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At first, Keigo isn’t sure what wakes him.
He blinks his tired, stinging eyes open to darkness and sees only the back of Touya’s pajama-clad shoulder. Touya is sound asleep, curled around the maternity pillow and snoring lightly. His chest rises and falls in a slow, even rhythm; his belly, too, is silent and still beneath Keigo’s palm splayed wide across it. His feathers prickle at his back, stripped to the studs, but nothing really happens for several long, quiet moments.
A car honks, faint, from several blocks over. A broken street light flashes in odd intervals through the crack at the bottom of the blackout curtains. Keigo sends a feather to pull them the rest of the way down, because now that he’s noticed it he won’t be able to forget about it until it’s gone. The fan is on full blast in the corner of the bedroom, all the way up because Touya sweats in his sleep on a good day and this baby is running him particularly hot. The string of the ceiling fan clicks the light, rhythmic and cyclical.
Keigo lets his eyes drift shut again and relaxes into his pillow. He’s nearly settled back to sleep when his feathers pick up the sound, again, of what woke him in the first place: it’s a cough, he realizes, sharp and muffled. He sits up on his elbows, flares his wings out; his feathers tense, tremble, tingle, quills rippling outward like a shiver. Someone on a bike drives by the apartment, clips a pothole, and there’s another cough. Then, a gag. Keigo’s feet smack the floor with enough force that Touya grumbles himself awake, bleary-eyed.
There’s the distant sound of something wet and splattering, and Keigo’s halfway down the hall before he even realizes he’s moved.
The door to the nursery slides open soundlessly. There’s a puddle of sick on the rug, lit only by the blue-hued jellyfish nightlight on the dresser. Keigo’s pup sits upright in the center of his pallet, hiccupping. The front of his pajamas are dark and wet with vomit. His little fists shake around the hem of his shirt, pinched tight between his talons. Touya calls out from the bedroom.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Keigo says, stepping around the sick with ease. He crouches beside Hayato’s pallet, holds his hands out for Hayato to grab when he decides he’s ready to be touched. Feathers have flipped the bathroom light on, are already laying a towel over the mess on the floor. Two more lead Touya down the narrow strip of their apartment’s hallway.
“Odon,” Hayato warbles, then pitches forward over his little knees to puke again. It’s hardly more than bile and spittle, and most of it lands in his own lap, but his body convulses with it anyway. He makes grabby-hands at Keigo between heaves, hiccupping and gasping. Keigo takes both of his hands in one of his own and uses the other to rub between his flared, frantic-flapping wings.
“I’m right here,” he says, dropping solidly onto his ass. Hayato bonks his over-hot head into Keigo’s hand and sobs, thick and frightened. His feathers curl and shudder, wrapping around Keigo’s knuckles for comfort. Hayato’s never been sick like this before. His skin is warm and clammy.
“I sowry,” Hayato says, babbled, dripping tears that sting when they meet his skin. It feels crushing, the admission. Keigo’s breath catches soundlessly in his throat, lodges itself there like a weight. His wings fold tight between his shoulder blades. Nothing comes out of his mouth.
Touya joins them on the pallet on folded knees, settling neatly on his heels. He cradles the back of Hayato’s head and coos, soft and wobbly. A purr starts up, rickety, from the dip of his throat; when Keigo looks at him, he’s teary-eyed and pink. “You’re okay, baby,” Touya says, thick with emotion and something else that Keigo isn’t privy to. He leans in to nuzzle their son’s sweat-damp curls, massaging his scent into his roots.
“I f-f’o-owed up,” Hayato tells them, like he’s in some kind of terrible, cosmic trouble for it. He’s not yet two, and something in Keigo pits. Hayato hiccups, gags wetly; nothing comes up but a painful-sounding belch, followed by a big, gasping heave and a fresh wave of tears. Keigo’s throat rumbles with worry, tight and warbling. Hayato lets out a hiccuping sob that rattles his whole entire body, all ten fingers clenched tight around two of Keigo’s. His talons prick his skin. “I sowry, Odon, I sow-ry.”
“You don’t need to be sorry,” Keigo says, rushed like he can’t get the words out fast enough now that his throat’s unclogged itself. He smoothes Hayato’s sticky bangs back from his forehead; there’s a lump, ugly and frog-like, deep inside of him, caught in the cavern of his rib cage because it has nowhere else to go. Hayato shakes with tremors, hot to the touch with fever. Keigo presses his knuckles back to the space between Hayato’s wings, rolls them up the notches of his spine in a slow, pinching rhythm, lets his own scent permeate the room. Touya takes over petting his head for him, touch light and fingers cold. Feathers zip to the bathroom for the thermometer.
