𝒍𝒐𝒓𝒆𝒏𝒂

He checks the answering machine. The red light is steady. No messages. The last thing you said to him—actually said, out loud, in person—was I'm closing tonight, don't wait up. He'd grunted. Hadn't looked up from the TV. He remembers that now.

You stood in the doorway with your keys in your hand and your jacket half-on, and you looked at him. He realises now that you looked at him, really looked, like you were waiting for something, and he grunted.

He calls the store. Clark picks up, says you didn't show for your shift last night. Or the night before. Didn't call in either. Clark sounds worried, but not in a panicked way. Just the clipped, pragmatic worry of a man already calculating how to cover the hours. 

Bobby tries to sound like he already knew, like he's been handling it. He's the kind of boyfriend who would obviously know that his girlfriend's been missing for three days.

He hangs up, stands in the kitchen and looks at the apartment.

Your coffee mug is still on the drying rack. Your jacket's on the hook by the door. Your shoes—the white ones, the ones you wear everywhere, the ones he's made fun of a hundred times—are sitting by the mat. You didn't leave, didn't pack anything. You didn't take your shoes or anything at all.

Bobby files a missing persons report that afternoon. 

The cops tell him to come in the following morning.

The detective's name is Moreno. He's got a desk in the back of the precinct, a cup of coffee that's been sitting there long enough to develop a skin, and an expression that Bobby doesn't like. There’s no hostility. It’s the other thing, the worse one. Interest. 

“So,” Moreno begins, flipping open a notebook. “Three days.”

“Yeah.”

“And you noticed this morning?”

Bobby's jaw tightens. “I thought she was working doubles.”

Moreno lifts his eyes briefly. “For three days.”

“It's happened before,” Bobby says a little defensively. 

“Has it?” Moreno writes something down. Slow, purposeful, the pen moving like he wants Bobby to watch it, to feel the weight of each letter being recorded. “Walk me through the timeline, Bobby. When's the last time you actually saw her?”

Bobby tells him. The doorway. The jacket. The don't wait up. The grunt.

Moreno nods. Writes. “And after that? What'd you do that night?”

“Watched TV. Went to bed.”

“Alone?”

Bobby stares at him. Jesus Christ. “Yeah. Alone.”

“Okay.” Moreno takes a sip of his dead coffee. Sets it down. “We talked to your neighbours, Bobby. Just routine. The couple in 4B, the Nguyens, mentioned hearing arguments. Through the walls. More than once, over the past few months.” He looks up from the notebook. “You want to tell me about that?”

Bobby's chest goes tight. “Couples argue.”

“Sure they do. What were you arguing about?”

“I don't—stuff. Normal stuff. Dishes. Schedules.”

“They said it sounded pretty heated sometimes,” Moreno remarks. “Mrs Nguyen used the word volatile.”

Bobby feels something cold move through his stomach. “I never touched her. If that's what you're—”

“Nobody said that,” Moreno's voice is easy, perfectly calm. The practised calm of a man who's done this before. “But I've got a missing woman who was last seen by her boyfriend, who didn't notice she was gone for three days, whose neighbours describe an argumentative relationship. You can see why I need to be thorough.”

Bobby can see alright. Bobby can see exactly what this looks like from the outside, and the cold thing in his stomach turns to ice because it looks bad. It looks like exactly what it isn't, and there's no way to explain the difference between I was a shitty, negligent boyfriend who took her for granted and I hurt her without sounding like he's making excuses for both or covering his ass.

“We'd like to take a look at your camera equipment,” Moreno says. “Your footage. You're a camera guy, right? Clark at the store mentioned you're always filming.”

Bobby nods. Numbly.

They take the camera. They take the tapes, too. 

Bobby sits on the couch in the apartment and stares at the empty shelf where the equipment used to be, and feels naked in a way that has nothing to do with clothes. The camera was the last layer between himself and the world. They've taken it, and now there's just Bobby, sitting in an apartment full of evidence of his own failures, waiting for strangers to watch his footage and decide what kind of man he is.

They call him back in four days later. Moreno's got a different look on his face now. Still interested, but muddied, thoughtful. Like he's found something he wasn't expecting.

“We reviewed the tapes, Bobby,” Moreno says.

Bobby waits.

“There's a lot of footage of her,” Moreno says carefully. Neutral. Watching Bobby's face the way you'd watch a surface for ripples. “A lot. Some of it she doesn't seem to know about. You filming her while she's sleeping. While she's cooking. While she's reading.”

“The light was good,” Bobby says automatically, the old excuse, and it sounds hollow even to him.

Moreno lets the silence sit. Then, “Bobby. I've got a missing woman. Her boyfriend has hours of footage of her, some of it taken without her apparent knowledge. Her neighbours describe fights. The boyfriend didn't notice she was gone for seventy-two hours.” He leans forward, knotting his fingers on the table. “You see the picture I'm looking at, right? It doesn’t look good. If you want to tell me anything, I can help you—”

“That's not—I never hurt her. I was—”

“What were you?”

And Bobby opens his mouth to snap back with something defensive, sharp. Bobby, who uses his tongue like a blade when he feels cornered, rears up to go, and what comes out instead is:

“I love her.”

Not loved. There’s no past tense here. This isn’t careful distancing of a man constructing an alibi. Present tense, raw, graceless, blurted out like a cough. Like something expelled from deep in his lungs against his will. His voice breaks on her, and Bobby’s eyes burn. 

Moreno is staring at him, and Bobby is sitting in a police precinct with his chain tangled and his crop top wrinkled, his earring catching the overhead fluorescent light. And he looks, in that moment, exactly like what he is: a twenty-something-year-old asshole who didn't know what he had until the world seemingly swallowed it whole.

“I love her,” he repeats, quieter now. Like now that the word is out, he can't stop saying it, like the dam has cracked and the only thing behind it was this. “I love her, and I was—I wasn't good to her, I know that, okay? I know what it looks like, but I didn't—I would never—”

Moreno watches him for a long time. The precinct hums in the background. Phones, footsteps, murmur of voices.

They let him go. No evidence. No body. They're able to confirm his alibi, and ten again.

There’s no proof of anything except the fact that Robert Franklin is a man who films the woman he loves while she sleeps because he can't bring himself to tell her she's beautiful while she's awake.

He goes to the store that night.

Not because he thinks he'll find anything. The cops already searched it. Half-heartedly, briefly, the way you search a place when you've already decided the boyfriend did it, and the crime scene is somewhere else. 

They walked through the showroom and poked around the loading dock. Went down to the storage level, shone flashlights between the flatpack bookshelves and the plastic-wrapped headboards, and found nothing. Because there's nothing to find. 

Bobby just knows that this is the last place you were. 

That your hands touched the furniture down here. The inventory sheets, the shelving units, the boxes of cabinet hardware and drawer pulls you organised on the night shifts he couldn't be bothered to stay for. Your fingerprints are on everything. The ghost of your routine is embedded in the layout of this room. The way the boxes are stacked, the system you developed for sorting shipments by vendor, and the little handwritten labels in your writing on the bins. 

Bobby stands in the middle of it, and he can feel you. He can feel you the way you feel someone in a room they just left—the displaced air, the warmth fading from a surface, the sense that if he turned around fast enough, he'd catch the edge of you disappearing around a corner.

He sits down on the concrete floor. Puts his back against the wall. The far one, behind the shelving unit full of cabinet hardware, the one that feels different from the others in a way he can't articulate. Cooler. Thinner somehow. 

He doesn't plan to talk. But at one point, the silence gets too much, and it just… comes out. 

“Hey, baby. It's Bobby.”

His voice sounds strange in the empty room. Too loud, too small. Bouncing off the concrete and the flatpacks and coming back to him slightly changed, echoed.

“I don't know if you can hear me. I don't—this is stupid. This is really fucking stupid. Obviously, you can’t hear me because you’re not here. But I just—” He stops. Presses the back of his head against the wall. Stares at the ceiling. “The cops think I did something to you. They looked at me like—” He swallows. “I don't care about that. I don't care what they think. I just need you to know I'm looking. Okay? I'm looking, baby. I'm not gonna stop.”

The draft brushes against his palm. Cool. Steady. Like a pulse. 

He comes back the next night. And the next. And the next.

It becomes the only thing that makes sense. The apartment is a museum of his failures. Every unwashed dish, every unanswered question, every space where your things are slowly being buried under his carelessness. 

But the store is different. The store is where you were. The last place your body occupied space. Sitting in it feels like sitting in the shallow end of your absence rather than drowning in the deep. He can think down here. He can talk. He can say the things he should've said when you were standing in the doorway with your keys in your hand and your heart in your eyes, and he was looking at the TV.

Hey baby. It's me. Found one of your socks behind the dryer today. The fuzzy ones. I put it on the dresser. Just in case.

I keep thinking about Thanksgiving. When you burned the rolls, and I said, "guess we're going to my mom's next year", and you laughed, but you weren't really laughing. You were hurt. I knew, and I didn't fix it.

I'm sorry about the rolls. They were good. They were a little burnt, but they were good. You made them, and I should've eaten every single one.

Bobby pauses. Picks at the concrete with his thumbnail. The storage level smells like particleboard and cardboard. Somewhere deep in the room, he can feel that draft again. That impossible nowhere-breeze he still hasn’t found a source of.

I was thinking about that morning. In the kitchen. You were making breakfast, and you turned around with a spatula and asked if I wanted toast, and the light was behind you, and I—I felt this thing. This huge thing. Like my chest was going to crack open. And I said, "sure." I said SURE. You were standing there in my kitchen looking like that, and I felt the biggest thing I've ever felt, and I said sure and loaded film into my camera like it was nothing.

It wasn't nothing. It was everything. I just didn't know how to—I couldn't—

Bobby stops. Presses the heels of his hands into his eyes.

I was so scared you'd see how much I needed you and you'd leave. So I made you leave by not letting you see. That's the dumbest shits anyone's ever done. Baby. I'm so stupid.

He comes back every night. Even when there are no words. Even when he just sits with his hand on the wall and his eyes closed, breathing in the sawdust and the nothing-draft, feeling the concrete thrum against his palm like a second heartbeat.

No leads. No calls. No breaks in the case because there's no sightings, no signs of a break in, nothing. Eyes follow him around town, full of questions and suspicion. There's those who genuinely believe he did something to you. It's stupid, so fucking stupid. He's many thins, but he would never—

Except he did. He did hurt you. Just not in the way these people think.

So Bobby keeps coming because this room is the last place you were. And as long as he keeps sitting in it, as long as he keeps talking to the walls, you're not gone. 

You're just somewhere he hasn’t found you yet.

Month two.

The news spreads the way news does in a place like Santa Clara.

A slow seep through the neighbourhood, through the strip mall. The regulars who used to come to Clark's store for dining sets and bed frames and the occasional impulse-buy end table. A girl went missing. She worked there. The police questioned her boyfriend. No arrests, but you know.

People stop coming.

Not all at once. But the thin trickle becomes a drought. 

The regulars find reasons not to visit. Other stores, other errands, a sudden preference for the furniture place on Stevens Creek that doesn't have a missing-person case attached to it.

The showroom gets quieter. The displays gather a fine layer of dust that Clark used to wipe down every morning, and now he only gets to it every other day, then every third day, then whenever he remembers. Which is less and less because Clark is a man watching his business die and his marriage fracture. 

He can feel both things slipping through his fingers at the same speed, and the bourbon is the only thing that makes the slippage feel like someone else's problem.

So Clark hires Kat. 

Not because he needs a full-time replacement. Frankly, customer traffic no longer justifies it, but the showroom needs a body in it. A presence. Someone to make the store look like a place where things are still happening. Kat is bright and cheap, and she doesn't ask about the missing girl, at least not at first, and Clark is grateful for that.

Bobby notices her the first time he comes in for his nightly visit to the basement. 

She's behind the register, leaning against the counter with a pen behind her ear, doing something with a stack of delivery receipts. Radio plays something tuneful from a boombox she's brought from home. Dark hair. Quick smile. She looks up when the door chimes and gives him that particular once-over that Bobby used to live for. The slow sweep, the lingering, the way women's eyes always catch on the chain, the earring, the slice of toned stomach under the crop top. 

She says, “We're closed.”

“I know. I'm not shopping.”

She watches him walk past the display couches and the dining sets, then down the stairs, all with undisguised curiosity. Bobby doesn't turn around.

The second time, she asks.

“You're the boyfriend, right? Of the girl who—” She catches herself. Has the decency to look uncomfortable. “Sorry. Clark mentioned it.”

“Yeah.”

“I'm Kat,” she says. “I'm covering her shifts.”

“I know.”

Bobby keeps walking. Past the model bedrooms with their fake pillows and fake lamps, down the stairs, into the storage level where the real furniture waits in boxes. He sits on the floor. Presses his palm to the wall.

Hey baby. It's me again.

That night, back in the apartment, Bobby can't sleep. He lies on his side of the bed with his hand on your side and stares at the ceiling. The silence is so complete it has a texture, thick and too heavy. He gets up. Goes to the living room. Stands in front of the shelf where the cops put the tapes back, lined up in a neat row they were never in before.

He picks one up. Turns it over in his hands. The label is in his handwriting. A date, nothing else.

He tells himself he's looking for clues. That's the reason he gives himself as he threads the tape into the camera, plugs it into the TV, and sits on the floor with the remote in his hand.

The apartment is dark except for the blue wash of the screen. He's going to watch the footage with detective's eyes, with Moreno's eyes, looking for something everyone missed: a person in the background, a car that didn't belong, a moment where your face changed because you knew something was coming. He's going to be useful. He's going to be the kind of boyfriend who solves this.

And there you are. In the kitchen. In the morning light. Turning around with a spatula in your hand, your hair messy from sleep, one of his t-shirts hanging off your shoulder. You're saying something—he can't hear it over the lump in his throat, but he can read your lips, do you want toast—and the light is behind you, exactly the way he remembered. 

You're so beautiful, so real and so present on this tape that for a second Bobby forgets. For one perfect, idiot second, his body forgets you're gone and his hand almost lifts to touch the screen. 

Then the moment passes and you're still in the TV and he's still on the floor and the distance between those two things is the rest of his life.

He watches everything. All of it. Hours. The sleeping footage that made Moreno look at him like that. Bobby sees it now, sees what it looks like from the outside, and he also sees what it actually was: a man so stunned by the existence of this person in his bed that he needed the camera between them to survive it. 

You in the kitchen. You reading on the couch with your feet tucked under you, turning pages with one hand, the other hand resting on Bobby's thigh without thinking about it. He filmed that too, the hand, just the hand. Five minutes of your fingers against his jeans because he couldn't say you touching me is the best thing in my life, so Bobby recorded it instead. You at the store, sorting inventory, your lips moving along to the radio, and you catch the camera, and your face does that thing—the mock-exasperated smile, the Bobby, stop that you never really meant—and your eyes are warm. 

Your eyes are so fucking warm. Alive.

He watches until the tapes run out, and then Bobby rewinds them and watches again. He can't help it. The apartment fills with the sound of you. Your voice, your laugh, the particular way you said his name, Bobby, half-scolding and half-tender. For a few hours, the silence has a crack in it and something warm leaks through.

He starts watching them every night. Before the store, after the store, sometimes both. It becomes a ritual. Some sick twin devotions, the basement and the tapes, the wall and the screen, one hand pressed to concrete and the other pressing play.

Month three.

Kat starts leaving coffee on the counter for him. 

It's hot, and it's there every night when he walks in, balanced on the edge of the register next to a ceramic lamp that's been on display since before you vanished. 

She doesn't make a thing of it. Doesn't say I made this for you, or I thought you might want. It's just there. An object in his path. Bobby takes it because refusing would require a conversation he doesn't have the energy for.

She starts sitting on the stairs when he's in the basement. Not coming all the way down, just perching on the third step, legs crossed, chin in her hand, talking to him through the open stairwell. 

She tells him about her day. About the customers, mainly. The couple who spent three hours testing every sofa in the showroom and then bought a lamp, the woman who wanted to return a bed frame she'd clearly had for two years, and some guy who asked if they sold waterbeds. Clark apparently almost threw him out. She's funny, in a way that's different from you. Louder, broader, more direct. 

You were a scalpel. Kat's a blunt instrument, and right now Bobby is so hollowed out that even blunt force registers as contact.

He doesn't laugh. He doesn't encourage her. But he stops telling her to go away, and Kat reads that correctly as the only invitation Bobby knows how to extend right now.

It's the tapes that start to bother him first.

Not anything he can really name at first. It's more like a feeling. Particular unease of looking at something familiar and sensing, at the periphery, that it's shifted. He's watching the kitchen footage—the toast morning, his favourite, the one he's rewound so many times the tracking wobbles at the edges—and something feels off. Bobby stops the tape. Rewinds. Watches again.

You turn around with the spatula. The light is behind you. You say do you want toast. Everything is exactly the same.

Except your face.

Bobby leans closer to the screen. Squints. Your face is… fine. It's your face. Your eyes, your mouth, the way your hair falls. It's you. But there's… something. Some flicker of wrongness so faint it's less than a shadow. Like the difference between a photograph and a photocopy of a photograph. The information is all there. It's just one generation removed from real.

He tells himself it's the tape. Old footage, cheap equipment, the kind of VHS degradation that happens when you rewind the same section a hundred times. He tells himself it's his eyes, his exhaustion, the fact that he's watching the same clips at two in the morning in a dark apartment obsessively. 

His brain is doing what brains do when they're tired and desperate: finding patterns in the static.

He believes it. For a while. He presses play.

One night, Kat is quiet for longer than usual. Bobby can feel her watching him from the stairs, her chin on her knees, the stairwell light behind her making her silhouette sharp.

“You loved her a lot, huh,” she says. Soft. Not a question.

Bobby goes rigid. His hand is flat on the wall. The draft tickles against his palm.

He turns his head. Looks at her. And whatever's on his face, he knows it’s not warm. It's the Bobby that bites, the one who gets mean, and Kat sees it happen, feels the temperature drop. The wall goes up behind his expression like a bulkhead slamming shut.

“I still love her,” he says, cold and flat. Corrective. Present tense.

He turns back to the wall. Kat is quiet for a long time. Then she gets up and goes back upstairs, and Bobby hears her footsteps cross the showroom floor above him. He closes his eyes, pressing his forehead to the concrete. He hates himself for being cruel to one more person who didn't deserve it or ask him but did you do it?

But he can't— 

He can't let her use the past tense. He can't let anyone use the past tense. Because that means it's over, and it's not over. It's not. You're somewhere, he can feel it. 

Bobby is a man sitting on a concrete floor talking to nobody, and the only woman who ever mattered to him is gone, and the last thing he gave her was a fucking grunt.

He can't live in that version. He won't.

Month four.

Bobby starts going through the inventory records. 

Your handwriting is everywhere. The logs, the labels on the bins, the sticky notes on the shelving units, reminding Clark which shipments need to go out first. He sits in the storage level with the binder in his lap and traces your letters with his fingertip. He can hear your voice in the loops and slants. The way you wrote like you talked, quick and slightly messy, always abbreviating things so he had to ask you to translate.

The tapes are getting worse.

He can't deny it anymore. The wrongness he felt at month three has deepened into something visible, a decay he doesn't need to squint to see. 

