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At first, it was an issue.
Dabi found himself young and fresh-faced on the streets, and after discovering the grafts that made up his skin and their fickle, prone-to-falling apart nature, rectified by staples and stitches and a blessed moment for his burnt tear-ducts to shine, he also found himself obsessive.
With his own cleanliness, that was. Idle paranoia about the state of himself and every odd chill or ache, determined to wash and replace and keep himself standing.
He would do his best to keep his spaces clean, no matter what haunt he was skulking in. Tidied, clear of dust and trash. Washed his hands near religiously, had too many partial showers in public bathroom sinks to count, had broken into public gyms and on the occasion even apartments just to be clean.
Dabi was quite literally falling apart, after all. Didn’t it only make sense that he should try and keep himself together? At least so much so that he could properly make it to his final, blazing day, right?
He found himself a rough business partner, as Giran called. No handshakes or pleasantries and after one-too-many nights out on the street because he couldn’t make rent, far too picky for as unknown as he was. Picky, picky…
Fucking hungry. Sick of outside, sick of cold that he can’t feel that makes his joints ache regardless, sick of the constant panic blaring alarm bells at all hours, sick, sick, and sick.
And slowly, it fades.
He… bothers a little less. Sleeps with the trash around him because he's too tired fresh off of work to do anything about it. Goes days, a week, two, without a shower because he’s out on a job and reeks of soot and ash any-fucking-way. Why waste it?
His breaking and entering becomes more about first aid and clothes and food than it does the running water. He becomes less particular, lets himself…
Waste, maybe, is the word.
He certainly doesn’t upkeep himself, doesn’t try to stop his skin from growing discolored because of another infection, doesn’t try to avoid anymore fights than he usually does when fever burns beneath his skin and leaves him hazy — he lets himself ache and ache and ache and ache. So be it.
Touya could learn how to do it. Work in pain, in spite of it.
And it’s not a problem. He learns, Dabi learns very quickly how to deal with it all. It becomes something regular, and the pain and viscera that seized him so often before barely brushed him, now, seeing the festering rot of one of his wounds that had spread, eating away at the back of his leg slow and crawling around the rest of him.
It’s fine. Normal. Inconsequential when he’ll end in death, anyway.
… He thinks so, at least.
___
His issues start again, obviously. Just on the opposite side of the spectrum.
It’s Grian, obviously. Of course it is, the man who had judged his choices before coming back around to judge them again as he collects him for whatever new meeting he’s tagging along to, staring at the odd, blistering quality to the grafts around his throat.
“Dabi,” he greets, and doesn’t make it very far before he’s gesturing to his own neck and pinching his brows. “What’s going on ‘ere? You gonna make it to this, or didja jus’ show up to tell me about yer throat cancer?”
Dabi rolls his eyes. “Please, broker. It happens. It’ll drain.”
And it will be painful. But he can deal.
“Whatever you say. ‘S’at like, one of ‘em blisters?”
“Basically,” he rasps. The chill of the night air as they walk feels nice, even if he’s only really perceiving it and not feeling. “Just under the grafts instead of on top of the skin.”
Giran shudders, side-eyeing him. “Yer one weird freak of nature, Dabi.”
He rolls his eyes again and continues in silence, until he’s led to a little alleyway and told to wait until he returns with another client. The client is a skipping teenage girl, as it turns out. Who stares at him and tries lunging for his throat the minute she sees him, earning a smoking hand shoved in her face.
Whoever she is, she just giggles. Bares her canines.
Giran sighs and tells them to head inside, and all is well.
___
All is not.
All is not well because— because—
Dabi can do kidnappings. Fine, whatever, see his little brother there and whatever, it’s fine. He can do mouthy blonde kids who he’s the only person smart enough to not get near. Hell, he can even do fucking heroes showing up to raid their place! He can do shitty Yakuza! He can do all of that just fine!
What he can’t fucking do, is this.
They, the League, had been drifting after Kamino. After that meeting with Overhaul. Shigaraki was pissy in his own right, after Kurogiri had left, plans to wreck that bastards shit in the making, and everyone else was just trying to keep afloat, mostly, and even if they all had their two cents to throw in about the state of where they’d been staying, it dulled out after the first few locations when they realized they were just going to have to deal.
Filth is fine. Dabi can do that. He’s more than comfortable in it, actually — his problem apparently is that no one else is.
His issue is mostly his leg — he’d known infection was eating away at it, but it had taken him too damn long to deal with it what with the constant moving, and now he was going to have to deal here. Now.
