Chapter Text
Rumi gets the call while she’s in the middle of dispatching a minor villain with an unknown quirk and a penchant for loitering creepily outside of lady's undergarment stores. She has him by the collar, with one fist cocked back to knock his teeth in for attempting to grope her mid-fight, when the chilling warble of the hero S.O.S. alert starts emitting from her phone. The villain reaches up to feebly grip her wrist while she goes for her phone with her free hand.
What she sees on the screen makes her blood run cold.
- INCIDENT: VILLAIN ATTACK
- WARNINGS: FLAME QUIRK & NOUMU
- HEROES PRESENT: HAWKS, ENDEAVOR
- ASSIST NEEDED URGENTLY
- RE: HEROES DOWN
- PROXIMITY: APPROX. FIVE MINUTES
Oh, no, she thinks. No, no, no, not Keigo. Not on my watch. Not fucking happening.
The winged hero - the lovable, passionate birdbrain who liked too much spice in his curry and enjoyed sappy k-dramas after bloody days in the field - was in danger. Could be injured, or dead already.
Ignoring the villain’s weak attempts to feel up her arm, she tosses him aside and takes off at a dead sprint in the direction the map indicates, her heart thundering and adrenaline making her vision tunnel.
Heroes down, heroes down, heroes down. The stark words run through her mind almost faster than her feet slapping the pavement, as she hurdles over parked cars and bounces off of storefronts when her momentum can’t be checked.
Five minutes? She’d be there in two. Hawks wasn’t the only fast one around.
She never notices the tendrils of white mist seeping into her wrist.
----
Dabi’s eyes are wide and his blood is practically singing in his ears. Finally, finally, he has Endeavor exactly where he wants him. The fucking bird has been sidelined, plucked like a Thanksgiving turkey by his own goodie-two-shoes instincts, and Enji is on his knees, a nice little souvenir carved into his face by the High-End Noumu.
Who’s the weak one now, dad?
“Not how I planned for this to go,” he comments, pitching his voice for the two injured heroes to hear. “But that’s fine, I guess.”
He means it, too. This wasn’t the original plan, but he can still work with it. Just the sight of Endeavor kneeling down, bloody and pained, ignites a fierce glee inside Dabi’s chest. Like he’s finally getting some of the payback he deserved after so many years of fucking abuse.
So let’s get this show started.
He stalks forward, all the words he’s wanted to say for years clamoring behind his teeth like a tidal wave, ready to spew forth in unforgiving waves.
“Nice to meetcha, I guess,” he calls, watching Enji blink blearily at him through blood and a haze of smoke. Dabi takes another step closer and Hawks tries to make a gesture - some kind of signal behind Endeavor’s back to get the villain’s attention - but Dabi’s not having it. As a matter of fact.
“No one told me you’d be here,” he observes with utmost irony, not even flicking his eyes toward the number two hero. No, his gaze is absolutely focused on his estranged father. It’s how he notices when the bastard’s one good eye widens.
“You!” He accuses angrily, and Dabi feels a thrill of adrenalin spike through his body like a jolt from a live wire. Had Endeavor recognized him?
“You’re the one who murdered Snatch!” The hero growls, struggling upright.
Something truly unhinged flips inside Dabi’s mind like a switch, and he feels the breath still inside his chest. For just the barest moment, he thought…
Didn’t matter. Endeavor would realize his mistake soon enough.
“Sna- who?” Dabi asks airily, nearly breathless with hatred. “More importantly, let’s chat while we have the chance.”
You’re gonna want to hear what I have to say.
And with that, he gives his rage life - blasting fire out in an enormous circle that rings around him and the two injured heroes, thoroughly blocking out any interference from the outside.
Just you, me, and the chicken, Dabi thinks, eyes never leaving his kneeling father. So he sees Endeavor’s eyes rolling slightly right before he slumps, hands barely preventing him from face-planting. Dabi’s lips twitch down into a frown, and his pace slows to a stop.
He catches Hawks saying something about being able to “hold off the villain” with his little nubby wings. And that, coming from the villain-wannabe, is just about enough for Dabi.
“Heh,” he huffs to himself, before pitching his voice again, “Come on, I’m just here to get my Noumu.” He takes another step closer, blood singing and muscles tensing. Anticipation and jittery fear nearly making his deadpan voice shake as he spreads his arms wide, “There’s no way I could actually win, right? Against the top two heroes, already beat up and bloodied?!”
Heat surges like magma under his skin, and he moves.
----
Rumi knows she’s arrived when the giant wall of flames becomes evident, even if she could feel them from more than a block away. The sheer height of them, though, makes her eyes widen: they have to be fifty feet high.
Not a problem for her, but… she’d need to clear them with some margin. No way was she risking charring her legs if she was about to get into a fight.
She builds speed, thigh muscles sliding smoothly under her skin as she hits a dead sprint, stride lengthening out as she turns her gaze up.
There!
The corner of a building, still whole enough not to crumble when she ricocheted off it. And with two more strides down the destroyed road, Rumi leaps.
In the air, hair streaming out behind her, she trusts her trajectory enough to risk a glance down, and the villain is immediately evident. A man in black, bearing down on an injured Endeavor and Hawks with flames pouring out of his hands. Rumi’s heart slams against her ribs.
She hits the building edifice at her pinnacle, seventy feet in the air, and her heels crack the concrete when she rebounds off of it, giving her a momentum far greater than just gravity - launching her on an intercept.
C’mon, c’mon!
The villain is right below her, not looking up. If she hit him full force, she’d fucking kill him.
Gritting her teeth, she pulls a knee up to her chest then snaps it out with perfect control, clipping the villain across the cheek. His head jerks to the side as she rockets by him and lands in a sliding crouch between the villain and the heroes, ready to launch herself again if she has to.
But the villain is staggering, clutching his face with pale fingers. Weirdly, where she might have understood blood coming out from behind his hand, she can see something white seeping into his face.
It’s weird. Really weird. But Rumi has priorities, and she glances over her shoulder at them - noting that both Hawks and Endeavor are really worse for wear, but alive. She releases a short breath of relief, then bares her teeth.
“Heard the news, and hopped right on over,” she declares, giving her attention back to the dangerous player still on the field. He was working his jaw with his hand, but she wasn’t fooled into thinking he was subdued. All around them, the wall of flames had leapt another twenty feet without any evident effort on his part.
Then the villain turns, blue eyes wide and furious, and Rumi meets his gaze with a fierce grin.
“Back off the injured guys,” she calls. “And you and I can tango on our own.”
----
Dabi’s eyes narrow in irritation, but he knows he can’t beat goddamn Miruko. She’d knock his teeth out through his spine and not even feel badly about it. Just the love tap she’d given him left his head fucking spinning - and even if he crisped her in the end, the bunny bitch would be a problem for long enough that he’d end up surrounded.
He glances at Endeavor, anger not cooled one iota, but more than patient enough to wait. It’s all he’s done for the past eight years.
Another time, dad.
“Too bad,” he mutters. “Just as things were starting to heat up.”
Dabi sees the rabbit hero bracing to come at him again. He lets himself relax, knowing she won’t land the next hit.
“Ujiko-san.”
He feels the familiar surge of noxious black gunk welling up his throat, but he’s got enough time for one last message.
“Bye for now, Mr. Number One Hero,” he tells his father. “I’m sure we’ll get another chance to talk, but until then…”
Grin stretching wide enough to split skin and eyes slightly wild, Dabi bellows out, “Don’t go dying on me just yet, Todoroki Enji!!”
Miruko is coming his way. Dabi would laugh if not for the summons boiling up his throat. Black splatters down his chest and he feels his guts tug.
The rabbit hero is only meters away, but Dabi’s world dissolves into darkness before she ever touches him.
----
Rumi passes through the air where the villain had been standing with a frustrated snarl, landing in the debris with a swirl of dust and grit. She glares at his remaining boot prints as if they’d personally offended her, before turning back to Endeavor and Keigo, the latter of whom was helping the number one up from the ground.
“You guys gonna be alright?” She calls as she approaches, wondering if she’d need to hop one of them over the flames, which hadn’t dissipated at all with the villain’s departure.
