Chapter Text
“I’m not hunting him down for you,” Touya snaps down the phone as he steps off the subway, winding through the cool corridor towards the station exit.
He’s bracing for the thick outdoor heat again, glaring at the off-white tiles of the station floor like they’re personally responsible for the impending change in temperature from ‘lukewarm interior’ to ‘immediate sweat puddles, victim to the summer sun, never to recover, etc, etc’.
Pedestrians filter past him in loose t-shirts and shorts. He should really have thought harder about the summer version of his hero costume. Why he thought he’d still need his coat, he has no idea.
“Oh, please,” Toga practically begs on the other end of the line. Her voice is fuzzy, softened by the static of bad phone signal. “He hasn’t replied to my texts in, like, a week. How do I know he’s still alive?”
“I think you’d probably know if one of the nation’s most popular Pro Heroes died, Toga,” he says. Somebody jostles him as he emerges from underground, blinking in the sunlight. “He’s probably just busy. Speaking of — aren’t you supposed to be working today? Why are you bothering me?”
“It’s boring,” Toga complains. Touya hears rustling on her end. “I’m just staking out this one coffee shop until the guy I need to kidnap comes by. I’ve been on this roof for hours and the weather’s so nice and Jin’s on vacation at the beach and I have nobody to talk to.”
Touya snorts. He’s given up his precious time to pick up Toga’s call and he doesn’t even get the credit for it. “What am I, then?”
“You,” Toga says, “are someone who’s going to come visit me on your way back to Hokkaido.” She says it like a threat. “I haven’t seen you in a year. How could you do this to me?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Touya says. He’ll figure out how to stop by the capital once he’s finished up in Fukuoka, but even he doesn’t know how long that’s going to be. Could be a week, could be a month. Could be a whole year, and that’ll sure give Toga something to complain about. “You settling in?”
“I suppose,” she sighs. “I wasn’t expecting the transfer, but I guess Tokyo isn’t bad. Everyone’s more attractive here than in Nagasaki.”
Not a comment about her actual work. Typical Toga, though; more fixated on the social life she’s accruing than the Pro Hero circuit she’s operating within.
Granted, she can’t give up much about her role; over time she’s only been taking on more elusive gigs, undercover missions that require about three NDAs just to see the mission brief. The elusion of it suits her, especially with her Quirk, but she’s definitely let things slip more than once that absolutely, definitely should not have been let slip.
Touya leans against a tree just outside the subway station, shielded from the sun by its sifting green leaves. “I’m so glad your burgeoning dating life can continue to flourish,” he says, heavy on the sarcasm.
“Thank you,” she says, like she genuinely means it. “And just lemme know if Takami’s alive, okay? You’re in the area, you might as well try and talk— shit—” There's the heavy clatter of movement on the other side of the line. “Gotta go.”
Touya lowers his phone as the dial tone starts to beep.
He stares at the screen, Toga’s contact photo staring back at him, a blurry picture taken in a bar three years ago during one of Touya’s rare visits. Her voice doesn’t change, even when they don’t speak for a while. He doesn’t notice her growing up, even though they go without seeing each for months on end.
Maybe because she’s the one who forces him into contact the most; his interactions with Bubaigawara, Shigaraki, and Iguchi in the past few years have been limited, because it’s practically impossible to get five Pro Heroes in one place for an evening, let alone Pros who live in all different parts of the country.
Touya hasn’t spoken to Takami at all, but perhaps he knows better than any of the others how Takami has grown with time. He just has to turn over to any news channel to get the latest on him.
He’s refused, time and time again, to let Toga pass on his number. He’s not going to sit back and let her play relationship with him and a man he hasn’t spoken to since graduation. He’s not going to let her poke at the trembling, delicate rift that’s one move away from either stitching back up or opening beyond repair. It’s a half and half kind of outcome. Touya’s view on the situation depends on that day’s level of optimism.
He has a single red feather tucked in a drawer in his living room. An unspoken agreement. He should have given up and sold it for millions already, but something stops him. The thought that one day, stupidly, he might need to return it.
Fukuoka swelters in the summertime. It’s a kind of sticky heat that has Touya melting into his hero costume, one that does no favours to the fire simmering under his skin.
He pushes off from the tree trunk he’s slouched against, setting off down the street, aimless.
He’s even less accustomed to hot weather now than he used to be. Hokkaido has moulded his cold resistance, braced him for harsh winters and mild summers. He’s so used to snow that this thick city heat is rending him apart.
