This is long and very wordy and very warm. If you make it to the end bless your heart. Godspeed, readers
~~~
By the time freshmen year started, there was nothing in that county that hadn’t already heard of them.
That was the thing about a place that small. A place with one blinking light, one church that half the town attended and the other half swore they’d make it to next Sunday; three buildings and a fenced yard that tried very hard to call itself an all-grades school even though everybody knew better; and one county line that held fewer than four hundred souls total if you counted the babies, the shut-ins, and old Mr. Talley out on the far back road who only came into town for feed and funerals.
A place like that didn’t allow for strangers, not really. It barely allowed for privacy. Everyone was related to someone and everybody knew everybody. And if they didn’t know you, they knew your mama, your granddaddy, the field your family worked, the year your uncle broke his leg falling off the water tower on a dare, and who your people had been feuding with since 1978.
Half the county lived in town proper, packed into neat little houses and trailers and hand-me-down homes along two main roads. The other half was scattered through the country in patches of land and fencing and dirt drives that disappeared into mesquite and dust. The distance didn’t matter. Nothing stayed separate long out there.
Especially not kids.
Their group of seven had been inseparable so long that no one in town could remember when they had started being seven instead of a shifting blur of scraped knees and loud voices and somebody always daring somebody else to do something stupid. They had grown up in each other’s yards, at each other’s kitchen tables, in church pews and stock show barns and the creased backseats of pickup trucks. They had learned to swim in stock tanks, learned to lie to adults with the kind of innocent faces only children could manage, learned every back road in the county before some of them were even old enough to sit in the front seat legally. Thick as thieves wasn’t even the right phrase anymore. Thieves could be separated. Thieves could turn on each other. These seven moved like they’d been raised out of the same soil.
And at the center of it, in the way that made no sense and yet made perfect sense if you knew them, were Rian Mercer and Elias Ford.
Rian Mercer belonged to a family people spoke about softly, even when they were teasing. The Mercers were county old. Their roots went so deep folks talked about them like weather or land, like they had simply always been there. Quiet people, every last one of them. Not unfriendly, never that. Mercer women could absolutely gossip when properly cornered, and Mercer men would be on your porch with tools before you had fully finished mentioning something needed fixing. But still—quiet. Controlled. They did not host. They did not throw parties. They did not invite half the county onto their property for fish fries or baby showers or football watch nights. A Mercer home was a place you were welcomed into politely and rarely. People joked that if the Mercers ever did host an event, the rapture had probably started and nobody noticed because they were too busy being good guests.
Rian fit them so perfectly it was almost funny. Sharp-eyed, sharp-minded, all angles and silence. By age twelve he could glare any older teen into apologizing for existing. He wasn’t mean. That was the mistake outsiders would’ve made, if outsiders had ever stuck around long enough to try. He just didn’t waste himself. Not his words, not his time, not his attention. When Rian did speak, people listened because he usually had something worth hearing. He was the type of boy who could lean against a fence post during an entire conversation and say maybe four words total, and somehow still leave with everybody feeling like he’d been central to it.
Elias Ford was the exact opposite and somehow no less inevitable.
There were Fords everywhere. Fords at the gas station. Fords at the school. Fords at church, spread across three pews and still managing to spill over. Fords with babies on their hips and sweet tea in their hands and opinions about everything. You could not drive a mile in any direction without running into one, and people swore the family as a whole could be heard from two counties over when they really got going. They were big and loud and loving in a way that took over a room before they even stepped into it. Their events were half the county’s events by default. Their laughter traveled. Their arguments traveled farther.
Elias came from them like sunlight comes from morning—easy, bright, impossible to ignore. He was the type of pretty that old women noticed and young girls pretended not to. Forever smiling, forever talking, forever draped over somebody’s shoulder or leaning too close or getting away with murder because he did it with dimples and a wink. He flirted the way some people breathed: naturally, thoughtlessly, with no real effort behind it and enough charm to make it everybody else’s problem. Carefree, people called him. Trouble, said the adults who liked him anyway. Elias had never met a silence he didn’t want to fill or a rule he didn’t want to test just a little, just to see what happened.
He and Rian should not have made sense together.
One all bright edges turned outward, one all sharp edges turned in. Elias talked enough for three people. Rian often looked like he regretted having to speak at all. But from the time they were little, they had been stuck to each other with certainty only kids can manage. Elias climbed first and thought later; Rian thought first and still climbed after him. Elias made friends in a breath; Rian kept them for life.
By freshman year, the whole county knew better than to talk about one without expecting the other nearby.
The first week of school, the seven of them claim the cracked picnic table behind the school building like it had been left there by God for their specific use.
It was barely ten in the morning and already hot enough for the air to shimmer above the gravel lot. Somebody had a Coke they weren’t supposed to have. Somebody else had stolen half a sleeve of crackers from home.
Elias, sprawled backward across the tabletop like he’d been dropped there from a moving truck, was in the middle of telling some story with his hands flying while one of the girls laughed so hard she nearly snorted sweet tea through her nose. Rian was sat on the bench with one boot hooked on the rung, shoulders tipped into shade, listening with that flat look he wore when Elias was being particularly ridiculous.
Which, to be fair, was often.
“You’re lying,” Luke accuses, pointing a finger.
Eli gasps and clutches a hand to his heart. “I am embellishing,” comes his response.
“You told Coach Granger your goat got loose in the house.”
“It did!”
“You don’t even own a goat,” Rian says with a sigh.
“My cousin owns a goat,” Eli replies, grinning ear to ear. “And family property is basically shared property.”
Daisy huffs through her nose and narrows her eyes, “That’s not how ownership works.”
Eli fully laughs now, turning just enough to bump Daisy with his knee. “See, this is why the adults don’t get all the full details. It makes me sound more honest by comparison.”
She whacks his knee away without looking and flips the page of her notebook. It wasn’t easy to forget, watching her uncap a highlighter like a weapon, that Daisy Whitmore had been terrifying half the county since birth.
Daisy was the girl that grown men minded their manners around.
Not because she was loud. Not because she was mean. Not because she had ever once raised her voice in public in a way that mattered.
No, Daisy Whitmore was terrifying for the exact same reason the Whitmore women always had been: she never needed to make an effort to be.
In a county that ran on gossip the way trucks ran on gas, the Whitmore place was the closest thing to a federal safe house anybody was ever going to find. If you wanted to be seen, you went to a Ford event. If you wanted to be fed, you found a church lady. If you wanted help fixing a fence, you called a Mercer. But if you wanted shelter from rumor—real shelter, the kind that swallowed secrets whole and spat out nothing but a polite smile—you went to the Whitmores.
Everybody knew it.
The Whitmore women did not gossip.
That alone made them unsettling.
They knew everything, of course. In a place that small, not knowing would’ve been impossible. But knowing and speaking were two very different things, and the Whitmore women treated private information like a locked gun cabinet: not to be touched, not to be discussed, and absolutely not to be mishandled. Men in that family, broad-shouldered and hardworking and perfectly capable of lifting hay bales and changing engines and handling themselves in a fight, turned into nervous wrecks if you asked them a question that even vaguely brushed against relationships, pregnancy, marriage trouble, or anything involving “women’s business.”
You could ask a Whitmore man to help drag a dead hog out of a ditch and he’d do it with one hand and a nod.
Ask him if his cousin’s wife was expecting?
He’d rather knock his front teeth out than risk saying the wrong thing and getting caught between the women.
Daisy had inherited every bit of that legacy and somehow managed to make it look effortless.
People swore she was a direct clone of her mother, right down to the posture. Straight-backed, neat as a pin, always put together even in school clothes and dusty boots, with eyes that missed nothing and a face that could look sweet as pie one second and shut a conversation down the next without so much as a twitch. She was pretty in that polished, almost dangerous way—hair always brushed, nails always neat, clothes always somehow cleaner than everyone else’s by the end of the day, as if dirt itself knew better than to cling to her.
She wasn’t an average, polished mean girl, though. That was the funny part. Daisy could be kind in the most practical, unwavering ways. She’d hand over gum, aspirin, bobby pins, safety pins, a spare pen, and a fully thought-out plan for how to survive the rest of your day. If you cried in front of her, she would absolutely help you.
