AN: No beta for this chapter! It's got some violence, and my beautiful, wonderful beta reader doesn't like that! Also, I can't link anything here, but the version I have on AO3 has some art linked in the author's notes for some visuals on what Featherlight looks like, and there's some of Dabi and Suzu, too. The fic there has the same name, and my author name is also the same!

010: here be lions.
Dig in; pull back the skin.
See what's inside you,
This sickness that drives you.
Beating black - demoniac.

Late November; 17 years.

The house, Dabi thinks, is like a living thing. It trembles and creaks in the wake of the thunder, body shifting, bones crackling. It sighs and hums with mechanical breath, central heat pumped all through its many corridors and rooms, as if worked by great, hot lungs.

It is a new thing, this house – a new, gratuitous body, made for these new times and newer sensibilities. It cannot be more different than the traditional house he grew up in, this big house with all its modern minimalism and bright, white walls. It is a sterilized, anesthetized kind of living. The windows gleam like many vacant eyes looking out across the rainwashed landscape, looking, but not seeing the wild and snarling old-world forest or the storm-blackened sky.

And, like a slow moving poison, Dabi drifts languidly through the wide vein-halls of the house, through living room-heart and kitchen-stomach, through den-mind and music room-memory. Here, he checks a bag. There, he observes a clock on the wall. His hand brushes along the length of a table, leaving things for himself for later.

He turns off lights.

He measures the distance of a corridor with his eyes, counting strides in his head. Six – no, seven.

He stares, increasingly eager, at the front door.

Dabi prepares. The minutes slip away, a metered tick-tick-tick. Second by second, they bleed out. Dabi can feel it. Dabi can smell it. The smile on his face is a fixed, terrible thing now. Even in the fresh dark, he can see it on himself in the reflection of those sedate, many-eyed windows. His face is distorted, all teeth, all hunger in that inky, oily rush of night rain.

Behind him, stitched to him like a loyal if flittering shadow, Suzume follows. Her hands are a constant and nervous press against him. They touch at his wrists, brushing the backs of his hands, cool fingers ghosting his arms –

And they flutter frantic like the wild beat of a bird's wing, snared in his hands, when he turns to take them in his own.

"Settle down," he tells her. Her fingers still, obedient, but he can feel the tension in them much like he can scent the coming of death in these halls. He rewards her with a brush of his thumb across the back of her little knuckles, and beside him, she makes a sound like a sigh, and presses her whole body to his, trembling.

Even as sick as she looks now, with most of the color washed out of her, she is too bright and vibrant for this awful, bloated house. He looks down at her, and a flash of lightning halos in her hair, orange and gold and pink, like summer peaches.

He doesn't mind it, this neediness. Likes it, even – even now. But Dabi is so hungry, and not for summer fruit and its sticky sweetness.

"Are you really that scared?"

Suzume doesn't look up at him. Her eyes are fixed on the front door, and her breathing is shallow. He can hear it. The dangerous want in him can feel it, too, prickling and electric along every nerve under his skin like some kind of feral, primeval sixth sense.

"Well?"

There's a shift, and then she looks up at him with wide, doe eyes. She looks up at him now, and now away, a puff of lavender smoke, lost to unfelt wind.

A flicker, and then gone.

Afraid. She cannot look at him anymore.

That instinct in him is a bestial thing. Predatory. He licks his lips and makes himself look up from her, away from her. Back at the door.

"You should have some faith in me." His voice is low. There is no helping the savagery that creeps into every word, not now. Dabi doesn't bother to try.

There is the sound of rain, against the glass, and against the roof, three stories up.

Beside him, Suzume shudders. "I do," she says, finally. Knowingly. Says it quiet, like it's too much for her, like its the most terrible thing she has ever known or had to say. Her fingers, still caught up in his hand, are cold and corpse-stiff against his hellfire skin.

This pleases him, too. Truthfully, he isn't surprised by her faith, terrified though it might be. This thing in him, this drooling hunger, this ancient-animal proclivity – it is only one side of a very old coin.

And Suzume is the other side of that coin, tender-hearted and meek, sweet as cream. Of course she would know what he is. The knowing is instinctual. It's self-preservational. Inborn in her, it is an old, old survival mechanism, hard-wired into her eons and eons before she was even born.

Dabi lets go of her hands and takes hold of her shoulders instead. The touch is light; he barely holds her. This gentleness is against his nature. "Go upstairs," he tells her. He does not look at her. Like her, he cannot let himself look at her now. From out of the corner of his eyes, he watches the front double doors, set heavy in their frame. His kill is out there, he tells himself. Out there, coming soon, ten months in the making.

Not here. Not this.

Suzume hesitates. He can feel it, the way she holds her breath. The way she goes perfectly still. He can feel the wild thrum of her heartbeat, too, when she presses herself so tightly against him, arms around his waist, face pressed against his ribs.

Dangerous. Dangerous. She knows, but doesn't care, prey seeking comfort from her predator. She is wired wrong. He has wired her wrong, and oh, god, he fucking loves it.

Leering, Dabi cups the back of her head, sifting fingers through her messy waves. He can smell her, smell her under the heavy mask of shampoo and soap and detergent. Her hair, her skin, everything. There is so much saliva in his mouth. His teeth ache.

She is so sweet.

Tick, tick, tick goes the heart beat of the house. Poison in the veins.

Death, coming slow. Unstoppable, now.

"Go," he says again, and all the roiling, starving things inside of him riot and scream, a great snapping and bone-clatter of teeth on teeth.

And, as if she can hear them, Suzume does.

He feels her detach. Arms slackening, and her hair comes free of his hands, and then she is gone. Her bare feet carry her away, a plap-plap-plapping sound of skin on tile, down the hall and into the living room. Farther now, away now, he hears her scamper like a frightened rabbit up the stairs.

The clock on the wall ticks steadily. He watches it instead of her.

Inside of him, and with each passing second, the violence builds.

Seconds pass, and then minutes pass, and then Featherlight comes home.

The big doors swing wide, and the sound of rain is so much louder now, a roaring pound out on the porch, and it comes into the house in sweeping gusts through the open doors. The many thousands and thousands of raindrops make a steady, droning beat on the wooden floors of the entryway, and it is loud inside now, too.

"Fuck," Featherlight says in a hiss of agitation. Light streams down the corridor from the doorway, violet and beautiful, the color of Suzume's eyes. The light wavers and dances like flame, vibrant all down the corridor and spilling weaker into the living room. It is a lovely, luminous incandescence –

And then it is gone.

Featherlight's wings, put away.

"Yua!" Featherlight's voice is a cry, somewhere between jovial and annoyed. More seconds pass. The door shuts, and the rain is outside. The house quiets, and goes still.

"Yua!" Another try. Louder now, and more insistent. Less jovial. Featherlight's girlfriend's name is swallowed up by the dark house, and there is no answer save the steady sound of the rain, kept at bay by the walls and the windows and the now-shut doors of the waiting house.

