mich

No amount of preparation ever seemed to relax you before a flight. Whether it was the long grueling hours spent in the airport or the anticipation of taking off, stuck in an uncomfortable seat with your elbows rubbing against a total strangers’, you absolutely loathed flying.

There were times when your determination won out, though. Fear of flying be damned, you had places you wanted to see before you died. 

Now was one of those times.

You were sitting stiffly in your seat, trying to even your breathing and calm the hell down now that the plane was actually in the sky. But there was a pressure in your head from the elevation making you feel like your ears were full of cotton and the loud, continuous hum of the engine wasn’t doing you any favors.

You were glad your seatmate had the window shade pulled down. The sight of being over the clouds would surely take you out in your current state. He wore a pair of vintage style headphones over his ears, minding his own business with his head rested back against the seat.

He had the right idea.

With trembling hands, you unzipped your carry on to pull out your own headphones. Drowning out the sound of the roaring engine with your top songs of the month would help clear your head and provide a nice distraction to calm your nerves.

Your bag was well-organized when you left the house. But by now you’d dug through it so many times it was a mix of tangled wires, chapstick, loose credit and ID cards, your worn half-read book you slid a receipt into as a makeshift bookmark…

No headphones. But you hadn’t forgotten them at home or packed them in the wrong bag; no, you had used them in the airport. Which means they were now sitting abandoned, waiting to be claimed by someone lucky enough to spot them.

At least they weren't your expensive ones...

You covered your face and groaned as quietly as you could. You still caught the attention of the man beside you. He had only glanced at you. No judgment in his eyes, but no sympathy either. He was just watching you, like, ‘oh. this is the person I have to ask to move if I need to use the bathroom.’

Heat climbed up your neck and you swiped your book out of your bag bitterly, opening it to your bookmarked page and staring at the words rather than reading them. They melded together in front of your eyes, letters blending and turning into inky blobs in the wake of your pounding headache. 

No headphones, no ibuprofen. You were lying to yourself if you thought you were well-prepared. Maybe this is why flying was always miserable for you. 

You squeezed your eyes shut, leaning your head back against the seat. The darkness behind your eyelids helped you focus on clearing your mind, singling out that loud engine hum and trying to force it to fade into the background. It became more and more distant and…

Was that music?

At first you thought you were wishfully imagining it in your head, still broken over your lost headphones. But then you focused on the sound a bit more, and yeah, that was definitely someone shredding on guitar.

You opened your eyes and looked beside you at your seat neighbor where the sound was coming from. His headphones were leaking his music, just loud enough for you to hear. It was barely audible, but you could make out what he was listening to.

His eyes were shut, so you took the opportunity to shamelessly catalogue his features to memory. Particularly the long scar running across his cheek. The dimple on his chin. The wrinkle between his eyebrows. 

You sat back against your seat, straining your ears to listen along. You were desperate enough to make a game out of it, too, guessing every track. Radiohead, the Smiths, Chevelle…

But the next song gave you pause. It immediately struck you with recognition, a song you’d heard maybe a hundred times over your morning coffee. It was almost comforting hearing it now, over 30,000 feet in the air.

So, being as subtle as possible, you leaned your head to the side of your seat, trying to hear a little better…

Okay, clearly not subtle enough. The music paused. When you looked over to investigate why, he was looking right at you. 

You sat up straight, turning your head away as if you hadn’t just been listening to music from a stranger's headphones. Totally cool, totally normal, you’re sure he didn’t notice.

He slid his headphones down to his shoulders, and you knew it was over for you.

“Were you listening?” He asked, pointing to his headphones. 

You laughed sheepishly. “Uh, yeah. Sorry. I sort of forgot my headphones.”

Instead of being weirded out by you–or if he was, he didn’t show it on his face–he just nodded, unbothered. 

For some reason, you decided to fill his silence.

“I’m a nervous flyer and music calms me down.” You explained.  You were like a running tap, not able to close your mouth the moment his headphones were off apparently. “Your volume was pretty loud so I could hear it through your headphones.”

Based on his lack of responses, you expected him to ask you to stop being a weirdo, and that he’s not a free radio station service. 

“The music calms me down, too.” He admitted it and then turned back to glance at the covered window, like he wasn’t expecting to open up to a stranger today.

Granted, neither were you. But you weren’t going to stop now. If you didn’t have the music anymore, you were going to get your nervous energy out by rambling to this admittedly handsome man sitting beside you.

“My best friend’s getting married,” you said, “I’m meeting her and some of our other friends for a kind of bachelorette trip. You?”

“Work.” He said simply, “not as interesting as partying.”

The scar on his cheek hinted otherwise. But you weren’t going to say that to him–you still had some semblance of a filter.

“We’re not really going to party, per se. Just…sightseeing.” You explained, looking down at the book still left in your lap. “She’s always wanted to go and her life’s so busy this is her only chance to do it before the wedding planning chaos.”

“What about you?” He asked, to your surprise. “Do you like traveling?”

You laughed nervously. “The being there part is great. Getting there, not so much…”

The slight shaking in your hands and bees nest in your stomach was proof enough. 

“That song that was just playing–I recognized it because, well,” you bit the inside of your cheek, “this is going to sound strange, but the jukebox at this diner I go to for breakfast every morning always gets stuck playing it on a loop, and–”

“The jukebox at the Bel Aire Diner.” He finished for you. “I know the one.”

Your eyebrows raised. “You’re from Hell’s Kitchen, too? I’ve never seen you in the diner, though. We must be there at different times of day.”

“Must be.” He repeated after you, and you caught the corners of his lips raising in a smile.

His gaze fell to your still quivering hands. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the MP3 player his headphones were connected to.

You watched him press play again, music filtering in through the headphones that were still resting on his shoulders. The music was now just loud enough for you and him to hear. 

“Go ahead and listen.” He offered. “If it helps.”

The gesture surprised you. But certainly wasn’t unwelcome. The buzzing in your stomach calmed to a soft fluttering.

“Thank you.” You smiled, leaning back in your seat again. “What was your name, by the way?”

He smiled, lips pulled to one side. “It’s Dex.”

You gave him your name, and watched him mouth it once before the music caught your attention again.

It was a slower song now, the chords progressing in a gentle melody. You recognized it, too, the lyrics repeating themselves in your head as you followed along.

You hadn’t even realized you drifted off until you woke later from the high-pitched whistle of the plane descending. The first thing you registered was how warm your body was, eyes fluttering open. It was then you felt the gentle pressure of your head resting against something hard.

Oh god. Your stomach flipped when you realized you had ended up with your head on his shoulder at some point. He didn’t seem to mind. He had the window shade pulled up now, staring out at the evening skyline. 

Your face heated up and you sat up straight in your seat, rubbing your eyes. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to fall asleep on you there…”

He turned to look at you and shrugged. “Didn’t even notice.”

If he was trying to rescue your dignity, he was doing a great job at it. 

His music was still playing until the plane had finished landing. You had moved out of the aisle to let him through, holding onto your book that had stayed in your lap the entire flight. In a distracted haste to grab your bag, you noticed he had left the plane before you got a chance to say anything more to him.

It made your heart sink. You were sure there was a little something there, even if it was just him being friendly… 

But once you too were out of the plane, smelling the fresh air of the new city you had traveled to, you were overcome with the excitement of being somewhere new.

You could be grateful to him for making it the least agonizing flight of your career, even if the two of you were ships in the night.

Your friends promised to pick you up after you landed, but you had made it about a half hour early. Sitting at the nearest bench, you flipped your book open to the receipt-marked page.

Oh. 

There was a note scribbled onto the empty space underneath the final paragraph of the page. 

See you in Bel Air Diner.

- D

Your lips pulled into a smile, your finger tracing over the blue ink.

You still didn't have headphones for your flight home, but now you had something a little better.

The library closes at nine. He knows this because he has been here every night for six weeks, sitting in the car across the street with the engine off and his hands folded in his lap, watching the lights die floor by floor. Third floor first, periodicals, local history, the reading room with the big leather chairs where old men doze over newspapers they aren't really reading. Then the second. Then the long, slow amber bleed of the ground floor, where you are always the last thing moving before the dark takes everything. He times it. Of course he times it. The interval between the last patron leaving and your silhouette crossing the lobby for the final walk-through is four minutes and thirty seconds, give or take twelve, and the give or take twelve is data he is still refining, still narrowing, because precision is the only thing that has ever made him feel like the world is a place that can be understood rather than a place that simply happens to him.

He sits very straight in the driver's seat, it is a fact of his body now, the way the Cogmium running along his spine holds him upright with a rigidity that is absolute and permanent, a steel architecture fused into the architecture of him. He has been through a great deal since the Riviera Psychiatric Institute, since the mental institution with its heavy medication and its stripped cell and the moniker they gave him there that he has chosen to keep. He has been through a great deal and he has come out of it with metal in his spine and his name cleared and his badge back and a very clear understanding of what he is, which is something he could not have said a few years ago.

Benjamin Poindexter. Dex, to the people at the office. Bullseye, to the city at night, though the city doesn't know that yet. FBI agent by day, by the rigid structure that has always been the thing that keeps him functional, keeps the frequency at a tolerable volume, keeps the version of himself that he has chosen to present to the world intact. And then, after the shift ends and the badge goes in the drawer, something else. Something that has always been there underneath, that he has stopped pretending isn't.

