Chapter Text
Hawks is jolted out of a half-peaceful sleep by the disorderly sound of shouting from the streets below his window.
He isn’t really startled by the noise, though, because the part of the city in which he lives has a nightlife that can be aptly described as rowdy. (Or, if he has an early shift the next morning and is trying to sleep, a better phrase would be fucking annoying).
He turns over onto his other side and presses his ear into the pillow with eyes still shut, wondering if it would be a PR nightmare if it came out that the Number Two Hero was making copious amounts of noise complaints in his area. Is that something people would be mad about, he muses, or would they commend him for being such a model citizen?
It would probably be about half and half, but he’s not really thrilled at the thought of taking that chance.
Instead, he pushes the irritating thoughts of getting yelled at by his bosses to the back of his mind and shifts closer to Dabi underneath the covers, touching his forehead to his shoulder and pressing his bare knee into a warm thigh where he curls up in the centre of the bed.
Now that he thinks about it, laying in bed with a villain would probably be a much bigger PR nightmare than making a noise complaint. Absolutely nobody would be commending him on being a model citizen for that.
About three different car alarms start going off at the same time and Hawks finds himself wondering what would be worse for his public image: sharing his bed with Dabi, or sending down some sharpened feathers to random cars in order to break them all from the inside.
His train of thought is broken by the sound of glass shattering.
With a heavy groan that might even be annoyed enough to wake Dabi up, Hawks groggily gets up from the bed to look out the window, reluctantly pulling himself away from the warmth - because as hectic as it sometimes gets in the night, there usually isn’t a whole lot of property damage, so it might be cause for concern.
When he rubs his eyes and takes a look out of the window, he concludes that it’s definitely cause for concern.
Where the usual chaotic groups of young adults would be, making loud noises and bumping into things, there’s shards of broken glass dusting the roads and fires emanating from totalled cars and a complete and utter breakdown of social order with people pushing and shoving past each other to flee the scene as quickly as possible.
Suddenly, instead of annoyance at having to wake up or shock at the horror that’s going on outside, Hawks feels a hot and irritated anger. Judging by the sheer scale of the carnage outside, there are probably casualties already, and Dabi is sleeping soundly in his bed having definitely not told him about this huge villain attack happening right on his front doorstep.
“Dabi,” Hawks grits out, half a shout and half a whisper as he stalks back over to the bed - and when that doesn’t work, it morphs into more of a full shout. “Dabi!”
However, blissfully unaware of everything that’s going on outside, Dabi’s sleeping so deeply that he’s pretty much dead to the world. Hawks taps his shoulders and then resorts to shaking him and then Dabi finally wakes, groaning deeply and blindly pushing Hawks’ hands away.
His eyes only open into slits, tiny lights of turquoise in the dark room. And in any other situation, Hawks would’ve focused on it, let it pull him in; but Dabi’s eyes have to be pushed to the back of his mind for the moment because- oh, right, the entire city is in chaos.
“You’d better have a good reason for wakin’ me up while it’s still dark,” Dabi slurs, turning his head into the pillows.
It would be endearing if the matter wasn’t urgent. Hawks glances quickly, worriedly back to the window where smoke is slowly rising into the night sky from the fires of destruction, then again to Dabi, curled up tightly in his bed.
He shakes his shoulder again, giving it a firm squeeze for good measure. “Look outside, you dick,” he grits in a whisper. “There’s major villain attacks going on now that you’re not telling me about? In my area, nonetheless? I thought we were past this.”
Dabi just gives him a look, and Hawks is done. He hasn’t done this since High End - withheld crucial information from him, especially information as important as this. The chaos outside is so bad that there’s no way there aren’t people injured already, perhaps even dead, and Hawks can’t stop himself from thinking about it. He should’ve been working, should’ve been helping, and instead-
Instead he was sleeping next to a villain, limbs tangled with the man who was supposed to tell him about these kinds of things specifically so he can minimise the damage to civilians.
