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shouyuus · 3 days ago

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─── 啓悟 THE ART OF FALLING

keigo; 4,599 words; hurt/angst, not that much comfort, heavy allusions to suicide, terminal illness!reader, mentions of abuse (keigo's dad), pro-hero!keigo, no "y/n", lapslock

summary: all of life is a falling, all of life is a losing, all of life a catching, a remembering. endless, endless, until it isn’t.

a/n: apologies in advance for this one -- pls do heed the trigger warnings!!! big thank you to @aimfor-theheart for beta-ing and suffering through my keigo-flavored meltdown u__u i promise i will be writing fluff with the birdman soon he deserves it but first... the horrors...

─── 啓悟 HE CATCHES YOU FALLING out of the sky; it will not be the last time.

“oop — careful there,” he says, cradling you to his chest, an easy grin slung across his lips, his eyes twinkling as if there’s an inside joke caught in liminal space between your body and his, “trust me, i get the urge to go flying too but,” he shrugs, zipping through the air till he’s found a nice low rooftop to set you on, “not havin’ a pair of these makes the landing a bit tricky,” he jerks his chin back towards his wings, feathers red as freshly spilled blood.

you swallow, the prickle of hot, angry tears tickling at your eyes as you blink slowly at him as he sets you down. your bare feet curl against the bits of gravel on the rooftop. he glances down at your feet.

“ah… sorry about that. here —”

two red feathers zoom out of nowhere and deposit your sandals at your feet. you stare, almost unseeing. it’s hot, the air miraged in heat, overhead the sun screams its light over the tokyo skyline.

he bends down, holding up a shoe, “alright, on you get —” he reaches out a gloved hand, gently picking up your ankle and slipping your feet into the shoe. your foot drops with a clatter and he glances up to make sure you’re stable before helping you put on the other. when he’s done, he pushes to his feet, stretching his hands above his head in a great, over-wrought sort of yawn.

“man, it really is a good day for flyin’ though,” he shields his eyes with his hands, squinting out over the endless rooftops.

you lick your chapped lips.

“why’d you save me?” you ask, voice soft. there’s a piece of gravel stuck underneath the pad of your right foot.

keigo turns, hitching an eyebrow as he looks you over. his lazy smile stretches, but there’s a hardness to his gaze that almost makes you flinch back.

“cause, pretty girl like you deserves saving, no? and, well, a big ol’ hero like me? comes with the job description.” he chuckles, the noise curt and self-deprecating.

you frown and open your mouth, but the heat is making you woozy, the world going liquid around you as you wobble on your feet.

“oi — are you alri — oi!”

his voice tunnels, warping, echoing and strange, an underwater thing. the sky pinwheels above you, and then — blissful, cool, darkness.

you wake up in a hospital bed; it is not your first time.

the systematic beeps of the machines around you is almost a welcome sound. you count your breaths, feel your heart sync up to the rhythmic whir of machines, you open your eyes to the white-tiled ceiling, the spinning fan, the lifeless fluorescent panel-lights.

“you awake?” a groggy voice asks.

you turn your head; your heart skips a beat. the traitorous machine to your left maps the skid in a perfect spike of bright green light.

keigo yawns, his wings flexing out behind him as he shifts in the hospital seat, strangely dwarfed by the size of his wings. he cracks his neck and sits up straighter.

“i’d say ‘nice place’ but…” he looks around the hospital room, his lips tug into a grimace, “they say it’s not good manners to lie to a lady.”

you can’t help it, a coughing laugh burbles out of you, the motion so unexpected it jolts your whole body. you swallow around the dryness in your throat, but keigo is already leaning forward, helping you up and pressing a glass of water to your lips.

“there, easy does it…” he watches you drink, soothing a hand up and down your back. his palm is warm against the thin linen of your hospital gown. he frowns slightly as you pull away, licking at your lips.

“thanks,” you say, your voice a croaking thing. you flush at the sound, heat creeping up your neck and into your cheeks. keigo laughs.

“no need, just promise me you’ll keep on doing that.”

you frown at him, “doing what?”

he points to the water, and then at you, “drinking water. keeping yourself alive.”

you let out a long breath at the way he leans into the last word, casting your eyes towards the window. outside, the summer sun is just skimming the far horizon, the light gilding the room in liquid gold.

you turn to find him watching you, even as his eyes flicker from your face out towards the setting sun. like this, every feather on his massive wings looks like a lick of fire, and you can almost reach out to feel their heat.

