tierfallen

Title: like a bird on the wire
Fandom: My Hero Academia
Pairing: EndHawks
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 7,887
Warnings: XTreem spoilers through manga chapter 390, battling through the misery to get to the hopeful bit like we always do
Summary: The aftermath, and the undertow, and something like a sunrise.
Author's Note: I'm still trying to process 390, and in the meantime this came out of my brain. Spoilers under cut!

If you are generously reading this at a later date, a reminder of some (extremely spoiler-heavy!) things that we did not know for sure at the conclusion of chapter 390:
- exactly how many limbs Enji and Dabi still had between them
- whether either or both of them would, in fact, live long enough for limb-counting
- whether Tokoyami was alive or not
- whether Bakugou would get up off the ground before his one-year heart-asplode-iversary or not
- whether half the cast had survived the last scenes we saw them in (notably: Endeavor Agency sidekicks, Miruko)
- whether Hawks had any chance of getting the wings back
- what the hell All Might is doing (BABY, BE SAFE)
- how Inasa is coping with the fact that Look Kid has gotten like three heartbreaking panels in the past couple chapters, and he has gotten ZERO


tl;dr I tend to err on the side of being too kind to characters, so I'm sure Hori has other plans, but I'm more interested in catharsis than I am in being right. :') I hope this makes you feel things, and I hope you enjoy it. ♥


LIKE A BIRD ON THE WIRE
The silence hurts. There’s a pressure to the emptiness—the weight of nothing. Worse-than-nothing. Absence. Deprivation. A dispossession that doesn’t even bleed. No trace that something ever was.

This is different from when the wings were ash. There had still been remnants, then—half-grown quills and stores of keratin too far beneath his skin for the fire to excise, and they’d still been listening. Everything was muffled and muddled and indistinct, but he could still hear the heartbeat of the world. He could close his eyes and concentrate and melt into it. He could map the universe in all its noise.

This is different.

This is a silence that bears down, a pressure like the air collapsing. This is a silence that makes any space he enters too small, makes it so the world can’t fit him, tries to crush him out and suffocate him where he stands. This is a silence that batters at him from every direction with tight-curled fists and then sinks in its teeth.

His skin hurts, too, and his bones do, and every movement burns or aches or makes something throb, but none of it is as bad as the deafening lack of sound, of sense, of vibrations. If he’s not dead, the whole world must be, because there’s nothing. White walls and scratchy sheets and the indistinct mumble of nonstop catastrophizing from the television even after all of it; and his thoughts, undampened, untempered, unmitigated, without an infinite number of distractions and inputs and stimulations to tune into or block out or dial down, are so loud. They’re so loud. His own voice in his head sounds high and reedy and nasal like a child about to start crying, and everything the motherfucker says is poison, and it spills and seeps and spreads its sticky fingers over everything, everything, and it’s so loud—

It feels like his eardrums are crammed full of lead. It feels like he fell off the edge of the universe. It feels like he’s underwater—a thousand feet down, far too deep to see the sun. Drowning in silence, alone in the dark.

He’s become one of the ghosts.

The upshot is that people don’t seem to care too much what ghosts get up to, left to their own devices.

As soon as he can stand without throwing up his guts, he starts for the door. He has to wait out the vertigo a couple of times, and he ends up grabbing onto stuff like an old geezer, but he makes it. He makes it happen. He makes it work.

Not a lot of geezer heroes. The life expectancy stats are… fun. Fun with math. Fun with probability. Needs a chubby animal mascot. Fight the odds with blood and sweat and grit and training, and you, too, can watch your whole life go down the fucking tubes!

Too loud.

He’s too exhausted to feel appropriately relieved when he shuffles out into the hallway, after a modest stint of clinging onto the doorframe until his knees felt less like warm goop. There are sounds out here—keyboards clacking and voices in conversation and a million monitors singing little bloops at him from every possible angle. Wheels rattling and gurney joints squealing and beds creaking, paper sliding and shifting and flipping. The low hum of the ventilation, the squeak of ergonomic shoes’ soles on the floor. So many overlapping voices. Signs of life.

He gets about eight wobbly steps down the hallway before a lady nurse sees him and sighs, then grabs the sleeve of a passing dude nurse, who looks at him like he’s a toddler covered in brightly-colored paint of unknown origin and immediately manhandles him back into his room, thence into his bed.

The only silver lining is that this place is less intolerably, oppressively quiet when someone’s huffing at him and rustling the sheets around like that.

He waits until the guy looks up, so that he can lay the puppy eyes on thick.

“C’mon,” he says, wheedlingly. “I’m getting cabin fever.”

“You’ve been in less than a day,” the guy says.

This guy probably knows exactly how many hours it’s been. They’ve probably been here the whole time—since before the battle started. They’ve probably been pacing these halls, prepping for what they thought was the worst while all the machines beeped at them like a Morse code warning nobody could have understood.

“Have you heard my catchphrase?” he says. “A day is like forever! I just want to stretch my legs. I feel fine. Never better.”

