Archive of Our Own

Hawks sweats in his armor, feeling for all the world like a roast chicken as he kneels in front of the king. King Enji’s beard flares. The King’s whole upper body burns like a wick, but he only crosses his arms and sneers down at Hawks like he may or may not deem Hawks worthy of staring at his feet.

A tiring start to the day when he’s already had such a long week. Traveling from Toshinori’s country to this strange kingdom, already lagging behind its neighbors, took a week. A week full of bandits he couldn’t kill and monsters he couldn’t slay. Not without breaking some agreement or other that Endeavor’s King had made with each and every bordering country.

No hunts. No outsiders slipping in to steal off their monsters, their trophies. Endeavor treats each monster like a medal to be won. It’s said his halls are lined with strange heads, stuffed and staring. Hawks’s own people claim the halls are haunted by harpies, but he can’t confirm it.

Still, the way Enji looks at his wings makes his shoulders twitch. There haven’t even been harpies seen in the open in almost a decade. Except for Hawks, with his mostly human features and mostly human voice.

He wonders if Enji is going to say something about it.

“Knight Hawks. I’ve been informed you’re unaffiliated.” King Enji turns, briefly, to face a white-haired woman at his side. Fuyumi smiles faintly at Hawks, deathly pale, but nods. An unsubtle sign to be honest, to be open. Most likely Enji already knows him by his reputation.

He wouldn’t have lied, even if she’d implied he should. Affiliation with a knight like him could get any kingdom in trouble. The Commission operates outside of the boundaries of the region’s kings and councils. They are the only power he currently answers to, and even they are only temporary if he can confirm Toshinori’s theories.

With the help of a voice like Toshinori Yagi, he doesn’t think any single person will be able to stop him. Prove King Enji is a murderous, son killing bastard and he’ll have taken down the biggest opposition to the Yuuei Council. The only opposition really. If it wasn’t for the resources Endeavor sits on pairing with the unparalleled military strength of his nation, then everything Toshinori’s trying to do would already be accomplished.  

Hawks lowers his head and tries not to grin. “That is correct, Your Grace. My father’s people, as you know, have long been driven out from the lands near here. My mother and I were taken in by kind strangers on the way, but I’ve never developed roots anywhere.”

“And what is your wish today? To establish those roots in my kingdom? Dig your harpy claws into Endeavor soil and carry off what you can take?”

Hawks closes his eyes and lets the irritation roll off of him.

When he was a kid and his father had finally disappeared one night, he actually had daydreamed of something eerily close to the scene so inelegantly laid out with Enji’s disdain. They’d been right on the outskirts of the city, bundled up in some abandoned shack his mother found with those ghostly eyes of hers, and she’d scrunched up on herself, gasping and crying and retching.

His father died. He never saw how, but his mother cursed Todoroki Enji with a spirited violence he’d never seen in her before. And while she cursed, he’d allowed himself a brief celebration.

No more Takami thief. No more dragging his father out from half-destroyed campsites before they got caught with his latest haul. No more starving in the dark and cold winters. With Takami gone, Keigo grew. Fierce, angry, efficient. Craving roots but finding only rocky, barren soil to settle into.

His mom hates him, even still. She watched him refuse to grieve for his father and tried to leave him. He found her nearly dead three days later, bleeding from a dozen wounds and delirious with dehydration and hunger. He’d saved her, dragged her behind him kicking and screaming, until the Commission found him and bought him. He learned quickly that money could cure most ails and soothe all the rest.

“The songs say the beast who plagues Endeavor is a demon,” Hawks makes a conscious effort to keep his wings from spreading behind him. “And only a god could kill it.”

“And you think yourself worthy of being compared to a god?” The deep baritone of King Enji’s voice mocks as much as it questions. “You’ll be ash before the hour is up.”

“Then you’ve nothing to worry about. No payment, no promises to keep.” Hawks raises his head, sets his golden eyes on the King’s ice blue. Neither of them waver at the steady, unbroken test of will. “I’ll be out of your hair by morning, either way. Either the beast is here and as bad as they say, or he’s not.”

Efficient, pragmatic. Enji likes things to be simple and easy to understand. If Hawks played on anything else, the King would become suspicious. But reputation, especially for someone as lowborn as Hawks, would be a motivation the King understands. What Enji thinks he understands, he rarely questions.

“You’re acceptable, then.” The King steps back, settles himself back into his throne. His two children on either side of him watch Hawks with carefully neutral expressions, hands clutching the arms of their seats with white knuckles. They all know why he's here. No one says a word against him.

A room full of traitors, it seems. Even the youngest, by all accounts the King’s favorite, stares ahead with thinned lips. 

Good. Hawks will fit right in.