The ruin spreads further than Hawks can see. Only the worst villains in Japan are capable of this kind of devastation and Hawks is in the same room as someone who would oversee it, Hawks was cuddling with someone who could’ve instigated the whole thing and was trying to keep him out of it-
“Villain attacks aren’t scheduled. We all dropped out of school,” Dabi says, tired. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Come back to bed.”
Hawks ignores the inherent intimacy of come back to bed.
“Dabi.” Hawks says it not with anger, but something close, and it wakes Dabi up a bit more. The seriousness in his voice, the irritated sort of look in his eyes. Hawks doesn’t give him that one often.
“Hawks,” is all he says back.
“Look out the window.”
When he opens his eyes fully and turns his head to the window, Hawks sees the drowsiness disappear from his face, quickly replaced with something that’s a mix of confusion and maybe even fear, if he looks deep enough. Already knowing what it looks like out there, Hawks fixes his gaze on Dabi - and he does seem genuinely shocked. Not like he had planned this and was trying to purposely keep Hawks occupied.
“Fucking hell,” Dabi mutters.
“Yeah, fucking hell,” Hawks repeats. “And who would do such a thing, huh?”
Dabi sits up in the bed, rubbing his eyes to get rid of the lingering lethargy. “Don’t act like this is my fault. If there was an attack on this scale, I would’ve known about it.”
“And what’s to say you didn’t? What’s to say they didn’t send you here to keep me from interfering? Oh, Hawks, I don’t have a reason for coming here tonight right before a massive villain attack that I supposedly don’t know about, I just enjoy your company so much.”
Instead of reacting to any of that how Hawks had thought - anger, maybe shock or callousness at being found out - Dabi just smirks, so wide that it borders on a laugh.
“It’s cute you think I was sent to honeytrap you,” he says with his signature shit-eating grin, the one Hawks has gotten very used to over the past months.
“Was I right, though?” He asks, leaning in probably far too close for what’s appropriate of the conversation. He’s fully aware that there’s still a complete free-for all going on outside but he just needs to know.
Dabi mirrors him and leans closer where he sits in Hawks’ bed, so close that Hawks can feel every single one of his breaths on his skin, soft and light and still slightly drowsy.
“No,” he says then, and pulls away. The tension doesn’t take its time fading, it’s just gone as soon as Dabi speaks and that dark, captivating look in his teal eyes disappears like it was never there in the first place. Hawks isn’t sure what he’s more bothered about - the fact Dabi was going to kiss him in the middle of a crisis, or the fact that he didn’t.
“Nobody we know does anything like that, anyway,” he continues, looking away from Hawks and out of the window again. There’s nobody helping, he notices - not one hero in the sky, not one emergency responder on the ground. Just people fleeing, terrified. Hawks can hear the screams through his feathers now he’s fully woken up and lucid.
It makes him feel sick.
“Out of the whole Paranormal Liberation Front, nobody is capable of that? Not even all of them together?”
Dabi gives him a stop bullshitting me look. It’s wild, the amount of different messages Dabi can give with such a similar emotionless expression - or maybe Hawks has just gotten better at reading him recently.
“Unless they suddenly multiplied by the thousands and took a shit-ton of quirk enhancers, no,” he deadpans.
It’s clear they’re not getting anywhere. Hawks smacks his palm to his forehead as his eyes zero in on the amount of abandoned cars outside, some with their doors still wide open, some completely destroyed amidst all the panic. That’s where most of the fire and smoke is coming from, Hawks is sure.
“I’m putting the TV on. If anyone’s going to be on top of this, it’s journalists.”
“Yeah. I saw your little interview last week after somebody snitched on you playing mobile games in your office.”
“I had clocked out already,” Hawks grumbles, reaching to turn on the TV. Good old trusty news outlets. He’s surprised nobody has called him in a panic, asking him to help with everything. Or anything at all, even. Maybe stopping the dozen different car alarms going off, because that’s going to get really annoying really quickly.