The nurse looks pointedly at the gauze bandages they mummified him in, practically head to toe.

“It’s very sweet of them to be so overcautious,” he says, “but I’m just lightly toasted. Barely scratched. Come on. What’s the worst thing that can happen?”

The nurse doesn’t look particularly impressed.

“Seriously,” he says. “I don’t have an agency anymore, and I didn’t have lawyers even when I did. What am I gonna do, cry on you? I just want to check on Endeavor. That’s all. Pinky swear.”

The nurse’s eyes dart towards the left before they settle on him again.

Bingo.

“I can’t authorize that,” the nurse says. “Stay put, or you’re going to make it worse. By the sound of it, he wouldn’t like that.”

Even as the nurse hightails it back out of the room with another warning look, there’s something warming about that—the thought that Enji would be disappointed, if not outright upset, to see him suffering unnecessarily.

Well. Necessarily. He’s never done anything more necessary in his life than the shit that got him here.

He waits a little while, then creeps back over towards the door. He climbs up the meds cabinet next to it, sits on the top, and keeps his head tipped towards the doorway. He’ll be able to recognize the sounds of a shift change, and this lot is overdue.

The tenor of the cacophony changes after some time spent perched there with his eyes closed, absorbing the wash of information. Drawers open and close. Someone says “When are you in next?”, and someone else says “See you tomorrow.”

He eases himself down off of the cabinet and tests his knees. They still feel a distinct kinship with gummy candy left out in the sun, but they keep him off of the floor, which is the important thing.

He drags his miserable ass out the doorway and starts down the hall as fast as he dares. He tries to keep his back straight and his shoulders squared and his head up. Everything fucking hurts, and all the bandages whisper against the flowy, too-familiar hospital gear, but he’s practically incognito now without the wings. He always has been. His quirk was his trademark, and his source of power, and his well of hope, and his second chance. His quirk was everything.

He keeps his hand against the wall. It won’t be obvious to anybody watching him how hard he’s leaning on it. He’s good at hiding, and he’s good at lies. He’s good at getting away with it.

Enji won’t be far. They’ll have had to cram all of them in close to the operating rooms, side by side by side so that the specialists can bounce from one piercingly silent hospital room to the next like bumblebees delivering bad news to every withering flower.

The doctor had told him, in a gentle voice, that Endeavor had gone into a coma while being airlifted off of the battlefield.

The doctor had told him, in a gentle voice, that it was a miracle Endeavor’s body had held up to the unthinkable trauma long enough to get him that far.

The doctor had told him, in a gentle voice, that they would do everything they could, of course, but that Endeavor had simply overtaxed himself so much that they couldn’t make any guarantees.

The doctor had told him, in a gentle voice, that Endeavor might just slip away at any moment without ever waking up.

Idiots.

Maybe it’s a good thing.

Maybe Enji will feel it, from wherever he is. Maybe he’ll intuit their faithlessness, the doubt, the disbelief.

That’ll give him something to fight.

In the meantime, the hallway goes on forever, and all the doorways look the same. One square of gray-on-gray speckle-patterned linoleum after another after another.

Still. Agonizing progress is progress. A foot in front of the next is better than nothing.

Yesterday, he could barely move. They drugged him up good, for one thing; and the weight of all of it came down like an avalanche, for another.

He’d lain there and stared at the ceiling and drifted in the swimmy haze of opioids oozing through his brain, dulling the whole world, and he’d hated it. He’d hated everything. Lying on his back had felt so fucking unnatural, so deeply wrong, that the self-pity had slithered all the way through him, blighting his thoughts and burning in his veins.

What’s the point?

What’s the point of any of it?

Even when they win—“win”—they end up here. Broken, beat-to-shit. Kids in the morgue, bloodlessly pale with blue lips or ripped to closed-casket tatters under crisp white sheets. Nothing fixed. Nothing solved. Nothing changed. The boulder tumbles back down to the bottom of the fucking hill, and there’s less of you to push it.

Why the hell do they keep trying?

Get up. Spit out the blood and stand, no matter what it costs. No matter what it takes. No one else is ever going to do it for you.

So here he is.

Up.

He has to believe that that counts for something. He has to find a place to hang his hopes.

What’s left of them. What’s left of him.

Tomorrow’s still coming, whether he’s ready for it or not.

So he pulls himself along the wall like a poorly-resurrected corpse, grabbing on to every doorway that comes within reach and holding on tight to hold himself up as he peers inside.

He knows every hero who’s cracked the top fifty in the past five years—real names, backstories, fighting styles, signature moves, sidekicks, strengths and weaknesses. He remembers the way the fraying corners of the flash cards felt when he tapped them against his fingertips. But the people in these hospital beds are so bandaged-up that he can’t see their faces well enough to ID them.

He can tell from their shapes, though, that none of them are Enji, and that’s the only thing that matters anyway. For now, at least. Maybe he’ll have space for the rest of it later. Maybe he’ll have the strength. Maybe he’ll be able to stomach those silences, with some time.