He bows, once, and pulls his wings in tight. He can feel the King’s glare on his back. He’s a monster, according to the laws of Endeavor. The human half of him isn’t strong enough to contain and excuse the harpy half. His father’s blood, keeping him in trouble even beyond the grave.

He eases the tension in his shoulders, smooths the sharpened feathers until they lay soft and non-threatening against the stone. King Enji has done his research. He knows a show of deference when he sees one. Hawks waits until he’s straightened to flash his smile, all fangs and crooked arrogance.

He ignores the sputtering laughter from the oldest of the sons behind him.

He doesn’t glance at the empty throne even once during the entire meeting. Even still, his periphery is enough to confirm the detail he’d been most curious about. Just as all the stories say, Touya’s seat is covered in black lace.

For a son who’s been dead for a decade, King Enji sure is keeping up all the mourning practices of a recent death. How unusual.

Hawks allows himself, briefly, to doubt. To feel sorry for the King in all the stories of the night his son’s bones were discovered chewed and spit into a blackened pile of ash.

And then he lets it pass. Whatever grief Enji may have felt cannot excuse his behavior.

Hawks heads into the woods surrounding the Kingdom with only his feathers and his armor. The sun sinks beneath the treeline. He has until dawn to bring back the head of the beast. He has even less time to prove Touya’s death was not the result of a run in with a monster hiding in the trees.

Fire, after all, is Enji’s domain. A body reduced to ash is his calling card.

##

The wood is dark and cold. Winter layers thick in the ice over heavy branches. Wind creaks and whistles, kicking up dead leaves. The night is quiet in Toshinori’s country where Hawks spent his last several months. All of Endeavor's noise feels foreign.

Or maybe it’s not the strangeness that makes Hawks’s hair stand on end. It’s the familiarity.

How many nights did he spend sitting at a campfire, listening to these sounds in the dark, waiting for his father to return? Too many to count. Enough that his mom will stare into open flame like a moth beckoned to one final moment of brightness before the end.

Harpy song is said to be a drug unlike any made by man. How lucky for him that his vocal cords are just different enough he can’t produce any. How unlucky for his mother that his father’s throat was slit too late to save her from such an addiction.

Still, he settles in and hums while he removes the carapace of his armor. Black, because the Commission refused to lean towards any banners. Engraved, because Hawks refused to disappear inside their folds of anonymity.

Right now, however, it’s more a hindrance than a help. Loud, heavy, clunky.

Plus, if the beast really is a beast of hellfire, then he’d rather not bake alive inside a metal suit.

He’s managed to take off the chest piece and the shoulders when he hears the first snap. The break is clean and quick. The sound barely lasts half a breath, there and gone again. For just a second Hawks thinks it could have been an animal breaking a twig beneath its hoof. But the rustle of falling leaves draws his attention just before the branch crashes down onto his camp.

Luckily, the winter has been a wet one. Between the ice and the thin, crackling snow beneath his feet, the fire doesn’t catch on the bare branch. He watches the flames snuff out and sighs.

“So, you do exist?” Hawks speaks aloud to the open air. “Or are you him, come to squash an inconvenience? I’m prepared for either, I think.”

The beast doesn’t answer. Hawks sighs again and continues moving. He should have known his original plan of sit still and wait would never work. He’s never been that lucky.

“Can you talk?” Hawks keeps his mouth moving. The upper half of his armor lies crushed beneath the fallen branch. “Did you drop that on me on purpose?”

The beast doesn’t answer.

Hawks frowns. The way the branch fell says the beast broke it from deeper in the forest. He finds the trunk—splintered and stripped wood, though the break is cleaner than he expected. Split wood juts from the center like a spike. The outer bark and inner rings are clean. The air smells like sweet pinesap and smoke.

He closes his eyes and listens, trailing feathers behind him in case the beast circles back. The smoke and singed bark don’t look good for the King.

He may have gotten away with everything if it was just his son. Touya’s temper had always been remarked upon, though he was only 13 when he disappeared into the wood. Only 14 when his father presented his bones and marked off the clearing that had since become a shrine and a burial site all in one.

A boy goes into the mountain with no explanation and never returns. A father grieves, a mother leaves, and all of the family goes as quiet as ghosts.

Shouto is the one who presented the theory, originally. Snuck across the border, face buried in the neck of Toshinori’s own protégé. Prince Shouto accused his father of killing the eldest Todoroki son. Toshinori had been quick to believe him, but Hawks held his doubts.

That Shouto didn’t come forward with this accusation until his father declared him the chosen heir to the Kingdom certainly factors into things. If ever Hawks understood deceit, he understands lying to avoid unwanted responsibility. He had tried to lie to himself—and others, though not for long—when he’d first left his mother behind. Swore she’d died, that he’d come across her body still and cold.

