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Tsunagu feels justified breaking into Hawks’s apartment. After all, it was only two years ago that Hawks had done the same to him—and Tsunagu won't go as far as to hold a sword at Hawks’s neck.
It’s too easy to slip some fibers under Hawks’s door and use them to turn the handle from the inside.
The curtains in the main room are open, everything perfectly in its place. The air conditioning is on, but the sunlight settling on the carpet has warmed everything a few degrees. “Hawks?” Jeanist calls out. After shutting and locking the door behind him, he makes his way down the hall. He’s been here only a few times; Hawks doesn’t like entertaining guests. Jeanist is maybe the only exception. He spent the night here, once, when Hawks had been too out of it to kick him out after another surgery.
He knocks on the door to Hawks’s bedroom.
“Jeanist? If that’s you, don’t come in.”
Tsunagu sighs and opens the door anyway, only to be met with Hawks’s deadly glare and a sword at his throat “If you don’t leave now, I’ll—“ he grit his teeth. “I’ll—goddammit. I’ll be… upset. Maybe.”
“Mera sent me.”
Hawks lowers his sword and leans against his door frame. Behind him is the still-lit screen of a laptop on the desk, complete with a can of coffee on a coaster next to it. “Of course he did. Can I get you some tea?”
“No, thank you.” Hawks would pull a trick—sit Tsunagu on the couch, putter around the kitchen for a moment, then slip out the door while there’s half a wall between them.
Instead, Tsunagu tilts his head toward the living room. “I’ll order us some food though, if you like.”
Hawks shakes his head. “I’m paranoid and don’t want to risk it.” He sighs. “Did you see the video already or whatever it was? I’m assuming, since you’re here.”
“I did.” Tsunagu answers, leading the way back to the living room. “And like I said, Mera called me.”
Hawks sits in the armchair sideways, leaning back against one of the arms and resting his legs on the other. “Typical Mera. I like him, but he’s a coward. He wouldn’t deal with me himself.”
“Would you have really wanted him breaking into your apartment instead of me?”
Hawks rolls his eyes. “Maybe I would. He has this weird sort of guilt hanging around him that makes him easy to boss him around. You’ll just nag.”
If Hawks were in Tsunagu’s current situation, he would be taking advantage. It’s only fair for Tsunagu to do the same. “Do I really nag?”
“Yes.”
Tsunagu wishes he’d taken Hawks up on the offer of tea so he could sip it calmly and patronizingly. As it is, he just smirks and hopes Hawks picks up on it under his tall jacket collar. “But you like me anyway?”
“Yes. Big fan of jeans.”
“You’d say we’re friends?”
“Yes.”
“Good friends?”
“Of course.”
“And what’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done?”
Hawks glares at him. “You’d do this to me? After I just confirmed how good of friends we are?”
“You’d do the same for me,” Tsunagu says.
Hawks sighs. “Yeah, I probably would. Most embarrassing thing…” He raises his eyebrows and gives Tsunagu an exaggerated grimace. “I hope you regret asking this. It was my failure with Jin Bubaigawara and how Dabi so easily exploited it. I don’t know if embarrassing’s the right word, but this is what’s being compelled out of me right now. Ha ha, right?”
Tsunagu does regret asking. “I—”
“I’m not mad at you though,” Hawks cuts in. “I’ve come to terms with it. And you don’t even have to give me that reproachful look, because I literally can’t lie right now.”
Hawks handled that problem well earlier when he was targeted at the PSC’s press conference. Someone with a high-risk quirk had made through the stringent protections to keep state secrets and confidential information away from mind reading and speech compulsion. Discontent with the PSC has been growing since the League of Villains’ first attacks, so it wasn’t surprising that Hawks was targeted. It was, however, poorly handled by PSC security. Hawks had framed and softened condemning information so well that his bodyguard didn’t realize anything was wrong. When directed to take the man down, he was reluctant, and Hawks had to step in and handle it himself. He didn’t divulge any sensitive information. Mera, however, was not prepared, and let slip that he’d first met Hawks when Hawks was fourteen and a trainee of the PSC—who had been living in the basement dorm of HQ for eight years at that point, separated from his family. The whole thing was streamed online, and the inevitable snowball of public knowledge might be why Hawks slipped away to hide.
Instead of giving Hawks the ‘reproachful look,’ Tsunagu leans forward to meet his eyes. “Are you alright?”
Hawks quickly looks away but brings his eyes back to answer. “Who knows? I will be. I am. I always am.” He laughs a little and leans back, looking for all the world relaxed and unbothered, like he’s just arrived home for the weekend and finally thrown himself on the couch with a beer. “I just wish no one knew all of that about me, and I’m sure it’ll be all anyone’s talking about by tomorrow once they’ve had time to look deeper than the sensational bit of me jumping into the crowd and tackling a guy.”
“That was impressive,” Tsunagu says.
“Yeah,” Hawks agrees. “You should expect nothing less from me.” Then grudgingly, “I’m not a very open person,” he adds.
Tsunagu laughs and decides to give Hawks a bit of a break by not probing into the substance of that. “What, you? I never could have guessed.” Hawks rolls his eyes, but it’s accompanied by a smile that seems fond. “No,” Tsunagu continues, “I promise, most people actually do have a second secret house that they hide even from their friends.”
