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KEIGO DREAMS OF fire.
It’s as blue as the oceans and just as destructive, engulfing his vision until his throat is burning and he’s jolted violently back into consciousness. On these nights, he wakes up panting and sweating. He doesn’t fall back asleep.
The Hero Public Safety Commission has high walls, but even so, gossip makes it through.
He learns of it in hushed whispers through air vents and when others don’t think he can hear, but he’s always been trained to listen, and his feathers pick up the slightest ripples through the air.
Soulmates—a curse and a blessing.
The first night the flames had come, he hadn’t been able to move, paralysed with fear, even in his dreams. His wings had burned against his back, the sensation pressing into his body, sending flaring pain ricocheting through his bones and he’d screamed, but no one had come, and when he’d woken up, sheets cool against his arms and wings intact, he’d had to fight to breathe evenly.
Dreams are memories, or so the rumours say.
He doesn’t have anyone to ask about it, but even so, he’s managed to fit together shreds of information like a puzzle. Those nights where dreams are as vivid as memories, is because they are memories.
More often than he should, he finds himself wondering what kind of life his soulmate leads, to have so many memories of fire and destruction.
* * *
The first time he sees blue fire in real life, he’s ten years old.
There’s a new kid joining the special training program, one with red hair and eyes as blue as the fire in Keigo’s dreams, and there are bandages winding all the way up from his wrists to his elbows.
When they ask him to demonstrate his quirk, Keigo stops breathing.
The fire that courses out of pale hands is the stuff of his nightmares, the same flames that send his body up in smoke and make him wake up with his pulse racing. Instinctively, he pulls his wings in closer, as if he can protect himself from the heat that rolls against his skin, even from where he’s standing.
He doesn’t have dreams that night.
Apparently, the guy’s name is Touya—Keigo knows this because about a week later, on his way back to his room, outside the door next to his, there’s a boxful of burn ointment labelled that. No other kid in the special program has a fire quirk, so that narrows it down to one possibility.
He steels his nerves and knocks.
The door opens, and Keigo smiles, just like his instructors teach him. “Hey!” he says, fluttering a wing slightly. “Just wanted to let you know that this box came in for you.”
Touya doesn’t respond for a while, his expression unreadable. Keigo wonders if he’d let his accent slip through—no, he’s pretty sure he’d spoken in standard Japanese.
Keigo detaches a few feathers to shove the box partway through the door. “You’re Touya, right? Or is that the brand of the ointment?”
“I’m Touya,” the fire user says.
There’s the sound of footsteps from the end of the hallway, and Keigo’s eyes widen. “Crud, I’ve gotta go—”
Touya doesn’t even look like he thinks. He pulls Keigo into the room, kicks the box in after him, and slams the door just before the footsteps round the corner.
Keigo exhales.
“Thanks for that,” he says, and Touya brings a finger to his lips.
Keigo mimes zipping his mouth shut, so they stay there, breathing quietly until the footsteps recede and there’s the sound of the elevator doors opening at the other end of the corridor.
A beat longer of silence. The elevator chimes.
Then Touya turns to him, blue eyes startling against pale skin. “You could’ve gotten caught.”
Keigo shrugs, trying to calm his racing pulse. “Yeah, well, you saved me. Thanks!”
“What were you even doing out after hours?”
Keigo pauses, glancing downwards, then back at Touya. He looks around the room.
It’s… painfully bare. His own room is also pretty bare; the HPSC doesn’t allow that many personal belongings, but even so, he’d managed to sneak in his Endeavour plush toy and he’s got a few manga volumes. Touya’s room, on the other hand—apart from the box of burn ointment, there’s nothing else in there except for the standard toiletries and clothes that are provided to them, courtesy of the government.
Actually, upon closer inspection, there are also a few rolls of bandages on the desk.
Keigo opens his wings slightly, the air nearly still against his feathers, and he looks Touya in the eye. “Have you heard of soulmates?”
Touya’s face turns icy.
“No,” he says carefully, and there’s a slight irregularity in his breathing that Keigo recognises as a sign of a lie. “Why?”
Still, he’ll play along. He shrugs, nice and easy. “I was just in the library looking for information about them. Don’t you think they’re cool?”