He'd returned to their last camp to find her alive. Alive and barely breathing and he’d tried to leave her there anyway. Had walked for three hours down the path and then three hours back to drag her with him.

Shouto, unlike the child Hawks had been, does not walk back his claims.

He presents evidence, though only Toshinori has seen it. Hawks doesn’t ask. Doesn’t have a reason to care. He trusts Toshinori. Toshinori may trust too easily, but he’s no fool. He’d chosen Hawks for this for a reason. The Commission had allowed it for probably a different reason.

“Prince Shouto is convinced you’re a different sort of monster,” Hawks continues, speaking to empty air. His feathers sharpen and ease again, repeating in a rhythm that soothes him. “Do you want me to bring back your head and show them all that you’re just a beast after all?”

The beast doesn’t answer. The woods shift around him, tossing shadows beneath the moonlight. Hawks stretches and watches the dark. His eyes are better in twilight or dawn, but the beast only appears in the dead of night.

Traipsing around in the woods after dark was completely avoidable, of course. No one would if King Enji had not offered a tempting reward for any knight who could slay the demon who killed his son.

There’s no other reason to be here. No reason to tempt a beast who has never once been sighted of the peak and the woods. And yet, King Enji keeps offering. Every other knight who’s wandered here since then has died. Only the guaranteed security for any knight brave and stupid enough to succeed keeps them coming back.

A spot in the King’s Guard. Their name in the trophy room, listed beside the names of the kings and princes. Enough gold to make all the other prizes irrelevant if a warrior didn’t want the recognition or the responsibility.

Of course, if they’re stupid, what does that make Hawks? He doesn’t even plan on accepting any reward.

Hawks hums again, picking through the few tunes he recalls from the songbirds in the taverns, flipping their pretty skirts and crooning out sultry songs with bedroom eyes. Sure, they had no effect on him, but he’d be a poor harpy if he couldn’t at least enjoy a nice song or two. Human song had always been studied by his father and his mother used to sing plenty.

I met a boy in a meadow down, Hawks sings, voice low as he stares into the silver sliver of moon that breaks the black, jewel studded velvet of the sky. Who sang me songs and wore me down.

He smiles, feathers picking up a break in the trees that isn’t the wind. He offered dresses, jewels and rings; he did, he did, all the shiniest things.

The beast, finally drawn in by Hawks’s distraction, by his apparent good mood, approaches quickly from behind.

He offered me roses and henbane, magic and mundane, Hawks pauses, wings twitching against his back. So much again and again, and yet never offered his name.

The fire roars through the gap in the trees. Hawks feels the heat—the loss of his trailing feathers, the blistering blaze—before he sees the light.

It’s far more beautiful than he imagined. He knows instantly that Shouto is wrong. The beast in the wood is not Todoroki Enji. He’s seen Enji’s fire.

The azure flames licking up the side of ancient bark, turning the ice and frozen ground into glittering blue puddles of melted mess; Enji has never produced anything like this.

He’s in the air before the fire can touch him, flipping until he can see the river of blue beneath—and the jagged, ashen blade of a man who throws the fire.

The beast Dabi is real.

Real and devastating in his beauty.

##

The fight doesn’t go at all how Hawks expects. The flames never taper out, never slow down. They move in a wall of death that scorches and destroys even the coldest, iciest trees. It’s no wonder none of the other knights returned. Hawks would be amazed if they even left bodies behind.

“You know, I was half convinced you were the King.” Hawks flits away, up over the top of an evergreen, hiding on a branch full of broken pine needles.  Dabi claps his hands in his direction and the trunk of the tree is engulfed. Blue heat floods his vision and Hawks hops back into the open. “And the other half was still convinced you at least worked for the King.”

Dabi doesn’t respond. His name makes sense now: cremation. A fire that destroys all things, that snuffs out life and death at once. Hawks imagines heat overtaking his feathers, plucking him from the sky and smearing him into the scorched earth below. Would Dabi even check to make sure he died? Or does he trust his power enough not to even bother?

An arm of deep blue breaks away from the wall ahead of him, snapping at his wings. The tips of his primaries curl away from the heat. The acrid burn of keratin slithers through the air in black ribbons and Hawks finds himself tumbling, catching himself on spread wings just before he crashes into the ground.

The laugh bubbling up from his lips does nothing to put him in the good graces of the “beast” he’s been sent to kill. Dabi shouts, words indecipherable over the roar of the fire chasing him down. A smile like a wound splits open Dabi’s face.

The silence when all that heat dies rings through the blackened landscape. Dabi stomps towards him, draped in black and the rattle of rusted, broken chains. He’s close enough Hawks can see the way the shadows shift over pale skin and disappear into violet scars, eyes glowing like embers in a cloud of white, spiky hair.

Hawks keeps his feet planted despite the harsh heat burning up his greaves. His hand rests on his sword—a precaution in case he loses his feathers, though he never expects to use them.

