Chapter 165 - The Murder

Hawks arrived at the crime scene on his bicycle.

He was wearing oversized trousers, shoes so long they looked like those of a clown's, and a large, smelly enamel jacket that he would never have touched under normal circumstances.

The dirty hood covering his hair and fell over his forehead, engulfing him in an unbreathable bubble of toxic poison.

He didn't push it back because that was part of the persona Shoto had created - a man capable of fetching cigarettes at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday - and he trusted him.

Hawks looked at the sky.

Black clouds, heavy and low, were gathering over Tokyo, obscuring the tops of the city's tallest towers, giving the impression of choking in the open air.

He found Shoto's ability to control the weather astonishing.

Had he been born in another era, people would have hailed him as a god.

Hawks focused on the road again, whistling.

Whistling wasn't his style, but it was certainly the sort of thing a man addicted to cigarettes would do. Or at least more addicted than Hawks was.

He whistled badly, though, stopping intermittently when he had to turn at a junction that was too dry or when the road became unstable to focus.

His fingers gripped the handlebars tightly, the plastic squeaking under the sudden, violent pressure.

It was ironic that one of the only men in the world capable of flying should be terrified of falling off his bike.

He smiled as he remembered the evening he'd spent with Shoto trying to teach him how to ride one.

The teenager had nearly pulled his hair out when Hawks had asked him for the twelfth time how to put his feet on the pedals.

Keigo laughed.

He wondered what Shoto's face would be like when he found out he didn't know how to drive.

Hawks turned right into a jagged residential street.

Wide, grey houses, without roofs or sometimes devoid of whole walls to enclose them, stretched along both sides of the road.

In some places the pavement disappeared altogether, replaced by stony bumps or holes in the ground that screamed 'building site under construction'.

The half-built garages were empty, the lawns so unkempt that the grass looked like vines and the backyards like jungles.

There were no bins, no 'work in progress' signs, no one but rats and cats.

The area had the appearance of a ghost town or a post-apocalyptic world.

Tokyo, like other Japanese cities, was dying.

To a lesser extent than elsewhere, but the capital was nonetheless being eaten away by this evil that was slowly devouring the world.

The dawn of Quirks - as well as bringing its fair share of wars - made humans less fertile and more sterile, so much that having children before the age of thirty was an increasing rarity.

Not for the first time, Hawks wondered if the arrival of Quirk had really been a boon for humanity or if it had been a slow and inexorable condemnation to extinction.

He turned right almost instinctively : Shoto had made him memorize his route so well he could have made the journey eyes closed.

His jacket billowed in the cold wind and rattled against his thighs.

His switched-off mobile phone weighed heavily on his thigh, but he knew it wouldn't stop the Commission from finding him if necessary.

At the end of the new street loomed the building he was supposed to get to.

It was a simple structure, only three floors of bare cement, without plaster or any other covering.

The roof was flat and easily accessible : Shoto had explained to him that the developer had wanted to turn it into a garden for the building's inhabitants, to make it more appealing than the surrounding houses.

The height also made it impossible to see what was going on from the surrounding streets.

Hawks changed streets, parked his bike two houses down behind a low wall and walked back to the main road, hands in his pockets.

He paused for a moment in front of the grey behemoth.

The building stood out like a tombstone against the dark sky. The clouds rumbled and rolled in, heralding the arrival of a storm.

A drop of water caught the corner of his eye and rolled down his cheekbone like a tear. He wiped it away with the tip of his thumb, his gaze riveted on the demonic place.

This was the kind of place where people died en masse.

He climbed the stairs slowly, his fingers reaching mechanically for the ice stalactite in the knife scabbard that hung from his waist, as if to reassure himself.

He paused at the entrance to the roof, the door slamming shut with a thud.

His eyes swept over the empty, dirty roof.

The stairs were the only way out.

Hawks climbed over the stairwell and lay down on it, his dark eyes fixed on the door below him, the stalactite clutched in his gloved hand.

Then he waited.

*

The house was silent.

Dabi knew that the old witch's third dog - the one who only watched over him at night, when the other two were asleep - was sitting on a chair outside his door, eyes closed as if he were resting, but not asleep.

Dabi didn't know what kind of Quirk he had, but it must have enabled him to locate people with ease.

Dabi - who hadn't slept all night - got up quietly.

He made his bed properly, arranged the sheets, shook out the pillow and pulled up the blanket so that the bed was neatly made.

Satisfied with his work, he moved on to the second step.

His satin pyjamas were neatly folded and left at the end of the bed.

His fingers caressed the silky surface, his fingernail scratching the button of his shirt.

These were the first clothes he'd worn in years that didn't irritate his skin - at least the shreds of skin he had left.

They were too good for him anyway.

He went to the closet and retrieved his cleaned and ironed old clothes.

They were still in the dry-cleaning bag.

Dabi pulled out his leather coat.

The smell of blood and sweat - so strong that even Dabi could smell it - was replaced by utter blankness.

He had earned the right to wear this jacket by shedding blood and sweat ; now holding it in his hands made him feel like a stranger in front of the relic of a life he had loved.

He put on the T-shirt - replaced because it was too damaged - then the trousers. The urge to scratch his legs as soon as he put them on was comforting.

He opened the box containing his shoes.

Ugly, too clean.

The laces - their ends a reddish brown from soaking in blood - had been replaced.

His worn-out boots had been polished to look as good as new.

He figured he'd have to dull their shine by stepping in a puddle or mud, because that kind of shine was the kind that would make him a beacon in the night and, for sure, get him killed.

