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The day after Takami Keigo turns twenty, which is just after he has debuted in the top ten hero charts, he finds a little bar called Enji's tucked into the end of an alleyway in Fukuoka. He is feeling rubbed raw after a long day of being the golden child and he just wants a damn drink. The problem with being the golden child, however, is that everyone and their grandmother really wants you to kiss babies and sign tee shirts and look pretty in selfies which cuts pretty severely into drinking time. Keigo likes doing all of those things, hell he's been trained extensively to do them, but give a guy a break.
He only spots Enji's because of the light shining from the wrong end of a dead-end alley. If it hadn't been raining, Keigo wouldn't have looked at all. The red light reflecting on the puddles, however, was- well. Like a neon sign, which happens to be exactly what it is.
The sign reads 'Enji's' in crimson katakana so straight Keigo thinks maybe he could cut a melon on the kerning. It has windows facing the street, which is odd, because aside from the people passing by out on the sidewalk there's also a couple of dumpsters and fire escapes which any patron has to traverse past in order to reach it. The area is a weird little architectural leftover from Fukuoka's industrial boom after the war, a spot everyone forgets with no street signage to even point a customer in that direction.
Still it shines, a beacon.
Enji's.
Keigo needs a drink. What are the chances he'll find a bar or a club where he's left alone long enough to order a drink, much less consume it?
He takes a turn and walks down the alleyway.
-
Enji's is a small place.
It's got a kind of western vibe with the shape of its six leather-upholstered booths and the long dark wood bartop but the booze has just as many sake and soju selections as it does whiskeys and vodkas. There are big industrial pillars, two of them, painted a dark blue that has deep scratches down to the original metal. There's a staircase in the back corner, a one stall bathroom that is frighteningly clean, and there's Enji.
At least Keigo presumes this is Enji; a titan of a man, broad and muscled and straight out of some of his earliest childhood fantasies. He's got short brown hair, eyes that are a bit too intensely blue, and a demeanor which suggests that he would rather eat lead in any form than actually serve anyone a drink. He could be in his late thirties, he could be in his early fifties. Enji defies dating in the same way particularly regal house cats do, daring you to question them about how many lives they might have left.
When Keigo sits down he looks up and says, "You're too fucking young to be in here."
This isn't the first time Keigo has had this discussion and he whips out his hero license with a theatrical flourish. "Your finest rum and coke, my good man, and I'll take it as a compliment," he says.
Enji looks over his license with an eye that seems practiced.
"...you're too young for this, too." he says.
Keigo frowns. Before he can say anything else, the man brusquely says, "Rum and coke," nods shortly, and assembles the drink.
-
Maybe it's just that he really needed it but it's the best damn rum and coke Keigo has ever had. He nurses it and listens to the silence with a kind of amazement. There are so few places in Fukuoka that are actually silent. He'd have to fly for two hours to get to anything like a farming village or similar, someplace where you can see the stars at night and they're all where they are supposed to be.
"How does it stay so quiet in here?" he asks.
"Good soundproofing."
"You're not much of a talker."
A grunt.
Enji's not much of a talker.
"Seems like a weird profession to get into, bartending, if you don't like to talk."
Another grunt.
"Or are you the strong, silent type? Bet you are. The ladies love that, good for you."
A roll of the eyes and a huff. Enji doesn't seem interested in his banter. That's really too bad for him- Keigo is great at banter and there's no one else in this bar to harass. Until he gets thrown out on his behind, the proprietor is what he's got. Only, wait.
"Hey. Quick question and you gotta answer this one, it's a hero rule."
"No it's not."
"Yes it is. Are you Enji?"
The man looks at him and Keigo feels...examined. Like he's been flayed and his inside thoughts and wants and dreams and fears are all being picked over by carrion birds. He doesn't like it. It doesn't last longer than a second before the man goes back to stacking glassware.
"Yes." he says the word like wild horses dragged it out of his chest.
"Well, Enji, nice to meet you. I'm Keigo."
"You handed me your ID. I know your name."
"Seems rude not to use it!"
Another grunt and then the small brass bell above the door chimes.
"Hey, Enji," someone calls, and Keigo goes happily back to his rum and coke.
