Chapter Text
Fall Into Heaven
Her heart hammered so hard it seemed to make the night itself tremble. The soft euphoria that had bloomed seconds before curdled into a bitter, hot adrenaline that flooded every vein. Y/N looked up into Toya’s face. His gaze had gone flat; glassy, exhausted, rimmed red in the way someone’s eyes look just before they break or just before they give out. It was impossible to tell which.
She glanced down at his hand. His fingers still clutched the collar of her top, holding her back from the drop. Her arms hung useless at her sides, as if they belonged to someone else.
“Toya…” she whispered, voice fragile and thin, and lifted her eyes to him again.
“I should’ve known better than to trust you… again,” he said, his voice uncannily calm.
“Wh… what?”
“You said you wouldn’t leave me alone when it ends.”
“I don’t understand…”
“But just now, when I pushed you over the edge–” He glanced away for a moment, toward the blackness below. “You looked like you were glad to go alone.” He turned back, and the red in his eyes deepened, as if his next breath might dissolve into tears. “You’re heartless, Y/N. A liar to the core.”
A single tear cut a path down her cheek. She frowned, stuttering. “That’s not who I am… I didn’t mean to hurt you...”
“If you mean it… prove it. Make me fall with you – down into death.”
Her pupils widened, the tears came unbidden. “Toya… I can’t. I just… can’t bring myself to do that…”
“You can. You love me, right?” His grip eased; three fingers loosening until only thumb and forefinger held fabric.
“Do it… or rot by yourself.”
“Toya… don’t do this…”
“Don’t waste your last chance, doll,” he said, and his thumb slid away. For a breath, everything narrowed to the sound of the river and the cold breath of wind.
She turned her head slowly, looked down. Below them the field was a thick carpet of flowers, dark and soft in the moon’s indifferent light. Seven meters, maybe more, it would be enough.
“Shame it ends like this…” Toya murmured, voice so low it almost folded into the grass. Then the last finger let go.
Y/N screamed, her voice raw with terror. Instinct overpowered reason; her hands shot out and clutched at Toya’s arm. His body lurched with hers, and the world gave way beneath them both.
Together they tipped into the void.
…
It was well past midnight when Natsuo sat perched on his windowsill, the glass pushed open, the night air moving gently across his face. He stared out toward the entrance of the estate, waiting for the familiar sight of his brother’s black Corvette turning into the drive. The hours slipped by, each one heavier, each one duller than the last.
When the clock above his desk read past two, he finally looked away from the dark road outside. He pulled his phone from the pocket of his pajama pants, the screen glowed in the silence: no calls, no messages. He had tried reaching Toya again and again, but as always, the phone was switched off. His brother had made himself unreachable.
Tonight, though, the silence carried a different weight. For hours now, Natsuo had felt a strange pressure in his chest, it was sharp and restless, like a warning he couldn’t name. With a weary sigh, he slid down from the sill and left his room.
The light spilling from the kitchen surprised him. Inside, Fuyumi sat alone at the counter, her hands wrapped around a steaming cup of tea. She was staring down into it as if waiting for some answer to rise from the surface.
“Fuyumi?” Natsuo’s voice broke the quiet.
She flinched, her shoulders tightening. Only then did she lift her eyes, half-lidded with fatigue. “Oh, Natsuo… what’s the matter? Can’t sleep either?”
He crossed the room, pulling down a mug from the cupboard. “Yeah… I don’t feel right,” he admitted, setting a teabag inside before pouring hot water from the kettle she’d left behind. Leaning against the counter beside her, he asked, “Have you heard from Toya tonight? Ever since he went off with Keigo, it’s like he vanished.”
Fuyumi took a slow sip before answering. “I spoke with Keigo about two hours ago,” she murmured, lifting her eyes to meet his. “After they met up with that friend Tenko, Keigo told me he watched over Toya for a while. He said it was because you’ve been worrying so much.”
Natsuo stirred his tea absently, the spoon clinking against porcelain. “Yeah… I told him weeks ago Toya’s been different. He’s always been weird, but now it feels like something’s really wrong.”
