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Two years almost entirely on the run.
Five years in the village they now call their home.
And then eight of the last months filled with caring for the newest addition to their household.
Pro Hero: Hawks had very few expectations for how his future would turn out. Having a child––a baby––with the now ex-villain that he had been charged to work with in order to infiltrate the ranks that then seeded in the dark shadows of Japan’s unground corners?
Not at all within the realm of possibilities Keigo could have conjured.
Even taking on his former name Keigo had not been something 23-year old him recognized as a possibility, especially in the midst of a war between villains and heroes.
The whole “running away from a war-torn Japan” had taken convincing on both their parts. Leaving their lives––the goals––that had been years in the making for both of them hadn’t just been some small choice. Not when Keigo had quite literally felt as if the entire weight of Japan’s future, the existence of all the innocent civilians, was on his shoulders like Atlas.
Keigo often remembers the night the thought was delivered into existence: when he turned over in the bed he occupied with Touya–then, still Dabi–and said the words that had plagued the crevices of his mind for weeks.
Run away with me.
The building of the question as Keigo watched Dabi light a cigarette between his fingers, Quirk flickering to light with a practiced ease: Why don’t we run away?
“Did you put something in your drink at dinner?” Dabi had asked, but there was a flicker––like to the small flame still lit on his finger––of something akin to hope. “You would leave Japan in a mess–and I still have things to do, if you remember, and I intend on finishing them.”
“And I’ll help you. We’ll wrap up things here––but then, run away with me?”
Dabi’s silence had been pensive, his lips pursed in thought. “You’re serious about this.”
“I’m serious about everything with you.”
There were more than a few loose strings they had to tie up before practically fucking off into a misty fog, out of sight from the world. Within several weeks after Keigo had initially posed the thought of running away, they were gone. They had made the connections they needed to. Their largest issue at the time had been trying to conceal their identities, but Touya had adept ease in this as he had hid his own noteworthy identity for the previous ten years. With Keigo’s own training from the HPSC going hand-in-hand with Touya’s underground connections with smugglers and dealers, keeping under the radar and setting the date to get out of the country almost seemed simple.
Before leaving, one of the last things they did was reach out to Touya’s family.
It had been one of his only desires, even if the intent then had merely been to inform Rei and his siblings that he was alive –– that he was alive but leaving ––
And like fog over water, as the sunrises and sheds through the obscurities: they faded.
For two years they jumped from location to location before landing themselves in a quiet village on the coast. They thought they were going to be there for a couple of months, but somehow a couple of months turned like the hand of a clock into several years, and before they knew it, they also had their daughter in their arms.
Himura Yua.
In the process of leaving Japan behind, and through all the moving they had done, they had gone through more than a few fake IDs: but in their last one, the ones they had gotten married to, Touya had suggested they take his mothers last name.
Himura.
And they gave their daughter the same last name.
“Yua,” Keigo whispers now to his daughter as he stretches back against the couch occupying the quaint two-bedroom home they inhabited. His wings are spread underneath him, one expanded up and around him and Yua, the other is flopped over the bottom of the couch, to the ground, the primaries feathers just grazing the coffee table in the middle of the room.
Yua babbles as he holds her up. Her angel-soft, angel-white, angelic wings are tiny against her back––flapping, not yet sure how to maneuver the additional limbs attached. She sits on his torso blinking with wide and curious, Touya-replicated blue eyes back at him––not sleepy in the least. “What’s your Papa going to do when he gets back and you haven’t taken a nap, huh?”
Keigo has been trying for–he glances at the clock in the kitchen–and, yep. Two hours. He’s been trying for two hours to get her to take a nap. They had gotten into a nice routine of her taking a nap right after noon, but today is just one of those days where she simply doesn’t want to. She’s much too preoccupied with reaching her baby-soft fingers to his face and holding onto his nose.
While Keigo had the day off from his work as a paramedic in town, Touya was off at the pottery studio that had first started a hobby of sorts before the owner, an older woman named Suzuki, took him on as her employee. Considering the size of the village, both of their jobs could keep them occupied without having to overexert themselves, or fear that they would miss out on too much of Yua’s new life.
In the eight months since Yua’s birth, she had been easier to put to sleep than Touya or Keigo had expected––but still, there were times when she was fighting sleep like it was harder to rest than any of the battles Keigo and Touya had gone through. Like it was her life’s purpose and mission to not miss out on a single thing either of her dads were doing.
