Work Text:
It’s late when Hawks joins him in the shitty motel room, well past their agreed upon ten-thirty meeting time. Hawks’s patrol ended at eight, and Dabi, bored but with no real options to entertain himself other than the barely-functional tv, is dozing lightly on his side of the futon that smells concerningly strongly of mold and dust. He tries not to think too hard about it, watching the tv’s antennae flicker strange shadows over the water stain on the ceiling.
Hawks shoulders the room’s door open at a quarter ‘til four in the morning, holding a bottle of extremely cheap plum wine by the neck in one gloved hand, dingy little key dangling from the fingers of the other. Shoved beneath his arm are several nondescript takeout boxes, brown and visibly grease-stained, and it both delights and irritates Dabi to see them steaming, especially because there aren’t any real restaurants for multiple villages, and he was honestly expecting to either go hungry or be forced to interact with the ryokan’s weird host just to have something in his stomach.
“The fuck have you been?”
“Relax,” Hawks says, dropping his backpack against the door and settling his haul on the low-set table Dabi shoved to the far wall the moment he arrived, just for something to do. The wood of the legs is old and frayed, and the center slab threatens to bow under the meager weight of takeout and chardonnay, but it holds. Hawks doesn’t seem bothered, plucking the fingers of his gloves and tossing them beside the food, then shrugging out of his coat. Dabi keeps his gaze locked firmly on a too-light splotch of the tatami so he doesn’t do something gay like stare or drool about the way Hawks’s insane biceps flex with every little movement. Hawks’s wings, which Dabi had assumed were entirely hidden, unfurl from between his shoulder blades. “I picked up dinner.”
“It’s tomorrow,” Dabi says, dragging himself into a proper sitting position with effort because being sideways isn’t doing him any favors. He half props himself up on his elbows to squint at Hawks in the extremely low light. The darkness accentuates the curve of Hawks’s waist. His jeans are practically molded to his ass like a second skin. It’s a far, far cry from the loose khaki of his uniform. Hawks waves dismissively and drops onto the World’s Shittiest Cushion, jammed between the tv stand and the table, crossing his ankles rudely in front of him. Dabi wrinkles his nose but keeps his mouth pinched shut, scooting himself to the cushion opposite and settling onto his ankles.
“And I haven’t eaten yet,” Hawks says, digging around in the table’s single shitty drawer and pulling out a paper-wrapped set of wooden chopsticks. He snaps them open and pops the top on one of the containers, absently tapping his nails. “So, dinner.”
As Hawks slurps drunken noodles into his mouth, Dabi goes about unfurling the edges of the other containers to see what else there is to steal bites of. One has grilled ube, and another has something green that’s probably cabbage but is so visibly fucked up it’s making Dabi nervous; the third has a very browned mackerel, which Dabi scoots as far away as he can the second he realizes. Hawks wordlessly passes him a second pair of chopsticks, this time from the takeout bag, when Dabi goes back to the ube.
“Didn’t know what you’d want,” Hawks says, muffled through the food in his mouth.
“Swallow first,” Dabi says, barely sparing him a glance. “This is fine.” He reaches for the omeshu, unscrews the top and takes a deep swig before the taste can hit. Hawks has the audacity to snicker meanly when Dabi’s nose scrunches up distastefully. He takes another drink and coughs, chasing the taste with a half slice of ube.
“That bad?”
“It’s like dirty sock water.”
Hawks barks a laugh, throwing his head back like an idiot. It wasn’t that funny, but Hawks’s fingers spasm lightly anyway, feathers shaking minutely where they’ve flared to block the tv. Had he the capacity still, Dabi would probably be blushing. His face feels warm enough for it. “Let me try,” Hawks says, and trades Dabi his noodles for the bottle. He knocks it back like a shot, smacking his lips obnoxiously when he’s done. He rolls his tongue around in his mouth; Dabi stirs the container of noodles and dutifully ignores the way his stomach flips. Hawks burps into his fist and picks up the mackerel from the far end of the table. “You’re so full of shit,” Hawks tells him, still laughing to himself as he cuts into the belly. “It’s not that bad at all.”
Dabi huffs. “It’s gross,” he argues, hunching to half-slurp noodles into his own mouth. Larger bites won’t be possible unless he unhooks his outer set of staples, and Dabi is way too tired (and way too concerned over the cleanliness of this place) to even bother with that right now. Hawks rolls his eyes and uses his chopsticks to scoot the box of weird greens towards Dabi’s side of the table.
“Eat some of this,” he says, shoving mackerel into his mouth. The waxy pectoral fin crunches audibly between his teeth. Dabi wrinkles his nose.
“What is it?”
“Dunno,” Hawks says. He takes another swig of the umeshu. Dabi blinks at him, takes a bite of fatty, overcooked beef and sits the drunken noodles back on the table with care. He cracks the lid of the greens.