Your face has lost something in the kitchen footage. Nothing he could point to, nothing a stranger who'd never met you would notice. But Bobby has watched this clip a thousand times, and he knows the terrain of your face the way a sailor knows coastline.

Something has shifted. 

Your eyes are the right colour, but the light behind them is dimmer, muted, like watching a candle through frosted glass. Your mouth moves and the words come out (do you want toast), but there's a fraction-of-a-second delay. The audio arriving just a breath after the lips, and it gives your voice a quality that makes the hair on Bobby's arms stand up. A dubbing. A sense that someone else is speaking through you, almost perfectly synchronised but not quite. 

He goes through the other tapes. One by one. Methodical. The sleeping footage first. And you're there, you're sleeping, but the quality of your stillness is wrong. Too still. A person breathing doesn't look like that, doesn't have that uncanny smoothness, that mannequin-serenity. 

The footage of you at the store next. Sorting inventory, lips moving to the radio is the worst affected so far. Your hands look right, but they move in a way that's almost, almost correct. The way a marionette's hands move when the puppeteer is very good. Bobby watches your fingers sort through drawer pulls and cabinet hardware, and he knows that those are not the hands that touched him.

He doesn't tell anyone. Who the hell would he even tell? Moreno? Hey, detective, the girl on my tapes is turning into something else? Yeah, same one that went missing and everyone thinks I secretly killed! His mom? Terrence? They already think he's losing it. Or, worse, they would think he’s high again.

They already use that voice with him now. The careful tone people use when they're managing a dangerous animal. This would be the thing that tips it, the thing that sends Bobby from grieving boyfriend to guy who cracked.

He starts making a list of his failures instead. 

An erosion in reverse. Every day, some new memory surfaces, a moment he discarded when it happened and now can't stop replaying. Each one is worse than the last because each one is a place where he had a choice and chose wrong and didn't even realise it. Or maybe he did. And that’s worse.

The night you came home excited about something—a movie, a book, something a friend said, he can't even remember what it was, and that fact alone makes him want to put his fist through drywall—and you'd been lit up, talking fast, gesturing, and he'd been reviewing footage on the couch.

He'd said uh-huh without looking up. Not even once. Not once during your entire story did he lift his eyes from the viewfinder. You trailed off mid-sentence and went quiet, and Bobby hadn't looked up then either.

He tries to find that moment on tape. He knows he was filming that night. The camera was always running, always capturing, the viewfinder his permanent excuse for not being present. He scrubs through the footage looking for it. Looking for your face lit up. Looking for the moment you dimmed.

He finds the timestamp. And what Bobby sees makes his stomach drop.

You're sitting on the couch. He can tell it's you by the posture, the clothes, the way you're tucked into the corner cushion with your legs folded. But your face. Your face is… smeared. Like a thumbprint pressed across wet paint. The features are there, technically. But only technically. Eyes, mouth, nose. But they've lost their arrangement, their specificity.

The uniqueness that makes a face your face instead of just a face. 

Bobby is looking at you, and he can’t tell what you look like. He’s lived with you, slept beside you, fucked you in every spot in your shared apartment, filmed you obsessively for months, and yet he’s looking at a tape from four months ago, and he can’t reconstruct you.

The audio is worse. Your voice—the one he knows better than his own, the one that said his name like a bell, half-scolding and half-tender—is distorted.

Vowels flattened, consonants dissolved. That familiar melody of your speech now reduced to a low warbling tone that doesn't sound like language anymore. It sounds like a recording of a recording of a recording. Each new generation losing fidelity, losing you, until what's left is just the shape of where a voice used to be.

Bobby ejects the tape. His hands are shaking so hard he almost drops it. He puts it back on the shelf and sits on the couch in the dark and doesn't move for an hour.

He sits with the inventory binder the next night and reads your handwriting and says to the wall:

Something's happening to you, baby. I can't—I don't know how to explain it. But something's happening to the tapes, and I think it means something's happening to you. I need you to hold on. Okay? I need you to hold on because I'm still here, and I'm not leaving. I need you to still be you when I find you.

I think I got scared of how much I needed you. So I stopped letting myself need you. And that's not an excuse. I know that's not an excuse.

The truth is, I wanted to be there so much that it was destroying me. I wanted you so much it made me fucking mean. I loved you in a way I couldn't control, and I've always been an idiot who quits everything. Who gives up when things get too big and scary. You were the one thing that made my hands shake, and I hated it, and I needed it. I needed you because you saw me. I didn't know how to need something without resenting it.

So I resented you. For making me believe in myself. For making me need something other than the weed. And I showed it by turning away and turning away and turning away until you thought I didn't feel anything at all, when the reality is I felt everything. I felt too much. I've always felt too much, and I've never once known what to do about it except hide behind the camera and make a dumb joke and let the moment pass.

He pauses. Slams the binder shut. Runs his hand over the cover where your coffee ring stains the cardboard.

I should've told you about the toast morning. The spatula. The light behind you. I should've put the camera down and told you right then.

I should've told you every morning.

Baby. I can still see your handwriting. I need to—I need that to mean you're still somewhere. That this is just the tapes. That the tapes are old and I'm tired and you're fine, wherever you are, you're fine and you look like you and you sound like you and when I find you I'll know your face.

Month five.

Kat touches his arm.

It happens on a Wednesday. She's handing him the coffee, and her fingers brush his wrist and stay there. A half-second too long. Warm. Intentional.

Bobby stares at her hand. Looks at her. She doesn't look away.

“You know,” she says cautiously, “you don't have to sit down there alone every night. You could stay up here. Sit on one of the display couches. They're actually pretty comfortable for fake living rooms.” She smiles. Not the interested once-over from the first night. Softer now, more careful.

Bobby takes the coffee. Goes downstairs.

His pager buzzes against his hip later that night. He unclips it, tilts it toward the light. Kat's number. She must've pulled it from the staff contact sheet Clark keeps.

He looks at the little green screen for a long time. Clips the pager back to his belt. Presses his forehead to the wall.

That night, at home, he puts in the toast tape. It's become a test now, a compulsion. He checks the way you'd check a wound, needing to see if it's gotten worse, even though looking makes it worse too. He sits on the floor in front of the TV and watches the kitchen footage load.

The spatula is there. The counter. The window with the morning light. The t-shirt hanging off one shoulder. Everything in the frame is crisp, real, and correctly rendered.

Except there's no one holding the spatula.

Bobby's breath hitches. He leans forward, hands shaking. Rewinds. Plays it again.

The spatula lifts. Turns. The t-shirt shifts on a shoulder that isn't there. Or is there, maybe, but wrong. A smudge of colour where a body should be, a heat-shimmer distortion where your outline used to sit. The light comes through the window and falls on the kitchen counter and on the empty space where you stood, and there is something in that space.

Not nothing, or blank tape, but a presence that has no edges, no features, no face. A blur. A smear. The visual equivalent of a word on the tip of your tongue that won't come.

The audio says — — toast — and then dissolves into a sound that Bobby can only describe as the noise a voice makes when it's being pulled apart from the inside. Each syllable stretches thinner and thinner until it snaps, and what's left is a low, sustained hum that sounds like buzzing lights in an empty hallway.

Bobby presses stop. Ejects the tape.

He goes to the shelf. Pulls another. The one where you're reading on the couch, your hand on his thigh. He puts it in.

Your hand is gone. His thigh is there. Bobby can see his own jeans, the denim folded at the knee. That specific wear pattern on the left leg. But the hand that used to rest on it has dissolved into a faded wash, a blurry disturbance on the surface of the image, like someone pressed their palm to a fogged window and then the fog closed over the print.

He puts in another. The store footage. You sorting inventory.

The bins are being sorted by no one. Cabinet hardware moves through the air. Drawer pulls lift and settle into containers by themselves, organised by a system invented by a person the tape can no longer render. The radio plays in the recording. Bobby can hear the music. Unchanged. But the voice that used to sing along to it is gone. Replaced by a low, pulsing tone that rises and falls in a pattern that almost, almost resembles the melody you used to hum, if he listens hard enough, if Bobby presses his ear to the speaker and closes his eyes and believes—

He can't. He can't believe it hard enough. The tape runs, and the inventory sorts itself. The radio plays somewhere underneath it all in a frequency that used to be your voice.

Bobby puts every tape in, one by one. Every single one. And on every single one, you’re fading. The early tapes—the oldest ones, the ones from before the store, from the first months—are the worst. 

On those, you’re gone entirely. The frame exists, as does the light. But the space you occupied is smooth and empty, the image healing the wound of your absence like skin closing over a wound.

Reality itself seems to be deciding you were never there and quietly, methodically, is editing you out.

On the very last tape he checks, the most recent, he can still see you. Barely. A silhouette that won't resolve. A shape in the doorway that could be a person or could be a trick of the light. He pauses the tape and stares at the shape, and it looks like you the way a cloud looks like a face. If you want it to, if you squint hard enough and ignore the parts that don't match.

Bobby sits on the floor, holding the remote, staring at the paused frame. He understands, with a certainty that bypasses logic and settles directly into his bones, that you’re being erased. Not just from his life. Not just from the apartment, the store, or the neighbourhood that forgot you. From reality. From any evidence that you existed at all.

The tapes were his proof. Not for Moreno, or the cops, but for himself. Proof that you were real. That the toast morning happened. That your hand rested on his thigh. Love, in all its messy, imperfect shape between you, was real. That you sang along to the radio and burned rolls at Thanksgiving. That you stood in doorways waiting for him to look up. For once in his life, to just look up and see you. 

He filmed you because he couldn't tell you he loved you, and thought the films would be enough. They were going to be the evidence he'd have forever, the record of what he felt even when he couldn't say it aloud.

And now even that’s being taken.

He doesn't go to the store that night. He goes straight to the basement and puts his whole body against the wall. Not just his hand. His whole body, chest, cheek and palms flat against the concrete. Maybe he’s going insane, finally, properly insane, but he talks until his voice gives out.

Don't go. Whatever's happening, whatever this is—please. Don't go. I know I didn't earn you. I know I don't get to ask you to stay when I didn't give you a reason to stay. But I’m asking. I'm begging. Please.

I can barely remember your face, baby.

I looked at the tapes, and you're not—you're going away. You're going away, and I can't stop it. The last version of your face I have in my head is from the doorway, the night you left, and I didn't even LOOK at it. I fucking grunted. You were looking at me, and I was looking at the TV. Now your face is disappearing from my own tapes, and the last real look I had at you I wasted on a GRUNT.

Baby. Please don't make me forget what you look like.

The wall breathes against him. The draft. The nowhere-breeze, cooler than the room, steady, almost rhythmic. Like breathing. Like something on the other side pressing back, watching him.

Bobby lifts his head but he's alone down here.

He stays until morning anyway.

Month six.

The apartment is starting to forget you.

Your shampoo ran out first. Bobby couldn't bring himself to buy more, so the shower shelf has a gap now.

Your magazines are buried under his mail, his camera equipment that's migrated back to every flat surface because there's nobody to complain about it. The coffee mug—your mug, the one on the drying rack—he put it in the cabinet. High shelf. Behind his. He can't see it when he opens the door, but he knows it's there. 

The tapes are blank.

Completely blank. Clean, smooth, unrecorded type of blank. As if the camera was never pointed at anything, as if the record button was never pressed. Hours and hours of footage simply un-happened. 

Bobby put in the toast tape last week, and what played was thirty minutes of soft grey nothing. The gentle hiss of virgin magnetic tape, the sound of a medium that has never held information. He put it in the camera, connected it to the TV, and watched nothing. Rewound it. Watched nothing again, ejected it, held it in his hands, turned it over and read his own handwriting on the label. 

The date, just the date. The label is the only proof left that something was once on this tape, because the tape itself has forgotten.

All of them. Every single one. He checked them all, one after another, on a Saturday afternoon with the curtains drawn. By the time Bobby reached the last one, he wasn't even surprised. Just hollow. The shelves are full of labelled cassettes that now contain nothing.

A library of blanks. An archive of absence.

He has no pictures of you. 

He realises this with a physical lurch, sitting on the floor surrounded by dead tapes. He has no pictures of you. 

Bobby the camera guy, Bobby who filmed everything, Bobby who pointed the lens at you while you slept because he couldn't survive the sight of you without a barrier, and somehow, he has no proof you exist. The tapes are blank. He never took photographs because the camera was always rolling. And the only image of your face he has left is the one in his head, and that one is fading too. 

Just the ordinary human erosion. The way memory smooths out detail over time. Six months of absence turns a face into an impression, an atmosphere, a feeling-where-a-face-used-to-be.

He remembers your eyes. He thinks. He remembers warmth, colour, the way they changed in kitchen light, and the blue wash of the TV at midnight. But he doesn't remember their exact shape. Doesn't remember if the left one was slightly different from the right. 

The details are blurry; the tapes can't tell him anymore, and no one else can, either. You’re being unmade—from the record, from the world, from his own goddamn memory—and Bobby is the man who was supposed to preserve you, who pointed a camera at you for years, and he couldn't even do that right.

He still goes to the store. Every night. Without fail. 

Even when it rains, or when he's sick, or when his hands shake on the steering wheel, driving down at eleven PM. He sits on the floor, and he talks. Sometimes he brings the coffee, your order, and a paper cup from the place on El Camino that makes it the way you like best.

Bobby sets it on the concrete beside him like a place setting at a table for two, and it goes cold while he talks. Eventually, he pours it out in the utility sink by the loading dock, rinses the cup and drives home.

It's getting harder to believe.

He can feel it. 

Faith eroding the way your shampoo scent eroded from the pillow, the way you eroded from the tapes, gradually, then suddenly. Six months. People don't come back after six months. The cops have functionally closed the case. 

Bobby's mom called and talked around the subject for forty minutes before finally saying honey, maybe it's time to— and Bobby hung up on her. His buddy Terrence sat him down at a bar and said, awkwardly, carefully, the way everyone talks to Bobby now, man, I know you don't want to hear this, but— and Bobby walked out before he could finish the sentence.

He knows what they're going to say. He knows because he's been saying it to himself at three in the morning, lying on his side of the bed with his hand on the cold spot you should be, a thought looping in his brain: she's not coming back. She's not coming back.

But Bobby goes to the store. And he sits on the floor. He puts his hand on the wall. The draft is still there—that impossible nowhere-breeze, cool against his palm—and it feels like breathing. Bobby presses his whole body against the concrete.

This space is the last thing that still holds you. The tapes gave you up. The apartment gave you up. The neighbourhood, the cops, his friends, his mother, everyone has let go. Bobby presses himself against the wall every night because this is the one place in the world that still has you in it. The last surface that carries your imprint, and he’ll not leave it. 

He will not let the last proof of you go.

Bobby thinks about who he was seven months ago, and the contempt is so total it's almost cleansing. 

A twenty-something-year-old asshole in a crop top who thought he was too cool to say I love you, who hid behind a camera lens because looking at things through glass was easier than looking at them with his bare, stupid, cowardly eyes.

He had a girl who made him breakfast and stayed up waiting for him. Who asked do you even want to be here anymore and answered her with don't be dramatic because the truth was too enormous and too terrifying to fit through his teeth.

The camera was supposed to be the thing that kept you. The proof, the record, the insurance policy against loss. He filmed you because he couldn't hold you, and now the film is empty. His arms are empty too, and the only thing left is a dusty basement with a strange wall and a man who doesn't deserve the comfort of it.

Robert Franklin, who quit everything, who let every good thing in his life rot through neglect and cowardice—Robert Franklin refuses to quit this. 

This is the one thing he will hold onto with both hands. Because if he lets go, he has to look at who he is without it, and that person has nothing. That someone is an idiot with a camera and a crop top sitting in an empty apartment full of blank tapes, where he ground something beautiful down to dust because he was too chickenshit to be soft.

So he goes. Every night. He goes.

Month seven.

Clark is drunk.

Bobby can tell before he's through the door. 

The showroom lights are on, but the sign is flipped to CLOSED, and the radio's playing louder than usual from somewhere in the back. When Bobby makes his way past the dining displays, he finds Clark sitting in the leather recliner. The expensive floor model, the one that's been here since the store opened, with a bottle of Jim Beam wedged between his thigh and that look on his face. 

The one Bobby sees in the mirror. The look of a man whose life is falling apart.

“Bobby.” Flat. Not unfriendly. Voice of a man who's been drinking past sloppy and into something cold and brittle on the other side. “Right on time.”

“Clark.” Bobby eyes the bottle. “Where's Kat?”

“Sent her home early.” Clark takes a long, gulping drink. He's still wearing his work shirt, that same button-down he always wears, but it's untucked and the collar's stained. He looks like he's been in that recliner for a while. “Sit down.”

“I'm going downstairs.”

“No.” Another wet gulp. His eyes are red but steady. “You're not. That's what I need to talk to you about.”

Bobby stops.

“Linda kicked me out,” Clark says conversationally. The way he'd talk about lumber prices or a late shipment. He gestures around the showroom with the bottle. “So I'll be staying here. Back office. Maybe downstairs, if I can clear space between the Scandinavian imports.” The joke almost lands. Almost. “Which means I need the room, Bobby. All of it.”

“You're—what?”

“I'm saying you can't come here anymore.”

The words land like a slap. Bobby's hand tightens on the strap of his camera bag.

“Clark—”

“Seven months.” 

And there it is. That thing that happens when Clark drinks, when the bourbon strips away the politeness and the it's not my place and the careful middle-aged-man diplomacy, and what's left is just the raw compressed anger of a man who's been swallowing his own resentment for months.

Clark is a man who holds everything down until the whiskey lifts the lid and whatever's underneath comes out scalding.

“Seven months of you in my basement. Seven months of—do you know what's happened to this place since your girlfriend disappeared? Do you? Because I do. I watch it every day. I watch the customers not come in. I watch the phone not ring. I watch the neighbourhood look at my store like it's a goddamn crime scene and take their money to Stevens Creek because nobody wants to buy a dining set from the place where a girl vanished.” Clark's voice is rising, a deep rumbling anger spilling outwards. “I built this store. And now I'm sleeping in it because my ungrateful wife thinks I'm a failure and my customers think I'm cursed and the only person who walks through my door every night is you, Bobby, sitting on my floor, talking to my wall—”

“That's not my fault —”

“She's not down there.” Clark slams the bottle on the end table. It cracks the mahogany finish, and he doesn't notice or doesn't care. “She's not in the walls, or the ceiling or the goddamn floor, son. She's not inside a goddamn flatpack bookshelf.”

Bobby sucks in a breath. “You don't know that. Nobody does.”

“Yeah, I do.” 

Clark leans forward. Red-eyed. Steady. And the thing he's been holding between his teeth for months comes out. The ugly thing that isn't about Bobby at all, it's about Clark, about a store that was failing before you ever disappeared and a marriage that was cracking before the customers stopped coming.

A man who needs someone to blame because the alternative is looking in the mirror and seeing his own fingerprints on everything that's broken. And right now, tonight, drunk and newly homeless and sitting in a recliner in a showroom full of furniture nobody's buying, Clark has found his someone.

