Random Fanfictions of a Thirty Something

Marvel:

Remy Lebeau x Reader: Ultimate masterlist.

Bucky Barnes-

Lust for life:

Summary: After multiple failed attempts at retirement, you keep getting pulled back into action by Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes. Despite the constant bickering and teasing, there’s an undeniable tension between you and Bucky—something everyone else sees except the two of you.

When a new threat involving stolen Inhuman tech emerges, you reluctantly join Bucky and Sam for one more mission. As the stakes rise, your playful banter with Bucky deepens into something more, and the emotional walls you’ve both built finally begin to crumble.

Warnings: Swearing, Violence, Smut.

DC:

Rick Flag Senior: Bang Bang, Kiss Kiss.

Summary: For five grueling years, Taskforce X was both your lifeline and your torment. Mission after mission, you faced impossible odds with the dangling promise of a reduced sentence. Now, at last, you’re free—no more Belle Reve, no more danger. You’ve put that chapter behind you, determined to leave it locked away in the recesses of your mind.

But Amanda Waller has other plans. When she appears back in your life, she brings a new mission—and a new team. This time, you’re working alongside Rick Flag Sr., the father of your former team leader, and the members of Taskforce M. As the stakes rise, so do unexpected emotions. Tensions give way to an undeniable connection between you and Rick, a bond that deepens with every mission and threatens to pull you back into a world you thought you’d left behind forever. Warning: Slow-Burn, Age Gap, Violence, Swearing, Smut.

Rick Flag Junior: Is It Over Now? Summary: He wasn’t sure exactly when or how it happened—how he ended up standing in his bathroom at 2 a.m., wedged between your legs as you perched on his sink, wiping blood from your face and cleaning whatever wounds you came to him with. He always swore it was the last time, that he couldn't keep doing this; not with someone like you. Yet every night before bed he still walked over and unlocked that damn window on his fire escape. Every night he climbed into bed and waited until he heard your boots hit his floor. Every damn night he waited for you, waited until he could finally breathe again. Warnings; Slow-burn, Violence, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Smut. Bulletproof

Summary: You bend the rules when they’re wrong. He lives by the book—until he doesn’t.

Thrown together on probation, you go from spilled coffee and reluctant partnership to stakeouts, rain-soaked arguments, and late-night rescues. Somewhere between fake domestic covers, tuxedo galas, and napkin-drafted rules, duty turns into something messier—and much harder to walk away from.

Warnings: Slow Burn, Enemies to Partners to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Smut (Eventually), Fluff.

Pairings: Alternate Universe! Colonel Rick Flag Jr/Reader.

Adrian Chase: Wonderstruck

Summary: Falling in love with your best friend wasn’t supposed to happen—but with Adrian Chase, it was inevitable. Maybe it started back in high school, when he smiled at you across the science lab. Or maybe it crept in later, during those long, adrenaline-soaked nights working (sort of, not really) for ARGUS, where the line between best friends and something more blurred every time he looked at you like you were the only steady thing in his world.

Loving him was easy. Living with the fact that he might never love you back? That was the hard part.

Because whether he couldn’t feel it—or just wouldn’t let himself—you were stuck in a limbo of almosts. Lingering touches, late-night confessions, unspoken things that hung heavy in the air.

And eventually, something was going to give. Warnings: Slow-Burn, Angst, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Smut.

Misc:

Bittersweet Symphony ( Rafael Barba x Reader, Sonny Carisi x Reader) Summary: When you unexpectedly discover you're pregnant, you're thrust into navigating the complexities of your new reality. As the baby's father remains distant, it's your partner, Sonny Carisi, who steps up in ways you couldn't dream of. You find yourself grappling with a whirlwind of emotions, including the unexpected feelings of slowly falling in love with your partner.

Jimmy Logan x Reader: (Logan Lucky). Summary: After a decade away, you return to Boone County, stirring up old tensions and unresolved feelings with Jimmy Logan, the man who never truly let you go. As Clyde watches the two of you navigate the weight of your shared past, it becomes clear that your return isn’t just a visit—it’s a collision with emotions neither of you can ignore.

Pairings: Jimmy Logan/Reader Warnings: Angst, Smut, Slow-Burn, Swearing New Romantics (Stephen Holder x Reader. The Killing)

Summary: You and Stephen had an agreement—no strings, just sex after a long day. You set rules to keep things simple, laughing as you both fleshed out the details over cheap takeout and a notepad. At first it was a joke made by two colleagues who didn't have time for a relationship; but one by one, you find yourselves breaking every single rule. Sleepovers, secrets, meeting family, getting jealous—it all slowly crept in until there was only one rule left. And then suddenly, neither one of you were laughing anymore.

Warnings: 18+, Smut, Swearing, mentions of past drug use. Pairings: Stephen Holder/Reader. The Only Exception (Shane Maguire x Reader. Untamed)

Enemies to Lovers. Summary: When you- a stubborn, sharp-tongued chef from San Francisco takes a job at a remote luxury lodge in Yosemite as a favour from your old boss, you immediately find yourself butting heads with the park’s brooding Wildlife Management Officer, Shane Maguire—a man who’s as uncompromising and wild as the land he protects. Protective of his solitude, Shane has zero patience for people from the city who wander off trail and break his every rule. Your first encounters are a battle of wits and wills, all biting sarcasm, heated arguments, and barbed nicknames—especially when he calls you “princess” just to watch you get more irritated.

But when the dangers of the wilderness close in, you two are forced together again and again. The line between rivalry and attraction blurs as every fight leaves you more breathless, every secret shared chips away at your defenses, and every accidental touch lingers too long. You falls first, despite all your efforts to resist him—but when Shane’s walls finally crack, he falls so hard there’s no coming back from it. Pairings: Shane Maguire/Reader. Warnings: Slow-Burn, Fluff, Violence, Swearing, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Smut, Enemies to Lovers.

Pieces of Me Masterlist (Benjamin Poindexter x Reader. Daredevil)

Summary: You never believed in soulmates—until you came home to find Benjamin “Dex” Poindexter, bleeding and wanted, in your kitchen.

The pull in your chest you’d ignored your whole life snapped into focus; the fugitive with perfect aim was yours. Between sarcasm, stitched wounds, and midnight stakeouts, the two of you try to build something fragile and real.

He was precision; you were chaos. Together, you found strange sort of balance

Pairings: Benjamin 'Dex' Poindexter/Reader. Warnings: Slow-Burn, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Swearing, Romance, Fluff, Smut, humor, smut.

Untouchable Masterlist (Jackson 'Jax' Teller x Reader. Sons of Anarchy)

Summary:

You moved to Charming looking for quiet — a rented house that looked nothing like your old one, a remote accounting job that you argued with your boss for, and no more of the club politics you grew up with. After cutting ties with your father, the president of a Nevada MC, you swore off anything with a kutte. But peace lasts exactly until you shoulder-check a man in the supermarket aisle.

From that collision on, the town stops being quiet. Jackson Teller keeps showing up — first to jump your dead car battery, then to ask for help with his ledger at TM. The banter turns familiar; the air between you gets heavier. But your last name is the kind that could burn down alliances, and the truth about who your father is sits like a loaded gun between you.

Part 1: Well, That Stick Has Ruined My Morning. You could say it.

They were only words.

Two of them, technically. Tiny, ordinary words. You’d said worse in kitchens at full tilt with a printer screaming and three people asking stupid questions at once. You’d said harder things to people you liked less, with less sleep, and more mascara running. Separately, the words were nothing. Harmless. Manageable.

Together, they were enough to make your stomach turn over so hard it felt personal.

I’m pregnant.

You stared at yourself in the bathroom mirror like your reflection might volunteer to do it for you.

It did not.

The little ensuite in the hotel here in Yosemite was too small for a crisis of this size. The sink was narrow, the light above the mirror too fluorescent that made you look even worse than you felt, the window cracked just enough to let in a seam of mountain-cold air that lifted the damp hair at the back of your neck. Your toothbrush hung useless in your hand, toothpaste foam cooling in your mouth while your brain ran itself into a wall over and over again.

You looked ridiculous.

Hair loose and sleep-mussed. One of Shane’s dark blue shirts hanging off you, the hem barely decent, one side slipping low enough to show the curve of your shoulder. Your skin looked annoyingly good, which felt like betrayal on a molecular level. Fresh air, less stress, actual sleep when Shane forced you into it, less city grime. Yosemite had done wonders for your face.

Fantastic.

You’d add that to the pros list the next time he tried the whole move closer to me conversation in that maddeningly calm voice of his, like he was discussing weather patterns and not the possibility of uprooting your life.

Pros:

Skin clear.

Boyfriend stupidly hot.

Unfortunately pregnant.

You spat toothpaste into the sink with more force than strictly necessary and rinsed your mouth, eyes never leaving your own.

How the hell were you pregnant?

You had been careful.

You had used protection. Every time, except maybe that one time but that barely counted because you’d both been half asleep and very much in love and very stupid in that specific way people get when they think, well, what are the odds? You’d done the responsible adult things. The deeply unsexy, practical things. The things people in pamphlets and women’s health articles told you to do if you wanted to remain a person with agency and not become a cautionary tale with stretch marks.

You even went to the bathroom after because UTIs were no joke and you were not about to let romance make you medically negligent.

You stared harder at yourself.

Actually, scratch that.

You knew exactly how you were pregnant.

You were not, tragically, the Virgin Mary.

You were just a woman in a borrowed shirt in a bathroom in Yosemite, trying very hard not to throw up from anxiety before nine in the morning. Your laugh came out thin and hysterical enough that if anyone else had heard it, they’d have started backing away slowly.

“Okay,” you whispered to the mirror.

Your voice sounded nothing like yours. Too high. Too careful. Like if you moved too fast the whole room might crack down the middle.

“Okay,” you said again, because repetition had always felt vaguely like control.

It was fine.

It was.

You were an adult.

Shane was an adult.

The two of you could have an adult conversation in an adult way about this very adult situation that had arrived in your life like a fucking wrecking ball. Never mind that the two of you had never actually discussed this.

Not really.

Not in the one year and six months you’d been together.

There had been jokes. Passing comments. The occasional god, can you imagine? when a toddler had a public breakdown in Trader Joe’s or when you and him had stood in an elevator with a screaming baby and the mother trying to shush them while apologising to you at the same time. But never a real conversation. Never a sit-down, eye-contact, what do we want? what would we do? kind of conversation.

Because, if you were being honest, you’d both behaved like the future was this vague, generous thing that would wait for you both to be ready.

Apparently not.

You both still drove between cities and towns once a week, that had turned into once every two weeks once you both realised that a six-hour round trip every weekend was actually exhausting and not really maintainable in reality. You dragged both hands down your face and inhaled through your nose.

The room smelled like Shane. Soap. Pine. The faint, warm cotton smell of clothes that had been slept in. Under it, the chill mineral scent of mountain air coming through the cracked window. Out in the other room, it was quiet in that particular morning way—floorboards settled, kettle not yet on, no radio crackling at his shoulder, no boots moving around. He was still asleep.

Of course he was.

Because the universe loved a joke and apparently since day one of you meeting this man you were the absolute fucking butt of them all.

You pictured him in bed—half on his stomach, one arm shoved under the pillow, hair a mess, face soft in sleep in that way he never let the waking world see. One knee bent up because the mattress in the Yosemite rental was too soft for his back but he tolerated it because you liked it. Mouth slightly open. Breathing deep and even. Completely unaware that in the bathroom ten feet away you were trying not to have a religious experience over a stick of plastic that was still sitting in the bottom of your bag.

God.

You could just show him the test.

That was an option.

A valid option.

You could walk out there, pull it out, hold it up between two fingers like evidence in a murder trial, and let him do the math himself. Let him say it first. Let him be the brave one for once.

You could almost picture it.

His face going still.

His eyes dropping to the test, then back to yours.

The silence.

Maybe he’d take it from you. Maybe he’d stare at it too long. Maybe he’d say your name first in that low voice he used when he already knew that this wasn’t something you were going to make a joke about because you were going to throw up instead. Maybe he’d say, Are you sure? which, fair. Maybe he’d say nothing for just long enough to make your soul leave your body and take up residence in the heating vent.

You clutched the edge of the sink.

No.

No, if you did that, he would look at you with those stupid steady eyes and you would immediately burst into tears like a child and he would hug you and say all the right things to make you feel better but nothing actually helpful except “I’ll stand by you no matter what,” like the stupid sensible asshole he was. You needed at least ten more minutes of pretending to be a person with executive function.

“Jesus Christ,” you muttered.

From the bedroom, nothing. No movement. No voice. No miraculous intervention coming from the sky that would do all the hard work for you.

Coward, your inner voice said.

You glared at yourself. Your reflection, unsurprisingly, did the same. You looked pale now. Less dewy mountain-skin miracle, more woman about to announce life-altering news in her boyfriend’s shirt while trying not to disassociate.

You reached for your brush just to have something to do and ran it through your hair too hard. It snagged at the ends. Good. Pain. Useful. Grounding.

You could do this.

You could.

You’d done harder things.

You’d left cities. Rebuilt kitchens. Loved a man who lived half in wilderness and half in silence and somehow taught him how to let himself be loved back. You had survived weddings, disasters, raccoons, rumors, breakups, awful bosses, your own brain, and a truly humiliating phase in high school where you thought low-rise jeans were a personal right.

You could say two words.

Your hand paused mid-brush.

Unless he didn’t want this.

There it was. The thought you’d been sprinting away from finally catching you by the hair.

Your stomach dropped so hard you had to grab the sink again. Not because Shane would be cruel. Not because he’d be angry. Not because he’d ever, ever make this harder than it already was.

That was the problem.

He’d be kind.

He’d go quiet first, because he always did when something mattered. He’d think before he spoke. He’d ask if you were okay before he asked how he felt. He’d make coffee. He’d sit you down. He’d put one hand on the back of your neck, thumb under your ear, and say we’ll figure it out.

And maybe he would mean it.

Maybe he’d mean every word.

But what if underneath all that steadiness was the truth that he hadn’t wanted this? Not now. Not like this. Not before a thousand conversations you’d both failed to have.

Your throat tightened. The room suddenly felt too bright, too close, too full of every future at once.

A baby.

Shane holding a baby.

Shane absolutely refusing to admit he’d cry and then crying anyway. Tiny socks hanging to dry in the Yosemite sun.

