Chapter Text
A soft touch to the shell of his ear—warm, so warm, ushered to his skin by a humid mist. He’s so cozy that he never wants to move.
Then there’s another kiss beneath the first, and another below that, and then the delicious heat settles at the join of his neck and his shoulder and stays.
“Good morning, love,” a voice murmurs, contentment rumbling low beneath the words.
Keigo rolls hard, tearing himself out from under the comfortable weight of the arm thrown across his waist, and scrambles to the far side of the bed, feathers readied, pressing himself back against the wall. At least he has pants on.
“What,” he chokes out around the thundering of his heart in the back of his throat, “the fuck.”
The man on the other side of the unfamiliar bed looks like Enji.
Except he doesn’t. Because there’s a hint of a smile behind the wince overwhelming his expression, and his eyes are soft. He doesn’t move right—he sits slowly, reaching across himself to put his left hand on the mattress and lever himself up. No sudden movements. No urgency.
“I’m sorry,” he says, ruefully. Ruefully. What the fuck, what the fuck, what th— “How are you feeling?” He reaches out, and there’s not enough space to make a break for it without battering past him. Can’t risk it. Not yet. Not with no information, with nothing, with—
His warm fingers close in, and Keigo flinches back, but the man who isn’t Enji doesn’t react—just presses the back of his hand gently to Keigo’s forehead. His expression goes pensive—and stays rueful. Fucking rueful, like a Victorian widower in one of those gooey period romance movies that Fuyumi likes.
The ruefulness is half of the cause of Keigo’s roiling nausea all by itself.
The other half is harder to put his finger on, but it seems to have brought some vertigo as its plus-one.
“You took a bad blow to the head in a fight yesterday,” Rueful Stud with Red Hair and a Suspiciously Similar Scar is telling him, voice still soaked through with wistful concern like curdling milk. His right arm ends in precisely the right place, T-shirt sleeve hanging empty past the stump. “You weren’t unconscious for long, and you kept insisting you were fine, but I could tell there was something wrong.”
The warmth of his hand is dangerously soothing, whoever the fuck he is. Keigo’s guts writhe.
It’s fine. It’s okay. He’s alive, presumably. This is… fucking bizarre, but it can probably be traced back to a quirk one way or another—an effect on him or on… not-Enji. Or it could be some sort of incredibly thick glamor that’s layered on top of one or both of them so heavily that the whole world is blurring. Simple explanation. Simple fix.
It’ll be simpler if Keigo doesn’t throw up. The way not-Enji is gazing at him makes his stomach twist and then clench and then wring itself like a wet towel.
It’s not him.
It’s not Enji in Enji’s skin. It’s not Enji grazing his fingertips gently down over Keigo’s cheek, letting them linger on his jaw, resting them on his collarbone.
Keigo tries to track the details—the stretch of the scar, the precise place it obliterates his eyebrow, exactly how far it extends beneath his lip.
His face is identical, and it looks like a stranger’s. This man holds it differently. All of his expressions are wrong.
Keigo’s wasting time dwelling on it, let alone lamenting. Stupid word, ‘lament’. Stupider still to do.
“Move,” he croaks out. He takes not-Enji’s wrist delicately in his fingers—they don’t even reach around—and relocates the huge, warm hand back onto the top of the bed so that he can scramble-crawl past it. Enji—not-Enji—doesn’t shift a muscle, which means that the wall of gorgeous hip and leg shrouded by the sheets is blocking Keigo’s exit. Okay. Fine. Great. He’s always wanted to climb Enji like a tree; climbing over him like a fallen log is close en—
“Keigo,” not-Enji says, very softly.
God. Goddamnit. Goddamnit.
The upshot is that whoever set him up for this isn’t going to escape in the meantime if he allows himself five seconds of frozen stillness to get over that. That’s because whoever set him up isn’t going to escape, period.
“Please lie down,” not-Enji says, and the feathers don’t even want to bristle as the warm hand settles on Keigo’s back. He’d only just started clambering over the nearest knee. “You need to rest. You—”
“Stop talking,” Keigo manages. Up and on. He’s going to be sick. He hopes the bathroom’s close in Shitty Fantasy Land. “Go back to sleep or something.”
The faintly exasperated sigh makes him falter, because it’s the first thing that’s sounded real.
Icing on the cake: faltering makes his elbow give out, which makes his weight tip, which makes him tumble directly off the side of the bed.
Not-Enji doesn’t even have the damn grace to have a futon at a time like this.
Keigo feather-lifts himself before he hits the ground and gets his feet underneath him even though his guts are lurching like a motherfucker, obviously, but—still.
Still.
The mattress creaks quietly as the man behind him moves, and he makes himself stagger for the door. Either everything is remarkably beige and nondescript in this room, or his brain has started eliding details to make room for more panic.
