Work Text:
Ring, ring… ring, ring… ring, ring…
“Hey gorgeous, why the sudden call?” his voice is smooth and playful, and a welcomed comfort to you at the moment.
You’re sprinting through Fukuoka city, weaving through different allies and streets trying to throw off whoever's on your tail. They’re catching up, and you’ve never been a runner. Your breath is running short and ragged, and you know you need help.
Taking a sharp turn down another ally, you curse under your breath when you realise it’s a dead end. You’re about to turn around and rush back onto the street since you’ve cornered yourself here, but something catches your eye.
To the left of you is a trash bin - one of those big industrial ones that have the two half-lids covering them. Above that, is a fire-escape ladder that’s for some reason been left down.
Climbing up onto the bin, you grab onto the bottom of the ladder and pull yourself up. Once you’ve got stable footing, you begin climbing up the rest of the fire escape.
“Oh, no reason-” you curse under your breath when your foot slips while you’re halfway up one of the ladders. You tighten your grip on the side rails and regain your composure, though you don’t miss Hawks’ chuckle from over the phone. “Don’t laugh!” you scold him, and he clears his throat to cover up his giggling.
“Okay, there’s a reason-”
“Always is,” he cuts in.
“Hawks!” you scold him again. This time, he goes quiet for real. “Remember that Quirk supremacist group you busted a few weeks ago?”
“Of course I do gorgeous, so do the headlines,” he bragged, his smugness a complete 180 from your panic.
You make it to the top of the fire escape and climb up to the rods building. Peering over the edge, you find no sight of your pursuer, and let out a deep sigh of relief. You sit cross-legged on the warm concrete and lean against the half-wall that surrounds the building’s edge.
“Yeah, well, someone ratted me out and they know that I got the commission that intel. They’re not all that jazzed about being outed by someone Quirkless like me.”
“No, I can’t imagine they would be.” Despite yourself, you let out a giggle. His laid-back demeanour eases your nerves and puts your mind at ease, as he would say, it’s his ‘roguish charm that has that effect on people’. You hear shuffling on the other end of the line, and after a few moments, you hear him open one of the many glass windows in his office.
“Anyway, care to come pick me up, since it was your mission that put me in this predicament in the first place?”
“Please, you only called me because you're in my city,” he scoffs. He’s slightly muffled by the sound of a breeze whipping against his phone’s microphone, though it doesn’t sound like he’s flying just yet. You can imagine him perched on the edge of the window, his phone in one hand, holding it up against his ear, and his brilliant red wings spread wide and ready for take-off.
“Not true,” you correct him, a small smile tugging at your lips. “I called you because I know you’ll get here.” He lets out a breathy laugh into the phone, one which sounds much gentler and more genuine than his usual chuckle.
“Just send me your location, baby,” he jokes.
“Thanks, honey, I owe you one,” you tease back. You hear the flap of his wings on the other side of the line, and then it cuts dead. He’s hung up. You quickly send him your location, which inconveniently happens to be on the other side of the city to his agency, and you let your phone drop onto your lap.
You peer over the edge of the building a second time, double-checking that you’ve lost the guys, but your attention is brought over the the stairwell door that sits a couple of meters away from you when you hear a noise coming from it. You listen closely, and your heart rate picks back up when you realise it sounds like footsteps.
Someone is running up the stairwell, and you can only guess who it is.
You stand up and begin looking around, trying to figure out what to do. You could climb back down the fire escape, but you’d be a sitting duck. You could also try jumping across to the next building over, but you don’t really feel like falling to your death today.
While you’re still standing like a stunned mullet, trying to figure out what to do, your time runs out.
The door to the stairwell flies open, hitting the wall behind it and startling you. The man who’d been following locks his gaze onto you and steps out onto the rooftop menacingly. He’s angry, eyebrows furrowed and a snarl on his face, and his breath rises and falls rapidly. You don’t blame him for being exhausted, he did just run up about 12 flights of stairs just to get to you.
“There you are, bitch,” he hisses in between ragged pants. He’s gulping down so much air it’s almost a little concerning.
Almost.
“C’mon now man, surely we can talk about this,” you try to reason, or stall, whatever will work at the moment.
“No way, you little rat,” he starts stalking towards you, the glint of excitement in his eye and a stark contrast to his livid expression. “You got my whole operation shut down! It took me years to get to that point, and one day, you and your little commission friends brought the whole thing down.” As he draws closer and closer to you, you notice the skin of his right hand is bubbling furiously, almost like there’s boiling water under his skin and it’s stretching, allowing the bubbles to push up against the surface of his flesh.
“Quirkless shits like you are inferior, you don’t deserve to live,” he starts monologuing. You’re tempted to laugh, but right now, pissing off the guy whose hand just morphed into a sharp curved blade before your very eyes doesn’t sound like a very smart idea.
“No one’s gonna miss you after I slit your throat and dump your body off the side of this building! You’ll hit the ground with a nice splat, and your body will be my message to the commission - don't fuck with me!”
You try to take a step back, but your heel hits the wall behind you and you remember that you have nowhere to go. The man continues to stalk towards you, and you glance over the edge of the building.