His face drops when the screen turns on, and the car alarms are drowned out by the emergency signal playing over a bright blue background, the block text white and unmistakable.
URGENT: THIS IS A NATIONAL EMERGENCY.
ALL CITIZENS MUST STAY INDOORS FOR THEIR OWN SAFETY UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
EMERGENCY SERVICES ARE CURRENTLY INCAPACITATED AND THEREFORE UNAVAILABLE TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC.
STAY INDOORS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
“What the fuck,” Dabi murmurs, still sitting down as Hawks rushes back to the window to assess what’s going on a second time now he knows that there’s apparently a nationwide crisis.
Hawks wants to curse but his words get lodged in his throat, stuck under panicked breaths.
“Check your fucking phone,” Dabi calls to him, now sitting half in bed and half out of it, definitely very much awake.
“Is fuck your favourite word now?” Hawks spits, his patience worn thin and heart beating quicker than he can comprehend. His feathers dart to his bedside table where his phone is without even a second’s hesitation, bringing it back to him and then turning the TV off so the alarm doesn’t give them both a headache.
There are no texts from the Commission, like he thought there would be. There’s nobody asking him to help, nobody asking where he is, nobody asking if he’s okay. Not one call or text or even an SOS.
“Nobody’s gonna text you a rundown on what’s happening,” Dabi says, and in Hawks’ panic he hadn’t even noticed him standing close behind him, peering over his shoulder at his phone screen. He turns it away from him with an indignant frown but not before Dabi can snatch it off him, opening social media and scrolling through whatever’s trending.
Hawks is too busy pretending to be annoyed that he misses whatever turns the healthy skin of Dabi’s face a ghostly white.
“Hey, what? Don’t steal my phone off of me and then-”
“Hawks,” Dabi mutters, interrupting him - and Hawks would be annoyed but he sounds serious in a way he normally doesn’t.
The video Dabi’s clicked on starts out dark and unassuming. Hawks holds a hand out to him, gently places it on his arm to subdue the shaking so he can see the video properly; it’s blurry and not filmed well and Hawks can’t really make sense of what’s going on until-
There are two distinct figures in the darkness of the city, lit up by headlights of abandoned cars and the occasional fire. The one, body language afraid and vulnerable, is frantically weaving inbetween motionless cars, and the other- doesn’t look human at all.
It’s too blurry to see properly but their clothes are torn and so bloody that if Hawks were on the scene, he would’ve declared them a lost cause. They’re chasing after the other with an unsteady but almost feral run, and Hawks sees it: they’re gaining on them.
Whoever it is, the blood-stained entity with a non-human look to them - they catch up.
Dabi averts his eyes, but the blood slowly begins to spread to the other as they stop fighting.
Hawks is glad it’s on mute.
“What the fuck,” he says lowly. “Did they fucking bite them?”
He thinks he hears Dabi choke on his own breath. Hawks snatches his phone back, probably much more forcefully than necessary - but when he scrolls, there’s more. They’re all blurry and far away, just like the first one, but he stumbles upon one that’s closer, filmed from behind a glass door.
He gets a close-up of it - savage and unyielding and dead, ramming into the door with its bloody limbs, practically killing itself trying to get inside. There are blue-green veins almost popping around the eyes and the eyes themselves are something else, bloodshot with pupils shrunken to pinpricks, something hardly recognisable as human and definitely, definitely not alive.
“That can’t be fucking real,” Dabi says. Hawks hadn’t even noticed he’d started watching again. “Fuck. Fuck.”
“This is half the entire country, at least,” Hawks mutters as he skims through various different accounts of the night’s events. “I don’t know if it even started here. I don’t know how far it’s gone.”
“I need to call Shigaraki,” Dabi blurts out and starts to frantically fumble for his own phone where it is on the floor. Hawks tries not to pay attention to the call out of courtesy - but he’s terrified himself, and needs something to tether him. They both do.
