Archive of Our Own

"Your connection points all appear to be in top shape, and the rest of your test show that you are fit and ready for launch." Dr. Ujiko tells him, not even looking up from his clipboard now that he's not prodding along the seam in Dabi's back anymore. "I think we're just about finished here." Which is as much permission as Dabi needs to reach back to pull the flap of artificial silicone skin back over the cybernetic grafts that cover eighty percent of his body. 

The edges connect and lock back into place and he pushes himself back up into a sitting position, his legs hanging off the edge, the black metal glistening from each of his thighs down to his calf on one leg and to his ankle on the other. He reaches for the two strips of silicone skin that he removed for the examination and brings them to the metal, the micro magnets catching onto it, and helping him easily slot them back into place. The false skin isn't quite the right color for him with too much of a pinkish undertone for his body, but he's never been able to find one that was a good match for him. He got a custom paint job that helped once, but it was several hundred credits, began to chip off and crease after three weeks, and the skins had to be thrown out completely from wear as usual after eight weeks. It wasn't worth the money to try and not look like a freak. He closes the seam over his stomach next, across his shoulders and around his neck, one arm fully encased, and the piece ending over his cheeks. The other arm comes on next, and then the under eyes. The only places he doesn't bother with the artificial stuff is over his lower lip and his lower eyelids. The false skin for those places is so delicate and shreds much faster than anything else, and he can't afford to damage his eyes if some of it gets in them, and he hated that no matter how careful he was monitoring the health of the lip, he always inevitably ended up biting it towards the end of its use cycle when it inevitably got moved while he was eating. He makes his peace with that primarily for practicality purposes, but at least the black metal shining against him in those places can look like makeup from a distance. 

Dabi looks up and finds the doctor watching him. "Your mission will only have you stopping once every eight months for supplies and refueling?" 

"Yes." 

"Your false skin--" 

"I'm using the weight allowed for personal items to pack backups for the travel time. We'll also be receiving check-ups from medical personnel at each waypoint, and I've sent my measurements to them so that they will have enough printed to last me the next leg." He can't bring anything else with him. Space on a ship is already limited, the weight of personal items is something that is closely monitored, though they are long past the days where people could only bring five pounds of personal belongings. Now they can have a maximum of one hundred. A full casing for his body is forty-five. He'll be wearing one that he will put on fresh the morning of launch, and will have two full suits with him, with the final ten pounds being patches for joints so that he can last out the last bit of each trip. The skin was deemed cosmetic-- it is , but Dabi had hoped that it would be reclassified given he does have to have a prescription for it. He's not even going to be able to bring a single book, not a personal photo, no clothes that aren't standard issue, nothing. At least he'll have his tablet on the ship that can do things other than work for the long stretches of time that aren't occupied with it. 

"You can go without--" 

"Is there anything else I need, Doc?" 

Ujiko, wisely, drops that line of conversation and signs off on his papers. He'd already given him that lecture six years ago. "I'll have Meilyn fax over the additional forms to Exovin." 

"Good. See you in five years, if you're not retired by then." 

"I'll hold out just for you." The doctor says in complete deadpan. 

Dabi snorts and gets off the table, redressing and heading out with a final wave. Ujiko's been one of Exovin's premiere doctors for the better part of three decades. He doubts that will change in the next five. 

///

This is his second time off-planet for an excursion, but launch day still fills him with a nearly giddy anticipation. He was already excited when he saw who his crew would be for this exploratory and surveying mission. Magne, Jin, and Atsuhiro are members of the last crew he was on, though Atsuhiro will be stepping down as captain so that one of the new crew members, Tomura Shigaraki, can take up that mantel, bringing with him a Varqix, a humanoid gecko-alien, called Spinner to round out the rest of the crew. He doesn't know if he'll get along with those two, but he's already done a five year stint with the first three and they not only remained friends, but still regularly hung out during their mandatory planet-side time, so he's looking forward to it. 

 The launchpad crew are in charge of getting everything situated for them to actually leave, and thank goodness, there are enough ships coming and going from the planet at this point that there's no longer hours-long ceremonies talking about what a big deal it is. There are still some people who make it one. He still went out with his siblings the night before to see each other and say goodbye. Natsuo waited to have his wedding until he got back last time, but he will probably have a niece or nephew by the time he comes back this time. Fuyumi could be married. Shoto will have graduated and be awaiting his first assignment if he hasn't already left himself when Dabi returns. Or he... might not return at all. Space travel is much, much safer than it was fifty years ago, trips to the moon and Mars are common enough field trips for elementary students and college students respectively, but exploratory excursions mean that he's going to be away from known systems, that they're going to be around strange new flora and fauna in whole new atmospheres. He could fail to come back to them. But he will take a small dinner with his siblings in private over some public tearful goodbyes that used to be common practice at these things. 

He goes over to the other crew members, meaning to at least start off on the right foot and introduce himself to the captain. He's surprised when he realizes that their captain doesn't have any gold on his suit, which means that this is his first trip off-planet even though he looks to be around twenty-three. He should have gotten an assignment immediately after graduating three years ago. And if that's not strange enough, he has long white hair that is tied into a pony at the base of his neck, but that is disappearing down the back of his suit which tells Dabi that it is far longer than the chin-length maximum that Exovin employees are supposed to maintain. Dabi doesn't say anything though, Tomura Shigaraki has pale skin, cracks splitting his lips, no eyebrows to speak of, and bright red eyes. He could be albino, he could be a mixed-species individual or someone who grew up in a culture that has strict rules about cutting their hair. The point is, if Exovin hasn't made him cut it, and they still made him primary captain over Atsuhiro who already has two trips under his belt, it means that they have high hopes for whatever he's going to do next. Best not to start off on the wrong foot before getting locked in a confined space with him for five years. 

"Primary Biologist and Secondary Environmental Scientist, Dabi." He introduces himself, offering a hand. 

"Primary Captain and Secondary Engineer, Tomura Shigaraki." The other responds, his voice raspier than Dabi had expected. He'd guess he was a smoker if it weren't strictly prohibited for anyone going off planet with their company. "It's nice to meet you, I look forward to working with you." 

"Thanks, you too." Polite introduction finished, he is able to move off to the others while Shigaraki goes about coordinating with the launchpad captain and ensures that everything is ready for their departure. He's really glad that so many different species don't have surnames, because he hasn't been asked why he doesn't have one since he entered the program. 

Introducing himself to Spinner is a lot less stuffy, he's their primary engineer and secondary medic, and has green scales and chin-length lavender hair. He's quiet and a little reclusive, but Magne and Jin will take care of that in no time, and through the process of just shooting the shit as they get onto the ship to start securing things for takeoff, Dabi learns that Spinner and Shigaraki were in the program together, that they are both twenty-three, and that they have been roommates for eight years already. So as long as they don't form cliques, they should be relatively safe as far as group dynamics go. Their first year and a half of this trip will just be them flying out to the area they're supposed to be surveying so they'll have plenty of downtime to get to know each other. 

It takes another three hours for them to be cleared by the launch crew, and for them to make sure everything and everyone is where they're supposed to be on the ship for takeoff. But when the engines finally start, Dabi is not filled with the sense of wonder and adventure that is supposed to come with this momentous step. No. Instead he's incredibly glad that there is absolutely no reason for him to be in the cockpit so that he can vomit his brains out from the immediate onset of his motion sickness as they exit Earth's atmosphere in the privacy of one of the bathrooms. 

///

"Oh, welcome back, champ!" Magne says too loud and too gleeful when he joins them in the cafeteria for dinner, though he really doesn't want to eat anything. He knows he shouldn't start the mission by alienating himself from their new crewmates. 

"Fuck you." He drops into the seat that Atsuhiro and Jin left between them, the former passing him his water bottle and Jin offering him a paper cup with two anti-nausea pills. He throws those back and doesn't love the fact that the new captain is already considering him. 

He likes it even less when Shigaraki addresses him, "Can I ask a personal question?" 

No. "What's up, cap? I miss something important before we're even past the moon?" 

"No, I'm just curious how you got through simulations with motion sickness that severe." 

"I only get nauseous if I haven't been in a ship-- or in a simulation-- for more than a week." He flicks one of his ears, the soft silicone not thick enough to hide the soft tink of the metal beneath. "Burns fucked up my inner ears. Same thing happens in cars or boats. It takes me a little longer to acclimate than normal, but it wasn't a problem during training because everyone pukes the first time they're in a sim, and then--" 

"We're in them every day for five years. I see." 

"I asked if I could hop in before we took off, but there wasn't a precedent for it, so the request was denied." It was, but Dabi always feels motion sick. He just can usually fake his way through it. Though, during his final exam catastrophe drill, he collapsed his throat on itself to keep from puking long enough to get a perfect score. Yeah, he had his brother doing off-the-book medic work, but he passed at the top of his class and finally earned his right to not be on the same planet as his father for five years. 

"That's a shame, I thought Exovin was better about accommodations than that." 

"For other species and cultures? Yeah, absolutely." But not for people like him. They like him working for them because if things get bad, they have someone who they can send into a situation with most of their nerves turned off. They want him because he was a steal from the Endeavor Corporation that has been expanding from military into space-military, and having him would be a good way to make sure his father didn't bring negative attention to himself by publicly feuding with or disenfranchising his son by going after his place of work. But Dabi is never going to pretend Exovin isn't a company paid by the International Planetary Commission to look good for the Interplanetary Species and Culture Collective. They'll make plenty of concessions for different alien cultures and species, but a disabled human isn't worth a second thought. Especially not when people with cybernetics as advanced as his are still fighting with their national governments and with each other about if they are disabled enough to earn that title. But that's Earth shit. If he has his way, he's going to be on missions just like this one until Exovin deems him too old and discharges him, and then he's going to pick a planet and spend the rest of his life there. "Are you new to the company?" 

"Yes and no. I was accepted into the training program, but I was blacklisted for hire." 

The whole table goes very quiet, a tension blooming between all of them. 

"Huh, that's weird given your current position." Magne says. 

"My grandmother founded the company, but she said that I could never be hired because it would be a clear form of nepotism. I negotiated and entered the program under a pseudonym so that there would be no precedent for special treatment and earned top grades in all subjects and on every test. She still rejected my application and I petitioned the board under the false name as well. They had no reason to turn me down." He says it all like this is simple and easy, and for a second, Dabi can only be impressed that there is someone on this ship with bigger familial issues than he has. Then he actually considers what Shigaraki just told him and what that must mean about what he didn't say. 

"Wait. Nana Shimura only had one son, the founder of Proximacard, the guy who's kid--" Dabi can't help it. His eyes go down to Shigaraki's left hand. 

Shigaraki-- Shimura -- taps his index and ring finger against the rim of his metal tray, and they clang the same way Dabi's ear had, even through his black leather gloves. "I'm more attached to 'Shigaraki' than I was to these. I'm sure that news is going to break that I changed my name in the next few days. I figured that it would be better for you all to know now. If you have any questions about my abilities to lead or perform my other duties on this ship, then please conduct them through the official channels so they can be dealt with appropriately." And he goes back to his food. 

The others go back to talking. Jin is really good at relieving group tension and Atsuhiro is good at people. They get Spinner talking, half-human half-Varqix it turns out, and Shigaraki's roommate all throughout school. Best friends those two, and Spinner had gotten his assignment before Shigaraki even appealed to the board-- something that the alien clearly didn't know about from how he keeps glancing at Shigaraki throughout the rest of the meal too. 

Dabi can't believe he did that. Can't believe he keeps having to force himself to keep his eyes up and away from the table because when he looks down he keeps finding himself wanting to glance at the other man's hand. Like somehow the leather will reveal something new to him. But it won't, and he knows those looks. That's why he changed his name to 'Dabi'. He was tired of having people stare at him for being Enji Todoroki's tragic child. He was tired of people asking if it hurt, how much he remembered, how he felt now. He didn't want to relive the worst day of his life over, and over, and over again. And his was only a day. He lost three years to the coma, but he was alright when he woke up. He didn't even need new schooling because of a neural implant that had been feeding his developing brain while he was out. 

But everyone knows that Tenko Shimura was kidnapped at age four, though who did the kidnapping always seemed to shift from story to story. Kidnapped to try to strongarm both Exovin and Proximacard into closing their doors forever. Dabi always wondered if the Endeavor Corporation had anything to do with it. But as horrible as his father is, he doesn't think he would have okayed a four year old being kidnapped and tortured. Because Tenko Shimura had a finger removed for every negotiation that Exovin and Proximacard attempted that didn't give the kidnappers what they wanted. They made three offers over the course of two weeks and then they stopped communication, intending to make the kidnappers bring them one to actually open the lines of negotiation. The kidnappers never did. They disappeared with the kid and people presumed him dead. Dabi remembers Tenko Shimura's face being on everything when he was little. He remembers the way his disappearance changed how they were perceived by extraterrestrial races because even people off-world didn't know if this was human-on-human violence or if this was because there were plenty of species that didn't think that Earth was ready to join the rest of the intergalactic system. His torture and disappearance made way for programs like this one to get off the ground. It brought Earth technology decades into the future because of the cooperation they had with other species. 

And while Dabi was in his third year of the training program, a fifteen year old Tenko Shimura was found on Silea, two star systems out, malnourished, missing three fingers, nearly-feral, and covered in the blood of the last person who had tried to buy him after he tore them to pieces with his bare hands. He recognized the emblem for Exovin and kicked up a huge fuss, trying to get someone to understand who he was. He used his nails to tear open his own neck, deeply enough that he had been bleeding so badly the crew had to take him on board to treat the injury. It was only when his DNA got pinged as they were trying to figure out what type of blood he needed for his transfusion that they realized who they had on board. He was finally brought home and disappeared out of the public eye to rest and recover after eleven years of whatever happened to him while he was gone. 

Everyone knows the story. Dabi's surprised to learn that he would want to be off planet again. But he can understand wanting to spite family, especially the kind who, no matter how they dressed it up, wouldn't let him deal with what happened in his own way. His dad certainly never wanted him to go near a space ship ever again. He thinks he can see where Shigaraki is coming from with his decision to leave and change his name. Dabi just doesn't like that he immediately became like all of the people who never knew how to talk to him as soon as Shigaraki told the rest of them that. 

But they have their first meal on the ship, and Shigaraki is definitely a little weird, but not nearly as weird as Dabi would expect given what he went through in his childhood. But aside from his name reveal, he doesn't seem like he or Spinner will be a bad fit for the crew. Time will tell, of course, but he's heard of things going much worse than this from the get-go. He just has to learn to exert the same tact and restraint he always wished people had given him when he re-entered the public eye. 

///

Shigaraki was probably right to tell them who he was the first night, because by the next morning, their ship is in the news, pictures of pre-school age Tenko Shimura that were plastered everywhere for years posted next to his graduation picture. Pictures of him when he was being brought off of the ship that found him, his hair down to his shoulders and turning white at the roots and-- Dabi balks when he sees the article that comes up with the picture of him without his artificial skin, him when he was fifteen and applying for the Exovin program before they even had the black metal on, when his father had thought leaving the clear plating that was used to monitor his healing while in the coma, would keep him in the hospital because he knew what a monster he looked like to everyone else like that. But he had gone for the entry test anyway. That picture circulated a lot when he was younger too. He doesn't like that an article of he and Shigaraki at their worst is plastered side-by-side on one of the biggest publications on Earth, saying the 'scarred sons' both were able to make something great of themselves despite their 'tragedies’. 

