Hawks lands on the cracked concrete outside the bar, keeping his goggles on as he looks up. The moon is out to remind him that he should be sleeping. But duty calls, and double-agent duty calls like a bump in the night, so he's here, instead of in his bed with his wings tucked around him.
By now, he'd usually be making his way inside the hideout with Dabi, or best-case scenario keeping it to a short talk outside—feathers drawn like swords—but tonight, Dabi is lounging from a second-story windowsill. Hawks doesn't care enough to ask what he's doing. Or maybe he'd just prefer not to understand Dabi any more than he already does.
Hawks has to crane his neck to look at him. Dabi's back is against the edge of the shutter, and he has one leg kicked up the windowsill and the other hanging down on the dangerous side.
"Angel," he says, just loud enough.
Hawks flinches when he hears it, and it's worse every time. It doesn't matter what comes before or after. It's just the way it's wrapped up in Dabi's voice, like layers of barbed wire, and the way he expects Hawks to reach through it anyway.
"Just tell me what you want," Hawks replies, not raising his own voice, either. "Not in the mood for games, tonight. You called me, so what is it?"
Dabi ignores his question entirely. "Didn't take you long to get here," he notes. And Hawks knows what it really means when he says it, how Dabi makes a point to remind Hawks that he's out there flying on a short leash. Shigaraki's leash. So really Dabi's leash, by default, because Hawks still hasn't been allowed in a room with the man, hasn't been granted that privilege quite yet. So of course he'd flown here fast, because there wasn't another option. The League of Villains' trust is a thing Hawks has to keep proving that he wants, over and over, earning and un-earning it sometimes mere seconds apart.
It's easiest to know where he stands with Dabi, at least. Hawks has that fickle trust now because he's angel, but if Hawks becomes hero he knows he needs to get it back again. Dabi only calls him that when he's wondering what would happen if he killed him, and if it'd be easier if he did.
It makes his skin crawl—how there's a method for it.
"I'm fast," Hawks reminds him. "That's kind of my thing."
Dabi stops looking down at him and instead busies himself picking at the staples of his pants. "Why don't you come up here and talk."
It isn't a question.
Hawks pushes his goggles up and breathes for a second, contemplating just flying back home, even if it isn't a real option and it's just for the peace of pretending it is. Things are nicer when he gets to call these things a choice, he can swallow them easier and sometimes they even stay down. Choosing to be a part-time villain, choosing to fly here at 2am, choosing to answer to angel.
So Hawks makes his not-choice, and flies up to meet him. He hovers in the air, a few feet away, and his wings keep beating like a hummingbird's.
Dabi continues to pick at his staples. "You look pissed, hope it's not at me."
"I'm just tired," Hawks tells him. And impatient, and anxious, and fighting for his life even when he doesn't know it, but that all stays inside.
"Then sleep here. Beats flying a hundred fuckin' miles, and maybe you'll appreciate our cause a little more, afterward. Bet they keep you real comfortable on the high road."
His muscles tense. "Your cause is my cause." Hawks hates that he has to say it, hates Dabi for making him say it. Hates the way he feels like a robot pre-programmed with all these words that aren't his, how they've been recorded in his voice, however detached, and sounding closer to his real one every time Dabi goes and pulls his string for an answer.
Your cause is my cause.
"Sure it is," Dabi mocks him.
Hawks has chills now even though he's sweating, and his wing-beats match the pace of his heart as it tries not to be terrified. "Did you call me here for a reason, because I have yet to hear it."
"Quality assurance." Dabi finally looks at him, then. There's nothing in his face or in his eyes, it's an empty slate, keeping Hawks guessing.
"What?"
Dabi laughs once, loud and abrasive. "Shigaraki doesn't like when plans fail, and I don't like to be around Shigaraki when he fails, so this is how everyone stays happy. I test things out." He lets his leg sway in the open air. "See? Now I know how fast you can get here."
Hawks blinks, in disbelief even though he should've expected it: another game to figure out his place in. He should be used to it by now. Dabi's games. It's a new one every time, though, and Hawks can't stand it—being tugged around by him and a hundred different strings, different people, to the point that his limbs start to go limp by default any time the League of Villains is around. He isn't supposed to be here, he thinks. Right now, or in any future he's ever dreamed of. He wasn't supposed to take the difficult path, to be this convoluted hero wearing a villain's mask in the underworld, but here he is.
Here he is.
"Fine," Hawks replies, and nothing is fine but he has to say it anyway, to give Dabi what he wants in that robot-Hawks voice, again. "I'm leaving, now."
Something flashes in Dabi's eyes.
"I could call you right back," he tells him.
