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Thunder rumbled overhead and a crack of lightening brightened the streets below, just for a moment. It was day, but it was impossible to tell. The black sky was ominous and the darkness covered the city, without the promise of daylight or reprise. Wind howled between the skyscrapers and Keigo watched one woman, dressed in a pressed grey suit probably on her way to lunch, struggle with a cherry red umbrella.
The weather was miserable.
As miserable as he had wished it would have been all those years ago.
His hospital room was only a few blocks away, and the window faced the building that the Hero Commission had moved into after All for One had been killed. They had used funds given to them by the Japanese government to help support the training and education of new heroes, and Keigo suspected that it was meant to be distributed to the hero schools.
He wished it had gone to the families who had lost sons and daughters, husbands and wives in the war instead.
The hospital room looked just as bare as he remembered it. Painted white and every ounce as soulless.
It was an uncomfortable juxtaposition to the room that he stood in now, three years and ten months later.
The meeting room that the Hero Commission had used to gather them was opulent. Painted in deep red tones with expensive wall paper decorating the wall opposite the windows. The meeting table was made of cedar wood, coated in a dark varnish, and there was a painting hung on the wall above where the Commissioner usually sat that Keigo suspected was an original, and worth hundreds-of-thousands of yen.
He wasn’t meant to be there.
He felt like the hypocrisy would stain his skin if he lingered.
It had already stained his uniform.
It hung heavy from his shoulders, too tight and covered in blood that would never wash out. The high collar used to be something to hide behind, a way of filtering his thoughts from the world. Now it sat around his throat, constricting and as immoveable as steel.
The collar that chained him to the HSPC.
The door into the meeting room opened, but Keigo didn’t look up. The room was already half-full of other heroes, heroes from all over the country, and he didn’t really care about their chatter. It was quiet background noise that he tried to filter out. To ignore.
They didn’t really want to talk to him anyway.
Suspicious looks followed him almost everywhere he went with his fellow heroes, as though it had been his eight months undercover with the PLF that had tainted him and not the seventeen years prior being corrupted and twisted by the HSPC. Objectively, he should have cared about their distrust. Being able to work cohesively with his fellow heroes was an essential aspect of his job, which the last three years had only exemplified.
In reality? He trusted them even less than they trusted him.
Watching his own personal hero be tarnished by the truth of his actions, and then watching no one care would probably do that to anyone.
Acceptable losses.
Collateral damage.
The phrase Dabi had used echoed in his mind, burnt into his skin, noticeable in the scars that still made his facial expressions a little lopsided. Dabi had been collateral damage. Hawks had been collateral damage.
In the battle for strength, but not for civilian safety.
In the war that Keigo had been recruited for, but had never signed up for.
Dabi was the foal bred for racing that had never performed well enough, and Hawks was the prize horse that had broken an ankle out of the starting gate. They were both meant to be put down behind a plastic curtain. The only difference was that Hawks was going to be put down in front of a crowd of millions.
And the HSPC wanted him to do it himself.
His wings had eventually grown back. It had taken years, and more quirk-enhanced medicines and surgeries than Hawks cared to think about. He had been told they were necessary, but every time he had been put under anaesthesia for another operation, he had felt a little piece of the hero Dabi had seen in him die.
His primary feathers had grown back in the last month, bringing out the fullness of his wings but without the gloss they used to carry. A hero without a quirk could retire. Keigo was just expected to limp on, until the Hero Commission was done with him.
Dabi had called him a good hero.
Would he still?
He didn’t really smile anymore. The scars made the fake grin look lopsided, and it scared children sometimes. If he looked emotionless, people seemed to think that he was just taking his job seriously. His ratings had fallen, because he wasn’t as personable anymore, but if he couldn’t grin for a crowd anymore, did it even matter?
Was that all he was worth in the end?
A pretty face and a nice smile?
When he didn’t, did that make him less of a hero?
Take away their fame and their glory, and their government pay check, and see who’s left.
Keigo glanced around the meeting room, at the gathered heroes. A handful who were his age, one or two who were older, but most much younger. All there to be humiliated in front of a crowd.
The scapegoats for the society that had moulded them.
The war had dragged on for years. Heroes, villains and civilians as casualties in every conflict. All for One had been killed about a year after the raid on the PLF manor, but Shigaraki had escaped the fight. The heroes had done enough to leave the remaining villains without enough members or support to really rally again, but the remaining nomu had wreaked havoc on society and it had taken months to track down and arrest the remaining PLF members.
