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He’s killed Endeavor.
Killed the beast, at last, the world is safe from him. The world, the family he didn’t mean to leave behind. The world.
The logistics don’t matter anymore. A grin stretches across his face, unnaturally wide; he’s fraying, now.
A lovely, secluded bluff overlooking the crashing saltwater waves below. Dirt rife with rocks, gravel and spattered grass gives way beneath his worn boots. It’s peaceful and scenic, a nice place for the fever to overflow. To give out, after far too long running on little more than rage.
…More than rage, a forlorn thought whispers. There was more than that. Wasn’t there, Touya?
“That isn’t my name.” His voice is ragged and raspy. Touya never sounded like that.
Isn’t it?
“Burned that fucker out when we died.” Only Dabi’s voice, here, in this aftermath. His epilogue.
Mm. Dabi, then.
“Who are you?”
Wind whistles by. Gusts off the ocean try to steal his warmth, but the fire inside isn’t finite enough to let them. He burns anyway, feverish in the open chill.
I am not your concern, dear. Not now.
“You’re talkin’ to me. I can’t see you. I don’t know you. Don’ know if you’re real. I think I should get some kinda answer.”
Swirls of wispy, inky dark creep into the edges of his vision. He takes just one, small step away from the bluff’s edge.
Rest is what you should get. You have been here too long, stuck in this misery.
A laugh tears its way from his throat, hollow, tired and unbelieving. He sinks down onto the ground anyway, weakened arms haphazardly holding his torso upright.
Is that not why you came here?
“What are you?” His voice crackles and breaks. He’s quieter now. A stray drop of blood slides down his face.
Oblivion.
“Oblivion, huh? That a name?”
Hm.
Her voice was an echo in the sky, something that encompassed all the world, yet was, in this moment, only for his ears. Maybe She is in his head, maybe She is elsewhere. It’s hard to tell. Strange, unearthly, She resonates.
I suppose you could liken it to a name, though it’s more a title.
He feels crazy. But, hasn’t he been all along? This can’t be too large a step further off the edge he’s been teetering on for years.
You’ll be alright.
A hazy, quick laugh slips away from him. “What the fuck?” Whispered to no one in particular, whisked away on the constant wind.
He’s burning up. It’s all catching up to him, now, sinking into his marred skin, seven years he couldn’t have possibly lived through.
He did live them, though. He lived them, and it was the freest he’d ever been. It was torture, yes, but it had been…
Memorable? Her voice is soft.
“Yeah,” he chokes out. Blood sizzles on his face. “Very.”
How so, Dabi?
“Don’t be a shit.” His arms feel like shit, trying to hold himself up like this. “‘S stupid. You aren’t real.” He lets himself lower down, laying on his back now. It’s not comfortable. He’s getting dirt in his hair, surely, and there’s small rocks digging into the back of his skull.
It might be the most relief he’s ever felt.
Say their names.
“What, m’ family’s?” he mutters, brow creasing in a small frown. He doesn’t want to do that.
Whichever names feel right.
He’s silent, for a while. Trees around him sway, leaves catching the wind like little sails, bending the branches they clung to.
“They won’t hear.”
You will.
To that, he had no rebuttal.
He listens, close as he can, to the waves breaking on the rocks below. Wild and loose. Battering, weathering. Cold. It’s almost meditative, for a moment.
“Himiko.” The name slips out without his permission. It startles him out of focusing on the water, for now. “Himiko Toga.” His eyes sting. “She deserves better.”
She does.
“I can’t give that to ‘er.”
No. You can’t. The solemn agreement makes his chest ache with something beyond the burn. You wish you could, don’t you? It almost makes him mad, how gentle Her tone was.
“‘Course I do.” His voice comes out hoarse and choked.
Anyone else, Dabi?
“Jin,” he breathes out. “Jin Bubaigawara. Shuichi Iguchi. Atsuhiro Sako. Kurogiri.” He swallows past an unwanted lump in his throat. “Kenji Hikiishi.” Redness streaks from the corners of his eyes, down towards the dirt beneath his head. “Tomur—no…” he frowns, trying to remember the name confessed in low tones during one of their late-night drunken conversations. “Tenko. Tenko.. Shimura, I think.”
He considers stopping there. He should.
But one name still rings in his mind, carrying the weight of so many emotions he hardly knows what to do with it.
You are so much more than rage, Dabi.
Am I?
You scuffed your boots the whole way here.
“Keigo.” It comes out in a sob.
Hoping he’ll find your trail.
“Keigo Takami.”
Do you want him to find you?
His face twists, agonized. “Not like this.”
Do you want him to know what happened to you?
He feels like She’s asking him a lot of questions. “Want ‘im to have some kinda closure, yeah.” Giving answers is getting a little annoying. “Get him to move on, one way or another.”
Do you want him to know, truly, what will happen, here?
He doesn’t respond, to this one.
The clouds are speeding by, overhead. Light, lighter than anything. Filamented, leaving trails behind them. Trails…
Briefly, Dabi wonders how he’d feel if crimson wings circled above.
He feels sick to his stomach at the thought.
He forces his eyes to close, to block out the image his mind wants to burn into his retinas. He’s not here. He draws in a breath, and it hurts.
You’re dying.
“I’ve been ‘dying’ for the past seven years, Oblivion.” It’s a halfhearted retort, but he’s angry. Not at Her, though— not really.
You know this is different.
