the violence of existing (for only you)

by skuppo

After a series of increasingly awful circumstances, Dabi finds himself playing the role of big brother again, this time to a girl eight years his junior. It's something he's both good and terrible at in equal measure - at least until she begins to grow up, and he finds himself growing perversely attracted to her. Then, it's mostly all terrible. Full summary within!

28. you can't stop a bullet

AN: I posted this chapter to AO3 over a week ago and kinda forgot to update it here until yesterday when I actually got several emails about some PMs I got... from like, weeks ago? IDK what's going on with FFN but for awhile I was getting PMs pretty much as soon as they sent, and then suddenly I just got emails about those weeks late PMs just yesterday! FFN, get it together please! If you sent me PMs, please know I wasn't ignoring you, it's just FF was NOT SENDING ME EMAILS! T_T

Initially I had plans to update here, but I got lazy about fixing the formatting and then just forgot. Whoops! I will always eventually come back and update here, but if you want more up to date releases, I'm more active/aware over there. I do appreciate the few readers I get here, even if no one really says anything!

Had to come up with a way to format the text messaging in this chapter for FF; it's a shame FF doesn't allow for AO3's formating features, womp womp. Or links... or anything, really. Ahhhhh!

Anyway, if you wanna find me, my username is the same over there as it is here. Same for the story name! Regardless, here we goooo!

---

028: you can't stop a bullet.

Early April; 13 years.

Friendships, Suzume is quick to discover, are a strange and tricky thing she isn't sure she really understands. Good sometimes, and awful others. She'd thought as much when she was younger too, back when she and her mother had first moved into their apartment. Even before Izuku, Katsuki had been her first friend then. Late one evening, she'd met him in the same park where she'd eventually go on to meet her brother, and much like she had when she'd met her brother, she'd been awestruck. Having been homeschooled in the country by her mother, she'd never had the opportunity to meet anyone her own age before. In Katsuki, she'd recognized the opportunity for the sorts of relationships she saw people have on TV and in books. A friendship.

They could be friends.

Too young and much too inexperienced to even consider the possibility of failure, Suzume had marched right up to him and his mother and declared – with a childish, unbridled excitement she couldn't contain – that she'd wanted to be friends.

That they must be friends!

Though he hadn't exactly seemed thrilled by the declaration, it had seemed to work – at least for a time. It had been summer then, the screaming of cicadas a near constant song, and the air so hot it was difficult to breathe. But when it was just the two of them together, Katsuki played as nice as she imagined he was capable of. Of course he was still brash, and loud, and even mean sometimes… but for that single summer, when it was the two of them alone, she found it was an easy enough thing to forgive him those things.

(To like him because of those things, even.)

It was when other people were involved that Suzume was left reeling with confusion. School had started a few months later, and without warning, everything had changed very suddenly. Katsuki was not willing to be her friend when his other friends were involved. He was not even willing to act friendly. And whether he was in school or out on the playground with his entourage – a pair of boys who had both been on vacation all summer – he acted as if she were a menace meant to be put in her place. It had been such a stark difference from the boy who, during a sleepover, promised her protection in the event that the zombies in the video games they played together ever escaped their fictional containment. That he could play the part of two different people at once – that he could be just as rotten and awful as the zombies he was supposed to protect her from – was bewildering to her.

And it proves just as bewildering now.

Because much like Katsuki back then, Shinsou Hitoshi on the train when it is just the two of them is a very different person from Shinsou Hitoshi on the walk to school.

He's not exactly like Katsuki. Not completely. For the first few minutes, he walks beside her – chats with her, even, talking about weapon choices, about monster farming, about hunts he's struggled with. He isn't particularly animated – not like she is, anyway – but he wears a small smile all the same, warm in the corners of his mouth and in the way his eyes crinkle when he looks down at her.

But at a stop light, in the middle of a sentence, he suddenly falls very silent.

Pulling her attention away from the street, Suzume casts a glance upwards. He isn't looking at her. He isn't even looking at the light. Rather, his attention is fixed on a pair of boys dressed in the Nabu school uniform, waiting to cross from the corner diagonal to their own.

Unabashed, the boys stare back. One of them is grinning. It's a smile like her brother gets sometimes, wide and leering, cruel in the eyes. The other is openly laughing. Even from a distance, Suzume finds their good humor off-putting.

Even from a distance, she thinks she doesn't like them at all.

"Hey," Hitoshi says, very abruptly. When she looks back up at him, he isn't looking at her, or the boys, or the street. He isn't looking at anything but the stoplight now, the red light a dim reflection in his cool and suddenly glazed eyes. There's a new tension to his jaw, to his mouth, the muscles gone taut as a strung wire beneath the skin. He stares down the light like a blind man might, unseeing, unfocused. And the way he talks – it's like he's talking out of the corner of his mouth, trying to move his lips as little as possible. "There's a convenience store back down the way a bit. I forgot breakfast, so I'm gonna go grab something real quick."

Suzume blinks up at him, baffled. "It's kinda late, isn't it? Won't you be late?"

"It'll be fine."

"I could go with – "

"No!" It's such a forceful exclamation that it sounds raw even above the sound of the traffic.

Suzume flinches.

At that, he looks at her again, and the tension is about his eyes now, his face a portrait of barely restrained discomfort. "No," he says again, much quieter this time. Shaking his head, he heaves a sigh – and when she blinks, that expression is gone. There is only his earlier placidity, as smooth and unblemished as the surface of a lake on a windless day. No smile. No frown. No nothing. "No. Sorry. I'm – sorry. I got it. I think I'd rather go alone."

Suzume isn't as good at that as him. She tries, of course. Tries to wipe her face clean, scrubbed neat of any emotion like she's seen her brother do. Like Hitoshi is doing now. She tries to blink again, as if that might help her own expression harden into impervious apathy. Blink, blink, blink.

Blink the feelings away.

It doesn't work.

(Of course it doesn't.)

"Oh," she says instead, and despite how much she wishes there wasn't, there's a quaver in her voice. "Okay."

Hitoshi's brows knit together, and she swears she can hear her brother's laughter, hear his voice in her head:

Your poker face is absolute shit, Suzu.

But that's all she gets: a furrowed brow. Not even a real frown.

When she'd been much younger, she'd spent a lot of time watching Katsuki leave. Whether they were parting on good terms or he'd just finished pushing her down in the sand, it had always been so hard to look away. For months and months, even when he was terrible, she'd been convinced they were friends, and she'd chased him everywhere with her eyes. It felt sometimes as if looking away might sever their bond – like she were a boat out alone on the sea, and he a lighthouse, and all its many promises of shore and safety.

If she were to look away, she'd be lost to it again.

Alone.

Now, gripping her book bag strap with both hands, she feels Hitoshi leave her. From out of the corner of her eyes, she sees him duck his head, rubbing at the back of his neck as he mumbles another half-hearted apology. And then he's gone. Back down the street, back and away.

And there's that old feeling again, years and years forgotten: the desire to turn and watch him go. The desire to give chase.

What has she done wrong? What could she have done better?

But she isn't six years old anymore. Not seven. Not eight.

Now, she doesn't watch him go.

---

By the time Suzume drags herself into class, half of the seats are already filled with chattering students. Fortunately, the sudden fear at having to make a decision about where to sit is short-lived. Relief pumps through her sluggish, morose body as she realizes that the papers on each desk are signs of a seating chart, arranged in the usual syllabary order.

As is typical for her family name, she finds herself on the far side of the room, next to the windows. With the windows to her left, that leaves her only three possibilities for seatmates. The desk to the right of her and behind are still empty. With five minutes left before the start of class, this doesn't particularly surprise her.

But the seat in front is already filled by a black haired shock of a girl. Dangerously thin, her long fingers are splayed across her desk like the spindling, twitchy limbs of a spider. Suzume catches her gaze as she slides past, and her eyes are as dark as her hair. They remind Suzume of oil, pooling deep in the cavernous recesses of her eye sockets.

Gaunt-faced and gangly-limbed, her skin is as white and thin as paper, stretched much too tightly over her sharp, pronounced bones. When Suzume takes her seat, those bones creak audibly as the girl shifts in her chair, turning to face her. It's a wonder that those bones don't pierce right through her tissue paper skin.

"Oh," the girl says in a dry-throated whisper. It's quiet, as soft as dead winter leaves rustling underfoot, and yet somehow so clear as to be heard over the myriad background conversations filling the animated classroom. "You play Souls games."

The girl is deeply uncanny to look at. Suzume holds her gaze anyway. There's something very familiar lurking beneath the haunting pallor of her face – something very human.

Excitement. Tentative – just a trace of it. But it's excitement all the same.

Reaching out across the space between their desks with her long fingers, the girl touches one of the gleaming pins fixed to Suzume's book bag – a cute, stylized portrait of a similarly haunting blue-haired witch girl – with a tender sort of affection that seems to soften the hungry, knife-sharp angles of her face. "And you like Ranni, too."

Staring into those pitch-colored eyes, Suzume sees herself reflected in them in more ways than one. In the question she hears an echo of her own voice.

Lonely. A touch fearful.

And buried deep beneath that, so many layers and layers deep:

Hope.

"She's one of my favorites, actually!" Swallowing back the lump in her throat that the memory of Katsuki and her interaction with Hitoshi had left there, Suzume feels a smile spreading across her face again. "This pin came as a set – Ranni the doll, and her wolf – but I couldn't find Blaidd's pin anywhere. I got it a year back maybe, and there wasn't a lot of merch in my old town… I love Ranni, but I think Blaidd might be my favorite of the two, and second favorite overall."

Without answering, the gloam-eyed girl reaches down beside her seat and pulls out a surprisingly cute frog-shaped coin purse from the bag at her feet. From that, she produces something small, something shiny, held out towards Suzume in the palm of her near-skeletal hand like an offering.

It's Ranni's missing partner pin: Blaidd, her half-wolf knight.

Just then, Suzume catches a bit of movement in the corners of her vision: a boy, tall and lanky, his upswept and wild violet hair only adding to the impression of height. Hitoshi. Slinking beside Suzume, he collapses into the seat beside her without a word.

It's with pointed effort that Suzume manages not to look at him. If the girl notices him herself, she doesn't give any indication. Her attention is wholly fixed on Suzume.

"I got him a while ago, too," she's saying in that same dead-leaf whisper from before. "No Ranni when I got mine; she was sold out everywhere. I always liked him too, but… Ranni's my favorite. My sister even took me into Tokyo to look."

The pin looks so small in the girl's hand, the silver-edging of it a cold and forlorn glint in the fluorescent lighting of the room. Suzume stares at it for a long moment, feeling the familiar prickle of heat burn in her eyes.

"Do you want her? Want mine, I mean?" In her chest, her heart quickens, and that prickles hot, too. It's that tiny, stubborn flicker of hope in the long-dark cavity of her chest, struck hot, burning, stubborn now. It's as if the girl in front of her holds flint and tinder and not just a pin. "You can have her!"

The girl's eyes go wide. In those corpse pale cheeks, there's the budding of something soft and pink, something springtime warm. It has the effect of softening her face even more. Suzume finds herself thinking maybe she wasn't ever actually all that uncanny, after all. "Oh, well – I couldn't – "

"It's really okay!"

"Well, maybe we could… trade?"

Looking between the pin on her bag and the pin in the girl's hand, Suzume shakes her head. The design of the pair is such that if placed beside each other, they fit together like puzzle pieces. A collector's set, meant as a pair. Impulsively – decisively – she unfastens the pin from her bag and presses it beside its match in the girl's palm.

"They've been apart too long already," Suzume says. "I think they'd be better together now."

The girl looks away from Suzume then, her own attention fixed on the pins in her hand. Slowly, so very slowly, she curls her fingers around the set, the metal clink of them very nearly smothered by a riotous burst of laughter from across the room.

Then she pulls her fist to her chest and holds them as one might hold something very precious. "No one besides my parents or my sister's ever given me a gift before," she murmurs, a little wonderingly, her murky gaze fixed on Suzume's desk.

Just then, the background chatter starts to settle in the respectful way afforded to teachers only by the grace of first day jitters. Suzume's attention darts to the door where she watches a man in a suit enter the classroom. The clock on the wall just above his head reads an even 7:50 AM.

When she looks back towards the girl, she's met once more by those round, black eyes.

They look a little wet this time.

"You'll have to tell me about how you built your character later," she tells the girl with another smile. Then, dropping her voice to a furtive whisper of her own: "Or you could… write me a note about it?"

For a second, the girl only stares at Suzume. Then – finally – a smile rises across her solemn face, wide and vibrant and charmingly crooked.

"Yes," says the girl, all dark hair and dark eyes, smiling a small but strangely contagious smile out from under that heavy gloom, "yes, I can do that."

"All right, all right." The voice comes from the front of the classroom, deep, masculine. Gentle despite that, it brooks no room for argument, punctuated by the squeak of a marker on the dry erase board as the teacher writes his name in lovely, calligraphy-worthy kanji. "Settle down now, everyone."

With an obvious reluctance Suzume finds endearing, the girl turns back to face the front with another muffled concert of creaking bones. Moving to put her bag down beneath her seat – short one pin, now – she catches sight of Hitoshi beside her, his chin propped up in his hand, his head facing forward –

And his sharp eyes fixed on her in a sidelong stare.

He doesn't return the smile she gives him. Brows furrowed and mouth pinched, he slides his gaze away from her, acting as if she hadn't just caught him staring.

But like the girl's eyes had been a little wet, Suzume notices his cheeks look a little pink.

---

At the end of a long but thrilling day of trading notes with potential new friend number two Mahone Mariko, Suzume makes the unfortunate discovery that Mariko lives close enough to school that she doesn't need to take the train.

Worse still, her path home takes her in the entirely opposite direction from Suzume's own.

They leave class together anyway, trading both conversation and their soft indoor slippers for their shoes in the genkan. At her full height, Suzume is certain Mariko stands as tall – if not taller – than Hitoshi, though she keeps her head tucked and her shoulders stooped so that Suzume can hear her even though her voice rarely rises above a whisper. There's no mistaking the way a few of their classmates move to give the pair of them a wide berth. Whether unnerved by her height or her general appearance, it's clear that it's Mariko they hope to avoid. Suzume earns only a few of their stolen, fitful glances.

Either Mariko doesn't notice, or she doesn't care. Surprisingly chatty despite her appearance – and it seems there is much about her that is at odds with her appearance – she rambles on about a lore video she promises to link to Suzume later when she has a chance to dig through her bookmarks.

"If you feel comfortable giving me your phone number, of course," she murmurs after a breathless pause, and it's apparent from the way her slender, knuckle-knobbed fingers twist in the folds of her skirt that she is more than a little nervous about asking.

More than happy to do just that, they spend their last minutes at the gate of the school trading phone numbers before departing with all the regretful fanfare of longtime friends about to leave on a months long journey apart –

And though she makes the walk to the train station alone this time, Suzume feels light both in step and in her heart.

At the station, she finds Hitoshi standing off to the side of the platform, waiting and obviously alone. Though Mariko had proven herself a very successful distraction from Suzume's wounded feelings from earlier, she had noticed that he had kept almost entirely to himself. Barring a few minor pleasantries with some of the other boys in class, he didn't appear to be drowning in companionship. It seems as if his similarities to Katsuki had ended with his refusal to be seen with her in public. Outside of that, he seems to be nothing at all like Katsuki and his throng of similarly mean-spirited friends.

If anything, she'd noticed the way the students had looked at him had been strangely similar to the way that they'd eyed Mariko:

Uncomfortably fascinated, if only a little less so.

Driven as much by pity as curiosity, Suzume finds herself crossing the platform with purpose, weaving in and out of the thin crowd towards him. Fixed as his attention is on the track, he doesn't notice her until she's upon him. He startles a bit at the feeling of her hand tugging at his sleeve.

"Sorry!" It's an instinct, the apology she gives him. He stares down at her as if seeing something exotic and strange for the first time, his eyes briefly widening in his face. But then – much more like her brother than Katsuki – his face closes in on itself, and he's reserved again.

She doesn't let it discourage her.

"I just thought – well, maybe we could sit together again. Do a hunt, again."

And she thinks she shouldn't want that. Shouldn't want to sit together. Shouldn't want to play a game with him. As a child, even as forgiving as she'd tried to be, there had come a point where Katsuki's refusal to acknowledge her as a friend to anyone but his mother and maybe Izuku had ultimately poisoned their relationship. It hadn't been because he was cruel. It hadn't been because of his temper. Even his arrogance – she could have lived with that.

She could have lived with all of it.

But more than any of that, it had hurt so much being publicly denied, time and time again. To be mocked publicly, and so derisively, as if she didn't mean anything at all to him. That was what she couldn't bear.

Hitoshi stares down at her in mute consideration for a long moment. His expression is unreadable."Well," he says, finally, "if you want to."

And for some reason she can't begin to explain she does.

So they stand together in strange silence on the platform. When the train arrives, she trails after him, fingers wrapped around the strap of her bag like one might cling to a lifeline. Hitoshi leads her in continued silence through a few cars until he finds a pair of empty seats. When he fills the first one, he looks back at her with a tepid kind of expectancy that only just borders on an implied invitation.

Suzume takes it, similarly quiet.

For the first few minutes, the pair of them sit, not speaking, not looking at each other. Together, Suzume thinks, but not really. Together, but apart. Rocked gently by the swaying train car as it travels along its tracks, she watches the way the city streams past in many shades of muted, urban grey, fidgeting with the bag in her lap.

Why was she trying to do this to herself again?

"You gave one of your pins to Mahone."

Hitoshi's voice, though not quite a whisper, is low. Quiet. Suzume doesn't look up at him, choosing instead to smooth her fingers over the now empty spot on her bag. Despite the vacant space it leaves, the sight only fills her with a kind of happiness she isn't sure she's felt in a long, long time.

