….
While Rumi and Eri are at the hospital, Dabi just got a text from her, informing them they are coming back to U.A., as they finished their visit to the hospital.
On the other hand, Dabi was already deep in assisting Aizawa with the paper work, who had been nagging him from the morning.
And just like that, for more than four hours, Dabi was reviewing the reports of Class 1A's Work Place sent by the Pro Heroes they are under.
'I should just resign.' he thought, leaning back in his chair.
True. Experiencing firsthand how the plot has changed due to his intervention, for Dabi, staying here, playing teacher and filing reports, felt like a waste of time he didn't have
…and he also needs to get stronger.
====
[GENETIC MILESTONE SYSTEM]
THREE EVOLUTION PATHS:
| [BREATH OF THE SUN] – 100/100% ✓
| [SUPER SOLDIER] – 100/100% ✓
| [ARACHNID GENOME] – (30 → 34)/100%
LIFE SPAN LEFT: 120+ Years
====
'Thirty-four percent.' He noted.
However, the decision is certainly that Rumi wouldn't favour either logically and financially.
Also, he is aware that he can't be reckless like he had been growing up, he has a family he wants to spend the rest of his life with.
Besides, the paycheck for a U.A. assistant teacher is really well deserved to be tempted to stay.
'How things change…' He chuckled, remembering not long ago, how he had thought his financial situation was comfortable.
But still no one rejects extra payment.
Obviously, and undoubtedly, before any materialistic satisfaction, he is certainly angry with U.A., security and Nezu had personally apologised to him expressing their failure to react faster.
But it was understandable since most of the teachers were busy contacting the Pro Heroes, the U.A., students are under, prioritising their safety first.
Nevertheless, he shouldn't be too disappointed even if he can't resign.
'Maybe I'll just use that guilt to negotiate a raise.' He mused.
He still had high hopes for his retirement plan.
….
Soon after Rumi and Eri are back as reported.
Immediately, Dabi left the stack of reports on the desk to meet them in the temporary faculty housing Cementoss had built for them, while the apartment was being rebuilt.
Inside, the space was functional but sterile, yet it was currently occupied by a sight that made Dabi's head throb.
On the floor, Eri was sitting cross-legged, her brightness seemingly returning as she focused on the small blonde girl sitting across from her.
Toga.
Or whatever Toga was now.
She looked to be about three or four years old now, her golden eyes wide and vacant of the madness that had once defined her.
….
Honestly, the current situation with Himiko Toga is way more complicated than the minimum attention Dabi had been giving.
When Eri's [Rewind] triggered, it didn't just revert Toga's body to her childhood.
Eri's quirk operates on a quantum-biological level.
Meaning, in real-time, the particles of Toga's physical form were subjected to a localized temporal inversion.
Quite literally, the Quirk disassembled her adult cellular structures and reassembled them into their chronological precursors: ribosomes, mitochondria, and specialized blood-quick pathways were forced into a rapid de-differentiation.
However, the real problem is to see when she actually wakes up.
Toga was in a coma for nearly a week, which was a reasonable shut down her body did to protect itself, and another two days just learning how to move her new, tiny limbs.
During all this time, she had been provided extensive care of considering every measurable precaution to make sure she was okay.
Eri's quirk rewinds the body, but it cannot reverse the consciousness trapped in the transition.
Toga's adult memories: the bloodlust, and trauma - remained etched into a brain that no longer held the same capacity or the hormonal stability to handle them.
And this is exactly where the problem lies.
Her tiny, undeveloped nervous system is currently under a metal strain of memories, experiences, and the past that can be proved lethal - when she wakes up.
If the public ever found out that an incident of such disturbance happened in the U.A., the outrage on Eri's quirk would be too high even for Principal Nezu to defend her.
And obviously, HPSC won't slide into a favoured situation to get back at Dabi.
But that is something he can handle.
He never cared about public image or what HPSC might do to him, and obviously even they are not stupid enough to mess with his family.
However, what actually hurt him was the weight of his own failure.
Dabi had been very successful in his recruitment for the past years.
He had hunted down the fractured souls of the underworld - Spinner, Twice, Magne - and forged them into the vanguard of a new Hero society.