Where his first impression of the city, late last night, was that of a ghost town, Fukuoka is much busier in the daylight, the streets heaving with people. Fukuoka Tower intersects the skyline, a permanent marker that stops Touya from getting horribly lost, caught up in the tight, twisting streets.
Touya doesn’t really do big cities. He never saw much of Musutafu, and Toyama was small despite its home to Shiketsu. He gets a taste for it from time to time, when he travels out to Sapporo, but he’s mostly contained to a city of a few hundred thousand.
He doesn’t really do big cities because, through his time as a hero, Touya’s really grown to despise the general population.
Touya’s still trying to work on his empathy, but he doesn’t know how many more snivelling, ungrateful, demanding civilian cases he can take before he snaps. He’s saved so many lives, and people are so fucking irritating about it.
Despite it all, despite the crush of the city, despite the unidentified anxiety buzzing under his skin, an ocean breeze drifts up from the nearby shoreline. It still catches Touya the same as it used to, that heady, salty smell worming its way into the deepest recesses of his brain. Something more than a memory. A formative, salt-spray imprint.
He debates just kicking back with an iced drink, spending the rest of the afternoon in the shade, when the one earpiece he’s got hooked up crackles into life, keyed one-way into the area’s local hero radio line.
It’s all been background noise so far, but what Touya hears now makes him falter in the middle of the street.
“General broadcast alert. Any Pro Heroes in the vicinity should immediately convene to a recent site of impact near Tojinmachi Station for back-up with villain takedown. Pro Hero Hawks is engaged with evacuating civilians.
“I repeat, any Pro Heroes in the vicinity should immediately convene to the site of impact near Tojinmachi Station, north-west of Ohori park.”
Touya would be hard pressed to say where either of those places are, but he knows exactly where the action is happening because he can see smoke rising up from between the buildings, back in the direction he’s just wandered up from.
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Touya mutters, turning on his heel. His light jog turns into a run as the broadcast repeats again, cutting his way towards the pillar of smoke like a beacon.
He’s not technically on shift, doesn’t have any authority in this city, but general broadcasts usually means there’s more trouble happening than usual. When you’re in a tight bind, you don’t tend to care about who’s technically on shift or not, so long as the problem is sorted.
He wrestles with his other earpiece as he weaves between pedestrians. When he’s wrangled both into his ears, he turns on the location piece and taps into the network.
“Pro Hero Dabi arriving for back-up,” he recites as he runs. He turns a corner sharply, the intersection coming into view in the distance, down a long straight road. “Villain Code?”
There’s a slight pause, before the operator responds. “Pro Hero Dabi confirmed. Villain Code 3. Favours long distance.”
Fine. Touya can do long distance. He recites his assertion and speeds up, boots pounding against the pavement.
As he approaches, he manages to get a better look at what’s going on. There are cars backed up for at least a mile, twisted in different directions as drivers try and fail to manoeuvre out of the crush.
The ground is soaked; the road shimmers with water, the puddles reflecting the endless summer sky in a dizzy illusion.
Touya ducks between the cars, spots a few overturned vehicles on his way. A Pro is helping civilians out of the most crumpled cars, coaxing them to crawl from smashed windows and half-hanging doors.
When Touya reaches the intersection, he skids to a halt. The sky is hazy and grey above him.
In the middle of the intersection, someone — something — the villain —writhes, an amorphous blob glistening in the sunlight.
Whoever they are, they’re almost formless, multiple liquid limbs shooting off in different directions like an octopus. The smoke billows from a soaked telephone pole, sparks catching in the air as excess water drips onto the concrete below.
As Touya watches, one rocketing water tendril smashes into the roof of a car unfortunate enough to be parked close to the damage, denting it so much that the bonnet shatters when it makes contact with the road.
Touya scans the surrounding area for Takami; he spots him on one of the roads branching off from the intersection, feathers snagging pedestrian’s shirts and flinging them away from the impact zone. Some of his feathers circle the villain’s head, but they seem to be passing straight through its body, their sharp accuracy doing nothing to stop the rampage.
As Touya watches, another aqueous limb starts to shoot towards where Takami is standing. From the way Takami’s hair is plastered to his head, darkened to brown by the water, he’s been hit before.
Touya jumps forward.