“Keigo,” Enji’s voice says, from higher up.
He swallows down the first spurt of bile and fixes his eyes on the door. Just a couple more steps. “Don’t call me that.”
“It’s your name.”
Keigo reaches out and lays his hand against the doorframe, leaning on it. He squeezes his eyes shut. That sounded—
That was—
Close.
That was almost right.
Is it learning?
Fuck. Fuck.
He pries his eyes open. He wraps his fingers around the doorknob. Cold. Okay. He’s probably not hallucinating. The sensory input is too pronounced.
He turns the knob and pulls the door open.
The hallway is less beige.
His legs feel like lead, and his stomach is still doing amateurish backflips. He focuses on hiking in quick, shallow breaths to try to avoid tempting his diaphragm to do anything they’d both regret.
The feathers quiver as Enji’s hand extends towards him again.
Out. Out into the hallway. Out of range, out of reach. He curls his hands into fists and digs his nails into his palms. One foot in front of the other.
He’s changed his mind about wanting to find the bathroom. He wants to get out—out of this whole fucking place, out into the air, out onto the street, just out. He’ll throw up in the gutter if he has to. On the lawn. On his own bare feet.
He opens his hands and holds them out on both sides, grazing the inoffensive wallpaper—vertical lines, light colors—to balance himself. His head is throbbing so hard that it’s making his stomach acid boil with envy. There are framed pictures on the walls. He keeps his eyes trained on the hallway directly ahead of him—on the opening at the end, on the left side, where light shines through.
Enji’s footsteps follow him. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
“Oh, buddy,” Keigo says, which really isn’t surprising, given that he can’t rationally be expected to maintain a speech filter under these conditions. “We’re way past that.”
“We wouldn’t have to be,” not-Enji says, “if you would just come back to bed.”
Keigo holds it together. He really ought to get a prize. He’s closing in on the archway at the end. “Hard pass.”
“Where are you going?” not-Enji asks. “Do you want me to make you some tea?”
“No, thanks,” Keigo says. That confirms his suspicion, though, and then the white light dutifully resolves into a little kitchen as he turns the corner.
He stops again, and not just because he ran out of nearby walls to brace himself against.
It’s cute. Unlike the bedroom and the hallway, it has a lot of personality—there are stickers and notes and paper menus all over the refrigerator door, and the potholders on the hooks by the stove have embroidered nightjars, one of them with its giant mouth wide open. Keigo would buy those. He would absolutely buy those.
It’s not beige, either. The backsplash tiles above the range alternate sandy-colored and chestnut-brown with green accents, and the floor and the wallpaper in here coordinate. They’ve got a little round table draped in a dark brown tablecloth.
They.
They aren’t.
They don’t have anything, because this does not exist.
The illustrious hero Hawks has finally lost every single last one of his marbles, and he doesn’t even get to enjoy it, because all of his internal organs have taken up parkour. Which they suck at.
He doesn’t want to stay.
He doesn’t.
It’s like the start of one of those movies he used to watch because they were the only thing on late, even though he could never sleep afterwards, and being alone and scared was lousier than being alone with the silence in the first place.
Things are only going to get worse from here.
There’s a door, to his right. Front door. Bronze mail slot. The rest of the door is painted dark green. It’s got decorative windows near the top, the backlit shapes of which he can just see through the cute little off-white curtains. There’s no deadbolt. There’s no sliding lock or chain lock or bar latch.
This isn’t his.
This isn’t real.
“Keigo,” Enji’s voice says, and his footsteps slow as he comes close this time.
Keigo takes one step towards the door.
His knees feel like jelly, and his head swims. What the hell? The banging in the back of his skull ramps up in tempo and intensity, like a whole drum section cutting loose. He fans the wings out, plants his feet, swallows hard, and tries to force his eyes to focus. He’s so close. He doesn’t know what’s out there, but it’s got to be better than this. He’ll find something. He’ll figure it out. He just has to—
Enji’s voice goes so staggeringly sweet again that Keigo barely recognizes it as his. He sounds like soft-serve ice cream tastes. “You look like you’re going to fall over. Please slow down. It’s all right. There’s nothing—”
Keigo’s rat bastard traitor of a left knee goes first, and his right sees which way the wind’s blowing and follows suit.
The floor is much less aesthetically appealing up close.
It would probably be even less appealing if he’d slammed his face down into it.
But Enji caught him.
Not-Enji.
Whoever the fuck this is.
Keigo’s hindbrain burbles uselessly about warmth and warmth and warmth and safety and softness and the instinctively-detectable smell of someone that he loves—someone he’s loved for so long that it’s the bass beat of his whole life, and even he hardly ever notices it unless all the other music stops.
