Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Touya Todoroki has been dead for eight years.

Honestly, he doesn’t think he’s ever felt more fucking alive.

There’s a feral grin on his face and he can feel it, really feel it, feel the stretch of a mouth littered with scars and the tips of elongated canines grazing the piercings in his bottom lip. His arm cracks forward again, and again, and again, the crunch of splintering bone and the squelch of blood both fresh and old only fuelling the adrenaline in burning muscles.

Does bone crunch? He thinks it does — feels it crackle beneath his split knuckles, feels the splattering of blood: a mixture of his own, spilling from between his fingers and his cut lip, smearing with the toxic red of the degenerate that’s unfortunate enough to meet his fist, today.

He can hear the man beneath him (an old beta, in his forties maybe, definitely not happy about his position — fucking reeks, it’s disgusting), moaning and groaning and gurgling out unintelligible words through a bile-clogged throat, and not dead yet, unfortunately. He shuffles in his position, straddling the man’s hips, resolutely ignoring the comfort of the two broken legs twisted at odd angles behind him. His own chest heaves, breaths ragged through a lilted mouth.

He doesn’t know what the man did to end up here. He couldn’t care less even if he tried.

“Dabi.” The voice behind him is whiny, high, scratched. Annoying. Followed by a giggle elsewhere. “That’s enough.”

And just as quick as the aggression came, it’s wiped away.

Dabi pushes out a sigh, raises himself to his feet. He collects the metal pipe that he’d traded in for his fist when the man had fallen to the floor — it’s disgusting, sticky with blood and god knows what else, but it feels at home in his hands.

Shigaraki, the pompous asshole, all wild hair and childishly psychotic eyes, drops down to his haunches by the man’s head, flicking out his coat behind him and tossing light hair over his shoulder. The goddamn drama queen. He’s one of those with a flair, a certain eccentricity, the kind of cartoon villain character that’d be labelled quirky, maybe. Misunderstood. That’s never really been Dabi’s style.

“So? You wanna answer my questions now?”

A choked laugh from a broken face, a mouth filled with a vile mixture of snot, spit, blood. The stupid twat seems to be under the belief that he’s valuable alive. How pathetic. Dabi cracks his knuckles, shuffles the pipe in his hand, and panicked brown eyes flick to where he’s standing.

Shigaraki scoffs, flicks his tongue over chapped lips. He scratches at the space beneath his jaw in a way that almost seems nonchalant, uncaring — but it’s frantic, the way his fingers move. He’s annoyed, his stupidly strong alpha scent of rotting leather is heavy and thick in the room.

“Fine. Whatever,” he snaps, standing and giving a swift kick to the bald’s head — his nose crunches. Dabi thinks that maybe it is the bones that crunch. “Toga, Twice, the useless prick’s all yours.”

Two more dive from the corner of the room, both betas, both riddled with the kind of insane bloodlust that makes Dabi cringe in annoyance. Their faint scents are happy, he can hear Twice babble about something nonsensical while pulling at the man’s fingers. Toga’s laughing.

Dabi drops his pipe, wipes away a drop of blood from his cheek.

Shigaraki approaches him, aiming to look domineering, maybe. Aiming to be in charge. A child trying to fill the position of a pack alpha; Dabi resists the urge to roll his eyes.

“You’re done for the night,” he snaps, he’s a couple inches shorter than Dabi is. That must be one hell of a kick in the face. “Be on—”

“Be on call, don’t go too far,” Dabi finishes, rubbing at his jaw — it’s beginning to ache, his fangs have been out for too long and his mouth isn’t quite sitting correctly. “The usual, boss, I get it.”

“Watch your mouth,” the alpha bears his own teeth behind dry lips, squares his chest in a way that demands dominance, and the dark red in his eyes sparks with annoyance. Shigaraki’s not really a fan of sarcasm. “You’re still new. Don’t forget your place.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Dabi drags a palm down his neck, ignoring the blatant fuck you, submit in the other man’s scent. His Alpha doesn’t take the obvious challenge, it never does, lounging around in the base of his skull like some kind of dozing panther. Perhaps that’s what makes him so appealing to people like Shigaraki, in their positions of power — despite his apparent ‘attitude’ and tendency to drift off alone, there’s attraction in the way he doesn’t indulge in violence to appease his own Alpha’s appetite for it; that appetite is damn near non-existent. It must be comforting, in a way, to know that there’s an alpha subordinate who won’t want to tear your throat out at every opportunity — that his aggression, his violence, is because he wants to, not because of instinct. His Alpha doesn’t tend to care about much.

He doesn’t bother throwing Shigaraki’s pack a goodbye as he leaves the room: Toga, the psycho little bitch, is laughing like a damn maniac, wildly swinging around a little hatchet that he’s never seen her without. Twice is sat cross-legged, seemingly unbothered by the way his counterpart nearly takes off his head multiple times, dislocating each joint in the man’s left arm and talking to himself softly, toying with limbs like a ragdoll.

He’s glad he was smart enough to not take the pack’s bite.

The building he’s in — old, some kind of headquarters for Shigaraki and his devout followers — creaks as he walks through it. It was once a family home, he thinks; it’d be homey if it wasn’t so tragic. He passes by boarded windows and shards of glass, broken picture frames and a row of dusty coats still hanging on the wall, kicks at an empty whiskey bottle with mild annoyance. He’s learned not to glance at the mirror in the hall, on his way out; as cracked as it may be, it still displays his face from a thousand different angles that he’s never wanted to see, hangs out his own stoic hollowness like a damn painting.

Touya Todoroki discovered very quickly that it’s easier to live if you don’t exist — Dabi was the one who learned how. He learned to live as a person not written into words when stories get told, learned to live in the blank spaces between the print, in the gaps between the pages. He lives as a speck of ink smudged between the lines of writing — a name created from ash with an indistinguishable meaning, a single word without true shape, one you hear whispered in the wind and forget until you hear again, a face that’s so familiar but so unfamiliar.

There’s something so freeing about not really being alive anymore. Teetering along the edge of existence like a tightrope over a cliff, knowing that you are the one in full control over whether or not you take the drop. Never being fully involved in anything. Never caring about anything. No commitments, no marks, not a trace of his actuality.

The front door creaks when it opens. The keys, forgotten in the lock with an assortment of pink keychains, jingle as they sway. The air outside is cold.

He cracks his knuckles, and the little sigh of breath he lets out curls around him in soft fog.

There’s a crick in his neck, an ache in his muscles as he rolls his dark coat’s sleeves down. He’d managed to avoid being covered by his punching bag’s vile bodily fluids but there’s still blood coating his hands, he can feel it drying beneath his fingernails, flaking on the skin of his knuckles. His lip’s stopped bleeding, but he thinks there might be some blood on his chin, too.

The street’s deserted. It’s around midnight, he thinks, but not quite one o’clock: the streetlamps are flickering, dimming, but not off yet, laying their sickly yellow light over a blanket of cold fog. They don’t really illuminate much other than a few cars with missing tires and smashed windows, the odd patch of graffiti, boarded up doors for buildings that’ve been cleared out. Shigaraki’s territory is one of those fit for an apocalypse movie — all empty, dust-ridden once-homes and broken down vehicles that’ve long since been looted, the odd patch of suspiciously coloured stains on cracked concrete. The people here live in shadows.

Dabi prefers Stain’s place. At least it’s fucking clean, there. He kicks at a can, hears a cat squawk.

Up ahead, someone — the only movement on the street besides him, the silhouette of a person who’s small, in baggy clothing. They stutter in their steps, nearly fall to the floor directly into the darkness of an alley that Dabi knows is marked heavily with Shigaraki’s scent. They don’t seem to notice him. He stops walking.

Whatever, not really his problem. Idiots tend to venture into this territory often enough that fresh blood splatters aren’t exactly unusual — nor is seeing someone beaten half to death, staggering into somewhere they probably shouldn’t be. Shigaraki’s territory is inhabited by a number of alphas or betas that’ve proved they can fight their way through life; anyone who can’t is meat for the dogs. It’s ruthless, here. If you aren’t strong, you don’t survive.

But it’s Compress that deals with the idiotic turf wars and childish inner-pack fights, not him. He continues on his way — the figure will probably be found in a few days when the smell of rotting corpse becomes too much of an inconvenience.

The scent doesn’t hit him until he’s around a metre from the alleyway’s entrance.

It stops him dead in his tracks — it’s only faint but it’s there enough to be noticeable: something sweet, just barely tangible in the crisp night’s air, caramel heated to the point of bubbling. It’s warm, piercing, rich and sweet and thick with anger, thick with fear.

It’s an omega.

His Alpha — the little bitch is still dozing around like some kind of well-fed housecat — perks its head. Dabi’s not too surprised; this is the first omega it’s caught a sniff of in a while. Omegas are rare in Shigaraki’s place. Their status varies from pack to pack, their level of equality differs between territories, and Dabi’s been to places where they’re treated like damn royalty but here, for definite, they’re nothing more property: something valued as a possession, with little to no rights as a person. Treasure, might be the right word. It’s odd to find one alone.

He stops at the alley’s mouth and sniffs at the air a little more, humming a little in thought. The scent is a lot thicker here, swirling through the air like some kind of mist: it’s like sugar, but burnt, sweet and intoxicating but sickly with omegan distress. His Alpha’s beginning to growl — with aggression or possession, he can’t really tell. Maybe a mix of both.

Dabi takes a quick glance around him. He’s the only one here now, but he won’t be soon. Not with a scent like that. Alphas are bound to be drawn in like a moth to a flame.

What’s one little look?

And if he rubs the inside of his wrist across the entrance of the alley, to mark his scent there, to deter another alpha from the area, who’s around to judge?

He approaches as quietly as he can, further into the dark, a dead-end alley where the only way to see is a single flickering streetlamp, eyes lazily scanning ahead for the figure he saw. At first, he doesn’t even spot the little thing — if it weren’t for the scent burning a lot stronger in the air than it was before and the fact that he’d seen someone enter, he probably wouldn’t have thought there was anyone in here. That is, until he hears a small sniffle, sees the twitch of a dark sneaker, down to the left.

Dabi isn’t sure what he expected, but he knows it certainly wasn’t this.

The first thing he notices: the omega’s small. The tiny figure of a boy, curled in the space between a stack of old plastic boxes and a large trash can, huddled beneath a canopy of cardboard, hugging his knees to his chest. He’s shaking like a damn leaf, eyes wide and trained on his fingers, fiddling with something in small hands between tightly packed knees. His hood’s pulled up but Dabi can see thick blond hair jutting out over his forehead from beneath it, spiking softly over the brightest carmine eyes he’s ever seen. He doesn’t look particularly old, maybe in his late teens — he looks like a fucking doll, pristine and smooth. Pointedly innocent. Naive.

There’s splatters of blood on his face, it’s a bright contrast against pale skin and nowhere near the impressive shade of those eyes. Dabi can make out enough on his temple that he suspects there’s some kind of injury there, but he can’t distinguish one beneath the matted clump of stained red hair, yet. The clothing he’s dressed in is dark, but there’s visible patches of blood on the jacket he has zipped to his chin. The metallic scent of it is a stain on the burnt sugar in the air.

The boy’s eyes look watery. He sniffs, heaves a shaky breath through soft parted lips — and, fuck, that does something to Dabi’s chest that he isn’t quite sure he likes. He hasn’t noticed Dabi’s soft approach, yet, quivering like a baby deer, holding whatever little object he has clasped in his hands close to his body. There’s two high-grade scent patches stuck against his neck but they’ve both been ripped, they’re useless — the omega’s scent permeates the air around him like some kind of fog, sour with distress and upset, but still so sweet.

And, shit, Dabi’s Alpha’s never really cared about much — it cares about this omega. It prowls around in his mind like it’s suddenly been kickstarted back to life, snarling and barking and causing one hell of a shitstorm. His instincts are going haywire — he stops himself from getting any closer when he’s around a metre away, but his Alpha absolutely does not support that decision: it’s roaring, and his head is filled with thoughts of protect protect protect.

Dabi sucks in a breath of biting air — the omega’s scent is everywhere, and all he wants is to take the fearful quiver away from those little shoulders.

“Someone did a real number on you, huh?” he hums out a low drawl, low and rough and he curses the monotonous drone that his voice has taken on when those wide eyes flit to him, bright with fear and spiking with panic. He doesn’t want such beautiful, sparkling eyes to be so afraid when they look at him. “You look awful beat up, doll.”

“Fuck off,” the omega snaps his teeth, innocent eyes flickering with something pointedly aggressive. The blond tenses from head to toe, harsh, shaky tone filled with a faux bravado. An attempt to show less weakness in the face of an unknown alpha. Dabi feels his eyebrows raise, his cracked lip pull into a small smirk.

Huh. Kid’s got balls.

Dabi’s never met an omega that’s snarled at him before.

“Easy there, tiger,” Dabi lets a lazy grin slip onto his face, shoves his bloody hands and split knuckles deep into his trenchcoat’s pockets in an effort to hide them. He doesn’t want the little thing to get more scared and start really lashing out, after all. “I’m not looking for a fight.”

“You’re an alpha,” the blond’s voice is like honey — it’s soft, deep with a forced roughness, and Dabi’s Alpha nearly fucking purrs at the sound of it. The omega curls further in on himself, clutches whatever item he has in his hands closer to his chest. His brows are furrowed, pretty mouth turned down into something like a snarl, and those eyes of his are fucking burning. “You’re all looking for a fucking fight.”

“Not all.”

The boy growls at him — it’s weak and omegan, distinctly pathetic through tiny fangs that could do no more damage than a damn kitten’s. His eyes are so bright, so wide — so innocent and yet so violent. It’s a contradiction that makes Dabi’s head spin, aggression and softness, hostility and hesitation. But the omega’s still shaking; Dabi’s not fooled by a few curse words.

He drops to a squat. Even on his haunches, their size difference is apparent.

God, he looks so scared, curled into his little box, even with Dabi still a metre or so away. He’s tense, muscles locked, clearly terrified but also very clearly ready to fight should the need arise. His eyes flick down Dabi’s form, taking in the inked wrists and the piercings and the clothing, the fucking blood drying beneath his mouth — it’s all pretty telling, and the way those pupils of his widen slightly with a determined kind of fear says that he doesn’t think he could win, should he attempt anything violent.

Dabi’s filled with the urge to take whoever made him so untrusting and break their fucking spine.

“Come with me, kid,” he’s trying for soft, but that’s quite difficult, he doesn’t think he’s ever had to make himself seem harmless before. He doesn’t think he’s ever wanted to make himself seem harmless before. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

“Fuck you,” another snap, limbs curling even tighter into themselves, pushing further back into the wall. “As if I’d go anywhere alone with some random alpha.”

Dabi hums. He can’t help but feel a little on edge: the longer they stay, the more likely it is that the boy’s scent will carry further. The tinge of a distressed omega bears a universal weight — if the boy’s scent becomes so heavy that it leaves the alley, the kid’ll be fucked. Both metaphorically and, probably, literally. Omegas on Shigaraki’s streets are highly sought-for property if they aren’t claimed, first come first served, especially around here: an unmarked one, sitting pretty and defenceless like this, isn’t going to stay unmarked for long.

Dabi’s Alpha snarls at the thought. He’s inclined to agree with it.

He drops backwards to sit against the wall opposite the little blond, shuffles sideways to place himself between the omega and the alley’s mouth. Extends his legs, stretches them, hums a little. He pushes out his scent as much as he physically can, with as much calm as he physically can, without making himself lightheaded, and the omega eyes him warily as the small space between them becomes overriden with the smell of ash and fire. It doesn’t tend to be particularly overwhelming, his scent, but he thinks it’ll be enough to make any approaching idiots hesitate.

“The fuck are you doing?” the blond snaps, shaky, baring his little teeth again, sharp crimson eyes glinting beneath dimming streetlamps. But the alpha’s scent is clearly having its effect; he looks a lot calmer. A lot less likely to bolt. He blinks at Dabi through long lashes and, God, he still looks so innocent, despite the harsh words.

“I wouldn’t complain if I were you, doll,” Dabi drawls, dropping his head backwards against the wall and trying to inhale his own scent rather than the omega’s — he’s getting dangerously close to drooling. “With those useless patches of yours, my scent’ll be the only thing keeping every alpha on the block from poking around.”

There’s quiet, for a few moments.

“You’re just trying to scare me.”

“Leave and find out.”

The omega looks at him, still wary, still afraid, and he’s still softly quivering like a deer caught in a hunter’s snare, but he’s clearly not stupid. He chews his bottom lip between his teeth, shuffles a bit, but relaxes into the wall behind him. His eyes are trained to his knees and Dabi can practically see the cogs turning in his head — weighing the pros and cons, maybe. Measuring the risk of danger. His hands move from being so tightly compact against his body — he fiddles with whatever small thing he was playing with before, eyes glued to it. Dabi can’t quite make out what it is.

“What’s your name, kid?” he busies himself with a cigarette, flicks his lighter a few times just for the sake of it, avoids the boy’s gaze in an effort to not come across as provocative, or intimidating.

“I’m not a fucking kid.”

“Oh, yeah?” he ventures, biting his cigarette between his teeth and letting the scent of it through his nose as a distraction from the omega’s caramel. “How old are you?”

“Why the fuck should I tell you, old man?”

“So,” he snorts, “A kid.”

The boy bares his teeth — his little omegan fangs glint under soft yellow light, small and not particularly threatening. Dabi’s Alpha huffs an amused, affectionate little chuff in his head. It’s grown a lot calmer now that the omega’s calming, too.

“Who the fuck even are you?” the blond’s voice isn’t quite so hostile anymore. Still cursing, still defensive, but not hostile, and not quite so fearful. Simply… cautious. Dabi counts that as a win.

“People call me Dabi,” he sticks out his hand even though he knows the boy won’t take it, slipping a slight grin onto his face with the cigarette propped between his lips. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“‘People call you’?” the boy repeats, narrowing his eyes at the outstretched hand, gaze flicking over the licks of ink that’re only just visible beneath the cuffs of his sleeves. His own hands stay clasped together around his little object. “The fuck’s that mean? That not your real name?”

“Of course it isn’t,” a yawn threatens to slip through his mouth — he pulls his hand back, the omega watches it warily. “It’s about as real as I am, doll. Means I’m whoever I damn want to be.”

“Dabi,” the little blond twists the name around his mouth, brows scrunching in a way that’s so damn soft. “You come up with that?”

“A friend did.” It’s not a half truth, but not a full truth — if the omega needs to ask a few questions to feel more inclined to trust, Dabi doesn’t care what he has to answer. “I… adopted it, per se.”

“Adopted it,” the blond whispers. His eyes are unfocused; wide and carmine and sparkling with a soft kind of hope.

The boy’s eyes flick upwards. “Who were you before?”

Dabi doesn’t answer, this time, just takes a long drag from his smoke, keeping his eyes on the omega’s with a lazy, thoughtful stare. The kid didn’t recognise Dabi’s name. That, in itself, speaks volumes — as well as his clear lack of knowledge of the territory he’s in. Something so clearly naive, sheltered, doesn’t belong in a place like this. Dabi wonders how he made it here.

“You’re not from around here,” he says after a short pause, as soft as he can muster — his voice is rough, deep, dark, and he curses it. It doesn’t particularly scream safety. “What’s a little thing like you doing in this territory, doll?”

Red eyes flick back up to meet his, once, briefly, before dropping back down. The omega’s fingers toy with the little object in his possession, small mouth turned into a slight pout, and he seems to shrink into the large jacket he’s wearing — he looks the picture perfect part of a soft little omega, and Dabi can’t think of a single thing the world could throw at him that would ever tear his eyes away.

“You looking to become someone else, kid?” he asks, shuffling a little closer, subtly.

“’M not a kid,” is the reply, again, but it’s quieter, softer.

“Mm?”

“I’m almost eighteen,” the blond says, gaze flicking upwards to eye him sceptically.

“Jesus fuck - you really are a kid,” he throws out a smirk, teases for the sake of teasing — he was on the streets at fifteen. He leans forward, rests his elbows on his bent knees. The floor’s damn uncomfortable, but he’s closer to the blond this way.

“Maybe you’re just fuckin’ old,” and the omega teases right back; he’s defensive, still, but there’s a certain lilt to his mouth that wasn’t there before, a certain looseness to his tense knees.

“Oh I am, huh?”

A growl, off to the left: both Dabi and the boy’s heads fly to the side. He shrinks further into his little box and he’s really shaking, now, scent riddled with fear — the noise was far enough away that it was muffled, but close enough that Dabi’s Alpha spikes with anger, protectiveness. He moves a little closer, pushing himself between the alley’s entrance and the little omega that his Alpha seems so keen to protect, barely manages to stifle the rumble that threatens to leave his throat. His eyes flick back to the blond’s, sharp and predatory.

“It’s a bad idea to be out here, doll. Especially at dark.” There’s a sharp intake of breath at the petname, and the rough growl darkening his voice that accompanies it, and the omega’s eyes meet his — wide, sparkling. Fucking beautiful, even when they’re licking with fear. “You’re going to end up in worse shit than whatever it is you’re running from.”

The blond drops his chin on his knees, scowls, but doesn’t answer. His eyes don’t leave Dabi’s: they’re gorgeous, under the flickering light, a bright, glinting carmine, swimming with fear and distrust and anger. Anger so ferocious that it seems like a damn fire. He’s never seen an omega look quite that enraged.

“Let me get you back home, doll.” There’s urgency in his tone, now.

“I’m not going home,” the boy whispers, fiddling once again with whatever he’s holding in his hands but not looking at it. As a comfort, maybe.

“You should.”

“I don’t want to.” I can’t. Dabi knows that struggle.

“Where are you going, then?”

“I don’t fuckin’ know.”

“You’re gonna spend the night here?”

“I’m working on it,” the omega’s talking so softly. Dabi’s Alpha’s almost fucking purring, the stupid bastard — it probably would be, actually, but the imminent threat of another alpha poking around is making it suffer through being equal parts angry and affectionate.

Another growl, louder, more of a snarl. A lot closer than it was before, at the alley’s entrance. This time, the omega jumps, a tiny squeak leaving his mouth. He tenses, legs looking seconds away from sprinting, face like prey that’s been caught in a snare.

Dabi can barely hold back the growl.

“Come home with me,” Dabi holds out his hand, ignoring the ache of his jaw when his canines decide to elongate, again. He wants to snarl, wants to bear his teeth, wants to throw himself over the damn kid and protect him from everything. He schools his face into nonchalance.

“Do you think I’m stupid?” The omega’s breaths seem a lot shallower.

“If I wanted to hurt you, I would’ve done it already,” he’s trying not to snap, really, but that’s so difficult — he doesn’t think he would ever so much as scratch a hair on this little thing’s head, but they need to go now. “I have a little apartment, just a short drive away. With a couch. Has to be more comfortable than your cardboard box.”

“How do I know I can trust you?” he whispers, but his eyes say he knows he doesn’t have a choice.

“You don’t. But in a few minutes there’s going to be more than just me here.”

Dark eyes glint at him. This omega has the kind of presence that consumes you — Dabi most definitely feels consumed. And when he says, “I’ll keep you safe.” and the blond looks up at him with such naivety, such innocence, he knows he means it.

