Accipiter

by fates001

Summary:

His phone vibrated again. A new message—not the Commission this time.

D: Back tomorrow. You still owe me a real date.

Hawks’ mouth bent. He typed back before he could think.

H: I have dirt under my nails and I smell like tomatoes. Still want me?

The dots blinked for an indulgent amount of time.

D: Especially then.

Hawks set the phone on the nightstand beside Dabi’s note and the paper airplane Toga had folded out of a requisition form and left on his pillow as a “housewarming present.” He crawled under the covers fully clothed, dirt and all. The greenhouse filled his head; the rooftop wind cooled the back of his neck; the sound of Dabi’s voice saying It’s a date lived warm over his sternum.

 

UNDER EDITING

Notes:

Hi guys!

This is my first ever fic so please feel free to give me feedback and comment so I know what your think
English is not my first language so if my grammar sucks I'm sorry :(

Chapter 1: Chapter 1

The city breathed in winter and exhaled neon. Below Hawks, Fukuoka’s streets were a braided river of light and sound—taillights pulsing, scooters humming between traffic like restless insects, the distant bark of a late vendor hawking steamed buns. Hawks liked to think he could read the city the way other people read headlines: the tempo of footsteps down an alley told him where a delivery driver kept late hours; the smell of oil and rain near a bridge meant a ramen shop that would be open until two in the morning. From the roof of his agency he could map the small economies and quiet tragedies that made up a metropolis, and for a few stolen hours every night, he let himself watch.

He crouched at the concrete lip, wings pulled tight around his shoulders like a living cloak. The feathers at his back fluttered in the wind, a restless fringe that never completely stilled. Hawks had learned to keep parts of himself small—small enough to fit inside comms pockets and clipped onto formal debriefs. But the world outside his agency was vast and indifferent and, for reasons he was still deciding about, he liked it that way.

A stray feather vibrated at the edge of his attention. Hawks tilted his head and listened—really listened—the way he only allowed himself to when he didn’t have to smile for cameras. Sensory threads ran from him to the feather resting just behind Tokoyami; it was a habit formed to keep a piece of the boy safe when he was out of the room. Through it, he caught the small domestic sounds of shoes scuffing, a door that stuck and took effort to open, the clack of three coffee cups on a low table. There was something almost tender in the image that bloomed: small, awkward Tokoyami with his hat feathers always a fraction out of place, balancing warmth against shadow. Hawks had never really been good at tenderness. He liked that he could be here, now, and be quietly competent at it.

He opened his eyes and focused on the street. A figure stood at the building’s entrance so still he might as well have been a statue carved of heat and cold; Todoroki Shouto looked like a person made of manners and restraint. The briefcase hanging from his hand was a punctuation mark. Hawks noticed details the way other people noticed gossip: the scuff at the corner of the leather, the threadbare cuff of a sleeve not quite hidden by careful posture. No jacket, either. In winter. Hawks felt a small, ridiculous pang—jealousy that someone could be so deliberate, so controlled, and not shiver.

He didn’t think. He moved.

Hawks launched himself off the roof in a single, smooth motion. His wings opened, catching air with a sound like silk unfurling. He descended in a silent arc and landed in front of Shouto, letting a grin—loud, practiced, public—spread across his face. He had always been good at the right face.

“Hi! I’m Hawks. Super excited to have you with me!” he said, hand thrust out.

Shouto’s eyes flicked to the hand as if measuring its weight and temperature. He blinked and then did something Hawks had long since learned not to expect: Shouto simply did not move. The silence between them stretched, full and awkward.

A clatter announced Tokoyami’s entrance; the dark-feathered boy fought a losing battle with a tray of steaming coffees. One cup teetered, then, with a reflex Hawks had polished to a shine, he snatched it and tossed it back like a shot. The heat burned his throat and left him gasping for a beat—Hawks hid the wince behind his grin.

Tokoyami’s shriek of protest was half indignation and half genuine worry. “Hawks-sensei! That—don’t—hot—”

Hawks waved him off. “You’re embarrassing him,” he told Tokoyami, then turned back to Shouto with the kind of smooth charm that made PR consultants weep with joy.

Inside the agency, Hawks sank into his chair and kicked his feet over the armrest in deliberate disarray. The desk was cluttered with the scraps of a thousand small tasks—case files, a half-assembled sandwich in a plastic wrapper, a public outreach pamphlet about hero etiquette. He flicked a folder into the bin as if he had nothing better to do, then flattened the habit into something useful.

“Let’s try this again,” he said, voice lighter than his eyes. “Todoroki-kun—welcome to my agency. Tokoyami, show him the dressing rooms. Get changed. We’ll be going on patrol in twenty.”

Shouto looked faintly surprised. “We’re going so soon?” he asked.

Hawks shrugged. “What better way to learn than being in the field?” he said. “You’ll see more in a day than in six weeks of lectures.”

Tokoyami’s feathers bristled; he blinked, nodded, and led Shouto down the corridor. The sight of the two of them—one awkward and birdlike, the other composed to the point of frost—gave Hawks an odd, warm sensation he couldn’t have named.

 

 

The alert came in like a second wind: a small fire, downtown, residential block. Hawks’ wings twitched with anticipation. He bent at the knees and shot toward the balcony, headphones pinging to life with the sound of local units scrambling. The wind tore at his coat as he crossed the space between the agency and the city’s humming center. He checked the feed on his wrist, took in the coordinates, and was gone.

The building rose dark and crooked against the early evening sky, smoke hungrily curling from a third-story window. It wasn’t cinematic—the tiles were cheap, the siding already blistered in places—but there were people inside. Hawks flared his wings, dropped into a hover, and let his feathers scout: heat pockets where a living room had become an oven, the uneven collapse of a stairwell, a child sobbing behind a wall. The structure groaned, and Hawks tasted adrenaline the way other men tasted coffee.

“Tokoyami, Shouto—window access. I want evac routes and a suppression line,” he barked through the comms.

They landed with the clumsy elegance of novices: temporary, a little too earnest, but there. Tokoyami’s Dark Shadow unfurled in a hush of raven wings, protective and huge; Shouto’s gaze cut to detail like a blade as he assessed exits, fingertips ghosting over metal frames, calculating angles like a man who spent his childhood measuring everything. They moved with a kind of violent concentration that made Hawks’ chest ache—the good sort that felt like bravery.

They got people out, at first, in a sequence that felt organized and almost too easy: a grandmother out of a second-floor window, a teenager shoulder-barging a neighbor into a stairwell. Hawks handed a small boy back to his mother with the kind of flourish he used for cameras, but there was nothing showy in the work. Tokoyami kept his shadow between flame and folk with a solidity that made Hawks’ throat tighten. Shouto carved paths of brittle ice along corridors, a glimmering tube from which residents could be shepherded away. Everything held for a beat.

Then the ceiling above the makeshift corridor sighed, and Hawks could feel the structure’s complaint through the beads of sweat on his brow. Ice settled against wood, and wood does not adore sudden strangers. The weight distribution shifted. A latent creak became a resounding crack. Hawks yelled for evacuation, for retreat, but Tokoyami, in the burst of adolescent courage that still made Hawks forgive a thousand infractions, tightened his grip on the Dark Shadow and charged deeper into the building.

Hawks never liked the raw panic of decisions. He preferred to dial into a plan and see people follow it like the chords of a practiced song. But there, amid the heat and smoke, decisions happened in the space of a heartbeat: Shouto’s eyes slotted into Hawks’ like cold steel meeting warm. He spread ice under Tokoyami’s feet, foundation to step, and pushed an arc of frost to support a sagging beam. It worked, for a moment, and Hawks felt his heart soar—until it didn’t.

Fire and ice don’t court one another—they quarrel. The ice snapped under the heat’s remorseless hunger and ran in scarred, melting sheets down the inside of the building. Weakened wood yielded in a new place, where no one had expected. There was a muffled crash and then a terrible, chemical-sour sound as structure and water and heat reorganized into collapse.

Hawks moved because motion is what he had. He grabbed an elderly man by the belt and hauled him free, felt the man’s grate of breath between his teeth, and shoved him into Tokoyami’s protection. Dark Shadow swallowed them like a curtain. Shouto braced against a post, sweat beading along his jawline, and used his quirk to funnel a cooling shield around a group of children. They made it out.

Not everyone did.

Hawks landed on the sidewalk and let the smoke peel itself away from his lungs like a bad memory. The sirens were louder now, the professionals taking over. Still, the image of a collapsed support beam took a slow, nauseating shape in his mind—an angle of light that remembered where the floor used to be. Shouto stood beside him, arms folded as if to keep himself together. Tokoyami’s head was down; his feathers whispered in a rhythm Hawks recognized: apology.

They had done good. They had also, quietly and irrevocably, caused a risk that might mean the building would not stand the night. Hawks didn’t shout, didn’t lay blame. He sat down on the curb instead, letting the kids stand around him. He watched smoke, measured paralysis that had nothing to do with wings.

Hours later, back on the agency’s roof, he played teacher like an actor playing a beloved role. He crossed his arms and rendered judgment with exaggerated sternness, letting them feel the safe weight of correction instead of the raw, cold weight of the world’s consequences.

“What have we learned today?” he asked, and let the question hang.

Tokoyami’s answer came in a small, earnest voice, at once embarrassed and defiant. “Don’t jump into a burning building without a plan.”

Shouto, less verbose, offered practical fallout: “Don’t ice a building without considering the stress on structure.”

Hawks let out a laugh, small and rueful. He ruffled Tokoyami’s feathers and then, carefully, smoothed the top of Shouto’s head as if performing some domestic magic that might stitch care back into the boys’ shoulders.

“You both did great,” he said, softening. “But listen—planning matters. Teamwork matters. And sometimes the right thing means leaving before you’re ready to be a hero.”

They took the advice like students who had been taught a hard lesson. Their cheeks pinked in the cold; their eyes had the glassy look of people who had seen too much too fast. Hawks felt the familiar tug of responsibility, that heavy, patient thing that had crept up on him when he was younger and never left. He told them to go home, rest up, come back tomorrow. He watched them leave—Tokoyami’s steps steady, Shouto’s shoulders constraining a private storm—and then his phone vibrated.

Meeting with the President.

The message had the bluntness of a state order. Hawks answered with the sigh he kept when duty pressed: a low, irrepressible groan. He flew.

 

 

 

The President’s office was a different kind of theater: immaculate, bright, deliberately unhomely. Hawks arrived silent, hands in his pockets, and waited. The woman at the desk—an iceberg wrapped in immaculate suits—clicked shut her laptop and let her gaze find him. It was the kind of look that could calibrate your heart rate.

“Hawks,” she said. “I’ve noticed you falling behind.”

The phrase landed like a verdict. Hawks let out a laugh that was half-defense, half-anger. He had grown used to being praised for efficiency and derided for flamboyance. Rarely, in the quiet between briefings, did he feel assessed in a way that burned.

She framed the next sentence with the businesslike brutality she favored. “We have new intelligence. The League of Villains is active and probing. We need someone in the field with enough access to be taken seriously.”

Hawks’ breath hitched. The folder she pushed across the desk had the weight of consequence. “Undercover?” he said. The word tasted like iron.

“Undercover,” she repeated. “Starting tonight. Build a believable profile. Find out who their contacts are. Feed us what you can. When the time is right—engage.”

It was not a request.

Hawks thought of Tokoyami’s earnestness, the way he had bounded into danger as if courage were simply the next logical step. He thought of Shouto’s shut-off look, the boxed emotions under perfect composure. He imagined them, alone and unprotected if someone traced their agency back to him. His chest tightened.

“I have interns,” he said, and the sentence held everything. The President’s expression did not soften. Her world favored outcomes over feelings.

"The whole of Japan could be in serious danger. Your excused."

"Yes ma’am."

Chapter 2: Chapter 2

Notes:

Thanks for reading :)

A hero's life was strenuous and unforgiving. Days bled into nights, and nights bled into hours of exhaustion that rarely felt enough. Hawks knew this intimately. His own job took up about eighty percent of his day, leaving him only a narrow window for himself, and now, with two interns shadowing his every move and a new undercover mission against the League of Villains, his personal time had shrunk to a mere three or four hours a day—sometimes less if the city demanded more. Even when he flew high above Fukuoka, scanning the streets like a hawk literally in flight, he could feel the weight of those missing hours pressing against him.

Tonight, after a long patrol, Hawks returned to his apartment with the kind of fatigue that was both physical and mental. The cold tiles of his entryway bit at his bare feet as he kicked the door shut, and he dropped onto the floor with a soft grunt, arms splayed wide in a starfish position. His wings ached from hours aloft, feathers crumpled and tamed into pockets during his patrol. The fog of too many shots from a bar near the latest League sighting clouded his mind, yet he forced himself upright, ignoring the temptation to collapse entirely and surrender to exhaustion.

The bar itself had been loud, a thrum of music, shouting, and the occasional clink of glasses. Hawks had sat in a shadowed corner, scanning the crowd while nursing a drink, letting his feathers stretch quietly into the room like invisible sensors. Each feather vibrated slightly in response to movement, murmuring tiny bits of information back to him. It was a habit formed in lonely apartments when he had first moved out at eighteen: a mix of paranoia, discipline, and intuition. He trusted the feathers more than most people, and tonight they had hummed with something he hadn’t expected—a faint, pulsing signal that would lead him straight to the League’s agents.

Before sleep could claim him, Hawks launched several feathers to patrol his apartment, each skimming along walls, slipping under doors, and hovering near windows to catch any sign of intrusion. The city outside might be oblivious to his vigilance, but he had long learned to respect the quiet dangers hidden in plain sight. Only once every feather returned with calm reports did Hawks allow himself to collapse fully into bed. It was 3:30 a.m. when he finally pulled the sheets over his head and surrendered to the brief respite of sleep.

 

 

 

Four days had passed since Hawks’ undercover mission had begun. So far, the leads had been slim and frustrating. Each trace of the League’s movement required careful verification, cross-referencing informants, and observation from afar. He was supposed to be at the top of his game, moving with efficiency and precision, but the constant mental juggling was beginning to fray even his practiced calm.

At the agency, Tokoyami and Shouto sat across from him. Hawks’ golden eyes scanned over the two students while he scowled at his phone, one hand pressing a protein bar flat from the force he applied unconsciously. The room was silent except for the soft hum of electronics and the occasional creak of the agency floor. The interns exchanged glances, communicating without words until Tokoyami finally cleared his throat.

“Hawks-sensei… is something the matter?”

Hawks snapped his head up, golden pupils wide, and tilted his head to the side, keeping his expression composed while masking the fatigue and tension coiling inside him. He tucked the phone away, placing it on the desk with deliberate care, and allowed a tight smile to play across his lips.

“Don’t worry, chicklets. Just more work!” He shifted his gaze toward Shouto, who immediately felt the attention like a spotlight and flushed faintly. Hawks let the look linger, studying the boy’s posture, the slight tension in his shoulders, the way his hand gripped the cup a little too tightly.

“Tell me, little Todoroki,” Hawks continued, leaning back into his chair and crossing his legs, “I’ve been observing you over the last few days, and I’m genuinely confused as to why you’re here.”

Shouto blanched at the question but shrugged with quiet indifference, taking a measured sip of his drink. “You’re the unofficial number two pro hero. There’s a lot I can learn from you,” he admitted, his tone carefully neutral, though Hawks caught the subtle pride hiding beneath.

Hawks allowed himself a deliberate blink, then another, letting the moment stretch as he took in the boy before him. Tokoyami, observing the exchange, let out a soft huff, the sound almost like a suppressed chuckle at the tension between Hawks and Shouto. Finally, Hawks allowed a slow, measured smile to break through, leaning back and letting the posture speak authority without intimidation.

“Apart from my daily routine, which I’m sure you’re already familiar with, considering your father,” Hawks said, careful to note the subtle reaction in Shouto’s expression, “there’s not much I can teach you that would suit your quirk.”

Shouto flinched slightly at the mention of Endeavor, a subtle twitch that Hawks filed away mentally. He would avoid the topic going forward. “Your control over both fire and ice is precise, and your long-range attacks are already impressive. That’s a skill few can match at your age.”

Shouto only nodded in acknowledgment, conserving energy for more important things, while Tokoyami’s shadow stirred restlessly behind him. The pause held weight, teaching without words as Hawks watched. Soon, the break ended, and the three returned to patrol, Hawks’ eyes scanning constantly, cataloging every movement, every hesitation, every subtle improvement in his interns’ techniques.

The city’s streets stretched beneath them like a living, breathing organism, neon lights reflecting in puddles from recent rain, the air carrying a faint scent of diesel, ramen, and burnt sugar from late-night shops. Hawks’ wings cut through the chill night air, eyes flicking to alleys and rooftops for the smallest disturbances, every sense on alert. Tokoyami stayed close, Dark Shadow moving protectively at his side, while Shouto’s controlled steps mirrored his calm precision. Hawks noted every detail, mentally correcting and encouraging as needed.

 

 

 

Hours later, after the patrol, Hawks returned the interns’ bags, ruffled their heads in a gesture of casual warmth, and sent them on their way. Within twenty minutes, he was airborne again, heading back to his apartment for a brief shower. The water barely touched him before he dressed in black jeans and a dark red hoodie. Then came the task he had trained for all his life: locating and listening through his hundreds of feathers scattered across the city, each one a conduit for intelligence.

His head throbbed under the sensory input. Hundreds of whispers in his mind: footsteps, conversations, ambient city noise, and, tucked deep among them, one signal pulsing faintly. Stain.

Hawks’ eyes narrowed. His feathers had picked up a cluster of voices near a club—a spot known for its connection to the League’s latest operations. He had visited this club before under different pretenses, but tonight his purpose was singular: to locate the individuals responsible for planning League operations in the city.

He landed on the street outside the club and entered cautiously, scanning through the crowd. Neon lights stuttered across the walls, music pounded in rhythm with bass-heavy beats, and bodies swayed with careless abandon. Hawks’ feathers moved silently, slipping past people, hovering over tables, eavesdropping on whispered conversations. He ordered a drink, choosing a quiet, shadowed corner where his presence would go unnoticed.

Closing his eyes, Hawks let the throb of the music fade into the background, focusing on the single feather stationed near a wrecked house across the street. His senses sharpened: shapes, sounds, vibrations—all feeding into a single, coherent image. Two figures, both men, their voices carrying over rubble and debris.

“-noying, right?” one said, muffled as if a mask distorted it. Hawks felt a sharp pulse of pain in his head as the man kicked a loose piece of concrete.

“What can we do? Shiggy has his mind on this plan. As long as I’m benefiting from it, I don’t care,” the voice continued, deliberate and calm, revealing experience and authority. Hawks’ breath caught. He had found them—the League’s operatives.

“As long as these Nomu work, it’ll be a piece of cake reaching our goal.” Hawks’ mind clicked instantly. The first voice—careful, theatrical—belonged to Mr. Compress. The other figure moved with restless energy, and the rhythm of his speech, the drawl in the vowels, the subtle inflections—it was unmistakable: Dabi.

Hawks sucked in a shallow breath, downing the drink that had been placed before him and letting the warmth roll down his throat. Dabi did not move toward leaving immediately; instead, he approached the window, resting elbows on the sill and surveying the street below. Hawks’ feather shivered from proximity, instinctively flattening to avoid detection.

The club’s chaos made concentration difficult. Hawks slipped out into a narrow alley, pressed against the brick wall, listening intently. Dabi’s fingers tapped to a rhythm unknown to Hawks, then unexpectedly he hummed. The voice was soft, almost melodic—a jarring contrast to the man’s usual reputation. Hawks’ feather jolted, his heart skipping a beat, praying that the subtle movement had gone unnoticed.

The humming stopped. Dabi remained at the window for a heartbeat longer before departing, boots crunching against broken glass. Hawks exhaled, muscles unwinding slightly, yet remained hyper-alert, cataloging every sound, gesture, and pause, storing the information carefully for analysis.

The city began to slow, the night bleeding into the faint blush of dawn. Hawks returned to his apartment, each feather retrieved and carefully folded into his network. His body ached, his head throbbed, but he allowed himself the quiet satisfaction of having successfully located and observed the League operatives. He would sleep soon, but only for a few hours—the city always demanded more.

Even as he lay in bed, eyes closed, Hawks’ mind replayed the night’s events: the club, the voices, the hum, the rustle of feathers across the streets. Each detail added to the map he was building, a network of shadows and whispers he could navigate. The mission had only just begun, and he knew the days ahead would demand every ounce of skill, patience, and cunning he possessed.

But Hawks was ready.

For now, the city slept. And Hawks listened.

Chapter 3: Chapter 3

Notes:

I present to you the first dabihawks meet up :3

The next morning, Hawks arrived at the agency in the comfort of grey sweats and a black compress-fit shirt. The kind of casual outfit that made him look deceptively effortless, even though his mind was already running through the day’s plans like a finely tuned engine. His golden hair caught the early sun streaming through the agency’s windows, and his grin stretched ear to ear. The interns blinked, momentarily unsure if they were still in a dream. The shift in attitude was almost jarring—Hawks’ usual playful energy seemed magnified, radiating from him in waves that threatened to give them whiplash.

“Good morning, my chicklets!” he called, bounding forward. Before they could even respond, he had their arms firmly in his grip, spinning them toward the stairwell. “Let’s go—have I got a surprise for you!”

Tokoyami’s shadow stirred behind him in cautious curiosity while Shouto’s eyes narrowed slightly, both students hesitant and alert as Hawks led them down to the underground level. When he flung open the heavy metal door, a rush of excitement and awe filled the room.

The gym was vast, a cavern of steel and mirrors and padded mats. Training equipment lined the walls—dummies, weights, punching bags, and apparatus Hawks had carefully curated over the years. The smell of leather, disinfectant, and polished wood mixed with faint traces of the previous day’s sweat, grounding the space in its purpose. Both students froze for a moment, taking it in silently. Hawks’ chest swelled with pride at their reaction.

“I know how I can help you, little Todoroki,” he said, pointing at Shouto, “and you too, little bird.” He waved toward Tokoyami, whose feathers ruffled ever so slightly at the affectionate nickname.

Their heads snapped toward him, curiosity flickering in their wide eyes. Hawks fought the instinctive urge to squeeze their cheeks in the same way one might with a particularly adorable animal.

“You,” he said, gesturing to Shouto, “are physically strong, but your short-term, rapid attacks… they need work. You get tunnel vision too easily, and that’s a danger when the fight moves faster than your strategy.” His eyes softened briefly before turning sharp again.

“Tokoyami,” he continued, “Dark Shadow is impressive—your quirk gives you an edge in so many ways. But you can’t always rely on him being there. Situations change, and you have to be ready to act with or without him.”

Hawks’ golden eyes flicked between them. “From now on, twice a week, we’ll take a break from patrol to focus purely on short-range combat. Building reflexes, anticipating movement, and mastering balance. You’ll thank me later.”

He stepped back, allowing them to stretch and warm up under his strict supervision. Hawks’ voice carried the kind of sharp authority that cut through hesitation: precise, encouraging, with a subtle undertone of playful challenge. The students followed instructions: laps around the gym, shoulder rotations, wrist stretches. Shouto’s fire and ice subtly rippled under his skin as he moved, a physical manifestation of energy barely contained. Tokoyami’s shadow coiled in tandem with his body, muscles taut and ready.

Finally, Hawks allowed them onto the mats. Detached from his wings to “make it fair,” he stood beside Shouto. “I want you to come at me. Don’t hold back. Don’t be afraid to hurt me—I’m a big boy.” His grin widened in anticipation, gold eyes sparkling with excitement.

Shouto’s fighting stance was precise, calculating, yet Hawks moved like water. In a heartbeat, Hawks’ reflexes anticipated every flicker of movement, and Shouto was on the floor, side aching from a strike he hadn’t seen coming. Hawks beckoned him up with a playful smile.

“Again. Shoulders down, Todoroki. Eyes on your opponent. Don’t ever look away.”

The next attempt was faster. Hawks lunged with practiced ease. Shouto managed a sidestep, only to find Hawks suddenly behind him, exploiting every misstep. His balance betrayed him, and he landed ungracefully on his face. Tokoyami couldn’t help the laugh that escaped him, while Shouto’s cheeks flushed with embarrassment. Hawks helped him up, patting him on the head with that casual, teasing warmth that both frustrated and motivated them.

“Tokoyami,” Hawks said, adjusting the smaller birdlike hero into a ready stance, “you’re already agile. Use that. Anticipate and strike. Your shadow is your ally, but your body has to be just as sharp.”

When Hawks attacked, Tokoyami focused intently, eyes tracking every subtle shift in Hawks’ posture. He slid back, raising arms defensively, attempting to anticipate Hawks’ movements. But Hawks’ smile was wicked, bordering on gleeful mischief. “Good!” he called, the sound echoing across the gym.

In a swift, almost theatrical motion, Hawks intercepted Tokoyami’s counterattack. An arm hooked his wrist, another locked onto the other, and a precise kick brought him down to the mat. Tokoyami let out a loud curse, the sound reverberating against the mats. Hawks’ golden hair was perfect, expression still teasing, completely unruffled as he offered a hand to help him up.

 

 

 

The day passed in the same rhythm: attacks, counters, falls, and corrections, punctuated by Hawks’ playful commentary and the occasional protective instinct. By the time the session ended, both students were sore, limping slightly, and sweating from exertion. Hawks, as if untouched by fatigue, skipped alongside them, waving them off with a cheerful grin.

The night was warm, the air fragrant with the first hints of spring. Hawks walked slowly down the streets, chomping on a bread roll and allowing himself a rare moment of pure satisfaction. Pride filled him like a tangible weight—his chicklets had improved so much in just two weeks. He hummed softly, letting the vibration echo through his chest, a private celebration of mentorship done right.

Then his phone buzzed. Grumbling, Hawks pocketed the roll and pulled out his Commission-only device. The name of his handler illuminated the screen. His stomach tightened.

“Hawks. We haven’t been able to see each other face-to-face for a while. Come in tomorrow,” the voice said, smooth, deliberate, and carrying just enough weight to stir suspicion.

“Yes, sir,” Hawks replied, voice steady despite the tension coiling in his chest. The line went dead, leaving him momentarily frozen in the middle of the street.

A car zoomed past, nearly clipping him. Instinctively, Hawks froze, heart racing, until a firm hand pressed against his shoulder.

“Yo, Hawks? What’s wrong with you, dude?”

Hawks looked up. Relief, warmth, and instinctive fondness rolled over him as he recognized the owner of the voice. “Rumi!” He jumped forward, hugging her, the tension evaporating in an instant. Her arms—strong, sure, and familiar—enveloped him briefly before she stepped back, hands gripping his shoulders as she inspected him like a hawk herself.

“Wings gone, slutty pants on, and lip gloss? Hawks, are you being a whore without me?” Her tone was half-laughing, half-feigned horror, eyes sparkling with amusement.

Hawks chuckled, sheepishly rubbing the back of his neck. “I’m just grabbing a drink, Rumi. I promise.”

She narrowed her eyes, then shrugged, smirking as her sharp teeth peeked briefly. “Did ya hear about the gala? The top hundred heroes have to attend after the Billboard Charts come out. You’re my date, or I’ll be stuck there on my own.”

Hawks nodded, the warmth in his chest mirrored by a small, protective squeeze of her hand. They parted with a promise, casual but binding, before Hawks turned to continue his own business.

 

 

 

Half an hour later, Hawks found himself standing in front of the derelict building he had surveilled earlier, the same one where Mr. Compress and Dabi had been spotted. He called for his feather. It fluttered out, reattaching itself to him like a loyal sentinel. The morning sun caught on broken glass, giving the house a surreal golden hue. Hawks crouched, touching a shard, delighted by the way it rang as he nudged it. Pupils widened in childlike awe at the sound.

A voice rasped behind him.

“You like shiny shit or something?”

Hawks froze, spinning slightly. Dabi leaned against the wall, cigarette between his fingers. The flame in his eyes seemed almost playful, teasing, yet dangerous. Hawks stumbled, searching for a response.

“N-no?”

Dabi’s gaze sharpened. “You asking or telling me, Hawks?” He flicked the cigarette to the ground; Hawks resisted the urge to pick it up immediately. The hero’s body moved instinctively, adopting the calm, measured stance honed over years of training.

Dabi stepped closer, blue fire crawling subtly along his arm. Hawks’ chest tightened, adrenaline prickling against his skin.

“I want to join the League,” Hawks said softly, almost a whisper, aware that the slightest misstep could ignite the flames between them.

For a long moment, Dabi said nothing. Then he flicked the fire away, face unreadable. “Piss off, hero.”

Yet even as he walked away, Hawks’ pulse raced. There was tension there—danger, yes—but also something unspoken, something magnetic. Hawks couldn’t stop his golden eyes from following Dabi’s retreating form, chest tight with a mix of exhilaration and frustration.

Even in defeat, Hawks felt the spark, and the thrill of the chase—the danger—stirred something deeper inside him.

The city remained alive, streets stretching endlessly, but Hawks’ mind was singularly focused: Dabi, fire, shadows, and a game only just begun.

Chapter 4: Chapter 4

Notes:

Just some CW for this chapter
•blood and gore/ murder
•implied past child prostitution

It was almost midnight when Hawks dropped from the rooftop, the city lights flickering below him, spilling neon reflections onto the wet asphalt. His wings were folded neatly behind him, tucked into the sleek black suit he wore for moments like this. Silence was his ally, the cold wind brushing past his face unnoticed by the few stray pedestrians far below. He landed softly on the edge of a rusted loading dock, boots barely making a sound on the metal grating.

The warehouse in front of him groaned under the wind, its paint peeling and rusty hinges squealing. Hawks’ sharp golden eyes scanned the shadows, moving with fluid precision, blending into the darkness. His heartbeat was steady, practiced—a metronome of deadly calm.

Inside, a middle-aged man stood alone, grey-white hair catching the dim light from a hanging bulb. Two children, a boy and a girl no older than twelve, were being held by two other men, their faces muffled. Hawks crept along the wall, close enough to hear their muffled voices without being detected. His feathers trembled ever so slightly, ready to obey without hesitation.

The grey-haired man leaned down, reaching out to caress the sniffling girl’s cheek. Hawks’ fingers tightened around the handles of two gleaming daggers. In a blink, he was in motion. He swooped in, silent as a shadow, hands gripping the cold steel of his weapons. The two men barely had time to register the movement before blood spurted, painting the concrete floor below. The children cried out, but Hawks was careful. Every move was precise; every strike calculated to remove threat without unnecessary collateral.

The third man, the grey-haired one, fell just as swiftly, a gurgle of disbelief leaving his throat. Hawks pulled out his dagger, wiping it on his sleeve, and clicked on his mic.

“Yes. Both children are here.”

The sound of boots echoed as the Commission agents moved in, cleaning the aftermath. Hawks didn’t glance back. He turned, folding his wings neatly, and disappeared into the night like he had never been there, leaving the chaos behind him.

 

 

 

By the time Hawks returned home, it was early evening, well past what anyone would consider “off-duty,” though Hawks never had a real off-day. He sprawled on the empty lounge floor of his apartment, the leather couch abandoned in favor of the cold tiles beneath him. A lukewarm cup of coffee sat forgotten beside him, its steam long gone. The TV babbled on, insignificant noise filling the quiet hum of the apartment.

Three weeks had passed since his internships began. Tokoyami had settled in, Shouto had started just a fortnight ago, and Dabi’s last appearance haunted his thoughts, igniting a flicker of adrenaline and something else Hawks didn’t quite want to name. The memories of scraping blood off his hands lingered, shadows of another life Hawks led that no one could touch.

Hawks let himself linger on the conversation with his Handler a week ago. Unlike the usual check-ins—strategy updates, progress reports—this had been different. The folder handed to him contained a single name, a mission outside the usual parameters, and a sting of personal failure that he couldn’t shake.

“If you were younger, we would have just sent you in like usual. But you’ve outgrown this man’s taste, Hawks.”

Hawks had clenched his teeth so tightly he thought his jaw might fracture. Bile rose in his throat. The faces of the children, innocent and frightened, burned in his mind. He had to force the memory down, every technique learned at the Commission grounding him. Even a seasoned hero like Hawks wasn’t immune to guilt.

Then his phone buzzed. Rumi. Miruko. A lifeline. Hawks stared at the message: Wanna get shitfaced tonight?

He did. Really, really did.

 

 

 

By nine, he found himself in front of one of the city’s most notorious clubs, the throbbing bass echoing through the streets. Hawks had indulged Miruko’s insistence on a little makeup; it itched against his skin, unfamiliar and distracting. He tugged at the edges of his shirt, adjusting the fabric. Social interactions weren’t his forte, but the thought of getting drunk and ignoring everything else in the world was enticing.

Rumi appeared like a storm, sweeping him into a big, unapologetic kiss. Hawks blinked, momentarily stunned.

“Sorry,” she said, grinning. “Needed to get the nerves out somehow.”

“What nerves?” Hawks asked suspiciously, brow furrowed. “What have you done, Rumi?”

She yanked him inside, past the strobing lights and throngs of dancing bodies, guiding him to a private table where four other pro heroes were already seated. Mount Lady, in a short pink dress, sipped from a straw, the corners of her lips puckered with amusement. Edgeshot lounged in a casual tight-fitting shirt, jeans replacing the usual tactical gear. Best Jeanist, immaculate even in this setting, animatedly conversed with Present Mic, who gestured wildly, voice booming over the music.

Hawks froze. Social situations like this weren’t his element, the chatter and laughter feeling like a current pulling him under. Rumi, sensing his hesitation, planted her hands on her hips, smirking.

“You never go out,” she said, playful accusation in her tone. “So I pulled a few of us together. Don’t give me that look—I know you love me.” She spun, letting her hair fly back, letting loose a triumphant “Look who’s here, bitches!”

Hawks’ golden eyes flicked around the table. He was competent in heroics, yes, and even strategy meetings—chess boards, rescue ops, coordination—but small talk, casual human interaction, this… was foreign territory. The group’s chatter hit him like a wave, and Hawks caught snippets, half-understood, half-lost in the bass-heavy music.

Edgeshot tugged him gently by the shirt into a seat, a drink thrust into his hand. Hawks accepted it automatically, the alcohol promising an anesthetic for his overtaxed mind.

“Kid! Hawks! How ya doing?” Present Mic’s grin was infectious, and Hawks opened his mouth to reply—then froze. A blush rose across his cheeks before he could form words.

“I, uh… don’t actually know your names,” he admitted, cough disguising his embarrassment.

Rumi snorted, laughter carrying over the thumping music as everyone introduced themselves. Hawks sipped cautiously, the alcohol burning warmth down his throat, loosening the tension coiled in his chest.

Time blurred. Shots passed, conversation flowed around him in fractured waves. He chipped in occasionally, witty remarks or small laughs, Rumi beaming each time. The alcohol loosened his tongue, though not enough to completely erase the awkwardness of spending time in purely casual social spaces.

An hour later, a new topic emerged. Miruko and Present Mic were laughing loudly, the sound like a crackle of static in Hawks’ mind.

“What hero hasn’t slept with another? Yuu and I spent many nights together before we got partners,” Miruko declared. Mount Lady smirked knowingly, Edgeshot and Best Jeanist nodding in agreement. Hawks froze, eyes wide, the casual talk of intimacy making his cheeks flare.

And then—Edgeshot, Shinya—his hand on the small of Hawks’ back, just beneath where his wings would normally rest. His golden eyes met Hawks’ brief, startled gaze, and Shinya winked, just for a moment, before turning back to the group. Hawks’ chest flared hot; the moment passed, but the feeling lingered, making him acutely aware of how out of his depth he was socially.

Panic surged. Hawks stood abruptly, the hand slipping away, murmuring something about needing air. The table froze, Rumi’s concerned eyes catching his retreating figure, but Hawks didn’t care. He fled, guilt and embarrassment flooding him, alcohol-laden legs propelling him into the night.

Back in his apartment, he collapsed onto the bed, shoes kicked off, limbs sprawled. He groaned, kicking his legs up like a child. Hawks’ golden eyes stared at the ceiling, mind a tangle of excitement, guilt, and overstimulation. He wasn’t unfamiliar with intimacy or touch—years of heroics had trained him in physical closeness—but this was different. Casual, non-mission, non-life-or-death intimacy. It confused him, left him awkward, flustered, and oddly exhilarated.

The buzzing of his phone went ignored. Miruko, no doubt, checking if he survived his social escape. Hawks turned toward the paperwork spread across his desk, diving into contracts, mission notes, and operational data. Alcohol fogged his thoughts, but the discipline of reviewing the files brought clarity, a grounding tether in the storm of sensations.

 

 

 

Three hours later, papers signed, notes detailed, Hawks’ eyes were bloodshot, the world outside cold and distant. He curled under the blankets, imagining warmth not from heat, but from someone else’s arms, protective, steady, holding him close. For a moment, the dangerous edge of his life—the killings, the missions, the violence—slipped away. Hawks let himself be human, letting the fantasy of connection warm him against the night.

The city outside hummed with life. Hawks’ heart slowed. His dual existence—a lethal, precise hero for the Commission, and a socially awkward, twenty-two-year-old craving human connection—stretched taut across the quiet apartment.

And in that quiet, Hawks allowed himself to imagine something more than missions and blood, a momentary escape into a world where he could be young, vulnerable, and yet… alive in ways he rarely permitted himself to feel.

Notes:

:3
Just a little filler before more chaos.

Chapter 5: Chapter 5

Notes:

CW for this chapter
•hawks gets drugged - nonconsensual touching

The week slipped by faster than Hawks liked to admit. He had grown used to the rhythm of his interns’ presence, their energy filling the halls of his agency with something beyond the constant hum of sidekicks shuffling reports and answering calls. Tokoyami and Shouto had become more than students—they were small anchors in Hawks’ chaotic life. Each patrol, each sparring match, each quiet meal on a rooftop had become a part of a fragile routine he didn’t want to lose.

But time never asked for permission. And now, as he sat with them high above the city on a rooftop, sharing a snack between patrol shifts, Hawks felt a tightness in his chest knowing they’d soon return to UA. The agency would be quieter, emptier. The silence he’d once relished would now feel heavier.

“Guess it’s almost time,” one of his sidekicks had said earlier that day, handing him a report. Hawks had responded with a shrug, but the words had lingered. Almost time.

He watched the students eat, Tokoyami speaking in low, measured words while Shouto answered with short phrases or quiet nods. Hawks found himself chewing his protein bar slower, eyes flicking to them again and again. Maybe it was the looming separation, maybe it was the exhaustion building from his double life, but he couldn’t shake the weight pressing against his ribs.

Then the world shattered.

A violent boom rattled the rooftop, and a column of blue flame tore through the sky like a spear. Hawks’ feathers bristled instantly.

“Move!” he barked, and they did, without hesitation.

The city below was chaos. Flames devoured buildings, screams pierced the smoke-filled air, and a second explosion roared as Hawks dived into the fray. His wings flared wide, releasing a storm of feathers that darted like living blades. They severed falling debris, shielded civilians, lifted children out of burning cars. Hawks’ ears rang with the cacophony, but his focus never faltered.

“Tokoyami, east block! Get them out!”

“Shouto, barrier up—now!”

The boys obeyed, their quirks flashing into action. Dark Shadow loomed, sweeping civilians to safety, while Shouto’s ice carved glacial walls that slowed the fire’s spread. Hawks spared them no more than a glance—he trusted them. He had to.

And then he saw him.

Dabi.

Blue fire crawled over his hands like serpents as he advanced through the wreckage, his stitched face lit in a hellish glow. Hawks reacted instantly, feathers launching like arrows to pin him to the nearest wall. The villain snarled, fire licking at the bindings, but Hawks’ control was faster, sharper. His feathers flexed and shifted, dodging the flames, tightening their grip.

“Fuck off, Hawks!” Dabi spat. “I’m in the middle of something here!”

They clashed. Dabi’s fire surged, Hawks’ feathers countered, slicing the air like whips. Shouto, face pale with fury, tried to rush forward. Hawks caught his movement and his heart clenched. The boy’s ice erupted, colliding with blue flame in a hiss of steam. For a breath, the street was swallowed in mist. Then fire erupted again, two columns of searing heat that forced Hawks to grab Shouto by the waist, hauling him into the sky just as the ground split with fire.

Hawks’ wings beat furiously. Below, civilians screamed, smoke choking the air. Shouto thrashed in his grip, voice breaking. “Why did you let him go?!”

Hawks’ jaw tightened. “Because there are too many injured. Our job is to save lives first. Dabi will be back. He always comes back.”

Shouto’s eyes burned, but he said nothing more. Hawks knew that anger—the helplessness, the ache of wanting to fight harder, strike deeper. But there was no room for ego in this work. Only priorities. And today, that priority was survival.

By the time paramedics arrived, Hawks’ body was trembling from exertion. Twenty minutes of nonstop evacuations, nonstop scanning for survivors, nonstop command. His throat was raw from shouting, his wings ached from overextension, and still, his feathers combed the wreckage for signs of life until the very last second.

Only when the street was cleared did he turn to his interns, both pale and shaken. He ushered them back to the agency, his tone brisk, his face unreadable. In the office, he sat them down, folding his wings tightly against his back.

“Tell me everything you know about the League. About Dabi.” His voice left no room for argument.

Shouto’s reply came fast, voice taut with emotion. “They’ve attacked us before. Kidnapped my friend. Tried to take Tokoyami. Tried to kill us.” His hand clenched into a fist. “What else do you want to know?”

Tokoyami remained silent, eyes lowered. Hawks let the silence stretch before nodding, dismissing them with a tired pat on the head. There were no cheerful words this time, no teasing. Just the quiet weight of unspoken fear.

 

 

 

Later that night, Hawks found himself outside a club. The neon lights buzzed, the bass of the music thumped through the pavement, and laughter spilled from the doorway. Hawks adjusted the collar of his coat, tugged his hoodie lower, and slipped inside. His feathers were tucked discreetly into his sleeves, some hidden in his hair, others pressed against the seams of his jeans. They were his unseen lifeline.

The club was a kaleidoscope of noise and movement. Lights flashed in dizzying patterns, sweat and perfume mingled in the air, and the crush of bodies on the dance floor was overwhelming. Hawks slid into a booth near the back, his eyes scanning the crowd. He ordered a beer, fingers drumming lightly on the table as he waited.

The first drink went down sharp and bitter, the carbonation fizzing on his tongue. He leaned back, eyes hooded, scanning faces. Most were unremarkable—young adults dancing, drinking, flirting. But Hawks wasn’t here for them. He was here because whispers had placed the League in the area. He had to know more.

Halfway through his beer, a server appeared with a shot. Hawks raised a brow. “From who?”

The server only gestured toward the bar. Hawks followed the motion but saw nothing distinct. Still, he downed the shot, grimacing at the burn. He shouldn’t have, and he knew it. But it was easier to play along. Easier to blend.

His eyes followed every movement, tracking, analyzing, waiting. Then as he had anticipated - Dabi entered, flanked by Shigaraki, Kurogiri, and another shadowy figure. Hawks attempted to send a feather over to gather intelligence but was struck by sudden dizziness, losing control.

Time passed. The music pounded louder, the crowd thickened. Hawks’ vision began to blur. His head swam. He blinked hard, feathers twitching uneasily. Something was wrong. His beer glass tipped in his hand, spilling foam across the table. He pushed himself up, ingoring his mission, weaving toward the bathroom.

Cold water splashed against his face. He gripped the sink, chest heaving, golden eyes glaring at his reflection. His pupils were blown wide, his skin pale. Roofied. Fuck. His feathers fluttered wildly, disoriented.

He vaugly heard the door being opened and then, a hand slid across his waist, holding him too tightly.

Hawks froze. The touch was firm, almost possessive. He tried to jerk away, but his limbs felt like lead.

“Need some help?” a voice rasped in his ear. It wasn’t familiar. It wasn’t kind.

He tried to speak, to snarl, but his tongue felt heavy. Another hand gripped his arm, steering him forcefully toward the door. His heart thundered. His feathers flailed, weak and uncoordinated. The air outside was sharp, cold against his burning skin. He was shoved against the brick wall of the alley. The stranger’s mouth was hot against his neck, jaw, chest, his teeth scraping skin. Hawks gasped, the sound more a whimper than a threat.