“Oi!” he shouts, and the villain turns towards the sound of his voice, although the limb doesn’t stop moving. Touya gets close enough to aim, and then he’s sending a thin stream of fire out towards the water tendril, cutting close enough that the water erupts into steam at the tip. The villain recoils and the limb jumps away from where Takami’s herding civilians.
At the commotion, Takami turns, and there’s a split second where he does a double take. Touya doesn’t have time to radio him, because the villain’s coming for him and he’s working to contain it, jumping out of the way as another tendril smashes the concrete where he was just standing.
He keeps up the same method, directing thin jets of fire to the villain’s periphery, forcing them to curl up tighter and tighter so that they don’t erupt into steam again.
He continues to circle them, drawing in all of the errant limbs spread out over the intersection. When Touya moves his arm just so, he makes his flame arc, the trajectory flickering like a lasso.
“Dabi,” Takami says through his earpiece. His voice is deeper than Touya remembers. “I think this is the case of a Quirk gotten out of hand. There’s something person-shaped in the middle of it that I haven’t been able to reach yet.”
Touya squints, where the water is thicker, denser, darker. A person’s shape crouches in the middle, their arms lashing out in time with the spray of their liquid appendages. “I see it.”
“Keep containing the water,” Takami says. “When it’s compressed, I’m going to try and pull them out.”
It’s all business, nothing to indicate what’s going through Takami’s head right now. Touya wants to know what’s going through his head so fucking badly. If he’s as shaken by this unexpected encounter as Touya is.
Touya can see Takami running in from the other side of the intersection, feathers still snagging at the civilians around him. Touya keeps up his lassoing effect, trying not to turn too much of the villain to steam, but he can’t help it. Fire can’t be controlled in the same way water can. He’s already putting all of his concentration into directing it into a flexible enough stream that he can diminish the villain’s surface area. When the fire jumps out of his hold, he can’t redirect it; once it leaves his palms, it’s pretty much uncontrollable. It’s only years of practice that allow him to control it this closely now.
A car lands upside down right beside Touya, the metal screeching over the ground. He flinches, jumping away from the wreckage. At a glance, no one seems to be crushed beneath it, so he turns back to the fight.
In his distraction, one of the villain’s appendages has snaked right in front of Touya, the water streaming through the limb in dizzying whorls. The limb hooks around Touya’s shoulder and jerks him off of his feet before he can dive to the side, its grip punishing.
Touya grunts as he receives a mouthful of gravel, face scraped into the concrete. He rolls over just to see another limb heading straight for his face, the sky warping through its transparency. He’s under no illusion that it’s going to pass straight through him.
Sending up a fast, silent apology for flouting a Pro Hero’s golden rule, Thou Shalt Not Cause Undue Harm, his hands come up in front of his face and they erupt into flame. The water meets the fire with a roaring hiss, and Touya nearly chokes around the steam cloying the air.
He scrambles up while the villain is distracted, recoiling from Touya’s heat. He spits stones out of his mouth.
Despite his aching arm, he continues to fulfil his earlier job with a retributive justice, corralling the last of the stray appendages until the villain’s watery exterior is curled into a tight ball, barely larger than the person inside.
As Touya keeps it tight, two large red feathers pierce through the bubbling mass, headed for the person in the middle. Instead of hooking into their body, like Touya thought Takami would do, they form a flat X shape, creating a barrier that pushes against the person’s chest.
There’s resistance, and two more feathers join the fray. One more stray tendril lashes out but Touya corrals it, sending it skittering back into the blob with a directed burst of fire.
The villain stumbles and then, with an ear-splitting sucking sound, they fall out of their sodden shell. All of the water contained within the mass suddenly breaks, and it’s all Touya can do in the moment to turn as much of it to steam as he can before it floods the roads.
In the aftermath, there is a moment of blissful silence, broken only by the sound of water dripping. It would be almost peaceful, except Touya’s sweating so much that his skin is threatening to slide off. Strands of hair stick to the sides of his face. When he takes a tentative step, his boot squelches.
Takami manages to secure a pair of handcuffs around the person, still watery but much more solid now. Two large blue eyes sit in their face, the colour shifting in the light. Takami looks almost apologetic as he secures the handcuffs. Touya thinks he shouldn’t be so soft.
The handcuffs are just regular protocol. Guilty until proven innocent. If Touya weren’t so cushioned by the system that absolves him of blame and places it on others, he’d probably have been put in handcuffs a long time ago. Good thing he’s shielded by the flawed ethics of hero society.
