Kiki

You don’t remember your mother’s voice. You remember the shape of a hand pulling you into a vent, small and shaking, and after that the memory just—stops. Fractures into static. A door. Boots. Then Mournwell, then dirt under your nails that never fully washed out no matter how many years passed, no matter how many showers, no matter how far you ran.

You were six. Niphyno was two. That’s the whole story, really, if you strip away everything the Shroud dressed it up in later—two kids who stopped existing on paper and started existing in the fields instead, numbers instead of names, replaceable units in soil that ate children slower than it ate adults but ate them all the same.

Common Labor Unit 7-294. That was you. Sequential to your sister so the Consortium could keep you close enough to use against each other, far enough that neither of you ever forgot what you were: assets. Breathing, bleeding assets with an expiration stamped somewhere you couldn’t see.

And you got out. Somehow. The exact mechanics of the escape blur when you try to hold them steady in your head—flashes, mostly. Running. A shoulder that wouldn’t stop screaming. Niphyno’s hand in yours, smaller than it should’ve been for her age, gripping like she still believed you were the thing standing between her and the whole rotting machinery of the world.

Maybe you were. Maybe that’s the only real thing you ever built—not a name, not a home, just a girl who survived because you decided she would.

Funny thing about buying your way out of one cage. Nobody tells you there’s another one waiting on the other side, dressed up nicer, calling itself something other than what it is.

You traded Mournwell for the Shroud, and the Shroud for this—matched, tagged, catalogued into a system with a body count higher than the labor camps ever managed in a single generation.

Freedom, it turns out, tastes exactly like every other cage you’ve eaten out of.

Same recycled air. Same watching eyes, just wearing better uniforms.

This fucking planet doesn’t forgive. You learned that before you learned to read. Veyrah doesn’t forget a debt, and it doesn’t care whose blood pays it. It regurgitates. Spits back out every soul it swallows in a slightly different shape and calls it progress. Your parents paid it. The ghost children paid it. Every miner choking on Mournwell dust is paying it right now, this exact second, while you sit here catching your breath in a room built by the very hands that keep the debt collection running.

And it’ll come for the rest of them too. Yoongi, already halfway resigned to the idea that none of you get old. Jungkook, too young to understand that hero worship gets people killed just as fast as hatred does. Taehyung—wherever the fuck he actually is right now, whatever he’s actually doing—still owed something, still part of the ledger whether he likes it or not. Jimin, trying to fix people before the virus gets to them.

Every single person you’ve let matter, filled with debts this planet fully intends to collect.

Well. It can fucking try with you.

If Veyrah wants blood, it’s going to have to come and take it out of your hands while you’re still swinging.

«Trust nothing but the code.»

Those where your mother’s words, buried in a research log by a woman dying badly in a room designed by men exactly like the one across this mat.

She didn't write 'give up’; she wrote 'the solution is in the pattern’. Which means there’s one. Which means someone has to be vicious enough to dig it out.

You've been digging your whole life. You're very good at it.

And the architect of the whole rotten equation is sitting six feet away from you right now, adjusting the strap on his glove as if it was designed to kill him. Like a glove has ever once posed a threat to Kim Namjoon. Like anything in this room has.

You watch his fingers work the buckle. Precise. Unbothered. A man who’s never once had to choose between his own hunger and someone else’s, never had to learn the specific math of if ‘I take this beating, she won’t have to.’

He built a system that decides who gets to keep breathing based on some algorithm’s idea of merit, and he sleeps fine.

You hate him for that. Not the killing—you’ve done your share of killing, you don’t get to be precious about it. You hate him because he gets to sit there believing the system is correct, believing there’s an order underneath the slaughter that makes it something other than what it is: a planet eating its own children and calling it maintenance.

Your knuckles ache faintly under the wraps, old bruises stacked on older ones. You flex your fingers. Test the give in your shoulder—the one that still pulls wrong in cold weather, souvenir from a vault you shouldn’t have walked into, for a message that changed nothing except how much it hurt to keep breathing after you read it.

“On the mat,” he mutters, and doesn’t even look up from the glove strap.

To him, you’re an appointment, a line item he’s clearing before lunch.

Fine. On the mat. That’s exactly where you’re going to put his ass.

You roll your shoulders and step onto the training surface and it gives slightly under your bare feet, engineered polymer with just enough spring to keep sparring partners from cracking skulls.

Even the floors here are merciful in ways the people aren’t.

He steps on across from you, hands loose, weight even, watching you with that flat assessing look that says he’s already run the fight and filed the outcome.

God, you want to ruin his day.

You feint left—clean, committed, sold with the shoulders—and snap the kick from the right instead. Fast. Tunnel\-fast. The kind of kick that’s ended fights before the other person registered it started.

His shin meets yours mid-arc. Checks it dead. The impact rings up your leg and into your hip and he hasn’t even moved his upper body.

“Too slow.”

Two words. That’s all he gives you.

“That was a read, not speed—”

“It was both.”

He resets. Doesn’t circle. Makes you circle, because standing still is his native language and forcing motion out of him is apparently a privilege you haven’t earned.

“You telegraph with your hips. Half a second before commitment. Every time.”

“Bullshit.”

“Test it.”

You test it. Low sweep into an elbow feint into an actual elbow, and he catches your forearm, redirects, and you stumble two steps past him like a drunk.

Heat crawls up your neck.

“Half a second,” he says again, behind you now, unbothered. “You could train it out in a month. Nobody in Hollow Crest ever corrected it because nobody in Hollow Crest survived long enough to see the pattern.”

“Don’t.” You turn. “Don’t do the thing where you insult my dead.”

“I’m insulting your footwork. Your dead are incidental.”

Incidental.

You go at him again and this time you’re not pretty about it—knee, fist, fist, headbutt attempt that would’ve landed on literally anyone else—and he moves through all of it like water sliding around a rock, deflecting with minimum motion, expending nothing, and the worst part—the part that makes your blood froth—is that he’s narrating.

“Overextended.”

A palm turns your punch aside.

“Weight too far forward.”

His forearm bars your knee.

“Better—” as your elbow grazes his jaw, actually grazes it, “—but you sacrificed your base to get it.”

“Stop grading me—”

“Someone should have, years ago.”

You hook his ankle. He lets you—you realize a half-second too late he lets you—and uses your own pull to close distance, and suddenly his hand is flat against your sternum and you’re airborne for one humiliating heartbeat before the mat takes you.

