Archive of Our Own

Chapter 0: What's going on here anyway?

Their relationship did not begin with tenderness and not with a plan. Keigo conducted intelligence in the criminal underground on behalf of the Commission. Dabi was calculating potential allies for future League recruitment. They ran into each other in a dirty alley after the raid.: Hawks is the perfect hero, honed to the last pen, and Dabi is a villain whose body is bursting at the seams, but whose mind is cold and sharp as a scalpel.

There was no fight. A conversation happened. About the methods. About the systems. It's about how nice it is to meet someone who doesn't try to feel sorry for you or save you, but just sees you as a whole-darkness, calculation, weaknesses—and doesn't recoil.

A year later, they are still together. Neither the League nor the HPSC knows. Their meetings are chaotic and rare. Touya sometimes disappears for weeks. Keigo sometimes comes with someone else's blood and stays silent for hours. They didn't take vows, they didn't make plans for "after." But when it gets really unbearable, each of them knows which roof in Mustafu you can land on and find a familiar silhouette in a dark raincoat there.

Keigo, ingratiating himself into the trust, shared his chains, how the Commission cuts off and clips his wings (not literally, Thank God, but what the hell is not joking with these bureaucrats), that he never knew what freedom was. Dabi revealed that he is the deceased son of Hero Number One, Endeavor. Not to get pity or out of the goodness of my heart. I just wanted to shock and see what this brave hero would do with such information. And at the same time, he was planning to kill Takami anyway. He didn't tell anyone. At least in words.

They never really trusted each other. Yes, they shared information about themselves, sometimes in moments of frankness even the truth sounded, but never completely. None of them would ever expose vulnerable parts in front of the other. No open backs and clean hands. Even lying in the same bed, they could kill each other if the situation required it.

Therefore, such a meeting was a little off the plan. A terrorist attack on an old chemical plant. This is not Touya's plan — it's the radicals with whom the League is temporarily cooperating for resources that are getting out of control before preparing for the first war with the heroes. More precisely, they expect that this blow will be enough, especially from Tomura in the flask. Touya is at the facility to pick up dirt on stray allies. Keigo — because the Commission ordered the removal of one of the leaders of the group before he speaks. The explosion occurs when they already find each other in the hallway. The factory is collapsing. They are trapped in a concrete "pocket" under the rubble: the space is two by three meters, there is little air, there is no connection, it is impossible for both of them to get out.

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

Chapter 1: Inventory.

Silence isn’t just one thing.

There’s the silence of an empty sky at three in the morning, when Keigo hovers above a sleeping city and hears nothing but wind in his feathers and can finally relax for one goddamn second—except then something happens and he has to drop to the ground and save the day. There’s the silence of the training room, where the only sound is his own heartbeat counting down the last seconds before the command: “Begin.” There’s the silence of the interrogation room, when the suspect has already said everything and you still haven’t decided whether to believe him or not.

But the silence under the rubble—that’s a whole different beast.

It’s not empty. It’s dense, thick, like cotton wool saturated with dust and ash. It doesn’t press on your eardrums with sound—it presses with its complete absence. Every second you’re waiting for anything: the screech of settling debris, the distant wail of sirens, a rescuer’s shout. But instead you get only the muffled, visceral groan of concrete slowly, inexorably compressing under its own weight. A silence that whispers, “You’re going to die here, and no one will ever know exactly when it happened.”

Keigo had hated this silence from the moment he came to.

The first thing he registered—even before opening his eyes—was the smell. Acrid, chemical, laced with burnt plastic and something faintly sweet that scratched at his throat. Some kind of industrial solvent had clearly spilled nearby, and Keigo mentally prayed it wasn’t flammable. He wasn’t exactly eager to burn for the second time that evening.

The second sensation was pain.

It spread from his left shoulder—dull, throbbing, with sharp lightning bolts every time he tried to move. Dislocated, he diagnosed almost mechanically. Possibly a cracked collarbone. His left fingers moved sluggishly, but they moved—already a win. He’d known heroes who came out of collapses like this without limbs. Pure luck that the slab hadn’t sheared his shoulder clean off, instead just crushing it into the narrow space between rebar and concrete rubble.

The third sensation—and the absolute shittiest—was his right wing.

Keigo tried to flex his feathers and immediately hissed through his teeth as a pain so sharp it whited out his vision for a second ripped through his nerves. Out of the fifty-plus feathers that formed the core of his right wing, barely a dozen answered. The rest were either crushed under the wreckage somewhere above him or ripped out by the roots—he could feel that in the wet, sticky warmth soaking through the back of his jacket.

Blood. A lot of it.

Feathers aren’t just body parts. Every single one of them is an exposed nerve, an extension of his sensory system. The Commission had drilled that truth into him over years of training: a feather is not a weapon; a feather is you. When they got torn out, he felt everything. Always. He’d just learned not to show it.

Now, in the dark, no cameras, no handlers, he let himself squeeze his eyes shut for a couple of seconds and just ride the pain—not suppressing it, not shoving it into some distant mental lockbox. Just feel it. Accept it. And then let it go, because pain wasn’t going to get him out of here. Pain was just information. Information received, processed, logged: right wing non-functional. Aerial extraction impossible.

Moving on.

Keigo opened his eyes.

The space around him was… small.

So fucking small it made him nauseous.

The ceiling—if you could call it that—hung barely an arm’s length above his head. Uneven, cracked concrete with rusty rebar spikes jutting out like the broken ribs of some giant prehistoric beast. In places, tangles of wire dangled from the concrete; in others, the insulation had melted and set in ugly drips. Water—or something vaguely oily and smelling of iron—dripped from a few spots, collecting in small puddles on the floor.

The walls—or what passed for them—were a chaotic jumble of wreckage: chunks of flooring, shattered brick, a metal staircase accordioned into a mess, someone’s office desk crushed to splinters. All of it compressed into a dense, impenetrable mass. Keigo assessed instantly: no way in hell he could shift this bare-handed, even if both his shoulders were working.

The floor beneath him was slanted—a concrete slab cracked diagonally, sloping down at roughly a twenty-degree angle. That crack must have formed the “pocket” they were in: a space about two meters long, three wide, and a meter and a half high. You could sit, not stand. Lie down, but only if you pulled your knees up. And not both of them at the same time.

Because he wasn’t here alone.

He didn’t notice Touya right away. Touya was lying in the far corner, where the floor’s slant was steepest and the shadows thickened to absolute black. At first Keigo thought it was just a pile of rags. Then the rags moved and produced a choked wheeze.

Alive.

Keigo didn’t call out. Instead he carefully, economically—any sudden shift could disturb the debris—rolled onto his good side and studied what he could see.

Touya looked bad. Even by Touya standards, and Touya never looked good.

His black coat—the one with the high collar and ragged hems he wore in any weather—had become a grimy, blood-soaked rag. The right half of his face, usually hidden by dyed-black strands of hair, was exposed now, and the sight was not for the faint of heart. Chemical burn. Not from his own flames—from a burst pipe somewhere in the corridor, right before the collapse. Keigo remembered that moment: the flash, the acrid smoke, and Touya instinctively covering his face with his sleeve, but not fast enough.

Now the skin on his right cheek had blistered up in ugly welts, and the edges of his old seams—the ones stretching from the corners of his lips to his ears and from his jaw to his cheekbones—were red and inflamed. In some places the seams had even split, and in the dim light seeping through a crack in the debris, you could see the damp, pink flesh beneath.

It pissed him off. Every time Keigo saw those seams, a shudder ran through him—not disgust, but a cold, hollow realization: this person is living in a body that is literally falling apart. And he keeps getting up. And he keeps moving forward. And he keeps smiling that creepy, crooked smile into the faces of people who have no clue what it costs him.

Now there was no smile. Touya’s face was relaxed—as relaxed as a face half-made of burn scars could be—and that made it look almost defenseless. Almost young. Almost like that boy in the photos from the Todoroki family archive, the ones Keigo had seen in the Commission’s dossier. White hair, huge blue eyes full of hope.

Before everything went wrong. Before his father pulled away. Before fire became not salvation but a curse.

Keigo shoved the thoughts aside. Wrong time. Wrong place.

He dropped his gaze lower—and spotted the second wound.

Rebar.

A thin, rusted rod as thick as a finger had impaled Touya’s thigh just above the knee. Straight through. The tip of the rod, coated in dried blood, jutted out of his pants leg, and the fabric around the wound had darkened and stiffened. It was nuts that Touya was even conscious—blood loss should have knocked him out an hour ago.

Then again… why was he surprised? This man had burned alive—literally—and come back. A piece of rebar in his thigh was probably like a splinter to him.

Keigo shifted his gaze back to Touya’s face. And met a pair of blue eyes.

“How much longer you gonna stare, birdie?”

The voice was hoarse, cracked, but carried that familiar lazy mockery that drove heroes, villains, and—Keigo suspected—every living creature within a one-kilometer radius absolutely insane. Touya blinked slowly, like a cat, and twisted his lips into something resembling a smirk.

“I was starting to think you’d croaked,” he added. “Just lying there, eyes open, not saying shit. Creepy as hell. You could’ve at least done the dead-fly twitch for realism.”

“Get up and show me how it’s done,” Keigo replied flatly.

Touya snorted. He tried to push up onto one elbow and immediately hissed as the movement jolted through his impaled thigh.

“Fuck,” he summarized succinctly, flopping back down. “Okay. Dead fly’s cancelled.”

Keigo said nothing. He just kept watching—assessing, calculating, running the options. Habit. Even now, both of them buried in a concrete tomb, his brain kept working like a hero’s: input data, analysis, possible scenarios.

Input data: two adult males, both injured, one can’t walk, the other can’t fly. Extremely confined space. Unknown air supply, but judging by how heavy it was already getting to breathe—maybe four hours of oxygen, five max. No way out. No comms. Not enough viable feathers to punch through the collapse. Touya’s fire couldn’t be used—it’d burn up the last of the oxygen and they’d suffocate before the debris even caught.

Possible scenarios: one. And it sucked.

“Wait.”

Touya, as if reading his mind, broke the silence.

“So what’s that hero brain of yours saying? We gonna make it out?”

“No.”

“Honest.”

“What’s the point of lying?” Keigo carefully, conserving motion, rolled onto his back and stared up at the concrete ceiling. “You’re not some hysterical civilian I need to soothe. You get it yourself. Air—maybe four hours. Debris overhead—about five or six meters. Nothing to shift it with. Your fire burns the air, my feathers won’t punch through a slab that thick. Only thing we can do is wait for rescue to dig us out.”

“If they dig us out.”

“If they dig us out,” Keigo agreed.

“And if the heroes show up first? What’re you gonna tell ’em? ‘Hey, colleagues, this isn’t what it looks like, I’m just lying here cuddling an S-class villain strictly out of professional necessity’?”

Keigo turned his head slightly and looked Touya dead in the eye.

“And if the League shows up first? What are you gonna tell them? ‘Hawks tripped and fell, total accident, I was totally about to finish him off but this pesky rebar in my thigh got in the way’?”

They stared at each other for a long few seconds. Then Touya let out a short, barking laugh—and immediately choked on it because the air was thick and acrid with dust.

“You know,” he rasped after the coughing fit passed, “this might be the most honest relationship I’ve ever had. We could fucking die together and no one would ever know what we were to each other. That’s beautiful.”

“Glad you appreciate the irony.”

“I always appreciate irony. It’s the only thing still keeping me going.”

Touya fell silent. Keigo did too.

The silence closed back in around them—dense, crushing, like the concrete slab overhead. Something screeched somewhere outside—settling debris, maybe rescue machinery. But the sound was distant, muffled, almost imperceptible.

And then Touya spoke again. And his voice had changed—softer, deeper, more serious.

“Keigo.”

“What?”

“Are you scared?”

Keigo didn’t answer right away. Because—yeah. He was. Not of death itself. Death had been too frequent a guest in his life to be scared of it in the abstract. He was scared of something else. That his death would be meaningless. That he’d suffocate here, under a pile of concrete, and no one would ever know why he’d come to this factory, what he’d been doing, why he’d even bothered to live. The Commission would write him off as a “tragic loss,” release a press statement, put up a photo in a black frame. That’s it. End of Hawks. Beginning of oblivion.

But he didn’t say that out loud.

“No,” he lied. “I’m not scared. I just… don’t want it to be for nothing.”

Touya made a low noise in his throat.

“‘For nothing,’” he repeated, tasting the words. “You know, birdie, I figured out a long time ago: it’s all for nothing. Our whole life is just a series of random bullshit that has no meaning until you make one up yourself. Revenge, heroism, saving people… we just pick a fairytale and live inside it. And at the end—concrete slab and darkness. No grand finale.”

“That’s dark.”

“That’s realistic.”

Keigo was quiet for a moment. Then he asked:

“What about your fairytale? Revenge on your father? Is that what keeps you going?”

In the half-darkness he saw Touya smile. It was that smile—ghastly, stretched by the seams, full of cold and fire at the same time.

“It’s the only thing I have,” he said. “The only reason I’m still breathing. And if this fucking slab kills me before I kill him,” he shifted his gaze to Keigo, and something deeply dangerous flared in his eyes, “I’m not gonna forgive it.”

“You’ll be dead. Dead people don’t hold grudges.”

“I’ll be dead, and I still won’t forgive it.”

That was Touya in a nutshell. And Keigo, looking at him—burned, impaled, with inflamed seams and hair crusted with blood—suddenly felt a strange, almost out-of-place emotion. Not pity. Not tenderness. Something halfway between respect and bitterness.

Because he understood.

He was living for something bigger than himself, too. The Commission, duty, the image of the perfect hero—that was all his own fairytale, one he’d believed in once. And now, lying under the rubble, he asked himself for the first time: what if the fairytale ends here? Right now? Would that mean he’d lived his life for nothing?

He didn’t have an answer.

“Hey,” Touya’s voice yanked him out of his thoughts. “Don’t fall asleep on me. You concussed or something?”

“No. Just thinking.”

“So think out loud. Not like we’ve got anything better to do.”

Keigo sighed. The ceiling still pressed down, the walls still closed in, the air still grew thicker and heavier. But for the first time in this hour—or however long they’d been here—he felt slightly, fractionally lighter.

Not because the situation had changed. But because he wasn’t here alone.

“Fine,” he said. “Let’s…”

And then his “brilliant” suggestion hit.

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

Chapter 2: Rules.

“Fine,” Keigo said, and in the cramped concrete coffin, his voice came out surprisingly matter-of-fact. “Let’s play a game.”

Touya cut his eyes sideways. It took a moment—the burned side of his face jolted pain through every muscle twitch, and he squinted, riding it out.

“A game?” he repeated. “Are you serious right now? We’re in a concrete shithole, you can’t even jerk yourself off with one hand, I’ve got a hole in my thigh big enough to fit a dick through—not yours, obviously, yours’d fit but who the hell needs that kind of heroic feat—there’s no signal, the air’s toxic, and you’re suggesting cards? Newsflash, Hawks: no cards. And my left hand’s gone numb, so even if you suddenly decided now’s the perfect time for a blowjob, I wouldn’t feel a thing. Tragic, right?”

He almost never got that crude—at least, not at the start of their… whatever. Before sixteen he hadn’t cursed at all, except maybe a “dammit” in frustration when another training session ended in burns. Then came the coma, three years offline, and his entire social development froze somewhere between “teenager who peeked at the maids” and “walking disaster with a thirteen-year-old’s hormonal wiring.” Now the dirty jokes and swearing weren’t just a mask—it was the only real-life shit he’d managed to grab before life itself ended. He still didn’t always know where the line was. Sometimes he didn’t give a damn.

Keigo let out a dry, short huff—almost a laugh.

“First of all, my dick doesn’t need your expert critique. You’ve seen it. You’ve… ahem… met it personally. The reviews were positive, as I recall.”

“The reviews were ‘fuck-fuck-fuck-Keigo-shut-the-fuck-up.’ That’s not positive. That’s a cry for mercy.”

“A cry for mercy is still a review.” Keigo shifted his head as much as his injured shoulder allowed. “And second of all, I’m not suggesting cards. I’m suggesting a conversation.”

