Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Oh, you aren’t real,” Dabi states plainly, as though it must be fact. It isn’t a fact, though, because Dabi isn’t real. Hawks knows he can’t be real, because this is all some sort of dream, although he feels as though he shouldn’t be in a dream at the moment. He had been… busy. Doing… something. Then he was fading into a scene, a memory. Back to he and Dabi sitting together in Dabi’s old room at the PLF headquarters, before the whole building was destroyed in the raid. They had kissed in this room, just once, tentatively, a week before Hawks killed Bubaigawara and Dabi burned Hawks near to death in his manic rage. 

So, Dabi couldn’t be real, because they couldn’t be in the PLF mansion. Hawks has been with a team of heroes for weeks now, chasing after Midoriya and fighting villains at every turn. After the mansion Lady Nagant had sent them to exploded, they’d lost track of Midoriya. It had been less than a week and they’d run into their fair share of villains. There was one, a woman… a dream quirk… right? Hawks feels dazed--maybe it’s her fault. And if that’s the case, then Dabi really is not real. 

He feels real, though. 

His consciousness feels like it’s blinking awake, yet he’s moving already. It’s that first kiss again. Hawks leaning forward into Dabi, their lips just barely touching in a chaste kiss. The best kiss he’s ever had. It’s nice, at first, just the memory of this moment. But then Hawks comes back to himself--Dabi, Todoroki Touya, his wings burning, his slow-going recovery--and he jerks backward. At first, they just stare at each other. Everyone had talked about Dabi revealing his real hair color as white, but this isn’t how Hawks had pictured it. It’s white, but it has depth to it, like traces of the black dye are still lingering, and there are bits of red at the roots. Sorta like Endeavor’s color. Or maybe more akin to Shouto, with the bi-coloring.  

In front of Hawks, Dabi keeps squinting at him, like he’s trying to figure out just what he’s looking at. Then the expression drops, and he plainly remarks, “Oh, you aren’t real.”

Yu is in the middle of a very nice movie date with her ex when Shinji shakes her out of the dream state. He’s in casual clothes, and a plain-looking young woman stands awkwardly a few feet behind him. Yu blinks at them both.

“Is this a dream?” She asks.

Shinji--because there’s no way she can think of him as Kamui Woods in a worn hoodie and sweatpants--nodded solemnly. 

“You’re in my dream?” Yu deadpans, because this all felt ridiculous somehow, but she couldn’t place why, exactly. 

“We were attacked by a villain sent by All for One. She took us by surprise with some kind of dreamlike state quirk. It feels like a dream and attempts to fulfill memories or fantasies, but actually we are just in some pocket-dimension state that her quirk creates. Edgeshot and I heard her explain it while you all vanished.” 

Yu blinks again, slower this time to make it obvious she found this all a little stupid. “So what, you guys heard her evil spiel and we just missed it?” 

Shinji nods. 

Okay, why not.

“So why is your girlfriend here?”

“Why is your ex-boyfriend from a year and a half ago here?” He counters.

Yu turns to look at Mitsuo, a man who she tried so hard to make it work with, but the hero’s job was just too much work, too much time away, and too much danger. Not to mention how much he hated her flaunting herself for the cameras. His face looks a little dazed, a little lost, and confused as hell. 

“Pretty sure he isn’t real,” Yu says to Shinji, who levels her with a stern look.

Behind Yu, Mitsuo pipes up. “Whoa, I am real!”

Before she can argue back, Shinji interrupts to clarify that his girlfriend is very much real and that it seems other people have somehow been dragged into this whole mess with them. Yu is disinclined to believe him on this one, but Shinji seems to be in his stern Hero Kamui Woods Mode, and reluctantly Yu figures it’s time to get her mind in gear and act less like the heartbroken Yu and more like the powerful Mt Lady.

 Kamui gives her and Mitsuo some time to get themselves together before they are supposed to head out. Apparently, Kamui had found them by simply opening a door wherever he and his girlfriend had been and then just walking right on through. The plan is then to just hope that works a second time and pray they find their fellow heroes--and whatever romantic entanglement they are trapped in here with. Before they can leave, though, the balcony door in Yu’s apartment (which isn’t her real apartment) opens and Shinya comes stumbling through. He’s holding hands with a woman Yu remembers him going on a couple of dates with prior to the war with the PLF beginning. 

“Great,” Yu says, “Shinya’s here. Less work for us.”

The six of them leave through the kitchen pantry.

The pantry door does not open to Yu’s pantry, but instead the door swings into the kitchen just to reveal traditional shoji doors behind it. Yu groans and slides that door open to find an engawa veranda and a rock garden. Walking along the path is Endeavor and a white-haired woman Yu can only assume is his wife. 

The group shuffles through the pantry door and the following veranda door, everyone bumping shoulders and nobody knowing where to stand. 

“Okay,” Yu says, “who wants to go snap Endeavor and his wife out of it.”

Obviously, no one wants to, but Shinya heaves a heavy sigh and stands up as straight as he can. 

“I suppose I can.”

He can feel the group all watching him with anxious eyes as he paces toward where Endeavor is showing a middle-aged woman around the rock garden. From where Shinya’s at, he can’t make out what they’re saying, but their body language isn’t what he expects from a long-married couple. She’s nervous, fidgeting with her sleeves, arms in front of her, shoulders slightly tense—her body language closed off. As for Endeavor, he’s stilted. He’s pointing at something random, speaking for a moment, and then looking around until he finds something new to point out. 

Shinya had been in a memory of when he went on his second date with Aiya, which wasn’t too long ago now. Perhaps the Todorokis are also in a moment not long after they met. 

That doesn’t make sense, though. Endeavor still bears the long scar down his face from fighting the High-End Nomu, and his wife, while lovely in a snowy way, shows her age in soft wrinkles around her eyes and the lax ways her body sags slightly in different places. 

Now that he considers it, Yu still has that scar across her eye that she earned during the raid, and he and Shinji looks just as they did outside of this dream world as well. 

What had that villain said? Her quirk felt dreamlike, but really they’re just in another place. Despite being in these memories and dressing the part, their bodies haven’t changed. 

Shinya steels himself and steps forward. He saw Dabi’s video on Endeavor, they all did, and he has no desire to insert himself into the misfortune of the man’s marriage, but they need to get out of this and defeat the villain responsible. Besides, his wife certainly does not deserve to be here, reliving the beginning of her surely awful marriage, any longer than need be. Shinya takes the man by the arm and shakes him. 

“Time to wake up, Endeavor.” 

Enji blinks out of the daze slowly. Edgeshot is shaking his arm insistently and Rei’s soft grey eyes are boring into him. 

“Enji.” She says. 

He can only stare back. He saw Rei not too long ago at the hospital after the raid, but that had been his first time seeing her in years. She’s just as beautiful as ever, but her eyes look pained, her brow knit. 

“What is this?” Enji turns sharply to Edgeshot, who sighs in response.

“There was a villain, recall?” He says. Enji nods, now out of his daze able to remember the short-haired woman. She had a scythe and a purple and yellow outfit. Edgeshot continues. “We’re all stuck in her quirk, and it looks like our most recent romantic--ah…”

“Yes,” Enji states, hoping that will stop what uncomfortable thing Edgeshot is about to say.

“Right, well, it looks like they get summoned to join us here. It seems as though it’s all constructed out of our memories but we’re still our present selves, nothing about our bodies has changed.”

“Good,” Enji says, while internally processing the situation as fast as he can. He turns back to Rei, who still looks scared and confused, but at least slightly less so than a moment before. “I apologize that you are caught up in this. I promised you and the children would be kept safe, and instead you are a victim to this villain’s quirk. I will see you safely out of this, and then make sure you do not have to see me again. I promise.”

Rei’s grey eyes gleam under a few stray white hairs as she takes it in, and Enji hopes she’s feeling alright when her face softens and she sighs into a soft smile. “That’s not true, Enji,” she says, and he almost argues before she stops him. “You’ll have to see me when Shouto brings Touya home, won’t you?”

The hope she has is admirable, and so much more than Enji himself has in him. He’s too emotional of a man, especially for the Number 1. He feels as his eyes begin to tear up, and Rei looks at him in that same judgemental way she did when he cried back at the hospital.

Edgeshot, wisely, turns away.

“We were just fighting him,” Shouto says into his phone, “and he vanished.”

“Fighting him? ” His brother yells more than asks. Fuyumi and Natsuo are together on the call, panicked and not without reason.

He thought he had been getting through to him, too. 

Their fight had turned from blasting fire wildly into dancing around each other, exchanging words. Touya had been calming down, had been asking questions, desperately trying to defend his actions and his vengeance. More importantly, he was listening to Shouto. He’d started to acknowledge that his siblings missed him, his mother, however much he resented her. He even believed Shouto when he’d said they all moved to a new house without Endeavor. 

It had been progress.

And then his oldest brother had vanished into thin air. He’d tried calling his father, but there was no answer, which wasn’t unusual lately. At least, not until his siblings called, saying their mother had just vanished into thin air.

“Shouto please be careful!” comes Fuyumi’s worried voice through the phone. 

“I will,” he says, “but I have to go.”

Bakugo is yelling at him, calling him “half-and-half bastard” and something about hurrying. As if he isn’t completely panicked himself right now. Of course I’m hurrying. Their class has spent so much of the time since the raid aiding civilians, relocating people, fighting villains, only to run into Dabi out of nowhere. Even Dabi had seemed surprised. His friends had tried supporting him in his fight against his brother, but now it hardly seemed to matter. Touya had vanished, his flames snuffed out across the warehouse room they’d been fighting in, and no one knew how to react. Except for Yaoyorozu, it seemed, who did the logical thing and called their teacher.

Eraserhead joined up with them and soon got All Might on the phone. Turns out he knows roughly where Endeavor last was, including the other five heroes who were with him--none of whom are responding to calls.

Hanging up with his sister and brother, Shouto runs back over to Eraserhead, his face grim. “Todoroki, All Might lost track of Endeavor and the others, we should--”

“My mother has also vanished.” Shouto interrupts.

Everyone is silent for a moment. Then, Eraser nods. “Okay, so it’s a family affair, then. Let’s get your siblings before anyone else goes missing.”

Deciding this whole thing is a product of lucid dreaming, Dabi decides to go back to kissing Hawks. The memory of it is nice, and in his dreams he can take things further and it won’t even hurt his scars. He cups his hand around the back of Hawks’ neck and tugs him in closer, and the birdbrain has the good sense to follow him into the kiss. Of course he does, this is a dream, and a good one at that. He never has good dreams like this, so he might as well relish this one while it lasts. 

Hawks’ lips aren’t quite as soft as Dabi remembers, but memory can be deceiving like that. He also feels like his hand was more buried in Hawks’ hair before, but now his hand ghosts across soft, short hairs. Dabi flutters his eyes open and pulls away slightly, glimpsing the end of a burn scar along Hawks’ cheek and crawling down his neck under his high collar. He puts his fingers lightly to Hawks’ chin and turns his head, the man gasping softly as Dabi touches him. It’s cute, yet the moment feels fragile. Slowly but assuredly, Dabi leans back in and presses a kiss to the scar on Hawks’ face, feeling hot air on his cheek as Hawks shudders out a nervous breath. 

It’s funny, in a way; in his waking thoughts, Dabi pictures Hawks in much worse condition. His pretty-boy face is more mutilated, his wings completely gone, burns across his neck and arms and back. In his nightmares, Hawks looks half-dead, soaked in sweat and Twice’s blood and charred to near-death. Here, though, he retains his looks, though the short hair shows his young age even more than before. Perhaps in a good dream, Hawks deserves to look a little less awful. He wonders how Hawks really looks right now--it can’t be like this. 

Dabi is frozen in thought for a moment, and Hawks takes the opportunity to push on his shoulders, shoving Dabi away just a little. Dabi drinks in the sight of Hawks now that he’s leaning back a little again. He’s dressed just like when they were here before: hero coat off, lazily tossed across the bed, but the rest of his costume remaining. Even the gloves are still on. Hawks is staring at Dabi, too, and part of Dabi wonders what he might be thinking, if only he were the real Hawks. The real Hawks would not kiss him though--no reason to without the spy mission--and would probably try to arrest him or kill him instead. 

Hawks scrunches his face up at Dabi for a moment. “Wait,” he says, “What do you mean I’m not real? You’re the one who isn’t real. None of this is.” 

Well isn’t this interesting. 

“Ah, actually hero, I think you’ll find that you're the fake one here. This is just some dream I’m having. An imagined version of what your current self might look like superimposed over a memory, that's all.”

Hawks blinks at him. “Yes.” He states, and Dabi smiles because he won this argument very easily. And then the man speaks again. “Except the opposite way. I’m just imagining you from what Jeanist and Endeavor described after the raid. They said you had white hair. Can’t figure out why I gave you red roots, though.” He mumbled the last bit, and Dabi reacts by self-consciously patting his hair. 

“My hair looks this way because that's how it is. You, on the other hand--there’s no way you came out of all that fire looking that good, birdie. You just kept your looks so I could have a nice dream. But the in-dream meta is kinda turning me off, so if we can stop now, I’d prefer that.”