There is the smell of alcohol. There is the sound of a shuffling body, of rustling clothes – a scrabbling of booted feet in the entryway.

Then, from down the hall and around the corridor, Dabi hears the wood beneath Featherlight's feet groan with a creak.

Featherlight is in the corridor proper, now. His socks muffle the sound of his unsteady and stumbling footsteps, but Dabi can hear them, anyway. He counts them, lips mouthing the words: one, two, three, four, five, six –

Seven.

Breaching the liminal space of that long corridor, Featherlight steps into the dark living room.

And then the light in the living room is blue, hungry, and so bright. Dabi watches Featherlight's head turn, fractionally – sees his eyes go wide and white, impossibly white. The blue light gleams in them, alight in them, dancing in them, a monstrous reflection.

Featherlight's lips start to part.

From his place just around the corner, Dabi's fist connects hard with Featherlight's jaw. It is a brutal, savage flashbang of a strike, anger in it, hatred in it, and Dabi is manic with it. The fire that wreathes his arm is blinding, and the fire gloving his hand is hot.

Featherlight goes down immediately. It's a graceless thing, the way he falls. He hits the ground wrong, wet clothes a sopping slap against the ceramic-tiled floor, and the air goes out of him in a gasping rush. His hands claw at his face, swatting frantically at the blue flames licking up the waves of his hair.

And then Dabi is on top of him.

Featherlight looks up at Dabi, and his face contorts. His mouth moves, elastic and wet and red in the dark, wide and gaping, but no words come out. Behind the impotent gnashing of teeth, the man's tongue rolls. The muscle is wild, thrashing in its prison.

"Winded, huh?," Dabi asks, conversationally. "That's unfortunate." Dabi's smile is as wide as Featherlight's eyes, as wide as his open-and-closing mouth. It aches in Dabi's cheeks and in his jaw. He can't stop smiling.

In his hand, pulled from his pocket, Dabi holds up something long and thin. It's small, and surprisingly innocuous, a tiny plastic tube, like a pen. So expensive, this little thing. So potent. An expression of Giran's faith in him, this powerful, powerful sedative.

"You'll get me back for it," Giran had said, a few days ago. "Go get me that bounty, and we'll be more than even."

Dabi intends to.

Featherlight thrashes, but he's disoriented and drunk. His eyes turn and turn in his head, spinning, and there is fury there, but more than that there is terror, and god, it gets into Dabi, it gets into him, and his throat tightens and there is fire in him, and he can't help the laughter that bubbles out of him like hot blood from a gaping, mortal wound.

Laughing still, Dabi stabs the tip of the pen sharply into Featherlight's neck. There is the shift-and-click of something mechanical, and Featherlight flinches roughly, a full body unhinged kind of jerking. He makes a sound like a wounded animal, deep and pit-of-the-stomach guttural.

And then his eyes roll up, and his pupils are gone, swallowed up beneath drug-heavy lids. The wild contortions of his mouth slacken. The wet thump and beat of his flailing limbs give out, nerves severed like a puppet's strings.

Unconscious. The rise and fall of Featherlight's chest is slower, now. Up and down. Up and down. Steadying. Steady.

Dabi steadies himself, too. God, it's in him now, it's really in him. It's in him, and god, fuck, god, he wants it. He wants it.

Not now. Not just yet.

Dabi slaps the fire out of Featherlight's hair. Smoke drifts between them, lazy in the way it rises through the air. An angry, snarling burn mars the curve of Featherlight's television-perfect jaw and cheek.

Dabi gets off him and stands up. Looks up.

From between the bars of the second story railing, Suzume stares down at him.

The house is silent. Outside, the rain is ceaseless. It falls in curtains. It soaks the world.

Inside, and for a long while, they stare at each other. Their eyes connect across the vast space between them, neither looking away.

Suzume's hands curl around the bars. Such tiny, dainty little fists. Her mouth opens, and it closes. She swallows, and then her mouth opens again. "Is he… is he dead?"

It's a whisper, but it sounds so loud in the rain-static silence of the room. She's so lovely, he thinks. So afraid. So fucking cute. His breathing is unsteady, and his smile hurts, and death is in the house, and death is in him, and he's never felt so alive.

"No," he says. "Not yet."

She doesn't say anything else. She still hasn't looked away. She has never looked at him like this, so long and so openly, eyes meeting his. How he loves it, this unbroken intimacy between them.

Even if it is fear that keeps her still.

Dabi lifts his hand. With a slow curling of his fingers, he beckons her to him.

"Come down," he says, grinning. "Come down and see."

Late November; 9 years.

Suzume tries to do as she's told.

She doesn't want to. Her legs feel as if they are made of wet, rain-sopped clay, heavy, heavy, so heavy beneath her, and slippery. They melt out from under her when she stands, and she almost stumbles. She has to grip the railing of the banister for the whole slow trudge around the landing, gripping it, gripping it so hard her hands hurt and the bones of her knuckles peek ashy and white through her skin.

Her brother moves in the room below her. She watches him as he stalks away from her father's prone body, shadowing her, a mirror of her movements above, just down below. At the bottom of the staircase, he stands, looking up at her.

Smiling. He hasn't stopped smiling.

On the landing, looking down at him, Suzume's legs shake so much she has to sit down. "I can't," she whispers, hollowly. Her mouth feels as if it's stuffed full of dry, rough cotton and her pounding heart, both.

And then, because she doesn't want to upset him: "Please, come get me."

He isn't upset. He comes to get her. He is a dark and certain shadow gliding up the stairs, smiling. His eyes simmer, and there's something in them. The fire that wreathed his hand and ruined her father's famous, perfect face is in them, and she can't look away.

Can't turn her head. Can't close her eyes.

A few steps below her, he holds out his arms. "Come here, Suzu." There's a heat in his voice, but no real warmth.

Unsteadily, she stands. Unsteadier still, she slips into his embrace.

Her brother carries her down the stairs again. He's gentle when he holds her, like he was before, just earlier – like in the park. Her feet dangle under the sweep of his arm, and there is no fire, and he does not hurt her.

On the ground floor again, the two of them stand, silent and together, staring down at her father's limp and twisted form. The even up-down movement of her father's chest confirms her brother's declaration: he isn't dead.

Not yet.

"I've never seen your fire before," she says, and the words are empty nothings, meant to fill the empty silence. His fire now is gone, but she can see it. It's so bright it's burned into her vision when she looks into the darkness, that aftershock of blue, blue light, burning, crackling, electric blue festival fireworks set against the murky haze of the smoky room.

She blinks, and blinks. There's no escaping it; the light of his fire is there, too, the flame a wriggling and writhing scar on the inside of her eyelids when she closes her eyes.

"No." He sets her down. He moves away from her, and from the long table along the wall, he retrieves the heavy cleaver from where she'd watched him leave it earlier. "You haven't."

It's hard to decide what to look at. Her father, on the floor, unconscious. Her brother, with the knife, looking at her.