“You’re gorgeous,” Hawks grins, leaning forward with his hand on his chest. “No one told me the beast was really a man painted over like this.”

Dabi stops, brows arched high, mouth open. He looks feral, smudged over with dirt and ash. He looks like the night sky pulled down to earth. “What?”

His voice is gravelly, clearly unused for a long time. Hawks sighs. Did he never bother to speak to any of the knights who came to hunt him down? A shame, then. They could have found him earlier.

“How long have you haunted these woods?” Hawks keeps his question low, even. Soothing, if he’s successful. He can’t tell if Dabi’s face scrunches in confusion or distaste. “The King has ordered me to kill you.”

“Then do,” Dabi crouches down, lifts his hands. Hawks has barely any time to shoot up into the air before the flame roars again.

He manages to make it out of the line of fire, away from Dabi’s sight. He needs to camp, to make food. An invitation, if he can manage it, for the supposed beast to come and share a meal with him. Not that Dabi looks starved. Sure, he’s a little thin, a little extra bony, but nothing a week or two of regular meals wouldn’t solve. Nothing like what he’d expect after so long.

The attacks had started three years after the bones of the Todoroki child were found on the mountain’s peak. Alongside the bones was a sizable chunk of melted stone. A cavern, by the time King Enji’s team had cleared out the rubble and smoothed out the jagged edges.

Was it this creature who killed the King’s eldest son? Some demon of the wood breaking down the first and least of the intruders? Had Todoroki Touya triggered something when he’d stumbled up here? And if so, what? What was he doing? What could a thirteen-year-old even unleash into the mountainside?

The night air cools his heat-tight skin as the wind cuts through his shirt. His feathers don’t catch the draft as easily as they did when he started this. Dabi’s already burned enough of his primaries to leave him dipping in the stronger winds, cartwheeling when the current lays down the treetops beneath him.

He only needs to make it to another clearing, close enough Dabi will find him. The barren trees are easy to search through for a place to land. His luck holds strong. Not only does he find a clearing—he finds an old camp of some long gone knight before him. Blistered, half-melted metal is all that’s left of the poor man. Hawks is more than a little impressed that even that amount remains.

Soot covered stones lie nearly buried in a circle. It’s still faster to uncover them than it would be to hunt down his own and dig the shallow trench to rest them in. The fire feels almost redundant when he’s trying to tempt a creature who proudly goes by cremation but Hawks doesn’t much like the idea of freezing whenever he’s not fighting.

He sings the song about the nameless suitor again and gets to work. Hunting was never a sport he particularly cared for, even when he was starving. Plucking up some unsuspecting animal is a little too easy when he has a thousand arrows at his beck and call, moving silently to and through whatever he commanded.

He’s still putting the fire together when his feathers return—two rabbits and a rather large fish. The fish nearly impresses him. His feathers don’t move easily through the water, and whenever they do, they’re usually blind without his input.

He takes his time skinning and deboning the meat. It’s sloppy—was always going to be sloppy, considering how little time he has to work with. Still, by the time he’s finished he has several slivers of pale pink meat and a flayed open fish carcass. And an audience.

Dabi watches him from the trees. Hawks hasn’t looked at him yet but he can almost feel the cat like glow of Dabi’s eyes on his back. He’s glad for the fire and the food, the enticing aroma of smoking meat. If he’d read Dabi’s surprise right—and reading people is most of what he’s trained for—then he is safe enough until the shock wears off.

How long he takes will almost certainly depend on how well he’s dressed this rabbit.

Salt pops and crackles in the fire when he sprinkles it over everything. Not much—not what he’d usually like to cook with—but for a campground like this he’s glad to have it.

“You really are something, you know.” Hawks talks vaguely in the direction that he thinks Dabi is in. The man is larger than life, looming and tall and monstrous in a way that makes Hawks’s pulse kick in his veins. He’d been sent here to kill and bring back the beast—whether it was a King or a King’s creature.

More than one terror had been born from spells and secrets stored in the dark corner of some King’s heart. Dabi teeters on the edge of that precipice, a man metamorphosing into something else before Hawks’s very eyes.

He doesn’t answer, and Hawks recalls how rough that voice had been when he’d finally shocked the man into response. The voice is always the first to go in these transformations.

Not that Hawks is an expert, but he knows something about the way a body can be mutated by trauma and anger and hate. When the Madame had found him he’d been a specter already. Dead-eyed and starving, mouth dripping with venom and voice wrecked by screaming.

She had hoped he’d retained some of those honeyed vocal cords but the damage—and his human heritage—had done more than she’d anticipated. Still, he proved himself useful enough. Maybe this Dabi could, too.

