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"-which is honestly really unfair and bigoted, so I think we'd be justified in kicking up a fuss. The League of Villains could really use a PR boost, and I know you're big on showcasing the failures of hero society-"
Hawks had been going on like this for the past six minutes. Dabi had been counting down the time as they sat inside of this shitty apartment complex waiting around for a text response from the rest of the League in regards to their current mission. They'd been tasked with going back to and searching the previously-destroyed Kamino Ward for... something. Shigaraki had wanted them to investigate and see if any evidence or clues were left behind in their bid for that doctor's insane new plan, if any part of their operation in Kamino had survived the catastrophic failure that resulted in the ward's current state.
Dabi personally thought the mission was a useless waste of time. The heroes had combed through the place already. The doctor had been vague at best about what they were looking for, and while Hawks was remarkably good at locating things, trusting him with any secrets was a recipe for disaster. Dabi wasn't the top brass, though, and so he found himself entertaining this nonsense on a perfectly good Tuesday that he could've spent doing anything else.
The League was taking an unusually long time to respond to their status report, though. Thus, Hawks sitting them down in some abandoned third-floor apartment and talking at Dabi until someone texted them back.
It wasn't necessarily that Hawks' information and plan were bad, per se, but the kind of job Hawks was currently yapping about was not remotely in the wheelhouse named Dabi. Dabi didn't care about PR, and certainly not about improving it. He had joined the League to destroy the PR of one man and one man only, and if Shigaraki wanted to take down the rest of Japan while he was at it, then so be it. He wasn't there to create positive press of any kind. He was only there to burn it.
Shigaraki, however, was convinced that Dabi was still the number one channel for Hawks to go through for any information that didn't pertain to the entire League, even if Dabi knew that Compress would be the one to write up whatever speech Hawks was currently suggesting they make. Compress was the only person smooth enough with words to do such a thing, but did Shigaraki care about that? No. Thus, Dabi's problem. Thus, Dabi dealing with the chattiest hero in the country. Thus, dealing with said hero's infuriating fake demeanor. Thus, Dabi dealing with-
Hawks abruptly stopped talking in the middle of his sentence. Dabi looked up, just barely catching the ripple of Hawks' feathers as they sharpened to deadly points.
“Dabi," Hawks said carefully, every trace of the fake demeanor gone.
Dabi made a noise approaching acknowledgement and studied him. Hawks had never done something like this before. It was significantly more interesting than listening to the intricacies of a plan he didn't care about.
"What?" Dabi asked, sitting up now that Hawks had gotten his attention.
“We have to go," Hawks said. His wings flared slightly behind him, as though he was reacting to something Dabi couldn't see.
“Why?" Dabi pushed.
"We have to go," Hawks repeated more forcefully as he stood up, even as his brows furrowed and wings fluttered in what could only be confusion. His feathers were restless, unsharpening and re-sharpening to some perceived threat. Hawks never fidgeted like that.
Still.
"What do you m-" Dabi started, right before the sound of the first screams started. He glanced across the room toward the window of the apartment, on the opposite end from where he was sitting by the door.
"Dabi, we have to go now," Hawks hissed. He started walking towards the window, eyeing its construction with raptor-like focus. Dabi wasn't stupid. He could easily guess what idea was in Hawks' head, even if he didn't particularly like it.
Hawks pulled the window's dusty curtain aside once he approached. Upon getting a full view of the outside, he stilled completely, hand frozen in the curtain's fabric. Dabi walked up behind him, curious to see whatever it was that had caused Pro Hero Hawks to actually get distracted on the job. Hawks quickly shook himself out of his stupor and slammed some type of small device onto the window's fragile surface.
“Back up a bit," Hawks advised, before Dabi got close enough to truly see anything. "That's going to explode."
Dabi backed up, but evidently not enough, as a gloved hand wrapped around his forearm and yanked him back even further. He whirled around, several sharp words on his tongue, but his statement was drowned out by the deafening sound of shattering glass.
The next few moments went by in a blur. The moment the glass broke, the wailing screams and faraway sirens filled the room like an eerie choir, followed by a freezing wind that slammed into his face hard enough to make him take a step backwards. Next to him, Hawks' wings flared in an effort to balance himself.
Dabi's first thought was, holy shit, that's cold, followed by a frantic, he's about to take off, followed by I'm going to have to replace so many back staples as Hawks jumped, taking flight and dragging Dabi out the window with him.
—
Outside was hell.
Hell frozen over, perhaps.
Upon leaping out the window, they were buffeted by another cold current so intense that Hawks was immediately veered off-course. Hawks frantically flapped his wings against the wind in a desperate attempt to not crash them into the side of the building, which was only moderately successful. If he hadn't been ten centimeters from slamming Dabi into the wall, Dabi might've spent more time appreciating Hawks' struggle against the air.
As it was, Dabi was more occupied with Hawks' desperate attempts at getting a proper grip on him again. He could feel his back staples become tauter and tauter until Hawks finally managed to lift him once more. He clumsily carried them further into the air bit by bit, the blizzard still pushing them off-course far more frequently than Dabi felt comfortable with.
At least between the freezing chill of the air and taking every one of Hawks' frantic downbeats of wind to the face, Dabi was actually somewhat thankful for his Quirk for once.
As Hawks steadied their ascent, Dabi took note of how the more distant buildings were completely coated in ice. The blizzard appeared to have only just reached them. He tried to wrack his brain for anything that could've caused a snowstorm of this level. A Quirk, for sure, but it didn't make sense for there to be a villain attack in Kamino in its current state. And while Dabi was intimately familiar with how strong Quirks could be, this was pushing the limit. Perhaps Trigger could be involved, but why? Was it an intentional act caused by combining multiple Quirks together? It could be a freak Quirk accident, he supposed, but all of this without a single sound of heroes flitting around trying to stop the problem?