Maybe not.

Maybe it depends on what awaits him in the room he’s looking for.

He keeps hauling himself down the hall. And he keeps looking.

The person in the next room has tiny feet—delicate toes pointed up, barely raising the sheets.

The person in the next room after that only has one, by the looks of it. Small again.

Maybe he’s barking up the wrong tree. Maybe that nurse looked left as a nervous habit. Maybe Enji’s in such bad shape that they moved him in the intervening hours, maybe he’s walled up in the ICU, maybe he’s in surgery for one of a million reasons.

Maybe Enji’s dead. Maybe they didn’t tell him because they knew his heart would start rattling in his chest like a Gatling gun firing full-force, right in the middle of a dashing secret escape down the endless hallway.

Funny, how that’s the one part of him that’s still moving too fast.

Enji can’t be dead, because he would have felt it in his bones, in his guts, in the deepest-rooted parts of him—the warmest parts, the softest ones, sheltered from the light by the stone and the thorns and the knives.

And because he would have seen it on the miserable fucking news by now.

He keeps moving. One step at a time. Ghosts don’t get tired. They feel pain, clearly, but they don’t give in to it. Not yet.

The next door down seems further away. Is it a bigger room, or is the increase in exhaustion exponential instead of additive?

He’s good at math, because he’s good at physics.

He isn’t good at this.

He limps up to the edge of the doorframe and leans on the wall for a second, still trying to decelerate the nonsense shaking the shit out of his ribcage. One breath. Two.

Then he looks in.

Finally.

Finally.

He knows those feet. Not in a fetish-y way. Yet.

He also knows his way around an EKG; knows Enji’s resting heart rate; knows that even if the big guy’s locked up inside his brain, at least he’s stable. At least he’s safe.

At least he survived.

His heart kicks back up into high gear without so much as a by-your-leave.

Enji might not want him here.

Sure, they went to hell and back together. Sure, it took some cluster of staring staff members the better part of half an hour to figure out which of the blood caked on his face was new and his, and which was Enji’s, branded into his skin by the blast AFO unleashed on him. Sure, he knows things about Enji Todoroki that have probably never been whispered to another living soul.

But he’s outlived his usefulness, somehow. He always figured he’d go out bright and brash and shockingly productive, but here he is—shredded, shrinking, empty. Spent. Silent.

And Enji cobbled the whole damn family back together, in the midst of it. He never expressed that as an objective, but that’s probably just because he always thought it was so far out of reach. He did the impossible again. Maybe a second chance at the first fuckup is what he really wanted all along.

The ventilator makes a harsh, hissing sigh as it pushes air into Enji’s battered lungs.

Fuck it. He’s a ghost now. Enji won’t even notice that he’s here.

He pulls himself around the doorframe and leans on another convenient cabinet. It’s nice to know that one human being involved with hospital logistics doesn’t hate him personally. He gives his knees fifteen seconds of recuperation and a stern talking-to, and then he rocks his weight up on top of them and crosses the room.

They pulled the window shades and turned out the lights, which seems dangerous on top of making this place feel twice as liminal. It didn’t need the help.

There’s a single metal-framed, plastic-backed chair turned at an angle towards the bedside. He drops into it too hard.

Hurts. Jars everything, makes his spine ache and his brain shudder in his skull. He’s so used to modulating his momentum that he didn’t even think about it. Even with just a smidge of scruffy down, he could do that much. Make himself weigh what he wanted. Make himself be what he wanted.

He breathes again.

He looks at Enji, motionless beneath the cold white sheets.

Even sleeping—dead to the world, oblivious to the updates, safe from the silence—the pain and the hunger have etched out the lines of his jaw, deepening the shadow under the shelf of his cheekbones and sharpening the lines around his eyes.

He’s still a knockout, obviously. He’d still stop traffic, never mind a stupid kid’s lonely heart.

They’ve got a wide selection of IV bags plugged into him, and a vast assortment of screens hooked up to monitors with little blinky lights. They know how important he is, even if they don’t really know.

His eyelashes look heavy. His hair’s singed pretty bad—no surprise there, all things considered. There’s a tiny patch on his forehead unobstructed by the winding gauze, where a little pale patch of skin is blistering and peeling up, but not from a burn. Frostbite, maybe. That’s a new one.

If only he’d open his damn eyes. They’d brighten up this lousy room in a heartbeat.

Leaning back against the chair fucking sucks. So does leaning forward—makes him dizzy. Makes his head swoop and then spin.

Enji doesn’t look small, tucked in and sleeping far too soundly, even with a whole-ass arm missing from the familiar equation. He still looks powerful. He still looks strong. He barely fits in the bed in the first place. There’s too much of him to contain.

Breathe deep. Head high. Enji needs people more than he lets on—needs to know they stand behind him. Needs to know they’re watching.

Even a ghost can do that much.