With the League hovering over him. Toga and Compress and Twice and even Magne, before — everyone, actually, for even Shigaraki had thrown a weird look his way — had their concerns about the cleanliness of wherever they were.
Dabi, are your scars going to be alright? Dabi, don't cha get sick easy with those seams? Dabi, we don’t have— Dabi, are you—
Dabi, Dabi, Dabi.
He’d brushed them off every time. He wishes he’d brushed them off harder.
“You all don’t need to stand over me like a buncha’ nannies, y’know.” he grumbles, shoving his pant leg all the way up to sit on his thigh and slowly beginning to pick out the staples circling his ankle.
Compress makes some sort of pained noise. “Dabi… well, excuse our nannying, but this is quite…”
He spares another sweeping glance to the League around him, not exactly caging him in but forming a semicircle around him. The last of his staples comes out painfully, the healthy skin reddened and angry. No pain aches at him, but he knows what that kind of discoloring means. A bit of swelling, foul-smelling.
And then Dabi promptly peels his skin back.
Various expressions of horror surround him immediately, a multitude of hisses and sucked teeth and sharp inhales — Dabi doesn’t twitch, the stiff yet fragile quality of his grafts foreign and cold from where he has them… bunched-up, ruched, just below his knee like the worlds' worst pair of leggings.
The sight of his bone only makes it worse. The wound is… rough, even he can admit.
Rough, and bad enough that he and a few other League members recoil at the smell — rotting, drainage, the cracked, exposed thing of an infection beginning at the side of his ankle and crawling around to his skin and the meat of his calf.
Its edges are jagged and oddly curved, purple-red at the edges and peeling skin, sloping into ugly patches of yellow that are shiny with fluid.
A gap near the top exposes the damning white of bone; his shin. Tibia, whatever. The deepest points around the inside of his leg bare completely blackened spots.
Dabi pokes at it with almost clinical ease, stomaching the smell easy and leaning over, jabbing again with his pinky and watching the purulent and clear fluid alike pearl up beside his finger.
It’s… he’s never — he’s had stuff similar to this, obviously, achy wounds and holes and open that he left out to scab over and fix themselves, but never to such scale.
Dabi can feel his heart suddenly pick up, a wild and thrashing wrongness sweeping through him — the stupid, animal part of him screaming at him that something was bad and wrong and needs to go away, a cold rush at seeing, digesting something that was not natural.
Dabi swallows it down. Forcefully. Shakes his head and tells himself that he’s being stupid and unreasonable, and that he needs to focus and take care of this.
First order of business is cutting away the blackened bits.
It’s just that when he looks up to find someone to hand him a knife to do that, he’s met with the same blankly, revulsed features of everyone in the League. Dabi scoffs a little, under his breath and then again, louder, loud enough to draw attention his way.
“Seriously? You guys kill people on the regular, and a little sore is tripping you all up?”
Twice scrunches his face. “Hey, no offense, but this is not just a little sore, man. Yeah, no, it’s pretty small.”
“I agree with Twice, here,” Compress clears his throat. “This is…”
Disgusting. Vile. Filthy. Just like you, you, you, little Touya.
“Please. Shit like this happens.”
“Happens?” Shigaraki leans forward. “Things like this don’t exactly happen, Dabi.”
“It’s… uh, like it’s bad, man. Is that bone?” Spinner rubs at his neck. Toga stays silent beside him, the only one so bold as to keep her nose anywhere near the smell, seeming about as unaffected as Dabi himself.
Dabi waves a hand. “Prob’ly. Look, you think I’m out here stapled like this and don’t deal with this kinda stuff? Speakin’ of, someone get me a knife. A sharp one, preferably, I’d rather not be sawin’ at this thing ‘til the sun comes up.”
Toga, dutifully, produces a blade from… somewhere. She swiftly moves up on Dabi’s favorite list, even as she crouches down and just kind of stares quietly.
Well. She could do whatever she wanted beside him, so long as she doesn’t try and interrupt him while she does it.
Shigaraki copies the move, actually, kneeling and offering a wildly judgemental side eye at the way Dabi tugs at the sides of the wound and even taps the black patch just to hear the dull clicking of the tip of the knife against hardened, scaly cells. But unlike Toga, his hands move with purpose, roving across the concrete until he produces one of the many staples he had pulled from his ankle.
He holds it up to the light and his face twists even further into a frown, if possible.
“This has rust on it.” he says, simply.