Touya groaned theatrically—so over-the-top you’d think his leg wasn’t bleeding out, it was just a boring Tuesday.

“Holy shit. Incredible. You know, when I said ‘let’s do something before we die,’ I really did not mean talking. I actually have a list. Wanna know what’s on it?”

“Judging by how you look right now—item one: bleed out. Item two: bitch about it.”

“Item three: fuck a hero. Oh wait, already did that. Cross that one off.”

“Technically,” Keigo raised a finger on his good hand, “I fucked you. You just lay there and cursed. Pretty standard for you, honestly. Nothing new.”

“Because you, motherfucker, were on top. I was on the bottom. That changes everything.”

“Oh, really?” Keigo arched an eyebrow, and in the dim light his golden eyes glinted with dangerous amusement. “So let’s unpack your logic. If you’re on the bottom—it doesn’t count? Meaning every time you…”

“SHUT UP.” Touya said it louder than he meant to, and the concrete above them gave an ominous groan. Both of them froze.

The groaning stopped.

“…great,” Touya exhaled. “We almost died because you wanted to litigate who topped who. You happy?”

“I was on top seventy percent of the time. That’s just statistics.”

“You did NOT count.”

“Of course I counted. I have an analytical mind. I’m literally a spy.” Keigo was openly smirking now. “But if you want a rematch… Touya, right now neither of us can even unzip our pants one-handed. Let’s save this talk for the second date after we’re rescued.”

“This was our thirty-fourth date, asshole.”

“You counted?”

Touya’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

“…you are insufferable.”

“I know. That’s why you like me.” Keigo settled back a little, trying to get more comfortable on the rubble. Didn’t really work—something sharp kept digging into his back. “Because nobody else can stand your personality longer than fifteen minutes. I suspect even your League only tolerates you for the firepower.”

“Ooh, rich word choice. ‘Firepower.’ Why don’t you just say, ‘your fire is so hot, baby.’”

“Your fire is so hot, baby,” Keigo repeated with zero irony. “I’m serious. I still have scars on my ass from our third time. Do you even control that thing or what?”

“I control it!” Touya protested. “It’s just when you do that thing with your…”

“Tongue?”

“I SAID SHUT UP!”

They were quiet again. Somewhere, water dripped. Or not water. In the basement of a destroyed chemical factory, it was hard to tell.

Then Touya let out a quiet laugh.

“Thirty-four,” he muttered. “And you say I’m a teenager.”

“You are a teenager. You hit puberty in a coma. You’re morally stuck at ‘love boobs and explosions,’ except you swapped boobs for arson and dramatic monologues.”

“Oh, and look who’s talking—top graduate of Perfect Manners Academy?” Touya cut his eyes at him again. “Have you ever even jerked off in your life, or did the Commission ban that too? They got a regulation? Paragraph seventeen subsection four: ‘Class A-plus heroes are forbidden to touch their own genitals without written authorization’?”

Keigo blinked. For a single second, something flickered across his face—a shadow, a micro-expression—before he tucked it back behind polite irony.

“Paragraph nineteen, actually. And yes, I do have written authorization. Wanna read it? It’s in my inside pocket. Signed and stamped.”

Touya stared at him.

“Are you joking right now?”

“What do you think?”

“Fuck, I can NEVER tell when you’re joking.” Touya thunked the back of his head against the concrete, instantly regretted it, and hissed. “That is your single most infuriating quality.”

“I thought my single most infuriating quality was being right all the time.”

“That too. You’re like a splinter in my ass, just morally. And literally, judging by your scars.”

Keigo laughed quietly—a real laugh this time, warm and low, the kind he never let himself do in public. In public he laughed differently: bright, open, with a perfect Hollywood smile. Down here, under the concrete, the laugh was rough. Alive.

“Alright,” he said, still chuckling. “Back to business. Before you talk us to death. Which you can. It’s a gift.”

“Un-fucking-believable. I just got accused of talking too much by a man whose TV interviews last longer than my rehab sessions. You know how long it took Garaki to put me back together? Three years. Your last interview on HeroTV ran two and a half hours. TWO AND A HALF. I watched the start, went on a mission, killed one asshole, came back—and you were STILL talking about how you saved a kitten.”

“It wasn’t a kitten. It was a dog.”

“OH MY GOD, A DOG. My apologies for underestimating the heroic deed. A dog was saved. The nation rejoices. Now tell me, Hawks,” Touya dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “did you give the dog your autograph too, or just blow it?”

“The dog got just the autograph. I blew you. And judging by how you were moaning, you enjoyed it more than the dog enjoyed the autograph.”

Touya choked. It was a complicated sound—laughter, indignation, and pain all at once.

“I did NOT moan.”

“You moaned. Like a fire siren. I was scared the neighbors would call emergency services.”

“WE DIDN’T HAVE NEIGHBORS. We were on a rooftop!”

“Then all of Musutafu heard. Sorry I didn’t warn you. Next time I’ll bring a gag. Or a sock. I’ve got a clean one, I think.”

“You keep a clean sock specifically to gag me with? That’s so romantic, Keigo. Total ‘Beauty and the Beast’ vibes. Except instead of a rose it’s a sock. And instead of a castle it’s a piss-stained abandoned warehouse roof.”

“It wasn’t piss-stained. I checked.”

“…you checked the roof for urine before we…”

“I’m a perfectionist. You know this.” Keigo said it so seriously that Touya started coughing again, almost choking on the laughter that couldn’t fully break free through all the smoke and dust.

“Fuck. Fuck.” Touya eventually stopped laughing, wiping at his eyes with his good hand—the few tears that could still leak out of burned tear ducts. “I hate you. You know that?”

“I know.”

“And you’re still lying here cracking jokes with me.”

“Yup.”

“Why?”

Keigo was quiet for a moment. Then he turned his head—slowly, carefully, because his neck hurt too.

“Because you’re the only person I can joke about blowjobs with and not worry about it landing on the front page of Hero Daily tomorrow,” he said simply. “You never try to be good. You just… are. Exactly what you are. And that, Touya, to someone who’s spent his whole life playing a role—is a breath of fresh air.”

For a second, silence hung there. Not awkward—different. The kind that happens when someone tells the truth and that truth weighs more than the concrete above them.

Touya looked away.

“Holy shit,” he said quietly. “We almost talked about feelings. Little bit more and you’d have confessed your love. Then we’d have held hands and died. Gross. Let’s go back to the game.”

“Let’s,” Keigo agreed, and something in his voice wavered—maybe gratitude, maybe disappointment, maybe both. “The game is called…”

“If you say ‘Seven Minutes in Heaven’ I’m gonna hit you.”

“Not ‘Seven Minutes in Heaven.’ Although…”

“No.”

“We are literally in an enclosed space, Touya.”

“NO.”

“No one’s finding us for hours…”

“YOU HAVE A DISLOCATED SHOULDER. I HAVE A HOLE IN MY THIGH. WHAT PART OF THAT SCREAMS ‘SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN’?!”

“…the next few hours. Stale air, nothing to do. Technically it’s ideal conditions.”

“I’m gonna burn you right now.”

“No you won’t. The slab will collapse and we’ll die. And you haven’t told your ending yet.”

“I’ll tell it AFTER yours.”

“Nope,” Keigo shook his head as much as he could. “You lost the last round. ‘For a fucking character arc’—that was weak. I was expecting a more inventive insult. So you go first.”

“That WASN’T an insult. It was a statement of fact. And since when are you keeping score? We never agreed on a score.”

“I always keep score. It’s my job.”

“You’re keeping score of our bickering?” Touya squinted. “That is the single most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard. And I’m in the League of Villains. Do you know Shigaraki once lost at Mario Kart and disintegrated his controller down to atoms? I work with that guy. And you’re still more pathetic.”

“Score is five-three, my favor,” Keigo reported serenely. “And yes, I count. I have no hobbies besides you. Sad, isn’t it?”

“Not sad. Creepy.” Touya fixed him with a long stare. “You really are… fucking hell. You really are a stalker.”

“I’m a spy. It’s literally my job.”

“A spy who counts how many times he’s slept with his target. What’s that called in Commission reports? Box marked ‘intimate contact with subject’? You tick it off every time?”

“Actually,” Keigo raised a finger, “they have a special form. Yellow. With three columns: ‘Date,’ ‘Duration,’ ‘Notes.’ In the notes I usually write ‘subject swore again’ and ‘subject was on top but I still won.’”

“You do NOT write that in the reports.”

“Wanna check?”

Touya opened his mouth. Closed it. Then laughed, exhausted—without the earlier spark, just because arguing was pointless.

“You know,” he said, “when I woke up from the coma, I thought the weirdest thing in my life was being stitched back together piece by piece by a mad doctor. Then I met you. And you somehow managed to top even that.”

“Glad to impress.”

“That wasn’t a compliment.”

“To me it was.” Keigo allowed himself a small smirk that, in public, would’ve been blindingly photogenic, but here in the dust and blood was just human.

“Fine,” Touya said after a pause, and his voice carried something halfway between surrender and mockery. “But if I’m gonna die down here listening to your heroic fantasies about a noble death, at least give me a reason to stay awake. What’s this brilliant suggestion of yours?”

“Brilliant is a strong word.” Keigo shifted somewhat, settling more firmly against the chunk of concrete propping him up. What was left of his right wing dragged across the floor, a dull, ceaseless ache pulsing through it. “More like… practical.”

“Practical.” Touya snorted. “You’re proposing we talk about death and calling it practical. Hawks, did you hit your head on the way down?”

“Checked. Doesn’t seem like it. Hair’s still flawless, as always.”

“Shame. A concussion might’ve done you good. Maybe made you less pretentious.”

“And you’d maybe be less of a sarcastic ass if you had a concussion?”

“Nah,” Touya stretched his lips into a mockery of a grin, and the seams on his right cheek pulled tight with a dull throb. “Was born this way. Ask my old man.”

Keigo snorted. The sound was weak but genuine.

He closed his eyes—not from exhaustion, but to focus. His thoughts still tangled, but the broad picture was taking shape. They were trapped here. Low on air. They might not be found—or the wrong people might find them. And if these were their last hours, then maybe he wanted… no, not love confessions, not tears, not goodbyes. He wanted honesty. The tiny shred of honesty they’d never allowed themselves on the surface.

“Listen,” he said at last, opening his eyes. “We both know how this all ends. Not here,” he gestured vaguely at the concrete box, “but in general. Your story is revenge. Mine is a contract with no retirement clause. We’re not the kind of people who get a ‘happily ever after.’ So why not tell each other the ending? Just to…”

He paused, hunting for the word.

“Just to what?” Touya was watching him closely. Too closely for someone supposedly disinterested.

“Just to know,” Keigo said. “I’m tired of masks. You’re tired of masks. We both wear them all day. Me—literally,” he tapped his visor, “you—figuratively. And right now, when we might not exist in three hours, I wanna say something, just once, that doesn’t have a Commission order behind it. And you—something that doesn’t have a revenge plot behind it.”

Touya stayed silent. Dripping water: drip, drip, drip. Creaking overhead.

“You sound like a character from a cheesy drama,” he said at last.

“And you act like a character from a cheesy drama. So we’re even.”

“Touché.”

Touya let his head fall back against the cold concrete. The burn on his cheek throbbed unpleasantly. His right leg had gone numb—he didn’t know if that was good or bad. Maybe a vessel was pinched. Maybe something serious was starting. Either way, there was nothing he could do about it.

He thought.

In some ways, Hawks was right—and that pissed him off the most. They really did wear masks. Every day. Every minute. Even now, lying under rubble, Touya caught himself automatically filtering his words, controlling his expression, maintaining distance. A habit worn into the bone. A habit that had kept him alive for the last ten years.

But Hawks was offering to take it off.

And that was terrifying. More terrifying than dying.

He rapped his knuckles against the concrete beside him.

“Deal. Or concrete. Whatever works.”

Keigo rapped back. Two dry thumps.

“Then talk,” Touya said. “Because you’re first.”

“The hell I am!”

“Because I lost the last round. ‘For a fucking character arc’—four out of ten. You were waiting for something about how you fuck by a Commission manual. I had so much material, and I wasted it… I’m gonna remember that.” Touya narrowed his eyes. “And when you tell your ending, I’ll be judging. Harshly. Like an exam.”

“You’ve never taken an exam.”

“Exactly. No standards. I can fail you just for breathing. So, Hawks, ready for the most biased judging of your life?”

“More than.” Keigo settled in—or as close to ‘settled’ as you could get with a dislocated shoulder. “Starting now. Try not to drag it out. We’ve got oxygen for,” he sniffed the air, “maybe four hours. Less if you keep running your mouth.”

“I’m running my mouth?! I was basically mute the first six months of our… whatever the fuck this was! You got me talking! This is your fault!”

“My fault you have a vocabulary now? You’re welcome. No need to thank me.”

“I hate you.”

“You’ve said that already.” Keigo turned his head and looked at him—not challenging, not ironic, but somehow different. Softer. “But you’re still here. So sit there and shut your trap—or talk to your Endeavor body pillow. Or whatever souvenirs daddy’s favorite boy keeps so he can sniff his old costume scraps, cry, and jerk off in the dark, since daddy will never look at you, you poor incest-dreaming victim lusting after a hundred-kilo fiery muscle-man?”

Keigo’s smirk was short and dry. He had a strange smirk: the corners of his lips twitched, but his eyes stayed serious, calculating. Like even in conversation he was plotting a trajectory, applying psychological pressure with surgical precision. Then he gave a theatrical sigh and squeezed out a single fake tear.

“Not that I wouldn’t want the same… Ah, if I had the choice between the two Todorokis, I’d pick your old man. Now that’s a man—chest, thighs, the whole package,” he paused, making a vague gesture. “You know… A man in his absolute prime. How old is he? Forty-six? He’s the textbook definition of a DILF. And can you really sit there, looking at me with those honest turquoise eyes just like his, and swear he doesn’t pin his partner against the wall and isn’t just as intense as he is on patrol? Pfft. And you say you know everything about him.”

Touya froze.

Not stiffened—froze, the way fire freezes a split second before it explodes. The muscles along his jaw—where the seams hadn’t fully fused with living skin—twitched. His eyes narrowed to slits. In the concrete coffin, the temperature seemed to tick up a few degrees—or maybe it just felt that way, or maybe it didn’t, or maybe his body temp really did spike for a second, the way it always did right before a flash.

Keigo was watching him with that fucking smirk—lazy, almost bored, like he wasn’t lying under rubble with a dislocated shoulder but casually sitting in a bar discussing the weather. And that tear—fake, theatrical, a single perfect droplet he’d sent rolling down his cheek with the skill of a professional liar—still glistened in the dim light.

The first reaction was: burn him. Just burn him to fucking ash. Forget the cave-in, forget the air, forget the hole in his thigh. Erupt with blue flame and watch that fucking smirk vanish into the fire.

The second reaction—and it hit almost instantly, overlaying the first, knocking it sideways, tangling it up—was something else.

Because Keigo, that bastard, knew.

He knew about the body pillow.

How?! Touya had never told anyone. Ever. Not a single living soul. It was… it wasn’t even a secret—it was something he never admitted to himself. That pillow, bought on the black market, with a print of Endeavor in his prime—he’d found it through underground merch dealers who specialized in the truly twisted shit. He was nineteen. Just out of rehab. Or, more accurately, had escaped that “joyful little bullshit-manufacturing center,” to quote Dabi himself.

He’d been spiraling. Hating. Missing. And he hadn’t yet learned to separate those three feelings, which had mixed inside him into some kind of toxic, flammable cocktail.

The pillow lasted exactly three days. On the fourth day he burned it. Watched his father’s face melt on the fabric and felt… better? Worse? He didn’t know. To this day he still didn’t know why he’d bought it. Maybe to prove to himself he could look at his father’s face without crying. Maybe to defile the image. Maybe—and this was the worst one—because it was the only way he could “hug” him without burning up from the sheer hatred.

And now Hawks—hero, spy, lover, asshole—was sitting there with his fake tear, quoting Touya’s darkest, most pathetic thoughts like he was reading the weather report.

Touya’s mouth opened.

Closed.

Opened again.

And—a complete shock to both of them—he burst out laughing.

