Work Text:
“I can show you the world,” Hawks hums, the words trailing birdsong like that of a real princess, “shining, shimmering, splendid—”
“Touch me,” Rumi interrupts, “and I’ll heave you over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes and show you my version of flight.”
The birdsong turns into a squawk as Hawks drops his arms from where he’d been approaching Rumi and gives an offended huff. He bounces off the ground and lets his wings flutter him forward instead, giving Rumi a comically wide berth.
They’re both in their civvies, off duty for what is not the first time in recent months to assist with recovery from the injuries they sustained in the war against Shigaraki. Not that either of them want to be off-duty. Hawks doesn’t really even know how he’s supposed to spend time off. So he’s ended up visiting Rumi, hoping that his equally bored compatriot has some ideas.
(And if he remembers hearing, years ago, about a girl with rabbit ears, wearing a wrestling mask and a school uniform, and breaking up underground wrestling rings so effectively that the HPSC couldn’t not offer her a job in heroics—well, he hasn’t directly asked Rumi if they could go looking for trouble, so as far as he’s concerned, his hands are clean.)
While off duty he may be, Hawks scarcely lets his toes brush the ground as he flaps along in front of Rumi, facing her and floating backwards along their path. Being wingless for so long, he can hardly bear refraining from reminding himself that he can fly every few minutes.
“Your version of flight?” he scoffs. “Please, what you do barely qualifies as a controlled fall.”
“And yet,” Rumi hums, ears perking up as she immediately zeroes in on the discomfited set of his shoulders, “you’re too chicken to try.”
“I don’t think it’s physically possible for me to be too chicken,” Hawks deadpans.
“Bawk,” says Rumi, tucking her hands under her armpits, “bawk, bawk. Check me out, number one hero Hawks—”
“Okay.” He rushes forward, shoving her hands down as heat creeps up his cheeks. “Okay, okay, but ixnay with the ‘number one’ talk, I literally can’t with that.”
Rumi snorts, flipping his hold until she’s grabbed his wrists and forcibly leveraged him to the ground. “Out of everything I call you, the one thing you can’t take is the compliment. Whatever. We’re going flying, my way, and by the time we’re done, you’re gonna wish you had legs like mine.”
“Kinda already wish that,” Hawks mumbles, “but it ain’t ‘cause of the jumping.”
Rumi snorts and kicks off her heeled boots, tossing them to Hawks. “Here,” she says. “Hold these!”
One boot thumps against Hawks’s chest and he lunges for the other so it doesn’t go flying off. Rumi, meanwhile, crouches down and holds out her arms as she waits for Hawks to board the bunny express. He stares at her, holding a boot in each hand.
“What am I supposed to do with these?”
“Hold them, are you deaf?” she snipes. “I’m not gonna jump three stories and land on my freaking Jimmy Choos, Hawks.”
“Hm. Thought these were from ABC Mart.”
Rumi makes as if to get up, and Hawks promptly hops onto her back, stuffing a hand in each boot and crossing his arms over her shoulders. Pressed this close against Rumi’s back, he can feel the growl that resonates through her chest. He did not know that rabbits could growl before this day—maybe it’s just a Rumi thing?
He’s spared from contemplating it further when she crouches, and he has to busy himself with tucking his wings as close to his back as possible. They’re honestly still not quite grown back, Dabi’s roasting having really put a dent in his healing speed and also the only reason he hasn’t forced his way back into active duty, but it at least makes them easier to tuck.
Rumi jumps.
At first, it’s not too different from his own takeoff. More sudden, for sure, since he needs to gain speed to reach his fastest while she starts at her top speed, but otherwise similar. She’s definitely not moving as fast as he can. They rise up, up, up, over the roofs of the beautiful glass building nearby. Is that Endeavor’s agency? Jeez, what does it say that Hawks only recognized it from the sky? Hawks ponders for a moment how Rumi doesn’t crack the asphalt when she jumps.
Then the upward motion slows to a stop, and Hawks realizes one very important thing: he hates this. He hates this so much—
Jumping, as it turns out, is absolutely nothing like flying. ‘Controlled fall’ is an absolute misnomer—nothing feels controlled about this at all! Just rushing air, a total loss of equilibrium, and the slow realization that what goes up…
“No, no, no, no, no—”
… must come down.
Air rushes around them, rough and loud and whistling their upcoming doom. Luckily, he has a way to fix this. Screw what Rumi says—what’s a flight without wings? Forget about his baby feathers, he’s not going out like this, so he shifts his shoulders back and—
“Hey, what’re you—Hawks, don’t—!”
Hawks does.
His wings fling open to their full wingspan in one fell swoop with a loud FWHUMP!, and for a single, glorious moment, everything feels under control.
Then Rumi swears loudly enough that he feels it all the way through her back, and they lose all control over their landing vector. Their angle changes sharply, and the satisfying echoes of feathers snapping open into flight are thoroughly chased from Hawks’s ears by the shattering of glass as they careen through a window.
Hawks, contrary to widespread jokes, has never actually flown into glass. The experience is much louder than he expected it to be, and the easy way that glass gives way under dramatic kicking sequences in movies is extremely misleading for setting up his expectations when it comes to the impact. He’s definitely going to come out of this with a few bruises.
A few bruises, and a hefty paycheck to compensate whoever thought to make this window out of safety glass, because at the very least his poor face doesn’t take any more damage from the tiny, raindrop shards that the whole window has burst into. A good thing, too; after what Dabi did to half of it, he’s got limited space left to work with!
He lands on his shoulder, tucks instinctively to roll over his back, and rams ass-first into what feels very distinctly like a filing cabinet. They have a very recognizable shape. Cold, metal, rattling, and with handles that dig into his spine in a ladder-like formation.