“c’mon,” he says suddenly, jumping to his feet and offering you a hand. you stare at it before slowly letting your eyes wander up to his face. he grins as he meets your eyes, there’s that self-same mischief dancing behind their golden glow, a secret he wants to tell you, just you, and no one else in the world.

you eye his hand once more.

“let’s get outta here, hm?”

you reach out to take his hand.

it is not every day that you get to watch the sunset from the top of the tokyo skytree, and not every night you get watch the moonrise there either. keigo sits with you slotted between his legs, his wings domed around you to block out the wind.

“why’re you doing this?” you ask, after a very long while. overhead, the stars have just started their twinkling ascent. keigo shrugs, letting leaning back, his hands propped behind him.

“like i said, it was a good day for flying and…” his voice trails off. he drops his chin, a mirthless little laugh tumbling out of him. after a moment, he shakes his head, almost mumbling to himself.

“figured… you’d probably never done anything like this before, so.”

you let out a giggle, the sound jolting him up. his eyes go wide as he watches you fall into a semi-silent fit of laughter, a palm pressed to your chest to keep from laughing too hard, lest you start coughing again. he gives you back a few ginger pats before you wave him off.

“n-no —” you manage between gulps of air, “can’t say i have, though… i don’t imagine most people have done this —” you motion towards the space around you, the night sky seemingly encasing you both, sat atop the outlook deck of the highest point in tokyo.

again, he shrugs, but there’s a smile spreading across his lips.

“yeah, well… i didn’t bump into any of them on patrol today, so guess they’re not that lucky.”

you scoff at the word, the smile slipping from your face.

“yeah… lucky.”

“hey,” he leans forward, tipping your chin up, “c’mon, dovie, none of that now.”

you frown, “dovie?”

keigo nods down at your white hospital gown, “yeah, white — like a dove.”

you crinkle your nose and try to shake off his hand. he laughs.

sometime before midnight, he brings you back to your hospital room. strangely, no one’s come to check in on you (though you find out later that keigo must’ve spoken to the nurses and told them to leave you be for the night). he sets you down beside your bed and hops back onto the window ledge.

you watch him with your arms linked behind your back.

“alright, you keep on drinkin’ water and —”

“staying alive, yeah, yeah,” you say with a tiny tremor like a laugh to your voice that makes keigo smile.

ten minutes after he leaves, you hear a faint tink-tink, only to find a single bright red feather poking at your water glass. your jaw drops.

“you left a feather to babysit me?” you ask, before you can even wonder if the feather can hear you. the feather taps it’s sharp spine against the glass once more, nudging it closer, even as you let out a long sigh and reach for it.

you take a long gulp, letting a thin droplet of water trickle down your chin.

smacking your lips loudly, you set the glass down and stare at the feather, now lying motionless on your bedside table.

“there, happy?”

the feather remains unmoved, but you can’t fight the tiny little smile that threatens your lips as you flip onto your side and tug the sheets up over your shoulders. outside, the moon is bright and round as a rime of rice; the city below her glitters in a sheet of undulating stars, and you close your eyes to sleep, for the first time, without fearing for what you’ll find in your dreams.

keigo does not know what brings him back to you; it will not be the last time.

but when he finds himself hovering awkwardly outside your hospital window, he allows himself a single eye-roll of what-the-fuckery before pushing forward to let himself in. you’re reading in bed, a fresh bouquet of flowers on your bedside table.

he feels a strange, almost startling jab of something inside his chest before he shoves the feeling aside and alights down easily onto the floor in front of the window.

you look up from your book, painfully unfazed by the appearance of the winged hero at your bedside.

“i made it into a necklace, look,” is all you say, tugging down the neckline of your hospital gown to show him the bright red feather now tethered to a thin red thread, looped around your neck. he clears his throat, feeling a blush prickle at his cheeks as he glances around the room.

“yeah — i — i know.”

you cock your head, staring at him, the movement so birdlike he almost laughs.

“oh, well, i thought about putting it on a gold chain or something like that, but metal’s not good for mri machines,” you say, casual as you reach for a small mandarin orange from a basket on your table and start the methodical process of peeling it.

keigo watches in muted fascination as you slowly work the peel off with your fingers, one long strip of it, till it falls away to reveal the soft veined flesh beneath. gently, you break off half the mandarin and hold it out to him.

