#i guess you don’t know too too much about bmb dabi’s background either tho that’ll be explored in bits and pieces

[inkykeiji]

its mentioned a little bit in the fic but while we're on the topic: how does tag!dabi feel about his mother?? and where is she now? since dabi says he misses her if im remembering correctly.

oooooh anon!!! such a good question!!

tw: mentions of physical abuse + drug abuse

tag!dabi’s feelings toward his mother are very, very complex. they aren’t something he’s even fully unpacked—aren’t something he’s sure he’ll ever fully unpack, hesitant on whether or not he even wants to untangle something so heavy and messy and convoluted.

you’re right! he does mention within part two that he misses her deeply. and he does. tag!dabi was very close with his mother, and one of the reasons why he fucking hates seeing keigo put his hands on reader (aside from the fact that it’s wrong on so many levels; just fundamentally wrong) is because his father used to hit his mother, and it made him so fucking angry that his vision bled a furious red. he was even angrier that he wasn’t big enough or smart enough or rich enough to do anything about it. he couldn’t help her. he couldn’t save her. he couldn’t protect her.

he loves her, deeply, dearly, but he doesn’t have many happy memories of her; only up until he was about 8 or 9, and then everything crumbles to ash the moment shouto enters their pristine family photo.

the feelings he experiences when he thinks of his mother are contradictory, paradoxical; he understands why she did the things she did, why she ultimately turned to drugs as an escape from it all. he also understands that his mother suffers from severe mental illness (and worries, silently, that he might’ve inherited a piece of it—he heard these things can be genetic, you know). he gets it, he does. but he also understands that while it isn’t her fault that she’s sick, it was her responsibility, her duty, to see a doctor and try to get better. he feels anger towards her, anger towards the fact that she took what he believes to be the ‘coward’s way out’, anger towards the fact that she picked drugs and their manufactured bliss over her own children time and again.

he sympathizes with her mother and everything she went through due to his brute of a father, but he knows she had resources, avenues she could’ve pursued to get them all help, to get them all out of there, and that she didn’t. that she deliberately chose not to. any fight she had ever contained had been beaten out of her long ago, and she was too tired to do anything but take the easy way out.

her choices hurt him. he took her decision to turn to drugs very personally. but he loves her so much, and he knows she tried. she tried to keep up the charade, she tried to be the Good Housewife and Great Mother in the Happy Family, she tried to keep everything as ‘normal’ as she could, even as she sank deeper into addiction, even as she began to crave that euphoric release more and more potently.

he doesn’t know if his siblings were ever taken from his father after The Incident with the kettle, after his mom had been put away, locked in a cushy padded cell. he didn’t stick around long enough to find out, but he knows that his father has enough authority to sway others, to get his way, just like he always does.

there is a tiny piece of him, buried deep deep deep in his soul, that holds resentment towards himself for running, too. that calls him a hypocrite for doing exactly what his mother did, for leaving his younger siblings to deal with their father, alone, because he just couldn’t take it anymore, couldn’t handle continuing to take the brunt of the abuse so his baby siblings didn’t have to. but he silences that shard of himself easily enough, reminding himself that he was only thirteen, only a fucking child, dealing with things no child should ever have to deal with, and it was not his goddamn job to parent his kid siblings. such responsibility should never be thrust upon a mere child. never. it’s extremely unfair to ask of a kid, especially a kid in his position.

so those are the knotty, complex feelings he has towards his mother. he hasn’t been able to bring himself to visit her in the psychiatric hospital, not once, though he hopes that one day he can. he thinks he’ll regret it if she dies before he gets to talk to her, and see her face to face, just once more.