The thought arrived first because apparently your brain had decided subtlety was for weaker women. Tiny white socks clipped to a line outside, moving in the high clear mountain air like surrender flags. So small. So offensively small. Little things made for a person who did not exist yet and somehow already had the power to ruin your composure before breakfast.

Then the next thought hit hard enough to make your grip tighten on the sink.

You, back in the city, nauseous and furious and alone for weeks at a time while Shane tried to make the drive work. Your apartment with its slightly warped floorboards and the upstairs neighbors who lived like they were training for a hoofed migration. The smell of hot pavement and garbage day in summer. You sitting on the edge of your bed with a bucket between your knees, hating everyone. Missing him. Resenting that you missed him. Resenting him for being somewhere all that sky and silence still fit around him while you tried not to throw up into municipal plumbing.

A cot in a tent and a child you could never put in it.

That one cut deepest.

Not because you thought Shane would suggest something that stupid. He wouldn’t. But because the image of his life—his actual life, the shape of it, the limitations of it—suddenly stood up in full, impossible detail. Canvas walls. Ground pad. Lantern light. The clean practical solitude of a man who could live out of a pack for days and somehow make it look like a philosophy instead of an inconvenience. You had spent a year and a half loving him in pieces and practicalities and now all of it was rearranging itself around a new fact.

His hand on your stomach.

Your mother’s face when you told her.

Mark’s face, God help you.

Brian and Gabe losing their entire collective minds.

The life you thought you had arranged for yourself tilting, then tilting more, then becoming something else entirely.

And underneath all of it—quieter, smaller, somehow more terrifying than panic—was the tiny glowing fact that some part of you was already protecting this.

Not deciding. Not planning. Not ready.

Just protecting.

Like your body had picked a side before your brain had even found the ballot.

The nausea hit so fast it felt personal.

One second you were staring at yourself in the little bathroom mirror, pale and wide-eyed in Shane’s oversized shirt, and the next your mouth flooded with that awful sharp water that meant you had maybe five seconds before this became a housekeeping issue.

“Oh, no,” you whispered to no one.

You lunged for the sink just in time.

It was not elegant.

There was nothing cinematic about it, nothing delicate or tragic. Just the humiliating violence of your stomach deciding it had opinions about the morning and wanted them heard immediately. Your hands braced hard on either side of the basin, hair dropping forward like it had joined the attack, shoulders tightening under the thin cotton of his shirt while you threw up once, hard enough to make your eyes sting.

You stayed bent over the sink afterward, breathing through your mouth, the tap still off, the room too bright. The toothpaste-and-pine smell of the bathroom had been replaced by acid and panic and the thin cold line of fresh air coming through the cracked window above the toilet.

Your eyes watered.

Your throat burned.

You could hear the blood rushing in your ears.

The floorboard in the other room creaked and then he was there.

Shane appeared in the doorway half asleep and somehow more awake than you had ever been in your life.

His hair was wrecked from sleep, one side flattened, the other sticking up in a way that would have been funny if your life wasn’t currently trying to fold itself inside out. He had on a grey t-shirt and sleep-soft flannel pants, bare feet on the cold floorboards, one hand still half braced against the doorframe like his body had arrived before the rest of him. But his eyes—those were already fully awake. Focused. Locked on you.

“Hey,” he said immediately, low and rough.

He crossed to you in two steps, turned the tap on without needing to think about it, and put a hand between your shoulder blades.

Not pressing. Not fussing. Solid.

Warm.

His palm moved slow once, twice, up and down your back while the water ran cool and clean over the porcelain.

“Hey,” he said again, quieter now. “You okay?”

A braver woman would have spilled then and there.

A braver woman would have turned around with shaking hands and wet eyes and just said the words. She would have let the cards fall where they may. She would have trusted him enough—or herself enough—not to stall.

But you were not, at this exact moment, a braver woman.

You were a woman who had thought once about disappointing her boyfriend and then, very stupidly, allowed that thought to set up camp in her ribcage and stayed.

No.

No, because that was the thought that kept catching its sleeve on everything.

Shane did deer and bears and raccoons and fences and missing hikers and stubborn chefs from San Francisco.

He didn’t do babies.

Your hand shook as you cupped some water and rinsed your mouth. Shane reached up with his free hand, gathering your hair out of the way and tucking it behind your ear with that maddeningly gentle practicality that always made everything worse.

“You’re burning up,” he murmured.

“I think Brian’s trying to poison me,” you said hoarsely, still bent over the sink. “I feel awful.”

You heard, rather than saw, the faint shift in his expression.

Because yes, objectively, that was ridiculous. But it was also the exact kind of thing you would say when you were trying very hard not to say the thing you actually meant.

His hand stilled against your back for half a second before continuing.

“Mm,” he said, in a tone that was deeply unconvinced. “Brian’s method’s gotten more ambitious, then.”

You let out a weak laugh that hurt your throat.

The water kept running.

You stayed facing the sink because turning around felt like walking straight into a wall you’d built yourself.

Behind you, Shane leaned one hip lightly against the vanity, staying close enough that you could feel him there without him crowding you. The little bathroom held the shape of him too easily: broad shoulders in the mirror behind yours, one hand still at your back, the quiet smell of sleep and cotton and skin and the mountain cold he always seemed to bring in with him.

He was watching you carefully now.

You could see it in the mirror without having to face him.

The furrow between his brows. The way his head tipped slightly, reading you. The stillness.

Your heart started doing that awful uneven thing again.

You took another sip from the tap just to buy yourself a second.

Then another. And then you straightened too fast, shut the tap off, and pressed the heels of your hands into the counter as if the cheap laminate might keep you from floating clean up and out of your own body.

For one horrible second, the room tilted anyway.

The bathroom was too bright. Too small. Too full of the sound of your own blood in your ears. The mirror gave you back a version of yourself that looked pale and wild-eyed and deeply unconvinced by her own coping mechanisms. Behind you, in the reflection, Shane stood in the doorway in sleep-soft greys and bare feet, one hand still braced against the frame, his face sharpened by concern and the kind of quiet attention that always made lying feel like amateur theatre.

He waited.

Of course he did.

Shane always waited.

He waited when you were furious and talking too fast, letting you burn through the first layer of temper before he answered. He waited in kitchens while you found the exact right word for what you meant, even if everyone else in the room had already decided they understood. He waited on trails when your pride made you insist you were fine, half a step back and to the outside, like patience itself had learned to wear flannel. He waited the first time you kissed him back, the first time you said you loved him, the first time you cried in front of him and tried to pass it off as allergies and rage. He waited at your worst with the same maddening steadiness he used at your best, like there was never a version of you he wasn’t prepared to stand still for.

So he waited now, in the little Yosemite bathroom that smelled faintly of mint and cold air and panic, while you tried not to come apart.

“Okay,” you said, because apparently your mouth had mistaken itself for a manager. “Coffee?”

Your own stomach responded to the word with a sharp little curl of protest.

You grimaced.

Shane’s eyes tracked that immediately.

“No,” he said.

The answer was so immediate, so flatly certain, that under any other circumstance you might’ve laughed.

He pushed off the doorframe and stepped fully into the room, gaze still on your face, taking inventory the way he always did—color, posture, breathing, whether you were still upright out of choice or stubbornness.

“I think,” he said, voice low and even, “what you’re going to do is have a shower, go lie down, put something mindless on, and stop trying to pretend you’re the foreman of this situation.”

You blinked at him.

He kept going, already planning, already moving pieces into place like a man laying out gear before weather hit.

“I’ll go into town and grab you some things. Crackers, ginger ale, whatever sounds good when I text you. I’ll call Brian and let him know he needs to do some actual work on the dinner menu instead of whatever bullshit he’s currently bringing to the table.”

“I thought I left the kitchen in safe hands,” you muttered, weakly defensive on behalf of your own command structure.

Shane’s mouth twitched.

“Safe-ish,” he allowed. “Contained, maybe. Not unsupervised.”

You wanted to argue. You really did. On principle, if nothing else. You were fully capable of managing your own nausea, your own crisis, your own deeply inconvenient emotional breakdown before breakfast.

But the truth was you were suddenly so tired you could’ve folded in half.

And Shane, the traitor, had already turned toward the shower.

He reached in and turned the water on, checking the temperature with his fingers the way he checked everything—carefully, practically, without fuss. The pipes groaned once before the stream evened out into a steady rush. Steam began to breathe slowly into the room.

You watched him through the mirror.

The quiet competence of him.

The way nothing in his body language was panicked, even though he had every right to be. The way he was handling you like you were something real and fragile and not an unexploded bomb he wanted to push back into the wilderness and hope never found its way home.

When the water had warmed enough, he turned back to you.

“Arms up,” he said.

You stared at him.

His eyebrow climbed.

You obeyed.

He hooked his fingers lightly into the hem of the shirt you were wearing—his shirt, dark blue, hanging off you in wrinkled surrender—and pulled it up over your head in one easy movement. The air hit your skin cool and immediate. You gave him a look the second you was bare from the waist up, because obviously.

He did not look down.

He very specifically did not look down.

Which, honestly, was more offensive than if he had.

You narrowed your eyes.

He kept his face pointed firmly somewhere around your shoulder, jaw set in that suspiciously neutral line he wore when he was behaving on purpose.

You caught the tiny tell, though—the faintest tension at the corner of his mouth, the discipline of a man very consciously not glancing where he absolutely wanted to.

Your eyebrow arched higher.

He felt it, “I can hear you judging me,” he said, dry.

“You should be judged,” you replied. “This is a hostile work environment.”

His eyes flicked to yours then, just yours, and there it was—that small, dangerous warmth that always lived under his restraint now, easy and private and entirely too dear.

“I’ll be back,” he said, and leaned in to press a kiss to your forehead.

It was a soft one. Not hurried. Not absent. The kind that said I know this is hard without the insult of saying it aloud.

Then he stepped back toward the door. “Shower. Bed. I’ll be back soon.”

You moved toward the steam with all the dignity of a damp Victorian ghost. “Yes, sir,” you muttered.

He paused with one hand on the doorframe and looked back at you.

That look.

Half warning, half amusement, all trouble, “Don’t.”

Your mouth twitched despite yourself, “I didn’t do anything,” you said, smiling as you stepped under the water.

It was a lie so obvious it practically glittered.

His gaze dipped—not indecently, just enough to let you know he was, in fact, still a man and still your boyfriend and still very much aware of the fact that you were naked in his bathroom, smiling at him like a menace while he was trying to be responsible.

Then he looked back up at your face and gave you the smallest, most betrayed huff of laughter.

“You know exactly what you’re doing.”

“Do I?”

“Yeah.”

You grinned at him through the steam. “That sounds like a you problem.”

His smirk arrived slow and unwilling, the way it always did when he was fighting one and losing with dignity, “Take the shower, Princess.”

“Oh, now you’re calling me Princess when I’m naked and emotionally compromised?”

“You’re the one who started with yes sir.”

“I was being respectful.”

“You were being a brat.”

The laugh that escaped you this time was real. A little shaky, but real. And that—somehow—that little scrap of ridiculous flirting in the middle of everything made your chest ache almost worse than the nausea had.

Because this was still you.

Still him.

Still the two of you, somehow, even with the world tilting under your feet.

He pointed once at the shower, like you were both a problem and his favorite one. “Five minutes. Then bed.”

“You timing me?”

“I’m considering it.”

“You’re obsessed with me.”

“That’s not the word I’d use.”

Your smile softened before you could stop it.

His did too.

For one second neither of you said anything. Just looked. Steam between you. Morning light catching on the edges of everything. The kind of quiet that didn’t ask for much except honesty.

Then he straightened, like remembering he had to actually leave if he wanted to get anything done, “I’m serious,” he said. “Shower. Bed. Phone on loud.”

“Yes, dear.”

He sighed like a man carrying an impossible burden. “You’re lucky I love you.”

You blinked once.

There it was again—that simple, matter-of-fact way he said it now. No drama. No weight thrown around. Just truth, offered the same way he’d offer you water or a jacket or his hand over rough ground.

Your throat tightened, “You too,” you said, quieter.

His face changed at that. Small. Wrecked around the edges. He covered it with a nod and stepped out, closing the bathroom door most of the way behind him.

You listened to him move through the cabin for a few seconds after that—the soft thud of boots being pulled on, the cupboard door, the rustle of keys, the muted clink of his ranger-issue mug being moved off the counter.

Then the front door opened.

Closed.

And suddenly it was just you.

You stepped fully under the shower and let the hot water hit your shoulders.

It should have helped.

It absolutely didn’t.

The room felt too loud now. Too bright. The water too sharp against your skin. Your stomach twisted again—not enough to send you back over the sink, but enough to keep your body on edge, every nerve waiting for the next wave. You braced your palms against the tile and bowed your head until your forehead rested there, the heat running over the back of your neck and down your spine.

The tile was smooth and cool beneath the steam.

You shut your eyes.

And there it was. Everything.

Not just the nausea, but the fact that you were too much of a coward to tell the man you loved the biggest truth of your life.

You’d told him you felt awful. You’d let him build a plan around symptoms. You’d let him kiss your forehead and tell you to go to bed and text Brian and take charge and do all the things he always did when you were fraying at the edges.

And still you hadn’t said it.

Your mouth opened on a breath that turned into something perilously close to a sob.

“God,” you whispered to the tile.

Coward.

You could fight with him, you could flirt with him, you could climb mountains, rebuild kitchens, confess love, steal shirts, make life plans, sleep in his ridiculous tent and bully him into buying a motel room instead.

But this?

This had reduced you to standing naked in a shower in Yosemite, forehead against the wall, trying not to cry because the truth was too big and too alive and too capable of changing everything.

You loved him.

That was the worst part.

You loved him enough that his reaction mattered more than your own panic.

You loved him enough that the idea of disappointment crossing his face for even a second felt unbearable.

You loved him enough to already be halfway protecting him from news that was as much his as yours.

And underneath all of that, low and glowing and impossible to turn off, was the other truth: some part of you was already protecting this too.

You pressed your head harder to the tile and let the water pour over you while your stomach twisted and your heart made a wreck of itself and the whole morning kept moving forward whether you were ready or not. <><><><><><><><> “Shane said you’re sick.”

Gabe’s voice drifted across the porch with all the casual menace of a man who’d absolutely clocked too much and planned to weaponize it gently.

