Chapter Text
When Dabi finally coaxes Fuyumi up off of the floor, he helps her finish off the mochi dough and put it in the fridge for safekeeping. It’s not like they’d be ready to eat in time for dinner, anyway, so she can make them later if she wants.
There’s a lot of things he could say about their little heart-to-heart, but he elects to say nothing at all. He’s not prepared for it right now, and he’s clearly going to have plenty of time for it over the next week, if these first twenty minutes are any indication of how the rest of their swap is going to go. Fuyumi is finally starting to look more settled and focused, and he has no intention of the assholes in the other room finding out what he looks like when he would be crying if only he could.
He starts helping her make curry, instead.
It’s a lot faster with two pairs of hands—well, three, sort of, in that Fuyumi lets Toga help them cut the vegetables and meat. It’s more than Dabi would usually let the little knife nut do, but at least Fuyumi doesn’t seem scared of her and also has the sense not to let her anywhere near the actual stove or the spices.
Compress follows Toga through the door, despite the fact that last time he was in the kitchen while Dabi was cooking curry, he accidentally dumped enough salt into the pot that not even Shigaraki would eat it. He pokes around asking leading questions and kibitzing their cooking until Dabi is about three seconds from hunting down a lighter to set him on fire in absence of his quirk, but Fuyumi puts her foot down and demands he either help or get the hell out of the kitchen.
Compress slinks sheepishly back out to the living room and Dabi grins to himself behind his mask. At least they don’t think Fuyumi’s a pushover.
When it’s ready, Dabi bullies Spinner into setting the table with a reminder that, in the absence of his fire, Dabi would have to get creative with his threats, and no one wants that. Spinner is still sulking and moving at a snail’s pace, but he is moving, and Dabi has way too much practice coralling these assholes—he’ll be done at just about the same time the curry is.
Compress gets a suspicious glare when he reenters the kitchen, but he’s radiating innocence and pointedly avoiding the pot, so Dabi doesn’t have to go after his fingers with a knife. Yet. “Ah, Dabi, I feel that you should be informed that Shigaraki is hereby banned from drink making in addition to his ban on meal preparation—“
“No shit,” Dabi says, confused why Compress feels the need to tell him this. “Have you tried his tea? There’s a reason I make you do it.”
Compress tilts his head. “…That would have been nice to know. This ban was implemented because he thinks poisoning is a necessary part of learning to cook.”
“I mean, he grew up a villain. That’s just fucking practical.”
“Please don’t make me regret letting you cook with me,” Fuyumi sighs from the stove. “Someone put a potholder on the table, I’m about to—ow.”
“Stop burning me, you idiot,” Dabi gripes, walking over to shoo his twin away from the curry. “How many times have you done that?”
“Oh, shush. This is the first time, I just forgot to let the cookies cool earlier before trying one—“
“Well, I have enough burns without you forgetting you’re not fireproof, so stop that.” Dabi pauses and then gives the curry pot a speculative look. “Can I seriously just pick the pot up without the handles, and it’ll just…”
“Barely feels warm,” Fuyumi assures him. “I’ll get the potholders.”
“Identity clue number one,” Toga announces. “Ihai is fireproof.”
Dabi rolls his eyes and smirks behind his mask. That’s one of the only clues they’ll find completely fucking useless—their jackass of a father had never bothered testing Fuyumi’s quirk enough to figure out that little gem, and Fuyumi wisely had not volunteered it. They and their mother are the only ones who know, unless she’s told their little brothers sometime in the last decade.
Still, he has a reputation to uphold. “No trying to guess. Everyone, sit down or I’m going to wind up dumping this shit over your head.”
“Can you reach that high?” Shigaraki asks.
Dabi resists the urge to dump it on him on purpose out of pettiness, but he’s outgrown the constant need to prove himself. Usually. “You got a complaint about my height, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Hey, Ihai, why are you so fucking short?”
“One of us had to be down-to-earth.”
Dabi scoffs and shoulders past a sniggering Shigaraki to put the curry on the table.
“Ihai’s taller than me!” Toga offers.
“You’re seventeen, you’ll grow,” Twice counters. “You’ll be a midget forever.”
“Is that a clue? That Ihai’s short?” Spinner asks.
“She’s 5’3”, that’s average height for a woman,” Hawks refutes, perched on his chair like he’s going to fly away any second. “Doesn’t exactly narrow it down.”
“How do you know my height?” Fuyumi asks suspiciously.
“I have a good eye for detail.”
Fuck. Hawks is the one Dabi’s actually worried about having enough resources to figure it out, or even just the luck—he bumps elbows with Endeavor often enough to potentially catch on if either of them are unlucky enough to say the wrong thing. “What did I say about the speculation?”
“But we’ll get to see Ihai’s face when you take the mask off for dinner.” Toga claps her hands together and grins smugly at him. “Then maybe we’ll see her again later, and we’ll all know!”