He hates the comments and he wants nothing more than to ignore them, which turns out to be a good thing because Shigaraki never brings it up with him. He doesn't bring any of it up, and over the course of their first week, proves to be as effective of a captain as Atsuhiro was. So Dabi doesn't have any complaints on that front. He blocks his name, given and changed, from his news feed so that he won't see anything about himself, and hopefully won't have to see any of those old pictures again, and he gets back to work. 

Being on a ship like this, traveling out so far before they actually are surveying, means that they each have small personal assignments to work on in addition to just maintaining the ship. For the most part, Dabi spends his time reviewing other biological and environmental files that have been submitted by other surveying crews and maintaining his and Magne's garden. They're not running any grand experiments on this leg of the trip, but keeping the garden well-maintained and thriving means that they can supplement their rations with fresh food and lower their carbon dioxide cycling. But they can, in fact, only watch plants grow so quickly. Things are much the same for the rest of the crew. They have small assignments to work on, busy work assigned to them to keep their superiors happy, but for the most part, their work takes six or so hours out of their day, including just keeping the ship up and running. They also start their split shift immediately, meaning that the whole crew is only supposed to be awake and working for around four hours a day, before half of them go to sleep and the other half stay up for their shifts. Ideally, if something happens, this means that at least half of them will be fresh and the other half will have been able to sound the early alarm. 

Exovin knows that a lot of the initial travel time will be downtime, so all of their ships do have plenty of entertainment to keep them sharp. Their tablets have a section dedicated to learning languages, logic and word puzzles, a large database of books, movies, and games, and the ship is outfitted with a gym so they can maintain their physical condition as well. And if they couldn't handle long stretches of near isolation and boredom, then they wouldn't have even made it through the program in the first place. So things are exactly what Dabi expected throughout the first month. And when that month is at its end, he goes to Jin to get his check-up. Everyone has to get them at the end of the month and at any sign of illness or unexpected fatigue, given how hard it is for them to get help for something serious if they don't catch things early. 

He's grateful that Jin always makes the glass into their medbay opaque for all of them, even if they never needed to disrobe, because it means when he comes in to get his full work-up, he won't have to have any of the others see him without the artificial skin. But when he's done with his basic physical and check-in and reaches to start to disrobe so that he can get his cybernetics cleared as well, Jin pauses him, pulling his sucker from his mouth.

"So there's been a change in procedure." 

"What kind of change?" 

"Well, after last trip, they wanted someone with a specialty in cybernetics to make sure your grafts are working the way they're supposed to. I can make sure that they're not being rejected by your organic tissue, but the actual diagnostics for the computer parts isn't something I can run maintenance on anymore." 

Dabi frowns a bit. It's not Jin's fault that the policy changed, but it's annoying all the same that Dabi wasn't the one that Exovin talked to about this. "Ugh, fine. Spinner's the secondary medic?"

"Yeah, but Shigaraki is the one who specialized in cybernetics." Of course he did. Probably because of his hand. At least his integration is small enough that he would probably be able to fix himself and keep going. If Dabi's systems fail, he's out of fucking luck no matter how knowledgeable about them he could have been if he had gone that track, because he won't be able to move his arms, legs, neck, he won't even be able to open his mouth to speak, so he chose to focus on other things. "I let him know today is your scheduled check-up day, and he said he could come here to do the exam, or you could go to his quarters when you're done with me." 

"Oh, invite to the captain's quarters? Scandalous. Thought we would last at least two months before any ill-advised hookups started." There are always ill-advised hookups on surveying ships. People want companionship, and no matter how many AI partners or how much porn Exovin tries to make accessible, they can't stop it. Dabi fucked Magne and got fucked by Atsuhiro on their last trip, but ultimately ended up paired with their old engineer, Simon, for the majority of their last trip. He's pretty sure that Jin and Magne hooked up regularly after that. It's good stress relief as long as no one pushes for something the other isn't looking for, and Exovin has begrudgingly accepted it was going to keep happening so all crew members, regardless of species or gender, are required to be on birth control for the duration of their trip. Dabi's glad one shot nowadays can fill that requirement across pure-blooded humans nowadays. 

"You do love bad ideas." Jin tells him and Dabi kicks him in the shin before hopping off the table, making the other man yelp. 

"Way to call me a slut without saying it." 

"If I wanted to call you a slut, I would just call you a slut! And you are , by the way. I'm just saying that you also like bad ideas. You're the one who tried unlogged fruit because the scanners said it was only mildly poisonous." 

"And I only got mildly sick and learned that it wasn't poisonous after being fermented for a week and we had non-regulation hooch for the rest of the trip!" 

Jin doesn't say anything about that, tossing the stick of his sucker and pulling a new one out of his lab coat. Dabi doesn't know how someone who only smokes one year for every five off planet still can't quite break the habit, but he knows a good fifty pounds of Jin's personal belongings are all candy to keep his mouth occupied. It's not his business though, and he heads for the door with a wave. He would rather do this in private if he has that option. Medbay isn't soundproof, for good reason, given if something goes wrong in here it's important that the rest of them know about it, but if he's going to have to have someone new talking about his skin, then he would rather do that as privately as possible. He gives a parting wave goodbye before he starts to head deeper into the ship, towards the crew's quarters. 

He was in this bedroom once, with Atsuhiro last trip, but he's not going to think about that too hard before he knocks softly. Shigaraki isn't on shift right now, which might mean he's asleep, though if he and Jin coordinated, then he shouldn't be. There's only a pause for a second before the door opens up, and Dabi is face-to face with the other man-- out of his regulation suit. Dabi blinks. The rest of them wear their jumpsuits tied around their waists, or unzipped with their approved personal clothes or the plain thermals beneath them. The full suits are miserably hot, though that's a good thing to have in case of their ship shutting down for some reason mid-flight which could lead them to freeze to death before they even run out of air or supplies. But Shigaraki always keeps his suit zipped up and impeccable like they're going to be under an inspection at any second. He's never seen him even in just his thermals, so seeing him in black skinny jeans, red tennis shoes, and a long-sleeved black shirt with his hair loose down his back and around his face is genuinely a surprise. As is the fact that he's not wearing his gloves right now, so Dabi can see the three shiny gold fingers on his left hand.

He blinks. Prosthetics come in clear, silver, and black as their standard color and it is generally recommended for people with enhancements to have the color that contrasts the most against their natural skin tone incase of injury. If they get knocked out or lose consciousness in an accident, there's a good chance that seeing any abrasions beneath it, could help prevent them from getting put in or by medical equipment that could short out their circuitry. And back when cybernetics couldn’t relay sensation to the brain, seeing the skin broken could be the only way that people could tell they were hurt at all. Gold is an aesthetic choice and one that must have cost a pretty penny to get customized. The fact he's not even wearing a skin over it, makes the gloves make more sense though. He must not have wanted to pack skins that Dabi guesses would wear down just as fast as the ones for his eyes or bottom lip would have.

"Are you alright doing the check-in here? If not, we can go to medbay." Shigaraki says and snaps Dabi's brain back into working correctly.

"Yeah, this is fine, cap." 

Shig lets him in and the room is what he expects for the most part. Captains get a little bit of extra room, but not much. Just enough for them to have their desk in their room, built into one of the walls, a skylight overhead that shows everything that they're passing, but their bed and closet are built into the wall like all the rest of them. Dabi definitely doesn't think Atsuhiro had a fucking exam table in here the last time he was in this room, he had a real desk. But Shigaraki has an additional-- Oh. As he brings Dabi across the room, he sees that it's not actually an exam table. It's a worktable, and there is a box of his personal items beside it, personal items that appear to be small tinkering projects, circuit boards, tools, things like that. He'd just thrown one of the sheets from medbay over it for him. Which, yeah, at least that means there won't be cold metal on the skin that can't have its sensitivity turned off, and makes this feel a little less like he's a corpse that's about to be laid out for autopsy. 

"I got your medical file," Shigaraki tells him, going to get his tablet from his bunk. "You can disrobe and hang your clothes and skin in the closet." 

The captain always gets access to their crew's pre-launch file to ensure they know any pre-existing conditions before they leave orbit with their people. But Dabi feels more naked knowing that he's read the full details of how his body was destroyed already, and knowing that he's going to see it all too. But he's had to strip for a lot of doctors in his life. If Shigaraki is an expert on cybernetics, then he is no different than any of them in this context. Dabi unties his jumpsuit as he moves over to the closet. Shigaraki has already put two hangers for him on the door. He toes his way out of his boots and unhooks his belt. 

"I hope so, otherwise this is way weirder." Easier to be sarcastic than genuine, and Dabi doesn't care what that says about him. 

Shigaraki chooses to ignore the snark for the moment. "Can I ask why your sensitivity settings are so low?" 

A frown tugs at his features as he hangs his suit and thermal shirt, "What do you mean? They've always been at this setting." 

"That's what I'm talking about." Shigaraki hasn't turned back to face him and Dabi loses his pants, leaving him in just his boxer briefs. 

"You're going to see me more naked than most of my sexual partners, you don't have to avert your gaze while I'm getting ready for the exam." 

The other man hesitates for a second, but Dabi focuses on swallowing the low curl of disgust in his stomach as he takes off his silicone skin. He's as careful with it as possible, making sure that he doesn't put any unnecessary strain or stretching at the joints. This one is doing well. He's been working out in his room instead of the gym as much as he can, and in his room, he can take it off. He's hoping he can stretch the lifespan of this one so that he doesn't have to go without for the last leg before they get to their first pitstop. 

"Your sensitivity settings are calibrated to only give you the bare minimum feedback. These aren't the standard settings anymore, they're only used immediately after being placed, when the fusion points are still healing and the brain is still registering echoes of pain from the organic nerves that were removed in the procedure." 

"Oh," he shrugs slightly. "I don't know, I do what the doctors tell me. None of them ever said anything about changing the settings."

"They might have been started low because of the trauma of the initial injury." Shigaraki tells him, his tone unchanging. "Do you have any chronic, lingering, or phantom pain in the areas around your grafts?" 

He's got half of his skin off and he is already feeling more naked than he would have if he'd fully taken off his underwear and flashed his boss. "I did for a couple of months after the coma, but that went away. Now they don't hurt except for when they're getting probed during exams." 

"What do they feel like otherwise?" 

"I don't know? Nothing?" 

"Unless something is touching the panels?" 

"Yeah?" He hangs up the last piece of himself and sucks it up and turns to face Shigaraki again. The other man has moved over to the exam table and he's got a stylus in his hand, writing away on his tablet, not even looking at him. Dabi forces himself to cross the room too, taking a seat on the edge just like he had for Jin. "Is it not supposed to be like that?" 

"No," Shig finally looks up at him and Dabi pretends he's trying to get a peek at his notes instead of letting a pit open in his gut as he accepts the fact he's going to be gawked at for a few minutes. "You should feel just like any person. It shouldn't be numb. I'd like to start to raise your sensitivity up to standard levels as we travel." 

"Is that safe? What if my nerves were too damaged for that?" 

"We can bring it up slowly, test to see if there is any pain, but these levels are dangerous if there wasn't, and it doesn't look like that was the case when you got your final grafts after you finished your last growth spurt." Shigaraki finally looks up at him again. "If you don't have nerve damage and stay at this level for too long, you will develop it. You might not even be able to get the feedback that gives you sensation now in a few more years." 

Fucking hell. "You majored in cybernetics while on the captain's track?" 

"I double majored in the leadership and engineering tracks and got a doctorate for cybernetics while Nana Shimura was messing with my application." 

"Oh, huh, okay." Because he doesn't really know what else to say to that. "Guess you should know what you're doing then. Don't break anything." 

"I'll do my best." He says, his tone completely dry. "Lay down, whichever side you'd rather start with." 

Thank god, Dabi shifts to lay on his stomach. The longer he can keep from having to look Shigaraki in the face as this happens, the longer he has to convince himself that this is just like any other doctor's appointment, the better. The thin sheet doesn't take away the fact this is a cool metal table, but he doesn't have that much skin to worry about feeling it. Shigaraki sets his tablet by Dabi's head, and he turns so that he can look at the screen as he retrieves a zipped up case from the box of tools at their feet. Opening it up shows the kinds of instruments that Dabi is already familiar with in these kinds of check-ups, and that does help him relax a little more. Shigaraki selects a feedback probe and clicks it on, starting with the back of Dabi's neck since anything over the spine has the most connectivity points. 

"Do you want me to talk while I'm working?" 

"Never had a doctor ask that before." 

"I have a doctorate, I'm not a doctor . I had perfect grades, I wasn't about to mar those by flunking out of the bedside manor class." 

"You're a captain," Dabi says pointedly. "You're supposed to be good with people." 

"I am good with people," there isn't a trace of doubt in his voice. "I'm good at getting them to follow my orders, I'm good at fostering loyalty, I'm good at reading them. But I do that without beating around the bush. Typically, people don't want a doctor who is so blunt they might tell them they're dying with the same tone they would tell them they just have a cold." 

"Am I dying, Doc?" He teases. 

"You better not be. You're apparently the only person on this ship who gets excited about soil nitrates." 

"They're important!" 

"They are. So are the systems that sterilize and recycle waste into fertilizer for the garden, but Spinner doesn't have a pre-loaded forty minute long lecture about it in case someone brings it up." 

"Magne said they were boring!" Dabi fumbles, "You weren't even here for that! That was last trip!" 

"That lecture lives on in infamy. I'm pretty sure one of your former crewmates leaked a recording of it." 

"I'm going to kill them when I find out who." 

"You'll have five years to calm down." He takes the probe off of the back of his neck and moves it to his right shoulder next. "Your spine is in good condition, no sign of deterioration at any of the connection points." 

"Good." Dabi stays still as he keeps going. "Can I ask a personal question?" 

"Only if I can ask one in turn." 

He doesn't like that, but he hopes given what his is about, Shigaraki won't go for his fucking throat in the quid pro quo. "You and Spinner graduated at the same time. Know why you didn't get an assignment immediately, but how come he's here?" In silvers like Shigaraki is. Never been off-planet for Exovin, not even for a truncated trip. Definitely not on a standard surveying trip or he wouldn't be with them on this one, he would still be three years into his first. The probe is moved to his elbow before Shigaraki answers. 

"He didn't apply for a mission until after my application had been accepted. We said we wanted to be on a crew together during our first mission, and he was sure that things would work out for me in the end, so he chose to wait. I told him he didn't have to, but he insisted." 

"There's that loyalty you spoke so confidently about." Dabi mocks lightly. He didn't have a single friend throughout his entire time in school, not even before he was burned. He was too... intense and off-putting to other kids, and to the other students in the program. He hadn't cared at the time. He could get along with people when he put in the effort, or he could melt away into the background. Dabi's pretty sure he'd ended up with the Ingenuity's crew as the only silver because Exovin assumed a loner like him would either get along well with people older than him, or they just thought he wouldn't mind being a spare as long as he was getting to go out on a mission barely two months after graduation. 

"I guess so. What's your favorite color?" 

"Really?" 

"It's personal, and I need to set your indicator lights to something. You should have then enabled when we're out here in case something happens, it will tell you and the rest of us if something malfunctions under your synthetic skin." 

He hasn't had his indicator lights on since he was in the clear grafts back in the hospital. He never wanted them to activate to remind him to clean his seams or that it was time for a check-up. He didn't want to bring more attention to his broken body. "Can you make it so they only activate if there's an actual system issue? I don't want to be glowing every time I work out."