The rest of his brain is trying not to drown in the murky water, while his guts make a serious effort at clawing their way up out of him and depositing themselves on the linoleum.
“You know how it is with head injuries,” Enji murmurs, stroking his hair. God, that feels… that… his hand’s so warm. “You have to be careful.”
Careful.
Sure.
He’s always…
He remembers—
Something falling. Collapsing. Dirt, maybe—dark.
A little girl.
Enji.
Enji shouting at him, reaching towards her, but not fast enough—not enough time—
Choking dust and strangling panic and then a slice of relief at the sharp imposition of the pain, because if he was feeling it, then surely Enji and the kid were both—
“Easy,” Enji whispers. “Stop thinking.”
Keigo tries to say That’s the most hypocritical thing you’ve ever said, you beautiful bastard, and I assure you I’m keeping a list, but what comes out sounds more like “Eurgh.”
“Come on,” Enji says, the one huge arm shifting expertly to draw Keigo in against his impossibly broad chest (warmwarmwarm). Keigo’s brain stalls like a junker car, sputtering heedlessly, spewing smoke. He can’t wrap his arms around Enji’s neck—it’d look like acceptance and an expectation, and both are out of the question—but he’s dead weight if he doesn’t. The feathers do a sluggish sort of flopping thing when he tries to convince them to raise him up, to scoop him out of Enji’s frighteningly gentle grip. His feet feel very, very far away.
Enji carries him into another room. His head lists back and forth, and his vision blurs, and he huddles in. Jesus fucking Christ, he must be dying. He wants to die with the real Enji, not in this… not…
Not here.
Enji lowers them and sits. The height feels about right for an armchair. Past all the glorious muscle barely contained behind the soft white T-shirt, Keigo can sort of make out a window, and a lamp. Everything’s hazy except Enji’s tits.
Not-Enji’s tits.
They’re so nice, but—
“Stoppit,” Keigo mumbles into still-not-Enji’s perfect chest. It’s so—oh, God. It’s everything. Fuck. Fuck. “Put me down.” Enji doesn’t. His guts pirouette. “I’m—I mean it. I’m takin’ advantage.”
Enji makes a soft sound deep in his chest—a little idle hum of acknowledgement that resonates outward, shivering through his ribs to push its way past Keigo’s. Getting close to somebody is dangerous. Always. “Taking advantage of what?”
Idiot. “Of you.”
“I’m twice your size,” Enji says, calmly, “and you can barely stand.”
The dark keeps fluttering like ragged curtains at the edge of his vision. Like television static. Like dying leaves, like the coming of the winter, like the advancing of the night. Cinching inward, deepening, inevitable. “You’re—you’re not you.”
Enji’s breath in his hair is so warm, so warm, so— “Who am I, then?”
“You’re not my Enji,” Keigo forces out. “You’re not—”
Enji’s hand cards through his hair, slower still this time, softer, sweeter. “Keigo.”
No, no— “Stop calling me that.”
Enji’s fingernails graze his scalp. The heat of his palm soothes the aching in Keigo’s head, the tightness in his neck—lulls him with the lies. The voice sounds realer when it’s low like this. When it’s so quiet. “Rest.”
Keigo tries to gather the shreds of his strength, tries to sit upright, tries to enlist the weary feathers to help him hold his head up. “No.”
His eyelids feel like weighted nets. His head feels like a bomb went off in the approximate region of his hippocampus. His stomach roils, but the wave of exhaustion overwhelms it.
Enji’s mouth grazes his forehead. “Rest, love.”
“I’m not…” The words disappear into the darkness, flicking their tails. “You’re not…”
“Rest.”
It feels like he’s sinking through warm glue. He can’t unstick his tongue.
“You’re not…”
★
Enji starts awake.
He dozed off in the old chair in his bedroom. He feels… strange. Something’s not quite—
He stares down at his arm.
His right arm.
Cautiously, he urges the flesh-and-blood fingers resting idly on his thigh to curl.
They respond.
Something is very—
“Dad!”
Fuyumi’s voice from the hallway. Even muffled by the distance and the door, the brightness of it sounds odd.
“C’mon! I know you worked late, but we gotta go, or we’re gonna miss the start!”
Enji’s impossible arm is sheathed in a crisp white shirt and a suit jacket—he’s fully dressed like he’s headed to a press conference, but Fuyumi wouldn’t be involved in that at all, let alone haranguing him about his attendance.
He clears his throat and carefully braces his hands—both hands—on the arms of the chair.
“I know,” he says, loud enough for her to hear him.
He doesn’t know, obviously, but it sounds like something that would acknowledge her concerns enough to divert her attention from whatever fucking crisis he just woke up to.