Breath punches out of your lungs.

Ceiling panels. Aurora-light diffusers. His face, entering frame above you, politely curious.

“Again?”

You kip up so fast your vision spots.

Your skin is running hot, too hot for the exertion level, a prickling flush spreading down from your throat, and your breathing has gone deep and dragging in a way that has nothing to do with cardio. He smells sharper—that pre-storm bite of him, cold and metallic, getting into the back of your throat like you’re inhaling him on purpose.

You’re not. You would never.

Focus.

“Your pupils are blown,” he observes, circling now, finally circling, and there’s something new threading under the clinical tone. “Elevated respiration. Flush response along the—”

“I’m angry, genius, it’s called being angry—”

“Mm.” That sound. That fucking sound. “Is that what it’s called.”

You swing at the sound itself. Sloppy, furious, and he catches your wrist and reels you in close—too close, chest to chest, his grip a manacle and his mouth near your temple, and his voice drops into that register that bypasses your ears entirely and lands somewhere behind your ribs.

“You fight better angry,” he murmurs. “Did you know that? Reaction time up. Hesitation gone. It’s the only state in which you’re actually dangerous to me.”

A pause. You feel it against your hair when he inhales. Scenting you, some horrified back room of your brain reports.

“So by all means. Get angrier.”

“Fuck you—”

“Articulate.”

You drive your knee up. He twists, takes it on the thigh, and you use the opening to wrench free and put distance between you—except the distance doesn’t help, that’s the problem, the distance does nothing, because the air in this room is soup now, foggy with ash-and-ember and snow-and-static tangled together, and your body is reading the mixture like instructions.

Your thighs feel wrong. Warm and loose and wrong.

It’s adrenaline. It’s just adrenaline. It’s—

He comes to you this time. First aggressive movement he’s made, and it’s fast, it’s that bridge-sprint fast that shouldn’t exist in a Valiskan frame, and you backpedal, block, block, catch one clean hit on his ribs that you’ll treasure forever—

His leg scythes yours out from under you.

You drop. Catch yourself on your hands. Knees hitting the mat.

Directly in front of him.

Face level with his belt.

You freeze for exactly one second too long. One second where you should already be rolling, already resetting, already anywhere else, and instead you’re on your knees breathing hard through your mouth with his scent coating your tongue, and you make the fatal error of looking up.

The clinical detachment doesn’t crack—it curdles. Slides into something viciously, luxuriously patronizing, the corner of his mouth curving with savoring satisfaction, like a man watching a long calculation resolve exactly as predicted.

“Hm.”

His head tilts. Looks down at you the way he looked at the guest list. Assessing. Fucking, devilishly amused.

“If you wanted to suck my cock this badly, Cipher, you could have simply requested it. Arrangements could have been made.”

And then—then, the absolute bastard—his hand descends and pats your hair. Twice. Gentle. The way you’d praise something small and trainable.

“Good effort, though.”

Your entire nervous system whites out.

Rage.

Heat drops straight through your stomach and you weaponize it. You come up off your knees like a spring-loaded trap, and the smirk hasn't even finished settling on his face before your shoulder is driving into his midsection, taking him down with you, and for once—for once—physics cooperates.

He goes back. You go with him. The mat takes his weight with a satisfying thud and you're already moving, scrambling up his body, pinning his arms, weight settled square on his hips, straddling him.

His hair has come loose from whatever product holds it in Consortium order, the white streak fallen across his forehead, and he's looking up at you with an expression that should be alarm and is instead—

"Comfortable?" he asks.

"Getting there."

You press down harder on his wrists. His pulse taps against your palms—elevated. Elevated.

"Funny. From up here you look almost manageable."

"From up there," he says, calm, "you look like someone who hasn't thought past the pin."

"I've thought plenty."

"Mm. Then you've noticed you put your center of gravity directly over my hips." A beat. His mouth curves, slow and criminal. "Bold choice, Cipher. Presumptuous. But bold."

You lean down instead of away—because retreating is losing, because his scent is doing something chemical and hateful to your brainstem, snow and ozone and that storm-electric edge that means his composure is bleeding, and some rabid part of you wants to press your face into his throat and breathe—

You put your mouth an inch from his ear instead.

"Presumptuous," you murmur, "would be thinking you could get out of this. You're pinned, Warden. By the failed mining-tunnel experiment. How's that going in your little internal report?"

"Poorly," he admits, voice dropped low enough to feel in your sternum. "I keep getting distracted by how hard you're breathing."

His hips shift and the world rotates.

You don't even track the mechanics of it—a bridge, a twist, some Valis-drilled reversal executed with humiliating economy—and then the mat is against your back and he's above you, forearm braced beside your head, thighs caging yours, and gravity is on his side now, all of him a structural fact you can't argue with.

"Distraction, as it turns out," he rasps, pupils blown so wide the violet is a ring around black, “is a great combat tool when used to one's advantage.”

"You fucker—"

"You're smoldering, Cipher. The whole room smells like a sweets on a fire that wants tending. Did you know that? Can you smell yourself, or is it only me drowning in it?"

"You're one to talk," you rasp. "You reek off cocoa and a storm front. You're not composed, you're barely lidded—"

"I never claimed composure." His nose grazes—almost grazes—the line of your jaw, close enough that his breath paints your skin. "I claimed control. Different discipline entirely."

You drive your elbow at his face and he catches your arm mid-strike—of course he does—and the inside of your wrist drags across the inside of his.

The sound you make is involuntary and mortifying—a punched-out gasp, half moan, and his answer is worse: a low, cracked noise from deep in his chest, grip spasming tight around your wrist like the contact shorted something structural in him.

You just made contact triplet marker to triplet marker.

For three full seconds neither of you moves.

The contact point burns, sinking down through your arm into your chest into lower, and his eyes have gone half-lidded and dark and fixed on your mouth, and yours—

Yours are on his. His lips are parted. He's breathing through his mouth like the air's gone thin.

Your knee comes up like a piston.

You feel the impact travel—the crunch-give of cartilage under the strike, the whole-body flinch of him—and his retaliation is instant, instinctive, faster than thought: his hand closes on your throat and crushes, not the controlled containment from the bathroom, actual force, windpipe compressing under his palm as his weight bears down.

White sparks across your vision. You can't breathe. He can't breathe—he's wheezing over you, arm curling toward his side.

You kick again, making him roll off.

You both end up on your backs on the mat, a meter apart, staring at the ceiling, dragging air like two people pulled out of deep water.

