AN: I had the worst work week of my life last week (the not work-based parts kinda blew too, honestly) and absolutely could not make myself write anything at all despite sitting down almost every night to try and make it work. Legit: just me, sitting there for an hour or two at a time, grinding out maybe 150 words that I absolutely hated! Didn't even keep any of them, lmao. 😭 ️ On Saturday, I woke up really early and banged most of this out, and finished it up yesterday. Edited it today, yeeeech. What a relief to be done with it!

011: feathers and lifelines.
I'll burn some buildings for ya,
I'll kill your parents, too.

Late November; 17 years.

"You can't." Suzume trembles before him, fully dressed and newly clean now, looking up at him with wide, red-rimmed eyes. Behind the feverish flush of her tear-irritated cheeks, her skin is a stark and sickly white, all the blood drained cold from her face. He thinks she'd be crying still if there were any more tears left for her to cry.

Nine years old, Dabi remembers. She is only nine years old, and only an hour and a half ago, she had watched him murder her father. And when it was done – when Dabi was done doing what he'd gleefully come to do – Suzume had looked too upon her father's twisted, fire-mangled corpse and seen his smoldering bones and charred, fresh-blackened flesh. His body fat had rendered down into a simmering, oily smear; joined with blood and viscera and gore-wet ash, her father had made a rather unsightly mess across the otherwise pristine white tiles of Suzume's childhood home.

She had been understandably terrified. It's something he understands logically, knowing how people are, how they're supposed to act, what's meant to be normal – even if he doesn't feel it the same way anymore. It had been apparent in her face, besides: eyes round and wild, mouth slack, face bloodless. When he'd gone to her to touch her with his bloodied hands, she had seemed moments from catatonia. That she'd managed to hold on to herself enough to heal him before completely shutting down had been a wonder.

He'd taken that as a compliment.

Now, though, looking up at him, her expression is much the same as before when she'd looked out over the death Dabi had brought into the house, all abject and reeling horror. Her chest is a rapid rise and fall beneath her new pajama shirt, and her hands twist frantically into the fabric across her stomach, tugging the graphic of the smiling, sleepy bear character on the front of it down into a pronounced frown.

"You can't," she repeats. Her shoulders heave with each quickening breath. "Please, please, you can't!"

"I can, and I will. I gotta. Just for a while. It'll only be for a little while." Lifting his hand, Dabi runs the back of his knuckles along the tumbling, finger-combed waves of her freshly blow dried hair. He'd been too lazy to bother using a brush the way Fuyumi had always insisted, and Suzume's hair is all the more wild for it.

But Suzume jerks away from the touch, nearly panting with the betrayal. "You can't, you can't!" It's a repetitive chant, a frantic child's prayer, hysteria leeching into every word. "You can't – you can't, if you leave me, if you go without me, I'll die – "

"You're not gonna die."

"I will!" For all the absurdity of the statement, Dabi can tell Suzume believes it wholeheartedly in her undoubtedly fast-pounding heart for the desperate way she clutches at it. "I will, I will – if you go, if you leave, after… after all this – Nii-chan, I can't, I can't – "

Still so young, Dabi thinks. She's still so very, very young, and so unlike him. This night for her has definitely been the worst of her young life. This night for him, though, has been – well. Even thinking it feels cruel.

He's careful not to smile, anyway, looking down on her, regarding her instead with placidly raised eyebrows.

"I'll come back," he tells her calmly. "You know I'll come back for you. Shit's gonna get pretty hot for a minute. It'll only be for a little while, until things simmer down."

"No! Please, wherever you're going – please, I wanna go with you! Not later – not some other time! Just – please, now!"

What a difference an hour and a half makes. An hour and a half ago, she had looked upon him with sheer, panicked dread, held paralyzed by terror, as if transfixed by the coming of something well and truly awful. Now, at even the mere prospect of him leaving without her, she seems equally undone by her fear.

Frightened and adoring in equal measure, Suzume behaves as a tiny disciple of a dangerously capricious and execrable god.

Dabi is not wholly without mercy for her, though – not when her fear of losing him in the wake of her overall fear of him is such a sweet, sweet balm for his ego. "Listen to me," he says, sinking down to take her face in both of his hands. "Listen to me, Suzu. Take a few deep breaths, okay?"

Her eyelashes flutter as she stares at him, taking in big, gulping breaths through her mouth. In the grip of his hands, he feels her try to nod. "Umm… uh-huh."

"Now, try it in through your nose, out through your mouth. Slow."

She tries. Her little nostrils flare around the first intake, and her breath on his face when she exhales comes out as cool little puffs of wind.

"Again. Slower."

Another breath. Suzume obeys; the breath is slower this time, if only a little bit.

"Again," he says, and lets go of her face to take her hands in his, holding them to his chest instead. "Follow mine. Feel it – look at it. Go slower, still. Be steadier with it. Be good for me, okay?"

Oh, and for that, she tries. Her gaze falls from his face to where he holds her flat palmed hands against himself, where she can feel the fixed up and down motion of his breathing – where she can see it. Suzume slows, and slows some more, in and out, in and out, until they breathe as one in a single, temperate rhythm.

"Good girl," Dabi whispers, and her eyes flicker up to him from beneath the weight of her heavy lashes. He doesn't miss the way her fingers curl almost imperceptibly under his own, or the way her next intake comes a little shakier before lapsing back into their shared, even cadence.

He lets himself savor it a moment before asking, "Better?"

Suzume nods, mutely, breathing steadily.