“they’re really sweet today.”

keigo nods, dropping into the seat by your bed and popping three slices into his mouth at once. there’s such an explosion of flavor he almost chokes. coughing, he reaches for the glass of water and chugs half of it in one go, thumping himself in the chest.

“wow — you really weren’t kidding — these are sweet!”

you nod, humming as you break off a section and press it slowly into your mouth.

“some of the girls from uni came to visit today,” you say, your eyes scanning across the words on the page before you flip to the next one, “one of them is thinking about asking an underclassman boy out.”

keigo watches you press another slice of mandarin into your mouth, his throat suddenly very dry.

“uh — yeah? wait — uni?”

you turn towards him, blinking owlishly, “yeah. i was studying to be a nurse. guess i got my wish in the end though —” you let out a flippant little sigh as you slump back into your pillows and look around the hospital room, “no better masterclass than to see the experts at work, right?”

keigo blinks. you were decidedly less talkative the last time he’d been here, though, it was also under decidedly very different circumstances. he wonders about the kind of girl you were before all this, before the endless tests and tubes, hospital visits and check-marked charts. if you were effervescent, if you laughed a lot, made jokes, more than the dry, gallows-humor kind that eventually infects everyone living with a terminal illness.

“oh, you’re super popular with them —” you say, and for a second, keigo is confused, but then he sees the stack of magazines half-hidden beneath the fruit basket. the corner of one depicting his signature bright red wings. he sighs, running a hand through his hair.

“yeah well, that also comes with the job description.”

you flash him a smile, bright and cheeky, and keigo silently thanks the heavens that he’s not the one linked up to the heartbeat monitor because he’s certain his reading would’ve just gone haywire.

“you never told me you were such a heartthrob hero,” you say, lilting the last two words. he scoffs, holding up his hands.

“whoa, whoa there, dovie — that’s not a light accusation to make — and plus,” he says, propping one leg over the other and leaning his elbow on the hitched up knee, “that kinda title is given, something bestowed upon you. ‘s not something you bring up yourself, alright?”

you hike a perfectly arched eyebrow and lace your fingers delicately across your lap.

“bestowed, huh? by whom?”

keigo leans back in his chair, balancing on the hind two legs, spreading wide his arms. behind him, his great crimson wings flare out, sending a woosh of air through the room.

“by the adoring public, of course.”

you stare at him for a beat of three seconds before falling into a fit of laughter that sets every nerve-ending in his entire body ablaze. he fights the urge to flap his wings, if only to get some air in here — damn — he glances towards the window to make sure it’s still open.

it is.

it’s a strange thing, spring. the shortest of all seasons, but eternal in it’s endless impermanence. flowers bloom, green buds darken into the lush green of summer leaves. the whole world blushes, and the wind spins her skirt tails, light over a humming horizon.

keigo’s always wondered about the likeliness of people falling in love in spring, thought it cliched and strange, a seasonal sickness maybe — the change in weather making everyone light-headed. but, he gets it now.

it’s hard now to fall in love, when the world is doing the same with living.

he finds himself hovering outside your window, more nights than not, hesitating about whether or not to go in. usually, it’s after he’s dropped you off after whisking you away to watch another sunset, somewhere, another moonrise, somewhere.

he basks in the musical lilt of your laughter, the rhythmic sway of your breaths (like wingbeats); he takes you flying and flying and flying, till you stop looking down when you plummet towards the ground. you know he’ll catch you, and he does.

every time.

except —

“i won’t need you to catch me when i’ve got a pair of my own,” you say one day, tucked into his side, sitting atop a skyscraper made of metal and glass, the summer sun burning itself out over the jagged tokyo skyline.

keigo glances over.

“a pair of…?” he pulls his attention away from the way you feel curled against him, body to body, his wing feathered over your shoulder like a cape.

you run a thin finger along one of his long flight feathers.

“wings, duh.”

keigo frowns.

your eyebrow kicks up in a devious little dance.

“y’know, for when i’m up in heaven.”

he freezes, every muscle in his body slowly calcifying. he turns his head slowly. you’re watching the sun sink inch by shimmering inch behind a row of faraway buildings, the light refracting off of a hundred thousand windows, spilling into a hundred thousand homes. a hundred thousand people going about their hundred thousand lives, unaware of the looming threat of death, tucked into every darkened corner, lingering behind every closed door.

keigo wants to scream.

he feels it building inside him, fluttering, as if the scream could grow wings and beat it’s way out of his chest.

