Going back to the hideout didn't feel like an option. But when you're running from both sides in a war, where else is there to go but what you know?
You ran as long as you could before you had to hide. By the time dawn took the sky, you'd made your way- well- it felt wrong to say home.
Tenko wouldn't punish or harm you for what you did. You couldn't say the same for Dabi.
"You bitch!" He yelled, his hands once gripping with iron strength flipping the coffee table the moment you walked through the door.
Everything atop it tumbled onto the floor, the already unsteady wooden furniture skidding across the ground. You didn't even flinch. Didn't even let your gaze crawl up from the ground as you locked the door behind you.
"What the fuck was that!?" Dabi yelled again.
"Urgh, they're going at it again," Compress said, pinching the bridge of his nose under his mask, sitting on the back of the couch next to Twice.
"Hey guys, let's just calm down, there's no need to fight!" Twice had an affinity for keeping the peace. "I bet on y/n!" Sort of.
Toga said nothing. She was the first to notice your chin tilted to the earth, something different about the way your entire body seemed limp for the exception of the muscles holding you standing.
Your hair was soaking wet from the rain, clothes too. It'd grown out a bit, but the length was still short enough to bare your face. And you were never the happiest person at the league, not after what you'd experienced. But there was always a sense of life to you- a smile here and there, something inherently you about sudden, more often than not, dark jokes that lit your expression, a sense of attachment you held to the people in the room evident in your warm eyes.
She was sure this wasn't the first time you'd had to do something you regretted. Or experience something that hurt in your bones. But Toga had never seen those warm eyes so dead.
Dabi's hand clamped around your throat without warning, shoving you back against the door. You hadn't even heard him walk over. You didn't react when the feel of the metal binding skin on his palm pressed against your windpipe or his fingers squeezed your veins.
"You thought you could kill me with a little storm?" He asked, more bite than bark behind his tightening grip.
You swallowed at the discomfort. But the estill fresh pain of having to leave your friends behind a second time didn't allow your face to so much as wince at his harshness. Dabi didn't seem to care.
At first, you might've thought it was embarrassment that morphed into an unquenchable temper. It wasn't. It was the loss of something he thought you shared. A blooming trust you killed by the roots. And you didn't even regret it for a second.
"If I wanted to kill you, you'd be dead." You whispered, as if you were reading a fact from a textbook.
"Is that so?" His question was laced with the irony that he deftly could crush your throat and watch you suffocate. God, he was so shortsighted, so stupid sometimes, you wish you had the energy to roll your eyes.
"You're the one who said my power'd end the world," you whispered again, not a single emotion fleeting across your face other than the apathy. "You have no idea how much energy it's taking to hold him back from breaking every bone in your body right now."
"Get off her." Toga warned, voice deeper by an octave or two, gravelly threats of her impending violence if Dabi didn't let go of her friend.
The villain's gaze drifted to her with annoyance. When the needles clutched in her fists came into view, he realized just how much you meant to her. Tsk-ing out a breath his hand dropped from its hold as he shook it out like if he'd been holding a bug in need of stomping.
