Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Dabi’s contact list was an amalgamation of things.

There were the expected entries like bloodsucker and handjob but also the more obscure names, like abracadabra, teenage mutant ninja lizard, and team mom and team dad.

Of course, the rotation of contacts was by no means constant. The names changed frequently, depending on the villain’s particular moods. For instance, when Toga was being particularly annoying, bloodsucker became crazy vampire girl. Shigaraki’s name was another that changed almost every week, using rotating between hand man, dusty, piece of shit boss, and buy some moisturizer you fuck (the last one was for when his phone got taken by one of the other League members).

The most frequently updated contact was Hawks’. Dabi gave the bird man a new name almost every day, sometimes multiple times in the same day. It had started off as a joke, but as the two of them met more and more it had become a thing between them—occasionally, Hawks even contributed, though Dabi always liked his own suggestions the best. At some point, Dabi reached a point where he pretty much gave him a new one whenever he thought of the hero, which was quite often—far more often than he would ever care to admit.

Regardless, Dabi’s system for naming his contacts was convenient for many reasons. First of all, it always annoyed Shiggy to no end when he stole Dabi’s phone only to find that he had absolutely no idea who anyone was, and a chance to piss off Shigaraki was always a gift. Plus, if Dabi’s phone ever fell into the wrong hands, no one would be able to decipher the names on the contacts without actually calling them, which would usually alert given that pretty much all of Dabi’s contacts were the League.

Unfortunately, it also had many downsides. Such as now, when the League was scrambling to pack up everything and switch bases because their entire building had been compromised.

It had started off with something like this:

Spinner had been craving a taste of chicken, and had stated as much.

“Why don’t you just order some then? I’m a vegan!” Twice had suggested.

Spinner had looked dejected. “The boss dusted my phone last week.” He had carefully chosen to omit the reason why, lest he piss off Shigaraki by reminding him yet again of his thirty-two consecutive losses in Mario Kart.

“Dabi, give him your phone,” Shigaraki had said, not taking his eyes off his game.

“Why don’t you give him your phone?” Dabi had complained, but he had nonetheless handed it over.

Spinner had accepted the device gratefully. When he had opened to the phone app, he had been surprised but pleased to see that Chicken had been one of the most recent calls. When exactly Dabi had ordered was something Spinner could not recall, but he had brushed it off in favor of calling the number.

The first call had rung for a long while before going to voicemail. Spinner had tried to call again, but unfortunately with similar results. On the third try, Spinner had been tempted to just find the number for a different chicken place himself, when suddenly the call connected.

“Uh, hello?” a voice on the other end had hissed in obvious displeasure.

“Hello? I want to order chicken. How much is it to deliver to this address?” Spinner had asked, quickly rattling off the address to the League’s hideout.

“I’m sorry sir,” the voice on the other end (which Spinner had thought was familiar, though he could not pinpoint exactly why) had replied, sounding pained, “I think you have the wrong number.”

“Who the fuck are you calling?” Dabi had suddenly asked from the side after noticing the commotion.

Suddenly there had been a scrambling on the other end and a slew of indistinguishable voices different from the original could be heard.

“Wait, that sounded like the villain Dabi,” was the only thing that Spinner had been able to make out in the chaos. The statement had been followed by more muffled noises, before the original voice spoke once more.

“No, you must have heard wrong, Police Detective Tsukauchi,” it had said, placing a heavy emphasis on the latter words.

At that point, the entire League had snapped to attention, looking at Spinner with varying degrees of horror as the conversation on the other side of the phone continued.

“No, I believe I heard the same thing,” another voice—this one deeper and more mature but also somehow familiar—interjected on the phone. “They mentioned an address earlier. What was it?”

“Uh, I’m sorry I don’t remember it, Eraserhead,” the original voice replied innocently.

“Hawks, why are you saying our names like that?”

“Like what? Haha, I don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re a pro hero, I should pay some respect to your title, right?” the original voice—which Spinner finally recognized as Hawks—laughed nervously, once again emphasizing a few important words, though he no longer needed to as by then all of the League had already figured out what was happening. He seemed like he wanted to say more, but he was interrupted by another unfamiliar voice, which repeated the exact address Spinner had given.

“Alright, all units scramble. Time is of the essence. We are raiding the location at the address stated before, call in all heroes in the vicinity and—”

There might have been more, but in a sudden panic Spinner had pressed the end call button.

“Oh was that Hawksie?” Toga asked, bouncing over.

Shigaraki whipped around to face Spinner, “You called Hawks?”

“Worse,” Dabi responded lazily, “he called Hawks in front of a Police Detective, an Underground Pro Hero, and probably at least a dozen other officers who are on their way to this location right now.”

“What the fuck Spinner?”

Spinner looked around nervously. “I just wanted to order chicken!”

“How the fuck did you confuse hawks with chickens? They’re not even the same type of bird!”

“It was Dabi’s phone! I literally just called the number that was listed under chicken,” Spinner whined. Everyone turned to look at Dabi, who only shrugged. Shigaraki buried his face in his hands.

“Fuck you all. Fuck this shit. Ugh, everyone get your shit and scram, we’re getting the fuck out of here right now!”

With that, the whole of the League scrambled in different directions to make their quick and messy escape.

All of that brought them to now. All remaining members of the League had abandoned their home base, and were now stuck in some run-down basement in an abandoned building in the middle of nowhere.

“Ugh, you just had to fucking order chicken.”

“How was I supposed to know Chicken was Hawks?”

Chapter Text

Class 1-A had an on-going bet about the identity of the villain Dabi.

Some of them thought he was a crazy relative of Stain’s seeking revenge for his incarceration. Others thought he was actually a wealthy playboy billionaire who turned to villainy to let off steam. Still others thought he was some former pro hero who had gone crazy and turned evil after not making top ten in the popularity polls, who wanted to murder all the heroes that had ranked above him. Jirou in particular had money on him being some kind of advanced nomu experiment gone wrong. When asked why, she simply shrugged and offered no further explanation.

It was during one of their Dabi conspiracy theory brainstorming sessions when Tsuyu suggested that Dabi was a long lost Todoroki, noting the similarities between their quirks and eye color.

“Hey Todoroki, you wouldn’t happen to have a long lost brother or something?” Kirishima asked jokingly, leading to a few chuckles around the room.

Todoroki looked at them all thoughtfully, carefully considering the question. As his silence stretched on, any laughter from before had ceased as their classmates slowly turned to Todoroki, whose brow was furrowed seriously.

“Uh, Todoroki?” Midoriya asked hesitantly.

Todoroki put down his slushie, which was a telltale sign that things were about to get serious. He opened his mouth, and for the next thirty minutes Class 1-A sat in silence as they listened to Todoroki tell the story of his older brother Touya.

By the end of it, almost all of Class 1-A were sitting in various states of wide-eyed shock.

“Holy shit, Dabi is actually Todoroki’s brother!” Kaminari said in awe.

“There’s no fucking way that fire fuck is half-and-half’s brother,” screamed Bakugou.

“Well, there’s one way to find out for sure.”

Everyone turned to Mina, the one who had spoken. Seeing that everyone’s attention was on her, she continued, “We can just ask him!”

Iida looked scandalized. “We cannot simply ask a member of the League of Villains for their real identity!”

Midoriya nodded. “Iida is right guys, and besides, there’s no guarantee Dabi would even tell us the truth. We need a way to verify his identity. Something that’s completely foolproof and of course there’s still the issue of avoiding being burned alive by his quirk and also even then we would still need to somehow—”

He continued to mumble to himself, but the rest of the class had long since learned to tune Midoriya out.

“If we could get close enough, we could just steal one of his hairs for a DNA test,” Tsuyu suggested.

Everyone paused for a moment as they took in what she said.

“That’s … actually not the worst idea.”

And thus the plan to kidnap the villain Dabi and find out his origins was born.

It was a normal Saturday afternoon.