Keigo waves her off, the much larger hero leaning on him for support. “We’re mostly okay. Endeavor-san is going to need treatment for his face but…” He gestures around the area as if it encapsulates what he’s trying to say. In a way, it does.
They’d survived, once again.
The grin she and Keigo exchange is exultant - almost giddy. The smile of those who’d beaten the odds, despite everything. Rumi’s cheeks practically ache with the force of it.
Then Keigo’s smile dies, and his golden eyes widen. “Uh, Rumi?” He points at her arm, where white mist was enveloping her wrist.
Enveloping and... erasing her.
Her heart jumps into her throat, but before she can do anything - say anything - the mist spreads upward in a surge, and completely overtakes her.
----
In Ujiko’s labs, Dabi had barely gotten his bearings back - the good fucking doctor was still in the process of berating him for losing the Noumu - when his cheek suddenly throbs with pressure.
“Dabi?” The doctor breaks off mid-rant, looking at him with something that could almost be described as concern. That, more than anything, sends the alarm bells ringing in Dabi’s ears.
Then abruptly, his vision goes white.
----
Rumi comes back to herself, completely whole, mid-sprint toward a towering wall of flames.
She can see the same building she’d bounced off of earlier. She was vaulting over the same set of vehicles she had before. The rabbit hero forces herself to stop, sliding to a halt fifty feet shy of the fires the villain had set to burning.
Had she blacked out? Was she experiencing deja vu?
Was I transported? She wonders, examining the arm that appeared completely unmarred from the weird white misty shit that’d wrapped around it.
Without warning, there’s a yell from within the circle of fire - a yell that sounds an awful lot like a really distressed Keigo.
Rumi’s moving again before she even realizes it.
----
Dabi doesn’t know what happened, but suddenly he’s back in front of his kneeling father, and the bunny bitch is nowhere to be seen.
Not one to look a very rare gift horse in the mouth, he lets his lips stretch into a gruesome smile. “Now, where were we.”
Hawks makes to move in front of Endeavor, uttering that same bullshit about “holding off the villain”, and Dabi almost frowns. It was… exactly what the hero had said before, wasn’t it?
Didn’t matter. And Dabi doesn’t bother with the same spiel as before - doesn’t even bother lunging for the heroes. This time, he crosses his arms in front of his face - palms facing out - and then drops them violently, flames jettisoning out along the way in a massive X that allowed almost no avenue of escape.
He hears Hawks yell - can see the winged hero struggling to pull Endeavor up and out of the way with his useless feathers. There’s even a tiny part of him that regrets having to take out the potential ally in a bid to rid the world of his father. But oh well.
What happens next, happens so quickly that it takes Dabi a moment to process it.
The wall of flames beside the villain parts in a perfect circle, with the rabbit hero flying through a split second behind, leg held out in a side kick position.
Did she fucking kick so hard the air pressure broke through my flames?
Dabi doesn’t have time to wonder any further, because the next second she’s vaulting toward her fellow heroes yelling, “NO!”
But she’s too late, and all he can do is laugh.
----
Rumi watches Keigo and Endeavor disappear in the flame attack, hears their brief yells - cut off too soon - and sees only red when the reality sets in that they’re gone. Keigo, her best friend, is gone.
Someone is laughing at the scene, and Rumi’s spine goes ramrod straight. Fury blinds her, and all training on detaining villains without violence goes straight out the window.
The next thing she knows, the villain is on his back on the other side of the makeshift arena, wheezing for air. It’s a herculean effort, but she refrains from following him and beating him into the dirt for what he did.
So she stands there like a statue, fists quivering and tears streaking her face as she tries to bring herself under control. Her teeth are clenched so hard the enamel creaks.
This time, her vision is too blurry to notice the tendrils of white snaking up her arm.
----
Dabi almost welcomes the white that coils across his vision. It sure the fuck beat trying to breathe against the massive bruise blooming across his chest.
But when he opens his eyes again, and his father and Hawks stand before him, just as they had before, his mind starts churning.
The only difference, so far, was the bunny bitch’s entrance.
And indeed, this time, even sooner than the first, the rabbit hero descends from the sky - a blur of white and brown and frantically wide red eyes. Dabi sees her look between him and the heroes. Sees her expression cave with relief.
Well, shit.
She’s seeing this too.
----
Her eyes darting between the villain and the very much alive Keigo and Endeavor, Rumi can’t help the few tears that prick at the corner of her vision.
I wasn’t too late this time!
This time of what though? What the fuck was going on?
“Some sort of deja vu quirk,” a voice suddenly speaks up. It takes her a moment to realize the villain is speaking and that he’s speaking to her.
A sharp retort is on the tip of her tongue, but… wait, did that mean he’d also repeated the last two times?
It almost doesn’t matter. She damn near ignores the insistent voice in her head that’s telling her something is fucking wrong. The death of Keigo, of her colleagues, is still too close to the surface.
“White mist,” she grits out, muscles bunching across her body as she forces herself to focus on the here and now. On the villain in front of her right now, not the one who’d murdered her friend just a minute prior.
The villain’s hand twitches, almost like he was going to move, and the tenuous hold Rumi has on her reason slips entirely. She’s in the villain’s face before he can so much as blink - one hand fisted in his shirt, and the other drawn back in a balled-up fist.
“Easy there, hero,” the man drawls, flicking his gaze over to Hawks and Endeavor. There’s a manic light in his eyes almost as bright as the fire surrounding them, and Rumi can feel her skin crawling. Something was wrong here.
Her fingers bunch into the fabric of his loose t-shirt. It’s not even intentional, but she realizes that she can see the scars extending down his torso.
“Hey now, my eyes are up here.”
I’m gonna kill him, she thinks, meeting those slightly insane eyes again. He cracks an evil smile at her, and white seeps out of his seams like fog escaping.
The hand that’d been holding his shirt disappears too, the fabric resettling against skin with a flutter.
Villain and hero exchange a look before they both disappear once more.
----
Dabi’s ready for her this time. He materializes into the same spot, with ash and dust roiling around him in clouds, and the first thing he does is look up - scanning the air for the interfering hero.
Maybe once she was out of the way, he could finally say what he’d come to say to his father.
As predicted, she springs over the fires. And this time he takes hold of the flames and makes them explode upward.
The rabbit hero doesn’t stand a chance. Just as his father and Hawks had only a few minutes prior, she disappears into the flames with a sharp yelp of pain that is cut off abruptly. He grins to himself before turning to the heroes.
Only to have something red flash across his vision and nail him in the chest. His last thought is that Hawks was a traitor to their cause, after all.
----
She comes to absolutely furious and, though she hates to admit it - slightly shaken. Death by fire was not pleasant, for all that it’d been really quick.
And how she’s still alive, after that, and still running back toward the flames, is beyond her.
Rumi ran anyway. She wasn’t going to leave Keigo and Endeavor with that psychopath, even if it seemed that whatever was happening only lasted for a minute or so.
Still, she chooses a different trajectory - no point in getting roasted again.
This time, when the villain comes into view, and she sees him looking the wrong way, her grin is a little savage. Especially when she tackles him into the dirt with extreme prejudice. They roll at least a couple of times before they finally stop, the rabbit hero sitting vindictively on the villain’s solar plexus, both of them coated in a thick layer of ash and concrete dust. Rumi takes the opportunity to sneeze directly in the villain’s face.
“Hi, asshole,” she snarls down at him while he makes a face of absolute disgust. “Long time no see. Mind not fucking roasting me this time?”
The villain glares up at her, hair so ashy it’s almost grey. “If you let me kill the flaming bag of dicks over there, then sure, bunny bitch.”
She thumps him. Right between the eyes. He curses a streak bluer than his flames while she sits back, purposefully crushing his ribs, and crosses her arms. “No more killing.”
“Why not?” He grits out. “Whatever the fuck this is, it’s gonna reset in a few seconds anyway. The fuck does it matter if I crisp Endeavor a few hundred times in the meantime?”
“It matters because I’m not just gonna sit here and watch you hurt my colleagues,” Rumi shoots back.
The villain sneers and Rumi watches little crumbs of grime trickle into the places where his seams had parted. It was nasty.