Hawks is blushing fiercely now, which is a good look on him. Matches the feathers. His face is scrunched up unattractively like he has to shit, and it’s endearing. Dabi likes this dream-Hawks, it’s all the good bits of the man without too much of the murder and betrayal. The guilt of still harboring feelings can be compartmentalized so long as he’s in his dreams.

Hawks looks like he’s trying to come to some decision. He’s thinking too much. Dabi decides for him--there’s no need to think through any of it right now. He dives forward again and pulls Hawks back down into a kiss, falling back against the bed. It’s so unlike how Dabi has imagined kisses feeling. He and Hawks had previously shared only soft brushes of lips, nothing more, nothing intense or heady. But now Hawks has his fingers in Dabi’s hair, gripping tight and pressing hard into a kiss. His tongue swipes across Dabi’s burned lower lip, then down across the top staple above his chin. He hadn’t known he was sensitive there. Involuntary shivers whisper through his body and he sighs breathily against Hawks’ mouth. Hawks, to his credit, takes the opportunity to dip his tongue into Dabi’s mouth, and Dabi promptly short-circuits. 

Hawks is exploring his mouth.

Hawks is exploring his mouth.

He’s running the tip of his tongue against his teeth, sucking on his upper lip, biting down on his lower. Everything is warm and wet and if Dabi didn’t feel dazed before, he certainly does now. His blood is leaving him, running south and it’s all too new for him. Hawks’ hands keep moving, carding through his hair, running down his sides, resting at his hips and squeezing right at the pelvis, right where it aches to be held yet doesn’t disturb any of his scarring. Hawks’ kisses trail away from Dabi’s lips to follow just above the line of his scarring, peppering his cheek all the way back to his ear, where he whispers, “Kiss back, Dabs.” 

Dabi doesn’t kiss back, he feels instead like he’s melting into a puddle underneath Hawks. Something in his bird brain must notice because he props himself up suddenly and tilts his head at Dabi. “What’s wrong? You started this.”

“This--uh--isn’t how I expected it to feel.” Dabi stutters out quickly. 

Hawks stares unblinkingly.

“You know, I um, I told you. When we first kissed. I’ve never, ah…”

“Aww,” Hawks croons, “Even in my dreams you’re all awkward about this.”

“I’m not the dream here, you are,” Dabi reminds him.

“Sure, sure.” 

Oh god, Hawks is just humoring him now. What a teasing asshole.

A too-innocent smile crosses Hawks’ face. “If this is your dream, how do you picture kissing me, huh? Can’t be in the PLF mansion, you hate those guys.”

Dabi huffs and pushes Hawks off of him so he can sit up again. “Oh yeah, but you think about me in my room at the mansion all the time, do you?”

“Sure,” Hawks says breezily.

Dabi narrows his eyes. “Why would you admit that to me?” 

“Easy, you aren’t real.”

He stays silent a moment longer, just watching Hawks, who keeps staring at him. “Fine. I don’t picture it like this, you’re right.”

Hawks tilts his head, clearly waiting for Dabi to expand on that.

“My family was always traditional.” Dabi takes a deep breath. It’s not easy to talk about himself, about what he wishes for or thinks about, but it helps that nothing feels real. He opens up. “I used to imagine us with a nice futon, a big one, and soft blankets--nothing that would pull on my staples, you know? And rain, just cozy and alone.” He pauses a moment. This is all too soft for talking to Hawks, and he feels a deep need to ruin it. “I stopped thinking like that after you stabbed Twice, though,” Dabi finished, properly sour. 

Hawks looks nice and guilty for a second, but it doesn’t last, because in a truly awful moment for Dabi’s motion sickness, the scenery shifts around them. First, it’s the walls--the dimensions pull closer, push farther, and shift in color. The bedding below them morphs into softer textures and Dabi fists the new blankets in his hands. A strange sensation washes over his sensitive skin as the clothes he’s wearing become new garments. Soft, silken fabric drapes across him and a sudden tightness develops across his torso. There’s a pattering noise around them--the sudden sound of rain--and the lights dim. Dabi blinks. A futon. Soft blankets. Silk yukatas. Rain. The floor is even tatami mats. 

Huh.

Hawks makes a choked sound that might’ve been him holding back a bird scream. Good, Dabi doesn’t want to lose his eardrums, even in a dream. If it is a true dream--that shifting sensation when the room changed around them was far too tactile to be a dream. 

But that leaves the far stranger problem: where are they? And how the hell did everything morph like that? 

Hawks is still trying to figure out how he got into the yukata. He isn’t sure he’s ever really worn traditional clothes. Certainly, he never did while growing up; his mother didn’t care for that sort of thing, his father never cared about anything to do with him, and the Commission didn’t bother with anything traditional. He’d never done any photoshoots that featured traditional clothing--he was more of the “young and modern” type. The fabric on his skin is cool and loose, the ties at his waist snug but not tight, and there are already slits in the back where his still-small wings can move easily. Traditional clothes are more comfortable than Hawks’ ever assumed they would be, and without thinking first, he says so to Dabi. 

Dabi stares at Hawks like he just grew a second head, or maybe an extra set of wings. “Usually there are more layers.” He states plainly. 

Right, the Todoroki family is fairly traditional. Dabi probably has a lot more experience with kimonos and such. 

For a minute, they both just sit there. Dabi fidgets with the blankets while Hawks just watches him, unsure what to do. The scene responded to what Dabi described, which means Dabi has will here. 

“We’re both real.”

“What? Dabi snaps.

“Think about it--first we were in a memory I think back on sometimes, and then when you describe a fantasy you used to picture, that’s where we end up. We both have control, at least to a degree. That means we’re both real.”

Dabi looks off to the side in a show of annoyance and appears to poke at his staples with his tongue. Hawks had started to notice that was a habit of Dabi’s back when he was spying. If the man’s guard was down, Dabi tended to thoughtlessly poke at the inside of his cheek, as though he might’ve once had a habit of biting his lip and had to cope with his scars impeding said habit. It was also just cute whenever Dabi started doing it. 

It’s cute now, too. He looks so wholesome swathed in blankets and bathed in warm yellow light from a lamp in the corner. His white hair is fluffier without the cheap dye and Hawks just wants to run his hands through it. Despite reasoning out that he and Dabi must both be real, his mind still feels hazy, like he’s still deep in a dream state. It takes all his self-control not to dive into Dabi and start touching him all over, find every soft part of him and put his hands there. 

Dabi seems to break out of the spell, though, because he starts unwrapping all the blankets from around himself and rises. They’re just on a futon mattress, so there’s no rolling out of bed and flopping gracelessly to the floor like Hawks would have expected from Dabi. He’s seen him roll off of couches and slouch his way out of chairs around the PLF mansion, but this Dabi is different. Maybe it’s the tatami mats, but Dabi walks differently. He steps lightly--barefoot, he’s got scars on his feet--graceful, almost, as he explores the room they inhabit. The man Hawks remembers always stomped around in his heavy boots, but in this room, he’s careful. 

“Dabi.” 

Dabi turns to face Hawks, a question in his eyes.

“I know…” Hawks begins, not sure how exactly he wants to start. “I know what it’s like to wish for things, simple things, that it seems like we can’t have. I could tell you a million things I wish I could’ve done or had growing up, places I wish I’d gone.” Dabi is still looking at Hawks, expectant. “You could tell me what you wish you’d had?” 

He’s offering an olive branch, and despite hesitating for a moment, Dabi takes it. His bare, scarred feet pad across the woven mats over to the bedding, and when he sits, it’s so their thighs touch. Hawks has to turn his head to look at Dabi, who gazes down at him with his bright blue eyes. 

For a long time, they don’t talk. Nothing about their pasts or what they wish they’d had but couldn’t all through their lives. Instead, Hawks surges up toward Dabi’s lips, catching them in a firm and desperate kiss. His head nearly spins when he feels Dabi press in just as intensely. Hawks pushes his hand through that soft white hair, deep enough that he knows he must be touching the red roots. Two hands place themselves on Hawks’ shoulders and push and then Hawks is on his back and laying across the bedding and Dabi is chasing after him, cupping his face over where that burn scar mars his cheek, laying on top of his body, their chests pressed together, Hawks’ breathing heavy and quick because this is the real Dabi. Maybe everything around them is fake, but the man kissing him is real. That assurance is all that Hawks needs. 

Their group attempts to talk about a strategy based on what they know about the villain’s quirk, but the fact is that they know painfully little about the woman, so the whole thing quickly becomes an argument about how they got into this mess rather than anything constructive. Enji regrets that he is a major part of this argument. 

The details of the argument are worthless, although there is merit in mentioning why they stopped to discuss strategy before they even found Hawks. 

Simply put: Hawks could not be found. After collecting Best Jeanist and his (highly fashionable) ex-girlfriend, they had proceeded into the next room in the same manner that apparently they had done to find Enji. Some of the best heroes in Japan, and the only thing they could think to do was walk through doors. Still. Their group, heroes and civilians together, left Jeanist’s apartment to find themselves in a messy bedroom. The bed was not made and a bloody mess of a first aid kit sat on the bedside table. Stray clothes and jackets were piled on a desk chair, and the accompanying desk was a mess of papers, food wrappers, and several of Hawks’ feathers nestled among pens in a ceramic mug. A disgusting place. Not to mention that Hawks himself was not present in the room.

They had poked around for a minute or two but quickly decided that if Hawks was not present, that meant he must have moved forward himself. Leaving through the closet door, though, they encountered a sliding shoji door. Mt. Lady informed him that the same phenomenon had occurred when they left through her pantry to find Enji and Rei. Pushing the door aside, they tramped into a quiet bedroom complete with tatami flooring and an unkept futon mattress. Here, they found a couple of Hawks’ smaller, downier feathers among the blankets. This was also when Kamui Woods had sighed in a resigned way and said, “Hawks has got himself lost in here, somehow, hasn’t he?” While no one disagreed, this was the issue that led them to their current disagreement.

Presently, Kamui Woods is lecturing Mt. Lady for not paying attention and therefore not being aware enough when the villain ambushed them. In fairness to Mt. Lady, Enji and Best Jeanist had also been distracted, and clearly, Hawks had been as well. While true that she used to seem rather vapid, for some time now the young woman had been nothing but dedicated to being a hero. If only a little, Enji envies her--he took far too long to come around, and even still he was learning, bettering himself more and more each day. 

Behind him, at the end of their party, Rei’s solemn eyes follow his movements. He can feel her, watching him. 

Rei should not be trapped here, stuck in some dreamscape with her abusive husband. For that reason alone, Enji needs them to escape as quickly as possible. 

Unfortunately, since it seems that with Hawks vanished to who-knows-where, that will not be happening. He wishes he could hold it against him, but Hawks is young, overworked, and traumatized from his childhood and recent events with the League, including Enji’s own son. A dreamlike romantic getaway of sorts might be quite freeing for the young hero, and Enji wishes that Hawks could actually have such a thing. As the world currently is, though, there is no room for such things. Perhaps after. Enji thinks he will encourage Hawks to find something healthy and happy, be it friends or romance. He himself had not made room for that in his twenties, and in learning from his mistakes, he feels he should help Hawks lead a good life. 

After they escape from this dream world, that is to say.

Eventually, the Lurkers decide they should keep moving. This was what Enji wanted to do anyway, but he is trying to refrain from engaging in a heated discussion with Rei so close and so clearly listening and watching. 

The next place they end up is the yakitori place Hawks took Enji to in Fukuoka, and it takes all his willpower to quell his flames. 

“I know that any of us could have been tricked by this, but I do wish Hawks could stay in one place,” Enji sighs. 

“You know what they say,” Edgeshot mutters, “He’s the man who is too fast. Was there ever any chance of him staying in one spot too long?”

Mt. Lady’s boyfriend (or are they not together? Enji does not want to pry into his coworkers’ personal lives like this) twirls a half-eaten yakitori stick. “You’d think his girl would want to slow down after a couple of these.”

Mt. Lady makes a face. “Maybe she did outside of these dreams, too. Hawks hasn’t mentioned a girlfriend so I’m assuming he doesn’t have one, at least not right now he doesn’t.”

“You think he’s stuck with an ex?” Best Jeanist asks.

Mt. Lady half-shrugs half-nods, and it seems the conversation is done when a cool voice speaks from the back of their group.

“Strange to think an ex-girlfriend would want to engage in all these memories, or fantasies, whatever they are. She’d have to still hold him well in her heart, wouldn’t she? To want to create these different scenes over and over.” Rei’s eyes are on the half-eaten chicken as she speaks, focused more on her thoughts than any of the people around her. “If you all want to speculate on his personal life, perhaps you should afford a little more optimism. They both must want to live in these happy moments together just a little longer. I believe that is promising for their interest in each other, if nothing else.” She smiles ever so slightly, and Enji feels another weight on his heart.

Good. He tells himself. The weight of guilt is what I deserve, and so much more.

Kamui Woods nods at Rei while squeezing his girlfriend's hand. “Well, we’ll just have to be faster than Hawks if we want to catch up to him.”

“If we are lucky,” Enji says, “maybe he will land himself in something that he’ll want to take his time with and give us time to catch up.”

“Oh god, I don’t wanna walk in on Hawks,” Mt. Lady groans.

Enji sputters and tries to backtrack, “No--no, that’s not what I meant at all. I wasn’t even thinking--no. I mean--” They all start to chuckle at him, and Enji sighs. “You all know what I meant.” 

