Chương 225: Chapter 222 - Birdie In a cage
At some point, there'd been a vase full of flowers that he'd broken. The nurses had been quick to clean it up.
He wondered who'd brought them.
He'd went through a few check-ups, had been showered – he couldn't properly stand on his own feet – and had been hand-fed a late dinner before he said he could do so himself at breakfast.
From what they'd said, he'd woken up in the middle of the night.
"We've called them", said the nurse. "They're coming"
Keigo, still a bit light-headed, had waited, wild eyes staring at blank walls.
He felt as if he were in a dream, his eyes going back and forth from the unwelcoming room to the door right in front of his bed, waiting patiently for someone to come in and open it.
The clock above the door kept on ticking.
Visitations had started more than two hours ago.
He'd grown impatient and fidgety.
Keigo pushed the button to call the nurses and asked when they would arrive.
"They said they'll come as soon as possible", had said the exhausted nurse, pity clear in her voice
Keigo had felt weirdly ashamed as if pushing for anyone to visit him was unfitting of his status.
He'd felt sour but had shoved it all down.
People were busy.
Waking up from a coma was no big deal.
Of course he could wait.
He'd gathered his thoughts, recalling with a near perfect precision last night's – or rather weeks ago – events.
He remembered the scorching heat and the way he'd draped his wings around himself, trying to fight off the heat.
He remembered the dark storm, clouds full of lightning, as his only way out.
He remembered his bone slitting Touya's throat, remembered the flash of panic that had risen in his eyes while he'd held his bloody hands against spurting blood.
He'd killed him.
He knew it deep in his bones, knew it as well as he knew that the sun would always rise.
He'd killed him.
Finally.
The following thought was for Shoto.
A nurse came barging in, a placating smile on her face.
She checked him some more, asked if he had been given food, and changed his perfusion.
He went along, though his eyes kept going back to where the flowers had fallen.
They'd been fresh.
Someone had come recently.
"They're coming", she said. "It should be any minute now"
She spotted a white petal stuck on the corner of the bed table and threw it in the trash.
Keigo waited.
Lunch came then passed.
He could do nothing but look around, and looking around felt weird as if he were living an out-of-body experience and couldn't properly connect with his own emotions.
He was there physically but his mind was somewhere adrift in a dark, dark void.
His mind had trouble embracing his new reality.
He couldn't have possibly slept for that long. It was unfathomable. When would they come?
He waited.
His monitor biped regularly.
He waited.
He felt there should have been someone here with him.
He waited.
He felt he shouldn't have been alone after waking up from a weeks-long coma.
He waited.
He felt as if someone should've cared about him.
He waited.
There was a clock above the door.
He watched until it was time for dinner.
A new nurse, younger than the previous one, came in with a warm tray of food.
She looked at him, starry-eyed.
When his dull gaze landed on her, she blushed and stuttered.
It was Hawks she was seeing, not Keigo.
"H-here's your food"
He waited, didn't touch the food.
"When are they coming ?"
She smiled apologetically.
"I'm sorry Haw- sir, but the visitations have been closed for an hour now"
She'd left him alone with his sad meal in a too-big, too-dark, way too-unfamiliar room.
The oppressive emptiness of the room started to make him feel anxious.
She came back to take his tray away and chastised him when she noticed it was full.
"You have to eat, sir", she said. "Your body needs nutrients to get its strength back"
He didn't care about getting any strength back.
She left.
A while later, the door opened.
It was a doctor.
The man had a long, rectangular nose above which glasses dangled precariously.
"I'm here to assess the damage to your wings"
He poked his wings with a pen and walked around the bed to see them from different perspectives.
Keigo looked down at the bony protrusions that lolled from his back.
He'd forgotten he had wings.
"Do you feel it when I touch here ?"
"No"
The doc pursed his lips and touched somewhere else, visibly harder this time.
"And now ?"
"Nothing"
The doctor frowned.
Keigo looked at what was left of his once proud and powerful wings.
Bits of frail, broken bare bones which hang sadly from his back.
Only three feathers had managed to grow in the weeks he'd been here.
One of them, smaller than the other two – both not impressive either – fell to the ground.
Keigo looked as the doctor bent down to pick it up.
