Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It takes Enji eight seconds to get tired of Burnin scowling at him from the seat beside him at the otherwise empty conference room table.

“Out with it,” he says.

The scowl deepens, but he knows she won’t equivocate.

“I don’t see why,” she says, “I couldn’t be your—”

As expected.

“Becoming my PA would be a demotion from your current position,” Enji says.  “Besides which your expertise would be utterly wasted fussing around with my calendar.  If you want a new job title, open your own agency, or ask for another department to head.  Don’t take a step down.”

She frowns at the table, then slants a glance at him, but by the way her hair flared and then settled to a lower, brighter burn, she’s finally thinking rationally about it.

“Why this guy?” she says.

He gives her a second.

She winces.  “Oh.  Optics of hiring a young female PA in the middle of a divorce… not so good.”

Enji folds his hands on top of his notebook.  It always hurts a bit—the weight and inflexibility of the metal fingers always press too hard against the ones on the left.  It keeps him grounded.  “And you’d be a pill about it.”

She stares for a second.

Then she laughs.  “Hey, don’t underestimate me.  I’m positive I can be a pill about it anyway.  Watch and learn, boss.”

His unimpressed expression just makes her grin wider.

He hears the footsteps outside the door a moment before she does.

The steps pause—not quite the same cadence, somehow, as a hesitation.

“Come in,” Enji says, not bothering to raise his voice.

He did enough research to eliminate most of the surprises, but the kid cleans up slightly better than he anticipated.  Smart charcoal suit; silver tie; slightly more understated black stud earrings.  The high-top sneakers are obnoxious, but at least they’re clean.

He’s holding a cardboard tray that bears two coffee cups, set diagonally opposite each other for balance.

The low bow of his head doesn’t hide the bright smile as the door falls shut behind him.  “Good morning,” he says.  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Endeavor, Burnin.”  He strides calmly past the vast length of the empty table to come level with them, and leans across the table to set one cup in front of Burnin, and the other in front of Enji.  What Enji thought were smudges of makeup, from the rare photos and footage, appear to be something more permanent.  The wings are folded tight against his back—more likely a concession to nerves than an attempt to minimize them.  The sidekick roster makes it self-evident that Enji doesn’t care.  “I hope you enjoy.”

Burnin eyes him, eyes Enji, and then eyes him again as he sits down directly across from her and smiles at both of them.

Either fearless, or shameless.

“How do you know our coffee orders?” Burnin asks.

The smile doesn’t waver.  The boy lays the empty tray down to his left, further along the table, and folds his hands.  “I asked around all the coffee shops down the street when I got the interview, to find out which one you go to.  Those guys are so nice.”

Burnin raises her cup and sips, still glowering at him.  He keeps smiling.  She sets the cup back down, with a faint lipstick print on the lid.  “You know there’s such a thing as overkill, right?”

The boy shrugs.  He fishes a small spiral-bound notebook and a pen out of the interior pocket of his suit jacket.  He didn’t unbutton the jacket when he sat.  “Seems to me like the Endeavor Agency philosophy is that anything worth doing is worth overdoing, so I figure anything worth killing is worth overkilling.”

Burnin looks grudgingly amused for a split-second before she hides it behind the cup, but Enji gets the feeling that this boy won’t have missed it.

Enji doesn’t move—just draws breath—but the boy’s sharp eyes dart to him.

“Introduce yourself,” Enji says.

The eyes go wide for a second.  His pupils are pointed, like a cat’s.  He clenches his jaw for a single moment before producing another smile.

“Sorry,” he says.  “Got ahead of myself.  I’m a little jittery.”  He stands up and bows again.  “Keigo Takami.  Or Hawks.  Whatever you like.”

Enji looked it up, when the bell rang in the back of his mind.  “Which do you prefer?”

The boy’s eyes tighten, just slightly, as he sits again.  “Hawks.  But I’m flexible.”

Enji knows that, too.

Burnin picks up her coffee, plants the other elbow on the table, and rests her chin on her hand.  She swirls the drink.  “So,” she says.  “Why leave a sidekick position at Jeanist’s?  Sounds like a pretty sweet gig.”

“Oh, absolutely,” the boy says, smoothly.  “I love the agency, and the job.  Jeanist is great.  If you haven’t already talked to him—” His eyes flick to Enji.  “—I’m sure he’ll say the same thing.”

Not quite.

Jeanist had said “You’ll like him.  Which is why you have to be careful.”

Enji had said “I don’t have time for you to be deliberately cryptic about a sidekick you only even let out as a pinch-hitter.”

“He’s better than he’s ever let anyone see,” Jeanist had said.  “He’s too smart for his own good, or anyone else’s—he keeps that hidden, too.  But he’s hungry.”

“For?” Enji had said.

“Everything,” Jeanist had said.  “Anything he can get, anything he can buy.  Power.  Freedom.  Fame.”  He’d sighed, quietly.  “You.”

Enji had blinked at the wall.  “Excuse me?”

“He has a calendar of you,” Jeanist had said.

Enji had pinched the bridge of his nose as hard as he dared with the metal hand.  “I haven’t done a fucking calendar.”

“I know,” Jeanist had said.  “He made it himself.”

Enji had pinched harder.  It had hurt.  “Shows… initiative.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Jeanist had said.

The boy lays both hands flat on top of his notebook, still smiling.  “I mostly just push paper,” he says, “because that’s what I’m best at, but you’d be surprised how repetitive the Tokyo scene can be.  Just… really got to wanting a change.”  His eyes flick to Enji again, too warm, clear and bright like glass.  “And I’ve always really admired the work you do here.  I think it’d be a good fit.”

Enji watches him.  “How fast are you?”

He blinks, still smiling.  “I type a hundred and twenty words per minute, and my record for a completed report is three minutes and sixteen seconds.  But it was an easy one.”

Enji doesn’t move.  “In the air.”

The boy’s shoulders shift—just slightly, angling himself fractionally away—but the smile doesn’t falter.  The wings fluff up behind him and then theatrically flatten themselves again, as if they’re deflating.  “Sorry.  These are mostly just for show.  I’ve never been able to fly with ’em.  They’ve never been big enough.”

Enji keeps his voice measured and his hands still.  “I’ve seen you carry a full-grown adult out of a building with a single primary.  Regardless of how much of that was a matter of leveraging the momentum afforded by its speed, you have more than enough of them to move yourself.”

The boy’s eyes gleam.  The fingers of his right hand slide down to the band of his watch, and the pad of his thumb presses against one of the links.  His smile tilts.  There’s a peculiar satisfaction in it.

“I’m going to ask the question one more time,” Enji says.  “How fast are you?”

The boy takes a deep breath.  He looks away for the first time—down at the notebook.  His thumb rubs harder at his watch.

“I don’t know,” he says.  “Jeanist doesn’t have a facility where I can test it out, and I’m on the watchlist.”  Level C.  ‘Limited telekinetic’.  “Wasn’t about to risk losing a nice job by running around the city throwing myself at radar speed signs just to find out something that doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter,” Enji says.

The boy pauses.

He looks up.

The smile is gone.

“How fast,” he says, “do you want me to be?”

There it is.

Enji stays completely still.  “Your résumé says you’re proficient in Excel.”

The eyes narrow, just a touch.  “Gotta lowball the expectations a little bit.  Just how many spreadsheets do you use?”

Burnin actually laughs.

Hawks’s eyes flick over to her, and then back to Enji.  “I can take a class if you want a certificate.  I’m good at that kind of stuff.”

“Because you’re young?” Burnin asks, cheerfully.  “Or because you’re detail-oriented?”

“Being young has nothing to do with it,” Hawks says, voice even.  “I like solving problems, and to do that you have to keep track of what the problems are.”  He shrugs, fluidly.  The wings move with it this time.  “In this business, details are sometimes literally the difference between life and death.  The error margin is zero.”

Burnin doesn’t know Jeanist—and his standards—as well as Enji does.  She looks pleasantly surprised.

“You listed ‘extensive’ calendaring experience,” Enji says.

Hawks nods, waving both hands like he’s clearing the air of the previous question.  “Yeah, Jeanist missed a press thing because he accidentally double-booked himself into a fashion thing, and they were overlapping on his calendar, and the press was so mad about it that they talked a bunch of smack about him, so I just… took it over.  His agency’s way smaller personnel-wise, obviously, so all-hands meetings are a heck of a lot easier to arrange over there, but he travels domestically a lot more than you do, with all the fashion shows and the team-ups and stuff.”

He did his homework, too.

Good. 

“How would you design a meeting agenda?” Burnin asks.

Hawks smiles at her, one fuzzy eyebrow raised.  “Exactly the way my boss wants to see it.  Same with briefings.  Nobody around here’s got extra time.  For me, legibility beats creativity ten times out of ten, but I’ve got one VIP stakeholder whose opinion matters more than anything else.”

Burnin’s going to hire him as her own PA if Enji doesn’t take him first.  “How would you describe your communication style?”

“Like a firehose,” Hawks says—and then he laughs, easily, and waves his hands again.  “No, no—you know how it is.  When you’re in a burning building, and you’ve got about ten seconds before the roof comes down, you don’t say ‘How do you do’ before you get to the point.  But when I’m writing to a bureaucrat who can arbitrarily ruin our insurance contract for the foreseeable future, you bet I hope my email finds them well.  The goal of any communication is to make yourself understood as much as possible.  Correcting a misinterpretation is a lot harder than whittling your way down to clarity the first time.”

He talks like an advertisement, but he’s right.

“How do you handle making mistakes?” Burnin asks.

The boy smiles again.  “Ideally, don’t,” he says.  “But since unfortunately we live in the real world—damage control first.  Then analyze what went wrong, figure out what you could have done differently, and take definitive steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  No matter how bad it gets, you come back swinging.”

This is the shortest interview Enji has ever conducted, but the past few questions weren’t even necessary.  Jeanist was right—the kid is hungry like a stray, and eagerer to sink his teeth into something.  He’s sharper than a hunting knife and twice as bright.