You looked up from where you were sitting on the back step of the bar, one knee bent, the other stretched out, a sweating glass of water pressed hard against your cheek like cold could fix bad life choices. The porch boards still held some of the day’s warmth, but the evening air coming off the trees had that Yosemite bite to it—pine and damp earth and the faint smoke of someone, somewhere, making fire behave. The fairy lights strung overhead hummed softly, throwing a warm halo over the service path and making everything feel just intimate enough to be dangerous.

Gabe stood there in the doorway for a beat, pink vape in hand, hoodie half-zipped, looking offensively unbothered by existence. He took a long pull, then exhaled a cloud that smelled like spun sugar, processed strawberries, and regret.

Your stomach twisted on instinct.

You made a face and brushed your hand in front of your nose. “I thought you were quitting.”

“I did,” he said, stepping out and dropping down beside you on the step with the long-suffering grace of a man settling in for gossip he had no official right to. “Then I thought about how great I was doing, had one celebratory puff, and now here we are.” He held the vape up between two fingers like evidence in a trial. “I’ve realized there are worse things in life than me vaping—”

“Like what?” you asked, still pressing the glass to your face because if you let it go you might combust.

“Capitalism. Global warming. The housing market.” Gabe ticked them off on his fingers. “Brian shaving his head again.”

You turned your head slowly and looked at him.

He met your stare with complete seriousness.

“Right,” you said after a second, because frankly there was no arguing with that level of confidence.

He nodded once, satisfied, then nudged your shoulder with his.

It wasn’t  a hard nudge; It didn’t need to be.

You winced anyway.

His head turned toward you in one sharp movement. “Okay,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “That got a reaction.” He leaned back slightly to look at your face. “So. Park Narc thinks you’re sick. What’s the problem?”

You kept your gaze on the service alley in front of you. The back path ran down toward the trees in a strip of gravel and shadow, still damp in places from the afternoon rinse. Beyond it, the lodge’s outer lights cut soft rectangles across the ground. Somewhere inside, someone dropped a pan and swore with conviction.

“Just Brian’s cooking,” you muttered.

Gabe made a noise so disbelieving it was almost artistic, “Nah uh.” He shook his head and took another drag. “Brian’s record of food-to-food-poisoning ratio is below average.”

You turned to look at him fully this time. “Should I be concerned that there’s an average? Does Justine know there’s an average?”

“I don’t know,” Gabe said, exhaling another plume of candy-scented poison into the night. “Ever since she went on holiday and met a man called Pedro, she’s had her head in the clouds. Which, frankly, is adorable and makes her less likely to notice when Brian nearly kills a tourist with aioli.”

That got the tiniest corner of your mouth to twitch before your stomach rolled again and reminded you this was not a fun, flirty porch scene in a movie. This was your life. Your very stupid, very loud, very hormonal life.

Gabe clocked it all.

Of course he did. He leaned his elbows on his knees, pink vape dangling from one hand, and looked over at you with the kind of concern he disguised so aggressively it almost passed for sarcasm.

“So,” he said. “Is this like sick sick, or sick sick?”

You blinked at him, “There’s a difference?”

He grinned. “There’s always a difference. I’ll bring out the sliding scale again if I have to.”

You let out a slow breath through your nose. “God, not the sliding scale.”

“Oh, it’s back,” he said. “It’s laminated now.” He held up an invisible chart in the air between you. “Sick is ‘I need soup and a day off.’ Sick sick is ‘I am about to alter the trajectory of my life and also maybe throw up in the fern by the ice machine.’”

That was too close.

You looked down at the glass in your hands. Condensation slicked your fingers. The ice had already started to melt, a quiet little collapse you felt strangely seen by.

“Seriously,” Gabe said, and the grin dropped away enough to show the real thing underneath. “You good?”

You wanted to say no.

No, you were absolutely not good.

You were tired in that deep cellular way that made sitting upright feel like a negotiable act. You were sore. Your back hurt. Your stomach had been turning itself inside out in waves all day—hungry, but also repulsed by food, except for when you were suddenly ravenous for the exact wrong thing at the exact worst time. You were exhausted from not sleeping and from too much sleeping and from the fact that your own brain had apparently become an enemy insurgency.

You had to think about your future.

And Shane’s future.

And your future with Shane.

You had to think about whether he would really move to the city for you and a baby, or whether he was still quietly, stubbornly fixed on not doing that in any permanent sense. Whether he’d sacrifice the mountain one week at a time and call it enough. Whether you’d end up giving up your career to move somewhere in between—some compromise town with one decent grocery store and a lot of emotional resentment—because neither of you could decide who got to keep the version of home that mattered more.

You had to think about apartments and doctors and distance and money and babies and bodies and jobs and time and whether loving someone was enough when geography was a very big very real thing.

You had to think about how Shane had looked at you that morning, all rough sleep and concern, and how he’d touched the back of your neck like he already knew you were balancing on the edge of something enormous.

You had to think about the fact that you still hadn’t told Gabe.

Or Becca.

Or Brian, who would cry and then make it weird and then cry harder.

You had to think about your mother.

Mark.

The kitchen.

Your own body, which no longer felt fully like it belonged to you.

You had to think about all of it at once, all the time, and you were so tired.

Instead, you lowered the glass into your lap and said, with a small, defeated sigh: “I just need another nap.”

Gabe stared at you. Then one eyebrow climbed. Slow. Deliberate. Dangerous.

“A nap,” he repeated.

“Mm-hm.”

“You’ve had, like, four today.”

“I’m committed to the bit.”

He leaned back on his hands and looked out into the dark for a second like he was giving the universe one final chance to make this less obvious. It declined.

When he looked back at you, the expression on his face was annoyingly gentle. “Chef,” he said carefully, “if you tell me you’re dying, I’m gonna be supportive. If you tell me you murdered someone, I’m gonna need details first but I’ll hear you out. If you tell me you’re just tired, after I personally watched you glare at a bread roll for thirty full seconds like it owed you money, I’m calling bullshit.”

You let your head fall back against the porch post with a quiet thunk.

The fairy lights overhead blurred for a second, “Don’t,” you muttered.

“I haven’t done anything.”

“You’re being unusually observant.”

“That’s one of my worst traits.”

Silence stretched between you, but not an empty one. Inside the bar, someone laughed too loudly. A chair scraped. Music bled faintly through the back wall, something bass-heavy. Outside, the mountain held its own quiet around all of it.

Gabe nudged your knee with his, lighter this time. “I’m not gonna push,” he said. “Mostly because you get mean when cornered and I happen to enjoy my face where it is.” A beat. “But, hypothetically, if this is bigger than Brian’s shitty aioli, you don’t have to do the whole thing alone; you have family here.”

Something in your chest tightened so fast it hurt. You swallowed. You loved this stupid asshole.

Looked down at your hands and at the clear glass between them.

At the water you hadn’t actually wanted but kept drinking because doing something felt better than sitting still with your own thoughts.

Your voice came out quiet.

“I know.”

And you did.

That was the worst part.

Because if you said it out loud—if you said the truth, if you took the thing in your chest and turned it into sound—then it would stop being yours alone. It would become real in a whole different way. Bigger. Sharper. Less containable.

Gabe, blessedly, did not fill the silence. He just sat there beside you, blowing smaller, more guilty-looking clouds into the dark like he was trying not to be offensive to your apparently fragile internal ecosystem.

After a minute, he held the vape farther away from you and said, “For the record, if this turns out to be something more serious than food poisoning, I’d like it noted that I was very cool and mature on the porch.”

You let out a tired breath of a laugh.

“No you weren’t.”

“I was porch-perfect,” He grinned.

“You smell like a carnival.” He looked offended. Truly offended, like you’d insulted his lineage and not his vape. “It’s strawberry.”

“It smells awful,” you said flatly.

Gabe pressed a hand to his chest. “Wow.”

“That,” you continued, pointing vaguely at the pink plastic crime in his hand, “is not strawberry. That is artificial strawberry.” You gave the word the same tone you reserved for “frozen hollandaise” and “pre-shredded parmesan.” “That’s what a strawberry would smell like if it had been described over the phone by a man who’d never met one.”

Gabe opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Opened it again, clearly ready to defend his chemical nonsense to the death; then his attention lifted over your shoulder and his face changed all at once.

Not softened. Not quite.

It just slid into that familiar, delighted expression he wore whenever the universe handed him a live episode of your life to narrate.

“Ah,” he said, straightening a little and lifting the vape in salute, “Canyon Casanova.”

You twisted enough to look.

Shane was coming down the gravel path from the lodge, one hand in the pocket of his jacket, the other swinging loose at his side. The outside dark had settled properly now, all cool blues and silvered edges, and he moved through it like he belonged to it in an infuriatingly photogenic way. Gravel crunched under his boots in that even, decided rhythm that your body had learned before your brain got a say. He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps, looked from Gabe to you, and then pointed at you like he was correcting a factual error.

“She does it better,” he said.

You blinked.

Gabe barked a laugh and pointed the vape at you. “See? Finally, a man of culture.”

The romance was not dead in your relationship. It was simply buried under several layers of sarcasm, practical concern, and a mutual need to bully each other for sport. Which was convenient, really, because you were currently sitting on a porch, keeping a pregnancy secret from your boyfriend, and trying very hard not to throw up on his shoes.

Those stupid boots.

Usually, the smell of him hit you like safety—pine, clean sweat, his soap, cold air, sun-warmed fabric, whatever impossible non-cologne cologne he’d been pretending not to wear for a year and a half. Usually it grounded you.

Tonight, the second the mountain air brought him closer, your stomach turned so violently you had to swallow back a gag.

God.

How had you once found outside on him attractive?

You loved him, apparently. Deeply. Idiotically. Enough to have his child, as it turned out. And right now he smelled like wet bark and fresh hell.

He came up the last step and stopped in front of you, eyes going immediately to your face. Not to Gabe. Not to the glass in your hand. To you.

The humor in his mouth faded just slightly.

“You eaten?” he asked.

The question was casual on the surface, but you knew him too well now. It wasn’t a question thrown out into the air. It was a check. Inventory. Data collection disguised as concern.

You opened your mouth.

Gabe beat you to it, “I tried to feed her,” he said, with the solemnity of a man giving a witness statement. “She glared at a bread roll, drank some water, then came out here. Me, being the concerned citizen that I am, followed. You’re welcome.”

Shane looked at him.

“You’re a community idol,” he said, deadpan.

“Finally,” Gabe murmured, basking. “The recognition I deserve.”

You looked between them and felt another small wave of nausea roll through you, less violent this time, but enough to make you sit a little straighter and breathe through your mouth.

Shane noticed that too.

Of course he did.

He always noticed.

His gaze dropped briefly to the untouched water in your hand, then back to your face. “Come on.”

You stood because arguing seemed like work and because if you stayed sitting another minute Gabe was absolutely going to evolve into emotional support stand-up comedy.

“I’m taking my break very personally,” Gabe said as you handed him the glass.

“You’re taking my whole life very personally,” you muttered.

“That’s friendship.”

“That’s surveillance.”

Shane’s hand landed briefly at the small of your back as you stepped past him. Not enough to steer. Just enough to say watch the step without saying it out loud.

You hated how much comfort there was in that.

Gabe watched the two of you go with the expression of a man who was absolutely going to have opinions later and knew better than to voice them while Shane was still in range, “Don’t die,” he called after you.

“Professionally impossible,” you said without turning.

The service path back to the cabin was quiet.

The lodge noise dropped away behind you in layers—the clink of glasses, the faint thud of music, somebody laughing too loudly near the side entrance—until all that was left was the crunch of gravel under your boots and the thin night sounds of Yosemite settling into itself. Pine boughs moved overhead in the breeze with that soft whispering hush that usually calmed you and currently just made everything feel bigger. The air was cold enough to wake your skin up, and still your body felt hot and strange and wrong.

Shane didn’t push.

Didn’t ask again if you’d eaten.

Didn’t fill the silence with one of his low, practical lectures about water and electrolytes and trying not to run yourself into the ground.

He just walked beside you, half a step closer than he needed to.

You could feel him looking over at you every so often, not obviously, just little glances in the dark that caught on your cheek, your posture, the way you kept one arm folded too tightly across your middle. Taking stock. Waiting for you to either speak or break.

Your brain, meanwhile, had completely abandoned dignity and started offering up ways to tell him.

Congratulations, you’ve been promoted.

Surprise, the protective custody unit got bigger.

Brian didn’t poison me, but someone did get me pregnant and frankly I’d like to speak to management.

That one almost made you laugh, except you were too busy trying not to throw up in the shrubbery.

Others were worse.

Blunter, harder.

I’m pregnant.

We need to talk.

Please don’t look at me like that.

You hated every version.

You hated that no arrangement of words seemed right enough for something this enormous. Too flippant and you’d look insane. Too serious and you might start crying before you got through the first syllable.

And sooner or later he was going to realize this wasn’t just Brian’s cooking.

Shane might not do babies, but he did patterns. He did observation. He did noticing when you tied your laces wrong or skipped breakfast or lied about being tired or pretended you weren’t hurt when you absolutely were. He noticed weather shifts and broken latches and the angle of your jaw when you were trying not to say the truth.

The longer you kept this from him, the worse he was going to take it Because he’d be hurt.

Because he’d look at you with those steady eyes and go quiet in that way he did when something mattered, and you would know immediately that waiting had been the wrong choice.

He glanced over again.

You felt it before you saw it.

“Still feel sick?” he asked at last, voice low.

“Yes,” you said, because that was easier than all the other answers stacking up behind your teeth.

He nodded once. “You want tea?”

Tea.

The domesticity of that nearly knocked you sideways.

He was talking about tea and you were carrying his baby and your entire life had become a bad rom-com written by someone who really liked stress.

“Maybe,” you said faintly.

He didn’t comment on your tone. Just adjusted his pace slightly when your steps slowed, as if the dark itself had asked him to.

The cabin came into view through the trees a minute later, porch light glowing soft and yellow against the wood. The small familiar shape of it made something in your chest tighten so hard it hurt. Home, for now. Home with his flannel over the chair and your boots by the door and his mug on the counter and the secret still lodged sharp under your ribs.

Shane went ahead the last two steps to the porch, pulling his keys from his pocket. The metal jangled softly in the night. He unlocked the door with the easy muscle memory of a man who had done this enough times to stop thinking about it.