“Bok choy?” he asks, unsure. He lifts a piece (a leaf?) in his chopsticks, turns it over and around, brings it up to his nose to smell. It clears up nothing; beyond the scent of whatever sauce monstrosity it’s bathing in, it’s almost concerningly neutral.
Hawks leans in to examine it, chewing. His eyes are flecked with another color, Dabi realizes. Maybe brown. Maybe even green. He looks away before his brain can get the chance to start obsessing over it. Hawks swallows his food, this time, before he speaks. “Cabbage?”
“Maybe,” Dabi says, turning his gaze back to the food before he does something stupid like start staring or maybe lean in and kiss Hawks square on his gross, fishy mouth. “Didn’t you order it? What’d you ask for?”
“I ordered corn,” Hawks says, snorts. The mackerel is down to just the head when Dabi looks again. The eyes are poked out. Hawks tucks the folds of the lid back together and sits the container off to the side, blessedly away from the ube. Dabi passes him the greens, and Hawks starts sniffing at them. “The cheese kind, off the cob and everything.” He huffs, glances briefly at Dabi, then looks back to the box. “Thought it’d be easier for you to eat that way. Is it seaweed?”
“I don’t think so,” Dabi says, cheeks warm. He’s glad Hawks isn’t looking at him anymore, because he knows he’s going pink in the healthy parts of his face. He pinches the fabric of his jeans between his fingers under the table, rolls the denim under his thumb until the pad of his finger goes numb. “Doesn’t smell like it, anyway.”
Hawks shrugs. “Guess I’ll try it.” He sniffs, picks up his chopsticks, and pinches a piece (definitely, maybe, a leaf this time) between them. “If I start foaming at the mouth just make a run for it, yeah?”
Dabi snorts, catching his laugh in his throat before it can actually happen, lest he clue Hawks in on the fact that he has feelings. The sound he makes instead is a warbly cough that sounds like he choked on his own laughter, and definitely gives him away instantly. Hawks looks at him knowingly but, blessedly, says nothing. Dabi’s face burns.
Hawks takes a bite, chews for a solid several seconds, sits with it in his mouth. Then, his eyebrows crinkle, and so does his nose. Dabi is so invested (in the reveal, of course) that he notices little sun freckles smattered across Hawks’s cheeks, notices the smear of concealer beneath his eyes. Dabi leans back, and Hawks sits the container back on the table, almost perfectly between them. He swipes his thumb over his mouth, lip twisted up when he speaks, clicks his chopsticks together like a nagging mother. “It’s cabbage,” he says, with certainty. His eyes flit to Dabi’s, then back to the box. He folds it back up, pushes it aside to join the mackerel, then takes a hefty, overdramatic swig of the wine. After, he looks at Dabi again and sticks his tongue out very childishly. “It’s really, really gross, dude.”
Dabi laughs, for real this time. He feels his grin stretch the seams of his cheeks, feels it pull at his gums. He snags the ube and puts it where the cabbage had been, almost perfectly between them. “What was wrong with it?” he asks, still giggling a little bit. He pinches a wedge in his chopsticks and takes a bite. A little salty, but otherwise okay.
It takes Hawks a few seconds to answer, like maybe his breath was caught in his throat, or maybe he hadn’t known what to say, for some odd reason. He clears his throat awkwardly into his fist when Dabi blinks up at him, halfway through his wedge. He looks a little pink in the cheeks, but that could easily be a trick of the light. It’s pretty dim in here, after all, even with the light of the tv playing on mute. Dabi shrugs it off and pretends not to notice the little flutters in his ribs.
“It was some weird ginger sauce or something,” Hawks says, furrowing his ridiculous brows. They’re less manicured than usual today. He swipes a slice of ube, chews and swallows dutifully before continuing, chopsticks pointed at Dabi. “I dunno. It’d clearly gone bad though.” His nose wrinkles again. He shakes his head as if to clear it of the taste, clicks his chopsticks again. “Are you done with the noodles?”
“Yeah,” Dabi says, scooting them closer to Hawks with his knuckles. The box is still almost hot to the touch, even though it’s been sitting open for several minutes now. Hawks scoops it up and shoves a huge bite into his mouth, clearly hungry enough not to care if he gets burned.
They eat the rest of their meal in relative silence. Occasionally, Hawks swipes an ube wedge almost secretly, like he’s trying to steal it to be funny, and Dabi pretends like it isn’t kind of cute. Occasionally, he offers Dabi a bite of noodles, and Dabi declines every time because he hadn’t really liked them all that much. They sit like that, quiet, comfortable, until the noodles are gone and all that’s left is the oil and sauce swimming at the bottom of the box. Hawks’s feathers deposit their boxed and bagged containers in the bathroom’s trash once Dabi’s so full he feels like the staples that run across his stomach are going to burst with one wrong move, and Hawks has polished off the remaining ube for him.