“You said this was some kind of deja vu quirk,” she continues in a bid to distract herself. “Did you get hit with one or…?”
“Miruko?” A confused voice asks from behind her. Keigo, she realizes, glancing up to see her best friend hovering nearby, one hand clutching at his ribs and practically all of his poor feathers missing.
“Hawks,” she acknowledges. “I know how weird this has to look, but this flaming idiot and I have been hit by some sort of quirk that resets time every minute or so.”
“Hey,” the villain protests, but she ignores him.
“I’ve actually been here five times now,” she reports. “And I need to figure out how to get repeat to stop. Any ideas? You ever heard of anything like this?”
“Hey,” the fire user tries again.
“A time loop?” Keigo guesses. “Were you fighting anyone earlier aside from Dabi?”
A blisteringly hot hand lands on Rumi’s thigh, and she jolts away from it on instinct, disengaging from the villain with a “what the f-”
“It’s been longer than a minute,” the villain interrupts, sitting up in the dust. So much filth cascades off of him that she almost misses the little cloud of white pour out of his face. Unfortunately, the villain - Dabi, Keigo had called him - reaches up to his cheek, and she knows she’s not wrong.
Ah shit, here we go again.
And once more, the world resets.
----
There are several iterations of this kind of meeting - clashes, minor speculation, more attempts at murder - before the bunny bitch figures it out.
The time loop, as Hawks - the goddamn traitor - had called it, is only broken by physical contact between himself and the rabbit hero.
And when they find this out? She fucking tackles him again, face-first into the debris this time, then proceeds to bend a piece of fucking rebar around his wrists while he’s still reeling from the tenth - eleventh? - impact into the dirt.
The rabbit asshole picks him up like a wriggling piglet under her arm and launches the both of them really high into the air, which draws an unintentional gasp from him. Then they’re free-falling like a roller coaster dive and Dabi’s stomach lodges somewhere right behind his molars. The only consolation he gets outta the whole fucking thing is that he throws up on the hero’s weird three-toed feet when they land on the other side of the flame barrier.
“Serves you fucking right,” he chokes out when she makes a noise of disgust.
“If you’d just taken down the flames, we wouldn’t have had to jump, you creep,” she reprimands, shaking him a little like he’s some kind of misbehaving kitten. Well, joke's on her - bile joins the vomit puddle.
“Oh, gross,” she groans, even as she limp-hops away from the mess. That’s when Dabi sees the gathering of police and heroes awaiting them in a thick line of flashing lights and obnoxiously loud voices blaring over speakerphones, calling out the usual, “hands up, quirks off, resist and we shoot” demands. Miruko saunters up to them with almost no regard for the fact that she has a dangerous villain tucked up under her arm.
Dabi thinks about frying her where she stands - going off like a bomb, maybe, in the middle of the crowd of societal authority figures. It’s not like he needs his hands free to do it - they just happened to be the most fire-proof part of his body.
But he’s curious, too, if the heroes have any way to break this fucking time-loop. If he can figure it out, he can kill the bunny bitch, reset the loop, and get out of it without a single hero being the wiser.
“Miss Miruko!” One of the police officers calls in warning as the bunny gets within ten feet of the line. A detective, if Dabi’s reading his insignia right. “Miss Miruko, that villain is Class A and very dangerous! Is he restrained?”
Dabi can actually feel the hero’s spine straightening as Miruko draws her shoulders back and tosses her ridiculously long hair over her shoulder. A few locks of it smack Dabi in the face and catch in his stapled cheeks, annoyingly enough.
“He’s partially restrained,” she says. Then she adds, with some amusement, “And I’m betting he’s thinking about using that to his advantage. Probably should fix that, huh?”
The villain’s eyes widen, and he cranes his head around to glare up at her-
-just in time to see the blade edge of her hand come chopping down into the base of his skull.
His world goes black, but this time not in the final kind of way.
----
“Sorry about that,” Rumi says sheepishly, hanging on tighter to the sudden dead weight of unconscious villain she was carrying. “And I’m sorry, but I can’t release this guy to you all just yet. We’re caught in a time loop of some sort, and the only way to keep us from repeating every minute or so is by staying in physical contact. Which is a bitch.”
The detective looks at her in something like disbelief for a moment before regaining himself. Rumi figures it’s probably not even the weirdest thing he’s heard all week.
“I -” the detective starts, before shaking his head and waving for a transport truck to come over to them. “Okay, that’s fine. We’ll get you to one of our QAS people. What about the other heroes?”
Miruko peers behind her at the fifty-foot wall of fire that still hadn’t gone down, even when the villain had, and she grimaces. “You guys got a helicopter? Might be better to airlift them out.”
Keigo will be annoyed at that, she thinks somewhat ruefully. Oh well. Shouldn’t have used up all his feathers.
“Miss Miruko?” The detective asks again, gesturing to two armored guards stepping out of the back of a van. They had with them one of the large black straight jackets that acted as a general quirk suppressant as well as a physical restraint. Not that Dabi needed it, being limp as a noodle.
She eyes the suppressant, “If you guys can get it on him without breaking my hold on him, by all means.”
The two guards share a look, but they shrug and get on with it, maneuvering Dabi from under her arm while still allowing her to rest a hand on his head.
It feels weird. Kind of intimate, in a strange way. To have her fingers buried in a villain’s hair, her fingertips brushing the back of his scarred ears.
Rumi was a hero who relied on her physicality to perform rescues and fight villains. She was no stranger to pulling victims into her arms or encouraging them to hold on tight to her. She was also no stranger to her heels cracking villain skulls (within reason) on a day-to-day basis.
Not so normal was having to cradle the bad guy, though.
Don’t think too much about it, she admonishes herself. A killer with soft hair is still a killer.
The back of the van is standard prison transport, with reinforced steel walls - meant to contain nasty mutation quirks that weren’t hampered by the straight jackets - and metal benches running along each side. The two guards sit on one side, while Rumi and a slightly lolling Dabi sit on the other. She even straps the seatbelt around him, because she’s a good hero and isn’t about needless injury - even to assholes who’d killed her.
It’s a tedious ride to the Hero Commission’s detainment center. Much of the traffic had been rerouted because of the attack and the subsequent rain of debris that now clogged several blocks, and it made for a long slog across the city. It was nearly an hour later by the time they actually made it to their destination, and by then, Rumi’s foot was tapping a dent into the floor in impatience.
The villain had slumped into her completely, and she couldn’t tell if it was because he was still unconscious (which would be concerning, actually, and their first stop would have to be the medical bay) or if it was because he was exhausted.
Honestly, she’s banking on the latter. The guy had snored at least twice that she could hear.
She almost asks about a sedative - something to keep him under for a little bit longer if only so she didn’t have to see his smug mug grinning at her, but she decides against it. He had two legs: he could use them.
“Oi, smokestack” she calls, jostling the villain with the half-asleep shoulder he’d been snoozing on. “Wakey wakey, time to face the music.” She’s sure to keep her hand firmly on his head, palming it like a basketball.
The villain’s eyes open slowly, already alert and practically glowing with intent. Rumi stoutly dislikes that look. That was very much a plotting sort of look.
He sits upright, popping his neck as he turns to her with a raised eyebrow. “Well? Let’s go see about your government’s priorities.” Dabi makes to stand, but she tightens her grip on his head, holding him in place.
“And what do you mean by that?” She growls, even as the two guards rise and open the back of the truck. Rumi holds her ground, glaring into a pair of blue eyes so glacially cold, she felt like she should be able to see her own breath.
“I’ll make a bet with you, hero,” Dabi confides quietly. “If the Commission cares about its people, they help you find a way to break this fucking time loop. If they care more about their public image, they’re going to put me on the chopping block before anything else.”
Rumi feels her pulse leap in anger, but before she has the chance to retort, there’s a full escort team gesturing for them to exit the vehicle. She settles on a mean glare and hisses, “You don’t know anything about how heroes work, so why don’t you go back to being quiet?”
He laughs, in an ugly, choked sort of way as they walk down the ramp together. Rumi tightens her hand in his hair, just so he doesn’t get any ideas about ducking away from her.
