#clean romance

I always kept to myself. Never thought about going out too much. Not like I could, really. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the company of others, especially my closest friends, though I was less of a social type. It was easier, I always told myself, to stay tucked in my little corner of the world.

I spent most of my time indoors. Some days seemed like an endless loop: waking up early, a quick wash in the water, showering, breakfast, breathing in the fresh air of my balcony, then spending a cosy evening in my small bedroom.

I can't seem to hate the outside world, though. I never did. And I deeply care about people. Even if I rarely approach them during the day.

However, every night was the same. I sometimes stayed up very late when sleep was disturbed by my heavy feelings. If it hadn't been for the smell of the herbal tea on the end table, or the breathless light of the moon, it would have been hard for me to forget about the melancholy that always came during those ungodly hours.

I took the night and its beauty as my closest friends, someone who visited every time to fill the void in my lonely heart. Nonetheless, I was still alone... and very lonely.

And then I met him. And my life changed completely from that point.

A ridiculous fall on my balcony was all it took to make our meeting the most memorable. And ridiculous, also.

It was a cold and very quiet night. Sleep was slowly getting the best of me when I heard a scream followed by a harsh thud against the barrier of my balcony.

The sound jolted me up, and through the blurry glass of the window, I saw long, red feathers rocking in the air near the plants on my balcony.

Instinctively, I got up and opened the window. There, I saw a man curled in on himself, wincing over his pain. The same long, red feathers were scattered all over his body, making it hard to distinguish his appearance.

"Is everything alright down there?" I asked, concerned. "Sir?"

The man's posture slightly shifted. He was leaning on his right arm, from where I assumed was the source of his pain. He slowly opened his eyes, revealing his shiny, golden irises, and eyed me from the side. After a moment, he leaned on his left hand and tried to get up.

"I'm coming down!" I said as I quickly turned and headed towards the door.

"NO! Wait!" a voice warned through the night's silence. "Don't go out, it's too dangerous!"

I turned around and almost missed the red flash storming up towards the sky, the same red feathers following behind. The sound of kicks and pained voices had me picturing a violent fight on top of the building.

A few minutes later, the silence returned. My eyes naturally landed on the red feather hanging on the side of a plant. A strong gust of air swept it away.

"Fheww... Never thought some punks would give me such a hard time! Guess I'll have to prepare myself for another surprise next time, huh."

I recognised the voice—It was the same from earlier. But this time more relaxed and assured. I was still a bit startled when the sound of flapping wings came closer to my window—Before me stood a lean and bold figure, standing effortlessly with one foot pressed on the railing. He wasn't very tall, but his posture radiated confidence, assurance, and a strange feeling of safety.

His wings were large and majestic, fully occupying the night sky behind him. The moonlight's gleam pierced through the spaces between his long, red feathers. Some rays reached me and gleamed on my skin, while his face was partially covered by shadow. Nonetheless, his golden irises shone like a thousand suns. And even if the light of the moon couldn't reach his form fully, I could easily distinguish every trait of his face.

His lips curled into a slight grin and pulled me out of my thoughts. He bowed, his wings spreading even wider.

"Sorry, miss, for disturbing your beauty sleep. But some people decided to ruin the night's silence for the purse of a poor old lady." He let out a heavy sigh, both hands on his hips. "Bad guys like these never give us a chance to catch a break. What a shame, really..."

He stood back up, his grin widening. "Well, since you seem safe and unharmed, I'll let you get back to sleep. My job's done for the night." With a small jump, he hopped off the balcony. "Thanks for checking on me earlier!"

'Right! He's injured!'

His red wings puffed up as he started to take flight. I quickly ran straight to the window.

"Wait!" I called, voice full of worry. "Aren't you going to get your wounds treated?"

He turned his head and raised an eyebrow before pointing a finger to the bruise on his forehead. "Oh, this?" He smiled. "Nah, I'm pretty sure it'll heal on its own. It doesn't even hurt that much. So no big deal!"

"What about your arm?" I insisted, "You fell on your arm earlier, right?!"

This time, he fully turned around. A soft sigh left his lips as he shook his head, still smiling. "My, you really are a worrisome one."

