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Soulmates were a thing that happened to other people.
That's what Dabi told himself, anyway, in the years between dying and becoming someone new. Soulmates were for people who had futures, who had names that weren't carved into a headstone somewhere on a hill he'd never visit, who had skin that didn't split when they smiled too wide. Soulmates were for people who were going somewhere other than a grave they planned to dig themselves.
He'd been nineteen, or twenty, or something south of both, the years had gone blurry somewhere around the sixth city, smeared together like ash in rain, like the faces of people he'd hurt that he couldn't quite separate anymore. He'd stopped counting. Everything back then was a haze of floors that belonged to people he didn't trust, rooms that smelled like mold and copper, a body half-ruined and held together with surgical staples he'd done himself in a motel bathroom with a bottle of vodka as anesthetic and his teeth clenched so hard he'd cracked a molar. He had a plan half-formed and nothing in his pockets but a lighter he didn't need and loose change stolen from a dead man's coat.
He woke up choking.
Physical, tangible, immediate, a pressure around his throat that hadn't been there when he'd closed his eyes. His body reacted before his brain did, hand flying to his neck, fingers scrabbling at leather, or something like leather, warm and smooth and fitted so precisely against his skin it might as well have been sutured there. A band circling his throat, sitting right over the ridge where the graft tissue met what was left of the original skin, the exact line where he hurt most, where the nerve endings were still raw and misfiring, like it had been measured for him. Like someone had taken a tape measure to his suffering and said here, right here, this is where we'll put it.
A collar. His fingers traced it in the dark, smooth, warm in a way leather shouldn't be, warm like skin, like a pulse, like something alive wrapped around his throat. Snug enough to feel with every swallow, every breath, every turn of his head. Not tight enough to choke. Just tight enough to remind.
Trailing from it, thin and red and catching no light, casting no shadow, passing through the wall like the wall wasn't there, a chain. A leash. Vanishing into the dark like a vein pulled from his throat and stretched across the world toward something he couldn't see.
Dabi sat on that stranger's floor and stared at the impossible red line hanging from his neck and silently laughed until his stitches tore. He felt them pop, one by one, along his jaw, the skin splitting in small wet bursts, blood or plasma or whatever was left in him sliding warm down his neck and soaking into the collar.
It didn't stain. The blood just ran over it like water over glass.
Of course.
Of fucking course.
Everyone knew how soulmarks worked. Everyone grew up with the stories, the legends, the breathless fairy-tale shit that adults fed children to make the world seem kinder than it was. Your soulmark is a reflection of who you are, they said. Your soulmark appears when the universe is certain of your path, when your life is so fixed, so irreversible, so thoroughly set that it looks at you and decides you will not change. Only then does it find the person walking a parallel road and bind you together. Your soulmark is a gift, they said.
A collar and a leash.
The universe had looked at Dabi and decided what reflected him best was something you put on a dog.
He should have been furious, should have clawed the thing off, should have hooked his fingers under the leather and pulled until something gave, the collar or his throat, whichever broke first, should have burned it, lit himself up blue and white until the leather cracked and peeled. He'd done it before with things he didn't want on his body, ripped out IVs, torn off bandages, once burned a man's grip off his wrist and taken three layers of his own skin with it.
He didn't try.
Because he already knew, with bone-deep certainty, that it wouldn't come off. That was the nature of the marks, immovable, invisible, irrevocable. He checked anyway, because he was nothing if not stubborn, stood in a gas station bathroom under buzzing fluorescent light that turned his scars green, turned his head, pulled at the skin of his throat with fingers that were shaking not from the cold. Nothing in the mirror. Just staples and dead skin and a face that belonged to someone he didn't know.
The collar was invisible to everything except him. The leash passed through walls and doors and solid concrete like it existed somewhere adjacent to reality, dark red and thin and infinite, threading through the world toward whoever was on the other end.
Whoever was holding the handle.
Somewhere, someone had a grip on a leash with his name on it. Somewhere, someone owned him, and the word sat in his mouth like bile because he knew this. Knew the particular taste of it, sweet at first, all high praise and purpose and you're special, Touya, you're going to surpass me, you're going to be extraordinary, then bitter, then rancid, then nothing. Then silence and locked doors and grief that led to death.
He didn't follow the leash.
He didn't trace that red line to wherever it led, didn't hunt for the person at the other end. Didn't want to know, didn't need another pair of eyes looking him over, assessing, calculating, deciding what he was worth, what he was for, whether the raw material was good enough to justify the investment.
