Lost Souls

Trapped

Despite having his first ever 'boyfriend', nothing really changed.
Dabi still questioned his choices as leader, continued to make snarky comments and run his mouth, ruffling his feathers in a way that only Dabi ever dared to do with Tomura.
And that was fine. Tomura could outwit Dabi whenever he needed to, and spit out equally offensive responses to his snide remarks. If he was feeling particularly sour about Dabi's attitude through the day, he'd just turn him away when he arrived at his door in the middle of the night. Sometimes he relented to Dabi's begging, and sometimes, he held firm.

What Tomura struggled with, was the eleven year old that came along with Dabi.
She wasn't bad, for a kid. Relatively quiet, apart from her nightmares, and followed orders well and usually without question.

Tomura... struggled with patience sometimes.
He'd tried to catch himself and stop getting frustrated with her when she struggled with her math work, taking a moment to close his eyes and take a deep breath before he would usually get irritable and snap, and instead tried to explain things to her again calmly and slowly.
Like right now, he was trying not to get frustrated with Star for not knowing her times tables... at all.

Tomura had been sitting, considering how to face the current issue she was having with his cracked lips pressed together in thought for a little while, spinning a pencil between his fingers with practiced ease despite his quirk.

"Okay. Let's try it this way." He sighs after a while. "Two and two is what?"

"Four." She answers easily, and he nods, writing down a two on the paper and then a four underneath it.

"And then four plus two?" He asks, catching her gaze.

"...Six." She replies cautiously.

He jots down the six under the four and rolls his wrist loosely with his hand for her to continue.
She, slowly but surely, manages to count all the way up to twenty four, and then he nods, straightening up in his seat.

"Alright. So this is the two times table." He informs you. "It's basically just adding the same number over and over."

She looks at him blankly, which is unsurprising considering she had never really done well with math.

"Do you think you can make one of these, but with three instead?" He asks, gesturing to the diagram he'd drawn out of the two times table and handing her the pencil.

"Can I have a juice break?" She asks, a little shyly.

He grunts, not appreciating the delay tactic, but getting up from his stool to get her a drink anyway.
Probably shouldn't have let a cheap, meaningless compliment about his intelligence rope him into giving a kid math lessons on Dabi's behalf, but here he was.
He rustles around behind the bar, pouring her a glass of apple juice, which he'd noticed she liked, and ignores the constant feeling of her eyes on him as he does it.

"Here." He says, sliding the glass towards her.

She thanks him quietly, taking a sip from her apple juice and watching him as he slides back into the booth beside her, scrolling through his phone silently.
Nothing interesting, just flicking through the news to make sure none of the others got caught last night. Beyond a few articles about clumsy arson jobs and a few stabbings, there appeared to be nothing linking the League to any petty crimes.

"Shigaraki?" She asks after a while, filling the empty space that Tomura had been quite enjoying.

He hums a response, not looking up from the screen in his hands. He doubts it'll be anything that needs his full attention.

"Are you Dabi's boyfriend now?" She asks curiously, sipping her juice soon after, still staring at him.

Shigaraki pauses for a second, locks his phone, and then looks at her with vague curiousity in return.