Hawks stutters in the air, breathing harder, and hoping that Dabi didn't notice either of those reactions. But he did. There's not a chance he didn't see it and now Hawks' leash just got that much shorter. He can feel the chains digging in.
"I wouldn't come."
Dabi seems amused by his answer. "You so sure about that? Go ahead, try it, see what happens, hero. See if you can live with it."
Hero.
And there it is. Hawks feels the trust he had before running through his fingers, falling to the ground where it slips through the cracks in the concrete. It was only a matter of time before he lost it. Dabi likes to play back-and-forth too much, likes to watch Hawks fall onto his hands and knees grabbing for whatever he can salvage. Because that's what this really is: figuring out how much control he still has. It's all he cares about. Hawks needs him, and Dabi knows it, and it doesn't ever seem to factor in how Dabi needs Hawks, too.
After a minute, silence just becomes a shorter way to say obedience.
Dabi tilts his head back, now that he's gone quiet. "No? Funny how fast things change." He pulls his leg back in the room and gives Hawks a look, as well as his fleeting trust back, like a child getting an allowance to tide them over.
"Now why don't you come in, angel."
But Dabi's smiling when he says it and it's all wrong, all teeth and gums, why the hell is he smiling? Hawks' eyes flicker past him, into the dark room behind him, thinking, he's never been on the second floor before, he doesn't know where the hell Dabi is. Where he wants to take him.
Hawks steadies his breaths. "Why?" he asks, trying to stall for time until Dabi gets bored or impatient, which never takes long. All Hawks needs is an inch.
"Because you're out there in the open, and you don't need me to tell you how dangerous that is."
There's a joke in there somewhere, how being alone in a room with Dabi could ever be the less dangerous option.
Hawks fists both hands. "Then let me go home." He's flinching as he says it. It makes him feel like even more of a child than before, like he's nine years old again asking some blank face in the Hero Commission when he can go back home to his mommy, but somehow, this is even worse. Being beholden to Dabi's wishes. He's sick over it, it's a sickness. There's no cure either, except to wait Dabi out and hope he gets caught before Hawks does.
Dabi cracks his bony knuckles and says, "Not yet, I'm not done with you."
So right now, it seems like the only way to outlast him is to be a good boy and play his games.
Hawks climbs through the window, making a point to wait until Dabi moves out of his way, and keeping a tight, mental hold on his feathers in case he needs them. He tries to touch the windowsill as little as possible, all the dirt and mold that's around it. Everything is ugly here. Looking at Dabi he only confirms how much he belongs in it—ugly, scarred, cruel. It's enough to make goosebumps swim over his arms.
It's only when Hawks is comfortably inside, dusting off his jacket, that he suddenly goes stiff. Remembering so clearly what Dabi had said before, and how it's just about the worst thing he could ever imagine.
"I'm not sleeping here," Hawks states. Fear keeps his voice strong.
"Then don't sleep."
Dabi is there, right in front of him, and he doesn't touch Hawks but he might as well be. His proximity feels like needles.
Hawks swallows. He can't be nervous now, he can't afford to be nervous around any of them, but especially him. "Dabi." His name comes out through grit teeth.
"You are pissed," Dabi says, "Look at you." His eyes are all over him, empty, dark, these wild sparks of blue set far behind them. But Hawks isn't pissed, he doesn't know what he is right now. The way Dabi keeps trying to pick him apart and falls just short every time, it makes Hawks feel like his pet project. It's supposed to be the other way around, isn't it—Hawks manipulating them. That's how the commission told him to frame it in his pretty little head; they'd said it just like that, patting him on the back to keep his spirits high. But they've always told him what he wanted to hear, too afraid of losing him.
Hawks shifts on his feet, and his feathers tremble, and two of them harden into swords. "Getting in a fight right now would make things a lot harder for both of us"
"Oh, angel," Dabi says, in a way that makes his toes curl. "This isn't a fight."
And then Dabi touches him. He puts a hand on Hawks' shoulder, abrupt, greedy for all the things he shouldn't do and does anyway. He squeezes his shoulder once before side-eyeing the feathers in the air, the ones that popped out of Hawks' wings and point directly at his skull. All they get is a laugh, no fear at all. "It's an exercise in trust," Dabi says, ignoring them. "Quality assurance."
Hawks shakes his head in denial, like Dabi's hand isn't already on him, touching him, getting away with it. As if his palm isn't hot through the fabric of Hawks' jacket while Dabi looks at him, wild and uncut, a grin tugging hard at the staples in his cheeks. He's already in so deep.
An exercise in trust, Hawks thinks. Because Dabi knows what lengths he'll go to secure it, and all he has to do is keep saying that magic word, dangling it in front of Hawks' face while his eyes cross trying to reach for it.
