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The sound jerks Enji away from the hazy edges of a doze—a low, distant clunking like someone meddling with the locks.
He rolls onto his right side, trying not to let the bed creak, and reaches out to press the palm of his left hand over Hawks’s mouth.
He spares a fragment of a thought for regret. Hawks’s eyes flicker open immediately, blearily unfocused for a second before he blinks awake, and they fix on Enji’s with the usual relentless precision.
The circles under Hawks’s eyes are deeper these days, though he’s trying valiantly to laugh and limp his way through it. Compensating for the reduced capacity of his wings takes more out of him than he wants to admit. They make quite a pair that way—a pair, that is, of miserable, mangled bastards who simply don’t know how to quit.
Enji darts a glance at the clock on the nightstand on Hawks’s side—half an hour past midnight. They finally straggled home about an hour ago, following the gruelingly protracted resolution of a rescue at an underground mall that an extremely disgruntled employee had collapsed, purportedly unintentionally. The question of accountability is the lawyers’ problem now. Hawks and Endeavor extracted everyone that they could find, dotted all the Is, crossed all the Ts, and dragged themselves back here to scrub off the worst of the concrete dust. Nothing else for it.
And apparently no rest for them.
Hawks reads his face instantly, even in the near-perfect dark, which makes Enji’s chest tighten uncomfortably. He’s been trying to get used to that—trying to teach himself to enjoy it, if such a thing is even possible—but it’s eluded him so far. Another person having that kind of power over him still feels like a threat.
Hawks’s head tilts slightly, eyes narrowing as he listens, and Enji withdraws his hand. Faint scuffling in the entryway. So much for sleep.
Both of them slide soundlessly off of the bed. Enji has to focus hard on his balance, on keeping his shoulders level, on where he puts his feet. His brain hasn’t cleared up enough to calculate for the missing arm yet, and they can’t afford to wait.
Some variety of telekinetic ability seems most likely, given the tactic for entry. If he and Hawks strike before they’re seen, this should be quick.
The scuffling grows slightly more pronounced for a moment as Enji pads silently through the bedroom doorway, Hawks at his heels—already haloed by the cloud of readied feathers that hover around his head and shoulders, just barely refracting enough starlight to cast a reddish tint onto the opposite wall.
Only one set of footsteps near the front door. Hesitant.
Enji lengthens his stride, keeping every step both light and deliberate—perfectly controlled. Whoever it is came alone. Rookie mistake.
He and Hawks are just about to reach the juncture with the front hall. Enji thinks he pities anyone who has to face the pair of them emerging from the dark.
A feather whispers against his shoulder, which can’t be unintentional, and then subsides.
Enji zeroes in, for that final second—centers himself, draws the last breath he’ll get before impact, reaches for the flame.
It kindles.
In the instant that he turns the corner, he ignites it up his arm, gathering a fireball around his fist, swiveling his weight onto his left foot as he draws his elbow back to launch it with searing force at—
Natsuo.
Who slams himself back against the wall, face contorted with a gut-wrenching combination of terror and disgust.
The fire chokes out before Enji can even consciously consider extinguishing it.
The feathers don’t retreat yet. Blurrily, it occurs to Enji that that’s the smart play. Hawks doesn’t know Natsuo. He doesn’t realize that an imposter could never replicate that expression—that an outsider would never even know that it exists.
It doesn’t last long: Natsuo smothers it down and boxes it up behind a much more familiar scowl. He lets that linger on Enji for a long second before he turns it on Hawks. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Enji feels more tired than he did ten minutes ago. Is there any chance that it’s shock, rather than denial? Perhaps Natsuo is just too rattled to have added up the bare feet and the worn pajamas and the proximity of Hawks’s arm to Enji’s side even though he might go up in flames at any second. Perhaps Natsuo is reeling too much from surprise to register the subtle intimacy—the trademarks of the trust.
A feather flicks the lights on. Enji doesn’t take his eyes off of his son, but he can feel the incremental shift of the air as Hawks bristles at the question.
“Well,” Hawks says, crisply, “I was sleeping. What the hell are you doing here?”
Natsuo’s jaw tightens. His eyes flick between them this time. Enji has learned the hardest way there is that tempers don’t skip a generation. He has about three heartbeats to defuse this before it boils over.
