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The bird was late. Again.
He usually was, by Dabi’s standards.
If anything, Dabi could arrive at least 30 minutes later, and still be here before his fine-feathered acquaintance. He lounged back against the rubble of the warehouse’s structure, and tapped his foot on the concrete floor. If the bird didn’t show within the next five minutes, Dabi was going to dip, and he wasn’t going to show again. Waiting for ages until the other decided to make his grand entrance made him tired. Apparently, it didn’t matter that their little rendezvouses had turned into something more than just intelligence gathering.
It was wrong to make your friend, or your lover, wait longer than necessary, too.
The term “lover” was used loosely in this context. He was unsure where the two of them actually stood. There were so many factors to consider, not the least of which being that one of them was a wanted villain and the other was the Pro-Hero assigned to take him out. It was Dabi, the terrorist. Hawks, the ever present thorn in his side and informant, the one assigned to take him out. The piece of intelligence that Hawks was sent to dismantle the League of Villains was supposedly a secret. One that not even Hawks knew they had, and Hawks knew a lot of what they knew. Shigaraki said it was so he’d trust them more, and so it would draw him further to their side. Dabi wasn’t so certain.
He thought the crusty bastard was going soft. No one else seemed to think so, though. No one but him, and maybe Twice’s alter ego. Toga thought it was “exciting.” Compress thought it “a genius idea, if a little unconventional.” Dabi had been outnumbered by everyone but a madman. In this particular case, he would have taken the madman. Especially because it would spare him the inevitable.
Speaking of, the inevitable seemed to have gotten the memo about being late. He heard the flap of strong wings overhead, and looked up to see a flash of crimson through one of the warehouse’s many skylights. The bird had arrived. He squinted in the direction of the wings he barely caught a glimpse of, trying to ensure the hero didn’t bring a squad of other heroes with him to arrest Dabi.
No matter what their dynamic, it was something Dabi lived in fear of. If he were caught and jailed in Tartarus, he would never be able to exact his revenge on Endeavor. He didn’t trust Hawks one bit, even if they exchanged spit on a regular basis. He knew Hawks didn’t trust him either.
“Hey, Hot Stuff,” Hawks landed on a crate in the abandoned warehouse.
“Hn,” Dabi couldn’t be bothered to respond with actual words. Pretty boy might use that nickname in person, but he never texted him with it. Never referred to him that way over the phone. He swore it was to keep his cover, but Dabi could also swear he knew better. Why would the man need to protect himself when he had a whole team of PR personnel to do it for him? He didn’t. When you paid people to comb the internet to cover your ass, you didn’t need to do shit for yourself, and supposedly, Hawks’s phone was secure. It’s why he used his personal device to text Dabi or call him.
“No one could crack that code,” Hawks had boasted to him early on in their meetings. That was back before they became closer than either of them bargained for.
Dabi was broken from his silent musings by a gloved finger tracing along the staples lining his jaw, “What’s going on in that brain of yours, Firefly?”
Hawks’s voice sounded gentler than usual. It lacked its usual bravado and charm, and instead sounded genuinely soft and inquisitive. If Dabi had been the one to question Hawks, it would have come out sarcastic and rude, even if he meant his concern. Dabi wasn’t sure he knew how to voice a question in any other way. He was just too full of the fire of anger and hatred.
Although, he had to admit, some of that fire had been doused simply by being with Hawks. Before, he didn’t care who got in his way. The world would burn, and if you didn’t step aside, no matter who you were, you would burn, too. Yet, now he found himself realizing if any of the League of Villains were to be in the way, he might ask them to move before reducing the world to ash. ‘Might’ being the operative word. There was still the very real possibility he would incinerate one of them, depending on what they stood in front of. If it were Endeavor… Well, that was self-explanatory, and he didn’t think any of them would stand between him and a Pro-Hero.
“Dabi?” Hawks raised his voice slightly.
“I hear you, idiot,” Dabi snapped back at him, “You don’t need to yell.”
A small smile quirked on Hawks’s lips, “If you say so, Hot Stuff.”