Choosing to look at her hands twisting together in front of her, she asks, "Are you gonna – gonna kill him with that?"

"Nah," her brother says, and she's relieved –

But the relief is short-lived when she sees the dark shape of him move towards her father's half-twisted body from out of the tops of her eyes.

With the heel of his boot, her brother pushes at her father's shoulder until he rolls over fully onto his back. Like a discarded and broken toy, Featherlight's limbs are a spill across the floor, one hand by his face, the other thrown far out wide.

Her brother moves again, and kneels down beside that far-flung hand. Taking hold of her father's fingers, she watches him pull that arm out as far as it will go, neat and straight.

And then he lifts the cleaver in the air, and the blade of it is neat and straight, too, shining in the lightning that fills the room.

Thunder rumbles. Waiting, waiting, her brother holds the knife in the air until the thunder rolls away.

Then, like the rain outside, hard and unyielding, the blade comes down. She watches it streak through the air, less rain now and more like lightning, like her father's own lightning, down, and down, and down.

The blade sinks deeply through her father's wrist, through ligament, through meat and bone. She hears the sharp, shrieky clink of it when it meets the ceramic floor beneath it, as if the living room floor were some huge cutting board and her brother a butcher.

Suzume thinks of her mother in the kitchen, teaching her how to butcher a chicken, cutting pale flesh into many bloodless, cold pieces.

She thinks of her brother, a different kind of butcher.

Thinks of her father – a different kind of meat.

"Good choice with the knife, Suzu," her brother says, admiringly, and there is blood on the knife she has chosen, and there is blood on the floor. She stares at the space where her father's hand was once connected with his wrist, and she sees the peek of flesh and bone in all of that red, wet blood.

Stumbling backwards a step, Suzume's hands are all over her face, crawling, spasming, pressing over her eyes, wrapping around her own mouth. There's a scream in her chest, clawing its way up the length of her throat, but she doesn't want her brother to look at her. She can't make a noise. She has to be quiet.

Through the cracks of her fingers, though – through even her closed eyes, behind them – the room is bright again, and the room is blue again, and the room is so hot, and she can smell it, now. Sweet, sweet, sickly sweet – the smell of meat, raw and now steaky, the hiss of it, the pop of it. Hot meat. Cooking meat.

Copper and rust.

Her stomach heaves. Her body jerks. "Are you killing him now?" She should be quiet. She should be, but the words come out anyway, and she can't stop them. Pitched high and hysterical, a cry rough-muffled behind the press of her cold, clammy hand – she can't stop them.

She hears her brother laugh. He laughs. "Nope," he says. "Still not yet."

The light goes away, and everything is dark again.

In the fresh-darkness, she can feel her brother stand, even if she can't hear it over the low-static sound of the rain. Then, his boots click across the tile, once, twice. She thinks about the black spot, in the kitchen, black against white ceramic tile, dug in with the heel of his boot. Thinks about her brother, a black, foreign thing in this white, white house.

Silence, now. Then, a rustle of clothes.

Thwack. The knife down, again. Clink, again. Blade on tile. Blade through meat, the meat stubborn this time. She hears her brother chuckle. "That cut wasn't so clean. First time, I must've gotten lucky."

Then, that terrible, blue light, and the heat of it, billowing over her. That awful smell of sick-sweet meat and copper and –

"Why?"

"Your dad uses lightning only after he presses his palms together," her brother explains, patiently. The light dies again. The darkness comes back, again.

Suzume can't put her thoughts to words. She can only choke out the same one, again and again. "Why?" She asks, and gags. There's spit on her chin, in the cup of her hands, stringy and wet. "Why?"

Her brother knows everything. Her brother is too smart. "You wanna know why I don't just kill him now, huh." There's no laughter, not now, but she can hear the smile in him. She can imagine it, too, too-wide, too many teeth, teeth like cleavers.

Suzume doesn't say anything.

"It's really not that bad to see, right now," he says, reasonably. "You should look."

Teeth pressed together, pressed so hard together that she's worried they might shatter and splinter in her own mouth, Suzume obeys, cracking a single eye open. From between the spaces in her fingers, she looks down at her father.

In the dark, haloed by spots of now thickened and tar-like blood gone rancid in the heat, her father's hands look like the crumpled bodies of dead spiders. His once elegant fingers – fingers that had gripped her, fingers that had hurt her, fingers that had once left her covered in bruises – are twisted and curled, now, stiff and ungainly.

They will never touch her again.

And her father's arms –

Stumps, where the hands should be. Blackened, burnt over. Fire-sealed.

The smell, she thinks. The smell of cooked meat.

"Why?"

Letting the cleaver slip from his fingers, her brother stands to his full height. She tilts her head back to look at him, and her hands fall away from her face, limp at her side, and he looks down at her. The room is dark, but his eyes are so bright. They've always been bright. Having finally seen his fire, Suzume now knows why.

"Suzu," he says, and takes a step towards her, slowly. So slow.

"Suzu, look at what he's done to you." Another step, the click of his boot on the floor.

"It's not enough to just let him go, quiet in his sleep." A third. Suzume wants to take a step back, but finds she's rooted to the spot, looking up at him. Looking up at him, and up at him.

"You know that, don't you, Suzu?" Click.

"Don't you?" Click.

"Suzu." Click.

She really has to tilt her head to look up at him now. He's close again, in her space again, and she can feel the heat of him rolling over her like waves.

There's the brush of his fingers across her cheek. They're gummy with blood, warm — congealed. His fingers are hot.

And then he sinks down, his stitched-together patchwork face level with hers.

"I know it's hard for you," he says, softly, watching her with his fire-blue eyes. It's so hard to look at them, to look into them. Like earlier, though, she finds she can't look away. "I know. But I'm your big brother, and I can't let that shit stand. Look at what he's done to you. Months and months, that bastard took you from me. And look what it's done to me."

Gathering her hands in his own, he lifts them and holds them to his cheeks. Beneath her palms and her fingers, she feels the roughness of his mutilated flesh and the hot metal of the staples, holding him together. "I had to work so hard. I had to do so much. All that fire, all of it, and I was so damn angry all the time, so angry and so hot because I wanted you back. Because he took you from me. You understand, don't you?" He lets out a breath of air, and that's hot too, stirring in her hair. "Don't you?"

Suzume feels sick. Her mouth feels sticky, all gummy and tacky like the blood on the floor and on his hands and on the knife, behind him.

Awful, awful. God, so awful.

And her head hurts, and her heart hurts, and her eyes swim with tears. Her brother, she thinks. Her big brother with his handsome face and his smile that puts butterflies with sticky-hot wings in her tummy. Her brother, his face a mess now, and his hands a mess, now, and his body a mess, now. Staples and ruined flesh, monstrous, a thing from her nightmares, handsome somehow, still, but in some awful, terrible way, eyes hot, eyes cold, eyes flashing, a flame, a knife –

"I'm sorry," she blubbers, and the tears spill down her cheeks. She leans forward, sick, so sick, willing it back, sucking in a mouthful of his hot air, so hot that it almost chokes her. The kiss she presses to his burning forehead is tremulous thing, and she cries against him, open mouthed, wet and sloppy. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I don't want you to be hurt – I didn't want – I didn't want you to get hurt."