“Hawks,” Enji says, quietly, without looking away from Natsuo’s face, “go back to bed.”
The floating feathers shiver hard—and then rattle pointedly as Hawks slots them all back into place.
“Like hell,” he says, but Enji had accounted for the Little Shit Principle, and he knows exactly how far the petulant tone will stretch. “I’m awake now. Could you please make it quick?”
Natsuo opens his mouth, but Hawks is already pushing past him and taking a sharp turn into the kitchen.
Hardly a human being alive could not notice how easily Hawks navigates the house.
Natsuo shuts his mouth and sets his jaw again, teeth clamped together hard enough that Enji can see the strain.
They just stare at each other while Hawks bangs around the kitchen unnecessarily noisily, even by his extremely rigorous standards for drawing attention. Before Enji can decide what—if anything—he could possibly say, Hawks reemerges with a glass of water in each hand and a third held by the feathers. The lattermost he shoves at Natsuo, and he pushes one into Enji’s left hand as he stomps exaggeratedly over. When Enji has taken the glass—more to avoid it spilling on the floor than because he wants anything to do with it—Hawks moves past him, freed fingertips grazing his hip, and heads back towards the bedroom.
A signal, or perhaps more of a warning: Hawks doesn’t want to interfere, but if it starts to spiral, he will intervene.
A strange, wistfully sentimental part of Enji hopes that whoever Natsuo finds someday is like Hawks—dug in and doubled down, ready and waiting to fight for him at the drop of a hat. Prepared to protect him at all costs, from a whole world full of traps and perils and pitfalls, yes; but most especially from himself.
Maybe there is no one like Hawks. He loves like it’s a battle he has to win—bloody-handed, wings aflame, giving no quarter and taking no prisoners and anticipating no mercy. Hawks would kill so that Enji didn’t have to. It’s a balance that shouldn’t work, most likely. Enji asks for nothing, which means that Hawks can give him everything without ever being taken advantage of.
“So what the fuck is this?” Natsuo says, voice low, eyes hard—Rei’s eyes, cool gray, like black ice. Like sleet. He takes one long step to his right and puts the water glass down on the edge of the end table. “Have you decided that you’re gay now, or something?”
Enji keeps himself too busy to entertain those questions—questions he’s unsure how to answer, and unconvinced that he even wants to understand. Questions that he doesn’t think make much of a difference anyway, in his case.
He doesn’t owe Natsuo honesty. It isn’t a requirement. But he’s going to give it of his own volition, because that does matter. He’s going to offer internality, come what may.
He takes a breath. “I don’t think so. It’s just him.”
Natsuo eyes him, harder still. Swing and a miss. “He’s—weird.”
The exhaustion has already started eating away at the adrenaline. Enji can’t quite bite the words back in time. “I certainly hope no one in their right mind would call me normal.”
Natsuo looks stunned for a second, and then he shoves his hands into his pockets, hikes up his shoulders, and looks away. “Whatever. I don’t even care.”
Enji does manage to bite back Then why did you ask?
Breathe deeper. Reach deeper. This is unsteady, but it hasn’t yet twisted out of control.
“What do you need?” he asks. Less accusatory that Why are you here? Lowers the barriers instead of reinforcing them.
Natsuo clenches his teeth, eyes flicking down the hall for another second before he glares at Enji again, hands curling into fists in the pockets of his jeans.
“Fuyumi told me she was looking for a shirt she misplaced,” he says. “A purple one, because it’s the favorite color of some kid in her class whose birthday is coming up. She said she thinks she left it here a couple weeks ago, and I was in the area, so I told her I’d come by and get it.”
Enji flips through his options like he’s sorting through a mental rolodex. He misses those. There was something reassuring about them.
“You could have knocked,” he says.
Natsuo’s shoulders rise even higher. He needs to be careful doing that. He’ll ruin his back.
“I was watching the news earlier,” he says, slowly, glaring downward now—fit to burn a hole in the floor. “I didn’t think you’d be here.”
He doesn’t have to voice I wouldn’t have come if I’d known that you were.
That’s his right.
At least Hawks didn’t fill the glass too full for Enji to walk with it. It’s probably better that he can’t beckon as he starts down the far hall. “I know the one she means.”
