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The apartment is small.
Touya has lived in worse. Has slept in places that made this look like a palace. So technically, it’s fine. The apartment is, by any reasonable metric, good.
It’s still fucking small.
One bedroom, and a kitchen that’s more of a hallway. A bathroom where the shower pressure is either scalding or nonexistent. No middle ground, which Touya has clocked as a metaphor for something and chosen not to examine. The living room has a window that faces a brick wall and a couch that sags on the left side because Keigo sleeps on it approximately forty percent of nights, passing out mid-sentence with the remote still in his hand and his wings half-folded.
Hawks’ apartment. Keigo’s apartment. Touya still calls it both things in his head, hasn’t settled on which is real.
He’s thinking about this, not on purpose, just in the aimless way his brain does things now, while he washes the dishes.
Because someone has to wash the dishes. Keigo doesn’t, or won’t, or actively forgets that dishes exist as a category of object requiring maintenance. He leaves mugs in places. On top of the refrigerator. On the bathroom counter. Once, memorably, on the windowsill three floors up balanced on the ledge, an offering to whatever god looks after stupid bird-themed heroes.
Touya had gotten that one down with a broom handle and said nothing.
The arrangement - and that’s what everyone calls it, in a careful bureaucratic language - is simple on paper.
Todoroki Touya. Dabi. Villain. War criminal. Dead, technically, according to three separate official records, and the discrepancy between that and his continued existence is everyone’s problem. The commission’s problem. His family’s problem. The public’s problem.
Keigo’s problem, most immediately, because Keigo is the one who went to bat. Who called in every favor he had left, and there were fewer than before, the commission’s trust in him running at a deficit - and argued, in rooms Touya wasn’t in, that the correct outcome here was not execution or permanent containment but something more complicated.
Touya doesn’t know exactly what was said, but he knows it cost something.
He’s here, so. That’s the result.
Living in Hawks’ shitty apartment, washing dishes that aren’t his, sleeping in a bed that smells the specific expensive conditioner Keigo uses on his wings, which Touya had noticed on day three and not said anything about then either.
He’s gotten good at not saying things.
Keigo comes home at six on a Tuesday smelling like smoke.
Touya registers this from the couch. He’s been reading - or staring at a book, which is close enough - and he looks up when the door opens.
“Long day,” Keigo says.
“I live here.”
“I - Touya. I know you live here. I’m making conversation.”
He drops his jacket on the hook and doesn’t hang it, just kinda drapes it in the general vicinity, which Touya will straighten in approximately an hour without meaning to.
His wings settle. There are singed edges on two of the primary feathers on the left side, the red slightly darkened, and Touya tracks this too without wanting to.
“Who,” Touya says.
Keigo heads for the kitchen, opens the refrigerator with the habitual optimism of a man who keeps hoping it’ll have filled itself. It hasn’t. “Someone with bad fucking aim.”
“You okay.”
“Mm.” Which means yes. It also sometimes means I don’t want to talk about it, and Touya has learned to tell the difference by the quality of the mm and the way Keigo’s shoulders sit after he makes it. Right now the shoulders are fine, they just look tired.
Touya looks back at his book and reads the same sentence four times. “There’s food,” he says. “Left side of the fridge.”
The refrigerator door opens again.
“You cooked.”
“I was fucking bored.”
“You cooked.” Keigo says it differently the second time. Not surprised, exactly - Touya has done this before, the specific boredom of a man with no sanctioned activities and too many hours leading him to the kitchen - but there’s something warm in his voice. “Well? What is it?”
“Rice. The chicken thing.” He turns a page he hasn’t even read. “The one you said was good last time. Fucking cannibal.”
Another pause. Longer.
“Touya.”
“It’s just food, Birdbrain.”
“I know it’s just food.” He can hear the smile without looking, can hear it in the shape of the words. “I’m just saying. Thanks.”
Touya’s jaw does something. It tightens and then releases. He stares at the book. “Whatever.”