Dabi was shuffling along in some back alley, just minding his own business when suddenly his danger senses—honed from years of living on the streets alone and then a year of being a wanted villain after that—went crazy.

Dabi had only a split second to prepare himself before he was suddenly met with a giant wall of ice rushing towards him. He quickly reacted with a wave of blue flames, vaporizing the ice in mid-air. The reaction created a giant cloud of smoke and vapor, forcing Dabi to cover his face and squint to try to see.

“Take this, you fire fuck!” came a scream as something blasted through the cloud, heading straight for him. Dabi quickly ducked and shifted to the side, narrowly avoiding another giant explosion. He fired back another blast of blue fire, but before it could reach its target it was intercepted. Dabi’s eyes widened as he recognized the hardening kid from Class 1-A.

The moment of distraction proved almost fatal as a shining laser beam shot through the cloud of dust, narrowly missing Dabi’s head. He quickly scrambled, searching for some sort of cover nearby. He narrowly avoided a spray of acid, simultaneously ducking out of the way of another ice blast and—wait, was that a gunshot? Just as he thought he was safe, he felt something wrap around his arm and he was unceremoniously yanked into the air. He barely managed to duck into a roll as he landed heavily on the sidewalk some distance away.

“He’s distracted, quick Iida!” shouted a voice that Dabi thought he vaguely recognized—it was the green All Might wannabe. There was a burst of wind and suddenly the engine legs kid from the class was in his face, reaching for his… hair? Instinctively, Dabi ducked back and kicked outward, sending the kid flying backward.

With the small window of time he had bought himself, Dabi quickly scrambled out of the alleyway, running down the street, uncaring of how suspicious he must have looked. When he was a safe distance away, he finally stopped to catch his breath.

What the fuck that was about? he wondered, taking stock of himself and his surroundings. It was only then that he realized he must have dropped his phone at some point during the chaos.

Well fuck.

“Darn, he got away,” Mina said, looking dejected. Sero patted her back consolingly.

The smoke had finally cleared, and the rest of the students who had come along gathered in a small circle to inspect the surroundings and see if there was anything left that they might be able to make use of.

“Oh hey, he dropped his phone!,” Kirishima said suddenly, holding up the device and showing it to everyone. “And it’s even unlocked!”

“Can I take a look at that, Kirishima?,” Midoriya asked. Kirishima nodded, handing over the device. “This is very useful, it might have some clues about Dabi’s identity. He has to have contact info for a family member somewhere in here right?”

Midoriya quickly opened the contact list. There were a bunch of entries, most of them being complete gibberish. There were simple things like dumbass no. 1 and dumbass no. 2. There were also entries that made little sense, like leave me the fuck alone, as well as specific ones such as lizard thing and entertainment. The most cryptic entries were in all caps—for instance, DO NOT CALL he thinks ur dead and DO NOT CALL she also thinks ur dead and BRAT (who also also thinks ur dead). The only entries that were anywhere close to normal were someone named Giran, another listed as Doctor, as well an entry for Daddy.

“I didn’t think Dabi would be the type to call his father daddy,” Momo commented, reading over Midoriya’s shoulder.

Jirou shrugged. “I guess you can never know with these things, right?”

Suddenly, Kaminari grabbed the phone out of Midoriya’s hands, waving it around excitedly. “Guys, we have Dabi’s phone,” he said animatedly, “do you realize what this means?”

“It means that we can turn it over to the heroes to assist them in defeating the League?” Iida suggested.

“No, it means we can figure out Dabi’s identity! If we just call his dad and pretend to be him, we can get him to reveal who Dabi is!”

“That’s a stupid plan,” Bakugou muttered.

“No, I think Kaminari is right. It could very well work,” Tsuyu said. A few others voiced their skepticism, but most seemed to be on board with the plan.

“It has to be convincing though, if we want Dabi’s father to believe us,” Midoriya muttered. “Who here has the most similar voice to Dabi?”

All eyes turned to Todoroki. He blinked owlishly.

“Please, Todoroki?” Mina asked. “You just have to pretend to be him for long enough that his dad calls you by his name. Then we’ll know who he is!”

“Or better, if Dabi really is Todoroki’s long lost brother, then he’ll know the moment Endeavor picks up right?” Kaminari pointed out.

Todoroki remained reticent, but under the combined pressure of his peers’ imploring stares, he simply shrugged in acquiescence.

In the end it was Midoriya who dialed the number, and he held up the receiver to Todoroki’s face helpfully.

“Hey,” came a smooth voice over the speaker that sounded vaguely familiar. More importantly, the voice was very clearly not Endeavor’s. The students all looked at each other, trying to figure out who it was.

“Hi, uh… dad— uh, daddy?” Todoroki spoke uncertainly, unsure of exactly what his friends wanted him to say. There was a long pause.

“What the fuck?” the voice on the other end exclaimed.

The class exploded into chaos.

“I guess Todoroki’s voice wasn’t convincing…”

“Maybe he sounds too young to be Dabi?”

“Fuck, fuck, we fucked up,” Kaminari screeched.

“Oh no, what if Dabi’s dad is some kind of yakuza boss? What if he’s coming here to kill us all right now?”

“Shit, you’re right. We should just hang up,” Sero said, reaching to grab the phone and end the call. Kirishima stopped him before he could, but even he looked hesitant. The rest of the class was no better, and Bakugou looked just about ready to explode.

“Wait, is that Hawks?” Tokoyami suddenly cut in, having finally figured out who the speaker was.

“Wait, who is this? How did you get this numb—”

“Why the fuck does Dabi have Hawks’ number?” Bakugou shouted, drowning out whatever Hawks might have said. He dove at Midoriya who was still holding the phone. Midoriya was too confused to stop him as he ripped the device away, intending to solve the mystery himself.

“Uh, wouldn’t a better question be why he has him listed as ‘daddy’,” said Tsuyu. Everyone was silent for a moment as they let it sink in. When it did, everyone exploded once more.

Bakugou was screaming bloody murder, activating his quirk and accidentally blowing the phone to pieces in the process. Midoriya activated his in an attempt to subdue him, while the rest of the class were yelling in varying degrees of shock and horror.

A long time passed before class was able to return to something resembling normalcy. Bakugou was still fuming from the encounter, but he had decided to let out his frustrations by punching some poor trees. Tsuyu and Uraraka clung to each other, whispering in soft undertones, while off to the side Momo and Jirou did much the same. Midoriya was muttering something underneath his breath. Tokoyami hid his face in his cape, unable or unwilling to make eye contact with anyone present, and even Dark Shadow was subdued, tucked away in a small pocket of darkness.

“I think I’m mentally scarred for life,” Kaminari whispered, voicing aloud what everyone was thinking. Kirishima nodded in solemn agreement.

“Can we all just… pretend this never happened?” Mina said slowly.

“I too wish for this entire event to be erased from my memory,” Iida said seriously.

“I don’t think it works that way, buddy,” said Sero consolingly.

Of the Class 1-A members present, only Todoroki remained largely unaffected. At some point during the entire exchange he had managed to procure some boba. Even as his classmates collectively lost their minds, he continued to slurp away, impassive to the very end.

Chapter Text

Shouta’s class had been on edge lately, whispering and staring after all the pro heroes like they hid terrible dirty secrets.

Whenever any pro hero pulled out their phone, all of his students would openly stare. If someone answered a phone call, at least half the class would flinch. There were other oddities as well; for instance, his kids broke out into whispers whenever the villain Dabi’s name was mentioned. Which was not unusual after the events of Kamino—what was unusual was their expressions when doing so. Where previously there had been varying degrees of anger, worry, and a small bit of fear, now there were expressions of pure horror. Even Bakugou, who had spent the better part of several months screaming bloody murder after the events of Kamino ward, now remained silent with a somewhat constipated look whenever anything relating to the League of Villains was mentioned.

