Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Winter always made flying easier to tolerate.

Not easier in the technical sense, though people liked assuming that about him too. People assumed a lot of things about Hawks. They assumed he preferred summer because warm air lifted better, because clear skies meant higher visibility, because sunlight looked better when it hit red feathers at the right angle and turned him into something bright enough for magazines to pretend was effortless. They assumed he liked crowds because he smiled at them, liked interviews because he was good at them, liked attention because he had learned how to hold it without looking like he was trying.

Every article written about him used the same handful of words eventually. Fastest. Youngest. Prodigy. Natural. Charming. They never seemed to get tired of rearranging them into slightly different sentences.

None of them ever asked whether he actually liked being looked at.

Summer in the city felt loud in a way that made his skin itch beneath his jacket. Heat clung to everything long after sunset, sticking to glass buildings and crowded stations and the damp backs of people’s necks. The air smelled too much like exhaust and sweat and food stalls and overheated concrete, and the streets stayed packed late enough that flying low became a calculated risk for entirely stupid reasons.

A rescue was fine. A high-speed pursuit was fine. A burning building was fine. What slowed him down was the inevitable cluster of phones rising toward him the second someone recognized the shape of his wings overhead.

Winter stripped some of that away.

The air over Kyushu in January carried a clean sharpness that settled deeper the longer he stayed above the skyline. It got under his collar and into the spaces where his gloves didn’t quite meet his sleeves. It numbed his fingers first, then the tips of his ears, then the skin along his cheekbones until every breath felt a little too bright going down.

Most people would have hated it after ten minutes. Most people liked warmth. Soft beds. Heated rooms. Hands wrapped around coffee cups while they complained about the weather like the weather cared.

Hawks liked it more the worse it got.

The city stretched beneath him in fractured light and rain-slick reflections, streets glowing amber and white below layers of drifting fog. Somewhere downtown, giant digital advertisements bled neon across the sides of buildings, pink and blue and artificial green smearing over wet pavement every time cars passed through puddles. A train slid along the outer district near the river, windows lit in a long bright stripe before vanishing beneath an overpass. From high enough above the streets, Musutafu lost some of its ugliness. Sirens blurred into background noise. Crowds became movement instead of people. Alleys disappeared into shadow. Everything flattened beneath distance into something quieter than it really was.

Distance lied beautifully like that.

Hawks let the wind carry him farther west for a few seconds longer than necessary, wings spread wide enough to catch the current without fighting it. His feathers shifted instinctively against the cold, separating and resettling with small clicking sounds almost drowned out by the rush of air around him.

The movement barely required thought anymore.
Flying had stopped feeling like something he did and started feeling closer to breathing. His body adjusted to pressure changes before he consciously noticed them, wings angling when the air thinned between buildings, smaller feathers correcting drag, the broader ones carrying weight and direction and speed with a precision that looked careless from the ground.

Careless was useful.

Careless made people comfortable.
Nobody liked watching effort too closely. It reminded them that heroes were built out of muscle and bone and exhaustion like everybody else.

His patrol had officially ended almost an hour ago. Officially, he had finished the last scheduled sweep, filed a report through his agency system, checked in with the sidekick team assigned to the eastern ward, and cleared himself for the evening.

Unofficially, he had crossed three districts twice because one of the routes felt wrong the first time, intercepted a robbery before the victim realized the knife had been pulled, redirected a falling construction sign before it hit the street below, caught a delivery bag before it knocked an old man off a curb, and spent eleven minutes helping local sidekicks evacuate an apartment building after somebody burned instant noodles badly enough to trigger half the smoke alarms on the floor.

None of it would make headlines.

None of it needed to.

Most hero work only became visible after something had already gone wrong. People liked disasters with clean endings. Cameras liked smoke, blood, rubble, dramatic landings. They liked seeing him drop out of the sky at the last second, all red wings and easy grin, saving someone just quickly enough to make the footage worth replaying. They didn’t see the hundred smaller corrections that prevented accidents from becoming tragedies in the first place. They didn’t see feathers slipping through alleyways before he did, checking corners, testing air, tapping lightly against unstable glass. They didn’t see how many things he stopped before anyone had enough time to be afraid.

That was fine.

Better, maybe.

The cold pressed pleasantly against the back of his neck as he reached into the sleeve of his jacket, fingers brushing smooth metal before pulling the vape loose. Small enough to fit hidden against his wrist if he folded his sleeve properly. Black casing. No visible branding. Nothing reflective. Nothing bright. He had chosen it for concealment, not taste, which was unfortunate considering the current flavor tasted vaguely like blue raspberry and mint in a way that should have been embarrassing for a grown man to inhale voluntarily.

