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anxiousbreathing · 7 months ago

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Observant | Touya Todoroki (Dabi) x Reader | Teaser

Summary: You are a rising hero at UA, being stalked by Dabi. This piece is a teaser for a series I'm planning on releasing weekly, exploring the concept of a Dabi/Hero!Reader relationship. (AKA, I want an excuse to write Dabi smut with the intensity of a real book with plot :)

Note: I've only seen the show, not the movies, and I haven't read the manga (I know, I know, I suck), so this series will mainly follow that canon.

TW: Overt stalking, vague descriptions of fight scenes. This series will only get more graphic as it goes on, and stalking will continue to be a major plot point. Obviously, if stalking is an uncomfortable topic for you, this is not the fic series for you. Even this small teaser contains descriptions of stalking. PLEASE use your discretion when reading my fics.

You love to dance. It’s always been an integral part of you, a central puzzle piece without which you’d be unfinished. Arms high, body flowing, eyes closed, you have always felt at home in the rhythm of rhyme. Sure, it’s not exactly the first thing anyone thinks of when they imagine a superhero, let alone one whose quirk deals with lightning and electricity. The words carry the stiffness of their namesake, to humans a high-speed, rigid power that runs their entire ecosystem.

To you, it’s a rhythm. The hum of power beneath your veins, embedded in your bones, emboldens you. It sparks a fire in your chest, tearing you apart, your body tingling with kinetic energy, waiting for you to light up. You often feel like you’re on fire when you fight, electricity coursing over your muscles in waves, providing energy, and passion. Your skin is alight, and every movement seems to extrude wrath, a powerful shock shuttering your opponents every time your body makes contact with theirs.

Every fighter has a flow. They have their favorite moves, the position their body feels most natural and comfortable in, and they will use it to their advantage. The best way to get one over on a fighter with more prowess than you is to recognize their flow and use it to your advantage. When an opponent becomes comfortable, they become predictable; predictability makes an easy target. You don’t love easy targets but you certainly don’t ignore them, either.

Dabi is beginning to understand your flow. He knows your strength, and your tricks, and has watched you in plenty of fights with other villains; a formidable quirk wielded by an equally-intelligent woman. He doesn't fear what you can do, no, that would be silly. In fact, he's very interested in what you can do. You clearly know the ins and outs of your powers very well, managing to use it in heat-of-the-moment, not-exactly-what-it's-meant-for situations.

But it also leads you to get comfortable in your performance. Just like your opponents, you have become predictable in your desires and routine, your right arm extending, hand pointing towards the sky as the hilt of a shining sword materializes in your palm. He was expecting this; in close-range encounters, you take advantage by adapting. While your enemies have to, on the spot, consider how their quirks will interact with the environment around them and their teammates nearby to make a split-second decision about how to engage, you have a leg up: your quirk allows you to materialize a few melee weapons on demand. A shortsword, an axe, and a warhammer. No need to cause collateral damage when you can strike precisely where you need to. No collateral damage means no extra seconds of mental calculation. No extra seconds of mental calculation means that while your opponent is still moving into their first action, you are already pushing your weight through your blade, towards their body, quicker than they can blink.

The shortsword, Dabi knows, is your favorite. His eyes glance up and down the blade as you begin a flurry of offensive attacks against the villain coming too close for comfort. Something about watching your figure, graceful and nimble as you deflect and counter, every pound of body moving exactly where you need it to be, is entirely irresistible. The impeccable control you exert over every inch of your form is astounding. At this point, he guesses, it has to be second nature. There’s no way you could perform the way you do without relegating at least a few processes to your subconscious.

This is where he wants to pin you.

You, the most popular hero at UA behind Izuku Midoriya. The Living Lightning Bolt. The Girl Made of Power. A woman who can move almost as fast as light has a smile as blinding as the sun, and a reputation for demolishing powerful, well-established villains. Your reputation as the golden child of heroes, a bright girl with no diminishing spots, was exactly what Dabi hoped to take.

Fucking well-off bitch thinks her quirk makes her special, he thought to himself, watching from a nearby rooftop as you shoot across at least a mile of distance, nothing more than a flash of light, to pound your fist into his compatriot's face. She’s just fucking fast. The man flies an unreasonable distance, too far for any normal person to survive, and craters the ground with a deafening noise. Dabi lets out an unimpressed snort.

“You think having a quirk means you get to hurt people?” Your voice echoes across the landscape of destruction surrounding you as you fly towards your target. Buildings torn to shreds, shards of their windows sticking out of gaps in your armor as you stalk towards the villain you just nearly killed while he cowers in the fetal position. The man peers out from behind his arms to make eye contact with you. His body shakes as he takes in all of you, though he has to squint due to the brightness of the electricity wrapping around your limbs.

