Work Text:
The apartment was clean. It always was clean, which was its own small mystery, because he had never once cleaned it. Keigo didn't remember hiring anyone to. He didn't remember not hiring anyone either, meaning the Commission had, much as they handled his taxes and his dental appointments and the precise shade of blonde that was to sit on his head. Keigo's sole contribution to the upkeep of his living space was being absent enough not to ruin it. The apartment was also bare. No photos on the walls. No books on the shelves. No clutter, no plants, no evidence that a person happened here on a regular basis. The fridge held water and energy drinks and protein bars and a bottle of hot sauce with an expiration date Keigo had decided, as a matter of standing policy, never to look at.
He should probably care about that. People had things. Art, throw pillows, those small decorative bowls that sat on coffee tables and held nothing, that just sat there being bowls. Keigo had a couch that still looked like the showroom floor model because no one had ever sat on it long enough to leave a dent in it, and a TV he used exclusively to check coverage of himself. This was, he was fairly sure, not how regular people prepared for their boyfriend's first visit. Normal people stress-cleaned, or cooked, perhaps lit candles. Keigo didn't own candles. Keigo wasn't entirely certain he owned much a personality, but that was a problem for a different day.
So he'd ordered yakitori from the place three blocks over and transferred it onto dark red plates he hadn't known he owned. He'd put the sauce in a little dish. He'd found chopstick rests in a drawer he had never had occasion to open.
His feet were cold on the tile. He ran a hand through his hair. It didn't do anything new, his hair never did, but it gave his hand a job.
He looked down at himself. Sweats, the good ones, the ones that sat low, a t-shirt a size too small, which was the entire point. Tadashi struck him as the type to go faintly pink at that sort of thing, and pink was a good look on him.
The doorbell rang. Keigo crossed the room, put on a face, and opened the door.
Tadashi looked good. He usually did, in a way that crept up on you, easy to miss at a glance and impossible to ignore up close. Dark hair pushed back, not styled so much as naturally obedient, doing what it was told. Dark eyes, warm, the brown so deep it went nearly black. A jaw straight out of a period drama. Tall, taller than Keigo, which admittedly was not a high bar, but he wore the height apologetically, shoulders soft and rounded, head tilted down to meet you where you stood. He was wearing a cardigan over a button-up. The cardigan was olive green and looked soft, and Keigo thought, not for the first time, that Tadashi dressed like a university professor whose students all had a quiet, ruinous crush on him. He would. He absolutely would.
"Hey," Tadashi said, smiling, wide and easy.
"Hey, I should probably change."
"Don't." Tadashi stepped inside, left his shoes lined up neat in the genkan, and bent to kiss Keigo's cheek first, then his mouth, light and brief and tasting faintly of mint gum. "You look comfortable."
Comfortable. Keigo had been aiming for fuck me immediately, but sure. He could work with comfortable.
"I brought wine." Tadashi held up the bottle. "I think you'll like it. White burgundy, very light, it should pair well with–" He stopped, gaze sliding past Keigo to the kitchen island. "Wait. Did you cook?"
"I have hobbies."
"Is that yakitori?"
"I contain multitudes."
Tadashi's eyebrows went up, impressed, maybe a little suspicious and choosing, generously, to believe it anyway. He'd have believed Keigo if Keigo claimed he'd hand-rolled the sushi and thrown the plates on a wheel himself. There was something almost unbearable about being trusted. Keigo collected the food.
They settled in. Tadashi poured the wine into stemmed glasses Keigo had located in a cabinet he'd had to stretch to reach, delicate things that he had only ever drank from at events. He'd always just gone at it straight from the bottle, back whenever–. Whenever.
"This looks really good, Kei," Tadashi said.
"I try."
They took the couch. Tadashi sat, crossed his legs, balanced his glass on one knee, turned his whole body toward Keigo like a tree with an engineering degree. Keigo dropped down beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched, and reached for the remote.
"So," Tadashi said, the light coming up in his eyes that Keigo had by now learned to identify as enthusiasm. "I've been dying to show you this. The Silent Hours. It's Benefiel's second feature, premiered at Cannes last year. It's about this couple who–, actually, no, I won't spoil it, better to go in cold. But the cinematography alone, there's this one scene with a window where–" Keigo thumbed the TV on. "–the way Benefiel uses available light to convey isolation, it's just masterful, the restraint of it–" The FLIX logo bloomed across the screen. Under it, a login box. Email. Password. Keigo looked at it. "–and it took the Palme d'Or, which, honestly, deserved, even though you could make a case for–"
He had a FLIX account. He was ninety percent sure he had a FLIX account. He was significantly less sure of the password, could not recall the last time he'd logged in, could not recall the last time anything had played on this television that wasn't his own face on a news chyron or grainy post-patrol debrief footage.
"I can throw it on my account," Tadashi offered, leaning in helpfully. "I've got FLIX."
"No, no, I've got one. Just–" Keigo squinted. "Can't remember the password."
He navigated to the reset, typed in his email, waited for the code, set the new password to a string of nonsense he would forget again inside the week. The home screen loaded.
"Oh," Tadashi said. "You've seen–"
Love Labyrinth: Season 3. Two people in swimwear screaming at each other on a beach, pink block text superimposed: WHO WILL FIND THEIR SOULMATE?
Butcher's Block: Season 2. A slasher serial, blood-red poster, tagline: EVERYONE'S DYING TO GET IN.
My Husband Is a Yakuza Boss?!: Season 6. A woman clutching her pearls while a man in a suit concealed a katana behind his back. There was a cartoon heart. There were, for reasons surpassing his understanding, sparkles.
Keigo had watched none of these. Had never heard of these. Had not, in twenty-three years of a life that had skipped most of childhood and the entirety of leisure, voluntarily consumed a single reality dating program, slasher serial, or live-action romance about being wed to organized crime.
And yet.
Six seasons of that last one. Six. Plus a Korean baking competition queued underneath it, and something whose thumbnail was simply a man weeping in the rain, and a documentary about deep-sea fish that was the only item in the entire row Keigo could imagine choosing on purpose. The only person who could have was–
Oh, that fucking asshole.
"You watched Love Labyrinth?" Tadashi was beaming now, delighted, like he'd turned over a rock and found something charming underneath.
"I–, no. I–"
"Season three's the good one, honestly, my brother's obsessed, he made me–"
"My mom uses my account." It came out smooth.
Tadashi went soft instantly. "That's sweet. That you share it with her."
"Yeah." Sweet. The sweetest. "She likes her shows."
She used to, anyway. Back when the television had been the only thing in the apartment that ever spoke back to either of them. Whether she still liked her shows Keigo could not have said, on the grounds of not knowing what city she lived in, or whether she was alive to do any liking at all. He took a sip of wine. It was too dry. He'd always preferred an asti, a fact Tadashi would find just as sweet and a touch embarrassing, which was exactly why Keigo would never tell him.
"So what do you watch?" Tadashi was already at the search bar, typing the title.
"Documentaries, mostly. Nature stuff. Quirk thing."
Not technically a lie. Keigo had watched one documentary about hawks, once, six months ago, at three in the morning, had watched birds drop out of a bright sky and open something smaller than themselves, in daylight, easy, unbothered, free. It had made him feel something uncomfortably adjacent to envy. He'd turned it off.
Tadashi found the film and pressed play.
The opening shot was a gray sky over a gray sea. A woman stood on a cliff. She did not do anything on the cliff, she simply stood, being windswept, for long enough that Keigo began to wonder if the file had frozen, if he ought to mention it, if this was some kind of test. A seagull entered the frame. The camera, with the grim commitment of a film that had won something at whatever a Cannes was, followed the seagull. Keigo watched a seagull for what he would later be prepared to swear under oath was a full and uninterrupted minute. The seagull left. The woman stayed. Riveting.
Eventually she went indoors, into a gray house, and sat at a gray table, and poured tea the precise color of the sky into a cup the precise color of the table, and Keigo understood, with a sinking and total certainty, that this was the whole thing. This was the texture. Gray people being quietly destroyed in gray rooms for two hours.
The husband came home. His voice was quiet and weary, as if reading from his own autopsy: La marée monte plus tôt que d'habitude. C'est toujours comme ça en octobre. Je vais fermer les volets. The woman said nothing back.
Keigo found himself wishing fervently that he didn't understand. Subtitles at least would have given his eyes something to do. He could have blamed the reading.
He glanced at Tadashi. Tadashi was rapt, leaning forward, wine glass forgotten in his hand, lips parted, eyes following the composition of the shot with reverent attention, like a man at mass. The screen light washed over his face and gentled it, the jaw, the cheekbone, the dark sweep of his lashes. He was beautiful, beautiful and wholly absorbed by a film about gray people in a gray house saying gray things to one another, and Keigo watched him watch it and concluded that Tadashi's face was, objectively, the more interesting screen in the room.