Enji separates his hands, sits back, and folds his arms.

“When can you start?” he says.

Hawks stares.

And then starts grinning.

Friday evening culminates with a man who has just been fired starting a barfight that involves fireballs.  Some people might find the whole thing wryly poetic.  Enji finds it infuriating.  He’s less susceptible to the flames, of course, but ninety percent of his most effective strategies are off-limits to avoid bringing down the whole building.

The upshot is that a steel-armed headlock goes a long way.

The other upshot is that if you hurl a man over the railing into the canal, his ability to shoot fireballs is substantially impeded.

By the time they’ve mopped up the worst of it, Enji is covered in ash and one inane comment away from threatening an incompetent police officer, and he has little choice but to accept that he needs to extract himself from this situation before it spirals out of his control.

He has learned that much.

He showers at the agency and then goes home to finish the rest of the paperwork, and to try to deal with the emails that have piled up in the meantime.

Fuyumi’s out tonight.  He picks up food on the way because the prospect of cooking sounds intolerable, but there are already takeout boxes in the trash in the kitchen, which means that Shouto’s long since eaten and disappeared deeper into the house.

Fine.  That’s his prerogative.

Eating in the home office feels undignified, but wasting time sounds worse.  The report should not be this painful, but Enji seems to have spent the day’s allocation of logic, leaving him with a pile of bureaucratic bullshit and—

Footsteps in the hall.

He saves the document, doesn’t sigh, and turns towards the doorway just as Shouto steps into it.

“Hey,” Shouto says.  “Can I have money?”

Enji stands up to make it easier to dig out his wallet.  “How much?”

Shouto watches him open it.  “How much can I have?”

Enji looks at him.  “How much do you need?”

Shouto grimaces.  “Why can’t you just give me a credit card?”

“Because then you’d never speak to me,” Enji says.

Shouto looks at him with a weariness that… hurts.  The fact that it’s his own fault doesn’t change it.

“Good point,” Shouto says.

Enji separates a few of the bills.  “What do you need it for?”

“Arcade,” Shouto says.

Enji looks up at him again.  “With?”

“Friends,” Shouto says.

Enji raises his better eyebrow.

“You don’t know them,” Shouto says.

Enji doesn’t know any of them.  Shouto makes sure of it.

He starts counting.  “Are you walking, or taking the train?”

“I don’t know yet,” Shouto says.

“I could drive you over,” Enji says.

“It’s fine,” Shouto says.

Enji crosses to him.  Shouto holds his hand out.  Enji lays the bills in his palm and battens down the bitterness.  It’s his own fault.  All of it is his own fault.

“That should be enough,” he says, “to cover it if you or any of your friends need to take a cab home.”

Shouto looks at it for a second, and then at him.

“Thanks,” Shouto says, slowly.

Then he turns away, already folding them up and cramming them into his pocket.  He’s so tall now that one stride takes him out into the hall.

Enji takes a step after him.  “Don’t be out past—”

“I know,” Shouto says.  He doesn’t even look back.

Enji sets his jaw and makes himself breathe evenly.  “Don’t—”

“Whatever,” Shouto says, stepping down into the genkan.  “’Bye.”

The hallway feels cavernous even though Enji’s shoulders nearly touch the sides.

All of it is his own fault.

“Be careful,” Enji says.  That’s not sufficient, on its own—Shouto has learned what following his orders leads to, and that following Enji’s example is worse.  “Please.”

Shouto pauses in cramming his feet into his sneakers.  The treads on them are terrible.  The rubber on the bottoms always cracks where his toes bend.  Enji puts a new pair out for him every time the current set starts to look battered, but Shouto always keeps using them until he’s worn holes through the heels, and his feet get soaked in the rain.

Shouto frowns at him for a second before shouldering on a coat.  “Okay.”

Enji lets him leave.

Enji locks the door behind him.

Enji goes back to work.

Hawks starts two weeks later.

Jeanist said they could have him earlier, but Hawks insisted that he wanted to ‘finish things out’ and make sure that all of the instructions he was leaving behind were complete.

His knock echoes into Enji’s office ten minutes before nine.  He must have burned through the new-hire paperwork and dragged his agency tour guide around double-time.

Good.

“Come in,” Enji calls.

It is uncanny that he can see from clear across the room that Hawks’s eyes light up as he lets himself in.

“Good morning!” Hawks says.  His measured stride doesn’t slow even as he looks around himself, more thoroughly than if it was ordinary awe.  He’s clutching his brand-new agency-branded laptop bag to his side a bit more possessively than necessary.  “How are you?”

Enji plants his right hand on the desk, levers himself upright, and looks at him.

Hawks grins.

Jeanist was right about another thing:

He’s got a rare combination of guts, a spine, and thickened skin.

He could make it here.

“Great!” Hawks is saying.  “Me, too.  Seize the day.  Strangle it dead.”  He proceeds directly to the smaller desk set up in front of the window without pausing for confirmation, and slides the new laptop out of the bag.  He glances over, still smiling, as it wakes up.  “Is there somebody who can give me access to your calendar?”

“You’re looking at him,” Enji says.

If anything, his eyes get brighter.  “Procedural question for you,” he says.

Enji nods.

“‘Sir’?” he asks.  “‘Boss’?  ‘Mr. Todoroki’?  ‘Endeavor-san’?”

“If you get your work done,” Enji says, “I really don’t care.”

Hawks’s eyes narrow slightly.  Somehow the lamp on Enji’s desk makes them look darker—a deeper gold.  He smiles again.

“Understood, sir,” he says.

The statement was true when Enji said it, but somehow now the word, in that mouth, on that tongue, aimed in his direction—

Unimportant.

Hawks drops into the desk chair.  He shuffles his sneakers on the floor.  The chair is just about the right height for him, which is a start.

“You can remove the back if you prefer,” Enji says, coming close enough to see the screen over his shoulder.  “Go to settings, and then shared calendars.  Add a new one.”

Enji’s gaze flicks to the hand hovering over the trackpad as Hawks taps his way through easily.  There are little scars all over his fingers, like he’s been clinging onto barbed wire for a lifeline.

“It’s etodoroki,” Enji says when the pop-up prompts Hawks for the user ID.  “Put in your own password.  I added you to the workgroup.”

Somehow it already registers as strange for Hawks to be completely silent.  Enji braces his left hand on the chair back and unfocuses his vision so that he won’t take notice of the password.  Hawks smells—pleasant.  Some subtle cologne, possibly, or a nice shampoo that’s lingering.

An animated wheel turns, and then Enji’s appointments start popping up.

Hawks’s eyes flick back and forth.  “Red’s internal?  Yellow’s media-related?”

“They’re labeled on the sidebar,” Enji says.

Hawks smiles.  “So they are.”

He doesn’t comment on the grayed-out calendar that Enji didn’t give him access to, but if he’s half as smart as Enji thinks he is, it’s only a matter of time before he knows more about Enji’s personal life than anyone else on the planet.

Doesn’t really matter.  There isn’t much to it.

Enji pulls up some of last week’s meetings to demonstrate the objective—which is now Hawks’s primary daytime aspiration—of minimizing the need to go digging for the original email in order to be prepared for any given meeting.  Obviously priorities evolve, and can be swayed by conversations further down the chain, but a combination of comprehensive but concise information, considered agenda items, and strategic attachments works wonders on the amount of fetching and fishing that needs to be done immediately before.

Hawks asks him if he has a boilerplate So sorry to cancel last-minute, a local landmark has been blown up by a bad actor, and Mr. Todoroki’s services were needed response.

Hawks asks him if he has a dry cleaner he prefers.

Hawks asks him if he has anything coming up that’s particularly sensitive.

He doesn’t (Burnin might).

He doesn’t (what difference does it make?).

He doesn’t (remember, and that’s the whole damn problem, and the whole damn point).

Enji tells him he should get in the habit of assembling a summary every Friday of what Enji can expect for the upcoming week, so that they can review it at the end of the day and go into the next week armed and ready, and so that Enji can use the weekend to do any particularly brutal prep work he couldn’t fit in around the actual job.

Today is Friday.  Hawks doesn’t look the slightest bit intimidated.

Enji sends him off into the wilds of the shared folders, which are teeming with painfully dry instructional guides for all of the systems that he’ll need and several that he probably won’t.  They have his laptop hooked up to the dock now so that he can use a full monitor screen like a civilized human being, but he makes handwritten notes in a larger spiral-bound notebook—remarkably quickly, at that.

Enji tells him that he doesn’t have to bring his own supplies, which Burnin must have already told him, and which he also must have already known; and sends him on a solo mission down to the wall of cabinets in the ground floor office area.  He comes back several minutes later with a fist full of logo pens and a grin a mile wide.

Enji leads him to the cafeteria shortly after noon and abandons him there, the better to go track Burnin down for a more detailed report on the morning’s incidents.  Hawks is so mesmerized by either the volume or the variety of choices that he doesn’t seem to notice Enji leaving, let alone mind his absence.

Enji does not like the reports.  They have a short-range teleporter stealing from small businesses who’s ‘too quick to catch up with’—Burnin knows it’s a cop-out, and wilts slightly as she says it.  There’s also a woman who can produce incomprehensible amounts of insects from underneath her skin and command the swarms at will, the pictures of which alone are so revolting that Enji regrettably understands the delay on that one. 

He can’t, however, imagine that her legions of exoskeleton-clad minions would withstand a torrent of fire.  It’s just a matter of having the stomach for it.  Enji has, obviously, done a lot worse.

“It was bad,” Kido says, helpfully.  “Roaches.  And spiders.”

Enji glares at the description.  “Spiders aren’t insects.”

“Oh,” Kido says.  “That’s true.  I’ll, uh.  Update it.”

Enji smacks the report back down in Burnin’s inbox, giving her a look and tipping his head just slightly in the direction of the top floor.  “Keep an eye on him.”

