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Rage is nothing new to Dabi. His life is driven by it. His quirk feeds on it. It’s what’s kept him going beyond the limits of human endurance over and over again. He could be hemorrhaging blood and slipping out of his own skin and the endless wells of fury in him would rise up, pushing him back to his feet, back into a fight, back to life, even when death itself had its claws in his mangled skin.
Dabi’s rage has kept him alive since he was thirteen years old.
Too bad he can’t fucking use it for someone else.
“Come on, Hawks,” he hisses, fury and fear making his hands shake as he gathers the hero into his arms, knees scraping against the asphalt under Hawks’ limp weight. There’s no blood visible, but Dabi knows that doesn’t mean shit in a world of quirks. For all he knows, Hawks is already dead.
Heavy arms drape over Dabi’s shoulders and Hawks’ head lolls to the side, exposing his throat. Call him crazy, but he swears he sees the thrum of a slow pulse under golden, sweaty skin, and it makes his fucking stomach weak with relief.
Fuck, Hawks, what the hell happened? he thinks, digging his fingers into the space under Hawks’ wings, fighting back panic when Hawks doesn’t respond to the rough treatment of one of his most sensitive areas.
Dabi saw Hawks fall from the sky mid-fight. After that, he doesn’t remember much. Heat bursting from his feet, the wrench of his shoulders as he caught Hawks’ dead weight, the scorching trench left in his wake as he skidded across the street, screaming Hawks’ name.
The hero hadn’t responded. Still isn’t responding. And Dabi can’t wait around for him to open his eyes if something really fucked up has happened.
So he turns his gaze down the street - to the recruit who first raised a hand at Dabi, firing off his quirk, which Hawks intercepted - and he feels flames leap from his shoulders, snarling and hungry for blood.
“What did you do to him?” he growls, voice shredded from yelling. Choking on the fear that clamps down on his esophagus.
“Shit, meant to hit you,” the recruit says shakily, staggering away from the flames that surround them both. He looks washed out in the blue light, face pale and sweaty. Perhaps his quirk took a lot out of him.
Not as much as I’m about to, Dabi thinks, feeling his skin begin to sear and not giving a single damn about it.
“Tell me,” Dabi warns, acid dripping from his words. Hawks feels dead in his arms. “Or I’ll be pissing on your ashes next.”
The threat is accompanied by flames thrashing wildly around them, still within Dabi’s control, and the recruit flinches away from the insane heat, eyes wide in fear.
“Failure!” he cries, quailing as the flames around him grow hotter, burning almost white. “My quirk is Failure! Anything hit with it stops working!”
Dabi freezes, horror digging its claws into his skull, making his hair stand on end.
Failure… Hawks took the shot straight to the guts, he realizes, casting his gaze down to Hawks’ greying face.
Organ failure. Hawks is going to -
Flames spike high all around them, and Dabi barely hears the recruit scream as he’s engulfed. It’s nowhere near as loud as the pounding in his head that screams die, die, die, Hawks is going to die.
Hawks coughs weakly, and Dabi’s inner mantra cuts off with a car-crash shriek. He shakes with the mental whiplash and clutches Hawks’ body tighter, feeling his shuddering breaths, his still-warm skin. Blue fires die out as Dabi’s entire focus funnels down to the hero in his arms and the virtual clock ticking over their heads.
It’s not too late. You’re not going to die. I won’t fucking let you.
“Not today,” he whispers, resolve hardening into steel. Rage still boils within him, and if he can’t give it to Hawks, he’s going to use it to save his fucking life.
The clarity of what he needs to do hits him all at once, and he hauls Hawks closer to his chest, digging into the hero’s back pocket until he finds his phone. A quick swipe of the screen reveals it’s password protected, and Dabi damn near snarls at the thing. How the fuck is he supposed to know Hawks’ password? It could be any four characters in the world, with hundreds of combinations.
“Fuck,” he hisses, ready to throw the useless thing before he registers that the lock screen photo is one that he recognizes. A sunset they watched together from Hawks’ balcony not two weeks ago.
Dabi refused to have his picture taken, and Hawks pouted, taking a snap of the horizon instead.
“If I can’t have a picture of you, I at least wanna remember this moment,” Hawks confessed, looking sheepish. “A little reminder of you as I go through my boring day, ya know?”
Dabi inhales sharply. Then, in a bid of almost hysterical hope, types in D-A-B-I as the passcode.
The phone unlocks, and that fucking choking feeling comes back full force as Dabi swipes over to the hero SOS icon and taps it. It’s on every hero’s phone, and it’s faster than any emergency services call could ever be.
Facial recognition pops up, and Dabi hauls Hawks into position so he can shove the phone in his face. The app unlocks, and a list of options pops up.
EVACUATION
HOSPITAL
VILLAIN ASSIST
NATURAL DISASTER
He taps on the first two and hits submit, finger practically slipping across the slick screen. Within moments the phone buzzes with a notification.
Your location has been identified. Please scale your emergency between 1-10.
A sliding bar pops up, and Dabi curses as he shoves it to 10.