“They keep saying you might not make it,” he says, trying to cast his voice conversationally, “but they don’t know you like I do.” He tries to smile to go with it, but he’s never had Enji’s knack for trying—for keeping at it, tirelessly, endlessly, dogged and undaunted, until he shouldered through, soldiered on, split it open. He’s too accustomed to tying it up easy. He’s too used to sorting it out fast. “You’ve got so many scores to settle,” he says to the motionless form in the quiet room. “You’ve got so much shit to do. You have so many more people to prove wrong.”

His throat hurts. Fuck that, too. Ghosts don’t care.

“Take your time,” he says, leaning forward carefully until he can curl his hands around the shitty little steel fence that frames the side of the bed. “Get your rest. You earned it.” He tries again, at the smiling thing. No luck. Maybe it colors his voice a little, though. “But when you’re done—come on back, number one. They need you.” He swallows. It burns. “And I do.”

People think heroes have it all figured out.

People think heroes are a different category of human being—something special, something magic. If heroes are never afraid, then their own fear disqualifies them from ever having to dive into the fire, from ever having to take the leap and put their life on the line. If heroes are, somehow, naturally stronger than the rest of society, then most people shouldn’t even attempt to rise to the occasion. They’ll never make it. Why should they try?

It pisses them off when they find out they’re wrong.

It pisses them off when they realize that they could have done more. To learn that it’s not a calling, or a gift—it’s an unending string of sacrifices. It’s a sickness. Nobody makes it out alive.

People think heroes don’t feel anything. They trust in that—in the untouchability—and it makes it all the easier to tear them to pieces when they fail. When they fall apart. When the whole house of cards comes down. When they need something in return.

He needs a fucking hero right about now.

“I’m scared,” he says, looking at the faint, weak light sneaking in around the shades and gleaming on the liquid in one of the IV lines. “Leaving my mom, first couple of missions, stats-gambling my way up the Billboard, getting in with the League—none of that shit was like this. That was all cut and dry. Linear. Purposeful. But right now—” He breathes in deep enough that it scratches all the way down his throat. “Right now, I’m looking ahead, and there’s nothing. Silence.”

He clenches his fists around the metal bar, trying to hear his skin skidding against the steel, but there are too many bandages on his hands. They just slide.

They say that sometimes people in comas can still hear you, and some of it sticks.

Which sounds like exactly the kind of bullshit people that make up to make themselves feel better.

He doesn’t want to feel better.

He doesn’t want to feel anything anymore.

“One of the doctors said Eri might be able to put them back,” he says, “even with the quirk factor all fucked. I don’t know. I don’t want to ask that of a traumatized kid, Enji. I don’t want to get my hopes up. You’d tell me—” His mouth tries to curve. “What? You’d say to shut my trap, because whining’s never solved a single thing in the whole scope of human history, and to just—try it. And see. And live with it. Because it’s not like I’ve got anything left to lose.”

He twists his hands around the bar. He taps the toes of his slippers on the floor. He watches Enji’s borrowed breath mist in the plastic of the mask.

“Bet you’re wrong, anyway,” he says. “Bet whining has fixed all kinds of stuff.”

He breathes, as deep as he dares, as deep as he can stand. The bruises on his throat throb, insistently, like they’re trying to strangle the breath out of him all over again. Like they’re trying to get him to stop.

They’re probably smarter than the rest of him.

“And you’re wrong about me,” he says. “Because I do have something left. If I lose you, big guy, there’s no damn point to any of the rest of it.”

He shouldn’t do it.

But shouldn’t is a word for people who haven’t looked the end in the eyes as many times as he has. Shouldn’t is for people who have a fuck or two left to give. Shouldn’t is for people who don’t understand how short life is, and how bad, and how beautiful.

He lets go of the bedframe and scoots the chair forward until he’s close enough to lean over it.

And then he wraps his fingers, carefully, around Enji’s left hand. Everything’s so bound up in gauze that he can’t see the knuckles and the lines. He hopes the fire didn’t burn the fingerprints away, didn’t wipe the slate clean, didn’t scour out the scars. Maybe it’s selfish, but he doesn’t want those stories to disappear.

“If you don’t make it,” he says, keeping his voice low, “I’m done. I don’t give a shit. They’ll never find me. I can live with Jeans hating me more than mass-produced polyester until the end of time. I can’t live without you. Not in any way that matters. I can’t do this shit unless I know you’re watching. And I can’t do it without your help.” He runs his thumb lightly over the broad back of Enji’s hand. The nicks and scabs all over his skin snag in the gauze. What a mess. “Besides—I don’t want to. I don’t care. You’re it. You’ve always been it. So this is one of those times, number one. One more time that the future of Japan depends on you, okay? You need to pull through, ’cause otherwise it’s all gonna fall apart, and I’m not even going to try to piece it back together. One more endeavor for you, hot stuff. One more hill to climb.” He squeezes—gently. Just a nudge. “So c’mon. You love a challenge. This one’s got your name on it. Your real name. This one’s for Enji Todoroki, signed and sealed. Get back here and make me regret this whole damn conversation.”

