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Izuku blinks. Stares at the body in front of him.
The body blinks back.
Izuku muffles his startled yelp into his mouthguard. He scrambles backward, trying not to move too fast or too loud, which makes it an interesting endeavor.
“The fuck are you doing down here?” Dabi growls, lifting his head to glare at Izuku. His eyes flash in the light of Izuku’s headlamp, and he cringes away from the brightness.
Izuku flips the switch on his mouthguard so it stops silencing him and hisses back, “I could ask you the same question!”
“Well, what did it look like I was doing?”
“I thought you were a body, so, dying, I guess?” Izuku gestures with one hand, kicking up dust.
The space they’re crammed into is small, dark, and hot. Izuku’s skin is already coated in a thin layer of sticky sweat, but with no airflow, it doesn’t do much to cool him off.
“Well obviously I’m not fucking dead.” Dabi suppresses a cough in his sleeve. “And stop fucking stirring up the dust.”
“Maybe you should have worn a mask,” Izuku snaps back.
Dabi snarls at him, glare somehow intensifying. “I will burn you to a crisp.”
“You won’t, because that would be a massively unwise decision. If you use your quirk down here, you’ll only burn yourself, as well, or your fire will use up all the oxygen down here and you will suffocate. So, really, you can’t do anything to me.”
“Hate it when you hero brats are right,” Dabi mutters. Slightly louder, he asks: “You never answered my question. The fuck you doing down here?”
“Investigating.” They had suspicions that the trafficking ring using the above manor as a home-base had hidden rooms to keep victims in. As the smallest hero on the raiding team, Izuku had been the one voluntold to go down into the crawlspace to look for evidence of secret hiding places and passages.
So far, all he’s found is dust, spiders, and one estranged Todoroki brother, apparently.
“And why are you down here?” he adds.
Dabi grunts. “Also investigating.”
“Really? Investigating what?” Now he’s piqued Izuku’s interest.
Dabi stares sidelong at Izuku through half-lidded eyes. “What’s that saying—I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine? I’ll tell you if you tell me.”
“A trafficking ring,” Izuku replies. “We suspect there may be hidden rooms in the manor, so I’m down here looking.”
“Mm.” Dabi glances back over his shoulder. “The fuckers tried to grab me. Couldn’t tell you if there are any secret rooms down here or anything, though.”
“You?” Izuku asks, shaking his head. “Wow. Okay, then. Well, the trafficking ring is gone, now, so you’re safe to leave.”
“Okay. Cool. Start backing up, then.”
“Me?” Izuku exclaims. “I guess, if you want to immediately be picked up by a team of heroes.”
“Are you deliberately choosing to help me escape?” Dabi questions, nose wrinkling as he frowns at Izuku.
“No.” Izuku pauses to reconsider his answer. “Maybe. You’re just in my way, and I would really rather not have to backtrack through the entire crawlspace and then go back in to continue searching it. That’s all.”
“Eh.” Dabi shrugs. “Makes sense.”
They both pause, staring at each other by the light of Izuku’s headlamp.
“So. I’m not going to back up,” Izuku says. “That leaves you.”
“Me?” Dabi points at himself. “No way. I am not going backwards. You don’t know what’s down here.”
“The crawlspace is too narrow for either of us to turn around in, and we already established that I’m not going to be the one backing up. Therefore, it stands to reason that you will be the one backing up.”
Dabi huffs. “Fine. But the moment we get out, I’m roasting your ass.”
They begin shuffling awkwardly along, Dabi scooting backward and Izuku maintaining a little bit of distance (he at least needs to stay out of grabbing and biting range). They collect cobwebs on their shoulders and hair and streak dust all over their clothes.
When Izuku gets back to the agency, he will be taking the second-longest shower he’s ever taken in his life (second only to the three hours he spent in the shower after encountering the sludge villain). He will also be deep-cleaning his costume and hunting down someone with a quirk that will make him grow a few inches, because he refuses to be the one press-ganged into wallowing around nasty, dusty crawlspaces ever again.
They’ve been crawling for a while when Dabi freezes and makes a face.
“Eugh. I just put my boot in something that squished. It stinks.”
Izuku presses his lips together. Good thing he can’t smell whatever it is through his mouthguard’s filtration system.
After a few moments, Dabi screws his face up and keeps inching backward.
He freezes again, expression shifting into one of abject horror.
“I stuck my hand in it.” He shudders. “Oh, gross, it’s in my staples, oh—oh, this is the worst fucking, ugh, smell—”
Danger Sense pings and Izuku scrambles backward, kneepads scuffing the ground as he rushes to get away from whatever is making the quirk go off.
He’s just in time as Dabi pitches forward, vomiting on the ground between them.
“Gross,” Izuku whispers.
Dabi hacks and wretches a couple more times before lifting one hand toward his mouth. He freezes halfway, eyes widening with realization, and he sets his covered-in-unknown-squishy-substance hand back down and uses the back of his other hand to wipe his mouth.
“Do you realize,” he growls, “exactly how much fucking cleaning I’m gonna have to do? I’m going to have to take out the fucking staples, disinfect everything, slather the shit in antibiotic cream, and put the staples back in. I hope you’re happy. I hope you enjoy crawling through my puke.”
With that, Dabi keeps crawling backward, eyes locked on Izuku. They burn with schadenfreude and his mouth twists with a dark glee at the thought of Izuku being subjected to getting vomit on his costume.
Izuku sighs, activates Float, and pushes himself to the ceiling of the crawlspace. There’s not much space, but he makes the most of it, flattening himself out along it and pulling himself forward with Blackwhip.
“Oh, you motherfucker.” Dabi sneers at Izuku. “You shit. You son of a fucking troll. I hate you. I can’t wait to burn you down to your mangled fucking bones.”
“You can try,” Izuku offers. “Good luck.”
Dabi snarls at him again before continuing to back up.
They keep up their crawl-shuffle through who-knows-how-many meters of crawlspace. It feels like miles, though Izuku knows that must be false. There’s no way miles of crawlspace have been jammed underneath the manor.
… Unless one of the traffickers had some sort of space expansion quirk, but Izuku’s really not sure how that would work, and he really doesn’t want to think about that possibility, so he won’t.
Ahead of him, Dabi freezes again.
“What is it this time?” Izuku asks.
Dabi shifts his weight around, scowling as he kicks one foot behind him. “Feels like a wall.”
“I can check. Lay down, I’ll go over you.”
Dabi sighs and flattens himself against the ground. Izuku activates Float again, pulling the same maneuver he had going over Dabi’s puke earlier, and they trade places.
Izuku’s light illuminates a bare concrete wall ahead of him.
“Great,” he sighs. “It is a dead end.”
“Well. At least I can go forward, this time.” Dabi snickers.
Izuku grimaces. He could maybe turn around … if he broke his ankle to shove his legs through. “I hope you enjoy crawling through your vomit.”
Dabi makes a retching noise. “Thanks for reminding me, shithead.”
“You know, I’m happy you’re going to be turning yourself into the heroes,” Izuku snaps back. “I hope you enjoy the crawlspaces in prison.”
“Oh, fuck you, too!”