"Good," he says, "'cause I need you to listen to me good, okay? Think about this logically: your dad is a big shot hero. He's just been murdered, and heroes as fancy and famous as your dad don't just turn up dead every day, and people're gonna find out about it real damn quick when he doesn't turn up for work tomorrow. They're gonna make a real big deal of it. The press is gonna have a fucking field day. You follow?"

She nods again. "Uh-huh."

Dabi wets his scarred lower lip with a sweep of his tongue. "Yeah, good. So, it's gonna be a big deal. And it's gonna be a right fucking big deal all on its own, already, but how do you think they're gonna react when his kid turns up missing, too?"

Suzume closes her eyes, her thick lashes red and gold shatter-glass against her white skin. She looks miserable. "...bad."

"No, not 'bad'. It's already gonna be bad. No, it's gonna be worse. A lot worse. I killed your dad, Suzu. You know what they'll do to me if I get caught?"

"Please, Nii-chan," Suzume whispers with closed eyes, another prayer, and her trembling hands curl around the fabric of his shirt. There's a skip in her breathing; she seems to fight to steady herself. "I don't… want you to get caught. I don't want you to leave me."

"I'm not gonna get caught." He says it cool, says it easy, all hot confidence. "I'm not, but even I don't wanna risk the extra heat they'd come after me with if I took you, too. You know how the public'd froth over a story like that? Beloved hero dead, and his cute little daughter, gone, taken – imagine the fucking manhunt. There'd be nowhere safe for me to take you."

"I know," she says, wretchedly, voice breaking under the weight of it. She's losing the battle again, and her shoulders quake violently with a sharp, stuttering intake of breath, the beginnings of a sob she only just barely manages to hold back. "I know, I know, I know… but I don't… I don't wanna be away from you… I don't wanna be with anyone but you. And I don't have – I don't even have anyone else, even if – "

"Breathe, Suzu. C'mon, you can do it for me."

"Okay…" Trailing off, Suzume settles into a despondent silence, compliantly attempting to steady her breathing. Secure in the safety of her closed eyes, Dabi allows himself a sharp, self-satisfied smile that is all teeth. For all that he has spent the last ten months fucking loathing Featherlight, the man has inadvertently done him a favor.

Suzume is nothing like Dabi; getting her to truly emotionally detach from her mother would have been an exceedingly difficult process, Dabi knows – even given his little sister's complicated feelings and growing frustration regarding the woman.

No, Suzume very much loved her mother, and her mother very clearly loved her daughter in return. It was the sort of genuine connection that Dabi knew could prove very detrimental to his growing relationship with Suzume. It had been a risk, even months ago – and, left to fester, that risk would have grown unquestionably exponential.

Better, then, that Kozue Meihane was dead.

That was something Dabi had realized months ago. He had certainly thought about it, too, back then in the park – but truthfully, he hadn't really wanted to kill Kozue himself. Something about that had given even him pause; the woman had seemed a good and doting mother at the end of it. That she'd done anything at all to defy her husband in defense of her daughter was more than Dabi would have expected given his own mother's track record, even if it was too little, too late.

It was just so hard to have a family of two with a girl who still had living relatives she was invested in. Now, though, there is nothing he needs to do – no ugly what-ifs to weigh, no dire decisions to make. Featherlight's selfishness has solved that little problem very, very neatly, leaving Dabi in a position to reap all the benefits without further dirtying his own hands.

No need to be a selfish, secretive, skulking murderer, no. Featherlight's transgressions mean Dabi can deal death openly as a savior, not underhanded as a slayer. He can murder her father, claiming vengeance on her and her late mother's behalf –

And look all the better for it.

In front of him, Suzume grows still and quiet again. In and out, her breath matches his. So young, he thinks; she has lost so much in so short a span of time –

And still she tries so hard to be good – to be good for him.

Dabi's grin stretches. He lets go of her hands and reaches out, taking hold of her shoulders instead, pulling her against himself. Stiffening briefly under the unexpected touch, Suzume is quick to relax in the cage of his arms, tucking herself into him with a needy, desperate eagerness he finds he has missed so much.

"It'll only be for a little while," he tells her, smiling into her hair. "I'll come back for you, always. It'll work out. You just gotta do exactly as I say, okay?"

"Okay," she says, softly, muffled against the ruined flesh of his throat. "Okay."

Late November; 9 years.

Suzume's brother moves with a determined purpose. He is quick, exacting, and entirely free of doubt, and for all her fear and overwhelming sadness, it's hard not to be in awe of him.

They are, the both of them, clean and dry now, dressed in fresh clothes. Even his boots are different: old still, scuffed still, but a new kind of old and scuffed. A second pair, he tells her; his previous pair has joined the pile of all their old and filthy clothes, covering what she knows is the corpse of her father. Most importantly, there is no blood on these new-old dark boots, no grease, no ash. When he moves through the rooms of the big house, he is dangerously graceful. His feet never step in any of the wet or the blood or the gore.

"I'm gonna burn the house down," he tells her. It is one declaration in a long string of declarations, of things he tells her he is going to do, of things he tells her she must remember. In his arms, carried through the house with him, she nods at this, as she has nodded at all the rest. "But first, I gotta make sure I take care of your dad and our clothes. They need special attention. You wanna watch?"

Suzume does not want to watch. Her father is a terrible person, and she does not miss him, and she thinks she might actually hate him, now – really, truly hate him in a way she'd only pretended to with Katsuki. It's a new emotion, this feeling. It prickles hot and cold in her, hot and cold. It makes her sick. She does not like how it feels even a little.

