#dispatch oc x reader

You had just finished setting your notebook down when the room seemed to loosen around you.

The interview was over.

At least, officially.

The air still carried the quiet aftertaste of it, that strange blend of tension, relief, and concentration that always lingered after a difficult conversation. Your pen sat neatly across the notebook now, your notes organized, your posture still professional even as your shoulders began to ease.

Aliyah was still pressed near you, all restless energy and bright eyes, like she could sense the moment had ended but refused to let it become boring.

You gave Chad one last steady look and folded your hands lightly in your lap.

“Well,” you said, your tone calm and measured, “honestly, everything looks good.”

The words were meant to soothe. To settle him. To give him something solid to stand on after all that effort.

And you meant them.

He had answered your questions clearly. He had been honest where it mattered. He had shown up, stayed present, and despite the obvious tension in his shoulders, he had not once tried to hide behind excuses or polish himself into someone he was not. There had been nerves, yes. A little too much thinking, maybe. But nothing that suggested dishonesty, nothing that suggested he could not be trusted.

Yet the greatest reason you found yourself respecting him was his willingness to change. It revealed itself in quiet ways, woven into every answer he gave and every decision.

So subtle it was almost invisible. Almost. But you noticed.

You even softened your voice a little as you continued.

“In my opinion,” you said carefully, “I don’t see any major issues moving forward…”

For a second, you thought he might finally be able to breathe more easily after you said that.

Instead, his whole expression went still.

His jaw locked so hard the muscle jumped beneath the skin. One hand, which had been resting against his knee, flexed once and then clenched so tightly the tendons stood out along the back of it. His gaze dropped to the floor, but not in submission, in the hollow, bracing way of someone staring at the place where the blow is going to land.

Then he laughed, the sound being short, bitter and without humour.

You blinked in confusion. “Chad-?”

“No.” His voice cut through yours hard enough to stop it.

His voice remained steady, but only on the surface. Beneath it, something was straining, held together by sheer determination rather than certainty.

You frowned, confusion flickering through you. “What do you mean, no?”

He shoved a hand through his hair and stood up so abruptly the chair legs scraped sharply against the floor.

The sound cut straight through the room, it startled Aliyah hard enough to flinch.

So did you.

The whole shape of him changed in an instant. One moment he had been trapped inside himself, all taut nerves and forced stillness, sitting in a way that looked contained if you did not know how to read the strain in his shoulders.

The next, he was on his feet, pacing energy already burning through him, as though the room had suddenly become too small to hold the force of his panic.

His chest rose too fast. His breathing had gone shallow. His hands were restless now, one dragging through his hair, the other bracing on the back of the chair as if he needed something solid to keep from coming apart.

“That…that…” he said, voice low and shaking with anger he was trying and failing to control, “was bullshit.”

Your brows knit together. “What?”

He turned away from you, but not fully, like he could not decide whether to face you or flee. His hand stayed splayed over the chair back, knuckles whitening. His shoulders jerked with one hard breath.

“You’re being too fucking nice,” he said, suspicion creeping into his voice. “Too nice…” He shook his head, already looking away.

“That…that… thing! The thing that fucking people always do when they've made up their minds but don't want to be the bad guy… so they just… smile, tell you everything looks good, and then later...” His jaw tightened.

“Later they tell you why you weren't enough...” He said in such a sad and defeated tone.

You stared at him, caught completely off guard.

“Chad, no.” You shook your head. “You're reading this completely wrong.”

He barked out another laugh.

“Am I?”

His eyes locked onto yours.

There was no anger in them.

Not really.

Just hurt.

Old hurt.

The kind that had been disappointed so many times it no longer knew the difference between reassurance and pity.

“Because it sounds an awful lot like you're trying to let me down easy.” He scoffed, pacing a step away before turning back again.

“Actually, no- you know what? Forget it.” He pointed vaguely toward you, toward the notebook, toward the entire interview.

“Just tell me what I screwed up.” His voice was rising now.

“Was it the questions about my record? The powers? The incident reports? What?” He laughed again, but there was not a trace of humour in it.

“Because there's always something.”

You stood, slower, trying not to escalate whatever was suddenly happening in front of you. “I’m telling you the truth.”

He finally looked at you then, and what you saw in his face made your stomach twist.

Fear.

He looked like a man standing at the edge of something he had already decided would swallow him whole.

“I know how this goes… don’t lie to me…” he said, his voice tightening with every word, like he was dragging them out against his will. He let out a bitter laugh and shook his head.

“They tell you everything looks good. They tell you not to worry. They smile, say they'll be in touch, act like you've got a real shot this time.” His jaw clenched.

“Then a few days later, they change their minds. Suddenly you're not ready. You're too unstable. Your file raises concerns. Your powers make people nervous. Your past is too complicated. There's always something.” He looked away for a moment, blinking hard before forcing himself to continue.

“And no one ever just says it straight! They dress it up, make it sound professional, like they're doing you a favor… but… but it always comes down to the same thing.” His voice cracked slightly, frustration and hurt bleeding through despite his best efforts.

“No matter how hard you try, no matter what you do, you're still the problem-”

His voice cracked upward on the last word, and immediately he seemed to hate that it had.

He looked furious with himself the instant it happened, and that only made it worse. His hand came down hard against the arm of the chair with a sharp, cracking smack that made Aliyah flinch beside you.

Aliyah looked from you to him and then back again, suddenly uncertain.

You took one careful step forward. “Chad, listen to me-”

“No! You listen to me.” His voice rose now, no longer trying to stay calm. “I already failed this interview. I can feel it. I know it. You’re just trying to be polite about it.”

He dragged in a rough breath through his nose and looked away again, jaw jumping with strain.

This was no longer just panic.

It was spiralling. Fast.

He paced a step away from the sofa, then back again, like the apartment had become a cage and his own skin was not large enough to hold everything moving under it. The temperature around him had begun to change, too, subtle at first, then unmistakable.

The air around him had changed.

At first, it was only a subtle thing, something you might have blamed on the room itself, the lingering warmth of bodies too close together, the stale breath of tension that had been building for too long.

But then it sharpened, became real, became impossible to ignore. The atmosphere near Chad seemed to dry out, as though the room had been left too long in the sun. The skin at the back of your neck prickled. Your mouth went faintly dry.

Then you saw it.

Near the edge of the coffee table, where his hand had passed too close, a thin curl of smoke twisted upward in a silent little ribbon, so slight it might have been nothing if you had blinked at the wrong moment. The faintest scorch mark had kissed the wood. Not enough to ignite. Not yet. Just enough to leave a warning behind, like a match struck in the dark and blown out before it could become a flame.

The smell hit a second later, sharp, bitter, unmistakable.

Something singed.

Enough to make your pulse kick harder.

Aliyah saw it too. Her gaze snapped to the smoke, then to Chad, and her face lost colour all at once. “Uh-oh,” she breathed, small and uneasy, like the word itself was dangerous.

Your attention stayed on him.

Chad was breathing hard now, but not evenly. Each breath seemed to scrape on the way in, forced through clenched teeth and anger that had nowhere to go. His shoulders were rigid, his hands flexing at his sides like they did not know whether to curl into fists or reach for something to break.

There was a wildness in him now.

“Chad,” you said, keeping your voice low on purpose, careful and steady the way you would speak to a live wire. “You need to breathe.”

His head turned sharply, eyes blazing with a heat that had very little to do with emotion anymore. He gave a harsh laugh that held no amusement at all, only panic trying and failing to disguise itself as anger.

“Don’t tell me to breathe.”

The words snapped out of him so quickly they seemed to leave a trail behind them.

You could feel the tension in the room tightening, pulling itself smaller and smaller around him. The silence that followed was worse than noise, it made you aware of every tiny shift, the faint creak of the sofa, the soft movement of Aliyah backing up half a step, the hiss of your own breathing as you forced yourself not to react too fast.

Because reacting too fast would be a mistake.

You could tell that now.

Chad was on the edge of something, and the edge was getting thinner by the second.

Another faint shimmer flickered near his fingers, orange and fleeting, there and gone so quickly you might have thought you imagined it if the smell of singed wood had not already proven otherwise. The heat rolling off him was no longer just metaphorical. It was real enough to sting. Real enough to make the air feel brittle, like one wrong word could crack the whole room open.

His jaw flexed hard.

His breathing hitched.

And for one awful moment, he looked less like a man losing his temper and more like someone wrestling with a force inside himself that was already winning.

You almost answered.

But then the door to the kitchen opened and his sister stepped back into the room at exactly the worst possible moment.

She took one look at him, one look at the way he was standing, the tension in his shoulders, the heat already building around him like a storm trapped under skin, and her expression changed instantly.

Not surprise.

Recognition.

The rigid set of his shoulders. The way his hands kept flexing and unclenching at his sides. The heat already building around him in pulses, like something alive and trapped under skin. Her expression tightened at once, first with resignation, then with the kind of exhausted irritation that only family could manage.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she muttered.

Her gaze flicked to you, then to Aliyah, and when it landed back on him, something in her face sharpened. She took in the room in one sweep and seemed to understand far too much and not nearly enough at the same time.

He did not even look at her.

He was too far inside his own head for that.

“I knew this was a shit idea,” he said, pacing another step, words spilling faster now, harsher, more self-destructive by the second.

“I knew it. I should’ve just done what I always do. I should’ve kept my head down, kept working, kept things simple. I shouldn’t have applied. I shouldn’t have come here. This is exactly what happens when I try to-”

“To what?” his sister cut in, sharp as a slap. “To do something decent for once?”

He whirled toward her, eyes flashing.

“Don’t.”

She did not flinch.

