Work Text:
There’s a baby on the love motel bed. Dabi’s pacing from the bathroom to the far wall behind him, has been for twenty or thirty minutes now. He’s gnawed his fingernails to the quick. Hawks can smell the blood where he’d bitten too-low on his thumb. The baby stares at him. Hawks stares back, unblinkingly.
The baby has dark hair like Hawks’s father and wings like his. Her eyes are gray. She looks exactly like Dabi, just tiny and fat. They’ve propped her up with pillows. There’s a towel under her naked bottom. The tips of her nails are curled and black.
“I’m gonna be sick,” Dabi says, for probably the fifth time in the last ten minutes. His bloody thumb is back in his mouth.
“Don’t,” Hawks says, like he has every time before. His wings are folded tight behind his back, fingers curled around his opposite hand in front of him. The baby gums her fist into her mouth. Hawks cocks his head to look at her, pinches the soft spot between his thumb and forefinger like it might wake him up or something. He’s tried this already, so obviously it doesn’t, not even when he digs his nails into the skin hard enough to pinch. He’d be having a panic attack right now, probably, if he was the kind of person who had panic attacks. Instead he just kind of feels numb all over.
“Bah,” the baby says. Dabi moans a high and pitiful noise. He shoves both hands into his hair and yanks, then knocks his head into the wall. It’s the third time he’s done that. Hawks tells him, absently and without looking over, to quit it.
“What the fuck are we gonna do,” Dabi says, warbling. It’s not a question, just words offered up in the ether that Hawks doesn’t have an answer to. He blinks, finally. The baby pees on the towel. Hawks is quick to use his feathers to lift her under her fat armpits and replace it. She doesn’t even seem to realize that anything has happened. Dabi chokes a garbled noise like he’s dying. Hawks knows he isn’t. Dabi is very dramatic.
“Do you think she eats?” Hawks asks, a furrow in his brow. He realizes how stupid it sounds the second it’s out of his mouth, but it’s not like he can suck the words back inside himself, so he lets them sit. The baby’s found her right foot, has her toes gripped in spit-slobbery fingers. She hasn’t discovered her left foot yet.
“I don’t know,” Dabi says. His fingers click as he picks his nail polish. “I mean, probably? Just because she’s from a quirk doesn’t mean she doesn’t eat. Does it? Oh my god.” Dabi drops into a crouch in the open frame of the bathroom door and moans again, fingers back in his hair. He says, again, “I’m gonna be sick.”
“You’re not gonna be sick,” Hawks tells him, because he’s pretty sure it’s true. His feathers don’t pick up so much as a gurgle from Dabi’s gut. Dabi moans again. The baby turns to him and giggles.
“She’s laughing at me,” Dabi bemoans, curling his forehead to his knees. Hawks, despite himself, cracks a little smile. His thumb squeezes the center of his palm, rubs up until the spot goes numb. It grounds him.
“You are being a little bit ridiculous,” he says, light, and pretends he doesn’t see when Dabi sneers at him. His teeth are dotted red with blood from biting at his lips and cheeks.
“I’m having a panic attack,” Dabi tells him, spat out like a curse. Hawks has been listening to him throw a tantrum for the better part of an hour now. He’s not the least bit threatened. Dabi’s cheeks glow pink. His eyes blaze.
“You’re not,” Hawks says, like an asshole. “Your heart rate is too steady. This is an anxiety attack at best.”
Dabi glares at him from under his bangs, fingers still twisted in the graying hairs at his roots. He’s still crouched in an awkward squat on the ground, too. His eyes are rimmed red near the waterline. “Fuck you.”
Hawks laughs, stomach fluttering. The baby shrieks like she’s trying to mimic him, then shoves her fist back in her mouth. Her tiny wings flap and flutter. They’re white. The feathers are a very pale pink at the tips. Hawks wonders if she likes shrimp.
He guesses he’s got forever to figure it out, since the quirk that made her is, apparently and kind of unfortunately, very permanent.