She dropped by for dinner and spilled beer on it. They scrubbed it out before it stained, but she left it in the laundry room to dry and went home in one of Hawks’s innumerable hoodies instead. After she left, Enji ran it through the wash for good measure. It’s a nice lavender color that looks particularly pretty on her. It has little opal buttons that catch the light.
He was careful of the buttons when he ironed it, after it dried, and then hooked the hanger over the rack on the wall so that she wouldn’t have to search the house.
Natsuo follows Enji wordlessly down the hall. He lingers in the doorway as Enji sets the water glass down on one of the shelves, takes the shirt down from the hanger, lays it out on the top of the washing machine, and folds it as neatly as he can one-handed. There’s a stack of cheap, stupid, Endeavor-branded drawstring bags—which he is definitely not responsible for—loitering on another of the shelves, so he slides it into one of those to protect it for however long Natsuo needs to carry it before he gives it back to her.
It’s a bit of a shame. There was something oddly pleasant about seeing it there from time to time—proof that she still has a presence here, and still wants to. A reminder that she’s probably coming back. He’ll have to find something else.
When he turns to hand over the parcel, Natsuo is staring at him. There’s a sharpness to it, but also a blankness—disbelief, possibly? It is deeply, frustratingly disquieting that Enji can’t interpret it. Natsuo’s features are nearly identical to his. His expressions should be the easiest to read, but Enji can’t even hazard a guess. He’s walled out.
That’s fair. He has to believe that that’s fair. He has to accept it.
“Hawks,” Natsuo says.
Enji resists the urge to say You have correctly identified the nation’s number two hero in spite of his confounding pajamas.
Enji steps forward and extends the bag. He has to balance it on his palm to keep it flat. “What about him?”
Natsuo grabs it away, but he holds it gently in both hands once he’s got it. Then he jerks his chin in the direction of the bedroom. “Isn’t he Fuyumi’s age?”
There are dozens of things that Enji could say to that—It’s none of your business. He can take care of himself. He has me wrapped around his finger, and he knows it. It hardly ever even matters except when I try to reference old television shows. If anyone’s being taken for a ride, it’s me, given that he eats like a pack of starved jackals and doesn’t pay rent. I’m not the same person anymore—not the one who taught you to be afraid of this. Of trust. Of home. Of love.
All of those are true, but none of them will matter, because they don’t address the question Natsuo actually wants an answer to.
“It was his idea,” Enji says. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
The staring increases in intensity, which at least allows Enji to register, this time, a significant amount of bewilderment in it.
He’s never admitted to incompetence or even confusion in front of Natsuo before. Hell, he’s hardly ever admitted to either in front of anyone. There is little that he despises more than being out of his depth. He’s worked himself to the bone all these years trying desperately to avoid it—trying desperately to always be ready. To be prepared for anything. To be good enough to meet it, and to match it, and then to win.
Life has a way of taking you out at the ankles and kicking you while you’re down. It took him so, so much longer than it should have to understand that you must be gentle with the people who offer you a hand back up. No one owes you anything, but you can’t carry all of it alone.
Natsuo looks down at the bag in his hands. Enji deliberately flipped it over so that the logo would be on the underside. Natsuo’s fingers tighten and then slowly relax.
“Does she come over a lot?” he asks.
Enji feels small, here, barefoot in his old pajamas, with the right sleeve hanging loose, with so much of the room between them.
It’s good. It’s good to be humbled, even when it rankles at the time. It’s good to have power, to trace the shape of its shadow, and to give it all away.
“Usually about twice a week,” he says, “if she isn’t busy. I think sometimes she stops by on her way back from work, but we’re usually not here.”
Does that count as ‘a lot’? He doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t think that any of this will ever make sense by anyone else’s standards, but he’s finally, finally learning not to measure everything that way. He actually sees her more than he used to when she lived here, and she keeps coming back. She smiles a lot. Hawks makes her laugh, and—sometimes, when he’s careful, when the stars align—he does too.
“She’s turning twenty-five this year,” Natsuo says, as if Enji—whose career has balanced teeteringly precariously atop case numbers, popularity statistics, and incredibly precise temperature calculations for almost thirty years—could possibly have forgotten how age works. “I want to… do something. For her. Something nice. A party or a big dinner or something.” He swallows, works his jaw, narrows his eyes at the wall. “It sounds like she’d probably want you to be there.”