This is gonna be a long day, she thinks, as the first wave of Commission lackeys rush out to greet them.
“Miruko!” One of them barks, “We have been briefed on your situation and have an interrogation room waiting. Please come right this way.”
If Dabi’s annoying words hadn’t been ringing in her ears, Rumi might not have questioned anything, but in spite of herself, she finds her mouth forming the words, “If you’ve been briefed, you know that we’re currently stuck in a time loop. Shouldn’t we be seeing a Quirk Accident Specialist first?”
The lackey looks at her with blinking eyes, as if he hadn’t expected push back. “We will be getting you to our QAS department afterward. But since this is a time loop, and we’re not sure when it might reset, we have to commence with the interrogation first. It’s standard procedure.”
She can feel the villain’s head shake with his chuckle, and that annoys her almost as much as the lackey’s response. “Whatever, just take us to the room. And make sure this guy gets a short chair - my arm is getting tired.”
----
They never make it to the interrogation room. Approximately two minutes into their trek through the Commission building’s maze-like corridors, the invisible clock binding them to each other, and to the time stream, hits the one-hour mark.
White mist envelops them amongst several befuddled and yelling guards, and the hero-villain duo disappears like fog on a windy morning.
----
It takes them only one more try to figure out they have a limit, even when touching each other, to their time loop. One hour from each reset, and they reset again regardless.
Dabi’s not thrilled about this. Not in the least because it severely limits their ability to fucking solve the problem. But also because it means that he could, potentially, be fated to see his father’s fucking face every hour, on the hour, for the rest of his goddamn life.
Just my fucking luck, he thinks sourly, as the bunny bitch lands beside him after their second hour is up. She grimaces as if her thoughts are running along the same trajectory, but she still grasps his elbow and doesn’t let go. Even through the scarring, Dabi can feel the pressure of her grip.
“Helicopter?” she offers grudgingly, since the second ride through the city hadn’t proved any faster than the first. Slower, in fact, since Dabi had been conscious the entire time, and the heroes had been significantly twitchier.
The villain looks toward the sky, where one of the police helicopters is circling. He scowls, knowing his stomach will revolt the second they lift off.
“Rumi?” A baffled voice interrupts their contemplation, and both of them turn to see a wary Hawks approaching, both hands held out in a show of non-violence. Since Dabi is painfully aware of the one remaining feather that Hawks is keeping hidden on his person, and just how fast the traitor can jettison it through the air, he doesn’t buy the bullshit show of vulnerability.
“Yeah, it’s me, Keigo,” the heroine replies wearily, revealing an interesting bit of information without even realizing it.
So his name is Keigo, Dabi thinks, eyeing the winged hero with a bit more thoughtfulness than he had before. And aren’t they on friendly terms, using each other’s given names. Maybe he killed me because they’re a bit more than that.
He dismisses the thought as Miruko responds with even more revealing information.
“Not an imposter, by the way,” she sighs, rubbing an annoyed hand down her face. “We’re stuck in a time loop, which lasts a minute without any physical contact and an hour max even with it. On your twenty-first birthday, we karaoked at a cheap germy place in Roppongi and you ended up with a cold that turned into pneumonia because you refused to rest. Good enough?”
Hawks blinks wide eyes at them, processing the information in the space of a couple of breaths. Dabi has to give it to the Commission - they’d certainly chosen their spy well.
“Okay,” Hawks says. Then again: “Okay. So, what have you guys tried so far?”
Miruko sighs, “Trying to get to the Commission to see if they have a way to break it, but the roads are so fucked up it takes too long. We’re thinking helicopter is faster, but you know the skies better than anyone - what do you think?”
Hawks glances between the two of them, and Dabi arches an eyebrow, wondering what the hero is willing to say.
After all, if he’s a spy, and trying to use me to get to the League… me getting taken in wouldn’t be ideal, now would it?
“Well,” the hero hedges, “I know that the hero commission building closest to here doesn’t have a helipad on the roof - it’s an older branch building.”
So helpful, Dabi thinks, his suspicions growing. “So, anywhere we can land nearby, hero?” He emphasizes the word, hoping that Hawks takes the fucking hint.
But then, maybe he could work this to his advantage - if the hero didn’t remember giving himself away… could Dabi still use him?
Hawks does shoot him a look, but it’s entirely unreadable. Dabi sneers at him but lets him continue.
“There’s one a couple blocks away, on top of the Suntory building,” he allows. “Tell the pilot it’s in grid 59-L and he should be able to find it no problem.”
“Welp,” the bunny bitch sighs, “that’ll have to do, I guess.” She starts tapping away at her phone with her free hand, presumably hailing their air taxi. None of them notice the person approaching from behind.
Dabi’s mind is preoccupied with how he can make all this shit work to his advantage, when a huge hand lands on his shoulder, yanking him around and out of Miruko’s grasp.
“Why have you not restrained -” Endeavor’s voice trails off when Dabi locks eyes with him, and suddenly everything goes still for one awful, eternal moment. The hero’s one good eye is wide, shocked, almost vulnerable as he scours Dabi’s face - tracing every stitch, staple, and scar that mark the open grave of a boy long dead. And even as the white tendrils of mist pour out of Dabi’s cheek, dissolving the world around him, he can hear his father ask in a shaking voice:
“Touya?”
----
Dabi’s eyes are closed when Rumi lands next to him this time. They’re closed, and his hands are trembling.
“What the fuck was that?” She asks, in as calm a voice as she can manage, even as she reaches out for his arm. He snatches it away though, as if she might be the one to burn him.
“Get the fuck away from me,” he snarls, face twisting so hard with hate and spite that several of his stitches begin to bleed. He staggers away from her, hands yanking at his hair, boots kicking up concrete dust in his haste to put distance between them.
Rumi isn’t willing to deal with another reset. She hops only once, and lands directly in his path, snagging both of his wrists, despite the chance that he might just set her on fire again.
But he doesn’t. His head is ducked low, almost between his elbows as she holds his hands out in front of him in a vice grip.
It doesn’t stop her from seeing the tears falling into the ash. After all, the bright blue fires reflected off of them so nicely.
It’s so odd to see such a violent stress response in a villain as cocky as Dabi that Rumi almost doesn’t know how to react. Sure, she’d had training to deal with distressed civilians who needed a calm, reassuring presence to guide them to one of the support teams. She’d even had training on how to talk down villains who were clearly on the “hurt and lashing out” side of the spectrum, as opposed to the “pure evil and maniacally laughing” sort.
She hadn’t expected Dabi to have a reaction like this. But then, she also hadn’t expected Endeavor, of all people, to recognize him by a name other than his villain one.
“Dabi?” she tries, aiming for a middle-road sort of voice. Not gentle - because the flame villain would probably get pissed at perceived pity like most villains did - but not angry either.
“I’m going to fucking murder him,” he seethes, but his voice sounds thick. Hurt. Rumi is beyond confused, but even so: death threats were not happening around her.
“No you’re not,” she says firmly. “Not while I’m around.” His wrists heat to almost unbearable levels beneath her palms, and she has to grit her teeth not to let go as the villain finally raises his head.
“He fucking deserves it,” he grinds out, voice hoarse but eyes snapping with fury. His whole face is a rictus of anger and tear-streaked cheeks that Rumi doesn’t fucking understand.
There’s something wrong here, she thinks, not for the first time, before saying, “Okay. Tell me why.”
Before he can answer, her ears twitch toward the sound of approaching footsteps, and both of them jerk around to see Keigo approaching, once more, with golden eyes fixed on Rumi’s hold on Dabi’s hands.
“Uh,” he starts out, once again thrown by their proximity. “Something I should know about?”
Dabi releases an ugly snort. “Sure, you’re not the only one trying to get in bed with the villains. So why don’t you fuck off while bunny bitch takes her turn with me.”
Rumi’s eyes narrow dangerously, and her grip tightens without her say-so. It’s only the villain’s hiss of pain and the realization that she has staple indents forming in her palms that make her loosen up.
“I’m sorry, today has been a big day of reveals for me, so maybe I’m a little behind,” she enunciates slowly, eyes flicking between Keigo and Dabi. “But it seems to me that you’re implying that you two know each other.”