Eventually, Dabi calms down enough to have a conversation with and they decide on taking her back to the compound. Hawks isn’t in love with the idea, but his apartment is too small and has far too many sharp edges for the baby to hurt herself on, and they don’t know how mobile she is because neither of them really know anything about babies. Plus, Dabi’s just restocked his minifridge. That’s what really seals the deal, honestly, because Hawks hasn’t gone to the market in over a month. There’s a single, very moldy onion in the fruit drawer of his fridge that he’s too lazy to get rid of. He’s also kind of curious about what it’ll grow in the sterile environment of his seldom-opened fridge. Aside from the onion, he has two beers in the door and an old lasagna in the freezer he keeps forgetting about.
The only light that’s on when the goo spits them out is the salt lamp on the desk. It’s blue. Dabi is holding the baby, partly because he’s the one with the transponder but mostly because he seems marginally more confident in how to hold an infant than Hawks is. There’s discomfort in the downward twist of his eyebrows regardless. He gags into his fist as the goo recedes and Hawks pretends not to see it because there’s nausea curdling in his belly, too. The baby seems unbothered, which Hawks figures makes sense when you’re still little enough to only have liquid poops.
They’d fastened a towel around her like a makeshift diaper before they left. She’d wet it immediately and they’d had to start over, but that was fine because their second attempt went more smoothly. Two hand towels knot together better than one big towel, as it turns out. Hawks left a pretty big stack of yen under the ice bucket by the tv, despite Dabi’s grumblings that it’s a love hotel and they’ve definitely seen worse, so hopefully the cleaning crew won’t mind the pile of pee towels in the bathroom too much.
“Do you want me to take her back?”
“No,” Dabi says, even though the baby is grabbing at the staples that hold the seam of his chin together. Dabi holds his jaw up and out of her reach, face all pinched up. It doesn’t deter her in the slightest. “You won’t do it right.”
Hawks rolls his eyes. He drops his backpack on the ground by the desk with a thunk. “I’ll do it just fine,” he says. “I hold babies all the time. I’m not a moron.”
“Coulda fooled me,” Dabi says, muttered, like he wants to start something. He sniffs, glances at Hawks and then away again. Hawks rolls his eyes so hard he’s pretty sure he sees his brain.
The baby says “ba ba ba ba ba!” before Hawks gets the chance to open his mouth and argue, so Hawks decides to click his teeth together and not rise to the bait. At least one of them should probably act like an adult. After all, they do have a baby now. Forever.
“I bought peaches,” Dabi says, then, apropos of nothing. He shifts the baby on his hip and give her his free hand so she stops trying to steal the metal holding his face together. She immediately gums his fingers into her mouth, slobbers on them, then lets go to tug at the staples in his wrist. Hawks blinks at him. Dabi is very obviously trying to pretend he’s not doing what he’s doing. He won’t meet Hawks’s eyes. He turns his hand over when the baby grunts so she can smack at his palm.
“Okay,” Hawks says, a little bit bewildered. He blinks again, and nothing changes. Stepping out of his shoes, he crosses to the minibar, pulls the tiny fridge open and brings the bag of peaches onto the counter. There’s four.
“Two should do it,” Dabi says. There’s an odd little hum in his throat, soft like maybe he doesn’t realize he’s making the sound. Hawks says nothing and puts the bag back in the fridge, two peaches lighter. The baby babbles pointedly, and Dabi says “mhm” like he’s talking to her and not to Hawks.
He cuts the peaches on a paper plate with a plastic knife because Dabi doesn’t keep real dishware or utensils in his room. They’re so ripe the skin slides off with the drag of the knife, which is probably for the best because Hawks isn’t sure the baby can digest the skin. He tosses the pits into the sink instead of the trash just to be annoying and mashes the fruit by pinching it between his fingers. He washes his hands, tucks two napkins under the plate, and turns back around.
Dabi is sitting on the bed, bouncing the baby on his knees. He’s mumbling nonsense to her, and she’s watching him like she’s hanging on to every word, four taloned fingers in her mouth. Hawks sits beside them and pretends that the entire second half of this day hasn’t been so surreal he still can’t believe he’s not dreaming. He picks up a mashed cube of fruit between his fingers and holds it up to her. She snags it in her slick, sticky fist and shoves both the bite and her fingers back in her mouth. She shrieks, tips violently sideways in Dabi’s hold, and grabs for more peaches.