“It’s a lot deeper into town, on the cusp of a few different territories.” And if he lets a little of his possessive growl slip into his voice as he speaks, who’s there to judge him for that? “With me, no one will be able to so much as touch you, doll.”

The omega’s breath hitches again. He swallows, chews a lip beneath his teeth.

“Are you—” His eyes are so damn wide, and, as though he knows exactly which of Dabi’s buttons to press, they fill with building tears, his fearful little voice cracks. “Are you going to hurt me?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Dabi’s reply is almost immediate, and he knows it’s not a lie. “And I’ll beat the shit out of anyone that tries.”

And then, slowly, with the quiver of a baby deer approaching a predator, the boy takes his hand. Dabi’s Alpha rumbles in a pleased fashion at the sliver of contact, at the way the hand feels so damn small in his own. The blond shivers when he’s pulled to stand, tenses a little when Dabi pulls him tightly into his side — his eyes are level with the alpha’s collarbone, which puts him at perfect height to be tucked under his chin. He fits there like a puzzle piece. Like he’s meant to be there.

Dabi wraps an arm around his waist, tucks the omega’s face into the crook of his neck, and growls at the footsteps making their way down the alley. The blond seems to understand; either that or he simply caves into his fear; he buries his face into the fabric of the alpha’s shirt, shudders a small breath, a soft whimper leaving his mouth. Dabi pushes out more of his scent, heavy and possessive and angry in the air.

One of the boy’s hands moves to curl into his white shirt tightly, and in the other, clutched between slim fingers, sits the little figurine of an owl, carved in dark stone.

Chapter Text

Katsuki Bakugou has been in fight or flight mode since the day he crawled out of his mother’s twat.

His mother would swear on her life that she’d always known he’d be an omega, that she could just feel it, no matter what other people said about his dysfunctional, abrasive little personality — she used to say his secondary gender was a blessing. That it suited him. She’d tell him that he’d go on to do great things, and not to let other people’s opinion on what he should be get in the way of what he wanted to be. That, if he played his cards right, he could gain power over alphas and betas alike, become number one. Show everyone that an omega could be the strongest.

He used to believe her.

He’s not so sure, anymore.

He blows a shaky breath through quivering lips — there’s a lump in his throat and a spark of some kind of emotion in his chest that he isn’t sure he likes, flighty between his brittle ribs: it’s too similar to fear. Katsuki Bakugou does not experience fear.

How did he even get here? He’s not sure he remembers, fully: his head’s still throbbing from where it’s been struck, his legs are growing more numb the longer he forces them to work. He knows he ran away, again — there’s flashes of adrenaline, bleary scenes blinked through an exhausted mind: slip-on shoes laid down prepared by an unlocked window, his beta father’s coat and cheap patches thrown on to cover his scent. Back alley routes and the biting cold and a sprint blinded by panic. He doesn’t recognise whatever territory it is that he’s run into — he hasn’t travelled out of the area he lives much before, anything outside of his little neighbourhood is unknown to him — but he knows that the invisible threshold he crossed was enough to make the pack’s lackeys cease their relentless attempts at chasing him down. For now.

He’s not exactly jumping for joy — honestly, he’d almost rather he’d been caught: the punishment would’ve been less severe than whatever he’ll get when he inevitably has to slink back home.

He grits his teeth at the thought, and his nose twitches — it’s cold out here, difficult to think about anything too much, and the strong, swirling scents of two alphas in the air is making his already dizzy head spin. The tip of his nose brushes the rough skin beneath the collarbone of an alpha he met minutes ago, heady with a scent of violent ash and burnt pine, face pressed into the low collar of a shirt made from coarse fabric. Stained fabric.

He curls his quivering fingers into it to hide their incessant shaking, and pointedly ignores the flakes of dried blood that fall from where his hands lie. The alpha’s scent of an ablaze forest is stained by the underlying metallic of it — Katsuki hates the way it feels so comforting. So safe. This is a man covered in fucking blood, for fuck’s sake. Get a grip.

He feels weak, like some kind of little prey animal. He despises the way his shoulders curl inwards, the way he shuffles himself further into the warmth of a heavy black trenchcoat, curses how he seeks comfort without having any control of his own actions. Quivering, leaning into the stability of someone who talks with an air of power, of nonchalant danger, he feels like the scared little omega his mother always told him he’d never become. His Omega’s keening, practically rolling over and purring under the attention of some random alpha’s protection, the fucking traitor.

But, honestly, he feels a lot safer where he is than he does back home — tucked into the body of an alpha he doesn’t know, cowering in the faux refuge of someone clearly damn criminal without any hint as to the motivation for such protection, but he knows that this is the smartest of all his options. There’s more safety here with some random alpha than there ever will be in that empty fucking house.

The alpha’s talking. His chest rumbles with words that’re softly growled and Katsuki can’t even pay attention — he pushes up onto his tiptoes as subtly as he can to press his face into the crook of the alpha’s neck, noses further into the scent of burning wood and cigarette smoke, breathes in more of it and adamantly pretends that it isn’t calming him. Adamantly pretends he doesn’t need something calming him. There’s battling scents in the air and he knows that his own is the most prevalent: a panicked little omega with useless patches, stuck dead in the centre of a pair of angry, possessive, knotheaded alphas — what a cliché. He almost rolls his eyes. But the alpha he’s tucked into doesn’t smell aggressive. Not like the other one. He can’t really tell what this one’s thinking.

His head’s growing confused with the sheer amount of conflicting instincts it’s facing: there’s a part of him, not ruled by his dynamic (perpetually rebelling against it, in fact) that won’t stop shrieking at him to fight. A million curse words throw themselves around in his head and he’s filled with the urge to scream, to blow up in some way or another. To keep running. To prove that he’s strong enough to not need this man’s help.

Even when he knows he’s not.

He squints his eyes closed, lets out another breath, feels himself calm. He’s not scared. He’s Katsuki Bakugou, and Katsuki Bakugou does not get fucking scared. All he needs to do is let himself think, let himself come up with some kind of plan.

Maybe running as far away from home as he did was a bad idea.

Just maybe.

But there’s always a plan. There’s always an escape route — Katsuki’s been running since he could walk, and there’s always an escape route, he knows it. At the minute, his smartest option is whatever clearly powerful criminal he’s happened to attract — he can stay under the protection of this alpha and run when he gets the chance, maybe; but where would he run to? Where can he go that hasn’t already proven itself to be dangerous?

It’s difficult, weighing up two different dangers, with two different risks — he thinks, should he go home tonight, that his disrespect will earn him a punishment nothing short of torture.

But, fuck, this alpha could be a damn serial killer, about to hack him apart with a machete, or beat him to death with his bare hands — he seems like he could. He certainly fits that demeanour. And the lean muscle that Katsuki can feel where his fingers are clenched doesn’t seem like a joke.

He still can’t make himself move away.

“Sweetheart?” the alpha’s voice is a quiet murmur, rough and low, and Katsuki nearly jumps out of his fucking skin at their close proximity — scarred lips just barely ghost the shell of his ear, nose brushing his hair and unmistakably taking a soft inhale of the scent there with a light hum. Katsuki’s breath hitches, he swallows his nerves.

Honestly, he’s starting to not give a shit about the risks: this is the first alpha that hasn’t immediately dove for his cunt upon first glance, the first alpha to offer him some kind of solace. It could all count for fuck all, but Katsuki’s not stupid enough to ignore the obvious escape route he’s been handed on a silver platter.

He moves his face away from the man’s neck and blinks up at light eyes, icy eyes, set in a face sculpted from stone — or marble, maybe, the statue of a character, created with distinctly deceptive intention. The alpha cocks his head, and Katsuki’s vaguely aware that his hands have moved: one rests large on the small of his back, his arm curving around Katsuki’s waist, the other is holding the cigarette he’d lit earlier. Katsuki’s are still fisted in that stupid stained shirt.

The other alpha is gone. Katsuki hadn’t even noticed him leave.

He coughs lightly, clears his throat, but his voice still squeaks, “Where’d—”

“Come on, doll,” he’s interrupted — the man’s mouth curls into a smirk that seems smug, in a way, cocky eyes flicking over his undoubtedly flushed face with the air of an odd kind of danger. “Let’s get out of here.”

Katsuki can’t even formulate a response and he hates that, this little loss of control: a large hand pushes the small of his back gently and he forces shaky feet to move before he can convince himself that it’s a bad idea, wobbling through the same alley that he’d crawled into only an hour or so before. In his state, it’s probably a good idea to simply just… follow along. He’s been offered a place to stay, after all.

The alpha’s gentle with him, surprisingly. Slow. His fingers rest softly against the curve of Katsuki’s spine, a loose push down cracked pavement. His hand is so big — Katsuki feels damn tiny, barely hitting the alpha’s collarbone, and there’s a tiny little voice in his head that whispers about how, should the alpha put both hands on his waist, his fingertips would probably touch.

He swallows the lump in his throat, suppresses a small noise on his tongue when he’s subtly pulled closer. His Omega’s keening. He ignores it.

The alpha — Dabi, he said his name was — walks with his head held high, dropping his cigarette to crush it beneath the steel-capped heel of his boot with nothing more than a small glance. Katsuki takes the moment to observe him, run his eyes over the few scars dotted around his face, the majority near his mouth: his lip’s been split, but its in a position that Katsuki’s unsure if that was done from a punch or from the sharp ass canines he’d been sporting when Katsuki had first seen him. His eyes, a light turquoise kind of colour, flick around every now and then at their surroundings, but the alpha doesn’t seem wary. If anything, he looks totally and completely unbothered. Like anything could happen right this second and he knows he could overcome it with ease.

He walks with an obnoxious air of composed dominance, strutting down these blood-stained streets with calm eyes and a faint smile, like he owns the whole damn town. Like he owns Katsuki, the little omega tucked into his side that he’d just postured against another alpha to protect. He seems distinctly possessive.

There’s flakes of blood drying on his face, a splatter, peeling off from his skin when the alpha rubs at it absentmindedly with his hand.

God, what is Katsuki thinking?

His hands are still trembling no matter how much he wills them to stop, curled into the rough fabric of his jacket, clutching his little stone owl. He mentally maps the streets they walk down but there’s not much point: he has no clue where he is, he’s injured and his scent patches are ripped and he doesn’t even remember which way he came from. He couldn’t make it anywhere safe from here. Not without being mauled along the way.

Not that he has anywhere safe — he hates that word, doesn’t really understand what it means. Kirishima is safe, maybe. Kirishima’s house isn’t. His own house isn’t. He doesn’t think he has anywhere that would qualify as safe; his sanctuaries often don’t last long, when he finds one. He’s learned to stop looking for them.

The night is silent, all he can hear is Dabi’s heavy boots’ footfalls, echoing off the walls of abandoned buildings with smashed windows. This place is a lot different than home is: home is plain, but it’s neat. Unkempt vandalism such as graffiti or a broken window or a destroyed phone-box has no place in Katsuki’s town — it’s too dirty. Or so the pack says.

He’s led to a car that’s not as flashy as he was expecting, to be honest, but it’s certainly a lot nicer than anything he’s ever come across — a narrow little thing, pitch black with tinted windows and no license plate, sleek but well-loved. There’s a small line of bright blue spray paint on the back wheel and multiple scuffs, scrapes, it even looks like it’s been keyed at one point, if the thin slice in the doors is anything to go by.

It’s simply parked on the side of the street. Another thing unseen back home — the pack doesn’t like luxury items being flaunted by anyone other than the top alphas. Those that do have a car (few and far between) don’t tend to drive them, for fear of being caught, so they mostly just sit and catch dust in hidden garages.

He isn’t entirely sure what to do when he approaches it — Dabi steps ahead of him, tugs open the passenger door, and doesn’t take his hand away from Katsuki’s spine.

“Get in, doll.”

He moves to, but takes a second to scan over the alpha’s face — he isn’t quite sure what he’s searching for, isn’t quite sure what he’d do if he found something there. Dabi’s eyes are snakelike, glinting under a flickering streetlamp and a clouded moon, light and calm and predatory. But Katsuki doesn’t feel quite so uneasy looking at those eyes. Not like he does with other alphas.

Maybe that should terrify him, maybe that makes him idiotic.

Either way, he doesn’t care.

He slips into the car, and Dabi throws him a sharp grin as he shuts the door.

It’s warm, and the scent inside is unmistakably Dabi more than anything else — Katsuki pulls his feet onto the seat, hugs his legs to his chest, buries his nose between his own knees in the hope to escape the woody smell he’s surrounded by and the sheer amount of security it provides. There’s empty cigarette packets dotted around every surface and a jacket thrown on the back seat, the small wooden charm of a wolf dangling from the rearview mirror. It just seems… normal, in here. The scent of blood doesn’t chase them in this tiny beat-up vehicle, like it seemed to out on the street. It gives no clues as to the nature of its owner.

Dabi’s quiet as he slips into the driver’s side, starting up the car’s engine without a single word. Katsuki watches him carefully, sinking further down into his seat, watching as bright eyes flick to him and immediately away.

He’s in a car, a now moving car, with a man that he doesn’t know. An alpha that he doesn’t know. In a place he’s unfamiliar with. Katsuki’s injured and dizzy and weak and if he were to fight, he wouldn’t win.

It’s starting to occur to him that maybe he’s a fucking idiot.

The night outside is dark, and he wonders what time it is. How long he has until morning — Kirishima would surely notice he’s gone in the morning. The car moves smoothly, silently. Katsuki watches like a hawk the way the alpha’s fingers drum the steering wheel, the way he hums an occasional single sound before falling silent again. His gaze stays straight on the road ahead of them, half-lidded and dangerously serene, face void of any emotion but mouth curled into the faintest little smirk.

“What are you going to do to me?” Katsuki spits; he tries for aggression, but it’s shaky and sounds a little afraid and he thinks he should hide that fear a lot better than he is. He’s already almost fucking cried, he doesn’t need to whine on top of that.

“I told you before,” Dabi answers, almost immediately — his voice is odd; a low, monotonous, almost bored drone, betraying neither thought nor intention. “I’m not going to let anything hurt you, doll.”

Katsuki sucks in a breath, his exhale is shaky; he’s trying not to believe words like those, words that he’s never heard before, words that he never knew he wanted to hear. Words woven by a man that clearly knows his way around his own tongue. “That’s not a fucking answer.”

“I’m not going to do anything to you,” the man glances to him from the side, one hand on the wheel and the other holding up his head, elbow propped on the car’s door, cerulean eyes predatory. “I just don’t think you should be out there alone, sweetheart. Especially when it’s so dark.”

“Why?” Katsuki swallows — having those eyes on him fills him with a strange kind of uncomfortable comfort, almost electric, and he can’t decide if he wants to chase that attention or hide from it. “Find it hard to believe you’d do so much for someone you don’t even damn know.”

“Because I can’t bear the thought of anything happening to you, doll,” is the reply, stated like it’s a simple fact, and, no matter how hard Katsuki tries, he can’t convince himself that it’s a lie.

He swallows the shudder that curls up his spine. Dabi’s grin curls a little further, and his eyes move back onto the road.

They travel in silence for a while — what feels like a while. They’ve entered a less urban area: what seems to be a mix between countryside and city, tall trees and large shrubs and cracked pavement with weeds growing through. The houses here are widely spaced, and look a little worse for wear but still liveable — a lot more than can be said for where they were previously. He follows the skyline with his gaze, and resolutely ignores the churning of his gut, the steady anxiety fluttering in his chest. The little stone owl in his hands is warm, safe, cared for above his own life as he runs the pads of his fingers along its dulling ridges.

His only sanctuary, his only home, his only thing that the pack have yet to touch. Maybe he does have a safe place, a little one, carved into the body of his owl.

He glances at the alpha beside him, again. His eyes follow the bridge of a sloped nose, the edge of a hard jawline. A mouth in a smooth line, illuminated in flashes by passing streetlamps. Scarred knuckles with a loose hold on the steering wheel, and the peekings of ink under the sleeve below them. A messy tuft of hair darker than charcoal, the way it dusts the eyes beneath it enough to almost hide the calm psychoticism burning within them.

Almost.

The eyes flick to meet his.

“So,” the alpha starts, and Katsuki jumps, twists his head away. His cheeks are burning. “You gonna tell me your name?”

He probably shouldn’t — there’s power in a name, and this alpha is clearly powerful enough to know people. Clearly powerful enough to strut around with another person’s blood all over his clothes and split knuckles and a head held high with no consequence. Powerful enough that another alpha had simply walked away from an omega up for grabs, without him even lifting a finger.

He really probably shouldn’t.

“Bakugou,” his voice is a whisper, it doesn’t feel like his own. “Katsuki.”

“Katsuki,” the alpha purrs, and he looks so pleased — he hums like he’s proud, like Katsuki’s done something right, lips curling into an even wider smirk. “Pretty.”

Katsuki’s breath stutters again. He sucks in another. He hates it, the way his brain’s divided — the rational part of him, the part that knows what alphas are and what they do, is wary and distrustful and adamant that he’s put himself in danger. That he may die. His Omega, on the other hand, is purring up a damn storm: an odd change of pace, usually it damn near disappears when any kind of unknown alpha is near. It only really trusts Kirishima.

Not anymore, clearly. He wishes the damn thing would get a grip and stop putting his head in a constant battle.

They pull into a little carpark — it’s dingy and not well-lit, with half-faded markers on its cracked tarmac and only a few shitty cars spaced around. Dabi stops in a space in the back corner quickly with practiced ease, but not before Katsuki notices the single vertical line in blue spray paint on the floor.

The car stops, sinks. Katsuki swallows the fear building in his throat.

Dabi opens the door for him.

“Thank you,” he whispers — he sounds timid, afraid, vulnerable. He hates that.

“Of course,” the alpha purrs. That damn hand finds its way to his lower back, again, guiding him gently over old concrete and sprouting weeds. His Omega’s whining like a damn bitch at the contact, purring in the back of his mind.

He could run, theoretically.

Well, he wouldn’t get very far, but he could try and that’s what counts — there’s forest right in front of him, an apartment building that looks to be falling apart. If he could make it into the trees, there’s a chance he could escape: he’s small, quick on his feet, and smart. That’s got to count for at least something.

The building, much like the little village it’s on the outskirts of, is run-down. An apartment complex on the smaller side, with a few boarded windows and moss on faded bricks. The pathway that Katsuki’s led down is cracked and covered in weeds: there’s a few suspiciously coloured stains on the concrete, an overgrown garden either side. Nothing is immediately next to it besides thick foliage and tightly-packed trees — Katsuki thinks the nearest house is a good half a mile away, at least.

All in all, it looks like somewhere you’d take someone before you murdered them.

Nobody but the people inhabiting would be able to hear him scream.

He’s pushed closer — the alpha’s grip on him is tight, and the more he thinks about making a break for it, the dizzier his head gets. The more his legs ache. He can’t run. His only hope at the minute is to pray he doesn’t die: maybe if he’s charming enough, he’ll be kept around. Charming. He almost scoffs; he doesn’t think he’s ever been fucking charming in his life.

The inside of the complex is no better than the outside: Dabi leads him through narrow hallways with peeling but pretty wallpaper and dirty carpet, past rows of chipped white doors, a broken elevator and stairs made from metal grating that echo the slightest sound. They don’t see anyone else, or hear anyone else, and before long they’ve reached apartment 210, right at the end of a dingy hall, where Dabi stops.

There’s the distinct scent of alpha marked across the door — the alpha’s burning wood musk is etched into every tiny splinter of its frame, and Katsuki tenses at the possessiveness. He’s about to enter the den of an alpha he doesn’t know. He isn’t sure he’s ever had to do that, before.

But, for some reason, it doesn’t quite feel uncomfortable — there’s no sense of danger when he passes through the threshold between Not Alpha Territory and Very Alpha Territory, like he thinks there should be. If anything, his damn Omega’s purring up a storm.

He doesn’t feel like he’s going to be hurt.

“Come on in,” Dabi jiggles the lock, pushes open the door. It creaks. Katsuki swallows his own breath. “Home sweet home.”

The apartment is small. And dark, that’s what Katsuki notices first: Dabi flicks on the light — an uncovered bulb, dangling in the centre of the ceiling — but it stutters before it finally turns on, and its shine is dim. The one window (not actually a window, a set of glass balcony doors) has blackout curtains drawn tight, and there’s no other lamps or sources of any kind of light at all.

It’s open plan but not in a neat way, in more of a hurried way — the kitchen and living room are separated by nothing but empty space and a clear, messy switch between hardwood floor and carpet. On the left sits a single black sofa in the shape of an L, framing a low coffee table with an ashtray. A plug-in heater that looks to be struggling to stand is leant against the sofa’s side, and a shitty little TV balanced on a box is opposite. On Katsuki’s right, a small set of kitchen units in a light green colour scheme, with a tall white fridge, an empty sink and a little microwave. Across from the front door is a hallway; Katsuki can only see a couple of doors back there, he thinks.

The vibe here is odd — it’s clean, even though Dabi is clearly not averse to walking around with his shoes on (on the carpet, like a heathen), but so… untouched. There’s no ornaments, no pictures, nothing to suggest the place is actually even lived in: the one thing hanging on the wall, a little wooden coat-rack, is bare, and there’s no appliances in the kitchen that would indicate it’s used often. The only sign of its inhabitance is Dabi’s scent, heavy and thick and inescapable with an underlying burn of cigarette smoke.

“You want a drink?” Dabi’s trench coat is tugged off in one smooth movement and tossed onto the table — beneath it, his arms are bare. “Something to eat?”

Katsuki shakes his head. He trails his eyes across the ink he can see on the pale skin of the alpha’s forearms, but he’s not close enough to make out anything distinctive — his arms are like a little patchwork quilt, a messy grid of little tattoos with no clear rhyme or reason to any of them. Just a collection of symbols, squeezed wherever they can fit.

Katsuki wonders if they have stories behind them. Wonders if there’s more where he can’t see, covered by the alpha’s clothes.

“Sit down, doll,” Dabi’s eyes meet his — still the same kind of calm power, nonchalant dominance. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Katsuki just sends him a glare, but he thinks it looks weak. It certainly feels weak. He grips his own elbows, hugs his arms to his chest.

“I promise. You’re safe here with me.”

God, why does Katsuki believe him?

He huffs, more for the sake of stubbornness than anything else, and Dabi snorts a small laugh with a shaking head. The alpha walks away, disappears into the hall — he’d left his front door unlocked. Katsuki could definitely make a break for it.

He doesn’t. He takes off his shoes.

The sofa is surprisingly comfortable when he drops onto it, and he shuffles backwards into its cushions — it damn near swallows him, large and plush and fuck, his Omega loves it. It’s warm and annoyingly comforting, a rest for his aching legs, and he lets his eyes slip closed: he’s small enough that when he pulls his knees to his chest and curls up, it feels like it’s surrounding him. It’s difficult to suppress his purr. It reminds him of what his nest used to be.

A throat clears behind him. Dabi’s smirk is a little more prominent, eyes holding a strange kind of glint to them under the dim light. He’s holding a black box with a ripped masking tape label, marked ‘first aid shit’ in bold marker letters, a few of them smudged and wiped away.