You watched the heat deepen around him, felt it in the room, and the fact it was getting hard to breath. A faint orange shimmer skimmed over his fingertips and vanished again; gone so quickly it might have been imagined if it were not for the smell that followed.

His sister saw it too.

That was the thing about them. Other people tried to calm him with words.

She survived him.

Words did not work once he was like this. Not when fear had already gotten its hands around his throat. Not when shame had turned sharp and hot inside him, looking for somewhere to go. Reassurance slid right off. Logic never stayed. Even kindness just gave him something else to ruin.

He was already convinced he had failed.

Already convinced everyone else could see it, halfway to burning the entire moment to the ground so he would not have to stand inside it a second longer.

His sister stepped closer, careful but unafraid.

“Chad, stop.”

“WHY-?” he snapped, the heat flickered.

“No.” Her voice went flat. Quiet. Dangerous in the way quiet people could be. “You are not doing this.”

He laughed, but it came out ragged and wrong, the sound of somebody trying to survive their own panic by turning it into something uglier.

“You don’t get it,” he said. “I ruined it. I walked in here thinking maybe- maybe this time... but I have already gone and messed it up without even starting! She is just-just-one of them!

Aliyah made a small sound behind you, barely a breath, but you heard it. You shifted instinctively, moving just enough to place yourself between her and Chad without fully turning your back on him. A protective angle and quiet barrier. Aliyah went still immediately, one hand gripping one of your fingers too tightly.

Chad’s sister noticed that too.

Her expression changed, just slightly.

His sister stared at him for a beat.

Then she let out a sharp breath through her nose, the kind that carried more disappointment than anger, and shook her head with a look so flat and unimpressed it was almost worse than a scream.

“Oh, shut up.”

Chad’s head snapped toward her. “What?”

She moved then.

The quiet way some people could be when they had finally run out of patience. One step. Then another. Her shoulders were level, her expression unreadable, her gaze fixed on him like a blade being slowly drawn from its sheath.

Chad frowned, bristling immediately. “What are you-”

SLAP!

The sound cracked through the room so sharply it seemed to split the air in half.

His head jerked sideways with the force of it. The apartment went utterly still. The noise vanished into the walls, swallowed by the stunned silence that followed. Even the heat of the room seemed to pause, suspended in the aftermath.

Aliyah gasped.

You felt your own body tense, every muscle tightening on instinct.

Chad just stood there, frozen in place, one hand hovering near his face like he could not yet decide whether he had been struck or merely imagined it. A red mark had already bloomed across his cheek, bright and unmistakable, the skin beneath it flushing deeper by the second.

Slowly, with visible disbelief, he turned back to face her.

“What the hell-?” he snapped, but the outrage in his voice had been punctured, weakened by the sheer shock of being hit by someone he had not expected to strike him at all.

His sister lowered her hand.

The same hand that bore old burn scars across the knuckles and palm, pale and rough in places where the skin had never fully forgiven whatever fire had taken its toll. That hand had probably dragged him away from danger more times than he had ever bothered to thank her for. It had likely caught him by the wrist when he was too reckless to listen, shoved him out of the way when walls were closing in, smothered sparks before they could become flames, and burned itself in the process.

She flexed her fingers once.

A tiny wince flickered across her face, brief enough that most people would have missed it. Then she lifted her eyes back to him, calm as stone, and held his gaze without flinching.

“That,” she said, each word measured and clean, “was because I’m tired…”

Chad blinked.

She took another step toward him. The air around her seemed to tighten.

“Tired of this...”

Another step.

“Tired of you acting like every bad feeling is the end of the world.”

Another.

“Tired of watching you scare people because you’re too stubborn to admit you’re scared…”

Something in him faltered.

The anger was still there, hot and defensive, but it was cracking at the edges now, losing its shape beneath the weight of her voice. She did not raise it. She did not need to. She had the kind of authority that came from history, from scars, from knowing exactly how many times she had pulled him back from the ledge he kept walking toward.

Her scarred hand lifted again.

Not to strike.

This time she held it between them, palm angled toward him, not an attack but a demand.

Look.

Really look.

The back of her hand was lined with old burn marks, patches of raised, pale scar tissue crossing the knuckles, the skin a little shiny where it had healed badly and never quite returned to normal. There were newer red marks too, faint but visible across her palm, as if she had recently pressed it against something too hot and refused to let go until he had backed down. The hand she flexed at her side looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with age.

“Look at my hand.”

The words came out quiet, but they landed harder than anything else in the room.

Chad’s eyes dropped automatically.

Then stopped.

His expression changed in an instant, the anger draining out of him so fast it was like watching something pour away through a crack in the floor. His mouth parted slightly. The breath in his chest caught. Because he knew those scars. Knew every one of them. Knew where they came from. Knew what it had cost her to keep trying.

That was when you saw it properly.

At the burns. The old damage. The newer marks. Every line of damage telling the same story: years of trying to save him from himself, years of grabbing him before he fell too far, years of paying for his chaos in pain she never should have had to carry.

She noticed you looking and did not bother to hide it.

She had stopped caring if anyone saw.

Because this was not the first time.

Probably not even the tenth.

She had spent so many years trying to reach him through heat and anger and the raw edge of his temper that her own hands had become proof of it. A map of all the times she had tried to hold him back from burning everything.

And he saw it too.

Really saw it.

That was what changed.

Not her words. Not the room. Not the tension.

Her hand.

The scars across it. The raw red at the heel of her palm. The proof that every time he got like this, she was the one who paid for it first.

Something in his expression broke and re-formed all at once.

The anger was still there. The embarrassment too. But underneath it, something else had surfaced, something that made his face go tight in a different way.

Guilt.

Real guilt.

And for the first time since the spiral began, Chad stopped moving.

Stopped talking.

Stopped pacing.

Stopped trying to outrun the fear clawing at his own throat.

His gaze lingered on her hand for one long second, then lifted to her face, and whatever he found there seemed to strike deeper than the slap ever could. Slowly, reluctantly, he turned again, past her, past the fury, past the room that had become too small to hold everything breaking inside it, and saw Aliyah standing behind you.

Small.

Quiet.

Wide-eyed.

Terrified.

The realization hit him like a second blow, sharper somehow because it was not made of force but of truth.

And this one hurt more.

His sister took another step forward, and he did not explode.

He just stared at her hand.

Then at Aliyah.

His sister saw the opening immediately.

“Yeah,” she said, voice rougher now. Less sharp. “That. That face. That’s the one you should be paying attention to.”

He swallowed, mouth opened, but no sound came out.

She looked from him to the hallway, then jerked her head toward the side room.

“Come with me.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now.” Her tone made it clear this was not a discussion. “Before you scorch the place because you got scared of your own reflection, you little shit.”

He gave a short, helpless look toward you, toward Aliyah, toward the room he had been unravelling in. Then his sister reached out and grabbed his wrist, not gently or cruelly either.

Just firmly enough to make it impossible for him to keep pacing, for him to keep feeding the spiral, and for him to stay where he was and keep setting the air on edge. The moment her fingers closed around him, she hissed and pulled back half a second later with a sharp wince.

“God, that stings,” she muttered, flexing her hand once before curling it back into a fist. The burn marks caught the light as she did. “Come on.”

And then, before he could resist, she tugged him toward the other room.

He stumbled once, more from surprise than compliance, but she kept hold of him and dragged him down the hallway with the weary certainty of someone who had done this before and had no patience left for drama. At the doorway she paused just long enough to glance back at you and Aliyah.

Her expression softened only a fraction.

“It’s fine,” she said, though it sounded more like a command than comfort. “He’s not going to blow up the apartment. He just needs ten minutes to stop being an idiot.”

Aliyah gave a tiny, shaky nod, still looking scared but no longer on the verge of bolting.

You stayed where you were and watched them disappear into the other room.

For a few seconds, no one spoke.

Only then did the apartment seem to loosen its grip on itself. The heat did not vanish, not exactly, but it stopped pressing so hard against the walls. The air still felt dry and charged, as if a storm had just passed too close to leave the place entirely untouched, but the room no longer seemed one sharp breath away from breaking.

In the other room, their voices carried more softly at first, then steadied.

“This is exactly what I’m talking about,” his sister said, low and controlled, though the strain in it was impossible to miss. “You do this every time. You get overwhelmed, you shut down, and then you lash out at everyone standing closest to you.”

He did not answer. You could picture him already: jaw clenched, shoulders rigid, all that pride held together with the thinnest thread of restraint.

Her voice softened, but only a little.

“I am not saying this to attack you,” she went on, and now there was something more fragile underneath the firmness. “I am saying it because I know you. Because I have watched you do this to yourself before anyone else even gets the chance to hurt you.”

A pause.

When he spoke, his voice came out rougher than before, quieter too, stripped down to something more honest than defiance.

“I know.”

That alone sounded like it cost him something.

Another silence followed, longer this time, heavier. Then he exhaled, dragging a hand over his face as if he could wipe the entire moment away.

“I just…” He stopped, and when he began again, the words came slower. “I do not know how to do this without messing it up.”

His sister did not answer right away. When she did, her voice had changed completely. There was no anger left in it now, only the kind of tired tenderness that only comes from loving someone long enough to be hurt by them and still stay.

“No one is asking you to do it perfectly,” she said. “We are asking you to stop treating every mistake like the world is ending.”

He gave a faint, almost broken huff of laughter that barely made it past his throat.

“I still do not think I am good at this.”

“You are not,” she said flatly.

He let out another breath, but this time it sounded more like surrender than frustration.

She went on, and now there was something achingly human in her voice, something that sounded like years of trying and failing and trying again.

“But you are here. You came back. You did not leave. That matters more than you think it does.”

For a moment, he said nothing.

Then, in a voice so low it felt more like a confession than a reply, he murmured, “I am trying.”

