tierfallen

Title: take a hike
Fandom: My Hero Academia
Pairing: EndHawks
Rating: PG
Word Count: 5,892
Warnings: manga spoilers!!!; schmoopy post-canon hopes and dreams, please join the prayer circle; Hawks finally gets some cocaine like he always wanted <3
Summary: Hawks drags Enji out of the house for a hike, which is insufferable except when it isn't.
Author's Note: I wrote this in : ) three days : )

I am just. So normal about these fucks. So normal.


take a hike
The world’s worst alarm clock shakes him out of a turbulent dream.  “Rise and shine, Bright Eyes!”

Hawks knows damn well that Enji was up late negotiating agency business, because Enji is always up late negotiating agency business, and Hawks is frequently up equally late texting him stupid image macros mocking his work ethic, which he apparently wouldn’t need if he wasn’t so slow.

This marks the eighth time this month that Hawks has broken into the house while Enji was out at work, taking a shower, or trying to sleep—and the third time this week, despite the relevant detail that Enji expelled him on Thursday night with a plume of fire at his heels.  Hawks seems to think that if he just keeps showing up, Enji will eventually acclimate to his presence enough to start letting him hang around and amuse himself at everyone else’s expense.  Hawks overestimates his own persistence and underestimates how fucking annoying he is.

Enji’s been meaning to change the locks.  Having an endless font of asinine nicknames burst into one’s bedroom on a Saturday morning is a pertinent reminder that there is no time like the present to install a state-of-the-art security system.  With lasers.

Enji pushes himself up on his elbow.  His balance still betrays him in the morning a lot of the time—before his brain wakes up enough to start to compensate.  He tries to lift his right hand to rub his eyes before he remembers.

One of the many, many problems with Hawks is that he takes acknowledgment of his existence as encouragement.  Enji pointedly doesn’t look at him, but it’s too late.

“There he is,” Hawks says, delightedly.  He was sending Enji captioned pictures of cats until a quarter to midnight.  Either there is a substantial quantity of an illicit substance in that canned shit he’s always pouring down his throat, or the twenties are even more forgiving than Enji remembers.  “Get dressed!  We’re going on a hike!”

Enji eyes him.  “‘We’,” Enji says.  Dignifying crap with an inquisitive inflection tends to incite the people who spout crap to produce more of it.

“Yeah,” Hawks says, planting both hands on his hips.  The lengthening feathers fan out ostentatiously and then shuffle themselves back into a more subdued configuration, folded closer to his shoulder-blades.  He’s wearing a loose gray muscle shirt with a stylized graphic of an arm wearing Enji’s costume, curled into a flexed position.  The words Watch me are emblazoned underneath.  Enji would remember signing off on an abomination like this, so it can’t be official merchandise.  “It’s good for you.”

“‘You’,” Enji says.

“Yup,” Hawks says, popping his mouth on the P and then sauntering closer before Enji has even finished crafting a mental workout regimen for him that would increase the definition in his shoulders.  His collarbones stand out too much.  Precisely why is he approaching Enji’s bed?  “Get some air.  Get some nature.  Get some lack of cell service.  Get you out of the house.  C’mon.  Trust me.”

Enji glowers at him, but he just keeps walking.  The space between him and the bed dwindles to four steps, and then three, and—

“Don’t,” Enji says.

Hawks drops down on the edge of the mattress hard enough that he bounces, at which he beams.

Typical.

“Come on, big guy,” he says, gazing up at Enji through his eyelashes like… like a lot of things.  He twirls his index fingertip into the sheets.  Enji is going to have to light him on fire.  There simply aren’t any other options at this point.  “It’ll be fun.  You remember ‘fun’, right?”

“No,” Enji says.  “I’m not going anywhere with you, let alone halfway up a mountain.  Get out.”

Hawks leans in close—so close.  Close enough that Enji can differentiate the faint ring of brown around his pupils.  Close enough that Enji can count the tiny freckles on his nose.  Close enough to see the individual bumps and knots and snarls of the pearl-pink scar climbing up the side of his neck.

He only does this when he wants to throw Enji off-guard—when he’s trying to get away with something.

“Hey,” he breathes.  “Live a little.”

Enji’s eyes narrow as he searches Hawks’s expression.  There’s always a game.  Hawks’s lips part for a flash of teeth, and Enji looks down at Hawks’s hands splayed out on top of the sheets.