He levers himself upright.
He can stand.
He feels slightly unstable at first—faintly dizzy, vision swimming momentarily while he squares his shoulders, then settling to rights. The sensation resembles losing a little too much blood, but not quite enough that you can’t muddle through.
He looks down at his hands again, holding them next to each other and flexing the fingers on both sides in unison.
This isn’t real.
This is a dream, or a nightmare, or—most likely—a quirk of some kind. Retaliation, probably. This is some puppet-master’s sick game.
Fine. All he has to do is learn the rules, and then he can beat it.
Enji is very good with rules.
He needs information, first—needs to see the gameboard and map its parameters, needs to identify all the other players, needs to test the limits subtly to determine where they lie without alerting anyone. He needs to play along before he can play to win.
He checks his pockets. His phone doesn’t appear to have changed much, though it’s a slightly older model. His wallet contains all of the same identification cards and very few of the same credit cards. His hero license headshot photo looks… different. He renewed it at the same time, but in the photo, he’s almost smiling. There’s something eerie about that.
He uses his right thumb to unlock the phone, feeling strangely like he’s stealing something. The date seems correct, in a way that is colossally unsettling—he should know the date, not intuit it.
He considers looking at himself in the phone camera, but he can feel that he doesn’t have the scar. As evidence goes, that’s important, but he doesn’t need to see it. He remembers what he used to look like. He was on TV all the damn time.
He scrolls through his recent messages—of which there are an endless number, precious few of them professional—and then thumbs down through his contacts. He searches the list in case he missed it somehow, knowing with a creeping certainty even as he does that he won’t find what he’s looking for.
Where the hell is Hawks?
That was going to be his first stop once he’s sorted out whatever the hell is so urgent that it’s just compelled Fuyumi to start rapping her knuckles against the door down the hall.
“Natsu, what are you doing in there, a puzzle? We’re going to be late!”
“Touya just texted!” Natsuo calls back.
Enji looks up sharply from his phone.
“He said it’s three in the morning over there, but to wish Mom good luck with her ‘weird hobby thing’.”
That’s—
Enji can work with it.
Hopefully.
“It’s not weird,” Fuyumi says.
Enji moves silently across the bedroom and opens the door a crack—just wide enough to hear it when Natsuo snorts in response.
“It’s kind of weird,” he says.
Fuyumi has her hands on her hips. She’s wearing a pretty pale blue dress and a white sweater.
“It’s nice!” she says. “Unlike you.”
Natsuo emerges from his bedroom struggling to knot a white tie that stands out sharply against his dark teal shirt. The overall scheme explains the blue of Enji’s ostentatious cufflinks—but not who orchestrated all of this, given that he himself finds the prospect of matching their outfits utterly intolerable.
“I’m going, aren’t I?” Natsuo is saying. “Anyway, he said the training is totally going to help him beat Hawks.”
That has to mean that Touya is—
A hero, at the very least. A pro, by the sound of it.
And Hawks is here. Around. Himself.
“He says every training is totally going to help him beat Hawks,” Fuyumi says, smacking Natsuo’s hands away and deftly navigating the knot of the tie for him. “He says Dad paying for dinner is going to help him beat Hawks. He says new sneakers are going to help him beat Hawks. Nobody beats Hawks.”
“Fangirl,” Natsuo says, contemptuously. “Maybe he’s right this time.”
Enji draws the door shut soundlessly so that he can open it again, much louder, jingling the change in his pocket for good measure. It’s idiotic to carry coins, but at least they’re useful just this once.
Fuyumi and Natsuo both look up and over at him.
They both smile.
Ah.
Yes.
Something is very fucking wrong.
“You look slick, Dad,” Natsuo says, without a trace of irony. Enji feels significantly dizzier all at once. Fuyumi finishes the tie and pats it down, and Natsuo’s attention slides easily back to her. “Thanks. Where is it this time?”
Fuyumi shoots Enji a long-suffering look that he doesn’t have the slightest idea how to respond to. “You’re not driving anyway. You drive like a maniac.”
Enji feels completely off-balance—flat-footed.
This is not even remotely a world he recognizes.
And the simplest explanation—for Rei being out somewhere and waiting for them, for Touya being overseas somewhere and possibly a pro, for the calmness of this house and the casual banter—
Is that he didn’t do most of the things that made him who he is.
He didn’t hurt them. Didn’t sacrifice them. Didn’t shove them away and grind them down and turn their childhoods into penitentiary sentences they were all too eager to escape.
Enji’s voice asks a question he can’t fathom the answer to, in a warped reality like this:
“Is Shouto going to meet us there?”
They both blink at him.
Fuyumi smiles first, innocently.
“Who?” she says.