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“Who would think? Shigaraki Tomura, ruthless villain mastermind. Deranged boogieman of hero society. Brushes and flosses twice a day, every day.”
Tomura spit out mouthwash before aiming a glare at Dabi’s reflection in the mirror above the sink. “What of it?”
“Nothin’. Just never thought you’d have something in common with All Might.”
Growling, Tomura grabbed the hand towel from the counter and chucked it into his—second-in-command’s? lover’s? boyfriend’s?—smirking face.
They’d fallen into a domestic routine so easily.
Individual duties occupied their daylight hours. Plotting the prison break for Moonfish and keeping tabs on movements in or out of UA on Tomura’s end. Team combat practice and coordinating with the core League members for Dabi. Nighttime, though, belonged to the two of them. By some unscripted agreement, they met around eleven in the upstairs bathroom in their respective sleeping attire, watching each other perform their usual pre-bedtime ablutions.
Tossing the towel back onto the counter, Dabi resumed dabbing homemade salve around the stapled seams in his bare torso: sides, neck, shoulders. “At least you don’t have to worry about going to the dentist’s office.”
The muscles between Tomura’s shoulder blades instantly bunched into a knot. “That’s why I do it. I hate the dentist.”
“This just in: No one likes the fucking dentist. Not even a masochist like me. Anyway, I bet when you did go you were their favorite patient. Bet you’ve never even had a cavity, let alone braces or something worse.”
“Three,” Tomura blurted before the logic part of his brain caught up to the reactive. “When I was a kid.”
Dabi cocked his head, eyes alight with interest. “Oh?”
How did he do that? Just…just poke and prod the exact emotional buttons to make anyone cough up anything about their lives? Even being aware of the manipulation couldn’t keep Tomura’s mouth shut.
“I went through…a phase…when I was, I dunno, eight? Nine? I wouldn’t eat anything but sweets. Kurogiri tried his best to get something with nutritional value into me, but I…I’d have a fit and…” Hunching his shoulders, Tomura folded his arms across his chest and averted his gaze from the mirror. “Anyway, eventually my teeth started to hurt—I didn’t take care of them then—so I had to see a dentist. She found three cavities and filled them. I eased up on sugar and started brushing right after. I haven’t needed to go back since.”
Dabi laughed in that quiet way of his, as if the trivia that’d tumbled out of Tomura were charming by any standard. “Found the needles and drilling that bad, huh?”
He hadn’t. In fact, they’d been the least painful part of the entire experience. Worse had been the searing exam light beaming down on him. The way it had exposed every jagged scar and mummified wrinkle on his face. Or how the dentist had recoiled, stifling a gasp, when she saw him fully the first time. Then the teetering balance between disgust and morbid fascination in her expression as she took in the mutated color of his eyes and—
The present hauled Tomura out of the flow of bad memories when hot fingertips skimmed his brow, brushing a swath of his hair aside. He jerked away like he’d been scalded.
Dabi didn’t drop his hand. “What’s eating you?”
Tomura turned his back on the mirror to avoid both his reflection and the lightning-blue eyes picking his every move apart. “Nothing.”
No comment followed for several hammering heartbeats. Then, “Okay. Hold still then.”
Glancing over, Tomura caught Dabi dipping his fingers into the jar of salve before reaching toward him. Panic punched into his chest and crushed the air from his lungs. Dabi wanted to touch his face. Touch his peeling, onion-like skin. See all the scars carved into it, the mole lumped near his mouth, the eyes that marked him as an outsider. He wasn’t a beautiful, self-made gestalt of contrasting textures and shiny staples and inner fire glowing bright through the seams like Dabi. He was a bleached out shell, a paper doll held together by nothing but aimless rage, a withered cocoon of what could have been. Who would want to look at, let alone touchholdcaressstaywith a thing like that? How long until Dabi stared at him with the same revulsion that the dentist, people on the street, heroes, everyone did?
When fingers came within a centimeter of his cheek, he quickstepped out of reach. The neutral lines of Dabi’s expression shifted into understanding, and Tomura realized, too late, that he’d sprung a trap.