Rumi groans from somewhere next to him. Hawks should get up, abscond from the area while she’s still groaning and not taking the crash out on his hide, but when he flops over and scrambles onto his elbows, he looks up to see the Flame Hero Endeavor himself, arms crossed and staring down at Hawks with a very unimpressed look on his face.
“Oh,” Hawks laughs. “Hah. Fancy meeting you here, number two. Uh.”
Endeavor’s frown deepens. He’s not actively flaming at the moment, probably because of all that business with his hero status. Dabi and all those other things that don’t seem to matter quite so much right now compared to the way the lack of flame is impairing Hawks’s ability to gauge whether the frown has progressed from ‘annoyed with these antics’ to ‘getting ready to turn Hawks into very handsome matchsticks.’
“Oh my god,” Rumi mutters, doing absolutely nothing to quiet herself as she stands. “Is this whole floor just for your office? Get me a place this fancy!”
“Yes,” Endeavor rumbles. “It makes it easier to relocate when birds come crashing through my windows. Here. On the twenty-third story.”
Hawks and Rumi glance at each other.
“It was her fault,” Hawks blurts, pointing at Rumi. He starts edging his way back towards the broken, open window. “She wanted to take me jumping—”
“—and this idiot,” Rumi shoots back, grabbing his extended arm and dragging him back, “messed me up! So now the guy we were following—”
“The what?”
Rumi glares at Hawks. He blinks, and starts backpedaling, both literally and figuratively. “Oh! Right, the guy. Haha, hit my head, sorry—yeah, the guy, he, uh, he went this way, and now we have to, uhh…”
“Search your offices!” Rumi finishes confidently, nodding as she opens the door out of the office. “For professional reasons. Thanks for understanding, Endeavor! Bill my agency for the window! Bye!”
She shoves Hawks out the door, slams it closed behind them, and immediately sets about dragging the heavy-set waiting bench in front of it. She gets it there herself before Hawks even thinks about offering to help.
“You don’t have an agency,” he points out, picking a bit of glass from where it’s embedded itself in his sleeve and dropping it to the ground with a plink.
“And you don’t have a brain,” she mutters. When she shakes her head, glass rains out of her hair like a waterfall, like she’s trying to one-up him.
Hawks thrusts her boots back at her, rolling his eyes. “Oh, you’re one to talk. I could’ve gone back out the window if you hadn’t dragged us in here, and then we wouldn’t be depending on this random bench to protect us when Endeavor realizes we’re full of shit and picks a fight!”
Rumi grins, sly and sharp, and starts off down the hall at a meandering pace that is very out of sorts with the level of urgency Hawks is currently experiencing. “I dunno,” she says, “I’m not the chicken, here. I wouldn’t mind a fight. I just figured you, fanboy, would want the chance to poke around for one-of-a-kind Endeavor merch.”
Hawks pauses in the middle of threading his hands through his hair, and side-eyes Rumi.
“...You think he keeps that kinda stuff in his offices?” he asks.
Rumi shrugs. “The prototypes, sure, probably. He’s gotta take a look at the stuff before it goes public, yeah?”
The thing is, Hawks knows he’s getting played. He’s not even getting played very well. Unfortunately for everyone involved, it’s working. He goes for a desk drawer immediately.
Fortunately for Endeavor’s potential secret stash of merch, the office door blows open in a cloud of soot and smoke. Little curls of ash float down the hall on the superheated air that billows out from the office room like a miasma, the last remnants of the bench that Rumi had shoved in front of the door.
Hawks freezes, clutching a handful of pens. “Heeeeya, big guy. I’m just taking these to get, uh, fingerprinted.”
Endeavor’s eyes flare with rage. Very literally, too—there is actual fire involved! When he levies his gaze at Hawks, Hawks finds himself swallowing down an anxious titter.
Endeavor takes a step forward, melted plastic trailing his footsteps.
Rumi, unaffected by the celebrity shock of meeting a childhood hero, shoves her Jimmy Choos at Hawks once more, and promptly hefts him over her shoulder.
Hawks yelps, once when he goes up and a second time when she pins his wings down against his back with her arm.
“Hi, Endeavor!” she shouts, and kicks out a window with another loud shattering of glass. “Bye, Endeavor!”
With a hop, a step, and a jump, they’re flying once more.
Or, rather, falling once more, trailed by the fading sounds of Endeavor’s cry of bitter exasperation. Hawks feels his wings flare out instinctively, but Rumi’s death grip across his back prevents a repeat of the catastrophe that landed them in Endeavor’s offices in the first place. Instead, they rise in a gentle arc into the sky, Hawks watching the ever-shrinking face of his childhood idol as the man leans out the window and waves a flaming fist at the two of them, and then slowly start to plummet back down.
“See,” Rumi says in a moment of silence as they arc over the apex of her jump and the rush of air slows. “When you don’t screw it up, it’s fine!”
Hawks clenches his teeth to avoid saying something rude or, more likely, screaming like a small child.
For all of Rumi’s smugness, their landing isn’t anywhere as smooth as their takeoff. Asphalt actually does crack under her feet, and her shoulder drives into Hawks’s gut so sharply that when Rumi lets him go, he slumps to the ground at her feet and wheezes.
“I am never,” he rasps, “going jumping with you again. I like fried chicken, but not enough to risk getting actually roasted again. Once is enough for this guy.”
Rumi ignores his extremely valid complaints in favor of bending over, and picks up one of the pens he’s dropped to the ground. “Huh,” she says. “Look at that—limited edition, after all!”
Hawks lets his head fall back to the street.