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Dabi tells himself that the cough is just because of the damage his lungs have taken over his life from fire, not aided by his smoking, but he’ll be damned if he gives that pleasure up. The tightness, the breathlessness, the occasional pains in his chest—the ones that feel like he’s being stabbed from the inside—they’re all just side effects of his history. They have absolutely nothing to do with a certain golden-eyed hero.
Nothing to do with lazy smiles but too-clever eyes. Nothing to do with wings that couldn’t be more red if splashed with fresh blood. Nothing to do with a lazy smile, with someone who seems to see him.
Pain, sharp and bright and terrible but for the fact that pain is forever proof that he’s alive, has Dabi clinging to a railing, trying to catch his breath. He knows he’s already late, but it takes long minutes, thinking of the cigarette he’ll smoke when he reaches the top, the way the smoke will fill his lungs, the way it will tickle the inside of his mouth, before he can go on again.
Dabi misses when they used to meet in abandoned places like warehouses. The last three meetings, Hawks has set up on roofs. Easy for him to get to without being suspicious, but not nearly as easy for Dabi.
The buildings are often abandoned, which includes the electricity being hit-or-miss in them, which sometimes means that in order to meet with the fucking chicken, Dabi has to climb ten flights of stairs or more. His lungs have never been great—scorched by his own heat when he was a kid—and climbing that many flights of stairs steals his breath, leaves him panting and gasping for air. He’s never going to be endurance anything because he simply can’t go for that long, but all these fucking stairs…
It’s his damned, damaged lungs that cause his gasping, his shortness of breath. It’s not a tickle of something else in his throat, nothing soft and velvety on the back of his tongue before he swallows it back down. He doesn’t think about the petals he’s finding on his pillows in the morning, the broken, torn apart pieces of flowers strewn around his bed. Fucking red spider lilies of all fucking things. When he figures out which of the other villains is fucking around with him, he’s going to set someone on fire.
The door to the roof is unlocked, and Dabi shoves it open with another heaving breath. Fucking fire doors are fucking heavy, and after fifteen motherfucking flights of stairs, Dabi’s amazed he’s still on his feet, never mind is able to shove the door open.
He spots Hawks’s silhouette crouched on the far corner like some weird fucking gargoyle, and is more than a little tempted to roast some chicken in retaliation for this little stunt, but he drags himself over, leaning over the tall wall that comes up to his chest.
Hawks looks down at him with something Dabi can’t quite read in his eyes. “Okay there?” he asks as Dabi practically hangs over the roof ledge to catch his breath.
“Can we not do this on a roof next time?” Dabi snarks. “What was wrong with the damn warehouses?”
“Easier for people to get to, and more suspicious for me to be around,” Hawks replies, though he’s still looking at Dabi with eyebrows furrowed.
“Gonna give yourself wrinkles if you keep frowning,” he says, the words called up from a long, long time ago. He thinks maybe he heard his mom tell Fuyumi that when she was upset. Fucking ridiculous thing to tell a little kid, now that he thinks about it.
The frown clears, and the lazily amused Hawks he’s more used to smiles at him. “Aww, you do care,” he says.
“Only ‘cause this whole fucking thing falls apart without you,” Dabi retorts, shoving down the little voice in his head that calls him a liar. He doesn’t like Hawks. Doesn’t give a damn about the winged wonderboy. The now-number-two hero. Dabi could never like or trust anyone involved in that whole fucking system.
If he shoved him off and burnt his wings on the way down, Dabi wonders how pretty and broken he’d be on the ground below. He thinks he’d like Hawks better that way—bent and shattered and splayed out, not able to smile that infuriating smirk—
A sharp pain spikes through his chest, and he has to cough violently to clear his throat. He doesn’t think about petals that are red as blood-stained wings.
“Hey, are you sure you’re okay—?”
He slaps Hawks’s hand away as it reaches for him, sensing the gesture more than seeing it. “I’m fine,” he snarls. “Just make sure the next time we meet, it’s somewhere with a fucking elevator.” He straightens, the sharpness in his chest fading to a dull ache, and he fumbles in his pocket for his cigarettes.
“Are you sure you should be smoking—”
“Are you my fucking mother?” Dabi interrupts.
“No. I just—”
“Then shut the fuck up,” he snaps. “We have work to do.”