It was a terrible laugh—barking, cracked, whistling from the smoke and dust. He laughed and couldn’t stop, and every jolt sent a stab of pain through his impaled thigh, but he laughed anyway.

“Holy shit,” he managed once the fit subsided. “HOLY SHIT. You… you just…” he wiped at his eyes—those few tears that could still flow—and stared at Keigo with an expression mixing fury, hilarity, and something that looked disturbingly like respect. “You just said you want to fuck my father. Out loud. Under a collapsed building. With a dislocated shoulder. My… whatever the hell you are… just said he wants my dad. This is really happening.”

“I didn’t say ‘fuck,’” Keigo corrected serenely, although inside he was coiled tight with anticipation. “I said ‘pick him.’ Different things. I value precision in language.”

“Oh, of course, SORRY. You don’t want to fuck him. You just want him to PIN YOU TO THE WALL. That’s completely different.” Touya flailed his good hand as much as the space allowed. “Totally changes everything. I’m calling him right now. ‘Hey Dad, someone here wants you to be intense with him.’ Think he’ll go for it? He’s in a midlife crisis anyway, maybe he needs somebody younger?”

“I think,” Keigo said slowly, picking his words, “that if he said yes, you’d burn both of us. And I don’t mean figuratively.”

“I would burn both of you,” Touya agreed. “Him first. Slowly. So you could watch. Then you. Also slowly. And you’d be lying there thinking, ‘Fuck, should’ve kept my mouth shut about the DILF.’”

There was steel in his voice. Real steel, not the kind from jokes about sex and ass-autographs. The steel his obsession was made of—cold, sharp, and capable of slicing through anyone who got between him and his main objective.

But Keigo noticed something else. Touya hadn’t said “I’d kill you right now.” He’d said “him first.” Even in a hypothetical revenge scenario, Keigo came second. Endeavor came first. Always first.

Keigo filed that knowledge deep—with all his other observations about this strange, broken, dangerous person.

“What imaginations you have,” he said out loud. “NTR, incest, patricide. Is there any content in your head rated for audiences over eighteen?”

“MY head?!” Touya actually pushed up on his elbow, ignoring the pain. “You just spent fifteen minutes describing how sexy my father is! You called him a DILF! Do you even know what that word means?!”

“DILF. Dad I’d Like to Fuck. An acronym. Fairly common in internet culture.” Keigo spoke in his lecture tone. “And yes, I know what it means. I do go on the internet. Sometimes. Between killings and saving dogs.”

“You… you…” Touya was choking on indignation mixed with hysterical laughter. “You went on the internet and googled my DAD?!”

“I went on the internet and googled you. Endeavor popped up in related searches. Not my fault your surname’s trending.” A pause. “And yes, I saw his photos from the Hero Charity Calendar, 20XX. July issue. He’s only wearing the cape. And I’ll just say: your mom is a lucky woman. Was. Before everything. Maybe not now. But back then—definitely.”

“SHUT UP.”

“And those thighs, Touya. You don’t understand. You have different genetics. You take after your mom—wiry, flexible. But him…” Keigo gave a dreamy sigh. “He’s a tank. In the best way. The very, very best way. You know, when I watch him shoulder-check a wall on patrol footage…”

“I WILL BURN YOU. RIGHT NOW.”

“No you won’t.” Keigo didn’t even blink. “Your left hand’s numb. And we’re low on oxygen. Flames eat the last air and we suffocate. You don’t want that.”

“RIGHT NOW I DO.”

“No. You want to tell your ending first. Then, maybe, burn me. Proper order of operations.”

Touya breathed in deep. Breathed out. In again—the air was stale, dusty, revolting, but he made himself breathe evenly.

“You know,” he said, once his breathing leveled out and his voice was almost calm, “I could hit back. About your father. About the shit you told me. I could strike back. It’d hurt a lot.”

“You could,” Keigo agreed. “But you won’t.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because you don’t hit people who see the real you. It’s your weakness. You can play the asshole all you want, but you never go after the ones who understand.” A pause. “I noticed that our third meetup. You could’ve burned me then. But you didn’t. Because I said ‘You’re not a monster, you’re just angry.’ And no one had ever said that to you before.”

Touya turned his face away.

“You’re a shitty shrink,” he muttered.

“Nope. I just had a lot of time to study you. A year. Thirty-four meetups. I didn’t count those as dates, by the way—that was you. I counted them as ‘field observations.’”

“You’re impossible.”

“I know.”

“And you really do want my dad.”

“I didn’t say want. I said he’s objectively an attractive man. There’s a difference.”

“There is NO fucking difference!” Touya was winding up again. “You look at him with those gold eyes and think, ‘Oh, Endeavor, Number Two, so hot in both senses’—”

“Number One, actually. You’re the one who sent a Nomu after him the exact day he got named Number One. Did revenge fantasies about his biceps fry your memory?”

“I DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT RANKINGS. AND FUCK HIS BICEPS IN THE MOUTH.”

“Shame. There’s interesting dynamics there. Especially after that scandal with…”

“Keigo.” Touya pronounced his name the way you’d pronounce a death sentence. “If you keep discussing my father’s hero ranking, I will forget about the oxygen shortage. I will forget about the hole in my thigh. I will find a way to ignite you even if I have to rub my face against you until I get a spark. Do you understand?”

Keigo looked at him—at the flaring nostrils, the blazing eyes, the white-knuckled fist of his good hand.

And smiled.

“Alright,” he said, almost gently. “Not another word about your father. Until the end of the chapter.”

“The end of the CHAPTER?! What do you mean ‘the end of the chapter’? We’re not in a book!”

“Metaphor.”

“Your metaphor can go fuck itself.”

“Can’t. Dislocated shoulder.” Keigo wriggled, easing back onto his rubble support. “C’mon. I’m done winding you up. I can start my spiel and then you do yours. Even if you say you want to die riding Endeavor.”

“I AM NOT SAYING THAT!”

“Too bad. Would’ve been dramatic.”

“Keigo.”

“Mm?”

“Shut up. Please. Just. Shut up.”

In his voice, the anger had mixed with something else. Exhaustion. And a strange, twisted relief—that Keigo had crossed a line and hadn’t been punished for it. That he could say that shit about Endeavor—about Touya’s main, sacred, untouchable life-topic—and stay alive. Not because Touya had gotten softer. But because it was Keigo. The only one allowed.

“Okay,” Keigo said. This time, with no irony. Absolutely none. “I’ve shut up. Seriously.”

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

Chapter 3: Keigo’s Ending

Keigo closes his eyes.

It's not meditation — Touya learned the difference over a year and a half. Meditation would be steady, calm, with even breaths and relaxed shoulders. This is something else. Keigo's gone still, but he hasn't relaxed: the hinge of his jaw is tight, his good hand lies on his chest too motionless, and even his feathers — the few that survived — don't twitch. They're frozen, like strings pulled taut before they snap.

Calculating, Touya thinks, watching him from beneath half-lowered lids. Same as always. Even now. Even here.

And at that thought, something inside him — something dark, ugly, something he'd never call disappointment — coils into a tight knot.

Fucking optimist. Still hoping that if he doesn't give too much away, I won't bend him over and broadcast it to everyone when we get out. Or use his weaknesses against him... Naive bastard.

He almost snorts out loud but catches himself — bites his tongue, literally, tasting the metallic tang of blood. His fingers twitched, and at the tips — just for a second — sparks of blue flame flickered. Pure reflex. The fire always answered his emotions before his brain could say no.

Shit.

He clenches his fist, killing the flame before it can catch. Just in time. The oxygen. This goddamn oxygen, already running low. Can't waste it on blue light tricks, no matter how pretty they look in the half-dark of their concrete grave.

His thoughts slip sideways for a moment — somewhere he usually forbids them to go. School material. Combustion chemistry. Keigo made him learn it. Not literally — Keigo never made him do anything, he just... explained. Once, on a rooftop, after yet another time Touya lost control of his flames and nearly torched them both. "Your combustion temperature is over two thousand degrees Celsius. If you don't want to kill yourself ahead of schedule — and I know you don't, you've still got a revenge timeline mapped out for the next year — you need to understand how fire works. The chemistry of it. Not just 'I get angry, it burns.'"

And Touya — Touya, who'd spent his best years in a coma, who couldn't name the planets in order, who once seriously confused Australia with Antarctica because in his head "everything at the bottom of the map is cold" — Touya fucking learned it. Because Keigo said: "If you croak before you get to your father, it won't be a tragedy. It'll be stupidity. And you, Touya, aren't stupid. You're just undereducated."

And now he remembered. Enough to not burn through their oxygen.

Bastard, he thought, almost tenderly. Even that — you gave me.

Keigo opened his eyes and began.

"I'm twenty-three."

His voice sounded like he was reciting a report to a committee — flat, dry, inflectionless. Touya had heard this tone hundreds of times: on TV, in interviews, at press conferences. The perfect hero reporting to the perfect public. Except there was no public here. There was only him — villain, target, lover, enemy — lying half a meter away on cold concrete.

"The Commission took me at seven years old." Keigo stared at the ceiling. "Seven years old, Touya. At seven, you still believed your dad was a hero who'd save the world. At seven, I was already learning how to snap a man's neck."

Touya said nothing. Rule number two: you listen, you don't interrupt. But something inside him clenched. He knew this story — in fragments, hints, offhand lines at three in the morning when Keigo was too exhausted to hold the mask. But hearing it like this, from the very beginning, under a concrete slab — that was something else entirely.

"Seventeen years, I've been their instrument," Keigo went on. "Not a hero. Heroes are the ones who choose. Who have a choice. I never had one. Not once. When I was eight, they sent me after a live target for the first time. It was a person, Touya. A living person. He breathed, he had a name — I don't remember it anymore, they made me forget — and he begged me not to kill him. And I... I killed him. Because orders. Because that's what they trained me to do. Because I didn't know there was another way."

He said it calmly. Too fucking calmly. So calm that Touya wanted to shake him. Or hit him. Or do something — anything — to make that voice stop being so goddamn even. Because Touya knew: behind that calm, there was nothing. Just emptiness. Just years of training that had burned out everything in him that could tremble.

"The average lifespan of an operative in my line is thirty-two years," Keigo continued, and somewhere in the darkness, water dripped. Drip. Drip. Drip. Like a metronome. Like a countdown. "If you're lucky. If you're not — twenty-seven. It's not the enemy that kills you. It's the wear and tear. Do you know what feathers are, Touya? Really? Every feather is a nerve ending. Every single one. When they get ripped out — and they do get ripped out, broken, burned, sliced — I feel it just like someone pulling out my teeth. No anesthetic. All at once. Dozens, hundreds of times per fight."

He paused. His voice stayed even. But Touya noticed his fingers on his good hand twitch — just barely, almost imperceptible.

"I learned not to show it. That was the first thing they taught me after the killing: don't show it. You can have a punctured lung, broken ribs, half a wing torn off — the public must not see. The cameras must not see. You smile, you wave, you say 'everything's fine, citizen, it's just a scratch.' And inside, everything is burning. All the time. Constantly. And you smile."

Touya stayed silent. His own scars — the ones covering three-quarters of his body — suddenly felt almost insignificant. He'd burned, yes. He'd burned alive, and it was the worst pain he'd ever known. But he burned a handful of times. Keigo burned constantly — and smiled.

"By thirty, I'll start losing sensation," Keigo said. "First in my fingertips. Then in my hands. Then in my wings. I won't be able to fly, Touya. Do you understand? A hawk without wings. It's like you without fire. Except you without fire is just you, dead. Me without wings is me, alive, but useless. Their retiree. Their former instrument. A toy put away on a shelf."

He turned his head and looked at Touya. In the dim light, his eyes seemed almost black.

"I don't want them to decommission me. I don't want to become some retiree giving interviews about the glory days, secretly downing antidepressants with whiskey. I don't want them to find a replacement — some new boy, taken from his parents and trained up just like me. I want my death to be the last word. A period. Not an ellipsis."

Touya was silent. His throat was dry. He licked his lips — salty with dust and blood — and broke the rule.

"So how?"

Keigo didn't snap at him. He just went on, in that same flat, colorless voice.

"There's an option. One. In two or three years, the Commission will plan a major operation. Not just a cleanup — an elimination. Someone really big. A political figure. Maybe a minister. Maybe someone from the UN. Someone blocking their plans. I'll be given the order, I'll carry it out — because I always carry out orders. And then, right there on the spot, I'll do what they won't expect. I'll take off my mask. In front of the cameras. In front of the whole country. And I'll say: 'I was sent by the Hero Commission. I am their killer. And every hero you know is just like me. You've been lied to. You've always been lied to.'"

Touya stopped breathing.

"They'll eliminate me within a minute," Keigo finished, almost casually. "They've got snipers everywhere. Their own. Someone I've known since childhood. Maybe Mirko, if she's nearby. Maybe Edgeshot — he always had good aim. Doesn't matter. By then, the broadcast will already be out. They won't be able to bury it. It'll be the beginning of the end for the Commission. And in that end — me. Not their puppet. Not their perfect hero. Not their pensioner. Just a person. Who chose how to leave."

Silence.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

And in that silence, Touya realized he had nothing to say.

No — he had things to say. Too many things. A whole tangled knot of words stuck in his throat, sharp as broken glass. But none of them fit. "That's stupid"? He'd promised not to judge. "You could live"? Hypocrisy — he wasn't planning to live past his revenge either. "I don't want you to die"? That would be the truth, but a truth he had no right to speak. Because they weren't a couple who saved each other. They were a couple who knew the truth about each other and stayed together anyway. And the truth was: Keigo Takami wanted to die — and that was his right.

"You're gonna die," Touya finally said. His voice came out hoarse, cracked — not the way it usually did when he played the villain. Real. "You're really gonna die. This isn't a 'maybe' plan. It's a 'definitely' plan."

"Yeah," Keigo agreed. "Definitely."

"And that's..." Touya stumbled. "That's your freedom?"

"That's the only freedom I'll ever have." Keigo turned his head and looked straight at him, and in that gaze there was no fear, no regret, no plea for understanding. Only a calm, almost terrifying certainty. "Do you know what it's like — when every action you take is mapped out years in advance? When you can't choose what to eat for breakfast because breakfast is part of your diet, the diet is part of your training, training is part of your missions, and missions are all you have? When you can't choose who to love, where to live, what to believe? When even this — me being here with you right now — is a choice that isn't mine, because I'm here on assignment, and who gives a shit that the assignment went off the rails ages ago — it's still in the reports."

Every word hit like a backhand. Touya felt it almost physically — as if Keigo wasn't telling him so much as ripping out pieces of his own flesh and dropping them onto the concrete between them. And the worst part wasn't even the words. The worst part was how he spoke them. Even. Calm. Without a single tear. Because they'd trained him out of crying, too.

"I don't want my death to be another order," he finished. "A hero's funeral. State flag. Commission President giving a speech about 'a great warrior fallen for justice.' Meanwhile, the truth is — just used-up material. No. If I die — I die how I want. That's my victory. The only one I'll ever have."

Touya looked away.

He couldn't look at Keigo. Not now. Not when everything inside him was churning from understanding — too complete, too precise, too painful. He, too, had lived for a single purpose. He, too, hadn't planned on an "after." He, too, knew his body was a timer counting down to the finale. The only difference was that he, Touya, wanted to die for revenge. And Keigo wanted to die to be free.

And he wasn't sure which was worse.

"Your question," Keigo reminded him, and his voice was back to normal — light, almost teasing. As if he hadn't just turned his soul inside out. As if it was just a conversation. Just a game. "You've got one question, Dabi. Ask. No stupid shit. And yeah," — he gave a slight smile, — "'how big is my father's dick' doesn't count. We already covered that."

Touya snorted — automatic, against his will. Keigo's dark humor always hit at the most unexpected moments. It was their way of surviving — turning every pain into a joke, every wound into material for sarcasm. The Commission trained him out of crying. Touya trained himself out of feeling. And together, they'd learned to laugh at things that made normal people scream.

But this time, the joke didn't land. It hung in the air and dropped.