He was rubbing his chin with two fingers, turning the feather between his hands.
"Is it irreversible ?"
The doctor's eyes snapped to Hawks' as if he had forgotten he was here.
He smiled.
"No, no. Of course not"
He looked back at the wings and the frown came back full force.
It looked as if a dead body was hanging from Keigo's back.
The doctor met Hawks's gaze and shot him a placating smile.
"I just need to run a few tests… Do you feel strong enough to partake in them? "
Hawks agreed.
Keigo didn't care.
The doctor tried to make Hawks use his wings: he tried to flap, move them around, and even tried to move the feathers around to no avail.
Keigo's eyes kept on going back to the door.
His left eye twitched, closing and opening quickly.
"Here, try to lift only this bit..."
Hawk's gaze went back to the doctor, but his mind was adrift.
There had to be someone who cared about him.
Keigo hoped to see Shoto burst through the doors, wanted to see the relieved face he'd have once he'd understood that Keigo was safe and sound.
It was pitiful that a teenager was the closest person to him.
Self-pity and resentment burst through Keigo.
The evening went by.
At some point, the doctor left, eyebrows furrowed.
He promised to come back first thing first tomorrow morning.
The young nurse came back with her dumb smile and her red jelly.
Keigo acknowledged neither of them.
"At least if you don't want to eat try to sleep, alright ?"
Keigo stayed sat against two pillows so thin his back hurt from his position.
He kept looking at the door, clenched fists holding his bed sheet, as still as a cadaver.
Soon, even the lights in the corridor went off.
Another nurse stopped by, told him to sleep, and shut off the room's lights.
Keigo stayed seated in pitch black, alone and cold.
Something akin to a crazy, desperate laugh, threatened to burst from his lips, but he held himself back.
His eyes were heavy and stinging.
At some point, he couldn't feel his back anymore.
Someone had to come. They had to.
When the door opened, Keigo looked at a different nurse who jumped up in fright.
"Oh my god", she said, hand on her heart. "You scared me. Why are you sitting in the dark? You know early risers have the right to turn on the lights, don't you ?"
She breezed through the room, opened the curtains, and let the early morning light come in.
"It will be a good day", she said, flashing him a smile. "I have a good feeling about it"
A while later, they brought him breakfast.
They took it back, untouched, later.
The doctor came.
He made Hawks go through different exams, and tried to see if he could walk – he could, though it was done on wobbly legs.
"Quirks users physically enhanced truly are something else", he muttered while jotting things down on a notepad
He left. Lunch came. It left too.
At three o'clock, the door opened once more.
It wasn't the nurse.
Standing in the doorway was President Pantu, one hand on the doorknob.
She seized Hawks from top to bottom, her eyes lingering longer on the battered wings that lay like a bag of bones around him.
"You look like shit"
Someone had come.
Someone had come.
He perked up before faltering, hurt and disappointed.
His boss had been the first.
'And probably the last', he thought sourly.
A few minutes later Pantu and her no-name assistant were seated next to his bed, the latter one hanging back nervously, shooting Hawks half-admiring half-horrified glances.
Pantu's voice was business-like:
"We read your medical report and the doctor was categorical: your wings are damaged beyond repair. Your career as a Hero is finished"
Something flashed in Hawk's dull eyes.
Fear and crippling joy exploded in his chest.
He'd never been anything but Hawks – and now, at 23, he'd been handed a ticket to a true life.
Oh shit. He wouldn't ever fly again.
But he'd be free.
Shit shit shit.
He wouldn't be the birdie in a cage anymore.
He was free.
"As per your contract-"
"And Dabi ?", asked Keigo, voice as raspy as sandpaper. "He's dead, isn't he ?"
Pantu eyed him for a while.
"… yes"
Keigo let himself fall back against his pillows, relief flooding him.
He'd done it.
And now he was free - free from the shackles of his past, free from his servitude : free, free, free.
"Though I would like to know… why did you fight him ?"
The corner of Keigo's mouth twitched, a smile threatening to make him look like a psycho.
"I was patrolling when I spotted him in this disaffected area"
Pantu's eyes were as cold as ice.
"You had no shift that night"
The lack of any inflection in her voice made her all the more startling.
