Work Text:
Some angels are destined to fall. Some angels find the heaviness put on their outstretched wigs unbearable. Sometimes it feels too easy to let it all go & let the gravity take over. Sometimes–
“Sometimes it’s actually great to have a water outage,” said a girl with long strawberry blonde hair, giggling. She jumped over the counter and flung the bag on her shoulder. “I can go home to Nyako~”
A boy dressed in an immaculate black suit was polishing the last few glasses in front of him when he said, “But we are losing money, too,” and sighed, “Good thing it’s just Tuesday.”
Power was slowly jumping towards the exit still facing Aki. “Which is why you’ll be fine closing on your own?” she grinned, her hand already on the door handle.
Aki gave her a warm smile without meeting her eyes. “Oh, come on, go ahead already. Leave. Feed Nyako. And Denji too, if he isn’t asleep already.”
“Ugh, that bum will wake up at the beep of the microwave and I won't be able to stop him. Anyway, Nyako, here I cooooome,” she exclaimed a little too loudly while opening the door. “See you at home Aki!”
“Mm-hmm.”
He gently pulled the tie knot side to side with one hand in an attempt to loosen the black silk tie, which matched the deep black of his hair. He took off the jacket putting it on a bar stool next to him and let his hair loose. It was just 2am. The bar Aki worked in was not too far away from the university campus, yet far enough for it not to be too popular. Bar crawls on week nights usually ended in bars and pubs closer to the dorms.
Due to the unexpected water outage in the building, they’d waited until two girls sharing a negroni left and decided to close early.
“I can still catch up on some studying,” Aki thought to himself while locking the bar door. He knew he wouldn’t be able to get any work done with Denji and Power creating a raucous at home. Not to mention, it was really too early to fall asleep. His work hours have completely messed up his sleep schedule.
***
Rubber sneaker soles making a scraping sound when dragged against the rough surface of the pavement. “I can’t take it. I can’t take it anymore. I can’t take it.” The muffled noises of pub music and laughter. “When will it all end? There is always a way out, right? I always have a choice. The choice to end it all.” The night air hitting the face. “If it becomes too much, I have a way out.” The dark green door with the peeling paint. Glass doors. Mahogany doors with a 25 on it. Black double doors. More glass doors.
Every door is closed. “Where do I go? Where the fuck am I going?”
Banging on the door and a teenager sitting on the floor in the corner in darkness. More banging. Voices. Hands shaking. Silence.
“It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine.”
In the darkness, a face lit by the screen. Endless scrolling through the news feed. Detained. Arrested. Protests squashed. Detained. “Allegedly murdered”. Bombed cities. Tortured civilians. A raid alarm. A raid alarm. No signal bars.
“Why is it so fucked-up? Why is the world so brazenly messed-up? What is wrong with people? Why can’t you leave people alone? Why can’t you leave us alone? I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I HATE YOU.”
Nails digging into the wrist leaving small red crescents.
“I can’t do anything. No one can do anything. We can’t stop it. I can’t stop it. I can’t do anything.”
It’s 3am on a Tuesday night. Angel finds himself streets away from the main drinking district near the campus, where he’d downed an unknown number of drinks. Probably too many.
“I am alone. I am alone. If something were to happen to me, I’d be alone. If nothing happens to me, I am still alone. God. There is no one, isn’t– No one.”
He cannot cry. He hasn’t cried in years. That is why the all-consuming angst and despair couldn’t find any outlet but fast walking into any direction and clenching his fists while repeating over and over again,
“There’s always a way out. I have a choice. I have control. I can just… go.”
Not long after, emotional exhaustion hit him, as if a switch was flicked. His face and body muscles relaxed to the point that he felt hollowed out. His dead eyes looked straight ahead. The sudden calmness he felt was like a corpse’s pulse. Nothing. He felt nothing. The night breeze made it feel like the blood in his veins had frozen. Nothing. “I might go for another drink,” he thought.
There’s always a way out. I can just go.
***
Aki climbed onto the bar stool and pulled a textbook from his backpack. He realized he had to catch up with the practical tasks otherwise he’d fall behind, and the lectures would stop making any sense. He was halfway through one section when he heard the door handle rattle. Someone was repeatedly, and impatiently, trying to open the door from the outside.
“They’ll go away,” he thought and went back to the problem on the page.
Bang.
There went a dull thud against the door, as if someone kicked the door.