You stood behind him, staring at the back of his jacket, at the broad line of his shoulders, at the nape of his neck where his hair had gone soft from the evening air.

You could still wait.

You could go inside, drink the tea, sit down, try to find a better moment.

A gentler one.

A smarter one.

Tomorrow morning, maybe. When the world felt less thin-skinned. When you hadn’t spent the evening trying not to vomit because your boyfriend smelled too much like actual wilderness. But then he pushed the door open and stepped inside, and the sight of him crossing the threshold—safe, familiar, his place, your place, the place the truth would have to live in eventually—made your panic spike so hard it overrode every last ounce of strategy.

“I’m pregnant,” you blurted.

He stopped.

Not gradually.

Just stopped dead in the middle of the cabin, one hand still on the edge of the door, body half turned back toward you as if the words had physically reached out and caught him by the chest.

The silence after was instant and absolute.

Your own heartbeat turned deafening.

The cabin suddenly seemed too small, too bright, every object inside it unbearably clear—the chair with his jacket over the back, the half-read field manual on the table, the lamp by the couch, the folded blanket, your water glass from this morning still sitting by the sink.

You had said it.

Oh God.

You had actually said it.

There was no taking it back now. No softer version. No strategic retreat. No joke.

Your stomach dropped so hard you thought for one insane second you might actually pass out and that would be not only humiliating but wildly off-brand.

Shane turned.

Slowly.

His face was unreadable in that first terrible second, not because he didn’t feel anything, but because he felt too much all at once and every part of him had gone still trying to catch up.

Your mouth opened, closed. You had the wild urge to immediately make it worse by talking.

To explain. To apologize. To say I was going to tell you earlier or please say something or I know this is bad timing or I know this is probably not what you wanted.

Nothing came out.

The panic was full-body now, hot and electric and humiliating. It buzzed in your fingers. Sat high in your throat. Made your knees feel weirdly detached from the rest of you.

Because now you had to wait, now you had to see his face change. Now you had to find out what that silence meant. And standing there in the doorway with the night still at your back and the truth hanging between you like a lit fuse, you realized with a horrible, crystal clarity that this was the part you had been afraid of all along:

Mot the pregnancy. Not the nausea. Not even the future.

This.

Chapter 5: Smurfs Smile. “But I was built from special pieces that I learned how to unscrew And I can always reassemble to fit perfectly for you Or anybody that decides that I'm of use…” Lonely Is The Muse- Halsey.

Andrew had never really known safety the way he felt it in that small kitchen that morning.

Not the way normal people meant it—soft, unconscious, something you lived inside without thinking about it. Pope’s version of safe had always been temporary. Conditional. Built out of things you could check and control. Locks. Guns. Plans. Escape routes. The weight of cash in a drawer. The knowledge that if something went wrong, he could make it stop.

Safe was a something he could hold.

Safe was Smurf’s house when Smurf was in a good mood—because her approval meant you weren’t in trouble, and in the Cody world not in trouble was the closest thing to peace you got. Safe was being useful. Being chosen. Being needed. Safe was doing what you were told and not asking questions that made her eyes go cold.

Safe was never kind.

Safe was never warm.

It was just… the moment before the next thing happened.

Even in prison, safe had meant learning the rules fast enough not to get eaten. It had meant keeping your head down, your mouth shut, your back to a wall when you could. Safe was vigilance until it became muscle memory.

So when Pope stepped into your kitchen that morning—shirt on now, hair still damp from a quick rinse—his body braced automatically for the familiar: tension, judgement, performance, a price tag.

But your kitchen didn’t ask anything of him.

It was small. A little cluttered in a way that said life happened here constantly. A drying rack full of mismatched cups. The butter container open on the bench.  A jam jar open, knife sticking out because you’d been interrupted mid-task. A grocery list stuck to the fridge with a magnet—half scribbles, half reminders, all necessity. The table had a scuffed corner like it had been bumped a thousand times. There were childproof latches on the cabinets, and Pope clocked them immediately—his brain couldn’t help it—but the sight didn’t tighten him like it usually did.

It made his chest loosen.

Because those locks weren’t about paranoia or control.

They were about the care of a little boy who would climb the counters to get into them.

Henry was there in tracksuit pants and a jumper, hair sticking up, tyre in his mouth, orbiting the room in quick loops. He wasn’t quiet, but he wasn’t dangerous either—just movement and sound and little happy noises as he hovered near you, drawn by routine like gravity. He was mimicking the same sentence over and over again, gibberish at first, and then what Pope could pick up, “Anyway, lets go.”

You were at the stove, moving with that tired competence Pope had come to recognise. Not pretty domestic, not curated. Real. A woman cracking eggs with one hand while keeping the other half-lifted like a guardrail, ready to block Henry from the stove if he drifted too close. You talked as you cooked—not for Pope, mostly for Henry—narrating the world in calm, predictable pieces.

“Toast first. Butter. Jam. Not on the floor, buddy. Plate. We’re gonna have a good day.”

Henry echoed fragments, satisfied by the structure, “Good day.”

“Good words,” you murmured, voice warm.

Pope stood near the doorway at first, instinctively unwilling to place himself in the middle of someone else’s space. His shoulders stayed tight. His hands stayed loose. His eyes tracked everything—windows, back door, where knives were, where Henry was, where you were, where the street noise would come in.

Then something strange happened.

Nothing happened. No one yelled. No one tested him. No one tried to make him prove himself. No one made a joke at his expense, no one poked at him to see if he’d snap.

The warmth wasn’t just from the stove or the morning sun through the window. It was in the way you moved around Henry without resentment. In the way Henry laughed high pitched after he tried to tickle your side and it turned into more like a sharp pinch and you didn’t flinch. In the way you gave Pope a mug of coffee and didn’t hover for gratitude. You just set it down with a smile like it was normal to offer someone something and not demand a piece of them in return.

It hit Pope like a hand around his ribs.

Warm. Firm.

Breathe.

As if someone had wrapped him up and told his body it could unclench after being suffocated his entire life.

Pope didn’t know what to do with it, he kept expecting the hook.

The Cody house taught you that warmth always came with a price. Smurf’s affection was never free. Even tenderness in that place was transactional—earned and revoked however she seemed fit. But here, the only price was… being present; and Pope realised, with a sharp little jolt, that this was what he’d been starving for without knowing it.

Not comfort. Not romance.

Normal.A sink full of dishes. A kid who threw toast twice before finally eating it. A woman who rolled her eyes at the universe and still made breakfast anyway. A house where the locks existed because someone loved someone enough to prevent disaster—not because someone wanted to keep you trapped.

Pope’s version of safety had always been built to keep violence out.

This safety wasn’t built against violence.

It was built despite it.

Despite overdue bills and sleep debt and the way your ex had shown up at 7:32am with entitlement and anger. Despite the world being heavy and unfair and constantly asking for more than you had to give. You still buttered toast. You still narrated the morning like you were laying down something for Henry to follow. You still found a laugh—even if it came out tired, even if it was the kind of laugh that was more breath than sound.

Pope stood near the edge of your kitchen like he didn’t trust himself to take up too much space; but his body still held that early-morning tension like it hadn’t realised it was allowed to stand down yet. His eyes were doing what they always did: tracking, counting, checking.

But the things he was checking here weren’t threats.

They were… life.

The countertop clutter: A pile of letters near the fruit bowl—some unopened, some opened and stacked neatly as if neatness could make the numbers less real. A school note. A therapy appointment card. A folded grocery list with bread and juice added in messy scrawl.

Pope’s gaze caught that list and he felt that familiar squeeze—late fees, overdue notices, the quiet violence of money. He didn’t say anything. He just filed it away like he had found himself doing to all of the other small things in your life lately.

Henry wandered over to the table and climbed up with the confidence of a kid who believed the world would catch him. His feet slid a little on the chair seat. He steadied himself with one sticky hand and left a smear of jam on the tabletop like proof of his existence.

You didn’t scold. You didn’t snap; You just reached for a wet wipe—already on the counter, already prepared, because you lived in preparation—and said, “Hands,” like it was routine.

Henry offered his hands immediately, palms out like a tiny presentation.

You took them gently and wiped—firm, careful, practiced. Your fingers moved over his knuckles and the undersides of his nails like you were cleaning away more than sugar.

Henry watched you while you did it, eyes bright, chewing slow on his tyre, “Clean,” he said, and his whole face lit up with pride.

“Clean,” you echoed simply, like the word mattered, like the concept mattered.

Henry grinned wider, satisfied, and immediately pressed his now-clean hands flat on the table again just to feel the surface, as if testing whether clean changed anything.

You turned back to the stove, spatula in hand, eggs hissing quietly in the pan. Pope watched the line of your shoulders as you moved—still tired, still tense, but steady. Capable. The kind of capable that wasn’t loud. The kind that didn’t need an audience.

Then you glanced at Pope, and there it was again—that automatic, apologetic politeness like you were bracing for judgement just because your house was lived-in.

“Sorry,” you started, “it’s not usually this chaotic—”You paused, eyes drifting toward Henry, then back to the pan, like you heard your own lie before it fully formed. Then you let out a small huff and corrected yourself with that deadpan honesty Pope was starting to recognise as your version of bravery, “Actually, that’s a lie,” you said simply. “It is always this chaotic.”

Your mouth twitched, like you were sharing a joke at your own expense, “Usually it’s worse,” you added, flipping eggs with practiced precision, “but he’s being suspiciously well behaved this morning.”

Henry, as if to prove you wrong, made a delighted little sound and started tapping his clean hands on the table in a quick rhythm—tap tap tap—while humming under his breath.

Pope’s mouth twitched again. Because you were standing there in the middle of a morning that should’ve crushed you—overdue bills and broken sleep and a man at your door—and you still found space to joke.

Pope looked at Henry—happy, humming, alive—and then back at you, and the thought landed in his chest with a steady weight:

This is what safety looks like when it’s made out of love instead of fear.

And Pope didn’t know how to live inside it; But for the first time in his life, he wanted to try. Not in the big, dramatic way—Pope wasn’t built for vows or speeches or promises that sounded pretty. He wanted to try in the only way his body understood: show up again tomorrow.

He stood in your kitchen with a mug of coffee he’d now picked up like it was a normal thing to do—dark, too strong, the kind he liked. The ceramic was warm against his palm. The house smelled like eggs and toast and the cheap strawberry jam Henry insisted on. It was so ordinary it made Pope’s ribs ache.

Henry sat on the table swinging his legs, tyre in his mouth, humming to himself as he watched you move between stove and counter.

Pope took a long sip of coffee, eyes tracking automatically—Henry’s hands, the chair, the edge of the table, the front door locks even from here. Habit. Safety. Then, because his brain wouldn’t let it go, because the image of that maroon-shirted man’s boot in your doorframe kept replaying like a threat loop, Pope asked the question that had been sitting in his throat since he’d stepped off his grass:

“Does your ex-husband knock on your door like that often?”

His voice was low. Flat. Like he didn’t care. But he did.

You froze for half a second—barely noticeable—then resumed spreading butter on Henry’s toast like the act required your full attention. Like looking at Pope while answering would make it too real. You hesitated.

Pope watched the pause with the same focus he once watched a bank teller when he couldn’t decide whether she had pressed the alarm or not.

“Well… not really,” you said finally, careful. “But I haven’t been answering his messages. Or his calls.” Your mouth twisted, then you added, quieter, “Or his lawyer’s letters.” You looked away toward the sink—toward the dishes, toward the window, anywhere but Pope’s eyes. Like you were bracing for judgement. Like you expected him to think you were stupid for ignoring legal letters, when really you just sounded tired. Like the words lawyer and custody and papers had become a kind of noise you couldn’t bear hearing anymore.

Pope didn’t say anything. He waited.

You exhaled through your nose, shoulders lifting slightly. “He keeps talking about custody,” you continued, voice flattening into something exhausted. “Says he’ll sign the papers once I agree to… twenty/eighty.”

Pope’s jaw tightened.

Twenty/eighty.

Custody as a bargain chip. Divorce papers used like a leash. Smurf would’ve respected the strategy in a sick way. Pope just felt his stomach turn.

You shrugged like you were trying to make it sound casual, like it wasn’t a knife in your ribs. “But—” you said, offhand, “he can’t cope with Henry,” You glanced at Henry as if to make sure he hadn’t heard. Henry was humming, blissfully unconcerned, fingers tapping the table in a little rhythm while he waited for the toast. “I’m not saying that to sound like an asshole,” you added quickly, apologetic already. Like you were used to smoothing everything down. “It’s just—he spent one weekend alone with Henry when we were still married.” You laughed once, short and humourless. “I had a work thing.”

Your hands moved faster with the toast, as if speed could outrun the memory.

“And by the end of the first night,” you continued, voice tight, “he was calling me asking me to come home because Henry had another meltdown and he was stressed.” You paused, swallowing. “Like—stressed because… parenting was hard? For one night?”

Your mouth pressed into a line, the anger flashing and then being smothered immediately.

You stopped for a long moment, staring down at the plate like it might tell you what to do next, “Anyway—” you tried, the word coming out like a door you were trying to shut.

Pope saw it. That pattern.

You opened up, then you flinched from your own honesty and tried to take it back. You apologised without saying “sorry,” the apology baked into the way you swallowed words and redirected them into jokes.

Like you’d been taught your whole life to shrink. To make yourself palatable. To make sure your anger didn’t make you difficult. To make sure your pain didn’t make you dramatic. To make sure your needs didn’t take up too much oxygen.

And Pope—who knew what it was to be moulded by a mother’s hands into whatever she wanted—felt something hit him hard in the gut.

A punch of recognition.

He wanted to tell you you were allowed.

Allowed to take up space. Allowed to say he scares me without adding a joke. Allowed to be angry at a man who couldn’t keep you in a marriage so he was trying to keep you in every other way. Allowed to ignore his letters if reading them felt like swallowing glass.

Pope wanted to say it out loud. Wanted to put it in simple words, the way you spoke to Henry—clear, steady, no judgement.

But Pope didn’t have the language for tenderness. Not cleanly.

What he did have was anger.

It coiled under his skin as he listened to you talk, hot and tight, turning his muscles into wire. Anger that told him to find the man again—follow him to his car, follow him to wherever he lived, learn his routines the way Pope learned perimeters.