“No,” he whispers, eyes wide.

“Yes,” you whisper in return. “Why else do you hurt people like this?”

“No!” This time he yells. Fear has taken over, survival instinct. You can hear his heart slamming in his chest, the peaking static of his pulse giving away his anxiety. His skin is pale and his hands slap the cold ground as he begins to panic, trying desperately to haul himself away before you can get to him. It’s futile, both him and you know. He just fought you. He knows you are faster than he could ever hope to be. “I’m not a bad guy! I’m not - I'm just doing what I have to! I just - ohgodpleasedon’thurtme!”

It’s this moment that nearly kills you. The power you wield naturally fosters this fear in others, a very real concern that at any moment the ‘Godkiller’ could snap. If a woman with the strength of 200 men and a quirk that allows her to control electricity were to have a mental break, she could demolish an entire country. And here is one man, destined to face that killing machine, stripped to his barest bones. In front of you, now, he is nothing but human. Your heart aches.

“Please,” he almost whimpers. “Please.”

Your body towers over his. Your shadow engulfs his shivering form, hands hiding a quaking face, and quivering lip. This man is afraid he will die. No - he thinks you will kill him, and he's afraid you'll make it hurt. The ache inside of you sharpens, tearing you from the inside out.

I am not a bad person.

Dabi watches and waits. He hasn’t actually seen a UA student kill anyone, not even Izuku. To see you, Y/N, the great star of UA, commit such an atrocity would devastate the country’s support for superheroes. And here it is, such an attractive prospect, placed nicely in your lap for the taking. Gnawing his lip, he pulls out his phone and opens the camera app. Placing you directly in the middle of the frame, he hovers his thumb over the Record button, just in case.

Unaware of the man watching your every move, you decide to take a chance. There has been plenty of death already.

Allowing your feet to hit the ground, you take a step toward the villain in the crater. He cowers in fear.

Okay, maybe a gentler approach. As quietly and gently as you can manage while wearing a significant amount of metal plate armor, you sit down and cross your legs, folding your hands in your lap. Waiting, your eyes stayed glued to the villain in front of you.

After a few minutes of silence, he finds the bravery to peek from behind his hands, and his eyes meet your smile, radiating light as if you hadn’t been this close to beating him into a pulp mere moments ago. His entire body shakes.

You have never been interested in cruelty. Truthfully, it has never been something you’d gravitated towards, even before you had your quirk. You were a weak, bullied child; when you discovered your powers, it was as though both a solution and more problems revealed themselves. Sure, now you would never be physically hurt again, but what about those other kids? The ones who would never have a quirk? Would they be subjected to relentless bullying the rest of their lives, unable to stand up for themselves the way you could now? No, you'd decided. You would stand for them.

And as you grew older, something else came to light: not everyone gets a desirable quirk. You were one of the lucky ones, with a quirk that was controllable and didn’t stand out in mundane situations. Take Himiko Toga, for example; grew up her entire life with a quirk that made her “undesirable”. Life is infinitely worse for people with quirks that have negative connotations.

So you tried to be understanding, and empathetic. Maybe that villain you’re fighting is misunderstood. Maybe they’ve been struggling their entire life against a system that refuses to make room for them. Maybe they’re tired of feeling like they’re being discriminated against merely because of the luck of the draw, or the decisions of their parents.

If that’s possible, you can meet them in the middle. You want to be the one to reach out. You will always offer a hand.

So as the man with more broken bones than you thought you’d given him lay cowering in a dent in the Earth you’d made with his body, you sat quietly and watched. A few feet away, so you wouldn’t spook him. Like earning a cat’s trust, almost, except it’s a human being who has every reason to hate you, considering you just beat the piss out of him a minute ago.

Yet the childish side of you continues to sit. Maybe he’ll reach out, it says to you, and so you stay.

Dabi watches the whole time. It’s profoundly stupid, in his opinion, the way you sit there with the villains you demolish. Crush them into dust, and then try to change their minds, as if the whole “obliterating you” part wouldn’t get in the way. He can’t understand why you keep doing this, keep giving chances to people who don’t deserve them - fuck, forget deserving the chance, you’re giving chances to everyone, even the vile bastards who take you for a fool. You never fall for the trick, but you always offer the opportunity to be tricked. That, in his opinion, is fucking stupid.

The low-level villain is too scared of you to let your blind hope in humanity penetrate his fear. You end up turning him into the authorities. This is how it’s gone the last two months Dabi has been watching you. Not once have you met a villain to take you up on your offer to “just talk.” Every time he sees you around, he wonders if you’ve given up hope yet.

