#riddle x reader

part 2 - scarabia, pomefiore, ignihyde (-ortho), diasomnia

⋆.𐙚 ̊ RIDDLE never imagined that a responsibility that he had for long could he so enjoyable, and all it took was you by his side. The first time this kind of date happened wasn’t even intentional. He was tending to the Heartslabyul’s hedgehogs, making sure that they are all okay after a game of cricket during an unbirthday party. That was the time that you decided to come help him, although he was hesitant about accepting your offer, he did finally gave up his resistance. And he was really glad that he did because together you started a new tradition, where you meet up at the end of every friday to have a nice picnic, surrounded by many colourful hedgehogs. Whatsoever, Riddle is still reluctant to admit to the fact that he does get a little jealous when looking at the way you baby these small animals. But that’s nothing a few kisses and snuggles can’t fix.

⋆.𐙚 ̊ ACE loves taking you to amusement parks. He especially likes it if you are more on the scared side when it comes to rollercoasters, as he can pride himself on being the braver one (despite internally crying at the sight of any extreme attraction), and sneakily avoid going to anything too scary for himself, without looking like a loser. Although his favourite part are the games. He always insists on winning you a plushie, no matter how many you already got from him. What can he say, he likes to show off his talent when there’s a chance to. And seeing you smile is always a huge bonus.

⋆.𐙚 ̊ DEUCE felt himself fall for you even further (if that’s possible) the first time you took him to a petting zoo. Specifically the section with chickens and little chicks. At first you could have thought that he wasn’t pleased with your choice of date, but it was because he was so overwhelmed by emotions that he had frozen. But after coming back to his senses he immediately looked at you with such eagerness in his eyes, that you couldn’t help but imagine a tail behind his back wagging. So with that in mind you took his hand and lead him to the laying chickens so you two could try to pet them. And you could swear that when he was holding one chicken and was surrounded by many more, his eyes look even more fond than any time that he looked at you (/j… or is it?)

⋆.𐙚 ̊ TREY and yours usual go to dates were what many would expect - baking dates. But this time you choose to take him somewhere entirely else. Well, not really take. You decided to invite him to your room so you two can have a sleepover party. Fortunately Riddle wasn’t very opposed so it wasn’t hard to manage. You finally have an opportunity to help Trey relax a little, cause while he wasn’t not the most self-pressured man, he still sometimes forgot that he also needs a little break. Many would not even call what you were doing a date, but you didn’t need anyone’s approval of calling it whatever you wanted. You had set on just having a movie watching marathon while cuddling. And for both of you it was more than enough.

⋆.𐙚 ̊ CATER for a long time wanted to take some photos of a karaoke night, so it was only natural that you proposed a date in a karaoke booth. You both came up with matching outfits so you could look even more like a duo when you will be singing together. When you already arrived, Cater instantly was in his element, probably due to being a part of a band with Kalim and Lilia. He even had took a professional camera so he could take the best photos and videos. But you had so much fun that you didn’t even notice when he was taking photos of you. And when posting what he recorded and photographed, he made sure to consult with you if you want to share your singing voice with others or not. He was okay with both, he would still get to hear you sing whatever your answer could be.

⋆.𐙚 ̊ LEONA in a theatre wasn’t a sight that many would have imagined. And while he wasn’t a huge fun of them, he tolerated them. In his younger years he did sometimes attend some performances due to his status as a prince, so it wasn’t anything new to him. There was a performance that you really wanted to see, so when you asked if he would like to tag along, he agreed without much hesitation. He may be fond of big crowds and noises, but he is fond of you so he didn’t have anything to lose. Although you had to help him get into his suit due to his laziness, as in holding his jacket so he could push his arms into the sleeves and buttoning his shirt. You also tied a tie around his neck but after seeing his frown you immediately took it off with a sigh. And after that you both were ready to go. At first you thought that he would just nap while the performance went on, but he was set on watching it. After all you were so invested in it, so how could he not?

⋆.𐙚 ̊ RUGGIE wasn’t the one to take you to the most extravagant and pricey dates due to obvious reasons. But it wasn’t something that bothered you much, as his presence and the fact that he still put an effort in taking you anywhere was enough. Although his favorite dates are the ones where you both just are able to go out for a walk when it’s almost night. It’s so peaceful and quiet, letting you fill the space with your laughter and chatter. Very often it’s the time where you both are most vulnerable - your night walks are the usual the place where all your arguments and problems are resolved. That’s why you two try making it a routine, you try to find at least one day per week where you both can meet up.

⋆.𐙚 ̊ JACK to many’s surprise was a big fan of gardening, especially when it comes to cactuses. And because of that you often arranged time for an opportunity to join him in his little hobby. His floral knowledge didn’t limit only to cactuses, so if you wanted to grow something else, he was your person to go to. While he didn’t voice his thoughts on your company, he knew that you know that he really appreciated your presence next to him. Although he did sigh quite often due to your forgetfulness about cactuses’ spikes. But despite his complaints about you not being careful, he was already taking your hands and wrapping bandages around your pained fingers. And who knows, maybe if you plead long enough he would kiss it better too.

⋆.𐙚 ̊ AZUL is quite a busy person, so dates weren’t something that occurred very often in your relationship. But when they did happen it was always extravagant and memorable. Although if he had to be honest, his favourite place to go with you was the aquarium. It may be predictable due to him being a merfolk, but there was something about them that just brings him peace. When taking you there he always made sure that there will be the least possible number of people, so you two can enjoy each other’s and the water creatures’ presence to the fullest. To no one surprise he especially enjoyed being with you in the octopus section. Watching you interact with animals that so many deemed as unpleasant to look at was something that always made him warmer and safer.

⋆.𐙚 ̊ JADE and taking him on dates was both equally difficult. Not in the sense that he was always dissatisfied with the places or activities you choose, but he always wore the same smile, which made you more determined to finally came up with the ideal date. And hiking was out of the question, cause then his whole attention was everywhere but you. It was not your ideal description of a date. So you cam with the idea of taking him to bowling alley, due yo the fact that he reminded you of a bowling pin. And thankfully it was a very good decision, as it was probably one of the few times that you could see Jade’s sincere joy. You could bear the fact that you lost all rounds that you played. It was definitely worth it.

⋆.𐙚 ̊ FLOYD is someone that you could take on a specific date once and never again, or at least keep quite a large distance between the times of taking him there. That’s why his favourite kind of date to go, was exploring abandoned buildings. And while he wasn’t all that interested in the architecture or history behind them, he really liked the thrill of not knowing if something would happen. Whatever it be a ghost, something falling down or someone chasing you out of their property.

⭑ DIVIDERS: by @/purefantasia

⭑ JUNII’S NOTES: coming back to my roots 🫡 something light so people won’t think that i have abandoned twst, also i have to finally finish my kisses and physical touch habits series but every time i sit down to do so i just come up with new ideas and write new stuff 💔

likes, comments and reblogs are appreciated !!

© juniiveey

You're an SS ranked Guide, which in theory means you should be drowning in Esper requests like some kind of twisted popularity contest where the prize is being psychically latched onto by someone who experiences a full emotional breakdown if their toast is slightly too brown. 

SS Guides are rare. SS Guides are valuable. SS Guides are supposed to have Espers lined up around the block ready to throw hands for the privilege of having you smooth out their jagged little energy spikes.

Except somehow, against all logic and the basic laws of supply and demand, every Esper in this entire facility takes one look at you and suddenly remembers they have a very important appointment elsewhere. 

Possibly in an S-rank Gate. Possibly in a dumpster. The specific location doesn't matter as long as it's not near you.

HR has tried to address this with you on multiple occasions, each conversation more painful than the last. The last time you sat in that aggressively beige office that smells like stale coffee and printer toner, surrounded by motivational posters with phrases like "synergy" and "collaborative excellence" in fonts that should be classified as war crimes, your HR rep looked at you with the haunted expression like their will to live was dripping away away like a leaky faucet. 

They said that your personality is a little challenging.

You blinked at them. "What's wrong with having a little whimsy? What's wrong with scaring a few Espers?"

"Last week you told an A-rank Esper that his energy signature felt like what you'd get if anxiety and a wet sock had a baby," they said.

"I was helping him develop self-awareness."

"He cried in the bathroom for forty minutes.”

Because honestly, if the living bombs are scared of you, isn't that their problem? Espers are supposed to be powerful. They go into Gates and fight monsters that look like they were designed by a committee of sleep paralysis demons. They have abilities that can level buildings. 

And yet somehow you're the scary one because you have a sense of humor and occasionally enjoy watching them squirm? You told one guy that Guiding him felt like trying to untangle earbuds that had gained sentience and malicious intent. You asked another if he'd ever considered that maybe he was the monster and the Gate creatures were just misunderstood. These are funny observations. The fact that multiple Espers have requested immediate transfers after sessions with you is a them problem, not a you problem.

But right now you're sitting in the Guide break room with your fellow Guides, nursing a coffee that's gone cold because you got distracted thinking about that one Gate last month that was themed like a CVS at 2 AM, and you're starting to notice something that makes you feel like the universe is personally victimizing you.

Everyone in this friend group is bonded or has an Esper.

You're the only unbonded Guide here, which makes you either the group's token single friend or their charity case, and you're not sure which is worse.

You squint across the table at the Guide who's been talking for the last seven minutes straight about how his Esper "totally thinks he's cool because of how well he handled himself inside the farmer's market Gate," and you have to physically bite your tongue to keep from pointing out that the farmer's market Gate was C-rank at best and the final boss was a mutated cabbage. 

This Guide is out here glowing with secondhand pride, talking like he just defeated an S-rank threat solo when really he did was probably just hit a monster with a vegetable until it stopped moving. You're watching this display of delusion in real time and it's making you want to walk into the ocean.

Then there's Trey, sitting in the corner with his phone in both hands, and he's got this expression on his face that can only be described as "catastrophically fond." His thumbs are moving at a speed that suggests whoever he's texting is sending him a multipart novel, probably about something deeply unimportant, and Trey's smiling at his screen like he's reading the most beautiful poetry ever written. 

You know without asking that it's his Esper, the one who has the energy of a feral raccoon that got into the trash and came out with a knife and a vendetta. Trey looks so in love it's making you feel physically ill.

You let your forehead drop onto the table with a thunk that rattles the coffee mugs.

"No one wants to be my Esper," you announce into the table surface, your voice muffled by laminate and despair. "I'm gonna die alone. They're gonna find my body in my apartment in like forty years, surrounded by the mummified remains of houseplants I killed and a freezer full of microwave meals I never got around to eating. The news article is gonna say 'Local Guide Dies Alone, Neighbors Describe Them As Having Questionable Vibes.'"

"That's definitely your fault," someone says immediately, which is both rude and accurate.

"You told an S-rank Esper that his aura looked like it was having a midlife crisis," another Guide adds helpfully.

"It did! I stand by that!"

Trey doesn't even look up from his phone. "You made an Esper cry by asking if he'd considered switching careers because his energy felt 'forever alone.'"

You lift your head just enough to make eye contact with the Guide sitting next to you, the one who's somehow in a committed bond with Malleus Draconia, an SSS-rank Esper who's so powerful he once accidentally destroyed a parking garage because he sneezed. 

Malleus Draconia, who shows up in news headlines like "SSS Esper Levels City Block, Says He Was Startled By A Pigeon." That Malleus Draconia. And this Guide bagged him. You grab them by the shoulders and shake them like you're trying to extract secrets through physical force alone.

"How am I supposed to get someone if they all just wanna use me as a Guiding port?" you demand, shaking them harder. "I don't want some boring professional relationship where I Guide them and they say thank you and go home. I want someone with spice. I want flavor. I want someone who's gonna come out of a Gate and say something so unhinged I have to take a second to process it. I want to make them mad on purpose. I want them to look at me and think about killing me at least twice a week. Is that too much to ask? Am I being unreasonable?"

"Yes," like four people say at the same time.

"Extremely unreasonable," Trey confirms, finally looking up from his phone just to judge you.

"You might need professional help," the Malleus Guide says while you're still shaking them. "Like therapy. A lot of therapy."

You're about to explain that your standards are actually very normal and everyone else is just boring when Ruggie, the Guide whose Esper is probably texting him about committing some kind of petty crime as a bonding activity, speaks up from his corner of the table.

"You know what? You might wanna ask for Esper Rosehearts."

You stop shaking the Malleus Guide. Turn your head slowly to look at Ruggie. "Who?"

"Riddle Rosehearts. A-rank Esper. Stickler for rules. Little guy, huge temper. Terrifying in the way that small angry things are terrifying, like a chihuahua that knows where you sleep." Ruggie takes a sip of his energy drink, which is definitely just straight caffeine in a can at this point. "My Esper wore gloves into a Gate once and this dude almost murdered them on the spot."

You blink. "What."

"Something about Gate protocol and proper conduct and a bunch of rules my guy didn't even know existed. Said Rosehearts turned red as a tomato and started yelling about standards and professionalism, and my Esper genuinely thought they were about to get decapitated over hand coverings. They said it was the scariest yet exhilarating moment of their life and they once fought a Gate boss that was just a sentient tornado made of knives."

You feel something rising in your chest. It might be hope. It might be the terrible coffee. It's hard to tell.

"Tell me more," you say, leaning forward.

"He's been through four Guides in two months. Keeps filing formal complaints about Guiding quality and professional standards. Apparently he has a list of requirements and expectations that's like eight pages long. HR's losing their minds trying to find someone who can deal with him without quitting."

The smile that spreads across your face is the kind of smile that makes people nervous, the kind that says you're about to make a decision that everyone else will regret.

"He sounds perfect," you breathe.

"He sounds like a nightmare," Vegetable Guide says flatly.

"A nightmare with standards," you correct, already standing up. "A nightmare who gets mad about gloves. A nightmare who's gonna look at me and my whimsy and either fall madly in obsession or try to strangle me, and honestly either outcome is a win."

You grab your coffee, realize it's empty, grab Ruggie's energy drink instead and chug half of it before he can protest. You hand it back to him, wipe your mouth with the back of your hand, and shoot him a smile that's all teeth.

"Thanks bestie, you've changed my life. I'm going to HR right now to ask for a new assignment."

"You mean a new victim," someone mutters.

"Same difference," you say cheerfully, already heading for the door with the kind of spring in your step that suggests you're about to do something that'll make HR update their incident report templates. "And it's gonna be beautiful. He's either gonna bond with me or try to kill me, and honestly the uncertainty is what makes it exciting."

Behind you, you hear Trey sigh. "Should we stop them?"

There's a pause, and then someone else says, "I mean we could, but watching this play out is gonna be the funniest thing that's happened all month."

"All year," another Guide corrects.

You're already halfway down the hallway, your steps light and your heart full of chaos and terrible ideas. Riddle Rosehearts. A-rank Esper with a hair-trigger temper.

Your future problem, if the universe has any sense of poetry.

You cannot wait to be so whimsical at him that he tries to cite you for violations. This is gonna be great.

The HR rep looks at you like you've just asked them to set themselves on fire for fun.

"No," they say flatly.

You lean forward in your chair, resting your elbows on their desk in a way that's definitely too casual for a professional setting. "I want Esper Rosehearts as my assignment."

"No," they repeat, and you can see their grip tightening on their stress ball, the one that's shaped like a little brain and says "Keep Calm and Synergize" on it.