Anger that said: He doesn’t get to treat her like property.

Anger that said: Henry is not a bargaining piece.

Pope took another sip of coffee, slower this time, because if he didn’t anchor himself in something mundane he’d stand up and go do something irreversible.

Still on the table, Henry made a happy little noise and reached for the toast when you set it down. He smeared jam with the back of his finger like a tiny menace, then licked his finger and giggled at himself.

You watched him with that soft, tired love again, like it was the only thing keeping you upright.

Pope’s eyes lingered on your face. The shadows. The stubbornness. The way you were holding it together.

He cleared his throat, the sound rough; “He’s using the papers,” Pope said quietly.

It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t advice. It was just… naming it. Pulling the thing out of the dark so it couldn’t pretend it was normal.

You looked up at him, startled. Like you hadn’t expected him to understand the game.

Pope’s gaze flicked to Henry, then back to you, “He’s not here for custody,” Pope added, voice low. “He’s here to keep you… stuck.”

The word came out harsh because Pope hated it.

He hated men who needed control to feel big. Hated the kind of coercion that didn’t leave bruises but left you exhausted anyway. Smurf did that kind of violence every day—paperwork violence, money violence, emotional violence.

Pope recognised it instantly.

Your throat worked as you swallowed. You didn’t deny it.

You just looked tired, “I know,” you whispered, and it sounded like admitting defeat.

Pope felt that anger twist again, but underneath it was something else—something steadier, something that scared him more because it wasn’t violent.

It was protective.

The kind that wanted to stand beside you, not over you. The kind that wanted to make your kitchen feel safe again, even with overdue bills on the counter and the memory of boots in your doorway.

Pope’s hand tightened around the mug, “If he comes back,” he reminded you, voice still calm, still low, “you don’t open it.”

You let out a small laugh that wasn’t humour. “I said that, too, once.”

Pope’s eyes didn’t leave yours. “Yeah,” he said. “And then you got tired.”

It wasn’t judgement. It was recognition.

He watched your face shift—anger flaring first, bright and sharp like a match strike… then shame trying to swallow it whole, smothering it down into something quieter. Something you could carry without anyone calling you dramatic.

Pope hated that shame.

Not in an abstract way. In a physical way. Like it scraped the inside of his ribs. Because shame was a tool. Smurf used it like a knife. Pope recognised it instantly when he saw it on other people—especially on you—because he’d spent half his life choking on it.

He didn’t know how to take it away, he didn’t have the right words. He wasn’t built for gentle reassurance. He’d never learned how to sit inside someone else’s pain without trying to control it, fix it, shut it down.

So he offered the only thing he could: “I’m here,” Pope said simply.

Two words that didn’t sound like much.

But in Pope’s mouth, it was a promise. Not a pretty promise. Not a movie one. A perimeter promise. A show up promise. The kind he could actually keep.

You stared at him for a long moment like you didn’t know what to do with that. Like you were waiting for the hook. Like you were bracing for him to take it back and laugh and call you stupid for needing anyone.

Instead, Pope just stood there with the coffee mug in his hand, eyes steady.

And then you broke.

Not loudly. Not in a way meant to make anyone feel guilty. You broke the way exhausted people broke—quietly, all at once, like a seam giving out.

“I’m not…” you started, and your voice wobbled. You swallowed and tried again. “You don’t need to.”

Your hands fluttered uselessly near the counter like you didn’t know where to put them. Like your body wanted to fold in on itself but you refused. Like you were trying to keep your spine.

“I’m—I’m a big girl,” you said, and Pope saw how hard you worked to make it sound like a joke. “I—I knew what he was like.” Your laugh was thin. “Well, more like I was warned what he was like and I didn’t listen.”

You took a breath that shook, “And now I’m stuck in a town where I don’t know anyone, with my ex banging on my door, and bills up to my eyeballs, and I can barely work because of Henry and—and my family is across the other side of the country, and I just—” Your voice broke on the last word like it physically couldn’t carry any more weight.

Your eyes watered. You looked down fast, blinking hard like you could deny tears by refusing to look at anyone while they existed, “Sorry,” you whispered.

Pope felt it like a punch.

Not the tears. The sorry.

You apologised like breathing. Like taking up space required permission. Something inside him snapped—not violent, not loud, but sudden and absolute; “Stop saying sorry,” Pope said, too fast, too sharp.

Your head lifted, startled.

Pope’s jaw flexed, then he forced his voice lower, steadier, because he didn’t want to scare you. He just… couldn’t stand the idea of you swallowing yourself down to make the world more comfortable; “You have nothing to be sorry about,” he said, blunt as truth.

He meant it with his whole body. He meant it like a rule.

And it wasn’t just about this moment. It was about every time he’d heard you say sorry over the months for things you didn’t need to apologise for—Henry stimming, Henry making noise, your yard being messy, your life being hard.

Pope didn’t know how to say you’re allowed without it sounding like he was giving you permission.

But he wanted to. God, he wanted to. Because watching you apologise for surviving made something ugly coil in his gut.

It wasn’t just anger. It was… attachment.

And that scared him because it felt different than Amy.

With Amy, it had been this careful, awkward reaching toward normal. Church air and polite smiles and the idea that if he did the right things—showed up, sat still, tried—he could become a version of himself that wasn’t soaked in blood. Amy had felt like a door to another life. A life where Pope could pretend the Cody darkness was something he could leave at the curb like shoes.

But it had always been fragile. Like glass. Like one wrong truth would crack it.

And it did because Amy had wanted him to be safe in a way that required him to become someone else. She’d looked at him like he was a damaged thing she could soften. Like love was supposed to wash him clean.

Pope didn’t blame her for leaving. He understood it. Love didn’t survive the Cody world. It got eaten.

But you… you weren’t asking him to be clean.

You weren’t romanticising him, either.

You suspected his mother was dangerous. You didn’t pretend Smurf’s smile was harmless. You didn’t look at Pope like he was a project. You looked at him like he was a man standing in your kitchen, offering help, and you didn’t make him pay for it with pity.

With you, the pull wasn’t about becoming normal, it was about being real.

Standing in the mess. Standing in the hard. Standing in the part of life that didn’t get pretty endings… and staying anyway. That kind of closeness terrified him more than church ever did.

Because it wasn’t a fantasy.

It was something he could actually lose.

You opened your mouth to say something—probably another apology—when Henry came barreling into the kitchen like a small storm.

“T-Rex,” he announced, urgent, grabbing your hand and tugging hard toward the hallway. “T-rex. T-rex.”

Your entire body shifted instantly—tears contained, pain locked away—because Henry needed you and you always answered; “No, baby, not yet.” You tried to keep your voice warm even as he pulled. “Mama’s cooking.”

Henry tugged harder, frustration building in his posture, feet stamping once. “T-rex.”

Pope watched the way your arm tensed under Henry’s grip, watched you try to negotiate calmly while your eyes still shone with unshed tears.

Something in Pope’s chest tightened.

He didn’t like seeing you stretched thin.

He didn’t like watching you carry everything alone.

Pope set his coffee down on the counter carefully, like he didn’t trust his hands to be casual; “T-Rex?” Pope asked Henry, voice low, curious rather than commanding.

Henry stopped tugging your arm for a beat and looked up at Pope like he’d just noticed him properly. His eyes flicked over Pope’s face, then down to Pope’s hands, then back up again.

Then, without hesitation, Henry released you and walked over to Pope and grabbed Pope’s hand, “T-Rex,” Henry said again, as if this explained everything.

And then he started pulling Pope toward the hallway like Pope was furniture he’d decided belonged in another room. Pope let himself be pulled, he didn’t even think about it.

You blinked, surprised by how easily Henry accepted him, by how willingly Pope went.

“He—um,” you said quickly, wiping at your cheek with the back of your hand like you hadn’t just almost cried. “He has a puzzle. He must have lost a piece.” You pointed down the hall. “I’ll grab it.”

Pope didn’t look back at you as he spoke—because if he looked at you, he’d see the wet shine in your eyes again and it would wreck him, “I can do it,” Pope offered instead.

Simple. Practical. Safe.

Henry tugged his hand again. “T-rex.”

Pope followed.

Your voice came out smaller than before, and Pope heard how close you still were to breaking, “Thank you.”

It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t dramatic, but it landed in Pope’s chest like weight.

And as he let Henry drag him down the hall toward whatever T-Rex crisis awaited, Pope realised something with a quiet, startling clarity:

He didn’t just want you to be okay because it was the right thing.

He wanted you to be okay because he cared. And Henry’s small hand in his was warm, insistent, trusting—as if Henry had decided Pope belonged in their orbit now.

Pope didn’t know if he deserved that; But he followed anyway. <><><><> Smurf was waiting for him when he got home.

Not in the kitchen with a cigarette and a casual comment. Not in the backyard pretending to tan. Waiting the way she waited when she wanted something—still, centered, set up like a trap you stepped into the moment you walked through the door.

She was sitting in the living room with her legs crossed, posture relaxed like she hadn’t been watching the clock. Like she hadn’t been listening for the sound of the gate. Like she hadn’t placed herself right in the middle of the house where no one could avoid her without making a statement.

The house was quiet in that bone-deep way it got when the boys were gone or asleep. No Craig laughing at his own jokes. No Deran’s footsteps pacing. No J’s quiet presence moving like a shadow. Just the low hum of the fridge, the soft tick of a wall clock, and Smurf’s perfume sitting in the air like it owned the oxygen.

Her smile was there, bright and practiced.

But it wasn’t a smile.

Smurf didn’t smile. Not really.

Smurf showed teeth.

“Did you have a nice morning?” she asked brightly.

Pope stopped just inside the doorway, keys still in his hand, shirt still smelling faintly of your kitchen—coffee, toast, soap. Ordinary smells that didn’t belong on him. For a second he had the stupid, irrational thought that Smurf could smell it too. That she could smell warmth on him like smoke.

He considered turning around.

He almost did.

He almost ignored her and walked away because he had a feeling—cold, familiar—about what was about to happen. He could feel it in the way the room was arranged, in the way Smurf’s voice held that light tone that meant she’d already sharpened the knife.

But Smurf had perfected making him freeze without raising her voice.

Pope didn’t answer. He didn’t give her the satisfaction of a reaction.

Smurf’s smile widened anyway, because she didn’t need permission to continue.

“Did you have a nice morning,” she repeated, voice sweetening, “playing family with the neighbour?”

The words landed like a slap dressed up as a joke.

Family.

Smurf said it like it was filthy. Like it was pretend. Like Pope had been caught doing something pathetic.

Pope’s jaw tightened. He set his keys down too carefully on the counter, the clink too loud in the silence. His shoulders were stiff, but his face stayed blank. He’d learned that blank was safer—blank gave her less to grab.

Smurf stood slowly, unhurried, as if she had all the time in the world to take him apart. She moved closer with that soft, confident glide, like a woman crossing her own house. Like a queen approaching her loyal dog.

“You think I didn’t notice?” she said, still bright. Still casual. “All those little chats at the fence. You fixing things for her. Watching the kid like he’s—what—your responsibility?”

Pope’s throat worked once.

It wasn’t responsibility.

It was… instinct. It was the way his eyes moved automatically to weak points. Gates. Streets. Water. The way his body reacted before his brain finished the thought.

It was the way Henry’s laughter had done something to him he didn’t understand.

It was the way your voice had sounded when you said I’m not great at having people in my space and Pope had felt like he understood it in his bones.

Smurf stepped closer until she was in his space. Not touching him yet. She didn’t need to touch to control. She could control with proximity alone, with tone alone, with the history between them alone.

Her smile softened. Her eyes didn’t.

“Andrew,” she said, like she was being gentle. Like she was being reasonable. “Do you really think someone like her is going to what?”

A pause. A tilt of her head. The question sharpening.

“Choose you?”

Pope didn’t move. But something inside him flinched.

Smurf’s gaze slid over his face like she was searching for a crack, “Save you?” she added, voice even lighter, as if the idea was funny. “Honey… you can’t run from who you are.”

There it was.

The hook.

Not an argument. Not a threat.

An identity.

Smurf always did that—reminded him who he was until it felt impossible to be anything else.

Pope felt his hands curl into fists at his sides, nails pressing crescents into his palms. He forced them open again. Forced his breathing slow.

Smurf took another step, close enough that Pope could smell her perfume properly, sharp and expensive, “She knows rumours,” Smurf continued, voice turning almost tender, “but she doesn’t know you.”

Pope’s stomach tightened.

Because you didn’t know him, not really.

You knew the neighbour-version. The man who fixed fences. The man who stood between a kid and water. The man who spoke quietly and didn’t judge you for the chaos in your home.

You didn’t know the version Smurf kept on a leash.

The one who had done what he was told. The one whose hands had done things that couldn’t be undone.

Smurf watched the thought land. She always knew when something hit; =

Her smile sharpened again, “What do you think would happen,” she asked, “if she saw who you were?”

Pope’s jaw ticked. Once. Twice.

Smurf leaned in just slightly, voice dropping, not loud but heavier—like she was speaking truth into him.

“You think she’s going to let you around sweet little Henry then?” Smurf murmured. “You think she’s going to invite you in for breakfast if she knows what you’ve done?”

The living room felt smaller. The air felt thicker. Pope felt the walls of his own skin like a cage.

Smurf didn’t have to list it. She didn’t have to say names. She didn’t have to remind him with specifics. The worst parts of Pope’s life lived in him already, sharp and permanent. Smurf only had to touch the bruise and he’d feel the whole injury.

And she did. Over and over.

“Look at you,” she said softly, and it sounded like affection until you heard the contempt under it. “Standing in some little kitchen like you belong there.”

Pope’s chest tightened, hot and sick.

He thought of you buttering toast while keeping your body between Henry and the stove. Thought of Henry’s small hand grabbing his and pulling him down the hall like it made sense. Thought of the way you’d looked at Pope like he wasn’t a threat.

Like he was safe. He thought of the way he watched Henry put together his dinosaur puzzle while you both ate breakfast and called yourself overdramatic before switching to a story involving you, an aeroplane and your fear of heights. He thought of the way he realised how easily he could breathe around you, around your son, around your chaos.

Smurf’s voice cut through it.

“You don’t get to be safe,” she said, not unkindly. Like it was just fact. “People like you don’t get happy little families.”