That’s not a promise, and Enji wouldn’t rely on it if it was.
But as far as Natsuo goes, the gesture alone—the willingness to propose it, even as a theoretical—is enormous.
Enji holds himself very, very still. He nods.
“I’d like to,” he says.
Natsuo’s grip on the bag tightens again, and he turns on his heel and starts back down the hall, but not before Enji hears him mutter, “Fine.”
He’s already jamming his feet back into his shoes when Enji catches up in the entryway, having walked very slowly on purpose.
“Thank you for doing that for her,” Enji says.
Natsuo doesn’t look up. “It’s not a big deal.”
Enji could say a lot of other things, but he thinks that—just this once—he might quit while he’s ahead.
Natsuo doesn’t look back even once on his way out.
But he doesn’t slam the door.
Enji takes a few seconds to take stock. He feels a little… woozy. Like coming off of morphine. He flexes the fingers of his left hand a few times and then reaches over to turn out the lights. He trails his fingertips along the wall on his way back to the bedroom, from the doorway of which he can see the telltale glow of a phone screen.
Hawks tosses the phone onto the nightstand and settles on his side again, chin propped up on the heel of his hand, beaming at Enji as he steps through the door. “That wasn’t so bad!”
No. It wasn’t. Enji prods tentatively at the warm little bubble swelling in his chest. Something like hope. Opalescent like the buttons on Fuyumi’s shirt.
“Next time,” Hawks says, with a full dose of the unholy glee that always betrays him as a little demon, “I’m gonna be naked, and we can see if he blows a gasket.”
Next time. As if it’s even on offer, let alone a guarantee.
Then again… something shifted tonight.
Not much. But avalanches start from less.
Enji sits down on the edge of the bed to make it easier to lower himself one-handed. “That’s not as funny as you think it is.”
Hawks sticks his tongue out. “Is so. Fuyumi’s going to think it’s hilarious.”
Deeply unfortunately, he’s probably right.
“As far as encounters with your sons go,” Hawks adds airily, “anytime that nobody actively tries to murder anybody else is a pretty good one.”
Enji settles, rolls both shoulders, and eyes him. “All things considered, I think I’m still doing better than you are.”
Hawks smacks his hands over his face so abruptly that Enji flinches, but then he starts laughing—perhaps a touch hysterically. “Ooh, I deserved that.”
“I’m sorry,” Enji says.
“You shouldn’t be,” Hawks says, shifting his hands enough for Enji to see a glimmer of the grin. “It was funny.”
“Still,” Enji says.
“‘Still’ nothing,” Hawks says, dropping his hands now so that Enji can see the face he’s making. “Okay. Out with it.”
Enji blinks at him.
Hawks blinks back in a way that is clearly meant to be mocking but just sort of makes him look like a concerned sparrow. “Don’t give me that. You’ve got the master plan face on. So tell me what it is so that I can tell you what I think, and then we can go the fuck to sleep.”
It is pure torment when he makes perfect sense.
Enji bites the bullet. “Do you think that if I invited them all over, they’d actually come?”
Hawks shrugs with his whole body like a shedding snake. “Probably not.”
Enji stares at him.
Unsurprisingly, the little bastard gives it three good seconds before he starts to grin.
“I’m kidding,” he says. “I’m not sorry, by the way. You should’ve seen your face.” He yawns, cavernously, and doesn’t cover his mouth. Enji can see his tonsils. “Fuyumi would come, and she’d tell Shouto to come, so he’d do it. And once Natsuo knew they were both on board, he’d have to show up to protect them from whatever the fuck it is that he always thinks you’re going to do.” He beams again. “Foolproof!”
There is a substantial difference between foolproof and Todoroki-proof.
But there is a chance—however slim, however spindly—that it might just work.
“We’ll see,” Enji says.
He pushes himself up enough to adjust the pillow and then lies down again. He looks at Hawks, who is gazing at him in what looks less like smugness than it does like rapture. He wonders how many feathers stowed away to listen to that conversation—just in case.
Something else occurs to him, annoyingly belatedly.
The rapture gives way to an equally familiar wrinkled nose.
