𝐂𝐲𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐞 𝐂𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢

[22] Writer. Artist. Word-Eater. ✍︎ Blog: https://cyreneclementi.wixsite.com/cyrene-clementi

[elysianightsss]

SUNSHINE

Simon Riley × Reader | A One-Shot

20K words, Simon’s hair has grown out, reader wears glasses, Simon doesn’t know how to dance, smut, the fluffiest fluff, angst, size kink, Simon is huge, pee mentioned, Simon is filthy but we all knew that. Tell me if I missed any tags.

He was four years old when he stole your crayons.

Not all of them. Just the good ones. The red one. The yellow one. The bright, sunflower-gold one that you'd been saving to colour the sun in the corner of your drawing, the way all four-year-olds drew the sun — a circle in the corner, rays shooting out like a child's idea of joy.

You looked at him across the low art table in that bright little preschool room that smelled of poster paint and digestive biscuits.

He was stocky even then.

Chubby-cheeked and heavy-set. A thick, sturdy little boy who sat with his legs wide and his fat fists curled around your crayons like he'd earned them.

He wasn't even looking at you.

He was colouring something — a car, maybe, or a blob that might have been a dog — and the yellow crayon moved in big, purposeful strokes across his paper.

You did not cry.

You considered it.

Then you leaned across the table and took them back.

He looked up.

Brown eyes. Even at four, they were startling — dark and serious and far too watchful for a boy his age.

He stared at you.

You stared back.

Then he slid the gold crayon back across the table to you, said nothing, and went back to his drawing.

His name was Simon.

You would not learn that until the register was called the following morning. But you remembered his eyes before you remembered his name.

— ✦ —

He broke your glasses in Year Two.

Not on purpose — or so you believed, for most of your life, until you were old enough to accept that

Simon Riley did very few things without purpose.

He knocked into you in the corridor outside the dining hall, your plastic NHS frames hitting the linoleum floor, one arm snapping clean off at the hinge.

You stood there, the world going soft and blurry at the edges the way it always did without them, and you felt the particular, humiliating sting of being unable to see properly — the vulnerability of it, the indignity.

Simon picked up the frames. Looked at them. Looked at you.

He didn't say sorry straight away. He examined the break with the seriousness of a boy who was already, at seven, very careful about what he said and when he said it. Then, "I'll carry your bag till they're fixed."

"You broke my glasses," you told him like he didn’t know.

"I know." He nodded.

"That's not the same as fixing them."

"No," he agreed. "But it's what I've got."

He carried your bag for three days. And when your mum brought the repaired frames in on the fourth morning, he handed the bag back without ceremony, turned, and went to join his mates by the football cage. No further apology. No acknowledgement that anything had occurred between you at all.

That afternoon, you kicked over his sandcastle in the playground.

He watched you do it. Didn't say a word.

You felt better.

And somehow, after that, you were friends.

— ✦ —

He couldn't read very well. You figured this out in Year Three, during the round-robin reading in class — when the teacher went along the rows and each child read a sentence aloud.

You noticed the way Simon's jaw set and his hands went flat on the desk the closer it got to his turn. The way his eyes moved across the page, laboured and slow, tracking words like they were things to be wrestled rather than known.

He got through his sentence. Barely. His face was blank when he sat back, the particular blankness he'd already learned to wear — that carefully constructed nothing that meant everything was fine when everything was not fine at all.

You didn't say anything about it. Not then. You were eight years old, not stupid.

What you did was start reading with him at break time. You presented it as something you needed — you told him you were practising for a reading competition and needed an audience.

Simon was not fooled. He was never fooled, not really.

But he sat down with you on the bench by the library door and listened while you read, and then slowly, carefully, you handed the book to him and asked what he thought happened next, and he had to read ahead to find out.

It took most of the school year. But by the summer he was reading chapter books. He never thanked you. He did start saving you a seat on the library bench every break time, and that was the same thing.

— ✦ —

He played football and rugby.

You read on the grass bank above the field.

It became a kind of institution — the ritual of your shared proximity without shared activity. Simon on the pitch, broad and determined and already bigger than the other boys by Year Five, already moving with that particular physicality that seemed less like playing and more like declaration.

And you on the bank above, your book open, your reading glasses (a better pair now, tortoiseshell) perched on your nose, half-reading and half watching without ever quite admitting to the watching.

He always knew you were there. He didn't do anything about it. But sometimes, when he scored, he'd look up at the bank first before he looked anywhere else.

You told yourself you were only there because the grass was nice and the light was good.

You were not a good liar, even then.

— ✦ —

The boy's name was Daniel Holt and he pushed you over in the playground in Year Five because you'd refused to give him the answers to the maths homework.

You'd said no three times and the third time he pushed you and you went down hard on your palms and your knees, the concrete was unforgiving.

You were crying before you'd fully registered what had happened. Not dramatically — small, shocked, indignant tears, the kind that arrive before the pain does.

Simon was there before a teacher was. You didn't even see where he came from. One moment the playground was its ordinary mid-morning noise, and the next Daniel Holt had a split lip and Simon Riley was standing over him with blood on his knuckles and a look on his face that was completely, utterly calm.

The calm was the frightening part. Even at ten.

He got three days at home for it. He spent the first afternoon sitting on your front step, eating crisps, because he knew you'd be furious with him and wanted to face it head-on.

You were furious. You told him he was an idiot. He told you Daniel Holt had it coming. You told him violence wasn't the answer. He told you Daniel Holt wasn't going to touch you again.

He was right. Daniel Holt never came near you again.

You didn't thank him either. You went inside and made him a sandwich, and that was the same thing.

— ✦ —

Secondary school arrived like a change in weather — everything slightly larger, slightly louder, the corridors longer and noisier, the stakes somehow higher and more ambiguous all at once. You arrived with a bag so heavy your shoulder ached within the first hour: your textbooks, yes, but also the extracurricular books you carried everywhere, the extra notepad you used for non-school thoughts, the six different highlighters you colour-coded by subject.

Simon took the bag from you on the third day without asking.

"I can carry it," you told him.

"I know," he said.

He slung it over his shoulder like it weighed nothing, which for him it probably didn't. He'd grown over the summer — not just taller, though he was that, but broader, thicker through the shoulders in a way that made him look like a man playing a boy, trying the shape of it on. He wore it well, even at eleven. He wore everything like he'd already decided what he was and was simply waiting for the world to catch up.

He carried your bag when it was heavy, and it was frequently heavy. He did it without comment and without making you feel small for needing it. That was the thing about Simon — he never made you feel small. He made other people feel small, sometimes, when they deserved it. But not you. Never you.

— ✦ —

The bruises were never from rugby.

You knew by the second year of secondary.

You were not naive — you had read enough, observed enough, understood enough about the world to recognise the shape of what was happening in Simon Riley's house even though he never said a word about it.

The bruises were in the wrong places for rugby. They appeared in the wrong season. They were around his ribs and his arms and once, memorably, along his jaw, and he came to school the Monday after the jaw bruise with that face — that blank, carefully constructed nothing face — and you sat next to him at lunch and said nothing at all.

You said nothing because there was nothing you could do. You were twelve. You were a girl with a book bag and highlighter pens and absolutely no power over the man who was hurting your best friend, and knowing that — the impotence of it, the helpless, hollow ache of caring about someone you could not protect — was the first truly adult pain you ever felt.

What you could do was this: you could make sure he had somewhere to go.

Your mother, who was perceptive in the quiet way that some mothers are, never asked questions when Simon turned up at the back door on a Sunday evening or a Wednesday after school.

She just set another plate.

Your house became a refuge without anyone naming it as such. Simon did his homework at your kitchen table, ate your mother's cooking, watched telly with your family, and slept on your sofa sometimes when the option was presented naturally enough that it didn't feel like charity.

— ✦ —

You got your period for the first time on a Tuesday in November, in Year Nine. In the school toilets, third period, when you were thirteen years old and the day had been entirely ordinary right up until it wasn't.

The particular cocktail of shock and pain and embarrassment and the specific existential bewilderment of being a person whose body was doing something enormous without prior adequate notice left you sitting on the closed toilet lid crying in a way you hadn't cried in years.

You got out your Nokia. That familiar brick of a phone, the keypad worn smooth at the number five. You typed Simon's number and pressed call before you'd properly decided to.

He picked up on the second ring. "Yeah."

"Simon." Your voice came out wrong. Too thin.

A beat. When he spoke again his voice had changed — quieter, more careful. "Where are you?"

"Girls' toilets. Near the science block."

"Right," he said. "Stay there."

He appeared outside the girls' toilets seven minutes later — you could hear him through the door, his voice low and flat, telling a Year Eight girl to go use the other ones — and then he was there, right there on the other side of the door, talking to you through it in that steady, even way he had when he wanted to be calm on your behalf.

"You're alright," he said. “Do you need me to go to the office?"

"No," you managed. "I need — I don't know what I need."

"I'll get you something from the vending machine," he said, that Manchester accent of his low and unhurried. "And I'll text your mum."

When you came out of the toilets twenty minutes later, looking wrung-out and clutching what the school nurse had provided, Simon was leaning against the wall. He looked at you for a moment — took you in, the way he always did, that comprehensive, assessing look — and then he stepped forward and kissed your cheek. Quick. Certain. His mouth warm and deliberate against your cheekbone.

"You're alright," he said again. He said it like a fact. Like he was making it true by saying it.

You cried a bit more, for different reasons, and he pretended not to notice.

— ✦ —

He was captain of the rugby team by Year Ten. It suited him — the leadership, the sense of purpose, the structure of it.

You went to his matches sometimes, wrapped in a scarf on the touchline, and watched him move across the pitch with that same quality you'd noticed on the primary school field: less like playing, more like declaration.

He was ferocious and focused and occasionally frightening, and the other boys deferred to him not just because he was bigger than them but because he had the kind of authority that doesn't need to be announced.

Afterwards he'd find you on the touchline, still carrying that quality — coiled, alert — and it would take him a few minutes to come back to himself. To come back to you.

"Good game," you'd say.

"Yeah," he'd say.

And then slowly, the set of his shoulders would ease, and he'd become Simon again. Your Simon. The one who stole your crayons and carried your bag and ate your mother's shepherd's pie like it was sacred.

— ✦ —

He could make you laugh. This was not a small thing.

Simon Riley was not, by general consensus, a funny person. He was serious and quiet and his face in repose looked like a man carrying a private weather system. But he had a dry, deadpan wit that he deployed rarely and precisely, and it landed, every time, like a key in a lock made specifically for it.

He knew how to make you laugh because he'd spent years learning you. The specific frequency of your humour. The things that made you dissolve into giggles rather than just smile. He deployed his wit with the same precision he deployed everything else, and the result was that when Simon Riley made you laugh — really laugh, the helpless, breathless kind — it felt like being given something he didn't give to anyone else.

Which, you would eventually understand, was accurate.

— ✦ —

His name was Ryan Marsh and he was your first kiss, in the park on a Friday evening in Year Ten, and it was fine. It was nice, even. Ryan was sweet and nervous and smelled of his older brother's aftershave and the kiss lasted approximately forty seconds.

Ryan Marsh had a broken nose the following Monday.

Simon maintained, with total conviction, that Ryan had walked into a door. Ryan, to his credit, corroborated this story completely.

You did not push the matter, partly because you had no concrete evidence and partly because some part of you — the part that read on the grass bank and watched the pitch and noticed when Simon looked up at the bank before he looked anywhere else — felt something that was not entirely uncomplicated about it.

You and Ryan Marsh did not have a second kiss. You told yourself it was because the chemistry hadn't been right.

You were getting a bit better at lying to yourself, by fourteen. But only a bit.

— ✦ —

GCSEs arrived the way all important things arrived — with more weight than you'd expected and less warning than you'd have liked.

Year Ten and Eleven were the years you restructured Simon's entire approach to studying, methodically and patiently, the same way you'd helped him learn to read, finding the approach that worked for how his mind moved.

Simon was not unintelligent.

He was, in fact, formidably sharp in ways that didn't translate easily to an exam paper: quick to read people, quick to understand systems, possessed of a spatial and strategic intelligence that you recognised and admired even as you taught him how to write it down in ways that the mark scheme would accept.

He sat with you at your kitchen table night after night — your mother quietly replenishing the tea,— and you explained things in the language that made sense to his brain rather than the language of the textbook.

He sat with you at lunch during school hours and glared at anyone who called you a nerd. The glaring was extremely effective. Simon Riley's face, by fifteen, was a significant deterrent.

His GCSE results, when they arrived, were good. Better than anyone who knew his circumstances might have expected from a boy who'd had so much working against him.

He rang you on the house phone when he opened the results envelope. He didn't say much. His voice, when he spoke, was different — something in it unguarded, the Manchester in it softer somehow, without the armour it usually carried.

"Couldn't have done it without you," he said.

"You did it," you told him firmly. "I just held the torch."

"Still needed the torch."

You smiled so hard your face ached. "Go celebrate, Simon."

"Yeah," he said. And then, quieter, "Thanks, sunshine."

— ✦ —

He was an apprentice at the butcher's on Renshaw Street after school — learning the trade with the same focused, physical competence he brought to everything else, solid and unhurried, his big hands learning new kinds of precision. You had a job at the bookshop two streets over.

On his lunch breaks you would walk over with a sandwich and a packet of crisps, and you'd sit on the low wall around the side of the shop while he ate and you talked about nothing in particular and everything in general.

He had sawdust on his boots and you'd have ink on your fingers from pricing stickers, and you'd sit in the thin afternoon light talking about books and people and where things might go from here, and it was the most ordinary, irreplaceable thing in the world.

You didn't know, then, that you were storing it up. You didn't know you were in the middle of something finite.

You were seventeen and you thought you had time.

— ✦ —

It was the eleventh of September, 2001.

You were at work when it happened — the bookshop had a small television in the back room, and you watched the footage with your hand pressed over your mouth and the world rearranging itself into a new shape around you.

Simon came to you that evening. He didn't knock — he had a spare key, had done for years — and you heard him come in and go into the kitchen and fill the kettle, the sound of him so familiar and domestic and real that something in your chest loosened a fraction.

He brought you tea. He sat on the sofa beside you and you watched the news together in silence, and at some point your head found his shoulder without either of you deciding it had.

"I'm going to join up," he said. Not asking. Telling.

You lifted your head from his shoulder. Frowned at him. "Join up what?"

"The military."

The word landed in the room and stayed there. You looked at his face — that flat, certain expression he wore when he'd already decided something — and you felt the ground shift slightly under you.

"Simon. You're seventeen."

"You can join at sixteen with parental consent," he said. Straightforward, as though he'd already looked into it. Which of course he had. "Seventeen without."

"That's—" You stopped. Started again. "You've thought about this before today."

"Yeah."

Of course he had. You could see it now, the shape of it — this was not a reaction to the footage on the television, not a hot, impulsive thing. This was something Simon had been building toward without telling you. The structure of it. The purpose. The particular kind of belonging that came from being part of something larger than yourself. You'd always known he'd go toward something like this. You'd just hoped, without ever quite admitting to the hoping, that it might be further away.

"You're not going to try to talk me out of it." Not a question.

"Would it work?"

He held your gaze. "No."

"Then no," you said. Your voice was very steady. You were proud of it. "I'm not."

He was quiet for a long moment. The television continued its awful repetition. Then his arm came around your shoulders, heavy and warm, and he pulled you in closer against his side.

You stayed like that until the tea went cold.

— ✦ —

The train station was grey and noisy with other leavings, other arrivals, other people in the middle of things.

Simon stood in front of you on the platform with his kit bag and his big, careful hands and the face he'd spent seventeen years learning to keep blank, and it occurred to you, not for the first time and not for the last, that you loved him.

That you had loved him in different quantities and different registers for most of your life. That you did not know how to say it and were not sure it would do either of you any good if you did.

So you didn't say it.

You went up on your toes and you hugged him — truly hugged him, arms around his neck, your face pressed against his jaw — and he held you back with both arms, the kit bag dropping to the platform, and he was so solid and warm and real that you memorised it.

"Don't be an idiot," you told him, muffled.

He made a sound that was almost a laugh. Almost. "Best I can do is try." The Manchester in his voice, low and warm and his.

"Simon."

"I know," he said quietly, against your temple. "I know, sunshine."

You stepped back. You held it together. He picked up his bag and he walked toward the platform and at the door of the train he turned, and looked at you standing there with your glasses and your coat and your hands pressed together in front of you, and for a second you saw something in his face that wasn't blank at all.

Then he was gone.

You cried on the way home. Proper, ugly crying, in the front seat of your mother's car, while she drove and said nothing and passed you a tissue.

You cried because you thought you might never see him again. Because the world had cracked open on a Tuesday in September and people were going toward the fracture and Simon Riley was one of them.

You cried because you never told him.

— ✦ —

He sent a birthday card every year.

They arrived with no return address and postmarks from places you'd never heard of, and sometimes they were late and sometimes they were so early you suspected he'd sent them weeks in advance in case he couldn't later.

They were always plain — Simon Riley was not a man who browsed the sentimental section — white or cream envelopes, the kind of card that was almost generic, and inside: his handwriting, which had improved vastly from the boy who'd struggled across the page in Year Three, and always the same thing. Your name at the top. Happy Birthday, sunshine. And then: S.

Just S.

Like he was still close enough that you'd know exactly who that meant. Like the initial was sufficient.

It was.

You sent his birthday gifts to a P.O. box he'd given you, wrapped carefully, the tag always: From your best friend. You didn't know if he received them all. You sent them anyway. It felt important to keep sending them — to maintain the thread, even when you couldn't see both ends of it.

— ✦ —

Thirty-four years old now.

You have no husband. You had come close, once — a man named Patrick who had been perfectly acceptable in every measurable way and who had wanted to marry you and had probably deserved someone who could give him more of herself than you could manage.

You had not been fair to Patrick. You knew that. You had been in love with someone else for most of your adult life, and even with the someone else absent and silent and possibly dead, there wasn't room for anyone else.

You have no children, though you wanted them. The timeline on that was becoming its own quiet ache, the kind you didn't prod too often.

You have a job that pays the bills and not much else — admin in an office building that smells of carpet cleaner and recycled air, the kind of work that requires enough of your brain to stop it from wandering but not enough to satisfy it.

You have an apartment that is functional and yours and that you have tried to make cozy, with books on every surface and plants that are mostly surviving and a kitchen you actually cook in.

It is not the house. It is not the house you told Simon about when you were sixteen and lying in his back garden on a summer evening, staring up at the sky.

No birthday card for five years now.

Five years of the particular, specific silence that was different from all the silences before, because the silences before had been interrupted. Annually, reliably, he had broken them.

Five years of nothing had the texture of conclusion. Of a chapter closing. And you had reached the point — slowly, painfully, with the kind of acceptance that doesn't feel like acceptance but feels like exhaustion — where you were fairly certain Simon Riley was dead.

Your heart ached for your best friend in the low, constant way of grief that has become so familiar it's almost structural.

You carried it the way you carried other things, quietly, with your spine straight.

Which is why you are sitting across from a man named — it didn't matter, it really didn't matter what his name was — on what your colleague Debbie had described as 'a perfectly nice date with a perfectly nice man' and trying to remember what it felt like to be interested in your own life.

The man sitting across from you was the complete opposite of Simon Riley.

He was trim and well-dressed and had the kind of face that was handsome in a way that required no effort to appreciate and inspired no particular feeling from you.

He had been talking for, by your reckoning, forty-seven minutes. In that time he had covered: his career (impressive, in his telling), his car (expensive, in his telling), his last holiday (exotic, in his telling), and his general philosophy on modern dating (nuanced, in his telling).

He had not asked about your job. He had not asked about your books or the one peeking out of your handbag; the one he'd glanced at and not commented on. He had not asked if your pasta was nice, which it was, actually, genuinely nice, and you'd have told him so if he'd asked. He had not asked you almost anything, come to think of it.

Simon Riley, who spoke perhaps a tenth as many words as this man, had always asked.

Simon Riley had always wanted to know. Not because it was polite. Because he actually, genuinely, in the particular way of people who care about very few things very deeply — wanted to know.

You excused yourself to use the bathroom and stood at the sink running cold water over your wrists and looking at your own reflection, and you thought: this is fine.

This is a perfectly nice evening with a perfectly nice man. This is what moving forward looks like. This is what being a person in the world, a person with a life and a future and reasonable expectations of company, looks like.

You dried your hands. You went back to the table. He had ordered himself another drink without asking if you wanted anything.

You finished your pasta and smiled at appropriate intervals and thought about Simon Riley and felt, as you so often felt, quietly furious at him for being gone.

— ✦ —

The birthday card arrived on a Thursday morning.

You almost missed it entirely — it was tucked between a pizza delivery leaflet and something from your energy supplier, the cream envelope almost camouflaged by the mundane. You shuffled through the post on autopilot and then stopped.

Your name, in handwriting you would have recognised anywhere, would have recognised in your sleep, had recognised in your bones for thirty years.

You sat down on the bottom stair. Your legs suddenly uneasy.

Your hands were not steady.

The envelope opened. The card was white. Plain. Almost generic.

Inside:

Happy Birthday, sunshine.

I'm sorry it's been so long.

I'll explain everything.

Come, if you want to.

If you can stand the sight of me.

Below that, an address. Three towns over. A postcode you didn't recognise.

And then, at the bottom, the way it had always been at the bottom: S.

You sat on the bottom stair for a very long time.

Then you got up, went to your room, and started thinking about what to wear.

— ✦ —

You plucked up the nerve to go on a Saturday.

The drive took forty minutes and you spent most of it trying to manage yourself — talking yourself through reasonable expectations (he is alive, that is enough, start there), warning yourself against things you could not control (the five years, the silence, the way your hands were doing that unsteady thing again), cataloguing everything practical (the address, the map).

The street was quiet. Semi-rural, the kind of neighbourhood that sits between things — between town and country, between the ordinary and the aspirational. The houses were spread out, set back from the road, each with its own front garden and its own character.

You parked. You looked at the address. You looked up.

And you stopped breathing.

It was a beautiful house.

Large, substantial and solid, the kind of house that had been built to last. White painted render, clean and bright in the afternoon light. A white picket fence surrounding the front garden, which was full of flowers. Roses climbing the gatepost. Lavender edging the path. Foxgloves and dahlias and great loose clusters of something purple you couldn't name from here. The kind of garden that had been planted with intention, tended with care, left to be a little wild in the best way.

A porch. And a porch swing, painted white, with a yellow cushion on it.

And flying from the corner of the roof, bright against the blue afternoon sky: the Union flag.

You sat very still in the driver's seat.

You were sixteen years old. It was a summer evening and you were lying in Simon's back garden on an old sleeping bag, looking up at the sky. He was beside you in the way he was always beside you — solid, quiet, taking up exactly the right amount of space. You'd been talking about the future the way teenagers do, in great floating hypotheticals that feel more like weather than plans.

"What kind of house?" he'd asked. He asked follow-up questions always, quietly, wanting the specifics. It was one of the things about him you loved.

And you'd described it. A big house, not ostentatious but real — space for books and for people and for a garden that did what it wanted within reason. A white fence, because you'd always liked them. A porch with somewhere to sit. A flag, because you were — despite everything — proud of where you were from.

Simon had been quiet for a long moment.

"Okay," he'd said. Just: okay.

You had thought he was humouring you.

You had not thought — you had not let yourself think — what it might mean, that he was going to do anything about it.

You got out of the car. Your legs were not entirely reliable. You held the gate and walked up the path — lavender brushing your hand where it grew close, the scent of it too perfect, almost staged — and you stopped at the foot of the porch steps.

The door opened.

He had to duck.

That was the first thing you noticed. The physical fact of him, the sheer size of him, his shoulders nearly touching the doorframe on both sides simultaneously, the automatic dip of his head as he stepped through onto the porch.

He straightened.

The afternoon light landed on him and you had to spend a moment recalibrating, because the last time you'd seen Simon Riley he had been seventeen years old with sawdust on his boots and a train ticket in his hand, and this man —

This man.

The white button-down shirt was simple, the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and from his left wrist to well past the roll of the sleeve his forearm was dark with ink — a sleeve of tattoos, intricate and considered. A whole geography of imagery that you couldn't read from here but would, you thought, take time to learn.

His right wrist carried a watch. His black slacks were fitted close enough that you could see the muscle of his thighs pulling the fabric with every shift of his weight, and his shoes — loafers, black with gold buckles, completely unexpected and somehow exactly right — were precise.

His hair. A dark sandy blonde, longer than military specification presumably allowed and slicked back from his face, which meant you could see all of it, his whole face; the angles that had sharpened from boy to man, the jaw, the set of his brow, and those eyes. Those brown eyes that had been watching you since you were four years old and had never, not once, looked at you with anything less than complete attention.

He was raking those eyes over you now. Slowly. With the same quality he'd always had — that comprehensive, unhurried assessment that somehow never felt like being measured — and his hands were in his pockets and he was standing there like that, on the porch he'd built or bought or arranged specifically around a description you'd given him at sixteen.

He looked like something out of a magazine and like Simon all at once.

You were going to murder him.

"Hi, sunshine."

His voice. Lower than you remembered, rougher, carrying all the years he'd lived since you last heard it. That Manchester accent — still there, unmistakably, that warm northern flatness underneath everything, the vowels shaped by a city, by a street, by a particular kind of upbringing that no amount of training had entirely smoothed out.

That nickname, in that voice, in that low, deliberate way he'd always said it: like you were his.

