Chapter Text
The park is scattered with families, the sun is shining, and Natsuo is cheerfully bitching about his premed classes, despite the fact that he scraped past his most recent disaster of a group project to continue holding his perfect 4.0. The whole day feels perfect, and peaceful, which is what probably should have tipped her off that something was about to go terribly wrong, because Fuyumi’s best days need about a 10% ratio of chaos—too much peace is usually the sign of a storm on the horizon.
The harbinger winds up being an admittedly adorable six-year-old girl who suddenly collides with her knees.
Fuyumi has a lot of practice not allowing herself to be tripped by small children, which is the only reason she doesn’t eat cement. It’s close, though—she pinwheels her arms and Natsuo has to grab her shoulders, keeping her from wobbling sideways off of the park’s winding walking path.
“Is this one of your students?” he asks, peering over her shoulder at the girl.
Fuyumi gives him a look of deep judgement. “I teach eight-year-olds, Natsuo.”
“…Is she too tall or too short?”
Fuyumi rolls her eyes, but the approach of a frazzled-looking woman with the same pink hair as the little girl stops her from actually giving her brother an impromptu lecture about the relative heights of children.
“Masako, what have I said about running off!”
“But she’s glowing,” Masako says gleefully. Confused, Fuyumi checks her arms—but she does not, in fact, seem to be glowing. A quick glance at Natsuo shows his eyebrows just as high as hers. “Mom, Mom, can I practice?”
“You’re not supposed to ask me, you ask them.” Masako’s mother looks up at them, her polite smile still looking hassled. “Sorry, I’m Sane Satomi. My daughter is very excited to practice her quirk now that we’ve figured it out what it does. Ah—you two are twins, I take it?”
Fuyumi blinks. She’s six years older than Natsuo, and she’s pretty sure that’s obvious in their respective builds. “…No?”
Masako stamps her foot. “Mom, he isn’t glowing, she is. Excuse me, Miss, can I practice my quirk on you?”
Fuyumi reacts instinctively to a child with a question and crouches down so she can speak to Masako at eye-level. “What is your quirk?”
“Pair Swap!” she announces proudly.
Satomi coughs awkwardly. “She, ah, body-swaps twins with each other. She’s very excited about it, but my husband and his twin are a little sick of it. Don’t worry about it, if your twin isn’t here her quirk is sort of a pain to undo…”
“Pleeeaaase?” Masako whines.
Fuyumi would be charmed, if she weren’t suddenly so sad. The day doesn’t seem as bright, suddenly, at the unexpected reminder of Touya. “I… don’t think I can help you practice,” Fuyumi says quietly. “I lost my twin a long time ago.”
Natsuo shifts uncomfortably next to her. Satomi gasps. “Oh—oh, I’m so sorry—“
Masako must misunderstand, because she lights up, excited. “Oh, I know! I can help you find them again!”
Her hands close over Fuyumi’s before she can protest, and the world flips upside-down until she’s suddenly somewhere else.
Dabi is chilling on the couch, pretending to be asleep, with all (or at least most) of the annoying League members out of his hair, when suddenly his brain does a vertical one-eighty and he isn’t on a couch at all. Instead, he’s crouched on a sidewalk in the middle of a park with a little girl holding his hands.
His usual reaction to this sort of shit—or at least, what his usual reaction would be if this shit happened to him on a regular basis—is to start roasting everything in sight. But the kid is less than four feet tall, and torching small children is the sort of shit Endeavor would do, so Dabi scrambles several feet back to a safe distance before igniting on instinct.
…Why does he feel cold?
He discards the question as interesting but not important, because there’s people around, people who can see him, except he stands and—immediately winds up flat on his back, the wind knocked out of him. The sidewalk is even colder, which actually makes a little bit of sense, because he definitely just slipped.
On ice.
Besides the fact that Dabi doesn’t remember regular ice actually feeling this cold—he didn’t see anyone make it, and they didn’t actually attack him, just the sidewalk under him. Where did it come from? Where the fuck is he?
And, most importantly, is that person leaning over him with wide eyes actually Natsuo?
“Fuyumi?” Natsuo says, clearly concerned. “Are you okay? You hit the ground pretty hard.”
He’s looking straight at Dabi when he says that, and he also doesn’t look freaked out by Dabi’s general patchwork punk aesthetic, staples included. Dabi blinks in confusion for a moment, and then looks down at himself. Has he been covered in glitter or something to completely nullify the intimidation factor?
Dabi looks up again immediately, because there may be no glitter, but that is definitely not his chest. “What the fuck just happened.”
Natsuo jerks back a little in offended surprise. “Language! There’s little ears right over here, you yell at me about that all the time, Fuyu—“ He stops. Looks closer. His eyes go comically wide. “Touya?”