He hears Keigo moving around the kitchen. The microwave. A drawer. The creak of the third cabinet from the left that Touya has stopped mentioning because Keigo is never going to fix it and at this point it’s just furniture.
Keigo comes out and drops onto the couch beside him. He always sits too close, with the easy physical confidence of someone who’s never had a reason to maintain distance. His wing brushes Touya’s shoulder and Touya keeps his eyes on the book.
“Bad day?” Keigo asks, mouth full.
“I don’t have days. I have hours. They happen in sequence.” He turns another page. “Not the same thing.”
Keigo considers this with the particular quality he brings to Touya’s more oblique statements. He’s always done this. It had been unsettling at first, the not-pressing. Every interaction Touya had understood before was pressure or absence.
Keigo just. Doesn’t push.
Infuriating, Touya’s brain notes. Completely infuriating.
“The Ketsubutsu debrief’s tomorrow,” Keigo says. A smooth change of subject. “Might run late.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t wait up.”
Touya opens his mouth. Closes it, and turns a page. “The creak in that cabinet is getting worse,” he says.
Keigo’s smile is audible again. “I’ll look at it this weekend.”
He won’t, but they both pretend.
The thing about Touya is that he’s been on fire for so long he’s forgotten what it feels like not to burn.
Not literally. Literally, the fire is managed now - suppressants and regular check-ins with a medical quirk specialist who has the particular professional blankness of someone paid specifically not to react to Touya’s file.
The physical burn is contained. Yep, that’s handled.
The other kind is different. He’d spent years running hot in ways that had nothing to do with his quirk. He’d thought - not consciously, but somewhere in the background hum of his plans - that the end would be the end. His end.
It wasn’t.
He’s still here. In Keigo’s small apartment. Washing Keigo’s dishes and reading Keigo’s books and waking up at three A.M. to the sound of wings against the window when Keigo comes in from a late patrol.
Getting comfortable, he thinks, and the thought has an edge to it. Warning or accusation, he’s not sure.
Getting comfortable is how you end up wanting things.
Wanting things is how you end up losing them.
October. First cold snap.
The apartment’s heating is, predictably, a disaster. The radiator does its best, producing heat unevenly and loudly.
Touya runs hot. Touya has always run hot. He doesn’t really notice the cold the way other people do, which should make this irrelevant.
It’s not irrelevant because Keigo runs cold. This is a thing Touya learned at approximately the same time he learned about the wing conditioner - passively, through Keigo pulling two blankets onto the sagging couch in September and complaining about the draft from the window.
Touya gets a draft stopper for the window. He says it was there when they moved in. It wasn’t, but Keigo either believes him or decides to.
October happens and the radiator starts its clanking and Keigo sleeps on the couch wrapped in both blankets and still shivers slightly, an involuntary thing that Touya clocks one morning when he’s up before Keigo for once.
He stands in the kitchen doorway looking at this. Keigo asleep, hair mussed, wings folded down, two blankets and still not quite enough. Somehow.
Don’t, he tells himself.
He does it anyway. Gets an extra blanket from the bedroom closet and puts it over Keigo without waking him.
Then he makes coffee and pretends it didn’t happen.
Keigo wakes up twenty minutes later and finds him at the kitchen table and says, “You’re up early,” and doesn’t mention the blanket.
Touya says, “Couldn’t sleep,” and doesn’t mention it either.
They drink coffee in the November-adjacent cold and that’s the whole thing. That’s all it is.
Sure, Touya thinks. Sure it is.
There’s a specific quality to Keigo that Touya has been cataloging without meaning to, the way people catalog things that keep drawing their attention regardless of whether they invited them to.
He’s - loud, in the way birds are loud. He takes up space. His wingspan alone demands acknowledgment in a room, the feathers present and red and unmissable, and Keigo has spent enough years weaponizing his visibility that he’s forgotten how to be small. He’s always the thing your eye goes to.
Touya’s eye goes to him constantly.