Fuyumi breathed out slowly, as though the words themselves weighed on her. After a moment she went on. “Well… Keigo said Toya picked up the girl he likes from the movies. They got dinner, then he dropped her off. He assumed it was her place.”
Natsuo turned his head slightly, studying Fuyumi’s face in the pale kitchen light. “But… that was two hours ago, right?”
“Yeah… by now, he should’ve been home.”
A tightness gathered in Natsuo’s chest. His voice was low, almost breaking. “Could something have happened on the way? Or… do you think he did something to himself?”
Fuyumi pressed her fingertips to her temples, as if trying to steady herself. “I don’t know, Natsuo… I’m as worried as you are.”
“Damn it… so what do we do?” His hand pressed hard against his chest, where his heartbeat thrashed violently, like a trapped animal tearing at its cage.
Before either could say more, Fuyumi’s phone began to ring. The sharp sound cut into the stillness of the kitchen, both of them looked down at the glowing screen on the counter. The name “Keigo 💕” pulsed across it.
“What? Keigo wouldn’t call this time of night…” Fuyumi whispered, hesitating as her hand hovered over the device.
“Answer it, Fuyumi! It’s gotta be about Toya!” Natsuo hissed, his voice harsh with urgency.
Fuyumi picked up the phone and switched on the speaker. “Hello? Keigo?”
“Yo… Sorry for the late call, but…”
Natsuo leaned forward, unable to hold back. “Keigo, just answer me – is Toya okay?!”
On the other end came only silence for a breath, then Keigo’s voice, subdued. “Shit… So he never came home.”
“No,” Fuyumi answered quickly, “I’ve been in the kitchen, waiting for him for hours. Did something happen?”
“Yeah,” Keigo muttered. “The police just called me. Y/N, the girl he was with tonight – she never got home either.”
Natsuo froze. Fuyumi’s grip on the phone trembled. “Wait, you told me he drove her home! So how can that be?”
“I just saw him park in front of what was probably her place. I never actually saw them leave the car. Damn it… Should’ve stayed watching. Now they’re both missing.”
At that moment, the front door slammed open. Heavy footsteps reverberated through the hall. “Dad?” Natsuo called, turning sharply toward the sound.
Enji stood in the doorway, his wide eyes mirroring their own. “Natsuo, where the hell is Toya?!” His voice cut through the kitchen as he stormed toward his son.
Natsuo lifted his head, pupils wide, the color drained from his face. “He hasn’t come home. We’ve been waiting too,” he murmured.
“Shit,” Enji muttered, he turned sharply to his daughter. “Fuyumi, has Toya contacted you?”
Before she could speak, Keigo’s voice drifted from the phone. “I take it the cops filled you in as well, Enji?”
Enji snatched the device from Fuyumi’s hand. “Yes, I was informed. Do you know their location? The girl’s father called me in a panic, demanding I find them immediately. His wife collapsed and needed a paramedic. If you know anything, tell me now.”
“Wherever they are, they’re together. I’m taking off to look. You should gather a search team too,” Keigo answered.
“My team’s on it. I’m heading out myself.”
There was a short pause, then Keigo’s voice, softer. “Okay. Let’s move.” The line went dead.
Enji lowered the phone, his eyes narrowing as they swept over his two children. Their wide, frozen gazes met his, the silence in the kitchen weighted with everything left unsaid. “The moment he comes through that door, call me.” Without another word, he turned and left. Moments later, the front door closed with a dull finality.
Fuyumi let out a long sigh, slipping her glasses from her face and setting them down on the counter. She pressed both hands to her eyes, as if trying to shut out the world. Natsuo watched her carefully. In moments like this, she reminded him of their mother; tired, fragile, yet still carrying more than anyone else should have to.
Quietly, he stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her. “Go get some rest. I’ll wait up for him,” he said gently.