Suzume is not like her brother, who seems to revel in his hatred. His eyes dance and move with an eagerness when she looks at him, when she looks at him looking at her father, buried beneath the mound of all their ruined clothes.

"Can I wait in the kitchen?" She asks, timidly. There are good memories, there: memories of Mama, teaching her how to cook and how to bake. Memories of her brother now, too, making her egg on rice – and giving her his own.

There are no more good memories in the living room. It's hard for her to remember if there ever was.

"Sure," her brother says, magnanimously. His lips brush her temple, and the heat of them makes her shiver in a way that's not wholly good, but certainly not bad, either. She's relieved that he isn't disappointed in her.

So she waits in the kitchen and closes her eyes. When she can still see the blue light seeping in through the doorway from behind them, she covers her eyes with her hands, too, and when the smell of smoke and meat hit her senses, she tugs the collar of her shirt up and over her forehead, breathing instead through her mouth. She tries to imagine her brother's chest in her mind's eye, up and down, up and down, imagining it in her mind, and under her hands, hot, hot, so hot. Slow and steady, he'd said. Her brother is so much better at being calm than she is.

Maybe it comes with knowing everything already, she thinks. By contrast, Suzume feels like she knows nothing at all, and the not knowing is the worst of it. Everything is a surprise. Everything is so scary, all the time. Everything she doesn't know is terrible.

Months and months. Her mother has been dead –

"Okay," her brother says, in the kitchen with her again, and she pops her head out of the collar of her shirt to look at him. Smoke wafts in thin tendrils from his long arms, ruined skin pulled taught over smoldering, lean muscle.

"Does it hurt?" She asks him, softly.

"Not like you'd think," he says it off-handedly, like a grown up discussing a scary thunderstorm they aren't remotely fazed by. "I've gotten used to it."

That's difficult for Suzume to imagine. His body festers with it. He is always so hot. She shakes her head. Whether he's lying or not, she struggles to make sense of it.

"Healing doesn't hurt you like it did before, yeah?" Her brother stretches in the kitchen, rolling his shoulders. They move smooth like a wave beneath the fabric of his shirt, and Suzume struggles to look away from them. "You got used to it."

"That's different," she says, finally, looking back up at his face. It is different. "And anyway – it still does hurt, even if it hurts… less than it did. And you set yourself on fire."

"Had to – my fire is hotter than what I'm gonna torch the house with."

She reaches out a tentative hand to touch his wounded arm, but he pulls it back from her, and shakes his head. "Later."

Suzume frowns down at his smoking arms. "But if you're gonna…" She pauses at the terrible informality of the word. "'Torch' the house – "

"I'm not gonna use my fire for that. Blue fire, it's too unique. I'm gonna use the old fashioned shit instead: gasoline and a match, some open gas lines."

That all sounds very terrible still, but at least it won't hurt him. Reluctantly, Suzume nods. "You brought… gasoline?"

"There's a shit load of it out in the generator shed," he says, looking out through the kitchen window, and a grin breaks out over his features, as if the prospect excites him. "Real convenient."

Suzume doesn't say anything. From the brightly lit kitchen, the outside is a still, black landscape beyond the window. She cannot see the generator shed, even if she knows that's exactly where it is.

Suddenly, her brother presses something soft into her hands. She looks down to find a worn plush cat. It looks very old. Staring back up at her with dark glass eyes, its little mouth is a barely perceptible frown behind the waves of its clumpy, dingy fur. She thinks it might have been white, once. Now, it is almost grey.

She blinks down at it, surprised. Old, yes, and clearly well-loved, doubtfully by him. The cat looks sad. Looking at it makes Suzume feel sad. "What's… this?"

She half-expects her brother to say something smart, like, "A cat," or to tease her for the stupid question. Instead, he turns the cat over in her hands and, taking her hand in his, presses her finger against a seam just along the curve of the cat's back. It's hard to feel behind the thick tufts of fur, and even harder to see.

"There's a phone in here. It's shut off now, but it's charged, and it works; you just have to turn it on. It's got a number you can reach me at inside. I'll find you even if you lose it somehow, but this'll make things way easier, so be careful with it."

A phone to use to reach her brother. Her fingers smooth the fur down over the rough-stitch scar. She has used the phone to call Katsuki and Izuku before. She has used it to call her mother, too, from their houses, a lifeline drawn like invisible veins between air and satellites.

"Did you pick a cat 'cause I like cats?" She asks. The threadwork is functional, but poor. She thinks she could do better. She wonders if he's done it himself, this clumsy trick with needle and thread, this telephone heart inside this old, well-loved toy. Something about that thought makes her want to cry.

"Yeah." He pauses, watching her, obviously thinking, and sucks his teeth a moment. "Had to go to a few second hand shops to find a cat."

Suzume swallows, and cradles the little cat against her chest, looking up at him. It's almost impossible to reconcile the brother who would go out of his way to find her a cat toy he could afford with the brother who so gleefully tore her father apart only a few hours ago. The lines of him blur, all washed out, gone indistinct and fuzzy through new, burning tears. "What if they… try and take it away from me?"

"They ain't gonna do that. Kid who just lost both her parents – nah, that'd be some real monstrous shit." Her brother brushes her tears from her lashes with his thumbs, and kisses her forehead. "I gotta finish getting ready now, though. You ready?"