“call me cynical but… i never used to believe in shit like that.”

you quirk your head, a curious little bird. keigo’s heart aches.

“used to?” you ask.

he lets out a puff of laughter, his wings drooping, closing in and in and in till they’ve almost blocked out the sun entirely.

“yeah,” he turns, his voice catching on his barbed-wire regrets, “and then i met you.”

you watch him for a second longer before leaning in. your mouth barely grazes his, but by the time he realizes, you’re already pulling back, a small, satisfied smile pressed between your lips like a flower, or a secret.

“c’mon, i’ve gotta be back by 8… or else the nurses will have your head.”

“eh, a couple of autographs and they’ll be happy.”

keigo grumbles, allowing you to tug him up by the hand. he loops his arms around you and tips off the edge of the building, letting the pair of you tumble into freefall for a long moment before swooping out of it with a great woosh of sun-licked feathers.

later, perched on the railings of the hospital rooftop, he peers over the edge of the building and wonders what it might be like to jump, to surrender yourself to air and gravity with no wings to catch you. he sighs and stretches out one wing, then the other, groaning as he feels each muscle and tendon pulling taut.

he’d never know. instinct would kick in first, and he’s always had his wings.

“the scan didn’t go well,” you say, toying with the worn red thread around your neck.

keigo’s long since gotten used to the tiny niggling feeling of your skin brushing against his feather. at first, he’d been acutely aware of it, the inside of your hospital gown, the soft warmth of your skin, the way he could almost, almost feel your heartbeat if he concentrated hard enough.

how the presence is a constant companion, a grounding piece of knowledge, something his mind gravitates towards during moments of pause and rest.

“hm, i’ve heard that before and you’re still here, aren’t you?” he asks, flipping through one of your magazines, rocking on the two hind legs of the hospital chair.

you shoot him a tired, annoyed kind of look.

“the doctor said i should stop treatment.”

the steady creek of the chair stops. you cast your eyes up at the white-washed ceiling, a bone-deep tiredness settling in as if death had been waiting for precisely that moment to come creeping in, to remind you of it’s closeness.

the chair clatters to the ground, but by the time you look over, keigo’s already halfway to the door.

“keigo — where’re you —”

“to go have a chat with those goddamn doctors —”

“it won’t do any good.”

he whirls around, wings flaring out. you push yourself up into a sitting position, wincing slightly as pain twines up the length of your spine.

“how do they know? they should at least try —”

“we have been trying. what do you think all this has been?” you motion at the room, the beeping machines, the endless tubes and iv drips.

“well you don’t stop trying just because it gets worse before it gets better —”

“there is no better, keigo. not for me.”

“you don’t know that!”

feathers, a flurry of feathers. his fingers pressing into your skin, his hands on your shoulders, holding you, shaking you. feathers everywhere.

you let him shake you, let him press his face in so close your noses are almost touching.

you wrap your fingers around his wrists and hold him till his grip goes slack.

“i — you can’t know that,” keigo says, and it sounds so much more like a plea. to what, or whom, you can only guess.

“the treatment’s not working,” you say, your words soft, gentle.

keigo slips to the floor, buries his face in your lap, crumples the rough hospital sheets between his fingers. his wings encase you both, a great dome of red, mottling out the light till you’re both just shadows.

he leans up to kiss you, a harsh breath puffing out against your lips the only warning. you nod ever so slightly before he tips forward and crushes you to him.

he’s never handled you as delicately as most other people do, as if you might shatter at the slightest touch. but now, he doesn’t hold back, clutches you to him, kisses you rough and hungry, there’s a desperate, furious slant to the way he licks at the seam of your lips, groaning deep in his chest when you finally let him in.

when he pulls back, you’re both lightheaded and breathless.

keigo runs a thumb along your bruised bottom lip with a tiny, self-deprecating laugh.

“how long?” he asks.

you sigh, looking down at the negative space between you.

“few weeks, a month,” you offer.

keigo swallows, the distant ticking of your heartbeat now no longer a sanctuary but a haunting specter, creeping ever closer.