“Stop—” His voice cracked. His legs buckled, trembling. His wings twitched uselessly, feathers falling limp. Panic clawed up his throat, tears stinging his eyes. He couldn’t fight. He couldn’t move. For the first time in years, Hawks was utterly helpless.

And then the weight was gone.

The stranger hit the wall with a grunt, thrown back by a force Hawks didn’t register. Hawks collapsed to his knees, gasping, chest heaving. A hand landed on his shoulder, steady but not forceful. Hawks blinked through the blur of his vision.

Blue.

Dabi’s eyes.

For a second, Hawks thought he was hallucinating. The villain loomed above him, cigarette smoke curling in the air. His stitched face was unreadable, but his hand remained steady on Hawks’ shoulder. Not threatening. Just… there.

Then the world tilted, and Hawks fell into darkness.

 

 

 

He woke to sterile light. The hum of fluorescent bulbs above him. The clinical scent of disinfectant. He blinked, groaned, sat up slowly. His wings twitched painfully against the sheets.

The Commission.

His Handler sat beside the bed, tablet in hand. Their expression was cold, lips pressed into a hard line. Without a word, they turned the screen toward him. A photo—grainy but clear enough—showed Hawks slumped against the alley wall, half-conscious, with a blurred figure looming above him. The image had already spread online.

“Explain,” his Handler said flatly.

Hawks swallowed, throat dry. “I was… compromised.”

“Compromised?” The Handler’s eyes narrowed. “By the time we sent an agent, you were unconscious on your apartment floor. Do you think this is acceptable?”

Hawks lowered his gaze, shame burning through him. His Handler sighed, exasperated, then reached out. Fingers brushed a stray lock of hair from Hawks’ forehead, tucking it gently behind his ear. The gesture was soft, almost parental, but the steel in their voice never softened.

“I’ve taught you better than this. Haven’t I?”

Hawks nodded, guilt sinking like lead in his chest. He hated this—being scolded, being reminded of his failures—but more than anything, he hated that they were right. He had been sloppy. And someone had seen.

His Handler’s hand lingered on his cheek, thumb brushing against skin with deceptive tenderness. “You’ll have to explain yourself to the President. He requested a meeting. I suggest you prepare yourself.”

Duty. Always duty.

Hawks exhaled slowly, his body aching, his heart heavier than ever. He would comply. He always did.

Chapter 6: Chapter 6

Notes:

More dabihawks to make up for the last chapter :p

The clock in the President’s office ticked far too loud for Hawks’ liking, each click like a hammer against his skull. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other, willing the cramp in his calf to ease, but didn’t dare move more than that. The woman sitting at the wide, polished desk hadn’t told him to sit, and Hawks knew better than to make himself comfortable where comfort hadn’t been offered.

The President typed steadily, long fingers tapping with mechanical precision. Her monitor glowed cold light against her face, highlighting every line and shadow. Hawks had memorized her face years ago—back when he was a half-starved boy shoved into the Commission’s custody. The Commission was the only institution that had ever called him valuable. His father had called him useless. His mother had said nothing at all.

Back then, the President’s sharp cat-like eyes had seemed terrifying, impossible to meet directly. They still were. Wrinkles fanned around their edges now, skin sagging slightly along her jawline, but the sharpness remained. She’d cut her hair in the same blunt style for decades—sleek, efficient, without softness. Hawks found himself staring at her shoes instead, trying to puzzle out if the heels were Prada or some obscure imported brand. The keyboard finally went silent, and Hawks’ spine went rigid.

The President shifted, resting her chin against her palm, her gaze landing on him like a weight. The sigh that left her lips carried disappointment sharpened into a blade.

“Hawks. It’s been almost a month since your undercover mission began. And in that time, you’ve barely given me the minimum.”

Right. So they were going to ignore the whole public-relations catastrophe from the club photos. Lucky him.

Hawks cleared his throat, forcing his voice steady. “I’ve made contact with Dabi. He knows I’m interested in joining the League. I’ve confirmed they’ve been producing more Nomu. And—” He paused, noting the way the President’s brow twitched at his hesitation. “I was staking out a meeting with their higher-ups when… the incident happened.”

His words hung in the air. Kuroda’s expression did not change.

“That’s it?” she asked finally. “I expected more. With everything I’ve done to make you perfect?”

The word slammed into him. Perfect. A Commission-made prodigy, feathered weapon, obedient tool. Hawks’ stomach turned, bile sour at the back of his throat. He couldn’t stop the flinch. That, of course, earned him her pleased smile. Guilt-tripping—her favorite tactic.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Hawks murmured, head dipping automatically.

She rose from her chair, heels clicking across the floor. Hawks’ feathers twitched against his back, a subconscious bristle he smoothed away quickly. Kuroda stopped in front of him, tilting her chin so she could look down at him despite their similar height.

“I want results, Hawks. Do whatever you have to. Whatever it takes. Understood?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He bowed low, the picture of obedience, before leaving the office. It wasn’t until the heavy door shut behind him that he finally let himself breathe.

 

 

 

By the time he retrieved his feathers from where he’d hidden them near the bar the previous night, Hawks’ nerves had frayed thin. He reattached them with practiced ease, stretching his wings briefly before shooting into the air, the city wind biting his cheeks.

Landing on his apartment balcony, he scrolled through his phone. His screen was a battlefield—dozens of texts from Rumi (mostly swears and all caps), the group chat with his interns, a work number from Edgeshot, and a paragraph of complaints from his PR team. Hawks grimaced.

His sidekicks had sent one more: Todoroki and Tokoyami are waiting at the agency.

He thumbed a quick reply: I’m sick. Give them the day off.

Before he could slide the door open, his phone buzzed with an incoming call. Without checking the ID, Hawks hurled it off the balcony. The phone tumbled into the night.

He collapsed onto the floor, the wood cold against his cheek, and sent a feather drifting through his apartment, routine habit.

It didn’t make it far.

Warm fingers closed around the feather mid-flight. Hawks’ body reacted before his brain did—he let out a sharp, involuntary screech and rolled onto his back.

A pair of glowing, unnatural blue eyes stared down at him. Burn scars framed the smirk curling across the man’s face.

“I was expecting more of a thank-you,” Dabi drawled, feather twisting lazily between his fingers. “But that works too.”

Hawks scrambled to his feet, blinking furiously. “Thank you?”

“You’re welcome.” Dabi dropped onto Hawks’ couch, boots thunking onto the coffee table. Hawks internally wailed as dirt scuffed into the rug.

“How the hell did you even find my place?” Hawks demanded, voice pitching higher than intended.

Dabi raised his brows, rolling the feather between his thumb and forefinger. “Who do you think carried your drunk ass home last night?”

The words landed heavy. Hawks froze, cheeks heating. “…It was you who—uhm—” He made a vague gesture, mortified.

“Yeah. Guess you were more out of it than we thought.” Dabi’s grin widened, teeth flashing. “You didn’t shut up the whole time. Blabber, blabber, blabber.”

Hawks’ entire face went crimson. He cleared his throat, forcing composure, though every nerve screamed awkward. Dabi. In his apartment. Sitting like he owned the place. Relaxed. Dangerous. The air between them buzzed with unease Hawks couldn’t quite name.

“…Why are you here?” Hawks asked finally.

Dabi leaned back, draping an arm across the couch. His scarred lips curved upward. “To put it simply? Shigaraki wants you.”

Shock lanced through Hawks, but he masked it behind a pout. “He’s too young for me.”

Dabi barked a laugh—genuine, rough. Hawks couldn’t help but smile faintly, though he tucked it away quickly. Dabi rose, pulling a cheap burner phone from his pocket and dropping it into Hawks’ lap.

“I’ll be in touch.”

Before Hawks could respond, a warp gate shimmered open. Dabi stepped into its darkness. Hawks’ chest squeezed tight, impulse making him shout: “Thank you!”

Dabi turned his head, eyes unreadable.

“For last night,” Hawks added, voice softer. “Thank you.”

For a flicker of a second, something strange—something almost gentle—crossed Dabi’s face. Then he nodded once and vanished.

 

 

 

The next day was a circus. Hawks couldn’t take three steps without cameras flashing. News reporters swarmed him, shoving microphones inches from his face, firing off questions about the photos plastered across every social platform.

“Care to comment on the scandal, Hawks?”
“Who was the man?”
“Are you in a relationship?”

He forced a smile so wide his cheeks hurt. Inside, his patience snapped.

When Dark Shadow swooped out, blocking the cameras with an intimidating stretch of shadow, Hawks nearly teared up in gratitude. Tokoyami glared darkly at the reporters, while Shouto wielded his father’s glacial scowl with terrifying efficiency, silently daring anyone to step closer.

Hawks’ heart swelled with pride. His chicklets. Protecting him.

Still, the frenzy only worsened. Finally, Hawks shot into the sky, climbing higher and higher until he floated well out of reach, paparazzi nothing more than ants below. Patrol continued like that—him watching from above while the boys managed the ground. At the end of the day, Hawks dropped back down, scooped both into his arms, and hugged them so tightly they squeaked in surprise.

“You two were amazing today,” he praised, voice thick with pride. “Seriously. I’m proud.”

Both flushed scarlet under the attention, and Hawks sent them home with ruffled hair and bright smiles.

Back in his office, the silence pressed heavy. Paperwork towered on his desk, and Hawks buried himself in it, tapping his pen restlessly against the forms. Everyone else had gone home hours ago.

The burner phone buzzed.

Hawks stared at it for a full five seconds before snatching it up, pressing “accept.”

A lazy voice crackled through. “Took you long enough. Here I thought you wanted to join the League.”

Hawks rolled his eyes, enjoying for once that no one could see. “Sorry. Some of us have real jobs. Paperwork, patrols. You know, boring stuff.”

Silence, then a sharp exhale of amusement. Dabi snorted. “Cute. I’ve got a task for you. A way to prove yourself.”

Every muscle in Hawks’ body tensed. “I’m listening.”

“I want information on the top ten heroes from the Billboard Chart. The new one coming out. You can get that for me.”

Hawks hesitated. This was it—the real test. He couldn’t afford to falter. His feathers twitched nervously at his sides. “…Sure. Anything else?”

“Yeah. Pick up quicker next time.”

The line clicked dead.

Hawks grinned. Successful. He fired an encrypted email to his Handler, attaching the request. Barely a minute later, the reply came. Attached. Don’t screw this up.

Hawks downloaded the file onto a USB, tucking it into his jacket’s secret lining. But curiosity gnawed. Opening the document, he scanned the list of names.

A grin tugged at his lips when he spotted Miruko cracking the top ten. “Knew you’d make it, Rumi,” he murmured fondly.

He skimmed down to his own ranking—Number Two. No surprise there. His chest felt both hollow and tight. He kept scrolling.

And then he saw it. The new Number One.

Endeavour.

Hawks leaned back in his chair, feathers rustling. “Well, well,” he muttered, smirk twisting. “Endeavour, eh?”

For the League, for the Commission, for himself—this was going to get messy.

Chapter 7: Chapter 7

The last day of internships always sneaks up faster than Hawks wants it to. He tells himself he’ll be cool about it, professional, a proper mentor who sees his students off with a clap on the shoulder and a “good job, see you next time.” But the second he sees them warming up on the agency’s training floor, his nose prickles and he has to swallow hard against the sting behind his eyes.

Shouto and Tokoyami stretch in their own distinct rhythms—Shouto moving with precise, practiced ease, like he’s measuring each breath against his balance, while Tokoyami tilts and rolls his shoulders in jerky motions, Dark Shadow flickering and stretching like a restless cat beside him. Hawks stands there too long just watching, feathers fluttering with the urge to wrap around them both.

He breaks the moment with a grin, sending a handful of feathers into the air in a glittery burst. “Surprise, surprise!”

A cake box dangles from his hands, decorated with messy frosting lettering courtesy of his sidekicks. Tokoyami blinks. Shouto’s lips twitch, fighting a smile.

“Graduation gift,” Hawks explains, setting it on the counter. “Don’t ask me to bake, or you’ll regret it. My sidekicks saved you from food poisoning.”

The boys exchange looks that say we believe you. Hawks walks over, clapping both on the shoulders. His voice comes out rougher than intended.

“Today, you’re the pros. I’m your sidekick. I’ll only step in if needed. Got it?”

Tokoyami’s chest swells with pride, posture sharpening into knightly dignity. Shouto gives Hawks a long, assessing look before nodding, lips quirking upward in a subtle challenge. Hawks swears he sees fire flicker in his eyes—and ice, too.

The morning patrol passes smoother than he expects. Hawks hangs back, letting the boys take the lead. Shouto handles a noisy group of fans who mob him for selfies—until Hawks catches the quick flash of a pleading look aimed his way. Hawks swoops down dramatically, snatching Shouto up in his arms with a flourish of wings, scattering the crowd. The boy’s deadpan glare says he’ll never forgive him. Hawks just grins.

They perch on a rooftop for lunch, legs dangling, the city humming below. Hawks bites into a rice ball, savoring the salty crunch of seaweed. He watches them eat, their conversation quieter than the bustle beneath, a rhythm they’ve fallen into during these weeks together.

Shouto is talking about his sister. His voice is calm, but there’s a softness there Hawks hasn’t heard before. “She’s been trying new recipes. Some of them are good. Some… not so much.” His mouth curves into the barest smile.

Hawks’ heart does something painful and messy. He reaches out impulsively, squishing Shouto’s cheek between gloved fingers.

“Little Todoroki, you’re so damn cute. I want to adopt you as my son.”

Shouto doesn’t even blink. He leans into Hawks’ hands, frowning. “You’re almost the same age as my older brother. That wouldn’t make sense.”

Tokoyami tilts his head, feathers fluffing, and lets out a soft chirp. Hawks bites the inside of his cheek to stop himself from answering instinctively in bird-song. His students are going to find out one day that he chirps back if provoked, and it will be the end of him.

“Natsuo-san is nineteen, right?” Tokoyami asks, surprising Hawks with his casual knowledge of Shouto’s family.

Shouto nods, face still cradled in Hawks’ palms.

“I meant my oldest brother,” Shouto adds simply. “Touya-nii would be twenty-four this year.”

The world stutters.

Hawks’ breath catches sharp in his chest. Tokoyami freezes, Dark Shadow flickering uncertainly. The word hangs there—would. Past tense. Hawks drops his hands, heart pounding.

Shouto doesn’t elaborate. He just finishes his rice ball, expression unreadable. Hawks swallows hard, throat dry, and lets the moment pass without pressing.

When they’re packing up to move on, Tokoyami lingers. He tugs softly at Hawks’ jacket, eyes solemn.

“Shouto rarely talks about Touya. He’s grown to really like you.”

Hawks’ chest aches. His voice comes gentle. “I’ve grown fond of him too. Just like I have with you, little bird.”

Tokoyami’s feathers fluff at the praise, Dark Shadow humming in shy agreement. Hawks ruffles the crown of feathers with his hand, laughing softly.

By the end of the day, Hawks’ composure crumbles. He’s crying—actual big, fat tears rolling down his cheeks—as he hugs them goodbye. Dark Shadow awkwardly pats his shoulder, muttering, “There, there,” while Shouto and Tokoyami stand stiffly, clearly unsure how to handle their sobbing mentor.

He lets his sidekicks take over the farewells, stepping back, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. Watching their retreating backs, something prickles along his skin, a sharp tingle that makes every feather twitch. He whirls, scanning rooftops, alleys, the sky. Nothing. Just the city breathing around him.

An itch, he tells himself. Just nerves. He forces himself back inside, burying in paperwork until exhaustion wins.

 

 

 

The next morning, his phone buzzes. A new message. A location. A time.

Dabi.

Hawks groans into his pillow. He’s going to have to fly flat-out to make it.

When he touches down, lungs burning, muscles trembling, Dabi is already waiting. He arches an eyebrow.

“I thought ‘too fast for his own good’ was just a PR slogan.”

Hawks sways on his feet, every inch of him aching. “Well, yeah. Usually I don’t have to push that hard.” His voice comes sharp with exhaustion. He pulls the USB from his jacket, glittery pink case catching the light. “Here.”

Dabi makes a face, plucking it from Hawks’ hand. “What the hell is this? Sparkle edition?”

“It’s got what you asked for,” Hawks says, deadpan.

Dabi pockets it, pulling out a cigarette. A flick of his finger ignites a single blue flame, eerily beautiful, lighting the tip. He drags in a breath, exhales smoke. Then he holds it out toward Hawks.

Hawks waves it off quickly. “Never smoked before.”

Dabi rolls his eyes, smoke curling from his mouth. “Figures. Commission’s golden lapdog. Wouldn’t know vice if it bit you.”

The words land harder than Hawks expects. He bites the inside of his cheek, arms crossing tight over his chest. Not wrong, a bitter voice whispers inside him. He forces a shrug.

“Maybe I am,” Hawks says, tone lighter than he feels. “But I believe in the League. I want change.”

The lie slides smoother than expected. Too smooth. Dabi studies him with narrowed eyes, unreadable. Hawks finds himself trapped in that sharp ocean-blue gaze, heat rising under his collar. He clears his throat, shifting on his feet.

“Can I go now?”

Dabi’s lips twist. “What am I, your Handler?” The staples along his jaw pull with the smirk.

Hawks stiffens, then forces a salute, mocking, before stepping backward. He jumps, wings snapping wide, the wind catching him as he soars away. He doesn’t look back.

 

 

 

The safehouse smells faintly of damp and disinfectant, the kind of neutral space heroes use when they don’t want to be tracked to their own agencies. Hawks is two minutes late, feathers ruffled from the flight. He mutters an apology, sliding into a seat.

His stomach flips. Miruko is here. And Edgeshot. Both of whom he’s been dodging since the humiliating mess at the club weeks ago.

Eraserhead stands at the front, hair half-tied, voice flat and tired. Hawks blinks, mildly surprised to see him here and not at UA.

Around the table sit four other heroes—lesser known, but competent. Hawks keeps his gaze forward, but his eyes flicker sideways, catching Miruko’s sharp stare. Concern is etched across her face. He forces a grin in return, though his gut twists. His gaze drifts to Edgeshot, profile outlined by the dim light, jawline precise. Hawks’ cheeks warm, and he’s suddenly very glad the room is shadowed.

Aizawa outlines the mission. An illegal fighting ring rumored to be laundering dirty money. They need proof before they can move. Apparently, an undercover hero is already inside. Hawks scans the room, wondering who, until Aizawa answers for him.

“Once Edgeshot collects the evidence, he’ll signal. Then we breach together.”

Hawks glances back at Shinya. The man nods slowly, calm, composed. Hawks’ feathers twitch. He can’t stop noticing the way his jaw cuts sharp under the low light.

The meeting breaks. Some leave. Some stay, murmuring. Miruko makes a beeline for Hawks, and before he can dodge, her hands grip his shoulders. She lifts him clean off the ground in a crushing hug.

Hawks lets out an undignified squeak, wings flaring for balance. She drops him back down, grinning wide.

“Dude! What the hell? Ghosting me? Not cool. I was worried.”

He rubs the back of his neck, chuckling weakly. “Sorry. Busy. And… honestly, I was embarrassed. About the club thing.”

Rumi smirks, leaning in. “Yeah, I know. Edgeshot thought he scared you off. But judging from that blush—” she pokes his cheek, cackling—“I’d say it wasn’t fear.”

Hawks panics, clapping a hand over her mouth. She laughs against his palm, eyes gleaming with mischief. He prays to every deity that Shinya didn’t overhear.

That night, sleep won’t come. Hawks sits at his desk, computer screen casting cold light. His fingers hesitate over the keys before he types: Touya Todoroki.

Nothing.

Just scraps of Endeavour-related articles. Family mentions in passing. Hawks digs deeper, tries again with Todoroki family. Paparazzi shots fill the screen—Endeavour towering, Shouto at his side, occasional glimpses of the other siblings. A fan page cataloging appearances.

No Touya.

Hawks’ pulse picks up. He logs into his Commission account, hesitating only briefly. He might get flagged for this, but curiosity claws too sharp to ignore.

This time, results. Two documents.

The first: a quirk support item request. Hawks scrolls, eyes narrowing. Touya Todoroki. Fire quirk, high output. But notes flagging it as incompatible with his body. Request denied. By the Commission.

Hawks’ feathers bristle. His chest tightens.

The second file makes his vision blur. A formal death notice. A photo of the Todoroki family in black, faces solemn. Shouto so small, head bowed, clutching his sister’s hand.

Hawks scrolls further, heart hammering. Cause of death: forest fire. No remains recovered. Attached photo of fourteen-year-old Touya—bandaged cheek, smiling brightly into the camera. Eyes—blue, innocent, shining.

Hawks’ breath hitches.

He slams the laptop shut, darkness rushing in around him. His chest heaves.

“What the fuck,” he whispers to the empty room.

Notes:

My updates will take a bit longer since I have uni assessments but I'll aim to get at least one chapter out a day. 🐥

Chapter 8: Chapter 8

Notes:

Implied spice in this chap

aka - hawks finally getting a little love

Hawks’s days had fallen into a kind of monotonous rhythm since internships ended. Patrol, paperwork, the occasional PR appearance, reporting back to the Commission, then crashing face-first into his bed just to repeat the cycle again. Mondays bled into Tuesdays, Tuesdays dragged into Wednesdays, and by Thursday he was so tired he could barely stand the sound of his own heartbeat. Friday didn’t come as a relief either—just another checkpoint before another round of sleepless nights.

And through it all, Dabi had gone silent. No sarcastic messages, no late-night phone calls, not even a snide comment in response to the carefully compiled packets of intel Hawks had been sending through their channel. Hawks told himself it was fine—radio silence meant the villain was alive, and alive was better than the alternative. But the quiet gnawed at him, crawling beneath his skin.

That night he was on a late shift, dressed in his black stealth uniform, perched like a gargoyle on a ledge, letting the night breeze thread through his feathers. The comm in his ear crackled softly.

Edgeshot’s voice.

“It’s time.”

Hawks flexed his wings once, shaking off the fatigue, and shot off into the sky.

The rendezvous point was an old warehouse Aizawa had scouted earlier in the week. Everyone was already in position by the time Hawks arrived. Aizawa, calm as ever, gave the subtle hand signal to move in.

The first sound was Miruko’s boot colliding with the steel door. The impact rattled down the street as it burst inward, and the quiet night exploded into chaos.

Inside: shouting, scrambling bodies, the metallic tang of blood and sweat. A fighting pit dominated the center of the warehouse, a crude ring of chain-link fencing where two shirtless men exchanged blows while the crowd howled for blood. One of the fighters—Hawks recognized immediately—was Shinya.

Edgeshot, drenched in sweat and bruises, was undercover.

The moment the door came down, the crowd’s cheers turned to screams. Hawks snapped his wings wide, sending a barrage of razor-edged feathers to pin half a dozen fleeing men to the walls and floor. He moved fast, fast enough that no one saw the hesitation before his feathers bound Shinya too—making the takedown look clean, his cover intact.

The operation was over in minutes. Aizawa’s scarf wrapped up stragglers, Miruko’s fists broke bones with dull thuds, and Hawks corralled the last of the panicked ring leaders against the wall. The police were already moving in when Aizawa finally signaled the all-clear.

Hawks let out a long breath. His feathers buzzed faintly, sharp and hungry.

Eraserhead dragged a man outside, leaving Hawks and Shinya alone near the emptied ring.

Shinya was wiping blood from his mouth with a rag, his body still slick with sweat. His hair hung damp against the cut of his jaw, plastered to the lean muscles of his throat. Hawks caught himself staring, unable to look away from the rise and fall of his chest, the flex of his abdomen as he reached for his discarded shirt.

“That was quick,” Shinya rasped, spitting out his mouthguard.

Hawks managed a smirk. “Well, I’m kind of known for that.”

The older hero chuckled, low and rough. “Appreciate the assist. That guy landed a few solid hits.”

Hawks bit the inside of his cheek, then blurted before he could stop himself. 

“I can help you patch up… at my place.”

Shinya stilled, his dark eyes sliding to Hawks with a look Hawks couldn’t read. Then, deliberately, he stepped closer.

“I assumed you weren’t interested,” Shinya murmured, voice pitched low, “after the last time.”

Hawks laughed nervously, scratching the back of his neck. “Guess I’m bad at hiding things.”

Before the silence could stretch further, a voice rang out across the warehouse.

“For fuck’s sake, just go fuck each other already!”

Both men jerked as Miruko stomped off, muttering curses.

The awkwardness broke like a snapped wire, leaving them laughing as they slipped out together.

By the time they reached Hawks’s penthouse, the adrenaline had curdled into something else—something hotter, heavier. Hawks’s pulse thrummed as he opened the door, suddenly hyper-aware of the clutter scattered around, the faint musk of feathers and cologne in the air.

Shinya closed the door behind them.

They didn’t speak. Not at first. Just looked. Hawks’s chest rose and fell. Shinya’s eyes tracked every twitch of his wings, every uneven breath.

Then Shinya crossed the space between them, caught Hawks’s chin in one steady hand, tilted his head, and kissed him.

It wasn’t cautious. It wasn’t testing. It was raw, hungry, pulling the air out of Hawks’s lungs. Hawks clutched at his arms to stay upright.

The night blurred into heat and motion. Clothes shed in a scattered trail. Mouths pressed hard against skin. Hands roamed greedy and unrelenting.

Hawks lost himself in it—Shinya’s steadiness, his heat, the way his mouth softened when Hawks trembled. It wasn’t about control or rank or missions. It was about contact. Warmth. Hawks’s body remembered what his mind tried to forget: that he was twenty-two, lonely, desperate for closeness.

They tumbled into bed, the city lights casting fractured shadows across their skin. Hawks let himself drown in the rhythm, in the press of bodies, in the sense that—for just one night—he wasn’t a weapon.

 

 

 

The red glow of the digital clock read 4:47 a.m. when Hawks blinked awake. His body ached pleasantly, the sheets tangled around his hips. Beside him, Shinya was asleep, his chest rising in a steady rhythm, hair falling across his brow.

Hawks slid carefully out of bed, tugging on the first shirt he found—Shinya’s, it turned out—and padded into the kitchen. The fridge light stabbed his eyes when he opened it, pulling a bottle of water. He was halfway back toward the bedroom when he froze.

Seven pairs of eyes stared back at him from the couches.

The League of Villains.

Hawks pinched the bridge of his nose. “This has to stop happening.”

Dabi lounged like he owned the place, eyes raking over Hawks’s bare legs, the shirt hanging loose off his shoulders. Toga was curled up with a lollipop, Twice muttered to himself, Spinner and Compress sat stiffly, and Kurogiri’s mist drifted faintly around the room. In the center, Shigaraki sat hunched, scratching his neck raw, staring at Hawks with that flat, unnerving gaze.

Nobody spoke.

So Hawks did. “What are you all doing here?”

“Watching you look like an idiot,” Dabi drawled.

Before Hawks could answer, Toga bounced up and pressed her face into his neck, inhaling deeply. “Your blood smells so good!”

Hawks held still, too tired to fight it, too aware of Shinya asleep in the next room.

Twice piped up. “We wanted to see the Number Two hero’s apartment! No we didn’t!”

Finally, Shigaraki spoke, voice rasping.

“What they meant is—I’ve decided. You’re in. Officially.”

Hawks’s stomach dropped. His mouth opened, closed. “That’s… great. Really super. But you all need to leave.”

At that moment, footsteps creaked from the bedroom. Shinya. Awake.

“Get out,” Hawks hissed, eyes sharp. His wings flared slightly. “Now.”

Kurogiri’s warp gate opened immediately. The League shuffled through one by one, but Dabi lingered, his eyes locked on Hawks with something stormy, unreadable. When the portal snapped shut, Hawks could finally breathe again.

Shinya appeared at the door in just his boxers, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Hawks crossed the room quickly, looping his arms around his neck and kissing him before he could ask questions.

“What are you doing awake?” Hawks whispered.

“Bed was cold,” Shinya murmured, kissing him again. “Come warm it up with me.”

Hawks let himself be carried back, though his eyes flicked once more toward the spot where the League had stood, unease clawing at his spine. He sent a single feather discreetly after the fading portal.

It burned instantly in Dabi’s hand.

Then the darkness of the warp swallowed it whole.

Chapter 9: Chapter 9

Notes:

Hero Billboard Charts!

Hawks hated waiting.

He crouched low, balanced on the balls of his feet, one arm draped lazily over his knee as his feathers rustled restlessly at his back. They weren’t even fully extended—just a soft tremor, a warning that his patience was thinning. The night was quiet except for the far-off hum of traffic and the occasional bark of a stray dog. A single lamp above the alley buzzed, moths suicidally dancing in its glow.

Twenty minutes past the agreed meeting time. Too long.

“You think they’ll actually show up?” Hawks muttered, tilting his head until it rested on his knee. His golden eyes half-lidded, but every muscle in him was taut, ready to strike.

Beside him, Atsuhiro Sako—Mr. Compress—looked perfectly unbothered. He wasn’t wearing his usual mask tonight; instead, his sharp features were free, his salt-and-pepper hair tucked neatly under a bowler hat. His long fingers rolled three small marbles across his knuckles, the click-click-click of them filling the silence.

“I have faith,” Compress said lightly, voice theatrical, as if he were warming up for a stage performance. “Patience, my friend.”

Hawks narrowed his eyes at the marbles. His feathers twitched. He pinched the inside of his wrist to keep his focus. “You sound pretty relaxed for a guy waiting on eight maybe-villains who might want to blow your head off.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Compress grinned, teeth flashing in the dark. “I’ve got the Number Two Hero sitting at my side. What’s safer than that?”

Hawks rolled his eyes and let himself flop backward onto the concrete, legs stretching out until the joints cracked. “Don’t flatter me. My job is to get bored so you don’t have to.”

But then the feathers at the base of his wings stiffened, a ripple of instinct traveling through him like a shiver. He closed his eyes and whispered:

“They’re here.”

Eight figures rounded the corner of the alley. Hawks had expected something dramatic: cloaks, masks, maybe even hoods pulled low like characters out of a bad gangster flick. Instead, the group marched toward them in obnoxiously bright neon-green T-shirts, the words “FIECE TIGERS” sloppily scrawled across the front in block letters.

Hawks blinked, then snorted so hard it startled a pigeon from the roof above.

“Whoever designed your shirts,” Hawks called, still half-slouched, “spelled fierce wrong.”

Mr. Compress choked on his own spit, coughing into his fist as the gang bristled like cats with their tails stepped on.

“The fuck is a hero doing here?” one of them barked, pointing an accusing finger at Hawks.

“Bodyguard,” Hawks said simply, pointing his thumb at Compress. “He pays better than the Commission.”

Compress stepped forward with a dramatic bow, cape swinging. He exchanged words with the would-be recruits—half promises, half veiled threats. Hawks tuned it out, busy flicking imaginary lint from his jacket sleeve. The negotiations ended quickly, cleanly, and Hawks thought he might finally get to crawl into bed before dawn.

But as he turned to leave, a careful hand touched his arm.

Hawks looked back. Compress was watching him with an oddly somber expression, the usual showman’s grin gone. For a second Hawks thought maybe he’d spoken aloud, maybe muttered something about his father or the Commission without realizing it.

“Don’t worry about Dabi,” Compress said quietly, voice stripped of theatrics. “He’s… having one of his moments. He’ll be back to himself soon.”

Hawks blinked. Raised a brow. But Compress just gave a theatrical flourish and vanished into Kurogiri’s mist before Hawks could ask more.

 

 

 

 

Three days later, Hawks was sitting in his dressing room, his hair being teased into place by a stylist, a makeup artist smoothing powder across his cheekbones. He was restless, drumming his gloved fingers against the armrest of his chair.

His phone buzzed. Dabi.

The first message in weeks. Hawks’s pulse quickened, but before he could unlock the screen, the air in the room shifted. Heavy. Cold.

The President walked in.

The stylist gasped, dropped her brush, and bolted, dragging the other woman out with her kit clattering. The door slammed shut. Hawks understood their fear. The President carried a presence that made even villains quake.

She didn’t waste time. Handed him a crisp folder with his speech notes. “Stay on script.” Then, casually, as if discussing the weather: “Update me on the League.”

Hawks’s throat dried. He didn’t mention their midnight visit. Didn’t mention Dabi’s silence, or the fact that every single member now knew his address. He gave her just enough to satisfy, nothing more. She left as abruptly as she came, heels clicking like a metronome of judgment.

A stagehand popped their head in. “Five minutes, Hawks.”

He nodded, rolling his shoulders. From beyond the curtain came the roar of the crowd, the emcee’s voice announcing names. Miruko’s introduction boomed, followed by thunderous applause. Hawks clapped proudly from the wings as she strutted onstage, grin sharp as a blade.

Edgeshot found him in the shadows, slipping a hand briefly onto his hip. “Be my date to the gala?” he murmured.

Hawks smirked, feigning deliberation. “Well… if you insist.”

Shinya poked him in the side before stepping into the spotlight. Hawks’s heart skipped stupidly at the warmth lingering where that hand had been.

Then it was his turn.

The lights blinded him the second he stepped out. Flashes popped like fireworks, cheers so loud they vibrated his bones. Hawks smiled wide, waved like he meant it, let his wings flare just so for the cameras. He looked every inch the charming Number Two Hero.

Inside, he felt hollow.

The emcee rattled off questions, pre-scripted PR fluff. Best Jeanist gave an eloquent answer. Miruko cracked a joke that landed perfectly. Endeavour stood rigid, flames licking angrily at his shoulders. Hawks leaned toward him, mic lowered.

“What’s it like being officially number one?” he whispered.

Endeavour’s glare could have melted steel. No answer.

Hawks rolled his eyes, raised the mic, and interrupted the program. “C’mon, who actually wants to listen to this crap? Stain, maybe?”

The crowd gasped. Silence fell like a guillotine. Hawks rose into the air on his wings, smirk sharp as a knife.

“If we’re talking about popularity, Best Jeanist is at the top. I’m runner-up, thanks. Edgeshot’s third. Endeavour…” he tilted his head toward the flame hero, “…he’s down at fourth.”

Flashes erupted again, cameras desperate. The President was nodding offstage, signaling him to keep going. Hawks ignored it.

“Honestly, I think it’s about time we stop faking. Maybe we should say what’s actually on our minds, yeah?”

He landed lightly, wings folding. The crowd leaned forward, waiting. Hawks gestured at Endeavour. “So let’s hear from our brand-new Number One—whose approval rating, by the way, is lower than mine.”

The silence was suffocating. Endeavour’s jaw flexed. Finally, he ripped the mic from Hawks’s hand, his voice like gravel dragged over flame.

“Just watch me.”

The words burned with more weight than fire ever could. Hawks clapped, alone, his grin genuine for the first time that night.

 

 

 

Hawks somehow wrangled Endeavour into a private lunch under the guise of celebrating his new title. They sat in stiff silence across from one another, a waiter nervously delivering drinks before retreating.

“Why did you ask me here?” Endeavour rumbled.

Hawks licked sauce from his thumb, leaned back. “Needed someone to pay.”

The glare that earned him nearly cracked the table. Hawks raised his hands. “Kidding. Look—I need your help.”

Endeavour crossed his arms, but his eyes sharpened, listening. Hawks lowered his voice.

“I’ve been hearing rumors. Nomu sightings. All over Japan. Started right after internships ended.”

A flicker crossed Endeavour’s face. Hawks tilted his head. “That’s right. Shouto left you to join my agency, didn’t he?”

A muscle ticked in Endeavour’s jaw. “…He didn’t like being reminded of his childhood, I guess.”

The weight of that sentence pressed into Hawks’s chest. He didn’t push further. Instead, he asked: “If Nomu are showing up this often, why aren’t there reports? Why isn’t the public being warned?”

He knew the answer: the Commission was burying it. But he wanted to hear Endeavour’s take.

“They’ve been small incidents. Contained.” Hawks shrugged. “But in my hometown? They’re showing up more often.”

He didn’t get to elaborate. The world shattered around them.

Glass exploded inward. A hulking black Nomu crashed through the restaurant’s window, claws carving through marble, shrieks rattling glassware. Screams erupted as waitstaff scattered.

Hawks moved instantly, feathers shooting to shield a terrified waiter. Endeavour’s fist erupted in flame, punching the monster out into open air.

“I didn’t realize Dabi meant now,” Hawks muttered under his breath, heart hammering.

The street outside dissolved into chaos. Civilians ran, horns blared, smoke curled from broken pavement. The Nomu roared, regenerating before their eyes.

Endeavour launched himself skyward in a column of flame. Hawks’s feathers split into dozens, then hundreds, darting through rubble to pull civilians free, to slice at smaller Nomu crawling from the shadows. His wings thinned with every rescue.

Pain throbbed through him. He was stretching himself too far, splitting his focus. But the sound of children crying, of glass cracking above survivors, forced him to keep going.

A guttural roar snapped his gaze skyward. The massive Nomu backhanded Endeavour mid-air. The Number One plummeted, crashing into the pavement hard enough to crater it. Hawks’s heart lurched.

He launched forward, but the beast loomed over Endeavour first.

Then flames erupted. Endeavour pushed himself up, battered but burning hotter than before.

“Not bad, old man,” Hawks breathed, relief loosening his chest. He sent hardened feathers to slash across the Nomu’s head. It shrieked, thrashing, momentum faltering.

But Hawks saw it—Endeavour was too slow. The monster was recovering.

Hawks grit his teeth. He had one move left.

He called every feather he had left, his wings trembling bare. They surged toward Endeavour, bursting into flame mid-flight, igniting into a radiant pair of burning wings at the hero’s back.

Endeavour screamed, the sound ripping through Hawks’s bones. Hawks choked, feathers searing, his vision blurring white-hot as pain tore through him.

Then the sky exploded.

A pillar of fire pierced the clouds, the Nomu incinerated in an inferno brighter than day. Hawks tumbled backward, slamming onto a rooftop, rolling until the world stopped spinning. His lungs burned, his feathers were ash, and still—still he forced himself up to look.

Endeavour stood tall amidst the flames, battered but unbroken. The crowd below roared, chanting his name.

Hawks swayed, his vision tunneling. A figure appeared at the edge of the chaos, blurred but unmistakable. Blue flames licking at pale skin. Dabi. Watching.

Hawks blinked—then everything went black.

White. Too bright. The ceiling above him buzzed faintly, antiseptic burning his nose. Hawks groaned, shifting against stiff sheets. His throat was dry, his body sore in places he hadn’t realized could hurt.

Hospital. Commission-built. Secure.

He tried to sit up, but pain lanced through his chest. Slowly, memory bled back: the glass, the fire, Endeavour’s wings blazing with his own sacrifice. Dabi watching.

Hawks closed his eyes again, a bitter laugh scraping from his throat.

“Guess I’m still alive.”

Notes:

Dabi’s POV next?

Chapter 10: Chapter 10

Notes:

Bit of a longer chapter :D

The first time Dabi saw Hawks, he almost didn’t recognize him as Japan’s second-ranked pro hero.

It was inside an abandoned house — one of Dabi’s old haunts, a forgotten husk he’d torched more than once just to feel the flames bite back. The place stank of soot and mildew. Cracked walls leaned inward like ribs, windows shattered into jagged mouths. No one should have been there.

Yet in the pale light of the broken ceiling, Hawks crouched low on the floor, wings folded tight. His golden eyes gleamed, fixated on a scatter of broken glass that glittered faintly in the dark. Fingers tapped at the shards like a child poking marbles. And then the sound — soft, involuntary, a purr vibrating from his chest.

Dabi froze in the doorway. For a second Hawks looked impossibly young, almost innocent, like some lost kid entranced by shiny things. His body twitched with a joy so raw it felt out of place in that ruin.

The sight unsettled Dabi. It made Hawks look human. Too human.

The next time, Hawks wasn’t harmless.

Feathers slammed him into a brick wall before Dabi even registered the movement. One moment he was walking; the next, the breath was knocked from his lungs, feathers cutting into his jacket like steel pins. Hawks stood across the alley, posture casual, grin sharp.

Dabi scowled, annoyed at being caught off guard. The day had been his — he’d blown up a building just to punish a debtor who thought he could skip on the League. But now the air reeked of smoke and feathers, and Hawks had backup. U.A. brats swarmed behind him.

Dabi’s gaze caught on one in particular: Shouto Todoroki, Endeavour’s son, standing close to Hawks as if the winged hero could shield him from everything. A bitter taste filled Dabi’s mouth. He didn’t stay to fight — not when the odds leaned skyward — but as he melted into the shadows, he made sure Hawks saw the look on his face: unimpressed, unafraid.

 

 

 

The third time burned hotter.

The League had met with a broker at a grimy bar. The place reeked of sweat, alcohol, and desperation. Couples ground against walls in the half-dark. Dabi wrinkled his nose, muttering “Gross,” earning a distracted hum of agreement from Shigaraki.

Then a sound split the air.

A cry.

Not just any — Hawks’s voice, slurred and weak.

All three villains snapped their heads toward the alley. And there he was: Hawks, pinned against the bricks by some stranger, body limp, eyes glassy. His shirt clung crookedly to his frame, bruises blooming across his hips. He struggled feebly, voice breaking.

Dabi saw red.

He ripped the man away, fire crawling up his arms, consuming the body in seconds. Screams cut off in smoke. Shigaraki cackled, brushing ash from his fingers after adding his Decay. Kurogiri caught Hawks before he hit the ground, mist cradling him carefully.

Without his wings, Hawks looked small. Too small.

Shigaraki crouched, poking Hawks’s arm like a child inspecting a toy. “He looks different without the feathers.”

“Don’t touch him,” Dabi hissed, kicking him back.

Kurogiri tugged Hawks’s shirt down, covering bare skin. “We cannot leave him like this.”

Shigaraki scratched at his neck, scowling. “We can’t drop him at a police station either. Maybe just—”

“No,” Dabi snapped. Too fast. Too loud.

Golden eyes fluttered open, unfocused. A broken chirp slipped past Hawks’s lips, soft and disoriented. The sound froze them all.

“Birdie,” Dabi muttered before he could stop himself.

Hawks’s gaze locked onto his. A purr vibrated in the quiet. His hands fumbled, producing his phone. Dabi held out his palm, and Hawks dropped it in. Address written right there on the case.

The rest was simple. Or it should have been.

It took both Dabi and Kurogiri to guide Hawks through the portal, the blond squawking until Dabi scooped him bodily into his arms. His apartment was bare: white walls, clean lines, lifeless. A cage disguised as a penthouse. Hawks lunged for the bed the moment he was set down, curling into the sheets, purring as if the nest of blankets made the world safe.

“Go to sleep, Hawks,” Kurogiri whispered, shutting the door.

“Yes, Koichi,” Hawks mumbled, already drifting.

The name lingered. No one asked.

 

 

 

After that night, Dabi told himself he wasn’t stalking Hawks. He was lying.

From rooftops, he tracked patrols, shadowed the flares of red wings across the skyline. Hawks was too fast to tail directly, but fans made it easy — crowds shrieking, cameras flashing, every appearance recorded and tagged.

He watched Hawks cling to his interns too tightly, sobbing when the kids left him. He saw the pained pout on Shouto’s face, the awkward comfort from Tokoyami. Dabi rubbed a stolen feather between his fingers, running his thumb along its edge. His breath caught when Hawks suddenly looked up, golden eyes scanning the shadows. Dabi ducked away, pulse racing.

Pathetic. He hated himself for it. And still he couldn’t stop.

The League fell into chaos not long after.

Their cash flow was gone. Toga and Twice wept into each other’s arms. Spinner paced, Compress brooded, Shigaraki sulked on the floor.

“What do you mean arrested?” Dabi snarled, flames licking at his skin.

Spinner repeated, grim. “The heroes shut it down.”

Dabi inhaled sharply. Not worth burning the base. Not worth—

“Hawks.”

Every head turned. Shigaraki sat up, eyes gleaming. “Hawks can help. With his intel, we’ll rebuild faster. He’s one of us now.”

“No,” Dabi growled.

“I wasn’t asking,” Shigaraki sneered. “Kurogiri. Let’s go welcome him.”

 

 

 

Moments later, they were in Hawks’s apartment.

The hero stumbled into the kitchen minutes later, hair messy, shirt half-open, pale thighs bare beneath. Dabi’s gaze darkened, following the line of collarbones, the twitch of muscles under skin. Shigaraki talked, but Dabi barely heard.

