Chapter 1: Liaison
The file on Hawks was thinner than it should have been, and that was the first thing that told you he was dangerous.
A hero at his level generated paper the way a fire generated smoke. Endeavor's file filled two cabinets. All Might's had needed its own room. The No. 2 Hero, the fastest man in Japan, a pro who had broken into the top ten at eighteen and never once dropped out of it, had a folder you could close with one hand. Birth name Keigo Takami. Quirk registered as Fierce Wings. Agency in Fukuoka. Debut, rankings, commendations. And then, on the last page, three grainy surveillance photographs taken outside a bar in Kamino that should not have still been standing, showing a man with red wings sharing a drink with a man held together by staples.
"We want to know who he really answers to," Superintendent Mori said, closing the folder with her long, dry fingers. "The Commission says he's theirs. The Commission says many things. You'll go in as our liaison for the joint task force. You'll watch. You'll listen." She looked at you over her rimless glasses. "You'll touch."
That was the joke in the unit. You'd heard it so many times it had stopped landing. Your quirk was called Echo, and it did one thing: if you put your bare hand on an object, you heard the last words spoken near it. A minute, maybe two, if the object had been close to the speaker and the room was quiet. You'd heard confessions in teacups and alibis falling apart in door handles. You'd once solved a murder from a pair of reading glasses.
Hawks shed feathers the way other people shed hair. They were everywhere he went. It was, Mori said, an unusually good match.
You were on the Shinkansen to Hakata by noon.
The Hawks Agency occupied the top three floors of a glass tower near the river, and it was the least secure building you had ever walked into. The receptionist waved you through. The sidekicks, a cheerful crew who all seemed to be eating something, waved you through. Nobody asked for your badge. A man in a delivery jacket walked past you carrying a bag that smelled powerfully of fried chicken and was also waved through, and you followed him up a flight of open stairs into a corner office that had no ceiling.
It did have a ceiling, technically. It was just a long way up. The office had been built as a double-height atrium, all glass on two sides, with a steel beam running across the top of it like a perch. On the beam, upside down, hanging by his knees with his wings folded around him like a red cloak, was the No. 2 Hero.
"Chicken's here!" called the delivery man.
"You're a lifesaver, Kenta." A single crimson feather detached from the wing, floated down, hooked the bag out of the delivery man's hand, and carried it back up to the ceiling. Hawks took a drumstick out without unfolding and bit into it. Then he tipped his head, still upside down, and looked at you through the tinted yellow lenses of his visor.
"And you must be my cop," he said.
"Police liaison."
"Mm. Liaison. Fancy." He swung, flipped, and dropped twenty feet to the floor, landing so lightly the papers on his desk didn't stir. His wings opened behind him as he straightened, a full, deliberate spread, crimson feathers rustling, and you had the sense he did it on purpose, the way a bird puffs up to see if you'll flinch. You didn't flinch. He looked pleased about that. "Hawks. Pleasure. Want some chicken?"
"I'm fine."
"You sure? It's really good chicken." He held the bag out. When you shook your head, he shrugged and took another piece. "Your loss. So. Joint task force. What's the police want with little old me?"
"Coordination," you said, which was the word on your paperwork. "Information sharing. Villain activity in Kyushu's been up since the League went quiet. The Agency thinks it would be useful to have someone embedded with the most active hero in the region."
"Huh. That's nice of them." He chewed. He was watching you. Behind the yellow lenses his eyes were very sharp and very gold. "Coffee?"
"Black, thanks."
He made a small tutting noise, and something brushed the back of your hand. You looked down. A feather was resting lightly against your wrist, right over your pulse, so light you'd barely felt it land.
"Funny," said Hawks. "Your heart rate went up a little bit right then. Like you were lying." He tilted his head. "You don't actually drink it black, do you?"
You looked at the feather. You looked at him.
"Milk and two sugars," you said.
"See? We're getting to know each other already." The feather lifted off your wrist and drifted back to his wing. He grinned, crooked and quick and entirely too charming, and called over his shoulder, "Kenta! Liaison wants a milky sweet one!"
You spent the first day watching him work, and you realized by lunchtime that you'd never actually seen a hero work before. Not like this.
