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THE WAREHOUSE DABI HAD agreed to meet at is completely run down, the roof caving in on one side and the metal on the doors dangerously rusted.
Despite that, the villain standing in front of him looks completely at home.
Never without a weapon, Hawks’ wings are half-open in a gesture that manages to be lazy and alert at the same time, eyes glinting predatorily and lips pulled up in a careless grin. His feathers flash in the dim light, indicating that they’re already sharpened, and instinctively, Dabi pulls fire to the surface of his skin, ready to ignite in a split second.
For a beat, there’s silence.
Hawks breaks it.
“Can we both agree that this is stupid?”
Dabi stiffens. Hawks continues, apparently not caring that the flames are dangerously close to bursting forth from his palms.
“I’m not stupid. Neither are you—actually, that’s debatable—but we both know that I know that the HPSC sent you to get intel on me. You can drop the act.”
Dabi forces himself to keep his face neutral. He’d known Hawks was smart, but he’d personally thought he’d been doing a decent job of staying undercover so far, giving away as little as possible and spinning a compelling motivation for joining the villains’ side. Still, Hawks isn’t lying—the reason he’s even talking to the villain right now is because of his (so far, six-month-long) operation to gather information on the newest villain who’s been tearing up society.
The worst thing is, he doesn’t hate it.
Dabi makes his face go completely expressionless, as cold as ice and just as unforgiving. He considers his options. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says carefully.
Hawks raises his eyebrows.
“You sure about that, Todoroki Touya?”
Dabi flinches.
He can’t help it.
That name shouldn’t exist.
“I—don’t know what you’re talking about,” he repeats, but his voice is less steady this time, and Hawks notices, judging by how his feathers flutter slightly and catch the light on razor-sharp edges.
“It’s not hard to figure out,” the villain says, evidently enjoying this game of cat and mouse gone wrong—Dabi was always meant to be the cat, but how had Hawks managed to turn the tables so fluidly? “Your quirk, your age, your eyes… they all match up. Your compelling backstory just sealed the deal.”
Dabi swallows, the heat beneath his skin turning to a pressing itch. “Todoroki Touya is dead,” he manages. “You saw the news all those years ago.”
The shrug that Hawks gives him is completely self-assured. “You’re right,” he says, tone mocking. “Because the media never lies.”
Dabi tells himself to breathe, because no matter what Hawks is saying, Todoroki Touya is dead. This is Dabi, the hero who’ll knock Endeavour from the number one spot despite being a disappointment , and he’s long since left behind the boy with red hair and fear in his eyes.
He cuts to the chase.
“What the hell do you want?” he asks the villain. “Why’d you call me here?”
The smile on Hawks’ face does not waver.
Dabi’s breath catches when he finds a feather at his throat, sharp and deadly and far too close to his skin for comfort.
“I can’t risk you leaking information on me to the HPSC,” he says easily, as if he isn’t a second away from slitting Dabi’s throat. “Having them on my trail would clip my wings.”
The fire at Dabi’s skin sears. The feather inches closer.
“It’ll be quick,” Hawks promises.
The flames burst forth.
Fire curls from Dabi’s hands, engulfing the warehouse, and if he weren’t prepared for it, the oxygen would have been snatched from his lungs. Even so, the heat makes it hard to breathe, and scorching blue imprints itself on the backs of Dabi’s eyelids when he blinks. His skin tingles painfully, but it isn’t unbearable— yet .
Out of nowhere, a tiny projectile nicks his cheek. A drop of blood trickles from his skin. He sends a longer feather up in flames as it shoots towards his chest.
And through the fire, Hawks lunges forward.
The villain looks like an avenging angel, wings burning and flame-wreathed feathers in his hands—
Dabi only just sends up a wall of fire in time to avoid being slashed to pieces.
He has approximately five minutes. After that, his skin will start burning, and the flames will steal all the oxygen from the air, and they’ll both burn to a crisp and die.
He turns, pulse racing.
He keeps his breaths shallow. Eyes trained for movement. He scans the writhing cobalt for a trace of red or gold, but finds nothing—
His torso erupts with pain.
He fights against the automatic response to gasp in pain, to send oxygen racing through his body. The adrenaline is enough to keep him from collapsing. He turns, the flames bursting forth before he thinks.
Hawks doesn’t scream.
Dabi watches it as if it’s in slow motion—the widening of gold eyes, the half-burned feathers that are more black than red, the automatic raising of arms to shield his face—
And the fire hits.
It’s too late for him to stop it now.
Dabi has always been one to start fires, not stop them—he’s not his brother, nor his mother, and he can only destroy .
Hawks rolls, the flames greedily consuming his wings. Bile rises to Dabi’s throat.
A fresh wave of fire surges from his palms, pushing through and clearing a circle in front of him.
The villain glares up at him, empty-handed, and he’s about to say something, but he’s interrupted by the screech of tires and the slamming of car doors.
“Open up!”
The shouts from the other side are loud and authoritative. Hawks grits his teeth and opens his wings.
When he meets his eyes, there’s no surrender in them.
Still, wings scorched and weapons burned, the look in Hawks’ eyes is a calculating one, and his eyes flit to the com in Dabi’s ear, then to the door, then to the trails of fire still coiling around his fingers in a split second. He staggers to his feet, looking at him challengingly.