“No,” Touya says. His voice sounds choked. “I don’t—they’re not cool.”
At that, Keigo falters, but he doesn’t let it show. If this guy is his soulmate, what does he dream about? Keigo’s own memories are mostly comprised of blurred motion, the grey walls of the HPSC, and the orange fire that had saved him—sure, they might not be the most interesting, but he doesn’t see anything in them that would make Touya’s expression go so cold.
Maybe he’s got the wrong guy.
“I think they’re cool,” Keigo says, folding his wings resolutely against his back, “even if you don’t.”
He’s lost him.
Touya’s expression goes stony, then angry, then finally, just tired. “Whatever,” he says, turning towards the door. “Believe what you want.”
He opens the door, a clear gesture for Keigo to get out—even so, he hesitates, searching the room for something, anything about the boy in front of him who may or may not be his soulmate, but either way, hates the idea of them.
“Thanks for letting me know about the ointment,” Touya says, and with a soft click, promptly shuts the door in Keigo’s face.
Except… he’s pretty sure he hasn’t got the wrong guy, because he’s heard that voice before in his dreams.
Always shouting. Always desperate.
Keigo flops down on the bed and falls into a dreamless sleep.
* * *
When the bandages come off Touya’s arms for the first time, their instructors set them up in a sparring ring together.
So that’s how he finds his wings burning at the tips while he tries to send his feathers through the flames, but they’re too hot and they keep burning before they can find their target.
He’s down to his primaries when he decides screw it, and he wheels straight through the fire. He curls his wings around him, gritting his teeth as the flames greedily latch onto them in a sensation far too similar to the one he’s dreamed about, then when he’s out of the fire—
Touya snaps his wrist backwards to call up another wall of blue. He’s not fast enough.
Keigo, sharpened feathers already in hand, spins to duck a flame, thrusts upwards, and rests the point of his makeshift sword delicately at Touya’s throat.
For a beat, none of them move.
Then the instructors scramble for the fire extinguishers, and the hiss of foam overtakes the crackling of flames, and with an exhale, Keigo lowers his feather.
Both of them, sporting burns and a few cuts, are sent to the infirmary.
Keigo watches as Touya inspects his own wounds, applies salve on them, and bandages them up with alarming speed.
“That was a good fight,” he says, flipping his wing in front of him to inspect the remaining feathers. He detaches a few of the more damaged ones, then reaches for the bandages. “Spar again sometime soon?”
Touya looks up from his arms. “You need to clean the burns first,” he says, not answering Keigo’s question. “Haven’t you dressed a wound before?”
Keigo bristles. “I have! Just—not a burn.”
He doesn’t say that fire is the one thing that he tries to avoid as much as possible—his feathers go up like kindling, and ever since the dreams, the heat against his skin is a little too real to be comfortable.
Touya sighs, glancing upwards like he’s regretting what he’s thinking, then gestures for Keigo to scoot over.
Keigo beats his wings softly, once, and lands lightly on the bed next to him.
“This ointment cools the skin, cleans it, and heals it at the same time, so you only really need to put it on,” he says, smearing said ointment over the slight burns on Keigo’s arms. “Easy enough for a birdbrain like you to remember.”
“Hey!” Keigo squawks indignantly, snapping a wing forward to swipe at Touya’s head. The older boy dodges it while unravelling a new roll of bandages. He winds the fabric deftly over Keigo’s burn, tightly enough so that it stays firm but loose enough for his blood to circulate normally, then secures it with something that looks like a pin.
Keigo has always been trained to think before he talks. Still, the question slips out from between his lips unbidden.
“How’d you get so good at treating burns?”
He’s pretty sure he knows the answer. Still, experience has taught him that asking questions he knows the answer to can sometimes gets him even more information, and he can’t help himself—he’s curious about the boy with the blue fire.
Touya’s laugh is bitter. “When you’ve got a quirk like mine, you learn.”
Keigo waits, but Touya doesn’t elaborate. He flutters his wings slightly, letting the cool air brush against the feathers. He swallows.
“Sorry if the soulmates thing made you angry,” he says quietly. “I know not everyone has one.”