"Oh, Suzu." Letting go of her hands, he takes hold of her face instead, brushing her tears away with rust-colored fingers, and there is blood, thick on her cheeks, now. He kisses her nose with fire-hot lips. "You don't have to be sorry. It's not your fault, is it? But that's why. That's why. The punishment's gotta fit the crime. Ten months of this shit, and god, Suzu, all those years before – lying to everyone, lying, acting like he's a saint, some paragon of society. Pretending to be good, and him wearing that fucking smug-faced, shit-eating-grin mask of his. Oh, everyone loves him, don't they? They fucking love him, 'cause they don't know – all while he hurts you. Hurts your mom. Takes you from me. Hero, hero, what a hero – but you know he's not. You know he's fucking not."

Suzume nods in his hands, both because she knows he wants her to, and because she does understand. The sheer and terrifying depth of her brother's anger is alien to her, but still –

She understands it.

It has been her anger, too, after all. Anger, sadness – and that terrible sense of helplessness. Always, always, so helpless.

"But I'm scared," she whispers. Because she is. She understands, but she is also scared, because this is still helpless. She still feels helpless.

A different kind of helpless.

"You should be," her brother tells her, cradling her head in his hands gently, gently, so very gentle. "Because it is scary. It's going to be scary. It's going to be scary, and then it's going to be over, and you won't have to be scared of it, anymore. But it has to happen, Suzu. Scary or not, it has to happen. It will happen. Okay?"

He looks at her, watching her out of his blue, blue eyes. Through them, she can see the fire inside of him, roiling, churning, hellfire judgment made manifest. Meat and bone. Flesh and blood, made hot and sweet.

Punishment to fit the crime.

Her brother, Suzume realizes, is merciless. He is merciless in everything he does.

Merciless in the way he hates.

Merciless in the way he loves.

"Okay?" He asks her, again, and it's not really a question, and there's no mercy there, either, because of course there's not. There wouldn't be. There couldn't be.

"Okay," Suzume says, because she is afraid.

Because she loves him.

His eyes are half-lidded now, and his smile is placid, and his teeth are put away behind the steep upward curve of his lips. "Good," her brother says, and he says it lovingly. "Good girl."

Because he loves her, too, Suzume knows – because he loves her, mercilessly, as he is made to love.

As is his way.

When her father wakes up a little bit later, moaning softly, head rolling limply along his shoulders, he is fully restrained. Bound tight to a heavy wooden chair brought into the living room earlier for her brother's purposes, the handless, gnarled stumps of his arms are secured along the sides of the backrest. His ankles, too, are roped tightly to the front feet of the chair.

Some of his hair is singed. The formerly soft and still purple waves of it are matted with ash and blood, and a heavily saturated clumpy piece of it falls over his eyes as he struggles to lift his head.

There is nothing remotely elegant about him, now.

Maybe there never really was.

Silently, Suzume watches him stir – watches him hiss, and puff his cheeks, clearly disoriented, fighting for consciousness.

Behind him, like her, her brother is silent, too. Suzume can just make out the features of his face – make out the way his smile breaks into a terrifyingly wide grin.

"You." Her father's voice. Even clipped as it is by the sedative, the venom seeps in. Suzume's eyes dart from her brother and find her father, staring back at her.

"What are you… what is this?" Every word seems an almost insurmountable struggle. Her father fights with it, fights through it. His eyes are cold. "What are you doing here?"

It starts in his legs. He goes to move them, and finds he cannot. A shake of his head, then, his blood-dried hair dusting his cheeks. His eyes focus, and his lips pull back from his teeth, his muddled visage halfway between fury and panic.

"My hands," he says, and his voice shakes with the saying of it. "I can't feel them."

Suzume can only stare at him, and then at her brother. She watches him bend down low, scooping up something she can't see from the floor.

Can't see, but knows to be horrifying.

"Sure can't," her brother agrees, and his voice is low, and full of his laughter.

Her father's body jerks once at the intrusion of that unrecognizable voice – a normal flinch. But the way his body moves when her brother lets those twisted, dead-spider hands fall one-by-one into her father's empty lap –

One lands awkwardly on his thigh. It rolls down his knee, and her father moves sharply, as if struck in the face.

The other, though, settles perfectly in the valley between his tightly secured legs, and it's obvious what it is, there – fingers curled up, curled tight, all stiff. And oh, her father stares down at it, and then he's really moving, a full body thrashing, head swinging wild, teeth gnashing, and he is awake, awake, awake and terrible, now.

"What the hell – " His eyes are cornered-animal wild. "What the absolute fuck – "

Helpless, Suzume thinks, and her blood is cold. Her father is helpless.

"They're yours, of course – the hands are. No tricks. No mind-control or illusionary quirks here." Her brother's hands come down on Featherlight's shoulders, and she can see the way the fabric of her father's costume creases beneath the tight, bruising grip of his fingers. The grin her brother wears is nightmarish. "But that's more your style, ain't it? Can't get your hands dirty. Play it like you're squeaky clean, while you get others to do your dirty shit for you. Tricky, lying bastard."

Featherlight howls. His head twists and twists, and the noises he makes are animalistic, barely-human, maddened and anguished. "You – who the fuck – who the fuck, I'll fucking kill you – "

"Will you?" Her brother's voice is mock-thoughtful and almost gentle. "No hands on you left, and what're you really without them, Thunder God? Can't call the lightning down – not like you would, even if you could, still. Nah, you're more the sort who pays people to take care of the ugly things you can't deal with, yeah?"

Fisting a hand into Featherlight's filthy hair, her brother jerks his head back and forth, back and forth, a sharp, waggling snap of it along his neck. Her father's eyes are big and white, his pupils blown out. He seethes like a rabid dog.

Suzume stares at him.

"What're you doing?" Her father roars, staring back, his eyes so white and so dark, fixed and terrible, blazing and burning and tearing her apart even as his head rocks and rocks painfully like a loose doll's head under her brother's cruel grip. "Go – fucking go, get help you daft fucking bitch – "

"Ohhhh." Wider still, her brother's smile. Wider, wider, and the shining staples can barely hold his jaw together. "Gonna talk to her like that? Really? All she's done for you, all you've made her do, and now you got a villain in the house, and you have the fucking balls to ask your kid to risk her life – all for the chance that she might make it to a phone, that someone could make it out here in the fucking sticks in time to save your worthless life – "

"Go!" Her father is screaming it. Again, and again, he screams it. It barely sounds like a word. Suzume doesn't move. Her eyes are on her brother, now.

