Chapter Text
The league had been sitting around doing absolutely nothing for like a week and a half now, and everyone was getting pretty annoyed of hearing Toga complain and hearing Shigaraki rage at League Of Legends, even if it was only on solo mode.
"Okay, boss, this is getting pretty annoying. We've been sitting here doing nothing with our goddamn lives because it's too fucking cold to go outside. We have to find something to do before I throw the fridge at this bloody bitch." Spinner stood up off the couch, stretching from being in the same position for like 25 minutes. Even Spinner, a gamer and a nerd, was tired of not doing anything villainous. Though, he was probably just excited to go out and do something that'll get Stain to noice him.
"Well I don't know what we're supposed to do, I've planned at least 7 different attacks on UA for when the weather stops being a bitch." The leader shrugged, pausing his game, since it was still on solo mode.
"So what do we do?" Toga asked, relieved that she was going to have something else to do other than try to gut her friends. They were starting to get too smart.
There was a long silence for a few seconds, before Mr. Compress and Dabi walked into the room as if they had a timed cue.
"No, but seriously, that's low. You can't treat your daughter-in-law that way, she's birthing your fucking grandkids." Dabi said, heated about something.
"You're literally a murderer, why are you judging people based on their attitudes towards someone?" Compress asked.
"I may have murdered 30 people in cold blood, but half of them were dirty recruits who were disgusting people and half of that half also tried to hook up with me so I think I was in the right for that." He defended himself.
"And the other 15?" Sako asked.
"We don't talk about them." He replied.
"What the fuck are you two yapping about? It's annoying." Shigaraki asked, adding in an insult because he wouldn't be caught dead asking that emo piece of shit about himself and what he does with his time casually. His ego is too good for that. (In reality, he acts cold and like a powerful leader but literally no one in the league sees him as cool. Especially after witnessing his lonely gaming sessions.)
"Am I the asshole stories, that's what." Dabi said, sitting down on a bench at the bar's counter and exasperatingly gesturing towards the other. "We read a few of them. Tell me, is it nice to treat your daughter-in-law like shit and make her feel isolated from the family?" He asked the gang.
"Dabi, you've most likely taken the life of one of those daughter-in-laws, you don't have shit against that mother." Compress crossed his arms, as the argument kept going in circles.
"Right, and you haven't killed?" Dabi posited.
"Definitely not as much as you."
"Fair point."
"What the hell is an 'am I the asshole?' " Shigaraki asked.
"Sad people on Reddit who either fuck up or someone fucks up on them and they post about it to ask if they're in the wrong or not." Sako summarized.
"And read-it is...?" Shigaraki queried, clearly not thinking of the app.
"An app. You can either see step-moms traumatizing their step children or videos of people brutally dying." The magician explained. "I'm surprised you don't know what Reddit is, since you spend so much time online." He added.
"No, he's just a loser that plays games. Not a loser that has enough brain capacity to write arguments all day." Dabi insulted his boss and only smirked at him when Shigaraki shot a glare in his direction.
"Right, ok. And why the fuck do you two care?" Their boss questioned. They're literally the most known villain group as of right now.
"Listening to middle-aged people rant about their fuck-ups is better than sitting here and waiting for the 'cold weather' to pass." Dabi replied, doing air quotes with his fingers when he spoke about the weather, as if he wasn't literally resistant to the cold.
"I saw one the other day about a father who was buying drugs then ended up buying from a new person who turned out to be his son, and when he tried telling his wife that his son was selling drugs his son snitched on him too!" Toga shared.
"Right..." Shigaraki was just about fed up with trying to understand her twisted mind.
"Hey, that actually gives me a great idea." Twice said.
"That idea better make up for the cringey ass Disney movie phrase you just spoke." Tomura commented.
"What if we started reading those posts and posted what we thought online? Like on YouTube." He suggested.
"Or we could make a podcast!" Toga liked where he was going.
"A what?" Shigaraki questioned.
"When people talk about subjects and sometimes it's filmed visually but sometimes it's just the audio." She explained.
"This isn't too bad of an idea. I mean, we could get tracked down, but we could also just move locations when we're filming so by the time they find the address that matches, we'll be gone back here." Compress agreed.
"You guys can't be fucking serious, we're literally the league of villains. Who would watch us rant about random shit on some video and react to other people's misery?" Their boss intervened.
"That's actually like..exactly what the internet has turned into." Iguchi said.
"Please, Tomura! It would help us get our names out there even when it's too cold to commit to an attack!" Toga begged him.
"Okay, fine. If it pisses the heroes off..." He grinned. "I'm in."