Two hours and eleven minutes. Keigo checked at the one-hour mark. Then, weakly, at what he'd estimated to be the eighty-minute mark and which turned out to be the ninety-minute mark, time having apparently also been condemned to move gray and slow. He resolved to stop checking, on the theory that checking was making it worse, and then almost immediately put his face down toward a cushion before catching himself.
The woman said, Tu crois qu'on finira par partir d'ici un jour?
The husband said, Où irions-nous?
"Il n'a jamais l'intention de partir," Keigo murmured, mostly to confirm his own mouth still functioned. Tadashi's head turned, "The conditional. It's not a question, he's already answered it."
Tadashi's head whipped fully around. "You speak French?"
"A little. Picked it up here and there." Across a pillow, in another life, from a mouth that had used it almost exclusively for insults.
"Say something else."
"If I keep going," Keigo said, dropping the bottom out of his voice and angling toward him on the couch, "we're not finishing the movie."
He let a wing do the rest. It was a cheap trick and a dependable one. One wing peeling slow off his shoulder, mantling up and over and around until the tip came to rest against the back of the couch on Tadashi's far side, folding him neatly into the span of it. A loose cage of red. Keigo coaxed a single feather free with a flick of will and walked it up the air between them, drew the soft edge of it along the underside of Tadashi's jaw and down the long line of his throat, slow, light as breath, deliberate as a signature, the way nothing involuntary ever moved.
It worked. It always worked. The wings were a cheat code, people went stupid for them on cue, the same way they went stupid for the magazine smile.
Tadashi's breath pulled short and audible. His eyes had gone dark and faintly helpless, fixed on the feather like it might decide to bite. He swallowed. Keigo tracked the motion of his throat with frank professional interest.
"We could," Tadashi started, and Keigo's wings shifted a hopeful millimeter against the cushions, "–pause it. And come back. It's just, the third act, the window scene, it's really the whole reason I–"
Right.
"–the way the light moves through it, you have to see it–"
The window scene. The light. The gray.
"Yeah, no, of course." Keigo eased back against the couch, picked his wine up off the table, and produced a smile. "Can't wait."
The window scene was, he had to concede, pretty. Light did several things. The woman cried, or didn't cry, or nearly cried; it was genuinely difficult to tell, given the film's deep and abiding commitment to close-ups of eyes and hands and yet more silence. Keigo understood nothing and felt nothing, which was either a failure of the film or a failure of Keigo. He suspected the latter and declined to investigate.
The credits rolled. Gray text on a black field. No music, because of course not.
"So?" Tadashi turned to him, hopeful, open, defenseless.
He had talked his way out of considerably worse than this with considerably less to work with.
"The conditional framing was clever," Keigo said. "Both of them use declarative statements very carefully the whole film. Everything's mostly a question or a deflection. It mirrors the architecture, all those corridors, the closed doors." He let it land. "Nobody ever says the important truths out loud."
Tadashi's face broke into a grin so wide it restructured his entire bone structure. Keigo drank his wine.
They talked a while. Finished the bottle. Tadashi had opinions about the director's use of negative space, and Keigo had opinions about what Tadashi's mouth was doing while it said negative space, and eventually one set of opinions carried the vote.
They made it to the bedroom in stages, with Tadashi stopping along the way to confirm that each next step was welcome. He kissed like a man being graded on it who intended to do well. Keigo kept score on most things, and Tadashi would have placed respectably in the standings.
Tadashi was careful with the wings. Nice people were always careful with the wings. They touched around them, over them, asked first, treated them like something borrowed, furniture that had come attached to the person and might still be under warranty. Is this okay? Can I–? And Keigo said yes, said of course, said go ahead, and meant it, and Tadashi's hands were warm and unhurried and entirely respectful, and they smoothed down the long feathers. Soft. Not pulling. Nobody ever pulled them. Nobody ever got a fist in close to the base, where the feathers gave out and the skin began and the skin gave way to something Keigo had never once put into words. The spot was there, unvisited, like a room in a house nobody used.
Tadashi slid his hand down, deliberate, palm flattening over Keigo and stroking slow, and his mouth dragged hot down Keigo's chest, his stomach, lower, pausing just shy with a patience that was its own kind of cruel. "I've been thinking about doing this all night," he murmured against Keigo's hip, voice rough, low and exactly how he wanted it. "You know, I could barely focus on the film. Kept looking at you instead."
Keigo's breath broke on a moan, hips canting up into nothing, into the promise of it. "Yeah?" he managed, and it came out wrecked, came out wanting. "So do it already."
Tadashi lay half on top of him, head settled on Keigo's shoulder, breathing leveling out. Keigo's wings hung off the far edge of the bed, slack, finally idle. "So anyway," he said to the ceiling, "this guy, villain, or possibly just a civilian having the single worst day of his life, is standing on top of a vending machine. Full business suit. Tie and everything."
Tadashi huffed a laugh into his collarbone.
"And I fly over, because that's, you know, concerning, and I go, hey, man, you good? And he looks me dead in the eye, completely serious, and says, the machine ate my coins. I'm not coming down until it apologizes."
Tadashi laughed, warm, delighted, pressed right into Keigo's skin and he–
His phone buzzed on the nightstand.
His eyes cut to it on instinct. One notification. One text. A number he didn't have saved. It could be a handler; they did that sometimes, surfaced from new numbers with no warning, except the area code was wrong, the area code was–
"Sorry." His voice came out level, ordinary. "Work. Hero work. It never stops. I have to take a call."
"Yeah, of course." Tadashi rolled off him and folded back into the pillows, sleepy and sated. He caught Keigo's hand as he stood, pressed a kiss to his knuckles, and smiled up at him through half-lidded eyes. Keigo was naked and backlit by the hallway light, and Tadashi was very plainly enjoying the view. "Hate to see you go," he said. "Love to watch you leave."
Keigo huffed something close to a laugh. "Five minutes."
He stepped out onto the balcony. Night air met his skin and his wings unfurled on their own, full span, the way they only ever did when there were no walls and no people to make room for. The city spread out below him, glittering, indifferent, twenty-three stories of empty air between his bare feet and the street.
He opened the text.
>Unknown: why did you change the password
Keigo exhaled through his nose. He leaned on the railing, wings cupping the wind, and typed.
<You: Hi. Hello. How are you, Dabi? How's life been, after, what, three years of no contact?
The reply landed in under thirty seconds. The bastard had always typed fast.
>asshole: it was going great until you changed the password
>asshole: fangsy is giving me shit now bc she cant watch her show
Keigo could picture her with no effort at all. Fangsy. Small, blonde, deranged. Toga, it had to be, seventeen and wanted in three prefectures. Cute as a button.
<You: Right. Your new little villain friend group. You guys been busy, huh? Is fangsy Toga?
>asshole: theyre annoying
>asshole: password?
The sheer, breathtaking audacity.
<You: I'm not giving you the new password.
>asshole: why
<You: Because I didn't know you were still using the account. If I'd known I'd have changed it years ago. Say thank you I'm not charging you.
>asshole: how did you even find out. you dont watch shit on flix
…typing…
>asshole: oh
>asshole: i get it
>asshole: there's a new dick
Keigo's jaw set. His feathers bristled along the railing. He was not doing this. He was not going to stand on his own balcony, naked, at midnight, and let himself be needled by his ex like some–
<You: Even if there was, why would I tell you.
Three dots. Longer, this time.
>asshole: [screenshot]
>asshole: ikeda tadashi. this his place? looks easy to get into. my flames are always up for something new to burn, and you do know there's a teleporter on the team right?
<You: Dabi. Don't you fucking dare.
>asshole: no, no, you're right. i'll wait till he's home. more fun that way
<You: Dabi. I swear to god.
>asshole: password
Keigo looked back through the glass. The edge of the bed, the shape of Tadashi under the sheet, peaceful, sound asleep, entirely unaware that an S-rank villain now had his full legal name and a photograph of his front door. Keigo was going to have to make calls, quietly relocate him, invent a reason to get the whole block shut down because telling Tadashi was not an option. Sorry, babe, a man I used to sleep with is feeling territorial about a streaming subscription, you understand.
He typed the password. Sent it.
>asshole: pleasure doing business with you birdie
Keigo's grip tightened on the railing.
>asshole: oh god he made you watch les heures silencieuses, was the sex this boring too??
Don't. Put the phone down. Go back inside. Get into bed with the stable, kind, cardigan-wearing engineer who has no criminal record and no secret identity and no body count and a perfectly reasonable amount of trauma. Don't you fucking-
<You: You now have opinions about art cinema?