“Get out. Now.” Hawks’s voice cut through, sharp and commanding.

From the bedroom came footsteps — another man’s voice.

Rage twisted in Dabi’s gut. He shoved the League back through the portal, but lingered. A feather zipped through after him, carrying Hawks’s moan. Dabi caught it, burned it in his palm until only ash remained.

Then came the sight that broke his restraint.

Endeavour and Hawks walking together, laughing, sharing a meal like comrades. Dabi’s stomach turned. Before he realized it, he’d called in a High-End Nomu.

The battle was brutal. Hawks tore himself apart, feathers ripped from his back to shield civilians, to push Endeavour higher. Dabi should have reveled in Endeavour’s fall. Instead his eyes stayed locked on Hawks — pale, trembling, wings bare.

When it was done, Hawks collapsed, fragile as glass. Guilt curdled Dabi’s chest. He fled before it could rot him from the inside.

Two days later, Hawks asked to meet.

Wings half-regrown, face lined with exhaustion, he greeted Dabi with a blade pressed to his throat. Golden eyes burned, furious.

“What the hell was that, Dabi? You said next week.”

“Change of plans,” Dabi muttered.

“Endeavour’s in the hospital. The Commission is on my ass about this. Do you even care?”

Dabi sighed, brushing the blade aside, stepping close enough to feel Hawks’s breath. He pressed a slip of paper to his chest. “Consider it an apology.”

Hawks frowned, lips tightening as he read. Dabi stared too long — freckles scattered across his nose, the sharp line of his jaw.

“What is this?” Hawks demanded.

“The base. Shigaraki says you’re one of us now.” Dabi flicked the corner of the paper and stepped back. Better distance than doing something reckless.

Then he left Hawks staring after him.

 

 

 

That night, Dabi couldn’t sleep. Heat prickled under his skin, scars itching like live wires. He stripped down, sprawled across the mattress, breath unsteady. Once, long ago, someone had pressed cold packs to his burns, eased the fire. Now it was just him, alone.

He reached under the bed, drew out the hidden photograph.

Two boys. One grinning, red-haired, hands squishing the tear-streaked face of a blond. Touya and Keigo.

Dabi’s thumb traced the smaller boy’s face. Older now, Hawks still carried those same golden eyes. The same mouth.

He pressed the photo to his chest, whispering into the silence:

“Goodnight, Keigo.”

For once, his dreams weren’t fire. They were feathers.

Notes:

Yeah so some amnesia Hawks ig.
I hope you guys enjoyed this! I found it so hard writing in Dabi’s pov after doing Hawks's so much.

Chapter 11: Chapter 11

Notes:

Some Hawks and Todoroki bonding :3
CW
•mentions of past CSA
•Endeavour

Hawks tells himself it’s just another door.

It isn’t. It’s a concrete mouth with a black tongue of threshold mat and a handle that’s too cold for the late-winter air. The wind pushes at his back like a hand that wants him to get on with it; his wings shiver under his hoodie and then settle, the way a flock will all lift at once and then remember themselves. He tucks his hands deeper into the kangaroo pouch, thumbs rubbing circles against stitched cotton, and stares at the door as if staring will make it less of a thing.

It has been a week since the High-End Nomu set Fukuoka’s sky on fire. A week since Endeavour survived what he should not have, since Hawks burned his feathers to turn another man into a comet. The ragged ache at his scapulae is gone—regrowth is miraculous and humiliating in equal measure—but an itch remains under the skin, a phantom-dead layer that will not be soothed. The city has returned to its patterns. Hawks has not.

His burner buzzed after patrol: Come over. No signature. It did not need one.

He doesn’t know how long he stands there before the latch clicks, before the door yawns open on its hinges and the League pours out of domesticity like water from a tipped bowl. Toga’s grin hits him first—sharp, delighted.

“HAWKS IS HERE!” she screams, an alarm bell wearing pigtails.

A small hand clamps around his wrist with surprising authority, and then he’s inside whether or not his legs decided to move. The base smells faintly, impossibly, like disinfectant and miso. Industrial brick softened by rugs, by a couch that is ugly in a comforting way, by paper screens someone bothered to stick up to pretend the space is partitioned. A bar glints in one corner; Kurogiri polishes the counter with a cloth and looks up as if he’s a barman in a much friendlier story. He inclines his head. Spinner and Twice sit hip-to-hip on a beanbag, bodies canted toward the television, locked in a death match on a game Hawks doesn’t recognize. Spinner’s tail flicks with every near-miss; Twice alternates between triumphant cackles and despairing self-scolds.

And then there’s Shigaraki: cross-legged on the floor in socks with little skulls on them, a violently pink headband keeping his hair back, cucumber slices crowning his eyes like an auntie at a spa. Toga perches on a stool in front of him with her tongue between her teeth, carefully painting his nails glossy black.

Hawks stops short, as if he’s come upon a deer that should have bolted but didn’t. He has seen these people set cities screaming. The tableau is… ordinary. Wrong. The wrongness is not the domesticity. The wrongness is how easily his eyes want to accept it.

His throat decides to cough before his mouth decides on words. He clears it anyway, and when no one turns except Kurogiri—who lifts a gloved hand and gestures up the stairs without comment—Hawks nods back, awkward. He wants tequila. He wants to write tequila on a piece of paper and slide it across the bar and have someone with a towel over their shoulder smirk and say, “Rough night, kid?” He wants a thousand impossible things.

He puts his sneakers on the first step and feels the relief of noise thinning behind him as he climbs. The second floor is cooler; the building’s sounds breathe differently up here. A hallway cuts cleanly along ten doors, unlabelled. He pinches the bridge of his nose and shakes his head at himself. A professional would knock. Hawks has been a professional since he was fourteen, and something inside him is suddenly very tired of always being a professional.

“Dabi?” he calls, and the name comes out too soft. He swallows. “Dabi?”

A clatter, a quiet curse. The fourth door on the left flies open and there he is, leaning a shoulder against the frame, shirtless like it costs him nothing. The staples gleam along his chest like a constellation no one ever wished on; Hawks’s eyes snag on the glitter of metal and then, because he is human and twenty-two and weak, want to snag lower.

He catches himself mid-fall. Brown—no, electric blue—eyes are already laughing at him.

“Like what you’re seeing, Number Two?”

Heat climbs his neck faster than his wings can compensate.

“Yes. I mean—no.” He hears the flap of his own mortification and winces. “No?”

God, I’m an idiot.

Dabi’s laugh is a rasp in a warm room. He steps back, beckons with a curl of fingers that is more command than invitation. Hawks obeys without letting himself name it.

The room is mostly blank—uncluttered in a way that is not spartan so much as unprepared. A bed in the corner, a desk with a cheap lamp that throws a triangle onto bare wall, a window framing a shoulder of forest that presses close.

The smell hits Hawks last: smoke gone cold, tobacco smothered in ceramic. The ashtray on the desk wears a crown of half-crushed cigarettes. He thinks about lungs and then does not.

“So,” he says because saying nothing is worse, and picks at the corner of his thumbnail in a way Dabi would absolutely notice if Dabi were anyone other than Dabi, “why’d you ask me here?”

Dabi drops onto the bed as if gravity loves him more than anyone else. He pats the mattress beside him, casual. Hawks sits like a man stepping onto a frozen pond: carefully, and then pretending he meant to do it that way.

“We were going to have dinner,” Dabi says. “The idiots got distracted.” A flicker—affection disguised as insult. “So we wait.”

Hawks blinks. “That’s it? The only reason I’m here is… dinner?”

“Yeah.” Dabi gives him a look that asks if the hero is, perhaps, unusually dense today. “You’re part of the League now. Family dinners are compulsory.”

Family. The word undoes a knot Hawks didn’t know he’d been clenching around. It also ties another one.

He swallows. “Okay,” he says, because he can’t say thank you without feeling like it might be mistaken for something else. He sits very straight because Dabi lounges like a painting, elbows behind him, thighs open, the kind of posture that asks for gravity’s full attention and gets it. Hawks gets the sudden, stupid urge to crawl into the lap that posture offers, to put his face where staples catch the light and—

“I don’t think your boyfriend’s going to appreciate you looking at me like that,” Dabi says dryly.

Hawks squeaks. His wings poof. Dabi’s mouth curves up like a fishing hook.

“What—boyfriend—I don’t—” Hawks’s brain stumbles across itself. “Shinya? No. He’s not— That was a one-time thing.”

“Looked otherwise from your kitchen.” Dabi’s hands rise, for once empty of flame. “Fine. One time.”

Before Hawks can decide whether to explain, someone yells that food’s ready and there’s no more time for explanation, only velocity. Dabi nudges him down the stairs with a palm between his shoulder blades that never quite touches, like the pressure is applied via air.

The table is a Frankenstein: mismatched plates and takeout containers, chopsticks and plastic forks, seven chairs in five different styles. It is the nicest thing Hawks has seen in a month. Dabi pushes him into a seat with a theatrical lack of gentleness and drops a bowl in front of him.

“Eat,” he orders, because he’s incapable of making anything sound like not an order. He smacks Twice’s reaching hand away from a piece of meat with parental efficiency and then, as if he didn’t just do that, steals a spring roll off Spinner’s plate.

Everyone but Kurogiri sits. The warp barman stations himself behind the counter like a benevolent ghost, towel over one arm. Shigaraki groans and flicks a gloved finger at his spring roll; a corner turns to dust in his hand, and he scowls like a toddler deprived of a toy.

Hawks tastes. His mouth remembers how to smile. Whatever this is—a yakisoba too oily, a miso that errs polite—it is also hot and shared and not another protein bar wolfed on a roof. He swallows and takes another bite. Dabi watches him from his periphery. Hawks pretends not to notice and fails.

Voices braid through the steam. Spinner holds forth on the fairness of in-game economies; Twice argues with himself about whether fairness exists; Toga hums and leans across Shigaraki to steal pickled daikon and he lets her, because the headband is back and the cucumbers have been eaten and for the moment he is something like content. Mr. Compress gestures with chopsticks as if they were props. Hawks glances at Kurogiri and receives a warm, unreadable nod in return. He eats.

It happens at the speed of the smallest word.

“Sweetheart,” Atsuhiro says, conversational as you please, “would you pass the rice?”

The room holds steady. Hawks does not.

The present whips out from under him like a rug.

He is twelve. He is not Hawks. He is a name he did not choose and a body that was never his alone. The air smells like stale cologne and too-sweet breath. Sheets twist under bare knees. A voice that wears patience like velvet says, “Just relax, sweetheart,” and he tries to make his bones into air. He tries to float out of himself and up to the yellow, yellow ceiling. He tries to be a bird before wings. Fingers on his ankles, on his wrists, on his mouth. A laugh that is almost kind. A hand on the back of his head, and he says please into the wrong palm.

The room comes back and he is not—he is not where he was—but the color of the walls is wrong for a second and everyone is too close. He has moved; he doesn’t remember standing. Chopsticks clatter on wood.

“Hawks?” someone asks from very far away.

“Sweetheart,” memory answers, slick as oil.

“Hawks,” Dabi snaps, nearer, and the snap is a rope.

He looks at them looking at him and knows he is trembling. The green of Twice’s eyes through his mask flashes worry, and Spinner’s mouth is open to say something that is probably the opposite of helpful, and Shigaraki has one hand on the table and the other hovering like he’s not sure if touching helps or kills. Toga looks like she might cry. Mr. Compress looks stricken in a way that pierces Hawks’s ribs like a thin knife, because the man did not mean to throw a grenade; he meant to ask for rice.

 

 

 

 

Hawks bolts.

No wings; he doesn’t trust them. Legs, then. The door. The corridor. The base’s air changes as he moves through it, from warm food-smell to the neutrality of cleaned halls to the bite of outside. A voice calls his hero name and he violates every piece of training that tells him to stop and breathe and accept help. His lungs punch him. His heart is a trapped bird.

He runs until his phone is the only sound left. He doesn’t answer it. He doesn’t check who it is. He doesn’t land so much as fall into his apartment and drag the door shut with a heel and then slide to the floor on his spine, hands open on tile as if arrested. He lays there until the cold re-teaches him the boundaries of his skin. Then he gets up and turns on the shower and stays under until the water goes from hot to indifferent to cold, and only then does he understand he is crying because his throat is raw.

He sleeps the wrong way around on his bed, because the headboard is too much like other times.

He ignores the burner when it buzzes three times; he ignores the way the feather he left on the balcony railing vibrates like a toothache, which probably means a warp brushed by. He turns his phone face down, and when it lights his room he lets it.

The next morning he goes to work.

He stays at work.

He sleeps at work without meaning to.

He does not read the messages. He doesn’t because he can’t because he is embarrassed, because there is a boy inside him who has never learned how to receive concern without converting it to debt.

On day two, the Commission calls. He answers the first, and his Handler’s voice is all clipped fuss: the PR fallout from slamming into a window (not now), the President’s note about Endeavour’s approval rating (not mine), the updated Nomu sightings (always mine). He says, “Yes, sir,” like the old days, because sometimes saying the right thing is faster than explaining the truth.

On day three, the memory is a bee that keeps discovering his ear. Someone—him—ate an apple that tasted like perfume and peeled the sticker off with his teeth; someone else—never named—said “good boy,” and the ceiling was still yellow.

 

 

 

 

On day four, his phone rings at 11:53 p.m., and he answers before he registers the number.

“Shouto?” he says, because his bones already know.

There is breathing. The kind that has rubbed itself raw against crying.

“Hawks?” the boy says, and boy is correct even though the world keeps asking him to be a man.

Hawks is upright without having felt himself sit. Every feather he’s got left stands to attention; the rest of him goes very still.

“Hey, kid. What’s going on?” Soft, like he’s trying to get a cat out from under a bed.

“I— Can I stay with you?” Shouto’s voice breaks like a wave against a dock and tries again. “Please. Dad and I… we argued, and I—”

“Yeah.” No hesitation, because there is no world in which Hawks leaves him in the place that made that sound come out of his mouth. “Where are you? I’ll come get you.”

“I’m near,” Shouto says, and the tiny scrape of shoes on pavement comes over the line. “Just text me your address.”

Hawks wants to argue. He has a lecture about safety and visibility and twenty ways to disappear a hero student in his throat. He swallows it and sends the address instead. It is, perhaps, an act of trust. Or maybe it is proof of how much he wants a body in his living room that is not his.

He cleans without meaning to while he waits. The couch receives its single cushion as if it were a small animal being returned to its nest. He puts water on that he will forget until it boils away and beeps at him, and then remembers and makes tea. He puts a blanket on the back of the couch that is not the kind of blanket he owns; it is too soft and too blue, which means a sidekick bought it for a thing that required a blanket and Hawks forgot to return it.

The knock is polite in the way only U.A. students’ knocks are: steady, three times, with an apology baked in.

Shouto stands there with his head down and his bag bumping his leg and his mouth thinking about being brave. His cheeks are flushed from cold and from tears. Hawks opens his arms without making his face ask anything, and Shouto walks into the space like he already knew the shape of it.

“Hey,” Hawks says into hair that smells faintly of smoke that is not Hawks’s fault, and he hugs the boy exactly as long as Shouto will let him. He shuts the door with two feathers without looking. He brings him to the couch and kneels, because kneeling makes him smaller and smaller is better. He wipes a track on Shouto’s cheek with a sleeve he doesn’t mind getting wet and pushes a streak of white hair out of his eye.

“Little Todoroki,” he says, careful, “will you tell me what happened?”

Shouto shakes his head immediately with a tiny, stubborn twist that is all Endeavour and none of Endeavour at once. Hawks feels something break that was brittle already. He nods. He does not push.

They sit like that. The tea gets cold. The apartment breathes like a thing with lungs. The city outside its skin goes through cycles of siren and quiet. Hawks remembers not to chirp, not to purr; he remembers that the bird noises come from a place children do not need to be asked to soothe. At some point, Shouto’s shoulders loosen incrementally, as if someone has found a way to unscrew them from his ears. He lifts his head and composes his mouth into apology.

“I’m sorry, Hawks-sensei.”

“Don’t be,” Hawks says, and means it in a hundred directions.

He gets up, because getting up breaks a spell when spells begin to hurt. He offers a hand like an elevator door. Shouto takes it like a promise.

“Spare room,” Hawks says. “Stay as long as you want. Forever if you want. I mean, don’t, because I do shed.” Shouto’s mouth twitches. “But—yeah. As long as you want.”

Tears slick the rim of Shouto’s eyes again and spill over obediently. Hawks wipes them with the pad of his thumb in a motion he learned from a woman whose name he cannot remember, who might have been a nurse or might have been a social worker or might have been a tired waitress who handed him napkins one night and didn’t ask him why he couldn’t pay. He tucks Shouto into sheets he is suddenly grateful are very boring and very clean. He squeezes the boy’s hand once, not because he thinks physical contact is magic but because it sometimes is.

Then he does the thing that is right and terrible: he texts Endeavour. Shouto is with me. He is safe. Do not come over. He adds: He will contact you if and when he wants to. He does not add: If you show up at my door I will put you through a window. Some sentences are understood.

He sits at his desk and “works,” which tonight means aligning paperclips by size and pretending the reports will not make as much sense in the morning. He listens with one feather on the doorknob of the spare room. He keeps the kettle honest. He doesn’t sleep.

He thinks about a public lunch and about a private night. He thinks about a word like father and how it can be both job title and body horror. The Commission wants the symbol, not the man. Hawks wanted, briefly and stupidly, a friend. He saw Endeavour as a thing with fire and a man inside and thought, I can help make that man the thing he pretends to be. He feels shame creep up his neck for having believed in a version of someone that might not exist.

 

 

 

 

Morning puts light into places that lied about being clean. Hawks stumbles into the kitchen and then remembers he invited a boy to live in his house and that means there must be breakfast. He does not cook; he assembles. Pancake mix is a marvel of chemistry and cowardice and he loves it. Eggs are eggs. He burns two, sacrifices them to the sink, and tries again. By the time Shouto emerges, hair damp, eyes less red, Hawks has created something that a child could credibly call food.

“Hungry?” he asks like a kindergarten teacher in a very nice cartoon.

Shouto nods, cautious about letting his body ask for anything. Hawks puts a plate in front of him and resists the urge to kiss his forehead, which would be wildly inappropriate and also too much.

They eat. It is silent in the good way. Halfway through, Shouto tugs lightly on Hawks’s sleeve. It is a polite tug. It says, I am making a request you are allowed to deny and I will not die if you do. Hawks wants to go back in time and punch the person who taught that kind of politeness into a child.

“I need to go to school,” Shouto says. “Can I come back here tonight?”

“You don’t want to stay in the dorms?” Hawks asks, because doing the obvious thing is often safer than doing the right one and he would like some cover if anyone asks later.

“I… I want to come back here.”

“Then you come back here,” Hawks says, and the sentence puts a line down in his day that he did not know he needed.

Shouto has packed his uniform with the kind of efficiency that makes Hawks have to go sit down for a second. He walks him to the station. They stand on the platform like two men in a painting. The train arrives; Shouto glances at him and then, tentatively, leans in. Hawks hugs him quickly, carefully, like a secret. A girl in uniform sees them and covers her mouth and squeals and Hawks scuttles backward like he has been caught shoplifting a moment.

He flies, because flying is easier than feeling.

The burner buzzes while he is midair. He pretends it is the wind. The Commission phone rings. He pretends it is a seagull. He makes the mistake—midday, too bright, too many reflective surfaces—of looking down while also thinking about a boy with a scar he did not ask for and flies square into a window with the kind of thunk that feels like a punchline.

He drops, recovers, puts a hand over his face like a man putting on a mask. The fans below shriek with a sort of loving cruelty and haul their phones up. He waves and acts like he meant to do that. He imagines the edits that will be online by dusk and already feels his PR team’s fury. He hopes they sue him for defamation of hero status. He hopes it makes a very dry lawyer laugh.

At 4 p.m., an email from his Handler arrives with the subject line: Apologize To The Glass. He closes the laptop. He will apologize to the glass when it apologizes to his nose.

By the time he gets home, the apartment smells like ginger and soy and a life he doesn’t remember signing up for but wants to. Takeout boxes are marshaled into the army of a meal; chopsticks lie crossed like swords. Shouto moves between counter and table with a competence that breaks Hawks’s heart; he is too good at taking care of himself. Hawks wants to put rocks in his pockets so he cannot go anywhere the world can take him.

“Hey,” Hawks says, and the word fills the room like steam. “You didn’t have to.”

“I wanted to,” Shouto says, and that is the end of that.

They eat again. The second meal of a friendship is easier than the first. Hawks asks about classes and tells jokes that are only a little stupid. Shouto almost smiles a couple times, and once even laughs, small as a coin. After, they wash dishes together, bumping shoulders in a choreography Hawks did not rehearse. He dries Shouto’s hands with a towel because there is a father inside him who didn’t get to exist and refuses to die.

When the spare room door closes, Hawks sits in his living room quietly enough to hear the neighbor two floors down sneeze. He wants to message the League. He wants to say: I’m sorry. It wasn’t you. It was a word. He wants to say: Thank you for not grabbing me when I ran. He wants to ask Mr. Compress what exactly he meant by sweetheart and how often he uses it and whether he could never again.

He drafts and deletes six times. Every version is wrong. Too raw. Too casual. Too much. Not enough. He sets the phone face down and tells himself tomorrow like it’s medicine.

The feather on his balcony railing quivers. A slip of air that is not air stitches itself just this side of visible. Hawks stands, slow, and opens the door. Kurogiri does not step through—of course he does not—but the faintest trace of warp haze spills into the cold like breath on a winter pane. It leaves behind a small paper bag and an envelope.

Hawks looks left, right, up. No one is there. He brings the offerings inside and sets them on the counter like holy things.

Inside the bag: a box of pocky (strawberry), a cooling gel patch still in its wrapper (the cheap kind you stick on a forehead in summer), and a lopsided origami crane made out of some flier for discounted udon. The envelope contains three notes.

The first is from Toga, pink marker hearts, a tiny doodle of a smiling knife in the corner: are you mad at me? if you are i’ll cry and that’s not even a threat, it’s just true. you looked so sad. i wanted to bite the sadness. we can use a different pet name if you want—what about cupcake?

The second is from Twice, half in capitals, half in lowercase, contradictions balanced against each other until they don’t tip: SORRY for making noise / i wasn’t there / but if i WAS i would have carried you to the couch gently / no i would have panicked and screamed / no i would have made tea / okay i would have at least asked if you wanted tea.

The third is a neat card, folded over once, black ink precise. From Mr. Compress: My apologies. In stagecraft we keep words soft to keep knives from slipping. I forgot that the same word can cut different throats. I won’t use it for you again.

Hawks breathes out and sits down. He opens the gel patch. The instructions show a cartoon child with a fever. He laughs, because it is either that or cry. He presses the cool rectangle to the back of his neck where the muscles meet the base of his skull; the relief is immediate and petty and perfect.

At the bottom of the bag, almost missed: a cigarette butt wrapped in a scrap of tissue, stupid and tender and the worst gift Hawks has ever received. He tilts it into his palm. The filter is singed in a way that says it went out not by lips but by blue flame. There is no note. There doesn’t need to be.

Hawks puts it back in the bag because he refuses to be the person who keeps other people’s ashes. He sits, then, and lets the day fall off him the way water did in the shower a lifetime ago. He lets himself consider that worry does not always come with strings attached. He understands, dimly and with resistance, that a group of villains just sent him snacks and an apology and a forehead sticker and that the correct response to compassion is not self-loathing.

He thinks of Endeavour’s heavy hand on Shouto’s shoulder. Of the way Shouto’s spine bent around it. Of the word approval and how much it apparently costs. Hawks had wanted to help the Number One be a better man. He is not sure now whether that man exists or whether the title simply sits on whoever is left standing.

He stands and goes to the spare room door. He lays a single feather on the inside of the handle, a tiny alarm that will shiver if the door opens in fear. Then he goes to his own room and lies on his stomach and lets his wings sit wrong on purpose, because comfort can’t always be the first priority. He texts Kurogiri: Thank you. Also tell Atsuhiro I’m not mad. Just… careful. He adds, after a moment: I’ll come by. Soon. He deletes soon and replaces it with later and then deletes later and replaces it with nothing at all. He hits send before he can unsend survival.

 

 

 

 

Sleep does not come. He watches the digital clock do its very best impression of progress. He thinks about Dabi’s bare shoulders and the way that laugh sits in a room like a match does before a birthday candle. He thinks about the photo he has not seen but suspects exists in someone else’s drawer. He thinks about the way Dabi said family like a dare and this dinner like a practice.

He thinks the word sweetheart and refuses to let it be a trap. He gives it new clothes in his head. He feeds it rice and miso and lets it sit across from him at a table where someone will dust a spring roll because they forgot to wear their gloves.

In the morning, he burns the coffee. Shouto sniffs the air and says, “I can make that,” so gently that Hawks wants to adopt him on the spot even though he cannot adopt someone almost his own age and would be very bad at forms. He lets Shouto make the coffee, and it is, of course, perfect, because the boy is too good at doing the adult’s job in any room he walks into.

They eat leftover gyoza cold over the sink like bachelors. Hawks takes a bite and laughs inexplicably; Shouto points at him with one eyebrow up. Hawks says, “It’s nothing,” and it is not nothing but it is also not a thing he can explain without explaining twelve.

On patrol, he flies a little lower than usual and then corrects. He does not hit any windows. He does get recognized by a little girl in a red coat who tells him, very seriously, that birds are not supposed to have coffee, which is why they wake up so early. He salutes her as if she is a general and wishes her a long life of being deeply right.

He does not answer the burner that afternoon, but he does not turn it off. Progress, like a pigeon, is not elegant but it gets there.

He gets home to a boy who is doing homework at his kitchen table and looks up with a face that, miracle of miracles, has not learned to brace for disappointment.

“Welcome back,” Shouto says.

The words land like seeds on fresh soil. Hawks rubs a hand over the back of his neck where the gel patch was and feels the ghost of cool. He smiles and thinks, wildly, that maybe this is a thing he knows how to do: fly, land, be waited for, return. He thinks of the League at a table that looked like a bad thrift store went to heaven. He thinks of a word in a mouth that meant well and didn’t. He thinks of saying family back and not choking on it.

He drops his jacket over a chair and says, “How about we make something that isn’t delivered in a box?” and when Shouto looks at him like he might have discovered a new quirk category, Hawks grins and adds, “Relax. I mean spaghetti. I can almost guarantee we won’t set anything on fire.”

“Almost?” Shouto says, and there, at last, is the full smile.

They cook like amateurs. It is terrible and delicious. They use too much salt and then more tomatoes to chase the salt and then more salt to chase the tomatoes, and in the end it tastes like a thing they made together on purpose and that is the important part. Hawks opens the window and a feather wobbles on the sill, catching a draft. He thinks about the way smoke smells when it clings to hair. He thinks about how this room smelled like ginger when he walked in and decides that is what he wants his life to smell like for a while.

When the dishes are done and the city has settled into the hum that means nothing terrible is happening for at least ten minutes, Hawks opens the envelope again and takes out the neat card. He flips it over and writes, Accepted. But I’m not a nickname person. He considers. He adds: You can call me Hawks.

He looks at the word sitting there in his own scratchy hand. Hawks. Not Keigo. Not sweetheart. He is allowed to keep the name that is armor and let it be a thing people say with gentleness, too.

He seals the card into a new envelope and puts it by the door. He does not know how letters get delivered to villains; he suspects Kurogiri will know. He goes to the spare room and sets one feather on the floor just inside and another just outside, a silly trick that makes him feel like a clever child, and then he goes to his own bed and lies on his side with his back to the door and his wings folded neatly, quietly, in the knowledge that if something wants in, it has to pass through him.

The city breathes. The apartment breathes back. For a long time, he listens to two lungs.

Later—tomorrow, or the day after, or next week when the air tastes a little less like the Bad Word—he will go back to the base. He will say, out loud, that he was triggered. He will explain enough and not more. He will thank Kurogiri for the bag and Toga for the hearts and Twice for the contradictions and Mr. Compress for the apology. He will not thank Dabi for the cigarette butt but he will think about it longer than is reasonable. He will sit at that patchwork table and he will pass the rice, and when someone reaches for it he will say, “Here,” in a voice that belongs to him.

For tonight, he texts a single thing to the burner number that has been waiting for him like a door: I’ll be okay. It is not an apology and not a promise. It is a small truth. It is more than he has allowed himself in days.

On the other side of the city, a man with staples probably reads it and rolls his eyes and calls him dramatic and then stores those words somewhere only he knows to keep things. On this side, a boy in a spare bed sinks into sleep with a breath that doesn’t catch on its own shadow. Hawks lies on his back and stares at the ceiling until it is just yellow with the light he chose to leave on.

It is not enough. It is not everything. It is tonight.

And tonight is a place to land.

Chapter 12: Chapter 12

Time, lately, moves like a decent song on repeat—familiar enough to hum along to, different enough to keep Hawks from skipping. One week becomes two, and Shouto is still camped in the spare room like a cat who has decided which human is his. Hawks is not complaining. If anything, the arrangement gentles the edges on days that would otherwise grind him down. Patrol ends, paperwork gnaws, the city breathes its restless neon—but then there’s the click of a key in his door at dusk, the quiet thud of a school bag, and Shouto’s flat little voice drifting from the kitchen with a report on math, a joke about a classmate, a verdict on cafeteria curry. For someone who grew up with a surveillance mic where most people keep a heart, Hawks is surprised by how quickly he learns to listen just for pleasure.

Tonight, dinner is a victory of competence over chaos: pan-fried gyoza and a seaweed salad that tastes like exactly what it is—prepackaged and perfect. They eat at the kitchen bench. Hawks narrates a sky-chase in which he accidentally ate a bug (“extra protein”), Shouto raises one eyebrow in clinical judgment, and the apartment fills with the ordinary music of chopsticks and running water and the soft YouTube playlist Shouto insists helps him study.

When Shouto slips back to the spare room—white socks, tidy steps, airpods in—Hawks rolls up his sleeves and turns to the sink. The plate-drying rhythm becomes a kind of trance. Hot water, cool ceramic, stacked reflections in the window. His phone vibrates on the counter; he answers without looking.

“Hawks speaking.”

A scoff crackles back, all gravel and bad attitude.

“Fucking let me in. It’s windy.”

Dabi. Hawks can feel his stomach betray him—an absurd little lift, as if his organs are wearing helium. He glances at the balcony and there’s the villain, framed by the sliding door and a sheet of moon-silver, one finger lifted in a parody of politeness, burner phone at his ear.

Hawks hangs up and slips outside, easing the door shut behind him. A feather, already stationed on the spare room’s knob, hums back: Shouto—music on, head down, safe.

“You cannot be here,” Hawks hisses, keeping his voice low enough that it doesn’t bounce off the concrete.

Dabi fishes a cigarette from his coat pocket, mouth already tilting around a light. Hawks snatches the stick from those scar-lined fingers and flips it over the railing before he can stop himself.

The look Dabi gives him would’ve curdled milk—offended, incredulous, a touch theatrical. Good. Hawks wants him off-balance enough to leave.

“I’m serious,” Hawks says. “Please. Go.”

Dabi leans to one side to peer past Hawks into the apartment, all lazy insolence. “Don’t tell me you’ve got your boyfriend over again.”

Hawks scowls and pushes him back into the shadowed corner, positioning his own body as a screen between Dabi and the kitchen. “I do not have a— What do you want, if you’re not going to leave?”

“I can think of a few things.” Dabi’s eyes sweep him—hoodie, shorts, bare knees catching moonlight—and the appraisal should make Hawks feel ridiculous. Somehow, it doesn’t. Somehow, he wants to stand up straighter.

He crooks two fingers for Dabi to lower his voice. “Inside voice,” he mutters, and the villain actually obeys, exhaling a tiny laugh before he speaks.

“You stopped answering,” Dabi says, softer than Hawks expects. “Compress feels guilty and melodramatic, Toga’s been chewing my ear about getting you back over. Pretty sure Shigaraki called you a—” his mouth shivers around the word “—pussy. Kurogiri invented a new drink and thinks he’s a bartender again. Twice… I dunno, he’s either distressed or fine or both.”

It lands like a bag of groceries he didn’t ask for and needed anyway. Hawks finds his mouth moving before he decides what to put in it.

“So… you’re not mad at me?” he asks, the words small and slippery with caution.

Dabi’s face eases, the perpetual screw-you in his eyebrows smoothing into something Hawks doesn’t see often—recognition. He reaches out, almost absently, and brushes a stray strand of blond off Hawks’s forehead with the back of a knuckle.

“No, idiot,” he says. “Concerned. After the way you left, Compress thought he’d accidentally murdered your entire family.”

A startled laugh breaks out of Hawks, quick and bright. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.” Dabi’s mouth quirks. “He was rehearsing an apology sonnet.”

Hawks hides his smile in a shoulder, breath fogging in the cool air. Dabi tucks his hands into his coat. The wind lifts black strands off scarred cheekbones, catches on the metal of staples; the light makes his eyes run brighter than they have any right to be.

Hawks opens his mouth to say thank you—or okay—or I’ll try, but the feather on the spare room knob shivers. Door. He acts on instinct: palms flat to Dabi’s chest, he guides him back into the darkest slice of balcony shadow, pinning them both against the cold rail.

“Not that I’m not into this,” Dabi starts, low and amused.

Hawks slaps a hand over his mouth. Through the glass, Shouto pads into the kitchen, fills a glass, stands there, scanning. Hawks holds his breath until the boy turns back down the hall. The feather calms. Hawks lets go—

—and Dabi’s hands close around his waist, firm and possessive without squeezing.

“What,” Dabi says, voice gone dry as bone, “is Shouto Todoroki doing in your apartment?”

A perfectly reasonable question that sounds, in that tone, like a fire hazard. Hawks glares up into that impossible blue and answers in the same voice he uses on PR disasters and small, stubborn animals.

“Staying with me for a bit,” he says. “And don’t even think about doing anything to him, or I will kill you.”

A beat of stunned silence. Dabi’s grip loosens—not because he’s afraid, Hawks realizes, but because something in him respects the shape of that threat. He steps back half an inch. His eyes have gone distant, not calculating—remembering.

“He’s staying,” Dabi repeats, the words coming rough. Hawks nods.

“Yeah.”

Dabi clears his throat like he’s swallowed a coal sideways. “I should go.” He glances past Hawks into the apartment again, and Hawks can’t tell whether the look is protective or petty. “Come by the base tomorrow. It’s game night.”

Hawks nods, suddenly, absurdly aware of the warm print Dabi’s palms have left on the skin under his hoodie. He says nothing more because nothing would fit the moment without splitting at the seams. Kurogiri’s warp blossoms soft at the balcony’s edge like a night-blooming flower. Dabi steps back into blue and is gone.

“How does he always know?” Hawks mutters to the air, and the air does not answer.

 

 

 

 

He finishes the dishes on autopilot and then, because he has learned that people don’t always know they can ask, he knocks on Shouto’s door and pokes his head in. The kid’s bent over his homework, hair tucked behind one ear, music a faint electric whisper.

Hawks flops onto the end of the bed like a cat trying to look casual and failing.

“Hey, chicklet,” he says, mouth twitching. “Can I ask you something?”

Shouto’s pen pauses. He doesn’t look up. “Do you want me to leave?”

“What? No, no.” Hawks sits up, hands raised. “Just—curious.”

The boy nods once, a tiny go-ahead.

“You mentioned your brother once,” Hawks says. “Touya. What was he like?”

It is almost a dangerous question. But Shouto’s face doesn’t flinch; he leans back in the chair, thinking with his whole spine.

“Angry,” he says finally. “Most of the time.” He stands, crosses the small space, and sits beside Hawks—close enough for warmth, not enough to crowd. “I was young when he died. I don’t remember much.”

“Angry at you?” Hawks keeps the question gentle.

Shouto shakes his head. “At Dad.” His mouth flattens. “We didn’t get to see each other often. But once I got hurt during training and hid behind a tree and cried. He found me.” He looks down at his hands as if they might be part of that memory. “He held me until I stopped.”

Hawks traces small circles into Shouto’s palm with one finger. It is not a technique he learned anywhere respectable. It is simply what his hands want to do when a child tells him he was held once.

Shouto’s voice goes thoughtful, puzzled, as if he’s listening to his own memory with fresh ears. “He was always so sad and annoyed. But Dad would take him out somewhere every week. He’d come back… happy. For a while. Fuyumi asked him about it once—‘what do you do?’—and he said he’d made a friend.”

Hawks feels that click in his head—the horrible one, the kind that suggests a shape his eyes can’t see yet. He files the detail next to too many others. The room seems smaller for a breath; he inhales through it.

“Thank you,” he says instead, because that’s the present-tense truth. “For telling me.”

They work through the homework together: physics problem, Japanese composition. The tucking-in ritual follows like a superstition they both pretend they don’t need. Shouto grumbles good-naturedly about being treated like a kid; Hawks pretends to believe him, smooths the duvet anyway, and pinches off the light.

When the door is closed, Hawks pads to his desk and opens his laptop. The Commission intranet splash screen pulses an anodyne blue. He types: Touya Todoroki. The two files he’s already read crawl back up like spider-silk—Quirk support item request (denied); formal death documentation (forest fire, no remains recovered). He has the summaries memorized. He wants more.

He does what he didn’t do before: he reads slowly.

The support request is clinical, the language of it so clean it squeaks. Subject: TODOROKI, TOUYA. Age: 13 (at time of request). Quirk: Hellflame variant (blue, high thermal output); tolerances inconsistent with subject physiology; spontaneous dermal damage observed. The recommendation is sensible: custom cooling harness, high-end regulator, dermatological monitoring. There’s a note in smaller type, not quite hidden, a budget code that whispers too expensive. The stamp across the bottom is a familiar red. DENIED.

Hawks sits with that like a stone in his mouth. He thinks of how many times he has brushed signatures across similar stamps because “there is only so much to go around,” because “allocation must prioritize impact,” because a spreadsheet says people come in columns until they are heroes, at which point they come in headlines. He closes his eyes. He sees blue fire crawling up a boy’s forearms, the skin not surrendering so much as losing the argument.

He opens the death file.

Incident: Uncontained wildfire on the slopes of Mount Sekoto. Weather conditions: dry, high wind, low humidity. Casualties: none officially reported; one presumed, body unrecovered. Personal effect recovered: scorched hair ribbon (red), found at the boundary of burned area; DNA: inconclusive due to thermal damage. Witness statements: limited; private interviews sealed. Hero response: contained and extinguished over twelve hours.

There’s a photograph—grainy, print-scanned—a family in black. Endeavour like a pillar of smoke at the back. Fuyumi’s face working around grief the way a person does when there are children to hold. Natsuo bitter and brittle, a mouth like a blade. Shouto too small, chin tucked, hand in his sister’s sleeve.

Hawks scrolls to the bottom and finds the nod that bureaucracies give to tragedy when they run out of forms. Conclusion: accidental death by misadventure. Recommendation: counseling referrals issued.

He leans back and stares at the ceiling until the cracks make a map. “Made a friend,” Shouto had said. The weekly trips. The happy returns. Hawks rubs his fingers together, as if the friction might strike a spark that becomes a pattern.

He hops out of the Commission system and into channels that pretend not to exist. A whistleblower archive. A sanitised investigation from a decade ago with a journalist’s name scrubbed off. A report tagged PRIVATE: DO NOT DISTRIBUTE that should not be this easy to find, unless the person who tagged it wanted it found by exactly someone like Hawks.

He reads. Early signs of parental overreach; training load beyond standard recommendations; pediatric consults logged, not attended; cooling equipment request denied (budget constraints); HPSC aware of risk to minor; no interventions recorded.

He stops. He stares. He feels the smallest, oldest part of him—child, file number, asset—flare with a recognition that burns and doesn’t warm. He thinks of Endeavour at that window, facing a monster that wanted to end him, and Hawks’s own wings burning to push him higher. He thinks of a boy with blue fire who needed a harness and got a debt instead.

He saves nothing. He prints nothing. He presses his thumb against the pad where wing meets back, the way you test a bruise to remind yourself the pain belongs to you.

 

 

 

On the counter in the kitchen, the paper bag Kurogiri left last week still sits, its origami crane guarding cool patches and strawberry pocky. Hawks plucks one stick out like a cigarette he doesn’t smoke and bites. The fake-strawberry sweetness is childish and medicinal.

He taps out a message to the League burner before courage shrivels.

Sorry I bailed. It wasn’t you. It was a word.
If game night’s still on, I’ll come by.
(Tell Compress he didn’t murder my family.)

He stares at the parenthesis and decides to let it live. He adds nothing to Dabi directly. He doesn’t know what to say that isn’t either a dare or a confession.

The reply comes quicker than it should at this hour.

(Twice) WE MISSED YOU / we didn’t miss you / WE MISSED YOU. bring snacks.
(Toga) if anyone calls you sweetheart I will stab them with a straw.
(Compress) Your magnanimous pardon is accepted. I shall bring theater snacks in celebration.
(Kurogiri) I’ll have that drink ready.
(Spinner) Game: Battle Toads—Retro Remix. Prepare to suffer.
(Tomura) We need someone to ruin Spinner. Come.

Hawks laughs quietly, alone in his kitchen, then shakes his head at himself because alone is not the correct word anymore.

He pads back to the spare room and peeks in. Shouto’s drifted sideways on the bed, one arm flung out, mouth open—young the way sleeping makes people. Hawks leaves a feather on the inside of the door and another on the sill. Superstition again. It comforts him.

Back in his room, he lies on his side and watches the projection clock breathe watery numbers onto the ceiling. The balcony draft carries a trace of smoke he can’t source; maybe it’s a trick of the mind. He thinks of Dabi on his balcony, that unconscious brush of knuckles, the laugh that always sounds like a spark blown sideways. The flirty edge is there, yes, but it’s wrapped in something Hawks recognizes from other kinds of war—respect, or at least care not to harm the things someone else is trying hard to protect.

His phone buzzes once, late. A number with no name.

Dabi: bring the kid ramen next time you come. shiggy hates it but he eats it anyway.

Hawks stares at the text for a long moment, heart doing something stupid and avian in his chest. He types back before common sense can lecture him.

Hawks: he’s not “the kid,” he’s Shouto.
Dabi: i know who he is.
Dabi: don’t worry. i won’t touch him.

Three dots wobble like a held breath. Then:

Dabi: you either.

The heat that climbs Hawks’s neck doesn’t ask permission. He faceplants into his pillow, then rolls onto his back, grinning like an idiot at the ceiling.

Hawks: …noted.
Dabi: sleep. you look like s— when you’re tired.
Hawks: you think i look at all?
Dabi: don’t get cocky, birdie.

The nickname should jangle him. It doesn’t, not from that mouth. Maybe because Dabi says it like it’s a description and not a leash.

“Goodnight, menace,” Hawks whispers to the dark, and if the night whispers back, it does it softly enough that he can pretend it’s just the city breathing.

Chapter 13: Chapter 13

Notes:

Game night with the League!!
Just a fun lil chapter

Hawks barely has time to touch down in front of the League’s base before the front door flies inward and a horde of Twices surges out like foam from a shaken can. Hands—too many, all the same—hook his elbows and belt, steer him over the threshold, and then melt into one very apologetic Twice who skids sideways when Spinner hisses, “Dude—carpet,” staring with disgust at a glistening puddle of clone residue on the floor.

The base is brighter than the last time Hawks saw it. Someone (Kurogiri, obviously) has scrubbed the concrete, buffed the steel, and set a proper bar in one corner where glassware gleams in neat ranks. A big table dominates the room, ringed by mismatched chairs that look like they were stolen from several cafés and a school. Toga is balanced on one knee on a chair, cutting open bags of chips with a pair of scissors shaped like a rabbit; Compress is arranging small bowls like a stage manager setting props; Spinner is booting up a console beneath a mounted TV and muttering about updates.

For a second Hawks just…stands. The door closes behind him; the room exhales. He realizes he doesn’t know where to put his hands. He tucks them into the pouch of his hoodie. His wings give an involuntary shiver as a ribbon of cold air sneaks through the gap under the door.

Dabi notices him first. He doesn’t call attention, doesn’t tease. He simply hooks a boot around the chair beside him and drags it out with a scrape, chin tipping toward it. An invitation. Hawks’s nerves flick and spark; he smiles too brightly and sits.