“Yes, boss,” Burnin calls after him as he starts for the door.  “Won’t let him so much as breathe on the precious files.”

Hawks doesn’t seem the type to snoop through the personnel files—at least not yet, when he doesn’t even know enough about his colleagues to understand which dirt will hold his weight and give him leverage—but Enji knows the lock and key on those filing cabinets wouldn’t give him the slightest bit of trouble if he set his mind to it.  Fortunately, the natural curiosity that makes Burnin a fine investigator also makes her extremely nosy, so she’ll probably be up there harassing Hawks before he’s even finished his lunch.

In the meantime, Enji has a much more literal pest problem.

Splendid.

Being spattered with charred bug guts somehow manages to be even less enjoyable than it sounds.  Enji always exceeds expectations.  Some such occasions are markedly more satisfying than others.

He cornered their culprit in a department store and just kept scorching every wave of increasingly disgusting insects she saw fit to expel from the frankly more horrific rents in her epidermis.  The way her skin split will be what Enji shudders about later, not the damn bugs.

But by simply refusing to back down or back up, and continuing to reduce each successive swarm to a mass of crispy little corpses, he eventually walled her in so effectively with her own dead ammunition that she had nowhere to run, and had gradually exhausted her quirk too much to conjure up any more chitin.

He’d just started to drag her out of there when the store’s sprinkler system had activated.

So he’s covered in charred bug guts and soaked to the bone.

He slaps the new report down in Burnin’s inbox even though she’s nowhere to be found.  Kido spins his chair around on its axle and punches the air.  A job well-done is the lowest possible standard, not a reward.  Enji flicks away yet another tiny leg that fused itself to his suit in the heat.

There’s nothing to get excited about.  One for two is a pathetic failure in Enj’s book, but they’re going to have to let the teleporter make another move—and potentially a mistake—before they can zero in on him.  He didn’t leave enough of a trail to follow, and Onima confirmed that the police haven’t even been able to identify him.

Fine.  Enji can wait.  The alert is out, in other jurisdictions too.  If he doesn’t show again soon, Enji will stop waiting and set a snare.

At the moment, he has more pressing concerns, such as the high likelihood of spider carcasses being stuck in his hair.

He knows rationally that he’s eliminated all of them with the shower, but he experiences more phantom sensations everywhere since losing the arm—as if a number of his other nerve endings have gone on a solidarity strike with the ones that he was stupid enough to get severed.  He doesn’t let himself brush at his damp hair one more time before he steps back into the office.

Burnin, both of the reports now somehow in her hands, flashes him a grin.  Hawks twists away from the keyboard, starting to smile—only then to struggle with it, swallowing once before he manages to summon it back.

Maybe there are still spiders.

Or maybe Hawks thinks it looks stupid when you put plainclothes obviously on top of a skintight suit, but Enji was cold.  It’s another annoying side-effect of losing a substantial piece of his body mass.  If Hawks believes that Enji gives a shit about what he thinks, in any case, he would be well-advised to reconsider.

“I’m teaching him how to decipher your hieroglyphics,” Burnin says warmly.

Enji eyes her, flicking his mouse pointedly with the metal fingertips to wake his screen.  “I’m right-handed.”

“Got bad news for you, boss,” Burnin says.

A drip tries to run down the back of his neck, so he vaporizes it.  “Get back to work.”

Someone who will follow an order will always be more valuable than someone who can take a hint.

Enji sorts through the emails while Burnin shows Hawks all of their internal tags for record-keeping, and he asks intelligent questions.  They transcribe Enji’s handwritten notes together and then send the draft to him for sign-off.

Before Burnin can start over-explaining the category tags, her phone makes an alarm noise, and she’s off again.  Enji glances at the banner notification on his phone—marked as moderate.  From the summary, sounds like a good test of one of their newer teams.  She can handle it.  There don’t seem to be any spiders.

He feels Hawks’s eyes on him while he’s working on a response to another email.  His right hand’s fingers feel staggeringly loud against the keys as he types—which is infuriating, because they aren’t; what’s making this feel unusual is the unnecessary scrutiny.  He forces himself to focus through the simmering annoyance—makes himself reread the text and tweak it, then skim it again before he sends.

Instants after the email composition window has vanished from his screen, before he’s had a chance to open another one, Hawks says “Excuse me, sir.”

At least he wasn’t just staring.

Enji looks at him.

He smiles.  “Do you prefer to have printouts for meeting materials?  Or softcopies?”

“Print them,” Enji says.  They use recycled paper.  It’s a worthwhile sacrifice.

Hawks doesn’t say anything about waste, or about being behind the times.  He just says “Got it,” and returns his attention to his screen.

He does use the printer.

A lot.

Enough that Enji begins to wonder if this is some sort of a con, and Hawks is about to try to get him to read the draft of a novel hot off of the printing tray instead of a schedule of what cannot be that many meetings next week.

He eyes the next page that the printer spits out.  Bullet points.  It will be what it will be.  He has to pry his hands away from the things he can’t control.  He has to embrace life gently instead of smothering it.  All of that crap.

He has a hell of a lot of incident reports to review in any case, because it’s Friday afternoon, so of course a significant number of his heroic hopefuls have procrastinated until the last minute to finish and submit them for his digital hanko of agency approval.  He makes himself breathe deeply and tries to stay unbiased.  Vindictiveness makes shitty decisions.  Their intentions don’t affect what’s on the page, and their administrative incompetence is slightly less important than what they do out on the field.  They came here to save lives, not to file forms.  They’ll learn.  He has to give them time.

He digs up another silver lining: it’s helpful to read these when they’re not perfectly polished.  In addition to priming him on what’s happening out on the streets of his city, and providing a barrage of information that might later turn out to be helpful, he gets a better sense of his employees’ personalities from the way that they cobble together their hasty submissions than he would if they’d rigorously edited their drafts.  He can index who’s exhaustively detailed and who’s more fixated on a bigger picture, and start matching up teams that cover for each other’s shortcomings.  He can piece together who gets along naturally, or what gets in the way.  It’s like an autopsy of the week’s activity, albeit with very bad grammar.

He sends back the ones that are incontrovertibly incomplete, but he makes the tweaks himself to the ones that are nearly presentable.  He makes notes of which are which.  A few of the newer sidekicks that featured on the first list last week have graduated to the second.  He’ll snag them when he can to review what they were missing.  He used to try to bring them as ride-alongs on patrol so that he could talk to them while working and kill two birds with one stone, but one kid passed out because he was holding his breath the entire time Enji was critiquing him, and a shoplifter almost slipped away while they were waiting for the EMTs.

He’ll figure something out.  He always figures something out.

His finance department is also full of shameless procrastinators.  The salary trend reports don’t include a projection for Hawks’s pay, and also don’t earmark anything for the expanded internship program, which they thoroughly discussed.  

He sends that back, too.

He has a pile of business expenses to approve, which he prefers to put through as quickly as possible so that people get reimbursed promptly for whatever they paid out of pocket.  Burnin just forwarded security camera footage of the thief who kept teleporting out of reach, which she apparently coaxed out of a local restaurant that she patronizes often enough that they just handed it over to her.  Enji watches it through three times, but the guy is smart—baseball cap and a sweatshirt hood on top of it, no logos, no lettering.  In and out in the blink of an eye.

But any visual does give them something—his hands look ordinary.  More importantly, they’re ungloved.

Enji rewinds it again.  If he grazed his hands against anything, they might be able to pick up a partial print.  It’s a long shot, but he’s made longer.

His phone alarm rings.

He was concentrating hard enough that it startles him, which is obnoxious, but given that Hawks jumps in his seat, too, at least he has no room to judge.

Quarter after four.

“So,” Enji says.  “Show me next week.”

The way the wings shrink slightly for a second—the feathers tightening against each other—before they relax gives the impression of a deep breath, which belies Hawks’s indefatigable smile somewhat.

He’s at Enji’s desk before there’s time to read anything into it anyway.

“Here we go,” he says, laying out small paper-clipped stacks.  “One day at a time.  Monday’s quiet.  Tuesday’s simple—few check-ins.  Wednesday is where it gets fun, with the Maeda’s Morning interview.  They asked for you two hours ahead of roll time at ten thirty.  How much do you want to give them?”

“Half an hour,” Enji says.  It’s always just hovering makeup artists, adjustments to the camera to accommodate his height, and bullshit small-talk.  He would despise it all even if he had the time to waste.  He only agreed to this at all because Okamoto in PR literally went down on her knees and begged him to do something ‘soft’, and the Billboard rankings will still be the first thing on everybody’s minds when the segment airs.  He lost three hours lying in bed thinking it over, but all he could come up with was more reasons that it might work, and ways that he can use it.  “Give it an extra fifteen minutes in case of—”

“Traffic,” Hawks says, jotting something down.  Close up, Enji can see that the characters in the notebook are unrecognizable—some sort of shorthand, possibly, but nothing he’s ever seen before.  “Perfect.  I’ll get Kurumada out front by nine.”  He extracts a stapled packet from underneath the printout of the meeting itself and smacks the new one on top.  “This is a compilation of questions you’re likely to get based on things Maeda typically asks.  She’s one of those ones who likes the personal angle, but she’s conflict-avoidant, so it’ll be easy to steer her back to the job.”

Enji’s chest positively fucking burns with the layers of indignity—the fact that they’d try to reduce him to some sort of archetype, try to pry into his privacy to increase their viewership, try to sell off the tiny fragments of humanity that he’s scraped together over time.

And the fact that Hawks knows already that he’s going to try to dodge that nonsense less as a matter of principle than because his so-called ‘personal life’ is a complete and utter fucking mess and a humiliating failure.

For what little it’s worth, he does think he would still hate the imposition even if he’d done anything halfway decent with the golden opportunities that he crushed to nothing.

