Chapter Text
"Courier service." A muffled deep voice accompanied the sharp rap on the door.
"Ooooh, my #11 titanium reusables are finally here!" Dabi winced at Toga's high-pitched squeal, and went back to his very important brooding-in-a-corner as the door squeaked open. "Oh hey, cutie! Do I know you?"
"Delivery for Todoroki Touya," came the voice of Todoroki fucking Shouto. Dabi suddenly had a lot more to brood about.
"But that's your name, honey," continued Toga, who had now predictably pulled out a knife. "Isn't it? Hey, Twice, it's one of the pretty boys from the dossier!"
Dabi hid his face behind a flaming hand, debating whether to sweep dramatically towards the door to throw his little brother out on his ass or to quietly slink off to his room and leave Toga to her favorite hobby. The first option won out because he didn't want to have to deal with Toga tormenting him in the shape of Shouto. One kid brother was enough for any busy villain.
Good thing he always wore his coat inside this freezing shithole. "What the hell are you talking about, kid?" Dabi growled, with maximum menace in the form of coattail flare, as he approached the doorway.
Shouto was casually sidestepping Toga and toeing off his shoes, not even having the decency to use the guest slippers and claiming Shigaraki's for himself. "Hi Touya," he said, blankly.
"Hee hee, no, that's just Dabi," said Toga helpfully.
"What she said," Dabi echoed, igniting a second palm because apparently Shouto couldn't take a hint.
"Sure, Touya," droned Shouto, and dropped a parcel into Dabi's outstretched palms. Dabi snuffed his flames and caught it, out of instinct, allowing Shouto to slip past him and park himself on the couch. The fucking nerve. Dabi almost didn't snag Toga's collar as she leapt after Shouto, knife outstretched.
"Awwww, c'mon Dabs, let me cut on him just a little!"
"No, I'm going to light him on fire now," hissed Dabi, dropping the package and drawing himself up to loom threateningly. Shouto had the audacity to be almost as tall as him, showing off the recently acquired height even in his elegant sprawl on the couch as he scrolled through his phone. Puberty had hit the kid like a goddamned Instagram filter, couldn't the universe have let Dabi have this one thing?
"Didn't think you'd be stealing Endeavor's lines until much later in life, Dabs," said the little shit. "Oh well. You know what they say about fathers and sons."
Dabi blinked, hard. "Bitch, you're Endeavor's son."
Shouto tilted his head, finally making bored eye contact. "Technically correct. I haven't thought of myself that way in a long time, since I've always been more of an object to him."
Although Dabi could relate hard to the trials of his blood relation, he refused to acknowledge it. "And you're telling me you're not still his perfect little project, all top-of-your class at his precious alma mater?"
"If that's your way of asking if I'm smarter than you, the answer is yes."
Hey, it wasn't Dabi's fault that he'd never finished high school. And he had street smarts, a faculty in which Shouto was on par with the concrete the streets were made of. "How dumb do you have to be to think that's what I meant?" demanded Dabi.
"Dumb enough to know you, smart enough to not want to be you."
"Burn," sneered a new voice, and Dabi swung to face Twice with a handful of blue flame. He saw Jin's eyes shift off to the left, and then back to Dabi, and Dabi groaned, seeing an identical handful of orange flame out of his periphery. He put the fire out.
"Is this really your little brother, Dabi?" asked Toga, who'd taken refuge behind Jin. "I wanna see him bleed!"
"Yes, we're brothers," volunteered Shouto.
"No, we're not brothers!" shouted Dabi.
Jin and Toga looked between them, and then fixed Dabi with disbelieving stares. Damn it, Dabi knew he should've invested in tinted contacts as well.
"He's not my little brother, and I've never seen this asshole before in my life!" he added, for clarification.
"Uh… that's clearly false," said Jin's more rational persona.
Shit. He'd forgotten about the forest thing. "Okay, I've seen him before, but everyone's seen him before. Who can forget such a bad dye job?" Dabi gestured emphatically at Shouto's weird hair.
"Still better than yours," the kid grumbled.
"Burn," said Jin, back to agent of chaos.