Takami gets the villain handed over to the police, and then he’s making his way over to Touya at speed, hair fluffing up around his head in the humidity. One clump curls over his forehead, already drying to the same beachy blonde he totes around these days.
Touya resists the urge to bolt. He’s not sure he’s prepared for this particular confrontation. He starts checking over his body for injuries, just to give himself something to focus on.
Takami comes to a halt a few feet away from him.
Amidst the clamour of reporters, the wailing of police sirens, and the civilians making a ruckus right outside the impact zone, Wing Hero Hawks, officially promoted to No. 2 on the Hero Billboard Ranking as of this month, just stares and stares and stares.
“Birdie,” Touya says, his heart in his mouth. He’s half-distracted as he pokes at his aching shoulder socket. He rotates the arm a couple of times. He can move it fine, so it can’t be dislocated; the villain just had a strong fucking pull force. He touches his face too, but if there’s blood from where he met the floor, it’s already dried.
“Your hair,” Takami stutters.
“Ah,” Touya says, reaching up to touch the top of his head. “Yeah, apparently having naturally white hair in the snowiest region in Japan has its advantages, if you can fucking believe it. It became a bitch to keep up anyway.”
He doesn’t mention how after a point the black became oppressive, shadowing his reflection and turning the lines of his face into gaunt, violent caricatures of his father.
He doesn’t mention the way he broke down in the single bathroom at Tempest’s agency when he’d come back covered in blood from a damage-heavy evacuation effort one night. He doesn’t mention that the red on black had merged into a hauntingly familiar russet shade under the fluorescent lights. He doesn’t mention the pocket knife sawing at the strands until he emerged, shorn and brittle, and Tempest fixed the rest for him without a word, shaving him down until all he had left was the white fuzz growing up from his scalp.
It took months to grow out to the same length again, but he can breathe more easily around the white than the black. He’s less shielded, less like he’s walls-up-disguised waiting for something to hit him.
He doesn’t mention that he can’t forgive his mother but he can sympathise with her delusion more than his father’s fury. He’s not his mother’s child, not yet, but the presence of his white hair is the most peaceable stalemate he can offer her, out of sight and out of mind in a hospital in Musutafu. He is a public piece of her. A shrine to what she could have seen grow up.
He visited her once. She didn’t flinch from him, like Touya thought she might. She gently commented on how tall he was, how he needed to eat more. Even after all of that, he was still the needy child she left behind, seeking the tender assurances that Fuyumi never quite managed to master.
Takami’s still gawking at him. Touya doesn’t want to have to probe into whatever crisis he’s dealing with, so he just picks at his fingernails and ignores the officers lurking nearby, waiting for Takami to notice them and file his report.
Touya’s not technically on shift, but he doesn’t think he can get away without also writing a report. He hates the fucking paperwork. Usually he bullies the interns at Tempest’s agency into doing it for him, but he’s pretty sure that won’t work in Fukuoka.
“What are you doing here?” Takami finally asks, apparently fully content to ignore his hero duties. A drop of sweat rolls down the side of his face, catching on his jaw before it falls to the ground. Touya can’t help but stare in turn. He blinks himself out of it.
“Back-up for the Delta Operation. Tempest’s been called in for a favour and they brought me with them. Not like I’ll be doing shit, though.” Touya raises a palm and allows the blue flame to lick over his fingers. He leers for effect. “I’m just the incinerator if we need to destroy any evidence.”
“Oh,” Takami says, feathers ruffling. He sounds almost pleased. “I’m leading on that.”
“I know,” Touya replies. He wasn't surprised to see Takami’s name at the top of the documents Tempest passed over to him.
Takami’s debut in the Top 10 immediately after graduation, while probably due to some strings pulled by the HPSC, was admittedly deserved. The public love him; his approval ratings are always through the roof because Takami’s honest and funny and knows how exactly to entice the masses.
He’s bold enough to speak his mind about some of the injustices that exist within hero society, charming enough that nobody seems to mind, and no one can figure out that most of his smiles aren’t genuine, only plastered on for the cameras.
That Takami is leading on such prominent missions like the Delta Operation is only a testimony to how he’s climbed up through the ranks swiftly and easily. The second best hero in the country, now that All Might has fucked off.
The jealous thing, the wanting thing, inside of Touya threatens to rear its head. He mentally beats it back with a stick.
