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Dabi loved him like needing air.
And maybe that was the problem.
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Touya laughed brightly, arms spread wide imitating wings, as his father whooped with the joy of swinging his son around in the air. They shared matching grins, private joy in their moment of peace rare to the family of the Number Two Hero.
Enji only had eyes for the speck of happiness in his life that was his only son. He looked at Touya with emotion uncontainable by his heart, so he spoke his adoration and love into the air. He spun tales of strong, red-haired knights who protected their world as his wife watched with quiet amazement from the porch.
She always held a soft countenance these days, cradling her eight month pregnant stomach, and positively glowing with the pride of her husband taking care of their son. She could barely get out of bed and yet Enji cared for her twenty-four seven alongside being an inspiring figure for their three-year-old son.
Touya noticed his mother when Enji swung him this time and practically scrambled down the mammoth of a man, falling flat on his face for all of one second before getting up to barrel into his mother’s legs.
Rei carefully palmed Touya’s wild head of hair, and to Touya looking up at her radiating comfort and content with her white hair illuminated by the late-day sun and her soft-strong steel eyes, she was his angel.
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The heat seared the air two inches from Touya’s neck, bringing light and attention to the bubbly appearance of the boy’s skin along his shoulders, arms, and abdomen.
Enji stood firm, unwavering, across the tatami mat. His fire is alight along near-imperceptibly hunched shoulders, and an entirely different fire rages through his stark blue eyes to their mirror six feet away.
Touya meets the challenge with a defensive stance and raised fists, standing to his full seven-year-old height. The fire in his eyes is cold. It’s a stone that says I will never bend to the likes of you.
Breathing deeply, his father seems to wish it didn’t have to be this way. The wounds from Enji’s fire set patterns into Touya’s skin that whisper his father is acting this way to get what he wants from Touya.
They both know it has to be like this.
The boy dashes sideways, dodging the anticipated bullet of flame. Enji lazily sends more of its kind after his son, as if the efforts of the little boy are puny enough to not be worth his own sweat.
Touya sees this, and his own fire sputters under the surface. It says to consume, to fight, to live.
He rockets toward the towering man in the center of the training room, his legs edging blue as he’s aided by the ambition of his fire. Touya sees the opening, the surprise held by the man who never goes defensive.
Touya’s grin grows manic as he blasts with everything his barely developed Quirk allows, his sweat pouring and arm skin sagging as it melts under flaming duress. The smoke produced by his flames covers the boy’s eyeline of his opponent, but he believes he’s finally won.
Until, the wreckage of a smoldering table is pushed through the cloud and crashes beside Touya.
Endeavor walking through the remaining smoke dissipates it, and the fire in his eyes hungrily devours the mounting fear in the frail boy’s.
Touya stumbles back, landing on his rear and shaking as the exertion of the training catches up. The Hero pauses for a moment before kneeling down next to his son, towering over the other in a mockery of comfort and safety. Endeavor gently holds the boy’s head in an overly large hand, tsk-ing a couple times as he tilts his head to observe stray scratches from the day.
The last thing Touya sees, screams and innocence ripped from him unbidden by a scorching feeling through his jaw, is the flaring fire behind Endeavor like a halo snapped in half.
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Touya rages silently through the family home, thirteen-years-old and grim with knowledge. The lanky not-quite-boy shoves against the training rooms doors, not surprised when they stay closed. Inhaling slowly, he exhales as he holds a flaming palm to the aged wood.
He watches as the door quickly crumbles to ash and then steps through the now hole in the wall to see a flaming hell awaiting him.
There’s sobbing in the north side of the room.
A five-year-old with split red and white hair, crying and wheezing painfully from the burns ravaging from his shoulders down the rest of his body.
Endeavor never could stand to hurt a pretty face, could he?
Touya races through the room to his brother, grabbing the boy to cradle his head right before he passes out from the pain of his injuries. Setting Shouto’s limp form down behind a snapped instruction table for cover, the teenager turns to the south side of the room with a smoldering in his heart one spark from a roar.