Like it was a prayer.

You opened your mouth. And you closed it. And you looked at him — this enormous, tattooed, stupidly handsome man who had stood on your mother's doorstep at twelve years old with bruises he didn't mention, who had kissed your cheek at thirteen and broken Ryan Marsh's nose at fourteen and waved goodbye from a train platform at seventeen and then sent you birthday cards from the edges of the world for a decade and then stopped for five years —

"Five years," you said. Your voice was very quiet.

Something moved in his face.

"I-,"

"I thought you were dead." You snapped cutting him off.

"I figured you would’ve."

"Simon."

"I know, sunshine." He said it the same way he'd always said things he couldn't argue with — not deflecting, not dismissing, just absorbing. The Manchester vowels in his voice like a hand on your shoulder. "I'll explain everything. I promise. All of it. Whatever you want to know."

You looked at him.

He looked at you.

The afternoon settled around the house, around the garden that was your garden in your own sixteen-year-old description, around the flag and the porch swing and the lavender and all of it, and the distance between you on the path and him on the porch steps was perhaps four feet and thirty years and five years of silence and a whole life of choosing not to say the one true thing.

"You built me the house?" you asked, whispering it. Like you were afraid to say it.

He was quiet for a moment. Then, "Bought it. Had the garden done the way you said."

"Simon." Your heart ached.

"You said lavender at the edges," he said. His voice was completely level. "You said a porch with somewhere to sit. You said you wanted to see the flag from the garden."

You pressed your hand to your mouth.

The rage was still there — it was not going anywhere quickly. The five years of it, the grief of it — but underneath it, something else. Something that had been there since you were four years old at a preschool art table, larger and quieter and more permanent than anything else you'd ever felt.

"You were sixteen," he said. As though this explained it. "You told me what you wanted. I just..." He stopped. Started again. "I wanted to be enough first. I wanted to have what you needed."

There was a long silence. A bee moved through the lavender. Somewhere a few streets away, a lawnmower hummed.

"Come inside," Simon said. "I'll make you tea. And I'll tell you everything."

You looked at him on the porch of the house he'd built you from a word, and you thought: you absolute idiot. You wonderful, impossible, infuriating man. You thought I'd stopped. You thought thirty years of this was something you could be enough for eventually, like it was a bar to clear, like there was a version of you I was waiting on instead of just —

Instead of just you. Always just you.

The lavender brushed your hand again. You walked up the steps and he looked down at you with those brown eyes that had never once left you.

"Hi, Simon," you said.

Something happened in his face. Something opened.

"Hi, sunshine," he said, his hand coming to the small of your back to guide you inside.

He made the tea.

You stood in the kitchen of a house that smelled of fresh paint and cedar and something faintly floral from the garden drifting through the open window over the sink, and you watched Simon Riley move around it like he'd always lived here — filling the kettle, finding the mugs without opening the wrong cupboard, knowing where the teabags were — and you thought: how long. How long has he been here, in this house he bought for you, learning where everything lives, waiting.

You sat at the kitchen table. It was a good table, heavy oak, the kind built to last and you ran your thumb along the grain of it and tried to arrange your feelings into some kind of order and failed.

Simon set the mug in front of you. Milk in last, the way you'd always taken it, which he knew because he'd made you approximately four thousand cups of tea over the course of your lives. He sat down across from you, his own mug between his big hands, and looked at you.

You looked back.

The kitchen light was warm and it caught the angles of his face. The jaw, the brow, the slight crook in his nose that was new, or newer, the result of something you didn't know about and weren't sure you wanted to.

He was watching you with that particular quality of attention he'd always had. Complete. Patient. Like you were the only thing in the room worth looking at.

"You're not wearing your glasses," he said.

You blinked. Of all the things. "No."

"Contacts?"

"For about ten years now, yes."

He was quiet for a moment, studying your face with that same unhurried attention, "I missed them."

"You missed my glasses?" You say with the deadpan tone you'd perfected over the years.

"Tortoiseshell ones," he said. "Used to push them up your nose when you were concentrating." He took a gulp of his tea, Adam's apple bobbing when he swallowed.

You stared at him. Eighteen years. Eighteen years of distance and war and God knows what else, and he missed your glasses. "Simon."

"Just saying."

"You are unbelievable." You scoff.

"The contacts suit you," he said, and the corner of his mouth moved — barely, almost nothing, but you'd spent your whole life reading that face and you caught it. "Everything suits you. But I liked the glasses."

"Stop it." You snap.

"Stop what?"

"Whatever that is," you said, and you pointed at his face, at the not-there-almost-smile, at the quality of his voice when he said everything suits you, at all of it. "You don't get to do that. You've been — Simon, you've been gone. You've been gone for eighteen years and for five of them, I thought you were dead." Your voice stayed steady, which surprised you. You'd expected it to crack on that. "So you don't get to walk out onto your porch looking like — like that — and tell me you missed my glasses and flirt at me like no time has passed."

He listened without interrupting. He always had — it was one of the things about him, the way he gave you the whole space of what you were saying before he entered it.

"You're right," he nodded.

"I know I'm right." Your spine straightened.

"I owe you an explanation."

"You owe me considerably more than that, Simon Riley, but yes. An explanation would be a start."

He wrapped both hands around his mug again and looked at you across the table and there was something in his face that was not the blank-nothing face, was not the armour he'd worn since he was twelve years old but something that was quieter and more exposed and a great deal more frightening because of it.

"Not here," he said.

You frowned. "What?"

"I don't want to do it like this. Sat in a kitchen." He glanced around the room briefly, as though orienting himself. "Come to dinner with me tomorrow night."

"What I—"

"The Grill on Merton Street."

You went very still.

The Grill on Merton Street. You hadn't been in years — not since you'd moved away from the area, not since things had shifted and the rituals of your old life had quietly been replaced by other things.

But you knew it. You knew every table in it. The way the light came through the front windows on a Sunday, the smell of it — roasted meat and old wood and the particular warmth of a place that had been feeding families for decades.

Your mother had loved it. Your father used to order the same thing every time and be pleased about it every time, and you and Simon had sat across from each other in the corner booth with the sticky laminated menus and kicked each other under the table and laughed.

"That's still open?" you managed.

"Had a look earlier this week," he said. "Still there. New owners but the same building. Same corner booth."

You looked at him. He looked at you. Outside, through the open window, a late bird was making itself known in the lavender.

"Fine," you said. "Dinner. Tomorrow. And you're going to tell me everything." you struck at him with a serious face.

"Everything," he agreed.

"I mean it, Simon. All of it."

"I know you do."

You drank your tea. It was exactly right. The temperature, the strength, the milk ratio and you hated him a little bit for that. For the fact that he still knew, that across seventeen years and God knows how many miles he still knew exactly how you took your tea, and he'd made it correctly on the first attempt without asking, and you were absolutely not going to cry about that.

You were not.

— ✦ —

You dressed carefully.

Not because you were trying to impress him.

You told yourself this firmly, standing in front of your wardrobe in the room you'd taken in the local B&B — you'd booked a night, not knowing how long this might take, not knowing what state you'd be in for the drive home afterwards — and you told yourself that you were simply dressing appropriately for a dinner at a decent restaurant.

That was all.

That was the entirety of it.

The dress was deep green. Fitted through the waist, falling to just below the knee, with a neckline that was elegant rather than dramatic.

You'd bought it for a work event two years ago and it had lived in your wardrobe since, waiting for an occasion that felt worth it. You put your hair up — not elaborately, just neatly, the kind of arrangement that looked effortless and had taken twenty minutes — and you wore the small gold earrings that had been your grandmother's. Low heels. The good handbag. A slick of red on your mouth that you almost wiped off twice before deciding to leave it.

You were not trying to impress him.

You were absolutely trying to impress him.

He was waiting outside The Grill when your taxi pulled up, standing on the pavement with his hands in his pockets. The air around him relaxed and easy. An anchored stillness, like a man who'd learned to wait and had made peace with it. He has the same dark slacks as yesterday, same loafers with the gold buckles, but the shirt tonight was black.

A deep, clean black that made his shoulders look approximately the width of a doorway, which was in fact an accurate assessment — and he'd left the top button undone. His hair was the same: pushed back, dark sandy blonde curling at the nape of his neck and catching the amber of the streetlights.

He saw you get out of the taxi.

He went very still. Completely, suddenly, entirely present in a way that landed on you like a hand against your sternum. Under your heartbeat.

You crossed the pavement toward him and his eyes moved over you — slowly, comprehensively, that same rake of attention he'd given you yesterday on the porch steps, only this time there was nothing restrained about what it did to your pulse.

He eyed you the same way he used to look at the extra cuts of slow roasted beef your mother added to his plate every time he joined you for a Sunday roast after church.

"Hi," you said.

"Hi, sunshine." His voice was low. The rough Manchester sending tingles down your spine.

He opened the door for you.

The Grill smelled exactly the same.

Roasted meat and warmed bread and old wood and something faintly of candle wax. It hit you the moment you stepped through the door and you had to stand still for just a second, just one second, to absorb the weight of it.

Your father's coat on the hook by the door. Your mother's reading glasses going into her bag as the menus arrived. Simon across from you, fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, his big hands wrapped around a Coke glass, his eyes on you under that careful brow.

The layout had shifted slightly — new owners, as Simon had said — but the bones of it were the same. The dark wood panelling. The low warm lighting. The tables set with proper linen and actual candles in glass holders. And in the back left corner was the booth.

Simon's hand was at the small of your back as the host led you through. A light touch, barely there, the kind of thing that could be merely courteous and was absolutely not merely courteous.

You said nothing about it.

You were almost at the booth when a voice said, "Well. I don't believe it."

You turned.

Margaret and Gerald Howarth.

Margaret had been your mother's friend since before you were born — a small, bright-eyed woman who had somehow barely aged in two decades. Her silver hair cut the same way it had always been, her husband a large, genial man beside her with a napkin already tucked into his collar. They'd been eating here since before you were born too, you suspected. Some people were simply woven into the furniture of a place.

"Margaret," you said, and you felt a genuine, warm rush of it. Of being seen by someone who had known you as a child, who had watched you grow up, who carried that particular knowledge of you that only people of a certain generation can hold. She was already rising halfway from her seat, her hand extended, and you took it and she covered it with her other one, the way she always had.

"We heard you were back in the area," she said — which was interesting, since you'd only arrived yesterday, but news apparently still moved at its old speed around here. Her bright eyes moved to Simon, and something in them softened with recognition and surprise in equal measure. "And Simon Riley. My goodness."

"Mrs Howarth." Simon's voice was respectful, quieter than usual, and you noticed — because you noticed everything about him — that he straightened fractionally. Not stiffly. Just the particular adjustment of a man in the presence of someone he'd known when he was young and unguarded.

"Look at the size of you," Gerald said, not unkindly, staring up at Simon with the frank appreciation of one large man for another. "What are they feeding you?"

"Gerald," Margaret scolded mildly.

"It's a compliment." He shrugged.

Simon almost smiled. "Good to see you, Mr Howarth."

Margaret was looking between the two of you with the expression of a woman who had been quietly observing people her entire life and drawing accurate conclusions from very little evidence. "Are you together?" she asked, with the particular directness that came with age and with having known you since you were in a pushchair.

"We're having dinner," you said carefully.

Margaret's expression said, quite clearly, that she had heard this and had also heard everything it was not saying. "Well," she said, patting your hand once more before releasing it, "it's lovely to see you both. You always did belong together, the pair of you. I said that to your mother once, do you know. I said those two—"

"It was lovely seeing you, Margaret," you said, with great warmth and only mild desperation.

She laughed, a bright, pleased sound and settled back into her seat.

As you turned to follow the host the rest of the way to the booth, you were almost certain you heard Gerald say, to his wife, "told you" in a tone of quiet marital satisfaction.

Simon was very carefully not reacting to any of this. You were very carefully not looking at him.

You saw two others you knew before you reached the booth.

Kim Ashworth, who had been in your form in Year Ten and who looked essentially the same as she had in school except that she had a baby on her hip and a husband trailing behind her with a changing bag.

She stopped mid-step when she saw you, did a small, delighted double take, said oh my God twice, and then looked at Simon in a way that was extremely uncomplicated in its appreciation before remembering the husband with the changing bag. There were promises exchanged to catch up properly, phone numbers that would probably not be used, genuine warmth on both sides.

And then at the bar, perched on a stool with a whisky, Dave Pearce — who had played alongside Simon on the secondary school rugby team and who greeted him with the particular vocabulary of men who knew each other at fifteen and have not changed as much as they think.

There was a brief, loud exchange that involved at least one shoulder-clap that could have knocked a smaller man sideways, and then Dave shook your hand too and told Simon he was punching. Which Simon received without expression and you tried your hardest not to laugh, biting your lip.

Finally the corner booth. You slid in. Simon folded himself into the seat across from you, the table scaled to ordinary human beings and therefore slightly absurd against the size of him, his knees bracketing it, his shoulders blocking the view of the room behind him entirely.

The menus came.

They were not laminated anymore — proper printed card, changed seasonally, the kind that meant the new owners had ambitions. But the roast was still on. The proper Sunday roast, the one your father used to order when you could afford to.

"Same corner," Simon said quietly.

"Same corner," you agreed.

He was looking at you across the table the way he used to look at you across this table, except that now his face was older and larger and had been to places that had clearly asked things of it. The look was different in its texture. Deeper, maybe. Older in the same way he was older. Like it had more weight behind it from all the years of being carried.

"You said everything," you reminded him. "All of it."

"I know."

"So." You gestured for him to start.

He set his menu down. Looked at you. And then he started talking.

He told it the way he told everything — without embellishment, without drama, in the flat, precise language of a man who had learned to communicate facts and trusted the facts to carry the weight without decoration.

He'd gone in at seventeen and he'd been good at it. Not surprising. He was built for the structure of it, for the clarity of having a purpose and a unit and a chain of things that made sense.

He'd moved up fast — faster than he let on in the cards he'd sent you, which had been careful, he explained, deliberately careful, because the more you knew the more you might worry. Which, you pointed out, had not been his decision to make. He didn't argue with that.

Task Force 141 came later. Years later, after deployments that he summarised in a sentence each and you understood enough from his face to know that each sentence was doing the work of much longer things.

He was a lieutenant now. He said it the way he said most things about himself, flatly, without vanity, presented as information. He had certain freedoms now that he hadn't had before, certain ability to make choices about where he went and when and what he did with the things the years had given him.

You both ordered your food.

"And the five years?" you asked, sipping your cocktail the waitress had brought over.

He was quiet for a moment, he stared at his San Miguel pint, the condensation sliding down the glass. Your food had arrived at some point during the waiting, while Simon collected his thoughts.

He picked up his fork and then set it down again.

"There was a man," Simon said.

Something about the way he said it made you put your fork down too.

"He ran drugs. Major operation, international — I won't go into all of it." He said this without flinching, looking at you steadily, not softening it. You'd always appreciated that about him — the way he treated your intelligence as a given. "After I escaped him, he decided to make it personal. He went after the people I—" He stopped. Chose the word carefully. "The people I was connected to."

The candle in the glass holder between you threw warm, unsteady light across his face.

"He killed them," Simon said. "My brother. Tommy's family." A pause that cost him something; you could see it cost him. "My Mother."

The restaurant continued around you — the murmur of other tables, the clink of cutlery, someone laughing softly near the bar — and you sat very still.

"Oh Simon," you whispered, you could feel the way your face formed the sympathy.

"I'm alright." He said it the way he'd always said it, the Manchester flat and absolute. The way that meant; don't make it bigger than I can hold right now. You knew that voice. You honoured it.

"He knew about you," Simon said and you froze. "That was the other thing. He'd done his research." His jaw shifted slightly. "As long as he was alive, you weren't safe. If I'd contacted you, properly contacted you, kept the thread going the way I wanted to, it would have given him a cleaner line. A more reliable way to reach me."

You understood the logic of it. You understood it clearly and immediately in the part of your brain that processed information. The other part — the part that had sat on the bottom stair with a birthday card after five years of silence, the part that had thought past tense — that part was going to take considerably longer.

"So you cut me off," you said. Not as an accusation. As a fact, laid down. You were starting to understand the shape of it.

"To keep you safe. Yes."

"Without telling me why." You sighed but you knew you were being unreasonable, but you hoped he would let you for a little longer.

"If I'd told you why, you'd have known there was a threat. And you'd have—" He stopped. The corner of his mouth moved, something that was not quite a smile and not quite not one. "You'd have done something about it. Gone looking. Made noise."

"I would not have—" You stopped, because you would have. You absolutely would have. You'd spent thirty years being completely unable to sit on the sidelines where Simon Riley was concerned, and the knowledge that someone was threatening him would have made you entirely unreasonable. "That's—" you huffed.

"Yeah," he said.

"You could have found a way—"

"There wasn't one. Not one that was safe." His voice was very level. "I went through every option, love. I promise you. Every one."

The word arrived quietly, without ceremony.

Love.

He'd never called you that — not in thirty years, not in all the time and all the familiarity of what you were to each other. He said it the way he said everything that mattered: without preamble, without dressing it up, laid down like the fact it was.

"And now?" you asked. Your voice was quite steady. Steadier than you felt.

"He's dead." No elaboration. None needed. The flat Manchester vowels carrying the weight of it cleanly, without mess. "And you're safe. And I—" He looked at you across the table, across the candle and the white linen. "I bought the house," he said. "I've spent a while making it what it is. Making if perfect. I saved up for years. The 141 pays well when you get to a certain level and I wasn't spending it on anything else."

"For years," you repeated, feeling a shiver rack up your spine and your toes go numb.

"Since I was about twenty." He said this without apparent embarrassment, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to spend fifteen years saving money to buy a woman a house from a description she'd given you at sixteen years old. "Took a while to find the right one that wasn’t too far from your parents. The lavender took three growing seasons to look like it did when you pulled up."

Three growing seasons.

He had planted the lavender three years ago. He had stood in a garden three towns from where you lived and planted lavender along a path because a sixteen-year-old girl had mentioned it lying on her back in his garden thirty years ago, and he had tended it for three years, and he had waited.

"Simon Riley," you said.

"It's got room for your books Sunshine, built the shelves myself." His lips quirked up at the corners at your flabbergasted expression.

"You are the most—" You stopped. Started again. "Do you have any idea what the past five years have felt like? Do you have any idea what I—" Your voice did the thing you'd been preventing it from doing, cracked at the edge of the sentence like a plate under too much weight. You stopped. Pressed your lips together. "I grieved you. I sat in my flat and I genuinely, actually grieved you and decided you were dead. I had — Simon, I had a plan for getting through it. I was managing it."

"I know."

"Don't say I know." you snapped sounding more like a bratty child than angry.

"I'm sorry." And this was different. This was not the automatic I know, the absorbing of your anger. This was something he said the way he said very few things — carefully, with full weight behind it. His eyes on yours across the table. "I'm sorry for the five years. I'm sorry I couldn't find another way. I'm sorry you were on your own with it." A pause. "I'm sorry it took me this long to have something worth coming back with."

"The house is not—" You stopped. "You didn't need to buy me a house, Simon. I didn't need—"

"I needed to," he said. Simply. "I needed to know I was coming back with something real. Something that wasn't just me turning up with nothing after all that time, asking you to — to accept—" He moved his hand across the table, and his fingers stopped just short of yours. Not touching. Close. "Asking you to take me as I was. I needed it to be enough. I needed there to be something I could give you that was—"

"Simon." Your voice was very quiet.

"I know it's not—"

"Simon." You turned your hand over on the table. Just that. The small, deliberate movement of turning your palm up.

He looked at it. Then he looked at you. Then, slowly, he put his hand in yours — his enormous, careful, tattooed hand. Not quite the one that had carried your bag through every corridor of secondary school and pulled you up off the pavement after Daniel Holt and held you on the platform at the train station, but this one now and his fingers closed around yours and he held on.

"I only ever wanted you," you said softly.

"Sunshine-"

"You were always worth it," you cut him off. And then, because it was time — because it had been time for approximately thirty years and you were done waiting for the right moment when the right moment had repeatedly failed to arrive — "You were always enough. You were always the thing I was — Simon, you have always been the only one I wanted. Exactly as you are."

He was very still.

"I didn't tell you on the platform," you said. "I should have. I've thought about it every day since."

"So have I," he said.

The candle between you flickered in some movement of air from the kitchen, and in the warm unsteady light his face was open in a way you had waited thirty years to see. His hand was warm and sure around yours, and from the other side of the restaurant you were almost certain you heard Margaret Howarth say something to Gerald in a satisfied undertone.

"You planted the lavender," you grinned.

"Three years ago." He finally smiles back at you, it was crooked and uneven and you loved it.

"You are," you said carefully, "the most ridiculous man I have ever known." You shook your head still grinning.

"Missed you too, sunshine," he smirked.

Dinner ended the way the best dinners end — not with a definitive conclusion but with a gradual, reluctant unwinding, the kind where both people keep finding one more thing to say, one more thread to pull, because the alternative is standing up and the evening becoming past tense.

You ordered dessert.

Neither of you particularly wanted it but you both ordered it, and you both knew why, and neither of you said so. The chocolate brownie was very good. Simon ate his methodically, the way he ate everything, and at one point looked up and caught you watching him and said nothing.

The candle between you had burned down to a stub by the time the bill came.

He paid. You protested on principle. He gave you a look that had not changed at all since he was fourteen years old — flat, certain, faintly amused — and handed the card to the waiter without further discussion.

"That's not—" you started.

"Next time," he said.

Next time. You let it sit there between you, warm and presumptuous and everything you wanted.

Outside, the evening had cooled.

The last of the summer still holding in the air, the kind of September evening that felt like a concession, like the year wasn't ready to be done.

The street was quiet for a Saturday, just a few couples moving between the restaurants and a group of lads outside the pub further down having a smoke. The amber of the streetlights made everything look like something worth remembering.

Simon stood beside you on the pavement, close enough that his arm brushed yours when he turned to look down the street, and you were very aware of the warmth of him and the black shirt and the lavender you couldn't smell from here but could somehow still feel in your hands.

"Walk with me a bit," he said. Not a question, not quite. He'd always done that — phrased invitations as though the outcome were already agreed, as though he simply assumed you'd say yes because you almost always did.

"Alright."

He fell into step beside you, and for a little while you just walked — past the wine bar with its fairy lights, past the old library that had become a gin distillery at some point in the last decade, past the post office that had been there since before either of you were born. You talked about small things. Easy things. The kind of conversation that runs alongside the real one underneath.

Then he stopped.

You stopped too.

Simon looked down at you. His hands were in his pockets. That brown gaze of his moved over your face in the way it had been moving over your face all evening — like he was cataloguing it, like he was making up for lost time in the looking.

"Dance with me," he said.

You blinked. "What?"

He tilted his head, "Come dancing with me."

You stared at him.

Simon Riley, who had sat against the wall at every school disco you'd ever attended, arms folded, watching everyone else with the expression of a man conducting a private risk assessment.

Simon Riley, who you had never, in thirty years of knowing him, seen voluntarily approach a dance floor.

"You don't dance," you said.

"No," he agreed. "But you do."

The simplicity of it landed somewhere very central.

You do.

As though that were reason enough. As though your enjoyment of a thing were sufficient justification for him to walk into it without hesitation.

Which, you supposed, when it came to Simon, it always had been.

"Alright," you said, for the second time in ten minutes.

His hand found the small of your back again, that same light, deliberate touch from inside the restaurant and he guided you down the street.

Simon said you weren't far, when you heard it.

The particular sound of a Domino's box. The slight crinkle of a carrier bag. And then your mother's voice, carrying across the quiet street in the way it always had — warm and clear and entirely without volume control.

"Oh honey! We thought - oh!"

"Oh fuck," you cursed.

You said it very quietly. Not quietly enough. Simon chuckled under his breath.

Your parents were coming along the pavement from the direction of the only car park around here — your father in his weekend coat, your mother in the blue one she'd had for fifteen years. A Domino's pizza box balanced in her arms and a carrier bag hanging from your father's hand.

Movie night. Of course. They still did it every other Saturday, had done since you were small, and of course they would do it tonight of all the Saturday nights in the entire calendar.

Your mother's face when she saw you was pure, unguarded delight — the face she always made when she encountered you unexpectedly, as though each time were still a pleasant surprise. Then her gaze moved, naturally and automatically, to the man standing beside you with his hand at the small of your back.

The delight didn't disappear. It did something more complicated.

"Oh honey," she said again, but differently this time. Softer. Her voice going somewhere else entirely. "Simon?"

The Domino's box dipped. Your father caught it with the reflexes of a man who had been catching things your mother nearly dropped for forty years.

Simon had gone still beside you. Not that controlled, present stillness he had, the one that wasn't tension but something adjacent to it. He was looking at your mother with an expression you couldn't fully read from the side, but you could see the line of his jaw, and it was careful.

"Mrs—" he started.

"Don't you Mrs me," your mother said. Her voice was not angry. That was the thing — you'd prepared yourself, in the split second between seeing them and now, for anger, or for the brisk, self-protective coolness she used sometimes when she'd been frightened. But it wasn't that. It was something that had tears in it, which was considerably worse to witness.

She handed the pizza box to your father without looking at him — he took it with the silent competence of long practice — and she crossed the pavement in four short steps and she put her arms around Simon Riley.