He has been acquitted. He has had his record cleared and his career reinstated and a very well-compensated attorney who argued very convincingly that everything he did, he did under psychological duress and the manipulation of Wilson Fisk, and the jury agreed, which he found interesting. He is not sure he agrees. He does not think what he did was Fisk's fault, exactly. He thinks it was more like Fisk opened a door that was already there, already ajar, and Dex walked through it because that is what you do with open doors. But the jury's version of events gave him his freedom back, and he is not going to argue with the outcome.

The point is: he is different now. Cleaner. More settled in the particular truth of himself, which is that he needs structure and he needs a North Star and without both of those things the corpse keeps walking and the insects get loud and the world becomes something that simply happens to him rather than a place he moves through with intention. He has the structure. He is currently in the process of acquiring the North Star.

She runs the library.

He discovered her by accident, the way he discovers everything that matters, not through planning but through the particular attentiveness he brings to the world at all times, the way everything registers whether he wants it to or not, the way his eyes and ears and the whole hyper-calibrated instrument of his nervous system collects data continuously and without his permission. He was driving past. She was visible through the ground floor window, moving through the amber light of the building's close, and something in the frequency of the world adjusted, just slightly, just enough, the way tinnitus breaks when the right sound cuts through it. The insects went quiet. His foot came off the accelerator. He pulled over and sat for a long time with the engine running and his hands still on the wheel and watched your silhouette move through the building until the last light went out.

He tells himself he is doing reconnaissance. The word reconnaissance is load-bearing in ways he cannot afford to examine, because if he examines it he will have to examine what comes after it, and what comes after it is just the raw, structureless truth: he cannot stop. He has not been able to stop since the first time he saw you, and the not-stopping has a momentum now, a mass, something that presses against the inside of his ribs every night as the lights go out floor by floor and your shape moves through the lobby toward the door.

He has been sitting in this car every night since.

He is not the man he was the last time he had a North Star. He knows this with clean certainty, he’s been taken apart and put back together with better materials. Julie was bright, genuinely bright, and he had needed her in the desperate, clawing way of a man with no other options, the way a drowning person needs a specific piece of driftwood, not because the driftwood is the right thing but because it is the thing that is there. He knows this now. He can see it clearly from the other side of everything that happened, from the vantage point of a man with metal in his spine and his name on a badge and a cleaner understanding of his own architecture. Julie was bright. You are something else. You are not a candle or a guttering thing he has to cup his hands around to keep alive. You are the North Star, fixed, and bright, and true, and the difference between the two is the difference between surviving and being saved.

He is not going to make the same mistakes.

You wear your hair up on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The rest of the week it falls loose, tucked behind your left ear when you're shelving, tipping forward when you're bent over the return cart. You park in the northeast corner of the staff lot, always the same spot, under the broken sodium light the city hasn't fixed in the six weeks he's been watching, you walked today. You carry your keys in your right hand from the moment you step outside, every single time, without exception, and this detail does something complicated to him. The fact that you've learned, at some point, to be careful. That someone or something taught you that particular lesson. He respects it. He also catalogs it, the way he catalogs everything: the way you move through a crowd like you've already mapped it, the way you check the lock twice before you leave, the way you tilt your head when you're thinking, chin down, eyes up, the expression of a person who gives problems the weight they deserve and not a gram more.

He knows the interval between your arrival and your first coffee. He knows you take the stairs on days when the lift is slow and the elevator on days when you're carrying something. He knows your shoes by sound, low heel, leather sole, the particular crisp click of someone who has never once shuffled, and the sound of them on tile has become, over six weeks, the metronome by which he organises his own heartbeat when nothing else will cooperate. He knows the way your whole face changes when the after-school children come through the doors on Tuesdays and Thursdays, how the professional composure doesn't disappear exactly, but softens at the edges, becomes something warmer and more unguarded, a version of you that you don't seem to know you're showing. He has watched you crouch down to a child's eye level to talk about a book with the same seriousness you'd bring to any adult conversation, watched you gesture at the shelves with the enthusiasm of someone sharing a personal secret. 

He has heard you, on two separate occasions from his position in the 500s, tell a small group of children that superheroes always come to libraries. That they are, without exception, readers. Knowledgeable. That the library is where they come to stay sharp. He watched a small boy with a Captain America backpack go very still at this information, and he watched you lean in with a conspiratorial expression and tell him, quietly, seriously, with the particular delivery of someone sharing classified intelligence, that Steve Rogers himself had come to this very branch after he was defrosted, because this was where the good books were. The boy's face had done something extraordinary. You had watched it happen with a smile that he has filed separately from everything else, in a part of him he does not have a clinical designation for, because it is the smile of a person who genuinely, simply loves the thing they are doing, and it is the most undefended thing about you, and it costs him something every time he sees it from the wrong side of a windshield.

He tells himself he is still in the surveillance phase. He has been telling himself this for three weeks longer than it was supposed to last, but he has rebuilt the plan twice now, and each time it has contingencies for everything except the shaking. Which is new. Which is not something he has ever had to account for, because he is not a man who shakes. He was cured of shaking a long time ago, along with several other inconvenient pieces of factory wiring, somewhere in the long corridor between the boy in the group home and the FBI agent who could put a round through the left orbital socket of a moving target at four hundred yards and feel, in the moment after, something very close to peace. He is precise. He is controlled. He does not shake. And yet, sitting in the car with the city moving around him and the amber light of the ground floor making your silhouette a long warm shape through the glass, his palms sweat against the steering wheel, and he has to press them flat against his thighs and breathe, four counts in, four counts out, the method that has never once made him feel better but gives the inside of his skull something to do while the rest of him waits to be functional again.

It is an operation. That is what he tells himself. Risk assessment. Variable mapping. Pre-mission reconnaissance. The language helps. It gives the shape of a framework to something that has no framework. The raw, terrible, organism-level need to not be alone in the particular way that he is alone. Not the ordinary kind of alone that other people mean when they use the word, but something more like a frequency. A specific pitch of isolation that hums behind everything and makes the insects start when the silence gets too complete.

He tells himself he is simply a man who uses the library. This is not a lie, exactly. He does use it. He has developed, over the course of three weeks, a genuine and slightly terrifying command of the 500s, Natural Sciences and Mathematics, because it is the section closest to the circulation desk without being at the circulation desk, which means he can occupy the proximity without the exposure of being obviously, helplessly near you. He has read forty pages of a book on mycology. He understands, now, more than he ever wanted to about the way fungi colonise a host, the patience of it, the slow chemical conversation between the organism and the thing it has chosen, the way the colonisation is already complete long before the host has registered it as anything other than ordinary contact. He finds this funny, privately. 

What he does instead, every Wednesday and Friday and twice now on a Tuesday when he could not keep himself in the car any longer, is watch the way you run the building. The staff orient toward you when you enter a room without you doing anything to cause it, no performance, no theatrical authority, none of the particular displays that mediocre people use to remind everyone they're in charge. You don't remind anyone. You simply are, and the room reorganises around it, and you seem entirely unconscious of this, which is the part that gets him every time, the part that makes it very difficult to maintain a reading pace in the 500s. You laugh easily. You argue cheerfully with the senior archivist about periodical cataloguing in a way that suggests this argument is ongoing and beloved by both parties. You bring coffee to the front desk without being asked, and you remember how everyone takes it, and you do not make a thing of remembering. He watches all of this with the focused, cataloguing attention of a man who is building something in his chest from whatever materials you unknowingly provide, and the thing he is building does not have a name yet but it is large and it is structural and it is, he understands in the quiet of the car on the long watching nights, the only thing in him that has ever felt like it was built to last.

The plan, in its current form, is elegant. He rebuilt it from scratch after the second version failed at the contingency level, specifically at the contingency he had labeled involuntary physiological response to proximity, which is the clinical designation for the fact that thinking about the moment of first contact makes his hands stop working the way hands are supposed to work. The new plan is simple. The east wing, where the returns cart parks on Wednesdays. A plausible approach angle. A routine accident, a stumble, a collision, the ordinary clumsiness of a large man in a narrow aisle, followed by the recovery: immediate, useful, apologetic. Harmless.

The 'Dex' persona is good. He has been refining it for years, the pleasant, slightly disarming version of himself that people find unthreatening and easy to be around in equal measure. He is pretty, in the way that makes people trust him before they have decided to, the kind of face that reads as open and a little earnest, that makes the intensity in his eyes look like attentiveness rather than what it actually is. He knows this. He has used it the way he uses everything, deliberately, efficiently, without sentiment. He smooths the mask into place now, sitting in the car, and he breathes, and he tells himself with the deliberate weight of a man talking himself down from a ledge:Wednesday. East wing. Return cart. A simple operation. You have run more complex operations than this with less preparation. He does not let himself think about what the stakes actually are, because the stakes are everything. If she looks at him like he is something to run from, the insects will never stop. If she says no, there is no contingency. He has not written a contingency for that because he cannot make his hands write it.

He gets out of the car.

The library is warm. It smells like old paper and something faintly chemical, cleaning solution, the particular preservation spray used on the leather-bound historical texts in the archive room. He moves through the entrance with the easy, unhurried gait of a man who belongs here, which is not a performance so much as a decision, he belongs anywhere where you are. He takes up a position in the 500s, pulls the mycology book from the shelf by muscle memory, and opens it to a page he has already read four times. His ears do the work instead of his eyes, mapping the building by sound, the soft percussion of keyboards at the reference desk, the particular drag of the returns cart wheels on the east wing tile, the low exchange of voices near the periodicals stairs, and underneath all of it, moving through the ambient noise of the building the way a signal moves through interference, the sound of your footsteps.

Low heel. Leather sole. Even pace. Never rushed.