Compress clears his throat with theatrical sobriety. “Hawks,” he says, folding one gloved hand over his chest, “I owe you an apology. If I said something at dinner the other night that—”

“It’s okay,” Hawks cuts in, fast enough that it bumps. “I overreacted.”

“Over—” Dabi begins, and then clamps his mouth shut. He doesn’t look at Hawks; he levels a stare at Shigaraki instead, who’s already drawing breath to add something cutting. For once, Tomura chooses apathy over gasoline. He slumps back and offers Toga a pinky when she demands his dominant hand.

“It’s GAME NIGHT!” Toga shrieks, launching upright, sending a confetti of black polish flecks into the air. “What do we want to play first?”

Three answers crash together at once.

“Battle Toads—” Spinner yells.

“—NO, skulls and strategy first—” Shigaraki snaps.

“—Monopoly, so we can watch society collapse!” Twice proclaims, then adds, “Never mind! Capitalism is a prison!”

Hawks leans toward Dabi’s shoulder, pitching his voice low. “What is ‘game night,’ anyway?”

Judging by how the entire table goes silent, he wasn’t as quiet as he thought.

Toga’s eyes glass over with sudden, weaponized pity. “Oh, Hawksie,” she breathes, hands clasped under her chin, “have you never had a game night?”

He has fought bioengineered monsters over burning districts with a smile on his mouthpiece. He has walked out of Commission briefings with his bones rattling and joked for cameras ten minutes later. This—five people and a teenager staring at him like a kicked puppy—is, somehow, harder.

“I’ve never really had the time,” he admits, aiming for flippant and missing the landing. “I guess.”

“That’s depressing,” Shigaraki grunts, and flips open a board game in an act that looks like mercy. “Best game for noobs is this. Team-based. Pair up with Dabi; he’ll teach you.”

Hawks looks at the box—hex tiles, small wooden pieces shaped like cities and roads, resource cards with grain and brick on them—and nods like he’s taking a briefing. He listens to the rules as if they’re evacuation routes. Dabi’s voice is matter-of-fact in his ear: “This gets you roads. Don’t trade with Spinner when he’s smiling. Don’t let Twice talk you out of your sheep.” Twice gives a wounded gasp; Hawks laughs, the first genuine laugh that night, and the knot in his ribs loosens a notch.

They play until the tension becomes a joke they’re all in on. Hawks learns the feel of the table—the gritty edge, the tiny wobble in one leg that makes the cities click together like teeth. He learns how Compress bluffs with his hands and not his eyes. He learns that Spinner sings under his breath when he’s winning and that Tomura groans out loud when a plan goes sideways, even if he pretends afterward he meant to do that. Dabi doesn’t say good job; he doesn’t have to. Each time Hawks places a road just where Dabi might have, Dabi nudges a knuckle against his thigh under the table. A small, practiced encouragement. It lands like a medal.

They clear the hexes and move on to cards. This one Hawks recognizes from Tokoyami—counting, memory, little flares of triumph—but the league plays it louder, messier. Twice narrates both sides of his brain mid-hand; Toga makes every draw sound like a dramatic reveal; Shigaraki cheats the way a cat steals socks. Hawks keeps losing and then starts winning, laughing so hard his wings twitch, and there is a moment—short, startling—when he feels exactly his age.

By the time Spinner slaps Monopoly on the table like a gauntlet, Hawks has internalized more unspoken rules than the printed ones. He understands that Kurogiri will always appear with fresh drinks right when a frown shows up; that Toga will wedge herself under whoever is tallest like a very affectionate space heater; that Compress will call everyone “darling” and “dear heart” in a tone meant to entertain and not dominate. He also understands that Monopoly is an excuse to bicker safely. Which is why, even as he racks up properties with unsettling efficiency, he keeps his voice light and makes sure to grin at Shigaraki each time the man lands on one of Hawks’s many pastel death traps.

“NO!” Spinner howls when his piece lands on Hawks’s hotel-lined row. He slaps down his last $100 with a sigh and then drapes his arm across Toga’s head like a defeated scarf. “I knew you were a cop.”

“Technically,” Hawks says, tucking the money beneath the board, “I’m a government contractor.”

“That’s worse,” Twice mutters, then brightens. “Or better!”

 

 

 

 

By nine o’clock the table is a battlefield of fake money and wrappers. Spirits have been poured and refilled. Kurogiri, whom Hawks had assumed didn’t drink, is nursing a glass of something that looks like a storm cloud and smells like a minty thunderhead. Someone picks a movie; everyone migrates to couches and floor cushions. Hawks ends up on the short couch with Dabi—somehow not by accident—knees tucked up, one wing draped carefully so the feathers don’t bend at odd angles. Onscreen, two idiots fall in love and mess it up with terrific style.

The room dims. A winter draft ghosts along the floor. Halfway through, a shiver runs down Hawks’s back, wing to nape. He rubs his hands together and keeps his eyes on the screen, not wanting to make a fuss.

Dabi shifts a centimeter closer. Warm fingertips find the small of Hawks’s back, anchor there, then begin to rub up and down between his wings in slow, absent strokes. There’s a hush of ignition—fssst—as Dabi pulls a thin ribbon of blue along his palm and kills it to ember, enough heat to seep through hoodie and skin. It’s not showy. It’s not possessive. It’s kind.

Hawks glances sideways. Dabi’s watching the movie, face turned, the glow from the TV making his staples look like constellations. Hawks mouths thanks. Dabi’s mouth tips—an acknowledgment rather than a smile—and he doesn’t move his hand.

The movie ends to a chorus of sighs and snorts. People talk across each other about favorite scenes. Twice does an impression of one of the leads crying that makes Toga shriek, “That’s mean!” even while she laughs. Hawks is answering something Compress asks about pacing when every feather in his wings ripples, a shiver that is half instinct, half machine. Sound threads up through the quills—thin, off-angle frequency his brain has learned to translate into syllables, then words, then a sentence.

He squeaks. Actually squeaks. A ridiculous little sound that pops free of his throat like a startled bird.

Five heads swivel in his direction. “The fuck, bird?” Shigaraki demands, scratching at his neck with one freshly lacquered nail.

Hawks’s face catches fire. “I—ah. I just heard something I—shouldn’t have.”

Compress tilts his head. “I didn’t hear anything. Your hearing must be—well, we knew it was good, but—”

“Not here.” Hawks waves a hand, mortified. “From my apartment.”

Blank looks meet him like snow.

He tugs a single downy feather loose—one of the tiny ones, nearly weightless—and balances it on his palm. “Through my feathers,” he says, realizing as he speaks that he has never said this out loud to anyone who wasn’t a handler or a doctor. “They’re… not just for flying. They’re sensors. They pick up sound frequencies; I trained myself to translate. Heat, too. Temperature differentials. I can map a room. That’s… how I found Dabi the first time.”

The room holds its breath. For a heartbeat Hawks wonders if he’s said too much—if tradecraft has just become confession. Dabi’s hand stills on his back, heat retreating, as if the data has to be absorbed before emotion returns.

“When did you learn that?” Dabi asks, voice level.

Hawks counts, eyes tipped up as if the years are on the ceiling. “Around Toga’s age,” he says at last. “A little younger.”

Toga makes a noise like a party horn and shakes Spinner’s arm hard enough to thump his scales. “Hawksie, that is SO COOL! What did you hear? Tell me!”

Hawks wants to bury his face in a cushion. Instead he clears his throat and lets mortification run through him like a wave that, if he doesn’t fight it, will pass. “My interns are staying at my place,” he says primly. “And… I guess they’re a lot closer than I imagined.”

The resulting chorus—“ew,” “gross,” “children!”—is instant and unanimous. Dabi’s face goes weirdly flat for a second, like someone turned the brightness down behind his eyes. He doesn’t move his hand off Hawks’s back. He does, however, resume the slow stroke of heat, as if to say, fine; that’s theirs; this is mine.

 

 

 

 

By ten the energy breaks like a tide. One by one, people declare themselves old and fold away into their rooms. Even Shigaraki, grumbling, admits defeat and decides to finish his movie commentary tomorrow. Toga collects cups with the ruthless efficiency of a raccoon. Spinner fishes his ruined hundred out from under the Monopoly board to tape it to the fridge as a memorial.

Hawks stands, sways. The floor lists a fraction to port. He hasn’t had that much to drink—Kurogiri’s cloud cocktail was surprisingly gentle—but he’s bone-tired and warm and comfortable for once, a combination that never happens on purpose.

“I’m gonna head out,” he says, meaning it, because there’s Shouto to check on and an early patrol and the precarious notion of responsibility to honor.

“No,” Kurogiri says from behind the bar, voice as velvet and absolute as a blackout curtain. In three strides he is in front of Hawks, big hands bracketing Hawks’s shoulders in a hold gentle enough to lean into. “Perhaps you shouldn’t fly right now.”

“I’m fine,” Hawks lies, blinking. “I have to—”

Dabi’s there suddenly, too—like heat shows up before flame. “C’mon,” he says, and Hawks finds his feet moving in the direction Dabi wants before his brain catches up. Stairs. A hall. A door nudged open with a boot. A mattress, low and wide, that catches Hawks across the back of the knees and folds him down like a paper bird.

This is soft, Hawks thinks, baffled and delighted.

“Just sleep, idiot,” Dabi says. It’s not unkind.

Hawks pouts automatically and fumbles for his phone. “Gotta tell Shouto—”

“I’ll do it.” Dabi’s thumb is already moving over Hawks’s screen with the confidence of a thief. “Sleep.”

The room is dark and warm and smells faintly of smoke and detergent. Hawks closes his eyes to say no and instead says, “Okay,” and slides straight under the surface of sleep.

 

 

 

 

He wakes to the insect whirr of his 4:30 a.m. alarm. The room is empty; the quilt is heavy; someone has left his hoodie folded over a chair. He sits up, listens—the base sleeps like a big animal—and then slips out, feather by feather, so lightly that not even the floorboards complain. Outside, the sky is blue in the way only before-dawn knows how to be.

He’s grinning by the time he hits his own rooftop. It’s the silly, post-sleepover grin of a twenty-two-year-old who learned what a team game is and beat everyone at capitalism. The grin lasts exactly until his handler’s name lights his Commission phone.

He lands hard on a nearby office block and answers because not answering is worse.

“Hawks,” the voice says, crisp as new paper. “Report on your meeting.”

The cold in Hawks’s stomach is prompt and punishing. He looks out over the waking city and thinks, with a clarity that hurts: they are villains. You do not get to be happy here. He squares the report before his mouth.

“No vital intelligence,” he says. “Social contact. Evidence suggests a relocation—personal belongings were consolidated since last visit. Unknown secondary base.”

A pause. Keys clack. “Find it.”

“Yes,” Hawks says, soft.

“And Hawks—” The handler’s tone makes the name into something sharp and private. “Takahashi reached out. He wants dinner after the gala next week.”

The name is a trapdoor; the street below him drops away. Hawks’s breath snags and his fingers go numb on the phone. All the air in the world becomes the wrong temperature.

He knows better than to say no. He knows better than to say why. He knows the choreography: you keep the voice neutral, you leave space for the order to pass through you like weather, you survive the part of the night you won’t remember in the morning, and you show up for the interview with a smile. He knows it. His body, treacherously, does not.

A small sound escapes him that isn’t a word.

“Hawks,” the handler says again. Not unkind; not kind. “We expect compliance. Do not make me escalate this.”

If he closes his eyes, he can see the form—the one with the boxes for “provisional assignment” and “debrief timeline” and “disciplinary framework,” the one that lives in a drawer no one opens unless they have to. He pictures a pen hovering over the word mandatory. He opens his eyes and watches a bus turn a corner and thinks about the way Dabi’s hand moved heat up and down his spine until the shiver left.

“Okay,” Hawks says. The word comes out the way a cut bleeds—honest, involuntary.

The call ends. The roof is suddenly too big, the sky too empty. Hawks’s hand drops to his side, phone still in it. He stands very straight for two long seconds, the way he learned to when a man who could decide things was speaking. Then he folds, abruptly, down onto the gravel in a crouch that becomes a sit that becomes knees up to his chest. The first sob comes like a cough, sudden and humiliating. The second wrings him out. By the third, he isn’t trying to stop it.

He presses his face into the cradle of his arms and lets the sound come, quiet and raw. He hates crying where anyone might see; he hates crying at all. But there is no one here and the wind takes the edges off, and for a minute he isn’t a symbol or an asset or a very polite liar; he is a young man whose job is to split himself into parts for strangers. The tears feel endless. They aren’t. Eventually the body decides to let the heart live another hour.

When he can breathe without hiccuping, he wipes his face with the heel of a hand and lies back on the roof, staring up. His feathers have crept around him like dogs; he strokes one with his thumb, and it shivers, loyal.

A phone buzzes. Not the Commission one. The cheap burner that says unknown and always means the same ten faces.

(Kurogiri) You left your hoodie. You may retrieve it when you like.
I have also prepared a warm drink for your next visit.

Hawks swallows. Types.

Hawks: thank you. sorry for bailing early. had patrol.

Three dots. Then:

(Toga) HAWKSIE DID YOU SLEEP GOOD?? also i took a picture of you sleeping but Dabi deleted it. rude. come back today. i braided Tomura’s hair.
(Spinner) you’re banned from monopoly. until i beat you. so forever.
(Compress) I accept your apology for existing without us. Come be adored properly next time.
(Tomura) bring ramen.

There is no message from Dabi. Hawks doesn’t know whether that feels like relief or something else.

He wipes his eyes one more time and stands. Time composes itself around him like a suit of clothes. Patrol assembles in his periphery: routes, check-ins, a slow morning that will become a fast afternoon. He tucks the burner back into his pocket, looks in the direction of his apartment, and pictures Shouto knocking sleep from his hair with the palm of a hand.

He launches. The air takes him; the city, below, does its endless work of being complicated and worth it.

He is a hero. He is a spy. He is a young man who learned a new board game and fell asleep safe with a villain’s hand warm between his wings.

He doesn’t know how to make those facts exist in one body. He knows, for the next few hours, how to move forward anyway.

Chapter 14: Chapter 14

Patrol has been nothing but polite hands and camera flashes for days—smiles thrown down like lifesavers to a sea of faces looking up. By the time Hawks drifts through his agency’s doors and slumps over his desk, his hips ache where a brute with a strength-enhancer bounced him off asphalt. Paperwork waits, bland and bottomless. He forces himself through three incident reports, signs his name where the lines ask him to be a symbol, then lets the pen fall and rubs at the bruise under his belt line until the ache stops being sharp and becomes simply there.

His phone buzzes.

       Shouto: Come eat.

It’s not a question—never is, when the kid’s decided on something. Hawks exhales a laugh and feels some private knot loosen. He takes the long way home, gliding across the late skyline until lights pattern into neighborhoods he knows by smell: sea-salt where the wind catches the bay, miso steam pouring from a late ramen shop, wet laundry warm as breath.

Shouto has already set out the takeout when Hawks lands—curry rice and miso and something buttery that makes Hawks’s stomach answer before he can say hello. The apartment looks different with another life breathing in it. A hoodie slung over a chair back. A stray pencil rolling near the couch. The sound of a kettle that someone who is not him put on.

“Oi,” Hawks says, softening the word with a grin. “You trying to fatten me up so I can’t fly?”

Shouto drops his gaze, mouth tugging sideways. “You forget to eat,” he says, so matter-of-fact that Hawks can’t even pretend indignation. He lifts a plastic lid and slides a bowl closer. “Sit down, Hawks-sensei.”

They eat facing the city, shoulder to shoulder at the counter. For a while the only sounds are chopsticks against paper, the faint gloop from the rice cooker cooling, a muted song from a neighbor’s apartment that slips through the cracked window with the breeze. Hawks keeps catching himself watching the side of Shouto’s face in profile—the way he chews mostly on the left; the way the scar’s texture changes when he swallows.

“Hawks-sensei,” Shouto says at last, not looking up.

Hawks hums and pauses mid-bite. Shouto’s fingers are doing that slow, self-contained wiggle on his thigh—his nervous habit, small as a tick but loud to someone who’s been watching. Hawks sets his chopsticks down without clatter and leans back, making room, putting his hands visible on the counter the way you do with skittish birds.

“I think I’m ready to tell you,” Shouto says.

Hawks doesn’t answer with words. He tilts his head, invites it. He cuts the voltage in the room by half just by being there, knees unconsciously pointed toward Shouto in case he needs to move fast.

“Dad wants to take me out of UA.”

Hawks scoffs before he can catch it. “What?”

Shouto nods, the motion tiny and stubborn. “He came home after the Nomu attack and—” He stops. The wiggle becomes a fist that opens again on his thigh. “He said he wanted to train me. Like before.” The phrase lands heavy. “I said no. He got angry. During dinner. With Fuyumi and Natsuo there.” His voice thins. “He says UA isn’t good for me.”

Something cold slides under Hawks’s ribs and hooks there. He hears himself ask, softly, the way you approach a scared animal, “Shouto, did he hurt you?”

He wants the answer to be no so badly that the wanting feels like a sin.

Shouto’s mouth makes a brave little line, then breaks. Hawks is there before the first tear clears the lashes, arms wrapping around the kid’s shoulders in the same motion he uses to shield civilians in wind shear, palm spreading between Shouto’s shoulder blades the way he soothed his own feathers after hard flights. Shouto is all angles and heat, breath sawing soft against Hawks’s collarbone.

Anger flares—bright, clean, terrifying. Hawks breathes around it. Don’t scorch the nest while you’re trying to protect it. In for three, out for four, the way the Commission taught him to cage a panic. He counts the beats under his hand and keeps his voice steady.

“What can I do to help, kid?”

Shouto looks up, eyes red and glassy. When he speaks, it’s not about lawyers or teachers or press conferences. It’s not even about Endeavor. It is something older and simpler, spoken in a twelve-year-old voice that lives under the present one.

“I want Tokoyami.”

Hawks’s answer is immediate, easy. “Done.” He kisses Shouto’s forehead without thinking about the cameras that would make of it a thousand things and reaches blindly for his phone. Little bird, he types, come over if you can. Shouto could use you. The reply is near-instant: On my way.

By the time Tokoyami arrives, the apartment has turned into a small sanctuary. Dark Shadow keeps to corners like a respectful cat. Tokoyami doesn’t ask questions in front of Hawks; he simply sits close enough to be felt and opens his arms in the brief, formal hug of someone who hasn’t been hugged often enough. Shouto curls into it like a plant toward sun. Hawks stands in the doorway to the spare room and watches, chest aching, and thinks, If I had this when I was their age… He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t have to.

It is only when Shouto is compressed into a pile of blankets and Tokoyami has pulled a chair up beside the bed like a sentinel that Hawks realizes he needs a drink. Not the public, camera-ready tumbler of soda with melted ice. Something that burns and tells the truth.

“I’ll be back,” he says. “Feather’s on the lamp. Shout if you need anything.”

The lamp’s shade rustles as a small crimson vane settles against it, the sensory thread tying him to the room with a fidelity that’s better than sight. On the street, rain starts—thin, then thick, then a sheet that turns sidewalks silver. Hawks lifts his face to it, lets it salt his mouth. Even his flight reflex hesitates.

Then he turns not toward a bar where civilians will gawk, but toward the one place where he can be a mess without being photographed for it.

 

 

 

 

 

Dabi is not physically suffering, which is almost disappointing. Pain is at least honest. He is, however, subjected to a brand of psychic torture that would make a saint bargain: Spinner and Shigaraki are screaming at Dora the Explorer as if volume can alter narrative outcomes; Compress is trying to teach Toga and Twice a sleight-of-hand only to have Twice loudly narrate the method and the reveal; Kurogiri is polishing the same glass with priestly patience, which would be soothing if the other half of the room weren’t a riot.

The door slams open and the room inhales cold like a gasp.

Hawks walks in drenched, hoodie clinging, hair flattened into errant curls at his temple. The scowl on his face is so dark that even Shigaraki pauses mid-itch and looks up. A feather spins off Hawks’s wing and skitters wetly across the floor. Kurogiri begins, gentle: “Hawks—”

Hawks ignores him. He crosses the room, reaches behind the bar like he belongs there, and grabs a full bottle of whiskey. He drops onto the couch next to Dabi and tilts the bottle like a man testing gravity. Half is gone before the rest of the room has recalibrated.

The first thing out of Dabi’s mouth is not smart. “You got a gag reflex there?”

All eyes swing to him, then to Hawks. The hero snorts without amusement. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

Yes, Dabi thinks savagely, and absolutely does not say. He watches instead. The damp at Hawks’s neckline, the way rain still beads on the lashes, the set of the jaw that’s an inch away from shatter.

“Are you okay, Hawks?” Compress asks, sincere concern cutting through the clowning.

“Just peachy,” Hawks snaps, then drinks again. The sound of the swallow is loud enough to be rude.

Shigaraki raises his eyebrows at Dabi, a look that translates to handle it and you broke it, you buy it. Dabi rolls his eyes and nods once.

He reaches over, plucks the bottle from Hawks’s hand just as Hawks is lifting it, and stands. Hawks squawks—actually squawks—as Dabi hooks an arm under his knees and another behind his back and simply lifts. He’s light like this, all hollow bones and heavy history.

“What are you—hey—put me—” Hawks writhes half-heartedly as Dabi hauls him up the stairs, the bottle dangling from Dabi’s other hand. Water drips on each step like punctuation.

Dabi’s room is spare and clean, bed pulled tight, a desk littered with cigarette ends and exactly one photograph face-down in the top drawer. He deposits Hawks on the mattress and sets the bottle on the floor, out of reach.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asks, not unkind, but flat. He’s learned that Hawks does better with the truth, even when the truth has no sugar on it.

Hawks rubs both hands over his face so hard the skin squeaks. The laugh that comes out could be a sob in disguise. “I kind of want to kill Endeavor.”

Dabi’s heart stalls, then kicks like it’s been shocked. For a second every map in his head rearranges—what did he do to you—but Hawks keeps talking, words tumbling and tripping over each other, and the picture clarifies with a horror Dabi knows too well.

“He’s hurting Shouto.”

It’s amazing, Dabi thinks inanely as the room tilts, how quickly one sentence can unbury a decade.

He moves before he knows he’s moved. Closet. Towel. Shirt. Boxers. The habitual cadence of care like a muscle memory he swore he didn’t still have. He thrusts the stack at Hawks, who looks at it like Dabi has offered him a weapon he doesn’t know how to hold.

“Get changed,” Dabi says, voice rough. “You’re getting my sheets wet.”

Hawks blinks at the shirt. Dabi knows what it looks like, knows what he looks like, and forces himself to stay in place, not to help, not to fuss. He sits on the edge of the bed and stares at the wall, every sense open to the rustle of fabric and the shuck of wet cotton hitting the chair.

 

 

 

 

The door clicks. Hawks steps back into the room wearing Dabi’s shirt, which hangs long, and Dabi’s boxers, which do not. For a raw second it is very hard to remember that the thing Hawks needs right now is not the thing that Dabi could take. He swallows around heat that has nothing to do with his quirk.

“Nothing else fits,” Hawks says, dropping his wet clothes on the chair. His voice is trying for light and getting tangled on the way out.

Dabi nods and says nothing. He listens instead: the breath in Hawks’s chest going in too fast and out too slow; the small, involuntary sound Hawks makes when he sits, like a wing settling. He lets the silence stretch until it becomes the kind of quiet people talk inside.

Hawks turns his head. Tears stand in his eyes with a steadiness that makes Dabi’s throat hurt. “I’m supposed to be a hero,” Hawks says. “I should have known—”

“No.” The word is out of Dabi’s mouth before he asks permission of any of his damage. He leans in and flicks away a tear with the back of a finger like he’s touching a bomb. “Don’t do that to yourself.”

Hawks stares at him for a beat so long Dabi wishes for a clock. Then Hawks moves—sudden—into Dabi’s lap, mouth colliding with Dabi’s mouth in a kiss that is all teeth and desperation and refusal to feel anything that isn’t right now. It hits Dabi like a flare. He grips Hawks’s waist on instinct—heat threatening his palms, anger threatening his mouth—and then pulls him back, hard enough to break the seal.

“Stop it,” he says, panting, forehead against Hawks’s forehead so the words can’t be mistaken for cruelty. “This isn’t what you need.”

Hawks’s face falls open in a way Dabi hates. “Yes it is,” he says stubbornly, voice roughening. He shifts his hips; the friction yanks a stupid sound out of Dabi that he swallows whole.

“Don’t,” Dabi warns, one hand closing around Hawks’s thigh to still him. He can feel the tremor in the muscle. He can feel his own restraint like a pulled staple. “You’re not in the right headspace.”

“So what.”

Dabi barks a humorless laugh. “So I’m not going to take advantage of you.” He hears the word in his own mouth and wants to put his fist through a wall for every time that word didn’t protect somebody. “Stay until you’re calm and the rain stops. Then go home.”

Hawks is quiet. The hand on Dabi’s shoulder loosens. The line of his body changes from fight to something that might be fold. It feels, absurdly, like watching a bird decide a tree is safe enough to land in.

Dabi lifts the blanket without another speech and coaxes Hawks under it, all the sharp planes going soft in the dim. He stands, turns for the door because that is what you do when you’re not a predator, and freezes when Hawks’s voice finds him from the dark.

“Stay?”

Golden eyes catch what light there is. They are not a weapon, or they are, and Dabi loses to them willingly.

“Okay,” he says, and the word feels like a promise he will have to learn all the ways to keep.

He switches off the lamp and stretches out on top of the blankets, careful to leave a span of mattress between them like a neutral zone. He stares at the ceiling and does the math of silence. A few minutes pass before he feels it: the soft press of Hawks edging closer without touching, the small heat of a living thing making itself known. Dabi turns his palm up on the quilt in answer—open, not reaching. A moment later, there’s a warm weight there: Hawks’s fingers, light as a feather and twice as deliberate.

They don’t speak. At some point rain becomes a hush instead of a percussion. At some point Hawks’s breath evens, and the hand in Dabi’s loosens into sleep. Dabi lies awake and watches the shape of the hero beside him and thinks of a boy with a messy golden head crying into his shirt while he laughed until he didn’t. He thinks of a kitchen table and a man with a flame for a face and the long, elastic shadow that kind of love leaves.

Touya, he thinks, because sometimes his name is still a place he can stand. What would you have done?

The answer is the easiest thing he’s thought all night: This.

He doesn’t move until the rain quits. He doesn’t let go until Hawks does.

Downstairs, someone cackles at Dora. Upstairs, Dabi lets himself be a steady thing a hero can sleep against and doesn’t burn.

Notes:

Dabihawks is happening I promise, just wait for the next chapter ;)

Chapter 15: Chapter 15

Miruko had turned Hawks’s bathroom into a backstage dressing bay, the marble counter a battlefield of primers and palettes, perfume and pins. On the couch, Shouto and Tokoyami sat with the patient stillness of cats at a window, watching their mentors orbit the last-minute storm.

“Rumi! This is scandalous—I can’t wear this!”

“Shut up and hold still,” Miruko said, deft as a pit crew. She wore a floor-length galaxy of black and silver, slit high enough to make a camera blush, and wielded a lipstick like a weapon. “It’s not scandalous, it’s hot. Shinya’s going to want to—”

“We’re still here,” Tokoyami called dryly from the living room.

Hawks angled his voice toward the door. “It’s nothing you don’t already know about.”

He tugged at the dark satin crossing his front—if “shirt” were a generous word for the swath of midnight silk that wrapped at the waist and knotted at the small of his back. Two long ties fell down his spine like inked ribbons, the open vee of fabric framing collarbone and sternum in a way that said fundraiser to the cameras and trouble to anyone paying better attention. He’d shed most of his feathers to make the silhouette cleaner; what remained lay sleek against his shoulder blades, like a luxury he could shrug off.

Miruko stepped back to admire her work. “You’re so pretty it’s basically cheating.” A sweep of blush. Gloss. A thumb to blend the glow at his cheekbone. “If I were single, I’d climb you like a tree.”

Hawks snorted. “You say the sweetest things.”

“Shinya will say sweeter,” she said, then caught the flicker in his eyes as his mouth tightened. “Hey.”

“I’ve got… prior plans,” he said, too light, the words sliding off their own surface. The old name—Koichi—bounced around his skull like a coin he didn’t want to pick up.

Miruko arched a brow but let it go. From the living room, Shouto, still half out of his school uniform, glanced at the television. “You’re going to be late. Most heroes have arrived.”

They had the livestream up. The feed cut to Aizawa in a classic black suit, hair tied back, looking like a man who’d been bribed into a wedding photo with the promise of extra coffee.

“Right,” Hawks said. He spritzed perfume at the hollow of his throat, kissed both interns on the head—earning Tokoyami’s dignified blink and Shouto’s automatic lean—and pressed a wad of cash into Shouto’s palm. “Don’t stay up. You have school tomorrow. And don’t—” he pointed at the couch “—don’t. I will know.”

Miruko cackled as the door shut behind them. “You’re a menace.”

“Mom friend,” Hawks corrected, and the elevator swallowed their laughter.

 

 

 

 

They arrived fashionably late, which is to say late enough to make the cameras hungry. Edgeshot met them just inside the glittering hall, a hand finding the exposed plane of Hawks’s back with proprietary amusement. Flashes stuttered—lightning in a dry storm. Miruko peeled off with a whoop to terrorize a cluster of pro friends, leaving Hawks and Shinya in their two-person orbit.

“You look incredible,” Shinya murmured against his ear, the words a low thread that tugged at Hawks’s pulse.

Hawks grinned, started to answer, and immediately found a microphone flowering under his nose. “Hawks! Tell your fans how you’re feeling!”

“Hungry,” he said brightly. “Thirsty. Grateful. Slightly underdressed. You?” Laughter. He fielded two more empty questions, then tugged Shinya’s sleeve like a bored date and let himself be pulled deeper into the chandelier-lit tide.

They worked the room—champagne in one hand, greeting in the other. Hawks kept himself on a slow, curated drift that avoided Endeavor as if the Number One were a riptide he had no intention of testing. He could feel the man’s gravity at the edge of every cluster, see the red bristle of him across a glass case. Hawks smiled wider whenever they almost intersected, and veered.

It was a fundraiser, he remembered hazily. For… disaster mitigation? Uniforms for underfunded local agencies? The cause was good; the cause was always good. He let that soothe the part of him that flinched every time he saw a Commission pin.

Edgeshot stayed a steady point at his shoulder—close enough to be read as a date, far enough not to claim. Present Mic and Aizawa found them near the silent auction tables; they traded easy banter, Hawks clocking the matching golden bands on their fingers with a lift of brows and a secret grin. He liked when the world gave kind secrets away.

Hizashi broke off mid-story, gaze snagged over Hawks’s shoulder. A hand—cool, precise—settled on Hawks’s bare shoulder.

“Hawks,” a Commission agent said, voice like the edge of paper. “He’s waiting for you. There’s a car.”

Shinya turned, the question in his eyes clean and immediate. Hawks’s stomach dipped. Right. The thing he’d been pretending wasn’t coming.

“Looks like I forgot to mention,” he told Shinya with an apologetic scrunch of his face. He lifted his voice just enough to be scandalous. “Rain check on getting down and dirty?”

Hizashi sputtered champagne up a sinus. Aizawa was already ghosting toward the exit with the air of a man who knew how to grab his partner by the belt if necessary. Shinya rolled his eyes, fond exasperation smoothing his mouth. Hawks squeezed his wrist and let the agent herd him.

The night air knifed under his shirt as they stepped out to the curb. A long black car idled like a sentence with no period. Hawks slid into the back. The door thunked shut; a smoked divider hummed up between him and the driver. The city began to scroll.

He leaned his head back against the leather and watched his reflection in the window—glossed mouth, the sharp collarbone, the small bird of his own face that the public loved. The suit felt suddenly like a costume for a different play.

 

 

 

 

Five minutes to arrival, his phone buzzed. He didn’t check the name. He just answered.

“Hawks speaking.”

A squeal detonated in his ear. “Hawksie! We’re watching you on TV! You looked so pretty, where did you go?”

He pulled the phone away and winced, then laughed despite himself. “Hey, Toga. I’ve got something on tonight.” He crossed his legs, the ridiculousness of the outfit absurd and comforting all at once. “Headed there now.”

“You’re on speaker!” Toga announced, and the car filled with the ragged chorus of the League’s living room. “Kurogiri and Compress say you look really good and Shigaraki won’t admit it but he totally blushed when he saw you and Dabi looked like he wanted to—”

“Fucking hell, Toga!” Dabi, strangled, like someone had just yanked the phone from him.

A scuffle, the sound of a slipper hitting a face. Hawks had to bite his lip to keep the smile off his mouth. The knot in his chest loosened another notch.

Kurogiri’s voice replaced the melee, smooth as a good drink. “Where are you going, to have to leave in such a hurry?”

Hawks coughed. “Seeing an old… associate.”

Silence breathed on the other end. Not judging—just listening. Shigaraki, finally, with all the social grace of a brick through a window: “Sounds boring. We could accidentally kidnap you and bring you back.”

“That’s unexpectedly considerate,” Hawks said, warmth creeping into words he’d meant to keep wry. “But this is something I can’t avoi—”

The car braked too smooth to be anything but practiced. Before he could finish the sentence, the door yanked open. Hands. Suits. A phone disappearing into someone else’s pocket. Hawks’s laugh died on his tongue.

“Sir is upset you’re late,” one of the men said without looking at him. “Stop walking so slowly.”

The mansion rose ahead like an accusation—white stone and lanes of hedges clipped into cruel geometry, a spill of light at the door like a smile with teeth. Hawks straightened his spine the way the Commission had taught him, squares of muscle stacking under skin, and let them steer him like cargo up the steps and in.

The lobby was money: marble that didn’t need to be that polished, a chandelier that didn’t need to be that large. Hawks registered details out of habit—the exits, the cameras disguised as sconces, the way the air smelled faintly of coriander and something cold—and filed them away even as his mouth dried.

At a white-paneled door, the man in front paused, then shoved. Hawks stumbled forward on reflex and caught himself with a little rattle of silk. The door slammed behind him. One guard stepped in and took up a post next to it, hands folded like this was church.

The room had been staged to look casual: a small table with two chairs and a decanter, as if this were a reunion. Hawks’s eyes found the only thing that mattered before he told them not to.

A man stood, back to the window, the night outlining him. Straight brown hair combed too carefully. Sharp green eyes that bought and sold gentleness. He had the body of someone who’d decided power should be visible; the tailored suit moved like skin.

“Takahashi Koichi,” Hawks said, and bowed because his neck still knew how deep. “It’s good to see you again, sir.”

A hand—cold, expensive—found the side of his neck. Thumb slid up under his jaw and pushed gently until Hawks lifted his face. Koichi’s smile was surgical. The pad of his thumb pressed just hard enough to bruise in a way fabric would hide.

“Yes,” Koichi said, savoring the word as if it were a rare dessert. His eyes traveled the line of Hawks’s open collar, the satin crossing his chest, the ridiculous ribbon-ties down his spine that Rumi had insisted on. “It is good, isn’t it, sweetheart.”

 

 

 

 

The word detonated in Hawks’s body like a tripwire. The present became a diorama behind glass. He stared at Koichi’s mouth moving and heard a liquor cabinet door from a different room, a different year. The chair he was being guided into might as well have been a memory.

Breathe, he told himself. In for three, out for four. Count something you can see. The chandelier. The guard’s shoes. The sweat bead under his collar. He tasted gloss on his own tongue and it felt obscene.

Koichi sat across from him and poured two fingers of amber into a glass like a host. “Late,” he said conversationally. “Rude. But you look… compensated.” The green eyes flicked to Hawks’s lips and back. “Say thank you.”

Hawks’s hands were steady on the table because he made them be. “Thank you,” he said, voice public-bright and empty as a set. His wings ached; the nerves along their line wanted to flare and he held them flat.

Koichi’s smile curved. “Good boy.”

It cost Hawks nothing to smile back and everything to keep it on his face. He was aware, all at once, of the phone in a stranger’s pocket, of a living room full of villains who had threatened to “accidentally kidnap” him out of boredom, of a kid with a scar asleep in a spare bed with a feather on his lamp. He could feel the small metal chip embedded in the seam of his shirt, the one the Commission insisted on, and the knowledge of it made his skin feel dirty.

“Tell me about your friend,” Koichi said lightly, as if they were discussing weather. “Number One. You’ve been close lately, haven’t you?”

Hawks didn’t let the flinch show. “I try to be useful to everyone,” he said, all PR and porcelain. “It’s my charming flaw.”

Koichi’s tongue touched a canine, amused. “Still funny,” he said. “Still fast.” His hand lifted, hovered, and Hawks had to fight not to tip toward it the way you press your face into a palm you’ve learned promises nothing. “Still mine to call,” Koichi finished softly, and the temperature of the room dropped.

Hawks smiled with his teeth and began to perform. The tension in the room strung tight enough to sing. He told himself he would walk out of this house the way he’d walked in—chin high, spine stacked, hands steady. He told himself he could hold both truths in the same mouth: that he had people who would burn down a city for him now and that he had always, always been good at surviving rooms like this.

Under the satin and gloss, under the neat hair and the stupid bow at the small of his back, the part of him built for storms unfolded its quiet wings and waited.

Notes:

Yall are going to hate me after the next chapter. 😔

Chapter 16: Chapter 16

Notes:

CW for this chapter
•mentions of past CSA
•mentions of r@pe

It started as background noise—just something blinking across Shigaraki’s restless channel-surfing as the living room drifted toward the hour where conversation thins out and even villains get heavy-lidded. Then the Hero Gala filled the screen, white lights and polished smiles, and Compress let out a low, appreciative whistle.

“Now that,” he said, “is an outfit.”

Dabi didn’t mean to look. He told himself he didn’t care what peacocks the heroes were parading this year. But then the camera cut to Hawks—blue satin cut into suggestion, red feathers pared back to a sleek blaze, gloss catching light at the corner of his mouth—and Dabi forgot to breathe.

“Dabi?” Spinner said after a beat. “Are you even breathing over there?”

The couch ignited under Dabi’s hands before he felt the heat. Twice yelped and bolted, returning with a clattering pot from the kitchen. The splash of cold water hissed against scorched fabric. Kurogiri tipped his head the way a patient bartender does when a glass breaks: no judgment, only an offered towel.

Dabi muttered, sat, and stared. The cameras loved Hawks—honeypot lenses drifting back to him again and again, catching the small, easy angles: the sideways smile, the way he leaned to hear someone in a room that roared, the light touch to a shoulder that made strangers feel favored. Edgeshot appeared and put a hand on Hawks’s bare back; Dabi’s jaw went tight enough to ache.

He watched through the first hour and into the second, the Gala’s gleam settling like dust. It wasn’t jealousy, he told himself; it was the understanding that a thing that beautiful should not be handled carelessly. It was the irrational fury of witnessing someone he had promised himself not to care for become everyone’s screen.

Then Hawks slipped off-screen. Ten minutes. Twenty. The feed dulled into banquet coverage and speeches no one remembered as they were said. The room’s energy collapsed in a mutual, irritated exhale. Dabi stood, ready to cut to bed and darkness, when Toga sprang up like a jack-in-the-box and pinched his phone out of his pocket.

“Hey!” he snapped. “Give it back.”

“Relax, grandpa.” She danced away and stabbed the call button with a grin. The living room’s clamor fell as Hawks’s voice, small with polite brightness, spilled into the room.

“—I’ve got something on tonight. I’m headed there now.”

They were all smiles and jokes for thirty seconds. Kurogiri asked where he was off to; Shigaraki deadpanned that they could “accidentally kidnap” him back. Hawks laughed, a sound that softened the edges of hard things.

And then the world shifted by degrees.

The hearable changed first—the quality of air the speaker picked up, the car’s smooth deceleration. One voice, unfamiliar and deep: “Sir is upset you’re late. Stop walking so slowly.” A door, a swallow of cavernous lobby echo. Dabi’s instinct flicked on like a knife in the pocket.

Toga clicked the phone speaker louder and set it on the coffee table. No one made a joke. Everyone leaned.

Footsteps. A door closing with the clean, wealthy snick of good hinges. Cloth against a microphone—someone pocketing the device. Hawks’s voice, further away, too even: “Takahashi Koichi, it’s good to see you again, sir.”

Kurogiri made a sound Dabi had never heard from him—a sharp inhale that felt like the room tipping. “That name,” he said quietly. “He said it the night we returned him to his bed. The first time.”

 

 

 

 

 

The living room went still. Even Shigaraki’s hand eased from scratching the irritated welt at his throat. A chair scraped. Cutlery chimed like little bells; crystal knocked a decanter’s lip. The phone was too far away to capture everything, but certain words came through with horrible clarity:

“Late.”

“Rude.”

“Say thank you.”

Hawks’s voice, obedient, brighter than a showroom. “Thank you.”

“Good boy.”

Toga’s hands tightened on her knees. Compress pressed two fingers to his mouth as if to keep words inside. Dabi felt something old and animal surge, pressing against his ribs like a thing that remembered fire before it thought of language.

“Why the sudden dinner date?” Hawks asked, humor smoothed to diplomacy.

A glass set down. The speaker smiled; you could hear it. “I’ve missed you. Is that not reason enough, sweetheart?”

The word hit the living room like a thrown stone. No one had forgotten the way Hawks went hollow at the League’s table over a single pet name—how his eyes had left the room and his breath had tried to abandon him. Kurogiri’s hand found Compress’s shoulder. Spinner swore under his breath. Shigaraki’s foot tapped, faster.

Hawks went very quiet.

Then Koichi’s voice, colder. “Eat your food.”

A small sound. “Yes, sir.”

Five minutes of cutlery and glass. Five minutes where the League—career criminals, high-profile threats—sat reverent and terrified of a silence that wasn’t theirs. Dabi leaned forward until his elbows creaked, like closeness could change a phone’s range.

“What did Hawks say he was doing?” he ground out.

Spinner didn’t look away from the phone. “Old ‘associate.’”

Shigaraki’s lip curled. “He sounds old. Like seventy.” He scratched harder; Kurogiri wordlessly passed him a bottle of soothing gel. He didn’t take it.

Koichi’s voice came back, silk over steel. “Tell me, sweetheart. How is hero life treating you?”

Hawks managed, tight: “You already know what I’m going to say.”

“You’ve become so shut off to me over the years,” Koichi sighed. “We used to be so close.”

“That was back when you were my Handler.”

“What is a Handler?” Toga whispered, eyes big and wet. No one answered her. No one knew how.

The scrape of chair legs. Footsteps closer to whoever held the phone; fabric rasped against the microphone again, louder—like a jacket bending as a shoulder turned. A different voice, gruffer:

“Daigo, take him to my room. We’re finished here.”

“Yes, sir.”

Dabi stood. The world narrowed to a clean, terrible line. “Kurogiri.”

“I’m trying,” Kurogiri said, already unfolding into mist as he reached for something Dabi couldn’t see. His voice had lost its bartender’s amusement; what replaced it was clinical and furious. “There’s shielding. Static on the frame. I can’t lock on.”

“Then lock on to the phone.”

“Moving target,” Kurogiri said tightly. “I’ll need it set down.”

The phone crackled with motion. Shoes on stone. A second door, heavier. Hawks’s breath, too shallow even at a distance. Daigo’s voice like a cut rope: “Stop resisting.”

Hawks laughed, high and tinny. “Where…are we going again?” Dissociation leaked through the edges of the words like light under a locked door. Dabi tasted iron.

Kurogiri closed his eyes, mist pooling around his shoulders. “If he speaks again, tell him to drop the phone.”

“How?” Shigaraki snapped. “You want us to call his name and ask nicely?”

“Yes,” Kurogiri said. “Because he will listen to you.” He meant: because he wants to be rescued, and he won’t admit it unless you give him permission.

But when Hawks spoke again, he was already somewhere else.

 

 

 

 

 

The room Koichi used was artful in its intimacy, designed to pretend danger was affection. Hawks recognized the cues the way a storm recognizes pressure: the smallness of the table; the softness of the rug that would leave no marks if you fell; the way sound died before it hit the walls.

He kept making little bargains with himself. He would sit, and he would be fine. He would answer one question, and he would be fine. He would look at the gold rim of a plate and count the reflections, and he would be fine. He wasn’t fine.