It’s just by chance that Hawks listens in, like it is most times. With all the feedback from his feathers, it’s difficult not to listen to anything and everything that’s in radius.
“Shig. Shigaraki,” Dabi whispers into the phone like Hawks somehow won’t hear him from where he’s stood about two metres away. “You’ve seen what’s going on?”
Hawks can pick up the leader’s dry response through his feathers. “I’d be blind if I hadn’t, ashtray.”
“You know what I fucking meant,” Dabi says, and Hawks pretends not to notice his sigh of relief, his collapse into his own body. In fact, he pretends he’s not listening at all, and pointedly looks out of the window at the rising fires instead of at Dabi. “Where are you?”
“In the PLF mansion,” is Shigaraki’s hasty reply. “Trying to find somewhere more permanent but we’re safe for now. Where are you?”
“At Hawks’,” Dabi says, an audible lump in his throat. “I’m safe too.”
It’s kind of endearing, how much they care for each other while simultaneously pretending not to.
(Hawks has to stamp down his own jealousy: not at Dabi speaking to Shigaraki, but at his friendship with the League, because he’s never had anything like that himself. And then he thinks, holy shit, we’re in the middle of a crisis, it’s not time to think about the fact that you have no real friends).
“The rest of the League are here too,” Shigaraki’s voice crackles through Dabi’s phone. “Is there any way the birdbrain can get you to us?”
“No,” Hawks butts in, perhaps a little too quickly - Dabi turns to frown at him and Shigaraki goes silent on the other end of the phone. Hawks tries to backtrack. “I’m not letting you leave from here,” he adds, which - in his haste to correct himself - kind of makes it worse.
Dabi’s eyes light up with an amused sort of fire. “You think you can control me, hero?”
“I think that we’re higher up in here and in a penthouse with heavy security,” he grits out in answer, calling on every lesson in quick thinking the Commission has ever taught him. “I’m not letting you leave so I can watch you die out of my window. If you’re meeting up with the League, the League are coming here.”
Hawks hasn’t considered letting a small group of criminals take shelter in his house before. Especially not the League of Villains. He cringes thinking about them all having free range over his entire apartment - not because they’d find anything shady, but because that’s his personal space, and Toga and Twice seem like they’d love to root through his cupboards.
Well, he’s offered now. It’d be weirder if he suddenly revoked it.
“Right,” Shigaraki deadpans. “We’ll just waltz into the Number Two’s apartment during a crisis so he can kill us all at our most vulnerable, with no consequence because everyone is already occupied?”
“How would it benefit me to kill you all now? Wouldn’t it be easier for me to just let you die out there of your own accord?”
There’s silence on the other end of the phone.
“My phone’s dying,” Dabi says suddenly. Hawks’ eyes zero in on the battery signal on his phone, a measly one percent. “I’ll- Shig, I’ll find you. Or Hawks will.”
“You better not die, asshole.”
The look in Dabi’s eyes is unreadable. Something sad and broken hidden behind a pale blue mist, behind a thick facade of callousness.
“...You’d make an ugly fucking zombie,” Dabi says instead, and Hawks wonders if Shigaraki can tell how miserable he feels underneath his words, how much he actually cares. “So don’t turn into one.”
Hawks watches the very moment Dabi’s phone screen turns pitch black. He can see Dabi’s face in the reflection in the small screen, forlorn and dejected.
It’s always been hard to tell what Dabi actually cares about. The man is mysterious, shady, and a notorious liar - but that phone call was the sincerest Hawks has ever seen him. Even through the slight insults and monotone voices, it was clear to see that Dabi was at the very least concerned.
“Are you… okay?” Hawks reaches out a tentative hard to touch his back, and then thinks better of it when Dabi lets his phone clatter to the floor.
“Need a fucking charger,” is all he says.
Hawks doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t mockingly ask Dabi to be polite or even to look at him. He just detaches a couple of feathers to get his phone charger, bring it back to his bedroom and then pass it to Dabi, who immediately starts untangling the cord like it’s personally offended him.