"I can do that. Favorite color?"

"Blue."

Shigaraki shifts the probe to his left shoulder and pulls a long cord with a magnetic connector out of the tool set. He places the magnetic part at the base of Dabi's neck and then plugs the other half into his tablet, opening up the system UI for his central graft and scrolling through to find the subsystem he needs.

"What's yours?"

"Red. You dye your hair?"

"Yeah, it'll be as white as yours in a few months." He couldn't bring the hair dye with him or he would have had to leave behind some of his skins. "How come yours is so long? Given your grandma didn't even want you in the field, I can't imagine she was giving you leeway with any uniform guidelines." 

"I logged the weight of my hair past my chin as part of my personal items for the duration of the trip. Technically, personal items with sentimental significance are allowed as part of that weight limit, and the rules about hair are already looser than people think because so many species have long fur and Exovin doesn't want to be exclusionary. The board already had to deal with the fact that turning me down with my grades was a recipe for a lawsuit, they didn't push it." He puts the probe on his left elbow, and keeps tapping at the system on his tablet. "Are you deliberately avoiding asking me what happened when I was kidnapped?" 

Dabi tenses, there's no hiding it, he's completely exposed. But he didn't think that would be a contentious thing. "It's none of my business." 

Shigaraki snorts, moving the probe down to the graft that curves over his lower back. "That's a first. Everyone in almost two star systems has an opinion on what happened. And you're probably the only person who could understand even half of it-- given your own incident." 

"I wouldn't compare the two." His throat is a little tighter when he says that. Folding his arms under his head now that Shigaraki is done with them and tucking his chin so he doesn't have to look at him. "I was just out for three years." 

"Three years is a long time." 

"Not as long as eleven." 

Shigaraki doesn't say anything for a minute, tapping away at whatever he's doing. "No. But we're not comparing them. I just think that you, of all people, know what it's like to have people make up a lot of theories and stories about what must have happened because they can't take not getting to know the truth." 

Yeah. He knows what that's like. "Do you want to talk about it?" He's not exactly a therapist, but Shigaraki must have had dozens of those. He certainly did, and if he were going to compare what happened to them, he's pretty sure while his own physical injuries were worse, whatever other tortures Shigaraki endured eclipsed what he experienced. 

"As long as I'm doing it in confidence, I don't mind. Do you want to talk about what happened?" 

"No." That's easy. "I'll keep my mouth closed about whatever you want to tell me, but you can make up whatever stories you want to about how I ended up like this. I don't care." 

"A rogue therazzad slurped off eighty percent of your skin and the only way to keep you from bleeding out and keep the parasite from laying its eggs in your abdomen was to throw you into a test engine." 

" What ?" 

"You said I could make up a story. If you don't like it, then you can correct me." Shigaraki's tone isn't cruel, it's the same easy rhythm that he's been talking to him with this whole time. Dabi has thrown punches at people who have made jokes out of his accident. But this one rings differently through him because... it's coming from Shigaraki. Maybe the only other person he's met who knows what it's like to have people take the worst parts of their life and make them the only ones that seem to matter in the public eye. "I'm pretty sure they were humans, at least at first. They called my father before they took me away. They found me and my sister walking back from the park near our house. I remember them telling him what they were going to do, and he begged, without hesitation, 'Please don't take my dear son, please spare him,' and I knew that I was going to die." 

He moves the probe to his right thigh. 

"Hana was always my father's favorite. She was ready to follow in his footsteps. I asked too many questions, I was sickly, I was sensitive, and I still wanted Grandma– Nana to come to holidays again because the picture albums showed that he used to smile around holidays when she was around. I wasn't his favorite child, and the fact that he pleaded for my life immediately told me that he was hoping they would prioritize taking me over my sister. He was right. They tried to get me secured, and I was too weak to fight them off, but Hana wasn't. She got away. No one ever talks about that first call. No one mentions that my sister was there when I was taken. But she was."

He moves the probe to the left and Dabi doesn't know what to say. He was curious, of course he was curious. He doesn't think there's a single person on Earth who wouldn't be curious. But that doesn't mean that hearing the truth of it, at least as Shigaraki remembers it, isn't hard to swallow. 

"What's a food that you're going to miss while we're out here?" 

"Seriously?" His voice is even more of a croak than it was before. 

"It's already over," Shigaraki tells him. "You know how it ended, telling you only hurts if I let it." 

Dabi wonders if he had whatever therapists that Shigaraki apparently did, if he would still wake up in a cold sweat, scrambling for a mirror to see if he's slept through his life again. "Mappo tofu, family recipe." 

"Sounds like a good thing to miss. Can you roll over for me? I'm ready to check the connection points at the front." Dabi rolls onto his back as soon as the probe and cord have been taken from his skin. He lays on his back, and he can't avoid looking at Shigaraki now. But his expression is still unmoved. "I'm going to start with your face, is that alright?" 

If it means he can close his eyes and not talk for a few minutes, then Dabi is more than happy for that. "Yeah, do what you need to." He closes his eyes and mouth and waits. Shigaraki shifts the probe to under his right eye. 

"Your connection points are very healthy from what I can see." The other man tells him. "Minimal scar tissue, good circulation and integration. Hopefully when we get the sensitivity up to where it's supposed to be, you'll forget that you even have the grafts." Dabi isn't going to ever be able to do that, but he doesn't have to answer, and Shigaraki lets him be quiet for the rest of the check-up, until he's putting the cable back to his chest. "I'm going to start by increasing your sensitivity by half a point. You should feel some light pins and needles as it happens, but any pain or aches means that there is deeper nerve damage. We'll have to get you regenerative nerve treatments at our refuel point, but that shouldn't be any trouble." 

"Okay," He agrees this time because he just doesn't know what else to say. His father was the one who paid for the grafts and his medical treatments, even after he'd given up his family name. But he'd only done that because it would look bad if he didn't. Dabi was injured due to the Endeavor Corporation's experiments after all. He doesn't know if the grafts he has are even any good. He just did what the doctors told him and didn't ask any questions. He doesn't want to ask questions because that means he has to think about them too much. 

Shigaraki taps onto his tablet again, and Dabi's seams and little dots of light start to glow a bright, clean blue across his panels. He only ever sees the lights when he's getting a check-up, and they're usually white, but the blue is kind of cool, he supposes as he is hit with a wave of pins and needles for a moment. It feels strange. His skin is the thing that's damaged, so he can still have his limbs go numb if he sits or sleeps on them wrong and cuts off circulation. But the grafts replace his skin, and having that sensation happen only across the surface of his limbs is definitely foreign and weird. He realizes Shigaraki is watching him. 

"Tingles, but it doesn't hurt." He tells him. 

"Good," he takes the cord off of him. "If that changes at any point, come see me, no matter the time, alright?" 

"Can do. Thanks, cap." He sits up, more than ready to go put on his skin and clothes and head out. He has mess duties for the night, and at this stage in their trip, there is actually fun that can be had with the cooking of the fresh foods they could bring with them. There are plenty of freeze-dried rations that they'll be eating later on, but food tech has advanced so much since they learned how other species preserve and grow their food for intergalactic travel, that there is a lot more they can do now. In another month or so, they'll have even more fresh vegetables from his and Magne's garden. He has fun on mess duty, even if Jin bans some of his integrations of freshly logged flora and fauna until there's been a proper workup that doesn't just tell them it's not immediately poisonous. 

"Your sensitivity levels are very low, Dabi. I would like to start bringing them up as quickly as we can safely manage. If you're alright with it, I'd like you to come back every three days to check in and get an increase." Dabi bristles slightly. He doesn't want to take his skin on and off that often. It will break down too quickly. 

"Can you do that through my skin?"

Shigaraki hesitates. "The connection has to be metal to metal. I can't do it on your face," He adds before Dabi suggests that. "The contact points are too small." Dabi really doesn't want to have to do this every few days. He doesn't want to wear out his skins by taking them off and on constantly either, but he doesn't have a good reason to actually say that. This is for his health. Which means that Captain's order's could override his hesitation anyway and he doesn't want to be barely a month into their travel and become a troublesome crewmate for Shigaraki. They may only be stopping once every eight months, but if he makes enough trouble, he can be discharged from the crew and have to stay at the outpost they go to for refueling until a different ship is headed back to Earth.

He doesn't want any of that either, but thankfully, he doesn't have to say anything about his reluctance. Shigaraki must see it in every inch of him. "There is something else we could try." He offers after a moment and Dabi turns back to look at him as he reaches into his tool kit again for a laser scalpel.

///

Things on the ship are normal. They're moving through well-traveled space. Sometimes they even see other ships out of their windows as they pass. Some people ping them to say hello, or to share information about radiation storms or drifting asteroids in the area. And on the ship, they do their jobs, they socialize, they maintain their health. It's just the last one that has Dabi going into Shigaraki's room once every three days to be recalibrated. The small hole that he put into Dabi's false skin at the base of his neck means that the check-ins are much faster than they were the first time. He heads to Shigaraki's room, sits on the edge of his work table, and he hooks his tablet up to Dabi's central graft, and slowly creeps his sensitivity up. They start doing it before Dabi's supposed to be going off shift or going to bed, so that when the strange tingles come, he can go to sleep and let his messy meat brain recalibrate itself to the new sensitivity while he's out. 

Dabi hasn't noticed much of a difference, but it's only been two weeks. He's only up two full points on the sensitivity meter, still apparently seven below where he should be if he doesn't have any severe nerve damage. Thankfully, he doesn't seem to have any of that at the moment. He is doing just fine and not having any strange or phantom pains. Maybe by the time he's halfway to the intended threshold he'll start to... feel more. He always thought the fact that he couldn't make out the texture of his clothes against his grafts was a sign that the technology just wasn't that far along. It's already so advanced compared to prosthetics a century or two ago, he never thought asking about more was something he could do. He didn't want to be greedy when he already has so much. Shigaraki, he thinks, generally skims the readouts for his grafts before he adjusts them, looking under the hood to make sure that there's nothing wrong with them that is beyond Dabi being able to notice at the moment. He doesn't take too long doing that though, and he doesn't usually start up any chit-chat. He definitely doesn't bring up anything that happened after his father gave him up to his kidnappers.

That's a hell of a thing to find out and Dabi isn't sure what to make of it. Tenko Shimura was four years old when he was taken. He might not have the clearest memory of what happened. Trauma distorts things. That's what all the shrinks told Dabi. But it can also put things into clearer focus. It just depends on the mind. The reports said that Tenko Shimura was taken when he was alone, walking his dog back from the park that was at the end of their street. He was less than ten meters from his house when he was taken, and he didn't even get to scream before it happened. His sister wasn't supposed to have been anywhere near there. The Shimuras weren't supposed to have been contacted until they sent the first image of him to prove he'd been taken. But that story... is very sanitized. It's sanitized the way his story was. it's all made neat and tidy, not putting too much blame on his family because the family were 'just as much' victims as poor little Tenko was. Dabi knows how the media twists itself into knots to serve powerful people. and the Shimuras are much, much more powerful than the Todorokis. 

But they don't talk about that when Shigaraki ups his sensitivity once every three days. He just does it, tells Dabi his systems are still looking good, and then sends him on his way. He doesn't bring it up either. He goes to bed. He tries not to think about it too much. 

///

When he's on the table the following month though, he doesn't have a choice but to talk. The full-system diagnostics take longer than the little check-ins and he has to fully strip for them and lay himself out on the table like he did the first time. 

"What's a food you're going to miss while we're off-planet?" 

"I don't really miss much Earth food," Shigaraki tells him easily, monitoring the probe as it runs his code. "I grew up eating other things, for the most part. I'm actually hoping that I can get my hands on something I've been missing at our first port." 

"What is it?" 

"It's like a tamale, made by the Dre'Von Lirra. It's got a strange savory filling that has a sour sauce that goes with it. I never knew what it was called, but it was very common on one of the planets I was held on." He keeps working, but asks, "Do you want to know more, or is it making you uncomfortable? We don't have to talk about this if it bothers you." 

Dabi does his best not to tense on the table. He doesn't know if he wants to stop learning about how Shigaraki survived what happened to him, what really happened if his words are true and accurate despite being memories based in trauma. "It's not that it bothers me. You can talk about it, I just don't get why you want to talk about it with me ." He hides his face against his arms, "I know things were different, but as similar as you're going to get as far as the media circus goes. But if you want people to know the truth, then couldn't you have told someone else? You could have gotten some journalist to listen, or you could have written a book or something. You must know that people would pay for your story." 

"Of course they would. People were writing my story before I was even found. But I don't want to do a 'tell all' for the public. Even if I told the truth and not the version that the Shimuras wanted from me, there's no value in it for me." 

"So why tell me?" 

"Because you're on my crew and you did have a similar experience. And I imagine that every time you've had to have someone work on your grafts, they either ask you all about the accident, or they try to ignore it and talk around it, and neither of those makes you feel comfortable. I can see when your stress levels spike while I'm working," which Dabi's sure, spike again when he tells him that. "But when I talked about myself, they lowered. I don't know if that's because you were interested or if you were just surprised that I was asking, but by the time I had the probe on your back the first time, your levels were so high I was a little worried you might have a panic attack." He moves the probe to the small of his back. "My bedside manor is bad, but I don't want to stress you out unnecessarily. I won't ever ask about your accident, Dabi. I'll tell you whatever you want to know about what happened to me. It really doesn't bother me. Hell, if you want to go sell the story when we get back to Earth, I won't even press charges. Or I can talk about other things. I just don't want you to seem like you're going to fall apart every time I have to touch you." 

Dabi stays quiet for a long moment, stunned into silence. "...So you're trauma dumping on me to keep me from having a panic attack?" 

"It was working." 

"You're kind of nuts. But I guess you weren't socialized properly as a child." It's absolutely not a comment he should make. It's absolutely something that if Dabi said in front of anyone else, he's pretty sure he would be in a disciplinary hearing over it. But Shigaraki snorts softly and when Dabi chances glancing at him out of the corner of his eye, he finds the other looking at him instead of his tablet, mouth curved into a small smile, and red eyes warm on him. He doesn't know if he's ever seen Shigaraki look so relaxed or... kind. He's usually so focused and severe, or painfully deadpan. 

"I was socialized, but mileage varies when it comes to how the cultures I was socialized by interact with humans." His eyes flick back to his tablet and he hesitates for a split second as he takes note of the readout. "Your stress levels are decreasing." 

"Yeah, cause now I know you're just a weirdo." 

"That's comforting?" 

"Kind of. Would rather have a boss who's a weirdo than a robot." 

"Bold talk from someone who has a lot more cybernetics than I do." 

Dabi takes a shaky breath. "Did your dad really let you get taken?" 

"He did. He probably wouldn't have even pretended to want me back if Nana hadn't found out. He lowballed each of the offers he sent. I was scared, I was in a lot of pain, but I remember telling them again and again that he wouldn't pay more for me than he had for his house. He was so proud of that house. Bought it without a dime from his mother and it was the most expensive thing he had even when Proximacard was rivaling Exovin's profits. They wanted ten times that amount for me. He wouldn't ever give it to them. He told them that when they called the fourth time and threatened to slit my throat this time. He added, 'You can only kill my son once, I can hang up on you as many times as I want,' and that's exactly what he did. Whoever was actually in charge then, realized this wasn't going to work, and I think there was real debate about if I would be killed, but don't remember much of that. I don't think they were human." Shigaraki tells him. "They didn't seem to know how to care for my most basic needs, and in addition to the blood loss and shock, they hadn't brought me more than a single cup of water in six days. I was pretty delirious at that point, and during one of the times where I was unaware, I think they found someone else who would buy me. 