He was so much larger than her. He had always been larger than her, even at fifteen when he'd eaten her shepherd's pie at the kitchen table and been careful to seem like it was casual and not like he was starving. Even when she gave him seconds and he looked like he would beg for thirds.

But now it was almost absurd, the smallness of her against the width of him, and he stood there for just a fraction of a second — that fraction where you could see him recalibrating, receiving something he hadn't prepared for — and then his arms came around her and he held on.

Your mother was crying. Small, quiet sounds, the kind she made when she was trying not to. Her face was pressed against his chest and her hands gripped the back of his black shirt and she said, muffled and with great feeling, "You absolute boy."

Simon said nothing. His eyes, over the top of your mother's head, found yours.

You had to look away. The street was very interesting. The lamppost in particular.

You bit into your lip.

Your father appeared at your shoulder.

He was a quiet man, always had been. The kind of steady, observant presence that took things in without making a production of the taking in. He stood beside you with the pizza box over one arm and the carrier bag in the other hand and watched his wife hold the boy who had eaten at their table for a decade, and he said, very quietly, to you,

"Well. He's not dead then."

"No Dad," you managed. "He's not dead."

"Good," your father said.

As though this settled it. As though the entirety of the past five years of your grief and his, because he had grieved Simon too in his quiet way, in the way of a man who doesn't say things aloud but feels them thoroughly. He looked at Simon over the top of your mother's head and gave him a single, deliberate nod. The kind that meant; we'll talk. The kind that meant; I have things to say to you. The kind that also, underneath both of those, meant; I'm so glad son.

Simon received the nod with equal gravity, which was exactly right.

Your mother finally pulled back. She held Simon by the arms — or tried to, her hands not quite making it around the circumference of them — and looked up at him with red eyes and the particular expression of a woman who has a great deal to say and is choosing, for now, not to say most of it.

"You'll come for dinner," she said. Not a question. The same tone she'd used on him at fifteen and apparently intended to continue using indefinitely. "Sunday. Proper dinner. Not a restaurant. Mine."

"Yes," Simon said. Immediately. Without hesitation.

"Good." She released his arms and reached up and patted his cheek once, firmly, the way you might with someone who had done something frustrating and beloved in equal measure.

Then she turned to you, and her expression did something complicated and warm and knowing, and she didn't say any of the things she was clearly thinking, which you appreciated deeply.

What she said instead was: "Don't stay out too late. You're thirty-five, not seventeen."

"Mum." You scolded.

"I'm just saying." She shrugged.

"We're going dancing," you told her, with the energy of someone redirecting a conversation through sheer momentum.

Your mother looked at Simon. Simon looked at your mother. Something passed between them that was private and thirty years old and not yours to have.

"Of course you are," she said.

Your father passed the Domino's box back to your mother, and said, "Right then. We'll leave you to it." He looked at Simon one more time. "Sunday," he confirmed.

"Sunday," Simon said.

Your parents moved off down the pavement.

Your mother looked back once — just once — and her face when she did was the face you'd seen her wear at your primary school nativity and at your GCSE results and on the morning you'd gone to university; the particular face of a woman watching her child be happy and feeling the full, complicated, loving weight of it.

Then she turned back to your father and said something you couldn't hear, and his hand found her shoulder as they walked, and they rounded the corner and were gone.

You stood on the pavement in the September evening and breathed.

Beside you, Simon was also very carefully just standing there.

"She cried on me," he said, after a moment.

"Yes."

"Didn't expect that."

You turned to look at him. He was looking at the corner your parents had turned, and his face had the quality it sometimes had when something had reached him — not visibly, not dramatically, just in that particular stillness that meant something had got through.

"She cried about you," you told him. "When you stopped writing. Three years ago — there were several times, actually, but three years ago was the worst. She held me in her kitchen and we both—" You stopped. Managed the next part carefully. "She loves you too, Simon. She always did. You were at our table every other night for years."

He was quiet for a moment. Something moved in his jaw. "I know," he said. And this time the I know was different from all the other times he'd said it tonight — heavier, and private.

"You agreed to Sunday dinner," you giggled.

"Of course I agreed to Sunday dinner," he said knowing full well he would have been stupid not to and gotten an earful from your mother.

Simon offered you his hand.

Not at the small of your back this time. His hand, palm up, in the space between you. Old-fashioned and deliberate.

You put yours in it.

"Come on then," he said. "Let's go dancing."

There was, as it turned out, only one place to go dancing in this town on a Saturday night if you meant actual dancing — the kind with a proper floor and music with a real structure to it.

It was not a club.

It was not a bar with a cleared space near the speaker.

It was the old church hall on Callow Street, which had been hosting the Saturday Evening Social Dance since before either of you were born, and which Simon seemed to know about with the specificity of a man who had done his research.

"A dance hall," you said, standing outside it. Through the tall, thin windows the warm light was visible, and the sound — strings, a proper band, something with a waltz rhythm that made the windows hum faintly. "You're taking me to a dance hall."

"Only place with a floor."

"Simon, this is a — there will be pensioners in there." you said quietly.

"There'll be a dance floor," he looked down at you. "And you said yes." he shrugged but looked smug.

He pushed the door open and held it, and because you had in fact said yes, and because the music through the door sounded genuinely lovely, and because you were still holding his hand from the pavement, you went in.

The church hall smelled of floor polish and tea. Fairy lights were strung along the rafters — someone's addition, not the original fixtures, and they made the whole space amber and soft.

Round tables lined the edges, most of them occupied by couples in their sixties and seventies and eighties, a few younger faces dotted among them, everyone dressed with the particular care of people who still believed an evening out was worth dressing for.

On the small stage at the far end, a four-piece band was working through something in three-four time with the ease of musicians who had played together for years.

And at the edge of the floor, clipboard in hand, wearing the same expression of organised authority she'd worn every PE lesson for fifteen years was Mrs Valerie Croft.

She was smaller than you remembered. Or perhaps you were simply larger.

She'd retired at some point — the hair was fully silver now rather than streaked — but the posture was identical: spine straight, chin up, the bearing of a woman who had spent decades telling teenagers to stand properly and had eventually simply become the embodiment of the instruction.

She looked up from her clipboard as you approached and her eyes moved from you to Simon, and to her credit, she didn't miss a step.

"Well," she tilted her chin up to meet his eyes, "Riley."

"Miss," Simon said. Which was technically incorrect given that she had a ring on her finger and had for as long as you'd known her, but you suspected it was because he'd called her Miss in secondary school the way you had. "Mrs Croft. Sorry. We were passing and— " He paused, which was unlike him. "Is there any chance we could crash it?"

Mrs Croft looked at him. She looked at you. She looked at your joined hands with the expression of a woman who had supervised enough teenagers to recognise a development when she saw one.

"Can you behave yourselves?" she asked.

"Yes," you said nodding.

Simon said nothing.

Mrs Croft made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one. "Floor's open," she said. "Don't knock anyone over." And she turned back to her clipboard.

The first dance was not elegant.

Simon was, as he had always been and had openly admitted, not a dancer.

He was a man built for other kinds of movement — purposeful, directed, the kind that had somewhere to go. Dancing required a different relationship with your body, a willingness to be present in it without agenda, and that was not naturally his.

But he was trying. And Simon Riley trying at something he wasn't good at with complete, unhesitating commitment was one of your favourite things in the world.

He held you correctly — one hand at your waist, the other holding yours at the right height — because he had clearly looked this up at some point, which you were choosing not to think about too hard. His footwork was careful. Deliberate. Slightly behind the beat in the way of someone counting silently.

"You're counting," you told him trying your hardest not to laugh.

"Shut up."

"Simon, I can see your lips moving." you snorted.

"I said shut up."

You were laughing now. Properly, helplessly, the kind that came up from somewhere real — and he looked down at you with that face, that flat, long-suffering, completely fond face, and something in his eyes that was warm in a way that had nothing to do with patience and everything to do with the fact that your laugh had always been, apparently, one of his favourite sounds.

"You're doing fine," you told him, once you'd recovered.

"I'm doing terribly," he answered. "Keep going."

By the second dance, he was better.

By the third, he had found something. Some adjustment in the way he held you, the way his hand settled more fully at your waist, drawing you closer so the movement between you became less about individual steps and more about one shared thing. He was a quick study. He always had been, once he'd decided something was worth doing.

You became aware, gradually, of the room watching.

Not intrusively. Not all at once. But in the soft, peripheral way of a room full of people who have been in love for decades and recognise the particular weather of it when it walks through the door.

An older couple near the stage — she in pale blue, he in a suit that had been good once and was still cared for — had stopped talking to watch you.

A woman at one of the corner tables had her chin in her hand.

Mrs Croft, by the door, was very deliberately looking at her clipboard and failing to look only at her clipboard.

You didn't mind. You were too busy watching Simon watch you.

The band changed tempo at half past nine.

The waltz gave way to something with a different shape entirely — something that moved from the hips rather than the feet, a rhythm that was slower in its pulse and considerably less innocent in its intention.

A rumba.

You looked up at Simon.

He looked down at you.

"I don't know this one," he said.

"I'll show you." you breathed.

You took his hand and placed it lower at your waist, right above the curve of your ass. Deliberately watching his face when you did it, watching the shift in his expression, the way something in his eyes went very still and very focused. "Hip to hip," you told him. "Slower than you think. Let the music pull you."

He followed your lead with an attention that was frankly overwhelming in its completeness.

Simon Riley giving you his full, undivided, physical focus was not a small thing. He was so large and so present and he moved with you rather than against you, adjusting with every shift of your weight, and somewhere in the second minute of the song the counting stopped and something else replaced it.

He drew you closer. His hand at your hip pulled you in until there was no space left between you, until you could feel the warmth of him through the green of your dress and you were very aware of every point of contact, of the music and of the room full of people who had gone very quiet.

Then he turned you.

It was not technically correct. It was not what the dance required. But he turned you in a single, smooth movement that his body had decided on and yours simply followed, because that was what it did with him.

And then he dipped you.

The room tilted. His arm was across your back, solid and immovable, and you were suspended in the amber light with the music around you and your hand at his shoulder.

He lowered you — slowly, with complete control, no hesitation in the hold and then his face was close, very close, and his nose grazed the line of your throat making your breath hitch.

A slow, deliberate graze. The warmth of his breath against your pulse point. You felt it in places that had nothing to do with dancing, between your legs throbbing.

His hand — the one at your hip — slid down, just slightly, just enough, finding the outside of your thigh where the fabric of your dress lay, and he hooked your leg, slowly, around his hip. His fingers at the back of your thigh. Holding you there. His nose still at your throat.

The music resolved. Somewhere behind you, someone started clapping.

He brought you upright. Smoothly, slowly, until you were standing again and his hand was still at the back of your thigh. Your leg still around his hip and your faces were very close. Your heart was conducting itself in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with exertion.

You were panting. Slightly. Just slightly.

He was not panting. He was looking down at you with the almost-smile, the one that had always been rarer than gold and twice as valuable — and his eyes were warm and very dark and entirely, completely satisfied with themselves.

"You looked that up as well," you managed.

"No," he said.

"Simon—"

"That one," he said, "I just wanted to do."

From the table by the stage, the woman in pale blue was applauding with great enthusiasm. Her husband had two fingers in his mouth and was whistling.

Mrs Croft had given up entirely on the clipboard.

The taxi back was not a long ride.

It felt longer than it was, and shorter than you wanted.

You sat beside him in the back seat with his thigh against yours and the city moving past the windows and neither of you speaking. The silence had a texture to it that was thick and warm and anticipatory in a way that made the air feel heavy in your lungs.

His hand was on your knee. Just resting there, heavy and warm, the way he did everything — with complete, unapologetic certainty.

You did not move it.

The house appeared at the end of the lane with its white fence and its dark windows and the lavender silver in the moonlight.

You were out of the taxi before it had fully stopped and you were aware how eager this appeared and you didn't care.

Simon paid the driver and caught up with you in three strides because his legs were considerably longer than yours and always had been.

He got to the door first. Key in hand.

The door opened.

And you did not wait for him to step through it.

You took him by the front of his shirt, that black shirt, warm from his body, the fabric bunching in your fists and you lips were suddenly on his.

You walked him backwards through the doorway and you felt the moment his back met the wall just inside and you were already kissing him before he'd fully registered the sequence of events.

Your mouth on his. Your hands in the front of his shirt. Thirty years of it finding its way out all at once, without ceremony, without preamble, without any of the careful management you had been applying to yourself since you were four years old at a preschool art table.

He kissed you back.

He kissed you back the way he did everything — thoroughly, completely, with his full attention and no apparent interest in doing anything else ever again.

His hands came to your face, big and careful, tilting your jaw, and for a moment you were simply inside the realness of him and the warmth of him and the fact that he was here and alive and kissing you in the hallway of the house he'd bought for you.

He pulled back.

"Easy, sunshine," he said against your lips. Low. A little breathless, which you would be privately triumphant about later. The corner of his mouth pulled up in that crooked smile.

You became aware, in the slightly dazed way of someone returning from somewhere, that your hands were still in his shirt and his hands were still on your face and you were standing approximately two inches apart in his hallway.

You also became aware, in the refocusing of your vision, of his mouth.

Of the scar on his upper lip.

You didn't know how you hadn't noticed it before — through dinner, through the dancing, through all of it.

Perhaps you had simply not been this close before. Or perhaps you had been looking at so many things that you hadn't been looking at everything.

It was small, a thin pale line bisecting the left side of his upper lip, old enough to have faded to silver, the kind of scar that had been there for years and had been lived with so thoroughly that the face had absorbed it.

You lifted your thumb and touched it, gently. "How'd you get this?"

He went very still, alert and present and reading you.

You kissed it. Softly. Just that.

Something moved in his throat.

His hands shifted from your face to your waist, warm and settled, and he began to move you gently — backwards, one steady step at a time — turning you both away from the wall and deeper into the hallway. His foot found the door behind him and pushed it closed with a quiet, final click.

"If I tell you about that one," he said, his voice low and even above your head as he guided you past the entrance and toward the stairs, "I'll have to tell you about the rest."

He looked down at you as he said it, that look, the one that said you were the most interesting thing he had ever encountered. The one that made you feel simultaneously seen and slightly undone — and his expression had in it something that was fond and amused and entirely, devastatingly warm.

You kicked your heels off at the bottom of the stairs. They went somewhere behind you. You didn't look.

Your bag went next, dropped against the banister.

"The rest?" you repeated. Your voice came out slightly smaller than you intended. Your eyes, entirely without your permission, moved down the front of him — the black shirt, the breadth of his shoulders, his torso, his thick thighs, all of him — and back up again. Slowly.

He watched you do it. He said nothing.

You swallowed. "Tell me then."

His hand at your waist steered you up the first step, and then the second, and the stairs curved slightly toward the landing above, and at the top of the stairs he pushed open the door to a bedroom.

The room was large and furnished.

A bed, properly large, the kind that accommodated a man his size without complaint. Low lamps on either side casting the same amber warmth as the hall below. Dark wood floors, a window looking out toward the garden, the curtain shifting slightly in a crack of night air.

He kissed you, just inside the door you kissed him back and his hands were at your hips.

Then he pulled back with a groan. Both of you breathing slightly harder than was strictly accounted for by climbing one flight of stairs.

"I want to, sunshine," he said. His voice was very low. Restrained. His hands still on your body, holding you there, his thumbs moving in a small slow motion against the fabric of your dress that was doing nothing to help you think clearly. "I do. But I need to hear it from you first. Your permission. Clear words. I don't want to misunderstand you."

You opened your mouth.

And then your eyes moved, over his shoulder, to the dresser.

A skull mask looked back at you.

You closed your mouth. You looked at it. The mask, white and stark and precise but somehow both alien and completely, recognisably his. The balaclava beside it, folded neatly. And tactical gloves — enormous, black, reinforced, approximately the size of your head.

"That yours?" you asked.

Simon turned his head, following your gaze. He looked at the dresser, then back at you. "Yeah."

"What is it?"

"What I wear on missions."

"Oh," you said.

And then your brain did something entirely beyond your authority. It constructed, with great speed and considerable detail, an image: Simon, broad and enormous, in black tactical gear. Gloved hands. That mask. Hovering over you.

You swallowed.

The image did not leave. It simply settled in, warm and vivid and decidedly unhelpful.

"Sunshine."

His hand came to your face — his big, warm, ungloved hand, his actual hand, the one you knew — his thumb sweeping gently under your eye, bringing you back into the room and the amber lamplight and the present moment.

"Hmm?" you managed meeting his gaze.

His eyes moved over your face with the same comprehensive attention he always gave you.

"Your permission, love," he said. Quiet. Certain.

"Oh." You blinked. "Yes. Yes, you have it. Always."

The almost-smile. "Not for everything I want to do to you." His thumb was still moving, very gently, under your eye. "I'll ask. Multiple times."

You stared at him. "Multiple—"

"Times," he confirmed. His voice was entirely level. His eyes were not.

You pushed his shoulder and your cheeks burned.

He caught your hand as you pushed it and laughed, a low, real, full sound, the kind that you had spent most of your life engineering because it was so rare and so completely, unreasonably good.

You laughed too, properly, the helpless kind, and his forehead came down to rest against yours and you were both laughing in the amber light of his bedroom with the skull mask on the dresser and the lavender outside the window and thirty years behind you and everything in front.

The laughing settled.

Not all at once — it unwound gradually, the way laughter does when it's the real kind, leaving something warm and loose in its place.

His forehead was still against yours. His hands had moved from your face to your waist, both of them now, holding you the way he'd held you on the dance floor — with that complete, unhurried certainty, like you were something he'd been waiting to hold properly for a very long time and intended to do it right.

The amber light of the lamps lay across everything. Through the gap in the curtain, you could see the edge of the garden — the pale shapes of flowers, the dark of the lawn.

"Tell me about the rest," you said quietly.

He pulled back just enough to look at you. "The scars?"

"You said if you told me about the one on your lip you'd have to tell me about the rest." You reached up and touched the scar again — that thin, silver line — with the pad of your thumb. "So tell me about the rest."

He looked at you for a long moment. Then he reached up and began, without ceremony, to unbutton his shirt.

You were very still.

He did it the way he did everything — without drama, without performance, button by button from the collar down, and when he shrugged it from his shoulders and set it aside you understood, in a way you hadn't before, what eighteen years of that life had written on him.

He was enormous.

You'd known that in the abstract — had known it from the doorframe and the dance floor and the way rooms seemed to reorganise themselves around him — but this was different.

This was the specific, undeniable reality of his shoulders, the breadth of his chest, the muscle of his arms that carried the tattoo sleeve on the left, the ink wrapping from wrist to shoulder in dark, intricate patterns that in this light you still couldn't fully read but wanted to.

And the scars.

There were more than you'd expected.

Each one a different shape and age and story, written into the topography of him in pale and silver lines. A long one along his left ribs. Something older, fainter, across the top of his right shoulder. A circular scar below his collarbone on the left side that your medical knowledge was sufficient to identify and that made your chest constrict briefly and completely before you put that particular knowledge away for now.

He was watching your face as you looked. Careful. Giving you the time of it.

You stepped forward. You placed your hand flat against his sternum — his heart under your palm, steady and real — and you felt him exhale.

"The lip," you said.

"Kandahar. 2004. Caught the stock of a rifle." He said it the same way he'd told you everything tonight — flat, factual, trusting the fact to carry the weight. "Bit through my lip. Wasn't pretty for a while."

You moved your hand from his sternum to his ribs. Found the long scar there, traced it gently with your fingertips.

"That one."

"Knife. 2009. I moved the wrong way and the other man moved the right way." The shadow of something in his face that was not quite humour and not quite not. "Lesson learned."

Your hand moved to his shoulder. The older, fainter scar.

"Before the military," he said, before you asked. His voice changed, just fractionally. Flatter. Doing more work to stay level. "Not a mission."

You understood. You didn't ask further. You pressed your lips to it instead — gently, just that, your mouth against the old pale mark — and you felt the breath go out of him in a way that was different from all the others. Slower. Deeper.

"Sunshine," he said. Very quietly.

"The one below your collarbone," you said.

A pause. "That one's not a story for tonight."

You tilted your head back to look up at him. "Is it a story for eventually?"

His eyes on yours. Something in them that was considering, assessing, "Yeah," he said. "Eventually."

"Alright," you said. You meant it. You had waited thirty years; you could wait for the story of one scar.

His hand moved to your face. That same gesture from the hallway — his thumb at your cheek, slow and deliberate and he tilted your chin up and kissed you. Not urgently this time. Slowly. Deeply.

His hands found the zip at the side of your dress — careful, unhurried — and he looked at you, a clear question in it, and you nodded, and his hands were very steady and very gentle. Your dress went the way of your heels and your bag, somewhere behind you, unmissed.

He looked at you the way he had looked at you on the porch yesterday, and outside The Grill tonight, and across the restaurant table, and on the dance floor — with that complete, comprehensive attention.

Only now there was nothing restrained about what was in it. It was simply there, open and certain, and it was thirty years of something finally being allowed to be exactly what it was.

"Hi," you said. Which was absurd. Which made him laugh again, low and real.

"Hi, sunshine," he said. His hands at your waist. His forehead dropping to yours.

“Si I need to-“ you breathed in deep, “I um,” he pulled his head away from yours, looking into your eyes with those brilliant brown ones of his.

“What is it Sunshine?” He asked, his finger under your chin tilting your head up.

“I’m, I’ve never-“ you sigh, “I’ve told you so many things, I can’t believe I can’t even say this to you.”

“Do we need to slow down?” He asked, his voice softening.

“No. It’s not that. I mean I’m not a virgin if that’s what you’re thinking I just, no guy has ever-“ you sigh again, your eyes dropping from his.

Simon is quiet. He waits, the way he always waits — giving you the whole space of it, not rushing you toward the end of the sentence.

“Made it good,” you finally say, to his chest. “For me. It’s always just, fine. Maybe sometimes I get close but then it’s over. Not that there’s been loads of guys, maybe three.”

A beat.

You make yourself look up at him.

Something changes in his face.

You see the flare of it.

Anger.

Not toward you — you feel that immediately, the anger isn't at you, it moves through him and settles somewhere else entirely. His jaw shifts. His eyes, for just a moment, go somewhere dark and quiet.

"Every one of them," he says. Low. More to himself than to you.

"Simon—"

"Had you," he says. "And didn't—" He stops. The jaw again. His eyes squeeze shut. "Didn't pay attention."

"It's not—"

"It is." His eyes open. He looks at you, his hands moving to your hips, both of them, settling there with a weight that feels like anchoring, like he needs the contact as much as you do. The darkness has settled now, controlled, underneath everything else.

"And I wasn't here." Something moves through his expression — not guilt exactly, but something adjacent to it, something private and old. "Should've been your first, sunshine. Should've been there to—"

He stops himself. His forehead drops to yours.

"I've waited years for this," he says quietly. "I'm not rushing it. And I'm going to pay attention."

“Pay attention?” You ask breathless.

“To every sigh,” he kissed your cheek, “whimper and moan.” His lips moved down to your jaw. “To the way your hips move, the way your back arches, the way you’ll writhe under me, how I’ve imaged it every time I’ve gotten off for the last two decades.” He whispered the last bit into your ear, teeth tugging on your earlobe.

You gasp, “Simon.” Your cheeks burn.

“Oh don’t tell me you never thought about it.” He grins pulling back to look down at you.

You look at the floor sheepishly cause of course you have. Of course you’ve cum the hardest you ever have in your life only when thinking about Simon fucking you.

"Oh you have." He smirked titling his head.

“Shut up.” You push his shoulder and he laughs.

His hands leave your hips and then you're moving, his arms around you, and the edge of the bed meets the back of your knees.

Then his massive paws are in your hair and his lips are on your neck as your back meets the sheets. His weight heavy and solid on you. You could tell he was holding himself up so he didn’t squish you.

He leaned back on his heels, kneeling between your legs. You sighed in satisfaction when his fingers ran over your bare skin. His blunt nails scratching softly where your pelvic bone sits.

"So beautiful Sunshine," He grabs your hips and squeezes, "Fill my hands with you finally." Simon groans. A noise you've been picturing in your head. This and everything else that happens this evening, you truly believe, will be one of those times when reality is better than anything you have imagined.

Simon's brown eyes have always been intense, but right now the way he's looking down at you it's like he is someone else entirely. His eyes almost black with how much they have darkened.

"Simon." You tangle your fingers with his.

"Can I?" He asks. His hand, the one not in yours, trailing down your thigh and stopping on your mound. You clench around nothing when he pushes down, just a little bit of pressure that you feel in your clit and makes your hips buck.

You don't miss the way his lips do the almost smile thing. You nod furiously but he shakes his head.

"Need your words love." He raises a brow.

"Yes, yes Simon touch me." You breathe out, your chest feeling tight when he nods, moving his hand down to cup your cunt over your underwear.

And maybe its because you haven't had sex in three years, maybe its because you are touch starved or maybe its simply because its Simon, but your back arches and your moan is down right pornographic with a simple touch over your underwear.

"So responsive." He mumbles, his thumb rubbing circles over your clit through the fabric. "Get your tits out for me Sunshine, wanna see em." he grunts feeling your underwear getting wet.

Shakily you reach behind your back and unclip your bra. "Been thinking about them for years. What they look like, how they'll bounce when I fuck you." He groans as you pull the straps down your arms and fling the bra on the floor.

His eyes are on your chest, he doesn't blink. Then as if his system has rebooted, he blows air out of his cheeks and whistles low. "Fuck lovie, so pretty. You're a dream." Simon leans forward and wraps his lips around your breast, his tongue swirling around the nipple as his thumb continues circling your clit.