“Up,” a voice said, and his body obeyed the way a body trained too early learns to obey before thought. He's walking, when did he start walking? Hawks furrows his eyebrows, closing his eyes breifly before blinking them open again. There's a bed infront of him and someone is loosening the tie around his neck. He felt the silk of his shirt move over his skin and tried to anchor there. He felt the cool of his own necklace chain against his throat and said silently, There you are. That’s you. Stay.

Hands—someone’s, not the one he feared and not the one he wanted—loosened the tie at his neck. Shoes tugged, jacket lifted. He protested; someone sighed.

A mumble of something Hawks heard as, "This was so much easier when you were younger. Old man can't use his quirk after your undressed?"

The sound of a door clicked.

“Ah,” Koichi said from the doorway, voice easing into the room like oil. “That’s enough. I’ll do the rest.”

Hawks sat, blinking at the man in the black robe, trying to understand where time had gone. “Koichi,” he said, relief and dread in a single syllable. He took a step forward and swayed.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” he said. The world tilted. “That man—do you know him?”

Koichi caught him. Fingers threaded his hair, domestically gentle. “Shh,” he murmured, the exact softness you use to coax a bird back onto your finger. “You just let me take care of you. You trust me, don’t you?”

Hawks nodded because that was the shape of the yes that closed a scene without escalation. He nodded because the alternative was this becoming something worse than the thing it already was.

He felt weight—another person’s—press him into cotton. He felt his arms move above his head and pause, like an old choreography. He asked a question that was not a question. He got no answer.

And when the pain came—bright and white and threaded straight through muscle he could not protect—he left himself.

He didn’t go far. He never went far; he had learned early that you have to stay just close enough to come back fast if opportunity opens. He watched from a corner of his own breath and made lists.

Things that were true:

The light fixture had six bulbs, one buzzing faintly like an insect.

The curtain rod was brass, not gold.

The robe belt was knotted incorrectly; Koichi had always been careless with his own clothes and meticulous with others.

Hawks’s name was being said in a voice that used to mean do well and now meant do not make me repeat myself.

He could hear, at the very edge of hearing, a familiar rhythm—the vibration of a feather, far from him, somewhere ridiculous and safe, maybe on a lampshade, humming. Shouto’s breathing in sleep. He held that like a stone in his mouth and did not swallow.

He did not count minutes. He counted swallows and screws in the door hinge. His hip is being lifted and without a warning he's being entered. Tears flow freely as he hiccups, chest heaving as he sobs. Hawks focuses on the rub of soft satin on his body rather then the harsh thrusting behind him. When its over, he lays the way a wing lies after a storm: wrong, and trying to remember right. Koichi’s shadow moved away. A door clicked with gentle finality.

Hawks curled by instinct, hands against the place right below his shoulder blades where pressure could hurt most, and he slept the way the body sleeps when it has used up too much of itself.

Notes:

IM SORRY ITS FOR THE PLOT

for some clarification Koichi's quirk is mind based - like mind erase and only works through physical touch

Chapter 17: Chapter 17

Notes:

Now things are beggining to happen....

Hawks woke to the smell of eggs and butter and something toasted. For a few seconds his brain misfiled the sensation—home, his kitchen, Shouto rattling a pan as badly as a teenage boy could—until the ache in his back and the unfamiliar ceiling corrected him. He lay very still, inventorying his body. Bruises tugged when he breathed too deeply. There was a steady pulse of soreness along the inner edge of both scapulae where his wings rooted into muscle. He stretched once, carefully, and the pain threaded up and through—but it was a clean, honest line of hurt compared to last night’s white static.

Light poured in through an open window. Someone had left a hoodie folded at the end of the bed. He didn’t remember putting on the soft cotton shorts beneath the shirt that clung to his skin. That detail made his stomach lurch—the way pattern-breaking always did. Koichi never dressed him after. The guards never came back in. Routine, even brutal routine, had rules; this did not fit.

He swung his feet to the floor. The hoodie smelled faintly of smoke and detergent, the cuffs a little frayed. He tugged it on over his head and pushed his hands through the sleeves like he was tunneling. He flexed his wings in short, clinical pulses, working stiffness from the small stabilizer muscles, then padded out into the hall barefoot, following the food and the murmur of low conversation.

The voices rose gently as he reached the stairs. He recognized them one by one like street corners he’d flown past a hundred times—Compress’s theatre-warm baritone; Toga’s sweet, high chatter; the twin edges of Spinner and Twice folded into each other’s sentences. There was the scrape of a spatula against a skillet, the clink of plates. The open-plan main room was bright with cheap fluorescence and a kind of domestic order Hawks had never expected to find in a place like this.

He took the last three steps too quickly, misjudged, and bumped into a body at the landing. Gloved hands flashed to his waist, steadying him, then recoiled as though burned. Shigaraki stepped back, gloves off in an instant, expression hard to read around the constant itch at his throat.

Hawks blinked at him. He blinked at the room—Compress at the stove, Toga hooked to his shirt like a duckling, Twice sitting unusually still on a beanbag, Spinner hunched and watching—and felt the air falter.

The mood shifted like a curtain falling. Heads turned but mouths didn’t open. He pasted on a smile, the public one, the one that could defuse a mob.

“Good morning?” he tried, brightening the word until it rang false even to him. “I don’t remember coming here last night. Guess I had too much to drink!”

No one laughed. Even Shigaraki’s fidget slowed.

Okay then.

Kurogiri and Dabi were nowhere in sight. He stood there at the bottom of the stairs and the hoodie suddenly felt too large, like a borrowed skin. The bruises on his legs—green and purple, some blooming up toward his hips—had no place to hide. His fingers found the hem of the hoodie and squeezed.

He took a step toward Shigaraki without meaning to. The boss took a step back without meaning to. Hawks stopped, frowned, then tried again, softer:

“Guys?” He snapped his fingers once as if calling a room to order. “Where am I?”

Compress set the spatula down. He drew a breath as though he were about to go onstage. “This is our official base,” he said. “We brought you back here after… uhm.”

Hawks tilted his head, waiting. The golden of his eyes caught in the flat light. The space between words stretched and thinned.

“After your meeting with your old Handler,” another voice finished, clear and even. Kurogiri’s portal opened with a low hum by the bar. He stepped out, straightening his vest as if adjusting his tie, and behind him Dabi followed, blue eyes a shade darker than usual.

 

 

 

 

Everything inside Hawks seemed to cinch at once, like someone had pulled a string through him. He became suddenly hyperaware of his neck, of how the hoodie dipped where Koichi’s fingers had pressed. He didn’t know what they knew—how much, how long, whether the worst parts had stayed behind a closed door or had spilled into the world.

He breathed in, out. Counted to five, then three. Built the strength to ask. “How much do you know.”

He placed each word carefully on the floor between them, like fragile cups he didn’t want to shatter. Around the room, shoulders flinched. Spinner’s fingers closed around his own knee. Toga’s chin trembled, lips pressed white; Compress’s throat worked. Kurogiri’s answer did not come first.

Dabi’s did. He met Hawks’s eyes and did not look away. “Your call never ended,” he said, voice roughened. “We heard the drive. The door. The dining room.” He swallowed. “We heard enough.”

The world went tinny at the edges. Hawks’s attention tunneled and he hated it, hated how the old instinct still yanked him someplace he didn’t want to go. He clung to the present with stupid, small observations: the egg on the edge of the spatula, cooling; the thread pulled loose on Toga’s hem; the faint chemical clean of the floors. This room. This morning. This now.

He cleared his throat. “How long did you… listen for.”

Toga made a broken, snuffling sob that she tried to swallow and didn’t. Compress reached back and patted her hand without looking away from Hawks. Shigaraki’s mouth pinched; he stopped scratching long enough to speak.

“We heard it all,” he said, and did not soften the words.

Oh.

Oh.

The word fuck pinged around Hawks’s skull like a ricochet. He couldn’t pull enough air into his lungs to swear out loud, so he did it in his head until even that exhausted him. His vision smeared for a second. He didn’t register the tissue until it was between his fingers. He blinked, looked up—Dabi, arm already withdrawing so their hands would not brush.

He wiped his face once, twice. Forced the smile back up because it was something to do with his mouth besides shake. Leave, his hindbrain urged, that old bird-language for survival, and his body, faithful, moved to obey.

“I should go—”

“No!” Toga’s voice cracked as she shot to her feet, cheeks blotchy with tears. “Hawksie, you can’t go back to them!”

Twice sprang up beside her, nodding too hard. “Yeah—don’t go back to the HPSC! Bad idea! Great idea to stay!”

“You don’t have to keep following their orders,” Compress said, breath catching on the consonants. “You don’t have to keep hurting.”

Spinner made a noise that was agreement turned into a growl. Even Shigaraki, who was not built for softness, said it without the usual sharpness: “Stay with us.”

Hawks stared at him. The room blurred again, but for a different reason. He hadn’t expected… this. Not pleading. Not sympathy. Not the word stay used like an invitation rather than a command.

Then Dabi added the thought that broke something open and also something loose. “Quit playing spy,” he said, quiet as a strike landing. “Join us for real.”

The sentence hit Hawks’s body like sudden gravity. He made a sound that wasn’t a word. He turned, fled up the stairs, into the room he’d woken in. He closed the door, paced the length of the carpet and back, breathing too fast and counting the lines in the cheap blinds to slow himself down. The Gala outfit lay folded on a chair—blue satin, black pants, a tether to a life that made sense on camera. He dressed because doing was safer than thinking. He looked for his phone because leaving was safer than stillness.

 

 

 

 

The door opened on his second circuit. Dabi stepped in and closed it quietly behind him. The room shrank by half just from his presence—not because he loomed, but because Hawks’s body recognized a heat source and rotated toward it.

“Where’s my phone,” Hawks said, turning. The words came out level. He heard the strand of panic woven through them anyway.

Dabi watched him for two breaths. The look was not clinical or cold. It was the exhausted care of a man picking his way through a room full of glass. He didn’t answer.

“Dabi.” Hawks held himself still with visible effort. “Where is my phone.”

Dabi took it slowly from his pocket, let Hawks see the case, the scuffs at the edges. When Hawks reached, Dabi’s arm moved up and out of range on reflex—a boy with two brothers, a man who had learned that sometimes you had to hold position until words landed. “Just… listen for a minute. Please.”

“I want to lea—”

“We’re not going to hurt you,” Dabi said, cursing under his breath as if the sentence offended his mouth. “I’ve known you were a spy since the night you chirped at broken glass in that old house. Months ago.”

Hawks stopped. The confession hit him in the gut—not with fear, but with a destabilizing sense of the floor shifting under him. He thought of all the careful halves he’d offered Dabi, the lies wrapped in jokes, the truths wrapped in sarcasm. He knew.

“Oh,” he said, small and stunned.

A wisp of smoke curled out of Dabi’s nose, gone as soon as it appeared. He lowered the phone. Hawks didn’t take it.

“We can help you,” Dabi said. “You can be fre—”

“Stop.” The word came out too sharp. Dabi stopped.

Hawks made himself breathe in through his nose, out through his mouth. He watched Dabi’s eyes move—down his neck, along his collarbone, skitter off the ugly color at his hip like a man flinching from a burn. Something in that flinch lodged under Hawks’s sternum and didn’t budge.

“I can’t leave,” he said. The truth, bald and humiliating. “It’s all I’ve ever known. Being a hero is the only… structure I have. It’s what I worked for. If I step out, who am I? Where do I go? How do I—” He chewed the inside of his cheek until copper bloomed. “That’s not a speech,” he said finally. “It’s just… reality.”

“We’re aware,” Dabi said.

Hawks went cold. “What do you mean you’re aware.”

Guilt flickered over Dabi’s expression and vanished like heat shimmer. He glanced toward the door in the same instant Hawks heard the quiet whoosh of a portal downstairs—the sensation had become familiar enough that his body cataloged it as part of the building’s weather.

“After we found you last night,” Dabi said, not looking away again, “we borrowed your HPSC file. Made a copy. Read it. Kurogiri and I just came back from returning the original.”

He said it fast, like pulling a bandage. Head slightly bent, as if he expected a blow.

The room tilted. Hawks’s ears roared. He pushed past Dabi, yanked the door open, and went hard down the stairs. He heard Dabi behind him, close, saying his name in a voice that tried not to chase and failed.

The League looked up as he came into the main room, every face already braced. The silence this time wasn’t awkward; it was ready.

“You read my file,” Hawks said, the sentence torn halfway between question and accusation. “You know everything.” The word everything scraped his throat on the way out. Even he didn’t know everything in that folder. There were parts of his life he had chosen to misremember because remembering would make him stop moving. The idea that someone had laid it all in one place and read it the way he read weather patterns made his skin buzz.

Kurogiri lifted his hands, palms open. “We should have asked,” he said. “We should have asked you. But we didn’t have time to ask anyone. You were—” He stopped. Changed direction. “We wanted to be prepared to keep you alive.”

“Let me leave,” Hawks said, aiming the sentence at the warp in Kurogiri’s shoulder as if he could will it open. “Open a portal. I’m going home.”

“Hawks,” Dabi said, catching his wrist on instinct and dropping it just as fast when Hawks flinched. “Please.”

“Am I that revolting,” Hawks said, and hated the rawness in his own voice, “now that you know. Now that the narrative isn’t glossy enough to love.”

“No,” the room said in chorus, the word heavy and immediate. Toga moved as if to throw her arms around him and stopped herself at the last inch; Twice nodded so hard his head snapped; Spinner’s mouth twisted like anger hurt his teeth.

Dabi stepped in, set his hands carefully on Hawks’s shoulders, and turned him gently to face him. “I know you’re furious,” he said. “You’re allowed to be. But promise me you’ll think about this like it’s a choice you get to make, not one you have to survive.”

Hawks stared at him. The faces around them had gone a little blurry again. He shook his head once. He did not promise. “Let me go, Dabi.”

Dabi let his hands fall. He took a step sideways, grabbed something from the table, and came back. Compress’s breath caught as he saw the folder. Dabi held it out.

“Take this,” he said.

Hawks looked down. A brown government folder. The word CLASSIFIED stamped across the top in institutional black. Beneath it, a name. Not “Hawks.” Not any of the aliases the Commission used like clean shirts. He felt the shock first as a physical thing—cold rising from his sternum, his hands going numb.

“Who is Keigo?” he asked, voice stripped down to wire.

Toga gave a small, unpretty cry. Shigaraki swore under his breath. Kurogiri’s chin dropped in something like grief. Dabi’s mouth flattened into a line that wasn’t cruel; it was defensive, as if he were bracing for a hit he hoped wouldn’t come.

“Just read it,” Dabi said.

A portal opened to Hawks’s right, purple mist unfurling like a theatrical cue. He didn’t say thank you. He didn’t ask another question. He took the folder and, with his free hand, plucked his phone out of Dabi’s now-limp grip. He stepped into the warp like a man walking off a stage, and the room snapped closed behind him.

Notes:

<3333

Chapter 18: Chapter 18

Hawks balanced on the lip of an advertising board until the aluminum frame rumbled under him like a tired drum. Traffic hissed below. Neon washed the puddles a sickly mauve. He chewed the inside of his lip the way he did when he was trying not to think. Lately, that was every hour.

He’d been ghosting everyone who wasn’t a student. Sidekicks, PR, other pros—ignored. He’d even blown off a handler check-in yesterday, stared at the ringing Commission phone until it went black on its own. The part of his brain raised on debrief calendars and punishments kept expecting a hand on his shoulder, a voice behind him. Nothing. Only the city inhaling and exhaling.

The League kept slipping into his head like a song hook he couldn’t shake. The domestic absurdity of their base, the way they’d moved as a unit when his voice on Dabi’s phone turned from banter into a sound he didn’t make in public. Stay with us, they’d said. He still couldn’t fit the words together with the people who put blue fire and knives into the world. He couldn’t fit himself in there either. Where did a Commission product sit in a found family?

His comm nudged his ear. Alert tone, low priority. Assault in progress four blocks northeast. Hawks stood, rolled his shoulders. His wings unfolded with a whisper of oil and down. He dropped into air and let the city rise to meet him.

 

 

 

 

Five hours later, the apartment’s quiet wrapped him like shrink-wrap. He’d showered hard enough to redden the skin over his clavicles, pulled on soft clothes, and then failed to make it as far as the bed. He landed at the dining table with the brown folder Dabi had pressed into his hands and did not open it.

He looked at it until his eyes watered.

CLASSIFIED. A name beneath the stamp that was not Hawks. He set a forefinger on the tab and left it there until his hand went numb. He told himself ridiculous things: If he didn’t look away, it couldn’t vanish. If he didn’t open it, it couldn’t change anything. If he opened it, it might eat the room.

His Commission phone lit up, danced across the table, and dimmed again. Ten calls bunched like stab wounds. He didn’t move. Miruko pounded on the door once, twice, thirty times—swore through the wood, the colorful kind that would have made him laugh any other day—and stomped away in a trail of echoed insults. He didn’t move.

Hours stretched until they didn’t feel like time at all but like a room with no doors.

The lock clicked softly just after dawn. Shouto emerged from the spare room in socks and uniform pants, hair unbrushed, expression pinched in mild confusion at finding his mentor frozen like a bird perched in the wrong place. He grabbed a drink, slung his bag, paused.

“…Hawks?”

Hawks hummed—noise without meaning.

“You haven’t moved for almost twenty hours.” Shouto stepped closer, not touching yet. “What is this?”

He turned the folder to read and Hawks’s body snapped back online. A gasp, too big for his ribs. He blinked like something gritty was stuck under both lids. When he finally made his eyes meet Shouto’s, his voice rasped from disuse.

“I think,” he said, and swallowed, “I think that’s my file.”

Shouto didn’t pry it open. He set it gently back within Hawks’s reach, a baseline of respect that undid something tight in Hawks’s chest. “I’m going to see my sister after classes,” he said. “Will you be okay, Hawks-sensei?”

“Yeah.” The lie had softer edges than usual. It didn’t clang in his teeth.

Shouto nodded but didn’t leave. The hug that followed was clumsy, sincere, adolescent: a long, awkward fold of limbs and careful pressure that still managed to land exactly where Hawks needed it. For a minute he tucked his head into the hollow where Shouto’s neck met his shoulder and let his own hands do the automatic patting he’d taught himself in internships—steady, steady, you’re safe.

When the door clicked behind the kid, Hawks stood. He made coffee that could blister paint. He splashed cold water on his face until his skin ached. He took a blanket to the bed like a concession flag and sat with the folder in his lap.

“It’ll be fine,” he said out loud to no one, and opened it.

 

 

 

 

 

PRODUCT 176156
Name: Takami, Keigo
DOB: [Redacted]
Quirk: Fierce Wings (Type: Emitter / Mutation hybrid)
Initial Capacity Index: 87/100 (See Appendix A)

A photograph clipped to the corner: a five-year-old in a Commission jumper that pinched his shoulders, grinning with the genuine, feral joy of a kid allowed to run. Hawks felt the floor notch under his feet. He pressed a thumb into the edge of the paper until the skin went white.

Training Schedule — Approved
0500 wake, 0515 nutrition, 0530 conditioning (aerobic), 0615 study block (literacy/numeracy), 0730 quirk drills (control: micro), 0900 observation (field), 1100 conditioning (anaerobic), 1145 nutrition, 1200 study block (HPSC Civics), 1330 quirk drills (macro), 1500 tactical scenario FW31/FW32 rotation, 1700 debrief, 1730 conditioning (flexibility), 1800 hygiene, 1830 lights.

Signed off in a precise hand by a President Hawks had only known from photographs and the taste of her name at the back of a lecture hall. Boxed checkmarks marched down the right margin like a chorus line.

He flipped to a training report at age six.

02/10/20XX — Trainer 78443
Primary Objective: Product 176156 must successfully complete obstacle FW31.
Outcome: Complete.
Handler: Takahashi Koichi.
Notes: Improvements noted in auditory filtration; subject can isolate commands at 35m in moderate urban noise. Hesitation observed at 2nd gate. Recommend desensitization protocol B.

Hawks’s eyes moved faster than his mind. The cadence of the language was sedative—present tense, clinical nouns, verbs deployed like screws. After a handful of pages, his breathing synced to the bureaucratic rhythm. He could almost pretend he was reading about someone else. He turned another month. Another. Birthdays marked in parentheses like maintenance checks. 8 y/o. Dental. X-ray (scapular microfractures – healed). Appendix D: fracture history.

Then the tone shifted a degree he could feel in his molars.

Observer: Handler Takahashi
Behavioral Observations: Subject displays increased compliance with tactile correction. Subject responds favorably to positive attention and demonstrates accelerated quirk control when corrections are paired with physical contact. (See Reinforcement Chart 3B.) Consider expanded contact schedule to leverage this responsiveness.

Hawks stopped. Heat climbed the back of his neck, slow and ugly. He flipped the page hard enough to crease it.

The next dozen reports were the same day repeated until repetition erased meaning—wake, eat, train, study, train, eat, shower, study, sleep—and yet something in the margins moved. A name that used to appear at the end of every page—Handler: Takahashi Koichi—began to migrate to the top where observers wrote “behavioral.” Tiny notations piled like ants: held gaze longer, responded to tone, quieted immediately. The language never admitted anything that wasn’t approved, but Hawks had learned to read what people hid inside what they were willing to say out loud.

He slid to the medical section. Broken ulna, healed with slight deviation. Left clavicle fracture, clean break, internal fixation (removed). Microtears in the levator scapulae left/right, chronic. Notes on pain tolerance thresholds. His mouth went dry. I know this already. His body stored that ledger in places he couldn’t entirely reach.

He turned a month forward. And another. A birthday recorded and not celebrated. 8 y/o (cake declined; training maintained). He felt the edges of a memory and recoiled before he could see what was in it.

He caught himself rubbing his wrists and stilled his hands.

A new header, slightly different paper stock, a carbon copy imprint faint under the ink:

Long-Term Assignment: LT-R/Blue
Objective: Develop sustained extra-institutional social connection; subject to demonstrate attachment, reciprocal interaction, and exploratory behavior in peer environment.
Duration: 12–18 months.
Location: [Redacted – District 7]
Oversight: Handler Takahashi Koichi (primary).
Secondary Liaison: [Redacted].
Peer Contact: Todoroki, Touya (male, 11y; Quirk: [Redacted]), familial environment supervised.

 

 

 

 

Hawks’s finger landed on the name without meaning to. It was as if his own body had found the bruise. He leaned back, away, then forward again. He read it a second time. The words fuzzed, cleared, fuzzed.

“What the—” The rest blurred into the exhale that followed. He closed the folder and set his palms flat on it, pressure as if it were a bird he could keep from flying if he pressed hard enough.

When he tried to go looking for that place in his head—the way a kid goes looking for the tree he fell out of to prove the scar was real—pain flared in white bands behind his eyes. Something old and mean tightened at the base of his skull. The harder he pressed, the hotter it burned.

He did what he always did when he recognized a trap: he moved around it.

He reopened the folder. Turned back two pages. Forward one. The assignment recurred in neutral monthly summaries.

Month 2, LT-R/Blue: Subject displays initial guardedness followed by marked prosocial behavior. Peer contact shows curiosity, assertiveness. Joint outdoor play successful; minor injuries (abrasions) treated on site. Subject initiated contact; see Appendix H (Observational Highlights).
Month 5: Subject and peer established routine. Subject demonstrates protective response patterns; verbal soothing effective. Handler notes improved micro-feather fine motor control concurrent with peer contact days (see training log overlap).
Month 8: Peer displays increased agitation; subject provides counterregulation (hugging; verbal reassurance). Handler authorized expanded contact window. Subject uttered name “Keigo” in third person when distressed; redirect successful.

He didn’t remember any of that. He tried to pry loose a single image and the white noise came back bitterness-sharp. He pushed through it, breath measured.

Hawks stopped reading.

The room tilted. Not a dizzy spell—an angle shift, as if the apartment, the furniture, his body had all slid a few degrees without moving. He put a hand to his forehead and found he was shaking. He swallowed, tried three times before saliva cooperated.

Why can’t I remember this.

 

 

 

There were lines in the medical that might have answered, if he could keep his eyes on them. Procedure: MN-3 (memory hygiene); authorized by President [Redacted], per §12.3. Rationale: mitigate destabilizing variables; maintain operational focus; reduce external attachments that compromise mission readiness. Outcome: effective; subject retains functional skills, loses episodic detail (LT-R/Blue).** The paragraph ended with a hand-initialed K. T. and a date that lined up with the end of the assignment.

He ran a thumb along the margin where the pen had pressed too hard and left indentations. He could have thrown up then. He didn’t. He shut the folder a third time and stood because stillness felt like being buried.

The apartment had taken on that empty-house smell: dust and old coffee and the faint laundry detergent Shouto carried with him like weather. Hawks padded to the sink and drank from the tap until the ache in his throat dulled.

Back on the bed, he cracked the folder at random and found a photocopy of a photograph. Two boys in a yard, one with sun-pale hair and a smile like he was trying it on because the other kid was looking. He flipped it over. 

He closed his eyes and tried to conjure a voice. Touya the way Shouto had said it a week ago: angry most of the time, sad, then happy when their father took him “somewhere” and brought him back with a smile. A boy under a tree, tear-streaked. Another boy finding him, pressing hands to his face, the odd comfort of someone else’s palms.

Pain spiked. He pressed his heel into it, the way you do when a cramp hits. He breathed through it. The white hiss settled to a background coil of heat. Behind it, for an instant, something small and vivid flickered: a laugh that sounded like wood catching flame; a palm warm against his cheek; someone saying his name like it belonged to him.

Gone.

 

 

 

 

He didn’t notice he was crying until a tear hit the edge of the folder and bled the photocopy ink.

His phone vibrated. He flinched so hard his wings snapped once, feathers whispering. Message preview: Miruko: OPEN YOUR DOOR OR I’LL OPEN IT FOR YOU. Another: Handler (HPSC): REPORT. NOW. Another, kinder: Tokoyami: Sensei, Dark Shadow says he can do intimidation at your door if needed. A picture from Shouto of a convenience store dinner: fuyumi made me real food but i didn’t want to rub it in. brought extra onigiri. you should eat.

He wiped his face with the blanket and let the laugh that almost cracked out of him become air.

The Commission call triggered an old reflex that went deeper than mood. He hit decline and then, because the pressure of one machine is often best countered with the presence of a person, he typed three words to Shouto that felt like treason and also like health.

come home early?

While he waited, he went back to the file because closing his eyes made the white hiss worse. He read the final lines of the assignment summary.

Termination LT-R/Blue: External factors (domestic instability; peer training failure) make continuation contraindicated. Memory hygiene authorized and completed. Subject returned to full mission track. Handler transfer pending.

There was a signature at the bottom. Koichi’s. The K tight, the line of the T pressed through.

Hawks turned to the last page and found nothing. The folder ended where his life in the file did: with a clean bureau sentence and a blank.

He touched the front cover. CLASSIFIED stared back like an accusation. Under it, the real name he had been carrying this whole time like contraband: Keigo Takami.

He said it under his breath, again, because he needed to be able to hear it and believe the sound came from him.

“Keigo.”

The apartment didn’t care. The city kept breathing. But the sound sat differently in his sternum now—as if it had weight and could be picked up later if he set it down gently.

Chapter 19: Chapter 19

Notes:

Backstory time!
Longer chapter :p

Keigo was newly five when he saved a dozen people.

The news never showed the first moments—the way the guardrail peeled like foil, the sedan flipping twice, the heavy quiet that follows an impact. What they clipped and replayed was the child with the red-gold feathers, too small for the uniform he didn’t own yet, dragging air like string to snag seatbelts and tug glass away from faces, weaving a net of trembling pinfeathers to hold a passenger up until help arrived. A passerby kept saying it into their phone—It’s a little boy, a little boy—as if repeating it would make sense of the physics.

The next day, two men in suits knocked on the apartment door. Keigo’s mother glanced through the peephole, smoothed her hair with her palm, and smiled in a way Keigo had rarely seen. The taller one spoke to her in a voice Keigo was too young to decode: warm words with a hook beneath. A white envelope changed hands. His mother kept smiling, wider, until her eyes went shiny.

“Keigo,” she said brightly, “these gentlemen are going to take you someplace special.”

He clutched the hem of her shirt. “I don’t want special.”

Her hands pried his fingers loose gently. “Be good,” she whispered. “You’re going to be a hero.” She didn’t look at him as she said it.

They guided him to a sleek black car that reflected the sky like water. When the door shut, the quiet felt like a lid. Keigo started to cry—small at first, then bigger when nobody told him not to. The man beside him huffed, a tired sound.

“Hey,” the man said, and something wrapped in crinkly plastic pressed into Keigo’s hands. “Lollipop. Kids like ’em.”

Keigo blinked tears through at the man’s face: brown eyes, slicked-back hair, the shadow of stubble. He put the candy in his mouth, cautious, and the sweetness lit up the back of his tongue. His sobs hiccuped and faded.

Up front, the driver laughed at something the other man muttered. Keigo watched his head bounce, his neck like a bird’s. He pointed, the plastic stick of the lollipop tapping the air. “Chicken.”

The car braked hard enough to make the seatbelt bite. The driver twisted around, wounded. “Did he call me a chicken?”

The man beside Keigo patted his hair without thinking. Keigo flinched—tiny, automatic—and then held very still. He’d learned early that grown-ups didn’t like it when you pulled away. The man’s hand paused, withdrew.

“Daigo,” he said to the driver, “we’re late. Keep driving.”

Daigo grumbled, but the car eased forward again. No one spoke for the rest of the ride. Keigo sucked the lollipop dry and watched the city sprint past.

 

 

 

 

 

The building wasn’t special the way his mother had said. It was careful: glass that looked like mirrors, pale stone that didn’t stain. Keigo tried to launch himself toward a toy store on the next block—the window display a cascade of blue racetrack—and the man caught his wrist with reflexes that proved they knew why they were there.

Inside, cool air tasted like antiseptic. A woman with straight shoulders and cat eyes introduced herself as the President. She knew his name without asking. Keigo hid behind the lollipop man’s leg and peered around his coat, curious despite himself. The President’s voice was smooth as ribbon. “Heroes save people,” she told him. “Would you like to save more people?”

Keigo’s feathers fluffed. He nodded, because the answer he wanted to say—I want my mom—wasn’t allowed to be loud in his throat.

They handed him to a cluster of staff in blue scrubs and masks. The masks made it hard to tell who was kind. The scrub fabric went snap when they pinched it. He was measured, weighed, swabbed, scanned. His wings were touched in places he didn’t know were sore until someone pressed there. He learned a new word—baseline—and that his was “promising.”

Later, a woman walked him down a hall that sounded hollow and opened a door onto a room with a single window, a single mattress, a desk bolted to the wall, and new sheets that smelled like factory. Keigo stepped inside and felt a split in his chest: half awe, half fear. He had never had a room that was only his; he had also never seen a room that looked so much like a box.

He turned to thank the woman and found the door closed behind him.

A throat cleared. Keigo spun. A man stood there who had not come in with him. He was not dressed like the others—no scrubs, no badge visible. He crouched so their eyes met, a practiced move that did not feel like care. His fingers tipped Keigo’s chin up, not hard, not soft. Green eyes studied him, cataloging.

“Beautiful,” the man said, as if naming a fact in a chart.

Keigo didn’t know where to put his gaze. He held still. People liked him more if he held still.

“I’m going to help you become a hero,” the man said. “Would you like that?”

Keigo nodded so hard his scalp hurt. The man’s mouth tucked up at the corner.

“You call me Sir,” he added, not unkindly. “Do you understand?”

Keigo bobbed his head, swallowed. “Y—yes, Sir.”

After the man left, Keigo pressed his ear to the new pillow and memorized the way it swallowed sound.

 

 

 

 

 

The days were full from the moment lights blinked on. Wake at five. Eat, fast. Run until his chest pumped and the trainers’ stopwatches matched the numbers they wanted. Study in a room that smelled like dry erase. Practice separating three sounds out of ten, ten sounds out of twenty, until he could pluck a coin out of a fountain with a feather from across the gym. A calendar with no weekends.

He learned new hands. The trainer with the stopwatch pinched when he needed pinching. The woman with the clipboard never raised her voice but could make your name sound like a mistake. The President smiled with her eyes when he hit a target and looked past him when he missed. Sir visited at odd times Keigo couldn’t predict—once during breakfast, once at night when the hall was quiet—and watched from the doorway with a look Keigo couldn’t give a word to. Sir’s corrections were gentle and exact; Sir’s praise was like heat on cold skin. Keigo found himself curving toward it.

The man from the car began to appear in the edges of Keigo’s days. Keigo learned his name by accident—heard Daigo complain to someone in the garage, a word like a bark—and then learned the other man’s the same way. “Yuto,” someone said into a phone. Keigo tucked the names into the place he kept special things: the smooth stone he’d found in the planter in the lobby; the one feather he’d been allowed to keep when a molt came early from stress.

He tripped in a corridor once—a scuffed shoe catching the edge of a mat—and hit the floor hard enough to spark pain behind his eyes. Tears came before he could stop them. A shadow fell over him. He braced for the pinched voice.

Instead, Yuto crouched. He opened his palm to show blue plastic. “Lollipop,” he said, shy about it, as if it were a secret they shared.

Keigo sniffed and took it. The wrapper wouldn’t budge. He tried to hide the panic in his hands. Yuto peeled the plastic off like he’d done it a hundred times and handed the candy back without making Keigo feel small for needing help.

“Why do you always have these?” Keigo asked around the stick.

“Sweet things make bad days sit softer,” Yuto said. His hair wasn’t slicked back now; a cowlick leaned into his eyebrow.

They walked. When Keigo’s steps stuttered, Yuto lifted him without asking and settled him on a shoulder like he weighed less than a jacket. Keigo tucked into his neck and felt, very fleetingly, like he used to feel when his mother was still sometimes kind. He lifted his face toward Yuto’s with solemn expectation.

“What?” Yuto asked.

“Kiss,” Keigo declared, pointing to the bridge of his own nose, because that was the place that meant safe.

Yuto stumbled a step and then huffed a laugh. “Can’t,” he said. “Rules.”

Keigo folded back into the warm place in Yuto’s neck and let the ache in his throat be what it was.

At his door—red numbers stenciled beneath the window: 176156—Yuto tucked him in with an efficiency that somehow felt tender. He smoothed the blanket at the sides until Keigo giggled from the drag across his ribs.

“My mother did it like this,” Yuto said without looking up, and left before Keigo could ask what his name was for her.

Keigo slept without waking once.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two months in, the novelty burned off like morning mist. Training got harder, which was expected. The part that made Keigo’s wings rattle was the nights: the click of the lock, the slab of quiet. The room held his breathing like a hand over his mouth.

He began to test boundaries the way any bright child will. He hid in a storage closet between study block and drills, agents taking turns having to pull him out. He pretended not to hear a whistle. He sat in the shower longer than he was supposed to and learned the alarm tone that meant he’d gone over. Sometimes he went mute for whole afternoons—eyes on the trainer’s mouth, hearing all the words but giving them nowhere to stick.

The pushback earned him new kinds of attention. Some of it was unpleasant—hands on his scapulae steering him firmly where he did not want to go; the bored trainer who twisted a flight feather too far to make a point. Some of it was the kind that made his stomach feel weird: Sir at the end of the hall, looking at him like he was already the shape of the future he wanted; a library worker who slipped him a comic book with the cover folded under so the cameras couldn’t see. Most nights, Yuto found him after lights—how he avoided the patrols, Keigo didn’t know—and sat on the bare mattress while Keigo talked about nothing until the lids of his eyes refused to fight anymore. Sometimes Yuto carried him back from unauthorized circuits of the corridors and tucked him in with that same brisk tenderness.

On his eighth birthday, a cupcake materialized in Yuto’s hand, small and pink with a frosting rosette.

“Can’t bring candles,” Yuto said.

They split it with their fingers. Keigo licked icing off his knuckle and looked at Yuto’s face and cataloged the sadness there the way he cataloged the color of the mats in the gym. He didn’t have a file name for that expression yet. He did not know he would later.

 

 

 

 

 

A week after the cupcake, Sir woke him at an hour that wasn’t on the schedule and put clothes in his hands that weren’t the uniform. Pants in a soft fabric. A shirt that didn’t scratch. Shoes with new laces. Keigo dressed in a daze, the way you don’t fight if the thing you want most is what you’re being told you might get.

Sir took him through corridors he’d never walked. Keigo did what he’d been trained to do: he observed. He counted cameras. He listened to the hum of the HVAC and sorted it from the hum of the elevator. He noticed the door at the end of the hall had a keycard reader instead of a keypad. He noticed Sir’s hand on his back sat lower than usual—territory his body registered even if his brain filed it under attention. He kept his face the way he’d learned to keep it. Good kids were easy to manage.

The new room was simple: table, two chairs, a glass door that let sunlight pour in. The sunlight caught dust like glitter. Through the glass, Keigo could see a strip of grass. His heart jolted, hopeful, like a wingbeat.

“Keigo,” Sir said, kneeling to make their eyes level. Lines around his mouth deepened when he smiled. “We have a new assignment. You want to go outside, don’t you?”

Keigo nodded, nearly hard enough to topple over.

“There’s someone we want you to meet,” Sir said. “Your assignment is to become friends with him. Okay?”

An assignment to be a friend. The phrasing sat oddly in Keigo’s head, but the promise grabbed him by the chest. He would have agreed to anything in that moment. He would have done the obstacle course backward and blindfolded.

“Yes, Sir,” he said.

Sir’s hand slid, just a fraction, and drew him close. “This continues,” Sir murmured, almost fond, “if you continue your training. No more skipping. No more pouting.” The smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Don’t make me be disappointed, Keigo.”

The word disappointed landed like a stone. Keigo hated disappointing anyone almost more than he hated the lock clicking at night. “Yes, Sir,” he said again, smaller.

Sir’s fingers hovered at his cheek in a gesture that would read as paternal on camera and felt like something else in Keigo’s skin. Keigo stood very still, because he had learned stillness looked like obedience and obedience bought him minutes in sunlight.

“Let’s go,” Sir said, standing. His palm guided Keigo toward the glass door and the bright rectangle beyond. Keigo’s heart hammered. He wanted to run. He did not run. He walked at the pace Sir set and told himself he could be good enough long enough to earn this new thing.

Notes:

Btw I was like high while writing most of this so ignore my spelling mistakes.

i can imagine keigo being he best baby ever <3

Chapter 20: Chapter 20

It was winter-cold and bleached-bright outside, the kind of day where the sun hid behind thin cloud and still managed to glare. Keigo squinted up and gasped anyway. Sun was sun. He didn’t get to see it much.

Sir walked half a step ahead of him, coat cutting the air like a blade. Daigo followed behind, both of Keigo’s small hands collected in one of his, steering him as if the boy might float away. The ride had been long; the building they finally reached was smaller than the one Keigo lived in, but it smelled the same—citrus cleaner, ozone, that sharp sting that lived in hospitals and laboratories. Commission, Keigo thought, filing it away. He took in everything the way he’d been taught: number of cameras (two), exit signs (three), security glass that flashed once when the light hit it just right.

They waited while Sir spoke to a masked man in a dark green suit. Daigo sat, then tugged Keigo into his lap without asking. Keigo chirped under his breath about the blinking panel over the elevator and the way the hallway floor made a path if you squinted. Daigo answered most questions with quiet patience, but after an hour a muscle in his jaw began to jump every time Keigo asked, What’s that? or Why is it like that? Keigo noticed and closed his mouth. He saved the good questions for his new “assignment.” Friends, Sir had said. Make one.

Sir returned. Keigo slid reluctantly off Daigo’s knee when the man stood. The hall door hissed open and Keigo almost squeaked.

Endeavor strode in, heat following him like a change in weather. Taller than on TV, broader, everything about him edged and certain. Keigo’s wings rustled once. He wanted to launch himself at the hero and say thank you for the time Endeavor came to their street and made Keigo’s father disappear for a while, but Sir’s palm pressed lower at his spine—a wordless order to stay. Keigo locked his heels and stared hard at the floor.

Endeavor stopped and frowned—not cruelly, more like a builder eyeing a load-bearing wall. He grunted, almost approval. Keigo’s cheeks warmed under the weight of it.

Another figure drifted in behind the hero’s shoulder: a boy, white hair falling over a fierce little face that shared Endeavor’s angles. He walked like he already knew where he was going. Keigo got the feeling this wasn’t his first time here.

Sir’s fingers squeezed once at Keigo’s shoulder and then pushed him forward. “This is Touya, Endeavor’s son. You’ll be spending the day together.”

Touya took Keigo in the way cats look at birds—curious, skeptical, a little hungry. He made a small, imperious humph and flopped into a beanbag chair like royalty refusing a throne.

Keigo’s stomach did an uncertain flip. Sir hadn’t given him the usual script—no list of do’s and don’ts, no targets to memorize. He had said only, friend. Keigo didn’t know the steps to that drill.

 

 

 

 

They were left alone in a small interview room. Keigo kept his eyes on the carpet’s loops and counted to slow his breathing. Touya stared and let the silence stretch until it hummed.

“You’re really pretty,” Touya said at last, utterly flat.

Keigo’s head snapped up. “O—oh. Everyone says that about my wings.”

Touya squinted, unimpressed. “Yeah, those. I meant you’re pretty.”

Keigo’s mouth opened and closed. “Sir says that to me sometimes,” he offered, because it was true, because he didn’t know what else to do with the word when it wasn’t about feathers.

Touya snorted and collapsed deeper into the beanbag. “That’s weird.”

Silence again. Keigo hunted the room for something useful, something he could do. Yuto always started with safe questions, things you could point at.

“How does the door know when to open?” Keigo asked, small and earnest, pointing at the black bar above the glass.

Touya blinked, interest cracking his boredom. “The automatic ones?”

Keigo nodded, heart tap-tapping.

Touya got up without sighing and showed him, fingers tracing the line of the motion sensor, the skinny wire chase that fed the panel. He popped the plastic cover loose just enough for Keigo to glimpse the little green board inside, its neat teeth of solder. He explained the cone of detection by sweeping his hand through it until the door hissed and slid.

Keigo’s feathers shivered. He liked the insides of things. He liked the secret working of the world.

They ended up on the carpet with knees knocking. Keigo, concentrating hard enough that his tongue poked out, sent a feather across the room to fetch a folded blanket from the corner. The blanket skimmed the floor, wobbled, then landed across both their laps like a flag. Touya’s smile flashed for real, sudden and bright.

“What’s your quirk?” he asked, eyes greedy the way kids’ get when they recognize a trick they want to learn. “Mine is fire. See?”

Orange licked along Touya’s forearm—clean, hot, controlled. Keigo gasped. The room warmed in an instant; the air smelled faintly of hot dust. He shoved the blanket off before he roasted.

“Fierce Wings,” Keigo said, sitting taller. “I’m still learning.”

“Can you fly?” Touya pressed, half-challenging.

Keigo nodded, proud. “My trainer just taught me.”

They emptied their pockets of words. Touya had siblings: a sister who braided his hair without permission, a brother with cool friends who sometimes let Touya tag along, a mother who sang off-key to old songs. His father trained him hard except lately there were limits. “They say it’s not suited to my body,” he muttered, showing the thin web of shiny pink at his wrist. “It’s like saying a knife is not suited to cutting.”

Keigo, careful with what Sir would approve, offered safe pieces. He had a schedule with boxes; if you checked enough you got a star. The gym had a high window where birds landed; Keigo could feel their feet through the glass if he tried. “I can hear through my feathers,” he whispered, conspiratorial. He demonstrated before shutting himself down: flicked a feather to the corner vent, tuned his ears, repeated Touya’s last word perfectly. Touya’s jaw dropped, then split into a grin.

A tray appeared at some point—sandwiches cut into triangles, fruit carved into flowers. Touya hauled it down and gave reviews with grave authority: chips that were “like air but salty,” gummies that “taste like fruit from Mars,” crackers that “make you thirsty just to prove they can.” He shoved a triangle at Keigo. “You’re gonna be a hero? You gotta eat. You’re tiny.”

Keigo, who had been trained to clean plates and to leave nothing, ate on command—once, twice, three sandwiches out of sheer determination. Touya looked satisfied. “Baby,” he said, not unkindly, and Keigo’s chest did something odd and warm.