And then she would ensure no one else ever heard about it.
That was why the seven had folded her in, even before any of them had language for what exactly she was to them. Every group of idiots needed somebody who could keep the wheels on. Every small-town kid needed at least one person who could be trusted not to repeat the stupid thing you’d said at two in the morning or the vulnerable thing you’d admitted in the wrong mood.
Which was exactly why Elias liked bothering her so much.
“You think if I fake my own death,” he asked one afternoon as the seven of them loitered in the school parking lot after classes, “your mama would let me hide out at y’all’s place?”
Daisy didn’t even look up from where she was carefully repainting a chipped thumbnail. “No.”
“I could be very discreet.”
“You are physically incapable of discretion.”
“That feels pointed.”
“It was intended to.”
One of the others laughed. Elias clutched his chest. “Cold.”
Daisy finally looked up, slow and unimpressed. “You’re a Ford. If you disappeared, there’d be a search party before sunset, and at least twelve of your relatives would check my house first.”
“That’s because they know you’re trustworthy.”
“That’s because they know I’d be the only one mean enough to keep you alive long-term.”
Elias’s rebuttal is interrupted by Lena and Luke appearing from behind a lone oak by the student lot like they’d been spat out by the earth itself, already mid-argument and both using enough hand gestures to make the leaves shake. Their faces were pink with heat and outrage, their voices carrying across the gravel in sharp, overlapping bursts, and not a single person in the group so much as flinched.
No one ever paid them much mind. That was just Lena and Luke. They had been bursting into scenes like that since they were old enough to walk and yell at the same time. If one of them showed up alone, people asked questions. If they showed up together and furious, people just nodded and made room.
Elias glanced over once, squinting into the sun. “What’s that one about?”
Rian didn’t bother turning his head. “Could be anything.”
“Could be the same one from this morning,” Jamie said.
Daisy capped her nail polish and slid it back into her bag. “Or fifth grade.”
That got a laugh out of the group, because it was true. Lena Granger and Luke Palmer had been at each other’s throats since before any of them could remember, and not even their families could agree on where it had started. Ask the Grangers, and Lena had come out of the womb already insufferable. Ask the Palmers, and Luke had been put on this earth specifically to antagonize her.
Either way, the result had been the same: two kids from fairly average county families, raised on church casseroles, porch gossip, and people who knew exactly how much sugar everyone took in their tea.
The Grangers, for their part, had patterns people could’ve charted if they’d been bored enough. Granger men came out of the womb built to run, throw, climb, tackle, rope, or otherwise turn ordinary movement into some kind of competition. It didn’t seem to matter what the sport was—football, baseball, track, rodeo, wrestling, impromptu races across a pasture at dusk—if a Granger boy touched it, odds were decent he’d be good at it before anyone had properly taught him how.
The women leaned different. Not softer, exactly, just louder in prettier ways. Granger girls tended to sing before they talked and perform before they walked, born with voices that carried and a flair for dramatics that made church specials, school plays, and community Christmas pageants feel like personal battlegrounds. The county had long ago accepted this as one of those family truths nobody could explain and nobody bothered questioning.
The Palmers had their own legacy, and it was written all over the county whether people noticed it or not. For as long as anybody could remember, if something in town had been built beautifully, painted properly, or made to look like more than just lumber and nails, a Palmer hand had probably touched it. Porches, storefronts, church signs, nursery murals, festival booths, kitchen cabinets, fences done up nicer than strictly necessary, even the old faded lettering still clinging to the side of feed stores and barber shops—there was Palmer work in all of it.
They were makers in the truest sense, the sort of family that looked at a bare structure and immediately started seeing shape, color, balance, finish. The county had been living inside Palmer design choices for generations, whether it knew it or not.
The Grangers gave the county athletes and performers. The Palmers gave it beauty and structure. Put those bloodlines too close together for too long, and the outcome was probably inevitable. Their children together, in every sense, were a creative disaster.
Lena and Luke had been attached at the hip since birth in the most hostile way imaginable.
Nobody really knew how it had started. There were pictures of them in diapers sitting side by side in the church nursery, both looking equally offended by the arrangement. There were stories about toddler birthday parties ending in tears because one had taken the other’s crayons and then both had bitten somebody over the fallout. They had been in each other’s houses so often growing up that both mothers had long ago stopped knocking before entering the other’s kitchen. They shared everything—school projects, art supplies, mutual friends, grudges, emotional damage—and seemed to hate every second of it.
They had also, to the eternal fascination of everyone around them, been dating off and on since the fifth grade.
The first time had lasted exactly two weeks.
Two weeks of hand-holding on the playground, aggressive eye contact at lunch, and the type of breathless scandals that only eleven-year-olds and rural adults with nothing better to do could create. Then they had broken up in spectacular fashion over something no one could remember—possibly a science project, possibly a pencil, possibly because one of them had looked at somebody else too long during recess—and by Sunday brunch they were sitting shoulder to shoulder in Luke’s family pew like nothing had happened.
That set the tone.
Every breakup was dramatic. Every reunion was inevitable. Every fight had witnesses. Every declaration of “I’m done with him/her forever” had a shelf life somewhere between six hours and three weeks.
They could not stand each other.
They could not stay away from each other.
And because God had a sense of humor, they were both wildly talented.
Lena was all color and motion and intensity. Paint under her fingernails half the time, charcoal smudged on her wrist, earrings she made herself out of things no one else would think to use. She approached life the same way she approached art—fully, recklessly, with too much heart and no regard for whether the medium could survive the experience. She cried at movies, fought with conviction, and threw herself into bad ideas like they personally offended her if she didn’t.
Luke was sharper about it. Same artistry, different shape. Sketchbooks full of impossible detail, handwriting prettier than half the girls in school, an eye for composition that made adults blink when they saw what he could do. Where Lena was messy genius, Luke was controlled obsession. He committed to things too hard, too long, and usually in the wrong direction. If Lena lit the fire, Luke would absolutely build a cathedral around it just to prove he could.
Together, they were exhausting.
Separately, they were somehow worse.
“Y’all are gonna get married three times and divorced four,” Elias told them once, sprawled across the hood of Luke’s truck while the rest of the group watched Lena and Luke argue in the gravel over whether a banner for the fall festival should be hand-painted or screen-printed.
Lena whipped around first. “I’d rather die.”
Luke, without missing a beat, snapped, “You’d have to plan better for that.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“I hate you.”
“You say that like it’s new information.”
“Can both of you shut up?” Daisy cut in, not even looking up from the sign-up sheet she was organizing. “Either paint the banner or don’t. The world keeps turning.”
Harry grinned. “This is foreplay for them.”
“It is not!” Lena and Luke shouted in perfect, furious unison.
Rian, from his place in the shade, said dryly, “That didn’t help your case.”
The group lost it. Even Daisy smiled, small and lethal.
Lena threw a paint rag at Rian. Luke muttered something about betrayal. Elias nearly fell off the hood laughing.
The rest of the group had learned early that Lena and Luke were best handled like bad weather: acknowledged, worked around, and never challenged directly unless you were prepared for collateral damage. Their arguments were so constant they’d become part of the rhythm of the group—like Daisy’s eye rolls, Jamie’s sighs, or Harry making a situation worse because it was funny.
And when it came to making things worse on purpose, Harry Hayes took the prize.
By age twelve, Harry Hayes was banned from half the stores in town and only allowed into the other half under active supervision.
Not because he stole. That would’ve been simple.
Not because he was a bully. Not really.
Not even because he was especially disobedient in the traditional sense.
Harry Hayes was banned because the adults of that county had collectively decided there were only so many near-disasters they could absorb before they had to draw a line.
He was the child who could walk into a feed store, emerge twenty minutes later with a sack of fertilizer, two lengths of tubing, a suspicious amount of twine, and a smile that made everyone nearby suddenly very nervous.
He was the child who could look at a pile of scrap metal and see possibilities nobody else wanted named.
The kind of boy people swore could build a rocket launcher out of dirt and sticks if you gave him an hour, a pocketknife, and insufficient supervision.
Especially if you told him he couldn’t.