>asshole: benefiel is a hack. the second act is dogshit. the window scene is a film school cliché. your guy has basic taste
Keigo caught himself with his thumbs already moving, an actual rebuttal half-formed. He locked the phone. Went back inside, and got into bed, Tadashi made a soft warm sound and curled in against his side.
By the fourth apartment, Keigo had arrived at a theory: apartments were all the same apartment. They'd been at it since morning. This one had a bay window. The last one had breakfast nook. The one before that had what the realtor had described as incredible bones, a phrase Keigo had nodded along to with grave suspicion that the realtor didn't know what it meant either. They were all boxes, boxes you put a life in, if you had one. Keigo had a balcony, he could not have described the rest of his apartment to a police sketch artist, and he had never once in twenty-three years understood the impulse to care about said box.
He'd been handed his current address on an index card. A Commission liaison had pressed a key into his palm and read a street name off a clipboard, and Keigo had gone and lived there and that was that. It had a high ceiling and a balcony wide enough to launch from, which were the only two features Keigo had ever required of a structure: somewhere to land, somewhere to leave from. Everything else was upholstery.
Tadashi did not feel this way about boxes. Tadashi felt about boxes the way other people felt about their children, or their gods.
That they were here at all was, honestly, Keigo's fault, his life always tended to be his own fault and rarely his problem. Tadashi's old building had been flagged for structural concerns, a sudden and unappealable verdict that had emptied the entire block inside a week, a few hundred residents politely rehoused and compensated and scattered across the city's hotels with brisk efficiency the Commission would be proud of. Keigo had made only three phone calls; it turned out that re-housing four hundred other people was embarrassingly easy.
His boyfriend had accepted, had been grateful, even, that the city was so careful with its people. Had happily spent the last couple weeks making spreadsheets.
"–and the thing is, see, this whole district's built on reclaimed land," Tadashi was saying.
Keigo came back to the room, blinked, turned his way.
Tadashi was crouched at the window with one palm flat against the sill, frowning at it with the tender concentration of a doctor at a bedside. He'd been talking for a while.
"Reclaimed land," Keigo repeated.
"Liquefaction risk." Tadashi continued. "In a big enough quake the soil basically turns to liquid, and anything that isn't piled down to bedrock just–" he made a little gesture, fingers folding, a building quietly sitting down. "You'd want deep foundations on a site like this. Pile-driven. I'd want the geotechnical survey before I'd even–" He caught himself, ducked his head. "Sorry. I'm doing the thing."
"No, keep doing the thing, I love the thing." Keigo meant it, the thing was cute. Tadashi lit up about poured concrete the way Keigo lit up about almost nothing, and there was something pleasant about standing in the warmth of a person caring that hard about anything at all, even if the anything was, fundamentally, dirt.
So Tadashi took him on the full tour of his anxieties. Egress, which apparently meant the way out in a fire, Tadashi seemed to care about with a moral intensity Keigo could not share, the way out of any room for Keigo was up, though it felt rude to mention. Wall assemblies. Whether the neighborhood was walkable, a metric so foreign to Keigo it looped back around to charming. Sidewalks, what a nice thing to worry about.
"So what do you think?" Tadashi asked.
Keigo looked around. The apartment had walls. It had a floor, presumably load-rated to Tadashi's exacting standards. The balcony was a juliet, barely a ledge, more of a concept, a dealbreaker, privately, not his to break.
"I think it's got incredible bones," Keigo said.
Tadashi laughed, surprised and bright. "Did you even–" He shook his head, grinning. "You have no idea what that means, do you?"
"None whatsoever."
A woman drifted out of the second bedroom holding a tape measure and wearing an attentive squint.
"Are these the original joists?" she asked, of no one and of the universe.
Tadashi turned toward her like a sunflower toward a second, brighter sun.
And then they were gone, the two of them, off into joists and span tables and something about the year the building code changed and how anything raised before it was a coin flip. Keigo stood at the edge of the conversation wearing a pleasant, vacant smile and nodding at intervals he selected at random. He understood perhaps one word in nine. The woman said something about lateral loads, walls maybe? Tadashi said something back that made her laugh. Keigo nodded again, warmly.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He had it out before he'd decided to.
Unknown number.
"Sorry–" He caught Tadashi's wrist, light, an apology and a leash in one motion. "It's my mom. Gotta take this, give me a second."
"Yeah, of course, angel." Tadashi laid his warm hand over Keigo's, squeezed once, and was already drifting back toward the woman and the joists. "Take your time."
Keigo found quiet at the dead end of the hall, past the bathroom, in an architectural nowhere every apartment they'd seen seemed to have, kept tucked. He leaned into it and opened the thread.
>Unknown: stop watching boring shit on flix youre wrecking my algorithm
<You: It's my account.
>asshole (2): im sure takashi has his own flix. use his
<You: Tadashi.
>asshole (2): right
>asshole (2): he's making you do the whole vég retrospective. nine fields. vespers for a dry river. four hours of a man not opening a door
>asshole (2): least make him put something watchable on. genuinely impressed you're getting through any of it conscious
Keigo's mouth did something. He flattened it.
<You: Some of us developed taste.
>asshole (2): you fell asleep an hour into the one genuinely good film i ever made you watch
>asshole (2): no chance you're awake for that shit
<You: Stop critiquing my boyfriend.
>asshole (2): stop using my account
He shut the phone with enough force that told him he'd need a new one, put it back in his pocket, walked back. Tadashi and the woman had migrated to the kitchen and were laughing about something load-bearing. Keigo slid in at Tadashi's side, fit himself along the line of him, set his chin near his shoulder.
"Everything okay?" Tadashi asked.
"Mm. She's good, says hi." That's what mothers probably did. "So." He looked around the apartment, the doomed little balcony, the joists of whatever fateful vintage, and let himself hope, openly, plainly, in the way he never allowed himself about anything that actually mattered. "Is this the one?"
Tadashi's mouth pulled apologetically to the side.
"So, Asami was just telling me," the woman lifted a friendly hand at the sound of her name, "there's a place across the river. Same developer, but they did the foundations properly, and the egress is good, and apparently the balcony's enormous, which I know you'd–" he smiled, helplessly fond, caught out by his own thoughtfulness, "–anyway. It sounds kind of perfect, don't you think? We should go see it."
Tadashi had remembered that Keigo liked a big balcony, and had quietly filed it under things to want on Keigo's behalf, and was now beaming about a seventh apartment.
"Sounds perfect," Keigo said.
The feather found the last one under nine tons of collapsed parking structure, a quick and faint heartbeat, in a pocket of air where the concrete had pancaked wrong just enough to leave a person room to be alive in. Keigo had a dozen primaries threaded down into the rubble before the rescue crew finished arguing about what was load-bearing, fanning them flat under the slab to spread the weight, lifting it an centimenter, then two, until a hand shot up out of the dark and the owner of the hand started screaming. Good, screaming meant lungs.
"Live one." Medics scrambled. Keigo scooped the man out on a litter of his own feathers and set him down soft as a dropped coat, already turning, already counting. Twenty-six dead. Twenty-seven, if the screamer gave up. Low number. He'd lost the clean tally of the injured somewhere around the second collapse, the arithmetic kept getting interrupted by more night.
The group had called themselves the Vermillion Dawn. They'd announced it, repeatedly, mid-fight, into a bullhorn, with careful diction as if each of them had rehearsed in a mirror. There had been a manifesto, there had been matching coats in a red that Keigo was half-certain was too deep to be vermillion, high-collared, a sigil stitched over the heart that was either a phoenix or a very powerful chicken and was, crucially, embroidered, which meant a grown adult in the Vermillion Dawn had sat down with a hoop and a needle and given real thought to their brand. They'd clearly spent more on the coats than the plan. The plan, in full, had been: drop an overpass, packed, at nine in the evening, and see. That was the back half of the manifesto: See what happens.
What happened was twenty-whatever and climbing, a commuter bus french-kissing a streetlight, and four city blocks turned out like the inside of a kicked anthill. One of them was still going even in cuffs, a kid, maybe seventeen, coat singed, explaining the reckoning to a paramedic while she took his blood pressure and said mm-hm and make a fist for me, boy.
"They're saying twenty-six." A rescue hero had drifted up at his elbow, young, ash up one cheek, gone gray at counting bodies for the first time and trying very hard to file it under work. "Maybe more. They're pulling the Maruwa block, the whole east face is coming–"
"Brutal," Keigo stated, and thought amateur.
It was. Loud and ugly and, professionally speaking, pathetic. You didn't get twenty-six off an overpass if you knew what you were doing; you got twenty-six off an overpass if you got lucky, or unlucky, depending which end of the bullhorn you stood at. Keigo could've taken this block down with a third of the noise and triple the number and sent everyone home thinking it was a gas main, no embroidery required. The killing was never the hard part, the after was, and the Vermillion Dawn had obviously, in their whole sequined little lives, never once thought about the after.