"I'll transfer," you say, and you say it with a bright smile that makes it very clear you're not bluffing even a little bit.

The HR rep's eye twitches. They squeeze the stress ball so hard you're worried it might explode. "You can't just threaten to transfer every time we don't give you what you want."

"Sure I can. I'm doing it right now. Watch." You lean back in your chair and examine your nails like you've got all the time in the world. "I'll transfer to the downtown branch. I hear they've got better coffee anyway. And dental. Do we have dental? I feel like we don't have dental."

"We have dental," the HR rep says through what sounds like physically gritted teeth.

"Well the downtown branch probably has better dental."

There's a long moment of silence where the HR rep stares at you and you can literally see them doing mental calculations, weighing the pros and cons of just letting you leave versus dealing with whatever chaos you're about to unleash. The thing is, you both know they can't actually afford to lose you. SS-rank Guides don't grow on trees, and this branch has been hemorrhaging Guides lately because apparently Cupid himself has decided to make this specific location his personal pet project. Guides have been bonding with Espers left and right, which means they're getting transferred to couple assignments or specialized units, and the number of unbonded Guides available for general rotation is getting dangerously low.

You watch the HR rep's face do a complicated journey through the five stages of grief before landing somewhere between resignation and despair.

"Fine," they say finally, and the word sounds like it's costing them years off their lifespan. "You can meet A-rank Esper Rosehearts tomorrow at 4 PM. Be on time."

"I'm always on time," you lie cheerfully, already standing up.

"You were forty minutes late to orientation."

"I said I'm always on time, not that I'm always early. There's a difference."

You're out the door before they can argue, and you can feel the victory thrumming in your veins like caffeine and poor decision-making. You practically skip down the hallway toward the vending machines because you've earned a snack and possibly several snacks, and that's when you hear it.

The yelling.

You slow down as you approach the vending machine area, and the scene that unfolds before you is so beautiful you could cry. There's a redheaded guy who looks like he's about three seconds away from a brain aneurysm, his face so flushed it's approaching tomato territory, and he's jabbing his finger at a Guide who's got the distinct appearance of someone who's chronically online and has definitely been described as "quirky" in performance reviews.

The Guide's got his phone out and he's holding it at an angle that suggests he was either taking a photo or contemplating taking a photo, and the redhead looks like he's ready to combust on the spot.

"Stop blogging about the ways your Esper smacks things around, it's against the rules!" the redhead shouts, and his voice has the kind of pitch that suggests he's been yelling for a while and his vocal cords are staging a protest. "Section fourteen, subsection C of the Bureau handbook explicitly prohibits the unauthorized documentation and distribution of Esper combat techniques on public social media platforms!"

The Guide with the phone blinks slowly, processing this. "But he looked really cool when he hit that Gate boss with the folding chair."

"That's not the point!" The redhead's getting redder, which you didn't think was physically possible but here you are, witnessing it in real time. "The point is that you're violating protocol and putting sensitive information at risk and also it's extremely unprofessional to run what is essentially a thirst blog about your own Esper's combat capabilities!"

"It's not a thirst blog, it's appreciation content," the Guide says, but he's got this little smile that says it's definitely at least partially a thirst blog.

The redhead looks like he's about to start citing more handbook sections, possibly the entire handbook front to back, and that's when you know with absolute certainty that this is him. This is Riddle Rosehearts. The guy who almost decapitated someone over gloves and is currently having a meltdown about social media policy in front of the vending machines.

You don't even think about it.

You walk right up to them and loop your arm around Riddle's neck in one smooth motion, pulling him into a casual side-hold that makes him immediately sputter and choke on whatever rule he was about to recite. He's shorter than you expected and also warmer than you expected, probably because all his blood has rushed to his face in rage.

"Yeah, Riddle's totally right," you say to the Guide with the phone, wagging your finger at him like a disappointed parent. "You really shouldn't be blogging about that stuff, very irresponsible, could compromise operational security or whatever."

The Guide blinks at you, confused about where you came from and also probably confused about why you're acting like you have any authority here. "Who are you?"

"Irrelevant!" you say cheerfully, and then you're dragging Riddle away before anyone can ask follow-up questions, your arm still around his neck as you haul him down the hallway like he's a misbehaving cat you're relocating.

Riddle is sputtering, his face cycling through approximately seventeen different shades of red, and when you finally let him go near the end of the corridor, he whirls on you with the kind of fury that would make a lesser person reconsider their life choices.

You are delighted.

"Hi!" you say brightly. "I'm your new Guid—"

You don't get to finish the sentence because a playing card goes whistling past your face so close you can feel the air displacement, and it embeds itself in the wall behind you with a sharp thunk. You turn your head slowly to look at the card, which is still quivering slightly from impact, and then turn back to Riddle.

He almost took your head off.

Your grin spreads so wide it probably looks unhinged. "You're not allowed to use your powers outside a Gate in the Bureau," you say, and your voice is practically singing with joy. "Pretty sure that's in the handbook somewhere. Section something, subsection whatever."

Riddle's face goes from red to a color that might not have a name yet, something between crimson and burgundy with hints of impending stroke. His hands are clenched into fists at his sides and he's shaking slightly, which could be rage or could be the effort of not throwing more cards at your head.

"Who," he says through teeth so clenched you're amazed that sound is getting through, "are you."

You stick out your hand for a handshake, still grinning. "I'm your new Guide! So nice to meet you, I've heard so much about you, all of it concerning and delightful."

Riddle stares at your hand like it might be a trap and doesn't take it. Instead he pulls himself up to his full height, which is honestly not that impressive but he's got the energy of someone who's about to recite his entire pedigree, and says with the kind of forced professionalism that sounds like it's killing him, "I am Riddle Rosehearts, A-rank Esper, and I don't recall requesting a new Guide."

"You didn't! HR assigned me to you because apparently you keep making your Guides quit, which is so fun, I can't wait to see what makes me special." You're still holding your hand out. He's still not taking it. This is the best day you've had in months.

"I don't make them quit," Riddle snaps. "They quit because they can't adhere to basic professional standards and refuse to follow simple guidelines that exist for very good reasons."

"Sure, sure, totally," you say, nodding like you're taking him seriously when you are absolutely not taking him seriously. "Anyway, I'll see you tomorrow at 4 PM for our Guiding session! Don't be late, I heard you're really particular about punctuality."

"Of course I'm particular about punctuality, being on time is the bare minimum of professional behavior," Riddle says, and he looks like he wants to say more, probably a lot more, possibly a full lecture's worth of more.

You just give him a smile that promises him that you're going to be the worst thing that's ever happened to him and you're both going to have a great time with it. "See you tomorrow, Riddle!"

He glares at you and then turns on his heel and walks away with a posture that suggests he's using every ounce of self-control not to turn around and throw more cards at you.

You watch him go, still grinning, your face still tingling from how close that card came to taking your nose off.

Tomorrow at 4 p.m.

You genuinely cannot wait.

At 3:59 p.m. the next day, there's a knock on your office door.

Exactly 3:59, which tells you everything you need to know about Riddle Rosehearts and also makes you wonder if he's been standing outside your door with a stopwatch, waiting for the cosmically correct moment to knock. You wouldn't put it past him. He seems like the kind of person who has opinions about atomic clocks.

"Come in," you call out, spinning your chair around in a way that's definitely not necessary but makes you feel like a Bond villain.

The door opens and Riddle steps in, looking like he's about to attend a funeral. His posture is so straight you could use him as a ruler. His eyes immediately start scanning your office like he's doing a health and safety audit, and you watch in real time as he catalogs every single thing that's probably driving him insane. 

The crooked picture frame on the wall. The stack of papers on your desk that's definitely not organized by any system known to man. The coffee mug that says "I'm not arguing, I'm just explaining why I'm right" sitting on top of a folder labeled "IMPORTANT - DO NOT LOSE" that you absolutely have already lost the contents of. The small succulent in the corner that might be dead or might just be playing dead to avoid your care.

His eye twitches just a little.

You're delighted.

"Sit," you say, gesturing to the couch.

Riddle sits like he's being photographed for a posture tutorial, hands folded in his lap, back so straight you're concerned about his spine's structural integrity. He looks ready to either recite the Pledge of Allegiance or list every regulation you're currently violating just by existing in this office.

Now here's the thing. You might be unhinged. You might enjoy chaos the way some people enjoy smooth jazz. Yesterday you absolutely did drag him down a hallway like a feral cat who'd found a new squeaky toy. But protocol is sometimes protocol, and Guiding sessions have actual procedures for actual reasons, and you're not about to be a dumbass about someone's energy stabilization just because you think being annoying is funny.

So you grab your chair and wheel it around to his side, pulling out the intake form that HR keeps insisting you fill out even though you've never actually completed one in your entire career here and you're not about to start now, but you can at least pretend.

"Okay, standard questions," you say, clicking your pen in a rhythm that's definitely going to annoy him if the way his eye twitches again is any indication. "Attack type or support type Esper?"

"Attack," Riddle says immediately, and there's this edge of pride in his voice like he's daring you to make a short joke or a comment about how he looks like a particularly angry choir boy.

You write it down. "Anything I need to know while Guiding? Weird energy stuff, spots that are sensitive, any quirks that might make me go 'what the fresh hell' mid-session?"

"No," Riddle says, but his face does this thing where you can tell he's running through a mental checklist. "Standard Guiding procedures should be sufficient."

"Sick." You tap your pen against the paper. "When was your last Guiding session?"

"Two weeks ago."

Your pen stops mid-tap. You look up at him. "I'm sorry, did you just say two weeks?"

"Yes," Riddle says, like this is a completely normal thing to admit and not a red flag the size of a small country. "My previous Guide terminated our working arrangement and HR has been experiencing delays in the assignment process."

Two weeks is bad. Two weeks explains so much about why Riddle looks like he's one minor inconvenience away from snapping like a glow stick. 

Espers are supposed to get field stabilization immediately after Gates, that quick patch job that keeps them from going nuclear on the spot, and then they're supposed to get proper Bureau Guiding twice a week minimum. That's the "please don't let your energy eat itself and also you" maintenance schedule. And Riddle's an attack type, which means he's burning through energy like it's his job, because it literally is his job, and he hasn't had a proper Guiding in two weeks.

No wonder he tried to decapitate someone over gloves. His energy is probably screaming. You're mentally screaming just thinking about it.

The only reason this isn't a five-alarm emergency is because he's A-rank and you're SS, which means you've got the horsepower to deal with whatever absolute disaster zone is currently happening inside his energy pathways. If he was any higher rank or you were any lower, this would be a "call a specialist and maybe a priest" situation.

"Alright," you say, setting down your pen and turning to face him fully. "Give me your hand."

Riddle blinks at you, and for a second he looks genuinely surprised, like he was expecting you to pull out a whoopee cushion or start doing a bit. But you're just sitting there with your hand extended, professional as hell, ready to do your actual job.

He hesitates for a second, then slowly reaches out and places his hand in yours.

His hand is warm and his grip is uncertain, like he's waiting for the other shoe to drop, which is fair because you were absolutely chaos incarnate yesterday and you'll probably be chaos incarnate again tomorrow, but right now you're working.

You wink at him.

The uncertainty on his face immediately converts into a scowl so powerful it could probably be used as a weapon. "Can you be professional for five consecutive minutes?"

"I am being professional," you say, grinning. "This is my professional wink. I have different winks for different occasions."

You start Guiding him before he can start an argument, and the moment you sink into his energy you understand everything about his entire personality.

His energy pathways are fucked. Not just tangled, but fucked in the technical sense, and the situation makes you mentally send a very aggressive email to his previous Guide for letting it get this bad.

Everything is knotted up like earbuds that have been in a pocket for three years, dense clumps of tension sitting in spots that must feel like having a rock in your shoe except the rock is internal and made of your own energy eating itself. The whole system is running so hot you're surprised he's not literally smoking, vibrating at a frequency that suggests he's been operating on pure spite and maybe three hours of sleep for the last two weeks.

Yeah, okay, you get it now. If your insides felt like this you'd also be mad about gloves.

You get to work, carefully smoothing out the worst tangles, loosening the knots that have probably been there so long they've got names and backstories. It's delicate and it takes actual concentration, and that means that you have to stop thinking about being funny or chaotic and just focus on untangling this disaster. 

You can feel Riddle relaxing incrementally as you work, his breathing evening out, his shoulders dropping from where they've been living up near his ears. His energy starts to cool down, stops trying to eat itself, remembers that it's supposed to be helpful instead of a liability.

It takes over an hour. Way longer than a standard session, but he needed it, and you're not about to do a shit job just because you have places to be, which you don't because your schedule is extremely empty and your plans for tonight involve microwaving something questionable and watching YouTube videos.

When you finally let go of his hand, pulling your energy back and disconnecting, Riddle takes a deep breath like he's surfacing from underwater. He opens his eyes and he looks better. Still tired, because one session isn't going to fix two weeks of neglect, but better. More like a person and less like a pressure cooker about to explode.

"Thank you," he says, and the words sound like they're costing him physical pain, like gratitude is a limited resource he has to ration carefully.

"No problem," you say, and then because you're you, you add, "So what Gate are you hitting tomorrow? I need to know where to show up and look pretty while you fight monsters."

Riddle straightens his jacket, smoothing out imaginary wrinkles. "B-7 Gate, downtown district, 9:00 a.m. Briefing is at 8:30 a.m."

"Cool, I'll be there."

"I expect punctuality," Riddle says, and you can tell he can't help himself, the words just falling out of his mouth like a reflex.

"Sure, sure, totally," you say, waving your hand. "But also you have to get me a coffee now."

Riddle stares at you like you've just spoken in tongues. "I beg your pardon?"

"Coffee. You gotta get me one. I just spent an hour unfucking your energy, I'm running on fumes and vibes, and if I don't get caffeine in me immediately I'm gonna have to crawl to the break room like a slug that's given up on life."

"That's not how professional Guide-Esper relationships work," Riddle says, but he's already standing up, and you can literally see him doing the mental math of how pathetic you're going to look crawling down the hallway versus the minor inconvenience of getting you a drink.

"It's exactly how they work," you say cheerfully. "It's in the handbook. Section something, subsection 'don't be a dick to your Guide after they save your energy from imploding.'"

Riddle scoffs and it's such a good sound that you want to record it and set it as your ringtone. He walks toward the door and you think he's going to leave you to suffer, but then he pauses in the doorway.

"I'll be back in five minutes," he says without turning around. "Don't move."

He's gone before you can respond, and you slump in your chair like a puppet with cut strings. Guiding takes it out of you, especially marathon sessions like that, and you're genuinely not sure your legs would work if you tried to use them right now. You feel like a phone at two percent battery.

Exactly five minutes later, because of course it's exactly five minutes, Riddle comes back holding a cup.

It's not coffee.

It's tea.

He sets it on your desk in front of you and it smells like chamomile and maybe honey and something else that's probably good for you in ways that coffee is not.

"It's better for you than coffee," Riddle says, and his tone suggests this is an empirical fact backed by research and not up for discussion.

You look at the tea and then stare at him. His hair is perfectly smooth and he's standing there with his arms crossed looking like he's waiting for you to argue about the beverage choice.

You reach out and ruffle his hair with one hand while grabbing the tea with the other.