Harry didn’t pick sides based on morality. Or loyalty. Or even personal investment, half the time.
Harry picked sides based on what promised the highest entertainment value.
If Lena and Luke were fighting, Harry was not trying to solve it. He was trying to escalate it just enough to see if someone threw paint.
If Elias had a bad idea, Harry was either funding it, improving it, or betting on how long it’d take before an adult got involved.
If Daisy said, “Don’t you dare,” Harry took that as a fascinating academic challenge.
He was chaos with engineering skills.
And somehow, impossibly, his mother adored him for it.
The Hayes family had moved into the county only a few years before Harry was born, making them practically newcomers by local standards even now. In a place where some families had been there so long their names were on roads, the Hayes’s were still spoken of with that lingering “well, they’re good folks, even if they ain’t from here” tone. But Harry’s mother, after surviving the raising of him, swore up and down she could not have done it anywhere else.
“No city would’ve kept him alive,” she said once, dead serious, while Harry was being chased across a field by two of his older brothers and a deeply offended goose. “And no suburb would’ve forgiven him.”
She was probably right.
Harry was the youngest of five boys, which explained a lot and nothing at all. His brothers were sturdy, normal-ish creatures. Loud, roughhousing, occasionally dumb in the way brothers tended to be, but broadly manageable. Then there was Harry. By far the smallest when he was young, by far the quickest, by far the least trustworthy if you turned your back for more than thirty seconds.
The most exhausting by a mile.
He had energy that bordered on supernatural. A grin like a warning label. A collection of bruises so constant no one even asked anymore. His mind moved too fast, his hands moved faster, and if he was quiet for too long, every adult in a ten-mile radius immediately went looking.
Because quiet Harry was never a good sign.
“What’d he do now?” was practically his family motto.
The seven, naturally, loved him.
Or, more accurately, they loved him the way people loved storms—warily, with preparation, and with the full understanding that something was definitely getting damaged before the day was out.
One Friday after school, the group had gathered behind the school building again, bags dropped in a loose circle, heat settling heavy over the dirt. Luke and Lena were arguing about a project design. Elias was antagonizing Daisy on purpose. Jamie was portioning out snacks like a battlefield medic. Rian sat on the picnic table, quiet and watchful, like he always did.
Harry arrived late, skidding into the lot on a bike that was missing at least one part it definitely should’ve had.
He hopped off without slowing properly, let the bike crash into the grass, and reached into his backpack with the expression of a boy about to become a problem.
Daisy saw it first.
“No.”
Harry froze, hand still buried in the bag. “You don’t even know what it is.”
“I know your face.”
“It’s educational.”
“That’s worse.”
Elias immediately perked up. “What’s in the bag?”
“Don’t ask that,” Jamie said, horrified.
“Ask it louder,” Harry encouraged.
Rian, not even moving, said, “If it explodes, you’re cleaning it up.”
Harry grinned, delighted. “That implies you think it might explode.”
“That implies I know you.”
Luke groaned. Lena leaned in despite herself. Daisy looked ready to commit a felony. Jamie was already setting his snacks farther away like he expected shrapnel. Elias looked like Christmas had come early.
Harry finally pulled out—
A coffee can. Wrapped in wire. Attached to something that absolutely should not have been attached to it.
There was a beat of total silence.
Then Daisy stood up so fast her notebook hit the ground.
“No.”
Elias shouted, “YES.”
Jamie made the sign of the cross on reflex.
Luke whispered, awed and appalled, “Where did you even get that?”
Jamie looked at the contraption, looked at Harry, and sighed the long-suffering sigh of a boy who had somehow, against all odds, become the unofficial disaster manager of six lunatics.
“Everybody,” he said, voice flat and final, “move away from the coffee can.”
And because Jamie Ferris rarely used that voice unless he was one bad group decision away from involving either a real adult or God Himself, they actually listened.
He was the pastor’s son, and in a small county that was its own kind of title.
Not quite royalty. Not quite danger. But definitely a category all his own.
If he wasn’t at school, he was at church. If he wasn’t at church, he was helping somebody. If he wasn’t helping somebody, he was almost certainly on his way to do so with a casserole dish in one hand and a polite smile that made grown adults feel like maybe the world wasn’t doomed after all.
The older men tipped their hats to him in that half-joking, half-sincere way country men had of showing respect without ever naming it outright. Women loved him. Grandmothers adored him. Mothers used him as an example in front of their own children. Fathers approved of him with the same quiet relief that usually came from seeing a gate latched properly or a truck start on the first try.
Jamie was neat. Not straight spined like Daisy, but tidy in a way that felt almost holy in comparison to the chaos around him. Shirt tucked when it needed tucking. Boots cleaned off when he could manage it. Hair combed. Manners flawless. A pleasant young man, everybody said, and they said it with real affection because he was.
He could cook better than most people twice his age, and not in the theoretical “boy can grill” sense folks liked to brag about. Jamie could cook. Properly. Biscuits from scratch. Sunday roast that fell apart under a fork. Cobblers, casseroles, fried okra, peach preserves, and the kind of soup that could make a sick person cry. He moved through a kitchen like he had been born there, sleeves rolled, expression calm, hands certain.
He could sing, too.
Not in the showy way Elias liked to do when he was being a menace and trying to make people laugh. Jamie could sing like church rafters were built for him. Like lullabies and hymns and old country songs were all cut from the same cloth and he knew how to handle each one gently. He had the voice babies quieted for and old men went thoughtful over. The smooth voice people stopped talking to hear, even if they pretended they hadn’t.
And then, because he was a Ferris, and because country life didn’t care what anybody thought a person should be, he’d step right out of the kitchen or church hall and go work cattle until sunset. Wrangle calves. Mend fence. Haul feed. Come home dusty and sweat-soaked and perfectly capable of doing every hard, ugly, practical thing the land required of him.
He was the kind of child people in that county liked to point at and say, Now there’s one raised right.
Which only made it funnier that he willingly, happily, repeatedly chose to spend most of his free time with the county’s most questionable collection of teenagers.
No one understood it.
Or, rather, they understood pieces of it and failed to assemble the full picture.
They could understand Daisy. Of course Jamie and Daisy were close. That made sense to adults. They were the two organized ones. The two capable ones. The two kids who could be trusted to remember details and bring what was needed and clean up after disasters not of their making. Between them, they carried enough spare supplies to survive a minor apocalypse. If Daisy didn’t have it, Jamie probably did. If Jamie didn’t have it, Daisy definitely did.
Aspirin. Needle and thread. Hair ties. Extra pencils. Safety pins. Bandages. Mints. Tissues. A pocketknife. Sunscreen. Bobby pins. A tiny flashlight. An extra church bulletin if somebody forgot theirs. Somehow, between the two of them, there was always exactly what the moment required.
People liked that. People found it comforting.
What they didn’t know what to do with was the way those same two would stand in the middle of a disaster zone of teenagers and look like the only competent adults in a room full of raccoons.
The county had tried, more than once, to make Jamie and Daisy into a thing.
Not maliciously. Not even particularly forcefully. Just the way small towns did when two neat, well-mannered, attractive teenagers of opposite sexes kept appearing together with alarming efficiency. It was less matchmaking and more assumption. A foregone conclusion people thought they were being subtle about.
One of the church ladies asked the question outright once after service, smiling like she’d invented romance herself.
“So when are you and Daisy finally gonna quit playin’ and start courtin’ proper?”
Jamie, all pressed shirt and patient expression, had glanced over to where Daisy stood three feet away pinning a younger girl’s crooked hem with one of her emergency safety pins.
Then he’d looked back at the woman and shrugged, easy as breathing.
“She don’t like men like that,” he said. “And neither do I.”
And then he’d walked off.
Just like that.
Leaving the poor woman standing in the church foyer with a plate of lemon bars and the most haunted expression anybody had seen all month.
For three straight days the county tried to decide what he’d meant.
Did Daisy not like men like Jamie? Was she picky? Was he saying he didn’t like men who were too neat? Too churchy? Too whatever? Was it a joke? A biblical reference nobody was catching? Was it one of those teenager sayings? Was he being smart with her? Was Daisy offended? Why had Daisy, when told about it later, simply nodded and said, “That was efficient,” like that answered literally anything?