Hawks suddenly stopped in place once they got over the tops of the high-rises, and Dabi saw the carnage.
The surrounding area didn't look like any of the neighboring wards, or any other part of Yokohama, or any other place on Earth. It looked more like an alien warzone, like someone set off a bomb of Quirks all at once with no clear rhyme or reason as to its effects. Ice coated the streets half a meter thick as snow pelted down from above, turning the city into the world's worst ice rink. Sand and what looked like jello lined the streets and buildings where cars and lights should have been. Giant spiderwebs coated everything, including suspiciously human-shaped lumps and a truly staggering number of doors.
Where Dabi knew several large buildings had existed shortly before, haphazard piles of metal and splintered wood now laid, presumably from a deconstruction Quirk gone wild. While the visibility wasn't great, Dabi could see that key parts of the Yokohama skyline were warped and missing in the distance.
Hawks seemed to beat his wings a few times without going anywhere, clearly surveying the area as well. Then he pulled Dabi further in and started flying, flying, and it was too fast for Dabi to make out much of anything at all.
As they cut through the air, it was so bitingly cold that Dabi was unsurprised at seeing the landscape turn white the farther they flew. The extent of the continuing blizzard was staggering.
Something was wrong. Something had gone wrong enough that the heroes couldn't immediately fix it. Seeing it unfold was almost exciting, save for the motion sickness of flying at breakneck speeds.
They began to slow down once they made it out of the city. Hawks' flying gradually grew shakier, careening this way and that again instead of the smooth glides that he was known for.
"Ah, shit," Hawks said—which was how Dabi knew something was up, because Hawks only swore under pressure—before gritting out a quick, "Sorry," and plummeting them directly into fresh snow.
Dabi's swear was muffled by the snow that he'd been roughly deposited into. He spat out the slurry of ice water in his mouth and pulled himself up from the mess with a groan, glancing around at his surroundings. Hawks had thrown them into a mountainside, although not too far up; he could just barely make out where the ground leveled out below. It was still snowing, but the storm wasn't quite as bad as it was in Yokohama's paralyzing blizzard.
He stood up slowly, wiping the snow off of his pants with a sigh as he processed the new situation. Before he bothered to look for where Hawks had gone, he carefully felt around his shoulderblades, inspecting each staple to make sure that Hawks hadn't actually popped any. To his surprise, they were all intact. There were perhaps a few loose ones, but they all felt salvageable.
Fucking miracle.
He rolled his shoulders back and started walking.
It'd been a long time since he was in a snowstorm. He'd forgotten how good it felt for his body to be in a climate it was made for, to not have to fight tooth and nail to regulate itself between burning and freezing. When he was in the cold, his Quirk almost felt like it fit right in his own skin.
Almost.
Dabi squinted at the horizon, trying to tell if there were any signs of motion he could detect between the poor visibility and his worse eyesight. He sighed.
“Hawks?" He called out.
Silence.
...If Dabi was going to have to go dig the Number Two Hero out of the snow, he would never let that idiot live it down. He would make sure the entire League told legends about it for years to come.
"Hawks," Dabi repeated. He was only met with further silence.
Of course.
As much as he hated to admit it, Dabi had to go look for him. He knew Hawks couldn't have fallen very far past him, and he'd be damned if he was going to walk down the side of a mountain in a snowstorm himself. Hawks got them into this mess; he could get them out of it.
With that in mind, Dabi continued walking, looking for any sign of movement despite the low visibility. They hadn't caused an avalanche, and the snow was too fresh for him to worry about Hawks being truly buried. He just needed to find where the idiot went. He was mildly surprised that he hadn't made enough noise for Dabi to locate him already.
Finally, Dabi saw a flash of red uphill, staining the scattered white dunes like a brilliant patch of blood. He sighed and made the trek upwards only to find Hawks spitting snowflakes out of his mouth and combing them out of his hair. He had clearly been thrown harder than Dabi.
Dabi watched his feathers flex and sputter underneath the snow that had settled on top of them, several meters of white-and-red wingspan spasming synchronously in time. It was fascinating, if not for the fact that Hawks seemed to just be content to lie in the mess for a while. He looked up as Dabi approached, wiping frost off of his cheek and giving him a half-hearted wave. When Dabi got close enough, he could see the way that Hawks' chest was heaving, making Hawks' idleness make more sense. He supposed that such a haphazard flight could have taken quite a toll on the man; Hawks probably wasn't used to flying in that kind of weather.
Still. Dabi stopped just short of the frozen mess kicked up around Hawks' body.
"What the fuck was that," Dabi said flatly as he stared down at him.
"Crash landing," Hawks gasped, chest still heaving.
"And why did we crash land?"
"Probably," Hawks panted, "probably because I can't feel my wings."
"You can't feel your wings and you kept flying?"
Hawks leveled him with a look. "My bad, I can just let us die next time."
Dabi rolled his eyes and offered Hawks a hand. Hawks took it, the harsh, ice-coated leather of his glove biting into his palm.
"Where are we?" Dabi asked as he pulled Hawks up.
"Mount Oyama, probably," Hawks said, shaking his feathers out like a dog and causing Dabi to wince. Once he stood up properly, he glanced around him in a wide arc. "Yeah. Mount Oyama. Thank god."
Dabi stared. Hawks had flown them, what, fifty kilometers in the span of a few minutes? Dabi hated him. He hated him.
"And why did you bring us to Mount Oyama?" Dabi asked calmly, rather than voicing his thoughts.
Hawks looked around more closely, searching for something despite the inclement weather. His face brightened and he pointed towards a section of the treeline.