You moan, fingers tugging at his hair.

He comes off your breast with a pop making you whine and push at his shoulder. He grins pressing his thumb firmer against you, while sliding his other hand over your leg, index finger tracing over the small scar on you leg from when you fell off your bike after Simon broke your training wheels.

There was something comforting about this. Simon wasn't someone you had to explain yourself to, he already knew every version of you, he was simply adding this one to his list. This version, open and honest and begging the man you'd known for thirty years to make you cum on his fingers.

This didn't feel like a hook up, not like other guys have, but it felt like two people who have been each other's home for years and they're finally admitting it.

"Kiss me Simon." You're not even sure if what you said made sense with how much you were panting. But he leaned down to graze his lips along yours. Teasing and soft, despite the fast past he'd started to set with his thumb.

"Stop teasing." You huffed.

"Its my favourite pastime." He grinned hooking his fingers in your underwear, pulling them down and moving with them to settle between your legs.

You gasp, when his tongue slides from your asshole to your clit. "Simon!" His dark eyes are locked on yours as he swirls the tip of his his tongue around your entrance. Your toes curl, your head falling back onto the soft bed sheets.

A few occasions, you could count on one hand, had a guy you were with eaten you out and it was good but fuck, it didn't feel like this.

You felt like you were burning all over with each swipe of his tongue, each dip inside your entrance, each pattern he begins to circle over your clit.

He was learning you.

Simon groans against you, his breath hot, it made you dizzy. You feel everything, its too much to quick and your hips start to buck against his mouth.

Simon clearly had no intention of slowing down or stopping as he slides his arms around your thighs and splays his hands over the tops of them locking you in place.

It feels like fire, like molten lava pooling low in your abdomen the harder his tongue presses against you.

You don’t even recognise the sounds coming out of you, it’s as if every movement pulls a new one from you. 

His thumb replaces his tongue and he rubs the bump in small circles until you can barely breathe. “Sound so pretty,” he murmurs just as your back arches and you moan loudly into the night air. 

He is still speaking but you can’t hear anything he is saying, it’s all blurring together the way your vision is blurring. His thumb slides from your clit down until it’s pushing its way inside you. Your hips jerk away but his other hand is quick to hold you in place.

“No running.” Simon growls.

You cry out when his tongue comes back to torture you, lapping at you like he’s never had a drink and you're fresh water. Soon enough the rhythm he’s built has your hips rolling forward seeking more of whatever he has to give you.

Your hand reaches for his arm and squeezes hard the exact moment your vision turns white and your body shakes, dissolving into pleasure. It's like lightning pulsing through you. He works your through your orgasm, wringing every last wave of pleasure from you before he moves to your lips, kissing you.

“Did so good Sunshine. I’ve got you.” His arms wrap around you, your nipples grazing against the hair on his chest, that alone has you whimpering. 

"Need more, want you inside me Simon. Please." You look into his eyes, your shyness gone with your orgasm.

"Okay Sunshine." Simon chuckles, the sound vibrating against you.

He pulls back and gets off the bed before he starts to unbuckle his belt. He pushes his black slacks down along with his underwear, his large, and he was so fucking big, cock already hard.

"Always wondered what you'd be like in bed," He tilts his head with a smirk, "If you'd like being in control. Or if you'd prefer me to lead," He knelt on the bed again, and oh my god Simon Riley, your best friend of thirty years and the love of your life was crawling up the bed towards you until his cock was flush with your entrance. "If you'd be needy and beg. Or if you'd bark orders at me." He slapped the head of his cock against your clit. "If you'd be loud or quiet."

"If you'd let me do whatever I wanted to you," his head titled back, eyes shut, "Fuck Sunshine, the things I've imagined doing to you," He looks down at you with the most intense gaze, pining you there on the bed, "Would you let me lovie? Do whatever I want to you?" He asks, pearly whites peaking out to sink into his bottom lip.

"Like what?" Your breath is so unsteady, so hitched and uneven you feel your cheeks heat even more than they have done at his words.

He grins, "Like what?" He chuckles pushing the head of his cock against your entrance, not in, but resting against it, "Wanna fuck you so hard you can't walk. Make love to you slow and so deep you'll feel me everywhere. Bend you over every surface in this house and make you cry on my cock-"

"Simon!" You gasp.

"Can I Sunshine?" He groans pushing in a little more and your eyes sting with tears at the stretch.

"Yes! Please yes!" He pushes in slowly. One of his hands coming next to you on the bed and the other gripping your hip. He keeps sliding in further, so slowly until its sheathed inside you.

Simon does not move. You can see the restraint within the way his teeth are gritted, his brows furrowed, sweat forming on his forehead. 

“Fuck you feel amazing wrapped around me, so tight.” He groans. 

You don’t have any words and even if you did, you doubt you would be able to say them. You have never felt so…full. So filled to the brim and unable to get a reprieve from it.

“M’gonna move, gotta move Sunshine,” Simon growls and the fullness disappears for a second before he’s pushing himself back in. 

“Fuck you feel so good Si.” You shudder and stars appear in your vision when he moves forward and takes your legs with him folding you in half.

Simon Riley has you in fucking mating press and didn't even break the slow rhythm he's building. He continues this push and pull movement until it begins to flow, each movement begins where the other ends. The pattern making you sob, “Don’t stop!”

You can't function and its only now that you understand the phrase 'being fucked dumb', rocking your hips, trying desperately to keep up with each thrust, back arched so beautifully.

Simon lets his hand slip and curve around your jaw without thinking about it, "Taking me so well Sunshine." The feral look in his eyes sends a shiver up your spine.

"Too big." You sobbed, your hands grabbing at his large biceps as he thrusts harder. He could feel every ridge and curve of your sopping cunt.

"You can take it." He encouraged you, biting at your neck leaving marks in his wake and looking so damn happy whilst doing it.

You continued to moan and whimper, tears of pleasure falling down your face while Simon's huge body hovered over you. Protecting you from the outside world, in here, it was just you and him.

"Si..oh!" you cried out feeling him hit that rough spot inside your weeping, swollen cunt.

"There it is." He didn't mean to grin like a obsessed man in such an intimate moment but he couldn't help himself. He never can with you. Each thrust hits the one place no man ever seems to be able to find but Simon seemingly found with ease. A spot that makes a tightening begin like a coil, being wound with every drive of his hips.

Your sinful noises morph into higher pitched breathy little screams.

"I know lovie, I know." He cooed, holding you closer. His sweat glazed skin meeting yours as his large veiny hand slips under your head, his other arm curling around your waist.

You move your hips and he groans vulgar into the air, his hand gripping your hair and pulling your head back, a little to the side before he attacks your neck all messy. Smearing his lips across your throat, you don’t even recognise the sound that leaves your mouth.

He pulls away, his dark eyes flit to your squelching pussy, the noise attracting his attention pupils dilating, honing in on the way your cunt sucks his cock back in. He couldn’t pull away even if he wanted to and fuck he doesn’t, he wants nothing more than to stay in your pretty pussy forever.

“Simonfuckyespleaserighttheredontstop!” All the words and moans blend together until your mumbling nonsense trying your hardest to keep conscious, it’s difficult with the way he’s fucking into you so deliciously it’s making you delirious in the best way.

His big body towering over yours, big hands gripping you almost bruisingly. His thick muscular hairy thighs press against your skin compellingly, the sight before you, it's irresistible. All you have to do is look down to see his massive cock sliding in and out of you, a ring of white collecting at the base.

It's too much seeing him like this, feeling the sweet pleasure burn through you and yet Simon moves one of his hands off your head and presses a thumb to your swollen, aching clit.

You're done for.

You sob, so fucking loud you swear everyone in the world can hear it, hot tears flow down your cheeks staining them.

"That's it." The words wash over you with your orgasm, it swirls around you, clings to you, and pushes you down down down the rabbit hole of pleasure. Oversensitivity sets in making you whine at his touch, but you can't stop yourself from wanting more.

Your hips buck into his touch eliciting a dirty chuckle from him.

As Simon picks up his thrusts, he comes to the conclusion that he loves you like this, wants to see it everyday. You're so drunk, so delirious and he loves it. Loves the far away look in your eyes right before they roll back into your skull.

He shoves his face into your neck groaning, "Gonna cum Sunshine, need to. Where?" his thrusts pick up again, as if that were even possible.

"Cum inside me Simon, fill me up." You cry out.

Simon must have been right there as he cums the second you finish your sentence. Hot thick robes of cum pushing deep inside you. He rubs your clit faster and another smaller orgasm zips through you leaving you whimpering.

He stays in you, holding you until he goes soft. He moves your legs so they don't cramp. "Did so well for me Sunshine. I love you so much." He looks into your eyes as more tears spill down your cheeks.

"I love you Simon." you bring your fingers into his hair, pulling him closer to kiss you. The contrast between the way he just destroyed your guts and is now kissing you so softly, is astounding.

He is careful when he picks you up and walks into the ensuite bathroom to the right, flicking the light on and placing you on the toilet. "Gotta pee sunshine, don't want you getting you a uti." He says and you're so tired you don't even have the energy to be embarrassed.

Your eyes as still closed as you pee. Your hand moves to find the toilet paper but a warm flannel is being pressed against you, Simon's other hand on your knee to keep them open. You whine and push his hand away, "Simon that's icky." You frown at him opening your eyes to see him looking at you with a frown of his own.

"Nothing about you is icky Sunshine. I'm clearing up my mess, now move your hand." You do as told and it occurs to you, through your tired haze, while Simon gently wipes you clean that he must be used to clearing up mess with the job he does.

"All done. Want a shower or straight to sleep?" He asks.

"Sleep." You yawn making him smile at you.

He carries you back to the bed, lifting the duvet and settling you both underneath it.

The particular quality of afterwards settles in the room.

The warmth of it, the specific silence, the way the world outside the window continues to exist and you become aware of it again in layers. The sound of the garden. The distant sound of a car somewhere. The sound of him breathing.

You were lying with your head on his chest. His arm around you, heavy and warm. His heartbeat under your ear, steady and unhurried, the same heart that had been beating beside you in one form or another for thirty years.

His hand moved. Slowly, idly, up and down your back.

You watched the lamplight glow on the beside table. You thought about the lavender. You thought about the train station in 2001, and the birthday cards, and the bottom stair with the cream envelope, and Margaret Howarth saying you always did belong together with the satisfied certainty of someone who had known it before either of you did.

"Simon," you said.

"Yeah."

"You planted lavender for three years."

"You mentioned that already."

"I'm still processing it."

A low sound in his chest that was the rumble of a laugh contained. "Take your time Sunshine."

You propped yourself up and looked at him. His face in the lamplight — older, marked, those brown eyes that had been watching you since you were four years old, now watching you from a pillow in the house he'd bought you.

His expression was open in the way it had been open on the porch and at the restaurant table and in the dance hall, the way it had been open perhaps three times in thirty years before tonight and was now, apparently, simply his face when he looked at you.

You loved him so much.

You had loved him in different quantities and different registers for most of your life and now you loved him in this one too, this new one, and it was the same love and completely different and you thought you would be discovering its dimensions for a considerable amount of time.

"You should have told me," you said. "Years ago. Before the train."

"Yeah," he said. No argument.

"I would have said it back then too."

Something moved in his face. "I know," he said. And then, quieter, "I wasn't ready then. Wasn't enough yet."

"Simon—"

"I know what you're going to say."

"You were always—"

"I know," he said. "I believe you. Now." His hand came up to your face, tucking a strand of hair back, his thumb at your cheekbone. "Took me a while to get there. But I'm here."

"You're here," you agreed smiling.

"And you're here." his hand tangled itself in your hair.

"I'm here." you giggled.

He looked at you for a long moment. Then, "Stay with me."

Not a question, not quite — more like a hope said aloud. The rarest thing from him. He had carried so much silently for so long, and this one small thing cost him something, and you could see it, and you loved him for it.

"It's my house," you said cheeky and bright.

He blinked. Then that laugh again — the real one, the rare one — and your heart did what it always did when you earned it, that particular, irreplaceable lurch.

"Yeah Sunshine," he said. "It is."

You lay back down against his chest. His arm came around you. His heartbeat under your ear.

Outside, the lavender moved. The Union flag was still on the roof. The porch swing sat in the dark with its yellow cushion, waiting for morning.

"Sunshine," he said. Into your hair.

"Hmm."

"I love you."

You pressed your lips to his chest, above his heart.

"I love you too," you said. "I've loved you since you were that chubby four-year-old who stole my crayons."

A long pause.

"Chubby," he repeated.

"Stocky," you amended, grinning into his chest. "You were very stocky."

"I was four."

"You were a very solid four year old."

His arm tightened around you — not painfully, just firmly, the way of a man making a point through the medium of holding — and you laughed again, helplessly, into the warmth of him.

He made that sound, that low rumbling laugh that lived in his chest, and the lamp burned warm and low and outside the lavender moved in the dark.

Simon Riley.

Who stole your crayons at four and broke your glasses at seven and learned to read because of you and carried your bag through every corridor of secondary school and punched a boy for pushing you over and kissed your cheek in a toilet corridor and sat beside you through every lunch and glared at anyone who called you a nerd and came round to your kitchen table for years and went to war at seventeen and sent you cards from the edges of the world and planted lavender for three years and bought you the house you described at sixteen and came home.

He came home to you.

Your best friend. Your home. Your Simon.

Taglist | @sdieflwr @pipsysstuff @laswells-cia-assistant @luneiiz @myblogystuff @kitty-kat-crevan @drugs-and-daddyissues @magicwriterinspo @twizkat @sea-4salt

[jojoujiz]

I wanna put this entire fic in my mouth and run away like a feral raccoon never to be seen again

[sleepingjuliette]

Liz and I have been playing dishonored and I care about only one thing!!

[eika-gr]

Continuing my composition studies. A sunny day in Dunwall is the perfect day for training!

[cyreneclementi]

Last Hope: Kyle Crane x Reader

Prologue & Chapter 1

Warnings: violence, gore, zombelinis wc: 1,870

Music playlist

PROLOGUE

I was in Harran before the epidemic hit. Stupidly, I was convinced by my best friend to move to Harran with little to nothing in our pockets and start a new life there together. Harris-Bloody-Brecken had never been a sweet-talker, but the dream of living in the Mediterranean, living out my passion with my best friend, was something I couldn't pass up. We both met in the UK as parkour instructors and have been joined at the hip since. We thought we were getting somewhere with our parkour classes. The Harran Athletic Games lured people to our business like cattle, but then the epidemic spread like wildfire. We didn't hesitate to rush survivors into the Tower. Our apartment turned into a base of operations overnight.

The beginning of the epidemic was the worst. Everyone who turned was fast, their humanity holding on by a thread. They pleaded for mercy as we tried to kill them despite their quick reflexes. Nearly all of our friends and neighbours were infected, and we survivors did everything we could to clear out and seal the overrun floors. Our group was running low on supplies, and everyone was too afraid to go back outside. They barely knew how to fight or protect themselves. But luckily, Brecken and I were able. The streets weren't safe, but the rooftops were better. So, we decided to teach people how to become runners.

Our best runners were the Aldemir siblings: the kickboxing champion, Jade the "Scorpion", and her younger brother, Rahim. I loved them both like family, and so did Brecken. I thought everything was going to be okay. We all did. The people of the Tower were slowly getting stronger, and our runners were keeping Harran barely alive. But then everything came crashing down on me, even before Kyle came into the picture.

CHAPTER 1

The Tower hums with life in the midday sun. Children are running around the halls, dodging past security personnel and a few of our runners. I lean against the wall of Brecken's office, watching the birds swoop through the blue sky of the slums.

I hear someone running into the room. He hunches over, out of breath. "We found a group of survivors holed up in a shop close by. "Five of them," he heaves out.

I sit him down in our base of operations and offer him a bottle of water as Brecken radios Jade to help out on this rescue mission.

I snicker to myself. We began calling these trips 'missions', and I like to pretend I'm a superhero. But even then, I know I can't save everyone. Our numbers are still small. There are around a dozen of us runners, and most of them are off on their own missions or resting.

Jade walks into the room and pats my shoulder as I check over our supplies. Rahim follows right behind, and before I could stop him, Brecken shouts from the couch without turning around.

"Don't even think about it, Rahim. You're not coming."

Rahim begs with his hands in prayer. I look at him with pursed lips as I shake my head.

"I told you to help Lena, and that's what you're going to do until we get back," said Jade.

"You're all holding me hostage like- like I'm some dog. When are you going to let me actually help?" Rahim whines.

"You're already helping a lot by helping Lena. Now go, shoo." I huff.

"But-"

"Go!" Jade and I shout.

I hear Rahim huff and stomp out of the room behind me. I shook my head at his insistence. No matter how many times we tell him, he doesn't understand why we stop him from leaving the Tower. He's still young, and the thought of losing someone like Rahim is a nightmare waiting to happen. But he thinks we see him as incapable. I just hope his misguided beliefs doesn't turn him against us.

Brecken rallies us all on the ground floor to pick up our weapons. The quartermaster hands me my trusty crossbow, a sharpened machete and a back-up knife. Our runner picks up a bag of extra weapons for the group we're about to rescue. Brecken begins to run us through our plan: cut through the infected, save the group, and haul ass back to the Tower. It's early in the afternoon and I can tell everyone is on edge about making it back to the Tower before nightfall. The last thing we want is all of us being ripped to shreds by Volatiles.

We follow the runner who found the group. Jade and I run over crumbling rooftops whilst Brecken and our runner slash from the ground to make a path for later. Sweat rolls down every inch of my body under the spring sun. Infected stumble and groan across the streets, the smell of rotting flesh and blood pungent no matter which way we ran. Broken cars haphazardly blocking the roads and piles of decaying bodies made it harder for us to weave through the streets. I've forgotten what clean air smells like, what a clean city looks like. I just feel sorry for all the children that have to see this.

The runner signals for us to slow down, and we all look at the apartments he's pointing at.

"Jesus christ, why are there so many infected here?" Brecken whispers.

There's over a dozen infected stumbling around the perimeter of the building. I already know the rescue will be tougher than usual, and when I look at Jade, she seems just as worried as me.

"We need to split up the team. Jade and I will get rid of the infected. You two, get the group ready to haul ass back to the Tower," I say.

Jade and I drop and roll onto the ground. We nod at eachother before we turn our backs and slash through the horde. Blood splatters across me. Guts and shards of bones spray onto us and onto the concrete floor. The infected stumble, growl and claw at us. Their deteriorating jaws snap at our limbs. The horde thins down with every cut until none were left in the area, but I can hear a few infected on the roads turning to the comotion.

"Are you okay?" Jade pants, holding onto my shoulder.

I turn to her, checking her for any injuries. She's covered in blood just as much as me and I grimace at the mess. "I'm okay, are you?"

Jade nods before she points up to the group of survivors at the top of the stairs. Brecken looks over the blacony before I send him a bloody thumbs up. Each one of the survivors come down the stairs: a middle-aged woman and man, a teenage boy and small girl. They remind of me of Jade and Rahim. The little girl clutches onto her teddy as her brother picks her up. We're going to escort a whole family to safety and I feel the weight of the world crushing my shoulders. I let out a shaky breath and line them up in front of Brecken. Jade and I are on either side of the group and our runner is at the back. We immediately begin to run back to the tower, the sun already beginning to teeter on the edge of the horizon as infected try to grab at all of us. We're a buffet rushing through the streets with kids in the middle. I wonder if Brecken can tell how terrified I am.

We're passing through a narrow alleyway, the Tower bowing over us. The father kicks a metal can with his foot. I hear him swear and Brecken ushers us to run faster. That's when I hear a viral slam out of a building to my left. My head snaps to its screams as it locks onto me. Brecken and Jade are making a path through a few infected blocking us. The little girl whimpers behind me. The viral runs towards me at full speed. I try to block its scratches and punches. I shout at the boy anf girl to run past me. I hear our runner fighting off another infected too. I kick the viral away from me before I swing my machete at its head. The blade sunk into its neck as it tries to claw at me again. I remove the blade from its neck and blood sprays all over me before I manage to behead it. I let out a sigh of relief, but I can barely turn around when our runner shouts at me to look out.

Cold hands grab onto me and a shot of pain rips through my shoulder. I scream, jerking forward and nearly falling onto the ground. Our runner rips the runner off me and makes quick work of it. The girl begins to softly cry. Everyone panics as Brecken pulls me up and holds me upright. We all rush down the alleyway and back onto the streets. I try to rip myself away from Brecken to help kill the infected, but he isn't having any of it. All I can focus on is Brecken repeating that I'd be okay like a mantra. I see the the Tower loom over us as I stumble up the stairs. Brecken rushes us up to the infirmary. I can barely feel or register anything as adrenaline rushes through me. That little girl's cries haunt me.

"Is the boy and girl okay?" I pant. Lena is already cleaning my wound and I barely wince at the alcohol flushing my wound.

"You just got bit and you care about those two?" Brecken laughs in disbelief.

"Yes, Brecken," I groan as the pain begins to settle into my shoulder, "I... I got bit? What the fuck..." I turned my head to my wound but immediately hiss at the strain in my muscles. Lena slaps my head forward.

"I'll get some antizin," Lena says.

Lena ordered me to hold onto the rag over my wound. I head her walk away before she began to rustle through a box behind me. Brecken walked over to her, before I heard Lena whisper.

"The antizin... some of it's gone."

The room plunges into silence. I hiss as a muscle spasms inside my wound. Brecken laughs and the box of antizin shut. I flinch, pain shooting up my shoulder.

"What the fuck do you mean some of it's been stolen? We secured a drop in the morning. So where did it all go, Lena?" Brecken shouts.

"I don't know! They were here before I went on break, I swear!" Lena yells back.

Every shout assaults my brain and I plead quietly for them to stop, but they won't listen. Someone walks into the room. A familiar hand softly grasps my non-injured arm.

Jade mutters a curse at the other two. "Will you guys quit it? We'll figure this all out whilst they rest up. Lena, patch them up please?"

The room is silent as Lena cleans and bandages my shoulder. I keep thinking about what Lena said: someone stole some of the antizin, but we picked up a crate in the morning. My stomach swirls; the thought of others not getting antizin today, and then me. What if I turn before we find any more? I'd rather go out my own way than turn.

[confirmed-and-contorted]

slamming your knights visor down when you’re finished talking to them, like slamming the phone back on the receiver.

[midnightinthemagicmicagarden]

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[midnightinthemagicmicagarden]

5:15 I bought a slice. I have no way to getting a room right now. It's going to take $200.

So one of these needs a home.

[midnightinthemagicmicagarden]

It's almost 8:30pm. I'm no closer. There have been heavy rains off and off this afternoon. I've been allowed to hang out at the pizza place that has my work on display. They will close. And as of now I have nowhere to go.

[midnightinthemagicmicagarden]

It's 10pm, I'm absolutely hopeless about getting a room for the night. I have nowhere near enough. I do appreciate both PayPals from Jennifer and John for pushing my cause forward.

[midnightinthemagicmicagarden]

It's well past 11, close to 11:30pm. I'm probably screwed. The cheap place is as expensive as the closer one and would require $50 in Ubers. The closer one, I can get a ride but I'll still need another $160 to book in the next half hour. Which seems unlikely. Of all nights this one is particularly hard because of the noise.

[midnightinthemagicmicagarden]

Support For Homeless Artist Kate Havekost

July 5th

Nearly 6pm, I need to go to bed but I can't afford a bed for the night. I've already been awake for over 34 hours in extreme heat. Sales very needed.

Funds will be used for shelter, food, and supplies so Kate (I) can continue to make art for Tumblr's Art and Plant Communities. Paypal and Venmo accounts not necessary to offer support/ put a deposit on a painting.

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Artist Support $150

DM to reserve paintings, request information about commissions, seek information about size, price, and availability.

[innerchildabortionclinic]

also I don't think parents "these days" are uniquely terrible, I just think neglect is showing up in new ways as technology progresses. today's ipad kid would've been wandering around in a ditch alone all day and night before. parents not wanting to have to deal with children is not a new phenomenon.

[bella-boos]

RZ Michael Myers x reader

prev | | next? series masterlist masterlist

summary: After a very shitty life in Maine, you decide to go back to your hometown, Haddonfield, for a fresh new start (and an undying curiosity to figure out what really happened to your childhood best friend) .You move back into your old house and start a new nursing job, not knowing what dangers are waiting for you.

wc: 3.2k

these chapters contain: cursing, violence, gore, murder, blood, conflicted feelings, no use of Y/N, bits of misogyny (don’t worry, reader doesn’t take ANY bullshit), you will see my hate for Loomis later on, introverted reader, eventual smut

A/N: this chapter is short but i promise it is very very worth it. next chapter will also makeup for it!

━━━━ ━━━━ ━━━━ ━━━━ ━━━━ ━━━

Chapter 3:

It’s been a little over a week since you’ve started working with Michael. Nothing really ‘amazing’ has happened ever since the first time with that head tilt, or whatever it was. The most he’ll do is look at you, but Loomis still insists that it’s somehow ‘great progress’. Whatever that means.

You’ve just got done passing out meds as you push open the break room door. You’re met with the faces of Jenny and Chris. You haven’t talked to them in a while.

“Hey guys” you say, forcing a little smile. It’s not like you were unhappy to see them, you were just tired. It’s been a long week of dealing with difficult patients. There was this one man who tried to fight someone in the cafeteria during lunch over a cup of jello. Yeah, not fun.