Katsuki coughs, scowls, but doesn’t move. “I don’t need—”

“There’s blood all over your damn head, kid,” he’s damn near grinning, the cocky bastard, sly in the worst of ways, dropping down to sit on the coffee table opposite where Katsuki’s curled. “C’mon. Let me take a look.”

Katsuki can’t say anything — it’s difficult to function when the alpha’s so close — so he simply does as he’s told, and shuffles forward, resolutely ignoring how powerless he is in this situation. How small, hunched under broad shoulders. The alpha’s knees are planted tall either side of Katsuki’s clamped-together legs, large leather boots next to beat-up canvas sneakers.

Dabi’s fingers curl under his chin, gentle and soft, tilting up his head like he’s nothing more than a malleable doll. He can’t bring himself to meet the alpha’s eyes even when he knows he’s prompted to, can’t even fucking breathe when there’s a scarred hand gripping his jaw with a touch so electric. His head’s turned from side to side to examine the blood on his face and it’s gentle, so gentle, the way he’s handled — the alpha moves him like he’s porcelain, like he’s something valuable that he couldn’t bear to break. The touch is featherlight.

“A lot of this isn’t yours,” he murmurs, low in the darkened room around them, and Katsuki doesn’t breathe. Dabi’s fingers slide, moving to gently stroke the sensitive skin at the top of his neck.

“No shit, Sherlock,” he snaps — it’s weak, he knows it is, but it’s his easiest defence against the intense vulnerability he’s beginning to feel. The alpha huffs a little laugh, but his eyes are glued to the small wound on the hairline.

His other hand lifts, cups the omega’s cheek, thumb swiping just under the little cut at his temple but not quite touching it. “Who did this to you, doll?” there’s a growl in there, somewhere.

Katsuki doesn’t answer.

“You fight back?”

This, however, he does — he flicks up his gaze to look Dabi directly in the eyes, unblinking, unafraid, stare narrowed, and his voice is a spit, “Of course I fucking did.”

And the alpha looks proud. Katsuki’s breath hitches; Dabi looks at him like he’s a gem, like fighting back against a pack’s top alpha is the best thing he could’ve done. There’s adoration in those ridiculously psychotic eyes of his, fondness laced within nonchalance. He doesn’t just look, he admires. Katsuki doesn’t think he’s ever been looked at like that before.

After another moment spent in quiet, with not even a single breath passing Katsuki’s lips, the alpha moves again, collecting some kind of cloth from his little first aid box and beginning to clean some of the blood from Katsuki’s face. It’s slightly wet, cold, and it stings when it gets too close to the cut on his head.

“So,” Dabi says, fingers still holding Katsuki’s jaw, “Do I get to know why you were out there alone?”

“No.”

The alpha snorts a short laugh. “Alright.”

He touches like it’s natural. Like he’s more comfortable than ever here, with his hands on Katsuki’s face — the repetitive wipes on his cheeks hurt, just a little, but the rough thumb gently moving at the base of his jaw holds enough softness that Katsuki doesn’t even notice.

Dabi has dimples. Katsuki, his eyes level with a grinning mouth where he’s sat, can see them clearly when he smiles — there’s definite dimples there, even little divots that look like they used to be piercings in his cheeks. There’s a little mole, just under his ear. The soft beginnings of a beard along the bottom of his jaw.

“Why were you?” he whispers, the pads of the alpha’s fingers just ghosting his voice box. He forces his eyes shut to stop their idiotic analysation of the alpha’s face. “Out there, I mean.”

“’S my job, doll.” And there’s that fucking nickname, again.

“Your job?”

“Mhm.”

Katsuki’s eyes open, and they narrow — the alpha’s shirt is still covered in blood. “Gang shit?”

Dabi barks out a laugh, carefully wiping at Katsuki’s cheek with his little white rag. It’s quickly growing more red. “Gang shit, indeed.”

“So,” he swallows: he’s heading into dangerous territory, here, and he wonders quite how much the alpha would tell him. “You’re in a gang pack?”

“Not exactly. I’m more…” a low hum of thought. “A hired hand.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Means I do a little bit of dirty work and get to reap the rewards,” Dabi laughs a little, more of a snicker, leaning back to stretch his legs and look clearly at Katsuki’s face, the tips of his fingers tilt the omega’s chin up gently. “But I’m not actually a part of anything. I can leave the minute things get a little too much for my tastes. No packs. No commitments.”

“Huh.” No packs, no commitments.

“That a problem?” his head cocks, eyes flicking over Katsuki’s face, again. Searching. “You scared?”

“No,” Katsuki snaps. “Fuck you, I’m not scared of anything.”

“Hm.” And, fuck, there’s that look again — that fond little look, proud, like he’s found a fucking diamond in a coal mine. It’s somehow both predatory and soft with a slight curl to his lips, and Katsuki’s knees feel weak.

“Dirty work,” he whispers, breathless and afraid but also not afraid. “What’s that?”

“Someone like you shouldn’t be concerned with shit like that, doll,” Dabi murmurs, leaning back forward with his elbows on his knees, fingers laced together and dangling just millimetres from Katsuki’s thighs. His eyes are lazily calm. The alpha looks at him like he wants to protect him — but it’s so different than what he’s used to with everyone else. It’s so different to his father’s weakness, Kirishima’s pity. He doesn’t feel patronised, not with those gentle fingers come back to smoothing the skin along his jaw, not when the pad of a rough thumb gently tugs at his bottom lip.

“Someone like me?”

He feels treasured.

“Mm.” Their eyes lock, and Katsuki’s so damn lightheaded, so damn breathless. “Someone like you.”

Katsuki almost shrivels, Dabi’s hand is getting braver, fingers brushing his scent glands, hand cupping his neck so wide that the tips of his thumb and forefinger touch both pulse points. Touching for the sake of touching, with no real excuse or reason as to why. It’s new and it’s terrifying and not even an hour ago Katsuki thought he was going to die: he feels so damn vulnerable, like the alpha can see straight through him and just knows what he’s thinking, just knows him through and through.

“I’m running,” he blurts, snapping out something just for the sake of it. He wonders if the alpha can feel his heart racing.

“Running?” Dabi hums, one-handedly shutting the lid on the first-aid box but simply sliding it onto the coffee table rather than putting it back where it came from.

Katsuki nods.

“From what, doll?” the alpha’s eyes narrow, his head tilts, his tongue flicks to swipe over his top lip in a way that screams danger like a neon sign. Katsuki’s never felt safer.

“A gang pack,” he murmurs.

“Mm.” That hand moves back up to cup his jaw properly, thumb brushing his cheek. “One I’ll know?”

“Probably.”

And he hates it, the way his thoughts drift — memories of a bedroom with a scent that’s become permanently sour, a torn-apart nest that’s never been rebuilt and a door taken clean off its hinges. That itch beneath your skin when you know you’re going to be hurt.

The way his Omega becomes completely silent the minute he steps through the fucking door.

“Alright,” the alpha replies, light eyes flicking between Katsuki’s own. They’re still narrowed, predatory, but not stupid — he seems to know not to push. “You looking for a place to stay?”

“I’m not looking for shit.”

Dabi’s quiet, for a second. Contemplating. “I can help you, you know.”

“I don’t need help,” he whispers. The alpha studies him for a moment. Katsuki doesn’t meet his eyes.

There’s a hum, briefly, a couple of seconds more of silence before Dabi stands. His palm moves from Katsuki’s cheek and he resolutely pretends he doesn’t miss the warmth, pretends that it wasn’t providing a sense of stability and comfort that he absolutely does not need.

“I’ll get you some clothes,” the alpha says, “That on your head’s just a small cut. Not bleeding anymore and not deep enough for any kind of treatment.”

“I don’t need—”

“You’re covered in blood, Katsuki,” Dabi’s voice is a purr, slightly snapped and minutely irritated, predator’s eyes glinting down at him from where he’s stood. “I’ll get you some clothes.”

Katsuki huffs again. His cheeks feel warm. The alpha disappears into the hall once more and Katsuki curls up like he was before, small and warm and surrounded by the scent of a crackling fireplace. Burning wood. His Omega’s not shut up since he stepped through the damn door and he’s mostly been ignoring it — but it’s quieter, now. No longer screeching for attention but simply purring, content and happy, rolling around in the back of his mind like a dog in its new bed. It’s decided that he’s safe. It’s decided that he’s protected.

“Here.” The alpha’s back, holding a short, folded stack of black clothing.

“Thank you,” Katsuki chews his bottom lip. He wants to be touched, again. How pathetic of him.

“Do you want a shower?”

“No.”

Quiet, for a second. Katsuki stands and Dabi sits, and he shuffles his feet awkwardly, not quite understanding his place. Not quite understanding a motive for this supposed kindness. Not quite understanding why he’s suddenly so willing to trust his man with his life — the alpha’s scent is almost stoic. Emotionless. It’s warm and comforting and everywhere around them but it bears no insight into what he’s feeling.

“It’s late,” Dabi leans back, into the couch’s cushions, and fishes out another cigarette from his trouser pocket. “You should change, get some sleep. Bedroom’s through there.”

“I’m— I can take the couch—”

The alpha just laughs. “Absolutely not, doll. Down the hall, last door. Make yourself at home.”

“Oh. Right,” Katsuki’s eyebrows furrow. “Goodnight.”

“Night, sweetheart,” his words are muffled with a cigarette between his lips, and he doesn’t look up as he flicks his lighter on, leaning his elbows on his spread knees. His eyes are illuminated in the light of a flickering cigarette — somehow both golden and cerulean. Like fire, but a bright, burning blue.

Katsuki opens his mouth to say something, closes it again. He shuffles to the hallway, and he can practically feel the alpha’s eyes on him the minute he turns around. Another shiver sent down his pathetic little spine.

There’s three doors, here: to the left, to the right, and straight forward. The one on the left is open just a crack — it’s a bathroom in a sage green colour scheme, with a rectangular box of a shower and a cracked mirror. The right door is closed.

And, sure enough, the Dabi’s room is the last door.

Katsuki’s not sure what he was expecting — some kind of drug den, probably. A body tied to the ceiling. Maybe a prostitute? He doesn’t know what criminals get up to in their spare time.

Whatever it was, that’s not what he’s met with.

It’s neat, for a start. Almost pristine. A stark contrast to the room before, this one isn’t cheap or messy in the slightest: the bedside table and single cabinet are both completely bare and without any scuffs or marks, the bed’s freshly made and unwrinkled. It’s a little lighter in here than out there — everything within sight that isn’t wooden is black, and the little lamp next to the bed is bright enough that everything is illuminated. It’s a small room, and there’s no windows, but, oddly enough, it gives the atmosphere a more comfortable feel. Homey. Safe.

He doesn’t think the alpha spends much time in here: his scent’s there, but barely, faint and soft and merely a dusting over the chemical air-freshener plugged into the wall.

Katsuki chews his bottom lip between his teeth, sucks in a breath, and pulls out the pack of matches he keeps in his boxers’ waistband.

He takes one from the pack, and slots it into a space on the hinge of the door — where it’d snap should the door be opened. Only then does he allow himself to undress: he changes into clothes that clearly belong to the alpha, with a scent clinging to them that’s a lot thicker than the one in the room. A simple jumper and sweats — they’re a few sizes too big, and they practically hang off his annoyingly frail body, but they’re warm and comfortable and his Omega gives a soft purr.

He doesn’t bother shutting it up, this time.

The bedsheets are soft. They smell like the alpha, too, and it’s difficult to pretend he isn’t happy about it when there’s no one around to fool but himself. He curls up as small as he can, lets out a sigh, closes his eyes. His little owl is clasped in his palm.

And, in the comfort of being alone and unseen, snuggled beneath a quilt that’s warm, with his nose buried in the scent of burning pine and crackling fireplace, Katsuki sleeps.

Chapter Text

A gang pack.

The omega’s being chased by a gang pack.

Dabi flicks his lighter on, then off, then on again. The little flame is soothing, in a way, even if it quivers with his clenched fist — it’s invigorating to watch its violence, see its sparks, to feel the threat of its scald on his thumb when all he wants is for everyone to fucking burn. He’ll shatter the damn thing, if he’s not careful.

Better this than something loud, he supposes — he’d hate for his omega, his Katsuki, to hear. Hate for him to be afraid.

There’s something scratching, itching beneath his clingfilm skin — it’s like anger, but more. It’s not quite as shallow as the rage he used to be filled with: this doesn’t feel like petty revenge, or feigned violence. This doesn’t feel like the nonchalant aggression that he’s used to, nor does it feel like the bitter, twisted sickness of the fire he felt long ago. It’s something else entirely — it’s new and it’s bright and it’s fucking burning, and he’s never felt anything like it before.

The omega, his omega, his Katsuki, is in danger. Because of some stupid assholes that clearly don’t understand what a treasure they’ve found.

It must be hours that he sits there, festering in his own wave of possessiveness. Because that’s what it is, and he doesn’t care to sugarcoat it — it’s possessive at worst, protective at best. Pathetic obsession with an omega that he only met that fucking night.

He doesn’t care. He’s not stupid enough to throw away a blessing when it’s just dropped into his lap like this.

He flops backward, lying across his couch, and his head’s placed near to where Katsuki was curled up, only hours before — his scent’s still there, warm and spiced and comforting, mixing with Dabi’s own and lingering in his apartment like it belongs there. Like it could never belong anywhere else.

The sun begins to peek through the crack in his balcony’s curtains —  Dabi hasn’t slept yet, and he’s not sure exactly how long it’s been since he brought the little blond home. All he knows is that it must’ve been a while; and soon enough, he hears Katsuki, his Katsuki, bare feet padding down the hallway, and his Alpha’s focus is redirected from the anger it was snarling in before. It’s almost purring, now, the braindead thing, perking up with chants of omega omega omega and fondly grumbling at the scent of warm caramel. Dabi can’t even find it in himself to shut the damn bitch up, and, honestly, he isn’t sure if he really even wants to.

When Katsuki appears in the kitchen’s doorway he still looks half asleep — his explosion of hair’s somehow even messier, mussed and soft, and he has one hand up to rub at a half-closed eye, fist hidden in Dabi’s hoodie’s sleeve. His cheeks are ruddy, a gentle red, small body swamped in baggy clothes, and when soft eyes blink open, Dabi feels his heart stop fucking working.

Fuck, he’s covered in Dabi’s scent.

Honestly, Dabi should be winning some kind of award for his self control — he knew exactly what he was doing, giving a little omega like that the largest clothes he owns, sending him off to sleep in his Alpha’s most protected, ‘important’, territory. He’s not usually one to feed into the ridiculous instincts that come with his dynamic (he’s seen first-hand what allowing your Alpha to dominate your mind looks like) but, damn, he doesn’t regret it in the slightest.

It’s comfort. It’s contentment. It’s happiness, almost, the feeling that his omega’s home — his omega, his little thing, all soft and protected in Dabi’s den. Where he’s safe from anyone that could ever harm him. Where fucking should be.

Suddenly, he doesn’t feel all that angry, anymore.

“Sleep well, doll?” he purrs, kicking himself up off the couch and tossing his lighter somewhere, he doesn’t notice nor care where, his eyes are purely glued to his omega.

“Mhm,” the little blond nods, yawns — Dabi just about swoons, he looks like a damn kitten, soft and tired and clearly having not been awake for too long. His eyes are fogged, glazed slightly with a faded tiredness.

“I’ll get you something to eat, love,” Dabi’s hands find the back of the couch and he leans onto them, leans closer, to that scent of warm caramel and spiced sugar and eyes the colour of blood but not quite that violent. “Come sit down.”

The omega blinks at him, careful, slow, still sleepy, and shuffles his way over to Dabi’s couch. He doesn’t show any indication that he’d heard what Dabi said — but he curls into the same spot he’d been in before, pulling his knees up to his chin, eyes sliding closed. His messy hair looks so soft, and, this close, Dabi can see the faint pink tinge to his cheeks. The dusting of red on the tip of his nose.

He’s fucking beautiful.

Dabi almost chokes — there’s a thin line of orange sunlight, glowing from the crack in the balcony’s curtains, lain across Katsuki’s cheek, brave, like it could ever even hope to be good enough to grace a work of art. It cuts into his eye, barely dusts the softness of a glowing iris — the colours there bend under the light, change, reshape into a breathtaking myriad of soft brown and maroon and red, a gorgeous, phenomenal red. A kaleidoscope, almost, and Dabi knows he would kill to watch its shapes forever.

A stroke of sunlight, made beautiful only by the image it lays upon.

Katsuki’s eyes close, and Dabi’s never felt so warm.

He knows full well that the only form of food he has in his kitchen cupboards is some off-brand cereal garbage — the kind he can stock up on cheaply, shove into his mouth in the mornings he needs some quick energy. The only meals he tends to eat are from diners, cafés, takeout: stocking up food in his apartment is too risky, too much of a money waste. He’s too big of a flight risk to do something so permanent.

He regrets that decision now, tipping this cardboard food into a cracked bowl that he didn’t even know he damn owned — his nose crinkles, he scowls, and his Alpha’s grumbling in annoyance, with scorned pride. He doesn’t even have any damn milk for it.

It’s disgusting. It’s wretched.

His Katsuki doesn’t deserve this absolute horse shit.

He’s almost about to leave his apartment to get something else before he catches himself, keeps himself still — this is an omega he met last night. He doesn’t want to scare the little thing with his Alpha’s overprotective buzz — the haze of provide provide provide is overwhelming, but not unmanageable. It’s just unexpected, more than anything, and Dabi curses his own lack of experience with it.

“Here,” he says, his teeth grinding, and he hopes the tension in his jaw is unnoticeable. “Tasteless garbage, but it’s all I’ve got.”

The omega doesn’t reply, simply takes the bowl offered to him, lets out a small hum, and begins to dig in. Dabi moves to sit beside him, at a safe distance — Katsuki’s smoky scent is still so fucking there. Still so present, despite the pointed distance between them.

“Slow down, love,” the alpha murmurs, because the little thing’s eating like it’s the only meal he’s ever had. Dabi wonders what he ate last, when it was. He wishes he was prepared enough to give something other than shitty cereal.

He wishes he knew exactly who wasn’t making sure his omega was well fucking fed.

Katsuki blinks, bleary eyes hazy and clouded, and Dabi’s distracted by his anger’s flame before it even has the chance to ignite — the omega’s finished with his meal only seconds after he’d been given it, humming a soft content little sound to himself, holding his bowl in sweater-covered hands. He has to say his name a couple of times before foggy eyes look up at him.

“Katsuki?” he says, soft, like whispered glass, like his words could shatter the world. “Omega?”

A small mrrp, a soft purr of a noise. Katsuki blinks up at him.

Oh.

Oh.

He’s scent-drunk.

Really, Dabi should’ve expected that — the little thing’s clearly sheltered, clearly new to strangers and their unknown scents. Clearly not yet desensitised to being surrounded by an unknown alpha’s scent for long periods of time. But Dabi hasn’t slept in that bed for a long ass while, and he didn’t think there’d be enough of a scent there to cause such a strong reaction.

He sees it, now, what he failed to notice before, in his own haze of needing to provide — the way Katsuki’s eyes stay lidded, pupils blown, the way he keeps his face half buried in the sweater he’s wearing. The slowed movements in every action he makes.

Dabi exhales slow, schools his breathing — there’s a slight rumble in his chest, the need to bundle his omega back up in his scent, the scent that belongs on him, the scent that’ll keep away anyone as stupid to think they’re even remotely good enough to be near his Katsuki. There’s an urge there, a little itch in his brain: his Alpha’s growling, his omega is vulnerable and soft and needs to be protected.

It’s getting all the more difficult to ignore.

“Here, give that to me, love,” he takes the bowl from Katsuki’s small hands and places it on the table — he doesn’t want to move away, doesn’t want to leave his little thing unprotected while he’s so gentle. He’s trying to get ahold of his own head but that’s so fucking difficult, like this, with a scent like warm sugar mixing with the smell of smoke in the air like it could never belong anywhere else and with Katsuki curling his knees to his chest on sofa’s pillows much bigger than his little body, nuzzling his own nose into a sweater that Dabi remembers wearing only last week.

“You alright, sweetheart?”

He knows, rationally, that right now the best thing for Katsuki would be his nest, and not somewhere so unknown.

But, fuck, if that doesn’t put forth an image and a half: tiny little Katsuki, sprawled in his nest, comfortable and content and purring, maybe, flushed and red. Wearing one of Dabi’s sweatshirts, oversized on his little frame. Nothing else.

An omegan whine, a blatant call for an alpha — Dabi’s both knocked from his daydreams and simultaneously pushed further into them, and he watches Katsuki shuffle, watches his little nose wrinkle in discomfort, blurred eyes blinking at the room around him. Looking for something.

Dabi’s chest feels taut.

He sits down, on the same sofa, but at a reasonable distance. Katsuki doesn’t take that as an answer.

The little thing shuffles closer into to his side, foggy-eyed, cheeks stained with the most beautiful flush — Dabi doesn’t move, can’t move, can’t allow himself any form of reaction as the omega’s cheek comes into to contact with his shoulder. He knows, now, that if he even allowed a sliver of movement in his own body that he wouldn’t be able to control himself any further.

Katsuki rubs his jaw over the fabric of Dabi’s shirt, like a cat, like a kitten, gentle and almost loving and when light eyes drift shut, Dabi can almost convince himself that this is real.

And then he starts to purr.

God, it’s a fucking beautiful sound — a soft rumble, not quite as violent as Dabi’d thought it would be. Katsuki purrs, pretty mouth curved into a small simper, light eyes closed. He shuffles closer, curls into Dabi’s arm, nose pressed as high as it can be given the goddamn size difference that Dabi is determined to ignore, nuzzling into the soft fabric of Dabi’s shoulder.

The sweater he’s wearing rides up on curved hips — the skin exposed there is pale, a milky white, smooth and untouched. Dabi can’t resist the way his fingers immediately slip beneath the jumper’s hem, hesitant, careful: Katsuki’s purring increases tenfold, hips stilling from their movement the minute Dabi’s fingertips start to trace small patterns on his skin. His arm is so large as he gently drapes it over the omega’s back, hand so big on such a tiny frame, smoothing upwards and resting on the omega’s little waist, warm beneath the jumper’s fabric — his fingertips trace the edges of a soft stomach, the heel of his palm in the dip between waist and hip.

Small whines slip from Katsuki’s mouth — the little omega nuzzles further into Dabi’s shoulder, scent content and distinctly happy. Content.

And, fuck, Dabi knows it’s fake. He knows that this is merely instinct, merely a vulnerable omega reacting strongly to an alpha scent that it’s not used to, merely a call-out into the dark from a centuries old need for someone to be there.

But that doesn’t mean he can’t play pretend.

“I think I’d better get you home,” he murmurs, choking on the scent, the feeling. Fucking everything.

He doesn’t move.

Something stops him. The newfound warmth, the fire in the space between his rough ribs, the burn of his omega curling into his side — he doesn’t know which stops him, nor does he care; he doesn’t move. He recalls the omega’s fear yesterday, the adamancy of a determined I’m not going home. He thinks of a small nose burrowing into fire-cloaked clothes, of beat up sneakers on his dirty carpet and blood wiped softly from pale cheeks. He thinks of spiked hair and blushed skin and a gaze so bloody but so gentle.