Whether he was enough.
He already knew the answer to that one.
Dabi met Giran within the same stretch of ugly weeks, ugly months. Maybe before the collar, maybe after, everything in that period bled together, indistinguishable, marked by which floor he slept on and how many milligrams he could scrape together to quiet the screaming in his nerve endings.
The leash didn't come up. Nothing came up except business. Dabi filed himself into the cracks of the underworld like a blade into a sheath, learned who to talk to and who to burn and how to stand in a room so that people feared him without having to prove why.
He felt it at night.
In the gap between closing his eyes and whatever came after, when the dark was too quiet and his body was too loud and the pain crept in through the cracks in his composure like water through rotten wood. He'd lie on whatever surface was closest, floor, mattress, bare concrete at times, when the safe house had nothing else, and the collar would press into the back of his neck where his head met the ground and he'd feel it. Every millimeter of it, this warm, constant, inescapable thing around his throat, tethering him to a person he'd never met, a future he'd never asked for.
On the worst nights, the ones where the dreams dragged him back to Sekoto Peak, to a body that was catching fire from the inside out, to his own voice screaming for someone who wasn't coming, his hand would find the chain.
He'd wrap it around his wrist. Once, twice, the red links pressing into skin, thin and warm and there in a way nothing else was. A line connecting him to a heartbeat somewhere out in the world, a person who existed because the universe said they matched him, and he didn't know what kind of person matched this but they were alive and attached to him and that meant-
Something. He didn't know what, didn't know if he wanted to.
He held the chain tighter, winding it until the links bit into his palm, until the pressure grounded him, until he could feel something other than the ghost of fire on skin that had already burned.
You are not alone, the leash seemed to say, on the nights when he couldn't breathe.
He didn't know if it was a comfort or a threat. Both, probably.
Time passed the way it did for people waiting to die, slow and fast and meaningless, measured not in dates but in distances. How far he'd come. How far he had left to go. How many bodies between here and the ending he'd prewritten.
The collar stayed as it always did.
Some days he forgot about it. Could go whole stretches without noticing the weight, hours, a full day sometimes, if the work was loud enough, if the burning was bad enough, if he had enough to focus on that wasn't the leather band around his throat. It became background noise, like the pain, like the way his grafts pulled when the weather shifted, like the low, constant hum of a body that was falling apart in slow motion and couldn't be bothered to finish the job.
Other days it was all he could feel.
Those days the collar seemed to tighten, seemed to press against his pulse point like a thumb, like the universe leaning its weight into his throat and saying don't forget. Don't forget you belong to someone. Don't forget you are tethered, leashed, kept. And on those days Dabi's fingers would find the collar and press into it until the skin on his neck ached and he'd hate it with a purity that felt clean.
Hated the collar, hated the leash, hated whoever was at the other end for existing, for having the audacity to be bound to him, for making him something that could be claimed. Because that was the trick of it, wasn't it, the leash wasn't the worst part. It never had been, being owned was easy, being owned felt like purpose, felt like warmth.
Being owned was golden.
It was being discarded that killed you.
And then there were the other days, the quiet ones. They came seldom. They crept up on him, unwanted, unasked for, and impossible to stop. His hand would find the chain without deciding to, fingers tracing links like a rosary, and he'd catch himself mid-thought, already deep in something pathetic before he'd registered the descent.
What they looked like. Whether their hands were rough or soft. Whether they were gentle. Whether they held the handle carelessly or carefully. Whether they thought about him, whoever was on the other end of their leash, whether they wondered what he looked like or whether they already knew, somehow, the way soulmates in stories always knew, and had decided to hold on anyway.
Whether they'd be disappointed.
That thought had teeth. It sat in his chest like a coal, hot and constant and buried too deep to dig out, and every time it surfaced it brought the same sick slide of images. His body in a mirror, in a window, in a lake. The ruin of him, patched and stapled and held together with spite and steel, skin that couldn't decide what color it was supposed to be, the dead purple of the grafts meeting the living flesh in ridges that looked like fault lines.
Would they hold tighter, or let go?
He didn't know which answer was worse.
Sitting on the floor of an alley, his back against a wall that smelled like damp and old smoke, running his thumb along the collar while staring at nothing, the thought surfaced. So desperately small, so fucking pathetic, persistent as infection, festering in the dark.
Would they want a pretty thing? Would they hold the leash gently, with slack, the way you led something you wanted to keep instead of something you wanted to control? Would ownership feel different from someone who was chosen for him?
Stupid. Pathetic. Irrelevant.