It was when he saw Tokoyami of all people—Tokoyami, the literal embodiment of the edgy and the dark—flinching at the mention of Dabi’s name, coupled with Izuku “The Sun Shines Out of All Might’s Ass” Midoriya suddenly asking many not-so-discrete questions about various top heroes’ love lives and (along with Todoroki) making a wall-sized map of potential secret lovechild relationships, that Shouta decided he had had enough.

He made his way to the teachers lounge, where the rest of the faculty were gathered for their lunch, engaged in the usual gossip about hero work and school drama. None of them seemed to have noticed the mysterious cloud of emotions that had befallen the students.

“Aizawa-san! Please, join us,” said Yagi cheerfully, completely failing to read his troubled expression. The rest of the teachers waved to him. Shouta resisted the urge to roll his eyes. It was Hizashi who finally noticed his tense expression.

“You look stressed, Shouta,” Hizashi noted in a tone of genuine concern. “Is something wrong?”

“Have none of you noticed anything wrong with the students?” Shouta asked exasperatedly, his question only half rhetorical.

The rest of them took a minute to mull over his question. Sekijiro shrugged, Nemuri shook her head, and Yagi looked as clueless as ever.

With a sigh, Shouta continued, “It’s my class specifically. They’re acting like all heroes take bribes and gamble and have secret illicit affairs.”

“Who is to say they don’t?” Nemuri replied wrly. Yagi looked slightly scandalized, but Sekijiro simply nodded in sagely agreement.

“Even if they do,” Shouta said slowly, as if he was lecturing a group of his students, “that doesn’t erase the fact that somehow Midoriya is starting to believe it. Last I saw he and Todoroki were making a list of your possible love children, Yagi, with Mirio at the top of the list. And if Midoriya—the biggest hero fanboy in all of Japan—is buying into hero conspiracy theories, then we have a problem.”

At the last statement, the rest of the heroes finally seemed to catch on to Shouta’s point.

“Now that you mention it,” Nemuri said thoughtfully, “I do seem to recall some weird things happening with your class recently. At first I chalked it up to teenage hormones, but maybe you’re onto something.” The rest of the faculty nodded solemn agreement.

“Is there something that might be causing this?” Yagi asked seriously.

Shouta shrugged. “I’m not entirely sure, but it may have something to do with the League of Villains. I’ve heard their name mentioned repeatedly, along with Dabi’s, and oddly enough, occasionally some things about Hawks.”

“Is this about the Kamino incident then?” Nemuri wondered.

“I doubt it,” Hizashi replied. “I think Shouta’s class seemed pretty normal after Bakugou’s kidnapping, all things considered. Maybe a bit more jumpy than usual, but nothing like the state of secrecy and conspiracy they seem to be in now. It definitely has to be a more recent development.”

“So then the League must have done something else since then, that we don’t know about. What should we do then?” asked Sekijiro.

Before Shouta could speak up about his ideas, Hizashi cut him off.

“I have a plan,” he said with a confident smile. Shouta suddenly had a very bad feeling.

Which brought Shouta to where he was now, crouched low on a rooftop overlooking a seedy alleyway. They had specifically scouted around this location and had received somewhat reliable information from several lower-ranking criminals that this was a place that Dabi frequented. Hizashi had insisted on tagging along, since it was “his plan” or so he claimed. They had also brought along Detective Tsukauchi for additional backup and for his interrogation capabilities, but had left the remaining faculty behind on account of none of them having any experience with stealth missions; making sure Hizashi remained quiet was difficult enough as it were.

“Are we sure he’s coming?” Hizashi whispered, leaning over. Shouta quickly slapped a hand over his mouth, his other hand coming up to point at the entrance to the alleyway where a man in a face mask who was clearly Dabi in disguise had just appeared. He casually made his way into one of the more shadowed areas between the two buildings, leaning up against a wall and pulling out his phone.

“Wha’ he doin’?” Hizashi's voice was muffled as spoke into Shouta’s hand.

“He’s calling someone,” Tsukauchi replied, looking through a pair of specially-made police binoculars.

“Can you see the name?” Shouta asked. If this was some kind of information exchange like Shouta suspected it was, this little stake-out could suddenly turn into a high value crime bust.

“Let me see,” Tsukauchi whispered back, fiddling with the knobs on his binoculars. “It says, hold on, I can’t read it from this angle, I need to wait for him to finish talking… ah, right there! I can just make out the letters, wait I can only see a few of them, let’s see, there’s B-O-O and a C-A on the line underneath it. I can’t see the rest, there’s too much shadow, oh wait he turned around, I can see it now, okay there’s an O-T-Y on the first line and an L-L below that.”

Shouta managed to piece together the words in his head at the same time Hizashi shoved his hand away and cried out, “Booty Call?!”

In response, Shouta tackled him to the ground, covering his mouth once more. Carefully, he checked over the ledge to see if Dabi had noticed the noise, but the man appeared entirely oblivious as he put away his phone. He leaned against the wall of the alleyway, seemingly waiting for something, presumably his— er, that.

“Should we even still be here?” Tsukauchi whispered urgently. “We can’t arrest him since we know the League can just warp out of places. And if we’re not going to arrest him, there’s no good reason for us to continue to wait here, now that we know his call wasn’t business related.”

“The name on the contact list could have been a ruse,” Shouta replied, eyes narrowed. “We should wait to see.”

And so they waited. Another ten minutes had passed before Tsukauchi once again suggested that they leave since nothing appeared to be happening. Shouta was about to agree when there was suddenly movement at the front of the alleyway, as a figure approached, making a beeline towards Dabi.

Luckily Shouta had the foresight to cover Hizashi’s mouth in time this time: his high-pitched shriek of “Hawks?!” was reduced to a mere mumble.

“What is Hawks doing here?” Tsukauchi wondered aloud. Shouta shook his head as he continued to hold Hizashi down, his attention split between keeping him quiet and watching what Hawks and Dabi were doing.

“Are they— are they flirting?” Tsukauchi suddenly asked, his voice breaking. Shouta whipped his head over to see that the two were suddenly right next to each other, almost intruding into one another’s space. In the next moment, they began to move even closer.

There was a thump, and when Shouta looked away for a moment he found that Hizashi had fainted in his arms. He looked back to where the rendezvous was happening in the alleyway to find the two men now locked in one another’s embrace. In the next moment, both their heads leaned in, and—

With that, Shouta lifted Hizashi into a bridal carry and turned away, readying himself to leap across several rooftops in quick succession.

“Wait, Aizawa, where are you going?” Tsukauchi called out.

“I’m leaving before I have to use my quirk on myself to erase my mind,” Aizawa shouted back, taking off and landing swiftly. He repeated the motion until he was out of sight.

That left poor Tsukauchi alone on the rooftop, staring in horror at the scene below as he questioned what exactly had become of heroes since All Might’s retirement.

Chapter Text

Dabi was having a very bad day.

Well, technically he was always having a bad day, there weren’t really many good days in his life and line of work. But even so, he was having a particularly bad day even by his standards.

It all started with the new batch of recruits he was supposed to meet that morning; their leader was some kind of yakuza upstart trying to get a leg up on the rest of the criminal underworld. As usual, when Dabi actually met them they turned out to be no more than a bunch of miserable third-rate thugs; they were so pathetic that Dabi had not even bothered to cremate them, instead just sending them off with a few nasty burns and a good healthy dose of fear.

Well, their leader had heard about Dabi’s rejection of his men, and had been none-too-pleased about the result. He had arranged a kidnapping for that very same afternoon—the yakuza thugs were surprisingly efficient when pissed, Dabi had to admit. Now normally even a whole squad of dozens yakuza would be no match for Dabi’s quirk, but somehow this group just happened to have a guy with a fire extinguisher quirk on hand. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they also had a guy with some kind of oxygen-manipulation quirk. The combination of their quirks made it impossible for Dabi to use his quirk effectively, rendering him near defenseless. After that it was a simple task for the thugs to tie him up with a pair of quirk-suppressing cuffs and drag him to their base of operations.

Really, Dabi should have just burned them all to ashes from the start and saved himself the trouble. Clearly, spending so much time with Keigo was turning him soft.