This is, he tells himself, because they live in a small space. Limited visual real estate. Of course your attention goes to the most present thing.
Sure, the back of his brain says, in the same flat tone as before.
The other thing is that Keigo laughs. Not performatively - he’s done that too, the public Hawks laugh, but actually, and it sounds different. Surprised out of him, sometimes. At things Touya says, mostly, which is baffling because Touya is not trying to be funny. He’s just talking. In the way he talks. And Keigo laughs.
It does something to Touya’s chest that he’s categorizing as indigestion.
“You were a hero,” Touya says.
It’s late, after midnight. Keigo is sprawled on the couch, his default state after ten P.M., and Touya is in the armchair across from him because the armchair is good and he’s claimed it and no this is not up for discussion.
“I’m still a hero,” Keigo says.
“But you’re on provisional status.”
“That’s still a status…” He has his arm over his eyes. “Alright, what’s your point.”
Touya doesn’t have a point. He’s thinking out loud, which he doesn’t do often. “You chose it yourself. Nobody made you.”
“My whole life was constructed to make me,” Keigo says abruptly. “But sure. I chose it.” He shifts his arm just enough to look at Touya. “You thinking about your dad?”
“ ’M always thinkin’ about my dad.”
“Yeah.” He puts his arm back. “I know.”
This is the thing about Keigo and the war and everything that came before it, he knows. He was in the middle of it. They’re the same kind of guilty, different crimes, same texture.
“Do you regret it,” Touya asks.
“Which part.”
“All of it.”
Keigo is quiet for a moment. Long enough that the radiator clanks twice and settles. “I regret the people who got hurt,” he says. “I don’t regret being there.” A pause. “Guess I regret that those things came attached.”
Touya looks at the ceiling. “Yeah.”
“You?”
“Every second.” He says it without drama. Every second somewhere in the background, the regret running like a process he can’t close. “Doesn’t change anything.”
“No,” Keigo says. “Doesn’t.”
They sit with that. The apartment makes its sounds. Outside, the city is still doing its city things, indifferent.
“Why’d you do it,” Touya says. “The arrangement with me.”
“Because you were going to die,” Keigo says. “Otherwise.”
“That was maybe fine.”
“It wasn’t fine.” A fact he’s apparently settled on. “It wasn’t fine, Touya.”
Touya’s chest does the indigestion thing. He doesn’t say anything. He’s gotten so good at not saying things that the silence is practically a language now, and Keigo’s gotten fluent in it.
“Go to sleep,” Keigo says.
“You go to sleep.”
“I’m already horizontal.”
Touya huffs. “Fine. Stay there.” He gets up. Takes the good blanket from the back of the armchair (he’d started keeping it there around week three, for no reason, it’s just where it lives now) and drops it on Keigo without ceremony.
Keigo catches it. Pulls it up. “Thanks.”
“Whatever.”
He goes to bed and lies in the dark. The sheets smell like Keigo.
Touya stares at the ceiling for forty-five minutes.
Indigestion, he thinks.
Sure.
November. Touya has a check-in with the specialist, which is mandatory, and with his case liaison, which is also mandatory, and with a therapist that the commission has assigned him and who is either very good or very good at pretending to be, he hasn’t figured out yet.
The therapist asks how he’s adjusting.
“Fine,” Touya says.
“Can you be more specific?”
He thinks. “Fine,” he says again.
She writes something. He’s decided she’s writing subject continues to be spectacularly unhelpful in very professional language. “How’s the living situation?”
“Fine.”
“And your relationship with Hawks - ”
“Keigo.”
The therapist looks at him. It’s a careful look. “And your relationship with Keigo?”
Touya looks at the window. This office has a window that faces actual sky, not a brick wall, which makes it objectively better than the apartment. “We have a functional arrangement.”
“Do you feel - ”
“We have a functional arrangement,” Touya says. “I help with the apartment. He facilitates my continued existence and non-incarceration. So. It works.”