"This," yelled Dabi, fully annoyed into losing his cool, aloof villain persona, "Is my natural color!!"
"Of your heart," supplied Shouto, still monotone. "You haven't called your mother for ten years."
Even Toga looked scandalized at that, and she'd straight up murdered her mother. That fucker Jin had produced a whiteboard out of nowhere, and was currently adding a third tick a hastily drawn column titled 'You Suck'. His slightly deranged gaze caught Dabi's own as he gestured meaningfully towards the empty column with the header, 'You Rule'.
Dabi couldn’t believe these people.
Or that sweet little Shouto had become such an insufferable prick. One more thing to hate Endeavor for, Dabi supposed, although he suspected most of the blame for whatever passed for a personality lay with Shouto. "Toga, slice him up good, I don't know this little shit and I sure as hell don't like him." Dabi donned the Big Brother grin that had been able to put the fear of God into a prank-loving Natsuo.
Shouto blinked, face barely shifting from its impression of a paving stone as Toga flipped open a switchblade and traipsed forward. "Do you have something bigger?" he asked.
Toga stopped, confused, and glanced at Dabi for some reason. Dabi shrugged, having no idea what the kid was on about.
"That knife," Shouto explained. "It's really tiny. Borderline insulting. Didn't you have someone with a giant sword made out of other swords? Can they cut me up instead? I do need a haircut, and they say it's always best to do that with sharper implements."
"Oh, lemme get Spinner! This will be so. Much. FUN!" squealed Toga, clapping her hands in glee before running to get Shuichi.
Dabi repressed a violent urge to rub at his approaching headache, and did his best to resume his trademarked pose of threatening nonchalance, leaning up against the wall with crossed arms. He commenced a stare-down with heterochromatic eyes.
… Shouto was really good at staring. Dabi squashed down a flutter of pride that his isolated baby brother had finally progressed to middle school levels of social intelligence.
Dabi immediately rescinded that assessment when Toga came back with Spinner. Shouto was an idiot, who clearly didn't know the first thing about self-preservation.
Still staring a burning hole into Dabi's already burnt face, Shouto extended his arm towards Spinner. The lizard-man hadn't quite gotten his all-in-one weapons-cache back up to its previous standard, but it still resembled a medieval torture device when he took it out of its canvas covering.
Dabi didn't surrender his stare-down with Shouto, but he could picture the looks of gleeful anticipation and sadistic curiosity on Toga's and Shuichi's faces. He himself wasn't letting his expression waver from a cocky smirk, although Shouto was up to the challenge, displaying all the emotion of a frozen fish.
Even though they were, apparently, playing chicken now, but with more knives. Well, one thing was for sure, thought Dabi, resolute. He wasn't going to be the one to get chopped.
Having a willing victim, Spinner was taking it slow, breaking the skin of Shouto's left arm almost gently. A line of red dripped down the blade, and Toga licked her lips. Dabi told himself very firmly that he did not give a shit. Anyway, it was Shouto's fire side and he'd always hated that Quirk. Who was Dabi to stand in the way of a good old-fashioned teenaged rebellion --
The knife slipped deeper, and Shouto sucked in a sharp breath.
"Stop!" shouted Dabi, body moving before he knew properly what he was doing. "Don't hurt him!"
Force of fucking habit, he supposed, he'd spent so long throwing himself between his baby brother and proverbial knives that Dabi shouldn't have been surprised to find himself doing it for real. Too little, too late, he knew, disarming Spinner with a burst of flame and yanking Shouto away from Toga and her needles. The brat was what, fourteen now, and sure Dabi could save him from these two-bit villain extras, but that didn't make up for the fact that he'd done exactly nothing but focus on his own survival and revenge while Shouto was growing up under the claws of an actual monster.
Keeping his grip on Shouto's wrist, Dabi frog-marched the surprised teenager into the nearest room and slammed the door, before whirling on his little brother. "Shouto, you little shit."
The kid's eyes lit up as the mask he'd been so careful to wear ever since Endeavor (ever since Touya left, ever since Mom was taken away too) shattered to dust, and a shy, familiar smile crept to the corners of his lips. "Hi, Touya."