Chapter Text
Night had settled over Musutafu with the softness of falling ash: quiet, drifting, reluctant to touch the ground.
Lyra Lecatelier stepped out of the research tower, the glass doors sighing shut behind her like they were relieved to let her go. Fluorescent light dissolved behind her heels, leaving only the cool thrum of the city humming under her feet.
She tugged her gloves tighter, leather snapping softly against her wrist. A ritual. A barrier. A reminder.
One last trial tomorrow. Stability curve. Tolerance frequency. Resonance decay. Maybe—finally—the version that wouldn’t burn out a nervous system after 200 hours.
Then udon. Yakitori. With leek. A delightfully small, human joy she clung to like a talisman.
The street was mostly empty except for the flicker of a neon sign and the low pulse of traffic several blocks away.
She walked briskly, shoulders tight with habit, brain already halfway home: cataloging spices, playback of centrifuge cycles, recalculating her reagent budget.
A mundane, comforting rhythm.
The shadow behind her did not belong.
It arrived too quietly, too coordinated. Not the natural hesitation of a pedestrian.
Something aligned. Focused.
Before she could pivot, a hand clamped over her mouth: gloved, rough, and practiced.
Her spine jolted. The world tilted.
A chemical sting slammed into her lungs.
Cheap. Industrial. Sloppy manufacturing.
Chloroform, her brain supplied in the split-second before it blanked. Overdiluted. Wrong pH. They didn’t even buffer it.
She managed one offended, muffled sound: half protest and half disbelief.
Her survival instincts were the kind you’d expect from a dove: a startled flutter, wings hitting glass, a single strike of resistance before instinct surrendered to inevitability.
Her knees gave out. The concrete rose to catch her. The lights stretched thin and long, like pulled sugar, before collapsing entirely.
And the dark folded her neatly inside itself.
She woke to concrete.
Cold chair. Colder air. Wrists zip-tied behind her.
Lyra exhaled through her nose. Great. A warehouse. How innovative.
Voices scraped the edges of her hearing: one low, simmering, another irritated and sharp.
Shigaraki stepped into view first, scratching at his neck like something underneath his skin was trying to claw out. Dabi followed, blue fire flickering along his knuckles like a bad habit.
The air wavered around him, subtly unstable. Too hot in one place, too cold in another: classic symptoms of unmanaged quirk strain.
Lyra catalogued it instantly, clinically.
“Awake,” Shigaraki croaked. “Finally.”
Lyra blinked once slowly. “…Why am I tied to a chair?”
Dabi scoffed quietly.
Shigaraki gestured dramatically. “We’re the League of Villains. We took you because you’re going to make us your new Guiding Ampules. The ones that fix the tolerance decay issue.”
Lyra stared at him.
Then at the ceiling.
Then back at him.
“…That’s your pitch? No ransom? No hostage video? Just ‘cook drugs for us or die’? You people are less ‘League of Villains’ and more ‘underfunded startup.’”
Shigaraki sputtered. “Watch your mouth—”
“Hard when it’s dry,” she said. “You abducted me before dinner.”
Dabi stepped closer.
Up close, he was worse: breathing tight, pulse uneven, and flame output spiking for half a second then strangling itself. A nervous system pulling too much current without a buffer.
She’d seen it before.
She hated seeing it again.
“Let’s get something straight,” Dabi murmured, leaning down. “I don’t like hostages who forget their place.”
His fingers gripped her chin, slowly and deliberately.
The contact shouldn’t have mattered.
But it did.
A thrum—soft, involuntary—escaped her anyway. A resonance leak. Just a breath of it. Barely a whisper.
But for someone running as hot and unstable as Dabi?
It might as well have been oxygen to a drowning man.
He froze.
Not fear.
Not shock.
Something deeper. Cellular. A body remembering what equilibrium felt like for the first time in years.
His flame sputtered out at his fingertips.
His breath stuttered.
Shigaraki blinked. “What? What was—Dabi?”
Dabi didn’t answer. He couldn’t.
He stepped back too fast, like she’d burned him. Or worse, cooled him.
Lyra sighed, head tilting. “Fantastic. Another high-emission quirk user with no regulator. You’re seconds from neural cookout, and you think I’m the problem?”
Shigaraki stared at her. “Neural—what?”
She lifted her bound hands slightly. “Classic. Overheated quirk pathways look for the nearest regulator. You’d know that if the government didn’t gut the Guide program.”
Shigaraki’s eye twitched.
Dabi still hadn’t spoken. His eyes remained fixed on her, as if replaying the sensation, trying to disprove it.
Lyra continued, voice flat: “Don’t worry. Half the country needs ampules because there aren’t enough Guides to go around. If you want your ampules faster, maybe don’t threaten the person who knows how to keep your brains from frying in your skulls.”
Dabi’s jaw flexed.
Shigaraki sputtered. “We didn’t fry our brains!”
Lyra gave him a pointed look. “…Yet.”
More silence. The flimsy kind, like paper held over flame.
Dabi was the first to look away.
But not for long.
He stepped toward the door. “Get her food.”
“What? She’s the hostage!”
“She’s also starving, and if she passes out, we gain nothing.”
Shigaraki made a strangled sound. “Why is she giving you orders?”
Dabi didn’t look back. “Because for once, the scientist is right.”
Lyra smiled faintly, the tired kind. “Udon, please. And yakitori. With leek.”
Shigaraki threw his hands up. “We kidnapped a diva.”
Lyra shook her head. “No. You kidnapped a chemist. Divas put up more of a fight.”
Dabi’s eyes flicked back to her.
He still hadn’t said a single word about what he felt when he touched her.
He didn’t need to.
Lyra already knew.