And his voice — still even, still controlled — pulled Touya out of his stupor. Keigo was already braced. Touya could tell by the slight tilt of his head, by the way he squinted, waiting for the sharp edge. "So how much did they pay you for this little performance?" "Did you pick the sniper yourself, or did the Commission recommend one?" "Sounds pretty, but you know they'll jam the broadcast in three seconds, right?"

A joke. Sarcasm. Armor. Their usual dance: one step forward, two steps back, strike — block, kiss — burn. They'd played this game for months. It was safe. It was familiar. It was them.

But now — here, in this concrete tomb, with the air running out and the blood still seeping from the wound in his thigh — Touya found he didn't want to joke.

He licked his lips. Dry, cracked, with the metallic taste of blood — the same blood from his bitten tongue.

"One question," he said, and his voice came out too low, too hollow, almost like the scrape of concrete. "Yeah."

He hesitated. Not for dramatic effect — he'd never been good at dramatic pauses, that was Keigo's thing with his TV experience. It was just... the question he wanted to ask was somehow stuck in his throat, like a bone. Like a shard. Like everything he'd never said out loud.

In this ending of yours — is there room for me?

Would sound pathetic. Would sound like he cared. Would sound like he was that broken boy, still waiting for someone to choose him. Not Shoto. Him.

But he wasn't that boy. That boy died on Sekoto Peak. Only Dabi remained. And Dabi doesn't wait. Dabi takes. Dabi burns. Dabi doesn't ask questions he's afraid to hear the answers to.

So he gritted his teeth, swallowed the lump in his throat — literally feeling it scrape down his esophagus — and asked a different question. The same question, but angled. Same words, but spoken like he didn't give a shit.

"In this ending of yours — is there room for me?"

Keigo hesitates.

Exactly one second.

Touya knows him well enough to understand: this isn't an act. It isn't calculation. It isn't how do I phrase this to manipulate the target. It's a second of real, living, human hesitation. As if Touya, with his question, actually pierced some layer of armor. Reached something buried deeper than all the Commission's training.

And at that — at the mere thought that he'd managed it — something inside Touya simultaneously exults and twists in agony.

Because he knows the answer.

He knows the answer before Keigo speaks it.

And in that second, Touya had time to think about many things. About the first time they clashed on a rooftop. About the first time Keigo kissed him — not for a mission, just because, at three in the morning when they were both too drunk and too tired to pretend. About the first time he stayed the night — and woke up to Keigo crying quietly, almost soundlessly, in his sleep, only to pretend in the morning that nothing had happened. About the fact that in a year and a half, they'd never once said anything resembling "I love you." And they never would. Because for people like them, love wasn't salvation. It was just another way to hurt each other.

"No," Keigo said. "You'll either be dead by then, or busy with your own finale. We don't die on the same day, Touya. It's not that kind of story."

And that word — short, simple, merciless — hits harder than any physical blow. Harder than the rebar in the thigh. Harder than the burns on his face. Because Touya knows it's the truth. And he knows he would've answered the same way.

It's not that kind of story.

And in those words, Touya hears what Keigo doesn't say. I wish it were different. I wish you could be there at the end. But we both know it won't happen. We're not the couple that holds hands at sunset. We're the couple that understands: each of us has our own war, and our wars don't end in a truce.

Touya exhales. Slowly. Controlled. The way his doctors taught him — no, not Garaki, the others, earlier, back when he still lived at home and someone still believed he could learn to control his flames.

"Honest," he said.

And he didn't add thank you, but it hung in the air between them — heavy, dense, like the smell of gas before an explosion. Thank you for not lying. Thank you for not giving me hope. Thank you for knowing: I wouldn't want you there in that moment. Or maybe I would. But it doesn't matter, because our endings — they're not about 'together.' They're about us. Separate. Like always.

Keigo's body was trembling slightly — he didn't even notice it. Blood from his torn feathers dripped onto the concrete, mixing with the blood from Touya's thigh. Somewhere above, metal screeched — machinery clearing the rubble. Or new debris collapsing. Or both.

Neither of them knew how much time was left.

"Your turn," Keigo said.

And Touya understood that now he'd have to do the same. Turn himself inside out. Talk about something real, something important to him. Truthfully. But that would come later. In a minute. Right now, there was one more thing he needed to say.

And his voice — still even, but now Touya hears something in it he hadn't heard before. Weariness. Not physical — that, he'd learned to hide since childhood. Something else. A deeper, existential exhaustion of a man who had just spoken aloud what he'd kept silent for years.

Touya shifts his gaze from the ceiling to Keigo. To his face — smeared with dust and blood, yet still disgustingly beautiful. To his eyes — golden, hawklike, looking at Touya not as a target, not as an assignment, but as... as what?

As an equal, Touya realizes. He's looking at me as an equal.

And from that understanding — terrifying, impossible, wrong — he wants to do something completely stupid. Like cry. Or laugh. Or burn everything to hell.

He does none of those things. Instead, he closes his eyes — mirroring Keigo's gesture — but not to choose his words. He's never been able to choose his words. He's always said what he thought, even when it destroyed everything around him.

He closes his eyes because it's easier. Because in the dark — even the artificial dark behind your own eyelids — it's easier to be honest. Easier to be Touya, not Dabi.

And the words come on their own — heavy as stones, sharp as glass shards, bitter as ash. Words he'd carried inside himself for years, never letting them break free. Words he'd never spoken to anyone — not the League, not himself, not even the mirror he looked into every morning, failing to recognize his own face.

"Hey," he called, quiet.

Keigo turned his head.

"If we get out of here..." Touya stumbled. "When we get out of here. And you go back to your golden cage, and I go back to my war. I won't get in your way. With your finale. I won't try to save you or change your mind. It's your life. Your death. Your choice."

Keigo watched him.

"But I want you to know," Touya went on, and every word was heavier than the last, as if he was hauling them up from the deepest part of himself — from the place where something other than hatred still lived — "that if we'd had a different life... If you weren't a hero and I wasn't a villain... If they'd just left us the hell alone... I probably would've..."

He didn't finish.

"Forget it," Dabi snapped, pulling back from that razor-thin line between saccharine words and the real thing — heavy, dragging you under like a stone — the desperate, clawing need to tell him something.

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

Chapter 4: Touya’s Ending

Touya doesn’t close his eyes. He stares into the darkness overhead, and his voice sounds different—deeper, harsher, as if the words are scraping his throat raw.

“You know I never planned to live long,” he begins. “From the start. From Sekoto, when I burned myself the first time and realized my father wasn’t coming. I was supposed to die there. But they picked me up. The Doctor, Garaki, poured so many resources into me I’m basically a walking medical anomaly.” He trails his fingers over the seams on his face—healthy and burned skin alike. “I’m alive because they rebuilt me. But I don’t live for them.”

“For revenge,” Keigo says.

“Don’t interrupt.”

Touya takes a breath, and the air whistles through his throat.

“Revenge is just a word. What I want to do to my father—it’s not revenge the way you mean it, hero. I don’t want to kill him. Death is an ending. Death is relief. He doesn’t deserve relief.” Touya’s eyes, vivid blue just like his father’s, flare in the half-dark—not with flame, but with something colder and more dangerous. “I want him to live long enough to see everything. To watch his legacy crumble. To watch society turn its back on him. To watch his precious Shouto—his masterpiece—admit their entire family was a madman’s experiment. I want Endeavor to understand: everything he built, I will destroy. Not a building, not a city—his name. His place in history.”

He pauses to breathe. The blood from his thigh wound has stopped flowing—clotted over—but every movement still costs pain.

“And then, when he’s on his knees, broken, having lost everything, I’ll come to him. Not in a mask. Not as Dabi. As Touya. And I’ll tell him: ‘You made me into a monster. But the monster didn’t come to kill you. The monster came to tell you that you were never a hero. You were just a man who didn’t know how to love. And that’s enough to destroy everything.“

“And then?” Keigo asks quietly.

“Then I walk away.” Touya smirks. “I leave him alive with that knowledge. It’s worse than death. Or I burn myself out in the process.”

“Will you die before or after?” Keigo doesn’t ask it sympathetically—he asks it almost professionally, one strategist to another.

“After. A minute later. An hour. Doesn’t matter. My body won’t last much longer—you’ve seen my medical charts, I know you got your hands on them. My quirk eats me alive every time I use it. Someday I’ll cross the line and Garaki won’t be able to fix me. I’ll just burn up.” He turns to Keigo, and something in his face shifts subtly. “But I want to burn up after. After he sees. After he understands. That’s my finale. Not a hero’s death, not martyrdom. Just a period at the end of a sentence I’ve been writing my whole life.”

Silence.

“Your question,” Touya says.

Keigo doesn’t ask right away. He’s looking at Touya the way he looked at marks before liquidation—assessing, weighing. But there’s no calculation here. Something else.

“Have you ever thought about what comes after? Not with him—with you. When it’s all over, when you’ve done the thing you lived for—what then?”

Touya blinks. That’s not the question he was expecting. He was expecting “why,” “why so cruel,” “have you ever considered just forgiving.” But Keigo asks about the emptiness afterward.

“Nothing,” he answers. “Absolutely nothing. I never planned an ‘after.’”

“That’s what I thought.”

And Keigo doesn’t say “that’s wrong.” Doesn’t say “you could live differently.” Instead he reaches out his good hand—slowly, clumsily—and rests it on the back of Touya’s neck, where the skin is still intact, where the seams don’t cross the spine. The touch isn’t gentle, but it’s firm. Tactile confirmation: I’m here, I listened, I didn’t look away.

Touya doesn’t flinch. After a few seconds, he lowers his head—not onto Keigo’s chest, just lower, his forehead coming to rest against Keigo’s shoulder.

“Your ending is shit,” he says, voice muffled.

“So’s yours.”

“I know.”

“At least we match on something.”

They lie like that for a while. The air gets thinner. Breathing gets harder. Topics cycle…

Touya opened his mouth. Closed it. Dragged in a breath. Let it out. His left hand—the one that still obeyed him—twitched involuntarily.

“Alright,” he said in a voice that sounded, to his own ears, suspiciously calm. Too calm. Dangerous. “Alright. You wanna play this game? Let’s go.”

He propped himself up a little on his elbow, ignoring the fire in his thigh.

“You’re sitting here,” he started, “—well, lying here, since you can’t stand right now, just like always when I’m around—and feeding me some bullshit about how sexy my father is. ‘DILF.’ ‘Textbook definition.’ ‘Would’ve picked him.’”

He twisted his face in a mocking impression of Keigo’s tone.

“But you know what I think, Hawks? You don’t just wanna fuck him. You’re in love with him. For real. Like a schoolgirl. You watched him on TV when you were seven and thought, ‘There. That’s the man who’s gonna save me.’ And he fucking did—showed up, arrested your criminal daddy, and accidentally became the hero of your whole pathetic little life. You didn’t choose heroism because you wanted to save people—you chose it because you wanted to be like him. To be with him. To be…”

He paused dramatically.

“…under him. Or over. Doesn’t matter. You’d take any position.”

Keigo blinked.

Touya kept going, picking up speed:

“You watched him for years. Knew his schedule. His patrol routes. His interviews. You can probably quote every single one of his lines. ‘Plus Ultra.’ ‘I’ll become the hero the world deserves.’ Did you jerk off to those speeches, Keigo? Admit it. I won’t judge. Well, I will judge, but that’s beside the point.” He tilted his head. “And now you’re lying here—in a concrete hole, with me, his son—and telling me how he’s… what’d you say? ‘Intense’? Because you’re projecting. You want him to be intense with you. But he’s not here. He never will be. So you make do with…”

He gestured vaguely at the space between them.

“…me. The souvenir. Daddy’s defective prototype.”

He exhaled and slumped back against the concrete—triumphantly, as much as the hole in his thigh allowed.

“Well? What’ve you got to say, hero?”

Keigo was silent.

Exactly three seconds.

Then he smiled—that particular smile that always made something in Touya’s stomach go cold, because it meant: I know something you don’t.

“You know what the funniest part is?” Keigo said, quiet, almost intimate.

“What?” Touya frowned.

“You’re right.”

“…what?”

“I did jerk off to him. Once. I was fifteen. The Commission had access to exclusive training footage for ‘combat efficiency analysis.’” Keigo made air quotes with his fingers. “And there was this one moment… he forgot to wear a groin guard. You know that skintight suit of his? Turns out it hides absolutely nothing if you’re looking at the right angle. And me, a fifteen-year-old boy who hadn’t even figured out why the girls in the ads didn’t interest him, suddenly understood. Very. Clearly. Understood.”

Touya stared at him in horror.

“You… you’re SERIOUS?!”

“Serious.” Keigo nodded with the expression of someone delivering courtroom testimony. “That suit, Touya. That goddamn blue suit. When he bends over… anyway, I switched orientations that very second. Not bi. Not ‘curious to try.’ Just—click—and there it was. I’m gay now. Thanks to your dad.”

“I… you… you SWITCHED ORIENTATIONS BECAUSE OF MY FATHER’S CROTCH?!”

“Not the crotch.” Keigo raised a finger. “The contents of the crotch. Two different things. The crotch is just the area. The contents… well, you’ve seen. You’re his son. Genetics. You Todorokis have a lot in common.” He slanted his eyes toward Touya. “Though of course, he has more. Mass. Volume. Gravitas.”

Touya groaned. It was the groan of a man who’d just lost a battle.

“But!” Keigo raised his finger higher. “That doesn’t invalidate the question. And my question, Touya, is purely academic. Anthropological, if you like.”

“No.”

“You haven’t even heard it.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“How did your mother…”

“KEIGO, I SWEAR TO GOD…”

“…Rei Todoroki, a delicate woman with an ice quirk,” Keigo plowed on, tone unwavering, “manage to accommodate Enji Todoroki, a man nearly two meters tall, weighing around a hundred kilos, and with…”

“STOP.”

“…certain anatomical features that I had the misfortune of witnessing on that training footage and that I’m certain run in your family? Because, Touya, I have a rough idea of the scale. And the scale is, let’s say… epic.” He paused. “How? Does she have a quirk not just for ice but for elasticity? Or was there some kind of special preparat—”

“I’M GONNA KILL YOU.” Touya tried to sit up, hissed at the pain in his thigh, gave up, and simply jabbed a finger at Keigo. “You. You’re discussing. My. Parents. In the bedroom.”

“Actually, I’m discussing them in a basement. But yeah, same gist.” Keigo looked disgustingly pleased with himself. “It’s a fair question. Scientific. Any theories?”

“MY THEORY IS YOU’VE LOST YOUR FUCKING MIND.”

"That's not a theory. That's a diagnosis. And it applies to both of us." Keigo sighed and suddenly sobered. Or rather, he didn't sober up — he just stopped smiling quite so wide. "Alright. One-one. You jabbed me about my childhood crush on Endeavor. I jabbed you about... well, the biomechanics of your conception. I think we're even."

Touya glared at him from under his brow — the look of a cornered wolf that hasn't yet decided whether to bite or just surrender. Or just put on a clown mask and go join the circus.

"You're insufferable," he finally said.

"You've said that already. About seven times today. Come up with something new."

"You... fuck. Fine." Touya exhaled. "Fine. But you'll answer for my mother. Separately. When we get out."
"Deal." Keigo nodded. "Now — the game."

"I hate you."

"You already..."

"SHUT UP. I GOT IT." Touya closed his eyes, then opened them and stared at the grey ceiling, collecting his thoughts. And with that, their conversation temporarily exhausted itself.

The silence lasted exactly one minute. For sixty seconds, Dabi digested the last piece of dialogue, and his condition finally nudged him to keep being honest after all.

"You know," Touya suddenly said, and his voice sounded almost normal, almost like before, before all of this, "I was just thinking..."

"Dangerous," Keigo interjected.

"Shut up. I was just thinking... We both can't stand that cheap crap. All that filth we throw at each other. About your dad. About your orientation. About who does what and how."

Keigo blinked. He hadn't expected this turn.

"We joke about it," Touya continued, "because there's no other way. If I don't joke about you wanting to fuck my father, I'll start thinking about how you're the only person who looks at me and sees... me. Not Dabi. Not a villain. Not Endeavor's son. Just Touya. And that, fuck, is so terrifying that I'd rather joke about incest."

He fell silent. The words had run out. He'd already said too much — more than he'd planned, more than he'd ever allowed himself. But in a concrete grave, the rules were different.