The Commission would have hated it.

Not because vaping itself mattered much compared to the things they usually monitored, but because they hated habits they didn’t authorize. Smoking damaged lung capacity. Nicotine affected sleep quality. Public image became harder to maintain if somebody photographed Japan’s Number Two Hero exhaling vapor clouds behind a nightclub at two in the morning. Hawks had spent enough years being managed carefully to know exactly how much of his life had once required approval, right down to interview outfits, meal plans, sleep blocks, media phrases, injury disclosures, and which casual drinks could appear in his hand during promotional footage. A handler had once taken energy drinks out of his agency office because the caffeine content was “unnecessary.”

Unnecessary was one of those words people used when they had never needed anything badly enough to understand why someone else might keep it.

The vaping habit had started three winters ago after a seventy-two-hour operation that ended with Hawks half-asleep on a rooftop while one of the younger sidekicks offered him a hit without thinking. He remembered the roof more clearly than the mission. Concrete cold enough to bite through his pants. Dawn barely starting to grey the edge of the skyline. His wings aching so badly he had held them still because moving them felt worse. The sidekick had been shaking with leftover adrenaline, trying not to look like he was shaking, and Hawks had pretended not to notice because people deserved privacy when they were coming down from terror.
The vape had been neon green. Hideous thing.

“Want some?” the sidekick had asked, then looked immediately horrified by his own audacity.

Hawks should have said no. Professionally, legally, medically, publicly, morally, probably spiritually, there were plenty of reasons to say no.

Instead, he had taken it.

He remembered hating the taste immediately. Artificial blueberry chemicals and freezing air settling together at the back of his throat while the city lights blurred below him through exhaustion. He remembered coughing once and making the sidekick laugh so hard the poor kid almost cried. He remembered laughing too, because that was easier than acknowledging the fact that he had been awake for three days and could no longer feel two of his fingers properly.

He’d bought his own the next afternoon.

Now the cold and the nicotine had tangled together into something dangerously close to routine.
Hawks inhaled slowly before letting the vapor drift from his mouth. The wind tore it apart almost instantly, shredding it into nothing before it could hang around him long enough to look incriminating. Another reason flying helped. Evidence disappeared quickly in the sky.

His phone buzzed once inside his jacket.

He ignored it.

Below him, headlights moved steadily through an intersection washed silver by recent rain. A convenience store sign flickered near the corner of a narrow side street. Two teenagers stood beneath its awning sharing an umbrella badly enough that both of them were getting wet. A cyclist cut through a red light. A taxi braked too late. A pedestrian turned her head at the sound of tires skidding, but by then Hawks had already sent one feather downward on reflex, light and sharp and fast enough to nudge the cyclist’s handlebar just enough for the taxi to miss him by half a meter.
The cyclist swore.
The driver swore louder.
The pedestrian clutched her bag to her chest and hurried across the street.
Nobody looked up.
Hawks called the feather back.
Good.

His phone buzzed again.
Then a third time almost immediately after.
Persistent.
He let another two seconds pass before finally pulling it from his pocket. The screen lit pale against the dark, several notifications stacked on top of each other. Agency updates. Scheduling confirmations. A reminder about tomorrow’s media block. Three unread emails from PR. One from an event coordinator who used too many exclamation points for someone sending messages after eleven at night.

A message from Mirko sat near the middle of the screen, sent twenty minutes ago.

“u alive or finally dead”

His mouth twitched slightly before he typed back one-handed.

”still unfortunately employed”

The typing bubble appeared almost instantly.

“tragic”

That got something close to a smile out of him. Not a full one. Nothing big enough to disturb the cold or the quiet or the steady rhythm of his flight. Just a small curve at the corner of his mouth that vanished as soon as another notification slid across the top of the screen.

Commission.

Mandatory attendance requested.
Tomorrow. 11:30 AM.
No explanation.
Not unusual.

Hawks stared at the message while cold air curled beneath the collar of his jacket, wings holding steady against the wind with almost no conscious effort. Below him, the city kept moving exactly the same way it had thirty seconds earlier. Cars crossing intersections. Light changing color. People going home. Someone stepping out of a restaurant with a hand raised to block the rain. Someone laughing too loudly outside a bar. Nobody looking high enough upward to notice the hero suspended above them reading orders he had already decided he would obey before opening them.