The adults never recovered.
The seven did.
Mostly because they had all nearly died laughing.
“You can’t keep saying things like that and then acting like you didn’t set a fire,” Elias had wheezed, doubled over in the back of Luke’s truck while Daisy sat beside him, perfectly composed.
Jamie, unfazed, had taken a sip of sweet tea. “I answered honestly.”
“You answered like a man who enjoys violence,” Rian said.
“That too,” Daisy allowed.
Jamie just smiled, mild and impossible. “Y’all are dramatic.”
Which, from anybody else, might’ve sounded like an accusation.
From Jamie Ferris, it was basically a term of endearment.
Because that was the truth of him. Beneath the polished manners and the pastor’s-son reputation and the church-lady approval, Jamie loved those six idiots with a devotion so steady it almost looked boring. He was the one who remembered who was mad at who and planned accordingly. The one who brought food. The one who could talk to any parent in the county and somehow make trouble sound survivable.
People wondered why such a perfect child ran with loud, rowdy kids.
The answer was simple.
Jamie Ferris liked them rowdy.
~~~
Freshman year came with all the usual promises adults liked to dress up and hand over like gifts. New start. New responsibilities. Bigger expectations. As if those kids hadn’t already been carrying half the weight of county life their whole lives. They had all been working, helping, hauling, babysitting, fixing, feeding, and minding since they were old enough to follow instructions. High school—or what passed for it out there—didn’t change that. It just made everyone start looking at them like they were on the edge of becoming something else.
But at that picnic table, with dust on their shoes and sun in their eyes and the whole year spread out ahead of them like one long dirt road, they were still just seven county kids who belonged to each other more than they belonged to anything else. Warmed by the nearness of a place too small to hide in and too full of love to really want to. Held by bloodlines and hand-me-down loyalties and the type of friendship that got built over years of being known too well and loved anyway.
Elias is still talking. Rian is still pretending not to listen. The others are still piled close enough to count heartbeats if they leaned in.
Oh no, another new project. Leave me alone. I'm vibing out
~~~
Vale doesn’t look up when the voice cuts through the room.
“You’re leading yourself into disaster.”
That narrows it down to about half the people here.
Energy in the warehouse is fraying in familiar ways—too much waiting, not enough direction. Crews lean instead of stand. A few laugh too loudly. Temporary people always do.
Vale finishes tightening a bolt and straightens slowly.
“Morale is crashing,” the voice continues. “Your men see this as a temporary job, which is terrible for long-term villainy.”
That gets his attention.
He turns.
The speaker stands near the back, half in shadow, hands in their pockets like they belong there. No uniform. No colors. No insignia. Just a person.
Vale raises an eyebrow. “You sound confident for someone who walked into my territory uninvited.”
“You let me in,” they say mildly.
Vale smiles. “I let a lot of people in. Most of them don’t critique my management style.”
“That’s because most of them don’t understand it,” they reply. “Or the lack thereof.”
Vale studies them openly now. “Alright,” he says. “Finish the thought.”
They don’t hesitate.
“You’re building something meant to last,” they say. “But you’re treating your people like placeholders. They don’t know the shape of tomorrow, so they’re hedging. That makes them sloppy. Sloppy makes noise. Noise invites heroes.”
A beat. Eyes from henchmen lingering around flicker between their boss and this new shadow. Some pretend to not be eavesdropping. Most don’t bother.
Then Vale laughs—short, delighted. A couple people jump at the sudden sound. The room has shifted from tension to something sharper. Curious.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “And you are?”
They meet his gaze without flinching. The bottom half of their face is masked, but their eyes shimmer an eerie red despite the shadows.
“A problem.” They pause, shifting their weight from one foot to another. “Or a solution, if you’re a glass-of-milk kind of guy.”
Vale squints. “Explain that metaphor.”
“You’re trying to build order,” they say. “Milk goes bad if you leave it out. You can pretend it won’t. Or you can accept that it will go sour quickly without proper conditions.”
Vale leans back and considers. Really considers. He can’t make out whether it’s a male or female. Dangerous, either way. He’d had his fair share of challengers in the past. People getting too wound up and snapping. People questioning his methods. People like that usually stood face to face, daring him to do differently.
But never had someone walked in, stood firmly in the shadows like they belonged to them, and claimed they were a solution to problems that hadn’t even been considered.
“I like you,” he replies casually. He moves to his feet. “What’s your name?”
They shrug. “I don’t have one that matters.”
“Everyone has a name.”
“Not everyone keeps it.”
Vale’s smile sharpens with interest. “Mysterious and condescending. You’re either very smart or very dead.”
“Neither,” they say. “I’m useful.”
Vale steps closer. Not threatening. Curious.
“Alright,” he says. “You’ve pre-diagnosed a problem with minimal symptoms. What’s your prescription?”
They mirror his head tilt, considering him. Their foot taps, just once, against the concrete floor.
“You need to get your act together,” they say. “Or hire someone to do it for you.”
Vale blinks.
Then he laughs again—longer this time, genuine amusement curling at the edges.
Around them, the warehouse hums—unfinished, impatient, waiting. People with no other purpose and no true understanding of the looming consequences if this standoff went poorly.
Finally, he says, “You realize you just insulted my leadership, my logistics, and my long-term planning.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re still standing.”
“You haven’t decided what I am yet.”
Vale grins, delighted. “No. I haven’t.”
He gestures toward the center of the room. “Sit. Tell me how you’d fix it.”
They don’t move immediately.
“Before I do,” they say, “you should know something.”
Vale waits.
“If I stay,” they continue, “this stops being temporary. For them. And for you.”
Vale’s grin softens into something more dangerous.
I'm really posting this arc all out of order, but it's really just whatever comes to me. I hope you all enjoy it nonetheless <3
**Side note: This arc is unrelated to the Salem/Rings arc. Completely different story line, same characters.
~~~
Bird had never made it a habit to visit museums. Something about the polished marbles floors that held hundreds of years of visitors, frozen exhibits reflecting stories that would never be told in full, glass cases holding silhouettes that no longer belonged to the living or the dead.
Museums after dark were even worse. The absence of the life that visitors brought left too much room for soulless eyes to stare back at you.
Rain patters against the glass roof of the main display room. The occasional lighting flashed through the sky, lighting up the otherwise dark space.
Milo crept ahead of the group, not taking any time to stop and admire the displays. Bird could tell he was as unnerved as she was, by his stiff movements and insistence on moving forward.
Will and Myra moved behind him, pausing more often to observe the different displays. This room held many, many decades of stolen treasures, victory artifacts wrongly claimed, tales of war that seemed too dramatic to be real.
Harriet and Bird brought up the rear. Harriet didn’t run missions as often as everyone else on the team, even her tech counterparts. But this mission had too many moving technical components for her to stay back at base, safe behind her screens.
So she stayed close to Bird, out of her element but ready to work regardless.
“Look at this,” Myra says, pausing once again and glancing over at Bird.
“Oh wow,” Harriet breathes lightly, eyes lighting up in fascination.
Bird slows despite herself.
The display Myra has stopped at sits slightly apart from the others, cordoned off by a low glass barrier and a plaque that’s been rewritten enough times to feel apologetic. The lighting is dimmer here—intentional, Bird notes distantly—angled so the object casts more shadow than reflection.
It’s armor.
Not a full suit. Just the chest piece and one gauntlet, suspended in the case like they were caught mid-removal. The metal is scarred, not decoratively so, but with the kind of damage that only comes from repeated, ugly impact. No filigree. No emblem. Whoever wore it didn’t want to be recognized. Just protected.
Bird steps closer, eyes narrowing.
The plaque reads something bland and careful about “An Unidentified Combatant, Late Conflict Era”, but someone—curator or intern, Bird can’t tell—has penciled a note in the margin beneath the glass:
**Recovered without a body.
Harriet leans in, fingers hovering just shy of the glass as if she can feel the hum through it. “The alloy composition is… odd,” she murmurs. “Layered. Not for deflection. For absorption.”
Will tilts his head. “So it wasn’t meant to stop the blow.”
“No,” Harriet says softly. “It was meant to survive it.”