He gave the kid a gold smile that showed you did good out there, and watched it work, the kid stood a bit taller and went off to file his grief as paperwork.
He'd had plans tonight. He'd texted the cancellation somewhere between the first collapse and the second, attack downtown, I'm on it, sorry, babe, raincheck?, and Tadashi had sent back three whole sentences of worry, a please be careful, and a red heart. The plan had been a movie. A restored print of something too many hours long that Tadashi had been vibrating about for a week, in a revival house clear across the city, a showing so determinedly unwanted that when Keigo had pulled up the seat map there were two tickets sold in the entire room. Theirs.
He'd wanted to go. Not for the film, no, for the dark, the long empty rows, the back of one stranger's head down front who might, at exactly the wrong moment, come in. He'd had a public thing for years, the room that wasn't quite private, the staying quiet, the failing to. He could draw a map of where he caught it, a stairwell off a parking garage, then a flat gravel roof in July, the brick wall behind a bar that didn't exist anymore, all with a hand sealed over his or a mouthy villain's mouth and the noise that got out around it regardless, that wrecked, unforgivable whimper that came out of those pretty–
"Hawks." Comms. "Structure fire, six blocks east. Caller's reporting blue flames, the suspect–"
Keigo was off the ground before the sentence finsihed.
He took it low and fast, ruined skyline strobing past underneath, sirens dragging long red smears down the wet streets, and he saw the shade before he was halfway there. The glow, the right color. Every pyro's fire was orange, honest, dumb, barely hungry orange, and then there was the good range, throbbing up out of a warehouse shell on the canal: cold electric blue, lighting the underside of the clouds like something blessed, like something Keigo would have followed off a roof at nineteen.
He came through the second-floor window without slowing, hit on a hard fold of his wings, primaries already snapping out into the smoke on pure reflex, raking the dark for a melodic heartbeat, a silhouette, a black coat, a–
Nothing.
The place was a husk. Stripped, condemned, four stories of bare concrete, the famished blue already guttering back where it had run out of anything worth eating. No furniture, no people, no man perched on a girder with piercings and a cigarette and a vicious comment. Just the lingering heat, and the cooling tick of steel, and Keigo alone in the middle of it all.
Every feather on his back stood up at once.
Two heroes dropped through the window behind him. "Clear?" one panted. "Anybody in–"
"Clear." Level. It cost him something to make it level. "It's a decoy. Whoever lit it wanted eyes pulled the wrong way." Which was a lie, or wasn't, he genuinely couldn't tell anymore and it shouldn't be infuriating. He turned his back on both of them and flicked his phone open, the hinge cracking under his thumb, and started typing with the fire still ticking down around his boots.
<You: Did you really have to make an even bigger mess tonight?
The reply came fast.
>asshole (2): why tf are you in nagoya?
>asshole (2): aww. miss me so bad you left your cherished fukuoka birdie
>asshole (2): cute
His wings dropped half a centimenter off the ceiling.
<You: Had a meeting. Legal work. I wouldn't expect the term to mean much to you, Dabs.
<You: As opposed to lighting empty buildings on fire for no discernible reason.
>asshole (2): oh lmao. that
>asshole (2): our movie nights get weird what can i say
Keigo stopped.
<You: …Movie nights.
>asshole (2): the thing normal people do. snacks, a screen, fun, not whatever you've got rotting in the last watched
…typing…
>asshole (2): the salt year?? birdie. the SALT year
>asshole (2): does he tuck you in after or do you nap through it on your own
His mouth did the outlawed thing. He flattened it and stepped deeper into the dark, the two heroes murmuring into their collars behind him.
<You: What do you even watch. True crime, so you can take notes?
>asshole (2): boss made us sit through some three hour thing. void monarchs III: the sundering
<You: That sounds genuinely unwatchable.
>asshole (2): the man wears a dead guys hand on his face, cant really defend his taste. was actually decent
A laugh got most of the way up Keigo's throat.
<You: You fucked him?
He didn't mean to send that. It was just gone, out, sitting there in blue, and he watched the typing dots come up and felt his jaw set hard enough that a feather twitched off his back and sheared a curl of smoke clean in half.
>asshole (2): you jealous?
<You: Of Shigaraki Tomura? Be serious.
>asshole (2): he's actually got game
>asshole (2): [image]
He opened it. Shigaraki, no hand on his face for once, which Keigo had not known the man ever did, he looked younger than the Commission's estimations, and was looking at whoever held the camera like they were an idiot. Dabi was in it too, close, an arm slung along the back of the couch behind Shigaraki's shoulders, head tipped toward him, mouth curled in a crooked cruel smile. Off to the side, half out of frame, a blonde smear that was almost certainly Toga caught mid-leap.
Keigo's feathers went flat to his back.
>asshole (2): you jealous now?
Keigo scoffed. He should text Tadashi back.
"Hawks." One of the heroes, closer now. "Structural's calling it, we need to clear–"
"Yeah." He snapped the phone shut. Open. Shut. Open again.
<You: Your couch is a crime scene and your friends are children.
>asshole (2): you didnt say no
The world kept arriving a half-second late.
The interviewer asked a question. Keigo watched as her mouth made the shape of it, watched the shape travel the… half meter? less? the distance between them, watched it arrive, and only then, with the lag of a satellite call routed through somewhere with worse weather, did the meaning catch up and resolve into language. A question. About him. Right, he was meant to answer it wasn't he? He could do that. Probably. He had been doing that, apparently, for eleven minutes, or so the clock above the camera claimed, the clock seemed more a gentleman than a liar even when everything else in the room had gone cottony and underwater and faintly hostile.
Concussion. The medic last night had said the word probably a great deal, which his handlers had taken as permission to ignore it. Concussion, and the flu the concussion had thoughtfully invited along to party and get wasted with inside his skull, the two of them throwing back shots and playing something deafening. Keigo had not been consulted to host. His handlers had reviewed this information and determined it manageable. Two pills, a third for the road, an ice pack pressed to the back of his neck in the green room until ninety seconds before he walked out, and the standing instruction that he was, under all circumstances, to be charming.
He was being charming. He could feel himself being charming. Allegedly. The way you can feel your body moving when wasted, watching it work in slow-motion from across the room.
"–and I think that's what people really connect with," the interviewer was saying. Sacchan, the show called her, a diminutive that suggested an intimacy the nation had agreed to pretend it had with a forty-whatever-year-old woman whose actual voice was being delivered directly into the meat of Keigo's inner ear at a frequency he was fairly sure was being used elsewhere to disperse crowds. "The realness. Hawks just feels like someone you could grab a drink with, you know? Like a friend."
The audience made a sound, more like several hundreds of sounds, people agreeing loudly. The wattage of a small sun was trained on the side of Keigo's face, the heat of it crawled under his collar and pooled and his whole body was a degree and a half too warm everywhere and four degrees too warm in places he couldn't reach without bleeding out. His feathers picked up the squeal of the front rows, three girls, maybe sixteen, seemingly vibrating. Could pick out every sound: the camera operator shifting weight, a stagehand's gum, the creak of Sacchan's chair as she leaned in, there was no volume knob, no door to shut. The talons would have helped. He didn't have talons anymore, hadn't since he was thirteen, but the want for them was right there, vestigial. If he still had talons he could reach across this little glass table and slice clean across her throat and watch the red pour out and stain her dress and maybe then she'd finally shut–
"What's the secret, Hawks? How do you stay so down-to-earth?"
Down to earth. Hilarious. Ask the wings.
His mouth was moving. Good. "Honestly? I think the second you start believing your own press is the second you're finished. I just try to remember I'm a guy with a job. A guy with a really cool job, sure. A guy with a job who can, admittedly, fly–"
The laugh came on schedule, it sounded too far away now. He paused. He blinked. The people in the crowd seemed to be merging into one blurry blob of noise.
Oh look at that. Black spots, those were new. Little floating black holes, maybe they'd swallow the blob.
"–but a guy. At the end of the day."
"See! That's the thing." Sacchan turned to the audience, presenting him to them, behold. "That's exactly it. The number two hero in the entire country and he's just a guy."
The number two hero in the entire country wanted, with a sincerity that frightened him a little, to lie down on the studio floor. The floor looked cool. The floor looked like the single most desirable surface in greater Fukuoka, dark and matte and probably tacky with spilled water but cool, and the image of it was so vivid and so achievable, it was right there, a meter down, gravity would do most of the work, his mouth was almost watering at–
"Now." Sacchan's voice dropped into the register that meant a segment was changing, a key change, the band coming back from the bridge. "I have to ask. Because the people demand it. They've been demanding it in my mentions for weeks."