Pope’s eyes snapped to hers then, and something feral flashed in him—anger, humiliation, a deep, ugly refusal.

Smurf smiled wider, pleased she’d found the nerve.

“You think you can keep that part of you hidden forever?” she asked. “You think you can wear your nice neighbour face and no one will notice what’s underneath?”

Pope’s throat burned.

Because part of him—stupid, dangerous—wanted to say she already notices me. Wanted to say she sees me, even if she didn’t know everything.

But Smurf had raised him. Smurf had trained him.

And she knew exactly how to make hope feel like a liability.

Pope forced his voice out, low and flat, “Leave her out of it.”

Smurf blinked—slowly—like she was amused by his attempt at a boundary, “Oh, Andrew,” she sighed. “I’m already in it.”

She took a step back, smoothing invisible wrinkles from her shirt like this was all casual. Like she hadn’t just reached inside him and twisted; “Just remember,” she said lightly, smile back in place, “when she finds out—when she gets scared—she’ll run.”

Smurf’s eyes held his for a beat, gleaming, “And you’ll come back here,” she finished, sweet as poison. “Where you belong.”

Pope stood there in the quiet after she walked away, chest tight, fists opening and closing like his body didn’t know what to do with the feeling.

Because the worst part was: Smurf wasn’t wrong about the world.

She was just wrong about what Pope wanted.

He didn’t want you to save him.

He didn’t want to be forgiven.

He just wanted—once, for a few minutes in a small kitchen— to breathe like he wasn’t suffocating.

 Chapter 4: The Not-Date (Stakeout Laundromat Edition) “A soulmate is an ongoing connection with another individual that the soul picks up again in various times and places over lifetimes…”-Edgar Cayce.

The afternoon was offensively nice.

New York had decided—just for a couple of smug, glittering hours—to pretend it wasn’t a city being slowly strangled by its own mayor. Sunlight bounced hard off glass towers and windshields, turning whole blocks into mirrors. Puddles left over from yesterday’s rain flashed like coins in the gutter. People moved like people still believed in errands and lunch breaks and the possibility of getting home before dark. Dogs pulled at leashes. A man in a suit laughed too loud into his phone. A woman in red sunglasses carried three shopping bags and a bouquet of peonies like the world hadn’t been split down the middle into before curfew and after curfew.

It made you want to throw something.

Because the brightness was a lie. The city looked scrubbed clean from a distance, but up close the evidence of Fisk’s New York was everywhere if you knew where to look. Curfew notices were pasted crookedly over old concert flyers and missing-cat posters. A smashed vigilante-wanted poster had been half torn off a lamp post and now flapped every time the wind turned mean. An AVTF cruiser rolled by slow enough to be noticed and quiet enough to feel deliberate. Safety, apparently, now came in black tactical uniforms and the sound of boots on concrete after sunset.

Very civic. Very reassuring. Very fascism with a nicer PR team.

Dex had picked the laundromat because he said it gave them sightlines.

You had picked nothing because apparently your role in this operation was be dragged into broad daylight on four hours of sleep and yesterday’s underwear and try not to look like you were currently accessory-adjacent to several felonies.

The laundromat was long and narrow, jammed between a shuttered nail salon and a corner deli with sun-faded lottery signs taped to the window. The awning outside hung low enough to throw a stripe of shade across the front glass, which meant anyone inside could watch the street without the street getting too good a look back. Smart. Annoyingly smart actually. Inside, the place smelled like detergent, hot metal, lint, and the very specific chemical optimism of fabric softener trying to convince everyone it was lavender and not a laboratory experiment.

Industrial washers lined one wall, white and square and humming like they had opinions. Dryers thudded in the back with that heavy, repetitive rhythm that made the whole room feel like it had a second heartbeat. A half-broken radio on a shelf near the register was playing something cheerful from at least ten years ago, the kind of upbeat pop song that survived entirely on vibes and a woman saying “baby” like it paid rent. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, trying to outshine the daylight pouring through the windows and losing badly.

You leaned against one of the washers and let the vibration press into your spine. It was almost grounding. Almost.

The hot dog in your hand was still warm.

That, more than anything, felt insulting because Dex had somehow worked buy you lunch into the operational plan with a straight face, and now you were standing in a laundromat eating a suspiciously decent hot dog while surveilling a wizard, like this was not only normal but maybe even quaint.

You took another bite and watched the man across the street through the glass.

Wong didn’t look like someone who could fold reality into itself.

That was maybe the most unsettling thing about powerful people in this city: how often they looked tired instead of mythic. He moved with that particular kind of contained purpose people had when they were used to not being interrupted. There was nothing flashy about him. No dramatic cloak snapping in the breeze, no visible sparks, no hovering. Just a man on a Manhattan sidewalk in broad daylight, walking like the air around him understood him.

Which, to be fair, it probably did.

You chewed slowly, eyes narrowed, and thought: a wizard. In New York. On a Tuesday.

It shouldn’t have felt remarkable. Not after aliens. Not after a purple man with a chin like a thumb erased half the population and then got undone five years later. Not after John Walker had publicly caved a man’s chest in with Captain America’s shield and everyone had just sort of… moved on from that. Not after a witch had hijacked an entire town and forced everyone in it to smile until their faces hurt.

Your standards for unbelievable had been dragged behind a truck and set on fire.

Still.

A wizard.

Across the street.

While you were in a laundromat with your soulmate, who was also a wanted murderer.

You hated your life a little bit on principle.

“You know,” you said around a mouthful of hot dog, because silence had never once protected you from yourself, “this could absolutely be considered our first date.”

You didn’t need to look at Dex to know his whole body had reacted.

It was subtle. That was the thing about him—subtle enough that most people would miss it, but you had been accidentally studying the man like your life depended on it. Which, okay, maybe it did. The line of his shoulders changed. His attention shifted. Not away from the street, never fully away from the street, but some of it snapped toward you like a wire pulled taut.

He stood two washers down pretending to read a folded local paper he absolutely had not absorbed a single word of. He blended when he wanted to blend. It was one of the more unnerving things about him, how easily he could decide what version of himself other people were allowed to see. Today he looked like a quiet man killing time while his laundry ran. Dark jacket. Neutral face. The sort of person you’d forget within ten seconds if you passed him on the sidewalk.

You, by comparison, looked like someone who had been hit by some super shitty circumstances.

“I mean,” you continued, because if you were going down, you were going down committed, “you brought me lunch.” You lifted the hot dog as evidence. “We’re in a quiet public place with mediocre music, stalking a wizard together while hiding from the police. That is objectively romantic.”

Dex’s gaze slid to you—brief, flat, warning.

You took another bite just to be difficult, “Very Bonnie and Clyde,” you added.

His jaw flexed once, the tiniest movement. “Do you ever stop talking?”

The tone should’ve sounded irritated. It mostly did. But there was something under it now that hadn’t been there the first night in your kitchen. Familiarity, maybe. Or the beginning of a joke he didn’t entirely trust himself to make.

You shrugged. “I could.”

He waited.

You chewed, swallowed, then added, “But then I’d have to sit here in silence with my thoughts, and my thoughts are a much bigger public safety issue than I am.”

A beat.

Then, without looking away from the window, Dex said, “That’s a fair point.”

You blinked.

Honestly? Offensive.

The bond under your ribs gave a small, traitorous flutter. Like it was delighted. Like it had just watched a wild animal do a trick and wanted to clap.

Across the street, Wong paused at the curb as traffic rolled past in glints of chrome and light. He tilted his head—not toward you, not toward the laundromat, but slightly upward, like he was listening to something above the range of ordinary hearing. It put a prickle down the back of your neck.

Dex straightened by a fraction.

You watched him instead of Wong for a second too long.

He felt it. His eyes cut to yours. “What?” he asked.

You took a slower bite than necessary. “Nothing.”

His expression said liar.

You swallowed. “Just thinking you look very natural. Real man-of-the-people energy. Community paper, stern face, body language like you could kill everyone in a three-block radius.”

“That’s not body language.”

“No, that’s fair,” you said. “That’s more like… ambience.”

The corner of his mouth twitched.

Not a smile. God forbid. More like his face briefly remembered the concept existed and then thought better of it.

It still hit you like a sucker punch.

You shifted your weight against the washer and let your shoulder rest there more fully. It hummed into your bones. The whole place felt hot with machinery and sunlight. Somewhere in the back, a dryer let out a soft metallic clunk and kept turning.

“So,” you said, quieter now, eyes returning to Wong, “we’re really doing this.”

 “We’re waiting.”

You gave him a dry look,  “That’s what I said. We’re stalking him politely.” You were splitting hairs and you knew it.

“We’re observing.”

“Sounds like something a stalker would say.”

“We’re waiting,” he repeated.

“Right,” you said. “Like two totally normal citizens hanging out in a laundromat with absolutely no laundry and no ulterior motives.”

Dex’s gaze dropped, very deliberately, to your hands.

You looked down too. Hot dog. Napkin. No detergent. No bag. No clothes.

You grimaced. “Okay, yes. In hindsight, I see the flaw.”

His eyes came back to your face like he expected you to have actually brought laundry. Your laundry was in your apartment that was probably swarming with cops by now and five dead bodies.

“Shit,” you said, already preemptively annoyed. “Sorry. I didn’t realize we need props for mystical surveillance. Next time I’ll bring a duvet and some pillowcases. Really commit to the bit.”

For one second—a real, visible, miraculous second—his mouth threatened an actual smile.

You stared at him, “That was nearly human,” you said.

Dex looked back out the window. “Focus.”

“Oh, no,” you murmured. “I’m writing this down later.”

Across the street, Wong started walking again. He turned the corner and suddenly he was out of sight.

Dex pushed off the machine, “Move.”

You pushed off the washer with a sigh and took one last bite of the hot dog before straightening. “You say the sweetest things to me.”

His hand landed lightly at the small of your back, not touching skin, just the fabric of your hoodie, and guided you toward the door. It shouldn’t have mattered. There was a layer of cotton between you. It wasn’t even a caress. It was practical. Barely there. The sort of thing one person did to steer another out of somebody’s way.

Your entire nervous system reacted like he’d put his mouth on your throat.

You hated that for yourself.

The bell above the laundromat door jangled as you stepped out into the sunlight. Afternoon hit you all at once—bright on the eyes, cold in the air, the city smelling like hot pavement, gasoline, coffee, damp stone, and sugar roasting from a nuts cart farther down the block.

“I’m sensing some tension,” you said, because your mouth had clearly mistaken survival for improv night.

Dex moved beside you, close enough to herd, far enough to look casual. “I’m sensing that next time you’re staying behind.”

You snorted and crumpled the napkin one-handed. There was a trash can near the curb; you banked the shot off the rim and into the bin. “Admit it. You’re almost enjoying having me around.”

“Am I?”

“Yes,” you said. “I bring range. Texture. Personality. I’m basically enriching your environment.”

He glanced at you. “You’re a liability.”

“That’s hurtful,” you said. “And rude. Also subjective.”

“It’s not subjective.”

“See, that right there?” You pointed at him as the two of you crossed under the shadow of the awning and into full sun. “That is not how you talk to a girl on a first date.”

“It’s not a date.”

“You bought me lunch.”

“That doesn’t make it a date.”

“You’re weirdly defensive for a man not on a date.”

Dex’s jaw tightened, but you caught it again—that faint twitch at the mouth, the almost-amusement he kept trying to starve out before it showed too much. It made warmth move low and unwelcome through your chest.

The bond purred under your sternum.

Traitor.

Wong was half a block ahead now, moving through the crowd with the kind of quiet inevitability that made people part for him without ever seeming to realise they were doing it.

Beside you, Dex changed.

It happened so cleanly it was almost more unnerving than if he’d suddenly drawn a knife.

One second he was enduring your running commentary with that particular tight-jawed patience that suggested he was debating whether homicide could, technically, count as conflict resolution. The next, all of him narrowed into function. His shoulders settled. His stride evened out. The loose, almost casual line of him sharpened into something quiet and predatory. His attention moved everywhere at once—shop windows, reflections in windshields, the roofline, parked cars, alley mouths, pedestrian flow—never randomly, never twice in the same order.

You felt it in your own body like a pressure change.

Your sneakers slapped lightly against the pavement as you matched his pace, trying to look like a woman out for an afternoon walk instead of someone who was one bad decision away from becoming wizard-adjacent collateral.

“So what’s the actual plan?” you asked, voice pitched low enough to dissolve into traffic noise. “Follow him until he does something magical? Follow him until you’re satisfied he isn’t about to snitch you out to wizard police? Follow him until I die of secondhand tension?” You shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t mind either way, but if you are about to get reported to some kind of interdimensional HOA, can I at least have your apartment key? I’d like indoor access while you’re being extradited to Hogwarts Guantánamo.”

Dex didn’t answer.

Which, in hindsight, should have warned you.

Wong turned suddenly—sharp left, down a narrow side alley tucked between a florist and a closed stationery shop—and Dex moved at the exact same moment.

One second you were walking.

The next, your back hit brick.

Not hard. Not enough to hurt. Just enough to stop you dead.

Dex crowded into your space fast and silent, one forearm braced near your head, the other angled at his side, body shielding yours from the mouth of the alley. He didn’t actually touch you—not skin, not even properly through fabric—but he was close enough that your brain shorted out anyway. Heat radiated off him in a tight, contained line. Soap. Deodorant. Clean cotton. The faint chalky trace of laundry powder still clinging to his jacket like he’d stepped out of his own too-neat orbit and dragged it with him.

Your thoughts went white.

Not blank exactly. More like every single one of them had run headfirst into a wall and dropped dead on impact.

You became aware, with humiliating precision, of stupid things. The scrape of brick at your shoulder blades. The sound of your own breathing. The fact that if you tilted your head even slightly your mouth would be too close to his throat for your dignity to survive it. The bond under your ribs flared awake, warm and hungry and deeply unhelpful.

For what had to be a full thirty seconds, you forgot every language you spoke.

He was close enough that you could see the minute shift of his jaw when he listened. Close enough that you could see the dark fringe of his lashes when his eyes flicked past you toward the alley. Close enough that all your body’s worst ideas woke up at once and began unionising.

Absolutely tragic, really.

“Now what?” you whispered, because that was apparently the best your brain could produce after flatlining.

Dex didn’t look at you. “Now you shut up,” he hissed back, voice low and edged.