“I know,” she said. “That is why I am still talking to you.”

And behind them, from the other room, Aliyah’s voice rang out suddenly and brightly, far too cheerful for the tension in the hallway.

“Prince Sister, come play!”

The contrast was almost absurd.

Almost.

His sister closed her eyes for a second, as if praying for patience, and then opened them again with a tired look that said she had already lived through too many versions of this exact disaster.

She glanced at him once more.

“Fix your face,” she muttered.

Then she turned and headed back toward the room, carrying the smell of singed skin and stubborn love with her like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

And Chad stood there in the hallway, jaw tight, pride bruised, temper still simmering low under his skin, trying very hard not to look like the entire shape of his future had just slipped through his fingers.

You did your best to pretend nothing had happened.

You sat back down on the sofa with Aliyah, letting the notebook rest loosely in your lap, and made yourself look calm. Normal. Unbothered. The kind of professional calm that suggested you had not, in fact, just witnessed a very tense family argument in the hallway.

Aliyah, bless her heart, did not make that easy.

She climbed right back into the space beside you like gravity had personally invited her there, small fingers tugging at the edge of your sleeve before she settled against your side with the confidence of someone who had decided you were safe. Her attention flitted between your notebook, your pen, and the little game she had apparently invented for the both of you, which involved pointing at objects in the room and making you guess what she wanted next.

“The lamp,” she whispered, with dramatic seriousness.

You narrowed your eyes at the floor lamp in the corner as if it were a criminal suspect. “The lamp?”

She giggled and shook her head so hard her hair bounced. “Nooo, not that one.”

You leaned closer, lowering your voice into exaggerated mystery. “Then what are you talking about, Agent Aliyah?”

Her eyes went wide with delight. “The one by the plant!”

“Oh.” You gasped softly, pressing a hand to your chest. “Of course. Silly me.”

That earned you another breathless giggle, bright and unguarded. She seemed to bloom a little when she laughed, like someone opening a curtain to let the day in.

You let her win a few rounds after that.

Let her proudly declare that the cushion was “too squishy,” that the window was “very shiny,” and that the ridiculous little decorative bowl on the table looked “kind of like a boat.” You even nodded solemnly at that one, as if she had made a profound philosophical observation.

It helped.

It helped to keep the moment light, to let the room breathe after all that tension. To pretend, just for a little while, that the world had not just split open in the hallway and shown you the sharp, messy things underneath.

But Aliyah was too observant for someone so small.

The game slowed.

Her voice quieted.

Then, with the kind of careful softness children only use when they are holding something fragile, she leaned a little closer to you and whispered, “They always fight.”

You looked down at her.

She was staring at the carpet, not at you. Her fingers twisted together in her lap.

Then she added, even quieter, “Is it my fault?”

Your heart seemed to stop and then start again with a dull, aching thud.

The question landed with such quiet force that for a second you almost forgot how to breathe. There was something unbearably small and brave in the way she asked it, as if she had been carrying the thought around for a long time and only now found a safe enough person to set it down in front of.

You turned toward her fully, your expression softening before you could stop it.

“Hey,” you said quietly.

The word came out tenderer than you intended, and maybe that was the point. You shifted a little closer, lowering your voice as though volume itself might scare the answer away.

“No, sweetheart. Never. It is not your fault.”

Aliyah’s eyes lifted to yours for a second, searching.

Children never let go of guilt easily. Not when they had spent long enough around adult tension to start building theories out of silence, out of slammed doors, out of tired voices and the sharp edges of love that had worn thin from being stretched so far. Sometimes they believed that if they could just be quieter, better, smaller, easier, less trouble, less noise, less need, then the fighting would stop. Then the room would stop changing shape around them. Then people would smile more and shout less and no one would look like they were carrying the weight of a whole life in their jaw.

You swallowed hard.

“Adults fight sometimes,” you said gently, “even when they love each other. Sometimes especially then. That does not mean you did anything wrong.”

She was still watching you, her expression solemn in that unnerving way children sometimes have, as if they have already absorbed more of the world than they should have had to.

“They tell me that too,” she murmured.

The ache in your chest sharpened.

Of course they did.

Of course someone had already tried to tell her that. Probably more than once. Probably after arguments, after raised voices, after the sort of silence that follows when people are too tired to keep pretending they are not hurting each other. But saying it once, or even many times, did not stop the child from asking anyway.

Did not stop the question from rising again when the fear returned.

You lifted a hand and patted her head softly, your palm lingering there with deliberate gentleness.

“They’re right,” you murmured.

Aliyah tipped her face into your touch, comforted by the simple affection, and for a moment she looked small enough that the whole apartment seemed too big around her.

Then the hallway shifted.

You heard the soft drag of a door, the sound of movement, footsteps returning.

You glanced up just in time to see her step back into the room.

She looked like she had stepped in carrying the last remaining edge of the argument with her. Not in a dramatic way, not in a storm of anger, but in the contained, practical manner of someone who had spent years learning how to put fire out with bare hands. She had that same precision in her posture, that same no-nonsense energy that made a room straighten itself around her presence. Her deep brown bob was still neat, though just slightly less perfect now, as if the fight had tugged at more than just her patience.

Her eyes landed on you.

Then Aliyah.

Then back to you again.

For a beat, there was only a thoughtful silence.

She crossed her arms loosely and looked at you with a level of directness that felt less like suspicion and more like careful evaluation. Not hostile. Just curious. Assessing what kind of person had ended up sitting on her sofa, making her child laugh, and apparently surviving an entire family crisis without bolting.

Then her expression shifted into one of mild annoyance, aimed not at you but at the fact that introductions had not already happened.

“I just realized,” she said, voice steady, “I haven’t introduced myself like a normal person.”

She stepped forward and held out her hand.

“I’m Zara. That idiot older sister, apparently.”

The way she said it suggested she had accepted the title long ago and was now fully committed to weaponizing it.

You rose a little from the sofa, taking her hand with a polite nod. “Nice to meet you. I’m [Y/N] [L/N].”

Her grip was firm. Work-hardened. Not unfriendly, just sure. The kind of handshake that came from someone who valued directness and did not waste time pretending otherwise.

For a second the room went oddly quiet after that, the awkwardness settling into the air like dust motes in sunlight.

Then Aliyah suddenly appeared at your side and wrapped both arms around your leg.

You looked down, startled, and she pressed her cheek against you as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“I like her,” she announced to Zara, muffled against your clothes.

Zara blinked once.

Then her gaze moved from Aliyah to you with careful, sharpened attention, the kind that says she has already started evaluating a stranger not because she is unfriendly, but because she is responsible for the people in her life and does not have the luxury of being careless.

“So,” she said, folding one arm across her middle, “why does my daughter know you already?”

The words sounded aggressive in the way only tired guardians could manage, but the curiosity behind them was plain enough. Protective and a little skeptical. Very much the tone of someone trying to figure out whether a stranger had somehow become important to her family before the adults had had a chance to approve of it.

You opened your mouth.

“I-”

Aliyah cut in before you could get a single explanation out.

With the intense pride of a child recounting a heroic legend, she lifted her head from your leg and announced, “She was like a prince!”

You blinked.

Zara blinked too.

Aliyah pointed up at you with one hand, eyes bright with memory.

“The mean older boys were being mean, and she came and saved me,” she said in a rush, words tumbling over each other with all the excitement of a story she had clearly told herself many times. “Like one of the princes in the stories. Except she wasn’t in a horse. She walked.”

That, apparently, was the detail that mattered most to her.

“She helped me,” Aliyah went on, now fully in her element, “and she bought me cake. Really good cake. Like, the yummy kind. And then she helped me find Uncle Chad.”

She delivered the last part with such certainty that the moment felt suspended, bright and fragile and unexpectedly sweet.

You stood there, suddenly and deeply aware of Zara’s face changing as the memory clicked into place.

First confusion, then surprise, then the slow, dawning understanding of someone rearranging old information in her head until it fit.

“Oh.” Zara exhaled sharply, one eyebrow lifting. “You’re that person.”

You gave a small, helpless nod.

Zara let out a sound halfway between disbelief and laughter. “You’re the one my dumbass brother kept talking about when he lost Aliyah.”

Then she shook her head, one hand lifting to her forehead in a gesture of pure disbelief. “I was so pissed at him at the time that I completely forgot the whole story.”

Aliyah looked from one of you to the other, pleased beyond reason that she had successfully connected the threads of a very important mystery.

Zara huffed a breath and looked at you again, this time with less suspicion and more open interest.

“And I honestly thought she was making up the prince thing.”

That did it.

You laughed.

It was such a perfectly Aliyah thing to say, and such a perfectly exhausted family reaction to have, and because the whole moment had tilted just enough away from tension that laughter felt like the only honest response.

Zara laughed too, a short breathy sound that softened her face instantly.

For a moment the two of you just stood there, smiling at the absurdity of it all, while Aliyah looked deeply satisfied to have been proven correct about everything.

Zara gestured toward the sofa again. “Sit.”

It was not really a request. You obeyed.

Aliyah climbed back up beside you almost immediately, still attached to your side with the unwavering loyalty of a small shadow. Zara took the chair opposite you, one ankle resting across the opposite knee, and for a few seconds the three of you simply sat in a strangely easy silence.

Then, somehow, the interview stopped being an interview.

It happened gradually.

At first, it was just questions.

What kind of work did you do before SDN?

Did you always want to do this kind of work?

What did you think of the Phoenix Program, really?

You answered honestly, and Zara listened with the kind of attention that suggested she actually wanted to hear the answer, not just extract useful information from it. She was sharp, but not cold. Curious, but not nosy. The sort of woman who could probably tell when someone was lying from a mile away, and whose approval meant more because it was never given lightly.

