"There's such thing as non-alcoholic spirits?" Maeve asked quizzically, inspecting a bottle of clear fluid against the light. Light jazz played in the background.
"If you look close enough you can see the label says 'why bother?'," Jin snorted, mixing different fruit juices.
"Who the fuck wants vodka for the taste? What's wrong with you?" She asked, brushing past Maeve to grab the salt. Maeve hoisted herself onto the countertop.
"I'm curious. Question: Drinking two bottles of straight vodka should kill someone, right?"
"That depends. Two bottles of the real deal are 46 standards, which the rulebooks claim should kill you if you down them at once. I've had friends who've had that much and woken up the next day without a hangover. This stuff, however," Jin indicated the alcohol-free vodka, "Lethal. For the soul. I came all the way from Fukuoka to make you drinks and this is the thanks I get," the nurse complained, turning off the tap.
"How is moving by the way?"
"Eh. Kenji's making it tougher than it needs to be. Imagine having emotions, blegh," Jin retched.
"Imagine being a complete asshat to your almost fiance and still claiming to have emotions."
"He wasn't an asshat. Just... Not right for me," Jin reasoned.
"Jin. He proposed to you over the phone, at a business conference for baby wipes," Maeve sighed, playing with a paper umbrella.
"And you wouldn't?"
"I absolutely would if I ever got around to proposing to anyone. The difference is that I'd understand the humour of the situation and decide to be an asshole anyway. I am not a passive asshat."
"It was a bit harsh to break up with him then and there though," Jin mused, twisting open the cap to a bottle of actual vodka.
"That's what alcohol's for," Maeve decided, watching her friend pour a decent portion into crystal glasses and do the same with fake vodka into a kiddy cup.
"Here's to drinking away our sorrows! Your first-ever failed exam and my failed relationship," Jin toasted cheerfully, and they both took a gulp. Maeve immediately began coughing her lungs out and collapsed on the floor.
"I can'tttt."
"Hmm. We can try fake tequila next. That might be more to your taste."
"When are Midnight and Joke getting here?"
"How should I know? Probably late, knowing them. No one's here to rescue you from your fate."
Maeve flopped around like a fish out of water in despair.
"Are you going to plaster me with pretend alcohol all evening? Is this really how it's gonna go?"
"When I get bored we can move on to e cigars and coriander hash brownies," Jin yawned, sipping her drink with an evil grin that countered the festive paper umbrella.
"I just want a juice box," Maeve pretend sobbed, sitting up. She took a sneaky sip and keeled over again.
***
They spent another hour arguing about what movie to watch, before finally needing to settle for nature documentaries. Jin was disgusted. Maeve was thrilled.
"You'll love this one, there's a rotting whale with worm fishes-"
"Bitch," Jin groaned, already tipsy enough to bully Maeve when no one else had the courage.
"Okay, okay. What's your favourite animal?"
"Flamingos," Jin replied without hesitation.
They watched flamingos. Until one chick was torn apart by vultures before their eyes and Jin hijacked the tv to put on Disney's Tangled. Maeve found the plotline of a teenage girl being locked away because her healing abilities might get taken advantage of hit too close to home.
"This is actually upsetting you, isn't it?" Jin laughed, stroking the surgeon's partings between braids. Maeve had curled up and shoved her head into Jin's shoulder to avoid watching.
"There's even an evil mother who gaslights her; this is too much," Maeve whimpered, clutching the remote with white knuckles. Jin sighed and paused the movie.
"You're not coping," she stated, and Maeve didn't have any particular reason to argue with her.
"You don't have anything to do except train for something you have no passion about, and you haven't left the school grounds except for today, which was under armed guard. This," she said, indicating around the modern living room, "isn't you."
"You know why it needs to be like this," Maeve replied, playing with one of Jin's braids. She couldn't bring herself to meet her friend's eyes.
"Why? What difference does it make where you are or what you're doing, as long as there's someone around to help and he can't figure out your location?"
"There are too many variables, at least as long as I might be pregnant."
"That's decided in a week. What about after then, when you're free of him and training to be a hero? You need to think in the long term."
"I'm not going to be free of him. Even if I'm not pregnant, they won't want to give up the connection," Maeve replied softly. The two sat in silence for a while.
"Come live with me," Jin suggested.
"What? In Fukuoka?"
"Yeah. I have a two-bedroom apartment and haven't started looking for a roommate. We can board up your room a bit so it's impossible to figure out the address. You need a change of scenery. You attacked someone today."