Keigo would have shrugged if he could have.
"I never have anything else to do", he said. "And you know I like flying while it's nighttime"
It had gotten him in trouble quite a lot of times when he'd been a trainee at the Commission.
Pantu looked at him in silence.
"So you didn't do it for the kid ?"
Keigo's bloodshot eyes snapped to hers.
Arms crossed, eyes narrowed, she was leaning back confidently against her chair.
"Don't look at me like that. You know as well as I do why we assigned you to him"
They'd tasked Hawks with gaining the kid's trust to get more insight into his abilities and, a few years down the road, to recruit him.
They just hadn't factored in the fact that their operative was craving any form of emotional connection – as meek as it could be – and that he'd be the one whose trust would be won.
"You knew we were considering striking a deal with the kid in exchange for killing his brother", said Pantu. "You wrote the reports suggesting we did so yourself and rather than let us get an advantage on him, you decided to do it on your own"
Keigo clenched the sheet in his fist, his eyes growing sharp.
"I have never written or said anything about such a course of action"
He remembered very clearly purposefully not writing about anything of the sort for he did not want Shoto to get caged by the Commission like he'd been.
"Don't play coy. You knew that it would've helped us get the kid's loyalty yet you decided to act on your own: and now what do we have? No deal and a useless, broken Hero"
Hawks and Keigo's left eyebrow twitched.
"I've killed someone we had on our hit list for a while", he said through gritted teeth.
"You planned an operation on your mine and undermined us in the process"
"I didn't plan anything", insisted Keigo. "I spotted him and I knew he was supposed to be on house arrest. I wanted to arrest him but he attacked me. I don't know what he was doing outside, but I picked up the scent of drugs on him. It may have been why he'd wandered so far from his home"
Pantu cocked her head to the side, assessing, wondering if she could trust the words coming out of a corrupted agent's mouth.
"… there were no drugs"
"What ?"
"There was no sign of any drugs in his system", she explained. "I know for sure because Endeavor insisted we checked in case they could plead that he wasn't aware of what he was doing in an eventual trial"
Keigo's froze.
Was she lying?
He put the 'trial' part aside, his mind going a mile per second.
He was sure that Shoto had told him he would drug Dabi to make it easier for Keigo to kill him.
That was why Keigo had shed his feathers and left them so far away: he'd been confident about killing Dabi no matter what.
"Anyway", said Pantu. "We need to talk about what we'll do with you-"
Panic shot up through Keigo's chest.
His skin grew sweaty, his breathing getting out chopped.
There had to be drugs involved.
There had to be.
"… still have your utility. You'll-"
"What do you mean there were no drugs ?", he pressed urgently. "Are you sure you haven't made a mistake? I am confident he was drugged"
Pantu frowned at being interrupted, shut up, then said slowly :
"A doctor appointed by the Commission and a doctor appointed by Endeavor himself ran an analysis on him: he had not taken the slightest amount of drug"
Keigo's eyes grew unfocused.
Sweating, he clenched his fists so hard he dug bloody crescent moons in his palms. Beads of blood rolled down the sheet.
It was absolutely impossible.
He couldn't believe it- didn't want to believe it.
No, it's not true. It's impossible.
Was she lying? She had to be lying.
Pantu was always trying to get inside everyone's head to make them do whatever she wanted: of course, she lied.
Of course.
And the more he thought about it, the more anxious he grew.
No. I refuse. No.
Dabi's last words before they fought hit him at full force.
'The kid's using you and you're too dumb to realize it'.
"As I was saying", said Pantu, wary eyes strained on an increasingly red Hawks. "Despite your circumstances, your contract hasn't been fulfilled"
Hawks' eyes snapped to hers.
He looked aghast, maybe even sick, his eyes glassy.
"Thus we have decided that you'll fulfill a new kind of mission"
Her assistant hurriedly put some papers down on Keigo's lap.
Keigo's hands clenched hard on it. Red smeared the corners.
The words written on the paper were hidden behind a blurry curtain: Keigo blinked profusely until his gaze focused.
He tried to read what was written but didn't manage to comprehend it.
His hands were shaking so hard he could only make out the outline of words.
"We'll get you out of here as soon as we can and you'll immediately start siring as many offspring as you can"
His panic turned to utter shock.