“What is it now?” Hawks says.
Enji frowns back. “I left that useless water glass that you gave me in the laundry room.”
Hawks rolls his eyes. “You know damn well that I just brought those over to keep your hands full so that neither of you could throw a punch.”
Enji stares at him.
“Huh,” Hawks says, blinking at him. “Okay. Uh… Surprise?”
Enji keeps his voice level. “How many times have you used deescalation tactics on me without me noticing?”
At least Hawks tries not to smirk. Enji can tell the difference these days. “Ever? Or this week?”
“Never mind,” Enji says.
Hawks is no longer trying. “Good answer. Now can we sleep?”
“The only thing stopping you is your big mouth,” Enji says.
“I know,” Hawks says, adoringly. “G’night, gorgeous.”
Enji reaches out and ruffles his hair, which at least convinces him to close his eyes.
Enji’s gaze drifts down to the way Hawks’s hands have curled into the bedsheet like they always do, clutching it to his chest, and then up over his shoulder to the wash of red just visible in the dimness of the night.
Enji had bought the bed shortly before this situation with Hawks… evolved. His back can’t handle futons anymore. He’d considered arguing with the chiropractor, but he’d talked himself down. It’s just an object. It’s just a tool. There are more meaningful battles to select, and greener hills to die on.
Despite its considerable size, Hawks took up far more than his share of the space, at the start—he always sprawled out on his chest with his arms shoved underneath the pillow, legs kicked wide, wings folded over his back and overlapping slightly, like an unconventional shield.
Lately, he sleeps on his left side instead, presumably to maximize the surface area available for absorbing Enji’s body heat. It leaves the wings dangling behind him, though, and even at the reduced weight, Enji can’t imagine that that’s good news for his spine.
There must be a company out there somewhere that will manufacture memory foam in custom shapes. Enji could put a few mockups together from old pillows and streamline a design from there. But it might need two pieces: a base, underneath the left wing, to keep it raised off of the mattress; and then a second part to fit on top which could support the right. There would have to be a substantial open space in each segment—the wings are, extremely gradually, growing fuller. Hawks persistently pretends not to notice, likely as part of a larger effort not to get his hopes up, but Enji can tell that he’s counting primaries when he pauses in front of the mirror in the mornings.
Hawks might not even want it. He wouldn’t be able to toss and turn if he wanted to, or to blast out of bed with reckless abandon after ignoring his alarm for the better part of twenty minutes. It might feel restrictive. The last thing Enji wants to do is build him a cage.
Not something to approach as a surprise, then. Neither of them likes surprises. The safest course of action would be to lay it out in logical terms and ask if Hawks wants him to put the time in to the project in the first place. Solicit his input. Find out what would make it most useful to him. What—
“You are thinking so loud,” Hawks says, still adoringly, without even opening his eyes.
“Sue me,” Enji says.
“It’s okay,” Hawks says, one eye opening a sliver as his mouth curves up. “Calm down. Get some rest. You can throw yourself at all of the world’s problems tomorrow.”
It already is tomorrow—it’s pushing one fifteen. Enji’s body is exhausted, but his brain is alive. Even if he just took an hour, he could check off half a dozen items he had to leave hanging on his to-do list when they got that call this afternoon. He could—
“If you get up and go work,” Hawks says, conversationally, “I will kill you. Do your breathing crap.”
“It’s not crap,” Enji says.
Hawks smiles beatifically at him. “Prove it.”
Enji frowns back again. “Do you ever shut up?”
“Only when I’m asleep,” Hawks says sweetly. Not even then, as it happens, but it’s not the time to talk nightmares after the day they’ve had. “Why don’t you demonstrate so I can be sure I get it right?”
Enji shifts up again, planting his hand on the mattress between them to lend himself the leverage to lean across the space and kiss Hawks’s forehead before he lies back down and obediently closes his eyes this time. “Idiot.”
“Hmm,” Hawks says. “Not the best start, but I have faith that you can come back from this. You’ve definitely regrouped from worse.”
Enji keeps his eyes pressed shut. “Hawks.”
“Okay,” Hawks says, and the laughter shivering underneath his voice feels impossibly comforting. “Okay, okay, okay.”
And it is, this time.
That’s the important thing.