Enji glances down over the first page and then flips to the second.  Underneath each question, Hawks has notated which pro or pros it was asked of and when, as well as the topic that usually preceded it in each of those interviews, and added suggestions of how to redirect the conversation.

It is distinctly possible that Enji doesn’t need to worry about teleporting thieves as much as he does about PAs who can apparently manipulate the progress of linear time.  He elects not to think about the implications of Hawks using that impossibility specifically to help him.

“This,” he says, “is excellent.”

In the first instant, Hawks’s whole face lights up.

In the second, he ducks his head, smile still wide, and starts picking through some of the other papers.  “How are we feeling about wardrobe?  You usually do…” He holds his hand out, palm upraised, and gestures up and down towards the whole of Enji’s person.  “…this… vibe.  Is that to make yourself look approachable?”

If he’s seen enough to know that, the truth will not surprise him: “It’s because I hate interviews.”

Hawks’s grin tilts delighted for a second before he jots something down, as if I hate interviews is the kind of factoid that he’s likely to forget.

“Are you interested in suggestions?” he asks, eyes still on the page.

Enji watches him.  “Depends on the suggestion.”

Hawks’s eyes rise slowly, but the smile spreads fast.  “Shoot for an extreme.  You could go more formal—really nice suit and a tie and the whole bit—to sell the image that you take this very seriously, and that’s why your answers are a little stiff.  Or you could run it in the opposite direction and show up in, like, a sweater and jeans to make yourself look all down-to-Earth and normal, to try to sell yourself as a friend they haven’t met yet.”

This was, in retrospect, somewhat inevitable given that Hawks has spent a couple years with Jeanist.

“The second one won’t work,” Enji says.

The tip of Hawks’s pen hovers over the page.  “You don’t have to decide right now.  Plenty of time.”

There’s never any time.  “Your first idea is smart.  I should have something I can wear.”

The corners of that damned smile turn up a fraction higher.  “You need solid colors.  Patterns do weird things on the camera sometimes.  Why don’t you bring in whatever you have, and if it comes to it, we can go shopping?”

Eyeing him continues to have no effect.  “Fine.  What else?”

There’s a finance meeting on Thursday, for which Hawks has fairly elegantly printed all of the most important spreadsheets; and a handful of Cabinet ministers visiting on Friday, for which he’s composed and printed profiles of all of the attendees, including their recent votes on the most relevant policy issues.  He even managed to scrounge up some information about the personal lives of several of the biggest players, which a cagier negotiator might factor in.

Enji’s going to play it straight, obviously.  But it’s remarkable work all the same.

He’s supposed to articulate shit like that so that employees stay ‘motivated’.

He straightens the stack for Friday.  “This is impressively thorough.  I wouldn’t say that lightly.  Keep it up.”

A glance confirms that Hawks is standing very still, hands curled around the edges of his notebook, eyes bright.

“Yes, sir,” he says.  “Thank you.”

Re-paperclipping Friday’s packets back together requires far more concentration than it should.  Enji needs to make time for more of the stupid small motor skill exercises that the occupational therapist recommended.  Forty years of reliance will take a while to unlearn, but he can’t afford to be fumbling around imprecisely.  He has to get it right.

That done—finally—he steps around the desk, passing Hawks, and goes out into the hall to sort through one of the cabinets.  He selects a pair in medium.  It’s a good thing the brat wears sneakers to work.

When he steps back in, Hawks is already back in the chair and typing away.  Enji clears his throat.  Hawks glances up just in time to get an agency-branded tracksuit tossed at him.

He catches it.

The design is… good.  The pants are black with Endeavor Agency in a white block font down the side of the right leg, taking the place of a stripe.  The matching sweatshirt has the flaming E insignia on the front-right chest and the name along the same sleeve.

Hawks stares down at them.  The pad of his thumb grazes over the logo.

“They’re not a present,” Enji says.  “Get dressed.  I need to know what you can do.”

Hawks blinks up at him for a second, then smiles.  “I can—I’ll make do without the jacket.  Hacking wing holes into stuff in a hurry doesn’t end too well.”

“Fine,” Enji says.  “Let’s go.”

Hawks pauses, glancing at his watch.  “It’s only—”

“I’m aware,” Enji says.  “No one’s going to be accomplishing anything else today.  The Billboard rankings get released at five.”

Hawks curls his fingers into the fleece, looking up at him.  “Lower your expectations for me.”

“No,” Enji says.  He starts out of the room to give Hawks a chance to change.  “Gym’s on the third floor.  Training room two.  Don’t make me wait.”

He’s almost finished configuring the course when Hawks lets himself in.  Hawks pauses, staring up and then around as the door falls shut behind him.  Possibly Enji should have said “The gym is the third floor,” which is technically more accurate, but it’s not like what you say alters what exists.

What exists is a customizable obstacle course that Enji spent a lot of time designing, aiming to accommodate every quirk they had represented at the agency and many that they didn’t.  The first architect quit.  The second was an engineer that Gang Orca warned him away from because her ideas were bigger than her ability to execute them.

Enji is extremely good at execution.

Hawks is wearing a black T-shirt that he must have had on as an undershirt, given how well it fits.  Enji gauged the track pants correctly.  Hawks has the jacket draped over his left arm, the laces of his high-tops double-knotted, and the wings folded small behind his back.

Enji doesn’t buy it.

He uses the red remote to lower the medicine balls hanging from the ceiling until they’re only a few feet beyond the field of cushioned metal posts.

“Uh,” Hawks says.  “Wow.”

Enji crosses to the wall and flips the lever to lock all of the components in place.  “Do you understand the track?”

Hawks’s eyes flick over it.  The pieces are color-coded.  Enji is sending him up along what would be a climbing wall, for a trainee who wasn’t airborne, and then he’s supposed to weave between a series of increasingly dense obstructions before arcing all the way back down to the floor to dip beneath a low balance beam, after which he has to skyrocket back up to the ceiling to ring the bell.

“Want to remind you,” Hawks says, slowly, his gaze on the room ahead, “that I don’t—”

Excuses.

“Enough,” Enji says.  “You will.”

Hawks’s eyes dart to Enji, narrowing.

He doesn’t trust his quirk, or himself.

“I’ve seen the videos,” Enji says.  “Even though you’ve tried to stay out of them.  I know that you’re capable of a hell of a lot more than you let anyone see.  And I need to know how much I can count on.”

Hawks looks at him for three more seconds, face set in unreadable neutrality, and then turns sharply to look over the course again.

His shoulders lower.

His chin rises.

One feather slides out of the wings.  He starts to raise the jacket in his hand, and the feather catches it up and carries it over to lay it on the bench against the wall before swooping back over to him and fitting itself into place.

He slips his hands into the pockets of the track pants.  His body tilts back, telegraphing ease, his hips tipped outward, his shoulders relaxed.  It’s sheer defiance, written in the language of indifference.

Good luck to him.  Defiance barely registers anymore.  Enji survived Touya as a teenager.  Nothing less than a cataclysm of sheer contempt even comes close.

Enji doesn’t ask Hawks if he’s ready.  Enji doesn’t give him a countdown.

Enji takes the stopwatch out of his own pocket, starts it, and looks up.

Hawks blinks.

And then he moves.

Fucking finally.

Enji could tell, from the way he avoided being caught on film—the ducking out of sight or around corners or simply ranging too far away from Jeanist, whom the cameras had to stay focused on, to end up in the frame—that Hawks was deliberately creating a kind of plausible deniability.  He didn’t want anyone to be able to watch a video and do the math and figure out how fast he is.  He didn’t want anyone to be able to prove it.

Which is unfortunate.

Because he’s phenomenal.

He hits the base of the climbing wall before Enji has finished blinking, slingshotting himself up over the top so smoothly that he looks like a streak of shadow limned with red.  The wings stay tight and close against his back—even knowing that they’re not what’s propelling him, it’s somewhat uncanny.  He looks more like a missile than a bird.

He dodges between the poles like a pinball, perfectly timed, perfectly controlled, narrow body curled up and tucked in neatly.  The soles of his sneakers smack into every pole at rapid-fire—but completely even—intervals as he pushes off of each in turn to kill and restart his own momentum so swiftly that it looks like physics has just given up trying to contain him.  He shimmies effortlessly between the medicine balls like a living ribbon.

Then he plummets to the floor at such a violent speed that Enji automatically steps forward, every instinct anticipating injury.

He whips himself up out of the dive so cleanly that Enji’s breath stops.

He’s so damn fast that Enji can barely even track his movements—it seems like he reaches out and curls a hand around the beam as he approaches it, so that his momentum carries him underneath, but catches on that fulcrum.  Within the same heartbeat, he’s used the leverage to fling himself back up towards the ceiling, supplementing with renewed velocity from the feathers.

The bell rings.

Enji’s thumb taps the stopwatch button.

He breathes out.

Hawks is grinning as he sinks slowly back down to the mats, modulating his speed without moving the wings.  “How was that?”

“Fine,” Enji says.

Hawks’s face falls.

It’s the truth.

“You can do better,” Enji says.  “But for a first attempt, without stretching, in a new venue, not bad.”

Hawks grimaces, but then a spark of mischief chases it away.  “How fast can you do it, sir?  Just—so that I can make sure I’m keeping up with you.  You know.”

Enji is wearing slacks and a shirt over his suit.

Which is good, actually.

Lighter than the pauldrons and the gauntlet.

He tosses the stopwatch at Hawks and doesn’t wait for him to catch it.

The climbing wall has a scattering of handholds.  He approaches at a run, with sufficient speed to jump high enough to clear the first third, catching just enough of a grip to sling himself higher with arm strength alone.  He claims enough momentum to catapult himself easily to the next level, finds a foothold, and takes himself to the top.

He only balances on the edge long enough to twist his body sideways—the breadth of his shoulders won’t fit between the poles.  He pushes off, reaches out—possibly he should have chalked his left palm, not least to help himself compensate for the lack of traction with the right, but that would have defeated the purpose.  The point is coming at this in plainclothes, from a standstill, without any preamble at all.