Fuyumi leaned into the embrace for a heartbeat, then slowly pulled away. “Thanks, Natsuo… it means a lot,” she whispered, the faintest of smiles on her lips. At the doorway, she turned back once more, her eyes soft but clouded with worry. “Just… don’t stay up too late either,” she added, before disappearing into the dim hallway.
…
The sky was pitch black as Keigo stood on the roof of a tall building, watching the city spread out beneath him. Tokyo pulsed with restless energy, its streets alive with murmurs, laughter, the occasional sharp voice cutting through the night. It was a city that never seemed to close its eyes.
He slipped his phone from his pocket and checked the time; just before four. The screen’s glow felt strange against the darkness. Opening the map app, he traced the lines with his finger, his eyes fixed on the screen. “I checked the whole area around Y/N’s apartment – no sign of them,” he muttered, tapping restlessly.
For a moment, he looked down again at the city, its lights shimmering like stars spilled across the earth. “Endeavor’s search unit is handling the area near his home.”
His gaze drifted further, toward the darker edge of the skyline, where the outline of the forest rose against the horizon. “Damn it… think, Keigo. Where would they go…” His eyes lingered, almost unconsciously, on the distant shape of Sekoto Peak. The thought brushed against him quietly, like a shadow. “Could it be… they went to...”
His phone vibrated in his hand. He answered immediately. “Endeavor?”
“Keigo, head north from your position and attach to the search team. They’ve been told to expect you,” Endeavor’s voice commanded, low and urgent.
Keigo glanced once more at the mountain; silent, immovable, the opposite direction from where he was being called. He let out a long sigh, spread his wings wide, and rose into the darkness, the city lights falling away beneath him.
…
“Natsuo… I’m here… Natsuo…” A rasping voice threaded through the dark, barely a breath. “Natsuo… please… get me out… get me out of here…”
Natsuo blinked and the world rearranged itself. He was no longer in his kitchen; he was kneeling on wet, heavy grass. The air smelled of earth and something colder; old rain, turned to mud. Two fresh graves yawned before him, their soil still loose at the edges, headstones standing pale against the washed afternoon sky.
“Where am I… what is this place…” he murmured, lifting his head. Around him stood faces he knew and faces he didn’t; his family, crowded in a slow ring, but their features were blurred by a black haze. Beyond them, strangers and a scatter of young people who looked like Toya’s classmates watched with a distance that felt like glass between them.
A sudden, hard pulse beat in his chest. He turned back to the graves and saw two coffins being lowered in unison, the ropes creaking and the shovels waiting like ceremonial instruments.
“Natsuo… I’m still here… I’m not dead…” The voice came again, and this time he recognized it – Toya.
Panic uncoiled inside him. Without thinking, he threw himself toward the nearer pit and tumbled onto the coffin’s lid. He clawed at the wood, nails scraping, trying to force it open, but it held firm. “Get me out… I don’t want to stay here…” Toya’s voice came muffled from within. Natsuo’s hands struck the lid until his palms stung. “Damn it, Toya! What the fuck are you doing in here?! You’re not dead!”
Above him, cold soil began to fall like rain. He looked up and saw two shovels tipping earth into the grave. “Hey! Stop! Toya’s not dead!” he cried, scrambling, but the sides of the pit were slick and treacherous; every time he hauled himself up the wet earth slid beneath him and sent him back down.
The grave took him in little by little. Mud clung to his knees, then his waist, each handful packing coldly around his limbs. “Please, stop! I’m here too!”But the shovel’s rhythm did not falter.
“Please, I’m begging you – stop!” His voice thinned with panic as the dirt climbed past his shoulders.
When soil finally kissed his face, he gasped; clay filled his mouth soon and the taste of it was bitter and absolute.
“Please – I’m going to die here!”
Dirt kept coming, small avalanches of earth burying the sound of his cries. For a heartbeat, breath was a thing he could still name; then even that slipped away. He felt the pressure of the world close in, the weight of a quiet that did not lift. At the very end, with the horizon of light narrowing to an impossible thread, he heard himself whispering – less a question than a wish:
“Stop… we’re alive… right, Toya?”