They do, but it was the first reason to laugh a little since ten of them had ended up stuck together, and even the civilians are smiling. Fine. Endeavor isn’t normally a hero that puts smiles on people’s faces, but at least he can do this for them all. 

They move on. 

The next place they end up is a botanical garden, and Enji watches with watery eyes as Mt. Lady has to coax Rei away from the blooming blue rindous. He tries hard to memorize the way her grey eyes shine as she coos over them, and not for the first time he wishes she could have had a better life, one without him.

The garden, for all its beauty, is rather devoid of other people and they eventually realize that Hawks is already gone. They had split up to search for Hawks, but reconvene by a garden shed all looking different levels of frustrated and bored. 

“I’m gonna kill that bird once we find him,” Mt. Lady says, and Enji huffs a little because he can’t help but empathize.

They go through the greenhouse door.

On the other side are cats. 

A chorus of “awws” coos from the group, and Enji briefly considers exiting back the way they came and abandoning everyone. He doesn’t, but he wishes he could.

The building is a cat cafe and a small one at that. They end up wasting precious time prying Edgeshot’s sort-of girlfriend away from the cats, and then more time trying to get the small beasts to stop using Kamui Woods as a scratching post. 

They leave out the back door, and Enji almost cries in frustration when faced with a small aviary. 

He marches straight from where they enter to a staff door, determined to keep moving forward. 

A snicker comes from behind him, a voice he can’t quite place, so it must be from one of the civilian significant others. “I’m sorry, but of course it’s birds. ” 

There are more laughs at that, as though everyone was holding in the same laugh. 

Even Enji has to smile fondly, because yes, of course it’s birds.

When he walks through the staff door, though, the smile drops from his face. Yes, Enji knows that Hawks likely missed out on so much growing up. The young man doesn’t speak on his life, but after Touya--Dabi--made that video, Enji and Best Jeanist had to ask at least once. He knew that Hawks didn’t have much of a childhood to speak of, tragically not dissimilar to Enji’s children, and his adult life was still ruled by his work until he’d lost his wings, and now their lives all revolve around chasing Midoriya and tracking the League. Even still, Enji closed his eyes and silently cursed Hawks. 

Before Enji sprawled a busy, densely packed hanami festival. Booths all crammed together, tourists and locals in a mix of modern clothing and traditional, plenty of flashy quirks all out for show, fair games, couples, children, school groups, runners, pet dogs, food and sake and cherry trees all in full bloom, the golden light of evening and paper lanterns, and plenty of space for Hawks to get lost in.

“Well Endeavor,” Edgeshot spoke beside him, “You said Hawks might end up somewhere he would want to take his time. Looks like we’ve got that.”

Hawks and Dabi had gotten a bit carried away. They’d made out for a little while, sure, but then they started talking, and it became like a game. Where would they go next? What inane things did they wish they could do?

Hawks had wanted for so long to take Dabi to his favorite restaurant, and despite complaining about the food, Dabi clearly enjoyed it. Dabi dragged their dream into a garden and admired the flowers while bantering back and forth, which accidentally ended up with them stumbling into a cat cafe. The cats gave Hawks the idea of the aviary, and the burning look in Dabi’s eyes told Hawks he’d never be forgiven for dragging him away from cats that magically didn’t want to bite and claw his staples. 

They were talking about all the different places, sort of softly chatting while Hawks held out a stick of feed for a curious parakeet. They’d been comparing things they’d missed in their childhoods, which was a little bittersweet, when they realized neither one had ever been to hanami before. Endeavor had considered the flower viewing festivities a waste of time, and then as Touya got older, his parents didn’t want him leaving home for a busy public space like that when he was so prone to illness and injury. Hawks shared that he never went with his mother because she had worried he would want to spend money while there, and then later on the Commission considered it a waste of time. 

Dabi never went, despite Toga pleading with him to go with her, because he was too easily recognized. Hawks didn’t have time for anything other than hero work, modeling, and basic daily things like eating too much and sleeping too little. 

“I’d never even worn traditional clothes until that room we were in earlier,” Hawks had said.

He figures now that that was the sentence that sentenced them to their current situation. 

They are in hakama, which is oddly formal for what Hawks had imagined, but he decided to blame Dabi what felt like hours ago, now. It had been bright out when they had started, but now it’s the golden light of evening, the lanterns are starting to glow, he’s got a stick of yakitori in his hand, and the world feels right. 

Hawks hums around a bite of chicken, swallows, and says, “So… when do I get to win you a giant stuffed animal?” 

Dabi smiles--it’s small and a little grotesque considering his staples but endearing in its own way--before he replies, “Sorry, pretty bird, but I’ll only accept a giant stuffed Stain.”

Despite it being absurd and Hawks despising Stain, a few steps later Hawks spots a game booth with a line of giant chibi Stains hanging around the top. 

“Well, would you look at that, Dabs? You summoned us our very own Stain games.”

It’s a knife throw, because of course it is. It’s Stain themed, after all. He makes Dabi hold his chicken.

They’d already discovered coin purses tucked in their sleeves, so Hawks fishes his out to pay for five small blades, five throws. They’re balanced terribly--nothing like his light and sharp feathers--but Hawks was trained for all kinds of combat. He can throw a few shit knives. He takes the first knife between his thumb and forefinger and pulls his hand back over his shoulder so he throws with his arm in a straight line while his left hand is straight out to point at the target. In part, he’s using this show of technique just to show off to Dabi, but also because these cheap knives have been used by children too many times and are truly something awful. In the back of his mind squirms the niggling thought that since he and Dabi control every aspect of this world, he could just imagine better knives, but there’s something to be said about the complete fair games experience. More than that, Hawks isn’t paying a lot of attention to logic at the moment. This whole place is so immersive, too immersive--so much so that he’s not thinking enough about their strange situation and instead letting himself go to the fantasy. 

His first throw hits its mark perfectly. 

If Dabi’s laughter (more of a cackle, really) is anything to go by, Hawks might not be the only one letting himself be taken by this dream. 

He hits the second target dead on. 

The third and fourth are equally perfect, but the fifth one gets dropped when Dabi leans down to surprise him with a kiss on the cheek right as the blade leaves his hand.

The guy running the stand laughs good-naturedly at them and lets them have the grand prize anyway. 

“Good throwing, hero,” Dabi says, and Hawks thinks it might be an insult if not for the affectionate lilt to the man’s rough voice.

Hawks rolls his eyes and holds his hand out. “Alright, I won you your Stain. Give me my chicken back.”

“Oh, I hope you don’t mean this,” Dabi says, twirling a stick with no chicken on it between his fingers.

“You villain, you ate my chicken!” 

Dabi shrugs. “If it’s any consolation, probably none of this food is real anyway.”

“That means the giant Stain you’ve got there won’t be real.”

Dabi sighs dramatically, “Our time together might be brief; I’ll just have to make the most of it while it lasts.”

Hawks finds another booth with chicken, ordering several sticks. The moment Hawks pays and has his hand full of chicken, Dabi snatches his free hand like he’s stealing it and drags him over to grab a beef skewer for himself. For the brief minutes Dabi has his hand, though, Hawks can feel his heart in his throat. 

Why does he feel like a high school girl with her crush? Why is this--he and Dabi--so easy right now, when before it was so hard? It must be the festival, something in the cliches easing the two of them along. Just the two of them, exploring, walking along like this, the temptation to set aside their lives is all too easy to give in to. And as they stop to grab drinks of sake and watch a woman play a shamisen, he lets himself get taken in by the dream. 

Next to him, Dabi drinks sake.

Maybe he is falling for the dream, too, Hawks thinks, and then he stops thinking, tucks himself against Dabi’s side, and enjoys the performance.

Dabi stills for a moment when he feels Hawks but doesn’t move away. 

After a few songs and slowly sipping a warm cup of sake, Dabi hears Hawks speak, even though the man doesn’t move at all from where he’s pressed against Dabi’s side.

“I’m sorry, for everything.”

Something in Dabi simmers. 

“You probably don’t want to hear this, I know, but… I spent a while thinking about it. Outside of this dream, I mean. So… I’m sorry. For all the lying, I’m sorry if you ever believed I lied to you about how I felt about you. More than anything, I’m sorry I--I’m sorry about Bubaigawara. There’s no going back and changing things now, so I’m not going to waste my time or yours wishing things were different. Things are what they are, so all we can do is move forward from where we’re at. So, yeah. I apologize for manipulating friendship with Bubaigawara and everyone else, and I apologize for making you feel manipulated romantically or sexually or otherwise.”

Dabi doesn’t react, won’t let himself react. He doesn’t reach up to brush the scar under his eye when a bead of blood leaks out, doesn’t let his breath hitch too much, he just watches the musician play. He’s still trying to form a response when Hawks must decide he isn’t done.

“You know, I’ll admit, though. When you said you suspected me the whole time, I had to wonder why you let me get so close. Sure, I understand having me close to the PLF, waiting to catch me in a lie. Must’ve been a game to you, huh? But letting me in your room, letting me sit on your bed--kiss you? I’ve gotta say, I never could understand that one, Dabi.” And then Hawks moves, finally. He props himself up on his arms and leans around to look Dabi right in the eyes.

Dabi avoids the question. “You know my name, you know.”

Hawks’ expression flattens. “And you know mine. But I’ve always called you Dabi.”

“And I’ve always called you Hawks, Takami,” Dabi bites out.

That sets the hero off. “Don’t call me that name, unless you love yours so much, Todoroki.”

“Fine then. Keigo. Like that?”

“Better, I guess, Touya.”

It’s all too bitterly spoken for what would be intimate for real lovers, and the notion makes something cold settle over Dabi’s heart. Before he has time to freeze completely, though, Hawks’ tense face collapses into a new expression, this one tired and a little soft. His eyes slide away from Dabi and back out to the festival around them. 

“Maybe we should just try to find out where we are, even,” Hawks mutters. It’s less to Dabi and more to himself, which means Dabi can elect to ignore it.

He answers the earlier question, instead. Softly, he speaks, “It was a game. I thought it’d be fun to catch you in your lies. Somehow, somewhere along the way, I started to get caught up in it as well; the last part of me that was capable of caring about anything. I thought that had all burned up years ago with most of my skin, but just like this body, it seems there was still more to burn.

“It wasn’t a lie for me either. I assumed it was all an act for you, though. Figured it had to be, and I was just a fool for letting myself fall for you a little bit anyway.”

Hawks is looking at him with discerning eyes, all yellow and sharp and looking too deeply, squinting a little bit like he’s thinking too much. Dabi turns his head. Hawks moves closer.

He reaches his hand up to Dabi’s face--smooth skin that doesn’t have years of scarring, doesn’t have seams splitting open from worsening his burns trying single-mindedly to kill his own family--and cups Dabi’s cheek. His thumb runs over the line of staples on Dabi’s cheek, and Dabi knows another kiss is coming.

He can’t have that, though. 

“I’m glad your wings are growing back.” I’m sorry, too.

“They’re taking their time. It’s pretty weird not having them. I keep falling from heights I’m used to flying from.” I won’t lie and say it doesn’t suck, but it could be worse.

There’s too much between them, and Dabi knows he can’t have this. He can’t. He’s probably going to die soon, and--all things considered--so will Hawks.

Keigo.

When Hawks moves closer, Dabi doesn’t just let Hawks kiss him. He opens his mouth and murmurs, “Keigo, ” and lets him in.

Touya kisses back.

Luckily for Shouto, the search doesn’t take too long. They head to where All Might knew the heroes were last and split into groups to cover the area. Hagakure, Ojiro, and Koda find a woman dressed in purple robes with yellow lining and wielding a scythe lounging around in an old warehouse and cackling to herself. They alert the rest of the class, and everyone quickly surrounds the area. The students better suited to stealth take to the upper levels, while the heavy-hitters watch the exits. Eraserhead decides that because they don’t know precisely what her quirk is, he won’t erase it just yet. 

No one disagrees--they all share the same gut feeling, it seems.

Shouto watches the east-facing windows and doors. When the main team enters, he can watch through the broken window when the confrontation begins.

Aizawa brings with him Iida (likely for his speed in case the villain tries to run), Uraraka (since she is a heavy hitter, especially with so much broken machinery and heavy crates she can use as gravitational ammo, so to speak), and Shinso (because Shinso has a good quirk and is Aizawa’s favorite, which no one minds.) Aizawa leads the group, heading straight in. The confrontational approach was less popular with the class, but Aizawa determined that she was likely to surrender anyway given that she will be outnumbered, and they have surprise backup in the form of the rest of the class. Despite this making sense, Shouto still wishes they had just snuck in with their stealth squads and had Shinso brainwash her immediately. 

Legally, Shinso shouldn’t be here. He doesn’t have a license to fight or use his quirk, but again--Aizawa likes him, and he has a useful quirk for things like this. Besides, the country is in turmoil. No one is hung up on it. 

They approach. The woman in purple notices them, her manic glee falling flat with dead eyes while she watches the hero group come forward. 

“Come for your heroes? They sure are taking their sweet time--but I expected as much from a bunch of try-hard pros.”

She’s trying to taunt, but that won’t work on this group. Shouto knows them, and he knows that they’re all hard as steel when they want to be. Experience has taught all of them too well. 

“Where is Endeavor?” Eraserhead asks.