He didn't get to want things. Wanting was what Touya did. Touya who wanted his father's attention, his father's pride, to be enough, wanted it so badly he'd stood on that peak and-
And yet.
And yet and yet and yet.
He wanted, wanted to be held and kept and chosen, wanted someone who'd look at what was left of him, the scars and the fury and the dead eyes and the body that was a countdown to nothing, and say mine and mean it the way no one ever had.
He wrapped the chain around his wrist that night.
Sometimes the leash pulled.
Not hard, a tug, barely anything, gentle and brief like a question asked in a whisper. Like someone on the other end testing the weight of the connection, checking, are you still there? Is this still real?
The first time it happened, Dabi's whole body locked up. Every muscle, every nerve, rigid in the dark, heart slamming against his ribs so hard he could feel the staples in his chest straining.
Someone was pulling his leash, someone was touching the chain that connected them, and he could feel it in his throat, the collar tightening by a fraction, a reminder that the distance between them was not guaranteed, that whoever held the handle could pull and he'd feel it, that he was attached to another living thing by a line he couldn't cut.
He sat there, rigid, breathing through his teeth, and didn't pull back.
The second time, he did. Barely. A twitch of his hand on the chain, a pull so small it might not have registered on the other end, and then he let go like the links had burned blue and pressed his face against his knees and breathed through the shaking until it stopped.
The leash went slack. Quiet. Nothing.
Then pulled again. Softer. It was barely a pull at all, more like a settling, like someone adjusting their grip, like someone saying it's okay. I felt you. I'm here.
Soft.
Dabi pressed his forehead harder into his knees and wrapped his arms around himself and did not cry because he hadn't been able to cry in years, the tear ducts scarred shut, and crying meant blood. He made a sound instead, low and broken and swallowed before it could become anything, and hated himself for it.
It became a keepsake.
A pull in the morning that might have meant hello. A pull late at night that might have meant are you there. A pull after the bad days, the days Dabi came back to whatever hole he was sleeping in with new burns and old fury and ash under his fingernails, that might have meant I'm here, I'm here, I'm here.
Or might have meant nothing. Might have been projection, his starving brain constructing meaning from mechanical tension because the alternative was worse.
He never pulled first. Couldn't, that felt like admitting something he couldn't take back, crossing a line he'd drawn in the dirt with his own bleeding fingers. But he answered. A tug back, small and brief, the absolute minimum he could give and still call it a response.
Still here. Still yours. He hated how easily it came. How natural it felt, that word. Yours.
Hawks arrived like a bad joke with good timing.
Number two hero, golden and grinning and too sharp behind the pretty face, offering himself to the League like a gift no one had asked for, wrapped in red feathers and plausible deniability. He was everything Dabi hated on principle.
They met in pieces first. Burner phones and dead drops and carefully constructed conversations where neither of them said what they meant and both of them knew it. Hawks was clever, too clever, too quick, too comfortable slipping between truth and lie like a fish through coral. Dabi didn't trust him, barely trusted anyone, but Hawks especially, because Hawks performed sincerity effortlessly and Dabi could see it.
But Hawks provided. Gave intel, gave names, gave enough that the League couldn't refuse him. Gave enough that Dabi had to stop circling and commit, a meeting, face to face, no screens, no middle men. The real thing.
He got there first.
An empty building, gutted and forgotten in the margins of a city that didn't care enough to tear it down. Concrete floors, broken windows, the smell of rust and pigeon shit and old water damage. Dabi leaned against a wall and shoved his hands on his pockets because they always seemed to want to go to his neck.
He waited.
The door opened.
Hawks walked in, yellow jacket, red feathers, mouth already half-curved in whatever smart-ass greeting he'd rehearsed, and stopped dead.
The rehearsed smile fell off his face like it had never been there, and his eyes, gold, so stupidly, perfectly golden, went wide, and Dabi watched them drop.
To his throat.
To the collar Hawks shouldn't have been able to see.
The chain went taut, the last of the slack disappearing, the leather at his throat tightening as the distance between them compressed to nothing but a room's width of bad air. And then he saw it.
A chain, red, thin, real, stretching across the room like an artery connecting two failing hearts. Dabi followed it with his eyes, traced the line from his throat to Hawks' end looking for the junction, the handle, the place where the hero was-
There was no handle.
There was red leather on a tanned throat and a collar, identical to his, sitting just above the high neck of the hero costume.
Two collars. Two leashes. One chain that met in the middle and became one unbroken line, throat to throat, and there was no handle because there had never been a handle.