-
He goes to Enji's again, and again. and again.
Mostly it's after a long day- and those are coming faster and harder now. The HSPC is up to its neck in issues and as their foremost man that means it's actually his neck on the line if things go south. It makes all of this glad-handing and pet saving and grocery carrying into busywork that Keigo can't afford. He keeps doing it. Mainly he does it to piss off the HSPC president who knows he has to keep looking good but also?
He does it for Fukuoka. For their idea of Hawks, their golden boy with his scarlet wings. He wants them to hold on to that lie, and maybe in their holding his deepest wish will become truth and Pinnochio will at last be a real boy.
Keigo gets to know some of the regulars at Enji's and there are a few. Mostly they work in the offices in mid-town. A few come from the factories in the southern corner. There's Daichi and Ruka, Keishiro and a fellow that the other patrons call 'Other Enji'.
He does get a few people who thank him for his service but most keep their peace and don't bother him. The resident barfly, Tsuneo, tells Keigo over his cheap sake one evening that it's because Enji's is a special place; it's where you come when you have nowhere else to go to quiet your head. Only right that everyone be given that courtesy, eh?
Keigo smiles and nods and finishes his Sex on the Beach with a loud and breathy moan and a 'compliments to the barman' that has Enji rolling his eyes. Keigo thinks maybe there's a ghost of a smile there. A hint. A touch.
-
The first time Keigo actually orders food at Enji's he's somewhere else.
It had been a team up operation with Miruko, the kinds of smugglers who used office basements to hide their dirty work. The fight had been long and hard and they'd lost one good officer to a stray bullet before Keigo could button it up tight. He's running on fumes and hadn't even intended to come to the bar; he'd wanted to walk right by, take the path that would put him on the main artery of the city so he could get the lift necessary to fly home to the balcony attached to the gigantic spartan penthouse apartment that the HSPC had shoved him in.
His stomach had other ideas.
He finds his ass on the stool that is quickly becoming his and a rum and coke is already in his hand. He looks up at Enji.
"...can you do yakitori?" he asks. Pleas, really.
The man rolls his eyes and heads into the back, nodding at Tomoyo. Tomoyo slides into his place at the bar, floating a half inch above the ground with her head at an unnatural angle as she pours drinks and cashes out customers. Yurei quirk, she'd explained to Hawks once; and no one wants to hire a barista who looks like she's about to crawl up a wall and tear their liver out.
Keigo takes small sips of his drink. He knows he shouldn't- his stomach is so very empty- but it feels rude not to, here in Enji's where the drink is the start of the long staircase back up to humanity.
A plate is put down in front of him.
It is piled high with gorgeous yakitori skewers, all doused in tare sauce.
"Eat fast or you'll disappear," Enji says, and goes back to mixing drinks.
Keigo does as he's told and the first piece has his wings twitching like they haven't since he was six and told that they were a dead emotional giveaway and if he couldn't learn to control them they would have to be controlled by other means. He doesn't quite moan, or assumes he doesn't since no one turns to look at him funny. He finishes the whole plate and by the time he's done the night doesn't seem quite so dark and the mountain of paperwork doesn't seem quite so unassailable.
He leaves with a spring in his step that gets him up to the fire escape, and from there he takes to the air and lets Fukuoka's breezes carry him home.
He eventually tries every yakitori place in Fukuoka.
None of them make it quite like Enji.
-
Takami Keigo worships a fallen hero.
Everyone knows that Flame Hero Endeavor was outed as a wife beater and a child abuser the year his firstborn son died in a quirk accident, roundabout when Keigo himself was eleven or twelve. The wife- Rei- took him for all he was worth and to the shock of the entire hero community the man didn't put up a fight. There's all sorts of theories as to why but Keigo doesn't share his.
The divorce proceedings started the week after their son's death.
Keigo's not a father but he figures no one would be up for much of a fight after that.
Years have brought hindsight to the whole situation and it's widely agreed that while Himura Rei had been well within her rights to have full custody and a divorce that honored their prenup agreement, she had gone a step too far in fighting for all of her husband's considerable assets- the agency he ran, the stocks he held, even the house he'd been born in. Yes, the court documents point out clear evidence of abuse- on the part of both parties. Keigo's read those documents. He knows about the frostbite scarring on Endeavor's lungs.