The point is that Enji will never push anyone harder than he pushes himself.  The point is that Enji will never tell someone else to do something that he wouldn’t.

He launches himself into the grid of padded poles.  It’s simple, with a rhythm—he gets his left fist around one of the ones ahead and his heels against one behind, supplementing with the right arm, propelling himself between them, zigzagging back and forth.  It occurs to him, distantly, as he zeroes in on the next target and the next and the next, that he needs to train himself to rely more on the right hand.  Trying to make up for it puts him at a disadvantage.  Intelligent adversaries—which admittedly are in fairly short supply—will notice that he favors the left.  They’ll correctly identify it as a weak point if he doesn’t make it every bit as powerful as the left.

Maybe—he has little choice but to engage the flame beneath his feet as he approaches the medicine balls, pouring heat from his left palm and angling that arm out behind his back to balance the propulsion—he needs to change his approach.

A metal prosthetic that he can’t quite bring himself to trust will never compare directly with the flesh-and-blood arm that he’s trained since he was too young to remember the ache.

He should make it as powerful as the left.

But in a different way.

He should take stock of the precise reasons that it’s been holding him back, and find a way to turn those into benefits.  He should build the weakness into a new weapon that no one will expect.

He’s not competing for rankings or recognition anymore, after all.

He’s competing against himself.

And against Hawks’s expectations, at the moment.

The net of medicine balls presents more of a challenge—because they’re hanging freely, he can’t use them for leverage, and they’re clustered too tightly together for him to wind between them the way that Hawks did.

But nowhere did the implied rules of the course specify how he had to move around them.

He rolls his body up over the first pair, and then down beneath the second, and then up again to crest over the third.  Five sets in total primes him ideally—he surges over the top of them and blasts himself directly at the floor, aiming for the balance beam.

That’s another component of his own training that he needs to reprioritize.  The weight of the right arm still surprises him, when he isn’t concentrating on it.  He can’t afford to be splitting his attention between his own body and the scene of an incident.  He has to make himself acclimate to it before it undermines him.

A task for tomorrow.  The only difference between a to-do list and a battle plan is how you use it.

The floor rushes up at him, but the floor obviously doesn’t know who it’s dealing with.

He hooks himself underneath the beam—barely—and turns up the heat.  Finishing poorly is just as pathetic as never finishing at all.

He raps the metal knuckles on the body of the bell and then cuts the flame.  He managed to keep it compartmentalized enough to avoid singeing his shirt.  Hawks seems observant enough to have noticed that he gave himself an additional impediment.

Observations aside, as Enji approaches, he finds Hawks clutching the stopwatch very tightly.  Hawks’s eyes are wide.  He swallows, hard, and clears his throat.

“That was—seriously fucking cool,” he says.  He clears his throat again.  “…sir.”

Enji snatches the stopwatch back from him.  “That was a warmup.  Stationary objects don’t replicate real-world conditions in any meaningful way.”  He assesses the elements of the track that might stay useful, if they adjust parameters in light of that first run.  He goes back to the rack of color-coded remotes on the wall.  “Jeanist only ever brought you out to clean up.”

Hawks smiles, sweet like the first bite of a pepper that will punch you in the throat.  “I’m a pacifist.”

Like hell.

“You’re holding back,” Enji says.  “I don’t care why.  But you’re not going to do it anymore.”

Hawks’s eyes gleam.  He doesn’t offer an explanation.

Enji meant what he said.  The reason doesn’t matter.

He hits another button.  The hydraulics lag a little.  He’ll check the maintenance logs.

Hawks doesn’t seem to notice that, at least, because he’s too busy staring at the gaps that slot open in the floor to admit vast, uneven chunks of cracked and crumbled concrete.  His head snaps up as the ceiling opens, too.  He eyes the texture of the fake boulders and the mechanical clamps holding them aloft.

“They’re weighted,” Enji says, which seems only sporting, “but they’re cushioned.  They’re also coated with a UV-sensitive powder so that no one can lie about being hit.”

Hawks grins.  “I only lie about the important things, sir.”

Enji eyes him.

And then raises the stopwatch.

Hawks’s eyes fix on his hand.

As soon as his thumb starts to flex, Hawks is off like a shot.

Enji slings the stopwatch cord around his neck while he strides over to the wall locker where they keep the CPR dummies.

He hefts the average-male-sized one and then hurls it out into the middle of the jagged concrete.

He hits the button on the remote to start dropping the boulders.

Hawks—

—laughs.

“Oh, I see how it is” is all he says before a gold-and-black streak splits the air.

Hawks has to plant his feet on the uneven ground and wrap both arms around the dummy to lift it—it must weigh as much as he does.  He has to jerk it out of the way of the first fake rock to fall, but then he manages to hike it up over his shoulders into a respectable fireman’s carry to balance the unmoving weight.

And then he’s in the air again, weaving easily between the boulders.  The extra weight seems to make the sound-barrier-threatening speed he can reach alone much more challenging, if not impossible, but he still moves staggeringly fast.

Speed isn’t everything.

Enji hits the button on the remote that controls one of the other special features.

Just as Hawks swoops low under the next boulder, a spurt of flame jets up from the floor to meet him.

He clears it—barely.

And he laughs again, breathlessly, surging towards the ceiling, dodging falling objects smoothly as he goes.

“This is like a theme park!” he calls.

Enji is fairly sure it’s not.

Hawks somersaults backwards in the air, still clinging to his person-sized burden, to rap the bell ostentatiously with his toe.

Either Enji’s going to have to train him out of that theatrical arrogance, or he’s going to have to work twice as hard in order to earn it.

Enji stops the watch and nods at the dummy.  “Put it down.”

A part of him expects Hawks to drop it to make a point, but instead Hawks alights on the floor and lays it down well clear of the fire vent—not ungently, although Enji does hope he would be more cautious with an actual injured civilian.

Hawks is upright again in instants, hands on his hips, grin in place, although at least he finally seems to have broken a sweat.  “You got a light show, too?”

Enji goes over to the remotes.

He steps past them.

He slaps the heel of his hand against the bank of switches and kills all the lights.

Hawks laughs even harder this time.

Enji hits the button that makes the auxiliary ceiling lights flicker very much like malfunctioning streetlamps, in a way that is designed to be as inconsistent and distracting as possible. 

He hits the stopwatch button.

Hawks is off.

Halfway through the course, when he’s in the air dodging his way between the posts, Enji hurls a child-sized dummy into the air ahead of him.  The strobing lights make it harder to track, but he jackknifes out of his trajectory and grabs for it.

Enji slaps the override to turn on all the lights—too many of them, so that the brightness is blinding, like summer noontide sun flashing right in your eyes.

Hawks flinches.

But he doesn’t miss.

He cradles the dummy to his chest protectively with both arms and barrel-rolls out of the path of the next boulder, then arcs high over the fire jet.

The door slams open.

“Endeavor!” Burnin shouts.  “They’re in!”

He can already tell by her tone, but he looks over at her.

She grins like a pack of jackals—very self-satisfied jackals, the record should show—and slams the door shut again.

Hawks is already skidding to a stop at the bench by the time that Enji turns.  Enji glances back.  Hawks laid the child dummy down on the floor right next to the adult one.

Hawks grabs up his phone and unlocks it.  His eyes keep flicking back and forth across the screen, but his shoulders do tighten slightly as Enji approaches, arms folded, and looms over him.

Hawks glances up, one eyebrow arched, amusement tugging at his mouth.  “You weren’t worried.”

“That’s because I can do math,” Enji says.

Hawks’s eyes crinkle at the corners.  He looks back down at the screen and keeps scrolling through the Billboard results, still panting lightly.  There’s sweat gleaming on his forehead, and on his neck.  “Man.  The times, they are a-changin’.”

Enji watches him.  “Meaning?”

Hawks holds the phone out to him.

Number nineteen—Incandescence, also known as Touya Todoroki.

Enji is—

Shit.

What?

Relieved seems to come first.  Not ideal.

He’s—proud.  He is.  But there’s a shadow on it.

He left his phone on the bench, too, so he’d hear it if it rang.  He taps into his contacts, knowing he’s taken too many work calls this week for the one he’s looking for to appear in his recents.  He selects the number, raises the phone to his ear, and walks away from the bench.

Touya picks up halfway through the first ring.  There’s a laugh in his voice.  “Come on, make it good.  I wanna hear it.”

Enji finds himself smiling.  “Congratulations,” he says.  “You earned it.”  He looks at the streaks of soot on the wall ahead of him.  There are a lot more of them behind him, but those are invisible to most.  “Now get back to work.”

Touya laughs brightly.  “Fuck off.”

“No,” Enji says.  “Touya—”

He holds back the scoff.  Generous of him.  “What?”

“You’re amazing,” Enji says.

There’s a silence.

Then Touya says, “I’m sending hate mail to your therapist again.”

“He framed the last one,” Enji says, which is true.  He lowers his voice.  “Just don’t—be like me.”

“Obviously,” Touya says, “I’m going to be better than you.”

“Do it by taking care of yourself,” Enji says.  “What are you doing other than working?”

“At the moment,” Touya says, “listening to you bitch in my ear.”

“I do not ‘bitch’,” Enji says.

“Oh, Dad,” Touya says, with the cold affection.  “You’re a grade-A bitcher.  I will give you that.”

At least he’s good at it.

Enji’s holding the phone in his left hand, which leaves only the metal fingers to rub his forehead.  That’s the whole damn point.  “Just think about it.”

“Wow,” Touya says.  “I can always count on you to build me up and make me feel good about my hard-won accomplishments.  Thanks, Pops.  I’m so glad we had this talk.”

Enji clenches his jaw, breathes out slow, and swallows as much of the steam as he can bear.  “You know I’m proud of you.  I just told you—”

“That’s not good enough anymore,” Touya says.  It shouldn’t sting.  “I don’t want you to celebrate what I can do.  I want you to feel threatened by it.”

