A/N: Sorry for the delay, everyone! As of this chapter, I'm officially caught up and will be reverting back to updating every five days!
When Denki opened his eyes, it was to the familiar view of the ceiling of Recovery Girl's office. He went through his normal routine of checking his body over, moving different parts until he determined that he wasn't in pain. He sat up quickly and was pleasantly surprised that his vision didn't swim. He was usually dizzy for a while after over-exerting himself and short-circuiting his brain.
He saw Hawks but no sign of Recovery Girl. He groaned, dragging a hand down his face.
"Pushed me over the edge, didn't you?" Denki half-asked, half-guessed.
He didn't quite remember, but he was sure it would come back to him.
"Hey!" Hawks responded, indignant at the accusation. "You went over the edge all on your own!"
Denki furrowed his brow in concentration, confused by what Hawks could have meant by that. He looked more closely at Hawks. He stood in the middle of the room, excited energy wafting off of him as he shifted from side to side.
"What?" Denki asked dumbly.
"You don't remember?!" Hawks screeched. "That's the coolest damn thing I've ever seen, and you don't even remember?!"
"It'll come back to me," Denki assured, pulling his legs up onto the cot to get more comfortable. "It always does. Can you please just explain in the meantime?"
"You… turned into lightning," Hawks said dramatically, looking upwards and spreading his hands in front of his face like he was reimagining it.
Denki laughed. "No really, though. What happened?"
Instead of answering, Hawks just smiled at Denki as he tossed him his phone. Denki caught it easily, surprised that the aftereffects of his quirk overdose hadn't affected him as much as it usually did. Usually, his reflexes would be off for at least a few hours, if not for a few days. Denki tapped on the play icon on the screen and smiled as he watched his 'last words.' It seemed familiar, so it all started coming back to him.
Then the camera shook and shifted just the tiniest bit. The on-screen Denki had abruptly stopped his speech to whip around and look behind him and upwards. On the top left of the screen, Denki saw a black smudge toss a pink smudge off the top of the building. Denki's heart flew up into his throat, wondering if he didn't remember because it was too damn traumatic, but that wouldn't explain why Hawks was so excited.
Denki startled when a bright light filled the screen, blinding him, and he jumped again when it was followed by a loud, crunchy noise, the sound distorted by the recording device. When the light vanished as quickly as it had appeared, Denki was missing from the frame, and another flash of light hit again, further away from the camera, closer toward the tallest building. Denki recognized it as lightning and didn't jump when the crunchy noise blasted through the speaker again.
Narrowing his eyes and moving his face closer to the screen, he restarted the video and watched it again. And again. And again.
Hawks was patient, watching Denki with a permanent smile on his face as he reviewed the footage over and over again, letting Denki come to his own conclusions instead of force-feeding him the information when he didn't understand quickly enough.
"This doesn't make any sense," he concluded, not moving his eyes from the screen, trying to pick out the trick. "Being a TikTok legend myself, I've seen it all, but this doesn't make any sense. How did you do this?"
"Me? Kid, that was all you!" Hawks insisted. "You turned into lightning, practically teleported, and grabbed onto that falling baby before turning into lightning again and practically teleporting to the ground instead of free falling!"
"Putting unnecessary emphasis on multiple words doesn't make what you're saying true," Denki snarked.
He pressed the replay button again, but the video was interrupted by a phone call.
"Uh… Too Hot to Handle is calling you?" Denki said, offering the phone to Hawks.
Hawks blushed, cursing Dabi in his mind for changing his code name in his phone, quickly swiped to dismiss the call, and handed the phone back to Denki. As soon as Denki restarted the video again, he sighed, and held the phone back out to Hawks.
"Now Number One Boyfriend is calling you. Did your multiple lovers find out about each other?" Denki joked as Hawks took the phone back, once again swiping to dismiss the call.