His lips grab the cigarette automatically while Dabi sets his finger alight. He pulls in a couple quick puffs, lets them out, then takes a deep drag, feeling the smoke fill his lungs for a moment, holding it there. He’s told all the time that cigarettes stink and taste awful, but his senses of taste and smell were pretty much ruined when he nearly burned his entire jaw off his face. It’s not about the taste or the smell to him, it’s about the tickling, light feeling of having smoke in his lungs, feeling the wispy fingers of it whisper down his throat, the raw, visceral pleasure of breathing out smoke, seeing his breath, and knowing he’s alive, that he’s breathing, that he’s real that comes with it.
People forget that food isn’t a pleasure to eat if you can’t taste or smell anything. That the cigarettes suppress his appetite is just another reason he’ll give them up over his dead body.
At least he can’t taste the petals.
“So,” he says as the last of the smoke from that first inhale trickles out. “You ready to get your fucking orders, dodo?”
Hawks makes a face at the nickname, wanting to protest, but he doesn’t. Dabi does not find it cute at all. “Yeah, I’m ready. Though if you’re that short of breath—”
“Stay in your fucking lane, birdbrain.” He takes another inhale, then lets it out in a slow, controlled breath. It’s almost meditative, really. Isn’t that yoga shit supposed to do with people’s breathing and stuff? He has to chuckle at the thought of people doing yoga while smoking. When he turns back to Hawks, he finds the hero watching him, looking… lazy, at ease. No fucking hero should feel comfortable with Dabi. He flicks the ash from the end of the cigarette and begins to relay the information Shigaraki gave him.
That strange, lazy look never leaves Hawks’s face, but at least the overgrown turkey doesn’t comment on his smoking again. Probably knows that Dabi’d roast him alive, liaison or no liaison.
When the time comes to go their own ways, Dabi’s chest tightens and he begins to cough. He chokes and gasps, feeling something almost trapped in his throat.
“Hey, Dabi!” Hawks says, coming to his side. Dabi wants to wave him away, shove him off. He doesn’t need help, not from a fucking turkey, not from anyone—
Hawks slaps him on the back, and it’s hard and it seems like enough to finally dislodge the thing that’s clawing at his throat. Somehow, some impulse makes Dabi catch the thing he throws up. There, kneeling on the shitty roof of an abandoned building, Dabi holds in his palms a whole spider lily blossom.
“A… flower?” Hawks asks, something odd in his voice as they both stare at the thing in his hands. “You…” He kneels down across from Dabi, cupping Dabi’s hands in his own, as if they’re both cradling the fragile bloom. “I didn’t think it was real.”
Breathing is still hard, still takes effort. It feels like his lungs aren’t getting enough oxygen, but Dabi closes his hands, crushing the flower as if crushing it could make whatever is growing in his lungs go away as well. Hawks makes a soft, pained sound as if Dabi were crushing his precious fucking wings— petal-colored wings, or wing-colored petals— and sets the crumbled remains on fire. There’s little enough warning that Hawks pulls back, which is what Dabi needs. He tries to get his feet back under him, tries to stand, but even getting halfway there leaves him trying to slowly inhale and exhale.
“You need to go to the hospital!” Hawks says, taking him by the shoulders. “You need to have the root system removed!”
Dabi tries to laugh, but it comes out more as a wheeze that quickly devolves into another cough, leaving him spitting more petals. He burns each one before it can hit the ground. “I can’t,” he gasps, trying very hard to take slow, deep breaths. His chest feels tight and somehow full and heavy, and he can feel the tickle in the back of his throat that says he wants to cough some more.
Hawks opens his mouth, only to close it after a moment. Probably realizing that Dabi’s right. He’s not being stubborn on this one. He’s an extremely wanted villain. Villains can’t just go dancing into the nearest hospital when they need help. Well, they could, they’d just end up arrested when they did.
Dabi isn’t going to die in a cage. He doesn’t particularly want to die in front of Hawks—stupidly, he’d like to spare the fucking birdbrain that sight if he could—but his options are quickly going up in smoke.
Taking him by his shoulders, Hawks demands, “Who is it?”
The fuck? Why the fuck would the bird give a damn? And where the fuck does he get off touching Dabi? Dabi swears he can feel the vines in his chest grow with how much he longs for a different kind of touch.
“It doesn’t work like that,” he rasps out, coughing out another clump of petals.
Hawks meets his eyes, looking honestly concerned, looking almost afraid, and Dabi is honestly a little insulted how invested the fucking hero is pretending to be in this whole thing.