"Safe house," Hawks breathed, pants coming in slower now. "The Commission has them all over. I was trying to get us far enough away to somewhere safe. I wanted to get us to one of their bunkers, but I couldn't..."
Couldn't keep flying, couldn't navigate there. Hawks seemed frustrated with the failure, as though he should have been able to overcome whatever it was either way. Dabi suspected that it had been drilled into him that he always could. That it should be something for him to strive for. Or, maybe, that a punishment would follow if he ever failed.
Dabi swallowed. He couldn't keep comparing everything to his own situation, especially not Hawks.
He distanced himself by mulling over the information he'd just been given over in his head. He absolutely couldn't see whatever structure Hawks was referring to through the snow, but Hawks had no real reason to lie.
Hawks sniffed. He was looking miserably cold, Dabi noted. The windchill someone would experience going at the speed that they did would probably do that to a normal person. It made Hawks' thick coat make sense, but no coat designed for a hero from Fukuoka would be prepared to handle whatever this was.
"You first, then," Dabi said. Hawks nodded and set off in the direction he had pointed in with only a small wobble to his steps. Dabi stared at his back and eyed his wings that looked a little too frosty to be normal. Hawks said he couldn't feel them. For all of his ice knowledge, Dabi didn't know how bird feathers worked, let alone how frozen wings would work on a person.
They kept walking. The snow continued to fall, the sky never wavering from the dusty gray that had overtaken it as a result of this mess. After just a few minutes, Hawks stopped in place, looking out into the snowstorm as Dabi continued to study him.
"What?" Dabi asked.
"It's still this bad, and we're at least forty kilometers from Yokohama," Hawks said quietly. "Tokyo is thirty."
Dabi knew that look.
"If this spreads-" Hawks started.
"You are not going anywhere near that, hero," Dabi said. "You can't fly, and even if you could, you'd die going back in." He glanced at Hawks' wings, which were shaking. Some of the feathers were completely covered in frost. "You'll die here if you don't get a move on, too."
"Right," Hawks nodded with a slight laugh, like he wasn't already shivering. Dabi clicked his tongue and kicked him. Hawks yelped and began walking again.
The house slowly came into view as they approached. The trees in the area hid it well, which was good, because the Commission hadn't taken any pains to ensure that the house blended in. It was, very frankly, a wholly functioning, conspicuous, modern city house placed on a mountainside nowhere near the city. Dabi supposed that the idea was that no one would look for someone here in the first place.
Hawks pushed through the rapidly-accumulating snow towards the front door, shaking his hands out before reaching for some hidden keypad. Dabi wondered how cold it truly was. He wasn't particularly good at telling.
When Dabi considered it all, all of this nonsense, he wanted to laugh. It was snowing in the wrong season, with some insane cold Quirk gone wrong at an unfathomable scale. He was talking with Hawks normally in Kamino an hour ago. Now he was... somewhere, near Mount Oyama, at a house that Hawks maybe brought him to in order to kill him.
He studied Hawks again. Maybe not kill him yet; Hawks was looking truly ragged. Dabi could fight him off. Besides, there was going to be decidedly less snow in the house than outside of it. Despite how much he enjoyed the temperature, being wet was a hassle that resulted in a lot of extra wound care and an unnecessary amount of steam.
A soft noise chimed after a few seconds, and Hawks tested the doorknob. He gave a stupid little cheer when it worked. Dabi hated him.
He followed Hawks into the house nonetheless.
Dabi studied the place as they entered. From what he could tell, it was the epitome of an average, boring, upper-middle-class home, though he didn't have much experience with the subject. He realized with striking clarity that this was the first house he'd been in in a decade. The last memories he had of one crashed and burned with Touya.
The thought lodged a strange feeling in his throat. He turned back to Hawks in an attempt to shake it away.
"You're staying here," Dabi told him. "I'm checking the place for cameras."
Hawks nodded, wings drooping a little bit as he processed the statement and the unspoken lack of trust within. Dabi almost raised his eyebrows, surprised at how easily Hawks agreed to relinquishing control, then did a double take at the sweeping red wings behind him.
Now that his vision wasn't obstructed by snow, Dabi could see that Hawks' feathers were puffed up bigger than he'd ever seen them. He huffed out a laugh under his breath. It made sense, he supposed; he'd seen birds do the same thing during winter, so it followed for Hawks to do the same, but being able to see how much the cold was affecting him at a glance was infinitely enjoyable. Normally, Hawks' masks were well-constructed and rarely wavered, but the man in front of him was looking just as cold, sad, and miserable as Dabi bet he actually felt. His wings probably ran on instinct, and instinct was a hard man to fool.
Dabi once again wondered how cold Hawks truly was.
"Keep moving so you don't freeze," he suggested, before moving away to investigate the house.
To his initial surprise, there weren't any cameras or recording devices that he could find, despite his intensive search. While he supposed they could be hidden by Quirks, a simpler explanation seemed more likely. With how corrupt the Commission was, he would be remarkably unsurprised if the various bigwigs who might use this safehouse wanted to keep their business private from other members. Hell, they could even be using this place to protect themselves from each other. Nothing was off the table with a group like that.
Dabi did a few more cursory sweeps of the house. He could do a more thorough exploration later when he got bored; for now, he'd located a pantry of non-perishables, the bedrooms, and a first-aid kit, and that was as much as he currently cared to find. He returned to the entryway to inform Hawks of the all-clear.