“She's either dead,” Clark says, and the word just hangs there, settling on Bobby's skin like hot oil spilling over— “or she left you. And either way, son. Either way. You need to stop. Because I can't have you down there anymore. I can't have this—this haunting—attached to my store. I'm trying to save what's left, and you sitting in my basement every night is—”

He stops himself. A crack appears in Clark’s anger, a fissure where the sober Clark underneath can see what the drunk Clark is doing. Using Bobby's grief to deflect from his own failure. Blaming a missing girl for a business that was haemorrhaging money long before she vanished, for a wife who kicked him out because Clark worked sixty-hour weeks and never once asked how her day was.

Clark knows. Underneath the bourbon, he knows. And the knowing makes his face twist with both sadness and fury.

“Bobby.” His voice changes. Drops. The anger drains out of it like water from a cracked glass, leaving only the exhaustion underneath. Clark rubs his eyes with one hand, and suddenly, he looks old. Older than he is, tired in a way that has nothing to do with the hour. “I didn't—that came out wrong. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said it like that.”

Bobby doesn't hear him.

Because Bobby is already moving. Past the display couches and the model bedrooms with their fake pillows and fake lives. He shoulder clips the corner of a dining table hard enough to shift it on the showroom floor, and the door chimes behind him when he rips it open.

The night air hits him, and he's in the parking lot, his hands are on his knees, and he's breathing in short, ragged, tearing bursts that feel like they're coming from somewhere below his lungs. 

Somewhere that's been sealed shut for seven months and has just been cracked open with the words she's either dead or she left you.

Dead or she left you.

Dead.

Or she left you.

He can't fucking breathe. He can't—the air is right there. Santa Clara night air, warm and full of eucalyptus and car exhaust, but he can't get it into his lungs. Because Clark said dead, and that word is a door Bobby has refused to open for seven months, and now it's open, it's wide fucking open. 

And behind it is a version of reality where you’re in the ground somewhere and the last thing he ever said to you was a grunt and your last memory of him is the back of his head and the blue light of the television and the sound of a man who couldn't be bothered to look up.

And the tapes are blank. And your face is gone. And there is no record anywhere in the world that you existed except the label on a cassette in Bobby's handwriting and in a basement he's just been locked out of.

“Bobby. Bobby, wait—”

Kat. Coming around the side of the building, car keys in her hand. She didn't go home. She was sitting in her car, headlights off, engine off, just sitting there, and she's been doing that, he knows she's been doing that, waiting for him, watching the door. And he's never said anything because acknowledging it would mean acknowledging everything it implies.

“Bobby, hey, stop, are you okay? I heard him through the door, what did he—”

Bobby straightens up. Pivots toward her. And he knows—somewhere in the functioning part of his brain, in the part that isn't currently on fire—that she doesn't deserve what’s coming. She's been nothing but kind.

Coffee on counters, stairs and parking lots and pager numbers he never called back. She never once asked for anything in return. She’s a good person standing in a parking lot trying to help a man who’s bleeding out from a wound she didn't inflict.

But the thing inside Bobby right now is not rational. It's not kind. It's the wounded animal, the cornered dog, the part of Robert Franklin that has always turned his pain into teeth and aimed them at whoever's closest because the alternative is feeling it. And he…

He can't feel it; if he feels it right now, he’ll come apart on this asphalt, and he doesn't know if he'll come back together again.

“Don't do that. Don't chase me. Don't wait in the parking lot. Don't leave me coffee. Don't—” His voice cracks, and he hates it. Hates the sound of himself breaking in front of her. Another woman who's being kind to him, and he's going to ruin it with his inability to do anything with tenderness except flinch from it. “I'm not going to fuck you, Kat. Alright? Is that what you need to hear? My girl is missing. The girl I love is fucking missing, and I don't know where she is, and I can't—I can't do this. Whatever you think this is going to become. I can't.”

He presses the heel of his hand into his eye. Hard. Grinding the tears back because Bobby doesn't cry in front of people. Even though he's been doing it alone on concrete for seven months, even though the irony—Bobby Franklin pushing away the person trying to be there for him while grieving the person he pushed away by not being there—is so perfect and so cruel it feels engineered. Like the universe is holding up a mirror and saying see? You're doing it again. You learned nothing, idiot.

He knows. He knows he's doing it again. He can't stop doing it.

“I can't,” he rasps. Quiet, broken. “I'm sorry.”

Kat stands still. Her keys dangle from one finger, catching the orange glow of the streetlight. She doesn't step back. Doesn't cry or get angry or tell him to go fuck himself, though she definitely should. Bobby almost wishes she would because it would give him someone to push against.

The tapes are blank, and your face is a smear. Reality is closing over the hole you left like water closing over a stone, and soon there’ll be no evidence you were ever here at all except a man in a parking lot who can't stop saying your name in the present tense.

Kat shifts her keys to her other hand. Takes one step closer. Not touching. Just closer.

She looks at him, and she says, quietly, softly, “I don't need you to love me, Bobby.”

Quiet. Simple. Like she's telling him the time.

Bobby's mouth opens. Closes. His hand drops from his face. The parking lot is quiet. Only the buzzing streetlight fills the silence. 

He looks at her, and he looks wrecked, he knows. Absolutely wrecked, hollowed out and scraped clean from last seven months, standing in a place where the only options are forward into something he's not ready for or backwards into a basement he's just been locked out of, and he doesn't say yes.

But he doesn't walk away, either.

the blonde started listening more intently to your rambles, crimson eyes zeroing in on facial features that have slowly matured over time, his own expression uncharacteristically relaxed—tender.

he started paying more attention to the way you lit up when he subtly complimented you, started noticing how your smile widened whenever he looked your way, squishy cheeks eventually puffed up with glee.

he started feeling weird, a slight fluttering sensation coursing through his veins once your eyes met—though he'd constantly disregard it as nothing more than mere figments of his imagination, or better yet, lack of sleep.

katsuki bakugo is good at a lot of things... except for romance.

which is why—he didn't think much of it when he snatched your hand into his, tugging you backwards against his chest and far far away from the extra he didn't recognize in front of you.

the blonde could tell from a mile away that this wasn't an ordinary conversation; coy smile, casual tone, and leaning against the locker besides yours...?

whoever this asshole was has other intentions, that's for damn sure, and for whatever reason—katsuki didn't like it, not one damn bit.

"back the hell off." he glares, not even waiting for a response before turning around, calloused hand sliding down from your wrist to your palm, leading you straight down the hall and out the building.

your brows raise, heart racing as you stumble close behind, mind reeling with emotions. "k-kacchan?! what was that all about...?!"

he scoffs, fuming with determination. "the bastard was obviously flirting with you, idiot." he glances back at you, eyes narrowed. "don't tell me you didn't notice."

"well, i kinda got the vibe but..." you pause, tilting your head ever so slightly. "you didn't have to save me or anything, i had it covered."

"tsk—i know that." he clicks his tongue, expression sour, facing forward once more, faint mumble escaping him. "...just didn't like it."

you blink. "hm?"

"...'ts nothing." he continues, voice calmer compared to a few seconds ago. "just—" he huffs, hand letting go of yours to stuff back within his pocket. "—stay close to me so it won't happen again, got it?"

thump thump. thump thump. thump thump.

the air seems to get knocked right out of you, eyes twinkling with newfound hope—excitement. it was the first time he verbally invited you to remain within arms reach, to stay close, and you hoped... you sure hoped, it wasn't the last.

you immediately lighten up, nodding vigorously with high spirits, suddenly latching onto his forearm with a familiar squeal of pure joy. "uhn!"

he tries to fight it off, he really does, but something with the way your warmth seeps into his—diminishes his stubborn pride. his heart does a full on somersault, the tips of his ears flushing a bright cherry red, palms sweaty.

yet he doesn't make a move to shove you off, simply letting you cling to him—just like you've always have. "...idiot."

katsuki bakugo is good at a lot of things... except for romance.

Katsuki shifted his weight, his fingers sparking with miniature pops. He was only five, but his ego was already ten feet tall—even if his height didn't match. "Fine! Then.. Then what do you want? If we’re gonna get married when we’re Pro Heroes, I gotta know what you like!"

Y/N paused, looking up at him through her lashes. Katsuki’s longlasting crush throughout their entire friendship was never subtle. She, however, wasn't ready to trade her sandbox independence for cooties just yet.

"Married?" Y/N giggled, shaking her head. "I don’t think so.."

"I’ll be the tallest! And the strongest!" He spoke with confidence, his face turning a shade of red that rivaled his eyes.

"Hmm, maybe." Y/N said, smoothing out a mound of sand. "But when you’re a big strong man who can carry me, then maybe I’ll consider it one day. Until then, go play with your bugs."

Katsuki stood frozen as her challenge sank into his stubborn head. Without a word, he stomped over to shove the beetle into a bush and turned on his heel.

"Just you wait, Y/N! You’re gonna be eating those words!"

He stomped off to the grassy field where his other friends were huddled. Y/N didn't pay them much mind, humming as she returned to her important task of building a princess castle—one strictly free of twitchy bugs.

Ten minutes of peace passed. She was just finishing the moat when a rhythmic chanting drifted over from the grass.

"Seven! .. Eight! .. Nine! .. Come on, Bakugo!"

Y/N looked up, squinting against the sun. In the distance, she saw a small, spiky-haired figure face-down in the grass. Katsuki was shaking, his tiny five-year-old arms locked at the elbows as he struggled to lower himself.

"Ten!" The group of boys cheered.

Katsuki collapsed into the dirt, panting heavily, but he immediately scrambled back up into a plank position. Even from across the playground, Y/N could see the furious determination on his face.

Y/N smiled, patting the top of her sandcastle. "He's so weird." She whispered, though her eyes stayed glued to his struggle for one more push-up.

The neon lights of the city flickered against the damp pavement, casting long, shimmering shadows as Y/N and Katsuki walked their assigned route.

They moved with a synchronized rhythm that didn't require words—a silent language built over many years of shared snacks, scraped knees, and grueling training sessions.

"It’s too quiet." Katsuki grumbled with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his hero costume.

The orange glow of his gauntlets caught the light every time he shifted. "If one more civilian asks me for a selfie instead of getting robbed, I’m gonna lose it."

"A quiet night means people are safe. Isn't that the point of being a hero?"

"The point is to win." He countered. "Can't win if there's no one to fight."

"Whatever helps you sleep at night, Katsuki.." Y/N teased, nudging his armored shoulder with her own.

With a sharp Tch, Katsuki leaned into her shoulder for a heartbeat before correcting himself. They’d been doing this dance since they were in diapers—Katsuki charging forward with explosive heat, and Y/N acting as the steady ground he always returned to.

The city noise began to fade into a hum as they turned onto the arched stone bridge that spanned the Musutafu canal. Usually, the water was just a dark ribbon cutting through the concrete, but tonight, it was transformed.

Y/N stopped in her tracks, her breath catching. "Look!"

Below them, hundreds of paper lanterns drifted with the current, their golden flickers reflecting off the dark water like fallen stars.

The pink lotus flowers scattered among them caught the soft glow of the neon skyline. Further upstream, a festival was winding down, its remnants finally reaching the quiet corner of their route.

Katsuki stepped up to the railing beside her. He didn't grumble about 'villains' or 'patrolling' this time. He just leaned his elbows on the cool stone, his gaze fixed on the water.

"It’s actually.. Pretty." Y/N whispered, admiring the view.

"It’s a distraction." Katsuki muttered, though his voice lacked its usual bite. He glanced sideways at her, the golden light from the water dancing in his crimson eyes. "But I guess it’s not the worst thing to look at."

Y/N leaned further over the railing, her eyes wide as she traced the path of a particularly bright lantern bobbing through a cluster of pink lotuses.

The golden light played across her features, turning her skin to honey and casting a soft, ethereal glow into her eyes. To her, the river was a masterpiece—a rare moment of tranquility in a life usually defined by training and sirens.

"It’s like the stars fell into the water." She murmured, a small, genuine smile tugging at her lips. "I could stay here all night and just watch them drift."

She was so captivated by the shimmering view that she didn't notice the shift in him beside her. Katsuki wasn't looking at the water anymore.

He had completely turned away from the 'distraction' of the festival lights, with his back against the stone railing and his arms crossed over his chest.

His crimson eyes were locked only on her.

He watched the way the wind caught a piece of her hair and how her expression softened in a way she only allowed when she felt safe.

To him, the lanterns were just paper and fire, but the girl standing next to him—the girl who had meant everything to him since they were five years old—was the only thing in the city actually worth looking at.

"Yeah.." Katsuki cleared his throat, his voice dropping into a low tone that hummed with a rare kind of sincerity. "Best view in the whole damn city."

Y/N finally blinked, pulled out of her trance by the tone in his voice. She turned her head, expecting to see him pointing out a distant skyscraper or a hero billboard.

Instead, she found him staring directly at her with a soft, focused expression.

"You're not even looking at the river, Katsuki." She teased him, well-aware of how close he was standing next to her.

"I’ve seen enough water." A steady warm smirk formed on his face. "I’m looking at what I want. Same as always."

"Oh, Katsuki.." Y/N sighed, playfully rolling her eyes as she fixed her gaze back to the view of the lights.

She felt his stare and fought the heat rising in her face.

The silence stretched between them, comfortable and thick with a history that spanned over a decade. The lanterns shimmered in her eyes, yet she only felt the heat of his presence beside her.

"Still trying to pull that 'yuck' face?" Katsuki asked suddenly, his voice teasing but hushed.

Y/N chuckled, her eyes still on a floating lotus. "I think I grew out of that. Mostly because you stopped trying to give me bugs and started giving me headaches instead."

"Hey, don't pin that all on me." Katsuki let out a low groan, his lips twitching into a ghost of a smirk. "You're a pain in the ass, all the time."

"And you like this pain in the ass?" Her eyebrow arched as she tossed him a sarcastic question.

"Damn right." He answered without a second of hesitation.

Y/N shook her head, letting out a soft, disbelieving laugh huffing through her nose. "You really never give up, do you? You’re the most stubborn person I’ve ever met."

"Had to be." He muttered, his voice surprisingly steady. "If I wasn't, I wouldn't have kept up with you."

He shifted, his shoulder brushing hers as the heat of his hero suit radiated against her arm. The playfulness started to dissolve, replaced by a heavier, grounded tension.

"I've liked this pain in the ass since we were kids fighting over the same damn swing set." He spoke to the air between them.

Y/N’s lips curled into a faint smile, the memories of their childhood blurring together in her mind like the colors in the water.

"Every time I had gotten a new move or a higher score, I’d look at you and wonder if I was finally checking off your boxes. Spent my whole life becoming that big strong man you always wanted."

He looked down at his own hands—gloved, calloused, and capable of leveled-city-block power. "I can carry you and this whole damn city on my back if I had to."

"Oh, you know I didn't mean it." She began, her voice soft but steady. "We're not five anymore. I was just a little bit of a brat. Bugs and boys were gross back then, but you—you’ve always been the strongest man I've ever known."

A low, huffed laugh escaped his throat—a genuine sound that didn't hold a drop of his usual aggression.

"A brat? Yeah, no kidding." He looked up at the stars, a small smile starting to break through. "Always did have high standards, I'll give you that."

The memory seemed to amuse him more now than it had back then. The frustration of a five-year-old boy had matured into the deep, enduring devotion of a man.

"I used to get so damn mad." He confessed. "I’d just go off and do a hundred more push-ups. Figured if a bug wouldn't work, I’d just have to become more strong."

"I don't think you were able to do a hundred push-ups at the time, Katsuki." A soft laugh escaped her.

"Yeah, yeah.. Whatever.." He glanced at her for a second, looking at her with a warmth he usually hid.

"But you’re right. We're not five anymore, and I stopped bringing you bugs a long time ago."

She looked at him, seeing the way his eyes were stuck on her—as if the rest of the world had simply faded away.

Y/N knew that look in his eyes too well—she could pinpoint exactly what he was fighting to keep to himself.

He was holding back, to respect her boundaries, refusing to rush a single thing even after waiting over ten years for her to finally meet him halfway.

He was a grown man now, but his eyes held the same desperate hope of the five-year-old boy who’d catch bugs to impress her and trained his hardest to become a 'big strong man'.

"So, what's it gonna be?" He finally spoke up. "You gonna keep me waiting until we're retired, or are you gonna let me prove it right now?" He was smug about it, expecting the regular pull back that she'd always do.

"I don't know, Katsuki.." Her voice trailed off playfully. "You talk a big game. You've got the hero rank and the flashy quirk, sure. But these bridge railings are pretty high, and I’ve had a very long day of training. I'm practically dead weight."

"Are you sure you’re even able to pick me up?" She already knew the answer he’d proven a thousand times before.

The challenge was like fuel to a fire. In one swift, fluid motion, he stepped into her space.

Before she could even blink, his arm hooked securely behind her knees and his other hand stabilized her back, hoisting her up against his chest as if she weighed nothing.

Her breath hitched as she looked at him, the lantern light fading against the heat between them. "Okay, okay!" She was breathless now, her heart racing as she realized just how close they really were. "You're definitely the big, strong hero you said you'd be."

"Damn right I am." He muttered as he adjusted his grip, pulling her just a little bit closer. "And don't you forget it."

Looking into his fierce eyes she’d known her whole life, Y/N decided right then and there—the wait was over.

"If you had known better—"

She cut off his smug comment instantly, leaning in to press her lips against his in a firm, long-awaited kiss.

It was a bold, sudden move—completely unexpected. Katsuki, the boy who was always three steps ahead, was caught off guard.

His hands instinctively tightened around her in a panicked, protective grip just to make sure he didn't drop her.

The kiss held the weight of a lifetime. When she pulled away, her cheeks were nearly burning red—the exact shade of his eyes.

Katsuki stared at her, his mouth slightly agape with his usual scowl nowhere to be found. He looked dazed, his pupils blown wide as he processed their first kiss.

Y/N smiled widely, her soft laughter breaking the tension. Watching Katsuki—usually a storm of noise and confidence—reduced to a quiet, wide-eyed statue was the ultimate win.

"Earth to Katsuki!" Her voice was light and musical. "You still in there?"

She gave his bicep a soft, grounding pat—a quiet signal to put her down now that she’d completely wrecked his composure.

Reluctantly, and still moving like he was in a trance, Katsuki let her feet touch the ground. The second she was steady, Y/N smoothed out her hero suit and turned on her heel.

"Come on, big strong man!" She called over her shoulder, her ponytail swaying as she began to stroll back into the rhythm of their patrol route. "We still have three blocks to cover. We're supposed to be looking out for villains, remember?"

His hand flew up, his fingers pressing firmly against his mouth as if he were trying to physically keep the feeling of her lips from fading.

Katsuki silently followed behind her, his face a shade of red that wouldn't go away as his mind replayed the last ten seconds on a loop.

The softness, the scent of her, the way she had finally closed the gap—it was better than what he had ever imagined.

A long, jagged breath escaped him. He buried his shaking hand in his pocket, his mind a whirlwind as he spent the rest of the patrol replaying those few seconds over and over.

He finally secured the win he had been chasing for practically his entire life.

The room falls quiet, the weight of silence settling around you. It takes a heartbeat too long to realize that Keigo has stopped speaking. Looking up again you see him looking at you with concern written over his face, thumb brushing over your hip—when did it get there?

