UA's Immortal Teacher

Part 50

Hawks dragged his feet, almost collapsing against the side of the alleyway wall. He'd been flying all around the city for hours, running to whatever incident the Commission told him to, like some kind of animal at their beck and call.

He winced. He wasn't supposed to think like that. Maybe it's just because I'm spending so much time with the League... I'm bound to pick up a thing or two from them. I just have to remember that the mission is the most important thing and anything else will always come second.

Sluggishly, he spreads his wings open and takes off into the skies. His head feels distinctly fuzzy, but he still manages to navigate over the city and to his apartment. He doesn't bother to come in through the main entrance and just flies right to his balcony door. Since he was at the top floor and it wasn't likely someone could break in, he never locked that door. The Commission would probably have a fit if they knew.

Dragging himself over the cold wooden flooring, he sank down into his couch, one of the only decent things about the apartment, in his opinion. He didn't know how to cook, so the kitchen was just mostly there for show. And it wasn't like he got all that much time to sleep, so the bedroom wasn't his biggest concern. The view... Well, he could get that anywhere. But the couch... the lovely, comfortable, amazing couch. It was big enough that he could lay down on it, and even spread his wings slightly. Honestly, falling into that couch was probably one of the highlights of his day.

He doesn't want to think about how sad that is.

Instead, he snatched one of the pillows and curled around it, shutting his eyes tightly and blocking out the world. His wings instinctively came around him, and one of the feathers tickled his nose. He knew that there were a million other more productive things he could be doing, whether it was tailing the League or going over case files that had a one in a million chance of being helpful, but he couldn't find it in himself to move.

Listlessly, he thinks back to the raid he and Dabi did with the supply truck. At the time, he hadn't been that concerned with where the supplies were, just that he got them. They needed to be low-risk for the Commission, and they needed to fit what the League needed. If they thought for one second that Hawks was more of a threat than he was a resource, he knew he would be out of there faster than he could snap. And that was if he made it out alive.

So he hadn't run it by his handler, and had instead just put the parameters into one of the Commission-only search engines. That truck was the one nearest to them that fit everything he needed, so he chose it. The location of the storage facility hadn't seemed that strange to him at first, just another lifeless building the Commission occupied.

And when he had gotten there, it had all been fine. He'd met up with Dabi, exchanged their usual snark-filled remarks, and had everything go according to plan. Sure, they had had a small problem when the Commission employees got off of their lunch break early, but all it took was a simple detour into a filing room and they were fine. Maybe Dabi got a little too interested in the files, but the villain had always been weird.

Once he had found a route that would take them out of the place discreetly, he started leading Dabi out of there, the black-haired man begrudgingly following him. He could tell that Dabi was thinking about something else, gripping the lapel of his black coat every few moments, as if checking something was still there. So he stayed silent, forgoing their usual back-and-forth. That was when the weird feeling started to settle in his chest.

The path to the outside had led them through an area that specifically said restricted access, the precise reason that Hawks chose to go that route. Dabi wasn't exactly inconspicuous.

When they were in that room, crawling started to settle under his skin. He vaguely remembered stopping in his tracks and staring wide-eyed at the entirety of the space. The off-white walls, the floors that were just slightly more padded than the rest of the building. It was all too familiar.