“You just have to confess, right? Maybe if you tell me—”
“You have to confess to the person, ” Dabi snaps. He didn’t look it up; he didn’t have to. He remembers his mother coughing up the same flowers when he was a child, holding the blossoms in her palms and smiling at him sadly.
“Why don’t you just tell him?” he’d demanded, hurting to see his mother in so much pain.
“Oh, my darling,” she said, stroking his face like he was as delicate as the flower in her hand. “It isn’t enough to tell them. It needs to be reciprocal to be healed.”
He hadn’t known what reciprocal meant then. He’d looked it up in a dictionary.
And then he’d burned the dictionary.
Reciprocal: shared, felt, or shown by both sides.
His mother had been in love with a man incapable of returning that love. Dabi had sworn to himself he would never, ever love someone who couldn’t love him in return.
And yet, here he was, coughing up the same poisonous blooms into his hands, just as she had. Her mental break combined with her hanahaki meant that Enji got to decide her course of treatment, and removing them was the only way to save her life.
Dabi had sworn that he’d never let anyone do that to him either. Better to be dead than be literally heartless.
The memories of his mother are enough to fight back the flowers, the roots, and clear his throat just a little bit. For now, at least. The weight and pain tell him that he doesn’t have long, which is, okay, it’s not ideal. It means he really has to move up his timetable. He almost certainly doesn’t have time for the long game that the League is playing.
“There has to be another option,” Hawks says, almost pleading. For a moment, Dabi lets himself pretend that Hawks actually cares about him, is worried about him.
It’s a mistake. He swears he can feel the roots grow in his chest, and he starts hacking again. The kind of deep, wracking coughs that tell you something is very, very wrong, the kind that makes all the muscles in his abdomen and back ache with the force of them.
“Dabi!”
He can feel the blossom crawling up his throat, clogging it, tickling, which just makes him gag and cough even harder. He can’t breathe around such a large bloom, and black dots dance in front of his eyes before another terrible cough dislodges the thing.
Slumping, his forehead finds Hawks’s shoulder to rest on, and he knows he shouldn’t find comfort in this. He’d coughed so hard that he must have pulled some of his piercings, because he tastes a little bit of blood. Somehow that metallic tang still registers on tastebuds that are almost entirely burnt out. Not unusual, though irritating.
This damn man is going to be the death of him—literally—after all. It’s probably just another sign of how monumentally fucked up Dabi is that even as he’s probably dying, and it’s probably the fucking chicken’s fault, and even so, he can’t help but drink in the almost accidental touch. He savors Hawks’s warmth, wishes his sense of smell were better, that he could inhale Hawks and memorize it.
“Dabi?” Hawks asks with an odd tone that Dabi can’t make sense of.
He opens his eyes, staring at Hawks far closer than he usually gets to be, and croaks, “What?”
Hawks pushes his shoulders back a bit, and the roots in his lungs feel like they writhe, growing on Dabi’s despair at being rejected so firmly. But Hawks doesn’t release him, just pushing him at arm’s length, staring down. After a moment, Dabi looks down too, and his jaw drops.
There, on the dirty, barren cement roof, is another spider lily, but not a blood-wing red one this time, no. This one is brilliant gold. Gold like gold hair, like golden eyes. It sits there, looking impossibly bright against the drab concrete, as if the fucking flower is confessing for him. As if his own fucking disease is trying to tell Hawks.
As if it would make a difference. As if Hawks could ever possibly love someone as ugly and broken as Dabi. As if anyone could.
When Dabi reaches for Hawks, it’s to use his shoulders as leverage to stand up. Even that simple exertion makes him sway, lightheaded. He tries to keep his breathing slow and steady, even though he feels like he wants to take lots of quick sharp breaths. He knows that’s dangerous and won’t help him, but it’s hard.
Several of Hawks’s feathers float around him, helping to steady him, even as Hawks gets to his feet. He shrugs them off, determined to put one foot in front of the other and head down the stairs, back to the League.
“Dabi!” Hawks’s hand reaches out to snag Dabi’s, and spins him, forcing him to face the hero. And he is a hero. He might be working with the League for the moment, but Dabi doesn’t believe he’s really gone villain. He’s the newly minted Number Two hero. He has the literal world at his feet.
