guard.

SET ME A FUNERAL PYRE

ACT II, SCENE I

set me a funeral pyre.

Bloody footprints and ashen lungs -- crippled breath and tearless eyes. Purple ichor swims through his veins; dyes his skin, burns blue to his soul. Brands him a monster with stolen sutures and silver medical staples.

Silver like moonshine shines drunk on his skin (pour gasoline, spit fire, burn like the next supernova headed toward greatness). He's the ghost of a brother - the ghost of a child, diamond-hard blue eyes and azure fire that stains him magneta and burns him black like the tip of a crumpled matchstick. Heart full of regret and lips twisted with resentment. He's rotten, rotting, falling apart from the threads that hold him―it's no longer skin. He's no longer who he was. Gone is the boy who talked to the cold spots on the wall - and gone is the boy, the hero. Gone is Icarus. Gone is he.

Gone is Touya Todoroki, he's nothing but ashes. Sickly bones in burnt skin.

Cremated - he's Dabi. (He's never going to be a hero.)

He's killed Touya, he's nothing but the demons trapped inside the pits of a boys mind. He's nothing but the fire that strips him of his humanity. This is how he'll ruin himself; tear him apart from bone and purple skin. Tame the blue devil trapped to his ribcage and let the world burn in an ocean light―let them see what happens to the ones they look up to when they leave a boy with his fire.

He's half-gone and half-here and it hurts to stay, but he's already burnt up so hard and fast. Like a supernova―

Dabi wonders if that's all Touya will ever be. He wonders if he'll ever amount to anything more than what he was. More than what he'd always been.

A star-burnt tragedy.

_

There is a monster in the room. Some conjugation of the figure that looks at the end of the interminable halls and the new spector that joins it. (But nobody joins her, she's so lonely.)

Touya tries to talk to her, but she's very scary.

Her eyes are gone, and she looks like the thing left of that dead bird he saw once. Sickly pale and decayed. It's painful, it's awkward (Touya's just learnt that word recently, Fuyumi was really proud! Of him! Nobody is ever proud of him, not since mama got pregnant again―that means there's another person in her. After Natsu-ototo) and stunted. He does see her more, though. She's really pretty, Touya thinks. He also thinks she'd be prettier if she weren't dead.

Her hair is long and black and she has pretty shoes and a hospital gown around her. She doesn't say anything, but Touya dreams her name is Nacchan, so that's what he calls her.

Sometimes, he swears, she smiles at him, calling him Aniki. Touya isn't an Aniki to anyone but Natsu-ototo, and he's only ever met Natsu-ototo three times, so he doesn't think that counts. Because Natsu-ototo is super small, and mama is scared he might accidentally hurt him. So he doesn't really think it counts.

If it does though, Touya doesn't think he'd mind.

(She looks like she's been swallowed by the dark. He wonders, wonders.)

"Aniki?" She says in that hushed voice of hers. "Aniki can you help me? Papa got home early. Aniki can you help me?"

She's gripping the kitchen door, hiding behind rice-paper sheets. She looks so human like this. Touya almost doesn't register what she's saying―then he does, and he picks up his school books and runs to his room. He runs down the halls, into his room.

The only thing that remains are the silent cries of nee-chan.

"Aniki I'm so sorry―"

_

Touya doesn't see her often, she says something about playing with her Aniki, Tou-ya he's so nice, like you and nee-chan―

She's very polite, and she whispers nightmares out of his bed, and hushes him, so that the other monster (the one from one-three-two doors down) doesn't come in screaming at him for being a coward. He knows not to hiccup anymore.

He wonders if the boy from before him ever learnt it too. Yucchan says that there's this other boy, and he cried and cried until he couldn't, and his fire burned the water away to ash.

Touya wonders, if he cried that much, about if he could burn his tears out, too? He wonders if he's going crazy, too. Because the monster doesn't see Yucchan even when she's crying in the corner of his training room, begging for the monster to stop burning him.

(It's never oto-chan, though. Touya promised he was gonna be a hero, that he was gonna be big and strong, and sometimes pa―oto-chan gets hurt, too, so Touya's gotta stop crying so much.

He might end up like that boy in the story Yucchan told him about.

She says she learned it from mama. He doesn't see kaachan much. The thing under his bed tells him that it never saw it's mama, so it wasn't mör, Touya doesn't know what a mör is.)

_

He's tasting one-yen coins when he comes too. His skins falling off, metal ridges snap-snap-snapping them away. Giran's gonna kill him when he finds out what he pulled. He'll owe the bastard one-two-three more things he can't afford to owe.

Dabi's name is good now. He's on the down low. Gopher boy, nothing more, nothing less. They can't tell jack on him 'cuz he looks older and younger than he is an nobody can make out that he turned seventeen three months ago. He got himself a shitty vanilla cupcake and some onigiri as a treat and starved off garbage can food and roasted animals he found one place or another.

It's getting colder, it's getting easier.

He moves in the cold like he's been living in it forever, that's what Giran says anyway. The sleaze is a bastard but he doesn't stoop to hell like―eugenics experiments with children.

(Hey, have you seen nee-chan, 'round?)

If he thinks about it enough, this sounds like that old pre-quirk classic? What did his mother call it? Hamlet. Son kills his uncle, by his fathers will, Dabi's just cutting out the middle man, killing the father of his own will.

(That's not really accurate, he knows, but he's been lying to himself for years - what's one more? Another, another, another, nother, nother―until he's not even real, until he becomes a lie―)

Dabi is a fake thing to cover up something else. Some bitter, awful thing under a mask of plum stained skin.

His mother would have looked at him with her winter eyes if she could see him now.

How tragic, she'd say, Todoroki Touya.

END SCENE