"I woke up next in a small ship, in a medbay. I was being treated, but I wasn't rescued, and I wasn't going home. I was outfitted with a muzzle and blindfold so that I wouldn't ever be able to look or call for help." Shigaraki lifts the probe, meaning to put it on the back of Dabi's knee, but he gestures with that hand towards his face. "When I pulled at them, they pushed barbs into my skin to stay in place." Which must be why there's so much texture around his eyes and mouth. They kept me like that for a long time. I worked on the ship, doing whatever I could without sight, changing hands when this master or that got tired of keeping me around.

"It wasn't good, of course, but there were times when it was less bad. Sometimes I had owners who took off the muzzle so that I could actually eat instead of being given food intravenously, sometimes I had ones who didn't feed me at all. I didn't know how long it had been. I never got to see myself. I knew I got bigger because tools felt smaller in my hands, my limbs felt thinner and there seemed to be uncomfortably more of me when I was trying to sleep in my pod, if I was given one. But after so many growth spurts, the blinders and muzzle were getting too tight and my owner this time, was worried that they would crack my skull if I kept growing without them being adjusted. He was one of the nicer ones. He called me his 'son'. He said that he was going to teach me and that someday I would inherit his empire. He took the muzzle and blinders off, and the instant I was no longer restrained, I pounced on him. I think he was human. But I'm not sure. I didn't really see much. The lights were too bright after years in the dark. He might have been something else." Shigaraki's voice sounds far away as he says it. His hand curls around the back of Dabi's calf and his fingers squeeze slightly. A shiver runs along Dabi's spine as he feels the pressure of his grip against his graft. His palm is cooler than Dabi thinks it should be when the one he's touching him with is made entirely of flesh and bone. "His skin was so soft. It gave way so easily. But his blood tasted the same as mine. I knew he was dead when I couldn't hear him breathing anymore. I don't know. I don't think anyone ever went back to find him because I couldn't remember how to speak when I found the Exovin crew at the ship port. I'm not even sure how long it was between those events. I just know it was long enough for me to adjust to being able to see again for the first time in over a decade. I don't know how fast that happened."

He lets go of Dabi's leg like he hadn't realized he was holding onto him. "Sorry, you can roll over now." Dabi is surprised his arms don't tremble as he pushes himself up. He doesn't know how he isn't registering high stress levels hearing about this. Is he not stressed? Is he actually just fascinated and... disgusted with himself for listening to Shigaraki talk about what happened to him like it is just an entertaining story? The other man meets his eyes just as easily as he did before as he continues speaking once Dabi is situated like this. "But after that, there isn't much to tell. My grandmother was, of course, the first to find out that I had been recovered, and she made sure that the news outlets got that information before my father so that he couldn't have me quietly dealt with before I got back to Earth. I was too busy trying to recover for their games to matter much to me at the start. But within the year it became clear that they didn't want me to get better. Nana had taken custody of me because when I saw my sister the first time I tried to kill her too, and after that, they were hoping that I would never figure out how to speak, that I wouldn't ever be capable of taking care of myself or reacclimating to being a person again. If I never got better, they could just lock me up in a facility somewhere and never have to risk me bringing any bad PR that would counteract how good my kidnapping had been for business."

He shifts the probe, "I got better just to spite them."

"Serves them right." Dabi's voice sounds a little strained, but even though Shigaraki is focusing on his tablet, his mouth still curls up into another small smile.

"See? I knew you of all people would understand. Why biology?"

"I don't like authority, I'm bad with computers, I had enough of hospitals, and I didn't want to potentially be standing next to any other exploding engines, but I still wanted to get off-planet. Studying alien life is the coolest track anyway."

"I don't know about that. I think the other tracks have their perks."

"What happened to your dog?"

"Not long after I got taken, my sister didn't check the side gate before letting him out. He got hit by a car and had to be put down."

"God, what a bitch."

"She was seven." But barely three seconds later, "Yeah. She flunked out of Proximacard's astronaut program, twice."

"Ruthless, stupid, and incompetent? Perfect, that's just what your Dad needs in an heir. I hope she serves the Shimuras well."

Shigaraki is smiling again and Dabi forgets that his chest is normally tight when he's out of his false skin for so long. 

///

Dabi is only two points below the threshold that he's supposed to be aiming to hit when he has to change out his skin for the new one. He gave his grafts time to adjust while he was sleeping, and when he gets out of bed, he moves to start putting on the artificial skin. He knows the silicone is a little heavy, it's a little weirdly cool compared to the rest of him, and that it's a little too smooth when he touches it with his flesh fingers. But he doesn't normally notice that, or how tight and clingy it is against his grafts. That it doesn't just sit snugly in place, it kind of... squeezes onto him, with an ever present pressure that makes it impossible for him to ignore that overwhelming too smoothness of the pieces. It's also... cool. He always was fine at registering temperature, or at least he thought he was, but maybe that was mostly because he is usually touching hot things with his hands which don't have any grafts. But now he's achingly aware at every time of the day that his body isn't quite right. That the places where the grafts meet his skin are warmer than the rest of the silicone, and that the clingy cool pressure of them against his skin is unpleasant. Dabi knows not many people wear the silicone skins all the time, he thought that other people just had a lot less of their body that was fucked up than him, or that maybe the cost of them was making them inaccessible to most. But now he's wondering if the only reason he's been able to stand these long-term is because his sensitivity was so low that he just wasn't actually feeling the skin at all. 

But when he goes in to have the sensitivity upped again, he pauses on the threshold of Shigaraki's door. The other man raises a, well, not a brow, but the expression tracks all the same. "What's wrong? Are you having problems with pain?" 

"No, no pain, just... more sensitive. Can we slow down the increases? I think I need more time to adjust between rounds. It's getting distracting, and I don't want to fuck up something because I can suddenly feel the hair on the back of my neck touching the grafts and start thinking a specimen got out of containment." He doesn't love the scrutiny that gets leveled at him when he says that, but Shigaraki gives him a small smile after a few minutes. 

"Can you feel your hair again?" 

"...Yeah." 

"That's good." Shigaraki reassures him. "It means that there probably isn't any underlying nerve damage. We should be able to get you up to baseline, and with grafts as advanced as yours, that means you should eventually not even be able to feel the place where your skin is separated anymore. We can go down to once a week, if you're still needing time to adjust we can make it once every two weeks." 

"Cool, I'm going to head to bed then. Have a boring shift." 

"Have an uneventful sleep." 

He gets to go back to his room and change into his regulation pajamas and sleep with his regulation blanket, and he is only halfway into his sleep pajamas when he gets frustrated with how it doesn't feel like he's changing into lighter clothes that aren't his suit. He can't feel like he's taking off the pounds of fabric he's wearing when he's on duty when just what he's wearing in silicone alone outweighs it. He feels heavy and uncomfortable as he tries to lay down, and after a few minutes, Dabi reluctantly begins to remove his false skin as well. 

By the time he's in his pajamas, Dabi feels more naked than he has been in a very, very long time. He sleeps better than he has in ages too. 

///

There has never really been a question of if Dabi loves his job or not. He does, he always has, and he doesn't think that anything else he does will ever compare to the way that being in space makes him feel. But he didn't love every second of being on the Ingenuity the first time around. He didn't like their secondary captain who always made a pass at him no matter how many times he told the guy he wasn't interested. He didn't like the fact that he only got along with three of his crewmates and only got along with the fourth when they were fucking. He didn't like that there was a tension in the air at all times, that it always felt like something was about to go wrong. It never did, they had a good run, Dabi made good friends that he's happy to be out in the world with again. 

But the travel is different this time around. It's different because Dabi has five years of experience under his belt. Different because he has friends already on board that he trusts with his life. Different because... even though Shigaraki and Spinner are new, it doesn't feel like they are. One thing about a healthy crew is that some people are going to get along better than others. That is just the nature of things. But even though he definitely gets along with his previous crewmates, that doesn't mean that he doesn't also get along with Shigaraki and Spinner. Spinner is kind of geeky , Dabi knows that he himself is nerdy. He definitely thinks soil nitrates are more interesting than the average guy. But Spinner likes working with the engines, computers, and electrical systems as much as one would expect from someone passionate enough about a job to commit to doing it away from friends or family in half-decade chunks until they retire or get fired. No, Spinner is geeky because in his downtime, he plays video games, he watches movies, he reads comic books. Dabi is pretty sure he wants to get them all into some kind of roleplaying game that does not sound like the kinky kind in the near future, and none of that is shit that Dabi is interested in. So he and Spinner are good at talking about work things, and not much else. But that's fine because Jin thinks that other stuff is interesting, and it turns out Shigaraki is almost just as into all that crap as Spinner is. So they all have someone to hang out with. He and Magne have a vested interest in brewing barely legal alcohol because that is, in fact, the most fun they can have without blowing something up. He, Magne, and Jin have fun playing cards, Atsuhiro has a good time cheating at cards with them, and it turns out Shigaraki is just as good at cheating as he is. And Shigaraki never hesitates to talk to any of them, to hear their ideas and input on whatever the subject, and then he makes his call as decisively as possible. Dabi loves his job, he really likes this crew, he enjoys spending time with all of them. 

So it's a goddamn shame that he's been alone every hour he's off-duty lately. 

It's been four months since they departed Earth and the travel has gone off without a hitch. Everything is going well. But Dabi's sensitivity threshold has been brought up to normal levels and he can't stand his silicone skin anymore. It gets clammy at the edges where his real skin sweats, if anything gets under it like lint from his clothes, the little bead of it is so noticeable that Dabi will find himself scratching at it, but the itch is underneath . And the pressure and weight that he'd started to notice when they were approaching the threshold, is unwavering now. The skin is heavy. It weighs half as much as he does, and even though it doesn't actually restrict his movement, it always feels like it should be. It only gets warm around the edges or if he keeps his thermals on and his suit completely zipped up. None of that stuff ever bothered him before, but now he hates it so much that as soon as he's off-duty, he takes it off. And looks like a freak. So he stays in his room. So he doesn't see the crew. 

He still loves his job as much as he did at the start. He just might also hate himself a little more as the days pass by.

///

"Dabi, can we talk?" Shigaraki is in the doorway of the lab and Dabi is glad that Magne is off-shift right now because that means it's just the two of them and Dabi's beloved forty-seven plants that he's been tending for the past hour. 

"Yeah, sure thing. Something wrong, cap?" 

He comes inside and taps on the door pad. The door shuts and the glass window down the middle goes dark to give them their privacy and Dabi realizes that yeah something must be really wrong for him to come see him like this. Shit. Is he regretting what he told him? They still talk during his check-ups at the end of each month, but Shigaraki still talks in broad strokes about what he suffered. Dabi knows it was a lot, knows it was bad, but he put as much effort in recovering psychologically as he did physically. He knows that Shigaraki doesn't sleep much, but it hasn't ever affected his ability to lead in Dabi's opinion. Surely he can't be thinking that Dabi would use any of the things he's told him in confidence to cause him trouble? 

"I actually wanted to ask you that." He says, and his tone is careful, red eyes searching Dabi's face with a scrutiny that he doesn't know what to do with. "You've been spending more time alone lately, is there something that you need to talk about?" 

Oh. Dabi is glad that there really isn't enough of his skin left to blush. "No, there's not anything wrong." He forces himself to be as honest with Shigaraki as he has been with him. "The increased sensitivity for my grafts is just making it harder for me to wear the silicone skin. I don't like... being out with it off." 

Whatever he was expecting him to say, clearly that wasn't it, because Shigaraki blinks and then frowns slightly. There's a few seconds of a pause, and Dabi half thinks that the other man is going to tell him to get over it or that he doesn't need to feel ashamed. Those are usually the two routes that people take when he says that he has an issue with the way he looks. It's such a shallow thing to care about, isn't it? He's alive after something that should have killed him. He should be grateful to be alive. He shouldn't have insecurities about his appearance. He does though, and he waits to be ridiculed for them. But Shigaraki doesn't say that. "I see. We can't lower the sensitivity again," he says, almost apologetically. "I don't want to risk giving you nerve damage. I haven't worn the skin, it's not recommended for my prosthetics, so I can't make any recommendations for mitigating that. But I do know some people who could give you a custom paint job over the panels. It's not cheap and will take up all your shore leave when we dock on Vinuh, but if you want something less noticeable, they can try to color match your skin." 

Dabi opens his mouth, and when no words come out after another second, he closes it again. What? 

Shigaraki's attention shifts, unhooking the strap on his glove and taking it off so that Dabi can see his fingers, "I had this done about six years ago, and it's held up incredibly well," He raises his hand so that Dabi can see, bending his fingers and showing him some of the connection points along the joints, "They were still experimenting with the procedure, when I first got it done, and they did have to shave down the edge of the joints to make sure that nothing ground together with the thickness of the paint and gloss, but they've gotten the formula thinner and smoother now so they can avoid breaking the warranty around modifications. I have only had a little bit of chipping a few times," he shows him on the edge of the joint and Dabi can see the smallest fleck of black underneath. "Otherwise they've held up incredibly well. It does take twice as long to get the paint removed, so I've been told, so I'd recommend thinking about the color for a bit before you get anything, if you decide to. I can send you a link to their website if you want to see the gallery of work they've been doing." 

It still takes him until Shigaraki is putting his glove back on before he finds his voice. "Okay." 

Shig looks at him again, with a little more of a pronounced frown. "Are you sure everything is alright?" 

"Yeah, Shig, thanks for checking in." 

The captain doesn't look like he's fully satisfied with that answer, but he doesn't push it for now, which Dabi is incredibly grateful for. He unlocks the door and leaves him alone, but Dabi locks it after he's gone, sitting back on his stool with his mind feeling distant and foggy for a while after he's gone. 

///

Shigaraki doesn't bring up their conversation again for a while, but he does send him a link to the website for the company he was talking about. It's Galiv-run which tells Dabi a lot. Galiv are an alien species that are not unlike hermit crabs, in the sense that their bodies have areas that are incredibly soft, no hard skull to keep their brain safe, no thicker skin or muscle along their backs to help insulate their spines from the outside world. One good hit to either place can kill them dead, and they adapted on their planet by crafting armor for their bodies to keep them safe. In this day and age, they use grafts much like the ones on Dabi's body over all of their sensitive skin, and having it decorated is an aesthetic choice, if not also a show of wealth depending on how lavish said ornamentation is. Their gallery is covered in beautiful pieces in a range of different styles from across the galaxy. Geometric lines, iconography of different famous pieces of art across many different planets, solid colors, some made to look like other materials like porcelain or wood. The variety of the paint varies as much as any other form of body art and modification can, and Dabi is relieved to see that they've worked with people who have even more of their skin ruined than his own, and they've worked with a lot of different species as well. He doesn't know what to do with the amount of relief that puts in him. But he navigates through the site and finds the section that talks about solid colors and skin colors. The solid colors all look as sleek and perfect as Shigaraki's fingers do, and he knows from experience that he thought it was the metal of the graft itself, not paint, when he first saw it. Looking at the false skin tones they offer, he has a little more hope for his own situation. The blend between the paint and the model's skin is so difficult to discern that they have the indicator lights on in half of the pictures so that he can see where the real skin starts and ends. They even will do a textured undercoat to give the grafts the look of pores and there is a secondary treatment they can do to add fine lines and wrinkles around joints as well. The matte clear-coat that goes on top is as durable, so they say, as the gloss coating they use on their other jobs and guarantee the paint to last a minimum of five years without chipping or damage provided the wearer is taking care of themselves. 