Keigo arranged his face into receptive. He had a receptive face setting. Settings. Yes.
"The number one most-asked question we got for tonight." She paused, milking it. His pulse was very loud and slightly wrong, an extra beat snuck in every fourth or fifth like a stitch dropped. "Is Japan's most eligible hero seeing anyone?"
The audience lost its mind preemptively, on spec, on the mere proximity to the topic.
Seeing anyone. He was seeing nothing. He was seeing fuzzy blobs and disappointing black holes and Sacchan's too-white smile with perfect teeth that looked exactly like Tadashi's, maybe they went to the same–
Tadashi. Yes. He was seeing Tadashi.
"Off the market, actually." He said, mumbled, his tongue felt heavy. His face moved. A smirk, a wink, one of the two.
The audience lost its mind. Loud. Loud loud loud. So loud. Why was everyone so excitedly loud? Keigo liked Tadashi enough, but even he knew Tadashi was not someone you screamed that loud–
Oh.
Oh no.
That wasn't the–
The script. There was a script. The script was clear. The script was a smile and a you know I never kiss and tell and a deflection so practiced it had calluses, keep the fantasy alive, an unattached Hawks sells more merchandise than an attached one, every person in that audience needs to believe they have a shot, this is marketing, this is the brand. Do not confirm anything.
Sixty cameras and a live feed and four hundred phones already lifting them up and carrying them off. There was no feather fast enough to catch a sentence. His handlers were going to skin him. His handlers were going to remove every tanned bit of his skin and use it for matching jackets.
Off the market. Couldn't even have the decency to be deniable about it. Couldn't have given them a coy maybe. Off the market, actually, like a man in love, which was suddenly hilarious, his feathers wanted to move, he bit the inside of his lip. Metal.
"You heard it here first!" Sacchan was crowing, delighted, she'd gotten her clip, her segment, her week of mentions. "Hawks is off the market!"
Yes. Thank you. He'd noticed. Hawks was also soon going to be given triple shifts or taken to–
He'd worry about it when he could feel his face again.
He surfaced at four-something in the morning like coming off the bottom of a pool, slow, against its own weight, breaking into the dark of the bedroom with the immediate and comprehensive understanding that he still felt like roadkill, just slightly more organized roadkill. The fever had broken and reset somewhere in the night and left his sheets damp and himself hollowed out and cold now, clammy cold sweat drying everywhere. His wings ached down to their roots. His head had downgraded from being split to merely throbbing in time with a pulse. Progress.
He had work at six. Six was far away. For now he lay on his side in the dark and did not move. He ran a slow inventory of his own continued existence and found it, grudgingly, ongoing.
His phone lit the room.
He got an arm out from under the blanket, dragged it close, opened it, squinted at the assault. The screen was a wall. Notifications stacked down past the fold, more underneath, the little numbers in their red bubbles all double digits, and it took his brain a full second to reassemble. Right. Off the market. He'd gone on national television sick out of his skull and announced his own romantic unavailability to a studio audience and a live feed and, it appeared, to absolutely everyone.
He thumbed through it from the top, triage.
Tadashi. Of course Tadashi, three texts, the first sent at 9:48 last night, minutes after it would have aired. Did you just– and then, KEI. and then, longer, a paragraph, that was long and sweet and romantic, that he hadn't expected it, that he didn't mind, that he was honestly kind of floored, that You didn't have to do that but I'm not going to pretend it didn't make my whole month. And then, beneath it, sent later, near midnight: Also you looked unreal tonight. Like genuinely. I had to put my phone down. How are you that pretty on a Wednesday?
Keigo looked at that one for a moment. You looked unreal. Had he? He hadn't felt it but he must've, flawless his stylist had said, the hair, the jacket, the smirk, the whole machine gleaming. He filed the thank you he owed Tadashi under later, when typing is a thing my hands do.
A handler, next. Two clipped messages, the second a correction to the first. We need to discuss the unscripted disclosure. And then, an hour later, evidently after the numbers came in: Engagement's strong. Public response favorable. You're not in the clear but it played. We'll talk. Which from a handler was practically a bouquet. He let his head sink back into the pillow. Not skinned. No room. He sighed.
Then the others. The friends who weren't. Mirko texting MARRIED MAN OVER HERE AND YOU DIDNT TELL ME, WHO IS IT. A sponsor's social account, professionally thrilled. A name he genuinely could not place congratulating him on something. He scrolled past all of it with the flat thumb of a man clearing a tray.
And then, near the bottom, an unknown number.
>Unknown: wtf were you on in that interview?
Keigo looked at it. He shut the phone too hard, dropped it on the mattress and stared at the dark ceiling and practiced not answering. He was historically bad at it.
The phone lit again, face-down, glowing at the edges like something radioactive.
He flipped it.
>Unknown: you looked like shit
That pulled the corner of his mouth before he could stop it. He opened it, his fingers moved slow.
<You: Aw, Dabs. Miss me so much you stalk me now?
>arson bitch: i literally cannot open my phone without seeing a clip of you going 'off the market'
<You: You jealous?
>arson bitch: you looked like shit
>arson bitch: wtf did they give you
Keigo would like to know that too.
<You: I looked fine.
>arson bitch: you looked 3 seconds from killing the host and then keeling over
>arson bitch: would've made a better segment honestly
<You: You're insane.
>arson bitch: you should've. her voice alone was begging for a feather through the throat
And Keigo bit down on his lower lip, hard, to keep a laugh from getting all the way out. It hurt more than it should've. He sucked the blood through his teeth.
He should put the phone down.
<You: It felt like a drill in my skull.
… typing …
Keigo had wanted to be a hero once. When he was small, when his whole world was four walls and a woman who remembered he existed on a rotating schedule, the word hero had meant only the bright fake people on the faulty TV, the ones who arrived and fixed things and left, who were paid in adoration and never seemed to bleed. Then Endeavor had walked into that apartment and put Keigo's father in handcuffs, and the word stopped being television and became a man, an actual man, enormous and flame-wreathed and real, and a smaller Keigo with smaller wings had decided he would be nothing else for the rest of his life.
The Commission had since revised that definition in a number of directions, most of them downward.
And now the actual man was standing three meters away at the head of a too-long table, still talking, and the advice came back to Keigo and how he'd wished he'd known it earlier: never meet your heroes. His hero had a voice like a cement mixer and a habit of explaining the obvious to a room full of people who'd grasped it four minutes ago, and Keigo would have given a primary feather, a good one, a flight feather, to be anywhere else.
"–which tells us the cell's operating with funding we haven't traced," Endeavor was saying, jabbing a thick finger at the map projected on the wall, a constellation of red pins that Keigo had stopped tracking somewhere around the third one. "These aren't smash-and-grab. Someone's coordinating. Someone with patience."
Around the table the assembled top twenty did their assembled-top-twenty things: nodding, frowning, performing engagement. The League, again. It was always the League now, the meetings multiplying like the pins, every agency in three prefectures pooling intel that amounted, when you swept the table clean, to we don't know who they are or where they are or what they want. Months of this. A standing appointment to be told, in increasingly grave tones, that the question remained open. Keigo knew approximately a great deal more about the League than the map did, he felt like he was watching someone do a puzzle while he was hiding the box with the picture on it.
Somebody else in here had to be dying of boredom. It wasn't statistically possible that he was the only one. He let his gaze track the table, looking for an ally in suffering, and caught Mirko two seats down already looking at him, one ear flicked sideways in the universal posture of get me out. She held his eye, then with enormous relish she mouthed: Tadashi.
Keigo nearly rolled his eyes hard enough to detach a retina.
She'd been unbearable since the interview, within the hour of it Mirko had been in his messages demanding to be introduced to the man who'd allegedly done the impossible and gotten Hawks to settle, treating Keigo's love life as a personal affront and a public utility in equal measure. I have to meet him. I have to shake the hand. I have to look the guy in the eye who tamed you. Keigo had said no. Keigo had said no with increasing creativity across four days. Mirko had taken each no as an opening bid.
He pulled his phone into his lap, under the lip of the table, a maneuver he'd refined to the point of art. Opened it, closed it, opened it. He caught the twitch of Endeavor's eyes flicking his way, the slight tightening that meant the enormous man had clocked the disrespect and was choosing, for now, to let it stand. Keigo gave him a face of dewy attentiveness and opened his messages.
<You: I hate you.
>arson bitch: oh fun. what'd i do this time
<You: I'm trapped in a meeting that exists entirely because of you and your friends. The thing in Komari Ward.
The dots came up, went away, came up.
>arson bitch: …
>arson bitch: we didnt do komari
Keigo frowned at the screen.
<You: You didn't?