"Jin... I can't."
"Why not?"
"One wrong move, one slip up, and you're dead."
"We won't slip up!" Jin laughed, but seeing Maeve's expression she settled down.
"Okay. Let me stay over tonight though."
"Dad would kill us."
"He'll kill us for drinking anyway."
***
"This is a terrible fucking idea," Maeve snapped, and some spittle sprayed into Jin's face. The nurse retracted like a turtle and nearly fell out of the bed.
"Oh my God, your lips are an impressively good launchpad," Jin giggled, settling back to face Maeve.
"You're drunk," Maeve complained, turning around to face away from her tormentor.
"Oh, you should see me actually drunk sometime, you'll be horrified. My white persona, Karol, loves karaoke."
She started singing the beginning of Bad Romance and Maeve kicked her. The single bed was so small they needed to lie squashed against each other, which was annoying until one wanted to cause serious bodily harm.
Jin proceeded to spoon her and continued belting the words out.
"How have you managed to make me miss Dabi?" Maeve griped, blocking her ears. Jin laughed and had to stop singing.
"What's he like? Can you keep away from him?"
"Yeah but it's like... He's letting me, you know? I don't have a choice in anything. So he'll be fine, just a bit irritating, but it's like a time bomb and I'm sitting there waiting for the fuse to blow."
Jin lay in silence for a while, and Maeve worried she'd said too much.
"Sorry. You shouldn't worry, he hasn't done anything-" She mumbled, heart rate increasing.
"Don't be sorry. I'm here for you, okay? Always. The offer's there if you reconsider, and in the meantime, if I ever get a chance to leave wall tacks in unfortunate places around the apartment-"
"Don't you dare. He's already going to be all high and mighty about failing the exam. God, if one more entitled male says 'I told you so' I'm going to turn their bones to jelly."
"I absolutely support that."
***
When Maeve woke up in an empty bed, she felt sick. Not because she was alone with an unstable arsonist. Nausea sick.
The whole point of fake fucking spirits was to avoid a hangover.
The girl started to dry heave and sprang out of bed to fumble through the dark towards the kitchen.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck
She made it so close to the sink as well.
***
Dabi groaned awake to a grey figure flailing past Maeve's couch. Instincts honed from years living in unsavoury neighbourhoods pushed the villain to his feet and he chased after them.
He wasn't exactly expecting them to collapse in the kitchen and heave up vomit onto marbled tiles. Not something he wasn't used to, however. Without thinking, he sighed and went to hold back Maeve's white braids from falling in sick like he'd done for countless junkies before her. In his defence, it was a dream and he was extraordinarily sleep deprived.
As soon as he brushed against the strands, Dabi realised that was a very, very bad idea. Lightning broke the sky outside with an earsplitting crack. This corresponded with a shriek from Maeve and she jerked away like she'd been electrocuted. The girl consequently slipped and fell hard into the patch of vomit. Whoops.
"What the fuck is wrong with you?" She yelled, gagging in disgust at her soiled pyjamas. Dabi was saved from replying since that seemed to trigger another bout of emesis. He instead escaped to turn on the lights so they could at least see what was going on.
Maeve's apartment was tidier than usual apart from the ex-contents of her stomach strewn in the kitchen. He wondered whether she'd hired a cleaner; heaven knew the doctor needed one.
Dabi found a box full of Maeve's nursing supplies and pulled the weirdly kidney-shaped vomit bowls he knew were nestled within. The villain returned to the kitchen and offered one to Maeve, who reluctantly accepted. She huddled on the floor against the kitchen island and clutched the bowl against her raised knees, but the bulk of nausea seemed to have passed.
"You done?" Dabi asked, not unkindly in his opinion.
"I think so. Yeah, I'm-" The girl held up a finger as she bent over and emptied even more sick into the container. Dabi had to wonder where it all came from. Her stomach was concave on the best of days. He picked his way gingerly between patches on the floor and sat down beside her as she pathetically spat away some last dregs.
They sat quietly, waiting for more to come. However, Maeve seemed to finally be finished. She lay down the bowl on the floor and examined her bare palms with clear distaste. The girl wiped her mouth on the back of a damaged hand, before fishing out paper towels and a bucket with soap from a cupboard.
"Don't worry about that. Go get changed," Dabi sighed, running index fingers over stitching in his face.