Hawks jumped as he approached, making Dabi stop in his tracks. Never, not even once, had Dabi ever managed to surprise him. It was a point of interest to the League as a whole. Hawks always seemed to know everything that was going on around him at all times, far past the point of what could be explained away by operative and hero training. There were even compilation videos online of Hawks blindly reacting to villains or thrown objects well out of the standard vision or hearing range. But Dabi hadn't even tried to be stealthy about it; he'd just walked up to him, and Hawks had flinched, hard.
Something was wrong.
Then Dabi caught the look on Hawks' face. His expression was too flat, too guarded, but he couldn't quite disguise the distress in his pinning eyes.
Something was definitely wrong.
"What," Dabi asked, more of a statement than a question.
Hawks looked up at him. "What do you mean, what?"
If they were going to play that game, then fine. Dabi would drop it. "I told you to keep moving. You need to keep bloodflow going."
Hawks blinked at him.
"You're standing still," Dabi said helpfully.
Hawks sighed, leaning into the wall. "I was walking around earlier. I was just looking into something," he said. He pulled two phones out of his pants pocket as he spoke. "I think someone probably had an electronics Quirk that blacked out the whole city. There's no service, no Internet, no nothing. On this burner phone, the SIM card is just... fried." He frowned. "My hero phone—it's supposed to work even when everything else is down, but it isn't. Actually, it's just straight-up dead. The Quirk might have scaled with the complexity of the technology, if I had to guess. But I figure it's why we weren't getting a response back from the League, and why there weren't nearly as many first responders as there should have been."
"Great," Dabi said. "No communications here, either, unless you shoved a camera up your ass."
Hawks gave him a look. Dabi made an exaggerated after you gesture towards the living room.
"So what do you think caused it?" Dabi asked conversationally as they made their way through the house. He didn't care about the communications being down, but if Hawks was going to be chatty about theories, he might as well get insight on the hero side of the info circuit.
Hawks shrugged. "It's very similar to the Trigger Bomb case. The one in Europe that leveled a city? I know you remember it, I was gone on that mission for like, a week."
Dabi made a vague hum of acknowledgement. Hawks sighed.
"The cult behind it rigged bombs with supercharged Trigger gas that forcibly activated everyone's Quirks in the radius. It destroyed the city within hours. This reads just like that to me. Yokohama's probably gone," Hawks added, almost as an afterthought. "But all of those bombs should have deactivated when the cult disbanded, unless someone created an entirely fresh supply. And if it was a Trigger Bomb, then we should've also been affected. So, I don't know. I need more time to think."
Dabi shrugged. "You've got an entire blizzard's worth of time now."
Hawks smiled ruefully. "I guess I do."
They grew quiet after that, with Dabi settling down on the couch and Hawks pacing across the floor in deep thought. Dabi wasn't sure how much time passed that way in silence, but the moment shattered when he got up to grab a book off the nearby bookshelf out of a vague combination of boredom and curiosity. He was flitting through the books that seemed to be more for show than for reading material when he spotted it.
Lapping at the bottom of the bookcase was a thin layer of frost. As Dabi watched, it inched forwards across the wood flooring, ever-so-slowly creeping over every surface, equal parts dangerous and impossible. He glanced up towards the entryway, confirming his suspicions that it started from there. The fact that he was the one to notice it first was another glaring sign that Hawks was slipping; the man was still busy pacing a hole into the flooring, unperturbed.
"Hawks," Dabi started.
Hawks paused his pacing and looked up again. "What?"
Dabi filed through potential causes in his head for a moment. "Is there something that would increase the duration of Trigger?"
"Why?"
"The house is freezing," Dabi said casually.
Hawks followed his gaze. He stared at the frost for a long, long time, watching as it crept ever-closer almost impassively. When he spoke, it was with an air of slight disbelief.
"How is that even possible?" Hawks muttered. "There's not- there shouldn't be any type of drug that could do that. Or, the ones that the Commission k-knows about can't do that."
Dabi waved his hand with a shrug. "It could be Quirk bullshit."
"I s-suppose," Hawks said, rubbing his hands together absentmindedly as he thought. Dabi wondered when his teeth had started chattering. "I've been thinking, and I think it could be m-multiple Quirks overlaid atop each other, but I don't know what the motive could be in that c-case. That requires organization, and I don't know what organization would bother doing this. The League certainly wouldn't." Hawks looked up at him, as if asking for confirmation, until his face fell again. "The League. Do you think everyone's o-okay?"
Dabi looked at him for a moment before he sighed. The information couldn't hurt anymore. "Everyone else was together today. No one came to Kamino but us," he said begrudgingly. "Kurogiri could teleport anyone with him out, anyway. They're fine."
Hawks' face cleared up slightly, relief etching its way onto his features. The way he wore concern and care on his sleeve made Dabi want to puke. What kind of spy did he think he was, caring like that? Getting involved like that? Getting attached would always be messy for him. Dabi didn't understand Hawks' game. He hated him. He hated him.
Then Hawks' face fell as he winced, his muscles contracting against his will into another shiver. Dabi wondered, not for the first time, how well he was actually faring.
The cold encroached further and further, nipping at Dabi's boots like a gentle ocean wave. He traced scores into the frost idly. It was probably another manifestation of the same Quirk or Quirk cocktail that had holed them up here in the first place. He watched, slightly transfixed, as it formed senseless patterns on the wood laminate.
Then the wave of cold hit him like a freight train, hard enough that even he was momentarily taken aback. Dabi glanced at Hawks again, whose expression had morphed into a distressed frown. They sat like that for a while, neither saying a word, but both watching as the ice worked its way through the house and the air thickened into further chills.
Eventually, Hawks quickly pulled off one of his gloves to inspect his hand and sighed before putting it back on. His wings were still vibrating. Dabi realized that was also a shiver.
Those were hard shivers.