Milo glances back over his shoulder, just once. His eyes flick to the armor and then away again, jaw tightening. “That’s not a hero’s gear.”
Myra’s mouth curves, sharp and knowing. “No,” she agrees. “Heroes want their armor to be seen.”
Bird studies the gauntlet—how the knuckles are worn smooth, not from polishing but from use. From bracing against walls. From catching something that shouldn’t be caught.
“How many stories do you think they cut out to make it fit in here?” Bird asks quietly.
Harriet swallows. “Not enough to scare people.”
Thunder rolls overhead, distant but heavy, and for just a second the lightning flash catches the armor at the right angle—etching the dents, the fractures, the places where it almost failed.
Milo shifts his weight, restless. “We shouldn’t linger.”
Bird doesn’t move yet.
She feels it—that familiar pull. Not ownership. Not nostalgia.
Recognition.
And somewhere deeper in the museum, something clicks softly. Not an alarm. Not yet.
Just the sound of a system waking up.
Bird straightens, eyes lifting from the armor.
“Stay sharp.”
~~~
Harriet has a map of the museum pulled up on her tablet now. She’s taken the lead just behind Milo, murmuring quiet directions.
“We should come here when the place is open to real visitors,” Will jokes, eyes moving over the wall of modern hero history. “Might learn something cool.”
“I can think of a few of the team who would find this place pretty interesting,” Myra agrees, more serious. “Not that most of it is real or unexaggerated, though.”
Milo pauses at the end of the hall, reading a plaque that caught his eye for whatever reason. Bird moves to read over his shoulder, curious what got the kid to finally slow.
WHITE FOX
Registered Hero
Ranked 5th Countrywide
Affiliated Sidekicks: SURGE, VIDA
Status: ACTIVE
And just below it, a plaque for both sidekicks mentioned.
SURGE
Registered Sidekick Operative
Service Period: Classified
Affiliated Hero: WHITE FOX
Status: Deceased
Bird glances over at Milo. His shoulders are tight. Though hidden behind a mask, she can feel the anger and hurt radiating.
“You know this one?” Will asks, coming up behind them. “Weird that this sidekick has no information at all. The rest have at least some sort of achievement or picture attached.”
Milo huffs and turns away, opting to instead look at the framed painting of the top five heroes on the wall. “I know what they left out,” he mutters bitterly.
“Can’t control the ending, cut out the middle,” Myra says with a dry laugh. “They do it all the time. Typical heroes.”
Bird sets a gentle hand on Milo’s shoulder, breaking him out of his deadly stare down with the painting. His shoulders finally slump, and he pulls away, falling back in into the lead with Harriet.
Harriet and Will both shoot curious looks at Bird, but her attention has already moved on.
Their private, unauthorized tour takes them out of the history hall and into the weaponry.
The weaponry wing smells like cold metal and polish—too clean for a room built to glorify violence.
Bird feels it immediately. That subtle pressure behind the eyes. The sense that this room isn’t dormant. It’s posed.
Rows of glass cases line the walls, each lit with reverent precision. Early hero armaments. Prototype suits. Weapons that promised control where fear once lived. At the center of the room stands the exhibit everyone remembers from school tours and recruitment videos alike.
THE FIRST TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANCED WAR WEAPON.
A turning point in the age of heroes.
It’s mounted upright, almost ceremonial: a sleek, spear-like device encased in layered glass, its surface etched with geometric channels that catch the light. It looks elegant. Controlled. Safe.
Harmless.
“I’ve never seen any weapon like this,” Myra says curiously. “What’s it even supposed to do?”
Harriet stops breathing.
“That’s not a weapon,” she whispers. Bird can see her hands shaking ever so slightly as she sets her tablet and backpack on the floor.
Will glances at her. “No?”
“It’s a housing,” she says, stepping closer. “A shell. The weapon was never the point.”
Myra circles the case, eyes sharp. “Then what was? Why would they put wires in a spear and call it a weapon of war?”
Harriet doesn’t answer yet. She kneels at the base of the display, fingers brushing the plaque’s mounting bracket. Her tablet flickers—then goes dark.
She exhales, almost reverent. “No wireless interface. No ports. No maintenance access logged in thirty-seven years.”
Bird steps closer. “Because it doesn’t need maintenance.” The hairs on her arms and standing up. Harriet’s awe was almost more nerve-wracking than the weapon itself.
“No,” Harriet agrees. “It’s asleep.”
The word lands heavy.
Will checks his watch. “Morning staff in twenty-two minutes.”
Bird nods. “Then we wake it gently.”
The glass isn’t locked.
That’s the first lie.
The second is that the display is standalone.
Harriet removes a small tool from her pocket—not tech, exactly. Something half-analog, half-intuitive. She presses it against the seam where the glass meets the floor.
The room hums.
Low. Deep. Old.
Milo stiffens. “That sound—”
“Power redistribution,” Harriet says. “Localized. The museum just rerouted electricity to us.”
Myra pauses in her pacing. “It noticed.”
The glass retracts—not sliding, not lifting, but unthreading, layers peeling back like something exhaling after decades of restraint.
Inside, the spear is wrong up close.
Not sharp.
Not heavy.
Its surface is warm.
Harriet breathes out slowly and pushes her hood off. Her silvery hair flows out, shimmering in the glow of the spear. By far the closest thing Bird has ever seen to magic in the modern world.
Bird feels it—an itch along her spine. “Harriet.”
“I know,” Harriet whispers. “It’s not inert.”
She places both hands on the device.
The room listens.
Data doesn’t flood in.
It waits.
“This system predates modern encryption,” Harriet murmurs, eyes unfocused. “It doesn’t want credentials. It wants intent.”
Milo takes a step back, thrown off. “What kind of intent?”
“The kind that knows what it’s about to learn,” she says.
Bird meets her eyes. “You don’t have to—”
“Yes,” Harriet says quietly. “I do.”
She presses in.
The spear fractures—not physically, but conceptually. Layers unfold into light and sound and memory. Ghost-images bloom against the walls: tactical overlays, live feeds, biometric readouts.
A city grid.
Marked in red.
Projected casualties.
A command stamp flashes once.
AUTHORIZED.
Will sucks in a breath. “Those numbers—”
“—are civilians,” Milo finishes, voice hollow.
A comm recording plays. Distorted. Calm.
If we intervene now, we lose public trust.
Delay until visibility peaks.
The narrative requires a catalyst. They don’t deserve our city.
Bird closes her eyes.
Myra’s hands curl slowly into fists. “They let it happen.”
“Yes,” Harriet says. “And this—” she gestures to the artifact “—wasn’t a weapon. It was the justification engine. The system that proved intervention was necessary after the damage was done.”
Milo stares at the light, at a familiar tag embedded deep in the data architecture.
SUPPORT OPERATIVE – SURGE – FIELD PROXIMITY CONFIRMED
He steps back like he’s been struck.
“They trained us to protect the image,” he says quietly. “Because this thing protected the lie.”
The room goes silent.
Then—
A soft chime.
Will looks at his watch. “Fifteen minutes.”
Bird straightens. “Can you extract it?”
Harriet nods. “Not copy. It’s self-destructive if duplicated. But I can move it.”
“To where?” Myra asks.
Bird answers without hesitation. “Dakota’s doorstep.”
Harriet hesitates—just a breath. “Once it’s removed, the exhibit collapses. The museum will know.”
Bird meets her gaze. “Let them.”
Harriet braces herself and pulls.
The spear folds inward, light collapsing into a compact, unassuming core no larger than a forearm. The room exhales—power draining, glass resealing, history pretending nothing changed.
Milo takes the core when Harriet’s hands shake.
It’s heavier than it looks.
Sirens begin to stir somewhere far below.
Bird turns them toward the exit. “We’re ghosts in ninety seconds.”
As they slip out of the weaponry wing, the plaque flickers briefly.
The title changes—just for a heartbeat—before resetting.
THE FIRST NECESSARY LIE.
No one sees it.
But the war remembers.
And it has finally been taken out of its glass case.
in 2026, remember how GOOD writing feels. remember how satsfying it is to get your characters to the point you have been dying to get to, where they will experience the love, fear, relief or whatever the feeling you want to bring to life may be. let this year be the year of writing, prgress and of satisfactory endings.