Then the conversation began to wander.

A little at first.

Then all at once.

You mentioned a book you had been meaning to read.

She brought up a type of food she had always wanted to try.

You admitted you had been thinking about learning how to fix small household things properly instead of pretending they would somehow repair themselves out of spite.

Zara gave you a look for that one and said, “That is exactly how people end up with five broken things and half-dead with a screwdriver in one hand.”

You laughed.

She laughed.

Aliyah, taking this as her cue to contribute to the adults’ obviously very important social ritual, immediately announced that she wanted to try “cake that looks like clouds.”

The conversation kept flowing.

And that was the surprising part.

At some point, somewhere between a discussion of favourite meals and the merits of quiet afternoons versus crowded ones, you realized Zara was actually relaxing.

Not completely.

She would never fully relax around a stranger in the first ten minutes, not someone her family had just met under chaotic circumstances. But the guarded edge had gone from her shoulders. The severity in her face had softened. She had stopped sitting like a woman waiting for the floor to collapse under her and instead looked like someone spending a rare quiet hour talking to another human being she did not need to distrust.

The strange thing was how easy it felt.

How naturally the conversation moved.

One moment you were talking about places you wanted to visit someday. The next, you were admitting you had always wanted to go somewhere with mountains just to see what it felt like to stand high enough that the world looked small.

Zara, after a moment of thought, said she had always wanted to see somewhere with snow.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, the atmosphere shifted from polite to personal.

It was subtle at first.

Zara asked what kind of childhood you had.

You answered carefully, not with lies, but with the kind of truth people use when they do not yet know whether they are safe enough to be honest. She listened, and then, after a pause, told you a little more than you had expected.

Not everything.

But enough.

She talked about how Chad had grown up with more weight on his shoulders than anyone should have had to carry so young. About Afghanistan. About the kind of father who made home feel less like shelter and more like a threat. About the necessity of hiding parts of himself just to survive long enough to choose a different life later. About leaving. Running. Rebuilding. The kind of decisions that look simple in stories and cost everything in real life.

Her voice stayed steady while she said it, but there was something in her face that made the words heavier.

Zara’s voice had gone quieter now, but not gentler.

There was a difference.

It was the kind of quiet that came when someone had told the same story in fragments for so long that the sharpest parts never really stopped hurting. She sat with her glass turning slowly between her fingers, her gaze lowered for a moment, as though looking at the water might make the past easier to bear if she stared at it long enough.

“You know,” she said at last, carefully, “back then he had to hide the fact that he was… different…”

The room seemed to still around the words, as if she was still in that unstable home, choosing her words carefully.

“Back home,” she went on, her thumb brushing once over the rim of the glass before stopping, “that was not something you could admit… not in that house… not to our father...”

Her jaw tightened, just slightly.

“He was already a hard man before that… our father believed fear was a form of discipline. If you made a mistake, he made sure you remembered it. If you answered back, it got worse.” She let out a faint breath through her nose, not quite a sigh, not quite a laugh. “And when he started noticing Chad for who he was, when the questions started, when the rumours started…” Her mouth pressed into a thin line. “That made everything worse.”

You could feel your own chest tightening as she spoke.

It was ordinary in the ugliest way. The cruelty that grows in silence, in religion, in pride, in the sort of father who thinks love is something he has the right to withhold until someone becomes easier to accept.

“He couldn’t accept it…” Zara said, and there was a bitter kind of truth in the simplicity of it.

“He didn’t want a son who was gay… he wanted the image of a son. The version that fit what he thought a family should be.” Her fingers tightened around the glass. “So, Chad was forced to keep hiding. Had to make himself smaller, quieter, harder to read. Had to pretend all the time, just to get through the day.”

She looked down then, and when she spoke again, her voice was steadier, but it carried a weight that made it heavier instead of softer.

“If Father thought he had seen too much, or heard too much, or if Chad looked too soft, too proud, too angry, too different… anything at all that reminded him who he was… he made him pay for it…”

The silence that followed was thick enough to hurt. The words were not shocking but it made things clearer for you.

You thought of Chad’s temper, he was so weary from kindness, even when you first helped Aliyah back then. The way he braced for rejection before anyone had even given him reason to expect it. Anger always seemed to arrive before fear could show itself.

It all clicked into place with a sick, quiet clarity.

Zara exhaled slowly.

“I tried,” she said. “God, I tried. I was older, so sometimes I got in the way… Sometimes I took the hits first… distracting father long enough for Chad to get out of the room.” Her mouth twitched, but there was no humor in it. “That only worked for so long.”

Her eyes lifted to yours then, and what you saw there made your throat tighten.

A yearn for understanding.

“Sometimes he was beaten so badly he could barely walk for days,” she said quietly, she choked a little.

Then, after a beat, she said, “And then one day,  our father decided I was old enough to be useful in a different way…”

The room seemed to narrow.

“He started talking about marriage like it was a transaction,” Zara said, her voice still controlled, but now there was steel under it. “Like I was something he could hand off and be done with. He had already chosen the man. Some old friend of his. Wealthy. Powerful. Convenient. The kind of man he thought would make the whole thing respectable.” Her expression darkened. “That was the day I understood staying would kill us both. Just slower.”

Zara swallowed once, hard.

“So we ran…”

“We didn’t have a real plan,” she said. “No money to spare. No safety net. Just whatever we could carry and the knowledge that if we stayed one more day, it would get worse.” Her gaze drifted somewhere distant.

“After that, it was all bad company and worse decisions, because when you’re desperate enough, even danger can look like rescue.” Her tone hardened, not with anger, but with memory.

“Chad was always a hot-headed idiot,” she said.

“But even then…” she whispered, her voice softening with the weight of the memory, “he did everything he could to protect us.”

Her fingers tightened slightly around the edge of her sleeve, as if she were holding onto something that had already slipped too far away.

“And when I found out I was pregnant…” A faint, broken laugh escaped her, the only thing left after years of pain was the ability to laugh at how unfair it all was. “He took it even more seriously. He thought it was his responsibility to keep us safe. To protect his family.”

Her expression twisted with something between affection and grief; she brushed Aliyah’s hair as she was sleeping against you.

“Ironic huh? I was the older one, so I was…” she paused, looking down, “I was supposed to be the one protecting him.”

She swallowed, eyes distant as if she was no longer seeing the room in front of her, but a memory from years ago.

“We were young,” she said. “Too young. Angry. Scared. We were just trying to survive however we could.”

Her voice grew quieter.

“So when he started spending time with the wrong people… when he started changing…”

She stopped.

The silence that followed said more than the words could.

“I noticed.”

A confession.

“I noticed the late nights... the way he stopped talking about where he was going… how he started carrying himself like he had something to prove the world…”

Her eyes lowered.

“But I told myself it was temporary.”

A bitter smile crossed her face.

“I told myself he was just angry… that we would figure it out together. That he was smart enough to walk away when he realized what they really were.”

Her voice cracked slightly.

“So, I looked away.”

She took a shaky breath.

“And that is the one thing I regret.”

There was something painfully human in her expression then, not just guilt, but longing.

“They found him when he was vulnerable,” she said. “That’s what they were good at. They knew exactly what to say. They made him feel important. Made him feel like he finally had control over something.”

Her jaw tightened.

“They didn't have to force him...”

A pause.

“They just had to make him believe he needed them…”

She looked away.

“They pushed him. They used him. They gave him the answers he wanted to hear until he stopped asking the questions he needed to.”

Her voice dropped to almost a whisper.

“And by the time he realized what he had become… he was already too far in.”

Another silence.

“I should have seen it.”

The regret in those words was heavier than anger.

“I should have reached for him before they did.”

For a moment, her voice dropped lower.

“Some of it he regrets. Probably most of it. But that is how people fall apart sometimes. Not because they are bad… cause we were exhausted… hungry. Because they keep being offered terrible choices and told to be grateful for them.”

That made something ache deep in your chest.

Zara looked at you fully then.

“But he got out,” she said, and now there was something firm in her voice. Pride, maybe. Or relief too old to be easy. “That matters. He got out, and he lived long enough to be sick of that life. That counts for something.”

She drew in a slow breath.

“People like to think survival is clean,” she said. “That one day you escape and the rest just fixes itself. It doesn’t. Sometimes getting out means you carry the damage with you for years. But, it means you don’t know how to trust peace when it finally shows up. And… you still snap at the people you love because fear is the only thing your body knows how to answer with.”

That last part settled over the room with painful clarity.

Now you could see it in full.

The constant bracing.

Chad seemed to expect the world to turn on him the second he relaxed. The way he burned hot when he felt cornered, like anger was the only shield he had ever been given that actually worked.

Zara’s hand loosened around the glass.

“He’s not easy,” she said quietly. “He never was. But he is trying. More than most people see. More than he’ll ever admit.”

The room went quiet after that, silence that comes when someone has finally said something they have been carrying for far too long. Her pain was still there, sitting between all of you, but now it had a voice.

There was no pity, no judgment, no one trying to rush in with empty words to make it better. Just a quiet understanding of what she had lost, what she had carried, and how much of her life had been shaped by moments no one else ever saw.

You were not just hearing about pieces of someone’s past, you were seeing the person behind them. The mistakes, the love, the regret, and the impossible weight of wishing you could go back and do things differently.

Aliyah had gone very still beside you, though by then it was clear she was no longer fully awake. Her small body had slowly softened against your side, the weight of her settling into you in small, unguarded stages until she finally drifted off with her cheek pressed to your arm and her fingers loosely curled in the fabric of your sleeve. Her breathing had deepened into the kind of quiet, even rhythm that made the room feel gentler around her, as if she had decided on her own that this was safe enough to sleep in.