Endeavor, he’s never Enji anymore he’s never the father that held his children with reverence and his wife with worship, stalks through the wreckage of the room. The air is glowing red-hot from the room’s heat like a mini-sunset. The man smiles with something close to reassurance, but it’s sharp in all the wrong places and soft in none of them.
Touya readies himself, standing tall and his temperature rising ambiently as he’s faced with a demon he doesn’t recognize.
The thing taking his father’s skin is apparently incensed by his lack of a fearful stance, flames lashing out from his calloused palms like the streaking stars the father and son used to lovingly wish on.
The teenager feels the void of love in his heart and grabs it, and strangles it until even the absence of love is gone. Touya’s eyes open again a second later -when had they closed?- with luminous tears tracking down his face for the scant few seconds they withstand the boy’s heat. The demon pauses its advance to observe this, amused by a show of emotion from someone that surely can’t afford such an action in the presence of his unending strength.
The steel Touya’s eyes open with slams Endeavor back a noticeable few inches. You wanted my strength, my beast, once upon a time. Didn’t you? Endeavor snarls at what Toya conveys in body language better than the fancy words he’s stumbled over his whole life.
Endeavor charges the remaining length of the training room towards Touya, who’s begun burning a temperature the man pushes through near manually. The man bodily throws the boy against the weakened walls of the dojo, the boy going through it like paper and landing outside of the house. Endeavor begins a scream, another rush towards the boy who was surely weakening from this beating.
Touya stares at the sky outside the family home, stars glimmering faintly back at him from where he remains limp on the autumn leaves.
The demon is a single step away when Touya feels.
Touya’s power blasts him upward from his back on the ground, to fifteen feet in the air, bluer flames than ever before encasing him from the inside out. They form sweeping lines from his back down his legs until the boy is using the force of gravity to form a blazing punch, and he himself is descending with blue wings of fire upon the plague standing dumbly below him.
The blow hits Endeavor’s temple, nearly screwing his head backwards on his neck.
A thud, the body of the Number Two Hero crunching against night darkened leaves.
A boy watching from inside the home with the awe only a child who thought his fate sealed can possess.
Another, older boy dropping to join the demon, like a puppet with cut strings.
Flames of blue don’t stop emitting from him as he writhes, unbearable agony as a body just not built for this can’t control his own unbelievable strength, found in the corners of his weakness.
Shouto drags himself to shaky feet and runs for his mother, deeper in the estate. When he returns with his siblings, Rei is already back in the dojo. Looking like less of a haunting ghost than she has in years, she is watching Endeavor desperately try to control blue from engulfing the very flammable home.
It’s hours later, and many police and firemen too, when Shouto is told that his avenging angel is dead.
The jaw fragment, indented with a shape too close to father’s fingers, is held like a trophy over the grieving boy.
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Ten years later, Shouto knows he’s not crazy to lean into the warmth of the forest fire.
How sad, Todoroki Shouto.
Indeed, Shouto thinks in the back of an ambulance, hours after Bakugou is taken and the students begin their uncertain path forward.
How sad that I must turn the tables and become your savior.
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Dabi stretches languidly against the rooftop electrical unit, uncaring of any danger and maybe privately wishing for it. The bird was late again.
He sighs.
That damn bird… The scarred man knows that his time with the League is drawing to a close, if only because if anyone is going to sus him out, it’ll be that drumstick.
The League has certainly served their purpose, gaining him the notoriety necessary to put him and his known hatred of the… eugh Number One onto front page news. Any time he comes forward for a fight now, the Heroes should know to do damage control by bringing Endeavor for him to fight instead of endangering civilians.
Besides, the routine was already getting a little old for him and he was never one to truly revel in the fear of others as the League seemed to.
Maybe… maybe Hawks will care enough to help him when Dabi inevitably drops out of the spotlight. When he drops out of the fighting completely. They’re dangerous thoughts, but Dabi has never been one to shy away from the resulting pain. The birdy wasn’t nearly as annoying as he would probably like to portray himself. If anything, the little song and dance they do entices Dabi further into Hawks’ light, wrapping him even further around the winged man’s little claw.