"Thanks, Riddle," you say, grinning as his face goes through approximately four colors in rapid succession.

"Don't—" he bats your hand away, immediately trying to fix his hair, "—touch my hair! What is wrong with you? Do you have any concept of personal boundaries?"

"Nope," you say cheerfully, taking a sip of the tea. It's good. He has excellent taste in tea, which you're filing away in your mental folder labeled "Things About Riddle That I Can Use For Future Annoying Purposes."

"And don't be late tomorrow," Riddle says, still trying to get his hair to lay flat. "8:30 means 8:30. Not 8:31, not 8:35, and absolutely not 8:45 with an excuse about traffic."

"I would never," you lie.

"You absolutely would," Riddle says, and he gives you one last look that's somewhere between exasperated and something else you can't quite identify before he turns and walks toward the door, muttering under his breath about proper professional conduct and why does HR keep assigning him to people who don't respect the concept of personal space.

You watch him go, still grinning, the tea warm in your hands and your energy still humming with the ghost of his.

Tomorrow, you're gonna be late on purpose just to see what happens.

You walk into the briefing area at 8:25 AM, which is possibly the most responsible thing you've done in your entire career at this Bureau, including that one time you accidentally filed a report correctly and then spent the next week paranoid that you'd somehow broken the space-time continuum. 

You weren't even trying to be punctual. You just catastrophically overestimated morning traffic like and ended up sitting in your car in the parking lot for fifteen minutes listening to a podcast called "Gates Are A Scam: A Conspiracy Theory Deep Dive" where the host argued that monsters are just unemployed actors in costumes and the whole thing is a government job creation program. 

You're not saying you agreed with him, but he brought receipts and they were compelling.

The rookie Guides standing near the coffee station look at you like you've just walked in juggling live grenades while riding a unicycle. One of them is holding a donut, completely frozen mid-bite like someone paused him. 

Another one drops her tablet and it hits the floor with a crack that sounds expensive, and she doesn't even look down, just keeps staring at you. You're ninety percent sure you hear someone whisper "is this the rapture" like your punctuality is one of the seven seals breaking.

You ignore them because you have a sacred mission, which is to locate Riddle and immediately ruin his morning in the most affectionate way possible. You spot him near the front by this massive tactical display screen that's showing a 3D model of a Gate layout, and he's examining it with an intensity usually seen on people trying to defuse a nuclear bomb using only a YouTube tutorial. 

His posture is so aggressively perfect that you're genuinely worried he's going to fold in half like a lawn chair if someone bumps into him wrong.

You make a beeline straight for him, weaving through other Guides and Espers, and before his brain can register the incoming threat to his personal space, you loop your arm around his shoulders and yank him into a side-hug that makes him go rigid like a mannequin that just witnessed a murder.

"What—who—why are you—unhand me—" Riddle starts making sounds that might technically be language. His face immediately does this thing where it goes through the entire red portion of the visible light spectrum at speeds that should not be medically possible, starting at a gentle pink and speedrunning straight through scarlet into shades of crimson that you're pretty sure don't have official names yet. You think you see burgundy. Possibly magenta. 

He might be inventing new colors through sheer force of embarrassment. He's stuttering so hard you're worried he's going to dislocate his jaw.

"Just checking your energy stability," you say in your most professional voice, which is about as professional as a clown at a tax audit, but you are actually running a quick diagnostic scan of his energy pathways to make sure yesterday's Guiding session is still holding up and he hasn't somehow fucked it up overnight through sheer force of personality. "Can't have my Esper going into a Gate with his energy doing the Macarena. That would reflect poorly on my professional reputation."

"What professional reputation?" Riddle manages to choke out, and you're genuinely impressed he's forming complete sentences while looking like he's about to spontaneously combust.

"Exactly," you say cheerfully. "That's why I need to protect the zero reputation I currently have. It's very fragile. Like an egg made of even smaller, more fragile eggs."

"That doesn't make any sense!"

"Neither does your face but you don't see me complaining about it."

But the second you'd invoked Guiding protocol and professional responsibility, Riddle had gone completely limp in your grip like you've just entered the cheat code that turns off all his motor functions. He's still red as a stop sign and he looks like he wants to file several formal complaints, but apparently professional justification is his off-switch. 

You've discovered that Riddle's kryptonite is properly cited workplace regulations. You're pretty sure you could get him to do anything if you claimed it was in section whatever, subsection whatever of the “new” handbook. You're filing this information away for future exploitation.

"Your energy feels stable," you announce, still refusing to release him from your grip because his discomfort is giving you life. "Good job not destroying it while you were unconscious. That's real personal growth. I'm so proud of you. You want a sticker?"

"Please release me before I report you for workplace harassment," Riddle says through teeth so aggressively clenched you're worried he's going to crack a molar.

"Can't cite me for harassment if it's Guiding-related. That's in the handbook. I looked it up specifically so I could do this."

"That's not what that clause means!"

Across the room, you make eye contact with Trey, who's looking at you with an expression that clearly communicates "you're a menace to society and also I'm morally obligated to intervene but this is the funniest thing I've seen all month so I'm going to let it play out." 

You're about to wave at him when Riddle's expression in your peripheral shifts to something between confusion and the deep exhaustion of a man who's given up on life, and he glances toward the window. You follow his gaze and—

Trey's Esper is in a tree.

No, not climbing a tree. Fully in the tree, perched on a branch like a very aggressive bird, and he appears to be having a heated argument with an actual bird. A pigeon, specifically. The pigeon looks confused.

You point wordlessly at the window because words seem insufficient to capture the majesty of what you're witnessing.

Trey looks. His face goes on an entire journey through the five stages of grief, touching briefly on denial, sprinting through anger, and landing solidly on acceptance of his terrible fate. He walks to the window, opens it, and yells out, "Get down from that tree right now or I swear to god I'm leaving you there!"

"The bird disrespected me!" They yell back, pointing dramatically at the pigeon, who has not had a single thought in its entire life and is not about to start now.

"The bird is a bird! It has a brain the size of a grape! It doesn't have the cognitive capacity for disrespect! It barely has the cognitive capacity for bird!"

"It gave me a look!"

"It's a pigeon! Looking is literally all it does! Looking and shitting on cars, that's the whole bird!"

"It was a very judgmental look!"

"Get down here before I come up there and make this everybody's problem!" Trey sounds like he's aged seven years in the last thirty seconds.

"You can't climb trees, you have bad knees!"

"I'm going to get a ladder! I'm going to get a ladder and I'm going to drag you down and we're going to have a conversation about appropriate pre-Gate behavior!"

"The bird started it!"

You're laughing so hard you can't breathe, tears streaming down your face, and Riddle uses your moment of complete weakness to finally wrench himself out of your grip.

"Your colleagues are a danger to themselves and others," Riddle says, straightening his jacket with sharp, angry little movements like the fabric has personally insulted his entire family.

"Bold words from the guy who almost committed homicide because someone wore the wrong accessories to work," you point out, wiping your eyes.

"That was about maintaining critical safety standards in life-threatening combat environments, not engaging in psychological warfare with urban wildlife," Riddle snaps, but his face is doing the tomato thing again and it's glorious.

"Right, right, totally different situations. One is about protocol and the other is about beef with a pigeon. Very serious distinction."

"It is a serious distinction!"

The briefing starts and the vibe in the room immediately shifts from "casual Bureau morning energy" to "oh fuck we're all going to die and also someone needs to update their will." 

The briefing officer, a tired-looking woman who's clearly stopped caring about things like joy and hope, pulls up a display showing three Gates that opened simultaneously across the city. Just looking at the visualization makes your stomach drop like you're on a roller coaster designed by someone who got rejected from engineering school. Two SS-ranked Gates and one SSS.

That's not a coincidence. That's a coordinated attack, which means something with a brain is organizing this nightmare, and that's a thought you're going to shove into a mental box labeled "absolutely fucking not, deal with literally never."

The SSS Gate has Malleus and another SSS-ranker dealing with what the initial field report describes as "a dragon made of smaller dragons, which are themselves made of even smaller dragons, it's fractals all the way down and we're pretty sure it's violating several laws of physics and possibly mathematics." 

Someone in the back mutters "that's bullshit" and the briefing officer just gives them a look that says she agrees but she's not paid enough to care.

The other SS Gate has most of your remaining heavy hitters. Which means this Gate—the SS-ranked nightmare that's apparently themed like a serial killer took an interior design course on Pinterest and got really into mood boards—gets the bargain bin team. The clearance rack. The "please god let this work" squad. Seven Espers, most of them S-rank and A-ranks, one B-rank guy who looks like he's actively having a spiritual crisis about his career choices, and the strategy is beautifully simple: don't die, keep the monsters inside the Gate, and wait for the big guns to finish their fractal dragon situation and come save everyone's ass.

It's a terrible plan. Everyone knows it's a terrible plan. The briefing officer knows it's a terrible plan. She's presenting it anyway because it's the only plan they've got.

You watch Riddle's face as she explains the hold-and-defend strategy, and you can literally see him doing complex calculus in his head. His eyes are moving back and forth like he's reading invisible spreadsheets floating in the air, probably calculating optimal formation patterns and energy expenditure rates and the statistical likelihood of catastrophic failure and horrible death for everyone involved.

When the briefing wraps and everyone starts moving toward the gear stations with the enthusiasm of people walking toward their own executions, you intercept Riddle before he can launch into whatever elaborate pre-Gate preparation ritual he definitely has planned that probably involves a checklist and three different kinds of meditation.

"I'll wait for you," you say, and you put your whole entire heart into it, channeling every romance novel you've ever read, going for the full period drama energy. You're basically doing the thing where the lover stands on the balcony watching their gentleman caller ride off to war while clutching a handkerchief and looking wistfully at the horizon as sad violin music plays.

Riddle just stares at you with an expression so flat you could use his face as a level for hanging pictures. "Yes. That is the job you are literally employed to perform. That is your job description. Waiting for Espers is the thing you do for money."

"You're supposed to say something romantic back," you complain, letting your arms drop. "Like 'I'll return to you' or 'wait for me, my darling' or 'here, take this locket with my miniature portrait in it' or literally anything that isn't a clinical description of standard workplace procedures."

"I'm about to enter a high-risk combat situation in an alternate dimension filled with hostile entities. My current priorities are ranked as follows: survive, keep my team alive, prevent Gate collapse, don't let the monsters escape into the civilian population. Romance is not on that list. Romance isn't even in the same building as that list. Romance is in a completely different city."

"Wow, okay, so where do I rank on this list of priorities?"

"You're part of the 'prevent Gate collapse' category because if the Gate collapses you'll also die due to proximity, so you're less of a distinct priority and more of a consequence I'm trying to avoid as part of a broader strategic objective."

You put a hand over your heart like you've been shot. "I'm breaking up with you."

"We're not dating."

"I'm breaking up with us conceptually. This whole thing. Whatever this is. I'm seeing other Espers. You'll receive the official paperwork in three to five business days via certified mail."

Riddle looks like he's trying to calculate whether you're joking or if this is a legitimate HR incident he needs to be worried about, and while his brain is buffering like a computer from 1997 trying to load a webpage, you dig into your jacket pocket and pull out a single-use stabilizer pack. You lob it at his chest and he catches it on pure reflex, staring down at it like you've just handed him a live grenade with the pin already pulled.

"I don't need this," he says, frowning at the stabilizer like it's personally offended him and also his entire bloodline. "I'm perfectly capable of managing my energy reserves without emergency supplies. I've been doing this job for years. I know my limits."

Here's the thing. Logically, rationally, Riddle is probably right. He's an A-rank Esper who's been doing this job long enough that he probably knows his energy capacity better than he knows his own birthday.

But there's this feeling in your gut, this weird animal instinct that you've learned to trust because the last time you ignored it an Esper almost died and you had to fill out so much incident paperwork that you're still having nightmares about it six months later where you wake up in a cold sweat screaming about form 27-B. Your raccoon brain is currently losing its entire shit, rattling the bars of its cage and screeching like a smoke alarm at three in the morning.

"Take it anyway," you say. "Consider it a good luck charm. A friendship bracelet. A token of my esteem and also my crippling anxiety. Whatever narrative helps you accept my heartfelt gift without having a medical emergency about it."

"It's not a gift, it's standard-issue emergency equipment from the supply closet that you're wasting on someone who doesn't need it when there are other people who might actually require it in a genuine emergency situation."

"Counterpoint: I don't care, and also you're wrong, and also I'm going to stand here arguing with you until you accept it so you might as well just take it now and save us both time."

You reach up and ruffle his hair so aggressively that it sticks up in approximately seven different directions and he looks like he just stuck his finger directly into an electrical socket.

"Stop—would you stop touching my hair!" Riddle bats your hands away with the kind of urgency usually reserved for swatting away wasps, already trying desperately to smooth everything back down into its usual perfect arrangement. "What is your obsession with destroying my appearance?! Do you have some kind of psychological compulsion?!"

"I think you look cute like this," you say, grinning at him like the absolute menace you are. "Very approachable. Really softens your whole 'I'm about to lecture’ energy. You should consider making this your everyday look. Really embrace it."

"I'm going lecture you right now if you don't stop," Riddle threatens, but even as he's saying it he's pocketing the stabilizer, which you're absolutely counting as a victory.

"Go fight monsters," you say, still grinning at him with way too much enthusiasm for someone who's about to watch people walk into a death dimension. "Try not to die. It would really fuck up my afternoon if I had to break in a new Esper. The paperwork alone would be a nightmare."

"You've known me for approximately forty-eight hours."

"Forty-eight of the best hours of my life. Truly transformative. I'm a changed person. I've seen the light. I've been born again. Now go before you're late to your own Gate and have to file a report about it."

Riddle gives you one last look that's somewhere between exasperated and something that might be fondness if you turned your head sideways and squinted really hard, and then he turns and heads toward the staging area where the other Espers are gathering and looking at their gear with the enthusiasm of people about to walk into a wood chipper. 

You watch him go, trying to ignore the weird uncomfortable feeling in your chest that feels suspiciously like concern, which is ridiculous because you don't do concern. You do chaos and poor decisions and sometimes you eat cereal for dinner while standing at the counter in your underwear. Concern is for people who have their lives together and have calendars.

You've been a Guide through a lot of high-ranked Gates. It comes with the territory of being SS-ranked and also being one of the only SS-ranked Guides who hasn't bonded yet, which makes you the emergency contact number they call when everything's on fire and someone needs to Guide an Esper who's two seconds away from a complete psychological meltdown. 

You've waited outside Gates that took nine hours. You've Guided Espers who came out physically intact but missing pieces of themselves that never really grew back, like their sense of humor or their ability to sleep through the night. You know how this works. You understand the rhythm of it, the way time moves weird when you're waiting for someone to come back from a dimension that's actively trying to kill them in creative ways.

But when you hit hour two and the energy readings from inside the Gate start doing things that make the monitoring equipment start making sounds like a car alarm having a seizure, you start feeling something that might be worry.

Three simultaneous SS+ Gates is bad. It's "maybe call your mom and tell her you love her" bad. It's "check if your will is up to date" bad. It's "consider getting right with your god" bad. 

It means something is targeting this city specifically, stretching your resources so thin you can practically see through them like they're made of tissue paper and wishful thinking. 