But Himiko Toga had been his one consistent failure.
Unlike the others on his team, whose criminal records made them easy to trace, she was different - a girl the same age as the protagonist who had lived a normal life until middle school, leaving almost no trail to follow.
From what he had gathered, her parents despised her quirk and may have misreported or disguised it, further obscuring the truth.
And not to mention, Toga's ability to become anyone allowed her to vanish into the mundane.
And then there was the quirk itself.
The ability to become anyone let her disappear into the ordinary; where Twice was trapped in his own loop and Spinner stood out as a target, she existed in the seams of society - one week a schoolgirl, the next a salaryman, always someone else.
Still, he should have not given up.
Only if he had known if things would turn out like this, he would have turned the whole country upside down to find her.
'Tsk… need to get it right every damn time and even one failure is non-negotiable.'
….
Oblivious to Dabi's complicated thoughts, Eri had both hands on the girl's cheeks and was squishing them together.
"Papa, look at her face." Eri was completely absorbed. She squeezed the cheeks again. The blonde girl's lips puckered out like a fish. "She's so cute, and her cheeks are so soft and squishy - they're just like mochi!"
Toga didn't snap or snarl, she just blinked, staring at Eri with a hollow, golden curiosity, while Dabi leaned against the doorframe and wondered how his retirement plan had turned into a literal daycare for the damned.
Rumi came from inside, carrying two bento boxes and a juice carton. "Alright, that's enough, it's lunch time. Let's go, kiddos."
Eri perked up immediately, releasing the blonde girl's face and scrambling toward the table.
The other girl watched her go, then looked at the food, and something in her posture shifted - a tiny forward lean, a slight widening of the eyes.
She was hungry.
But the reaction was muted, held back, like she had already learned at some point in her short new life that showing too much of what you wanted was a mistake.
Dabi watched that, and filed whatever thoughts he was having.
"Okay… Fine. Whatever happens, happens."
Rumi set the bentos down and shot him a look."What are you even talking about? Isn't this obvious from the start?"
"I am just saying I am on board." he replied, a touch defensive now. "We're doing this."
"Well, I guess I am glad you finally caught up and got on board with it."
Dabi looked at her.
Honestly - He was surprised how Rumi accepted the situation.
From what she reported during the fight, Rumi was the most angered she was, and Toga had been the primary target. He could literally imagine her kicking the high school girl's skill to death for something were to happen to Eri.
However, he also kinda understood what was going on inside her right now, or at least he had a rough map of it.
Rumi was blaming herself.
She had done everything right, given everything she had, and someone she had still let the villains get their hands on Eri.
That was eating her alive, even though she did not say it out loud.
And then there was the other thing.
That morning, Naomasa Tsukauchi; the detective Dabi had worked with before, the one with the lie-detection quirk.
He came with a file on 'Himiko Toga' detailed history.
Rumi had read it… Only to learn how the cheerful, well-mannered girl succumbed under society, while her parents called her rotten to the core and labelling her as inhuman.
[Transform] - Her quirk allows her to take on the perfect physical appearance, including voice, of anyone whose blood she ingests.
The quirk is undoubtedly not a heroic one, and if not taken care of, it can promote a natural inclination towards blood.
It was a tough situation; a kid whose quirk made her want blood the way other kids wanted affection, and instead of anyone helping her understand that, they had told her she was broken.
She was labelled inhuman, a monster wearing a girl's face all the while she just was lonely, leaving no choice but to learn to hide her real feelings behind a smile.
In the end, what had happened to her was miserable–
–as she eventually succumbed to Quirk's influence and ended up attacking another student, Saito, who was bloodied and bruised from a fight, believing that what she felt towards him was a crush.
For Rumi… who had spent her entire life being exactly who she was, loudly, violently, without apology, in a society that mostly tolerated it because she was strong enough to make tolerance the easier option.
And reading about a child who had been crushed for the crime of being born different had landed somewhere deep, and personal.
This wasn't charity or guilt, but Rumi deciding she was going to fix something that she didn't break, and god help anyone who tried to talk her out of it.
Dabi leaned over and kissed her forehead.
