he isn’t expecting endeavor to show up. if it were any other situation he’d react appropriately, with visible and audible confusion, questions and slight concern. but all he can muster right now is a blank stare as he looks at the number one hero, standing in the doorway of his hospital room. it reminds him of after the fight against high end, but now the roles are reversed— touri is the one sitting in a hospital bed.
and now touri is the one who’s been scarred for life.
except it isn’t just a scar on the face. pain still lingers in his back, where the base of his wings had been, right where they’d been torn from him by a villain he can only describe as a monster. he feels like a shadow of himself, and he doesn’t know what to do. how can he do the only thing he knows how to with no wings?
the silence he lets pass is excruciatingly long, mostly attributed to his own jumbled thoughts, too loud in his own head for him to think of something to say. mostly, he thinks he just wants endeavor to go away. he doesn’t like being seen like this.
he speaks and his voice is too dull, nothing like the brightly shining hero he was. “ i didn’t expect you to be here. “ / @burningrepent
he was just about to leave his office when he got the call.
standing in front of his desk with a jacket half-pulled over his shoulders as his secretary barged in with the news, enji felt, suddenly, as though the carpet had been ripped out from under him. he rarely feels like this --- unprepared for a situation, or unsure of how to act in the face of an emergency. he’s got the record for most solved cases in history. he knows what he’s doing.
but with this, with hawks, blistered and broken and bleeding out, he remembered what it was like to be eighteen and fresh out of school and lost in the world of heroism. he remembered what it was like to have something valuable to him, and to be afraid of losing it.
it seemed to be late, but enji had gone anyway --- he abandoned everything and rushed to the scene, thinking not only of japan’s number two, but of his son’s husband. a part of his family. the little boy who used to admire him. by the time he arrived the place was empty and barren and as eerie as ever; the villains disappeared in a flash of violence and horror and had left him here on the floor, kissing the concrete, bleeding out into the cracks on the street. enji had seen his wings, lying there. they almost looked as though they could still be twitching, reaching for phantom nerves and phantom blood and phantom bonds.
he doesn’t quite know what to say, or what’s right to begin with. he’s dealt with loss many times in his career as a hero, but never like this. he clears his throat. ❝ fuyumi tells me that natsuo is on his way. he’s been trying to get here since you were admitted. the... roads are closed. ❞