Zara noticed the silence you had fallen into and gave a small shrug, as though she had somehow said too much and still not nearly enough.

“I’m not telling you this for sympathy,” she said quietly. “Just context… He’s not easy… difficult, stubborn, dramatic, and far too convinced the world is waiting to screw him over.” Her eyes flicked toward the hallway where Chad still had not fully reappeared, and something softer moved behind the exhaustion in her face. “But he tries. Harder than most people realize.”

You looked down at Aliyah, asleep against your side, her mouth slightly parted now, her whole body loose with trust, and then back at Zara.

You lifted the notebook slightly in your lap and let out a soft breath, the kind of breath that carried both relief and honesty.

“For the record,” you said, your voice low so you would not disturb Aliyah, “I had already written him down as a potential candidate before you told me all of this.”

That got Zara’s attention.

You tipped the notebook just enough for her to see the page, the neat lines of your notes, the small marks beside his name, the observations you had already made before the evening had begun to unravel into something far more human than an interview should ever be.

You looked at her and kept your voice steady.

“I could see it in him already,” you said. “Even with the wall he puts up… with all the fire and the self-doubt… but I can see it… in the way he cares for your daughter too…”

You paused, choosing the words carefully, because this mattered. “He wants to change. That’s the part I noticed.”

Zara said nothing at first, so you continued, softer now.

“That’s what I look for, really… people who want to change… be better than what hurt them.” Your fingers tightened lightly around the notebook. “And Chad has promise. Real promise. With the right guidance, I think he could do something good with all of that strength.”

For a second, Zara just stared at you. Her eyes shone first, then narrowed slightly as she looked down and blinked once, hard, as if she could force the feeling back into place if she tried. Her mouth pressed together, and when she looked up again, her expression had gone soft around the edges in a way that made her seem suddenly younger and older at once.

“That…” she said, then stopped, swallowing against the emotion that had risen too quickly for her to hide. “That’s… hard to hear.”

Her voice wavered only slightly, but you could hear how much it meant. Then she let out a shaky breath that was almost a laugh and almost not.

“I mean,” she said, blinking fast now, “it was tough… it was always tough... watching him carry all of that, watching him try to survive it, watching him keep standing after all of it…” Her voice broke just a little, and she looked away, embarrassed by the tears that had gathered without warning. “So yeah. Hearing someone else see the effort too? That…” She shook her head once, smiling through the emotion. “That means more than I can say.”

Her eyes glistened fully now, and she rubbed at one of them with the side of her finger, annoyed with herself for it and failing to care all at once.

“I’m proud of him,” she admitted, voice low. “Always have been. It’s just…” She exhaled again. “It’s been a long road… and I think people only see the rough edges and never the fact that he is still trying to become someone gentler than what life made him.”

You felt that land in you deeply.

Because it was true.

You understood then that what they shared was not neat or easy or polished. It was survival. It was history. It was loyalty worn raw by time. It was a thousand small acts of staying when leaving would have been easier.

Aliyah shifted in her sleep, her hand loosening in your sleeve, and that tiny movement seemed to crack the heaviness just enough for air to return to the room. Then, without warning, she stirred fully for a second, blinking sleepily with her head still resting against you.

Her voice came out thick with drowsiness and complete seriousness.

“Do you like cake more or cookies more?”

The question was so absurdly ordinary that it pulled a startled laugh from Zara before she could stop it, tired and genuine and warm enough to loosen something in the room.

You looked down at Aliyah, smiling despite yourself.

“Cake,” you said softly. “Definitely cake.”

Aliyah considered this with the weight of someone making an important life decision, then gave a tiny, satisfied hum and settled back into sleep as if the matter were closed.

Zara wiped at the corner of one eye and shook her head in disbelief.

“She likes you,” she murmured.

You glanced down at Aliyah again, at the child asleep on your arm as though you had always been meant to hold this exact shape of trust, and then back to Zara.

“That doesn’t make me look at Chad any differently…by the way…” you said quietly. “If anything, it does the opposite...”

Zara’s brow furrowed slightly.

You held her gaze, making sure she heard you clearly.

“It makes me understand him better. It makes me see how much he has already survived.” Your voice softened. “And honestly, it makes me respect him more.”

Her expression changed in one careful, visible shift, first surprise, then something like relief, and then, finally, a pride so raw it looked almost painful to carry. Her lips parted slightly, and for a second, she seemed to have to look away from you entirely just to keep herself composed.

When she spoke again, her voice was rougher.

“He doesn’t hear that enough,” she said.

“I don’t think a lot of people do,” you answered.

Zara, still emotional, still proud, still carrying all the hard-earned worry of an older sister who had seen too much, sat across from you with a look that was no longer guarded.

Just grateful and tired.

Somewhere beyond the wall, Chad had been listening.

Not fully at first, maybe not even meaning to. Just caught by the sound of your voice through the apartment, by the shape of what you were saying when you did not have to say anything kind at all. But by the time you spoke his name with that much certainty, by the time you said you had already seen the promise in him before anyone else had named it, something in him seemed to shift.

The silence from the other room changed.

Then, faintly, almost too softly to catch, came the smallest sound of breath easing out of a chest that had been holding itself too tightly for too long. A flicker of disbelief, maybe, and underneath it the beginning of something fragile and unfamiliar.

Hope.

And when his eyes found yours as you spoke to his sister, there was the smallest, uncertain curve at the corner of his mouth, like he was starting, despite himself, to believe you might be right.

Not just about him.

About what he could still become.

---

By the time you got back to the office, the interview was already wearing off in the worst way. The moment you were alone long enough for your mind to start dragging everything back out into the light.

You sat at your desk with your hands folded too tightly in front of you, staring at nothing while the office moved around you in its usual steady blur. Everything in the room kept going like the world had not just asked you to stand in front of people and prove, once again, that surviving was somehow not the same thing as being allowed to feel safe.

Your thoughts had already started to go dark around the edges.

First came the girls.

The ones you had saved.

The image hit so sharply it made your throat tighten. Faces flashed through your mind in fragments: fear, bruised wrists, shaking hands, eyes that had gone too empty from being afraid for too long. The ones caught and sold, the ones no one had looked for until it was almost too late. You had gotten them out. You had gotten there in time. You had done something good, something real, something that should have mattered enough to silence the guilt.

But it never did.

Because the second your mind touched that memory, it immediately reached for the next one.

How many more were still out there?

How many more had not been found yet?

How many more were trapped in places nobody had bothered to notice because people like them were always easier to ignore until they turned into headlines?

Your chest tightened around the thought until it felt impossible to draw a full breath.

Too much pressure. Too many faces. Too many unanswered questions clawing at the inside of your skull.

You dug your fingertips into your palm hard enough for the sting to bloom beneath your skin, chasing the sharp, grounding bite of pain like it might anchor you to the present. Like it might stop your mind from wandering into places it had no business revisiting. It didn't. If anything, it only sharpened everything.

The moment one memory loosened its grip; another took its place.

Your thoughts lurched sideways, abandoning the girls and the unanswered what-ifs, only to land somewhere equally painful.

The team. Your old teammates. The people who were supposed to have your back. The people who, for one ugly, unforgettable moment, had looked at you like an enemy instead

The sharp, ugly edge of the moment they had turned on you, voices raised, anger flashing too fast and too close. Brickhouse had come at you hard enough that you had genuinely thought, for one horrible second, that this was how everything you build was about to end.

You could still feel the shock of it, the certainty that came with being singled out, blamed, cornered. You could still see the moment everything might have gone terribly wrong.

And then-

Blonde blazer.

Phenomaman.

Stepping in.

Stopping it.

Enough to keep it from becoming a disaster.

The memory should have made you grateful.

Instead, it sat in your chest like a stone.

Because even after they stepped in, even after the situation had been pulled apart and shoved back into something resembling order, you remembered the look on blonde blazer’s face when the anger finally cracked. The strain. The hurt. The way everything in them seemed to give way all at once, as if they had been holding themselves together by force alone and the effort had finally run out.

They broke down.

Right there.

And it was so unfair it made your stomach turn all over again.

Unfair that some people got to snap and fall apart while still being met with patience.

Unfair that you were expected to keep standing through all of it.

Unfair that the world kept asking more from the people who had already given too much.

You swallowed, hard, staring at the edge of your desk until the lines in the wood blurred.

Your breathing had gone shallow without you noticing.

In.

Not enough.

Out.

Not enough.

Your mind, now fully committed to hurting you, offered up one more thought with cruel, precise timing: maybe the problem had never been the interview. Maybe it had never been the job, the team, the office, the danger, the fear.

Maybe the problem had always just been you standing too close to everything that broke.

You did not even look up right away. You were too far gone for that, too deep in the spiral to notice the shift in the room, too wrapped up in the wreckage inside your own head to realize someone had been watching you the entire time.

It was only when a voice cut softly through the haze that you finally registered him.

Evan.

He was already there, close enough to catch your attention, all soft light and impossible pink, looking like he had wandered out of a dream and into a cubicle farm by mistake. How long he had been there, you could not tell. Long enough to see everything, apparently. Long enough to notice the exact moment you started falling apart.

He leaned in just enough to meet your eyes.

“[Y/N],” he said, and immediately his voice went quieter when he saw your face. “No. Don’t do that thing where you pretend you are fine when you are very obviously not.”

You blinked once, slow and unfocused.

He was smiling, but not in his usual playful way. This time the concern was right there under it, bright, impossible to miss. His glow had dulled at the edges, softening around him like he had lowered himself on purpose so he would not overwhelm you.

You tried for a joke. It came out tired.

“I wasn’t pretending.”

Evan’s expression shifted into something gentler, something sadder. “That was not convincing.”