They don't have their prices listed, but Dabi has no doubt that it will be obscene. He books a consultation and quote anyway. 

///

"Thanks for telling me about Thuprea." He says the next time Shigaraki has him laying on the table in his room, his skin off, and him really noticing the chill of the metal through the sheet. 

"You're welcome. Are you thinking of getting anything done?" 

"Yeah, in consultations. I'd say it's going to cost an arm and a leg, but even selling off one of each wouldn't really put a dent in the price." It's going to be over half of what he made on his last trip, but this job means he only has to house himself for one year every five, can't exactly be spending a ton of money ordering things for a house or apartment, doesn't have any particular vices to spend his pay on, and isn't exactly taking any vacations. He has the money, and when he calculates how much he spends on his silicone skins over the course of five years, and if the chipping is as minor as what is on Shigaraki's hand after that long, he figures that this is an investment worth making. 

"We're going to be restocking and refueling for four days. Will that be long enough?" 

"They said that they can get it done in twenty-two hours, but they want to split it up across three days. If I make sure everything is ready for the ship on the first, then I should have enough time." He scoffs softly, "They saw the pictures of me and said they would like to have a photographer for a before and after." 

"You should tell them if they want to use you for advertising, that they can either pay a modeling fee or you will take a discount on a portion of the cost." 

Dabi can't help snorting into his arms. "Even for work on prosthetics, I don't think anyone's going to pay to take pictures of me unless it's for some tabloid scandal." 

"Why not? You're attractive." Shigaraki says it with the same even inflection as everything else, not even looking up from his tablet. 

Dabi blinks, and after a second, as the sincerity of the other's words sinks in, he feels a little heat creep to the flesh parts of his skin. "Sorry, but I don't know if I can trust the guy who didn't get to use his eyes for a decade when it comes to assessing attractiveness." 

And because Shigaraki really doesn't care about making jokes about what happened to him, he snorts this time. "I think I value beauty more after not being able to see for so many years." He tells Dabi, moving the probe. Dabi shivers slightly, feeling the cool magnet against his slightly warmer grafts. He never noticed the slight heat that his grafts generated before, the warmth of his blood beneath them and the electricity working through them, but with the sensitivity this high, he notices now. "If you were going to be in the tabloids for some kind of scandal, what would it be?" 

"Murdered my father." He answers automatically. "You?" 

"Probably the same. What if we take patricide off the table?" 

"Hmm, stole a ship and flew off planet. Don't tell your grandmother that." 

Shig chuckles. "I'll give you the security codes if you bring me with you." 

"You really don't want to live on Earth after this?" 

"No. I never understood teachers in the program who only went out on a survey or two, and then decided they wanted to stay on Earth for the rest of their lives. If I can spend every day of the rest of my life under skies that are different from the one I was born under, I'd be happy. What about you? Retirement plans?" 

"I'm not going to stay on Earth either, but I do have three siblings. My brother just got married, my sister is in a pretty serious relationship, I think she's going to be engaged at the very least by the time we get back, and my youngest brother is in the program right now. He'll be graduating when we get back next time. If I can make it work, I want to make sure he and I are away and returning on the same schedule while we're working, and when I do eventually retire, unless the lot of them are willing to relocate, I'll probably have to pick somewhere within our solar system to live. Maybe I'll actually buy myself a small ship and go around to other places, but I don't want to abandon them." He feels the other man move the probe and Dabi sighs softly. They're almost done with his back, almost halfway done with the session. Then he'll be climbing back into his awful second skin, and he won't really have reason to hang around Shigaraki anymore for the night. It's kind of too bad. He likes these conversations with Shig. There's a candor to them that soothes the thing in him that has had to be sharp and defensive for so much of his life. "You didn't say what you would have a scandal for that isn't murder." 

"Probably getting caught at a BDSM club." 

Dabi's body immediately tenses, every inch of him as his mind goes completely and unhelpfully blank. Shigaraki is so deadpan at all times that he doesn't know if the other man is joking or not, and he turns his head back to get a look at his expression. Shig's eyes flick up to meet his gaze, but he is as stunningly inexpressive as he always is. " What ?" 

"It's not your turn anymore, Dabi." He says lightly. "Do you like your siblings' significant others?" 

"I-- yeah, Natsuo's wife is a Chodon nurse. She's nice. And my sister's girlfriend is half human half Yelnois, she's a Constellations Collective officer, loud and brash as hell, but she makes Fuyumi happy. Shoto wouldn't know what romance was if someone hit him with a brick, and they're gonna have to if they want his attention anyway. BDSM club ?" 

"I like to have sex, I like to be in control, I like to know exactly what I'm getting into with my partners before I do it. I worked as a professional dom while I was getting my doctorate and waiting to hear back from the board." 

Dabi is stunned silent as Shigaraki tells him that. Holy fucking shit. Yeah, if anyone had caught wind of Tenko Shimura ending up at a BDSM club, as a professional dom , then yeah, yeah, Dabi could see that becoming a headline for the tabloids. 

Shigaraki doesn't say anything for another minute and then he takes the probe from Dabi's skin and waits for him to roll over because he knows the routine by now. He still feels a little shaky when he does it. Red eyes are waiting for his to look up and he feels his voice catch in his throat. Shigaraki hasn't ever been anything but professional with him, and given Dabi slept with over half of his last crew, he really shouldn't be scandalized to find out that the other man had a healthy sex life back before he got sent out. "Does that bother you?" 

"No." He says immediately. But maybe too immediately, because Shigaraki doesn't say anything else before he brings the probe to Dabi's face, forcing them to have to take a break from the conversation. It takes a few minutes for him to get the readings from those grafts and Shigaraki moves on to his chest without comment. "It doesn't bother me." He says again. "I was just surprised, given everything that you went through--" 

"I like being in control," Tomura tells him, not looking up. It takes Dabi a second, but he realizes that Shigaraki is avoiding making eye contact . He told him about the time that his captors refused to feed him butchered meat and he had to snap the neck of the poultry they gave him, and pull out handfuls of its feathers with his bare hands. He told him how he vomited and they took away the meat until he ate that again too. He hadn't been ashamed of that, hadn't avoided looking at him when he told him about the horrors of his life. But this , this is something he expects ridicule for. "BDSM, being a dom, means that I'm always in control. I make sure my subs are taken care of, of course, but it's the... only way I was able to trust someone else getting that close again. I choose what we do, I decide if they can touch me or not, I determine how far we go." He gives a soft, self-deprecating laugh, "I worked as a dom for over a year before I actually had sex for the first time. Pathetic--" 

"Ask me how old I was when I lost my virginity." 

"I'm not going to ask that of my subordinate." 

"Why not? We talk about everything else." 

Shig still hesitates for a second, finally glancing up at him again, and Dabi holds his gaze. "... When?" 

"I was twenty-three. Do not tell Magne she punched my v-card or she is going to get such an inflated ego." Duster blinks, his surprise plain across his features. "I... was always too self-conscious about my burns. I knew the silicone didn't feel great to other people, my body was too cold, and I was always too in my head to really get properly aroused with a partner. Not to mention the fact that I'm shit at talking to other people. I was pretty certain that I was going to die a virgin, but Magne hit on me a few years into the trip when everyone was getting a little pent-up and stir-crazy. I was so nervous about showing my ass and being terrible that I apparently 'put in the work' and she was impressed. Atsuhiro and I hooked up a couple of days later, and then I was with Shun for the rest of the trip because he actually had a fetish for mannequins? Or something? He liked that I didn't feel like a person--" 

"Agalmatophilia-- you went from a virgin to having three notches in your belt in a matter of what? A month?" 

"Which is why Jin calls me a slut. I like sex. I don't know if I care about control, but I care a lot ," his throat feels so dry, and Shigaraki isn't paying the probe any attention anymore. He's looking at him again, eyes a little too intense and Dabi feels so naked as he admits, "about what I look like." His voice is so weak and small. He hasn't ever said those words out loud. Not to his siblings, not to his therapists, not to his doctors. Everyone who knows him, knows that he does. Knows that he's beyond ashamed of his looks, that if he ever got an apartment of his own, he would pry out or cover up every mirror and reflective surface in the house so that he would never have to look at himself again. 

Shigaraki looks at him for a long moment and then takes a slow breath. "I could tell you that you don't have anything to be ashamed of. I could tell you that I think you're beautiful. I could tell you that your looks don't define you and that you should be proud of who you are now. But that's why you don't talk about these things." He is guessing, but he knows . Because Shigaraki knows what it's like for the world to define someone by their trauma. Shigaraki should be proud of how far he's come after everything he went through, but other people telling him that will feel condescending whether he believes it himself or not. "And it's not entirely honest either. People care about what they look like. People treat you differently because of it, even if they don't say anything directly. You should care-- I just hope that you find a way to be happy with how you look, or at least make peace with it." 

Dabi's throat is so tight when he croaks, "Did you ever make peace with what happened?" 

"... No." His voice is smaller too. "Do you think it matters?" 

"I don't know." 

"Neither do I." Tomura looks back at his tablet and pulls the probe away from Dabi's grafts. "Maybe we can figure it out together." 

The exam is done, but they spend another few minutes before Dabi sits up. He takes Tomura's hand this time when he offers it as he climbs down from the table. 

///

A week passes. Two weeks. Three, four. In the time that eclipses, Dabi and Shigaraki work together just the same as they have been for the months prior. Neither of them bring up how heavy their conversation was. They still get along great, they have fun when they're talking about other things, there isn't anything different. At least not between them. But at three weeks, Dabi faces having to put on his skin one morning, and he just can't do it. His face is already ruined, already on display for all the others at every time of the day. His uniform covers most of the rest of him. He is shaky and nervous the whole day, but no one comments on the fact they can see his scars all the way from the tips of his ears down to his collarbone, that his fingers are black without him wearing any gloves. No one comments, he gets a double take a few times, but they don't stare, they adjust in a manner of seconds and no one says anything. Not even Shigaraki. 

He doesn't say anything as Dabi comes to his room for his next check-up and only has to strip his clothes before he's laying on the table. He starts on his back, as always, and before he can rethink this, before Tomura can steer their conversation towards something else, 

"I was born prematurely."

Shigaraki pauses as he looks at his tablet. "Your heart rate--" 

"It wasn't just something that happened accidentally. My father bought his wife from the Himura's because he wanted to use their bio-engineering company to build a better child. The technology to have a designer baby was still in its infancy. He wanted to make sure that he would have a golden star child who could be the face of the future. He wanted to be the human that every other government in the galaxy goes to for things to do with Earth. He needed an empire to do that, and children who could serve that function would be best. He wanted to tweak my embryo to be more athletic, to be smarter, to avoid any chronic illness or disability. But the tech wasn't good enough. I was born too soon, my lungs were under developed. They thought I was going to die, but I pulled through. 

I think that's when he first started to suspect that the gamble wasn't going to pay off. He didn't mess with my sister's DNA for our mom's next pregnancy. She was born normal. We were kids when she got pregnant with Natsuo, and I was a good student and I was athletic. I don't know if he was holding out hope, or if he was waiting for the technology to get further along, but he didn't meddle. He started me in simulators when I was six." 

"That's--" 

"Illegal, yeah, everything he was doing was illegal, including beating his wife, but no one was going to tell him to stop. Least of all me. I loved the sims once I stopped puking my brains out. I wanted to see the stars. He told me that someday I would be the face of the planet, and I already thought he hung the moon. I couldn't fathom that what he was doing or telling me was wrong. You knew your dad was a piece of shit early, I didn't figure it out until I went in to see the doctor for a cold, and he found out that I had a weakened immune system. They'd tried really hard to make me perfect, and my body took even the slightest amount of stress to be a sign that there was something wrong with me. I had a brand new autoimmune disease they'd made by accident.

"They didn't think that it was going to kill me, but I also couldn't do the things that I used to. Which stressed me out even more. I lost pigmentation in my hair. When things were particularly bad, my skin would feel paper thin and bleed or bruise badly if I so much as slept wrong. And I was just getting worse when my father started pulling away further and further. When he announced my mother was pregnant again I was furious. He was replacing me. I knew he was. I was more than certain of it when my brother was born because he had hair, half red, and half white. They'd figured out what was wrong with me, and they'd fixed it in vitro. They didn't bother with me because I was deemed to not be worth the effort or risk.  Giving a baby prenatal treatments is easy, but bringing in a child for an experimental gene therapy means that people will take notice. 

"They didn't fix me because they were scared someone might look too hard at my condition and figure out what they did. I was so angry. I could be everything I was supposed to be if I could have the treatments, but they wouldn't do it. I kept begging my father to make me better, and he kept ignoring me. He didn't want me better, he wanted me to fade into the background because he had his new perfect face of the future. So when my school brought us on a tour of the facilities, and showed the simulator room, I went to the shuttle room instead. They were also simulators, but the point of these was to make sure that the engines could actually take the things that the pilots might try during maneuvers. I went in, knowing that a crash, with my weakened body, would damage my skin badly enough I would have to go to the hospital to be sure I didn't have internal bleeding, and either doctors would start asking more questions and my father would have to out my sickness to the whole world, or he would have to make it go away. He always wanted to sweep things under the rug. I knew he would fix me if I did this. 

"But the engine wasn't calibrated correctly for the experimental fuel that was being used. I figured it out," Dabi can't help the laugh that comes out of him, his nails biting into the seam between his graft and his palm. "I realized that the crash would take out half of the building if I didn't open the thermal vents. It would flood the cockpit, but it would cut the explosion in half. At least as a stupid martyr I would be a face of the Endeavor Corporation's future." He makes himself take a breath. "They did fix me, while I was in the coma. Not because they wanted to, but because they had to to make the cybernetics connect with my nerves. If I rejected them, people would know there was something else wrong because no one has cybernetic rejection anymore. I woke up, and I was better. But I was ugly. I was a black spot on the Endeavor Corporation's record, and my father made it apparent that he would keep up appearances, but that I was not his son in any way that mattered and that I would never touch his legacy again. So have you and Spinner ever hooked up?" 

There's a long pause, and Dabi tries desperately to breathe and slow the sound of his blood pounding in his ears. Tomura moves the probe to his leg. "No, why?" 

"You guys were roommates for years, he waited for you to apply for an assignment, he looks at you like you hung the moon and stars. And I told you about my hookups with coworkers last time." 

"I haven't ever hooked up with a coworker." Tomura tells him. "Spinner is my best friend, but that's all he'll ever be. I know he's not into the same things that I am, and I... don't know if I would want to start a relationship with someone that... would treat me differently if I opened up to them." 

Dabi doesn't ask if Shigaraki is going to treat him differently now that he's spilled his guts all over his table. When he has to roll over, Tomura asks, "Have you and Magne finished brewing your first batch of mead?" 

"Almost. It should be ready to drink next month." 

"Save us a bottle, captain's orders. I think we deserve it." 

"Okay," He wonders what the readout on his tablet says, because Dabi's whole chest feels unfamiliarly warm. 