Months and months of chasing dead ends and red herrings, which had turned into years.
And then when it was done, when Keigo had thought that they could finally put the war behind them, when the crime rates had finally dropped back to a manageable level and public faith in heroes had risen for the first time in years, they had been summoned to the HSPC.
To make an apology to the public.
For failing them.
So, even after months of fighting, years of investigation, the loss of his quirk and the painful, torturous medical practices to get it back again, Keigo had still lost the war.
They all had.
Tokoyami was hovering nearby, talking to a young woman in a pink hero uniform who was wringing her hands, but Hawks couldn’t look at him for too long. He couldn’t look at any of them for too long.
The new heroes, the ones that had graduated high school last spring, were all there. All wearing shiny new uniforms that had barely been broken in by the amount of time that they had spent patrolling the streets with their chosen agencies and their freshly minted full hero licenses. There were graduates from UA, but graduates from other hero schools were in the room as well.
All so young.
Some, but not all, scraping nineteen years old.
And yet, in the eyes of the HSPC, they were just as responsible for the war that had tormented their lives, as well as the lives of the general populace, for the last four years.
Which was why they were there to apologise as well.
And Keigo couldn’t look at them.
How could he?
He had failed to protect them as well. He hadn’t been strong enough, or fast enough to handle the League of Villains on his own, or even with the help of the nations best pro heroes. They’d had to rely on a few dozen hero students to get the job done.
Students who should have been studying, safe from street thugs, let alone highly ranked villains who rivalled All Might.
Hawks had tried, tried to talk to the HSPC of the necessity of having a group of recent graduates apologise for events that were so out of their control that it was almost laughable, but the Commissioner has dismissed his concerns with a passing comment about how important it was for all heroes to show contrition for their actions. A public apology to show remorse, while they merrily planned the next Billboard Awards Ceremony.
Once upon a time, the hypocrisy might have slid off Keigo’s shoulders, but not anymore.
It was hard to put on a display of apology when he knew that the blame didn’t belong at the feet of the heroes who would have to apologise. Sure, he had made mistakes, just as any number of other pro heroes had made mistakes, but the environment that had fostered those mistakes was not his fault.
There was no indication that very much about it was going to change.
Popularity was still as important as it had ever been, and heroes made mistakes while trying to keep their ranking up, if they weren’t distracted entirely.
And perhaps worst of all, when the dust had settled and there was space to actually question the integrity of Endeavor’s behaviour and whether he should still be a hero, he had been presented with an award for services to the country. Keigo had tried not to listen to the bubbling public opinions, because he couldn’t see how it would be helpful or encouraging, but there was a shocking lack of disgust that the power-hunger within the Todoroki clan had driven Mrs. Todoroki to a mental hospital and almost killed the eldest son.
It was almost as though, because Endeavor’s actions were the result of his desire for stronger heroes, better heroes, heroes without faults, they were understandable.
And Keigo didn’t understand that.
He wondered if he would have understood, if he had never met Dabi. He wondered whether he would have been able to listen to Dabi’s speech, his confession of his identity and his exposure of Endeavor’s behaviour, and have not felt any empathy for the man who had suffered near-fatal burn scars at the hands of his father.
Of course, he had met Dabi.
He had watched at he minced his food into tiny mouthfuls. He had been woken by screams in the middle of the night and had sat with Dabi until the nightmares retreated. He had watched Dabi with Toga and Twice, and had known that he loved his siblings.
He could do the maths as well.
Dabi had spent the third week in January in Hokkaido. He had spoken about it with a cool detachment and obvious regret. His first kill.
Five days in the third week of January, when Todoroki Touya had been seven, would have meant that he spent his seventh birthday hoping to survive long enough for his father to return to take him home. That kind of context was devastating.
How many times had Dabi listened to Hawks talk about Endeavor, his idolisation of the hero clear in his tone? How many times had it hurt, to be naked in bed with Hawks and listen to praises about a man who had all but killed him?
He knew he should have cared that Dabi had known so much about Hawks the entire time, and had kept it to himself, used it to hurt Keigo’s reputation and destroy public faith in him. But maybe he was right to.
He hadn’t lied about him.
He was the murderous son of a murder.