Bird’s voice cuts through the still air like a knife.
Adira is sitting in a chair at the head of the room, facing the glass wall that overlooks the city. They’re at the highest point of her tower, sitting at the edge of the city like a lookout.
Her back is to the entrance, long brown hair dangling over the back of the chair. It sways as Adira slides out of her chair with the most dramatic groan Bird has ever heard. And being the leader of her vigilantes, that was saying something.
The woman pops back up from behind the desk and storms over to the nervous assistant standing just behind Bird.
Bird keeps her gaze neutral and forward fixed as Adira gets in the face of the assistant.
“I thought I gave very clear instructions that she was not to be let in here,” Adira growls.
“Well… I mean- I- I couldn’t have exactly-”
“Whatever,” Adira interrupts. “Get out. I’ll deal with you later.”
The assistant squeaks and scurries out, like a mouse given another chance.
Bird glances over as Adira appears in her vision again, with a smile far too wide and eyes too bright.
She claps her hands together and impressively widens her fake smile. “Bird,” she coos. “It is so lovely to see you.”
“Skip the pleasantries,” Bird says dryly.
The switch is immediate, swapped to a face of unchecked disgust.
“Oh good, I’m so glad you agree,” Adira huffs, walking back over to her desk. “So what brings you by? I hope it’s not to tell me to call off my people from the west district, that would be-”
“It’s not.”
Adira’s grin returns, more sharp and entertained this time. Ignoring the interruption, she begins pacing back and forth and wiggles a finger at Bird.
“Y’know, your vigilantes have been all over town recently. I’ve heard so many rumors, it’s hard to keep up. Dakota’s heroes too, I’m really starting to feel a bit cornered here.”
Bird doesn’t move.
She lets Adira pace. Lets the sound of heels against polished stone fill the space where intimidation is supposed to live.
“You’re not cornered,” Bird says calmly. “You’re crowded.”
Adira stops mid-step. Slowly turns.
“Oh?” she drawls. “And here I thought I was expanding.”
“You are,” Bird replies. “That’s the problem.”
Adira laughs, sharp and bright, spins her chair once before straddling it backward, arms draped over the back like she owns the room. Which, unfortunately, she does.
“You always did hate my ambition,” Adira says. “You called it pressure. I called it inevitability.”
Bird finally looks at her.
“You called it necessity,” Bird corrects. “You were wrong then, too.”
The smile slips. Just a fraction.
Adira’s eyes narrow—not angry. Curious.
“Careful,” she says softly. “That tone implies you think you’re in a position to correct me.”
“I am,” Bird says. “That’s why I’m here.”
Silence stretches.
The city glows behind Adira through the glass wall—alive, restless, unaware of how close it is to becoming a chessboard again.
Adira glances back at it, then at Bird. “You didn’t come to threaten me,” she says. “You never do. You came to warn me.”
Bird inclines her head. “You’re pushing too hard.”
Adira scoffs. “People are calm. Crime is down. Supply lines are clean. Even the princess’s precious heroes can’t argue with the numbers.”
“No,” Bird agrees. “They can’t argue with the surface.”
Adira’s fingers tap against the chair. “Then enlighten me.”
Bird steps forward—not aggressively, not cautiously. Just enough to shift the room ever so slightly.
“You’ve replaced chaotic disagreements with scared compliance,” Bird says. “It looks like peace. It isn’t.”
“And what have you replaced it with?” Adira snaps. “Trust? Hope? Those are luxuries. They break.”
“They heal,” Bird replies. “If you don’t crush them first.”
Adira stands abruptly, chair rolling back and bumping the desk. “You think you’re better than me because you hesitate?”
“I hesitate,” Bird says evenly, “because I understand consequences.”
Adira laughs again—but there’s no humor in it now. “No. You hesitate because you’re afraid of becoming me.”
Bird meets her gaze, unflinching.
“No,” she says quietly. “I hesitate because I could.”
That lands.
For the first time since Bird entered the room, Adira looks… still.
“You didn’t come to join me,” Adira says slowly.
“No.”
“You didn’t come to beg.”
“No.”
Adira studies her sister’s face—really studies it. The restraint. The certainty. The quiet confidence that doesn’t need a tower to stand tall.
“…You came to draw a line,” Adira murmurs.
Bird nods. “I came to tell you that you’re standing on it.”
The city hums beneath them.
Adira turns away, walking back toward the glass, hands clasped behind her back. “You always choose the middle,” she says. “Do you know how exhausting it is to watch you refuse to commit?”
Bird doesn’t raise her voice. “Do you know how dangerous it is to think commitment only looks like control?”
Adira exhales sharply. “If I don’t expand, someone else will.”
“Then let them,” Bird says. “You don’t have to be inevitable. You need to be responsible.”
Adira turns, eyes sharp again—but thoughtful now. “And if I don’t listen?”
Bird doesn’t threaten her.
She never has.
She’ll never need to.
“Then I’ll keep people alive long enough to survive you.”
The words are quiet. Spoken to her in a way no one else ever dared to.
Adira stares at her for a long moment. Then she smiles—slow, genuine, and far more dangerous than any of the others.
“Oh, Skye,” she says softly. “You really have grown.”
Bird holds her ground.
“So have you,” she replies. “That’s why this matters.”
Baby we're backkkkk. Life has been so insane. Here's a little fic for funsies <3
Masterlist
~~~
No one had seen Bird in eight hours.
That never meant anything good.
The last time the team leader disappeared, she’d come back six months later with twelve names and a crazy idea.
Myra would never admit it out loud, but she’s nervous.
People kept asking her questions.
“Do you know where Bird is?” “I can’t find Bird, can you help?” “I have a question for Bird…”
Myra has a headache… and she’s starting to understand why Bird had disappeared.
She’d left her watch and phone at the base. Harriet had seen her on the cameras, masked and geared up, heading south. But that’s where the trail ended.
Now, Jake and her were sat in the conference room. They’d been there in silence for the last hour. No one else besides Harriet and Raya had caught onto the worry.
Not that Myra was worried. Bird always came back. But it was different now. Before the team, it was normal for her to disappear from their shared apartment for days or weeks at a time. But now, they had a team to look after. A responsibility. And Bird took such things incredibly seriously. She’d never just leave without saying anything.
Until she did.
“It’s only been a few hours,” Raya had said gently, when Myra had muttered under her breath. Harriet had shrugged and said she’d keep an eye on the city cameras.
Jake is leaning back, arms crossed, squinting at the digital map of the city hanging on the wall. It sparkled with moving blue and red dots, highlighting hero and villain patrols respectively. Myra has a coin she’s fiddling with between her fingers and occasionally tossing into the air.
The coin hits the table and spins, metallic whisper cutting through the silence.
Jake doesn’t look away from the map. “You’re going to wear a dent in that thing.”
Myra catches the coin before it falls. “I’ll replace the table.”
“I don’t mean the table.”
She snorts quietly. “No one ever does.”
The map pulses. Patrols shift. A hero unit reroutes south, then stops. A villain marker blinks out entirely.
Jake leans forward now, forearms on the table. “She wouldn’t go dark without a reason.”
“No,” Myra agrees. “She’d go dark because of one.”
Another silence settles. Heavier this time.
Raya passes the doorway again, pretending not to look in. Myra clocks it anyway—the careful steps, the tension in her shoulders. Harriet’s presence is a constant hum somewhere deeper in the base, keyboards clicking too steadily to be casual.
Myra flips the coin once more, higher this time. It arcs, catches the light, lands back in her palm.
“She hates the rain,” Jake says suddenly.
Myra looks at him.
“It’s been raining all morning,” he continues. “If she chose today, it wasn’t coincidence.”
Myra’s jaw tightens. “She also hates unfinished problems.”
Jake exhales. “That too.”
Footsteps come down the hall. Harriet appears, nervous, tablet clutched to her chest like a shield.
“I—um,” she starts, then stops. Swallows. “I found something on the cameras.”
Jake is on his feet immediately. Myra’s eyes follow Harriet without a word as she steps into the room and connects her tablet to the large screen on the wall next to the city map.