They were mid-quirk-show-and-tell when the door clicked. Sir’s voice was light, almost lazy. Approval. Keigo stood fast enough that his knee popped. “Time’s up. Let’s go.”

Touya’s mouth tugged down. “Bye,” he said, like a dare.

Keigo looked back exactly once. Touya’s blue eyes caught and held. The line between them hummed tight and then slackened as the door shut.

In the car, Keigo asked if he could see Touya again. Sir didn’t answer in the car. He waited until they were at Keigo’s door. “You did well today,” he said. “Keep up your training and we’ll arrange next week.”

Keigo glowed. “Yes, Sir.”

 

 

 

 

 

Yuto brought him the next time. Keigo filled the entire drive with chirping talk—about birds at the window, about lifting a coin with a feather without making it spin, about the cupcake Yuto had smuggled him once. At the smaller building, Endeavor stood in full hero gear, flame beard a brand. Touya hovered behind him, trying to look like he wasn’t staring.

They were told to go off together. Yuto ruffled Keigo’s hair and turned to speak to the pro hero in the corner. Keigo tucked the ruffle away like a secret snack and let Touya hook their hands together and tow him down the hall like a tugboat dragging a buoy.

“You know where we’re going?” Keigo asked, a little breathless because Touya’s legs were long.

Touya nodded. “I come here a lot. Doctors. They do tests. Some are stupid. Some are useful.” He slowed when he noticed Keigo’s feet skidding. “Sorry. You’ve got baby legs.”

The room Touya chose this time was cozier—a ridiculous pink couch facing a low window with trees like a painting. A small table held a plastic bin of snacks Keigo didn’t recognize. Touya hauled the bin up between them and began a lecture that felt like a treasure map. He popped a chip into Keigo’s mouth. The crunch echoed in Keigo’s head and a small chirp slipped out of him like air from a bellows.

He slapped his hand over his mouth, horrified. Sir didn’t like it when Keigo sounded like a bird. Sounds should be clipped and adult.

Touya stared, mouth open, crumbs falling on his shirt. “Was that a chirp?”

Keigo’s eyes filled. “Please don’t tell Sir,” he hiccuped. “Please.”

Touya lunged without thinking, the way kids do when they decide to be gentle. He patted Keigo’s head awkwardly and earnestly. “It’s fine. I won’t. I think it’s cute.”

Cute. Keigo didn’t know where to put the word. He kept it.

“You’re such a baby,” Touya added, not mean. “Stop crying. We’re friends now. You don’t have to get upset about everything. I’ll always help you.”

“Friends?” Keigo breathed.

Touya stuck out his little finger, serious as a vow. “Promise to never leave and to become heroes together.”

Keigo’s smile blew him open. Yuto did this with him sometimes too. He hooked his pinky with Touya’s. “Promise.”

 

 

 

 

They made more promises without labeling them: to tell each other first when something hurt; to share the best snacks; to ask before touching feathers or scars. They set rules for their space: no shouting unless it was for fun; if one was quiet the other would wait five whole breaths before asking why. Touya called the pink couch our ship and the window our ocean. Keigo’s feathers made sails. Touya’s heat made wind.

Habits sprouted like weeds. Touya knocked twice on the doorframe before stepping in; Keigo chirped once softly to say safe. Keigo tucked a tiny feather under the couch cushion as a beacon he could feel from down the hall; Touya left his least favorite gummy in the bin every time so Keigo could “find” it and pretend to be disgusted.

They traded knowledge like currency. Touya taught Keigo how to bank heat in the walls at a low burn so a room stayed warm without setting off detectors. He taught him that sometimes breathing with pain worked better than biting through it. Keigo taught Touya how to layer his hearing through more than one feather—one by the vent, one at the door, one down the hall—without getting dizzy. He taught him that tilting your head changed the angle of your ears and could separate a voice from a hum.

They invented games to make drills feel like play. Keigo floated paper rings and Touya flicked them into a target with quick puffs of heat, just enough to move air, not scorch. They made a sport of skirting the very edge of the automatic door’s sensor—Keigo with a feather, Touya heckling the score.

When Touya came with gauze peeking from under his sleeve, Keigo didn’t ask how. He tilted his head, let his feathers spread just enough to push a breath of temperate air against the bandage. Touya exhaled despite himself.

“Don’t tell anyone I liked that,” he muttered.

“I won’t,” Keigo said solemnly, and kept the promise.

When Keigo arrived with a raw patch where a trainer had grabbed too hard, Touya scowled like a small storm. “Show me who,” he said, ridiculous and fierce. Keigo laughed even as something in his chest unwound.

Sometimes Endeavor hovered like Sir did, two suns throwing different kinds of heat. Keigo learned the set of Touya’s mouth when his father was near, the way the boy’s breath shortened at advice delivered like an order. Touya learned the way Keigo’s shoulders crept up when Sir’s shoes clicked, the way Keigo’s voice got brighter the more nervous he was, like a bird trying to make itself bigger.

There were bad days. Touya sat with his back to the couch and didn’t speak for twenty minutes. Keigo lay on his stomach until their shoulders touched and chirped once—here—and again—waiting. Eventually Touya said without looking, “He says a lot of things. Some days I believe him. Today I don’t.” Keigo said, very quietly, “Sometimes I am good and it still isn’t enough,” and Touya nodded like the words had bones.

 

 

 

 

There were good days. Keigo flew three laps without wobbling; Touya clapped like a one-boy parade. Touya held a flame steadier than a match for fourteen seconds; Keigo called him amazing with the sort of seriousness that made Touya look away, ears going pink.

They drew maps of places they weren’t allowed to go. Touya sketched his neighborhood from memory—corner store, the good vending machine, the park bench that smelled like sap. Keigo added the tallest buildings he could see from the gym window, shading their glass so it glittered. They named the streets after jokes only they understood: Chirp Alley, Flame Lane, Pink Couch Boulevard.

One day the vending machine ate Touya’s coins. Keigo angled a feather into the return and fished them back out with surgeon focus. Touya whooped, made a nurse flinch outside, and then split a candy bar down the middle like peace.

One day a doctor told Touya to rest. Touya seethed and went quiet. Keigo folded the blanket and tugged it over Touya’s knees the way Yuto tucked Keigo in at lights-out. Touya didn’t say thanks. He didn’t need to.

Sir watched sometimes from behind glass; sometimes he came in with a clipboard and that light smile that meant good results. Endeavor watched with his arms folded and said hm in ways Touya pretended not to hear. Keigo learned to keep certain things under his tongue where they couldn’t be measured—how Touya’s laugh felt like sunlight finally hitting a cold hallway; how a pinky promise could hold your ribs together when you were sure you might come apart.

They always ended the same way. A shoe clicked in the hall. A knock. Touya would say “Bye” like a challenge. Keigo would look back exactly once. The thin line between blue and gold would hum and then go slack again as the door shut.

At Keigo’s door that day, Sir said, “You did well. Keep up and you’ll see him again.” Keigo said, “Yes, Sir,” and tried not to bounce.

That night in his small white room, the numbers 176156 stenciled under the window, Keigo lay on his mattress and practiced hooking his smallest finger around nothing, feeling how light and strong that grip could be. He didn’t know yet that promises can be ropes as well as lifelines. He knew only that he had made one, and that keeping it felt like flying, and that flying felt like being exactly who everyone kept telling him he was meant to be.

Chapter 21: Chapter 21

Notes:

We're making some progress now :3

Hawks was going to be in so much trouble. Not the PR kind—apology-tour, sad-eyed-smile trouble. The real kind. The kind that ended with paperwork written in euphemism and a closed casket.

The security camera in the corner of the narrow corridor buzzed once, then coughed out darkness as a single feather sliced the lens. The faint click of cooling plastic echoed down the empty hall like a dropped coin.

He stood very still in the dark, back to the wall, breath low. His pulse thudded at the base of his skull and along the hinge of each wing. It had taken two days to decide he couldn’t keep reading the file alone and two hours to convince himself he needed another file to understand the first: Touya Todoroki. The name shone through the blank spots in his memory like a shape behind frosted glass. It didn’t matter that what he’d already read left him shaking. It didn’t matter that every instinct screamed leave it buried. Hawks needed to know why a boy he couldn’t remember felt like a promise he’d once made with both hands.

So he’d come to the one place he dreaded more than any battlefield: the Commission’s archives.

The janitor closet smelled exactly the same: citrus cleaner, wet mop, metal polish. In the quiet, his own whisper sounded too loud.

“Hey, old friend.”

He palmed the far wall with gloved fingers, mapping by muscle memory. As a child he’d discovered a flaw in the drywall where the frame didn’t catch—a thumb-width notch hidden behind a crooked panel. The Commission had eventually found most of his shortcuts. Not this one.

Fabric snagged. Hawks grinned despite himself, fed a feather into the seam, and levered the panel open. Cold air breathed out from the crawlspace—dust, concrete, a faint hint of ozone from the old static-laden wiring. He wriggled in on his belly, then had to stop and swear when his shoulders jammed. He wasn’t six anymore. He exhaled everything, pulled his wings tight to his spine, and pushed.

On the other side he unfolded like a pocketknife and took in the room with a practiced glance. A disused office: gray carpet, two desks, a dead ficus skeleton in a cracked pot. Dust lay on everything like talc. He sent three feathers into the corners to scout cameras and motion sensors—snip, snip—and heard their tiny relays die.

The side door had a simple badge reader and a bolt. He kneed the bolt while a feather worried the latch from the inside—one-two-three, click.

Voices drifted past the door in the hall. Two agents. He stepped back into the wall-shadow, set his breathing to match the AC’s hum, and waited while their footsteps scuffed by and faded. He counted to sixty twice before moving again. He’d learned patience in halls just like these—wait, measure, move—and the old rhythms slipped over him like a too-familiar coat.

The auxiliary maintenance bay was three rooms deeper. He slid inside, shut the door without letting the latch catch, and climbed. The vent grille was low—bless the lazy remodel—but tight. Feathers fanned into the duct first, like red scouts. He followed, careful not to bracket his shoulders against the sheet metal. Every creak sounded enormous in his skull. He froze when an elbow rasped aluminum, and waited until the thumping in his ears gentled.

The vents forked twice. He took the left by scent—paper, cold ink, the gummy tang of machine oil from the high-capacity shredder—and then the right by memory. When the drop opened under him, he let himself hover, body parallel to the grate. Four agents patrolled the surrounding corridor, one stationed at the files-room door, arms folded, bored. The red LED on the card reader blinked lazy green. Hawks stayed suspended, letting the faint hot breath of the ducts keep him aloft.

 

 

 

 

 

Inside, the archives were exactly what he remembered: rows upon rows of cabinets in bone-white powder coat, each labeled in block letters that were supposed to look modern and instead looked like hospital signage. He ghosted the grate aside, slid down the wall in a slow fall, and hit the floor without sound.

Alphabetical. Always alphabetical. And then by project. And then by outcome.

His hands shook a little as he pulled the T drawer. TODOROKI, TOUYA glared up at him in neat black type—thin file, too thin. He flipped it open expecting the same public copies he’d already seen in other databases: a birth record, school admissions, a list of hospital visits with names blacked out and reasons listed as “training incident.” Deceased at fourteen, cause: forest fire, remains unrecovered. That was what anyone could access with enough persistence and a tolerance for stone walls.

But attached to the manila folder were three sealed sleeves. Hawks slit the first with a feather. Assignment Briefing — Project Bridge. His mouth went dry. Another long-term assignment, dated within months of his own “friendship initiative.” He scanned down the page and his stomach turned. Target outcome was written in clipped sterile language that tried and failed to disguise what it meant: interpersonal link, compliant trust, operational leverage. For a boy. For boys.

The second sleeve was medical, more detailed than any public record. He skimmed just long enough to see the phrases incompatible phenotype, scarring consistent with thermal insult, support item request: denied. At the bottom, the word DECEASED in thick, final type. He swallowed, thumb pressed white to the page.

He didn’t make it to the third sleeve.

The bang on the door rattled the room, tore through the quiet like a shot. He snapped the file closed by reflex, feathers zipping into the grille above.

“Open up,” a voice barked through a mask, distorted and metallic. Not Commission cadence. The knock again, harder. “Now.”

Koichi’s men. Hawks didn’t have to hear the voice to know the brand: the precise timing, the ugly courtesy of asking before breaking.

He shoved the Touya file flat against his stomach, under his shirt, and in the same breath launched—palms to wall, knees tucked—back into the vent. Breath control went ragged as adrenaline spiked, but he forced himself to slow it. The ducts magnify panic. They carry sound like rumor.

He paused three elbows forward and listened. His feathers, spread like a net through the ductwork, fed him a hissing map of the floor. On one side: twenty Commission agents flooding the disused office he’d used to enter, overlapping radio chatter and the distinct clack of safeties being thumbed off. On the other: seven in dark suits and masked voices, coming through a forced door he’d just pulled shut behind him. Caught between teeth. If he took a wrong corner, he’d land in a mouth.

His brain offered a stupid solution on a bright platter: fight. Go fast, go hard, go loud, and then vanish in the confusion. He pushed it away. If he fought here, today, someone would recognize the signature of his feathers, the way his wings sounded. The Commission didn’t need a confession; they just needed a pattern.

He inched forward through the vents until a grate opened over the old study room—a classroom once, long ago. The tables were still bolted in pairs to the floor, the whiteboard stained a faint pink from overuse of red marker. He popped the grate, eased down, and landed on a desk. The hall outside was worse: three agents mid-patrol and a fourth leaning against the door frame like he’d rather be anywhere else, which meant he was paying attention.

 

 

 

 

 

Hawks pressed his forehead to the cool cinderblock and exhaled a long thread of air that felt like the whisper of a prayer.

“Fuck it,” he told the wall.

He pulled the Commission phone he swore he’d never use for this and thumbed a number he never should have memorized. It rang long enough for dread to bloom before a voice answered, sharp and ready to bite.

“Who the fuck is this.”

Relief hit like heat. “Dabi, it’s me.”

Silence at the other end. Hawks didn’t waste it.

“I know it ended badly last time,” he said, bare and fast. “That’s on me. I’m sorry. But I need a hand. I’m boxed in and Koichi’s dogs are in the building.”

Muffled speech, moving away from the mic. Footsteps, another voice he knew muttering back. When Dabi came back, the growl was edged with something else. “Where?”

Hawks swallowed. “Commission archives annex. Where you would have—” he choked on stolen my file and managed, “—three doors down from the evidence room. Old study corridor.”

“Okay,” Dabi said, and the word was a promise. “One minute.”

The line went dead. Hawks called his feathers back—felt them streak along the duct like minnows—and in that moment the air at the far corner of the room rippled and tore. Purple mist bled into space. Kurogiri’s warp blossomed open in perfect silence, and Shigaraki stepped through like a shadow wearing a boy’s shape.

“Dabi’s making noise,” Shigaraki said, voice flat. “Let’s go.”

As if on cue, the building shuddered under a concussive boom two halls away. Not enough to bring the ceiling down—just enough to make everyone below it look the wrong direction for three breaths.

Hawks didn’t argue. He took the gloved hand Shigaraki offered. The warp swallowed heat and light and shape; the pressure change made his inner ear complain. Then they were elsewhere.

The League’s base—a League base—had grown up since his last visit. The first-floor hall looked like a community center drafted by an arsonist: folding tables, a scuffed foosball table someone had half-painted black, battered couches, crates that hummed faintly like they contained electronics. A crowd—dozen, two dozen—of unfamiliar faces turned when he stumbled through. Villains, small-time and strange, a few with the careful look of people who never gave true names. Spinner shepherded a knot of them; Compress spoke to three at once, hands flickering. Twice darted around the edges like a nervous collie. Toga perched on the back of a couch, upside down, hair just touching the floor.

Hawks’ body knew how to be watched. He held himself easy and neutral, wings tucked high and tight, chin level. Shigaraki’s grip firmed at his elbow and steered him upstairs to a door Hawks recognized: the private lounge that had become a de facto war room. The door clicked shut. The sounds from below muffled to a distant hum.

Kurogiri stood at the far corner, half-phased, attention on the dark oval of his gate. Shigaraki collapsed onto the couch and opened a bottle the way people in movies did when they needed their hands to stop shaking. The nearest chair sat empty, a space open beside the couch where someone else usually sprawled.

 

 

 

 

 

The warp whispered again. Dabi stepped through in a cloud of smoke and the smell of scorched fiber. His sleeve was singed to the elbow; the staples along his jaw caught the light like metallic embers. For half a breath their eyes met, and the relief that jumped in Dabi’s bright blue gaze was so naked Hawks had to drop his eyes to keep his face from answering.

“Hey,” Hawks said, because his throat didn’t trust the weight of thank you. “Thanks for… that.”

Dabi’s nod was short, almost a flinch. Shigaraki tossed the bottlecap, the tiny ping loud. “What were you doing sneaking around there?” he asked, chin tipping toward Hawks’ black hooded getup.

Hawks peeled the hood back and tucked his hands into his pockets so he wouldn’t fidget. “Looking for a confidential file.”

Kurogiri’s fog folded and shifted; his head tilted. “You could have asked.”

“Not this one,” Hawks said, and the bitter line of his mouth gave away more than he meant. “The Commission keeps some things so far down you need a shovel. Only the President and her top handlers can touch them without the walls screaming.”

Shigaraki’s fingers scratched lines into the pale skin below his collar. “Top handlers?”

“Four,” Hawks said, counting them off because the listing steadied him. “You know one: Takahashi Koichi.” Even speaking the name tasted like old pennies. Dabi’s arm smoked, just a little. Hawks went on. “Yuki runs the Tartarus liaison desk; she can ghost files and make prisoners vanish on paper. Satori is head of PR. If the Commission needs a lie to sound like a lullaby, she writes it. And my—” he swallowed— “manager, who coordinates with local police, judge’s chambers, anyone who can make a case open or close on command. They’ve all been fixtures for years.”

Kurogiri’s gaze softened at the word he didn’t say. “Handler,” he supplied gently.

Hawks accepted the correction by not fighting it. Kurogiri drifted to a sideboard, chose a drink, and handed it across with both hands. Cold condensation beaded under Hawks’ fingers. Strawberry milk. He hadn’t forgotten mentioning it by accident, weeks ago. Heat prickled behind his eyes; he swallowed the first half of the bottle in three gulps and let the sugar settle his hands.

“So,” Shigaraki said after a minute, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “what was worth getting shot at twice?”

Hawks’ thumb stroked condensation up and down the carton for a heartbeat. Then he reached under his shirt and pulled the thin, crooked stack of papers free. He didn’t offer them to Shigaraki. He held them out to Dabi.

“I don’t remember him,” Hawks said, hating the way the words came out small, “but he’s in my file.”

Dabi took the folder fast enough to be a snatch—then stopped himself, gentled his grip, and looked down. The name pulled his face taut, all the easy mockery burned off like cheap varnish. Touya Todoroki. He didn’t read far. He didn’t need to.

“Why does that sound familiar,” Shigaraki muttered, scratching harder at his neck.

“Todoroki is Endeavor’s family,” Kurogiri said, stepping closer to scan the header, his tone as neutral as distilled water.

Hawks retrieved the file and tucked it back against his ribs. He felt suddenly, stupidly, like a child hiding candy.

“This isn’t me asking you for anything,” he said to the air, and to Dabi, and maybe to the scared kid in his own chest. “I just… needed to say it out loud. That I’m not crazy. That the hole is real.”

Silence settled like dust. Below, someone laughed, high and wild. Upstairs, the four of them held still as chess pieces.

Hawks pushed to his feet. “I should go.”

Kurogiri’s mist immediately gathered, polite as a butler. Hawks took a step toward it, then stopped and turned back. Dabi’s head tilted the tiniest degree, like he could feel the pivot coming.

“One more thing,” Hawks said, the words feeling like the edge of a cliff under his tongue.

Shigaraki flicked his eyes up. Dabi’s hands went still.

“I’ve thought about it,” Hawks said, and for the first time since he’d snuck into that building, he breathed all the way down. “I’m in.”

Shigaraki blinked. “In?”

“Your offer,” Hawks said, and though his voice was steady he could feel his pulse in his wrists. “Last time. It’s not too late, right?”

Dabi’s smile was small and fierce and a little surprised, like a flame catching when you weren’t sure the match would take. “No,” he said quietly. “It’s not too late.”

Hawks nodded. “I have some things I need to… settle.” He thought of the kids He thought of a gold nameplate on an office door and the soft weight of a hand on the back of a child’s neck. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Promise?” Dabi asked. It could have been mocking. It wasn’t.

Hawks’ wings lifted a fraction, feather edges whispering. He pulled his hood up, and the shadow hid how much he suddenly looked younger. “Promise.”

Kurogiri’s warp opened—cool, clean, and mercifully blank—and Hawks stepped through it into the city he’d been told since he was five belonged to him in one direction only. He came out on a rooftop with the Touya file hot against his ribs and the taste of strawberry still in his mouth. For a long time he didn’t move. The night breathed around him. Far below, the Commission building glowed like a tooth.

He took out his phone, thumb hovering over a number he would have answered without hesitation two weeks ago. He didn’t dial it. He sent a single message instead—requesting personal leave—and turned the device face down beside him.

Then he opened the file and began to read the third sleeve—the one he hadn’t touched in the archives—hands steady now, each page carried away by the wind of his own wings, one promise heavier and one promise lighter than when he’d gone in.

Chapter 22: Chapter 22

It took Hawks exactly seven days to unwind twenty years of momentum. Seven days to drag a life that had always sprinted forward into a gentle, deliberate walk—long enough to pick what he would carry and what he would set down.

He started with money, because the Commission taught him young that people who controlled the ledgers controlled the leash. At 03:14 on a Monday, bleary-eyed and bare-winged in a hoodie, he moved a series of tidy, legal-looking transfers into a private account he’d opened under a shell corporation two years and three identities ago. A portion splintered into two fresh accounts—one in Fumikage Tokoyami’s name, one in Shōto Todoroki’s—with the origins masked through a chain of bland municipal fee refunds. It wasn’t the Commission’s coin anymore. It was his—payment for childhoods he and the kids never got to have.

He waited until dinner to tell them. Hawks cooked—a miracle in itself—pan-seared salmon that came out slightly over, rice that came out perfect because rice was forgiving, broccoli that squeaked between their teeth. He waited until they were halfway through, until Tokoyami had made his third pun and Shōto had just finished describing something Momo Yaoyorozu had said in Ethics class with the unshakable seriousness of a scholar citing scripture. Then Hawks set his chopsticks down, folded his hands, and told them everything.

He started with the easy hard thing: his undercover mission with the League. He watched their faces cycle—surprise, worry, a flash of betrayal—then land on the patient attention he’d earned in patrols and late-night ramen runs and paperwork marathons done at the same table.

He told them about his childhood. Most of it. Enough. Enough that he had to stop twice to sip water and breathe through a stinging pressure low in his ribs. When he said Handler, Shōto’s eyes flinched like someone had tapped a bruise, and Tokoyami’s shoulders squared like a knight preparing to take a blow.

He finished with the hardest easy thing: “I’m leaving the hero life,” he said, voice steady in the quiet kitchen. “I’m joining the League.”

The yelling came like a summer storm—brief, intense, all wind and thunder with no lightning. Shōto’s words spiked: how could Hawks trust them, what about legal consequences, what about Endeavor’s enemies who were now his enemies? Tokoyami’s questions dove precise: what did this mean for civilians who looked to Hawks, what of the kids in Fukuoka who collected his trading cards and slept easier because he existed?

Hawks let it wash over him without deflecting, without turning it into a joke. He waited for the storm to pass. And like summer storms do, it exhausted itself and left the air clearer.

Tokoyami spoke first. “Is this truly the path that calls you?” he asked, brows drawn, beak set in a line. He sounded like he was swearing someone into a knighthood.

Hawks smiled, and realized with a start that he didn’t have to force it. “Yeah,” he said, small, honest. “It really is.”

Shōto had gone very still at the mention of Touya. Hawks reached across the table, held his hand the way he’d learned this particular kid needed—firm and warm, a tether without pressure.

“Little Todoroki?” he said softly. “You haven’t said anything.”

Shōto looked up. The pained recognition in his face made Hawks’ chest ache. Then the boy moved, sudden as a gust, and Hawks had an armful of him—cold cheek pressed to his shoulder, breath hitching once before evening out.

“I’m glad you were Touya-nii’s friend,” Shōto whispered.

The name caught like a thorn and went through him—pain and anchoring both. Tears threatened, a pressure behind his eyes like altitude, but Hawks pulled them back and wrapped the kid tighter, a feather hooking Tokoyami around the waist and dragging him into the tangle until all three of them were awkward and warm and held.

Later, when Hawks tucked them into Shōto’s bed because neither would admit they preferred not to sleep alone, Tokoyami’s clawed hand caught his wrist.

“I think you’re the most amazing person, Hawks-sensei,” he said, voice thick with sleep.

Hawks huffed a laugh. “How so, little bird?”

“Because even after everything you’ve endured and everything you still face,” Tokoyami murmured, eyes half-lidded, “you’re choosing one step toward freedom. Toward happiness. Even if… it is not the most strictly legal way.”

Hawks inhaled sharply, stung by the simple mercy of it. He pressed his palm to the kid’s feathered brow, smoothing the furrow that so often lived there. “Thanks,” he said, and meant it like a blessing.

 

 

 

 

 

The favor to Edgeshot took longer.

Shinya’s home fit him—clean lines, quiet means. Hawks felt small walking its airy hallway, because he had always felt small in houses where nothing was out of place. He refused the drink Shinya offered, because he needed the words to come out whole.

“Shinya, I have a favor.”

Edgeshot leaned on the counter, attention sharpening. He touched Hawks’ jaw with two fingers, more checking pulse than caressing, though the heat of it jumped to Hawks’ ears. “Of course. What do you need?”

Hawks swallowed. “The safe houses you own. Could I borrow one?”

There was a pause long enough to count a measure. Then a nod, and Shinya disappeared down the hall. He returned with a black folder and set it on the counter, then thought better and slid it aside when Hawks shook his head.

“I’m afraid no one can know,” Hawks said, wincing at how it sounded.

“Understood.” Shinya’s hand settled on Hawks’ thigh—grounding, not possessive. He tipped his head toward the bar. “Sure you don’t want a drink?”

Hawks’ mouth twisted; he meant to say “No, thanks,” and somehow said Yes—which turned into hours of body-warmth and quiet, and the kind of conversation that slips out of you when the world is dimmed and you’ve already decided to leave it behind. He left the next morning clothes and hair a mess, and Tokoyami met him at the door with a line that knocked him clean out.

“Funny,” the boy said, arms folded, feathers puffed high, “when the parent starts lying to the kid.”

They both froze. Tokoyami’s plumage fluffed higher in mortified horror; Hawks’ heart folded in on itself and then burst open like the stupid confetti cannons at his PR events. He swept his little bird into a hug that creaked ribs.

They didn’t mention it again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rumi came the next day, all perfume and danger and the precise click of heels on hardwood. Hawks was so deep in numbers and lists he didn’t hear her until she flicked the back of his head.

“Oh, Rumi—when did you—” he started, mouth full of fries. She stole one, chewed with aggressive satisfaction, and rolled her eyes.

They kept their voices low in the corner booth of a greasy spoon Hawks loved because the coffee tasted like dirt and the waitresses kept his secrets by not asking to know them. He told her what he needed. She told him what she’d already done.

“I’ve got you,” she said, casual as a thrown knife. “You sure you don’t need me to kick someo—”

Hawks’ hands flapped. “No, no! You’re already doing more than enough.”

Her look said try me. “I’m serious, featherbrain. I love you. Let me help you.”

He softened in a way that didn’t make it to his grin. “Well, in that case, you wouldn’t mind paying for my food, right?”

“Keigo,” she warned, voice low and fond.

He stood, brushed crumbs from black pants, and blew her an exaggerated kiss as he backed out the door, laughing when she cursed him loud enough to shake the windows. It felt like a benediction.

 

 

 

 

 

Then he flew.

Not on patrol vector, not on PR choreo. He launched from the restaurant’s roof, wings spreading wide like a stretch after a too-long sit, and climbed. The city fell away into neat geometry. The wind found the seam of his shirt and poured through it cool and clean. He rose until the air thinned and the noise did too, and then he aimed for the blue smudge at the horizon he’d told himself he would visit “one day” and never had.

The beach he chose was a narrow ribbon of sand between rock and windbreak pines, a place fishermen used at dawn and teenagers at midnight. At late afternoon it was empty but for a gull with opinions. Hawks landed clumsy and laughing, kicked off his boots, rolled his pants to the knee, and stood at the edge of the water like a child meeting an old story.

The first lick of tide around his ankles made him yelp. Cold. Colder than rooftops at three a.m., colder than winter patrol. Salt air filled his mouth and nose; the sun blinked in the chop like a friendly eye. He waded to mid-shin, let a wave slap his knees, and laughed at the audacity of it. The sea didn’t care who he was. It didn’t want a statement or a signature or a proof of arrest. It wanted him to be and to balance and to accept that it moved how it wanted.

He stood there a long time. The horizon breathed in and out. He thought about what he was about to do—walk away from a rank, a salary, a cage—and his body flooded with a feeling so large he couldn’t name it. Grief, yes. Fear, of course. Relief so intense it hurt. Underneath, stitching them all together, a bright, trembling joy that made his teeth ache.

He cried. Loudly, stupidly, the way small children cry when they’re too hungry or too tired or too loved. He crouched and let the water soak his cuffs and didn’t wipe his face because he wanted the waves to do it. He cried for the kid in the white room and the teenager who learned how to make himself smaller in a camera lens and the man who’d been asked to swallow too many lies for other people’s comfort. He cried for the boy Touya whose absence was a shape in his mind, and for Shōto who carried a family like a coal in his mouth, and for Tokoyami who called him parent without venom.

Eventually the sobs unknotted into hiccups. The gull complained from the rock; the sky had turned gold at the edges. Hawks scrubbed his face with his sleeve, sniffed, and laughed at himself because the laugh felt like breath coming home.

He stood and let the late sun dry his shins. “Okay,” he told the horizon. “Okay.”

He knew why he was doing this. People sometimes said Hawks was selfish. It had been a PR trick at first—“selfish” translated to “honest,” and honest tested well in polls. But the word fit, newly, in a way the Commission would hate: self-full. He was choosing, for the first time, a path that wasn’t written by someone else’s memo. He was choosing to help people because he wanted to help them, not to keep a brand intact or a ranking paper high. He was choosing to try to become Keigo again—not the product, not the pedestal, but the kid who liked strawberry milk and the way automatic doors hissed when they opened.

Notes:

Hawks is finally with the League 🐥

Chapter 23: Chapter 23

Notes:

Sorry my updates are slower, I've been super busy 😭

Dabi’s phone went off in the middle of a debrief—one of those endless, oxygen-draining meetings where three different egos argued about the same plan using slightly different nouns. The ping was loud enough to earn him an entire row of glares. He did not, in any universe, care.

He glanced down and had to bite back a smile that tried, without his consent, to take his whole face.

It was a selfie. Hawks at the beach, hair wind-ruined and wet at the tips, foam and sky stacked behind him in blue-on-blue stripes. He was grinning so hard his eyes had disappeared. Pure, blinding joy. The kind of smile you take when no one is asking you to prove anything.

Skeptic snorted from the far side of the table, then lifted his own device and gave Dabi a long, unimpressed look—as if to say I can see what you see. Dabi arched an eyebrow, slow and threatening. He was very nearly done letting that creep hover over his shoulder. He wanted that photo to be his alone.

The meeting droned. Dabi occupied himself by tugging idly at a staple along his jaw, a pain-spark every time Shigaraki and Re-Destro looped back to the same point. Eventually even Spinner snapped, palm hitting the table hard enough to crack it down the grain.

“I think we’re all sick of your yapping, Re-Destro,” he said, tail lashing. “Forget who’s in charge here?”

Shigaraki slumped, irritated and a little pleased. “Fucking get out already.”

Dabi was upright and moving before his chair finished clattering. He liked the mansion’s marble floors well enough; he liked the money that had bought them even better. He did not like the way the new hall traffic turned the simplest walk into a gauntlet. He lit thin blue lines along both forearms as he pushed through the crowd—just enough heat to create a respectful bubble. By the time he reached his room he wanted to throw someone through a wall; instead he collapsed face-first into expensive cotton and let it eat the worst of his mood.

Another ping. Hawks again.

Little Bird:
so would it be ok if I came tomorrow?

The speed at which Dabi’s mouth turned up would have been embarrassing if anyone had been there to see it.

Me:
yeah all good, pretty.
kurogiri will send a portal. don’t freak when it opens in your living room.

A second photo came through—Hawks with a straw in his mouth, pouting around it, cheeks pink from wind or laughter. Dabi zoomed; there was Shōto in the background, not even pretending he wasn’t smiling. Dabi took his own picture—tilted a little, chin up, staples sharp—and sent it before he could second-guess the impulse.

The typing bubbles popped up under Hawks’s name…stopped…popped up again. Then:

Little Bird:
i think you killed hawks-sensei.

pause

—Shouto:
oh. you have. he won’t be able to respond for a while.

Dabi barked a laugh that bounced off his vaulted ceiling. That brat had a better sense of comedic timing than half the League.

 

 

 

 

 

Hawks’ apartment felt wrong when it was empty. Not unsafe; just…airless. He’d packed carefully, which meant ruthlessly—duffel bag at the foot of the bed, drawers lightened to decoys, the kitchen stripped to bare essentials that would make a quick exit look like a quick errand. Shōto and Tokoyami were back at UA and Hawks had walked them through the contingency plan twice, then a third time when he caught his own reflection in the microwave door and didn’t recognize the man looking back.

Tomorrow would be his last day in hero blues.

He tried to sleep. Fifteen minutes later he was up, heart slamming. Tried again. Ten. Third time. Fourth. Hawks rolled onto his side, stared at the dark, and groaned into his pillow.

He opened his phone and hovered over the call button long enough to feel ridiculous. Then he pressed it.

“Mm.” Dabi’s voice came low and sleep-rough. “Hawks. What’s wrong?”

Guilt pricked—Dabi sounded like he’d been asleep. “Everything’s fine. I just…uh. Could I come over now?”

There was the briefest pause. Then an amused exhale. “You could’ve just said you missed me, pretty.”

Before Hawks could deny it, the corner of his room thickened and glittered—Kurogiri’s warp gate blooming to life with a soft, ozone-cold smell. Hawks yelped despite himself. Dabi’s laughter curled warm in his ear.

“See you soon.”

The line went dead. Hawks stood, grabbed the duffel, took one last look around the space that had been his cell and sanctuary, and stepped through.

Dabi’s room—Dabi’s room—was bigger than Hawks had expected, which made exactly no sense. Double bed in clean black, an entire wall of glass that drank the forest’s dark, a bathroom door with absurd gold-and-brown inlay that screamed “new money who wanted old.” Dabi sat on the edge of the bed, the soft blue night licking his silhouette.

“Where’s the rest of your stuff?” he asked, chin tipping at the bag in Hawks’s hand.

“This is it,” Hawks said, and watched Dabi look at the duffel as if it had insulted him personally.

“Okay.” Dabi flicked his fingers; the bag arced to the wall and thumped softly. Then Dabi tugged him forward with the same casual certainty he used to light a cigarette.

Hawks squeaked—actually squeaked—and ended up on his side, face-to-face with a smirk he could feel in his own bones. Dabi hauled the blanket over them both with an economy of motion that said he did this alone most nights. One hand found the curve of Hawks’s waist and stilled there, heavy as promise.

“What are you doing?” Hawks asked, uselessly.

“You called because you couldn’t sleep. So sleep,” Dabi said, as if this were the simplest math. “You’ll need it.”

Heat stroked out of Dabi’s palm, soaking the bedding in slow warmth until Hawks’ muscles unwound of their own accord. His eyes drooped like he was weighted; he slid down until his forehead rested on Dabi’s shoulder without asking permission.

The purr leaked out before he could choke it back—a soft, involuntary vibration that betrayed him worse than any word ever had. Hawks flinched and went to pull away.

“Don’t,” Dabi murmured, not moving his hand. “It’s okay. You can do that here.”

Something in Hawks that had braced for mockery…did not break. It loosened. He let the sound come and felt it roll through Dabi’s collarbone into his own chest. The world narrowed to heat and breath and the ache in his ribs he only felt when he realized how tense he’d been.

He slept.

 

 

 

 

 

 

He woke to shouting, which would have launched him from the bed any other morning. Today he opened his eyes and found the shout muffled by the solid weight under his cheek.

Toga’s voice carried like a siren down the hall: “DABI!”

The door banged open. Dabi’s shushing was immediate and foul-mouthed; Hawks stayed very still, curious and oddly unwilling to move.

“Oh that’s so cute,” Toga whisper-squealed, hands clasped under her chin.

Twice snapped a picture with the whisper-solemnity of a paparazzo capturing a rare bird.

“Get out, idiots,” Dabi hissed without volume, death in it. “You’ll wake him.”

More cooing. The door shut. Quiet settled.

A giggle vibrated against Dabi’s throat. Hawks blinked up, fuzzed with sleep, cheeks blotched pink. “Morning.”

“Morning, pretty,” Dabi said, and watched Hawks flush in a way that looked like permission and panic tangoing.

They disentangled themselves with a minimum of dignity and pretended not to notice the way they had fit. Dabi led Hawks through the mansion’s maze, slowing without comment every time Hawks’ attention snagged on something with a shine or a weird edge. Twice they had to stop while Dabi stared down a mass of Liberation recruits in the hall until the corridor cleared like the Red Sea.

By the time they hit the lounge, Hawks was latched lightly to Dabi’s sleeve—nothing a camera would catch, everything Dabi noticed. He pulled a chair out with his boot and nudged Hawks into it, then went straight to the kitchen and cracked eggs like he was breaking a problem’s back.

“So,” Hawks asked, wings stretching in a careless arc that made three Liberators trip over their own feet, “how long have you had the MLA under your roof?”

“A few weeks,” Dabi said, flipping the eggs with brisk competence. “Common goals. Shared resources. Shigaraki’s command.”

“And he’s fine with…sharing?” Hawks asked, deadpan.

“He’s not sharing,” Dabi said, plating. “They bent the knee. Big difference.”

They ate side by side in a comfortable scrape-and-chew that felt like it had always existed. Hawks’ face had gone blank in the way it did when he was overthinking; Dabi was about to prod him out of it when Spinner and Compress drifted in with Skeptic glued to his laptop and a scowl.

“Skeptic insisted he meet Hawks,” Compress sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “He noticed an addition to his count of people last night.”

Spinner dropped into a chair near Dabi and muttered, “Took all of Shigaraki’s threats to keep him out of your room.”

Skeptic closed the distance to Hawks like a man investigating a bug, eyes flicking across Hawks’ posture, wing tilt, the fluff at his hairline. Dabi stepped between them before Skeptic could inhale a full breath.

“Back off,” he said. “It’s none of your business why he’s here. And get your face away from him.”

Skeptic sneered around Dabi’s shoulder. “Not my business what the Number Two hero is doing in our home? I bet this bitch is only here to sell us out.”

Hawks’ fingers tightened on Dabi’s sleeve hard enough to burn even through the deadened nerves. A low growl built in Dabi’s chest. Compress groaned into his hands.

“Get. Out,” Dabi said, and it rang like iron on iron.

Skeptic opened his mouth to retort something nasal and unforgivable. Spinner spared everyone and physically hauled him toward the door, one hand clamped around the back of his shirt. The latch clicked behind them. The room breathed again.

“Do you two…know each other?” Spinner called through the door, sympathy threaded through sarcasm. “What’s his deal with you?”

Hawks chuckled once, dry as dust. “Something like that.”

They let it lie. For now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hawks spent the next day exploring, which meant Dabi not-quite-tailed him like a shadow that refused to be caught. The building had been a high-roller’s retreat once—private lounges now turned into strategy rooms, spa suites laced with wiring skeins, a basement that had never been on the brochure.

He insisted on going alone, which Dabi hated in a way he did not say out loud. He settled for pacing the floor above with a cigarette unlit between his teeth and a phone warm in his pocket.

Hawks learned the traffic patterns in an hour—who liked which halls, which stairwells ran cold, which vents turned a voice into a rumor. Most people let him pass with only a double-take. A few stopped him and asked what his Quirk felt like; one asked if he was scared; Hawks decided the truth was simple enough to live in.

“Not like this,” he said, and the follower smiled, small and real.

He took the last flight down to the underground on a hunch. The air changed—chemical, damp, the hum of machines that didn’t want to be heard. He pulled his shirt over his nose and moved quieter.

The lab hit him like a punch. Tubes the size of men stood in rows, purple fluid climbing their sides like bruises. Shapes suspended inside—limbs, eyes half-grown, the obscene stillness of not-yet-born things. He took a step, then froze when a voice bobbed up at his elbow.

“Ah! A visitor. I don’t get those very often.” The man was small and round in the way of an old toy that had survived too much handling. He beamed. “And a hero, too!”

Hawks arranged his mouth into something friendly. “You must be Ujiko.”

“Call me doctor,” the man said with a wink, and then, without asking, smoothed a palm down Hawks’ left wing in a gesture that set every instinct on fire. Hawks stepped back, polite and firm.

“What is this place?” he asked. He knew. He wanted to hear him say it.

“My office,” Ujiko said, waddling toward a smaller room. “I’m the doctor around here. And—as you can see—I dabble in scientific experimentation.”

“So you created the Nomu.”

Ujiko laughed, belly patting his knees. “Yes, I suppose I did.”

Hawks’ fingers itched to rearrange the chaos on the desk: labeled vials jostling with candy wrappers, a microscope perched atop a stack of journals like a bird on a lamppost. His eyes skittered, memorizing, and then his feet took him politely backward and out the door.

He didn’t run. He wanted to.

He surfaced on the third floor, the building finally quiet enough to hear the air-conditioner’s breath. His new room was next to Shigaraki’s—an accident of architecture or a joke; Hawks couldn’t tell. Toga had overdelivered on the bedding: a bed in generous white, a stack of pillows that made his chest hurt with their softness, a green blanket that felt like being forgiven.

He sat on the small sofa and wrapped himself in the green. The television flicked from news to nature to a cooking show where someone yelled about butter as if it were a moral failing. The news hadn’t clocked his absence yet. He felt relieved and insulted by that in equal parts.

The ceiling was painted with some baroque nonsense—angels and laurel leaves and a dog that looked suspiciously like a lion. Hawks stared at it until the paint swam.

This is real, he told himself. The quiet. The lock on the door he controlled. The absence of a camera in the corner.

It didn’t land. Not fully. His body was still waiting for an order that would send him back to the sky.

A knock. Toga’s voice, sunshine with knives. “Hawksie? Dinner!”

“Not hungry,” he called, and winced at the hoarse scrape of his own voice.

“Okayyy,” she sang, and padded away without pushing. The kindness of it pressed behind his eyes like a thumb. He fell asleep on the sofa like that—curled tight under the green, stomach empty, mind too full, a little boy wearing a man’s face.

Dabi checked on him twice and pretended to be casual both times. The first pass he found Hawks asleep in a knot, wing draped like a blanket and mouth parted in a way that made Dabi’s palms itch with the urge to protect something he could not even name. He turned the TV off, set a bottle of water on the table, and left the door unlatched.

The second time the hall was darker and quieter. Dabi stood in the doorway, hand on the frame. He watched Hawks breathe, counted it like a prayer, and then did the only thing he knew how to do without making it weird: he left an old hoodie—soft and black, smelling faintly like smoke and mint—folded over the sofa’s arm.

He turned off the overhead light and left the small lamp on. He closed the door softly, pretended he hadn’t, and told himself he’d only check a third time if the building caught fire.

Chapter 24: Chapter 24

The first week inside the new base taught Hawks a lesson he hadn’t planned to learn: without patrol routes, press calls, and a commission calendar grinding him forward, the day got very long.

He shadowed Dabi out of instinct more than strategy. The scarred man didn’t seem to mind; if anything, Dabi carried Hawks’ presence the way he carried heat—like something he’d learned to live beside. Hawks followed him through logistics check-ins, through Shigaraki’s short, clipped stand-ups, through the labyrinthine back halls where new MLA bodies moved like shoals of fish. He learned the rhythms—where Dabi cut corners, where he paused to look down from a balcony as if measuring the building’s bones, when the dry humor showed up like a match struck in a dark room.