Keigo’s face reveals nothing, but Dabi’s mulish sneer is more telling than Rumi would like. She cocks an eyebrow at the villain, “How is it that you know both Endeavor and Hawks?”
That gets Keigo’s attention, and his eyes zero in on Dabi with all the ferocity of the predator he’s named for. “Oh? You failed to mention that.”
Dabi cackles in a sort of hopeless, hateful way. “Just like you failed to mention you were gonna betray the League? Fuck off asshole, don’t act like you have the high ground here.” He leers evilly at Hawks’ rather pathetic wings. “At least today, you really don’t have it anyway.”
Rumi can feel her temper slipping at the vague hints and snide remarks, and she gets the feeling Dabi’s going to draw this out into something needlessly painful. In any other situation, with someone as infuriating as the flame villain, knowing that they’d probably reset again anyway, she’d simply headbutt him and try to pry the answers from Keigo.
But… she’d seen him crying because Endeavor called him someone else’s name, and that’s a point of interest that, she hates to admit, she’ll need to treat with some delicacy.
“So, your name is Touya,” she starts out bluntly. She feels the villain jolt under her palms and sees Keigo’s golden eyes widen. “Keigo and you know each other, somehow. Which I’m really hoping you have a good explanation for -” she directs at her friend “- and Endeavor knows you by that old name. Also, he’s coming this way. Keigo? Stop him - we need to sort this out and he’s not going to make it any easier.”
In an uncharacteristic move, Keigo is slow to respond. His shocked gaze is turned on Dabi, and his mouth is hanging slightly open. “You- he’s- the fire quirk…” he trails off, before suddenly he’s in Dabi’s face, staring at him with a frantic expression. “You’re his son?”
Dabi reels back as if struck, and Rumi’s own jaw drops in surprise. It’s just enough of a shock for the villain - Endeavor’s kid, his fucking son - to wrench his hands out of hers.
And it’s just enough that she doesn’t catch hold of him again before the mist starts its predictable work, pulling them into the past once more.
The last thing she sees are his furious blue eyes, glaring at her. It strikes her then that they’re the exact same shade of turquoise as Endeavor’s.
How did none of us realize?
----
When they rematerialize, Dabi feels as if every iteration before this has piled up on itself. The pain, the death, the burning - all condensed into one massive fucking ache in his entire being. So, completely giving up on trying to manage any sort of image in front of Hawks and his father, he just lets his legs fold underneath him.
His ass hits the soot-covered ground with a painful thump only a moment before the bunny bitch lands at his side. He doesn’t even protest when she takes his wrist again.
She doesn’t say anything for a moment, and he can see her waving Hawks off. He wonders why the fuck she bothers. No hero in his life has ever cared, and he really doesn’t want her to fucking start now.
“We need to break this stupid time loop,” she grumbles eventually. “If I learn any more about your tragic backstory, I’m gonna have to break something.”
The unexpected candor of her comment makes Dabi snort, and some of the tension leeches out of his shoulders without him even realizing.
“So…” She trails off, and Dabi feels himself tensing all over again. “If I hop us over the fires, are you gonna puke on me again? Or better yet - can you let down the wall?”
He sighs, and some sparks chase out along with the expelled air. “You got a plan?”
She hums. “I figure we break this fucking time loop first, and sort everything else out after.”
Dabi cocks a disbelieving eyebrow at her. “You’re just gonna let all this shit go?”
The heroine huffs in irritation, “Not by a long shot, but hell - one thing at a fucking time. I don’t know about you, but this shit -” she waves his limp wrist around for emphasis “- is getting old.”
He nods, contemplating the hero beside him for possibly the first time since this whole debacle had started. Her large, red eyes were narrowed in frustration and a furrow was carved in between her stark white eyebrows. Even her long white hair seemed frazzled with her agitation, and her big white ears were laid nearly flat against her skull. The overall picture made for a… surprisingly human display of annoyance and uncertainty that actually surprised him. He’d figured any hero in the top five would be cock-sure beyond all belief, like his dad or Hawks.
But Miruko was a series of surprises.
She’s still a fucking hero. Don’t let your goddamn guard down, he berates himself viciously.
Beside him, the bunny hero clicks her tongue against her teeth, and grumbles out grudgingly, “As much as I hate to admit it, I think the Hero Commission is out. Even if we get there in time with the helicopter, the second they pull you into interrogation and find out who you are, there’s no way we get to figure out how to break this thing before our hour is up.”
She turns those bright red eyes on him, speculating. Dabi cuts her off before she can even ask.
“My side’s not going to be any better,” he scoffs. “Bringing in a hero with me would be bad enough. But none of those fuckers know shit about time quirks.”
He leaves out the reason he knows this. There was literally no way to tell her that he’d had to endure a three-hour debate between the League of morons about how time travel worked. Shigaraki’s theories about infinite universes clashing with Mr. Compress’s support of the Novikov self-consistency theory and then getting thoroughly derailed by Twice’s conflicting views on wormholes and Spinner’s arguments (that were 100% based on Back to the Future), was a conversation Dabi wishes he could purge from his mind.
Still - it provides him with enough information to know that between all of the League members, they’d be wasting as much time as trying to go to the Commission, if not more so.
“Well,” the bunny hero admits ruefully. “Can’t say I was thrilled about the prospect of walking into the League’s hideout anyway. So I guess that leaves us with one option.”
Dabi almost doesn’t want to ask. In fact, he refuses to give her the satisfaction.
Unfortunately, she doesn’t seem bothered by his studious lack of interest, and instead continues with her thought: “We’re gonna have to Google it.”
----
Logistics were, of course, a problem. First, they had to find some way to disguise themselves - because they’d never get anything done running around as a villain and a hero. Then they had to find an internet cafe that was A) still open and B) still had functioning WiFi. Because apparently, having a fucking Noumu run rampant through the city gave even the most jaded citizens pause.
Rumi doesn’t blame them, really, but she is annoyed by the extra hassle. Especially because Dabi was making it so difficult.
“I am not getting princess carried while you hop around the city looking for a computer.”
Case and point.
“Then it’s gotta be a piggyback ride or a fireman’s carry. I’m not waiting on your slow ass, and we need all the time we can get.”
He huffs out an angry breath that makes his shoulders drop sharply, but he still doesn’t turn around to look at her, which she finds beyond odd. She was literally pulling pants up around her leotard - it wasn’t like he hadn’t already seen her thighs.
And felt just about everything else.
She’d gotten them away from the police line and the heroes with… relative ease. It did help that Dabi had done something with his flames that’d generated a shit ton of smoke, blinding the helicopter overhead and the heroes surrounding them. He’d been sweating profusely when she scooped him into her arms and launched them through the tiny window he’d created in the wall of flames, and had barely raised a word of protest in those first few minutes it took her to get them to an abandoned clothing store for disguises.
But he was certainly making up for the complaints now.
“Why can’t you just use your phone?” Dabi asks petulantly, his hold on her shoulder nearly dislodging when she wobbles as the skinny jeans inevitably get stuck on her big feet. She catches her balance, then wriggles a bit to force the pants over her thighs and tail, and Dabi has to turn his wimpy, two-finger’s-barely-pinching grip into an actual hold.
“I don’t have cooties, ya know,” Rumi snorts disdainfully. “And I also don’t have internet on my phone. It’s my hero one - it connects to the Hero App and that’s about it. You can turn around now.”
Dabi does so, though his eyes are still curiously trained anywhere but on her. She takes the opportunity to annoy him a bit further - gesturing broadly at her too-tight top that she hadn’t yet covered with the nondescript hoodie she’d snagged. “Besides, you really think I have anywhere to put my personal phone in this getup?”
The villain’s eyes narrow and a muscle in his jaw jumps under his mangled skin. “Maybe you should consider changing jobs. We don’t make Toga run around in a skinsuit.”
Rumi scoffs, “No, from what I hear, she runs around using other people as skinsuits. Now take your pick - piggyback or fireman carry?” She shrugs on her hoodie without thinking, unintentionally forcing Dabi to relocate his hand to the closest bit of uncovered skin.
