Fly High, Burn Bright

Chapter 7

By the time I'd managed to wake Keigo up, we had a little less than fifty minutes before we needed to clock in to work. He groaned, but eventually managed to drag himself out of the bed once I'd yanked the blanket off of him. While Keigo got dressed, I made us both some coffee and popped two slices of bread into the toaster, covering them in cherry jam once they were ready. Neither he nor I were morning people, so a slice of toast was usually more than enough to get us started for the day. When Keigo finally came to the kitchen, I'd already eaten and was sipping on my coffee, phone in one hand as I scrolled through the latest news.

Everywhere I looked, I saw the interviews from yesterday. I'd already watched the official news report yesterday right after getting back to the agency, and had been pretty disappointed with how the interviewer portrayed not just me and Keigo, but all of the present heroes, but there wasn't anything I could do about it now. By now, almost all social media platforms were blowing up - turns out, a citizen had been able to film the entire interaction, and the video had been circulating for several hours now. When it popped up on the 'recommended' section on my YouTube account, I waved Keigo over, waiting for him to sit down with the toast in one hand and coffee in the other before pressing the play button.

"Huh? What's that?" Keigo asked, craning his neck a little to get a better view of my phone. 

I rolled my eyes, pausing the video. "Do you live under a rock or something?"

"Hey, hey! If I live under a rock, then so do you!" He pouted in response, and I giggled a little. He still was the same as he'd been all those years ago.

"Whatever you say," I teased him, quickly kissing the tip of his nose. "Apparently, someone took a video of the fight from yesterday and uploaded it on YouTube. I was just going to watch it now," I explained to him, and Keigo's eyes lit up when I pressed play once again. We watched as the villains split from their group, each taking on a hero that had arrived, the camera shaking a little every few seconds. Despite the fact that I'd been a hero for three years now, it still felt weird, knowing that there was footage of myself everywhere on the internet. 

Keigo was focused on the bottom left corner of the screen, coffee stuck halfway between his lips and the table as he watched me fight against Muscular. To anyone who didn't know my quirk, it would probably seem like the villain was drunk - he kept attacking empty spaces where no one stood as I dodged around him, trying to get as many cuts in with my knives as I could. Even I had to admit it looked as if I'd picked a fight with an oversized intoxicated idiot, but I smiled a little. Compared to how I'd fought my first villain, the progress of my mastery on both my quirk and my knives was drastic. By the time the video hit the ten-minute mark, I'd managed to tie up the villain and was running to where Keigo - no, Hawks - was. 

The camera zoomed in onto the both of us, the video losing focus for a second before returning back to normal. From a different perspective, my interaction with Spinner was even more gruesome - the angle made it look as if I'd actually cut the villain's throat, and the yank on the handcuffs looked even more forceful than it actually was. I flinched a little, watching myself drive my knee into Spinner's face as the expression on my face was a deadly calm - surely I didn't actually look like that?  Blood dripped from the villain's face, but in the video, I still looked like I wanted to force even more pain on him, my eyes fueled with a cruel determination. 

Keigo glanced up at me from the screen, his eyes full of concern. "M-maybe that's enough for now," he stammered, pausing the video. There's no way I'm actually like that, is there? That video probably just made me look bad. I'm not that sadistic when it comes to putting the villains in their place.  With shaky hands, I clicked out of the video, going instead to the comments section. "Hey, Kira, how about we stay away from the comments for now, alright?" Keigo offered with a smile, but I waved him off. 

To no surprise, the top comment was about Keigo himself - one of his many fans ranting about how cool and strong he was - and several other similar comments followed. I scrolled down a little further, past all of the thirsting remarks made about my boyfriend, until I reached something a little different.

"Did you guys see that? 11:43 - she's crazy loll"

I pressed on the timestamp only to get returned right to the part where I'd first started questioning Spinner with the knife in hand. I winced, but returned to the comment, scrolling briefly through the replies. They were all just as negative, saying that even though he was a villain, it was wrong of me to be so merciless. 

"She seems more like a villain than a hero"

My heart shattered. Did they really mean that? I was just trying to get information from Spinner... Besides, I'd been the first hero on site to defeat one of the villains. Surely they didn't actually mean it. There's no way that I'd spent my whole life training to be a hero just for people to accuse me of being the exact opposite. Maybe I should take it a little easier next time... I drained my cup of coffee, trying my best to push away the dread that settled over my chest. No. I did what I had to do. Spinner was wrong. He hurt hundreds of people, and what I did to him is barely on the radar of all the pain he deserves for putting others through hell. I refuse to change my morals just because some random person I've never met thinks I'm not likeable.

I numbly turned off my phone and shoved it in my pocket before quickly washing out my cup, trying my best to calm down the anger that built up within me. Who are they to tell me how I need to do my job? If they don't like the way I work, that's too bad for them. Suddenly, I felt warmth wrap around me from all sides as Keigo hugged me from behind, resting his chin on my shoulder and kissing my cheek.

"Ignore them," he whispered into my ear. "You're a hero, and you always will be, no matter what they say about you."

I turned around so that I could face him, my arms locking behind his neck as I pulled him into a slow kiss. "Don't worry about me," I smiled in response after we'd broken apart. "I'll be fine as long as you're by my side."

After another sweet kiss, I pushed Keigo back to the table, where he still had his half-eaten toast and almost empty cup of coffee. I left the kitchen and went back to the bedroom, grabbing my belts of daggers and poisons and strapping them onto my waist and thighs. My quirk wasn't the best when it came to fighting, so I had to learn how to use weapons to my advantage. A few more minutes passed before Keigo was ready to leave, and by 7:48, we'd already made our way to the elevator of the apartment complex. We didn't really have to walk to the agency, considering we had access to the roof and Keigo could just fly us down, but walking together helped us both relax - it reminded us of our younger selves.

Within minutes, we stood outside the agency, and were greeted by an angry Niko - they seemed to spend every second of their day at the agency, always being the first person to get to the agency and the last to leave. As soon as he saw us, he pulled out their phone to show me the video, but I gave them a meek smile.

"We saw it already. The comments, too." Niko's gaze softened a little, and he let us go to our offices in peace. The day assed pretty quickly, with nothing unusual happening - Keigo and I, along with some other heroes from the agency, had been assigned to patrolling the city, and I paid more attention than usual to the area near Seijin high school. Luckily, nothing out of the ordinary happened, with only a few small criminals attempting a robbery that I'd managed to stop pretty easily. When the walkie-talkie buzzed, calling us all back to the agency, I filled out a few papers about the robbers, submitting them into management, but thankfully, small crimes like that didn't require too much work to file. 

As soon as our shift was over, Keigo and I left the agency behind with a quick goodbye to our coworkers, walking through the streets and towards a weekend of free time spent together.