Villain, Dabi says. Villain. The word rings in her ears. His laughter does, too, ringing, ringing.

"Cut down the ewe when she got too unruly, so now you need the lamb, huh? Sacrifices, sacrifices, 'cause you need your meat fresh and dumb and malleable, and god, fuck, it's all so easy for you, isn't it? You don't give a shit. Not at all, never fucking once. Can't even lie to her proper, can't even play at being nice with her like you do with everyone else. The mask has to come off sometime, doesn't it? Trash like you, you can't keep it up all the time, no, no, so it comes off with your family! Use them, hurt them, treat them like shit. That's how you all fucking are."

Ewe. Lamb. Sacrifices. Suzume's head is a foggy nest of terror where her brother's words have come to roost. What is he talking about? What is he –

"Running your mouth like you know goddamn anything!" Her father spits at the ground, spits the words. There is spit all over his lips, all over his chin. He's so incensed Suzume can barely understand him, more spit than words. "What the hell do you know!"

"I know how much you stagnated in the rankings when your wife left you – I know how you fucking floundered. God, how that must have stung – you had her putting you back together so long, and her healing you, it let you be so much flashier than you otherwise could be. You got to build yourself up in your head, convince yourself it was all you, huh? Your success, oh, it was all yours, all fucking yours. Told yourself you worked so hard for it. Deserved it. A real fucking prince." Dabi jerks her father's head back roughly, staring down into his twisted face with a terrifying leer all his own.

"Oh, but you can lie to yourself all you want. You know you don't believe it. You know you know better. You're fucking nothing without her and her magic healing hands. The only reason you didn't lose rank when she left is 'cause you're such a fucking whore with a nice face girls cream themselves over – but one more year without her, and god, you'd have been fucking done for! Down to rank six, seven, eight – get your perfect face thrashed, and no docile, subservient wife to fix you up, no, and you know it's over. The only thing you got going for you is your fucking face."

Her father's breathing is erratic. Chest heaving, red-faced, his stump arms pull and tug at their bindings. "Shut up!" It's a hiss and a shriek. "Shut up, shut up, shut up!"

"Lucky for you, though! What's it matter when your wife bails, really? Pussy comes cheap, doesn't it – it's not like that matters! And what she took with her when she left, well – who gives a shit? You had a back up! And wow, what d'you know, you settle in good and sweet with your little back up battery, and suddenly you're back to climbing rank again, yeah? What'd you get to tonight?"

Her father tries to wrench his head free, to no avail. Dabi pushes his head forward, forcing him to look at Suzume.

"Hey, Suzu!" Dabi sounds fiendishly delighted, his body tense with an insane, menacing excitement. His eyes bore into hers. It is as if he is the only thing in the room. "Did you know your dad climbed up from Number Five to Number Four tonight? Aren't you fucking proud of him? Not like he could have done it without you – "

"Who the fuck is this?" Her father's voice is raised, but haggard. She can see in her side vision that her father is staring at her, seething. Desperate. Utterly bewildered. "How do you – how do you fucking know this worthless animal – "

Suzume shakes her head, watching Dabi. Shakes her head, shakes it. She can't breathe. She can't breathe –

Dabi lets go of her father's hair. He lets go, and draws his hand back –

And the room is so bright, and there's a splintering of wood, and her father is screaming, bellowing, but there's no words – it's just noise.

But the light isn't blue. It's a warm, beautiful, dreadful violet, and her father's wings are out. Featherlight's wings are out, huge and luminous, filling the room, made real in the room, and the chair splinters and shatters, and the ropes strain, cutting into him and his wings both.

Suzume falls back, screaming too, in sheer terror. Her father is free, her father is free, and he thrashes with handless arms in the ropes, a twisted, hateful, beautiful thing.

"What a fucking show!" She hears Dabi shout, gleefully, and he's laughing, laughing, delirium in him good, now. "God, I'd hoped you'd do this! Let's take these away, too!"

And then Dabi is on her father again, and the room is purple, and the room is blue, and the room is hot, hot, hot.

Her father goes down, again. The ropes tangle around his legs, and between that and the ferality of Dabi lunging after him, he goes down badly. With arms steeped in blinding blue fire, Dabi chases him to the floor. Tearing at those frantically beating and incandescent wings with fire-forged fingers, Dabi claws and rips at them, gone savage like a beast.

There's no hope for her father. His wings are fragile, ephemeral things. He's always been so careful with them; it's why he keeps them hidden while he fights. It's why he takes them out to fly, and to fly alone, far up and away from anyone who might use them against him, summer heat lightning gleaming in the clouds.

Under the fiery rip and tear of Dabi's onslaught, they come apart so easily. Huge, radiant pieces of them are torn away, smoldering in his hands, smoking and crackling, blue and violet, blue and violet, and her father is screaming, wordless still.

"You're nothing without it – " She can barely hear Dabi over the sound of lashing bodies, over the keening wail bleeding out of her father. "Nothing, nothing – so fucking proud, so confident in your own house, god, and it was so fucking easy, just too fucking easy – "

Her father puts away what's left of his wings. The chunks of them torn loose lay strewn about the floor, blazing blue, lit aflame. Their own violet light falls away, like dying embers, snuffed out.

"Oh, had enough, finally?" Dabi's laughter is horrible. He is in ecstasy. He is the scariest thing Suzume has ever seen.

Pinned beneath Dabi and the clutch of his blazing, empyreal hands – wings torn, hands gone, lightning-robbed – Featherlight stops fighting and goes still save for the rapid, ragged rise and fall of his chest.

Perspiration pours out of the both of them. They are smeared in ash and blood.

Like his wings and his hands and his lightning, the anger in her father is gone now, too. A strange, steady panic seems to settle over him like a funeral shroud. She can see it in the way her father looks up at his aggressor, his eyes moon-eyed like hunted prey.

Yet when he speaks, he sounds so strangely calm. "What is this?" He asks, voice gone raw with all the screaming and the smoke. The breath he takes in sounds halfway to a gasp. "Who are you?"

"No one you'd know," Dabi says, and he is calm, too, gone dangerously and perfectly serene.

And Suzume remembers looking down on him from the tree, in the park, all that time ago, and getting the same response.

No one you'd know.

Oh, she knows him, now.

"Why, then?"

Dabi tilts his head in an exaggerated mimicry of deliberation, grinning, eyes half-lidded, gone silent. Fire laps at Featherlight's costume, smoldering in his hair, little bits of it everywhere, all over.

Then, finally:

"You wanna know? Let's trade for it."

Her father is incredulous. "What?"

"Tell your daughter what you did to her mother."

Suzume, only a couple of meters back from all that hateful heat, feels herself go ice cold.

"What?" Her father says again, but his voice falls away from him, a husk burned away in the hellfire. "I don't – I don't know what you're talking about."

"Oh, is that guilt you're feeling?" Her brother's voice is fraught with amusement. "Finally, finally, you can come clean – but even here, with the one person you couldn't be assed to lie to, you still want to act like you're something better than the shit you are."