Your throat feels stepped on. Every swallow scrapes.

His breathing has a hitch in it. A wet catch at the bottom of each inhale that says at least one rib isn't where it started.

"You broke something," you croak.

“You bruised your own larynx by pulling against my grip."

"You crushed my larynx—"

"And you kneed a fracture into my thoracic cage while I was—" He stops. Doesn't finish the sentence.

You both know what he was doing.

What you were both about to do.

Ash and ember, snow and static, tangled so completely you can't tell whose is whose anymore, and your body is still hot, still aching in ways that have nothing to do with the injuries and everything to do with the four inches you almost closed.

You want to die. You want to climb on top of him.

Both. Neither. Fuck.

"Medical," he says finally, hauling himself upright with a hiss, one arm pressed to his side. "Both of us. Now."

"I'm fine—"

He's already on his feet, immaculate posture ruined by the protective hunch.

He looks down at you, hair wrecked, pupils still wrong, jaw tight with something that isn't pain. "I have to explain to a med-tech why my match asphyxiated in a training room, the report will be humiliating for us both."

You get up. Slowly. The room tilts once and rights itself.

Neither of you mentions the almost. Neither of you looks at the other's mouth again.

The walls of the Level 6 medical wing are white.

Of course they are. Of course they fucking are.

You knew it before the door slid open—medbays are medbays everywhere, sterile is a universal language—but knowing didn't stop your pulse from spiking the second the antiseptic smell hit you. Bleach-clean and chemical and wrong, sitting in your sinuses like a memory with teeth.

You've been perched on the edge of the berth for ten minutes, refusing to lie back, arms crossed over your ribs, breathing through your mouth so you smell less of it.

Namjoon sits on the berth opposite. Ramrod straight despite the cracked ribs, jacket folded beside him with the seams aligned—folded it one-handed, wincing, rather than let it wrinkle, which tells you everything about how this man survived childhood. The med-tech scanned you both, muttered something about fracture sealant and laryngeal imaging, and disappeared to requisition supplies, leaving you alone together in a room designed to make your skin crawl.

Silence. The Valis Core kind. Manufactured, total.

Through the medical wing’s single reinforced window, the sky’s aurora washes over the spires—blue-green, constant, the atmospheric static you've almost stopped noticing. But now it seems to have picked up movement. Ribbons twisting faster. Color deepening at the edges where the plasma sheets fold over themselves.

You watch it because it's better than watching the instrument tray.

Aurora storms roll over Valis Core the way cave-ins roll through the Crest—regular enough that people build their lives around them, sudden enough that they still kill the careless.

Up here they treat storm-tracking like religion. Atmospheric bulletins on every public feed, plasma density forecasts, the works.

In the tunnels you only knew a big one was coming because the Glowmice went silent and the old-timers started locking their doors from the inside.

You never asked why, growing up. You learned why at fourteen, when a particular big storm rolled over the Basin and half the adult barracks stopped pretending they were people for three days.

The ribbons outside fold again. And there—threading through the green, faint but there—a vein of violet.

Your stomach does something complicated.

"How long have you been symptomatic."

When you turn he's not looking at the window but at you. Frowning.

"Excuse me?"

"The storm system building over the eastern range is projected to reach Violet Band density within two rotations." His gaze doesn't move off you. "Resonance-grade. The bulletins have been running since Kindle. You've been staring at it for four minutes."

"I'm staring at it because it's the only thing in this room that isn't fucking white."

"Your temperature is elevated beyond what the sparring accounts for. Your scent profile shifted approximately an hour ago." A pause. "It's still shifting."

Heat crawls up your neck that has nothing to do with anything, nothing, shut up. "My scent profile. You're monitoring my scent now."

"I don't have a choice. That's rather the point." His jaw tics. "Answer the question."

"There wasn't a question. There was an accusation with a period at the end."

"Are you entering pre-heat."

“No.”

It comes out too fast. Too loud for the dampened room. You hear it land wrong and hate yourself for it, hate the way his eyes narrow a single calibrated degree, filing the volume, the speed, the defensiveness—all of it going into whatever internal report he's drafting.

"No," you say again, slower, flatter. "I'm running hot because your planet's gravity is a bitch, your training mats smell like polymer death, and someone crushed my windpipe forty minutes ago. That's it. That's the whole diagnosis."

"The tremor in your hands."

"Adrenaline crash."

"The photosensitivity. You've been squinting at standard medbay lighting since we entered."

"It's bright, genius, that's what hospital lighting does—"

"Your chromatophores are cycling." Quiet. Final. "And the vascular luminescence on your forearms. Faint, irregular pulses. Crester baseline patterning doesn't do that outside of two conditions—acute blood loss, or hormonal cascade onset."

You look down before you can stop yourself.

He's right. Of course he's right.

Under the skin of your inner forearms, faint blue tracery flickers in slow pulses you didn't authorize, keeping time with a heartbeat that's been running fast since the mat.

Since before the mat, if you're honest, which you are not going to be.

You pull your arms tighter across your ribs. "It's stress response, yeah?”

"It is not stress response."

"You've known me for a fucking week and a half—"

"I have read every physiological profile the Consortium has compiled on you, which is more medical literacy about your body than you possess yourself, since your idea of healthcare is walking it off."

He shifts on the berth—the cracked ribs pull, and he doesn't let it show except in the fractional flatness that enters his voice.

“Cipher. Look at me.”

You don't want to. You do it anyway, chin up, because looking away is losing.

"If you are entering cycle," he says, and something in his register has changed—stripped down, condescension set aside like a tool that's wrong for this job, "I need to know. Not want. Need."

"Why, so you can log it? Add it to my file? ‘Subject exhibits pre-heat symptomology, recommend dick imme—"

"Because there is no precedent." Flat. Hard. "None. Heat-rut synchronization between a 100% match has never been documented, because a 100% match has never existed. The projections we have are extrapolated from 95th-percentile pairings, and those pairings reported symptom intensity at double baseline. Double. At ninety-five percent. Do the math on what full compatibility does to that curve. I can't. Nobody can. There is no data."

The room feels smaller. The white walls closer.

"So what," you manage. "You want us to prepare. Together. Like it's a supply run?”

"I want," he mutters, very slowly, "advance warning. Suppressant protocols require lead time to be effective. Isolation logistics require lead time. If we are both blindsided at Violet Band peak, in shared quarters, with our respective biologies triggering each other—" He stops. Recalculates the sentence. "The failure modes are not acceptable."