He thinks of the omega curled at his side, and he thinks of home.

“Do you remember where you live?” he whispers, and Katsuki blinks up at him, and Dabi’s throat is tight.

The omega’s eyebrows furrow, and he nods, softly.

“Here, doll,” he’s being soft, he’s being careful, and when he shuffles a little to wriggle his phone from his pocket he takes extra caution not to jostle the little in omega beneath his arm. “Put it in here for me.”

Katsuki takes it, light eyes swimming with slow recognition. He wriggles, and Dabi’s hand continues its soft petting in the sliver of safe space it’s been granted — the small section between hip and waist, the one safe curve on a body lined with caution tape. His fingertips prickle and they feel electric, everything feels fucking electric — it’s burning, everything’s burning, and Dabi’s not used to feeling such warmth when he’s set alight. Not used to such softness when the world’s on fire.

“Good omega,” he murmurs, low, and the gentle chirp he gets in response, soft, quiet, like a cat, just makes his Alpha’s possessive growl louder in his skull. Katsuki taps out an address on the phone’s keyboard, making few mistakes, surprisingly — when he passes it back, his eyes are sparkling with excitement, Dabi thinks, or pride. Expectation.

“Good job, doll,” Dabi praises, and Katsuki purrs in contentment, settles back down to nuzzling the alpha’s shoulder.

With one hand, Dabi rubs soft circles into Katsuki’s hip — with the other, he examines the address he’s been given. Relatively nearby, a twenty minute drive, or so his map says. But he doesn’t recognise the area the omega lives in.

Huh. That’s… odd, for lack of a better word.

Dabi’s worked many a job — he’s fairly certain that he’s done the dirty work of every surrounding pack and even some further out than that: for Katsuki to live so close, yet still in a place that Dabi doesn’t have much of an understanding of, is unusual.

He doesn’t even know who’s territory it is that his omega’s living in.

He could ask, he supposes. But Katsuki doesn’t seem the most willing to open up even at the best of times, and he’s almost certain that he’d close himself off over this: he’s aware that the omega hadn’t wanted to go home, before, that he’d said he was running. He doubts he’d get any answers as to from who.

He hums, glancing away from his phone — when he flicks his gaze down, Katsuki’s eyes are already on his. They’re clearing, squinting up at him with flexing pupils.

“You back with me, love?” Dabi stills, Katsuki tenses, and, within seconds, the omega’s pushed himself away.

It’s a loss that Dabi mourns — the softness, the scent, the loving eyes. The closeness.

“What the fuck did you do to me?” Katsuki snaps, strained — a complete 180º from how he was just minutes before. Dabi’s Alpha rumbles in pleasant surprise and he can’t help his little huff of a laugh: it’s amusing, the distinct duality between rough and soft, violent and sweet, how Katsuki can flick between the two within seconds. Dabi can’t decide which Katsuki he likes more: the one that’ll purr, or the one that’ll roar?

He wonders which side Katsuki likes more.

“I didn’t do shit, doll,” he drawls, shifting backwards on the couch but staying seated, and hopes the smirk on his lips looks more like amusement rather than danger. “If I’d known that’d happen just because you spent the night in my den I’d’ve just let you sleep on the couch.”

“What—” blonde eyebrows furrow, his nose crinkles, and Dabi can still remember how soft the skin of his face is. “What happened?”

“Scent drunk, sweetheart.”

“The fuck is that?” Snapped anger, forced anger, defensive anger.

“They don’t teach you this crap in school?”

“Don’t exactly spend much time there.” Ah. Dabi can understand that.

“Too much alpha scent, probably,” he says, voice a little smoother, a little softer. A little more comforting, he hopes — he can’t remember the last time he spoke so carefully to someone, but he knows it’s necessary when coaxing a scared kitten from a corner. “If you’re not used to it that strong for that amount of time it can make your Omega drunk on it. Probably doesn’t help that you slept in it.”

Katsuki blinks, eyes wide — his face has lost its red flush, instead becoming pasty, pale. He’s quivering, softly, shaking in the shoulders with a tremble in his lips.

“You alright?” Dabi murmurs, resisting the urge to shuffle ever closer, to pull his omega in and keep him safe. To crumble the panic that he can see in such beautiful eyes. “It won’t do anything to you, you can stop looking like you’ve seen a damn ghost.”

But he doesn’t want to scare, and that’s the tricky thing — he can see the way Katsuki wants to move closer, can see the way he battles the Omega in his head. He wonders how easy it is for him to draw the line between instinct and conscious wants, to separate the animal and the human. The base desire and the real, true feelings.

“Take me—” Katsuki’s voice is quivering. “Take me fucking home.”

“Alright. If that’s what you want, doll,” Dabi replies, and his Alpha screams, and he wonders how well he could do that separation, too, if he tries. He’s never had to try before. “I’ll take you home. You got all your shit with you?”

“Um—” the omega’s fidgeting, small fingers toying with hems of the sweater he’s wearing — his hands are shaking, and his cheeks are still so pale, and Dabi’d give the world to make him feel safe again. “My clothes—”

“Don’t worry about those, love,” Dabi stands, cracks his stiff knuckles — when Katsuki makes to speak again, he waves a hand to stop him. “They’re covered in blood, doll. Keep what you’re wearing.”

The blond opens his mouth, closes it. Opens it again. Ultimately decides to keep quiet, nodding gently and standing. He looks unsure of himself, uncomfortable, like he doesn’t know what to do or how to behave or how to exist within this new space — he’s so different from when he first woke up. So different from last night.

Dabi aches, and his Alpha whines, and he’d rather die a thousand deaths than see Katsuki look uncomfortable in the place where he belongs.

The omega shuffles on his feet, twiddles his fingers. Dabi watches him — not very subtly, but he doesn’t care much — sees him sniff, wrinkle his nose, the little twitch in his lip. Sees him shove his hands into his pockets.

“My—” a pause, a breath, and all movement stilling. “My owl. Where’s my owl?”

No warning, no hesitation — Katsuki darts from the couch, sprinting back down the hall. Dabi’s Alpha whines in his head at the omega disappearing from sight, but that pathetic upset is very quickly overshadowed by a spike of protectiveness, anger, almost, at the pure panic he saw in his omega’s eyes. The spike of fear in his caramel scent, traces of rotten sugar and lingers of molten sweetness festering in the air in his wake.

He follows, careful not to get too close while Katsuki’s clearly distressed.

They end up in his bedroom. The sheets are still rumpled from the night before, there’s still a crease in the pillows Dabi hasn’t used in a long, long time — there’s something haunting about it, something satisfying, seeing a bed that he’s never had the stomach to live in being used by his omega.

The scent of him is all over the room, he can smell it clinging to his rumpled bedsheets — it’s warm, it’s comfortable, it’s home, it’s Katsuki.

And then his eyes fall on Katsuki, actually see Katsuki, rifling through the rumpled bedsheets, rooting under the pillows. He’s frantic, desperate, deranged, and his breaths slip out in panicked pants.

“You alright, doll?” Dabi calls, crossing his arms and leaning against the doorframe and aching to get fucking closer.

“No!” a cry, damn near a screech, and it sets Dabi’s Alpha off on a howl. “I can’t—”

“Hey,” Dabi’s jaw tightens, he takes a single step forward, and he’s talking so softly, so gently, like Katsuki’s an injured animal that he’s trying to coax from a corner. “Hey, c’mon, it’s alright, love.”

“I can’t find it—”

“What’ve you lost, sweetheart?” His head’s fucking aching, his jaws are burning, all his senses are alight and he has to keep his omega safe has to keep omega happy—

“My owl,” Katsuki’s hands tighten in the sheets — he’s shaking, more and more. “Her owl, I’ve lost her owl—”

“C’mere,” Dabi pushes from the door but resists the urge to touch, to coddle, to protect — his Alpha’s snarling in his head like it has something to fight, like his omega’s in danger. He wills it to shut the fuck up. “Sit down, love, let me have a look.”

He doesn’t know if Katsuki hears him, or if he drops of his own accord; the little thing slips to the floor, back against the bedframe, arms quivering as they curl around his knees. His breathing’s shallowed, croaky — and, dear God, his eyes. Those eyes, crystal red and glinting with a dim lamp’s light, shining with a film of unshed tears — they’re so strong, Dabi knows, he saw their fire only the night before.

He wonders what it is about this owl that makes it easy to shatter that.

Sure enough, without the panic, Dabi finds it quickly, nestled between two pillows. A little owl, carved intricately in dark stone. There’s so many details, so many ridges, and Dabi can’t resist running the pad of his finger over the feathers of its body — it’s so neat but so messy, at the same time, clearly carved by hand but clearly carved with care.

“Here,” he turns, holding it in his palm for Katsuki’s tear-stricken eyes to see. “This?”

“Yeah,” Katsuki breathes, and sucks in a breath, and a single tear falls. Dabi feels the pained whine in his skull like it’s knives on chalkboard. “Thank you.”

Dabi has a million questions he wants to ask, but he’s not sure he’d get answers to any of them — he wants to know where the owl came from, what it means, why it’s so precious. He wants to know what about its origin it is that made Katsuki so frightened to lose it.

With time, he thinks. He’ll learn with time. There’s no need to rush.

“That all you had with you?” he asks, Katsuki looks at him skeptical, but nods. “C’mon, then.”

He stands, and stays quiet.

He doesn’t speak even as Dabi leads him out of the apartment, and down to the car — he stares at his surroundings with the same critical eye as the night before, gaze lingering on the doors he passes and the wallpaper in its peeling spots. The dark stains in the carpet. When the elevator quivers on the way down he jumps, almost violently, twisting slightly to Dabi like he was expecting to fight.

Dabi can’t help but feel endeared, despite the distrust. His omega’s so perfect.

He leads him through the same path they did last night — a rough building, a broken car park. He opens his car door for Katsuki again and welcomes the mental purr when he slips in with no hesitation; his Alpha’s on a buzz, a high. It’s seen his omega in its most treasured territory, and that’s enough to add to the infatuation.

“Seatbelt, love,” Dabi murmurs, Katsuki doesn’t reply, but he follows the direction, and Dabi starts driving.

Katsuki’s breaths are still a little shaky, his eyes unfocused. He’s staring down at the little carving in his hands like it’s a lifeline — Dabi watches him from the corner of his eye. He seems to be calming, now, from the rollercoaster of feelings this morning, coming down from his emotional high, and Dabi wonder what it is he’s feeling, right this moment — is he afraid? Is he upset?

How much time will it take for him to be comfortable?

“Wait,” Katsuki lifts his head from the owl, eyes focusing on the road in front of him, blinking with furrowed brows. “Where are we going?”

“Home,” Dabi replies, eyes turned back to the windshield in an attempt to school his face into nonchalance — but he can’t quite shake the smile from his lips. “Where you told me to go, doll.”

“I didn’t tell you where I fucking live,” a snap, a curse, a reminiscence of the Katsuki that Dabi first met. The Katsuki that sparked Dabi’s fondness.

“While you were,” he waves a hand, doesn’t label the term after seeing the way the blond bristles, “You put your address in there, I’m just following where it tells me, see?”

“You’re—” light, firey eyes flick to the phone that Dabi’s got propped on the dash. “You’re actually taking me home.”

“Of course I am,” a chuckle, soft as he can make it. “Where else would I take you?”

Katsuki doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even look at him, but he does relax back into the passenger seat. Every now and then his eyes flick to check the satnav’s direction — Dabi props it up a little higher, where it’s easier to see from both of their perspectives. If he wants to get Katsuki back with him again, he has to keep the omega’s trust, above everything else.

He doesn’t think Katsuki has many people he can trust.

“That’s never happened to me before,” Katsuki whispers, eyebrows furrowed, a pretty little pout on his lips. “Scent drunk.”

“Not around many alphas?”

“Almost everyone in my fucking life is an alpha,” the omega scowls.

“Hm.” Dabi’s Alpha’s built up its slow growl, again, the fucking thing. “Could just be a one-off thing, doll, I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“I’m not worrying,” Katsuki snaps, but hesitates, softens his tone, and Dabi nearly grins. “Just— felt weird.”

And Dabi gets that, he does: he knows the feeling of succumbing to instincts that don’t even feel like they’re yours, knows what it’s like to have every thought seem as though it’s swimming through something thick and heavy. Knows the fear that stems from losing control over the only things you can control.

They travel in silence, after that, with no noise other than the quiet hum of the car’s engine and the occasional huff of breath from the little omega. Katsuki seems to have decided that Dabi’s not a threat, that Dabi won’t hurt him: his posture is relaxed, fingertip tracing little shapes on the fabric of his knee, eyes still partly lidded. Every now and then he’ll sigh to himself, softly, and gaze out the window, or flick his eyes back to check the map.

He doesn’t make any move to speak, so Dabi doesn’t push him into it.

The area they travel into is… weird. Almost recognisable, teetering on the edge of known. A ghost town kept in pristine condition, almost like a damn ornament: there’s no blemishes on the pavement, no cracks in the road. Every house is a carbon copy of the one before it: the same white-painted doors with the same glass patterns, the same stone pathways, the same hedges cut to the same size.

And when he reaches the destination marked in his phone, it’s the same.

Painted white and pristinely clean — a thin house among a row of thin houses, kept neat and tidy. Soulless, almost, with no special kind of decoration or care. It’s difficult to believe someone as vibrant as his Katsuki lives here.

He checks the map again — that’s definitely Katsuki’s address.

Movement, in the corner of his eye: a flash of red, the outline of someone stood outside of his omega’s home. His Alpha picks up its possessive snarls, again, and he doesn’t attempt to quiet it down.

“There’s someone at your door,” he says, low, careful, the hint of a protective growl there — he feels his fists tighten on his steering wheel, knuckles flushing white, and tries to school his breathing into something calmer.

“What?” the omega’s head flicks upwards, a flash of vivid panic in those pretty little eyes of his, and he cranes his neck to see out of the window.

Before laughing a second later.

“Oh,” he snorts, relaxing back into his seat — his eyes look amused, but Dabi sees the way they flicker, tired. “That’s just Kirishima.”

“Kirishima?”

“I went to high school with him,” the omega’s head falls back against his seat. “He lives down the street.”

The car doesn’t move. If Katsuki can smell the possessive tinge in Dabi’s scent, he doesn’t comment on it — he does look at him, though, for the first time in their journey, flicks his eyes to the side and narrows them.

“He’s harmless,” he says, hard. “Literally a fuckin’ puppy in human form.”

“An alpha?” Definitely a growl in there, this time.

“Don’t even fucking start with that dumbass alpha bullshit,” light eyes roll, glare — Dabi’s Alpha preens at the attention of them piercing him, even when they look so irritated. “We met fuckin’ yesterday, keep your dick in line.”

“You slept in my den and are now covered in my scent.” Not quite a snap, but not exactly the softest he’s ever been — he doesn’t find himself regretting it, when Katsuki’s eyebrows raise, when those prety eyes of his glint with amusement. “Give me a little bit of damn credit, doll, it’s just instinct.”

It’s not just instinct — Katsuki is his omega. His. And the thought of any other insignificant piece of shit touching what’s his makes his gums ache. His fists tighten again. He’ll break the fucking steering wheel, if he’s not careful.

“So, what, the omega gets ‘scent drunk’ and the alpha goes all apeshit and protective?”

“Not exactly apeshit, am I?”

“Your scent says otherwise, smartass.” Amusement. Amusement, amusement, amusement — Katsuki’s entertained, dare he say happy, in his presence. Comfortable, at least a little.

Dabi grins.

“Katsuki!” A new voice, belonging to the alpha at Katsuki’s door — it’s high, whiny, annoying. It makes him want to fucking hit something. He’s stalking over, and Dabi can see him, now; all tall, broad, hair dyed a vivid red. A fucking eyesore.

“Shit,” Katsuki looks tired, rolling down his window. If he sees Dabi’s twitching lips, the fangs he barely conceals, he doesn’t mention it.

The alpha appears at the side of the car, hands tightening over the bottom of the window — his claws are elongated. Closer, now, Dabi can see finer details — he’s young, he notices, maybe Katsuki’s age, with tanned skin, a splash of freckles. An alpha’s jawline, sharp and hard and set with a permanent kind of tension. Dabi doesn’t have to look at his eyes to know that they’re drilling holes in his head.

He turns his gaze out to the front, drums tight hands on the wheel in an effort to seem calm.

“Where were you, Kats?” God, he’s so irritating. “And who the hell is this?”

“No one, Kirishima,” Katsuki snaps, but it’s aggressive — Dabi wants to smirk, grin in pride, be smug. “And I told you not to fucking call me that.”

The alpha’s hands clench — those fucking claws of his dig into the casing on Dabi’s car door, and blue eyes flick to the side. His Alpha grates its teeth on the lining of his skull, snarls its way into attention behind his eyes. It sees territory, it sees damage, it sees threatening claws on threatening hands and a threatening mouth coming too close to his omega for fucking comfort—

“You wanna get the fuck away from my car, kid?” he growls, snarls, snaps with tension in steadily growing fangs. He can feel his head clouding and it’s weird, it’s so weird — it’s fucking scary, allowing his Alpha to just take over in a way that it hasn’t been permitted to in so long.

“You wanna tell me why the fuck Katsuki’s in your car?” the kid’s entire maw of teeth are built like damn knives, unlike Dabi’s set of only four sharp canines — when he bears them, it’s ferocious. It’d be horrifying, to anyone else. 

“Get. The fuck. Off my car,” Dabi snarls, and it’s strangled in the effort to keep himself contained. He doesn’t remember the last time he had to hold back quite so much. “Before I fucking make you.”

The alpha snarls at him, squares his shoulders, pushes out more of his scent and it’s angry, a blatant challenge — and that’s grounding. That’s familiar. That, surprisingly, makes it quite easy to find his own rationale through the haze of protect protect protect clouding his idiotic alphan brain.

He releases his grip on his car’s wheel, slumps shoulders that he didn’t even know were tensed.

“Jesus fuck,” he groans, rubs at his temple a little — he hasn’t reacted that strongly to an alpha’s blatant challenge in a long, long time, and his head aches at the foul atmosphere and the foul instinct and the foul scent that’s now invading his damn car.

“I hate alphas. More than fuckin’ anything,” Katsuki’s got his face in his hands, his feet on Dabi’s passenger seat. His knees knock together and they’re trembling, gently, almost unnoticeably — Dabi wants to put his hand there, to touch him, to comfort him, to keep him safe. Wants to bundle him up in more of the clothing from his own closet and take him back home, where he fucking should be, where he’s protected.

“You and me both, doll,” he mutters, subtly but not-so-subtly pushing out a scent distinctly calm, keeping his wrist close to his omega, in an effort to keep him comfortable. In an effort to show that he’s nothing like the immature twat clinging to his door. “Tell your friend to stop stinking up my car.”

“I can hear you.”

God, everything was going so fucking well until this prick showed up.

“Oh yeah?” Dabi’s teeth clash, and his jaw aches, and his head pounds. “Then fuck off, kid. I don’t need my seats reeking of some possessive little brat all day, I got shit to do.”

“Not until you tell me why the hell—”

“Kirishima!” Katsuki, this time, his voice loud and his eyes wild — gorgeous eyes, made even fucking prettier by the way they burn. “For fuck’s sake!”

The alpha looks like a kicked puppy. Dabi almost feels sorry for him when he stammers, pleads, “Kats—”

Almost.

“Fuck off,” Katsuki spits, but softens his tone. “Just— Just for a second. I’m already coming home, I don’t need your bullshit on top of that. Go wait for me, I’ll be out in a sec.”

His voice cracks, breaks in its anger for a single moment, and Dabi’s Alpha’s attention is refocused back to where it should be — Dabi releases more of a calming scent, easy to enforce in the car’s small space.

The alpha’s eyes flick to him, to Katsuki, back to him. They look hurt, and Dabi relishes in their pain. “Fine.”

When he stalks away, Dabi fights the urge wave him off.

“Don’t look so smug,” Katsuki murmurs — quieter than he was, softer, with a level to his tone that just wasn’t there before. “I just need a break.”

“Me? I’m not smug,” Dabi replies, but his lips still curl into a smirk that he can’t quite will away.

“Yeah yeah,” Katsuki’s eyes roll. “We’re just taking a minute. You haven’t won anything.”

“Just taking a minute,” he says, nods — and then, louder, “but this totally means I won,” he yells, grins, lets his fangs show, and the alpha lets out a loud snarl from where he’s pacing back and forth on the pavement.

Katsuki rolls his eyes again, and he snorts. He elbows Dabi in the side, not particularly gently — all anger is forgotten, all annoyance, Dabi’s feeling so fucking fond and so fucking soft.

God, his omega’s fucking perfect.

“You’re not funny,” the omega mutters, but the twitch in his lips is telling.

“I’m hilarious, sweetheart,” is the snarked response, the affectionate response. “Riling up an alpha that can’t rein in their own fuckin’ instincts is part of the fun of life, don’t you think?”

Katsuki hums, twiddles his fingers and toys with the owl on his lap. He looks like he’s in thought, and there’s a comfortable quiet for a few moments that Dabi doesn’t dare to break, lest he shatter this contented atmosphere lain over them.

“Thank you—” Katsuki starts, cautionary, “for not—” he waves a hand in the air, “Y’know. Rising to the challenge, ’n’ shit.”

“Of course. Got better things to do than entertain some annoying alpha brat.”

“Hm. Didn’t think alphas had that much self control,” Katsuki huffs, half a laugh and half annoyance. Dabi hums, there’s a pause, but Katsuki speaks again. “He’s like an overbearing mother.”

“Mm. He’s immature. Most alphas are ’til they reach an age where they don’t even count as alphas,” Dabi’s eyes flick to the side again, to Katsuki, who seems significantly calmer than he was before but no less nervous. “You good, doll?”

“I just—” a moment’s hesitation, “I just need another minute.”

“Rough home?”

“You could say that.”

He looks tired, exhausted — Dabi gets that, understands the bliss yet the deep-rooted fatigue, the somehow both immensely freeing and achingly caging feeling that comes with an attempted runaway. The burst of suddenly feeling like you can finally fly and the halting remembrance that, at some point, you’ll have to go crawling right back to where you came from.

He wonders, again, what Katsuki ran from.

There’s a kind of burn there — it’s nothing less than possessive if Dabi’s being blunt, ‘protective’ if he’s trying to maintain a little bit of dignity. He doesn’t want to unlock the car, doesn’t want to send the little thing back off into the damn snake pit, with alphas he doesn’t know and a house he doesn’t know and scents that aren’t fucking his.

This is his omega. His Katsuki.

And nothing will ever harm his Katsuki again.

“Here,” he drawls, carefully nonchalant, plucking the small scrap of paper that was conveniently sitting in his car’s centre. “Take this.”

“The fuck?” Katsuki cocks a brow, watches the alpha scribble the digits of his current phone number — he doesn’t stick to one phone for long, but he’d keep this one to his damn grave if it meant giving Katsuki someone to contact.

“Just in case.”

“Just in case?”