"Eh, I've cleaned body fluids from weirder places in my time," Maeve croaked, trying to sound cheerful when so clearly despondent.
"Me too. We've got so much in common," Dabi replied dryly, getting up to fill the bucket with hot water. Maeve sat for a few seconds, her brain clearly processing too much information at once. 'Dabi's doing me a favour' required excessive processing power.
"Sweetheart," Dabi said, enjoying that all it took was calling her a sexist name to break Maeve out of the mental glitch into a pissed off expression, "Fuck off."
Maeve nodded and got to her feet with a groan, wincing as vomit-covered fabric shifted across her torso. She hopped neatly between clean areas and once safely onto the carpet, Dabi handed the girl a fresh bowl. Maeve disappeared into her bedroom and drew across a curtain.
The villain distracted himself from the fact a girl was stripping in the next room by heating his hands until the water in the bucket began to writhe.
***
The first thing Maeve noticed, coming back in Jin's clean hoodie and sweats, was a line of half-empty spirit bottles on the counter, in order of size. Dabi was like an annoyingly intelligent sniffer hound. She and the nurse had hidden them behind fake backing in the pantry Maeve had installed a few days ago. Before then, Maeve removed their labels and partially dumped their contents down the sink as a prank on Aizawa.
"The exam went well then, I take it," the villain observed sarcastically. He was wiping down the counters of a now spotless kitchen and the man's sleeves were rolled up to reveal leathery forearms.
"I've had enough humiliation today as it is, I really don't need a lecture," Maeve groaned, collapsing on the couch with a vomit bowl at ready.
"You're the professor. Aren't you? Oh wait, Dr Aizawa doesn't even have a PhD-"
Maeve made a sound similar to a tiny dog growling.
"Frankly I'm just impressed. You went from stuffy academic turned school nurse to prohibition-style alcoholic, drop out, charged with assault in the span of 24 hours," Dabi continued, counting out the list with his fingers.
"I wasn't charged with anything. The beauty of heroics," Maeve declared, stretching her limbs across the full span of cushions.
"How'd you know about that by the way?" She slipped in, trying to make her tone as casual as possible.
"Know what? That you failed the exam or gave Endeavor's son a hiding from the inside out?"
"It appears the two correlate."
"Absolutely not. No one can deny offing the kid would make the world a better place; the points would've worked in your favour for such a true display of heroism."
Maeve grunted and buried her face in pillows, before immediately getting up and moving to an armchair when she realised they smelled faintly of woodsmoke.
"For two people who claim to get on well, you cause each other a hell of a lot of injuries," Dabi continued, setting two steaming cups of green tea on the coffee table and sinking on the couch Maeve had just vacated. He sat as far away from her as possible and it was satisfying watching such a dangerous man keeping a wary distance.
"Actually, they failed me before any of that happened. I wasn't taking the exam seriously. Apparently."
"So, in short, they were never to let you pass anyway," Dabi snorted, taking a sip from his still boiling tea. It was bizarre seeing him in such a domestic light; the situation almost reminded Maeve of a children's book Aizawa used to read to her. 'The tiger who came to tea' felt fitting to their entire unfortunate relationship, actually.
"When are we going to talk about the elephant in the room?" Dabi asked, breaking her thoughtful silence. She'd been enjoying imagining him being ripped to pieces by tigers. Maeve felt genuinely baffled about what he could be talking about. With the number of elephants crammed into every nook and cranny, it was a miracle they hadn't been metaphorically smothered. Picking just one felt unfair.
"Alcohol, Maeve. The league prefers All for One's child have just the one head," Dabi explained, observing her over his mug as cooly as a raptor. Maeve felt an overwhelming urge to keep up the ruse and see where it took them, but she'd participated in enough self-destruction for one day. Even so, the stress and frustration of the past week repressed by Jin began to bubble up. What made her angriest was that she couldn't be angry without getting a face full of fire.
"The ones I had were non-alcoholic," she muttered.
"What's the fucking point of that?" Dabi asked, with even more visceral disgust than Jin.
"I just wanted to know what they taste like, okay? God, why is that so hard to wrap your wizened head around?" Maeve snapped and immediately felt her churning stomach flop to the floor. He'd been surprisingly good-tempered so far, yet she had first-hand experience how quickly that could switch to violence.