The flicker of red catches his eye one second too late.

Hawks jumps up and darts out of the doorway, a dutiful feather depositing Enji’s phone into his waiting hand just as he swings into the hall.

“I’m taking a hostage!” he calls back.  “Get dressed and get in the car, and you might get to see your precious emails again!”

Enji definitely should have set him on fire.










Nearly everything is more complicated with one hand—dressing, washing his face, putting toothpaste on the brush, rubbing vaseline into the scar tissue, pulling on socks—but opening the childproof cap on the painkiller bottle takes the grand prize.

He’s trying not to become reliant on the prosthetic.  The fact of the matter is that he won’t always have it—and, potentially, that it won’t always work.  A minor electrical manipulation quirk could short-circuit nearly everything that makes it useful.  He needs to be able to fend for himself without it.

He’s doing “better”, whatever the hell that means.  He’s moving.  One foot in front of the other, one minute after the next.  Do no harm, take no shit, give no quarter, expect none.

He knots his sleeve.  People have been staring at him for so long that it rarely registers for him that it’s usually for a different reason these days.  Hawks didn’t deign to tell him where the hell he’s being blackmailed into going.  Workout clothes are a safe bet.

The sooner they get this over with, the sooner he can get back to work.  He has a whole obstacle course of meetings on Monday, and mental notes won’t be sufficient.  He’ll VPN into the office from his laptop this afternoon; he needs the files.  In the meantime, tallying the to-do list in his head occupies him all the way down the hall, and if he could just remember where his sho—

Hawks shoves a backpack against his chest, forcing him to clasp his hand over it on instinct.  “You’re going to have to carry this,” Hawks says, “for obvious reasons.  It’s got water in it.  And trail mix.  Do you like raisins?”

“No,” Enji says.

“Shit,” Hawks says, blinking owlishly at him.  “Me neither.  How about peanuts?”

Enji looks at him.

“Don’t start,” Hawks says, turning swiftly on one heel.  “It’s still a great idea.  Hurry it up, already, let’s go.”










Hawks drives like shit.

Enji’s grip cracks the plastic insert in the passenger side door.  He’s awake now.  He is very, very awake.

“Lighten up,” Hawks says, leaping out into the little tree-lined parking lot and stretching both arms over his head, then both wings over his arms, until his spine cracks loudly.  “We survived.  Man, I never get to do that.”

“I can tell,” Enji says.

“Hey!” Hawks says, fitting both hands onto his hips again.  It makes him look much less like All Might than he seems to think—all it ever accomplishes is dragging one’s eye down along the neat line of his waist.  “Take a second and smell that nice, clean nature.”

A brief assessment of their surroundings identifies a machine to pay for parking—which Hawks will expect Enji to spring for—and a kiosk offering paper maps.  Enji starts towards it.  If he has to do this in exchange for his appropriated phone, he’s going to do it as efficiently as possible.  With any luck, he’ll get some cardio out of the deal.  Blackmail tends to go that way in this line of work.

“Are you smelling it?” Hawks is calling after him.  “I don’t see any sniffing.”

“If you’re too busy inhaling nature to keep up,” Enji says, trying to parse the placard with a larger park map even as he approaches it, “I’m leaving you behind.”

“That’s the spirit,” Hawks says.  “Rugged individualism.  Crush the trail.  Take no prisoners.  Throw trail mix at anyone who crosses you.  Isn’t this fun?”

“No,” Enji says, shoving an indecipherable trail map at him.  “Come on.”










They’ve hardly even stepped out onto the most promising-looking trail before they encounter an elderly couple coming towards them from the opposite direction, having apparently already completed the entire loop.  Enji suspects that that’s more related to discipline than to the pair of metal poles that each of them is digging into the trail with every step, but it’s the poles that Hawks points to after they’ve inclined their heads and moved to the side of the trail to make room to pass.

“We could try that for you, old man,” Hawks says, trying to elbow him.  “We’d only need to get one.”

Enji looks at him.

Hawks grins back.  “And you’d stab me with it.  Duly noted.”

Enji steps past him and starts up the trail again.  “I thought yakitori was your favorite.”

Hawks laughs so loudly that the couple turns around to stare at them.

Embarrassing.










The switchbacks of the narrow trail—which is just steep enough to keep Enji awake, and slightly more challenging than it would have been a couple years ago—make it seem logical to rotate who walks ahead first.  Hawks is in front as they approach a few pale boulders integrated into the path, apparently with the intention of making unsuspecting hikers climb over them.  If they incorporated more of that, and increased the incline by another ten or fifteen degrees, this might almost be worth it.