“You were like that,” Rei had expressed once over the phone.“You and Natsuo both were never the sleeping babies, but never fussy either. You both didn’t want to miss out on anything.”
There are only a few things in the world that work to put their daughter into a quick slumber, as they unfortunately realized that more days than most Yua was the type of baby who preferred to gaze upon the world, blue eyes bright and taking in every moment with wonder and curiosity.
Usually, when their daughter couldn’t sleep, Touya would rock her as he walked the length of the hall in their home. Sometimes, he would pause, and Keigo would join him, and they would sway together: Keigo’s hands at Touya’s waist with Yua peacefully tucked to his side, her head of wild blonde locks sleepily slumped against his chest. Holding her between them, with Touya humming a lullaby he remembered Rei singing to him as a child, Yua would drift into a serene slumber.
Rei had visited them for a short while after Yua was born. They had kept in contact with Rei and Touya’s siblings as much as they could without exposing their identity, but most of their contact with her had been phone calls and the occasional video calls. With Yua though, she was on a flight and in their home, helping both with Touya’s recovery to helping and leading Touya and Keigo in caring for their baby. Whether it be rocking Yua, singing to her, changing her diapers, or being there in the middle of the night to ease Yua back to sleep: Rei was there to help.
The lullaby she sang to Touya as a child was the same she sang to Yua while Touya and Keigo watched in the evenings as they made dinner.
It’s the same lullaby Keigo has tried to sing today to coax Yua into her nap.
But it appears all of the usual tricks he has up his sleeve aren’t working. While Touya has always had this sort of magic touch when it came to soothing Yua––even if it was just Touya being in the same room––Touya isn’t currently here. He’s at work and Keigo has been reduced to trying everything in the box.
The journey for “Getting Yua to Sleep” had started first with Keigo sitting outside on their small balcony, facing the seaside, with the breeze fluttering at his cheeks and over Yua’s strands of hair brushing at his chin––but she cried.
She cried and cried. Bawled even as Keigo treaded up and down the short hall of their house, bouncing with Yua. He had hoped the movement would settle her, like it often did.
He tried a bottle of formula. Tried taking a couple of his feathers to halo around her head like a mobile––and that had worked for… a short while.
(Meaning: it worked for a solid five minutes before Yua’s blue gaze stopped circling with the feathers, and trained back on him like he was the enemy in the equation.)
He hummed and sang the same lullaby Touya would sing.
With absolutely zero luck.
When she had been born, she had been overtly fascinated with Keigo’s feathers, as well as the miniature plumages folded closely against her tiny back––and the same fact still rang true. Keigo would often detach the same feathers he used as a temporary mobile, for her to play with. To chew on, to wring the barbs between her tiny but strong fingers. Sometimes he could brush a covert across her nose, over her forehead, soothingly back and forth like a person might with their cat, furtively lulling her blonde eyelashes to a close
He tries the same now, once more.
And it works for a time–twenty minutes in total–and he’s up from the couch, standing carefully with her to take her to her crib before her wails begin again.
“My sweet Yua,” Keigo says, pressing his lips against her forehead, kissing at her cheeks to will the thick tears away. “Papa won’t be back for another few hours,” he whispers, but her resounding ‘waaah’ overpowers whatever else he was going to try to say.
He makes a quick decision.
The pottery studio is practically up the street, a short walk from their cottage-like home––and maybe on the walk over, Yua would fall asleep. And if not, Keigo knows that Touya will at least be happy to see him and their daughter, and then maybe Touya would be able to get her to rest.
* * *
The walk to the shop had been relatively quiet after Keigo had worked the baby wrap around his body, wiggling his wings through the soft stretchy fabric. Years earlier Keigo had been incredibly vigilant and careful of wearing the entire extent of his wings in public, but for a majority of the most recent years, the notoriety of his visage, especially in another country, had diminished. It left him able to wear the bulk of his wings at his back instead of packing his feathers tightly into a backpack, or leaving them shed at wherever they might have been dwelling for the time. For their time in this incredibly minisculely sized village, Keigo had been able to stretch his wings out without a single question from neighbors or other townsfolk.
Eventually he was able to get Yua into the baby wrap too, nestled comfortably against his chest. Though Yua didn’t cry on their walk from the path of the house all the way to the studio, she did continue to gaze, wide awake, at the neighbors they passed, and the leaves of trees blowing hushedly overhead.