He dreamt of the feeling of his feather sliding clean through Twice’s body and woke up terrified. Sometimes he had killed Dabi, sometimes it was Toga.
Sometimes he was covered in the blood of the League, sitting on a throne of their broken bodies and forced to smile.
Always forced to smile.
He had won, they told him, he did what he needed to.
The League was evil. They would destroy the world if they weren’t stopped.
But was it evil to want the right heroes to be protecting people? Dabi hadn’t wanted a world for the most powerful, he had wanted a world free of people who hurt others for the sake of selfish gain. Maybe it was more elaborate than that, but maybe it wasn’t.
Dabi had told the truth about Endeavor, but nothing had changed.
There was no public uproar. The public were disgusted that Dabi was the eldest Todoroki son, but the anger had not shifted towards Endeavor. There was no indignation that such a highly ranked hero could get away with such atrocities against his family.
No one suggested he was an unfit parent, or an unfit spouse.
There certainly wasn’t any suggestion that he was an unfit hero.
And Keigo didn’t understand that.
The Hero Commission had spent years drilling good hero behaviour into him, and they could so easily revoke Endeavor’s hero license, if nothing else, but they didn’t. They didn’t even discuss it.
When Keigo had brought it up, it had been laughed off, as though Dabi’s childhood was an amusing opening conversation for more important discussions.
But Endeavor never apologised, and no one ever asked him to. He didn’t even deny it. He just spent the next year or so looking guilty, and then that, too, faded.
Like the knowledge that he had almost killed his son was old news, and eventually became irrelevant.
It never became irrelevant to Keigo, but with every mission he was forced to complete with Japan’s Number 1 hero, he felt a little piece of his faith in his fellow heroes crumble. Once upon a time, he would have done almost anything to work alongside Endeavor. Now he could barely stand to be in the same room as him.
And maybe if he had never met Dabi, it wouldn’t have mattered.
But he had. And it did.
It had mattered when Hawks had sat through interviews for new hopeful young sidekicks, listening to the responses they gave to the dreaded “and why did you choose to become a hero” question, and only some of them gave responses that weren’t mired in obsessions with fame and wealth. It mattered when Hawks noticed how many heroes paused to give the reporters two seconds of their time when there was still a job to do. It mattered when he overheard other heroes, or parents, talking about the “promise” someone’s quirk showed when the person in question was still too young to be thinking about their future careers at all.
It mattered when the HSPC gave him a junior to train, just for a few weeks, someone who wasn’t even in high school yet but whose eyes had shone with all the optimism that he remembered in his own youth. Someone who believed that there were on the fast path to helping make the world a better place, because their quirk made them unique.
Dabi, in all his cruelty, had done more than just burn his wings down to the bone and shatter his faith in Endeavor.
He had disappeared.
He had fought once more with the PLF, in a huge fight that had once again levelled entire blocks of Kamino Ward, but he had barely spared Hawks a glance, then he had disappeared without a trace when it had become evident that, once again, Endeavor was not going to fight him directly. He had been injured, the burn scars stretching across more healthy skin, and his eyes had sunken, his clothes too loose around his frame.
Unlike the other ex-members of the PLF, there weren’t any real leads on Dabi’s location, only rumours and mist. Hawks had looked, though he spent long hours on patrol, in the middle of the night, wondering if he would actually arrest him if he did find him.
Or would he leave.
He had heard from Dabi in the months that followed, but he didn’t give him a location. It had been a simple letter, in a neat off-white envelope, delivered to his agency with the rest of his fan mail. It had smelt of honeysuckle, and the handwriting was elegant and refined.
I’ll be waiting.
Whether he was waiting to finish the fight that they had started, or whether he was waiting for something else, something less descript, Hawks didn’t know. He hadn’t found out.
That had been over three years ago, and it had been the last scrap of communication he’d had with Dabi. The last scrap of communication anyone had had with the villain.
And the silence made it worse. So much worse. Because when Keigo started to question his peers, it felt new and raw and he had no one to talk to about it, no one who would understand. He wanted the reassurance that not everything they did was wrong, but sometimes it was hard to distinguish.
Where did he draw the line when he was talking to heroes? Could they have good and bad reasons for wanting to be heroes? How was he meant to tell whether the good reasons outweighed the bad? Dabi had been able to tell, but Keigo?
Everything felt wrong, and he didn’t know how to find the middle ground.