It’s nice enough.  It’s better than a treadmill.  The towering firs sweeping down the mountainside keep the trail cool, and—other than the company—it’s very quiet.

In a new instance of an increasingly frequent mistake, Enji looks ahead instead of out over the plant life.  Human life is a much more mixed bag.

Hawks hacked some uneven holes into the back of his tank top to fit the wings.  Scar tissue spreads over the back of his neck and bleeds across his shoulder, and the light fabric billows back and forth across it as he moves.

Occupational hazard.  Enji tries to think of it that way.  Hawks is an adult.  He’s responsible for himself.  He made a choice knowing that it might have consequences.

Enji wonders, occasionally, if Hawks has to detach most of the feathers temporarily to be able to fit into his shirts, and then he brings them back.  It seems like the only possible solution, especially when the wings were fuller than they are now.

Squinting, Enji can just make out a shimmer on the surface of a few of the feathers.  Motes of dust twirl around them as the air currents fractionally change.

“You’re cheating,” he says.

“I’m not cheating,” Hawks says, shamelessly flashing the usual shit-eating grin over one shoulder.  “I’m using my God-given quirk as a perfectly natural supplement.  This would be cheating.”

The wings flutter, the air gusts, and Hawks buoys himself smoothly upward, staying airborne for one wholly unnecessary second before he alights on the peak of the next boulder, balanced daintily on one toe with the other foot kicked up behind him.  He looks like a nightmarish parody of the plastic ballerina in a music box.

“After you,” he says, bowing deep.

Enji frowns at him, but there’s no point standing around, and Enji has never been inclined to pass up an opportunity to take the lead.  He starts upward again.  With Hawks, however, morbid curiosity sometimes wins out.  “Why?”

“Because I want to look at your ass,” Hawks says cheerfully, which makes Enji turn so fast that it hurts his neck.  “What?” Hawks says, beaming at him.  “Not my fault you’ve got cake.”

Enji turns the glower on the trail ahead, which will probably respond better.  “Could you speak like an adult once in a while?”

“Not on your life,” Hawks says.

Enji breathes the steam out slowly and tips his head back to look up at the intricate web of intertwining tree branches overhead.

“You really do have a great ass,” Hawks says.  “Do people tell you that?  They should.”

Enji glares over his shoulder, and the little backpack gets in the way.  There is no dignity in any of this.  “Your ass is going to end up in the stratosphere if you don’t watch your mouth.”

Hawks beams some more.  He’s a regular pole star.  “Sounds like a date!”

It occurs to Enji—far, far too late—that their current escapade would, if described to a neutral party, sound more like a date than blasting Hawks’s scrawny, miserable mortal coil into the upper reaches of the atmosphere would.

It also occurs to Enji that there is nothing here for Hawks to gain.  Even if he’s playing a long, long game of trying to piggyback off of Enji’s gradual return to hero work—which sounds too slow for Hawks’s tastes, and too involved for his style—this particular venture has no value that couldn’t be found much easier elsewhere.

Enji turns that over.  He nudges it with his toe like the corpse of a feral animal that might not be fully dead.

Hawks considers life too short to do anything that doesn’t serve a purpose.  In an utterly backwards sort of way, it’s the haste itself that makes him reasonable.

Enji does suspect that sometimes the purpose amounts to Fucking with Endeavor for fun and profit, but one way or another, in Hawks’s mind, this must not be a waste of time.  He wants something.  He wants something out of this.

It doesn’t make much difference.  Hawks is perfectly capable of keeping secrets, but only the important ones.  The odds are high that he’ll triumphantly announce his own intentions before Enji ever gets a chance to pick apart the evidence.

“Hey, toss me that trail mix,” Hawks says.  “There’s M&Ms in it.”

“The last thing you need is candy,” Enji says.

“Cut me a break,” Hawks says.  “I’m making up for a lot of lost childhood, here.  Besides, it’s authentic, like in the movies!  And I need the carbs.  I’m not an infantry tank of concentrated athleticism like you are.”

“Drink some water,” Enji says.

“You’re giving me no choice,” Hawks says, which is such a non-sequitur that Enji glances back at him again.  “None.  I either have to say ‘Give me some sugar’ or ‘I am really thirsty.’  Look what you’ve done.”