"Shouta, you're... gonna want to see this." Midnight came in the teacher's lounge, them two being the only ones there, so far.
"What is this, a sci-fi mystery movie?" He commented, pointing out the overused phrase.
"Just search up VillainVibesTV." She instructed him. "No spaces, but each ‘v’ has a capital and the TV does, too." She added.
Eraser wondered what Nemuri was making him watch, but he would soon find out. He clicked on the channel and onto the first video they'd posted, titled:
Five Antagonists and a Pyromaniac React to Weird Reddit Threads.
What the fuck kind of title is that? He saw a list of six other videos in his queue, all of them having similar thumbnails and titles. The thumbnails looked like a normal podcast setup, except the faces of the people in it were blurred and there was a little added ambiance on the border of the screen, probably just to attract more viewers. But the titles… didn’t get any better. They clearly had a pattern, which was they all said 'Five antagonists and' then point out one of the other members of the channel and a quality about them. And the qualities were... not so normal, to say the least. There were a few on the list, those being:
Five Antagonists and a Psychopath….
Five Antagonists and a Crusty Fellow…
Five Antagonists and a Lizard…
Five Antagonists and a Bipolar Bitch…
Five Antagonists and a Failed Magician…
Who even calls themselves antagonists? Aizawa didn't understand.
Before he even began to question the nicknames, the first video had loaded and all the ads had gone by so he just watched.
"Hello, and welcome to a new series we're starting, called Five Antagonists and a Blank."
Aizawa nearly fell off of his chair when he first saw Himiko Toga herself narrating the intro to the video. What the hell is she doing on YouTube? And who in their right minds hired her- oh, shit. The titles on the videos. Aizawa had a feeling he knew the identities of all the 6 antagonists already. Which also answers his question of why they would call themselves antagonists.
“This is a mini series we’re making so you can get to know about us!” She continued on. And low and behold, she moved away from the camera into her seat as they edited a zoom-out feature on the camera, showing the entire fucking league of villains in their own chairs.
"We're just gonna be doing a bunch of different random things on this channel, and today we're reacting to shit on Reddit." The villain known as Mr. Compress explained. Him and Spinner were both searching on a phone, and Aizawa has yet to find out what it was for.
"I can't believe you all convinced me to fucking do this..." Tomura Shigaraki said under his breath.
"Oh, come on, Tomura! You bitch all the time, you were made for this!" Toga said. Dabi smirked and joined in, seeming to love insulting his boss.
"Yeah, this isn't any different from your daily bitching. You're just saying it to a camera now."
"Both of you, shut the fuck up. I'll fuck you up so badly that maybe I'll be the one asking Reddit if I'm the asshole for murdering you both." The leader threatened.
"See? Easy as can be!" Toga only seemed to encourage the energy he had, teasing him further as he moved on.
Mr. Compress laughed at something and showed it to Spinner, who also laughed.
"I think we found a good one." The Stain wannabe was still laughing.
"What is it?" Toga asked.
"It's called Am I the asshole for attempting to burn my house down?" Compress read out loud.
"No." Dabi shook his head, everyone turning to him and laughing. It wasn't that funny, Shouta thought to himself. He wasn't having this.
"Easy for you to say." Iguchi commented.
"I mean, it's just fire." He said, picking at a staple on his arm. When he looked back up, Compress was staring at him, in a judgmental matter, from what Aizawa could guess was behind his mask, and gestured towards the patchwork villain's body.
"If you consider that end result to not be a big deal, then you do you, I guess."
"This is different, it's a house. I'm a living person."
"Barely." Mr. Compress commented. This time, Dabi couldn't help but smile and try to contain a laugh, being called out so personally and being left speechless by Compress. Toga found that hilarious apparently.
"Oooh, Compress got'chu now and you know it!" She lived for the drama.
"Let's hear the post first." Dabi said, saying they should wait before commenting on it, even though he started it. Spinner cleared his throat quickly before beginning to read.
"Okay, here goes.
Am I the asshole for attempting to set my house on fire because my boyfriend did something horrible?
So me, 23 female and my boyfriend, 26 male, have been dating for 2 and a half years now. He was the man of my dreams, he was a gentleman and treated me like a queen. I was madly in love with him. I'm still in university, and my class had a week long trip which required me to drive an hour and a half there, and I unfortunately couldn't bring my boyfriend. Which meant he would be at home alone for the entire week. Before I had left, I set up a camera to check on the dogs while I was gone because my boyfriend worked full time and I knew that I would have more time during the day to check on them than he would. I didn't bother telling him because I didn't think it was such a big deal. Our relationship was built a lot off of trust.