“I didn’t know you cared so much,” Hawks remarks offhandedly while Dabi fumbles with the plug socket.
Dabi doesn’t look at him and just scowls instead. “Sorry if it ruins your bad boy villain image,” he says, hunched over the outlet in the wall- “But you don’t fucking know me.”
He’s right, of course. Hawks got to know Dabi for the mission, and then started to get to know him just for himself - but even through all of that, he’s not sure he ever learnt the man’s true intentions. He doesn’t even have a small idea of who he actually is underneath everything.
Dabi’s a lock in a cage in a safe thrown to the very bottom of the ocean, for all Hawks knows. It had just been surprising to see one of those intricate layers be taken away, bared for him to see without even trying.
There’s at least thirty seconds of struggle before Dabi stops with a grunt. “It’s not working,” he mutters. “You got another?”
“What do you mean, it’s not working? Give it here,” Hawks says, because if there’s one thing the Commission loves to do, it’s pay all of his house bills so they look like saints and he can’t complain about his job.
He takes a seat by Dabi’s side on the floor and takes the charger out, plugs it back into the wall. When still nothing happens, he unplugs it from Dabi’s phone and plugs it back in only for nothing to happen again.
“Maybe it’s your shitty phone,” Hawks says, reaching for his own phone and plugging that in instead- to nobody’s surprise, nothing happens again.
“Maybe it’s the charger,” Dabi mumbles, worrying his lower lip between his teeth, but both of them know it’s probably not true. Hawks doesn’t know a lot about Dabi but he knows that neither of them are the luckiest people in the world. It’s sort of only fitting that the power goes out, because why wouldn’t it? It’s them.
Hawks uses a feather to flick his light switch on. Nothing. Flicks it off and on again. Nothing. Flicks it so many times that the only sound in the room is the lightswitch going click click click click and Dabi has to shove him in the shoulder to get him to stop. Even when he tries to turn the TV on because it was working pretty much two seconds ago, there’s nothing.
It’s only then that he notices everything else in his room switched off - the bedside lamp, the alarm clock. And at the same time Hawks is confirming his hypothesis to be true, Dabi is realising the same and panicking.
“I won’t be able to find them,” he murmurs. “Hawks, how much have you got left?”
“Ten percent,” Hawks says, hoping that’ll quell at least some of Dabi’s doubt, but it just leaves him putting his head in his hands. “I’ll save it, okay? We’ll find power somewhere, or a radio. We both have our quirks, we’re gonna be fine.”
“They might not be!” Dabi shouts, standing up from the plug socket to loom over Hawks, his stance somehow terrified and angry and worried all at the same time. “I can’t sit up here in your fancy fucking apartment while the rest of the League dies.”
Hawks stills at his honesty, because it’s just not something Dabi is. Everything the man says should be taken with a pinch of salt, because Hawks is certain only about 30% of all the things he says is actually true, and those 'truths' in themselves are mostly only half-truths anyway.
He’s told Hawks before that he didn’t care for the League. That he was simply using them for his goal and Hawks should know he isn’t going to lead him to them - but the phone call and the subsequent fear is enough to convince Hawks of the fact that all of that had been complete and utter bullshit.
“They’re not going to die,” Hawks stands up to face him, trying his best to seem like he’s not terrified, and he’s telling the truth - because Dabi needs him now, and when does Dabi ever need him? Dabi needs at least one of them to have their head screwed on because otherwise they’re both going to lose it. He just needs a push to be able to keep going.
“Shigaraki wouldn’t lie to you,” he carries on, staring him straight in the eyes. “He said they’re all safe. Why are you doubting him, huh? You think he’d make that up?”
Dabi stills, tries to breathe in. Hawks thinks he’s trying to unlearn his immediate response of offence in order to defend himself, trying to actually be truthful now that the situation is dire. He doesn’t respond because they both know if he does, it’ll be either a shout or a lie.
“No,” Hawks answers for him. “He wouldn’t.”