That’s the first thing Enji really taught him, after all—how to believe in something. How to hold on to the light. How to craft your last hope into a weapon.

How to hope at all.

How to hope as resistance. How to hope as defiance. How to hope as a Fuck you to the whole damn universe—how to grip it in both hands and turn it into a bludgeon and a battering ram and a bonfire and a battle cry. How to hope like a bird flying northward in the night.

He searches Enji’s face for a couple seconds, running his thumbs back and forth. It’s hard to be completely sure around the oxygen mask and the bandages, but it’s possible that a little bit of the trademark frown has smoothed out.

Cool. He’s getting fucking delusional.

It’s the fear. He knows it’s the fear. And the grief. And the iron-deep, iron-heavy, rust-bitter knowledge that he’ll never fly again. That he’ll be trapped forever.

He looks down at Enji’s hand. It’s so warm that it quells the trembling in both of his. Makes them feel a little like they’re coming back to life.

Fuck it. If anyone asks, he’ll say that he was cold, and he was too weak to walk back to his own room. How are they going to argue when it’s already done?

He lays Enji’s hand down on top of the wide, gorgeous, reassuringly respirationally active chest and then climbs up into the bed and fits himself into the sliver of space at Enji’s side.

There’s barely room for him—Enji takes up so much of the shitty little mattress. The man is a monolith.

He gathers Enji’s arm in both of his.

If he is dead, this isn’t anywhere near as bad as he was afraid of. Setting aside the ambient agony thing, which is admittedly less than ideal, he’s conscious, and he’s close to Enji. The conversation is more one-sided than he’d like, even by their pretty rigorous standards for unbalanced dialogues, but all things considered…

Not bad. Not too bad. Not as bad as it could be.

He settles his hand gently on Enji’s forearm, fingertips resting over the radial artery. If he can’t hear Enji’s pulse, then he’ll just have to feel it. That’s fine. Not as bad as it could be.

He leans his head against Enji’s shoulder, soaking up the heat, and closes his eyes.

“Come back to me,” he whispers to the warmth. “Or else.”










He wakes up back in his own shitty little bed.

Odds are that that’s an ix-nay on the expiration date, then. He must have a couple more miseries stashed in the belly of the gachapon of his life. God ain’t finished with him yet.

Fine. Maybe he ain’t finished with God, either.

They brought him something that they seem to think is breakfast. He begs for coffee. They tell him it’ll exacerbate his throat, and he laughs, but the orderly doesn’t get the joke. Well—the orderly doesn’t get that he’s the joke. It’s funny.

He doesn’t throw up, which is a plus. This orderly almost looks like she believes him when he says he’s feeling better, and she jots something down in his chart. The pen scratches so quietly that he has to focus on the way it moves, on the ribbon of ink uncoiling into slashes and sweeping lines.

The charts will be wrong. His medical history won’t matter.

His metabolism is going to be different.

Everything is.

She looks the other way when he limps out of the room to find something—anything—to listen to.

It’s good, too. He needs to listen. He needs to learn things. He needs to find out what happened on the other fronts, what happened to the host of human beings that they started with. He needs to find out where they stand, and who they buried.

He can still charm nurses as a fraction of himself. He doesn’t need wings to play cute and then funny and then pitiable at perfectly-timed intervals. He doesn’t have to be complete to crank up the charisma.

He bewitches the young woman at the desk and acquires a mental map of all the rooms, as well as extensive updates on some of the people relegated to other floors or other hospitals altogether. It’s a long fucking list.

He also duly earns himself carte blanche to wander around this place as he pleases.

Maybe if they can do something for the scars, he could get into movies. Get typecast as the debonair love interest who’s actually kind of an asshole. Get some swooning going on.

In the meantime, though, he needs to hobble his way around this hellhole and pay some visits to people who don’t buy into his bullshit.

And then, of course, he’s going back to Enji.

Simple as that.










The good thing about doing shit you’re scared of is that it’s never quite as hard as the first time.

The afternoon is dwindling by the time he sits down, curls up, and takes Enji’s hand in both of his. He strokes the back with both thumbs, cautious of the tape and the needles and the heartrate monitor clip. They’d better be pumping the nation’s number one full of the highest-quality shit they’ve got. These had better be not just the good drugs, but the top-notchiest ones. The best for the best.

He looks across the bed at the flat space where the sheet sinks into the emptiness, where Enji’s other arm should be.

If anyone had ever really loved either of them, they’d be headed for the I told you so of the century. He thinks they both knew it, though—they both knew that one day they’d just run out of things to give.

The machine makes Enji breathe.

He tries to match the cadence, but it’s too slow for him.