East wing.

He closes the mycology book. He puts it back with the spine flush to the shelf edge, the way it was when he took it. His pulse is a problem. He is aware of it in the way he is aware of a weapon malfunction mid-mission — the knowledge arriving clean and cold, without panic, but with the particular weight of a variable that has just gone outside acceptable parameters. He tries the military cadence. It does not cooperate. His heart is running its own rhythm, something frantic and uneven that has nothing to do with discipline and everything to do with the fact that the east wing is right there, and the returns cart is right there, and you are —

You are right there.

Your back is to him. You are sliding a book onto a high shelf with the economy of someone who has done this ten thousand times, your arm raised, your chin tilted slightly, and the warm amber light of the east wing does something to the shape of you that he does not look at directly. He has learned, about certain things, not to look directly. He reaches for the nearest book without looking, his hand finds the spine by proximity, closes around it, and he makes himself stand in the posture of a man who came here for books and is having a perfectly ordinary Wednesday evening, while every nerve he has orients toward you with the fixed, unblinking precision of a targeting system that was never designed to be aimed at something like this.

He takes a step. He is calculating the approach angle, rechecking the variables, telling himself the mask is holding and the plan is intact and all he needs to do is execute the intersection — and then his shin finds the returns cart and the whole thing tilts and the books go everywhere.

Not the planned stumble. Just a stumble.

Fuck.

The silence between your turning and your first word is the longest interval he has ever counted. He is crouched on the floor with a stack of perfectly aligned books held against his chest like something he is protecting, his breath coming too short and too shallow, making himself swallow it, making himself take up less space in his own ribcage, waiting for the first word, the first signal, the first indication of whether he has ruined everything or whether there is still —

He hears you turn.

He goes still.

The silence between your turning and your first word is measured automatically, the way he measures everything. He is crouched on the floor with the books held against his chest, his breath controlled and even, he does not hyperventilate anymore, he does not do a great many things he used to do, the stillness goes all the way down now, and he waits for the first word with the particular patience of a man who has learned that patience is not the absence of wanting but the discipline to let the wanting be what it is without letting it run the operation.

"Oh my god, are you okay?"

Your voice hits him somewhere below the sternum — a clean, precise impact, the kind that doesn't announce itself until after, like a blade that finds the gap before the body knows the blade is there. It is warm. Immediately, genuinely warm, the warmth of someone whose first instinct when a stranger goes down hard in her library is uncomplicated concern, who is already moving toward him before the question has finished leaving her mouth, and he was prepared for a great many things but he was not prepared for toward. He has been running the variables for six weeks and he did not adequately weight this one — that you would simply, immediately, without calculation, come toward him. He was prepared for a great many outcomes. He weighted this one at fifteen percent. He adjusts.

He rises slowly, straightening to his full height — all six feet and one inch of it, the weight and the reach and the particular physical fact of him that he has spent years learning to make less visible, and he makes himself small in the only way he knows how. The soft voice. The open hands. The slight rueful tilt of the head that says clumsy, harmless, a little embarrassed about it. He has a good face for this. He has always had a good face for this — something in the arrangement of his features that reads as open and trustworthy before he has done anything to earn it, the kind of face that makes people lean toward him rather than away, and he is using every inch of it right now while his pulse does something frantic and uneven that has nothing to do with the fall.

"I'm fine," he says, and his voice comes out warm and a little self-deprecating, with just enough sheepishness to be disarming. "I'm so sorry. I didn't see the cart."

He is blinking too much. He knows he is blinking too much. He cannot make himself stop. His eyes when they lock onto your face have an intensity he cannot fully manage, a laser focus that sits badly against the apologetic register of everything else, and he is aware of this and cannot do anything about it and is standing here with a perfectly stacked set of library books held against his chest like a holy relic waiting for you to decide what he is.

You look at the books in his arms — perfectly stacked, spines out, ordered by height with a neatness that has nothing to do with the accident that produced it — and then you look at his face, and he watches you take in the blinking and the too-quick apology and the white-knuckled care with which he is holding what he has gathered, and he waits for the recalibration, for the professional distance to come down like a shutter —

You reach out and gently lift the top two books from the stack. Not all of them. Just two, redistributing the weight, freeing his arms slightly, the practical instinctive gesture of someone who has looked at a person holding too much and responded to that specific thing without making anything of it. "You really did stack them perfectly," you say, and there is something in your voice that is dry and kind at the same time, the specific combination of a person who has noticed something a little unexpected and chosen to respond to the part of it that is charming. "Most people would've just shoved them back any which way."

The 'Dex' mask is still there but the seam is showing and underneath it is something that is not the performance at all — just the raw, stripped-back fact of a man who braced for a door closing and has found it still open. "I didn't want to make more work for you," he says, and it is true, and it is one of the more honest things he has said to another person in a long time, and the honesty of it sits on his face for one unguarded second before he gets it back under control.

You try not to smile. He watches you try. "You can put them on the cart," you say. "That's what it's for."

He looks at the books in his hands. He does not put them down. "I'd rather help put them back, if that's okay. I knocked them over." He lets the smile come through properly now, easy, a little rueful, the smile of a man who knows he's being slightly ridiculous and is comfortable enough in his own skin to own it. "It's only fair."

You look at him for a moment, really look, the assessing look of a woman who is careful by habit, and he stands very still and lets you do it, because being looked at by you, even carefully, is something he has been looking forward to for six weeks; your eyes don't linger on the scar across his cheek, skipping over it like it was as natural as his lips or nose.

You are already repositioning the cart against the shelf, glancing back at him over your shoulder with an expression that is entirely open, entirely unafraid. "Come on. You can help me put them back since you clearly know where they go."

He follows you.

His boots make a soft sound on the library carpet and he keeps an easy, non-threatening distance, close enough to be useful, calibrated to the inch, and he is hyper-aware of everything: the back of your head, the way you move through the aisle, the specific quality of the air in this narrow space between the shelves which is warmer than the rest of the building and smells like old paper and something faintly floral that he files with everything else. He hands you books, spine out, author's name forward, and the rhythm of it establishes itself without either of you deciding it should.

"Do you need help with the higher ones?" His voice comes out lower than intended and he adjusts, tries again, deploys the slight self-deprecating tilt of a man who knows he is being a little much and is offering to be useful as a form of apology for it. "I can reach almost anything. Just — whatever you need. I'm right here."

There is a lot of I'm right here in that sentence in terms of what it is doing underneath the words. He is aware of this. He does not think you are.

You glance back at him, and you are trying not to smile — he can see the effort of it, the slight press of your lips — and the effort is somehow worse than the smile would be. "The top shelf," you say. "I usually hold onto the unit to climb up, which is definitely not approved." You hand him a book, spine out, and then another, and the rhythm of it establishes itself without either of you deciding it should — you handing, him reaching, the warm quiet of the east wing settling around you both — and he lets out a breath that he has been holding, in some form or another, for six weeks.

You talk while you work. Not the composed, head-of-the-building version of talking but the easier version, the version that comes out when you are at ease in your own aisle with your own books and the evening is winding toward its close and you have provisionally decided that the man beside you is fine. You tell him about the biography section — the gap on the third shelf you've been trying to fill for six months, the ongoing argument with the acquisitions budget that you are clearly winning on points if not on funding. You hold up a battered donated hardback with a library sticker half-peeled from the spine, showing him the annotations in the margins, the dog-eared corners worn soft with handling. "Somebody loved this very much," you say, with the expression of a person genuinely moved by the evidence of someone else's devotion. "Which means I can't be annoyed that they wrote in it. I can only be a little annoyed."

"Only a little?" he says.

"I'm a professional," you say, and you slot it onto the shelf with a tenderness that entirely contradicts the exasperation, and he watches you do it and feels something move in his chest that he is going to have to examine later, alone, in the car, where it cannot reach his face.

You tell him about the children's reading programme on Tuesday afternoons with the specific delight of someone describing the best part of their week. The way the kids come in already certain of what they want, six years old and completely decided, the most refreshing thing. The small boy last week who had informed you with great authority that sharks could not stop swimming or they would die, then asked if there was a book about sharks, then asked if sharks came to the library, and you had told him very seriously that sharks were avid readers but found the revolving door difficult. You tell this with the expression of someone reliving genuine joy and he watches your face while you tell it and he thinks: there it is. There is the smile from the window. There it is from three feet away.

He watches you stack the books from the trolley in groups of four before you begin shelving — a small unconscious order imposed on the task before the task begins. Four books. Set them down. Four more. He watches it happen twice before he understands what he is seeing, and when he understands it the breath moves through him in four counts without him deciding to breathe.

He does not say anything about it. He hands you the next book, spine up, author's name forward, and says nothing about it at all.

"Do you always tell the kids that superheroes read?" he asks, because he knows the answer and wants to hear you say it from here rather than through a windshield.

You look at him with an expression that is partly surprised and partly pleased that he asked. "Always," you say, without a trace of self-consciousness. "Because it's true. And because a kid who thinks Captain America goes to the library is a kid who thinks the library is worth going to." A beat, the beat of someone deciding whether to say the next thing, and then deciding to. "I may have told a child last month that Steve Rogers came to this specific branch after he was defrosted. Because of the collection."

"Did he?" Dex says.

"The collection is excellent," you say, very seriously, and he laughs — a real one, a short surprised sound that gets out before the mask can review it, and the surprise of it is on his face for one full second before he gets it back, and he watches you notice it, watches your expression do something small and warm in response, and he files it carefully in the part of him that keeps the things he cannot look at directly.