The image Harriet pulls up isn’t the city map. It’s a single still frame—grainy, half-obscured by rain.
Bird, hood up, mask on.
She’s standing at the edge of a bridge.
Not fighting.
Not running.
Waiting.
“She crossed into a dead zone,” Harriet says softly. “No cameras past that point. No hero coverage. No villain markers either.”
Jake stares at the image. “That’s not a coincidence.”
“No,” Myra says. “That’s a message.”
Raya appears in the room, gently closing the door behind her to keep nosy team members from overhearing. “What kind of message?”
Myra doesn’t answer right away. She’s already reaching for her jacket on an adjacent chair. “The kind you leave when you don’t want anyone else involved.”
Jake’s voice hardens. “That’s not her call to make anymore.”
Myra pauses, fingers tightening on the zipper.
“She knows that,” she says. “Which means whatever’s out there… she thinks it’s worse.”
Jake swears under his breath. “We should’ve noticed.”
“We did,” Myra snaps, sharper than intended. She exhales. “We just didn’t stop her.”
The room hums with power and rain and unspoken fear.
Raya steps closer. “What are you thinking?”
Myra finally looks at her. “I’m thinking Bird is very good at carrying things alone.”
Jake nods once. “And very bad at letting people help.”
Harriet’s voice is deceptively steady. “Do we… do we call the others?”
Myra considers it. The noise. The chaos. The questions.
Then she looks back at the frozen image of Bird in the rain.
“No,” she says. “Not yet.”
Jake meets her gaze. “You’re giving her a head start.”
“I’m giving her a chance,” Myra replies. “There’s a difference.”
Another patrol icon flickers out on the city map behind them.
This time, all four of them notice.
Raya’s voice is quiet. “How long do we wait?”
Myra flips the coin one last time.
It lands heads-up.
“Until the rain stops,” she says. “Or until she doesn’t come back.”
The world around her comes back in waves. First; soft, gentle talking. Then the beeping of machines in the background.
She feels soft bedding underneath her. Her feet are warm, but the rest of her is freezing. Laura tries to open her mouth to ask for another blanket, but her tongue sticks to the roof of her dry mouth. There’s something soft around her wrists and ankles.
The discussions dies down before Laura can pull herself together enough to pay attention to what they’re saying. She feels a presence approaching.
It’s painful, trying to pry her eyes open enough to see. They feel just as dry as her mouth, a similar feeling to having your eyes stapled shut. The rest of her body is sore, every small shift has her muscles and bones screaming in protest.
The room is bright, there’s sunlight and starch hospital lights and machines everywhere. She squints at the person standing next to her bedside.
Laura doesn’t recognize any of the three people in the room. A woman dressed in scrubs, a male dressed in a suit and tie, and-
“Fuck,” she gaps, trying to push herself up and out of the bed. The hero starts to walk over, but the nurse shoos him away. The short restraints on her wrists painfully force her back down on the bed.
“Just relax, sweetheart,” the nurse says kindly. Her badge reads ‘Sage Elder’. “You’re safe here-”
Laura inhales sharply and pulls at the restraints again, ignoring the sharp pains shooting up her arms. “Let me go!”
Two more nurses appear from behind a curtain, which reveals a door that Laura assumes goes out to the hospital halls. They shoulder past the men. One grabs a syringe off a cart at the foot of the bed.
“Don’t you come near me with that,” Laura warns, eyeing the needle. She does her best to relax in the bed, while still remaining tense. “Don’t you fucking dare.”
The nurse holding the syringe looks at Sage, a silent question. She shakes her head, resulting in the syringe being set back down.
Laura looks around the room, taking in the hospital. She’s dressed in a gown with socks on her feet. Her hair feels like it’s been put up into some sort of bun, but she can’t tell.
Outside the window she can make out a courtyard with people walking through. She’s certainly not on the top floor, but not far up either. There was a tree that didn’t seem far either. She could jump out and scale the wall, or grab the tree, if the opportunity arose. The door was another option if the hero decided to leave. Even with her unknown injuries, a few nurses and security guards would be easy. Not even a grave could hold her down in this situation.
“Where am I?” She asks shortly, keeping any emotion carefully out of her tone.
Jett, the hero, hums and crosses his arms over his chest. “Well, you and your friends decided to interfere with a mission I was running.” He glances at the suited man unhappily. “You got separated from them and knocked out pretty hard by the guys you were fighting. We grabbed you and brought you here.”
Laura inhales and exhales slowly, doing her best to keep the panic from rising. “Where’s my stuff?”
“We have it secured back at our base. Once you’re medically cleared, you’ll be transported there for questioning.”
“Do you know my identity?”
He hesitates, mouth opened to answer but nothing comes out. The suited man jumps in. “We were hoping you could shed some light on that for us, actually.”
“You see, we’ve had some time to run you through international databases, every single one in the world. DNA, fingerprints, not a thing has come back. You may as well be a ghost.”
That’s when Laura really relaxes in relief. This situation wasn’t ideal, but as long as Harriet’s tech held fast, she could still get out of this without more than a lecture from Bird and some coverup.
Jett once again opens his mouth, but his phone starts ringing aggressively. He pulls it out, frowns, and walks towards the door. The suited man gestures for the door and asks the nurses for some privacy. They hesitate for a moment, but after some reassurance they too exit the room. Sage doesn’t leave without first subtly moving the emergency call button within reach of Laura’s restrained hands.
Laura narrows her eyes and clenches her fists and the man approaches the foot of the bed. He sets his hands on the metal frame and leans forward.
“I’m the head of SaurHorn Towers, the country’s top hero agency,” he says softly. “I’ve seen the incredible things you and your friends can do. You’re all very impressively trained, better than most of the heroes I employ.”
He stands up straight, smiling. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re a ghost. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a miscommunication with your security watch tonight and your medical records get cleared on accident.”
“What’s the catch?” She asks suspiciously, raising an eyebrow. She knew how heroes and their management worked. Nothing came without a catch.
He shrugs and looks over at the window. “Consider this offer. I want you and your friends to come work for me. You don’t have to be heroes. But your skills are valuable, and I want all my heroes to learn from you lot.”
“My name is Ivan Nay, if you’re ever interested. Your gear will be left in the hospital locker 980, the code is on a sticky note under your bed. Good luck, I hope you decide to accept.”
And with that, he leaves, not leaving Laura a chance to say anything in response.
TW: Brief descriptions of death, dead bodies, and a brief morgue scene, as well as a passing sentence of murder. Nothing long or super descriptive, but it's there.
Masterlist
~~~
Milo has to sit down sometimes.
Not because his feet hurt, or he needed a break. Sometimes the world just got dizzyingly stressful.
He hated when it got like this. Bird carried far more weight and stress than he did. She had an entire team to run, missions to plan, people to worry about. All he had to do was worry about himself and he couldn’t even do that without freaking out.
Some people on this team felt far too many emotions, some didn’t seem to feel any at all. Milo would like to say he was at a good middle ground, but he really isn’t. He went some days feeling absolutely no emotion and dry as a desert. Other days?
His bedroom isn’t silent. His watch and radio are constantly beeping. His security phone buzzes occasionally in his back pocket. The clock tick, tick, ticks.
The mission was two hours ago, and his panic is still at the ceiling—screaming, pounding, rattling like someone trapped behind glass—and he’s face down on the carpet, still in his uniform.
It hadn’t even gone that horribly. They’d gone in, he covered Cane while the scientist got the samples they needed, and they were out. But the morgue had been cold, dark, and absolutely reeked of death. No one else dared go into the morgue with Cane, Bird had volunteered him.
And Milo had obeyed, like he did best. He never complained, always did everything he was told. He can still see the pale, waxy faces burned into his brain. A young female, killed by a horrible house fire. An older man, face frozen in fear after being stabbed at a gas station.
Milo had seen death before. He was no stranger to it, he’d played his fair share in death counts all over the world. But there had been something so unnerving about that place, dozens of souls preserved in the cold. It made his skin crawl and itchy.
He would’ve sworn that the hands of the old man moved, or that the young woman’s foot twitched ever so slightly. Cane had hummed cheerfully while collecting samples, the sound echoed too cleanly off the sterile walls.