“Let go,” he says, trying to shrug out of Hawks’s grip. If Hawks doesn’t fucking just let him leave with whatever limited dignity he still has, he’s going to do something fucking stupid, like confess, and then he’s going to fucking die at Hawks’s fucking feet because the fucking chicken just couldn’t leave well enough alone.
It would be the perfect fucking cheery on top of his dumpster fire life.
“No,” Hawks says, something like anger in his voice.
Dabi winces. It’s not like he blames the fucking bird. In his golden peacock place, he’d be appalled if someone like Dabi had hanahaki over him.
“Don’t bother,” he snaps, yanking his arm free, determined to move forward, only to be met with a wall of wing. “Unless you want to be a roasted chicken, you’ll move that fucking wing.”
“You have hanahaki,” Hawks says, and Dabi can’t read his voice, doesn’t want to look at his face. He just knows that it’s going to be bad, and he doesn’t want to see the look on Hawks’s face. He doesn’t want that to be the last sight of him, if he’s going to go.
Glancing back at where the yellow spider lily was, he’s surprised to see it’s gone. He was about to send a flame at it, make a quip about there being no evidence since of any such thing, but he sees the flower being held aloft by several feathers.
His flames leap to life, and then Hawks puts himself, inexplicably, in Dabi’s line of sight. Which also probably means he’s moved the flower. “Don’t,” he says, and Dabi has no choice but to look at his face, to see the disgust and disdain there.
Only… that’s not what he sees. Hawks is looking at him intently, but it’s not… he doesn’t look angry. It takes Dabi a moment to place the expression because he’s never seen it on Hawks before.
He looks like he’s in pain.
The roots begin to writhe in his chest again, and Dabi can’t help but grasp at his chest, even knowing how futile that is as another flower begins to creep up from his lungs into his windpipe.
“You’re in love with me?” Hawks asks, stunned, probably still working his way to horrified. “With me?”
Dabi gasps in pain, and then he’s choking on another flower as it chokes him, feeling like it’s climbing from his lungs to spill out of his mouth in blooms. He tries to inhale, tries to cough, tries to do anything, but all he can feel is the petals on his tongue, the roots and stem growing in his throat, and he staggers.
“You idiot,” Hawks snaps. As far as the last words the person he’s in doomed, selfish love with says to him goes, really, that could have been much worse. Focused on trying to breathe, trying to fight down the panic that will do nothing but hasten his end, he misses Hawks stepping behind him until his arms wrap around Dabi’s waist, giving a sharp jab that drives up into Dabi’s diaphragm and manages to dislodge the stem. A whole yellow spider lily spills out of his lips, including the stem, which has him retching as it tickles his gag reflex on the way out. He can breathe again, a little bit, though it’s still hard. Dabi’s not actually sure that’s a good thing.
Licking his lips, tasting blood, feeling the slick of split, cracked lips, Dabi manages to say, “Don’t worry. I won’t say it.”
“Don’t—” Hawks cuts himself off, then, to Dabi’s shock, presses his chest more firmly to Dabi’s back, almost as if… almost as if he’s cuddling Dabi.
The flowers grow again, fast and furious, and Dabi is suddenly sure that Hawks has decided to literally kill him with kindness.
As he chokes and gags around the flowers trying to grow up through his throat, he wonders if he’s actually upset about that or not. He has things he wants to do, things he needed to do, but it doesn’t seem like he’s going to get to. If he at least gets to die in the arms of his love, maybe that’s not the worst end? A final fucked up kindness in a life that’s barely known kindness at all?
Hawks drives his fists into Dabi’s solar plexus again, dislodging another flower, stem and all, and this time some bile follows it. There’s nothing else in Dabi’s stomach anyway, which is probably the only reason he hadn’t thrown up sooner. He waits for Hawks to let him go as he tries to catch his breath, even if he knows it’s in vain. When he doesn’t move, Dabi risks putting a hand over the fists that are locked together around his waist.
“It’s okay,” he says, oddly at peace. Part of him wants to lash out, wants to just burn the whole world around him down. But at the end, he doesn’t want Hawks to die. “You should go.” He takes as deep a breath as he can, feeling the petals of another flower beginning to tickle at his throat, and calls his fire forward, expecting to chase Hawks away.
“You idiot,” Hawks yells, pulling him closer, which is the wrong direction. “I love you!”
Dabi’s flame goes out without his direction, and he twists in Hawks’s arms to stare at him.