“The fuck?” Aki turned around. What followed was another deadened thump.
Aki stood up and headed for the door. He pulled it open, and the body that’d been leaning against the door fell on its elbows.
The stranger was not tall and had auburn hair in a messy bun. Disoriented, he turned his head around and quietly said as if to himself,
“Interesting.”
Aki was slightly caught off guard so it took him a moment to bend down to help the person stand up. When he was reaching for the person’s arm, they did not let him and forcefully pulled the arm away, which led to them losing balance and falling on the side.
Having understood the hint, Aki did not try to touch the person again and instead asked, “You good?”
The stranger struggled to stand up but eventually caught the door frame and got up staggering.
“You open?” he asked.
“Erm, no, sorry, water outage,” said Aki motioning to the back of the bar, “We are closed for tonight.”
The person in front of him surely did not look sober. They were clutching their hoodie with one arm, while the other one was on the door frame, which minimized the unsteadiness in their feet. The light from the street lights outside was illuminating one half of his face with a warm orange glow, while the other half was hidden in the shadows of the bar after hours. They looked tired. The dark circles under their eyes made a stark contrast with the pale face washed in the yellow light. The auburn-made-brighter hair was escaping the bun and falling in the face. For a second it seemed their lips twitched.
“Bummer,” he said.
“Yeah, sorry,” Aki replied, not knowing what to say.
The stranger turned and crossed the threshold exiting the bar. They stood with their back to Aki and looked to the right, to the left, then to the right again. After a good minute, they took an unsteady step to the left.
“Goodnight, then,” they said while waving with the back of their hand.
“The dorms are the other way,” Aki’s voice trailed off when he called after the stranger.
“And I’m not going there,” they raised their voice just a little to make sure the response was heard by Aki.
Aki nodded to himself and was slowly closing the door while watching as the shadow from the lonely figure was mockingly growing and shrinking in size, growing and shrinking until it fully disappeared from view.
***
No matter how hard he tried, Aki couldn’t go back to studying. He was standing next to the bar stool with his jacket and a pile of handouts and was thinking about the person who decided to unapologetically crash into the bar. Though they weren’t impolite in the slightest.
“They looked quite charming,” Aki admitted to himself and closed the textbook. He hadn’t seen them before, otherwise he’d have remembered, he was certain.
“I wonder if they are going to drop by in the future,” he pondered while stuffing his backpack. “Ugh, nevermind.”
He felt tiredness wash over him. He wanted to get home.
When Aki left the bar, it was almost after 4am. The night sky was still ink black. The moon was hanging low and was diving behind some buildings in the uneven skyline only to reappear a moment later. Aki strolled leisurely along the road that would lead him to the residential area Hayakawa trio lived in. He was watching his feet without raising his head: he knew the way all too well.
After several minutes of walking, a shadow shrouded the part of the pavement his boots stepped on. He looked up. The image he witnessed sent shivers down his spine.
An angel?
It took a moment for Aki’s brain to make out an unsteady slender figure on the rooftop of a three-story building. The shadow cast by the street lights and flickering neon signs made it seem like the person standing on the edge had wings. Rustling leaves of the nearby tall trees created an illusion that even the feathers on those wings were ruffled by the night breeze.
It seemed as though even if the figure leaped forward, they wouldn’t go down – they would hover over the rooftops, over the paved streets with the yellow light splattered on every corner. Aki held his breath and imagined the creature slowly flapping their heavy wings on their way down; how they would envelop him with the angel’s torso towering over him.
“What?” he whispered to himself.
It didn’t take long for him to recognize the auburn hair and the oversized hoodie he saw tonight. Without a thought in his head, he screamed, “Um, hi?”
The body on the edge staggered just a bit, and Aki’s whole body tensed and he subconsciously leaned forward.
“Please, wait,” he exclaimed while heading for the emergency staircase on the side of the building. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the person move, and for a moment Aki’s face twisted as if it was in pain but he kept running up the staircase. When he reached the rooftop, there were no wings. The slender body seemed even smaller than before because the person was sitting on the edge with their legs dangling.
“Wait for what?” he heard them say without turning his head.
Aki slapped his hands onto his knees trying to catch his breath. “I thought–” he mumbled breathless. He made his way to the edge, and the stranger did not move and kept staring straight ahead.
“Are you supposed to be here?” Aki asked, putting his backpack on the ground between his legs.