>arson bitch: nah
>arson bitch: but shigs is cackling now and compress is getting more whiskey. so we're claiming it. clean job, good for the brand
>arson bitch: free rep we'll take it
<You: That's another six years in Tartarus you're volunteering for, collectively.
>arson bitch: if we lose
<You: Cocky.
>arson bitch: always
Keigo bit the inside of his cheek. Whiskey sounded nice, anything would dull over Endeavor's voice sounded wondrous.
>arson bitch: whos in there with you
<You: Why do you care.
>arson bitch: im bored. you texted first. spinner put on some anime that's funny but dumb, not rlly my thing
<You: What's it about?
>arson bitch: fine birdie. i'll entertain your boring meeting
>arson bitch: so it's about this guy. low level salaryman type. gets hit with a quirk, now he's a washing machine
>arson bitch: that's it. that's the premise. he's a washing machine. he can only say washing machine things.
>arson bitch: twice swears wash wrote it
Keigo huffed a laugh, he converted it, with the desperate reflexes into a cough. Two seats down Mirko's ear swiveled toward him like a satellite dish acquiring a signal.
<You: That's the most unhinged thing I've ever heard.
>arson bitch: fangsy is backing him up, they've got a solid theory
>arson bitch: there's romance birdie. someone falls for the washing machine. it has to be wash
"–Hawks. Anything to add from the field?"
Keigo's head came up smooth, phone already sliding facedown against his thigh, the smile already in place. "Nothing the others haven't covered. They're disciplined, they're patient, and they're enjoying the gap between what we know and what we can prove." All true. Beautifully true. "I'd keep the pressure on the money."
Endeavor grunted, which he'd learned was as close as the man ever came to approval, and moved on.
Tadashi had invited him to dinner with his friends, and Keigo had said yes, because that was what boyfriends did. Boyfriends went to dinners. They sat at long tables in restaurants that didn't print prices on the menu and didn't need to, and they made conversation with their boyfriend's friends, and they did not, at any point, check the exits more than twice. Keigo was on his third check of the exits.
The friends were… well, he'd spent the first half hour genuinely unable to work out how any of these people knew each other. They hadn't gone to the same school. They weren't in the same field. There was a woman doing a doctorate in something with the word molecular in it; a man who designed houses, adjacent enough to Tadashi's work that the two of them had burned ten minutes on load tolerances Keigo had tuned out like weather; somebody in publishing; somebody who used the word "practice" about her job in a way that meant law or medicine, he hadn't cracked which. Degrees stacked on degrees. People with savings and dental plans they'd selected personally and relationships that had lasted years, all of them turning to Keigo now and then with that careful friendly interest to ask what it was like, the hero thing, is it scary, do you ever get hurt, as if hurt were an occasional weather event and not the entire job.
"You get used to it," Keigo said, to the scary one, and smiled, and the table laughed like he'd been modest.
It took him until the second bottle to crack it. They were film people. That was the thread. None of them worked in it, not really, but they watched the way other people worshipped, every one of them lighting up the same way Tadashi lit up the second the talk turned to some director, some festival, some three-hour study of grief that had reorganized all of their lives in a theater.
He should have seen it coming. Of course Tadashi's people were Tadashi's people.
The thing was, he could almost follow it now. Months of Tadashi had done that, months of lying with his head on Tadashi's shoulder while Tadashi talked, Keigo paying attention mostly to the buzz of the words through the ribs under his ear, to the shapes Tadashi's hands cut in the air when he got going, and picking the rest up by accident, the way you learn the lyrics to a song you never decided to memorize. So when the table got onto someone named Souma, an auteur, that word again, Keigo had looked it up once and come away understanding it meant a director other directors were afraid of, he could nod along. Soma had been robbed. Soma had made something luminous and difficult and a man named Vauthier had walked off with the prize that was rightfully his, and the whole table was wounded about it, personally, on Soma's behalf.
"It's a travesty," said the lawyer-or-doctor.
"It's politics," said the house man.
"It's Vauthier," said Tadashi, like the name was a slur, and the table groaned, and Keigo drank his wine and watched his boyfriend be beautiful and furious about a European award ceremony.
Then Tadashi's hand landed on his knee. It settled itself warm and heavy on it. Keigo glanced over. Tadashi was still talking, still mid-sentence about Soma or the jury or the politics of the thing, profile lit gold by the low light, not looking at Keigo at all, face doing nothing. Innocent. His hand pressed in.
Keigo went still. It was nothing. It was a hand on a knee. People did that, anchored themselves to whoever they'd come with, it didn't have to–
The hand slid up a few centimeters, onto the lower thigh, thumb finding the soft inseam.
Keigo's whole body reported in for duty.
Surely not. Surely Tadashi, kind, careful, asks-twice Tadashi, who in months had never once done a single thing in a room with other people in it, surely he wasn't–
Keigo looked again, harder, hunting the tell. Nothing. Tadashi laughed at something the publishing one said. His thumb moved in absentminded circles.
His head was making it up. That was all. His head and the wine and the inconvenient fact that he'd been half-hard since Tadashi had picked him up because he had done something different with his hair today, something loose and sexy, and Keigo was, fundamentally, a disaster with a hair-trigger. Tadashi was just being affectionate and Keigo was now going feral over a knee at a civilized table.
His phone buzzed against his thigh, in the pocket right under where Tadashi's hand wasn't quite. He angled it up. Cover screen.
>burnout: wsa at a bar
Drunk, or high, the typos didn't discriminate. Keigo did not answer. Not here, not with a hand on his leg and a table of masters and soon-to-be doctorates and the whole performance of being a normal man on a normal night.
Tadashi's thumb drew a slow circle.
Keigo's breath did something he hoped the molecular woman didn't clock. He looked at Tadashi, and Tadashi looked back, a flick, a half-second, mid-laugh, and there was something in it. A glint, a later, he was hoping he wasn't inventing it. Maybe Tadashi had felt him go tight and was doing this on purpose, the quiet bastard, maybe under the manners there was a man having an excellent time. And God, Keigo wanted later. Keigo was starving for later, could see it already, the drive back to the place that wasn't so new anymore, the door barely shut before he was being pushed against it, kissed slow and then not slow, those careful hands finally with somewhere to—
Buzz.
>burnout: there was t his guy, looked like u
His jaw set. He turned the phone further over, as if that would mute it. The hand on his thigh squeezed, and Keigo chased the thread back. Tadashi's mouth, Tadashi's weight, the is this okay he'd breathe into Keigo's neck and–
The thumb was barely even doing anything. Idle circles through the fabric, nowhere near anything that counted, and Keigo was holding onto the feeling like it was life support, because he could hold onto so little of anything, ever, and this he was allowed. Those hands, Tadashi had good hands, strong, an engineer's hands, and Keigo thought about them gripping his thigh, shoving his leg aside, and holding him open, or holding him down or–
Buzz.
>burnout: same blonde, prtty, no wings thiugh
He read it sideways before he could stop himself. No wings though. Of course no wings, there was only one–
The thought came apart, the hand on his thigh had pressed slightly harder, fingers digging, and his body had decided somewhere underneath thinking that hard was good, that he wanted hard, wanted a grip that left something behind to find in the morning, shades of red and purple against tanned skin in the shape of–
Buzz.
>burnout: u still do the thing? i mss it, yknow, how everything turned red, ur wings mantling ovr me and…
He couldn't read the rest without unlocking the phone. Did not need to because he knew exactly where Dabi's train of thought was heading.
The hand on his thigh was not gripping hard enough to bruise, but how he wanted it to, wanted to see four thin marks in a row, wanted to press on the marks tomorrow and feel them hurt. Later was too far away, he wanted now, he could already imagine the heat coming off the hand, going past warm, fever-hot, and he could smell it, under the wine and the woody cologne and the restaurant. Smoke and the thick sweet char of flesh. And that devastating shade looking up at him, wings coming up off his back, folding the two of them into a cage of red where nobody could reach, where the heat pressed in close and the grip dug deeper and that low scratched voice said birdie against his ear and blue eyes–
Keigo blinked.
That wasn't–
He wasn't–
Tadashi's hand was still on his thigh. Still warm, just warm, thirty-three and not a degree over. Still gentle even where it held. Still asking, in the language of hands, is this okay, and it was fine, it was good, it was a good hand of a good man who loved him and built bridges and had never once put a mark on Keigo he hadn't requested in writing or words. And sat on his leg with the wrong force, with the wrong texture and the wrong color and–
Keigo grabbed the hand. Stopped it. Closed his fingers around Tadashi's wrist, too hard, and Tadashi turned, brows up, a question forming.
"Bathroom," Keigo said.
"Course." Tadashi smiled, easy, and lifted Keigo's hand and pressed a warm kiss to the knuckles before letting it go.