“You okay there, dove? You spaced out for some time,” his voice softens when he says ‘dove’, like the nickname holds more than just teasing now. And your heart, the traitorous thing it is, beats a little faster at it.

He grins, small, boyish and a little shy. Of course he could feel that, the feather still pressed over the spot where your heart is, but he could probably also feel it with the way your chest is pressed up against his.

You hope he can’t see your cheeks flush (he can, damn him and his good eyes even though it’s dark inside), and just nod once. “Mm. ‘Was just thinking about the time you lost your tooth because you flew into a wall.” Liar, you were thinking if it would still be like this if the commission gave you two more time for yourselves.

Sometimes you wonder if what you feel is love, being in love with your best friend, what a classic trope. But then you push that thought aside, quickly, like it's dangerous. You can’t afford to let yourself want that.

You two are seventeen years old, getting groomed to be the perfect weapons the commission wants you to be. You know if you were to fantasize about it, they would strip it away in the blink of an eye. No, you can’t be in love with Keigo, for it would only end in heartbreak.

Within a second your world tilts. You're now laying on Keigo’s chest, him laying flat on his back, one of his wings dangling off the bed, the other draped over you. The wing twitches slightly, brushing against you as if it’s trying to reassure you, but it only makes your heart race a little faster. Both his arms wrapped around your waist.

“Liar,” he says with a grin on his, stupidly handsome, face. “C’mon dove, tell me. You can tell me anything, you know that right?” The sincerity on his face makes you move your mouth before even realising it.

You gulp once “I was just thinking about what life would be like outside these walls. What our lives would look like. If you—” you trail off, looking to the side, to the same industrial gray wall you’ve seen all your life, not daring to meet his eyes when telling him the next part.

“If you would still be here, with me,” you finish your thought in a whisper, and the room feels heavier somehow, the silence wrapping around you like a blanket.

You hear him sigh before his hand comes up to cup your face, gentle, as if you’re made of glass. You feel yourself melt into his hand slightly, before you catch yourself. His thumb brushes against your cheekbone, an action so soft compared to the actions they’d made him do just earlier today.

His voice is quiet, barely above a whisper, when he finally speaks, “Yeah, dove. I’d still be here. With you.”

His words make your face heat up under his hand. Words are stuck in your throat, because it shouldn’t be like this, the two of you can’t be like this. Still, you look at him, first at his eyes, filled with pure adoration, and then that traitorous part of your brain—your heart really—looks at his lips for a heartbeat too long before ripping your gaze upwards again. Shit.

You can only hope he didn’t notice, but of course you're not that lucky. His soft smile, turns into a teasing, smug one that still has hints of softness underneath. You feel his thumb move down to your jaw. His gaze half-lidded now.

A whisper in the back of your mind warns you of the danger, of how you two shouldn’t do this. There are only seven more months until you two get sent off into ‘the real world.’ Just seven, and then your lives would change, no longer living inside these gray, sterile, walls.

“You’re right, we shouldn’t, dove,” Keigo speaks out, startling you, quickly looking up at him again—when did you look away? Did you say that out loud? You don’t know, all you know is that you’re warm, Keigo’s wing still draped over you, feathers whispering against your skin like soft little love notes, his chest steady and warm underneath you, hearts syncing to the same beat.

Still, you slowly start closing the distance between the two of you, murmuring a “We really shouldn’t.” His head lifts from the pillow, one last whisper, before meeting you halfway “We’re not doing anything.”

The first brush of his lips steals your breath, a clumsy meeting of warmth and want. He tastes like something sweet and sharp, adrenaline and something softer hidden underneath. His wing tightens around you, pulling you closer until you can’t tell where you end and he begins.

It’s desperate in the quietest way—the kind of kiss you give when you’ve both spent your whole lives being told you can’t have this. His hand finds the back of your neck, thumb tracing small, grounding circles there, and you think you could drown in the feel of it.

When you finally pull back, the world feels different. Brighter, maybe. Dangerous, definitely. But you’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Your eyes flutter open, looking straight into Keigo’s. Lips a bit red and swollen, drawing your attention to them once again. There’s a slight flush on his face, creeping down his neck and disappearing into his Commission issued shirt.

Hands tighten in the fabric, his wing still tight around you, the little feathers puffed up a bit on your back. He pulls you up a bit more, nosing along your jawline. “We shouldn’t do anything more often,” he murmurs against your skin.

You laugh, small and breathy. It skims across his face like a gentle breeze, making him think of the clouds he sometimes flies through when the Commission lets him out—only for him to do his mission, which most of the time involves something teenagers shouldn’t be even thinking of doing.

“We really shouldn’t.” with that you capture his lips again, stealing his breath—and heart—once more. Eyelashes fluttering against cheekbones, tongues entangling a bit more expertly now, but still awkward. Noses keep bumping into each other, and you exhale a laugh into his mouth. You feel him smile in return before he tightens his hold on you once more.

The rest of the time together is spent like that, adrenaline filling the both of you. This shouldn’t be happening, you shouldn’t even entertain the thought of kissing someone, much less Keigo—or Hawks, as they call him here.

He shouldn’t even be in your room right now, having snuck out of his own earlier that evening. How the two of you haven’t been caught over the years is beyond you, but then again, the two of you aren’t perfect weapons for nothing.

By the time you pull away from him—still close enough to feel and hear his heartbeat beneath you, feel the way his chest rises and falls with every breath—it’s way past the time he normally sneaks back into his own room.

“You should probably go,” you whisper, and his eyes are still on you—on the way your hair is a bit messy now with the way he was running his hands through it. On the way your lips are red and kiss-bitten. On the way your cheeks are almost as red as his wings. “You’re already later than normal.”

And oh, how he wishes he can just stay here, in the same bed as you, wrap his around around you and fall asleep with your head on his chest. But that isn’t reality, is it? The two of you are still in this mindless dungeon your parents sold you off to. Industrial gray fills his vision when he looks around your room once more. The only thing that makes it seem brighter is you—even if what you’re wearing doesn’t have any color in it.

He’s been thinking about this moment for years. Just being alone with you, having you all to himself, away from the watchful eyes of the Commission. He’d buy an apartment for the two of you, living together to save expenses.

Of course he’d have to feed the Commission some bullshit lie about the two of you working better together. Team building isn’t something they’re fond of, but with the right twist of words he can definitely work something out to keep you close to him.

But for now he knows he should go back to his room. Be mindful of the handful of handlers that sometimes walk through the hallways—always watching, except for when they’re not. He’s memorised their routines. How many steps each handler takes. When they do their rounds. Knows the way the camera’s are angled, and how to avoid them.

He knows, but still he can’t seem to let go of you. His hands on your hips, tracing small, invisible shapes into your skin. He surges forward once more, giving you a small peck this time. “Goodnight, dove.”

“Goodnight, Kei,” you whisper back, before pushing yourself off him so he can get out of the room. He glances back toward you one more time, feathers angled towards you like they’re reaching out, before he dips out of your room and towards his own.

Rolling over you bury your face into the pillow and let out a small squeal—one of the only feelings you let yourself feel while inside of this building. It’s so unlike you, so unlike the person the Commission wants you to be. But you can’t help it.

And then you feel it, under your shirt, pressed over your heart—Keigo’s feather. The one he keeps on you to make sure you’re safe. It wiggles a few times before sliding up and slipping out of your neckline. Right, he can hear you. Huffing through your nose you look at it hovering right in front of you. “What?”

The feather shudders slightly, as if laughing. Dickhead. Then it moves towards your face and taps you on your nose once—a small gesture Keigo loves to do when you’re frowning, and now apparently when you’re squealing, too—before it brushes feather-soft over your lips and disappears into your shirt once more.

Rolling your eyes you finally situate yourself in the bed. But your smile never leaves your face, and even in your sleep you can still feel fingers and feathers all over you.

The next few weeks are spent tense. No secret glances, no lingering touches, no acknowledgement that you and Hawks know each other as more than just two perfect weapons in the making. There are handlers constantly watching the two of you, so if your gaze would fall onto him a second too long, they’d know something is off.

Inside of these concrete walls you cannot show your true emotions, face blank at all times of the day, despite you wanting to reach out and hold Keigo.

You’re not sure what the two of you are right now—except for children that are being groomed by those who are supposed to protect heroes—as you haven’t had a chance to talk to him about it yet. There have been no more talks in your bedroom.

But every time you walk past him, that one small feather at your ribcage wiggles just slightly. A small acknowledgement that he’s seen you, that he can still feel and hear you, despite not being there with you.

It’s harder than you expected it to be. Never in your life would you’ve thought that you’d share a kiss with the boy you’ve spent most of your life with. And never in your life would you have thought you’d come to the conclusion that you are, in fact, in love with said boy.

That doesn’t mean you haven’t talked to him, though. Well… talked is a big word, it’s mostly you who did the talking while he would hover his small feather in front of you, sometimes tapping on your skin if he agreed or disagreed with something. It was a small language the two of you had configured when younger.

A smile threatens to take over your face, before you smooth it over and look ahead again. Your handler is walking behind you—an older woman in her fifties—hands clasped behind her back, clipboard in hand, her heels click click clicking on the linoleum floor below, suit crisp, not a single wrinkle in sight. Her expression schooled—the same way yours is, and everyone else’s in this entire building.

Another set of footsteps can be heard from the other side of the hallway, one a bit more lax, and the other right on their heel. You know that gait anywhere. Hawks.

The two of you walk past each other and bow your heads towards one another. Custom, something they drilled into you. There’s nothing to be seen in his golden eyes, not a glimpse of emotion, nor can it be found in yours.

His birthmarks seem darker in these lights, almost as if they had filled them in with an even darker shade of black before he had to train. You’re sure people will think that it’s simply eyeliner, when it’s not.

One of the little kids here—around six—had asked him if it was, and he’d laughed at them. Small but genuine. It was one of the only times he’s ever shown emotion outside of your room, and it made your heart flutter inside of your ribcage. Something that didn’t go unnoticed by the blond, whose feathers puffed up behind him a little.

The footsteps disappear behind you, indicating that Hawks and his handler are away from earshot, which makes your own handler finally speak up. She talks about quirk swapping the kids, aged ten to fourteen. There are only four in total—seven children in the program, including you and Keigo—but they need to know what it’s like to not fight with their own quirk.

It’s your quirk, being able to swap quirks of others. The first time you told Keigo that, he absolutely lit up and asked you if you could swap quirks with him, which you did without a second thought. You’d warned him it meant he didn’t have a quirk, at all, but he just beamed and told you he wanted to see his wings on you.

Seven year old you had done so after confirming he really was okay with it. When he nodded, you focused and swapped them around. Crimson wings sprouting from your back, while Keigo’s disappeared. It went fine for all but 2 seconds, then it went wrong.

Keigo was so used to his wings, he instinctively leaned forward to keep balance. Without his wings, he toppled forward, center of gravity having shifted, no longer being dragged back by his wings. You in the meantime fell backwards, the heavy wings dragging you down, not having braced for the extra weight you’d be carrying on your back.

Keigo landed on top of you, while you landed on one of your—technically Keigo’s—wings. Pain shot through your spine, and up your skull. Tears pricking at your waterline, and one even slid down your temple and disappeared into your hair.

And then came the noise. It was as if everything was tuned up to the max—you could hear the buzz of electricity in the ceiling lights, keypads, electric doors. Could hear your own heartbeat, blood rushing through you, the sound of the feathers twitching behind your back. And you could even hear his heartbeat and blood rushing through him.

Putting your hands to your ears you tried blocking everything out, but it didn’t help. You could hear everything around you, even when you curled up in a ball.

The boy above you was touching your shoulder, speaking, but even that felt like it was too loud—not registering the words he was desperately trying to tell you. You laid on that floor for what seemed like hours, crying about everything being too loud.

It was only when Keigo started whispering, so soft no one else would’ve heard, that you finally heard what he was saying. ‘Swap it back. Give me my wings back and it’ll be fine.’ And you did just that. The red plumes disappearing behind you and reappearing behind their rightful owner.

“Sorry, I should’ve warned you,” Keigo’s voice was trembling a bit, fingers wiping under your eyes to rid them of their tears. “I forgot. I’m used to it now.”

That made your heart stutter a bit. That’s what he hears at all times? It wasn’t something you accounted for. You’ve seen his quirk in action—flying, though it was more hovering in place, and him controlling th individual feathers to slice through objects with precision it scared you—but you never actually asked what it did.

“That’s what you hear all the time?” you breathed out, fingers trembling slightly beside you. Keigo nodded his head, his golden curls bouncing with the motion. The two of you are silent for a bit before you finally spoke up again, “I’m sorry you have to hear all of that.”

He merely shrugged, as if this was normal. As if it’s normal to be able to hear footsteps the floors down. To hear the electricity travel through appliances. To hear your own blood pump through you. And it made little you so incredibly sad. While it’s quiet in the building, it is still loud for him. You always thought it was eerie with how abandoned the building seemed—not because it was falling apart or because there was ivy growing everywhere, but because of how empty it was inside. But for him every single thing is noise.

You’d pulled him into a hug right then and there, and whispered in his ear that you’d talk to him if he ever felt lonely. He merely smiled at you and returned the hug. Just two weapons in training that found solace in each other.

The kids inside the facility, despite being older than you and Keigo were at the time, still remind you of the two of you. The first time you swap their quirks around, they all look confused, still used to how they fight with their own quirk, only to quickly realise they have to adapt.

On one hand it’s a good lesson, you’d never know when you’d lose your quirk during a battle, on the other hand it’s absolutely disgusting that they’re practicing this on barely teens.

You keep swapping quirks around once they get used to how the new quirk feels, just to throw them off. It’s not something you do with great pleasure, but you can’t exactly go against whatever your handler assigns you to do.

It’s something you’ve tried before, only to be put in solitary confinement for a week. In there they still had you practice all sorts of things, but you just didn’t get to be around people anymore. You still shudder every time you think of the place.

Once the handler deems the exorcise to be enough for the kids—almost two whole hours later—you get steered out of the room, onto your next assignment.

“Since you and Hawks are about to debut in a few months, we need to make sure the two of you are desensitized, him moreso than you,” she flips through the papers on her clipboard, occasionally nodding her head at something that’s written down. “You’ll have to act like fans without boundaries. There will be other people pulling him into every direction. Just make sure he doesn’t sharpen his feathers.”

With that she pushes the door open, and in the middle of the room stands Keigo—or Hawks, right now—his red wings spread out into a brilliant arc, showing off all the way from the primaries down to the dowry feathers he has.

His handler is checking his wings, ensuring the strength and health of them, twisting and turning some pieces, and tugging on others. You know he hates that. Hates anyone that touches his wings, except for you. It’s something he’s told you since the two of you were young, said it hurt with how they disregarded the fact that he could feel whenever people touched his feathers, as sensitive as nerve endings.

It took him a while to trust you enough to let the pad of your finger skim over one of the primaries while they were in their half-sharp state. He wasn’t sensitized enough to let you touch his feathers when they were in their resting state just yet, but he did trust you enough that he at least let you touch them. Ever since that moment he started trusting you more and more, to a point where you can now preen him without any problems.

He’s fallen asleep once, when you were preening him after a brutal day. They had him run simulations all day long—fly through rubble and falling buildings, soot and smoke clinging to his feathers turning the brilliant velvet into ash. He had to save hundreds, if not thousands of dummies that were stuck in the wrecks—to a point where the skin at the base of his wings were inflamed.

You’d wanted to trace the skin, soothe it somehow, but you thought better of it. He’d snuck out of his room later that day to get into yours, and the moment you saw him you patted the limited space beside you on the bed.

He’d all but flopped onto the bed with a groan, telling you about how much his wings were hurting him. It’s not something the two of you did often—complain to each other—but after particularly hard days you just had to vent to someone, and who better than your best friend.

So you’d combed your fingers through his wind-swept hair, untangling the obvious knots in them. Sometimes you accidentally tugged on a strand a bit too hard, but he didn’t complain about it even once; merely sighed out into your duvet and kept talking about whatever his mind could conjure up.

At some point your fingers slid down to his wings, and you’d started to carefully preen him. While his wings were cleaner now, there were still some stubborn pieces of soot clinging to them—something you yourself couldn’t get off with just your hands—but that wasn’t something you were after. No, you just carefully started to put every feather into their rightful place, sometimes that meant twisting the feather at the base a bit, and other times that meant getting rid of the keratin casings on the newer feathers.

You weren’t sure when, but somewhere when you switched to preen his other wing, he’d stopped talking and his breath had evened out, eyes fluttering shut. Smiling you continued to preen him.

The sight of the handler tugging on some of the feathers makes you more mad than you should be. Not that you can show it, though. If someone were to suspect anything going on between you and Hawks, you were in some deep shit, whether it be just surface-level friendship, or something deeper. So you swallow and steel your expression.

Your own handler gives a squeeze at your elbow before she leaves the room to go to the monitor room. Once Keigo’s handler steps back, he nods once and walks past you, thrusting a piece of paper and a pen into your hand.

With that, the two of you are left alone. Well… you know there are tens of pairs of eyes upon the two of you, watching, waiting.

And then the simulation starts. A pro hero walks beside Hawks, chatting. The entire room transforms into that of a city, cars buzzing past, people leaving little shops—just a normal day in a city. Not that you and Keigo really know what that looks like.

If you were gonna do this, you could at least have some fun with it. Inhaling, you put a smile on your face, before absolutely squealing. “OH. MY. GOD. IS THAT HAWKS?!”

The simulation responds. People stop on the sidewalk, looking back at ‘the two heroes’, cars slow down slightly. And then you move. Fast. You cross the sidewalk in no time, getting all up in Hawks’ space.

“You’re my favorite hero! I can’t believe I get to meet you— can I get an autograph?” you gush, not giving him a moment to respond before thrusting the pen into his face and holding out the paper the handler gave you.

Hawks, for his part, just smiles, and it makes your heart beat a little faster—something he can definitely hear. “Of course, what’s your name?”

You mumble out a random name before your hand shoots out toward his wing. “These are so cool. And so soft! Do you think I can get one?” You tug on his feathers a bit forcefully, not going as hard as you probably should for the assignment, but you also don’t wanna hurt him.

There’s a slight bristle from his feathers before he smooths them over again. Keigo just chuckles at you, signing your piece of paper before giving back the pen. “Ah, sorry, no can do. Wish I could, though.” He winks over at you before he gets absolutely hoarded by other people—fake or not, they still feel real.

The rest of the day is spent like that, you throwing your arms around him, tugging on his feathers, squealing and screaming. Anything and everything to show the handlers that he’s sensitized enough to be able to walk outside without any problem.

Once the two of you are done, your handler pulls you aside. “We’re gonna run another simulation. Tomorrow. Your turn.”

Right, because they have to know if you’re good enough to swap quirks with him if needed. Luckily the two of you have practiced that many times after the first time.. The Commission telling you that no one else should ever get their hands on his wings, except for you. If he ever loses too many feathers during a fight, you have to jump in and swap quirks. You’ll get his feathers while you give him one of the quirks from the fight—leaving one of the villains Quirkless.

So they have to know you don’t completely shut down in an environment like that. Which you get, but it’s still annoying as fuck.