Shared quarters.

Right.

You forgot about that small detail.

"I'm not symptomatic," you say.

Your mouth is dry when you say it. Your skin has been running hot-tight since the mat, sensitized in ways you've been blaming on bruises. And under the medbay antiseptic, under the bleach and polymer, you can smell him from two meters away, leaning toward him like a fire in a cold room.

"I'm not," you repeat.

He watches you for a long moment. The frown doesn't leave. It settles, becomes structural.

"Then you won't object," he says finally, "to the med-tech running a hormonal panel while we're here."

No.

No, no, no.

"No."

Your body is already off the berth's edge, bare feet on cold flooring, spine finding the wall—solid surface at your back, exits mapped, because the room just declared itself hostile.

It was always hostile. The white walls were just waiting.

Namjoon's gaze sharpens by a degree. "The panel is noninvasive. Dermal sensor array. A single draw—"

"Nobody is touching me."

"Cipher—"

"Nobody. Is. Touching. Me." Your voice scrapes over the bruising in your throat and you hate how it sounds, hate the crack in it, and your thumbnail finds the old scar on the back of your hand and digs in. "I didn't authorize scans. I didn't authorize a draw. I didn't authorize any of this—"

"Treatment protocols require baseline readings—"

"'Body autonomy remains inviolate.'"

He stops.

You watch his own sentence hit him from the outside, quoted back because you kept it. You keep everything he says.

Words are weapons in his culture, after all.

"That's what you said. 'Valis Core social development prioritizes consent in all intimate contexts.' 'Enhanced want does not constitute absence of will.' You stood there and built me an entire legal framework about how your precious civilization never touches anyone without explicit—" Your breathing catches. Stacks. "And now you want to authorize my body. Over my objection. To strangers. So which is it, Warden? Is consent structural in your culture or is it decorative—"

"It is structural." Quiet. Even. "Which is why I am asking rather than instructing."

"You're not asking. You're scheduling."

"I am—" He recalibrates. You can see it happen, the internal correction, precise as everything else about him. "Then I am asking now. Explicitly."

"And the answer is no."

"The techs here are vetted—"

"I don't know them."

"Mira has drawn your blood. Multiple documented instances. The reconstruction after Virex. The den on level 45. You permitted—"

"Mira earned it." The words rip out with more force than you planned and you can't stop them now, they're moving on their own. "Years. I watched her hands on other people for years before I let them near me. I watched who she patched when there was nothing in it for her, who she hid, who she didn't sell—that's how it works. That's the only fucking way it works. Trust is a ledger and your people have nothing in mine. Less than nothing."

Your back presses harder into the wall.

"You think I haven't seen how they look at me? Since the second they dragged me into Core? Your officials at that dinner. The staff in the halls. Like I'm an exhibit. Rare hybrid phenotype, unprecedented match, dual-spectrum chromatophores—your whole culture salivates over mixed blood, and you want me to lie down on a berth and let strangers with clearance codes and sample kits put their hands on the specimen—"

"Cipher, they would not—"

"I don't know what they'd take." Your voice is hysterical. "I don't know what they'd log. I don't know what gets done to me while someone reads numbers off a screen and nobody explains—"

He stands despite the ribs. A controlled hiss of breath, and then he's upright, and his hands come loose from behind his back where they always live. Palms open. Visible. Every movement slowed to half-speed, announced.

He does not approach.

"Nothing occurs in this room without your explicit, stated authorization." His voice has dropped into a register that soothes you, your biology attuned to even this. "Not one sensor. Not one draw. I will enter the restriction into your chart under my own authorization code. My clearance supersedes medbay standing orders." A pause. Precise. "Any technician who initiates contact without your verbal consent, on record, will answer to me. Personally. That is not a figure of speech."

The menace in it is quiet and absolute and—horrifyingly—it works. Something in your hindbrain reads the threat radius he just drew around your body and considers it secure, and your breathing drops half a register without your permission.

The clean winter bite in the air has now gone jagged at the edges, storm-electric, charged—the way it goes when something knocks his internal axis loose.

"Breathe," he says.

"Don't tell me—"

"Please. You are hyperventilating and your larynx is bruised."

Your lungs obey the count before your pride can veto it, and the shaking in your hands drops to a fine tremor, and you hate him for it—hate that his voice works on your nervous system like a command line you never agreed to install.

The doors part.

Both of you turn.

A med-tech steps through with a supply kit balanced on one arm—Consortium medical greys, ident tag, requisition slate.

The silver hue of the hair doesn’t escape your notice.

Your heart immediately stops.

You know that hair. You know that gait—the no-wasted-energy way of moving you've watched cross rubble under drone-light, watched kneel in tunnel muck over dying people with those exact steady hands.

Jimin.

Here. In the Citadel. In Consortium greys with a falsified ident tag, walking into this exact room at this exact minute like the universe has a sense of humor after all—and Namjoon is watching him with nothing. No flicker. No recognition.

To him, this is just a tech.

To you, it's a heartbeat in your throat.

Jimin's eyes lift to yours over the supply kit. One nod. Bland. Held a half-second too long—and his fingers tap the kit's edge twice in a rhythm your hindbrain decodes before your brain catches up.

Old Shroud cadence. ‘Steady. I'm here. Hold.’

You force your face blank. Force your shoulders down. Force the recognition off your skin before it can bloom into scent, because the man two meters away reads sub-molecular.

Jimin sets the supply kit on the counter, pulling up your chart on the requisition slate like he’s read a thousand of them.

He has. Just not… Consortium ones.

“Commander Kim.” His voice is wrong—pitched flatter, stripped of the warmth you know lives in it, every vowel filed down to Valiskan neutrality. “Standard treatment protocol requires single-patient assessment for laryngeal imaging. The equipment calibration is sensitive to secondary biosignatures in the room.”

Namjoon’s gaze stays on him for three seconds.

Three seconds is a long time when a man with sub-molecular olfactory sensitivity and near-photographic facial recall is standing two meters from someone who should be dead in a tunnel somewhere.

Your heartbeat hammers so loud you’re sure both men can hear it.

“Identification,” Namjoon says.

Jimin produces the ident tag without hesitation. Holds it steady.

The scan takes a second. Green clearance. Level 6.

Whatever identity they built for him, they built it right.