Fuyumi looks briefly panicked. Amateur. Dabi sweeps a quelling glare around the table and says, “No, you won’t.”
Toga tips her head to the side curiously. “Then how are you going to eat?”
…Dabi has not thought it through that far quite yet, but he’ll figure something out. “Sit the hell down, all of you, you’re going to give me gray hair and I just dyed it.” Fuyumi twitches at the reminder, but the action draws Hawks’ and Spinner’s eyes and Dabi is absolutely willing to use her as a distraction. It’s for their mutual benefit, anyway.
“If you can take off your glasses, you can use the top of one of my masks and hide half of your face that way,” Twice offers. “Stay the hell away from my costume.”
“Thanks, I guess, but I need these glasses to see,” Dabi points out. “Speaking of—Ihai, your eyesight is fucking awful.”
“I don’t need to take that from a man who has staples in his face,” Fuyumi says firmly. “We all have our crosses to bear.”
As everyone starts in on the curry, Dabi is left to figure out how to protect his identity without looking like an idiot while trying to eat. He winds up leaving the mask on his face and just shoving it up and holding it there with a hand covering what the mask normally would. Fuyumi’s glasses keep it from going over his eyes, so while it’s obnoxious, it’s workable, and much better than the alternative.
“You look stupid with your hand over your mouth like that,” Spinner observes.
Dabi shuffles his chopsticks to be able to flip him off with the same hand. “Does my hand look stupid like this?”
“Oooh, you should paint your nails,” Toga says excitedly, reaching across the table to grab said hand and making his chopsticks drop to the table. Dabi rolls his eyes at her customary complete disregard for personal space. “We can have a girl’s night—“
“Not a fucking girl.”
“I meant a person’s night. Or something. You can paint them black!”
Dabi thinks about it for one lightning-fast second, but even if he wouldn’t mind having black nails—it’d be punk as fuck, in the absence of most of his usual accessories—he would never recover from having allowed Toga to win an argument. Especially not this argument. He pulls his hand away so he can pick up his chopsticks again. “No, fuck off.”
Toga pouts at him for a grand total of about two seconds before having a visible lightbulb moment and turning to Fuyumi with a grin. “Hey, Ihai—“
“Don’t you dare,” Dabi snaps. Then he remembers that telling Toga not to do something is next to useless unless you’re willing to back it up with force, and he glares at his sister instead. “You are not allowed to paint my nails.”
Fuyumi eyes him. Then her gaze wanders up to his hair—that is to say, her hair, which currently looks nothing like her hair at all. “It’ll be temporary,” she says sweetly, because siblings are the fucking worst.
Spinner snorts. Dabi flips him off again without looking.
“We still have an actual important discussion to have.” Shigaraki cuts through their banter like the wet blanket he always is when he plays at being a leader. “Dabi, why haven’t you fixed the quirk yet?”
Dabi grimaces and pokes at his curry. He’s surprised they haven’t asked until now, but he didn’t exactly have urgent news on the matter. “There’s two ways for the quirk to reverse. First one is getting Ihai, in my body, back to the kid and having her activate the quirk again. There are… obvious issues with that.”
“The fact that you’re a wanted criminal, and even if the kid doesn’t recognize you, no sane mother is going to send her child off alone and she definitely will?” Fuyumi suggests, dry as a desert.
“Yeah.”
“What’s option two?”
“…It wears off in a week or something.”
Fuyumi drops her chopsticks and her jaw. “A week? Or something?”
Dabi ignores the varied, incredulous reactions of the League and turns to Fuyumi to shift into placating mode, if only so she doesn’t actually set something on fire. Again. He already misses having more than one couch. “Hey, it’s fine. I know it sucks not having options, but the League isn’t really planning anything for the next week anyway—“
“I was planning things,” Fuyumi says, a little hysterically. “I have a girlfriend. I have a job. And for the record, you are absolutely forbidden from trying to perform my job, especially after what you did to my hair.”
Dabi rolls his eyes. “Believe me, I have no intention of trying to do your job.” He’s not good with small children on a good day; too used to terrifying them. Besides, Fuyumi probably knows all their names and favorite colors or whatever teachers need to know about their students, and Dabi knows precisely none of that with no desire to learn. “But I have your phone, so tomorrow you can email them and let them know you’re having a family emergency.”
“But—they—I’m—gaaaaah.” Fuyumi puts her head down on the table, thankfully before she becomes coherent enough to give away any clues about her job. She stays there for just long enough for Dabi to wonder if he should pat her shoulder or something, and then she sits bolt upright again just as Toga is gearing up to poke her. “This is fine! A week? I can handle a week. Here. With all of you. In the wrong body. This is fine.”
“You don’t sound fine,” Twice says dubiously. “Suffer with the rest of us, bitch.”