“Are you here to tell me that I am not?” he replied with a question.
“No,” Aki said sheepishly. “I just didn’t expect–”
There was no reaction. The stranger kept dangling his legs against the facade of the building and clutching the edge with both hands.
A few moments later, Aki got down and awkwardly swung his legs over the edge, while still leaving some distance between them.
Angel stole a glance to his left, without moving his head. “Is this the same guy from the bar?” he thought but didn’t say anything.
Aki turned to the person sitting an arm’s-length away from him and said, “I am sorry the bar was closed,” his intonation rising towards the end, as if it was a question. The remark was accompanied by an apologetic but warm smile.
After a second of silence, Angel burst out laughing.
“Ha-ha, oh my god, ha-ha-ha,” he shrieked while fully putting one of his hands on the even surface behind him.
Aki was visibly confused or just flustered. The way the laugh made their eyes smile made his stomach drop a little.
Angel put a strand of his hair behind his ear and said, “It’s nothing, really. That drink would probably have been one too many anyway.” To which, Aki nodded.
What followed was an elaborately timed exchange of glances during which no one was caught looking at the other one until… Until their eyes met and they both grinned.
“So, you’re not going to ask me what I’ve been doing here?” Angel probed.
“Would you tell me?” Aki responded with a tinge of respectful caution in his voice.
Angel hummed for a second, “Don’t you know already?” he tilted his head and gave Aki a thin smile.
“I see,” he said and looked away and down at the pavement beneath them.
Neither of them spoke. The wind was ruffling their hair. Aki put a jacket over his shoulders. “May I ask why you want to do this?”
Angel turned to him and said, “I don’t want to do this.”
“Then what–”
“I don’t want to jump. I just want to not be alive,” he confessed and looked at the treeline up ahead. Behind it, a thin orange line was starting to appear on the horizon.
“You’re not going to say that life is worth living, that there are things that are worth living for, that a human life is precious–” Angel’s voice gained a mocking tone as he trailed off.
“No,” Aki said deadpan.
“No?”
“No. Would it have changed your mind?” he continued.
Angel chuckled, “No, no.”
Aki may have seemed calm and even apathetic in his last response but he had no idea what to say or do. He wouldn’t know how to deal with it for himself, let alone for others. Somewhat rattled he asked, “But you–”
“You know I am actually terrified of pain,” Angel interrupted him. “I don’t think I can take the pain, or a failed attempt. I really don’t like the pain, so no matter how much it hurts, I don’t even know if I can ever go through with it, you know?” he explained. “I don’t even know how or why I got up here. I don’t know what I was thinking. This is not even high enough. Oh my god–” Angel snickered and covered his face with one of his hands.
“You could let it all go. Let gravity win. This is what I was thinking. Perhaps. Just let it go. Just let it be. Just let me be. Put everything on gravity.”
Angel stopped talking.
“Did you know that gravity is by far the weakest force we know?” rang unexpectedly and clearly in Angel’s ears.
“Oh, so you’re an expert?” Angel teased.
“Um– I mean, that’s like high school physics I think. And well, I am an engineering major, so–” he retorted.
“Ha-ha, sorry. No offence. Keep going.”
“Um– what I mean to say is…” Aki cleared his throat. “While gravity is powerful enough to hold galaxies together, it is so weak that you overcome it every day. If you pick up a book, you’re counteracting the force of gravity from all of Earth.”
“Hmm, if you look at it this way,” Angel said amused.
Seeing the stranger’s reaction, Aki suddenly felt too self-conscious and wondered if he was even supposed to be saying these things. “Anyway, gravity is not an omnipotent power; sometimes you don’t even have to fight it that much and can just get the better of it,” he concluded.
“What if I don’t want to get the better of it?” Angel asked with a slight smile and deep sadness in his tired eyes. “But it is true that I’d rather not fight at all.”
Aki couldn’t look away from the person next to him. He suddenly wanted to know everything there was to know about them. But he was also scared shitless. Scared that this fallen angel was going to drag him down with them not in the sense that he would start playing with the idea of gravity’s final victory, but in the sense that he seemed to care a bit too much, a bit too fast. Aki was used to being level-headed and collected. He was not at all invested in the lives of people he barely knew, especially the more he worked in the bar encountering dozens of strangers each night.
“I am tired,” Angel breathed out as if in continuation. The corners of his lips rose even more – a slight smile stained with resignation.