"I didn't – "

"Who'd have thought you were capable of shame? Like she doesn't hate you already – like there's anything left to fucking salvage!"

There is silence. Dabi's fire is a soft rush of noise, the occasional snap-crackle of something burning – and there is the rain, and there is the silence.

"Nii-chan."

Both her brother and father turn their heads and look at her.

Her father is a man lost. His eyes are dull. He looks at her, and even his curiosity is gone from him. He looks without seeing.

Her brother – Dabi – is something else entirely, completely unknowable. His smile is slick and hot.

Dabi, who sees everything. Who knows everything.

Suzume's throat burns, with the smoke, and with everything else. Her hands twist in the fabric of her pajama pants. "What did he do to Mama?"

"Your mom's not in a hospital, Suzu." Dabi's voice is so impossibly even-kilter. "You mom was never in a hospital. There was nothing to save. Your father had her killed."

There's a ringing in Suzume's ears. It's so loud, so high-pitched. She covers her ears with her hands, but it's in her head, ringing, ringing. Her eyes meet her father's, and he looks at her, and his mouth doesn't move, and his face doesn't move, and his eyes are dull, and they see nothing. He says nothing.

He does not deny anything.

The unruly ewe and the malleable lamb. Sacrifices. Ringing in her ears. There is no rain, and there is no crackle of fire, and lightning flashes through the room, but Suzume doesn't hear the thunder.

In her periphery, she sees Dabi's mouth moving, but she cannot hear him. He looks at her, and he looks at her, and his mouth moves, but she can only shake her head at him. Shake it, shake it, shake it.

All of her, shaking.

Never a hospital. Already dead. How long, she thinks – how long?

She's shaking, and she cannot stop. She wants to cry, but there's nothing inside of her, just like there is no sound, just like there is no air, and she cannot breathe –

Dabi, in front of her, looks away from her, and down at her father. His mouth moves, and he says things she cannot hear, and her father says something back. They talk in voices she cannot hear. They talk.

Then, Dabi's hands move, and she can see they fit nice and neat around her father's throat.

And the room is blue. It is so blue. Radiant and shining, so blue, reflecting brightly in her father's dull eyes that move to stare and stare at her. Her father is alive – she sees him breathe, in all that bright light – but he is dead, dead, dead.

Dabi is a monster, she thinks. Something a million years old, something truly inexplicable. Something that has clawed its way up through a crack in the deep, deep earth, lean-limbed and hungry, magma and death given form. He is a ghost, a spectre, a lich, stitched together by fury and vengeance and spite.

And with his hands around her father's throat, his teeth come out. And the blue fire that swallows him up comes out, and the fire is his teeth, and with those blue, searing teeth, he begins to chew, and chew, and chew right through her father.

The fire leaks from him. It billows from him. It's all up his arms, enveloping his chest. She sees it, in his mouth, and she can see him laugh, and the laughter is a bellows, and he burns hotter for it.

So hot. Too hot.

Her father is melting. Her father, smiling on the television, bright eyed, handsome in a way she has always hated – he's not handsome now. His skin comes away from his face, and from his throat, and his costume ignites, and he is gelatin, now. Jelly, now.

And Dabi – all aflame – keeps laughing. She looks at him, because she cannot bear to look at her father, and she cannot bear to look at Dabi, but she looks at him, because he is nothing but sin-searing flame, now. It stings her eyes to look at him.

It will eat him up, she knows. It will eat him up, too.

And her mother is dead. And her father is dead, a puddle of fat, a whisper of bone, of exposed meat. Number four hero, dead on his coronation night.

And Dabi – her brother, her savior, this hellfire-teeth monster come up from inside the deep, dark earth, losing himself in delirious, delicious consumption –

He will consume himself, too.

Suzume closes her eyes. Suzume screams, and screams, one word, over and over and over again that she cannot hear –

Pleasepleasepleaseplease.

It's all she can manage. Please, please, please, but the implication is something else.

Please stop, she means. Please stop, please stop, please stop. I can't lose you. I can't. I can't. Please. Please. Please.

Not you. Not you, too.

Behind her eyes, it is bright. It is bright, it is so bright, and then it is less so. Blue, blue, midnight blue, now. Black now. The aftershocks linger, that writhing imprint of his fire behind her eyelids, but there is no more light in the room.

The ringing begins to subside. She can hear the snap and crackle of fire. Distantly, she can hear the sound of rain.

And then there are hands on her. They feel slick, oily. Hot.

Up her arms. On her face, in her hair. Brushing, burning, pressed against her throat.

She opens her eyes.

Her brother is in front of her. Smoke seeps out from the holes in his cheeks where a few staples have been torn loose. His black hair is in his eyes, and sweat drips down his nose. He is filthy. He smells of hot meat, meat cooked too long. Burnt meat.

She doesn't know where the smell comes from. Him, or her father? Both? Her hands are shaking when she lifts them, when she presses them against new, fresh-burned skin, right where his shirt dips to reveal it.

The heat in her hands when she touches him is a different kind of heat than his. The pain that rips through her body is sobering. It is a physical thing, like all of her bones splintering, every muscle fiber forcibly unwound, bit by bit. It is the peeling back of skin, of salt in the wound, and it hurts, it hurts until she cannot stand, until she cannot exist, and her brother has to reach out to hold her while she heals him.

It hurts worse than any physical pain she has ever known.

It has nothing on the way her mind breaks.

Some foggy and indeterminate amount of time later, Suzume realizes she is in a large wet room, seated on a small stool.

It's a slow come-to. She sees the bathtub first, tall and wide. Then, the many shower heads set in the wall, the chrome sheen of the metal a stark and almost dazzling contrast to all the dark tile and marble walls.

And her brother is there, pulling his gorey shirt over his head.

She stares at him. His boots are gone, and he's not wearing any socks. There are large swathes of his chest that are just like his face, twisted and malformed, held together with staples that gleam like the chrome bathroom fixtures.

He notices her looking at him as he lets the shirt fall to the floor. "Oh," he says, and she can hear him, and his voice is normal, so painfully normal. "You back with me, then?" Casual. You-want-me-to-bring-you-a-snack-tomorrow normal, as if they are months and months in the past, and not here, in this terrible future –

In this terrible now.

"Suzu," her brother says, as if to hold her attention. His hand goes to his belt, which he begins to unbuckle. It sounds loud in the tile-and-marble room.

She stares at him some more. "Where are we?"

"Your dad's bathroom."

Finally looking away from him, she glances around the room again. She has never been here before. Her father's room has always been off limits, even when she'd had the freedom to explore the house.

He's dead now, though. Suzume guesses it doesn't matter, anymore.

"Why?" The room is so large, like everything in the big house. She feels so small in it, lost in it.

Her brother, though, is larger-than-life and very matter-of-fact. "Because we're both disgusting."