Enji stops walking to maximize the intensity of his glare.  He looms to the best of his extremely advanced ability.  He releases a little bit of ambient flame.

Hawks just laughs.

Fortunately, Enji is not some kind of idiot who would leave the house completely unprepared.  He added to the bag before he reluctantly ceded Hawks the car keys.  He eases his left arm carefully out of the strap so that he can swing it around in front of himself without it sliding off of his right shoulder.

“You can have a banana,” he says.

“What?” Hawks says.  “I don’t want a banana.  Except in an innuendo way.  In which case, give me your banana, if you—”

“Catch,” Enji says.

Hawks doesn’t even fumble it.

“If you think for a second that I’m not going to pretend that this is a gun,” Hawks says, “on account of the whole mangled wreck of a childhood thing—”

“I am not qualified to be your therapist,” Enji says.

This smile is fundamentally different from all the ones that preceded it today.

“It’s funny,” Hawks says, slowly, tapping the end of the banana against his open palm.  “I kinda think you are.  I think you’re the only person on the planet who can actually hear me.”  He pauses.  “Except Jeanist, maybe.  And you’re way hotter than he is.”

“None of that is funny,” Enji says.

Hawks levels the banana at him, pretending to sight him along the top of the peel.

“Bang,” he says.

Enji turns around and starts up the trail again before they both end up covered in banana flambé.










Enji is coming around on the parts where they’re walking uphill, and Hawks has to focus on his footing and keeps his yap shut while he concentrates.  Those parts are pleasant enough to make this seem like a tolerable pastime for the kinds of people who have time to pass.

Enji does not like the parts where they stop and stare down at a trail map consisting of a series of intersecting squiggly lines scattered with incomprehensible symbols.

“We’re supposed to go to the right at marker twenty-eight,” Hawks says.

Enji looks up at the fork ahead of them, which has not changed since the last time he looked at it.  “This is thirty-two.”

Hawks wrinkles his nose, scratches at the edge of the scar slicing up his jaw, smears trail dust all over his own cheek, and turns the map upside down.

He looks back.  He looks ahead.  He turns it another ninety degrees.

“Hawks,” Enji says.

“We’re not lost,” Hawks says.  He traces a fingertip along the squiggly line that might indicate the way they came.  “We know exactly where we are: we’re right here.  We just don’t know where we are in relation to anything else.”

Enji looks at him.

“Which is what ‘lost’ means,” Hawks says.  “Give me some water, wouldja?”

Enji hands him one of the bottles.  He tips his head back and chugs a third of it at a dizzying speed, throat undulating, sweat glistening on those damn too-prominent collarbones, and his abominable excuse for a shirt sticks to his skin.

“On the upside,” Hawks says, and the way his mouth gleams and his breath comes short is somehow even worse, “we’ve got so much red going on between the two of us that the rescue helicopters will definitely be able to find our corpses from the air.”

“Hawks,” Enji says.

“What’s the rush?” Hawks says.  Enji’s face—or possibly the flickers of orange cropping up around it—must make for a sufficient answer.  “Okay, okay,” he says.  He shoves the bottle back at Enji.  “Hold my not-beer.”

Enji has hardly wrapped his fingers around it before Hawks rockets up into the sky—but not too far.

He hovers, little wings sweeping up and down in what must be more of a matter of habit than any act of physics, and holds one hand up to shade his eyes as he looks back and forth and then down at the map.  He still keeps his knees bent and his feet tucked underneath him in a way that is… disarming.

At least, it is until he drops back down to Earth like a particularly chatty sack of potatoes.

“Jeez,” he says.  “It’s so much easier from above. I don’t know how anybody does this shit quirkless.  C’mon.”










“I’m dying,” Hawks says.

“You’re not dying,” Enji says.

“Tell my family that I love them,” Hawks says.  It’s not even that steep.  He inserted a wheeze into his voice on purpose.  The histrionics never cease.  “Wait, I take that back.  Tell my Instagram followers that I love most of them, except the trolls.”

“If you kept your mouth shut,” Enji says, “you would die slower.”

“I thought I wasn’t dying,” Hawks says, deliberately dragging his feet one at a time now.

“I take it back,” Enji says.  If he leaves Hawks behind, so be it.  The idiot can fly home when he feels like composing himself.  “You will be if you keep this up.”