"Okay." he said. "We will do it your way."
She looked up at him, for a second, the armor came down and her expression was raw.
Then it was back. "Obviously my way. When has your way ever been the better option?"
"I am choosing not to answer that."
So, Toga was staying.
The decision had been ratified, signed, and delivered before Dabi had even walked through the door, which was exactly how things worked in this house.
But there were things he was uncertain about.
The rewind.
Eri's quirk had taken Toga back to her toddler years - physically, mentally, everything.
From what he had observed over the last day and a half, the girl had no memory of her life after childhood, and probably before she awakened her quirk.
She neither recognized faces or the names she knew after a certain point.
She was, by every measure Dabi could apply, a normal child.
And Dabi was confident he wasn't being fooled.
He had spent years reading people in the underground, where the ability to tell when someone was performing and when they were genuine was the difference between going home and going into a ditch.
This girl wasn't acting or hiding - She was just a kid.
'But would that hold?'
He couldn't rule out the possibility of memories resurfacing.
Quirk factors didn't just disappear, and the blood-related quirk was still in there somewhere, dormant, waiting to manifest.
Dabi wasn't worried about the quirk itself.
A quirk was a tool, it was neutral.
With proper guidance, the kind Toga had never gotten the first time around, she could learn to live with it; and use it without it consuming her.
What worried him was everything else.
The variables he couldn't control, the things that might trigger a relapse, or a memory cascade, or a personality shift that nobody saw coming.
But in the end, he let all of it go.
Because honestly, Toga's situation hit a nerve he didn't like admitting existed.
As he mentioned she was one of the people he had wanted to change, but he obviously failed.
Fortunately or not, his daughter had unmade it, and now there was a second chance sitting on his living room floor getting her cheeks squished by an enthusiastic four-year-old.
He wasn't going to waste it.
"No fair!" Eri had apparently been watching the forehead kiss.
She marched over, dragging Toga by the hand.
The blonde girl followed with the careful, tentative steps of a child who wasn't used to being led somewhere good.
"Eri wants a kiss too! And Toga too!"
"Sure, sure." Dabi crouched down and kissed Eri's forehead, then he turned to Toga.
The blonde girl looked at him.
Those golden eyes; the same one that had been predatory is now just wide and uncertain.
She didn't lean in or pull back, just waited, like she wasn't sure this was for her.
Dabi kissed her forehead too, the same way he did it for Eri.
Toga blinked, her hand came up and touched the spot where his lips had been.
She looked confused, like she had been given something she didn't have a category for.
"Nobody's asking for MY affection around here." Rumi said from the table.
She had her chin in her hand and she was trying to look offended and failing completely.
Toga turned around.
She walked over to Rumi, small, careful steps, and when Rumi bent down, expecting a hug or maybe a forehead bump, Toga stood on her toes and kissed Rumi on the cheek.
Then she stepped back and looked at Rumi with that same uncertain expression, like she was waiting to be told she had done it wrong.
Rumi's face did something complicated, as she blinked a few too many times.
"Okay." she said, and her voice was rougher than it had been a second ago. "Okay… yeah, that's - yeah, that's fine."
Dabi watched the three of them.
Rumi crouching down, Eri bouncing on her toes, Toga standing between them with the first traces of something that might eventually become a real smile pulling at the corners of her mouth.
He let himself have the moment, then he straightened up. "Should we eat…? The food is getting cold."
"Papa can just reheat it with his quirk." Eri said.
She said it matter-of-factly, like she was pointing out something obvious that he had somehow overlooked.
Dabi opened his mouth, closed it… opened it… again.
His eldest daughter had just told him, to his face, to use his quirk, the blue fire that burned hot enough to melt steel, the flames he had used to dismantle two Nomu in under three minutes as a microwave.
Toga was nodding along, a small, serious nod, like Eri had made an excellent point and she was in full agreement.
Rumi was laughing.
Dabi looked at the three of them, his two daughters and his women...
All conspiring against him.
"You know what?" he said. "This isn't fair, none of it is, and it's getting harder to pretend otherwise."
He reheated the food anyway.
….
.
[To be continued…]
★─────⇌•★•⇋─────★
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