For a moment, he remained exactly where he was.
The cold had settled deep enough into his skin now that his hands had gone slightly numb around the phone. He could stay another few minutes if he wanted. Circle the outer districts once more. Drift farther south where the buildings thinned and the ocean air started cutting sharper against his face. He could ignore the message until morning and answer with something neat and professional over coffee like the timing hadn’t landed between his ribs with all the subtlety of a knife.
Nobody would question it. As long as he showed up eventually, timing stopped mattering much at his rank.

Still, after another minute, Hawks locked the screen and slid the phone back into his pocket.
Some habits stopped feeling like choices after enough years.

The feather he had sent toward the siren returned a few seconds later, brushing lightly against his shoulder before folding back into place among the others. False alarm. Minor car accident. Civilians unharmed. One driver angry. One passenger crying. No injuries beyond a bruised wrist and someone’s ruined bumper.

Good.

Hawks angled himself downward at last, body tilting smoothly through the freezing air as the skyline shifted around him. The Commission building waited somewhere on the western side of the city, buried among administrative towers and government offices where the streets stayed unnaturally clean no matter the weather. He could see the district from where he was if he looked for it. Dark glass. Pale stone. Windows that reflected almost no light. Buildings designed to appear boring enough that ordinary people forgot to resent them.

His phone buzzed once more during the descent.
Hawks didn’t check it this time.

Instead, he let himself drop lower between the buildings, the cold wind shifting immediately as the city closed around him again. Up high, the air moved cleanly, broad and sharp and almost honest. Down here it tangled itself between towers and alleyways, carrying traces of cigarette smoke, rainwater, car exhaust, restaurant kitchens still open this late into the night. Steam rose from vents along the street and curled around traffic lights. Music drifted faintly upward somewhere below him every time a bar door opened. Neon signs reflected against wet pavement in fractured colors that blurred whenever headlights crossed over them.
The city felt different after midnight.

Not quieter exactly. Just less rehearsed.

Office workers disappeared first, followed slowly by crowded trains and families and students in uniforms. What remained afterward always felt strangely honest to him. Smokers standing outside convenience stores with jackets pulled tight against the cold. Drunk businessmen stumbling through side streets pretending not to be drunk. Delivery drivers smoking beside idling trucks while fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Couples arguing quietly under awnings. Half-empty restaurants with exhausted employees wiping counters in silence. Men in suits loosening ties the second no one important was watching. Girls in party dresses walking barefoot with heels hooked over two fingers, laughing through chattering teeth because being miserable together was apparently still better than being miserable alone.

Nobody expected heroes to be around at this hour unless something had gone wrong.

Hawks preferred that.

Recognition happened less often at night, but not never. As he crossed above a main road near the entertainment district, somebody down on the sidewalk pointed upward suddenly, voice carrying faintly through the cold air.

“Hawks!”

He didn’t look down immediately.
People liked being acknowledged. That was one of the first things they’d taught him. A glance lasted longer in public memory than rescues sometimes did. Small interactions built trust better than speeches. If he ignored them, someone would post about it by morning. If he acknowledged them too much, more people would stop walking and start filming. There was a correct balance to everything. There always was.
By the time he finally turned his head slightly, three phones were already pointed toward him.
Hawks lifted two fingers lazily in acknowledgment without slowing his descent.
The reaction below was immediate enough that he could hear it even from this height.

“Holy shit—”
“I told you that was him!”
“Wait, take another one!”

Their excitement faded behind him almost instantly as he continued westward through the rain-heavy dark. Within another block the city swallowed the voices completely.

His apartment tower stood near the edge of the waterfront district, all dark glass and polished steel rising above the surrounding buildings. Expensive enough that nobody ever asked questions directly. Private enough that photographers rarely managed to get close without security removing them first. Secure enough that the Commission had approved it after only three rounds of objections, two inspections, and one conversation Hawks hadn’t been invited to.
It looked beautiful from the outside.

Most controlled things did, if enough money was involved.

Hawks landed on the rooftop terrace out of habit more than necessity, boots touching concrete softly while rainwater collected in shallow pools around him. The terrace was empty, of course. It always was this late. Planters lined the far edge, decorative trees bending slightly in the winter wind. Someone employed by the building trimmed them every Thursday morning. Hawks knew because he had once come back from patrol at the wrong time and watched a man in grey gloves cut a branch for seven straight minutes with the concentration of someone performing surgery.

For a moment, Hawks stayed still.
The wind was weaker here.
Warmer, too.

He hated that immediately.

Hawks folded his wings slowly against his back before walking toward the terrace entrance, fingers brushing absently against the vape still hidden in his sleeve. The hallway beyond the rooftop doors smelled faintly like expensive cleaning products and somebody’s cologne lingering from earlier in the evening. Soft lighting reflected gold against black marble floors. Somewhere lower in the building, music pulsed faintly through the walls, probably from one of the tenants who believed wealth made them immune to noise complaints.

