Archive of Our Own

~

“Listen: the way I loved you
was like my palm over a flame.
My skin is skin, but your body -
its edges dull the grain
of what it passes through.
I know better than to curl
into warmth that sputters
at the first breeze, but here I am,
mantle of bone, altar of stars.
Pull me back to the dirt
that made us both.”

- Ruth Awad, “The Mounts”

~

Nobody ever told him how big the word almost is. 

I almost failed. I almost got lost. I was almost happy. I was almost home. I almost loved you. 

Almost, but not quite. 

Nobody ever told him that almost crushes souls and dreams and little things in-between, like the difference between being an ideal and making a life out of selling a lie.

That’s how a lot of Keigo’s stories start and end, he thinks; something that was made to be beautiful that he ended up ruining somewhere along the way because he almost let himself change, he almost let himself be a part of something more, he was almost free.

Almost, but not quite.

~

A few weeks pass after Dabi sics the High-End on him and Endeavor in the middle of the god damn city. A few weeks since Hawks gets to witness firsthand the unbearable heat of that blue fire, encircling them like a circus act gone wrong. 

He’d underestimated Dabi. 

Endeavor was bloodied, tired, and overheated, and Hawks hadn’t been much better off with nothing but small feathers left when Dabi had swallowed the three of them up in a wall of fire that burned so high it blocked out the soft sunset of the sky in an instant. And unlike his fellow hero, he was very much flammable. The searing heat of that cloistered ring that cooked the asphalt of the street until the air reeked of burning sulfur had every inch of his skin under his clothes soaked in sweat. 

It’s the first time since meeting him that Hawks had been on the receiving end of Dabi’s mania, of the fever-bright light in his eyes as he’d launched himself at them. They’re only alive because of Mirko, and Hawks knows better now than to wonder if Dabi would have spared him because of their agreement to use Hawks as an informant: he wouldn’t have.

Hawks wouldn’t underestimate him again.

Which is why the tense, silent weeks that follow the two of them meeting in that shitty building by the docks later that same night after their battle, the sword-sharp point of Hawks’ feather-blade tipping Dabi’s chin up until his blue eyes shone in the moonlight that filtered through the grimy windows, does nothing for his nerves. Or his handler’s patience. 

I’d prefer it if you and I got along better.  

Hawks had been slowly worming his way in. Slowly, being the keyword there. Dabi was like an impenetrable fortress, traps springing closed when even a whisper of movement crossed them. Every conversation was a god damn minefield and Hawks frequently left feeling like he’d lost more than he gained. He’s the only member of the League that Hawks has contact with. He knows if he tries to go around Dabi, he’ll end up as nothing more than some ashes blowing away in the wind, so this is how it has to be.

But Dabi had called him a pet. And if he’d have any feathers left, all of them would have been ruffled. Patchwork asshole, casually pushing aside a sword to his throat with a smirk. That would have really done something for Hawks if he hadn’t been so pissed off about being lied to, about the damage and the aftermath of the stunt.

You came to us saying you sympathized with our cause, yet you fought so hard today.

It doesn’t matter, he supposes. What’s done is done, and now he’s left having to scramble back into Dabi’s good graces lest the whole mission fall apart. Which would be a whole lot easier if the villain would answer his damn phone. But he’s iced Hawks out entirely, giving him a shoulder colder than the weather has turned since they’d last met up. It doesn’t help that Hawks has all but spammed Dabi with several text messages every couple of days and getting absolutely nothing but read receipts back.

He couldn’t just show up at the League’s door; he didn’t know where it was. 

He couldn’t just find Dabi; they had a god damn teleporter in their ranks and could be anywhere within seconds. 

He had to wait on them to contact him and hope that he’d dangled himself like a choice cut of meat well enough to be worth coming back for seconds. In the meantime… 

“You gotta be kidding me,” Hawks groans as he turns his head up towards the sky.

All morning since he’d woken, the sun has been blocked out by dark, thick clouds hanging grey and low in the sky, turning the air even colder and threatening worse. A fat snowflake hits his cheek and melts on contact and any remaining bit of Hawks’ decent mood melts with it. 

Not an empty threat then, and he’s hardly prepared for the cold as usual. Especially now that he’s been caught running a few errands in nothing more than a thin jacket over a t-shirt. He’d left most of his feathers in a heap on the floor in his bedroom just so he could wear this stupid jacket and go about his day without getting recognized. Not that they provided much in the way of warmth, but at least it would have been something.

He had a couple bags of groceries on him and he had more he needed to do, had thought about even dipping into the agency to clear some more reports off his desk, even if it was his day off. Workaholic was a moniker Hawks was intimately familiar with, even though he did nothing more than smile it away with a wave of his hand. Having too much to do was better than not having enough to do. To be alone in his own head, in his own apartment, hands empty and time like some endless void he needed to fill so it wouldn’t swallow him whole. 

There’s not a shot in hell he’s doing any of that shit if it’s snowing though, fuck that. He’s going home to order takeout and curl up on his couch swaddled in a blanket to fall asleep right there while watching whatever trashy TV show he sets his heart on. 

Hawks turns around, just like that, and makes the trek back to his own place. He’d waited so long as it was to go out to get his things done, luxuriating in the opportunity to sleep in until his stomach demanded he get up. It’s late enough, what little of the winter sun shining through the dark clouds is beginning to sink past the horizon of buildings. But at least he’s managed to get the most important errand of groceries out of the way so he won’t starve all the next week. 

Dumplings, he decides, thumbing through a delivery service app as he wanders back. No, something hearty like oyakodon, something he could have leftovers of tomorrow before his patrol. Yeah, that’d be perfect. 

He places the order as he pulls the front door of his building open, even goes so far as to ride the elevator up to the penthouse like an average, non-winged person. He shoulders his door open to the empty darkness, pulling on a feather to get the kitchen light as he kicks the door closed behind him. It’s nice and warm at the very least, chasing off a bit of the chill racking him as he chucks his phone onto the counter and opens the fridge. 

His phone buzzes from the edge of the breakfast counter where he’d left it.

He assumes it’s the delivery service confirming his order. 

He continues to put his groceries away leisurely, carton of eggs on the far left of the second shelf, apples he’ll probably forget to eat in the drawer on the right…

His phone buzzes again. 

Hawks frowns, still bent over as he deposits a plump peach in its little mesh sleeve that had looked so good onto one of his empty shelves, and glances at his phone. It doesn’t buzz again, laying silent save for the little light in the upper corner flashing to tell him that a message is waiting for him. He slams the fridge door shut, now empty grocery bag still clutched in his hand, and reaches for it. 

A text message. His heart gives a swooping sort of thud in his chest as he thumbs it open. 

The first message is just an address that when he clicks on it drops a pin on some random building he’s unfamiliar with. The second text message only reads: You have one hour.

Dabi. 

Hawks stares at it for one second, two seconds, three seconds… and then he’s dropping the empty bags right there on the floor and pulling on his feathers as he sprints for his balcony door. Streams of red come streaking from around the corner of the living room, catching up to him and refilling all his plumage as he gets the glass door wrenched open. He’s not even sure he slides the door fully closed as he launches off the balcony and into the night without another thought.

One hour. 

The ever-overused joke of being the man too fast for his own good might actually be funny if he could just go fast enough. He feels like he’s balancing on a tightrope strung between two skyscrapers and Dabi is on the other side with a comically sized pair of scissors ready to cut his losses with a laugh. 

Hawks flies like someone possessed, blitzing through the frigid snow clouds instead of trying to maneuver around them. With single-minded focus and zero leisure, every beat of his wings sheds the ice that tries to cling to them as he pushes himself even harder. 

One hour. 

He reaches the rooftop of the designated building a little too fast, pulling up out of his dive so hard something twinges in his left shoulder, and he lands ungracefully, boots skidding against the roof until he can slow himself to a stop. The roof, however, is maddeningly empty of any moron except himself and the dark, frigid sky of the night. Dabi is nowhere to be seen. Not here, not there, not skulking in the shadows of the satellite dish, nowhere.

“Motherfu—” Hawks kicks an empty can from an inconsiderate pile of litter left on the roof as hard as he can and sends it sailing into the night, and hopefully not onto the head of some poor civilian below. 

He’d flown all this way, it’s cold as hell, snow falling in fat flurries now, creating a thin blanket on the rooftop where he can track every step he’s taken and the full slide of his landing. Hawks gnashes his teeth together to try and get them to stop chattering. He can’t feel his nose, his fingers are cramped from keeping them curled into fists just to protect them from the cold since he’d forgotten to grab his gloves. He’s fucking damp, nearly soaked through to his shirt from passing through all those clouds and every layer of clothing he has on feels like it’s frozen to his body. He hadn’t even taken the time to put his heavier jacket on, had just dropped everything and left.

The reality of his predicament sets in just a little bit too late, just a little bit after the hot spike of rage that he’s been set up. Dabi hadn’t been particularly happy that Hawks had brought Endeavor with him, not even when he’d been the one to walk back on their plan and let loose a fucking monster in a city full of innocent people. The metaphorical tightrope beneath him is starting to feel like it’s about to snap. Giving him a rooftop location to try and murder him for breaking their deal doesn’t seem very smart on the villain’s part, but after the display he made a few weeks ago, so much fire and so fast, Hawks isn’t so sure all the open air is necessarily to his complete advantage. 

He’s got a primary in his hand sharpening to a cutting edge before he can even fully register the gurgling sound behind him. Like a choked rain gutter in a storm. Hawks pivots, pointing his blade at the swirling mess of black spreading across the dark rooftop as a whole body steps out. 

Dabi.  

Neither of them moves, not even as the warp gate behind him swirls in on itself until it winks out of existence once more. Hawks keeps his sword up and his arm as steady as he can despite the chills racking him and the villain who’s done nothing but read receipt him for three weeks regards him with eyes that burn like twin pilot lights. 

“Boss wanted to make sure I’ve still got you hopping through hoops after your little stunt,” Dabi offers up by way of explanation, waving the cellphone he’d undoubtedly texted Hawks from back and forth. “And look how well you jump, birdie. Twenty-eight minutes, that’s pretty good.” 

He looks like he’d been bothered in the middle of doing nothing, just like Hawks had been. In an oversized white t-shirt and a pair of loose, comfortable looking sweatpants, he’s shoved his feet into his usual calf-high boots and the juxtaposition should be comical. The way the black fabric of his pants is pushed up around the mouth of his boots zipped up only to mid-calf. Except there’s just… an obscene amount of skin on display, an amount Hawks isn’t used to seeing. Nearly the whole of his arms and the scoop of his shirt collar exposing all the way down past the rail of his collarbones. Pale skin washed nearly white in the soft glow of the city beneath them, staples holding his body together winking softly as he shifts from one foot to another. 

Birdie. That’s new.

“That’s it?” Hawks hisses out from his clenched teeth, knuckles tight as he holds his primary in a vise grip. “You had me fly over two hundred kilometers in the snow to prove a point?” 

Dabi slides his phone into a pocket, the added weight pulling the fabric clinging to his hips down just a little bit. And Hawks dry swallows but holds his bored, half-lidded stare, doesn’t let his gaze dip any lower than that. “That’s the deal: you dance when I tell you to dance, you sing when I tell you to sing.” 

Off-duty Dabi is a fucking sight indeed, and Hawks is mad all over again that he kind of likes it. A lot. And those are certainly not thoughts befitting of someone who calls themselves a hero. It’s simpler, and always has been, to reduce his enemy to something monstrous. Makes the blood on his hands feel less filthy, makes him feel like the red in his ledger is worth more than the nightmares he has about the monsters he takes care of on the Commission’s behalf. 

Standing in a t-shirt two sizes too big and fucking sweatpants now sagging low enough on one side that the uppermost swell of a skinny hipbone is visible, looking as aloofly irritated as always doesn’t make Dabi look like something monstrous . It makes him look like a human being who just got up off his couch after getting bothered by his boss to make sure their pet hero still asks how high when they tell him to jump.

