🌺Lillie🌺

Of all Hawks’ secrets, you are the most well-kept.

Version: Female Reader version | Male Reader Version Links: Gifset (art only) | Mood Music

NIGHTHAWK Rating: Explicit   |   Word Count: 13k  | Art: 14 animations, 2 stills (Technically no spoilers, but if you aren’t caught up on the events of the manga you’ll be missing important context. The fic takes place after Hawks’ meeting with the commission.) Synopsis: Casual was the word you used when you first agreed to sleep together. As weeks turned into months turned into a year, those quick and dirty nights blossomed into private moments that earned him little pieces of you. Warnings: Dom!Hawks, Nurse!Reader, animalistic behavior, rough sex, quirk/feather play, light bondage, biting, praise kink, hurt/comfort, secret relationship, talk of past lovers, mentions of death, panic attacks, PTSD, mention of a past, non-canon event. Spicy, then bitter, then sweet.

There was nothing exceptional about your life from an outsider’s perspective. You lived in an apartment on the outskirts of Jaku City, unmarried and childless. During the day you attended medical school where you studied for your doctorate. During the evening you worked as a nurse in the intensive care unit. Then, when you were home, you sat alone for dinner at a kitchen table meant for two.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

For the past year, however, an occasional tap at your sixteenth-story window would break up the lonely monotony. The tap was quite a scandalous secret, not that anyone would believe you if you let it slip. Even you still had a hard time accepting the bizarre reality of the situation; but it was real. Just as real his voice, which you could hear echoing faintly through your apartment.

You glanced up from your lukewarm dinner and dropped your fork. For a long moment, you sat in silence, listening intently until you heard it again. It was him; it was his voice. Your heart pounded against your ribs as you shoved out of your chair and jogged to the window. The part between your curtains opened, but when you peeked through you saw only the glow of city lights below a blanket of darkness.

A frown found your face, and a sigh spilled past your lips. You heard his voice; you would never mistake it for another. It echoed casually against your dim walls again, and you turned your head towards the sweet sound. The television was on in the living room. Your heart dropped at the realization. The little square thing sat on your end table and taunted you with his image. 

There he was. Hawks, the winged hero, being interviewed by a woman in a pantsuit. It wasn’t often he did interviews, so you left your dinner to go cold in favor of watching the program.

You didn't have to ask.

The answer lived in everything he did.

It was written in the empty walls of his office, still poised on the highest floor. Whispered in the cool breeze during his lunch breaks, taken on the radio tower atop the roof. Even how he'd walk through a doorway, shoulders folding in and tilting to the side for a pair of pantom limbs. It was all a painful confession: A part of me is missing.

The answer filled the office now with how he stared at the clouds sliding past his window; the pile of reports he'd been thumbing through long forgotten. The familiar rush of cutting through that fluffy white mist was so close, but so impossibly far away.

The question bubbled up in the back of your throat, but you swallowed it back down.

You were afraid to ask, because you were afraid of him knowing that you felt it, too.

Since the day you met him, when those wings were full and proud and a part of him, they felt like a part of you. They'd given you the rush of flight in a bid to impress you, all those years ago. They'd sheilded you in times of turmoil, held you so carefully during secret rendezvous.

But you asked anyway.

Not because you didn't know the answer.

But to open the door to mourn. Together.

"Do you miss it?" you asked.

This yellow eyes fluttered before they met your own, and then the silence settled between you. A smile tugged at his lips, small and whistful as he took one last look at the sky he loved so much, but had been long banished from.

"Sometimes," came the reply. It was a soft admission, almost a lie. One word to sugar coat his pain.

Some things never changed.

"but not as much as I would have missed this."

Your hands squeezed the seat of your own chair, brows raising like a question.

"This?"

He laughed, one light enough to make your shoulders relax and your aching heart slow into a more comfortable rhythm. Again, some things never changed.

"Had I not risked it all in that last battle, what's the chance we'd be sitting here together now? Safe and sound?"

Your lip disappeared between your teeth as you contemplated his question, but this was one you didn't know the answer to.

He scooted in his chair, rolling out from behind his desk as the wheels squeaked. His feet kicked until he came to a jarred stop beside you, then leaned into you with that lopsided grin on his face.

The same one he wore all those years ago, when he almost anxiously asked if you wanted to fly.

"I miss it, of course. Every day," came his heavy, truthful, answer. But his hand laid on the back of yours.

Lillie's sheets :)

Vent piece for the cover of my hawks x reader fic, Myosotis. Speedpaint below!