The trolley is empty.

He realises it at the same moment you do. You look at the bare cart, then at your watch, and a small crease of surprise appears between your brows. He knows what you are calculating. He calculated it four minutes ago.

"That was quick," you say.

"You're efficient," he says.

"We're efficient," you correct, and the we is nothing, is a casual inclusion that means exactly what it says, and it lands in him like a key finding a lock it was not made for and turning it anyway. He holds out the last book. Your fingers close around the other end before he releases it, and for one fraction of a second the book is held between you both, and the distance between his hand and yours is three inches, and he is acutely, devastatingly aware of every millimetre of it, the warmth of that gap, the weight of the book as a shared object, and he lets go before the moment becomes a moment.

"Thank you," you say, book tucked under your arm, already turning. "For the help."

"Anytime," he says. The word comes out steady. It costs him.

He is almost at the exit — almost through the door and back into the cold city air, almost clean away with everything he came for and nothing he cannot account for — when he stops. He stops because something has occurred to him, something the 'Dex' mask had filed as inadvisable and which the thing underneath the 'Dex' mask has apparently decided to do anyway, because the laugh got out and the we undid something that had been carefully constructed, and he is at the door with his hand on it and he turns back.

You are at the circulation desk, already bent over something, the particular quality of your focus when you're alone with your work even more concentrated than when people are around. He watches you for two seconds. He makes himself stop after four.

"I feel like I should apologise more formally," he says, and his voice carries across the quiet ground floor with the warmth of a man entirely comfortable making conversation, the easy confidence of someone who has nothing to hide and knows how he reads. "For the cart. I cost you time and made you do the same work twice."

You look up. Mildly puzzled. Mildly amused. "You helped put everything away," you say. "We're even."

"We finished thirteen minutes early," he says, and he lets the smile come through fully now, the disarming one, the self-aware one, the one that reads as charming without trying too hard. "Which means I actually saved you time. Which means technically you owe me."

Something in your expression recalibrates. The look of a person who has just discovered that the man from the east wing aisle is also, unexpectedly, a little funny. "Is that the logic you're going with," you say.

"I'm open to a different interpretation," he says. "But I think the maths holds."

The corner of your mouth does something that is not quite a smile and is considerably more dangerous than one. You reach for the notepad on the desk. You pick up the pen. And you write your number down with the expression of a person who has made a decision and is at peace with it, tearing the page from the pad with a clean neat motion and holding it out across the desk.

"Next time you cause a shelving incident," you say, "you can call ahead."

He crosses the lobby. He takes the piece of paper from your hand, the distance between his fingers and yours smaller than three inches, registered and filed, and folds it once along a clean crease and puts it in the inside pocket of his jacket, close to his chest, where it immediately becomes the most significant object he is currently carrying. More significant than the badge. More significant than the weapon at his hip that you do not know about.

"Goodnight," he says.

"Goodnight," you say, and you are already turning back to the desk, and he walks to the door and through it and out into the cold city air and he does not look back.

He makes it to the corner before he has to stop walking.

He stands with his back against the wall of the building next door, eyes closed, hands flat against his thighs, and he breathes — four counts in, four counts out — while the city moves around him and the insects, for the first time in longer than he can remember, are completely, entirely silent. Not manageable. Not reduced to a tolerable volume. Silent. The paper is in his inside pocket and it is the first thing he has chosen to keep close to his chest in longer than he can accurately calculate, and the warmth of it is either the warmth of a folded piece of notepaper or it is something else entirely, and he is not going to examine which one it is tonight.

He opens his eyes. Through the library window he can see your silhouette at the desk — bent forward, focused, the particular quality of your attention when no one is watching. He checks his watch. Eight forty-seven. Thirteen minutes earlier than your usual closing routine. He helped with the shelving and the shelving went faster and you are thirteen minutes ahead of yourself and he did that. That small, measurable, entirely deniable difference in the shape of your evening — he did that. He is already, in the most practical and ordinary possible way, useful to you.

He is going to be so much more useful than this.

He gives you four minutes. Then he follows.

The window is lit.

You are there.

Your coat is off. You move through the apartment and he can see it properly now — the accumulated warmth of it, the specific living-in of a space that belongs to a person who cares about where she is. There are plants everywhere — on the windowsill, trailing from shelves, a large one in the corner that catches the lamplight and turns it green at the edges. He counts seven from this angle and suspects more. They are not neglected. They are the plants of someone who tends things, who notices when things need water, who has the patience to keep something alive over time. The lamps are warm-toned, two of them visible from here, the specific amber quality of someone who has thought about the light she wants to live in rather than simply accepting the overhead. There are blankets on the couch — he can see the edge of one, the particular softness of something used regularly, something reached for at the end of days like this one. The fire escape runs along the outside of the east-facing window and even in the dark he can make out the shape of another plant out there, something in a terracotta pot, and the edge of what might be a folded chair. A person who uses her fire escape as an extension of the apartment in warmer months. A person who makes the most of every space available to her. He files this. He files all of it.

You make something to eat. He watches the sequence of it, counter, stove, the practiced back and forth of someone who has made this particular thing enough times that the movements are their own kind of order, their own ritual. He wants to know what it is. He wants to know what you eat on a Wednesday evening after close, whether it is the same most nights or whether it varies, what the logic is. He wants to know everything about the shape of your ordinary life with the comprehensive, slightly terrifying hunger of a man who cannot tolerate a gap in the data when the data is you.

You make coffee. He can tell by the choreography of it. Then you open the refrigerator, and even at seventy metres through a rifle scope he can see the particular carton you take from the door shelf, the size and shape of it, the way you shake it once before you open it — and it is not milk. The colour is wrong for milk, the consistency when you pour it is slightly different, and he has been watching you long enough and carefully enough that the difference registers cleanly. Coconut milk. You take your coffee with coconut milk, at the end of a Wednesday evening, standing at your kitchen counter with the lamp on and the coat off and your hair loose, and this detail — this small, specific, entirely ordinary detail — lands in him with the weight of something he has been given rather than taken. Like you handed it across a desk. Like you held it out and said here.

He wants to know if it is always coconut milk or only sometimes. He wants to know if you have a particular brand, if there is a reason for it or if it is simply what you prefer, if you ever run out and substitute something else or if running out means a trip to the corner store regardless of the hour. He wants to know this with an intensity that he recognises as disproportionate to the information itself and does not care, because the disproportionality is the point, the disproportionality is the whole truth of what this is — that there is no detail about you that is too small, no variable too minor to matter, no piece of the complete picture of you that he does not want to hold.

You eat at the counter. Standing, one hand braced against the surface, looking at something he cannot see from this angle — your phone, maybe, or the middle distance where people look when they are processing a day and deciding what to keep. He wonders what you are keeping from today. He wonders if any of it is him.

The insects do not start when he wonders this. That is the thing that undoes him, quietly, on the cold rooftop with the scope at his eye. Usually the wondering is precisely when they start — the not-knowing, the unconfirmed variable, the gap in the data where something could go wrong. But they stay silent. They stay silent because the silence is not about certainty. It is not contingent on the variable being resolved. It is contingent only on you, on the simple fact of your existence in his field of vision, on the coconut milk and the counter and the loose hair and the window you pause at without knowing you do it, and he understands with the particular clarity of a man who has spent a very long time learning to read his own warning systems that this is different. That you are different. That none of the others — not one of them, not Eileen Mercer with her careful structured sessions and her yellow notepad, not any of the guttering candle-light people he has tried to orbit before — none of them did this. None of them made the corpse feel like it might not be a corpse at all.

You rinse the plate. He watches the way you do even this — efficient, unhurried, no wasted motion, the same economy you bring to the library shelves. He watches you pause at the counter after, your hands braced on the edge, looking at something he cannot see, and the stillness of it is different from the stillness of the library, looser at the edges, the specific looseness of a person who has put down the weight of being in charge and is simply existing inside the space that belongs to her.

Then you water the plants.

You move from plant to plant with a small watering can that you fill at the kitchen sink, and you do it with the unhurried attention of someone who knows each one individually, stopping longer at some than others, touching a leaf here and there, the particular way you handle them telling him things about you that he could not have extracted from the parking lot or the 500s or any amount of watching from the wrong distance. You talk to them. He is almost certain you talk to them. He can see the slight movement of your mouth at one point, bent over the large one in the corner, and the realisation of it does something to the quality of his attention that he does not have a clinical designation for and is not going to look at directly tonight.

You love them. This is not data. This is a fact about you that has no operational relevance and that he is going to carry with him regardless.

You move away from the window, deeper into the apartment, and the kitchen light goes off. A new light appears — warmer, lower, the bedroom lamp — and the specific quality of it tells him you are winding down. He watches the light. He watches the shadows it makes at the edge of the window frame. He watches the brief silhouette of you passing across the room once, twice, the particular unhurried movement of someone with nowhere to be and no performance left to give, and he thinks: this is it. This is the version that exists when no one is watching.

He is watching.

The bathroom light comes on from behind your bathroom, he can see the glow of the light that bleeds into the bathroom. He watches the warm glow of it and he waits with the particular patience that is no longer the white-knuckled patience of a man holding himself back but something cleaner than that, something that comes from understanding that the waiting is part of it. That every minute of this is a minute he is building something. She is in there and she is going through whatever she does at the end of a day, the small private rituals of a person alone in her own space, and he cannot see it from here and he does not need to see it because the fact of it is enough. The fact that she exists in there, moving through those rituals, is enough for tonight. He will learn the rest gradually. He will be patient.