There’s a sudden explosion outside, what Hawks thinks must be another car crash or a gas fire. In his haze, Dabi doesn’t seem to register the noise.
“Shit,” Hawks mutters, mostly to himself because he’s convinced nothing is really going in Dabi’s head right now. “I’m gonna go and lock my door, barricade us in. You’ll be fine here, alright? We’re gonna be fine here.”
Dabi doesn’t say anything at all in response to that, and his silence is so deafening that Hawks is hesitant to leave.
He’s used to dealing with shock, he’s used to it more than anything - in his line of work, it’s basically inevitable, and every day he manages to help people through it, get them moving again and getting on with their day, but it’s different with Dabi.
But, Hawks thinks, is this actually shock, or is it a trauma response? Is he shutting himself down so he won’t have to deal with the pain when it inevitably comes?
Where does he even stand in this situation? He’s never seen this happen before. He has no idea if Dabi would want him to comfort him and he has no idea whether he’d be averse to him leaving - but Hawks doesn’t want to die like those people in the videos. He doesn’t want to become that. He’ll just lock the doors and then come back to Dabi as quickly as he can.
Hawks locks his front door and then calls upon every tiny inkling of knowledge he has about makeshift barricades (which is, admittedly, not a whole lot). He uses his feathers for most of the heavy lifting, setting a chest of drawers and a few chairs stacked up against the door, and then some more of his furniture for good measure.
It’s terrible. He knows that. It’s absolutely not going to prevent the feral, raging things he’d seen in those videos from getting inside, should they manage to get up to his apartment - but it’ll give them time if they need it.
Not wanting to stand there in embarrassment of his handiwork for any longer, he rushes back to Dabi who still hasn’t moved an inch since he left. Hawks can’t help the way concern laces itself through his bones for him and he finds himself closing the curtains without a second thought, seeing how Dabi keeps glancing through the window even though it’s clearly distressing to him.
His breaths come a little easier, then, but they’re still not steady. He doesn’t move from his place on the floor and Hawks is struck by how scared he looks even through that disinterested expression, how out of his depth he seems. This isn’t the villain he met while he was trying to infiltrate the League - this is somebody terrified and alone.
“Hey,” Hawks says softly.
Dabi doesn’t say it back. Instead, he responds with a blunt, “How much food do you have?”
“Enough,” Hawks hopes that will calm him at least a little. “By the time we need more the chaos might have died down a bit, and I can use my feathers.”
“Running water?”
Hawks quickly checks his bathroom sink with a feather, not daring to take his eyes off of Dabi for another second. The water runs, soaks through the red vanes; he quickly calls it back to his wings then tells Dabi, “yes.”
Dabi glances back to the closed curtains, probably forgetting that Hawks had shut them. He rubs his eyes with shaky hands and Hawks feels helpless, not knowing how to comfort him, what’s okay and what isn’t. He knows Dabi doesn’t have a problem with Hawks touching him but this is new territory - Hawks has no idea what to do when Dabi’s genuinely scared.
It’s not like him. But, Hawks reasons, it probably is like him, and he’s just never had a reason to see Dabi genuinely scared before. In what situation would he have seen Dabi like this, to know how he would react now?
“There’s no need to leave here, then,” Hawks tries to reassure him, still keeping a short distance away, just in case. “We’ve got food, we’ve got water, we’re high up. We can just stick it out in the flat, right? They’re not smart enough to get up here.”
Finally, Dabi moves. It’s only to look up at Hawks, but at least he’s not frozen anymore.
“What if they are?”
“I doubt a zombie is going to get in the lift and press the exact button for my floor, then wait patiently for it to stop and then break in my door-”
“The stairs, dumbass. Or even the fire escape. How do you think I get in here every time?”
Hawks shrugs. “Your undying want to see me?”
Dabi levels him with a look, which normally he’d be annoyed about, but he’s just glad he’s returning to himself. Dabi isn’t Dabi without that endearing, completely vacant expression.
