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Flames, everywhere he can see, red and black and steel twisting together in rapidly shifting spires. There’s an explosion and then more red, and then golden sparks, and then there’s black smoke and crimson flames, and then the world is shimmering like a mirage through the fire: steel beams, metal girders, twisted glass, flickering behind the blackened air. A crash reverberates through the ground and his boots and his body and his wings, and Hawks watches as the once-proud Hero Commission building—along with his life, his future, and his legacy—collapse and give way and are swallowed by the fire.
In his ears, the roar of the blaze is deafening, a comfortable din that stifles out the screams. The constant cacophony of metal and screeching and earth-shaking makes it impossible to detect any individuals in trouble, and Hawks is grateful for that. He wasn’t sure if he’d be able to not save someone if he heard them or if his feathers picked them up; old habits die hard, they said.
But die they must. He watches the flames, the destruction, and he digs his heels into the ground and tucks his wings into his black coat. This is necessary. This is what he wanted, this is what they were going to do, and maybe…Hawks swallows painfully, black smoke filling his lungs and making him choke. Maybe if he did what he had always wanted for the two of them, then maybe he would come back? Maybe if he brought back the flames and the heat and the warmth…maybe it’ll feel like he’s by Hawks’s side again?
Hawks blinks. The flames vacillate, and he’s—he’s not seeing right, he can’t be seeing right, right? He blinks again, just to be certain, but there it is; the fire is reflected in his eyes, and he sees blue, a blaze of electric blue, and this is all he needs to know . He knows, he just knows , he needs to know that if he turns around he’ll see black hair and blue eyes and little dashes of steel etched into skin, he’ll hear that manic laugh, that smile playing on his lips. Hawks chokes, and this time it’s not from the smoke: tears are rising to his eyes and a lump is forming in his throat, and he reaches out, brimming with relief and euphoria and emotion because he really did know all this time—he knew that there was no way that Dabi was dead, because Dabi would have wanted to be with him when Hawks finally stopped deliberating and finally freed himself, and then the two of them would run away together, just like they’d planned, a blue blaze lighting the path forward and red wings carrying them away. Hawks is shouting something, his hands are moving, and he knows that Dabi is reaching out too, and that they’ll meet in the middle and that he’ll feel calloused fingertips and then the slip of a scarred hand in his—a scarred hand that always ran on the hot side, just shy of burning, which Hawks didn’t mind because he was always cold anyway. Between the two, they evened each other out.
Hawks blinks again and the fire is red again, his hands are cold again. There are no warm, almost-burning hands in his. His left hand is only holding an empty matchbox; his right is holding the last match. Where was he again? What was he doing again? His hands move again without him telling them to, clearly familiar with the motions. He swipes the match across the box, watching the tip light up, but it’s red, and not blue, not those familiar blue flames he now remembers he was looking for. That’s right: he was looking for the blue, chasing the blue, needing to see blue again.
Hawks chucks the match and the matchbox into the fire. They’re useless to him if they’re not blue. He has more. Dozens more, in fact. He reaches into the pockets of his coat: they were already fairly wide, but now they’re almost completely bulging with matches and lighters and other fire-setting paraphernalia. He pulls out another matchbox, dumps out all the matches, and he sets them alight one by one. Red, red, red. Useless, useless, useless. He goes through all the matches in seconds, so he pulls another matchbox out from his pocket. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Red. Useless. Red. Useless. Red. Useless.
Hawks pulls out a lighter, but his hands are slick with sweat, and his hands slip off the switch. He tries again, and his hands slip off again, and it’s too much, it’s all too much, he can’t deal with this right now, and so the lighters go into the flames with a frustrated yell. Surely he has more than enough matches, anyways. Hawks fumbles for another matchbox, and another, and another. The fire remains stubbornly red. It’s all Hawks can see. A blur of red. Another matchbox. Another useless red flame.