Dabi grew up with the cold, in the Todoroki household. He grew up with knowing how ice worked, knowing what to do if Rei or Fuyumi frosted something or—god, when Shouto got his stupid Quirk in and froze the entire house. Rei had taught him cold safety and the signs and stages of frostbite, even though his body always did particularly well against the cold. He'd never thought he was going to use the information, and had somewhat buried the memory until now.
But.
Dabi watched as Hawks continued to pace, as his breaths grew thicker and harsher. If this Quirk kept going, if the cold kept getting stronger like it was, Hawks was going to be in big trouble.
He knew that warming someone who was extremely cold needed to be done gently, with a careful hand. He knew that if you introduced significant heat to someone who was hypothermic, they'd go into shock, which wasn't something he could possibly deal with. But he was the only option, wasn't he? Hawks couldn't fly. He was the only option.
The window of time in which Dabi could still help him was getting thinner by the minute. And God—Dabi could help someone with this stupid, stupid Quirk for once, couldn't he?
The irony was thick enough for him to choke on it.
...
Dabi watched as the frost began to coat the ceiling.
Hawks would die if he didn't do something.
His body moved before he had another chance to think.
"Hawks," Dabi called out. "Come here."
Hawks responded slowly, his brows furrowing before he shuffled towards him. "Okay?"
Dabi sighed. He reached out and grabbed Hawks by the arm, pulling him in towards the couch. Hawks blinked like an awkward baby bird at the development, allowing himself to be pulled but looking bewildered all the same.
"What's up?" Hawks asked.
"Come here," Dabi ordered again, gesturing at himself with his free arm.
Hawks looked between them, his brows furrowing even further. "Wh-"
Dabi sighed and yanked Hawks forward, causing him to lose his balance. He used the momentum to pull Hawks most of the way into his lap; Hawks stumbled slightly and just stared between them for a few seconds. Dabi had never seen him look more lost in his life. It was almost amusing, if he didn't need Hawks to get with the program already.
"Take off your jacket," Dabi said.
"What?" Hawks asked, still looking lost.
The Number Two Hero could not be this stupid.
"Me, fire Quirk," Dabi said. "You, dying. Take off your jacket."
Hawks just... stopped. Stared. Several emotions seemed to break out over his face until he finally gave Dabi a look that—he could barely decipher. Awe? Confusion? Hawks was looking at him like he was salvation, like no one had ever done anything for him before, like Dabi was supposed to just—what, watch him freeze to death? Sit there and let him die?
"Jacket," Dabi reminded him exasperatedly when Hawks continued to just stare at him.
That broke Hawks from his stupor. He wiped the gobsmacked expression off of his face, and instead wiggled his eyebrows at him and winked before complying. Dabi had no idea how he found the wherewithal to mess around in his state, but at least Hawks was acting like Hawks again.
Said man began to remove his jacket, then frowned and paused. Dabi wasn't sure what was going through his head, but after a few seconds, Hawks pulled his arms back through the arm holes of the jacket, leaving the rest laying over his shoulders. Dabi supposed that made sense; it would keep Hawks a little bit warmer. Still, he swallowed as they stared at each other for a few seconds, the imminence of the situation becoming abruptly apparent now that Hawks had finished whatever was going on in his head and had gotten with the program. When he felt Hawks continue to shiver, however, he knew he had to bite the bullet.
Dabi closed his eyes and took a deep breath before calling his Quirk to his skin, gently, as gently as a Quirk made exclusively to destroy could manage. He'd done this before a few times when he was trying to fight off an infection on the streets, though in that case his body was more prone to do it itself—but he'd done it before, in theory. He'd never had to be quite so careful with it before; he'd never needed to try. He inhaled as his Quirk prowled across his skin, licking along the edges of his bloodstream and chomping at the bit to be freed. He pushed it down. He could do this. He could do this.
Dabi felt the warmth rise up in the parts of his skin that still had feeling, too warm to be normal but not warm enough to be too much. Or, at least, he hoped it wasn't too much. He couldn't perform any exact sciences, between the fact that they had almost no equipment and his Quirk being temperamental on a good day. It was going to be flying blind, but it had to work. It had to work. If it didn't, the rewarming shock from his Quirk could give Hawks permanent damage, and Dabi already had enough of that to last two lifetimes.
Dabi supposed it was good that the house was so cold, because at this rate, he otherwise would be overheating miserably within minutes. His Quirk felt overcharged in its own skin, buzzing as if enraged that it was not being set free. He willed it down as he opened his eyes once more, only to see Hawks watching him with raptorlike precision. Dabi scowled; Hawks started laughing.
Dabi pinched his leg in retaliation before attempting to regain his focus. He took another deep breath and looked back up at Hawks, over his shoulders and down the newly-revealed expanse of his arms, which were quickly turning pink from the cold. He knew he was stalling, even though he had no good reason to stall.
God, it was awful, but in this stupid situation, he couldn't help but think about how long it had been since he had hugged someone.
...Since Touya, probably. Touya had been hugged by his mother a few days before Sekoto Peak, when he was still in that stupid, spacious house with its stupid, sweltering heat. Inside of this freezing safehouse, the difference felt even more stark.
Toga had tried to get hugs from Dabi on multiple occasions since then, but he always sidestepped her until she'd gotten the message and stopped. It wasn't like he'd had any real romantic relationships, either. He'd been living on borrowed time with only one goal in mind.
So, really, this was probably going to be the first time that Dabi had actually hugged someone in about ten years.
He glanced back up at Hawks' face. The man was looking similarly awkward. Neither of them... did this. Dabi wasn't tactile on a good day. Hawks probably wasn't allowed to let anyone near him without them signing four NDAs. Sure, he'd known the hero for a while now, and had gotten used to him and his little idiosyncrasies, and had introduced him to the League. And sure, the League liked him, but this was...