He'd spent years imagining the person gripping the other end, imagining their hand on the leather, their knuckles white with ownership, and there was no hand. There was just Hawks, collared and leashed and staring at him with shaking eyes. The chain between them singing with tension.
One chain. No handle. And it had to mean something. You belong to me as much as I belong to you. Or, I will hurt you as much as you will hurt me.
Or both, probably both, always both.
Hawks was staring, looking, raw and open and wrecked, golden eyes wet. Hawks' hand came up to his own collar, fingers pressing into the leather, as if he didn't yet believe it. Mouth open but it didn't look like he was breathing.
A hero. His soulmate was a hero.
Somewhere in the rotting, denied, suffocated core of his wanting, he'd imagined someone whose hands on his chain would be a choice. Someone unshackled and unbroken, who held him because they wanted to, not because they were chained right back.
Instead he knew exactly what the collar felt like and there had to be more to it but Dabi didn't know what yet.
The chain hummed between them. Dabi felt it in his teeth, in the screws holding his jaw together, in every staple and graft and the raw red seams where his body had been stitched into something that could keep walking.
Hawks moved first. Or Dabi moved first. Or neither of them moved and the chain simply ran out of patience, shortening between them like a breath being drawn in, pulling them forward, a force that didn't care about sides or missions or the careful architecture of lies and tact.
The distance closed. The leash tightened.
Dabi could feel every link of it against his skin, warm and humming, and then Hawks was there, right there, close enough to burn, close enough to break. His hands came up to Dabi's face and Dabi almost flinched, almost, caught it at the last second, held it between his teeth like a scream, because Hawks' palms were settling against his jaw, cupping his face like it was something to be held instead of something to look away from.
Fingertips tracing staples, the ridge of graft meeting flesh, the topography of everything that had gone wrong with him, and the touch was soft.
No one touched him like that. No one had ever touched him like that, like he was worth being careful with, like the damaged skin under their fingers was something to learn instead of something to endure.
Dabi leaned in. Kissed him teeth first. Teeth and fury and the iron-copper bloom of blood as he bit down on Hawks' lower lip hard enough to feel it give, to taste him. Because this was his. The universe had looked at every broken, monstrous, unsalvageable thing Dabi was and had given him this, this one single solitary thing, and he was going to mark it, was going to bruise it, was going to leave proof in flesh and blood that he had been here. That someone had been his, at least once, even if it ended with fire.
Hawks gasped against his mouth, caught halfway to a growl and bit back. Teeth sinking into Dabi's lower lip, splitting it, and blood filled the space between them, his and Hawks', shared, mingled, indistinguishable. Hawks kissed him like he was starving for it, like he'd been waiting. Wanting.
Dabi's hands found Hawks' collar. Hooked his fingers under the leather and pulled, dragging him closer, feeling Hawks' pulse hammering against his knuckles, alive and real and racing. Hawks' fingers slid into his hair, gripping, pulling, and gentle, his other hand curled under Dabi's collar and they were holding each other by the throat, by the leash, by the only honest thing between them.
The contradiction made his head spin, the violence of the kiss and the tenderness in fingertips that were careful on scars even as his mouth was vicious, even as they bled into each other.
Dabi pulled back. Barely, just enough to see.
Hawks' eyes were gold and wet and ruined. Blood on his mouth, theirs, lip split and swelling, and his fingers were still hooked under Dabi's collar, holding, knuckles pressed against the leather like a pulse point, like if he let go something irreversible would happen.
The leash between them had no slack left. Wound tight, binding them in something that was either a lifeline or a noose and maybe there was no difference, maybe there had never been a difference, maybe that was the whole point and you held on anyway.
Dabi looked at him. At this collared, leashed, bleeding, golden thing the universe had decided was his. At the only person in the world wearing the same chain. At someone who clearly, somehow, knew what it felt like to be owned, to be kept, to be held by something that didn't ask permission.
At someone who was looking at the disaster of him and did not seem to want to let go.
"You're mine," he said, rough, torn out of him like a staple, bloody at the edges. The first true thing he'd said in years. Irrevocable.
Hawks' grip on the collar tightened. His thumb pressed into the hollow of Dabi's throat, right over his pulse. Dabi felt the pressure, the warmth, the undeniable weight of being held by someone who was shaking and holding on anyway.
Hawks smiled, there was blood on his teeth, and it wasn't the billboard smile, wasn't the hero smile, it was another one, crooked and devastating and terrible. "And you're mine."