Putting them on gave him a strange feeling, as if he was turning back into someone he hadn't been for a long time. He felt good, like he was home again.

Or almost.

His Swiss pocket knife and brass knuckles were gone.

People always believed that villains - or heroes - spent their days spamming their Quirks. No one had the stamina for that, least of them all Dabi.

If he had to fight in public for some reason, he'd better not draw attention to himself by creating a geyser of blue flames or some such nonsense.

He could really end up in jail this time.

Dabi faced the closed door of his room, rolled his shoulders and then his neck.

He took a few seconds to stretch his numb legs, jumping a few times to get the blood flow to his thighs.

Idleness was fun for a bit, but Dabi had always been a man of action.

He inhaled slowly through his nose and exhaled to quell the adrenaline that raised the hairs on the back of his neck and sent a wave of shivers through his shoulders.

Then he ran to the door, opened it with a jerk and pounced on his warden.

The man, slumped in his chair, barely had time to look up from his book.

His eyes widened and his lips parted in alarm.

Dabi struck his throat sharply.

The man fell to his knees on the floor, both hands on his throat, his face flushed violently, while his eyes looked as if they were about to pop out of their sockets.

The book on the arm of the seat fell to the floor.

Dabi almost kicked him in the head out of habit - if you aimed right, you could kill - but he then remembered he wasn't there for that.

Instead he slipped behind the man, put his right arm around his neck and grabbed his left bicep with his right hand, which was perpendicular to the guard's head.

Then he squeezed.

Within seconds the choked man stopped struggling.

Dabi counted fifteen more.

There was still no sound in the house.

Slowly, he released the man. His limp body collapsed against him.

Dabi straightened up, picked the man up and laid him on the chair, arms crossed, book open on one thigh, cheek against shoulder, as if he'd fallen asleep.

He waited a few seconds, checking the barely lit corridor.

Nothing.

Then he shut his bedroom's door softly and went downstairs to the kitchen.

He rummaged through the drawers, picked up a small knife whose absence would not be noticed, put it in his pocket and left the house.

He took took a shady path through the forest surrounding their house, the one in the camera's blind spot, the same one he'd used to escape eleven years ago, limping and bleeding like a wounded dog.

*

He kicked open the door.

It slammed against the wall with a deafening noise.

Dabi glanced around.

The clouds were of a black almost grey, the area was half shrouded in darkness. The sun was about to rise.

The roof was empty.

Dabi took one slow step, crossed the threshold, then a second and stopped.

Apart from the cubicle of the stairwell, there was nothing.

A cold breeze raised the hair on the back of his neck.

Wide-eyed, Dabi turned to the side, his arm instinctively raised to protect his face.

Two vertically yellow slited eyes appeared under a hood above him, as if the man were falling from the sky.

Dabi saw the ice spike glint in the darkness, the faint light of day shining down on it, lending it the appearance of a knife's blade.

Dabi stumbled to his feet, a burst of flame erupting from his shoulders and elbows to ward off the man.

The assailant, his speed-swollen jacket billowing around him, had sharp, determined eyes, the rest of his face lost in the darkness.

He didn't even blink as the flames licked at his skin.

A geyser of fire erupted from Dabi's skin as the ice stalactite sank into his flesh.

Hawks, the soles of his feet barely touching the ground, threw himself backwards.

A sudden pillar of blue flame shot ten meters high in the air, illuminating the whole neighbourhood for half a second.

Then, abruptly, the flames died out.

Hawks landed heavily on the ground, his feet screeching against the floor.

A cloud of steam covered the middle of the roof, preventing him from seeing what was happening on the other side.

He opened and closed his left hand - the one that had held the stalactite - to test its mobility, his eyes staring straight ahead.

He couldn't feel it, but he knew his palm had just been scalded.

The cloud hung in the air.

Hawks waited, breathless, legs bent.

One of the two feathers previously hidden behind one of the roof's edges flew to his hand.

Lightning crackled far away.

Then a white flash streaked across the sky and Hawks saw as if it were daylight.

At the other end of the roof, a hand against the junction of his neck and shoulder, stood Dabi, his wide blue eyes a stark contrast to his darkened silhouette.

"An ice stalactite, eh ?"

Another bolt of lightning ripped through the sky.

In the brief interval of light, Hawks caught the image of Dabi pulling out what was left of the melted ice pick.

Blood spurted from the hole in his shoulder as he pulled it out, splattering his cheek, his jacket and the ground.

Everything went black again.

"I should have guessed you'd make friends..."

Hawks remained motionless.

As much as Shoto had repeatedly assured Hawks that he'd get through everything easily, Hawks had only said 'okay' to satisfy him.

Dabi was the kind of cockroach you didn't just kill with an elaborate plan, drugs involved or not.

Hawks remembered all his feathers scattered around the city, all the ones Shoto had - justifiably - told him not to bring.

He had every intention of killing Touya, but he had no intention of dying with him today.

"Do you know what the worst part is ?"

The sky rumbled. Another bolt of lightning.

A white flash illuminated the roof.

Dabi, his shoulder pissing blood, smiled, his lips curling up intil it ate three-quarters of his face in perverse glee. His eyes were dull, dead, scrutinising Hawks malevolently.

00h00

"The kid's using you and you're too stupid to notice"

The two men glared at each other.

Then they threw themselves at each other.

*

A/N : If you want to read of schedule AND support the story, go check the story's P@treon, Nar_cisseENG