She touches her face. It's a wonder her hands don't shake. Her skin feels tight, because something has dried on it, and when she touches it, the texture is uneven and foreign. Grime. Ash and blood and parts of her father, she thinks. Whatever is all over her brother's hands, he's gotten on her.

"Oh, yeah," she says, softly, watching him step out of his ripped pants. "I guess you're right."

Down to only his trunks, now, her brother comes to stand before her. From her seat on the stool, she looks up at him, always looking up at him, and he looks down. Always, always.

"Lift up your arms," he tells her, evenly. "I'm gonna take off your shirt."

Suzume has the sense that she shouldn't do this. Something tightens in her chest. She isn't sure why.

She has bathed with her mother, of course. And she has bathed with Katsuki's mother, and Izuku's mother, too, when she'd spent the night at their houses.

Once, even, when they'd been much younger, Katsuki's mother had taken both her and Katsuki into the bath. "We're family," she'd said, laughing, and Suzume, at six, had thought nothing of it. After being scrubbed clean, she and Katsuki had splashed about the bath together, making a right sopping mess of the bathroom.

It is one of her favorite memories. It feels like a lifetime ago. It feels like the memory of some other little girl she isn't sure she knows, anymore.

Her brother watches her. "Are you scared?"

Suzume isn't sure. She stares up at him, feeling numb. "I don't know."

"I won't make you," he says, "But we're family. It's nothing I haven't seen before."

Family, she thinks. Family, bathing together. "You've never seen me – not like… that." But it's something she can't be sure of, really. Her brother, after all, knows everything.

"I didn't mean you." He reaches down, and takes her hands in his gentle-hot fingers, and holds them over her head. "Keep them up."

Suzume does as she's told, but something about this revelation makes her feel… sad. Sad, somehow, just a bit, through all that cold numbness. "Who did you mean?"

Her brother doesn't answer. Instead, he tugs her shirt up and over her head. It joins the crumpled pile of his own clothes on the floor.

Suzume stares at the pile. Her shirt is much smaller than his. "Who did you mean?" She asks, again, her arms stiff in the air as his fingers hook into the elastic band of her pajama pants.

"I had a little sister before you." He pulls down her pajamas, and they pool around her ankles, and the air on her legs and on her exposed chest is cold, cold, winter-chill cold.

"Had?" The word is a stone in her throat, and in her mouth. She feels so sick. She feels very alone.

Taking her under her still-raised arms, he lifts her, gently, out of the crumpled fabric of her pants. Then, he sets her back down, standing, on the stool. Against the soles of her feet, the wood feels cold, too. "Not anymore."

"Am I a… replacement?" She asks. She thinks of her mother. She thinks of herself. Unruly ewe, and the malleable lamb. Malleable. What does it mean?

She knows enough to know she was meant to take her mother's place.

To be useful.

Strange, strange. She hates the idea of being useful, of being used like that. But she wants so much to be useful to her brother. Months and months, always wanting to make him happy. How she's wanted that.

She wants to be useful, and she hates the wanting of it, and she wants to cry, too, but there are no tears. Maybe stopped up somewhere inside of her, blocked by the stone in her throat, or in her mouth, or by another stone all together. "Will you replace me, too?"

With the help of the stool, she is taller, but still nowhere near as tall as her brother. He stares down at her, and his eyes are a deep, blue sea, and the waters are calm, calm, deceptively calm. She knows what lurks beneath those waters, now. That crack, somewhere deep in them, down in the earth; the schism where the monster comes out.

She knows because he has told her, because he has shown her. But now, the sea is calm. His eyes are calm.

The monster, sinking deep, has gone back to sleep. Sated and full and gorged on death, lost to dreaming, now. Dreaming.

Dreaming.

Everything feels like a terrible dream. She feels outside of herself. She feels as if she is falling, falling, far away, lost somewhere.

Taking Suzume's face in both of his unclean hands, her brother now is so, so soft. The sea in his eyes is calm, and she's drowning in it. "No," he says, finally, and his voice is strange and raw. "There wasn't anything worth replacing before, Suzu. You're something else – something different, all together. You're better in every way. I got to choose you, remember? I will never replace you."

"Really?" She's so cold, and she can feel the heat radiating off him. There is gooseflesh prickling all over her, and she feels so exposed and so awful and so very, very sad behind the layers of numb and cold.

"Yes."

Suzume doesn't say anything. She wonders about his sister. Dead? She wonders about her mother. Dead.

She turns, and vomits onto the tile floor. His arm goes up and around her shoulders to steady her, and his free hand gathers her hair away from her face, and her body heaves, and heaves, and heaves. Rice and egg. Egg and rice. Acid, acid. Everything, everything, and Suzume gags, and he holds her against himself, and his skin feels feverish, pressed to hers.

"It's not okay now," he says, near her ear, and his breath fans the side of her face and her neck, and her whole body shudders. "Maybe not for a long while. It's not, but it will be. It will be."

When she is done, and there is nothing left in her to purge, her brother lets her go and turns on the water. There are three shower heads, one for each wall at the end of the shower, and they turn on in hissing unison.

The water is warm, and then it is hot, and then steam fills the shower, rising thick in the air. And then the steam is warm, and the steam is hot, and it wreathes her in wet, humid heat.

"Do you want to take your underwear off?" He asks her.

Suzume looks at him. Not yet fully in the shower's spray, the water only really hits his back. It steams on his shoulders. It runs rivulets down his body, carving light paths through the muck and the grime and the gore. It pools, the color of rust, down at his feet. It seeps into the pile of their clothes, darkening them.

Blood, washing away. The egg and the rice, washing away.

"No," she whispers. Her mouth tastes like rice and eggs and bile.

"Okay."

And then her brother goes to the corner, and brings back soaps. Bright bottles, colorful bottles. There are flowers on the bottles. Fruits.

He sets them down by the feet of the stool.

"This is… Dad's shower?"

"Yeah," her brother says, "But not his things. You don't want to smell like him, I imagine."

Suzume shakes her head slowly. The haze of the room and of her mind is so thick, but not enough that she's not surprised by his consideration. By that, and…

"Mama took everything, though – "

"Girlfriend." A blunt clarification. He takes the handheld shower head down from the wall, and moves it over her hair.

"Oh," she manages, quietly.

"It's gonna have to do," he tells her. "We both need to clean up."

And the water pours over her, hot, hot, but not too hot. It's a steady drum on her head, the pressure intense, but not painful. He wets her hair down, his fingers moving through the long curtained waves of it, combing through it until it's good and saturated and ready for soap.

Then comes the shampoo. Floral, fruity, and the shower is full of the smell of it, and she can hear him lathering it in his hands.

"Close your eyes."

She does.

The shower steams. The water is hot on her naked skin. Her brother's long fingers lather in her hair, and she feels the scrape of his nails against her scalp, and the pressure of his fingertips, working the soap into her skin.