With a sharp flap of his wings, he was already standing back in front of me. Both surprised and amazed by the astonishing speed, I backed up a little. His face was so close that my breath was immediately caught in my throat.

"Wanna patch me up, birdie?"

His tease set my cheeks on fire. I didn't respond. I couldn't respond. My sweaty hands kept a firm hold on the balcony's railing. I couldn't tell why I suddenly felt so shy in front of him. All I could think was how clear his face appeared to me right then.

The moonlight illuminated his pale skin. His eyes shone like gold glitter behind his yellow-tinted glasses. A fine line was traced along the edges of his eyelids, another along the undersides of his tear ducts. His hair, ash-blond and a bit messy, swayed gracefully with the night's cool breeze.

I never thought that so much charm and beauty could exist in one person, let alone believing that I'd have the honour to meet such a good-looking person in my life.

Yet, the longer I looked, the more familiar his face appeared to me...

'Red wings, blond hair, a cheeky smile...'

I screamed internally.

'No way...!'

At that moment, I wanted to slap myself for not recognising him earlier: the No. 2 Pro Hero. The one I saw on TV during the Hero Billboard Chart JP event a week ago. I remembered him showing off his wits and charisma to everybody. I didn't want to admit it then, but I secretly found it amusing how someone could speak so boldly to the public.

However, having him in front of me in person was completely different from seeing him on a TV screen. The more he stared back at me, the more I felt that my legs could give out anytime soon.

"Ahahaha! Why are you looking at me like that?" he laughed loudly. "Is this the first time you've seen me? Aww, don't be shy. I don't bite."

My hands grew even sweatier against the railing. "I-I... um..." I tried to say, before swallowing the knot in my throat, hoping the blush on my cheeks would stay unnoticed. "Are you... Are you sure you're okay? You seemed like you were in a lot of pain earlier."

His laugh grew louder. "Yeah! This ain't the first time I've taken a good fall. A few bad scratches aren't going to bring me down."

He adjusted his arm to play it cool but got betrayed by the wince that escaped his lips.

I deadpanned, less red in the face, but the blush was still noticeable. "You were saying?"

He chuckled and put back on a careless expression. "Well, yeah... or you can just ignore that." He flapped his wings and started hovering over the balcony. "But seriously, this is nothing. I've had way worse than that. Just a little bit of rest and it'll heal in no time!"

I silently watched him take his leave, still a bit worried about his condition, but I decided to trust his judgement.

Before he went completely out of sight, he turned around and smiled at me. So genuinely, it almost brought tears to my eyes.

"But still, thanks for the care. It's nice to have someone looking out for us pros instead of relying on us to save the world. And who knows, maybe one day I'll have you treat my wounds, and even grab a drink sometime. You seem quite lonesome for a pretty thing like yourself." He winked. "Good night, little dove."

With one last flap of his wings, he flew towards the night sky until he went out of view. I kept my eyes on the moon's full brightness, my hands still curled around the bars long after he'd gone.

Lonesome dove.

He has no idea how right he was.

I looked down at myself then—thoroughly, something I haven't done in years since I lived in this cage. The soft white feathers had lost their glow and slightly turned grey from the lack of any exposure to the sun. My legs, small and weak, were slightly shivering on top of the perch from nervousness and anticipation as they supported my tiny frame. I looked at the door behind me, the one I never dared to step into. I never tried to push it, even though it was open all this time.

I thought of him, flying without a second thought. Falling, getting back up, then flying again, not once questioning whether the sky belonged to him or not.

Something inside my chest—stubborn, small but very much alive—unclenched.

I stepped away from the perch and turned to the small door and touched it, half-expecting it to hold firm the way it always had in my mind. It never did, and opened, as it had always waited for someone to try it.

I stepped out. The cool night air met me fully. No bars between us now. I lifted my arms. Beneath them, wings—small, white, trembling with disuse—unfurled for the first time into the open world.

I didn't know yet how far I could fly, or where I would go, or how much things had changed since someone had let me try. But I spread them anyway, and jumped.

The wind caught me before the fall ever had the chance to. I exhaled a sigh of relief, catching up with my other friends from the past who also flew in the sky.

Freedom.