Keigo hesitated. Then he spoke — and his voice was uncharacteristically quiet, stripped of its usual irony:

"You know why I joke so much about it? About Endeavor, about your mom, about 'peak dilf' and all that?"

"Why?"

"Because if I stop joking, I'll have to admit that I don't actually even know what sex without an assignment feels like," Keigo said, and the confession dropped between them, heavy and awkward. "Before you, there was no one. No one at all. All of that stuff I say in public, this whole image — 'sexy macho Hawks, playboy, beloved by women and men' — it's all fake. The Commission wrote that role for me when I was sixteen. They decided a 'sexually appealing hero' would sell better. And I play it. I'm always playing it. I don't even know where the role ends and I begin — if I even begin anywhere."

Touya listened, holding his breath. This was important. He could feel it: what Keigo was saying now — it wasn't an act. Not a report. Not a mission. This was the truth — that uncomfortable, prickly truth they'd both hidden behind layers of sarcasm and filth.

"And when I'm with you..." Keigo stumbled. "When I'm with you, I don't know how to be any other way either. I know how to undress. I know how to touch. I know how to do everything needed so that a partner... well, you understand. But I don't know how to just... be. Just lie next to you and be quiet. Just hold your hand. The Commission didn't teach me that."

"Me neither," Touya replied, hollow. "I don't know how to do jack shit. I was in a coma from thirteen to sixteen, Keigo. Do you get that? My puberty happened in a medical capsule. Everything I know about sex, I learned from porno mags one of Garaki's assistants used to smuggle to me, and from our... experience. And before you, there was no one. So all those jokes — about 'not getting girls' from when I was a kid, about 'I'll fuck a hero' now — that's just... a way. A way to act like I know what I'm doing. Even though I have no fucking clue."

They fell silent. And in that silence, it suddenly became clear — with a sharp, cutting clarity — that they'd both been playing. This whole time. Playing "macho man" and "fatal villain," "playboy" and "seducer," when in reality they were just two broken people who had no idea how to love, but were desperately trying to learn.

"God," Keigo breathed. "We're so pathetic."

"Yeah." Touya's grin was crooked. "Utterly fucked. Two grown men under a collapsed building discussing how they're both virgins at heart. If anyone could hear us..."

"...they wouldn't believe it. Because I'm Hawks, the number three sex symbol according to Hero Monthly. And you're Dabi, the villain with charisma and a 'I'll fuck you and kill you, not necessarily in that order' stare. We have reputations."

"Reputations," Touya repeated with disgust. "Screw reputations. I don't know how to hold hands. You don't know how to talk about feelings. The only thing either of us knows how to do is cause pain — to others and to ourselves."

"And joke," Keigo added. "We know how to joke. That's the only thing we do sincerely."

"That's not sincerity. That's armor," Touya objected. "We joke so we don't cry. We joke so we don't have to admit we're hurting. We joke because if we stop — we'll fall apart."

"...yeah," Keigo agreed after a pause. "I guess that's true."

He suddenly felt unbearably cold. Not from the temperature — from the realization. He'd played a role his entire life. Since he was seven, they'd trained him to be perfect — the perfect hero, the perfect speaker, the perfect body, the perfect face. He smiled when he wanted to scream. He laughed when he wanted to cry. He flirted with journalists even though touch made him sick. And he'd come to Touya — first on assignment, and then for reasons he couldn't explain — and kept playing. Because he didn't know how else to be. Because without the mask, he didn't exist.

And now, under a concrete slab, in a pool of his own blood, the mask had cracked. And he had absolutely no idea what to do with the person left underneath it.

"Hey," he called quietly. "Touya."

"What?"

"Remember the first time we held hands?"

Touya froze. Then he nodded, barely perceptibly — the movement was almost invisible because his head was still resting on Keigo's shoulder.

"I remember."

"It was... terrifying."

"Really terrifying," Touya agreed.

"Scarier than sex."

"Way scarier."

They were quiet for a moment.

"I thought then," Keigo said, and his voice was muffled, as if each word had to be forced out, "that if I let myself do that — just hold your hand, no assignments, no reports — then that was it. There'd be no going back. I'd stop being a spy. I'd stop being a hero. I'd become just a person who needs another person. And that's the scariest thing that can happen to someone who was taught that attachment is weakness, and weakness is death."

"No one taught me," Touya answered quietly. "They just left me. And I decided that if I never got attached to anyone, no one could ever abandon me again." He paused. "But then you showed up. And it all went to shit."

"Mutual."

They fell silent again. The air was getting heavier. Breathing was getting harder. But something had shifted — not in the air, but between them. As if they'd both shed one layer of masks and now lay there, bare and vulnerable, two people without pretense. Without the game. Without "hero" and "villain."

"You know," Touya said, barely audible, "if we get out of here... I'm not promising to be good. I don't know how to be good. I still want to burn my father and everything he holds dear. I'm still a villain. And if you get in my way, I'll hurt you. I'm good at hurting — it's the only thing I'm good at."

"I know," Keigo answered. "And I'm not promising to stop working for the Commission. I don't know how to be free. I'm still their instrument. If they order me to turn you in — I'll turn you in. If they order me to kill you — I'll probably try. I'm good at obeying — it's the only thing they taught me."

"But?"

"But I don't want to," Keigo said, and something in his voice cracked. "I don't want you to die. I don't want you to burn up. I know it's your choice — and that's the only thing that matters. Your choice. But I don't want it. It's selfish. It's wrong. It goes against all our rules. But I don't want it."

Touya closed his eyes.

"Me neither," he said, so quietly that Keigo barely heard. "I don't want you to die either. To take off your mask in front of the cameras and wait for the bullet. To become their last victim. I know it's your choice, and I promised not to judge. But I don't want it. Also selfish. Also wrong. But also... yeah."

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

Chapter Four: Touya's Ending

Touya open and doesn't close his eyes.

He stares into the darkness overhead — at the grey concrete, veined with cracks like his own skin — and stays silent. Not because he has nothing to say. But because there's too much to say, and all the words are wrong. All the words are the wrong ones.

Keigo waited. He knew how to wait — the Commission had drilled that skill into him to perfection, right alongside combat training. He lay half a meter away, breathing shallowly because the air in this concrete sack was getting heavier, thicker, more suffocating by the minute, and watched Touya. Not with challenge, not with irony. Just watched. As if they had all the time in the world. As if they weren't bleeding out in the basement of a ruined chemical plant.

And then Touya spoke. His voice was different — deeper, rougher, the words scraping his throat, clawing their way out like each one had jagged edges.

"You know I wasn't planning to live long."

Keigo knew. He'd known from the very beginning — maybe even before they first clashed on that rooftop. He'd read the dossier. He'd seen the medical files, obtained through Commission channels. He understood: a man whose body was seventy percent scars, grafts, and transplants wasn't counting on a long, happy life.

"From the start," Touya went on, and his gaze went distant, fixed somewhere beyond the concrete, beyond the earth, beyond the years, "since Sekoto. When I burned myself the first time and realized Father wasn't coming."

He said it so simply. So matter-of-fact. When I burned myself the first time. As if it were something ordinary — a child engulfed in flames, waiting for a father who never showed. Keigo had heard this story before — in fragments, in hints — but now, under a concrete slab, it sounded different. Heavier. More terrifying.

"I was supposed to die there," Touya said. "On the peak. In the fire. That would've been... right. Logical. Burned to ash, the way a defective son should be. But someone picked me up. Doctor Garaki poured so many resources into me that I'm basically a walking medical anomaly." He ran his fingers along the seams on his face — along the border between healthy and burned skin, along the scars that would never heal. The gesture was mechanical, habitual, like he'd touched those scars a thousand times. "I'm alive because they put me back together. But I'm not alive for them."

"For revenge," Keigo said quietly. It wasn't a question.

"Don't interrupt," Touya snapped, but without real anger. Just out of habit. He took a breath — the air whistled through a throat that was slowly failing him along with the rest of his body. "Revenge is just a word. Too small. Too... simple. What I want to do to my father — it's not revenge in your sense, hero. I don't want to kill him."

He turned his head and looked at Keigo. Touya's eyes — bright blue, eerily similar to his father's — flared in the half-dark. But not with flame. With something colder. More dangerous.

"Death is an ending," he said. "Death is relief. You fall asleep — and that's it. No problems. No guilt. No memories. He doesn't deserve relief. He doesn't deserve peace. He deserves..."

Touya stumbled. Not because he didn't know the words. But because the words were too big for his mouth.

"I want him to live long enough to see everything," he continued at last. "How his legacy crumbles. How society turns its back on him. How his precious Shoto — his masterpiece, his golden child — admits before the whole world that their entire family was a madman's experiment. That there was no 'great hero.' There was only a man who didn't know how to love, and four children he mutilated."

He caught his breath. The blood from the wound in his thigh had stopped flowing — it had clotted, mixed with the concrete dust into a filthy crust — but every movement sent pain shooting up through his chest, his collarbones, his teeth. Touya ignored it. He'd long since learned to live with pain — she was his constant companion, his nurse, his only faithful friend.

"I want Endeavor to understand," — his voice grew quieter, but sharper, — "everything he built, I will destroy. Not a building. Not a city. His name. His place in history. Every goddamn article, every award, every second of airtime. I'll erase him. The way he erased me."

Keigo was silent. He knew this rage — not secondhand. He felt something similar toward the Commission, toward the system that had broken him and kept breaking him every day. But his rage was cold, calculated, frozen by years of discipline. Touya's rage was different — hot, all-consuming, devouring him from the inside.

"And then," Touya went on, and his lips stretched into something resembling a smile, grotesque and wrong, "when he's on his knees before me... broken, stripped of everything, abandoned by everyone he believed in... I'll come to him. No mask. Not as Dabi. As Touya."

He held the pause — long, heavy, like a dying breath.

"And I'll tell him: 'You made me a monster. But the monster didn't come to kill you. The monster came to say that you were never a hero. You were just a man who couldn't love. And that's enough to destroy everything.'"

Silence.

Somewhere, water dripped — or chemicals, or blood, impossible to tell anymore. Drip. Drip. Drip. The sound was almost hypnotic, lulling, and Keigo had to focus to keep from slipping into oblivion. The concussion — he was almost certain he had a concussion — was dragging him into the dark, gently and insistently. But he couldn't sleep. Not while Touya was speaking. He couldn't.

"And after?" he asked quietly.

"And after, I'll leave." Touya smirked. "I'll leave him to live with that knowledge. That's worse than death. Or I'll burn up myself in the process. Those are details that only matter in the moment. Maybe I'll see his pathetic expression — and it'll disgust me so much I won't want to kill him. Maybe the opposite. Maybe I'll just... get tired." He slanted a glance at Keigo. "You know, you're probably the only one who gets it. The tiredness. Not the physical kind. The other kind. The one inside. When you wake up in the morning and think: 'Why? Why am I doing all this?' And then you remember — and you do it. Because there's nothing else left."

Keigo understood. Understood too well. He'd woken up with that thought every morning for the last five years.

"Will you die before, after, or during?" he asked. Not with pity — almost professionally. Like one strategist to another. Like a man who had planned his own death and treated it like a work project.

"After. A minute later. An hour. Doesn't matter." Touya spoke about it the way people discuss the weather. "My body won't last long. You've seen my medical files — I know you got your hands on them. You get your hands on everything, whether you should or not, you fucking spy. My quirk devours me every time I use it. Every. Goddamn. Time." He raised his hand to his face and looked at his fingers — burned, scarred, with purple nails. "It's like... you know when you borrow from a loan shark, and the interest keeps growing, but you keep borrowing anyway because you need it here and now? My skin is the interest. My nerves are the interest. My lungs, my throat, my eyes — interest, interest, interest. Someday I'll cross the line, and Garaki won't be able to fix me. I'll just burn up."

He turned his head and looked at Keigo. Something in his face shifted imperceptibly — not his expression, but something deeper, beneath the skin, beneath the seams. As if for a second he stopped being Dabi — the villain, the arsonist, the walking catastrophe — and became just Touya. Just a person.

"But I want to burn up after," he said. "After he sees. After he understands. That's my ending. Not a heroic death, not martyrdom, not a tragedy. Just a period. A fat, ugly, charred period at the end of a sentence I've been writing my whole life. The end of the story of Touya Todoroki. The boy who wanted his daddy to be proud of him, and became a monster who wants his daddy to suffer."

He fell silent. The silence pressed down on them, dense as the concrete slab overhead. Drip. Drip. Drip.

Keigo didn't ask right away. He looked at Touya — the way he looked at targets before elimination: assessing, weighing, analyzing. But there was no calculation here. There was something else — something he had no name for. Something the Commission hadn't gotten around to teaching him.

"Have you ever thought about what comes after?" he finally asked. "Not about him. About you. When it's all over. When you've done the thing you've been living for all these years. When the revenge is complete, and you're left... what are you left with? Who?"

Touya blinked. This wasn't the question he'd expected. He'd expected "why?", "why so cruel?", "have you ever considered just forgiving him and moving on?". He'd braced for defense, bristled in advance. But Keigo asked about the emptiness after.

"Nothing," he answered, and his voice came out hollow, as if from far away. "Absolutely nothing. I never planned for 'after.'"

"That's what I figured."

"Then why'd you ask?"

"Because you asked a question too, even though you knew the answer." Keigo turned his head, and their eyes met. "You asked if there was a place for you in my finale. You knew I'd say no. But you asked anyway. Because... it's not about knowing. It's about hearing it out loud. Accepting it. Living through it."

Touya stared at him — long, searching. Then he snorted.

"When'd you get so wise? Did the Commission teach you philosophy too?"

"No. I learned philosophy on my own. At night. When I couldn't sleep." Keigo smiled faintly. "I had a lot of nights."

And Touya understood. Because he'd had a lot of nights too. Too many. Nights lying in Garaki's capsule, staring at the ceiling, thinking about his father, about Shoto, about how unfairly everything had turned out. Nights when he woke up from his own screams and couldn't remember what he'd dreamed — only the smell of burning and the feeling that his skin was still on fire.

"Alright," he said. "One-one. Or whatever the score is. I've lost count."

"Three-two in my favor," Keigo answered automatically. "But I'm not sure we're still keeping score. I think we've been out of the game for a while now."

"We've been out of the game since you asked about my mother and the biomechanics of conception."

"That was a scientific question."

"That was a question normal people punch you in the face for." Touya snorted. "But we're not normal. There's nothing normal about us. We fuck on rooftops, discuss my father's dick size, and plan our own deaths. This isn't even a relationship. It's some kind of... I don't know. Performance art."

"We could have been normal," Keigo suddenly said. Quietly. Almost a whisper.

Touya turned his head and stared at him.

"What?"

"I said — we could have been normal," Keigo repeated, and in his voice there was no irony, no sarcasm, no familiar mask. Only exhaustion. An enormous, bottomless exhaustion that had been building for years and suddenly broke through. "If we hadn't been broken. If you hadn't been left on that peak. If I hadn't been taken at seven and trained like a dog. We could have been ordinary people. Met somewhere. A café. Or a park. And just... talked. Without all of this."

He fell silent.

Touya was silent too.

And then they both — simultaneously, without conspiring — burst out laughing. It wasn't happy laughter. Hoarse, cracked, more like coughing. The laughter of two people who knew that "could have been" was the most useless subjunctive mood in any language.

"In a café," Touya wheezed through his laughter. "Can you imagine? Me — in a café. With these seams. The waitress would run."

"And I'd order a latte and pretend I didn't know you."

"Oh, thanks. Very romantic."

"I try."

The laughter faded. The silence returned — but different now. Less tense. As if they'd both exhaled and allowed themselves to relax. For a second. For a moment.

Keigo reached out his good hand — slowly, clumsily, fighting the resistance of his own body, which screamed with pain at every movement — and laid his palm on the back of Touya's head. Where the skin was still whole, where the seams didn't cross the spine, where warmth could still be felt.

The touch wasn't gentle. They'd never managed gentle. It was firm — almost rough. Tactile confirmation: I'm here. I listened. I didn't look away.