When Dabi peeled off into fireteam drills or war-room bickering, Hawks drifted down a level to the lab. Ujiko made him uneasy for obvious reasons—rows of glass lungs, humming machines, that unnervingly buoyant smile—but the old man’s talk had gravity. He treated Hawks like a very bright grad student: set a tray of trinkets on the bench, pointed a stubby finger at a component, and asked questions that spiraled from chemical ratios to philosophy: What is a quirk if not a series of thresholds? How many thresholds make a person? Hawks listened. He swept up shattered beakers with cut-resistant feathers. He learned how the Doctor could trip a failsafe without bringing the whole grid down. He learned two ingredients that, if mishandled, would turn a room into a cautionary tale.

“Careful,” he told Ujiko after the third crash of the afternoon, hauling the doctor upright by the elbow. “You’re going to run out of hands to keep if you keep knocking things over.”

“Mm,” Ujiko said, patting Hawks’ forearm like he was an obedient grandson. “That’s why I have you.”

The compliment landed like a tack.

That night, over takeout in Shigaraki’s room, Hawks mentioned the lab in the tone you used for a workplace acquaintance. Shigaraki’s eyes cut up sharp.

“The Doctor isn’t a hobby,” he said. “And he isn’t harmless. Don’t be alone with him. Don’t trust him.”

The words were flat, as if he were ordering coffee. But they pinned like nails. Shigaraki stood, gathered bowls, and eased Hawks into the hall with a nod that was almost—almost—apology.

 

 

 

 

Hawks slept badly. He tried filling the days with culture he’d missed: movies everyone had posted about five years ago, the kind of sweeping scores that used to leak from apartment windows when he’d flown higher to avoid being recognized. He curled under Toga’s ridiculous green blanket, watched strangers fall in love, watched battles choreographed to be cathartic, and waited for the ache under his ribs to shift. It didn’t. The base felt full when he was with the League and strangely hollow without them. Every corridor he walked alone reminded him he no longer had a city as an excuse to keep moving.

By the fourth day he’d learned which halls to avoid at certain hours, which recruits greeted him with a shy nod, and which ones stared as if they were trying to reconcile a trading-card image with a man who wore a hoodie and scuffed socks. He ate late to skip the crush. He answered Shōto and Tokoyami on an untraceable handset Kurogiri had pressed into his palm with a formal, “For your peace of mind,” and pretended the distance didn’t bite.

The invitation to the ops meeting arrived like a rope thrown over a cliff edge. Hawks showed up five minutes early and still felt late. He took a seat in the second row, fingers in the hoodie drawstrings, forcing his wings to settle against the chairback even though every instinct told them to flare.

The room buzzed with the layered noise of a machine warming. Dabi and Shigaraki sat at the front beside Re-Destro: heat, static, and tailored menace in a neat line. Compress slid in next to Hawks with the ease of a man choosing the seat that would give him the best view of the show. Toga draped herself on Hawks’ right and started whispering running commentary about outfits, stakes, and who owed her blood.

“The last plan failed wonderfully,” Shigaraki said dryly as the screen flickered to a map of a remote compound. “We need this facility down.”

A field leader Hawks didn’t know stood. “We were overnumbered—until we weren’t. Backup arrived three minutes into breach. Kondo’s team is still down.”

A woman at the far right scoffed. “Third this week. We bleed for intel that doesn’t exist. We move on.”

“No,” Shigaraki said. “This one matters.”

They moved through it: entry points, guard rotations, volumes of concrete versus explosive thresholds. Hawks scanned the dossier on an old iPad—grainy overheads, half-redacted rosters—his stomach sinking in recognition. The place belonged, nominally, to a network of underground heroes. The money and directives? Commission fingerprints. He knew the type: deeply inconvenient to storm, designed to be boring until it was too late, gummed together with protocol and coffee. He also knew their blind spot.

“The security’s too tight,” said a man someone called Ryota. “Even with Dabi we’ll cook the second-floor girders before we get eyes on the mid-vault.”

“We could send Toga,” someone offered. “Inside job.”

She made a face. “Blood plus turnaround times? I can do miracles, not admin.”

Skeptic opened his laptop like a priest with a bad bible. “There’s another site north. Softer target.”

“Why don’t you just take the tower,” Hawks said.

The room paused. Skeptic scowled as if air had been stolen from him. Ryota squinted. “What tower?”

“The transmission tower,” Hawks said, suddenly aware of the way Dabi’s gaze found him and didn’t move. “They hide them as power lines. You said backup came fast. That’s because you were seen before you committed—floor sensors, perimeter mics—and the alarm tripped with a direct link to HPSC dispatch.”

Compress leaned on his palm, eyes smiling. “So without the tower?”

“Without the tower, nothing in or out,” Hawks said, and his voice—used to playing for cameras—curled low and certain. “That site runs on veterans and rookies. Rotations slip. Sleep debt is a culture. You hit the tower quietly, then hit them when their schedule is at friction points—mid-shift crossover or the dead patch where the night crew thinks the morning crew has eyes. You’ll look like phantom pain and they’ll call it a systems glitch. If you time it right…they’ll argue instead of act.”

A silence that wasn’t doubt took the table. Hawks felt it like the warm side of a window: people listening with the intention to use what they heard. Shigaraki’s smile sharpened. Dabi’s mouth did something infinitesimal and private.

“You wouldn’t happen to know how to make a tower like that go away,” Dabi said, easy as teasing, heavy as steel.

Hawks shrugged, careful with the urge to preen. “Three or four guards. I can draw you a map.”

Toga squealed and head-butted his shoulder. “Teamwork!”

 

 

 

 

Orders rolled like marbles: assignments, fallback points, comms sync. People filed out fast, moving the way people move when the plan finally has oxygen. The room emptied to the core: Shigaraki, Compress, Toga, Kurogiri’s flicker in the corner—a promise of doors—and Dabi, perched on the edge of the table like gravity respected him but didn’t own him.

“Come with,” Dabi said when the last of the field leads cleared the frame.

Hawks blinked. “What?”

“It’s your idea. See it land.”

He wanted to. God, the part of him that was still Pro Hero Number Two wanted to see a plan executed clean, to watch a team move like a muscle. He also pictured a grainy photo on a blog and the speed at which that would turn his kids’ lives into collateral.

“Not yet,” Hawks said gently. “Public still thinks I’m on medical leave. If I pop up as a smudge on a rooftop, we lose days we haven’t even stolen yet.”

Compress stood, pried Toga’s arms off Hawks in a movement like a bow, and tipped two fingers to his temple. Somewhere in the last twenty minutes Shigaraki had vanished like fog. It was just Hawks and Dabi now.

Dabi slid closer, the veneer of leader melting into something softer, less useful to anyone but the two of them. “Hey.”

Hawks’ mouth answered without his permission. “Hey.”

“How’s villain life?” Dabi tilted his head, staples catching the light like a constellation. “Treating you all right, pretty?”

“Stop calling me that.” The protest didn’t even have teeth. “And…it’s weird. Boring, sometimes.”

Dabi’s hand came down palm-first, slow enough to refuse spooking. He rubbed his knuckles across Hawks’ where they knotted the hoodie strings. A little sound—one of Hawks’ small, involuntary ones—leaked out. He shifted, the kind of lean you do when you’re about to be caught and you want to make it easy, and rested his temple against Dabi’s thigh.

The hand found his hair on muscle memory. Hawks should have pulled away. He didn’t. The scratch of calluses against his scalp clicked some deep switch labeled safe. He breathed. He let himself.

“It’s a lot of waiting,” Dabi said, voice low enough to hum in Hawks’ bones. “And I heard you were keeping the crazy doctor company. Maybe don’t. Make other friends.”

“I’m not good at that,” Hawks said into the denim. “At…making friends. You all look busy. I don’t want to be—”

“In the way?” Dabi’s laugh was more breath than sound. The hand slid to Hawks’ hip and pressed there, a quiet claim. Hawks’ body answered with a tiny, shocked trill he would have been mortified by anywhere else. Dabi’s mouth tipped. “We thought you wanted space after…everything. We can crowd you instead.”

Hawks pulled back, startled to find his face wet. “Oh. I didn’t—”

“Yeah.” Dabi thumbed a tear away, then used his sleeve to blot the rest like he’d done it a hundred times. He pinched Hawks’ nose gently until the hero swatted at him, unwilling laughter breaking the adrenaline’s hold. “Dinner when I get back. All of us.”

“Can it be just us?” Hawks asked, open and hopeful in a way he usually weaponized. This time it wasn’t for a camera. This time he kept it.

Dabi leaned in, heat eddying off him like a small weather pattern. “It’s a date.”

The inch between them became all too suddenly noticable and Hawk's face flushed red. With a awkward cough he leaned back, slowly, so Dabi knew he hadn't pushed a boundry.

“Go draw me that tower,” Dabi said, voice rougher than before.

Hawks wiped his cheeks with his wrists and laughed at himself. “Bossy.”

Dabi’s grin flashed quick and private. “Only when I’m right.”

Hawks took the iPad back to the table and, with the same neat certainty he used to draft incident reports, sketched a failure cascade: access panels, maintenance ladders, breaker placements, the hidden junction box where the tower’s brain pretended to be a power meter. Dabi watched, contributing exactly two words—“Here,” and “Perfect”—then stood, caught Hawks’ wrist, and pressed their foreheads together for one breath’s worth of quiet.

“Hey,” he said again, softer. “You did good.”

Hawks swallowed. The pride that lit in his chest didn’t feel like points on a scoreboard or a spin on a talk show. It felt like purpose that belonged to him. He nodded, once.

“You too,” he said. “Go be a menace.”

Dabi snorted, then turned toward the door, back-alighting as he walked—an old habit of a man who knew what his silhouette did to a room. At the threshold he glanced over his shoulder.

“Eat,” he ordered. “Then sleep. When I’m back, we can talk.”

“Just talk?” Hawks asked.

Dabi’s mouth curved. “Just talk.”

The door clicked. Hawks sat for a while with the empty seats and the echo of the plan in his head. He looked down at the map he’d made and, for the first time since crossing the threshold into this life, felt the quiet in his chest settle into something like belonging. Not because he had a role. Because he had people.

People he loved, he realized, and didn’t flinch from the word.

He stood, tucked the iPad under his arm, and went to find something edible. Dinner first. Then sleep. 

Chapter 25: Chapter 25

Notes:

Just wanted to say thanks if your still reading this!

The kitchen had never been quiet in Hawks’ old life—there’d always been TVs murmuring, handlers paging him, the floor buzz of a thousand lives. Here, the silence startled him. He opened the fridge and laughed quietly at how overstocked it was: neat rows of produce, tubs labeled by someone who believed in systems. Feathers pried drawers, fanned cutting boards into place, plucked onions and cilantro and a little knob of ginger. The rhythm steadied him—knife, sizzle, stir; steam fogging the stainless hood; curry coming together into something golden and honest.

And still, Dabi’s offhand promise—It’s a date—kept fluttering in his chest like a trapped moth. Hawks groaned, rolled his shoulders, and turned the heat down before the sauce stuck.

The door clicked. Scar and leather and the faint mineral heat of a quirk walked in behind him.

“Well,” Dabi said, shutting the door with his heel, “I really like the look of this.”

Hawks startled, then grinned. He lifted a spoonful of sauce and held it out. Dabi leaned in without ceremony. His eyes went wide; his mouth opened again in a silent plea for another taste.

“Sit,” Hawks scolded, delighted and embarrassed. “I’ll get you a bowl, menace.”

Dabi put on a token pout but retreated to a chair, elbows on knees, watching Hawks dart from pot to rice cooker with all the intent of a cat at a window. Hawks set down two bowls—rice domed, curry ladled—and then a bottle of wine with two mismatched glasses.

“You’ll be happy to know,” Dabi said as Hawks slid into the opposite chair, “your tower idea landed. Took them blind.”

“Wine?” Hawks said, half to change the subject, half because his hands needed something to do.

“You said it was a date,” Dabi answered, pouring. “That I did.”

They ate. Dabi made feral noises Hawks didn’t know a human throat could make. “Fuck, Hawks. When did you learn to cook?”

“Self-defense,” Hawks said, and told him about the protein bars and the takeout that always tasted like it had been left on a radiator. About the bookstore, about reading recipes like he’d once read case files, about failing a béchamel so aggressively it nearly sued him. Dabi listened with eyebrows that moved like punctuation and the occasional wicked grin that pulled at his staples like lightning opening a sky.

Hawks tried not to stare—at the way Dabi’s jaw worked, at the shine on his scar tissue where the light caught it, at the veins along the back of his scarred hand when he lifted his glass. His thoughts started to wander; his wings twitched; he wanted—he didn’t know. Not yet, he told himself. It’s enough to be here.

His phone rang. The tone he’d set for the kids.

“Shit,” he whispered, already sliding his thumb across the screen. “I promised Shōto I’d call.”

A flick—disappointment?—crossed Dabi’s face before he smoothed it out. “Do you have to?”

“I like…knowing they’re okay,” Hawks said, softer than he meant to, and hit connect.

Tokoyami and Shōto crowded the frame, both speaking at once.

“Hawks-sensei! Shōto learned a new move—”

“—it’s not perfected—but—”

Hawks propped the phone, smiling so hard his cheeks ached. “Is that right, little Todoroki?”

Shōto stepped back into frame, shook out his arms, and sprinted two strides; he kicked into a clean flip, an arc of ice rippling off his body in a controlled bloom. Tokoyami shrieked; Dark Shadow applauded.

“That was—” Hawks began, and then Shōto squinted at the screen.

“Is that Dabi?”

Hawks choked on wine. He hadn’t noticed when Dabi slid his chair around so they sat side by side. “Yeah, so what, brat,” Dabi said, leaning in to glower with theatrical disdain.

“You’re drinking wine,” Tokoyami observed. “You said you only drink at functions or on a da—oh.”

A low growl from Shōto. A very ungodly snort from Dabi. Hawks made a helpless little noise and covered his face.

“Yeah,” Dabi said blandly, “and you two are interrupting.” He plucked the phone out of Hawks’ hand.

“Dabi…” Hawks warned, mortified and strangely warm.

“You can’t,” Shōto snapped. “I don’t approve.”

“Good thing I’m not asking,” Dabi said, and hung up.

“Hey!” Hawks yelped, catching the arc of the phone with a feather before it met the floor. He set it down and felt the laughter start in his stomach before he could stop it. “You’re impossible.”

Dabi made a face that said he’d heard worse and liked it.

They lingered. They didn’t rush to dishes or to doorways. Hawks found the date lived in small details: Dabi’s foot hooking the rung of Hawks’ chair; the way Dabi cooled his palm when Hawks absentmindedly pressed the back of Dabi’s hand to his temple; the quiet circling of conversation—food, a movie Toga insisted he watch and Hawks hated, the time Dabi had tried to cook and created something their enemies might consider a war crime.

They didn’t kiss. It felt like a decision, not a delay. But when they said good night at his door, Dabi cupped the back of Hawks’ neck for one lingering second, and the heat there carried Hawks through until sleep.

 

 

 

 

 

When Hawks woke alone two mornings later, a yellow scrap of paper waited on his pillow in Dabi’s spare scrawl:

Sorry I had to go, pretty. Away a few days. Since our last date was interrupted, I want to take you out when I’m back and you can stretch your beautiful wings. Kurogiri’s around if you need anything. —D

Hawks pouted at the paper like it could see him, then propped it against the lamp where it looked ridiculous and perfect. He worked out, showered, dressed, tucked his wings. He walked the halls. People nodded now. The building felt less like a staging ground and more like a hive—useful motion, not mindless buzz.

He paused at the top of the down stair to the underground level.

Shigaraki’s warning had been simple and clear. Don’t be alone with the Doctor. Don’t trust him.

Hawks could take care of himself. He’d been doing it since he was five. He went.

The smell hit first: antiseptic underlay, chemical bite, something faintly sweet like the memory of fruit. He found Ujiko on his back beneath a tank, mumbling to a wrench.

Hawks sent a feather to tickle the Doctor’s nose. Ujiko sneezed, sat up, peered around, and beamed.

“Oh! Hello again.”

Hawks took the outstretched hand. The man’s skin folded like paper around Hawks’ fingers. “I thought—”

“I know what you were told,” Ujiko said cheerfully. “And I also know a bored flyer when I see one. Come.”

He toddled down a side corridor Hawks hadn’t noticed, keyed a door. Humidity puffed past them like a breath. Hawks stepped into a greenhouse that had been starved for care: long beds choked with leaves, strings of vines like abandoned rope, labels curling at the edges.

“I’m often too busy to mind them,” Ujiko said, almost shyly. “I remember you like plants.”

Hawks stared. “These are mine?”

“If you want them,” Ujiko said, eyes bright behind glasses. “They’ll forgive you for the neglect I’ve shown them.”

It shouldn’t have landed the way it did. It was dirt and water, a room with a broken mister, an old man making a gift out of something most people would call a chore. Hawks’ chest went warm and loose. He smiled, so wide it hurt. “Yes,” he said, and then louder, unable to help it, “Yes.”

Ujiko patted his hand and vanished back toward his machines.

Hawks rolled his sleeves. Feathers whisked away dead leaves, fetched shears and twine and a battered watering can. He loosened soil with his fingers just to feel the grit; he tucked seedlings into beds and wrote their names neatly on new labels. He fixed the mister with a stubborn feather and a guess. By the time Ujiko reappeared to chivvy him toward dinner, he was damp, filthy, and happy, a ridiculous grin still stuck on his face. He hugged the Doctor impulsively on his way out. The old man went rigid in surprise, then patted his back once, awkward as a cat learning to accept affection.

Hawks hopped down the hall with dirt under his nails and a sense—dangerous, disobedient—of belonging. Shigaraki’s warning still lived under his skin. Hawks didn’t ignore it. He just let the greenhouse be its own truth.

 

 

 

 

 

Nights stretched different without patrol. He tried sleep and failed, tried movies and failed, tried sitting on his bed in the dark with his feathers splayed and failed. Eventually, he went up.

The roof was a sheet of cool concrete under his bare feet. Pines swayed black at the edge of the grounds. A truck idled by a side entrance, two men leaning against its bumper laughing at a joke so bad Hawks felt personal offense on humor’s behalf. He sank into the shadowed lip of the parapet and let his hearing open.

Four more came out carrying boxes, the easy arrogance of men doing something they knew would be rewarded. A redhead with a bad undercut crouched to inspect a crate. Hawks inched closer, slipped a micro-feather into the seam of the man’s waistband until he could hear the fabric rasp against skin.

“This the whole lot?”

“Yeah. Pain in the ass, but at least we won’t get dusted.”

“Worth it,” Redhair said. “With these the heroes won’t have a chance.”

Hawks didn’t move. The words went cold through him. Erasing.

“Hey,” another snapped. “Keep it down. Anyone could hear.”

The truck doors thudded closed. Two men clapped each other on the shoulder like they’d just assembled a bookcase. Three climbed in. The redhead lit a cigarette, exhaled smoke that drifted up to Hawks like a dare.

Shigaraki’s voice from that meeting: Don’t be seen. Dabi’s hand warm on his hip: We can crowd you instead. The League’s laughter around a table. Shōto and Tokoyami’s faces on a screen. The folder with Keigo stamped on it. He was a traitor in every direction if he bent to the wrong wind.

He swallowed. He pulled his burner and typed with his thumbnail, fast and clean. He didn’t write half-truths. He didn’t play coy. He sent a set of coordinates, a truck description, a mileage counter, and six words: No pursuit. Intercept only. No casualties.

He hit send. He watched the truck pull out and roll down the forest road, taillights threading red through trees. He waited until his phone buzzed back with a clipped acknowledgment and a follow-up question he didn’t answer. He slid the phone away and sat very still until his hands stopped shaking.

Guilt came like a tide. He didn’t fight it. He let it crest, let it recede, and held onto the reasons that were more than excuses. He knew how the Commission would deploy those bullets. He knew who would be targeted first and hardest. He could not undo the existence of the weapon, but he could choose who didn’t get to use it. He could also make sure none of the kids on either side died proving a point for someone else’s ledger.

He took off from the far side of the roof—silent, low, a wraith between trees—and angled back toward the base. He kept his wings tight to his body, a smear in the pine-scent night.

Inside, the halls hummed even at this hour. He nodded to a patrol, made himself invisible in the way only a celebrity could—no one wanted to be caught staring. In his room, he slid the bolt, leaned his forehead against the wood, and breathed.

His phone vibrated again. A new message—not the Commission this time.

D: Back tomorrow. You still owe me a real date.

Hawks’ mouth bent. He typed back before he could think.

H: I have dirt under my nails and I smell like tomatoes. Still want me?

The dots blinked for an indulgent amount of time.

D: Especially then.

Hawks set the phone on the nightstand beside Dabi’s note and the paper airplane Toga had folded out of a requisition form and left on his pillow as a “housewarming present.” He crawled under the covers fully clothed, dirt and all. The greenhouse filled his head; the rooftop wind cooled the back of his neck; the sound of Dabi’s voice saying It’s a date lived warm over his sternum.

He did not pretend the choices he was making weren’t contradictions. He didn’t pretend the line he walked wasn’t a cut waiting to happen. But in the tight, tired space behind his ribs, a truth settled: he hadn’t joined the League to watch the world burn. He’d joined because—finally—he could choose where to carry water. He could choose which fires to starve and which to light, whose lives to widen and whose harm to interrupt.

It still felt like treason. It also felt like breathing.

Chapter 26: Chapter 26

Notes:

We're getting close to the end of this guys!!!!
CW
•hawks has a nightmare - implied CSA

The dark had weight.

It pressed against Hawks’ chest the way a hand might—heavy, patient, claiming. Threadbare sheets rasped his bare skin like sandpaper. The air tasted like metal and dust. Somewhere beyond the pounding of his pulse, a voice spoke in a low, satisfied hum he didn’t need to understand to fear. Fingers clamped his wrists to the mattress. Another palm closed over his throat.

He kicked. His heel thudded into a chest that didn’t give. The pressure at his neck tightened, and his world narrowed to the animal math of oxygen. His lungs hitched; his vision pixelated; sound tunneled. He made a desperate, strangled chirp—instinct older than language—then another, smaller, plaintive.

A different hand—warmer, callused—found his cheek.

“Hawks.”

He twisted, breathless and furious, trying to roll and failing. The warm hand slid up into his hair and tugged—gentle, grounding, not possessive—and he trilled, panicked, confused, the old nightmare insisting on its logic.

“Hawks?” The voice was near, rough with urgency.

Teeth against his chest and his body flinched, braced for pain. The grip on his wrists tightened—

“Wake up.”

“Keigo—please.”

His eyes blew open.

The room snapped into place: gray light seeping through the cracked window, the square of streetlamp glow gilding the floorboards, the hum of the vent. Cold air skated over his sweat-wet skin. A hand—not on his throat—rested on his knee, steady as a paperweight. Dabi crouched at the bedside, blue eyes storm-bright, mouth taut, every movement careful.

For a heartbeat Hawks couldn’t separate the then from the now. His ribs panicked again, trying to breathe through a history that wasn’t physically here. He forced air into his lungs—one, two, three—and felt Dabi’s palm anchor him to the mattress. The tremor in his arms turned from frantic to aftershock.

“Sorry,” he rasped, finding his voice. He slid his hand over Dabi’s, not dislodging it, just covering it the way you might warm a stone. “Just a bad dream.”

Dabi’s brow pinched, the expression at odds with the feral planes of his face. “Want to talk about it?”

Hawks shook his head. He wiped his forehead with the heel of his hand and tugged the blanket up to his waist, acutely aware of his damp shirt sticking to his back. “Maybe one day. Just—” He swallowed. “Lay with me?”

Dabi hesitated only long enough to toe off his boots and shrug out of his coat. He eased onto the mattress, leaving space like an invitation, and then—only after Hawks tipped toward him—wrapped an arm around Hawks’ waist. Two fingers found the bare strip of skin where Hawks’ shirt had ridden up and rested there, not possessive so much as present.

The room quieted around the beat of two hearts finding a rhythm. Hawks let his face tuck into the warm crook of Dabi’s neck, feathers rustling once, twice, settling. A small, involuntary chirp snuck out, mortifying and relieving at once.

“You’re back,” he murmured into scar and heat.

“Yeah.” Dabi’s hand skimmed Hawks’ hipbone, a lazy, soothing arc. “I’m not leaving from now on.”

Something unclenched. Hawks’ lips brushed the rough skin at Dabi’s throat—nothing needy, just acknowledgment—and his eyes slid closed. The dark stayed, but it lost its weight.

He slept.

 

 

 

 

 

 

By morning it was almost funny.

Almost.

Dabi walked into the common room and got a face full of wing. A primary feather—long, glossy, unmistakably Hawks—slapped across his mouth before fluttering to the floor. Toga wheezed with laughter. Shigaraki, unhelpful, pointed it out to everyone within fifty feet.

Dabi tugged the simple knot loose. The ribbon fell away to reveal scrawled, eager ink:

Meet me in the greenhouse. I miss you!
— H <3

Stupid. Cute. Stupidly cute. It carved a smile into his face he couldn’t fight.

The greenhouse door was ajar when he got there. He stopped at the threshold.

Hawks knelt in the dirt wearing a dark brown apron and traffic-cone pink gloves, pockets stuffed with a hand shovel, pruning shears, plant ties. He had a peat-stained tomato seedling cupped in his palm and was murmuring to it in a mix of words and high-pitched avian syllables that made Dabi’s chest do something ridiculous. Most of Hawks’ feathers were gone—light wings hugged tight to his back in a tidy fan—leaving the sharp lines of his shoulders and the vulnerable slope of his neck exposed.

He must have felt the look. He glanced over his shoulder, and that smile—unguarded, bright as noon—broke across his face.

“Dabi! Can I show you my garden?”

He could have said anything. He nodded.

It took an hour, and Dabi didn’t mind a second. Hawks moved bed to bed with a docent’s pride, naming everything with the reverence of someone cataloging friends. Basil that finally took once he fixed the mister. Nasturtiums that sulked unless he sang. Tomatoes staked in neat lines, green fruit dimpling the vines. The way the air smelled here—wet soil, chlorophyll, a little mildew—felt like a planet different from the one upstairs.

He noticed the way Hawks drifted toward him as he talked, the way their hands found each other without comment. He noticed, too, how solid Hawks felt—less brittle, less hollow-eyed. The bruises were fading to jaundice yellow. The shadows beneath his eyes were gone. There were rumors upstairs—whispers, snickers—and Dabi had put a stop to them with a wall and his knuckles. He’d do it again.

“And Ujiko gave this to you?” he asked, more cautious than judgmental.

Hawks pulled a face. “Shigaraki already gave me shit for it yesterday.”

Dabi chuckled and thumbed away a streak of dirt on Hawks’ cheek. Up close like this, the freckles looked like little planets; the leaf-littered floor squeaked beneath their boots.

“How long you been at it?”

“Only a few days,” Hawks said, incapable of hiding the pride in his voice, “but look at my progress!”

Dabi tucked a loose strand of gold behind his ear. “Looks wonderful, darling.”

Hawks flushed the exact red of a ripening tomato, and Dabi—who had no business being careful and yet was—kept the observation to himself. Since their not-quite date, touch had been easier: a shoulder leaned into, an ankle hooked over an ankle, small navigations in crowded rooms that acknowledged their center of gravity had shifted. It had been noticed. He didn’t care. He cared only when Hawks’ shoulders hunched at the sound of gossip. That had lasted an afternoon.

Now, with heat crawling up both their throats, Dabi’s body moved before his brain wrote the sentence. He stepped in until Hawks’ pulse pressed against his sternum. Hawks tipped his face up, eyes steady.

“What are you doing?” Hawks asked softly.

Dabi froze. Reality did its math—one kiss they didn’t talk about; a past Hawks didn’t remember; the name Keigo held like a match behind his teeth—and he almost stepped back.

Hawks solved it for him. He rose onto his toes and pressed his mouth to Dabi’s. Not hungry. Not nothing. A kiss like a hand held out in the dark: this is where I am; this is where you are. He did it again, a breath longer. When he pulled back his smile was small and sure.

“That’s what you were going to do, yeah?”

Dabi’s answer got lost somewhere between his ribs and his throat. Hawks laughed—an unguarded, bell-clear sound—and then eased away to point out the rosemary that hated being watered too much. Dabi let him. Want could be patient. It had already waited this long.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Upstairs, Hawks fell face-first into his pillow and immediately muttered into cotton, “What is wrong with me.”

The kiss shouldn’t have happened, his fear insisted. Not because he hadn’t wanted it—he had, desperately—but because kisses meant names, and Hawks’ name wasn’t the only one in this equation.

He’d finished Touya’s file.

He’d read it until the words blurred and his eyes burned: the clinical record of injuries dressed by Commission doctors; the language about incompatibility and quirk strain; the schedule of training days that looked painfully familiar. He’d traced the path down the page to the entry with the neat, damning summary: Forest fire. Deceased. He’d put the folder beside his own—PRODUCT 176156: KEIGO TAKAMI—and realized with a sick, inevitable gravity how two lives, groomed and used by different hands, had collided into the men they now were.

Everything aligned in a way that made denial dishonest. Dabi’s hatred of Endeavor. Shōto’s flinches. Flames as blue as a cut on the sky. Burn maps that matched the old fire’s footprint. Ages that lined up within a year of each other. Hawks picked up his own file—the one he’d avoided finishing—and forced himself to read it all. Every appointment. Every handler note. Every medical entry. He didn’t stop when he reached the parts he had carefully skirted. He read the pages about compliance strategies; about “events” that required “recalibration”; about procedures with acronyms he recognized only from whispered med tech jokes. He read the signatures. He read the stamps.

He closed the folder very carefully. Then his legs went out and he sat hard on the floor.

If it was all true—and he had no reason left to pretend it wasn’t—then the gaps in his head weren’t grief alone. Someone had made choices about what he got to keep. Someone had pried memories loose and filed them in boxes with labels like operational and compromising.

The more he reached for what predated the lab rooms, the more a heat built behind his eyes: a pressure headache, sudden and punitive, like the act of remembering tripped a wire someone had rigged. He heard himself make a sound he didn’t recognize—anger, wounded and low—and he stood on shaking legs and left his room.

Atsuhiro stepped into the hall and nearly collided with him. Hawks barely saw him. He had momentum and a demand.

The door to Ujiko’s lab banged open against the wall. The Doctor jerked, scalpel in hand, then blinked Hawks into focus over the rim of his glasses.

“Oh—”

“Can you make me remember?”

The words came out too loud. They echoed off metal, off glass, off the bodies bobbing in purple in the tanks beyond, and Hawks didn’t care. He needed an answer and he needed it now.

Ujiko tilted his head. “Remember what, dear? Sit down—you look like you’re about to be sick.”

Hawks shook his head, then nodded, dizzy. He crashed down onto a rolling stool and caught himself on the edge of the counter. “Can you make me remember my life?”

Confusion flickered across Ujiko’s face, replaced by something that looked uncomfortably like interest. He smoothed it away and came around the counter with doctor hands and a doctor voice.

“I can attempt to reverse—or at least bypass—certain kinds of induced dissociation,” he said, careful. “But I need to know the scope. Depending on how the… editing was done, the intervention may be blunt.” He glanced toward his locked cabinet.

“There’s a lot,” Hawks said, and tasted blood where he’d bitten his cheek. “Just—give me all of it.”

“Hawks,” Ujiko said, for once dropping the patter. He lowered his voice. “This is not a panacea. It will not return a day-by-day record. It will… lift doors. Sometimes all at once. It can be painful. It can trigger… episodes, as the mind attempts to reconcile what it protected you from with what you are now asking it to carry again. You may not like every door you open. Are you sure?”

Hawks stared at the tiles between his boots. The grout line had a crack shaped like a river delta. He followed it with his eyes until his vision steadied. Then he lifted his chin.

“Please.”

The Doctor nodded once. A little of the showman fell away. He unlocked the cabinet and drew out a chilled vial, clear fluid catching the overhead light like glass. He set it gently in a tray, then added syringes, adhesive leads, an IV line. He pulled on gloves with a snap.

“On your back,” he said, gesturing to a narrow exam bed. “Straps are precautionary. You could seize. You could thrash. I don’t want you falling.”

Hawks lay down. The vinyl was cold through his shirt. He didn’t fight when Ujiko buckled soft restraints around his ankles and wrists, and a band across his hips. He stared up at the ceiling while the EKG leads found all the familiar places: collarbone, ribs, the meat of his shoulder. The monitor chirped to life with his heartbeat, messy at first, settling.

A needle pricked the back of his hand as Ujiko slid the IV in. The Doctor held the vial up for him to see one last time, perhaps out of habit, perhaps ceremony.

“This might burn,” he warned. “I’ll be here. If I call, answer. If it’s too much, I can taper the drip. I can’t take it back, but I can slow the doors.”

Hawks nodded, throat tight. His mind wanted to run, and his body said stay. He closed his eyes.

The first push went in cool. Then the heat came.

It lit behind his eyes like a fuse and unspooled down his spine. His fingers clenched reflexively, straps suddenly necessary. The ceiling buckled and swam; the edges of the room went bright and then very far away. Somewhere he heard the monitor spike and a voice—Ujiko’s—say something calm and procedural.

 

 

 

 

 

Memory didn’t arrive as pictures. It arrived as sensation—smells layered atop sounds layered atop the way his body had felt, small and fast and eager to please. Citrus cleaner and wool blankets and a lollipop’s syrup stuck in his teeth. The way a training mat thumped. The way praise felt like sun and a frown felt like winter. Glass doors, automatic, the first time he learned they knew when he was near. A hand smoothing his hair back and a thumb pressing too long at his mouth. Yuto’s arms under him, solid as a promise. His mother’s perfume, faint, receding. A boy with white hair, eyes blue as a sky after rain. A smaller hand hooking a little finger through his and saying Promise.

Pain threaded through it—bright, white lines of it—when he touched the places someone had labeled No. He flinched and the restraint on his shoulder held him. He felt the logic of the walls and the sense of their failure. He tried to breathe through his nose; his chest forgot how and then remembered. He heard himself call out—a chirp, cut high—then a name he didn’t remember learning, then another he’d been given.

“Hawks,” Ujiko said from very far and very near. “Do you hear me?”

He did. He didn’t have a mouth that worked, but he heard.

“Good,” the Doctor said. “That’s good.”

The room turned on its side. The heat in his head flared and then blew open like a door unlatched in a storm. He fell backward through it into a younger body and a younger night. The air tasted like smoke. The world was orange and blue. Somewhere, somebody shouted Touya. Somewhere else, someone said Keigo like a password and like a prayer.

The monitor sang its thin electronic song as lines climbed and dropped. Ujiko’s hand steadied the IV.

This time, when the dark came, it didn’t have weight. It had a shape. He recognized it.

He went under.

Notes:

Yikes.

Chapter 27: Chapter 27

Notes:

CW
•child abuse
•implied CSA

I was yelling about wanting this story to post another chapter, forgot I was the author.

Age 8

“Again.”

The command landed like a weight on Keigo’s shoulders. His palms were slick against the cold tile, elbows trembling as he pushed up. The room smelled like disinfectant and rubber, the air-conditioner’s dry breath scraping the back of his throat. He kept his eyes on the painted line in front of him and counted in his head the way he’d been taught—one, two, three—because counting pushed the burn to the edges.

His drill looked simple on paper: vault, land, roll, spring, cut right, ten-meter burst, stop on a dime. Repeat. But his legs had gone wobbly three sets ago, and sleep had been thin and glassy all week. On the fourth attempt his foot slid on sweat. He corrected midair, rolled too tight, thumped to a stop just shy of the mark.

The trainer’s chin tipped—barely. “Acceptable. Dismissed.”

Keigo swallowed his whine so hard his ears popped. He bowed, careful, formal, and padded toward the door on aching arches. The hallway outside was colder still. His wings, damp and heavy, pressed at the seams of his uniform shirt. He kept them tight. The last time they’d flared without permission he’d had to do the whole drill again “the proper way,” which meant with a weighted harness and no water until he stopped panting.

The numbers stenciled on his door—176156—had started to blur together after so many nights. He wiped his hands on his shorts, opened to the small white room, and tried to make his face neat. His Handler stood by the desk, reading glasses in one hand, that easy not-smile on his mouth. Keigo went obediently into the waiting arms and stood very still.

“I’ve been told you’re falling behind,” his Handler said, voice smooth as polished stone. “What is the meaning of this.”

Keigo tipped his face up. The lights stamped green into the man’s eyes. “I’m trying, Sir. I promise. I’m just—” He swallowed the word tired. His stomach made a small, humiliating noise. He hadn’t finished lunch. He never finished lunch on drill days.

Fingers slid along his back to the ridge where feathers anchored into muscle. Keigo felt the touch before the pinch, felt his whole spine brace against it. He didn’t make a sound when a primary came loose. Pain bent through his wing and dug into his ribs. His eyes watered anyway.

“You want to be a hero?” the Handler asked. He plucked a second feather, a silent metronome: sharp, sharp.

Keigo grabbed at the fabric of the man’s jacket, steadying himself. “Yes, Sir.”

“Then stop being such a disappointment.”

The word wasn’t a shout. It didn’t have to be. It landed with perfect aim. Keigo’s mouth closed on the sorry that wanted to escape. His Handler let him go, and Keigo sat down hard on his narrow mattress because his knees preferred not collapsing on the tile.

“Physical exam tomorrow,” the Handler added, putting his glasses back on. “I’ll be supervising. Sleep. And quit crying. You’re not a baby anymore.”

“Yes, Sir.”

The door clicked. Keigo lay on his side, blanket pulled to his chin, and let the tears come quietly. He found the blue thread at his wrist—the one Touya had tied there two Fridays ago—and rolled it between his thumb and finger until the tight spot in his throat loosened.

Friday. He pictured a messy mop of white hair, blue eyes that went soft whenever Keigo got too excited and started chirping by accident. He pictured hands warm as a patch of sun, the way Touya always listened like every word was important. Keigo helped him with breath work—slow in, long out, hold the fire in the cup of your hands—and Touya taught him ordinary magic: how to tell a good vending machine from a stingy one, which corridor lights were motion sensors and which were heat, how to fold a paper crane that actually looked like a bird.

“Keep doing this for Touya,” Keigo whispered into his pillow, and the ache stopped being so big.

 

 

 

 

 

Touya hugged him before he could fully step into the room that Friday, practically picking Keigo up off his feet. The door shut with a kick and a bang and then Touya let go and turned, planted, and punted a chair across the floor so hard it smacked the wall and fell in a sulk.

“Touya?” Keigo ventured.

Touya turned. The left side of his face was pink and shiny, not-burn-not-quite. Keigo reached up with both hands. Touya leaned into his palms like someone finding the right height of a pillow.

“My quirk,” he said, voice rough. “Dad says it’s… not fit for my body. He won’t train me if I’m going to keep getting hurt.”

Keigo’s mouth made a little O. “But your quirk is so cool,” he said, conviction immediate and total. “Are we not going to be heroes together?”

Touya huffed, the sound halfway to a laugh. His hand slid from Keigo’s cheek to the top of his head, carding through the shallow layers of gold. “I’m practicing on my own,” he said. “We will. I swear.”

They didn’t talk about the pink skin again. Touya didn’t flinch when Keigo’s thumb grazed it. He collapsed onto a beanbag and started talking about Fuyumi’s birthday party—the paper crowns, the strawberry cake, the wall of pink that had swallowed the living room. Keigo listened wide-eyed, a hundred questions stitching themselves to his tongue. He stuck most of them behind his teeth and took the candy Touya pressed into his hand: a soft caramel, slightly squashed.

“I kept this one for you,” Touya said, who always remembered to keep one for Keigo.

He popped it in his mouth, immediately stuck his jaw, then laughed at himself. They toppled, graceless and happy, onto the carpet, Touya swearing and Keigo giggling. A moment later Touya rolled them so Keigo’s wing wouldn’t be trapped. “Sorry,” he muttered, already running fingers along the base feathers to check for bent barbs. Keigo cooed despite himself, mortified, comforted.

“When we become heroes, I’ll throw you a party every week,” Touya said into the comfortable quiet.

“When we’re heroes, can we have an agency together?” Keigo asked, not even pretending not to hope.

Touya rolled his eyes like twelve-year-olds did, then nodded. His arm wound around Keigo’s waist and tugged him closer, careful of wing and still-bruised elbow. “Anything you want, birdie.”

 

 

 

Age 9

He didn’t hear the snap. He felt it—bright, white, decisive—and then the training room tilted. The next minutes were jerky images: trainers’ shoes, the seam in a mat, the ceiling panels counting off above him. The medical bay smelled different—sharper, noisier. The doctors didn’t talk to him; they talked around him and about him, and when he fussed and tried to sit up they slid a mask over his nose and told him to breathe deeper and the lights went away.

He woke with a blue cast from wrist to elbow and a distant ache under the hum of painkillers. The sheet fell funny over the bulk of it. The room had that empty echo that meant he was not supposed to get up and absolutely was going to. He slid his legs over the side and hopped down, cradling his arm without meaning to do it, and nudged the door with his foot.

Yuto was leaning against the wall outside, hands in his pockets, looking like he’d just remembered he had a body and was trying to figure out how to stand in it. His head came up at Keigo’s small tug on his trouser leg.

“Ah,” Yuto said, and smiled the kind of smile that made his eyes crinkle. “You’re awake, little red. How’s the arm?”

Keigo’s eyes went hot. The sob escaped before he could swallow it. Yuto bent, quick, and scooped him up. He did it slowly enough that Keigo had time to adjust the cast with his good hand, and then he was settled on Yuto’s hip, cheek against scratchy suit, breathing smoke and cheap coffee and something that was just Yuto.

“Do you still want to go today?” Yuto asked into his hair.

Keigo jerked upright so fast his head almost cracked Yuto’s chin. Mom. He nodded hard, twice. Yuto bit his lip, pulled out his phone one-handed, and typed a message with the solemnity of a man disarming a bomb.

They changed him—new shirt with the sleeve split to fit over the cast—and met the Handler downstairs. No guards. Keigo’s heart sank and then steadied. Yuto’s palm landed on his head for a second like a benediction. The Handler’s hand landed on his shoulder like the other thing. He was guided—pushed—into the car.

The building they pulled up to was nothing like the small apartment Keigo remembered: tall and shiny and quiet, the kind of place where footsteps learned manners. The elevator made his ears pop. The hallway smelled like lemon polish. The Handler knocked at the last door.

Keigo thought about the hug in his head. He rehearsed the word Mommy behind his teeth and promised himself he wouldn’t cry. The door opened.

The woman who looked at him had gold eyes that matched his and everything else that didn’t. Her hair was sleek and straight. Her skin was full and flushed. Her dress fit on purpose. Her mouth fell open.

“Hi, Mommy!” Keigo said, huge, hopeful.

He lifted his good arm, reaching. She didn’t move. The smile in his chest faltered. He took another step and took hold of her dress like he was five and lost in a market.

A hand closed around the back of his neck and tugged him, gentle and inexorable, back a pace. He stumbled against suit trousers.

“What is he doing here,” she said, not at him.

Keigo looked at his Handler and got no answer. “It was my birthday, I—”

“I want him gone.” Her voice got thinner and harder at once. “You promised I’d never have to see him again.”

“Apologies,” the Handler said, tone buttery. “Keigo only wanted to see you. Now that he has, we can go.”

No, Keigo thought, body leaning forward while the hand on his neck kept him straight. No, you’re supposed to hug me. You’re supposed to smell like you used to. I have things to show you. The door shut. The lemon smell flooded back in and washed away everything else.

He pressed his face into Touya’s shoulder the next Friday and didn’t say a word for an hour. Touya didn’t ask. He just sat there on the carpet with a boy in his lap and rubbed slow circles between Keigo’s wings until the sobs narrowed to shivers and then to small, stubborn breaths.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Age 10

Touya brought a book from home that week—The Princess and the Frog—and sprawled on his stomach beside Keigo, feet kicking mindlessly in the air while he did all the voices. Keigo’s laugh went bright and high when the prince turned human again; he clapped without thinking and then ducked his head, remembering to be quiet and failing.

