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“I think it’s cute,” Dabi smirks. “The whole double-agent thing.”
Hawks picks his head up from Dabi’s chest, his palm resting on the rough, charred skin of his stomach. “Yeah?”
Dabi laughs. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “It’s very fuck-the-system. Adorable, really.”
Hawks scoffs, rests his cheek back on Dabi’s skin.
He isn’t much of a cuddler, okay—that’s not what this is about. He’s just fucking tired, and he’s bored, and waiting to get it up again, and Dabi runs hot, like you could watch steam hiss off him, like his skin is always simmering at the edge of flame, and he says he doesn’t mind the cold winter air, really, it doesn’t bother him, so Dabi lounges naked and Hawks is curled around him, wings blanketing his body to seal in both their body heat.
It is not cuddling.
“Well,” Hawks says, trailing his fingers along a line of staples down Dabi’s midsection, “the system is fucked, so, fuck the system.”
He flashes a grin at Dabi, who laughs at him the way you humor a child. He runs his fingers through Hawks’s feathers, even, a little rough with nails dragging down, and it sends an involuntary shudder through Hawks’s body that he knows Dabi likes to feel against his skin.
Sometimes he wonders if Dabi believes a single word he says. Most days, he wonders whether that matters at all.
Dabi’s fingers move to where the wings slide seamlessly into the skin of his back. It almost tickles, sends shudders through his ribs and shoulders. He usually hates being touched there, but the way Dabi does it, the warmth of his fingers—it’s nice, alright? It’s nice.
“My father was a Hero, you know,” Dabi muses, his fingers starting to press more insistently, more fervently. Hawks lets himself be moved, lets Dabi roll him over onto his stomach and lean over him, raking his fingers through too-sensitive feathers, roaming his mouth over Hawks’s shoulders. The catch-snag of stitching and staples across his skin pulls little noises out of the back of Hawks’s throat.
“I didn’t know,” Hawks says. It’s honest; the Commission’s briefing on Dabi was bare bones at best. He appeared from nowhere four years ago with half a face and an obvious alias. No database recognition, no registered quirk matches. Whatever his real name is, it’s ash now.
“Mm,” Dabi says. He leans over Hawks’s body, the warmth from his skin radiating. He presses kisses into Hawks’s spine as he speaks, down through the crest of his wings. “He would go out,” kiss, “and save all the little people,” kiss, “from all their little problems,” kiss, “and then come home and beat his wife and fuck his kids.” He stops, pulls away. “Or sometimes the other way around.”
Hawks twists to face him, eyebrows pulled together. “Are you serious?”
Dabi’s face is placid as it ever is. “What would I gain from lying?”
It’s true, at least. Dabi seems to be many things, but rarely a liar.
“Sorry,” Hawks says, stilting. “That’s fucked.”
Dabi shrugs. He leans over Hawks again, this time facing him, straddles his thigh and grinds lazily down. Hawks can still feel the slick of his own come on the inside of Dabi’s thighs; he doesn’t think he’s got another round in him, but whatever. Let Dabi do what he likes.
“I’m sure the Commission knew,” Dabi muses. “They’d have to be stupid not to. But it wasn’t convenient for them to intervene.”
Hawks laughs, this ragged thing. “No,” he says, and behind his eyes he can see a little bandage-wrapped girl with a glowing horn, a rescue party sent in not for her but for her blood. “No, it wouldn’t have been.”
“How old were you?” Dabi asks. “The first time.”
Hawks blinks. “What?”
Dabi stops moving for a moment; he grins, tilts his head. “Come on,” he says. “You’re fucking a guy with half his skin held on by scotch tape and letting me get off on you while talking about how my daddy used to touch me. You’ve got some issues. Your turn.”
He rolls his hips like he’s making a point.
Hawks stares at him. The thing about this job—this life, this person that he is—is that so much of it is lies. Lies on top of lies on top of bigger lies, all the way down to the foundation, until it is nothing but sand underneath his feet.
Sometimes, though. Sometimes he tells the truth, just to see what happens.
“I don’t remember the first time,” he says. “Young. Dad had gambling debts. Last time was right before I turned eighteen.”
Dabi smirks. “Get too old for them?”
Hawks shakes his head. “Nah,” he says. “Too busy. Not enough downtime for Commission lackeys to take the star pupil away for private lessons.”
He feels like his hands are shaking, suddenly. It’s not like any of this feels like a secret—everyone knew what was going on, he’d sat through more than one meeting where someone was given a slap on the wrist and a warning not to do it again quite so publicly. But he guesses he’s never really talked about it, all the people who have found it too easy to find entertainment in a kid with nowhere to go and a lifetime of keeping his mouth shut and putting on a show.
“It’s a real honorable society they’ve built,” Dabi scoffs, and Hawks leans back and lets him do the rest of the work.
When Dabi comes, he fists his hands in Hawks’s hair, pulls at the golden-blonde strands until Hawks’s eyes water. Then he slumps over, patchwork skin pressed up against Hawks’s body.
It’s nothing, he tells himself. The way he feels calmer underneath Dabi, the way his fingers trace the edges of his skin like instinct now. Tomorrow, he’ll clean himself up, fly back to his agency and bother the hell out of Endeavor some more. Tomorrow, he won’t care about Dabi at all.
Lies on lies on lies.
For now, he closes his eyes under the radiating warmth, and he sleeps.