Touya should probably stop writing hate mail to therapists and start filling out application forms.

Enji rubs his forehead a little harder.  “Is this what Natsuo is talking about when he calls you an edgelord?”

“I’m going to kill him,” Touya says.

He hangs up.

Enji lowers the phone.  He looks at the screen for a few seconds, but Touya doesn’t change his mind—Touya rarely does.  Yet another thing Enji would carve back out of his genes given the choice.

Enji pockets the phone, folds his arms, and turns to Hawks, who is pretending to be too preoccupied with his own to have been listening.  He smiles sunnily as he looks up.

“Just wanna say,” he says, “that it is impossibly cool to be number one.”

Enji tries to imagine what it might feel like to find yourself here, after twenty years of quiet striving—to be slingshotted into a place of power after toiling all this time behind the scenes.

He tries to imagine what it might feel like for Touya, today, to have cracked open a longstanding dream.  To have the real target finally in his sights.

When Enji broke the top ten, it just felt like the mountain had doubled in size.

When he made it to second place and sunk his teeth and his fingernails into every inch of it that he could reach, it just felt empty.  It just felt like losing higher up.  It just felt like the oxygen was so thin that everything would be the same, but harder.

Hawks’s eyes are bright.  Maybe he still believes in something.

“Get used to it,” Enji says.  He jerks his chin towards the course.  “Do it again.”

Hawks does.

And he keeps flying flawlessly, wings tucked tight against his back to minimize his own wind resistance, and his instincts remain unerringly solid.  He relies entirely on his speed and agility—which are, admittedly, so impressive that he has outclassed an embarrassing number of double-digit-ranked pros in the past hour alone.  But Enji scoured the handful of videos of him, keying through them frame by frame and reading in between the fuzzy lines.

Hawks hasn’t unsheathed a single feather since the one that dropped his jacket on the bench.

He’s still holding back.

No more fucking around.

One could argue that Hawks’s first day on a job that purportedly doesn’t even require actual hero work is too early to force him out of his comfort zone.

But the world doesn’t wait.  The world doesn’t care.  Opportunities are scarce.  Enji doesn’t waste them.

There’s also a water spout with firehose pressure in one of the walls.  You can set the floor to shaking, which makes all of the obstacles tremble unevenly as well.  You can drop more objects from the ceiling—various sizes, at proportionate weights, so that they plummet at slightly different speeds.  There’s a distracting siren sound effect, loud enough that it makes your ears ring, and another noise that replicates civilians shouting and screaming.  There’s a thunderclap.

Enji unloads every single damn feature of the room on Hawks.

Then Enji goes to one of the lockers, where there’s a basket full of baseballs.

He has to use his right hand—the left feels too awkward, too imprecise.  Let that be a lesson to him, too, likely.

His aim is still decent.

Hawks has to duck the first pitch, which would have hit him squarely in the center of the chest.

His eyes go wide for a fraction of a second, but then they narrow, and he bares his teeth with another grin.

Enji lobs another one, aiming for his head.  He dodges that, too.

But he’s carrying two child-sized mannequins this time, and they change his balance and slow him just enough that projectiles present a threat.

Enji throws faster, passing new baseballs to his right hand with the left, flinging them one after another after another—

The accumulation of them overwhelms Hawks’s ability to anticipate and smoothly roll out of the way.

Several feathers separate from the wings.

Finally.

The color of them shifts—they go from a translucent red, especially at the edges where the barbs connect more loosely, to a shining opacity like hard plastic.

Like a knife.

The first feather slices cleanly through the latest baseball, both halves of which go spiraling off in opposite directions before tumbling to the floor.

The others make short work of Enji’s next few pitches—and give Hawks control of the field again, even as the lights continue to flicker, and weighted detritus keeps cascading from the ceiling.

Hawks opens his wings.

Five-foot span, at a glance, to the tips of the primaries—one of which jerks itself out of the form to bisect another baseball.  They’re such a deep, rich ruby-red that even the inconsistent lightning can’t detract from it.

Four long feathers knife through the air towards Enji.

He is not, of course, a fucking amateur.  He just saw what those can do.  He left all his armor in the office, which reduces his options as far as deflection.

He ignites all the likeliest targets—his left arm, his head, and his chest—and meets the onslaught with the metal forearm of the right.

They didn’t come in fast enough to damage titanium, but they do make a horrendous screech as they scrape across the surface.

Hawks arcs up towards the bell, but Enji has trained his eyes so relentlessly that the flashing lights don’t hide what he’s trying to.

Enji bats the feathers away with the metal arm and a burst of flame, putting another beneath his feet to blast himself over to the wall, flip up the plastic casing, and slam his fist into the large red emergency stop button.

The regular lights come back on.

One last reluctant-looking obstacle drops sheepishly from the ceiling.

Hawks froze, three feet from the bell, his arms full of dummies.

Enji was right.

“You’re bleeding,” he says.

Hawks looks at him for one second too long.

Then he makes the descent look like floating, the long feathers that had threatened Enji sliding smoothly back into place as his toes touch down on the jagged crap all over floor.  He lays the mannequins down carefully again, and then starts feeling around on the small of his back, grimacing.

“Can’t believe I didn’t even get to wear these pants once,” he says.  “At least they’re black.”

Enji does not stop glaring at him.

He has the humility to wince a little harder as he trudges over.

The late-shift in-house medic should be here until midnight, but Hawks isn’t acting like he’s hurt.

He is acting like the sensation hurts—he’s walking delicately, possibly even supporting some of his weight with the feathers to reduce the impact of each step on his back—but he doesn’t seem particularly concerned or remotely surprised.

The intensity of Enji’s judgment must imply the words.  Hawks breathes half a sigh, seems to regret it, and then sets his shoulders and looks up.

“It’s fine,” he says, which may well be the single most ludicrous thing that has come out of his extraordinarily ridiculous mouth.  “It’s—this just happens if I pull too many of ’em out at once.  There’s… they don’t like that.”

Enji starts for the door.  “Come on.”

“It’s fine,” Hawks says.  He doesn’t move.  Enji stops, turning up the heat of the glare, and he waves his hands.  “I’ll just—get a shower and go home.  It’s okay.  Happens all the time.”

It doesn’t.

Enji has only seen evidence of him separating the feathers from his body in a fight a handful of times.  Obviously, this must be most of the reason why.

“You have open wounds on your back,” Enji says, and something flickers in Hawks’s eyes.  “We have an on-site medic.  This is not a negotiation.”

Hawks breathes out.  He works his mouth for a second.  His chin lowers, just slightly, and then his shoulders do; and then he pushes his hands into the pockets of the track pants and saunters over to where Enji is waiting at the door.

“You can just point me in the right direction,” he says.  “Don’t want to waste the rest of your night.”

Enji has more work to do.  Enji always has more work to do.  “Don’t be stupid.”

Hawks smiles again.  His right hand emerges from his pocket and grazes where his shirt sticks to the small of his back, and his fingertips come up crimson.  “That’s going to be a tall order, sir.”

“Then do better,” Enji says.

Hawks keeps his body angled away for the duration of their silent trip to the medical center on the floor below.  He clearly doesn’t want Enji to see the bases of the wings, or whatever exactly is bleeding on his back.  That’s his business.  Enji doesn’t care what the problem is.  He was looking for Hawks’s limitations, and he found them.

Enji leaves him with the medic, returns to the training room, packs all the fallen crap back into the ceiling, crams the dummies and the intact baseballs back in the lockers, and fixes the floor.

Then he goes upstairs to the office and gets back to work.

Altogether, it’s less than half an hour before Hawks straggles in, shoulders and jaw both tight enough to telegraph pain.  Disinfectant, probably.

He looks down at his suit jacket draped over the back of his chair for a second before delicately laying it over his arm.

He looks over at Enji.  He pauses.  He smiles.

“I can,” he says.  “I can do better.”

Enji doesn’t remember much of being twenty-three.  It was all smoke and desperation.

“You did fine,” he says.

A little bit of the tension leaves him—subtly, but Enji knows where to look.

“The point stands,” Hawks says.  “Have a good weekend, sir.”

Enji just looks at him until he flashes a grin, flicks a salute, and starts for the door.

Enji can’t see much through the narrow slits on the back of his T-shirt, but the streaks of blood have crusted into dark rust-colored stripes down the fabric, and they gleam in the light as he draws the door shut behind him.

Enji works for a while longer.  One minute melts into the next.  He’s distantly hungry.

His phone shudders.  It’s a text.

It’s a text from Rei.

Is Touya okay?  He won’t answer my calls.

Enji squeezes the bridge of his nose.

He unlocks his phone and taps over to his last call.  He hasn’t changed the picture of Touya in a long time—it’s from the day he picked up his official license.  He was beaming like the sun.

Enji puts the call on speaker so that he can skim through and file away some unimportant emails at the same time.

Touya picks up after two rings this time.

“What now?” he asks, somewhat indistinctly.  It sounds like he’s eating.

“Call your mother,” Enji says.

Touya snorts.  “What’s in it for me?”

“Other than not causing her unnecessary distress,” Enji says, and he deserves the derisive laugh; “calling her is the only way to get me to stop telling you to call her.”

“I don’t want to talk to her,” Touya says.  Enji gives up on the emails for a second to rub his eyes with the knuckles of his left hand.  “What does she want, anyway?”

“Probably to congratulate you,” Enji says.

He just bites back the other words—too new, too sharp, too honest.

Isn’t that what you want?

Isn’t that the only thing you want?

“It wouldn’t mean anything,” Touya says.  “She doesn’t understand.”

He’s wrong.

She understands too well.

Enji didn’t give her any choice.  Enji dragged her into hell with him by her wrist, and then by a fistful of her hair when she resisted.

“She abandoned us,” Touya says.