"No," Suzume answers, truthfully. Her fingers dig in into the plump cat, feeling, feeling. She thinks she can feel the edge of the phone, there, just like he'd said. Lifeline, she thinks. Her brother is that much more real, now. "But I'll try."

"Gotta do more than try, princess," he tells her, but he's gentle with the admonishment as he takes her chin in his hand. "Remember what I told you?"

She does. She's not sure she'll ever forget. "Yeah."

"If you can do what I tell you," he says, and his fingers feel warm on her skin, "it'll all work out. You just gotta do what I tell you."

"I will," she promises, voice soft.

Her brother rewards her with a smile and a lingeringly warm kiss to her cheek.

Late November; 16 years.

They let him wait out the rain. It's night, they reason. His target is sure to have celebrated himself into a deep stupor; the waiting will only make that more assured. The radar had promised only a few hours of it, anyway, and now it is done and clearing, and now they tell him: go.

So, he goes.

The clouds as he flies are thick at first, but as the kilometers stretch on, so too, do the clouds. They thin and drift, giving way to the curiosity of a thousand peeking stars in the storm-fresh sky, and then there are no clouds at all. The stars come out in full, then, gleaming like a million jewels spilled against a dark velvet backdrop.

With the blinding, ever-bright lights of the city far behind him and the sweeping countryside ahead, the sky seems so alive. He moves through it cleanly like the sweep of a blade, and the air is damp and rich and cold, and the wind gets under his wings, and he sails with it, up and down, up and down. Down, and his hands are a brush over whispering, wet grass; up, and up, then, until the ground falls away, and the small, old country houses in the distance look like little grey beetles nestled among ribbons of road.

The act of flying is joyous. It is freedom distilled into its rawest form. He thinks about that, and mostly that, and less so about what he knows he's been asked to do. Told to do.

For the greater good.

It's not bad work, he tells himself. Work is work – a necessary evil. Rarely do people enjoy their jobs. Rather, they do them because they must: whether that's to put food on the table or to keep the wheels of society greased and functional or both, it doesn't matter.

Sometimes, that grease is blood, he reasons, and that's fine. He is a practical young man, and this doesn't really bother him.

He just enjoys flying so much more.

In his pocket, his phone vibrates. He pulls it out, wings wide and still, gliding on an updraft of wind. "Hey," he says, only loud enough to be heard over the rushing sound of flight. "Hawks."

"Something's wrong," comes the crackling voice of his handler. Service in the country isn't so good; this is expected. "We just got a call from someone claiming to be at the Meihane house."

"Yeah?" Hawks is very still as he lets his wide wings follow the length of the wind. "And?"

"Says he's a villain." This isn't expected. "Says he's killed Featherlight."

That's even less expected.

Hawks hums in response, his keen eyes searching the horizon. The roads and the landscape and the farm houses rush along in a blur beneath him. The mountains are a jagged slash of teeth across the horizon, and the many eyes of the night sky watch him, impassively. "He still there? Maybe I'll treat him to a drink, since he's gone and done my job for me."

"He said he's – " The voice is tense as it cuts out. The line sounds like static in the rushing wind. "Hawks – "

"Really," Hawks says, pleasantly, thinking to himself just how nice the sky looks. "it sounds like the trash took itself out."

" – his kid's there."

Those words hit Hawks at the exact moment his eyes light on the billowing mass of black pluming up from the edge of the horizon. So much darker than the sky, it blots out the mountains and the treeline, smothering the blanket of stars behind it.

Smoke, he realizes, its fat, rounded edges gleaming red.

"Fuck," Hawks hisses, "There's a huge fucking fire."

"Yeah – " The voice says, and then, " – mentioned that."

"And Featherlight's kid is there?"

"Yes – " The call gives out, and Hawks puts his phone back in his pocket.

Hawks' wings give a great sweeping movement then, a great percussive crack against the cold night air. He is an echo of thunder in the clear, cloudless sky as he begins to fly much more quickly, this time in earnest.

Late November; 9 years.

The big house goes up with a terrible sound, and then there is a high pitched and ringing whine in her ears.

It's like the explosions in a video game, Suzume thinks, but so much worse. It's deeper, and she feels it, as if it's coming both from inside herself and from every other possible direction, all at the same time.

Inside the shuddering little garden shed on the far corner of the property, Suzume covers her deafened ears and screams her surprise. She cannot hear herself, really, but she can feel it, at least, sharp and pointed in her chest and her throat amidst all the ways she feels that awful, dull rumbling of the house breaking apart.

She knew this was coming. Her brother had told her what to expect: the explosion, the feeling of it, even the ringing in her ears. Her brother knows everything, after all, and the force of it is less scary than it otherwise would be, she thinks. Less, but still terrifying.

Suzume wishes he'd been able to stay with her. She wishes he'd have been able to sit with her in the shed, and cover her ears with his hands, and mouth the words 'be good for me,' through that awfully incessant, shrieking ring. That would make things better. At the very least, it would make things easier, having him to focus on.

Outside something shifts and rumbles – the big house, that big, awful house, all the good and bad memories, coming apart. Picking up her fat plush cat, she pushes against the door of the garden shed and looks out across the wide yard.

The house is coming apart at all the seams that hold it together. The roof has caved into the awful third floor guest room, and the angle of the structure slumps and bends, a slouching, lumpy figure. Smoke billows from gnashing, broken teeth windows, and she is reminded of her brother and his own fiery leer.