“You can’t—”
“I love your fucking stupid ass, and if you want to burn yourself out, you’re going to have to take me with you.”
Shaking his head, Dabi tries to shove him away, feeling the flowers climbing again, needing to cough, needing space, needing not to be lied to.
Hawks doesn’t let him get away though; he shifts his arms to rest one on Dabi’s waist, then anchors one behind Dabi’s neck to pull him forward and kiss him. Dabi would swear it tastes like sunlight, warm and welcoming, but it’s short, the flowers clawing at his throat again forcing him to break it. Hawks quickly shifts him to start another Heimlich maneuver on him. This time, it takes three painful tries before the flower comes out. This stem has three large blossoms on it and leaves Dabi retching again, spitting out petals.
“Leave me,” he manages to say through an abused and raw throat.
“No,” Hawks says, angry and firm. “Never. I’m not going anywhere, and neither are you, so say it!”
Dabi shakes his head. It’s a lie; he knows it is. And it’s going to hurt so much more—
“You fucking stubborn ass. Say it!”
He shakes his head again, hard enough that it makes him dizzy, which just means that Hawks has to support his weight more directly.
“Just fucking admit it already!”
The flowers are climbing his throat again, and they feel even larger.
So this is it, he thinks.
Well, if he’s going to die anyway, does it really hurt?
“I love you,” he manages to force out around the flowers clogging his throat. He closes his eyes and tries to inhale, but he can’t, can tell that he’s getting no air. Hawks doesn’t hesitate to give him the Heimlich maneuver again, and it’s probably a good thing he’s going to be dead, because he thinks that if Hawks does that any harder, he’s going to have ruptured organs. It does somehow work to dislodge one of the flowers, and he can get a tiny bit of air, enough to start coughing in earnest.
He can’t keep his footing, and somehow finds himself lowered to the ground, where he’s soon on hands and knees, scraping his forehead on the cement as he tries to cough up the flowers that must surely fill his lungs. Even through the intense pain of the coughs, Dabi can feel Hawks close, his hand rubbing Dabi’s back soothingly.
Several huge golden lily blooms spill from his mouth, stems and all, making an almost comically large pile beneath him. He keeps hacking, keeps coughing, keeps throwing up blossoms, and thinks if he realized that the death would be this drawn out, this ignoble, he’d have just thrown himself from the building and save himself the pain.
Then something in his chest seems to give, and he coughs up more flowers, more stems, his world becoming nothing but the flowers in his chest and mouth, and Hawks’s hand at his back. Not even the cold concrete beneath him registers.
Just when he thinks he just wants to fall over and die, end it all, a final ball of flower and stem finally fall from his mouth, and he collapses to his side. He’s so dazed, dizzy and exhausted from the coughing and the lack of air that it takes him a while to realize he’s staring at what looks like an entire fucking bouquet of spider lilies. They’re not all yellow though.
The final lilies, the ones resting on the top, are a pure, perfect white.
Not gold, not even red, but white.
Hawks’s hand rubs his side, and he realizes that Hawks is cuddled up behind him like he’s the fucking big spoon, and Dabi can breathe.
“You…” he starts to say, but his voice is barely more than a whisper, his throat probably raw from coughing and the flowers that have passed through it. “You really love me.”
Hawks presses his forehead to the nape of Dabi’s neck, moving his arm to wrap around Dabi’s waist. “I do,” he says.
Part of Dabi wants to argue, to protest, to insist it simply can’t be, but the pile of flowers before him, and his now clear lungs tell a different story.
Only reciprocated love can heal hanahaki, he knows. No matter how part of him tries to protest, the proof is there in sunlight-bright and moon-pale flowers.
“You have terrible taste,” he says.
Against his back, Hawks chuckles, but the arm around his waist tightens. “I always liked the grumpy ones,” he says.
“Not grumpy,” Dabi protests. “Misanthropic.”
“I love you anyway,” Hawks replies simply. Dabi expects the roots to grow in his lungs, the flowers to block his airway, but neither of those things happens.
“Like I said,” he replies, “terrible taste.”
He feels a flutter against his nape and it takes him a second to realize that Hawks has kissed him there.
“Freak,” he adds.
Hawks laughs, a joyous sound that fills Dabi with warmth. “Your freak,” he agrees.
Dabi isn’t sure he hasn’t died and mistakenly ended up in some heaven, but he looks forward to finding out. He squeezes the arm around his waist.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “You are.”