She writes something longer this time. He watches her hand move.
“That sounds,” she says, “like a transaction.”
“It is a transaction.”
“Is it only that?”
Touya shrugs. She lets the silence run, and he looks at the sky out the window and thinks about what only that means and what it would mean if it weren’t.
“We’re done,” he says. “I need air.”
She closes her notebook. “Same time next week.”
He leaves. Stands on the street outside with his hands in his pockets and the November air cold enough to register even on him.
Traffic goes by. People go by. Detached, he watches them.
His phone buzzes.
Birdie: done early. want food?
Touya looks at the message.
He types back: yes.
Puts his phone away. Walks toward wherever Keigo is.
Functional arrangement, he thinks.
Sure.
The first time Keigo kisses him it’s an accident.
Or. Not an accident. Keigo doesn’t do accidents, at least not in the way of someone careless, because he’s the most precisely intentional person Touya has ever met. So it’s not an accident.
It’s also not announced. They’re in the kitchen, Touya making the coffee because Keigo makes bad coffee in the same way that his apartment has bad heating and his couch sags on the left, everything slightly insufficient in ways that have accumulated into being familiar - and Keigo comes in from the back room still pulling on his shirt and says something about the debrief timing, and Touya turns around to answer and Keigo is right there.
Too close. Same as always, no concept of distance -
And he kisses him. Brief, and light, the corner of Touya’s mouth, almost cheek, almost mouth, right at the edge. The way you’d kiss someone you’ve been kissing for years.
Then he leans past Touya to get a mug and says, “The debrief’s been pushed to three,” like that just happened and is fine, and Touya stands there holding the coffee carafe like an idiot.
What, his brain says. The word sits there blankly.
“You gonna pour that,” Keigo asks.
Touya pours the coffee. His hand is steady. He’s proud of this. He’s also going to think about the corner of his mouth for the next six hours.
“Three,” he says.
“Yeah. So I’ve got time.” Keigo takes his mug and goes back to the other room like absolutely nothing has occurred. “I was thinking we could get out. Walk somewhere.”
“You want to walk.”
“You don’t? You’ve been in this apartment for four days.”
Touya counts. He has been in the apartment for four days. The days had felt full, somehow. He’d cooked and cleaned and read and watched something on Keigo’s laptop and done the dishes and straightened the jacket on the hook and replaced the coffee when it ran out.
Four days had just - gone.
“Okay,” he says.
They go for a walk. The city in November is grey and cold and loud, which is fine, Touya has no feelings about November specifically. Keigo walks beside him, and people notice. Some of them recognize him. He ignores this with practiced ease, a man who is off-duty and will continue being off-duty regardless of whether anyone else agrees.
He buys Touya coffee from a cart and doesn’t ask what kind, just hands him the cup. Black, correct temperature, which is a thing he knows because he’s watched Touya make it enough times.
Functional arrangement, Touya thinks. The words feel less accurate than they did this morning. He’s not sure what to replace them with.
He drinks the coffee. His mouth still feels like the corner of it.
He doesn’t say anything about it.
Neither does Keigo.
“What are you doing,” Touya says.
He means generally. Specifically he means it’s midnight and Keigo is on the kitchen floor surrounded by the contents of a cabinet he’s apparently decided to reorganize, and this has no obvious cause.
“Cabinet,” Keigo says.
“The one you were going to look at.”
Touya leans against the doorframe. Looks at the chaos, which includes two mismatched mugs, a flashlight with dead batteries, three takeout menus for places that have definitely closed, and a box of something labeled EMERGENCY SUPPLIES that contains, as far as Touya can see, exactly one protein bar and a broken compass.
“This is what you’ve been putting off for two fuckin’ months,” Touya says.
“A month,” Keigo corrects proudly.
“It’s been - ” Touya doesn’t actually know how long it’s been. The days go. “It’s been a while.”
“I’m fixing it now.” Keigo picks up the emergency compass and examines it. “Why do I have this.”