///

Telling someone else what happened, why it happened, not just playing up the idea that he was such a hot-shot kid that he wanted to do a simulation well past his years, it makes everything feel different. He kind of resents that. He wanted to tell Tomura and have it not do anything for him. He wanted it to just be something he said and there to be no catharsis in it because if there was, then that would mean that he was denying himself that catharsis for years to keep his pride, to hide from the fact he was broken long before he got burned. But to his credit, he doesn't think that telling anyone else would feel the way this does. Because the only person he knows who has a shittier relationship to his past and father than him is Shigaraki. Because he's the only person he thinks he could tell this shit to and not have him try to make excuses or justifications. He will just keep on like Dabi is the same person he knows, will not try to psychoanalyze him for it, won't try to advise him to make peace with it all. He... just lets Dabi exist, and he didn't know how badly he needed that. 

He's working in the lab again when Shigaraki comes in, "Hey, cap, what's up?" Because he wouldn't come find him for nothing, especially not when Dabi is actually elbow deep in double-checking reports that one of the other surveying crews sent out, not when they are already going to be seeing each other later for his checkup. 

"Hey, it's been six months." 

"Sure has? You getting stir-crazy this soon?"

"No," but there is a touch of amusement in his voice. "Six months since we started changing your sensitivity. Which means you need a full diagnostic work-up and I need to do an inspection of your seams along each portion of your grafts tonight." 

"Oh, okay. Mead's ready too. You want me to bring a bottle so we can get plastered after you feel me up for half an hour?" They normally aren't both off shift after their session, but Spinner needed a day sitting in the showers to get his shed to finish coming off and they'd shuffled around the schedule so he wouldn't be running around the ship itchy and uncomfortable for the day. 

"I'm giving you an examination, not feeling you up. I have glasses in my room already." He turns back to the door, and when Dabi doesn't stop him, just snorting with his own amusement, he heads out. 

Magne is going to kill him for taking a bottle and breaking their tradition of tasting it first, but he is absolutely going to do it. 

///

Dabi heads to Tomura's room after they've both finished their shift, after they had dinner with the rest of the crew, and after he's gone and taken a shower. If he's going to have his grafts all inspected at their connection points he wants to make sure that his skin is totally clean of any oil or dirt that might have gotten on him throughout the day. He finds himself looking in the mirror, his fingers straying up to his hair, looking at the roots, and it takes him a second to realize that he isn't looking at the grafts on his face. That he barely noticed them. That he is looking in the mirror without the flesh skin wanting to crawl off his body. He's a little distracted over that when he gets the mead and actually makes his way to the captain's quarters. 

He barely has to knock before the door is opening, and Shigaraki opens it, his hair tied back in a pony, though his fringe is still loose around his face, the thermal shirt of his suit on, exposed because he has his suit tied around his waist. Dabi tries not to let his eyes stray or linger. Everyone on their ship is in peak physical condition, they have to be to be able to survive out here, but he didn't expect Shigaraki to be cut under the loose long-sleeved shirts or his bulky suit. He is though, the short-sleeved thermal shirt clings to his shoulders, around his biceps, pecks, the shadow of his abs as he lets him in the room. He tries very hard to ignore that because he doesn't need to be thinking about it as he passes off the bottle so he can take off his clothes. 

"Who's turn is it?" He asks as he strips away his t-shirt and pajama bottoms as Tomura puts the mead with the two glasses on the windowsill near the desk. 

"I don't remember, you can go first if you want." He says easily. 

"What do you do during your downtime that isn't gaming?" He asks as he climbs up on the table, but doesn't lay down immediately as Tomura pulls on a set of nylon gloves that they normally don't bother with, but normally he doesn't really have to touch him during these check-ins. 

"I study mostly. I want to know more languages so that if I'm ever in a situation where I can't rely on a translator, I will still be able to survive. So I'm sure you're used to this, I'll be going over every seam along the metal and making sure they're still flush and then going around the graft-to-skin seams to ensure there's no nerve or tissue degeneration. If anything makes you uncomfortable or causes pain, let me know so we can figure out what's going on." 

"Got it." 

"I'm going to start with your face and work my way down. Go ahead and lay back, and when we're done you can roll over." 

"Going to give me a back massage while you're at it?" 

"No, but it's definitely going to feel differently than it has in the past." 

"I hope so, otherwise that was a lot of work for nothing." Dabi says pointedly. 

Tomura's mouth twitches up just a bit into a smile. "I'd ask my question, but I need you to shut up for a few minutes."

"I'll give you another and you can ask me two in a row when you're not groping my jaw."

"Sounds fair." 

"You logged your hair as a personal item, what else did you pack?" When he is finished speaking, Shigaraki brings his hands to Dabi's face. He starts under his eyes, thumbs running gently beneath the seams. That skin has always been more exposed than anything else, and while he can feel the warmth of his flesh thumb, the cool metal of his own prosthetic is kind of a surprise against his skin even through the gloves. 

Most people bring something sentimental, some extra clothes for shore leave, maybe some games, things like that. Magne brings her hair dye, clothes, honey, and the bottles they need to distill whatever fruits they find. Jin brings a bunch of candy to keep his mouth busy when he isn't able to smoke. Atsuhiro brings real cards, poker chips, and suits so that he can look put together and important when they're out and about. Shigaraki definitely brought some clothes with him, but he has been in his room a lot and hasn't seen anything else. 

"I brought some clothes," he says, moving from his eyes to making him turn his head so he can comb his hair back away from the seam around Dabi's left ear first. Having his fingers running along the shell of his ear has a little bit of a shiver going through him. He hasn't had sensation there in a long, long time. But it doesn't hurt. It's just... different. "Spinner and I both wanted to bring different games. The tablets have a lot of emulators, but we both got really into restoring old consoles while we were in the program, so we each brought one and as many of the physical games as we could. To the right antique collector, we probably have about thirty-thousand credits worth of old tech on this ship." 

" Thirty-- " 

Tomura flicks his ear before he turns his head to check the other. "No talking until I'm past your throat." Dabi shuts his mouth with a huff, and lets him check his other ear. "We bought as many of the broken ones as we could find and cobbled together two working systems for about eight-thousand over the course of our training and the sabbatical after graduation. Old tech like that is valuable for collectors and off-world museums that want to showcase the earlier iterations of human technology. We just wanted to play the original Mario Kart using actual controllers. But that wasn't much as far as weight goes. I packed mostly things that I remember being traded for on other planets, certain types of metal and glass, even some types of rock and dirt, seed packets, little things like fidget toys and the like. Earth things are boring to us because they're just things from where we're from, but to the right people on different planets, those things are exciting, and people like to trade for them. The toys are especially good to give as gifts for first-contact or to open negotiations. It's not anything super valuable, but it's a show of good will and a lot of species appreciate thought being given to their children. I know that as a surveying crew, we shouldn't be intentionally making first-contact with too many other species, but anything to aid in diplomacy is always good to have." Shigaraki's hands move from his ear to along his cheeks, thumbs dragging inwards along the seam to the edge of Dabi's lips. Then he just uses his flesh finger to gently tug his lower lip down. Dabi opens his mouth for him, knowing he has to check the seam on the inside as well, but feeling his face get a little warmer as he has the other leaning over him with his mouth open like this. 

"And even though we're not supposed to trade things at ports, there aren't explicit rules against it during our leave as long as we declare whatever we find, and we don't try to smuggle anything we're not supposed to have when we come back to Earth. I want to see what we can find. Satisfy my own curiosity about what things are so important for other species to get from us." 

Dabi wonders if he just wants to find people who trade for human things because they might be the same kind to trade humans , but if Shigaraki wants to find the people who kept him from home for so long, that's his prerogative. He's a little distracted anyway as he leaves his mouth alone and instead runs his fingers under his jaw and down either side of his neck, one finger spread so that he can also trace the seam in the metal down the center of his throat. The feeling of that has his breath catching in the back of his throat. Shigaraki isn't squeezing or anything, but just having his hands settled so heavily around that falsely delicate skin is making it a little harder to focus for some reason. 

But his hands aren't on his face anymore, and Dabi does his best to sound normal when he says, "You brought seed bags and didn't share them with me? What kind of captain are you?" 

"I didn't bring anything that you don't already have in your garden." His lips quirk up into a small smile. "Your seams seem very healthy so far. How is the sensitivity?" 

"Fine, it's different. It used to just be pressure and temperature, but I can feel the gloves now. I can tell the difference between your hands." 

"Without pain?" 

"Are you trying to hurt me?" 

Tomura's eyes are warm with his smile. "No, you didn't ask for that. But if it's hurting anyway, then we have a problem." 

"Nothing hurts, cap. It's just different." 

"Good." He moves to his left side and brings his hands along his shoulder, down the length of his arm, catching his wrist and stretching his arm out, having him bend it as his fingers slide over his grafts. It doesn't hurt. He'd joked about a massage, but having someone touch his grafts like this, even though he's had these exams many times before, is very different than it usually is. It feels... nice. "You used up all your weight limit for your skins, what are you going to get instead once you get your grafts painted?" 

Dabi doesn't think that should be a challenging question, but it takes him completely off-guard. He never let himself have anything else because he never thought that would be an option. "Huh, I don't know. Maybe some hair dye if I can find it?" This is one of the closest ports to Earth that they'll be at, it has a decently sized human settlement, hair dye of some kind shouldn't be hard to find. "Maybe some clothes too." He only has his standard issue suits, thermals, and pajamas. It would be nice to have a couple of pieces of clothing that he could wear off-ship that don't scream exactly who he is and where he works for the rest of the trip. "If I can find a nursery and some cookbooks, I would love to have some alien spices and plants to use to help add some more variety to our rations." Bigger ships, diplomatic ships, military ships, interplanetary ships, have entire decks dedicated to farming fresh food, and synthesizers in kitchens that can print anything else. Surveying crews don't get those same luxuries because they're only out for five years instead of one or two decades, if they have the crew depart the ship for anything other than maintenance at all. But so long as their food passes the standards set by the scanners, they can supplement their diets. That's why Magne has been able to brew alcohol on the ship, so long as they aren't indulging when they're on duty and it's properly stored so that they don't cause a fire or explosion or something on accident. 

"You're a good cook. Where did you learn?" He moves to the other arm. 

"My mom. After I got sick, she knew that I was getting worse because I wasn't being given anything to do. So she gave me more responsibilities around the house to help me feel useful. I liked cooking best because no matter what else, my father had to eat. He had to acknowledge that I was doing something that was worth doing, even though I was broken. Can you cook?" 

"Not at all." Tomura tells him, his hands moving over his grafts, up over his shoulder again so he can inspect the one running over his collarbone. "I didn't get a chance when I was young, then I wasn't in the position to cook for myself for a long time even after my return, I went directly into to program where all of our meals were provided, and spent the past few years afterwards ordering in with Spinner at all hours of the day. I think that if I was expected to try and cook something fresh, I might destroy the ship or poison us all." 

"I could teach you the basics, if you want." 

Tomura's hands pause on his body. "Really?" 

"Yeah, if you want to. You don't have to." 

"I appreciate that, I would love to." Dabi gasps softly as Tomura moves his hands along the seam, pressing between the metal and skin and making a warmth stir beneath his skin, his nipples pebbling from the sensation. "Did that hurt?" 

"No, just... more intense than it usually is. I'll tell you if something hurts." 

"You can tell me if you need a break too, Dabi." He tells him gently. "We can take this at whatever pace you want." 

Dabi tries to ignore the way that puts a thin warmth in his gut. "I want to get finished so I can find out how much less tact you have when you're drunk. Keep going." This is just the first part of the exam. Shigaraki will still need to test his reflexes using the electric probe, giving him little shocks to make sure the muscles beneath the skin all still respond the way that they're supposed to. 

Tomura takes him at his word and moves his hands down over his stomach, tracing his seam there, and not commenting on how the muscles in his stomach quiver slightly because that is so much more sensitive than it has been before. Because each touch is becoming more and more distracting and unfamiliar as his words dry up in his throat. When his hands move to his thighs, Dabi thinks he forgets to breathe. He curls his damaged hand around the back of Dabi's knee, making him lift and spread his leg a little more so that his flesh hand can move around the seam cutting high around his thigh. his fingers wrap around, stroking and prodding, looking for any swelling, and soreness, any slight variation in temperature that could be the starting signs of infection. Dabi doesn't think that he's going to find anything, but as his fingers circle his flesh and his body grows warmer, a soft blue light starts to spill out across their bodies.  

"Shit-- what--" Dabi doesn't get a chance to finish asking his question, because Tomura's fingers are tightening around his thigh and he can't help the soft whimper that comes out of him at the feeling of the other touching him like this as his whole body goes a little warmer. 

"Does it really feel that good when I'm touching you, Dabi?" They've talked about a lot of things during these sessions, but he's never heard Tomura's voice go low and hot like that. Never had his eyes on him like he wants to devour him. And even then, it takes seeing the other man is leaning in to kiss him for Dabi to realize that his lights are on because he's getting turned on . That his body is so unused to feeling arousal that isn't dulled by the grafts over so much of his body, that it thought it was cause for concern. Tomura hesitates with his mouth a hair's breadth from his own, and Dabi forgets how to breathe. But when he hesitates, the other starts to pull away, the heat that was in his eyes starting to douse and regret flooding in instead. Dabi doesn't want that. Doesn't want to chase away the heat that's building under his skin. 

His hand reaches up and carefully catches the end of Tomura's long hair. He didn't like his subs touching him. Dabi doesn't know if he's allowed. He barely understands what a sub is. He just knows that he wants whatever he can get. Tomura's eyes soften a little and he leans back in. Dabi doesn't hesitate to close the last bit of space between their lips now. He surrenders himself to what the other wants, so long as it keeps feeling as good as his hands on his skin, as good as his scarred lips opening his so that his tongue can lick behind his teeth. Kisses before only felt alright, they were dull and he was always worried that the metal of his lower lip would bruise or cause discomfort for his partner. But Tomura kisses him like his mouth is all the same soft give of flesh as his own, tastes him like he never wants to stop. Dabi whines softly when he pulls back so they can breathe and he hears metal moving in the tool kit as Tomura reaches inside and pulls out one of the other probes. 

"Let me show you how good you can feel now?" 

"Okay," he sounds as breathless as he feels, and Tomura gives him another soft peck before he flicks on the electric probe. Dabi can hear the soft hum of it as it starts to buzz with energy. Tomura brings it to the outside of his calf first, hesitating for a second as he waits to see if Dabi changes his mind, but he doesn't. And so the metal touches his graft. Before, during examinations like this one, Dabi just felt little twitches and tightness in his muscles as they were made to dance beneath the skin. 

When the probe connects this time, he feels the spark race over his grafts and seep into his muscles, making them tighten, but also making the nerves connected to the graft buzz and hum with sensation. His indicator lights are already maxed out at their brightness and he's not doing anything to get rid of the stimulation, so the heat generated by them needs to be vented. Dabi hasn't ever had the vents between his seams open up to let out a thin stream of warm air that kind of smells like blood before, but he's only making it worse because that embarrasses him further, which only makes him hotter. 

Tomura drags the wand along his calf, up over his knee, and starts it along his outer thigh. He doesn't know if he heightens the intensity of it, or if it's just because this is closer to where the graft meets the skin, but the sparks dancing along his nerves get all the more intense and he can feel himself starting to harden. There's no hiding that in his thin underwear, but Tomura doesn't do anything but look down at him like he's starving for his body. It's different from how Shun looked at him. He was fascinated with his fake skin. Dabi didn't even feel like himself half of the time that they were in bed together. Different from Atsuhiro who was kind, but didn't have the passion that Dabi imagined when having sex. Different from Magne who had the passion but wanted him to take the lead. Tomura doesn't even give him the option. He makes Dabi's body bend to his will. He runs the electric probe along the seam of his flesh and graft, moving it from the outside of his thigh to the inside, and flicking his thumb across the bottom of it to make the pulses of electricity more intense. So close to his groin, the sensation of the pins and needles, of the muscles spasming beneath his skin, has him tangling one hand tighter in the sheet over the table and the other in Tomura's hair as he arches off of the table, a loud cry tearing out of his throat. 