Before you could answer, Evan noticed something you had not even realised you were doing, hands clenched so tightly that the gloves had left faint, angry indents across your palms.

His expression changed at once.

“Hey,” he said softly, and this time his voice didn’t tease.

You barely heard him.

Your mind was still somewhere else, back in the memories, back in the anger, back in all the people you couldn’t save.

Evan reached for your hand, not to pull it away, not to force you to stop, just to cover it with his own. His touch shifted almost immediately, the slime beneath his skin adjusting as if it had been waiting for the chance to help. His usual warmth drained into something cooler, a soothing chill settling over your knuckles as he carefully rubbed the deep impressions left by your grip. The viscosity of his hand changed too, softening just enough to mold around yours without pressure, easing into the shape of your fist like he was coaxing your body into remembering it was safe to let go.

The tension in your hand eased by degrees under his careful touch.

You blinked.

It was such a strange feeling. So, unlike anything human. And somehow, still felt more human than anything this week.

“You’re hurting your hands again,” he murmured.

Only then did you realize how tightly you had been holding on.

Your breath caught.

Evan’s cool hand stayed over yours, steady and gentle.

“Sorry,” you said quietly.

His head tilted, eyes soft.

“Why are you apologizing?”

You had no answer for that either.

His thumb made one slow pass over the marks on your skin, his touch still cool, still careful.

“Come back to me,” he said, barely above a whisper. “Just for a second.”

And against all the noise still raging in your head, you did.

“Evan-”

“Nope.” His voice was still soft, but there was real urgency underneath it now. Concern. Worry. The kind that made his eyes look brighter by contrast. “Stay here. With me. Not in your head.”

For someone who could reshape himself into anything, he had chosen exactly this: firm enough to ground you, careful enough not to feel like pressure. The motion made his own body shimmer a little, his viscosity tightening just enough to hold form.

Your mouth opened. Nothing useful came out.

His gaze sharpened immediately, as if that was answer enough.

“There you are,” he murmured, almost to himself. Then, louder: “What happened?”

You looked away first.

That, apparently, was also answer enough.

Evan followed your line of sight for a moment, then back to you, and whatever he saw there made his brow crease with visible distress. His voice dropped further.

“You are spiraling.”

You let out a strained, humourless breath. “I’m not spiraling.”

His look said he had heard that lie before and would not be accepting it today.

“You are,” he said, very gently, like he was trying not to spook you. “And I need you to look at me for one second.”

You did.

He was so close you could see the tiny shift in the light around him, the way his pink glow brightened and dimmed with the rhythm of his concern. His face had settled into such a kind shape he wore best, the one he probably thought made him easier to be around. It did. It also made it worse, in a way, because the sweetness of it made it nearly impossible to forget he had no business being this tender with you when he clearly felt this much.

“Talk to me,” he said.

Your throat worked once, but the first answer that came to mind was too tangled to say out loud. Too many things lived behind your ribs at once, sharp-edged and restless, pressing against each other until even breathing felt like a task.

When you finally spoke, your voice came out rough.

“People are still out there.”

His expression shifted slowly, carefully, as though he was putting together the shape of what you could not say. He did not need every detail. He did not need you to explain the girls, the missing, the fear that had followed you into the office and settled there like dust you could not shake off. He understood enough to know this was bigger than a bad day. Big enough to knot your whole body up from the inside.

His hands tightened at your shoulders, just slightly, grounding rather than restraining.

“I know,” he said quietly.

That was it.

No promises he could not keep. No easy comfort. No bright, useless words meant to smooth over something that did not deserve smoothing over.

Just: I know.

“Hey,” he said, softer now, his voice losing all its usual teasing warmth and turning into something steadier, more careful. “You do not have to say it if you do not want to. You do not have to explain any of it to me right now.”

The permission in that almost made your eyes sting.

You looked down before he could see it, because if you met his gaze too long you were afraid whatever was holding you together would finally give way.

His thumbs moved once over your shoulders, small and absent-minded in a way that felt more comforting than anything deliberate. He was here. Just here…

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked after a moment.

You hesitated.

Evan seemed to read that too. His mouth softened, understanding settling there before he could even speak again.

“Okay,” he said. “Then don’t.”

The simple ease of it made something in your chest loosen by a fraction. He watched you for a second longer, as though making sure you were still with him, still anchored in the room, still breathing.

Then, with the smallest shift, he leaned back enough to give you space without stepping away.

“Let me stay,” he said.

You looked up at that, just enough to catch the sincerity in his face.

He gave you a small, crooked smile, gentler than his usual one, less playful and more careful around the edges.

“I mean it,” he said. “You keep working and I will keep you company.”

The words should not have meant as much as they did.

You did not answer right away, because if you did you might have to admit how badly you needed that. How much easier it suddenly felt to keep going with someone nearby, someone warm and patient and quiet, who would not demand more from you than you had left to give.

Evan did not press.

He just pulled a chair closer, close enough that his shoulder brushed yours when he sat down, close enough that the space between you no longer felt so empty.

Then he folded his hands, tilted his head toward your screen, and said lightly, “You keep doing whatever important-looking thing this is, and I will be over here being extremely supportive and not at all distracting.”

That got the tiniest breath of a laugh out of you.

His whole face changed at once, relief flashing through him so quickly it almost made him look younger.

“There you are,” he murmured, warm and quiet.

He stayed after that.

Every so often, Evan glanced over at you like he was checking you were still okay without making it obvious, his knee bumped yours under the desk, brief and accidental and somehow exactly what you needed.

At some point, when the tension in your hands finally eased enough for you to keep typing without flinching, he leaned back and said in a low voice, “See? I make excellent company.”

You huffed a breath through your nose, almost a laugh again.

“Debatable,” you muttered.

He grinned, soft and fond.

“Liar,” he said.

A reluctant smile tugged at the corner of your mouth.

The moment Evan saw it, something in his expression loosened. Relief flickered across his face so quickly it almost hurt to look at, as though he had been standing at the edge of a cliff waiting to see whether you would take one step forward or disappear entirely.

His shoulders dropped a fraction.

“Yeah,” he whispered, a soft smile finding its way onto his own face. “That’s better.”

“Now tell me what you need. Coffee. Water. A walk.” His mouth twitched. “Or I can go scare Royd for you. I'm flexible.”

A surprised laugh escaped before you could stop it. Thin and tired, but undeniably real.

Evan's entire face softened.

There it was again, that look of relief, warm and immediate, like someone watching a light turn back on after fearing it had gone out.

“Much better,” he said quietly.

His voice dropped lower.

“Missed that.”

The words were simple, almost casual, but they landed somewhere deep inside your chest.

For a second neither of you said anything.

“That's my favourite version of you,” he said lightly. “The one that occasionally remembers she's allowed to smile.”

You rolled your eyes, but the smile stayed.

Evan's grin widened immediately.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “Keep that one around for a bit.”

---

That night, after you got home, the thought refused to leave you alone.

Even Evan’s company, even his steady voice, the way he had tried to pull you back from the edge of your own head, it all only held the darkness at bay for a little while. Once you were alone, it came creeping back in, slow and merciless, until staying still felt impossible.

So, you went out.

You went out as Revenant.

You should have gone straight home after the day you had. Or the week, really. You knew that. But Chad’s face stayed with you. Zara’s too. The strain in their voices. The look in their eyes, like they were trying to stand upright while the whole world kept driving a boot into their backs. Chad’s anger hadn’t surprised you, not really. Betrayal did that. Hurt did that. Being doubted again and again until your truth started sounding like a lie.

If you had been in his place, carrying that same invisible blood on your hands, you would have snapped.

And that thought followed you into the night like a second shadow.

You were angry.

It was not simple frustration. Something that sat beneath your skin and tightened your muscles before your mind could catch up. Anger for every person crushed beneath someone else's cruelty. For every innocent life treated as disposable. For every moment where doing nothing was considered the safer choice. The helplessness always came back wearing a different face, carrying a different name, but the ending was always the same: someone hurt, someone ignored, someone left behind.

It reminded you of-

“HELP!”

The scream cut through the night like a blade.

It tore you out of your thoughts so violently that for one disorienting second, everything else vanished. You stopped mid-step, every muscle going taut, your head snapping toward the sound.

Then you moved.

No hesitation. No thought. Just instinct, raw and immediate, dragging you forward before your mind had fully caught up. Your boots struck the pavement hard as you cut across the street and vanished into the narrowing mouth of an alley, the city folding in around you in jagged fragments of shadow and light. Fire escapes clung to the sides of the buildings like ribs. Graffiti flashed by in streaks of colour. Glass glittered under the streetlights. Somewhere ahead, something was exploding with the ugly, stuttering violence of a power gone wrong.

By the time you reached the scene, the air was already choked with panic.

A car had been shoved halfway through a storefront window, its front end crumpled inward, sparks spitting and hissing from somewhere beneath the chassis. Civilians were scattering in every direction, some running, some dragging others by the arm, all of them shouting over one another in that frantic, panicked way people did when they were trying not to die.

One man had stumbled and was being hauled upright by a woman with blood on her sleeve. Somewhere to your left, a child was crying. Somewhere to your right, someone was yelling for help.

The road itself looked like it had been struck by something furious. Two cars had been torn apart and flung aside like toys. The pavement had been gouged in deep, violent arcs, chunks of concrete ripped loose and scattered across the street. Streetlights flickered overhead, their glow stuttering uncertainly through the smoke.

And in the centre of it all stood the cause.

A villain.

Twisted, unstable, half-swallowed by a storm of crackling energy and black smoke that rolled around them in surges. They stood as if they owned the wreckage, head thrown back, laughing like this entire street, every terrified person in it, existed only to amuse them.