“I dunno why you have any of this shit.” Touya slides down the doorframe until he’s sitting on the floor, back against the wood. “Throw it all out.”
“The compass might work.”
“It’s broken.”
“The needle still moves.”
Frustrated, Touya snaps, “In circles.”
“So it works, it’s just not accurate.” Keigo sets it aside in the keep pile, a decision Touya is not going to fight tonight. “The menus are probably outdated.”
“Three of those places are closed.”
“How do you know that.”
“I walked past them.” Touya reaches over and takes the menus, stacks them, sets them in the trash pile. “You should get out more.”
Keigo looks at him. The look has a quality to it that Touya has started categorizing. This one is the are you aware of what you just said look, patient and fond.
“Bold,” Keigo chuckles.
“I walk.”
Touya picks up the flashlight. Shakes it. Nothing. “Dead.”
“We need batteries.”
“We need batteries,” Touya agrees, setting it in the trash pile.
Keigo watches him do this. Then he starts sorting too, the two of them going through the cabinet contents on the kitchen floor. Keigo keeps the compass. Touya throws away the protein bar because it expired a longass time ago and some standards must be maintained.
“The creak’s worse,” Touya says, when the cabinet is mostly empty.
“I’ll fix it tomorrow.”
“And you keep saying that.”
“And one day I’ll be right.” Keigo is looking at the inside of the cabinet with an evaluating expression. He has plans for cabinet organization, he’s just been waiting for midnight. Apparently. “If you screwed the hinge it’d stop.”
Touya looks at him. Keigo looks back. There’s something in the exchange that’s - he doesn’t name it. An acknowledged thing between them, in the shape of you’ve already thought about this, haven’t you, you’ve already figured out what the problem is and how to fix it -
Which is true, yeah. Touya looked at the hinge three weeks ago and thought half turn on the screw and then didn’t do it because it wasn’t his cabinet.
Except it sort of is his cabinet. At this point.
“I’ll fix it tomorrow,” Touya says.
Keigo’s mouth does the almost-smile, one that’s more in his eyes than anywhere else. “Aw, look at us. Planning.”
“Don’t make it weird.”
“Hey, I’m not making anything. I’m just noting that we’re planning. As people who live together.”
“As people with a functional - ”
“Arrangement, yeah.” Keigo says it lightly. “Touya.”
“What.”
He doesn’t say what. He just looks at him, the midnight light making shadows across his face, and Touya is sitting on the floor of a kitchen that’s started to feel like his and his chest is doing the indigestion thing again, worse than usual.
“Nothing,” Keigo says. “Help me put this back.”
They put the cabinet back. Minus the menus and the protein bar and the dead flashlight and, after a brief internal argument with himself, the compass, which Touya puts in the trash when Keigo’s not looking. The hinge creak happens once more when Keigo closes the door.
Tomorrow, Touya will fix it.
He fixes it on a Tuesday. Twenty minutes, right tool, half turn. The cabinet closes silently.
He stands there for a second after. Closes and opens it twice more. It’s quiet both times.
Then he goes back to the couch and picks up his book and doesn’t mention it.
Keigo comes home at seven and opens the cabinet for a mug and stops. Opens it again and looks at Touya.
Touya is reading.
Keigo makes his coffee. Sits on the couch. His knee presses against Touya’s thigh, the no-concept-of-distance thing. He picks up his phone with one hand and the wing on the side closest to Touya half-opens, half-extends, feathers spreading into the available space, warm against Touya’s arm.
Touya reads. Keigo scrolls.
Domestic, says a tiny voice. Very domestic.
Yeah, Touya thinks. I know.
December.
Keigo comes home one night with singed feathers and a split lip and says, preemptively, “It looks worse than it is.”
Touya looks at the split lip. “It looks fine.”
“See, so - ”
“It looks fine because you look like you always look. It’s probably bad.” He gets up and retrieves the first aid kit from the bathroom, which Touya reorganized in November and which now actually has things in it, useful things, rather than the shit that he’d found when he first arrived.