Malleus is still tied up with the fractal dragon situation, which according to the latest comms update has somehow gotten exponentially worse in ways the field team can't adequately explain because they keep getting distracted by the geometric impossibilities happening in front of them. One guy tried to describe it and just ended up making sounds. 

The other SS team is drowning in their own nightmare scenario. The seven Espers in this Gate are holding the line completely alone, and from the energy readings that are coming through, the line is looking less like an actual line and more like a polite suggestion that nobody's following.

At hour three, Espers start stumbling out of the Gate.

You feel relief crash over you like a wave for about twelve seconds before you start counting heads. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. You count again because maybe you miscounted, maybe your brain is malfunctioning from stress and caffeine withdrawal and that weird protein bar you ate for breakfast that tasted like cardboard and lies. Still six. You count a third time while your heart starts doing something deeply concerning in your chest that feels like it's trying to escape through your ribs. Six Espers. Definitely six. You count their faces to make sure. Six different faces.

Riddle's face is not among them.

Riddle isn't out.

You start pacing, and pacing turns into wearing an actual trench in the floor, and you're staring at the Gate entrance like you can personally drag him through it using only the power of mounting panic and increasingly unhinged thoughts. 

The other Guides are swarming their Espers like very concerned bees, doing emergency field Guiding sessions, everyone tangled up in the desperate work of keeping people from destabilizing and exploding like human fireworks, and you're just standing there vibrating with anxiety and the dawning realization that something is very fucking wrong.

The last Esper stumbles out and it's Trey's Esper, and you're on them so fast they doesn't even have time to register that they're back in normal reality and not currently fighting for their life. You grab them by the shoulders hard enough that you're definitely going to leave marks.

"Where's Riddle?" you demand, and your voice comes out higher and tighter than you intended.

They blinks at you slowly, their eyes unfocused like they're still half in the Gate, their face covered in something that's either blood or Gate residue or some kind of fucked-up combination of both that you don't want to think about too hard. "Oh man, Riddle? Yeah no, he uh, he made us all leave."

Your heart does something that feels like it's trying to climb out of your throat and escape through your mouth. "He fucking what."

"Said protocol requires at least one Esper to maintain Gate stability until backup arrives or core destruction is achieved. Quoted the whole regulation at us, like the full text, word for word, with the amendment numbers and everything, while he was literally beheading something that looked like if a filing cabinet gained sentience and chose violence and also had way too many teeth."

They sway dangerously and Trey materializes out of nowhere to catch them, already starting to pull him away toward a quiet corner for emergency Guiding. "He did the whole commander voice thing. Very authoritative. Kinda hot if you're into that, which I personally—"

"Not the time," Trey says, sounding like he's aged even more in the last three hours.

"I'm just saying, the man has presence—"

"I love you, but please stop talking."

You stare at the Gate entrance. You look at all the Guides who are currently occupied with keeping their Espers from having catastrophic energy meltdowns. You look at the equipment rack where they keep Esper gear that's definitely not rated for Guides and comes with warning labels that specifically say "NOT FOR GUIDES" in big red letters.

Your brain, the logical part that occasionally prevents you from making decisions that end with you in the hospital or in front of HR, says this is a terrible idea. 

Your brain says Guides are squishy support units who die if you look at them wrong inside a Gate environment. Your brain says you have no business going in there, that you'll probably die, that this violates approximately forty-seven different safety protocols and possibly several laws. Your brain is listing all the reasons this is bad.

Your brain can go fuck itself because Riddle is in there alone and that's unacceptable on every possible level.

"Fuck it, we ball," you mutter to yourself, and you're already moving toward the gear rack with purpose, grabbing a reinforced jacket that's at least three sizes too big for you and makes you look like a child playing dress-up in their dad's clothes. 

You grab a helmet that doesn't fit right and keeps sliding down over your eyes. Gloves that are meant for someone with hands the size of dinner plates. An oxygen canister because Gates are famous for having atmospheres that are less "air you can breathe" and more "exotic poisons we haven't even discovered yet."

"Wait, what are you doing?" one of the rookie Guides yelps at you, his voice cracking with panic.

"Something that's either gonna get me a promotion or get me super fired, and honestly I'm gonna find out which one in real time!" you yell back, already jogging toward the Gate entrance because if you slow down you'll think about it and if you think about it you'll stop.

"You can't go in there, you're a Guide! You'll die! You'll die immediately!" someone screams, and they sound genuinely distressed like they're watching you jump off a bridge.

"Sounds like a skill issue!" you yell back, and then you're at the Gate entrance and you don't let yourself think because thinking will just give your brain time to catch up and tackle you, so you step through.

The transition feels like being shoved through a wall made of angry bees. 

The air on the other side hits you like a physical slap from a very large hand, thick and wet and wrong in ways you don't have adjectives for. 

It tastes like copper and burnt plastic and something else you can't identify and don't want to. The atmosphere is humid in a way that feels personally malicious, like it's humid specifically to make you uncomfortable, and breathing it is like trying to inhale soup through a coffee stirrer.

The theme of this Gate is what you can only describe as "what if a serial killer got really into arts and crafts and had unlimited funding and also several untreated personality disorders and access to a Pinterest board." 

The walls are covered in polaroid pictures that you're actively choosing not to look at because you value your ability to sleep tonight and possibly ever again. The floor is sticky with something you're absolutely refusing to identify or even think about too hard. There's screaming coming from somewhere that might be a sound effect or might be the walls themselves or might be the Gate having feelings. The lighting flickers and you'll never admit it to anyone else but yoy flinch. 

You spot Riddle in what looks like the world's most nightmarish kitchen where you'd find a cookbook titled "To Serve Man," and he looks absolutely terrible. His jacket looks like he fought a paper shredder and lost. 

There's blood on his face, his hands, his clothes, streaked through his hair, and you can't tell how much of it is his and that thought makes your stomach drop. He's swaying on his feet between kills like a boxer in round twelve, and you can see his energy from here, flickering and sputtering like a candle in a hurricane that's about to go out. He's been solo-tanking an SS-ranked Gate for three fucking hours with no support, and it shows in every movement he makes.

You march right up to him and grab him by the ear.

Riddle spins around and his eyes go so wide you're genuinely worried they're going to fall right out of his skull and roll across the floor. He stares at you for a solid five seconds like his brain is trying to process whether you're real or if he's hallucinating from exhaustion or if you're some new type of monster that's shaped like his worst nightmare come to life.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN HERE?!" he screams, and his voice cracks so hard on the last word that it practically shatters.

"WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE I'M DOING?!" you scream back, already dragging him by the ear toward the exit like you're hauling a misbehaving child out of a grocery store. "I'M MAKING TERRIBLE DECISIONS! IT'S MY HOBBY!"

A monster that looks like someone asked the question "what if a chandelier could murder you" drops from the ceiling directly above your head with terrible intent, and Riddle annihilates it with a card without even looking away from you, his eyes still locked on your face in absolute horror and disbelief.

"You can't be in here! Guides aren't designed for Gate environments! Your energy isn't defensive! You don't have combat training! You're going to die! You're going to die and it's going to be my fault and I'm going to have to file an incident report about how you died and—"

"OH SO YOU'RE WORRIED ABOUT THE PAPERWORK?!" you shriek, yanking harder on his ear hard enough that he has to stumble along with you or lose the ear entirely.

"NO, I'M WORRIED ABOUT YOU BEING DEAD, YOU ABSOLUTE—"

"THEN STOP BEING A SELF-SACRIFICING IDIOT AND GET THE FUCK OUT OF THIS NIGHTMARE KITCHEN!"

"I can't! Protocol clearly states that a Gate must maintain a minimum of one Esper presence until backup arrival or successful core destruction occurs, otherwise the destabilization risk increases by forty-seven percent according to the 2018 comprehensive study by Dr. Stupidface and his team and—"

"I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR FUCKING PROTOCOLS! I DON'T CARE ABOUT DR. STUPIDFACE! I DON'T CARE ABOUT THE TWENTY-WHATEVER STUDY! STOP TRYING TO DIE FOR BUREAUCRACY!"

"It's not bureaucracy, it's evidence-based safety regulations that exist specifically because people died when we didn't have them!" Riddle is killing monsters on complete autopilot while arguing with you, destroying things left and right without even looking, and it would be impressive if you weren't currently having a stress-induced breakdown.

"PEOPLE ARE ALSO GONNA DIE IF YOU COLLAPSE FROM BEING A STUBBORN MORON WITH A DEATH WISH!"

"That's not how statistics work!"

"I'M GOING TO MAKE YOU A STATISTIC IF YOU DON'T SHUT UP AND MOVE YOUR LEGS!"

"You can't threaten me into abandoning my post!"

"WATCH ME!"

You drag him through the Gate entrance using pure adrenaline and spite as fuel, and the second you're back in normal reality you have to immediately slam the oxygen canister to your face and take the most desperate, grateful breath of your entire life. 

The air tastes like absolute heaven. Clean and wonderful. Doesn't taste like a crime scene had a baby with a chemical spill. 

You're gulping air like you've been drowning for the last ten minutes, which you kind of have been.

The second you have enough oxygen in your system to not immediately pass out, you grab Riddle's hand and start Guiding him right there in the middle of the staging area. 

You don't bother finding privacy or a chair or any of the things you're supposed to do according to proper procedure. He needs stabilization right fucking now and you're going to give it to him even if you have to do it in front of the entire Bureau and God himself and also his mom.

Your legs have completely given up on the concept of supporting your body weight and you have to lean your entire existence against Riddle to stay even remotely straight. He catches you automatically, his arms coming up to hold you steady, and you're basically using him as a structural support beam while you work on fixing his disaster of an energy system.

His energy pathways are comprehensively fucked. They're choppy and depleted and there are spots where his energy is literally coming apart at the seams from overuse, fraying like a rope that's been supporting too much weight for too long. 

You start smoothing everything out with as much focus as you can muster, and the whole time you're muttering into his shoulder because you're too exhausted to have a filter anymore and your brain-to-mouth pipeline has completely shut down.

"I'm stealing all your candy," you say while untangling a knot that feels like it's been there for six months. "Every single piece. The fancy chocolate you hide in your desk drawer like I don't know it's there. The cookies in the tin with the flowers on it. That weird expensive imported shit you keep locked up like it's the nuclear codes. I'm taking everything brcause it's your fault for making me worry about you."

Riddle tries to start a lecture and you can feel him taking a breath to launch into it. "You violated approximately fifty separate safety regulations by entering that Gate without authorization. You could have been killed. The liability issues alone—"

You pull back just enough to glare at him with as much intensity as you can manage while being held up entirely by his arms, and you must look absolutely feral because he actually stops talking mid-sentence with his mouth still open.

"Stop being stupid and I'll stop walking into Gates," you say, and your voice comes out flat and deadly serious in a way that surprises even you. "That's the deal. You stop trying to martyr yourself for the sake of protocols that are meant to be guidelines and not fucking suicide pacts, and I'll stop doing dumb shit to drag you out. Deal?"

Riddle opens his mouth and closes it. Opens it again like a fish out of water. He looks like he's trying to find a loophole in your logic, searching for some kind of technicality he can exploit, and coming up completely empty-handed.

"That's not how safety regulations are intended to function in a professional environment," he says, but his voice is weak and you can tell his heart isn't in it.

"I don't care. Deal?"

He stares at you for a long moment while something shifts in his expression, something that looks almost like surrender. "...Deal."

"Fantastic," you say, and you finish smoothing out his energy until you're confident he won't spontaneously combust or have his pathways collapse on him in the next few hours. You pat his chest weakly with the hand that isn't actively holding onto him for dear life. "Now you have to give me a piggyback ride to your car and drive me back to the Bureau because my legs have stopped working. This is your penance for making me commit approximately forty-seven felonies."

"I'm not giving you a—" Riddle is sputtering again, cycling through about seven different emotions in the span of three seconds, but you're already trying to climb onto his back like a very determined and uncoordinated koala bear.

Riddle protests and cites workplace conduct policies and makes sputtering sounds about professional boundaries and appropriate behavior, but he still crouches down enough for you to climb on his back properly. He stands up with a sound that might be a sigh or might be his soul leaving his body in real time, adjusting his grip on your legs to make sure you don't fall off.

"This is the single most humiliating thing that's ever happened to me in my entire career," he mutters as he starts walking toward the parking lot, and you can feel how tense his shoulders are.

"This is what you get for being a hero without consulting me first," you say into his shoulder, letting your eyes close because you're so tired you might actually pass out. "I could've been your emotional support. Your cheerleader. Your guy in the chair. Instead I had to be your emergency extraction team, which is a way worse role and doesn't even come with a cool jacket."

"You're completely insane. You're genuinely unhinged. You need professional help."

"Yeah, but you're stuck with me now. I'm like a curse but prettier."

Riddle doesn't respond to that, just keeps walking while carrying you, and you're pretty sure you can feel him doing that thing where he's trying not to smile and failing miserably at it.

You're absolutely stealing every single piece of candy he owns. Every chocolate. Every cookie. That fancy imported shit. All of it. He's earned it.

You did, in fact, end up Gate poisoned.

In your defense, you didn't notice at the time. In your defense, you were running on approximately four percent battery life, pure adrenaline, and the specific flavor of stupid bravery that only activates when someone you've known for forty-eight hours is doing something catastrophically self-sacrificing inside a murder dimension. In your defense, you had bigger things to worry about, like staying upright and remembering to breathe.

None of this is actually a defense. You're Gate poisoned. You did this to yourself.

It announces itself about fifteen minutes into the car ride back to the Bureau, while Riddle is driving with the rigid focus of someone taking their third driving test after failing the first two. 

One second you're sitting in the passenger seat feeling vaguely terrible, and the next second your stomach decides it's going to attempt a full escape from your body via your mouth.

"Pull over," you say.

Riddle glances at you. "Why?"

"Pull over right now or I'm going to redecorate your upholstery and you're going to be furious about it."

He pulls over so fast the tires make a sound like a small scream. You barely get the door open in time, and then you're throwing up on the side of the road, which is already bad enough, except you look down and the situation is demonstrably worse than normal vomiting because it's glowing. Faintly. Greenish. Like something that should not be happening to a human person.

Riddle doesn't say anything. You can feel him sitting in the driver's seat, completely silent, probably staring at the glowing situation with an expression you'd rather not see.

You straighten up. "Okay. I'm good. Let's go."

"Are you sure you're—"

"I'm great. Fantastic. Never better. Let's go."

You make it exactly eleven more minutes before you have to ask him to pull over again. This time the glowing situation is more pronounced and Riddle gets out of the car while you're still suffering, walks around to your side with the kind of calm that suggests he's so angry he's looped back around to eerily quiet, and just stands there next to the open door with his arms crossed, waiting for you to finish.

"I'm fine," you say preemptively, wiping your mouth.

"You're glowing," Riddle says.

"I've always had a radiant personality."

"That's Gate poisoning."

"Could be vitamin deficiency."

"It could absolutely not be vitamin deficiency." He reaches into the car and physically extracts you from the seat like you're a particularly stubborn splinter. "We're going to Medical."

"Riddle, genuinely, I don't need—"

"You walked into an SS-ranked Gate as a Guide and breathed unfiltered Gate atmosphere for eight minutes and your vomit is currently bioluminescent," Riddle says, and his voice has this quality like a rubber band stretched so tight it's one more millimeter from snapping. "You're going to Medical if I have to carry you there."