Then they turned and saw you.

The laughter faltered.

And that tiny break in their confidence was enough.

Good.

They knew what you were.

You did not give them time to recover.

Revenant became motion.

You crossed the street in a blur, fast enough that the edges of the world seemed to smear around you. Your foot swept a jagged piece of debris out of your path. Your shoulder clipped the side of a burning vehicle as you drove forward. A falling sign twisted loose overhead, and you shoved one terrified civilian out of the way just in time for it to crash into the pavement where they had been standing a second earlier.

The villain attacked first.

A burst of force electricity tore from their hand, bright, violent, and hot enough to turn the air into a shimmering wave. It would have ripped through a lesser body without effort.

You twisted at the last second.

The blast skimmed past your shoulder with a rush of heat so fierce it burned through the air beside your face. The force of it threw sparks off the concrete behind you.

You answered with a brutal punch to the ribs.

The impact jolted up through your arm and into your shoulder. The villain staggered, breath punching out of them in a sharp, ugly sound, and you used that opening without mercy. Another strike. Then another. Fast. Controlled. Relentless.

You kept them moving. Kept them off-balance. Kept them from getting close enough to turn their power fully on the crowd.

The street became chaos.

Electricity snapped through the air in wild arcs, illuminating broken glass, smoke, and terror in brief violent flashes. The villain laughed again, but it had lost its edge. They hurled a bolt that would have shredded the side of a building. You ducked under it, felt the heat rip across the top of your hood, and drove forward through the aftershock, closing the distance before they could reset.

“Is that all you’ve got?” you snapped, voice low and cold.

The villain’s grin sharpened.

Another strike came from their left hand, this one sharper, bright with electricity. You ducked beneath it, the air hissing overhead, and slammed an elbow into their jaw. The villain reeled back, boots scraping sparks off the road. Somewhere behind you, a woman screamed for her child. You did not look away long enough to see whether the child had made it.

That was the thing about this life. You learned very quickly not to split your attention. Not if you wanted people to live.

The villain straightened slowly, and only then did their eyes seem to focus on you fully.

“Oh,” they said.

A grin spread across their face, all teeth and recognition.

“It’s you. The rumoured ghost.” Their grin widened. “Revenant.”

That name carried differently in their mouth. Familiar. Delighted. Like they had heard stories before and were pleased to find the monster matched the rumour.

It was not a surprise that they knew who you were. Back in the days before Blonde Blazer pulled you from the streets, before the suit and the mask and the thing you had become, you had been known.

Notorious.

A shadow people whispered about when they wanted a warning to land harder. Still, hearing it now, from a second villain in a row, made something cold settle behind your ribs.

You filed it away to look into later.

Lightning crackled around the villain’s fingertips, little blue-white veins crawling over their knuckles.

“I’ve always wanted to see whether the rumors were true,” they said, voice curling with mock curiosity. “The crazed vigilante… or maybe bloodthirsty suits you better.”

You stepped forward. The streetlights above flickered.

“I don’t care what you want.”

Voltage’s grin sharpened.

“That’s unfortunate.”

The lightning came instantly.

You moved left.

The bolt slammed into the asphalt where you had been standing a fraction of a second earlier, vaporizing concrete and hurling shards into the air. You were already moving again, pushing off the ground, closing the distance before they could reset.

One punch.

Your armoured knuckles connected with their jaw.

The force of it launched them backward through the windshield of a parked car. Glass exploded in a glittering spray. Metal screamed under the weight of the impact. The car rocked on its suspension, alarm stuttering to life and then dying under the chaos.

The fight detonated around you. Electricity against precision. Chaos against control.

He threw bolts but you weaved through them in tight arcs, each dodge measured, each movement deliberate. You forced them away from the civilians, away from the storefront, away from the bodies still scrambling to reach safety. A second burst of energy cracked into the street behind you, blowing smoke and rubble into the air.

Another explosion ripped through the side of a nearby vehicle.

You were already there.

A man had been pinned beneath a broken beam, his arm trapped under twisted metal. You seized him by the collar and dragged him clear, the beam splitting where it had been holding him down. A woman stumbled behind a concrete barrier, sobbing so hard she could barely breathe. You shoved her fully behind cover just as the villain raised both hands for another strike.

A sound cut through the storm, low and mechanical and unmistakable.

WHIRRRRRRRRR.

The noise rolled across the street like a warning bell.

You turned.

There he was.

Mecha Man.

He landed hard enough to shake the road beneath him.

The suit; towering, metallic, precise, all hard angles and engineered purpose. Cold light slid over the armor in fractured streaks, turning him into something almost unreal for a second, something too polished and too controlled to belong in a street reduced to wreckage. Steam hissed from a vent near his shoulder. Somewhere in the chest unit, machinery clicked and recalibrated with a low electronic hum.

You did not need to see his face to feel the tension snap taut between you.

It had been there before tonight. It was always there.

In the pauses that lasted too long. In the silences that followed your names. In the way neither of you ever quite looked away first, as though the other was a wound neither of you wanted to touch because touching it would prove it still hurt.

Whatever had happened between you lived under the surface of every encounter, a live wire buried just beneath the skin. Too much history. Too much left unsaid. Too many things that had gone wrong in ways neither of you had managed to name properly.

But now was not the time.

Not with civilians screaming.

Not with a villain still standing.

Mecha Man moved without hesitation, one armoured arm locking around the villain’s next strike before it could land. The force of the impact reverberated through the street. The villain snarled and twisted violently, trying to wrench free. You caught the opening and drove low, taking their balance out from under them. The three of you collided in a storm of motion, his precision, your speed, the villain’s desperate chaos, while terrified people scrambled for cover around you.

The villain looked between the two of you and faltered.

Their confidence slipped.

“Well,” they said, laughter suddenly thin. “This just became unfair.”

Neither of you answered.

There was no need.

You attacked at the same time.

“Get them clear!” Mecha Man barked, the words distorted through the suit’s comms, sharp with command and that familiar edge of authority that always made you want to either obey him or argue purely out of spite.

You didn’t answer. You were already moving.

You drove one civilian behind a parked truck, then spun back just as the villain unleashed another wave of force. Mecha Man took the blast squarely, armour grunting under the impact, and you used the opening to smash your fist into the emitter point exposed along the villain’s wrist.

Metal cracked.

Sparks burst outward.

The villain staggered, clutching at the damaged limb with a snarl that had become more human than monstrous.

You and Mecha Man moved like a blade splitting through chaos. He caught; you broke escape routes. He pinned; you displaced. He blocked a collapsing slab of masonry while you hauled two civilians free from under a parked car. He took a blast meant for the crowd; you answered by tearing the villain away from the center of the street and driving them into the wreckage of their own destruction.

By the time the last trapped person stumbled out into the open, half-crying and half-laughing in relief, the villain was finally cornered.

The street looked less like a city block and more like the aftermath of a battlefield.

Your chest rose and fell beneath the hood, each breath hot against the filters of your mask, each inhale carrying the taste of smoke, concrete dust, and ozone.

Around you, the chaos was beginning to settle.

Civilians emerged cautiously from behind shattered vehicles and broken walls. Some clung to one another with trembling hands. Others simply stood where they were, staring at the destruction in stunned silence, as though they could not quite believe they had survived it. A child buried their face against their mother's shoulder. An elderly man sank onto the curb, shaking too violently to stand.

They were alive. That was enough for now.

Across the ruined street, the villain struggled against the immense grip of Mecha Man's armoured frame. One massive mechanical handheld them effortlessly against the wreckage, hydraulic servos humming with restrained power as sparks spat from the villain. The fight had gone out of the villain now, replaced by ragged breaths and frustrated curses.

You turned to leave.

Then instinct made you look back.

Just once.

Across the wreckage, Mecha Man was already looking at you.

The visor concealed his eyes. The armour concealed his expression. But neither could hide the weight of his attention.

It rested on you with an unbearable familiarity, not as a stranger studying another vigilante, but as someone trying to read a language they had once understood.

There was no gratitude in that stare.

No triumph.

Only something heavier.

Disappointment? Concern? Judgment?

Maybe all three.

A bitter knot tightened beneath your ribs.

Of course.

The civilians would remember the rescue. He would remember everything else.

You broke eye contact first.

Some conversations were better left buried beneath concrete and sirens.

You turned, boots crunching softly over broken glass as you stepped toward the waiting shadows.

One step.

"Revenant."

You stopped.

The name hung in the air between the wail of distant sirens and the crackle of dying fires.

For a long moment, you said nothing.

Part of you wanted to keep walking.

To disappear before another word could be spoken.

Before old wounds could be reopened.

Before this became what it always became.

You almost did.

Your fingers curled once inside your gloves.

Then, slowly, you turned.

He stood amid the wreckage like a verdict waiting to be read, suit dusted with ash, one arm hanging slightly lower from the strain of the fight. The light from a flickering sign splashed across the metal. Inside the suit, his presence felt focused, controlled, but there was something sharper under it now. Something older. Something personal.

“You keep doing this,” he said.

The words hit like a hand to the sternum. You knew what he meant.

Your jaw tightened beneath the mask. “You called me back for a lecture?”

“You know what you’re doing…”

The street seemed to quiet around the two of you, even with the sirens still approaching.

His tone was steady, but the restraint in it made it worse. “This isn’t justice.”

You gave a short, humourless laugh. “You’re really doing this now?”

“I’m serious.”

So were you.

You lifted your chin.

“Funny how it's only called justice when people like you are the ones delivering it,” you say with a scoff.

 “You’re killing people.”

You didn’t flinch.

“Only the ones who've already chosen what they are.”

A beat of silence.

The suit’s mechanical systems murmured softly, as if even it were listening.