Even now, as you hand the villain off in quirk-cancelling cuffs, that infuriatingly sympathetic look is still on your face.

He fucking hates your hope. He’d like to watch it die, slowly. He’s convinced it will.

—----------

Somebody is watching you. They've been watching you for a while. After you fought that villain, something kept nagging at you from the back of your mind. You ignored it until you couldn't any longer, sitting quietly at home in your apartment but assaulted by the hammering of a heart. Static noises peaking, falling, peaking again, getting louder and quieter as your watcher moves around, becomes almost impossible to ignore.

You don’t think they know you know, which is probably for the best. There’s something odd about so many levels of deception, knowing you have the advantage but needing to pretend you don’t to keep it - it’s a precious dance, walking the tightrope of attention.

Act normal. Their heartbeat is so close. Outside the front door? It's so loud now, clouding your thoughts and fuzzing the edges so you're barely able to think. Remember when this would happen as a kid? Of course you remember, you're not stupid, you're just nearly in pain from how impossible it seems to focus your attention. Breathe. Close your eyes. If you were normal, what would you hear?

You close your eyes and try to imagine peace and quiet, but that's not quite right. The noise continues. Your heart is beginning to pick up pace. Breathe. A long inhale, longer exhale. I hear the fridge running quietly. My upstairs neighbor's dog jumping off the couch. There are cars on the street outside, and a bus, engines muffled but still seeping through my windows.

Your mind begins to quiet. You ride it out until the heartbeat is nothing but a mental note to yourself: You're being watched.

Do I just tell them to come out? The thought briefly flits through your mind before you shoo it away. That’s probably the worst thing I could do right now.

I’m safe in my apartment. They can’t get in here. Maybe I’m hearing a neighbor and misinterpreting. You giggle. The thoughts don’t make you feel any more comfortable, but they at least remind you that you might be going insane, which you'd pick over being stalked.

It feels fucked up to know the pattern of your stalker’s heartbeat. Fuck, you’ve never even been in a relationship long enough to know a partner’s heart that well - to be so close to someone so dangerous? It’s an odd sort of shared intimacy. The knowledge they likely think they’re the smart one in this interaction while you listen to their heart begin to speed as they walk past your door - something inside of you lights up at the thought. You love to be clever, and this is such a clever trick. Some personal pride swells in your heart. Dear fuck do not start making this into a confidence thing. Having a stalker is bad, even if you’re outsmarting them.

Finishing a late dinner, you settle on the couch in your living room, tucked warmly underneath a blanket. Happily you notice the heartbeat is receding from your attention - they're finally leaving. Hypervigilance cast aside, your muscles decide to release tension all at once, a profound ache radiating through your body. You didn't realize you'd been sitting so...rigid.

As you watch some shitty reality TV, Dabi is walking away from your apartment, mind full of fantasies of you. Your body floats in his head like some kind of strange “rotate a horse in your brain” experiment, except it’s the beautiful figure of one of the most powerful women on the planet.

He’s a criminal; no, not just a criminal, a villain. It would not work out. In fact, it would be near-impossible for him to get a word out around you without you immediately noticing his presence and going full-throttle on him. It’s hard enough to dodge flying bolts of lightning and blink-and-you're-dead punches; try doing that while also trying to flirt with the person trying to kill you.

Something about that turns him on. You’d be so shocked, he imagines, there's a decent chance you'd freeze in place. That’d be a sight; a literal lightning strike frozen in the moment. The electricity wrapping around your arms sparks when you’re excited, he knows from having watched you with your teammates. Your body looks like an arc flash when anyone mentions boba tea or ancient history. Would you light up like a ball of energy, seething at the edges, if he touched you? Would you spark under his skin?

Stupid, he thinks to himself as he walks the back streets back to his hideout. Toga is going to grill him again on where he’s been; he’ll give the same answer he always does, none. It works out well enough. Dabi doesn’t cause problems for the league, and Shigaraki lets him do his bullshit during his free time. Doesn’t ask. Doesn’t need to know, anyway, about Dabi’s personal interests, so long as it doesn’t interfere with his duties.

The worst part will begin soon when he has to track you down again. You’re a fast girl, always zipping in and out of fights, occasionally floating above the chaos. Fuck, half the time he has no clue if you’re even in Japan; he just assumes. No worries. If he could find you once, he can find you again.

#dabi x reader #touya todoroki x reader #touya x reader #in case you can't tell i'm both mentally ill and DOWN FUCKING BAD for this guy #first fic on this account !!!!!!!!

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