Dabi hasn’t heard that name in a solid decade. It makes his stomach lurch even harder than slipping on the ice did. “Uh.”
Natsuo’s jaw drops. “It worked? We thought you were dead!”
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. “What worked?”
Natsuo makes a sound like a fork caught in a garbage disposal, instead of talking like a helpful person. A woman Dabi doesn’t recognize steps forward, looking absolutely mortified, but she almost slips on the ice. Natsuo catches her arm and starts melting the ice away.
It’s kind of a lot of ice. Dabi stares. A big circle of it, and at the epicenter is… “Did I do that?”
The woman gives him a nervous smile, which Dabi supposes is its own kind of answer. “I’m so sorry about this. My daughter’s quirk is called Pair Swap, and it body-swaps twins. She saw your sister glowing, and I—I’ve told her she needs to ask, but your sister said she…” She drops her voice. “Lost you, some years ago, and my daughter didn’t understand what she meant. She said she’d help to find you, and…” She waves her hand helplessly.
“And I did!” the little girl announces. “The glow changed, so that’s her twin!”
“It actually worked,” Natsuo says, dazed. “Holy—“ He glances at the little girl and censors whatever he was going to say. Instead, he gives Dabi an incredulous sort of glare. “Did you seriously fake your own death?”
Dabi glares right back, climbing to his feet. His center of balance is off and his arms are weak and it’s weird. “It wasn’t that fake.”
At least he’s not the only uncomfortable one here—Annoying Mom looks like she wants to be anywhere in the world except in the middle of this family drama. Good. If the kid’s her daughter, Dabi’s labeling this as 60% the woman’s fault. “I—should I tell you now how to switch back?”
“It’s not just a time limit?” Natsuo asks.
Annoying Mom shakes her head. “I mean, there is a time limit, but the quirk will last for almost a week on its own, and I figured—“
“Other option,” Dabi says shortly. Natsuo gives him annoyed look when the woman laughs nervously, but Dabi doesn’t care; being polite is not exactly high up on his list of priorities.
“Right,” she says awkwardly, and clears her throat. “Well, unfortunately my daughter can’t just her quirk on your again, since the glow… changed. She’ll have to complete the link to let you go back. Where are you? Or, I guess, where were you?”
They need to find him. They need to find Dabi. Who is currently actually Fuyumi inside of his body. A minute and a half ago, he was in the League base, chilling with a bunch of murderers and assorted villains, and now Fuyumi is there.
He’s silent for too long. In his defense, endless internal screaming will do that to a man. Natsuo eyes him and says slowly, “Please, please tell me you’re at least in Japan.”
…Yeah, Dabi is neither confirming nor denying that shit. “A week it is,” he says flatly, and turns around to leave.
Natsuo makes a sound of deep offense. “Touya, where are you even going?”
Dabi doesn’t answer, partly because he isn’t sure he knows. But Natsuo clearly realizes he has no intention of stopping, and he freezes Dabi’s feet to the sidewalk before he gets more than ten feet away.
Dabi uses his quirk on instinct. Which, yeah, he should probably have thought through a little better, because all it does is make the ice thicker. A lot thicker. And it’s… cold.
He’s not used to feeling the cold. But clearly, he got Fuyumi’s fucked up quirk in the swap along with her body instead of his, and the two of them were all sorts of mixed up like that. She never got sunburns when they were kids. He wonders if she ever gets warm in the summer, or if she never notices it. It’d explain the frumpy pastel cardigan he’s currently wearing—well, it would explain the cardigan part, at least. He’s not so sure he can forgive being forced into pastel.
Dabi is still contemplating his frozen toes, wondering how the hell you melt that sort of thing with an ice quirk, when Natsuo jogs up to him. He doesn’t remove the ice immediately, oh no, little brothers are apparently too obnoxious for that; all Dabi gets is a chiding look, like he’s some sort of runaway child.
It’s… almost as effective as Fuyumi’s looks used to be, actually, which is impressive.
“Well, I got her number—“
“You sly dog, Natsu. Took what, ten seconds?”
“—so we can call her if you change your mind, oh my god.” Natsuo shakes his head. “It’s good to see you’re still a jerk, I guess. Anyway, you should. Change your mind, I mean, so we can call her and get this sorted out. What are you going to do, live Fuyumi’s life for a week? Have her live yours? What’s your life even like? I didn’t, you know, really think you had one. Since. You’re legally dead.”
Dabi doesn’t bother answering that flustered deluge of questions. He just glowers and silently points to his feet. Natsuo rolls his eyes but removes the ice. Dabi immediately stalks down the street, but Natsuo keeps pace with him.
“Look, I can see you’re grumpy and everything and clearly you didn’t want—“ Natsuo looks at the sidewalk intently. “Didn’t want to see us, or anything, but you’re here now. We can figure this out. You don’t have to hide from us, Touya.”