A bell tingles as Keigo opens the door of the familiar pottery studio. A wash of a breeze touches his cheeks and brushes at his cheeks as he enters. He is immediately met with the scent of wet clay and the sight of the walls lined with ash colored shelves and stacked with all sorts of vases, mugs, plates of varying sizes. All of which Touya had helped to create alongside the studio’s owner, Suzuki.
The lighting is dim, hanging lamps lined through the narrow entrance to the far back of the shop, where the studio door is wide open.
Yua babbles at him, and Keigo shifts her in her wrap, effectively pulling her closer up his chest so he can nose at her hair. “Yeah, we’re here to say hi to Papa,” he says. She giggles in return––like she’s won a prize––and he shakes his head at the thought that she is certainly getting Touya’s genes in that manner.
An older voice, crackling with kindness, pulls his attention from gazing at Yua, and the space around them, “Now, who is this that’s coming to visit?”
He turns to be faced with the very woman who owns the pottery shop and studio–Suzuki. Suzuki is an older woman who had often reminded Touya and Keigo of Rei, but twenty years into the future. The crow’s feet framing the dull brown of her eyes are the first detail that gives away her age, besides the graying spots in the longer strands of her hair pulled into a ponytail over her shoulders. She hunches more than she had six years previously, when Touya and Keigo had first begun trying to settle into the small village–first felt at home in comparison to the previous towns and villages they had escaped to and floated through like specters. Forced into a life of living like ghosts, in order to be able to stay off the radar of the police and heroes.
Suzuki’s eyes squint as she smiles brightly, stretching her arms out to Yua. “Sweet little Yua-chan–my favorite baby to exist,” she says as Keigo passes Yua over to her without a fuss.
“Good afternoon, Suzuki-san,” Keigo greets with an easy grin. Yua blinks, her own giggling smile shining as she spots the familiar form of Suzuki. Honestly, without Suzuki, Rei, and some of Keigo’s coworkers, taking care of a newborn baby would not have been as easy as it felt having the help that they did. “You may not want to tell your grandchildren that.”
“Now, now,” Suzuki hums, patting Yua’s back with her wispy hand. “My grandbabies aren’t the babies they were anymore.”
Keigo places his hands into the pockets of his joggers, tilting his head to the side.
“And so by that logic,” Suzuki says, “Yua is my favorite baby. But why are you here, dear? Yua keeping you awake?”
“Something like that. Touya’s always been better about getting her to fall asleep––and I thought it would be good to see you, of course,” Keigo responds, rolling his head on his shoulder. His neck pops with the movement.
“Sure, sure,” Suzuki says in that tone that speaks I Don’t Believe You.
“It’s true!” Keigo grins, but quickly jumps to ask, “Is Touya in the back?”
“Touya-kun!” Suzuki calls out to the back of the shop––to the two doors that are swung open, where the pottery studio is tucked behind. The elusive spot where they do all the work they sell within the shop: designing, molding the pottery on the wheel, firing, glazing. The whole shebang happens there, and Keigo has been there more than a few times even just to visit, but occasionally Touya had brought him into the studio to try to show him how to create pottery.
Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on who asks, Keigo wasn’t quite fit to be the one in the chair throwing the clumps of clay onto the wheel and making something out of nothing. He would much rather watch from the next chair over as Touya, with his long, slender fingers, skillfully shaped what was once a wet lump of sculptable clay into a bowl or vase for firing. Seeing the concentration in Touya’s eyes––the same dedication and calculative looks that he once used to review reports for the Paranormal Liberation Front, dissecting worthy recruits from those that would drag them behind––seeing that look was more than worth it, especially when it translated from fingers dipping into pots into fingers trailing over Keigo’s skin with an equal fervor.
From the depths of the studio, Touya’s responding grunt to Suzuki causes Keigo to snort.
“There are a couple of special guests here to see you,” Suzuki answers. “Both incredibly cute if you were to ask me.”
“Tell them I’m busy,” Touya retorts in his low tone that keeps Keigo’s cheeks hurting from his growing smile. Touya says this, but still Keigo hears the scraping of a chair over the floor, and Touya's thick-booted steps over the ground.
“Always so dramatic,” Suzuki hums.
“You’re telling me,” Keigo mumbles jokingly.