"You just barely piggybacked me to your car an hour ago, you don't have the upper body credibility to make that threat."

"I carried you just fine," he mutters, and he sounds offended, which is the funniest thing that's happened all day.

You're going to tease him about that later. You add it to the mental list.

The Bureau's medical center has this specific smell, like sorrow, and the doctor on duty is a woman who you've interacted with enough times that she has a specific expression reserved just for you. It's the expression of someone who has made peace with the fact that you're going to keep showing up in their medical center, probably forever, doing progressively more elaborate things to yourself.

She takes one look at you and Riddle and then takes one look at the faint green glow you're emitting and just closes her eyes for a moment. Like she's loading patience.

"What did they do this time," she says, and it's not a question.

"Gate poisoning," Riddle says.

"How long were they exposed?"

"Eight minutes, unfiltered atmosphere, SS-ranked Gate."

She opens her eyes and looks at you with an expression that's doing a lot of heavy lifting between "professional medical concern" and "genuine personal disappointment." "Are you trying to die? Is this a pattern? Do I need to refer you to someone?"

"I think I'm fine," you say.

She examines you with brisk efficiency because she's had to deal with you before and has therefore stopped giving you the benefit of the doubt on anything. She shines things in your eyes, takes your vitals, makes sounds like a person reading a very bad restaurant review. Riddle stands beside her and explains what happened, and you watch his face while he talks.

His voice is controlled. His posture is controlled. His face is controlled. His hands are clenched at his sides so hard his knuckles have gone white, which is the only thing that's not controlled, and you watch him doing it while he listens to the doctor explain the full scope of what you've done to yourself.

The look on his face when she gets to the part about Gate toxicity complications is something you're going to think about for a long time.

"Well," the doctor says, snapping off her gloves and giving you the medical equivalent of a disappointed shrug, "the good news is you're not going to die. The bad news is we need to keep you here for a full week on detox protocol and monitoring, because Gate contamination at this exposure level has a small but genuinely unpleasant chance of causing systemic changes if we don't flush it properly."

"Systemic changes," you repeat. "Like, could I get wings? Because I personally wouldn't mind wings. Wings would be incredibly practical. I could fly to work. Save on gas. Never be late again."

"You're not going to get wings," the doctor says.

"You sound very certain about that."

"I am very certain about that."

"Okay but what if—"

"You're not getting wings," Riddle says sharply, and his voice comes out weird, like he's going for annoyed but landing somewhere else entirely.

"You don't know that," you say.

"I know that. Stop trying to find an upside to being Gate poisoned and let the doctor finish talking."

The doctor finishes talking. You're hooked up to a detox setup that involves multiple bags of fluid in colors that you're pretty sure fluids aren't supposed to be in nature, and the whole thing hits you about ten minutes later like a truck that was specifically designed to make you drowsy.

Your limbs go heavy. Your thoughts go soft around the edges. The world gets warm and fuzzy in a way that would be pleasant if you weren't aware that it's because your body is fighting off Gate contamination.

Riddle sits down in the chair next to your bed.

You wait for him to say something. He doesn't. He just sits there with his arms crossed and his jaw set, looking at a fixed point somewhere around the middle distance like he's trying to solve an equation he can't figure out.

"You can leave," you offer, your voice already getting drowsy. "I'm fine. I'm just gonna sleep."

"I'm aware," Riddle says.

"That wasn't an invitation to stay."

"I'm aware," he says again, and he doesn't move even slightly.

You look at him for a moment. He looks at the wall. The detox drugs are wrapping around your brain like a weighted blanket made of exhaustion and mild sedatives, and you're too far gone to push it, too tired to needle him about the look on his face or the way his hands were clenched or the fact that he's sitting in a medical center chair that looks deeply uncomfortable and shows no signs of leaving.

You fall asleep.

When you wake up, the chair is empty.

Visiting hours are over. You stare at the ceiling for a while and try to identify the feeling in your chest, and you can't quite get there, so you eat some of the Jello a nurse brought and go back to sleep.

The next day, Riddle comes back.

You wake up from a nap to find him sitting in the chair next to your bed with a small white box in his hands. He places it on the table beside you and then sits back with his arms crossed, resuming his apparent mission of staring at the middle distance and refusing to speak.

You open the box and find a strawberry tart inside that is so professionally made it looks like it belongs in a pastry magazine. It's definitely from somewhere that clearly charges too much money for small beautiful things, and it's perfect.

"You brought me a tart," you say, and your voice comes out soft from sleep.

Riddle doesn't respond.

"Are you not talking to me?"

Nothing.

"Is this a punishment? You're giving me the silent treatment?"

He adjusts the position of his crossed arms slightly, which you're interpreting as a yes.

"Okay," you say, and you eat the tart, which is genuinely one of the best things you've eaten in your entire life and you're furious about it. "This is incredible by the way. This is a ten out of ten tart. This tart has no business being this good."

Riddle's mouth does something very small that isn't quite a smile and disappears before it can properly form.

This is how the whole week goes.

Every single day, Riddle shows up during visiting hours carrying something from what is clearly a very good and very expensive bakery. Tarts. Mini pies. Little cookies that look like they were assembled by someone who went to school specifically to make tiny perfect cookies. Pastries that have multiple components and probably took three hours to make. He puts whatever he's brought on the table, sits in the chair, doesn't say a single word, and stays until visiting hours are over.

It's absolutely insane. It's genuinely one of the strangest things anyone has ever done in your vicinity. It's also, if you're being completely honest with yourself, making you feel a specific way that you're not going to examine too closely while you're still being drip-fed detox fluids while occasionally glowing.

On the last day, you get visitors.

Trey shows up first with his Esper in tow, and then a few of your other Guide friends filter in, and suddenly your medical room has too many people in it and at least one person is commenting on the absolute spread of baked goods on your bedside table.

"This is insane," Trey's Esper says, picking up a small pie and examining it like evidence. "Someone really went to town on you. Who brought all of this?"

"Riddle," you say, and Riddle, who is in his chair doing his daily impression of a very well-dressed statue, goes very still.

They slowly turn to look at Riddle. Riddle looks back at them with an expression that very clearly says don't.

Trey's Esper has never once in his life responded to don't.

"Every day?" they ask, their eyes lighting up like a pyromaniac who's just found an unattended fireworks display and a lighter.

"Every single day," you confirm, and you watch Riddle's jaw set.

"Riddle," Trey says, in the tone of someone about to perform a public service, "isn't it true that you've also been refusing Gate deployments all week? Because I heard from a very reliable source who works in HR that you've been citing personal commitments every single time they tried to send you out, and that they're starting to think you have a second family somewhere."

The room goes quiet.

You turn to look at Riddle.

Riddle is staring at Trey with an expression of pure, undiluted betrayal, like Trey has just set fire to something that was very important to him.

"Shut your mouth," Riddle says, very quietly.

"He's been here every day," Trey's Esper continues, absolutely not shutting their mouth, clearly delighted by the chaos they're generating, "sitting in that chair, bringing baked goods, turning down deployment after deployment, basically standing vigil like—"

"I said shut your mouth," Riddle says, standing up from his chair so fast it nearly tips over.

"—like a very uptight guardian angel who expresses love through pastry—"

"I'M LEAVING," Riddle announces, and he's already heading for the door with the energy of someone trying to outrun a natural disaster.

"YOU HAVE TO DRIVE ME HOME," you call after him, because you're getting discharged today and he's your ride and also because the look on his face is the single funniest thing you've ever seen. "I'M BEING DISCHARGED TODAY, RIDDLE. RIDDLE. YOU'RE MY RIDE."

He stops in the doorway. His back is to you. His shoulders are somewhere around his ears.

"I'll wait by the car," he says stiffly, and he's gone before anyone can say anything else.

The room is silent for a second and then Trey's Esper absolutely loses it, doubled over laughing, and a couple of the others follow.

Trey is looking at you with the fond exhaustion of a man who's seen too much. "Take it easy on him," he says, which means he absolutely knows you're not going to.

"I will be perfectly kind and reasonable," you say, which is a lie so transparent that Trey doesn't even bother responding to it, just shakes his head and starts helping you gather your things.

The discharge process takes forever because there are forms about Gate exposure and forms about liability and forms that seem to exist purely to make you sign your name a lot, and by the time you actually get out to the parking lot you half expect Riddle to have given up and gone home.

He's leaning against his car with his arms crossed and his face carefully neutral, like he's been standing there composing himself for the last forty-five minutes and has mostly succeeded.

You start walking toward him and he watches you, and you notice almost immediately that his hand does this thing. You're still a little wobbly on your feet, the last dregs of the detox making your legs feel like they're made of that weird foam that's too soft to be useful, and Riddle's hand comes up slightly like he's going to reach out and steady you.

Then he stops himself. His hand just hovers there in the air behind your back, several inches away from actually touching you, committed to neither helping nor not helping, like a man having a full philosophical crisis about whether physical contact is something he's allowed to offer.

You watch this happen and feel something in your chest do a complicated maneuver.

You reach back and take his hand and lace your fingers through his.

The noise Riddle makes is very small and very quickly suppressed, but you heard it. His whole face goes red from the collarbones up like someone slowly filling a thermometer and he looks straight ahead and says absolutely nothing.

But he doesn't pull away.

He walks you to the passenger side, his hand in yours, warm and a little tense and definitely not letting go, and he only releases your hand when you're at the car door and need both hands to get in. He walks back around to the driver's side and gets in while trying very hard to act normal when he's currently not normal even a little bit.

The drive to your apartment is quiet in a way that feels different from the silence in the medical room this week. That silence was loaded with things he wasn't saying. This silence is softer and warmee. The radio is on low and you watch the city go past through the window and occasionally sneak looks at him when you think he's focused on the road.

He catches you looking, twice. Both times he just looks back at the road. Both times his ears go pink.

He parks in front of your building and then—and this is new, this is a Riddle development—gets out and walks you to your door like you're going to dissolve into the hallway carpet if left alone for thirty consecutive seconds. Which is honestly not that unlikely given your week.

You reach your door and turn around to face him, and he's standing there with his hands back in his pockets, looking at a point slightly above your head like it's got something more interesting on it than your face.

"Riddle," you say.

"You should rest," he says, still looking at the point above your head. "Properly. Not just because you're bored. And eat something that isn't pastry."

"Look at me," you say.

He looks at you, which he clearly immediately regrets because you're grinning at him in a way that probably looks unhinged.

"Thank you," you say. "For all the tarts. And the pies. And every single baked good. And for sitting in that extremely uncomfortable chair every single day. And for the hand holding. And for turning down deployments to come stand vigil over my glowing ass."

"I wasn't standing vigil," Riddle says, and the words have no conviction behind them whatsoever.

"Sure," you say generously.

"Take care of yourself," he says, and it comes out stiff and formal, like he's trying to cover something softer underneath, and it's the first full sentence he's said to you since the Gate incident and you're going to absolutely lose your mind about it privately later.

You lean forward and kiss his cheek.

His eyes go wide, and his mouth does something that isn't quite any expression you've seen before, and the red that floods his face is so fast and so complete that it's almost impressive, like someone hit a button.

He stands there, frozen, for a full four seconds.

"Thanks for everything," you say brightly. "You're a good Esper. Very dedicated. Very attentive. Would recommend."

"I—you—" Riddle opens and closes his mouth several times, cycling through partial sentences that don't go anywhere. He turns on his heel and walks away so fast it's almost a jog, and you watch him go with the grin of someone who's just won a competition they invented.

He makes it about ten feet down the hall before he turns back and says, very crisply, "Don't be late tomorrow. 9:00 a.m."

"Is that a threat or a date?" you call after him.

"It's a SCHEDULE!" he yells, his voice cracking on the last word, and then he's gone around the corner so fast you swear you can see cartoon speed lines.

You stand at your door for a moment, grinning at the empty hallway.

Then you go inside, collapse onto your couch, and stare at the ceiling thinking about warm hands and a voice saying take care like it meant something more than the words.

"I'm so normal about this," you say out loud to no one.

You are not normal about this even a little bit.

You come back to work the next day at 9:46 AM, which is only forty-six minutes late, which is frankly a miracle given that you spent the better part of last week being slowly detoxed from Gate poisoning and your body is still operating at about sixty-three percent capacity. 

You're counting it as a win. You're counting it as a triumph, actually. You're counting it as evidence of your incredible dedication to this job and to the people in it.

The first Guide you pass in the hallway takes one look at you, puts both hands on your shoulders, and says, "I respect you so much and I need you to never do that again."

"Good morning to you too," you say.

"My Esper," they continue, their eyes haunted, "has started asking me if I would walk into a Gate for him. Unprompted. While we were eating breakfast. He looked me dead in the eyes over his cereal and asked if I loved him enough to get Gate poisoned." They tighten their grip on your shoulders. "I need you to understand what you've done."

"I think that's actually really sweet," you say.

"It's not sweet, it's scary," they say, and lets you go and walks away looking like someone who hasn't slept properly since last week.

You continue down the hallway and the pattern repeats itself with minor variations. Another Guide stops you to say he respects your commitment to your Esper but he's personally not interested in Gate poisoning himself and could you please stop setting precedents. 

A third one pulls you aside to say his Esper cried about the story, which he might have found touching except they cried while they were in the middle of a Guiding session and he lost focus and it set them both back twenty minutes. 

A fourth one doesn't say anything at all, just gives you a very long look that contains a full paragraph of feelings, and keeps walking.

By the time you reach the briefing room at approximately 10:00 AM, you've been stopped many times, and you're both touched and deeply aware that you've caused a ripple effect in the Guide community that's going to take a while to settle.

You walk in and immediately locate Riddle, who is sitting at the table looking like he's been waiting and calculating exactly how late you are with the precision of someone who's been doing angry mental arithmetic since 9:01. You slide into the seat next to him liek you're right on time.

He turns to you immediately. "You're late," he says, in a whisper that is so aggressive it's basically just talking.

"I was sick recently," you say pleasantly. "Very ill, actually. Quite the ordeal. My whole body hurt. My legs especially. Really rough week."

"You were discharged yesterday with a clean bill of health—"

"Sore, Riddle. I was so sore. You know how I got sick, right? Do you remember how that happened? It was a whole thing. I saved someone's life and then I got Gate poisoned. Very traumatic. My legs are still recovering. It's a miracle I'm here at all, honestly, if you think about—"

He makes a frustrated grunt that comes from somewhere deep in his chest, the sound of a man swallowing all the things he wants to say, and it very clearly promises that he's filing all of this away to deploy at a more strategically convenient moment. But he also closes his mouth and turns back toward the front of the room.

You pat his hand. He stares at your hand on his. You remove your hand. He looks back at the front of the room. His ears are pink.

The briefing officer clicks on the projector, and you settle in expecting the usual Gate updates and deployment logistics.

What comes up on the screen instead makes you sit up very straight.

The PowerPoint presentation is titled, in bold letters that suggest someone made this with genuine distress: PROFESSIONAL BOUNDARIES AND YOU: A REMINDER FOR THE MODERN ESPER-GUIDE PAIRING.

There's clip art. It's a sad clip art man standing very far away from another sad clip art man with a large red X over an arrow between them. Someone put genuine effort into this clip art choice and you respect the commitment.