Some people called Rei a gold digger and worse when those bits went public but Keigo doesn't think any of that is true. He thinks she'd been scared and angry and hurt and wanted to inflict as much harm as she could while the iron was hot, in a metaphorical sense.
Maybe she'd expected Endeavor to go to bat, to prove to the world that all the court documents did was tell the truth. Maybe she'd been surprised when he hadn't.
Either way Himura Rei's crusade against her husband had done something else.
It had turned the tide of public opinion against a man who, at the time, was Japan's number two hero- second only to All Might.
So the HSPC had responded. They'd done as the public asked.
And just like that, Endeavor disappeared. Entirely. In a single night he was gone. It was as if he'd scrubbed himself out of existence.
The strange case of Endeavor comes up every few years in documentaries and articles and claims of sightings. It's been stirring lately, since the youngest Himura- Shouto- has begun to attend UA, his lost father's alma mater.
Takami Keigo worships a fallen hero but he does not blog about it. He doesn't examine the photographs or read the forums. He doesn't care what other people have to say about lost Endeavor, whose case closure success rate has not yet been matched even more than a decade on, and whose sudden departure led to a spike in crime in Musutafu that raises its ugly head like a hydra that only one man ever managed to fully kill.
He doesn't care what Rei is up to or how Shouto's performance in the sports festival was. Takami Keigo worships a fallen hero because before his fall he was Keigo's rise, and a light in the dark is just as bright in a battered casing as a shiny new one.
-
On Endeavor's birthday- August 8th- Keigo goes to Enji's.
"Can I get an Endeavor?" he asks.
Enji stares at him.
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
Keigo grins. "Bourbon double. No ice."
If Enji rolled his eyes any harder they might wind up flying out of his head but he gets Keigo his drink, and the Wing Hero worships the fallen like he has every year-hoping, wherever he is, that he's safe and warm and happy.
-
Things start to change with Enji right around the time shit gets serious with the League of Villains.
It starts the night Keigo stumbles in after a meeting with Dabi. He can still hear screaming and smell sizzling skin.
Fucking prick.
Enji's closed, he's certain, but the door opens under the force of his quirk-enhanced hands and he practically falls into the bar.
When he looks up there's a shotgun pointed at his head.
"Boy," Enji snarls, "what the fuck-"
Keigo pukes right there on the hardwood floor and passes out.
This is the first time he wakes up in the tiny apartment above Enji's bar.
It isn't the last.
-
One night Keigo gets a napkin with his rum and coke.
Enji has never given him a napkin before.
He tucks it in his pocket.
When he gets home, he finds there's a phone number on it.
Calling it gets him attached to a liquor supplier in Musutafu, who is more than happy to talk- 'because Red told me to'- about the weird little bar he's been supplying out in Kamino, which doesn't actually have a lot of alcohol in its orders because, get this, most of the patrons are a bunch of kids?
-
"So." he asks two weeks later, after formal introductions have finally been made and he's able to report success to the HSPC for once, "Who's Red?"
Enji slices limes.
"is Red, like, a bunch of people?"
He puts the limes in their jar.
"Like. Can I send them a thank you card?"
Enji puts the lime jar away.
"Boy," he says, "you are the worst spy on the planet."
-
Keigo is not intoxicated when he propositions Enji for real, but he kind of wishes he was when he gets crushed.
"I have children your age."
Children? Kids? Enji? Enji doesn't have kids. Enji lives above his bar. He was birthed there out of old cigarette butts and empty hennessy bottles. Enji is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. He has always been in the bar at the back of the dead end alley. He will always be in the bar at the back of the dead end alley.
Keigo smiles and hopes it looks corny enough to hide the hurt. "Hey, I just got turned down by this absolute fox. You got anything that can heal a broken heart?"
"No."
He still gets his rum and coke. Enji doesn't even make him pay for it.