"Fuck," Tomura's voice is thick with his own arousal. "You have to talk to me, baby boy," Dabi whines just from hearing him call him that. He's older than Shigaraki. He isn't-- "I need to know if you want to stop." 

"No!" The protest is high and whiny and he sounds like he might throw a fit if the other tries. He doesn't want the pleasure that is screeching across his nerves to be taken away. Every pulse of electricity under his skin is waking nerves he didn't know could feel like this. He thought that he was getting used to feeling how sensitive his nerves could be now that he isn't at the level of barely functioning, but this is different. This is better than any other time someone has ever touched him, and Tomura has barely started to touch him. "Don't stop, please, Tomura--" 

His desperation earns him another kiss. it earns that probe moving over to his other thigh and giving the seam there the same treatment. He does his best to kiss back, but he finds himself panting hard against his mouth as the electricity dances through his body. But those sensations pull away as Tomura takes the probe from his skin. 

"No, Tomura," he whines, tangling his fingers on his sleeve and trying to pull him back. It earns him a kiss, that he turns away from petulantly, his cock aching even though they've barely started, and the other breathes a soft laugh before kissing his cheek, and then licking along the seam cutting across his cheek. Dabi gets distracted because he can feel how wet and warm his tongue is, can feel the tip tracing the line and making him squirm because no one has ever wanted their mouth on his seams before. But it feels good . 

"I'm going to keep going, sweetheart. I want to make you feel good, but I could burn you without lube, precious." 

Dabi's head feels like it's a million miles away from his body, but he manages, "Have you done this before?" 

"Not with a partner," he says shamelessly, reaching into the tool kit and getting out the tube of conductive lube that he's had used around his seams before. "But I had the tools and curiosity. Want to see what I learned, firefly?" 

He nods immediately, but after a second asks, "'Firefly'?" 

Tomura hums in the back of his throat, setting the probe aside so that he can squeeze some of the lube into his hand and then start to smear it along Dabi's skin, tracing along his collarbone and over his chest, thumb rubbing over one of his nipples, and then down along the graft that stretches across his stomach. When his hand moves even lower, to the v above his groin, Dabi barely manages not to whine. He's so hard that he's straining his boxer briefs, but Tomura's hand doesn't go to where he wants. He tries rolling his hips up, tries to show how desperately he needs more. But he doesn't get what he wants. He only gets lips on his neck instead. "You're so pretty all lit up for me." His indicator lights can't turn off when his body is in such a state and Dabi trembles as he feels the gentle scrape of Tomura's teeth on his neck, how his lips close over that spot and sucks at his graft. He can't leave a hickey but it doesn't matter because just the trying feels so good . 

He reaches for the wand again and Dabi's breath catches in anticipation. He doesn't bring it back to his thigh, he stands over him, eyes hot, and brings it underneath his chin. The first pulse as he turns it back on has Dabi nearly choking on his tongue as he feels his throat tighten and tremble as the muscles contract in it. But he changes the settings and in the next second he's taking a long rattling breath as the sensation changes to the aching pleasure of the tingling pulses instead. He brings the probe to where his mouth just was and Dabi all but thrashes, one hand catching Tomura's wrist because he has to hold onto something to try and keep him grounded. But he is having such a hard time withstanding the sensation as Tomura makes it spread through him, moving down from his neck to the seam on his chest. He overlaps the tip of the probe over the metal and skin and lets him feel the way that electricity spreads. On his flesh, it sinks in deeper, creating a throb in the immediate area as the muscles tighten. But over the grafts, it disperses more widely, spreading that pins and needles sensation and giving his muscles beneath sharp little twitches and aches that he doesn't know should feel so good. He's never thought that the probes felt good before. He's not even sure if he's not actually in pain as this is all happening. He just knows that even if it does hurt, he doesn't want it to stop. 

Tomura brings the probe along the path of the lube, catching it and keeping his skin from burning so that he doesn't have to stop what he's doing. He brings the probe to his nipple and circles it around the skin, sending more of the pins and needles through him, more of that ache, and Dabi can't stop the sounds that are tearing from his lips. He can't help that his body is twitching against the table like he's being really, properly electrocuted, as pleasure courses through his body. He fumbles with his other hand, needing to touch himself, needing some kind of relief because if he can't get that then he might die. As is, his vents let out a puff of steam again as he can't sweat across most of his body. 

"Oh, precious, you can't be patient?" He shakes the grip Dabi has on his wrist so that he can stop him from getting his hand around his cock, and Dabi gives a broken whine. 

"Tomura, Tomura--" 

"I know, baby boy. It's a lot, isn't it?" Tomura circles his nipple one more time before he brings the probe to the graft over his stomach and Dabi's muscles contract so sharply beneath it that he's worried that he might lose control right then. "I want to give you more. Can you be a good boy and be patient for that?"

Dabi doesn't know if he's going to be able to wait for anything , but he wants to be good for Tomura. He always tried to be good for his partners and he always failed because he didn't know how to do that without showing how inexperienced he really was. But Tomura already knows everything about him. He knows him better than the people he already spent five years with. "Wanna be good," he whines when he runs the wand along the seam lower, closer to his crotch, and Dabi doesn't know if he's going to be able to when the muscles there are being forced to contract the way they usually only do when he's about to orgasm. He doesn't think he's going to be able to hold on. "Tomura, I-- it's too much," he's so hard that he can feel his pre soaking through his underwear. 

"Do you want help being good for me? Or do you want to stop?" 

"I want to be good, please," he realizes distantly, "I want to make you feel good." He tried with the others to make sure that they liked what was happening. He put in the effort to make sure they were getting off as much as he was, better than he was when half of their touches fell on sections of his body that didn't feel like anything. Even less than that with the silicone skin in place. 

"Okay, baby boy, I'm going to help you. You're being so good just telling me what you want. That's all you need to do, baby. I'll take care of everything else." Control. He wants to be in control, wants to decide how to let himself feel good, and Dabi just wants to feel everything that he can give him. He lets his hands fall back to the table, up by his head, and does his best to relax. "Perfect, now lift your hips for me. I want to see your pretty cock too." 

Dabi doesn't have to worry about a blush giving him away, the heat venting from his seams and the bright glow of his indicator lights bouncing around the room and off of Tomura's features, is more than enough to tell him how embarrassed, how aroused, he is as he lifts his hips. Tomura hooks a few fingers in his waistband and eases them over his hips and down his legs enough for Dabi to kick them off, not caring about where they land, just feeling the good chill of the air against his overheated skin, and waiting to see if there is even a flicker of doubt in his eyes as he takes in his body from head to toes. He has seen almost all of him already, more of him than any of his other partners. Dabi doesn't know if it's possible to have a dick so repulsive that it would outweigh how awful the rest of him is, but it doesn't actually matter because the heat never wavers. Tomura licks his fucking lips when he sees his cock is hard, flushed, and dripping, curving immediately up against his stomach as he tries to be patient and not beg for his touch. 

"Gorgeous, firefly. And so excited, no wonder you're having such a hard time being patient. It all feels brand new, doesn't it?" 

He barely manages a nod, and Tomura smiles at him. It might have even been a sweet smile if he didn't look like he was going to eat Dabi alive. He grabs the lube again, and lets it dribble over his length, not smearing it along him right away, just letting the sharp chill of it slither over his skin and down his balls teasingly. He whimpers softly, his cock twitching in response, another drop of pre beading at his head. He expects a hand around his cock, he expects to be stroked, to be teased. He doesn't expect Tomura to bring the probe along his length again, waiting for a second and holding Dabi's gaze as he sees if he's going to protest. But everything else has felt so good. His heart hammers behind his ribs, he's not sure if he can take this, if this is even something they should be doing, but Tomura said he's done it before. He hasn't lied to him yet. Dabi holds onto the sheet and gives another weak nod. 

The pulse of the electricity along his length is blinding. Dabi sees stars bursting behind his eyes and he cries out so loudly that he'll be lucky if the entire ship doesn't hear him. Tomura curls a hand around his hip and holds him in place, not letting him trash away as his legs try to close involuntarily, his thighs pressing together, but not protecting him from the electric probe as it moves around his head and along the underside of his cock, he's just hearing the wet squish of the lube against his skin instead. Every breath feels like it's barely reaching his lungs and he doesn't know how Tomura expects him to be able to use this to make him be patient for the height of pleasure that he is telling him to hold out for. He wants all of that pleasure right now, and it feels like he's going to get it as the strange tightening, pricks, and aches that are going along his cock make it feel like he has a hand stroking him from underneath his skin. 

"Tomura, Tomura, Tomura!" He can't find anything else. He's babbling, he can't even keep his eyes open. There's a pressure building behind his eyes that tells him he’s close to tears from how intense the sensation is. 

"Shh, I promised I'd help, firefly. Just take a breath and I'll make it better soon." It's so, so hard to make himself breathe around the moans that are coming out of him. Tomura drags the probe all the way down to his root and Dabi can't breathe at all. Not when he follows the slick beads of lube to his balls--

He changes the intensity of the shocks, and the slow, deep thrum of it radiates through his sack and forces them to contract, drawing in closer to his body as he spills his cum all over his stomach in a thick stream that comes without the force of an orgasm. He's just leaking all of his cum out across his skin, the tension in his cock lessening, but not giving him an orgasm or walking him back from the edge of it. He whimpers as he sees his mess spread over his skin as his cock stays just as hard as it was before. 

"Ah, hah, ah," The little gut-punched sounds are still in his throat as Tomura makes sure the wand has plenty of the lube on it before he catches one of Dabi's thighs and holds his legs open wide again as all of his muscles feel absolutely useless. Then he brings the probe back past his balls, to his hole, and starts to circle his rim. He doesn't put it inside, but it doesn't matter . Just like his cock felt like it was being stroked from the inside out, that aching pleasure-pain makes the muscles inside of his hole contract and loosen as effectively, giving him the sensation of something moving inside of him as it would if Tomura's cock or fingers were there.

"Do you still feel good, firefly?" He asks in a purr.

Dabi manages a dry sob, his tear ducts don't work right, replaced right along with his lower eyelids. He can't cry because his prosthetics only release enough of the artificial tears to keep his eyes lubricated and irritant-free. They won't give him any to actually cry with. "Good, good, Tomura, more, please, please--" he just came but he didn't orgasm. He still wants that. The need is living under his skin as his body tries to desperately give him what he needs so he can cum again properly. 

"So cute leaking like that. Now you'll be able to hold on while I make sure that you feel as good as you can. Is that alright, baby boy?" 

"Please, please, Tomura," 

"Love it when you say my name like that, firefly." Tomura half growls, using the hand on his thigh to pull . The thin sheet slips across the metal table and Dabi squeaks as he's pulled to the edge of the metal, his legs spilling even wider so that he can make room for Tomura who is between them now. Dabi's head spins, as even through the sensation of being falsely fucked by the electricity alone, he sees the tent that Tomura's cock is making in his pants. That the table is the perfect height for him to fuck him properly right here. He doesn't know if he's ever made such needy sounds, if he's ever felt so out of his depth in bed with someone else, not even during his first time. But he doesn't want to stop. He wants Tomura to feel good, he wants to be fucked by him. 

He circles his hole with the wand a few more times, letting go of his leg so that he can soak him with the thick lube. Dabi's whole body is trembling, but he doesn't hesitate to spread his legs open as wide as he can, doesn't stop himself from tilting his hips up as his arms reach back to grip the edge of the table above his head, wanting to be open and at the right angle so that he can have his cock as soon as possible. Tomura doesn't give him his fingers , doesn't give him his length, he pressed the medical probe inside of his hole, and switches the pattern of the pulses again, the frequency much lower and more sustained than the previous ones, leaving Dabi keening as he feels his muscles forced loose and relaxed like he is being stretched and prepped. He isn't even going to need that if Tomura keeps doing that. Not going to hold on for it either, even after he had his cum milked out of his balls with the current when Tomura is kissing along his thigh, licking at his seam and biting bruises into the skin just above it. 

The current, kisses, and nips don't stop for a long few minutes. Not until Dabi is crying without tears as the pleasure threatens to tear him open, and Tomura has decided to give more. And even then, he asks, "I know that it's already been a lot, sweetheart. Can you take some more? Do you want to feel my cock inside of your cute little hole?" 

He whines, managing a nod, holding onto the table tight enough he knows he's going to have lines in his palms from it. 

"You have to use your words, baby boy, or I'm going to have to stop." There's a hint of mockery in the words, made even more cruel when he grinds the probe a little deeper, only giving him an inch, but that is more than enough to have Dabi's vision bursting with stars. 

"Tomura! Please, please! Fuck me! Please, need you! Need it!" He sobs. He's not expecting that to earn him a groan as Tomura rests his forehead against his leg, not expecting how hearing that hungry sound out of the other is going to make him all the more desperate. 

"Sound even better when you beg than I thought you would." Dabi isn't given a chance to really process that. Not when he's a little too busy trying not to choke on his tongue as Tomura pulls away from him so that he can take off his shirt. Dabi knew from the steam in the air that his body was hot, but he can see the sweat starting to glisten across the other's skin as well, can see every inch of toned, solid muscle that is corded across Tomura's body and mingled with the scars that also mar every part of him. He doesn't recognize the source of all of them, but he sees some patches of burns where someone put a cigar out half a dozen times over his collarbone. He sees the rough hacking in the shape of a rectangle over his right shoulder that he knows comes from someone trying to remove a slaver's barcode. But there are other knots of the past that he lived through carved into every inch of him. 

Tomura has never seemed self-conscious, but when Dabi meets his eyes again, he sees that there is a touch of hesitation. He wonders if he's ever let himself fuck anyone else completely naked. If he's ever fucked someone with the lights on. Dabi hasn't. But he wasn't even thinking about it when they started because he just wanted him so badly. He doesn't know if Tomura wants to hear that he's still gorgeous. He doesn't care about the way that he looks the way that Dabi does. 

"Don't stop," he manages instead. "Please, want you, Tomura." 

"Never going to stop giving you what you want, Dabi," The words feel too big, too real, too honest. All of their words have felt too big since they started talking alone here. But he is able to pretend those things aren't important as Tomura steps out of his boots and unties the sleeves of his suit from around his waist. Then he tugs the zipper down the rest of the way. He's wearing the black thermals underneath too, and Dabi is kind of astounded that he hasn't melted , when his whole body is venting his heat like he's going to combust. Those come off too, and let Dabi see the outline of his cock much more clearly in the dark red boxer briefs that he's wearing beneath. He would make a joke about his favorite color if he weren't about to choke on his tongue as he sees the shadow of how big he actually is. Dabi hadn't given cock size much of a thought when he hooked up with anyone else, but holy shit . Tomura is bigger than him, and thicker too, and just as achingly hard as he is. His head is plumy and dripping with his arousal and that takes his breath away, wanting nothing more than to get to the part where they're both lost in their pleasure. 