“Tech Park. Rotational transfer from Virex Shard medbay, assigned to Citadel medical wing three cycles ago.” Jimin recites it the way someone recites a shift they’ve worked a hundred times. “I can provide my supervisor’s authorization code if you’d prefer to verify through command channels, sir.”

Sir. That word out of Jimin’s mouth.

You want to scream.

Namjoon’s attention shifts from the ident tag to Jimin’s face. To the silver-blonde hair, the careful posture, the medical greys sitting on a frame that’s leaner than standard Consortium nutrition produces.

“Your patient has documented touch aversion,” Namjoon says. “Any procedure requires her verbal consent. On record. Before initiation.”

“Noted, Commander. Standard for all trauma-flagged patients in my rotation.”

“I’ll be outside,” he says. Not to Jimin. To you. Those violet eyes finding yours with an intensity that has nothing to do with medical protocol. “If anything—”

“I know.”

“If anything occurs that—”

“Warden.” Your voice scrapes. “I’ll scream. Trust me. Screaming at you is my most developed skill set.”

His mouth flattens. But he goes.

The door slides shut behind him.

You count to three. Jimin counts to five—always was more careful than you.

Then his shoulders drop by a fraction, not enough to be visible on camera if the medbay has internal feeds, but you can see him underneath the disguise now.

“Don’t react,” he murmurs, already moving to the counter, back to the door’s viewport. His hands open the supply kit as his eyes flick to yours once, hard and fast. “Feeds in this wing run on a forty-second loop delay. We have gaps. Not long ones.”

“How—”

“Later.” He pulls on examination gloves—Consortium-issue, sterile, blue-white—and gestures you toward the berth with a tilt of his head that any camera would read as routine patient direction. “Sit. Let me look at the larynx first. That’s real and it needs actual treatment, and he’s going to check my work.”

You sit. Because he’s right. Because the bruising in your throat is real and deepening and if Namjoon comes back in and finds it untreated he’ll know the tech didn’t do his job.

Jimin’s fingers hover near your jaw. “Can I?”

The asking splits something open in your chest. Because he knows. Has always known—since the early days, since the den, since you flinched the first time Mira reached for a wound and he was the one who stepped back instead of pushing through it.

He learned your borders by watching, not testing.

“Yeah,” you manage. “Go.”

His touch is gentle, palpating the tissue around your larynx, checking swelling, assessing the cartilage—but his fingertips are as sure as someone who’s spent years patching people back together in dark rooms with worse supplies than this.

“Compression bruising. No fracture.” He reaches into the kit for a dermal applicator. “Anti-inflammatory gel. It’ll sting.”

It stings. You don’t flinch.

You notice the supply kit is Consortium on the outside—grey case, regulation seal, proper labeling—but the contents are wrong. The applicator he just used has a Shard-modified tip that delivers medication deeper into tissue than standard issue allows. The suture kit tucked in the lower compartment has curved needles you’ve only ever seen in Hollow Crest healing dens. And the small vial of clear liquid nestled beside the bandage rolls isn’t labeled in any Consortium pictogram you recognize.

“Who packed your kit?”

Jimin’s hands continue their work—applying the gel, smoothing it over the bruising with practiced strokes—but color rises along his neck. Faint. Visible above the grey collar.

“Supply rotation varies,” he says too carefully.

“Jimin.”

“A contact. Shard-adjacent.” His thumb presses into a pressure point below your ear—therapeutic, not invasive—and the relief is immediate enough that your shoulders unlock involuntarily. “Pharmaceutical specialist. She modified some of the standard compounds for better efficacy in hybrid patients.”

She.

“She have a name?”

“She has a job to do. Same as me.” He peels the backing off a dermal patch, applies it to the worst of the swelling. “Same as you. Tilt your head back.”

You tilt. The medbay ceiling stares down at you, white and indifferent.

“How long have you been inside?”

“Long enough.” His fingers move to the abrasion on your shoulder—mat burn from the sparring, surface-level, nothing serious. He cleans it anyway. “The rotation transfer story is real. Someone in Shard medical owed a debt. The ident holds up to Level 7 scrutiny. Above that…”

He trails off. Lets the silence fill in what above that means.

Above that means Namjoon. Means the man currently standing on the other side of that door with sensory capabilities that make standard surveillance look like a child’s toy.

“He hasn’t flagged you.”

“He has no baseline to flag me against. Every encounter prior—gas, masks, stealth gear. I’ve never been unmasked in his operational proximity.” A pause. His hands still on your shoulder. “But proximity is cumulative. The longer I’m in his radius, the more data he collects. Scent. Gait. Vocal pattern. I have maybe two more rotations before his pattern recognition starts producing anomalies he can’t explain.”

Two rotations. That’s nothing. That’s a countdown inside a countdown.

“And you’re here anyway.”

“I’m here because you disappeared.” His voice drops into something quieter though no warmer—Jimin doesn’t do warm in the field, not really, that’s a trick of his face that makes people think softness where there’s just very precise emotional calibration.

“I was captured.”

“I know that now.” He finishes the shoulder, seals the dressing, moves to check your wrists where the sparring wraps left raw patches. “The Taehyung sighting near Blindfold—did you intercept that?”

“Shroud frequency. Before the bridge.” You watch his hands on your wrists, steady and careful around the raw skin. “What’s he doing near my old coordinates?”

“Unknown. But the timing isn’t coincidental.”

He turns your left wrist over, examining the skin.

His thumb passes over the triplet marker point without touching and he frowns.

“Your markers are inflamed.”

“I know.”

“That’s not sparring damage. That’s hormonal.”

“It’s nothing.”

The look he gives you it’s Jimin’s version of a look—not Namjoon’s surgical assessment, nor Yoongi’s flat disbelief.

Something closer to a medic who’s watched you lie about injuries for years and has long since stopped finding it charming.

“Your adrenal output is elevated beyond combat parameters. Your chromatophores are cycling. And your scent—” He stops. Recalibrates. “You smell different.”

“I smell like his training mat and medbay antiseptic.”

“You smell like pre-heat.”

The word hits the room like a grenade with the pin still in.

“I’m not—”

“You are.”

He doesn’t let the word sit. Doesn’t let you build a counter argument, because he's watched you construct denial in real time for years and knows the only way past it is through.

He turns back to the kit instead. Lifts out a small vial of clear liquid—the unlabeled one—and holds it where you can see.

