Chapter 2: Feathers Talk
"Ten true things," said Hawks, and held up both hands, fingers spread, a stick of yakitori wedged between two of them. "That's the deal. You get ten. Any more and I start charging."
The yatai was one of the old ones along the river in Nakasu, a wooden cart with a red lantern and a canvas awning and six stools crammed under it, steam rolling off the grill. The owner had greeted him by name and not looked twice at the wings. Hawks had ordered for both of you without asking, and you had let him, mostly to see what he'd pick. Chicken skin. Chicken hearts. Tsukune. A plate of chicken wings, which he set in front of you with a perfectly straight face.
"You're a menace," you said.
"That's not a question. Doesn't count." He bit a piece of tsukune off the stick. "Go."
You'd spent all day deciding what to ask him. You'd spent all night lying awake with his voice in your head, low and serious. Tell Dabi Thursday. You had not reported it. You had sat with your phone in your hand for an hour, Mori's number on the screen, and not pressed call, and you still did not know why.
"Favorite food," you said. "To warm up."
"Chicken."
"You're a bird."
"I'm a guy with wings. Totally different. Ask a better one."
"Where do you sleep?"
He blinked at that. "Huh. Okay. Somewhere with a window that opens. I can't sleep in a room I can't get out of fast." A shrug, light, practiced. "Hero thing."
"Is it?"
"Is that question three?"
"Yes."
He looked at the grill for a moment. "No," he said. "It's not a hero thing."
You let that sit. You asked about his feathers, how many he could control at once (more than he could count, fewer than he wanted), what it felt like when they burned (like losing a fingernail, over and over). You asked if he liked being No. 2. He said, "I like being fast," which wasn't an answer, and then, after a beat, "I like that people stop being scared when they see me. That part's real." You asked if he had ever been on an actual date. He laughed and said this was technically question eight, and then he looked down at his hands and said, "No. Not really. Not one where I wasn't working."
"Are you working now?"
"Question nine." His eyes slid to you behind the yellow lenses. "Are you?"
You put down your chopsticks.
"Ten," you said. "Who's Dabi?"
The whole yatai went quiet. Not literally. The owner kept turning skewers, the river kept running, a group of salarymen at the far stool kept laughing over their beer. But Hawks went still in a way you had not seen him go still before, not even on the factory roof, a total, predatory stillness like a raptor on a wire. Every feather on his wings flattened.
"Not here," he said softly.
He put a stack of notes on the counter, far too many, and stood, and held out his hand. Not to pick you up, this time. Just held it out.
You took it.
He flew you to a rooftop above the river, a flat expanse of gravel and air vents with the whole lit spread of Nakasu below, red and gold and blue reflected in the black water. He set you down and stepped back and pulled the visor off and pushed it up into his hair, and without it his face looked softer and more tired at once, his gold eyes very bright.
"The feather," he said. "On your collar."
"Yes."
"I didn't put it there on purpose. I want you to know that. I wasn't trying to play you." He scrubbed his hand through his hair. "I read your file the day before you came. I knew what you could do. I should have checked. I always check. And then I picked you up and you grabbed my jacket and yelled at me about asking, and I forgot." He laughed, short and humorless. "I forgot. I don't forget things."
"Who is he to you?"
"I can't tell you that."
"You can't, or you won't?"
"Both. Neither." He turned away from you, wings half open, to look out over the river. "If I tell you, you're in it. And if you're in it, you're in danger, and not the fun kind with gas explosions. The kind that doesn't come back."
You walked up beside him. The wind tugged at your hair.
"I work for the National Police Agency's counterintelligence unit," you said. "Not the task force. There is no task force. I'm here to find out whether the No. 2 Hero is a traitor. My handler is a woman named Mori who doesn't blink. I planted a bug in your chair, and I've got another one in my bag right now, and I haven't reported what I heard on that feather to anyone. I don't know why. I've never not reported something in my life." You looked at him. "There. That's ten true things from me. Your turn."
He stared at you. For a long moment he didn't say anything at all.
"You didn't report it," he said.
"No."
"Why?"
"I don't know." It came out rawer than you meant. "Because I watched you carry a hundred people out of a burning building yesterday and look sick about the one wall you couldn't save. Because I don't think that's what a traitor looks like. Because I want to be right about you, and I don't know if I am."
Something moved in his face. It went across it fast, like a cloud over the sun, and then it was gone, and he was just looking at you with his mouth slightly open and his hands loose at his sides.
"I can't tell you who I work for," he said, very low. "But I can tell you something nobody else in this city knows."
"Okay."
"My name's Keigo." He swallowed. "Nobody calls me that. Nobody's called me that in a long, long time. I don't even know why I'm telling you."
You reached up and touched his face. The stubble was rough under your palm. His skin was warm from the grill smoke and the wind, and he leaned into your hand like something that had been waiting a long time to be touched.