"As many of you are aware," the briefing officer starts, with the tone of someone who did not get paid enough for this, "this branch has seen an unprecedented rate of Esper-Guide permanent bonding over the past several months."

She clicks to the next slide. It's a bar graph. The bar for this branch is so dramatically taller than every other branch that it looks like a mistake, like someone misread the scale.

"The rate of permanent bonds formed at this branch," she continues, "is currently sitting at four hundred percent above the national average, which is," she pauses, "statistically speaking, not normal."

Someone in the back coughs.

"The issue," she clicks to the next slide, which is a diagram of two Esper-Guide pairs with large arrows indicating that they can no longer be deployed separately, "is that permanently bonded pairs cannot be assigned to different areas in times of crisis. They experience significant distress when separated for extended operational periods, which creates deployment complications that are, to be frank, becoming a logistical nightmare."

You press your lips together very hard.

The next slide says ROMANCE: IS IT WORTH IT? in large letters, under which someone has put a stock photo of a person looking thoughtfully into the distance and another stock photo of a very organized filing cabinet, presented as apparently equivalent options.

Riddle's posture is very correct beside you. He's watching the presentation with his hands folded on the table.

"Romance," the briefing officer says, and she says it like she's reading a word from a foreign language textbook, "while a natural human experience, is not necessary for a fulfilling professional life. Many individuals find deep satisfaction in their careers without pursuing romantic entanglements with their direct professional partners."

The next slide is a bullet point list titled FULFILLING ALTERNATIVES TO ROMANTIC BONDING and the first bullet point is A PRODUCTIVE HOBBY.

"Do you have a productive hobby?" you whisper to Riddle.

"Stop talking," Riddle whispers back.

"I'm just asking. The slide says it's fulfilling."

"I will report you to HR."

"HR is currently busy making this presentation. You'll have to wait."

"I will wait," he hisses.

The second bullet point is PROFESSIONAL ACHIEVEMENT.

"You've got that one covered," you whisper to Riddle. "You're very professionally achieved. Gold star. You don't need romance. You've got protocol."

"I'm going to move seats," Riddle whispers, and his jaw is doing something very tight.

"You won't though," you whisper back, and he doesn't.

The briefing officer clicks to the next slide, which is titled A NOTE ON VIGILS and contains a short paragraph about how remaining on vigil for a partner outside your assigned duties is, while emotionally understandable, operationally disruptive and should be avoided in future situations.

You feel Riddle go completely still next to you.

You don't look at him. You stare at the slide for a long moment. Then you whisper, "She's talking about you specifically."

"She's talking generally," Riddle says through his teeth.

"She put it in the presentation specifically."

"It's a general policy update."

"Someone had to make a slide about vigils because of you specifically."

"I will move seats," he repeats, with slightly more desperation than before.

"You won't," you repeat, and you're right, because he's still sitting right next to you, rigid as a fence post and pink from the ears down.

The next slide is titled YOU ARE ENOUGH: A SELF-SUFFICIENCY REMINDER and contains an extremely unhinged graphic of a person hugging themselves that looks like it was sourced from a 2009 motivational website.

"This," you whisper to Riddle, gesturing at the graphic, "is what we're supposed to do instead of bonding. According to HR."

Riddle makes a sound that is, despite everything, despite all his training and his professional bearing and his deeply held commitment to appropriate conduct in workplace settings, a snort. 

It's a tiny snort, barely audible, immediately suppressed, and he looks absolutely mortified the moment it escapes him. His hand comes up to cover his mouth like he can physically put it back. He stares very hard at the presentation. His ears are red.

You feel a grin spread across your face so wide it almost hurts. You look back at the presentation and say absolutely nothing, because sometimes the most powerful move is to let a man sit with the horror of having snorted in a professional setting because of you.

The briefing officer reaches the final slide, which just says PLEASE MAKE BETTER CHOICES and then ends. There's a silence in the room where about thirty Guides and Espers sit with that for a moment.

"Any questions?" the briefing officer asks, with the energy of someone who's praying there aren't.

You raise your hand.

"No," the briefing officer says, and she hasn't even looked at you yet, she just already knows.

You put your hand down.

"Good," she says. "Dismissed.”

Realizations of this magnitude should happen during thunderstorms or at least during something more dramatic than an afternoon while you're eating a mediocre sandwich at your desk and doing absolutely nothing of note.

But there it is. Sudden and clear and slightly horrifying.

You're attached.

Not just attached. Genuinely, specifically, alarmingly in love with one Riddle Rosehearts, A-rank Esper, walking rulebook, owner of an impressive collection of expensive pastries that he pretends are for himself. 

You've become attached to the guy who tried to take your head off with a playing card the first time you met him and who you still think about as one of the best first impressions anyone has ever made on you.

You do a mental audit, because this feels like the kind of thing that deserves evidence.

You seek him out in the mornings. Not because you have to or because there's a Guiding session scheduled, but just because you walk past the cafeteria and think oh, Riddle's probably getting his coffee right now, and then you go get coffee you didn't want just to stand next to him and make comments about whatever he's reading until he puts it down and talks to you instead. You've been doing this for weeks. You didn't notice you were doing it until right now.

During breaks, you find reasons to go wherever he is. Sometimes it's real reasons. Sometimes the reason is that you invented a reason. Once the reason was that you wanted to tell him about a dream you had about a Gate shaped like an IKEA, which was not a reason at all, and he listened to the whole thing anyway while pretending to be annoyed, and the IKEA Gate dream went on for seven minutes.

After rough Gates, you almost always end up at dinner together that's never planned. It always just happens because neither of you is ready to stop talking yet, even though technically the talking mostly looks like you saying unhinged things and Riddle responding to them with increasing reluctance to pretend he doesn't find you funny.

So. That's where you are. You're attached. You've gone and gotten attached to the one Esper in this entire facility who has filed more HR complaints than anyone else in Bureau history.

The problem, you think, finishing your mediocre sandwich and staring at the wall, is you.

You're not delusional about yourself. You're aware of what you are. Unhinged raccoon energy is not a vibe that translates universally, and it's already sent approximately six Espers fleeing in the other direction during the year you've been at this Bureau. You walk into Gates you have no business walking into. You ruffle people's hair without warning. Your HR file is probably thicker than some people's novels. You once told an SSS-ranked Esper that his aura looked like it was going through a breakup, and you stand by it, but still. 

The point is that Riddle likes rules. Riddle likes order and schedules and things that make sense and can be documented properly. Riddle's entire personality is a very organized filing cabinet of correct behavior, and you are a raccoon who got into the filing cabinet and rearranged everything into a system that only makes sense to you.

If you want to bag this Esper—and you have apparently decided that you do, the sandwich has made this very clear to you—you're going to have to be Normal.

You haven't been Normal since you were a teenager in high school trying very hard to fit in and failing in ways that were character-building in retrospect but deeply unpleasant at the time.

You put on Normal like an uncomfortable coat.

The next morning, you arrive on time. Actual on time. Not 9:46, not 9:31, not the one legendary occasion last month where you arrived at 10:23 and told Riddle you'd been there since nine and simply hadn't been visible. 

You arrive at 8:58 and you walk into the briefing room and you find Riddle and you smile at him, a real smile that you've specifically calibrated to be pleasant and not unhinged.

Riddle looks at you like you've grown a second head.

"Good morning," you say, and your voice comes out so measured and normal that it almost sounds like someone else.

"Good morning?" Riddle asks slowly, like he's trying to identify whether the thing in front of him is actually what it appears to be or if it's a trap.

You sit down next to him and look at the front of the room and wait for the briefing to start, and you don't say anything else, and you don't lean on him, and you don't ruffle his hair, and you don't tell him that his energy feels like a very intense symphony today which is a compliment you'd preparedlast week and are now setting aside.

Riddle keeps glancing at you throughout the briefing.

You look at the front of the room and take notes.

At lunch, you sit across from him in the cafeteria and eat your food and make small, normal conversation about normal things, like the Gate reports from this morning and whether the cafeteria's soup has gotten worse recently. 

You don't lean across the table. You don't steal food off his plate. You don't tell him that watching him eat a sandwich with that level of structural precision is honestly one of the most fascinating things you've ever seen in your life, which is something you were going to say last week before you started being Normal.

Riddle eats his sandwich with increasing discomfort, glancing at you between bites.

"Are you alright?" he asks.

"I'm great," you say, and you smile pleasantly, and Riddle looks at you for a long moment like you're a math problem he can't solve, and then goes back to his sandwich.

By the end of the day, you're exhausted. Being Normal is genuinely the most tiring thing you've ever done, including the Gate poisoning incident, which at least had the upside of being interesting. You're packing up your office in the early evening, everyone else clearing out around you, and you're thinking about going home and being feral in private where no one can see you, when there's a knock on your office door.

"Come in," you call.

The door opens and it's Riddle.

You blink at him. "Hey. Did we have something scheduled?"

"No," he says, stepping inside with his hands behind his back, and he's got this look on his face like he's come with a specific purpose and he's going to see it through regardless of how it goes. He closes the door behind him. "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine," you say, turning back to your bag and continuing to pack.

"You've been acting strangely today."

"I've been acting normally today."

"That's what's strange," Riddle says, and there's something in his voice that makes you pause. "You didn't say anything this morning. You sat through the entire briefing without making a single comment. At lunch you talked about soup."

"Soup is a valid topic of conversation."

"You once told me during lunch that you thought the Gates might be the universe's way of coping with anxiety and then argued the point for twenty-five minutes when I disagreed," Riddle says. "Today you talked about soup. Something is wrong."

You open your mouth to say something Normal and dismiss it, and then you make the mistake of looking back at him.

He's watching you with this expression, careful and intent, and his eyebrows are doing something worried, and you feel something in your chest go sideways.

"I'm okay," you say, and you mean it to come out light and easy but it comes out softer than that.

Riddle looks at you for another moment, and then he crosses the room, and before you've fully processed that he's moving, he brings both hands down on your desk and cages you in, leaning forward with an expression that's so genuinely concerned it's doing things to your ability to think clearly.

"Are you sick again?" he asks, and the question comes out urgent in a way he probably didn't intend. "Because if you're sick again and you didn't tell anyone I swear I will—"

"I'm not sick," you say.

"Then what happened to you?" He's close enough that you can see the specific shade of his eyes, close enough that when he continues talking it's almost sharp with something that might be frustration but doesn't smell like it. "Did something happen? Did you get another Esper to go harass? Did someone actually manage to—"

And that's when it clicks.

It lands on you with the weight and precision of a piano falling from a great height, right there in your own office with your bag half-packed and the evening light coming through the window at a slant.

This Esper. This specific, infuriating, rule-citing, tart-bringing Esper who you thought was interesting and then realized was fascinating and then somehow, at some point, started specifically wanting to impress—

He likes you.

He came to your office at the end of the day because something was wrong with you and he noticed and it bothered him enough to do something about it. He's been glancing at you all day because the absence of your chaos registered like a missing tooth. He came here and put his hands on your desk and leaned in close and asked if you were sick again in a voice that had panic under it.

Riddle Rosehearts, who has filed more HR complaints than anyone in Bureau history, who tried to take your head off on day one, who gave you the silent treatment for a week and showed up with pastries every single day—

He came to find you.

You lean in.

The remaining distance between you goes from several inches to almost nothing, and Riddle's eyes go a little wide but he doesn't move, doesn't pull back, just stays exactly where he is with his hands on your desk.

"What if I did get another Esper to harass?" you say, and your voice comes out low and easy and absolutely nothing like Normal.

Riddle opens his mouth and what comes out is, "Bureau regulations section twelve, subsection four clearly states that Guides are expected to maintain their assigned partnerships and are not permitted to provide Guiding services to—"

He's saying it almost against your lips. The rulebook, recited from memory, in a voice that's lost about seventy percent of its structural integrity. His hands are still on the desk but they've gone tense in a way that has nothing to do with anger.

You close the remaining distance and kiss him.

For approximately half a second, nothing happens, and then Riddle kisses you back with an enthusiasm that is frankly very surprising from someone who just finished citing subsection four at you, his hands scrambling off the desk to grab onto you instead, pulling you in like you're something he's been trying not to reach for for a while now.

You laugh against his mouth, and you feel him make a sound that's not quite a laugh and not quite anything else, and you think about the bar graph from HR's presentation, the one where this branch's bonded pairs were so far above average the bar looked like a mistake.

You think about how you're about to become another notch on that graph.

Riddle pulls back just far enough to look at you, and his face is red and his hair is slightly less perfect than it was five minutes ago and his expression is doing something complicated that keeps threatening to become a smile.

"This is going to be a problem," he says.

"Massive problem," you agree, still grinning.

"HR is going to—"

"Update the graph, yeah."

He looks at you for another second, and then he does something you've been cataloging and storing and thinking about since approximately the first week you met him. He smiles. A real one, small and a little reluctant and completely genuine, and it lands on his face like it belongs there.

"You're the worst," he says.

"Yeah," you say. "But I'm you're mine now."

The HR department of this Bureau occupies a corner that always smells like printer toner and the specific brand of institutional despair that comes from spending your career managing people who regularly fight monsters for a living and have the emotional regulation to match. 

The motivational posters are still there. "Synergy." "Excellence Through Collaboration." The little stress brain that says "Keep Calm and Synergize" which you're pretty sure your HR rep has squeezed so many times it's developed PTSD.

You walk in at 9:00 AM, which is early for you, because some occasions demand punctuality and this is absolutely one of them.

Riddle walks in beside you, his posture immaculate, his jacket perfectly pressed, his face doing the thing where it's trying very hard to be neutral and only partially succeeding because the tips of his ears are red and have been red since the day you bonded and you're not sure they've fully recovered.

You have the look of absolute victory. You're not trying to hide it. You've never been less interested in hiding anything in your entire life.

The HR rep looks up from her computer when you walk in, and you watch the exact moment she takes in the two of you together, side by side, you with your shit-eating grin and Riddle with his red ears, and you watch her face do the full journey. Recognition. Comprehension. Denial. Grief.

She closes her eyes.

"Don't," she says, and her voice has the quality of someone who's been through a war. "Whatever you're about to say, don't say it. I'm asking you, as a person, as a human being who has done nothing to deserve this, please don't say it."

You take a breath.

Her eye twitches preemptively.

"We're permanently bonded," you announce, with the full radiant energy of someone setting off fireworks indoors, "and cannot be separated for operational deployment under Bureau regulation, which I'm told is very important and should be respected."

You notice Riddle go slightly redder beside you at the sound of regulations being used by you, which is a bonus you hadn't fully anticipated and which makes this moment even better than you planned.

The HR rep makes a sound that falls in the category of sounds that humans make when they've exceeded their processing capacity and their brain is buffering, like a computer fan spinning very fast before the whole thing shuts down. 

She picks up the stress brain from her desk and squeezes it. She squeezes it for a long time. She squeezes it with the focused intention of someone who is using it as a proxy for squeezing the universe.

"You," she says finally, opening her eyes and pointing at you, "have been the subject of more incident reports, HR complaints, liability waivers, and what I can only describe as interpretive medical documentation than anyone else in this Bureau's history."

"Thank you," you say.

"That wasn't a compliment."