His phone buzzed again.
Then again.

Hawks ignored both notifications while stepping into the private elevator at the end of the hall. The mirrored walls reflected him back from every angle, damp blond hair falling messily across his forehead, jacket still darkened by rain near the shoulders, red wings taking up almost too much space inside the elevator despite being folded tightly inward. A small scrape ran along the outer edge of his left boot from catching the falling construction sign earlier. He noticed it immediately and then noticed himself noticing it.

The reflection looked composed enough.
People always assumed composure came naturally to him.

The elevator descended silently, so smooth he barely felt the motion. Numbers changed above the door in soft white light. Thirty-eight. Thirty-seven. Thirty-six. His wings shifted once behind him, a slight adjustment to avoid brushing the mirrored wall. The movement pulled faintly at muscles near his shoulder blades. Not pain. Not quite. Just the ordinary dull ache that settled in after a long shift and stayed until he slept or ignored it long enough to stop registering it.

He did the second one more often.

By the time the doors opened again, Hawks had already slipped the vape back into his sleeve before crossing the hallway toward his apartment. Cameras tracked him discreetly from the corners of the ceiling. His keycard unlocked the door immediately, and the system gave a soft confirmation chime he had once meant to change and never did.

Warmth hit him first.
Then silence.

The penthouse stretched dark around him beneath floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city, lights from outside reflecting dimly against polished floors and the still surface of the indoor pool farther inside the apartment. Expensive furniture sat exactly where he’d left it earlier that morning. One lamp near the kitchen remained turned on, casting soft amber light across the counter. The heating system hummed quietly through hidden vents, steady and unobtrusive, keeping the entire place at a temperature some building designer had probably described as comfortable.

Everything looked untouched.
It usually did.

Hawks shut the door quietly behind himself before slipping off his shoes near the entrance, aligning them automatically against the wall without looking down. He noticed the scrape on the left boot again as he set it down and adjusted the angle half a centimeter so the pair sat evenly. His jacket followed a second later, draped carefully over the back of a chair instead of the couch because wrinkles annoyed him more than they should have. Rainwater darkened the fabric along the shoulders. He would need to hang it properly later.

Not now.

The silence inside the apartment settled strangely against his ears after the noise of the city.

Too clean.
Too controlled.

He crossed toward the windows instead of turning on more lights, one hand sliding back into his pocket for the phone at last. Notifications flooded the screen immediately the moment it unlocked. Interview requests. Agency updates. Trending tags. Public reactions to tomorrow’s rankings coverage. A message from PR asking him to avoid jokes about sleep deprivation on air because the last one had become a meme. Another from his stylist confirming wardrobe. Another from a sponsor asking whether he could hold their product during a casual behind-the-scenes clip without making it look like an advertisement, which was a stupid request because that was exactly what advertisements were.

Somebody had already posted blurry photos from earlier downtown.
One of them showed him suspended above the street against the rain-heavy sky, wings spread wide enough to swallow most of the frame. The image was slightly out of focus, lights bleeding around him like some dramatic nonsense from a movie poster. He remembered the exact moment it must have been taken. He had been correcting his angle to avoid a billboard antenna and wondering whether the vape flavor would taste better if it were colder.

The caption read:

“literally how does he exist like this”

Hawks stared at it briefly.
Then locked the phone again.

The reflection staring back at him from the dark glass looked unfamiliar for a second in the low light. Not enough to matter. Just enough to notice. City lights stretched behind his reflection in blurred gold and white, making his wings appear darker than they actually were. His face hovered in the window like a stranger’s, features softened by darkness, eyes too shadowed to read properly.

Outside, rain streaked slowly against the windows.
Inside, the apartment remained perfectly silent.
Hawks hated silence when it lasted too long.
He crossed toward the kitchen without really thinking about it, opening the refrigerator mostly out of habit before staring blankly at the contents for several seconds. Bottled water. Leftover takeout he didn’t remember ordering. Fruit somebody from his agency kept stocking because nutrition mattered and apparently heroes couldn’t be trusted to feed themselves correctly. A row of neatly labeled containers from a meal service he had agreed to try because refusing had required more conversation than accepting.

Nothing looked appealing.
He shut the door again.

The clock on the oven read 11:02 PM.