Touya remembered — suddenly, inconveniently, as always happens in moments like this — their first real touch. Not sex — sex had come earlier, sex was easier, sex was just bodies. The other thing. When they first held hands. It was six months ago, on some stupid rooftop, after a particularly rough conversation. Touya had blurted out something about his father — sharp, vicious — and Keigo had suddenly gone quiet, and something in his face had flickered. And instead of answering with a jab, he'd simply taken Touya's hand. Just took it — and that was it.

That was worse than sex. Scarier than sex. Sex was predictable — it had rules, a rhythm, a beginning and an end. Holding hands was exposed. Naked. Defenseless. They'd both sat like that for a few minutes in complete silence, and then pretended nothing had happened. Because admitting it mattered meant admitting too much.

Now — under concrete, with a hole in his thigh and a shattered shoulder — it was almost as terrifying. Almost.

Touya didn't pull away. After a few seconds, he lowered his head — not onto Keigo's chest, just lower, pressing his forehead against his shoulder. One half of his face felt nothing — dead nerves, dead skin — and probably never would feel anything again. But the other half still lived. Still remembered what warmth was.

If they got out.

"Your ending's shit," he said, muffled, into the torn fabric of the hero costume.

"So's yours."

"I know."

"At least we match on something." Keigo paused. "And your deodorant's shit."

"I don't wear deodorant, dumbass."

"Exactly."

Touya wanted to laugh, but he didn't have the strength. They lay like that for a while — two broken men in a concrete box, fighting on opposite sides of a war, but bound by something that had no name. The air was running thin. Breathing was getting harder. Consciousness was slipping — gently, insistently, like the tide coming in — but they couldn't relax, couldn't fall asleep. Too risky. You might not wake up.

Topics for conversation circled back on themselves.

Touya opened his mouth. Closed it. Inhaled. Exhaled. His left hand — the one that still obeyed — twitched involuntarily in Keigo's grip, as if he wanted to pull away, but changed his mind mid-motion.

"Fine," he said, in a voice that sounded suspiciously calm to his own ears. Too calm. Dangerous. "Fine. You wanna play this game? Let's go."

He propped himself up slightly on his elbow, ignoring the pain in his thigh. And the other parts of his body that hadn't exactly been waking up with pleasant sensations and now were at the point where sawing off half of it would be easier than trying to make it function.

"Here you are," he began, "or rather, lying here — because you can't stand right now, same as always when I'm around — and you're feeding me this bullshit about how sexy my father is. 'Dilf.' 'Peak specimen.' 'Would choose him.'"

He grimaced, mocking Keigo's intonation. Not remotely accurate, but who's judging?

"But you know what, Hawks? It's not just that you want to fuck him. You're in love with him. For real. Like a schoolgirl. You watched him on TV when you were seven and thought: 'There. That's the man who'll save me.' And he fucking did — showed up, arrested your criminal father, and accidentally became the hero of your whole pathetic life. You didn't choose heroism because you wanted to save people. You chose it because you wanted to be like him. To be with him. To be..."

He made a dramatic pause.

"...under him. Or on top. Whatever. You'd take any position. You'd even just watch him with someone else."

Keigo blinked, not expecting that blow, even if it wasn't painful. Or maybe the dwindling oxygen was acting as anesthesia for this particular incision.

Touya pressed on, picking up speed:

"You watched him for years. Knew his schedule. His patrols. His interviews. You probably know every phrase of his by heart. 'Plus Ultra.' 'I will become the hero the world deserves.' Did you jerk off to those speeches, Keigo? Admit it. I won't judge. Well, I will judge, but that's beside the point." He tilted his head. "And now here you lie — in a concrete hole, with me, his son — and you tell me how... what'd you call him? 'Intense'? Because you're projecting. You want him to be intense with you. But he's not here. And he never will be. So you settle for..."

He gestured at the space between them and bared his teeth, a flash of turquoise eyes, before snapping his expression back to what it was before.

"...me. The souvenir. Daddy's defective prototype."

He exhaled and slumped back against the concrete — triumphantly, as much as the hole in his thigh would allow.

"Well? What do you say, hero?"

Keigo was silent. Exactly three seconds. His brain was still capable of rapid analysis and strategy. He'd had conversations far more provocative than this.

And then he smiled — that particular smile that always made something go cold in the pit of Touya's stomach, because it meant: I know something you don't.

"You know what the funniest part is?" Keigo said quietly, almost intimately.

"What?" Touya scowled. He was already regretting his attempt at retaliation, since his tongue was clearly not on his side today, and losing yet another round in the "Sharpest and Most Cutting Wit on This Island of Japan" competition was beyond stupid — especially when he'd started this subject himself instead of shutting up and dying with his honor intact. If Dabi even had such a thing.

"You're right."

"...what?" Dabi forced out a sound that was more exhale than word, his eyes gradually widening as his brain raced ahead and finished the answer for him.

"I did jerk off to him. Once. I was fifteen. The Commission had access to exclusive training footage for 'combat effectiveness analysis.'" Keigo made air quotes with his fingers. "And there was this one moment... he forgot to put on groin protection. You know that skintight suit of his? Turns out it hides absolutely nothing if you're looking from the right angle. And I, a fifteen-year-old boy who up until then didn't even understand why the girls in commercials didn't interest him — suddenly understood. Very. Clearly. Understood."

Touya stared at him in horror. This was worse than he could have imagined. Or rather, he was mentally prepared for such an answer, but that didn't take away from Hawks's sheer effect of surprise in delivering this gem of a quote about his sexual awakening, triggered by the pyromaniac's father because he'd forgotten to wear a cup one day.

"Are you... are you FUCKING SERIOUS?!"

"Completely." Keigo nodded with the expression of someone giving sworn testimony in court. "That suit, Touya. That fucking blue suit. When he bends over... anyway, I switched orientations in that exact second. Not bi. Not 'curious to try.' Just — click — and done. Now I'm gay. Thanks to your father."

"I... you... you SWITCHED ORIENTATIONS BECAUSE OF MY FATHER'S CROTCH?!"

"Not the crotch." Keigo raised a finger. "The contents of the crotch. Different things. The crotch is just a region. The contents... well, you've seen it. You're his son. Genetics. You Todorokis have a lot in common." He slanted his eyes at Touya. "Though, of course, he has more. Mass. Volume. Imposingness."

It was impossible to tell whether the hero was joking, delirious from their circumstances, or had just delivered an entirely too honest tirade about the structural particulars of what was between Endeavor's legs. And this on the brink of death, when every word between them might be their last.

Touya groaned. It was the sound of a man who had lost a battle. A battle he'd started himself, which was worse. He'd genuinely just received karmic payback for his own stupidity from an opponent who was in far too good a form today.

"But!" Keigo raised his finger higher. "That doesn't invalidate the question. And my question, Touya, is purely scientific. Anthropological, if you will."

"No."

"You haven't even heard it."

"I don't want to hear it."

"How did your mother..."

"KEIGO, I SWEAR TO GOD..."

"...Rei Todoroki, a delicate woman with an ice quirk," Keigo continued, not lowering his tone in the slightest, "manage to accommodate Enji Todoroki, a man nearly two meters tall, weighing close to a hundred kilograms, with..."

"STOP."

"...certain physical attributes which I had the pleasure of witnessing on those training recordings and which, I am certain, run in your family? Because, Touya, I have a rough idea of the scale. And the scale is, shall we say... epic." He paused. "How? Does her quirk cover not just ice but elasticity? Or was there some kind of specialized technique for—"

"I WILL KILL YOU." Touya tried to sit up, hissed at the pain in his thigh, gave up on everything, and simply jabbed a finger at Keigo. "You. You are discussing. My. Parents. In bed."

"Technically, I'm discussing them on a futon. But yes, same essence." Keigo looked disgustingly pleased with himself. "It's an honest question. Scientific. Do you have any theories?"

"MY THEORY IS THAT YOU'VE LOST YOUR FUCKING MIND."

"That's not a theory. That's a diagnosis. And it applies to both of us." Keigo sighed and suddenly sobered. Or rather, he didn't sober up — he just stopped smiling quite so wide. "Alright. One-one. You jabbed me about my childhood crush on Endeavor. I jabbed you about... well, the biomechanics of your conception. I think we're even."

Touya glared at him from under his brow — the look of a cornered wolf that hasn't yet decided whether to bite or just surrender. Or just put on a clown mask and go join the circus.

"You're insufferable," he finally said.

"You've said that already. About seven times today. Come up with something new."

"You... fuck. Fine." Touya exhaled. "Fine. But you'll answer for my mother. Separately. When we get out."
"Deal." Keigo nodded. "Now — the game."

"I hate you."

"You already..."

"SHUT UP. I GOT IT." Touya closed his eyes, then opened them and stared at the grey ceiling, collecting his thoughts. And with that, their conversation temporarily exhausted itself.

The silence lasted exactly one minute. For sixty seconds, Dabi digested the last piece of dialogue, and his condition finally nudged him to keep being honest after all.

"You know," Touya suddenly said, and his voice sounded almost normal, almost like before, before all of this, "I was just thinking..."

"Dangerous," Keigo interjected.

"Shut up. I was just thinking... We both can't stand that cheap crap. All that filth we throw at each other. About your dad. About your orientation. About who does what and how."

Keigo blinked. He hadn't expected this turn.

"We joke about it," Touya continued, "because there's no other way. If I don't joke about you wanting to fuck my father, I'll start thinking about how you're the only person who looks at me and sees... me. Not Dabi. Not a villain. Not Endeavor's son. Just Touya. And that, fuck, is so terrifying that I'd rather joke about incest."

He fell silent. The words had run out. He'd already said too much — more than he'd planned, more than he'd ever allowed himself. But in a concrete grave, the rules were different.

Keigo hesitated. Then he spoke — and his voice was uncharacteristically quiet, stripped of its usual irony:

"You know why I joke so much about it? About Endeavor, about your mom, about 'peak dilf' and all that?"

"Why?"

"Because if I stop joking, I'll have to admit that I don't actually even know what sex without an assignment feels like," Keigo said, and the confession dropped between them, heavy and awkward. "Before you, there was no one. No one at all. All of that stuff I say in public, this whole image — 'sexy macho Hawks, playboy, beloved by women and men' — it's all fake. The Commission wrote that role for me when I was sixteen. They decided a 'sexually appealing hero' would sell better. And I play it. I'm always playing it. I don't even know where the role ends and I begin — if I even begin anywhere."

Touya listened, holding his breath. This was important. He could feel it: what Keigo was saying now — it wasn't an act. Not a report. Not a mission. This was the truth — that uncomfortable, prickly truth they'd both hidden behind layers of sarcasm and filth.

"And when I'm with you..." Keigo stumbled. "When I'm with you, I don't know how to be any other way either. I know how to undress. I know how to touch. I know how to do everything needed so that a partner... well, you understand. But I don't know how to just... be. Just lie next to you and be quiet. Just hold your hand. The Commission didn't teach me that."

"Me neither," Touya replied, hollow. "I don't know how to do jack shit. I was in a coma from thirteen to sixteen, Keigo. Do you get that? My puberty happened in a medical capsule. Everything I know about sex, I learned from porno mags one of Garaki's assistants used to smuggle to me, and from our... experience. And before you, there was no one. So all those jokes — about 'not getting girls' from when I was a kid, about 'I'll fuck a hero' now — that's just... a way. A way to act like I know what I'm doing. Even though I have no fucking clue."

They fell silent. And in that silence, it suddenly became clear — with a sharp, cutting clarity — that they'd both been playing. This whole time. Playing "macho man" and "fatal villain," "playboy" and "seducer," when in reality they were just two broken people who had no idea how to love, but were desperately trying to learn.

"God," Keigo breathed. "We're so pathetic."

"Yeah." Touya's grin was crooked. "Utterly fucked. Two grown men under a collapsed building discussing how they're both virgins at heart. If anyone could hear us..."

"...they wouldn't believe it. Because I'm Hawks, the number three sex symbol according to Hero Monthly. And you're Dabi, the villain with charisma and a 'I'll fuck you and kill you, not necessarily in that order' stare. We have reputations."

"Reputations," Touya repeated with disgust. "Screw reputations. I don't know how to hold hands. You don't know how to talk about feelings. The only thing either of us knows how to do is cause pain — to others and to ourselves."

"And joke," Keigo added. "We know how to joke. That's the only thing we do sincerely."

"That's not sincerity. That's armor," Touya objected. "We joke so we don't cry. We joke so we don't have to admit we're hurting. We joke because if we stop — we'll fall apart."

"...yeah," Keigo agreed after a pause. "I guess that's true."

He suddenly felt unbearably cold. Not from the temperature — from the realization. He'd played a role his entire life. Since he was seven, they'd trained him to be perfect — the perfect hero, the perfect speaker, the perfect body, the perfect face. He smiled when he wanted to scream. He laughed when he wanted to cry. He flirted with journalists even though touch made him sick. And he'd come to Touya — first on assignment, and then for reasons he couldn't explain — and kept playing. Because he didn't know how else to be. Because without the mask, he didn't exist.

And now, under a concrete slab, in a pool of his own blood, the mask had cracked. And he had absolutely no idea what to do with the person left underneath it.

"Hey," he called quietly. "Touya."

"What?"

"Remember the first time we held hands?"

Touya froze. Then he nodded, barely perceptibly — the movement was almost invisible because his head was still resting on Keigo's shoulder.

"I remember."

"It was... terrifying."

"Really terrifying," Touya agreed.

"Scarier than sex."

"Way scarier."

They were quiet for a moment.

"I thought then," Keigo said, and his voice was muffled, as if each word had to be forced out, "that if I let myself do that — just hold your hand, no assignments, no reports — then that was it. There'd be no going back. I'd stop being a spy. I'd stop being a hero. I'd become just a person who needs another person. And that's the scariest thing that can happen to someone who was taught that attachment is weakness, and weakness is death."

"No one taught me," Touya answered quietly. "They just left me. And I decided that if I never got attached to anyone, no one could ever abandon me again." He paused. "But then you showed up. And it all went to shit."

"Mutual."

They fell silent again. The air was getting heavier. Breathing was getting harder. But something had shifted — not in the air, but between them. As if they'd both shed one layer of masks and now lay there, bare and vulnerable, two people without pretense. Without the game. Without "hero" and "villain."

"You know," Touya said, barely audible, "if we get out of here... I'm not promising to be good. I don't know how to be good. I still want to burn my father and everything he holds dear. I'm still a villain. And if you get in my way, I'll hurt you. I'm good at hurting — it's the only thing I'm good at."

"I know," Keigo answered. "And I'm not promising to stop working for the Commission. I don't know how to be free. I'm still their instrument. If they order me to turn you in — I'll turn you in. If they order me to kill you — I'll probably try. I'm good at obeying — it's the only thing they taught me."

"But?"

"But I don't want to," Keigo said, and something in his voice cracked. "I don't want you to die. I don't want you to burn up. I know it's your choice — and that's the only thing that matters. Your choice. But I don't want it. It's selfish. It's wrong. It goes against all our rules. But I don't want it."

Touya closed his eyes.

"Me neither," he said, so quietly that Keigo barely heard. "I don't want you to die either. To take off your mask in front of the cameras and wait for the bullet. To become their last victim. I know it's your choice, and I promised not to judge. But I don't want it. Also selfish. Also wrong. But also... yeah."

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

Chapter 5: The Confession.

Chapter Five: Confession

Somewhere around the third hour, when the oxygen in the concrete "pocket" is critically low, Touya speaks again.

His voice isn't sharp anymore — it's tired, hoarse, with that particular cracked edge you get from spending too much time in the smoke. But something else cuts through it. Something he's never let himself show — not to Keigo, not to the League, not to his own reflection in the mirror every morning.

Maybe he just decided that someone ought to hear it.

Maybe he doesn't give a shit.

Or maybe — and this was the scariest possibility — the lack of oxygen and the slow, inexorable blood loss had finally done what years of therapy never could (therapy he'd never had, obviously): ripped the last lock off the door behind which he'd hidden everything that was left of the little boy named Touya Todoroki.

"You know what the funniest part is?" he says, staring into the darkness overhead.

"What?"

"He loved me."