"They're a matching pair," she says, just as quiet as he is, smiling to herself. "They're meant to be together."

"She doesn't have any friends."

At that, Suzume looks up at Hitoshi. He isn't looking at her. He isn't looking out the window, either. He's frowning down at his hands. It's a small frown. He could be studying them, or upset, or simply resting his face. She can't tell.

"What?"

"She doesn't have any friends," he repeats, as if that's any kind of an answer to the question she's asking him.

In defense of her new friend, Suzume feels herself bristle. "So?" And then, even more testily, "She does now."

"So?" He looks at her steadily then. "Shouldn't you be asking why instead?"

Though his face is that same calm, unblemished apathy from earlier, there is a heaviness about his eyes that isn't just the sleepless bruises gathered like shadows beneath them. It's an intensity. A strange sort of earnestness. His gaze simmers like her brother's often does, made hot by something he holds too close to his chest for her to know or understand.

Suzume frowns, trying to imagine why Mariko might not have any friends. There's really only one reason that she can see, and it feels a little terrible to even voice it aloud. "What, because she looks like she does? I don't care about that."

And she doesn't. It's not as if she's any stranger to unconventional appearances. In the very few times she's been out with her brother – and in the fewer times still where he's gone without his mask – he always draws a lot of curious attention.

Attention that is often unkind.

Confident in that easy, unflinching way of his, her brother has always been the sort to either stare down his gawkers until they look away or laugh the whole thing off. He's never bothered by it. It upsets her far more than it does him. "Don't worry about it. Y'know they're gonna stare, Suzu," he'd told her once when she'd found herself growing more and more angry on his behalf. He'd tweaked her puffed up cheeks and blown hot air in her ear until she flinched, until she was pushing at his chin, laughing despite her anger. "So they ain't ever seen a living corpse before. Let 'em gawk."

But Mariko doesn't strike Suzume as the sort who laughs it off very easily. She strikes Suzume as someone who has only come to learn to bear it with the sort of quiet grace that shouldn't be expected of anyone –

Let alone a thirteen year old girl. When Suzume thinks about that little frog coin purse, it feels like there's something sharp and awful being pushed right through her chest. She's just a girl. Just a normal thirteen year old girl.

It isn't fair.

"It's…" Hitoshi sounds like he's struggling to find a way to order his thoughts into words delicate enough not to upset her. "I mean, yeah, it's that, but also that's not everything. She looked a little more normal when she was younger, but even then – "

It doesn't work. Suzume is immediately upset.

"I don't care what she looked like before – or why anyone doesn't want to be friends with her," Suzume says with a coldness she borrows from her brother. It's a coldness that feels awful to step into – and yet so right for how her heart burns. "I wanna be friends with her. I'm gonna be friends with her. And if that's – "

Hitoshi is quick to cut her off. "No one wants to be friends with her 'cause her quirk scares them." Despite the sudden interruption, there's no excitement to him. There's nothing to him but a strange sort of tiredness. "Did she tell you what her quirk is?"

"She didn't. It didn't come up – and it doesn't matter, anyway. I don't care what it is."

Some of that tiredness falls away from him. Now there's a tension in his brows so tight they're almost trembling, his mouth pulled down sharply at the edges. "Everyone cares about shit like that," he says, and he says it so quietly she's not even sure he means for her to hear it.

It's with no small amount of regret that Suzume remembers Katsuki and the way their friendship had fallen apart. She hadn't been able to forgive him pretending that they weren't friends when she'd been a child, but would she be able to now? It still stings, just as much now as it had then. But in the end, is it really unbearable?

Maybe if she could understand. Maybe she could have done more, made it work. What had been the reason? The real reason? Why had Katsuki done it then?

And why is Hitoshi doing it now?

Sitting beside him as she is, it occurs to her that she'd been prepared to forgive Hitoshi the way she hadn't Katsuki because she'd spent many a night being eaten alive by that look on Katsuki's face when she'd told him she'd hated him. To do that again –

Except it isn't just his refusal to acknowledge her. She thinks now she could forgive Hitoshi that. But the way he's talking about Mariko? Mariko is different. She can't forgive him for being mean to Mariko.

Mariko hadn't shied away from anything. Mariko had slipped her notes, and smiled with her at lunch, and followed her to the shoe lockers after class, chattering away, not caring who noticed.

And Suzume had been so happy to finally have a friend – a real, honest to god friend her own age – that she hadn't been remotely troubled by the strange looks they'd earned from their classmates. Everyone had seen them. Neither of them had cared.

"Well, not me," she insists stubbornly, feeling defensive enough to go on the offensive. "And if you're trying to tell me I shouldn't be her friend, well – then I don't wanna be yours."

Hitoshi's downturned lips part over his teeth in a heightened grimace, and for a moment he looks so wounded she feels like she's looking at Katsuki out in the school yard all those years ago. Unlike Katsuki though, he shakes his head –

And tries to argue.

"That's – listen, okay? You got me all wrong. I'm not saying you shouldn't be friends with her." His voice drops again, hardly more than a tense whisper. "No doubt she probably needs it."

Suzume stares at him. It's as if he's intent on being as cryptic as possible. By now the agitation is made plain on his face; she can tell he's on edge, borderline adversarial.

And it has the side effect of making her feel adversarial, too.

"I can't help getting it wrong if you're not gonna be – if you won't say what you mean! I don't know what you're talking about, or what Mariko's quirk has to do with anything – what me being friends with her has to do with anything!" And then, before she can really reel it back: "At least she was nice to me in front of other people! We got to class and you acted like you didn't even know me!"

Hitoshi looks away from her then, his mouth closed, thinning further, his hands on his knees made into neat and tidy fists. As quiet as she's tried to be – as hushed as she's managed to keep her little outburst – the pair of them are still drawing looks from the mostly adult passengers. Even if she feels vindicated in her feelings, she can't help but feel chastised by the subtle way an older businessman shakes his head as he steals a glance at them, his mouth pursed and sour.

"This is dumb," Suzume whispers, frowning at him and feeling very suddenly as stupid as the entire situation. "If you didn't wanna be my friend, you could have just told me no."

He still isn't looking at her when he answers, and his tone is snappish. "That isn't what I'm saying. If I didn't wanna be your friend, I would've said so. That isn't – that isn't this."

"Then what is this?"

"Just – what if you find out something about…" Closing his eyes, the expression he makes is twisted up, almost like he's fighting back nausea. "About m– about Mariko that… I don't know. Something about her that makes you not wanna be her friend?"

Again with Mariko. Again!

Suzume feels her own face twisting up. More than just hurt now, she's feeling so frustrated. Part of it is from a sense that there's something going on that Hitoshi won't explain, and part of it is the fear that Hitoshi is for some reason still trying to convince her to stop being friends with Mariko.

It's only been a day, she knows. Only been one day, one fragment of a day. Eight hours of friendship. But Suzume glowers down at the empty spot on her bag where Blaidd the half-wolf had once taken up guard and feels in her heart that what she has with Mariko is special – will be special.

In the end, Blaidd had been made to turn against Ranni against his own will, driven by a birthright he had no control over. But Suzume isn't Blaidd, and she doesn't have to betray Mariko.

She probably needs it. Even Hitoshi had said it.

Suzume needs it, too.

She shakes her head. "I don't wanna… don't wanna listen to you be mean to her anymore." Quiet as it is, her voice quavers with a potent cocktail of emotions: indignation, betrayal, hurt. It's hard to put her foot down. She doesn't really have much experience. The last time – the last real time, because her brother always has a way of undermining her when she tries with him – that had been with Katsuki. It had hurt then. Even now, with this tiny, almost-friendship, it hurts now.

"I wasn't – " Hitoshi tries to speak, but cuts himself off.

"Wasn't what?" She stares at him. He stares back. He looks as indignant as she feels, but he only stares at her. After a moment, his mouth moves – but he doesn't say anything.

Still frowning, he only shakes his head.

"Yeah," Suzume says, standing up from her seat so quickly she almost gets vertigo. "Yeah, okay."

And then, without letting herself look back, she pushes off through the mercifully sparse crowd in search of another seat all together.

Hitoshi doesn't follow her – but then, she doesn't expect him to.

She finds one in the next car over, and it's a double blessing: there's no one in this car to have witnessed her outburst, and from this new seat she can't see Hitoshi at all even if she wanted to. Settling into it, she pulls her bag up and into her lap, and feels very sorry for herself.

One friend, to two friends, and back to one friend again. It's still a net positive, she tries to tell herself. She'd had zero friends at the start of the day, unless she counted Hawks – but being that he's so much older than her, it's hard to count him sometimes. Hawks occupies some strange space, an almost-brother space in her heart. Maybe if she didn't already have a brother –

And maybe if she didn't love her brother as much as she does…

As for her brother – her brother is her brother. Her brother is her world, the sun with which she revolves around. Her brother is fire from the gods with which she would be dead without, a god in his own right, a god in the body of a boy, in the body of a young man, the secret of his strange divinity betrayed by the otherworldly blue of his eyes. He is unflinching and unfathomable. She loves him desperately.

But he isn't her friend, either.

So, one friend now. Just the one.

Suzume presses her fingers to the empty space on her bag – and feels her bag vibrate.

Tugging it open, she pulls out her phone. She's never really had much cause to use it for anything besides serious and adult things before – serious and adult things like social workers and hospital calls. Even Hawks, as much as she likes him – there's something official about him, too, and even more so now that he's her guardian.

Which isn't to say she doesn't like talking to him. She likes it. Loves it, even. But there's always that fear that he's doing it out of obligation still, small though it's become over the years.

And her brother –

She can count the number of times he's interacted with her over the phone on one hand.

Again, in her hand, the phone vibrates. It's not a call. It's a text message. One of two, now.

Suzume opens the lock screen.

Both text messages are from Mariko.

The first is a picture of a pair of pins: Ranni and Blaidd together, fixed to a board absolutely covered in other meticulously arranged Elden Ring pins. Somehow, despite the crowd, they seem set apart from all the rest, lending them an air of importance.

As expected, they fit together perfectly.

The second text is a real text. The words are clear on the shiny glass screen:

Ranni-chan: I thought about putting them on my bookbag like you. I want to show them off. But also I'm afraid of losing them. So I put them on my pin board, next to my bed. They fit together perfectly.

The glass of the phone's screen is so clean. So shiny. But suddenly it feels like it's hard for Suzume to read the words there; they've gone all blurry. She blinks, and her cheeks are wet – wet, because her eyes are wet.

Her phone vibrates again, this time in her hand. Suzume has to rub her eyes with the back of her hand to see the third text that comes in:

Ranni-chan: Thank you again for the pin.

And then, another almost immediately:

Ranni-chan: I'm really excited to be your friend.

Suzume smiles down at her phone. It's a wobbly, wet kind of smile. A two friends gained and one friend lost kind of smile –

But it will be okay, she thinks.

At the end of the day, one friend – one really good and cool friend – well, it has to be better than zero.

Suzume: me too! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

---

As soon as Suzume opens the door to her apartment, she's greeted by the steady, rhythmic whisper of water rushing through pipes.

The apartment is decades old, in a decades old building. She's quickly learned the sound of the water moving through the walls when someone is at the sink or in the shower is louder than in any other place she's lived. Standing in the entryway, grocery bags in her hands and her school bag slung over her shoulder, Suzume stands very still, listening to the familiar woosh of invariant white noise. There's no sound of the water splashing in the basin in the kitchen that she can hear. The shower then, she thinks, her nose crinkling and her brow furrowing with little more than harmless interest; her brother must be taking one.

Earlier that same morning as she was getting ready, he'd trailed her, as he had started doing recently, from room to room to room in her strange, new apartment. Bedroom to bathroom, bathroom to kitchen, the heavier sound of his footsteps always in concert with her lighter ones, the floors beneath the both of them creaking and whining. "You freaked out?" he'd asked her. Not even turning to look at him as she'd made rolls in the tiny rectangular egg pan, she'd bobbed her head mutely. Of course she was freaked out. What kind of a question was that? The apartment was new. The school was new. Everything was new and strange and surely awful for it, and she'd found herself terrified at even the prospect of tugging on her shoes in the entryway. Suzume moved as if from something terrifying in a dream – those awful chased-by-something-monstrous kind of dreams where she felt like she just couldn't get any momentum at all. Her traitor-limbs were leaden and too heavy, her feet clumsy, stumbling as if through thick, treacherous mud.

Right when she'd gone to leave, her brother had taken hold of her shoulders and spun her around, pinning her firmly against the front door. As old as the rest of the house, she remembers the way it had whined like the floor under their combined weight with a little shiver. Ignoring how flustered and huffy she'd gotten – or, knowing him, reveling in it – he'd bent down until his face was level with hers, his eyes filling the entirety of her vision.

She had felt lost in all that pristine blue.

"You look real cute in your new uniform," he'd said, his voice drawling and slick, buzzy in her head.

(She'd felt lost – and a lot like how she thinks being drunk must feel.)

"Oh, um. Thanks," she'd mumbled, tongue feeling thick between her teeth. Her fingers smoothed down the hem of her skirt with nerves wholly different from new-school jitters. "What're you gonna do today?"

His heavy-lidded eyes had gotten heavier. The smile he'd been wearing had gotten fractionally wider. Secretive.

Sly.

"Mmm. Who knows. Maybe I'll desecrate your room. Really foul the place up."

"Desecrate it?"

He'd cracked a leering grin at the face she'd pulled, rolled his eyes – half playful, half mean – and said, "Prolly gonna start with a shower, though."

Your room, he'd said. She'd repeated the words in her head all day. It had lingered like an itch she couldn't quite scratch, through Hitoshi, through the good and hurt feelings – through even Mariko and the unadulterated joy of trading notes with her all day. Not their room, or his room, or his house. Her room. Why the change? There hadn't been time to ask him. Not wanting to give him the satisfaction of rising to his bait – more than the sour look she'd quickly put away, anyway – she'd sniffed and said, "Please don't do… whatever you mean about desecrating my room. Please just take a shower. And then two more."

He'd laughed. It had moved like his fingers often did over her face, stirring in her hair, his familiar, hot breath seeping into her. "We'll see how I'm feeling," he'd said, letting his hands slip down her shoulders to fuss with her tie. She'd braced herself then, waiting for him to do something cruel – to pull it too tight, to tug her forward on it like a leash, like a dog. In the end, though, he'd only straightened it out, smoothing his fingers down the length, and told her, placidly, "You know how it goes."

She did know how it went, even if she didn't understand why it did. Her mercurial brother and his showers, she'd thought. One of his many mysteries. Now she shuffles out of her school loafers in the genkan, tucking them beside her brother's scuffed boots in the shoe cabinet and listens to the rush of all that water. If he had taken a shower after she'd left, this would make it his second shower at least.

But the day has been… if not perfect, at least better than she was expecting. Buoyed up by her surprisingly resilient good humor, she finds the noise takes on a comforting, familiar cast, becoming much more her favorite brother and his endearing if inexplicable habits and much less her weird brother and his weirder showers.

Smiling to herself, she pads down the hall and into the kitchen, shedding her book bag and blazer in the living room along the way.

The kitchen is where her brother finds her some twenty minutes later. He drifts into the sun-soaked room like black smoke, as out of place as ever – and there are no fire alarms to herald his arrival. Light-footed and silent in a way that has to be on purpose, she doesn't notice him until he's got his hands caught round her waist, his too-hot body pressed to her back. The cold showers he claims to take never seem to do anything about how hot he gets. Even through both his clothes and her own, Suzume can feel the heat radiating off of him.

"I'm home," she says cheerfully. It's traditional, and more than that – ever the sentimentalist – Suzume wants to say it. It's a little difficult to flip the cabbage pancake she's cooking with him pressed so close, but she's had plenty of practice cooking this way over the last year. Even when he doesn't have anything to cut for her, he's always like this when she's in the kitchen: pressed snug against her back, either his hands or his arms a constant at her shoulders, her waist, her hips.

Heat on both sides.

"Mmm." It rumbles in his chest. Passing through her too because of proximity, it fizzles inside of her like effervescent carbonation, bubbly, heady, bitter and sweet on the tongue. "Welcome home." That's traditional, too, the clear affection in his voice left bare for her to bask in. With his head tucked against hers and his nose at her hairline, he breathes in, deep and long and slow. The kitchen is already over-warm, but she doesn't begrudge him the heat from his breath – and certainly not from his mouth when he sneaks a kiss against her temple. Despite the heat in the kitchen, she shivers –

And when he chuckles against her ear, low and heady from the back of his throat, she shivers then, too.

Clearing her own throat, she runs her chopsticks across the crispy side of the pancake, trying to distract herself. The sound is satisfying. Unsurprisingly, it isn't enough. "Another shower? The water bill's gonna be crazy now that I gotta take care of it." It's a light admonishment, lightly delivered. Suzume doesn't really care. It's more an attempt at playing the part of the adult she wishes she was –

Or maybe to distract herself, and her brother, too.

But of course that doesn't seem to work, either. Wholly focused, his hands start wandering immediately, tugging shamelessly at the fabric of her shirt. He's much too quick. Already he's got one side of her shirt untucked from her skirt before she can really react.

"Hey!"

"You mean your dead dad and his blood money gotta take care of it," he says, impervious to the way she starts swatting at his other hand. "I can't say I don't take a sick kinda gratification in knowing that's where his money's going. Bet that bastard's spinning in his fucking grave." He laughs again, though whether or not it's because he's got her shirt fully untucked or because he's thinking about her dead father is unclear. Now his hands are up and under her shirt, the press of his palms so much more intimate against her bare skin.

Intimacy. Everything from the way he looks at her to the way he touches her is an incessant, demanding kind of intimacy these days. He holds her with wildfire arms and breathes smoke into her lungs, hot on the outside, made hot on the inside. Sometimes she finds it suffocating. Now she lets her head roll back against his chest, breathing him in with a neediness she doesn't really fight. There's the faint, foreign scent of spice tickling at her nose, of fire-warmed wood, and then it's all him: simmering heat and the lingering smell of smoke.