“Hey girl!” Jenny says, with too much enthusiasm with someone who works a lot more hours than you do.

She continues, “I was just talking to Chris about you!”

“Good things, I hope?” you say with a slight laugh, pulling up a chair across from them.

“Of course! I was wondering if you’d wanna go out with us tonight?”

“Where at?”

Chris pipes up, “This bar and grill downtown, a few others from here and probably gonna come too.”

“I figured it’d be good for you to get out! You’ve worked your ass off here and since you’re new in town, it would be a good way for you to make some new friends. Oh! Or maybe even a few guys!”

She reaches over and grabs your hand, squeezing and shaking it a little as she laughs.

“I don’t know, guys… I’ve never really been the social type—“

“Come on, girl! Live a little! what does it kill ya to relax and drink for a few hours!”

You think about it for a second. Would it really be that bad? It has been a very long week and it wouldn’t be that bad to get a little buzzed and eat some food.

What you definitely won’t be doing is making new ‘guy friends’ Jenny suggested.

“Fine. I’ll go.”

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .*:☆ﾟ. ───

It takes a very embarrassing amount of time for you to find an outfit. It took about 30 minutes for you to pick between two dresses and double that to find a hair style you wanted.

There’s an even more embarrassing amount of the times you’ve fixed yourself in the mirror.

You can’t remember the last time you were dressed up like this. A nice dress, makeup and hair done. Hell, you even put on your expensive perfume. It’s a bar and grill, yeah, but Jenny told you to go all out.

It feels very unnatural, but good. It’s nice to get all dolled up once and awhile

Nervousness claws at your stomach. You’re not a very social person, never had been. You like familiarity, not meeting new people.

The warm heat of your car almost makes you stay in it.

But the thought of the sweet burn of alcohol sliding down your throat overcomes that.

With a heavy sigh, you push open your car door and step out.

____

You’re met with the sound of laughter and drunk yelling as you walk in. Your eyes scan across the crowd of drunk old men yelling at whatever football match plays on the tv, soon finding Jenny waving you down.

It feels weird seeing her not in a nurse outfit. Same with Chris who’s sitting beside her.

You make your way over with quick steps, sliding passed chairs and people, trying not to slip on the dirty ass floor in your heels.

Jenny has already spared a seat for you, next to her. There are a few others at the table that you recognize from work, but none whom you know the names of. You think the most you’ve never interacted with them was a nod or two.

“You look great girl! That color suits you. I’ll buy you a drink, first ones on me.” Jenny says with a smile.

—-

Conversation flows smoothly around you as time passes. You only talk when spoken to, mostly just listening to everything happening.

You’ve deemed that the drink you're nursing right now will be your last one. You’re buzzed and you don’t have a DD so you thought it would be best.

You do feel more relaxed, laughing more easily at jokes, your body not as tense. It feels nice to have a break form… Well, everything.

Work hasn’t been too bad, just tiring. Plus the nightmares have been getting worse since it’s closer to halloween, more frequent. They’ve always gotten bad in the fall, ever since the murders.

What's also been keeping you up is what Michael said in that dream…

“Why’d you back?”

You came back for a fresh start. Right? I mean, sure the idea was definitely impulsive but what other reason would you have to come back?

You have been curious about what happened to Michael for a while but that curiosity is hardly enough to drive you back here. Right?

Whatever. You take a big sip of your drink, trying to get the idea out of your mind

Jenny’s not drunk yet but is close to being. She’s the more talkative one at the table. She always has been. In every room she walks into she seems to be the light of it, no matter who else is there. A part of you envies her easiness to make friends and conversation.

As whatever conversation she was originally was having gets boring and shifted over to Chris, she turns to face you.

“Soooo, a little birdie told me that you are the new nurse of The Boogieman.”

That name makes you cringe inside. You hate it. You hate how this town has turned Michael into an urban legend to scare others, a story that parents tell to their kids to scare them to get back home before dark.

But nonetheless, you force a smile and nod.

“Yeah, Loomis assigned me to it a little over a week ago.”

“Why? I mean, it’s not like I think you can’t do it, it’s just not the thing you were originally hired for.”

Shit. Now you gotta lie.

You can’t just say,

“Oh yeah, I was his childhood friend before I moved away and Loomis thought it might be a good chance to see if there’s any signs of him improving. Nothing special though!”

Yeah no. So instead,

“Not really sure, actually. I think it might have had something to do with my resume. I’m not complaining though, I get a bonus out of it.”

Is it a great lie? Not at all. But Jenny seems to buy it.

“How is it?”

“Not bad at all. He’s like most patients, just really quiet.”

“Really? Loomis makes him sound more evil.” Jenny mumbles, taking a sip of her drink.

“Has he talked to you about Michael?”

“Not to me, but I've read his book on him. He sounds messed up as fuck.”

Loomis wrote a fucking book on Michael? You try your best to suppress the shock on your face but it obviously slips through.

“You didn’t know?”

“No! What has he been saying?”

“I can’t remember exactly but he describes him as like this embodiment of a demon, a true psycho, really fucked up stuff he says. If you’re that interested, look into it. It might be best to know a patient of that extreme better.”

Loomis never once mentioned a book to you. Who writes a book on someone they’re trying to help? And if what Jenny is saying is true, why would he write that about Michael even after he’s stated he thinks there might be room for improvement, even if it’s small? You will look into it.

“Yeah… yeah I probably will. I’m probably gonna head out. See ya monday.” You say, getting up from your chair, forcing a little smile despite your racing mind.

“See ya, girl! Drive safe!!”

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .*:☆ﾟ. ───

It doesn’t take you long to find it.

It’s called, ‘The Devils Eyes, The Story of Michael Myers’

Not all of it is bullshit. Loomis does do a deep dive of what mental problems might be wrong with him and proof from his studies, you don’t doubt that. He also talks about the nature of his murders, which was kinda tough to read.

What is bullshit is how he talks about Michael’s childhood in Haddonfield.

He gets most of it wrong, and doesn’t even mention you once. (which you are kinda glad for.)

You were there, you would know. It’s like he’s literally just pulling information out of his ass.

Jenny was right, he does describe Michael as a demon, if the title wasn’t already enough to tell.

Here’s a quote for even more proof,

"The darkest souls are not those which choose to exist within the hell of the abyss, but those which choose to break free from the abyss and move silently among us."

- Dr. Samuel Loomis

Michael killed 3 people at 10 years old, yes, but that does not give Loomis— his doctor, one that has been supposed to help him—to over exaggerate his childhood and life for blood money.

But what do you really know about Michael now? You knew him when he was a kid, and Loomis has been with him for 15 years. He could’ve seen stuff you didn’t. He could very well really be the ‘devil’ or ‘boogieman’ as they say.

Maybe you’ll ask Loomis about it.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .*:☆ﾟ. ───

You go into work the next day absolutely exhausted. You stayed up late researching, then could get no sleep because you were thinking about everything. Almost every part of your childhood with Michael replayed in your mind, trying to piece together things that might go with whatever diagnoses that Loomis gave him, trying to maybe see the early signs

So with 0 hours of sleep and enough caffeine to kill a horse, you walk over to Dr. Loomis’s office.

The hallway has been decorated with halloween decorations, they’re practically everywhere in the building now the holiday is only a few hours away. Little pumpkin stickers decorated the walls and doors, with the occasional bat or ghost.

Halloween has always been your favorite holiday, even after the incident with Michael. You like the shitty horror movies with unrealistic gore, you like the costumes and masks and dressing up (even if you don’t dress up anymore unless it’s for a party), you like the candy, you like the pumpkin scent that fills the air.

Lifting your hand, you place three soft knocks on the door. You wait until you hear a ‘come in’ from the other side before going in.

Loomis looks up from whatever paper he’s reading and greets you with a smile.

“Oh great! I was already hoping to talk to you today. Come in, sit.” He says, waving you over with his hand.

You pull out the familiar chair you’ve sat in many of times

before, and take a seat. Loomis speaks before you even get a chance to open your mouth.

“I know I've said this before but I've worked with Michael for 15 years and every technique I have tried to help him has failed. Even with bringing you in to maybe help, I didn't do much but have a bit of a reaction change. I’m going to be honest with you, I don't see much more I can do for Michael. Therefore, I'm resigning.”

You freeze in your seat. This is definitely a lot and not what you were expecting. “What will happen to Michael?”

“He will be transferred in a few days. After that, you can go back to what your routine was before.”

He’s just gonna quit? Just like that? “So that’s it? You use him for blood money then just give up?”

This obviously takes Loomis back. His eyebrows pinch together and his eyes narrow. “Blood money? I’m afraid I don't know what—“

“The book, Loomis. Don’t act stupid. You used the deaths that he caused and his mental state to capitalize off of other people’s misery, so you could get enough money to retire.”

“That is not what I did. I wrote that book to inform people of the evil that Michael holds, to show them my work and how I tried to help Michael.”

“Maybe originally. Originally, when you first met him, you truly tried to help, but after realizing you failed, you decided to use him for your own benefit. That’s definitely what it seems like to me and many others, Doctor.”

“I tried everything. Everything. But nothing can fix evil like that. I wrote the book to share my experiences with Michael.”

“Sure. Sure that’s all you did it for…”

The chair legs screeches as you stand.

“Have a good retirement, Loomis.” you call over your shoulder.

“I don’t know what Michael you knew before the killings, but I promise you it’s not him now. Michael is pure evil. And maybe one day you’ll see that.” He yells out before you slam the door behind him.

That’s not how you expect that to go. Well, you don’t know what you were expecting, but it wasn’t that.

You didn’t expect Loomis to just retire, especially after this long of working with Michael.

______

You try to not think about it for the rest of the day, but fail pretty miserably. It plagues your mind non stop.

Where is Michael getting transferred to? Loomis didn’t say, he was very vague about it. Another facility? Maybe another part of the building?

You shake your head. Why do you care so much? It’s not like he’s your friend anymore, let alone do you know anything about him now.

It’s your last day being his nurse anyway. Maybe after your routine goes back to normal, it’ll help you stop thinking about him.

The cart you push down the hall is filled with trays of lunch for your patients, plus their meds. Each paper cup has a name written on the side. The first one?

Michael Myers.

With a heavy sigh, you keep pushing until you reach the gated area.

The same guard is there again from last time. He spots you as you're still a good amount from the gate. His face spreads into a grin, rotting, yellow teeth on full display.

You internally groan, praying to whatever god is out there that this fucksss guy doesn’t talk to you again.

And much to your luck…

“Hey, sweetheart? Back so soon?”

The amount of restraint you have not to punch this dude in the throat is astronomical.

“Again, just doing my job.”

“And looking damn sexy while doing it. Tell you what, I'll let you in that gate, if you let me take a sweet thing like you out for dinner.”

There isn’t much you can say without losing your shit and getting fired. So you stick with,

“I have a boyfriend.”

“He doesn’t have to know, gorgeous! Come on, now…”

You glance up at the camera on the ceiling. It points directly at you two. You’re hoping whatever guards that might be watching have enough pity to understand the situation and what you’re about to say and don’t report you.

You take a deep breath and close your eyes for a moment.

“Listen, man. I’m not interested. At all. Now, will you please get the fuck out the way so I can do my damn job!”

The man’s grin drops at your sudden switch.

“Whatever, bitch.”

The gate opens with a buzz.

“Here, damn.”

“Thank you.”

You say mockingly before flipping him off, dragging your cart in tow.

You’ve always hated people like that, who can’t take hints even if you shove it right in their face. Especially creepy ones like that guy.

Does he do this to just you or other female nurses? Either wouldn’t surprise you.

You stop in front of the door labeled ‘Myers’. Taking your hands off the cart, you drag them down your face with a sigh. You can already tell this is gonna be a long day.

Loomis isn’t here to do his usual standby at the door. You figure it’s because of the argument earlier.

Grabbing his tray off the cart. You push open the heavy metal door.

Michael is at his desk, like he normally is. You don’t think you’ve seen him anywhere else in the room.

With careful steps, you go inside.

You sorta take in the moment. This will probably be the last time you’ll even be in the same room as Michael.

Did you get all the answers you were hoping for? No. But you have gotten some. But there is a part of you that wish the others you were curious about one day do get answers.

He doesn’t look up or pay any mind to you as you walk in, continuing to work on whatever and papier-mâché mask is now taking up his time.

You walk over to his desk and reach to set the tray down, like any other time.

Before you could pull your hand away, his own shoots out and wraps around your wrist.

In an instant, his grip around your wrist tightens and a white-hot pain shoots up your arm.

Confusion and fear set in. Why is he doing this? And how is his grip so strong? It almost feels like he’s crushing the bones beneath your skin.

You look down at where his hold is on you and see the red mark forming. There will 100% be a bruise left.

But he’s not doing anything else. Just holding. You’re

“Mikey, please… you’re hurting me.”

His grip doesn’t let down, but only for a few more moments. Only then does he let go. But his eyes. His eyes burn through you, much like the ones in your nightmares, seeing straight through you, deep in your soul.

You take a tiny step back, then another, and another, and another, until you’re all the way outside the door, all while holding his gaze. Only when you start to shut the heavy metal door does he look away and go back to his work.

━━━━ ━━━━ ━━━━ ━━━━ ━━━━ ━━━

taglist: @questionablefruitsalad @stygianoir @everysecondcounts1 @pixieszlov @l0kilaufeys0n7 @suga-rrr @scarredtarts @my-eyelash-flew-off @crispytigerarcade @mikaelaca09 @animemangalover001 @dij-ology @jaxhwii9 @theressaicon @luluscoff1n @thesweetestever @anyteah44 @k2muda @bealittlething7322 @1-sleep-1 @ma11euss @tcygyuhijifyd4ygino @amarsmitherine @podonjr @peachcalpicocorpse @mialuvzmichael @inkycapps @mikejacksbabymommaaaaa @sidneynoelle12 @nacihe @azzyraza @shxttereddoll

if you want to be apart of my slasher taglist put a 🦇 in the comments!!

[homunculus-argument]

Not book smart or street smart but a secret third thing.

[luckyletd0wn]

supid

[homunculus-argument]

supid.

[frankencain]

Chinese Satellite - Phoebe Bridgers / Disco Elysium / My My, Hey Hey - Neil Young / Cowboy Bebop x 26 / Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book / (unknown) / Andy Muschietti’s direction during the quarry scene in It: Chapter Two / DE / Chelsea Wolfe, from Hisspun; “Two Spirit” / Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A history of Folk Horror (Kier-La Janisse, 2021) / Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless / DE / The Four Generations of Chang E - Zen Cho / DE / (x) / DE / James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room / DE / W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence / Safia Elhillo, from Home Is Not a Country; “The Stranger” / Succession 03x07 / My Tears Ricochet - TayIor Swift / DE / Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again / DE / James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room / Stalker (1979) / Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children’s Crusade, Kurt Vonnegut / Cinema Paradiso (1988) / John Murillo, “Mercy, Mercy Me,” from Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry / Riches and Wonders - The Mountain Goats / Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces / Warsan Shire, Home / Pathologic 2 / Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords / Warsan Shire, Home / Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me / Emily Jungmin Yoon, from “Related Matters” / Kentucky Route Zero / Lorde - Buzzcut Season / The Umbrella Academy Volume 1: Apocalype Suite, Gerard Way & Gabriel Bà / The Penumbra Podcast 02x09 / Black Sails 01x02 / Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours; “Interview with Hara Tamiki (1950)” / DE / When the Sick Rule the World, ‘Phone Home’ by Dodie Bellamy / Night in the Woods / The End - Kings of Leon / Hermann Hesse, Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth

[midnightinthemagicmicagarden]

It's 12PM, aka Noon Tuesday. Tuesday needs to be good news day. I didn't get a bed last night and had a lot of difficulty finding wifi. I'm now hoping I will be able to get enough for a bed for tonight. I didn't make sales during my opening. I'm devastated. I have nowhere near a enough to pay for a room after 3pm when hotels and airbnbs allow check ins.

I need $400 so...I'll let these 22"x 30" go for $400.

Venmo Kate-Havekost

[midnightinthemagicmicagarden]

It's 4:04pm

I haven't slept since Sunday night. I'm nearly falling asleep on my feet.

Instead of sales, I'm further away from a room. My net worth is currently $15. The room is $193, including taxes.

[midnightinthemagicmicagarden]

4:44pm $65/ $194 Finally a bit closer. $129 short. 3x $45.

[midnightinthemagicmicagarden]

5:55pm Still $129 short.

[midnightinthemagicmicagarden]

7pm. I could fall over I'm so tired. And I'm afraid to spend anything on food because I'm still $130 short on a room for the night and haven't had phone service since Saturday.

[deepdwellingsteamboat]

Estate District DISHONORED 2012・dev. Arkane Studios

[bird-gifs-collection-agency]

While its eyes are not as big as its mummy's, this baby tawny frogmouth is still using its beady peepers to see the best it can

[screaming-potato]

Another life, same love

Zeno Wesker x B.O.W!Reader

As a high ranking member in the criminal organization known as the Connections, Zeno never truly experienced anything real but when you arrive at the ARK as his new ‘partner’ he had no idea what to think of you. Though he had his reservations of your seductive manipulative nature and kept his distance from you he couldn’t help the subtle fascination that grew with each passing day and a memory of you he couldn’t quite hold onto. Time and time again he would seek you out only to gradually find out all the things you’ve been deprived of and reveal secrets neither of you knew.

Sitting in my drafts since MARCH. B.O.W Reader who finds out she’s a clone. Reader doesn’t quite understand real romance and intimacy or signs of abuse. Suggestive 18+ themes. Long emotional roller coaster ride. Mentions of Victor Gideon/Reader. 17k+. Elements of a past relationship with Albert Wesker/ past reader. Sorry for any missed mistakes, enjoy!

The quiet night had you filling out reports and periodically updating the higher-ups on the slow progress of Elpis and your various side projects. Most of the facility had long since retired, as you were content with the peace, waiting so you wouldn't see any humans others. Sleep didn't come easy, but in the hours you were awake, your productivity thankfully increased. However, a strange exhaustion had slowly been tormenting you the last couple of days, and you couldn’t understand why.

Well… you knew why, but he didn’t need to know. 

You were lost in thought until fast approaching footsteps heading towards your private lab piqued your interest. Leaning your head slightly to the side, the soft hissing of your door sliding open reached your ears.

“Hello Zeno, I hope you had a productive business trip! I assume you’re having difficulty resting?”

“I’m fine.” His dismissive, snappy tone only fueled your curiosity as the scent of a delightful new cologne reached you. Albeit, a bit sharp for your senses, your mind couldn’t dwell on it as you automatically began assessing all the possibilities for the reason behind his subtle hostility. 

Without tearing your eyes away from your screen, the clicking of your keyboard resonated throughout the room. You had to get these reports done, your father would be expecting them soon. “You seem…upset. Is that an accurate assumption?” 

“I don’t need your pity. Why are you still here?” 

Taking note that he ignored your question, you stored that small bit of information for later as you thought about how you were going to redirect him back to telling you the truth. But pity? That was something new. You never felt the need to pity him. For now you would mildly entertain the conversation. 

“I don’t believe my observation was meant to pity you. More like-sympathize? Or understand?” You offered waiting for a moment. “Anyways…I have multiple reports to send in to our higher ups for review.”

“I mean why are you here still…at the facility.” 

Oh?

The clicking of your keyboard came to a halt for just a moment before you quickly resumed typing.

”Have you already forgotten I was stationed here for my assignment to be here with you?” Silence took hold of your private lab once more to the point that you had nearly forgotten Zeno was there if it wasn’t for the pounding of his heart. “Is my presence here after so long still an issue for you?” 

Was your presence here still causing him such distress?

You gazed at him for a moment, your fingers moving at an unprecedented speed to continue your reports. “Did you require my company Zeno?” The question lingered in the air far longer than you anticipated.

He despised the way ‘my company’ rolled off your tongue as if he had some ulterior motive to come to your lab. With a slight frown, all he did was stare at you from behind those sunglasses that did very little to conceal those mesmerizing eyes, carefully tracking your every move.

You were used to being scrutinized.

After all, you had been born and raised in one of the many of the Connections laboratories with a beautiful view of the ocean side on a private island your father owned.

Although you were alone most of the time, you learned that the serenity of nature inspired you to incorporate a sense of peace into your own life, despite the Connections wanting a spy and a weapon for their own personal endeavors. They were a criminal organization built on destruction, and your main objective was to remain loyal to their cause and fulfill your duties.

And they made sure you thoroughly comprehended that. 

The soft, practiced smile you gave Zeno had him avert his eyes from you. “No.” He mumbled, reaching into his pocket to pull out his infamous lighter, which you had become acquainted with, and a cigarette. 

Perhaps his nerves were getting to him? 

You had made multiple notes on his habits as one of your current assignments was to ensure Elpis was on track and oversee the facility and its operations. No one could access Elpis at this time, so that was a laughing matter-a near insult which made it seem some members wanted you out of their labs, mostly in fear,  after they had ‘accidentally’ terminated one of your specimens. From creation, you had a rather unique upbringing, with the ability to control bioweapons nearly similar to a neural hive mind, so you had grown a fair attachment to many of the specimens you cared for. 

You called it love.

Others called it parasitic.

Sick.

Unnatural.

The Connections thought sending you away would be some sort of peace offering to appease you, which was a rather moronic attempt in your opinion, but you smiled regardless and agreed to go-not that you had a real say in the matter.

However, how was this suppose to appease you? Delegating you with more responsibilities in operations that had no correlation to your current work. It was suspicious to say the least. There were so many things they required you to oversee that didn’t align with your past objectives, but supervising Zeno at the facility was one of them. 

He was one of those rarer individuals that made you experience…new things.

Want? Desire?

You didn’t know what to truly call it. You weren’t created with the same emotional variables as humans but you hypothesized that they hadn’t expected you to do your own countless hours of research in the middle of the night to comprehend the quiet feelings you often had to swallow down. When you had questions considering the implications behind the emotional impact of your research it was rather disappointing you didn’t have anyone to help you decipher them. 

“Those feelings you are experiencing are merely fictitious. It is basic mimicry that has been developed into your upbringing for the seamless adaptation into society, my child.”

Your father-your creator, told you that when you were young.

“It is safer we don’t dwell on it  and move forward.” 

He was a brilliant retired scientist and now a Senior Executive within the Connections that had his hold on many powerful people and their money. You were the ‘pinnacle of his work’, he often told you.

Created from his own DNA and that of his deceased ex-wife, and cultivated with a unique strain of an aquatic parasitic specimen he had found many years ago, to create an impressive agent for their own work.

You.

You adored the enormous snake-like bioluminescent parasite, often finding comfort with it when you were alone as a child. You spent countless hours underwater-nearly drowning multiple times due to your ridiculous human lungs. You hated the skin you had but that’s where you felt free. Aside from that you were the only person, best of both worlds-‘human’ and monster- to pacify the parasite and communicate with it, which intrigued and frightened many, so naturally, you were valuable and had a target on your back.

You were a tool, some would say. Yet, you could never truly wrap your head around the idea of being just that when your father regarded you as his daughter.

Though there was a disconnect.

He had pictures of both of you hung up in the hallways and his office because most fathers loved their daughters, didn’t they?

They weren’t cruel yet praise their scientific breakthroughs?

They didn’t constantly remind them of not comprehending human nature, even if they were created with some of the same genetic makeup of human DNA. You believed your father loved you. You were his creation, he had raised and even gifted you your own lab, and a place to come back home to. Even allowed you to have 'friends'...even if they were just other specimens.

“Blood of my blood”, your father told you, “You will make me proud.”

Though it wasn’t praise but a demand. 

He even had other members say he indulged you a bit too much, which you disagree with. It was far from the truth when he would berate you when you didn’t meet certain expectations, then later apologize in private. Then he would often remove you from wherever you were stationed within the blink of an eye, always seeming to keep you closer to home. It upset you when you were removed from your military-based operations. Then the field. Then your espionage work. Then your lab, and now you were here at the ARK. Though you admired your own work and enjoyed spending time by yourself, this place was different.

You were often given freedom when you successfully completed your previous missions but being sent very far away, from your work, your lab, your specimens, and the parasite you regarded as your mother figure for an assignment to this ruined city, surrounded by unfamiliar faces, deprived you of everything. So to ease your own mind, you often designated things to what felt like home. 

And unfortunately, the closest thing that came to that was…Zeno.

You associated Zeno with the ocean.

The warmth of the sun on your skin.

The cold breeze on a hot day.

The easing tension in your muscles and bones when you crawled into bed after an exhausting day.

That peace you craved came naturally when you were with him. Maybe it was because both of you were created?

Though both of you had your own jobs, you had always welcomed him to join you in your lab. After all this time, you didn’t truly know everything about Zeno besides the fact that he was a clone of some sort of man named Albert Wesker the Connections had dealings with a long time ago, but it never stopped you from admiring him.

There was a pull towards him you couldn’t quite rid yourself of. 

You were barely briefed on Zeno before your arrival, having to do your own research as you wanted to be prepared as possible to deal with the man you were going to be assigned with. You never had to watch over men like him but you knew you had to be careful.

But there was a certain level of excitement to finally meet another…bioweapon like yourself. A conscious being created in a lab with superhuman strength and abilities that was able to hold a conversation? 

That was a dream.