By the time your handler lets you go, Keigo is already gone. Probably towards his own room for the night. It’s only when you walk past a supply closet that an hand encloses around your wrist and tugs you into it.

The first thing you do is try to twist whoever’s arm it is behind them, but you’re quickly spun around. Your back hits the door with a thud, one hand is covering your mouth while the other is on your hip. “Shhhh, dove, it’s just me.”

Your hands fall to your sides. Blinking a few times your vision sharpens enough to see Keigo’s silhouette. “Fucking hell, Hawks, what are you doing?” you hiss at him once he removes his hand from your mouth. Keigo just smiles at you, small, but dangerous. “What, you think you can just touch me all day without driving me absolutely crazy?”

Right, you did do that, but that was for the assignment. Trying to get an reaction out of him. So what if your fingers skimmed over his most vulnerable parts—the base joints near his shoulder blades—that was all for the assignment, of course.

“You can’t just pull me into a storage closet, what if someone saw us?” you ask him, still not moving from where you’re pressed against the door. “No one saw us, and the camera’s have a dead spot here.”

Damn him and his smart brain. His thumb is tracing small circles on your hipbone, while his other hand creeps up to cup your jaw. Your own arms enclose around his neck, fingers playing with the hairs at his nape.

He surges forward, lips crashing against yours in a frenzy. You kiss him back just as eager. It’s been weeks since the last kiss, and you’d be lying if you said you didn’t miss him.

“Missed you,” he mumbles against your lips, nose bumping into yours when he angles his head a bit. “Missed you, too.”

His wing wraps itself around you, feathers whispering against your skin over the fabric. They tremble slightly while your tongues entangle, puffing up slightly in affection he can’t hide.

A string of saliva connects the two of you when you pull away from him. It snaps a second later, leaving your lips shiny and slightly swollen. His aren’t any better, small teeth indentations on his bottom lip from where you pulled it between your teeth.

His forehead drops to yours, eyes halflidded and hazed over a little. Your breaths mingling, but mouths not touching any longer. Your chest rises and falls against his, heartbeats syncing, before it stutters once he looks at you like that—pure adoration filling his eyes.

“Hated not being able to see you for so long,” his voice is breathy, a slight groan pulling from his chest when your finger wraps around one of his locks of hair. “Heard you, though.”

And he did. You talked to him almost every night, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that he wasn’t there in person with you.

“Only five more months,” you reply. Five more months before the two of you are finally free from this prison they keep you in. Those industrial gray walls you’ve seen almost your entire life. The slightly cold rooms that keep you on edge constantly. “Just five before we can get out of here.”

Keigo just smiles at you, not replying with words, but rather by pressing his lips to yours once more. It’s quiet and full of love. “Then let’s endure them and we can finally stop sneaking around like this, love.”

The nickname has you blinking a few times. Maybe it was a slip of the tongue, ‘dove’ and ‘love’ are so similair, after all. But your cheeks heat up all the same. Nodding your head you peck his lips once more before finally letting go of him.

He steps back slightly, fingers lingering on your hip before retracting completely. You twist the doorknob before looking over your shoulder and smiling slightly. With that you leave him in the supply closet, alone.

Keigo presses his forehead against the door for a few moments to let his heart calm down. He didn’t think he would miss you so damn much, but after that once kiss the two of you shared weeks ago, he hasn’t been able to think of anything but you.

Cursing he runs his hands through his hair once, before opening the door and slipping out. Wings dragging behind him like a cape that holds every little sign of affection he’s had for you since the first day he saw you.

It’s only a few days later when Keigo comes to your room again. You honestly hadn’t expected him today. They’d sent him out on a mission that from the looks of it, was going to take all day, if not all night. But here he is, standing in your door opening.

Sitting up you pat the space beside you, inviting him in like you always do. He crosses the room quickly to go sit beside you. His fingers are playing with each other—a small habit you haven’t seen him do often—while he looks at everything but you.

“You okay?” you ask, your hand reaching for his shoulder, only for him to jerk away before you can touch him. Blinking a few times you let your hand fall back beside you. “Hey, what’s going on?”

He takes a deep breath in, stops fiddling with his fingers, and looks you straight into the eyes. You get slightly lost in everything that they are—golden with those amber specs in them, all predator when he narrows them—before you shake your head slightly.

“I think we should stop seeing each other,” he states, still holding eye contact with you. And you can feel your heart drop to your stomach. Freezing slightly, everything around you seems to slow down—the way you’re breathing, the slight electral buzz that’s always there in the walls somehow feels muffled and distant, hell even Keigo looks far away.

“What?”

“It’s just not going to work. Not with the way the Commission is always on our asses. And- and I don’t think I really have feelings for you,” he vomits the words out like they’re acidic, burning his tongue if they don’t leave fast enough.

It doesn’t compute for a second. The words sound foreign. As if some random stranger came up to you and told you the sky was purple. “I- what? But what about the five months? You said we only had to wait for five more months before we could stop sneaking around.”

Keigo just shakes his head, standing up from your bed. The distance between the two of you feels greater than it actually is, as if there’s a canyon between the two of you, whereas you two were normally all up in each others’ space.

“Just… don’t. This is better. For the both of us.” With that he starts walking toward the door. You feel under your shirt for the red plume that’s pressed to your ribs.

“Then take this back,” you spit towards him, throwing the feather in his direction without a care. He picks it up before slipping out the door, just as quietly as he came in.

When you hear the door click shut behind him, you let yourself fall back onto the thin matrass, staring up at the cold ceiling. There’s this quake in your chest you refuse to acknowledge.

Almost twelve years. Almost twelve years of knowing the boy with his crimson wings. Almost eleven years of being friends. Ten of being ‘best friends’. And yet, two months of being more than best friends, and everything crumbled.

You knew. You knew the friendship you and Keigo built was based on a house of cards, one wrong move and everything would collapse, but never did you think the collapse would look like this—like him being the one pushing the house to collapse.

All those smiles and giggles. All those memories made in corners the Commission could never reach. And now it’s all gone.

All because you let yourself fall in love with your best friend.

The next few months are a hell on earth—not that you weren’t used to it by now, but it’s definitely different not having Keigo by your side. You pushed yourself into assignments more and more; any free time you did have was spent asking for more assignments, or just training in general.

You couldn’t dare to sit in your own room, forced to sit in the silence that feels more suffocating than ever. The walls still carry the laughter. Still carry the gentle warmth Keigo somehow left behind, almost as if his feathers spanned the walls, feather-soft to the touch.

Whenever you’re in your room you just stare blankly at the ceiling, listening to the buzz of the electrics around you. There was one time you had your pillow clutched to your chest, unable to sleep, because you kept seeing golden eyes staring back at you. Crimson wings touching your skin, and those unruly tufts of wind-swept hair.

The pillow still faintly smelled like him at that point, and you tried so hard not to bury your nose into it and inhale like your life depended on it. You were so lost in thought, trying—and failing—not to think about him, that you startled when you felt something prick into your chest.

Moving the pillow you felt something soft brush over your skin, something that felts suspiciously much like a feather. Heart pounding in your chest you ripped the pillow from your chest, hoping to see that familiar crimson plume you threw back at him in a fit of anger, only to see a singular, sad white feather.

Right, pillows are filled with feathers.

Your hands were shaking when you picked it up, swallowing around the lump in your throat, you laid it under your pillow, which you put under your head again. It was something you couldn’t explain, but it just felt right to keep it there, with you.

It’s still under your pillow, even now—almost five months later. Sometimes you pick it up and twirl it around in your finger, watching the way it droops down like it’s sad. And with the right imagination you can imagine it being red, but even when you do that you know it isn’t his.

His feathers were a little harder, not fanned out as much. They were sturdy and so brilliantly red, you couldn’t imagine it being his.

Despite that you still held onto it like it was worth anything more than it actually was. Sometimes you put it under your shirt while you slept, waking up with an itch, almost as if reminding you it shouldn’t be there. Other times you just… talked.

But this feather doesn’t respond to what you’re saying. Doesn’t hover in front of you, shuddering with laughter when you say something stupid. Doesn’t tap your nose or skin in agreement. It’s just there, clutched between your thumb and index finger.

You sometimes wonder if he misses you as much, but then quickly push the thought away. He broke it up for a reason, so you can’t let yourself go down that route.

Whenever you saw him in the hallways, you didn’t look at him. Didn’t nod like you used to, just stared blankly ahead. Teeth clenched, hands balled, leaving small indents on your palms.

He didn’t look at you, either. Always staring ahead. Hand in his pockets while avoiding eye contact. While the two of you never lingered on each other, there were some glances. Now it’s like the two of you are merely strangers.

So no, you wouldn’t admit you miss him, because he’s clearly doing fine without you. The Commission’s golden boy. Now getting even more praise. You hear it from the ‘kids’ all the time—missions he went on, the absolute control he has over his quirk, anything and everything.

You tune everything they say about him out. Never listening too much about what they’re saying. Not the handlers, not the kids.

The two of you had a mission together two weeks ago, which went… okay. Hawks did most of the work, to be completely honest. Something about not needing you there. It honestly stung when he said that, but you pushed the feeling away, merely telling him he could do whatever he wanted. Which he did.

You’d gotten reprimanded about not participating, while Hawks got all the praise. He’d looked over at you with a smirk on his face—not the one he used to give you, no this one was radiating smugness from him—and you wanted to punch it clean off his stupidly handsome face.

Now it’s time for you to step out into the real world. The Commission had gotten you your own agency with a few sidekicks in the Sendai district, while they had sent Hawks to Kyushu—the other side of the country.

You weren’t sure how to feel about that, feelings conflicting in a tight knot inside your chest. On one hand you were glad he wasn’t with you, on the other hand you felt sad because the two of you had dreamed of running an agency together, or at least close enough to each other that you two would be able to frequently see each other.

And with the way the Commission had sent you out on missions together from when you were younger, to training together, you’d absolutely believed they would let the two perfect weapons stay together, strengthening each other. But alas, the two of you had drifted away from each other.

Now you’re looking at the building that supposedly ‘yours’. You know damn well it’s the Commission’s, but you let yourself believe for just a moment that it’s something of your own. They own you, though, so you’re not sure you’ll ever get something of your own.

Stepping inside the lobby you step into a new part of your life—alone.

The first year goes well. You quickly climb the rankings, no doubt the Commission having something to do with it, but it’s still something. You recently just breached the top 10. Your name being everywhere.

The rookie hero who debuts in the top ten!

But wherever your name is, his follows. Hawks being more popular amongst the masses, purely for being so charismatic. You roll your eyes at that, as if you didn’t know damn well how charismatic he can be. And from everything you’ve seen, the smirks, the winks, the little murmured sentences to his fans—all fake.

You’re muttering to yourself about how his real smirk is more awkward, it has that little adorable tilt to it that makes it more cute than sexy. His wink normally isn’t as smooth. The little dimple doesn’t appear on his face when he smiles.

But not that you notice that. Of course not. He’s made it very clear with what the two of you are, which is absolutely nothing. So you don’t look at it too long, always clicking away whenever his face pops up on the screens.

Seems like despite not working together you still can’t get away from him.

The Commission drowns you in assignments. You do your normal patrols, go out when you get paged, and after that you have to do the dirty work no one ever would even think of heroes doing. Granted most heroes don’t do the things you—and Hawks—do.

It makes for a good distraction, though. You’re simply too exhausted to even care about a certain blond-haired crimson-winged hero at the other side of Japan.

That is until the annual hero billboards come around. Your days have been so swamped that you didn’t even realise it was that time of the year already.

So here you are, walking backstage, waiting for the event to start. Number ten.

You know the Commission definitely messed with the numbers, but you aren’t complaining. There’s a lot of things you do that go unnoticed, so maybe this is a way of them telling you you did a good job. Or maybe they’re trying to keep you under their thumbs by putting you in the spotlights so you can’t slack off for even a day.

The perfect weapons.

That’s all you’ll ever be to them. Not a person. Not a hero. A weapon they created to use at their disposal. Same for the guy you spent almost your entire life beside.

Speaking of— your shoulder collides with another, making you stumble slightly. It’s not something that has happened often, your handler always being on your ass to be alert. Vigilant. Stay aware of your surroundings at all times. But with how tired you are you can’t really focus. Seems like even the strongest sometimes need a break.

You’re bowing a full ninety degrees, mumbling out a ‘sorry’ before straightening up again. And all the air seems to leave your lungs.

A pair of golden eyes is staring straight at you, lips pursed, bushy brows furrowed slightly. An annoyed look you weren’t familiar with. Never in the thirteen years of knowing him has he ever looked at you like that—or anyone for that matter, because handlers would have his head if he so much as disobeyed them.

“See you made the top ten,” he mutters out with a scoff, disdain lacing his voice. But you can’t hear him, not really anyway. Your mind already far, far away from the billboards and rather back in those industrial gray rooms that you were so familiar with.

Eyes that are golden with amber specks in them are looking at you. There’s dark marks around the eyes that has your head tilt a bit. Your hand is fisted in the fabric of this tall stranger’s pants—you’ll later learn that it’s your handler, one of the many you’ll get over the years that you’ll stay in that rotten place you’ve never escaped—while you step away from their legs just slightly when you see the boy stand there.

His golden curls bounce on top of his head, a single curl falls into his eyes, which he swipes away with one hand while the other is clutching a plushy of sorts. You’re not familiar with what, or who it is, but it’s clearly a man with a flaming beard.

Your voice doesn’t come to you, throat hoarse from all the screaming you’ve done when your parents told you to stay here with the nice lady while they went out for errands. You just couldn’t understand why they didn’t want to take you with them and rather let you stay with a stranger.

Eyes welled up with fat tears that rolled down the round apples of your cheeks that were blotched red with the way you were crying for your parents.

Why didn’t they want to take you with them?

Nose snotty and eyes completely red-rimmed you were staring at this boy that seemed to be your age. He wasn’t that much taller than you were, but he was calm, looking at you like you were something interesting. And in that moment you calmed down slightly.

The hiccups stopped after a while, when the handler nice lady told you you could play with the boy. That seemed more fun, for a second forgetting your parents just left you here. Maybe being here for a few hours wouldn’t hurt all that much.

Said boy told you his name was Hawks, and you’d giggled then and told him your real name—something you got reprimanded for by the lady, and your little mind just couldn’t understand why she was scolding you for simply telling him your name—in turn.

The rest of the day was spent with giggles and hushed voices. There might not have been much to play with—only giving the two of you a few blocks to play with—but it was enough to keep your mind off the fact that your parents pretty much had abandoned you here.

It was only when the lady came back and told you two to go to bed that you were brought back to reality. Your little fist rubbing your eyes while you asked if mama and papa were there for you. The lady gave you a look, something between disappointment and reprimand, and told you that you were having a sleepover today.

Your lips pursed while your eyebrows furrowed together. As much as you liked this new boy, you weren’t a fan of sleeping over here. Your parents said they would only go out to run some errands, never saying anything about you staying here for the night.

When you’d pleaded with the lady to just go home, she got angry and told you to behave, almost scolding you like a mom does.

That seemed to do something to the young boy, though, because he immediately clamped his mouth shut while his eyes turned blank—the signs of him being happy were simply erased from his face like a light switch was turned off—and he stood up to go to, what you presumed was, his room.

From then on out there were no more playdates, only people testing your quirk out on different people, trying to gauge your power from when you were a mere five years old. Your parents never came back for you, and you later found out that you’d simply been sold off.

But through it all, from that first day up until almost the last, was one person you could always rely on—Keigo. Or as the masses call him: Hawks. That name makes you shudder, for multiple reasons, but mostly because you know what it meant for him to get a name like that. A prisoner in a corrupt system that should’ve never existed to begin with.

And now he’s here, looking at you like you’re a pest in his life. Like you’re one of them. Not trying to hide his disdain for you, and you can’t help but feel a nerve in your jaw tick at the sight.

Sure, you were the person who fell in love with your best friend—which you knew was stupid to begin with, not just because he might not love you back, but also because the Commission would never allow the two of you to be distracted to begin with—but he’s the one who broke whatever it was the two of you had off.

So why is he glaring at you like you’re mere gum on the bottom of his shoe, or that one little barb he never can reach in his wings that you always had to preen for him otherwise he’d get agitated.

“Mhmm. See you did, too. Must’ve been easy, charming every women to get a little more popularity over there,” you smile at him through gritted teeth, trying so incredibly hard not to let anyone who’d walk past see that there’s any animosity between the two of you.

He smiles at you all condescendingly. It makes your eye twitch just slightly, but his eye see the movement—of course they do, the two of you have been trained to look at little tells like that since you were young, always so in tune with other’s emotions—and his grin widens, almost as if he’s won something.

He’s about to retort something when his wings twitch on his back, a movement so minuscule, no one else would catch it, but you know him better than anyone else, even if you don’t want to acknowledge that part right now.

The two of you straighten up and smile at each other—one of the practiced, fake ones that no one would be able to tell was fake to begin with—pretending to chat about the rankings. One of the heroes walks past and nods his head at the two of you, while the two of you bow back to him.

When he’s out of sight you drop the entire persona, not bothering with the fake smiles and niceties. You note the way Hawks relaxes slightly, feathers betraying his every being no matter how much he tries to hide from you, too.

Your hand shoots to your ribs, fingers skimming over your hero suit. The fabric dark with gold details—just like his, because the two of you might not do things together, but the HPSC still has their claws in the two of you—but it’s empty underneath. Just flesh and bone. No red feather that flutters against your skin whenever the blond saw you, or missed you. No longer replies to your sighs.

It’s easy to get lost in all that’s him. The blond and red. The cocky smirk he has on his face, and the slight stubble he’s beginning to grow. It’s easy to get lost, and then get pulled back into the present when he scoffs and walks past you, shoulder deliberately knocking into yours.

You want to spill your heart out when you once again see him walk away from you, just like that night. Wings held high, feathers trembling slightly and the back of his head turned towards yours. Want to tell him that it meant nothing, that the two of you could still be friends, like old times sake. But you know that won’t happen, no matter how much you want it to.

The two of you have simply… grown apart. No longer best friends, or that more-than-bestfriends thing the two of you had before he broke it off. Right now the two of you are colleagues. Strangers with history. Enemies competing for the better spot on a leader board the two of you don’t care about.

Your hand falls from your ribs to your side, and it’s so easy to make him stay, but it’s also easy to let him walk away. Because what good would it do? He’s made his stance very clear on the matter. No longer wanting you in his life, no matter what he had promised you.

Walls no longer industrial gray, but rather a muted white, but they feel more lifeless that the prison that you called your home for years, because a certain someone isn’t there to brighten them up. Only the sun setting into hues of violet and peach paints the room in colors.

He said he’d still be here with you, yet you watch him walk away from you the moment the two of you see each other again.

Fine. So be it.

And that’s how the competition really begins.

After the first hero billboard comes the petty revenge. Flirting more with your fans—showing him that you can use his tactics to become more popular, too. The hero rankings are constantly fluctuating, you and Hawks surpassing each other every time, trading ranks like you’re trading stock.

People online have started putting bets on who will be higher ranked this year. The two rookie heroes going head to head, making for an exciting race, or whatever it is they’re saying.