He’s better now. He’s no longer backed into the corner he once was. He doesn’t have to prove himself to anyone anymore, and maybe now he can finally admit that he was never on Takami’s level to begin with.
Touya was never destined to overtake him, and he’s only accepted it with time. Witnessing some of the things that Takami has to go through as a Top 10 Hero, Touya's glad that he’s not there, too.
Hokkaido has been healing, in more ways than one.
“I saw your statement, by the way,” Takami says. His eyes hold a certain gravitas, an understanding within them that Touya can understand better now than he would have before.
“Yeah,” Touya says, for lack of anything better to add. He’s done this so many times, spoken to so many people who have nodded their heads and looked sympathetic, before moving on with their lives with a spare pitying thought. Touya can’t move on, can’t just nod and be over it. It’s really fucking unfair. “Didn’t do much, really.”
Touya hasn’t known peace for eighteen months, after he released a public statement on the history between him and his father, of the abuse and the neglect he suffered behind the closed doors of the Todoroki household, of the same treatment that Shouto was put through in a bid to raise a crop of heroes to surpass All Might.
“You caused quite a stir,” Takami says. “I know you had reporters after you for a while. The gossip rags loved it.”
Touya caused quite a stir, and he barely scratched the surface of the ugly, festering thing that Todoroki Enji planted in him from birth, basically. He’s still living with it, doesn’t think he’ll ever truly escape it. He’s still learning how to soothe it, hold it tight and make it small instead of just shoving it away and letting it grow.
Not that it was much use.
Shouto started at UA in March, earning his place upon Endeavor’s recommendation.
It leaves something sour in Touya’s mouth, to see that Endeavor still has influence and Shouto is once again doing better than Touya ever did. He hopes, facetiously, that his honesty hasn’t stopped his baby brother from making friends.
He still has that drawing, faded with age. It’s stuck to his fridge, like he’s playing a farce of a nuclear family in his lonely apartment, but he can’t bear to get rid of it.
The statement boosted Touya’s rankings, at least. He now sits comfortably at No. 55. The public probably just want to see Dabi and Endeavor fight it out at the next Billboard Hero Rankings, but joke’s on them — Touya’s planning on boycotting it for life. If his father gets to sit comfortably at the top, if the rankings get to run on politics and nepotism, he doesn’t want anything to do with it.
He just wants to be a little better than his father is, just wants to be a nice fucking person to someone.
“D’you think it was worth it?” he asks, trying not to let on that he’s seeking an answer that might be very important to him.
“I dunno,” Takami says. He shrugs, a casual, rippling move that sends his feathers fluttering again. There are lines at the corners of his eyes that deepen with his mild amusement. “No one grabs lunch with him anymore.”
“Well,” Touya says, tamping down the bile in his throat with the favour of a quick remark. “I’m glad that Endeavor has to sit through lunch alone. It’s the only suitable punishment he deserves.”
“Hawks.” A police officer approaches them, finally given up on waiting for Takami to do his job. “I need your report by the end of the day.” His eyes flicker down at his clipboard, and then up at Touya. “Dabi, I’ll need a report from you, too, as you assisted with the takedown.”
“Sure thing, man,” Takami says. He offers him a thumbs up. He looks every part the cool, composed Pro. “End of day it is.”
The police officer nods, satisfied, and returns to his car, scribbling something down as he goes.
“Fuck’s sake,” Touya mutters. One more thing on his plate. Once he’s out of earshot, Takami turns back to Touya and takes a step closer.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were in town?” Takami asks. He punches Touya’s shoulder lightly, the uninjured one, and the touch lingers, Takami’s knuckles sliding down Touya’s arm. Touya scowls and rubs where the epicentre of the touch lies.
“I just got in last night. I was going to swing by your agency,” Touya says. He wasn’t, too afraid of what the confrontation might bring, but Takami doesn’t have to know that. He never claimed to be good at keeping promises. They’re here now. Touya did want to see him, almost ached for it, but he wasn’t prepared to lay himself down under Takami’s feet and wait to be noticed. “If you weren’t too busy for a small-town boy like me.”
“Oh, never too busy for you,” Takami smiles, slow, teeth peeking out between his lips.
He’s grown into himself. He’s taller, muscles more prominent. He’s still lean, but there’s a certain bulk to his shoulders that betrays strength. Touya’s grown, too, so it doesn’t really bother him. He can still lean over Takami, still has a couple of inches on him, and that’s all that matters.