“Been thinkin’,” he says. “Not just for the novelty, for once. Also the boredom. This place is so boring I’d have spent half of today screaming if my throat could take it. And the other half staring at the wall, since that’s about the only thing there is to do here until they authorize visits, and somebody brings my phone.” He runs a fingertip feather-lightly over the tiny gap between two bands of gauze on the back of Enji’s hand. “Anyway. If this Eri thing doesn’t pan out, it’ll pay to have a backup plan. So if I’m shit out of luck in the miracle-child department, this is me officially submitting a good, old-fashioned job application to do intel at your agency, okay? I’m pretty sure you’d go for it. It’s better than leaving me unsupervised in this state—nice little bonus self-sacrifice for you. I’m so thoughtful. And, I mean, hell. I’d be good. Will be. Might be. Right? I’m good at getting information. And it’d be for you.” It comes out so easy. “I’d do anything for you.”

He gives the words a moment to expand into the stale air.

They’re true, unlike so much of his life. They deserve to have some space.

“I would,” he says, slowly, trying out the taste of brutal honesty—of reaching down into himself and dragging things out into the light. They come up squirming, gasping, writhing, but he can pin them down and hold them still and see what they’re made of. “I’d burn the world down for you. I guess that’s not healthy, but I never have been. Don’t think I’d know what to do with life if it was nice.” He looks back down at Enji’s hand. He stretches his index finger out until he can lay the tip against Enji’s radial artery again, pressing it against the slow, faint, steady pulse. “So wake up. Give me something difficult to do.”

He breathes in, and out, and in again, and then raises Enji’s knuckles to his mouth—mindful of the medical miscellanea swaddling Enji’s entire hand, as if there’s a critical mass of gauze that the universe will bow to. As if you can bind somebody up so tight in remedies that fate will have no choice but to concede.

“Tell me what to destroy for you,” he says, watching his breath rippling through the tiny threads of cotton, making them sway like stalks of wheat. “And it’s done.” That’s not fair, though, really. It’s not enough. “Or tell me what to build,” he says, “and I’ll find a way.”

He drags his thumbs up and down over the tendons in the back of Enji’s hand—clean, straight lines.

“New strategy,” he says. “Even if you can’t hear me, this one oughta work. You’ve always had a sixth sense for my shit. So here we go—I’m going to be so annoying that you’ll have no choice except to wake up so that you can shake me by the shoulders and yell my name in my face, and I can say ‘Yep, that’s me!’.” He strokes his fingertips along the undersides of Enji’s fingers and kisses his knuckles again. It’s obviously a fealty thing—just loyalty, not devotion. Not the purest thing he’s ever had, ever felt, ever been. Nobody can prove otherwise. “Checked in on Shouto, and he was conscious just long enough to ask about you. Before you celebrate that, I need you to know that the answer I gave him was that you had Advanced Sleepy Bitch Disease.”

He waits.

He watches Enji’s face for a trace, a shift, a sign.

He sighs.

“Told the doctors that they should consider making you feel more at home by playing music that’s familiar from your childhood,” he says, “like chamber music from the 1700s. I suggested Bach. It was gonna be an Arnold Schwarzenegger joke, but they made me leave before I could finish it. That’s the other reason you gotta wake up; nobody’s got any damn sense of humor around here.”

He massages Enji’s hand—very, very gently. The kind of massage you’d get from a slightly overzealous butterfly. It probably still hurts, given the state Enji’s in, but odds are good it wouldn’t even register because the baseline of pain everywhere else is so sky-high.

Then again, maybe it does chart on the agony scale—it seems like Enji’s pulse quickens. Just slightly. Just a touch. But he knows it, knows the standard, measures his life in the lengths between the beats, and it… maybe. Maybe, maybe not.

Fuck it. Life’s too short not to load up the big guns and fire away.

“If you don’t make it,” he says, “I think I might take over your agency. Isn’t that great? Picking up the torch. Carrying on your legacy. Absolutely nobody is going to be able to stop me. The first thing I’m going to do is get a banner made that runs down the whole side of the building, as a memorial to the fallen, but with the best picture we can find of your ass. High-res as fuck.” He rubs his thumb in a slow circle over Enji’s smallest knuckle. “Actually, the first thing I’m going to do is find some way to legally write myself in as un-fireable as the CEO, and then I’ll do the ass banner. Foolproof.” He turns Enji’s hand over very carefully and kisses the inside of his wrist. Maybe Enji’s pulse is faster. Maybe he’s finally losing his grip. “I’m just going to interpret your silence as confirmation that you’ve given me your blessing,” he says. “I’m glad we had this talk.”

Enji’s forehead creases.

The concept of breathing abruptly becomes quite passé.

Enji’s eyelids part just enough to dislodge a tiny flake of crusty shit from the corner of his eye. The slimmest sliver of electric blue shows through his eyelashes. In a perfect world, they would look luminescent in the dark.

They look dull.

But they turn towards him, and it doesn’t much matter how bright they are, or aren’t.

All he can hear is the shuddering scrape of air moving through the oxygen mask. The voice he’d follow anywhere—to the depths of hell and back, and down again, and back again, until the sun burned out—isn’t audible, but he can tell what the sounds were meant to be from the way that Enji’s lips try to form them.