They take swigs of the omeshu, passing the bottle back and forth until it’s just backwash at the bottom, and by then, the sun is cresting over the horizon and Dabi’s head is more than a little bit fuzzy. Even still, they’re both too wired to sleep, so they move to the cheap, low-set couch Dabi left in its place at the center of the room. It creaks under their combined weight, but it doesn’t dip in the middle or anything like the table had, so Dabi pays it little mind. He’s used to shitty furniture, and as long as it works, he has no real complaints. He fumbles with the remote until the tv unmutes, flips through channels absently while Hawks settles his wings more comfortably over the back of the couch. He finds some pre-quirk-era action movie that doesn’t seem too bad and puts it on for background noise.
He’s a little bit buzzed. He thinks maybe he had more of the wine than Hawks did. Right now, though, that feels okay. Hawks, in just his white t-shirt and jeans with no belt, radiates soft warmth beside him. His arm is slung over the back of the couch, braced behind Dabi’s head. When he leans back, Hawks doesn’t pull away, so Dabi relaxes against him. Hawks’s fingers find the ends of his hair. When Dabi looks over, a glance from the corner of his eye, Hawks has his eyes on the tv; he’s twisting Dabi’s hair absently into little spirals, anyway.
The movie plays. It rolls into another. The shoji doors, closed tight to their private section of engawa, glow a soft brown as light filters into the morning through the trees. They have work they need to be doing, plans that need to be discussed, an encrypted flash drive that needs to be decoded. They need, really, to sleep. There’s two futons folded in the closet. Instead, Dabi’s hand finds its way to Hawks’s thigh, partway through the second movie. Hawks’s fingers find the shell of his ear not long after.
Hawks rolls his earlobe beneath his thumb, runs his nail along the shell’s curve. Dabi, though he’s trying not to focus on it, is very rapidly growing hard in the confines of his jeans. He’s tipsy and easily riled like a teenager; he couldn’t describe the plot of this movie with a gun to his head, couldn’t have explained the last one if he tried.
Dabi’s hand travels higher on Hawks’s thigh, strokes up and down the leg of his jeans almost teasingly; when his palm and the pads of his fingers have gone somewhat numb, he ghosts his pinky against the seam of Hawks’s zipper. Hawks’s thighs relax, fall open minutely; Dabi dips between them to find that the crotch of Hawks’s jeans are damp.
He sighs, soft and shaky. Hawks’s socked feet shift over the tatami. Dabi looks at him, and Hawks stares back. Those extra flecks of color in his eyes are green, he realizes. The better lighting helps. He realizes, too, that some of the hairs in his goatee are red. Dabi wonders, faintly and somewhere in the back of his mind, if anyone else knows that, or if it’s just him.
Hawks leans in, hoods his eyes, flicks his gaze to his lips and back again. His lashes flutter when he blinks, so close Dabi can feel his breath tickling his jaw. Dabi closes the distance and kisses him, dry.
They’ve done this before, but it usually happens under the cover of night: sometimes, in an alley on the far side of town where no one will recognize Hawks if they happen see him, wings mantled high around his head; sometimes, in a love hotel under assumed names, where both of them leave alone long before the sun comes up and pretend, later, that it didn’t happen, even though they both know they’ll do it again because Hawks has a card on file; sometimes, too, it happens on dirty concrete immediately following a too-long shift, or up against some wooden warehouse crates with nothing inside them, or in the rafters of a half-built building, on a floor too high for the non-quirked eye to see.
This, however, is new. Right now, Dabi thinks it’s a very, very good kind of new. He thinks he’d like to do this again, when all of this is over.
Hawks exhales through his nose, lids drawn low. His knee comes up onto the couch, tilts his body in. The tip of his tongue taps the back of Dabi’s in his mouth, follows the line of his stitches, curls to trace the roof of his mouth to the backs of his teeth. Dabi’s eyes pinch when he moans, sucking Hawks’s breath into his lungs. He tastes like ube with too much salt.
Hawks’s button comes undone in Dabi’s fingers, zipper pulled as far as it can go. Dabi’s buckle falls open, and so, too, does the zipper of his jeans. Hawks, fist warm and dry, coaxes his cock through the hole of his fly, curls his fingers around the shaft; Dabi’s own fingers, equally dry and equally warm, dip into the front of Hawks’s boxers. Hawks breaks the kiss, bends to spit half in his own hand and half against the head of Dabi’s cock, licks his lips and slots their mouths back together. Dabi, in contrast, uses the wetness built in Hawks’s fuzzy mound to slick his fingers, spreading them apart on either side to frame Hawks’s twitching dick in the webbing. Hawks sighs into his mouth, gives Dabi’s cock a stroke to spread his spit.