“…”
“Toya?”
…
Natsuo jolted awake, his chest heaving, clothes clinging damply to his skin. Terror lingered in his body, trembling through him as though the dream still clutched his lungs. He pressed a hand hard against his chest, coughed, then dragged both palms across his face.
“Damn it…” he muttered, his voice thin. The kitchen swam back into focus around him; the faint hum of the refrigerator, the cool wood against his legs. He realized he had been sitting on the floor, his back pressed against the counter as if he’d collapsed there. “Just a nightmare… nothing more.”
Forcing himself upright, he reached for his phone. “Almost five already…”
He slipped out of the estate and stepped into the front yard. The air outside was sharp, filled with the faint scent of damp soil and summer grass. He scanned the parking area: his father’s Mercedes gone, Toya’s Corvette absent too.
“Still gone…” He went inside again and closed the door. “Where are you, you reckless idiot…” he whispered, running a hand through his hair as he climbed the stairs.
His body carried him toward his own room, but when he reached the landing his eyes shifted, drawn instead to the far corridor. At its end stood the last door – the one that belonged to Toya.
A strange chill seemed to seep from it, invisible but palpable, as if countless cold hands reached out, tugging him closer. His heartbeat returned to the frantic rhythm of his dream.
Step by hesitant step, he moved down the hallway. The brass knob glinted dully in the dark, and he stared at it until his throat tightened. “Should I really…?” His fingers brushed the handle, then recoiled quickly. He looked over his shoulder toward the stairwell, half-expecting footsteps, a voice, anything.
But silence pressed in, Toya had not returned, not since yesterday. And the memory of the nightmare still burned in his chest. “What if it actually happened this time…”
He turned back toward the door. His hand, almost without his permission, settled on the knob again. “I’m sorry, Toya,” he murmured, swallowing hard, “but this counts as an emergency.” The latch clicked softly, and he stepped inside.
The room greeted him with a heavy stillness, as if it carried the residue of old sorrow. The walls were plain white and empty. Aside from a lone electric guitar leaning against the wall, nothing marked the space as his brother’s. The furniture was minimal, functional. The bed lay unmade, stripped of covers, its pillow bare. A few clothes slumped over the back of the chair, more scattered across the floor. It felt less like a bedroom than a place abandoned mid-thought.
On the desk stood a box filled with strange and unplaceable things; bottles of glue and thickening agents, different flours and powders, containers of chemicals Natsuo couldn’t name, and even a carton of eggs.
“What… the hell…” he muttered under his breath. His eyes shifted to the test tubes lined up beside the box. They contained fluids both transparent and clouded, as if suspended between water and milk, unsettling in their ambiguity.
Natsuo shook his head, forcing himself to look away. He knelt and searched the shelves beneath the desk; school supplies, tangled cables, spare parts for Toya’s PC and guitar. Everything ordinary, even dull. He opened the waste bin, but it too revealed nothing.
That was what unsettled him most. The room felt stripped of presence, like a place someone passed through without ever choosing to stay. If Toya were truly to vanish one day, whether swallowed by his Quirk or his own will, there would be nothing left to hold on to. Because Toya did not live, he merely drifted.
Natsuo’s vision blurred. He rubbed his eyes quickly, pushing back the sting before the tears could form. He sat down on the bare bed and released a shaky breath into the stillness.
That was when he noticed the scent. It was faint at first, then undeniable; the same toxic-sweet fragrance he had caught before, when Toya had opened the door with reddened eyes and shoved him away. Natsuo pulled the blanket closer, burying his nose in the fabric. The smell clung sharply; blood orange, faint floral notes, something woody beneath.
“Why does this smell like… a girl?” he whispered, unsettled, pressing his face to the pillow now. The fragrance was stronger there, soaked into the fabric as if someone had slept with their perfume steeping into the cotton. Natsuo jolted back, heart racing. “What’s going on here…”
His eyes fell on the wardrobe. It seemed ordinary, but something about it called to him with silent urgency, as if the truth itself was pressing from inside, demanding to be found.