"Well, how'd you find them?" Dabi asked, just as relaxed as before. Maeve couldn't work out whether it was his usual intimidation tactics or an actual attempt to make her comfortable. She also couldn't work out which option made her feel worse.
"Underwhelming," the girl replied, reaching for her tea. They sat staring into their cups, and it was quiet enough that they could almost imagine the other person wasn't there.
"Are you an alcoholic?" Maeve asked blandly, letting the steam spiralling from tea fog up her glasses.
"Yes," Dabi said matter of factly. The villain had abandoned his usual deflections and sarcasm; Maeve could tell he was looking directly at her even though she stubbornly glared at the ceiling.
"Are you?" He asked, still with the raptor eyes.
"Why would you think that?" Maeve asked, twisting her body into an even tighter ball.
"Junkies who get pregnant always begin with harmless alternatives they think might give them the same hit," Dabi shrugged, with a pointed glance at the line of spirit bottles. Maeve downed the rest of the tea and placed her mug back on the table.
"Did you know that for greyhound racing, they always run a fake rabbit around the track that the animals chase? A manky bit of electronics on a stick. Yet the dogs would run themselves to death to catch it, even just once. They never do, so their world shrinks down to the edges of the running track and that rabbit. Racing greyhounds last a couple of years before they're put down."
"You're not an addict, I get it, you don't need to make up a whole proverb," Dabi snorted, unfolding himself and stretching endless legs across the length of the couch.
"My dear old mother's clients used to come to the gates of her complexes after they'd run through their life savings and beg. Get down on their knees and sit there for days because they couldn't afford any more trigger. Police used to have to drag them away or they'd dehydrate to death. Didn't you ever wonder why her villain name was Greyhound? She invented a rabbit on a stick so potent people's worlds shrank down to finally being satisfied by a hit and how they were going to get another one. I always pictured them thinking 'this time,' this time it'll be such a good trip I won't need more and I can go back to my life. Except every time they chase the rabbit it runs just a little bit faster."
"Is this the speech you give the kids in your nurse's office for health class? Can I have the birds and the bees one next?"
"No. That's the speech I give when I expel them on the spot for having drugs in their system," Maeve replied, getting up to leave.
"I don't use any recreational drugs because I hate that for every rabbit on a stick, there's someone pulling it from the other end."
***
The week leading up to when Maeve could take a pregnancy test established unofficial routines and unspoken agreements.
Their sleep schedules overlapped in the early hours of the morning. Both told themselves they couldn't be bothered to arrange a cut-off time when in reality it served as a reprise for Maeve from nightmares and Dabi from spending any longer than necessary in her mind forest. He soon discovered that any time he spent asleep with Maeve still conscious sent him to companion Flea in her pitiful quest to find a timeline buried in insurmountable layers of memories. For Dabi, it was stepping into a minefield of Maeve's past experiences that left him even more emotionally drained than his nightmares.
One moment, he'd be laughing uncontrollably perched on the shoulders of a handsome man, gripping their navy hair as they ran through sun-dappled meadows. Then he'd be crying and screaming 'I don't want to' over and over again while monsters in surgical masks forced his tiny hands onto All Might's lifeless form and yelled that he needed to do whatever it took. Flea delved further and further down into darker levels where memories he thought were traumatic looked pleasant in comparison. He didn't want to think what Maeve would do if she knew how much he'd seen.
Maeve quickly realised the potential of spendingthat 24 hours working while being still technically well-rested. She was also thrilled to discover that pushing her quirk to its limits in a dream had no consequences, so turned her office into a temporary laboratory. Dabi wasn't easily disgusted, but opening the fridge expecting leftovers and instead finding various severed body parts left him gagging over the sink. Maeve wore her visor and lab coat when conducting experiments, so in a way, it felt more like he was in a villainous lair than the league's actual hideout.
Dabi got on with planning dastardly deeds in a notebook and they barely talked, each with their assigned territory; The villain took the sitting area, Maeve her office and bedroom, and the kitchen served as Switzerland.
Yet it was impossible to keep everything from each other. They left 10 minutes to get themselves in order after waking up, following Maeve walking in on Dabi after he was so disturbed from a nightmare he must have looked like something that crawled right out of hers. In turn, it was bizarre that he knew how Maeve stretched after she'd just woken up, that she had a kitten called Strawberry who left piss a couple times on the couch Dabi slept on (he was dead sure Maeve encouraged the act), and that she hummed infommercials to herself when handling human material.
It was also very clear she was suffocating.