“You’re adorable,” Hawks says.  “Promise me that you’ll bait the internet trolls for me when I’m gone, Mr. Endeavor, sir.”

“Shut up,” Enji says.

“I can’t believe this,” Hawks says, but the sulkiness sounds a little bit… off.  Enji glances back at him again.  What’s the game this time?  “My brilliant plan to drag you outside and torment you with fresh air has backfired.  I’m miserable, and you’re enjoying it.”

Enji feels pleased about that for just a moment before it clicks that that’s exactly what Hawks was angling for.

“Knock it off,” he says.  “I just want to get this over with.”

Hawks’s posture immediately straightens.  He rolls his shoulders, sighs, and produces a rueful version of the grin this time.  “Worth a shot.  You are enjoying it a little bit, though.  I can tell.  It’s better than sitting at home, staring at the walls and hating all your employees, right?”

“No comment,” Enji says.










The last half-mile stretch conveys them to the peak of the mountain in more or less direct sunlight.  Enji’s sweat is steaming off of him, which feels… good.  Or at least productive.  He thinks he used to be able to differentiate the two.

Hawks, however, looks bedraggled in a way that is unsettlingly charming—damp and disheveled like he fell out of a birdbath, ruffling his feathers with every other step.  He frowns down at the map as they come around another bend, approaching what looks from Enji’s vantage like a cliff face, with the dust swirling thicker around their feet by the moment.  The steam makes it stick to him.  Hawks rubs at his forehead with the back of his hand and smears gritty sweat everywhere.  He draws his hand away streaked with it.

“I am,” he says, “revising my opinion on hiking.”

“So am I,” Enji says, primarily because startling him is its own reward.

Hawks blinks twice.  Enji raises an eyebrow at him, adjusts the stupid backpack, and then heads over to the rocks positioned near the edge of the summit, functioning as a built-in bench.  The tops are worn visibly smoother than any other part of them by all the people who have sat here and stared out over the wilderness over an unfathomable number of years.

Enji sits down and breathes out.  Hawks drops down next to him—on the right.

Between the drive up and the walk itself, they climbed much further than he’d realized.  The whole world falls away beneath them only to crest again on the far side of the valley, surging up to meet the sky.  Enji can differentiate individual trees if he focuses very, very closely.  Otherwise it’s too much to take in.

He watches for a few seconds out of the corner of his eye.  Hawks’s shoulders are loose, and his eyes are half-lidded.  He leans back on his hands, head tilted slightly, gaze ranging slowly back and forth over the view.  He has some stupid sunglasses pushed up into his equally stupid hair, with trail dust smudged into the sweat on his forehead.  He hiked one leg up over the other at the knee, and his upraised foot swings idly.  The breeze pulls at his hair.  Sweat clings to his collarbones, and the tops of his shoulders are burning pink.

It’s the right time.

Enji clears his throat.  “Give me my phone so I can take a picture for Fuyumi.”

“Good idea,” Hawks says, and the relaxation warmed his voice to a low, honeyed murmur, but then he sucks in a deep breath and sits up straight.  He pushes both hands into his pockets.  “Here.  Go wild.”

He deposits Enji’s phone into his palm again at long last—and then, as expected, takes out his own and starts trying to snap a selfie of the two of them even though they’re sitting in harsh sunlight, covered in grime.

Enji glares up into the camera for an even dozen of the photos before obediently making his mouth curve up slightly.

“Holy shit,” Hawks says, hauling the phone back down and flipping into the photos app to thumb back and forth through the whole sequence.  “You should smile more, you know.  One of these days, if you’re feeling crazy, you could try out a laugh.”

“You laugh enough for both of us,” Enji says.  He opens his emails.  There is marginally less bullshit than he expected.  “It would be excessive.”

“I’m serious,” Hawks says, deftly spreading his fingertips to zoom in on Enji’s face.  Enji reads through a few moderately stupid questions, selects one, and taps the button to start composing a reply.  “It’d be good for your image.  You could feed it in really slowly so that people don’t think you’re faking it.  I really like this one.  You mind if I—you bastard.”

Enji tightens his grip on the phone, but it’s so much more difficult to grasp one-handed that he can barely even impede Hawks snatching it out of his fingers.

That part he expected.

Hawks standing up and shoving Enji’s phone down into the front of his pants, however, is… less anticipated.