He thinks about the faint floral quality of the air in the east wing aisle, which he catalogued this evening for the first time at close range, which means it is something she wears on her skin rather than her clothes — a lotion, maybe, or a perfume applied at the pulse points, the specific places where the warmth of the body carries it. He wants to know what it is. He wants to know the name of it and what it smells like described and whether she has worn it for years or whether it is new, whether she bought it for herself or whether someone gave it to her once, and the thought of the latter produces a response in him that he does not examine.

He will find out. He has time.

The bathroom light turns off.

The bedroom lamp is still on. He watches your silhouette pass the window again — your hair down, something softer on than the work clothes, the private version of you that the library never sees — and you stop at the bookshelf. He can see it from here, the dark shape of it against the warmer interior, and he watches you run your fingers along the spines the way you run your fingers along the library spines — with the quick, certain touch of someone who knows what she is looking for before she finds it. You pull one out. He cannot see the title from seventy metres in the dark and this is the specific gap in his data that bothers him most acutely tonight, more than the food, more than the perfume, because books are the thing he can talk to you about. Books are the territory you share. He wants to know what you read at the end of a Wednesday when you come home from the library and water your plants and make coconut milk coffee and pull something from the shelf before bed.

He’d have ask for a recommendation and see what you suggest

You settle. He watches this for a long time. There is nothing to see, technically — only the warm square of the window and the faint suggestion of the light inside it — but the watching is not about seeing. The watching is about the knowing. About the fact that she is in there, reading, in the warm lamp-glow with the plants on the windowsill and the blankets and the coconut milk coffee going cold on the nightstand probably, and the world outside her window is moving and indifferent and she has no idea that someone is lying on a rooftop seventy metres away in the cold thinking about the way she shook the carton before she opened it and talked to her plants in the dark.

He watches the light for a long time.

He watches it begin to dim — not all at once, but gradually, the particular dimming of a lamp being turned down by degrees, or of someone who has fallen asleep with it on and whose hand has slipped. He watches the quality of it change and change again until it is barely there, the faintest warm edge at the window frame, and then it is gone.

She is asleep.

He stays on the rooftop for a while longer. Long after the window is dark, long after there is any operational justification for remaining in this position in this cold. He stays because the insects are quiet and the cold air is clean and the paper is in his inside pocket and he is not ready to go back to the version of himself that exists without this. The version that sits in an apartment where everything is in its correct place and the photograph on the wall is level to the millimetre and the absence of a North Star is a sound that fills the whole room.

He does not put on the Bullseye costume tonight. He thinks about it — there is work to be done, there is always work to be done, the city does not run out of things that need his particular kind of attention — and he decides against it. Not because he can't. Because tonight is a different kind of night. Tonight is the night of the first brick, and the first brick requires a kind of attention that does not have room for anything else. He wants to sit with it. He wants to carry the paper in his inside pocket and the coconut milk and the plants and the eleven minutes behind the frosted pane all the way home without putting anything else on top of it.

Eventually he disassembles the rifle. In the dark, by feel, in the time it takes most people to tie their shoes. He replaces it in the bag. He zips it closed. He looks one more time at your window — dark now, the city moving quietly behind it, the plants dim shapes on the sill, the fire escape empty, the whole apartment sealed and dark and interior and hers — and he lets himself have it for four counted seconds.

Then he stands. 

Then he goes and his only thoughts are of his north star. 

He walked back to his car at the library and drove over to your apartment, sitting outside with a clear view of your window. He sits in the car for a long time. Your building stands quiet and brick-dark, your window a small dark square on the sixth floor, and he watches it the way he has watched the library window for six weeks — hands on the wheel, engine off, the particular stillness of a man who has found the only fixed point in a dark map and is not going anywhere.

You are the North Star.

He has had others before. People he tried to orbit, fixed points he built his survival around, the bright and guttering things he mistook for stars because they were the brightest lights available at the time. He has had them and he has lost them and each time the dark closed in a little wider and the buzzing got a little louder and the corpse kept walking because that is what corpses do. He knows what loss does to him. He knows the shape of the dark on the other side of it and he is intimately, precisely acquainted with the cost of losing a North Star and he is not going there again.

He has her number in his inside pocket. She said next time like it was already decided. She waters her plants at night and takes her coffee with coconut milk and reads in bed and the lamp goes out gradually rather than all at once, which means she falls asleep with it on, which means she is a person who reads until sleep finds her rather than reading until a decided hour and then putting the book down. He is going to learn the rest. He is going to learn all of it, one layer at a time, with the patience of a man who understands that this is the most important operation he has ever run and who is going to get it right.

He breathes. Four counts in. Four counts out.

Next Wednesday he will have coconut milk in his coffee, in the car, while he watches the lights die floor by floor. It seems like the right thing. It seems like the beginning of a correspondence that only he knows is happening, a conversation that is entirely his until he is ready to let it be shared. He will sit in the car with the coconut milk coffee and watch the amber light of the ground floor and think about the plants and the blankets and the eleven minutes behind the frosted pane and the book he could not see the title of, and he will wait, and he will be patient, and he will be so careful.

He will be back

You worked at ARGUS for five years. 

Your departure from them had been… less than amicable. A Belle Reve cell had your name on it after you’d been exposed as a threat-level unregistered metahuman. Even after dedicating years of your life to Amanda Waller and her questionable causes, there was no sympathy to eke out. You’d been made a criminal— a pariah overnight. 

And all for the unclaimed glory of saving a life.

So, you’ve been run out of the city and into hiding by one of the most powerful women in the world. You flee from Washington DC. 

On your way out, you expect the following to be endless. You expect Amanda Waller’s surveyors and lackeys and employed guns to already be wherever you’re going. 

And to a certain extent, it’s true. You’re on the road for three weeks; swapping stolen car for stolen car when need be. You’re stopped and almost apprehended countless times; at gas stations, at motels, at tollways, where ARGUS agents have been planted to watch for you. Their first order is to subdue, restrain, and subsequently arrest you. If that fails, order 1b is to put a fucking bullet in your forehead.

A clerk at a by-the-hour motel slides you a key card from across the counter, and the bell on the door behind you chimes, announcing an arrival. You recall your hair standing up on the back of your neck. 

‘Y/N L/N, you’re under arrest for—…‘

Yes, yes. Alphabetically,

Aggravated assault, concealment of assets, contempt, domestic terrorism, eluding and fleeing, false pretenses, fraud, homicide– a lot of fucking homicide, motor vehicle theft, resisting police, trespassing, voluntary manslaughter, use of weapons of mass destruction.

It all ends the fucking same. Everytime.

A trail of blood surrounds you, a red circle, a cycle; suddenly there are such sins at your back, it would kill you to turn around.

And then it changes. Maybe you took a turn on a road they didn’t foresee, maybe they never knew where you were going in the first place. Maybe Amanda Waller is tired of wasting resources on a lost cause. Because slowly, and then all at once, you stop having to kill ARGUS officers. 

You pass a sign that says Entering: Metropolis.

It’s a big city. You hear the word Metropolis on national news always in conjunction with some close-call ET bullshit. Always busy with actual malignant super-beings and their respective felonious plans. They wouldn’t be worried about you there, you deduct. There’s a life here, maybe, without killing and being killed.

If you’re lucky.

The trajectory of your time on Earth takes a dramatic shift; falls fast and hard into an uncharted territory for you. You’re so scared. And then… the sun wakes up from behind the skyline, floods your car with orange light. It hits your skin, and it shocks. It feels like you've been living in Plato’s cave for weeks. 

You take it as a sign. Drive towards it.

You get a job as a lab phlebotomist at Metropolis General Hospital and you keep your head down. 

Undoubtedly strange, you are. You have a deep, dark, static cloud that hangs above you like a baby’s mobile, and people take notice. They tend to shy away from you; something is deep seatedly wrong. You press a hollow needle into someone’s blue-green vein a hundred times a day, and you don’t bother to make small talk with the patients anymore. They leave as fast as they can. 

Some days, you barely utter a word to a soul. You learn to go on without anyone's help, or attention, for that matter.

You take to wearing dark clothing and folding into yourself, trying to make as little ripples in the world as possible. Since leaving yourself behind at ARGUS, you have little contact with the things you loved before, and all contact with the nature you deal in. 

Blood.

You can smell it, you can hear it sliding along the common person’s veins like it’s nothing. And it almost is nothing. It’s so glaring sometimes, but the very thing that bars you from your past life at ARGUS is what cradles you now. 

It’s all you can count on being there when you wake up. 

Nobody recognizes you from before, not with your new name and identity, and no agents have come knocking down your door with a warrant. You think that maybe one day, someone will come to know you and you won’t thrash against it like you’re being burned. And it’ll all be okay then. It’s just not safe right now.

But at least you’re fucking alive.

It’s been comparably quiet these last two years. 

Comparably quiet, that is— until your phone rings.

Unknown Number calling…

The only person with the number to your burner phone was one Emilia Harcourt. Not that she would ever admit it willingly to the masses, but you’d made a friend out of her at ARGUS. Steadfastly cold-blooded as she tries to be, she can’t deny your leaving had left her already shoddy personal life wanting.

Currently, she’s building a team against inter-dimensional bugs, whilst fighting along side one of them in a Murn shaped body. Murn and Harcourt have a shocking and disturbing lack of resources and allies. But fuck it, they could make do. 

Though, a name burned consistently into the back of Emilia’s mind over the course of a few nights. Maybe they didn’t have to just make do.  She feels pathetic for having to call, and especially behind Waller’s back, but to make it simple and wholly emotionally detached, they could really fucking use someone like you on their side. 