“I’ve got one.”
The surprise on Keigo’s face is genuine. Mostly.
“You do?” he asks, trying for astonishment, wings flaring out above his head. “Have you met them? Do you know their name? Do you know for sure that you’re soulmates—?”
Keigo clamps his mouth shut, and folds his wings against his back again.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” he says, glancing at Touya in a half-apology. “I was just curious.”
There’s a long moment where Touya doesn’t meet his eyes, which means a long moment for Keigo to run through everything he’d ever said to the boy and wonder where it all went wrong. (It’s hard to pinpoint a single time.) Touya winds the bandages back up and sets them on the table, rolled into neat spools.
Keigo presses his lips shut and waits.
Touya tugs his sleeves back down over his bandages and meets Keigo’s eyes—and this time, Keigo sees more than the blue of scorching flames there.
“Soulmates just… don’t always end up well,” he says, in a voice that holds the weight of certainty. “My mother has a soulmate.”
Keigo leans forward slightly.
Touya pauses. “It didn’t—she’s in hospital, now. Because of him.”
Something heavy settles on Keigo’s chest, and suddenly, all his preconceptions about soulmates seem too bright, too flashy for the reality of the grey walls around them and the dry fluorescent lights above.
He stretches a wing out automatically, then withdraws it.
“I didn’t know.”
Touya laughs, and there’s no humour in the sound, but no meanness, either; it’s not something that’s meant to hurt, but more a product of being hurt.
“No way you could’ve known,” he says, leaning back against the wall.
Keigo fidgets. “Still—”
“You can drop the act,” Touya says. Keigo freezes, and Touya continues talking. “I know we’re soulmates. I’m not that stupid.”
Keigo takes a deep breath. The air smells like antiseptic. He digs his fingers into the mattress beneath him, and curls his wings inwards in an instinctive attempt to shield himself.
“We might not be,” he offers.
Touya raises an eyebrow and boosts himself off the bed, heading for the door. “Sure,” he says agreeably. “The bright red wings and the fact that my dreams have stopped are probably just coincidences, right?”
Keigo’s words get stuck in his throat, and Touya shakes his head in resignation.
“I don’t hate the idea of soulmates,” he says. He glances back, blue eyes unreadable. It just doesn’t mean much to me.”
He leaves the infirmary, closing the door behind him, and Keigo remembers to breathe normally again.
The weight in his chest lightens a little.
It’s a start.
* * *
The bandages never stay off Touya’s arms for long, and when Keigo bursts into Touya’s room to announce that he’s chosen his hero name, he freezes.
Touya secures the wrap and glances at him with a startingly apathetic look in his eyes.
“I told you to knock,” he says quietly.
Keigo swallows. “What happened?”
Touya doesn’t answer immediately.
The burns on his arms had always looked painful, but now, even though he’s dealt with wounds before, looking at Touya’s arms makes his stomach turn over. Still, he can’t tear his eyes away with a morbid fascination.
He’s been trained to deal with pain, but somehow, it’s always harder to deal with when it’s not his own.
“I just—pushed a little too hard,” Touya says. Smoke starts rising from his hands. Keigo’s eyes widen.
“You’re burning up.”
Touya glances downwards, where the sizzle of burned skin makes Keigo want to throw up, and clamps down on it with his other hand.
Keigo sends a feather to carry over a jar of that burn salve.
“This stuff cools the skin, cleans it, and heals it at the same time,” he says in imitation of what Touya had explained. He unscrews the lid and inches closer. “Easy enough for you to remember, even if your head is filled with smoke.”
At that, Touya cracks the slightest smile. “Birdbrain.”
He really doesn’t feel like smiling right now, especially after seeing all that burned skin, but he forces one anyway as he spreads the ointment over Touya’s arms. The scars are rough under his hands, and he wonders whether the nerves are dead, too. Whether this hurts.
If it does, Touya gives no indication of pain.
Keigo moves to an area where the skin is rawer, and Touya winces, jerking his arm back slightly.
Keigo pauses.
Touya inhales, exhales, then puts his arm back where it was before, a silent indication to continue.