“You can get home and get some rest?” Aki suggested earnestly.
Angel chuckled in response, “This is cute.”
Confused, Aki looked at him questioningly.
“I am very, very tired,” he answered, hoping his roofmate would get the meaning without him needing to explain.
“Oh.”
Aki had to do something with his hands. Anything.
“So you’re a student at N university? Engineering, right?” Angel asked.
“Yup,” Aki replied and took out a cigarette pack from his backpack. He then held out the pack to Angel, “You want one?”
“No. Personally, I prefer my dying solution to be a bit more short-term,” he jested.
Aki laughed for the first time this night. It wasn’t just a respectful smile, nor an apologetic grin, it was a genuine laugh. “Oh, yeah? I guess I am used to taking things slow.”
Angel raised his brows ever-so-slightly and giggled, “I see.”
“Was it weird? It sounded weird, right?” Aki thought to himself and mentally was hitting his forehead with his fist. But to the new acquaintance he said, “I never thought I’d start. But my boss can teach one a few bad habits. With smoking, I gave in, but at least I am still holding my ground with drinking.”
Aki put a cigarette between his lips with one hand and took the lighter in the other one. For a brief moment, the flame illuminated his face with warm light but then died out, and only the end sparkled dimly as he inhaled the smoke for the first time.
“So, you work in a bar and do not drink. Is this right?” Angel asked, watching Aki’s hands. He held the smoke in his mouth for a moment and silently blew it out.
“Yeah, ha. I think I try not to,” he replied and flicked off the ash from the rooftop. “The truth is I rarely have the time to go out or something. And seeing people absolutely hammered day in and day out kind of does a decent job of keeping me away from alcohol. And you–” he turned his head to the stranger and took another puff at his cigarette.
“Well, let’s say I don’t go banging on closed bar doors every night,” Angel said.
“Then I am the lucky one,” Aki teased.
“I guess you are,” he smiled.
“What about you though? Are you studying at N too?” Aki wondered.
“Me? Um, yeah. I do literature with a bit of linguistics. Being good at languages only was what brought me here anyway.”
“Here? You mean– you’re not from here?” Aki asked. The ash kept building on the cigarette end with his hand outstretched.
“Nope.”
Without giving any chance for Aki to react, he tried standing up, which was not entirely smooth, and so made Aki tense up. Angel straightened his hoodie and spoke,
“Anyway, I’d better go,” he took a few steps away from the edge. “You too. You didn’t have to get up here.”
“I–” Aki tried to say something but Angel interrupted, “Thanks for the gravity crash course.”
He started walking towards the staircase, away from Aki, who kept staring intently after him. He felt so restless. With the cigarette still in his hand and a backpack putting pressure on his lap, he sensed the counterforce of his body’s urge to get up and follow his new acquaintance.
Hastily he put out the cigarette, adjusted his jacket and went to catch up with Angel. When he got close enough, he said quietly, “I should be going too.”
The stranger nodded and started going down the stairs with the clangour of his footsteps breaking up the thick silence of the soon-to-be early morning.
Aki was slowly following when he asked, “What’s your name?”
“Angel,” he replied.
Aki stopped for a moment and asked incredulously, “Excuse me?”
His mind flashed back to the mesmerising image he saw. The otherworldly vision made him experience awe, terror, excitement, familiarity and tenderness all at the same time. He felt the impulse to reach for the person two steps below him. Yet again, a gust of wind felt like the flapping of wings closing in.
“My name is Angel,” he repeated.
“Oh.”
“What about you?” Angel wondered.
“It’s Aki. Aki Hayakawa,” he responded, slowly dragging his feet on the last few steps of the staircase.
“Hi Aki,” sang Angel, now on solid ground
“Um– hello,” he tried to smile but he just looked lost.
It began to dawn. Both of them could get a better look at each other, which they did as they held their gazes for a few moments, without moving or speaking.
“It’s almost morning. Don’t you have classes tomorrow?” Angel asked.
“Yeah. But my classes are mostly online, so I should be good. They are after noon too.”
“Lucky you,” he sighed. “I guess, goodbye?”
Angel was about to turn around to start making his way to the dorms, when he heard Aki say, “You know where I work, so erm…” he didn’t finish his thought.
“Don’t worry, I won’t be trying to break in again.”
His half-smile made Aki feel a tinge of sadness.
Some are destined to fall & some are destined to fall [for]?