“Call my sister a bitch again and you won’t be talking for the rest of the week, Twice.”
“Sorry, Dabi! It’s a dumb insult anyway.”
Toga starts tapping Shigaraki incessantly on the shoulder, despite his attempts to shrug her off. “Are you seeing this? This is adorable, look, he’s a protective big brother.”
“We don’t actually know if he’s older than her or not,” Shigaraki says crabbily, batting her hand away with his thumb curled into his palm. Toga doesn’t immediately pull away, because she has she self-preservation instinct of a drunk lemming, but Dabi isn’t about to intervene in something that annoys Shigaraki that much.
Also, it’s keeping attention off of Fuyumi before she can lose her cool. Dabi’s had several hours to get used to the idea of a week like this, but she was probably still holding out hope that this entire nightmarish situation would reverse any minute.
“I’m older,” Dabi tells them, if only because he has to set the record straight on this right now, before Fuyumi gets any ideas in her head of trying to steal that pedestal from him. This is identifying information, technically, but he is not willing to cede his hard-won position as the eldest sibling for a paltry thing like operational security. “Only by a couple minutes, obviously, but I am older.”
“Clue number two!” Toga crows.
“Three. Two is that Ihai dyes her hair,” Spinner argues.
“Dying her hair should probably be the first clue we know, since they mentioned it first,“ Hawks puts in.
“Dabi dyed her hair, maybe Ihai doesn’t dye it? Oooh, maybe he dyed it back to the original color?” Toga loses her focus and almost pokes Shigaraki in the eye; Shigaraki finally loses his cool and he and Toga dissolve into a high-stakes slap fight. Twice and Compress hastily intervene to prevent any potential dusting.
Dabi takes the time to keep an eye on Fuyumi, determinedly ignoring Hawks keeping an eye on him.
When he’s pretty sure Fuyumi isn’t going to dissolve into hysterics if someone nudges her the wrong way, Dabi says, “For the record, Ihai, you’re gonna be fine. You’ve clearly already terrorized the rest of these assholes into compliance.”
Fuyumi looks at the slap fight on the other side of the table and then back at him. This is compliance? her expression says, but she just rolls her eyes and shakes her head. “Yeah, only one asshole left,” Fuyumi snips, and kicks him under the table.
“I thought you were terrorizing him during your talk in the kitchen?” Compress asks.
“What? Why would she scare me?” Dabi demands, insulted. Which, okay, Fuyumi was a little alarmingly pissed off when she saw what he did with her hair earlier, but Dabi was not scared. And even if he was, there’s no reason anyone in the League would ever have to know about it. “You guys are just wimps.”
“I’m not terrorized either, but I can be bribed with cookies,” Toga informs Fuyumi brightly.
“Oh, that reminds me!” Fuyumi exclaims, pushing her chair out to stand. “I made a Western dish for desert, give me about ten minutes and I’ll have it out. I’ve never made it before so I’m curious if it actually worked.” She disappears into the kitchen.
Spinner gives Dabi a look that clearly asks what on earth is wrong with his sister. Since the answer, as far as Dabi can tell, is nothing, we’re the weird ones, he just glares right back.
“This is called Crème Brûlée,” Fuyumi says, passing out a small dish to everyone. “I don’t know if anyone here has had it before, but it takes a long time to make so I sort of focused on the challenge. I have no idea how well it actually turned out, so I guess we’ll all figure that out.”
Compress lifts his mask away from his face for just long enough to take a careful bite, humming in delight. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had Crème Brûlée, but this is quite good, I assure you. Nicely browned, as well! I admit, I didn’t realize we had a butane torch in our kitchen, much less one that was functional.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t see one either.”
“Then how…?”
Fuyumi holds up a finger and bites the lip of her tongue, concentrating, to produce only a lick of bright blue flame. There’s two failed dishes in the kitchen she’d burned before figuring out how to maintain only a small flame, but she’s very proud of herself for figuring it out. “Like this!”
Dabi’s mouth drops open in offense. “Goddamn it, Ihai, you can’t use my quirk for cooking.”
Shigaraki starts cackling as Himiko’s eyes are sparkle in amusement. Compress is doing his oh-so-subtle cough into his fist, which Fuyumi is starting to consider as just how he laughs, because it’s deliberate, showy, and disguises absolutely nothing.
“I needed practice,” Fuyumi protests. She eyes Hawks. “It’s be a real shame if I burned something I didn’t mean to.”
Hawks, already halfway through his Crème Brûlée, blinks like a deer in the headlights, wings mantled up defensively. Fuyumi feels sort of bad for scaring him—except no, actually, she doesn’t feel bad even a little bit. She smiles at him for full effect.
Hawks takes another bite of Crème Brûlée, presumably so he doesn’t have to try to defend himself. Twice leans over and pats him on the shoulder, stage whispering to him, “It’s okay, I think she’s really a softy. We’ll have roast chicken by this time tomorrow.”