Zeno’s calm demeanor when delegating orders to facility members at first had you disappointed, categorizing him with the rest of the men you had met in your life who believed they were superior above all else. Many of the staff seemed to be working under stressful conditions, and you absolutely could not have that.

Stress leads to mistakes, which resulted in delay in production and progress.

So when you had time, you would break them down with a soft smile or encouraging words, collecting valuable information that you needed relating to certain projects to ensure your Father had the upper hand and everything was running smoothly.

It was never anything cruel. It was just business. 

Though your presence had drawn more attention and eyes- you couldn’t help that-people often forgot their place. And with a sweet smile and a gentle threat reminder to have them return to work, it never failed to yield positive results.

At heart, you were a gentle curious person most of the time, doing your best not to terrorize others because you knew what you were capable of. You knew people often feared you when they found out what you were or what you could do.

-

"Then may I ask why you’re here so late? Did you require something else from me? Or must I go down an entire list of questions in hopes of finding an answer?” 

Zeno could feel your unrelenting gaze as you questioned him. And the underlying hint of sarcasm on your tongue that he desperately wanted to taste for himself. His pants strained. He knew now you were engineered as a bioweapon that preyed on weakness through manipulative or seductive means.

Before he thought you were another normal spoiled brat-dainty, easy, pretty until he found out the hard truth. Now it all made sense. He repeatedly convinced himself that was the reason each moment he felt weak around you.

Like your smile, it drew him in the moment he first met you.

A moment he kept close.

-

Zeno had received the news that one of the higher ups would be coming for a visit to the facility, which had everyone on edge. Apparently, they were displeased with the lack of progress of Elpis-as if it was his fault, and the latest shipment of bioweapons that had proven to be an ultimate failure in the field. And when he heard they were sending him a ‘partner’ it bruised his ego more than anything. They always wanted instantaneous results as if that hadn’t failed them in the past. 

Zeno waited patiently for whatever Senior Executive would chastise him. He has been preparing for this moment, and the nicotine burning in his lungs did very little to ease his nerves. The downpour reflected the emotional turmoil he had been attempting to smoke away. Then the sounds of the helicopter in the distance reached his ears before it finally made its descent. 

Putting out his cigarette, he fixed his cufflinks to greet whichever member was going to test his patience. However, when he saw the face of a man with a terrible scar stretching from his forehead and up into his hairline, it was a face… he vaguely recognized as a scientist that dealt with parasitic bioweapons.

The man was closely followed by security as they held an umbrella over his head, and judging by his demeanor, he knew it wasn’t going to be easy to mollify his concerns, already making him dread the interaction. He knew men like him rarely ever made an appearance at locations like this one. 

Most of them found it beneath them, so why him?

But before Zeno could greet him, his eye caught you. 

Exiting the helicopter, you refused any assistance and refused an umbrella to shield you from the rain. Your eyes traveled up to the skies, taking in the grey clouds and gloomy weather. In a somewhat immature manner, you purposely stepped through the puddles as your long coat hugged your frame. 

Who were you?

For a moment, Zeno could barely register what the man had told him when he couldn’t pull his eyes from you. You were like a fleeting memory. Something he wanted to hold onto but continuously kept slipping through his fingers. Had he known you before? A certain yearning reverberated deep inside of him that he had no choice but to force away. “Doctor, I’m glad…you were able to make it during the storm.”

”Yes-yes.” The doctor said dismissively, looking over his shoulder to see you catching the rain within the palm of your hand.

Raindrops delicately fell in intricate patterns across your face, shaping your features, searing into Zeno's mind like nothing else had ever done before. It made him forget wanting to terminate the doctor right there on the spot for his dismissive attitude. “This is your-let’s say your temporary partner who will be overseeing the facility and operations, as you know. She will also be reporting and conducting her own research in a designated lab. One that I hope has been prepared prior to our arrival and accommodated appropriately. Come here child.”

Your father called you over like some lap dog, that didn’t sit well with Zeno but the idea you were his partner eased his nerves just a little bit. He’s never seen your face before, yet…he somehow knew you. It had to be some sort of test. Since when did this executive have a child? Did the other members of the Connections purposely withhold that information from him? 

You paused for a moment, a slight disapproving look visible on your features. “Coming…father.”

Zeno’s eyes flicker over to you once more, catching your little too practiced smile. At this point, you were nearly drenched from the rain without a care in the world. Were you not worried about keeping up appearances?

With bated breath, he eyed your every move as you approached. The confident stride of yours and the way your heels echoed against the wet concrete commanded attention, including his, as security hurriedly made room for you.

Your father looked over your frame in disbelief at your ruined attire, but had not mentioned another word. You, out of all of the members of the Connections, were to keep an eye on him? 

“Introduce your-"

”Hello Zeno. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.” 

Why did the world around him seem so muted when your eyes finally met his? Confusion filtered into his mind. What was this? Why couldn’t he breathe?

Shaking his hand, your cold touch sent an unfamiliar sensation rolling across his skin even through his gloves. 

He was aware you were doing this for simple formalities but the closer he looked at you a suffocating feeling nestled deep in his chest. A confusing conglomeration of positive and negative emotions repeatedly flooded his mind but…remorse stood out the most. 

Why would he feel remorse? 

There was nothing he could have said besides, “Pleasure’s all mine.” 

Neither of you noticed the way your father eyed both of you with an unknowing glint in his eyes before ushering Zeno to start familiarizing you with the facility. Your plastic smile remained as all of you entered the facility, with you glued- exceptionally a bit too close- to his side. 

However, the lack of care to your father’s words intrigued him as you were idly looking around the facility in fascination yet boredom? Is this what entitlement looked like? Although, Zeno had no choice but to deal with this he didn’t have time to deal with this level of behavior. Then you proceeded to take out a notepad and began scribbling down notes.

What the hell could you possibly be writing down? Something to critique him on later? To scruntize him even more than the higher ups? 

After the brief tour, you had barely looked up from your notepad to acknowledge either of them, just offering a ‘mhm’, 'of course’, or throwing in a ‘fascinating’ seemingly just for your own amusement. Zeno's reservations towards your apathetic attitude towards everything was beginning to get under his skin. Especially when all the scientists, researchers, and other staff were suddenly more productive upon you and your Father’s arrival.

And when your father departed, you barely acknowledged that either. It was amusing to see an executive unable to control his own child, but then Zeno remembered he had to deal with you himself for however long. 

Bringing you to your personal quarters you’d be residing in he was even more perplexed by you. ”The doctor I presume informed you we will be meeting for a conference with the board in the next three months?”

Slowly taking in the room you placed your notebook neatly on a table almost as if you were searching for something. “He forgot to inform me I would be residing here for three months until then.” He noticed the way your shoulders deflated when you spoke as you continued to survey the room, looking in small crevices and corners. “No windows…of course.”

Were you assessing if you were being watched in your room?

There was a strange guilt that settled in his chest listening to you speak. “But yes, he did inform me of that conference.” You finally stopped pacing and stood in the middle of the room. Zeno understood the disappointment when people withheld information from him but there was nothing he could do to ease your mind.

”Good. If there is-” An alarm went off from your watch as you casually turned it off all while concealing a little yawn. Zeno paused for a moment observing the softness of it all. He had forgotten had easily people like you would grow fatigue. “If…there is anything-“

”I will find you and debrief in your personal quarters tonight.”

Huh? Had he heard that right?

Zeno blinked as if you were utterly insane. Debrief in his personal quarters? What were you planning? He had no intentions of staying at the facility tonight.

“I would advise against-“

With that you closed the door in his face not allowing him to finish his sentence. He stood there outside your door, tempted to knock on it once more, anger simmering just beneath the surface. Did you just dismiss him? And what the hell were you even on about? Did you think you could make a fool out of him? Invade his personal space whenever you liked? 

Conjuring up a plan, he waited for you that night. He had no idea how you were going to locate him within the facility but he was not going to be pushed over by an unknown name, even if your father was one of the executives. 

And when your knock finally came, he let you stand outside his quarters to teach you a lesson.

A moment passed.

Then another

And another.

After a while, he could sense you had not moved a single inch. Your patience was…utterly astounding. With a sigh, he finally answered the door as you flashed him a smile.

”Were you planning on having me stand outside your door all night? Not very gentleman like of you.” You playfully pointed out, seemingly more enthusiastic than earlier on in the day.

“You came to my private quarters uninvited.”

Puffing your lips and curling your hands behind your back you quickly corrected him. “I did inform you I was coming tonight for a debrief.” 

For someone that showed little interest just earlier on in the day he was surely unimpressed by whatever you were planning.

“I don’t have time to play these games with you.” 

You blinked once at him with curiosity, reflecting on your behavior from the day. Logically assessing the situation, he hadn’t known about you prior to this so it was obvious he would feel some sort of irritation at your presence so you had to play your cards right. Then again he also hadn’t know you were forced to come here and you were still grieving losing your specimen-your friend. Though it wasn’t his problem to shoulder you still wanted to make an effort to bond with Zeno.

And hopefully you could trust one another.

“You’re absolutely correct. I am what they call a…night owl and I didn’t consider how late it was-my apologies.” Bowing your head with an apologetic smile you continued. “Perhaps, we can reconvene in the morning to discuss certain matters?”

You were just going to give up so easily? And what matters were so important you needed to debrief about it in the middle of the night?

In his quarters.

Zeno’s brow unconsciously twitched. He expected an argument-some pushback but received none. As much as he wanted to hold disdain for your presence he couldn’t. Your eyes and sultry voice pulled him in causing the tension in his chest to tighten further and his resolve to crumble. Why was he having these conflicting emotions towards you? Why didn’t he want it to stop? 

“That’s…fine.” He firmly spoke, ignoring the way your smile grew wider making him strangely…content. He was aware it was your job to pretend. To most likely spy on him and report back on all and any wrongdoings or lack of progression.

”Thank you, have a goodnight!” With that, you turned sharply on your heel, your hips swinging in a hypnotic rhythm that he had to forcibly tear his eyes away from. And just as he was about to close his door. “And Zeno?” 

He reluctantly met your gaze as you looked over your shoulder. “You don’t have to pretend when I’m here.”

And with that, you left without another word.

Why…why did that sound familiar?

What did you mean he didn’t have to pretend when you were the one putting on this entire facade? 

As if he would trust you. 

You never brought up that conversation again. Days had turned into weeks and you had unexpectedly found Zeno when he less expected it. How was it you were so unusually quiet? Asking your questions in a reserved but enthusiastic manner before thanking him and disappearing back into your lab you allowed no other staff access to. 

You were there all day and night, taking breaks at odd hours to explore the ruins of Raccoon City in the more safer areas. Many of those breaks, you extended an invitation to him. At first, he rejected you the first multiple attempts hoping you would give up until the day he sought you after a long day and found you weren’t in your lab. There was an urge to snoop around but even then he found nothing of interest. What the hell were you doing in this empty lab? But when he found no one had seen you, the urgency to search for you came.

That’s how you found yourself making your way to Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center much to Zeno’s dismay where he had no choice but to introduce you to Victor Gideon. Though you firmly believed your presence at the center made no difference, you still wanted to observe everything firsthand, forgetting you also needed it for your reports. Though you were incredibly bored and needed something productive to do you were interested in meeting the infamous doctor on his progress but maybe it would encourage Zeno to perhaps…spend time with you for closer observation spend his time more efficiently with the man he was investing so much money on. 

And lo and behold as you predicted Dr. Gideon took a great liking to you. You couldn’t help that you had an affinity for the strange and peculiar as much as you did for water.

It was inevitable. 

However, the center oddly made you feel ill, and the doctor had clearly been involved in his own…unique experimentations, you had to keep up your curious facade and charming smile. Your father lectured and warned you about interfering with certain affairs like his. Sometimes, humans disgusted you. At least your parasites never harmed each other for the greater good of the hive.

Humans were savages at best, yet you felt indebted to serve them.

“You are a fascinating creature. Perhaps you would allow me the time to examine you more closely under other…circumstances.” Victor purred. 

The image of you giggling at that angered Zeno. As if Victor had not suggested something vile for his own sick amusement when he should be focusing on his own projects involving the latent strain of the T-Virus and Elpis.

“Oh Dr. Gideon, you sure do know how to make a lady blush, but my apologies, if only I had more time to spare, I would be able to indulge you.”

And there it was again. 

Another vague memory of your face in the rain. Sadness blooming in your eyes as you stared up at him before it transformed to a black…casket. Nausea flooded his senses. Why the hell was he seeing this? He rid himself of that thought, allowing it to be replaced by disgust at you entertaining Victor.

“But I do expect a full report on your progress thus far on my next visit.” Snapping out of it, Zeno observed the way you charmed your way into people’s hearts and minds. “Then we can discuss anything to your heart’s content. Can you do that for me, Doctor? Or should I call you Victor?” That curve of your seductive smirk and your hand crawling up to give Victor’s arm a squeeze infuriated him like no other.

“Hm, whatever you desire. And of course-" Victor tilted his head, with a pleased sigh as the smacking of his lips echoed loudly in his office. “I do not intend to disappoint my benefactor or...you.”

You smiled, gently clapping your hands together. "Excellent. I’ll leave you to it. It was great to finally meet you.” 

Watching you manipulate another man in front of his eyes made Zeno feel nothing but deep contempt. Especially with the way Victor arrogantly carried himself, but he was glad you rejected the fool.

Of course, both of you had to meet Victor once again who was distracted and completely enamored by your skin, your bone structure-that resilient look in your eyes. Dragging one of this fingers disgustingly down your arm in order to grab ahold of your hand and look at your fingers up close. 

“There’s something unique about you.” Victor’s words rang in Zeno’s head to the point that they haunted him for the rest of the week.

Why was he so comfortable touching you?

How could you stand being touched by him?

Victor took pleasure in hearing about your projects, which you barely disclosed anything about but you indulged him with stories and scientific verbiage that had him eagerly wanting to learn more. Zeno knew all your tricks by now, or would like to think that he did. Very lightly did you tread on the topic of Spencer trying to obtain information that you would most likely report back to your father. The questions that you would often direct to him were now directed to Victor, who clearly enjoyed hearing you speak, enjoying the way you analyzed things, even if you had an unusual way to go about it.

Zeno never voiced it out loud but in private he warned Victor to keep his hands and perverse comments to himself.

“I’ll only say this once, Victor-keep that filthy tongue of yours between your teeth when she’s present.”

This effort was under the guise of you being an executive’s daughter but Victor was very adamant that you had no objections and he never crossed any lines, throwing it in his face he was a doctor after all, unlike him.

It had gotten to the point where Zeno decided to confront you later on. “You shouldn’t allow him to put his hands on you.”

The look on your face would've been mildly amusing if he weren't so furious. The way your eyebrows innocently curled in confusion, and you blinked at him with doe-like eyes, further softened his resolve. “You mean Dr. Gideon?” 

Lighting a cigarette outside the center, he deeply inhaled the toxic smoke before continuing. “Victor has his orders and is at the center for one reason. None of which concern you.”

But they did concern you, hadn't they? Why had your interaction with Victor gotten under his skin? If you had know any better you identified his concerns as caring or some sort of jealousy, perhaps?

“Well it has been some time since there was some actually…progress? As the…man funding him I thought you would be the one who would understand. Considering you spend how much money behind him again?” You questioned him with a smile. 

One that he didn’t take too kindly to. 

Taking a deeper puff of his cigarette, he approached you with a heavy step, your hand already reaching out to stop him from getting too close. Not that you were intimidated in the slightest-you found his sternness rather attractive, but you wanted to minimize any misunderstandings. “But…at the end of the day. We are on the same side, Zeno. I only want to ensure we have some sort of progress by the end of the month. A little encouragement goes a long way, don’t you agree?” 

No, he angrily thought.

The faint smell of tobacco on his breath heightened your senses as he stared down at that 'innocent' smile of yours, his voice dropping a bit with disdain as he leaned closer. “Then you see to it that’s the only thing you’ll be doing.” 

From then on, although Zeno didn’t want to entertain the idea of you, he found himself pining over you in your absence. He couldn’t quite push you away yet, something was telling him he needed to keep his distance. It had been days since he last saw you and your absence grew ever more. 

Yes, you had your own secret projects but why hadn’t you come to him? Why weren’t you asking random questions? Did his last interaction discourage you from wanting to speak to him? Or was it that he had once again rejected your attempts to have you join you on your frivolous excursions? 

He had to find the answers himself. 

But you were once again nowhere to be found, and when you hadn’t returned after waiting for you for hours, he decided to search for you himself. He had hoped you hadn’t found your way back to Victor, which would’ve essentially sent him into a blind rage. You weren’t in any of the safe zones of the city. It was dangerous to be wandering so far, so why the hell would you put yourself in harm’s way? 

You couldn’t protect yourself. 

He tracked down a vehicle that was unaccounted for just to see it abandoned and you nowhere in sight. With his heart pounding in his chest, he was ready to send a team out to go look for you, already dreading the possibility that you were dead or infected. The memory of that casket played in his mind, leaving his thoughts in shambles.

But when he found you overlooking the ruined city with your notepad that was always attached to your hip drawing away, his fear slowly dissipated. He hadn’t taken you for the artistic type. Adorned with a dazzling pearl necklace, you looked at peace, enjoying the nice breeze as the sun eased over the evening skies. His first initial reaction was to scold you, but you quickly spotted him.

”Zeno!” You greeted him with a smile. “I’m glad you decided to take me up on my offer.”

“What are you doing?”

“Admiring the sunset.” You obviously pointed out going back to your notepad. “I don’t have any color to make the city more…lively but I’ll remember it for later.” Suddenly, you turned to him with a small gasp as if you were struck with the most revolutionary idea. “Wait-now since you’re here, I’ll add you.” 

“Add me to what?”  The roughness in his tone sounding more agitated than he intended.

Raising your finger up, you told him to give you a moment. Your pencil moved effortlessly against the paper as your eyes flickered up to his every other second. “I knew it was missing a crucial component. And here!”  

Flipping over your notepad, you sketched Zeno with the ruins behind him in such a short time. Hesitantly, he took the notepad, having no idea what to think of it. You sculpted details of himself that even he didn’t often think about. “It’s not my best work, but I think it’s a great piece to add to my collection.” 

To your collection? In a way, Zeno…was honored.

Why did you find the need to draw him? He was keen to see your other drawings, but he missed his chance when your alarm went off, and you quickly took your notepad back, already making your way back to the ARK, telling him he should make the effort to join you more often if he was interested. He quickly followed behind, unsure if it was an attempt to worm your way into his personal affairs, but as much as he yearned for it, he wouldn’t allow such a weakness to get to him. 

So he scolded you anyway and escorted you back to the facility.

“I know you’re intelligent enough to understand the dangers of the city. You’re a liability out there.”

Without missing a beat, you ignored him. “I always wonder if there was a way to salvage the city so the people who lost their homes could return. It’s like visiting a…tomb.”

Zeno’s eyes softened at your words. He knew the aftermath of the city didn’t concern either of you. “Did you hear me?”

Tilting your head, you drew your eyes from the window. “Yes. I’m capable of caring for myself, thank you.”

There was no anger in your voice, but he could see the gears going in your head.

“I have my doubts.”

You scoffed at him, the frown in your brow deepening before you caught yourself. With a soft smile, you resigned, leaning back in the car seat. “You’ll see.”

Zeno didn’t know if it was a threat or not, but you definitely demonstrated your ability to care for yourself. When he returned to the ARK after a week long absence, he decided he would shadow you in your lab, but found you overseeing another lab, completely enrapturing the scientists and researchers alike.

He wasn’t surprised at this point but what were you up to now? 

“There was an error in measurements.” You quietly hummed, pointing out a mistake that was made. “Silly in nature for someone of your caliber-yes but nothing that can’t be corrected.” You gently encouraged one of the newer researchers. The jittery man had been nervously standing beside you, thinking you were going to punish him, but you quietly quelled his fears. 

Why did you behave like this? 

You were like a sore thumb amongst all these others. However, Zeno noticed it before anyone else. Someone was carelessly not watching their station and left one of the burners on causing one of the vials to implode on itself and set off an explosive chemical reaction. 

And you were in the crossfire. 

Undoubtedly, he knew he would be deemed responsible of harm that was done to one of the Senior Executive's only daughter. But he didn't want to see you get hurt. Using his speed to his advantage, he grabbed and shielded you with his body, pressing you against the closest wall.

Fire and smoke flooded the room, and slight panic among the staff ensued. 

The sprinklers had failed to go off, and that was just another issue that needed to be rectified. Zeno had no time to dwell on that and instantly began assessing you for any damage-and damnit it, he saw a flash burn across one side of your face that had him carefully cradling your face. Guilt and an unrelenting rage simmered deep inside of him from not saving you in time, and he was going to take it out on the rest of the staff until he looked to see your bright eyes staring up at him with an…unusual color, and your wound already healing? 

He was at a loss for words. 

After all this time, was it possible you were like…him?

“Nice for you to join us, Zeno! I’m quite alright, thank you.” You smiled completed unbother by the entire ordeal. “Perhaps, you should direct your attention to the others? And the burning lab? I do believe a lesson in lab safety is required and…” Your eyes trailed down from his face and down his body. “And maybe put out the small fire on your no doubt expensive coat?” 

Looking at you in disbelief, an insurmountable array of questions flooded his mind. Why would they send a bioweapon to watch over him? Why wouldn’t they tell him? Was this all a ruse to keep him in line? Why hadn’t you shared that information with him? How come he didn't know? Was this all to humiliate him?

Irritation and an unbearable warmth and protectiveness swelled in his chest. Is this the reason there was irritation when someone else tried to get close to you? Or when the scientists or Victor Gideon-that insufferable wretch- openly fawned over you? Is this why he was so drawn to you? To your power? To your intelligence? Was it the memories? 

Memories of you, possibly knowing…him? 

You must’ve known him. There was many things the Connections kept from him and maybe you were too.

He could clearly see your delicate face through the fogginess. Your sweet smile. Kind but tired eyes. There was a semblance of peace knowing he had found someone who was like him. As much as he kept his distance, there was an undeniable fondness he found himself having for you, luring him in with each passing glance. But now this possessive nature to keep you close and apologize for not saving you in time was practically clawing its way in his throat to voice that. 

“You can proceed to remove your hands now Zeno.” You reminded him, as he immediately released you watching you walk through the flames to grab a fire extinguisher and put out the fire all while simultaneously lecturing the others. 

Why did they really send you here? 

-

“I don’t need anything.”

Picking up on the stiffness in his voice, you had to speak up. “Now that appears to be false, you did seek me out after hours.” You gently teased, subtly calling him out on his lie. “If you’d like, you may sit-" You gestured to a chair not too far from you. “But please think twice before lighting that cigarette inside here. I really don’t need the sprinklers going off at this exact moment. I’ll be done in approximately 83 seconds.” 

Zeno rolled his eyes at your comment pocketing his lighter. You were always so technical. So robotic when you were working. Always seeming like a wise ass, even if it was unintentional. You were created for efficiency, so could he truly blame you? 

Taking you on your offer, Zeno took a seat. A sense of dread flooded his senses when an air of familiarity swarmed his mind again. Watching you quietly work was the most he could do now during your stay at the facility. He knew the higher-ups had little faith in him.

The imitation of Albert Wesker.

Yet, you never compared him to that.

And just as you said, you sent in your reports and spun around in your chair to face him. “Now what do I owe this pleasure?” 

“I came here for business purposes.” 

Nodding gently at his statement you urged him to speak. “Then please continue.” 

Zeno observed you for a moment more. Watching the way you crossed your legs, blouse and skirt ironed to perfection, stockings and heels on full display, which was unfitting for a lab, but he never questioned it. You tilted your head, waiting for him to say something. He had gotten into the strange habit of staring at you, but you wrote it up to him being so endlessly in thought. 

“I can defend myself.”

You raised a brow, unsure what he was referring to. “Care to clarify?” What could he possible be referring to? Then realization dawned on you, followed by a soft laugh. “Oh, the conference you mean! I have no doubt you could have, and you did.”

“It's obvious they don’t trust me.” His confession had your smile faltering just a bit. 

“Why…do you say that?”

Clenching his fist, you could hear the tension in the fabric of his glove. “Do you not feel the same way?”

Lately, you hadn’t really felt much of anything regarding the organization expect disdain. “They are driven by human emotion, and I am an...asset of the organization.  Whether I want it or not.” 

Something strange happened when you saw Zeno pull his gaze away from yours, making you disassociate yourself from the professional mindset that was driven into you. Your heart skipped a beat, and you wanted to comfort him. You always had a passion for others like yourself, especially him.

You were losing Zeno before he could really be vulnerable with you. “But-" Zeno's eyes met yours again. “I did not appreciate their tone. They had no reason to be scrutinizing you during a meeting like that. We were not there to discuss you. Or me. They were out of place in…my professional opinion and needed a gentle reminder.” 

Zeno scoffed, he remembered your ‘gentle’ reminder. Both of you sat side by side during the meeting, but even before that, he couldn't stop thinking of you.

-

Zeno wouldn’t admit it aloud but after the lab incident he made the effort to get closer to you. It was small at first. He would have one of the lower level staff members bring you coffee or tea with a light breakfast but you continuously rejected it. Thats when you told him, you didn’t consume human food and were strictly on a nutrient injection diet you would administer to yourself every 72 hours for full efficiency. 