So, while his beliefs and ideals turned to dust that surrounded him, threatening to suffocate him, he was alone.
And that, more than anything else Dabi had done in the past, was what Keigo struggled the most with. He wanted the reassurance that not everything he did was worthless, that he wasn’t worthless. He wanted someone to talk to, someone he could be honest with.
Someone he could be himself with.
The most honest version of himself, that was what he had thought when he had last been with Dabi, and with more distance and more silence, Keigo missed that version of himself. He missed the person he was when he wasn’t Hawks.
So, he had looked for Dabi. He had searched for him on empty streets and homeless shelters, run-down buildings and deserted offices. He saw him in flashes of unkempt black hair, or the sway of an ankle length coat. He saw turquoise eyes in busy crowds, and in his dreams, flicking in the firelight, but it was never the right colour of blue amethyst.
He had even found his way back to the clearing, hidden deep in the mountains, but it had been abandoned months and years earlier.
Just as Hawks had been.
Red and turquoise flickered in the corner of Keigo’s vision and he stiffened, turning his head minutely to see who had dared stepped up to the window beside him.
It wasn’t Endeavor, and his wings relaxed ever so slightly.
The youngest Todoroki had grown with age, though he still wasn’t as tall as his father. He was taller than Keigo though, and probably taller than Dabi. He had some of his father’s strong-lined attractiveness, but more of his mother’s delicate beauty.
Not that Keigo had ever met Dabi’s mother, he’d never had a need to, but he had spent long enough watching Dabi, analysing his profile and the gentle slope of his neck, the softness of his jaw and the height of his cheekbones, that he knew those features were not gifted to him by his father. Not that he could see Endeavor in Dabi, and in Shouto, but Dabi’s beauty came from his mother. Not from his father. Keigo was sure of it.
Shouto wasn’t looking at Keigo though.
He was staring out the windows that overlooked the miserable streets below as well, his hands folded across his board chest with a frown creasing his eyebrows. He looked annoyed, as though he too found the whole exercise too ridiculous to even contemplate. It was a picture of frustration.
One that Keigo was familiar with, and caused a pang of loneliness to lance through his chest.
Shouto, to his credit, seemed to notice Keigo’s curiosity almost immediately, though his eyes only slid over to focus on him in the reflection of the window, he didn’t turn to face him.
“Hawks,” he greeted evenly.
His voice was rough with exhaustion, and Keigo only then noticed that, although Shouto’s uniform was fresh, it had been thrown on in a rush, and he still had scraped skin just above his collar that looked distinctly like road-rash. Keigo had been flown in that morning, so he’d had a chance to sleep on the flight and then shower at his hotel, but Shouto looked like he had only just finished his shift.
“Frostburn,” Keigo greeted him with a small nod.
Shouto watched him for a moment longer before his gaze slid off in the window to look at the other pro heroes in the room. Dynamight had arrived moments earlier, with a foul expression but in silence, which probably meant that Shouto was looking for the hero he had started his agency with, Deku.
Most people were surprised when Shouto decided not to join Endeavor Agency as a sidekick, but after three years of internships, Keigo rather suspected that he had learnt everything that he had wanted to from his father, and was happy to put some distance back between them. Especially since Endeavor had stopped whatever public act of family unity he had attempted in the months that followed the reveal of Dabi’s identity.
Hawks had never known if it had gone beyond a public appeal for sympathy and an attempt to show that he had changed, but it certainly hadn’t succeeded in endearing his youngest son to him.
And Keigo couldn’t blame him.
“Are we expecting Endeavor today?” Keigo asked quietly, after a moment of silence and Shouto’s perfectly trained stillness.
Shouto’s gaze slid over to him again but there was consideration in his mismatched eyes now, a hint of curiosity and a hint of distrust. He didn’t respond for several minutes, so long that Keigo started to question whether he would, and then he released a slow breath and shrugged nonchalantly.
“He’s out of the country,” Shouto replied eventually, “he was invited to a convention in America about international heroics standards, so the Hero Commission excused him.”
There was something hot and angry that bubbled in Keigo’s chest at that news, at the knowledge that somehow the HSPC had considered Endeavor exempt, but was happy to disgrace him, and dozens of rookie heroes. He pushed it down so that it wouldn’t show in his expression, but he couldn’t get it to subside. It mixed with the lonely ache in his chest and felt distinctly unfair.