“Oh?” Touya’s comforting rumble draws him from his conversation with Suzuki. As he looks over his shoulder, he’s thrown for a moment at the beauty that is Touya: always so beautiful, even when ‘Dabi’ was the only name he wished to be called, even with the purpling, gruesome scars ravaging over half of his body, Keigo had been drawn to him nonetheless. Though now the black dyed locks had been long replaced with their natural white, and where the purple scars had been remains pale, healed skin, though still strigosed and rigged. Over the years, much of the skin had turned like tegument covering with tattooed ink: up his arms, crawling up his neck, around the thinner scars of his pectorals, and an assemblage of patterned images over part of his legs as well.
Pro Hero: Hawks’ expectations for the future had been completely thrown out the window when Dabi appeared in his life, and he wouldn’t give it back for anything else in the world. Touya’s small smile, his fond but surprised gaze aimed at him and Yua, are things the universe would have to fight him for if it ever tried to take them back.
There are flecks of dried clay on his face, and the tips of his fingers are similarly darkened by pale, dried glaze, even as he wipes his hands across the apron situated over his torso, fastened around his back. The apron is black, but there’s a little design on the front that says Keep Calm and Fire It, and it was bought by Keigo just a few months after Touya had begun working with Suzuki in the studio. Then, Touya hadn’t been one of the only workers, he had just been another person wanting to learn and see how to make something beautiful from an indistinguishable lump of clay. Then, Touya had desired to do something still with his hands that wasn’t going to cause destruction: something that wouldn’t cause his healing scars to practically molt and revert to their original state.
The delight in Touya’s face was easy to see when he arrived back at their little home: an emotion akin to relief in his gaze as he would wrap his arms around Keigo, dragging him in for a hug around his back. He would settle between the form of Keigo’s wings with his nose nestling at the hair’s of Keigo’s neck where––at that point in just the two and a half years they had completely disappeared as Hawks and Dabi––Keigo’s hair had grown longer than the length he had trimmed it to in hopes to better blend in with crowds.
Now Keigo keeps his hair long enough to pull into a short bun that Yua likes to tug on as she falls asleep on his chest––hair that Touya cards his hands through when they fall asleep in bed together, Yua tucked away in her crib in her own bedroom.
“Looks like I do have a couple of special guests,” Touya’s habitual tone teases and lulls Keigo back from his thoughts. The man steps the short distance across the room as he rolls the sleeves of his shirt further to his elbows, bringing the ink designed over his arms to the light of day. All familiar markings that Keigo has traced with his eyes and fingers more times than he can count.
“Wonder what I could have done to have the celebrities of the town grace me with their presence?” Touya asks just as he leans forward and presses a soft kiss to Keigo’s cheek––Touya smells just like the rest of the studio, of clay and pottery, with an underlying scent of smoke and mahogany.
Keigo shakes his head but returns Touya’s kiss with one of his own––chaste against Touya’s chapped lips. “‘Celebrities of the town,’” Keigo jokes, “you mean Yua. She’s the one everyone wants to see around here. Did you hear Suzuki? She called Yua her ‘favorite baby.’ Even over her own grandchildren.”
Suzuki’s laugh rattles in her chest, and Touya just grins.
“How’s that feel, birdie?” Touya says. The nickname is an accustomed word in Touya’s vocabulary, once comforting to Keigo’s ears. “You’ve turned from the world’s golden boy, reduced to just this one’s chauffeur overnight.”
“Overnight?” Keigo scoffs and shakes his head. “This has been months in the making, and it’s her own fault she’s so damn cute. Plus, I’m fairly sure the ‘golden boy for the world’ shtick dropped when the golden boy disappeared from the world you’re talking about.”
Suzuki’s soft laugh has them both looking at her. “Yua has the genes of you two to thank. Since the day she was born the entire village has been captivated with her. And who wouldn’t be?” Suzuki’s voice is softer as she looks back at Yua who’s small wings flap at her back––eggshell white feathers, no larger than the face of Keigo’s own hands at the moment.
“Here,” Suzuki says, gesturing with her chin to Touya, “she’s getting far too hefty for this old woman to stand around with, plus I think she may want her Oto-san.”
Touya easily takes their daughter into his arms, holding her on his hips––Yua giggles and grins up at him and a weight of warmth settles in Keigo’s stomach. The same weight that always exists when he sees his husband with their daughter. It’s been like that since Yua was born.
They had been nervous––for years they had been nervous about potentially bringing life into the world considering the hand of cards they had both been at a young age. Neither of their childhood’s had been ideal, or could have even been called a childhood when neither of them had been in a position to simply be children. Keigo had been taken at the ripe age of seven into the hands of the Commission, and at that point he was thrown into the forge and hammered into the perfect shape of the weapon Hawks. Keigo had been left behind in a dilapidated home, and he had gratefully taken on the name Hawks in hopes of being a hero––in hopes of helping. It was all he had wanted to do–strived for after the glimpse of Endeavor he had been given from throwing his father into prison. To the plush he held onto for years.
