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This is fine, Hawks thought to himself as he looked down at his hand. It’s going to be fine.
Hawks was an excellent liar but he still couldn’t successfully convince himself this situation was even remotely fine.
“Well this is a goddamn bitch of an unsatisfactory situation,” Dabi said.
“Hm,” Hawks replied, voice slightly squeaker than intended, unable to tear his gaze away from the disaster that was not so much slowly unfolding as it was rapidly heading towards doom with reckless abandon.
The situation was this: a member of the Paranormal Liberation Front with an annoying as fuck quirk was lucky that both Hawks and Dabi were currently preoccupied and unable to hunt him down and threaten him until he undid whatever it was he had done.
The situation was this: Hawks and Dabi were holding hands, and it was not consensual.
Dabi shook his arm violently, which caused Hawks’ arm to also shake violently. The shaking did not improve the situation.
Dabi tugged. Dabi growled. Dabi yanked. Dabi cursed.
And still, Hawks and Dabi were stuck - no, glued - together. Palm to palm in a perpetual high-five.
It’s going to be okay, Hawks tried to convince himself again, for a record breaking number of lies in the span of one minute.
His phone buzzed in his pocket, accompanied by the telltale ding of the Hero Network app’s alert of nearby villain activity. He refrained from thinking no shit there’s nearby villain activity, he’s currently trying to pull my arm out of its socket, but only because he accidentally said it out loud instead of thinking it.
“At least one of us is trying to fix this, ” Dabi said angrily, giving Hawks’ arm another violent shake. “You going to answer that?”
Hawks blinked and realized that his phone had progressed from dinging to ringing. He couldn’t reach into his pocket with his right hand, since Dabi was connected to it and he wasn’t about to shove Dabi’s hand down his pants, so he reached awkwardly across his body with his left hand, fumbling a bit and nearly dropping his phone when he saw the caller ID.
Call from: Boss Lady
Dabi was right. This was a goddamn bitch of an unsatisfactory situation.
He hastily pressed the decline button.
“Who’s Boss Lady?” Dabi asked, peering over Hawks’ wing, which he had tried and apparently failed to block his phone’s screen with. “Your secret girlfriend, or something?”
Hawks didn’t even have time to shudder at the image that was now seared into his brain for all eternity before his phone rang again. He answered it, if only to stop Dabi from saying something even more horrifying.
He wasn’t fast enough.
“Wow, she’s persistent, isn’t she?” Dabi said with a laugh. “Do you like getting bossed around, Hawks? Does it turn you -”
“Hi!” Hawks said very loudly into his phone. “How are you?”
“Hawks? Are you alright? Your voice sounds strained.”
“I’m fine,” Hawks lied, glancing sideways at Dabi. “Can’t talk at the moment.”
“Have you made progress? Are you any closer to the target?”
Hawks made a sound that was not quite a whimper. His fingers twitched, brushing against Dabi’s.
“Haha, yeah,” he said weakly.
“Can you come in later today?”
“Oh.” Hawks’ heart sunk. “I’m not sure -”
Dabi muttered something under his breath.
“What was that? Is there someone there with you?”
Dabi opened his mouth to say something else and Hawks reacted on impulse, stuffing his wing into Dabi’s mouth before the word could form. Dabi made a choking sound but was unable to escape, since he was stuck to Hawks.
Hawks coughed in an attempt to cover up Dabi’s enraged but muffled yelling. “I’m uhhh not feeling very well,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll be able to come in tonight. Or tomorrow.” Then he coughed again, in case he didn’t get his message across.
“Hm. Keep me updated.”
“Will do!” he said a little too cheerily to be convincingly sick. And then, heart fluttering with panic, he hung up before the situation could get any worse. He let out a long sigh of relief. That bought him a little bit of time. How was he going to get himself out of this mess?
Dabi wheezed, and Hawks remembered he still had feathers shoved down Dabi’s esophagus.
“So,” Hawks said cautiously after carefully removing his wing from Dabi’s throat and watching to see if Dabi was going to set him on fire. “What now?”
“What now?” turned out to be a sleepover at Hawks’ apartment.
Well, “sleepover” was a generous term.
They spent several hours searching for the glue-quirk culprit in between ducking into utility closets to avoid being seen and getting tangled in mops. Their task was made nearly impossible due to the fact that neither Hawks nor Dabi had gotten a good look at the guy who ruined their day. And then they spent several more hours trying every conceivable method of unsticking themselves short of a knife. And then they spent another hour tiredly arguing about where they were going to spend the night because it was clear the stickiness wouldn’t go away on its own any time soon.