For some reason, the thought that you couldn’t even eat food only had him imagining the worst of what they’ve done to you in the lab. It disgusted him, but he wasn’t surprised. The labs were the most successful yet terrible moments he could ever remember. And when he would visit you at night, he found out your alarm would go off to remind you to get rest throughout the day so you wouldn’t essentially collapse from exhaustion. Your face haunted him at night and he couldn’t bare the idea of you possibly killing yourself over work.

"You should’ve seen me in younger days. My father wanted to see how long I could go without sleep. He told me I needed to learn resilience when I had begged him to rest.” You laughed one time. “S.D.P they called it-the Sleep Deprivation Project, amongst others. Short but interesting time in my life. At times, I could have sworn I was hallucinating about…doesn’t matter, but I slept for two days straight and had a subarachnoid hemorrhage- brain bleed for short, but obviously my regenerative factor quickly healed me. I blame human genetics for those small issues, but I’ve never seen Father so concerned for my health. It was nice when he finally kept me company.”   

Zeno looked at you as if you had confessed the most horrific story in all of creation. The smile on your face didn’t falter as you seemed enthusiastic about your own upbringing. If both of you were bioweapons, was it cruel? Or just more pawns in this bigger game? “That’s…tragic.”

”Tragic?” You blinked at him, not expecting him to say that. “No no it’s fine. I don’t require a full 8 hours and someone of our creation can withstand these strenuous periods of stress/activities, making us perfect for almost any situation. Although it was a frightening learning experience for the team but the results were interesting. We found out I couldn’t stay awake after 17 days if I was consistently on missions.”

"17 days?” Zeno questioned you, a bit taken aback by that revelation.

“Yes, only 17. The nutrient injections did help but not for long for those trials. Again, I blame human genetics for hindering further research-this body is so limiting.”

“You could’ve died.”

The hollowness in his voice haltered your thoughts for a moment. “No…with my regenerative abilities I would’ve been okay.” You offered with a warm smile. 

“Would you have done the same experiments to others?”

”To others?” 

“Yes.”

”I-of course not. I’m…I know the implications behind this so I volunteered to be the subject. It was the optimal choice.”

“I see.” Zeno mumbled, lighting another cigarette. He remembered your confused look, analyzing every micro expression on his face.

“It wasn’t all bad if you believe it’s a cause for concern. I learned that if I were home-bound, I was able to conserve more energy and lasted 29 days.  Not by much, but overall, we decided that withholding sleep from a subject would not be the best outcome for efficiency. So over the years, we would slowly push to decrease the need for sleep but still incorporate it into my daily schedule, making me a...night owl!” You chuckled nervously, drawing in your notepad.

“I can get more work done without feeling fatigue so often. 20 minutes of rest every 4 hours over a 24 hours period or essentially two hours a night is where we’ve gotten. My father wanted me to stop the regimen but that can’t be undone so easily at this stage until I decide to put a hold on all of my projects which is not an option.”

Zeno knew how far men like your 'father' were willing to take things. His body was littered with invisible scars that sometimes kept him up at night. Yet, hearing you speak on your experience made him realize how inhumane they were.

At the end of the day you were just another weapon.

“I think…it was nice when Father kept me company during those harder days. We would…talk and somehow it made everything more-what’s the word?” Puffing out your cheek, you looked up towards the ceiling. “I guess it would be worth it? Bearable? But nowadays nothing seems like it except to just…work, but what could we do besides rebel in our small, little ways?” 

Zeno never forgot that conversation.

He found himself enjoying the time with you and engaging in conversations of all kinds. That’s why it was so strange seeing you like this after he found out you were a B.O.W and did intensive research to look into you. Why would an executive allow his 'daughter' to go through such experiments? He was a doctor, but that couldn’t be the real motive behind it, could it? He had his suspicions about whether he was even your Father or if he truly used his DNA to create you. However, upon his search, it was difficult to find anything on you, and he had to secretly pull some strings just to find out you were once utilized for military combat on missions a couple of years ago.

But what changed?

He saw the footage, which more or less intrigued him than disturbed him, because you showed restraint against hurting others and showed an attachment to certain specimens. You were fast. Agile. Intuitive. And your abilities to control specimens through parasitic means were something to behold. Always, you carefully avoided harming humans and specimens alike but you had an issue with listening to authority out in the field. You were too combative with your team leader on every mission you were assigned and some unknown altercation had occurred. However, the data show there was 100% success rate in missions with you involved.

He couldn’t find how exactly you became a B.O.W, but Zeno found notes from a classified team of doctors and researchers stating you were too emotional and had grown attachments to team members in the past, and even showed signs of distress when certain team members died out on the field. When you told them you wanted to mourn them, they dismissed your claims, saying you weren’t able to differentiate between your feelings, and from then on, you stopped engaging with your doctors, making it difficult to further assess you.

He saw pictures of your bright smile, which didn’t seem as false as you practiced now. No one would ever know, but he kept a photo of you far from any prying eyes of you wearing a skin-tight combat suit that hugged you in all of the right places.

You excelled in everything, it was nearly impressive. But then, numerous times over, your father eventually pulled you out. 

However, some more interesting data resulted from you terminating your caretaker in your younger days. The only human you had been known to dispose of due to possible signs of unknown abuse, but you refused to speak about it, making them unable to further investigate. Due to that incident, you had been labeled volatile under certain conditions and needed a higher level of security for surveillance, but the time you spent amongst him and others proved otherwise.  

You always seemed perfect to him. 

-

“I do hope this conference is of some importance and ends soon.” Brushing your skirt and adjusting your blouse, you made sure you looked presentable, letting out an exasperated sigh. 

“I agree,” Zeno mumbled under his breath, the urge to pull a cigarette from his pocket just tingling at the tip of his fingers. 

And before he could blink, you looked him over and stretched your hand up to adjust his tie ever so slightly. “There you go.” Your infamous smile flashed him once more before entering the board room.

It was harder to deny it, but he had experienced this before, hadn’t he? Another subtle memory with your face attached to it.

The way his heart sped up watching how you carried yourself with such confidence was unlike him. The gesture seemed too intimate to brush off as nothing. Why would you do that? Even now, you were too calm for his liking. He wondered if they had ever gotten into your head? Made you feel small? Made you feel like you were merely property? A failure? So many things you’ve done that made him feel like he mattered, and you never asked for anything in return, and continued on with your day. 

The flashing of the presentation you had seen countless times played once again. Perhaps some data changed. Perhaps one of the newer specimens developed a unique mutation, but there was never anything new. How could they discuss new specimens when they terminated yours on unfair grounds just a couple of months back during a training session? You held onto that grudge-some would call it- and were indirectly showing signs of disobedience without overstepping any real boundaries. 

Sitting beside Zeno, you pretended to take notes, drawing away in your notepad and writing thoughts on your future projects. It wasn’t until the conversation suddenly changed to him that they began berating him about his progress on Elpis.

About the ARK facility.

About Victor Gideon.

”I ensure you everything has been going as planned.”

”We have heard the same repetitive rhetoric from you. Albert Wesker would not have-“

“My apologies.” You calmly interrupted, your eyes immediately meeting the executive across the room. She was a bitter old woman who disliked you when she found out her son was trying to pursue you and accused you of being a parasitic leech in attempts to seduce him. 

If only she knew you nearly made her plan funeral arrangements.

Your hand found Zeno’s thigh under the table, where no one could see, causing him to go rigid from your touch. A quiet gesture to show him you were going to take it from here. “This meeting has been ongoing for quite some time. May I ask how exactly does this correlate with today’s meeting?” 

Calmly putting your hands together, you leaned on the table. That smile of yours irritating the executive sitting across from you. “I don’t believe we were speaking to you.”

”I did extend my apologies prior to speaking.” You gently fired back. Your father sat a couple seats down already rubbing his temple. “We came to discuss matters in respect to the development of whatever this is-“ You vaguely gestured to the screen. “Nothing we haven’t discussed numerous times before. Especially with very little progress from your team to back it up. Did you intend to waste our time by summoning us here? Or perhaps, you want to take on his role and construct a more comprehensive plan to produce better results? We would be more than thrilled to take suggestions.”

Zeno looked at you from his peripheral. What in the world could have possessed you to speak out of turn like this? Was this how you always were? Is this what they meant you were too emotional and combative with authority figures? He didn’t need you to speak on his behalf, but he couldn’t deny himself the satisfaction of watching the higher-ups scrambling to take control back.

 “Careful now, child."

“No.” You pressed with a little shrug. 

“Are you challenging me?”

Tensions rose when you withheld a small laugh. “I don’t believe there’s much of a challenge there Executive.” 

Sniggers rang out around you that was quietly silenced with a glare. “This indecent display is disgustingly unbecoming of you.”

”Then perhaps we should proceed with the meeting?” That small smile of yours sickened her and before she could hurl another comment at you, your father silenced the both of you. The meeting proceeded as some of the other members were amused and others not so much. And all executive could do was stared daggers at you while you returned to your notepad.

You knew your father was going to give you a lecture later on but for now you didn’t care. She had no right to speak about Zeno in the matter she did. It was unnecessary. You knew about the undeniable pressure that was thrown upon his shoulders so what was the purpose of constantly reminding him? There was no value. You would chalk it up to a waste of company time. And if this persisted with your knowledge, you would to send another gentle reminder of how your skills in espionage worked quite efficiently within the organization as well.

-

“That was such an amusing meeting.” Leaning back in your chair, you reminisced on how it made you feel. “I could remember as if it was yesterday.”

“It took place yesterday.”

“And yet I’m still beaming from the outcome!” 

Zeno sighed, “Why?”

“Why what?”

”Why even…say anything at all?” 

Pursing your lips, you looked at him in bewilderment. “You were present in the meeting.” 

“I’m aware.” 

“And you heard what I said. Why more could be said about it?” The question was purely genuine, laced with a layer confusion of what Zeno was trying to look for.

“The only thing we were created for was to be weapons. Yet, you’re squeamish to certain experimentations, squandering your talents and apparently opposed to killing-your morality getting the better of you in the grander scheme of things. Tell me, did you feel that way when you terminated your caretaker.” 

For once, Zeno saw the way you pulled back from him, regret quickly bubbling in his chest. “T-that is irrelevant to our current conversation-where did you get that information from?” Though you kept a calm facade, the pressure in your head intensified along with the unsettling pounding in your chest.

“I have my ways.”

“I assure you I only make decisions unless they’re absolutely necessary.”

"Is that so?”

Although a strange resentment settled over you towards Zeno’s statement bringing up your past he knew absolutely nothing about, you decided to let it go. 

Uncurling your fists, you took silent deep breath. Maybe another day. “Zeno, what is this all about?” 

“They sent you here to spy on me. To report everything.” Zeno firmly stated before his voice soften.

To get into my head.

To get into my heart.

To make me weak.

To taunt with me your face of someone Albert Wesker probably once knew.

To make me care about your existence.

“Why?” You took note of his posture sinking ever so slightly and the glazed over look in his eyes, even through the sunglasses and prescriptions, shielding away one of his most prominent distinguishable features. “All they see is an…imitation. All of my shortcomings. No matter what I do. You’re no different than them. All you see is a weakness you have to supervise and exploit.”

Silence washed over both of you.

“Do you truly believe that’s what I’ve been doing?” 

“Yes. Anything else would just be you wasting your time and…mine. Why wouldn't you?"

Listening to the sound of his voice, there was pain. A pain you weren’t sure if you were the root cause of.

All this time, had he thought you were going behind his back?

You knew you weren’t entirely sure how to express your interest in him, but it was evident you had been doing a terrible job if your presence and actions were still causing him this much frustration. 

Though it wasn’t in your design, you wanted to try for him.

For once in your life, he had made you feel something no other person had been able to. After countless nights and days together, did he really think you were trying to do all this just to hurt him? Is that why he was so angry? Did he really think you thought so low of him?

Never once did you gaze at his beauty and think him weak. It was quite the opposite that you ensured him he wasn’t alone, and you wanted to have him in your life.

“It’s simple, really.” You whispered, making your way to sit beside him, noticing the way his muscles tensed up when you got near and how he was… teary-eyed. Zeno knew it was a weakness. He adored the way you looked after him, but loathed the way you infiltrated his heart and mind so freely.

He wondered if you put that much effort into caring about him as a 'partner' just because it was your assignment or if you truly cared. And he was terrified to know the truth. He despised the way others looked at you. Despised how you were treated as if you weren’t superior. Despised the way Victor secretly wanted to assess you under his care. Despised you were here with him instead of living your life free of chains. 

“May I?” Slowly, you reached up to remove his sunglasses. He flinched away from your touch making you resign until he let out a soft sigh and leaned into you. “There he is.” You smiled, watching you with softened eyes. You always wondered if he thought about you the same way you often thought about him. 

 “You do not deserve their cruelty.” You continued tenderly, using your thumbs to carefully dry the corner of his eyes. “Especially when they can’t even fathom or cannot control what we are. You may have been created from a deceased man’s genetic DNA or may have had his imprinted memories but you are Zeno. You are beautifully designed regardless of how or why they made you. You have your own heart and mind that makes you, you and no one in this life can take that from you. Besides, I think…you’re perfect the way you are. And I’ve learned to accept that I truly don’t really care if they think I don't have the emotional depth for it, but… I find myself appreciating and loving you all the same.” 

And before he could say anything word, you placed a gentle kiss to his cheek. Physical affection was not lost on you but romance and intimacy was. You never experienced that and never imagined how others could forcefully push that upon others. It was a simple confession that held weight. You didn’t expect him to say he loved you back-that would be silly. This life you led wouldn’t never grant you that happiness. It may take time and maybe Zeno could finally understand what you meant when you when you told him he didn’t have to pretend from the very beginning.

You were always on his side. 

“It’s late now. Maybe we should retire for the night. It’s been a long day.” You spoke, taking off your watch right before the alarm went off.

Flashing Zeno one more smile you were about to lead him out of your lab when he grabbed ahold of your arm, his fingers gradually tightening its hold on you.

“Is something wrong?” You looked at up, watching as he slowly rose from his seat. Zeno never intimated you in the slightest but now in the darkness of your lab and that menacing glower you weren’t sure what he was planning. “If I overstepped…I apologize.”  

Hesitantly, he dragged his hand down your arm, testing your boundaries, gauging your reaction to his touch. He thought of the way Victor touched you and how those from your past hurt you and how he wanted to annihilate every single one of them. His hand found your waist, resting his hand there for a moment before pulling you in until you were flushed against him. 

The idea of Zeno was something you had difficulty putting into words that didn’t sound like scientific jargon or nonsensical formulas that hopefully brought you to a solution. You couldn’t help but admire him. Gazing over his face to his single dangling cross-shaped earring that brought a unique sense of personality you rarely saw with anyone in the Connections, you felt a blurring warmth in your chest.

"No. I apologize if…I do.” With a hand under your chin, he lifted your head and placed the softest kiss on your lips. No man who ever tried pursuing you treated you with such reverence as this. It was always violent. Always forced until you had to put them down yourself.

The kiss was short lived yet one of the sweetest sensations you ever indulged yourself in. When he pulled away you drew your eyes elsewhere. Bashful was the first word that came to mind as your fingers grazed over your lips.

Zeno couldn’t deny himself the pleasure that was you. Your lips were a luxury he wanted to taste over and over again if you allowed it. Did Albert Wesker have someone like you in his past? Someone sweet and loving? Did he let her slip away? Was it a possibility that it was you? Or-

“I’m sorry.”

"No.” You smiled, placing a hand on his chest. You were well-versed in the arts of manipulation. Preying on the hearts of weak-willed greedy men who saw you as nothing by a past time.

Subtle seduction.

Soft words.

Utilizing your skills to get whatever the organization needed and leaving without a single trace, and perhaps leaving behind a trail of broken hearts, all while sabotaging rivals and obtaining company or military secrets. Although it wasn’t normal, you successfully completed every mission by subduing your targets. 

You took pride in yourself not having to use your abilities to physical harm anyone unless absolutely necessary. You were superior than most and understood your strength and intelligence. But this was new. Nothing could have ever prepared you for Zeno. He was a breath of fresh air despite his prior reservations but you never held it against him.

Especially now when he looked at you with such desire and longing. A longing you’ve never seen in a man that wasn’t trying to take advantage of you. You knew your feelings weren’t fictitious. You knew it meant something but without proper care to guide you, you never could truly understand it and you never wanted to.

Not until you met him.  

“I don’t know how to describe this feeling.”

I do, Zeno thought to himself, it’s love like you said. It’s admiration. It’s a weakness. 

Yet, he wanted it all.

”But I do know, you’re the only one I want to experience this with….may I try that again?”

Zeno smirked through the heart felt moment. “You may.” He let you take the lead, your soft lips reaching up to meet his. It wasn’t as smooth as you liked causing heat to flare up across your face as you embarrassingly pulled away, bumping right into one your chairs. 

This was something he wasn’t going to let you live down.

”Oops-my apologies. I…do hope you have a good night Zeno.” You fumbled over your words, feeling like you were making a complete fool of yourself. As much as you did your research on this, nothing frightened you like this. 

“I can walk you to your room.”

Shaking your head, “N-no it’s okay, you don’t have to trouble yourself with that.” You said backing away, hiding your face in your hand.

Zeno looked at you in bewilderment, his hand reaching out to stop you. Was he scaring you? Or were you so inexperienced in matters like this that you didn’t know what else to do? Nonetheless, he found himself amused at this, his nerves immediately dying down.

“It’s no trouble.”

You were already halfway out your door when you stopped. The both of you needed to exit the same way and leave down the same hallway anyways but his voice calmed the storm brewing in your head.

“If…you want.”

-

This went on for weeks. It was an odd phenomenon how you became more reserved around him when both of you were alone. This only encouraged Zeno to make the efforts to corner you when you least expected, pretend he wasn’t teasing you, or steal a kiss when no one was watching before leaving you weak in the knees. He had become rather mischievously good at avoiding you. And he could see you were trying your best to keep up, to calculate when he was going to show up or attempt to surprise you, until one day he truly did.

“You want to take me where exactly?”

”Out of the city.” His voice was leveled watching you close your last report for the night. He could see the exhaustion in your eyes and he knew you desperately needed it.

“But…I’m not necessarily suppose to leave the facility without prior authorization.”

Zeno could almost laugh at that. “And that’s prevented you from leaving before?”

You concealed your smile, thinking about all the times you snuck away for your own curiosity and exploration. “An astute observation-fine. Let’s do it!” 

It was a late-night helicopter ride and an hour away to a small city with a waterfront. You loved the water due to your unique biology. The dazzling lights of the lively atmosphere had you in awe as you watched people living their best lives. You could practically hear your father’s voice telling you that you weren’t one of them playing in your head over and over again. Your indoctrination into a life solely made to be used as a weapon was once thwarted by the beauty of the world.

”You should try it.” Zeno told you, pouring a glass of wine for you. You guys sat at the balcony of a quiet restaurant. The rest of the patrons had been cleared out, as you could tell, he had gone through the extra efforts to have you alone.

“I don’t have a peculiar taste for human…beverages or food.” You mumbled, thinking about how you were strictly relying on nutrient-supplied injections to keep your functioning throughout the week. Though the possibility of the drink being spiked lingered just vaguely in the back of your mind.

He brought the glass closer to you, picking up his own, he hadn’t forgotten you rarely consumed food, but he wanted you to experience something new. “Perhaps, it’ll surprise you. Give you a chance to expand your palette.” 

You blinked at him, picking up the glass as he gently clinked his glass against yours. Sloshing the liquid around in the glass, you were hesitant to bring it to your lips. Though you had mimicked scenarios like this for many missions, you never actually consumed alcohol. You never understood the value of it. But after watching Zeno take a zip, he watched you with those keen eyes of his. 

And when you finally took the first sip, the initial contact of the liquid…burned your tongue. There was an unbearable bitterness that you couldn’t escape from as you calmly struggled to swallowed it down.

Clearing your throat, you nearly gagged looking back at Zeno. “That was interesting.”

Zeno chuckled, “You didn’t like it.”

“No-I didn’t say that!"

”You don’t have to lie.” He said without a fuss, leaning on the table just a bit. 

Why couldn’t you be normal? You felt nothing but embarrassment as you confessed, “It wasn’t the best.” 

Zeno ushered someone from within the restaurant to remove your glass as you quietly thanked them. “Sorry.” You mumbled, feeling a bit childish.

”No need. We’ll find something you’ll like.”

A certain warmth rose up in your chest from his admission. It was a silly observation but the idea he was making the initiative to find something you would be able to consume was touching. No one ever cared that much to experience that with you. 

“Thank you Zeno.”

The night went on smoothly, trying small things. Many things you didn’t like, but other things you didn’t mind so much. It was an exciting experience that had you genuinely smiling from ear to ear until you no longer had an appetite to continue where he took you for some fresh air.

“Each time I’m in my lab dealing with my own projects. I forget about the world around us.” You mumbled, taking his arm that he offered you. The both of you strolled along the quiet streets by the broad walk to see the moonlight dancing on the calm ocean’s waves. Zeno hung to your every word, enjoying the way you spoke about personal matters of the heart. 

“I use to be thrilled to be sent out for a missions- not because it would make father proud or to prove to the higher ups I wasn’t as violate as they believed I was but because of moments like this. I would see something new. Feel something new. Father was adamant that what I was feeling wasn’t real. He hired the best psychiatrists to probe my mind for answers but he received no answers he liked. Then I remember I’m just an asset. Created for a purpose that wasn’t met to lead a normal life so maybe I shouldn’t feel that way. I think I’ve come to terms with that until…you came along.”

Zeno looked at you, your gaze fixated on the ocean. “Me?”

”Yes, you.” You hummed. “You’re the perfect example of a distraction. A possible conflict of interest that would prevent me from continuing tasks.” Your smile couldn’t reach your eyes at the statement. “I’m usually tasked to report such…distractions but I never have or will, especially when it comes to you. My loyalty could only go so far with my Father and I found it’s possible to pledge loyalty to other things. No one needs to know about us…if you wish and I won’t allow them to harm you in any way.”

You struggled to meet his eye. The confession was strange. Being honest was something that made you feel things you didn’t necessarily want to feel but welcomed. “I always wished someone would help me with these overwhelming thoughts in my head without trying to use it for some research. Then after a while I thought maybe I could find that solace…with you?”

“You can.” Zeno reached out for you, your hands slipping through his. Neither of you were the affectionate type before this. Deprived of that since creation. He never told you before but he had his suspicions of you for other reasons regarding Wesker. Memories that kept him up at night. The urge to hold you. The urge to claim you as his. The urge to search for you when you were out of sigh for too long. “It may take time but…you’ve made it clear you’re the one. I always felt it was a lapse…of judgement to have you so close but there’s moments in my memories.”

With a tilt of your head, you smiled. “Memories of me?”

“Memories of you and….him. And your face is there and I can’t seem to escape it.”

Zeno hated the way your smile fell. He never voiced that to you before. 

You had known about Zeno and Albert Wesker but never once did you see information regarding yourself in Zeno’s memories. No notes. No labs. No warnings. Now it begged the question…were the Connections keeping secrets from you?

“My face in your memories?”

”Yes. They’re often sad. And I assumed he…he wasn’t kind to you.”

Blinking at Zeno in disbelief you grew worried keeping your voice leveled. “He? Are you referring to Albert Wesker?”

The hesitancy in your voice drew questions you didn’t want to know the answers to. There has been times you had dreamed about…Wesker.

Through exhaustion.

Though hazy hallucinations when you could no longer stay awake.

Through your own dreams.

You never knew why. You never questioned it. The concept of dreaming was a mystery to all of creation. The face of a man you never knew. His name felt like such a taboo on your tongue bringing him up in front of Zeno but you had to know. 

Zeno gritted his teeth with a nod. “Yes, memories of him and you in what seemed like a lifetime ago.”

A lifetime ago? “I don’t think that true Zeno.”

”Isn’t it?” He gently questioned you. “The way they created me. Us. How they have you watching over me. The way we naturally seek one another. The remorse embedded in my very memory of you.”

”Zeno…” You whispered emphatically. “That’s not possible.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I never met Albert Wesker.”

Zeno looked at you, sympathy on his brow. If that’s the case then your father had most likely been lying to you longer than you realized. Even you didn’t know the full truth of your own creation. “I can’t put it all together but it’s no doubt you…”

“No, it can’t be. That would mean-” Your blood ran cold from the revelation. The lightheadedness that flooded your mind was unlike anything you’ve experienced since your youth. 

No. No. No.

Not only had you been a created in a lab…were you a clone? Of someone Albert Wesker knew in his past? A past lover?

You swayed just a bit but Zeno was quick to catch you. “Are you okay?”

You couldn’t meet his eyes. Is this why he was so concerned about you? Always seeking your comfort because of a memory? Is that why you admired Zeno from the beginning. “I’m fine…I need to do some research.” 

The pounding in your ears was astounding as you became nearly delirious. You hadn’t spoken another word as you and Zeno returned to the helicopter and made your way back to the ARK. You felt terrible leaving Zeno after he taken the time to take you out but you returned to your lab and logged into the Connections private network system. 

You had searched through years of old employees and there was certain files even you were restricted from that you never considered checking. Over and over and over you tried but nothing worked until you used your father’s override code. It would certainly be flagged but that was the least of your concerns. You searched through countless records, countless employees until you came across an obituary with your name on it. It was filed under your father’s name but reading through the documentation your heart sunk. 

You were able to find the account linked to your name under another alias. Your heart race as you logged onto to the inactive account and saw your face staring back at you. Black spots in your visions almost made you pass out, how could you not know? Why couldn’t you put those clues together? You rocked back and forth humming to yourself to calm your nerves. 