“King Enji sent countless knights after you. At this point it’s just as likely he’s using you as a tool to weaken the neighboring kingdoms as he is trying to kill you. Don’t you think you could do better than to play right into his hands?”

The risk of the taunt prickles up Hawks’s back. He doesn’t turn around, doesn’t stand or move to face it. If Dabi tries to attack right now, Hawks is all but defenseless. He can hear the faint crunch of footsteps over melted snow. Still, Dabi doesn’t come any closer. Hawks turns the rabbit, leaving the fish to flake and drip fats into the fire.

“Would you share dinner with me? I know you’re going to try to kill me again, for whatever reason, but I haven’t actually attacked you.” Hawks glances up and is surprised to find he can see the outline of the man in the shadows. “You could at least get a nice meal out of it. Something to chew on while you plan out how you’re going to roast me.”

A derisive noise comes from the tree line, but Dabi emerges. The chains aren’t as loud with his subtle, softer movements. They don’t rattle like a ghost from a children’s story. And without that vicious snarl, Hawks can tell Dabi is even prettier than he originally thought.

Dirty, yes, and angry, but pretty.

Dabi comes closer to the fire and crouches, blue eyes catching the light. They’re familiar, sharp and piercing and narrowed in quiet contemplation. The hint of a scowl, the strong brow, the jut of his chin. If not for the softness of his jawline and the pure white of his hair, he’d almost look like the King.

Hawks almost drops the stick he’s turning with bits of rabbit meat skewered on the end.

None of the theories had mentioned this as a possibility.

“It must be hard, trying to survive up here on your own. Aren’t you cold?” Hawks gestures towards the threadbare cloth on Dabi’s black top. Even wrapped like it is, the outline of Dabi’s body is clearly visible. Yet, the man isn’t shivering, doesn’t even seem bothered by the snowfall that’s started to pile onto his shoulders. He’s staring into the fire like he can’t decide if he wants to see it or not, like he can hardly determine if its real.

“Guess not.” Hawks wants to get the man talking. Wants to draw him back into himself, anchor him inside this body before it gets eaten up by more of his own fire. “Do you really go by Dabi?”

Dabi frowns, head turning to finally look at Hawks. “Do you really go by Hawks?”

The question throws him. He hadn’t mentioned his name to Dabi, not the one the Commission gave him for his missions nor any other. How would he have known?

“No.” Hawks considers. “Well, sort of, actually. No one calls me by my real name any more.”

He hadn’t even noticed when that had happened. Just one day anyone who knew Keigo was either dead or no longer referred to him by anything at all.

Dabi stares at him for several seconds before turning back to the meal cooking ahead of him. The skin pulls away from the fish, shrinking. “I don’t like fish.”

“Oh?” Hawks grins. “I’ll eat that, then. I’m not picky.”

He hadn’t expected it to be that easy. Then again, with the way Dabi had attacked, how many people were getting close enough to see him? Maybe he really had been thrown by Hawks and his strangely timed compliments.

Dabi closes his arms around his knees, scrunching tight. Like this, he looks like a child, small and fragile in the glow of the campfire. “Why did you say that?”

“Say what?” Hawks sighs and pulls the first rabbit from the heat. The meat runs clear, oily and under seasoned, but well cooked. “I talk a lot. You’re going to have to be more specific.”

“About me. About the King.” Dabi hunches tighter, a sharp edge of anger to his voice. “About not attacking.”

“You’re a strange one, aren’t you?” Which doesn’t really need to be said to the feral man attacking him in the woods with walls of hellfire, but still. “I said it because I’m not intending on playing into his behaviors either. I figured you at least deserved the chance to decide for yourself what part you want to play.”

Dabi studies him from the corner of his eye. Blackened fingertips clench and unclench over his shirt. A few false starts where his mouth opens and closes again, and Hawks tries to hide his amusement.

Maybe he really was getting too cocky if he found Dabi’s confusion endearing. “Did you want to ask something else? Or maybe you want to clarify your position?”

“Clarify my—” Dabi laughs at that, a sound broken up and crackling. The sudden break of it makes Hawks feel like he just took a shot of something strong and burning. “Thought you said you knew I was gonna kill you?”

“Gotta eat first, right?” Hawks shrugs. “Besides, I’m pretty sure none of your other knights could fly. Maybe I have a chance to survive this encounter. And then what? You gonna hunt me down? You plan to leave this mountain for the first time in a decade?”

“You think you’ll make it away?” Dabi looks pointedly at Hawks’s burned feathers.

“Ah, I won’t get caught twice.” Hawks grins. “And besides, you missed the first time. Don’t think you’ve ever done that before. Not according to the stories, at least. Which brings me to another question.”

Dabi narrows his eyes but he’s already opening up, arms falling more loosely at his sides, knees not quite so drawn to his chest. “What?”