Dabi sighs, too, tucks his tongue beneath Hawks’s in Hawks’s own mouth. Saliva pools. He swallows it, even though it isn’t his. When Hawks moans Dabi feels it in his own throat, returns the noise without having to think about it.
He’s buzzed, still, so it doesn’t take him much to teeter the edge. His cock swells to full hardness quickly. Any other time, he might be embarrassed, but not now. Not like this, when Hawks’s wings are shivering behind his back, arced just high enough for Dabi to see. His toes curl, bare atop the tatami. One of Hawks’s feathers wraps around his ankle, squeezes once, unfurls just enough to stroke along the length of his foot. Dabi realizes, between kisses, that he’s drawing circles with the individual pins of the quill; he shivers, feels himself throb against the teeth of his zipper. Sweat beads at his hairline.
“Hawks,” he says, sighs. Hawks’s lips trail his jaw, kiss with tongue down the mottled hollow of his throat. Dabi pinches the fat of his clit, tugs out and up like he’s jerking him off, though the angle is awkward. He repeats the motion, lets the slickness guide him, follows the subtle roll of Hawks’s hips. Hawks moans, teeth at his jugular.
“After we sleep,” Hawks starts, lips moving over his skin. His goatee scrapes Dabi’s collarbone. “I’ll suck you off.” Dabi groans, shuffles his feet on the floor. Hawks sucks a mark into his throat, bites hard enough to bruise beneath the purple of his scarring, and Dabi sighs into the nothing of the morning. Hawks squeezes on the next upstroke, wrinkles Dabi’s foreskin at the head of his cock, smooths it back out on the downstroke. Precum beads, spills, eases the glide of his calloused palm.
The tv flickers, plays a commercial neither of them are paying attention to. The white light is less harsh than it was just half an hour ago. Shadows dance more quietly up the walls as the sun overtakes them.
Two of Dabi’s fingers slip easily into Hawks’s cunt. The heel of his palm rests, warm and slippery with sweat and arousal, against his twitching, unhooded dick. Hawks begins to rock on his fingers, sitting on his knees and ankles; Dabi fucks slowly into the loose hole of his fist, times his thrusts with Hawks’s own little bounces.
Hawks kisses him again, all tongue and teeth, and then again and again. His cunt flutters around the intrusion of his fingers, rim tight and silky where it clutches his knuckles. The feather around Dabi’s ankle curls, instead, around the arch of his foot, tickles a line across the bottom. He moans, soft and breathy. His cock drools.
“Gonna cum,” he says. Hawks sucks on his tongue, swipes his thumb over his slit, breaks the kiss to nip at his bottom lip.
“Fuck me a little faster,” he whispers, trailing open-mouthed kisses to Dabi’s ear. Hawks lifts himself, just a little. His thighs flex around Dabi’s wrist. He sucks Dabi’s earlobe into his mouth, and Dabi does what he’s told.
He cums before Hawks does, spills hot over his fingers. He grunts, gives a shattered gasp against the flushed skin of Hawks’s cheek, and Hawks strokes him through it, squeezes the head like he’s trying to empty him. Dabi, hips shaking, thinks it might be working. Exhaustion, finally, creeps up the tingle of his spine.
Dabi’s fingers slip from Hawks’s cunt with a cloth-muffled squelch. Hawks’s own hand, with his knuckles pearled from Dabi’s spend, replaces it. He cums in his pants with a shudder, face tucked into Dabi’s throat and palm splayed across his chest. Dabi kisses his ear, the connection of his jaw, his cheek. Hawks, once the tremble in his wings has settled, cups his throat, runs his thumb back and forth over the bump of his jugular. Dabi’s eyelids droop. He lets his head, heavy, drop onto Hawks’s shoulder.
Feathers slide the closet door open. When Dabi lifts his head, blinks bleary eyes over the back of the couch, the futons have been rolled out. The top layer is untucked, corner folded over. The base cushions are touching.
They stand, together, hand in hand for a fleeting moment. Dabi tucks himself back into his jeans, pulls his belt through the loops and kicks his pants away. He steps around the couch and drops himself too carelessly into bed, not bothering to crawl beneath the covers because he knows he’ll get too hot if he does. He chooses the right side, by the closet. Hawks joins him a moment later, sans pants. He doesn’t tuck himself in either, lies on his side and nudges Dabi’s ankles with his toes. The tv has been turned off. The room isn’t dark, but it is yellow.
“Wake me up in four hours,” Dabi says, slurred into his pillow. Hawks snorts, beside him. His feet tangle with Dabi’s.
“Sure, man,” he says. There’s a fondness in his voice that Dabi doesn’t think he could bear to look at, so he keeps his eyes pinched shut. His stomach flutters, just a little. Hawks’s wing folds over him like a blanket. “Goodnight, Dabi.”
“Night, Hawks.”