“You don’t like me seeing your face, do you? Or any part of your body, for that matter.”
In an instant, Tomura’s nails sank into each side of his neck. Droplets of blood took the place of the tears that had dried up in him long ago.
Dabi’s eyes narrowed. “Quit that.” He followed word with deed, grabbing the wrist of one scratching hand, smearing it with salve.
Teeth bared, Tomura windmilled his arm, forcing Dabi to either let him go or have his elbow twisted and locked. He was released only to be gripped under the chin. Fury gushed up from Tomura’s guts like poison from a ruptured spleen. Outrage at the ease with which he’d been snared, dissected, this hidden part of him laid bare. Resentment toward an awareness of his body he’d never suffered from until Dabi had shown up. Before then, he hadn’t given a solitary fuck about appearances. Because no one had been looking, no one had paid any attention, and he’d been blissfully, blessedly alone.
Tomura’s jaw tensed up so tight that it distorted his voice, turning it into something that might have been snarled from between a muzzle full of sharp fangs instead of a human mouth. “Let me go or I swear I’ll Decay your fucking arm off right now.”
“Oh, yeah? Don’t want to hear an objective opinion?”
Just like that, the question staunched his rage. Tomura blinked, staring at Dabi but finding nothing besides cool curiosity. Taking advantage of the hesitation, Dabi finally swiped aside his hair, tucking it behind his ear.
“There. Was that so bad?”
Tomura made a show of rebellion, shaking his head and shoving his hands—index and middle digits safely raised—against Dabi’s chest, but the will to fight had already abandoned him. Because the truth was he did want to hear. Needed to. No matter how much it hurt in this moment, the agony would only grow exponentially worse the longer he waited. So, he went still and said nothing, too busy suppressing the tremor starting in his legs.
“You trust me, don’t you?”
When he shied away, Dabi forced his chin back up.
“Don’t you?”
His voice rasped like a blade against a whetstone. “Yes, damn you.”
His reward consisted of a smile and murmured, “That’s the spirit.”
The quiver steadily worked its way up his body, only worsened by Dabi tilting his head this way and that, angling it toward the light over the sink, examining each detail and making the occasional hum of interest. Tomura was convinced he was going to break down and beg for the first time in his life when he felt the buttons of his pajama shirt being popped open. He gasped and immediately hated himself for it.
“What—”
“Shh. I have to take overall composition into account, right?”
The only thing Tomura could do was screw his eyes shut and force himself to not squirm like a worm on a hook as his shirt was unbuttoned and slipped off of one shoulder, then the other. He clenched his arms around his stomach, preventing the sleeves from slipping off completely. Gentle fingers traced the pink craters of scar tissue in his biceps left behind by Snipe’s bullets—which, as much as he was loath to admit it, had skillfully avoided hitting bone. They traveled old, silvery trails dug by his nails over the years across his collarbones and the ripples of his ribcage. They followed the long, thin stripe just above his right hip from the first time he’d faced a mugger with a knife during one of his rambles around the city. From head to toe, his body was nothing but a living record of his weaknesses and past mistakes.
Dabi shifted, maneuvering them around. His heart beat hard but steady against Tomura’s back as he pressed in close.
“Look.” The hand on his chin guided it front and center.
Cracking one eye open, Tomura warily took in their reflections. Him ghostly pale and shivering, arms defensively crossed over his belly, black shirt hanging from the crooks of his elbows. Dabi’s broader form framed him from behind, stapled cheek hot against Tomura’s temple, irises electric. As he watched, the hand not cradling his chin crept up his chest, spider-like. A long thumb and forefinger caught one nipple between them, pinching and pulling and rolling in a way that made his knees unlock and begin to buckle. Tomura braced himself with palms flat on the counter and swallowed a whimper. His eyes remained wide open, tracking the progress of Dabi’s other hand from his chin…skimming down his neck…tickling over his solar plexus…tracing around his navel…pulling at the waistband of his pajama bottoms and—
One of Tomura’s own hands flew up and clamped over his mouth in a vain attempt to hide a breathless little moan as a questing grip found him willing and ready.