His hands are shaking. He can’t feel them. They’re numb. They’re cold. They’re so cold. He scrabbles at his pockets. Empty. Useless. The world is glowing red, which is wrong. All wrong. He needed to fix it, but where are the matches? Where is the fire?
As if to mock him, flames shoot up at his feet, licking at his boots, lapping at his knees, rising to his waist. This is it, he thinks, it’s over. He's going to die. He doesn't know how he feels about it: is he relieved? Exhilarated? But there's nothing but the press of disappointment behind his head. People say that your life flashes before your eyes when you die, but all Hawks sees is Dabi. The first time he met Dabi. The late-night phone calls. The lies. The truths. The kisses. The dreaming. The promises. The fire is flaring up hotter, higher, and the heat and smoke are suffocating. Red creeps up along the ground, brushing the bottom of his coat, starting to creep up the fabric, and then, without really meaning to, Hawks runs. He runs because he can’t die yet, not until he fixes everything—
“We’re going to set the Hero Commission building on fire together,” he had said, “and then, pretty bird, we’re going to be free.”
Hawks sobs. Dabi had been taller than him, so the tattered black coat around his shoulders already fairly engulfed his figure—but he still pulled it a little closer as the flames bore down on him, useless and red and swallowing him up.
Keigo had laughed. “And what are we going to do when we’re free?”
Dabi paused. “Let’s go and get a bucket of chicken nuggets.”
“Chicken nuggets?”
“Or whatever the Commission didn’t allow you to do before, because fuck them,” Dabi drawled. “Chicken nuggets weren’t part of your fancy hero diet, right?”
Keigo beamed, hiding his grin behind his sleeve. “Chicken nuggets sound good.”
“And then we kill Endewhore.”
“And then we free your family, preferably keeping human casualties to a minimum,” Keigo agreed. He switched to the PR voice the Hero Commission had trained him in because he knew it annoyed Dabi: “and then, of course, we concert our efforts towards dismantling the current corrupt hero system and making the world a better place overall, enacting crucial systematic changes…”
“Shut uuuupp, Keigo,” Dabi griped. He paused again. Then— “Do you really think we can make a difference?”
“I don’t know,” Keigo admitted, being completely honest, as he only could with Dabi. “But I’m a hero. It’s my job to save people and fix things, y’know? So I’m gonna try.”
Dabi laughed lowly, a slight note of disbelief in his voice. “Stupid birds with hero complexes.” But he smiled (the smile that he reserved only for him), so Keigo moved his sleeve and smiled back.
There was still much they had yet to talk about, awkward conversations to broach, complications to work out. They were completely different—maybe irreconcilably so—but that hadn’t stopped them before, and they could take things slow, figure it all out at their own pace. One step after another. One dream after the next.
Maybe they would make a difference. Who knows? They had their whole lives ahead of them.
He blinks again, and he’s flying above everything. The city below is up in smoke and fire, but from his vantage point in the sky, it all seems small and inconsequential: the haze and high of being in the smoke and fire and red is fading (red, it’s useless, it’s hopeless) and he forces himself to think, to clear his head, to figure out his next steps. It isn’t difficult. He’s a hero. He’s been trained to keep his head level and be a pillar of reassurance for society, no matter the situation.
Hawks pauses, flapping his ragged wings slowly. Is he a hero? He’s free now, technically, to do whatever he wants; with his wings and his speed, there would be no way for anyone to find him again if he chose to run away.
He could disappear into the crowd. Start a new existence. Begin again with an alter persona, forget all that had happened, and pretend to be a normal 23-year-old that wasn’t Hawks, that wasn’t the number two hero, that wasn’t traumatized or indoctrinated or mentally disturbed or anything. He could just forget everything and live a normal, mundane life—
Or he could stay. His manager would be beside herself, but his PR team could work wonders. People would forget about the incident soon enough; he knows how the media worked. And then he’d be back to comfortably shackling himself within the chains of hero society, comfortably going along with each new mission and each new life-threatening danger, comfortably breaking himself apart day after day after day for the good of the people…
If he’s to be completely honest, that was the option he preferred. He could hide behind the mask of the number two hero and then die a martyr, die in a blaze of glory, have people chanting his name and championing an image of his youth, his power, his sacrifice. He could die and leave this unfixable world at his debt. He—Hawks—would be an idol. And he , Takami Keigo (his Takami Keigo: the Keigo that fit in his arms, the soft “Keigo, Keigo, Keigo” that he whispered at night, the Keigo he saw through his eyes that was human and raw and free), would fade away.