"You used the soap I got you." Smiling, Suzume scrapes at the pancake again if only to have something to do with her fidgety hands.

"I mean it's better than the 3 in 1 shit I was using. Wasn't gonna not use it." He says it in that off-handed, not-a-big-deal way of his.

Expensive and luxurious, Suzume had ordered the shower gel online on impulse and all but begged him to use it. He'd acted much the same way then as he does now: coolly indifferent. Maybe I'll try it, he'd said, turning the bottle over in his hands as if he were handling a grenade and not body wash; if I get around to it.

She's glad she has him at her back, glad that he can't see her smile. "It smells good," she says, and then, poking at the edge of the pancake, she adds, "On you."

Her brother grunts, and his voice when he speaks again is a little husky despite the nonchalance. "Sure." As if to further illustrate how not a big deal any of this is, he promptly changes the subject. "Okonomiyaki though, huh. Shit day?"

In the pan, the layers of batter and cabbage crackle in the hot oil. The sound and the smell of it joins his own as it fills the tiny kitchen, comfort on comfort, rich and savory.

It's a dish her mother had often made for her when she was small.

"Just a little treat," Mama had said once, back when they'd lived at the big house. "Like a little festival at home."

"I guess I do make it most often when I'm sad." It's a sudden realization, one that has only just dawned on her after years and years of making it at the end of long, tiring days.

Of course it's something her brother would have noticed. Nothing ever escapes him.

"But," she says, a little wonderingly, "I'm not actually sad now."

Straightening up behind her, his chin rests at the crown of her head, his thumbs working slow circles into the dip in her waist. "Oh, yeah? School didn't wreck you, then?"

It's meant to sound as nonchalant as everything else he's been saying, she thinks. Indifferent. Apathetic. Very I-don't-care-you-got-me-fancy-soap.

Don't-care-if-you-think-I-smell-good.

But he isn't the only one who's come to know things over the years, and Suzume catches a very faint and no-doubt purposefully obscured fragment of curiosity in his voice.

"Nope! It was pretty good, actually," she says, a little bewildered by how much she means it. If anything, it was pretty good is an understatement. The day has been almost perfect, and after putting some distance between Hitoshi and herself, there's come to be a giddiness in her she can't quite hope to conceal.

Something in the room seems to shift, and against her, too. Her brother's cheek touches hers. It feels as fire-warmed as the rest of him, the hot metal of his staples a pleasant but prickling sting against her skin.

"Huh. What happened?"

That curiosity feels a little more pronounced now. A little sharper. For as careful as he always is, it doesn't seem he can help the way the edge of it slides clean through that veneer of casual disinterest like a nail poking out from beneath an otherwise soft rug.

And much like a nail, his curiosity can be dangerous if she isn't careful where she steps.

It's a shame, really. She wants more than anything to tell him everything about her day. It isn't that she never does; rather, she always has. But Suzume has never had anything more to say than recounting her lessons or the minor dramas and stories she's overheard from her classmates.

Now, though, she does have more.

Now she's made friends –

Or one, anyway.

(And she can't tell him about it.)

It's not that he's ever told her explicitly that she isn't allowed to have friends. Unlike many of his other rules – many of which she suspects he makes up on the spot only to frustrate her – he's never once touched the subject. And really, he hasn't needed to. Since Katsuki and Izuku, Suzume has never taken the opportunity for friendship outside of her woefully undefinable relationship with Hawks.

Still, she remembers the disdain he'd had for her friends when she'd been younger. She remembers the disdain he'd had for her mother even, tempered though it had been with something that might have passed for sympathy – or as close to sympathy as her brother was capable of managing, anyway.

More so than any rule he's ever enforced, that it's the two of them and just the two of them has always seemed inarguably implicit.

There has never been any need for him to tell her so. No need for him to say, "You can only have me."

But he has said, "You were made for me," and the unspoken other half of that has always been the very obvious, "And you aren't meant for anyone else."

She knows it like her lungs know how to take air. She knows it like her heart knows how to pump blood. The sky is blue, and the earth is round, and it is her and her brother, just the two of them.

(Only and ever the two of them.)

So she doesn't tell him about Hitoshi. She doesn't even tell him about Mariko, and the notes they'd exchanged in class – notes she'd begrudgingly thrown away outside the bakery on the way home from school. Leaving Mariko's text messages in her phone is all she's willing to do. It's not a lie if she doesn't tell him about it.

(It will be a bridge if and when they come to it.)

So instead, the chopsticks gone still in her hand, she says, "If we were… if we were the same age, or – or close enough that we could go to the same school together – would you hide the fact that we were friends?"

"Friends?" Her brother repeats the word so slowly she can imagine it like a tangible thing he has to talk around, simmering in his mouth, burnt to cinders on his too-hot tongue. His grip on her waist tightens as much as his hold on that carefully constructed nonchalance seems to falter. "Is that what you think we are?"

It isn't, of course. Suzume huffs, shaking her head as if to clear the air. "Friends – brother and sister – whatever it is we are. The what isn't what's important, Nii-chan, it's the… well, not the why, but the… would?" Pointedly ignoring this maybe-threat, she lifts the pan from the stove and eases the fully cooked pancake onto a waiting platter. "Would you hide it from people? Would you pretend you didn't… didn't like me?"

"Where's this coming from?"

It's risky, asking her brother this. It's risky, but she doesn't know who else to ask. Hawks? Hawks would find some way to sugar-coat it, to spare her from anything that might hurt too much. The kindness in him runs too deep, too sweet, spoonfuls of confectionary white lies to help choke down something ugly. Her brother, by contrast, is a spoonful of broken glass; all jagged-edged truth.

He is so rarely gentle.

"On the way to school, on the train – I saw a boy and a girl sitting together. They spent the whole time talking to each other. They seemed…" Suzume trails off, frowning down at the fully cooked pancake. The bottle of okonomiyaki sauce sits on the counter waiting, but she doesn't move to pick it up. A breeze drifts in through the crack in the window set over the stove, summer warm and a little humid, more heat to envelop her. Goosebumps raise along her arms as the wind ghosts across her skin like a hot, slow breath.

"They seemed close, I guess. The way they talked. Like… easy friends. And then later, in class – they were in my class, the two of them. And they sat next to each other, but they didn't talk anymore. It was like… like the boy pretended he didn't even know the girl at all. And I think it made her sad."

Her brother doesn't say anything. Desperate to have something to do with her hands, Suzume finally picks up the bottle and starts to dress the pancake, layering it with red-brown sauce the color of old blood and older wounds. "Later on, on the way home – they were talking again. A little more strained, this time. But it felt like – it felt like the boy wanted to pretend they weren't friends at school. In front of other people."

"But he didn't care if you saw?"

Suzume imagines she hears a note of accusation in his tone. She knows it isn't real. Her brother is too cunning to let something so obvious slip in if he doesn't want to, even if his grip on her waist is a little too tight –

Even if his voice is a little too sharp.

"Why would they care if I saw?" She asks, quietly. "I'm nobody."

When her brother doesn't say anything again, Suzume gestures to the kewpie mayo sitting on the highest shelf just beside the window. "Can you get that for me?"

Wordlessly, her brother frees one hand from her waist and retrieves the white bottle. He doesn't hand it to her, but rather sets it on the counter, his now empty hand curling into a fist beside the plastic container. The sun that slants through the window glitters in the silver metal of his staples, a little blinding, and she can see the white of his knuckle bones pushed up beneath the skin pulled tautly over them.

Rather than pick up the bottle, she touches the ridges of his knuckles, slotting her slim fingers between them. It's something she does often. There's something comforting about how easily they seem to settle into place, how neatly they fit. "Why would someone do that?"

At first, she thinks he won't answer her. The silence hangs heavy between them, too heavy for all the light brightness of the sun-bleached room. There is only the heat of his hand beneath her palm, and the heat of his other hand at her waist, his fingers pressed so snug into her bare skin that she imagines the memory of them will be left there like fingerprints at the scene of the crime long after he's pulled his hand away.

But then she feels him exhale out through his nose, a sharp noise in the quiet room. "Why do you care?"

"I just… I don't know." Suzume wets her lips, shakes her head. There's no answer to that question she thinks he'll like, and many she knows he will hate. "I don't, really. It was stupid to bring up. Forget it."

"Don't lie to me, Suzu. You do care. I know it; you know it. Don't insult me or yourself by pretending like it's not the most obvious fucking thing in the world."

It should be a threat, she thinks. The words are pieces of one, parts of something venomous, fragmentary shards of cruelty. But his tone is strangely placid, smooth and thick as velvet rolled out over all the sharp edges she thinks should be there.

Restrained, but only just. There's no weaseling back out of this now.

"I guess it just reminded me of Katsuki, when I was younger," Suzume says softly. "He did that to me, before… before we had our falling out. Was nice when it was just the two of us… well, nice-ish, I guess. But then when there were people around to see – people who were his friends – "

"He was a total jackass?" That velvet smoothness is still there, though decidedly more threadbare than before.

"Well, I mean – yeah. I guess."

Another snort. Another bout of silence. Suzume stares down at her pancake, growing soggy under the sauce.

And then her brother says, "I know I call you dumb all the time, but c'mon – even I know you're smart enough to figure this one out on your own."

It's her turn not to say anything. The hand her brother has at her waist moves around her, his palm sliding over the bare skin of her stomach beneath her shirt until it reaches her other hip, drawing her further back into himself –

As if there is any space left between them –

Anything left to conquer.

"I can't think of anything else but that your guy on the train is ashamed of this girl he's supposedly friends with," her brother says. He says it so easy – as easy as he might slip an especially sharp knife lovingly between her ribs. "Same shit with that little prick from elementary school, too. What other reason would there be?"

Suzume smiles down at the half-dressed okonomiyaki. Lifting her hand from her brother's on the counter, she opens the mayo bottle and begins to layer it over the pancake in neat, orderly lines. Criss-cross, criss-cross, over and over. They're measured, and even. Festival-perfect.

There's a lump in her throat, but she smiles anyway. Thinks about Mariko, and all their notes. Thinks about the pair of pins, gleaming and pretty, like her brother's staples in the kitchen sunlight.

She tries not to think about Katsuki, or Hitoshi, or the strange hierarchy of boys and friendships and school.

"Would you pretend like you didn't know me… y'know, if we went to the same school? If we were friends, or… or whatever we are? You know… in front of our classmates?" She asks him again. The ache in her throat feels like it's inside her teeth, now, and her cheeks hurt from smiling too hard.

Would you be ashamed of me?

Her hair moves in the wind – except it isn't the wind. There's no breeze coming through the window. It's his breath again, as warm as the breeze, hotter, hotter, his mouth near her ear once more.

"Quit playing dumb." The admonishment is a whisper. "What do you think?"

She closes her eyes, and she does what he says. She thinks about it. Remembers her brother holding her on his lap in the train when he'd taken her to Yokohama, completely unruffled by the evasive but decidedly judgmental gazes of the strangers around them. Remembers how easily he'd declared his affections for her to Giran, bold and shameless and self-possessed like he is about everything else. How he'd carried her on his back, swept her up into his arms at any opportunity.

Of course there's a benefit to being 'siblings'. It's easier for even an undemonstrative boy prone to shyness to be affectionate with his younger sister. There's not as much stigma surrounding that. Still, the ways her brother touches her, the way he holds her, out in public, and even now –

(Especially now – )

None of that is really normal. None of it is really acceptable. She's too old for them to really get away with it like they might have when she was younger – too old to be carried around by her older brother, or be fussed over by him on the train or at the doctor.

But her brother clearly doesn't care. Her brother has never cared. Immune to the disapproval of strangers and acquaintances alike, he'd seemed wholly unimpressed even when Elixir had openly called him out.

Gross, Elixir had said. Disgusting.

Her brother had only laughed.

Setting down the mayo on the counter, Suzume twists awkwardly in her brother's arm. The grip he has on her gives just enough to let her turn – to let her link her own arms around his waist, her cheek pressed to his chest.

"I'm sorry," she murmurs. The thin, worn fabric of his shirt flutters beneath the movement of her cheek, her mouth. "I'm sorry. I know. I just – I just wanted…"

Wanted what?

He knows that, too.

"Wanted me to say it?" Lifting his hand from the counter, her brother sinks it into her hair. The sensation of his fingertips moving slow over her scalp feels so good her knees almost buckle out from under her.

"Yeah," she says, muffled against his chest. "I'm – I was being selfish. It's selfish. M'sorry."

Her brother laughs. It's not a loud sound. It's quiet, more of a chuckle, really, more of his breath in her hair, moving there like his fingers, hot and comforting. Okonomiyaki at the end of a long, bad day.

"If we went to school together," her brother says, that laughter a lingering heat in his tone, "whether friends, or siblings, or whatever the fuck you can imagine we are in your dumb little scenario – y'know I'd be every bit as suffocating in class as I am in private. On the train, in the street, in class. In front of whoever. Fuck, I'd do it on purpose. It doesn't matter. No one else matters but you. But us." He cradles her head. He strokes her hair. His palm is so hot against the naked curve of her hip, fingers locked as if into place. "You know it doesn't. Know they don't."

Suffocating, he says. It's a good word. It's one she's used for him herself, even, even if only in the privacy of her own mind.

And sometimes it's bad, the way he's suffocating. Sometimes he's every bit as hot and monstrous as his quirk, a fire in the room greedily feasting on every lungful of oxygen until she can't breathe, until she's dizzy and sick and emptied out of everything but what he's willing to give her.

And sometimes he's suffocating like a heavy blanket might be in a thunderstorm. Buried underneath it, swaddled in that hot, barely breathable warmth, he keeps her cocooned in all of his familiar dark – kept safe from the big, frightening world and all its big, frightening problems.

Sometimes, Suzume thinks, the fire gets you first. The fire burns. It hurts.

And sometimes, the smoke puts you to sleep with a lungful of lullaby long before the flames make their way up the stake.

So with her face pressed to his chest, Suzume breathes in, long and deep – and there's the smell of him again. Nose-prickling spices, warmed wood, and smoke.

It fills her lungs, suffocating, and deliriously so –

And Suzume has never loved anything else more.

---

It's funny, she thinks; everything about her life as she's gotten older has only ever felt like it was getting more and more complicated. Her living situation, her relationship with her brother, with Hawks – and now, even with Hitoshi. Just as soon as she feels like she's getting a handle on something, something else happens, turning everything on its head. Up becomes down, left becomes right, and all she's left with is a mess she has to try and make sense of like a charlatan diviner might with tea leaves at the bottom of a cup.

Which is to say she often feels like she's just making up everything as she goes and hoping for the best.

But while everything else in her life is a steady pendulum swing between chaos and reason, one thing remains constant.

Easy, even.

Mariko.

By the end of that first day, the two of them both reveal to the other that they've given each other nicknames in their respective phones. Mariko is Ranni-chan, named as much for the character as for the pin that brought them together – and Suzume is Malenia.

Suzume: i'm not as cool as malenia! not in a million years!

Suzume texts back when Mariko makes her reveal. But Mariko is insistent.

Ranni-chan: No. You absolutely are. No arguments.

And even if she isn't sure she believes it herself, the notion that she might be even half as cool as Malenia – that someone thinks she actually is as cool as her – is enough to chase off any lingering grumpiness with regards to her argument with Hitoshi.

Two days in and Suzume is braiding Mariko's long, shining hair during break, marveling at how smooth and straight and cold it feels in her fingers.

Three days in and Mariko's bringing Suzume one of her favorite games, a whole new genre she's never really dabbled in:

Otome.

"Think of it like a visual novel," Mariko tells her in her customary whisper as she slips the game into her bag after class. Her black eyes, already so wide, seem even bigger somehow, gleaming in the classroom fluorescents. "A visual novel, but for girls… and you can end up in a relationship with a lot of the characters. A dating simulator."

Even from that brief description alone, Suzume is entirely intrigued. For nearly the entire trip home, Mariko sends her text messages with pictures of each of Suzume's potential video game boyfriends, replete with pictures and tiny, spoiler-free bios.

Ranni-chan: Don't look up a guide.

She urges her.

Ranni-chan: Please try it blind, and tell me how it goes.

Thankfully, the game is something Suzume can play on her Switch. Eager to start, she spends an hour pouring over the intro while her brother takes one of his excessively long showers. She texts her reactions live to Mariko along with animated stamps and shaky camera shots of the boy who most catches her interest:

An especially shifty-eyed boy with black hair.

Ranni-chan: Oooooh. You like the villains. ︎

Four days in, when Mariko asks after Suzume's family before class, Suzume does something she's never done before and tells her a bit about her brother.

(After a fashion, anyway.)

"Well, um. I live alone." At the slight quirk of one of Mariko's brows, which Suzume has come to realize means immense surprise, she finds herself rushing to clarify. It feels especially bad lying to her one and only friend. "I mean… sometimes. Rarely, actually. Most of the time, my cousin – ummm, he's older – he stays with me. Looks after me. My parents are…"

Suzume shakes her head.

It's half a lie. Three quarters of a lie? Better than a full lie, she hopes, feeling miserable about it.

(It's not like she has a lot to work with.)

It seems to work, though. Having the grace to not ask after Suzume's parents, Mariko moves onto what clearly interests her more. "Older cousin? How old is he?"

"He's, um, he's twenty-one now. Twenty-two in January. He's been looking after me for a while." At first Suzume doesn't realize why she bothers to add those extra bits in – but as a strange, goofy kind of grin takes over her face, it occurs to her that she's excited to be able to talk about him to someone.

To anyone else. It's as if talking about him makes him real. Makes him less of a ghost.

Makes what she has with him feel more real.