Keigo doesn't ask who he's talking about. It's obvious. There haven't been that many people in Dabi's life who loved him. You could count them on one hand — his mother, his siblings — and it's debatable whether he still counts them at all. Plus Keigo, if Dabi ever allows himself that generosity. Which is unlikely.

"Endeavor," Touya goes on, and there's no sarcasm in his voice. None. Not a drop. Only a strange, inside-out bitterness — like he'd pulled something out of his chest that had been lying there for years, and now it's rotting in the light. "He really did love me. Not Shoto — me. When I was little, before my quirk started eating me from the inside out, he used to carry me on his shoulders, show me hero moves, promise that one day I'd surpass him. He'd look at me — and there it was in his eyes. Pride. Hope. The certainty that his firstborn would become a great hero."

Touya pauses. His breathing is heavy — the air in the pocket is stale, saturated with dust and chemicals. And no doubt the stench of his own body. Burned flesh doesn't exactly smell like flowers, let's be real. But he needs this confession like he needs air. It rips its way out of him like pus from an old wound, and there's no stopping it now. Just so someone hears. Just so the words exist outside his head, where they've been running on an endless loop for ten years.

"And then my quirk started eating me," he says. "And he got scared."

A pause, filled with so much pain it's practically tangible in the air.

"Not of me," he corrects himself, and something sharp as glass cuts through his voice. "My fire was hurting me, and he couldn't stop it. He — the fucking Endeavor, the Number One Hero, the man who defeats villains with a single glare — couldn't stop his own son from self-immolating. And instead of trying... instead of figuring out how to be a father to someone who burns alive every day in training... he just ran. Pulled away. Acted like I didn't exist and focused everything on his perfect project — on Shoto."

Touya's voice grows quieter, but firmer. A rhythm creeps in — like a confession he's rehearsed for years but never spoken aloud.

"He dumped the responsibility for me onto Mom. 'Don't let him train, Rei. Stop him, Rei. You should have been watching him.' And then he went into the training room and slammed the door. Didn't look back. Same as always."

Keigo stays silent. Listens. Over a year and a half, he's learned: in moments like this — moments of rare, almost involuntary honesty — you shut the hell up. You shove your "very necessary" commentary deep up your ass, along with your useless words of support and pathetic attempts to say something non-obvious, strained, fake. Because Touya doesn't need words. Touya needs someone to just be there and not flinch away.

"I think..." Touya licks his dried, cracked lips. His tongue barely moves in his mouth. "I think he really did pray for me to stop. He didn't want me to get hurt. I really think that. Now. Here."

He smirks — crooked, lopsided, and it's more terrifying than any snarl.

"But he didn't want to be the one to tell me 'no' either. Because that would mean admitting: his own fire is a curse he passed down to me. His power, his pride, his goddamn legacy — it's killing his own son. And he couldn't live with that. So he just... left. Hid. Buried himself in work, in Shoto's training, in hero duty, in anything — as long as he didn't have to look at me."

Touya falls silent. In the quiet, all you can hear is his breathing — raspy, heavy, as if every word ripped a chunk of flesh from his throat.

"He's a coward, my father," he says at last. "He loves, but he's a coward. And that love — it's real, you get that?"

Rage cuts through his voice. Old, familiar, like the grip of a knife in his palm. A knife he uses to cut himself — and the pain brings a perverse, almost erotic pleasure. Like finally ripping the bandage off a festering wound that's been pissing him off for ages. Like finally letting himself feel what he's always felt.

"But he did nothing with it!" His voice cracks, scrapes like metal on concrete. "He just shoved it in a box, sealed it up, and put it on a shelf! While I was burning! While I was dying on Sekoto, inhaling my own smoke and screaming into the void! While I came back three years later, pieced together by a mad doctor, and stood outside the door, watching someone else already standing in my place!"

He stops. His chest heaves. His burned lungs whistle as they drag in the stale air.

Keigo waits.

Water drips somewhere deep in the rubble. Drip. Drip. Drip. Like a metronome. Like a countdown.

"I saw him after," Touya says, almost in a whisper. All the rage is gone, leaving something worse in its wake — emptiness. "That night I came home. After the coma. After the rehab. After I ran away from Garaki and crossed half of Japan to see my family."

He closes his eyes. His lids — burned, scarred — tremble.

"He was training Shoto. My father. My dad. Training Shoto — his perfect son, his masterpiece, his redemption. He didn't even notice me standing at the door. Didn't even turn around. I was dead to him — officially, with a funeral, with an urn, with a goddamn wake — and he just kept training his golden boy. Like nothing happened. Like I never existed. Like I was just... a failed experiment. Defective. Version one-point-zero, scrapped when version two-point-zero came out."

He falls silent. The silence is so thick you could cut it with a knife.

Maybe he shouldn't have poked at old wounds. Maybe he should've kept his mouth shut and died under this concrete with a villain's dignity, without putting his rotting insides on display. Maybe.

But the words have already clawed their way out. And now they hang in the stagnant air like smoke, like the smell of burning, like the echo of a distant explosion on Sekoto Peak.

The chasm in Dabi's heart — between the beloved son who trained with his father from an early age and glowed with happiness when Daddy praised him, and the bitter, universally rejected street dog who'll bite the fucking Flame Hero's hand off and make him suffer as much and as long as possible — hasn't gone anywhere. It gapes, like an open wound. And now, in the dark, with Keigo, it's bleeding more than ever.

Keigo waits a few more seconds. He feels — with his skin, his feathers, the intuition honed by years of espionage — that he can't stay silent now. That if he does, Touya will fall into that chasm and never climb out. That words are needed. Not the right ones — right ones don't exist. But some kind of words.

"You don't know what happened when you weren't looking," he says, evenly. Too evenly. Like he's reading a report.

"What?" Touya turns his head.

"Endeavor searched for you. On Sekoto. For weeks."

Touya freezes. His pupils — bright blue, eerily similar to his father's — dilate. Not from fear. From shock.

"He dug through the rubble with his bare hands," Keigo continues in the same colorless tone. "Every night. Outside of patrols. Outside of his hero schedule. He filed requests for a search operation — five times. Five. They denied him: too dangerous, unstable area, high toxicity, risk of collapse. He still flew out there. Alone. Spent hours he could've spent on Shoto, on work, on anything. Looking for you."

"How do you know that?" Touya's voice cracks into a rasp. There's no threat in it — just a desperate, almost childlike need to understand. How did this wounded little bird find out about that? Why does he dare to say it now? Why does he dare to drive nails into the coffin where Touya buried his faith in his father's love?

"I have access to Commission archives." Keigo looks straight at him, and his golden eyes express nothing. Professional mask. Perfect spy. "Managing the Number One Hero is part of my assignment, too. The Commission considers it important to keep him under control and eliminate him if necessary. There are reports. Files. Testimonies. He searched for you. For months. Until..."

"Until he found my jawbone," Touya finishes, his voice dead. "I know. I read the same files when I hacked their servers. But he didn't find me, Keigo. He found a bone and gave up. He stopped looking."

"Yes," Keigo agrees. "He stopped."

"And that changes everything?" Touya jerks up onto his elbow, ignoring the pain in his thigh, ignoring the dizziness, ignoring everything. His eyes burn — not with flame, but with something worse. "The fact that he looked for me after I died changes the fact that he abandoned me before? The fact that he cried over my bone cancels out the fact that he never — not once! — came to me when I was alive and burning alive right in front of him?!"

His breathing is ragged. The air in the pocket is getting thicker, and every inhale is a battle.

"He loved me," Touya exhales, and it sounds like a curse. "He really fucking loved me. And he still did everything he did. Love didn't stop him. You get that?" He looks at Keigo, almost defiant, almost pleading: understand, refute, tell me I'm wrong. "He's not a monster. He gave me a home, warmth, didn't starve me, didn't tell me I was a mistake. He was just... a scared man. Who didn't know how to be a father. And instead of trying, he chose not to be one at all."

"And me," his voice drops to a whisper, "I didn't know how to be a son without a father. So I chose to become someone he couldn't ignore."

A pause.

"And even when I tried to kill Shoto," he goes on, and every word is another nail in the coffin, "when I, a stupid kid, lunged at my little brother with fire in my hands because I thought: 'If he's gone, Daddy will look at me again'... even then, Endeavor didn't come to me. Didn't talk to me. Didn't try to understand. He just became an even stricter watchdog for his masterpiece. Guarded Shoto from me. Like I was a threat. Like I was already a villain back then."

He catches his breath. It takes effort.

"If he hated me," Touya says, almost soundlessly, "it would be easier. I could just hate him back. Clean, simple, uncomplicated hatred. But he loved me — and that's the fucking tragedy of my entire life."

He closes his eyes. His burned eyelids tremble. That love didn't go anywhere. It just turned into something else. Something that burns from the inside hotter than fire. Hotter than any flame Dabi could ever produce. Someday it'll burn him to ash — and that'll be almost a relief.

Silence. So dense you could swear you hear the dust settling.

Keigo says nothing. Because there's nothing to say. Because any words here would be fake. Because he hates his own voice when it tries to comfort.

But Touya isn't done. Something inside him — something he's been strangling for years — is breaking loose, like flames through the seams in his skin. Uncontrollable. All-consuming.

"You know what I actually want?" he says, and his voice trembles — not from weakness, from strain. "Not to burn him. Not to destroy him. I want him to look at me. Really look. Like he used to — when I was little. When I was his hope. I want him to see: here I am. I'm alive. I didn't die. I've been here this whole time — mangled, pieced together, burned out from the inside, but alive. And I became a monster not because I was born one. But because you, Dad, were too scared to look me in the eye."

His voice breaks. Completely. Touya goes quiet, sucking in air in ragged gasps. His shoulders — the ones that still move — are shaking. Silently. No tears — he can't cry, the tear ducts burned up along with half his face.

Keigo watches him. Something inside him is breaking. Quietly, almost imperceptibly. Like a crack in the concrete slab above them.

He knows this pain. Not the same kind — he didn't have a father who loved and left. He had a father who never loved at all. But the shape of the pain doesn't matter. The pain itself matters — pure, concentrated, burning out everything inside.

And he answers. Not as a spy. Not as a hero. Not as the Commission's tool. Just as a person — another broken person.

"Your father," Keigo says quietly, "did he hit you?"

Touya opens his eyes. Looks at him. Something unreadable flickers in his gaze.

"No. He wasn't."

"Mine was."

Two words. Simple. Heavy. Like a concrete slab.

"He beat me every day," Keigo goes on, and his voice doesn't tremble — not because it doesn't hurt, but because they trained the trembling out of him years ago. "Not because he was angry. Not because he was drunk. Just because he could. Just because I was there. Just because my existence annoyed him, like an insect. He told me I should never have been born. That if it weren't for me, he'd be free. That I was a mistake he should've corrected before it learned to breathe."

Touya listens. Doesn't interrupt. His breathing's still ragged from his outburst, but his gaze is sharp, intent.

"My father was a criminal," Keigo says. "Not like you. Not principled. Not with some grand purpose. He was just a scumbag: robbed, killed, sold drugs, beat his wife. One day, your father caught him. Irony, right?" He smirks with the corner of his mouth, and the smirk is dry as ash. "Endeavor broke both his arms and handed him over to the police. I watched it on TV. I was five. And I thought: 'There. That's a man who isn't afraid. That's a man who's strong. That's what I want to become.'"

Touya stays silent.

"My mother was a junkie," Keigo continues. "She didn't want a kid. At all. She told me straight up, no sugarcoating: 'You're a burden. You're an anchor. If it weren't for you, I wouldn't be on the needle.' And then she handed me over to the Commission. For money. Like an object. Like defective goods you can offload."

A pause.

"I thought: maybe if I leave, it'll be easier for her. Maybe without me, she'll... I don't know. Get clean? Find a job? Be happy? I was seven, Touya. I didn't understand she was just selling me. I thought I was saving her."

He falls silent. Somewhere, water drips.

"I never went back," he says. "They told me my father hung himself in prison. My mother probably died of an overdose. They both died to me — and I kept saving people. Not because I'm good. Just because I don't know any other way. I don't know how to be any other way."

Touya looks at him. Long. Silent. Something inside him is shifting — not disappearing, but rearranging, like tectonic plates before an earthquake.

"Your father beat you," he repeats. "You still grew up to be a hero. My father loved me. I grew up to be a villain."

"Yeah," Keigo says, simply. No judgment. No surprise. Just a statement.

"And you didn't end up hating Endeavor," Touya goes on, and something new cuts through his voice. Not rage. Not bitterness. More like... disbelief? Amazement? "After everything. After what I just told you. After what he did to me. To Shoto. To my mother. To our whole goddamn family, which was an experiment, not a family. You know all of it — and you still support him."

"Yeah," Keigo says without hesitation. "Because he's trying to be better. My father never tried. My father died the same as he'd always been. But yours is alive. And he's trying. Clumsily. Shittily. Too late. But trying."

Touya is silent. This silence is heavier than all the ones before. In it — the collapse of an empire. In it — an earthquake. In it — a little boy still waiting for his father, and a grown man who wants to kill that father, and both of them can't exist at the same time, and yet here they are.

And then he says it — quietly, almost inaudibly:

"There's something I'm not even ready to admit to myself. And it's a death sentence for you. Because if I say it and we survive — I'll have to kill you. One hundred percent."

"What?" Keigo asks, though he already knows the answer.

"I still love him." Touya says the words like a verdict. And that's what they are. They feel like the fall of a guillotine — heavy, cold, inexorable. "I'm angry. I hate him. I plan his death every goddamn day. But somewhere deep down — where the boy from Sekoto Peak still lives — I'm still waiting. Waiting for him to come to me. For him to say: 'Touya, I was wrong. You mattered. You always mattered. You were what I really wanted.' I want him to look at me the way he did when I was a kid. When he was showing me a new move and my life meant something."

He stops. His chest rises and falls — heavy, ragged.

"That's pathetic, isn't it?"

"No," Keigo says.

"I'm serious."

"So am I." Keigo stares into the darkness. It's easier to tell the truth in the dark. "Your father fucked up. He wasn't cruel for pleasure, like mine. He was a coward. A weak man who got scared and ran. But he loved you. I've seen it."

"You don't even really know him."

"I've worked with him. I've seen how he looks at fire." Keigo pauses, feeling himself cross the line of honesty he'd drawn for himself. Telling his idol's son how much that idol inspires him — not the smartest idea. Even for a daredevil like Hawks. But he goes on: "When a building's burning, when there's black smoke in the sky, Endeavor's face changes. He stops being the Number One Hero. He becomes a man who once couldn't save his own son. And now he tries to save everyone. Not because it's his job. Because he can't do otherwise. The same way I can't do otherwise."

"And I saw him training Shoto when I was already gone," Touya says, hollow. "And that was enough for me."

Keigo doesn't argue. He doesn't try to change his mind. He just speaks — and it's possibly the most open thing that's ever left his lips in his entire life:

"My father will never look at me and say 'I'm sorry.' He's not capable of it. He doesn't even regret it. Dead or alive — he never gave a shit. I was worth less to him than dirt under his fingernails, and he never thought otherwise. Your father is a weak man who got scared, screwed everything up, and now doesn't know how to fix it. But at least he knows he's guilty. At least he feels guilt. And that's... it's not an excuse. But it's a difference."

He turns his head and looks at Touya. In the half-dark, his golden eyes seem almost black, but there's something warm in them. Almost human.

"You're not pathetic, Touya. You're just a person they didn't quite manage to break. Who they bent, burned, abandoned — and he's still alive anyway. And he's still capable of love. Even if it's love twisted into hatred. Even if it's love that wants to kill. It's still love."

Touya looks at him. Long. Endlessly long.

And then, in the darkness, he finds his hand.

Squeezes.

Hard enough to hurt.

Hard enough to grind bone.

"And you?" he asks, his voice rough.

"What about me?"

"Are you capable? Of love?"

Keigo is silent. This isn't a question he wants to answer. Too dangerous. Too close to what the Commission spent years burning out of him. Attachment is weakness. Feelings are vulnerability. Love is what gets used against you.

But they're under a concrete slab. The air's almost gone. And at this stage, it doesn't really matter what anyone uses against anyone.

"Probably," he says at last. And he can't quite believe how honest it sounded. "Otherwise, why do I keep coming back?"