“I do say so,” Dabi knocked aside the hand Hawks had reached out toward his own. It wasn’t that he didn’t like to be touched, it was more that Hawks started coming onto him with these tender, loving gestures, like brushing his shoulder, and squeezing his hand while looking into his eyes. Dabi couldn’t stand it.
He wished he could say it’s because he didn’t want to reciprocate.
He did.
Oh, how he did.
It was more the fact that when Hawks attempted these gestures, they felt hollow. It felt as if he were putting on a show. It was almost like he was attempting to fake his way through this like he did his entire Hero persona, and Dabi couldn’t stand that shit. He hated the fake smiles that never reached Hawks’s eyes. Those smiles always accompanied the tender gestures, and Dabi knew from that alone that Hawks was sleeping with him merely to use him. What he was using him for was the mystery that begged to be solved.
Option one was that he was being used for information. Dabi didn’t believe for one second that he was using him for information. Hawks hadn’t asked him for information in weeks, and Dabi hadn’t volunteered any to him. This led him to option two: being used for sex. That was far more likely, and Dabi couldn’t say for sure why he was allowing it. Well, he could, but that would involve admitting things to himself that would hurt, and he didn’t have the time nor the resources to deal with a broken heart.
There was a slight hurt in Hawks’s eyes when he knocked his hand away, and Dabi almost asked what was wrong. Almost. He held his tongue and surveyed him with quiet dispassion, “What did you call me here for?”
Might as well get down to business. He knew there was some big news conference centered on Hawks about to happen in less than two hours. The two of them didn’t have time to fuck. They barely had time to exchange whatever information Hawks was about to drop on him.
“What? Can’t I just ask to come see you?” Hawks laughed, and it rang true for once.
“Hn,” Dabi grunted at him, “You can’t. You never do. It’s always to exchange information. Or to get in my pants. Now, what do you want?”
“Always so prickly,” Hawks stuffed his hands into his pockets.
“Yeah? Maybe I wouldn’t have to be if you would just get to the point.”
“Fair enough,” Hawks shrugged. He looked away from Dabi, and his shoulders hunched over, as if his body were curling in on itself. If Dabi didn’t know better, he would say that Hawks looked…guilty. As long as he had known the man, neither of them expressed any feelings of guilt in the toward the other.
Hawks cleared his throat, and when he looked back, he looked Dabi square in the eye. Hawks’s expression betrayed nothing. His face was perfectly smooth. Blank. So, when the words came, they hit like a freight train going at full speed, “I’m getting married.”
Oh.
Dabi felt as if all the air had been knocked out of him. Those feelings he hadn’t wanted to confront and deal with? Suddenly, they were front and center. Wind roared in his ears, and muffled whatever next few sentences emerged from Hawks’s lips. He caught a few words here and there, and from what he could gather, the gist of it was that someone had caught onto Hawks’s real sexuality, and he began seeing the pretty, young lady hero to throw them off. It had gotten out of hand, and now everyone, including his PR team, expected a proposal, which he had dutifully followed through with that morning over breakfast.
Dabi knew he’d been quiet for too long, but he couldn’t catch his breath. He couldn’t speak through the shock.
“Hot Stuff?”
The shock immediately turned into white-hot rage, grounding him.
“Don’t fucking call me that,” He reached out with a hand full of blue flames to shove at Hawks, but he was too quick. Hawks sidestepped out of Dabi’s path, eyebrows raised, “C’mon, Hot Stuff, you had to know-“
“I said, don’t fucking call me that!”
Dabi launched a plume of fire at his face. Hawks sidestepped once more, and it was almost a nonchalant gesture, as if he’d prepared for this reaction. Dabi wasn’t certain if that pissed him off more. The fucker came into his territory, to deliver news he knew would set him off, and acted like it was no big deal. Acted as if Dabi’s chest didn’t ache like it had an axe lodged in it.
Another flash of his flames erupted from his hands, and again it missed. He was going to get a hit in on this asshole if it was the last thing he did. How dare he? How dare he use him on the side and discard him to maintain his own image as if he were trash.