Enji coughs, winces, tries to raise his weak, unsteady hand towards the mask—Keigo releases his grip on it to reach forward and unhook the band from around the back of his head. Fuck the doctors. This is what Enji wants, and he’s going to get it. Everybody else can go to hell.

Enji’s eyes are exhausted, but they’re clear—focused. He swallows, hard.

“Do something for me,” he says, and his voice is gravelly and rasping and low and faint and so fucking beautiful that Keigo’s heart implodes like a dying star.

“Anything,” he says.

It sucks to mean it.

And it doesn’t, too. It un-sucks. It feels like surfacing.

“When you go to Eri about your quirk,” Enji says, undeterred by the way the hoarseness undercuts every other syllable, “see if she’ll take your voice away as collateral. Do you ever shut up?”

“Man,” Keigo croaks out through the way his esophagus just sealed itself closed and started stinging everywhere. “You must’ve hit your head real hard if you don’t know the answer to that one, big guy. Can you tell me your name? Do you know what day it is?”

“‘Time to get the fuck out of here’,” Enji says, gritting his teeth, “to both.”

The readouts of his vitals are going a little wild, but this whole hospital is overflowing with bigshot heroes with big name quirks whose monitors are in a constant state of haywireness. Keigo stands up, staggers, rights himself against the metal frame on the side of the bed, and presses the call button.

Over. Just like that. The spell’s broken. The dream is fading. The fantasy is dead.

He sits down in the shitty plastic chair. It’s way too easy to fit. His skin crawls. He can’t hear the medical personnel in the hallways anywhere near well enough to know if they’re coming.

Enji’s looking at him, though—intently, as always. That’s something. That’s a spar in a shipwreck. A lifeline.

“How long?” Enji asks.

“Three days,” Keigo says.

Enji’s eyes narrow slightly, and their focus slides away from Keigo’s face as he turns that over.

Good thing, too, really. Keigo has avoided most of the mirrors, but he must look like dogshit. It’s hard to care how greasy your hair gets when the only human being whose existence actually matters is lingering on the line between life and death.

Enji’s eyes return to his. Then they sink lower, to his empty shoulders. To the nothing.

He breathes.

The pain in Enji’s eyes helps, actually, in the worst way. At least he cares. He cares enough to feel it.

“My turn,” Keigo says. “How much did you actually hear?”

“More than you want,” Enji says, meeting his gaze levelly. Completely fucking fearless.

Keigo loves him. Keigo never had a choice.

Enji doesn’t look away. “And not enough.”

“Wait,” Keigo says. He tries to wriggle back from what that means, but the significance of it clamps him in a vise grip and cinches tight. Steel fingers. One hand’s enough to hold him. “Are you telling me to keep talking?”

“I’m low on options,” Enji says. Back-from-the-deadpan. Cute. His jaw works aimlessly for a second, which has to hurt in its own right. “How are they?”

“Hanging in there,” Keigo says. “They’re a tough bunch.”

Endeavor made them that way. It’s a twisted sort of blessing at times like this.

He runs his tongue over his teeth and makes himself use the name that Enji wants to hear.

“Touya’s still in the ICU,” he says. “But they’re pretty sure he’s pulling through. Rei and the snow bunnies are practically ready to check out of this shitty hotel. Hard to tell how Shouto’s doing, other than ‘kinda awake sometimes’, because his idiot friends bought every box of strawberry milk in the entire city and built a wall around his bed, but I talked to the docs after he passed out, and it was mostly good news.”

Enji nods, slowly. His eyes stay expectant.

Damn.

Deep breath. Easy does it. The worst’s over, maybe. Some of it.

“All the kids have scraped through so far,” Keigo says. “Midoriya’s still under. Brain bleed. Something about backlash from pulling out all the stops with all the quirks at once, but I haven’t been able to get the details.” He hasn’t tried. It’s not that he doesn’t care so much as that he can’t access the part of himself that probably does. Self-preservation at its finest. “Bakugou’s stable. They’re still scratching their heads, but Edgeshot knew his shit. The kid almost blew it all up again trying to produce enough light to dispel Dark Shadow, but he’s like you. Unfinished business. The spite will go a long way.”

Enji eyes him. “‘Like me’? Like us.”

“No way,” Keigo says. “I’m God’s sweetest little angel. Sugar and spice.”

Enji eyes him harder, then releases a slow breath. His hand shifts incrementally towards the oxygen mask, and then his jaw works some more, and he curls his fingers slowly in the sheet again. “Shouto’s other classmates.”

Keigo bites the tip of his tongue until his head clears. “Yeah. Most of ’em are just banged up. Iida’s gonna need a shitload of PT, but he’s still kicking, so to speak. Nobody’s sure if Jirou’s… whatever it is… ear jack… thingy… is gonna grow back, because she’s never gotten one ripped off that bad before. Tokoyami…” It’s on the back of his eyelids every fucking second. He wrings it dry, rips it apart and reassembles it, one moment at a time. There had to have been something—something else he could have done. Some way he could have stopped it. It has to be his fault. “He’s… struggling. No surprise. He’s first in line for Eri, as far as I’m concerned.”