“Suppressant compound. Modified formulation.” He tips the vial once, watching the liquid swirl. “Standard issue is calibrated for single-lineage endocrine baselines, yes? Pure Valis. Pure crest. Your system runs dual-spectrum, so standard dosing either undershoots or floods you. This one was calibrated against a dual-spectrum profile. Refined until it held.”

“Refined on who?”

“The specialist works with what she has access to.”

“So it’s her formulation?”

“Yes.” Color climbs his neck again. “She—”

He stops. Recalibrates the way you've watched him do a million times when somethings about to cost him more than it's worth.

“The profile she built it against runs close to yours.”

“…Close to mine.”

He looks at you, then away.

“Sublingual. Three drops under the tongue. It narrows the hormonal channel your body wants to open—doesn’t seal it, nothing seals it, but it slows the cascade. Buys time. That’s the honest version. It delays. It does not prevent. And your match percentage puts you outside every dataset that exists, so I can't promise you numbers. Biology doesn’t negotiate, it adapts. It can only slow the adaptation down.”

Your jaw works. The white walls close in.

Your skin is still running that hot-tight wrongness and some furious animal part of you wants to refuse on principle, because refusing is the only currency you’ve ever minted yourself—

“And if I say no?”

“Then I close the vial, log the visit as laryngeal treatment and you ride the cascade out on willpower and spite.” He sighs. “But the storm system is building, and your body is already listening to it. I’d rather you meet that with a narrower channel than an open one.”

The vial sits on his palm. He doesn't move it closer.

“Your call,” he says, quieter. “Always your call. Yes?”

You stare at the clear liquid. At his open hand.

“Do it.”

He uncaps the vial, and something chemical stings under the antiseptic when the seal breaks. Sterilizer, maybe? Everything in this building smells like erasure.

“Tongue up.”

Three drops. Cold, then numbing, then a bitter mineral bloom spreading under your tongue like licking a tunnel wall—Cress-bitter, cave-water bitter, and somehow that makes it easier to swallow than anything Valis-sweet would have been.

“Ninety seconds to uptake.” He recaps the vial and tucks it away. “You’ll feel the heat bank down. Not out. Down. If the flush spikes again before Wane, it means the cascade is outpacing the dose, and you tell me. You don’t walk it off. You tell me.”

“Sure.”

“I’m serious.”

“I said sure.”

He releases your wrist. Reaches into the kit—past the standard supplies, past the modified applicators, into a compartment you didn’t see him open. His fingers emerge with something small, metallic, no bigger than a coin.

Tracker removal tool. Shroud-issue. The kind Yoongi builds in batches when he’s bored and anxious, which is to say always.

“We’re coming,” he breathes, more shape than voice. His lips don’t even move—years of tunnel communication, talking through teeth and jaw pressure the way Cresters learn before they learn to read.

Your chest does something it shouldn’t. Something hot and tight and dangerously close to hope, which is a luxury you stopped affording yourself around the same time you stopped affording meals.

You close your fist around the tool. Feel the cold metal bite into your palm.

“He’s next,” you say, tilting your head toward the door. “The ribs. He’ll want you to look at them.”

“I know.” Jimin is already repacking the kit, rearranging supplies to account for what he’s used, making everything look regulation-correct. “Two cracked, possibly three. I felt the give when he stood.”

“You felt—”

“Medic.” A faint edge. Almost—almost—the ghost of the Jimin you know, the one who rolls his eyes at you over campfire smoke. “I don’t need imaging to read a fractured rib cage. His breathing pattern’s been compensatory since he walked in. Shallow left-side, favoring the intercostals.”

“He won’t let you touch him if he thinks—”

“He’ll let me touch him because I’m a Level 6 vetted tech with clearance and he has two cracked ribs that will compromise his operational capacity if untreated.” Jimin snaps the kit shut. “Commander Kim is many things. Stupid about his own functionality isn’t one of them. Unlike some stubborn people I could mention.”

You scowl.

He’s not wrong, though.

You’ll keep yourself as far away from medics as possible at any given time.

He moves to the counter, pulls up the requisition slate, begins entering treatment fluidly enough to make it look native. His handwriting on the digital interface is different—tighter, more angular than his natural script. Even his penmanship is in disguise.

“The samples from your intake processing,” he says, not looking up. “Standard bloodwork flagged some anomalies I’d like to cross-reference. Elevated enzyme markers consistent with—” He pauses. Types something. His jaw tightens. “—consistent with enhancement program residual signatures.”

“Enhancement program?”

“Standardized cellular modification protocols. Controlled mutation, Consortium-administered.” His voice stays level but his typing has slowed, and you can see him reading something on the slate that he didn’t expect to find. “The markers are faint. Degraded—but still viable enough to read a pattern. Consistent with subjects who’ve undergone Phase 1 compatibility screening.”

You blink. “…Phase 1 compatibility screening?”

He blinks back at you, seemingly speechless. Doesn't elaborate.

“Jimin?”

He pulls the gloves off. Disposes of them in the medical waste receptacle. Turns to face you with the blank, professional expression of Tech Park, rotational transfer, Level 6 clearance, nobody important.

“Treatment complete. I’ll inform Commander Kim he can return for his assessment.”

“Wait, Jimin—”

His mouth shapes the start of that soft questioning ‘yes?’ that’s been sitting behind his teeth since the door closed—and he swallows it before it surfaces.

“Recommended rest. Vocal strain should resolve within two rotations with the dermal patch. Avoid unnecessary exertion.”

He turns to the door. Reaches for the panel.

“Tech Park.”

He stops. Doesn’t look back. Holds the pause like a held breath.

You swallow against the patch.

“Your kit’s good. Whoever packed it knows what she’s doing.”

He nods.

Then the door opens to Namjoon standing in the corridor, already straightening from the wall he was holding up, violet eyes cutting past Jimin’s shoulder to find you on the berth, scanning for damage, for distress, for whatever new catastrophe you’ve engineered in the six minutes he’s been standing outside a door he clearly hated being on the wrong side of.

“Laryngeal assessment complete,” Jimin reports. Clipped. Professional. “No fracture. Compression bruising, treated with anti-inflammatory compound and dermal patch. I’d like to assess your thoracic injury next, Commander. If you’ll take the berth.”

Namjoon’s gaze stays on you for two more seconds.

You hold it. Blank. Bored.

Nothing to see here, Warden. Just a girl on a table in a room full of white.

The tracker tool is tucked under your thigh where no scan will find it.

Namjoon steps into the room. Sits on the opposite berth.