7 days in, on the last day, I checked on the dogs yet again and I saw my boyfriend at home, which he called me everyday as soon as he finished work throughout the week, so I found it weird that he hadn't called me if he got off early. Then I thought maybe he hadn't even gone to work at all that day since it was so early. It was weird he didn't text me. Then I heard a girl's voice.
Confused and upset, I waited for him to come closer into the frame before I made any dumb decisions, and low and behold, he'd brought a girl home. My best fucking friend of 7 years. Ah yes, the most basic fucking thing a man can do." Spinner read out loud.
"Period, girl. I hear you." Toga said.
" I knew I had to act. I wasn't just going to sit there and let them get away with this. They could not live with the satisfaction of it. I knew that there weren't any plans today except for saying goodbyes, so I got in my car and started the few hour drive home early.
I got home super early and went into my house, only to find them IN OUR BED, clothed, but barely. I don't know what got over me, but my plan of yelling at my boyfriend to pack his shit turned into a rush of rage and adrenaline, and before I knew it I was knocking over lit candles, cranking the oven on, doing anything I could to cause destruction that would give me time to escape before I would get stuck in the mess. I wanted to watch that little brunette bitch burn. I sat outside watching the beautiful scene I caused for a bit before contemplating calling 110, but decided I didn't owe them shit and drove off. But I forgot the cameras so it didn't take long for the cops to show up at my hotel. They both made it out alive so honestly I don't think I did anything wrong, but what do you think?
Update: I'm on trial, it's leaning more towards a mental institution rather than a cell. I think it's because there's too many villains taking up the jail space.
...
"I still don't think she's in the wrong." Dabi shared, breaking the few seconds of silence they were contemplating in.
"Of course you don't, you fucking pyromaniac." Spinner said, unsurprised that his opinion didn't change but still disappointed that he genuinely thought that woman was in the right.
"And what's wrong with that? Setting stuff on fire can be therapeutic, take this as an example." Dabi defended his beliefs.
"The fuck you mean, 'therapeutic?'" Iguchi judged him.
"It clearly helped her express her feelings and helped calm her as she watched the building burn. Now maybe it was a crime, but she was girlbossing." He explained, which stalled the other for a few seconds. Did he just say she was girlbossing?
"You can't be fucking serious."
"Deadass. On my own grave." Dabi said, Sako laughing silently to avoid being noticed but literally everyone noticed.
"What?" Spinner asked, wondering what was so funny with that expression.
"Nothing. Go on." Compress waved his hand at them, wanting to continue listening to them bicker.
"Can someone give me a fucking hand? Shigaraki, you bitch at him all the time, help me out."
"As much as I hate to, I agree with him. She was being a badass." The leader shrugged.
"WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU TWO?" Spinner shouted, regretting his choices of joining forces with these two.
"A lot of things, lizard. That's why we're here."
"I swear to fucking god, don't call me that, Dabi. And you and me both joined the league because we liked Stain's ideals."
"No, I joined because Stain's ideology was respectable and because I wanted to burn a certain hero to his fucking death." Dabi corrected him, wording his sentence aggressively exclusively when he spoke about murdering said hero. "Plus, this has nothing to do with that. This is about that chick who was absolutely cooking, kinda literally in this situation." He continued.
"Let her cook." Shigaraki said to Spinner.
"How the fuck do you even know terms like that?" Mr. Compress asked his boss, who was usually known as someone who lives under a rock and plays games on solo mode. "This is getting out of hand. For a regular citizen who suddenly snapped with seemingly no history of trauma or mental illnesses, which she would've surely mentioned if she had them, this isn't normal one bit. She did not cook. In fact, she left the food raw." He stepped forward. Toga gasped.
"You did not." She said.
"Oh, I did." He stood his ground.
"And what about you, Jin? What do you think?" Toga snapped her neck to look at him, as the others also looked up, normally, unlike her. There were a few seconds of silence as he stared at them stressfully, his eyes flickering between each of them anxiously.
"Fuck this shit." He said, walking out.
"There goes my bipolar roasts for today." Shigaraki said, as the door closed.
"Look, my mother is in the mental hospital." Dabi brought himself back into the argument, seemingly coming up with another plan to prove his point, sitting up and starting to use his arms while he spoke. But the tone he used with that statement was a little too out of the blue to not be funny, most of them blasting out laughing and clearly questioning him.
"That explains a lot." Compress commented, being the only one who managed to keep a sarcastic tone as the others were laughing at the arsonist.
"Fuck you. Anyways, so if this girl suddenly thought 'ooh fire yay' and burned the house down, she's probably fucked up in the brain. And no doubt her boyfriend of over two years would've noticed that, which means he was reckless, should've done something about her mentality beforehand and he had it coming." Dabi explained, sounding like a child trying to explain why they thought 2+2 equals 7 and making no sense, while in court.