She’s not even really sure if you’re alive.

Her knee bounces as the phone rings in her ear. And then, there’s a lack of ringing, and she thinks you’ve sent her to voicemail. She’s about to pull away when an unsure breath sounds through her phone’s speaker— a life on the other end.

You’re brought back to the land of the living by way of that long-dormant phone lighting up and buzzing on the nightstand of your cold and pallid apartment in one of the rougher neighborhoods of the city. You don’t know it yet, but as soon as you hang up the call, you’ll move like lightning, packing a bag and leaving this apartment cold and pallid and empty for the foreseeable future. 

‘Hello?’ You breathe out, voice cracking from unuse.

-

A location ping is sent to your phone, and you drive to Washington, and back into where you are wanted most— into the company which Amanda Waller keeps. 

It takes you three days to make the drive from the east coast to the west.

Emilia Harcourt rushes out the door at the sound of a car pulling up to their motel, Murn following closely behind her. Headlights flash them in the eyes, and they hold their hands up as a visor.

You turn the car off, headlights going with it. Their eyes focus in on your figure, and you step out. It’s all still for a moment, except for a light rain hitting the parking lot. She’s just how you remember her; all hard facial expressions and strong eye contact, just with shorter hair. You don’t know the man behind her, but she trusts him, even knowing what he is beneath the handsome face.

‘You came.’ Emilia sighs, and there’s an upturn to her lips. Murn watches curiously. He silently takes stock of you. 

For the first time in a long time, you smile.

‘You called.’ 

You’re pulled into what you assume to be Harcourt’s personal quarters, and just like that, you’re back in the proverbial game. It’s a familiar feeling. Unkempt and startling, but familiar.

Murn throws two dossiers on the couch next to you. You open them as he speaks at you, one for a politician named Goff, and one for a Christopher Smith, alias Peacemaker. You recognize this Peacemaker, and you ask Harcourt if this is the very same Christopher Smith who’d been shot and killed in Corto Maltese. She replies in the affirmative.

‘For your eyes only. Study them. We’ll lay low here for a couple days. Waller is sending someone she trusts for reinforcement.’ Murn speaks with authority. You’re inclined to trust it.

Harcourt shows you to your own room, two rooms away from hers. Close enough for comfort but not so much that it draws suspicion. The door clicks shut behind you, locking automatically, and you let your duffel drop out of your hand next to your feet. 

You’ll sleep soundly here, you think.

-

You’re bound by obligation to come along when everyone ambushes the Peacemaker at his weird home. 

The first time you meet Chris Smith is also the first time you meet Leota Adebayo. You’re holding the fridge door open for Economos, whom you’d been acquainted with in your past work— while he bends forward to rummage through for food. 

Clemson Murn sits in a chair opposite Chris as the rest of you watch on and make your own personal conclusions about the Peacemaker. He introduces you one by one, glazing over your actual job as hostility management.

‘And this is our new recruit, Leota Adebayo, which means she’ll be doing most everything else.’

Leota takes this as an opportunity to make herself transparent with a speech.

‘Glad to be here. Ready to kick some ass, sir. And really lookin’ forward to gettin’ to know all of you. Even you, Peacemaker. Even though you’re not the best guy in the world.’

‘And Economos, you seem like you’re very easy to talk to, so I look forward to working with you. Harcourt, L/N, I feel like because we’re the only women here, we have to have each other’s back. Anything you need, I got you.’

You stand leaning your hip against the counter Harcourt sits on now. You mean to nod your acknowledgement to Adebayo, you really do, but you’re struck– mouth open at how long and drawn out she’s able to make this. It’s thoroughly sweet, though. You like her, as if there was any chance you wouldn’t.

‘And Mr. Murn, I have to say your outfits are really dapper. I’m really excited to be here, and I promise you’re not gonna regret this. I know inside my mind I’m not supposed to be giving a speech, but sometimes my mouth just does what it wants, so…’

‘Close mouth. I’m bitin’ my tongue right now. Not gonna talk again. I’m done talkin’.’

Murn shifts topics and descends into a long lecture about the operation and Chris’s supposed role in it, and by the end of the whole uncomfortable event, you’re sure they could’ve done this without you and John. And probably Leota. 

Though, you’re endeared to her now, after hearing her speech. You tell her to call you by your first name instead.

Adebayo extends her arms out wide and gives you a look and a smile, silently pleading for a hug. You wonder if maybe she’s so cautious because she’d tried to do the same to Harcourt upon meeting her and been shaken off violently and loudly. 

The last time you were hugged isn’t even a viable memory anymore. It’s so far away that it evades you. Racing thoughts make you hesitate, and you ask yourself if this could be a step in the right direction, and away from the isolation you’d felt before. It’s so cold. You long to feel warmth at your fingertips again, even though you’re supposed to be a fugitive willing to do anything to survive, turned to stone in the process.

You shuffle awkwardly into Adebayo’s arms; she gasps and she wraps around you, her coat rustling when you hug her back. You're flooded with emotion in the embrace because she’s smiling so big her cheek meets yours. At the touch, your brain notices her heartbeat and its exact rhythm, how her veins dilate and contract. Your eyes flutter shut, and the sensation is filed away in your mind under Leota Adebayo, and now she has a trademark that you’ll be able to recognize next time she touches you. She’s rocking you lightly with excitement. 

Emilia observes the moment of interpersonal warmth with mild distaste. You meet her eyes over Leota’s shoulder. Her face changes when she sees your expression of solace and relief. She watches you receive something you needed. Her grimace fades a little, just for you.

-

It’s nine pm, and the secure phone Economos has given you is in your hand and scrolling idly. You rest easily in the pseudo living room, all your limbs at different angles and strewn about the couch.

If there’s any surefire way to disrupt someone’s rare moment of ease, it’s by knocking on their door the way Emilia Harcourt does. 

BANG. BANGBANGBANGBANGBANG. Seriously.

Not that you need to, but you look through the peephole because it’s a habit you’re not sure you’ll ever be rid of. You see her through the warped fish-eye glass of the hole, and she looks how she does everyday. You think she has something Project Butterfly related to send you to.

‘Hey.’ You open the door for her and walk away from it, not needing to invite her in. You make your way back to the couch and sit upright this time like a normal person.

‘Hey.’ She sounds… unsure, the word dragging out a bit. She shuts the door behind her and follows you inside, but heads towards your tiny motel fridge instead of you.

‘Couldn’t sleep?’ You inquire. She takes her time scouting the entirety of your fridge and it’s contents.

‘I sleep just fine, thank you.’

‘Oh, right,’ You muse, ‘It’s not like you’re a tortured soul or anything.’

‘Don’t you have any beer in here?’

‘I did. An hour ago.’ You nod to the trash can that is full to the brim, three or four empty Heinekens resting on top. ‘Sit.’ 

She doesn’t, but she huffs and deigns to stand before you in the living room, leaning her full weight against the wall opposite you, arms crossed over her chest and clearly not wanting to sit down as it’d imply that she’s staying for any memorable amount of time. You angle your neck up to look at her. She’s small, but her presence is huge.

You sigh at the tension, ‘What’s going on?’

‘Nothing.’

Sure.

‘Oh? Emilia Harcourt wants to hang out? Outside of work? Color me surprised.’

Her face doesn’t change one bit, her resolve unbroken. She’s holding onto something, and hard. She probably doesn’t even know why she’s here herself. Usually she lets unspoken things fester forever and perish unseen. 

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ You run your hands down your face and breathe restlessly, becoming more anxious by the second that she’s got something horrible to tell you, ‘Just say it.’

‘About before…’ She tucks her hair behind her ears, ‘I… never said thank you.’

You think you know what she’s hinting at, but you’re not confident enough to embarrass yourself by assuming. ‘For what?’

She scoffs, rolls her eyes, ‘Oh, please. Don’t play dumb, it doesn’t suit you.’

‘Thank me for—‘ You stand now, hands running over your lap as it disappears and coming to rest on your hips, ‘—for coming here? Or for the other thing? Because you know I never needed you to thank me for that.’

Shaking your head as you speak, you take a step forward.

‘True, you didn’t. But… honestly,’ She shrugs and throws her hands up in the air, ‘…maybe you should’ve. It was fucked up. It was unfair. And I owe you an apology. For you being put in the position you were. It was unfair.’

‘Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say the word apology in my fuckin’ life.’ It’s not an insult. It’s an observation. You love her for her inability to admit contrition. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel it. It comes with the childhood she had. You grew up poor with a less than peaceful home life just like everybody else within arms reach of you right now, and you learn that people with fucked-up developmental stages will have… eccentricities. 

‘I’m serious! You were my f—‘ Emilia cries out, frustrated and sentence cut short by a lump in her throat. She grunts and resets, trying to push the burn in her eyes back, ‘You’re my friend. I never wanted that to happen to you. Especially…’ She laughs dryly, brokenly—

‘Especially not for me.’

Three years ago, you and Harcourt and many other agents, all nameless and faceless to your memory now, were sent on a recon mission to gather intel on a new, violent organization that had risen in ARGUS’s list of highest priority dangers. 

They’re demanding money now, millions in exchange for civilians. The name and nature of the organization… none of it you can remember now. Only that they’d up and left their base and taken hostages to a second location, and the two of you were leading a group to scope out the first location.

A slightly younger Emilia Harcourt stands beside you in a dark, dingy room abandoned of life. It’s all empty cots and obsolete equipment left behind, except for two surveillance cameras that sit high in two corners of the space, red light indicating it’s recording.