Understood. Stand by.
Dabi checks Hawks’ pulse, only to find it thready and weak. Sweat stands out on the hero’s forehead, and his breathing is slow. He hasn’t opened his eyes once since he got hit, and Dabi fucking hates how desperate he is to see teasing gold instead of the deep blue veins of Hawks’ eyelids.
Thirty seconds pass. Dabi’s starting to hyperventilate when another notification pops up.
Switch Hero: Sub-in has been engaged. Prepare for hospital arrival.
Dabi clutches Hawks tighter to his chest, unsure if this hero will just take Hawks, or if they’ll be able to take them both. He doesn’t care. Can’t care, as long as Hawks gets treatment, but…
Suddenly, there’s a haze forming around them, blurring out the fires and smoke and wreckage from the fight, squeezing them both tighter and tighter, like diving deep underwater. Dabi grits his teeth as a loud, squealing whine builds in his ears along with the pressure until it suddenly pops.
And just like that, they’re no longer in the street, but in the middle of a brightly lit hospital room, with doctors and nurses awaiting their arrival. Several of them reel back, and at least one screams upon seeing Dabi curled around Hawks like a venomous snake, but Dabi doesn’t give a damn. The first one who meets his eyes is the one he begs.
“Help him.”
The doctor, an older woman with cat ears, steps forward, her slitted eyes pinning on Hawks.
“What happened?” she asks, dropping to a knee next to him even as the room fills with chaos and people start calling for police, heroes, anybody, to come get rid of the villain in their midst. Again, Dabi ignores the trash, too busy concentrating on the treasure in his arms.
“He got hit with a quirk. It’s making his organs fail,” Dabi replies, voice cracking.
“How long ago?” the doctor asks, gesturing for someone to grab the gurney. They hesitate, and her ears lay flat against her skull.
“All of you!” she snaps at the room. “Get yourselves together and help!”
Surprisingly, it works. And Dabi finds himself helping lift Hawks up onto a gurney, while a shaking nurse gets an oxygen mask strapped to Hawks’ ashen face and another sticks a fucking enormous needle in his arm.
“How long ago?” the doctor repeats, pressing her fingers into Hawks’ wrist as he’s wheeled into a room full of machines.
“Less than ten minutes,” Dabi says, following helplessly as the bodies rush to hook Hawks up to a myriad of machines, all of them reporting back red graphs and numbers that absolutely freak the fuck out of everyone.
The doctor takes the news in stride, directing someone to get a dialysis machine, while another one is directed to fetch a BAL. Dabi doesn’t recognize either of those terms, but he’s not given the chance to ask when the doctor snaps out another question.
“Do you know if the quirk targets a specific organ, or all of them?” she asks. “His numbers read like his kidneys and liver are shutting down, but the plan is going to change if his lungs and heart go too.”
“I… don’t know,” Dabi says, feeling fucking helpless and so pissed off about it he can barely see straight. “The fucker just said whatever his quirk hit would fail.”
“Understood,” she says grimly, calling for another machine. “We’ll plan for the worst.”
Dabi stands there, hands limp at his side, useless in his fury. He can do nothing but watch as doctors go to work like a pit crew on a racecar, fighting against time to save Hawks’ life. Blood is drawn, scans are run, and someone with a healing quirk is brought in. She puts her hands on Hawks’ abdomen and doesn’t remove them, even when sweat begins dripping from the end of her nose and she begins to shiver violently.
The heroes come, because of course they do. They approach warily, clearly on edge with a villain in the middle of a hospital, standing over their favorite hero, who’s beyond vulnerable right now. Do they try to remove him and risk his wrath? Do they leave him be and risk him going off like a bomb should the doctors fail?
Dabi lets them rot in their uncertainty, never taking his eyes off of Hawks, the whining machines, and the shuddery way his chest rises and falls with the help of the oxygen being pumped into his lungs.
Dabi’s not moving, and no one is strong enough or idiotic enough to make him.
Fuck, Hawks is the only one in the prefecture who could get me to do anything I don’t want to, he thinks, somewhat hysterically. And he wouldn’t even have to use his quirk to do it.
The hero’s phone digs into Dabi’s palm where he clenches it tight. Reminding him that the hero has played his hand without meaning to, setting Dabi’s name as the password. Adding their fucking sunset as his background photo.
“C’mon, you useless pigeon,” he mutters under his breath. “You’ve royally fucked me over this time. You don’t get to fucking die.”
Almost as if he hears him, Hawks groans against the facemask, his stupid eyebrows pinching together in distress. Dabi’s not too proud to admit his back sags with relief.
The healer also lets out a gasp, her sweaty face breaking into a grin as she looks up at the monitors. They’re slowly moving from red… to yellow… to green, and the whole room’s atmosphere changes like a light has been switched on. Doctors lean into each other, and nurses recheck the screens, cheeks bunching up in wide grins beneath their masks.
Even the cat-eared doctor bows her head in relief, a soft purr emanating from the back of her throat. Then she turns her slitted eyes on Dabi and nods.
