"You may not love me, but you love being wanted," Dabi's eyes never left his face, "so let's make a deal."
That... was not the response he antipcated following his playful confession— or, in this case, his non-confession. Not that there's any love between us. Tongue-and-cheek. He practically winked. Dabi had a way of cutting through all of that, didn't he? Right to the point... always giving him the length of rope before pulling it tight around his throat.
And Keigo would have liked to deny it. He did, in a way, by telling himself that it wasn't a matter of being wanted. It was a matter of duty. Of what had to be done. It wasn't a matter of caring what Dabi— the enemy— thought of him.
"What kind of deal did you have in mind?" There was too much invested in it for him to argue the point of being wanted. To risk his mask. Better to keep things light. "Because I thought we were already partners in crime."
A dry, unamused smile. "I'm not talking about your job. I'm not talking about whatever information you think you're giving me." He raised a finger and put it over Keigo's heart. "I want a deal for this.”
"My hea—" The joke came easier than hearing the actual answer.
Ah. “If you want to hurt me, you're going to have to offer—”
Dabi stepped abruptly closer, and Keigo, who had never been taught to back down, squared his shoulders. Not that this had any impact on Dabi. Never did.
" When I hurt you," not if, fantastic, "I won't be asking you what you want out of it."
He had the same piercing blue eyes as Endeavor, down to the shade. It was the first thing Keigo had noticed when he'd gotten a closer look at him. It was something he continued to pretend had no impact on this relationship. Purely professional relationship.
"Hawks," Dabi continued, and Keigo couldn't shake the feeling, again, that his mouth curled around something else in the name, like he was just barely holding back another one— one he couldn't possibly know, "I'm proposing that you let me use you. And, in turn, I let you meet the rest of the league."
An interesting move. Vulnerability? Some kind of emotional edge? Domination? "Use me as in you'd like to..." This time Dabi waited for him to finish. Raised an eyebrow. Hawks swallowed. "Well! That's very forward of you, don't you think you should take me out to dinner first?"
"I didn't think you were the old-fashioned type." The smile dropped straight off of Dabi's face, a familier aura taking it's place. Like the flame he wielded: lethal and indiscriminate. "And I want you."
A very unprofessional feeling blossomed in the pit of Keigo's stomach. This would be for the job. It would be for the access I need. But he'd never liked lying, especially not to himself— not when he had to do it so often. I like it better when he's like this, when he's dangerous. It made him feel like they were the same, like this was fair, like he wasn't doing anything wrong by playing this game. "Dabi—"
He kissed him. Rough. Intense. Burning. It wasn't a good kiss, or a comfortable kiss. It felt like an attack, and he kissed back not because he felt any sense of romance but because he was trained to respond to violence with violence. His body, on the other hand...
"Do we have a deal?" Dabi tasted like ash. Like death. And everything in Keigo's body drew him towards it. I guess the HPSC really did beat the survival instinct fully out of me. So he tasted like irony.
And it was for the job. The job. The job. For the sake of everyone else, he could have something he wanted. "We... yes. We have a deal."
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