Her cheek.
They stand there for a couple of seconds, frozen by the weirdness of the contact. His fingers are warm against her skin - not the scorching hot weapons they had been earlier. Her breath escapes in a surprised exhale, and she can see his thumb twitch from where it hovers a bare inch from her lips.
Then Rumi clears her throat and reaches up and takes his hand - pulling it away from her face with zero resistance.
“Your turn,” she gets out, gesturing at the big jacket Dabi had seized upon entering the shop. It was hanging off of a rack nearby, while his villain coat - with its distinctive bracers and tattered ends - was stuffed into a purloined gym bag by the villain’s feet. He glances down at their intertwined hands with raised eyebrows, and then she’s cursing the time loop all over again because she realizes Dabi will also need his hands free to pull on the jacket.
Especially since there was no question of him walking around in his t-shirt as he was now.
With the uninhibited view of the scars that spanned all the way up to his deltoids - possibly connecting with the ones that stretched down his neck and onto his chest - there was no way he could walk around unrecognized.
Biting the bullet, she lifts the villain’s hand along with her own and transfers her touch to his cheek without waiting for permission. It was awkward enough without her making a thing of it.
“Get dressed,” she commands. “We don’t have all day. Literally.”
She can’t help but notice how wide the villain’s eyes get at her fingers resting lightly along his stapled skin. And even behind the armor of hero-trained stoicism, she finds herself curious at the difference in texture that she can feel. His scars were ridged, but surprisingly smooth. They felt like burn scars, for all that they looked like really poorly done skin grafts…
Her fingers almost pulse with the desire to explore further, but she holds herself back.
Meanwhile, Dabi was shrugging on his jacket and zipping it all the way up with jerky motions of anger or embarrassment or both. She really can’t tell, but when his knuckles bump into hers at the top of the zipper, he snatches her hand away from his face and refuses to meet her gaze again.
“I’m not getting fucking carried,” the villain grits out, suddenly taking off toward the door, almost making Rumi stumble with his haste. “There’s got to be a place nearby that has a computer - we’re in the middle of downtown.”
She nearly objects, but they’re suddenly out on the abandoned street, with smoke still billowing in the distance and sirens wailing audibly across the affected area, and she remembers that she’s holding hands with the villain that’d caused this entire mess to begin with. To say she was unsettled would be an understatement. And the thought of carrying him - his chest pressed to her back, or her hands scooped under his thighs and shoulders, suddenly sounds less than appealing.
If we don’t find something this round, we can try again next time, she reasons with herself, falling in step with the villain. With… Touya.
She’d been ignoring the series of reveals that’d happened over the past few loops. The fact that her adversary was human and had human emotions came as no surprise - that was something all heroes were trained to recognize and deal with in the course of their hero training.
That he was the son of one of the most prominent heroes and evidently had enough hatred for his father to try and murder him in cold blood was… not something she was trained to deal with.
One thing at a time, Rumi, she tells herself again as she strides alongside the villain into the heart of the city.
One thing at a time.
----
It’s stupid to even think it, but Dabi feels like an idiot walking around a cordoned-off area hand-in-hand with a hero. He hasn’t held hands with anyone since he and Fuyumi were small and got to walk down to the corner grocery store together. Or maybe his mom had been the last person? Walking him to the car after one of his hospital visits?
He grits his teeth, trying to banish memories he hadn’t dusted off in years.
Why the fuck did she have to have white hair?
Not that she elicits any sort of familial emotions - she was far too rude and commanding to be anything like Rei or Fuyumi - but fuck if catching sight of that long white hair didn’t send his memory reel into high definition ‘fuck your mental health’ replay.
Fuck this time travel bullshit.
Suddenly, her hand jerks in his, and a tanned finger jabs past the end of his nose, pointing toward something.
“There!” the heroine crows, hopping in place a little in a seemingly unconscious act of satisfaction. Dabi follows her pointing digit up toward the sign of a 6th-floor entertainment building, advertising an internet cafe that still had the lights on inside. He can only sigh in relief that they’d found one so fast.
“C’mon,” Miruko demands, dragging him in the direction of the stairs. “Let’s fucking break this damn loop. Preferably the first time.”
-----
It doesn’t happen the first time. Nor the second, for that matter.
The first time was because the internet cafe had the lights on, but it was so close to the epicenter of the fight that all the staff had been evacuated. And they’d evidently locked the computers down with some kind of master command. No amount of yen purloined from the change machine, or gentle bopping, or not so gentle bopping would make them turn on.
As for the second time - that, she blames entirely on Dabi. At least, that’s what Rumi tells herself.
They’d grabbed disguises again, and had headed in a direction further away from all the sirens and smoke - into an area of town that was still operational, electronically speaking. There, they’d found another cafe.
Now, Rumi doesn’t approve of these types of cafes either - they make her feel weird.
But the villain’s reaction is over the top.
“I’m not going into a hero cafe,” he says, tugging her away from the entrance with a horrific scowl marring the visible parts of his face. Rumi exhales harshly in frustration, yanking more insistently on his wrist.
“Get over it - we’ll only be in there for a little while,” she points out. The outside of the shop is plastered with posters of the top ten heroes. She can even see a poster of herself, striking a fearsome pose near the front door. Right next to her, though, is a poster of Endeavor.
That better not be someone subtly shipping us again, she thinks, icked out by the idea. He’s old enough to be my -
Oh.
She turns to Dabi then, and despite the metaphorical heels he’d dug in, the look on his face is anything but stolid. His remaining skin is white with anger, and his mouth is so tight she wonders if he’s holding back vomit or tears or fire. Any one of them is fair game as his eyes bore holes in Endeavor’s visage.
“He fucking deserves it.” Dabi’s words from earlier, after he’d threatened to kill his father, echo in her ears.
She bites her lip, eyes going back and forth between the image of Endeavor - arms crossed and flames blazing around his stern eyes - and Dabi, white-faced and refusing to go any nearer. For the first time, she wonders where Dabi’s scars came from. Who they came from.
“Let’s find another cafe then,” she grumbles, pulling the villain in the opposite direction of Endeavor’s image.
One thing at a time.
----
The third time - because it does indeed take them another reset to find one - they strike gold, and Dabi is damn near grateful to the bunny bitch for spotting it. By the time they’re actually at a computer terminal, with no one giving them a second glance in their disguises, he can practically taste the freedom of being alone again and getting away from the heroine’s too-knowing gaze.
Gonna have to do something about her anyways, he thinks as she settles into the chair in front of the computer and he sinks into the one next to her, their hands still linked under the table.
He wasn’t sure what that ‘something’ was. But she knew too fucking much about him. About his weaknesses. And weaknesses were meant to be exploited.
“Don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to log on to a computer before,” the heroine mutters, red eyes bright as she brings up a search page. “Let’s see here… ‘How to Break A Time Loop’ should be straightforward enough.”
She continues muttering to herself as she scrolls and Dabi keeps an eye on the time. They had a little over half an hour to do their research, and he allows his mind to wander. Contemplating whether or not he can get her to keep quiet about his relation to Endeavor or if he’ll have to kill her on the final reset. There’s a little twinge of regret there - something that makes his stomach clench in discomfort, so he puts the thoughts on the back burner and instead turns his contemplation over to Hawks. Keigo.
Need to find out if he’s actually a traitor or if he just killed me because he and bunny bitch are an item, he thinks in irritation.
“Oi,” he prompts, and Miruko’s ears twitch in his direction, indicating she’s listening even as she scrolls down a list that reads ‘Most Common Time Loop Tropes’ at the top of the page. “Are you and the birdbrain together?”
That gets her attention, and she turns to him with both eyebrows raised in sardonic surprise. It doesn’t register why until he thinks over his question and how it sounds. He makes a face.
“Don’t get any ideas, just…” he waves a hand in the air in irritation because nothing he says will make it sound any less like he’s actually interested.
“He’s my best friend,” Miruko answers after a beat of awkward silence. “Has been for years now.” That makes Dabi blink - nothing in any of his research on the Winged Hero had turned up mentions of Miruko unless they were working a joint mission.
