little canary , we’ve gotten you everything you could ever need ! entrapped in a wire cage of gilded gold , faux tarnish at focal points in the gleaming surface from HANDS , MOUTHS , TEETH. we’ve given you this cage and asked you to lie in it , to sleep and drink and feed , silver platters and platinum knives and forks that dance in the gleam of fluorescent lights hard like hospital rooms. AND NOW WE REACH OUT , wary of recoil , creating a bird of prey out of an innocent songbird — but who is at fault ? for is this not a society that raises young into beasts , expectations out of reach : setting standards that can never be achieved , forcing children to strive for a greatness when they will ALWAYS , ALWAYS , ALWAYS be inadequate ?
his hands fixate themselves at hawks’s hips , and this is where they belong. this is where the number two hero belongs. he belongs under the thumb of something greater , something all-encompassing and earth-shattering , a change of times and a twist in society for the greater. THIS IS HEROISM. heroism is way tiers catch hawks’s bottom lip like magnetism , tugging ‘til he tastes the surface layer of gold give in under the force and expose the copper beneath. heroism is how he frees hawks — because they’re the same. they’re the same , and he knows it , and he feels it THEY BOTH DO they can feel it feel it feel it in the way the atmosphere crackles , liminal spaces between pale furnace fingertips devouring the moisture in the air and spitting it back out in the way he nips along jawline and breathes against the patch of flesh just beneath the hero’s earlobe , mouthing something ( praise , but it’s sneered , revolted , something cold and hateful and mourning all the warmth that was once in his heart ) at the soft and vulnerable flesh that resides there.
dabi does not know kind words. every phrase he breathes is something bitter , caustic , something brimming with a hatred towards all that has befallen him. he is hopelessness where hawks is hope itself , and he folds himself into that hope , taints it , leaves dark scuff marks along the vibrant metal that coats the surface. HE WILL MAKE SOMETHING SINISTER OF PERFECTION. he will be the impurities in the titanium backbone of hero society , an acid that devours the bone from the nerves within and FEASTS FEASTS FEASTS and his gluttonous appetite will never be satisfied and damn it , hawks will come with him , hawks will be ruined and ruinous , a fiendish thing of his own making , the monster of frankenstein with his quick wit and his need to belong.
“ is this what you wanted ? ” his sneer could cut like a knife , sinking through flesh as if the only spine he aims to mar is the one that calloused fingertips move to dig into each and every vulnerable divot of. there is a strength in his frame that few know of , something brutal and boiling with his animosity ; he could snap the bone , could burn it from the inside out , find himself high on the wretched and putrid stench of flesh charring and blood boiling under his grasp. it’s so easy to make the other ARCH into his touch , a fallen angel eager to prove his loyalty to a higher cause , and he almost LAUGHS at the image of it , letting breath fan along the vulnerable expanse of hawks’s throat , watching the way goose - flesh rises and falls under the uneven and hasty breaths that dabi withdraws and expels. for every action , an equal and opposite reaction , this further proven by the way he bites and flesh resists , sinks his teeth now into the point of hawks’s pulse , threatens to snatch away his life force with the quick snap of a jaw , and his skin fights back — it resists his force , the spike in heart rate felt strong as it pounds against his own skin. “ i’ve never met a more despicable hero. ”
of all the words to escape him , the mockery is the sharpest , manifesting in razor wire held to that resisting skin there and roved along flesh like a twisted tool of foreplay to invoke an addictive rush of adrenaline. “ you’re disgusting. traitorous. unreliable. unloyal. ” and he knows. HE KNOWS. because he is too , he’s the same evil thing , rotten to the core , eviscerated from the inside out by the existence of selfishness and greed rooted so deeply in the society of heroism they’re accustomed to. HE KNOWS ! because hawks and he are the same , faces on either side of a tin coin , a slight alter in paths leading one rocketing to the top and one CRASHING , BURNING to the bottom. we look at this and we think , WHO IS ICARUS NOW ? a man who has burned himself out , crushed every last hope within himself and tossed it aside for the ingrained desire for vengeance and visceral DESTRUCTION of the man who made him this way.
SAY , AM I ICARUS , OR AM I THE SUN ?
“ and yet , you’re so fucking ... ” and he laughs. a genuine laughter but it’s grotesque in the way charred children’s dolls are , something damaged with smoke , worn from screams , tethering off at the ends ‘til all that remains between them is a faint and dulling ember of that broken , devastating sound. a calm before the storm. ( or maybe the storm’s already passed. ) “ you’re so fucking perfect. ” / @perniciter
