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You’d weigh him down.
That’s what he told you before he left. When he stepped onto your balcony in the dead of night, shadows enveloped his form. Hawks was a faceless, winged silhouette at your rails, and despite him being only a mere two feet away, you couldn’t reach him. Where was his bright smile now? You needed to see it, to relish in it like sunshine in the night. You laughed nervously and claimed all of this must have been one sick joke. That he wasn’t serious. Hawks, you wouldn’t do this… But he would, and he was. Who were you to say what he would and wouldn’t do? Who was he when he turned his back on you?
You didn’t want to know.
A gust of wind swept over you as he began to take flight. While he grew higher, you remained grounded at the threshold of your bedroom. White curtains billowed and moved to the mercy of his motions. You froze to the mercy of his desertion. Perhaps he mumbled an apology then. You couldn’t know for sure—the sound of his wings threatening to carry him away was too loud, far harsher in abandonment than it was in a farewell.
Hawks was a man of ambition. He had a noble goal with sometimes less-than-noble ways of pursuing it. This was one of them. Over anything else, his priority was to orchestrate a world where heroes and citizenry alike could rest easy. You, a part of that latter half, were reduced to a hefty cinderblock bound to his ankle at the mere mention of—and you hated the word now—love.
Hawks dealt in dualities of dire severity and the playfulness he portrayed to the public. You saw both, and perhaps something in between: vulnerability. He couldn’t love you, not like that. Loving you took away the most valuable resource of all. It occupied his time. Loving you put you in danger. It made you a liability.
What did loving him do? It pushed him away.
You used to enjoy how he always left traces of himself behind. Now, as he flew away, the gentle fall of his red feathers felt like hot ash after a fire. Singes and stings against skin. You picked one up and held it delicately between your fingers and thought of the irony of it all. Were his wings to be swallowed in flames, he’d come crashing down. The feathers really would be ash, then.
--
Life moves on. You didn’t see him again. His near daily visits, the way he’d tap on the glass of your balcony door seeking entrance—gone. He had looked like he only needed a companion, someone to talk to, feign normalcy with. Asinine discussions with him were somehow made fun. A movie a night, bodies sitting far closer than they should have, but never any more than that. You knew Hawks followed what he wanted with little control. Perhaps he never needed to exercise self-restraint with you.
The thought grounds you. You find your pace again without him. You learned to stop looking at your phone for a message from him that never came. The only way you saw his face now was through his regular appearances in the news where you learned of his heroic deeds, his trademark speed bringing him ever closer to his ideal world, one where you had no place.
Did you see what Hawks did today? You’d hear. He’s amazing. He’s so fast.
Too fast, you think.
Civilian life isn’t quite like that. Hawks soared the skies and you took public transportation. You ate boxed lunches and he had whatever whims he felt like fulfilling. Convincing yourself that these differences were so stark comforted you somewhat. You and Hawks would never work, your worlds far too different. In reality, you shared the same one, and it was as dangerous as Hawks said it was.
When the time came for you to be faced with a villain for the first time in your life, you realized what he meant.
The twitching, horrifying monster of an experiment came thrashing through your balcony doors in an instant. Glass shattered every which way. It tugged and tore at the curtains and turned them from grace to scrap. Its pulse throbbed beneath its corpse grey skin and you felt your breath hitching in your throat as your limbs locked in fear. You tried to scramble off of your bed to get to your door, but all you managed was a pathetic stumble and a whimper in your voice.
It drew closer to you. You could hear it snarling. The drip of its hot spit spilled over its gaping mouth. The more you looked at it, the more horrifyingly real the situation became. Its eyes rolled wildly in what looked like a protruding brain before they finally focused on you.
“We… found… you…”
Your eyes widened. It could talk. You clutched your own chest with your back pushed up against the nightstand. You hadn’t realized you were crying until a sudden breeze crossed your cheeks and cooled the tears against your skin. A flash of red came through. You blinked once, twice—Hawks was standing over you. You could feel his heavy breathing, hear his heartbeat. You had never seen him so frantic before. You looked up at his face and while he should have been your focus in any other moment, you craned your head to try and see what had become of your intruder.
Hawks gripped your jaw. He turned your head to keep your eyes on him and nowhere else. “Don’t look.” And so you didn’t.
You closed your eyes the moment he pulled you close. His heart pounded against his chest and you could feel it on yours. His wings came around you and sheltered you from the visceral smell of blood in the room. You could no longer hear snarling or heavy steps. No threats. No fear.
Hawks had come so quickly, so instantaneously that even with his revered speed he couldn’t have just appeared even if he knew what was happening the moment it came. That is, not without having been around to begin with.
His arms tightened around you. You clung to his body in great desperation. Hawks didn’t push you away and he didn’t leave. Your life had been in danger and had he not been watching you all these weeks, silently flying high above you when you walked home or left to buy your damned boxed lunches, you may have very well been dead.
This was exactly what he feared, and you realized that now. He was holding you just as desperately as you were holding him. What little self-restraint he had was long gone. You had stopped trembling, but he didn’t. Vulnerable. That was the side you saw of him now. The side he allowed you to see and no one else.
“I’m here,” the comforting words came out, but they weren’t from the hero.