The bathroom was mercifully single-occupancy, marble and brass, a door that locked. Keigo locked it. Put both hands on the basin and looked at his reflection in the mirror. He looked fine, slightly flushed, maybe, eyes a little too bright, but anyone would file that under wine, under a good night, under a man in love at dinner with his partner.
He ran the cold tap, put his face in his hands, brought it up dripping.
"Fucking–" he told the sink. "Fuck."
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He dried a hand on his thigh and pulled it out.
>burnout: ths is stupid
Keigo looked at it for a long moment, water dripping off his jaw onto the screen.
Yeah. It was.
The card had given him a name he wouldn't remember, a city that he was almost always far from, and a district with leaning buildings threatening to eternal rest, and Keigo had filled in the rest himself. The Commission liked to hand him one corner of the picture and trust him to paint in the remainder.
He'd found the apartment inside an hour. Finding Jisaki in it was the easy part. The hard part was the apartment, which looked like a paper mill had detonated inside a man who'd never once thrown anything away. Years of it. Newsprint in yellowing towers, receipts, takeout containers fossilizing in their own sauce, a single path worn through the debris from the door to the one clear chair. Somewhere in this landfill was a notebook the Commission wanted very badly, and Jisaki Hideto was the only living index to its location, and Jisaki had so far declined to be useful.
He was pinned to the crumbling wall by six feathers, one through each shoulder, one through each forearm, two crossed over the thighs to stop the legs kicking, every angle worked out in advance so nothing he needed in order to keep talking got punctured. He'd bled a respectable amount onto his own archived newspapers. The feathers held him a few centimeters clear of the floor, toes just grazing, which was an exhausting way to hang and usually loosened a tongue inside ten minutes.
Jisaki was on minute twenty-one.
"If you just told me where the ledger is," Keigo said, somewhere around the fortieth time, inspecting a hangnail, "this stops. That's the entire deal. One location, and I make it quick. The silence isn't buying you anything except more of the silence."
Jisaki made a noise, blood wet and defiant, and that wasn't a location.
"That's not a location."
Jisaki gathered himself, with effort, and spat. It caught Keigo on the cheekbone, warm, and slid.
Keigo went still. Then he pursed his lips, drew a feather up between two fingers, and wiped it off with the flat of it, fastidious, like cleaning a bug off a window.
"Rude." He sounded, to his own ears, a little hurt. "I'm being professional about this. The least you could do is match my energy."
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
He knew, with a small sinking certainty, who it probably was. Tadashi. It had been Tadashi for three days running, soft little check-ins Keigo kept answering in fragments. Busy. Sorry. On a job. Can't talk. Which had the rare double virtue of being completely true and completely a stall, because Keigo was trying to end it, had been trying for a week, and the holdup was logistical. There was a correct way to leave a good man, gently, heart left mostly intact, and Keigo hadn't located it, because the real reason wasn't one he could say out loud. Sorry, Tadashi. It isn't you. It's that I've started wet dreaming about glossy eyes shedding bloody tears and a stapled mouth moaning my name, and apparently I want to fuck my dumbass ex. You understand.
Jisaki, clocking Keigo's attention drift toward the phone, made the strategic decision to start begging.
"Please–, please, you're–, you're Hawks, you're a hero, I've seen you, I didn't–, whatever they told you, I didn't do anything, you can't just–, you're a hero–"
Keigo took out the phone. His lips curled. New burner.
>Unknown: did you watch hounds?
His thumbs were already moving.
<You: I have taste.
>wildfire: liar
<You: You were right. It's good.
He paused, watched Jisaki strain and drip in his peripheral vision. He'd found the film again last week. Watched the whole thing alone at two in the morning in his bare apartment, and it had been lean and vicious and gorgeous, had teeth, ended on a shot so cruel and so right that Keigo had sat in the dark afterward for a while without getting up.
<You: The ending is mean. I respect it. Didn't fall asleep this time.
>wildfire: does the boyfriend know youre watching films for other men
Keigo's thumb moved before the rest of him signed off, already typing: Not boyfriend for–
He looked at it. Deleted it.
"–money, okay? I have money," Jisaki was saying, voice climbing, "whatever they're paying you I'll double it, triple, I have it, it's hidden, you'll never find it in here, you need me, you need me alive, you can't find anything in this place without–"
"See, now you're negotiating." Keigo didn't look up. "That's growth. Where's the ledger?"
"How much are they–"
"I don't want money."
<You: Say. You're a villain. Where does a paranoid little man hide a notebook in an apartment that's already nothing but paper?
>wildfire: why
<You: This one won't tell me and his place is an active crime against hygiene.
>wildfire: show me
Keigo lifted the phone, took a picture of the room. The flash cracked white across the squalor. Then the kitchen. Then the towers of newsprint. Jisaki, pinned, bleeding, toes scraping the floor, watched him photograph his apartment as if documenting water damage for a claim, and something in his face went past fear into a new and specific horror.
"What–, what are you–, are you texting–?"
"One sec." Keigo sent them. "Getting a second opinion."
>wildfire: freezer
>wildfire: guys like that think nobody digs through the frozen peas. theyre always wrong. start there. failing that the toilet tank
Keigo crossed the disaster to the kitchen, phone in one hand, opened the freezer. Frost everywhere, a fossil of something that had once been ground meat, a bottle of vodka. And shoved in the back, behind a bag of broccoli gone gray with age, a freezer bag, and inside it a second freezer bag, and inside that a slim water-stained notebook. He thumbed it open one-handed. Columns of names, account strings. Perfect.
He looked over at Jisaki, who had finally started going the same color of the frost.
"See how easy that was?" Keigo came back across the room. "Twenty minutes, you could've saved us both. And for the record–" he tucked the notebook into his jacket "–Dabi just spared you a lot of pain. You should thank him. You won't get the chance, but you should."
Jisaki's whole face came apart. "Dabi–, you–, you work with–"
"Not exactly." Keigo drew a feather to the front of his hand, idle, turning it in the blue-tinged dark. "It's not personal, Jisaki. You did something, or knew something, or you were standing in the wrong place when the Commission needed a clean story. I honestly don't know which and don't care. It's you or me."
"Wait–, wait, please, I–"
The feather went through his throat before the next word. Jisaki's eyes went wide, then went dead. Keigo wiped the feather. Patted his jacket for the notebook. Took a last slow read of the room, mapping it for whatever the cleanup crew would need to stage, and raised the phone.
<You: Thanks, hot stuff.
>wildfire: he cry?
<You: A little.
>wildfire: funny
The champagne wasn't sweet enough. Somebody important had decided a long time ago that the correct drink for a room full of important people was a dry, fizzing, faintly metallic nothing served in a glass too thin to hold without feeling like you might snap the stem.
He'd been here forty minutes. Maybe fifty. Long enough that the number had stopped counting up and started to feel like a sentence handed down. The ballroom drowned in gold and white, a string quartet sawing politely in the corner, a few hundred of the most photographed people in the country performing the act of enjoying one another for the cameras stationed at every door. Heroes, sponsors. Keigo had shaken sixty hands and run the magazine smile until the edges of his face went numb.
"Where is he?"
Keigo turned. Mirko had arrived at his elbow, two neters of muscle poured into a dress that had clearly been cut by someone who'd lost an argument with her about how high a slit could legally go. She was looking past him, around him, behind him, scanning like he had something stashed at his back.
"Where's who?"
"The boyfriend." She said it like he was being slow on purpose. "Off-the-market guy. Whole country watched you go soft on live TV, Hawks, I've got money down in three separate group chats. Where is he?" She squinted. "He shy? You don't read as the type to go for shy, but hey, what do I–"
"He's–" Keigo turned the glass a quarter-turn in his fingers. He'd ended it on a Thursday, in person, because the man deserved a Thursday and a face. "Things didn't work out."
Mirko's brows shot up. "Oh. Shit. Sorry. That's–"
"No. No, it's fine." He found a smile, an easy one, the right size. "Really. It's fine."
She studied him. He let her, could feel her hunting for the crack, the wobble, the brave-face-over-a-fresh-wound, and he watched her not find it.
Mirko's mouth tipped into a grin. "Well," she said. "You know what they say. Best way to get over someone's to get under someone."
And then her hand was around his wrist, she had a grip like a docking clamp. Keigo learned that his opinion on whether he was now circulating was not, in fact, being collected.
So Mirko fed him into conversations and reeled him back out, a one-woman tide, and the night went past in a procession of faces lit warm and forgiving by the chandeliers. A model with a jaw you could set a level against, who laughed half a second before Keigo finished his sentences. A pro hero's ex-husband, quick and charming, flirting with the ease that truly surprised him. Somebody's daughter, twenty and luminous, looking at Keigo like a poster had peeled off her wall and come to the gala. A retired hero with good stories. A sponsor's rep with excellent teeth and debauching intentions.