“And if you try to kill him again,” she continues conversationally, turning back to her computer, “I’m going to rip your legs off and beat you to death with them.”
Dabi snorts without any real humor. “Death threats from a hero, real original.”
He sees her spine straighten, and can feel her fingers tighten around his. With a frustrated growl, she turns in her chair to face him again.
“Look,” she says bluntly - voice quiet and intense. “I get that something happened between you and heroes. Probably you and your dad - which I’m betting has to do with all your scarring. It’s not good, and it’s not okay that something like that would happen to anyone. I’m still trying to process just the fact that you’re Endeavor’s son -” Dabi flinches without meaning to, and her fingers tighten even more, holding him in place without pulling any punches “- and what that could mean if he was involved in anything that happened to you.”
Dabi opens his mouth, but he can’t find the words - and his mouth is far too dry to get anything out anyway. So Miruko continues ruthlessly.
“But you were the one talking earlier about hero priorities. Right now, I want to get us out of this time loop. After that, I’m more than happy to listen to you and what you have to say, even if it’s stuff I would rather not believe. Just…” she trails off, and for the first time, her gaze drops from his.
There’s tension frizzing between them. Dabi can feel it knotting his muscles and feeding into his irritation. Irritation with her for making so many assumptions and for fucking throwing them in his face; at his father for being alive, still, despite his best efforts; at himself, for the tiny thrill of hope he’d felt when Miruko talked about actually listening.
The heroine sighs, running her free hand through her long hair, her ears flat again in frustration. “You wanna help me with this? The sooner we break this thing, the sooner we get to the real questions.”
Dabi lets his eyes trail over the nearly bare cubicle before he lands on a nondescript notepad and a pen that’s attached to the desk with a cord. He snags them both with his free hand and pulls them close, pinning the pad with his elbow as he looks up at Miruko with a deadpan ‘well?’ expression.
He refuses to admit that he kind of likes the satisfied grin that stretches her lips.
-----
It takes them a couple of loops to get all the information that they can find, and they compile it into three lists: ‘To Try First’, ‘Might Work’, and ‘No Way In Hell’. They have to memorize them, even if some of the solutions Rumi would rather purge from her mind forever. Really, ‘breaking the time loop via having sex’? Who the fuck thought this shit up??
Ugh, at least there are solutions that might actually work.
Many of the solutions they found seemed to indicate that some sort of redo of the original loop was what it would take to break it. Which Rumi figures might be worth a try.
Dabi, not so much.
“You think I’m just going to let you kick me in the face again?” He asks, arms crossed - forcing Rumi to grip his bare-again forearm. They were on one of their short resets, hashing things out before they let go of each other to try again. Rumi shrugs at his stubbornness, trying valiantly not to look over at Keigo and Endeavor’s baffled expressions.
“Seems to me this thing is touch-based anyway. And your white misty shit comes out of your cheek where I kicked you, so it’s worth a shot.”
Dabi’s bright blue eyes narrow, and the flaming wall that once again surrounded them jumped a few feet in response. “So if it comes from my cheek, why does yours come from your arm?”
It’s a good question, actually.
“No clue,” she says, scratching one of her ears as she thinks back. Hours had passed for her since her last fight, despite it being actually only a few minutes in real time. “Was fighting a criminal before this, but...” She trails off, remembering suddenly that he’d been feeling up her arm.
“Son of a bitch,” she hisses, before snatching Dabi up onto her back and vaulting them over the flames, back in the direction she’d come from. The villain curses the entire way.
----
They don’t find the guy. Not even after several loops of trying. And given the fact that he apparently had some sort of time manipulation quirk, it’s not entirely surprising.
Dabi stands in front of the store where Miruko had been fighting the criminal before, eyelids low and anger high. “You know what that creep was probably doing, right?”
The heroine’s jaw is tight. “A guy who can reset time, making anyone forget what he did each time he loops - loitering around women’s underwear stores? Not a hard guess.”
The villain is silent for a minute, contemplating, before turning on his heel in disgust.
If I ever meet that asshole in a back alley, I won’t even bother with the recruitment spiel. Scumbags like that are barely even worthy kindling.
Miruko is pulled along with him, since her hand is held tight in his. He never notices the considering look she gives him.
----
The next few iterations see them trying out some of the “solutions” they’d written down at the internet cafe. And, much to Dabi’s evident chagrin, they do, in fact, attempt to recreate the first meeting.
Rumi comes hurtling in at high speed, while Dabi surges forward below her - deliberately not looking up. He does close his eyes right as her foot impacts his face, though - she catches the expression just as she flies by, before skidding into the dirt and ash again.
They stand there in their respective spots for a few moments longer, staring at each other as they wait for their minute to tick down, Dabi still cradling his injured face. Then she sees Dabi’s eyes turn to Keigo and Endeavor, who were standing behind her.
She can’t hear either of the heroes moving, so she keeps her eyes trained on Dabi. And she sees how his expression shifts - to anger, to grief, to hate. Again, she has to wonder what had happened between him and his father to elicit such intense reactions even after having stood in that same spot at least fifty times. She also sees when the white mist leaks from his cheek once more.
Sighing, Rumi closes her eyes and waits for the reset.
----
“Maybe I should kick you next time,” Dabi grumbles as they wait out another attempt at breaking the loop. The bunny bitch had insisted on trying the kick to his face a handful of times, just in case the angle had to be perfect of some shit. Beside him in the ash, Miruko snorts.
“That’s on the list. The one I named ‘No Way In Hell’,” she points out, flicking her long hair over her shoulder and smacking Dabi in the face with it. The temptation to set it on fire rises. “We still have a lot more likely scenarios to try out.”
He sighs, rotating his bruised jaw while watching Hawks approach them again with a thoroughly weirded out expression on his face. In the background, Endeavor kneels and sways and probably also has a look of confusion plastered on his bloody face. Dabi tries not to think about it too hard.
Too fucking tired for this.
“Rumi?” Hawks asks again, still sounding so confused to see the villain who’d just gotten his face kicked in sitting so docile next to the woman who’d kicked him. Beside him, Dabi can see Miruko slump.
And this is getting old.
“She’s not crazy or an imposter,” he monotones, beating the hero to the punch. At least figuratively. “Something about a karaoke bar when you were twenty-one, got you sick or some shit. Can you go the fuck away?”
Hawks blinks even wider eyes down at them before they narrow again in suspicion, and his hand creeps toward the sleeve where Dabi knows he has his remaining primary hidden.
Fuck.
Before the situation can devolve into another bloodbath, Miruko speaks up.
“I was your first rescue,” she says, voice fond and exhausted. “You pulled me out of that car wreck when we were both kids. And you got my Aunt and Uncle out too. You were the reason I became a hero, Keigo. And even if I give you shit all the time, you know I’ll always have your back.”
Dabi stills, and so does Hawks. Miruko is just looking at the birdbrain with a soft smirk on her lips, as if…
As if she really loves him.
And Hawks? His cold expression clears and, though he still looks confused, his smile is genuine.
Which is, of course, the kind of sappy bullshit that would mark the end of that particular loop.
The villain’s last thought, before they fade away, is, If I learn any more about her backstory, I’m gonna fucking puke.
----
Several unsuccessful loops later, trying everything from recreating the original circumstances, to trying to fall asleep to break the loop, Rumi has had enough. They’d exhausted all options of lists ‘To Try First’ and ‘Might Work’.
It was time to break out list: ‘No Way In Hell’.
She lands in front of Dabi this time, her eyes fierce and her expression set in determination. The villain actually takes a step back in alarm as she marches toward him, grabs a fistful of his shirt, and locks lips with him.
He grunts in surprise, and she can hear Keigo hollering behind her, even as her momentum carries her forward another few steps. Unfortunately, since Dabi was unprepared for the assault, he trips over a piece of debris and they both go down into the dust.
Their teeth clack and their noses are crushed together, and she’s pretty sure she knocks the air out of the villain’s lungs, but by damn Rumi was not going to be trying this again. If a kiss was what it took to break the fucking loop, she’d give the villain a kiss that time itself wouldn’t forget.