I wasn't supposed to be in Bulgaria. I was supposed to be in my safe, quiet apartment in Seattle, sitting in my ergonomic gaming chair with a massive bag of sour gummies, optimizing cloud databases from a comfortable distance. But the Hope Horizon Foundation—a global humanitarian aid group—had suffered a catastrophic data leak in their Eastern European servers. They thought it was a localized malware glitch and flew me out because I wrote the original framework for their cloud storage.

It wasn't a glitch.

When I started patching the leak, I found a hidden script manually embedded deep within the donation routing system. It was quietly siphoning fractions of a dollar from global charity transactions and bundling them into an untraceable offshore account. Over the last year, someone had stolen nearly twelve million dollars meant for global medical supplies and clean water.

Now, on my lunch break, the sheer weight of what I had discovered was making my chest feel like it was being squeezed by an iron vice. The social anxiety was clawing at my throat. To stop the incoming panic attack, I sat on a crumbling stone bench in the courtyard behind the office and pulled out my leather-bound journal.

I flipped past my sketches of North American yarrow and focused on a tiny, heart-shaped weed growing in the cracks of the Bulgarian stone. Capsella bursa-pastoris. Shepherd’s purse. It was a common weed here, known for its ability to constrict blood vessels. I focused on the fine lines of its leaves, drawing them into my notebook. Breathe in for four seconds. Hold for four. Sketch the stem.

A sudden, sharp screech of tires shattered the quiet courtyard.

I looked up. A black utility van slammed to a halt right in front of my bench. The side door flew open. Two men in tactical gear, faces masked, lunged toward me.

Panic completely paralyzed my limbs. My brain screamed at me to run, but my legs wouldn’t move. Before I could even drop my pencil, a heavy, gloved hand grabbed my arm, wrenching me violently off the bench.

"Hey! Let go—"

A rough canvas bag was shoved over my head, cutting off the light. I gasped, tasting dust. Instinct kicked in, and I jammed my journal and pencil into the deep pouch pocket of my hoodie, curling my arms over my chest as they threw me like a sack of potatoes into the back of the van. The doors slammed shut, and my world went completely black.

Chapter 2: The Operator

"Target is secured. We are moving to the secondary extraction point."

My voice was a low growl over the comms as I cut the heavy zip-ties binding the civilian's wrists. She was hyperventilating, curled into a tight ball on the floor of the abandoned warehouse. She wore a baggy, grease-stained hoodie that looked three sizes too big for her.

"Hey. Look at me," I commanded, grabbing her by the shoulders. Her wide, terrified eyes locked onto mine through my night-vision goggles. "I’m an American soldier. You’re safe. Can you walk?"

She nodded rapidly, though her knees were visibly shaking. She didn't look like a high-level data architect. She looked like a kid who got lost on the way to a comic convention.

"Stay on my six. Do exactly what I say," I said, pulling her up.

My five-man DEVGRU squad formed a tight perimeter around us as we breached the back door of the warehouse, moving out into the dense, foggy forest of the Balkan foothills. The chopper was supposed to meet us in a clearing half a mile north.

We made it three hundred yards before the sky blew apart.

An RPG screamed through the trees, detonating against a boulder to our left. The concussion wave slammed into my chest, throwing me backward. Shrapnel tore through the canopy, and automatic gunfire erupted from the ridge above us. A well-coordinated ambush.

"Ambush! Heavy contact, north-west!" my point man, Rook, yelled over the static-choked comms. "They knew we were coming!"

"Fallback to the ravine!" I ordered, firing a burst from my rifle into the muzzle flashes in the tree line.

I reached blindly into the smoke, my hand catching the thick fabric of the civilian's hoodie. She screamed as a line of machine-gun fire chewed up the dirt at her feet. The enemy was closing the pocket fast, cutting us off from the rest of the squad.

"Down! Down!" I yelled, wrapping one arm around her waist.

The ground gave way beneath us. We plummeted over the edge of a steep, muddy embankment, tumbling out of control down a fifty-foot ravine. Branches whipped my face, and the civilian’s weight crashed against me as we rolled over rocks and thorns before slamming hard into the freezing mud at the bottom.