Hawks' voice is smaller than he'd like. "I've proven it already, plenty of times, you can trust me."
"Prove it again."
Hawks feels his guts twist inside of him, writhing like snakes. Dabi is too close to him, too awful, it hurts to be near him. It hurts to feel the pressure of his hand and how close it is to touching his skin, when all Dabi would have to do is slip underneath his jacket collar and take his neck by force—put that cruel, brittle palm against his bare throat, and then-
Nothing.
Dabi lifts his hand and toys with the soft ends of Hawks' hair, so self-aware that it's crippling. It's worse than choking him. It feels like he's inside of him, the way he takes whatever he wants away from Hawks and mars it, irreversibly. He refuses to meet Dabi's eyes now, no matter how hard he's vying for them, tugging at his pretty hair with this intensity that Hawks can't wrap his mind around, and doesn't want to.
Eventually, though, Dabi has to settle for something else. So he leans in, and lets smoke pour from his nose, and he tells Hawks, "Kneel."
Hawks rips his head backward, stunned and so full of dread that it weighs him down like an anchor.
"No."
"You don't understand how this works, then. I'm not asking."
He's dead serious. Dabi is never not serious, but he likes to fuck around with words and threats until he strikes the right combination, and here he's found it, the one thing that could shake Hawks down to his bones and wring out his heart. The feeling of being at someone's mercy. The thought of kneeling on the floor at Dabi's feet, praying to him out of necessity, please, please let me live long enough to at least kill you, if nothing else.
Hawks could kill him already, right now. But the trick is, Dabi knows it too, that's why his hand is so close to his face as he says it. So he keeps his mouth shut for now, because he has to, but his silence might as well be a direct disobedience.
"You really like making things harder on yourself for no fucking reason." Dabi tells him, like it's his own fault, everything that's ever gone wrong. "So are all heroes masochists, or just you?"
When he feels a painful blow against his ankle, Hawks knows that his choice has been made for him, again, and he crumples to his knees while Dabi keeps talking above him. "You don't have to answer that. I'll find out myself, starting with the fan favorite and working my way backward."
"Fuck you." Hawks' voice nearly cracks when he says it. The ankle Dabi had struck throbs underneath him but he stays on the floor. There are other things to think about, other factors in play. Hawks is ten steps ahead trying to figure out where this will spit him out, whether Dabi will trust him more if he fights back or if he doesn't, and whether he's even doing this for Shigaraki in the first place.
But he knows the answer. No matter how hard Hawks tries not to understand him—not to feel around his brain—he can. He can hate it all he wants but he's in Dabi's head, trapped with him, thinking like he would, and right now Dabi would be happy to turn Hawks into a pile of ash just to watch the butterfly effect.
Hawks looks up, because the least he can do is meet his eyes dead-on and take it.
"How brave of you," is Dabi's reply to being cursed at, glared at. He doesn't care, it slides right off him because he put a hero on his knees. And if Hawks had anything at all to say back to that, it gets ripped from his chest the moment Dabi rests his boot between his legs—no further than resting, but Hawks feels his blood spike all the same. It's the implication of it. The horror underneath, the way he starts to sweat, the way his own body works against him.
And Dabi smiles when he feels the way he tenses. It's such an unwelcome sight that Hawks starts to lose the nerve he had so much of, before. His feathers rattle like they're in a cage, even though they're right behind him, begging to be used, but he can't, he can't.
When Dabi speaks again, his voice is just as oppressive as his boot. "I have a problem for you to solve, and I'll even let you fly home after."
But he doesn't answer, and Dabi presses down with his boot when Hawks' eyes drift above him, past him, trying to break free."Look at me." Hawks flinches, but he obeys like he's been programmed to do. "That's it. Now tell me this, hero, what happens when a masochist meets a sadist?"
Hawks can only choke in reply, so Dabi is generous enough to offer a live demonstration. All his weight goes straight to his boot, digging in, crushing him, the ridges of his sole rubbing against Hawks with more friction than he knows how to take. The pain spreads out through his whole abdomen. He bites his tongue and groans around it, leaning back, pressing himself against the floor as much as he can to get away. As if Dabi would ever let him do that.
"Come on," Dabi says, pulling his boot back so he can at kick Hawks' inner thighs, make them spread nice and wide, open, vulnerable, everything Hawks shouldn't be around Dabi. And he shouldn't be hard either, but he is, and now Dabi sees it too. What it did to him. How low he's fallen, on the floor being stepped on by someone who probably has fantasies about a world where he's dead.