Into the woods. He'd told her he was going into the woods, where the shadows will eat him up, where they will take him and hold him and hide him away. There are many, many kilometers of sprawling forest here, and they are all dark and unwieldy, rarely traveled. Later, he promised her. He'll come for her later.

For now, she must be patient. She must be good. She has to wait.

They have to find her, her brother had told her. They will take her and they will question her and they will be very sympathetic. She is a victim, after all, he'd said. She won't even have to pretend.

Suzume thinks about that, about herself as a victim. A victim of her father, along with her mother. Her father – a hero.

And a victim of her brother?

She's not so sure. Villain, he'd called himself in the house, poised to murder her father, and her head swims, messy with her thoughts and all the smoke and the fire and the heat she can feel even from here, even so far away from the flames. Heroes shouldn't kill people, but her father had had her mother killed. Was he still a hero?

And burning down her house feels very much like a villain thing to do –

"It's for you," her brother had told her. "I wanna do this for you."

Villainy, then, motivated by love. Was that still villainy? If her father was a bad, terrible man who killed his own wife for selfish gain, was murdering him for love truly evil?

Above her, Suzume thinks she sees something moving in the sky. She tilts her head back, drawing her plush up and under her chin. There is an awful lot of smoke there, filling in the horizon all dark and gray. Her ears are still ringing, but it's quieter now, and the house shifts, and the concrete cracks, and she thinks she can vaguely hear it in much the same way as she knows she feels it.

And then, through all the smoke and the dancing light of the blazing house, she can see it:

The movement wasn't smoke, she realizes with an immense sense of dread. It was wings.

It's a person.

These wings are not incandescent and brilliant on their own, like her father's wings. Set against the sky and the smoke, they only reflect the light of the fire, like a bird's wings might. Even from far away, she can tell they are big and wide, stretching out, catching the wind, drifting down –

Closer.

Suzume imagines her father, a shambling corpse taken to the wind even in death, his wings tragic and dark, never to glow again. She imagines him, hatred in his gaze, something vile come down from the sky, eager to visit the vengeance forced upon him in her name back on her.

She manages only three screaming and stumbling steps before strong arms have her, lifting her up and up. Her feet leave the ground, and the ground falls away from her, and it takes everything in her to hold onto the cat her brother has given her.

Her lifeline, she thinks, screaming still, her fingers tangling in the dirty fur of the toy. She cannot lose it, no matter what –

"Hey!" The voice sounds so far away, but she can feel it against her ear. Warm breath. Living breath. Even muffled as it is, the voice does not sound at all like her father. "Hey, hey, you're okay! I'm not gonna hurt you!"

And the eyes that look back at her are gold and not violet, and there is no hatred in them. They are wide, and even set under the tense furrow of his bushy eyebrows, Suzume thinks she recognizes something like concern in them.

It's an alien thing, his expression. After many months of knowing only her father's hardened face – and then her brother's hot-and-cold temper, with his wild-eyed mania and awful, terrible calm – this man's soft amber eyes and his openly troubled expression seem so…

Human.

"Is he still here?" She thinks she hears him say. It's so hard to hear him over the wind, over the ringing in her ears.

Who does he mean? Her father, gone forever? Her brother, gone for a time? She guesses it doesn't matter. They're both gone. And even held securely in this man's arms, looking up into his maybe-kind and seemingly fretful face, Suzume wishes her brother had taken her with him –

Wishes she were gone, too.

So Suzume shakes her head, hugging her cat plush close to her chest, and, despite her best efforts, bursts into tears.

Late November; 16 years.

Hawks' handlers tell him they should take his new charge to a hospital in Tokyo. Instead, he opts to take her to one in Saitama's capital. It's much closer, he reasons, and after having refused their demands to return to her father's house and verify his supposed murder, he figures this adaptation of his orders won't matter much in the long run. Discipline will come regardless; what's a little more?

She cries for some of the way, and then she quiets, and then she is so very still save for the wind in her wild hair. He cradles her against his chest, and she looks out at the sky, and the stars reflect brightly in her glossy eyes.

She looks as if unseeing.

"Are you okay?" He asks her, finally.

It's a stupid question, he thinks, regretting it even as the words pass his lips. She shakes her head, and she looks at him then, and he has the feeling she doesn't really see him, either.

"I'm sorry," he says, and means it.

She nods, solemnly. Her face is wan, and too thin. Hawks thinks she'd be a pretty kid were it not for how very unwell she looks. "You got here really fast," she observes quietly, and her eyes seem to focus just a bit when she looks over his shoulder at his wings.

"I am pretty quick. S'one of the few things I'm good at." To illustrate, he beats his great wings once, twice, and up they go together, soaring up ever higher.

Hawks isn't sure what he expects, but she is neither impressed or frightened. Instead, she looks away from him, and out into the sky again. "The man said it'd probably be awhile before anyone came out, since the big house is out in the country."

"The man?"

"The man who killed my dad."

Hawks stretches out his wings and takes to a backdraft again, and the beating, upward motion goes from choppy to smooth in an instant. "Did you see it?"

"Yeah." It's a faint affirmation. He doubts he'd be able to hear it were it not for how close she is.

"You saw the man kill your father?"

Her gaze slides back to him, and her eyes are heavily drawn. She looks so tired. "Yeah. He did it with fire, like he did the rest of the house."

Hawks sets his teeth for a moment, thinking. Taking her with him had been a gut reaction. It would have been prudent to check – it would have been what a hero would do, to verify there wasn't anyone else who needed saving in the inferno of that catastrophic house.

