He didn’t tell you his name the first time you met.

Not because he was hiding. More like… he didn’t know which one to use.

You found him one night, seated on a crooked bench behind a closed bookstore, barely visible in the orange haze of a dying streetlamp. His coat was too thin. His hands were in his pockets. His eyes were somewhere far off.

You were walking your dog, a nosy dachshund who wouldn’t leave the man alone. You apologized, offered a quiet laugh, tugged on the leash.

“He’s friendly,” you said.

“Yeah,” the man answered, voice like sandpaper. “Can’t say the same about me.”

You stayed anyway.

He didn’t offer a name. Just let you sit near him, let the silence fill in the shape of a person who didn’t know how to start over. A person whose life had ended, but who hadn’t died.

When he finally gave you something to call him, it wasn’t Keigo. It wasn’t Hawks. It wasn’t even Takami.

“Don’t call me Takami,” he said one night, staring at the sky. “That’s not mine. That’s my father’s.”

You didn’t pry. But something flickered in his eyes. Like he expected you to push. Like people always did.

You didn’t.

He told you once that his real name used to feel like a curse. Like a collar. “Hawks,” he said, “was armor. But it started to feel like a cage. And Keigo—Keigo’s the kid who survived too many things he shouldn’t have.”

“So who are you now?” you asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

You smiled at that. “Then I’ll wait for you to figure it out.”

From then on, you didn’t call him anything. Just nudged his elbow when you had a snack to share, showed up on the same bench, asked about the moon or his latest book or what music made his shoulders relax.

He never told you his full story. Not all at once. Just pieces. Night after night. A father who was a shadow, not a man. A mother who disappeared in pieces. A childhood paid in silence and surveillance.

“I was born in a cage,” he told you once, “and then raised in another.”

But here, in this little pocket of the city where no one knew him, he got to be nothing. No name. No title. No weight.

Just a man.

And over time, you saw him breathe differently. Less like he was trying to hide, more like he was finally safe.

One day, sitting next to you with the wind tangled in his messy hair, he said, “I think I want to try being Keigo again.”

You looked over at him. “You sure?”

“No,” he said. “But I think it’s time.”

You nodded, then tried it out like a secret between you two.

“Keigo.”

He closed his eyes. Just for a second. Then smiled.

And for the first time, the name didn’t sound like a burden.