"Maybe," Hawks answered, but distractedly. Two phone calls in a row must have meant that something had happened. He knew that they knew he would call them back as soon as he was able to. "If they kill me," Hawks went on, trying to make his cover airtight, "maybe I'll take your strategy and haunt them."
Denki smiled, but then the memory hit him. He wasn't so excited about turning into lightning as he was about what might have done during that time. "Oh no! Hawks…" he whispered, eyes narrowing. "Did I kill that baby with my electricity?"
Denki thought that maybe he had initially mistaken Hawks's nervous energy with excited energy, and Hawks was there to drag him to Tartarus for killing an innocent baby, but he was shaken out of those thoughts when Hawks laughed loudly, taking two large steps forward and planting himself on the cot next to Denki.
"Absolutely demolished the baby," Hawks answered, his tone happy despite the melancholy, gruesome news.
Hawks reached under the bed and tossed a pink bundle at Denki before he could devolve into a panic, thankfully not being cruel enough to prolong the torture of not knowing.
Denki doubted that Hawks was going to toss a dead baby's corpse at him, but he was cautious and hesitant as he unraveled the toasted, pink blanket to peek inside anyway. He sighed in immense relief when he saw that Hawks was right: He had demolished the fake, plastic baby. The battery compartment was blackened with how much electricity Denki must have pushed through the stupid thing, frying the batteries. He couldn't remember even hearing the baby crying over the roaring in his ears, so the fried batteries were an absolute waste.
He risked his life to save this toy.
"This was a set-up?" Denki asked, but he already knew the answer. "What made you think I was capable of something so—so—"
"Powerful? When you were waiting out Full Throttle's quirk, your outline seemed to completely disappear at times before coming back again after a really strong bolt of lightning. It happened a few times before that blonde friend of yours—"
"Boyfriend," Denki corrected automatically.
"Before your boyfriend got there," Hawks corrected easily. "He's the one with the copy quirk right? What did you guys do? Make a circuit? That was really smart."
"Yeah, but I didn't know that you were there," Denki hedged. "Have you told anyone?"
"Are you kidding?" Hawks said. "I'm not trying to get you killed, sparky." Denki snorted, and Hawks smiled. "Believe it or not, I'm on your side, here. If you manage to get full control over this, you'd be pretty close to unstoppable."
That sounded pretty damn cool on the surface, but Denki still didn't quite understand.
"Why did you do this? Electricity isn't exactly your area of expertise, is it?"
It's not like Hawks was going to come right out and say something like, 'the League of Villains requested I take you in and share everything I know with you,' even if that was the truth, but Denki felt like he had to ask anyway. It's not like Denki could ask what he really wanted to know, not with Force Majeure's quirk sitting dormant at the back of his mind, ready to flicker to life at a moment's notice.
"No, but I know potential when I see it."
Denki nodded and fiddled with the edge of the blanket wrapped around the broken, fake baby. "How am I going to get full control?"
"I'll keep working with you."
"What?" Denki asked, a smile forming quickly across his face, continuing with a teasing lilt in his voice, "gonna challenge me to a race, Hawks?"
"I'm fast, but I'm not faster than the speed of light," Hawks said, nudging Denki's shoulder with his own.
Denki blanched, his joking nature seemingly draining from him. "Oh, shit. I'm faster than Hawks."
"Yeah, you are! What are you going to do, now, hot shot?"
Denki didn't even have to think about it. "I'm going to challenge Iida to a race."
Hawks laughed, leaning back against his hands on the cot to make himself comfortable. "Until you get full control, you should probably keep this to yourself."
"Yeah," Denki agreed nodding. "Except I'm going to tell Neito and Hitoshi."
"Neito is your boyfriend, right?" Hawks asked and Denki nodded. "Okay, so who's Hitoshi?"
"Hitoshi is my other boyfriend, and also Neito's soulmate," Denki informed, then, "I'm actually surprised you didn't know about this. We were a hot topic when we first arranged all that, though I guess Tokoyami isn't exactly the gossiping type."