And this little girl – Akihiko Meihane's daughter – has no idea Hawks had no intention to save her father. She has no way of knowing that he had actually been tasked to kill the man after the HSPC had discovered conclusive proof that he'd had his own wife killed – no way of knowing that only moments earlier, Hawks had been genuinely pleased to find out that someone had gone and done his dirty work for him.

"I should've gone in for him," Hawks says, eventually, in thorougly mimed sincerity. The smile that crosses his face is the perfect amount of apologetic. It's easier when he does feel sorry, he finds. Rather than her father though, it's her he feels sorry for. While certainly a rare blessing that whatever villain came after her father's life had enough warped sense of morality to spare a child, it's not something she seems to be handling very well, given the vacancy of her expression. "I just saw you and figured I'd take you somewhere safe, in case anyone was still around – "

The girl shakes her head. Suzume, he thinks he remembers her name being from the files he's read about her family – about the mess he was meant to clean up. Sparrow, her name means. Little flightless bird. "I saw him… I saw him melt," she whispers, and she holds her dirty cat plush more tightly to herself. Shivering now, her bare toes curl in the cold November air. "He was more… he was more wet than person, at the end of it. There's… there was nothing to go in for, anymore."

He imagines this small girl inside the fiery carcass of her gaudy, oversized house, watching her terrible father burn to death. Hawks' has read over Featherlight's file; he knows what kind of man her father was. Even so, though, to see something like that, and be so young –

"Shit," Hawks swears softly. It's out before he can pull it back, but if she notices or cares, she gives no indication.

"I'm so cold," she says instead, almost absently. Turning her head to watch a particularly large tree below them soar by, Hawks can tell that she wants to change the subject. "Say, what's your name?"

"Well, you could maybe think of me as your big brother if you wan – "

"No, thank you." Her reply is so clipped and sharp and unexpected that it almost shakes him out of his convivial ruse. It's his mistake, he reasons, surprised to find it stings a bit. Family is clearly and understandably a sore spot.

"You can call me Hawks, then," he tells her, fixing her with a generously bright smile that doesn't betray the way his thoughts wander to darker things.

For a while, she doesn't say anything, choosing instead to study him. "You smile like my dad did," she says, finally. Her voice almost succeeds at being impassive, but Hawks can hear the way her doubt creeps in. "Like you'd be on TV. Your face is handsome like his, too."

"Well, well – " Hawks' smile widens cheerily, playing at a humble kind of bashfulness he doesn't actually feel.

This is not the compliment it sounds like, Hawks knows. Known-charmer Featherlight was irrepressibly charismatic, and the public had adored him. That he'd made it to number four in the rankings was proof of that. There's no doubt in Hawks' mind that his daughter knew what he was really like, though. A man willing to kill his own wife –

Even his own father hadn't gone after his mother, and the gods knew that Hawks was well aware exactly how awful his father had been.

"Hawks-san."

He looks at her, and she seems a million kilometers away, somehow. "Yeah?"

"If I ask you something, will you be honest with me?"

"I – "

She does not look angry. She does not look afraid. She looks sad, and lonely, and desperate. She looks so small. "Please?"

He shouldn't, he knows. He should wait for his debriefing. He should wait for new orders. Instead, he finds himself nodding. Hawks does not want to be her father with his handsome face and false charm, so he puts his carefully constructed smile away and regards her with a seriousness that feels wholly unfamiliar. "All right," he says, and means it. "I promise."

Suzume swallows, collecting herself. "Is my mama… is my mama really dead? My dad said she was in the hospital, but the… man – he said otherwise."

There are other people who should be answering this question for her, Hawks thinks. People who could break this to her more kindly than he knows how to do, even with all his many years of interpersonal training. Hawks has been built for infiltration and charm, not grief management. He's not even sure if it's okay to disclose whether Kozue Meihane is dead or not.

But her eyes are so big and round in her face now, and she looks at him, expectantly, needily, and Hawks has already thrown so much of his caution and training to the wind tonight. If this is what she wants –

"I know you want me to tell you that she's not," he says, carefully, and very slowly. "And I wish I could. I really wish I could. And I'm sorry I can't, but you asked me to be honest, and I don't wanna – "

She smiles, and it is a very sad and brokenhearted smile, and when she pats his shoulder with one tiny hand, Hawks can't bring himself to finish. "It's okay," she whispers. "I thought so. Thanks for being honest with me, anyway. Maybe you're not so much like my dad, after all."

And that is a real compliment, he thinks; it's a compliment that gets under his skin like a splinter – something that goes straight to his heart and aches, and aches, and aches.

Late November; 9 years.

At the hospital, there are a lot of smiling people in white clothes. Some are serious, some are worried, and all of them are kind. They are quick to take Suzume from Hawks – something she notices he's rather reluctant to let happen – and they usher her away to a quiet room that's not so bright as all the wide, sterile hallways.

There are a few needles pressed into her by soft talking women. To take blood, they say. To give her fluids. There are warm hands to hold while it all happens, the brush of thumbs across her knuckles. Someone tells her she will sleep for awhile.

Suzume feels so tired, so she nods. Yes, she says. She'd like that.

And she sleeps. The sun rises, and she wakes up a few times to a nurse in colorful scrubs who helps her into the bathroom, or to someone trying to coax food into her. Suzume isn't very hungry, but she tries, because the woman who asks her to is old and her face is worn and soft like a well-loved blanket, and Suzume worries the woman will be sad if she refuses to eat.