Just how long is this fall, anyway?
“Thinking of jumping? Killing yourself before I kill you?” he taunts, getting closer and closer at his own pace. He’s really drawing this out. “Well, please don’t. It’ll spoil all the fun!”
You toss one final glance over your shoulder.
You’re seriously contemplating this, debating whether you’d have a higher survival chance if you just jumped and got away from this guy.
But, in the distance, you see a flash of something. It’s red, and it’s moving fast.
Yeah, you can make it.
Turning around and looking back at your pursuer, you give him a smirk. He falters, put off by your sudden smugness. There’s a moment where the two of you just stare at each other, and just as he opens his mouth and is about to say something, you step back and up onto the edge of the building.
Shock passes over his face and he lunges forward, reaching out to grab you and pull you back onto the building with him.
You take a deep breath to still your beating heart, and give him a half-hearted salute as you let your weight shift onto the back of your heels. He lets out a guttural scream of frustration, and you fall.
You’re freefalling, and the feeling of being attached to nothing is strange. Similar to the feeling of being on a big amusement park ride, your stomach drops and the air is taken out of your lungs. You force yourself to suck in a deep breath and your hair and clothes whip violently around you.
From beneath you, you hear a woman shriek in terror, and you close your eyes.
Waiting… waiting… waiting…
There’s a whip of air from behind you, and you feel a hand wrap around your arms and steady you in the air. You’re brought into a warm embrace, and when you open your eyes, you find yourself looking up at Hawks.
“I can’t believe you jumped.” is the first thing he says. His face is contorted in focus, and you can tell he’s stressed. A bead of sweat rolls down his temple to his chin, and once he’s secured his grip on you, his wings flap again and he takes off, away from the building and away from the man.
You smile up at him, wrapping your arms tightly around his neck and burying your face into his collar. Your heart is still beating widely, and you take in a deep breath of his scent before letting it out in a relieved sigh.
“I knew you’d catch me, Birdie,”
He sighs, and you two enjoy the rest of your flight in silence. Before long, he's flying you both back into his office through presumably the same window he left to get you from. He places you down gently on his carpeted floor and waits for you to readjust your footing before letting go of you. You miss his warmth and go to reach out and grab his wrist, but he doesn’t linger.
He makes his way over to one of the couches he has in the centre of the room, intended for impersonal meetings and things like that, and he flops down onto it, deflating into the comfortably worn cushions. You watch as he brings a hand up and pinches the bridge of his nose, his face scrunched up in a mix of different emotions.
Slowly, you make your way over the the couch and flop down next to him. The two of you sit in silence for a few minutes, before he finally breaks it.
“Sorry…” he mumbles. He says it so quietly you almost miss it, but you’ve always had good hearing.
“For what?” you ask, not quite on the same page as him, apparently. He sighs to himself and lets his hand drop down onto his lap. His head is tilted back over the edge of the couch, and he spares you a glance before looking away again.
“If I’d dealt with him when I was talking down the operation the first time, none of this would’ve happened. I knew I shouldn’t have let him get away, but he wasn’t the mission’s main target,” there’s another brief pause. “I’m really sorry, gorgeous.”
You chuckle and lean into him, placing your head on his shoulder and taking his hand in yours. You give it a light squeeze, then he shifts them so that he’s loosely gripping yours.
“Not your fault, Birdie,” you reassure him, placing a gentle kiss on the pulse point on the side of his neck. He sighs and tilts his head away from you, angling it so you have better access to the spot under his ear you know he likes the best. “Besides, you caught me.”
He lets out a low chuckle, but there doesn’t seem to be much humour in his voice. He turns his head and looks directly at you, and you find yourself enamoured by his golden eyes.
“Don’t ever do that again, by the way. Think my heart just about dropped out my ass when I saw you rock backwards.” You cringe at the visual image, and he laughs at you, placing a chaste kiss on your forehead.
“Don’t worry, I don’t plan on doing that ever again,” you tease.
You two sit there in comfortable silence after that, one of his arms around your shoulder and pulling you into his side while the other keeps your hand gripped in his. He traces over your knuckles idly as you simply enjoy each other's company.
“So, where are you staying tonight?” he finally asks, a bit more of his usual playfulness back in his voice. You smirk.
“Well, the commissioner did book me a nice hotel room for the weekend,” you mention, moving your head slightly so you’re looking up at him and blowing a puff of cold air on his ear teasingly. He shudders, and his grip around your shoulder tightens. You feel him shift your weight and you go with it, allowing him to position you so you’re straddling over his lap. His hands settle on either side of your waist, and you let your arms wrap around his neck. He leans his face closer to yours, so there’s only a breath between you.
“Perfect,” he says. As he talks, you feel his warm, minty breath fan over your lips. He moves in even closer, and his lips ghost over yours as he speaks. “That means we won’t have to clean up after ourselves.”
You chuckle, resting your forehead against his.
“Oh really? And what exactly are we gonna be doing that’s gonna make such a mess of my nice hotel room?”
“Baby, you already know the answer to that…”