“Don’ feel good,” Hayato says. He lifts his face and his cheeks are tacky with tears that shine in the low, low light. There’s puke smeared into his nose, sweat clumped in his eyebrows and snot dribbled to his chin. His eyes are glossy and clouded over. “Odon, ‘ ucky.” Touya whimpers, carding Hayato’s bangs out of his eyes, tucking soiled and slimy strands uselessly behind his flushed and feathery ears.
“I know you don’t,” Keigo says, soft. He swallows around the knot within him that grows and grows and grows. “Oton is so sorry.” Hayato gag-burps again and tips himself forward to hide his sticky eyes in Keigo’s palm with a stuttered whimper.
“Can Otou-chan take your temperature?” Touya asks, low like a murmur, scratching his nails through the downy fuzz of Hayato’s nape. Hayato’s feathers curl and coil and rattle with the force of his hiccups. He doesn’t like the thermometer, hates the way it squeaks when it goes in his ear.
“No, Odou,” Hayato warbles, pinching fretfully at the bare skin of Keigo’s knee. He shivers like he’s cold, squeezing in on himself. He tucks himself as tiny as he can seem to manage, and Keigo aches with it, too-familiar. “‘ucky.”
“Okay,” Touya says, sitting the thermometer to the side and shifting to tuck his heavy belly more comfortably in his lap. He sucks his bottom lip between his teeth, and turns, for the first time, to Keigo. His brows are drawn together with worry. The bags beneath his eyes are deep and dark. “He needs medicine.”
“I know,” Keigo says. He runs his thumb back and forth across Hayato’s temple, tense and taut. It seems to be calming him, somewhat. His feathers have already poured children’s tylenol into a little cup on the bathroom counter. “I’m running the tub.”
“Okay,” Touya says again, fiddling with stuck-up strands of Hayato’s hair. He takes a deep breath and the exhale shudders. His eyes shine, extra bright and blue in the reflection of the nightlight. His fingers tremble as they card through Hayato’s curls. “I’ll clean up in here, then.”
“I’ve got it,” Keigo tells him, whispered, throat tight. Touya sniffles and swipes his wrist below his nose. The unscarred parts of his face are flushed pink. His voice cracks when he speaks again.
“What can I do, Keigo?”
Keigo softens. He calls his feathers back to himself. “Never mind,” he says, leaning in to bump Touya’s nose with his own. He smiles, small and kind. Touya’s bottom lip wobbles. His forehead presses cool into Keigo’s. Hayato’s breaths whimper out of him, body nestled perfectly between them. “I was wrong. Can you clean up in here, please?”
“Yes,” Touya says, and sobs, just once, hard enough to jostle his belly. He leans back, and relief floods his expression. More tears spill over his waterline, quickly caught by the back of his hand. He rises with surprising fluidity from his knees to his feet with more than a little help from Keigo’s feathers, steps around the both of them and, with one last, lingering pet to Hayato’s tiny head, leaves to get the mop from the closet down the hall.
Within a few short minutes, Hayato has settled into a sleepy slump in the palm of Keigo’s hand. His baby breaths puff hot over the skin of his wrist, faint enough to tickle. “Haya-tan?” Keigo whispers, low so as not to startle him. Hayato’s wings twitch. His feathers flutter, flare along the shells of his ears. His long lashes tickle the heel of Keigo’s palm when he blinks his eyes open. “Can Oton pick you up, sweetheart?”
“Oday,” Hayato says, slurred with fever and exhaustion. Keigo coos and gently shakes his fingers free of Hayato’s grasp to cup him beneath the armpits instead. Hayato’s belly gurgles and groans, but he doesn’t throw up again, just whines a pitiful noise of discomfort that fades once Keigo has him tucked snug against his chest. He buries his wet little nose in Keigo’s throat, smearing snot and spit and puke. His lungs are clear when Keigo slips a feather beneath his shirt to check them, but his breath still shudders when it leaves him like the aftershocks of a sob. Touya returns to change the bedding, passes by with gentle fingers against the too-hot swell of Hayato’s cheek and his bottom lip sucked between his teeth. He meets Keigo’s eyes, the briefest of glances, and both of them wordlessly agree that Hayato will be in the nest for the rest of the night.
Keigo walks his son to their singular bathroom with slow and steady steps. He’s never done this before. He doesn’t want to jostle him, doesn’t want to make him any sicker, doesn’t want to take care of him wrong and make him even worse. Hayato hasn’t been this fragile since he was a newborn and Keigo couldn’t fathom the smallness of him without feeling like he was falling apart. The task of fatherhood feels terribly monumental in this moment, in moments like it, Hayato’s heart beating hummingbird-fast beneath the pads of his fingers.
He keeps the lights off when he enters the bathroom, trades them, instead, for the light of the hallway so the brightness isn’t quite so overwhelming. Touya’s flicked the nursery’s lights on to clean now that they’re gone, which helps, too. Hayato’s fingers pinch in his soiled collar, roll and tug the fabric while Keigo bends to check the water. It’s low and slightly less than lukewarm.