Hawks crushes his eyes shut, and then opens one of them again. "Satisfied?" he asks, out of breath like Dabi had burned the very oxygen from his lungs. He doesn't think about how his dick aches for two different reasons. He doesn't think about anything but his own bed, and how nice it'll be a hundred miles from now when he's able to crawl into it, changed, changing more every time he dreams until one day maybe he will sleep here instead, because it'll be the only place that feels like him, anymore.
"Someone's satisfied," Dabi replies. His boot finds his crotch again, almost lazily in contrast to Hawks who's under him straining and throbbing, cursing himself. There's heat pulsing through his core as Dabi steps down again, hard, learning what Hawks likes so he can cross that line into what he doesn't. It's easy enough to do. Hawks' whole back is against the floor now, pinning his wings, and his legs stay spread without any intervention. Free to use, free for Dabi to leave his mark, and in some ways, it's almost like nothing's changed at all.
Hawks peers up at him. He can't read his face from the floor, his vision is too blurry and he's almost glad for it, because he doesn't want to see what Dabi knows about him. Doesn't want to be pulled back in his head with him, not ever again, after this.
"You really are fucked up." It's the most alive Dabi's ever sounded, when he says it. Hawks makes a noise in his throat, one that means nothing, or means whatever Dabi wants it to mean—whatever makes this stop.
Dabi does stop. He takes his boot away and steps right over his thigh, and Hawks bears the resounding pain in his abdomen as he stares up at the ceiling, watching it swirl, listening to those footsteps circle around him on the cheap, battered hardwood. Dabi avoids his wings on purpose, at first, almost like he's dancing through the gaps. And when he finally steps down in the center of one—his sole heated by his quirk—that's on purpose, too.
Hawks moans. His nails leave lines in the floor as he reaches for something to hold onto that isn't Dabi's leg.
"Gotta admit, you surprised me with this one."
He punctuates it with a stomp, and then twists the metal toe of his shoe into Hawks' wing, the way you'd put out a cigarette on the ground, no care at all. Hawks feels it through his whole body, in his mind. The invasion of it. The way it lasts and curls around his brain, and promises him that he'll be thinking about it even when he does crawl under his sheets tonight—thinking of Dabi.
So a nightmare, then.
Hawks almost laughs when Dabi lets up, moving his boots away so his wing can twitch and rewire itself around that black footprint, trying to make itself whole again. It's a laugh that comes from realizing how irreversibly he'd fucked up. It was bound to happen sooner or later, with all the roles he was trying to fill and people he was trying to please. The fact that it's Dabi is a kind of poetry that money can't buy.
Dabi is standing directly behind his head, now, looking down at him. Looking at what he's done.
"I think you've earned your ticket home, angel."
For a moment, Hawks wonders if that's his nice way of saying I think I'll kill you, now, because his boot presses down one last time, right on the side of his skull. His cheek smashes against the floor and his mouth falls open, and there's enough of an empty pause afterward that drool runs from the corner of his lips, and tears form in his eyes from the sheer pressure of it. From the weight of the world as it crashes, and burns, and takes him with it.
Hawks should fight. If there was ever a moment to fight, it's now, but for whatever reason Dabi isn't heating his sole, or putting enough weight on him to do any real, lasting damage. It's all about Hawks. What he can make him endure. He feels Dabi's eyes trained on him, every inch, watching his hips roll, watching Hawks take the brunt of his boot because it's the only choice left that doesn't jeopardize everything.
"Then let me leave," Hawks says, his voice warped and wet and muffled. He's back to begging like a child again. He doesn't care.
The pressure subsides, and the boot comes away.
Dabi takes a step backward while Hawks gathers himself, stretching his wings and ignoring the phantom pressure from all the places Dabi found to play with, fuck with. He hates that it won't go away. That it isn't enough that he has to live with this now, but he also has to carry an imprint of how it felt; Dabi's boot, Dabi's voice, Dabi's pet name that means he still trusts him—however much that's worth, in the end.
Hawks doesn't even turn around to face him again, just leaves out the same window he crawled through. It's a relief. It's air, and sky, and freedom, and he still relishes in all those things, so it turns out that he isn't changed yet. He isn't a stranger in his own bed like he's so scared of being.
He makes it the whole way under his nice, fleece sheets before it happens—and he's thinking about Dabi again.
It's his voice, and all the barbed wire around it, and the way Hawks answers to anything and everything that comes before or after.
Angel, angel, angel.
He manages to fall asleep eventually. Only after Hawks lets it all out, fucks himself into his fist and squeezes his dick raw even while he still aches from Dabi's boot—the heat of his quirk—and Hawks is sweating again remembering everything about it, how it felt to be crushed, and he cums just like that, while it all coils around him in waves.
Dabi's voice comes back, too.
You really are fucked up, angel.