He willed himself not to think about it.
"Your staples," Hawks gasped intelligently as Dabi pulled him to his chest. "God, they're cold."
And that... that helped. Hawks always had that air about him, defusing situations without even trying. The Commission's charisma training had to have counted for something, Dabi supposed, but he didn't think it was intentional this time. Hawks was... just being Hawks.
Dabi hated him.
"How can you even tell?" Dabi muttered, wrapping his arms around him. "You're freezing."
"They're metal," Hawks protested. "It's thermodynamics."
Dabi hid his snort in Hawks' hair.
They stayed like that for a few minutes, Hawks fidgeting like he wasn't sure what to do with himself. He was still shivering, so Dabi supposed he was probably uncomfortable, but it was more than that. Dabi's thought about the Commission not allowing anyone near Hawks without signing NDAs may actually have been true, considering Hawks very clearly had absolutely no idea where to put his hands.
His hands.
Dabi pulled back from the hug. He untangled his arms from around Hawks' waist and held out his hands palms-up.
"Hands," Dabi demanded.
Hawks looked down at his own leather-covered hands, then at the space between their bodies. He moved to remove his gloves, but hesitated.
"You can put them back on after you warm your hands up," Dabi said impatiently. "Do you want frostbite or not?"
Hawks took a deep breath, nodding to himself before carefully removing one of his gloves. Once he did, Dabi quickly realized the true source of his reluctance.
On each of Hawks' fingers laid a small, black-tipped talon, his nails shifting from a normal color at their base into the sharp, darkened points at their ends. They weren't large, perhaps the same size that Dabi had seen on some acrylics, but they were significantly more pointed and structured than anything that could be considered normal.
He took Hawks' cold hand in both of his own, using the time to investigate. He carefully drew a finger over the sharpened edge of one of Hawks' nails. "Are these natural?" He asked, already guessing the answer.
"Yeah," Hawks said, his voice growing quiet. He was fidgeting again. "They're not—anything crazy, I guess. You can trim them and they'll look n-normal, so it's why they're cut blunt or painted in most of my photos." He gave a humorless laugh. "I'm l-lucky, really. I didn't have to get any cosmetic surgery to fix them. Just... have to cut them if I'm due for some advertisement."
Dabi opened his mouth, the words "fix them" echoing through his head like a ricocheting bullet. There was so much to unpack in that statement. Being with Hawks in the last few hours had quite possibly answered more questions about the Commission than Dabi had ever thought he had.
In lieu of responding, Dabi pulled at Hawks' other glove. Hawks looked briefly surprised at Dabi's non-reaction, but quickly covered it up with a stupid smirk.
"At least buy me dinner fir-"
"Do you want me to drop you? Because that's how I drop you," Dabi muttered, wrapping his other hand around Hawks' newly revealed one.
Hawks only looked amused at the statement, smiling. Dabi wondered when his edge had worn off.
"Your staples aren't cold anymore," Hawks mused as Dabi urged heat into his hand.
"The comments really aren't necessary," Dabi bit out. Hawks just smiled again, but dutifully stopped speaking.
It was still slightly awkward, the new space between their bodies making them liable to maintain eye contact as they waited for Hawks' hands to warm up. Dabi ended up looking away after a while, studying the ice patterns on the flooring, just for something else to do.
At some point during their strange not-staring session, Hawks' wings twitched, then slowly, ever-so-slowly, began to wrap around Dabi's body. Dabi brought his gaze back up from the floor and watched curiously as the mass of feathers began to unfurl from the tight hold that Hawks had maintained on them. His wings were shuddering, Dabi realized, and he immediately understood why Hawks was trying to surround them in a sea of red. There was only one good way for Dabi to warm up his wings.
Even still, Hawks was dragging them forward at a snail's pace, as though he was afraid that Dabi would snap out of it and stop him if he moved too fast. Dabi supposed that was fair; he was willingly letting Hawks surround him with what equated to a few hundred knives, after all. Dabi swallowed down his concern in favor of Hawks' hypothermia, settling for watching him closely until he felt ice-cold feathers finish wrapping themselves around his back. The sensation was strange, but not altogether unpleasant.
Hawks hissed suddenly, causing Dabi to shoot his gaze back upwards. Hawks was looking down at his hands, flexing them slightly in Dabi's grip.
"It can be a little painful as the feeling returns," Dabi supplied, relaxing once he realized that he hadn't burned him. Hawks just nodded. It was strange to be able to feel Hawks' feathers relax slightly behind him in real time, but even stranger to watch Hawks' expression immediately clear of any sign of discomfort, as though the pain was irrelevant now that he didn't need to worry about it.
Dabi let go of his hands at the same time as that thought. Hawks blinked in surprise.
"If you can feel them, I don't need to focus on them anymore," Dabi said by way of explanation. Hawks swallowed and nodded. Dabi took that as his cue to pull Hawks back in chest-to-chest before either of them could overthink it again. Hawks, for his part, still seemed to flail for a bit when Dabi held him, confused as to what to do with his newly-freed hands, until he finally, tentatively, wrapped them around Dabi's back in kind.
Dabi sighed.
"Under the shirt," he instructed. "Unless you want them to freeze again."
"Um," Hawks said, laughing nervously. "Okay."
"Did the Commission decide that being a virgin was marketable?" Dabi asked innocently. "What happened to being a ladykiller?"
Hawks squawked and smacked his back, but didn't otherwise deign it with a response. Eventually, he acquiesced and carefully moved his hands underneath the back of Dabi's shirt.
And that was. Something. Dabi allowed himself another internal sigh. This whole day sucked.
