Work Text:
I'm cherishing our memories
But I keep hearing the sound
Of an angel who lost its wings.
Parting - ONEWE
They arrive at the Todoroki family home on the final day, hours before the armistice is meant to end. It’s just as Touya remembers it — burnt to a husk, but still intact for all that it looks on the verge of collapse. If he squints, he might even be able to pick out his family’s ashes among all the debris.
He doesn’t, because why would he? Oh, there’s no love lost between himself and his father, but his mother. Fuyumi, who was going to graduate and become a teacher. Natsuo, ever smiling, and little Shouto.
“Come on, Touya, we need to find cover before the acid rain hits.”
Touya sighs through his nose, ducks beneath one crumbling doorway and mutters, “Shut up, I’m coming.”
It’s not Keigo’s fault they’re here, just as it wasn’t Keigo’s fault for getting caught and experimented on before the world went to hell. It’s not any human’s fault that an asteroid smashed into the moon and the seas went wild as it’d exploded — not unless the scientists and governments had seen it and done nothing. Nobody will ever know though, not with most of the human race burned or drowned or otherwise too dead to care about the living.
At least they’ll never have to worry about dying at the hands of aliens, of all things.
“Touya?”
“I said I’m coming, just —”
Touya runs into Keigo’s back with a loud oomph, nose almost cracking against a shoulder-blade. They’re in the ruins of a room that Touya immediately recognises — after all, he’d grown up and did his homework and slept in it for all of twenty years.
“So this was yours, huh? I bet it would’ve been a nice place to live in.”
Something in Keigo’s voice is wistful, for all that the room is ash-blackened and still smells of smoke. It makes sense that they found their way here, when its structural integrity was the only reason Touya made it out alive at all, but something niggles at Touya’s mind as he steps back and rubs his nose.
One look at Keigo’s sad smile is enough to make Touya’s mind still though. He could’ve seen the room as it was before, under normal circumstances, but Keigo gets to see a charred wreck instead.
“It was better than nothing,” Touya says in a voice too curt to sound unaffected. “Now, can we get moving before we get holes burned into us?”
Touya knows it’s unfair of him to snap at Keigo. He’s well aware that he was the one who spaced out first and that Keigo has every right to call him out on his snappishness, but Keigo’s sad smile only gets sadder before he turns away from Touya. “Yeah, let’s make sure the roof and walls are solid.”
It won’t matter when the rain stops. The armistice will be over by then, and we’ll die just as miserably as all our friends and family did.
“Sure, whatever,” Touya says instead. “I’ll take the right if you take the left.”
There was little enough to be happy about in a world like theirs. Sniping the guy who’d kept him company (and sane) for the past six months just didn’t seem that satisfying, in the end.
“Y’know, I wouldn’t have pegged you as a rich kid,” Keigo says as they’re settling down in the corner, where the roof and walls are most stable. “When were you gonna tell me you lived in a mansion and everything?”
“There are bigger mansions out there,” Touya scoffs.
“There were bigger mansions, you mean.”
“Are, were — does it matter?” Touya wraps his arms around his knees and stares down at the patchy, burnt skin that never healed on his forearms. “Just drop it, Keigo.”
“…Sorry.”
The sad look is back in Keigo’s eyes again — it reeks of pity, just as useless to Touya as the ghosts of his past, and it hurts him just the same. Touya knows, from what Keigo’s told him, that he could only dream of having his own room and living in an area once filled with the upper class. If he only knew what Keigo knew of him, Touya might even envy his own life too.
Except — Touya does know better. He remembers the lessons that never ended, all the blood and sweat and tears that went to holding up the Todorokis’ perfect façade, and the crushing weight of being the eldest.
If there was one good thing that came from the world ending, it was the destruction of social expectations. Like anyone would scold him for using the wrong cutlery at mealtimes anymore — he’s lucky if he eats more than once a day and doesn’t vomit it up later.
(If there was another good thing then Keigo would be it, but Touya never says anything and Keigo doesn’t either. When he’d stumbled upon a man that was more skin than bones, blond hair almost black from dirt and on the cusp of death, Touya had thought of leaving him for dead.
That he almost had keeps Touya up at night, sometimes. That he’d grown from looking at the gangly, scruffy man as a random act of kindness to the feelings he has for Keigo now keeps him up on other nights.)
It’s easy for Touya to worry and sink into heavy thoughts these days, and easier still to forget that he chose to look out for Keigo. That it was a moment of compassion (or pity, or even arrogance) that there’s someone warm and still too thin by his side, hair brushing up against his shoulder as Keigo presses closer for warmth. For all he snaps at Keigo and Keigo is still not quite comfortable around him, they’re all the other has in the world.
Touya doesn’t apologise, because Keigo doesn’t need to see more weakness in a man who wears his scars more visibly than most. He doesn’t ask for forgiveness either, because what is there to forgive?