“Phone privileges revoked,” Hawks says.  “You sneaky—”

“Me?” Enji says.  “You’re the one stealing my property and—” He gestures, helplessly.  “—whatever the hell this—”

“Safekeeping,” Hawks says, smugly.

“I meant the hike,” Enji says, struggling to keep his voice level and his temperature low.  “You turn up in my house first thing in the morning and immediately start making demands—”

“Suggestions,” Hawks says.  “Enrichment plans.”

Enji stands.  Even down a limb, he still casts a shadow over Hawks’s entire frame.  “I have work to do.”

And Hawks still doesn’t back down.

“Don’t give me that,” Hawks says, but it’s a bitter kind of bite-back—too resigned.  “I know you, okay?  And I respect you.  I respect your right to make your own damn choices about your own damn life.  But God if you aren’t—”

The hand through the hair, the wing-lifting sigh, the whole rigmarole.

“I get it,” Hawks says.  The hard look is new.  It’s strangely fascinating.  “I dream about flying every night.  Every single one.  And look what it’s gotten me.  Look where I am.  Peaked and went out like a comet nobody even had the time to name.  I’m falling apart not even halfway through my twenties.  I can’t sleep.  I can’t relate to anybody who doesn’t have PTSD.  My social life amounts to following you around like a fucking puppy, taking potshots like one of these days I’ll actually make you laugh.”

There are so many things that Enji wants to say that none of them will materialize from the miasma of half-formed thoughts.  

He even believes a few of them.

Just not the nice ones.  Not the ones about futures, or about changing, or about hope.

He doesn’t get a chance to cobble any sentences together, because Hawks is waving both arms too vehemently for him to get a word in edgewise anyway.

“And look at you,” is the exhortation this time.  “Still running the goddamn show with one hand and the same old brick-wall determination.  Your PT keeps begging you to dial it back, and you don’t—you won’t.  You can’t.  You never rested.  You never took a break.  You went right back to the bonfire as soon as you could stand up, and stuck your hand back in the flame.  You’re never going to quit.  You’re never going to retire.  You’re going to keep on pushing the throttle until you crash and burn so hard that you can’t get back up.  You’re going to keep driving until somebody gets the jump on you someday.  You’re going to do this until you die.”

It’s all a bit rich coming from someone who made a sincere effort to go out in a blaze of glory some half-dozen times in a matter of months, and almost succeeded every single time.

But Hawks’s eyes are wild, just now—desperate in a way that Enji’s never seen this side of an active battlefield.  Desperate in a way that’s usually streaked with blood.

Enji is not a symbol.  He never has been.

But he was a template, once.  Maybe still.

That matters.  Small things do.

Enji watches the wind shiver through the feathers, watches the light gleaming on them, lets his eyes drift over the new, much less permanent pink burn licking its way down from the tops of Hawks’s shoulders.  Too close to the sun.

“What should I have done?” Enji asks.  “What else is there?”

The tension drops out of Hawks’s body so abruptly that he almost sways on his feet, no thanks to the stupid, gaudy, dusty high-tops they’re shoved into.  “Fucked if I know.  I just—want you—to—make it.  Get old.  Get to have some snotty grandkids who don’t believe your stories.  Get to see that it made a difference.  Get to slow down.  Get to be something else someday.”

Enji looks at him—which isn’t pleasant.  A Hawks with the fight gone out of him is like a banner underfoot.

Enji turns, next, to reconsider the view he left behind him.

“So this was a reminder,” he says.  “Of how big the rest of a life can be, if you let yourself look at it.”

“Yeah,” Hawks says, shoving his hand up into his hair again and scrubbing it around.  He kicks at the dust.  “More or less.  And I got almost a whole hour where I didn’t have to share you with your stupid emails, which I think is a world record.”

Enji looks at Hawks for a few moments more, until he notices and starts to squirm and pull faces to try to deflect, the way he always does when Enji watches him too seriously for too long.

Then Enji looks at the land—out over the dizzyingly steep valley, flush with countless trees of countless species, dappling into a carpet of endless verdant green.  Most of them are older than he is.  Most of them will outlive him.  There are species of insects, of animals, of algae, of life that no one has ever laid eyes on before.  Every time a forest burns to the ground, as much survives as dies.

“In that case,” Enji says, very slowly, testing his weight on top of the words as he lays them out, “what else did you want to do today?”

He gives Hawks a few heartbeats to compose himself, but apparently it wasn’t enough.  Hawks still looks like he’s been sucker-punched when Enji turns.  It takes a few more seconds for the beaming grin to unfurl again.