“Frog,” Keigo teased as Touya closed the back cover with a smack. “Ribbit.”

Touya propped his chin on his fist and narrowed his eyes in mock offense. “Say it again and I dare you to kiss me.”

Keigo gasped like he’d been given a mission. He leaned in and pressed their mouths together. His lips were soft and a little sticky from the candy Touya had smuggled in. He counted to seven in his head—because seven felt right—and leaned back, proud of himself for following directions so well.

Touya stared at him. Pink rose up his throat to his cheeks in a fast, shocked flood. He made a tiny noise Keigo recognized—people made that when they stood up too fast—but stayed perfectly still.

“Touya!” Keigo spluttered, hands patting, alarmed. “Why are you red? Are you okay?”

Touya pressed a finger gently to Keigo’s mouth and nodded, dazed, and then winced like he’d twinged something in his neck. “I’m fine,” he said hoarsely, then coughed and tried again. “I just—got hot.”

Keigo glanced at his wings as if to blame them for any ambient heating and relaxed when Touya grinned, small and wobbly. “Read it again?”

“Again,” Touya agreed helplessly, and did the voices twice as big.

The week after that, Keigo launched himself toward Touya as soon as the door clicked shut and earned another flush for his trouble.

“Are you sure you’re not sick?” he asked for the third time, poking Touya’s cheek, because the red had climbed even faster this time.

“I promise, birdie,” Touya said, and flicked the edge of Keigo’s ear for good measure. He gazed at the half-built tower of cards between them, sighed, and tapped it. It collapsed with theatrical tragedy. “I’m twelve now. It happens.”

That explains it, Keigo thought solemnly. His teacher had given a whole talk about Growing Bodies and Changes last week, and Keigo had taken notes because taking notes was a way to be good at things.

He asked Daigo about it on the car ride back that night because Daigo always had answers that were a little wicked and usually correct.

“Sounds like your friend’s got a little crush,” Daigo said, very pleased with himself.

“What is a crush,” Keigo asked, carefully, because words were tools and he wanted to use them properly.

“Something you can be gentle with,” Daigo said, and then looked out the window like he’d said more than he meant to.

A female agent in Records, kinder than the job needed her to be, explained it the next day when Keigo trailed after her and looked worried enough to trip over his own feet. She said, “Sometimes your chest feels full when you look at someone. Sometimes you want them to be happy even if it doesn’t make sense. Kissing can be special. You don’t have to do it just because someone wants you to. Save it for people you really, really like.”

Really like went into Keigo’s head like a seed into good soil. He lay in bed that night, turning the phrase over and over, sorting his world with it.

His mother used to kiss his nose before she tucked him in—he remembered that like a photograph. He didn’t think about her much anymore if he could help it. The Handler kissed him too sometimes in ways that left Keigo colder than before; Keigo had learned to be very still and very good during those moments because still and good was when the day remained survivable. He decided he must like his Handler a little, because the Handler made sure he had food and shirts that fit and a bed with a blanket that was his alone.

Yuto never kissed him. Yuto tucked the corners of the sheet around Keigo’s legs so he wouldn’t kick it off in the night and said “good work” like he meant it when Keigo came back with grass in his hair and scuffed knees. Once, when Keigo was shivering and pretending not to, Yuto had put his palm in the middle of Keigo’s back and pressed gently until the shaking quieted. Keigo had heard a soft “I love you” against the dark and stayed perfectly still because sometimes the best way to keep a thing was not to move too fast toward it.

Touya was… something else. Touya laughed at Keigo’s jokes like they were clever instead of eager. Touya sat with him when Keigo’s brain felt too loud and let him press his ear to Touya’s chest to listen for the steady drum of you are here; I am here. Touya accepted every new trick Keigo learned with a whoop and then asked to be taught the ones that would help him hold his fire where he wanted it. Touya never hurt him, even by accident.

Keigo rubbed the blue thread at his wrist where Touya’s clumsy knot had cinched and dried. “If I was going to love someone,” he whispered into the dark, testing the word on his tongue. “I guess it would be him.”

He chirped softly to himself, not because anyone was listening, but because sometimes you sang to keep the shape of joy in your mouth.

 

 

 

 

 

The next Friday, Touya burst in breathless, eyes bright, hands flinging as he explained a new trick with his flames that didn’t hurt as much because he’d figured out how to heat his hands first and not just blast all at once. Keigo listened like he’d been starving in a field and someone had handed him bread. When Touya ran out of words, he pressed the heel of his hand to his eyes and muttered, “Dad’s still mad. Says it’s not… compatible.”

Keigo reached up and waited a second. Touya tipped his head and let Keigo fix the cowlick at his temple with meticulous care. “We’ll be heroes anyway,” Keigo said. “We’ll make our own rules.”

Touya snorted, affectionate and scornful in the same breath. “Yeah we will.”

They linked little fingers, as always. “Promise.”

“Promise,” Touya echoed, and pulled the blue thread on Keigo’s wrist tight with his teeth so the knot wouldn’t slip. Keigo squawked, indignant, delighted. Touya laughed until he had to lean against Keigo to breathe.

There were tests Keigo still hated, days he still failed and had to do twice, nights he cried into his blanket because eight-year-old bodies are small even when they’re brave. There were also Fridays that made the rest of it bearable, where a boy with a fire that wanted to eat him alive sat on a floor and showed Keigo how ordinary a miracle could look if you did it together.

The Commission called it “social development,” “long-term assignment,” “rapport.” Keigo called it learning the names of things he hadn’t known he was allowed to want.

He filed them away the only place safely his: in his body. The weight of an arm over his waist. The sound of someone laughing for him and not at him. The way blue thread felt when he worried it to calm down. The certainty that showing up mattered, that again didn’t always have to mean alone.

Chapter 28: Chapter 28

Notes:

Not gonna lie, this one made me tear up a bit
CW
•blood, violence, a bit of gore, lots of death

:D

Age 11

Touya started acting strange in a way that wasn’t fun, and Keigo noticed because he noticed everything Touya did. It happened in little skips and stalls: the way Touya’s shoulders rose when Keigo ran to hug him hello; the way his eyes skittered away when Keigo chattered about drills; the way he chose a chair on the far side of the room instead of flopping onto the carpet beside him. Keigo tried to be smaller—quieter—because small and quiet was how you kept things safe. It didn’t work.

They were alone the third Friday it happened, the door shut on footsteps and security chatter. Keigo rolled a dice back and forth in his palm so his hands would have something to do besides tremble. Touya sat, arms crossed, face tilted toward the ceiling like it might answer a question.

“Touya, are you mad at me?” Keigo asked. He engineered the question to sound light. He was getting good at that.

Touya’s mouth pressed flat. He shook his head without looking.

“Are you okay?” Keigo tried, softer.

Touya’s answer was a slow exhale that wasn’t an answer. Keigo crouched, put the dice on the floor, and rolled it toward Touya’s shoe. It clicked to a stop against the rubber toe.

“Do you want to play this game wi—”

“Just stop talking.” Touya’s voice snapped like a twig under a heavy foot—sharp, ugly, startled at itself.

Keigo’s breath stuttered. He hadn’t heard Touya sound like that. A small sound escaped him anyway, a hurt chirp he couldn’t swallow in time. He pulled his wings around his sides like a robe and rubbed the blue thread at his wrist until the knot dug into his skin. They spent the rest of the hour in a silence that tasted like coin on the tongue.

The car ride back to the Commission was worse. Keigo sat upright, hands flat on his thighs, nails etching crescents through the fabric. His Handler’s palm rested between his wings, the way it did when Keigo needed to be reminded to behave. The hand vibrated faintly with a tension Keigo had learned to translate: angry.

He didn’t understand what he’d done wrong until later that night.

 

 

 

 

Yuto was nowhere in his usual places—medical corridor, side entrance where he smoked, the vending machines that ate coins without shame. Keigo followed the hum of voices instead, the noise of agents on break. The Handler’s men used a long, low office with humming fluorescent lights and mismatched chairs. Laughter rolled over the desks. Some agents had their masks off; some hadn’t bothered to put them on. Keigo knew most of their faces even if he wasn’t supposed to. They knew he knew and pretended they didn’t.

He wove through legs and coat hems until he found a man slouched at a desk with his feet up, phone propped in his palms, thumbs flying. Shoulder-length black hair curtained his face. The corners of his eyes crinkled with focus.

“Taroji-san?” Keigo said, hopeful and polite.

Taroji pivoted his chair to offer Keigo his back.

Keigo sighed. It was their ritual. “I know you can hear me.”

A couple agents laughed into their sleeves. One, passing by, ruffled Keigo’s hair, then remembered himself and moved his hand like the ruffle had been a fly.

Taroji cursed softly, rotated back, and tipped his eyebrows in the direction of a calendar filled with scribbles. “I have a kid at home,” he said. “Don’t need one bothering me at work.”

Keigo hopped up, landing light on the edge of Taroji’s desk. His wings gave a quick, involuntary shiver before he tucked them tight. “Why is Sir angry?”

Taroji watched him from under his hair, jaw flexing. He worked the corner of a paperclip until it snapped. Keigo waited, still as a lizard in the sun.

“You were there today,” Keigo added, voice smaller. “With Touya. Why was he angry after?”

Taroji blew out a breath. “Fucking hell,” he muttered. “Fine. I’m quitting soon anyway.”

He hooked a finger in Keigo’s collar and tugged him down, pitched his voice low enough to be plausible deniability.

“Endeavor pays the Commission a shit-ton to help the kid. One day—years ago—your Sir thought, hey, maybe our little bird could be useful. Exposure, control, whatever. Kept you seeing each other because it made you train harder and kept money flowing. Meanwhile the labs got all the time they wanted to poke at Todoroki’s quirk.”

Keigo’s stomach dropped like an elevator. “Poke at it for what?”

Taroji shrugged like it was weather. “Don’t ask me. Something about compatibility and ‘secondary expressions.’” He scowled at his phone. “This week Endeavor said he’s pulling Touya out. And with whatever breakup you two are doing—” his eyes flicked over Keigo’s face, caught on the way his mouth tightened— “there’s no argument to keep him.”

Keigo bowed, quick and neat. “Thank you,” he said. He jumped down without knocking the photo of Taroji and his son—two heads bent together, laughing—off the desk.

His heart hurt in a way training never prepared for, a hollow ache that made his hands want to crush something and his lungs want to forget how to work. Touya’s leaving. Maybe that’s why Touya couldn’t look at him. Maybe being mean was a way to make it easier. The thought made Keigo’s throat swell.

He kept himself busy the whole week—volunteered for extra conditioning, recited vocabulary lists to the wall, scrubbed his floor until the smell of bleach shoved back his thoughts. Friday arrived trembling in his bones.

 

 

 

 

 

Daigo drove him. Daigo glanced over at a stoplight and pinched Keigo’s arm harder than necessary. “Don’t bolt out of the car when we get there,” he said. “You’re not a stray cat.”

Keigo nodded, then bolted anyway. Daigo’s pinch at the door was withering, but he waved Keigo toward Touya with a jerk of his chin, annoyance already fading toward fond.

Touya was there, and he looked like he hadn’t slept. The room door clicked behind them. Keigo lifted his pinky halfway and paused, braced for rejection. Touya hooked it with his own like he was drowning and Keigo was a rope.

“I’m sorry,” Touya blurted, arms coming up and around, squeezing so hard Keigo’s feet left the ground. One hand cupped the back of Keigo’s head and held on. “I’m sorry. I was—I was being an ass last week. I was trying—” The words tangled. He blew them out in a rush. “Dad’s pulling me. We’ve been fighting. He says I’m done. He won’t even look at the new stuff I can do. And I didn’t know how to tell you without breaking in half so I thought if I made it easier now… I heard you sniffing and I knew it was my fault and I—” He cut himself off, swallowed. “I never wanted to hurt you because I lo—” He stumbled, cheeks flaring. “—care about you so much.”

Keigo’s breath came back to him like a loan returned. He hugged Touya back with all the strength in his small body. “It’s okay,” he said into Touya’s shirt, voice watery. “I forgive you for being an ass.”

Touya huffed a laugh that sounded like a sob in disguise and kissed Keigo’s throat without thinking, a soft press that left heat where lips had been.

They curled into the beanbag together, knees denting the same patch of stuffing, hands traced into hair and along wing coverts. Keigo didn’t tell him what Taroji had said. Not now. Not when Touya’s shoulders finally unhitched.

“Are you really going to leave?” Keigo asked at last, small as a pinprick.

“I’m trying to convince him,” Touya said, jaw tight. Then he saw Keigo’s expression and forced his face gentle. “I promise I’ll figure something out, okay? I’m never leaving you.”

“Promise,” Keigo said, because promises were things they were good at making, and refused to count the ones adults broke around them like stepping on brittle sticks.

 

 

 

 

 

Somehow Endeavor changed his mind, or said he did. Touya crashed into the room four weeks later, grabbed Keigo by the waist, and lifted him so recklessly they both went down in a heap. He kissed Keigo’s cheek with a noisy smack that made Keigo squeal and then shove at him, mortified and delighted.

They’d gotten bolder with kissing lately—Touya eager and careful at once, peppering Keigo’s hairline and temple and jaw—and Keigo had learned the exact sound Touya made when his mouth touched the sensitive place under Keigo’s ear. Light as a feather, gone as soon as it came, leaving behind fizzing heat that made Keigo giggle.

“It was your birthday,” Keigo said, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “I made you something.”

Touya’s grin softened. “You didn’t have to.”

Keigo rummaged in his pocket, produced the thing like a magic trick. A small, bright red feather—one of his own—anchored to a black cord with a simple gold clasp. Touya’s eyes went wide and wet.

“Do you like it?” Keigo asked, hands worrying themselves together. He’d asked a seamstress in Costume to crimp the hardware for him and hadn’t breathed properly until she handed it back.

“I love it,” Touya said, voice cracking, head coming up like he was surfacing. “I love you.”

They froze together, mirror-stunned. Keigo’s heart banged once, twice, fast enough to wobble his knees. His wings poofed so hard he nearly toppled backward. Touya’s face went white and then scarlet like he’d been slapped by the sky.

“I love you too,” Keigo said, because it was true and because Touya looked like he might be sick if Keigo didn’t say it back. Saying it made it real in a way that felt like stepping into warm light. Touya’s relief crashed over both of them in a laugh and he fumbled the cord around his neck, the feather landing over his sternum like it had always belonged there.

They matched now: blue thread on Keigo’s wrist; red feather against Touya’s chest. They spent the afternoon sprawled on the rug, whispering and shushing each other’s giggles like conspirators, kissing in quick, secret presses that made the room feel wider.

Daigo gave Keigo grief the whole ride home. “Really, kid?” he said, deadpan, when Keigo’s lips still tasted faintly like Touya’s and Keigo couldn’t stop smiling. “In front of me?”

Keigo tucked his face into his shoulder and laughed so hard his ribs hurt.

Yuto tucked him in later, a rare smile easing years off his face as he listened to Keigo’s breathless recounting. He smoothed Keigo’s hair back and said, “Goodnight, little red,” and turned the light off like he was dimming it for a theater and not a cell.

Keigo dreamed a bad dream. A park he didn’t recognize. A crouched figure whose shoulders shook. He reached for them and the world went to fire—orange and then blue, hotter than anything he’d trained against. Heat hit him the way waves hit. A scream tore the night. He squeezed his eyes shut and felt the burn on his skin, the kind you wake up from and check for blisters. He willed himself awake, and when his eyes flew open he could swear he still heard it, the way you can still taste sweetness after the candy’s gone.

Keigo.

He lay there panting in the dark, rubbing the blue thread around his wrist until it bit him back.

 

 

 

 

 

His Handler appeared in Keigo’s doorway three mornings later while Keigo was still struggling with the buttons on his shirt. The Handler did not say good morning. He did not bend to fix the button or smooth Keigo’s cowlick like he sometimes did when people were watching. He stared at the bracelet around Keigo’s wrist—at the blue thread—and something shuttered over his face. He took Keigo by the hand and marched him upstairs.

Four agents joined them at the elevator without being called. The top floor always smelled colder, like the air itself was afraid to move the President’s hair. The President was older each time Keigo saw him, a thousand lines in his face. Keigo stood where he was placed and folded his hands behind his back so the trembling wouldn’t show.

The door closed. The President cleared his throat. He didn’t warm up the way adults did when they were getting ready to say something that mattered. He just said it.

“We’ve received notice. Touya Todoroki died a few days ago in a fire.” He glanced at the paper as if to check he was reading the right line. “There were no remains.”

The words didn’t land; they detonated. Keigo’s body hollowed. Sound collapsed to a whistle. It felt like someone had yanked the floor out from under him and he was still waiting to hit. The scream shoved out of his chest before he knew he was making it. His throat tore around it.

Hands grabbed him. A palm slammed over his mouth. Keigo bit it, hard enough to taste iron. He fell to his knees without feeling the fall. The bracelet dug into his skin and something inside him snapped like a taut line cut.

He called a feather without deciding to. It didn’t so much fly as appear, hard and exact, and punched cleanly through the throat of the man trying to drag him back. Hot wetness sprayed across Keigo’s cheek. He didn’t hear his own gasp.

Another hand closed on his wing and was there and then wasn’t because Keigo’s feathers were blades now, ten of them, twenty, slicing anything that moved. The room filled with shouting, and then stopped being a room. It became edges and cutting and red. Doors flew open. Agents poured in. Keigo kept screaming until he ran out of voice and the only sound left was his breath and the air-conditioning, steady, indifferent.

 

 

 

 

 

When the world slowed, it did it all at once. Keigo blinked and the floor was a smear of shoe prints and blood. The President had slumped at his desk, head at an angle that made Keigo’s stomach flip. The rug had soaked through to black. His Handler was gone. Keigo’s feathers were dripping. He took a step and nearly slipped.

A body twitched in the corner of his vision. Keigo staggered toward it on legs that remembered how to be legs just enough. He dropped to his knees. Brown eyes found him. Yuto’s face was pale, mouth gone soft, a neat terrible slash seamed across his neck where a feather had been and wasn’t.

Keigo’s heart cracked clean down the center. “Yuto-san,” he whispered, and then louder, and then louder, until he was shouting. He pressed both hands to the wound the way he’d watched medics do. Blood slid between his fingers, hot and slippery. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—please—please stay awake.”

Yuto’s breath stuttered. Keigo could feel it against his wrists. The room rocked gently like a boat no one was rowing. Keigo looked wildly around for another still-moving body, another pair of hands, someone to tell him what to do. There was no one. The office was a noise of nothing.

“Help!” he yelled anyway, voice scraping. “He’s still alive! Please! Somebody—”

A hand—cool, shaking—rose and touched Keigo’s cheek. Keigo flinched, then leaned into it like a plant to sun.

“It’s… it’s okay,” Yuto whispered. His lips pulled into a fraction of a smile that reached his eyes and made Keigo want to tear the ceiling down.

Keigo shook his head hard enough to blur the room and pressed harder. Yuto groaned and Keigo sobbed and eased a fraction. “Don’t move,” Keigo pleaded. “I’m going to save you. Please. Please.”

Yuto’s hand fumbled at his pocket, then the floor, then Keigo’s lap. Something small and crinkly landed there. Keigo looked down through tears. A blue-wrapped lollipop stared back up at him.

“Sweet… things,” Yuto said, breath a broken thread. “Always… make me… f-feel b-better…”

His hand slid away. His body softened in Keigo’s arms the way things do when they’re not people anymore. The room went very quiet.

Keigo stared at the candy. It blurred and sharpened and blurred again. He held it in both hands because he didn’t know what else to hold. Blood dried tacky on his wrists. His ears rang. He could still taste metal, and under it, ridiculously, sugar.

He didn’t know how long he sat like that. His knees ached and the air cooled on his skin. Somewhere far away a door opened and feet ran, then stopped. Keigo lifted his head very slowly.

“I didn’t mean to,” he told the room that used to be an office, voice small and hoarse and very clear. “I didn’t mean to.”

No one answered. He tucked the lollipop into the pocket over his heart with hands that wouldn’t quite stop shaking and looked down at Yuto’s face one last time. Then he stood, swayed, and looked for a sink. He needed to wash his hands. He needed to breathe. He needed Touya to be alive, because anything else felt like a mistake he didn’t know how to undo.

Notes:

What an emotional roller-coaster.

Chapter 29: Chapter 29

Notes:

I know, it just keeps getting worse.

CW
•Mentioned CSA
•child prostitution

Age 11

Keigo woke bound to a cot, canvas biting his wrists, the tang of antiseptic needling his nose. The ceiling tiles were the same gray as every room in the Commission, but the light felt meaner here—a narrow cone aimed square at his face. His eyes burned. His throat rasped when he swallowed.

Sir stood a pace away, jacket on, tie straight, speaking to a woman Keigo didn’t recognize. Short blond hair, no nonsense mouth, shoes that clicked like metronomes on tile. Keigo tried to chirp—anything—but only a dry ghost of sound left him.

Green eyes cut to him. Sir leaned over, studying Keigo the way he studied reports. His lashes lowered. “I can do it,” he said, like he was accepting an assignment. “But a full erasure takes time. Longer for him to stop clutching at the pieces.”

“How long?” the woman asked. Her voice snapped without rising. “We cannot have another massacre because he gets emotional.”

Keigo went very still. His palm crinkled. He realized then there was something clenched in his fist. He dared not look.

Sir considered. “Two months. Three if he’s exposed to triggers. Keep him away from them, it will go faster.”

The woman exhaled through her nose, stepped to Keigo’s other side, and gave him a cool, appraising once-over, as if deciding which shelf he’d live on. “I’m the new President,” she said. “Thanks to you, we have a vacancy. I’d thank you for the promotion, but you’ve made my first day tedious.”

Sir’s mouth twitched. Keigo blinked up, mute and stinging.

“It appears my office will require reconstruction,” she went on, dry. “Remarkable how much blood one room can hold.”

Keigo flinched. He hadn’t meant—

“Begin,” she told Sir, already turning. “I expect a body count by end of day. Have him presentable for the memorial.”

“Yes, President.”

The door sighed closed. Sir slipped off his jacket, rolled his sleeves with a neat, practiced efficiency. He rested an elbow on the side rail, all easy warmth. “Really, Keigo,” he said lightly, as if they were sharing a joke. “So dramatic.”

He tapped a finger up Keigo’s shin, knee, chest, and finally flattened his palm over Keigo’s sternum. The pressure was gentle, almost affectionate. Heat bloomed under skin, then spread inward until Keigo’s skull felt packed with cotton.

Why am I lying down? Where is Touya? Who’s Tou—

Pain burst like white fireworks behind his eyes. He clamped his fist harder around the crinkle without meaning to and then the world blew out.

 

 

 

 

 

Age 14

His first long-term mission tasted like sugar on his tongue. Keigo wore clean white shorts and a soft blue shirt that made his eyes brighter and his face younger. He held hands with a man he’d never met who smelled like aftershave and paper, and let himself be led down a trash-choked alley to three men who watched like they were counting their money already.

The exchange was ugly and efficient. The hand in Keigo’s slipped away, replaced by the sag of a duffel loaded with cash. A knuckle hooked Keigo’s chin up. Close breath. “Pretty,” one of them grunted. “Boss’ll like you. You—take him.”

The door to the “club” was a slab of rust. The music inside hit like fists. It smelled like spilled beer, peppermint mouthwash, old sex, and money. The boss was all sharp elbows and greasy hair and didn’t bother pretending this was anything but what it was.

“Clothes off.”

Keigo did it with the same focus he brought to drills. He kept his gaze soft. He catalogued faces, exits, the location of cameras, the rhythm of security rotations. Fingers prodded his hip, the back of his thigh. “Front floor,” the boss said. “Beautiful things make people spend.”

On the floor, bare bodies pressed from all directions. A laugh cracked open behind him and a heavy arm hooked his waist, dropped him onto a lap that jiggled with every breath. Hands kneaded thigh meat like dough. Keigo smiled pleasantly, like he didn’t want to fly out of his skin. The table was sticky. His bare feet stuck to the floor. He listened, because listening was the only thing here that could save anyone.

Two months. No contact. No extraction dates that didn’t slither when touched. Every night spent curled under sweaty arms. Keigo learned how to move in ways that made men open their mouths and talk. He learned how to keep his eyes dry. He learned the exact speed you had to go to make it look like you were submitting while still keeping your center. He learned exactly how much of himself could leave his body and return later.

When an agent finally bought him for an hour and closed the door, Keigo almost collapsed with relief. He poured information out like beads onto a table—names, times, routes, the keypad code only the boss used. The agent listened, nodding, pocketed everything with a soft “Good work,” and then shoved Keigo backward onto the bed.

“I didn’t pay for nothing.”

Keigo stared at the ceiling after, face turned away, and pretended the blackout curtain was a night sky. When the raid came a week later and the walls shook with boots and men shouting clear, he didn’t feel the thrill he’d always felt in drills. He felt tired. He felt old.

Back at the Commission the applause sounded tinny. Koichi beamed, hand to Keigo’s shoulder. Keigo flinched. It was small. Koichi felt it anyway. Something like offense flickered through his eyes.

Three days off. Keigo slept them like a fever.

When he woke, he was told his Handler would be changing. In the President’s office, Koichi stood close enough their fingers brushed. “I’ve been given an exciting new assignment,” he said, cheeks full of pleasure. “But I’ll still see you, sweetheart. You’ll come when I call.”

Keigo smiled because you smiled at the President. “Of course, Sir.”

“Wonderful,” Koichi said, laughter warm like fresh coffee.

That was the last day Koichi was his Handler. It wasn’t the last day he touched Keigo.

 

 

 

 

 

Ages 18–21

The debut fit like skin. Hawks’ new uniform sculpted to every line. In the greenroom, a makeup artist tapped gloss onto his mouth and hummed a pop song. “Perfect,” she said, leaning back. The stage manager counted down on fingers. Hawks rolled his shoulders, felt the weight of a city waiting, and stepped into the light.

The interview was softballs and smiles. He sparkled like they’d trained him to sparkle. The President spoke about sacrifice, about civic duty, about the honor of raising children to step into danger. Hawks laughed into his hand and turned the sound into a cough.

It worked. Within a year he was top ten, then top three on the Billboard. Headlines sang. Fans made posters. Miruko texted him feral encouragement and showed up at 2 a.m. with food he absolutely wasn’t supposed to eat. The apartment felt less like a set and more like a home. Hawks met Endeavor in person for the first time and felt something ripple under that plank of a face, a flick that caught on Hawks’ instincts and then slid away.

He turned twenty alone in a chair by a window, the city glittering like a thousand eyes. He wanted a lollipop so badly his teeth ached. He poured whiskey instead, then called Koichi because that was easier than admitting he wanted sweetness. Koichi answered and was rough like always and the wanting burned away into a familiar, survivable quiet.

At the Sports Festival, a boy with half-white hair moved like a story Hawks had heard once and forgotten. The angle of his shoulders felt like a memory you can’t look at straight. Hawks bit his lip until he tasted iron and wrote down the name Todoroki Shouto with steady hands. Birds flocked to birds.

 

 

 

 

 

Blackness receded like tide. Hawks came back to Ujiko’s lab on a stagger, mouth tasting like tin and old sugar. The restraints tore loose. Hands—gloved, surprisingly careful—helped him sit. A bucket thunked into his lap. He gagged dry.

“How long?” he croaked.

“Six hours forty-three minutes,” Ujiko said, flipping his watch and peering over half-moon lenses. “Seven if we count pre-drop. You should return to your quarters. It’s… busy today.”

Hawks pressed his fingertips into his thighs until sensation cut through the throbbing in his skull. He nodded, slid off the cot, and swayed his way into the corridor. He wanted Dabi. He wanted a quiet room and hands that warmed and didn’t take.

What he got was Skeptic.

The man walked down the corridor hunched over a screen that looked like it never left his hands. His pupils flicked like cursor blips. Hawks’ instinct was to make himself small and let chaos wash past. The hall was too long. There was nowhere to go.

Skeptic lifted his head, face sharpening when he registered Hawks. The sneer set before he spoke. “Why are you still here, spy?”

Hawks folded his hands at the small of his back, a posture that made him feel less likely to break. His head throbbed. “No point lying,” he said, voice flat with exhaustion. “Spy.”

“I left years ago,” Skeptic snapped, closing the space between them with quick, birdlike steps. “At least I’m not still sucking the Commission’s dick.”

The words hit and slid off. Hawks took a single step back, because if he didn’t he was going to put a feather through something and he was too tired to clean up the mess. “Good talk,” he said, and slipped past, up the stairs, into his room.

His file sat on the table, spine blown, like a wound that wouldn’t scab. He wanted to burn it. He wanted to swallow it. He fell onto the bed instead. His phone buzzed under his hip. Shouto. The panic shot him upright.

He dialed Tokoyami. No answer. The hollow under his ribs opened wide. He dialed again. Shouto picked up on the second ring, frame at an odd angle, Tokoyami ducking into shot behind him.

“Hi, Hawks-sensei. Tokoyami is here to—”

“You’re a lot like Dabi, you know,” Hawks blurted, his brain lurching toward the wrong exit.

Silence crashed.

Shouto’s eyes narrowed. “You think I’m a mass-murdering psychopath who burns innocent people?”

Hawks stared at his own dumb mouth reflected in the black bar at the bottom of the screen. “That’s—no. That’s not what I— I meant stubborn. And fire. And— Let’s ignore that.” He forced a weak smile. His head pounded. “I’m not feeling great. Maybe I—”

“Perhaps we should call tomorrow,” Tokoyami said gently, voice like a hand on a shoulder. “Rest.”

They signed off. The shame tasted like old pennies. Hawks thumbed through messages and found the one that changed the shape of his day. He exhaled through his teeth. Dabi would have to wait.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shinya’s safehouse sat where the city stopped caring who lived in its ribs. Inside, it was clean and quiet and full of ordinary things: a coffee machine that burbled, cabinets with mismatched mugs, a couch that had known naps. It felt like a place heavy with other people’s secrets.

Koichi sat on the couch as if it were a throne he’d rented. Hawks made tea with hands that remembered the proportions without help. He set the cup down on a coaster shaped like a lemon slice. The table was a map of Hawks’ last few weeks—photos paperclipped to notes, timetables, sketches of hallways, serial numbers of crates, the shape of a transmission tower disguised as a line of power poles.

“We move in forty-eight hours,” Koichi said, as if reading the weather. “Heroes will be in position. We’ll wait for your signal.”

Hawks’ heartbeat crawled up into his throat. “It won’t be enough,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Give me two weeks and I can—”

“No.” Koichi sipped. His mouth curved, the good humor of a man who had all the cards and a marked deck. “You might find motivation useful. We have agents shadowing your interns. Would you like to see?”

The bottom fell out of Hawks’ stomach. He hadn’t dismissed their threats as empty—he never did—but proof pinholed the world. Koichi turned his phone. A live feed: Shouto and Tokoyami at the dorm dining table, Shouto talking with his hands, Tokoyami listening with that tilted-curious posture that made Hawks’ chest ache with affection.

Hawks didn’t let his wings flare. He didn’t throw the phone. He breathed and counted to eight and stopped. He needed time. He needed a plan that saved both the kids and the people upstairs who had, god help him, become his.

“In two days,” he said, and made it sound like agreement.

Koichi’s smile thinned. “Attaboy.”

When the tea was gone, Koichi left. Hawks sat in the quiet after, hands flat on his knees, and thought until the sky paled. Every path he traced either ended in a graveyard or a jail. He didn’t want either. He wanted something else. Something he had never allowed himself to want because wanting it had been dangerous: everyone he loved free at the same time.

He stood. He flew through a seam in the clouds so he wouldn’t cast a recognizable silhouette. He circled the forest until the roofline of the mansion slid out of trees, then dropped to the higher eaves. He slipped the bedroom window with a practiced twist of a feather in the latch.

The room smelled like his soap and clean cotton and the faint scorched-sugar scent that clung to certain hallways here. He took one step inside, feathers flattening to his back.

A shape unglued itself from the shadow by his dresser. Blue eyes glinted, steady as pilot lights.

“Want to tell me where you’ve been, pretty?” Dabi asked, voice low and rough with sleep or fury—Hawks couldn’t tell which. The word pretty landed softer than the question.

Chapter 30: Chapter 30

Notes:

Final chapter!!!

Dabi returns to the base from recruiting knowing something is off. His room is colder then usual and the base isn't filled with the usual buzz of people. He showers, letting the water trickle over his body and washing away his sweat. 

He doesn't bother putting a shirt on when he heads downstairs to find the other members.To his suprise only Toga sits at the kitchen bench, munching on a red popsicle. 

"Where are the rest of the idiots?" He asks, yanking open the fridge door. 

Toga whines and flops face first into the bench, "They all went to scout out another location, and they told me to stay. Can you believe them!" 

Dabi rolls his eyes and chews on some leftover chicken, "Yeah I can. Where's Hawks?" 

He turns to sit next to Toga, nose scrunching up when he realizes that her sweet treat is actually frozen blood. She hums taking another bite out of the popsicle. 

"Pretty sure I heard him head down to Ujiko's lab before, but that was hours ago. Maybe I should get Hawksie one of these!" 

She points to the now melting stick in her hand a huge grin spreading across her face. 

Dabi scowls with a stern "No" and tugs on one of Toga's hair buns, she shreiks and runs away, yelling about his greasy fingers. At least Hawks is okay, probably having the time of his life in that Greenhouse. Dabi smiles at the memory of their kiss. 

He stops chewing, too focused on replaying the moment again in his head, Hawks on his tiptoes, golden eyes watching him, pink lips on hi- 

"What the fuck is wrong with you." 

Dabi snaps his attention to the new voice, he cringes as Kondo stares at him. Oh god, why'd the freaky mind reader have to interrupt him right then. 

"What." He asks defensively. 

"Quit having wet dreams about Hawks, I can hear you from my room three stories up." 

Kondo looks just about ready to smash his head into a wall, and Dabi would feel sorry but Kondo had kept him awake all of last night fucking his girlfriend. He shrugs and offers a piece of chicken instead. Kondo takes it and grabs a beer from the fridge. He's just about to leave when he turns around looking confused. 

"I saw Hawks running downstairs, but now I can't hear him. Did he leave?" 

Dabi frowns wiping his hands with a tissue, swallowing his last bite as he tilts his head, "Hawks hasn't left the base since he came. What do you mean you can't hear him." 

Kondo takes a swig of his drink wiping his mouth after, "I mean I can't hear his thoughts, not that I ever really could. That guys mind is like a brick wall. Anyways it's like he's not even here, stopped hearing him like seven hours ago?" 

Something twists in Dabi’s stomach and he strides past the confused Kondo and heads up to Hawks's room. He runs into Skeptic and narrows his eyes as he hears him swearing. Dabi stops him and asks when he'd last seen the hero. 

Skeptic scoffs, "Of course, he's sucking your dick too." 

Dabi growls and pushes the guy away. Hawks's door is slightly ajar and he clenches his jaw as he steps in to find it empty. His breath catches when he notices the file on the table and sits down on a chair. It'll be morning soon, wherever Hawks has gone, he'll need to be back soon. 

~~~

He's right. Hawks returns not even two hours later as the clock hits seven in the morning. Dabi notices instantly the strained look on his face and steps forward. 

"Want to tell me where you've been pretty." 

Hawks tenses, his feathers perking up. Dabi watches him slowly make his way away from the window and towards him. He doesn't expect the hero to fall into his chest and Dabi wraps his arms around Hawks bending his knees so they sit curled up on the floor. Now he's even more worried, Hawks's body is shaking but he's not crying, at least not yet. 

"I'm sorry." 

Hawks's voice is so soft and pained Dabi's heart aches hearing it. He brings one of his hands to smooth red feathers and uses his other to adjust Hawks into his lap. The hero's arms wrap around his neck and his face presses into Dabi's collarbones. He's suddenly all too aware of his half nakedness. 

He pats Hawks on the back and heats up his hands just the way Hawks likes it. It does the job and Dabi can feel the younger relaxing against his body. 

"What are you sorry for?" 

Hawks sniffles and lifts his head up, his gold eyes shine with emotion and Dabi has to remind himself to focus as he gets lost in them. 

"I rem- I'm sorry for leaving. Just wanted to fly."

"Oh Hawks, I should have noticed sooner. This isn't the best place to spread your wings out is it." 

Hawks grimaces and nods once. 

"Yeah..." 

Dabi closes his eyes before flicking them open again, he smiles and bravely places a kiss on Hawks's nose. The younger blushes and blinks a couple of times. The reaction is too cute and Dabi does it again and again. He only stops when Hawks's small giggle fills his ears. 

Hawks shifts so that he's straddling Dabi and both of them move closer together. He admires the way hero's eyes travel down and across his body. 

He brings his hands and places them on both sides of Hawks's small waist. The hero stares at him and Dabi lets him. Hawks leans in and carefully presses their lips together. It's so surreal it takes Dabi a moment to realize its happening. He wastes no time and presses back into Hawks’s mouth eagerly. 

There's something different in the way Hawks kisses him and Dabi loves it, it's more needy, more desperate. He reciprocates happily, pulling Hawks even closer into him, smirking as the younger lets out a breathy moan. He uses that moment and slips his tongue inside sucking on Hawks's bottom lip. 

Their panting, chests heaving at the lack of oxygen and Hawks eventually pulls back. Dabi leans forward and noses along flushed skin on the hero's neck,  kissing it as he does. 

"Dabi, wa- wait. I can't-" 

He pulls back immediately, the memories of Hawks's brusied body after the Gala flashing through his mind. 

"I'm sorry..." 

Dabi shakes his head dragging his hands soothingly through Hawks's wings, "It's okay, you're okay." 

Hawks shudders and crawls back off Dabi much to his disappointment. They stand up and Hawks’s eyes travel to the file on the table. He clears his throat sending a feather to carry the folder over to his bag and drops it in there. 

Dabi doesn't ask. 

It's suddenly awkward and Dabi alternates his weight onto his other foot. Hawks still has a distant sort of expression on his face that Dabi just can't figure out. 

"You should go to sleep. You've been awake all night right?" 

Hawks seems suprised and raises a single eyebrow, "Have you not also been awake." 

Dabi puffs up his cheeks, Hawks seems so genuinely concerned, "How about we both head off to bed. Would you... would you want me to stay?" 

Something in Hawks’s face twitches and Dabi watches his throat as he gulps. The hero nods shyly and bites his lips in a way that makes him realize how young Hawks really is. Dabi sighs out in content as he tucks himself into Hawks’s bed, the heroes lips curl up as he watches. 

Hawks sidles into the bed beside him and cautiously Dabi drapes an arm around Hawks’s waist. When there's no signs of protest he scooches forward resting his face into golden locks of hair. 

~~~

Hawks can't sleep, he wastes the whole day watching Dabi sleep, tracing his fingers softly against the purple scars and staples on the villain’s chest. His heart feels heavy, Touya had to go through all of that and yet here he is as Dabi, and nothing's changed, he's still the same thirteen year old boy who looks at him with hearts in his eyes. 

He slips out of Dabi's hold making sure not to wake him up as he does. He has around ten hours to get him and his chicklets as far away as possible. The League will be okay, he knows they will be. Shigaraki is a strong leader and with the Meta Liberation Army backing them up, the hero's won't be able to hold them for long. Plus, with all the new areas they've been scouting out, there's more than enough places to run for refuge. 

And Ujiko... well, with his Nomu it will definitely help slow down the hero's. 

Hawks's feathers collect his belongings and pack them quickly into his bag. Dabi still sleeps soundly curled up in his bed, he watches the rise and fall of the villain's chest for a few minutes before heaving out a sigh and walking out of the room. 

Fuck. This is harder then I thought it would be. 

Hawks’s phone buzzes and he smiles softly at the little thumbs up from Tokoyami. He'd told them the plan on his way back from his meeting. He checks the time, it's almost five. Quietly he makes his way into the kitchen and grabs himself something to eat, he can't be running on fumes. He's going to need all his strength for this. 

It hits six too fast for his liking and he tucks the pen he was using away. With a shaky inhale he sends a quick message and then slides into a side door that leads outside, his wings shiver at the cold breeze. Bending his knees, he grips onto his bag tighter and takes off. 

~~~

Dabi's shaken awake by a distressed Compress, he blinks and with a sinking feeling in his chest, notices the absence of a certain hero in the bed. 

"Dabi get up. There's a meeting in the lounge, hurry up." 

He narrows his eyes suspiciously, Compress has never been so hurried before. He kicks the sheets off himself and accepts the shirt that's offered to him. They both trudge downstairs where the rest of the memebers sit, all looking devastated. The TV is playing and Dabi widens his eyes at it. Two students went missing last night from UA grounds? 

"What the hell is happening." He grumbles out. 

Something is shoved into his chest and he looks down to see a slip of paper. Spinner looks grim as he nods his chin at it. 

"He wrote one for all of us. Read it, it'll explain everything." 

He raises his eyebrows in confusion but cracks open the paper regardless. His heart stops after reading the first line and he forces down his fire. 

Dabi,

By the time you read this I'll be long gone. I leave because Shouto and Tokoyami are in danger and I couldn't live with myself if anything were to happen to them.

I also write this as a warning, the hero's will be arriving today. That's my fault, I only wish I had more time to warn you and the other's and I'm sorry about that. 

It'll all be okay though. I'll make sure it will be. I'm not sure how long I'll be gone, all I know is that I need to keep these kids safe and away from the HPSC. I hope you'll understand. 

The Commission is ruthless, they won't stop hunting me once they realise what I've done.

But I'm sure you know that, right Touya? 

Dabi stumbles back a step a pained moan slipping through his lips. Everyone watches him solemnly, they each have their own letters gripped tightly in their fingers. He takes a stuttering breath and continues reading. 

I'm sorry I've made you wait, it took me too long to remember everything, but the important thing is that I do. I remember you. 

Touya, there's nothing I want more then to be with you right now, to hold you, to kiss you again. Without a doubt your the best thing that's ever happened in my life and I don't know what I'm going to do now knowing your in danger because of me.

Which is why I've left you the address of where I'm taking the kids. Come with me, leave the villain life behind. 

Of course I understand if you don't, I've provided this choice for each of the other members too. I know it seems like I'm running away, and we'll I am. But it's the only way I can buy myself enough time. 

I'm so sorry it has to be this way. 

Love, 

Your Keigo.

The room is deadly silent and he drops his hands, blood trickles down his cheek and Twice offers his handkerchief. Dabi opens his mouth to speak but all that comes out is a choked sob. Shigaraki works his jaw and stands up from his seat. 

"I've already told the other about the hero's... start transferring as many people out to the other bases. Hopefully we can clear this building out before they arrive." 

Kurogiri holds up his own letter eyes scanning over it, "He says he never provided the locations of them, we'll be okay as long as we leave now." 

Spinner nods, "Kurogiri, I'll help you get people through." 

Shigaraki frowns and turns his gaze to the whole room, "Toga and Twice assist the crazy doctor, Compress we'll need your help to keep the crowds calm. Dabi find Ryota and get his guys to clear any evidence lef-" 

"No." Dabi barks out, clenching his fists in determination.

"I just got him back. I'm not leaving him now." 

Toga smiles and Spinner gags. Shigaraki groans in exasperation rubbing his face, theres a sort of gentle look on his face and Dabi knows he's not mad. 

"Yeah alright, kinda figured you'd say some dumb shit like that." 

Dabi's gaze remaines laser-focused on the address scribbled in the corner of the letter, his mind replaying the memories he'd shared with Keigo as a child.

For years, he'd revelled in chaos and destruction, but then Hawks's face flashes through his mind, and he knows his priorities have shifted.

He'd follow Keigo anywhere. 

As if summoned by Dabi's decision, a portal materialises before him, its whooshing sound a stark contrast to the tension in the air. Dabi turns to Kurogiri, sending a quick smile of gratitude.

His grip on the letter tightens and without a backwards glance, he steps through the portal, leaving the others behind.

Notes:

Yes there is going to be a sequel!

Woo, this was a whirlwind of a story. Thank you guys so much if you made it all the way to the end !

Leave a comment, I love reading them :3

Notes:

Thanks for reading!

-S

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of Under Bloodied Wings