Enji lets himself squeeze his eyes shut and tries to ignore the throbbing in the back of his skull.  “Give her ninety seconds.  She cares about you.”

“Sounds like a personal problem,” Touya says.

“Touya,” Enji says, letting the frustration whet the edge of his voice, “call her.”

“Fuck you,” Touya says.

He hangs up.

Again.

Enji slams the phone facedown on his desk much harder than he should and rubs his left hand over his face, trying to unclench his teeth.

Touya might still be riding so high from the success that he’ll do it as an act of charity.  Enji doesn’t care what the motivation is if he follows through.

Enji can’t make him do it.  Enji can’t control him.  That’s always the point.

Enji can’t control anything.

Twelve years ago, Rei disappeared.

Enji had come back late, as usual.  When he’d left again the next morning, he still hadn’t seen a trace of her, but he hadn’t dwelled on it.  She’d developed a habit of ‘going for walks’.  He’d thought, bitterly, that it must be nice to be able to take the time to indulge your misery, instead of dragging it behind you like a ball and chain as you returned to the depths of hell again, day in and day out.  The work didn’t stop for something so petty as the walls closing in, and your life crumbling around you.  The world didn’t care.

The nurse had been fretting by the time he’d come back the following night.  Enji had sent the woman home so that she would stop agitating the children.

Then he’d looked.

A lot of Rei’s clothes had been gone.  All of her belongings had been removed from the bathroom, and the handful of personal effects that she’d kept were conspicuously absent.

She hadn’t left her wedding ring.  Enji had assumed she’d been planning to sell it.

He’d done something he hadn’t in years, and hadn’t wanted to.

A household attendant had picked up the phone, kept their voice perfectly level for the “Just a moment, sir,” and let him grind his teeth for longer than remotely necessary.

After some faint sounds, Miyuki Himura’s voice had cut to his ear like crystal breaking cleanly at the edge.

“She’s staying here,” Miyuki had said, “until her condition improves.  We’re going to file for guardianship of her, given her current—instability.”

Enji had felt miles away from it.  Enji had felt like he was watching the past few weeks—months—years—from the far end of a tunnel.  She’d been acting strange around the children, lately, but they were exhausting.  She was exhausted.  The lightning flash of loathing that had sliced through the weariness when Shouto had shuffled into the room—

“Fine,” he’d said.

“You,” Miyuki had said, not even trying to mask the disdain, “are going to provide a monthly subsidy, and transportation for the children to come and visit her as soon as a psychiatrist thinks she’s ready.  You are, in fact, going to do anything I say, immediately and without complaint, because if you don’t, I will make sure that the entire world knows what you really are.”

Enji had known from his very first meeting with the Himuras that they didn’t fight the way that he did.  They were old money, old blood, old rules.  They would never stab you from an angle where you’d see the knife.

The stark blue bellflower had looked so small, in his hands.

This was a trap he couldn’t spring, because it was the kind that he had no idea how to construct.

And he’d—deserved it.

Hadn’t he?

He’d thought he could do it all—take it all, steal it all.  He’d thought he could sell them all the lie of Endeavor—a man so much better than the rest of them that he could do everything.  He could win.

Some fucking champion.

He’d clenched his teeth so hard that his jaw had ached.  He’d held his palm over the phone receiver so that she wouldn’t hear the steam hissing out with his labored breath.  He’d listened to his heartbeat counting down another wasted minute—another failure.

He’d bitten out the word: “Understood.”

“Good,” Miyuki had said, frigidly.  “Someone will be in touch.”

She’d hung up.

He’d raged.  He’d set the training room on fire; he’d broken half the dishes; he’d strained his elbow hitting the punching bag too hard and too recklessly.  He’d seethed.  He’d schemed.  He’d stewed.

And he’d come up empty-handed.

He’d tried the other tack—he’d researched.  He’d dug up the closest things that he could find to legal precedent, scoured the records, perused their pre-nup word by word.

People didn’t talk about things like this.

They just made the problem go away.

Enji couldn’t make the problem go away.  Enji had created the problem, and now the consequences of it were standing in the doorway of the kitchen, pale-headed like drifting ghosts.  The problem had four pairs of eyes fixed on him.

Touya had said, “Did you kill her?”, and had only grinned when Enji had snarled “How dare you.”

Shouto, clinging to the hem of Fuyumi’s skirt, had halfheartedly ducked back behind her.  He’d already learned that there was nowhere to hide.

Enji had leaned on the counter and pressed his free hand over his eyes, forcing himself to focus, making himself think.

They’d had what they had.

They’d had him.

And he’d had them.

That simple.

Two months later, Touya’s school had called.  They’d caught Enji between minor catastrophes.  They’d told him that Touya had gotten into some kind of trouble.  They wouldn’t specify any details, and they wouldn’t let him send a proxy.

It had seemed that this was his due, now—getting backed into corners, again and again, by people with some tiny scrap of leverage that he couldn’t pry away.

Infuriating.  Humiliating.  The steam was rising from the backs of his hands and the base of his throat by the time he’d made it to the damn school.  He’d forced himself to stop, breathe deeply, grit his teeth, and compose himself before he stepped inside.  Parents would flock to the press to say that Endeavor had made their children feel unsafe.  He could see the damn headlines.  Nowhere was safe.

When he’d opened the door they’d directed him to, he hadn’t even seen the principal’s face—his eyes had latched onto Touya.

Blue eyes.  Bleeding hands.

It had thrown him—too hard.  It had felt like a warped mirror, like a flashback, the tidal wave of his own past surging up to swallow him—

The burns were so bad that they were bleeding through the gauze.  Touya had needed a fucking emergency room—ideally one with an excellent disinfector or a fast healing quirk—not a lecture.

The words had washed over Enji, foamy and faint, echoey in the wake of the recognition.  They were suspending Touya for a week for injuring another student with his quirk, and then hurting the teacher who’d tried to stop him.

A sick sense of pride sought to land in the pit of Enji’s stomach, and he grabbed for it, trying to crush it to cinders between his fists.  It was wrong.  It didn’t matter how strong Touya was, how powerful he was, how ferociously skilled despite the limitations, if he used it like this.

Enji made himself look at the principal for long enough to say that he understood.  That something would be done.  That it wouldn’t happen again.

Touya had never stopped looking at him, hands folded loosely.  The burns ran all the way up his forearms.  His wrists were so small.

They’d walked back to the car, Enji carrying Touya’s backpack, feeling hopelessly stupid with it dangling from his hand.  Anyone who witnessed this would know it for what it was.

Touya had bitten his lip and reached for the handle of the car door.  His fingers, where they emerged from the swathe of bandages, were shaking.  Enji couldn’t exactly elbow him out of the way and pull the door open for him.

Touya climbed in.  He put his seatbelt on.  He sat very still with his eyes closed for a second, throat working, mouth twisted in a thin line of suppressed agony.

Enji hadn’t felt it in a long time, but you didn’t forget.

There had been a hospital close by that owed Enji a few favors.  He intended to remind them that discretion cost them nothing.

He’d started the car.  He’d watched the street.

“This,” he had said, “is the end of it.”

Touya had been silent, but Enji hadn’t dared to hope that it was a concession.

After a little too long, Touya had shrugged.  “That’s up to you.”

Enji flicked a glare at him.  “It is.  And I said this is over.  You’re going to—”

“Here’s how it’s gonna go,” Touya had said, with such calm authority that it was too mystifying to be mad at.  “I’m not going to stop.  And we both know you’re too busy to keep an eye on me.  You can’t.  So you’ve got two choices.  You can train me, and you can teach me how to do it safe.  Or I’ll train myself, no matter what it takes.”

He’d always had too much Himura in him.

Enji had weighed it, hands clenched tight around the steering wheel, making his eyes stay focused on the road.

What was it worth?

The boy he’d just collected from that cramped little school office—the boy with burns up and down his arms, with his eyes hardened to chips of ice and his jaw set, with no apologies and no excuses—was him.  A concentration of his will.  A distillation of his worst.

He’d tried saying No, saying Stop, saying Quit.

He’d been a fucking idiot to believe for a second that it could work.

All the same damn things that people had said to him—You’ll hurt yourself, It’s too destructive, You’ll never make it—

He’d wanted Touya to be safer than he was.  Happier.  Whole.

But by the time he’d seen it, it had already been too late.

Left to his own devices, he would do precisely what Enji would have done—burn himself to ash, and the city to the ground.

Enji had looked at the road.  The street signs had seemed incongruously ordinary.  There had been a massive maple at the corner just before the turn to the hospital.

“You get two nights a week,” he’d said.

“Three,” Touya had said.

“Two,” Enji had said.  “And if you even think about using your quirk outside of them, you’re getting nothing.”

He’d chanced a glance.

Touya had been smiling.

“Fine,” he’d said.

Four years ago, Fuyumi had come back from a visit to the Himuras’ looking more unsettled than usual.  Stranger yet, she’d come to the office doorway and lingered until Enji had looked up.

“She wants to talk to you,” she’d said.

He’d looked at her.  There were thousands of possible reasons, and only one way to narrow them.  Simple.

“Give her my number,” he’d said.

The next night, he’d gotten a text.

It’s me.

He’d thought it over.  It could have been another one of their games.

Prove it, he’d written.

Typing, for a few moments.

And then—

There’s a note from your father taped to the back of the photo in the shrine.  It says “Good work.”

He’s never told anyone about it.

She had to have found it herself.

He’d laid the phone down and then picked it up again.  What do you need?

The typing bubble rolled, and then it filled itself with text.

Enough money to get a diagnosis from an external therapist substantiating that I’m stable enough not to be a dependent, so that I can contest the guardianship.  And a place to go if I manage it.

How much of life is just moving from one trap to another?

The Himuras might retaliate.  They could drag Enji through dreck the likes of which he’d never dreamed of.

His life was already hell.

And he’d made hers something worse.

Done, he’d written.

She did it, of course.