Fixing her with a keen-eyed look, a rare but knowing smile dimples Mariko's wan cheeks. She leans towards Suzume across her desk conspiratorially. "Your cheeks are hot." It's still a whisper, but as close to an exclamation as a whisper can get. "I guess you two are close."

And the way she says close makes Suzume's cheeks burn even hotter.

By the time that first week is over, it feels as if they've known each other their whole lives. There is nothing at all cryptic about Mariko. There is nothing mean, nothing strange, nothing impossible to decipher.

And then there's Hitoshi.

For the rest of the week after that first day, Suzume and Hitoshi sit apart from each other on the train. On the way to school, she's careful never to sit in the same car as him if only because seeing him in her periphery makes her feel terribly sad.

But on the way home, the choice is essentially out of her hands. Boarding with him at the same time means it's his choice –

And Hitoshi always seems to wait for her to choose her seat so he can sit somewhere nearby.

She could stand up, of course. Find another seat. She thinks about it the first day, and even the second. But in the end, it doesn't matter. Whether in separate cars or the same, it feels as if there is always that same vast and empty gulf between the two of them.

School isn't any different. Sitting beside him, the both of them facing forward and as still as statues, Suzume will catch him watching her out of the corner of her eyes. Even then, the gulf remains. If she ever turns to look at him, he pulls his eyes away, fixing them ahead instead.

Suzume wonders if he thinks he's being subtle.

(Wonders if this is what her brother thinks about her when she's trying to be sneaky and failing miserably.)

Cunning as she's learned her to be, Suzume thinks Mariko notices the strangeness between the two of them immediately. While she doesn't say anything the first week, by week two any attempts at polite disinterest have been abandoned. It's clear she's unable to keep herself from broaching the subject.

Except she gets it all wrong.

"I think Shinsou likes you," Mariko declares offhandedly to Suzume at the shoe locker that Monday afternoon. She'd let Suzume put on her shoes first, and now Suzume watches her take off her school slippers. The conservative brown loafers she changes into are standard, but do not match her haunting aesthetic whatsoever. "I feel like every time I turn around to talk to you, he has his chin in his hand, eyes forward… but he's always staring at you out of the corners of his eyes."

This isn't news to Suzume. Still, the very notion of Mariko's conclusion makes her ears hot. "It's not like that!" She insists, perhaps a bit too emphatically.

Which of course has the opposite of her intended effect. Immediately Mariko crowds closer for the details, seizing on the scrap like a dog going for a bone.

"If it's not like that, that means it has to be something," Mariko says, and though her expression doesn't change much, her voice takes on that faintly giddy cast she gets when Suzume talks about her progress in the dating sim or her brother. "You absolutely have to tell me everything."

So rather than take the train home immediately, the two of them opt to take a trip to the convenience store. It's Mariko's idea. ("There's a new ice cream thing there, or so I heard," she says, adding, "And anyway, it sounds like a conversation better had in person.")

Mariko, Suzume is learning quickly, is particularly wise for a thirteen year old girl. Not that she knows how wise thirteen year old girls are supposed to be, being that Mariko is the first one she's had the chance to really talk to. But she feels wise to Suzume, wise kind of like her brother is, and patient where he isn't.

Mariko is also an excellent listener. The two of them walk together along the sun-baked asphalt in their fluttering school skirts, her a whole head taller than Suzume, as tall as her brother – maybe even taller. She leans down to hear Suzume, to drink in her story, nodding along with interest and prodding her with gentle questions when she wants more details – and her collected expression reads so judgment-free that Suzume only feels relief in the telling.

So Suzume tells her everything. It's easy to open her heart up to Mariko – as easy as talking to Hawks. Easier, even, she thinks – because she's Suzume's age.

Because she's a girl.

Because something about her tells Suzume that Mariko is good at keeping secrets.

By the time they reach the convenience store, Suzume has all but talked herself and her story out. "So anyway, I'm pretty sure he's just ashamed of me," she says, trying and failing to keep the dejection from her voice. She has worried over this conclusion long before her brother had all but confirmed it was true a week ago. She hadn't wanted to admit it, especially as a child, but why else would Katsuki have behaved that way?

And why would Hitoshi be any different?

She'd ended up asking Hawks about it too, but his kindly, "Maybe he's just shy," was a balm much too weak to soothe the doubtful knife Suzume had plunged into her own heart years and years ago – a knife her brother had been sure to twist well into place. "Or, he hates me. Or maybe I came on too strong, was too annoying. Or – "

"You said he brought me up at the end?"

Living through that awkward, slow moving catastrophe of a conversation with Hitoshi had been a nightmare the first time. It's a nightmare the second time, too. Retelling it to Mariko had made it all feel fresh again for its own sake, nevermind having to tell it to Mariko herself of all people –

Hearing her bring it up herself has a grimace darkening Suzume's face even as Mariko is pressing a colorfully wrapped ice cream into her hands. "Um, yeah," Suzume says, slowly. Regretfully. "He did."

She hadn't wanted to tell Mariko about that. Worried that it'd hurt her, she'd planned from the start not to mention it at all. But with all the precision of a surgeon excising something cancerous, somehow Mariko had wheedled it out of her with a bit of careful questioning. To Suzume's surprise, the details she'd shared hadn't seemed to bother her much, if at all. That death-gentle countenance of hers hadn't wavered once in the telling.

And Mariko still doesn't seem particularly bothered as she picks out her own ice cream from the freezer. "So, I don't think he was trying to caution you against being my friend. Not that I don't appreciate you standing up for me… because I do. But I think he was genuinely worried you wouldn't like me because of my quirk."

"Does… does he like you then?"

Mariko gives a soft shake of her head. The twin tail braids Suzume had given her earlier that morning dance behind her like two sleek, black snakes. "No, no. It's not like that. We've never really interacted before. He wasn't really acting in my defense, on my behalf. It's more likely that he's worried that if you wouldn't like me for my quirk that you also wouldn't like him because of his quirk."

Suzume gapes at her. "But I told him I didn't care about your quirk. Wouldn't care about it, whatever it was. Is."

A rare smile rises fully to the surface of Mariko's face like something secretive and lovely billowing up out of a deep, bleak lake. "I know. And I believe you. But maybe he didn't. Maybe he thinks you were just trying to be nice. People get weird about my quirk. They get weird about his quirk, too. I'm guessing he didn't tell you?"

She stands facing Suzume, one skeletal-thin hand on the freezer door. The bitter, frosted air pours over the two of them in foggy waves. It feels as damp as breath on Suzume's skin. Despite the chill, it feels… good. Bracing, somehow.

It's Suzume's turn to shake her head. "No, he – I didn't ask. About yours, or – about his, either. I got too upset… and anyway, I figured if you wanted to tell me your quirk, that was your right to tell me, and not his."

Despite everything else they've talked about this last week, neither of them have brought up quirks. On Suzume's part, it's been because she isn't sure how much she wants to tell Mariko – and, as with everything else, how much she's willing to lie to her.

And on Mariko's part…

Suzume has wondered, of course. Is her refusal to either acknowledge or ask the standard question everyone asks each other because of what Hitoshi had said? Was she afraid Suzume would find her quirk uncomfortable? Distasteful? The thought had been heartbreaking. It had been enough to keep Suzume up those first few nights, fretting over how to bring it up, how to tell Mariko that everything was okay without spoiling how she knew.

Only she hadn't been able to come up with anything.

Now Mariko looks at her steadily, and shuts the door to the freezer, sealing that chill back behind the thick, frosted glass.

"Well, mine's bones," she says with a nonchalant kind of simplicity, as if they were discussing something mundane. "Or, to be more exact, it's the control of bones. My own, mostly. I can control my own; make them grow. Longer, or thicker. Bigger. I can the bones out from my fingertips, for instance. Make them claws. I can repair them, too, if they break. Which I guess isn't too flashy.

"But I can also do the same with bones that are outside the body. Bones that aren't mine. Bones that… aren't attached to anyone, anymore." She works her free hand into the pocket of her skirt and pulls something free. When Mariko holds it out to Suzume, she blinks down at what appears to be a shard of something the size of a large coin, faintly yellowed with age and shaped like an old, flat pebble. It's the sort that Hawks had taught her was excellent for skipping rocks and making wishes in ponds.

"What's that?" Suzume asks, fascinated.

"It's a bone chip. Fragment of an animal bone. My father's a butcher – which is, relatedly, another reason our classmates don't really like me. He's got the same quirk as me. He brings these home, and lets me have some. I don't really get to do much with my quirk in any kind of regular scenario, because most people don't, but… I practice with them in private, sometimes. I can manipulate them like my own bones. I can make them bigger, make them take shapes, become different kinds of bones. Replicate them. Control them."

The thing in Mariko's hand looks so small. So totally innocuous. It's hard to imagine that it's a piece of bone – let alone that she can do the sorts of things with it that she claims. "What kinda… shapes?"

"Well, Mariko whispers, even more quietly than normal, "I can turn them into fully formed skeletons. I can also make them move around."

"Like… like the ones in video games?" It sounds so stupid, voiced aloud, but Suzume doesn't know a better way to ask. Even more fascinated now, she barely realizes she's dropped her own voice to a whisper. "Like… in the crypts in Elden Ring?"

That earns Suzume another small sliver of a smile. "Yes," Mariko agrees, and more than the smile, Suzume thinks she detects a faint but still somehow pronounced note of pride in the other girl's voice. Her eyes gleam like she's never seen them before – like polished onyx, lustrous and ink black, the velvet night sky cleansed of stars and moon as if they were mere impurities. "Just like that."

"But that's so… that's so cool though," Suzume says in a rush, whispering in that furtive, boggled way of someone who's just been told a very exciting secret. "You're like… a necromancer!"

Mariko's smile widens, and her teeth are very white and very straight, little pearls gleaming behind her pale, thin lips. Suzume wonders if she can move those, too – if she'd straightened them out on her own, or if she was born with perfect teeth. Perfect teeth seems a fitting birthright for someone born to control bones, she thinks, feeling a little awed. "Kind of," Mariko says, seeming pleased with the comparison all the same. "I can't do flesh. So maybe more like half a necromancer, but…"

"The coolest half."

Mariko pays for Suzume's ice cream. Suzume hems, and haws, and whines, all of it playful. Mariko deflects every bit of it, as serious-faced as ever, but the smile she'd worn in front of the freezer lingers in her voice when she refuses Suzume's money.

"You gave me Ranni," she tells her, "and it was a limited edition pin. Limited edition ice cream is hardly comparable."

Mariko says that, but Suzume wonders if she realizes how much Mariko has given her in such a short amount of time –

And how much more all of those things are worth to her than a pin.

Suzume thinks about those things as she takes the train home alone. Having gone home before her, Hitoshi isn't there to lurk at the corners of her vision, frowning down at his phone with knit brows or staring vacantly out the window. She hasn't seen him bring out his Switch the entire last week.

She hasn't played Monster Hunter, either. She'd played other games, of course; the one Mariko had lent her, and another RPG her brother seems especially keen on watching her play. But no Monster Hunter. Having played it with a friend has spoiled the single player experience, and even the thought of it alone now feels…

Well, lonely.

(She wonders if he doesn't feel the same way.)

And this, Suzume thinks, letting her eyes drift over passing signs and passersby as the train carries her swiftly home, is one of those rare and special gifts Mariko has given her:

The gift of understanding.

(Suzume can only hope she's actually right.)

The next morning, Suzume gets ready for school as she always does: with her brother at her heels, touching her with his hot hands, pinching her, poking her, trying to get a rise out of her as she stands over the stove cooking eggs and soup. It doesn't work. She's feeling too optimistic – cautious an optimism though it might be – to let it phase her. Besides a few squeaks, she suffers his torment with, at least in her own mind, admirable resilience.

(And she's certain it annoys him.)

Still, when she turns in place and tugs him down to her level by the hem of his collar, he lets her – just like he lets her press her finger to his mouth as if to shush him.

"Stop being dumb," she scolds him, smiling. When he grins back at her, she presses her forehead to his – and she can almost feel the annoyance desert him. In the face of her unbridled affection, it almost always does, bled clean out of him like an arterial wound. His hands abandon her hips, losing interest in the bruises he's probably already left, settling instead around the back of her head, around the nape of her neck. Straightening up, he holds her just like that, kissing the top of her head, once, twice.

The third one lingers. "You seem a lot happier as of late," he says into her hair, against the crown of her head. She can feel his lips move when he speaks.

He kisses her again, a fourth time.

Suzume feels her toes curl, a smile blooming out from her mouth, out from her heart. It feels so easy for once.

Just one week –

Just one week with a new friend, and everything feels so much better.

Because it's true. She is. She is happier.

So she takes that happiness and she packs it up careful into her school bag. She takes the hope that Mariko had given her, and she takes her Switch, too.

And when she boards the train for the ride to school, she drifts through the cars until she finds Hitoshi sitting alone like he always does.

The seat beside him is empty – but the look in his eyes when he stares up into her face from where he's sitting is considerably less empty.

He looks very surprised to see her.

"Hi, Hitoshi-kun," Suzume says, and she says it firmly if a little breathlessly, but certainly not unkindly. And then, without preamble: "I'm gonna sit next to you."

"Oh. Uh, hi." He blinks at her slow, like a cat might, a flutter of violet lashes over violet eyes. For a second, Suzume frets over the silence that lurks after those first three words, worried he might choose to argue.

But then his eyes are fuller still – full of something she thinks just might be relief. "Yeah, all right. That's fine."

Pulling her bag into her lap, Suzume fills the seat as declared. Feeling like she will lose her nerve if she doesn't push forward, she shakes her head, wrapping her hands in the strap. "So, um… I'm sorry for being mean the other day. I got freaked out about what you were saying about Mariko." The words start slow and hesitant, but as she says them, they start to spill out of her. Soon they're a cascade she's not sure she could hold back if she wanted to. "Not 'cause I was worried about her quirk or anything – it's more 'cause I thought you were being mean about her. To her. Or… well, you know what I mean, I think. I hope you weren't being mean. I still don't really get what you were going on about, but I do know I got really sensitive about it. And I'm sorry about that."

Suzume tries to make herself take a breath, staring down at her bag. She gives him a moment, trying to see if he wants to say anything – but he is only still and quiet beside her.

Maybe she's being stupid, she thinks. Maybe her brother was right. Maybe Hitoshi is ashamed of her, and maybe he thinks Mariko is bad, and maybe Mariko was wrong. Maybe her brother is the only boy who will ever not be ashamed of her.

And would that be so bad?

Maybe, maybe, maybe…

But she thinks of Hitoshi always sitting in the same train car as her. Always looking at her in class. About the way he'd seemed at least a little concerned for Mariko when he'd tried talking to Suzume about Mariko before. She probably needs it, he'd said. And even if Suzume hadn't understood what he'd meant, the comment hadn't sounded cruel.

It had sounded sad.

Mariko's quirk makes people uncomfortable. Mariko had told her his quirk did the same. Suzume still doesn't understand why that would mean he's afraid of being seen with her, but maybe she could understand, if she got to know him.

And maybe, like Mariko, he needs someone. Someone to get to know him.

She'd be so alone without her brother. And even with him, it had still felt so lonely sometimes sitting in class, one of only a few students with no one at all to talk to.

And she never sees Hitoshi talk to anyone – not in any real way. Not really.

(Doesn't he need a friend, too?)

"And anyway," Suzume says, "she ended up telling me about her quirk. Fancy bone… stuff. Which means she's like… a half-necromancer."

She turns to him and smiles. Happy, because Mariko is her friend. Proud of her. Hopeful he'll be her friend again, too. "And I think that's really cool."

Hitoshi stares at her. Full on stares at her, with his head turned, his eyes fixed on her own. His expression is anything but apathetic, and his eyebrows are doing that thing again where they're almost trembling, but Suzume isn't really sure what kind of face she'd call it. There are too many emotions there, too many to name, there one second and gone the next. Relief, again. There! Anxiety. Hope, like her own, a tiny flicker of it in a dark, dark room.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Maybe Suzume doesn't know anything. Maybe he feels none of those things. Maybe she is imagining them. But she decides to keep going; keep trying.

Because maybe Mariko is right.

"Also, while I am really sorry about being a butt about things… I do think the whole thing was kinda dumb. The whole… fight thing. It's dumb 'cause it's not important, dumb that I got so worked up over it. 'Cause I still wanna be your friend. And I hope I didn't – didn't ruin everything by storming off… 'cause I wanna go on hunts with you, still. I even brought my Switch today, 'cause I was hoping – "

"You bring your Switch every day," he says, but his voice is soft. "I see you talking to Mahone about the stuff you're playing."

"Yeah, but I haven't played any Monster Hunter since last Monday 'cause…" She trails off, not certain she wants to admit her feelings. But Suzume is nothing if not impulsive. Impulsive. Reckless. All words her brother would use, complimentary some of the time, and deeply put-out for others. "'Cause it made me kinda sad. So, you know, if you're feeling up for it…?"

Hitoshi is quiet as he considers her, those many and varied emotions still moving over his face like rainwater down a blurry window.

It isn't an uncomfortable silence.

And then, finally, he smiles. It's a conservative smile, a thawing of his mouth, as if he's warming to the feeling. "You're really weird, Suzume," he says, but there's nothing sharp about the way he says it. He says it the way her brother sometimes says mean things, like when he calls her dumb, or tells her that she doesn't think – but his voice is sweet, effusive, like he likes those things about her.

That's how Hitoshi says it.

Fondly.

And then he unzips his backpack and pulls out his Switch –

And Suzume finds she can't stop smiling.

---

Late Spring; 21 years.

It doesn't take long for Dabi to figure out that Suzume is keeping things from him.