“How did these stories get spread if everyone who comes up here dies?” Hawks had questioned that first, when Toshinori told him the plan. Of course, Toshinori had only given him that big, goofy grin and congratulated him on coming up with a question no one else had bothered to ask. “How does King Enji know there’s not a group of knights up here ready to fight back?”

Dabi stretches out his arm and plucks up the rabbit Hawks offers him. He turns the stick a few times, as if considering. “He used to come up here, on his own. To check on the bodies. That was before I—”

Hawks holds his breath and pulls the fish and the other rabbit, setting the latter closer to Dabi’s thigh so he can grab it when he’s finished with the first. Hawks’s stomach protests the loss of food, but Dabi’s bones jut out from the top of his shirt. Hawks doesn’t mind giving it up. Besides, he could always catch more, if he needed.

Dabi doesn’t dig in, doesn’t eat like he’s starved. Not the way Hawks expects him to, like the beast they’ve called him. He eats in slow, careful bites, chewing as he contemplates whatever he plans to say next. Hawks finds himself hanging on the next word, endlessly curious about what this strange man will reveal to him.

So far, nothing has been what Hawks prepared himself for. He wants to ask if Dabi remembers Touya—if he is Touya, still alive after all this time and all those blackened bones presented to the public. Buried beneath the shrine where the King and his family pay tribute every year.

Is it a lie? Is all of it a lie?

Hawks had found it strange that the only description of the beast they had found was that he attacked with blue flames and left nothing behind. No one could even provide a shape of the beast. Whenever he’d asked he’d only received frightened, paranoid glances and rude shushing.

Of course, there were rumors. Things that people said that were never confirmed. Stories of a giant cat or a dog were most common. Any number of wild creatures could account for these legends, but none of them ever held up to questioning. People usually admitted to having been frightened off the trail by some leopard cat and that was it. No supernatural fire, no evil creature. Just a hissing cat and glowing golden eyes.

Which is always where Hawks completely gave up on their threads. The one and only thing he’d learned about the creature—a slip up from the King himself when he spoke with Toshinori—was that it had blue eyes. Haunting. Terrible.

Familiar, in the end.

Hawks wipes his hand across his mouth. The fish is oily and strong and he hates that he’ll smell like this until he can find some way to get clean again. Bathing in the cold is probably a death sentence but maybe it wouldn’t be that bad to just dip his face in. Not when he’s sure it’ll be dried in no time by the human torch beside him.

“So, why did you kill your first?” Hawks hurries before the defensive snarl on Dabi’s face can turn into another fight so soon. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

Dabi stops at that, as if surprised. “Knights usually pretend their kills don’t count.”

“A life is a life, whether it’s my sword or any other that takes it.” Hawks shrugs and tries to bury the bitterness of the words in the hollow space between his shoulder blades. “I don’t figure they forget that when they’re tallying up their trophies in front of kings, bragging about the hundreds who fall at their hand for whatever flag they’re killing under.”

“You sound bitter.” Dabi smirks, reading Hawks all the way down to his tense fists. “Don’t like your job, knight?”

Dabi says knight like others would say thief or vagrant—an insult, searing and smoking from his tongue. Briefly, Hawks imagines that Dabi is not some slinky cat, some snarling wolf but something much worse. Much more proud and dangerous.

Dabi grins at him like he can see the dragon Hawks imagines. His cheeks burn and he’s grateful for the cold that disguises his blush as something he can blame on the biting wind.

“You aren’t too fond of us, either.” Hawks grins back and shrugs. “Don’t pretend you don’t understand.”

Dabi’s smile fades. Silver shines against his skin, lines and lines of it trailing through his scars like starlight. Hawks’s fingertips tingle with the need to reach out and see if Dabi’s even real or if he’s some manifestation of the night turned flesh.

“My first kill was a few years after I woke up.” Dabi’s voice rasps, the words dragging themselves from his throat like they’re full of hooks. “A man had stumbled up to my camp and was stealing my things. I don’t really remember what happened. He threw something at me and I—”

Dabi stops, mouth snapping shut as he turns back to the fire.

The story doesn’t sound like some horrific battle. It sounds like an accident, like the panicked response of someone who didn’t know what to do. Tension clicks in Dabi’s jaw as he refuses to look in Hawks’s direction.

Hawks takes a deep breath. He’d fully intended on sharing the story of his first kill as a knight, as Hawks and not Keigo, someone trained and taught. A monstrous tale in return for Dabi’s own. He can't return Dabi's honesty with posturing, with proof of his own bloodied talons.

“I killed my first man when I was six years old.” Hawks clears his throat. “My father was gone on one of his hunts and my mother was sleeping in the cabin we’d found to stay in. A man came up and wanted to taste her and take me. That's when I found out that my feathers could sharpen.”