“Thanks Twice,” Hawks manages. He swallows his mouthful of desert. “That’s… helpful. Hey, actually, I need to get back to maintaining my Hero cover. I can come by again tomorrow, does anyone need anything?”
Dabi snorts. “Still can’t believe you’re scared of my goddamn sister, but go on, run away, little birdie.”
“I like my feathers where they are,” Hawks protests. “Also, fuck you, I do have to run a patrol tonight.” He starts wolfing down the rest of his Crème Brûlée while standing from his seat.
Fuyumi settles herself into her seat and starts on her own desert while doing her best to ignore all of that. He’s still running around like a Hero just to keep a cover, ugh. She fantasizes briefly about telling Rumi about this and watching her kick his feathered ass—possibly after burning all those feathers off herself, because he’s exponentially more dangerous the more of those he has available.
At least when Hawks leaves she won’t have to think about him for a while. She can whisper-yell at Dabi later for corrupting a Hero, though she doubts he’ll see it her way, especially if Fuyumi was right about seeing Hawks checking her out while thinking she was her brother.
Himiko pushes her chair back and showily tiptoes out of the kitchen after Hawks has left. She’s back less than thirty seconds later, hurrying in and hopping into her seat, vibrating with energy. “Okay, he’s gone!” She slams her hands on the table, earning Fuyumi’s immediate attention and alarm. “Ihai, you seem really stressed about Hawks being here, but don’t worry, he’s still a Hero. He’s just sneaking around here because he’s trying to be a double agent.” Himiko frowns to herself thoughtfully. “Wait, triple agent? Um, one of them, I forgot how those work.”
Dabi chokes on his spoon. Fuyumi is glad she hasn’t actually tried to take a bite yet, because she suddenly has many, many other questions—that cannot mean what it sounds like.
“Okay, first of all,” Dabi says, “There’s still a solid 20% chance he’s actually trying to defect to villainy—“
Himiko, Twice, and Spinner all immediately start snickering like schoolchildren. Compress hides his mouth behind his hand, despite the fact that it’s already hidden by the mask he’s already replaced; neither do much of anything to hide how his shoulders are silently shaking.
Shigaraki just outright laughs in Dabi’s face. “You mean there’s a 20% chance he won’t do anything because he thinks you’re hot.”
“—Second of all, how long have all of you known this.”
Cue collective eye-rolls from all around the table.
Fuyumi’s brain finally reboots enough for her to say, “Wait, you’re saying—let me get this straight.”
“There’s nothing straight about this, but continue,” Compress says politely.
“Hawks is a double agent reporting back to the Heroes,” Fuyumi says. A collection of nods; Dabi just looks disgusted and doesn’t respond, but she is going to assume that means the same thing but with more contrary reluctance. “All of you know this, and have probably known for a while.” Nods again—even from Dabi, who looks extremely put out about it. “And you’re not… doing anything about it?” Mixed responses, but mostly shrugs. “Why?” she bursts out.
“Well,” Compress hedges, “we aren’t doing anything particularly villainous at the moment—“
“Dabi’s walked into four door frames in the last month and it’s fucking hilarious,” Shigaraki says shamelessly.
Fuyumi slowly turns to look at her brother. Most of his face is still covered by the mask, but she can see the creeping red of his blush despite his expression of absolute rage. “I have not, you fucking liar.”
“I have it on video!” Himiko announces with a wide grin.
Dabi’s attention snaps toward her. “Delete it. Delete it now.”
Fuyumi’s head is spinning. If Hawks is a double agent—triple agent, whatever—then he would do something if the villains were an immediate threat. And Fuyumi doesn’t have to rat him out to Rumi, either, and pit her against her best friend. It could be a trick, but Fuyumi frankly isn’t sure Himiko has that much subtlety in her entire person, and she doesn’t think Dabi would go for a story like this.
And as for the League of Villains… Fuyumi watches the byplay between them: Dabi snarling at a smugly grinning Himiko, Shigaraki and Spinner jeering at him, Twice cheering on Himiko, and Compress observing them all like an indulgent uncle. This club of disasters is a collective menace to society, true, but they aren’t nearly as much of one up close.
They are also clearly the closest thing Dabi has had to a family in a decade, spats and annoyances and all.
…Okay. Fuyumi can respect that. She’s been handling them for six hours already, even half-believing they’d try to kill her when this was all over, but if they’ll tolerate a triple agent in their midst just because Dabi likes him, there’s nothing they’ll be willing to do to her. She can handle this.
But first, something much more important—Fuyumi leans forward over the table to say, very seriously, “Himiko, I desperately need you to send me a copy of that.”
“Don’t you dare,” Dabi snarls.
Himiko claps her hands together and beams. “Of course, Ihai! I knew we’d be just like family!”