The move, of course, had been the first thing to put him on guard. It wasn't that the reasoning for it hadn't been sound enough. Despite the way he's always picked at her, Suzume has always been a smart kid, and it made sense that her social workers would expect more and better from her, that they'd favor a city over the middle-of-bumfuck-nowhere Chichibu. Besides Chichibu's schools offering fuck all for prestige, bias against little old country towns has always been rampant among those in the bigger cities. Dabi understands that; it's a sentiment he'd shared up until he'd experienced the benefits of small town life –

Chief of which was that there wasn't much competition for Suzume's attention.

But he'd known Saitama City would be different, that it would bring many more and new distractions into their quiet, secluded lives –

And day one of Suzume's first week of school, he realizes he'd been right.

At first, he tries to ignore the signs. They're not all bad; not really. In those early days of her second year of middle school, his little sister comes home in a strange mood that he can only really describe as part-ways sullen and most-ways optimistic. She asks him questions he thinks she means to sound cryptic and waffles between easy laughter and a quiet, almost sad kind of contemplation as she makes dinner or does her homework or sits with him to play games.

After years of being more subdued, it's the shift towards this new, upbeat flavor of excitability that sticks out most to him. Soon she's smiling more, prattles on more, about school, about the stories she's reading, about her games – about everything. More than that, she touches him much more freely, much more often, and with considerably less hesitance than she had in the tense months before the move. Fisting a hand in his shirt or sneaking her fingers between his own, she's back to crawling into his lap at every opportunity like she had when she was younger and more unburdened.

It's this change that stills his hand for so long. Burdened with his own need to touch her, he takes no small amount of pleasure with how often she comes to him now, seeking out the wandering and ever-present intimacy of his hands of her own accord. And sure, there's still that flicker of discomfort in her face if he pushes a little too much. Still that adorable, shameful heat in her cheeks when he gets her flustered, still a big show where she'll swat his hands away if he gets a little too greedy or too demanding –

But by and large, she laughs most of it off. She doesn't pull away. And god, he likes the look of her face when she smiles – likes the sound of her laughter when he says something that catches her off guard, bubbly and bright and so terribly sweet.

He likes it all so much.

Too much.

It's risky to like it so much, he knows, because he can't help but ask himself why it's happening. There's no way to keep himself from questioning the sudden change. When she tucks herself against his chest and drowses off with all the apparent serenity of someone wholly unfettered by fear or unease, Dabi stays up for hours, mulling it over in his mind every night for almost four fucking weeks. He works that awful, nagging question in his thoughts like a clam might a piece of sand, turning it over and over, trying to smooth it out, desperate to make it feel a little less uncomfortable.

A little less wrong.

Why?

It isn't respect for her autonomy that keeps him from her phone for four weeks. That thought is a joke. He's never had that, and can't imagine himself developing a sense for it any time soon. Suzume is and has always been his business – his to do with what he wants, when he wants.

(It is the privilege owed him by being her older brother.)

Rather, he recognizes it as what it is almost immediately: it's nice to play pretend. He likes the way she seems to open up as the days turn into weeks, as the week turns into a month. Likes the smiles, and the laughter and her fingers brushing his cheek, his hair, the line of his arms. She's so reverential. She's so affectionate, and as much as he wishes he wasn't, he finds himself starving for it even moments after she pulls away.

More, more, more.

But there's no turning that grain of sand into a pearl. He tries every night, every night for those four weeks. They come and they go like a flash, more grains of sand slipped between his fingers, and the only one that lingers with him every night in the still dark of her new bedroom is the one that tells him something is off.

Something is wrong.

So, eventually, he gives in.

It's easy to do. Suzume is and has always been a heavy sleeper. And one night, he fights back the urge to keep holding her enough to disentangle himself from her sleep-drunk arms.

She stirs a bit at the loss of his heat. Her head on the pillow cants to the side, heavy lashes fluttering against her cheek, thick and bright, the color of summer peaches set against white, white cream. "Nii-chan." It's a clumsy murmur, slurred by lack of awareness. She isn't really awake. There's a flicker of discomfort that moves across her face like the light of a candle, but when he lets his fingers trace the curve of her jaw, the light snuffs out. She's quiet, again. Asleep again.

At night, Suzume leaves her phone to charge on her desk. He finds it there where it always is, neatly perched atop an even neater stack of books, screen face down. It's such a benign thing, he thinks. The white of it gleams even in the dark, even through the clear pink plastic case. A pair of cat ears situated along the top of it spoil the smooth, modern minimalism of the thing, as does the little cat charm at the bottom. It rattles a bit when he lifts the phone, the tiny beads settling against each other in a sound he knows Suzume likes for the way she's always fussing with it.

There's no lock on the phone. He suspects it's not her choice – suspects it's something she does out of respect for him. Respect, or fear, or some proper combination of the two –

It almost makes him smile.

Almost.

With nothing to stop him, Dabi stands in the silent dark of her bedroom and sifts through her phone. It's something he'd done often enough with her old phone, but there'd never really been anything to find. Call logs to numbers he knew went to social workers, and nothing else – the joy of so old a phone meant there was nothing else she could really do with the thing.

This new phone, though –

This new, awful fucking phone –

The first change is glaringly immediate. No longer are the calls made to or from contactless numbers. Now – the few of them that are there, anyway – are all saved under names. It's an intimacy that makes his stomach twist and his lips pull back from his teeth.

There aren't many names, and all of them but two are formal sounding entries: 'Ishikawa-san - Social Worker.' 'Takami-san - Social Worker.' 'Higuchi-san - Social Worker.' Most of them are social workers. There are a few doctor's names listed. Dabi spies his own, even – 'Nii-chan,' complete with a ridiculous blue-heart emoji, though they almost never text or call each other. It's one of the two informal entries.

The second one, though – the one that makes his jaw ache as he sees it – reads 'Ranni-chan.' Ranni-chan, plus one similarly ridiculous sparkle emoji.

It's hard to decide what he hates more about this egregious fucking discovery: the fact that Suzume feels familiar enough affection for this person to end their name with chan, or the idea that this person also apparently deserves their own emoji.

And that he should have to share goddamn both with this person –

"Well Horror Show, it seems your mysterious 'Ranni-chan Plus Sparkle' is one Mahone Mariko."

It's a week later when Dabi finds himself in one of Giran's offices, frowning up at the broker from under dark, knitted brows. Sunk deep into the sagging chair Giran always offers him, Dabi has his boots settled on the edge of his desk, his fingers laced beneath his chin. "And?"

Giran cards a hand through his silver hair and snorts, tapping the stack of papers beside him on the desk as he leans against it. "And with a name like 'Mariko,' you should be unsurprised to discover that she's… any guesses? Drumrolls?"

Dabi narrows his eyes by way of answer. Giran only laughs.

"You're such a shit. Can't I have any fun? Anyway, to no one's shock or surprise, she's a fucking thirteen year old girl."

When Dabi doesn't answer again – when he only stares down Giran with his still-narrowed eyes – Giran heaves an over-dramatic sigh before punctuating it with another laugh, and shakes his head. "Mahone Mariko," he recites again, in a nearly perfectly mimed robot voice, "is thirteen years old. Birthday: October 23rd. Blood type: A. Quirk: bone manipulation. Family: two parents. Mother is a house wife. Father is a butcher. One sibling; an older sister, aged twenty, currently studying veterinary medicine at Tokyo University."

Clearing his throat, his voice becomes normal again. "More totally unimportant details: her father lives away from the family, which is unsurprising considering he works an 'unclean' profession. No doubt it's meant to spare his family the judgment. I imagine our little Mariko deals enough with that and her bone manipulation quirk – nevermind the fact that she's fucking scary looking. Scarier looking than even you, maybe."

Lifting the top paper, he hands it to Dabi with an overexaggerated flourish, a sweeping gesture of his hands. Not bothering to match the theatrics, Dabi snatches it from his fingers. Much like the information about Suzume's family Giran had provided Dabi with years ago, the sheet is a detailed dossier on Mahone Mariko that contains everything Giran has already revealed... and, as expected, much more.

Also as expected, there's a picture. Mahone Mariko is exactly as described; the girl is haunting. Black, long hair, so straight as to be almost lank, and black eyes. Her mouth is far too wide and big for her unfortunate face. That face, too – it's all wrong, much too thin, too many bones and too many angles, corpse-like and almost difficult for Dabi to look at. How her spindly neck manages to support the weight of her skull is a mystery.

It's strange having a face to put to the texts Suzume shares with this girl. Dabi had spent that first night reading through their exchange several times over, feeling sick, inwardly seething at the idea that his sister would have anyone in her life besides him.

And he's done the same every night since.

"Dreadful appearance notwithstanding," Giran is saying, his smile small and knowing and all the more agitating for it, "I can only imagine that the conversations your sister has been having with Little Miss Ranni-chan Plus Sparkle Emoji have been riveting to read. I understand teen girl gossip is the height of drama these days."

"Fuck off," Dabi says without much fire behind the words. It's a concerted effort. More than the jab, he finds his temper sparking at the way Giran says the word sister. Holding his gaze steadily, Dabi lets the paper flutter to the floor. It's a petulant power play. It's beneath him, he knows it is. Giran does, too, because he laughs like he always does and fishes out a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his ostentatious suit jacket.

A peace offering. "Want a smoke?"

Dabi takes the proffered cancer stick from Giran wordlessly, offering up a flicker of blue fire at the tip of his finger in trade. Lighting his own cigarette in the flame, Giran studies the hot, blue glow of the cherry for a moment before working the cigarette between his nicotine-stained teeth. It's with no small amount of relish that he sucks in a long drag of heady smoke.

All around them, the haze of the room deepens.

"Ain't gonna light yours?" Giran asks, curiously.

Dabi shrugs. "Maybe in a bit."

"You gonna off this one, too?"

Another question. Giran asks this one as cleanly as the first, direct and to the point and absent of any criticism. There is only curiosity there.

He means Tamashiro, of course. Tamashiro Jun is another person Dabi had tasked Giran with investigating. Though he'd never made mention of what he'd plan to do with that information, it doesn't surprise him in the slightest to learn that Giran would discover it on his own. Despite the man's continued congeniality, Dabi has never been arrogant enough to assume the strange camaraderie between them would preclude the broker from looking into Dabi or his business.

Of course he'd look into Tamashiro in the weeks following Dabi's interest. Of course he'd guess why the boy went missing –

And what that had inevitably meant for the kid.

Dabi meets his Giran's bright gaze, still so clear somehow through all the smoke. "Mmm." It's a non commital noise. "Was thinking about it."

Reasoning with his cigarette, Giran shakes his head, a craggy-toothed smile cracking across his face. "You're mighty fucked up, Horror Show."

Dabi flicks his eyes upwards, a half-assed eye roll, wholly unruffled. "Don't judge me, old man."

"I ain't. Not really. More curious, if I'm being honest. You know me, though, right? Can't blame a man for his curiosity." Giran exhales smoke through his nose, the acrid scent bitterly familiar as it floods the room. Whether by cigarettes or of his own making, smoke clings to Dabi like filth at the bottom of his boots. It's a strangely comfortable smell, second only to Suzume's own scent. "I think I'm starting to get you figured out, even. It's been a slow process, I admit. Years spent trying to pick you apart, piece you back together, figure out what's what. How you work – why you work. But I really think I'm starting to get it."

"Yeah?" Dabi twirls the unlit cigarette languidly between his fingers. It's a move he's wowed Suzume with plenty of times when he's stolen her pens, a move she's never been able to replicate despite repeated and careful explanation. Dabi's long come to suspect she won't learn it on purpose, as if to preserve her continued amazement. She doesn't want to spoil the magic.

(Another thing he likes about her.)

Giran isn't distracted by it, though. Giran's gaze never leaves Dabi's face.

"First of all," Giran says slowly, and with a careful flavor of caution that almost makes Dabi grin. "I know your sister ain't your sister. I knew who she was the second you dragged her down into the Gutters. I mean, you had me up to my fucking nipples in Featherlight's shit for weeks. I still remember his mother's maiden name. It wasn't like I wasn't gonna recognize his kid immediately."

It's not a full on smirk, but Dabi still smiles faintly, the cigarette a steady spin between his fingers. "And who says I ain't Featherlight's bastard?"

The snort Giran makes devolves almost immediately into a hacking smoker's cough, smoke billowing out from behind the hand he throws over his mouth as he nearly doubles over. By the time he rights himself, the crow's feet at the corners of his eyes are wet, gleaming behind his transition lenses. "Funny joke," he rasps, pounding his chest with a heavy, many-ringed fist. "I'll keep my own joke about Featherlight and his entourage of affair partners being lookers and you – well, you looking like you do – to myself. Come off it, Dabi; I know he ain't your daddy. I can see her father and her mother well enough in your… ah, your kid sister. I can't see any of them – or any of his affair partners – in you."

"Maybe." Another smile, this one with teeth. Beneath their feet, the floor rumbles as the song playing in the bar below switches to something with a heavier, harder bass line. It feels like a second heartbeat inside of him, like adrenaline pushed through his veins. Dabi tugs his feet from the desk and settles them on the floor, one foot tapping just a touch out of time with the heady beat, just a bit too fast. Arrhythmic. Erratic. "Maybe not."

Unfazed and much more put together now, Giran gestures towards Dabi with his lit cigarette and takes in a deep breath of the stale office air. "Couldn't ever figure out why you wanted to kill Featherlight so bad, why you'd take that risk. Money would have made sense, but you let me keep his bounty. Fame would've, too, but you didn't want word it was you getting out. And you know, that shit ate at me. For fucking years it bothered me. Couldn't understand it. Couldn't parse it all out. But it was for her, wasn't it?"

Dabi doesn't say anything. As if spurred on by the pace of the song, Giran's voice picks up in speed, gaining a note of excitability. "Same shit with the boy from before. I had no idea why you suddenly wanted information on some nothing kid in the middle of nowhere. But soon as I laid eyes on your sister that day in the Gutters, I knew immediately. Meihane Suzume's maternal grandmother lived in Chichibu – I remembered that too, by the way. Up to my nipples, I fucking tell you. Anyway, being that she'd be Suzume's only living relative, it makes sense the kid'd move there. Go to school there.

"Which is why you were there, hours and hours away from any reliable work. Why it was always like pulling goddamn teeth to get you to come out and do shit. Why that kid went missing there. Your sister again, huh?"

"You can stop saying 'sister' like that, Giran." The rapid tap of Dabi's boot grows even faster. "I mean, congratulations, it was dramatic the first time; now you just sound like a fucking tool."

Chuckling, Giran gives another slow shake of his head. "And now this new girl. I went into this phone number deep dive well-aware of Suzu-chan this time. So when the numbers all turn up as social workers and one lonesome teenage girl – "

Suzu-chan. Dabi fucking hates that. Oh, he hates it.

"Actually," Dabi says, drumming the fingers of his free hand against the armrest of the decrepit chair, "let's go back to you calling her my sister. Don't really dig 'Suzu-chan,' at all."

Grinning triumphantly from behind his cigarette, Giran wags a finger in Dabi's direction emphatically. "There! There it is. For whatever reason – nefarious, or otherwise, who fucking knows with you – you killed her dad so she'd be… what? Easier to get to? And that kid in Chichibu, and this girl, now – you're fucking jealous, Horror Show. You're a bonafide, certifiable control freak – emphasis, of course, on freak."

The cigarette in Dabi's fingers stills, stops moving. Inclining his head to the side, he studies Giran's broad, smiling face, the wrinkles gathered worn and deep around his eyes, the stark laugh lines at the corners of his mouth. Convivial as always. Genuinely exuberant, even about this. He sounds thrilled, as if he's unraveled some long and bothersome low-stakes mystery – one that doesn't involve the assassination of the erstwhile number four pro-hero –

Nevermind the murder of a twelve year old boy –

And the potential murder of a thirteen year old girl.

Despite himself, Dabi finds himself laughing at the absurdity of it all. If it were anyone else, he thinks – anyone other than Giran – he would have razed the whole building and everyone in it to ash. His secrets are his secrets, and no one else's. Somehow, though, with Giran, there's no offense to be taken. Maybe it's the absurdity of Giran's complete lack of judgment. His total disinterest in the morality of the situation is nearly unthinkable, even if it is expected.

It's such black fucking comedy.

"Well," he says, and finally lights his own cigarette in another burst of blue flame.. "No sense denying it."

For a time, the two of them only watch each other. The dense smoke from their cigarettes softens Giran's countenance, erasing years and smoothing stress from his face like a blur filter might. In the soft, hazy light, he looks every bit the part of an eccentric but doting grandfather, and not at all like a man who traffics with things that regularly lead to peoples' torture or death.

Eventually, Giran clears his throat. His smile is there, but smaller now. A little more restrained. "So, listen. I don't know how else to say this, but I feel like it needs saying, and hey – I go into this knowing full well you ain't gonna wanna hear it. You're young, but you don't think you are. You're young, but at that age where you think you know best. And I ain't saying you don't, mind you. You been on your own for a long goddamn time, Horror Show. You've killed people. And that…" Fussing with the cuff of his jacket, Giran takes a moment to suck his teeth in thoughtful contemplation. "Well, you had to grow up quick, and I think that makes you old in a way even people older than you can't really touch, can't understand. I get that, too, I do, so understand I'm trying to go at this as diplomatically as I possibly can."

Falling silent, Giran waits with a patience that Dabi thinks might maybe be fatherly if his experience with both fathers and patience weren't both so catastrophically terrible. The almost-tenderness of it puts him on edge. He's more than certain he doesn't want to hear whatever it is Giran has to say. Still, he waves at the broker with a subtle motion of his hand, the cigarette caught between his fingers a streaking blue comet slashing through the air between them. This last bit of information retrieval, Giran has done for free. Even if he's never been particularly interested in paying his debts, listening to whatever he has to say strikes Dabi as the least he can do.