"Keigo," you said.
His eyes closed.
"Can I kiss you?" he asked, without opening them. "I'm asking. See? I learned."
"Yes."
He kissed you like he flew, fast and sure and then suddenly slow, his hand sliding into your hair and tipping your head back, his mouth hot and tasting of tare and smoke. You fisted your hands in the fur of his collar and pulled him down, and he made a sound into your mouth, rough and surprised, and backed you up against an air vent with his whole body. His wings came up around you both, great arcs of crimson closing out the city, the lights, the wind. It was suddenly very warm. It was suddenly very quiet, apart from his breathing.
"My place is two roofs over," he said against your jaw. "It's got windows. Lots of them. Is that... do you want..."
"Yes. Take me there."
You don't remember the flight. You remember his mouth on your neck the whole way and your legs wrapped around his waist, and the sound of a glass door sliding open, and falling backward onto a wide, low bed in a room that was more windows than walls, with the city glittering all around and the night breeze coming in through every one of them.
He knelt over you with his wings spread wide behind him, blotting out half the sky, and pulled his shirt off over his head. He was lean and hard and scattered with old scars, a shiny burn across his ribs, a puckered mark on his shoulder. His chest was heaving. His gold eyes were blown nearly black.
"Tell me what you want," he said, roughly. "I'll do anything. Just tell me."
"I want to touch your wings."
He froze. Then he laughed, breathless, and his ears went red. "Okay. Yeah. Just, uh, be gentle. They're kind of sensitive."
"How sensitive?"
"Not that sensitive," he lied, and you reached up and ran your fingers slowly along the edge of the left one, against the grain of the feathers, from the shoulder out, and he shuddered from head to foot and swore out loud and nearly collapsed on top of you.
"Very sensitive," you said.
"Very," he gasped. "Okay. Very. Do that again."
You did it again. You sat up and stroked both wings from the root, where they joined his back in a warm, dense mass of down, out along the long flight feathers that trembled under your fingers, and he knelt there between your legs with his head bowed and his hands fisted in the sheets, making low, broken noises you felt in the pit of your stomach. Every feather you touched shivered. You could feel the vibration of them in your fingertips, a hum like a live wire, and you realized he could feel you through every single one.
"Your heart," he said hoarsely. "I can hear it. Through all of them. It's going so fast."
"So's yours."
"Yeah." He lifted his head. "Yeah, it is."
He got your clothes off with hands that were not steady at all. He kissed down your body like he was memorizing it, your throat, your breasts, the soft skin of your stomach, his stubble scraping and his mouth soothing the scrape. When he settled between your thighs he looked up at you, and asked, "This okay?" and when you said yes, he put his mouth on you, and you forgot your own name.
He was good at it. Of course he was. Fast and then slow, his tongue flat and then pointed, learning what made your hips jerk and doing it again and again. His feathers drifted down around you, dozens of them, brushing your arms, your ribs, the insides of your knees, so light you could barely feel them, and every one of them was him, touching you everywhere at once. You came with your hands buried in his hair and his name, his real name, breaking out of your mouth, and he groaned against you like it was the best thing he'd ever heard.
"Again," he said, crawling up your body. "With me. Please. If you want."
"I want." You reached down between you and found him hard and hot and leaking, and stroked him once, and watched his eyes roll back. "I want you inside me, Keigo. Now."
He pushed into you slowly, both of you watching, and the stretch of him made you gasp. He stopped, shaking, his forehead against yours, his wings flared rigid behind him.
"Okay?"
"Move," you said. "Please."
He moved. Long and deep at first, then faster when you dug your heels into his back, the bed creaking, the night air pouring in through the open windows across your sweat-damp skin. His wings beat once, involuntarily, and a gust swept through the room and scattered papers somewhere, and he laughed against your neck, helpless, and did it again. You reached up and grabbed the base of his wings where they met his spine, and he cried out and drove into you hard, and the second climax built in you so fast it was frightening, a tight bright spiral, until you broke around him with his mouth on yours. He followed you over seconds later, burying his face in your shoulder, his whole body shuddering, his wings closing down around you both like a red cocoon.
You lay tangled together in the dark for a long time afterward, his wing spread over you like a blanket, his fingers tracing lazy patterns on your bare back. He was quieter than you'd ever heard him. You thought he might be asleep.
"Thursday," he said into your hair. "Don't follow me. I mean it."
You didn't answer.
At six in the morning your phone buzzed on the floor where you'd left your jeans. You slid out from under his wing without waking him and picked it up.
A message from Mori.
Dabi sighted in Hakata. Expected at the docks Thursday night, pier seven. Tactical team moves at 23:00. If Hawks is there, he is to be taken into custody. You will be present. Confirm.