“alright…” he says, unable to think of anything else to say, “alright then.”

later that night, whistling through the clear metropolitan night, he remembers the one and only time his mother had ever brought him to the beach as a child. he remembers watching a family of three building a sandcastle — mother, father, and son — how the child had been so delighted when the castle was finished, clapping his pudgy little hands, his fingers caked with sand, but less than half an hour later, the rising tide had all but washed the sandcastle away.

he remembers being enchanted by it, the transitory nature of the thing. how something that looked so solid against the dying light could be whisked away so quickly, so completely, by just a rush of foamy water.

he thinks of his father, and enjoys the sun.

that same year, they’d passed by a winter festival on their way home from picking up groceries. he was sporting a freshly bruised arm, and his mother a black eye she was attempting to cover with her muss of mousy hair. they’d caught a glimpse of the tail end of an ice-sculpture competition, the massive glittering structures standing on mounts, already dripping.

keigo had heard the announcer lament about how terribly sad it is that things so beautiful can’t last forever.

he’d thought it a strange sentiment then — wasn’t their ephemera an integral part of their beauty? the fact that it doesn’t last forever? because he knows, better than most, that temporary is good, temporary means that there’s always an ending worth looking forward to.

except he’s not a kid anymore, and this is a kind of ending that he never thought he’d have to deal with, at least not so soon.

with a looping barrel roll, keigo lets himself tip into a dive, cutting through the humid night air like an ill-shaped comet. he wonders briefly when he’ll stop falling in love with ice sculptures and sand castles, things that are destiny-bound to leave him. he thinks it’s such dramatic irony that the first time he properly falls in love is with a girl with one foot already out the metaphorical door — but of course it is.

your funeral is a muted affair, small, intimate. keigo debates whether or not he should go — after all, he hasn’t really told anyone about you (one night, he’d wondered wryly who he would even tell — endeavor, perhaps; he strikes the thought almost as soon as he has it), and you about him. so he watches from afar, watches on crimson wings and nectar-drenched air and wishes he were something else, someone else — someone with a quirk that didn’t literally pin his identity to his back.

“it’s a bit lonely at the top, isn’t it?” he remembers you asking one day, the magazine in your lap opened to a glossy centerfold of the most recent pro-hero rankings. he glances over, eyes catching on a candid shot of himself, his wings taking up a decent quarter of the page, eclipsed only by endeavors’ hulking form, the flames melding seamlessly into his own mess of feathers.

“lonely? nah — i’ve got —” he cuts off as he tries to think of something to say that won’t sound like a deflection — his legions of adoring fans? his fellow pro-heroes? the people at his agency? the students he’s mentored? sure, they’ve all staked out their own claims to his heart but closeness, the kind that he’s seen so casually bandied about on the mid-summer streets (in the way teen girls topple into each other, giggling, careless of the way their limbs get tangled, in the way men who have known each other for decades greet each other with just a knowing smile, in the swift way lovers might graze a kiss by the other’s cheek to say hello or goodbye), he suddenly finds that he can’t think of a single name.

you, perhaps.

he bites his lips.

you let out a tiny laugh, “it’s okay, it gets lonely here too,” you’d said, before going back to flipping through your magazine.

he thinks he could kiss you, then. so, he tugs the magazine from your lap and does.

he feels your body burn, his feather burning with it, the distant knowledge of heat and smoke stinging his subconscious. he feels it standing at the edge of the hospital roof, staring down. he’s been doing that a lot lately, coming up here, perching on the railing, staring down.

he tries to think of what you might’ve felt, standing here like this, the hopelessness, the endless, innumerable hurts of life, how a person might be tempted to step off and simply cease to be.

but he’d caught you, that day, falling. and he still can’t figure out if he’s glad he did.

he feels you burning, until suddenly, it’s over. the feather rendered to ash along with the rest of your body. he hopes you’ll be buried somewhere the spring can reach, somewhere with flowers, somewhere high up, perhaps, but not high enough to warrant a jumping off.

keigo takes a deep breath, can almost taste the smoke in his lungs.

faintly, he thinks he can feel summer breeze pick up, brushing by his cheeks, his lips, grazing his skin like your lips once had.

“i won’t need you to catch me once i’ve got a pair of my own,” you’d said of his wings.

he hopes that heaven is a beautiful place; he hopes that your wings are bigger and more beautiful than his, stronger too.

he closes his eyes.

the air is mandarin-sweet.

he teeters over the edge. his wings ache. distantly, he thinks he can hear the voices of curious people below — he must cut such a silhouette.

then, he breathes out, tips himself forward, and lets himself fall.

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