“He’s going to make it.”
Dabi’s feels the furious terror that has driven him so hard drain away with such abruptness it leaves him weak at the knees. He sinks down into a squat, cupping his hands in front of his face so no one will see the blood welling from the seams beneath his eyes.
There’s a shift in the energy behind him and he knows the heroes will have been emboldened by his display of weakness. He finds that he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about anything.
He’s going to make it. He’s going to make it. He’s going to make it.
They could take him away right now. Put him in solitary confinement for the rest of his life. Execute him in front of the nation. Nothing could make him regret getting Hawks to safety. Nothing could ever trump the bone-melting sweetness of knowing Hawks will live.
Despite his thoughts, the hand on his shoulder still surprises him, if only because it’s gentle rather than apprehending. Of course, it’s the cat-eared doctor.
“We will make sure he knows what you did for him,” she assures, an odd expression of understanding on her face. Dabi feels the press of bodies behind him. Hears the unmistakable clink of handcuffs being opened. He doesn’t take his eyes off the doctor.
“Take care of him,” he says, trying to put force into the threat. “He won’t do it himself.”
She smiles. “You can count on us.”
And Dabi believes her.
—--
Epilogue
It takes almost a week for Hawks to visit him in jail, so Dabi’s faith in the doctor was not misplaced.
The hero looks good. There’s a healthy, well-rested glow to his skin that Dabi’s never seen before, and it makes Hawks look even younger than he normally does. It’s odd to realize how stressed Hawks must normally look if a week-long stay in a hospital actually spits him out looking better.
“Hey, hot stuff,” Hawks says softly, sliding into the visitor chair across from Dabi. There’s not even a glass wall between them, due to Dabi’s full and unequivocal cooperation thus far. Frankly, the police are baffled by him. Dabi just knows that he wouldn’t be here, across from Hawks, if he’d started shit while in custody.
“These guys tell me you’ve been harmless as a kitten around here,” Hawks says, as if reading his mind. Keen golden eyes sweep up and down Dabi’s prison gray uniform and the quirk-suppressing cuffs clasped around his wrists. “Seems unlike you.”
Normally, Dabi would have a snappy comeback. A witty one-liner that’d leave Hawks squawking or pissed or some combination of the two.
Today, though? Today, the image of Hawks’ gray face is too near the surface, and Dabi is helpless to do anything but stare at him, taking in the living, breathing, snarking sight of him.
God, Dabi’s so fucking gone.
Maybe his feelings show on his mangled face. Or maybe Hawks is feeling his close call, too. Whatever the case may be, the hero’s expression softens and he reaches across the table, taking Dabi’s fingers between his own.
“Hey, now,” he murmurs softly, golden eyes flicking between Dabi’s with concern. “I made it out okay, thanks to you. Doc says my innards have never looked better, and that’s saying something with all the takeout I eat.”
A weak smile tugs at the corners of Dabi’s lips. It hides the tremble in his jaw.
Hawks still gets up from his seat, ignoring the guards jerking to attention as he rounds the table. Dabi barely has a second to steel himself before Hawks is pulling him into a hug that he can’t reciprocate, and fuck, a second wasn’t long enough, because Dabi can feel the hot blood streaking down his cheeks.
“It’s okay, Dabi,” Hawks whispers into his ear, his cheek nuzzling into Dabi’s prison-gross hair. Dabi leans into it, feeling undone. Like a fire doused into embers, no longer fuel but the charred remains of something once brilliant.
“I thought you were going to die,” Dabi admits, his voice choked once more, though without the excuse of screaming or smoke this time.
“I know,” Hawks says, breathing in deep. His arms tighten around Dabi’s shoulders. “Thank you for saving me.” He digs his nose into Dabi’s hair. “For everything, you crazy bastard.”
Dabi’s resolve takes another hit, and he turns his face into Hawks’ chest, hiding his expression from the cameras and guards.
“Don’t do that again,” Dabi warns, voice muffled. Hawks hums deep in his chest, the sound vibrating through Dabi’s cheekbone.
“No shot, hot stuff,” he says gently, a hand drifting up to cup the back of Dabi’s neck, careful of the staples hidden in his hairline. “I’m always going to want to save you.”
Dabi’s brows furrow, the embers inside him stoked, but he doesn’t get the chance to reply as Hawks whispers into his hair.
“Starting here and now. How bout we get you outta here, Dabi?”
A reluctant smile tugs at Dabi’s lips. The embers die back down.
“Their food is kinda shit here,” he says. Hawks nods against his hair.
“The hospital food was garbage too. So green and healthy. Absolutely vile.”
Dabi laughs. “Figures you barely get your guts functioning again and you’re trying to destroy them. Let me guess… fried chicken?”
“As if you’d say no to fried chicken right now.”
“You’re right. I’m fucking starving anyway.”
Red feathers skirt by in the corner of Dabi’s vision, and he hears the thumps of bodies hitting the floor. Hawks pulls away, eyes shining.
“No time like the present, right?”
Dabi grins.
“Let’s fucking go.”