Her mouth slips into a sly smile. “He’s not here. Came looking for the big, bad child abuser?”

Not really. They’re here to find Shouto’s mother and brother; Endeavor is just a piece of the equation right now. 

“Just tell us what you’ve done,” Eraserhead deadpans.

That wicked smile grows and she must laugh under her breath, but Shouto can’t hear that from this far. 

“Talk. Now. ” 

Shouto recognizes that voice, it’s Eraserhead’s seriously-pissed-off voice. He must be impatient with so many top heroes missing in action.

She rolls her shoulders in an uncaring shrug. “Fine, fine, I only benefit from explaining to you.” Everyone seems to lean in simultaneously at that. She continues, “My quirk is technically just named 'Dreamscape,' but it’s more apt to call it 'Romantic Dreamscape' or maybe 'Romantic Getaway,' if you’re feeling clever.”

“I’m not,” Eraser says.

Shouto thinks he sees her roll her eyes. 

“My quirk traps anyone within a certain range in a pocket dimension which conforms to their romantic desires with whoever they last had a reciprocated romantic tie to. The real person, not a copy or something. They get snatched from whatever-the-fuck they’re doing and get kidnapped into my quirk as well. I used to sell my abilities to couples, but the cops started sniffing at me. Plus, creeps would try to get me to use my quirk to force their ex to talk to them.”

“You’ve trapped Endeavor and the others in your quirk, then. Why?”

She swings her scythe in a lazy circle. “Easy way to kidnap someone.”

“Why kidnap them? ” Eraserhead asks through his teeth. 

She gives a long-suffering sigh. “I should be able to use my quirk as I please. Sell it to couples, establish a real business instead of this shady cash-only bullshit. The Paranormal Liberation Front desired that for the world.” She spreads her arms wide as she speaks, continuing, “The longer I spent with them, the more I understand Shigarki’s vision. I can hinder these heroes and their loved ones, and when they reappear, they’ll be right here--vulnerable! When I take out Endeavor, Mt. Lady, Edgeshot, Kamui Woods, Best Jeanist, and especially Hawks , who killed one of the PLF’s Lieutenants and even Dabi never got to finish the job with, they’ll love me! They’ll make me one of their leaders. Maybe All For One will give me an extra quirk! I can’t lose!”

“Well,” Shinso says plainly, “you’re about to.”

“Wait!” Uraraka covers Shinso’s mouth, as though that will stop his quirk. It does stop the villain from responding, so if that’s what she is going for, it works at least. 

Shinso and Eraserhead give Uraraka matching confused glares. She levels them with a serious gaze in return before turning back to the villain and serving her best death stare.

Uraraka might be a little too round, soft, and pink to deal out Endeavor-level death glares, but Shouto has to commend her on her effort. 

“If you end your quirk, what happens to the people trapped inside of it?”

She makes a decent point. Shinso activating his quirk could very well lead to, at the very least, a brief stop on their quirk. That’s what happened to Midoriya, at least, when he lost control of Black Whip. 

The woman with the quirk in question blinks at Uraraka. There’s an awkward beat of silence before she answers, “Why the hell would I have ever tried ending my quirk with people inside of it? I don’t even think I could do that, to be honest.”

“So you don’t know what will happen to them?” Uraraka presses.

The villain shrugs.

Shinso and Eraserhead sigh in tandem. 

“Well, fine. We can do this the annoying way then,” Shinso says.

The villain brandishes her scythe, “Finally!” she yells, and then all five of them burst into action.

Several things happen at once. In no particular order, they are: Shinso and Eraserhead lash out with their capture weapons. This is a more practiced move for Eraser, so he is faster at getting his attack forward than Shinso. Uraraka hops backward, touching some discarded metal and activating her quirk. Iida’s engines fire and he shoots forward. From above, where the stealth team is already in the wings, Jiro’s sound waves pulse down in a sound attack. The villain leaps forward with her scythe, sweeping in a downward motion.

This is only the first movement of the fight, and already Shouto wishes he could be inside with his Heaven Piercing Wall and just end it. He knows he needs to trust in his class to do their part in this fight, and more than that, they are trusting him and all the others to remain in position around the building. What if she has backup coming, or what if she suddenly shows off an escape ability and makes for the exits? Just watching, though, is making his heart pound for his friends.

Uraraka jumps into a forward-flip, clearing the high-low swing of the villain’s scythe, which already swings too wide from the shock of Jiro’s soundwave. Her hand touches the woman and activates her quirk to float them both, as well as the metal she already had as a backup in case this move didn’t work. Eraser’s scarf catches the end of the scythe and he pulls it straight toward him, flipping the blade down, clearing his students to move more safely. Behind him, Shinso’s weapon flies out to bind the villain, who is kicking in the air and shrieking at Uraraka. Iida avoided the scythe by circling in a flank attack and now comes in from the side to pull Uraraka down just as a knife sneaks its way between the binding cloth and toward her lower leg. 

They move like a well-oiled machine, a class that’s been fighting together too long for teenagers, and in only a few slow-motion seconds, the fight is over. Uraraka releases her quirk, thanks Iida, shakes her legs a bit like she’s shaking off the fight, and turns back to the group. Eraserhead is already collecting the weapons and searching the villain for more, and Shinso signals for people to come join them.

Iida, a responsible class representative, turns and asks their captive, “What is your name, villain? We need to know what to call you when we turn you over to the police.”

Shouto misses whatever she says because he has to leave his window to go back to the main door so he can enter the building, but when he gets back within hearing range, Bakugo is inside already and laughing hard.

“What is there to laugh about, Bakugo?” Shouto asks once he’s close enough. The villain is looking rather put-out, her eyes fixed on the ground.

Serves her right.

Bakugo doesn’t answer--he’s too busy laughing. Instead, Kaminari turns and explains, “Her villain name is Baku.” Kaminari looks a little overwrought, probably from not only having to wait on the sidelines with Bakugo but also now watching him cackle over this.

“As in mythological dream-eaters?” Shouto asks, as confirmation.

Kaminari nods.

Bakugo recovers enough to point at Baku and yell, “You sell your quirk for romance, how the hell is that eating nightmares? Fuckin’ loser.”

Shouto agrees, just a little bit. 

“Hey, my quirk can become nightmarish!” Baku attempts to defend herself.

It is rather hard to defend oneself when handcuffed and wrapped in a capture weapon on a grimy floor in a warehouse. 

Indignantly, she huffs, “If you’re stuck with someone you ended up hating, then it could be a nightmare.”

“Yeah, a real shit date,” Bakugo chortles. He chortles.

“She’s right about that, at least,” Shouto says. Unfortunately, this makes Baku look a little too prideful, but so be it. “My mother is likely stuck with that man, which would explain why she went missing from Natsuo and Fuyumi.”

“Doesn’t explain how your shitty villain brother went missing, though.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Aizawa cuts in. 

“Wait, who did I kidnap?” Baku asks. “I don’t live under a rock--your “shitty villain brother” is Dabi, isn’t he?”

Shouto nods, because lying would be pointless.

Baku just looks more confused, as if she was hoping she was wrong about assuming they were discussing Touya.

“Look, I targeted a group of six pro heroes. There’s no way Dabi could get brought into my quirk from them.”

Shouto nods again at this. It’s not as if Mt. Lady was ever Touya’s secret hero girlfriend.

The rest of the class has rejoined them by now and more than one person is shuffling awkwardly. It’s Mina who speaks up. 

“Um, it’s not that I don’t believe you--because I totally do, actually--but Dabi vanished right in front of us around the same time that Todoroki’s mom vanished in front of his other siblings, so if that wasn’t your quirk, then… what happened?”

At this, Baku simply shrugs.

Yeah.

Aizawa directs the students to check the area for anything or anyone that they might have missed, and he proceeds to grill Baku for more information on her quirk. They learn that to leave the dream world, all someone has to do is fall asleep. Usually, it does not actually take very long, as a lot of people end up somewhere relaxing or having sex, so sleep is sure to follow, especially with the hazy cloud of the dream world fogging up their mind (which apparently is a thing that happens inside her quirk.) The people targeted by the quirk will reappear, asleep, with about fifteen feet of Baku after falling asleep in the dream. Since nothing in the dream world has true substance, they usually come back hungry and a little tired from not having truly slept. Aizawa expects this effect to be greatly increased for the amount of time the heroes have already spent trapped in her quirk, which Baku says is only happening because they are all try-hard heroes who will look for a way to escape and therefore never relax enough to wake up.

In effect, all they can do is wait.

Someone has the idea to go somewhere comfortable so Endeavor and the others can come back and immediately rest, which leads to the idea that they should have food ready for them, too. Everyone starts brainstorming what food to make, where to go, and Aizawa acts exasperated in an affectionate sort of way.

Soon, they’ve decided to book a big, traditional house using Airbnb. They split into groups: one group to escort Baku to the house (this group includes Aizawa) and one group to go grocery shopping. 

Shouto stays with Baku (who, no matter how much they pester her, refuses to share her legal name, likely in spite of Bakugo’s ridicule.) Bakugo insists on going with the group to buy food since he believes they’re all too incompetent to get good ingredients without him. In this case, he might be correct.

No, they don’t know what happened to Touya. But he was listening earlier, which meant he could listen again. Shouto has hope. He can find his brother and bring him home.

For now, he just has to hope his mother was doing well trapped with Endeavor. He can't imagine what she's going through, being trapped with him in a confusing landscape as the dream world was likely to be. His mother is strong, though, Shouto knows this and believes it with his whole heart. Even strong-hearted people can fumble when the situation is too awful. Hopefully, she can find a way to sleep, even with Endeavor there. 

He wonders what it’s like for her right now. A sad part of him thinks it can’t be good.

While lost in thought, Baku speaks up again. “You know, a couple stayed in my quirk for a few hours one time, and they somehow started to get anxious. I’m not sure of the details since it shook them pretty bad, but the important bit is that their fears started to manifest inside the quirk.”

Everyone in their Airbnb-bound group stares at her in shock for a pregnant moment.

“I hope your heroes aren’t afraid of anything painful. You hero kids wonder what happens if my quirk ends, but I’ll admit, I’m curious; what happens if you die inside of my quirk?”

They’re eating dango together when Touya looks like he’s worked up the courage to say something big. He takes a deep breath, his scarred muscle tensing as he looks at Hawks, inspecting him, almost. Hawks braces himself for whatever it is Touya has to say. 

“If we get out of here, I don’t want to fight you again.”

“And I don’t want to fight you. Easy, right?” Hawks asks, feeling like it is not that easy.

“No. If you fight anyone from the League again, I will fight you. If I have to choose, I’m choosing Shigaraki and Toga and Spinner.”

“Sounds a little soft for you, Touya,” Hawks says, poking Touya in the side.

He’s not having it. “I can’t stop you from helping the heroes, I know you’re going to. But don’t put yourself against the League. Skeptic, Lady Nagant, whatever, I don’t care. They’re just pawns.”

“But the League isn’t?”

“No,” Touya says forcefully.

“That’s not what you said about Twice,” Hawks bites, remembering how Touya talked about his supposed friend after Hawks put his feather blade through his back.

“Fuck you,” Touya bites back.

Hawks winces. “Sorry, I--”

“I was upset--when you killed him. I was. I did care.”

They quietly eat the dango. When Hawks finishes his, he looks up. “I don’t want to fight you, either. I’ll leave the League to the other heroes, and I will protect them if I have to, but I won’t get directly involved in a fight with the remaining members of the League. Not that I’d be much use, anyway.” He hesitates a moment before-- “I promise. I won’t fight them, and I won’t fight you.”

Touya nods. “I won’t fight you either, pretty bird. That’s a promise. Might even try to keep the others off your little bird intern.”

They start off again, heading into a new part of the hanami crowds. Their hands dangle for a moment, not knowing how to connect, before Hawks reaches for Touya. His fingers brush where the scars have worsened severely, the staples much closer to his knuckles than before, but Hawks runs his thumbs over the line of scarring and hopes Touya likes it alright.

He hums, so Hawks figures he must. “Keigo,” Touya says, not trying to get Hawks’ attention, just turning the name over in his mouth, seeing how it sounds. 

Hawks has to admit, it does sound nice when Touya’s rough voice says his birth name.

Keigo gives Touya’s hand a squeeze. “Keigo,” he says, giving his own name a try.

Rei is looking between two festival stalls with a small tree between them at her son Touya, who she has only seen once since she was sent away, and that was on a TV screen.

Their group had split up to search for Hawks, and Rei had insisted she was perfectly capable of looking around a romantic paradise version of a festival without an escort. This was reasonable enough, so no one disagreed much other than some muttering, mostly from the male heroes, anyway.

She has not found Hawks. Somehow she has found Touya.

At first, she wonders if this is a part of the dream. Easily, she rules this out, as from what limited information they have, these are supposed to be romantic fantasies, and this is not her fantasy. It’s supposed to be Hawks’.

Yet, Touya.

His hair is white, but at the roots she can see just a tiny bit of his red hair. He’s wearing a nice-looking hakama--it’s just black and white, but it looks good on him. Under his arm is a giant plushie, although she doesn’t know who of. The scarring looks as bad as she feared, but his eyes are bright and he looks well-fed. Being a successful villain likely keeps at least some food on the table. She isn’t sure she should be glad about that, but as his mother, she is.