“If anything happens,” Dabi holds the paper up, pinched between two fingers. “Anything at all, I want to know about it. You’ve got a place to stay that no one knows about, so— don’t run around at night alone again.”

Katsuki blinks at him: once, twice. His eyebrows furrow, his nose wrinkles — those eyes of his flick up to Dabi’s face, back down to the paper scrap.

“I can come back?” he sounds skeptical.

“Whenever you want, doll,” Dabi purrs, and he’s grinning again, and he can only hope that it doesn’t come across as intimidating. “Hell, every damn night if you need it. Just give me a text, or call, or whatever. I’ll come grab you. But don’t go so far alone again.”

There’s a few moments of silence.

“I can—” Less skeptical, now, more shocked. Disbelieving. “I can come back?”

“Of course,” Dabi’s voice is low, and Katsuki takes the paper from Dabi’s hand, slowly, like a deer approaching a wolf. “I just said, didn’t I? Just drop me a text. I’ll swing by and pick you up, don’t want you out on your own. ‘Specially at night.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why would you do that for me?” Katsuki murmurs, eyes still fixed on the paper scrap, and Dabi doesn’t breathe, “You don’t even know me.”

Ah. The million-dollar question.

Dabi hums, settles on a, “Just wanna keep you safe, doll.” and hopes that isn’t too see-through.

Katsuki eyes him, careful, contemplating — Dabi meets his gaze head-on, and when their eyes lock it feels like a challenge. It feels like carnage. It feels like both a tiptoe and a massacre and Dabi’s craving the violence it promises.

The omega’s lips quirk, and those bloody eyes flicker with amusement.

“Oh,” he smirks, all wolfish and mocking and beautiful. “So you really are just a dumbass alpha.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” faux upset, faux offence. Dabi snarks, and they’re back to their toying game, their song and dance of careful teasing. “That a problem?”

“No.” A pause. “Gets me a free bed.”

“And food.”

The omega lets out a loud snort, “That shit was not food.”

“It was edible, wasn’t it?”

“It was garbage.”

“Tch,” Dabi rolls his eyes to the ceiling, leans his head back against his seat. “Ungrateful omega.”

Katsuki huffs, “Shitty alpha.”

Dabi hums, smiles, reaches over to pluck his number from Katsuki’s grip, “I guess you won’t be wanting this, then.”

“Hey!” A flash of panic, a flair of upset. “No.”

Katsuki dives to grab the paper from Dabi’s hand again, and Dabi lets him — his eyes are wide, a beautiful red, and Dabi’s feeling so fond, so soft. It’s odd, to feel so completely at ease with another person’s jabs, to have that tantalising atmosphere of comfort in someone’s presence.

He’s so fucking affectionate in his brittle fucking ribs that he almost chokes on it — and he doesn’t even think he’d mind much if he did.

He wonders if Katsuki can feel it, too.

“You should probably head out, doll,” he murmurs, and it’s quiet, low. “That alpha of yours is giving me one hell of a death glare.”

“He’s not my fucking alpha,” Katsuki responds, scowling, fiddling with the paper on his lap.

Dabi snorts, “Does he know that?”

“Whatever,” the omega’s eyes roll again, but it’s halfhearted, and the way he fiddles with his fingers seems distinctly nervous, shy. It’s endearing. “You’re sure you don’t mind if I stay with you again?”

“’Course not.” I’d rather you stayed with me always, but we’ll make do for now.

“Could I—” he hesitates, briefly, chewing his bottom lip between his teeth. “Could I come back tonight?”

Perfect.

“I said whenever, didn’t I?” he replies, smooth, fighting the urge to grin, to purr, to praise, “Sure, doll. Let me know when to come get you.”

“Yeah. Um.” Katsuki’s more awkward now, but that’s alright — he places a hand on the door’s handle, but doesn’t open it yet. “See you later, I guess.”

And that hesitation is what sets Dabi alight, that disappointment — that physical proof of something in eyes distinctly tentative, disheartened. The physical proof of the way his omega doesn’t want to leave his side.

His Alpha’s purring, and he doesn’t quieten it.

“Until tonight, sweetheart,” he murmurs, and it’s intimate, the air that falls over them.

Katsuki smiles, gently, and that’s intimate too — when he leaves the car, he takes all the warm air and oxygen with him.

Dabi’s never felt this way before, never been so compelled by another person — it’s exciting, terrifying, the exquisite burn of holding a cocked gun to his own head and giving another person control over the trigger. Katsuki’s left his side and with it he’s left Dabi feeling so empty.

It’s scary. It’s so very scary.

But as he drives away, he sees Katsuki in his rearview mirror, taking out his phone, holding Dabi’s flimsy bit of paper next to it.

And Dabi grins.

Because, yeah, nothing else could ever matter at all — the danger, the distance, nothing, not when his Katsuki is smiling like that.

When his Katsuki is smiling, Dabi feels at home.

Chapter Text

Until tonight, sweetheart.

And Katsuki breathes, for the first time that morning.

He watches the car as it pulls away, a slip of crinkled paper pinched between his forefinger and thumb, and the heat in his face creeps up on him — it’s embarrassing, the ridiculous flush he feels despite the cold, but he really can’t find it in himself to care. His thoughts stay plagued by eyes like ice and the twinges they hold, low-lidded expressions on a face unknown yet familiar, rough hands on a steering wheel and the gentle press of fingertips on his cheek, his jaw, his neck— 

“Who was that?”

Katsuki blinks. Schools his lips into a scowl to chase away the warmth, wrinkles his nose to feign irritation. The piece of paper is shoved into his pocket.

“Someone,” he says. And that’s that. He files away his Omega’s complaints at the flippancy, the dumb thing’s overwhelming urge for publicity, for a claim, for possession. It bounds around in the base of his skull like an overexcited hare, all chirps and flutters and ridiculous instinct, ridiculous daydreams, of candied canines and a red tongue, large hands and messy hair and light skin. It fills him with thoughts of strength, and protection, and some other stupid clichés that it demands he take notice of.

“Who?”

And through those thoughts there’s a haze — a fog, a blurred flicker of memories that he can’t quite manoeuvre through. Like walking through thick syrup his head takes him down a path that reads like a dream but presents itself like a memory.

He wonders if he dreamt the feel of fingertips on his hipbones. Wonders if it’s normal to still feel the touch hours later. 

“Just some guy, Kirishima,” he snaps, but it’s half-assed and distracted and later than it should’ve been, and he knows Kirishima notices for the way those red eyes burn, “Chill your shit.”

“I don’t trust him at all,” the alpha’s growling. It’s weird, it doesn’t sound right from a sunshine voice-box, and Katsuki doesn’t like it, nor the way his scent swirls, an odd mix of wet mud and heavy earth — pleasant in the way that petrichor can be but not nearly as blanketing when it’s so violent. “I hate him.”

“Shock horror,” he drawls, eyes down on the pavement and nose inches away from the collar of a hoodie that isn’t his — there’s smoke stuck there, burning wood and tobacco and fire, and he hates the way he wants it closer. “You’re fuckin’ amazing at hiding it.”

“What did you expect, Kat?” Kirishima’s voice shocks him with its aggression — it’s so different to Dabi’s low snarls, the roughness in this growl. “You show up randomly at like ten in the morning, after radio silence the whole damn night with some strange alpha that looks like— like that— and— holy shit you aren’t even wearing your own clothes— and, what, you expect me to just— be okay with it?”

Katsuki blinks. Once, twice, another with furrowed brows and a twitched nose, and he turns his head to look Kirishima in the eyes for the first real time — the alpha’s looking at him like he’s grown a second head, like he’s insane, and the panic in his voice makes Katsuki’s heart twinge, just a smidge.

“Don’t call me that,” he whispers, and it sounds like something pitiful. An apology, maybe, if he had enough empathy in him to paint it that way.

“Where did you go last night?” Kirishima’s eyes are desperate. Katsuki looks away from them, they’re too emotive.

“Out.” Out. Dark streets and dark eyes and dark bedsheets.

“Out where?”

“I don’t fucking know, Kirishima, I just ran— what is this, a fucking interrogation?” Comfort, and warmth, and the scent of fire.

“Yes!” the alpha’s voice is shrill, his hands all over the place and so expressive. “Katsuki, you fucking reek, that disgusting fucking scent is all over you!”

“Lay off, Kirishima.” Safety. Safety.

And Katsuki can’t take it, not really — the way that tone is so confused, so hurt, so stupidly sick with worry. A child before all else, he shows his colours, shows his teeth, shows his inability to handle the guilt with the way he aches for ignorance — and he turns away. He turns on his heel and walks with a high head across an old garden pathway and Kirishima follows him, because Kirishima always follows him, even when following hurts. 

Kirishima steps on the crack in the tile that he knows Katsuki avoids from the first time he tripped running across it, Kirishima kicks a fluffed dandelion even with the knowledge that they were Katsuki’s mother’s favourite. And Kirishima knows him. Knows the shake in his bony hands when they push keys into the rusted lock of an old door that both of its users are too tired to replace, knows how they linger over the carved owl in the frame, the hidden intricacy.

Knows that entering here means quiet. Means sneaking. Means secrets.

“Who is he and when did you meet him?” his voice is quieter now, because he knows it has to be, but no more calm. The squeak of Katsuki’s front door hinge is louder than him, but it’s equally as jarring. “How did you meet him?”

“Just a guy I met last night,” Katsuki says, tired, quiet, prickling with a kind of fear that he doesn’t let himself feel anymore. “He helped me out.”

He leaves the door open, barely, to save the click. Kirishima knows not to comment on it.

“What the fuck?” a hiss, low, disturbing the air’s dust in a dark hallway and barely the same volume as the creak in the bottom stair when Katsuki presses his foot onto it. “So we just go and pick up random alphas off the street now?”

“For fuck’s sake—” it’s whispered, but it still conveys the frustration.

“Did he do that to your face?”

“You know he fucking didn’t.” They’re halfway up the stairs, now. Katsuki can hear the sound of an old film that he knows is on repeat through a shut door at their peak. “Calm your shit, you’re being irrational.”

“Oh my God, did you have sex with him?” rough eyebrows furrow. “Is that why you’re wearing his clothes?”

“What? No.” The top of the stairs. Soft fingers against a carving in the banister, hidden on the underside — a fox, this time. “Jesus fuck, Kirishima, I really don’t fucking need this.”

“I was up all fucking night worrying about you,” Kirishima’s face twists with his snarl, in a way Katsuki can’t read, his eyes blur into something mean, something heady, lips curled to bite and sharp teeth only a guise for what slips through them. “And you were out, what, spreading your legs for the first available knot?”

Too far. Too far. Too far — and he knows it’s too far, Katsuki can see it in his dumb fucking face, but he’s nothing if not ostentatiously stubborn and, God, all he wants is a fucking reaction. Katsuki curses him for knowing exactly how to get one.

Within a second, he’s whirled around — hands on Kirishima’s throat feel pathetically natural, pathetically calming. He can feel the rhythm of alpha’s pulse at his fingertips and he squeezes, with both hands, hard enough to hurt but not to do damage. The same as always, the same scene they’ve replayed a thousand times — in the park, at Kirishima’s front door, at the top of Katsuki’s stairs next to an old fox carving that he’s not seen years but has mapped with his fingertips.

“Kirishima, lay the fuck off of me for once in your fucking life,” he spits. Beneath his nose, he smells smoke.

“No,” Kirishima says, whispers slightly ruffled by the pressure on his neck, but no less emotive. His hands find Katsuki’s wrists. Katsuki can still feel Dabi’s fingers there. “No. You don’t get to do this. You’re self-destructive as all hell and usually it’s manageable, whatever, but I can’t keep letting you run off alone if you’re gonna be doing shit like this, Katsuki! It’s like you’re begging for something bad to happen!”

“Can’t ‘let me off alone’?” Katsuki curls his lips over pathetic omegan fangs, and the worlds bleed into the air, and he knows, deep down, that they’re not meant. But they still sting. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

“I’m your friend, Kats, and your pack alpha.”

They stare for a moment, an unstoppable force and its immovable opponent, red on red and noses scrunched. They’re close enough that their breaths mix, that Katsuki can see the fleck of a scar on Kirishima’s eyebrow.

When red eyelashes flutter, he pushes away.

“It’s my responsibility to keep you safe,” Kirishima says, and it sounds tired. It’s quieter. Katsuki ignores him — his Omega’s picked up a low mix between a growl and a purr, its need for a pack but its overwhelming possession over its newfound safety causing conflicting instincts. He’s getting a headache.

“I told you I don’t want shit to do with any pack,” he spits, but he still holds his bedroom door open for Kirishima to slip through. Still lets him sit on the chest of drawers in the corner. “I’m not your responsibility, Kirishima.”

The alpha takes a moment, cross-legged on the wood — it’s a picture that Katsuki can’t help but second glance at, the normality of the image there. He wonders if there’s another life where he exists without the tension in his brows, without the hushed voice; he puts his fingers to his temples to rub in small circles, and Katsuki dreams of another universe where he doesn’t have to.

Where Katsuki doesn’t need to run. Where Katsuki accepts the bite of a pack that loves him. Where Katsuki meets an alpha with blue eyes and dark intentions and doesn’t let his childish craving for security dictate his actions. 

Katsuki dreams. But he’s not deluded.

“Yes, you are—” Kirishima starts, voice shaking, scuffed sneakers scratching chipped paint as he looks up from his perch. He blinks. “What are you doing?”

Katsuki doesn’t pause. He tosses the only two backpacks he owns onto his bed, wide open, and Kirishima watches as though he’s afraid.

They aren’t in an another life. They’re in this one, and in this one, Katsuki runs.

“Packing,” he says, and the world breathes a finally.

“Why?”

“Why do you fucking think?” He doesn’t own many clothes that he cares about — he shoves them all down into tightly crumpled balls, and manages to fill a single bag. “I’m not staying in this shitty ass house for any night I don’t have to. Not after yesterday.”

“So where are you staying?”

“The moon.”

“Oh my God. You’re going back to that alpha.” Katsuki doesn’t turn. He doesn’t think he could bear to see Kirishima’s eyes when his voice sounds that scared. “You’re going back. Jesus fuck, Kats.”

“I just need somewhere to hide for a few days.” In his other backpack, he’s more delicate. “He said he’d keep me safe.”

A rolled handmade canvas that contains a set of chisels. A couple of carvings, forever unfinished. A leather-bound notebook, buttoned to keep it closed, and the cracked ballpoint pen he stole from his mother’s office when he was younger.

“Of course he did, he wants you to trust him! Why are you being so naive? This isn’t like you at all.”

“I can trust him.” A poetry book, with a pressed cornelia flattened on his favourite page. 

“You don’t know that. What will you do if he’s some kind of— of rapist? Or someone who makes money off of sad little omegas with nowhere to go? What will you do if he takes you somewhere really, really bad?”

Katsuki’s delicate with the things he treasures. Gentle. Everything is placed neat and orderly and packed.

He thinks he’s a little tired.

“And what will I do if I stay here, Kirishima?” he whispers, but it’s loud, and he’s still holding his mother’s poetry book and its pressed cornelia, still staring down at his mother’s set of chisels, still wishing on the carved owl in his pocket. When he meets Kirishima’s eyes, they blur. “Wait for Chisaki to decide that dad has more taxes to pay? Wait until he decides that just taking his omega son for a test-drive isn’t fucking good enough?”

“Katsuki,” Kirishima’s voice is softer, now. 

And oh, Katsuki thinks. Oh. He’s crying.

“Fuck,” he laughs, once, wet and fake and pained, “Do I wait until I go into my first heat? I’m a sitting fucking duck here, and if I stay, it’ll only get fucking worse — maybe if I take this damn escape route while it’s open I’ll finally be able to go a single fucking night without having to run away into different territory just to feel safe.” 

“Why can’t you just come stay with the pack?” Kirishima’s voice cracks. Katsuki’s heart cracks with it.

Oh, again. Oh. They’re both crying.

“Because that went so well last time,” he turns back to his bags, tucks his mother’s cornelia-holding poems beneath the journal he uses to analyse them, “I’m not a part of that pack. And I never fucking will be.”

“I can convince them,” the alpha pleads, and it’s just as pathetic as it is hurt. The both know it’s delusional — the both flinch. “It was a misunderstanding, Kats, they know that.”

Katsuki scoffs. He only wipes his eyes away after a drop lands on the half-finished face of a wooden horse.

“Katsuki, please. I can’t just— let this happen. What if something awful happens to you?”

There’s quiet, for a moment. Katsuki takes a second to school his breaths and his eyes and his mind without letting Kirishima see his face — he knows Kirishima does the same, knows he’s picking at the skin around his fingernails in an anxious habit that he’s never shaken. And he thinks it’s unfair that they have to be this way, always tiptoeing over cracked ice, always dangling on the faces of cliffs they didn’t want to climb in the first place with raw hands and raw fingers and raw fucking hurt.

Katsuki thinks, for all Kirishima’s stupidity and all his stubbornness and all his idiotic snaps, that he deserves something good. 

Katsuki thinks, for all his own tragedy, he will never be Kirishima’s something good.

“My Omega trusts him,” he whispers, and the breath he hears is sharp. “And that little shit doesn’t trust fucking anyone ‘cept you.”

Kirishima stays quiet.

“He could be a dick. But he could be fucking fine,” Katsuki continues, zipping both of his bags as far as they will go. It feels like finality. “I’m willing to take this risk more than I’m willing to stick around here and wait for Chisaki to decide he’s done playing games.”

“Kats.” God, Kirishima sounds so tired, and Katsuki hates himself for putting that look there. “That guy looks insane. Like— like he kills people for a living. Or for the damn fun of it. His knuckles were split open.”

“He probably does,” Katsuki chuckles, weakly, an attempt at humour through the guilt he feels twisting at his ribs, and it’s worth it for the way the alpha’s lips twitch. Just once. But it’s familiar. “I don’t care. He promised he’d protect me, and I believe him.”

“He could hurt you,” Kirishima hops down from the drawers, words saying he wants to argue more but tone saying he knows there’s no point. “Claim you, or— I don’t know, kidnap you—”

“He’s already had the chance.” And this feels more normal, now, them in Katsuki’s bedroom pointedly ignoring its scenery but basking in its familiarity. Raw, emotive, they bleed and they bleed and they do it so much and so often that they can’t even tell whose blood is smearing who anymore. “If he wanted to do anything like that he’d have fuckin’ done it last night. Or this morning. I slept in his den, Kirishima, ’n’ he didn’t do shit to me, he just brought me home.”

“What? Kat—”

“If I get even a hint that shit’s going south, I’ll split,” Katsuki promises, and it’s not a lie. “I’ll call you immediately and I’ll come back, or find somewhere else to hide or some shit, whatever, the point is I’ll leave.”

“Katsuki,” Kirishima’s hands find his wrists, again, gentle enough that they’re so light but with enough impact to bruise — his fingers are thicker than Katsuki’s and twice as rough, calloused and hardened and not the way an eighteen year old’s hands should be.

“I can’t stay here.” He doesn’t fight their touch. Doesn’t fight when those fingers slip through the gaps of his own. “I won’t stay here.”

Kirishima’s quiet, for a moment. Intimacy, in its finest hours — two boys, hurt and scarred and still bleeding, holding each others hands like the minute they stop they’ll lose each other. 

“What’re you gonna tell your dad?” he whispers, eyes careful and quiet and sympathetic, because he knows.

“I’m not telling him shit,” Katsuki’s eyes close. “And neither are you. He knew what he was signing up for with me the minute he chose to sit by and fucking watch.”

And that’s enough of the affection. Enough of the touch. Katsuki’s a frame built with fragile woodwork and the rough callouses of familiar hands are too much for a softwood sculpture that’s already splintering, sometimes. 

Katsuki pulls his hands away, and Kirishima doesn’t penalise him for it.

“Okay,” he says.

“Okay?”

“Okay I won’t argue with you anymore.” He picks up the bag of Katsuki’s clothes and slings it onto his shoulder without asking if it’s needed — because he knows, he always knows. “But I want to know you’re alright. At least once a day. At least. Please. And you need to leave the minute you feel even slightly off. And I want to see you regularly, alone.”

“Sure,” Katsuki says. He holds the bedroom door open for Kirishima to slip through, for the second time. “It’s not permanent, anyway. Just ’till I can sort shit out myself.”

“Alright, Kats.”

There’s quiet, again. The stairs are in view, they don’t approach them yet.

“Thank you, Ei,” Katsuki whispers. Gentle, soft, he downturns his eyes to a floor that doesn’t welcome them.

“Of course, Kats,” Kirishima replies, just as soft, twice as gentle. He’s always been better at care. “I’ve always got you, man, you know that.”

Katsuki nods, because he does.

Kirishima hums. “Is he gonna come pick you up?” he asks, and they both ignore the grit to his teeth the tense line at his temple.

“Yeah. I think. Maybe. I haven’t asked.” Katsuki’s eyebrows furrow, he slings his backpack further onto his shoulder to pull out his phone. It’s an old thing, his mother’s old one — there’s a crack about halfway down, jagged and horizontal, that distorts his reflection in its face. He runs the pad of his thumb across it, maps it like it’s one of his favourite carvings.

With it, a crumpled slip of paper. The squeaky kind that says it’s some faded receipt, but Katsuki can’t make out the words — on the back, scrawled in surprisingly neat pencil, is Dabi’s phone number.

Katsuki’s Omega purrs at him. He doesn’t quieten it. Beneath his nose, the scent of a forest fire rages — it’s warm and it’s intense and it stings his nose when he inhales too hard, but it’s so fucking comforting, so much more than any alpha scent he’s known before. 

when can u come get me? is all he types. They’ve stood on the landing for too long — and Kirishima doesn’t say anything when Katsuki starts forward, just skips the creaky floorboard with practiced movements, hums lightly under his breath as his friend runs the pad of his finger along the hidden fox indents, keeps his feet to the sides of the top step.

Katsuki holds his breath. Halfway down the staircase, he lets it go.

He’s still not quiet enough.

“You’re leaving?”

He stops. Kirishima’s hum skips a beat before it silences.

And, God, if Katsuki didn’t know any better, he’d think his father sounds worried.

Inhaling through his nose, he turns to face Masaru Bakugou in all his glory — clad in a neatly pressed pastel t-shirt and light slacks, he looks composed, pristine, but Katsuki knows better. There’s scratches on his neck, raw and red and puffed, where he’s clawed at the patches stuck to his scent glands; he’s anxious. His fingers have that nervous twitch that says he’s desperate for his next fix.

“Yeah,” Katsuki says. The whites of his eyes are riddled with red, bloodshot and irrational and clawing with desperation — they’ve been that way for a while. Katsuki can’t remember when they changed.

“Again?” 

“Yeah.” Because it’s that simple.

“You’ve packed a bag.” Thick brows furrow. Katsuki wrinkles his nose, watches his father’s gaze flick down his clothes, and his bags, and Kirishima’s nervous shuffles.

“Great fuckin’ observation,” Katsuki drawls — Masaru’s lips twitch, showing his teeth for a fraction of a second, and there’s this awkward tension in the air that betrays the way neither knows what to say. 