Hawks won, because his bed was king-sized, he had a full fridge of leftovers, and Dabi literally couldn’t argue when Hawks picked him up and rocketed them to lethal heights before Dabi could get a spark of a complaint out.
And now, even though they were both nearly dead on their feet, they were sitting on Hawks’ couch as far apart as physically possible without ripping their arms off. Despite the fact that it was after midnight, neither of them wanted to be the first to suggest trying to sleep. Neither of them said anything. Neither of them even looked at the other.
Meanwhile, Hawks’ phone kept vibrating with villain alerts for his agency. Each new alert made his wings twitch. His knee began bouncing five minutes in. Within ten minutes he was having anxiety sweats.
Did he really need his hand? Surely he could still do hero work without it, right? Or maybe he could sacrifice Dabi’s hand? It would probably ruin his top secret spy mission but at least he wouldn’t be sitting on his couch knowing there were people out there who needed him. People he could be saving if he wasn’t dragging a villain around.
“Will you please stop?” Dabi finally said.
Hawks jumped at the sudden noise, wings flaring out and slapping Dabi in the face. “What?”
“Turn your damn phone off,” Dabi growled through the feathers in his face. “Your rank isn’t going to suffer from a day off.”
Indignant anger flared through Hawks. “My rank? I don’t care about that! I can’t just sit here, uselessly, while there are people in need. I want - need - to help people.”
“How noble,” Dabi said, voice dripping with sarcasm. “So much for being a villain.”
“I’m not turning against heroes because I want people to die. I’m not evil. ” He looked pointedly at Dabi. “And I’m not like some people, who just want to see the world burn. If we’re going to burn everything down it has to be so that something new can grow in its place.”
Dabi stared at him for a long time before finally looking away. “You should still turn your phone off. It’s just stressing you out. There’s nothing you can do and imagining all the hypotheticals is going to drive you crazy.”
“Why do you care?” Hawks snapped.
“Because obsessing over things you can’t change never ends well,” Dabi said bitterly. He seemed to realize he’d given too much of himself away, because he hastily added, “and also all the non-stop buzzing was pissing me off.”
Hawks considered Dabi for a moment. He considered his scars and wondered how and why and when he’d gotten them. He wondered if some kind of obsession over unchangeable truths had caused them.
He reluctantly turned his phone off.
Eventually exhaustion caught up to them, making it impossible to put off figuring out sleeping arrangements any longer.
Hawks had a very large bed. Some might even call it excessive. But it was not built for two people who were glued together at the palm and who strongly disliked each other and also one of them has wings.
Hawks usually slept on his stomach. Dabi claimed that he normally slept on his back, but Hawks wasn’t sure if he was just being contrarian or not. They managed to work out a compromise.
If “compromise” means “Hawks got his way because he’s the one with the wings.”
“Maybe when we wake up the glue will be gone,” Hawks said hopefully.
“Or maybe it won’t and I’ll have to burn your hand off,” Dabi replied with a toothy grin.
It was a good thing Hawks was too tired to think about how unsettled that grin made him feel.
They settled down onto the mattress, still fully clothed, and Hawks smiled at the instant sigh of comfort from Dabi. “I told you coming back to my place was a good idea.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dabi grumbled sleepily. “Mr. ‘I’m absurdly rich and have a nicer mattress than whatever your comparatively broke villain ass can afford.’ You don’t have to rub it in.”
“I never said anything about your ass.”
“Speaking of, does your secret girlfriend ever wake up with feathers up her butt? Just want to be prepared, since you seem to have stuck feathers into every other part of my body.”
“Nobody’s gonna wake up with feathers in them unless they steal the covers,” Hawks said. And then with slight desperation, he added, “and that wasn’t my girlfriend. I don’t even have time for dating.”
“So tragic,” Dabi said flatly. “Does that make me the first person you’ve held hands with?” Dabi wiggled Hawks' hand for emphasis, as if Hawks could ever forget.
Hawks took too long to answer and Dabi laughed. Hawks shoved Dabi down into the mattress with a wing and pressed his own face into his pillow to hide the flush in his cheeks. “Shut up,” he mumbled.
Dabi’s body shook with residual laughter and Hawks drifted to sleep feeling Dabi’s breaths under his wing.
Hawks woke up to his bed on fire. For a half-second he thought this is it. Dabi wasn’t joking when he said he’d burn my hand off. And then his eyes shot open and he realized Dabi was still asleep. He was on fire but he was still asleep. The flames licked at Hawks’ feathers, at his blankets, at his hand, which he couldn’t pull away no matter how hard he tugged.