Dabi has always been a sucker for the freedom of wings, reminding him of the religious stories Rei and… Enji used to read him in wintertime.
Maybe an angel such as Hawks should mix about as well as oil and water with the demon Dabi is sure he himself represents.
However, as bright wings make their way across the city skyline is a winding and lazy and show-off loop for Dabi’s rooftop, the man thinks maybe he could become an angel for him.
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It all comes crashing down for the Shie Hassaikai of all goddamn things.
Dabi had already initiated his slow pull out from the League, and finishing whatever business Shigaraki struck up the Shie was supposed to be his final mission. The rest of the League was curious and slightly offended of course when he announced his plan to detach from them, Shigaraki seemed to twitch with the want to dust him on the spot for saying such a thing. However praise Mama Giri, because the smoke man easily explained everything Dabi wished he had the spine to say himself.
Dabi’s goals from the beginning were simple; he wanted notoriety to tear down Hero Society. Now that he had that, and an easy way to the Number One, he no longer needed to be affiliated with the League and all of the dangers that come with such a connection.
Shigaraki hummed, contemplating, before seeing what Kurogiri -Dabi- was saying.
And so, they agreed on Dabi tying up loose ends with the Yakuza as a final hoorah for the League plus Dabi before they all move onto bigger and greater things. It seemed it was becoming an excuse for the team to evolve, stronger than Heroes will have ever seen before.
But, that really all is null now.
Because Dabi, in tying up Shiggy’s loose ends, feels himself becoming more of a Hero than he ever wanted to be.
The Heroes had arrived at the Shie Hassaikai main base mere minutes before Dabi was due to leave. The rooms had shook with the force of the entering explosion used by them, and Overhaul’s grimy little henchmen told Dabi to either evac or to face the Heroes wrath.
Dabi pinned one against the wall, breathed a few choice words and maybe some flame before the shaking man broke down and spat out they were after one. Fucking. Little. Girl.
Many things are recontextualized for Dabi in a moment that an anime would’ve probably paired with a realigning of the stars, and the scarred, hardened man finds himself running to find a little girl who’s been fighting her own demon.
It’s four storeys underground that Dabi runs into the tail end of a nasty fight. A high school kid is splayed on the ground, obviously one of the kid Heroes deployed to rescue the little girl. The real surprise however, is seeing Overhaul looking slightly worse for wear, Chronostasis wobbling with one ankle looking mildly crunched, and Shin Nemoto knocked out further in the tunnel.
A little girl peeks around a turn in the corridor close to Overhaul, ratty hospital gown tousled and an abundance of bandages along her arms and visible legs.
Dabi… Touya remembers.
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Maybe years later, Aizawa Shouta is able to tell a bruised but not broken man about this fight. Perhaps Midoriya Izuku walks in halfway through and follows up on everything the tired man says with stars in his eyes and near-holy worship hanging in each breath.
But that day is not today, and Dabi wakes up with concrete cold on his cheek, Overhaul set to a quite beautiful crisp, and Izuku Midoriya finishing the greatly weakened man off. Scars gaping to let off veritable clouds of smoke, Dabi numbly turns his head to see Eraserhead poised over his prone body and staring single mindedly at the final threat of the Shie Hassaikai. Sir Nighteye is crouched close behind Dabi and Eraser, clutching a little girl close to him as they grimly watch the young man in front of them beat Overhaul into the bloody pulp he deserves to be.
It’s about this time that Overhaul, delightfully smelling of fried chicken -god Hawks would so love to be here right now- finally falls to his knees and passes out with the ensuing kick by Broccoli kid. Eraserhead takes a deep breath, assessing, before blinking slowly and moving his gaze down to the Villain beneath.
There’s a vast universe Dabi finds in the Hero’s shadowed eyes, and with the amount of stars he’s seeing Dabi’s pretty sure it’s from a probable concussion he has.