In idle, side-cycling parts of his brain, he wonders if things are going to change. Everything will. Everything has. But he wonders if the fast-track hero schools will end up different. He wonders if Mitsuki Bakugou will try to sue UA. He wonders if the model will change, or if it’ll just embrace the fact that it’s training kids to be special ops soldiers—that it’s doing the same thing the Commission did to him, dressed up with cutesy matching uniforms and school festivals and a slogan that really means Die trying.

“As far as I know,” he says, “the rest of them are all right. Most of them ended up at another hospital, but the nurse I interrogated didn’t have any bad reports, and the pink one’s keeping tabs on everybody, so our lot would have heard about it if one of ’em was in real deep shit.”

Enji nods slowly.

Keigo considers slamming his hand down on the call button again, harder this time. He knows what’s next.

“My sidekicks,” Enji says.

Keigo lets the emotions through to his expression. It won’t soften it, but at least it’ll pave the way.

“Burnin has another surgery scheduled tomorrow,” he says, “for a couple more skin grafts.” He takes the breath and holds himself steady. “Kido and Onima didn’t make it.”

Enji closes his eyes.

Keigo gives him a second. Then Keigo gives him another, and then three, and then five. It’s a good thing the doctors in this place apparently don’t give a shit.

Enji’s eyes open a sliver again. “Have their families been notified?”

The impulse to grimace is strong enough that he has to choke it down. “It was all on TV, big guy. Real time. Living color.”

“Fuck,” Enji says.

“Yeah,” Keigo says.

Enji stares into the middle distance for a moment. Somebody is pushing a gurney in the hall. Maybe the call button’s broken. Maybe it’s just the way it’s always been—there’s nobody out there. There’s nobody waiting. No one is ever going to come. You just have to get up and save yourself.

And sometimes—sometimes, when you’re really fucking lucky, once in a long, long while—there’s somebody next to you who won’t mind if you lean on them while you do.

Enji’s chest rises and falls. He fingers the edge of the oxygen mask and then looks over at Keigo again. “The pros.”

Keigo wonders, too, how many of them that signed up for this had the slightest idea what it meant, or what they would have to become.

“All Might looks like you do right now,” he says, “but I don’t think that guy can die. They keep sedating Eraser, because otherwise he prowls around the hallways near the students’ rooms and scares the janitors.”

Enji’s expression tightens. Keigo doesn’t figure it’s the cleaning staff that he’s feeling for.

“Jeanist is physically fine,” Keigo says. “More or less, anyway. He’s a mess about Edgeshot, though. Miruko’s immortal, too, I guess—she’s gonna be so excited you’re awake. Keeps talking about showing you ‘the tricks’, whatever the fuck that means.” He tries to remember who else he dug shit up on or from, weighing which information Enji would care about. The doctors are already going to kick his ass and cut him off all the good drugs for stressing their patient out three seconds after he woke up. “Rock Lock stuck around. His scar’s not as sexy as yours. Kamui’s messed up, but he’ll live. Mount Lady, too. They’re gonna be the cutest couple in the early retirement home.” He stretches a grin across his mouth. “How’s that? Did I pass my job interview for the Endeavor Agency intelligence department?”

Enji says “I’ll think about it,” which means yes. His eyes flick up and down over Keigo’s bandaged face, his bandaged neck, his unadorned shoulders, his bandaged hands. “You shouldn’t be talking.”

“You shouldn’t be awake,” Keigo says.

“I shouldn’t be alive,” Enji says. “But since I am—” There are the laser eyes. The little thrill that runs down Keigo’s spine almost doesn’t remind him of how grotesquely light his back feels. “I have no intention of quitting any time soon,” Enji says, matter-of-factly. “Not on them, and not on you. Wherever I go from here, you’re coming with me.”

Enji lifts his left hand, and all the tubes and wires oscillate. It looks heavy—it looks like it costs him something.

Everything does. But he keeps going.

And he keeps holding it there, even after it starts shaking, until the impossible clicks into place in Keigo’s feeble brain.

He reaches back.

He wraps his hands around Enji’s. Warmth around warmth, gauze around gauze, two idiots who don’t know how to let go. Who never figured out who they are, underneath the duty, past the job.

Maybe they’ll have time, now. Maybe once they’ve re-learned how to listen, and how to move.

Keigo can hear footsteps in the hallway, now—enough of them, brisk and crisp, that it sounds like the call button cavalry might have arrived at last.

“We’re here,” Enji says, gripping his hand harder for a second before slowly releasing it, fingertips lingering on the back, then on his palm, then on his knuckles. “Go take a shower, and then we’ll figure out where we’re headed next.”

Smiling hurts like hell.

“Is that your way of telling me I stink?” Keigo says.

“Yes,” Enji says. “Make it quick.” His eyes are hard, and soft, and bright like the open sky. “Is that still your trademark, or not?”

Keigo lets himself breathe. “Guess we’re gonna find out, aren’t we?”