He tries. He really does. He needs to move on, and the logical part of his brain knows that. He flits around for days, days that seem like an eternity, passing time by sleeping in a tree, visiting a seedy bar, just going through the motions and ghosting by on pure instinct. Hawks is barely staying alive.
But maybe a part of him had already died alongside Dabi.
Because now he can’t start over and forget everything, or else he’ll forget him, too. And if he lets himself fade away, then nobody will know Dabi, the Dabi that Takami Keigo came to know. The driven Dabi, the Dabi with stars in his eyes and a dream that he needed to fulfill, a purpose that he and Keigo both yearned for:
A world where heroes had time to kill.
“A world where heroes are heroes,” Dabi had told him.
“A world we’re going to create.”
This is such bullshit, Hawks thinks, suddenly furious. How dare the universe take Dabi away? He didn’t deserve to die. Of all people, he was the last person in the world who deserved to die. All those dreams, that passion, that determination—for fuck’s sake, what was it all for? And he had a family, a family that he cared about, a family that thought he was dead. He had wanted so badly to have a chance to reach out to them again, but he didn’t want to involve them in villainy—and even then, he still wanted to protect them and to rescue them. Hawks has never had a family—not a full one, anyways, but Dabi did, and Hawks envied how Dabi cared for his siblings and his mother, no matter where life led him. And now he’d never have the chance to meet them again. They’d think that Dabi really had been dead all along. It was bullshit. It was all bullshit.
Hawks was always detached, calculating, deliberating. Dabi burned , and maybe he burned a little of Hawks along with him, but Hawks had let him. But now Dabi wasn’t here, Dabi was dead, and Takami Keigo has to burn for the both of them, burn Hawks away, burn away the injustice in this filthy, violently red world.
Flames surge through him, screaming and clawing at his insides; the heat flares up, screaming to be let out, everything being set ablaze in fervor and necessity and purpose. He’s a hero, right? So who better than him to correct what was wrong?
He can fix this. He has to fix this. They’re going to fix this.
Coincidentally, the crappy motel he’d been staying at isn’t far off from where the fire in his gut is telling him he needs to be—although his wings and the flames could probably take him across all of Japan if he had needed to. Keigo snaps his wings outward, unfurling primaries and secondaries and tertiaries in a burst of crimson, and then there’s a flurry of feathers and air rushing up beneath him, carrying him up and away and to the one and only thing in his life that actually matters. The blue sky and blue fire greet him—encompassing him, flooding him, and driving him forward.
He’s found it. There it is. The blue.
Keigo wonders if this is how Dabi felt all the time.
Endeavor had never been Keigo’s childhood hero. He had always looked up to All Might—the paragon of heroship, the shining symbol and living proof that the good guys would always prevail in the end. But All Might merchandise was ridiculously overpriced, and whenever it was restocked, it would sell out in minutes. Keigo’s family had only ever been able to get the Endeavor plush for him.
Still, as he watched Endeavor on their apartment’s broken TV, he came to appreciate his efficiency, his speed, his understated bravery. But what had really sold him on Endeavor was that All Might had never started a family, but Endeavor had. He’d look up the happy photos of Endeavor and his beaming wife, of them talking about their children, of the rare photos of the Todorokis he could find. He would cradle the Endeavor plush between his wings and hold it when he fell asleep, dreaming that Endeavor would save him. And when he went to train with the Hero Commission, even though the plush was covered in fleas and dirt and filth, he refused to let the Hero Commission take it away, because the plush gave him hope. One day he’d be a strong hero just like Endeavor, and he’d have a family too—a perfect family like Endeavor’s, and he’d be a strong hero to protect them.