Regardless of that, Dabi finds a void in himself filling with the grit and determination and care lined in every muscle of Eraserhead’s face. The words come out hoarse, haltering, at a volume that Touya forgot he used to only have in a long lost home filled with tenderness and angels.
“Does… this mean you’re the good guys?”
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It’s been two weeks since the team rescued Eri.
Aizawa knew she would end up fine -she’s young and clearly resilient- and with the care that UA (and he) were sure to give her in the following years, she will become a strong and compassionate Hero. However… he can’t say the same for a current Top Hero.
Hawks, upon wiggling into the situation post Eri rescue, hasn’t left Dabi’s side for longer than two. Goddamn. Minutes.
Honestly, having the Number Two to watch the comatose Villain wasn’t anything to worry about and in fact brought a level of security no one else could. On the other hand…
Aizawa has to spend too much time with this human spit-up of the sun.
Eri loves the Hero. His bright wings are an especially huge focus of hers for some very complicated reasons. Said complications being the Villain who’s been in a medically induced coma while his body and about ten gajillion doctors try to fix at least the damage sustained in his fight against Overhaul. The situation is, at its core, a fucking mess. Because he’s a Villain. Who not only saved Eri but also Nighteye and he weakened Overheal enough that the man was almost already a human pot roast by the time their fragment of the team found the fight.
And, by Eri’s stumbling and shaking testament, Dabi was her bird rescuer covered and flying by blue fire.
“Please don’t be mad at him Mr. Aizawa!” Eri pleaded, red eyes huge with an adoration and awe that gave Aizawa the impression he should be mad but for another, secret third reason.
Hearing her description alongside testimony given by a scared shitless Chronostasis was enough to have Aizawa begrudgingly call the scarred man an angel of war.
Speaking of angels though… Aizawa grinned, only slightly deranged and mostly incredulous, as he watched the Number Two Hero greet Dabi’s surprise exit from the coma with a sobbing hug and passionate kiss.
“Yea alright, time to call Nezu,” Aizawa sighs, rubbing his temples and knowing quite fucking exactly what “outcome” the rat is probably already crafting.
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Dabi knew now, he could never go back.
Villain life, life on the streets, any of it and all of it needed to end.
He… was given pause by this.
What was there to do, without revenge against Endeavor?
How was he eventually supposed to sleep at night without Hawks there to defend him?
The demon was arrogant, yes, but it wasn’t stupid.
It must’ve known from the beginning who Dabi was.
And Touya…
Touya shakes from the force of his sobs against Hawks’ sturdy frame as he rushes all of this out in panicked breaths, connected dots he had laid with his angel for months and months prior to this.
Maybe his angel would lose his halo, as his demon once had, to avoid taking the rocky road by Touya’s side.
But maybe…
“Oh Touya,” Hawks sniffles wetly, eyes just as sunken and sleep deprived as the thin man, “Oh my love, I’m so sorry you think I wouldn’t stand by you through anything.”
Touya’s head shot up from where it had hung low through his latest confession, confused by his angel’s words. “I mean, baby, we could last a lifetime in another universe, but I doubt we could in this one. I’m… not what you deserve.”
A moment later, Hawks is pressing his forehead to Touya’s and his wings move to cup around the pair, creating a dimly lit and private space between just them and none of the security cameras.
“Touya, I don’t care what happens in another universe. You’ve brought the light back into my life figuratively and literally. I… I love you like I love feeling the cold dew of the clouds at five in the morning, I love you like preening the whole weekend away… I love you more than fried chicken,” Hawks laughed softly, his soft hair almost glowing in the low light, his eyes gentle with none of the fight he reserves for being on duty but all of the resolve.
“Hawks…”
“Keigo.”
Touya’s eyes widen slightly with his surprise -his fire dancing with his hope- and he’s always been good at taking these things in stride.
“Keigo,” he breathes it, like a prayer he hasn’t bothered to say in the ten years since he became his own demon.
Touya realizes suddenly he loves Keigo like he needs air.
And this time, safe, off the streets, with Heroes who are learning they’re willing to put their lives on the line for a bruised and scarred little angel, maybe…
Maybe it’s not a problem.