Harcourt presses her finger to her earpiece, giving the rest of the team and all clear for this wing of the base. 

And then, there’s movement behind her. You eyes flit fast to where your brain alerted you, and a wall obscures the majority of a shadowed figure you can barely make out. The world slows down, and the figure peeks out just enough to aim a gun with a laser sight directly at the back of Emilia's head.

A man in a black baseball cap and gaiter mask, seemingly given orders to keep watch of this property. You don’t know if he’s on his own here, or if there’s a matching red dot on your skull right now too. 

You can smell him now, his heart is racing. He takes a breath in and out to steady himself for the shot. Your hand shoots out instinctively towards him and over her shoulder, fingers spread to their fullest extent. 

When you think back on this moment, you don’t know what your fingers aimed to do. Maybe to attempt to cover her, or to persuade the assailant to please, stop. 

‘No!’ A scream is wretched from you and echoes out into the room. The man’s finger starts to press in on the trigger.

Your mind reaches out, grabs a hold of something, and pulls. Hard.

Harcourt turns just enough for her face to be splattered in viscera. The man’s head explodes into red matter and chunks, flying onto every surface surrounding. His body collapses to the floor, his black hat following suit. Harcourt’s hand falls from her earpiece.

You think you hear her utter a What the fuck? under her breath. It’s a fast, low resolution blur after that, and Harcourt is shaking your shoulders and saying something obviously important, given her intonation and expression. Your ears ring, and your face is wet. Blood, sweat, tears.

You make out the word run.

And then you can only remember doing just that— running far, far away.

In the midst of the recollection, you feel yourself walking to her habitually. To console. To hammer in your words with closeness. You’re sure she’ll slough you off, but she needs to know that you’ll try for her

‘Emilia…’ You sigh, ‘It was always going to happen.’

‘I know. It doesn’t make it suck shit any less.’ 

‘Listen.’ You grab her shoulders softly in your hands briefly, only to center her. Her body is tense, lactic acid and blood filling and pooling the muscle there, ‘It kept you alive. I’d do it again.’

Harcourt can’t think of anything to rebut with that would hold any water. Her eyes flit between yours. She finds no resentment there. So, you continue.  

‘We’re good. And maybe it was for the best. Y’know, so we could both be here to save the planet from bugs.’

‘Bugs.’ She laughs, and she wipes a lone escaped tear away with her sleeve like she hates this one tear in specific, ‘Fuck, I’m tired.’

‘Go to bed.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Want me to tuck you in?’

‘Don’t push it.’

She makes way to leave now, and it’s your turn to follow her. She’s halfway out the door when she stops and pivots, eyes to the ground. She calls you again, but this time in a different way, ‘L/N?’

You answer, like you always do, ‘Yeah?’

‘Did I do a shitty thing? Calling you?’

‘Not at all.’ You open the door again a little bit from the crack she was speaking through, and you peck her cheek almost where it meets her mouth before she can comprehend what’s happening. You pull away with an exaggerated Mwah! It's different, touching Harcourt. Easier. More instinctive, and you know she'll put up with you. ‘It’s past your bedtime, lady.’

Her face gets the tiniest bit warmer. ‘Oh, fuck off.’

And she leaves. All’s well that ends well.

-

Emilia will try to keep you away from prying eyes as much as she can, and you rarely have to get your hands dirty. You are, after all— still a wanted woman. You are also, unfortunately, a liability. The less known about you, the better. 

But–

On the other side of the coin, you’re a blank slate. No one knows you in Evergreen, and that makes you hard to locate, and a great candidate for participating in black ops. Additionally, you were thoroughly trained in combat as a prerequisite to your job at ARGUS. An extra set of hands to hold a glock is a huge plus, and you know how to do a lot more than just hold a glock. 

So later that night, hours after Emilia leaves you and all is quiet, another characteristically violent knock on the window of your room shakes you wide-eyed

. 

You and Harcourt, half awake, rush into Leota’s car and make way for where the chip in Chris’s head says he is, Wild Estates Apartment Complex.

In assisting with his escape from the apartment and the fleet of cops, you’re used in the field for the first time aside from occupational level sneaking around and unloading a magazine into someone. There are a lot more moving bodies here, so you decide to drop the blood pressure of multiple officers until they faint and fall into the grass below them, which buys Chris more time to do… whatever Chris does.

And now the floodgates are open, and you’ll be using the blood hungry part of your brain to eat away at Project Butterfly’s opponents going forward. You try to settle into it.

Some time later, John is stitching up a particularly nasty gash on Chris’s shoulder after going toe to toe with— and eventually blowing to pink mist— Annie Sturphausen.

You sit next to Economos, assisting him by handing him medical supplies when need be. The two men bicker like children, but you are not mature enough yourself to not find it entertaining. 

By God, you’ve missed people.

You listen quietly and smile to yourself when John uses the term stan.

‘I’d rather be with fuckin’ Bat-Mite than you!’

‘Who’s Bat-Mite?’

‘He’s a two foot tall interdimensional imp who stans Batman. I’d rather be with him.’

‘Is that a real guy?’

‘Yeah.’

Chris’s eyes flit over to you for a second opinion. You nod twice slightly, your mouth bending into a downwards purse that communicates your confidence in Bat-Mites existence.

-

The first time you see Vigilante, he’s peeking from behind a bush at the Goff stakeout. He ends up staying, but you don’t say anything to each other directly.

The first time you meet Vigilante, it’s straight after the would-be assassination turned into a torture scene for he and Chris, a one on one with Judomaster with Economos, and an experimental explosive try-out for the rest of you.

You’re the last to get in, shutting the door behind you and planting yourself in the only left available seat, which is next to the guy clad in teal and black; who hadn’t been invited, but has now been sucked into your group for security reasons.

The van rocks you all back and forth, and Vigilante cradles his leg in his hand, one foot bloody and bare. When he’d gotten into the car, you smelled him before you saw him. Red drips from his pinky toe onto the metal plated flooring, resonating in your ears even through the chatter.

Vigilante groans and whines. ‘I’m not sure I’m ever gonna walk again.’

‘Why?’ Says Economos disbelievingly from the front.

‘Motherfucker cut half my pinky toe off. S’the most important toe there is.’

A myriad of disagreements sound off.

From Adebayo,

‘Yeah, that’s not true.’

From you,

‘No.’

And from Harcourt,

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Yeah, it is! You can’t walk without it!’

Adebayo tries to take the reins, ‘You can walk just fine without a pinky toe.’

‘You’ll fall over and look stupid all the time and everyone will laugh at you.’

Harcourt asks the important questions, ‘Who’s gonna laugh at you for falling over because you don’t have a toe?’

Chris answers it for her, laughs and tries to silence himself when he receives stares, ‘I was just imagining it. I’m s— I’m sorry.’

‘You can’t walk if you lose your metatarsal. That’s like the knuckle of the pinky toe, but if you just lose your pinky, it’s fine!’

‘Pinky actually contributes, like, the least.’ You agree with Adebayo, trying to offer some comfort.

‘Well, it fucking hurts! Look!’ His knee is up to his chest now, trying to give you in particular a better view. He barely knows who you are, just that you’re an ally, and you seem to maybe, possibly— care about his plight. And he really wants some sympathy right now.

Your thighs touch in the bumping of the traffic. He looks to you for your opinion. You give it to him.

‘It’ll heal. There’ll just be a scar.’

‘Mmph.’ He pouts. 

You lean forward to make eye contact with Harcourt, ‘Should I stop the bleeding?’ 

‘No.’ Her back falls against the wall of the van, annoyed and worn thin, ‘Let him fuckin’ hemorrhage.’

You’re alone in the van now. The back door is open to the parking lot, morning light submerging the space so you can see well. The back of the vehicle is usually a mess after a mission of any sort, and you guys just keep picking up strays to add to the invite list. 

Random knives lay unholstered on the ground, along with an empty bag of Hot Cheetos and rags used to wipe dirty faces and hands easily in the process of driving back to headquarters. Economos sometimes leaves unassuming cords lying around too, waiting to be tripped over. You put things back where they belong. It gives you something to do while you wait for the adrenal crash and following exhaustion.

So now, you’re kneeled before Vigilante's small pool of amputation blood. You look at it for a moment, and then you will it off the floor and into the air. Red droplets hover before you in orbs, wavering and swishing until they come together to form one bigger, collective orb. You usher it into an already dirty rag in your hand. It obeys, sinks into the fabric easily like it’s being swaddled.

‘Hi.’

Head shooting up from the rag, you look, and it’s Vigilante. Quickly, you stand from your crouch, ‘Hello…?’

‘I don’t usually get body parts cut off. I’m very on top of my game, y’know— with killing people… before they can do that. This was just a one off. Thought you should know.’ You don’t really know why he’s telling you this, but he’s definitely awkward about it.

‘Ah.’ You offer him a nod, ‘Happens to the best of us.’

‘What are you doing?’ 

‘Uh—‘ You look to the floor where his blood was, now completely clean and without a trace of viscera ever being there before. Letting the rag in your hand fall open, you gesture to the red. ‘Cleaning your blood up.’

‘Oh, yeah. Sorry about that. Bye.’ 

He waves and limps away. You think you’ll probably never see him again.

-

You find out that the man behind the Vigilante mask is called Adrian.

The first time you saw Adrian, he was your busboy at Fennel Fields at dinner with the whole operation days earlier.

The first time you meet Adrian, you’re being debriefed by Economos’ powerpoint days later. 