“I don’t want to discard you, Firefly,” Hawks had once again dodged Dabi’s anger. He sounded pained. As if he were the one in emotional turmoil and not him.
Dabi grimaced at the response. He didn’t mean to voice that particular thought aloud. What he meant to do was incinerate the motherfucker’s entire pretty face, and incinerate it he would.
“Dabi, please, stop! Listen to me, would you?” Hawks verged on desperate now, voice cracking behind the pain. He may have planned for Dabi’s anger, but couldn’t estimate the intensity of the feelings behind it.
“I don’t want to listen,” Dabi snarled, “I know exactly what you want! You don’t want to discard me, you just want to keep using me, just like you used me all this time. I was some side piece you kept to satisfy yourself, while you put on some pretty, straight front for the public, and you want to keep me around to continue doing that.
“Well, guess what, asshole. I’m not your plaything! I’m a human being, with my own feelings! Fuck you! Fuck you for treating me just like everyone else in my life always has!”
It was Hawks’s turn to be enraged, and Dabi wasn’t quite sure which of his jabs hit him the hardest, all he knew was that the pretty face of his former lover was smoother than marble, hiding anything that might betray him. The only thing that betrayed him was his voice, as he hissed at Dabi, “You think I want this? You think I want to be paraded around in public as the ideal hero with the perfect life? I don’t. I fucking don’t. The cage I live in is just a gilded one. You of all people should know that. I’ve told you multiple times how tight the leash is around my neck.”
“So break it, dumbass. Break it before it chokes you,” Dabi stopped, panting hard from the exertion of chasing Hawks around the abandoned warehouse. Finally, they were getting somewhere. If he could get Hawks to focus on the fact that this sham of a marriage he offered to this woman was just another way for the HPSC to tighten their grip on him, maybe he could finally get Hawks to leave and join the League fully. This could be the tipping point.
The rage in Dabi cooled significantly at the thought. There was hope after all, if Hawks was acknowledging just how fucked up his current life was. The man slept, ate, and did hero work. There was nothing else. Not until he started seeing Dabi. If nothing else, Hawks was at the very least getting laid, which seemed to help his stress levels immensely.
The two of them, of course, had begun the whole shebang with zero trust. Swords at throats; threats of incineration; these were commonplace amongst their first meetings. Gradually, Hawks won over Dabi. Mostly with food. He found out his favorite meals, and brought him take-out wherever they happened to rendezvous that night.
The two of them ate in silence at first, eventually chatting about work related things, until finally, bits and pieces of their personal lives came out. That was when Dabi went for it. He’d laid a kiss on Hawks while the two of them were seated on a crate of some import or other, sharing soba out of a styrofoam take-out cup. It had been quick, and quite sloppy, but the message had been sent, and Hawks was receptive to it. He returned the kiss in full force, moving their food away, so as not to get knocked over.
(Later, Hawks joked that he couldn’t lose the food. Dabi was so skinny he could snap him like a twig. The food was necessary to protect. Dabi had graced him with one of his least sarcastic smiles after that.)
Dabi looked up at Hawks, who had taken to the air to dodge the bursts of flame being sent his way. Hawks’s whole body had stiffened, and the anger that had previously laced his voice was gone when he spoke, leaving nothing but an emotionless drone behind, “I can’t do that. You know that. I’m bound to this life. This is who I am.”
If Dabi thought the confession that Hawks was engaged hit him like a freight train, then he was mistaken. Hawks’s refusal to fight against the status quo, which he lamented over every time they met, hit harder than anything else that night.
Dabi thought he was going to choke over the lump in his throat that was forming. He might have if the anger didn’t make its reappearance at that moment as well. Crying was beneath him. He wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing the fucked up way his tear ducts functioned. Not to someone who just destroyed his heart in more ways than one.
“Who you are? What the fuck are you talking about?” Dabi was more than furious at this point, “You’re always going on about how you can’t wait to tear down hero society and build a better one for everybody. How can you say that?”
He raised his voice until he was shouting at Hawks, who stood there impassively. The neutral look on his face infuriated Dabi even more, “You can’t say you’ve been lying this whole time! I know better!”
