watch me burn || BNHA DabiHawks

3. the ice cream curse

Dabi's in the middle of taking his shirt off - unfortunately, not in any fun context - when he hears Keigo draw in a sharp breath.

"What?" he asks, throwing the shirt on the floor carelessly, despite having a perfectly usable hanger right in front of him. He turns around to find many more eyes than just Keigo's focused on him, which is just creepy, thank you very much – he knows he's hot, but it's a pretty strong reaction to his good looks alone, if you ask him. Which makes him realize there's probably something he's missing here.

And then he remembers.

Already scolding himself for being an idiot, he glances down at his exposed chest and, yup, it's covered in bruises. And an occasional cut or two. And one tiny teeny totally unimportant gunshot wound that he isn't going to talk about.

His classmates are all staring at him in various degrees of horror, fascination and disgust. It's probably kind of sad that he's pretty used to people looking at him like that.

"What the hell happened to you, Todoroki?" blurts one of the guys, whose name Dabi struggles to recall at first, his eyes wide and glued to the mess that is Dabi's chest. And he's not the only one. Even Kaneko can't help but stare. Which, again, rude. Damn Keigo for distracting him before he could slip away to change in his usual bathroom stall.

But really, for people who aspire to be heroes, they all seem overly surprised to see injuries that, for any working hero, would be nothing more than a slight inconvenience. Granted, Dabi isn't a hero and his hero-adjacent activities are a secret, so he can see why they would be alarmed. Still, these are hero course students and getting hurt is a huge part of that job. If they aren't ready to get some scars, they would be better off resigning now that they still have all their limbs attached and no life-long psychological trauma haunting their nightmares.

Briefly, he wonders what they would say about his previous scars, if they're so disturbed by something so mild.

"Not your business, Hahn," he replies cheerily, not even certain if that's the guy's name, reaching for his new (and improved) hero costume and quickly putting it on to make them stop ogling him like a damn freak at a zoo. Do they not have anything better to do? Surely there are more interesting things to gape at than a few bruises.

Bruises that, in all logic, he shouldn't even have. With his quirk being what it is, getting close enough to land a hit on him used to be close to impossible. In all his years as a villain, the number of times someone actually managed to physically hurt him could be counted on the fingers of one hand. And now, a little over a month has passed and he looks like a fucking punching bag. All because of some stupid laws.

At the very beginning of his vigilante gig, he slipped quite often, using his quirk when the fight seemed to be becoming too tedious and he just wanted to end it quickly. Quite careless on his part, he can admit, but, well. He wasn't getting bruises then.

However, it didn't take long for the stories of a mysterious stranger bearing blue flames to start flying around and, subsequently, for him to realize that it might not have been a very smart thing to do. Fire quirks are common, sure, but his is special and it wouldn't be that hard to identify him through it. Especially since, this time around, he isn't, you know, legally dead. And as much as, to him, there aren't many differences between being a vigilante and being a hero, the law disagrees. For them, he could just as well still be a villain.

(And isn't that funny? Somehow, in their minds, saving people without a stupid piece of plastic with his name on it is the same as, let's say, setting the building on fire and listening to the glorious screams of people perishing in his flames. Ridiculous.)

Even so, his own opinion notwithstanding, he's become way more careful not to show off his quirk during his outings since that realization. Instead, he started to rely on improvised weapons he could pick up in the moment, in addition to carrying a small combat knife for real emergencies, and continued like that. Which isn't that much of a problem, except for the fact that it leads to much more close range combat, and therefore a lot more bruises. The bright side is, most of his encounters, even if they result in some minor injury, are the 'you should see the other guy' kind of situations. The less bright side? It still results in a lot of unwanted questions when someone happens to see him without his shirt on, apparently.