Some of them were nice. Some were funny. More than one was, objectively, devastating and they leaned in toward Keigo with warm hands and warmer plans, and he smiled and charmed and turned each of them over in his hands because none of them were the right temperature.
He had his phone out somewhere around the third devastating stranger. Turned a shoulder to the room. Found the contact.
>You: I hate galas.
The reply came fast. It always came fast.
>wildfire: gross
<You: You still miss me?
He watched the dots come up, watched them stop, watched them start again.
>wildfire: [location]
Keigo's pulse sped with no dignity in it at all.
<You: Give me fifteen.
>wildfire: come in through the window on the east side. third from the left, its open
>wildfire: hurry
Keigo did not, strictly speaking, possess fifteen minutes' worth of excuse, so he made do with four words and a wince, migraine, early patrol, aimed at the first handler he passed, and was out a service door and onto the roof before the man finished saying it was fine. They'd been lenient on his health since the interview.
He went up off the roof in a single snap of his wings, pointed himself across the river, and did not pace himself, because fifteen minutes was a lie, fifteen minutes did not begin to cover the air between that ballroom and that address, but Keigo knew exactly one thing with total certainty about the man at the other end of it: Dabi hated to wait, had always hated to wait, would make Keigo pay in some small mean way for every minute over. So Keigo flew like the sky owed him money, wind shrieking over his feathers, the gala suit pressed flat to his body, the city smearing lights underneath.
He dropped onto the fire escape on the east side, third window from the left, open. Folded his wings, ducked through.
And there he was.
Dabi was leaning against the far wall of a dim room that smelled like char and old cigarettes, arms crossed, watching the window like he'd been there the whole fifteen minutes.
He looked older. Three years was three years and no face stayed twenty-one because you wanted it to. But knowing and seeing were different animals. There was more wear at the corners of his eyes now, a deeper line bracketing the unscarred side of his mouth. He looked like the years had taken what they wanted and left no bills on the counter. Keigo looked at every new line and shadow time had pressed into him and loved it. There was more of him now to look at.
"You flew," Dabi said. Same tilt, hoarser. "Fourteen minutes. Impressed."
"You said hurry."
Something moved across his eyes. "Yeah," he said. "I did."
Keigo crossed the room and then there was no space left at all and he had a fist in Dabi's collar and Dabi had both hands buried in his hair, and their mouths came together open and hard, Keigo's lips parting against Dabi's and Dabi licking straight into him.
Keigo tilted his head and took it deeper. Slotted them together and chased the slick heat of Dabi's tongue with his own, sliding wet and graceless, pressure and tongue and want. The little ball of Dabi's tongue piercing dragged along the roof of his mouth and clicked against his teeth and Keigo chased that too, caught Dabi's tongue and sucked, felt the metal roll under his own, and a moan came up out of his chest, low and ruined, swallowed between them before it could fully escape anywhere.
Dabi caught his bottom lip in his teeth. Bit slow, then sharp, dragged it out and let it snap back, Keigo gasped into the gap it left and surged after him, caught Dabi's lip and bit down until copper bloomed thin and bright across both their tongues and painted red into each other's mouths, sharing the same used scrap of air.
Dabi's fists twisted in his hair and hauled his head back, baring his throat to the room and putting his open mouth on it. His hot tongue flat against Keigo's pulse, and Keigo's knees threatened to give out from under him. His breath punching out in a sound he hadn't okayed, punching its way down his spine and pooling. Dabi knew exactly where to put his teeth, sucked a bruise up under his jaw, scraped down the tendon. Keigo's hands scrabbled at his shoulders and his hips canted forward grinding into Dabi's thigh, aimless and desperate, and he had to bite the whimper away.
His jacket went warm against his chest, then hot and scorching and the lapels were curling and blackening, flaking off in fast clean lines of blue under Dabi's palms, the whole thing eating itself down to ash. Dabi kept working on his line of bruises while his hands burned the suit off by degrees, dragging fire and ash down Keigo's bared chest.
"God, you fucking–" he got out against Keigo's jaw, voice shredded. "Birdie. Fucking look at you."
Keigo sent his feathers, a dozen off his wings and at Dabi's clothes, slicing seams, stripping fabric away in strips, because his own hands were fisted in Dabi's hair and he wasn't moving them. He wanted skin, wanted it now, wanted nothing left between Dabi's hands and the rest of them.
Skin on skin, Dabi's palms flat pressing and burning over his chest, his ribs, his stomach, hot enough that some far-off part of Keigo expected blisters and the rest of him arched up into it anyway, greedy, pushing into the heat, wanting it to leave the shape of his hands seared behind so he could find the marks tomorrow and press on the proof.
"Fucking missed you," Keigo said into his mouth, wrecked.
Dabi mouth found his jaw, sucking, biting deep enough to bruise to the bone. "Yeah?" He murmured into the mark. "That right?" Teeth. "Tadashi know you missed me?"
"He's gone."
Dabi went still against his throat. Pulled back just far enough to look, and his eyes went dark, pupils blowing so fast and so wide there was barely any blue left, only a thin ring of that impossible shade overtaken by black, and he looked at Keigo like he was something to be taken apart slowly.
Keigo took the opening. Flat hands on Dabi's chest, shoved. Dabi went back onto the bed and took Keigo with him, fingers hooked in his waistband, dragging him down sprawling on top, the two of them landing in a tangle of bare limbs and half-burnt cloth, Keigo's wings flaring wide to keep from crushing them both.
And Dabi's hands went to his wings. Straight to the base, where the feathers gave out and the skin began, fingers digging in, searching, finding. Keigo's whole body locked, wings snapping rigid, every feather standing on end, and the keen that tore out of him was loud and high and cracked clean down the middle, a wrecked, broken thing that he'd forgotten he could make, his hips driving down hard against Dabi's opened legs, his fingers clawing into burned shoulders.
"Mine," Dabi said, fingers working that spot, watching him come apart on it. Certain.
Keigo dropped down over him. Dragged his tongue up the ruined side of his face, slow, following the seams, the cold hard line of every staple, tasting metal and scar and the salt underneath, and marked it his.
"Yours," he breathed into Dabi's cheek. "You don't know how much I've thought about you. Your fucking eyes." He pulled back, looked into them, that blacked-out blue. "I dream about them. Crimson coming down them."
Dabi's smile was a terrible, gorgeous thing.
"Then make me cry, birdie."
>pyro-princess: change my fucking contact
<You: No.
>pyro-princess: im saving you as bird bitch
<You: Cute.
<You: By the way, I think Spinner saw me leaving.
>pyro-princess: birdie i fucking told you to be careful you idiot
<You: I needed to get out fast. You burned my clothes, hot stuff.
>pyro-princess: worth it
>pyro-princess: spinner ratted to his mophead boyfriend. shig's knocking at my door. fuck
<You: ...Boyfriend?
… typing …
Madam President's office had too many lights. The kind built to keep you awake, hospital-white, total, the kind that made everyone in the room look freshly embalmed and handed them all a matching low headache. Keigo did not like the lights. Keigo did not, as a rule, like coming to this office at all; he never left it without a mission carrying at least a coin-flip's odds of killing him. But the missions he could work around. The lights he could not. He really, sincerely hated the lights.
At least he wasn't alone this time. A dozen Commission agents lined the long table, all of them squinting faintly into the glare, Madam President at the head, and the meeting was, as it had been for the better part of an hour, about the League.
Buzz.
>pyro-princess: hawksie!
>pyro-princess: hawksie!
>pyro-princess: hawksie!
>pyro-princess: you're coming to movie night right?? you ARE. you HAVE to be. dabi-kun brought asti
He'd admit it, privately, under these terrible lights, the girl was growing on him. There was something genuinely endearing about Toga, even when the thing she was being endearing about was your blood.
>pyro-princess: fucking
>pyro-princess: give her your number she keeps taking my phone
Keigo glanced up. Madam President was mid-sentence, not looking his way. He angled the phone against the lip of the table.
<You: You got me wine?
>pyro-princess: stole
>pyro-princess: are you coming or not, she wont stop yelling
His feathers caught the shift in Madam President's voice half a beat before the room did, the drop into the register that meant she was about to address him directly. He locked the phone, tucked it between his thighs, and she turned to him with gray eyes that had never once in their life held anything as frivolous as color.
"We have a new assignment for you, Hawks."
<You: Turns out I have a lot of free time. Yes, I'm coming.
>pyro-princess: ?? werent you getting some new assignment
<You: I did. I'm infiltrating the League of Villains.
>pyro-princess: lmao
>pyro-princess: get here. shigs picked the movie and he gets pissy when he has to wait
<You: Sounds like someone else I know, hot stuff.
>pyro-princess: fuck you
<You: Later.