It’s not like Keigo brought about the world’s destruction.
“Do you think it’d hurt?” Touya asks.
“What, you mean — the acid rain?”
“Course that’d hurt, we’ve had skin stripped off by it. No, I mean…” Touya taps his fingers on his knees, face stubbornly turned away from Keigo. “The end. Passing on. Dying. Do you ever think that… that people know, when their time’s up?”
Keigo is silent for so long that Touya almost forces a laugh, if only to pass it off as one of his terrible jokes, but then Keigo says in a soft, low voice, “I’d hope not. I’d want to die knowing that I — I was loved, or I’d be missed, or I did something good for the world.”
It’s not something any twenty-year-old should be saying. It’s not anything any of them should be thinking at this age.
“That’s…” Touya shuts his eyes and swallows around the lump in his throat. “That sounds good enough for me, too.”
“I’m glad,” Keigo says.
His voice sounds anything but.
“I’d rather not die though,” Keigo says next. “If there was a way to live —”
“What, with those things? The ones that came and made us like this?” Touya scoffs and turns to glare at Keigo, even though it’s not Keigo (never Keigo) that he’s truly angry at. “I’d rather die by their hands than join them — those things wouldn’t know mercy or anything good if it spat in their faces.”
Keigo blinks, blinks again, and forces out the worst laugh Touya’s ever heard from him. “Yeah, you’re right. Aliens and humans… we can’t co-exist.”
Touya doesn’t know how long they sit there in silence after that, listening to each other’s breathing and the hissing of rain hitting (and scorching) the burnt-out house. It’s one of the few times Keigo doesn’t bother striking up a conversation about their past or the imminent invasion, or any of the other things that flit through his easily distracted mind.
If he were with anyone else, Touya would say it was an uncomfortable silence. He’s with Keigo though, the man who only ever saw him as his scarred, sharp-tongued self and accepted all of him regardless, so Touya only presses a little closer to Keigo and waits for the rain to subside.
It’s as they’re getting to their feet that a harsh crackle makes them stop in place. It’s not a natural sound — but then, neither is the chatter of a foreign (alien) language outside.
“I commend your bravery, meaningless as it is,” a thickly accented voice says amid the chatter, “but your world is in ruins. Your people are scattered. If you do not wish to die as meaninglessly as your brethren once did, come outside and surrender now.”
“There goes the armistice,” Touya mutters softly.
And there goes our freedom and future, too.
Touya turns to Keigo and sees the weariness in his eyes, but it’s the determination in the slant of his mouth that Touya responds to. “Want to go out with a bang?”
Keigo chuckles and shakes his head. “At least it’ll be better than dying with a whimper.”
The alien contingency outside are only one of many across the world, Touya knows — a welcoming party for each pocket of resistance left, to finish what they had started with that asteroid. Killing one or two of the aliens outside won’t make much of a difference (if it makes any at all), but what else can they do? Touya bends, picks up a brick in passing, and hold a hand out to Keigo.
Keigo takes it, like he’d done all those months ago. He doesn’t stop there though — he yanks, jerking Touya towards him, and smashes their lips together.
It’s nothing Touya expected his first kiss to be. It’s everything he didn’t know he needed, and more.
If this were another time, if he and Keigo weren’t on the verge of death, would it have been better?
The thoughts fly through Touya’s head faster than he can think of them (faster than his approaching death, and faster than the kiss itself), but then Keigo pulls back and licks at his bloodied lips.
“I’ve wanted to do that for weeks,” Keigo confesses quietly. “I’m glad you didn’t push me away.”
Touya opens his mouth and stares at Keigo. He’s certain, beneath his burnt skin, that blood’s rushing to the surface and desperately trying to make him flush.
He wants to tell Keigo that he likes him, too. He wants to pull Keigo in and kiss him again. The aliens can wait for him to have one stolen moment of happiness, of euphoria, for all he cares, but Touya only manages to lean in a little before bright red feathers fill his vision.
“I’m sorry,” Keigo says behind the feathers — feathers that belong to him, that mark him as one of the aliens noisily making their way towards their location.
Touya had last seen those feathers descending like rain upon his youngest brother, burying Shouto in red he couldn’t tell apart from blood. All the aliens look like humans with animal characteristics, from the grey rabbit ears he’d seen on an otherwise-normal woman to a man who’d looked more lizard than human, but he had only ever seen a single instance of bright red feathers.
He wants to ask Keigo why, except — does he even want to know the answer?
A hand presses against his throat before Touya can decide, cutting off his breathing and smoothly pushing him into unconsciousness — but in the moments before he falls, Touya manages two cold, painful thoughts.
You lied to me, even though you knew how I felt.
You’d better hope I’m dead when you see me again.