He garners attention by flirting with his fans, you garner attention by doing a shoot, face plastered on every billboard across Japan. It’s petty. It’s stupid. It’s the only way you can keep him close to you despite being hundreds of kilometers apart.

There’s a nagging voice at the back of your head now every time you see his face or name anywhere on the internet. No longer associated with Keigo but rather with Hawks the hero who you’re competing against.

The second annual billboard ranks you at five while he’s at six. The saccharine smile you plaster on your face when the two of you are on stage ticks him off. You can see it in the little tells, one of his feathers near his scapula is razor-sharp one second, while soft the other.

People start asking the two of you questions—rookie heroes, dating scandals, anything and everything they can get their hands on. You deflect with a smile and a wink, and he does the same.

Later that same night there’s hundreds of clips posted about how the two of you would make such a good team or would be so good together. Your eye twitches at that, fingers cracking with the way you’re balling your hands so hard your nails breach the skin on your palms and blood steadily trickles down your forearm.

What would they know about you being ‘such a good item with him.’ They do not know Hawks the same way you do, and over your dead body would you go back to him. The feud you have with him is at this point more important than anything else.

So you start doing other things on your off time—which you already barely have, but for the sake of winning this god-forsaken competition you’d give up all of your free time—such as going into schools and telling children about safety and what to do in villain attacks.

Your popularity numbers are climbing by the day, more of you can be seen in tabloids. Face plastered all over social media for helping a cat get out of a tree. Bringing in groceries for the nice old lady on the sidewalk. Things you would never do out of your own volition, purely because that hasn’t been trained into you to do.

Seems like you underestimated how low Hawks would step, though. It’s during one of your regular patrols, the sun is blistering down and sweat is beading off your temple and down your jaw. There’s a marker in your hand while a kid is jumping up and down in excitement to get your autograph.

You’re smiling, already thinking of where you could get something to hydrate, the cold surely feeling nice against your parched throat, when a big shadow falls across you.

People starts squealing and pointing into the sky, and sure enough there he is. Hawks. All red wings and cocky smirks, hovering in the air. He circles a few times before touching down, immediately getting mobbed by tens of fans.

Hell, even the kid you were giving an autograph just… runs away from you. Your pen hovering uselessly in the air. The stench that comes from the marker fills your nostrils, and it finally snaps you out of your reverie.

Pinching yourself once, you confirm that Hawks is, in fact, really here. Standing on your turf, talking and taking pictures with your fans. And you can already hear that stupid counter climb up by the second, getting more popularity by just touching down here.

And as if he can feel your gaze on him, he lifts his head lightly, golden eyes finding your form. For a second he just stares blankly, then he smirks and throws a wink into your direction. Fucking dickhead.

Sighing you continue your patrol while already thinking of how you’ll get your revenge.

Kyushu is… different than you expected. You never read up much about it, but you knew it was an island—duh—so you didn’t expect to see high rise towers litter everywhere you looked. The buildings so high you would almost be able to touch a cloud if you opened the window; an over-exaggeration, but still.

You thought the place Hawks chose, or well, the HPSC chose for him would have more sea. You thought the air would smell salty, like the ocean, and hear the waves crash ashore, but nothing is less true.

Fukuoka is a heavily populated city. There’s buildings, cars, and street life everywhere. When you got sent here you thought it might be different than back in Sendai, but nothing is less true.

The mission had been simple. Go undercover for a drug ring, get the info, let the President know what’s happening, and turn the whole thing upside down before they even know someone infiltrated their home.

What you’d failed to consider, though, is the fact that this is the home of a certain crimson-winged hero who could spot you from hundreds of meters away.

Looks like he didn’t spot you, but rather you him. Tiny feathers slicing through the air at lightning speed, multiple civilians getting pulled out of the way by their clothes while the number two hero fights the villains.

It’s a sight for sore eyes, wings almost down to little nubs, no longer able to fly, and it seems like these villains aren’t gonna stop any time soon.

He’s exhausted. There’s too many innocent bystanders nearby that he has to keep track of while also fighting off two other villains. His wings are almost non-existent, most of the feathers having been used up at this point. One feather-blade is in his hand, luckily still able to use it.

There’s sweat beading down his brow, nearly falling into his eye before it drips to the ground, which is littered with debris from the wreckage the villains have done to the city. It’s honestly more than he’s encountered in the years before—here anyway.

Villains of this size were normally more common in Tokyo, but seems like they decided to bother his district this day.

He deflects one attack while scooping up a child that had fallen trying to run away with one of his feathers, returning the child to his mother who was in tears, officers holding her back from running onto an active villain site.

Then he hears it, a sharp whistle he hasn’t heard in years. It’s music to his ears. It grates him. Almost like he can’t decide if he loves you for being here right now, or if he hates the fact that you’re even here to begin with.

He knows you wouldn’t come here out of your own volition, just like he doesn’t go to Sendai unless ordered, so you’re here on a mission. And here you are, seeing him in this pathetic state, nearly losing to two villains.

You’d probably laugh at him when you have the time, tell him he’s gonna drop a rank and you’ll sprint ahead of him again. The swapping of places hasn’t once stopped. The number two and three, constantly swapping places but never getting that number one spot.

But he knows. He knows he should give you the go-ahead. Get this over with. The civilians are the most important thing right now, so he should do what’s best for them—even if that means you get a tally added to the score.

So he gives his signal that it’s okay to swap. His wings slowly disappearing from his back. The feathers that he has in his hand goes limp—just an ordinary red feather right now—just like all the others that he’s used to get the bystanders out of the way.

Some people gasp, while others are already filming. He can feel the way his quirk has been swapped for someone elses—one of the villains, though he doesn’t know which of the two.

The villains in front of him look confused for a split second before they grin again, certainly thinking they have the upperhand now. Hawks can only grin in turn, tucking his feather in his jacker sleeve—a souvenir he can give to fans if they want it.

And then a flurry of red feathers come down—sharp as can be. The villains get pinned down almost immediately while Hawks goes in to put quirk-cancelling handcuffs on them. He sees you walk up to him a few seconds after, whistling with your hands in your pockets—a sight so him it pisses him off. Of course you’d try and mock him while he’s already down.

More people are gasping and screaming each of your names now, but neither of you give them any attention. You stop in front of him, a lazy nod given while the police officers rush onto scene, dragging away the suspects.

There are some words exchanged while you still have his quirk, crimson stark against the dark fabric of your hero suit. And he can see the way the feathers are trembling, just like your fingers. There’s a slight tick in your jaw you never could hide, not even from the Commission.

You’re overstimulated. His quirk simply picking up too many noises at once, while he can’t hear anything at all. It’s something the two of you haven’t done in a long time—swapping quirks. While you did this on a regular years ago, it’s now something foreign. Still, he has to applaud you for keeping your face as neutral as you are right now, because he knows how rowdy people can be.

After the officer is done talking with the two of you he walks away, leaving the two of you to fend for yourselves. Masses crowd around the number two and three, as if you two are merely circus acts and everyone can just do whatever they want.

People want pictures where you have the wings, others are touching the feathers to see if they really are as soft as Hawks’. And he notes how uncomfortable you are right now, shivers running up your spine when someone tugs on one of the feathers, and he sees the way your—technically his—wings are twitching like they want to lash out.

So he whispers, as low as he can go, that the two of you can get out of here if you just fly away with him. Which is exactly what you do, picking him up with ease—ease that was never there to begin with since he was heavier with the wings dragging behind him—and flying away from the crowd to one of the high-rises.

It’s an bumpy, unsteady flight all the way up to the tallest building there is, and he has to cling onto you to not plummet to his death. Once you land, clumsy and everything, you set him down.

Your wings shudder behind you before they disappear from your back and form back onto Hawks’—only for there to be stubs instead of actual, massive wings he normally has.

There’s sweat clinging to your spine and beading down your temple. You’d forgotten just how loud his world actually is, not having had to bother with it for years on end. That of course doesn’t mean you forgot what his quirk can do—things no one else in the world except for the President and a few handlers know.

You straighten up, swallowing past the bile that was threatening to come up if you stayed down there any longer, you nod to yourself. You’re okay. This is okay. Everything is okay.

The blond is just watching you, for once having no quip ready on the tip of his tongue, but rather just… looking. There’s a hint of concern he can’t quite seem to hide from you, but you don’t focus too much on that.

Walking up to him you pat him on the back, just between his scapulae where he’s the most sensitive. A little payback you’d say, not just for the fact that you had to get the two of you out of there since he didn’t have enough feathers to even fly, but also for all the bullshit he had pulled this year to get ahead of you.

“Well, see you later, number three,” your voice mock-cheerful. You were the number three hero currently, but with today’s save, or whatever you want to call it, you’re sure your rank will rise once again, surpassing Hawks’. “Gotta do stuff.”

Before you can even walk away a gloved hand wraps itself around your wrist, tugging you back. Another hand finds itself on your hip, warm and familiar in a way you don’t want to acknowledge right now. “Where do you think you’re going?”

Clenching your jaw you look over at the blond, brows furrowing and lips pursing into a straight line. You don’t bother to conceal your expression right now, there’s no one around to see, so you can just show your disdain on your face whenever you want—one of the special occasions.

“Oh I’m sorry, I forgot. I… gotta… go,” you slowly annunciate every word, almost as if you’re talking to a deaf person with dementia who has to lip read. You know he can hear you just fine—while he might not be able to hear everything, his ears still work perfectly fine.

The next instant you’re backed onto a brick wall of the bulkhead. Rough stone scraping against your back through the fabric of your hero suit. It has you gasping out slightly, not thinking he would do something like this.

“You’re such a brat sometimes,” he breathes out, pupils almost like slits, and oh, he’s pissed. Not his normal relaxed self, but rather actually annoyed at something you did—and if you had to guess it was to hit him where it hurt the most. “You should be happy I even gave you the go-ahead to use my quirk.”

That ticks you off. It’s not like you want to use his quirk, but he was in a bind and he knows it. If it were up to you, you would never even think of using his quirk. So you do what you know best—hands coming around to his back to where the little wings are still uncovered, one of your fingers tracing over his feather. Slow and teasing.

He groans out at the sensation, eyes fluttering closed for just a second before he opens them again, pupils dilated slightly. Then he turns you around, your chest pressing up to the stone while your cheek lays flat against the rough texture. A gasp rips itself from your throat.

His breath ghosts the shell of your ear while he presses his chest against your back, and you feel the bulge in his pants on your ass, making you gulp out. He cannot be serious right now.

“You sure you wanna do this, birdie?” the nickname has you close your eyes for a split-second. For a moment you can hear it echo in your head, distort it until you hear that all too familiar nickname: ‘dove’, but he doesn’t, he just uses the same nicknames he gives his fangirls.

You scoff out at it, and try to wiggle your way from him, only for your ass to brush his bulge. He moans out at the sensation before pushing his hips further into you—pressing it right against your ass so you can feel just how hard he is. “Tell me to stop, and I will.”

Pressing your thighs together, you can feel yourself getting hot and bothered. Even after all these years he still gets you going like no other—not that you’ve ever even looked at someone else. The competition between you two has had your focus so much that you haven’t even had the time to go on a date, and honestly you didn’t care to go on one, either.

When you don’t say anything he chuckles. It comes deep from his chest, rumbling it with the sound that’s completely foreign to you.

“Who would’ve thought,” he whispers, fingers slowly tracing up and down your side, not groping, not grabbing, just tracing featherlight touches along your sides while he humps against your ass. It’s almost as if he isn’t aware of his own ministrations, simply rutting against you like a dog in heat—better yet, like a bird in heat. “Bet you flew us here just to rile me up.”

One of his hands slowly goes to the front, fingers skimming your ribs, just where his feather always used to lay. He makes a little shape there before his fingers trace upwards, squeezing your tit once over the fabric. Shivers run down your spine, straight into your core, and you can feel yourself getting wetter by the second. Panties sticking uncomfortably to your folds.

“Hah, you wish—shit,” your head lolls back onto his shoulder when he finds your nipple over the fabric, pinching and rolling the bud between his forefinger and thumb before he tugs on it slightly. “You’re so full of yourself.”

“You’re gonna be full of me in a second,” he murmurs against your cheek, hips never ceasing their motion, while his other hand finally trails down, stopping just at your pants. It’s only when you nod at him that he slips his fingers inside them, digits finding your heat immediately. “Oh? So wet for someone who’s ‘so full of himself’.”

His fingers move over your panties, lightly caressing it, almost like he’s preening himself—careful not to press too hard, nor move too fast, and it has you absolutely whining out for him.

“R-really, that’s all you can come up with. Thought you’d have some—fuck just keep them there—more practice with your l-little fangirls,” you moan out when his fingers skim over your clit, not pressing or rubbing, just featherlight touches that drive you absolutely crazy for him.

Chuckling his finger finally presses down onto your clit, moving it in small circles while pleasure shoots up your core. Your hand clamps itself onto his forearm, not trying to move it, just holding onto it while you gasp out into the open air.

“That’s itttt, love it when your rival plays with your pussy hmmm?” his finger doesn’t stop, just keeps circling your nub until you’re whining out. “Just put them in already, Hawks.”

He makes a thoughtful sound in the back of his throat—something between a hum and a groan—before he finally moves your panties aside and glides one finger through your slick folds. The feeling of the pads of his fingers directly on your skin has you arching into his touch, trying to chase his fingers even though he keeps sliding them through your folds.

One of his fingers finally slide inside your snug walls, warm and wet around him. It has you struggling to catch your breath. When was the last time you even got time to get yourself off? The feeling of his singular finger so much thicker than your own, eyes rolling to the back of your skull.

He slowly starts to pump in and out of your pussy, walls clinging onto him every time he tries to slide his finger out. Soon another one joins the first, stretching you out even further. Blunt nails dig themselves into his forearm, making him hiss out.

“F-feels so good,” you whimper out, careful not to be too noisy. There might not be anyone around, but if someone living in the apartments below, there’s a possibility they’d be able to hear you, and you’d rather not get caught getting fingered by your so-called rival.

His hips pick up pace behind you, still rutting against your ass like a damn animal in heat. Groans fall from his lips like an open faucet, never once stopping. He curls his fingers up while his thumb grazes your clit before it presses down onto it—adding all the more stimulation.

Trusting his fingers in and out a few times, he finally finds a spot that has you actively keen out, your other hand slapping itself over your mouth when he continues to attack your g-spot with his fingers. “F-fuck, please keep them there.”

Hawks just groans while his hips stutter behind you, fingers keeping their pace. Your thighs are starting to shake, knees buckling slightly. Suddenly there’s a tug on your nipple, completely forgetting his hand was still on your breast, and your eyes roll to the back of your skull. “Cumming, cumming— oh shit.”

Your orgasm shoots through you, and it’s so much more powerful than ever before. At the same time his hips cease behind you, warmth seeping through his pants while he muffles a moan into your shoulder.

It’s only when you catch your breath that you look at him from the corner of your eyes. “Did you just cum in your pants just by rutting yourself against my ass?”

His fingers slip from your heat, cunt clenching around nothing after his fingers retreat, when they come down with a quick slap to your clit. You jump slightly at the feeling, yelping while your head turns to the side to look at him.

“Shut up,” his cheeks are blotched pink, not once daring to look you in the eye, confirming what you thought had happened. He eyes his hand, spreading his fingers slightly, looking at the way your arousal webs between his fingers before they snap!

Almost in a trance he pops his fingers in his mouth, lips wrapping around the digits while his tongue licks the wetness right off. He moans out at the taste, eyes nearly rolling to the back of his skull while he can feel his dick twitch to life in his pants again.

Your mouth falls open at the sight, so sinful it makes you all the more hornier. Without realising your hips are moving back, ass brushing against his hardening cock, which he gives a quick slap. He pulls his fingers out of his mouth, lips shiny with a mixture of spit and cum, having your eyes snap to them. “Still haven’t had enough, thought you hated me?”

You roll your eyes at that, not bothering to confirm nor deny his accusations. Turning around your hand cups his member, palm pressing against it while you smile sweetly up at him. “Could say the same thing for you, Hawks.”

He growls—actually growls—at that, eyes narrowing down at you before his fingers make quick work of your pants. You unbuckle his belt, fingers fumbling slightly with how they’re trembling, and you can only hope he doesn’t see it.

He frees his cock from his underwear, mushroom tip angry red and shiny with cum. Giving it a few tugs he gets himself fully hard again. His other hand creeps down your thigh before he grabs just below your knee and hoists your leg up to put it around his waist. Your other feet shuffles around on the ground slightly, trying to find your balance again, while your hand shoots out to grab his shoulder—this time careful not to touch anywhere near his wings.

“Sure you’re ready for this?” he asks, fingers toying with your panties that are soaked through at this point, flimsy material doing nothing to hide your swollen folds.

“Just put it in already,” you roll your eyes at him, watching the way he once again pulls your panties to the side while he lines himself up. There’s anticipation and slight dread running through you now. Are you ready? Did he prep you enough? How are you even sure you can take him?

He glides his shaft through your folds a few times, skin getting shiny with your slick, when his tip rubs over your clit, shooting more pleasure through you. It’s only when he glides over it once again that you feel it—something metal.

Dickhead has a dick piercing.

“Bet your f-fangirls love that,” you whimper out, still eyeing the way he’s gliding through your folds, tip catching on your entrance only to move it up again, and again, and again. “How many compliments did you ge—fuuuckk.”

He doesn’t let you finish your sentence, instead finally deciding to push inside. The stretch feel insane, walls clamping down immediately, tip pushing past that first ring of resistance. Tears immediately spring to your eyes, and your hand tightens on his shoulder.

“S-shit, ease up, d— birdie,” he grunts out, not trying to push in any further. His hand comes down to your hip, thumb rubbing circles on your hip while he lets you adjust to the stretch. “You always this t-tight, or is it just me who has that effect on you?”

“Shut up,” you whine, not caring how you sound right now. You let your body slump to the wall behind you, sweat starting to collect at your nape again. Never in your life did you think it would feel like this. “Y-you can move.”

Looking at you for a few more seconds he slowly inches in, the stretch torturous, and he isn’t even half-way in yet. You claw at his shoulders, trying to find anything to hold onto while he was splitting you open.

“Just a few more inches,” he murmurs down at you with—is that concern? in his voice, thumb sliding from your hip to your clit, rubbing small figure eights on it to help you relax slightly. A few more inches? Looking down you see the way his skin is wrinkling at the base, and yup, he still had two more inches give or take left.

Once he finally bottoms out he lets his head fall forward, straight against your collarbone, breath hot even through the fabric. His tip is smooched against your cervix, and you can feel the two barbells of his piercing sit snug against your walls, even when he isn’t moving.

It’s a weird sensation—the metal cool against your warm cunt, smooth surface rubbing you just right. After a few moment he finally pulls his hips back—just slightly—and thrusts back in. It’s a shallow thrust, but it knocks the breath right out of your lungs.

“Y-you always this weak when fucking your girls?” You shouldn’t ask it, you don’t even want to know his answer to it, but your mouth is moving before your brain can even catch up. Luckily for you he doesn’t reply, only pulls out further before thrusting back in, making you moan out.

He sets a steady pace after that, hips pulling out halfway only to thrust back in, tip hitting your cervix each and every time, pre clinging to your walls. Moans and groans fill the air while the two of you are too lost in the pleasure to even taunt each other.