Dabi resists the ure to start laughing hysterically. Look at me, look at what he did to me, he wants to say, but. Well, he isn’t carrying any of his scars, and without them, he doesn’t know how to explain any part of the last ten years in a way that Natsuo—annoying little Natsuo that he used to play soccer with, playful happy Natsuo that used to help him make chocolate milk slushies in the summer—could ever understand. He doesn’t know how to make Fuyumi understand, either, but she isn’t here right now.
Natsuo isn’t looking at Dabi. He’s looking at Touya, the ghost of someone who doesn’t exist anymore. That hurts, but so does breathing sometimes, with his scars. He’ll get used to it.
For now, a smokescreen of complete and utter bullshit should keep Natsuo off the trail of anything Dabi doesn’t want him to know. Scattered with bits of truth, because Dabi is an expert like that. “If you make me even look at the old man,” he says carefully, pretending a concession, “I am going to turn him into an ice sculpture.”
Natsuo snorts. “Don’t tempt me.”
He probably thinks Dabi is exaggerating. Dabi is very, very much not exaggerating. But he doesn’t have the time or the desire to correct him—he’s going to be losing Natsuo as soon as possible. He has to get back to the League and the painfully civilian twin currently wearing his body before Fuyumi can do something stupid, like calling the police or getting herself hurt.
Fuyumi sits straight up on a couch she was not laying on a moment ago, and almost falls right off the edge. A momentary scramble later, she has herself stabilized, but she feels weird. She feels itchy. She feels warm.
Mostly, though, she feels confused.
There’s a man in a very strange mask and a top hat staring at her, head tilted to the side. “Are you feeling alright?” He looks familiar, but Fuyumi can’t place exactly why. It’s moderately concerning, but there’s a lot of things that are concerning right now, so she’s struggling a little with where to put that on her priority list.
Fuyumi blinks. Twice. “What… just happened?”
The man in the top hat tilts his head further to the side. She’s a little worried the top hat is in danger of falling off. “I didn’t see anything unusual, just that you sat up very quickly and look rather distressed. I didn’t think you were asleep…”
The disorientation of her sudden dislocation is steadily fading into the deep suspicion that whatever Masako’s quirk did actually worked. This isn’t her body, and this isn’t anywhere she’s ever been. Even though Touya is dead, and has been dead for ten years, somehow he’s here—or was, until about ten seconds ago, when suddenly Fuyumi wound up here instead.
“I’m… fine. I think.” She pauses; her voice doesn’t sound like hers, now that she’s paying attention. Does it sound like Touya’s? She doesn’t know. She thinks it’s a little too raspy, but the last time she heard his voice they were both fifteen. “Thank you for the concern,” she offers.
The man in the top hat actually removes his mask to give her a concerned look. While she’s puzzling over that reaction, someone else’s forearms land on the back of the couch next to her and she jumps, glancing at the man leaning over the back of the couch.
“Did you just say thank you? Did you get fucking brainwashed while we weren’t looking?”
The man who says it has light blue hair, red eyes, and chapped lips. He is also carelessly holding a severed hand, which only helps to identify him as the extremely wanted criminal that is the current ring leader of the maniacs who keep attacking her little brother’s class at school.
Fuyumi has no idea what a calm and rational response is supposed to look like in this case, but it probably isn’t what she does: she screams, jerks sideways, and falls off the couch while setting it on fire.
There’s a flurry of movement and swearing. Fuyumi finally recognizes the man in the top hat as Compress at about the same time he grabs her shoulders and pulls her away from the flaming furniture. Shigaraki Tomura, meanwhile, disintegrates the couch in order to starve the fire. It’s a very practiced reflex, she notices. The flames dissipate, leaving the air several degrees warmer than before.
“What the fuck, Dabi?” Shigaraki says, some unholy mixture of bafflement and rage coloring his expression and his voice.
Dabi?
…The fire was blue. The fire was blue, and that’s—that’s what Touya’s fire looked, looks like, but—that’s what Dabi’s fire looks like too.
Fuyumi looks down at her hands. They’re larger than they’re supposed to be, and there’s a clear line between regular, pale skin and the worst leathery burn scars she’s ever seen, and she sees Shouto’s face all the time. “I have staples in my hands,” she says blankly, even though they aren’t really her hands. She puts her hands on her cheeks, poking around tentatively, and yes, she can feel skinny bars of metal poking into her skin. She can feel the ache of the them holding her skin together. “I have staples… in my face.”
Shigaraki’s eyes narrow. “You aren’t Dabi.”
“I think I’m going to pass out,” she says faintly, and it’s lucky Compress is already holding onto her, because then she actually does.