“Magic?” Hawks guesses again, only to be met with the same face. “Okay, fine, but I’m assuming they can’t climb stairs. Or the fire escape.”
“Why would you assume that?!”
“I don’t know, they’re stupid!”
“Did we see the same videos? They can definitely climb stairs and that means lock your door, you dick.”
“I did,” Hawks grumbles quietly, taking a seat next to him on the floor. He doesn’t touch him, even though he wants to put a hand on his knee or maybe an arm around his shoulder - but Dabi’s posture relaxes with Hawks by his side, and he thinks that this is close enough for now. He doesn’t want to push it.
“Just…” Hawks trails off, trying to think of the right words before he carries on. “I have my quirk and you have yours, if anything does happen. People will sort something out and it’ll end up being fine. We’ll be okay.”
Dabi doesn’t say anything to that, and lets the quiet settle over them both.
There’s a horrible, agonised scream from down on the streets below as they shuffle back against the bed, and Hawks has to fight the urge to put his head in his hands, cover his ears with an iron grip.
He should be helping. He needs to be helping. And even though he hasn’t been asked, hasn’t had any contact from the Commission whatsoever - there’s an inherent need within him to help. To save. He wouldn’t be with the Commission in the first place if he did, wouldn’t have ever saved those people from the car crash in his early childhood.
Maybe it harms him, to have his heart bleed so badly, and so often. But he hears the screams from far away and he can only think of his younger self, broken and vulnerable and alone.
Four-year-old Keigo’s parents wouldn’t have protected him in an apocalypse. If he really thinks about it, his father would’ve probably run off and abandoned them, and there’s no way his mother was in any state to defend herself, let alone her son. Four-year-old Keigo would’ve been the first to die in this situation and he knows it all too well - he would’ve died alone and in pain and Hawks can’t just sit here with Dabi knowing that there are people he could be saving-
“Hey,” Dabi shoves him lightly. “You can’t help. You know that.”
Hawks shoves him back harder - half because what he’s saying isn’t nice, and half because he had known exactly what he was thinking. Was he really that obvious? And when did Dabi learn to read him so well?
“What do you mean? Of course I can, I need to be out there, Dabi. I need to be saving people.”
“Right,” Dabi rolls his eyes, not at all grasping the sheer amount of inner turmoil that’s swirling a hurricane through Hawks’ stomach. “And where are you gonna put them? What’s gonna happen to them when you ‘save’ them? You gonna put the whole of Fukuoka on a mountain until this all blows over?”
Dabi has a point. Hawks hates that Dabi has a point.
He knows he’d be able to find the survivors, knows he’d be able to hear their heartbeats and the terrified screams - he knows he’d be able to locate them all and retrieve them no problem, but what would he do then?
He couldn’t take the entirety of the city back to his apartment. They wouldn’t all fit and not to mention the fact there’s a wanted criminal in here already. He’d be able to find them all but there’s no way he’d be able to keep them all safe. He’d give them a false sense of hope and then just have to listen to them die.
Where would he put them, if he took them away from here? From social media, it looks like it’s already spread through the country, and he can’t exactly pick people up two at a time to fly them overseas. The rest of them would be dead by the time he got back.
He’s doubting it more and more until Dabi says-
“What would happen to me, huh?” he asks him, tilting his head like he’s not just broken through the brick wall of Hawks’ indecision. “You’d just leave me here to die on my own?”
Hawks, and he cannot stress this enough, hates that Dabi has a point.
Because, again, Dabi is right. He wouldn’t just leave him to die on his own, for reasons he can’t quite yet admit to himself - the same reasons that make him feel protective, possessive. Much to the chagrin of his handlers and probably the entire HPSC, he’d rather save Dabi than save a random civilian.
Dabi smirks, like he knows exactly what Hawks is thinking. Like he knows exactly what to say to push Hawks’ buttons, to wrap him around his finger.
“So what do we do, then?”
Hawks shrugs. “We wait, I guess.”