“F-fuck, pussy gripping onto me—shit look at that—like she doesn’t want me to leave,” he groans out, eyeing the way your lips are wrapping around him every time he pulls out.

“Maybe she just wants you to cum so she can get away from you,” you mutter out, which he hears loud and clear. The stubs on his backs flutter slightly, not bothering to hide any reaction you pull out of him any longer.

His eyes narrow at you before his hand that’s still rubbing circles stops. The pleasure dwindles slightly, only for him to set a more brutal pace, balls slapping against your ass while he pummels into your poor pussy.

“Yeah? Well then maybe— oh fuck… maybe I shouldn’t get you off,” he changes his angle slightly, hiking your leg further up his waist before he starts pistoning his hips in and out of you, an audible squelch can be heard every time he bottoms out.

“Don’t need you—there, please there,” your eyes roll back while you babble out ‘please’ and ‘there’ over and over again. Your mouth falls open, high off ecstasy while Hawks keeps bullying your g-spot with lethal precision.

“There, yeah? Fuck feel her clamping down on me. What was that… hahhh, about not needing me?” he grunts out while he can feel his abs start to tighten.

Your own hand comes down to your sensitive clit, rubbing circles on it while you’re incoherently babbling now, cock-drunk on the way he’s pummeling into your weeping hole. “Gonna—” you gasp out, before it cuts off with a choked cry. Your walls spasm around him while you get thrown into your second climax of the day, thighs trembling slightly.

“F-fuck,” he chokes out before he thrusts once more, hips stilling while he paints your entire walls white. His wings twitch and flex against his back, and you’re pretty sure you can see the left over feathers sharpen and soften against his back through your hazed-out mind.

The two of you stay like that for a while, just breathing in each other’s presence, not daring to move. It’s only when he pulls out with a hiss that you realise the situation. Looking down you see his seed bubble out of you, a bit of red mixed in the mess.

Hawks also sees it, looking down with concern at you. “Shit— fuck, are you okay?”

Rolling your eyes you let your leg fall from his hips, and your thigh almost immediately seizes up. Luckily you can deal with cramps—having been through enough training that this doesn’t feel like anything anymore—but the foreign feeling of your pussy having been stretched out has you grit your teeth.

“That’s your blood,” you mumble out, swiping your thumb on a cut just on his eyebrow. It leaves behind a trail of red, staining your finger in the crimson substance. Holding it up for him to see you just swallows and nods once.

Wiping it off on your uniform, you put your panties back in place, grimacing slightly when you feel the sticky substance ooze out of you. Pulling up your pants you pat everything down to see if you still have everything before straightening up.

There’s an awkward beat where the two of you just look at each other. And it finally sinks in what just happened. You fucked Hawks. Your ex-bestfriend, ex-lover, current rival. The one person you swore you would be done with.

Swallowing you quickly push yourself from the brick wall, finally noticing just how much your back hurts at the moment. Running your fingers through your hair you nod once towards the hero before you open the door and walk away from whatever all of this is.

And while you awkwardly walk down the stairs—gait off and your hole pulsing around nothing—you know that you’re absolutely and utterly fucked.

The time after that moves weird. You hadn’t seen anything of the crimson-winged hero while you stayed in Kyushu, only hearing people whisper about him in passing, but never once seeing that blur of red move through the sky.

You know somewhere deep down that he’s avoiding you, and you’re honestly doing the same. The night in the safehouse after what happened made you unable to sleep, eyes blinking up at that same industrial gray you’ve seen your entire life, and for just a moment—just one—you could feel him beside you on that bed. Only this bed was bigger than the one you had for twelve years.

When you closed your eyes you could feel the way his breath would ghost your skin while laying beside you, his wing flopped over you like a soft, unique blanket that sometimes twitched whenever either of the two of you moved.

Could still feel the way he would trace soft patterns over your arms when he thought you’d fallen asleep before he was out of the room. Could still feel the gentleness in his gazze whenever he looked at you.

But when you opened your eyes you were met by silence. No soft whisper of feathers ruffling or the soft breathing pattern he always had around you—something that had been trained into the two of you. There was still that small electral buzz you were familiar with, but it made your heart only do more complicated flips.

It was like you were suddenly thrown back to when you were seventeen years old and got told that the two of you shouldn’t see each other anymore.

And just like then, you have a feather in your hand. Soft, white, and itchy. Not the crimson, alive feather you used to wear like a shield. Like a promise etched onto your skin. But rather just a dead feather from god-knows-where.

It droops to the side sadly, like it’s reminding you that this isn’t what you were familiar with for half your life. But still you put it on your chest and begin talking to it like it can respond. The stories are quite silly, and you would never actually say all of these things out loud—when you’d done grocery shopping online, the latest villain arrest, a short story about how your sidekick had put soap in the food instead of olive oil.

You’re gesturing around the room wildly, a small smile on your face while your eyes are closed. It’s easier that way, telling stories to a feather that can’t respond. But for a moment you just let yourself believe it can. Let yourself believe that you’re seventeen years old again and that you’re ranting to your friend.

The golden-eyed boy across the hall that always looked like you were more than the weapon they were trying to make you out to be. The one who you shared secret glances and giggles with. The one who put a warm hand over your stomach whenever your cramps got too much, but the handlers just kept pushing you to do more more more.

And when you open your eyes, there’s a slight part in your heart that yearns to see that red feather hovering in front of your eyes. But you’re met with air. The white feather still laying on your chest, not moving an inch from where you last put it.

A tear slides down your face before you can stop it. Quickly wiping it away you chuckle into the empty room. No one can hear you, after all, so why would you care?

There’s a slight throbbing between your legs, soreness running through your muscles—an type of sore you’ve never been before, and it scares you slightly—while there’s no one to tell you it’s okay.

Rolling over you look at the empty spot beside you in the bed. It’s cold and pristine, not a wrinkle in sight. How many times have you imagined there to be someone beside you? It’s honestly too many to count, and you can’t help but let another tear slide down your face.

There’s a slight discontent in your heart that tells you that after today he’ll never even look at you anymore. That this will be just like what happened seven years ago, where he told you the two of you couldn’t be together and walked out of your life.

You had this silly competition, chasing after numbers the two of you knew didn’t matter. While other heroes yearn to be in the top 10, the two of you treated it as an game to one-up one another. Taunting the other with whoever has the higher rank that year.

That was the only time you talked to him, honestly. The annual Japanese Hero Billboard Chart. One of the only times you’d see him in real life instead of on a screen with an update on his latest endeavor.

And somewhere deep down you know that even that will cease to exist after today. The silly competition will be over, no more trying to get more popular, but rather just actually focusing on what the two of you are—heroes.

You grab your pillow, squeezing it to your chest. Of course you had to fuck it up once more.

The pillow feels to hard. Too many feathers stuffed into the thing, and without thinking about it you rip it open, hundreds of little feathers spilling from the casing. Sitting up you look around the room knowing that each safehouse had a small kit with a thread and needle stored somewhere.

Searching around for it, you find it under the sink. Sitting on the bed once more—a few feathers poking you in the butt and your legs—you get to work.

Hours pass, the dark night sky changing to the soft break of dawn that paints the entire sky hues of orange, to daylight where the sun is shining onto the sealed windows.

Your hands are cramping and bleeding slightly, small spots of red against the stark white feathers that make you just wanna cut your hand open to stain them red entirely—something you decide against when you repeat it in your head.

When you finally lay down the thread and needle you look up at your nightstand. It’s just past twelve in the afternoon, which gives you plenty of time to still get ready for the mission. Scrubbing a hand over your face you look down onto the bed.

An entire sheet of feathers lay there, neatly sown together in something that resembles the form of a wing. The entire thing is soft and way too itchy, but you still run your hands through it, hoping that one of them would twitch.

They never do.

Leaning your body back you look over at the wall, just… staring at it for a good few minutes. Since when were you so lonely that you had to sow together a whole feather blanket just to be reminded of when you were younger?

A small chuckle escapes your lips. Hollow and heartbroken. Of course, of course you would go ahead and fuck him after what happened when you kissed him last time.

Hands shaking you put the feather blanket over your legs, trying to feel the warmth in them—but they are too different. Even your brain knows this isn’t what you want, but it’s the closest what you can get. Sighing you get up to get ready for the day.

The mission comes before anything and everything else.

After that night you haven’t been able to focus, quickly losing sleep and some of your popularity considering you haven’t been doing that good of a job interacting with your fans. You were short and snappy with them sometimes, almost like a bird that’s being cornered into a cage.

Your number two rank—because you did get to two after that save—quickly dropped to four over the span of mere weeks. Tabloids printing out more and more articles about you. Speculations, your latest mishap, you name it and it’s there.

And of course wherever your name went, his was not far behind. Hawks, the number two hero, charming his way with the ladies once more. His ruby studs catching the light just right in the latest picture, and you know his magpie brain loves to see it.

Clicking the screen off you let yourself fall backward. This isn’t what you wanted, not even close. And just like you expected, there’s no more real competition. But maybe that’s also because you’re not letting there be competition.

The Commission has been on your ass about your latest endeavors, scolding you and even putting cameras inside of your own agency, just so they can keep track of what you’re doing in there.

Your sidekicks have been eyeing you carefully, but you just smile at them and tell them everything is fine. Because it is, isn’t it?

No matter how much time passes, every time you get home—if you even get the time to go back to your own apartment, nothing Commission owned—you look in the almost-empty closet and fish out the little feather blanket you made weeks ago.

Every time you can’t sleep, you lay it over you, just to try and trick your brain that everything will be okay, even when it will never be again.

The Hero Billboard Chart that year felt brutal. You fell down the rankings—now the number five hero—while Hawks was at his number two spot. It’s been the first time in years since the two of you didn’t stand next to each other. And oh boy, didn’t people have their opinions about it.

There’s speculation, children and adults alike screaming at the two of you asking if something happened. Others are more bold and ask if the two of you had a falling out of sorts. And of course there are the shippers who are making sad edits about you and Hawks, compiling every picture the two of you are in together to throw a sad song over it while unrelated pictures get used.

It’s honestly… something. Never in a million years would you have thought that people cared like to this extent. The two of you weren’t that close. Not in the public’s eye anyway, and no one knows about the history you have with the birdbrain.

So why is everyone always trying to get you two together anyway? Is it because you two debuted at the same time and rose the rankings together? Or do they see something deeper you yourself are refusing to admit?

Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter, because the HPSC is once again calling a meeting. Walking in you see that one face you were dreading to see, but you can’t just walk back out. Steeling your face you go to sit down at the long table that’s filled with people in business suits.

The meeting drones on and on. Beginning with reprimanding you for losing rank so fast. Rolling your eyes you let them talk about how they are going to rectify things, as if being the number five isn’t good enough.

A pawn. That’s still all you are to these people. Just a little piece on a much bigger board they can use any time they want. Same goes for the crimson-winged hero across from you. He’s leaning back, arms behind his head while he leans back.

There’s a beat of silence before your handler finally speaks up. “The two of you will do an ad together. Just to show everyone there’s no bad blood.”

That makes you freeze up slightly, hairs standing on end like someone threw a cold bucket of water over you. The blond across from you also halts for half a second—one you’re sure everyone around the table saw—before he smiles, big and bright.

“And what would this ad be?” he almost purrs across the table, canines on full display while he sits up a little straighter. The lax position from minutes ago disappearing completely.

The handler looks you over for a second, then him, then looks down at the tablet, just to create a little suspense. You know she knows what the ad is about, everyone here, except for you and Hawks do. They never call in a meeting without being prepared to the max.

“It’s an underwear ad. They want to advertise their new matching sets—for partners. The two of you can do that, right?”

Of course. Of course they would throw you in the deep end like this. It isn’t even just the fact that you have to do an ad with him, but the forced close proximity and underwear. Fucking great. Across from you Hawks’ eyebrows shoot up.

“An underwear ad,” he echoes, dragging every syllable like he’s chewing on taffy and trying to figure out how to get it out of his mouth. “For couples.”

Everyone at the table looks at him before his own handler smiles, cold and devoid of any emotion. “The two of you can do that, right? Show the world there’s no bad blood like they think there is. Just two heroes who are competing to be the better hero.”

You nod slowly, mechanically. There’s no saying no to this, and he knows it as well. His golden eyes flit over to yours, and for the first time in forever you can see a glint of emotion in there. It’s gone as quick as it came, but you swear there was some relief in there.

Which is why you’re here now, two weeks later in a warehouse that doubles as the set. There are people everywhere around you. Two are working on your body, lotioning it up so it looks good in the lighting—or whatever they said, you weren’t really listening to begin with to be completely honest—while there are another two people working on your hair and makeup.

The underwear is plain. A little heart cut out on your ass—nothing scandalous, just something cute—while there is a little bow on the front. Your bra also has a cute little bow at the front, tits sitting snug in it, and it’s honestly cute.

You can hear the assistants whisper to each other about everything and anything, but most of the time yours and Hawks’ name fall from their lips. Straining your ears you can just about hear what they’re saying—He’s adorable’ ‘adorable? he’s so hot.’ ‘I think I like her more’ ‘Fine then, more for me’.

They’re giggling as if you can’t hear what they’re saying, and if you can hear it, you’re certain he can, too.Speaking of, looking in the mirror you can see him walk up and lean against the doorframe, arms over his chest, biceps bulging.

He’s in nothing but boxers, and you have to keep your eyes up to not ogle him. Lean frame gotten a bit more defined over the years, but nothing extreme. He has to be able to fly, after all, and it would be more difficult if he was on the bigger side.

The stylist puts on some lipgloss before she steps away with an watchful eye. Once she determines everything is fine she nods at you to go stand up. Walking over to the guy who fills every room without even trying—though his wings certainly had something to do with that—you stop just short in front of him.

He lets his eyes rake over you, stopping just slightly when he sees the cute bow before he whistles. Low and sharp. A catcall if you ever heard one. Your hand shoots up and hits him on the back of his head, a small little flick of your wrist.

There’s a small, sharp sting on the back of his head. Not hurting him enough to complain, but enough to get him back into the present. The two of you are not alone, and when he looks around, he can see almost every eye on the two of you.

Right. Just an ad campaign and not just the two of you.

“Ready?” he murmurs, pushing himself upright before stepping aside slightly. You roll your eyes at him before pushing past him to make your way to the set. He flicks two fingers into the air to everyone in the dressing room before he turns to follow you. And, oh—oh now that’s unfair. The little heart cutout has his eyes drawn to it.

It’s cute, small enough to be inconspicuous, but enough for him to notice. And notice he does. His feathers bristle slightly before he has to calm them down. Memories of months ago filling his head. You pushed to the brick wall, your warm, wet walls clamping down on his fingers, on his dick—shit.

He flexes his arms in hopes to get the blood rushing to there instead of down there. And he already knows this is going to be a long day.

The director is absolutely delighted when he sees the two of you walk in, immediately shaking your hands and thanking the two of you for coming, since he knows how busy hero work is. He’s absolutely beaming when you start talking a bit more, but then remembers he has to actually put the two of you in positions for the shoot.

It starts out with Keigo sitting down, muscled thighs spread oud, and you have to perch on his lap. Of fucking course. This is a couples ad, after all. But that didn’t mean you weren’t hoping it wouldn’t be like this.

Still the shoot goes on, running through multiple poses. Sitting on his lap, standing in front of each other, standing in front of him while you were with your back turned toward the camera, one of his hands on you waist, which slid lower lower lower, until he was grabbing your ass—which the director absolutely loved to see.

‘Make it more sensual.’ ‘Good, good, look each other in the eyes like you mean in.’ ‘Oh, yes yes that! that’s it!’ ‘Put your hand on his chest—there we goo.’ ‘This is looking good guys.’ ‘Okay now I just need something that shows off the front. Ohhh that’s good!’

He was… energetic to say the least.

By the time the two of you are done with the shoot—having had solo shots done as well—it’s already late at night. Most of the people have packed up already with a promise to go to dinner together, while there are still a few people walking around.

You’re in your dressing room removing your makeup when the door opens. Looking up through the mirror you can see Hawks leaned against the door, crimson wings spread open slightly while his arms are over his chest. Still in just his underwear—same as you.

You’re not sure what happened next. One minute he was talking to you—taunting you, really—and the next the two of you are stumbling to the couch, fingers groping and touching everywhere your eyes can see.

You’re laying on your back, hair splayed out underneath you while Hawks stands over you, teeth in the wrapper of the rubber that he— “Where did you even get that from?” He walked in here in just his boxers, so unless he was hiding it in there you have no idea where he got it from.

“Sent a feather to retreat one from my wallet,” he chuckles before he drops the last piece of clothing, dick springing free and hitting his bellybutton. He’s already hard and leaking for you—a sight you cannot get used to—and the soft amber lighting of the mirror shows you the two barbells just under his tip.

Fuck, if that isn’t hot. Your thighs squeeze together while you feel yourself start to soak through your underwear, white fabric almost turning translucent, sticking to your folds that leaves nothing up to the imagination.

Rolling the condom on he positions himself between your legs, hand at his base tapping his tip on your clit over the fabric a few times. Each tap has your thighs jolt, almost clamping them shut before you feel multiple feathers on them, keeping you nice and spread for him.

“You always like to tease this much or— or are you trying to keep me here longer?” you ask him through your teeth, annoyance dripping from your voice. It just makes him chuckle, golden eyes trained on where you were dripping for him. “Hmm, just wanna get you nice ‘n wet for me, but seems like I don’t have to do much, do I?

You roll your eyes at the statement. It’s not like he’s wrong, though. There’s no hiding it, either, not with the way your spread out for him.

He finally takes your panties off, hooking his slender fingers into the waistband before he lets it snap against your skin once, having you jolt out, before he finally takes them off. He looks down at the way you’re spread open for him—wet slit spread open for him with the way his feathers are keeping you open, and he can’t help but pry your lips open ever further with his thumbs.

Your hole clenches around nothing, more arousal dripping out of you and down the couch. He’s just staring for a few seconds, pupils blown out at the sight, and it would’ve made you chuckle—taunt him about hypnotizing him with your pussy—if it wasn’t for him putting his thumb in your weeping hole.

“Fuck, Hawks. Wanted your cock,” you mewl out when he slowly moves his finger in and out of you, totally transfixed on the way you’re swallowing him whole. “Seriously, just g-get this over with.”

You grab the base of his cock, manicured fingers wrapping around the appendage, before you move it over your slit, head bumping your already-sensitive clit. That finally snaps him out of it, retreating his thumb from your snug walls with a pop!

Positioning him at your entrance, he finally moves his hips, pushing in slowly. The stretch is still overwhelming. Leaning down his teeth sink into the fabric of your bra before he pulls it down just enough to bunch under your tits. Your nipples pebble immediately after they get exposed to the cold air, which just makes him groan before wrapping his lips around one of them.

The dual sensation has you mewling out, hands finding purchase on his back, fingers skimming the base of his wings making them arch out, the red plumes the only thing you can see right now. He whimpers at the sensation, feathers bristling slightly before he folds them back in.