Enji’s therapist—Takiya—sat some sessions with her.  Takiya’s wife is a lawyer, and was all too happy to take on the requisite paperwork to back Rei’s case.  Enji bought a house with a garden, close to a train station and several parks, far enough from his that their paths would only ever cross on purpose.  Touya had been renting his own apartment by then, but Natsuo and Fuyumi had started visiting her regularly.

Shouto hadn’t.  Fuyumi said Shouto thought she wouldn’t want to see him, because it was ‘his fault’.  She’d begged Enji not to let on that she’d told him.

He hadn’t known how else to bring it up to Shouto to correct the misconception.  There’d been so much to do that it was an easy excuse.  There was always too much to do, and something else to prioritize—something less important.

He’d left it.

Shouto had stayed.

Until the Sports Festival last year, where his bizarre new friend had shouted all the things that Enji had been too much of a coward to say out loud for fear of losing him altogether.  For fear of being forced to let go.

He and Rei don’t exactly have long, heartfelt conversations, but they’ve gotten to the point of semi-regularly sharing information about the kids.  Touya avoids her, and Natsuo avoids Enji.  Fuyumi drifts back and forth.  Enji knows she wants to leave, but he doesn’t know how to talk about that, either.  He’d get angry and end up upsetting her.

Takiya keeps telling him not to call the game before he even knows which players are on the field, which is insultingly reductive on top of being unhelpful.  Enji knows himself better now than he ever has, and he’s always known the difference between an uphill battle and a losing one.

He knows he still hasn’t learned how to lose.

Rei texted him again, two months ago, on a Saturday morning even though she usually works on weekends.

Can your career handle it if we file for divorce?

He’d been in the office.

He’d put the phone down, picked it up, put it down again, paced around the office, let flame uncoil from his left-hand fingertips, looked at the unfeeling gleam of the ones on the right.

It didn’t matter.  It didn’t change anything.  It would simply be a piece of paper notarizing what had been the truth for twelve years, if not longer.  He could treat it as ordinary—plenty of people dissolved their marriages after all of their kids were grown enough, and things were settled.  It wouldn’t spiral out into a scandal if they kept it calm and quiet, which would be what she wanted too.

The only thing he’d ever built that hadn’t crumbled in his hands was the agency.

And this, too, was a lie.

A tower stretching skyward to compensate for the hopeless insignificance of a man who could only ever hope to win by default—by disqualification.  Not earned, not seized, not fought for, but dropped to him—discarded.  A hand-me-down victory.  A sick joke.  A pyrite crown.

He’d picked up his phone.

He’d written Yes.

He’d sent it.

He’d sat down at his desk and put his head down and downloaded the paperwork.

Takiya always tells him that letting go is not the same as giving up.  Takiya always tells him that developing an immunity to the poison in his mouth isn’t inherently noble, and it isn’t always necessary.  Takiya tells him biting off more than he can chew is not a requirement, and that he’s allowed to spit things out.

They’re almost through it.  He’s tried not to be the bottleneck, but sometimes he can’t make sense of the Byzantine bureaucratic bullshit at eleven or midnight when the other work is done.  Divorce forms make insurance claims look straightforward by comparison.  Fairly frequently, the holdup has been him trying to offer her a fair share of assets or investments, and her making counter proposals that shortchange her.  She finally said last week that she wants to earn what she gets for the first time in her life.  If she’d come out with that months ago—

But he understands why she didn’t.  Presumably he should have guessed, or figured it out.  Presumably that’s exactly why this needs to be done—he doesn’t even know her well enough to sever legal ties.  There was never any hope he’d make her happy.

He tried, at the start.  Not enough.  There was never time.  The agency siphoned everything he had—drained him, bled him dry.  And after—

Excuses.

Irrelevant now.

It’s nearly done, and then he can put it behind him.

He has to put it aside for now.

There’s work to do.

Some time after he’s read through all of the past month’s press releases from the Public Safety office—both as a matter of assessing what’s in the pipeline and as a method of trying to pinpoint their priorities before next Friday’s visit—his phone buzzes again.

It’s Rei.

Thank you.

He picks up the phone and types slowly.  Did he behave?

She sends back a laughing emoji.  He stares at it.

He was civil, she writes.

Enji scrubs his hand up through his hair and then down the back of his neck.  He rubs his thumb into one of the particularly sore tendons for a few seconds.  He breathes out.

That’s often the best you can hope for, with Touya.

I’ll talk to him, Enji writes.

It’s all right, she returns, too quickly for him to second-guess himself.  I’m keeping the door open, even if it’s just a crack.  He is who we made him.  I’ll wait.

He can’t think of anything useful to say to that.

She apparently doesn’t expect much of a response—a moment later, she types again.

Take care.

He does.  He takes care with everything—every movement, every moment, every coil of flame and every word that leaves his lips.  He has to.  He’s a walking powder keg.  He’s a danger to himself and others.  He is always, always on the verge of fucking up.

It’s a useless platitude.  It’s a sentimentality.  She’s saying it to defray the possibility of his anger, not because she actually means well.

Of course she doesn’t.  Why should she?

Why would any of—

He lowers his face into both hands, pressing the pad of his left thumb into the hinge of his jaw, and makes himself breathe out slowly.  This isn’t about her.  He’s using her as a target.  This is about him—about accumulated stress and unexpressed anger and sublimation and all those other fucking words Takiya keeps teaching him to try to circumscribe his misery with.

He has to do better than this.

He picks up the phone.  He considers it for a second, writes You too, and then taps back to the list of message logs.

Below half a dozen more requisite work communications, there’s a group text with the younger three kids.  Fuyumi started it to try to track who would be home for dinner at any given time before Natsuo moved out.

Keeping the door open.

Right.

Enji checks his calendar and then lays the phone back down on the desktop to start typing.

I’m going to arrange a celebratory dinner for Touya on Wednesday night.  I’d like you all to be there.

Natsuo starts typing immediately, which at least means that he hasn’t blocked Enji’s number this week.

The response, however, is less optimistic.

He just sends No.

It’s Enji’s doing.  There’s a chance he could have salvaged some of it, with Natsuo, if he’d started sooner and tried harder, but it took him too long to wake up to how bad it really was.

He bequeathed the iron-clad obstinacy to all of them.  By the time they’ve charted a course, they can’t turn around.  If they believe they’re right, it’s set in stone.

Natsuo is never coming back.

Fuyumi at least has the grace to send an emoji that looks regretful.  Does it have to be Wednesday?  There’s a big staff meeting at work, I can’t get out of it.

Shouto adds I have homework.

Two seconds later, he tacks on And plans.

At least they didn’t make him wait.

I’ll see about another night, he writes.

He rereads it.  It’s efficient.  It’s self-contained.

But that’s not enough anymore.

Thank you, he adds.

Fuyumi likes it.

He goes over to his texts with Touya.

He breathes slowly in, and slowly out.

He’s talked through the rationale with Takiya several times.  He has to put it into practice.  Practice paves the road.

It’s a request, not a requirement.  It’s I want, not You will.  He needs to offer something of himself without attaching an expectation.

It’s all a colossal waste of time, but it’s not like he was having any damn luck with the direct approach.

He writes, I’d like to take you out to dinner on Wednesday to celebrate.

There.  Nothing controversial or confrontational about—

Nope, Touya writes.

Enji stares at the screen.  There has to be—

Working late weds, Touya adds.  Did you do that shit you always do where you ask everybody else before asking me and then get mad at me for having other priorities?

Enji clenches his teeth.

No, he writes.  It’s—true.  Mostly.  He’s not mad at Touya; he’s mad at himself.  And it doesn’t matter anyway, since none of the others were willing to make the time on Wednesday regardless.  Is there another night that would work for you?

There’s an unusually long pause.

Maybe, Touya writes.

What a useless excuse for a—

Here’s the thing, Touya adds before too much steam can build up in Enji’s chest and start to choke him.  I don’t want to go out to dinner.

Enji reads that three times.

Fine, he writes, cautiously.  What would you prefer?

Touya sends him a decidedly smug emoji.

I want you to actually make an effort, he writes.

What the hell does that mean?  Enji does nothing but make efforts.  It’s in his damn name; it’s the entire point of—

Touya drops another message.

I want you to MAKE dinner for me.  Thursday.  Something nice.

Enji reads that three times, too.  And then a fourth.

Like Natsuo, Touya inherited all of Enji’s stubbornness—but without the emergency brake of the love for logic.  Once Touya has committed to something, no power on the face of the Earth will make him move.

Enji looks at his calendar again.

Thursday is fine, he writes.  What do you have in mind?

Touya answers almost instantly.

Surprise me.

Enji doesn’t even get time to sigh before another bubble appears on the screen.

Oh and could it NOT be a fucking family affair for once??

If Enji is not mistaken, his firstborn just asked him to uninvite two of his children from a dinner held in the house in which they live.

He rubs his forehead.

Fuyumi will understand.  She knows Touya well enough that she won’t even be surprised.  Shouto clearly didn’t want to be a part of this in the first place.

That’s fine, Enji writes. 

Bangin, Touya writes.  Sing my praises until Thursday then

Enji always does.

It’s the opposite of serendipitous: by the time he puts the phone down and returns his attention to the computer screen, the cadre of incomparable imbeciles who spew pro hero clickbait have started disgorging thinkpieces across the internet.  Every idiot in possession of a keyboard has volunteered some insipid opinion on why Touya took so long to break top twenty, or whether he’s overrated, or how he’s peaked.

Is this it?

Is this what Enji did it all for?

So that his children could spend the rest of their lives replicating his misery?

The pictures all make Touya look too young—cocksure and flashy, more spark than substance, out of his depth and destined to fail.  Admittedly, the sheer quantity of metal that he’s embedded in his face over the years doesn’t exactly do him any favors as far as ostensible professionalism, but it’s not—

Fair.

It can’t just be a circle.  It can’t just be a lost cause.

There has to be something else.

There has to be.