Hawks had frozen. Dabi and Shigaraki had told him that they knew of a group who gave them the idea to set up their relationship the same way. This whole time, they were talking about Denki. Hawks knew that the League did extensive research when it suited them, but to keep such close tabs on Denki continued to be surprising to him, especially the lengths they seemed to have gone. Plus, they knew that Denki had been targeted by Full Throttle, and Hawks wasn't the one to tell them that. It was more than just a vague interest in someone they had captured; it was much bigger than that.
Denki eyed Hawks as he remained silent and emotionless. "I don't think you have any room to judge, Mr. I-have-two-lovers-calling-me-within-seconds-of-each-other," Denki said, trying to be lighthearted about it, but it definitely hurt if Hawks was put-off by his relationship with the soulmates.
"It's not that," Hawks reassured him. "But I do really have to call them back and see what they wanted. It's rare that they call me back-to-back like that, so it must be important."
Hawks then excused himself, and Denki smiled as he fiddled with the baby doll on his lap. It was looking more and more likely that Denki was right about Hawks being the one infiltrating the League of Villains. He wondered what would have happened if he had answered Hawks's phone for him.
"I have big news!" Hitoshi announced before Denki had the chance.
"You're finally fluent in Spanish after all of those lessons from Sero?" Neito guessed.
"No."
"You got bitten by a radioactive spider and now you have an extra quirk?" Denki chimed.
"What—no!"
"You—"
"I'm getting adopted next week!" Hitoshi rushed out before his boyfriends could thrust another wild theory onto him. "Eri, too!"
"Holy shit! Congratulations!" Neito said, leaning forward toward Hitoshi with excitement written all over his features.
"I knew it was worth including in my last words," Denki said with a nod.
The two soulmates whipped their heads in Denki's direction. "Oh, I've gotta hear this!"
"Okay, so Hawks taught me how to turn into lightning, right? Well, as he was doing that, I felt like he was actually trying to kill me by making me overuse my own quirk, so I started listing off my final words to everyone. My final words to Aizawa were that he could adopt both you and Eri, and he should! So, I'm really glad he is!"
"Back up," Neito demanded. Hitoshi nodded in agreement that Denki needed to back the fuck up. "Hawks taught you how to turn into lightning?!"
"Oh, yeah! That was going to be my news!"
"… Well, tell us the details, Denki! I'm dying from anticipation here!" Hitoshi demanded, plopping himself down on the floor, dragging Neito down with him.
Denki looked down at the soulmates who looked back up at him with endless admiration and excitement in their eyes. God, he loved them. He plopped down on the floor, too, and told them all about it.
"So, when Tokoyami joked around that Hawks was going to teach you how to fly…" Neito started.
"When has Tokoyami ever joked about anything?" Hitoshi finished the thought.
"I don't think he knew what Hawks had in mind," Denki said with a shrug. "I just think he knew he had something big in mind for me or he wouldn't have poured that much time and energy into me."
"So, Neito was wrong," Hitoshi stated bluntly out of nowhere.
"Excuse me?" Neito said with a scowl.
"You're excused," Hitoshi answered automatically with a smirk.
Denki bit back laugher, and Hitoshi said with a wink, "Eri taught me that one."
"I was wrong, too," Denki admitted to ease the rising tension, though he knew it was nothing serious. "None of us knew what Hawks was up to, so it was easy to misjudge him and his intentions."
"Well, he could have told you," Neito said, glaring at nothing in particular.
"Would I have believed him, though?" Denki asked, placing his elbow on his knee and his chin in his hand. "Hey, Chargebolt! I'm going to push you past your limits to help you turn into lightning! Wow! Thanks, Hawks! Sounds fantastic, like a completely reasonable goal to attain."
"Okay, smartass," Neito said, shoving at Denki's shoulder, but he was smiling all the same. "You have a point."
"I always do."