Giran snubs his cigarette out in a tray overflowing with the bent-angled corpses of dozens of others. Wetting his lips, he studies Dabi a moment more, giving a minute shake of his head. The smile he wears is somehow even smaller than before, tight and a little tense and barely a ghost of its earlier self. Dabi imagines it remains only on account of the old man's stubborn devotion to his perpetual and wholeheartedly ridiculous joviality. "Listen. I don't fully know what it is you got going on with – with your kid sister, right? Can't guess what motivated you in the first place. And ultimately? Not important. A story for another day, let's say."

"Yeah. Sure," Dabi agrees coolly, and by which he means never.

"As for now, what's going on is…" Giran looks as if he's debating on what to say, but only for a moment. "Well, it's not like you've tried to hide it. It's pretty obvious. Weirdly so, even, and I got that part down pat. In some form or fashion, you're into her. And to be clear, I don't really care to know the details. That's your business; I respect that. Hell, I can even respect the need for control, too. No outside forces, no one stepping on your toes.

"More to the point, it seems like whatever you're doing, it's working. Just like I can tell what's going on with you… it's clear your sister's obsessed with you. Like, lost her head about it. I can tell by the way she looks at you, or talks to you, or about you. Even Elixir – I talked with him about it later – he sure fucking picked up on it. From you, from her. Whatever freaky shit you got going on…well, seems it's mutual." Another pause. Giran clears his throat, though whether it's genuine or for show is anyone's guess. "Congratulations, I think?"

"Lead up's dragging a bit, Giran," says Dabi, dryly. "My attention is, too."

"I'm getting there, you little shit." The laugh that elicits from Giran eases some of the tension that's visibly settled along the line of his shoulders, and Dabi watches them soften some. "But fine, I'll get to the point: there's a risk with this sort of thing, right? 'Cause at the end of the day, she's a kid – a kid who's, what, thirteen now, by my memory? A teenager, and soon to be a disaster, if she isn't already. I'm telling you, she's got hormones and what will almost certainly be a desperate, crazy-girl need for independence all but waiting to kick down her – and your – metaphorical door.

"And you – well, it's obvious she got her heart set on you. But at the same time, you're also raising her. That puts you in a position of authority over her, and you've got that need for control, and you're out here wanting to snuff out her maybe-friends, and I get it, I do, I'm following the vision. But also you're gonna run yourself straight into a real ugly situation doing that. Kids hit that age and what they want goes all fucking contrary. She's gonna want what she isn't getting. And even if she loves you – hell, even if she's in love with you – you hold on too much, too tight, and bam." Giran claps his hands, his rings clacking together sharply. It's only by sheer force of will that Dabi manages not to startle. "She's gonna want space to breathe. Room to be alone. Time with friends. Opposite is just as true, right? You act a little distant, you'll get what you want. She'll be crawling up your ass. You get what I mean? That's how kids are. That's what kids do, especially with their parents. And whether you wanna be or not, whether she's in love with you or not, you're essentially her parent. Parents. Plural. Father, mother, the whole shebang, it begins and ends with you. The burden of all those weepy, wounded, rebellious feelings, all that rotten teenage angst… that's gonna fall on you."

Evidently finished with his cautionary monologue, Giran closes his mouth and scrubs a hand across his scruffy chin, massaging his thumb into the meat of his still smiling cheeks as he looks at Dabi expectantly –

And not a little bracingly.

Dabi, for his part, shifts in his seat, rolling his head back along his shoulders in a stretch that cracks his neck. "You sure been thinking real fucking hard about all this. Me and my sister been living rent free in your head, huh?"

"Occasionally, maybe," Giran says cheerfully, his many ringed fingers gleaming gold in the dim, smoke-choked light, "but certainly no more than she rots in yours."

"You old fucking cunt," Dabi says, and it almost, almost sounds fond.

Giran seems willing to take it as it is. His smile becomes toothy again, wide and comfortable. "Ain't trying to step on your toes. Just figured – "

"Nah." Lifting the cigarette to his lips, Dabi sucks down his first breath of hot nicotine, savoring the prickling, mosquito-wing hum as it filters through his lungs and into his blood. "I get it."

Emboldened by Dabi's composure, Giran crosses his arms across his chest and leans forward marginally. "This Ranni-chan Plus Sparkle Emoji. You've seen the shit they talk about?"

"Yeah." Another drag. Another hit. The too-quick tap of his heel against the floor starts to slow, just a little.

"Mundane teenage girl shit, right?"

Giran is right. That first night, and every night after, it's all been the same sort of garbage. Mundane teenage girl shit is absolutely the perfect way to describe the things Suzume and her new friend seem to discuss. Homework, video games, or the occasional ramble about favorite characters – links to clothes, or perfume, or cute plush collectibles. How much they like being each others friends, sappy and teeth rotting. Mahone Mariko and her interactions with his sister are as inoffensively boring as it gets. That Suzume has apparently been having these girly chit-chats with what looks to be an almost dead girl has proven to be the only thing of interest he's gleaned from this entire ordeal. Based strictly on their conversations, he'd imagined Mariko as someone much more forgettable, and mousy, and dull.

Exhaling smoke between them, Dabi shakes his head. It had never been about what they'd talked about. It had been that they were talking at all. That Suzume needed anyone or anything else but him – that had been the problem. That had been what had kept him up the whole of last week, furiously scrolling through the smattering of messages every night, reading and rereading until his eyes burned and his jaw ached with how tightly he was clenching his teeth.

Why didn't Suzume want to tell him those things? And when she did – why wasn't telling him enough?

You're a bonafide, certifiable control freak – emphasis, of course, on freak, Giran had said –

And he'd been right about that, too.

"Yeah," Dabi says, flatly. "Mundane teenage girl shit."

"So let this one live," Giran says with surprising firmness. "This kid got dicked down by the quirk lottery and I'm sure the way she looks is social murder enough. One could argue that's a worse enough hell for anyone to go through – nevermind some catastrophically awkward teenage girl."

That's true, too, he knows. He can't imagine being a girl and looking like that. Still, whatever hell Mahone Mariko is living is not far enough away from his sister.

"Maybe real murder'd be doing her a favor, then." Dabi smirks at the exaggerated scowl Giran fixes him with. "The way you go on, I think you actually feel bad for her."

"I do," Giran says plainly. "Fuck being on your bad side, Horror Show. Shit sounds scary as hell." Digging around in his pockets, Giran fishes out a pair of hard candies wrapped in crumpled, crackling plastic. Dabi shakes his head when offered one. With a smile, Giran helps himself to both, working at the wrappers with an almost childlike kind of excitement. "And anyway," he continues through a wet mouthful of candy that clicks against his teeth when he talks, "somehow, despite your involvement, your baby sister's a hell of a sweet kid. If you go off and merc her only friend, I'm gonna feel bad for her, too. More than that – more important than this old man's sentiment – I guarantee you she's gonna go off the rails if you nuke her new bestie. You're heading into some dark times what with the whole teenage years bearing down on you already. Don't make 'em worse for yourself."

This isn't what Dabi wants to hear, of course. He doesn't want to hear it because it runs counter to what the awful voice inside him has been urging him to do since he'd first discovered those text messages.

And he especially doesn't want to hear it because it's unsurprisingly sound advice.

(He hates that, too.)

Dabi blows a neat and perfect smoke ring up towards the ceiling. "Who'd have thought you were such a fucking saint."

Laughter from Giran again, a rumbling sort of chuckle. "I know, right? Got a letter from the pope a few days back about my upcoming canonization. Gonna be a whole thing. Would mean a lot to me if you could be there."

"Well," Dabi says, sparing the extra energy to ash his cigarette over the ceramic dish rather than across the floor like he wants to do, "Assuming I don't end up killing any kids, I just might be able to make some room in my schedule."

---

Late October; 21 years.

"I've got something to say:
I've acquired a taste for watching you in pain.
It's pretty hard to admit,
It makes me feel like shit;

But I mean it."

It's a dreary day in late October when things really start getting terminal.

Dark as it is for midday, it's not really raining – not full on raining, anyway. There are only sudden bursts of it, wet smatterings of droplets sent scattershot against the windows, sporadic and violent. The noise is jarring in the otherwise quiet apartment. Every time it happens, Suzume jolts a little in her spot on the couch beside Dabi, looking up from the book she's been reading him with a frowning but controlled sort of alarm.

She keeps losing her place.

"Wish it would just start already," she grouses, more to herself than to him. "Feels like the wind is specifically throwing it at our window."

Dabi likes the way she says our window, like it's their house. Not that it's any particular surprise that she does – he's certain that's how she thinks of it in her own mind, where the way they're living and the things they do together are an elaborate form of playing house. And why shouldn't she? When it had started getting dark around midday, it had been the both of them rushing out onto the porch to rescue the fresh drying laundry from the line. It had been the both of them who had strung it up all across the living room too, her feeding him blouses and skirts and trousers and shorts from the pile of barely salvaged clothes. Now they hang all around them like ghosts, drifting in the combined breeze of an oscillating fan and the air conditioning set to full blast.

The day is already a cool one. With the fan and the AC both on to help the clothes dry, their shared make-believe home is almost bitterly cold. Evidently giving up entirely, Suzume closes her book and shifts her position, tugging her feet from Dabi's lap and scooting across the space between them until she's tucked against his side. Even buried under the weight of two heavy blankets, the cold is clearly too much for her.

And Dabi welcomes the feeling of her body pressed to his the way a man in a desert three days past death might welcome the feel of chilled water on his tongue – even if he's careful not to show it. Rather, he only lifts his arm to let her settle herself further, brushing his fingers through the ends of her hair.

She'd only been across the couch for the last thirty minutes.

Somehow, it feels like it's been thirty years.

It's been a hard two days – for her, anyway. For Dabi, it feels like a blessing. A bad stomach ache had seen her home from school halfway through Thursday, and she'd called out Friday entirely. Opting to act as her good and attentive older brother, Dabi had put off any work with Giran to stay home and play nursemaid instead. Whether cooking for the two of them from his limited repertoire of recipes or cleaning the bathroom alone when she'd asked, he'd been every bit the model support. He'd teased her about it, of course. He'd complained about the responsibility, called her a cry baby, rolled his eyes, huffed, scoffed, and pinched her flushed cheeks more than a few times.

But he hadn't meant it. Not really.

Now it's Saturday, and she seems at least marginally better. Like always, when she isn't paying attention, he steals greedy little looks at her. The near-perpetual grimace from Thursday and Friday is mostly gone.

And even when he asks –

"It's not as bad anymore," she says, running her fingers along the spine of the book in her lap. There's another flurry of rain rat-a-tat-tatting at the window, and Suzume shivers against him.

He tries not to like it and fails, spectacularly.

"At least, I think."

It's a concerted effort to hide the almost delirious smile that threatens at the corners of his mouth. For him, it's been a lovely couple of days. "You think?"

"I don't know. It doesn't hurt as much, but... I guess I feel kinda light-headed."

In a move borrowed from his mother when he'd been exhausted from practicing with his quirk too much, Dabi lifts his hand and rests the backs of his fingers against her forehead. It's pointless; he's always so much hotter than she is, and as usual, she feels perfectly cool –

Perfectly perfect. There's an ache in him, an ugly thing gnawing at the space behind his ribs, and he wants to push her over and climb on top of her, trade his fingers for his lips, his breath parting her hair, his other hand holding her chin –

"That's not gonna work," she huffs, and her breath moves cool and soft over the back of his hand. "And anyway, I don't think I have a fever. It doesn't really feel like I do. No body aches or anything. Just... I don't know."

"Mmm." Dabi drops his hand, lets it settle over the blanket, over where he knows her thigh is. She doesn't even flinch when he curls his fingers around it. "If this shit keeps up, you prolly need to see a doc."

This isn't said lightly. Dabi hates involving outsiders in their lives. The heavy involvement with her social workers is already something that keeps him up at night. Still, if she's sick in some real, meaningful way –

"Like Elixir?"

But more than outsiders, he finds he hates the poorly concealed note of hope in her voice even more – that tiny, fragile thread of excitement running through the question.

"Fuck Elixir," he says bluntly, and it's only by the grace of every god imaginable that he manages to keep his tone free of any telling agitation. "I mean a real doc."

More often than not, Suzume tends to be very childish when she argues with him. Now he can tell she's trying for something more diplomatic, something more reasonable. Logical. When she speaks, it's very carefully, decidedly respectful. "But you said he's basically a real doctor."

Normally he'd be impressed that she'd managed to keep any note of accusation from her tone. Somehow, though, he finds it annoys him more.

"Yeah, well, I take it back. Dude's a quack." When he squeezes her thigh a little too hard, she flinches a bit, smothering a squeak behind her closed mouth. It's cute. Fuck, it's so cute, and he feels better almost instantly. "And anyway, I meant somewhere closer. Can't be running off to Yokohama every time you get a headache."

"It's more than a headache," she grumbles, childish again – but she doesn't push the conversation further. Rather, she looks away from where he has his hand fixed to her leg and gazes off down the small hall towards the water closet, a little forlornly. The slight jut of her lower lip and the deepening crease between her brows is also cute.

God, he thinks. Sometimes it all feels like too much.

What better to cover that up with? "What, too much of a baby to make it to the bathroom on your own? Need me to hold your hand?"

More huffing. A brief puffing up of her cheeks, and her rearranging her pout into something more adult, more put together. "It's just so cold."

He leans into her, lowering his head closer to her own, his breath in her hair as he drops his voice. "Is not."

"Is so." She leans away from him, angling her head to look at him more full on as she fixes him with that crinkle-nosed but still decidedly toothless scowl. "You can't judge, dummy; you're a furnace all the time."

"Better a dummy than a baby, Suzu," he says lowly, one of those wide, lazy grins that never fails to fluster her unfurling across his face. As expected, it works exactly as intended. There's a slight tremor to her lashes as her frown falters, and her lower lip shifts as she works it between her teeth. She doesn't even realize she's doing it – probably doesn't even realize how pink her cheeks have gotten.

God. Fuck. Cute, cute, cute.

"Furnace or not," he says, "Doesn't mean I don't know what you are."

With a speed and urgency he hasn't seen her use in days, Suzume is up immediately. The top blanket slides off her and onto the floor, and the second one she tugs up and around her head and shoulders like a makeshift cowl. The bright and almost neon yellow blanket is much too loud when set against the much more subdued palette of her outfit, all soft creams and softer whites, and before he really realizes what he's doing, he's reaching up to snatch it off of her.

But she's surprisingly quick as she dances back on her feet. Of all the many and myriad changes he'd been expecting from her as she'd started to really grow up, this stupid fucking quickness she's been exhibiting as of late is certainly not one of them. She's halfway down the hall before he's even on his feet, and well behind the sanctity of the bathroom door before he's taken even his second step.

"Sorry," he hears her call out from behind that swiftly locked barrier. "Gotta bathroom!"

Against the window there's another starburst of rain, and then another, and then another – and then the rain begins to come down in earnest. More than a bit unsettled by how much he finds himself already missing the feeling of her body, Dabi bends down and picks up the fallen blanket.

It starts as an aimless gesture.

It doesn't stay that way.

Without really thinking about it, he lifts it up and presses his face into the soft, heavy knit. And then he's breathing, in and in, a deep, slow breath, in through his nose, in through his mouth. There's detergent, of course, floral and sweet – but beyond that, there's the smell of her, of her skin, of her hair.

Breathe out. Breathe in. In, and in, and in, as if he can take in every last bit of her, every molecule, every atom, picked up and packed away, locked up tight, held in his lungs, behind his ribs. Made safe. Caged in.

Out, and in, and in, and he moves the blanket in his hands to catch a fresher scent. Fuck, it smells so good – she smells so good.

The whole apartment smells like her. It's so much more intense than it had been at her grandmother's house, where there had been years and years of someone else there to dilute it all. Here, everything is hers. Everyone who has lived here before the pair of them has been thoroughly flushed out, and all that's left is her: the plants, the absurd, cutesy knick-knacks, the colorful, sunshine blankets. Around him, in the artificial breeze, there are so many of her lace-lined skirts and fluttery blouses, and they move like the flittering wings of excitable birds. Even her tights and socks and stockings, damp as they are, hang from the clotheslines like white wedding streamers, their fabrics gauzy, fragile, insubstantial.

Easily torn away.

In the blanket, his fingers tighten, white-knuckled in their grip.

Between his legs, his cock twitches.

Fuck, he thinks. Think about something else. Think about anything else. Something distracting. Something awful. Fire, and heat. Blood, sticky on the hands. Death. A knife in the fist, blood on the knife, hands cut away, tendon and bone and blood. Death. A dead boy in the forest – a boy's skull made ash.

Anger. Childish hurt feelings, and the vitriol they'd become, poison in his veins, fed from his heart to his brain and back again, made black in the cycle, made blacker still, gone septic, made toxic. Hate. Hate.

His family. His –

But he doesn't pull the blanket away from his face. He moves it in his hands still, sliding it between his fingers, finding new spots, fresh spots, breathing in, and in, a fiend, a freak, every muscle going tight, so fucking tight, coiled up like something ready to spring, to strike. And in his nose and in his lungs, there is so much of that sweet, sweet smell.

And how can he think about anything else? How? How?

Over the rain, though, there's a noise. It's soft, smothered, faraway. Maybe a groan, maybe a moan. Dabi almost thinks it's him who's made it, that he's hearing it through layers of blanket, through layers of starving, hazy need. But as he lifts his head from the fabric like a slavering dog lifting its snout from a particularly inviting carcass, his head quirked in the too-quiet common room, he knows it isn't him –

Because there it is a second time, smothered and frightened, from off down the hall –

Because his cock twitches again at the noise.

"Suzu?"

Silence. Rain. The blanket falls from his fingers, a cascade of pale blue knitting that puddles at his feet, wholly abandoned. He crosses the room in two long strides, and is in the hall and outside the door to the bathroom a half-second later. His hand hovers over the door knob.

Silence. Rain.

Had he imagined it? The seconds tick on, and then, very faintly, there's a noise again: a soft but sharp intake of breath from the other side of the door –

And that same breath hitching just as softly in her throat.