“Huh,” Hawks says, mostly steadily.  He shoves his hands into his pockets and rocks back on his heels, an uncharacteristically weak attempt to make the contentment look casual.  “I dunno.  Maybe… let’s… go to the beach.  And just… lie there.  Do absolutely nothing.  Yeah?”

“Fine,” Enji says.

He’s expecting to earn another face-filling grin for that.

Instead, though, Hawks’s expression falters, and his mouth scrunches up.

“Hang on,” Hawks says.  He reaches down the front of his pants.  Enji ages at least a year.  “I think you just got a text.”  He pulls Enji’s phone out, and his face lights up again.  “Oh, it’s Shoto!”

The beach will be a fine place to set fire to him.  Minimal casualties.










Hawks insists that it would be wasting time to stop at the house, which they both know that Enji recognizes for what it is: a not-unfounded fear that Enji would immediately break the spirit of the promise and pick up his laptop.

Hawks parallel parks even worse than he drives.  They carry their shoes.  They buy an indescribably horrible oversized novelty towel from a street vendor to spread out on the sand.

Enji lies down.  He folds his arm behind his head.  He squints up into the sun.  His ears are still piqued for peril, but the screams of the children chasing each other through the foaming waves have a noticeably different timbre than civilians coming face-to-face with their mortality.

There is simply nothing to accomplish here—nothing to do, nothing to be done, nothing to be.

Enji watches the sharp sunlight play on Hawks’s hair.  He lets the steady, inevitable, but never identical crash and hiss and receding rush of the waves roll over him.  A seagull wheels overhead.  It’s too hot.  It’s too loud.  It’s too bright.  It’s perfect.

He closes his eyes.










When he opens them again, a lattice of red feathers hangs overhead, just barely broad enough to shadow his face and torso.  He’s not sure how long he was asleep, but the sun has shifted, and his hand under his head has gone thoroughly numb.

Hawks is sitting with one leg stretched out and one knee drawn up to his chest, leaning forward to rest his chin on the latter as he scrolls slowly through something on his phone.  He has his toes curled into the sand just past the edge of the towel.  His shoulders, his nose, and the back of his neck are violently red.

“Give me my phone,” Enji says, and it comes out in much more of a bleary, mush-mouthed mumble than he would like to admit.

The way Hawks smiles over at him—instantly, instinctive—makes his chest clench.  What a waste of time.

How extraordinary to have the time to waste.

Hawks hands the phone over without a word, which has to be a universal first.  Enji opens the camera and takes the single worst picture on record of Japan’s second-ranked hero—from a low angle, with Hawks’s face half in shadow from his upraised hand, with his mouth twisted up, his hair spackled with sweat, and the tragic new sunburn on full display.

“Come here,” Enji says.

Hawks sighs, but he’s already leaning down.  The feathers splayed out over Enji don’t move.  “Don’t tell me you’re stuck.  I know you’re not stuck.  If you want a pillow, just—”

Enji curls his fingers into the front of Hawks’s horrible shirt, pulls him in close, kisses him, and pushes him back upright.

“You’re going to peel,” he says.  “Like a snake.”

Hawks looks… dazed.  Intoxicated, possibly.  Like someone struck him around the head with a rock-solid rainbow.

“Fried chicken,” he says.  He blinks, shakes his head, and clears his throat.  “Snakes are cute.  Right?”

“No,” Enji says.  He rolls onto his side so that he can open the browser on his phone and type a little easier.  In this day and age, there must be a store nearby that will have a gallon of aloe vera ready for curbside pickup.

“Lobster,” Hawks says.  “Lobsters are cute.”

“No,” Enji says.  Why does aloe vera cost so much?  It’s plant juice.  For this price, he could buy a brand-new plant and squeeze it himself.

Hawks keeps grinning regardless of the heinous vagaries of capitalism.  “Well, I’m cute.  Right?”

Enji eyes him.  “Not when you’re peeling like a rotted onion.”

Hawks sighs so loudly that the feather terrace shading Enji’s head trembles this time.  “But you’re gonna rub lotion on my back,” he says.  “Because it’s your fault.  And you feel bad.  And I’m still a little cute.  Right?”

“Don’t push your luck,” Enji says.  He adds a gallon of highway robbery to his virtual shopping cart and taps the button to check out.  “What do you want for dinner?”