Villain, enemy, terrorist, murderer, psychopath, he reminds himself even as he lowers his blade. It doesn’t help that the casual bow of Dabi’s shoulders plucks at Hawks like he’s the bowstring. Or the way he regards Hawks with zero reverence, zero adoration, zero respect, just looks at him. It doesn’t matter if he’s kinda hot, literally, Dabi is very off-limits in about a million different ways. 

The flicker of anger at getting jerked around for the hell of it warms Hawks’ chest a bit. He uncurls his fingers one by one from his feather and lets it zip back into place. “Maybe I don’t feel like performing.” 

Not the right thing to say, he knows as soon as it’s left his stupid mouth. That’s his job, to perform: silently unless instructed otherwise. For the Commission, for the League, for whoever the highest bidder was, for whoever needed to be undermined for the greater good.

Dabi just smiles though, a little thing that plucks at his shiny cheeks, and tilts his head a bit like a curious animal. “That’s more like it. And here I’d thought you’d left your spine with that pathetic excuse of a number one hero back there in the street.” 

And Hawks has… no fucking idea what to do with that, and certainly nothing appropriate to say. He’s cold, he’s mad, he’s tired, his shoulder is starting to throb, he’s damp to the skin, and Dabi is just staring at him, through him. It’s unnerving and he feels utterly see-through and it’s probably nothing more than one big, stupid game of chicken and he refuses to be the first one to break.

Everything I do is in the name of advancing the League.

Sure, say that all you want.

It’s so much colder up on the roof, away from the warmth of any streetlights or open convenience store doors letting heat roll out, up where the wind has Hawks tucking his wings into his body and his stupid, wet excuse for a jacket as tightly as he can. The sooner he can get off this roof and away from this asshole he wants to throttle with his bare hands, the better. He definitely won’t get let into the League if he strangles his recruiter. 

“Is that it then?” He’s trying to hide the shivering but can’t quite tamp down the tremors coming up through his chest.

Dabi’s head tilts even further as he regards Hawks for a silent moment. In the steady downfall of snow, flakes have begun to pile in his black hair, turning patches of it an almost-white. “Do you patrol in Kyushu next week?” 

“Obviously.” It’s all he can do not to roll his eyes. It’s where his agency is, it’s where his routes usually are unless he’s covering for someone, this is all shit that the League knows, this is all shit that Dabi knows.  

“Stay away from the docks then.” 

Hawks narrows his eyes, tucks that away for later. He doesn’t have to be at the docks to patrol them next week and he sure won’t be turning a blind eye now. “No more Nomu.” 

“For now.” Great, more shady shit then, more late nights spreading him and his feathers thin to make sure nothing catastrophic happens on his watch. He’d known this mission was going to be a longshot at best and suicide at worst, but it was turning out to be twice as exhausting as he originally thought.

A stronger wind kicks up, sending the littered cans skittering a little, and the chill goes right through Hawks like an arrow. He jams his wings against his body and hunkers into his damp jacket. Dabi just stands there, in his t-shirt, in his short goddamned sleeves, still staring, and doesn’t so much as twitch. “Aren’t you fucking freezing?”

Dabi blinks at the question, expression that of practiced blankness, covering up whatever reaction he might have had. “No, I’m sorta resistant to the cold.” 

Right, fire quirk, what a dumb question. He’d just assumed that must mean he’d be vulnerable to the cold, but he must have been mistaken. Just Hawks then who gets to be fucking miserable at the League’s behest. 

As if watching him shiver isn’t doing it for him, Dabi waves him away with all the energy somebody would shoo a street pigeon getting too close. “If you fly back to your cage just as fast, I won’t even have wasted an hour of your precious time, hero.” 

There’s no use pressing him for further information or purpose: there really probably is none. He wouldn’t put it past Shigaraki to try and test his loyalty at the most inconvenient times moving forward. And all he’s likely to do is piss Dabi off if he keeps prying.

So, Hawks unfurls his wings, and even they quiver a bit in the cold and the snow still clinging to downy feathers, nearly iced near the scapulars at his back. He’s got half a mind to flip Dabi the bird, just to be tongue-in-cheek about the whole fucking thing, but resists. He bends his knees a little, tries to roll out his aching left shoulder subtly, and takes off from right there, from all of three feet away, so that the full backblast of air on the rooftop is an utter barrage against the asshole who just made him fly through snow. 

Dabi throws an arm up against the gale as it blows his hair back and whips his shirt around. Lifts it enough that Hawks can see the curve of where marred skin is stapled to pale skin across the stretch of his abdomen. Nope, nope, nope, bad, absolutely not.

“Fucker,” Dabi shouts up at him, scowling as Hawks offers up a salute for a goodbye. It almost makes what’s sure to be a freezing cold flight home worth it.

Almost.

~

“Press skip on the ad already, Toga, my fingers are starting to cramp.” 

“I’m trying, I’m trying!” She mashes at the tiny button in the corner of her phone’s screen, skipping past a fast-food ad and back to the third tutorial they were trying to make sense of. 

Hawks had done a lot of things in his time as a hero, unspeakable things sometimes, in the name of the greater good, no matter what it cost him personally. When the Commission had put him up to this, infiltrating the League to feed information back to them from center stage of the underbelly, he’d quietly made his peace that he’d likely do some more shit that would haunt him for years to come. Espionage wasn’t for the faint of heart after all. 

Learning to braid the hair of a seventeen-year-old girl for the first time is another thing for him to add to that list, although the unspeakable things might come soon if he can’t figure out how the fuck to do it. 

Toga is sitting on the floor in front of the couch, her hair piled in Hawks’ lap as she picks her phone up off the coffee table again and holds it aloft and angled so that they can both see it. Spread out on the table is an arsenal of nonsense, brushes and combs and small hair ties and ones that are thicker, a scrunchie Toga insists it’s called. His gloves, visor, and headphones are stacked in the corner, out of the way of their array of tools. Hawks takes a deep breath, ungloved hands hovering over the blond hair piled on his legs and waits for Toga to press play again.

“Start by sectioning the hair into two equal parts…”

A door somewhere in the warehouse groans as it’s either opened or closed, Hawks can’t exactly tell since he hasn’t spread many feathers around tonight to keep watch, as he parts Toga’s hair down the middle right at the nape of her slim neck. He was supposed to meet Dabi tonight, he’s always supposed to meet with Dabi despite being let into the League and having no need for the asshole as his only point of contact anymore. Even accepted as Hawks was now, Dabi was still trying to play games with him it seemed. It’d been Spinner that had opened the door for him. He’d been on his way out, and it was only Toga in their makeshift living room when he’d walked in and no one else. 

“Then grab a small section of hair from the outside on the left…” 

“No, no, no, go back. Wait, hang on,” he mutters, staring down at the mess he’s already made again.  “No, back like five seconds, not thirty. Shit, did she say under or over?” 

The door to the living room opens softly as Hawks is leaning forward, holding Toga’s parted hair in one hand and trying to drag the time bar to exactly where he wants to go on the video while she holds her phone steady for him.

“What in the shitting hell are you two doing?” 

Hawks’ head snaps towards the sound, feathers rustling at the intrusion. Being in a literal villain’s lair without much of a guard up has to go on record for the stupidest thing he’s done recently. Somehow being here among the League, a roomful of active combatants whose worst crime when they were all in a room together was their terrible jokes, has made him a little too comfortable. 

It’s only Dabi standing in the doorway, hand still on the knob, as he takes in the scene of Hawks and Toga on the couch. It’s safe to assume he’s been up to no good, Hawks can see a darkened smear of ash across the healthy skin of his left cheek from here and the open door lets the air roll in, carrying the usual musty smell of the warehouse and the warm smell of fresh smoke. Blue eyes dart between them before settling on Hawks, and one stupid, thin eyebrow goes up in demand of an answer.

“Washing her car, obviously, you—” Hawks starts to say, frustration at being unable to do what looked so damn easy and getting caught off guard reaching its peak, at the same time as Toga speaks up too.

“Hawksie is braiding my hair! Isn’t he just the nicest?” she coos as she gives Dabi her usual toothy smile. Hawks struggles to hang on to the way he’s got her hair separated as she starts moving her head. “I didn’t even have to threaten him!” 

“You threw a knife at me when I walked in here, you gremlin.” Said knife is still impaled in the wall just to the right of the door, a sure sign that she’d only been having some fun at Hawks’ expense. In the times he’s seen her fight, he’s rarely seen her miss. 

Dabi approaches the couch slowly like they’re two startled animals he’s cornered, like he’s not over an hour late as to when he told Hawks to meet him, and Hawks can do nothing but just stare at him because this is exactly what it looks like. It’s Hawks, a freshly minted villain by the League’s standards, watching video tutorials with their youngest member and trying to braid her hair on a perfectly respectable Saturday night instead of being… out in the city, stopping crimes or crashing bars with hero friends. And the worst part is that he’s perfectly happy about that because he’s exhausted from patrolling all week and bars are loud and overstimulating, no matter how many free drinks Mirko plies him with. 

Dabi looks down at the utter, knotted mess Hawks has made of Toga’s hair, squinting at it like Hawks has woven some sort of secret Commission code into it. “Move, pigeon. You’ve fucked it all up.” 

“We’re following a tutorial!” he says, and there’s no defense for what he’s done, but he’ll be damned if he lets Dabi of all people drag him for trying.

“You’ve already proven you can’t take simple directions.” 

Dabi’s fingers brush against his, swelteringly warm to the touch as he gathers up the hair from Hawks’ hands. Heat rises to his cheeks as he’s shouldered aside gently, forced to scoot to the edge of the couch to free up space. And Dabi steps across the couch with his boots still on like some sort of heathen until he sits down precisely where Hawks had just been, bracketing Toga’s small shoulders in with his denim-clad knees. 

It’s been happening too often that it almost feels like these are the new hoops Dabi has him jumping through to prove his loyalty despite having already been let in, for the most part. Little things, like standing too close, a shoulder bumping against his as he walked Hawks out, the too-warm brush of his fingers when Hawks handed documents over. The terrible bird-puns, the coy looks, the barrage of text messages in place of the read receipts he used to get. Like his tolerance is being tested almost, his patience needled. Hawks is hardly a stranger to casual touch: fans always wanted to shake his hand or hug him or pull on his damn wings, lingering longer than was appropriate just because he was so bad at boundaries where the public was concerned. He’s a stranger to fleeting touch, like a ghost, there and gone, so light, so quick, it’s like he’s imagined it.

If it were a field of study, Dabi was a master and Hawks was very, very out of his depth and treading so hard just to keep his head above water and his thoughts where they belonged. And either the water was getting higher lately or Hawks’ legs were starting to get tired from keeping himself afloat. Enjoying his stupid comments, and whip-smart humor, and the dumb pet names, and his shiny, stapled together face is very much not part of the mission.

Dabi looks down at the mess the two of them have made, what definitely amounts to knots and not a braid, pulling it this way and that until Hawks realizes he’s trying to see if their work is even salvageable. It must not be because he frowns before shaking it all out and raking his fingers through it to smooth out any snarls. Gently, so gently, he gathers it all up again so it’s all flat against her back.

Deft fingers weave through the blonde hair that Hawks had already brushed out to a shining gleam, pulling strands from underneath with a flash of black-painted nails. Toga’s hair isn’t all that long to begin with. Fully brushed out, it sits just at her skinny shoulder blades. Under, up, over, under, up over, from the back of her head as far as he can go, Dabi braids her hair without so much as a pause. 

He taps at Toga’s shoulder when he reaches a point that he can’t braid it together any further, sticking a hand out, palm up, where she can see it in her peripherals. With unspoken understanding, she drops one of the smaller hair ties into his waiting hand. 

Hawks sits upright from his new corner on the couch, one wing splayed out over the back of it, the other piled on the couch cushion behind him. Dabi’s gaze slides in his direction at the sound of rustling feathers as Hawks leans forward in awe and now, more than a little annoyed.

