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The flash of fire, the dry crinkle of paper burning, deep inhale and release. The rush of god-awful sickly-sweet cigarette smoke pulls her from sleep-addled depths and into the present. She feels so heavy, limbs weighed down by bonds she can’t see from her prone position, and she can’t rise; there’s a hand on her chest, hot and immovable as stone. She’s sweaty where it rests, but the person attached to it is indifferent. It’s hard to see him in the darkness, turned away as he is, until she shifts beneath his hold and he snaps toward her.
His eyes pin her like a butterfly to a board. They are hypnotic, fluorescent, burning blue. They stir something within her. She’s seen them before, beneath the red hair of her mentor. And once, via television, beneath the soft white hair of his son…
She scans the face and recognizes the visage. It’s him, the prodigal son, the villain, the one who rose from the ashes. She doesn’t even remember fighting him, let alone how she got to this dark, dank place and beneath his control.
“Right on time,” his soft, smoky voice grates in cool, mocking tones. “Such a good girl. The perfect intern.”
Despite the warmth of his aura, she shivers. With her hands bound she may as well be quirkless, at least with them separate and dangling off the bed, unable to touch the slightest thing with her fingers or palms no matter how she twists within her bondage.
This villain has done his homework.
“Touya,” she whispers, though there’s no need. It’s not like they have to be quiet in this close, dark, empty space that looks like a closet in a basement, or maybe a storage area. He’s close enough he could taste the word from her lips, so maybe that’s it. She’s just playing into the intimacy he’s created.
One of his thin brows lifts and his hand strikes across her, burning with speed, impact, temperature alike. She forces back the hiss of pain.
“Did I say you could use that name? Any name? That you could speak at all, little hero?” He scoffs. “You are disgusting. I bet you don’t even know why you’re here.”
Dread builds at the base of her spine. It’s a leaden stone in her stomach and fluttering race of her heart. Lest she set-off the villain again, she shake her head minimally in reply.
“It’s because I know your little secret,” he spits. “I know what it is you want to give my father when you graduate from your pathetic hero school. And,” he says, his voice dropping to mimic her tone only a moment ago as he leans down to speak it against her flesh, “I know that he wants it, too.”
She recoils then, from his presence, which is too hot, too near, and smells of the sickly sweetness of cooked meat and rotting flesh, antiseptics and smoke, and from the meaning of his words. That he knows of her insipid schoolgirl crush on Endeavor and the obvious lie that a man like the top pro hero of Japan would ever entertain a budding novice like herself.
Hot steel grips her cheeks to hold her in place. Dabi looms over her, his white teeth flashing in the dim light. “Turn away from me and I’ll give you scars to match my own. Got it, doll?”
She tries to bob her head in his vice-like hold, but can’t. Fortunately, that’s enough of an answer for him.
He releases her. Her head drops back on the bare, stained mattress and relief floods her.
“Now, here’s how this is gonna go. You are gonna willingly give that prize of yours over to me. We’re gonna film it and send it as a present to dear old dad.” His grin widens and stretches until the medical staples struggle to keep the scarred skin attached to the grafted healthy flesh. Delight dances in his eyes. He stares down at her, inhales deeply of the cigarette that had been in his offhand, and blows smoke rings while he waits for her to reply.
She is mortified. He not only knows her secret, but is going to force from her what should be freely given? What she’s fantasized about giving— and he wants to film and send it to his father! It’s sickening enough to stir that stone in her belly and make her nauseous, to overwhelm her fear. She is lost for words, unable to think past the white noise of—
“What the fuck?”
The weight reappears on her sternum and grows hot, boiling, searing, blinding until she smells the nauseating scent of her own flesh, hears it sizzle, and her screams to stop soon ring through the air.
He does, but the sting continues. She whimpers and sniffles and he gazes down at her impassively. This is nothing to a man who has murdered dozens of innocents by his own admission.
“The longer you deny me, the worse this is gonna get. And let me tell you, doll face, it wasn’t gonna be fun to begin with. Well, not for you. So until you beg for me to fuck away your virginity, I’m gonna make pain your new best friend. And if you never give up… well, I’ll just turn your corpse into a fuck doll and do it that way.” He shrugs at the end of his little speech, then casually ashes the cigarette on her stomach.
She licks her lips, tasting salt and snot against cracked flesh. “I’ll never do it.”
“No skin off my back. Yours, however.” He glances pointedly at a table behind him and she catches the gleam of sharp edges. “Let’s just say I’m working on more than one way to take out a bitch.”
A shaky sob threatens to crack her resolve, but steels herself. This might be a bluff. He might be trying to scare her into compliance.
She’s a hero student on the cusp of graduating; it’ll take more than a threat to convince her to play this twisted game. She turns her head away in disgust.
“Fine. We’ll do this your way, princess.”
And she waits. But instead of hurting her, Dabi leaves.
It’s hours later when he returns. She was drowsing on the uncomfortable bed with its questionable stains barely visible from the lightsource she can’t see.
There’s jangling, then a weird feeling comes over her at the world shift. He picked her up, now’s her chance!
Before her sluggish, aching limbs come back under control, she’s on her stomach and latched back the way she was. Dabi’s quicker than she realized, stronger too, though she’s been locked down here for no idea how long, immobilized and body stiff with it. The odds were always stacked against her.
“So, doll, have you decided to play nice?” he murmurs with his back to her. He’s facing that table and she tries to remind herself that he won’t kill her, not while there’s something to gain from her life.
She doesn’t speak.
