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KEIGO HAS A routine.
Typically, it looks like this—
He wakes up, sometimes regretting drinking the night before and sometimes not, and if he doesn’t, he hits the gym. (If he does, he nurses a raging headache for the most part of the remaining day, and this is usually accompanied by yakitori and chicken soup.) When he’s done with the gym, he showers, closely followed by breakfast overlooking a sweeping view of the city.
This is also typically when he responds to his manager’s frazzled text messages, assuring her that yes, he’s aware of the gig at the end of the week, yes, he’s getting enough sleep, no, he hasn’t forgotten about that photoshoot he’s scheduled for.
After he’s adequately satisfied his manager’s concerns, he always sends a text to a number he shouldn’t be contacting (but ironically, is at the top of his contacts list), then he puts his phone away and tunes his guitar.
Normally, it takes about twenty minutes until his doorbell rings—more than long enough to finish tuning and warm up, even run through a few songs.
This is his favourite part of the day.
The dyed black hair and piercings are a sight that never fails to put a smile on his face, and it’s enough to make him forget about the pressure of the industry for a while. When Touya’s around, he plays music because he loves it.
Hawks is sure he loves at least two things in his life—music, and the sound of Touya’s voice.
In front of the crowds, they don’t know each other, both their producers explicitly instructing them to stay out of relationships—thus, the hungry kisses in dressing rooms and the lack of a name on Touya’s contact, and sessions like these.
They don’t know each other in front of the crowds, but here, behind walls and way up high in Keigo’s city-view apartment, they can afford to do anything they want.
Touya’s voice sounds like a home that Keigo’s never known.
It’s so, so beautiful, raw and pained and magnetic, and if it’s a storm, then Keigo’s guitar is sunlight in the background that threads through the clouds and promises that everything will pass, a clear light that threads through glassy raindrops and doesn’t dissolve them, but plays through them and sends sprays of iridescence reflecting and glinting through the rain.
This is real.
Keigo has two identities, and sometimes, Hawks, perfect and golden, does not feel like a real person to him. Keigo is real—flawed and maybe a little cracked here and there, but the cracks are where the light seeps in. If he plays a dissonant chord, all Touya does is give him that accusing smile and continues singing, not waiting for Keigo to scramble and recover. That game of catch-up is also real, and he’s addicted to it.
The twang of the strings against his morning-cold fingers is sometimes painful, but it anchors him, a sensation that keeps him grounded in actuality and stops him from pinching himself to ensure that he’s not dreaming. He doesn’t use a pick when he’s alone, and that usually leaves blisters on his fingers, but just because he can afford not to, he doesn’t care.
On stage, Touya is beautiful, eyes like cobalt skies and faraway mountaintops that Keigo can never hope to reach. His silver piercings may as well be stars, for how distant they are, and once upon a time, Keigo had thought that maybe the nature of humans was to fall in love with things that were unreachable.
He was wrong, he knows that now.
Touya is no less beautiful offstage than on—Keigo would confidently say that he’s even more beautiful. Humanity builds spaceships to reach the stars and braves the cold to hike mountains, and when the unreachable comes within their grasp, the view is breathtaking.
Up close, Touya is not flawless. His roots are starting to grow in, crimson bleeding into black, and his voice is not auto-tuned and pitch-matched. But Keigo has never been interested in a picture-perfect front. He’s seen too much of it, and sometimes, when he himself is caught up in that illusion, he doesn’t know whether the real him is the front he puts up, or the man who has blistered fingers and stays up a little too late and listens to music louder than he should.
He’s always admired Dabi, with his effortless devil-may-care attitude and raw vocals. But he’d fallen in love with Touya, all rough edges and tearing at the seams, soft whispers over phone calls and intertwined fingers in the dark.
Touya makes him feel real .
And Keigo wants to wrap that feeling around himself and let it consume him.
The ending chord that Keigo plays is a little bittersweet, and it echoes and mingles with Touya’s voice before dispersing into the air.
It’s eight-thirty in the morning.
“Was that your new album?” Keigo asks, leaning over his guitar.
Touya grins. “You like it?”
Keigo loves it. With his voice, Touya illustrates everything about them. The kisses swapped under streetlights, the midnight coffee runs, the stillness of pre-dawn air—everything the public doesn’t know, and everything Keigo craves with all of his being.
Still—
“Don’t you think your fans would get suspicious?”
Touya leans back, morning sunlight glinting off his piercings as he raises an eyebrow. “Suspicious of what?”
“Kind of… everything,” Hawks says, waving a vague hand. “The lyrics in your songs. They’ll suspect you’re in some kind of relationship, won’t they?”