Dabi swallows back – swallows back what? Tension? Lust? What are those noises? There's the sensation of his blood pounding in his ears, through his whole body, and he feels genuinely jittery, high off a potent, alien sort of adrenaline that's half-anxiety and half-need.

"Suzu – "

From behind the door, her voice has none of the forced perkiness she'd used to mask her embarrassment from earlier. Now the high noted tremor of it comes from something like fear, or pain, or both. "Nii-chan," she says, and she sounds young again, very much like a little girl again. It's the way she gets after waking up, disoriented, from an especially bad nightmare. "I think – I think something's wrong."

"What do you mean by something?" Trying the doorknob, Dabi finds it won't give. Locked. Of course. He hates the locks. Hates that she uses them, hates that they exist at all. When he next gets the chance, he's going to break every single lock in the house besides the ones leading outside. "Open the door."

"Nii-chan, please, no." Pleading, now. There's that telltale warble, almost tears. "This feels weird and bad and gross and I don't know – I don't know – I don't want you to – "

"Open the door, Suzu."

"I don't wanna get up," she says, and it's nearly a wail now.

Cursing under his breath, Dabi lets go of the doorknob to fish his worn leather wallet out from his back pocket. After rifling through a few rumpled notes, he finds what he's looking for buried along the bottom: a similarly crumpled but unfolded paperclip.

The paper clip fits easy and clean into the tiny hole in the doorknob. Having practiced this innumerable times, he has the door unlocked and opened almost immediately, throwing it back wide.

The toilet room is small. Narrow and long, there is only the toilet, and a small sink set into the wall. Crumpled atop the toilet's closed lid, Suzume sits with her ankles crossed and her thighs pinned together, her shoulders hunched, her tights a limp, sad pile at her feet. With her arms wrapped around herself, she looks very, very small.

She looks up at him as he all but shoves his way into the bathroom. Her already wide eyes are even wider now in her face, staring up at him with a skittish, animal kind of panic.

"Please don't," she says, very faintly, sounding hopelessly unsure of her own declaration.

"Don't what?" There's no keeping the exasperation from his tone, even if it is driven almost entirely by concern. "What the fuck is going on?"

"Don't come in," she mumbles pathetically, doubling over her legs as if to bury her face against her own knees. "Don't look at me – don't do – don't do anything. Don't – don't – "

There's a whisper of hysteria creeping into her voice, glacial in its slow moving delirium. Unable to hold himself back, Dabi moves through the bathroom, his heart picking up to a steady, foreign pace as he stands over her. With his body blocking most of the overhead light, she is cast almost entirely in shadow.

She doesn't look up when he takes her shoulder in his hand. She doesn't do anything but flinch.

"Suzu," he says her name, very slow, very steady. "You know you gotta answer me. Tell me what's going on."

Letting out a breath, the one she takes back in its place is erratic and stuttering. He feels her whole body growing more tense beneath the pressure of his palm.

"I'm... I'm bleeding." She whispers this like it's some dirty, awful confession – like he's caught her doing the sorts of things he does in the shower, only here in the water closet. In the living room, for just a moment, he'd wondered if that hadn't been the case – if she hadn't snuck off in search of privacy after he'd unsettled her, if she wasn't growing up faster than he'd expected, and in more ways than were obvious.

But this clearly isn't that. This is something else entirely.

"Bleeding." He repeats the word, as if grasping for the meaning behind its vagueness. He lets his hand drop away – takes a half step back. Letting his eyes trace her up and down, there's no obvious wounds anywhere. No blood.

But then his eyes fall down to the floor, to that tangle of tights at her feet – and there, stark against that white, flimsy fabric, is a dark spot of red-brown.

"Oh," he says. And then, "Bleeding," again, but this time the word lingers in his mouth, like he's puzzling over it, considering the way it tastes –

Like he's savoring it.

Because the realization hits him all at once. Her fear, both of what's happening to her, and of trying to explain it to him. Blood on her tights, and how tightly she keeps her legs together, how she folds over on herself. The stomach aches the days prior, her face pale with pain the last two days.

The minor alleviation in pain today.

And then, before he realizes what he's saying: "Show me."

His eyes find hers. Her breathing is stuttering and hiccupy, not yet in tears, but very obviously on the precipice. She looks at him from out of her frightened face, her fingers digging into her own arms as she stares up at him. "What?"

Suzume knows what he means. He knows she does. Even so, Dabi repeats himself. "Show me where," he clarifies. It's not that he actually needs her to. He knows. Still, he crouches down before her, and lets his hands cup her thighs just above her knees. Besides being a touch clammy, her skin is as cool as it ever is. Goosebumps prickle beneath his palms as he works his thumbs in measured, soothing circles.

"I can't." On the second word, her voice breaks. Despite everything – despite her fear, and what's happening to her – she doesn't sound convinced of her own refusal, and Dabi takes in a deep and very nearly shuddering breath.

"Suzu." Low and raw and made warm by the fire in his gut, he says her name. He leans forward, his face centimeters from hers, his eyes fixed on her own, coaxing her with a carefully contrived gentleness that only just obscures the way that terrible fire threatens to consume him from the inside out. "C'mon, Suzu. You can do it. You can show me."

There isn't a world where any of this is good or right or normal – where his motivation for asking is good, or right, or normal. Dabi knows this. He's very certain she does, too. But then, what about their relationship has ever really been any of those things? And does it even matter, ultimately, to either of them?

It certainly doesn't to him.

Whether it does or not to her, though, she does as he tells her, because of course she does. It isn't like her to refuse him anything. Straightening up slightly, her hands slip into the fabric of her skirt, holding on as if for life itself as she tugs it up her thighs – and without looking away from him, she very carefully spreads her legs –

Dabi feels his hands move as she does because he, too, doesn't look away. The normal clarity of her violet eyes are glassy now, unfocused, like she is looking through him rather than at him, and there's a faint crease between her not-quite frowning brows. Lifting one hand from her knee, he cups her cheek, smoothing over the softness of one pensive eyebrow. "Good girl," he tells her quietly.

And then he glances down.

There isn't much to see, really. Be it from fear, or shyness, or both, she hasn't spread her legs much, and her skirt, not fully hiked up, still leaves her some modesty. Even so, there's enough visible to confirm: there's a faint smear of red between her thighs, fresh enough as to be not quite dry. More damning, a spot blooms dark against the otherwise white fabric of her underwear, obviously wet.

Obviously blood.

Dabi feels – he isn't sure. There's a ringing in his ears. The room feels so small, suddenly, and she is somehow smaller, too. He can see her face in his periphery as he stares at that bloody confirmation, see the way that her barely held back concern melts into something more peeled back – much more frightened.

He wants to reach out. He wants to push his hand between her legs. He wants to touch that wet fabric, press further, touch her.

God, he wants it.

God – he's so fucked up.

"You look – " Her voice sounds far away through all that ringing, like she's talking to him from another room. "You look – scared?" She sounds unsure. She sounds terrified. "Am I okay? Am I gonna... gonna die?"

He'd laugh at how stupid the question was if he wasn't already reeling. She doesn't understand. Two days of pain, and now this. Shifting, her thighs touch, her knees pressing together again. Dabi looks up into her face again, trying to swallow back the sudden and aching dryness in his throat.

Fuck. It isn't that he doesn't feel bad for her. He does. There's something in him that's so soft for her, tender in a way he hates, and it's not as insignificant or as small as he'd like to tell himself it is. There's that boy caged up in the bottom of a well, the bottom of a deep, dry well, and that boy looks up from that awful place and into her wide and darting eyes and feels – what? Pity? Sympathy? That boy feels for her fear, for the pain, for what this means for her now, and in the future.

"It's fine," he hears himself saying. Now his voice sounds faraway, too.

Her cheek feels so cool, nestled into the curve of his hand. He thumbs her nose, runs it over her half-parted mouth. Presses in, feels her teeth.

She doesn't fight him.

"It's fine," he reiterates, voice serene even as his own eyes widen. "It's normal."

It is fine. It is normal. Those are both true things. But it also isn't fine, because he isn't fine, and he isn't normal. That boy in the well is only part of himself, one very, very small part of himself, and he'd long ago left that boy to starve, to rot. That boy is dead, and this feeling, this small, insignificant feeling, it's only a memory.

Blood and decay, fire and ash – how much can it mean, really, at the end of things?

How much can it mean in the face of all this nearly-realized want that yawns up within him, stirring at the thought of the red between her thighs like something primeval and awful, something starving, something demanding a long-unanswered satisfaction?

It's fine, he thinks, fighting back that manic grin again. It's normal.

Because she's ready now, isn't she?

Isn't she?

Now he's perfectly vindicated, wanting what he wants. Now he's justified taking it, if he does.

When he does.

"Normal? Bleeding like this is… normal?" Her voice trembles when she repeats the word, and Dabi stares at her, at the gentle curves of her face, the slope of her nose, the heavy peach-gold fan of her eyelashes. She's so cute. So fucking pretty. Every day, it's more of the same. A day older. A week cuter. Prettier and prettier, month after month, coming into her own. He swallows back a sharp longing that splits him down the middle as it moves from mouth to gut, smothering the laughter that threatens to boil out of him, hot, frantic.

It feels like he's been waiting for this forever.

"Normal," he says, in a very normal voice. "Totally normal."

---

He leaves her at home and goes out into the rain, shoulders slouched, hoodie pulled up against the storm. After managing to convince her she wasn't dying – a struggle, really, considering both her panic and that fever-pitch need moving from ringing to an almost shriek inside his own head – he'd told her to pack her underwear with a rag and give him some time to 'take care of things.'

Taking care of things involves a trip to the nearest convenience store, where Dabi loads up on important provisions: pads, pain medicine, and, at the clerk's insistence when he tries to pay, several bars of dark chocolate.

"Better than pain medicine," the clerk says when Dabi comes back to the register with the candy, as instructed. She's a solemn-faced woman, late forties, early fifties, her greying hair pulled back into a severe bun at the nape of her neck. He's seen her several times prior, though they've never really spoken. Her manner has always been refreshingly brusque. This bit of advice comes as a surprise – though maybe not an entirely unwelcome one. "Though they're obviously best used together."

Dabi nods. It's as close as he gets to gratitude. The woman eyes him as she scans the items, looking at him, really looking at him, as if for the first time. "For your girlfriend?"

"My kid sister. First time."

Her brow furrows. "I'd think something like this'd be better left to your mother, or a sister – "

"No sister," Dabi clarifies, "and mom's dead."

For just a moment, the woman's hand hangs over the scanner, the chocolate bar frozen in mid air. One second, a half second more – and then she's moving again. Three bars. Four. Five.

"Cigarettes?" She asks, and the moment is gone. He's surprised she remembers him enough to ask – nevermind that she remembers him enough to fetch the right brand for him when he agrees. Dabi suspects she means it as an apology; she's always asked for the brand before.

"Thanks," she says after he pays, in that polite but vaguely insincere way of retail workers who aren't all that invested in their jobs. And then, with just a fragment of real sincerity: "Please... be kind to her."

He leaves with a wave – more than he's ever done – and smokes all the way home, two and a half-cigarettes worth. It isn't like him to smoke outside of social situations with Giran, and those are few and far between, but he's so flooded with adrenaline, with intent, that he's desperate to have any kind of a distraction.

By the time he lets himself back into the apartment, he's sopping wet. Shedding all of his clothes save for his trunks in the entryway, he takes a moment to drop them off in the washer before he finds himself in the living room. From the kitchen, there's the sound of water rushing over the rain, splattering in the sink.

He tries not to think about blood, and what it means.

"You should be resting," he says, without looking into the kitchen. It feels important for his sense of self-control to look at anything but her for the time being. Feeling up a pair of his pants hung closest to the fan, he finds them dry enough to tug on, the damp bag held in his teeth as he fidgets with the zipper.

The front of his trunks are damp, too –

And much too slick to be rain water.

(It's nothing the jeans can't fix.)

"Just... trying to work out the stain." Suzume's voice is faint; vague. It floats into the living room from the kitchen, distracted, barely audible over the sink and the rain.

Knowing her, she's been in there the whole time he's been gone, fussing at the fabric of her stained underwear, scrubbing determinedly at the stain if only to have something mindless to focus on. "Let it sit," he tells her as he collapses onto the couch. "It'll work out better if you quit messing with it."

There's no answer. Just the running of water, just the rain on the roof. After a few seconds though, he hears the protesting squeak of the faucet as she turns it, hears her wringing her hands in the sink. Then she's out in the living room too, dressed in the same blouse from earlier.

The skirt, though, is entirely new.

Minor surprise registers on her face as she takes in his own appearance. "Where's your shirt?" And then, "Were those the pants you were wearing a moment ago?"

"That shit's all in the laundry. Got soaked."

A flicker of a tired smile brings a brief bit of color to her, and then she's grim again, gone grey and queasy looking. She smooths her damp fingers down her skirt anxiously. "But there's an umbrella right by the door.

Fishing his purchases out from the bag, he sets the medicine and the chocolate on the table, shrugging. "Wanted to cool off."

Suzume exhales through her nose, a noise that in any other time might have been a laugh. "Could've taken a shower for that."

The box of pads he pulls out last, and these he throws to her. "Oh trust me, I'm absolutely gonna take one later."

Her curiosity with regards to the box is distraction enough that she doesn't notice the sly way he says it. It's just as well. Blessedly oblivious, she turns it over and over in her hands, her eyes moving as she scans the package.

"So this is what these are for," she says, disappointment hollowing out her voice. "I'd always kinda wondered."

"Told you." Picking at a bit of peeling skin at his thumb with his teeth, Dabi eyes her from across the room. "Normal. Everyone girl's gotta deal with this shit."

"But why? I don't – I don't understand. Just, I have to bleed for no reason?"

He'd been purposefully vague before he'd left for the store, and at the time she'd been too preoccupied by her shock – and, upon finding out that she wasn't dying, her subsequent relief – to bury him under a deluge of questions. Now she stands in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room and looks at him pleadingly, the box trembling in her small hands. She's overwhelmed by her indignation at this sudden burden, and her need for answers.

"Not for no reason, but – God, I swear your fucking dad's still ruining shit, even years after being put in the ground." Dabi combs his hand through his damp hair, feeling it prickle his palms, a strand snagging on a staple.

Alarm nearly overwhelms all of her features. "This has to do with my dad?"

"It – yes, and no. Your dad ain't got anything to do with why you're bleeding, but you should at least know a little bit about what's going on. They teach you this garbage in the fourth grade. Not like they teach you well, you get me, but it's enough that I don't think you'd have been here freaking out about dying if you'd been through the lesson. But being that he kept you out of school, well, whoops. Here we are." Dabi clicks his tongue against his teeth. Tsk, tsk, tsk. "You don't know shit, and now I gotta explain it to you."

Wilting, she looks very suddenly sad. "If it's too much, I – "

It takes him moderately off guard. With a brief sigh, Dabi shakes his head, shedding the brief flare up of annoyance. "Nah, it's not actually that big a deal. Listen, take that box and go in the bathroom and figure it out, okay? Trade the rag for the real thing and then we'll see if we can't school you about all this stuff."

When she says "Okay," she draws the word out, slow, doubtful, a little mournful, her head hanging a bit as if chastised. Dabi watches her shuffle off back towards the bathroom again, her slippered feet more dragging than actively walking across the floor.

Her legs are bare. She'd never replaced her tight.

In the time she takes figuring herself out, Dabi makes himself busy. All the apparent good-for-periods magic in dark chocolate aside, Suzume has never cared for it. She's too easily overcome by bitter, stringent flavors. Still, it's an easy enough problem to overcome. Breaking one bar down into pieces, he warms them to a smooth, thick melt in a ceramic bowl with his palms and a careful application of heat.

He's in the kitchen still when Suzume reemerges from the bathroom some several minutes later. That's where she finds him as she pads into the room, dipping the last of a series of ripe strawberries into the glossy, tempered chocolate. She spends a long moment hovering near his elbow in respectful silence before finally asking him, "Um. What're you doing?"

"What's it look like I'm doing?" He doesn't bother looking at her just yet. There's three strawberries left, and more than that, it's hard to look at her.

"Okay, so you're making chocolate covered strawberries" she says, carefully, "but why?"

"Lady at the store said dark chocolate helps with the pain. That and meds, but you don't need help with that. You need help with this. Considering your dumb baby taste buds can't handle dark chocolate, I had to get creative."

"Oh," she says, very softly.

For a time, she simply watches him work. Without any real consideration for aesthetics, he moves quickly, laying out the strawberries on a plate where they stick together in a growing puddle of slowly congealing chocolate. If the chocolate were red instead of brown, Dabi thinks it would make for quite the grisly scene: red flesh in a dripping, red syrup, rent and butchered.

The thought has him pushing his tongue between his teeth in the effort it takes to suppress a shiver.

Too focused on the strawberries, Suzume doesn't notice. Her eyes follow the plate when he lifts it from the counter and slides it into the space he'd made for it in the fridge. They only find his face again by the time he's put himself back together.

"You can try 'em with some of that whipped cream spray you got later," he says, looking down at her as he sucks a bit of chocolate from his fingers. The desire to make her do it for him simmers inside of him, kerosene for that inferno that grows more monstrous by the month, by the day, by the minute. It's something he pointedly ignores –

At least, for now.

"Should help you choke it down."

Fidgeting with her skirt again, Suzume casts her eyes down and away. "You didn't have to do all that."

"You're right," he agrees, "I didn't." And then, reaching for her elbow, he tugs her with him into the living room. "C'mere."

Dutifully, she follows him – lets him lead her to the couch in that easy, wanting-to-be-lead way that takes her sometimes. He loves that. He barely has time to plant a pillow over his legs before she's crawling sideways into his lap of her own accord, and he loves that even more. After a bit of nesting, she presses her cheek to his shoulder, her expression twisted by a muted sort of dismay.