“Wanna know what I think?” Dabi’s mouth was hot as a torch next to his ear, making sweat break out along the back of his neck. “I think you’re a lot of things. A creep, for one.”
A squeeze made Tomura’s head loll back onto the stapled shoulder behind it.
“A crazy genius, for another.”
How could something be utterly mortifying yet so fucking good at the same time?
“A ruthless killer too.”
Strokes from the base ending in circles drawn around the tip forced helpless mewling sounds from his throat.
“And, sometimes, you’re a goddamned brat who deserves to have his ass paddled raw.”
A sudden tug had him jerking like a puppet on strings.
“The one thing you aren’t, though, is ugly.”
Tomura struggled to salvage words from the wreckage of his mental state. “Please…I can’t…you’ll make me…”
“I’m not the only one who thinks so either,” Dabi continued as if he hadn’t heard, fingers settling into a smooth, steady rhythm. “Spinner would burst a fucking brain vessel if he saw you like this. Twice would do anything you asked him to. Shit, Magne wouldn’t have minded showing you a good time, according to her.”
Unable to control his ragged breathing, Tomura buried his face against the rippled scars of Dabi’s neck, ashamed and pleased and grateful all at once.
“I got to you first, though, didn’t I?” The pace of the strokes picked up a notch. “I stared at that picture of you Giran showed me so long it made him jealous. After that first time we talked in the bar and you let me see your face, I went straight to my room and jerked off until I singed the blanket. I planned for weeks—fucking weeks—on how to approach you. And when you kissed me right here in this room, I knew the risk had been worth it. Now it’s me who gets to enjoy stripping you piece by piece and putting my hands all over this beautiful body of yours while you shake and make the prettiest noises for me. And you know what? I think it’s just going to get better each and every time I see it.”
Faster. Faster and faster and fasterfasterfaster.
“Go on, Shigaraki. Show me how fucking good you look falling apart for me.”
Tomura did not disappoint. On cue, he gasped like a drowning swimmer breaking the surface as his spine arched, contracted muscles wringing every drop of pleasure out of his nerves. Dabi slowed but didn’t stop, slickened fingers sliding over sensitized skin until it began to sting. Drained, Tomura sagged forward, only the scarred arm across his chest keeping him upright. With bleary eyes, he stared into the mirror.
He was still pasty, still scabby, definitely still disheveled…but he felt fucking amazing.
“Asshole,” he panted anyway. “Now I have to get back in the shower.”
Dabi’s soft laugh tickled his ear. “You gonna tell me it wasn’t worth it?”
“No…though don’t think that means you aren’t going to pay for ignoring my list and not asking permission first.”
That earned an intrigued hum. “You threatening me with a good time?”
Fucking masochist. He twisted, turned, and threw his arms around Dabi’s neck, burying his face against his shoulder while minding the staples. Fingers—the clean ones—combed through his hair and rubbed soothing patterns along his scalp.
“Did you mean it?” Tomura mumbled after a bit.
Hips ground against his, offering a very different definition of hard evidence. “Every word. I talk a lot of shit, mophead, but I don’t lie.”
He peeked up just enough to glare. “Don’t call me that.” Especially now, after he knew how at least part of his name sounded when spoken with heat and affection and want.
One corner of Dabi’s lips twitched. “Sweetheart? Honey? My sun, my moon, my starlit sky?”
“Ugh. Do you want me to kill you?” His stupidly pounding heart, however, didn’t match the way Tomura shoved his—second-in-command? lover? boyfriend?—aside.
Like he could sense the spike in blood pressure he’d caused, Dabi let the twitch grow into a full-blown smirk as he turned on the faucet and began washing his hands. “See you at my room or yours in a couple of minutes?”
Tomura huffed. “Mine. You don’t even have a TV in yours.”
“Didn’t have any trouble keeping you entertained when you were there last time, boss.”
“Keep it up and you’ll be sleeping out in the fucking alley…patches.”