His phone pings but he doesn’t check it, instead he feigns nonchalance, pretends the sight of dear old dad doesn’t make him feel violently sick to his stomach. There’s the urge to crawl in on himself, to bury his head down and curl his body around it like that’ll keep him safe — he knows it won’t. He tries anyway.

“Where are you going?” Masaru steps down one level, doesn’t take the care to silence the creak. Katsuki flinches, they all pretend he doesn’t. They all pretend a lot of things.

Kirishima looks uncomfortable.

“As if I’d tell you.”

“I’d like to know where my son is disappearing to for whole nights, Katsuki.” And there’s that tone, from a voice with no love and eyes with no care — he wonders when his father’s voice became intolerable, when the grit that dances in its harsh fear began to evoke such distaste. 

Where Masaru is afraid, Katsuki is terrified. Where Masaru lands himself in trouble, Katsuki pays the price.

“Why? So you can let your little gang know where to find me?”

The scathe hits its mark. His father steps forwards again, a couple of steps this time, and he’s a lot closer to them now, all deep-set frowns behind weathered skin and wiry little eyes narrowed. 

“Katsuki—” he starts, and Kirishima shuffles between them, ready to move, before Masaru stops. Sniffs the air. Katsuki’s heart feels ready to drop. “Whose scent is that?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” he snaps. Tries, but it’s shaky. 

“You were with an alpha?” Incredulous, afraid. Katsuki looks at the floor. “Are you out of your goddamn mind?”

And, God, how Katsuki aches. His father’s perfect sculpture, his moulded bones creak to please — and part of him; ridiculous, alone, a child at heart; feels ashamed. 

“How could you be so selfish, Katsuki?” Selfish.

His father’s perfect sculpture, a figure of wood and porcelain, Katsuki burns and breaks at once.

“Fuck you, dad,” he says. Selfish, selfish, selfish.

His father’s perfect sculpture, Katsuki moves his wicker limbs towards a flame that he knows will ruin him. He doesn’t speak as he turns, only hurries his way down the last few stairs with legs that’re creaking and ignores his dad’s shouts — they’re panicked, they’re scared, and they don’t care for him like they used to.

When Katsuki leaves, he has no remorse.

Kirishima follows (always follows), but he’s quiet as they leave. They both know Masaru won’t do anything with him there.

“Are you okay?” he prompts, once, hesitant, the minute they leave the front door.

“Shut the fuck up, Kirishima,” Katsuki bites. He bites, he bites, he bites.

Because he’s his father’s son, selfish little Bakugou Katsuki, who’d cut his own nose to spite his face and who’d rather fucking die than let another set him aflame. His father’s son who runs the pad of his thumb across an old carving in the door’s frame and presses against it hard enough to imprint it across his skin, who ignores the gentle prompts of a boy who only ever follows, who only ever helps, and spits in the damn face of those that show him a semblance of kindness.

His father’s perfect fucking sculpture. 

Across his collarbone hangs the scent of an alpha he doesn’t know — and, fuck, he’s still thinking about it, the muddled memories through a mind hazed, of gentle touches and gentler words. He remembers sinking into couch cushions that felt more like home than home ever did, remembers the gentle weight of an arm around him and a nose in his hair and remembers desperately aching for more. 

He remembers feeling safe. He remembers feeling protected. He remembers wondering when he ever craved those things.

When he pulls out his phone, his hands are shaking.

Anytime you like

I have a job tonight but I can get you before or after, makes no difference

what time is the earliest, he asks, desperate and afraid and so, so, selfish.

The replies are immediate. Katsuki chest flutters.

Few hours, give or take

Around midnight? Same place as this morning

ok

thanks

Of course, doll

Doll. Doll. Rocket-fuelled and impulsive at his best, Katsuki burns alive. Kirishima’s eyeing him as they walk down the street, watching his fumbling fingers and rose-tinted knuckles and the flush on his neck — he doesn’t comment, though. Katsuki’s thankful.

“Midnight,” he says, still walking, still burning, only slightly flinching when Kirishima looks to the side to meet his eyes. “He’s coming at midnight.”

“Okay,” the alpha replies, gently, like he’s talking to a stray, “We’ll be fine to go through the front, then, I think Pa’s out for the night. And you know Ma won’t say anything.”

“I’d rather not risk it.” He pockets his phone. His Omega mourns the loss.

Kirishima studies him for a moment. Katsuki feels small. “Alright, Kats. If that makes you more comfortable.”

And, God, fuck that — Katsuki inhales through his nose like Kirishima’s stung him, and he walks faster, if only to escape the fire nipping at his heels and Kirishima’s stares. It’s only minutes before they arrive at his door; much more pristine than Katsuki’s is, much more new, much more up to standard for their territory’s pathetic standards.

Katsuki doesn’t even look at it. The sight makes him sick. He slips through a path worn in neat grass with a practiced fluidity, close to the white picket fence, close enough to touch the pink hydrangeas growing as bushes, if you wanted to. He doesn’t want to.

Instead he stands, leans his shoulder against neat brickwork, metres below a permanently open window and a trellis packed with ivy, and waits for Kirishima to take his place.

And he does. As always, Kirishima drops to one knee, passes Katsuki his bags, and wordlessly laces his fingers together on his thigh.

And as always, Katsuki takes the step, tosses his bags, and lets Kirishima push him upwards.

As always, Katsuki doesn’t thank him.

He crawls through a window annoyingly large — one he and Kirishima had broken together when they were children, fixed the latch careful so that it would be impossible to close. Katsuki eyes obnoxious-pink walls but doesn’t let himself see the pictures hanging on them, skims over white wooden doors but doesn’t read the names. 

Kirishima’s tall enough to make the jump himself — it makes Katsuki feel irrevocably bitter, watching him and his inherited alphan stature effortlessly pull himself into his own window. He smiles, even though he knows, and simply takes both of Katsuki’s makeshift luggage and leads them through his perfect fucking hallway.

To the left, there’s an open door. Aiko’s in there, body half folded over an open book on her crossed legs — as they creep across her view, she glances upwards to give them a short nod.

Her doorway smells like fresh cut grass. Katsuki’s nose recoils. She looks back down.

Kirishima smiles at her, all brotherly warmth and affection — she’s younger than them, the middle child. An alpha, with none of the temperament to make her unbearable. She was friends with them both, once, when they were young, when presentations were far in the future and secondary genders were almost entirely meaningless. Now, when she looks Katsuki in the eyes, all she has for him is pity.

Katsuki knows that Kirishima thanks whatever higher power he believes in daily that neither of his sisters were born an omega. Knows that he, as the street’s resident fucking experiment, is the topic for their little fucking family chats all too often.

At the end of the hall, precariously placed close to the stairs, is Kirishima’s bedroom — his den, with his Alpha’s claim laid all over the doorframe, the dull bitterness of his muddy scent so strong that it makes Katsuki’s nose wrinkle. He strolls in without pausing, and knows he doesn’t imagine the low, calm rumble in the back of his friend’s throat. 

He does ignore it, though. Kirishima coughs.

His bedroom is stupidly homey — the walls are painted the same disgraceful red as his hair, the decor slightly darker, with mismatched patterned curtains and drapes and a rug with an uncomfortable texture. It’s low-lit, packed tightly with messy knick-knacks and ornaments and figurines, scattered with dirty clothes and strewn paper. 

Katsuki skips through it all, plots himself down on a pile of blankets built for him in the corner, and hugs his knees to his chest. 

“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” Kirishima murmurs, sitting cross-legged on his bed. Katsuki tucks his chin into his knees, thumbs his mother’s owl in his pocket.

I can’t either, he wants to say. I’m terrified, he wants to say.

“He didn’t do anything to me, Ei,” is what he says instead.

He thinks of blood-stained fingertips on narrow hips, of the red they’d smear against his skin — he thinks of how they’d burn, how they’d prickle, how he’d love that feeling. He thinks of fear, and affection, and a frightful mix of the two.

“I was expecting to wake up to, like—” he sucks in a breath. “Or to not wake up at all. But he didn’t even come in the room.”

“Yeah?” Kirishima’s lying down, now.

“I put a match on the door hinge.” Same way I used to when I was here. “It was in the same position when I woke up.”

The redhead props himself up on his elbows, light eyes so annoyingly pitying, and soft, and understanding. Katsuki can’t bring himself to meet them.

“I only noticed it because it snapped, actually, when I got up in the morning,” he fiddles with the hem of Dabi’s sweatpants, buries his face further into them because the scent’s still there, it’s still sticking, and it’s comforting him a lot more than it should be. “I was too— I was too tired, to remember to check it.”

That’s all he’ll say, he knows. He won’t talk about being scent drunk, or Dabi’s sofa, Dabi’s touches, or a lackluster breakfast, or a car-ride’s talks — that feels too private to share. Too intimate. Katsuki wants to hold that memory, foggy though it is, tightly between his fingers and never let it go — wants to press it down between book pages like his poetry’s cornelia, preserve it forever, privately, in the inner workings of his psyche.

Dabi’s eyes flash in the front of his mind, and his Omega purrs.

“That’s—” Kirishima frowns. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” and Katsuki looks at him. “I trust him, Ei. I know it’s real fucking stupid, but I do. My Omega trusts him, and that’s gotta count for something, right?”

“I still don’t. And if you weren’t,” Kirishima’s hand gestures at him vaguely, waving in the air with a light-hearted downturn to his lips, “You, I’d be chaining you to a damn tree to keep you from going back.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I know you’d—” He laughs, light. “I don’t even know. Chew your way through the chains, or something. Then hunt me down and kill me to death.”

Katsuki’s snort is quiet. “Kill you to death?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a dumbass.”

It makes the atmosphere so much lighter, these gentle teases — it makes Katsuki feel fond, and normal, like his and Kirishima’s relationship is nothing more than two friends at some dumb fucking sleepover, like it was founded on nothing but skinned knees and riverbanks and childhood adventures. Like the only hardships they’d ever faced were shitty high-school teachers, or not being allowed out past 9pm.

Katsuki breathes. It’s nice to feel ordinary.

“What happened last night?” Of course, Kirishima has to fucking ruin it. “Why’d you run?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I heard you scream.”

“Kirishima,” Katsuki snaps. “I mean it.”

“Okay.”

They’re quiet, for a moment. Katsuki lays his cheek on his knee and wraps his arms around his legs, tucked into blankets that aren’t his but don’t smell quite right to him. It’s pathetic, this makeshift nest to replace his own that he won’t ever have, built by an alpha so desperate to fix him.

Not for the first time, he wishes there was less to his and Kirishima’s bond than Alpha and Omega. Wishes he could whittle them down to childhood again.

 “You should probably sleep, Katsuki.”

He can’t, though.

Katsuki blinks. Lethargic and weary, he lets his eyes stay closed. “Wake me up at eleven.”

If there is a response, he doesn’t hear it. He curls himself further into Kirishima’s bedroom corner, hiding out in there like he’s some kind of fucking hermit — with one shaky hand, he pulls the collar of Dabi’s hoodie over his nose.

It still smells so strongly like him. His shoulders relax. He didn’t even know they were tense.

For the second night in a row, Katsuki buries himself in a scent of a burnt forest, and he doesn’t fight the safety it brings him.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

No matter how he pokes and prods and picks at them, the bruises stay bruises.

Katsuki scowls. It’s ugly and fierce and nothing like what an omega should be doing — his eyes burn, wildfire, reflected back in a mirror half-cracked and bouncing red off the linoleum beneath him. He’s still wearing Dabi’s hoodie and he’s still wearing Dabi’s touches, on the back of his neck and the line of his jaw and his throat, all over his throat.

He doesn’t really know what to feel. Everything’s melding together, a cacophony of turmoil curling in his gut that he hasn’t worked out how to sift through. He feels so out of place — Dabi’s bathroom is dirtier than he’s used to, and it’s a different colour to the one at home, and it stinks of burning wood and fire and smoke. The whole flat does — it’s a strange juxtaposition, the overwhelming scent of an alpha’s home but a place that looks so... impersonal. So purposefully not lived in. It’s a house, not a home.

Katsuki doesn’t feel like he belongs here. He can’t really remember when he last felt he belonged anywhere.

He picks at the wounds on his neck. They start to bleed again. Dabi had set aside a bandage for him but the thought of using them makes something in him shudder — he doesn’t need a fucking bandage. He doesn’t need a bandage, and he doesn’t need to feel the way he does, and he doesn’t need the excessive care that Dabi seems all too willing to give him.

It’s meaningless, anyway. Another bull-headed alpha jumping at the chance to save an omega in distress. Katsuki scoffs at the thought — he’s no fucking damsel.

There’s little thoughts niggling at him, memories from the night before. Proof, his mind says, that Dabi’s shown countlessly he is not that kind of person — he decides he won’t entertain them. He doesn’t know what kind of person Dabi is, really. He doesn’t know who Dabi is. Pondering over the character of someone as sketchy as Dabi will probably have consequences he isn’t ready to deal with.

Resolute, determined, pretending there isn’t an incessant niggling of fear in the twitches of his chest, he turns his back on Dabi’s stupid bathroom mirror on its stupid stained white wall. His bathroom has a strange faded green colour scheme that he’s almost certain Dabi didn’t choose, but it looks like the most lived-in room in the entire damn flat: there’s a toothbrush lying discarded on the sink, a toothpaste tube squeezed within an inch of its life beside it. Aftershave, too, though it looks unused. His shower is still damp, the bottle of shampoo on its floor’s corner is an opaque white and scentless.

It’s 3-in-1. Katsuki wrinkles his nose.

The living room is a little more familiar. Katsuki feels himself relax (disturbingly) at the scent within it, the soft haze of smoke and ash and a forest set ablaze. He roots around the bag that he’d dumped on the sofa, past his scrunched up clothes and haphazard belongings, pulling out his little burner phone, and the small penknife that Kirishima had slipped in his bag before he’d left.

There are only four numbers in it. Katsuki hovers over Dabi’s for a moment, contemplates deleting it — he hadn’t had the stomach to name the contact, the string of numbers he’s practically memorised with how hard he stared at them and their miniscule conversation all night.

He doesn’t trust Dabi. He doesn’t. He can’t, surely, he’s only just fucking met the guy — he doesn’t care what his goddamn omega feels, what his instincts are screaming at him. For all the bravado and unrelenting confidence he force-fed to Kirishima, Katsuki feels afraid. It’s a sickening feeling to acknowledge.

He skips the number. He doesn’t name it.

He skips the one immediately below it, too, and then he skips the one immediately below that — his mother’s. He refuses to delete his mother’s.

Kirishima’s number is bottom of the list.

He picks up on the first ring. Katsuki knew he would.

“Katsuki?” his voice is crackled, distorted by static — but there’s hope in his voice, a glimmer of anticipation, and Katsuki’s heart aches.

He closes his eyes. He takes a single deep inhale.

“Yeah. It’s me,” he says. Quiet. He wonders if he imagines the hitch in Kirishima’s breath.

“Oh, thank God,” the alpha laughs, winded and more than a little breathless, and Katsuki can picture it — him, Kirishima, maybe lying in bed but probably pacing, and his stupid sharp alphan teeth bared in relief as he grins, “Been worried sick, man.”

“It’s been two hours, dumbass,” Katsuki mutters. He picks at a frayed seam on the elbow of Dabi’s jumper.

“Mm.” Frayed, but he can’t find it in himself to take it off yet. “You’re safe?”

“I’m safe.”

“Nothing’s... happened?”

“I’m fuckin' here aren’t I? I’m fine. He dropped me off and then left to do something else.”

Kirishima hums. They’re silent for a minute, nothing but static through Katsuki’s shitty phone service, and he imagines Kirishima, again, gaping over the words he wants to say. He imagines the dirt that is almost definitely smudged on his skin somehow from his nightly run, his chipped bitten nails that may be red or pink or green depending on what Ashido was feeling when he last saw her.

“I’m so sorry, Kats,” Kirishima chokes. Katsuki imagines him, and he imagines the distance between them now.

“Don’t be.” They’ve never had that distance before. The wounds on Katsuki’s neck are itching.

“I didn’t think he’d—” a breath, “He was just scared. He wants to keep his family safe.”

“Save it, Ei,” he says, snaps, before Kirishima can holster any more half-assed defences or pitiful apologies, or before he can start to cry. That’s even worse.

“Does it still hurt?” He scratches at his neck until the slits burn under his nails.

“Nah,” Katsuki says. He lies. “Cat scratches. Dude’s a pussy, tell him to come at me harder next time.”

After a second of quiet, Kirishima huffs a laugh.

“I’ll be sure to pass the message along,” he says, something in his tone quivering like there’s more he needs to say, more he needs to do, “I’m sure he’ll appreciate it. Dear old Pa.”

Katsuki gives him an emotionless hum for his efforts. It isn’t often that Kirishima directly talks against his father.

“Probably for the best that you left,” he continues, quieter, “If Alpha’d found out, there’d be hell.”

Katsuki’s heart gives a slow, traitorous shudder.

“I wouldn’t have fuckin' said anything,” he says, quickly, “I didn’t last time.”

Quiet, again.

“Yeah,” Kirishima whispers, more static than anything else, after the silence stretches a moment too long, “I know.”

I know. I know, but maybe you should’ve.

Katsuki doesn’t remember falling asleep.

He and Kirishima had spoken for a small while — or, rather, Kirishima had talked and Katsuki had listened. In their established routine, that’s always how it goes. He’d curled up on the sofa with the one blanket he’d managed to steal from Kirishima’s bedroom (a multicoloured one, sewn together by multiple loving hands, that stunk of all of Kirishima’s little posse so much that he consistently has to remind himself to wrinkle his nose in an attempt to be disgusted by it), the phone by his face and his nose in one of the cushions — it smelled like Dabi, he remembers, but only very faintly.

Then, in a blink, he’s stirred awake by sunlight, and he’s lying in a bed.

There’s a sense of deja-vu — Katsuki blinks, squints against the sliver of pink-orange glow that slips from the crack in the blackout curtains of Dabi’s bedroom. It’s a little different than before; his head’s not swimming like it was when he last woke up here, even surrounded by Dabi’s scent so it is.

The smell is nice, though. It’s pleasant to wake up to. He would rather die than admit that aloud.

He’s still wearing what he was before, still wrapped in that patchwork blanket. It’s as though he was lifted from the sofa and deposited here without changing his position in the slightest. His Omega’s purring like a fucking chainsaw — there’s only one person that could’ve put him here. Dabi’s probably home.

The thought makes him mildly anxious, but the warmth and his Omega’s consistent affections are winning him over — he’s not dead, at least. After a quick check of himself, he’s not harmed, either. His phone is sitting beside him, hung up and with a dead battery.

So much for keeping it ‘hidden’. At least Dabi hadn’t taken it away. Or his knife, apparently, which sits unassuming beside it.

He slips out of bed, but keeps the blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He can smell Ashido woven in its threads, Kaminari, Sero. Kirishima over them all. He bundles it closer, because no one’s here to see him to do it, and he fucking can.

The bedroom door’s closed. His matchstick from the night before is still there, snapped. Dabi must not have noticed it — Katsuki pads down the hall, quiet as he can, hoping that his barefoot on the old carpet won’t alert the alpha that he’s here before Katsuki can spot him first.

Turns out, he didn’t have to be so careful.

Dabi’s in the living room. He’s on the sofa. He’s asleep. Katsuki pads closer.

It’s strange. It’s so, so strange — he’s sleeping. Katsuki didn’t think he was a creature capable of sleep. Something about it is so innocent: he’s on his back, one forearm cushioning his head, the other dropped to hang off the sofa to the side, and he’s snoring, softly, mouth gaped open like a damn fish.

This Dabi doesn’t really correspond with the Dabi he knows. It’s too peaceful. There’s a small splatter of blood on his cheekbone, though, and Katsuki’s a little frightened at how used to the sight he is, at how it makes him more at ease with this side of the alpha he hasn’t seen. He doesn’t think Dabi would look the same without his miscellaneous fucking bloodstains.

He’s pretty when he sleeps. Katsuki chooses not to dwell on it, but he takes the chance to look, while he can, at a face he hasn’t let himself properly analyse with those watchful eyes usually trained upon him.

He’s pretty. He is. In a strange way: his cheekbones are scoped, pale skin pulled taut over the bone like cling-film, dark eyelashes fluttering over them in his sleep. His nose is sloped but the shape of his bridge is mildly distorted, as though recovering from a break — there’s a set of piercings in each nostril, three in one and a spiked hoop in the other, and there’s something a little endearing about the thought of Dabi putting them in himself: maybe stood in front of the same cracked mirror Katsuki was, staring himself down with those ice-cold eyes, trying to push juvenile metal into juvenile piercings.

There’s more in his mouth, too. One just under his nose, two on either side of his bottom lip. The space around his mouth is dotted with various holes where he might’ve had them pierced, once, before taking them out.

His mouth is pale. A soft blush of a pink, cracking. There’s rough raw skin where his fangs have dragged. Somehow, his lips are two different shades — Katsuki squints for a second before he notices that his skin is, too, beneath his bottom lip line, the skin is... raised. Uneven. Katsuki hadn’t noticed that, before.

It’s slightly paler than the rest of his face — it’s scarred, Katsuki realises, mottled into soft spiderweb-like patterns, and it must be old because it’s not really visible unless you’re looking for it. From ear to ear, slanted so that it slashes his mouth in half and joins at the points between his lips, it covers his jaw and his chin and dips down to his neck.

It drops below his neck, too, beneath his jugular and his collarbones. Beneath— oh. Oh.

Dabi’s not wearing a shirt.

Katsuki’s unsure how he failed to notice that. The tattoos all over his skin, maybe, had all mottled into one black blur: the scar woke him up more than he’d like to admit, the size of it, he’s thinking clearer now, sharper, his stomach curling with something he doesn’t want to acknowledge.

It must have hurt. The scar. He wonders how it might have happened.

It looks almost like a burn.

He hadn’t really noticed Dabi’s tattoos before, either, with the stress of things, but he sees them now — scattered across his skin like little doodles, a collection of miscellaneous little symbols. Both of his arms and the entire length of his torso are covered in greyscale ink, seemingly meaningless designs with no main focal point, a myriad of small tattoos, rather than a single big one. They’re so diverse, too: Katsuki spots a variety of different birds, a cat, some stars, a skull, all in different styles, like a child’s doodle-covered paper. None that particularly scream any kind of meaning.

They’re stacked across his scars. Random little things, with intent to hide.

All too suddenly, Katsuki feels like he’s seeing something he shouldn’t be. Something a little too private, a little too intimate. He doesn’t think Dabi would let him see this if he was awake.

He takes a step back. The table is right behind him — he notices too late that there’s something a little too close to its edge. It falls, because of course it does, because heaven forbid anything go right for him: it’s a quiet thud, but it’s enough that the alpha’s eyes shoot open. Katsuki’s unprepared for the sight of those eyes when they snap to him, looking far more awake and far more alert than he thought they’d be, and they’re dead, so dead, they’re—

“Didn’t mean to wake you,” Katsuki says, quiet, quick. It’s the closest thing to an apology that he could probably ever manage, and those dead, hollow eyes soften.

“That’s alright, love,” Dabi says — and, God, his voice is deeper, huskier in the grit of rousing from sleep, and when he yawns, his mouth is all fang.