-
Red's a damn handy man to have access to and Keigo's getting real sick of Enji being cagey about how to reach him. He's fairly sure that Red is a single person- possibly some kind of minor crime lord, watching the rise of the LoV with the same amount of concern as the HSPC. Keigo doesn't tell his handlers about the notes he sometimes gets on napkins at the bar. The enemy of my enemy is my friend and also is more likely to keep being my friend if I don't bring the supercops down on his head.
Does Enji launder money for Red? Is that how he stays open, despite being stuck in the ass end of the worst spot for a watering hole this side of Tokyo? Keigo thinks about it. It's likely- way more likely than drugs or other smuggled goods. Enji's isn't that big a place. So maybe Enji owes Red and passing information to the hero who is stuck to his bartop is the payment.
That would be more likely if any of the notes got Keigo into trouble but they don't. They're always useful- dates, times, names. He's getting a reputation amongst the other heroes as the guy who knows what's going to happen before it happens and while Keigo isn't sure he likes that he knows that it's good.
-
Enji's is a shadow.
No amount of digging will bring up a property deed, a lease, hell any piece of information. Keigo finds its original blueprints logged with the city planning office but that only tells him that he was right in his assumptions; there's no way that Enji's is being used to smuggle goods, there's no goddamn room. Who owns the building? Who pays the electric? It all loops into dummy accounts that loop right back into other dummy accounts and if Keigo wants to unravel this he's gonna need a computer guy.
Keigo does not have time to be worrying about computer guys. The LoV is planning something big, and he has to be there to find out what it is. Even if it means dealing with Dabi again.
So he sets it aside.
For now.
-
The problem with being a hero is that sometimes time just gets away from you.
First it's the kid getting kidnapped. Then it's the destruction of Kamino in a fight that isn't lost, but isn't won, either. Then it's 'oh by the way now that All Might is revealed to probably be on the edge of death's door Best Jeanist is number one so you're going to be number two, smile for the cameras, Hawks, you gorgeous golden god of a man'.
Which you wouldn't think is too bad but the whole time all Keigo can think, as he smiles and nods and hands the microphone to Jeanist, is how big these shoes are. Everyone knows Hakamata Tsunagu never fit in them. No one does.
No one at Enji's congratulates him for his promotion in the rankings. The place has all the taste and feel of a wake. When Keigo slumps into his chair, Enji slides him his rum and coke with a little too much force.
Keigo looks up and can see that he has been crying.
-
Please the league above all else.
That is what the HSPC wants.
They want information, they want an in, they want his feathers and his knives tucked at the backs of as many of these deadly idiots as he can so when the request is made that he lure Jeanist out to the Fukuoka, that the next nomu should be tested against someone with a reputation and skill, Keigo smiles and balances on his knife-thin wire and says yeah, sure, where do you want to drop the big fella?
It isn't supposed to be in the first ten minutes after Jeanist drops his damn bags off.
It isn't supposed to turn into a street brawl.
It isn't supposed to wind up in this alleyway, at this time.
It isn't supposed to be here on Enji's goddamn smoke break.
-
Keigo knows he doesn't have the strength to overpower a nomu, a nomu he let in, a nomu he knew was coming, a nomu who is ignoring Jeanist running down the street to them entirely for reasons fucking unknown and he doesn't have enough feathers for this.
It's clawing up over the dumpsters howling about strength and spitting black saliva. People are screaming. His people. His grannies with groceries, his babies to kiss on the forehead, his middle schoolers with signed notebooks and backpacks and shirts.
Keigo has pulled down two primaries and turned them into blades when he hears the chime of the brass bell behind him.
He doesn't have time to shout.
He lunges and the nomu jumps over him and-
CLANG.
the nomu falls back.
Enji steps into view, examining his cast iron frying pan, which he had just swung at a monster easily three times his size without so much as blinking. He runs a calloused thumb over the clear dent in its bottom and sneers in annoyance. A cigarette, unlit, dangles from his lips.
"Son of a bitch that's my best pan."
"Enji-!" Keigo starts because he can't, he can't lose Enji, the grannies and the babies and the children are bad enough but if he loses Enji he won't ever make it back into the sky.
The nomu roars again.
"...okay." Enji says. "If you insist."
He inhales, slow. Keigo watches with wide eyes as he huffs out a long stream of steam. Fire flickers at his temples. Fire- fire?