After a while, Hawks incrementally began to relax, but he still seemed to be on-edge, still constantly fidgeting. Dabi wondered when Hawks would crack.
Ten minutes passed before he got his answer.
"It's still too quiet," Hawks whispered, leaning further into Dabi.
"We're the only people in here," Dabi replied, slightly confused.
"No—my wings," Hawks tried to explain. "I can feel them now, a little, but there's no—normally I can sense everything through them, okay? But I can't feel anything. I've never had them but not been able to feel anything," Hawks said, panic creeping into his voice as he shivered. "Dabi, I can feel them but I can't feel anything-"
"Hawks," Dabi cut him off. "They're just cold. Stop panicking."
"I'm not panicking," Hawks muttered. "I don't panic."
"You are panicking right now," Dabi said flatly. "As we speak." He paused. "Bit delayed, actually. I was wondering what was wrong with you earlier."
Hawks made a huff of noise into his shoulder that Dabi figured meant he would be glaring at him if he could right now. He fought the urge to smile, and instead poked Hawks in the ribs as a distraction.
"You think they'll feel again once they warm up?" Hawks asked eventually, voice small. Dabi blinked. Was Hawks... asking him for reassurance?
"Yes?" Dabi said, utterly bewildered, more of a question than a statement. "Your fingers did, didn't they?"
Hawks nodded into his shoulder, seeming to take this explanation in stride. He finally seemed willing to allow their current situation to happen, gradually sinking completely into Dabi's arms. Dabi swallowed. That was- that was more than reassurance. He tried desperately not to consider the magnitude of the trust that Hawks was placing in him while his hands rested mere centimeters below his wings and neck, especially considering what Hawks had just revealed to him about his wings not being able to "sense" things right now. It must have been how no one ever got the jump on him, and Hawks had just told him it wasn't working, yet decided to relax into Dabi anyway, and that was- that was-
Dabi took a deep breath, trying to control his Quirk. It was becoming increasingly more difficult to do, and Dabi started fidgeting. It seemed to only want to be let out more the longer he forced it to simmer half-alive under his skin.
Hawks noticed his discomfort and made an inquisitive hum into his shoulder. Dabi swallowed.
"My Quirk is completely awful at this," Dabi admitted. Secret for a secret. "It doesn't just stay still on command. When it burns, it burns. Keeping it like this is… not what it wants to happen."
Hawks hummed again.
"It's okay if you burn me," he said nonchalantly. "I don't mind. I mean, you're helping me, right? So it's fine."
Dabi opened his mouth before choosing to close it again after a few seconds.
Hawks continued on like nothing was wrong, pushing back on Dabi's chest slightly so that he could idly tug at his wings, like Dabi hadn't just admitted he was a ticking time bomb and he hadn't just revealed a gross misunderstanding of boundaries. He pulled slightly at one of his feathers, looking elated as it detached from the wing.
"You're right, I can sort of feel them again," Hawks said happily before putting it back. Dabi continued to stare.
They stayed like that for an untold amount of time. Probably a few hours, if Dabi had to guess. He was fading in and out of awareness, having to concentrate more and more on keeping his Quirk in check. In the meantime, Hawks busied himself with preening his feathers once they had fully defrosted. Apparently, a few of them had ended up being irreparably damaged by frostbite, which Hawks solved by snapping each of them in half without flinching, almost mechanically, as though it were routine.
Dabi had stared at that long enough for Hawks to say something.
"I can't just throw them away," Hawks had explained with a shrug. "If I don't break them, I'll still feel them. That's the downside of the telekinesis."
Dabi decided that was a good time to check out completely. He wasn't quite sure what time it was, anymore, but the room felt like it was getting warmer. He was feeling a little lightheaded. The next time he blinked, the frost on the floor was gone.
He couldn't remember why that was a problem, and closed his eyes again.
"Dabi?" Hawks asked him carefully, at some point.
He ignored him.
"Dabi!"
—
"...Dabi."
Dabi awoke slowly. It took him a few tries to open his eyes, his eyelids scratching against them uncomfortably, as though he'd kept them shut for too long. Once he finally managed to blink his eyes open, he stared blearily up at an unfamiliar ceiling. He furrowed his brow and tried to sit up, only to be stopped by a firm hand. He immediately looked to the side to see a very irate Hawks glaring daggers at him.
"Dabi, you're a fucking idiot," Hawks breathed, removing his hand once he determined that Dabi wasn't going to try to sit up again.
"Good morning to you too," Dabi muttered, still working through the warm haze of sleep.
"It's seven p.m., actually," Hawks corrected flatly. "You have been asleep for sixteen hours. You know who had to watch over you for sixteen hours? Me. Do you want to know why you were asleep for sixteen hours?"
Dabi thought for a moment through the haze. It took longer than he would've liked.
"I passed out?" He guessed. His arms vaguely hurt from the inside.
"Yes," Hawks hissed. "Yes you did."
"I mean-"
"I'm fine, he said," Hawks mocked. "I'm not going to knock myself out with a horrible fever when we're stuck in a blizzard with no access to anything, he said."
"I never said any of that," Dabi protested.
Hawks glared at him.
"Your bedside manner could use some work," Dabi drawled after a minute, moving to inspect his arms.
"I'm not the one who gave myself quirk exhaustion!" Hawks exclaimed, then gestured at his scars. "How do you even do that?"
"Okay, fuck you too," Dabi protested. "You could at least say thank you."
Hawks glared at him again. "You could have told me how bad it was, rather than pass out on me. It's kind of difficult, my ass."