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

Chapter 6: The Things They Don’t Say.

Near the end, when the air is thick and breathing is nearly impossible, and the noise outside is building — machinery, rescue teams, firefighters, someone — Keigo says the thing he would never have said on the surface.

"I'm a killer. And I hate myself for it. Every day."

Touya blinked. That was... unexpected. No, he knew, of course — knew that Keigo killed on the Commission's orders, knew his hands were drenched in blood up to the elbows. But he'd never heard Keigo talk about it like this. Without the familiar irony. Without the polished composure. Without the mask.

"I know," he said carefully.

"No." Keigo shook his head, and the movement was jerky, unnatural — like a broken doll. "You know I follow orders. You know I kill. But you don't know..." He faltered, and Touya suddenly realized with horror that his voice was shaking. Keigo Takami, the perfect hero, the man the Commission had trained to flawless precision — his voice was shaking. "You don't know that I stopped counting."

Silence. Drip. Drip. Drip.

"The first few years, I counted," he went on, and the words came out in jerks, as if he were forcing them from a throat that was used to keeping everything inside. "Every one. Every target. I memorized their faces. I memorized their names — if they were in the file. I thought: if I remember, if I know exactly who I killed, it'll be... I don't know. More honest? More human? Like I'm not just a killing machine, but someone who at least remembers."

He paused for breath. The air in the concrete sack was so stale now that every inhale was a struggle, and speaking was getting harder. But he kept going. Because if not now — then never.

"And then I stopped. Around sixteen. First I missed one. Then another. Then I realized I couldn't remember the faces of the ones I'd killed last month. And then..." His voice dropped to a whisper. "And then I realized I didn't care."

Touya listened without interrupting. Something inside him was clenching — slowly, inexorably, like the concrete slab overhead.

"I've killed more people than half the League combined," Keigo said, and each word fell into the darkness like a stone into water. "The only difference is, the state pays me. And I wear a hero's cape. And I've got fangirls hanging off my neck, brands lining up for collaborations, and I smile and wave at them. Hawks — the number three hero. Hawks — the nation's savior. Hawks — the sex symbol. But in reality, I'm just... a butcher. A butcher in a nice suit, paid to do the dirty work."

He fell silent. His good shoulder — the one that wasn't dislocated — was trembling faintly. Touya noticed it from the corner of his eye and said nothing.

"I've never told anyone this," Keigo continued quietly. "No one. Not even myself. I pretended everything was fine. That it was just a job. That I was a hero. That the targets I eliminate — they're bad, they deserve it, they're a threat to society. But you know the funniest part?" He smiled crookedly. "Some of them, I didn't even know. They gave me a name, a photo, coordinates — and that was it. I didn't know what they'd done. I didn't know if they deserved to die. I just carried out the order. Because I always carry out orders."

Touya was silent. His hands — the ones that still obeyed — clenched into fists. He didn't know what to say. He wasn't exactly a specialist in comfort. All he knew how to do was burn, break, destroy.

But maybe, right now, that wasn't what was needed.

"You know what it's like," Keigo went on, and now his voice wasn't just quiet — it was... hollow. Burned out. "Waking up every day knowing you're a tool. That you're a weapon they take off the shelf when someone needs removing, then put back until next time. That you have no future. No past. Only orders. And you follow them because you don't know how to do anything else. Because they never taught you anything else."

He turned his head and looked directly at Touya. In the dim light, his golden eyes seemed almost black — two bottomless pits in a face white with dust.

"My hands are covered in blood, Touya. And I can't wash it off. Ever. No matter how many kittens I rescue from trees, how many children I save from fires, how many interviews I give about heroic valor — it won't change anything. I'm a killer. And I hate myself for it. Every goddamn day."

Silence. Long. Heavy. So thick you could cut it with a knife.

Touya rolled his eyes with exaggerated emphasis — a gesture meant to look casual, but it came out twitchy, unnatural — and turned his head to look at Keigo.

"You think I care about that?"

"You should."

"You're forgetting who you're talking to." The smirk came out crooked, pained, but real. "I'm planning to kill my own father and possibly my brother or the whole family while I'm at it, if the opportunity presents itself. I'm no saint, Keigo. I'm not even good. I'm a villain — terminal stage. This isn't a sainthood competition. I'm not expecting righteousness from you."

Keigo turned his head. Their faces were very close — closer than they usually allowed themselves outside of bed. Their breath mingled in the scant air. But neither leaned in to close the last few centimeters and kiss the future corpse beside them. Not that kissing someone with half a face full of chemical burns under the rubble of a chemical plant was particularly romantic.

"I'll never be able to be normal," Keigo said, and the words rang out like a verdict. "Even if the Commission collapses. Even if I somehow make it to freedom. I don't know how to live without orders. I don't know what to do with myself when no one tells me what to do. I'll just become... no one. An empty space. Used-up material they forgot to dispose of."

He drew a ragged breath.

"Or worse — I'll end up leading the Commission. You know, they've already hinted at it. That I'm their best project, their perfect instrument, their future president. And I'll spend the rest of my life slaving away for them in a golden cage, like a circus monkey performing for bureaucrats and ordinary people. Pretending I make decisions. Pretending I have power. While every day I'll look at the chandelier on my office ceiling and decide which tie would look best to hang myself with."

He fell silent. The confession hung in the air — heavy, grotesque, like a corpse on a rope.

"No freedom is coming for me," he finished, almost in a whisper. "None. I'll die their puppet — one way or another. The only question is how."

Touya looked at him. Long. Silent. Something strange was happening inside him — something he couldn't find a name for. He'd seen Keigo in so many ways: confident, exhausted, angry, laughing, aroused, asleep, crying in his sleep. But like this — this broken, this exposed, this real — he'd never seen him.

And instead of saying something encouraging, something supportive, something a normal person would say to their... their what? Partner? Lover? Enemy? — Touya answered the only way he knew how.

"Great," he said. "Me neither."

Keigo blinked. Then snorted — weakly, barely audible. Almost a laugh. Almost.

"That's all you've got? 'Me neither'?"

"What did you want to hear? That I'll save you? That I'll pull you out of your golden cage and we'll run away to the ends of the earth?" Touya grimaced. "It's not that kind of story, hero. You said it yourself. I don't save people. I burn them."

"I know."

"And I don't know how to comfort. I don't know how to say the right words. I don't know how..." He stumbled. "I don't know how to love. No one ever taught me. And the scraps I remembered — from Mom, from Fuyumi — they burned up on Sekoto along with everything else. All that's left is this." He gestured at himself: the scarred body, the seams, the grafts, the burning eyes. "Rage. Hatred. The urge to hurt. That's the only thing I'm capable of."

Keigo was silent. And then — slowly, carefully, fighting the pain in his dislocated shoulder — he shifted a couple of centimeters closer. Now they were lying almost pressed together: shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, breath to breath.

"That's enough," he said quietly.

"What?"

"You. Just being here. That's enough."

Touya froze. A lump rose in his throat — sharp, prickly, like a piece of glass. He wanted to snap back with something sharp, something cutting, something that would shatter this moment and drag them back onto the familiar ground of sarcasm and filth. But the words wouldn't come. For the first time in years, the words wouldn't come.

"You're an idiot," he finally rasped.

"I know," Keigo agreed. "Doesn't change anything."

And in that moment — no fanfare, no confessions of love, no promises neither of them could keep — they acknowledged out loud, for the first time in a year and a half, what they'd known for a long time. They didn't fix each other. They didn't heal each other. They just fit — like two broken pieces that, in the grand scheme of the world, were never supposed to touch, but somehow did. Not perfectly — with gaps, with sharp edges, with cracks that never went away. But enough.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

The air was growing heavier. Time was running out.

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

Chapter 6: The Things They Don’t Say.

The screeching overhead had become deafening. The concrete slab above them shuddered, and dust rained down from the ceiling — fine, acrid, clogging their noses and mouths. Somewhere up there, machinery was clearing the rubble. Or maybe more debris was collapsing. Or both at once. They didn't know. Time in the concrete grave moved differently — stretching like rubber one moment, collapsing into a single point the next.

"If this is the end..." Touya began.

"Shut up."

"I'm serious. If this is it. If we get buried for good, or if the rescue teams dig us out and we have to go back to being enemies, and this was our last conversation..." He licked his dried, cracked lips. His mouth tasted of blood and dust. "I want you to know—"

"Don't." Keigo looked directly at him, and his voice came out hard. Too hard. As if he'd put the mask back on — one last time, before the finale. "Don't say something you won't be ready to repeat on the surface. We both know what happens if we get out. You'll go back to your revenge — and you'll be ready to burn me if I get in your way. I'll go back to the Commission — and I'll spy on you, because that's my job."

He paused. The next words were harder to force out — Touya could see it in the way his Adam's apple twitched, the way the muscles of his jaw tightened.

"I'll sleep with you to gather every secret the League has," Keigo went on, and his voice turned cold, detached, almost mechanical. "I'll pretend I care. I'll look you in the eye and lie. I'll use every touch of yours as a source of intel. Without feeling a single second of pleasure from having you near me. Because it's my job. Because I'm a tool. Because..."

He cut himself off. Something in his face flickered — a crack in the mask, microscopic, barely perceptible. But Touya noticed. Touya always noticed things like that.

"You done?" he asked.

Keigo was silent.

"You really think I'm buying this crap?" Touya propped himself up on his elbow, ignoring the pain in his thigh, ignoring the dizziness, ignoring everything. "You really think that after everything we've told each other down here, I'm gonna believe this is 'just a job' to you?"

"That's exactly what it is. A job."

"Bullshit."

"I never lie. I'm a spy. I'm trained to tell the truth so it sounds like a lie, and lies so they sound like the truth. You said it yourself: you never know when I'm serious and when I'm playing."

"You're playing right now," Touya said. "And you're shit at it."

Keigo opened his mouth — and closed it. Because there was nothing to say. Because he was playing. One last time. Desperately clinging to a mask that was splitting at the seams.

"Look at me," Touya demanded.

Keigo looked. And in his eyes — golden, beautiful, terrifyingly empty — Touya saw what he'd been hiding all this time. Not coldness. Not calculation. Not professionalism. Fear. Pure, naked, defenseless fear — the fear of a man who had lived his entire life on orders and was now, for the first time, face to face with something that refused to obey.

"You're scared," Touya said. It wasn't a question.

"Yes," Keigo admitted. "I'm scared."

"Of what?"

A pause.

"Myself." He breathed the word out like poison. "I'm scared of myself. I'm scared of what's left once the mask comes off. I don't know if there's anything there at all. I don't know if I exist — Keigo Takami, a person, not a tool. Maybe there is no me. Maybe I'm just... emptiness. A bundle of reflexes and protocols. A machine someone told was human."

Touya watched him, and something strange was spreading through his chest — hot, heavy, almost painful. He knew this feeling. He felt it every time he thought about his father. But now — now it was different. Less furious. More... bitter? Sad? He didn't have the words.

"You exist," he said. Simple. No grandstanding. No tenderness, which he wasn't capable of anyway. "I see you. You're here. You're holding my hand, even though we both know I might be broadcasting your real name across Japan in a couple of months. You look at me like no one's ever looked at me. And if that's 'nothing,' then I don't even know what the hell matters anymore."

Keigo closed his eyes. His lashes — pale, almost transparent in the dim light — trembled.

"You don't understand," he whispered. "I want to die. Not just 'die at the right moment to expose the Commission.' I want to die right now. Here. Under this concrete. With you. Because if I get out, I'll have to keep living. And I don't know how. I don't know how to do it. I'm so tired, Touya. I'm so fucking tired."

His voice broke. For the first time — in all the time Touya had known him — his voice broke. There was no irony in it, no sarcasm, no masks. Only pain. Pure, concentrated pain — the pain of a man who'd kept everything locked inside for twenty-three years and was finally, on the edge of death, letting the crack become a fracture.

Touya looked at him. Something was happening inside him — something he couldn't put a name to. He'd seen Keigo in so many ways — confident, exhausted, angry, laughing, aroused, asleep, crying in his sleep. But like this — open, shattered, pleading for help without words — he'd never seen him.

And he answered. The only way he knew how. The only method he had.

"You decided to croak?" His voice came out harsher than he'd planned. "Right here? In my arms? Don't hold your breath."

Keigo opened his eyes. There was moisture in them — he wasn't crying, but he was close. Closer than he'd ever been.

"I'm serious," he said.

"So am I." Touya leaned closer — as close as his mangled body would allow. "You're not dying. You're getting out of this concrete coffin, you're going back to your Commission, you'll smile for the cameras and do your job. You'll live — long enough to hate every single day of it. And you'll know that somewhere out there, on the other side of the war, there's me. And I'm alive too. And I hate every single day of it. But I'm alive — to spite my father, to spite everyone who wanted me dead. And you'll be alive — to spite the Commission."

"That's not comforting," Keigo said quietly.

"I'm not comforting you." Touya's smirk was crooked. "I don't know how to comfort. I know how to hurt. And if it makes you feel any better knowing you're not the only broken, miserable bastard out there — good. If not — I don't give a shit. I'll still be alive. And so will you. Because I said so."

Keigo was silent. He stared at him — long, searching. Then the corner of his mouth twitched.

"You're... an impossible person," he said.

"I'm aware."

"You say 'I don't know how to comfort' — and then you do it. In your own way. Terribly. But you do it."

"I'm not comforting. I'm stating facts."

"The facts are that we're probably still going to die down here," Keigo reminded him.

"The facts are that even if we die, we won't die the way they wanted," Touya snapped. "You — not as a tool, pensioned off and discarded. Me — not as the defective son, burned up in the shadow of my father's glory. We'll die the way we chose. Even if that choice is just lying here and waiting. It's still our choice. Not theirs."

The screeching overhead grew louder. Closer. Or maybe further away. The acoustics in the concrete tomb distorted everything — turned machines into monsters, rescue into destruction. Touya's thigh had gone numb. That was probably a bad sign. Keigo's dislocated shoulder no longer hurt. That was probably worse.

But neither of them moved. Neither of them called out for help. Not yet. There was still something left to say. Something that couldn't be said under open sky, in a world where they were enemies.

Touya broke the silence first.

"Hey."

"What?"

"If we get out... and I burn down half of Tokyo, and you have to stop me, and we end up fighting again..." He paused. Swallowed. The lump in his throat had grown spines. "Don't hold back. Don't you fucking dare hold back. I won't."

"I know," Keigo said. "I never planned to."

"Good."

"But I might miss on purpose. Just once."

"You won't."

"No. I won't." Keigo's smile was barely there — a ghost of a smile, the kind that hurts more than tears. "But I'll want to. And that's already more than I've ever wanted for anyone."

Touya closed his eyes. His chest felt too tight — and not from the dust, not from the bad air, not from the wound in his thigh. From something else. Something he'd refused to name for a year and a half.

He didn't name it now either. But he let himself feel it. Just this once. Just for a moment.

"If this is the end..." he started again.

"Quiet," Keigo cut him off again. But this time — softer. Without the cold. Without the mask.

"I want you to know," Touya stubbornly continued, ignoring him, ignoring the pain, ignoring the noise overhead, "that I don't regret it. Any of it. That rooftop. That first night. Whatever this... whatever the hell this was between us. I don't regret it. And if someone gave me a second chance — I'd do it all the same way. Even knowing how it ends. Even knowing you'd betray me, and I'd betray you. I'd do it all the same. Because it was... real. The only real thing I've had in ten years."

Keigo looked at him. Looked and doesn’t look away. “Doesn’t change anything.

Somewhere above, the screeching gets louder. Voices are heard more clearly, and it's hard to make out who. The stove is shaking. Rubble and other parts of this cursed building are raining down on their heads. It is unclear whether this huge thing will collapse on them now and they will be found holding onto the handles, or whether the structure will slide aside and the light will become visible.
Who finds them first—the heroes, the League, the rescuers—will determine if they will return to their wars right now.
But this conversation is something that was said in the dark... That's what stays with them.
Even when one burns the other's wings.
Even when one kills the other's work partner.
Even when they meet in battle as enemies.
Because it's their choice. An adult, conscious, not forgiven.
That's how they love each other.