Which should not have done anything for you.

And yet.

He eased away a fraction, just enough to look past the corner without losing the cover of the wall, and you had to fight the genuinely embarrassing urge to make a disappointed sound. You blamed sleep deprivation. The bond. Trauma. New York air quality. Anything other than the more obvious answer, which was that having an attractive, terrifying man almost pin you to a wall in broad daylight had done unpleasantly effective things to your central nervous system.

You were a victim, frankly.

Dex leaned just far enough to sight down the alley.

Then, to your horror, he stepped out.

Not stealthy. Not predatory. Not knife-first or ghost-quiet or any of the other alarming things he was good at. He stepped into the open with both hands raised, palms visible, posture loose but deliberate.

“I’m unarmed,” he called.

You stared at the back of his head in disbelief.

Then you did what you always did when Dex did something insane: followed him anyway.

You pushed off the wall and stepped out after him, lifting your hands too. “This was all his idea, I swear.”

“Stop,” Dex breathed, not even turning.

Rude.

Wong stood ten feet down the alley. Up close he felt different—not because of anything flashy, but because the air around him seemed settled in a way the rest of New York wasn’t. He was looking at Dex, but when his gaze shifted to you it landed with unnerving precision.

It felt like being read.

Not ogled. Not assessed like a threat. Not even judged, exactly. Just… seen. Too directly. Too cleanly. Like if he wanted to, he could look past your face and your clothes and your sarcasm and put his hand on every secret bruise you’d managed to pass off as personality. Your chest tightened. Your stomach pulled into a knot. For one ridiculous second you had the urge to start listing innocuous facts about yourself—your coffee order, your shoe size, the fact that you did in fact return library books late but not maliciously—just to crowd out anything worse.

Wong’s gaze stayed on you for one heartbeat too long.

Then it returned to Dex, “Why,” he asked, calm as still water, “were you following me?”

Dex lowered his hands, but only a little, still showing open palms. “I need answers.”

Wong waited.

Dex said, “About soulmates.”

You turned your head so fast your neck almost clicked.

You blinked at him. Once. Twice. Then you stared. Of all the answers he could have given—about Fisk, about the docks, about magical interference, about needing a favor or a threat assessment or literally anything remotely normal—that was what he went with.

Your chest did something catastrophic and humiliating.

“Oh,” you said, because apparently that was all the language you had left. “That’s what this is about?”

Wong looked from Dex to you and back again. His face didn’t change much, but something near his mouth shifted. Not amusement exactly. More like the beginning of it.

“You could have knocked on my door,” he said.

The snort left you before you could stop it.

Dex cut you a look.

“What?” you said, hands still half raised. “He’s funny.”

Wong’s eyes flicked to you again, this time with something undeniably warmer in them. “I like her.”

“That makes one of us,” Dex deadpanned.

Your jaw dropped. “Wow.”

Neither of them looked particularly moved by your suffering.

Wong studied Dex for another long moment, and the mood changed—not hostile, but heavier. Sharper. As though he’d glanced beneath the surface of the answer and found all the bits Dex wasn’t saying out loud. You could practically feel Dex refusing to shift under it, every part of him locked down and deliberate, like if he stayed still enough nothing would leak.

Finally Wong said, “Soulmate bonds are not usually something people stalk sorcerers over.”

“Usually?” you echoed.

Dex ignored you, “I need to know what it is.”

Wong’s expression remained unreadable. “You know what it is.”

“No,” Dex said. “I know what it does.”

That quieted you because there was something in the way he said it—flat, precise, stripped down so completely it almost sounded blunt. Like he was naming a weapon and not something that rewrote his entire nervous system.

Wong seemed to hear that too, “And following me through Manhattan felt like the best way to begin this conversation?” he asked.

Dex’s jaw flexed. “You didn’t leave me another option.”

“You could have knocked on the door,” Wong repeated.

You tilted your head. “See? Now he’s doing a callback. Strong stuff.”

Dex inhaled through his nose.

Wong, to your horror, almost smiled, then he lifted one hand.

You had seen portals before, on screens, in battle footage, in fragments of shaky internet clips people swore were fake until the next apocalypse rolled in and proved them right. None of that prepared you for one opening six feet in front of you.

Gold sparked into the air with a harsh, circular hiss, bright as welding. A ring of light carved itself open in the alley, spinning too fast and too smooth at once, edges shedding orange-gold embers that died before they hit the ground. Through it you could see another space entirely—shadowed stairs, dark polished wood, the suggestion of high ceilings and old light.

The Sanctum.

Your whole body recoiled on instinct.

Wong gestured once. “Come.”

You stared at the glowing circle like it had personally insulted you, “Oh, no,” you said immediately. “Absolutely not. I am not stepping into the weird glowing hole in space.”

“It’s a portal,” Wong corrected.

“Great,” you said. “That makes it so much better.”

Dex’s voice came flat from beside you. “Move.”

You looked at him in disbelief. “What if we end up in Florida?”

Wong blinked. “What’s wrong with Florida?”

You turned slowly to look at him. The look you gave him said, in order: really, how long do you have, and I refuse to believe a man who guards reality has missed that much news.

Wong regarded you with monk-like calm, “That doesn’t answer the question.”

“It’s Florida,” you said, as if that should settle the matter on a spiritual level.

He considered that for a beat. “We are not going to Florida.”

“You can’t say that with certainty.”

“I can,” Wong said.

“You say that now.”

Dex stepped closer. Not touching—never touching—but near enough that the heat of him slid along your side like a warning. “Go.”

Your eyes narrowed. “Interesting.”

Neither man moved.

You looked at the portal again, then back at Dex, and realized with a fresh spike of annoyance that he was waiting.

Waiting for you.

A tiny, ridiculous part of you went soft at once. Because maybe this was him being careful. Maybe this was him letting you choose. Maybe this was him standing back because if something was wrong on the other side, he wanted it to hit him first after you’d crossed. Maybe—worse, more dangerous, infinitely more humiliating—it was him being a gentleman.

Another, far meaner part of you wondered whether he just wanted to see if you got eaten by magic before he committed.

You wanted very badly to believe the first version. The bond under your ribs, useless and dreamy and clearly unqualified for the job, leaned hard in that direction.

You pointed at Dex. “If a tentacle grabs me, you better save me.”

“It won’t,” Wong said.

“How do you know that?”

Dex’s mouth twitched once. There and gone.

You saw it.

Of course you saw it.

Infuriating man.

With as much dignity as a person could reasonably gather while arguing with a wizard in an alley, you squared your shoulders and took one tentative step toward the portal. Heat licked at your skin—not burning, just strange, like standing too near an oven door and realizing the room on the other side of the threshold did not belong to the same physics as the one you were in.

You stopped at the edge.

“This is insane,” you muttered.

“That’s relative,” Wong said.

“Oh, good, he’s still funny,” you said over your shoulder.

“Move,” Dex repeated.

You twisted just enough to look at him. “You’re enjoying this.”

“I’m not.”

“Liar.” But you stepped through anyway.

The first sensation was wrongness—not painful, not violent, just the sharp, disorienting certainty that your body had gone one place while your stomach had briefly considered staying behind. Light flickered gold at the edge of your vision. Air changed. The noise of the street vanished as though someone had cut the cord on it.

Then you were standing inside the Sanctum.

Cool air brushed your face, old and clean and faintly spiced with incense, dust, stone, and something you could only describe as ancient library with a side of apocalypse insurance. Shadows pooled in high corners. Wooden stairs curved upward. The room felt enormous without trying to prove it. Not empty but layered, occupied by the weight of a thousand strange things being exactly where they were meant to be.

You turned in a slow circle.

“Okay,” you said quietly, because it was either that or start swearing in earnest. “That’s… upsettingly impressive.”

Gold flared again behind you as Dex stepped through.

You felt him before you heard him—some small internal knot easing, your body recalibrating to the fact that he was still there, still close, still real. Which was pathetic, yes, but not currently your biggest problem.

The portal snapped shut with a hiss.

For one suspended second, it was just the three of you in the dim, breathing quiet of the Sanctum.

You looked at Dex.

He looked back.

And because your brain was committed to your humiliation as a long-term project, the first clear thought it offered up was not about magic, or danger, or why he’d dragged you here to ask a wizard about soulmates.

It was: He let you go first.

And that felt far more dangerous than the portal had.

<><><><><><> 

The tea Wong made you felt almost offensive given the circumstances.

Not bad. Not suspiciously herbal in the way that suggested it might either heal your soul or make you see God. Just offensively good. Warm, fragrant, balanced in a way that implied someone here respected the ritual of tea enough to make even a hostage-adjacent conversation feel curated.

You sat with the cup cradled in both hands and let the heat soak into your fingers while trying not to think too hard about the fact that an hour ago you had been in a laundromat stalking a wizard and now you were inside the Sanctum Sanctorum drinking what tasted like the most expensive version of calm you’d ever had in your life.

You made a mental note not to mention accepting mysterious tea from funny wizards in strange houses at your next therapy appointment.

Your therapist already looked at you like she was one bad update away from billing you for her own therapy.

The Sanctum was worse the longer you looked at it.

Or better. You hadn’t decided.

At first glance it had been all grand old-house energy: dark wood polished to a low sheen, tall windows, carved banisters, layered rugs over gleaming floorboards, staircases curving away into dimness. But the longer you sat in it, the stranger it became. The room was too quiet in some places and too alive in others. Lamps cast a steady honeyed light that somehow never felt harsh. Candles burned without smoking. Shelves climbed the walls, packed with books whose spines ranged from ancient leather to modern clothbound editions, none of them decorative. They looked used. The whole place smelled faintly of tea, dust, old paper, wax, wood polish, and something sharper beneath it all—metallic and mineral.

Artifacts sat everywhere in that deeply unhelpful way that suggested they were safer where Wong could see them. A brass astrolabe the size of a serving platter rested on one table, all patient menace and carved markings. A glass case held something silver and intricate that might have been ceremonial or might have been able to end you dimensionally. Near the hearth sat a shallow bowl filled with smooth black stones etched in gold you absolutely did not trust.

The room felt old in the way cathedrals felt old—not fragile, not sentimental, but like it had survived long enough to stop explaining itself.

Dex sat near the edge of his seat, elbows on his knees. Hands clasped. His untouched teacup sat on the table in front of him, steam thinning into the air. He had not relaxed since stepping through the portal. Not by an inch. His gaze kept moving—to the doors, the stairs, the windows, the artifacts, Wong, you, back to Wong again—cataloguing every exit and every threat like if he stopped for even a second the room might turn on him.

You took another sip.

Still good.

You were annoyed by that still because it wasn’t like you could pop into the bodega and buy some.

Wong sat across from you with the calm of a man who had seen much stranger things than two idiots trailing him through Manhattan to ask invasive questions about soulmates. One hand rested on the arm of the chair. The other held his own cup. His face was unreadable in that practiced, disciplined way some people had when they knew silence could do half the work for them.

“So,” Wong said at last, voice even, “soul bonds.”

“How do you get rid of it?” Dex asked immediately.

You choked on your tea.

Not delicately, either. Properly. A sharp inhale hit wrong, heat caught the back of your throat, and you bent forward coughing into your fist while trying not to spray sanctified wizard tea all over a rug older than your bloodline.

Wong’s eyes flicked to you once, then back to Dex.

And there it was.

The real reason.

Not curiosity. Not caution. Not some vague need to understand the thing that sat between you like a live wire and a loaded gun.

He wanted out.

The thought landed so fast and so clean it felt like swallowing glass. You kept your face turned toward your cup so neither of them would see it happen, but the ache had already opened under your ribs, deep and ugly. Of course. Why wouldn’t he? The bond might have felt like relief to you—terrifying, humiliating relief—but Dex had never once looked at it like a blessing. He looked at it like one more thing he didn’t control.

Wong said, “You can’t.”

Dex’s expression didn’t change much, but something in his posture sharpened. “What do you mean, you can’t?”

“Soul bonds,” Wong said, as though explaining weather to two particularly dramatic strangers, “are not something you remove because they inconvenience you. They are part of you. No different from any other part of your body. You can resent them. Ignore them. Misunderstand them. But you cannot cut them out without tearing into whatever else they are rooted through.”

Dex went very still. “So what happens if one of us dies?”

The words dropped into the room like a knife laid carefully on a table.

You looked up at him. “You planning on killing me?”

His eyes cut to yours; Not anger exactly. More like a flare of something rawer—offended on principle that you’d even say it, and furious with himself for asking the question in a way that made you able to.

Then he looked back at Wong.

Wong watched him for one beat and said, “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”

You lifted your cup because your hands needed a job. “Comforting.”

Wong ignored the sarcasm. “The bond does not vanish cleanly. If one soulmate dies, the surviving one still carries the damage. Sometimes it is grief. Sometimes pain. Sometimes absence that never fully closes over. There is no universal rulebook. The bond is not always romantic, so the consequences are not always romantic either.”

That made you look up properly. “What do you mean it’s not always romantic?”

Wong folded one leg over the other. “People like to narrativize soul bonds as destiny in the most flattering terms possible. Lovers. Grand devotion. Meaning written in the stars.” His mouth shifted, not quite amused. “Reality is less tidy.”

“So sometimes it’s just… bad?”

“Sometimes it is friendship,” Wong said. “Sometimes siblings in all but blood. Sometimes teacher and student. Sometimes enemies. Sometimes two people who will wound each other more deeply than anyone else because they understand each other too well. Sometimes two people never meet at all, but still shape one another’s lives through consequence, survival, and choice. Not everyone has a soulmate. Most do not. Those who have one tend to call it a blessing.”

“And a curse?” you asked, meaning it as a joke.

Wong inclined his head in agreement.

“Why a curse?”

“Because,” he said simply, “to be bound to another person is still to be bound.”

That sat with you for a moment.

“The blessing is being known,” he added. “The curse is that you cannot decide you would rather be unknowable.”

You stared at him.

That was irritatingly good. Very wizard of him. Very calm old-man-in-a-house-full-of-impossible-books.

You hated it because it made your chest hurt.

Wong set his teacup down. “I know two soulmates. Both of them have abilities. She is cursed to never be able to touch his skin.”

Your head snapped up. “Wait. Why?”

“Because her abilities allow her to absorb the powers, memories, and life force of whoever she touches. His is kinetic energy.”