"This sucks," she mumbles dejectedly. Her cheek slides against his skin when she does, smooth and soft and cool. "Can't believe I gotta... gotta wear a dumb diaper thing to keep from – from bleeding everywhere."

He barks a short laugh, a surprised but genuine hah. "Gross. Pretty sure I could've lived my entire goddamn life without that imagery." He looks down at her again, but she isn't looking at him. She's watching the way her fingers lace and unlace together in her lap, her hair in her face.

"Yeah. I feel gross." She says it so quietly he almost doesn't hear it.

Dabi shifts under her. Pushing his hand up and under her skirt, he lets it settle midway up her thigh. "Sick gross or gross gross?"

"...gross-gross. Queasy, too, but not that kind of gross."

"Gross 'cause of what's happening?"

"Uh-huh."

Letting his head roll along the back of the couch, Dabi clicks his tongue against his teeth again in thoughtful contemplation that he tries to keep from going anywhere too far. "It's not gross. Not really. It's normal shit. Biological, that's all. Like I said, it's something girls gotta go through."

"Why?"

Of course she'd ask this; want details. She'd asked it earlier, she asks it now – and why, indeed. Straightening up, he looks down to find her gaze fixed on him, hesitant and unsure despite her probing interest.

"Well, Suzu," he says in a carefully leveled tone, "the long but mostly short of it is that you're now fully capable of getting knocked up. Congrats."

"Knocked up?"

When she repeats the words knocked up in horrified disbelief, Dabi sinks his teeth so violently against the inside of his own cheek that he tastes the coppery tang of blood. It's even more difficult to hear her announce, with an obviously naive sort of terror, "You mean I could just end up with a baby now?"

"Fucking hell." Dabi chokes out a strangled half-laugh. Concealing the way this conversation has him very quickly unraveling at the seams with feigned indignation is all he can do to keep himself under control. "I mean unless you're planning to convert to some western religion and somehow stumble into being the second coming of the Virgin Mary, no, you're not gonna just 'end up with a baby.' It's not like the little bastards crop up outta nowhere."

He should be good, he tells himself. He should. He finds a part of him wants to be, even, as much as that surprises him. She's hurt, and confused, and frightened, sat in his lap, looking to him for comfort, already so deeply overwhelmed.

And he loves her. He does. It's a realization he's been fighting since it started dawning on him: he loves her, so much, so much it makes him sick.

So much it makes him angry.

(And maybe that's why, he thinks, distantly. Maybe that's why that small and insignificant part of him wants so badly to be good.)

But Dabi isn't angry now. He isn't good, either. He isn't anything but ravenous and sick in an entirely different way, and he tugs his hand from her skirt to push it up and under her blouse instead, settling it over the soft curve of her stomach. Touching her there, feeling the pliant way her soft flesh gives beneath his invasive, hungry fingers – it's impossible not to think about how her body's changed –

(And what it's now capable of.)

"You do know how babies happen, right?"

It's a loaded question. A loaded gun – dynamite tied to a smoothly-delivered trigger. Suzume blinks up at him, her cheeks warming, and then she looks away, out at the room, down at the shape of his hand moving under her shirt. Her eyes dart quickly, flitting from object to object as if she can't decide where she wants them to settle – as if she wants to look at anything other than him. "I – well, a little, I think. They've touched on it at school, some. I think – I think we're going over more of it at the end of this year, and..."

It's not a sudden interruption. Her voice falls away from her slowly, eroded out from under her as one of his wandering fingers finds her belly button and, without any hesitation, pushes its way in. There's not much give. It's a shallow little thing, a snug, tight fit – and yet, like the rest of her always does, it seems tailor-made to suit him perfectly –

To take him, perfectly.

"Oh, Suzu," he breathes out her name, hot, hot, so much hotter than normal for all the heat of that kerosene glutted fire threatening to overwhelm the both of him. Even if he'd handed that gun off to her, he's gone and pulled the trigger himself.

It's fine, he tells himself, like he always does. Just a taste. Just a little tease. That's it. That's all. All it ever is.

"You gotta get properly fucked to get pregnant."

The pillow had been a strategic choice. It's one he's been making often as of late when they sit together. She'd laughed the first time he'd done it, blissfully unaware of his intentions, and fuck – then as much as now, that innocent naivete was almost unbearable for him.

"Oh, premium seating now?" she'd asked, cradling her controller in her hands as she'd settled down, wriggling her way to comfort.

"Sure," he'd said at the time, leaning back to give her space to arrange herself, savoring the way her body moved against his own. "Something like that. A premium seat for my favorite girl."

Open and affectionate declarations from her piece of shit big brother? Her biggest weakspot. Rare as he is with his compliments, they always have her cheeks pink, her mouth curling into an adorable, flustered smile.

She'd liked that, because of course she did. Loved it, even, and he had, too.

He'd been hard then. Hard every time since.

And hard now, especially.

Unlike then, when she'd been utterly clueless, she seems more aware this time. It's not like she really understands; Dabi knows she doesn't. But between the hand he has over her stomach and the low tone of his voice when he'd made that proclamation, it's enough for her to pick up on something.

Obviously uncomfortable with what little she can comprehend of that something, Suzume squirms on his lap – and god, it feels so good.

"The way you say it… you make it sound so gross."

She tries to say it lightly. Very, ha-ha, funny joke, you're so weird, Nii-chan. She tries, and she fails. The tension in her voice gives it away, a fluttery, tremulous kind of nervousness that should be sobering but only has his cock aching beneath the weight of the pillow.

He's worked so hard to wire her wrong – but he's wired wrong, too.

"Mm. It's more fun when it's gross," he says through a grin, through his teeth. He pushes the finger he has against her belly button deeper in – deep enough, at least, until her face registers the beginning tells of pain. Her pretty mouth thins considerably, and the lingering crinkle of her nose is so desperately cute – so cute he can't help himself, can't keep his finger from moving, pulling out, pushing in, slowly, so slow. He keeps a relentlessly steady pace.

She seems like she's holding her breath.

"But like the whole bleeding thing, it's natural. God knows it's a better time than your virgin birth fear. Crotchspawn with none of the benefits? Hard pass."

Suzume pulls her focus down from where she'd fixed it to the ceiling moments ago. Rather than meeting his own gaze, her attention settles on his hand again. It's as if she's transfixed by the way the fabric settles and resettles around it while his finger moves, in and out, in and out.

Physically, it feels like nothing – not for him, and probably not for her, either. It's such a nothing sort of touch. It should be. And yet more and more it feels like Dabi can't get enough oxygen with each breath.

And as for his sister –

She has a glazed look about her that he finds so devastatingly and unutterably lovely. She isn't looking away now. She isn't looking at anything else but the vague shape of his hand moving beneath her shirt. At the edges of his vision, he can't help but notice the way her toes have curled against the couch. The tension in her feet seems so tight.

He suspects it must hurt.

And very suddenly he is struck by the insane and almost violent notion that he will suffocate if he doesn't take her by the jaw and suck the breath straight out from her lungs.

Is that a kiss? Is it? He isn't sure.

God, how things have changed.

When he'd first started coming into his own sexually – a strange and decidedly awkward experience for a homeless teenage boy who had gone through puberty entirely while in a coma – he'd had a lot of time to kill. Whether on the streets or huddled up in some tiny cubicle in a hole-in-the-wall internet cafe, he had always had so much time. He could have drowned in it. There was never enough money. Never enough food. Gangly and starving, he'd had dirty clothes, and dirty hair, and dirty thoughts, and time, time, time. Nothing else to his name.

Without any money, what was he supposed to fill that empty, screaming space with? Boredom made him restless. It made him angry. So he'd taken that aching hollow inside of him and fed it the only thing he really had:

The internet.

As a child living at home, internet access had been monitored by computer programs that were probably better at parenting than either of his parents were. The shady internet cafes Dabi had taken lodgings in when he'd been a total derelict had had no such restrictions. Unfettered by arbitrary conceptions of what was or wasn't proper for children to see, Dabi had taken to it like a pig to filth. There was just so much to do online.

A lot of that time was spent hunting all over the internet for scraps of his father. Articles and fansites, videos, interviews. As a high ranking hero, Endeavor was a veritable cornucopia of entertainment, and Dabi hate-read and hate-watched everything at least twice.

And when that had gotten him good and vicious with rage, there was always social media. Dabi had learned quickly what a ripe hunting ground that was. It was easy to make new emails, make new accounts, easy to trawl through the inane bullshit of people who probably had a roof over their head and food in their belly and families that actually gave a fucking shit –

Easy to go after them. Easy to argue with, to bully, to doxx.

Of course there'd also been time for porn.

He'd developed many of his awful proclivities then. Driven on almost entirely by a potent combination of boredom and what he suspects now was a starvation for anything that felt good, he'd started at the bottom – and worked his way steadily down. Dumb shit at first; the sort of things one might find if they were ten, or eleven, sneakily typing in "tits" into a search engine and hoping for the best. Then, feeling more bold, maybe a search like 'sex,' or 'missionary,' or even 'fucking.' Real softcore type garbage.

It had been a very fast sort of snowball from there. Angry as he was, hungry as he was, soon all that hokey trash wasn't doing anything for him, and he was trying words like, 'crying,' or 'gagging,' or 'throatfuck.' He'd discovered a whole genre where girls dressed up in wigs and actual pro-hero costumes, girls who were debased, degraded, used. Sometimes it seemed like they liked it. Sometimes, it absolutely seemed like they didn't.

Was it real? Was it roleplay? Uploaded illegally to aggregate sites – because fuck if he was going to pay for porn when he could barely feed himself – there was never anyway to check.

But Dabi hadn't particularly cared.

In the beginning, nothing much had turned his stomach. After months and months of ever worsening indulgences, it was no surprise that even less did.

Somehow, though, out of every terrible thing he'd watched then, the one thing that soured him almost immediately had been traditional intimacy.

He never liked his porn sweet. Never liked it when something perfectly rotten devolved into some god-forsaken moment of levity. The tender brush of fingers against a tear-stained cheek in the middle of some gagging deepthroat scene would take him right out. An under-the-breath "Are you all right?" heard from off-camera in some poorly shot but still somehow compelling amateur upload was enough to ruin the entire fucking experience.

Kissing, though, that shit had always been the worst. It physically turned his stomach, left him feeling actually sick. Sometimes it was enough to kill his lust for an entire day, leaving him hissing curses under his breath, his cock gone woefully soft in his precum-slick fingers. He could maybe handle the occasional brief exchange if it was something like a peck to the cheek – or, more forgivably, a girl giving a cock some messy, reverential kiss – but when both participants got into it with each other, grabbing faces and hair and mouthing wetly against each other in some nauseating attempt at passion –

That had always been too fucking much.

As he'd gotten older, that hadn't really changed. Not in porn, and definitely not in real life. He'd taken a few partners, one night stands met in shitty bars filled with criminals, and kissing had been a hard-line there, too. He'd always been the sort to cut his losses immediately if a girl tried to get even a little kissy.

A peck to the cheek in porn was iffy, but bearable.

A peck to the cheek in person made his skin crawl.

With Suzume though, as with all things, it had been different. From the beginning, he'd been the one chasing after her with kisses. Kisses meant to charm her. Kisses meant to overwhelm her. Her fingers, her palms, her cheeks, her closed eyes. It never mattered; he left them everywhere. And it had been fun, really, genuinely fun watching her get flustered, watching her fall apart. It had been an ego-boost because she was falling apart because of him. For him. Manipulation and entertainment, all in one, that's what he'd told himself, and she'd taken so eagerly to that particular brand of poison, just like he'd expected her to.

But now he looks back on all of that and is certain he's gone and poisoned himself right along with her. That somewhere along the way, he'd started to enjoy it, really enjoy it. Crave it in the same way he craves tears, and ruined make up, and torn skirts.

(That he'd started doing it more for himself and his own satisfaction than any attempt at manipulation.)

And that's what this is, he realizes. That's what this want is, this need, here, now, in this moment. He wants to take hold of her throat and he wants to hold her down. He wants to force her mouth open, and worm his way inside, lick all along behind her teeth until she's coughing and gagging because it's too much and she can't handle it. He wants to feel her squirm because it's too much. He wants to hear her cry because she can't handle it. He wants to feel her face get warm, warm enough that even he can feel it, warm and wet and salty with tears, with cum –

It's fair game now, says the voice in his head. This voice slithers out from the thing inside of him, that thing that's all stitched up, falling apart, rows and rows of teeth and rot and empty, unfulfilled need. She's fair game now. He can do whatever he wants with her, whenever he wants.

And he wants her so badly now. He's been wanting her for so long.

Hasn't he?

The boy in the well is so very quiet now.

Suzume is not.

"Nii-chan," she says. A whisper. "Please."

Please what?

Oh, he thinks. She wants it.

She doesn't understand it, but that doesn't mean she can't want it.

Her cheeks are red, though woefully dry. Her eyes are heavy, half-lidded, faraway and nightmare-dreamy when she looks up at him. Her lips are pink and soft and parted, so pretty, always so pretty. Everything about her is pretty, he loves all of her, he does, but god, he loves her perfect, lovely mouth so fucking much. Smiling, laughing, all of it. He thinks about filling that pretty mouth up every night, every night after she falls asleep and he stands at her desk, reading through her phone, getting angry, feeling side-lined.

She shouldn't be wasting that pretty mouth talking to people who don't matter.

He wants to fill it with something that does.

Fuck. Fuck. It feels like he's losing his mind.

"Please," she says, sounding so unsure. "It's… too much."

"What is?" His voice is hot and low.

You are, he wants to hear her say, if only so he can touch her face, tuck her hair behind her ear, kiss that flushed, tip-tilted nose and tell her, Let me help you take me.

But she shakes her head. In his lap, beneath the press of his fingers, she seems like she's shrinking back as much as she's able. She doesn't even understand what she's saying, what she's feeling – and still, somehow, she knows it's too much.

It's okay, he tells himself, wildly. That's fine. He can take it slow.

But he knows if he lets himself go, he won't. He won't take it slow. Can't go slow with her, god, not now. He's lying to himself, and he'd be lying to her if he told her that – and he does want to tell her that.

Wants to lie, and lie, and lie.

Oh, he'll take it slow. He'll make it work. Oh, can't she be good, and sweet, and try for him? Can't she? Can't she?

And it wouldn't even be hard. He knows he could coax her into it. He could get her to agree to anything, because that's who she is. That's how he's made her. He'd just need to cajole her a bit, tease her, pinch her, kiss her cheeks, the corners of her mouth, play at being sweet, ohhh, work her up, even more than she is now. Get her to melt a little, and then a little more. Get her to give in, give up, give him everything he wants and has ever wanted, and more, and more, and more –

"Nii-chan," she says again, pleadingly. God, the way she says it, the way she says it. Doesn't she know what that does to him? Doesn't she?

Oh, his little sister. His sweet, stupid, perfect little sister, the both of them digging her grave. She doesn't even realize she's holding a shovel.

She touches his cheek with fingers that tremble. Her palm is cool against his skin, her thumb stroking down the length of the staple closest to his mouth. She does this often. It's like she likes the way it feels.

(He always likes when she does it.)

"Nii-chan," she says, "please."

And then, so softly, looking like she might cry:

"I love you. Thanks for looking after me."

Very gradually, the finger he has fit inside that shallow little hole goes still. There's still so much heat in him, but he finds he's choking it back, trying to choke it back, sucking great big lungfuls of it back as if he were drowning in an ocean of fire. He closes his eyes, taking in a deep, long breath, trying for air instead – and feels nothing but smoke and flame, turning his insides black, black, and blacker still.

God, it makes him sick. He's sick. Sick in the head, sick to his stomach, and the need is still there, and the need is worse, and he's sick with that, too.

She loves him. God, she's so stupid, so dumb, so perfect. How could she? Why? So dumb. What's wrong with her? What has he done to her? She loves him.

But no – no. What has she done to him? Ruined him for porn, ruined him for other girls, ruined him for kissing, ruined him for fucking everything –

Her fault, her fault, her fucking fault –

"If you love me, you'll let me do what I want. You have to make it up to me. You'll let me do it, and you'll tell me you love me through the whole fucking thing."

But he doesn't say that. He doesn't say anything. He exhales, and Suzume startles in his lap, terrified, because suddenly there's smoke in the room, grey and hazy. It's billowing up from his throat, thick as vomit, seeping out from between his clenched teeth.

"Are you okay?"

That concerned terror in her voice is so painfully genuine. Even overwhelmed, even afraid – overwhelmed by and afraid of him – she's so worried about him.

She loves him so much.

She does.

He knows this.

He doesn't deserve it. He hates himself for being this way, for wanting these things. He doesn't care.

"I'm okay," he manages to rasp through another throatful of smoke, of blue-hot desire only just barely smothered by his ever-loosening control.

"Are you sure?" She touches him fretfully, touching his cheek, his forehead, brushing his hair out of his face. Her fingers glow, golden and soft like gentle dawn light – and then her face tenses, wincing, twisting. He knows what that means. Even now, he thinks, wanting to laugh – even now, here she is, trying to trade her pain for his. It's like she's trying to scrape away at all the rot he's filled himself up with. She has to know that he's just going to fill himself back up with it.

So dumb. So sweet.

God, fuck –

"But you feel – you feel so hot – "

"I'm allways hot," he tells her, shaking his head, wishing for her own sake that she'd stop touching him –

Wishing for his that she'd never stop touching him.

"More than normal, I mean – "

"Oh, Suzu," he says, giving up this one small internal battle and leaning into her touch. He won't let himself hurt her – not now. Not yet. But if she wants to hurt herself for him, well –

"It is normal. Totally normal."

Because it is.

Because this, now, terrible as it is – terrible as he is – is his normal.

(And he knows there's no going back to the way things were before.)