There was so many locked files linked to the account that no one had access to until you came across a journal. You had no idea what the password could possibly be with only one attempt left. It was obvious someone had tried to get into the account numerous times but there was a hint relating to the beauty of the ocean.

You sat there for who knows how long until you touched the delicate pearls around your neck before removing it. It was a gift your father he had given you years ago but even then he seemed hesitant to give it to you. Then you looked through each pearl, assessing each one, one pearl at a time until you felt a small engraving and upon inspection it spelled out the word ‘Freedom’.

With a deep shaky breathe, you typed in the password only to have the screen go black and load in to see a video log dated back years ago.

You were in.

The pounding of your heart against your ribcage only escalated as there were hundred of notes and logs complied into different categories all signed off with your name.

Some were research.

Some were personal moments.

Some labeled…Albert Wesker.

Clearing your throat, the ones that caught your eyes was labeled,

‘My Last Note.’

The clamminess of your palms nervously had you clicking on the video and as clear as day you saw yourself. It was uncanny. It was made you feel ill but the sadness in her eyes? Or was it yours? Made you feel worse. 

“The time is now 2:47 am. I’ve just returned from the lab under military supervision feeling…terrible.” With glazed over eyes, the woman painful swallowed looking over to the night sky holding her abdomen.

You recognized the room as yours.

It was your balcony.

It was your bed.

“My father has decided along with the Connections to keep me on ‘house arrest’ until they decide what to do with me. In other words, imprisonment until I decide to cooperate. At least it’s my room with the beautiful view so it’s not that bad. Anyways, I’ve spent the last couple years fighting for some sense of freedom. What they’ve been doing has been beyond atrocious. This ‘secret’ battle that has been ongoing since before I was born makes me sick to my stomach. Now, I could truly understand why mom left dad.”

“She was a brilliant hematologist that divorced him so I wouldn’t have to live my life in a criminal’s shadow being possibly hunted every day of my life. She got out of there and gave me everything I needed to succeed with very limited time for dad to see me. She hated talking about him but she told me that he destroys everything he touches. And anyone involved in the organization makes it… worse. I could clearly see that now. But after she died from unknown causes that the both of us were fighting so hard to cure…I couldn’t save her from…I had no one. Not until, Dad forced me to try to persuade Albert Wesker into personally joining his team. I thought I was doing good when I became successful. But even after my numerous doctorates and my work with a dream to help people, that died so quickly. 

“I thought dad was bringing me along to do some good and he believed in my research and provided me everything I needed. Promising me to make the world we live in a better place but no…everything he did-they did just brought death and chaos. He took my benevolence parasite that I found when I nearly died and decided to use it. Just to stupidly weaponize it for evil? Figuring out it was one of keys to actually help improve human evolution-something that even Mr. Spencer himself couldn’t even do properly. I worked on it all of my professional life, using its properties to find a way to heal the terminally ill and he used it to…hurt people. He soon found out we formed a bond…and it obeyed my command. I figured we saved each other’s lives and we created what felt like a symbiotic relationship.  We kept each other safe so after many years of me trying to hide the truth, dad confiscated it for his own agenda. I kept questioning how could I live with myself after that?  So I had to find a way out-”

The woman chuckled reflecting your own smile. 

“Al was there. ‘Picking’ up the pieces with more pretty lies. But I needed something or someone. Anything to keep myself from going insane. And I know he was so distant but there was those moment of us together where it felt like it was just us against the world. Dad wanted me to get close to him.”

The woman laughed again.

“But he didn’t…anticipate…how close. Dad despised everything about it but admired the ‘brilliance that was him’ and wished there was a way to make him more trustworthy and reliable to further push his agenda. But you know Al…always had his own plans. And I don’t know what was going on in dad’s head but he thought I was betraying him and the Connections. Of course I thought about it and of course Albert had tried persuading me several times that he would protect me from my father but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t work with either of them.”

-

A strange pounding in your chest came. Memories that didn’t belong to you, entangled in sheets with a man with piercing cat like reddish orange hues staring down at you in a moonlit room. “You are an exquisite seductress you know that.” An unfamiliar sensation hummed deep in your lower stomach simmering away as your body was involuntarily reacting.

You struggled to push the feeling away.

“Eyes of me.” The feeling of a firm hand gripping your chin to look up at him as your legs stretched wide around his waist. “This will always be mine. And mine only.”

The sensations that never belonged to you. 

“Dad is a damn scientist for crying out loud-and he thought I was somehow giving away the organization’s secrets to a man who wanted to destroy the world…a world I wanted to build a future with him.” Tears flowed down her face, as she took a shaky breath and wiped the tears on her rolled up sleeve. “No one knew the Al I knew. Despite his undying passion for control and power. So I left him too…I had no choice and he needed to be stopped. I know he would never choose me over anything. I was just there…and after my license was revoked and I lost access to all my research I had nothing. Everything was taken from me. I had no evidence but I’m not stupid. I know it was the Connections. I know it was Dad’s idea to teach me a lesson but when I found that Dad made a clone of me…” 

Your own breath hitched in your throat.

“I knew I no longer had a place in this world. There was no point in living anymore. Dad wanted to control me. Albert wanted me on his side just as an extension of more power. Connections just wanted my intelligence. I knew no one held any real love for me but creating a clone just to prove I’m replaceable? Just to prove that you could create life as a petty joke to get back at me? Just to try to find another way to control the specimen without me? But then I looked at the files-that poor…little girl. I wish I could save her but…I know I’m already sick. I’m a dying woman…dying from the same thing that killed my mother and I can’t even save myself. Even when Al found out how sick I actually was and told him I had no intentions of living forever just to have nothing he said he had no use for dying woman and he’ll sort it with or without me.”

Memories of Wesker, looking over documentation confronting you about your specimens and her sickness clouded your vision. The feeling of him grabbing your arm as he towered over as he scolded you about something you couldn’t quite make out. 

“But…I’m going to go out on my terms. I’m not going to let them treat me or use that poor girl as spare parts knowing she’ll undoubtedly heal from. She has such a kind heart despite the torture they’ve been putting her through. She doesn’t know better yet but dad wanted to use her as my donor as if I’m not already too far gone. As if it wasn’t his people that most likely cultivated a virus…of apparently unknown origins to keep me under his thumb. They already started the preparation for surgery.”

“Dad thinks she’s the key to the next step to evolution and if I had known sooner…she’s proof that we could be better and create something to actually save humanity and rise above hatred despite what’s flowing in her blood. I’m not Spencer. I’m not some old fool who learned too late in life that we can’t continuously harm others to chase our own silly dreams of a human evolution and then change our minds last second but…if she can make a change anything is possible.”

“If she really is..me in lamest terms…perhaps there is hope to destroy this organization. It won’t be easy-nothing has ever been easy. But I just can’t live with myself any longer rotting away scared everything I created has essentially amounted to nothing. All my patients I couldn’t save. All that intent to do good destroyed. But…father is predictable to an extent. She’ll survive him with my serum I created from my specimen and I know he used it to help create her. All of the signs are there with a unique skillset different from other bioweapons I’ve seen. He desperately wanted to make a point. To create a version of me he could mold and weaponize and listen to his every order whenever I refused him. He’ll get want he wants for a time-more then I’d like to admit but they won’t be able to control her…not for long anyways. She’ll be too powerful and since she has my face I know that will slowly destroy dad deep down when…” She paused. “Dad always prided himself on family and ‘our’ work when he got a hold of me but I’ll think of her as a part of me that wants to live on-needs to. Still fighting for a world worth protecting.”

“Goodness me- I’m rambling, must be the nerves. I just miss thinking about the future I could’ve had if things were different. Believe it or not…Al talked about marriage and having a child to give his entire ridiculous empire to. Dad hated that idea but now I know Dad will never change except something drastic happens and Albert…my dear love will get himself killed one day. Heh-it’s sad I wish that he was here now. He knew that I would always come back to him. Crawl into his bed and although he would rarely express how he truly felt about anything he would wrap me in his arms burying his face in my shoulder… but he’ll get my letter. He’ll understand why I had to do what I needed to do and…maybe he’ll hate me for it.”

“And he’ll probably look for me, denying the truth until he realizes what happened. I don’t know how he’ll feel deep down but he’ll know that I wanted something better for all of us despite knowing people like him can’t be happy as they are because of the consequences of their own actions. Destroying humanity all in the sake for power…will be all for nothing if all the beauty of the world is shattered into ruin. We will have nothing. And then what? We can’t rebuild at that point. There will be nothing….but now I finally have an answer to my question: how can I live with myself? It’s simple-I don’t.” 

The woman sadly shrugged, pulling off the same pearl necklace and set it aside. She picked up a picture frame and admired it for so long dragging her fingers over it before a broken laugh left her lips. “It was one of the more quiet moments of Al and I-” Flipping over the picture, it was a semi blurred photo of her and Albert Wesker lying next to each other. “He didn’t like photos but he allowed me to keep this one….I just wish I could revisit it again but-” The woman looked at her watch. “It’s 3:07 am. I have the only neutralizing serum they wanted to control the girl but I created a placebo-nutrient stimulants she’ll have to use every 72 hours. Make it seem like they’re in control. It’ll be funny the day she realizes no one will be able to stop her and I’m going to destroy the original.” She showed off a purple vial in her hand before pocketing it. 

“And this-“ she pulled out a needle. “Is just to ease the pain you know. So I don’t feel anything. I know no one is ever going to see this so I don’t even know who I’m talking to at this point but if they do…I hope you find it. My clone…I want you to know I tried. I was not helping the organization for the love of it. They took everything from me and I had no choice at the end of it. Passing me along as if I’m…nothing. They even imprisoned me here. But they created something they’ll regret for the rest of their lives comprised of my own DNA and my specimen. And you’ll…be the change we need. I hope you are. Goodness-I really hope so.” With a sniffle, she looked over at the balcony. “I hope you can find some happiness one day in this rotten world. Don’t make my mistakes. And if all else fails…find the Wolf.” 

The quiet waves of the ocean in the distance sent a quiet wave of dreaded serenity to wash over you. “This is me signing off one last time. And I can’t stopping thinking about it. I wish Albert was here to hold my hand and tell me it’ll be okay but we’ve moved on from that. I think…I’ll be okay. Far away from suffering when I get lost in the ocean…let’s just be better.” Then the woman stood up from a chair looking off towards the balcony with a smile, before taking a deep breath and disconnecting the video feed making your blood grow cold.

You sat there in silence watching the screen. Nausea formed in the pit of your stomach. For hours, you sat there going through video after video. Breeding projections. Cloning projections. Note after note. And nothing made you feel better. Not the ones addressed to the organization. Not the ones to your father. Not to ones addressed to Albert Wesker you never met and was long gone. You always wondered where your compassion for the specimens came from. Where your compassion to save people even when they didn’t deserve stemmed from. Now you had all the proof and evidence that that would be confiscated if they found out the truth. Finding spare USBs you downloaded everything from the account. They would surely confiscate your computer and probe you for the password to the account. And of course you’ll give it to them just so they could see everything was wiped cleaned with an inability to retrieve the data.

Tears blankly rolled down your face. You hadn’t realized you were crying. Not for yourself but a version of you that took her life. The one that essentially saved you. You saved yourself. The only one that thought about you and didn’t hate you despite everything. How had she suffered for so long? How was she sick? Your father-no that bastard often called you emotional but all of the executives were greed driven pigs. And Albert Wesker had one of the most kindest and brilliant person on his side and couldn’t see that. Had he truly been that blinded by his ambition? That version of you stated no one really knew him but you wished to know how he must’ve felt when you were gone.

What did he say?

What did your letter say? 

Then your thoughts traveled to your lover. Did Zeno only pursue you because his faded memories were comprised of regret because of you. Did you subconsciously do the same? You didn’t feel real anymore. Had you ever? So many things in your life finally made sense. You wanted to follow in her steps but how could she when she hoped you would be the change. 

It wouldn’t be easy so you decided to make a bold move. You called your creator through his deceased daughter’s account. At first, the call failed multiple times until a man answered. He was confused at first, his face growing pale.

“Put me through to my Father.”

The man gulped, “Ma’am…it’s late. P-perhaps we can-“

”Put. Me. Through. To. My. Father.”

You gave him a vague look and he immediately did as you asked. And after moment or two, your father answered the call with a sleepy look in his eyes. “Do you know what time it is…is something wrong?”

You opened your mouth to speak as your voice got caught in your throat. “My apologies. I forgot you need 8 hours of sleep to fully function.” 

Your father sighed at your words, “Is something wrong? Did something happen at the ARK?” 

Tapping your fingers impatiently, you barely could meet his eyes. The image of yourself. The image of Albert Wesker. Zeno. All flashed repeatedly in your mind. The door to your lab opened but all you could do is stare at your hands.

”Everything is accounted for.”

”So what’s wrong? Why are you upset? Why are you…wait-wait what account are you calling me from?”

Forcing a smile, you tilted your head. “You see the name as clear as day. Maybe you could tell me.”

Another sigh-more defeated left your father’s mouth as he ran a hand over his face. “Is this what you’re calling me over?”

”So I’m a clone?”

 A beat. 

“Was it not obvious at this point my child?”

“Obvious?” The laugh that echoed in the room even frightened yourself. “There has been many obvious things that occurred in my lifetime but being a cloned of your deceased daughter when she was alive- wasn’t one of them.”

”You-“ He angrily pointed at you. “Are treading on the thin ice. You have no idea-“

“That your daughter took her own life because she couldn’t trust the only men she had in her life? ”

“No-“

”No?” You tilted your head. “You didn’t drive her to that. You didn’t take away that light in her eyes?”

”I loved my daughter. I knew what she needed-“

“Did you? Then why did she take her life?”

You felt faint watching him. “You are being emotional right now. We will discuss this when you come back home-“

”Emotional? I didn’t create a clone of my daughter when she was alive as a joke and parade her clone around as my daughter pretending she didn’t kill herself. Then proceed to in enroll the clone in the-“ You looked over a file. That was hidden deep in the archive, associated with you and Zeno. It was sickening to say the least. “The B.O.W Breeding Program when she became of age. Now, that’s rich coming from you. What were you hoping to gain from that program? That I would be compliant and subject my body to that?”

”From a scientific perspective you will never know the depth of how important my daughter’s research was. My research. Yours. And as a father-“

”You’re a failure.” The dryness in your voice burned. “She loved you even after everything. Even after Albert. Even after what you did. And you decided to invest time into me only because you lost her and didn’t get the chance to use me to save her. You just created a thing! Pretending you cared about me. Then you thought you could fix things by attempting to raise me as your daughter…I’m assuming you thought it would keep me safe? Then you thought you could make amends but assigning me to partner with Zeno didn’t you? Thought it was would rectify all your wrongdoings and give me some sense of contentment that you deprived her? But aha- here’s the catch. If I decided to form a relationship with Zeno, you’d be able control both of us under one roof once again to push this agenda of yours aka your breeding program. Just like what you tried with Albert Wesker! You think you would be able create something new to see what we’ll make if your dreams came to fruition-“ 

“I’m sending a helicopter to take you home.”

“There is no home for me if you’re there.” You gritted your teeth, tears findings its way to your eyes as you tried calming yourself down. “You made sure to personally see to that. And I’ve grown tired of you.”

”Tired? I created you. I know what you need. I know what’s best for you. You would never know. Not you. Not her. Not even Albert Wesker who was just another dead man whose ambition was too great and got himself stupidly killed. The only leverage I had over that man is when my daughter died. I was distraught at her loss but seeing the way his smugness faded away was exceptionally satisfying. But at least he was useful in other ways. You will not survive on your own. Another monster waiting to get killed without my guidance.” You stared your father down before he decided another approach. “Fine…what…what can I do to make this up to you? You’re in a very emotional state right now and I know there is something we can come with a solution together. This is barely a minor setback my child with everything going on. I promise you.” 

“You promise?” You smiled. As if he could sweep it under the rug again. As if he could hide the truth. “Actually…there is one thing one. I will be taking my specimens one way or another. I wish you didn’t survive Albert Wesker shooting you in the head-the real truth behind your scar. And I desire nothing more than for you then to live the rest of your life in guilt to the point it slowly eats you alive, deteriorates you sanity knowing you drove your wife away and killed your own child.” 

“We can talk about-“

With a soft click, you disconnected the call, leaving only you to see your sad reflection in the black screen and from your peripheral Zeno standing off in the distance. Slowly, you rose from your seat-agitated and hands shaking as you aggressively pulled at your fingers unable to find the appropriate way to release all of the pent up tension and anger inside of you. 

You safely secured the USB’s for later before grazing your fingers across the top part of your work laptop and crushing it between your fingers until the screen and device cracked under the pressure before you ripped it apart and chucked it straight into the wall, leaving behind a huge dent.  

It wasn’t enough. 

Nothing would ever be enough.

Grabbing the stool, you chucked it straight into one of the empty thick glass containments shattering it on impact. Your table was next then your neatly organized equipment. You didn’t realize you were breathing so heavily lost in your anger that you were standing there.

You’re too emotional. 

You’re not human.

You can’t be so weak willed.

Youll never survive on your own.

Your feelings aren’t real.

You’re volatile.

Another monster waiting to get killed.

A soft hand on your arm pulled you out of your thoughts for a moment. Zeno. The urge to apologize for such brazen behavior was teetering on a fine line but you stood there unable to speak again.

“It’s okay.” Zeno spoke pulling you into his chest, placing a gentle hand to the back of your head to comfort you. He knew the frustration all too well. The disappointment of knowing your existence was temporary and made for servitude. 

”No…it won’t.” Thoughts of your past self? Original self? The real you? That woman replayed in your head over and over again. The guilt of existing already consuming your wellbeing. However, the anguish you were feeling wasn’t because of yourself but her. “I was created as a mere joke. My existence meant nothing from the beginning.” Zeno looked at you as you pulled away.

You’ll be the change we need. 

Let’s be better.

I miss Albert. 

I hope you finds some happiness. 

Don’t make my mistakes

Find the Wolf.

“You know that’s not true.” Zeno spoke to you.

“It is.” You looked down at your hands, thinking about how much you’ve done in their name. All of the unwanted advances you dealt in the name of missions. The quiet abuse you shouldered alone. Your undying loyalty.  “He loved to brag amongst colleagues that I am proof of his work-father and daughter with every successful mission or projects. If his daughter didn’t kill herself, they would’ve kill me long ago and use me however they pleased.”

“I feel ill. He use to tell me that my emotions were fictitious. Unreliable. Detrimental to my mission. But was I always destined to have this attachment to you because of her? I have no memories of her exactly but memories of Albert Wesker-nothing of her besides her DNA. And yet, I look at you-I’m aware you’re not him. I will never compare you to him but my mind is unable to comprehend the depth of this for my own sanity. I just wanted to experience love for myself without-” Your lips wavered, looking over your hands. “Without feeling like a monster. Without feeling like- I don’t know. I can’t process this.” 

”Do you remember what you told me the first time I came to your with my own reservations?” 

His hand tightened around your wrist, stopping you from pacing across the room. “No.“

”You’re lying.” 

“H-how about I lying?” You spat, your question painfully simmering in your chest from his accusation. Zeno held your chin, raising your head to look at him. 

“I know you remember.” He looked at you for a moment, seeing your gaze flickering in between his eyes. “Now, you need to take a moment to think.” He knew that the physical contact between two of use had been your ultimate language of understanding and your words of comfort sealed all the unspoken moment between the two of you. 

Closing your eyes, you took a deep breath to calm your nerves. “My apologies, I do remember.”

”Then tell me.” He whispered. His thumb gently rubbed across your cheek encouraging you to continue. Those blackened eyes of his pierced yours as you found yourself grabbing his hand. You concluded you needed some sort of comfort as you spoke. You were being vulnerable. Something you rarely did. 

“I told you, that being a clone or having another memory imprinted on you does not define you. You are you. You may have been made from his genetic DNA or even imprinted memories of a deceased man but you are Zeno. You are beautifully designed regardless of how they made you. You have your own heart and mind that makes you, you and no one in the life can take that from you. And I…love you all the same.” 

His heart leapt when you recited word for word what you told him weeks ago. Though he never was able to say those words back to you, you never held it against him. He worshipped you above all us and in this cutthroat business he knew the implications of what attachments could costs. What love meant.

”Then why are you allowing their ignorant ideologies of you to affect you so much?” 

“The same reason, it affects you. We know we were created this way, yet the secrets they keep and the way they act as if we’re nothing…I should have known better. Nothing in my life has been..real. Everyone has been chasing a memory of me and maybe I have been too...”

Zeno gazed at you with grief etched in his eyes. After all the nights you shared with one another. After you defended and accepted him with warm smile, wiping his tears when it became too much for him with kindness he never was able to reciprocate at times. 

“Do you truly think I only pursued you because of a mere memory?” 

That loathing in your heart from that question only made you feel weak. The way he spoke to you with same kindness and connotations in your voice as you had done for him. Weakness was a term that wasn’t in your design yet that’s what remained in your mind when you were at your lowest. “I rather you tell me.” 

Zeno said nothing else before he gave you a gentle kiss you couldn’t fully commit to. The way his heart yearned for you drove him to near madness. Despite knowing they would use it against him, he hadn’t let that prevent him from comforting you. You wouldn’t explicit state you were hurting. Hurting from betrayal. Hurting from their words. Hurting from the lies. 

He just wish he wasn’t the one that led you to that conclusion you were a clone. 

He was so sure you knew him. So sure of that you only pursued him because of whom he was cloned from and for the Connections. Though there were times, he desired to confront you about the overwhelming memories of you he couldn’t. Now the only thing he longed for was you. 

And he wished he wasn’t a clone of the man who had shared a relationship with the woman you were cloned from. 

But he didn’t think of you as that. Not even now. 

Not ever.

“There are vague memories of your face. Emotions I can’t decipher. Warmth. Remorse.” He spoke gently, stopping you from pulling away. “An empty casket…which I ran a hand over more times than I count. But there was a never a moment where I felt the need to pursue you based on a memory. I wanted to understand it but not at the cost of potentially harming you.”

Staring down at the ground littered with broken glass, you listened to him. “For so long, I firmly believed you were too good to be true to look after my well being. Another deceptive trick sent by higher ups to keep me in line. Checking in with me numerous times and preventing anyone from discussing him in front of me. I thought you were too precious to be here. Too delicate to be apart of this world we were brought into. I thought you needed protection…but I found I needed you.”

Slowly your eyes met his. Your eyes were as safety net. Yet, there was some peace knowing he would come back to you at the end of the day. Made him understand he could be himself around you. Made him want to help you understand intimacy and romance on a level he no longer wanted to pursue elsewhere. He knew the implications of love when it came to you. He knew you would be his one weakness. And he desired it anyways. Even if Albert Wesker was superior to him…he missed out on one of the most beautiful things known to man and he wasn’t going to repeat his mistakes. 

“I sought you time and time again because you’re the closest thing…I had to joy and peace. I’m not going to stand here and pretend it doesn’t bother me to see you like this because of them…. I’m with you. Even if they had their ulterior motives of bringing us together-“ Zeno paused to hesitantly remove his sunglasses clearing his throat. You always enjoyed seeing his full face when the both of you were alone. There was a certain beauty that made you want to get lost them for hours.

“I love you.” 

Your eyes widened at his confession and Zeno took note of the way your pupils dilated in awe. The anger that was on your brow softened and that glazed over look in your eyes brightened. A gentle smile found its way on your face as you finally wrapped your fingers around his pulling yourself closer. 

“Do you actually mean that?”

“I do.” 

For a moment, you looked away, a little soft sniffle echoing in the room as you couldn’t stop your smile from growing as you took a few steps back to fully look at him.

“You know…I love you too.”

”Can you show me?” Spinning you back into his arms, Zeno mused watching how bashful you became when his flirtatious comments or questions got to you. 

Leaning up, you placed a sweet kiss right on those soft lips of yours, making him melt right into your touch. You both deserved a sense of love in this cruel world. And Zeno wasn’t going to let you slip from him. 

“If…you have no plans on returning back to them. Come home with me.” 

Dread and excitement festered inside of you by his words. 

“You know, he’ll come searching for me.” You stated in a matter of fact tone, raising your hand up his chest to fix his collar. “You know how relentless they can be.”

”Let them come.” You blinked up at him unsure if he knew what he was truly getting himself into by taking you in. “I’ll deal with them.”

”Are you sure?”

”Do I look like I’m not?”

With another smile, you gave him a nod, “Okay. I trust you. You won’t be alone anyways.”

Those words gave him strength like no other as he offered you his arm. You immediately accepted, allowing him to guide you out of the lab, avoiding broken glass and chemicals. “I apology for ruining the lab. That was…unbecoming of me.” 

“The lab is just a room.”

You nodded to yourself, “As for our date, I apologize for ruining it. Is there a way we can redo it?”

Zeno smirked at himself. He already had plans to worship you and show you what true devotion meant as long as you allowed him to. “We can do it as many times as you like.” 

You leaned on his arm, “I would appreciate that.”

"Then you’ll have it.”

This was far from over but you two were going to do every possible thing within your power to keep each other safe. Zeno was going to make sure of that. Unlike anyone else could do. Unlike your Father. Unlike Albert Wesker. 

He could do the impossible with you by his side. 

[havencoast]

The Catacomb Saints

[homunculus-argument]

This counts as vent art.