Everyone already there is sitting around one side of the desk when Adrian and Peacemaker walk in together. Adebayo is just ahead of them in terms of punctuality, setting her bag down, and Adrian watches her bend down to you in your seat to give you a brief good morning hug. She’s uttering some apology and reason for why she’s late. His focus attaches to you now, almost magnetically. 

Dark, round shades sit high on your nose. You wear a hoodie with the hood up, wisps of hair peeking out behind the fabric. 

You accept her embrace immediately, using one hand to pat her back and the other to hold a mug. Your face stays perpetually unmoved, but it's clear from your disposition that if you found the touch you’re receiving to be undesirable, you’d make it known.

Adrian’s never seen this exchange between the two of you— actually, he’s never seen anybody in this entire group touch one another gently or compassionately, at least not that he can tell. So, Adebayo’s a hugger, and you make space for her, for some reason. It’s natural, and he takes notice.

Behind his thick wall of blind confidence in himself, he wishes he could be so natural. Peacemaker never hugs him. Adrian frowns.

The powerpoint presentation turns into an all out shit-show. An anticipated shit-show, if you’re wise. 

Chris exclaims that Superman uber liebes the old schiesse, Harcourt yells at Chris for spreading misinformation to a group of individuals actually trained and relied on to have the correct information, Chris yells at John for putting his father in prison, and finally— Murn yells at everyone.

‘Do y’all want to be here til tomorrow?’

You’re sat in between Leota and Harcourt. Your arms are crossed over your chest and your head hangs low, not having been paying attention to the powerpoint at all. It wasn’t really for you, as you’d done your research and read all the files Murn had to offer. A headache pounds behind your sunglasses. The yelling is not making it any better.

The room goes silent, and Adrian slowly raises his hand, 

‘Do you have cable? Cuz, I don’t want to be here overnight if there’s no cable. Fargo’s on tonight.’ 

You lean forward in your chair until your elbows rest on the desk in front of you, recognizing his voice and demeanor after not paying much mind to him. The chair creaks under your movement, and your eyebrow furrows in discernment. 

He got his pinky toe half cut off, amongst other things that befell him, and he’s worried about… Fargo? ‘… Didn’t you get your balls electrocuted last night?’

You speak for the first time today since muttering a greeting to no one in particular when you’d entered. Adrian turns to the sound of your clear, low voice that disarms him, rings his head like a bell. He stammers visibly for a second before scoffing a breathless laugh. 

‘…No.’ He says it with almost too much incredulity. He doth protest too much. 

You shoot a look at Emilia, face shifting into an amused closed lip smile, and a moment passes between you two that Adrian can’t read. She doesn’t break a smile herself, but her brow lifts up like she’s heavily tuned in to the conversation, which is reaction enough to satisfy you.

Adrian is thoroughly embarrassed to be so exposed in front of the weird girl. Not to mention that you and Harcourt are obviously having a telepathic girl-conversation about him right now. He whips his head around to Chris, ‘Why the fuck would you tell her that?’

Peacemaker shrugs, ‘Told everyone.’ 

‘Wha—‘ Adrian flusters for a moment, and comes back full force, ‘Okay, separate question, you have the scary boss, the underboss, the computer nerd guy, the rookie, the ass-kicking people, and…’ 

He points to Murn, Harcourt, Economos, and Adebayo respectively, ending with gesturing between himself and Chris, even though he himself isn’t even officially on the team. 

‘What’s your job?’ He points a gloved hand squarely at your face. It’s quite clear that he’s trying to shift the focus off his electrocuted crotch.

Chris sighs, ‘She’s been here the whole fuckin’ time, and you don’t know what her job is?’ 

‘It never, like— came up! ‘Scuse me for being curious. God.’

Murn pipes up after rubbing at his temples silently for the span of this conversation, ‘That’s on a need-to-know basis.’

‘I don’t qualify?’

‘No.’

‘But I was totally cool and helpful last night!’ Adrian’s attention keeps revolving back to you each time after being scolded. ‘Why are you wearing sunglasses? Are you blind?’

Finally, a question you can answer yourself comfortably. ‘I’m hungover.’

‘Oh.’

Angry blonde woman to your side shoots you a disapproving glare and sighs heavily, ‘Of course you are.’ 

You suck your teeth in fake surprise at her callousness, ‘Tchk. So judgy.’ 

‘Aside from being hungover,’ Harcourt starts, ‘She’s also field trained and highly valuable. We need her, so try not to creep her out. If that’s fucking possible.’

Adrian’s eyes skip around the desk in front of him for a moment, debating whether or not to ask the question that could make or break his day. As if he could stop the runaway train that is his voicebox. Chris had told him previously that you’re an import from Metropolis, and also told him that you’re a babe with superpowers or some shit.

He went home that night and typed your name— misspelled at first— into his search engine and pored over a lot of fucking articles and looked at a lot of fucking images.

For the articles, the public information on you is pretty meager, probably due to the nature of your line of work. But from what he can find, there’s an open case for unexplained bodies with a unique calling card that popped up across the span of the US. They don’t mention what the calling card is, but ARGUS attributes these murders to you, and they conveniently leave out the fact that they’d previously employed you.

Adrian finds that a couple years ago the CIA put out an APB on you and in it, released your age, height, approximate weight, identifying marks, and aliases you may answer to, including but not limited to: the Hound.

As for the pictures, they’re mostly blurry CCTV frames and the headshot from your ARGUS ID.

Adrian tells himself it’s plain old detective work, doing his due diligence, but he stares at your picture for a long time.

‘Do you know Superman?’

‘No.’ There’s no simple inflection to your voice. You’re not annoyed by his question, or offended.

Adrian throws his head back and sighs like an angsty teenager, ‘God dammit!’ 

‘No more questions.’ Harcourt chastises him, harsher this time. But he’s already bouncing back from his Superman disappointment, and he doesn’t hear her over his river of questions, still flowing.

‘They call you the Hound? Like from Game of Thrones? Sandor Clegane’s face is all fucked up, but yours is, like, fine.’

It’s not fine. He thinks it’s better than fine. 

A silent moment passes, and Adrian thinks he isn’t going to get an answer out of you. You chew at the inside skin of your cheek. Then, a wet tingling starts at the beginning of his nose and trails down to his upper lip. The taste of iron seeps into his mouth, and he touches at his cupid's bow. His gloved hand pulled away wet and glistening red. Adrian tries to meet his wide, confused eyes to yours through your sunglasses, but he can’t tell where you’re looking.

This is a small, controlled display of potential without having to say it. If he were a bad man with bad intentions and a gun pointed at you, you could pull all the blood out through his pores. You could make the cells vibrate until the skin bursts and human matter spews everywhere.

Once, you’d been surrounded by bad men with bad intentions in the alleys of Metropolis. You were scared. And where fear meets unchecked and unbalanced hemokinesis– violence is to be expected. You exsanguinated the lot of them on barely a conscious thought, leaving pale, tough bodies for some rookie cop to follow up on.

It was a sickly, gasping, drenched orchestra of sounds. 

You find yourself having to use it for unsavory reasons. Turning people into red puddles. Turning yourself into a red puddle. When you turned twelve, you got your period. The first day was okay, mostly spotting. But the second and third days, from what you can remember— we’re just small moments between heavy cramps in the fetal position. 

You’d gotten up to get painkillers when another cramp struck through you like a twisted knife to the gut, and you bent in on yourself, grabbing at your stomach. A wave of something crashed over you again, but unlike the pain from before. A collection of rapid heart beats and red flashes behind your eyelids consume you. Your eyes move back and forth like you’re in the middle of a dream. 

You clench hard. Everywhere.

And then—

A blissful release.

When you’re sure the worst is over, sensation comes back to you. A warm wetness starts to cool off between your thighs and down your legs. Your eyelids part to find a giant pool of blood at your feet, still expanding over the hardwood floor and leveling out. The pool soaks your white socks— it’s origin plain to see at your underwear.

You’d had your first period all at once.

Your mind had bent your growing body to its own will. The ache and the sheer change of it had made your subconscious bubble to the surface, searching for relief and taking drastic measures to protect you. It flushes what it feels it needs from your system; it kills the pain the only way it can fathom. 

Something's the matter with you. And you are your own first victim.

As teenagers often are.

Over the years, you grow and evolve. You change countless times over on the way you feel about your capabilities. In the end, or at least, where you find yourself now— it’s clear that this might that’s been thrust upon you is never going to be conventional. And nothing you’ll ever use it for will be something that can be understood. 

You’ll never be able to find a throughline of where the power comes from, only that it comes naturally, and to ask it to be pretty would be against it’s own design. Divinely given or otherwise.

It’s useful for all sorts of things, though.

Phlebotomy, notably. Sometimes a good vein is hard to find.

And a small nosebleed to ensure understanding from an otherwise suspicious character you’ll be working with indefinitely. Adrian wipes the remaining red from his nostrils on the heel of his gloved hand, obviously unconcerned about the blood staining, and more focused on you.

‘Bloodhound, dipshit.’ Harcourt answers Adrian angrily, hoping it’ll be the last of it. 

‘Wha—‘

‘No more questions, dude.’ Peacemaker shakes his head.

‘Just Y/N is… fine.’ You nod in Adrian’s direction reassuringly. He nods back, a smile creeping up on him when he looks away, fully overtaken by the effect one woman can have on the human body from four feet away.

He understands now. He thinks he does. It only draws him closer.

It also tightens a coil of arousal low in his chest.

-

part two

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