Dabi takes the meager step back to her side and she turns her face away. She won’t give him the satisfaction. Even as the cold edge of a blade slides gently over the bare flesh of her black, she remains still and silent. When it bites into her skin, she tenses and holds back a whimper.
His breath reeks when he dips low to mutter in her ear, “You didn’t think I was bluffing, did you? Oh, baby doll, I don’t bluff.”
When rights himself, it’s to dig in deeper, slicing right to the muscle in a line that feels a mile long. She grits her jaw and whines if only to keep from scream and she can just imagine the macabre grin on his grisly face, the picture of Death himself, as he cuts perpendicular to the first but just as deep. He’s making a box on her back and just when she thinks he’s done, he’s sliding the knife beneath the edge of one side to rip through the fascia connecting skin to muscle.
It’s like no pain she’s ever felt before as he slices until there’s enough loose flesh to grab, and then he’s gripping it and peeling the skin off her back and she screams and screams and screams and—
By the time she realizes he’s done, she’s sobbing and chanting, “No, no, no,” in a voice hoarse from torn vocal cords; she’s sweaty and bleary-eyed and dizzy from the pain and endorphins flooding her system.
“What’s that, doll?” He sits back and lights up a cigarette with a flick of his finger. It’s such a mundane action, so at odds with the fact that there’s a piece of her own skin on her back, slimy and disgusting where it sits.
“Please stop this,” she grinds out, spittle and blood dripping onto the mattress beneath her cheek.
He hums thoughtfully as he draws on the end of his cigarette. When he leans forward, he ashes on the open wound. “You gonna let me fuck your little virgin hole?”
She sobs. She sobs brokenly, hopelessly, as she realizes he wasn’t joking about her new intimacy with pain.
But he won’t kill me, right? she thinks. There’s no way. That would totally defeat the purpose, or so she hopes. So the stubborn girl slowly shakes her head.
Dabi tsks. “Well, whatever. It’s your funeral.”
“Y-you won’t kill me,” she groans.
He peers at her with renewed amusement. “I’m gonna let you in on a secret, doll: you heroes like to play at being gods, perfect little scions of goodness to be worshiped by the masses. But I know the truth; you’re all pathetic little worms who crave that admiration so you don’t have to face the inevitability of your own demise. That’s where I come in. I’ll knock you all off your pedestals and drag you to your graves. Do you know why?” She swallows as his face inches closer, til their noses nearly touch and she’s breathing in the stench of death. “You might be playing at being gods, but I’m a living, breathing demon, and my goal is to take you all to hell right along with me.”
With that, the self-proclaimed demon takes another draw of nicotine, then stubs out the butt on her back. The suddenness robs her of even the ability to breathe. She passes out.
When next she wakes, it’s to find she’s on her back again. The raw nerves of her flayed muscle rub against the coarse mattress, but she ignores the pain in favor of the new wounds that litter her body.
Missing and burnt flesh pattern her like a patchwork doll; Dabi has even sewn thread at the skin of her wrists, elbows, knees, stomach… It’s horrifying.
Not as horrifying as when she starts to keen and finds her mouth similarly sewn shut. A fine tremble begins in her cold, numb hands and works its way up to creak as a whimpering sob in her throat. Her mouth squirms and that redoubles her crying as it stretches and tugs at the stitches.
“Pathetic.”
Dabi’s suddenly here to sneer down at her with those familiar eyes full of alien emotion. He truly finds her disgusting right now.
“I shut your mouth so I wouldn’t have to hear your bitching anymore. You can answer with nods, right?”
She swallows and nods, hoping to convey and eagerness to be released from this particular torture.
“Good. Now, you changed your mind or do I have to get more creative?”
Blankness fizzles through her mind; she blinks and tries to clear it but that means shaking her head and then Dabi is turning toward the table.
“Mmmmmm. Mhm. Mmmmmm,” she tries to communicate, but he shakes his head and sighs in heavy disappointment.
“Y’know, I really thought waking up like this might have done it. I gotta give it to you, doll, you’re tough.” When he turns, there’s a small, toothy length of metal in his hands, a bone saw.
She keens at him and nods to say yes, she has changed her mind. She has. Don’t do this.
Dabi saunters to the bottom of the bed where her legs are fastened and he traces warm fingers over one foot. “I’ve heard this can be tough, even with the right equipment. Do me a favor and don’t pass out; I don’t wanna have to waste time seeing if you’ve survived.”
“Mmmplssh,” she attempts, uncaring as the iron tang of blood hits her tongue. The pain from the stitches starting to rip through her mouth is nothing to the adrenaline flooding her at the very sight of him there, saw in hand. “Ahgvumb.”
“I can’t understand a word you said,” he replies. “Whatever. Just lay back and fucking take it.”
She squeezes her eyes shut when he sets the saw against her skin.
When the screams begin, she doesn’t even realize she’s torn her mouth open. The blood flows down her chin, her pulse marches in her ears, and the world tilted until it all goes black.
Dabi holds up the detached foot in triumph, throwing a grin at the girl on the bed only to sigh and toss the detached extremity aside. How fucking inconvenient. With her eyes shut he can’t tell if she’s dead or just passed out.
He ties off the stump just in case and strides to the head of the bed, lapping the blood off one hand. He reaches out with the same hand and strokes along her throat until he finds the vein where her pulse should be.
“Fuckin’ brat,” he grates, bright eyes flicking toward the blinking red light of the camera that has recorded everything he’s done to his father’s little intern.
With a heavy sigh, he begins to undo his belt.
Well, he did say she was fucked either way…