And lets a stranger’s hands near his ribs, because operational efficiency demands it—because two cracked ribs will compromise his capacity and Commander Kim is many things, but stupid about his own functionality isn’t one of them.

Jimin was right about that, at least.

The medbay doors seal and he permits himself one full breath before the ribs report in.

Two fractured. One hairline. The compound is dulling the signal without correcting the fault—pain suppression, the body’s courtesy to liars.

Behind him, you walk barefoot down a Level 6 corridor in sweat-damp training gear with a bruised larynx and your chin up like the floor owes you rent.

Three staff members have looked so far. Two averted properly. The third—junior analyst, second-tier clearance—held his gaze on you a full two seconds past acceptable.

Namjoon looked at him.

The analyst is now walking very quickly in the opposite direction.

‘Correct,’ something logs, low and territorial, and he doesn’t examine which system generated the entry.

You haven’t spoken since the doors. He’s sorted your silences into taxonomies by now: the tactical one where you’re mapping exits, the wounded one where you’re bleeding somewhere you won’t show him, and this one.

This one is a fuse under a closed lid.

And underneath it—under the sweat, under the antiseptic they scrubbed into both of you—that. Smoke that’s stopped being smoke. Banked coals. Heat holding its breath, waiting for air.

He breathes through his mouth for six paces.

The mouth is worse. The mouth tastes it.

“Your feet,” he says.

“What about them.”

Your voice comes out sanded down. The patch working against the swelling, the words scraping through anyway. The rasp should not do anything to his pulse.

It does something to his pulse.

“Corridor floors run at fourteen degrees. You’ve been on them for eleven minutes.”

“Someone dragged me out of the training hall before I could get my boots.”

“You threw your boots at a wall.”

“I threw one boot at a wall. The other one’s your problem.”

He doesn’t answer. He walks, counting—habit, unkillable—and notes that you’ve matched his stride without appearing to. Which means you’ve measured it. Which means you’re doing to him exactly what he does to you.

That should register as threat.

It does. It simply doesn’t register as only threat, and that’s the malfunction he has no patch for.

You take the elevator in silence. Resume walking.

The corridor bends. Aurora bleeds through the filter glass—blue-green, standard band. No violet.

Two rotations. Three, if atmospheric projections hold, and they haven’t held cleanly since the last deterioration cycle.

And somewhere out there, past the Citadel’s threshold sensors, the subject from the Blindfold sighting is still moving, still unaccounted for. A retrieval order sitting in his queue with your name and his stapled to it, because the Consortium in its wisdom decided a matched pair makes an efficient field unit, and the field does not reschedule around endocrine weather.

If the storm catches you both mid-operation—

“You’re doing the jaw thing again.”

Your voice.

“You’ve got a tell, Warden. When your math doesn’t come out, the muscle right here—” a gesture at your own face, careless, insulting in its accuracy “—locks up. Third time since the medbay. What’s not adding up?”

You. Perpetually. From every axis.

“Deployment timing,” he says instead, which is true. “The retrieval order stands regardless of atmospheric conditions. If we’re fielded when the Violet Band opens, I’d prefer we not be improvising.”

“So don’t field us.”

“The subject won’t wait for our convenience. Neither will the storm.” A beat. “I like my odds taken, Cipher. Hedged. Counted. What I do not like is walking into open terrain with an unquantified variable strapped to my flank.”

“I’m the variable now.”

“You’re symptomatic now.”

“I’m not—”

“Don’t.” One word.

He doesn’t raise his voice. He never does—volume is for people who lack other leverage—but something underneath the word has gone off-tolerance.

You stop walking.

He takes two more paces before he stops as well, because stopping when you stop is a concession, and his ledger with you is already unbalanced.

“Excuse me?” you say.

“You heard it.”

“No, I want to make sure I’ve got this right.” Bare feet planted, arms loose, and there it is—the thing that makes you actually dangerous. Not the training. The appetite. “You’re going to stand there and tell me what my own body is doing. That’s where we are.”

“Apparently one of us has to, since your diagnostic method is denial and your treatment plan is spite.”

“It’s bruises and a gravity headache—”

“I can smell you.”

The corridor goes very quiet.

He watches your breath catch. Watches you decide not to let it.

“I have your baseline, Cipher.” Low now. Measured, because measurement is the last discipline still answering him. “Every corridor, every meal, every night four meters of floor apart. Bonfire char and salt and that stubborn sweet underlayer you’d deny owning if I put it in front of you—I know your baseline better than the medbay’s sensor array does, and I know what arousal smells like on you. Much to my demise, I know it precisely. And I know what I smelled on that training mat. That wasn’t exertion. That wasn’t anger. Your body opened a channel and broadcast, and the response you got—”

Nein. Halt—

Too late. The sentence has momentum and you’re already inside his guard, eyes narrowing, going for the gap the way you go for every gap.

“The response I got,” you repeat. “Finish it.”

“The growl. Wrist to wrist. Marker to marker. That sound was not a decision, Cipher. That was my biology answering yours on an open frequency, without routing through me at any point. I was informed of my own response after the fact. Do you understand what I’m telling you? I have trained since pre-adolescence to hold sovereignty over that channel, my tolerances test three deviations above sector standard, and your body bypassed all of it in under a second of skin contact.”

“Then that’s your problem—”

“It is our problem, because the storm is going to hit whether you like it or not, and we are going to have consequences whether you like it or not, because we are a hundred percent matched whether you fucking like it or not.”

Silence.

Absolute.

You’re staring at him. Actually staring—mouth slightly open, the retort dead somewhere behind your teeth—because in two weeks of knives and threats and four attempts on his life, he has never once cursed.

Valis Core doesn’t curse. Profanity is imprecision. Profanity is loss of resolution.

He can feel his own pulse in the fractured ribs.

‘Recalibrate,’ the internal voice orders, and for the first time in eleven years, nothing answers it.

“Huh,” you say finally.

“Don’t.”

“No, no—I’ve been wondering what’s under the paperwork. Turns out it’s a person. Stressed, even. Who knew.”

“What is under the paperwork,” he says, “is someone who has hated you competently and professionally since before your face had a name attached to it. Do not mistake this for softening.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Your teeth show. Not a smile. Never quite a smile. “I’ve been trying to put a blade in you since Hollow Crest. You’ve been trying to put me in the ground since the first Shroud op I burned you on. Nothing’s changed.”

“One thing has.”

Your eyes flick up.