“You know about it, obviously. Since you’re here.”
“And who else?”
“Um. . . Lady Nagant knows.” He shrugs and leans his head on the back of the couch to look at the ceiling.
“The woman who assassinated one of your predecessors. You told her?”
Hawks sighs. “I trust her. It was mainly the PSC I didn’t want to know, but that’s less of an issue now, seeing as I am the PSC.”
“Mm,” Tsunagu says. “Makes sense, I guess.” Especially given what Mera confirmed about Hawks’s childhood today. The organization must have been like an overbearing parent. Or worse than just overbearing, for Hawks to have kept his true relationship with them a secret and bought a whole second apartment.
“I don’t even have that other apartment anymore,” Hawks says, rolling his eyes. “The PSC paid for it so they could keep an eye on me, and again, that’s no longer necessary.” Jeanist’s eyes start to narrow, and he quickly catches himself and opens his expression back up before Hawks can pick up on it. Hawks’s posture and tone remain casual, but the information about the PSC is something he wouldn’t have shared normally.
Tsunagu shifts it back away from the topic. “Well, this one needs some work, obviously.” He stands up to tap the vibrant art of Fukuoka food stands hanging on the wall. “This is good. But I don’t see any denim in here. It’s like you designed it just to spite me.”
“I don’t think people usually decorate with denim. If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll add some jean something-or-other in here. Just for you. Maybe one of those 100% denim Best Jeanist-themed tapestries? I already have a picture of you in my room, though, so maybe that would be a bit much.”
“Ha ha,” Tsunagu says flatly. “Wait. Hawks, can you lie if you’re joking?”
Hawks grins. “Nope. I really do. You’re framed above my bed.”
“If I go snoop in your bedroom, are you going to make a break for it while my back is turned?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re coming with me so I can confirm it.”
“Am I?”
“Hawks.”
Hawks shrugs. “You can always just ask me about it, if you’re that desperate to know.”
“Fine. Why do you have a picture of me in your room?”
“Because I like the picture.”
Tsunagu glares. “You’re insufferable. You know that, right?”
Hawks sits up in his chair normally and smiles. It makes him look young in a distinctly evil way. He’s seen this exact smile before on eight-year-old troublemakers that had toured his agency on a field trip and hidden for hours in his bins of fabric scraps while their teacher panicked. “Oh, I know,” Hawks says. “I do this on purpose. You think anyone could be this annoying on accident?”
“I always kind of figured, but it’s nice to have confirmation.” Tsunagu sighs dramatically. “The wayward youth. Very troubling, the trend these days toward annoying your elders.”
Hawks scoffs. “You were the one that broke into my house.”
“I was worried about you.”
“That makes it worse.”
“The wayward youth,” Tsunagu sighs again, “so determined to do it all on their own.”
“Can you blame me?” Hawks asks. “When my options for support are”—he disdainfully looks Tsunagu up and down—”this?”
“You can’t pretend you don’t like me when you said we were good friends earlier and you have a framed photo of me hanging in your bedroom.”
Hawks doesn’t joke back, just hums an acknowledgement, and they fall into a companionable silence. Jeanist opens his phone to check what traffic he’ll hit on his way out, then, with morbid curiosity, visits someone’s reposted video of the press conference. The comments line up with Hawks’s prediction: mostly about Hawks’s “badass kick,” and few more recent along the lines of “ummm so they took Hawks from his parents is anyone going to talk about that.”
Tsunagu had suspected something strange between Hawks and the Commission based on Hawks’s diamond uniform and his bittersweet attitude when he heard the news of its near destruction. But Hawks hadn’t told him. Tsunagu is the one Hawks asks to pick him up from the hospital, to accompany him to his estranged mother’s house, to fake his death and join Hawks in risking his life. Hawks wasn’t lying when he said they were close. And if Hawks hasn’t told Tsunagu about his childhood with the PSC, he’s not ready for the whole world to know. By tomorrow, the real story will be what Mera revealed, and Hawks will take it in stride as he does everything else thrown his way, but he’s hardly caught a break since he started that LoV mission.
Hawks taps at his phone, his hair too short to fall over his face now. The scars never seemed to bother him, and Tsunagu is strangely proud of that. Both Hawks and Bakugou Katsuki understand the value of a pair of distressed jeans.
Hawks looks up at Tsunagu and meets his eyes. “Can I be honest for a sec?”
“Hm. I don’t think you really have a choice.”
“That’s true. Maybe I’ve been taking advantage of that fact the whole time.
“Oh, I’m sure you have. But go ahead.”
Hawks puts his phone down. “I was worried you were going to show up and force me to, I don’t know, tell you everything about my life and work through it until we had a solution and a plan of action. I don’t know why I thought that. If you make us tea now, I won’t run away.”
“Okay. Which tea?”
“Black, please.”
Tsunagu smiles fondly at him as he stands up. That’s quite the show of trust from Hawks, the same man who showed up to request his help with a sword in each hand. And he’s not abusing that trust as he spins on his heel and bolts down the hallway to trespass in Hawks’s bedroom and find the photo.