“Dabi!” Hawks shouted. But Dabi was deep in whatever nightmare he was trapped in. Thrashing and twisting in the sheets and nearly yanking Hawks’ arm off. “Dabi!” Hawks said louder, shaking their still conjoined hands.
Dabi woke up with a jolt, eyes wide and fearful. He was breathing heavily. He didn’t seem to notice Hawks. He was still on fire.
“Dabi,” Hawks said calmly, ignoring the flames for the moment. “Look at me.”
Dabi’s gaze settled on Hawks.
“You’re safe,” Hawks said.
And just like that, the flames flickered out. Hawks finally allowed himself to wince and take in the damage. His hand wasn’t badly burnt, but the sleeve of his jacket was singed. The bedsheets were ruined. The room smelled like smoke. Or maybe that was Dabi. He was still smoking slightly, little curls of smoke escaping through the seams of his scars.
“Hawks?” Dabi said, and Hawks hated himself for being affected by how broken Dabi’s voice sounded. How lost. Hawks could feel Dabi’s shaky breaths through his feathers. He could feel the sweat through their glued together hands. He could see how terror gave way to confusion and then shame and then defiant anger.
Hawks didn’t know what to say. It was one thing to know that villains often had tragic life stories. It was another thing entirely to see the effects of one so close and be unable to look away. He intertwined his fingers with Dabi’s and gave his hand a small squeeze.
“Do you...want to talk about it?”
Dabi’s eyes narrowed.
“I guess that’s a no?”
“That’s a ‘you even think about mentioning that to anybody and you’ll be fried chicken before you open your mouth’.”
Hawks mimed zipping his mouth shut with his free hand.
Since they were still stuck together, they couldn’t leave Hawks’ apartment without the risk of being seen. Which meant they were back to sitting on Hawks’ couch. Except this time, they sat knee to knee. After sleeping in the same bed, and then whatever that nightmare was, it seemed like a waste of effort to try and stay away from each other.
Dabi was in a weird mood, which, understandable, but it meant that Hawks was left to sit in silence. Which meant Hawks was left with his thoughts. He was very conscious of the fact that he had never spent this long sitting so close to someone before. The spot where his knee touched Dabi’s felt tingly, and he resisted the urge to lean into Dabi’s warmth. He wondered how much of that desire was loneliness and how much was an attempt to justify that using loneliness to further his mission, and how much of it was about the mission and how much was actually him wondering what made Dabi who he was and why Dabi acted the way he did and whether Dabi really trusted him or not.
Hawks wasn’t sure how long he spent contemplating his existence before Dabi finally broke the silence.
“If I’m stuck to you for another goddamn minute I swear I will burn off both our hands,” Dabi growled.
“Well then propose a solution instead of complaining about it!” Hawks shot back.
“We’ve tried everything that your dumb stuck up hero morals will let us do! The only thing that’s gonna get us out of this is to find that asshole and cut off his fingers one by one until-”
“We’re not torturing someone,” Hawks interrupted, gently whacking Dabi’s head with his wing. “There has to be something we haven’t tried that doesn’t involve death or dismemberment.”
Dabi huffed and rolled his eyes. “Pretty sure the only thing we haven’t tried is true love’s kiss, which I think we both know won’t-”
Dabi paused. He looked at Hawks. Hawks looked at him. They looked at each other, neither of them willing to be the first to break the awkward silence but both clearly thinking the same thing.
“Unless…”
“Maybe…”
Hawks licked his lips. Dabi leaned in close enough that Hawks could taste his breath. Hawks stared into Dabi’s bright blue eyes. Dabi’s staples glinted in the light.
And then they were kissing. Kissing. Not just a quick press of lips to lips, but wet, sloppy, messy kissing. Hungry, frantic, desperate, intense kissing.
Hawks lifted a hand to run his fingers through Dabi’s hair and was brought harshly back to reality by the fact that they were still glued together.
It hadn’t worked.
It hadn’t worked and they were still stuck together and he and Dabi were making out like two horny teenagers who were very attracted to each other and Hawks was screwed.
He broke the kiss and immediately looked away from Dabi because he didn’t want to see whatever look was on Dabi’s face.
The bad thing about kissing someone who you’re going to end up betraying and who stands against everything you live for and who is a literal murderer and who you’re literally unable to escape from, is that when you kiss them in a desperate attempt to be free and it ends up not working, you are then forced to sit awkwardly next to them and pretend that you’re not having conflicting emotions about the whole thing while in reality you feel like your world is ending and you’re going to die and your vision starts to go fuzzy and-
“Fuck, Hawks, breathe.”
Oh right. Oxygen was a thing that humans needed.
Hawks breathed. Dabi’s free hand was resting on Hawks’ knee. Hawks focused on it and tried to ignore the voice in the back of his mind screeching at him that he had just ruined his life.