It was too late for regrets unfortunately, as the thugs manhandled a still quirk-suppressed Dabi into some run-down warehouse, tossing him to the ground in front of their leader. Dabi winced as he hit the concrete—although it did not hurt him badly, he bruised easily, and a fall like that meant he would have ugly bruises for weeks. He resisted the urge to sigh.

“So, you’re the infamous Dabi of the League of Villains,” someone sneered, interrupting Dabi’s internal laments about his fragile complexion. He looked up into the face of the yakuza leader, some idiot in a cat mask that sat on what was probably supposed to be a dramatic throne but was really just a cheap folding lawn chair spray painted a tacky shade of gold. Dabi rolled his eyes.

“Yup. And who are you supposed to be, some kind of Overhaul knock-off?” he quipped sarcastically.

The man seethed at the remark, clenching his fist in anger before forcing himself to relax. “We are the Ten Commandments of Evil,” he said, waving his arms in a dramatic arc, “and we are here to cleanse the earth of pathetic humans and their dog-loving ways and to bring about the rule of those blessed with feline-based quirks!”

There was a pause as Dabi processed what he had just heard. Then, he burst into cackles, rolling on the ground even with his hands bound behind his back. This continued on for about half a minute, with the yakuza members growing visibly angrier and more uncomfortable but unsure of how to react to the hysterical villain on the ground.

“Seriously?” Dabi choked out in between laughs.

“Silence!” the yakuza leader shouted. “We will fulfill our ultimate goal, and the League of Villains will help us!”

Dabi laughed even harder, not even bothering to hide his reactions at this point. He grinned a cheshire grin. “And what makes you think we’ll do shit for you?”

“Tomura Shigaraki will give us whatever we want in exchange for the safe return of his lieutenant! In fact,” he gestured towards one of his grunts, who pulled out a phone—Dabi’s phone to be exact. One of the idiots must have taken it from him when they grabbed him. “Let us call him now.”

Dabi snorted. “Shiggy is too busy playing video games to answer random calls. Plus, even if he did pick up for some random reason, he would just yell at me for getting myself into shit and then wait for me to bust myself out of here, then laugh in my face when I get back. You’re not getting shit from him.”

A few of the thugs exchanged uncertain glances. The leader frowned. “We shall see,” he said evenly, turning to the man holding the phone. “Is it unlocked?”

The man nodded, showing him the unlocked home screen, which displayed a picture of a shirtless Hawks with his pants on backwards and his feathers all ruffled. It was a more recent picture, one that Dabi had taken just last week.

“Interesting picture,” the leader mused. “You should really put a password on your phone. Anyway, enough of this! Call Tomura Shigaraki!”

The grunt began to fiddle with the phone. He swiped back and forth for a good while, his frown growing deeper and deeper as he seemed to struggle with something.

“Well? What’s the hold up?” the leader demanded.

“Uh, sir, there’s no listed contact for Shigaraki anywhere on this phone!”

“What? What do you mean? Let me see that!” the leader said, grabbing the phone out of the man’s hand. “Double team, godzilla but smol, knock-off david copperfield, princess, spiritomb, todo: get cerave for xmas gift, vampire mystique,” the man mumbled to himself as he read off the list. “What even is this?”

“It’s my contact list, bitch.”

“What do you mean this is your contact list? Where is Shigaraki? Where are the members of League of Villains?”

Dabi simply smirked, but otherwise remained silent, preferring to maximize the amount he could mess with their heads. His ruse seemed to work as the yakuza grunts all began to whisper among themselves.

“Sir,” said the man who had originally held Dabi’s phone, who (now that Dabi was actually bothering to pay attention) seemed to be one of the middling members in the chain of command, “it’s possible that Dabi has a separate phone for work-related purposes, and this is just his personal phone.”

“That still doesn’t explain the stupid names!”

“Well, it could be that Dabi is aware of the risks that his career brings to his friends and loved ones in case this exact situation should arise, and took precautions ahead of time. Perhaps he disguised all of his contacts’ names so that we could not figure out who they were!” At this point the man was really feeling himself, and began to speak faster and with more enthusiasm, in a very posh scholarly tone (much to Dabi’s wry amusement). “Perhaps they are coded based on who they are to him! We may not have the League of Villains here, but if we can get our hands on someone important to Dabi or to the other members of the League then they will be forced to do something!”

As he continued to speak, the others seemed to buy into the theory more and more. Eventually, even the leader was convinced, and he nodded along sagely, “Yes, that does make sense. Then, who on this list would be most important to Dabi?”

The grunt was nearly jumping up and down in his excitement at being acknowledged by his superior. “Why, that’s obvious! I’ve gone through all the contacts, and considering how many of these are ridiculous names, clearly the most important must be the simplest one, as it would be the easiest for Dabi to remember! Out of all of these names, the simplest one is by far the contact named ‘Princess’ and what’s more, I’ve figured out who it is!” Here he paused for dramatic effect.

“Well, then, spit it out! Who is it?”

“It’s obviously Dabi’s daughter!”

...

“My daughter? Just how old do you think I am?” Dabi asked, half sarcastic and half incredulous. Several yakuza members jumped, having already forgotten he was even there.

“I dunno? Thirty? Forty? It’s hard to tell with the scars,” the leader of his kidnappers replied. Dabi resisted the urge to facepalm (not that he could with the ropes and handcuffs binding him).

“I don’t have a daughter,” he scoffed instead, mildly offended.

“See! He’s denying it! Clearly, he’s trying to protect his daughter,” the same grunt from earlier spoke triumphantly. The others nodded, murmuring praises of his genius.

Dabi rolled his eyes. “You’re all dumbasses, but sure, go ahead. Why don’t you call my ‘daughter’ and see what happens.”

“Do it,” the leader ordered. Without hesitation, the grunt gleefully dialed the number.

Ring.

Ring.

Ring.

“Hello?” came a distinctly masculine voice.

“That doesn’t sound right,” the leader hissed. “It’s too deep and old!”

“Uh, maybe it’s his daughter’s father!” the grunt said quickly, clearly grasping at straws.

“What do you mean? Dabi’s the father.”

“Well that’s rather heteronormative of you,” someone mumbled.

“Yes, exactly! That must be Dabi’s partner, his daughter’s other father!” the grunt whispered. “He must have confiscated the kid’s phone.”

“Hello? Dabi? Are you there?” the voice over the phone spoke once more. There was a mad scramble as the phone was passed around. It somehow ended up in the leader’s hands.

“Am I speaking to Dabi’s partner?” the leader asked into the receiver.

“Uh, what… his partner?” the voice over the phone replied. “I guess yes, technically? Wait, where’s Dabi? Who am I speaking to?”

“Let me clarify,” the leader replied, “am I speaking to Dabi’s partner, the other father of his daughter?”

“Wait, what? Excuse me? What daughter? Dabi doesn’t have a daughter!”

“See, the man is clearly deflecting,” the grunt from earlier told the leader confidently. “He must have figured out what’s happening and he’s trying to protect his daughter’s identity by denying her existence!”

The leader nodded in agreement. He spoke into the phone once more, “This is the Leader of Ten Commandments of Evil. You may have heard of us. We have taken your partner hostage, and unless you connect us with the League of Villains and convince them to aid us in our quest for feline supremacy, we will kill him. And then we’ll use our extensive resources to hunt down you and your daughter and kill you too,” he added for good measure.

“Wait, hold up, who are you guys? Feline supremacy what? Dabi, how did you get captured by a bunch of randoms I’ve never even heard of?” The last statement was half incredulous, half admonishing.

The leader huffed indignantly, readying himself to respond with a long rant about the strength of the Ten Commandments and their goals, when he felt a sudden searing heat. He looked up to see Dabi standing up and rubbing his rips, his ropes burned away and his cuffs lying open and discarded on the ground.

“How did you—”

Dabi rolled his eyes. “Maybe tell your dumbass underlings to stand further away next time,” he said, twirling the key he had pickpocketed from one of the grunts.