He grasped the handles and flung the doors wide. For a moment, everything looked as expected: clothes shoved without care onto shelves, folded lazily into uneven piles. But his gaze slipped downward, toward the lowest shelf.
It was a heap – no, a small mountain of clothes, lightly damp with sweat and blood and carrying the faint, acrid scent of smoke. Training clothes, most likely, abandoned here and left waiting for a wash that never came.
Natsuo knelt before them and began to dig, though he couldn’t have said why. What was he searching for? A clue? A piece of Toya the family hadn’t already lost? Or something darker… proof that the distance between them was already too great.
He tossed the pile behind him in careless armfuls until, buried at the bottom, something surfaced.
A small wooden box.
Natsuo froze. His hands trembled as he lifted it carefully, as though the weight of its contents might tip the balance of everything he thought he knew. It might contain nothing… or it might hold exactly what he feared most: the truth that Toya was already gone, in ways no one had been willing to admit.
He set the box on his lap, closed his eyes, and drew in a long breath.
“Shit… What kind of trouble did you get into, Toya…”
When he opened his eyes again, he lifted the lid. The sight inside made his breath catch.
The first thing he drew out was a small bundle of tied-together hair; soft, glossy strands that could never have belonged to Toya. Natsuo turned them in his hand, the faint sheen catching in the faint morning light.
“This hair… it’s familiar…” he whispered, though the recognition slipped through him like water, the shock blurring his memory before any face could take shape. He set the hair carefully on the floor beside him and reached back into the box.
Next came a lipstick, or a tinted balm, it was small, unremarkable, and entirely out of place. Then a piece of fabric, light and crumpled. When he let it dangle from his fingers, its shape was unmistakable: a thong, pink and delicate. His body flinched as if burned. He dropped it instantly, his breath quickening, heart hammering against his ribs.
Still, his hands moved again, as though compelled. This time, he found a sheet of paper, folded and crushed. He set the box aside and smoothed the page flat against the floor. It was a manga panel: a portrait of a male hero, strikingly reminiscent of Toya himself. But the image was covered in kiss marks; red and pink prints pressed over the face, careless yet deliberate.
Natsuo stared at it in silence, unable to decide whether this discovery revealed anything at all, or whether it only deepened the riddle of his brother.
The next object he drew from the wooden box was a perfume bottle, its glass the shade of deep red wine. He uncapped it and brought the nozzle to his nose. The scent that rose up was unmistakable the same fragrance woven into Toya’s blanket, clinging stubbornly to his pillow.
For a moment Natsuo froze, then his gaze flicked over the growing collection of unfamiliar things scattered around him. Each one pointed in the same direction, and together they began to form a picture… A picture he didn’t want to see.
“What is this… what’s going on…” he whispered, though the words did nothing to steady him.
He peered once more into the box and noticed a folded slip of paper at the bottom. Carefully, yet unwillingly, he pulled it free and unfolded it. The handwriting was Toya’s.
The words blurred as his eyes filled. Each line pressed heavier against him, unbearable in its weight. The world seemed to tighten around him; the air grew sharper, colder. His chest locked, and his fingers shook as if frost had settled into his bones. And yet the morning was warm, softened by a summer breeze drifting in through the open window.
This cold had nothing to do with weather. It was the chill of absence, the kind that stretches into forever.
Then, breaking the silence, came the faint rhythm of footsteps in the hallway. Soft, deliberate and drawing closer. Natsuo’s tears stopped instantly. His body stiffened, his breath caught.
“Is that… Toya?”
Panic rushed through him. He scrambled to gather the scattered items, shoving them back into the wooden box with clumsy hands. The footsteps paused just outside the door.
“Shit,” he hissed under his breath, jamming the box into the wardrobe and fumbling to throw the clothes back over it.
The doorknob turned, the door opened. Natsuo spun, heart hammering, words spilling out before thought could catch them.
“I didn’t mean to – I’m sorry!”