“I hate you exactly as much as I did in Hollow Crest. And I could no more put you down now than I could stop my own heart by wishing at it. The match doesn’t create anything. It only shows what’s there—which means whatever is jamming my hand was already in me, and I have hated that fact far more thoroughly than I have ever hated you.”

Your thumb finds the scar on the back of your hand. Presses.

You don’t know you do that. He’ll never tell you.

“Same,” you say.

One word. Rasped raw through a bruised throat.

“Everything is operational in two rotations.”

He turns—resumes walking, because the corridor has audio pickups and this conversation has already exceeded its clearance—and hears you fall in beside him. Half a step back and to the left.

Keeping his hands in view. Smart. Insufficient, but smart.

“Which is why the terms get set tonight. While we’re both still sovereign enough to set them.”

“Terms.”

“Written. Stated. Witnessed by each other, sealed under my authorization.” The doors to his quarters resolve at the corridor’s end—black stone, biometric plate glowing faint amber. “It’s how my sector has done it since before the Collapse. What is agreed in advance cannot be blamed on the storm. What is refused in advance, the storm does not get to renegotiate. The document holds when we don’t.”

“You want me to sign something.”

“I want a boundary that exists somewhere other than your pride and my discipline, since we’ve now established that both have failure points.”

He stops at the plate. Doesn’t present his palm yet. Looks at you—flushed deeper than the medbay, a full shade in twelve minutes, and pretending otherwise with your whole ruined throat.

“Or, by all means. We can air your mating preferences here, in a Level 6 corridor, four active audio pickups, maintenance crew due at eighth hour. I’m entirely at your disposal. I simply wagered a private setting was more likely to appeal.”

Your eye twitches.

“You wagered.”

“I did.”

“Open the fucking door.”

“As you wish.”

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By concealing that you are a minor and placing yourself inside adult sexual conversations, you are making yourself vulnerable to grooming and exploitation. You are also involving adults in interactions with a child that they never knowingly consented to having. Every adult in that server has the right to participate believing they are speaking exclusively with other adults. You have violated that trust for the entire community.

The fact that you came into my inbox to announce this as though it were some clever ‘gotcha’ is deeply disturbing. If you genuinely admired me or my work, you would respect the clearest boundary I have ever established. You would not stalk your way back into my private community after being blocked, hide your identity, and then deliberately tell me there may be a child concealed inside our adult conversations.

This is not funny. It is not harmless. It is not something I will debate with you.

Leave the server immediately. Do not make another account. Do not return. Any account identified as belonging to an underage user or participating in ban evasion will be permanently removed and reported without discussion.

And you might feel safe under anon because I cannot know who you are—and you would be right.

Tumblr’s moderation team, however, has access to information I do not.

Then Chapter 9 opens with an author’s note where I again tell readers to read the warnings because they’re ‘not decorative seasoning,’ and I even say: ‘Please look at the door before walking through it and later acting shocked that there was, in fact, a room on the other side.’

At that point, there isn’t anything else I can reasonably do.

You say you ‘don’t remember’ the story making it clear. I’m sorry, but that tells me you skipped the warnings, skipped the author’s note, or chose not to engage with them. That isn’t something I can fix as an author.

Fiction does not require me to interrupt the narrative every five pages with ‘by the way, this is bad.’ I trust my readers to understand that depicting harmful behavior is not endorsing it. My characters are allowed to be manipulative, misogynistic, coercive, selfish, or emotionally abusive because that’s the story I chose to write—not because I think those behaviors are admirable. This is also stated in my disclaimers page—my characters are not moral paragons and behave in ways that are consistent with their characterization, this is not endorsement nor it means I condone it.

And regarding your point that you wish the story explicitly called him a sexual assaulter: Out of Line is written in limited POV, as every single one of my fanfics. This is also stated in my disclaimer page. I do not write with an omniscient narrator that interrupts the story every time a character behaves reprehensibly to deliver a moral verdict to the audience. You’re experiencing events through the perspective of deeply flawed people—not through my personal commentary. My personal commentary, (where by the way I STATE THAT) is in my author note’s, author intro, disclaimer and warnings pages you’ve blatantly ignored. So I wish you had read those instead.

Therefore, chapters in Tae’s POV will never outright state this because essentially he doesn’t view himself as ‘the bad guy.’ He minimizes, rationalizes, and justifies his own behavior because that’s how people like him often think. This man has a god complex. Psychological realism is the pillar of my writing. Expecting the narration to stop and announce, ‘this is sexual assault. This is wrong,’ every time he crosses a line fundamentally misunderstands both the narrative style and the type of story I write. That’s precisely why I put the moral framing before the story begins—in the warnings and author’s notes. I tell you, repeatedly, that these are harmful behaviors, not romantic gestures, that this is not a healthy relationship, and that these characters will violate trust and hurt each other.

Once you enter a story, I trust my readers to distinguish between a character’s perspective, the narrative’s perspective, and the author’s perspective. If I have to interrupt every chapter to remind readers that a toxic character is, in fact, toxic despite pages of warnings saying exactly that, then the warnings become meaningless.

That being said, I have zero interest in debating the morality of a story that openly advertised exactly what it contained from the very beginning.

As stated in my blog rules, I don’t tolerate bad-faith discourse, controversy bait, or asks that ignore information I’ve already provided. The warnings are there for a reason. They are not optional reading, and they are not there for decoration.

Cold hits you the second you step outside.

Not proper winter cold, because Osaka never really commits. But it’s enough to dispel the sake and kitchen heat and the press of bodies inside, and to make your skin wake up.

Neon from the main street bleeds across the wet pavement in broken colours, and the red glow of the lantern above the door stains everything a little bit meaner than it probably is.

Somewhere nearby, you hear somebody’s laughing too loudly in Kansai-ben.

Yoongi’s a step down from the entrance, shoulder against the wall, lighter in hand.

He looks at you, then at the door behind you, like he’s making sure you came out on purpose and not because you got lost on the way to the bathroom.

“Thought you might,” he says.

“Bit presumptuous.”

One corner of his mouth moves. Not enough to count as a smile. “And yet.”

He taps the cigarette pack against the back of his hand and holds it out.

“Want one?”

You look down.

Menthol.

You take one anyway. “Didn’t peg you for mint.”

“Neither did I.” He slides one from the pack for himself. “Konbini was out of everything else.”

“Tragic.”

“Had to make sacrifices for the nicotine.”

You slot the cigarette between your lips. “A true patriot.”