The leader glared at his men. “Well, what are you waiting for? Subdue him!”

The grunts slowly advanced on him, with the fire extinguisher and oxygen-manipulation quirks leading the charge, but Dabi merely grinned.

“Nice try, I’m not falling for that twice.”

Dabi dusted the ashes off his trenchcoat, which had unfortunately become dirty in the fight. He picked up his phone from where it had been discarded on the ground. The screen had luckily remained uncracked through the course of the entire fight. Thank god for phone cases and screen protectors.

10 missed calls from Princess.

He dialed the number. Hawks picked up on the first ring.

“Dabi! Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, birdbrain,” Dabi replied. “Just got jumped by a bunch of shitty Shie Hassaikai knock-offs. I’ve already dealt with them, thanks for the distraction by the way.”

“Of course,” Hawks chuckled. “By the way…”

“Just spit it out you dumb bird!”

“We have a daughter?” Hawks asked. Even through the phone, Dabi could hear his shit-eating grin.

Dabi groaned. “Don’t even start—”

“What? I’m just saying, we could totally—”

“Hawks, shut up.”

“Okay but—”

“Keigo—”

“I’m just saying—”

“I’m hanging up on you.”

“Wait, don’t hang up, I still need to talk to you about—”

Chapter Text

To be completely honest, Hawks was SO. TIRED. of being randomly called from Dabi’s phone by random people calling him random names.

First it was Spinner, who for some reason called him for chicken of all things. Normally that would have been fine—just a bit of a misunderstanding, no big deal—if not for the fact that he had been in the middle of a meeting with Eraserhead and Tsukauchi.

He had tried ignoring the call, but for some reason Spinner had called back again and again. At some point, it became too suspicious to continue. So he had picked up, and he had tried—tried being the key word here—to signal that they should hang up, but unfortunately the League of Villains shared one collective brain cell and evidently Spinner had not been in possession of it at the time.

Thankfully, the League had eventually figured it out and the crisis had been averted, but still it was a close call. Sure, he got some weird looks from Tsukauchi and more than one suspicious side-eye from Aizawa, but that was nothing Hawks could not deal with.

That should have been the end of it.

Of course, nothing in his life was ever that easy.

Somehow Dabi’s phone had ended up in the hands of UA’s Class 1-A. Which culminated in some phone calls,

The last straw was when Dabi somehow got himself abducted by a bunch of low-life yakuza thugs, who then came to the conclusion that the two of them had a daughter together. Which, sure—that was something that Hawks had considered dreamed about in secret—but still, it was the principle of the matter for All Might’s sake! Hawks did not even have a chance to chew Dabi out for all of his recent phone shenanigans since Dabi had hung up on him in the middle of their last conversation.

Needless to say, Hawks was pissed. He wasted no time flying to the League of Villains’ latest hideout, bursting through the door in a shower of feathers and startling the villains inside. No one even flinched; considering the number of drama queens among their ranks, at this point everyone was far too used to theatrical entrances.

“Oh hey it’s Hawksie—”

Hawks barely registered Toga’s words, single-minded in his mission to confront Dabi once and for all. He stormed over, hand outstretched in front of him.

“Give me your phone,” he said in a tone that brooked no argument.

Dabi glanced up, face entirely impassive. “Why?”

“I’m deleting my number from your phone,” Hawks said, crossing his arms and glaring. “You clearly can’t be trusted with it.”

“How do you plan on contacting the League then, pretty bird?” Dabi drawled, making no move to take his phone out.

“Oh, oh, oh, can I have Hawksie’s number?” Toga asked excitedly.

Hawks shrugged. “Sure, if you can get me Dabi’s phone for me.”

Toga squealed. “Dabi gimme!” she said, jumping forward to tackle Dabi. He hastily dodged backward. Hawks sent several feathers forward to try to pluck the phone out of Dabi’s pocket while Toga had him distracted. Unfortunately, Dabi incinerated all of them before they could reach him.

“Hey Twice, grab Dabi’s phone!” Toga shouted.

“Nice try, you can’t trick me with that,” Dabi said, not bothering to turn around. “Spinner and Twice left to get snacks and—”

“Sure! No way, grab it yourself!” Twice said as he walked in and plucked the phone out of Dabi’s jacket. He tossed it to Hawks, who caught it with a feather.

“What the fuck Twice when did you—you know what, never mind, it’s not like you can get in anyway. The phone is password protected.”

“Let me guess, the password is your mom’s birthday? Ah, yep, there we go, first try and I’m in,” Hawks said smugly, scrolling through the contact names. “Let’s see, that one’s Shigaraki, that’s Toga, hmm ‘discount dino’ is definitely Spinner…”

Dabi lunged forward violently in an effort to grab the phone out of his hands, but Hawks was too fast for him, flying up towards the high ceiling and out of reach of. Dabi could not use his quirk without risking burning the entire place down, so he was reduced to glaring a

“I swear birdie, when you come down from there I will turn you into fucking fried chicken—”

Hawks seemed entirely unbothered, continuing to identify contacts with seemingly no trouble despite Dabi’s coded system.

“—that one’s his mom, those four are definitely his siblings, okay this one is definitely Endea—I mean, he-who-shall-not-be-named, okay not sure why you kept that one—”

“When I’m bored I use the number to sign up on shady websites,” Dabi cut in. “I figure they’ll spam him with those shitty telemarketing calls.”

Hawks whistled. “Wow, that’s pretty damn evil. Okay, but where am I on this list? All that’s left are oranges, cheap shitty hair dye, allergies, and just tell him. Did you delete my number already?”

Dabi said nothing, arms and legs crossed as he leaned back on the couch. He was the picture of apathy, but underneath his indifferent exterior there was a hint of apprehension.

“You should check the numbers and see if one of them matches yours,” Toga suggested.

“Good idea,” Hawks replied, clicking on the remaining numbers and checking them one by one. “Not that one, not that one, nope, uh wait this one is mine.” Hawks looked up, but Dabi refused to meet his eyes. “Uh, Dabs, why is my contact just tell him? What did you want to tell me?”

Dabi resolutely kept his gaze pointed anywhere except directly at Hawks. Hawks slowly lowered himself back to the ground, touching down gently and taking small, careful steps in Dabi’s direction.

“Come on Dabi, just tell me,” Hawks pressed gently, his voice now soft. “I think I already know what you’re going to say.”

Dabi still did not meet Hawks’ eyes even as the latter moved closer, until they were separated by less than a foot of space. Toga, Twice, and Spinner watched the exchange with bated breath, wisely keeping quiet so as to not interrupt the moment. Hawks crouched down so that he and Dabi were on eye level. One of his hands caressed Dabi’s face tenderly, turning his head so that he had no choice but to lock eyes with Hawks.

“It’s okay, you don’t have to say it,” Hawks said in the softest of tones, smiling gently. “I already know, and—”

“YouleftyourendeavordollinmyroomtheotherdayandIaccidentallysetitonfire—” Dabi cut in.

“—I love you too,” Hawks finished.

“—okaynotaccidentallybutyouknowthebastarddeserveditand—wait, huh?”

Toga and Hawks both shrieked, though for very different reasons. Multiple people began speaking at once.

“Awww I knew it! Hawksie and Dabi are in looooove!”

“You did WHAT?”

“Wait can we go back to the part where Hawks said he lo—”

“For what it’s worth, I guess I love you too?”

“No, absolutely not, I take it back, I hate you,” Hawks was pissed. “HOW COULD YOU? You knew what it meant to me! I don’t care if you think your father is a piece of shit, that doll had sentimental value. I demand that you get me a new one!”

Dabi scoffed. “As if I would be caught dead buying a fucking Endeavor doll.”

“Then you’re sleeping on the couch for the next week!” Hawks said, storming out of the room.

“You can’t kick me out, it’s my fucking room,” Dabi called after him petulantly, but Hawks ignored him, sending a few feathers back to slam the door loudly.

As soon as the door closed, Toga began to chatter excitedly once more.