"That doesn't make like..any fucking sense." Iguchi said.
"So you're saying that she chose to commit arson because she's mentally fucked." Mr. Compress seemed to be onto something.
"Yeah, I guess." Dabi shrugged then nodded.
"Now who here likes to set things on fire because he says it's 'satisfying?'" Never mind, he was just turning Dabi's words against him.
"...Well I already know I'm fucked so it's ok." Dabi said, resorting to an answer that made absolutely no sense but couldn’t be denied since he didn’t know what else to say.
"Yeah but think of this woman as a normal and sane person and judge the situation under those circumstances. Not everyone was abused like your burnt ass." He said.
"If you have a problem with my ass just say so." Dabi sarcastically said, knowing fully that Mr. Compress wasn’t talking about his ass but accusing him anyway.
"You know what I meant, smartass." He hissed back, using another name with ass in it just to make the other man laugh, which worked.
"This is fun to watch." Toga said to Shigaraki, their boss appearing to be processing a thought.
"Hold the fucking phone," Shigaraki got their attention, the processing look on his face disappearing. "Compress. How do you know Dabi got abused?" He asked, and by the looks on the other two's faces, he was onto something.
"He told me." The other replied, purposely leaving out context.
"How much?" His boss asked, wanting more information.
"...Everything." He hesitated, but told.
"What the fuck, Dabi?! It was the first goddamn question I ever asked you. Why is the magic-kink sicko the one you told?"
"It-It's not a kink..." Compress said, traumatized by the fact that someone would even think that about him and Aizawa thought for a second that he was actually crying.
"I saw him without his mask and he threatened me to the point where I felt happy to tell him my name in return." Dabi admitted, eyeing Compress nervously as he spoke about being threatened. “Then overtime we spoke about it a bit more and I just ended up telling him most of the shit I went through.” He added, as Shigaraki tilted his head downwards and sighed, which the hand on his face made it look like some sort of facepalm.
"And if anyone has a weird kink here, it's you and your weird hand kink." Compress pointed accusingly at him and put his other hand on Dabi’s shoulder as if he was hiding behind the arsonist, finally giving a decent comeback, not letting Shigaraki’s previous comment go before he snapped back.
"That's my fucking family." Shigaraki glared at him.
"..Oh yeah..." The magician shut up.
"Why do you wanna know who Dabi-Kun is so badly?" Toga asked.
"Stop calling me that, we're not friends." Dabi warned her.
"I care because as the goddamn leader I think I deserve to know who my second in command is." Tomura said, pointing out what he thought would be obvious.
"Oh, don't be so dramatic. We trauma bonded before." Dabi said, acting like they were besties to tick him off.
"When did that happen?" Spinner questioned, knowing his boss wasn't one to talk about feelings. Like ever. Like he's 96% sure the man doesn't know what excitement to non-murderous topics feels like.
"Why do you think he trusted me to be in charge of the Vanguard action squad when I didn't even tell him my real name? We basically just joked about trauma but didn’t say any names." Dabi said, acting as if anyone could guess that.
"Yeah, as if that's normal..." Iguchi made eye contact with Compress as they both judged the other two.
The arguments went on as Dabi, Shigaraki and Toga kept defending the woman as the other two wondered who they were following as villains and debated whether or not they should simply leave and never come back.
"Okay, he clearly takes from his fucking mother." Spinner said, tired of listening to Dabi's arsonist ass try to make sense with this. "Let's move on to a vote."
"Not the asshole." -Dabi
"Not the asshole." -Shigaraki
"The asshole." -Mr. Compress
"Not the asshole." -Toga
"The asshole." -Spinner
Aizawa skipped through some last comments about the Reddit post and the outro, but continued to be attentive to the audio in case one of them dropped a bomb and he would have to rewind it. After a just minute of skipping, the video ended.
The next recommended videos popped up, some by the league and some by those two emo guys, Johnnie and Jake. Probably because their content seems similar, he figured. He leaned back into his hair, trying to silence his brain's hundreds of questions about what he just watched.
"...What the fuck did I just watch?" Aizawa asked Midnight, who was still standing next to him.
"What the fuck did I just watch you watch?" Vlad King asked, only being able to guess what was going on since Eraser had earbuds in.
"I feel like this is going to cause a lot of trouble..." Present Mic said, also secretly watching Aizawa’s screen.
"Should we gather some heroes and have a meeting about it?" Eraser asked, scrolling through the channel to examine it further. Mic nodded.
"Yeah. I'll call up some people."
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