“Sit.”
“I can - ”
“Birdie.” He sets the kit on the coffee table. Sits across from him. “Sit.”
Keigo sits. He’s tired in the aftermath of sustained attention finally releasing, the body understanding it can stop now. He has it often. Touya recognizes it because he had it too.
He cleans Keigo’s lip. Careful, with the antiseptic wipe. Keigo is very still, watching Touya’s face. Touya keeps his eyes on the work.
“You don’t have to,” Keigo says.
“Yeah.” He assesses the split. Not deep enough for anything beyond what he’s doing. “You should be more careful.”
“That’s rich.”
“I’m retired.”
Keigo makes a sound that is not quite a laugh. “You’re twenty-four.”
“I’m retired.”
“Okay.” He’s quiet for a second. “Yeah, maybe you are.”
Another pause, while Touya finishes and caps the antiseptic. “What does that make you.”
Touya sits back. Looks at him. The split lip, the tired eyes, the feathers with the singed edges that happen every few weeks because Keigo throws himself into things, always has, will probably always do. “Dunno,” he says.
Keigo looks back. “Me neither,” he says. “About me. About - ” He makes a gesture. At the apartment, at the space between them. “All of it.”
Not a transaction, the therapist’s voice says, in the back of Touya’s head.
He tells it to shut up. It doesn’t.
“Your lip’s fine,” he says.
Touya picks up the kit, puts it back in the bathroom. Stands in the bathroom for a moment with his hands on the sink, looking at himself in the mirror, a thing he’s still not entirely comfortable with, the specific face that’s his and also the face of a dead person and also just. A face.
Keigo says he has a face, when Touya has said anything near this territory. You have a face, Touya, people have faces, yours is fine. I think it’s pretty.
Yours is fine. I think it’s pretty. Said with the same flat certainty as everything else Keigo says when he means it.
He goes back out. Keigo has settled against the couch, wings spreading into the armrest. His eyes are half-closed. He’s going to pass out in seven minutes, Touya has clocked the pattern.
Touya gets the blanket from the armchair. Puts it over him and gets another for himself and sits in the armchair and opens his book.
In five minutes, Keigo is asleep.
In seven, his breathing has gone slow and even and his wing has relaxed entirely, one feather brushing the edge of the coffee table, red in the lamp light.
Touya looks at him for too long.
What does that make you, Keigo had asked.
Something, Touya thinks.
The second time Keigo kisses him it’s not an accident.
It’s also not an accident the first time - yes, Touya has had weeks now and he knows this - but this time there’s no pretending otherwise. This time Touya is in the kitchen and Keigo comes in and doesn’t reach past him for a mug.
Just stops right there and waits.
Touya turns around.
Keigo is looking at him with the expression that’s been sitting underneath all his other expressions for months, the one Touya has been cataloging and not naming and the not-naming is suddenly, obviously, completely over because it’s right there, in Keigo’s gold eyes in the kitchen light, patient and certain and a little like took you long enough.
“Keigo,” Touya says.
“Yeah,” Keigo says.
The kiss this time is not a corner. Keigo’s hand comes up to Touya’s jaw and he kisses him properly, and Touya’s hands find the front of Keigo’s shirt because they apparently decided to do that without consulting him.
He smells like Keigo and his own specific warmth and the conditioner, always the stupid fucking conditioner, and Touya has his hands fisted in the fabric of his shirt and is kissing him back in the kitchen at - he has no idea what time it is, it’s irrelevant, he doesn’t care.
When they stop - Keigo pulls back slightly, checks, the gold eyes close and then open - Touya is still holding his shirt.
“Hi,” Keigo says, a little dazedly.
“Don’t you dare,” Touya says.
“Don’t what.”
“Don’t be fuckin’ smug.”
Keigo’s mouth does the thing. The almost-smile becoming an actual smile, quick and bright and real. “I’m not being smug.”