“Awww, it’s their first real lover’s quarrel! That’s so cute!”

“Shut up,” Dabi mumbled. “This is all your fucking fault, if you hadn’t helped him grab his phone he would never have found out.”

“Technically, Twice was the one who grabbed the phone. Besides, based on his contact name, weren't you planning on telling him anyway?” Spinner reasoned.

“Fuck all of you!” Dabi got up to leave as well, before remembering that Hawks had commandeered his room for the foreseeable future. With a sigh, he dropped back down onto the couch, wincing as he thought about sleeping on the lumpy cushions for the next week.

Meanwhile, the others had already moved on to another subject, no longer interested in Dabi’s love life now that there was no more drama involved. All of a sudden, Spinner recalled something that had been said during the exchange.

“Wait, does that mean Endeavor is Dabi’s father?”

Chapter Text

+1

Sometimes Keigo wondered how exactly he got himself into these situations.

One minute he was happily chatting and laughing with his coworkers—or were they his friends? Keigo had never had friends before—in fact, he had exactly one friend growing up, and that friend had ended up faking his death before coming back as a villain years later, and they were technically dating now, or at least Keigo thought they were dating, and well—

Anyway, the point was Keigo did not really have friends growing up, so he really had nothing to compare friendship against. But what he had now with Miruko, Jeanist, Mount Lady, and Kamui Woods—with Rumi, Tsunagu, Yu, and Shinji as they had insisted—was as close to friendship as he could imagine, so he felt comfortable thinking of them as friends.

So one minute Keigo was sitting there, happily chatting and laughing with his friends, and the next he was desperately scrambling to hold together his secrets and the very fabric of hero society itself.

Ah, so this was why the Commission never wanted me to make any friends.

It went something like this:

After a team-up against some kind of elephant villain that they had dealt with with relative ease, Rumi had mentioned offhandedly that a group of them (mostly the younger heroes who teamed up often) regularly met on Friday nights to get food and get wasted together. Rumi had invited Keigo along, and when Keigo had politely refused, she had insisted and pestered him until he agreed.

So there they all were, gathered in Rumi’s apartment on a Friday night. Rumi had challenged Yu to a drinking contest, and had looped the rest of them into a few drinks each. After a while they were all a bit tipsy, and eventually the conversation inevitably turned to work-related things.

“So, Hawks, what’s your secret? How did you hit the top two so quickly?” Yu asked as the only hero present who was not ranked in the top ten.

“Yu! You can’t just ask someone that,” Rumi laughed, only half-admonishing.

“It’s a good question though,” Shinji had said quietly, unable to hide his own curiosity despite his usually polite demeanor. “How did you end up with your own agency at eighteen? Usually that takes years of building up a reputation for yourself under an already-established hero, not to mention the infrastructure and ridiculous amounts of funding required to build an agency of your size.”

Keigo blinked, unsure of how to answer. His mind was a bit sluggish due to the alcohol and his tongue was freer. Still, could never let go of his training entirely. “I’m pretty well-connected I guess,” he finally settled on sheepishly. It was technically the truth, after all.

The rest of the group blinked, having not expected such a straightforward answer.

“Now that I think about it, you never did tell us your full name Hawks,” Tsunagu mused.

“Yeah, what is your real name, Hawks? We promise we won’t tell anyone,” Rumi added.

“Ah, I can’t tell you that I’m afraid,” Keigo replied. “Sorry, it’s classified. I wish I could tell you guys but it’s not up to me, it’s the higher ups.”

“What higher ups? You’re the second ranked hero in the nation, who could possibly be ranked higher than you? Endeavor?” Rumi wondered.

“Why would Endeavor stop him from telling us his name?” Tsunagu pointed out.

Yu gasped as she came to a sudden realization. “Wait, are you secretly a Todoroki?”

There was a brief moment of silence, before everyone suddenly began speaking at once.

“No, that’s not—”

“That would make sense—”

“Is that why you admire Endeavor so much?”

“Endeavor doesn’t really act like his father though—”

“GUYS!” Keigo shouted, cutting them all off. “No, I’m not a Todoroki, not yet at least,”

There was another pause as everyone processed what Keigo had just said.

Shit.

“Are you dating Endeavor?” Yu all but screeched.

“He’s like twice your age!”

“That’s less important than the fact that he’s married!”

“I thought his wife divorced him?”

“No that’s just a rumor, they’re still married I’m pretty sure.”

“Guys, I’m not dating Endeavor—”

“Well then why did you say not yet?”

Keigo did not know what to say to that. He could not reveal the truth, but there was no other explanation for his momentary slip of the tongue. Keigo blamed the alcohol. It was ridiculous really—the Commission had trained him in alcohol tolerance in addition to all his training in developing resistance to common drugs and poisons, but Rumi could somehow still drink him under the table.

The other four stared at Keigo expectantly, but he remained silent, unsure of what to say.

“Guys, wait I have an idea,” Yu suddenly broke the silence. her eyes gleaming with mischief. “Quick, hold him down!”

“Wait, what?” Keigo was usually fast, but the alcohol was making him clumsy. He did not have time to react before he was suddenly being held down by three top heroes, all of whom had somehow seen no reason to question Yu’s command. Shinji had control of his right arm while Tsunagu took his left at the same time that Rumi held down both of his legs. Yu reached over, digging into Keigo’s jacket pockets until she found what she was looking for. She leaned back, gleefully waving Keigo’s phone in her hand.

“Got it! Now, let’s see who Hawks has been texting recently.”

Keigo tried to remain calm. There was no way that they could guess his password.

“Oh, he even has Face ID enabled. That’s convenient.”

Well shit. Keigo had forgotten about that. In his defense, usually no one could even get close to him, let alone pluck his phone out of his hands. Nonetheless, it should still be fine, since he had been careful never to put Dabi’s name in his phone—

“Smile!” Yu interrupted Keigo’s thoughts as she turned the camera around to face him. With a click the phone unlocked itself. Keigo tried to send out a feather to get his phone back, but with all the alcohol running through his system he had none of his usual pinpoint precision. Instead of just a single feather flying over to grab the phone from Yu, instead all of the feathers on his right wing went rushing over in a torrent that almost buried her. Thankfully, none of them were sharpened. Despite her close brush with death, Yu seemed entirely unperturbed.

“Now, let’s see. Tsk, no illicit texts with Endeavor. He does have the guy’s number though, not surprising, though why didn’t Endeavor give me his number when I asked?” Yu whined.

“Because you were hitting on him,” Shinji replied, rolling his eyes as he continued to pin down Keigo’s right arm.

“That’s not fair, I’m sure Hawks has hit on him before too!” Yu replied, continuing to scroll through Keigo’s phone to see if she could dig up any secrets. There was not much, just a few numbers to fast food restaurants. It was Keigo’s personal phone (he left his Commission phone at his agency since that one was constantly tracked) after all and Keigo had few personal connections, save for the hero friends he had recently made and—

“Wait, who exactly is ‘Touya’ heart emoji?”

Well fuck. Keigo had been hoping she would not find that.

“Aww, does Hawks have a secret boyfriend after all?” Rumi teased.

“No!” Keigo exclaimed, panicked. “I mean, no, I don’t have a secret boyfriend.”

“Does that mean you have a secret crush then? Are you too afraid to tell him?” Rumi continued to take delight at seeing Keigo squirm.

“Don’t be like that Hawks!” Yu said encouragingly, earnestly. “Any guy would be lucky to have you!”

“Objectively, Yu is correct,” Tsunagu mused. “You have been voted Japan’s most eligible bachelor of the year for the past two years.”

“That’s not it, guys—”

“We should call him!” Rumi said suddenly. “Invite him here, and when he sees Hawks all cute and blushing like this there’s no way they won’t confess to each other!”

“No wait, don't do that!” Hawks screeched, his voice an octave higher than usual.

“That sounds a bit extreme and also rather immature for heroes of our age and status,” Shinji said carefully, looking over at Keigo who seemed frozen in place and seconds from having a full-blown panic attack.