You blinked. “That feels aggressively unfair.”

“Yes,” Wong said.

“And they just… what? Deal with it?”

“With difficulty,” Wong replied. “With care. With frustration. With adaptation. With longing. With anger, from time to time. But they make it work.”

You thought about that.

About skin as hazard.

About wanting as a logistical problem.

About the bond between you and Dex, and the way both of you had become acutely, miserably aware of touch by avoiding it.

The room went very quiet. You became aware, all at once, of where Dex sat in relation to you. Not close enough to brush knees. Not so far it could be called distance. Near enough that if either of you shifted wrong, your elbows might touch. Near enough that the bond under your sternum had gone from aching to listening.

“That’s bleak,” you muttered into your tea.

“It is honest,” Wong corrected.

“You people are exhausting.”

“We keep odd hours,” he said.

That startled a laugh out of you before you could stop it.

Dex made a low sound—almost a breath, almost not—and when you glanced at him his eyes were already on you. Not soft, just fixed there for a half beat too long, like your laugh had done something to the air he was still trying to understand.

Then he looked back at Wong. “If it can’t be broken, can it be controlled?”

Wong’s expression sharpened slightly. “That depends what you mean by control.”

“The pull,” Dex said. “The… effect.”

The effect; That was one way of describing the fact that your whole body had started orienting toward him like he was magnetic north and everything else was just ignored.

Wong leaned back a fraction. “The bond intensifies with recognition. Proximity. Shared experience.”

You nearly choked again. “Well, that’s unfortunate.”

“It can also be steadied,” Wong said.

“How?” Dex asked at once.

“Trust. Time. Choice.”

Dex’s face closed; Of course it did. The three things he would least enjoy being prescribed by a wizard.

“There are rituals,” Wong added. “Meditations. Disciplines. Sometimes charms if the bond is manifesting dangerously. But none of them remove it. They only help the people inside it live without letting it drive the car.”

You stared into your tea as if that was normal language. As if the thing between you and Dex was a house and not a wire strung too tight between two rooftops.

“And if one person doesn’t want it?” you asked before you could stop yourself.

The silence that followed was immediate and surgical.

Wong didn’t answer right away. Dex went rigid beside you, not outwardly dramatic, but so tightly controlled you could feel it like a knot in your stomach.

When Wong finally spoke, his voice had gentled by less than a fraction. “Wanting the bond and wanting what it demands are not the same thing. No one asks for a soul bond. That is why so many people mistake resentment for freedom. But whether a person wants it, rejects it, fears it, or clings to it—those things change what they do with it. They do not change that it exists.”

You looked down quickly. Too late, probably. You could feel Dex not looking at you and that was somehow worse than if he had.

The ache inside you had changed shape. It still hurt. But now it hurt around the edges, less like rejection and more like being forced to admit this had never been simple enough to reduce to he wants out.

Of course Dex wanted answers. Of course he—Dex, who liked exits and clean lines and weapons he understood—would come here asking how to remove the one thing in his life that had begun to matter without permission.

That didn’t mean he wanted you gone.

It also didn’t mean he didn’t. Which was, frankly, worse.

You took one final sip and found the tea had gone lukewarm.

Tragic.

“So,” you said, because somebody had to stab the silence before it became sentient, “to recap: nobody gets a refund, if one of us dies the other one is cosmically unwell forever, and the solution is trust and feelings.”

Wong looked at you with infinite patience. “That is an inelegant summary.”

“But not inaccurate.”

“No,” he allowed. “Not inaccurate.”

The silence that followed sat in the Sanctum like a fourth person. Not awkward exactly—though yes, awkward, but in a very specific, expensive way. The kind old places could hold without strain. The lamps burned low and steady. Somewhere deeper in the house, wood settled with a soft ancient creak. A clock you hadn’t noticed before ticked upstairs, each sound measured and patient, as if time itself was less frantic in here.

Wong rose, collecting his cup. “You should both leave before the city makes worse decisions.”

You blinked. “That implies New York has ever once made a good one.”

He almost smiled. “If you insist on treating the bond like a weapon,” Wong said, looking at Dex first and then, more briefly, at you, “it will behave like one.”

“And if we don’t?” Dex asked.

“Then it becomes a language.”

You made a face. “That’s very poetic for a man who just told us cosmic grief is forever.”

“It is still true.”

“Rude.”

Wong dipped his head a fraction. Then his gaze rested on you again.

Longer this time.

Not impolite. Not invasive. Just… intent.

It prickled.

There had been something strange about the way he looked at you from the alley onward, like he kept reaching the edge of a conclusion and choosing not to say it aloud. It happened again now. His eyes tracked over your face with a precision that made the skin at the back of your neck tighten. Not your clothes. Not your bruised cheek. Not your messy hair or the fact that you were still running on adrenaline and tea. Something quieter. Deeper. As if he was listening to something in you instead of merely looking.

For one stupid second your mind flashed bright and ugly:

Westview.

Hex magic under your skin. Forced smiles. Wanda’s red curling around the edges of your life like a stain that had never washed out properly.

Your stomach clenched.

Wong said nothing.

But the pause lingered a fraction too long before he turned away. If he had noticed something different about you—something residual, altered, wrong, or simply not entirely untouched by what had been done to you—he gave no sign beyond that brief unreadable look.

Which was somehow worse.

“Okay,” you said, clearing your throat. “Love the ominous silence. Very encouraging.”

Dex’s gaze flicked to you at once, sharp and immediate, like he’d heard the strain under the joke even if Wong hadn’t commented on it. Or maybe especially because he hadn’t.

You hated that he was getting better at that.

Wong moved toward the window, one hand lifting as gold sparks began to hiss and spin at his fingertips. The portal opened with a bright circular flare, throwing warm light over carved wood and dark rugs. Through it you could see an empty side street washed in late-afternoon grey.

“You’re sending us somewhere weird, aren’t you,” you said.

“No.”

“That was a very fast answer.”

“It is three blocks from where you were before.”

“Three blocks is enough to ruin a person’s life in this city,” You heard yourself mutter.

Dex stood before you did. No surprise there. His untouched tea sat accusingly on the table, cooling in a cup with a thin blue line painted around the rim. You had the absurd urge to tell him to at least say thank you.

Instead you stood and smoothed your hands over the front of your hoodie.

Wong’s attention shifted to Dex. “If you come back, use the door.”

Dex’s expression didn’t change. “Noted.”

“You won’t.”

“No,” Dex agreed.

That made you snort.

You moved toward the portal and stopped at the threshold, glancing back over your shoulder. Wong stood in the warm light of the Sanctum like he’d grown there—still, watchful, one hand lowered at his side. His gaze moved to you one last time.

That same pause.

That same private calculation.

You stepped through before you could decide if you wanted to ask what he was staring at.

The air on the other side felt colder.

Noise returned all at once—distant traffic, a truck changing gears somewhere nearby, the muted hum of a city pretending not to surveil itself to death. Behind you, gold light flared once more as Dex stepped through after you, and then the portal sealed shut with a hiss that left the street looking too ordinary to be trusted.

Empty sidewalk. Brick walls. A shuttered deli with a sun-faded Pepsi sign. A pile of trash bags tied neatly near the curb. One dented bike chained to a parking meter. A streetlamp buzzing faintly overhead. The sky above the buildings had started washing toward evening, pale at the edges.

“Well,” you said, exhaling hard. “That was awful.”

You dug your phone out and squinted at the map as it struggled to orient itself. “I have no idea where we are.” You pinched the screen, frowned, then sighed. “I guess I could order an Uber.”

Dex didn’t answer.

Of course he didn’t.

You looked up just in time to see him turn and start walking away from you. You shoved your phone back into your pocket and pushed off after him. “Oh, super. We’re doing the brooding thing again.”

His shoulders tightened at the sound of your footsteps catching up, but he didn’t stop. He just kept moving up the sidewalk with that same clipped stride, face unreadable, silence wrapped around him like he’d decided words were now a personal failure.

You matched him anyway, “So what now?” you asked.

“Now we go back to my apartment,” Dex said without looking at you. “I need to think without you talking my ear off.”

You stared at the side of his face. “Right. Because I’m the problem.”

No response.

You laughed once under your breath, the sound drier than you meant it to be. “Good talk.”

He kept walking.

That hurt more than it should have.

Maybe because you were tired. Maybe because your nerves were still stretched from the laundromat and the Sanctum and the conversation about death and loss and bonds you couldn’t choose. Maybe because Wong’s words were still crawling around under your skin, refusing to settle. Or maybe because you had sat in that chair and heard Dex ask how to get rid of the thing between you with the same flat voice he used for exits and weapons and kill zones, and no amount of philosopher-wizard nuance was going to stop that from landing exactly where it had landed.

You heard yourself say, before you had properly decided to, “I heard what you said back there.”

That got him.

Not a full stop, but enough of one that his pace shortened by half a step.

You kept going because stopping now would be worse and you weren’t known for your good decision-making skills, “Look. If you want me gone, I’m gone. I don’t need this.”

Dex stopped.

Actually stopped.

You nearly walked into him for the second time that day, which would have been mortifying if you weren’t suddenly too angry to care.

He turned to face you. The streetlight above you flickered once, then held. It cast a weak yellow wash over the side of his face, the line of his jaw, the mouth that had become a problem in ways you deeply resented.

“That isn’t what I said.”

You folded your arms. “It’s what I heard.”

His expression changed—only slightly, but enough. Not softer. Just less blank. Less armoured.

“You heard what you wanted to hear,” he said.

“Wow. Strong opening. Very empathetic.” And something people had been telling you all your life so this wasn’t news.

His jaw flexed. “I asked how to get rid of the bond.”

“Yeah, Dex. I was there.”

“Because I need to know what it is.”

“No,” you snapped, stepping closer. “You need to know how to control it. How to manage it. How to make sure it doesn’t inconvenience you,” You should stop, you know you should stop, “You asked what happens if one of us dies.” His face shuttered again, but slower this time, like you caught something underneath before it sealed over. Fear. Not of you. Of the possibility.

The bond in your chest went tight and hot, pulling in weird, contradictory directions—hurt, anger, the awful instinct to close the distance anyway.

Dex spoke carefully, each word clipped into shape. “You think I wanted that answer?”

You blinked.

He took one step closer—not touching, never touching, but enough to force your attention fully onto him. “You think I asked because I want an exit?”

“Yes,” you said, though it came out smaller than you intended.

Something in his face hardened, then cracked around the edges almost at once. “I asked because I don’t know what happens if Fisk gets to you.” His voice had gone lower. Rougher. “I asked because I don’t know what happens if you get caught in this and I can’t—”

He stopped.

Air went thin between you.

You stared at him.

And because your life was apparently one long exercise in emotional whiplash, your first thought was not coherent enough to be useful. Just a sharp, humiliating oh.

Dex looked away first, eyes cutting down the street as if the parked cars had personally betrayed him by being present for that sentence. “I needed to know,” he said more flatly, trying to pull himself back together in real time, “what the damage is.”

The damage.

Not how to lose you. Not how to escape you. How bad it would be if you were taken from him.

Your throat tightened.

“You have a terrible way of phrasing things,” you said.

His gaze flicked back to your face. “I know.”

“Well. That’s not enough of an apology to count.”

“I wasn’t apologizing.”

You rolled your eyes. “Of course not.”

That might have been the end of it. On any other block. In any other life.

But the air was still too charged, the silence too full of the things neither of you were saying cleanly enough to survive. You looked at him and saw how tightly he was holding himself. How furious he was—mostly at the shape of his own helplessness.

It softened you against your will.

A little.

Not much.

“Look,” you said, quieter now. “I’m not asking you to suddenly become a person with healthy communication skills. I know that would probably kill you. I’m just saying if you keep phrasing concern like you’re filing an after action report, I reserve the right to take it badly.”

A pause.

Then, to your surprise, Dex said, “That’s fair.”

You stared at him. “Did Wong drug the tea?”

He ignored that, but the line of his shoulders loosened by the smallest degree.

The bond under your ribs answered with a low, traitorous warmth. Not triumph. Just the awful sensation of things settling half an inch closer to where they were supposed to be.

“So,” you said after a beat, looking down the block, “no Uber?”

“No Uber.”

“Because?”

“Because I don’t want a record of you getting in a car from a portal drop three blocks from the Sanctum after we followed Wong all afternoon.”

You took that in.

Then sighed. “Right. Fine. That is, annoyingly, a real reason.”

Dex turned and started walking again, slower this time.

You fell into step beside him.

The two of you moved in silence for half a block, shoes scuffing pavement, the city’s evening light dimming by increments around you. It wasn’t comfortable, not exactly. But it wasn’t the sharp-edged silence from before either. This one had a little more room in it, like neither of you had bled out all your options just yet.

You shoved your hands deeper into your hoodie pocket and glanced sideways at him. “For the record, this was the worst first date I’ve ever been on. And this is New York; I’ve had some absolute rocker first dates.”

Dex didn’t miss a beat. “It wasn’t a date.”

“Mm.” You nodded to yourself. “That’s exactly what a man says after buying me lunch, stalking a wizard, dragging me through a glowing hole in reality, and finding out we’re cosmically handcuffed.”

His jaw twitched. “I bought you a hot dog.”

“Two hot dogs,” you corrected. “Don’t erase your own grand gestures.”

That got you a look—brief, flat, almost offended—and something low in your chest eased despite yourself. The bond answered with a warm, traitorous hum. Not loud. Just there. Still listening. Still refusing to take the hint and die quietly.

The street opened onto a busier avenue. Headlights dragged pale ribbons over wet asphalt. Somewhere down the block an AVTF cruiser rolled by, slow and ugly under the streetlamps, and both of you tracked it without turning your heads. New York kept moving around you anyway—buses sighing, a distant siren, somebody laughing too loudly outside a bar like the city wasn’t being strangled one ordinance at a time.

Dex slowed half a step so you could match him without hurrying.

Not enough to comment on. Enough to notice.

You looked straight ahead. “So,” you said, voice drier now, more tired than sharp, “you brood. I talk. Apparently that’s the language.”

Dex was quiet for a moment. Then, low enough that it almost disappeared into traffic, he said, “Keep talking.”

Your throat tightened in a way you refused to examine.

You kept walking beside him, close enough for the bond to settle, far enough that your hands never brushed. Above you, the city darkened by degrees.