Takami has shed the last of the puppy fat on his face, roundness giving way to a sharp jaw and high cheekbones. There’s a light scar at the corner of his lip, one that twists as his mouth moves.
Touya’s being stared at in the exact same way. Honest looks in exchange.
Takami’s eyes trace the scars that Touya has accrued post-graduation, some of his burns getting the best of him. His jaw is a particularly nasty purple now, cradling his face in such a way that it gives him a permanent skeleton smile, the skin held together with medical staples.
There’s further damage down his neck and chest, along his arms, but it’s mostly covered by his hero costume. Children tend to cry when they’re subjected to seeing it, which causes their parents to get huffy at him. Like it’s his fucking fault.
He’s not self-conscious about it, sees the scars only as a by-product of his Quirk, but with Takami assessing him like this he wants to shy away and hide.
Takami looks suspiciously pleased to see him. Touya’s been tied up in knots picturing seeing him again, especially with how they left things, but Takami sinks into it like barely a day has passed.
“So, you figured out your stuff yet?” Takami asks, hands on his hips. He tilts his head slightly — almost flirtatiously, if Touya didn’t know any better.
“Not really,” Touya admits, because he doesn’t know if he ever will. He still wakes in the night sometimes, in his single-bedroom apartment in Asahikawa, and imagines that his father is standing at the foot of his bed. It doesn’t help that Endeavor graces television screens everywhere. Japan’s No. 1 Hero. What a fucking joke. Touya’s desperately trying to find the humour in it.
Maybe things are just constantly dire. Maybe he’s the problem. Maybe he can’t keep waiting for things to get better, because they never will.
If his therapist was here, she’d remind him quietly that he’s catastrophising again.
“Me neither,” Takami chirps. He scratches at the back of his head, forearm flexing. His eyes are very warm and very bright in the soft summer afternoon light. “Wanna grab a drink? We can talk about everything that’s wrong with us. I’ll get one of my assistants to do the paperwork.”
“You’re a real piece of work,” Touya says, the corners of his mouth curling up against his will. “Bet you’re a slavedriver of a boss.”
“Ah, I try,” Takami says. He waves down another Pro, a woman with iridescent skin and translucent wings on her back. When she turns, her eyes are entirely black, two antennae waving at her hairline. “What’s the point of being in the Top 3 if you can’t have a little fun? Coleope, can you cover for me, please?”
He addresses the other Pro for the last part. She rolls her eyes but nods anyway, trotting over to the police officer still lingering at the scene.
“Too important to do the dirty work?” Touya asks.
“Bet you do the same,” Hawks leers, and Touya can’t dispute that. “Besides, if I’m too important to do the dirty work, where would that leave you, then?”
Touya sighs, but something light bubbles up in his chest. “I see you’re still fucking annoying.”
“I think you missed me, though.” Takami grins, pleased like a predator locked in on prey, his wings flaring out behind him.
Touya doesn’t deny it. Somehow, throughout their final year, Takami successfully managed to worm his way into Touya’s life. Touya gave it all up when they graduated.
He wonders how Takami dealt with the aftermath, if he felt just as out of sorts as Touya did. He wonders if he’s allowed to ask, if it’s salt in the wound.
Six years out of graduation isn’t too late for retribution, right?
Touya doesn’t regret it. If he kissed Takami again, if he stayed the rest of the day, if he thought they could actually try, they’d have crashed and burned immediately, caught in the crossfire of their flaring, apocalyptic amounts of baggage.
They’re different people now, even if they can’t ever shake off the things that shaped them. Touya’s still half ghost, but he lives with it. He deals with it. He pays for therapy with his own fucking money because he’s so grown-up and mature about it.
He’s lingering on the what-if. The way Takami’s looking at him right now, they might finally be in the same place. Caught between the past and future, searching for just a bit of peace among the noise.
“Whoever has the most tragic coming-of-age story gets a free drink,” Touya says, instead of addressing the weight of the past hanging between them. They have time to sort it out. He holds out a hand to shake.
Takami grins, the slightly crooked one that isn’t just saved for the interviews. He slaps his hand into Touya’s, fingers brushing where scar meets wrist. His grip is firm, determined. “You’re on. Don’t expect me to go easy, though.”
Touya scoffs. Takami’s pulse flutters under his fingertips. The past and the future settle, briefly, into their shared palmful. “I won’t.”