Touya squints at her like he’s trying to decipher something. Then he turns away. Rei’s heart nearly breaks, except that Touya calls out, “Hey, Keigo, I think I somehow created a fake version of my mom.”

“What, really?” a curious voice asks. Then, from where she previously couldn’t see him, Hawks emerges. Touya points at her, and Hawks follows the gesture with a curious and birdlike tilt of his head.

“Huh. How’d you do that?”

Touya shrugs. 

It’s a good thing Rei is so shocked she can hardly react because the part of her who realizes what is going on wants to laugh like a little girl.

They don’t believe she’s real. And why should they? They must have figured out that something was amiss, but without someone like Edgeshot to shake them out of it and explain, they’d be left to wonder. And, apparently, disregard anything that doesn’t seem to make sense. 

Not to mention that--Hawks is here with Touya. Clearly, more had happened between them than Hawks had ever let on, but that made sense. Rei knew the pain of being hurt by a lover all too well, and to admit to something happening to their family while they were hurting… Yes, she could very well see why Hawks might keep his heartache to himself.

Still, all she knew was that Touya had been Hawks’ first--and, for months, only--contact with the League of Villains, and then during Hawks’ betrayal, Touya had badly burned Hawks, nearly killing him.

But right now--

“Should we bring her along?” Hawks asks.

“Of course we should, she’s my mom.”

“Well, she’s not real.”

“I know, but still. Don’t shrug--not all of us have scum mothers who sell us.” Touya turns to Rei and motions for her to come along. “Maybe she appeared because we never went to a festival together?” 

Hawks gives Touya a flat look, but he rolls a single shoulder anyway, as though he might as well agree with this logic in absence of any other explanation.

Touya looks at her again, and she so desperately wants to close the distance and hold him. Just a few feet away from him now, she can see how his burns have spread out from where the staples hold the skin together. It looks awful, and she yearns to hold icy hands over the burns to soothe them. She holds back; she doesn’t want to scare him away.

“It’s good to see you, Touya,” is all she settles for. 

He sucks in a deep breath through his nose, like he did as a child trying not to cry. He believed he should never have to cry if he were to become as strong as All Might.

Oh, how Enji poisoned our children.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the movement of one hand reaching for another. Hawks tugs on Touya’s hand. He gives a small, sympathetic smile. “There are some benches under those cherry trees--over there--if you wanna sit for a minute?”

Touya nods, and it’s small. If a nod could be quiet, this one is.

“The blossoms will look pretty with your white hair. It’s too bad you aren’t in traditional clothes; Keigo and I appeared here in them.” He places his hand (scarred, burned) on her back, and gently guides her to the trees that Hawks is pulling him toward.

Rei sits on a stone bench while Hawks--Keigo, as Touya keeps calling him--cuts a few flowers off the branch under Touya’s direction. They’re fussing just a little bit, but there’s affection there, one that she and Enji never shared. Hawks’—Keigo’s small wings flutter as he uses a tiny feather to cut the sprig. She looks on sadly. His wings are small because of Touya. Touya burned them down to that size.

Touya tucks the sprig behind her ear, brushing back some of her long hair to situate the flowers in place. He offers a small smile as he does this, and under all the burn wounds, Rei recognizes her quiet son. 

He was only quiet as he grew up. Before, he had been so loud, so energetic. 

Hawks runs to grab them macaroons from a stall further down, leaving Rei to a few quiet moments with her son. She has so much she wants to tell him, too many things crowding her mind--that she has missed him so much all these years, that she is still proud of him despite all the harm he’s caused, that she wants him to come home and live peacefully with all of them, that they won’t hold all of this against him, that he just needs some help as she did so he can move on from his father and be his own man, that Hawks--Keigo--seems nice and she wishes he had never burned him, but her tongue is stuck in her mouth and she says none of this.

“I’m glad I can have this,” Touya says, “I know it won’t be this peaceful if I do see my mother again.” 

Rei’s heart breaks for her son. Hesitantly, she reaches forward. Touya stiffens, but when Rei wraps her arms around him and pulls her son close, he doesn’t pull away. 

“It will be,” she says, because it already is. “It will be.”

Nearby, a stream sings.

Hawks--no, Keigo. Keigo Keigo Keigo--returns with macaroons shaped like a hero she doesn’t recognize who appears to have a blackbird mutation. The reverse side has a strange shadow version of the hero.

“Check it out, it’s Tsukuyomi! He’s a macaroon! And Dark Shadow is there as well!” Keigo is bouncing up and down in his excitement. Touya looks rather bored by this.

“Did you think up hero merchandise for your intern?”

Oh, so that’s why she doesn’t recognize him.

Touya and Keigo argue playfully while they all eat macaroons, and despite the taste being wonderful, Rei realizes she doesn’t feel any more full than before. 

With children, there had always been times that they tried to hide things, and she spent the day searching for whatever silly trouble her kids were keeping from her. Sometimes, it was just eating too many sweets and hiding all the wrappers under their futons. Sometimes, it was trying to secretly train a fire quirk that burned the skin.

She became, if nothing better, decent at investigation. She also learned to recognize her gut feeling that something was wrong.

Right now, she has that gut feeling. 

“Boys,” she says, and Touya looks at her fondly, if sadly, and Keigo looks a bit surprised, although excited, as if he’s just happy to have a motherly figure include him. 

Not all of us have scum mothers who sell us.

“Why don’t we get some dinner? Have you both been eating?”

They both look a little pleased and a little unsure how to proceed because neither is used to having a mother trying to look out for them. Lamentably, this includes Rei’s poor performance as Touya’s mother, but all she can do for him now is to be what he needs her to be in the moment. There is no fixing their family’s past, only their future.

Apparently, despite snacking on skewers for the past couple of hours, they could both “still go for dinner,” which isn’t easing Rei’s concerns right now. If they aren’t filling up from eating anything, either, then dinner might just be another act in futility. Nevertheless, they find an outdoor restaurant with low tables and cushions to sit on. All the seating is on top low tables, so each area is not on the bare ground, but rather a small platform. Touya and Keigo find an empty table in the corner, which Keigo says that it’s good to sit in the corner at places so you can watch everyone who arrives, and Touya says is good in case you need to make a quick escape.

Rei shelves these perspectives in favor of asking Keigo to get them all yakisoba and sushi, which Touya makes a face about. Right, Touya never liked fish. How could she have forgotten?

Touya adds that Keigo should get sake and that it might as well be a nice one since the money they’re spending isn’t real anyway. 

Twenty minutes later, they end up with Rei and Keigo sharing sushi while Touya complains that the League was always eating disgusting fish, too, and that nobody in the PLF had any taste. Keigo agrees with that, but only because the coffee was too bitter there and they never had good creamer. Rei quietly remarks that the villain organization might have more issues than craving sushi or having bad coffee. 

This, somehow, puts both of them on edge. 

It’s a good thing they have warm sake and cool breezes because Rei needs something to help get her through this strange dinner.

At one point, Touya and Keigo compare this sake to other sakes they’ve been drinking here, and it dawns on Rei that they aren’t getting drunk here, either.

When she mentions it, they both take a moment to process this realization, then,

“Oh yeah, remember when we got drunk with Spinner awhile back? That didn’t take us long at all,” Touya says.

Keigo nods and laughs, “Yeah, I guess none of us could hold our alcohol.”

“Except Mister.”

“Except Mister, yeah.”

Touya shakes his head disbelievingly, “Did you--no, you weren’t there. During that whole battle in Jaku City, he practically tore himself to pieces to get Shigaraki and Spinner out of there. It was insane.”

Keigo’s face scrunches up. “I saw photographs of his injuries. It was horrific. It’s a miracle he’s still alive.”

“He’s alive?” Touya’s eyes blow wide, and it pulls on the staples around the sensitive skin of his face. Rei worries if he becomes too expressive, will they tear?

Keigo nods. “Did you not know?”

“I just assumed. When we told Toga--after we finally found her again--she pretty much had a breakdown. Twice and Compress on the same day… It was too much to take in, especially since she didn’t even see what happened to Compress.”

“You say that like she saw what happened to Bubaigawara.”

“She saw the last of his copies say goodbye to her and turn to mud in her arms. Apparently, she and Compress were fighting side by side down below when you killed him.”

They both turn silent then. Keigo’s eyes close and wrinkles form close to the bridge of his nose, and Rei realizes he might be trying very hard not to cry. It reminds her too much of her children. Touya is watching Keigo, a little angry and a little removed. 

“We can’t change any of that, though,” Touya finally says, and Keigo chokes out a single sob in response. Around Touya’s eyes, a single bead of blood squeezes out and starts to run down his cheek. He wipes it away. “Let’s get tea,” he says. “I’ll go find a place to order us a pot. Mom, do you like jasmine?”

“Yes, jasmine is good,” she says softly. As Touya walks off, moving languidly through the crowd, Rei turns to Keigo. 

“Sorry, you probably don’t want to hear about all that—even if you aren’t real.” He tacks on the bit at the end, as if he’s trying to console himself a little with it. 

Exasperated, Rei sighs. She scoots off her cushion and around to Keigo so she can pull him into a hug. He freezes.

“Um, Todoroki, it’s, ah, it’s okay. Really. You don’t need to…”

Rei shakes her head and places her chin on top of Keigo’s feathery blond hair. “You’re too young, Keigo.” He melts a little into her arms when she says his given name, so she keeps going. “You know, you’re my daughter’s age. Younger than my eldest, though I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that.” Keigo shakes his head a little bit from where he’s snug up against her. “I look at you, and you’re too young. My husband might see you as a coworker, but I don’t have any professional obligations to disregard your age. You have gone through so much already, too much, and you aren’t even as old as all of my children. I’m always hoping that they take the time to rest, to tell me or their partner or their friends or teachers about their troubles. Are you taking the time to do that? I have to wonder, remembering you at the hospital, and again, seeing you now.” The wind rustles through the crowd, and she watches the fabric of Keigo’s hakama billow with the breeze. 

“I am an adult,” Keigo defends weakly while relaxing more against Rei’s chest.

“Yes,” she says, “you are, and you’re an excellent young man. It’s nice to see my son happy to hold your hand and share food and drink with you.”

Keigo mumbles something about how it’s “not like that,” despite it very clearly being “like that.” Rei smiles, and lets go of all the complications that these two are going to have to work through if they decide to try to honestly love each other. 

“It’s alright to rest a little more, Keigo, and to be joyful. Find these things that you wish you had, and have them in the real world, not in this dream. Being content and relaxed is good for you.”

“Working is good for you,” Keigo counters, and Rei just laughs.

“Yes, work is good. People are made to do work, it’s in our nature to find meaning in work. But we also love socializing, and playing, and taking the time to make good food, and loving one another. Make time for those things as well, Keigo. Don’t repeat the mistakes of my family.” 

They stay another moment like that, Rei holding Keigo, before Touya comes back. 

“You better not be trying to steal my mom from me, pretty bird.” He’s got a coy smile on his face, so Rei assumes this is more of their banter. 

Keigo jerks away quickly, flush with embarrassment like a middle schooler who just had to tell his parents he loves them. He gives Rei a sharp nod that she interprets as a “thank you,” then they both return to their cushions. Touya steps out of his geta and kneels on their platform, sets down a tray with a clay pot and three matching cups, then pours. He must remember his manners, because he pours Rei’s first, then Keigo’s, then his own. 

She’d missed him.

When the sun is completely gone, the lanterns glow across the festival. Rei has come to understand the giant plush the boys have been carrying is The Hero Killer: Stain and she decides to shelve that realization with a lot of other concerning things she’s heard or seen. For now, she’s content to sit by the stream with her feet in the water while Keigo and Touya light sparklers together. Touya is using his quirk to light them, which made both Rei and Keigo flinch at first, but after a few times, it got easier to watch. She thinks Touya is keeping the flame purposefully small, anyway.

“Hey, Touya?” Keigo asks.

He hums, indicating that he’s listening.

“What do you think will happen when we wake up?”

Keigo is sitting in the grass tucked up against Touya’s side, and Rei wishes she could take a photograph of them together. Perhaps one day, once they leave this palace and go back to the real world.

Touya tilts his head to the side while he ponders the question, then answers, “This is a dream, right? I bet I wake up with the League and go back to that whole shitshow, and you wake up with your little hero crew and go back to sucking Endeavor’s dick or whatever.”

“I am not doing that.”

“Sure, feathers.”

“You shouldn’t talk like that in front of your mother,” Keigo angles.

“Why? She’s not real. I’d never tell her daddy dearest was unfaithful just for some twink bir-- oof, ouch!”

Keigo elbows him in the ribs. “I have never done anything disgusting with Endeavor, stop saying that. He’s like, twice my age.”

“Bet you’ve thought about it,” Touya smirks down at Keigo while the man glares back up at him, and Rei realizes with a start the Touya has won the argument.

She gasps a little, because god, Enji, and the two young men break from their moment--Touya into a fit of cackles and Keigo turning red under the lantern light and hurriedly trying to deny the accusation. 

When they finally calm down again, staring up at the stars and pointing out constellations (which Keigo knows many more of than Touya from navigating by the stars at night), Keigo asks, “What do you mean by the League being a shitshow right now?”

“Wasn’t it always?” Touya counters.

“Maybe, sure, but this sounds different, or else you wouldn’t have said that.”