He does it like Katsuki's mother would. Like Izuku's. His hands are deft and knowing. They work from the crown of her skull, down and down, rubbing intently behind her ears. At the nape of her neck, he massages the soap into her with small circles that leave a shiver inching its way up her back.

Like Mama would.

"How did…" She swallows. There is nothing in her stomach, nothing left in her at all, but she still feels so sick, somehow. "How did… Mama die?"

His fingers don't stop moving. They continue to work the soap through her hair. "Mind control," he says, simply. "Your father paid someone with a mind control quirk. They had her commit suicide."

Her brother takes his hand away, and the shower wand is back, and there is hot water, rinsing the soap from her hair. The perfumed smell of it is stronger now, sweet and feminine, and the room smells so sweetly with it. His fingers return to her hair, working their same magic a second time. The soap slowly rinses away.

Suzume bows her head, and the soapy water dribbles down her face and into her mouth while she mouths the question she wants to ask him. Open and closed. Open and closed. No sound comes out. Soap in her mouth. Wash all the bad away. Wash it all away.

"How?" She finally manages. It feels like minutes later, or hours, or days, or years. A soap bubble blooms on her lips, iridescent before it pops.

"Mmm." Her brother's hand snakes its way under her chin. Tilting her head back, he brushes his thumb a few times across her mouth, as if to wipe the soap away. "Don't drown yourself."

"How?" Her eyes seek his.

He stares down at her, his hand still on her chin, and she looks up at him. The shower wand in his free hand hangs at his side, its stream hitting the wall behind him.

"Please tell me, Nii-chan."

His hand tightens. It doesn't hurt, but it has the effect of squeezing her cheeks, of pursing her lips together. He stares down at her, watching her.

His expression is inscrutable. There is no tension to his face. He is completely impassive.

Suzume thinks he must be weighing what he plans to say carefully.

"They had her hang herself," he says, finally. He lets go of her jaw, almost reluctantly, maybe, Suzume thinks. He turns, and from the floor, he picks up a long cloth – one he begins to lather with a different, sweet-smelling soap.

It sounds like the truth. Suzume wanted the truth, didn't she?

Didn't she?

"Oh," she says, again. She wants to ask how. How – how does he know? Why, how? Please? But she's so tired. So tired. Much too tired for questions, anymore. "Okay."

The cloth is a textured drag on her skin. It doesn't hurt. Somehow, it's both relaxing and too much, but she's just too tired to ask him to stop.

So her brother works the cloth down the column of her neck, and across her sagging shoulders. He holds her chin and cleans the grime from her cheeks, and the water runs red again, just a little.

Then her arms, sweeping up and down, scrubbing, scrubbing, paying special attention to all the spots where he'd touched her before in the living room. The water runs red and then clear. Red, and clear, for all the spots.

"Nii-chan."

"What?" The cloth moves over her stomach, so slowly. There are no spots, there.

Suzume takes in a breath, feels it fill her lungs. She still feels dizzy. It's not enough. It feels like it will never be enough. "I wanna cry."

He looks at her. Watches her. No one has ever looked at her the way he does. He is big in the shower like he was big in the room upstairs. His neck is thicker than hers, and his shoulders are more broad than hers, and his body is hungry looking, lean muscle under skin, angular and foreign. He touches her knowingly, like her mother, but there is nothing feminine to him.

It feels strange. It feels –

His eyes are half-lidded, again. "So, cry."

Suzume shakes her head, anguished. "It won't work. I want to, but it won't. It won't."

"Won't it?"

"No!"

Her eyes burn, but there's nothing. Her throat aches, but there's nothing. Her bottom lip juts out, trembling, but there's nothing in her, and she wants it out, she wants the nothing out of her –

Her brother pushes the cloth into her hands, and then he lets the shower wand hang. With his hands free, he takes hold of her hips. The water streams all down his back, and his eyes are bright, and he presses his fingers into the soft spots at her waist and pinches.

Hard.

The pain is sharp. It bites into her, and she drops the cloth to the floor, yelping into the steaming air. "Wait – "

He pinches again. Again. Her hips, her waist. Now her thighs. Now her arms.

She thrashes on the stool, trying to pull away from him, and almost falls. He catches her – holds her against himself in one arm, bare skin to bare skin.

And with his free hand, keeps pinching her.

"Please – " She cries, and her eyes burn more, and his do, too. He pulls her into the hot stream of the trio of showers. Her hands find his shoulders, and she pushes at them all while he picks at her, pokes at her, pinching and pinching, everywhere he touches her –

It hurts. He's hurting her, and she squirms, and squirms, and she can only cast glimpses of his face in the thrashing. His eyes burn, watching her.

"C'mon," he says, and his voice is low, and his fingers pinch her inner thigh now, now her spotless stomach. "C'mon, Suzu. Let it out. You can cry. You're a big crybaby, aren't you? Go on and cry, now. C'mon."

And it all is just so –

So much. She feels so much, she can't make sense of it. She feels sick. She feels tired. She feels sad. She feels shameful. Everything feels awful and wrong, and there is that terrible nothing in her, and the way he touches her hurts, and his skin against hers is so hot, so hot, and she feels so dizzy, and he won't stop pinching her, and it hurts, it hurts, oh, it always hurts so much and –

Her head rolls back on her shoulders and the sobs finally start. Her shoulders quake with them. That build up, that awful build up, and now she can't stop, and it all comes out of her, spilling out of her. She's bleeding it out, that awful tension, that terrible nothing, oh, finally –

She gasps into the hot shower air, sobbing, sobbing, body trembling with it, and her arms fall away from his shoulders, and her brother stops pinching her.

Instead, he pulls her into himself, chest to chest. She can feel the staples of his chest against her skin, made hot by the water and his body heat. His hand is a weight on her back, holding her, holding her so tightly to himself. His head lolls forward. He nestles it into the crook of her neck.

She thinks she feels the prickling ghost of teeth along her shoulder. Then, maybe, the press of his lips, like hot shower water, up along her throat. His hair is a dark spot in her periphery.

And Suzume cries, and cries, and cries, and she feels as if there is less of that nothing in her, now, and more of her brother, instead.

AN: I really wanted to draw out Dabi and Featherlight's conversation more, but the chapter was already getting long. There were more things I wanted to cover, but I figure I can touch on them later. One more chapter left of clean up, though, and I'm gonna say the first act of THE LONGEST SET UP IN THE WORLD is done. Jesus christ, finally. PARENTS: DEAD! Now things can devolve into really fucked up fluff for awhile before the REAL (sexy) HORROR BEGINS.

Also, I realize Featherlight's a big fancy hero who kiiinda went out like a chump, but like, if you've ever played vidya grames, you know how much easier it is to take down big bosses when you know how to be stealthy and catch assholes unawares! That's my defense, anyway. :v

AND, in my defense #2, people in Japan are a lot more cool about doing things like taking baths with their families. Which is why Suzu even considers it as being remotely okay – though she's rightly still kinda skeeved out by it, being that her brother is uh, very… shall we say: unhinged.