“I’d rather it be by your hand than anyone else’s.”
Dabi hesitates.
He never hesitates. But the villain in front of him, ash smeared on his face, wings defiantly flared despite most of the feathers being missing, and that stubborn determination in his eyes—it reminds him of another boy, one in the past with bandages running up his arms and three younger siblings to protect.
And aren’t heroes meant to save lives, anyway?
He can’t afford to ponder.
The pros knock the door down, and he snaps his wrist out to send a roaring wave of blue flames forward. He grabs Hawks. Another burst of blue fire blows open the door behind them, then they’re tumbling out into the open, gasping for breath and cold air stinging their lungs.
There’s no time to think.
Hawks apparently doesn’t need any, because Dabi’s stomach threatens to exit his mouth a moment later. There’s a rush of motion. The city blurs around him, and when they’ve cleared the top of a building, Hawks promptly deposits him onto the roof.
Dabi rolls painfully and doesn’t stand back up. Beside him, Hawks coughs and drops to a crouch.
“What the hell,” Dabi manages. “You still had that much energy left?”
Hawks makes a sound like he’s trying to laugh. “Barely.”
Below them, Dabi can hear the sound of shouting and his flames crackling, consuming the dilapidated warehouse.
He turns to the villain beside him.
“You knew I wouldn’t kill you.”
“Heroes are always meant to save lives,” he responds, an unsettling imitation of what had been going through Dabi’s mind in the moment where he’d pulled both of them out of the flames.
Hawks’ wings are all but gone. If there was a good time to take him down, it would undoubtedly be now, but still, Dabi finds himself withholding.
He inhales, catching his bearings, the acrid scent of smoke filling his lungs. He keeps his voice steady, devoid of emotion. He’s good at that.
“How’d you find me out—what gave me away?”
“What gave you away? Nothing.” Despite the ash on his face, Hawks smiles. “I never trusted you.”
“And still, you let me hang around you for six months?”
He’s stalling for time. He isn’t sure what his end goal is now, because he’s been found out, so all hopes of getting more information are out the door. The wound in his torso isn’t too deep, but it’s long, and there’s a fair amount of blood dripping from it—rolling on the roof can’t have been good for it, either.
Hawks’ expression hardens. “You should’ve realised from the start. Hawks don’t hunt in groups.”
“They don’t pull their prey from burning buildings, either,” he counters.
“That’s because their prey doesn’t usually attack members of their own.” Hawks tilts his head, sunlight glinting off the piercing in his ear. “Why did you do that, anyway?”
“I—“
The words die in Dabi’s throat. There’s the sound of rushing water from below, and a vindictive hiss as his flames are forced to quell.
“What I said was true,” he finally says, pressing a hand against the wound on his torso. The adrenaline is starting to fade, and the pain comes hard and sharp. “I could never protect my siblings from the monster inside my own house, and the HPSC did nothing about it. Hero society is messed up.”
“So you’re turning to villainy?”
“Yeah,” he says, the response immediate. “The only reason I became a ranked hero was out of spite.”
“Spite for your old man, right? You want to knock him down from his spot, Todoroki ?”
Again with the name, and this time, Dabi manages to clamp down on the automatic response to flinch. “Believe what you want.”
And the scary thing is, Dabi knows that he’s right. In front of him, Hawks stands almost completely weaponless, the remaining feathers on his back scorched and skeletal, and it would be so easy for Dabi to send out a torrent of fire and put the bird straight into jail.
It would also be so easy— so easy —to turn straight to villainy, to tear Endeavour down from his pedestal and expose to the media everything that he’d done to them, to him and his siblings and his mother—he can’t pretend he hasn’t thought about that. If he did that as a hero, he’d spend the rest of his career being compared to his dirtbag of a father, but if he did that as a villain—
If he turns to being a villain, who’ll be there to protect the children who go to sleep with empty stomachs and feel safer in their nightmares than in reality?
Still—just in case—
He’ll keep the options open.
Hawks is his in on that.
“Believe what you want,” he repeats, and Hawks’ wings tilt in the light. He takes the com from his ear and crushes it beneath his boot. “But everything I told you is true.”
Hawks regards him, eyes unreadable, wings folding and unfolding like he’s about to take flight.
“I know,” he finally says. He lifts the visor from his eyes. “I’ve known for a while.”
Dabi doesn’t know how to feel. When have heroes ever accepted him like this, and when has he ever been free to speak like this? Hawks was never meant to belong in a cage, and maybe he wasn’t either, but the flames that arc from his body are their own prison that maybe he can never escape from.
It’s suffocating, and he’s rapidly running out of air.
Hawks gives him a look—not pitying, definitely not sympathising, but all the same, Dabi feels more understood than he ever has before.
“I’ll be in touch,” Hawks says, and he spreads his wings, charred as they are.
Dabi presses his hands more firmly against his torso. He breathes slowly and deeply. “You’re not worried about the HPSC?”
The grin Hawks gives him is the devilish smile that Dabi has discovered makes his breath hitch. “If you’re not working with them, what’s there to worry about?” He slips the visor back down over his eyes. “They’d never keep up with me, anyway.”
And in a blink, he’s gone.