Which was a childish notion. The world wasn’t fair, and he knew that better than most.
“Of course,” Keigo nodded calmly, tucking his gloves into his jacket pockets so that Shouto wouldn’t see his talons biting into his palms, even through the thick leather.
There was a bustle of movement at the door and Deku, bounced into the room, his cornflower yellow cape floating behind him. Keigo watched as so many of the other heroes, especially the younger heroes, shifted to gravitate towards him, but he didn’t move. Deku was a good hero, he had done an internship with Hawks at his agency in his last year at UA and Keigo could see why All Might had taken him under his wing, even if it was never official.
He wondered if Dabi had approved of him, but honestly, Keigo wasn’t even sure that they had met.
“Have you-“
Keigo cut himself off with a frown but the question burned on his tongue and desperation coiled in his throat.
Shouto hummed curiously, his gaze flicking back to look at Keigo with familiar intensity. He had the same smouldering intrigue in his eyes, even if only one of them reflected the same turquoise shade as Dabi’s.
“Have you heard from your brother?” Keigo asked quietly, his wings drawn up and around him slightly, to hide himself from anyone who might have been watching him or eavesdropping.
It was a redundant question.
Even if Shouto had heard something from Dabi, by some miracle, he wasn’t likely to share that information with the hero who had been given responsibility for arresting him, and had failed spectacularly on multiple occasions.
Shouto gave him an indecipherable look, turning his head to look at him directly for the first time since he had walked over but didn’t reply. He didn’t even look like he was thinking about replying. Keigo knew that it was a stupid question, and a long shot at best, but…
His uniform was heavy and uncomfortable, and the chatter of his fellow heroes made his jaw hurt from how hard he had his teeth clenched together. He dreaded his phone alerting him of jobs, and his agency was too pristine and perfect. His life was an illusion and he didn’t know how much longer he could suffer to smile and pretend that everything was okay.
But without Dabi, he didn’t know what other options he had.
He had never been very good at taking initiative on his own.
It went against all his training, after all.
Shouto was saved from responding by a press representative of the HSPC marching into the room, her hair twisted into an impossibly tight bun with a clipboard propped against her hip and a Bluetooth earphone clipped around her right ear. Keigo didn’t know her by name, but he disliked her by appearance alone, which would have felt a little unfair if he was less resentful of the situation and her interruption.
She didn’t pay him any attention anyway.
She focused on chivvying the heroes closest to the door towards the elevator in the corridor, which would take them downstairs to the executioner’s block – or the press stand. Whatever they were calling it, it served the same purpose, so Keigo hung back, his hands buried in his jacket and his shoulders tense around his ears as his wings shifted slowly, quivering with anxious energy.
He didn’t really notice that Shouto had lingered, and hadn’t stopped looking at him, until the younger hero cleared his throat pointedly. The hubbub of the room was loud enough that no one else noticed the noise, or that Hawks paused to look back at Shouto curiously.
Shouto straightened the cuff of his uniform with a blank expression and then looked up to meet Keigo’s gaze with determination.
“Did Touya ever tell you about his seventh birthday?” He asked with a tone of uninterest, every bit as bored as he would have been if they were discussing the weather instead.
Shouto didn’t wait for Keigo’s response, though, as he carefully strode past him to join Deku and Dynamight and a handful of their fellow graduates from UA. Deku looked up as Shouto approached and Keigo watched as he laid a careful hand on his shoulder, asking something that was spoken too softly for even Keigo’s sharp hearing to make out.
Keigo lingered by the windows, even as the room emptied and he was alone. Shouto hadn’t answered the question exactly, but there was something of an answer in his lack of answer. He didn’t know if it was enough of an answer to actually provide the answer he wanted but staring at the pouring rain and the miserably grey streets below the windows, he also found that he didn’t really care.
* * *
When the press representative came back to look for him, Hawks was gone. His steam-cleaned and tidy but stained uniform jacket and trousers were folded over the back of one of the chairs, and his Hero Identification Card was placed neatly on top of the stained wooden meeting table.
The room itself was silent and undisturbed, except for the pelting rain that knocked against the glass panels of the windows. Thunder crashed overhead and a flash of lightening illuminated the sky for one brief, precious moment.
For the first time in years, the world shrunk below Keigo again, the wind under his wings made him feel light and free, and the rain washed away the ashes.
And by morning, when Keigo could breathe again, he was finally clean.