“I NEED TO KILL ENDEAVOR!” Dabi had screamed. “YOU DON’T GET IT! You—you don’t understand what it’s like to…to see your siblings and mom every day, getting beaten black and blue—you don’t get what it’s like to be irreparably broken, to be seen as damaged goods —to watch your mom flinch when she sees you—”
Keigo’s childhood dreams shattered with every word.
The large walls around the Todoroki property are laughable defenses against a flying intruder.
“Hawks?” Endeavor’s the one that answers the knock on the door, which is very convenient, really. The universe really is choosing to work in his favor today.
“Endeavor-san,” Keigo says. He leans back, slouching nonchalantly. His hands are in his pockets, and his face is arranged in some sort of pleasant facial expression. “I need to talk to you about something.”
Endeavor looks at him suspiciously, although that certainly isn’t anything new. “Why couldn’t this have been done during working hours?”
“It’s urgent,” Keigo insists. “C’mon, don’t you trust me?”
Endeavor furrows his brows. “You disappeared for two days without prior notice after the Hero Commission building burnt down. Witnesses recalled seeing you close to the scene before and after it occurred, implicating the possibility that you were involved in the incident. I’m sure you can understand my distrust.”
Keigo smiles awkwardly and fibs through his teeth. “Sorry. I live close to the Commission building, and I was running errands off-duty during the incident. And as for my disappearance, I had some family issues.” He rubs the back of his neck. “You know how it is.”
Keigo does not know “how it is,” because Keigo’s family may as well be dead to him, seeing as he hasn’t seen them in nearly two decades. Keigo wouldn’t know anything about an adult’s “family issues,” but from what he now knows about Endeavor, he’d be all too familiar with them. The fire rises a little higher as he thinks about Endeavor, and the Todorokis, and a certain specific Todoroki; Keigo examines Endeavor’s face closely, looking for a reaction, but Endeavor’s face remains taciturn.
“I see,” Endeavor says gruffly. “Come inside, then.”
“I can’t.” Keigo tries to sound apologetic, but the flames are a dull roar (useless, Endeavor, red, fire, red, useless) in his ears now, so he’s not sure if he succeeds. “I need to go soon—y’know, because of the family issues I mentioned earlier—but I just had to tell you this first. Although,” he says, giving the doorway a meaningful glance, “I’d prefer if we weren’t overheard.”
Endeavor still looks suspicious, but he relents. “Come along then. We can talk in the back.” He’s already walking away without waiting for Keigo’s reply, and Keigo follows, his easy smile taking on a sharper edge, blue swelling up inside of him.
Endeavor takes a few steps. (Red red red, useless red.)
Keigo reaches behind him. A feather sword makes its way into his hands.
Endeavor keeps walking. (Ungrateful, undeserving, unsuspecting.)
Keigo walks a little closer. The fire in him rises.
Endeavor is still walking forward. (A family. A father. A failure.)
Keigo sees blue. Eyes. Staples. Scarred flesh. A plea on broken lips, a dream to make a reality.
Endeavor is slowing down. (Dabi’s purpose. Keigo’s purpose.)
Blue, blue, blazing blue. Burning blue. The world set alive in blue. Cerulean, exploding and imploding, collapsing and falling and rising and soaring. Sparks, coming apart, breaking and fizzling. A flicker, a glow, a familiar scarred hand pressing into his; an ignition, a combustion, and roiling black smoke charring his throat; a seething, almost unfamiliar hatred pouring into his veins and an inferno growing and growing and growing inside of him—a maelstrom, a storm, the whirlwind of life and hatred and purpose that was Dabi, that is blue, that is fire.
Keigo raises his feather sword.
Endeavor turns around. (Their purpose.)
Keigo strikes.
And Keigo burns.