Dabi raises his eyebrows. “Does it, now? Huh.”
“That doesn’t concern you at all?” Shigaraki snaps.
“Explains why my skin was so tore up, then. Even more than usual when it decides it wants to reject whatever staples I stick in there.”
“And this just— you just, what, do this? Let it happen?”
His voice is demanding. Dabi sneers. “Yeah. So what?”
“ So what— We’re your team. You can’t be, fucking, I don’t know, dying of infection alongside us! We need you, you stupid, reckless fucking—”
“ Dying — you’re so fuckin’ dramatic, you know that? Think I’d know if I was dying.”
“I suppose it is possible,” Compress muses, breaking into the budding back-and-forth. “Perhaps you are constantly in what would be sepsis, and your quirk just chases it out before your organs can begin to fail.”
What a happy thought. One he’s had before though, mulled and considered — only for his whopping conclusion to amount to… fuck, maybe.
Dabi rolls his eyes one more time for good measure and then stabs himself.
Maybe stab is a strong word. Lightly jabs might be apt, as he shoves the tip of the blade right under the edge of the most immediate black spot, wedging and shimmying it under like he’s flaying the skin off of a fish, or something.
It’s… messy. Undignified. Lowly.
Unceremonious, as he doesn’t flinch or bite down and in fact hardly even feels a thing besides a few sparks, with his own ruined nerve endings, and despite the palpable disdain for it, the League remains circled.
Spinner is the first to break the newfound silence. “That doesn’t… hurt?”
“No,” Dabi shakes his head. Uses his finger to lift the patch and saw away at the final string of tissue connecting it. Prods at the chunk until it falls to the floor. Toga grabs for it, and he lets her. “I can’t feel anything.”
Twice wordlessly passes him a cloth. Antiseptic. Bottled water. Dabi pats at the drainage until he deems it clear enough, rubs the antiseptic around the sides and dumps the water right on.
Doesn’t feel a thing and hears the silence.
His degloved skin folds back over with a shudder that passes through the entire League, and he just kind of… listlessly prods at his seams. Shigaraki stands suddenly, reappearing after a handful of moments with a staple gun in hand.
He dumps it into Dabi’s hands without making a sound. Watches him intently.
Dabi completes his little anklet easy, finding it familiar and almost refreshing to hear the deafening shnk over and over, until bright bands of silver are there to keep himself together again. Flexes and points his foot, testing and stretching the skin and feeling the appropriate tug that told him the tension was enough.
When he looks up, Toga finds his gaze and bites into the chunk of necrotic flesh she’d taken from him. Dabi watches it with a wondrous sense of revulsion building in his gut, especially when her expression twists but she does not spit.
No, no, she swallows it. And then drops the rest and flutters her fingers.
“Ew.”
Dabi raises an eyebrow. She waves her hands. “Tasted… dead. Weird. Cold and flat.”
“That’s probably because it was dead tissue.”
Toga sticks her tongue out at him. For the millionth time this evening, Dabi rolls his eyes, and then slides up to his feet and rocks on his heels, shifting and bending.
Still, nobody says anything. Not until Shigaraki stares him up and down and makes an odd face at him. Dabi blinks.
“Are you going to be good for this raid?”
The Overhaul one, that is, when they steal his arms and also his fancy bullets. “‘Course. Told you this shit happens all the time, dunno why you’re all treatin’ in like a big deal.”
Shigaraki doesn’t look pleased, for some fucking reason or another. Crosses his arms. “I’m ignoring that. If you die from something as stupid as tetanus I’m going to find you in hell and bring you back so I can kill you again myself.”
“Really feeling the care, boss.”
“Die.”
“Palpable, even. Radiating off’a ya’.”
Shigaraki grumbles, looks away — as good as admitting defeat, as far as Dabi’s concerned. He takes it for the win it is.
Everyone does get over it, in a sense. All leaving to their own devices and whatnot.
Dabi stares at a few of his other wounds, in the after. The festering ones pocking up on his arms, the blistering beneath the skin of his shoulders and draining at his neck, the swelling and dry crackling of his cheeks and the sting of his tear ducts and eyes.
…Whatever. It’d be fine.
He’d managed this long — even if he looks at himself and his state and thinks of Touya, so painfully bright-eyed and worried for himself like it mattered at all — without whatever bullshit Shigaraki, the League, whoever, wanted to spew.
Dabi would be fine. He had been, and he will be.
No reason for him not to rot on his last days, after all.