“How the hell did you know how to do that?” he demands, because it’s perfect. It looks just like every single stupid video tutorial they’d been watching in the last half hour. “Toga, you told me you’d never done this before!”

“I haven’t!” she says, running a pale hand down the back of her head, feeling out the braid. Dabi slaps her fingers away before she can mess with it.

“My sister always liked to have her hair braided,” Dabi offers up.

Sister, is the first word Hawks’ brain clings to. Sister, sister, sister, Dabi had a sister. Dabi, skulking, nasty-tempered, perma-loner Dabi had a sibling. 

Liked, is the second word that Hawks’ wild thoughts hit like a metaphorical wall. Past tense. She was dead then. 

Was this what had led the villain down the path he was currently on? Had she been killed? Caught up in something where a hero couldn’t save her? Is that why Dabi hated heroes so vehemently? Because one of them had failed to save his sister, had failed him in turn, leaving him to spit venom at their hero-centric society as he tried to claw it all apart?

Or, maybe, she was just dead to Dabi. 

And wouldn’t that make it all the more complicated. Maybe she herself was a hero. Maybe Dabi had grown up to scorn everything she stood for. 

It’s hard to picture a before for Dabi anyway, and this new sibling reveal still doesn’t make it any easier. It’s hard to imagine that Dabi was a whole person once, literally: unscarred, unbroken, untainted by the shitheap their world and country had become over the years. That he’d been young once, young and impressionable and fragile, that he’d been just a kid. Hawks can’t fathom what he must have lost, or what he must have got tired of not having, that remolded him into this. 

He tries to picture Dabi again, without the garish purple scars, with just soft pale skin and those blue eyes and his dark hair. But he can’t, Hawks can’t picture him any other way and instead he’s just sat on the couch in the rundown warehouse the League called home, watching as a very scarred Dabi expertly wraps Toga’s hair tie around her perfectly fishtailed braid.

“Aww, I just knew you had shitlord, older brother vibes,” Hawks finds himself saying, brain not quite fast enough to catch his mouth. 

Who are you, he thinks, and not for the first time. Who were you? Why does no one know? 

“Dabi, Dabi, Dabi, take a picture please! I wanna see!” 

And he takes her phone without complaint and goes so far as to lean back a bit so he can get a proper photo of his work. Her baby pink phone case with the whole mess of charms looped through the top corner is laughable in his scarred hands.

Maybe the long-lost sister is why he dotes on Toga like he does, though the others seem to as well, in their own odd ways. Even though Dabi makes it a part-time job to keep every last one of them at arm’s length, like some sort of feral animal, hissing and spitting in warning. Hawks has noticed, it’s his job to notice even the littlest of things. Toga and her new jacket, the same soft pink that she said reminded her of the love of her life, whoever that poor soul might be. Toga and all her very obviously stolen skincare products because she really is just a teenage girl living in a fucking dilapidated building with no semblance of normal childhood. (Not that Hawks had any stones to throw in that particular glass house.) The snacks, the cellphone charms, all the paying attention when she was rambling on about whoever she’d set her heart –or knives– on that week. 

Dabi slides a gaze as blue and frigid as a glacier over to him, a look that promises pain if he keeps running his mouth, and hands Toga her phone back. Her squeal of delight almost drowns his next words out entirely. “I never said I was an older brother.” 

Hawks likes to think he’s become rather good at Dabi’s little back and forth game though and just gives him an easy grin. “You can’t fool me, man.”

Toga shoots to her feet and does some little high-stepping dance in a circle before clapping Dabi’s scarred cheeks in both her hands and jiggling them. “You’re the best older brother I never had, Dabi! You have to do my hair like this all the time now!” And she’s off with a literal skip in her step, calling out for Twice as she prances out of the room, leaving Hawks alone with the guy trying to epitomize if looks could kill.

“I won’t tell,” Hawks promises, miming zipping his mouth shut as he sinks into his corner of the couch, settling one arm across the back of it alongside his wing. Inside, he feels like a hive of bees that’s been awoken, head buzzing under the unwavering attention of that blistering gaze. His fingers are still tingling too, just a little. “I’m good at keeping secrets.” 

“Yeah?” Dabi leers at him, lip curling back in a sneer as he leans in towards Hawks. And there it is again, it keeps happening. The draw, the push-pull of an interest he has no business having. It still feels like a game, and it shouldn’t. It’s a dangerous one to be playing with himself, knowing what he does, plotting what he’s supposed to. “And whose secrets do you keep, Hawks?” 

Does this make him like his mother, he’s started to wonder? Attracted to someone literally no good for him, a villain, someone actively on the run, who will never be able to wash his hands of the things he’s done and live in the light? He’s stopped runaway trains before, but he doesn’t know what else to compare this utter sense of helplessness to. Is he doomed to make the mistakes of his mother? 

It’s too easy to push right back though. To stretch his legs out across the couch until the soles of his boots are almost pressed up against Dabi’s stitched up jeans and his warm thigh just beneath. To make a show of adjusting his wings so he can lean back more comfortably, the soft ends of some of his primaries brushing over the leather sleeve of Dabi’s coat. He doesn’t look away, doesn’t even blink, but Hawks watches his eyes darken, watches his head tilt just a little bit further, waiting for an answer. Hawks pulls at the tight collar of his compression shirt, feeling so exposed even though the only things he’s taken off so far are his visor, his headphones, and his gloves a whole hour ago. Dabi’s gaze dips to track the movement of his fingers before sliding back up, slow as molasses. It makes his pulse stutter in ways he’s not used to, ways that make him feel almost giddy, unmoored.

“Whose secrets do you want me to keep?” 

Dabi pivots, twisting far enough that he can grab Hawks’ ankle, right where his boot gives way to his calf. His touch burns even through the thin material of his pantleg, pale, pretty fingers with painted nails gently wrapping around, thumb ghosting up and down his shin. The touch jolts right up his bones and into his chest, feathers quivering involuntarily at the sensation. Gentle, so gentle, at odds with the ash smudged on his cheek that speaks of nothing but violence. Hawks’ train of thought, all the smart things he could have said, screeches to a sharp halt, and all he has left to give is a bit of an open-mouthed stare. 

That’s a new one, he thinks. Tender, human touch rendering him speechless, just as Dabi’s hand closes firmly over his calf and he yanks. Hawks goes sliding across the cushions with an undignified squawk until his back is nearly flat on the couch. Dabi pins his leg between him and the back cushions, and his other hand moves to grip the outside of Hawks’ thigh. 

Heat that has nothing to do with the fire-quirk user currently manhandling him singes the nerve endings everywhere he’s being touched, sears all higher, logical thought from his brain. He doesn’t even register that he’s grabbed ahold of the lapels of Dabi’s coat, like an instinct to have a hand on his enemy just to redirect his attack, until he moves to pull them back. To put them up in apology, to laugh it off, to give a good TV smile and a joke. Only he just about drags Dabi up his body like he means it.

A hand hastily slams down one side of his head for balance, dipping the cushion awkwardly, and Hawks can smell the smoke clearly now. Like a forest fire hovering over him, all intoxicating heat and the promise of destruction. 

Dabi looks twice as surprised as Hawks feels, gaze of heavy-lidded blue blown wide and there’s a delicious looking flush to the pale, healthy skin of his cheeks and across his pierced nose now. Bad, bad, that’s cute, he’s more bark than he is bite, that’s really bad. That’s not helping at all. 

They’ve never been this close before. Hawks had assumed that he’d be warm, that he’d radiate heat just like his hands seem to do sometimes, but he doesn’t. He just smells of burning wood and hot metal, alive despite the scars and the staples holding him together. Only his hand grasping Hawks’ thigh is hot, warm through even the thick canvas fabric of his pants. 

“None of them,” Dabi whispers, and Hawks can’t even remember what the question was anymore. 

Part of the mission, for the greater good, Hawks starts to chant in his head as he looks at Dabi. He doesn’t know how to stop looking. There isn’t just one thing to stare at. Bad, bad, bad, part of the mission, for the greater good.  

“Want you to tell me every last one.” Dabi’s head dips along with the rest of his body.

The Commission doesn’t need to know everything, right? They certainly don’t show him all the cards they’re holding. He’s just their canary they’ve sent into this coal mine. He’ll feed them all the information he can get his grubby little spy hands on, just like they asked. They’ve never cared how the mission gets done, just that it does. This could be an angle he works all on his own. And wouldn’t they be so proud. Then they both get what they want. Part of the mission, for the greater good.

So, Hawks tightens his hold on Dabi’s jacket until the leather crinkles in his hands, drops his gaze to the one part of Dabi’s face he’s been trying not to stare at, and pulls him closer. “You tell me yours, and I’ll tell you mine.” 

~

It takes just a second for him to register the threat. 

Dabi, with his back turned, torching a nearby enemy. He’s overheated already, has been for almost ten minutes, smoke curling from the seams of his wrists, rising from his chest in thick wisps. Hawks can smell the burning, the charcoal-heavy scent of cooking flesh laced sharp with the metallic tang of blood. He’s too focused on what’s in front of him to realize what’s behind him: a guy with fists like battering rams, charging at him like a frenzied animal. 

He can see it all from up here, right as the guy drops into a slide, and his feet connect with Dabi’s, unbalancing him. He lands hard on one shoulder, rolling until he’s on his back and can get another hand up in the air to attack. The guy towering over him has already drawn one of those deadly fists back, cocked for a punch meant to kill. 

And Hawks dives, wings tucked tight, dropping out of the sky like a comet, feathered blade arcing out to slice the man’s throat so deeply he nearly decapitates him before his boots even connect with his shoulder, kicking the already lifeless body to the side.  

Dabi eases himself up onto one elbow, chest heaving with labored breaths, lying in the ashes of the body he’d burned, smoke rippling out of the crisscrossing lines of his chest and hands. Blood is splattered across the mismatched skin of his right cheek, across his mouth, in his mouth, it’s on his teeth, down his scarred throat and exposed chest, blossoming like little poppy flowers across his white shirt. It’s in his hair, soaking some of it to a dark shine where the sweat-matted fringe is stuck to his temples, exposing his forehead where more blood drips across his eyebrow, trailing across the bridge of his nose to trickle down across his other cheek from the angle he leans at.

He’s staring up at Hawks, eyes wild around the corners with shock and what he realizes with a jolt is fear. His gas flame blue gaze darts from the primary feather Hawks is holding over him, blood soaked down to the rachis, and over to the body face down on the concrete just a few feet away, an almost comically large pool of red growing around him, before spitting into the ash smeared beneath him, and looking back up.

“That was really gross,” he gasps out, face twisting with disgust. There’s still blood in his mouth that doesn’t belong to him. 

“The words you’re looking for are ‘Thank you, Hawks, you’re the most super, amazing person ever’.” 

Hawks feels wet as he reaches his free hand out to offer Dabi a leg up. He feels wet, filthy, soaked in the blood still dripping off his feather. 

It should have been no choice at all to leave Dabi to his fate, to let that other villain make a sidewalk pancake out of his pretty face. To tell the League, to tell the PLF, that he just wasn’t fast enough to save him. He could have really hammed it up, shed some tears even, vowed vengeance, vowed violence in place of their fallen lieutenant. Could have reported to the Commission that one of the enemy’s leaders had been eliminated. One less villain, one less weapon in the arsenal of the enemy, the cost of one life to save what would probably be countless future ones. It’s how it should have happened.

Hindsight isn’t helping Hawks swallow past the lump in his throat as Dabi grabs ahold of his gloved forearm, hands still so hot he can feel them through his leather, and he hefts the other man to his feet.

Hawks all but drags him behind the dumpster between two buildings on the edge of the intersection the fight had erupted in. Heroes will be coming soon, if not nearly here already. He hopes whatever it is that Twice and Spinner broke into that building for is worth it with the scene they’ve caused now. The smoke from Dabi’s fires is rising steadily from the smoldering remains and the screaming hasn’t quite died down.