His lips were… odd, but not entirely unpleasant. She presses against skin that is both soft and pliant and also unyielding with scar tissue. Dabi makes a noise under her that she can’t decipher, and his hands go to her hips to keep her from sliding off. She’s almost distracted enough by the touch that she doesn’t feel him… tentatively pressing back. His lips moving against hers like he’s not quite sure what to do or how to keep up.
She pulls back an inch to grab a quick breath before going straight back to work, head tilted to get a better angle, hair acting as a curtain around their intense exchange. Under her breast, she can feel his heart beating hard, and his lean body warming to almost uncomfortable levels. Sweat trickles down her neck when he introduces some teeth to their game - catching on her lower lip and pulling. His fingertips dig in at her hips.
“Miruko!” And that’s Keigo, shouting somewhere behind her. Scrunching her nose, she honestly hopes this isn’t the method to break their time loop, otherwise Keigo would never let her live it down.
Pulling back, Rumi swipes her tongue along her lower lip - breaking the stream of saliva between the two of them. It’d almost be gross if she hadn’t found herself looking directly into Dabi’s blown out pupils, his expression totally open and almost…
Villains don’t do ‘vulnerable’, Rumi, she reminds herself even as she sits up abruptly, tossing her long tresses over her shoulder.
“If that doesn’t work, we’re never talking about it again, got it?” She growls, poking him in the chest to cover her own embarrassment. That should not have been as… enjoyable as it was.
Without waiting for an answer, she hops off his stomach and proceeds to dust herself off. Her face feels hot, but she refuses to acknowledge it. Better to get onto business.
Dabi too, was rising from the dust, hair entirely disheveled and expression once more closed off.
But even the scars and the ash and the neutral expression couldn’t hide the blush coloring his remaining skin, and Rumi wonders if she’s made a terrible mistake.
----
Dabi’s head is spinning from both cracking it against the concrete and from having a hero’s tongue in his mouth. Or rather, from having a hero’s tongue in his mouth and enjoying it.
He almost welcomes the distraction when Hawks suddenly gets up in his face.
“What the hell did you do to her?” He demands. Then he darts his gaze over to Miruko, looking worried. “Are you okay?”
Heat rises under Dabi’s skin at the implication that he’d done anything. He’d been just as surprised as Hawks, after all.
“I didn’t do anything to her,” he grits out, eyes narrowing dangerously. Hawks returns the look and opens his mouth to say something stupid in return when Miruko sighs gustily.
“Keigo, he didn’t do anything - no aphrodisiacs or pheromones or anything, because I know which case you’re thinking of. This was entirely on me.”
Dabi glances in her direction, surprised at the backup, and sees her studying her arm with a resigned look. That all-too-familiar white mist was beginning to curl around her fingers.
Funny. With other parts of his face tingling so much, he hadn’t even noticed the pulsing in his cheek.
----
They reach the bottom of their list - the proverbial dregs of the time loop trope list that’d been so unnerving to read through at the internet cafe. From what Dabi can remember, they only have two “options” left before they have to go back to the drawing board entirely.
“So it’s either you let me kick you, or we do it in front of my father and your best friend. Take your pick,” he says, trying to keep his expression entirely neutral. Miruko’s face has enough contortion to it for the two of them anyway.
“Ugh,” she says. “I’d rather be stuck in the time loop than have Keigo see me have sex and remember it.” Dabi snorts, eyeing the two heroes who were once more crouched down next to each other on the other side of the fiery arena. At this point, so much time has passed that Dabi almost doesn’t care that Endeavor’s there. He just wants to get away.
“We wouldn’t have to be here, though,” Miruko continues thoughtfully, and it takes him a second to catch onto what she means. Blood rushes to his face without his say-so.
“Don’t you think there’s a bit more obvious choice to try first?” He gets out, voice sounding choked even to his own ears. Miruko’s chin juts out stubbornly as she glares ahead, apparently weighing her options.
The fact that she was weighing taking a small kick to the head against having sex with a villain actually boggles him a little bit.
“Fiiine,” she groans. “You get one kick, you hear me? If a reverse of the original impact is really what it takes to break this fucking thing…” The heroine trails off with some very unheroic cursing that makes Dabi’s lips twitch in something almost like amusement.
“Heroes and their pride,” he mutters, shaking his head before rising from his spot, her hand still clasped in his. Over her shoulder, he can see Hawks starting to jog their way, and he suddenly realizes what he needs to do.
Another wall of fire erupts from the ground, blocking the winged hero and his father off on the other side, and Dabi clenches his teeth as he works to keep it under control. Miruko’s eyes widen as she gazes up at him.
But some kind of trust has built up between them at this point, because she doesn’t retaliate, or immediately assume he’s hurting the other heroes. Instead, she just braces as if to get up, and actually pauses when he presses back against her palm.
“Stay down there,” he grumbles. “Not all of us can go flying through the air, and I’m not tearing any more staples for these goddamn loops.” He taps his thigh pointedly, “That shit hurts.”
Miruko’s eyes fix on his face before trailing down the length of his body, and he can see the calculating light in her eyes as she imagines just how ruined he is from top to bottom. And hell, if this didn’t work out, maybe she’d find out first hand.
But something tells him that this one will work.
“Fine, whatever,” she grumbles, settling back down into a more comfortable sitting position. “I’m seriously gonna take you to the doctor after this though. Fucking not being able to kick is a goddamn tragedy.”
Dabi doesn’t smile, but he also doesn’t feel the usual fury when someone mentions his disabilities. He fully believes that she’d do exactly as she said: take him to the fucking doctor.
She’d probably also follow through on her other threats - to look into Endeavor’s actions, to listen to Dabi’s - Touya’s - story. It’s part of the reason this can only end in one fucking way.
He lifts one foot, chambering just like his old man had taught him all those years ago. Her wide red eyes track his stance, but she doesn’t shift, fully trusting that he’d only tap her like she’d done to him.
Eyeing the spot he’d felt pulsing on his own face so many times, he cracks a crooked smirk down at her and drops her hand. White mist immediately blooms where her fingers had been.
“See ya on the other side, hero.”
Then he snaps his foot out as hard as he can, catching her across the cheek and sending her crashing into the dust and concrete.
She doesn’t stir. Doesn’t disappear, either. Dabi blinks down at her unconscious form, and reels, internally, that it’d actually worked.
Kneeling down, he reaches out, fingertips brushing her long white tresses away from the bruise forming on her cheek. If he had a more complete ice quirk, he might even be tempted to do something about the inevitable swelling.
Which is my cue to get the fuck out of here, he thinks, curling his fingers into a fist and rising from the ashes.
When he escapes through the small hole in the blue flames, he doesn’t look back.
----
Rumi wakes barely ten minutes later, while she’s in the process of being checked over by a paramedic. The flames surrounding the area had died away, and Endeavor was being helped into an ambulance.
Keigo probably needed one too, but he was busy hovering over her paramedic’s shoulder, staring down at her with wide, concerned eyes.
“Rumi?” He asks, in that same tone of confusion that she’d heard at least a hundred times by now. She swallows, throat dry and heart beating sluggishly against her ribs. Her head throbs brutally from the impact of Dabi’s boot. Still, she manages a small smile.
“Hey, Keigo,” she says, holding a hand out to him. For some reason she doesn’t want to examine too closely, hers feels rather empty.
He takes it, cradles it in his, and sits down next to her while the medic finishes up. In the meantime, her mind starts coming back online, and she can finally start analyzing everything that’d happened in the past… hours? Days? She’s not even sure anymore.
When the medic declares that she has a mild concussion, but should otherwise be alright, she squeezes Keigo’s hand to keep him from rising.
Because from what she’s put together from Dabi’s comments and Keigo’s own hints - her best friend was somehow working with the villain. And with how well she knows Keigo, she knows it’s probably not of his own volition.
It had the Commission’s fingers all over it.
But if Keigo is working as a spy to enter the League, and Dabi is his point of contact… she wants in. For several reasons that she’s also choosing not to acknowledge.
So instead of walking back to the police line and facing all the reports and paperwork and interviews that she knows await them, she uses her grip to pull her best friend in close, and growls into his ear:
“We need to talk about your friend Dabi.”