His cock throbs inside of you once he bottoms out, flushed head steadily dripping more pre. The feeling of the rubber is different, the layer between your walls and his flushed cock has you whining out. The little barbell also feels weird, not like last time.

“Stop clenching— fucking hell… like that,” his hand smacks your thigh, aa sharp sting running up your thigh and straight to your core, having the exact opposite reaction he wanted—walls clenching down on him further.

“Just move already,” you moan out when his tongue flicks over your nipple, still waiting for him to move. His hips start to move, pulling them back he thrusts forward again. A deep and brutal thrust that has you clawing at his back, leaving behind angry, red marks. The red that matches his wings.

Your hips move in tandem with his, skin slapping against skin, heavy balls hitting your ass while his mouth finally finds your other tit, peppering it with kisses and bites. “So good for me, love it when I fuck you, don’tcha?” he murmurs against your skin.

Your legs wrap around his waist before you flip the two of you around, his body hitting the couch with an ‘oomf’. Straddling him you grab him at the base before sinking down on his girth, weeping hole swallowing him greedily. “Hate you. Hate you so much.”

His hands come down to your hips, helping you move up and down his cock. His eyes are transfixed on where the two of you are connected, lips stretching around him. “Yeah, hate me? That why you’re bouncing on my cock right now?”

His thumb presses onto your clit while two of his feathers come down to play with your nipples—feather-soft brushes against your skin making you keen out into the air, not caring who could possibly walk by and hear the two of you.

“T-this doesn’t mean anything,” you moan out, ass slapping against his thick thighs with each fall of your hips. Your pace slowly dwindles down, hips not lifting as far up as they did before, which is a wrong move because Hawks tightens his hold onto your plush hips and starts moving you.

“C’mon now, birdie. Wanted to ride me so. ride. me.” he slams you down with each word, tip hitting your cervix every time he bottoms out. You throw your head back at the feeling, back arching to the point where your tits are basically smothering him. Not that he cares though, he just happily groans while licking off the sweat that’s beading down the valley of your breasts.

“You’re—shit—dirty,” is all you can get out while he’s bruising your walls, fingers digging into your flesh in a way that you know will leave behind marks the next day. Luckily your hero suit covers it, because otherwise people would definitely know what happened.

Your thighs are starting to strain, knot in your stomach coiling deeper and deeper until it finally snaps. Body trembling above his, walls constricting around him. “Shit— tryna milk me even when you know you can’t get filled?”

He holds your body against him while he plants his feet on the ground. Pummeling his hips into yours, he chases after his own orgasm. You’re whining out at the overstimulation, hips writhing above him trying to get away from the feeling, only for him to lock his arms around your waist, keeping you still for him.

With a groan he finally cums, rubber preventing you from feeling him fill you up. The only sounds filling the room is the two of you greedily gulping in some air, and his feathers twitching against his back—puffing up slightly with affection before they go down again.

That’s the way the two of you begin this… arrangement of sorts.

Instead of taunting about rankings, the two of you began doing… favors for each other. He ate you out after you shot up the rankings again, and you sucked him off when he was still the number two—above your ranking—the next year.

You can still remember the way he was teasing you about sounding hoarse during patrol. Your throat was constricting around him a mere ten minutes before you had to go out, so there was no time to even look for something to soothe your throat.

And then you had the times where he came over just to take his frustrations out on you, hips pummeling into your ass from behind, grunting about how overworked the two of you were. The Commission still on both your asses, giving you assignment after assignment.

Your ass was red and swollen by the time he was done, puffy cunt absolutely abused while he watched his cum drip out of you only for him to lick it out of there mere seconds later.

Sometimes he came inside of you, other times he pulled out just in time, painting your skin with ropes of white, rubber having been ditched after your third time together. You were whining about not being able to feel him, telling him that you were on the pill so he couldn’t get you pregnant anyway—thank you Commission for doing something good for once.

Which is leads you to today, you’re laid out on a bed. Not the small beds the two of you had in the safehouses, nor the couches backstage somewhere or the rough bricks scratching against your back whenever the two of you find yourselves outside again. No this is Hawks’ bed, massive, just to comfortably fit his wings onto.

He’s pounding into your poor, overstimulated pussy. His hips coming down to grind against you before he pulls back and slams back in. The headboard is hit hit hitting the wall behind you, luckily for the two of you he lives in the penthouse, so there will be no noise complaints.

“Fucking hate them,” he grunts while sweat is beading down his temple, wings spread out behind him in a brilliant, crimson arc. Your fingers are clawing at his biceps while he continues his rant. “No, Hawks, it isn’t enough. Nothing you ever do is enough. We’ll just keep on sending you on missions, because that’s why you’re here. To be a hero means to sacrifice,” he mocks one of the handlers.

It’s not often that he reaches out to you, much less when he actually calls you over. Hell, this has been the first time you were even in his apartment, and you had no time to actually admire the place before he had you pinned to the wall already.

Sinking to his knees he muttered out a, need this. need this pussy to suffocate me. before he all but yanked your shorts and panties down in one, swift movement. His lips immediately latched onto your sensitive nub, making your hand fly to his hair while your head thunked! onto the wall behind you.

“Fucking hell, what’s gotten into you?” you asked him through a moan. While he’s eaten you out before, he was never this desperate to get his hands—or in this case lips—on you. It was always filled with teasing and taunting remarks. But this time he just groaned into your mound like it was the answer to all of his questions. “Seriously, Hawks… what happened?”

You’re pulling on his hair trying to get him to at least acknowledge you, but all it did was make him whimper out into your slit while his wings shuddered behind him. Well guess you found out something new about him.

“Commission was on my ass,” he mumbles through licks, his tongue flitting over your clit while one of his hand is groping your ass like it was his personal stress-ball. “Fuck you taste so sweet.”

Your eyes rolled to the back of your head, hips starting to grind down onto his face while he plunged his tongue inside of you, wiggling the muscle around into your tight walls. “Want me t-to talk about it?” you breathed out, swinging one leg over his shoulder—careful not to pin his wing to his back—to give him more access to your slit, which he happily takes, pressing his mouth further into your pussy.

“Jus’ need you right now,” he grunted out, continuing to eat you out. It was messy, spit dribbling past the corners of his mouth while the lower part of his face was shiny with your arousal. “Pussy loves me, doesn’t she?”

You couldn’t answer that, too busy trying to focus on your upcoming orgasm to even think of responding to him talking to your pussy like it was alive instead of just an organ. Gripping his hair even tighter you began gyrating your hips down onto his face which he happily let you, groaning out while he angled his face so his nose would nudge your clit with each roll of your hips.

Once you came on his face—thighs trembling, tummy clenching, moans flowing free out of you—he dragged you to the bed where he took no time to slide into you. You’re still not used to the way he stretches you out, despite it having been years since you first began fucking him.

He’d filled you up once already while you’ve cum three times, weeping pussy sensitive to each roll of his hips, and you can feel your stomach starting to tighten once more.

“Haven’t I sacrificed enough already?” He’s still talking, still asking rhetorical questions that you could answer—that you would answer if he wasn’t pounding you into oblivion—but all you can do is moan out at him. “D-did everything for them.”

Nodding your head you run your hand through his hair, trying to soothe him slightly, but you just tighten your grip once he finds that spongy spot inside of you again, bullying it when he realises he’s found your g-spot once again.

“F-fuck, Hawks. Wait. Feels weird,” you’re trying to get him to slow down, to get that weird feeling building up in your lower stomach to go away, only for him to continue babbling about the Commission and how they ruined his life. If you weren’t so busy you’d give your two cents on it, but you can’t. Legs starting to tremble around his waist while your toes curl.

He presses his thumb to your clit, and that does it. Your orgasm crashes into you like a lighting strike. Clear liquid gushing out of you and onto Hawks’ abs, thighs, balls and bedsheets. Your hands tighten in the sheets beside you while you sob out his name. “Fuck, Keigo— Kei. Pleasepleaseplease. Love you— shit.”

That makes him still. Just completely still against you. You don’t notice, though, too busy riding out your orgasm to even see the way his eyes are wide open, mouth agape. The pleasure shooting through you has you crying, tears rolling down your cheeks and disappearing into the pillows below you.

“What did you just say?” His voice is so small, unlike his normal, cocky self that you finally open your eyes. Blinking a few times you note the way he’s hunched over you right now, a few feathers suspended in the air while his golden eyes look at you like you’re made of glass. He says your name—not birdie, not dove, not your hero name, just your actual name. The one you haven’t heard in years.

“Say it again,” he breathes out, almost begging you. “Please.”

Gulping you look at those golden eyes you’ve seen your entire life, the ones that always meant that you were safe. The ones you’ve hoped to see beside you every day, but got taken away from you when you were a mere seventeen years old.

“I love you,” you murmur, trying to gauge his reaction. The next second his mouth crashed onto yours, plump lips groaning out after he finally tasted you. It’s been ten years. Ten years since the two of you last kissed. You two hadn’t kissed even once after debuting, despite the two of you having been fuck-buddies for years.

It’s filled with warmth and lust, his tongue clashing against yours while you drink up all of his sounds. The wings on his back unfurl and furl back in, almost as if he has no control over what’s happening to them.

“Love you, love you, love you,” he mumbles out against your lips while slowly starting to trust back inside again. The overstimulation has you keening out, but you just wrap your legs further around his waist while pulling him back in. “Mine, all mine.”

His pace picks up, hips snapping against yours once more. One of his hands gropes your breast while the other squeezes your waist, pulling you down to meet every thrust.

Your body is completely pliant against his, bones feeling like jelly with the way he’s made you cum multiple times already. The last sunrays catch your eyes, and it has him gasping out. You look like an angel beneath him—his angel.

He spills inside you not soon after, a second load filling you up. And you coax him through it, hands running through his hair while his lips latch onto your throat.

You thought he’d be done now, but you can feel him twitch inside of you. “Are you still hard?” you whisper, incredulous.

Keigo merely smiles down at you before he pulls out of you, his thick seed immediately bubbling out of you. He gives you no time to even realise what’s going on, picking you up into his arms and setting you down in front of the big window that overlooks the city.

Your body tilts forward, tits pressing against the cool glass while you turn your head to the side to look at the man behind you. “What are you doing?”

“Gonna show everyone you’re mine,” he growls before nudging your knees apart and slips back inside. Your mouth falls open when he starts moving again, the cool glass a stark contrast to your overheating body.

The streets below are still busy, and if someone were to look up they would be able to see the number two absolutely railing the number three hero. Your nipples brush against the smooth surface, adding all the more pleasure to your core.

Inner thighs are slick with a mixture of your and his cum, and you can see him in the reflection of the glass. The crimson almost getting swallowed by the burnt-sienna of the sky outside, but his eyes are transfixed on you. He chuckles when he feels you clench down onto him, walls fluttering uselessly around him. “You like the thought of people seeing you like this?” he murmurs into your ear, breath warm against the shell.

Your hips move back against him, knees weak with the way he knocks you forward with each thrust. Wrapping his arm around you, he lifts you up, feet dangling uselessly above the ground. You gasp out at that—at him using your body like you were merely a doll he could just pick up whenever he wanted.

“Shit— Keigo,” you whine out his name, forehead thumping against the glass, eyes fluttering close when that piercing passes over your sweet-spot with each pass of his hips. Nails leaving angry indents into his forearm.

“I know, dove. I know,” he murmurs against your cheek, he pounds into you from behind like a man possessed. “Let go for me. Show me how much you want me.”

Your eyes roll to the back of your skull, mouth opening in a broken moan that sounds so unlike you. White-hot pleasure shoots through your core, whitening out your vision for what feels like an eternity.

Keigo is not far behind, hips snapping against your ass like a punctuation. “S-shit, trying to milk me for all I’m worth.”

He spills into you for the last time that night. Hips ceasing their ministrations completely, his sweaty chest pressed flush against your back. Letting your head loll back against his shoulder you look at him, tired eyes blinking over his form.

He’s flushed from his face down all the way to his chest. Sweat beads down his body and he’s panting against your neck. His hair is plastered to his forehead, eyes blown out wide.

Moving the two of you back to the bed, he carefully lays you down before walking away, only to return with a washcloth seconds later. He carefully opens your thighs for him and begins to clean you up. You trash slightly at the sensation. “I know, dovey. Will be over soon.”

He throws the washcloth somewhere to the ground, and it lands with a wet schlap! somewhere in the corner of his bedroom—something you’ll probably reprimand him for when you have more energy, but right now you couldn’t care less.

Shuffling into the bed, he pulls you to his chest. One of his wings wraps itself around you—just like old times. It takes you right back to that too-small bed where the two of you would talk into the late hours of the night.

Feathers are twitching against your skin as if trying to kiss your entire body. It makes you relax, body sinking more into his chest while he traces small shapes in your skin.

“That was… a lot,” you mumble out, not quite sure if you should even address it, but you can’t stay silent any longer. The way he said your name, told you he loved you, gave you your old nickname back. It was, quite frankly, a lot. And even if that all didn’t happen, he also made you squirt for the first time. The memory has you flushing bright red.

“Mhmm, nothing I said was untrue, though,” he mumbles out into your hair, pressing his lips feather-soft against the crown of your head. It has you closing your eyes for a few seconds before opening them again.

“Why did you even leave in the first place, Kei?” It’s been bothering you ever since he walked out of that room. The way he was so fidgety, no longer wanting anything to do with you when the two of you only had a few more months before the debut. A few more months and the two of you could’ve just stopped sneaking around.

You can feel him lean back a little, head angled down before his fingers find you chin and nudges your head up so he can look at you. “What are you talking about, dove? You’re the one who told me that we couldn’t be together.”

Furrowing your brows you look at the golden eyes you’ve known your whole life. Shifting slightly—and hissing when you accidentally rub yourself against his thigh—you sit up a little, just enough to look at him.

“No, no. You came into my room telling me it couldn’t work any longer,” you start, eyes darting around his face, confusion settling over you. You can still remember that night vividly, and it was him who broke it off with you. “Said you didn’t have feelings for me and then just… walked out.”

“Now why would I do that when I’ve been in love with you for all of my life?” He asks you, bushy brows furrowed together. There’s a slight crease between them, and you want to rub it away, but you’re still racking your brain.

He continues, voice lower now, more sad, “I came back from that horribly long assignment and you were waiting for me on my bed. At first you were just… quiet. Then you told me that it was a mistake and that it was just the proximity that had made you kiss me.”

You chuckle at that, hollow and sad all at once. “Just the proximity? Keigo I’ve liked you ever since I realised what it meant to have a crush on someone.”

He just purses his lips at that, not moving an inch. The feathers that are still on your back twitch a few times, a shudder going through them that he doesn’t bother to stop.

“Then why would you—” he trails off, golden eyes almost bulging out of his skull with realisation. “The Commission.”

“Wait, what?” You’re confused now. What does the Commission have to do with any of this? It was just you two that knew about everything, the Commission has never even known that you and Keigo even knew each other outside of any assignments.

“Think about it, dove. You’re saying it was me who broke it of, I’m saying it was you—”

“I never broke up with you. God I was so heartbroken.”

“—and neither of us is saying we did that. Hell, we’re both saying we wanted to be together. So what else could it have been? You know how the Commission is, they could get their hands on any quirk user, and I would bet there’s someone who could shapeshift, or something like that.”

You’re still looking at him, mind racing now. You honestly can’t believe neither of you thought about this earlier, but then again the two of you didn’t really talk. Just played stupid games to be close to each other.

“The feather,” you finally breathe out, fingers ghosting over your ribs where he always put the small feather. The one you’ve been missing on your skin for years. “It didn’t float when I threw it back at you. It just… fell to the floor. And ‘you’ picked it up. Picked it up.”

How could you have missed it—that small detail that would tell you something was wrong. Sure he was acting strange, not letting you touch him and just being twitchy in general, but his feathers were the dead giveaway. They never could quite hide everything he wanted to, despite having been trained for years.

How did it never occur to you that he had telepathic feathers and he picked it off the floor rather than just bringing it toward himself.

“You gave that feather back,” he murmurs, his own thumb coming to your ribs. Then a small, sad chuckle falls from his lips. “Even after all the training we’ve had, we still got outsmarted by the suits. Purely because we couldn’t see past our emotions.”

Tears spring to your eyes, because it’s true, isn’t it? You let the emotions get the better of you, throwing out the small feather that could have solved everything. What would’ve happened if you never threw it back at ‘him’ in that fit of anger? Would the two of you still have been best friends? More than best friends? Or would he not have believed you?

“How did they even find out about it?” you whisper. His thumb comes up and wipes away some of the tears that are gathering on your waterline, the action so soft compared to how he used your body mere minutes ago. “We’ve never gotten caught in twelve years.”

“Must’ve been the supply closet,” he answers, pulling you back to lay on his chest. “Maybe they realised that us walking back took longer than needed.”

And how stupid could the two of you have been? Of course they would know how long it takes for the two of you to walk back—especially considering Keigo had left before you and went out of the supply closet after you.

That’s the exact thing the two of you were trained on noticing, patterns and behaviours. Yet it didn’t occur in your minds that they would be using it as well. Didn’t think about much but him at that moment, to be completely honest.

“Can’t believe secret kisses in a supply closet is what has gotten us caught,” you groan out into his chest, the words slightly muffled. And he laughs at that, a small breath through his nose that rattles his chest. “At least you were my first everything.”

“Wait what?” He looks down at you, looks at the way you’re burrowing yourself further into his chest, trying to find his warmth. His wing instinctively tightens around you, feathers whispering against your skin from where they’re puffing up slightly. “You mean to tell me that time on the rooftop was your first time, too?”

You hum slightly, a small, drowsy thing that comes deep from your throat. His words still have to catch up with your brain, but when they finally register your head snaps up. “What do you mean, too?”

“I never fucked anyone beside you,” he says, not even a tremble can be found in his voice. Looking at him for a little while longer, you let a small chuckle escape your lips. He never fucked anyone else?

“Then why do you have a piercing there?” Your leg shifts slightly over him, making him groan out, wing tightening a fraction. He grabs your leg with one hand, halting your movement, because he can already feel blood rush south again—way too sensitive from the multiple rounds the two of you had earlier.

“Got it so I could jerk off faster—why are you laughing, you out of all people should know that we don’t get any time to get any release. Especially with the way the Commission keeps throwing more and more missions at us.”

“It’s just… I thought you had fucked half the population here in Fukuoka City, and here you are telling me you were a virgin and just got a dick piercing to make yourself more sensitive?”

It’s ridiculous, honestly. And everything makes sense—the way he would never respond to your taunts about other girls, just like you wouldn’t respond to any of his taunts since you wouldn’t just tell him he was the one to take your virginity.

“Guess we have a lot of catching up to do, love.” There it is again, that nickname. Not a slip of the tongue as you thought it was ten years ago. He really did call you ‘love’ back then.

Your eyes close against your will, body finally going boneless against him. “Mhmm, but first we should go to sleep.”

“I don’t care what we do as long as I have you beside me,” he murmurs out against your skin, lips brushing your temple—feather-light, almost like it was never there to begin with.

You don’t know what’ll happen tomorrow. All you know is that you got the boy you loved back and that this time nothing will come between the two of you.

©CursedKisss do not copy, steal, plagiarize, or feed my works into AI. I will send Shigaraki after you if you do.

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