He had hoped he would be helping.
Touya, in the shadow of Endeavor, had been dealt a crumbling home that had been on fire from the brush it had been built upon. Striving. Always striving and desperate for his father to be there, for his father to be exactly that: his father, for even a minute, over the hero.
So the father figures of their lives hadn’t been quite up to par––all of the parental figures in their lives had been that way: from a mom who seemed to be floating in a space of her own like the external eyeballs hovering at her head, to a mother who was on her way to being a shell of what she had been when Touya was first born.
Over and over, they discussed ever having kids, repetitively. Words digging into the ground until eventually the possibility of a child became an actuality.
Yua was born. And while some of the nerves still remained––even now Keigo worries that putting up dishes too loudly in the evenings will give Yua nightmares, and Touya fears for the possible day Yua’s wings erupt in flames and he may be helpless to do anything except watch––while these fears still remain, they are there to reassure one another that these things won’t happen.
Keigo has assured Touya that if there ever does come a day that Yua receives her father’s flames, that they aren’t going to be the children of their own parents––watching her suffer, watching her push her to the brink of near-death.
And Touya has similarly reassured Keigo that they won’t be his parents. Keigo knows there are plenty of things to be disgusted in the world over––had been brought into the world by some of them, and had been practically raised by others––but should Yua have any of that disgust in the world, they refuse to be the root of it.
“Was she not going to sleep?” Touya asks and Keigo hums in response.
Touya bounces his weight on his feet, steadily rocking back and forth like a human rocking chair and Keigo is entranced at the sight.
“You know how she is,” Keigo begins before he takes a seat for himself on a nearby stool––one they likely used when the shop had pottery classes every couple of weeks. He stretches his wings out as far as he can without knocking over any of the items lined up in the shop––he certainly wouldn’t want to incur Suzuki’s wrath if any items were destroyed and it was his fault. He may or may not have done that before, years earlier––but he would blame that instance on Touya until the end of their days, considering it had been Touya’s mouth on his neck in the quiet of night, long after Suzuki had left, leaving the two of them in the studio by themselves.
“I swear she was just tricking me to come and get you.”
“We have a little trickster, don’t we?” Touya asks as he begins to read a path around the entrance of the shop, while continuing to bounce Yua. Yua whose eyes are closed with what appears to be a pleased smile on her face with her head against Touya’s chest.
“We definitely do, and that’s entirely on you.”
Touya’s eyes glitter as he looks over his shoulder at Keigo, and Keigo’s feathers flutter at the heat in his gaze.
“My trickster ways seem to do the trick though,” he says, and Keigo beholds once more the sight of Touya holding their daughter––Yua, fast asleep in the man’s arms, her tiny hand fisting a sliver of Touya’s shirt. She clings to him as if in a mien of keeping him put.
As if Touya would ever leave her––as if Keigo could ever see himself or Touya leaving her willfully.
A soft laugh escapes Keigo’s throat as he stands and meets Touya in the middle of the room. “They always seem to work,” Keigo responds, gazing up at Touya.
In Touya’s eyes swim a hundred soft emotions that would take Keigo hours and days to list off, describe, but mostly they remind Keigo of the sea outside their home. When the surf is calm, and the tide is low, when the shells brought up during high tide are exposed as the sun rises over her rest below the horizon. There’s love: love in the same manner the golden rays of the sun touch on the still blues of the water.
There’s something that won’t fade.
“Worked with you didn’t they?” Touya chuckles, inclining forward in a gentle tilt until his lips are pressed to the top of Keigo’s head. His lips are warm, his breath is warmer, and the shape of Yua between them is the sun.
Keigo huffs, closing his eyes as he leans forward to Touya’s [levity]. Nearly eight years have brought them here since the start––since Hawks and Dabi––and they have plenty of years to look forward to. His wings encapsulate the three of them for the moment, creating a cocoon just for them.
“They did,” Keigo responds, peering down at Yua–he smiles and echoes once more, “They absolutely did.”
Pro Hero: Hawks had very few expectations for how his future would turn out. He expected to die on a battlefield.
Instead, Keigo gets to live, and he gets to live the unexpected future with Touya and their daughter.