“Can Oton sit you down for a second, baby?” Keigo asks, lips against the radiating warmth of his son’s head. Hayato nods into his throat, sluggish. He keeps playing with Keigo’s shirt collar like he hadn’t heard him. Keigo sighs a trembling exhale and squats to place his son on the bathmat. Hayato warbles fretfully, tightens his grip momentarily on his shirt and then his fingers, but lets go when prompted with a kiss to the knuckles and a gentle, rumbling croon.
Keigo strips quickly, kicking his clothes towards the cracked-open doorway to be put in the hamper later. Hayato is a bit more difficult to undress, wings still uncontrolled and body wracked with shivers, but Keigo manages, some long forgotten part of him reminded of dirty floors and a soapy bucket and wings folded too-tight to his own burdened little body. He is reminded, too, of being alone. He tucks his fingers back beneath Hayato’s armpits but doesn’t lift him back up for several seconds because he just needs to touch him, just needs to feel his baby-soft skin, warm and fevered as it may be, to keep his head on straight for just a little while longer. Hayato isn’t alone. Keigo isn’t alone anymore, either.
Once they’re both bare and Keigo has Hayato settled back against his chest, tiny body curled up as small as his knobby little knees will allow, Keigo sheds his feathers into the wicker basket by the door and steps over the lip of the tub to lower both of them into the water.
Hayato whines the second his pink painted toes touch it, jerks his knees hard into Keigo’s sternum.
“I know,” Keigo says, cupping bathwater in his free hand and ignoring the bruise that’s already beginning to bloom beneath his right pec. He lets water spill through his fingers to wet Hayato’s pudgy, freckled legs. They curl even closer to his chest, goosebumps following the contrasting warmth of his touch. “I know it’s cold,” he says, lips against his son’s limp and sweaty curls. He shifts his arm under Hayato’s bare bottom. “I’m sorry. It’s just for a minute.” Hayato hiccups, whines, burrows into his throat like he’s trying to crawl into his skin. Keigo pets his dampened palm to the scrunch of his fat little legs and uses his foot to turn the tap back on so he doesn’t have to let go.
Touya passes back by the bathroom door with the mop. He’s grumbling to himself, but Keigo can’t pick any of it up over the roar of the running water without the help of his feathers. The wheels of the bucket rattle and pop over the grooves in the linoleum. The hall closet slides open with a creak and closes with a bang, too off-set from the frame to shut without being slammed.
Hayato startles at the sound, snuffling noisily and sucking his fist into his mouth for comfort. Keigo lets him, even though his mouth and fingers are still dirty. He’s already sick. His own mess won’t get him sicker. The fingers of Hayato’s other hand pinch the dusting of hairs at his chest, overgrown in between waxing appointments, his little face warm and tacky where it’s mashed against his collarbone. His lashes flutter, clumped with drying tears.
“Odou-chan?”
“He’s right outside, baby.” Keigo presses a kiss to Hayato’s curls, petting a damp hand over them afterwards to smooth his bangs back from his head. It doesn’t work. Hayato shivers, nuzzles his damp nose into his throat, and Keigo shifts his elbow higher to keep him there. Touya passes the bathroom again on quick, shuffling feet, still muttering to himself. The nursery light clicks off. In the kitchen, the washing machine starts to thump with the weight of Hayato’s soiled futon.
“‘ucky,” Hayato tells him again, slurred around his slobbery fingers. Keigo hums, cups more water in his palm to pour through Hayato’s jittery, bed-raggled feathers. He splays his fingers between Hayato’s wings, starts a low rumble in his throat, and lets the warmth of his palm soothe his pup while the water heats the tub.
He fills the bath to Hayato’s toes, then turns off the tap. When Hayato doesn’t flinch away from the water and, instead, seemingly relaxes to submerge his feet, Keigo deems it safe to wet his hand again. He swipes gently over Hayato’s mouth and chin with his thumb, tilted to sort-of see over the point of his own nose, then cards damp fingers properly through his hair until it’s slicked back from the warmth of his forehead, darkened grey and free of any visible sick. Hayato only fusses a little bit, too tired to fight him.
Touya pokes his head around the crack in the door just as Hayato goes back to being limp against his chest. His eyes are red and irritated from tears, but he’s not crying anymore. “Hi,” he whispers, and holds out an empty plastic cup from the kitchen for Keigo to see, just in case he needs it. He hums, once. “How’re we doing?”
“Better,” Keigo says, mumbled. He strokes his thumb back and forth across the jut of Hayato’s knee. He presses another kiss to the top of his wet head, and Hayato grumbles a soft, involuntary noise. There’s a faint, almost inaudible puppy purr sputtering in his chest.