And then a phone vibrated, making them both jump and earning Dabi another mouthful of feathers. Hawks’ hand reached automatically to his pocket, heart pounding, but his phone was still off. He hoped his sidekicks weren’t panicking at his absence. Or injured. Or dead. Or-
“Damnit,” Dabi said, digging around his own pocket. He looked at the caller ID and groaned. He answered the phone with a growl.
“What do you want?”
A pause.
“I didn’t realize I had to ask your permission before leaving the building.”
Another pause.
“Well I can’t come back right now, I’m busy.”
A longer pause, presumably a lecture, if Hawks had guessed right and it was Shigaraki on the other end of the line. Dabi stared at Hawks while he listened. His fingers twitched irritably in Hawks’ palm.
“Actually,” Dabi said slowly, “you know how I said I found us a promising new recruit?”
After another long pause, Dabi hung up with a long sigh. He turned to Hawks. “You wanted to meet the boss, right?”
Hawks’ heart skipped a beat. Yes. He very much did want to meet the boss. But… He looked down at their hands. If it came down to a fight, he had a pretty heavy weight attached to one arm. He really shouldn’t go into something like this handicapped.
“You can’t do shit for the heroes like this,” Dabi said. “But you can prove your loyalty to us.”
It wasn’t how Hawks imagined the meeting would go, but at least he finally got to this point, so that was something. Who knew all it took to gain an audience with Shigaraki Tomura was some glue and his first kiss?
He stood outside a large set of double doors, seconds from meeting Shigaraki and other high ranking members of the PLF for the first time, and wondered how he was going to explain this to the Commission. Maybe he could leave out the handholding part. And the bedsharing part. And the part where he calmed Dabi down after a nightmare. And the part where Dabi calmed Hawks down after he had a panic attack over his first kiss being with a villain .
Hawks curled his fingers around Dabi’s. Dabi’s reflexively did the same. He glared sharply when he realized what it looked like.
“It’s less awkward like this,” Hawks explained.
“We’re holding hands.”
“Yes.”
“And that’s somehow supposed to be less awkward?”
Hawks didn’t have an adequate response, so he kept his mouth shut.
“Fine.” Dabi sighed. “It’s not like this can get any more embarrassing.”
It could, and it did.
The second they entered the room, everyone leapt to their feet. Hawks bristled instinctively and Dabi leaned away from the incoming feathers-in-mouth. A blonde girl - Toga Himiko, Hawks remembered - squealed in delight. There were several indistinguishable shouts or yells of shock from the others. Then the shock of seeing a pro-hero faded and was replaced with the shock of seeing that pro-hero holding Dabi’s hand. Hawks felt Dabi tense. Hawks squeezed his hand. Dabi squeezed back. Hawks tried not to take comfort in the way it steadied him.
And through it all, Shigaraki laughed.
Their explanation left out some of the finer details, namely the kissing, but Dabi convinced Shigaraki to hear Hawks out, and Hawks convinced Shigaraki that he wasn’t going to immediately turn around and spill all of their secrets to the heroes (not like he could, considering he was still tethered to Dabi).
Dabi and Hawks took seats at the table, their joined hands hanging down under the table where nobody could see. Shigaraki seemed slightly annoyed that all attention was on them and not him, because his gaze kept catching on Dabi and Hawks, the furrow of his brow deepening each time. Most noticeable, and unsettling, of the reactions to Hawks’ presence was Toga’s. She looked at Hawks hungrily, like she couldn’t wait to slice him up and eat him for dinner. Hawks was pretty sure he was going to end up breaking Dabi’s hand if he squeezed any harder, but it was the only way he could release any tension without drawing attention to the very large knives on his back that could kill everyone in the room in the blink of an eye.
Somewhere in the middle of Shigaraki explaining his grand vision for the future, Hawks’ hand slipped from Dabi’s grasp.
For a second after their hands separated, relief flooded through Hawks. He wiggled his fingers and squeezed his hand into a fist for the first time in over a day. Then he felt Dabi stiffen next to him, and flicked his gaze to him. Dabi was staring blankly across the table, no emotion on his face.
Suddenly, Hawks’ hand felt empty. It felt wrong, like something was missing.
Dabi’s fingers bumped up against his questioningly. Hawks stared straight ahead, not betraying what was happening under the table. He searched for Dabi’s hand with his own, and when he found it, entwined his hand with Dabi’s. A flash of warmth spread through him when Dabi rubbed his thumb against Hawks’.
Hawks smiled.
This is fine, Hawks thought to himself as he looked down at his hand. It’s going to be fine.