Touya sighs. “You’re right, there. It’s just four of us left, now, though we did keep Skeptic, I guess.”

“Thought you liked him?”

“He’s useful. Now listen or else I won’t give up information that I shouldn’t be giving up.” When Keigo stays quiet, Touya continues, “Toga has been a mess since the raid. If Twice and Compress weren’t bad enough, she fought one of those UA kids she had a crush on--”

“Uraraka Ochako,” Keigo supplies for him.

Touya nods, “Yeah, that one. Toga believes that the kid would kill her like you did Twice. I don’t think any of those soft-ass UA kids are government-trained child soldiers ready to put a feather through their mark if they felt it was needed, but Toga does believe that. She’s been on edge constantly and there’s no more ‘Dabi, let me paint your nails and let’s watch romance movies’ like she used to do. She did that shit with Twice and Big Sis Mag, mostly, and they’re both gone, now. Plus, her and Spinner are both holding grudges against me for not telling them who I was.”

“Can’t blame them there,” Keigo says, which earns him a glower from Touya. “Sorry, carry on.”

“Right, well, Shigaraki isn’t the same after his stint in Ujiko’s creepy lab. He’s not all buddy-buddy with us anymore, and he’s a lot more ‘lead by fear’ like he was when we first joined the League, except now he has the means to truly lead by fear. He’s not the guy we followed and respected through that shit in Deika. This has been bothering me and Toga, but admittedly we’ve both been dealing with our own, ah, emotions lately. But Spinner has been really messed up by it. I’ll admit, some part of me is really— really thinks that the lizard is gonna be all worried over Shigs and end up just getting dusted by him.”

“You’re worried about him,” Keigo states this as a fact, not a question, and Rei can see in Touya’s eyes that yes, he’s worried.

“Spinner cares too much, that’s his problem. Too much like Stain in that way, maybe.” 

Keigo nods, and Rei has to remind herself that the people they’re discussing are some of the most wanted terrorists in the country, and that Keigo and Touya have done painfully normal things with them, like watching movies and getting drunk together.

“I know that must be stressful for you, but I’ll be honest, Touya, the idea that Shigaraki is not only crazy powerful but that he might no longer care about the few people he has cared about in the past is a scary notion for me as well. If Shigaraki loses it completely, that could doom the country.”

Touya nods like this is something he’s considered. “Might have already,” he says. He purses his mismatched lips and is silent for a while as he gathers up the nerve to say, “I’m not just stressed, Keigo, I’m scared of what he might do. I don’t want to see Spinner dusted, or Toga lose it anymore. I—”

He’s interrupted by screaming.

Ah. Shit, Touya thinks as the ground some distance away cracks and shifts. 

His mother looks around, frightened, and Keigo jumps to his feet looking very much like he’s just shifted into Hero Mode, except he has almost no feathers and therefore very little way to deal with the oncoming disaster.

“How—”

“No clue, but this looks like Deika did, so maybe we talked about Shigs being a scary fuck for too long.” Touya grabs his mother’s wrist and starts running away from where the damage is coming from. They need to put distance between themselves and the decay. Getting off the ground would be ideal, but Keigo’s feathers are gone—which is Touya’s fault—so there’s no flying out of this. They’re not far from some public restrooms, and Keigo yells over the noise of the crowd that he can get at least enough air to boost Rei and Touya onto the roof. 

“This is what Deika looked like?” Keigo asks breathlessly while they weave through the crowd. They’re not that far from the restroom building, but everyone is running in different directions, unsure of how to escape the destruction.

“Sort of, but with a lot of ice, fanatical civilians, and a whole army of Twices.”

“An army of Twices?” Rei asks, because that part is just slightly stranger than the other two parts. 

“Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it, actually,” Touya says, because he does not want to add that to the already bad situation.

Unfortunately, it happens anyway. Not fifteen feet from the restrooms, Twice appears. Bloody, screaming, and grabbing at Keigo’s arm.

“HAWKS!” He yells, and Touya lets go of his mother to loop an arm around Keigo’s blessedly small waist and yank him away from Twice.

Keigo looks stricken, nearly frozen in shock, and Touya figures that’s fair. Twice looks awful; he’s beaten and bloody, like the fresh corpse left behind in the mountains, not the man he had been before. 

Touya gives his mother a firm shove toward the building up ahead, sets Keigo behind himself, and unleashes a burst of flames toward the fake Twice. Twices, now, as the grotesque clones duplicate, their flesh dripping into mud, unable to hold form. He’s screaming, all of them are screaming, begging to know why Hawks betrayed him, why he killed him, how could he, will he keep killing? Hawks is the real villain, not him. 

They have to push through the crowd of Twices, arms snatching out to make grabs at Keigo’s hakama. Touya will admit to having a few mental blocks against unleashing his flames against his recently murdered friend, but the sight is gruesome enough that he can do it. Keigo has almost no defense other than short feathers, two of which he has sharpened in his hands to act as knives, but he isn’t doing more than slashing at the hands reaching for him. That makes sense, at least, because likely if Touya is struggling to lash out at Twice, Keigo is probably having a much harder time.

They reach the building. It’s not pretty, and their clothes are soaked in mud and blood from the melting and dying Twices, but they make it. His mother is watching fearfully when they catch up to her, but it seems Twice’s energy is directed solely at Keigo, not actually at Touya or his mother. 

“Can you get my mother up first?” Touya asks, and Keigo nods. 

Touya keeps the doubles back with an onslaught of blue flames. They roar against Twice’s yelling, which turns into screaming. Not far off, civilians shriek and cry as the Sad Man’s Parade multiplies and Shigaraki’s decay expands through the area. The sounds are oppressive, crowding Touya’s senses. The burning in his hand and forearm doesn’t help calm him.

“She’s safe. Though, she’s not real, so maybe we shouldn’t have focused on saving her,” Keigo says, thunking to the ground behind Touya.

“Yeah, but this shit is weird enough, I’m not watching my mother get ripped to shreds or dusted on top of everything else going on right now.”

“Yeah, that’s fair.” Keigo watches Touya unleash another round of flames on Twice, and Touya doesn’t miss his full-body shudder as the copies drop into mud before them.

“My turn?” Touya asks, because they need to get out of this. 

Keigo gives a shaky nod. “Yeah.”

He loops his arms around Touya’s waist, under the billowy sleeves of the hakama, and beats his tiny wings hard as they lift off the ground. Several feathers detach to try to support their weight elsewhere, but they aren’t doing much good. 

“Good thing we ended up in these clothes and not yukata, imagine running in that, huh?”

Keigo huffs in what might be agreement. Touya knows he’s nervous, but the Fierce Wings elevator is taking its damn time, and the duplicates are climbing on top of one another and melting together and he is not having a good time watching it.

After several too-long minutes of flight, Keigo drops Touya unceremoniously onto the hard restroom roof. Touya turns to snark at him but instead watches as the bleeding, muddy hands wrap around Keigo’s skinny ankles and drag him back down.

He doesn’t have enough feathers to pull himself out of the mass of melting bodies clamoring to tear him to pieces. 

“Keigo!” Touya cries out, and behind him, his mother shrieks as well.

He launches himself forward, diving back down into the crowd. From above, he can see just how dangerously close the decay has come to their position. And in the distance he sees Shigaraki, standing in the epicenter of the destruction, no longer laughing. He’s silent, watching and standing still. It’s out of character, and Touya hates it for only a moment before he’s level with the Twice clones. His hand reaches out, and there is Keigo, eyes desperate as he reaches up for Touya. The bodies close around them, crying and screaming and begging Hawks for answers.

We are going to fall into the decay and turn to dust together, Touya thinks. He smiles, and so does Keigo, oddly. They pull themselves together, coming chest to chest. Touya wraps his other arm around Keigo, squeezing him tightly as the hands around them start to pull insistently at their clothes.

He closes his eyes and prepares for the Twices and themselves to disintegrate.

Instead of getting turned to dust, a series of loud cracking sounds echo around them, and an intense chill settles over his body. When he and Keigo hit the ground, the ground is not ground, covered in dirt and blood and ash and spitfires, but ice. Looking up, Touya sees a jagged wall of ice.

“Touya!” Yells the worried voice of his mother, who creates an ice slide and glides down before running over to her son and his partner.

Could she call him that? His partner? 

It didn’t matter, not now, at least. She’d watched Touya dive to save him, and she knew that they didn’t have the means to live through the mob of bodies on their own. She’d acted out of desperation, because that was her son and she’d already lost him once. She would not lose him a second time. She rushes over to where they lay on top of her hastily made ice wall. 

“Mom?” Touya asks, his eyes wide. “I’ve never—You can do that?” He shakes his head up at the ice in wonder, and she laughs a little. 

“Yes, Touya, I can do that. Shouto’s quirk didn’t come from nowhere.” 

Keigo squirms around where he’s pinned beneath Touya, and Rei watches as her son blushes something fierce and awkwardly clambers off of the winged hero.

“The Twice clones—”

“Will have a hard time chipping through this ice.” Rei finishes.

Touya shakes his head. “They’ll climb over, go around.”

Keigo sits up and stares at her with wide, unblinking eyes. Then, at the ice wall. Then, her. He isn’t saying anything, just opening and closing his mouth a few times, so Rei assumes he must be in a bit of shock.

“Here, I know what we can do. Come close,” she directs. Touya hauls Keigo to his feet, and they both stand nearby, but he’s putting distance between himself and Rei. The show of power must have confused him enough to put him on edge so that he doesn’t quite trust her. Fine, that’s what Rei had expected from Touya prior to today, anyway. She doesn’t like it, but she tells herself it will be okay in the long term.

She puts her worries with Touya’s trust on her mental shelf with all her other concerns so she can focus. She hasn’t done this since she was a much younger woman, but she did it enough growing up that she knows she can do it again.

Just like the saying goes, Plus Ultra.

Rei harnesses her quirk, raising the ice beneath their feet to get them higher off the ground in case the decay catches up to them while also pulling it into a tight dome above their heads to encase their trio on all sides, no way in or out. The ice glistens as it rises into the darkness of the night, and then disappears from perception as it thickens and blocks out the lantern light, the stars, the moon. Before it closes up completely, she sees bright red flames streak across the sky. Keigo gasps; Touya tenses. The man in the night sky doesn’t matter. As the ice closes around their heads, they plunge into darkness.

And quiet. The cacophony thundering outside of the ice dissipates into a dissonant hum, then, silence. The ice has grown enough that no sound can break through.

Touya lights a small fire with the flick of his hand.

The blue flames flicker and reflect against the ice, giving the appearance of an arctic glacier at night. Rei smiles softly. Even Keigo stares in wonder, admiring the beauty that the flames and ice create together.

“Are you real?” Touya asks her, his discerning blue eyes shining by the light of his matching fire.

Rei smiles at her son and shrugs coyishly. “It was a bit funny that you thought I wasn’t, I have to admit.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Keigo demands, but he’s less angry than he seems just worn out.

Rei offers Keigo the same smile she gave her son. “You both looked too happy, I didn’t want to interrupt any more than I was.” She laughs a little at their startled faces before she continues, “And anyway, I was so shocked to see you, Touya, that I had trouble saying much of anything for a moment there.”

He looks like he’s trying to say something—trying to be angry, to deem it an unfair lie that he can’t forgive—but he can’t get the words out. He doesn’t need to, anyway.

“I’m just so happy to see you, Touya. I’ve been so scared, and I mourned for far too long. I wasn’t even home when you—When you died. At least, when we thought you died. Just to see you alive and smiling has made my world so much brighter.” She cups her hands over his cheeks, over the burns, over the staples. He’s taller than her, but not too much—unlike Natsuo and soon Shouto, too. She pulls him down a bit, and he leans easily into it. Slowly, tenderly, she places a kiss on his forehead. “My bright, wonderful Touya. I love you so much.”

From there, he crumples. The light flickers out and in the darkness he buries his head into her shoulder. There’s a wetness there, one she knows must be blood, but she lets it go. The boys are right--it is far too easy to shrug off concerns when you presume that much of this is not real.

Slowly, she lowers herself and her son to a sitting position with him wrapped in her arms as she leans over him. She feels his body wrack with silent sobs, she feels his fists grip her shirt tightly, feels him loosen, feels when his fingers—unburned at the tips—start to play with the ends of her hair, when he begins to card his hand through her hair, when he strokes his fingertips down her spine. His movements are precious, because this sheltered moment is nearly unreal. They are both just trying to savor it all. She traces his sides and feels where he’s squishy with healthy weight, where he’s boney and where he’s firm with muscle. She tousles his thick, spiky hair and takes in the smell of ash and burnt skin. He's her son, and she wants to feel him present and grounded in this world, no matter how false the rest of this world might be. Touya is real. 

After a display of patience that assures Rei that Keigo is firmly not like her husband, Keigo breaks the silence. His voice tinks around inside the ice. “How are you here, Todoroki?”

“Rei, Keigo.”

“Ah, Rei. Okay. How are you here?” he asks again.

Touya lights a new small blue flame on his forefinger. In the blue light, Rei can see discolored black steaks and smudges down his cheeks. For now, she disregards them.

“There are a good number of us all trapped in whatever this dreamworld is. It’s not worth joining them, not with the chaos outside, and not when many of them are heroes and will be none too pleased to find you, Touya.”