“Good,” Touya says, relief palpable. He clicks his tongue into his teeth and steps properly into the room. He has to open the door wide to fit his belly through it, but he’s quick to crack it again behind him. He settles onto the closed lid of the toilet, too big now to get on and off the floor by himself in such a cramped space. He smells like milk and jasmine and the salty tang of worry. “Has he had medicine?” Keigo brings his knees up to help support Hayato’s weight, releasing his own scent into their itty bitty apartment bathroom.
He nods towards the cabinets, pulling his arm out from under Hayato’s bottom. It drips over the lip of the tub and onto the bathmat when he reaches out, palm up. Touya hands him the cup from the kitchen, and Keigo scoops water into it to drizzle down Hayato’s back between his wings. They shudder. “Not yet.”
Touya hums at him and turns to find the little cup of medicine on the sink. His eyes squint in the almost-dark, the bathroom lit, now, by only the yellowed overhead light of the hallway. He’s left his glasses on the nestside table, but Keigo doubts they would’ve helped him much. Hayato’s wings flap involuntarily to tickle his skin, and Keigo pours another cup of warm water down his feathery spine.
“Odou-chan,” Hayato repeats, sudden like he’s just realized that Touya’s in here with him, wobbly and slurred around the fist still stuffed in his mouth. He snuffles, trying to catch his scent, his own milky and strong as he searches almost-blindly. “Odon,” he says, weakly smacking his slobbery palm against his chest. “Odon, Odou-chan.” He turns his head, and Keigo moves him to his other arm so he can see the both of them properly instead of just the colorful sticker tiles on the shower wall. Touya scoots forward on the toilet with a throaty coo, one hand braced under his belly for support as he reaches out to meet Hayato’s fingers with his own.
Jasmine floods the bathroom, warm with milk and just a little bit smoky. Hayato’s chest rattles with the force of his purrs. His wings rustle noisily.
“Hi, little owl.” Touya squeezes his tiny, spit slobbery fingers just once, then lets go to grab the medicine. He passes it to Keigo, who taps the cup against Hayato’s lips. Hayato takes it without fuss, too tired to really notice what’s going on anymore now that Touya’s scent has settled around him like a weighted blanket. His eyelids droop low, blink heavy and struggle to flutter back open.
Touya takes the cup back and tosses it into the sink to be dealt with later. He holds both arms out for their pup, cupping him beneath the armpits when Keigo passes him over. Touya pulls his wet little body to his chest, not seeming to care that his belly is in the way or that his pajamas are getting soaked. Keigo recalls a handful of feathers to snag a towel. He lays it over Hayato’s head, then tucks the feathers beneath his son’s legs to help support his weight. Touya smiles at him, sleepy and grateful, and pulls the door all the way open to leave, Hayato’s face buried in his throat. He flicks the lights on as he goes and, a moment later, the hall light shuts off. The bedroom door slides shut with a quiet click.
Keigo flips the drain and uses his toes to start the tap again, pulling himself to his feet with his palm curled over the lip of the tub. Feathers fiddle with the nozzle to start the shower for him, then deposit themselves on the floor tiles to be haphazardly cleaned beneath the spray. Keigo rinses, runs the bar of soap across his body with militant efficiency, and turns off the tap. His shower lasts less than five minutes. He smells like nothing. Feathers bring him a towel and new boxers from the laundry basket on the dining table, then slot back into the joint of his wings. As he’s pulling his underwear up his legs, more feathers bring him a sippy cup of water and turn the bathroom lights off for him.
He pads down the dark hallway silently, sippy cup in hand. He avoids the creaky panels in front of the closet, lets his wings brush the walls to guide him forward like a ghost. He slips into the bedroom and shuts the door behind him; Touya is propped up against the headboard, Hayato curled against his hip. Hayato is, blessedly, already asleep, Touya’s fingers carding through the dampness of his curls. He’s got another towel from the laundry basket, freshly washed and dry, wrapped around him. It’s green, with blue and lime and yellow scales across the hood. A kappa, Keigo thinks, but he’s not too sure. Shouto bought it.
Keigo sits the sippy cup on his nightstand beside his phone, crawls into bed on his hands and knees to settle at Hayato’s back. Gently, he untucks his wings from the towel so they’ll dry better. Touya watches him with lidded eyes and big, sleepy blinks that make his lashes flutter. Every few seconds, the motion of his fingers stalls, then picks back up again as he fights to stay awake. Keigo lets him be, because it’s a losing battle. His own eyes feel heavy. His waterline stings.
Tucking his feet beneath the crumple of the blankets at the edge of the bed, Keigo twists to pull them up over the three of them, only covering Touya to the swell of his belly so he doesn’t sweat them all to death in the night. Hayato snuffles, pinching at the hem of Touya’s shorts with his baby nails. Touya’s hand, finally, goes limp. Keigo splays his palm gently over his son’s rumbling belly and joins them in sleep.