“Oh come on, it won’t hurt to call him! We don’t have to do anything, we just want to see what kind of man has caught the attention of our number two,” Yu winked as she dialed the number.

Someone picked up on the first ring.

“What’s up, pretty bird?” came a low and seductive and very familiar voice.

Yu dropped the phone. The five heroes (minus Keigo) in the room looked at one another, as if to confirm that they had all heard the same thing. The person on the other end did not stop talking.

“Hello? Kei? Are you okay? Talk to me birdie.”

Slowly, Yu bent down and picked up the phone once more. She quickly hit the END CALL button before whoever was on the other end could realize what was happening. Then, as one, all four heroes turned to stare at Keigo.

“Hawks,” Rumi hissed, voicing the thought that was at the forefront of all of their minds, “why do you have Dabi on your contact list with a heart emoji?”

“It was the wrong number?” Keigo tried. The rest of the heroes stared at him, entirely unconvinced.

“He called you pretty bird,” Yu said, her voice somewhere halfway between a shriek and a whisper.

“And Kei,” Tsunagu pointed out. “Who is ‘Kei’? Is that an alias? Or... is it your real name?”

“We don’t even know his real name,” Rumi muttered.

“That wasn’t Dabi, that was just, uh, a cosplayer I know who happens to like to cosplay as villains sometimes?” Keigo said, struggling to keep his tone neutral but confident.

Before the other heroes could respond, the phone lit up again, ‘Touya <3’ displayed prominently on the screen as the caller ID.

“Should we pick up?” Shinji wondered.

“No, we need to figure out what’s going on first,” Tsunagu reasoned. “Hawks, we need to know why you have one of the most dangerous villains in the country on speed dial, under a cutesy nickname too. What exactly is your relationship with him? Are you a hero traitor?”

Keigo stared at him in genuine horror. “No, of course not! I would never do that!”

“I believe him,” Rumi said. “I don’t think Hawks would betray all of Japan and hero society.”

“Well what else could it be? Some kind of illicit affair? A star-crossed lovers drama?” Yu said sarcastically, “What, did you guys meet as childhood friends only to be torn apart by circumstances outside of your control, mourning and pining and then somehow finding each other again as adults, only now on opposite sides of the law?”

There was a pause. They all stared at Keigo with wide eyes.

“That’s… surprisingly accurate,” Keigo admitted.

“That would explain how Dabi knows his real name,” Rumi muttered, still slightly salty about Keigo’s secrecy and reluctance about revealing his identity.

“How would you even meet someone like him?” Yu wondered. “You guys are like polar opposites.”

“Well,” Keigo hesitated, not sure how much he should reveal, “we went through hero training together.”

“Dabi was training to be hero?”

“It’s not like there’s some machine out there that just spits out villains all the time,” Shinji pointed out, “they have to come from somewhere.”

“Actually, there does exist such a machine,” Keigo said quietly. That caught everyone’s attention. “It’s called society.”

Keigo’s phone rang again, but no one paid it any mind, too focused on the details Keigo was slowly revealing about himself.

“People are not born as heroes or villains, at least not most people,” Keigo continued. “They become what they are because of a number of reasons, often related to how society treats them. That is not to say that villains should not be held accountable for their actions, but there’s a reason there are very few active heroes with so-called ‘villainous’ quirks. And there’s a reason so many people with strong, flashy quirks but poor personalities become heroes, while those with less powerful or less eye-catching quirks are often denied the ability to become a hero altogether.”

“Even still, how did you and Dabi train together as heroes?” Rumi asked. “People with strong quirks are usually noticed in their first year or two of hero school, and I’ve never heard of anyone with that strong of a fire quirk going to any of the top hero schools. Come to think of it, I’d never heard of anyone with your quirk either before you debuted.”

Keigo gave a rueful smile. “Well, you see, that’s also classified.”

Rumi fumed. “What is it with you and keeping secrets—”

Before she could continue, she was suddenly interrupted by the formation of a black portal. A raspy voice as a tall, lean figure dressed in black stepped out of it dramatically.

“Whoever you fuckers think you are, you should have known better than to mess with someone who is under the protection of the League of Vil—what the fuck?”

Dabi was not sure what he had expected when he had burst in to rescue Keigo; perhaps some small-time thugs or a wannabe rival villain organization. Whatever it was, it was not the scene currently laid out before him. The third, fifth, and seventh ranked heroes had his boyfriend pinned down between them while some other hero stood above them all.

“Kei— Hawks, how the fuck— no, why the fuck did you get kidnapped by heroes?” Dabi asked incredulously.

“Not kidnapped,” Keigo squeaked from his place on the ground. The other heroes quickly realized what was happening, and scrambled up off the ground, quickly falling into defensive fighting stances.

“Villain Dabi,” Rumi said, cracking her knuckles menacingly. “What is your relationship with Hawks?”

Dabi blinked. That…was not the reaction or confrontation he was expecting. Well, since the heroes were being weird, he might as well roll with it.

Dabi leaned against the wall, the picture of casual indifference.

“Relationship?” he asked innocently.

“Don’t play dumb,” Rumi threatened, “you called him pretty bird on the phone!”

“Oh, you heard that? What, as if I wouldn’t pass up a chance to taunt a hero,” Dabi drawled. “What, do you want me to call you a beautiful bunny—” several people in the room, Dabi included, shuddered, “—okay, fuck that actually, you’re right that’s fucking disgusting. I am never doing that again.”

“Stop distracting from the topic here. Hawks said you and him trained as children, is that true?” Tsunagu interrupted.

Dabi looked at Keigo, who was standing behind the wall of heroes, wings fluttering in anxiety and purposely looking everywhere except at Dabi.

Dabi scoffed. “You think a hero and a villain trained together as kids? What are you on?”

“That doesn’t answer the question,” Shinji pointed out.

Dabi shrugged. “Believe what you want. Since no one’s in imminent danger here, I’m taking the bird and leaving. Since you’re all so desperate though, I’ll throw you a bone.” Dabi grinned menacingly. “If you’re interested in the real story behind everything, I would take a closer look at the Commission’s top secret archives. Not just the hidden ones, those are fake, you have to look a few layers deeper than that.”

With a casual wave, Dabi stepped back through the portal. A moment later, a second portal appeared just behind Keigo. An arm reached out through it and grabbed onto him, pulling Keigo back through the portal before the other heroes could react.

“Hawks is being kidnapped—” Rumi cried out as the heroes all lunged for the portal.

“Not being kidnapped! I’m fine, don’t worry g—” Keigo called back through the portal just before it snapped shut.

The remaining heroes stood in shock.

“Well, that just happened.”

“There’s no way Dabi was telling the truth,” Yu reasoned, hours after Dabi and Hawks had disappeared. The four remaining heroes had quickly sobered up soon after their disappearance. “Why would the Commission have extra secret archives? And why would they have anything about Hawks, let alone Dabi?”

“Well what if the Commission was involved in training Dabi and Hawks? And something went wrong and then Dabi became a villain?” Rumi suggested.

“It is unusual, but it would make sense,” Tsunagu mused. “We know for sure Hawks did not go to any of the hero schools in Japan, since there is no record of him and none of us or the heroes in his age group knew him in high school. Yet, he’s a better hero than almost anyone. So there must be some kind of secret training program that he was part of, one that the Commission was involved in.”

“Why would the program be top secret though?” Shinji wondered. “Would the Commission not want to claim credit for one of the most successful hero debuts in recent history.”

“What if the program was unethical in some way? Like they beat their students or something?” Rumi hypothesized.

“Hawks doesn’t seem like the type to have been abused, he’s confident and charismatic and outgoing while victims of abuse are usually anxious and secretive… distant… have issues trusting other people…”

There was a pointed silence as everyone digested Yu’s words.