He sits up, cracks his knuckles, and stretches. God have fucking mercy, he stretches; Katsuki drops his gaze, watching the contortion of the muscles he’d chosen to ignore. Dabi’s not burly like the alphas he’s accustomed to, nor is he whip-lean the way betas normally are, but the tendons of his arms are ropy, the planes of his shoulder-blades rough, muscles bunching beneath his spiderweb scars. He’s all sinew and spite, like a stray dog that’s survived its whole life on scraps. Katsuki knows the feeling well.

“Good morning, doll,” Dabi snarks, voice a low rumble, and Katsuki snaps his eyes upwards. The alpha’s eyes have gone back to the way he knows them: lazy, soft, gentle and yet still so jarring. “Sleep well? Enjoying your view?”

Katsuki flushes. He’s loathe to admit it, but he feels the way his ears heat.

“Fuck off,” he snaps, but even he can feel the lack of venom in it. Dabi has the audacity to laugh at him. He doesn’t seem to care for the scars he’s showing.

The alpha scratches at his chin — his completely clean-shaven chin, Katsuki now realises, whatever scar is there must have done something enough to fuck up his ability to grow any kind of beard. He wonders if Dabi would tell him about it, if he asked.

He decides he won’t try.

“Take a seat,” Dabi says, waving a hand, the bandaged one, though the bandages have almost entirely come off by now. “C’mon, love, you look all tense just standing there. I don’t bite.”

Katsuki sits, keeping a healthy distance, curling his knees to his chin and wiggling his feet into the sofa’s cushions. He watches Dabi stretch his legs, leisurely, scratch his ear like a dog, unwind the bandages on his hand to re-tighten them with a blasé little hum — as though he’s not uncovering a fucking massacre by doing so.

His hand’s covered in bite marks. At least, mostly — it looks like a feral dog’s chew toy, the skin ripped and torn with the distinctive pattern of teeth and fangs. It’s fucking bloody, it’s fucking mangled. The marks left from that will be fucking brutal.

Jesus fucking Christ. What does this guy do in his spare time?

“What the fuck happened to your hand?”

Dabi keeps humming, huffs a little laugh. He lifts his hand above his head as though to inspect it, flexes his fingers like the open gashes don’t even affect him.

“Couple of scratches,” he says, nonchalant. It’s like he doesn’t feel pain at all. “Nothing serious.”

“It looks like it’s been mauled by a bear,” Katsuki narrows his eyes at him. “Then wrapped by a fucking child.”

“Ouch,” the alpha gasps a mock gasp, scandalised, mouth curling into a shit-eating smirk. Katsuki gets the urge to punch him, all of a sudden. “You wound me.”

Katsuki rolls his eyes. Dabi pulls the gauze tight, and starts to wind it again.

“That’s disgusting,” the omega spits, wrinkles his nose before he can check himself, “You aren’t using those shitty dirty bandages again, surely?”

Dabi looks at him, quirks an eyebrow. He doesn’t respond, but there’s an edge to his face, to the gesture he makes with his non-wounded hand. A challenge in his eyes. Show me, then. Do it better.

And, well. Katsuki’s never backed down from a challenge.

“Fuck’s sake,” he snaps, rolls his eyes again for good measure — the bandages Dabi gave him are still on the table, still wrapped and taped and clean, above all else. “Give me your stupid hand.”

The alpha hums. He looks annoyingly amused. “Your neck could open any second. You don’t want those?”

“Dick. ‘M not half as injured as you are,” Katsuki circles Dabi’s wrist with his fingers, more gentle than he’s ever been in his life, and peels off the remaining gauze. It’s sticky, and stained. “Idiot. How did you even do this?”

Honestly, he’s surprised it isn’t infected. His whole hand is layered with wounds, not quite deep enough to be overly concerning but it’s still a lot — the alpha’s fingers are stained, crisped with the dried blood that wasn’t cleaned away.

“Don’t worry about it, doll.”

As expected. Tight-lipped as ever. Katsuki grits his teeth, leans over to the shoddy first aid kit still on the table beside them to pull out something to wipe with. Preferably alcoholic.

“And why do you keep calling me shit like that?”

“Hm?”

“Don’t play fuckin' dumb.” Honestly, the amount he’s rolled his eyes in the last ten minutes must be a record. “Why do you keep calling me shit like that?”

Dabi’s quiet, for a little minute. His lips curl into a small smile, a genuine one, more smirk than anything else but with less teeth — Katsuki busies himself with wiping at his skin, dislodging dried blood and unhealed scabs, but he can feel those eyes on him.

“It suits you,” the alpha says, his voice unreadable and his gaze sharp, “If you want me stop, all you have to do is ask, doll.”

Katsuki isn’t particularly eager to unpack that.

“Now you’re just taking the piss,” he mutters, and he swipes at the wounds a little harder than he probably should. Dabi just grins, like the motherfucker he is, and does not even flinch.

“Astute observations, doll,” he purrs, “Very intuitive.”

“I have a name.”

“Katsuki,” the alpha grins, wolfish, voice a low monotonous drawl; and, god, if that doesn’t send a spark through Katsuki’s spine. He purses his lips. He refuses to let that show on his face, he will not give the stupid fucking bastard any satisfaction.

When the old blood’s wiped away, the wounds don’t look too bad. They’re still deep enough that Katsuki’s more than a little concerned, but he feels a lot more comfortable faithlessly bandaging them now than he did before.

The scars reach here, too. The spiderwebs. They curl over his wrist, climb the back of his hand, but don’t quite land at his knuckles — Katsuki’s thumb swipes over them just once, because he can’t help himself, to feel the ridges. How did he never even notice them?

“You know what you’re doing,” Dabi comments, apparently unable to stay silent for longer than a minute. He’s watching Katsuki intently, the way he unwraps the clean gauze carefully, lays it with gentle precision in the best places for it to be actually useful rather than just cloth.

Katsuki flicks his eyes upwards, briefly. The alpha’s eyes are soft, the ghost of a smile itching at the corners of his scarred mouth.

He looks back down.

“You fuckin’ don’t, apparently,” he snarks. “Would’ve thought someone as sketchy as you’d be good at this.”

The alpha’s laugh is a huff, “Could say the opposite for you, doll. Those scratches of yours a regular occurrence?”

There’s something in his tone that Katsuki doesn’t like. But if Dabi can be secretive, he fucking can be too, so he chooses to answer with nothing more than, “You’re gonna need stitches.”

The alpha hums. Katsuki doesn’t have to look up to know those eyes are looking right through him.

“Nah,” is the response, “The bandages will do, don’t stress too hard about it.”

“You don’t need painkillers?”

Dabi laughs. That answers that, then.

When the gauze is wrapped, and tucked, and essentially impossible to dislodge unless you’re really trying, Katsuki drops Dabi’s hand. He doesn’t say anything, schools his face into careful stoicism to pretend the loss of that touch doesn’t make his Omega wail.

“Looks great, Katsuki,” the alpha lifts his arm, flexing his fingers again, and Katsuki feels himself burn at the praise. “Thanks, love.”

“Whatever,” he spits. “Consider it repayment. Don’t fuck it up again.”

“Yes, boss.”

Katsuki stands. He bundles the dirty bandages into a ball, and dumps them in the first aid box — there isn’t much useful shit in there, anyway, and he can’t stand the texture on his hands much longer. Dabi’s watching him, like always, and something in him crawls with a need to escape those eyes. He finds he doesn’t really want to. It’s a confusing feeling to have.

“Alright,” Dabi claps his hands together, rubbing them, and his smile is something to behold — his teeth are bared, as per, fangs sparking, eyes cold. “Breakfast?”

“No,” Katsuki bristles. He hugs his elbows close. “Not if it’s the same shit as last time.”

Dabi tuts at him, “My cooking is great, you’re just ungrateful.”

“Cooking?” Katsuki hisses, narrowing his eyes, “You made cereal. And still ruined it, somehow.”

“You’re welcome to do better,” the alpha snarks, lip curling, waving a hand in the general direction of his kitchen. “Please do show me the art of cereal, O Wise One.”

Katsuki just rolls his eyes. He shuffles toward the kitchen — it’s not as clean as he’d like, a bit dark and bit dingy, with chipped surfaces and wooden cupboards almost entirely stripped of their paint. The only thing on their surface is a battered microwave and a knife block. All of the knives are missing.

This room’s open plan, so Katsuki can still see the back of Dabi’s head over the shitty little breakfast bar even when he begins to rummage through empty cupboards.

(Empty cupboards that need a clean. God.)

Dabi’s humming to himself — an upbeat little tune that Katsuki doesn’t recognise. His hair is shaggy and a little matted from the back, when he scratches at it, his knuckles flex, bruised and almost split. There’s a small stain of something on the back of his neck, stark against his pale skin. Katsuki doesn’t have to look closer to know that it’s blood.

“Oh,” the alpha flicks his eyes back, head tilted. In his hand, he’s waving a book that he’s picked up from the floor — must be what fell off the table, earlier. “You want this? I got it for you.”

“No,” Katsuki snaps. He goes back to his rummaging. I got it for you.

“You can have it,” Dabi waves it in the air, nonchalant, stretching his back like a cat, “Take it, it’s yours.”

He throws it, then, the fucking heathen. It spins in the air and slides onto the counter open and cover-down, and Katsuki has to grab it to prevent it from falling. He scowls, but he picks up the book anyway and flicks through a few pages.

It’s covered in handwriting. The corners have creases where they’ve been dog-eared.

And in the front cover, there’s a note.

Awase, it reads, I really think you’ll like this one! It’s all the adventure you love, and still one of the classics that I love! Do visit soon. I miss your company. Yours always, Momo✿.

Katsuki closes the book. It’s Tom Sawyer. He’s read Tom Sawyer.

“Where did you get this?” he asks. His voice shakes but he doesn’t acknowledge it; he doesn’t want the answer, but he doesn’t acknowledge that either.

“Found it,” Dabi says, not looking at him. He won’t say anything more, Katsuki knows, but he doesn’t know if he’s thankful for that or not.

He drops the book onto the counter like it’s burned him. His fingers prickle, numb, and he’s feeling an odd little sense of danger — but not quite: it’s creeping, crying, an unfortunate discomfort and unsettled shame.

Someone owned this book. Someone was gifted it, and was loved so much that they were given perfectly curated annotations. Someone felt so loved that they dog-eared the pages and read these words so often that they’re worn and rugged and smudged.

They’re probably dead. He wonders if their lover knows.

Katsuki pushes the book out of sight.

“What do you want to eat?” he mutters — too quiet, apparently, because Dabi’s response is just a “Hm?”

Katsuki doesn’t repeat the question — there’s nothing to eat, anyway, not in the cupboards, so he just grunts and starts rummaging through everything he can find to open. He yanks at a few of the drawers. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t find food in them. Instead, rattling around in a drawer as though innocent and unassuming, he finds a gun.

Katsuki finds a gun.

“What the fuck?” he yells — yells, because he will resolutely deny the unholy shriek that comes from this mouth. Dabi’s head whips around so hard that his neck cracks, eyes panicked, mouth tense. A typical alphan response to an omega’s cry.

“What happened?” It’s a shame he doesn’t have the capacity to be annoyed by that at the minute. He slams the drawer shut again.

“You keep guns in your kitchen drawers?” he spits, shrill, and he might be hyperventilating but he’s unsure — he can hear it rattling around as it settles back into place, can still see it in his mind’s eye.

Unsurprisingly, Dabi’s reaction is nothing more than fuzzed-over amusement. He relaxes back into his seat, muscles softening, and his mouth quirks. He looks at Katsuki with humour, with a cat’s slow blink, with the blasé attitude of someone that cares little for the danger he holds.

Katsuki’s reminded of the night they met.

“I keep guns everywhere,” he says, like it’s obvious, “Never know when you’re gonna need a gun, sweetheart.”

“Oh, I do apologise,” Katsuki snaps, “I forgot how violent and dangerous fucking cooking is. Silly me.”

Katsuki’s only seen a gun a few times in his lifetime. They’re prohibited in the territory he came from, but his mother had one regardless. She only used it once. The sight makes him feel fucking sick.

“So, what’re you cooking?” Dabi’s head tilts. His eyes glint, like a puppy presented with a treat — there is no care in his face for Katsuki’s discovery. No lingering tension. He’s likely already forgotten the interaction.

Katsuki almost forgot who he was dealing with.

“Not when there’s more goddamn weapons in your cupboards than food,” he mutters, and he can’t quite bring himself to find Dabi’s eyes so he doesn’t bother — he turns around, instead, sifting through cupboards he’s already looked in just for something to do with his hands.

“Apologies, your highness,” the alpha drawls, “Didn’t realise I was housing royalty. Are my lowly peasant cupboards not stocked enough for your tastes?”

“You’re an asshat,” Katsuki snaps, “What are we meant to eat?”

He doesn’t have to look to know that Dabi’s rolling his eyes. He doesn’t have to look to know that Dabi’s wearing some stupid fuckoff smirk.

“Chill, princess.” Katsuki curses the spark that sends through his spine. “I’ll go get some shit. What do you need?”

He takes a breath.

“I’m coming,” he snaps, swinging around to face the alpha withering glare — Dabi cocks a brow at him. “You’ll only get the wrong fucking stuff anyway.”

Dabi grins. He grins, as always, in a maniacal way that shows his teeth — too much gum, too much fang, too much unhinged pleasure. Katsuki scowls in response. He’s not scared of some twat with a gun.

“Whatever you desire, my liege,” Dabi purrs, but turns away. He stands from the sofa, stretching his arms above his head — his back cracks, muscles contorting. Katsuki refuses to notice his bare chest again. “I’m gonna change. Whenever you’re ready, your chariot awaits.”

And with that, he’s gone. Katsuki lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

The night he met Dabi, he knew he was dangerous. He knew, in both head and heart, that following an alpha like this was akin to following a lion right into its den — he’s always known that, really, despite the fleeting moments of comfort he’s garnered from having a predator at his side.

He should’ve contemplated the risks more, he supposes. Too late for that now. All he can do is try to keep that predator at his side — while they’re allied, while Dabi’s intrigued, while there’s still a flickering spark of alphan instinct to keep him safe, Katsuki will stay alive.

Katsuki’s good at staying alive. He can get better at it.

“You alright?”

Dabi’s back. Katsuki straightens.

The alpha’s leaned against the kitchen counter, hip cocked, with his arms crossed. He’s wearing a nondescript white shirt that hangs loosely off his collarbones, watching Katsuki with careful eyes, his mouth a thin line. The way his arms are crossed makes the tattoos on them flex — one of them, a collection of five birds in flight, twitches fluttering wings at him mockingly.

“Of course,” he replies, and he hopes it sounds smoother than it feels.

Dabi watches Katsuki intensely, like he’s looking for something — Katsuki wonders if he finds it. It’s hard to tell. The alpha’s face levels into something softer, his voice tapering into a hum.

“If you say so, love,” he says, quirking his face again — in a blink, he goes back to how Katsuki knows him, all snarky grins and amused glances. He flicks his eyes down Katsuki’s frame. “You ready to go? You’re just wearing that?”

“Don’t have much else.”

Dabi narrows his eyes. He pulls on the coat he was wearing the night they met, the long one — it’s rolled up at the sleeves, folded and faded. “Let’s take a detour, then, doll. After the groceries. Get you some new shit.”

“We don’t have to do that,” Katsuki mutters, feeling oddly insecure at the thought and tugging Dabi’s jumper closer to him. He follows Dabi anyway when the alpha prompts him to, shrugging off the hand that tries to guide his shoulder blades, scowling when Dabi huffs a laugh.

“We’ll see, love,” the alpha cracks his knuckles casually, bowing with a flourish as he opens his front door. “After you, my liege.”

Katsuki rolls his eyes. He tells himself he isn’t endeared, tells himself he doesn’t feel anything really — this is a man with a gun. A man with bloodstains he won’t explain and an empty flat in the middle of nowhere, who can stroll through a dangerous territory with such an obvious confidence that he must have earned to wear so easily.

And he does that again, now — this fucking building is ridiculous, like a scene from a damn horror movie, with its cracking paint and creaked floors. One of the lights flickers. There are noises coming from the apartments they walk past.

Dabi struts past it all with ease. Katsuki doesn’t know if being by his side makes him more afraid or less.

Still, he will make it through. He will stay alive.

He is fucking good at staying alive, and he will get better at it.

Being in Dabi’s car hasn’t gotten any less weird than the first time — Dabi doesn’t play music or have any background noise, which wouldn’t be much of a bother if Katsuki’s thoughts weren’t so loud. He taps at the ridges of his kneecaps while Dabi stirs his car into starting, rolls his cheek between his teeth as though the blunt pain will distract him.

Dabi doesn’t speak. Katsuki doesn’t either.

They don’t speak even when they’ve driven for a while. Even when they pull into a car park, when they stop in a parking space conveniently close to the entrance of a small supermarket, even when people look at them oddly and eye their presence with caution.

“Ready?” Dabi asks, and it looks gentle but it feels like a test — Katsuki looks at him, looks at the supermarket.

“Sure,” he says, and he doesn’t give Dabi much of a chance to response as he lets himself out of the car. Something in him thinks he wouldn’t have gotten a decent one anyway. The smirk on his face is too damning.

The supermarket is strangely ordinary. Dabi strolls in with a hum, plucks a trolley from the nearby stack of them — Katsuki just watches him, watches as he rolls it along. He’s leaned forward to rest his forearms on the handle, hunched and lazed, his eyes slowly dragging across the store’s contents before landing back on Katsuki’s face.

“Where to first?” he asks, like anything that they’re doing here is normal.

“Depends,” Katsuki says, easing awkwardly into steps that match his pace. “What’s my budget?”

Dabi snorts. “There isn’t one.”

“What?”

“No budget,” the alpha throws him a grin, “Just grab what you need, doll, I’ll take care of it.”

Katsuki scoffs, and rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t dignify that with a response.

When he was young, his mother taught him to cook as best she could. She said it was a life skill he should learn as soon as he can, how to make a substantial meal with only small numbers of components — it’d keep him alive, she said.

When his father asked about it, later, she’d told him it was to make Katsuki desirable to his future alpha. He’d never asked why she’d lied about that — he will forever curse that it took her death to understand his danger.

“What are you planning to cook?” Dabi chirps, as Katsuki leads him down aisles of various spices and sauce, eying everything the omega picks up with unbridled curiosity.

“Dunno,” Katsuki mutters, gruff — in his hands he holds two jars of some generic curry paste, different only by how blended their ingredients are. “What sorta shit do you like?”

“Dunno,” Dabi mocks. He plucks both of the jars from Katsuki’s hands and deposits them into the cart. “Surprise me.”

Katsuki raises an eyebrow. Both of those are expensive — the kind his mother would tell him to budget on, to pick one and make it last until he could afford another. “Are you sure you can cover this?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Wow,” he rolls his eyes, but keeps walking. “You really are sketchy.”

“Am I?” the alpha’s voice is a purr, Cheshire grin mocking and amused. He watches Katsuki sift through ingredients — but he doesn’t get involved in the choices again. He’s made his point.

“Mhm.” Katsuki won’t look a gift horse in the mouth. If Dabi’s insistent on him not worrying about cost, he won’t fucking worry about cost. “What is this? Blood money?”

“Would it bother you if it was?”

Katsuki eyes him, then. He thinks of the gun in the drawer. “Forget I asked.”

He goes about the store on autopilot. He picks up essentials only, first — pasta, rice, bread, various different seasonings and sauces to make any actual meals. It’s easy to fall into his element, here, to switch off his brain and categorize the only things he needs to think of: when he thinks of something else, he doubles back. When he remembers Dabi has nothing to cook with, he guides them down different aisles to collect cookware.

If Dabi’s annoyed at the backtracking and constant loops, he doesn’t comment on it. He doesn’t really say anything, actually, content to be Katsuki’s packhorse while the omega makes meal plans in his head — he just watches. Watches so intently that it’s hard to forget his presence, those eyes are on him constantly.

His aren’t the only ones. Katsuki’s used to being looked at, but not like this — every aisle they turn down, the atmosphere within it changes, careful eyes following his every movement. There’s little to no noise, little to no movement: all gazes, alphas and betas alike, are on him with poorly hidden intrigue. They aren’t the stares he’s used to, and they make him nervous.

“People keep fucking looking at us,” he says, eventually, under his breath, because it’s worrying him that it’s happening and it’s worrying him even more that Dabi isn’t acknowledging it. “Why do people keep looking at us?”

“Ignore them.”

It’s more than just looking, though — people glance at them only from the corners of their eyes, skittering nervously like they’re itching to run but too terrified to move. He can’t decide whether they look at him more, or at Dabi, terrified little glimpses before they can unlock their muscles and slink out of sight.

“You famous or some shit?”

Dabi barks a laugh — it’s loud, and sudden, and a small beta woman near to them startles so violently out of her frozen state that she drops her basket of shopping.

“Apparently,” he says, cryptically, and doesn’t offer anything more despite the way Katsuki’s eyes narrow at him. Katsuki wants to ask if the woman needs help — but by the time he looks at her again, she’s gone.

Dabi leans up from the trolley, stretches his arms over his head. He saunters over to where Katsuki’s standing — in front of various sweet treats, searching for cooking chocolate. It’s been a long time since he’s baked, and he figures he’ll take the opportunity if this psychopathic freak is willing to let him blow his funds. Maybe he’ll make him a damn cake

Staying alive, and all that.

“Throw these in,” Dabi says, reaching to a higher shelf for a packet of some kind of chocolate biscuit things, waving them under Katsuki’s nose. “Snacks, for the road.”

Katsuki snatches them from him, flips them over to read the ingredients. It’s a distraction — Dabi’s not subtle, and Katsuki’s not stupid, but he’s not entirely ungrateful for it. “What the fuck even are these?”

“No idea,” the alpha shrugs. “Breakfast.”

“It looks like a heart attack in a fucking packet.”

“Morning dessert, then.”

“You need to eat something proper, dick,” Katsuki spits. He throws the cake-biscuit-chocolates back in the cart anyway.

“Careful there, princess,” Dabi grins at him, slowly, returning to his place at the cart’s handles. “Almost sounds like you care about me.”

“Die,” is Katsuki’s response. He gets half of a raspy laugh for his efforts.

He throws in a few cleaning products, too, when they happen to walk down that aisle. Like fuck is he cooking in a kitchen in that state. Dabi doesn’t comment on it, and that leads him down another road — he stocks on toiletries, better things to use in the shower and a new toothbrush. He’s pushing his luck a little, if only to see what he’ll get away with.

Turns out, he’ll get away with most things.

“I’m done,” he says, and the cart looks like they’re restocking a store of their own. “Let’s go pay.”

He says it confidently, but he’s never quite seen this amount of stuff in one place. He can’t even fathom what this would cost.

“Don’t bother,” Dabi, evidently, doesn’t care. “C’mon.”

He pushes the cart towards the exit — Katsuki doesn’t argue with him, but something in his throat spikes. He doesn’t really know what he expected shopping with someone who clearly has no regard for the law, he doesn’t know why blatant blasé stealing has surprised him.