Dabi chose not to respond, instead inspecting what parts of the room he could see while still lying down. In the time that he was asleep, Hawks appeared to have collected a myriad of supplies from across the house, including what appeared to be every blanket, towel, or fabric-like substance that he could find, another futon, the first-aid kit, and several washcloths and bowls filled with water.
"You are so hard to treat for a fever, did you know that?" Hawks asked, following his gaze.
Dabi rasped out a laugh at that. Oh boy, did he.
"It's warmer," Dabi said instead of responding, as his first intelligent thought of the day.
"Don't get your hopes up. There's still two meters of snow in front of the door," Hawks replied. "But they had a generator in storage. It took a while to get it to work, because it was completely frozen over until the frost Quirk receded, but I got it running eventually. The kotatsu is behind you."
Dabi merely hummed in acknowledgment, staring up again at the ceiling as he processed the last few minutes of his life.
Quirk exhaustion. When he thought about it, it made a sick sort of sense. He'd never sustained his Quirk for that long at once before, considering its volatility and incompatibility with his body. He'd never tried to truly keep it under his skin like that, either.
He held up one of his hands in front of his face. It was slightly pink, and felt sensitive to the air. Dabi wanted to laugh. Of course his Quirk would be defective any way he tried to use it. Of course.
He lowered his arm and looked back at Hawks, who was in the middle of floating a water bottle and a can of rations towards him.
"I'm not eating in bed," Dabi declared immediately, because he still had some sense of pride. Hawks rolled his eyes, but directed the can-and-feather towards the kotatsu instead.
Sitting across from Hawks at the kotatsu turned out to be a somewhat awkward affair. Hawks had acquired a can of rations for himself as well, and was slowly picking at it as they sat in silence. The food was still freezing, but Hawks didn't seem to be perturbed by the palatability in the slightest.
Dabi thrummed his fingers on the table as he stared down at his food. He wouldn't admit it, but it was a bit nervewracking to be trapped in this house with Hawks. He was pretty sure Hawks was too goody-two-shoes to kill him, especially after the lengths he'd just gone to for him (and Dabi would ask more about that later), but... they were too close. It was too close. Dabi hadn't been this close and trapped with other people since... well, since Touya, but this was different. This house wasn't as bad, necessarily, but it was still certainly uncomfortable. They'd both been taken out of their element. Now they were here, sitting across from each other eating shitty rations, trapped in a room together after saving each other's lives, not talking. It had been much easier when Dabi was a villain and Hawks was pretending to be one.
There was less acting, now. Dabi wondered idly if anyone else had seen how pissy Hawks could get when he was truly annoyed.
He finally picked up his can of food as he lost himself in thought. They didn't have any connections to the outside world for the time being. Dabi had no idea whether what happened in Yokohama was the only incident that occurred yesterday, or how it concluded, or if the entire rest of Japan had also gone under. If Endeavor had kicked the bucket before Dabi got to enact his revenge, Dabi was going to find his shitty, icy grave and kill him again.
But that was a thought for later. The most pressing matter was that this situation with Hawks was very real and in front of him, right now. Dabi wasn't sure where they stood, currently. Really, all he'd done in the past day was cuddle to save Hawks' life.
...He'd saved Hawks' life.
That was a damning, irrefutable fact. Dabi didn't think about it all that much at the time, but the truth was now quite literally staring him in the face. He had planned to just let Hawks suffer, but then the frost started creeping in, and Dabi-
He didn't think, after that. He really didn't.
So he'd saved Hawks' life.
...Why?
"Sooooo," Hawks started, pulling Dabi out of his thoughts. "Wanna play board games or something?"
Dabi stared at him.
"They've got some playing cards, and chess, and a couple of other things," Hawks continued, as though Dabi wasn't drilling holes into the side of his face. "I don't know what you know how to play."
Dabi had been made speechless more times in the last twenty-four hours than he'd ever been before in his life.
"Yokohama doesn't exist anymore," Dabi started, "and you want to play cards?"
"Well, I can't really do anything about that right now," Hawks said brightly, "so playing cards is a great alternative, I think."
Despite his cheery tone, Dabi could see the line of tension in Hawks' shoulders, the way his feathers kept sharpening ever so slightly whenever he sighed. He snorted.
No way Hawks could ever be a villain.
...Fuck it.
"Did the Commission know you were in Kamino?" Dabi asked casually after a moment.
Hawks looked up at him, gaze searching. Dabi didn't know if he would find whatever it was he was looking for.
"Yes," Hawks said slowly.
Dabi hummed, something like adrenaline flooding into his veins.
"So they don't even know you're alive, do they?" Dabi asked, then gestured around them. "No cameras in here, either."
Hawks looked down at the table. So he'd realized that, too.
"You could just... fuck off, you know," Dabi offered. "Leave forever."
"I can't-" Hawks started.
"Yeah, yeah, because you're a spy, I know," Dabi said, waving his hand. Hawks opened his mouth to respond, but Dabi beat him to it.
"Don't get your feathers in a twist," he added. He barely registered what he was even saying. "I didn't recruit you because I thought you were being honest."
Hawks clearly cycled through several things he wanted to say before glancing up at Dabi and muttering, "I was being honest."
Dabi stared directly into his eyes. "Yeah," he said. "I know."
Hawks didn't reply.
"The Commission is probably going to pull you out after all of this, if you go back to them," Dabi added after a while. "You could at least take a vacation first."
Hawks stared at him. "You-"
"I'm just saying," Dabi said with a shrug, his heartrate spiking. He wondered if Hawks could sense that, too. "You could do something for yourself, for once."
"I-"
"Just think about it, yeah?" Dabi said as he stood up, giving him a little salute. "It's not like I'm going anywhere."
Hawks looked at him for a long, long time, before he started laughing.
"Alright," he said. "Sure, Dabi. You win."