“If you think about it, Hawks has always been outwardly cheerful, but he rarely connects with anyone and he avoids people outside of work. No one knows what he does in his free time. He never mentions his past, or his family, or anything about himself. Honestly he seemed more comfortable when Dabi nabbed than he is ninety-nine percent of the other times I’ve seen him,” Rumi said softly.

“Okay, so the Commission might have been harsh on Hawks with his training. But I mean, it couldn’t have been that bad, he turned out a hero after all, and he seems to have a decent relationship with them now,” Yu pointed out.

“Well they might have also trained Dabi, and we know how that turned out,” Shinji replied.

That statement made the heroes even more uncomfortable. They all sat in silence, contemplating the ramifications of such an implication.

Finally, Tsunagu spoke. “Plain guesswork is not productive. We need to take a look at the Commission archives.”

From there, a plan was hatched. Rumi, Tsunagu, Shinji, and Yu would remain silent about the events of the night until they uncovered the truth.

They first attempted to access the files through legitimate means. Being the third-ranked hero in the nation, it was fairly easy for Tsunagu to request access to private Commission files that were restricted from the public and lower-ranking heroes. He simply walked in and demanded access, citing the need to do research for a recent case.

However, as they had suspected and as Dabi had claimed, there was no useful information in the files. There were files on all of the high-ranking heroes including Tsunagu himself, but when it came to Hawks’ file, almost all of the information was redacted. All that remained was his hero name, the name of his quirk, and random trivia like his height, weight, age, etc., all of which was public information.

In contrast, almost all the other heroes had complete profiles citing their full names, blood types, quirk strengths and weaknesses, and in some cases even their addresses. When Tsunagu inquired about the oddity in Hawks’ file, he received a non-committal reply:

“We are simply protecting Hawks’ privacy and his family, sir.”

A week ago, Tsunagu may have accepted that, but the villain Dabi’s recent words lingered in his mind. The other three heroes had similar issues locating actual information, and even the number one hero had seemed clueless about Hawks’ personal life and upbringing.”

“Is Hawks not his real name?” Endeavor had grunted when asked. Rumi had quickly bounded off after that.

With legal avenues for obtaining information entirely exhausted, the group of four turned to less-legitimate means. It turned out that there were a handful of ex-Commission employees who had managed to stay alive after leaving the organization (a handful, not many—which was a statement in and of itself) and one or two with connections to the underworld. After much bribery, threats, several cases of breaking and entering, a lot of broken noses, and one instance of brilliantly executed seduction—courtesy of Tsunagu of all people—they finally obtained the information they needed.

A week later, the four heroes sat in a circle on the floor, once again gathered in Rumi’s apartment.

Tsunagu began, “So, let’s review: Hawks’ real name is Keigo Takami. He’s the son of the famous Takami Thief that Endeavor caught a decade and a half ago. When he was eight, Hawks saved a bunch of people from speeding cars, which caught the attention of the Commission. They bought him off his mom and basically treated him as a child soldier, training him to be a hero for more than twelve hours a day, for the next ten years.”

“That explains a lot about why he’s so good at his job and also why he never seems to take breaks for himself,” Rumi muttered.

Tsunagu continued, “Meanwhile, Endeavor’s oldest son Touya was having difficulty controlling his quirk, so Endeavor brought him to the HPSC for them to sort it out. The two of them must have met since they were the only children being trained by the Commission, and based on what we know now they must have been good friends.

“When Hawks was 14, Endeavor and his son got into an argument, which escalated until they came to blows, and then the kid burned himself, presumably to death. The Commission covered it up because they did not want to tarnish the reputation of hero society, and they also erased all mentions of the kid from internet archives. They also spent years hiding the fact that Endeavor was physically and emotionally abusive to his children and wife, to the point where his wife had a psychotic break and was admitted to a mental hospital, where she remains to this day.

“After his debut, Hawks continues to work for the Commission, who are the legal owners of everything associated with his brand and name, including his agency and his apartment. He takes jobs directly from them and does underground hero work in addition to his public work—”

“How the fuck does he have time to sleep?” Yu wondered.

“He probably doesn’t,” Rumi answered wryly.

“Ahem,” Tsunagu interrupted, before continuing, “most recently, Hawks was given an assignment to infiltrate the League of Villains and disrupt their plans in any way possible. He was given a license to do anything, up to and including murder. His main point of contact was Dabi, an A-ranked villain known for worshiping Stain and the second-in-command of the League next to Tomura Shigaraki. This is not in the Commission archives, but Dabi is presumably the same Touya Todoroki that Hawks knew as a kid.”

“And they’re most likely sleeping together,” Rumi added.

“I think it’s more than that, there are definitely ~feelings~ involved,” Yu argued.

“How do you talk like that?” Shinji wondered.

“Like what?”

“Somehow I can hear the tildes in your tone of voice. It’s mildly unsettling.”

“I’m just ~cool~ like that,” Yu sniffed.

“Anyway,” Tsunagu cut in, upset at being interrupted once more, “did we cover everything?”

“Aside from all the hundreds of not Hawks-related dirty secrets that the Commission was hiding, I think that’s everything,” Rumi confirmed.

“So, we have indentured servitude, child labor, training child soldiers, emotional manipulation, abuse, highly unethical use of force, conspiracy, cover-ups and just general corruption, all from the organization at the foundation of hero society. With a side of physical and emotional abuse and quirk eugenics from the number one hero,” Yu concluded.

“Sounds about right,” Shinji murmured.

They sat in silence once more.

“So… what do we do with all this?”

In the end, it was easy to leak all of the documents to the press and let everything spiral from there.

A week later, Keigo had just returned from a nice vacation away from all the distractions of the internet. It was the first one he had taken in years—the first one he had taken ever, actually—thanks to Dabi’s repeated nagging and downright shameless methods of persuasion.

He could only stare in complete shock when he came back to the League hideout and opened up his phone for the first time in a week, only to find himself number three of the list of trending topics, after #hpscandal and #fallofendeavor.

“What the fuck?” he said, unable to believe what he was reading. “What the actual fuck?”

The first thing he did was dial Rumi.

“Yo, what’s up? How was your week-long vacation?” Rumi had the gall to ask, as if nothing was wrong.

“What did you guys do?” Keigo shrieked.

“What? We didn’t do anything. If you’re talking about the news, some stuff came out. Turns out the Commission has been hiding a lot of stuff, who would’ve known,” Rumi said innocently.

“Rumi! I know you guys are behind this, I can’t believe you would—”

“Sorry, gotta go, bye! Enjoy the rest of your vacation!”

“Rumi—”

Click.

“Fuck.”

Keigo tried dialing Yu, Tsunagu, and Shinji but received similar responses. It was infuriating; he knew for sure they were behind it, and while he was grateful that his friends were willing to go so far for him, it did not change the fact that he was frustrated beyond belief at their faux innocence. He deserved it, he supposed, for hiding everything from them.

With a huff, he stormed out of his room and into the lounge area of the hideout, only to find Touya there doubled over with laughter, staring at something on his phone. As if sensing Keigo’s presence, Touya stopped laughing and looked up.

“Kei—”

“Don’t Kei me! Did you know about this?” he said, waving his phone in the air.

Touya grinned, knowing exactly what Keigo had been referring to. “I promise you I knew absolutely nothing about this. Do you think I would be able to keep a straight face for a week about something like this?”

Keigo rolled his eyes. “Of course you’re all happy, this is exactly what you wanted! How could this happen? I leave for a week and suddenly all of hero society collapses.”

“Aw come on babe, stop acting as if all this wasn’t secretly what you wanted. Plus, it really had nothing to do with me, or with you leaving for a week. If anything, it had more to do with you letting those hero friends of yours get into your phone.”

Keigo glared at him, but did not refute his statement. “It happened one time! One. Time. How many fucking times did I have to deal with people taking your phone and doing the stupidest things? Do I need to remind you of the time your brother called me dad?”

“Hey, at least when someone takes my phone it doesn’t destroy all of hero society,” Touya replied with a cheeky smirk.

“Fuck you.”

“I love you too babe.”