“Maybe I’m just a prodigious bastard.” Touya cracks a grin, and there it is, that insouciance that’s practically his trademark, that attitude that keeps his fans coming for more and keeps Keigo drawn towards him like a sailor to a siren.
The smile slips off Touya’s face as he leans closer to Keigo, and his grip around his guitar tightens at the sudden close proximity.
“They won’t find out about us. And even if they did…” Touya exhales, and Keigo studies the fan of his eyelashes against pale skin. “ Baby, kiss me before I go, because I’ll tear down reality for you and I don’t know whether I’ll make it home ,” he says softly, and a shudder runs through Keigo’s body.
“Imagine I’m in front of you next time you sing that, and your fans will go crazy,” he jokes, attempting to lighten the mood.
Touya settles comfortably back against his couch again. “I already do.”
Keigo feels his cheeks flush as a lazy (and far too self-satisfied) smile spreads across Touya’s face, but he refuses to back down. “When else do you imagine me?”
“Pretty Bird,” says Touya, amusement dancing in his eyes, “you don’t wanna know.”
Keigo makes a mental note to himself to turn up the air conditioning, because suddenly, his skin is burning . (Also, looking back on it, he had definitely walked himself into that one.)
The lyrics linger in Keigo’s head, though. Baby, kiss me before I go, because I’ll tear down reality for you and I don’t know whether I’ll make it home.
Touya writes his own lyrics, and part of what makes him so captivating is how real they are.
For all the appearances they have to keep up, something that neither of them compromise on is the quality of their music—and that has to come from somewhere genuine.
It’s another thing that Keigo’s sure is real.
His phone chooses that moment to start ringing, and he picks it up with a pointed look at Touya. The singer mimes zipping his lips shut—one of Keigo’s own habits, which he takes note of with a suppressed smile.
“ Hawks ,” growls Miruko’s voice, “where the hell are you? Our photoshoot starts in twenty minutes.”
(So maybe he had lied to his manager about not forgetting this shoot.)
“Rumi!” Keigo greets. He glances at the time, then clamps down on the mild panic bubbling up when he realises that she’s right. “I just got held up a bit. I’ll be there soon, don’t sweat it!”
“If you’re not here by the time it starts, I swear—”
“I got it, I got it,” Keigo says with an easiness that he does not feel. “Catch ya later!”
He hangs up before Miruko has a chance to yell at him.
Touya mimes unzipping his mouth and vocalises Keigo’s exact thoughts. “You’re fucked.”
“I know ,” Keigo groans, dropping his head into his hands.
Touya rolls his eyes and all but drags Keigo to his own bedroom, rummaging through drawers while Keigo finds a leather jacket and slips it on over his shirt. Touya brandishes black eyeliner in his left hand and a silver chain necklace in his right.
“Put that on,” he instructs, and Keigo can’t stop a smile from forming.
“Fashion advice from the edgelord himself,” he teases, but he lets Touya drop the chain over his head. The rectangular pendant at the end of it thumps against his chest.
Touya tells him to close his eyes—or, more accurately, threatens to stab Keigo’s eyeballs if he doesn’t—and draws on the eyeliner with a deft hand, closely following the line of his lashes and giving it the slightest wing, then going back to his inner corners and adds the signature bird-like markings that transform him from Keigo to Hawks.
When Touya’s around, though, Hawks feels real as well.
“How do I look?” he asks, opening his eyes and striking his smirking-at-the-camera model pose. Touya chokes back a weird sound in his throat.
“Like a pretty bird,” he says roughly, then he caps the eyeliner before shoving it back into a drawer. “And I’d like you to buy me a coffee for my services, so you need to get your ass out of here before Miruko kills you.”
Keigo doesn’t have much choice, seeing as Touya all but pushes him to his front door, effectively kicking him out of his own house. He jams his foot in the door before Touya closes it on him.
“Baby, kiss me before I go?” he says with a grin, and he knows he looks good and he knows he’s being a bit unfair, but it’s so fun to tease Touya that he can hardly deny himself the pleasure.
The singer makes a noncommittal sound, then yanks the door back open, kisses his hand, and shoves it at Keigo’s forehead.
“Cheating,” Keigo complains, and that shit-eating grin makes its way back onto Touya’s face.
“You get a real one after my coffee,” he says, then he closes the door on Keigo’s face. “I want an Americano.”
And Keigo stands outside his apartment for a while before realising that if he wants that real kiss, he first needs to survive Miruko’s inevitable annoyance, so he hustles downstairs and tries to wipe the smile from his face.
(That smile is another thing that’s definitely, definitely real.)