"We have already a few potential candidates ready", said Pantu. "Though we could take the scientific approach, it is believed that the traditional way tends to create stronger children"
He stopped moving, stopped thinking, stopped breathing.
"As it was not part of your training when you were you were younger", said Pantu "You'll have to follow a few courses before starting the project. Though I believe I should congratulate you for being the first member of the Japanese's Quirks Inter-crossing Quirks Project"
She smiled, one of these slow, rare smiles that were supposed to make you feel as if you did great, as if pleasing her and getting one of her signature smiles was of utmost privilege.
His eyes slid to her a no-name assistant.
The man had had no reaction; Keigo felt another burst of hysteria threatening to make him lose his mind.
He ran his nails back and forth in his palms, so deep that he grated bits of bloody skin.
"What-"
Hawks licked his chapped lips, too stunned to continue properly.
"What will happen to the kids ?", Keigo croaked
Pantu's smile dimmed.
"They'll have the honor of being our nation's Heroes or soldiers, of course". She shrugged dismissively. "Though it'll depend on how well they'll do during their training years"
Keigo's mind went blank.
"You won't have any legal authority over them but-"
Keigo's generation of Commission's child soldiers had been the first.
He'd been the only one to become a Hero: he thought it had meant they deemed their program as unrealistic.
He thought it meant they'd be the first and the last to ever suffer as much as they did.
"- they'll know you are their father. Though no contact will be-"
But they wanted another generation of winged kids training in cold, dark undergrounds.
"-allowed-"
There would be another generation of lonely, anxious, emotionally stunned kids, raised by strangers who didn't care about them.
"-considering your age, we think we could conduct the project for the next twenty years at a rate of twelve children a year-"
They would be his.
His.
"- rare Quirk. You will be generously rewarded for each of them that get your wings."
She smiled.
She fucking smiled.
And then, suddenly, something snapped inside Keigo.
His mind went white as if the accumulated pent-up anger and frustration he'd held onto his whole life was bursting through in a single, devastating wave.
His fingers closed on his feather before he even knew what he was going to do.
He moved forward and hit, hit, hit again.
Someone screamed.
Blood splashed onto his face, warm and slick.
He hit again.
His muscles were hot from the movement, his bones creaking as if it had been years since he'd moved as much.
He hit for his anger was a burning fire that consumed him whole, hit until his atrophied arm started shaking, hit until his breathing grew heavy and ragged.
It smelt like iron. His nostrils flared.
He wouldn't let go.
He couldn't let go.
Thud.
Children.
Thud.
She was going to hurt children.
Thud thud thud.
Keigo inhaled.
He rose, panting, and dropped his broken feather.
He sat on the edge of his bed, mind blank, eyes on the pool of blood growing and disappearing under his bed.
His hair was sticking to his sweaty brows; he slicked it back with one hand, smearing red all across his forehead.
He felt utterly calm.
His vacant gaze roamed over the room.
The no-name assistant had fallen from his chair and was sprawled out, frozen, eyes widened in terror.
His pack of cigarettes fell from his front pocket and right into the blood. It sent red splashes everywhere.
At the threshold of the room was the young nurse, her legs wobbly, holding on the wall for dear life
She'd peed her pants.
None of them dared to move, afraid that if they drew his attention he'd sprang up and do the same to them.
Keigo bent down and took the cigarettes.
His bare foot squashed a bit of Pantu's breast while he bent.
He settled comfortably onto the bed, one leg hovering over the floor while his arm lay carelessly against a raised knee.
The cigarettes were soaked red. He didn't mind.
Keigo smoked slowly, thoughtfully, as if he were back in one of the Commission's bars to get wasted.
Rings of smoke rose from his lips. They hit the blood-speckled ceiling.
Now people would definitely come to see him.
*
A/N : Taking my one week planning break starting from today.
Next chapter will be wednesday or saturday (depending on the amount of bonus chapters I manage to pull out for P@treon members)
If you like the story, want to see what happens next/support it/read ahead of schedule up to 27 chapters (+ the last chapter of Part 2 that will arrive friday) then go check my P@treon, Nar_cisseENG
And see you in the next update everyone !
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