He doesn’t explain how the man had been bearing down on him, all oversized muscle and wine-soaked breath. He doesn’t recount the bruises left on his wrists for weeks after, purple and splotchy yellow-greens. The man has no face in his memory, just a leer and a barking, rotten laugh.

When he looks back to Dabi, the man is watching him with an appraising expression. Almost like Hawks has revealed he’s hiding a bag of gold nearby and not that he’d killed a man while his mother slept drunkenly in the other room. His feathers hadn’t even come in fully, then.

“The royal family officially lists your first victim as a little boy. A teenager.” Hawks tilts his head, already bracing himself. “Touya.”

The knife is unexpected. He hadn’t even known Dabi had any weapons on him. The blade seems a little redundant with those flames of his. Then again, some people might say the same about Hawks and his sword.

Dabi’s fast. He’s knocked Hawks onto his back, straddling him as he shoves a blade against his throat, all before Hawks can even bring his feathers around to shield himself. The snarl tugs all of those scars into something vicious and terrifying. The silver catches the moonlight, and Hawks is breathless for a moment.

“Say that name again and I’ll kill you,” Dabi presses the knife closer, until a thin swell of blood drips a line of hot red down Hawks’s neck.

“You’re beautiful,” Hawks has said it before. Will certainly say it again as long as he doesn’t die here. “Touya.”

Dabi’s—no, Touya’s—eyes widen. There’s a moment where Hawks is sure he’s about to die. Throat slit, just like his father. Hopefully his death came in a nobler pursuit.

Then the knife lands with a thud in the snow. Dabi hasn’t moved off of him. He hasn’t corrected him either. His chest heaves in uneven, panting breaths, nails digging into Hawks’s shoulders like he might collapse if he lets go.

“How did you know?” The question falls hoarse, shattering between them.

Hawks gives an offer as an answer. “You tell me how you know my name is Hawks and I’ll tell you how I realized who you were.”

Dabi glares, but immediately answers. “The other knights who came here. A few of them mentioned you, mentioned your wings and your reputation. You're not the only one who tried to talk to me before you knew I was there. The others threatened. Some of them threatened you.”

“What made me different?”

“Answer me first.”

Hawks hums and for the first time in years wishes he had harpy song to calm down this man bent over him, dripping sorrow and confusion on Hawks’s chest like an open wound. He settles for lifting his gloved hands to cup Dabi’s face. The man jolts but doesn’t jerk away. He only glowers down, warm even through the thick wool, and waits.

“You’re the right age. Your eyes don’t help you any, either. That blue, that piercing scorn, the perfect way your face twists in rage. Your father’s genes run deep.” He sighs and lets his hands fall back at his sides when Dabi rears back as if Hawks had struck him. “None of that, though, is what gave it away. I actually didn’t know, only had just started to suspect. Not until you reacted to your name like that.”

He’d really only mentioned Touya as a test, to see if Dabi even recognized the name. Not that this would have given away too much. Plenty of men on their way to being monsters lose themselves entirely. There was always a chance that Dabi wouldn't remember who he'd been before this mountain. The relief that floods Hawks, realizing that Dabi does, is enough warning that Hawks knows he's in a different sort of danger.

“Not many survive the first attack.” Dabi grunts, finally standing and freeing Hawks from between his legs. “Even fewer actually bother to ask me anything. None have ever complimented me.”

The last sentence hisses between Dabi’s teeth, like he can’t decide whether he’s more embarrassed or angry about it.

Hawks decides abruptly that he’d like to compliment Dabi more. Maybe he can make those pale stripes of healthy skin turn pink. Maybe he can paint an aurora over Dabi’s mottled skin and see him actually smile.

God, he’s always been stupid. This may be too far for even him.

Dabi did try to kill him only seconds ago.

“You must have remarkable control over your fire. That’s, what, a perfect kill count?” Hawks hums and scrambles to his feet so he can look up into Dabi’s face more easily. “Except for me, of course.”

“Never said I’d let you live.”

“I don’t know.” Hawks shrugs, playing off like he’s nonchalant. “You haven’t killed me yet. My chances are looking pretty good.”

Dabi’s mouth twitches. “I can’t let you leave the forest. Even if I don’t kill you, Enji won’t let you survive. I let a man go, once. Did he make it out of Endeavor?”

Most likely he hadn’t even made it off the mountain. Hawks had never heard of a show of mercy like that from the beast. It certainly wouldn’t have matched the image the King had painted of an undefeatable demon lurking in the woods. At Hawks’s silence, Dabi lets out a wry laugh and shakes his head.

“The man barely had a sword and not a lick of courage to his name. I think he pissed himself the second he walked through the trees. I was tired and wounded and hungry and didn’t want to bother. I hid. He never even found me. But he saw, of course, the scars left behind from previous battles. Gutted, scorched clearings and remnants of camps. I think he found the place where I was chained up a few times.”