She turns to Riddle. "And you," she says, and her voice shifts into a different register, the register of someone who has watched a slow-motion catastrophe develop over several months and is now watching it reach its inevitable conclusion, "have filed more formal complaints about Guide conduct than anyone in Bureau history. You filed three complaints about your previous Guide for, and I'm reading from the document here, 'insufficient commitment to regulatory frameworks and a troubling disregard for section nine subsection two of the Gate Operations Manual.'"

"That's accurate," Riddle says, with complete dignity.

"And now," she says, setting the document down and looking at the two of you with an expression that contains seven different emotions and none of them are happy, "you're telling me that you've permanently bonded with the Guide who walked into an SS-ranked Gate unequipped and unprotected and came out glowing."

"They also," Riddle says, and then he stops, and you look at him, "saved my life. So."

There's a pause.

"So," the HR rep repeats.

"So," Riddle confirms, with the air of someone who's prepared to defend this position in writing if necessary.

The HR rep looks at the two of you for a long moment. Then she opens her desk drawer, takes out what appears to be a much larger stress ball than the brain one, shaped like a sun with a little smiley face on it, and begins squeezing that one instead.

"I have to update the graph," she says, mostly to herself.

"I know," you say sympathetically.

"The PowerPoint I made specifically to prevent this from happening," she continues, "the one with the clip art and the bullet points about productive hobbies—"

"The self-hugging graphic was a really nice touch," you offer.

"—apparently did nothing," she finishes, as though you hadn't spoken.

"In fairness," you say, "the filing cabinet was not a compelling alternative to him specifically. Have you seen him? He brought me tarts every day for a week. The filing cabinet wasn't going to do that."

Riddle makes a sound beside you that might be him swallowing a smile and might be him swallowing a complaint, you genuinely cannot tell anymore and that's one of your favorite things about him.

The HR rep pulls out a form from her drawer like she's been doing this so often she keeps the forms within reach now. She slides it across the desk.

"Permanent bond declaration," she says. "Sign here, here, and initial here. You'll be assigned as a permanent pair, which means joint deployment scheduling, shared operational briefings, and," she pauses and looks at you specifically, "a shared incident report file, which given your individual histories is going to be the most alarming document in this building."

"Great," you say, picking up the pen.

"This is not great," she says.

You sign. You pass the pen to Riddle, and he takes it, and he signs too. You watch him sign and feel something warm and slightly stupid settle in your chest.

He caps the pen and slides the form back across the desk.

The HR rep picks it up and looks at it for a moment, the two signatures sitting there next to each other, and then she puts it in a folder and puts the folder in her filing cabinet and closes the drawer.

"The graph," she says, to no one in particular.

"Fourth entry this month?" you ask.

"Fifth," she says. "Trey's pair finalized last night"

"He didn't tell me," you say, genuinely delighted. "I have so much to text him."

"Please leave my office," the HR rep says, and she's already turning back to her like she's trying to pretend she works in a normal building where normal things happen.

You stand up. Riddle stands up beside you with perfect posture, straightening his jacket with those small precise movements that you've catalogued and memorized and will probably find endearing until you're very old.

"Thank you," you tell the HR rep sincerely.

"I want you to know," she says, without turning around, "that I'm going to make the new slide specifically about you two. It's going to have your names on it. People are going to study it in onboarding."

"I'm honored," you say.

"It's not meant to be an honor."

"I know," you say, and you follow Riddle out the door.

In the hallway, Riddle exhales, long and slow, and you look at him and he looks at you and he's got that expression again, the one that keeps threatening to become a smile and then becomes one anyway before he can stop himself.

"I hate you," he says, which means something entirely different now than it would have meant three months ago, and you both know it.

"No you don't," you say.

"No," he agrees, after a moment, and his ears are red again. "I don't."

You take his hand as you walk down the hallway, mostly because you can now, and he lets you, mostly because he wants to, and somewhere on the behind you, your HR rep is opening a new PowerPoint and beginning to type, with the grim determination of someone who knows they're losing a war but intends to document it thoroughly anyway.

The graph gets updated by end of day.

Life, as it turns out, goes on.

This is not a profound observation.But there's something about the specific part of your life now that feels worth noting, if only because you spent a long time being the only unbonded Guide in your friend group and eating cereal for dinner alone in your apartment and thinking that maybe your personality was simply too much of a thing for anyone to want to be around consistently.

Turns out you just needed to find someone whose personality was also too much of a thing. You needed someone whose too-much-ness happened to fit against your too-much-ness like two completely unhinged puzzle pieces that somehow complete the same picture.

Who could have predicted it would be the guy who cited a subsection at you while you were trying to kiss him.

Actually, you could have predicted that. That was very predictable. You were just too busy being delighted by him to connect the dots.

So life goes on, and it goes like this.

You ragebait him when the mood strikes, which is frequently, because the mood is almost always striking. 

But somewhere in the last few weeks something has shifted in the calibration of your chaos, and you've started to notice that the things you do have drifted from things that make him flustered and irritated toward things that make him try very hard not to smile and fail completely. 

Last week you left a small carved wooden duck on his desk with a note that said "office support animal, bureau regulation, do not remove" and he spent the entire morning pretending he hadn't noticed it while the wooden duck sat there on his desk and watched him work, and when you walked past his office at noon it had been moved to a slightly more prominent position near his monitor.

The duck stays.

A few days after the Normal Incident, as you've started thinking of your brief and deeply uncomfortable foray into being a regulated human being, Riddle finds you during a break and stands next to you with his arms crossed and says, looking at a point just past your shoulder, "You don't have to do that."

"Do what?" you say.

"The." He makes a gesture that encompasses, apparently, your entire personality. "The being different. The Normal, as you call it. The coming on time and not saying things and eating lunch without—" He stops and looks at his shoes for a moment and then looks back up. 

"It's unsettling," he says, which is the Riddle way of saying it worried me and I didn't like it and please don't do it again. "You're." Another pause, and his jaw works slightly like he's chewing through the words to get to the right ones. "You're fine. As you are. The way you actually are."

You look at him for a second. He's looking somewhere slightly to the left of your face with the expression of someone who has said a vulnerable thing and is bracing for the consequences.

"Riddle," you say.

"Don't make it weird," he says immediately.

"I'm going to make it a little weird."

"Please don't."

"That's one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me," you tell him, and you mean it, and you can see the moment he realizes you mean it because something in his face goes soft before he gets it back under control.

"It was an observation," he says, with absolutely zero conviction. 

"Sure," you say.

"It was."

"Of course."

"Stop smiling at me like that."

"I can't help it," you say, which is true. "It's my face. It does this. You just said you like my face as it is, so."

Riddle makes the frustrated grunt that you've come to understand means you've won but he's not going to admit it, and he goes back to his office, and you watch him go and think that you are absolutely going to tease him about this for the rest of your natural life and he's going to let you, which is its own kind of love language.

So you stay yourself, which is easy because you've never successfully been anyone else, and he stays himself, which means that before every Gate he finds you and tells you at least five times, with escalating intensity, not to step into the Gate under any circumstances.

It's become a ritual.

"Don't step into the Gate," he says at the staging area, not looking at you, checking his gear with practiced efficiency.

"I make no promises," you say, which is your ritual response.

"I mean it." He checks his jacket. "Under no circumstances. No matter what happens inside. You stay out here."

"Riddle, I hear your words."

"That's not a promise."

"It's an acknowledgment."

"I need a promise."

"I promise," you say, "to think very hard about not stepping into the Gate before I make any decisions."

He turns to look at you with an expression that says he knows exactly what you're doing. "That's not—"

"It's the best you're getting," you say pleasantly.

He makes the grunt. He goes into the Gate. Every time.

And every time he comes out, you're there, and these days the Guiding sessions have evolved into something that would probably make the Bureau's original Guiding manual raise several concerned eyebrows. There's just supposed to be hand contact. 

What actually happens is that Riddle comes out of the Gate and walks directly toward you and you open your arms and he steps into them and you Guide him like that, your arms around him and his face somewhere in the vicinity of your shoulder, his energy unwinding slowly like something that's been held too tight finally getting to let go. 

It started gradually, the distance between you closing in increments so small you barely noticed until one day you looked down and realized you were just hugging your Esper while you worked and he was hugging you back.

You're very pleased about this development.

He's never commented on it, which is his way of saying he's very pleased about it too.

And then you go home.

Home is, at this point, a somewhat flexible concept. Technically you have an apartment. It has your furniture in it and your plants that are mostly alive and your inexplicable collection of things you've acquired and never thrown away. Technically Riddle has his own place, which is neat and organized and smells like expensive tea and has exactly the right number of things in it and not one more.

But also, sometimes home is his passenger seat on the drive back from a late Gate, the city sliding past the windows while you tell him about something stupid that happened during your morning briefing and he responds with increasing reluctance to pretend he's not listening. 

Sometimes home is his kitchen at nine PM eating whatever he's made, which is always good because Riddle approaches cooking the same way he approaches everything, with complete commitment and a frankly unnecessary level of skill, while you sit on the counter and provide commentary that he keeps telling you to stop providing. 

Sometimes home is your couch, the two of you on opposite ends with the TV on, and the opposite ends becoming less opposite as the night goes on until at some point you look down and he's fallen asleep with his head somewhere near your shoulder and you're not sure when that happened.

You have a sneaking suspicion he feels the same way. That home has become a portable thing for him too, something he carries around in the general vicinity of wherever you are.

You base this suspicion on evidence. Specifically, the way he tracks you in a room without appearing to. The way he redirects conversations toward you without making it obvious. The way he falls asleep on your couch with such complete ease, which for Riddle, who once told you he has trouble sleeping in unfamiliar places because his brain doesn't quiet down, means something considerable.

You haven't said any of this out loud to him. You don't have to. This is one of the things you've learned about Riddle, that he communicates in a dialect of small precise actions that you've been translating with increasing fluency. A tart on your desk on a bad day. Showing up at your office door when something's off. Telling you you're fine as you are while looking studiously at his shoes.

You've also gotten better at talking back in the same language. Leaving wooden ducks in prominent positions. Making no promises but always, always being there when he comes out. Letting the car rides go long even when you're tired because neither of you wants to be the one to say goodnight.

It's a good life. You think about the version of you from a few months ago sitting in the break room, slamming your face on the table because you were the only unbonded Guide in the friend group, shaking the Malleus Guide by the shoulders and demanding to know how to get someone with spice.

You got someone with spice. You got someone with spice and rules and a bark that's worse than his bite, which is still pretty bad, and a tendency to show up when it matters in ways that he'd never describe as showing up because he'd call it protocol compliance or operational necessity.

You got Riddle, who tried to take your head off with a playing card on day one and then brought you strawberry tarts every day for a week when you were sick.

Worth it, you think, watching him fall asleep on your couch with his shoes still on because he always insists he's not tired and then immediately proves himself wrong, his face smoothed out and quiet in a way it rarely is when he's awake.

You reach over and, very carefully, ruffle his hair.

He doesn't wake up. But the corner of his mouth moves, just slightly, in a way that makes you think he might not be completely asleep.

You grin at the ceiling.

Yeah. This is your life now.

You're very okay with this.

You are, without question, the worst thing that has ever happened to Riddle Rosehearts.

He wants to be clear about that. He wants that established upfront, on the record, documented properly with the correct date and time and filed in triplicate. The worst thing. 

Worse than the B-rank Gate that collapsed on him in his second year and he had to fight his way out of with a sprained wrist and no backup. Worse than the time his previous Guide filed a counter-complaint against his complaint and HR had to mediate for three hours. Worse than every single professional inconvenience he's ever experienced stacked on top of each other in a tower of suffering.

You are worse than all of it.

And he is so completely, catastrophically, irreversibly gone on you that it's been keeping him up at night for months.

But let's start at the beginning, because Riddle is a person who believes in proper chronology and also because the beginning is important for understanding how thoroughly you dismantled every single thing he thought he knew about himself.

Riddle's relationship with Guides has historically been complicated, which is a polite way of saying it's been a disaster.

He knows he's difficult. He's not delusional about it. He has standards, and his standards are high, and his standards exist because people get hurt when standards aren't maintained and he refuses to be responsible for that. His previous Guides had all, in various ways, failed to understand this. They thought he was being difficult for the sake of it. They thought his insistence on protocol was a personality flaw to be managed rather than a feature of someone who genuinely, deeply cared about everyone coming home alive.

So they left. One by one. He filed the complaints because the complaints were warranted and he stands by that, and they left because apparently basic operational standards were too much to ask, and Riddle ended up cycling through four Guides in two months, which was a record, and which HR was very unhappy about, and which Riddle was also unhappy about but would not admit because admitting it felt like conceding something he wasn't ready to concede.

He was alone. He was fine with being alone. He'd always been fine with being alone.

And then HR sent him you.

He meets you for the first time near the vending machines, which is not a location he'd have chosen for a significant life event, but apparently the universe doesn't ask.

He's in the middle of a very legitimate and entirely necessary confrontation with a Guide who's been running what can only be described as a documentation blog about his Esper's combat techniques, which is a clear violation of Bureau operational security policies and also deeply undignified, and he's mid-citation when an arm appears from nowhere and drops around his neck.

He starts making sounds that are not quite words yet because his brain is trying to process the fact that a stranger has just grabbed him and is now, inexplicably, agreeing with him. A stranger who appeared from nowhere and is nodding along with his regulatory citations like they're personally invested, and who is now winking at him, and who smells faintly like coffee and Redbull, and who is dragging him down the hallway before he's fully understood what's happening.

"Hi, I'm your new Guid—"

A playing card leaves his hand.

He doesn't remember making the decision to throw it. His body just did it on his behalf, which is embarrassing, because the card goes past your face close enough to move your hair and you don't flinch. You just turn and look at the card embedded in the wall, and then turn back to him, and you're grinning.

You're grinning.

Riddle has made grown adults cry with less. He once made a Gate monster retreat with his tone alone. And you're standing there looking at the card that just nearly removed your nose and you're grinning at him like he's just done something delightful.

He doesn't know what to do with that. He goes home that night and lies on his ceiling and stares at his bed and tries to figure out what to do with that.

He comes up empty.

The next day he shows up at your office for Guiding and then you're just. Normal. You sit beside him and ask proper intake questions and when you take his hand to start Guiding, you wink at him, and he's about to say something about it, but then you actually start and he forgets what he was going to say because.

His energy has been a mess for two weeks. He knew it was a mess. He'd been managing it, compensating for it, running at reduced capacity and refusing to acknowledge what that meant. But the moment you start Guiding him, the moment your energy starts moving through his pathways, it's like every tangled awful thing he's been carrying starts to loosen. Like someone found all the knots and started undoing them one by one with patient careful hands.

He didn't know it could feel like that.

He's had four Guides. Not one of them made it feel like that.

He sits there for over an hour while you work and he can feel his own edges softening, the constant hum of something wrong going quiet for the first time in weeks, and he stares at his own hands and tries to understand why his eyes are doing something embarrassing.

When it's done, he thanks you stiffly, because he's Riddle and stiffly is the only register available to him when he's feeling something he can't categorize. You immediately ask him for coffee. He immediately scoffs. He comes back with tea because you just spent an hour fixing his insides and coffee would be bad for your recovery and that's just logic, that's just practical thinking, that has nothing to do with anything.