He does know. He’s not sure how to feel about it.
“Yeah, ‘s different,” he manages, snarky despite the circumstances and the shake in his voice. “I’ve never had a fuckin’ thing in my head askin’ me shit.”
A minute passes, and She stays silent.
He feels a shift in the air above him, and pries his eyelids open.
The sky, now, is blotted out by a shadowy silhouette who towers above him. The edges of Her are wispy, translucent, more lenient with the light that passes through than the rest of the inky depths which make up Her form. Her head is tilted at a slight angle. Four blindingly bright, pure white eyes hover on the surface of Her ‘face’, two smaller eyes just below the larger pair, hardly visible, but Dabi spots them. She’s peering curiously at him.
“…Hi,” he rasps, eventually.
Hello, dear. She does not have a mouth.
He wonders, distantly, why he isn’t afraid.
“Ya gonna kill me?” He’s not sure why he asks.
If She had eyebrows, he thinks She’d frown. No. Of course not. Reassurance and comfort pours from Her voice. I will stay with you, though.
It’s not quite the answer he’d expected.
“Why?” It’s a simple word. A simple word with a complexity, a weight, so vast. He lets his head fall limply back onto the ground, and his eyes close once more. “What are you?” Questions, he knows, whose answers he couldn’t comprehend, right now.
Nobody deserves to go alone, is Her reply. I accompany.
“You gonna get impatient with me?” he asks. “Might take me a while.”
Whenever you’re ready, Dabi. The heavy presence in the sky shrinks away. I’m in no hurry. We can wait.
He does wait, for a while. He’s not sure how long he lays there in the dirt. Long enough to think.
He thinks through everything he can remember. Sorts his thoughts, finds places for the remnants and the fragments, organizes names and dates and emotions like his mind is a filing cabinet. Family. Father, Mother. Childhood. Siblings. Expectation. Jealousy, anger, determination. Sekoto. ‘Death’. Escape. Scars. Seams. Staples. Isolation. Survival. Pity. Cerulean flames. Pride. Vengeance. Wrath. Violence. Himiko. Protection. Fondness. The League. Safety. Belonging. Twisted familiarity. Hawks. Suspicion. Keigo. Something close to love. Betrayal, and enough broken promises to last a lifetime. Justice, revenge. Closure. And now…
Now?
Turning the last page, shutting the book. The last grain in the hourglass falling still in the bottom half. The flickering of a light, a beacon with a dying battery. The final minutes of a movie that ran too long. The last drops of blood draining from veins which once ran warm. The chorus leading into the closing verse. The embers of a dying fire, glowing dim in the dark.
A story coming to a close ten years too late.
Dabi’s eyes open slow. He blinks, languid. Stares at the sky. Musters the effort to push his body from the ground. It takes him a minute to find his footing.
He shrugs off his signature coat, charring now in some places. It slides off his shoulders, down his arms, and pools on the ground behind him. Another clue, for those who might search.
He tries not to, has been trying not to. But in a final moment of something fragile — weakness, desperation, hope, dread, maybe all of it at once, he’s not sure which — he turns his head to look over his shoulder at the tree line behind him.
It stands still, empty and green. No witnesses, not a soul in sight. Nobody deserves to go alone, huh? He tries to ignore the sinking of his stomach as he turns to face the white-capped waves. Thanks, I guess.
He steps forward.
He wants to make this choice. A final act of rebellion, the ultimate decision resting in burning hands. Go via the inevitable immolation scheduled years ago, or through his own willingness to step off that edge?
It won’t help.
‘With the heat’ goes unsaid, but Dabi hears it.
“I know.”
I know it won’t cool me, won’t stop the burning. Nothing could, not anymore.
He was okay with that, he thinks.
He plants the heels of his boots firmly in the gravelly dirt near the edge, and he lets them burn. Burn into the ground, singe the soil, mar it with fragments he knows to be his. He’ll know, if he finds it. The stench of melting fabric, melting rubber, melting skin wafts upward.
He doesn’t feel a thing, physically.
Blood leaks down his face, traces his neck, soaks the collar of his shirt, stains it crimson like the feather on the necklace he’d cached nearby.
I’m goin’ out on my own terms. Fuck fate.
He peels the remnants of his boots from the ground. Steps forward, rethinks, takes a few steps back. Gathers what little energy he has left, the edge is rushing toward him, and for a moment, he’s soaring.
My way.
The water offers no comfort for his landing. The waves rise up to meet him halfway, and he tumbles under.
It’s cold, freezing even, he’s sure, but it can’t compete with the inferno he no longer has the will to hold back. He thinks it’s boiling around him.
He pushes down the urge to struggle as he inhales and bitter saltwater slides down his throat, into his lungs. Forces himself to give in to the currents dragging him to and fro. Pulling him apart at the seams.
The water in his chest washes him free from years of smoke, cleansing him inside and out. His lungs burn, finally, from something other than his own flames, and the water, in a way, relieves him of his long-running suffocation.
As the wispy, inky edges of Oblivion close in around his vision and Her arms encircle his form, the last of the oxygen bubbles from his mouth.
It’s a new kind of burning, he finds, to drown. Nothing like the fire he’d almost grown used to. What started sharp in his chest now runs through his veins, searing in its totality. His vision has gone dark, his head swirls and spins; his limbs feel fuzzy, staticky. He’s weightless.
He thinks he likes this burn better.