Hawks hums, glancing at the still chains wrapped around Dabi’s arms. Strange that he’d been captured long enough for those to get attached.

“Either way, I don’t think he’d figured anything out. Probably just thanked his luck and moved on. Or tried.” Dabi hunches his shoulders, makes himself look small again. “Then I found him, bones picked clean inside his armor. Enji’s fire doesn’t burn like mine, but enough time and anyone can disappear.”

Hawks considers this new information. The inconsistent char on the bones of the ones Toshinori presented to him. The fact most knights didn’t leave even that much behind. King Enji’s approving stare when he saw Hawks in power and arrogance.

This supports at least one of Toshinori’s theories about what King Enji has been up to with this beast business. Though, Hawks suspects this theory belongs more to one of his advisors. The logic, and cynicism, flows much more naturally from Aizawa’s mouth than Toshinori’s. Toshinori wouldn’t have mentioned it if he didn’t think it held merit, of course, but he knows the man. He’s too optimistic to have come up with Enji using a fictitious beast to kill off powerful knights from other kingdoms.

Too hopeful. Hawks sighs and the sound catches Dabi’s attention.

“Not the reaction I expect from a knight.” Dabi drags his gaze over Hawks’s black greaves and black leather clothes. The cloth is thick and padded and that alone is probably keeping him from freezing to death on this mountain. Their fire long ago burned down to only embers.

“Can’t say I’m terribly surprised. I’ve seen worse things done in the name of power.” Hawks considers for a moment. He can’t think of any, but he’s sure he’s just not thinking hard enough. “So, how did you end up here?”

Dabi watches him, but doesn’t respond.

“What, I’m not good enough to know that?” Hawks shrugs, like it’s not a big deal, but the curiosity claws at his throat. He finds himself opening his mouth and his own vulnerability dropping out. “Takami.”

“What?” Dabi frowns.

“Takami Keigo.” Hawks grimaces, but continues. “That’s my name. Or well, what they called me when I was a kid. I don’t really. No one calls me that anymore.”

“No one calls me Touya, either.” Dabi shrugs. “No one really calls me anything.”

Hawks nods, like that makes sense. Like it’s not the most isolated thing he’s ever heard another person say. “Why haven’t you killed me yet?”

It’s not the question he means to ask. Not the question he should ask, probably. Why challenge a man who definitely can kill him?

“My father brought me here, when I was a kid. My flames had burned hotter than his. I don’t know if he really was excited about it or if he was angry, they looked the same and the memory blurs.” He narrows his eyes, turns away. “I waited for him to come back.”

Dabi doesn’t finish the story. He also doesn't answer Hawks's most recent question. 

Hawks’s heart rattles in his ribs. “Want to kill him?”

Dabi goes still. He barely breathes.

There’s a whole plan that Toshinori outlined to Hawks before he came here. To reveal King Enji’s crime, if there are any, or to destroy the beast that so easily devours the enemies Enji taunts into his flames. Crown Prince Shouto has already agreed to numerous plans Toshinori and his protégé have laid before him. Contracts and treaties that will start the long process of reestablishing populations of displaced monsters that King Enji had all but hunted to extinction.

Harpies were part of that agreement. Not that Hawks took the job for a heritage he never connected to, for villages and homes he never held in his own hands.

None of that matters to Dabi, though. None of that matters to Touya, still wrapped in the chains of his father, still held in the prison of the mountain he died on.

“Say it again,” Dabi says, eyes unblinking.

“Do you want to kill King Enji of Endeavor?” Hawks steps forward, close enough to reach out and steady Dabi as he stumbles back. The offer seems to have struck a physical blow against him.

Hawks keeps his voice low, easing his feathers around the chains on Dabi’s arms. They’re brittle, filing down easily. They fall, coiling like snakes at his feet. The skin beneath is scarred and faded, pale compared to the dark bruise of the other stripes. “I’ll help you. Get you close, get you back in that throne room. They leave it draped in black, just for you, you know.”

Touya shivers and Hawks grins. “That’s a big promise to make, little bird.”

“I’m good for it,” Hawks lifts his wings. “Besides, it’s something I already wanted to do. You're just one more reason on a long list.”

“And then what?” Dabi doesn’t step back, doesn’t seem at all intimidated by Hawks’s proposition.

“Then I have some friends to introduce you to,” Hawks laughs, and Dabi follows and hearing him laugh again is everything Hawks had hoped it would be. “If you’re willing, we’ll change everything.”

“And if I’m not?”

Hawks shrugs. Having no home, no banners, no loyalties to betray means he has a lot of room to improvise. “We can figure it out when we get there?”

“We?”

“Monsters have to stick together, don’t we?”