“You’re about to be.”
“I’m just - ”
“You’re calculating how long it took, I fuckin’ know you are.”
Keigo looks at him for a second. Then. “Eleven weeks.”
“That’s…” Touya lets go of his shirt. Steps back. His chest is doing the non-indigestion thing, the thing he’s going to have to find a new word for now. “That’s exact.”
“I know.” Not smug, just Takami Keigo. Precise, and present, looking at Touya the way he looks at problems he’s already solved but is waiting to see the other person work through. “You needed time.”
He reaches past Touya and takes the coffee off the burner, saving it. “Drink that before it’s terrible.”
Touya picks up the coffee. His hands are steady. He’s still proud of this. He takes a sip and it’s already slightly terrible but manageable.
They stand in the kitchen. Keigo with his hip against the counter. Touya with his back against the other counter. The space between them is the same space as always, small, the kitchen providing no room for significant distances.
“So,” Keigo says.
“I wish you wouldn’t make this into a discussion,” Touya says.
“You know, it should probably be a discussion.”
“It should be - ” He stops and drinks more coffee. “It should be what it is.”
“Which is?”
Touya looks at him. At the split lip, mostly healed. The singed feathers, the gold eyes.
“Something,” Touya says. The same word he’d used in his own head, weeks ago.
Keigo nods slowly, like he’ll take it and build from there. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
“So we’re doing this.”
“Don’t say this.”
“Well, then, what should I say?”
Touya drinks his coffee. Looks at the cabinet, which doesn’t creak. At the blanket folded over the arm of the couch. At the plant in the window, Keigo’s plant, dying when Touya arrived, watered now with the same irregular attention he gives everything, still alive. It feels like evidence of something.
“I’m staying,” Touya says. He doesn’t mean tonight. The word is larger than tonight.
Keigo hears the larger thing, because he always hears it. “Yeah,” he says. “I know.”
“That’s - the thing I’m saying. That I’m staying.”
“I know, Touya. I heard you.”
“Okay.” He puts his mug down. “Okay.”
Keigo’s wing extends slightly, brushing his shoulder, the geometry of a large person in a small space, the same as always.
Not accidental, Touya thinks. None of it.
He stands in the kitchen of the shitty apartment and lets the wing-weight settle on his shoulder and thinks about eleven weeks and cabinet hinges and a blanket on a cold morning and coffee from a cart, and the word he keeps almost arriving at is -
Not love. He can’t, because the word is too large and has too many things it used to mean before it meant anything good.
But there’s something that wants to be that.
Something that has been building without blueprints since he walked through a door he wasn’t supposed to walk through into a life he wasn’t supposed to have, and found it, somehow, fitted for him. Wrong in all the ways that are actually fine. Adequate heating he doesn’t need. A sagging couch that isn’t his. A creak he fixed.
A person who waited eleven weeks without asking for anything.
“The coffee’s bad,” Touya sighs.
Keigo takes his mug and fucking drinks it anyway.
“We’ll make more.”
We. Same as always. Sitting in the sentence.
Touya looks at him. At the easy certainty of him, the way Keigo occupies the present tense without apology. The wing still at his shoulder. The smile, just for him.
“Yeah,” Touya says.
They make more coffee.
The apartment is small.
Touya has lived in worse.
He won’t, he thinks. Not anymore. He won’t live in worse because he isn’t going anywhere, and neither is Keigo.
A life, he thinks, with the particular shock of someone realizing they’re in the middle of one.
Oh. So this is what it feels like.
That night Keigo falls asleep on the couch as usual and Touya puts the blanket over him as usual but this time, he lies down with his back to Keigo’s broad, warm chest. Not as usual.
He’ll say it eventually. There’s time now. That’s the new thing - there’s time. He’d spent so long without it and now there’s just - more of it, stretching out, ordinary and daily and full of small fixable problems.
He’ll say it when it’s ready.
For now, he sleeps.