Still, Hawks didn’t move toward the bedroom or the shower or the Commission-issued tablet waiting untouched near the couch. Instead he wandered farther into the apartment, footsteps nearly soundless against the polished floor as he crossed past the indoor pool. Water reflected shifting fragments of city light across the ceiling above him, rippling faintly every time one of his feathers brushed the air too sharply behind his back. The pool had been one of the selling points. Private relaxation space, the agent had called it, like Hawks had ever been relaxed enough to use an indoor pool for anything other than swimming laps at strange hours until his muscles burned cleanly enough to make sleep seem possible.

Most people loved the apartment.

Visitors always reacted the same way the first time they saw it. Too impressed by the windows, the view, the size of the place to notice how impersonal it felt after long enough. The Commission had arranged most of it after he’d entered the top rankings. Better security. Better location. Better image. A penthouse suited Hawks. Successful heroes weren’t supposed to live in cramped apartments with weak heating and neighbors screaming through the walls at three in the morning.

Everything inside the penthouse matched in the careful expensive way magazines liked. Dark furniture. Clean lines. Neutral colors interrupted occasionally by gold accents someone had probably chosen because they matched his wings. The couch looked good in photographs and was uncomfortable after more than twenty minutes. The dining table could seat eight people even though Hawks had never had eight people over at once. A decorative vase near the hallway cost more than the first apartment he could remember living in.
There were almost no personal photographs anywhere.

Not because Hawks disliked pictures.
There had simply never been many worth framing.

He reached for the speaker system near the far wall, music crackling softly through hidden surround speakers a second later. Low bass filled the apartment almost immediately, quiet enough to blend into the background instead of demanding attention. The Neighbourhood. One of the slower songs. Something he’d listened to often enough that it stopped requiring active thought. He would have denied liking them if asked. Not because it mattered, but because some preferences felt embarrassing once spoken aloud, and because people had a habit of turning every detail about him into something consumable.

Better.

The silence retreated slightly after that.
Hawks rolled the sleeves of his black shirt higher up his forearms before reaching automatically for the vape again, leaning one shoulder against the kitchen counter while blue-white city lights flickered beyond the windows. The nicotine settled warmly at the back of his throat this time, sharper indoors without the freezing wind tearing it apart immediately afterward. He took another breath through his nose and tasted mint underneath artificial sweetness.

He hated how much he liked it.

His phone buzzed again against the counter.
Agency manager.
Hawks let it ring twice before answering.

“You checked tomorrow’s revised schedule yet?” his manager asked immediately, voice clipped with the kind of exhaustion that came from managing too many people at once.

“I got the notifications.”

“PR wants the blue Tom Ford for the interview.”
Hawks glanced vaguely toward the walk-in closet down the hall. “Thought they hated that one.”
“The focus groups changed.”

“Tragic.”

A quiet sigh crackled through the speaker. Papers shuffled faintly somewhere on the other end of the line.

“You’ll need to leave by six-thirty if traffic stays this bad tomorrow morning. The studio moved the interview slot forward twenty minutes.”

“Mm.”

“Hawks.”

“I said I heard you.”

“You also said that last week before showing up exactly thirty seconds before broadcast.”

“And yet the ratings survived.”

“That isn’t the point.”

His gaze drifted back toward the rain sliding down the windows. “Pretty sure ratings are always the point.”

Another sigh.

“You’re impossible to manage.”

That one almost got a real laugh out of him.
Almost.

“I’ll be there,” Hawks said, because he always was.

“You’d better be. Morning interview, rankings panel at noon, sponsor dinner at six, then your Commission block.”

His gaze flicked briefly toward the notification still sitting unanswered near the top of his screen.

Commission.
11:30 AM.

“I saw it.”

A pause crackled softly through the speaker.

Then:
“Good luck.”

The line disconnected.

Hawks stared at the darkened screen for another few seconds before setting the phone back down beside the vape. Rain continued tapping softly against the windows while the bass from the speakers hummed low through the apartment.
The Commission meeting lingered unpleasantly at the back of his mind now that the city noise had faded enough to leave room for it. Mandatory attendance usually meant operational reassignment, political damage control, or somebody higher up deciding Hawks had become useful for something inconvenient again.

At his rank, it was usually the third option.
He inhaled another slow drag from the vape before exhaling toward the ceiling, watching the vapor dissolve slowly into the dim apartment lighting. Somewhere below the penthouse, the city kept moving. Traffic lights changing. Trains crossing tracks. People stumbling home through rain-heavy streets without ever realizing the hero they plastered across billboards spent his nights pacing barefoot through oversized apartments trying not to think too hard about tomorrow.

Hawks checked the time again.
11:17 PM.

Too early to sleep.
Not that he would’ve managed it immediately anyway.