Keigo starts wrapping a bandage around the burn. “You shouldn’t push yourself like that,” he says, glancing up at Touya’s face. “It’s bad for you.”
Touya’s eyes blaze. The look on his face is one of quiet determination.
“I’ve got three younger siblings,” he says, and his tone is unyielding. “Someone’s gotta protect them.” He glances at Keigo. Rolls his eyes. “I guess I’ve gotta take care of you, now, too. I can’t believe my soulmate doesn’t actually know how to dress a burn.”
“I do!” Keigo protests. His pulse jumps at the acknowledgement of them actually being soulmates.
Touya looks pointedly down at the too-loose bandage around his arm, and Keigo hurriedly adjusts it.
“Anyway,” he says, bandage now passable by Touya’s eyes, “you don’t have to take care of me. Because we’ll take care of each other, right? That’s what soulmates are for.”
The hesitation on Touya’s face is evident, but Keigo’s already made up his mind, a small spark of determination lighting in him, hot and concentrated.
He’s not letting Touya sit there with burns on his arms again. He’s not going to watch as his skin becomes more scarred than pale, and he’s not going to see that pained expression on his face again, because, despite the bare room and the desperation behind blue eyes, Touya is still the boy who’d pulled him into his room without a thought and dressed Keigo’s wound for him.
He’ll train.
He’ll train until he’s faster than anyone, better than anyone, he’ll train hard enough for the both of them, so that Touya doesn’t have to suffer and maybe he’ll see those blue eyes smile.
He’ll become a hero so that Touya doesn’t have to hurt himself anymore.
“Anyway, I came to tell you that I’d decided on my hero name,” he says.
Touya raises an eyebrow. “What, did Birdbrain stick?”
Keigo whacks Touya lightly on the head.
“I’ll go by Hawks,” he says, spreading his wings slightly, extending them so that they block out the cold white of the light and turn the fluorescence to a soft red. “Cool, right?”
Touya doesn’t say anything for a while. He examines his arms, looking at them from all angles, then drops them and looks at Keigo. He gives him a small smile.
“I still prefer Birdbrain.”
And for a second, the high walls of the HPSC are forgotten, and so are the burns on Touya’s arms, because Keigo decides right then that a pillow fight is a good idea and promptly slams a cushion straight into Touya’s face.
(They get a stern talking to after that, because Keigo is not supposed to be in Touya’s room, nor is he supposed to be starting pillow fights left and right, but he looks at Touya’s face, all repressed smiles and pretty blue eyes shining—
And he thinks it’s worth it.)
* * *
Keigo is twelve years old when Touya dies.
It happened at night, in the training room, a tragic accident that had sent the boy with red hair and eyes like his fire up in glowing blue flames. Keigo, always trained to listen and always trained for alertness, had lain awake in his bed, sheets tangled around his ankles and registering the crackle of the fire.
When he’d made it out of the door and down to the training room, breaths silent and wings half-open, there was nothing there except the faint traces of ash on the floor.
His instructors tell him about it in the morning.
He’s too numb to react.
Touya does not show up to what was meant to be another sparring session in the afternoon, and in the evening, when Keigo knocks at his door, there’s no answer. Keigo sends a feather in through the crack beneath the doorframe to unlock it from the inside, and when he steps into the room, there’s only the cool smell of burn salve in there and a few rolls of half-used bandages.
And no Touya.
Still, he can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong . Touya’s his soulmate—surely he’d feel something if he were dead, but all he feels is a tingling numbness and the sense that something’s tugging at him, like the feeling he’d gotten before he’d met Touya and the feeling that had drawn him to those deadly blue flames in the first place.
When he falls asleep that night, he dreams.
It’s his first dream in two years, and the blue flames are as scorching as he remembers, but somehow, they’re less terrifying, now that he’s experienced them in real life and he knows that the person behind them had dressed Keigo’s wounds for him and had a pillow fight with him late at night.
He’s pretty sure the dreams are meant to stop if his soulmate is dead.
Keigo used to fear his dreams, but now, he welcomes them, and instead of flinching away from the flames, he inches closer, peering through the glowing blue, searching.
Touya’s alive. He knows it.
Keigo dreams of fire.