He raises one flaming thumb to his lips, lights the cigarette. The brown dye in his short hair begins to cook off, unable to take the intense heat of the flames that wreathe his face, his neck, his shoulders.
By the time Flame Hero Endeavor swings his now whitehot frying pan at the nomu's face again, there's not a speck of brown left in his red, red hair.
-
By the time they finally down the thing, it's in the middle of the shopping district and everyone and their mother has seen Best Jeanist and Hawks team up with a denim-clad apron-wearing Endeavor.
Then fucking Dabi shows up.
Fucking.
Dabi.
"What's up, pops?" he greets.
Keigo stares.
"I should have known this was one of your toys, you little shit," Endeavor says. "It's cheap and breaks easy."
"In your dreams, old man. How's your eye?"
Endeavor flares up again but it's a moot point; it had taken everything in him to get the nomu up above the city skyline, to finally burn the head that allowed it to regenerate. Jeanist too is looking bad, though his denim continues to python menacingly around his neck, making ouroboros rings in warning. Keigo still has one primary left and he grips it like a lifeline. Which it might be, depending on how this shakes out.
"Still running your mouth to save your skin?" Endeavor snarls.
"Oh, Daddy, you wound me. No really. You did."
A flash of blue fire.
"Keep the bird. We're all done with him. Enjoy my sloppy seconds, old man."
Keigo has enough presence of mind to shout, "WE NEVER EVEN FUCKED YOU ABSOLUTE-" before the heat becomes too much to bear and he just starts to cough.
-
The amount of sheer paperwork involved in explaining yourself to the HSPC for a job they put you up to in the first place is enough to make Keigo seriously consider getting on the first flight to Korea and never coming back.
Then there's explaining to Hakamata that yeah, yeah, that thing was definitely supposed to kick your ass, and boy isn't THAT a fun conversation.
Then there's a meeting with Toshinori Yagi AKA All Might AKA The Absolute Fuckwit that mostly ends with Enji yelling at him and since no one ever yells at All Might Keigo just sort of enjoys the novelty of it.
By the time all is said and done, Endeavor has his license provisionally reinstated because apparently he and All Might have been having this back and forth for ten goddamn years, and he'd always known who Keigo worked for and why and who he was underneath all the spit and polish because 'I never forget a face and your eyes are like your father's.'
Not something Keigo wants to hear, honestly.
The next bit's better, though.
The next bit is where Flame Hero Endeavor takes a flask out of the bag he'd packed before being stuffed onto the train to Musutafu with Hawks, gets two cokes from the vending machine in the HSPC lobby, and makes them both a drink.
-
"So you're Red."
"what gave it away?"
"....soooo. Does the carpet match the drapes?"
"In your dreams, boy."
-
"You gonna be able to kill him?"
"...Touya?"
"Yeah."
"Honestly? I don't know."
"Guess we're about to find out."
"Guess we are."
-
Musutafu in the days after the All For One war is a chaotic and beautiful and awful place. There are heroes to bury, heroes to put back together, and a whole lot of society to reassure after months of terror and confusion. Hawks wants to go home but he knows he can't, not yet. Fukuoka might have been largely spared after the High End fight but other places did not fare so well.
He's sitting on a bench on the UA campus when Enji sits beside him.
He hands him a bottle of rum.
"Couldn't find any coke."
Keigo laughs and laughs and then cries and Enji tucks the smaller man up against him. He smells like cinders and sweat.
"I want to go home," Keigo sobs. "Can we go home?"
We're going home," Endeavor promises him, and Endeavor does not break promises.
-
You have to be looking to find Enji's.
It's a little bar down an alleyway. You have to walk past two dumpsters and a bunch of fire escapes to get there. There's no waitlist, no check in, just a door with a little brass bell. The bell's dented, but it still works fine.
If you come on the right weekends you'll find a handful of UA students there, doing homework and having an unofficial work study. Come near the end of the day and you might find Wing Hero Hawks coming in off his beat, ready for his rum and coke.
If you ask- very politely- you might get the bartender to make you a flaming shot.
He'll judge you pretty hardcore for it, though.