Keigo sighs. “So what, we just wait here until we magically leave this place?”

Touya looks to be considering this suggestion. Keigo shoots him a glare, and Touya responds by smiling. Rei likes watching them. 

“For now, we should. Let the fighting outside calm down. Keigo, you and I can’t fight, anyway—” Keigo makes a face at this, but doesn’t argue.

Touya does. “Keigo can’t, but look at this ice! Mom, you’d be incredible—”

“I do not want to fight, ” Rei amends.

Begrudgingly, Touya settles. 

“We can wait,” Rei says, “because we all need some rest anyway, and Enji will have a hard time burning through this much ice when he has the villains outside to deal with. It always took him a while to get through any of our children’s ice, anyway.”

The young men both nod obediently. 

“And,” she smirks, letting a mischievous tone take hold in her voice, “I want to hear everything about you two. We’ve got time, and I don’t want the hero and villain version, so please forget all the Dabi and Hawks nonsense you’ve been up to.”

“Been up to?” Hawks squawks indignantly. He’s quite birdlike at times, and it’s endearing. 

“Yes,” Rei says. “In my eyes, you are just my son and the nice young man my son brought home.”

“I haven’t brought him home,” Touya argues.

Rei waves him off.

They relent.

The things they talk about include their meetings together as hero and villain, but they also include board games with the core group of the League of Villains (which Rei learns are the people that Touya likes, and everyone else is sort of worthless to him. It dawns on her that similar logic applies with how Keigo views them, too.) And they include drinking with the League and making fun of the other villains together. They talk about how they ended up kissing one night, and without them admitting it, Rei understands how new and innocent this was for them. They tell her about the other places they went within the dreamscape, and the whole adventure sounds cute for them, romantic. They’re still new to each other, but they’re exploring how they fit with each other, and Rei wants to hope for them. They both look so happy.

As they talk, she ends up wrapping her arms around both of them in one big, cold snuggle. Keigo is shivering, and Touya makes fun of him for “not being gifted at birth with an immunity to the cold.” Rei thinks that Touya deserves the feather that lightly smacks him for the comment. 

Keigo is curled up in a tight ball, tucked against her chest. Touya has his head resting on her shoulder, one hand reaching out to hold Keigo’s hand and stroke his fingers with the pad of his thumb, his legs stretched out across the ice. His foot is alight, and despite being further away, the reflections from the ice spread the light around nicely so they can see each other. But it is dim, and comfortable, and conversation slows. Rei takes over the conversation, describing how she learned to make an igloo for herself as a young girl, and how she used it to hide from her parents up until her marriage. She tells them how she showed it to Enji, only twice. Once, before they were married, as a display of the strength her of her ice and a promise for the strength their child might have. Once more, shortly after they were wed. She thought it would be fun and cute to hide inside of the ice with her new husband, an energetic newly married couple. It wasn’t, and the last time she made use of her quirk this was for Touya, when he was just a toddler, before his quirk ever came in. She had been pregnant with Fuyumi, and Touya’s bright blue eyes lit up in wonder at the ice castle he was surrounded by. 

She doesn’t say she stopped when he didn’t get an ice quirk. She hadn’t wanted him to keep seeing something he couldn’t have, but now she realizes that with his mother and siblings, there was no reason he should ever have had to be without his fantastic ice castle.

Touya slumps against her, deadweight up against her shoulder and chest. Keigo’s eyes have been drooping slowly for some time now, and they are finally staying closed. 

Rei begins to think she should plant soft kisses to the tops of their heads, or maybe just let herself fall asleep against them as well—when they both vanish. In an instant, they are gone, taking the light and their sleepy body weight with them. Rei nearly panics before it hits her: they’re gone, and that’s good. She laughs to herself. It’s been so simple this whole time, and the action-oriented heroes would have never realized it.

She’s still laughing when Enji finally melts through the ice enough to let the light in.

When the crowds start screaming, Yu knows it’s gone to shit. By the time she and Kamui Woods realize that the cause is Shigaraki and his decay, they’ve also realized that they need to get off the ground. Going full Mt. Lady wouldn’t help much, so she gains enough size to carry Mitsuo and Kamui’s girlfriend and they take off running. Fifteen minutes later and after getting found by most of the other people they came into this annoying dreamscape with, Yu is sitting in a giant hammock made by Best Jeanist while Endeavor and Edgeshot try to zip around in search of Endeavor’s wife and the yet-to-be-found Hawks and his mystery partner. Or maybe ex-partner. Most likely ex.

Around the time the giant ice wall shoots into the air, they figure that Rei, at least, must be fine. 

Yu feels like they’re sitting in the godforsaken peanut gallery for the weirdest nightmare ever.

It’s dark out and most of the lanterns that had been lighting the area have been destroyed by Shigarki’s decay. The darkness makes it hard to see what’s going on, but the glittering ice wall is hard to miss, and Endeavor’s bright flames are incredibly distinctive against the night sky.

Within the next twenty minutes, Shigaraki vanishes, as does most of the crowd. In the eerie silence that falls, Yu decides, fuck this, it’s safe enough now to stand on the ground again, and jumps down. 

The dematerializing crowds also mean there isn’t a reason for her to have been holding back with her quirk. If they’d started by having her go giant, Hawks would have seen her like a lighthouse to a lost ship, and they would have found him forever ago. Now, though, she just uses her size to make better time walking over to where Endeavor is slowly trying to melt through a metric fuck ton of ice.

Whatever. Not like they’re in a rush or anything.

Endeavor huffs while he works on the ice. “Rei’s quirk allows her to create vast amounts of ice, but she can’t melt any of it on her own. Shouto can use his fire to melt his ice, but without fire or some other applied heat, the ice will just stay until it melts on its own, which takes days when it’s this much. When we first met, she told me she would leave herself a small exit when she made something like this, but she must have decided not to this time. I can’t find an opening anywhere.”

Yu nods sagely. “So it’s the hard way, then?”

“Yes, the hard way.”

The hard way takes an hour. Endeavor claims this is a good time.

When they finally pull Todoroki Rei out of the ice, she’s giggling to herself about something, but when Yu asks what’s got her laughing, Rei waves her off, shakes her head, and says, “Oh, it’s nothing.”

Sitting alone in the dark inside an iceberg of your own making and there’s nothing with you but your thoughts? Yu wonders if the woman might actually have some issues.

Everyone is grouped at the bottom of the iceberg and even the civilians feel the need to fret over Rei, asking her if she was okay being alone that long, how scary it must have been to be alone when Shigaraki attacked. 

Oddly, Rei says, “Oh no, I wasn’t alone. The boys were very adept at helping me get away from the decay and all the Twice clones.”

“Twice?” Best Jeanist asks.

"Boys?" Comes Endeavor, which gets ignored.

Rei nods. “It was rather awful, but I think it had something to do with Kei—ah, Hawks.”

Yu did not get to where she is in the hero rankings by being dumb, no matter how many times she plays up the bimbo roll for ads. “On a first name basis with Hawks, Todoroki?”

Rei smiles. “It really is confusing if you call me Todoroki when there are so many of us. Rei is fine, I promise.” Yu does not think she can call her ‘Rei’ in front of Endeavor, but fine. Rei continues, “And yes, I suppose, though I think he was just letting me do what I wanted. He’s a nice young man—Enji, he’s nice, don’t you think?”

“What?”

“Hawks,” Rei says, by way of explanation, as if anything she is saying makes sense.

“Hawks is professional and good at what he does,” Endeavor says in a gruff way that Yu interprets as begrudging affection. 

Rei hums. Then, “What if he was around the family more? I know the kids weren’t particularly fond of him at the hospital, but—”

“Rei, what is this about?” Endeavor snaps a little, and Rei jumps.

Yu puts herself between Endeavor and the wife he abused, because at the end of the day, Yu believed Dabi with his shitty viral video, and Endeavor admitted to it anyway. “Looks like she’s found a younger model. Good for you, Rei, Hawks is flighty at times but he is Japan’s favorite young bachelor.”

Rei laughs good-naturedly while Endeavor sputters behind Yu, which Yu considers a win. Maybe she should be spending more time with Rei, especially with her husband here. She has some previous thoughts she wants to reevaluate regarding the woman. 

“It’s funny, I heard a rather similar comment made to Hawks earlier this evening.”

Everyone seems confused by that, but Rei is smiling like it's an inside joke with two people who are no longer here. Which reminds Yu: “Speaking of your new boy toy—” Endeavor really does not like that comment, if the heat on her back is anything to go by, “where is Hawks, and his other?” 

“Oh,” Rei says, “they both fell asleep. I think I tricked them into resting while we were in there,” she motions to the ice, “and they both vanished when they fell asleep. They took the light with them, too. I bet that is our way out of here—we just need to fall asleep. All of the heroics and searching might have been a bit useless, in fact.”

That feels like a slight, but nobody comments on it. Instead, everyone just groans, because now they have to look around for a place to have a very awkward slumber party.

They wake up by falling against a tatami mat floor. They had definitely fallen asleep curled next to Touya’s mother, but now they’re in an evenly lit room, blinking awake together against traditional flooring. 

Touya sits up and takes in the room. It’s decently sized. A couple of futon mats have been laid out, and a woman is handcuffed, gagged, and tied up in the corner. Touya isn’t sure if this means heroes or villains are at work, but either way, he shifts his mindset away from the feel-good fluff from earlier and back into the cold and uncaring mentality he needs to be A-Ranked Villain: Dabi.

Right. He’s in his clothes again, his heavy black boots, his fireproof coat with staples all over it. He’s him, and he gets the feeling this is the real world, not that weird dream world. The haze clouding his mind before is gone, and finally, he can think again. He climbs to his feet, feeling only a twinge guilty about his boots stomping on the nice tatami mats. The woman tied up whimpers a bit in fear.

Great, he’s recognized. 

Next to him, Keigo rolls to his feet and blinks around at the room. “Huh,” he says. 

A male voice yells from the room next to theirs, “Hey! If someone is back in there, take off your shoes! This place is way too nice for that!”

Dabi blinks. 

Where the hell is he?

There’s some bickering on the other side of the door—something about being nice because they’re probably confused.

Someone else—a girl?—calls out, “Please take your time! We made food for when you want it!”

Keigo seems just as confused as Dabi, so at least this isn’t his fault—this time. Neither of them knows where they are or who is in the other room. Dabi lights up his hand, just in case, although Keigo is already batting at his wrist and mouthing “Wooden building. ”

Not like Dabi hasn’t torched wooden buildings before.

Keigo eyes the woman behind them, but Dabi ignores her for now, figuring that she’s safely bound up, whoever she is. He puts his hand on the sliding door, takes a steadying breath, and flings it open.

Way too many UA kids stare back at him, their happy little smiles instantly dropping. 

“Whoa, wait, Todoroki, you’re brother is involved,” the electricity one exclaims. 

Dabi slams the sliding door back closed before he can stare too long at the half-white, half-red hair inside that room. 

“That doesn’t make any sense, though?” Comes one of the girl's voices, and Dabi thinks he might combust. 

“Oh good,” Keigo says, “I was really worried it might be your guys who we were with. Looks like it’s safe.”

“No—” Dabi starts, but Keigo is already sliding the door back open. 

The class—god the whole class of 1-A brats is there—collectively gasps.

Keigo’s bird intern, Tokoyami, practically chokes in surprise. 

“Hawks?” says Shouto, whose grey and blue eyes flit between Keigo and Dabi.

“Holy shit,” someone says.

“Uhh… guys?” Keigo looks around like he’s waiting for someone to explain. Behind them, the woman starts making more noise.

Dabi lights up his hand. “I get the feeling this is your fault—” He’s cut off from lighting the woman ablaze by his flames suddenly going out and a somewhat familiar capture scarf wrapping around him. He struggles for at least a second before he realizes that he is painfully outnumbered and can easily be rendered quirkless by Eraserhead.

“Give up,” Eraserhead growls, and Dabi obliges. 

Eraserhead drags Dabi into the room with all his students, which Dabi thinks might be a little bold of him, and looks around at the teenagers. “My handcuffs are on Baku, I need a second pair.”

The assholes jump to provide. 

Dabi ends up handcuffed and sitting down cross-legged at the table. All in all, his day has been spectacular so far.

Once Eraser seems to think Dabi is adequately bound, he turns his single-eyed glare on Keigo, which serves the bird brain right.

“Hawks, why is Dabi here?” Eraser asks, his voice tight.

“I don’t know, we just appeared together in some weird place. We didn’t really figure out what was going on.”

“You appeared together ?” Eraser stresses. Shouto covers his mouth with one hand.

“Uh, yeah?”

Eraser’s eye flashes dangerously at Keigo. 

“That’s not true, bird brain,” Dabi says from the floor, “we learned more than nothing. We knew it was some kind of unreal place, and that other people might have been there. And that nothing we ate or drank mattered, so we couldn’t get full and we couldn’t get drunk. That’s something, at least.”

“We couldn’t get drunk?”

“Did you miss how many cups of sake we had?”

The bird intern puts his head in his hands. His very creepy, very dangerous sentient quirk comes around to pat his shoulder sympathetically.

The scene Dabi is a part of feels just as strange and unreal as the last few, and this isn’t happening inside of a false reality. 