One time she wakes, and the sun has set again, and the sky outside her window is dark. The lights are low, and outside the cracked door, there is the constant hustle and bustle of people and the clatter of carts.

On a stool pulled up next to her bed, Hawks looks up from his phone and gives her a dazzling smile. "You feeling any better?"

Suzume thinks about that. "I'm tired," she says, finally. It feels like a safe thing to say. She doesn't know why he's here. His smile is comfortably friendly, but so was her father's. That moment of honesty on the flight over doesn't mean anything, Suzume knows. People lie all the time, after all.

"It's okay to sleep some more," he says, generously, and she watches him pocket his phone. In the low light of the room, she can see him better than she was able to the previous night. He looks like he might be her brother's age, give or take a year or two.

"You look kinda young to be a hero." She says it mostly to fill up space. Her brother, she thinks, is too young to be a villain, but that certainly hasn't stopped him.

"I'm a speedy guy." Hawks laughs, and his laughter is easy, and his eyes twinkle as if he's telling a joke. "I get most places early."

"Does it work like that?" She asks, curiously.

"It does for me." He nods as if he's imparting some kind of sage wisdom. Again, he has the pleasant air of someone telling a joke, but Suzume thinks he might actually be serious. "Sometimes, you gotta do everything fast, including growing up."

Suzume looks away from him then and into the motionless face of the cat toy her brother had given her. It stares back up at her with its gleaming black eyes and its sad, downturned mouth. "That doesn't sound good."

Hawks hums. "Maybe not, but it's not really bad either. Some things just are."

Shaking her head, Suzume pulls a tired face. "But that doesn't make sense. If you go too fast, you miss things, though. Like if you read a book and skip too many lines, and then suddenly things don't make sense anymore – and that isn't good. That's just bad. What if the story was a good story, and now you can't figure it out?"

Hawks makes a show of tapping his chin. She half expects to see staples on the back of his hands, and is almost surprised at their normal, ruddy-knuckled appearance. "That's fair," he allows, "But if you want to, you can read the book again, and you can take it slowly, right? Life ain't like that, though; when the years go, they're gone. And maybe that starts out as bad, but it doesn't have to be, if you don't let it. Being sad about something doesn't change the fact that the bad thing happened, does it?"

Suzume frowns down at her cat toy. "No," she says, a little unsure, "I guess not."

"So, the bad things happen, and yeah, they were bad when they happened. Probably bad for a while afterwards, too. You mourn them, and they hurt, but eventually they just… " Hawks shrugs, smiling still. "Well, they just are."

Slowly, Suzume looks up at him then. "What if it hurts really, really bad?"

"Do you have any scars?"

Suzume reflects on that for a moment. "A little one – on my thumb, where I cut myself with a knife on accident."

"Brutal." His laughter is so effortless and confident, and his shoulders shake pleasantly with it. "Does it still hurt?"

"Well…" Rubbing her scarred thumb against her forefinger, Suzume finds she feels nothing. "No."

"But you can see it, right?" He presses.

She looks down at it, at the little line set in her skin. "Yeah."

"So, it's like that," he says, and he says that easy, too. "It's there. You know it is – you remember where it came from. It used to hurt – maybe you even needed stitches! Eventually, though, it just is. You learn from it, you deal with it, but that's all it has to be. Something you deal with; something that becomes easier, over time. Like having to grow up too fast – maybe you miss it at first. But eventually, you know, that's just how it is. And you feel okay with it."

"That sounds…" Suzume pauses, debating on her choice of words. "Too easy."

"Everything is easy once you know how to do it."

This must be the way it is with boys her brother's age, Suzume thinks. All blustery conviction, all razor-sharp wit, always with a quick answer for everything. She doesn't understand what it's like to be so free of self-doubt. Hawks seems fearless, just like her brother, so completely and effortlessly secure.

It isn't that she can't follow his logic. No, his logic seems sound, and that's the absolute worst of it. Suzume can't find a single flaw in it.

"But what if I'm just… bad at it?" She whispers. "What if I can't make it work, and it's really hard, and I'm always really bad at it, and it hurts forever?"

Hawks has such fluffy eyebrows. They remind her of caterpillars, and she watches the confident arch of them soften. He reaches out a hand for her, but hesitates. Instead, he leans forward, crossing his arms over his knees as he regards her. She finds she's thankful he doesn't touch her."You're a kid still. It'll be easier when you grow up. And the wound you've got now – well, it's bigger than anything a little knife could do. It'll probably hurt a whole hell of a lot for a long while. But over time – over time, it'll get easier. All things scar eventually."

Her brother had said something similar. It will get better. It will be easier. You'll get older. Things will change.

"I wanna be older soon," she whispers, knowing she cannot be that. All of those things are so far away. "I wanna be better at it now. It hurts a lot right now."

Suzume does not know how to describe the way he looks at her other than maybe 'gentle'. "Do you wanna sleep now?"

So Hawks is astute like her older brother is, too. Suzume nods, relieved, and she watches him press the little button by her bed that summons the nurse.

"Tomorrow," he tells her, suddenly, "There will be people who will come to ask you questions. Guys in suits, probably real serious dudes. They're gonna wanna know about what happened to your dad, and how you feel about him."

Staring at Hawks, Suzume nods slowly. The official government people her brother had told her about, and all their questions. She's surprised it's taken them this long.

"The things they ask you might hurt, but it'll go faster if you work with them, even if they say stuff that makes you upset." Rubbing his chin a little absently, Hawks casts his eyes to the ceiling for a moment. "Think of it like ripping off a bandaid. It's better if you don't pick at it slowly. Just rip the whole thing straight off."