Dabi is still holding Hawks’ arm, grip tight as though he’s afraid Hawks will make a run for it if he lets go. He leans against the stone wall of the store, head tipped back as he breathes heavily. The blood spattered down his throat glistens darkly against the gnarled purple of his scars, like a wash of precious gems. Hawks’ pocket has started to buzz, a sure sign that any and all heroes in the area are being alerted to the situation, the one he’d just helped cause. 

He dumps a few feathers, sending them as covertly as he can down the other alleyways and back into the intersection, down the other avenues that lead to the scene of their crime. He can hear chatter of people nearby yelling out to someone, though he can’t tell if it’s to each other or to a hero that’s arrived. Either way, it’s time to go. 

He tugs on Dabi’s wrist, pulling him away from the wall a bit. Hawks really did do a number on him with the blood, it’s… everywhere. The white of his shirt looks more like a crime scene than the actual intersection. Dabi probably feels as gross as he does and Hawks isn’t even the one wearing all that blood. “I can fly you back, if you want?” he offers like an almost-apology. “Twice and Spinner are already gone, we shouldn’t hang around here much longer.” 

“Pass,” Dabi exhales and the smoke rising in thick curls from the seam across his collarbones has died down to nearly nothing.

Hawks frowns. “You’re not seriously gonna walk all the way back to the damn mansion like that, are you? You’re just begging to get caught.” 

“No,” he scoffs, taking the heel of his palm to his chin to get the blood, and effectively smearing it like some child’s cursed fingerpainting. He settles for thumbing back some of the hair stuck to his temple and it stays slicked to the top of his head, exposing a sliver of the pale skin of his forehead and the thin eyebrow beneath it. 

“Y’all get a chauffeur and not tell me? That’s cold. Re-Destro is gonna bankroll you guys until you’re spoiled rotten.” Dabi looks towards the mess they’ve made of the street as he fiddles with the collar of his coat, and Hawks knows that gesture. “Ugh, you’d rather spew sludge than get a free ride?”

Blue eyes snap back to him, a scowl pulling down the corners of his pretty mouth, the staples digging into his cheeks with the movement. “I get motion sickness, alright? Cars, trains, and probably feathers. Wouldn’t wanna ruin the upholstery.” He eyes the length of Hawks’ wings warily. 

“Since when?” Hawks balks, calling a few feathers back as he crosses his arms over his chest. “I’ve seen Spinner drive you guys around, you can’t fool me.” 

“Since I was a kid, asshole.” Dabi, the king of unnecessary and prolonged eye contact, refuses to look at him. “Car rides always meant doctor’s appointments, sometimes the hospital.” 

Hawks can’t help but stare, even if Dabi still won’t meet his eye. He was a lockbox on the best of days, a certified vault of three-foot thick concrete walls and a door rigged to blow if you so much as touched him the wrong way. He’d gotten… better at sharing things about himself. Less careful, more open in moments when it was just the two of them. Hawks has tried not to push, not to pry, it’s not like he’s been overtly forthcoming with information about himself either. There might be something resembling an odd, mangled form of trust between them now, but it was far from ironclad. It was a dance, and he and Dabi were making up the steps as they went.

“And Spinner almost kills us every time he gets behind the fucking wheel. I’m pretty sure he never got a real license and his only driving experience is from GTA.”

Doctor’s appointments since he was a child had to mean one of only a few things: he’d been a sickly kid (not an unreasonable assumption considering how skinny he still is), or he’s been suffering from overuse of his quirk for much longer than Hawks assumed. It’s no secret now that he’s up close and personal that Dabi’s body doesn’t seem to handle his fire very well. And by very well, he kind of thinks not at all judging by the huge swaths of scarred skin that cover him. They’re all over, no part or limb of him had been left untouched. Inching just a little bit further every time Dabi pushes himself too far. Stretches of scars across his torso and back, up and down his legs, sparing some of the delicate parts of him like his feet and the back of his knees. 

Hawks is intimately familiar now with how little sensation those scarred, barely healed parts of Dabi have. Pressure, sure, but almost no pain. Hawks has inferred that’s how he’s able to fight as hard and sometimes as long as he does despite the outright damage it causes him: he can’t feel it. They’ve accidentally ripped staples on his calf before and Dabi never even noticed. It was Hawks who’d spotted the streak of blood in the sheets that hadn’t been there and figured something wasn’t right.

How long has he been like this? How come no one has turned on the five o’clock news and recognized their son, their brother, their former classmate even? 

The Commission had nothing on him. Dabi’s folder that had been handed to Hawks, alongside all the other members of the League at the time when he’d taken this mission, had been paper-thin with all of three sheets of information in it. Two of which had been grainy photos and the other being full of a bunch of blank guestimations as to his age and Quirk. No medical records for a child covered in fourth degree burns, no school records, fire quirks were a dime a dozen but surely someone had evidence of a child lobbing around fireballs that burned hotter than lava, but no. Nothing, they had nothing.

Who are you?  

“You don’t have a license either,” is all Hawks can choke out to keep the conversation going. 

“Somehow puking on the windshield seems like a bigger road hazard than whatever the fuck Spinner does.” Dabi seems to have given up trying to wipe the blood off him, realizing finally just how much there actually is. 

“Fine, have it your way,” Hawks concedes, calling the rest of his feathers back to him. They’re here, someone is at least, in the far corner of the intersection, directing bystanders away. It’s time to go. He can spiral some more about who might have medically traumatized Dabi as a child later. “Sludge your way back home now. Before the upholstery is the least of your problems.” 

Dabi tilts forward, hand still gripping his glove, he hasn’t let go since Hawks hauled him to his feet, and Hawks is drawn in like the ocean beckoned to high tide by the moon, caught up in the gravity of something larger. Easy, it’s so easy to lean into him, so easy to give in and— 

He stops short, lips just a hair’s breadth away from Dabi’s. “You’ve still got blood on your mouth,” Hawks whispers. “And in it.” 

“Your fault,” Dabi murmurs back, wrinkling his nose so he can bare his reddened teeth in some sort of comical grimace. And that’s sure a look, between the dark scars and the shining staples and the cosmically impossible blue of his eyes, wearing the blood of a dead man like a bib down his throat and chest. Hawks kind of wants to shove him right back up against that wall and show him how good of a look he thinks that is, but they haven’t the time.

“I can make it up to you later, if you like.” 

“I expect you to,” he says, mischief curling one corner of his mouth up and he lifts the gloved hand he’d been holding and plants a blood-wet kiss to Hawks’ palm. He doesn’t linger, stepping back to thumb at the collar of his coat again, whispering into it, but a dangerous sort of warmth has already sunk into Hawks’ guts.

He looks away, he can’t stand to watch any of them, least of all Dabi, spew that oil-spill like mud. Such a gross way to travel. He waits until he hears the wet slap of the filthy remnants splatter across the sidewalk before turning back around. Just a splash of dark liquid is all that remains, spread almost artfully across the concrete. 

Like blood on the pavement. 

I could have let him die, he thinks, and it’s a backburner sort of thought, one that bubbles up from the depths of his subconscious, unbidden. I should have let him die and I didn’t. And the bile rises in Hawks throat, and he’s quick to bend over the dumpster and retch into it, narrowly avoiding his own boots. 

He’s killed before, of course he has. He’s killed so many people in the name of the greater good of society that he’s run out of fingers and toes to count them all. It’s nothing new and it’s nothing special, not anymore. He’s always tried to be quick, efficient, as clean as he could be, he didn’t like needless suffering. He could end a life in a blink, it didn’t have to be messy, it didn’t have to be brutal, and it was never personal. Compartmentalize, reacknowledge that his actions are justified, sanctioned, tuck it away, don’t think about it. 

The body still smoldering in the ruined intersection, the one whose head he’d nearly sliced clean off, might have died quickly but it had been very, very personal. And Dabi, without Hawks having noticed, had covered up any and all evidence that anyone other than him had committed such an atrocity by burning the guy to charcoal, right there in the puddle of his own blood. There’s nothing to say Hawks was ever there. 

It’s over.

Don’t think about it.

He’s already dead.

The reasons don’t matter now.

He’s dead and Dabi is still alive.

That’s it. That’s all that matters.

He’s afraid if he holds up those actions to the light, he’ll see right through them to what they really mean.

~ 

“I exist for one purpose only,” he hears Dabi drawl. 

“Oh yeah?” Hawks says, adjusting his grip on the half-empty can of cold brew. He’s sat up above the door onto the rooftop where they’d agreed to meet like old times, outside of the busy, ever-crowded villa for once. He’s supposed to be on patrol, and is still, technically. But it’s hard to resist the siren’s call of his pretty arsonist when he decides to drop by.

He can’t even remember what they were talking about, what led Dabi to making such a ridiculous declaration. He expects another joke, of course, considering Dabi is a master of turning one sentence into an entire fucking riddle. 

He’s not stupid enough not to take Dabi seriously. He’s learned rather intimately over the last few months just how unserious the villain is about too many things. About violence, about the downfall of all heroes, about his own god damn life. The things he did care about, tea being made at the proper temperature, no baths, only showers because baths meant soaking all his staples because his body was like one open wound, books that smelled of old paper and leather, clean sheets, the stars on a crisp, cloudless night, cold soba, he’s almost as vehemently outspoken about. 

He’d read the basically non-existent file that the Commission gave him long ago, of course. The not knowing –who Dabi really is, why he joined the League beyond the usual line of villain propaganda, what his life was like before now– is what made him the most approachable to Hawks in the beginning. As far as trying to infiltrate their little den of violence goes, Hawks had decided the brooding, unbudging pyromaniac was his easiest in, even if took time to weave a convincing enough lie. 

What had… become of them in the months since is nothing he’d planned on and everything he’d become desperate not to lose. 

A game he was never going to win anyway.

Regardless, he knew that ninety percent of the shit that came out of Dabi’s ruined mouth was a joke or a jab or some scathing remark dressed up as an outright threat. But when he says shit like this… 

“And what’s that?” he glances down to Dabi’s arms slung over the railing that extended from one side of the rooftop door, casual and unbothered as always.

He watches the afternoon breeze ruffle his dark hair just a bit as he tips his head back in Hawks’ upward direction. In another life, he’s devastating: tall and lean and self-assured, with such lovely, pale skin unmarred from years of constant quirk overuse. In this life, he’s devastating and terrifying, a literal, walking warning of the lengths he’s willing to go to get what he wants. And Hawks’ ability to protect and defend clearly does not extend to the whims of the feelings he pretends not to have, even now. His eyes burn like his fire does, brilliant and all-consuming as he looks up at Hawks.

“To be the number one Hero.” And the smile he gives Hawks, all bright teeth, so wide a few of the staples that line the corners of his mouth and march up his cheeks in perfectly spaced lines like little soldiers pull at either end of the skin they tether together. 

It’s… an awful look. Unhinged, but Dabi has never seemed like all his marbles are in the same bag. Unfortunate that Hawks is really kind of into it. And he’s already acutely aware of his counterpart’s feelings about heroes, he’s made enough of his opinions known over time. He used to spit the very word in Hawks’ direction as if it’s the worst curse he knows. 

“Ha-ha, so funny,” Hawks grumbles, tipping his head and his can of cold brew back so he can finish it off. With everything unfolding and so quickly, his patrol hours had gotten longer, the late nights turning into early mornings some days. More often than not, by the time he drags himself back to his apartment, the sun is already starting to come up.

“You don’t think so?” Dabi hums. He’s still looking at Hawks. He can feel the singe of that gaze in his bones. “I think it’s a joke to die for.”

Hawks can think of about four different and immediate things that mouth could be doing that isn’t blurting out stupid nonsense, but he keeps them to himself. He’s not here to start an argument, not if he can help it. He’s here to soak up all the attention that Dabi will give him, to monopolize and hoard whatever time he’s willing to spend with Hawks. 