He whimpers and spreads his legs a little more. He doesn't know if the electricity opened him up enough, but he hopes it did, because he doesn't want to wait for anything else. He doesn't even know if the trick he pulled before to bring him relief without bringing him off will be enough to stall his orgasm for much longer. Not when he wants more so badly that he feels like he might die without it. Thankfully, Tomura doesn't tease him anymore. He gives another generous squirt of the lube and strokes his length, letting Dabi hear the sound of it smearing over his skin before he's moving in closer, bracing one hand against the table so that he can lean in. Dabi meets him readily, moaning as their lips meet again, mouths open and hungry. 

Tomura slicks his cock, and uses the lube still coating his hand to re-wet his hole, letting it spill out of his palm and inside of him, the coolness of that making Dabi shiver and gasp against his lips. But then that slick hand is around the back of his thigh, lifting him a little higher, shifting his hips a little more. Just enough so that Dabi can feel his cock nudging against his hole. Definitely bigger than anything else. Definitely intimidating. Definitely going to die if he doesn't have him inside right now . 

"Please, Tomura, want you to fuck me." He begs against his mouth. 

 "Give you anything you want, Dabi." 

And Dabi believes him even before he starts to press inside. 

The ache of his walls stretching for him is different from the ache of the electricity that he's been teasing him with. Organic, warm , solid. It's all so good and Dabi holds tighter on the table to keep from grabbing onto Tomura. But he doesn't have to hold him in place. Tomura stays right where he is, gives him everything that he can, feeding his cock inch-by-inch into Dabi's eager body until there are supernovas going off behind his eyes. He's shaking badly by the time he's bottomed out, still sobbing without tears, his unrestrained thigh tight around Tomura's hip to keep him as deep as possible because if he starts to move right now, Dabi is going to last a humiliatingly short amount of time. But even though he must feel good, god Dabi hopes he feels good, even though Tomura has already been patient, he doesn't rush him. He presses kisses against his eyelids, across his cheeks, down his throat. The hand around his thigh rubs soothing, sweet circles over his seam.

"Too much, firefly?" More than it's ever felt like he's been given before. But Dabi shakes his head. 

"Is this what sex is supposed to feel like?" He manages weakly. 

Tomura laughs, and the sound is strained with his own arousal, but it's warm , not cruel. "I hope so." He noses against his cheek, letting Dabi feel the curve of his smile against his skin. "Is it good?" 

Dabi manages another nod, his fingers flexing on the edge of the table. 

"Are you ready for more?" 

"Please," he doesn't know if he's going to last, but he wants to find out. Wants every inch of the pleasure that Tomura is offering him. He wants every inch of-- of whatever Tomura offers him. He twists his face, and is immediately given the kiss he was after, sweet and hot, and perfect, Tomura sharing breaths with him when he murmurs. 

"You can hold onto me if you need to, baby boy." Like he could see how much he wanted it, and how scared he was to cross a line. Tomura rolls his hips, grinding his cock along his walls that spasm and tighten, lighting up with pure, sharp pleasure that is such a different flavor from the pain-tinged electricity of before that he is seeing stars again as he immediately wraps a hand around Tomura's shoulders, nails biting into his skin to hold onto him. When the other draws his hips back and gives his first thrust, Dabi's other hand is curling up his back, holding on hard enough he's either going to have scratches or bruises and he can't even bring himself to care. 

Tomura starts to move in earnest then. He rolls his hips into Dabi's, finding the pace, the depth, the angle to have his insides lighting up and his cock aching for his release. Every movement has him letting out a loud moan or gasping for breath. The air between them is sweltering as his grafts try to vent the heat, but wherever they're pressed together, he hears Tomura's sweat sizzling as it drips onto the metal from how inefficiently he's able to cool himself and how much he's heating up his partner's skin in turn. But it doesn't stop Dabi from demanding more. He doesn't know if he's allowed himself to be so greedy since he came out of his coma. But he wants, and he won't deny himself that right now. 

"Touch me, please, please, Tomura," the words are so hard to get out because he can still barely breathe around the moans spilling past his lips. He doesn't get a chance to try to speak again though, because Tomura kisses him again, his teeth nipping uselessly at his lower lip, but not seeming to mind, just savoring on how much louder Dabi moans when he does it. He's distracted by his kisses, by how good it feels as he makes sure that his head is grinding over his prostate every time he pushes back into his body, and he thinks for a second that maybe he doesn't need a touch against his cock to bring him the rest of the way over the edge. 

And then his whole body tenses as he doesn't get a hand against his aching dick. He gets the wand. He whimpers softly, scared that he's going to steal away the pleasure of his orgasm again, but Tomura shushes him and presses a sweet kiss against his temple. "It's okay, precious, I'm going to make you feel good. That's all you want, isn't it? Just want me to help you feel so good. Let me help you, baby boy." 

Dabi's head feels hazy and he wonders if he's actually boiling his brain in his skull from how badly he wants this, from how good everything is feeling without relief. He barely manages a nod and the wand turns back on. It's sharp, short pulses unlike the ones he was giving him before. Pulses that Tomura's thrust match the pace of, that make if feel like he's being jerked at the same perfect rhythm as he's being fucked. Stars dance behind his eyes and he can't hold himself together, just tries to hold onto Tomura harder instead and he moans and moans. He can't take this, can't even gasp a warning. But after just a few seconds, after just letting the other rub around his head with the toy twice, Dabi's body gives out. 

His orgasm hits him so hard, so thoroughly, that Dabi's vision goes black through it. He arches into Tomura's body, clinging onto him, his hole going as tight as it can, like holding him inside will make the pleasure even bigger. He doesn't know if he can do pleasure any bigger because the wonderful sensation across his whole body suddenly goes dark in so many places. His orgasm ripples pleasure, but there are suddenly voids of sensation as he blinks and realizes that it's darker in the room than it was a second ago too. But Tomura is still moving in him, still kissing his throat, but he can't feel it anymore. Dabi doesn't care. If he just burned out his nerves on one perfect orgasm, then it will have all been worth it. If he can make Tomura feel as good as he just did, then that's more than enough. 

"Fuck, fuck , you're so beautiful, firefly." It doesn't take long for his thrusts to grow sharper, each one sending a fresh ripple of his pleasure through his body that has Dabi trembling and gasping on the table even with so much of his nerves refusing to relay those sensations. He can definitely feel it when Tomura sinks in deep the last time and spills his cum so deep and so copious that he feels drenched in a way he's never allowed himself before. Too worried about someone suggesting they clean up together which would make him take off the silicone skin. But he likes the way it feels to be full of the evidence that his body was just as capable of wringing pleasure from Tomura's body as his body was for him. 

His indicator lights may be dark, but the lights in the room are still on. Dabi is still holding onto him, and Tomura's eyes are still warm when he leans in and gives him another kiss. But his mouth doesn't feel like it did before, and as the echoes of his bliss slip further and further away, he starts to feel a pit in his gut. He just started to be able to feel again. Is that really gone now?

"I can't feel my grafts." He barely manages to say. Tomura's hand, the one not covered in lube, reaches to stroke his knuckles just above the seam on his cheek. 

"It's alright, firefly. It will come back in a few minutes. I think we overloaded them. It happens when there's too much going on for your circuits to process. Is everything else okay?" And there is a flicker of hesitation in him now. 

Is it? He slept with Atsuhiro too, but this feels different . Tomura's not just his captain, not just his... friend. He's something else. He's been something else for a long while now. Dabi just doesn't know what that is, doesn't know how to sleep with him when they didn't figure that out before. "... Yeah." He lies because he doesn't know how to be honest with whatever is happening in his chest. 

Tomura's hand stills on his cheek, and then he shifts to pull out of Dabi's body. He can't help gasping softly as he's made so much emptier, his seed spilling out onto the sheet too. Tomura uses that to clean off his soiled hands and wipes away most of the cum and lube from Dabi's skin, but he doesn't move from between his legs. Dabi has just about gotten enough sense back to take his arms from around his neck when Tomura tells him, "Legs around my waist, and hold on tight, firefly." He barely is able to comply before Tomura has a hand at the small of his back and the other around his thigh. Then he lifts him. 

Dabi lets out a humiliatingly indignant squeak before Tomura is carrying him across the room. He looked strong, but this is kind of beyond what Dabi was expecting. He's heavy , heavier than someone his size should be because he's covered in metal . But Tomura doesn't blink, doesn't flinch, he carries him over to the bed, and sets him down and then climbs right in with him. He leans in and presses a kiss to his forehead, against his eyes, the tip of his nose, his cheeks. His lips. 

"I thought we had a quid pro quo, Clarice. Since when do you not trust me enough to tell me the truth?" He sees a flicker of something cross through Tomura's eyes as he searches his face, and then the warmth that was there starts to fade as his brows pull together a little more. His hand pulls away from his face and Dabi sees tension starting to coil through his muscles. Doubt. Worry. 

Dabi hesitantly reaches up and threads his fingers together with Tomura's, his thumb running over his prosthetic one. "How honest should I be when you just fucked me so good that you blew my circuits?" 

"Honest enough to tell me if you want to do it again?" He squeezes his fingers back. "Because that's what I want, firefly." 

Dabi really, really hopes he's not delusional when he thinks that Tomura doesn't just want him in his bed again. 

///

Tomura wants him. He just wants him. All the time. For sex, for conversation, for the two of them curled up in his bunk as they both discover the other has nightmares that rival their own. And Dabi wants him. He doesn't stop wanting him, doesn't stop feeling a little more solid and whole the longer that they spend doing this because Tomura just gets him the way that he never found anyone else to. He never tries to make him be better, never tries to tell him that he needs to accept the past and move on, never tries to minimize the things that led him to making the choice he did, even if the consequences were so much worse than he thought they would be. He tells Dabi how gorgeous he thinks he is, and he tells him that he'll be saying the same thing even if he decides to get his grafts painted neon green. They spend a month together and the rest of the crew is very, very kind in not saying jack shit about it or pressuring either of them to explain what's going on. Getting into a relationship that isn't a casual fling is not an abnormal thing for crews that are together for a long time. Eight months is not a long time on a five year trip. Things between him and Tomura could still blow up spectacularly and destroy the cohesion of the entire crew. 

But he tries not to think about that. He tries to let him believe that for once in his life he's going to get lucky. That the world isn't going to make this all blow up in his face. 

"Dabi?" Tomura's voice comes from outside of the cargo hold, the doors open as they get the supplies from the Exovin station here. 

"What's up, cap?" 

"Isn't your appointment in twenty minutes?" He asks as he comes up the ramp. He catches him with a hand around his hip. Technically, Dabi isn't on duty right now, which is probably why Tomura feels like it's alright if he is a little more familiar with him in mixed company. 

"Yeah, and apparently it's only a five minute walk." 

"You should check in early if you can." Which is his very polite way of telling him that he doesn't need to hover when his shore leave has already started. The less polite way would be to outright send him to his room or kick him off of the ship so Dabi accepts the excuse graciously. 

"Fifteen minutes isn't going to save me if something goes wrong." But he leans in. Tomura meets him halfway, lips smiling against his before he gets his kiss goodbye. "I'll see you in a few hours." 

"See you later, good luck." Tomura sends him off and Dabi goes out of the ship, out for the first time in years without his silicone skin on. 

Through the bustle of activity on the streets, the different species moving along and to businesses and into apartments, no one seems to take any special notice of him. Dabi keeps expecting someone to turn horrified eyes on him. He expects someone to scream when they see him, but he reminds himself again and again that only happened the first time because his grafts were clear . They're opaque now. He doesn't look like a horror movie monster. He doesn't look normal , but he doesn't look… awful. He tells himself that again and again as he walks to Thuprea's building. It's not far away from the dock that Exovin setup because this, he finds, is a very high-end part of the city. 

When he walks in he is immediately greeted by modern architecture, sleek, clean lines, bright light, and a crispness that makes the entire place feel... cold. There is a single long desk off to one side of the room, with a secretary sitting in front of an all glass monitor, a few pictures of models blown up on massive screens behind the desk. Dabi's steps echo loudly as he walks over to the desk. 

"Hi," his translator hums and buzzes softly, making sure it's synced to whatever the Galiv working speaks. 

"Hello. Do you have an appointment?" 

"Yeah, Dabi, no surname." 

They type it into the computer and pull up his file. "I see. You're early. When your technician is ready, they will call you into the next room to give you your in-person consultation and finalize the price point. At that time, you will need to provide payment for your balance in full that will be separate from the consultation fee that you paid when you booked." 

"Right, got it. Is there a waiting area or do I just stay in here?" 

"There is no designated area for 'waiting'." The Galiv goes back to their computer and Dabi moves off to the far side of the long desk so that he can look at some of the pictures of other jobs they've done, the different designs that got him here in the first place. He has almost fifteen minutes to wait as it cycles through the photos. Though he wishes the screens didn't go dark as they transitioned so that he wouldn't see his reflection staring back at him. 

///

Dabi's heart is pounding, his blood rushing in his ears, and his fingers hot from the paper containers that he has clutched between his palms. The cargo doors are already closed, and the ship is quiet when he gets back in, heading straight for Tomura's room. He knocks on the door, mostly because his lover probably thinks he's alone on the ship at the moment, and he doesn't want to startle him. 

It takes a second and then Tomura opens the door. He still seems startled. "Dabi? It's only been--" 

"You said that food you wanted was like a tamale with a sour sauce, right? Made by the Dre'Von Lirra?" 

"What-- Yeah." Dabi pushes into his room and goes to the table which is not currently set up for an examination. 

"You got dinner plans?" He asks with a cocksure grin as he sets down the boxes. 

"Dabi, what are you doing back here? I thought that you were going to be gone for eight hours? Did something happen?" 

Dabi opens up the boxes, showing the four tamales, their husks a bright purple plant that imparts the-- "They're called iwuchosse--" with the color. "And luckily for you they're entirely vegetarian, even luckier the very nice Dre'Von Lirra woman who runs the stall was so happy to hear that I was interested in learning how to make them, that she said I could come back tomorrow to get some lessons and she would give me cuttings of her garden so we can have them on the ship." 

Tomura comes over and catches him around his hips, forcing him to come to a stop. "Dabi, what happened?" 

"I decided that I didn't want to spend thousands of credits to get a paint job." He says with a slight shrug. But that's not enough for his lover, and he waits. "I decided that... I've gotten used to seeing myself like this for the past few months. I still have one of my skins left so I can go back to that if I need to, and I can always come back here and get the paint done if I want to. But... I don't think I need to waste three days doing that when I could be doing more fun things, like learning how to make my boyfriend's favorite food." 

And because Tomura knows him, gets him the way that no one else has in so long, he doesn't push. He just smiles, and leans in to give him a kiss. "Don't suppose that nice woman would teach me too?" 

"Absolutely not. She's a nice woman. I'm not about to let you burn down her restaurant by accident!" 

///

Dinner that night is good. Their shore leave is good. Dabi's blocks on news articles about himself are very good, but that doesn't stop Magne and Jin from seeing the article that some tabloid prints with a picture of he and Tomura walking through the street with their hands interlocked. Absolutely doesn't stop them from making fun of them incessantly for being gross and in love. Dabi doesn't know if either of them ever really thought about love, he's not sure if either of them thought they would ever be able to connect with another person again. But it doesn't matter. It works for them right now, works for them throughout the rest of their assignment, and is clearly still working when they're trying to decide where they're going to live for their next year planet-side until they can go away together again. Dabi is pretty sure it's going to work for the rest of their lives.