This sounds like more sage advice. Suzume nods some more.

"Also," he continues, and his eyes find hers again. "If you want – if you're feeling anxious – you can ask them to let me sit in on the questioning with you. At least I'm someone you know." Sitting back up, he holds his hands out to her, palms up. "Maybe that'll help."

"But…" Suzume trails off, internally debating with herself. Is it rude to point this out? "But I don't know you."

While like her brother in some ways, Hawks is completely different in others. He's so expressive, for one. His hand finds his chest and he regards her with an exaggeratedly wounded expression, his brows lofting up towards the backwards sweep of his blonde hair. "We flew for like a million kilometers together, chickadee." Gone thick with drama, his voice drops then, like a man from a fantasy game revealing some important piece of lore. "Those are bonds forged in the sky, madam. I'll not have you disrespect their sanctity."

Suzume is tired, and she does not want to smile. She tries very hard not to, digging her teeth into the inside of her lower lip. The sharp sting of pain does nothing against her losing battle, though; she can feel the corners of her mouth beginning to quirk upwards.

And if the smile that spreads across Hawks' face is any indication, it's something he clearly notices, too.

She points at him, brows drawn, mouth wavering between a frown and an unwitting grin that hurts somewhere deep in her chest. "Don't!" She means it as much for herself as she does for him.

In this way, of course, he is exactly like her brother, and he does exactly what she demands he not do. His head falls back, and he laughs, and laughs, and laughs. The sound is rich and warm and boisterous, and it fills up the whole room, and his wings fan out behind him, a fluttering and pleased whisper of red feathers.

Ducking her own head, Suzume covers her mouth with her stuffed cat toy right as a young nurse walks in.

"Well, well," she says, her hands on her hips, and Suzume recognizes her as one of the ones from this morning. A pretty lady in bright scrubs, she was the nurse who'd helped Suzume navigate her way into the bathroom with her IV. "I thought you said you weren't going to be causing a ruckus!"

The nurse fixes Hawks with a look that is equal parts serious and playful, hands fastened securely to her hips.

"Hey," says Hawks, with a shrug and a stolen wink in Suzume's direction. "Ain't laughter supposed to be the best medicine?"

"You're not the one feeling under the weather, are you?" The nurse laughs, and her laughter is warm, too, and Suzume feels herself relax a little bit, settling back down into her pillow. "Try not to OD on your own sense of humor, I've got a busy enough shift as it is!"

Turning from Hawks, the nurse's expression softens as she regards Suzume. "You need something, kiddo?"

Smoothing her hands over her plush cat, Suzume nods. "I'm kinda tired. D'you think I could… maybe have something to help me sleep again?"

The nurse jerks her thumb over her shoulder in Hawks' direction, grinning. "Is it him? 'cause I can have security rough him up, ruffle up a few feathers if he's being a noisy jerk."

"Hey!" Hawks' voice sags under the weight of his pretend-offense, but his smile is cheesy. "I'm always a gentleman!"

"No," the nurse draws out the word, shaking her head and clicking her tongue against her teeth in a tsk-tsk-tsk. "I can tell. You're trouble. Now go on, get! I've got drugs to administer!"

And at her command, Hawks is up on his feet, shooting one more wink at Suzume. He mouths the words ask for me tomorrow very exaggeratedly, and then he's out the door with a similarly exaggerated wave, his wings rustling behind him.

"Goodness," the nurse chuckles, and begins to hook up something to Suzume's IV. "He's certainly a damn character!"

"How long…" Suzume thinks about Hawks sitting next to her bed, phone in hand. "How long was he here for?"

The nurse looks down at her watch. Suzume smiles faintly when she notices the cats all over the watch face. "Maybe the last hour or so? I think he said he got off of work – said he was worried about you. Raised a bit of a stink to be allowed in here, actually." The nurse looks up at Suzume, and Suzume thinks the nurse's cheeks look a little pink. "He's a lot, but he's clearly got a good heart."

"You think so?"

The nurse begins to depress a plunger on a syringe into Suzume's IV, very slowly. "I think so. He puts on a big show, but when he was asking after you, the boy was fretting like a mother hen. It's a lot to risk, getting invested like that in the people you save as a hero, especially so when you have to save so many people. He's young, though – they're usually less cynical."

Suzume nods. She thinks she understands, but she is also very tired. She feels her eyes closing.

She wonders if her brother frets like a mother hen when she doesn't see him. She wonders if he'd be here if he could be, sitting on a stool next to her bed, watching her, waiting for her to get up.

The cat plush is a gentle weight on her chest, moving up and down with her slowing breaths. She wishes she could call him now. She wishes she could ask him.

"Get some rest, kiddo."

And then Suzume falls away into a blessedly dreamless sleep.

AN: God, this chapter. This chapter was like the way the last day of school feels, right before you get let out for summer. Like, it needs to be written because it establishes some important things (I'm a broken record, honk honk), but next chapter starts all the little vignettes I'm gonna write of Dabi and Suzu growing up together, and like... god, I'm so excited for that. Like, there will be some fluffy stuff, and it's gonna be cute, but also Dabi starts really taking a nosedive into Worst and Most Perverse Older Brother Ever, and like, man, I have been wanting to write that for months now. Just had to keep telling myself it was just THIS chapter standing between me and THAT. TORTURE.

Also: hi Hawks! 👋