Still, he follows.

Staying alive, and all that.

There’s an attendee stood at the door — a beta boy, perhaps Katsuki’s age or perhaps even younger, and he blinks at them as they walk past, unsure and a little confused. Dabi pays him no mind.

“Uh, sir?” the boy tries, swallowing heavily: he’s at least a foot shorter than Dabi is, and half the muscle mass. “You need to pay for—”

The stare Dabi directs at him is plain, and a little terrifying, flicking his icy eyes to the side. The boy pales. His teeth clink when his mouth snaps closed — the poor kid looks like he’s about to piss himself.

“You’re new, huh?” the alpha drawls.

“Um. Excuse me?”

Dabi rolls his sleeve leisurely, while humming a small tune under his breath, uncovering the collection of tattoos that Katsuki saw only hours ago — the employee’s eyes focus on one, though. It’s fine-line, and it looks newer than the others, less faded. A part of it in the corner is peeling, as though it’s scabbing too much or isn’t actually real — but Katsuki doesn’t get a good look at it, really.

The boy’s face drains whiter than a sheet.

“I apologise, sir,” he squeaks, and then, as though it’s the most natural thing in the world, the boy bows. He honest-to-god fucking bows. “Please, give Alpha Shigaraki my best.”

Katsuki stares at him, dumbfounded. Dabi, as per fucking usual, does not look surprised. He just hums and turns his gaze away from the teenager he’s just made cower. “Come on then, doll.”

They leave the beta boy behind. He’s still bowing when Katsuki glances back to check on him.

Dabi doesn’t explain himself, and Katsuki didn’t think he would — he whistles a tune as he rolls their cart into the car park, as unconcerned as ever, very pointedly ignoring Katsuki’s eyes on him and Katsuki’s quivering hands. He’s sure Dabi notices. Part of him thinks there isn’t much Dabi doesn’t notice.

“Shigaraki?” he asks, tentative in a way he doesn’t recognise from himself.

Dabi pauses, and looks at him, eyes contemplative. He’s quiet for a second or two before he answers. “He’s the Alpha here. We’re in his territory.”

Katsuki knows he won’t get much more than that. He doesn’t know if he wants much more than that. He’s seen what being on the winning side of a pack’s hierarchy will do to someone, he’s lived the losing side. The thought of Dabi being anything like the people he’s seen where he’s from makes him feel deeply uncomfortable, deeply afraid.

He won’t push it. He finds he’s content to live in ignorance.

Staying alive. He will get better at staying alive.

Dabi opens his car boot, and Katsuki watches him pile things inside — loose, because they hadn’t grabbed any bags. He doesn’t offer to help. Dabi doesn’t ask him to. He’s still whistling, and those scarred lips of his are slightly upturned, amused.

“You wanna try one of these?” he seems perfectly content, shaking the packet of whatever sugary monstrosity he’d chosen. Katsuki finds his persistent calmness to be a strange kind of disturbance, the kind that’s only there when you really think about it, the kind that could almost be a comfort. He doesn’t want to unpack what that says about him. Or Dabi. Or their entire situation.

He snatches the packet from Dabi’s hand.

The biscuits are pretty good. Katsuki hadn’t realised how famished he was — he wolfs three of them down before he even registers that he has, while Dabi pointedly pretends he doesn’t notice and pointedly pretends he is not amused. He allows himself to be shepherded back into the car, doesn’t fight the hand on the small of his back that pushes him there nor the pleased grin on Dabi’s face when he steals one of the biscuits Katsuki’s still ploughing through.

Dabi starts driving. They’re quiet again.

It’s not as uncomfortable as Katsuki wishes it would be.

“Do you want some new clothes?”

Dabi asks this when they’re five minutes onto the road and halfway down the packet of biscuits — Katsuki’s taken to eating two at a time, briefly pausing every now and then to hold them over the gearstick for the alpha to take one. He plucks them with his bandaged hand.

He’d spoken with his mouth full. Katsuki grimaces at him.

“I don’t have any money,” he says, but it falls limp and lame — Dabi looks at him pointedly, eyebrows raised, face amused.

Katsuki crunches on another biscuit. The alpha snorts.

“There’s a little store nearby that we can stop at. I’ll take you somewhere nicer, when we have more time.”

It’s a weird feeling. Katsuki doesn’t reply, and Dabi keeps driving, and they have a car boot full of stolen (Is it stolen if it was allowed to happen? Is it thievery if the thief seems to abide by higher laws? He isn’t eager to unpack the thought.) shopping, and now he’s being offered more.

If he were less desperate, he might fight such a thing. He might kick and scream like is his usual, might insist that he doesn’t need the help of someone like fucking Dabi.

He isn’t less desperate. He says nothing.

Vaguely, he recognises the area they’ve driven to — it’s near to the flat, he thinks. A street of miscellaneous rundown shops and a single truck selling what looks to be the most disgusting burgers Katsuki’s ever seen. There are no cars on this road aside from one, left to the side and stripped: the tyres are gone, the windows smashed through, missing a door and the bumper and the radio. Picked clean.

“Stay close, love,” Dabi murmurs, a hard set to his eyes and a level to his jaw. He steps out of the car with the grace of a celebrity and the air of a tyrant, guiding Katsuki with that ever-present hand at the small of his back. Katsuki doesn’t argue.

This place feels more reminiscent of where he was when he ran. Where Dabi plucked him from. He sees graffiti and used needles and the occasional laughing gas cannister, strewn across the pavement. The people here are hunched and hollow and they do not stare at him and Dabi the way those in the supermarket did, nor do they scatter — they keep their gazes down, their dead eyes empty but not quite afraid.

The shop Dabi tugs him into has much the same atmosphere. It’s almost entirely empty. The clerk at the counter does not greet them.

“Go ham, Katsuki,” the alpha says, “Get shit to keep you going until we can go someplace else. Whatever you like.”

“Sure,” the omega spits, and he holds his elbows close but he isn’t sure why he feels the need — he can feel eyes on him. It’s more uncomfortable than the supermarket was, more unnerving. “This being paid for with blood money, too?”

Dabi snorts, and his lip quirks with what may be a reply — he’s cut off by his phone. By a trilling continuous tone, sharp and loud, one that makes his face wrinkle.

“Bastard,” he growls, the rumble in his voice matching the tick to his eye. “I have to take this, doll, I’m sorry.”

Katsuki blinks at him. “Like I care.”

Dabi whips his phone out of his pocket. A little thing, a cracked flip phone. He answers it quickly, barks a snarled “What?” in a tone that makes the omega shiver — and then he’s gone, back out the door.

Katsuki doesn’t pay him much mind. He feels like the contents of that call are not something that he should try to overhear, nor something that he would want to overhear.

He doesn’t really bother to browse either — he makes a beeline for the corner, where there is nothing but dark hoodies and sweats and baggy soft things. That’s all he needs, really. He plucks a couple of shirts and an extra jacket, miscellaneous things in black and grey prints that are nice to touch and will hide everything on his body that he wants them to.

A hand falls to his waist.

It’s not Dabi’s. Katsuki knows that without even having to turn around.

“Hey there,” a voice purrs, and it’s close — too close, Katsuki can feel hot breath on his ear, can feel some disgusting petrol-ish scent curl around him like it’s trying to suffocate.

“Get the fuck off me,” he barks, his teeth curling into a pitiful omegan snarl. He drives back an elbow and has a sense of satisfaction when he hears a pained grunt. It gets the hand away from him. He spins around.

“Little bitch got claws.” The alpha is quivering. He’s taller, and wider, but his muscles have a strange tremor to them — there’s a bruise on his arm. A bloodied and disturbed prick at its centre. “Fuck, you smell incredible — and unclaimed, too, it’s my lucky day—”

“Fuck off,” Katsuki pushes him, hoping the obvious inebriation will work in his favour — it does. The alpha stumbles into a clothes line.

“Watch your damn mouth, bitch,” is the spat reply, dirty blond hair stringing down a sweat-stricken forehead, “You should have some respect.”

“You’re fucking disgusting,” Katsuki sneers. “Don’t make me laugh.”

The alpha bristles. His pride has evidently won over his desire, his black eyes harden into something violent and angry and— he snarls, raises a hand.

And Katsuki feels a spark of fear. It’s unintentional and unwanted and he despises it — through it all, a little niggling voice, a cry to call for Dabi, for his alpha, for the man who’s proven he will keep him safe. Katsuki swallows it down like it’s burned him.

He doesn’t want to do it— he doesn’t want to rely on anyone—

The alpha strikes with claws.

But the blow never comes. Katsuki feels a hand snake around his waist and he recognises this touch, he knows this touch — he allows himself to be pulled back into a body with a scent he understands, welcomes rather pathetically the comforting smooth of a thumb across his hip.

Dabi’s there.

And he’s snarling.

“There a problem?” he says — growls — his fangs are bared, elongated, the sound coming from his throat is guttural and deep and downright fucking horrifying. He’s got the alpha’s wrist in a grip so hard his knuckles are white, claws out, care not for the creaking of bone.

“You’re—” the alpha’s stuttering. He’s stuttering. Katsuki’s never seen an alpha behave like this before: there’s no posturing, no battle, no immediate flash of domineering assertion. He breathes deep. The smell of smoke fills his throat.

“You wanna lose this hand?” Dabi’s fingers tighten on his waist, on the wrist of the alpha that dared to cross him. “Back the fuck off.”

The alpha runs away. Like a kicked dog, tail between his legs, scarpering like a rabbit at the sound of a gunshot. He runs away, and Katsuki lets out a soft breath, and Dabi’s still gently snarling, the look in his eyes wild and unhinged.

He runs away.

It’s like a switch has been flipped. Dabi blinks and his eyes lose all anger, dropping down to Katsuki’s face and scanning like he’s looking for something — they’re hard, icy, and yet they soften. Katsuki wonders what it is he sees that makes his face smooth like that.

“Let’s go, Katsuki,” he says, soft, but his fangs still shake, “You have what you need?”

“Yeah,” Katsuki breathes, still in disbelief and possibly still shaking. There is not an ounce of fear in him, anymore. “Yeah, I’m done.”

And they leave. Just like that. No one stops them on the way, no one bats an eye — no one’s even looking at them, every gaze in the store dropped to the floor, every quivering body shrunken as though trying to remain as hidden as possible.

There’s something uniquely thrilling about it — this power, his standing beside someone with as much influence as Dabi has. Katsuki dreads to imagine how such a reputation was gained. He feels something, something that makes his gut squirm: he feels superior. He feels herculean. He feels like he’s been plucked from the trenches he was dragged through since birth and dropped onto a fucking throne.

At his side, Dabi walks without care for the lowers’ fear. One of his hands slips to its place on the small of Katsuki’s back.

Katsuki doesn’t shrug him away.

Staying alive, and all that.

They stop for coffee on the way home, at Dabi’s recommendation. And a snack, because he’s oh so famished, so he says, despite finishing over half of the biscuits he stole. It’s later than Katsuki thought it would be — the little clock on Dabi’s scuffed dash reads 6:16, and the roads are a lot busier than they were before. Dabi says it’s the afternoon rush.

They don’t talk about what happened in the clothing store.

It’s only just starting to get dark; the sky’s dimmed to a pale kind of grey, the clouds sparse but still hanging like a loose fog. Dabi’s humming a little tune to himself as he speeds down straight roads — he overtakes cars often, dangerously swerving around corners. Something in Katsuki wants to be afraid, but he sees the way other vehicles move out of his way.

He’s learned by now that Dabi does what he wants. Like picking up deranged omegas from the streets, and taking more from shops than he can afford, and snarling down alphas with no consequence.

It’s frightening. Katsuki’s never been on this side of alphan entitlement before, never been on the gaining end of pack authority.

(He thinks he’s owed it, after what he’s been through.)

They pull into a small carpark off the side of the road — there’s a diner, tucked pretty between a small coffee shop and a rundown petrol station. Dabi comes to an abrupt stop outside of them, with little care for the designated spaces.

“C’mon,” he chirps, and Katsuki must have something written all over his face, because Dabi snorts right after, “Don’t look at me like that, we’ll be quick. Coffee?”

So Katsuki just follows him. He doesn’t know what more he can do.

“Hot chocolate,” he mutters. Dabi grins.

The café is quaint. It’s cute, really, a hipster’s dream — the walls are decorated with fake ivy and hanging plants, various books and obscure paintings. The tables are small, the chairs comfortable, the colour scheme never quite deviating from soft browns and earthy beiges. Dabi looks wildly out of place here, but he’s coming to learn that Dabi looks wildly out of place everywhere: in a generic supermarket, in a quiet clothing store, in a soft little café.

It’s comforting, in a way. Dabi looks as out of place as Katsuki feels.

Still, he strolls through like he owns the whole damn building. The barista at the counter is stiff, she listens to his order with a clenched jaw and doesn’t tell him a price and does not even glance Katsuki’s way. He demands a black coffee and a hot chocolate and he does so with little bite to his voice but all the authority in the world.

He gets him a muffin, too, without asking for the flavour he’d want.

It’s cherry. Katsuki will never tell him that cherry is his favourite flavour of anything.

They don’t stay to drink in the shop. The nervous barista hastily places flimsy to-go cups on the counter and Dabi scoops them both up without a word, turning on his heel and strolling out of the place like the whispers and the aching silence at his presence are both normal to him.

Katsuki takes his muffin. He mutters a small thank-you to the barista, but her eyes don’t meet his. He’s surprisingly used to it, despite it only being a day of this weird little world he’s now in — there’s a part of him, deep down, deep deep down, that’s fucking revelling in it.

“Katsuki,” Dabi calls. He’s stood by the door, propping it open with one arm, an eyebrow cocked. It’s quiet. Everyone hears his name. “You coming, love?”

Katsuki takes a breath. He squares his shoulders and squares his jaw, and when he follows, it’s without even a modicum of hesitation. “Coming.”

He doesn’t look at anyone on the way out, but they all look at him.

Instead, he catches up to Dabi, and lets the alpha lead him back to his car — lets the alpha hand over his hot chocolate, lets him open the door for him with a flourish and a grin. He slides into his place in the passenger seat, and he doesn’t speak, even when Dabi sits beside him, even when Dabi starts to drive.

He sips his hot chocolate. He eats his muffin. Both are quite possibly some of the most delicious things he has ever consumed. He can still feel the phantom touches of the alpha from the store — the hot drink helps, in a way. It’s a comfort.

There’s a million things he wants to ask, a million things he wants to know.

Why does everyone look at you that way?

Why does everyone look at you with such fear?

Why does everyone look at you with such hatred ?

“Do you like pasta?”

Dabi flicks his eyes to him. The smile on his face is softer, a mere twitch at the corner of his mouth.

“I like pasta.”

He cooks pasta.

By the time they get back, it’s getting dark, and they’re both famished. Katsuki puts away the groceries while Dabi carts them into the flat — it takes him a few trips, and he learns to place them around where Katsuki’s organising them, and it feels stupid and domestic and more comfortable than Katsuki would like to admit. He fills Dabi’s cupboards. He’ll clean them when he has more time. The pasta is boiling while he flits about the kitchen.

Dabi doesn’t have much by way of appliances, and what he does have is old and dented and scratched — with the alpha’s agreement (though he doesn’t particularly seem to care), Katsuki tosses them out. They’re replaced with the new things he bought (stole (stole?)), all shiny and new and pretty.

Honestly, Katsuki’s a little overwhelmed.

“How have you even fucking survived this long?” he snaps, in one of the breaths when Dabi’s emptying his arms of groceries, because an overwhelmed Katsuki is an angry one. “Can you even cook?”

“Not to some people’s standards, apparently,” Dabi snarks. He takes the anger in stride, like always.

Katsuki can’t really reply to him — he’s not used to the lack of a wither at his bite.

Part of him misses Kirishima for that.

“Food’s nearly done,” he says. Dabi hums his acknowledgement from the hall, arms full of clothes that he’s taking through to the bedroom.

It’s stupid. It’s domestic. Katsuki drains the pasta and plates it and mixes it with sauce and it’s more comfortable than he’d like to admit.

Everything with this arrangement seems to be.

“Katsuki,” Dabi appears again, a dog with its nose in the air. His voice is resolute and purring. “Darling. That smells amazing.”

“It is amazing,” Katsuki spits, narrowing his eyes — he gestures vaguely to the plate he’s left on the breakfast bar, “Eat it, dick.”

Dabi snorts at him. He throws himself into his seat and doesn’t wait before he starts to dig in: by the time Katsuki slides onto the stool two down from him, his food is half gone. He eats like he’s starved — Katsuki tries not to feel pride at the way the alpha shovels food into his face, tries not to let his Omega dare to preen.

Katsuki eats slower. Truthfully, he wants more of those biscuits from the supermarket.

“Thinking about finally bandaging that neck?” Dabi talks with his mouth full again. Katsuki levels him with a withering stare.

“You’re disgusting,” he spits, and then, “Sure.”

Dabi grins pointedly with food in his teeth. Katsuki fakes a gag.

The alpha swallows, and laughs. “Take a shower, love. Bandage it after. You’ll have your new clothes to sleep in when you get out, won’t you?”

Katsuki doesn’t say anything.

“I left them in the bedroom.”

“I saw.”

Dabi hums. His plate is wiped clean. He’s fiddling with something on his phone, so Katsuki doesn’t say anything more, leaves his half-finished food on the counter and heads to the bathroom — Dabi doesn’t stop him.

He should’ve gotten himself some toiletries. Dabi’s 3-in-1 stares him down mockingly.

It takes a second for him to take off his clothes — the bathroom has a lock, one Katsuki tests multiple times, but he doesn’t quite trust its strength. He flicks the shower on as low as he can, so that he might still hear footsteps. His wash will have to be brisk. Next time, he’ll wait for the alpha to leave.

He cleans himself as quick as he can manage. Dabi’s wash is scentless, but he doesn’t quite mind that — it makes a change to the overtly musked shit his father buys, the one that smells like alpha but doesn’t really have one definitive scent to it. This one feels nicer on his scent glands, doesn’t wash away his omega’s caramel and burnt sugar.

It’s nice. He doesn’t have much faith in its ability to cleanse him, but the wash is peaceful. He scrubs his waist so hard the skin is raw. It still doesn’t quite feel clean.

He showers quickly. He’s done in under ten minutes.

The towels in the cupboard are stiff and a little too old to be soft. Unused, evidently for a long while. He plucks one that is big enough to shroud him, and thick, wrapping it around his whole body to dash through the hall with his dirty clothes bundled in his arms.

No sign of the alpha. He hears faint movement from the kitchen.

The bedroom is exactly as he left it this morning — his new clothes have been dumped unceremoniously in the middle of the bed, piled and messy. His bags are still by the side table, one opened and rifled through but left exactly it had been.

Dabi has not touched his things. He has not touched this space at all.

It’s fucking weird. Katsuki feels like he’s wandering around with bated breath, like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop and the façade to end — he thinks back to the clothing store. He thinks back to when Dabi protected him, defended him, touched him so confidently and with such careful hands.

Katsuki’s used to being treated like property. He’s used to alphas battling their way into a chance in his life— but Dabi’s touch didn’t feel like that. His aggravation didn’t feel like staking a claim, nor did it feel like a dog defending its holdings.

He’s not met an alpha like Dabi before. He doesn’t know if he’s more scared than he is thankful — the other alphas in his life are predictable, safe in their violence and safe in their movements, because he knows what they will do when they meet certain behaviours and he knows what they will do to keep him in line. He can expect that. He can prepare for that.

He can’t expect anything Dabi does. He fears it, because he cannot predict it.

He cannot control it.

Katsuki lets out a soft breath. He lets the towel drop around him and stands bare. The bedroom door is open. Unsure of what he’s expecting, he stands in silence for a moment. Perhaps he wants part of him to be proven right — perhaps he wants Dabi to charge in here with all the violence Katsuki knows he’s capable of, to take what he is rightfully owed for his generosity, to stake the claim he’s been waiting for.

But it never comes. Katsuki drops to the floor amidst his crumpled towel.

He ponders what would happen if he walked through that hallway, right now, bare as he is. He ponders what might happen if he let his scent reach as far as it is craving to — if he let his idiotic Omega’s base desires win.

He doesn’t know what Dabi would do. The thought is as terrifying as it is comforting.

Mechanical in his movements and more doll than human, Katsuki pulls on his new clothes. They smell like generic washing powder and smoke and caramel.

He pads down the hallway.

And Dabi’s... washing their plates. That’s all.

He’s taken off his coat, rolled the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows. He’s being overly careful not to wet his bandaged hand, and Katsuki’s chest is both warm and hollow and everything it can be at once.

It’s strange, again, the same type of strange as seeing him asleep — it’s weirdly homely, in a way Katsuki never pictured Dabi being capable of, softly humming to himself as he wipes down their forks and leaves them to dry on the side of his sink.

A drying rack. They’ll need a drying rack.

“I showered,” he says. His voice is quiet. Dabi turns to look at him.

“I’m so proud,” the alpha snarks, grinning as he dries off his hands on a stringy tea towel. His eyes sweep Katsuki’s form only once — is there desire there? Is there an urge? Is there something dark hidden beneath the mask of his kindness that he’s biding his time releasing? “You look lovely.”

Katsuki scowls. “Don’t be an ass, I’m wearing sweats.”

Dabi just chuckles, and turns drain the sink, “You look a hell of a lot more comfortable, doll. It’s a good look on you.”

Katsuki can’t really reply to that. He doesn’t know what he can say — his chest is still warm, his hair is still wet, and he’s still wearing clothes that he didn’t buy. What more does he say?

“You’re a dick.”

“As you do so love to remind me.”

The alpha hums a little tune — he swipes his phone and his keys from the counter, ignoring the way his phone is incessantly buzzing, barely sparing a glance to the way Katsuki’s awkwardly stood as he picks up his coat.

His coat?

“You’re going out?” Katsuki says, and it lacks his usual bite, “Again?”

“Gotta pay rent, doll,” Dabi responds, flicking his eyes to him with a light curl to his lip, “With my blood money 'n all.”

Katsuki doesn’t think Dabi pays any rent, actually. He decides he won’t say that. He holds his own elbows — for the comfort, maybe, though he isn’t sure what he needs comforting from — and his feet shuffle on the bare carpet.

“You’re so fucking sketchy,” he snaps. And after a moment, quieter, “When will you be back?”

Dabi looks at him properly, then.

“You’ll be asleep by then,” he says, and his voice is oh so soft. “Don’t worry about it, love.”

His eyes are gentle despite their ice. He looks at Katsuki with a strange kind of fondness — his face is soft, the spiderweb scars splattered across his jaw are still.

“Just kick back, relax,” he says, purrs, “Read the book I got you. Bask in the freedom of living with someone that doesn’t really give a shit what you do. This is your space as much as it is mine.”

Before Katsuki can even blink, Dabi’s moved closer. His hand lifts to wipe away a stray drop of water rolling down the omega’s temple, a gentle swipe of his thumb and then seconds, mere seconds of a careful palm on his cheekbone.

“I’ll be back before you know it,” he murmurs. “Get some sleep. Make sure you tend to your neck.”

And then he’s gone. And Katsuki’s alone.

He thinks he might hate it.