He’s not here to think about what could have been, in another life, in another universe maybe. One where he and Dabi aren’t on opposite sides of the law. One where he knows Dabi’s name, one where he can stand by Dabi’s side and not worry about who sees them, one where maybe they seesaw back and forth in a race against each other for that number one spot, one where their every minute together didn’t feel rushed, didn’t feel stolen. He’s here to be greedy, to take what’s willingly given until every last grain of sand in the hourglass of their doomed end falls to the bottom. 

Next week. 

The raid on the Villa, and the hospital, will go down with express intent to arrest any and all members of the Paranormal Liberation Front next week. A joint effort between the police force and the heroes, all thanks to that little tidbit of information Jin had let slip to Hawks a few months ago.

Which meant that next week, Dabi is going to do his absolute, level best to kill him. 

If he can get to him. 

The sheer number of pro-heroes and police that are going to be present is wild. They’ve even dragged in those poor UA kids as standbys in the forest should any villain break through their assault. They’ve seen more than what’s fair for just teenagers, and just knowing Tokoyami is going to be out there too has Hawks’ stomach twisted up in knots. Dabi will have to get through all of them, or sneak by, just to get to Hawks.  

And Hawks already has his own marching orders: detain and neutralize Twice by any means necessary. 

He’ll be there for their meeting, to finalize and set in motion all their plans before Shigaraki wakes, their poster child defector. As far as any of them know, Hawks is a turncoat, in bed with one of their lieutenants, and about to shake the foundations of hero-society by revealing his change of sides in the fight to come.

Lies, lies, it’s all lies, it’s been nothing but lies the whole time.

Well, almost all of it.

He was never supposed to get emotionally involved. Fucking a villain was not part of the mission debrief he’d received at the beginning of all this. Practically living out of said villain’s bedroom in the mountain estate instead of in his own swanky apartment was never supposed to happen either. He was never supposed to feel safe, feel content, feel loved. The last few months, despite exhausting and working himself to the bone living two lives, are the happiest he’s ever been. It’s almost enough to consider chucking it all away and seeing just how much of that happiness he can cling to. Almost.

Which meant that next week, Hawks would give up the one little slice of peace he’d carved out of this wretched world for the greater good. The needs of one could never outweigh the needs of the many. He’d been courting violence since childhood, buying, bartering, and begging for it at every turn it seemed. At least in this too he’d be consistent. 

“I guess… they’ll come after me too for this,” he says, staring down into the black abyss of his empty coffee can. He can just picture Mirko’s face when she learns why he’s been dodging her every lunch invitation or bar night for the last six months. He could blame it on this mission, but a solid eighty percent of that ‘mission’ is standing right next to him. 

“What?” Dabi’s still looking up at him, but the glee at his stupid joke has leaked out of his gaze entirely. Now he’s staring with furrowed brows and a wrinkle across his fine-boned nose that speaks of not just confusion, but anger. 

Right, that probably doesn’t make much sense when half of it was internalized. Dabi had been the one to ask to meet on the roof though, claiming he was tired of the over-planning and loud fuckery of the villa. And the villa really is loud, brimming with villains at all hours, but so is Hawks’ head anymore. He’s grateful to be alone with Dabi, but there’s still so, so much noise.

“I’m… not who they think I am. This was all I’ve existed for, for so long, for so many years. I mean, it figures, I can’t stay a hero forever.” He crushes the empty coffee can against his knee and smiles down at Dabi, an empty offering. “When the Commission gets wind of this, hoo, there’ll be a target on my back the size of Mt. Fuji. They gotta catch me first, I guess, but… I wonder if they’ll bounty me. How much do you think I’m worth? I got so close to your number one spot too, so it’s gotta be a couple million, right?” 

“Birdie—” he starts to say, and Hawks throws his crushed can in the air so he can kick it with the toe of his boot. It goes skittering across the rooftop but not over. It just becomes a fixed point in the distance that he can stare at, so he doesn’t have to look Dabi in the eye.

“Either it all folds or they fold, and I’m not worth the whole damn thing going ass over tea kettle for if they can help it.” 

Dabi’s mad now, if the smoke that curls out of his mouth when he opens it is anything to go by. “This is not some sort of… recompense for what you have to do to make people see the truth, for what you had to do to survive.” 

This being losing his friends and his colleagues and his mentors, having them turn on him, he assumes. Not the ones he’d made accidentally in Dabi, in Twice, in Toga, in Compress, in Spinner, hell even in Shigaraki. Which, if he was serious, if this was really happening, they would. Those heroes would turn on him in a heartbeat. Some of them might hesitate, he likes to think some of them would hesitate… but they couldn’t afford to for long.

And this being the sole purpose of Hawks’ existence since he was six. He’d told Dabi the basics, albeit vaguely, of his life. Of being ‘recruited’ by the Commission as a child, trained in isolation, and brutally for years, molded and crafted to be a hero. Succeed or die. Of being under their thumb in every way imaginable, of being nothing more than their puppet, of being their pretty bird in a cage that they let out to wow the public and fight regardless of the odds. Salt in the wound for the silly pet names Dabi called him. The silly pet names he’d kind of grown to enjoy, not that he’d admit that under anything less than torture. 

“It stands to reason—”

“What the fuck, no it doesn’t.” With a little hop that’s more endearing than it is threatening, Dabi grabs ahold of his ankle and yanks. As if he’s gonna drag Hawks down from his perch, but he barely scooches forward, and Dabi seems mollified enough to just hold him with a grip like a vise and glare up at him, uncharacteristically mad. “I don’t think the universe operates on a debt system, Hawks. There’s no version of this world where you deserve to lose what you’ve lost.” 

“And how does that work?” he asks, and his chest feels like scrambled eggs, broken open and seeping, and now he can’t look away from Dabi. 

So, he doesn’t miss the way Dabi flinches, the way he practically recoils from the question, the way his eyes go a little wide, a little too much white around the blue. Because that’s not the preach he’s been practicing, not at all. Dabi on his best days is a walking vendetta, a knife meant to be stuck between the ribs, he’s sharpened the edges of himself on everyone and everything in his life, uncaring of who he cuts on the way to his mark. And he stares up at Hawks as Hawks stares down at him, as the hand he’s got wrapped around Hawks’ ankle grows warmer with the seconds that tick by. 

“It just does. Become the debt system. Do it to them before they do it to you.” Sound advice from a guy who acts as if he’s got absolutely nothing he cares about to lose.

“Is that what you’re doing?” 

They don’t ever talk about it. They dance around it like it’s a spring trap in their dance floor, spinning and twirling and circling it but never on it. It’s been there since they took each other’s hands, since they started this death waltz, this danse macabre, plain as day, and every time their footwork gets too close to it, skirts the edge of it, they dance away.

I trust you to hold me, but not to know me.

“No, birdie,” he says in that sad, quiet, resigned way that makes Hawks want to wrap his hands around his scarred throat and strangle him sometimes. Who are you, who are you, who are you? You can tell me, it’s the one secret I’ll keep for real. Who did this to you? Who made you like this? I think I kind of want to kill them. “I’m just paying it forward now.” 

An almost-truth, then. Still, they dance away from that trap. Next week. Hawks really hadn’t meant to start an argument, to sink what could have been a fun, casual afternoon away from the villa into something… existential. It just seems to be where his whole head has drifted lately. Into thoughts he has no business thinking, into ideas he can’t afford to entertain. 

It’s not the time. It’s never been the time. And besides all that, he came here to be greedy. He came here to be selfish. Just for one more week. 

He hops down lithely, wings giving a little flutter to spare his joints the jar of the landing and Dabi gives no quarter. He’s crowding Hawks up against the closed roof door, shoving him with hips and chest, reaching with hands just a little too hot for Hawks’ waist. They don’t linger there, surprisingly. They squeeze, hard enough to bruise, hard enough to leave an impression of Dabi behind, before they coast up his stomach, up his chest, up his throat, to hold his face. Gently. Reverently. Tenderly. All the ways that, six months ago, Hawks would have said Dabi wasn’t capable of.

All the ways that he saves for Hawks, only for Hawks. 

The way he licks into Hawks’ mouth is neither gentle nor tender, but reverent twice over. By the time he pulls back, Hawks is half-hard, and Dabi panting into his neck as he bites a bruise into his tendon, just below his ear. It’s a wonder no one has caught on to what he’s been up to with all the marks Dabi leaves behind.

“If their golden boy can see the truth, then there’s more of them out there that will too, probably.” 

He wants to believe it. That he can make a difference and save people, protect all of them. He wants to believe that good, proper, healthy change is possible. He wants to believe that he can have something all for himself, something with just his name on it, something completely of his own choice. He wants to believe that he can just have it, that he can just keep it, that he won’t have to fight tooth and wing for it, that it can just be. It’s almost good enough to believe. 

Almost.

~

“I won’t make a mistake because I let emotions get the better of me.” 

This— this wasn’t what he’d wanted. That wasn’t how it was supposed to go down. He’d meant what he told Jin before, that they could salvage this, that Hawks could help him, that they could make it all right. He’d liked Jin. A lot. There was an honesty in him that Hawks had found not just refreshing but heartbreakingly endearing because everyone lied, everyone, even him. But Jin told it like it was twice over and Hawks was so used to nothing but falsehoods. Despite the back and forth with himself, Jin was easy to talk to, just wanted to be there, just wanted to listen, just wanted to help, just wanted to be good enough. He was everything that Hawks himself wanted so desperately to be.

And Hawks had put a blade through his heart anyway.

He thought he’d stopped underestimating Dabi months ago. He’d also thought that a literal army of heroes and police would be too great a force for even Dabi to get through. He thought he’d get to break his own heart alone, quietly, in a corner of the mansion where no one but Twice would see him fall apart. 

Hawks hadn’t banked on Dabi’s tenacity outweighing his own. 

Between the pain, the exquisite agony of being burned damn near down to his bones, and the rippling waves of blue fire that never seemed to stop, Hawks could see the blood. He’d already known Dabi couldn’t cry. He’d already known what happened instead if he did. And still when he’d looked up through a haze of pain and fire, he could see it: thin, dark rivulets tracking down Dabi’s cheeks.

Who are you?

Who are you?

Who are you?

He knew. Dabi knew the whole time. The whole fucking time.

He knew Hawks’ name. Had talked to him, walked with him, fought with him, kissed him, slept with him, whispered promises to him on rooftops under the stars and between the sheets and on park benches and on street corners. Called him Hawks when he knew the truth all along. Hawks was a mask, a pretty costume, a well-trained smile, a part he’d been taught to play. And he’d known the whole time.

Lies. All of it. Nothing but lies.

It’s only right, isn’t it, comes the voice of the poisonous thoughts he’s been trying in vain to ignore. You lied all the same too. You knew the whole time, there was no keeping it, no keeping him. You knew that there’d be no way to talk your way out of it, no way to salvage it. You knew too. He just got to you first.

Touya Todoroki. 

Keigo Takami finds himself whispering the name like a litany, like a prayer, like a hex. The respirator he has to wear muffles it, hides his mouth from the world, and with his ruined esophagus and a voice that comes out as nothing more than a whisper, he says it over and over and over again.

Touya Todoroki. Touya Todoroki. Touya Todoroki. 

Touya Todoroki had told everyone who he was after burning his wings away, dragged his deadbeat, imprisoned father into it, exposed the whole puppet that he was in the name of what was good. Touya Todoroki had sold him out as a murderer, as a false idol of the people. Touya Todoroki had told the whole fucking country that their pillar of heroism, the lynchpin just barely keeping their society tacked together, was a quirk married child abuser forcing a legacy even he couldn’t achieve onto his offspring. 

The vitriolic hatred he had for Endeavor, for heroes and hero society as a whole, made sense now. His story finally had a beginning, and all the blank parts that muddled up the middle of it were beginning to fill up in awful technicolor. 

My father. The hospital. My siblings. The coma. My revenge. The failing body of a teenage boy.

And Keigo’s… everything aches, with bruises and burns and regrowing wings and damaged organs and scars forming. But he aches all the more when he thinks of Dabi, when he thinks of little, scrawny Touya Todoroki burning himself to death for love. 