The pink kid raises her hand like she’s in class, but speaks while she raises it like a misbehaving kid. “Ai--sorry--Eraserhead? Since Dabi is cuffed now, and we made all this hot pot, and he won’t be a danger, shouldn’t they like, eat? I know we’re all shocked that Hawks is, like, banging Todoroki’s older brother and all, but--”

“Whoa, no,” Dabi starts.

At the same time, Keigo, “No, what? We aren’t—Oh my god, no—We’ve never—I've never—”

Dabi hears that annoying purple kid mutter to the electricity kid, “Did Hawks just say he’s a virgin?”

Dabi’s will to live gives out, and he groans, letting himself fall forward and his forehead thunk against the table. His stomach growls.

Eraserhead sighs and relents. “Fine, eat. We can talk over food.”

Without raising his head, Dabi lifts his wrists and shakes them, jangling the quirk-suppressing cuffs. “Can’t eat like this, Eraser.”

“Would you rather they be around your ankles?” The man asks the question in a menacing way. He’s not offering, he’s threatening. Dabi mulls over the option, anyway, because his stomach feels hollow and like it might be gnawing at itself on the inside.

He lifts his head to meet Eraser’s glowing red eyes. “Yeah, actually, I would.” 

The man scowls down at Dabi. He returns a manic smile.

Keigo nudges him with his foot. “Don’t be difficult,” he says.

“It’s in my blood to be difficult,” Dabi retorts.

Across the room, a flat voice chimes in, “Only if you want to be like dad.” Shouto walks over and Dabi fumes. His quirk doesn’t activate, though, not with the cuffs. “You should eat. I can make you a bowl. Is that okay?” Dabi meets Shouto’s gaze and finds that this isn’t a question. His brother is acting nicely, but he intends to make Dabi eat.

“Fine. I’m not eating with my wrists tied, though. I have some self-respect.”

Shouto nods. “Take off your boots and we can move the cuffs to your ankles. You shouldn’t be in shoes on the nice mats, anyway.”

Dabi pulls a face but shifts to try to get his boots off anyway. It’s… frustrating, to say the least. Shouto is steadily ignoring him while focusing on getting a bowl together. 

“Do you have any food allergies?” Shouto asks while he scans everything set out on the table. Meanwhile, class 1-A stares at him like he’s grown a second head.

Dabi thinks for a moment. “Yeah, I can’t eat fish.”

“Oh, really?” Cute of Shouto to just believe him.

Keigo, on the other hand, speaks up, “He’s lying, he just doesn’t like fish. He used to whine about it all the time at the PLF base.”

Dabi kicks at Keigo with his still-booted feet. “I hope you develop an allergy to chicken.”

Keigo looks like he’s about to say something snippy back when he stops to stare at Dabi’s feet.

“Do you… need help?” He gestures at Dabi’s boots.

“No,” Dabi lies.

Keigo raises his eyebrows as if to say is that so? And kneels on the cushion next to Dabi. Seeing where this is headed, Dabi huffs and sticks his foot out. Keigo smiles a little fondly down at the foot in his lap, which just makes him look ridiculous, and tugs off Dabi’s boot for him. 

“This is weird,” one of the kids says.

“Imagine how I feel,” Dabi drawls.

Eraser stares him down, quirk activated, when he transfers the cuffs from Dabi’s wrists to his ankles. Reflexively, Dabi rubs at his wrists, despite not wearing the cuffs for more than a few minutes. Eraser rolls his eyes at him for the action but says nothing.

Keigo hasn’t made to get himself any food, instead just trying not to wither under all the stares from the heroes in training. Dabi picks up a chopstick so he can stab Keigo’s hand with it.

“Ow,” Keigo says, pouting. 

“If Shouto is making me eat then I’m making you eat.”

His piercing eyes narrow, but Keigo leans forward to put a bowl together for himself. On his other side, Shouto shoves a very full bowl at Dabi and looks expectantly at him.

As Dabi and Keigo both start to eat—fuck, he is hungry—the teenagers start to loosen up just enough to go back to their own food. Annoyingly, Shouto moves his bowl so he can sit next to Dabi. As Shouto plunks down on the cushion to Dabi’s left, he scooches right. His thigh presses against Keigo, which does something annoying to his heart, especially when Keigo makes no move to put distance between them, but Dabi ignores it just like he ignores his baby brother. 

“Well, this is all really awkward, and I’ll be honest, I have no idea what’s going on anymore,” Keigo says between bites.

Dabi nods and takes a deep breath. “I was fighting you brats earlier, but you seemed surprised to see me, so I’m guessing those things don’t have a lot to do with each other.”

Shouto shrugs. “You vanishing into thin air would have made us go looking, but we only figured out what might’ve happened because mom vanished at the same time, and it seemed like Endeavor and the other heroes he was with stopped answering their calls, too.”

“And you just assumed that was related?” Keigo asks.

“We thought it might have to do with our family, but, uh.” Shouto stops talking, a blush rising to his cheeks. He goes from having been looking at Dabi and Keigo while explaining to refusing to look at them.

Dabi recognizes Bakugo Katsuki, who snorts from his spot across the table. “Clearly, we were missing some info.”

Keigo sets down his bowl. “Wait, I’m really confused, what happened to us all that we all vanished at the same time, where were we just now, and why is everyone acting so weird?”

There’s silence, then a girl with a costume Dabi wishes she wasn’t wearing speaks up. “All Might was able to give us the area he last heard from Endeavor, Hawks, Best Jeanist, and The Lurkers—”

“That many of you?” Dabi asks Keigo. He just shushes him.

The girl gives him a hard look before continuing, “We combed over the area and found the villain who is tied up in the other room right now. She calls herself ‘Baku’ and her quirk allows her to trap people inside a dream world. She targeted the six heroes who were working together, knowing that you would have to fall asleep inside her quirk in order to escape, thus reappearing nearby to her asleep, making the heroes easy targets when they appeared.”

“How the hell does that involve me, or my mom, for that matter?” Dabi asks.

The girl gets quiet, so instead of her explaining, Bakugo takes over, glaring while he talks. “Her quirk doesn’t just trap the people she’s targeting. It’s called Dreamscape, but it’s all about romance shit. She traps people along with their most recent romantic partner. And now you and the damn flamingo pop out of there together.” 

Next to Dabi, he can hear Keigo choking on his food. A few vindictive thoughts about him pass through Dabi’s mind, but really, his brain is shutting down. System failure.

“So what’d you do, seduce your way into the League or something? Keep that part to yourself so you wouldn’t have to tell Endeavor?” Bakugo scowls at Keigo, but at least his energy is directed at him and not Dabi.

Shouto shifts around on his cushion next to Dabi. “That would be pretty messed up if you did,” he says quietly, his tone edging into threatening.

What the hell?

Dabi feels his brain rebooting, slowly coming to terms with what everyone thinks has gone on between him and Keigo. “Wait,” Dabi says, “I wasn’t seduced.”

“Okay,” Shouto says, “then what happened?”

“That’s personal, not for nosy little brothers to know.”

“I bet they got drunk,” the girl with the weird ears says. The brat looks like she’s enjoying this.

“This is so stupid that Aizawa fell asleep,” says a guy with purple hair and tired eyes. Dabi looks over his shoulder to see a yellow sleeping bag with black hair sticking out. Eraserhead cracks open his single good eye to glare at his students, Keigo, and Dabi, then closes his eye again.

Keigo knits his brow. “Why do you guys think I would be drunk?”

“They’re teenagers,” Dabi replies, “Just ignore them.”

“Okay, but you guys still haven’t actually explained,” the pink girl says.

“I’m just gonna assume they hooked up,” says the ears girl.

“That doesn’t sound very manly.”

“We did not hook up, we barely even kissed. Now stop asking or else I will strangle someone with these handcuffs.” Dabi digs back into his food, adamantly refusing to look up at anyone at the table, not the 1-A teens, not his kid brother, and certainly not Keigo. Someone coughs.

A few minutes pass before the kids start chatting--not about him and Keigo, but other things. Dabi doesn’t care, so long as it’s not about him and his sex life, or lack thereof. Shouto nudges him with his elbow, and Dabi looks up to see a soft smile. 

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Shouto says. “I was worried when you disappeared. You were calming down, and then you just vanished. But you seem calm right now, compared to before. I’m glad.”

“I’m calm because it’s not worth one of me trying to fight my way through,” he pauses to count, “sixteen of you, not including the bird.”

“Hey!” Keigo protests.

Dabi gives him a sharp look, “You made a promise, pretty bird, don’t go breakin’ it so fast.”

A few spaces at the table away, a horrified bird intern breathes out the phrase “pretty bird” like Dabi just called Keigo by an anti-mutant slur. Actually, considering what Spinner is always griping at him over, he wonders if he did. He’ll have to check with Keigo later, but not now, in front of everyone. He’s not keen on having a soft, considerate discussion right now.

Shouto is, though. 

He speaks quietly, updating Dabi on Fuyumi and Natsuo and how they’ve been handling things recently. He talks about their mother, about her coming to live at their new home. He tells him about having family dinners together, just the four of them, and how if they had a fifth it would make it easier to vote for what movies to watch and games to play since there would be a tiebreaker vote, finally. 

He calls Dabi “Touya,” and Dabi slinks out of his villain persona and into himself again.

Damn little brother, making him soft. He was supposed to be emotionless, and now here is Shouto, warming him up again.

“You’ll have a hard time, though, with Natsuo and Fuyumi,” Shouto says at one point.

“They’re pissed at me?” Touya assumes.

Shouto shrugs. “Sure, we all are, but I don’t mean that right now.” 

Touya looks at him through the corner of his eye. “What about, then?”

“They don’t like Hawks very much.”

To his right, he feels Keigo deflate. For the first time since waking up among all the hero students, Touya laughs.

Edgeshot is the first to come back, after Keigo and Touya. He’s stretching as he walks through the door from the bedroom to the large sitting room, the kids all greet him warmly, if a little stiffly.

“The others will probably take a lot longer to come back, I have a lot of practice in meditation that I don’t believe the others have as much skill in.”

They get Edgeshot set up with some food, and he sits down along the wall, not the long table. Keigo can’t blame him; the table is crowded enough with all the students. He explains what went on with the other heroes while he and Touya were busy having a string of perfectly romantic dates, and Keigo feels properly embarrassed at his poor performance as a pro hero. Bakugo makes a comment about how “Sounds like the ‘pretty bird’ got distracted sleeping with the enemy,” which starts an argument with Shouto and Tokoyami trying to awkwardly defend Keigo and Touya, and Edgeshot finally does a proper double-take at seeing Touya.

“It’s gonna be like this all night, isn’t it?” Touya drones.

It isn’t, luckily. The next person back is Rei, and she throws herself around Shouto and Touya and cries through a bright smile. Neither Touya nor Shouto are very physically affectionate people, but Rei doesn’t pay that much heed as she holds her sons close. Eventually, she reaches out, her fingers closing around the collar to Keigo’s black hero uniform shirt, and tugs him into the group hug as well. They’re all stiff and have no idea how to do this, how to have this kind of closeness, but it’s nice anyway, in its own way. 

“How did you get back so fast?” Touya asks.

“Especially with that man with you,” Shouto adds.

Rei squeezes them all with her arms. “I had something I was looking forward to. It made it easy to rest.”

They decide not to wait for the heroes and their exes to get back. Especially not when Endeavor could be the next person back. Not with his patience, but they don’t want to wait around to find out.

Eraserhead grumbles over it but he helps move Touya’s handcuffs from his ankles to his wrists. They end up on the veranda, letting the night air wash over them and drinking warm sake. Shouto shouldn’t have any, but Rei lets him try a few sips anyway. Touya looks like he’s trying to not accidentally drop his, but he’s managing okay. They’re sitting along the edge, letting their legs drop over the side and onto the ground. Rei starts pointing out the constellations, but after just a couple, she asks Keigo to point out some, too.

He did point them all out in the dream world, didn’t he?

It’s easy to think about the stars, for Keigo. He’s been spending his nights flying under them for years, letting their light guide him. Dying light, really. Thousands of years away, these stars have already moved, died, but from Earth, it doesn’t look like they’ve changed much at all. 

As he points up at the stars with his left hand, Touya slowly nestles his head on Keigo’s right shoulder. Keigo stills for a moment, then carries on, pointing out dead constellations a million years away. It’s nice, to think about how things have already changed without seeming to from where they are now. Touya sips his sake and quietly complains about how wearing cuffs is annoying and he hopes Shigaraki comes to free him, and Keigo thinks it might be a lie. Rei looks a little worried, but she’s still smiling. 

Keigo thinks he doesn’t look any different than yesterday, and Touya probably doesn’t either, nor Rei, but things are changed anyway. 

Touya asks him about Lynx, why it’s just a squiggly line of stars, and Keigo smiles. It’s just a silly question, not a real one. He leans into Touya’s white hair, takes a sip of his own drink, lets the warmth flow through his body, and starts to talk about how the constellations move. They aren’t what people think they are, having changed shape already before humans ever gave names to the shapes they found in the sky. 

Perhaps Hawks and Dabi are just constellations, already changing by the time they were named. Keigo presses a kiss to the top of Touya’s head. 

The night washes over them in a cool breeze, creating ripples in their drinks and rustling their hair. Touya’s hair tickles Keigo’s nose, and neither of them moves away from each other, not tonight.