“Do you?” Hawks replied, coolly.
“I’m not stupid,” Dabi snapped, “When you kiss me-“
His voice cracked, causing him to clam up. He was dangerously close to bloody tears running down his scarred face, and that would certainly be a sight.
“You think those kisses meant anything?” Hawks could have been a statue for all the emotion he showed. The only time Dabi saw him like this is when he fought. No reactions. No emotions. Nothing. Just a machine built to take down the enemy in one fell swoop. Where this sudden change in attitude came from, Dabi couldn’t say. If he were to take a guess, he would say Hawks was giving up completely, shutting himself off from all feeling that might sway his resolve.
Dabi’s breathing grew erratic. Something needed to be done to cut through the stone facade now facing him.
“Of course they meant something. Didn’t they?”
He hated how he sounded as if he were pleading with Hawks.
Hawks scoffed, “You were just a mission. One I was required to take by the HPSC.”
The words struck like a lightning bolt, “But… you just said…”
“I lied,” Hawks shrugged, “It’s what I do. It was fun while it lasted, but that’s all it was: fun. It could still be fun, if you wanted it.”
Dabi couldn’t believe his ears. He was just some honeypot mission. A plaything. That’s all he amounted to in Hawks’s eyes. Their time together meant almost nothing to Hawks. He thought he was convincing the pro-hero to come over to their side by showing him they were human and deserving of the same respect the rest of society received. Instead, he still saw them as villains to be eliminated, and somehow he still wanted Dabi to stick around and let Hawks fuck him on the side?
“I’ll fucking kill you,” he threw himself at Hawks, hands out, ready to blast him with a plume of flame while tackling him to the ground. Instead, Dabi found himself pinned by several red feathers to the wall of the warehouse, one of Hawks’s long, sharpened feathers at this throat.
“You’ll do no such thing,” Hawks said in that damn emotionless drone he adopted so effortlessly a few moments before.
Dabi would have bitten Hawks’s nose off if he’d been a bit closer to his face. At least it would have destroyed his pretty boy image and made Dabi feel better, if nothing else, and Dabi desperately wanted to feel better.
He hated the turmoil of emotions welling deep in him. Hated how he allowed himself to be played for a fool. That hatred continued to bubble in him until it spilled over into vitriol.
“You’re done for, Hero,” Dabi snarled and tried to escape his feathered shackles, “I should have known not to trust you the second you walked into my life. Trusting a hero is a bullshit dream. You’re all trash. The only thing you people think about is your image. No wonder you idolize Endeavor.”
Dabi spit out the name of the number one pro-hero with more venom than ever before. If he were paying any attention to Hawks, he would have seen him flinch, ever so slightly, but Dabi was blind with rage. All he saw before him was a traitor.
“You used me,” he continued, hissing through gritted teeth, “You wanted to have your cake and eat it, too. Wanted to fulfill your fantasies while maintaining that perfect image, and I happened to fall for your stupid charming smile enough to make that happen for you. You make me sick, Hero. Get out before I incinerate you. Go live your boring, strait-laced, white bread lifestyle picked out for you by the Commission. Just remember when you wake up one morning wondering why you’re miserable that I told you so. I fucking told you so.”
Hawks’s lips turned up in a humorless smile, “Whatever you say, Hot Stuff. Let me know if you change your mind.”
Great, crimson wings spread behind Hawks as he launched himself into the air and out through a broken skylight in the roof. He made sure he was well out of sight before he released the feathers holding Dabi prisoner.
Hawks’s parting words were like salt in the wound, and Dabi realized all the anger he held was deflating. He crumpled to the ground. He felt broken, and numb. It was like he couldn’t get his legs to work right in order to stand up. His fingers fumbled with his phone, and he could barely dial Kurogiri’s number to get a portal home. Once he managed to dial, his request came out barely above a whisper. His chest was too tight to speak any louder. He stumbled through the warp portal, straight into what passed for his bedroom, and began to plot.
He swore no one would ever use him and toss him aside like his father, and that’s exactly what Hawks did.
And he would pay for it.