Your attention should have been focused on me.

Look at this, birdie.

Did you see that? 

Are you paying attention?

I want your eyes up here.

Are you looking?

Are you looking?

Are you looking?

Look at me.

The news footage of him that plays on repeat on every channel at every hour of every day shows him with hair as white as untouched snow. 

White.

White with the ends dirtied gray, like all the black ran out of it like watercolor. 

Keigo can only stare the first time he sees it, heart thudding so hard in his chest like it’s trying to beat its way out of him. 

He’s met Shouto before, the youngest Todoroki. He’s seen that white hair in half measures. He’s met Rei now, with her soft grey eyes and her little sloped nose and her thin brows and her rounded jaw, and that’s Dabi’s face. Even with the scars and the staples and the piercings, there was a softness to his features that even the harsh injuries of his life hadn’t rid of. Dabi had his mother’s face, like a carbon copy, a copy-paste, even down to the little smile she offered Keigo in her husband’s hospital room with the rest of their family standing around her, head tilted just a bit. Exactly like her firstborn son.

She knows, she knows, she has to know just by looking at me. Mother’s always know.

He had his mother’s face and his father’s eyes. 

The mirror avoidance he was prone to made sense now too.

And when Keigo sits alone at home, the glow of his TV the only light in his apartment as it flickers through an endless stream of pictures and video from the fight and the raid, while he wheezes through his respirator, hands clenching and unclenching as he rides out the pain of his wings trying to regrow, he wonders how he never saw it. He wonders how he never put two and two together. Fire, eyes as blue as a cloudless summer sky, the same gruff attitude, the same strength of their convictions.

Maybe he just didn’t want to believe it.

How can the man who saved him, who showed him that heroes weren’t just a fiction, a figment of his desperate imagination, the man who pulled him from his broken home and set him on his path, be the same man who drove his family to the brink and his son over the edge?

Look at me.

But Keigo had always been looking. Like staring at an accident in a sick attempt to feel anything at all, he’d never been able to look away even when he wanted to.

It hurt to think, it hurt to even be awake. Every conscious moment is filled with throbbing pain in every bone and every muscle and every tendon and every cell he’s made of. And just like the TV, his head loops through endless footage. Conversations and late nights and arguments and too-warm hands and lovely, shiny staples.

As he sits in his fancy apartment, his now that the Commission has fallen apart since the death of the President (and he doesn’t have the energy or the strength to feel anything but relief about that), and he wonders where Dabi is now. Now that the villa is destroyed and the PLF scattered and the country in the exact kind of chaos they wanted. 

He doesn’t have to wonder if Dabi is mad; his back is testament enough to that, he thinks. 

Sometimes he sits with his phone in hand, Dabi’s contact pulled up and his thumb hovering over the call button. He’s not brave enough to press it, or stupid enough, maybe. He can’t exactly talk anyway and he’s the last person on planet fucking Earth that Dabi would answer the phone for now. Now that all their ugly truths were out for the whole world to see, to judge, to witness.

Because he said he knew Keigo was a liar from the beginning, from their very first encounter. Which is so, so much worse than anything Keigo could have dreamed up. Worse than the pain, worse than the state of everything, worse than the mess they’ve made.

Because that means he chose anyway. Chose to talk to Keigo, chose to run him in circles, chose not to roast his face off that first time on the couch in the League warehouse when Keigo had hauled him in for a kiss. Chose to eat with him, chose to sleep with him, chose to spend his time with him, he chose, he chose, he chose. And that says more about Touya Todoroki, holding out on some kind of mad hope that maybe Keigo would choose too, then all the things he ever outright said aloud. 

Which had to mean that it was never real. None of it. Because if Touya knew from the start, then the whole damn thing was nothing but a house of cards, just one lie stacked precariously on top of the other.

Because that had to be it. Fake. Simulated. Just pretend. 

Because otherwise the perfectly warmed hands kneading the tired muscles of his shoulders and back after a day of flying from Kyushu to the villa made no sense. Because otherwise the gentle, coaxing words when he was found dissociating in the shower until the hot water ran out after a particularly gnarly mission made no sense. Because otherwise the shared meals, and the slow kisses, and the silly inside jokes, and the gentle sweep of fingers tracing the patterns around his eyes over and over lullingly, and the way his head would thunk back onto the pillow as his mouth dropped open on a curse, and the fond crinkle at the corner of his eyes when he rolled them, and all of it, all of it, all of it, made no sense.

It meant that Touya Todoroki deserved every award in acting there was because even Hawks the spy, even little Keigo Takami, had believed it.

He wonders how much of what he got to have, what he got to feel and hold and cherish and love, love, stupid fucking idiotic suicidal love, was maybe just Touya Todoroki glutting himself on someone so much like him for the first time in his life. In both their lives. That maybe every desperate, screaming part of him that echoed Keigo’s hadn’t meant for it to happen, hadn’t meant for it to mean anything, and yet…

That maybe it wasn’t fake at all.

Look at me.

And Hawks had almost started to believe it. That the League, that the PLF, could have changed it all, flipped it all on its head, started calling attention to the dark corners of their little world that people were too afraid to shine the lights on. Places like the Commission and the hole they’d dug for Hawks, the hole they’d placed him down in, the hole they pulled him out of only when the man they’d created, the image, the ideal, the lie, was needed. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t always felt that way, that he used to feel nothing but gratitude for the life he was rescued from and the one he was given in return. It didn’t matter that it was all gone now, dead and blown to pieces. 

He doesn’t believe it though, because he knows the master pulling at their puppet strings now, knows that the League’s idea of the greater good can’t come to fruition because it’s already been swallowed whole, already been broken down and dispersed behind the mania of a man who wanted nothing more than to be a despot. 

War. They’ve started a war.

And Keigo’s young, the things he’s seen and done and now been pardoned from number an astronomical amount for his age, but even still he’s never been to war. So, they’ll see each other again. Probably across a battlefield. If they’re lucky, they’ll never even have to look each other in the eye. 

If they’re lucky, they’ll both die there. Keigo, so he doesn’t have to live under the weight of his failures, live in the mess he so desperately tried to clean up before it spread, live with nothing when it’s over. Touya, because his life has split into only two paths, death or prison, and somehow, despite everything he’s done, all the damage he’s caused, death seems the kinder road to walk.

Despite all of that, Keigo still presses his fingers into the scar on his cheek, prods and pulls at the healing skin, cranes his neck over his shoulder so he can look at all gnarled skin of his back in the bathroom mirror, at his fluttering little wings that grow back bit by bit every day. His wings that, even as they keep growing, he knows will never be what they were, they’ll never be the same.

Did you know the world can be forever altered because of one person’s singular obsession?

He hopes it was enough. For what it was, for how little time they had, for how it started. He hopes he gave enough, talked enough, smiled enough, loved enough. It’s a desperate, sadistic kind of hope, one that leaves him a gasping mess with tears that won’t fall that some part of him is seared all the same somewhere in Touya. That some corner of his soul bears Keigo’s name and always will no matter how hot he burns, no matter what he does. He hopes that when Touya Todoroki thinks of him, it’s with light shining through all the miserably dark cracks of his broken life. That he’d meant it, that for him it was real. No matter what happens to them, no matter what comes, he hopes.

For him, it was, it is. It’s everything he’d ever let the quiet parts of himself dream of. It’s everything he’ll be holding in his heart when he lays his life down to try and make it right.

He’ll carry Dabi and Touya to his grave, etched into his skin forever. It’s almost enough to make him smile.

~

The first time Keigo Takami gets to see Touya Todoroki, neither of them speaks a word to the other.

In fact, the whole visit is over in about forty-five seconds. 

Naturally, they’d made him check his katanas at what amounted to their front desk. Safety and protocol, he understood, so he did everything they asked without complaint. He let them search him, let them frisk him, let them sweep a metal detector up and down his body. And when they were satisfied that he wasn’t a threat, he let them guide him down the odd labyrinth of hallways to a door that had two guards posted at it.

Down there in sub-level four of the medical center, the guards heft open the thick, metal door into what amounts to a small viewing room, too much like the pre-Quirk capital punishment chambers. White and sterile, hexagonal tiles stretch the entire empty room, scaling halfway up the walls that have been painted ever-so-slightly blue. The window at the other end is dark, save for the singular soft light on the other side of the glass that shines down on a dark coffin that beeps slowly, but steadily. There’s a little panel screen mounted just in front, with a small round speaker.

Keigo walks into the room feeling utterly defenseless with his hands empty. 

He instantly hates the way his shoes echo on the tile as he takes two steps into the room. It’s empty, barren except for the screen and the window on the other side. Not a couch or an armchair or even a bucket turned upside down like a makeshift stool. He takes two more steps, tap tap, resonating within the constant, soft beeping. 

He didn’t know what to wear, or when to even come, or if he even should, he feels foolish and desperate, and he has no idea what to do with his hands. He ends up wringing them in front of him, nervous and suddenly skittish, squinting at the dark window and the contraption behind it, trying to catch a glimpse. So, when the soft, almost lulling beeping, becomes something blaring, something fast that sets off an alarm, which sets off another alarm, he startles half out of his skin.

The door has no sooner been pulled closed behind him before it’s opening again. He’s taken all of four steps into the room and he has no idea what he’s done to set off all that noise.

“You need to leave, sir,” the guard says without giving him much of a choice as she begins to strongarm Keigo out of the room. “You’ll have to try another time. I’m sorry, it seems like having you as a visitor is a struggle for him.”  

And they hustle him out of there, slap his katanas back in his hands at the front desk, and have him out the door before he can even pull his new I’m the President card on them. He didn’t so much as lay eyes on Touya.

It’s for the best, probably. Because he goes right home and spends the rest of the day on his couch, staring at the black of his TV screen, looking at nothing and thinking about everything. 

The next time he visits, he nearly gets the same treatment. He makes it to the window this time at least. And at the window, he gets to see the full extent of the containment chamber. It’s barbaric looking, medieval almost, all dark shining metal that hides three-quarters of his body like some sort of sarcophagus. Parts of his face are visible though, like a death mask. Keigo can only glance up at him for half a second before he has to look away, bile rising in his throat alongside the horror. 

There are… screws in his face. A lot of them. Long ones, with a halo of metal around what remains of his forehead and around his jaw, bolting him together and bolting him to the machine. Keigo can see tubes, running this way and that, and skin, exposed skin, if it can even be called skin anymore. And he can see… wires. Hundreds of wires hang from everywhere, roped and corded, all different thicknesses and colors, all connecting to that tube, keeping him alive. The same soft, steady beeping from his last trip fills the empty room.

There’s so little left of him.

Keigo has watched what absolute minimal footage there is of Touya Todoroki burning himself up a hundred times over. He thought it would prepare him for this. It hadn’t. 

There’s a steaming hiss of something, and the once-steady beeping increases a couple clips until it’s a frantic, heady drumbeat to match the panic cresting in Keigo’s chest alongside his nausea. 

By the time he can work up the nerve to look back up, blue eyes are peering down at him out of the darkness. And the whole fucking world washes away to some tinny, distant sound and it’s just Keigo staring at Touya, the same way he had almost a year ago when he’d tracked him down to be recruited. Just two people wearing masks, pretending to be something other than who they were. 

Vaguely, behind him somewhere, Keigo knows they’ve opened the door again, that the guard is coming in to remove him from the room. But all the things he’d planned to say, all the things he wants to say, have dried up in his throat and all he can do is stare. The beeping is so loud now, and he realizes, utterly delayed, that it’s Touya’s heart.

An arm hooks through his, the guard, and his body sways with the momentum of getting pulled. She’s speaking, but it sounds so far away, outside of himself, like he’s in a bubble where nothing can reach him. Like he’s in a metal coffin, waiting to die.