He didn't patrol so much as exist over Fukuoka. He'd be at his desk signing papers and then he'd lift his head like he'd heard something, and he'd be gone, the glass doors to the balcony banging open and a gust of wind tumbling your paperwork. Ten minutes later he'd be back, a bit windblown, saying something like, "Bag snatcher in Tenjin," or, "Cat. Up a pole. Don't ask." His feathers came and went all day, peeling off his wings and sailing out over the city in twos and threes and coming back with his coffee, his phone, a pen he'd left on the other side of the room.
"They're like extra fingers," he told you when you asked, flopping into his chair with his boots up on the desk. "Extra ears, kind of. I can feel vibrations through them. Footsteps. Voices. Heartbeats." He waggled his eyebrows at you. "Very handy for catching liars."
"Is that what you're doing? Catching me?"
"Oh, I caught you hours ago." He said it lightly, cheerfully, in exactly the tone he'd used about the cat. "I'm just deciding what to do with you."
You didn't answer that. You smiled politely and went back to your laptop, and inside your chest your heart did exactly what he'd said it would.
At four o'clock a call came in, a gas explosion at a factory in the port, and he was on his feet before the dispatcher finished the sentence. He paused at the balcony door. He looked back at you.
"Coming?"
"I'm a liaison. I don't..."
"You're a liaison," he agreed, and crossed the room in three strides and picked you up.
You had time to say his name, sharply, and then the glass doors burst open and the floor fell away.
The wind took the breath out of you. You grabbed for him without thinking and got a fistful of fur collar and the hard muscle of his shoulder under it. His arms locked around your back and the backs of your knees, steady, utterly unbothered. The city wheeled away underneath, all river and rooftops and the gray glint of the bay, and the sound of his wings was enormous, a great rhythmic thunder right behind your ear.
"You alright?" he shouted over the wind.
"You could have asked!"
"You'd have said no!"
"Yes! That's the point of asking!"
He laughed, loud and genuinely delighted, and banked so hard your stomach dropped.
At the factory, he set you down on a roof well clear of the smoke and was gone again before you'd found your balance. You watched him from up there. You watched a hundred feathers peel off his wings and scatter into the burning building, and you watched them come back out, one after another, carrying people. Workers. A woman in a hard hat. A security guard. They floated out of the smoke on clouds of red, coughing and dazed, and were set down gently on the grass across the road as if they weighed nothing. He'd cleared the building before the first fire engine arrived.
When he landed beside you on the roof again, he had soot on his cheek and a scorched hole in his jacket, and his wings looked thinner, ragged where so many feathers had gone. He was breathing hard. He didn't say anything clever. He just stood next to you and watched the firefighters go in, his jaw tight.
"Everybody out?" you asked quietly.
"Everybody out." He let out a long breath. Then he looked down at you, and the grin came back, but slower this time. "Impressed?"
"Not even slightly."
"Your heart says otherwise."
"My heart's an idiot," you said, and he laughed again, softer.
That evening, while he was on the balcony arguing with someone on the phone, you knelt by his desk and slid a listening device the size of a grain of rice into the seam of his chair. It took two seconds. You'd done it a hundred times.
At eight, he flew you home. You told him he didn't have to. He did anyway. He set you down on the walkway outside your rented apartment in Hakata as neatly as if he'd done it a thousand times, and stood there with his hands in his jacket pockets and his wings tucked in.
"Good first day?" he asked.
"Educational."
"Same." He took one hand out of his pocket and held it out, palm up, and you looked down and saw a tiny black device the size of a grain of rice sitting in the center of it.
"You dropped this," said Hawks.
You didn't move. Somewhere below you, a car went by. He waited, perfectly at ease, gold eyes glinting behind the visor, his mouth curved in a smirk you wanted very badly either to slap or to kiss, and couldn't tell which.
You took the bug off his palm.
"Want to know who I work for?" he said. "Dinner. Tomorrow. My treat. I'll even tell you some true things, if you ask nicely." He stepped back, and his wings opened, and the wind of it lifted the hair off your face. "Night, liaison."
He was gone before you could answer.
You went inside and leaned on your door in the dark for a long moment. Then you went to hang up your jacket and found a single crimson feather caught in the fur at the collar, where his face had been pressed when he carried you home.
You shouldn't have. You knew you shouldn't have.
You pulled off your glove and touched it.
His voice came into your head, low and clear and stripped of every ounce of charm, the way he must have sounded when he thought no one was listening.
"...no, she's police. Sharp, too. I like her." A pause. A breath. "Tell Dabi Thursday. Same place. And tell him if he sets anything on fire again, I'm not covering for him."