He stepped forward one pace. “You don’t get to decide that.”

You let that hang between you.

Then you said, “And you do?”

For a moment, he didn’t answer. The silence stretched long enough. Somewhere behind him, a wounded car alarm wailed. Somewhere beside you, one of the rescued civilians was crying with shaking relief. The world kept moving, uncaring, while the two of you stood there with old history between your ribs and newer anger at your feet.

At last, he said, “The difference between us gets smaller every time you do this. Don't make me prove it.”

You took one slow step back, letting the darkness gather around your shoulders again. “I’d like to see you try.”

Even through the suit, you could feel his attention sharpen. The line between warning and challenge had always been thin with him. Thin enough to cut.

His voice lowered. “You think I’m bluffing?”

You tilted your head, the hood swallowing what little of your expression the mask did not.

"No," you said evenly. "I think you keep mistaking your assumptions for understanding."

Mecha Man was silent for a long moment before he spoke again.

"If you keep doing this..." His voice was quieter now, stripped of command, carrying something dangerously close to concern. "...eventually you'll become the very thing you're hunting."

A hollow laugh escaped you, muffled beneath the mask.

 "Maybe.”

 The word hung between you like the smell of cigarettes. You watched it land, watched something tighten in the rigid posture of his suit.

"You don't get it," he said, almost pleading now, as though there were still time to pull you back from a road he had already decided would end in tragedy.

"No." you answered softly, taking a single measured step closer until your reflection stared back at you from the dark visor of his helmet.

For the first time that night, there was no hero and no vigilante standing in the ruined street. Just two people, separated by a line neither of them knew how to cross.

The distance between you tightened with all the unresolved things neither of you said. Memories flashed and vanished too quickly to hold onto: working side by side before everything curdled, trust given and withdrawn, narrow escapes, sharp words, the sensation of almost understanding each other before some old wound stepped in and ruined it.

“Reverent... please,” he said, quieter this time, command was gone from his voice, leaving behind something far more dangerous hope. “It doesn't have to be like this. Every time you choose the knife, you walk a little farther away from the person you used to be.”

A slow breath escaped your mask, violet vapor curling through the filters in thin, ghostlike ribbons before disappearing into the cold night.

“Then maybe,” you replied, your voice calm beneath the hood, “stop showing up to a knife fight expecting me to believe the world can still be talked into changing.”

Silence settled between you.

It was the familiar silence that had always existed between the two of you, a place where neither of you was willing to surrender, yet neither could quite bring themselves to walk away. Somewhere between duty and desperation. Between mercy and necessity. Between the hero who still believed everyone could be saved... and the vigilante who no longer believed the world gave everyone that chance.

The approaching sirens painted the street in flashing blue.

You turned first.

Not because the conversation was over.

Because it never was over.

Because if you stayed another moment, one of you might say something that could not be taken back.

You stepped toward the dark before pausing just long enough to glance over your shoulder. The fractured city lights caught the edge of your mask, turning it into little more than another silhouette among the ruins.

“Catch me if you can, Mecha Man.”

Then you disappeared.

Behind you, Mecha Man did not follow.

He simply stood there amid the wreckage, the restrained villain at his feet, emergency lights washing over battered steel in alternating shades of blue and red.

His visor remained fixed on the place where you had vanished.

Long after there was nothing left to see.

For just a moment, the years slipped through his fingers.

He remembered another night.

Another alley.

He remembered thinking there was still time.

Time to earn your trust. Time to pull you away from the streets before they became all you knew. Time to convince you that justice did not have to come wrapped in blood.

He had believed there would always be another chance.

Another conversation.

Another day.

Instead, those missed moments had become years.

And somewhere between the person you had been and the person standing beneath that hood tonight, he had arrived too late.

The realization settled heavily behind his ribs. Not because he believed you were beyond saving, cause, despite everything that had happened, some stubborn part of him still refused to stop hoping you were not.

That hope was becoming harder to hold. Yet he could never let it go.

Not while he could still hear echoes of the life you might have had. Not while there was even the smallest chance that one day, when he called your name...

...you might stop running…

Man, he needed a drink.

Banshee/Emily

Upon first meeting Emily, she can come across as very creepy and unsettling with her naturally ghostly appearance, stature, and mannerisms, especially if you meet her in her at SDN/on the job with her long white dress and shawl and long black her in her face. But when you get to know her she’s actually just a sweet and well mannered person who just has issues with social interactions/situations. In her civilian clothes she has a more creepy soft croquette/pastor’s haunted daughter aesthetic. She does naturally has that ghostly stare though. It’s her shocking blue eyes, resting doll eye stare, and dark circles from her insomnia. She looks like the 1000th happy haunt of the haunted mansion or a Tim Burton character.

She really is a kind and gentle soul. She loves all creatures regardless of their reputation. She refuses to kill bugs and spiders that find their way into her apartment and SDN office, and will happily call to stray cats she finds while on the ground during work.

You will have to look out for her when she talks. She’s naturally very soft spoken and can easily be drowned out by louder speaking people in conversations. Think of how Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas and Fluttershy from MLP talk. Fun fact, my voice claim for her is basically Sally with some more pitch.

Her love languages are gift giving and quality time. She likes being around you and the people that she cares about, whether it be actually doing an activity together/going in a date or just being in the same room. She also likes to look for things on her trips to thrift and antique stores that remind her of you or something that you might like. She makes sure to get it and restore it, if it’s needed, and gift it to you.

She gets bashful with words of affirmation. She gets all red and hides her face in her hair. It’s actually really cute. She freezes up with physical touch though. She likes being close to you, but touch is a bit of an iffy thing for her. She prefers being close more. But an occasional kiss on the cheek or temple is nice.

Speaking for antiques… I hope you’re not afraid of porcelain dolls and figurines, or at least can tolerate being in the room with them because she likes to collect them. So you either need to get with it or get out. On top of being cool with the antique style because her decor mostly consists of antique and thrifted furniture she’s managed to get and fix up.

Cadaver/Jane

Jane a hard person to read considering they have a very monotone way of speaking and don’t really express emotions regularly. There is the joke to make that they’re dead inside but technically they’re dead outside too. They’re literally a walking-talking corpse of a Jane Doe that they managed to snatch to be able to walk around. They can experience emotions, they just don’t emote them. So you need to get that they show their caring and affections in other ways, along with the whole corpse thing.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that they have identity issues, but their gimmick is that they’ve been hopping from body to body for so long that they don’t have any meaningful connections with any of them or any possible future ones when this one gets too damaged to keep going, on top of them not even remembering what their original body or name even was. The only name they know is Jane or John Doe. They were a person… are a person… once… but they’ve depersonalized so much from the fact that the bodies don’t feel anything and that its only a matter of time till they have to make their jump to a new one. I guess if you’re their partner then they feel more grounded, which would be like a breath of fresh air that they haven’t had for who knows how long.

I feel Like Jane’s primary love language is acts of service with the addition of quality time. All the other ones are kind of weird for them. Their body can’t feel anything like touch so physical touch (giving or receiving) is kind of awkward because they can’t feel it. Words of affirmation are a maybe. They might rarely say “I love you” if you tried to make them, but you’ll definitely hear “Good job” or something like that every now and again (SDN or not). And gift giving really isn’t their thing. So acts of service and hanging out with you is the thing they fall into. They’ll help you with anything you need or just lighten your load for you.

They do also like it in return. Especially if you know how to patch a body up. Their injuries don’t heal, so they need to either bandage it up or sew closed any cuts. They normally take care of that themself but if you don’t mind it, they’d really appreciate it if you did it for them. It’s actually one of the most intimate things that you can do together. Sex is a no go. They don’t have a libido and feel those things let alone physically feel that type of gratification, period.

I mean why would you want to anyways? That’s legit a walking corpse. Who are you? Lawrence Oleander?

Jane is highkey on the aroace spectrum if you couldn’t tell

Clown Girl/Candice/Candy

The most silly, goofy, whimsical, joyous, ray of sunshine person ever. Her powers literally make her a looney tunes character and she chooses her hero get-up to be a clown! She’s a motherfucking clown superhero!! BY CHOICE!!

By the way, her name is Candice but everyone calls her Candy outside of work, and that includes you. If ever use her real name, she assumes you’re mad at her or have something serious to say because literally no one calls her Candice unless it’s serious. It’s either Candy or Clown Girl. And obviously you can’t call her Clown Girl what she’s not in the makeup or on the clock at SDN.

She will do anything to make you happy. Say jokes, pull a little light-hearted prank, make you a little balloon animal, or just talk to you. If you’re having a bad day or not feeling well, she’ll always be there to help you cheer up. No valley is too low, or mountain too high, or joke too silly. Anything to turn your frown upside down! I guess you could say that she’s got all the love languages. Physical touch, words of affirmation, acts of service, gift giving, and quality time. It’s all in her routine!

I think the best love language to be on the receiving end for her is simply humoring her and her antics, especially if you work with her at SDN as a hero or dispatcher, because she is in fact the office clown. She’s always goofing off somehow. Whether it be placing fake bugs to give someone a good spook or making a bunch of balloon animals and placing them around the office. Or just straight up having fun on a call. I mean, what criminal is going to expect getting hit in the face with a cream pie by a clown? Or that they’re going to pull out a comedically large mallet? Or that they can make a sentient balloon dog that can sniff them out? Or pull out a party canon out of thin air. Or walk on thin air that doesn’t take effect unless she acknowledges it? She’s so unserious that you have to either get with it or leave. She’s can take things seriously, and will… but where’s the fun in that when you can use your goofy ass powers to be goofy and silly?

So you either need to be down to clown or at least be the Jessica to her Roger Rabbit, or the Miss Piggy to her Kermit. That also works.