The little red light next to the tiny, mounted speaker and screen in front of the window flashes on to tell him that sound is coming from the other side. Keigo wrenches his arm out of the guard’s hold and stumbles a little to regain his footing, an undignified act for the President of the Commission, but he doesn’t care. He’s been off-balance since losing his wings, but he feels more unstable now than he has in months under that all too familiar gaze of burning blue.  

“Nobody… told me… you were… alive.” 

It’s just a hiss of a sound, like wind sending leaves skittering over the concrete. 

The rasp of it, once a soft grate and now like sandpaper scraping together, is instantly recognizable. 

Keigo’s eyes begin to burn.

He probably hoped that Keigo –Hawks– had died in that final battle. It’s what he deserved, it’s what he still deserves. As far as Touya Todoroki could care, Hawks was a traitor, and a liar, a fraud who’d played into the cause and played into their chemistry to worm his way into both the heart of the League and his own. He’d made that very clear in the last thing he’d ever said to Hawks all those many months ago. Even if bloody tears had dripped from his smoking cheeks as he spoke.

At the end of the day, your death means nothing.

“Unfortunately,” Keigo croaks in reply, and he doesn’t fight it this time when the guard grasps his arm and begins to all but drag him towards the exit.

Like a sigh, Touya’s voice cuts through the shuffling sound of bootsteps on tile, over the rush of blood in Keigo’s ears, over the erratic beeping of his own heart.

“Good… that’s good.” 

And Keigo hasn’t cried since he got his wings burnt off by the same man he’s so desperately trying to keep seeing. He didn’t cry when they grew back in, agonizing, awful pain, not even as his burns healed, and the skin sloughed off, and the scars across the entirety of his back thickened in place. He didn’t cry when they had him in a respirator for months. He didn’t cry when he found out that Dabi had gone after his mother. He didn’t cry when he had to watch the hero who’d saved his life get reduced to nothing more than a man. He didn’t even cry when he lost his wings, for good.

Some mornings as he rubs scar cream into the parts of his back he can reach, over shoulder blades he’d never been able to touch before, he gets so close. Eyes welling, throat squeezing, hands shaking, chest burning, choking on all he’s lost, but the tears won’t fall.

But what the fuck is that supposed to mean? 

Good.

Why? Why is that good? Why is it good that he’s still alive? 

It’s not until he gets home, propping his katanas up by the front door and shucking his shoes and suit jacket off, staring into the emptiness of a place that had never felt like his, even now when only his own name is on the paperwork, that the tears come. Staring into the emptiness of his hallways that Dabi had once tread, grumbling about the contents of his fridge, into his living room where Dabi would take up the whole damn couch, complaining about something he saw on the news. The throw pillows still smell of burning wood, like smokey cedar and antiseptic. There’s still a handprint burned into the drywall above his bed, something he’d had to go out and buy a whole fucking painting to hang over it, to hide it. 

Keigo squats down right there in the entrance of his apartment, folds his arms over his knees, buries his face in his arms, and sobs. He cries until he’s so empty he feels light, for the first time in months, maybe even years. He sleeps on the couch that night, with his face in one throw pillow and another hugged to his chest.

The guards at the medical center, the one lady and the guy with the water collar for the gills in his neck, they’re pretty nice, letting him know they were willing to be… as lenient as they could be about visiting hours but had no intention of endangering the life of whom they guarded. They were nice enough to let him know when the Todoroki family usually came to visit their eldest son, either together or separately. 

He plans his visits around when the Todoroki family comes. He’s not ready to face Rei again yet, even thinking about her makes his throat close up and his chest ache. And, frankly, he can’t even look Enji in the face since he formally retired. It was bad enough… when Dabi’s broadcast had gone out, the PR shitstorm they’d worked so hard to clean up, the aftermath of having to look his once-hero in the eye and know. 

Know that neither of them had ever really been heroes. 

Keigo tells himself he’s just not ready and doesn’t much care if it’s a sad excuse or not.

When he visits Touya, it’s on off-days when his family isn’t there, when it’s just the two of them, for the handful of minutes Keigo’s allowed to have. For the handful of minutes that Touya has the strength to even speak. He has questions, so many questions that he has no right to the answers, questions he could ask Shouto, maybe even Rei but he’s a coward.

He wants to know if this is it.

Is this the best they can do? To lock Touya up with a machine to keep him barely alive until he inevitably succumbs to his own self-inflicted injuries. Were they planning on getting him any kind of medical care? Did he already get some kind of care and Keigo just didn’t know? Was there even a chance of saving him? 

(And other questions he’ll always keep to himself. Did Touya even want to be saved? What did saving him even look like? Getting him healthy enough to put him down in Tartarus for the rest of his natural life? He’s still a criminal, he’s still a murderer, most of the world still sees him as nothing more than a villain regardless of what he forced them to acknowledge. What was left out here for him anyway?)

Keigo would take what he could get without asking for more. He was used to that, at least.

“Wings?” Touya’s scrape of a voice asks him the next time he visits. His too-fast heartbeat still fills the room, a steady reminder that despite everything he was still alive.

“Gone,” he says, and he can still feel them, all the time. Swears he can feel feathers in places he’s left them before. Like a thousand phantom limbs he no longer has, grabbing at him in his nightmares, ghosting across scarred skin with hardly any feeling left at all. “All For One took them.” 

“Deserve it.” 

“Yeah.” And that’s not anything he hasn’t told himself in the mirror every morning as he buttons his dress shirt over the black and gold of his old hero uniform that he hardly needs anymore. “Yeah, I know.” 

Sometimes he never wakes at all, and Keigo spends his allotted time just looking, thinking, remembering.

His visits are never outright pleasant. Leave it to the man who once masqueraded under the name of cremation to do his level best with all of fifteen words a day to burn every imaginable bridge between them. The heart monitor betrays the rage he must feel at the fact that Keigo keeps showing up, always beeping wildly when Touya opens his eyes long enough to realize he’s back again. Keigo keeps coming though, and if Touya rather he stopped, he never wastes the words saying it.

“They know… their President… is a murderer?” he asks one visit after Keigo has just entered the room. It’s the first time he speaks before Keigo does.

Dabi had seen to that all the same, with the footage of Hawks killing Twice. All the information leaks in the collapse of the Commission had seen to the rest of it. Hawks’ red ledger of death was out there for the whole fucking world to see. An ever-present reminder of the life he’d led, of the autonomy he’d forfeited for most of that life.

He isn’t sure who told Touya about his new position, because he certainly hadn’t. Maybe his family. Had he asked? Or had they just offered the information up like passing small talk?

“Yes,” he tells him, because it’s the truth.

The room falls so quiet, with nothing more than the steady beep of the heart monitor that Keigo wonders for a moment if he’s fallen asleep. Until the red light by the speaker illuminates again, amplifies the death-rattle crackle of Touya’s breathing as he speaks.

“You don’t know… who you are… without a cage.” 

And Keigo supposes that’s true too. He’s always had a part to play. Stripped bare, being President of the Commission was just another role, just another typecasting for him, just another uniform to wear. It’s a part he’s happy to play because he wants to help, he has to help, has to be capable of something.

“The plan isn’t to stay there forever,” he tells Touya softly, on his next visit. “The plan is… to make things right and then step down. To let somebody worthy of the role fill it. To make sure the things the Commission did to me don’t happen to anyone ever again.”

“More… pretty words.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing but… I wanna try,” he admits quietly as he looks down at his hands. They’re scarred too, just like the rest of him. He has become a map of his failures, signs pointing to all the roads he’s taken to get where he is now. It’s not so different from the staples that had held Dabi’s body together, he’d realized a while ago. “I have to.” 

“Want you to hold me accountable,” he says, to the almost gratifying sound of Touya’s heart monitor speeding up. It’s the only thing that gives him away anymore. “I want you to make it out of there and make sure nobody can sweet talk me into staying. I’m twenty-four, I want to retire.” 

Touya is nothing but his blue gaze from inside that machine keeping him alive, but the unwavering attention, the same as it always was, still makes Keigo’s skin crawl deliciously. It’s like standing in front of an imprisoned deity, all splintered divinity held together by metal and machine, and begging to be spared on the day he gets free. He’s always been powerful, always been dangerous, that fact used to drive the heat to Keigo’s head before sending it lower. To have someone like that melting under his hands had been a special kind of blessing. Neither of them are the same but the fluttering effect in his chest of getting pinned like a butterfly to corkboard under that gaze hasn’t changed. 

“I’m not… your keeper,” Touya whispers and it’s not an insult as much as it is permission. 

Once, a lifetime ago it feels like, Hawks had told Dabi that all he wanted was to be free. That he wanted to belong to himself. And of all the terrible, short conversations they’ve had over the last few weeks, of all the nasty things Touya has said to him, this is the first thing that’s any sort of acknowledgement of their past, of what was between them. Because in that lifetime ago, Dabi had told him to be free, he had to actually want it. 

Hawks didn’t understand what that meant, but Keigo did now.

“No,” Keigo says, and he doesn’t stop the smile that pulls at his face. It’s the first time he’s smiled in a while. “I don’t want you to be.”

He feels lighter with every visit, even after the bad ones. He keeps trying to explain himself, apologize, rationalize, and Touya figuratively steps on his face over and over again. Only when Keigo tells him of the projects he’s working on, the things he’s been doing, the real change and progress happening outside the quiet confines of this room does Touya hum out any kind of acquiescence.

He sets up a foundation. Anonymous, of course. Years of cushy pro-hero pay, not to mention the merch sales, the modeling, he’s got more money than he thinks he could spend in a lifetime. He tells no one he’s doing it, because it’s probably ill-advised and he doesn’t want to be un-advised from it. He knows the Todoroki’s have money, he’s seen their damn house, he knows any medical bills are probably just a sneeze for them. He doesn’t care. 

He ‘donates’ an absolutely absurd amount of money to two places: directly to the medical center in Touya Todoroki’s name, and to the best and brightest support tech company that the unhinged tech genius girl from UA recommends to him and doesn’t look back. And he keeps visiting Touya.

Whatever they’ve been doing, infusions, treatments, the whole gambit, it’s working. Just slowly. Touya’s voice gets stronger, there’s less of a rattling wheezing that comes across the speakers when he breathes. He can speak in full sentences without having to pause midway through to gasp at the oxygen in his hyperbaric machine or cough around his damaged lungs. 

He still uses all that medical care to be an asshole. And Keigo would be so fucking mad about it if it didn’t just make him… love him that much more. He’s glad Touya is still angry, in some fashion, that maybe it’s lessened over all these visits, but he’s still not ready to forgive Keigo outright. And that’s good because Keigo wants to earn it. Touya was still an inferno, and that’s exactly how Keigo wanted him to stay, ferocious and blazing.

“Gonna pull the fuckin’ plug on me too? Stab me in the back when they let me out of this coffin?” 

“You know I can’t,” Keigo whispers, and it’s twofold. He’s incapable of doing such a thing in more ways than one, especially now. 

They’ve likely told Touya what’s happening, he is the patient after all. And he’s run into a few Todoroki siblings over the last few weeks without meaning to. All short, almost stilted conversations, awkward, as they dance around this shared topic that none of them have the strength to address outright. They don’t ask why he’s there, or why he’s there so often, but there’s something to be said about the way Shouto stares at him, with some dead-fish unblinking gaze of all-knowing youngest siblinghood that has Keigo making any excuse to get away. 

He can tell just by looking at you. Just like their mother could.

“I won’t see you for a little while,” he says instead.

Because just last week, cornering him on his way out as she came in, Fuyumi, the only Todoroki daughter, had told him exactly what was to happen to Touya in the coming weeks.

By now, he’s read enough medical journals, talked to enough doctors to know that the recovery will take months, maybe even over a year. That it’ll be grueling, if Touya even survives the surgeries he’s set to have. Skin grafts, a lung resection, cleaning up the stump that’s left of his arm so it could be fitted for a prosthesis in the future. The healing alone will take months, the physical therapy he’ll need afterwards probably twice as long. He’ll be here in the medical center for a long while yet.