You ruffle his hair, and he grumbles, and he walks back to his office and sits at his desk and stares at nothing for a while.

He thinks: this is going to be a problem.

He is correct.

Here is something Riddle has never admitted to anyone and will take to his grave unless circumstances force it out of him: he has always been difficult to like.

He knows this. He's known it since he was a child when his exacting nature was already fully formed and already making other children uncomfortable and already making him eat lunch alone because nobody wanted to sit with the kid who'd report you for running in the hallways. He learned early that being correct was often indistinguishable from being unpleasant, and that the way he cared about things—intensely, totally, without knowing how to modulate it—made people tired.

He accommodated this. He built his life around it. If people were going to find him difficult, he would at least ensure that his difficulty was in service of something real.

What he did not accommodate for, because how could he have, was you.

You, who walked into his professional orbit and immediately started treating his exactingness like it was funny. And it wasn't dismissive—the way people laughed at him. You genuinely found him entertaining. 

You cited his own subsections back at him with a grin like they were inside jokes. You showed up to things he was at and immediately positioned yourself next to him like that was the obvious place to be.

Every event. Every briefing. Every awkward professional gathering where Riddle stood slightly apart from the group because he'd never quite learned the mechanics of casual social presence. You found him every time, and you stayed, and you never once looked around to check if there was someone more interesting to talk to instead.

He noticed. He noticed and he filed it away in the mental drawer he keeps for things he's not ready to examine yet, right next to the folder labeled what you said about his aura on day one that he definitely doesn't think about, and the sub-folder titled the way you laugh when he says something that's technically an insult but you take as a compliment.

He noticed and he told himself it was just your nature. You were like this with everyone. It didn't mean anything specific.

He kept telling himself this right up until the Gate.

The Gate is the part of the story that Riddle cannot get through without his jaw doing something tight and his hands wanting to find something to hold onto.

He was following protocol. He wants to be very clear about that. He stayed inside the Gate because protocol requires a minimum Esper presence until backup or core destruction, and the protocol exists because people died when it wasn't followed, and he has never been able to make himself choose his own safety over a rule that was written in someone else's blood.

He was managing. He was exhausted and he was running on fumes and his energy was doing things that felt concerning, but he was managing, and the backup would come, and he would hold the line until it did.

And then you walked in.

He sees you and his brain just.Stops.  Because there's no file in his mental catalogue for this. There's no protocol for the eventuality of his Guide walking into an SS-ranked Gate in gear that doesn't fit, carrying an oxygen canister like a weapon, looking absolutely furious and also somehow like the best thing he's ever seen in his life.

You grab him by the ear.

He should be more offended by that than he is.

He's yelling at you. He can hear himself yelling at you, telling you to get out, telling you that you're going to die, telling you that this is insane and you're insane and you need to leave right now. And you're yelling back, something about terrible decisions being your hobby, and you're dragging him by the ear toward the exit while he's still fighting monsters on autopilot, and somewhere in the middle of all of this there's a feeling in his chest that he doesn't have a name for yet.

He'll find a name for it later. He has a lot of time to find a name for it.

You drag him out. You immediately get on the oxygen canister. You take his hand and start Guiding him right there in the staging area while using him as structural support because your legs have decided to stop working, and he holds you up, and he can feel your energy working through his pathways even while you're clearly running on nothing, and he thinks, with a clarity that's almost violent:

He doesn't want anyone else to do this.

Ever.

The thought arrives fully formed, not as a slow realization but as a fact that's apparently always been true and just needed the right moment to become visible. He doesn't want another Guide's hands on his energy. He doesn't want to come out of a Gate and look for a different face. The idea of it makes something in him recoil so hard it's almost physical.

He wants you. Only you. This specific raccoon who walks into death dimensions for people they've known for two days and makes no promises but means all of them.

He doesn't say any of this. He drives you and you throw up on the side of the road twice, and the glowing situation makes his hands shake in a way he hides by gripping the steering wheel very hard.

The hospital is where it gets bad.

He comes every day because the alternative is not coming every day, and he cannot do that. He cannot sit in his apartment knowing you're in a hospital bed being detoxed from Gate poisoning you got from walking into a Gate for him. He brings things. Tarts and pies and the expensive cookies from the bakery on fourth street because you mentioned once in passing that you liked them and he filed it away in the part of his brain that apparently keeps very detailed records about you specifically.

He doesn't talk to you. He can't, because if he opens his mouth he's not sure what's going to come out, and whatever it is will probably not be appropriate for a medical setting and possibly not for any setting. So he sits. He sits and he watches you sleep and he watches you make faces in your sleep because you're the kind of person who has extremely expressive dreams apparently, and at one point you make a small sound that might be discomfort and he grips the arm of the chair hard enough that the plastic creaks.

He turns down every deployment they offer him.

He does not examine why very carefully because he doesn't need to.

When you get discharged and you're still a little wobbly on your feet and his hand comes up automatically to catch you before his brain has even decided to do it, and then stops because he's not sure if he's allowed, and then you reach back and take his hand—

He doesn't breathe for a moment.

He drives you home. He walks you to your door. He tells you to take care of yourself and the words feel completely inadequate for what they're actually trying to say, and then you kiss his cheek and his brain files immediately offline, all systems down, no one home, please leave a message.

He walks away and gets in his car and sits there for five minutes before he's recovered enough to drive.

Come on time tomorrow, he'd said.

What he meant was: please exist near me tomorrow. Please keep existing. Please don't walk into any more Gates and please be careful, be there.

There's a moment, a specific one, that he keeps coming back to.

It's the day you tried to be Normal.

He noticed immediately. Something was wrong from the second you walked into the briefing room, wrong in a way that bypassed his brain and went straight to his chest. You were on time, which should have been good, and you were quiet, which should have been fine, and you ate lunch across from him and talked about soup, and the whole time he sat there with this low-level alarm going off somewhere in his ribcage that he couldn't silence.

You, being you, had apparently decided that the way to appeal to him was to become someone else entirely. You had looked at yourself—your raccoon self, your chaotic wonderful completely exhausting self—and thought that wasn't right for him. That he needed something different. That you needed to sand yourself down into a shape he'd find more acceptable.

The thought makes something in his chest hurt in a way he doesn't fully have words for, even now.

He'd found you in your office at the end of the day because he couldn't not. He'd put his hands on your desk because his body made that decision before his brain could intervene. And when you'd asked what if you did get another Esper to harass and he'd started citing subsection four at you—which he was doing from muscle memory at that point, his mouth on autopilot while his entire nervous system was doing something completely different—

You kissed him.

And he kissed you back, immediately, with an enthusiasm that would have embarrassed him if he'd had any capacity left for embarrassment, and you laughed against his mouth, and he pulled you closer because there was nowhere else to put his hands that made any sense.

His type, it turns out, was never a thing that existed until you.

So this is his life now.

You ragebait him with the focused intention of a professional, and he takes the bait every single time, and you look so delighted about it that he can't even maintain proper outrage. You leave inexplicable objects on his desk. The duck is still there. He's moved it twice, both times to slightly more prominent positions, and he's not going to examine that.

Before every Gate he tells you no fewer than five times not to walk in. This is non-negotiable. This is the one thing he will not budge on. You make no promises, which means you'll think about it, which means you're probably not going to do it but he can't rule it out, and that uncertainty is both the most frustrating and the most you thing about you.

He comes out of Gates now and goes directly to you, and somewhere in the last few months the professional hand-holding of proper Guiding has evolved into just being held. 

He walks out and you open your arms and he steps into them and you work while you hold him, your energy doing the thing that only yours does, smoothing out all the jagged edges, and he can feel the exact moment he stops being an Esper managing his post-Gate state and starts just being a man who's very glad to be in the arms of the love of his life.

He's never going to admit how much he looks forward to it.

He thinks you know anyway.

Home is wherever you are. He's made his peace with this. He's made his peace with the fact that your couch is more comfortable than his even though it's objectively worse furniture, and that your terrible taste in television is something he now has opinions about, and that the cereal you keep in your cabinet that's shaped like little colored rings and has the nutritional value of cardboard has somehow ended up in his cabinet too, right next to his tea.

He has a ring in a drawer in his apartment.

He looks at it sometimes when you're not there. He thinks about the fact that you're already permanently bonded by Bureau documentation, that there's a form with both your signatures sitting in HR's filing cabinet, that you're legally and professionally and in every bureaucratic sense already his.

He wants it on paper that has nothing to do with the Bureau.

He wants it because you went into a Gate for him before you had any obligation to, before there was any rule that said you had to, and you came out glowing and sick and still managing to make jokes about wings. He wants it because you've never once looked at his prickly exterior and decided it was too much work. He wants it because you find him at every event and stay beside him and the version of himself that ate lunch alone has been so thoroughly replaced by the version that has you leaning on his shoulder making unhinged observations about whatever's in front of you that he can't even remember what the loneliness felt like anymore.

He wants it because home is wherever you are and he'd like that to be official.

The ring stays in the drawer.

For now.

He's waiting for the right moment, which for Riddle means he's overplanning it and second-guessing himself and probably going to end up doing it impulsively at a completely random moment, like in the car on the way back from a Gate, or over dinner in your kitchen, or on your terrible couch in front of your terrible television.

Somewhere where it's just the two of you, and it's quiet, and you're being exactly yourself, exactly the raccoon you've always been, exactly the person who ruined his life completely and gave him a better one in its place.

He'll know the moment when it comes.

He hopes you'll say yes.

He thinks you will.

You did promise, after all, to think very hard about not stepping into Gates before making any decisions.

He's choosing to interpret that as a yes to everything.

The same applied to the sunscreen. A handful of bottles with various SPF levels were lined up on the table outside your room. Riddle examined them with an intensity that made it look like a matter of life and death.

"SPF thirty? Inadequate." He tossed the bottle aside. "Fifty? Still no." Finally, he nodded in approval at the last one. "SPF one hundred. Acceptable."

Before you could even head to the beach, he sat you down under a parasol and began applying the sunscreen with meticulous care. Shoulders, arms, back, legs… every single motion was slow and thorough.

"I will not miss a single centimeter," he said, completely focused.

When you started laughing and told him he was overdoing it, he merely smoothed down the sleeve of his shirt.

"As a vampire, I have no intention of watching you burn," he said sternly.

And exactly two hours later, as if he had a built-in clock in his head, he pulled out another bottle.

"It is time for the next layer," he called out to you.

"I don't need it!" you called back from the water.

"You do." He looked at you with that calm, yet utterly unyielding gaze.

He applied the same meticulousness to your wardrobe. One afternoon, you noticed a few neatly written sheets of paper resting on the table. Stepping closer, you realized it was a list of rules.

The first forbade overly revealing bikinis. The second stated that a light shirt or a pareo must always be worn over swimwear. The third required a hat without exception. The fourth mandated staying strictly in the shade between noon and three o'clock. And the fifth briefly announced that Ace's fashion advice was to be entirely ignored.

"Why are there so many rules?" You looked at him, amused.

"...I do not want others staring at you," he hesitated for a fraction of a second.

"So that's the real reason?" You tilted your head. A silence fell over the room for a few moments.

"...Next question," he muttered. He didn't need to say anything more.

Later on the beach, when he noticed a man staring at you a bit longer than was polite, his expression shifted ever so slightly.

He calmly walked over to you, took your hand, and stepped right between the two of you.

"Excuse me." His voice was as polite as ever. "I do not believe you have any reason to look this way for so long."

There wasn't a single raised note in his voice. Not a hint of anger. Yet, the man apologized almost instantly and hurried away. Riddle simply intertwined his fingers with yours, satisfied, and kept walking as if nothing had happened at all.

During the day, he barely left the shadow of his parasol. But whenever he noticed the direct sun hitting you, he would move the entire umbrella without a word just to keep you shielded.

He only truly relaxed after sunset. The moment the sky bled into shades of orange and purple, he took your hand, firmly lacing his fingers through yours.

"This is much more pleasant," he offered a faint smile.

You walked along the shore as the waves quietly washed over the sand and the evening breeze played with your hair. A stray strand fell across your face. With surprising tenderness, Riddle tucked it behind your ear, pausing to just look at you in silence, as if wanting to imprint the image in his mind.

Along the way, he picked a few red hibiscus flowers.

"They will match your hair." He carefully pinned them in place and took a step back, watching you for a long moment.

"...You are beautiful." The moment the words left his mouth, his composure shattered for a second. He looked away, the blush on his cheeks impossible to hide.

But he changed the most when you were completely alone. The moment the door closed behind you or you found a quiet spot far away from everyone else, it was as if all his strict rules ceased to exist.

He looked at you differently. His gaze was calm, tender, and filled with something he would never allow himself to show in public.

"...No one can see you now." He slowly untied the knot of your pareo. He was in no rush. Every movement was careful, almost reverent.

His fingertips gently traced your hip. His cool skin contrasted pleasantly against your warmth, and he paused for a second, as if trying to memorize the sensation of the touch.

"This..." His voice was barely a whisper. "...is for my eyes only."

Then he leaned down and pressed a soft kiss to your shoulder. A second kiss claimed your collarbone. Finally, he let the tips of his fangs graze ever so slightly against your neck.

He never bit you. He just smiled that rare, genuine smile meant only for you.

"Do you have any idea," he whispered into your hair, "how difficult it is to be a gentleman when you look like this?"

Vampire Instincts

He is extremely territorial, though he would never dream of calling his jealousy by its actual name.

He constantly keeps you in the shade, viewing the sun as his absolute greatest enemy.

When he notices someone staring at you for too long, he instinctively positions himself between you and them.

He protects you publicly through his "rules," while in private, he is far gentler and more relaxed.

He would never bite you without your explicit consent. As an aristocratic vampire, he views trust as something sacred.

In the evening, when you fall asleep together, he holds you so tightly it feels as though he wants to shield you from the entire world.

His cool hands often seek out your palm or your waist—not just out of affection, but because feeling your warmth calms him down. Plus, it’s a lovely, refreshing contrast when you're flushed after a whole day in the sun.

Even though he claims all the rules exist solely for your own good, the real reason is much simpler. "I do not want anyone else seeing what belongs only to me," he mumbled against your neck.

— ✧ — ✧ — ✧ — ✧ — ✧ — ✧ — ✧ — ✧ — ✧ — 

his hair had been transformed from one kind of topping to another — glazed strawberry to whipped cream. you really don't mind either flavor. dessert is dessert! pressing your (currently) closed mouth against his head, you intend to do a little taste-test…

the baby-faced housewarden's eyes are fluttered shut but he still has enough energy to lift his hands from his lap and push you away, albeit gently.

you think he mutters something about you being hungry enough to eat his hair and to go ask trey to fix you something instead. It's like he's still dreaming. pawing at his fancy uniform, you smile. this rare sight is as sweet as strawberries and cream to you.

riddle’s cheeks are flushed as you poke them. his embarrassment is like bait on a thread. the more you see it wobble, the more you want to pounce upon him with all your might!

you would have liked to stay here all day to play but a part of you was nice enough to let this strange snow-white riddle rest until he returned to his usual self.

closing the door with a resounding click, you managed to drag yourself away and tried not to begin to think about having potentially broken a rule on heartslabyul grounds.

(the next day when everything had begun to become "normal" again, your head was still intact and you knew in your heart of hearts that he had forgotten your impertinence.)