She’d told him that Touya had been seeing an entire psychiatric team every other day since he could hold a semblance of a conversation. She’d told him that Touya, just like their mother, had been diagnosed bipolar. That while it would take time, they were determined to find therapy that worked, a medication regimen to supplement it, to get him the proper care he’d deserved since he’d been born. She’d told Keigo that she refused to give up, that she wanted her brother back, that she’d argue with whomever she had to, sit through meetings, do press conferences, bang on doors, whatever it took for him to be allowed to have even a fraction of the life she thought he deserved. The life they all thought he deserved. One that might not be Tartarus if she had anything to say about it.

Keigo has no fucking clue why she tells him all this, none, all right outside the door where her brother is. But he knows her conviction reminds him of Touya, reminds him of Shouto. He knows her eyes are as blue as his and he knows she probably sees right through him too. He knows she sees right through him when she pulls a pen out of her purse and writes her number into the meat of his palm. He tries not to picture her white hair flecked through with blood red in a pretty fishtail braid.

So, Keigo can wait. He’s become better at waiting, at being more patient. 

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?” Touya snaps at him, and the uptick in his monitored heart rate is strangely gratifying. Blue eyes blister down at him from behind their halo of metal. 

“Promise me you’ll be good and play nice with everybody.” He’s too stubborn to be killed thrice over, so Keigo knows he’ll make it. The next time he’s here, he might actually see Touya’s face.

“Hey— I’m talkin’ to you. Hey! Taking advantage of me for being fuckin’ disabled now, huh,” he calls out to Keigo’s retreating back. He can’t quite yell, but it’s the loudest Keigo has heard his voice since before it all went to shit. The loudest and the closest to what he remembers, the snap, the conviction, the passion. “Don’t you dar— Birdie.”

Keigo does stop at the old nickname, letting it zing through him like a jolt of electricity before he turns back around. The constant beep of Touya’s heart is hummingbird fast now, it won’t be long until the guard comes in to tell him he has to leave if he doesn’t settle down.

“Don’t I dare?” he finishes the sentences for him, sliding his hands into his pants pockets to hide the way they shake.

In the silence between them, oh-so-slowly, Touya’s heart rate drops off, steadies out, stays just a shy too fast but it loses its frantic edge. Behind him, he hears the door open a crack and he pivots to see the female guard poking her head in to check that everything was alright. He just gives her a little nod and waits for the little smile he always gives him in return. They have constant access to Touya’s vitals out there so that they can remove visitors immediately if necessary, and Keigo has been yanked out of the room multiple times at this point.

“Look at me.”

It’s not a command. It’s hardly even a whisper. Keigo turns all the same. He doesn’t deserve to hope, he doesn’t.  

He’s tried to picture Touya’s face again, has tried to picture what the little swath of pale, unmarred skin across his nose and cheekbones would look like everywhere. He’ll miss the staples believe it or not, he liked the shine of them, the texture, their existence a constant reminder that Dabi refused to give up even as his body failed him slowly. They were a symbol of his commitment, even if most of those commitments had been selfishly homicidal. Hawks had only ever had lies and pretty stories and masks, and even then he’d liked the realness of Dabi, the raw nature of his goals, even if he never agreed with them. He backtracks the few steps he took and looks, he’s always been looking. 

He doesn’t deserve to hope, he doesn’t.

It doesn’t stop him though. 

He lays a palm flat against the cold glass of the window that separates him from Touya and smiles up, a small, desperate thing. 

“I’ll tell you everything if you get out of there. Every last secret,” he promises, and it’s probably just a trick of the light, but he swears the blue of Touya’s eyes gets a little wider. “Even the stuff you don’t want to hear.”

“All of it?”

“Every scandalous detail. I’ll even put together a slideshow for you, if you want.” 

Touya falls quiet, as if he’s mulling this offer over. Keigo had made an offer like this once, on some grubby couch in a twice as grubby warehouse, a lifetime ago. He’d only sort of meant it back then; he wanted to know everything without revealing anything of his own. Still clinging to empty promises and the shell of what he thought he deserved, what he thought could never get any better. He wanted to take without giving, not just because anything he had to give was laden and laced with the guilt of half-truths, but because he’d never really been given anything before. Greedy, lonely, selfish boy playing make believe that he was a hero.

In his own way, Dabi gave and gave and gave, and in comparison, Keigo feels like Hawks gave him next to nothing back. He hopes Touya will let him try again. He wants to give him everything this time. 

“You tell me yours, and I’ll tell you mine,” Touya echoes and Keigo tries and fails not to smile like a hapless idiot.

“Yeah, something just like that.”

~

He’s sitting in the third floor lobby of the medical center on a Wednesday afternoon, the one with the glass ceiling that lets all the warm sunlight stream through, waiting for Fuyumi to come up. He’d been here for his own physical therapy appointment, like he did every Wednesday, trying to work through and break down as much of the scar tissue in his back as he could to keep himself mobile and relatively pain free. Now he’s watching doctors and patients and visitors mill around, enjoying the warmth of the autumn sun through the skylights. 

It’s been seven months since he last saw Touya in that death chamber they’d been using to keep him alive. Each Todoroki sibling has been nagging him to come visit, but he won’t. Natsuo presses but gives in quickly, and Shouto doesn’t even bother to push beyond his initial request, just stares before giving a nonchalant shrug as if he understands. He probably does.

Fuyumi is the worst of them, somehow. She tells him everything, which he feels deeply unentitled to. She tells him how the surgeries went, she tells him how physical therapy is going, she tells him about doctors and medications and setbacks and goals reached and she tells him everything he could ever need to know short of setting foot in whatever room they were keeping Touya in now. And then she also stares because that Todoroki family gene pool is righteously strong apparently, and she stares some more in quiet demand that Keigo actually do something.  

He doesn’t.

He’s waiting. 

“You’d hardly recognize him,” Fuyumi said to him last month. “He actually… looks like Touya again.” 

The only Touya that Keigo has ever known was the crispy, cranky fucker on the precipe of death in his little life support box. But he’s seen pictures of young Touya now. And where once he’d struggled to imagine Dabi before the burns, he had a better idea now. All her stories and updates keep him going, keep the candle lit in his chest, just a warm, flickering little thing that he holds close, his own life support as the days and months go by.

“He asks about you all the time.” 

He’s waiting for Touya to ask to see him. He’s decided that the distinction is important to him. Fuyumi insists it’s practically the same thing. They’re at an impasse of wills at this point.

Instead, he’s tapping his foot against shiny hospital tiled flooring in a frankly uncomfortable armchair, waiting to take her to lunch so she can tell him everything anyway. Because that was the loophole she’d found. Keigo was too polite to turn her down and just like her older brother, when she spotted a weakness she dug her hands right into it and wouldn’t let go. Politely, of course, because Fuyumi was utterly friendly and endearing and downright terrifying.

And, now, she’s late.

He supposes he could meet her there, they always went to the same little cafe a couple streets down from the hospital complex anyway. He leans over a bit, vinyl chair crinkling underneath him as he fishes his phone out and texts her a slew of question marks and waits. Five whole minutes pass as he stares, growing impatient to see little dots marking her incoming reply. Then the read receipt pops up and nothing else. He hunches over his phone, elbows on thighs, phone between his knees as he sends her some more question marks and a few hourglass emojis just to be an impatient brat. Another few minutes pass as he keeps staring, his stomach rumbles, he keeps waiting, and then the second read receipt triggers.

“You’re just like your fucking brother,” Keigo grumbles fondly, thumbs tapping away.

“Planning to start shit with the rest of my family now too?” 

Keigo startles so hard he drops his phone, head jerking up. He knows that voice.

Blue eyes surrounded by whole, unbroken skin and no staples and no seams and no painful burns stare down at him and Keigo is already on his feet without understanding when or how he had the strength to stand.

Touya.

He’s wrapped in soft, silvery-lavender scars like he’s been stitched back together with moonlight. He’s staring at Keigo with his head tilted, like he always used to, the mop of his white hair like a halo of fresh snow.

His right arm is a mix of metals, a dark gunmetal grey that disappears up to the elbow under the too-big t-shirt he’s wearing, the collar loose around his no longer horribly scarred neck. His left arm is all pale skin and the same almost pearlescent grafts, with a chunky metal bracelet snugly wrapped around his wrist and Keigo knows a quirk suppressor when he sees one.

The broad line of his shoulders is the same, even beneath the large shirt that hides the fit taper of his waist, the lean muscle of his wiry frame. Keigo has practically watched Shouto grow up and fill out, knows too that Natsuo is built just like Enji, that Touya’s genetics all mixed up with the softness of his mother’s still had to compete with a whole apparent ancestry of men built like brick shithouses. Consistent meals and physical therapy have softened all the razor edges of him and he looks so healthy.  

But he’s right there, he’s right there, and he’s standing on his own two feet and he’s as whole as he’s ever going to be, new prosthetic appendages and all, and Keigo’s eyes fucking burn at the sight of him. 

Touya reaches for him first, flesh and blood fingers snagging at his jacket sleeve. The metal that bands his wrist has a tiny screen embedded in it and it gleams in the sunlight filtering down through the glass ceiling of the lobby. Keigo can see the way his jaw is clenched, watches pale brows sink into something that’s probably supposed to be a scowl but it’s all at odds with the wide, wondrous sort of pleading in his gaze. Like he can’t quite believe that Keigo is here either. 

And Keigo’s freaking out a little bit, heart thrashing in his chest, blood so loud in his ears that all he can hear is ringing. His phone is still on the floor. He expects to get punched, kicked, ripped into verbally, something, anything, because he probably deserves it even if he doesn’t want it. Everything has sort of tunneled, his vision going a little fuzzy all around the edges, narrowed down to just white hair and pale, pretty skin and– his fucking bottom lip is trembling, he’s– Touya’s shaking, and so is Keigo.

It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because Touya with his big stupid tremulous blue gaze is reeling him in, until he can get one arm around Keigo’s back and the other heavier, metal arm around his shoulders. 

Touya’s hand smooths gently down his scarred, wing-less shoulders, trembling as it coasts from the vertebrae at the top of his spine down to his lower back. Tears burn in Keigo’s eyes as Touya’s shaking hand curls into a fist in the back of his jacket and he mashes his pretty, undamaged face into the crook of his neck.

The whole world fisheyes out around him, the blue sky through the glass ceiling above them and the quiet din of the hospital lobby, and he folds himself into Touya, wrapping his arms around and squeezing harder than he probably should. He smells like ozone and wood smoke, like antiseptic still, like the salt of skin and the clean of laundry and something in Keigo’s chest, some tether, some red thread that’s been pulled taut for the last year, finally snaps.

“I was waiting for you,” he whispers into Keigo’s hair and Keigo can feel the press of each one of his new metal fingertips against his shoulder and the warmth of his real palm on his back through his layers. 

“I know,” Keigo whispers back and there, over Touya’s shoulder a few feet away, is Fuyumi with her hands cupped around her mouth and tears visibly spilling down her pretty face behind her glasses. A little schemer. It’s almost too good to be true. Almost. “I’m sorry. I thought–”

“I thought I did too.” Soft hair tickles his nose and it reminds him of mornings waking up curled along the warmth of the back he’s holding like a lifeline right now, his face buried against textured scars.

“I don’t, I–” he continues to say and there’s a quiet whir right at Keigo’s ear as the fingers of Touya’s metal hand close, grabbing another fistful of his jacket. Touya just hugs him harder, like he’s trying to crawl into Keigo’s jacket and back under his skin. 

And Keigo has lost so much, wings and purpose and friends and himself. He thinks he’s held it together pretty valiantly, all things considered, but whatever is loosening in his chest threatens to wring a stupid, pitiful sob out of him. Touya is warm and solid and Keigo had made his peace months ago, that if he ever got to touch him again, it would probably be with a burning hand around his throat and a sneer on his lips. This is so, so much more than he’d ever allowed himself to hope for. Everything, it’s everything. 

“I did– I do. I still do.”