There’s a knock at the door.
“Milo?” The door creaks open, soft hallway light spilling into the room. He doesn’t look up, but he recognizes the voice of Nate.
“Doin ok, buddy?” He mutters, stepping softly into the room. He hears a second pair of footsteps enter—heavier, probably belonging to Deacon.
The two walk up to him and sit on either side; close, but not too close. Their presence weighed down like a warm blanket.
There’s a rustling of paper. Milo turns his head ever so slightly to see Deacon pulling out of his jacket pocket a sketchbook and a pack of gum.
“Want?” He asks, holding out a gum. Usually Milo nitpicked what flavor and brand Deacon had on hand, but he just slowly extends his hand in silent acceptance.
It’s strawberry, and Milo’s favorite brand. Not a coincidence, but he’s not about to say thank you either. Just a small huff of acknowledgment as he pushes himself up to be able to chew properly. His entire body feels full of weights, or like a towel that had fallen into a pool.
Nate sighs and leans back on his hands. His gaze wanders around the room, starch white hair falling into his face. Deacon is sketching in the dark, sketchbook positioned in the small line of light from the cracked door.
Milo looks down at his lap and pushes the gum to the side of his mouth. His folds his hands to keep from fidgeting.
“I don’t know what I’m so afraid of,” he says quietly. Deacon doesn’t pause, but Nate’s gaze flickers over to him momentarily. “It’s not death. I don’t think it’s the dark, I’ve never been afraid like that.”
Deacon shrugs, pen moving skillfully across the paper. “Everyone’s afraid of something stupid, dude. I’m afraid of cats, and popcorn.”
Milo and Nate’s heads snap up in confusion. “Huh?” Nate says, bewildered. “Popcorn?”
“I don’t like the sounds it makes.”
The two exchange a three second glance, before they start laughing quietly.
“Alright,” Nate says finally, sighing heavily. “I’m afraid of the ocean.”
Milo nods. “They’ve got some scary shit in there, I don’t blame you.”
The three don’t talk anymore. Milo chews his gum, feeling the weights being lifted from him one by one. His panic is slowly finding itself back down from the ceiling. Nate lays flat on his back, eyes closed. Deacon is now sketching a picture of Nate swimming away from an absurd looking fish.
Well.... It's only the fourteenth... so here's day four!
Masterlist
~~~
Smoke curls from the open panel of the generator, the acrid smell of burnt wires filling the air. West crouches beside it, grease smeared up his forearms. There’s shouting in the distance, echoing down the starch white halls of the underground bunker.
Jake is hovering nearby, shooting glares over his shoulder every few seconds. His foot is tapping incessantly, grip tight around his rifle. A few bodies lay near the other end of the hall he’s guarding, unfortunate souls who took a wrong turn.
“Don’t be scared, Jake,” West mutters under his breath. He can feel the soldier’s gaze staring into his back. “I’ve done this before.”
“I’m not scared,” Jake snaps, shifting from foot to foot. “I’m fuckin annoyed. You techs have no sense of urgency.”
West pushes himself up into a kneeling position and drops his metal tools to the ground obnoxiously. He shrugs when Jake looks over angrily and runs a gloved hand through his tangled hair. “I don’t have to fix it. You go ahead.”
He scoops up his tools and tosses them all into his backpack, scooping it up with him as he stands. The army man protests as West shoulders past him.
Jake grabs his arm before he can take another step. His grip is iron. “Don’t you walk away from that, West,” he growls. “We need that generator online before Bird gets back, or we’re blind and buried.”
West exhales through his nose, slow and dramatic, staring at the flickering light overhead. “I heard you the first five times.” He makes eye contact with Jake, purposely keeping unbothered and nonchalant. He enjoyed watching Jake trying to match the mood and failing miserably.
Jake’s jaw tightens and his grip loosens. “You’re gonna get us killed one day.”
“Yeah?” West throws his bag down again and crouches back beside the panel. “Out of all the people here, statistics are pretty low.”
He cracks open another circuit board, sparks jumping at the contact. The bunker hums faintly, the air thick with tension and ozone.
For a while, there’s only the sound of tools clinking and Jake’s boots pacing restlessly across the floor; the occasional shouting and gunfire somewhere far down the endless corridors. Then the lights overhead blink once, twice—then flare back to life.
The hum evens out. Systems stabilize. The generator roars to life with a low, steady pulse.
West wipes his hands on his pants, leaving streaks of black grease against the blue denim. “See? Told you. Easy fix. Just had to threaten to quit.”
Jake lets out a breath that sounds too close to relief, though he’d never admit it. “You’re an asshole.”
Whumptober day threeee. Tbf I'm only three days behind. Enjoyyyy
Masterlist
~~~
The power had gone out hours ago, and Harriet still hasn’t fixed it. Not because she couldn’t, but because she’d been asked not to.
The base is lit only by candlelight now, small flickers of gold scattered across tables and windowsills. The torrent thunderstorm outside had slowed to a soft patter against the roof. The city hums faintly beyond their walls. But in here, it’s still.
Raya is showing Piper and Laura how to make bracelets with colorful string. Jake, Nate, and Will are sat in a half-circle on the carpet, methodically cleaning weapons and gear. Milo is deep in a game of chess with Ridge, neither have said a word in an hour.
Bird has her back against the bottom half of the couch. The floor had long since become uncomfortable beneath her, but she didn’t dare move. Myra leg is softly brushing against her shoulder—she’s relaxed on the couch—reading the book Bird had gifted her months ago.
Even the three techs are strangely quiet, she’d expected Harriet’s fingers to start itching around thirty to forty minutes following the power outage, but she’d simply shrugged and put an earbud in after Bird asked her to hold off on fixing the power.
Now, West and Cane are silently tinkering at the center table, Harriet has her head face down on the table with her hand on Cane’s leg.
She can feel the silent tension radiating from the game of chess, mixing with the chilled vibes radiating from the rest of the room. This is nice, Bird could absolutely get used to this. She hated the rain usually, but now it felt like it had momentarily lifted a weight from her shoulders.
At some point, she isn’t sure when, Will and Raya—in some strange silent unison—get up and leave the room. They’re back only minutes later with mugs, coffee, tea, and warm muffins.
Bird doesn’t ask how they managed to heat up everything with no power, she only takes a blueberry muffin and cup of coffee with a whispered thank you. Similar murmurs of thanks echo around the room as the treats and drinks are passed around.
“Kinda feels like the end of the world,” Laura laughs, her voice dampened.
“That’s what happens when you’re not used to the quiet,” Harriet replies, head now lifted.
Bird takes a grateful bite of the muffin. She looks around the room, she’s surrounded by people she considered more than just her team, acquaintances, or even just friends. These were people she’d bled beside, argued with, and nearly lost. Faces lit by gold flames and darkened by the shadows.
Jake catches her eye and gives her a small nod. Myra nudges her with her leg in acknowledgement, like she knew what Bird was thinking through.
The candles sway gently, and for a fleeting moment, the world outside could’ve disappeared and none of them would have noticed. Bird certainly wouldn’t care.
Whumptober day 2! I'm a bit behind and I doubt I'll ever be on time this month, but I'm still excited to write everything!
Masterlist
~~~
“Gosh, it stinks down here.”
Piper’s complaints echo through the sewage tunnels. Myra pinches her mask and pulls it up her nose a little higher. Her boots sludge and slosh in the ankle-deep gunk. The beams of their flashlights bounce off the concrete walls, highlighting old graffiti, rusted grates, and the shimmer of rat eyes.
“You ever think about how much stuff ends up down here?” Deacon mutters, his voice carrying too easily down the tunnels. “Like, how many people’s-”
“Shut up,” Myra hisses, glaring over her shoulder. “Noise carries.”
Piper gags audibly behind her mask as she momentarily loses her balance. She clings to a rusted grate. “Pretty sure the smell carries too.”
Jake appears out of the darkness behind them and puts a hand on Piper’s shoulder, guiding her forward in a silent order to keep moving.
Myra focuses her gaze forward again, trying not to focus on the smell. The tunnels branch like veins, each one a dangerous darkness something could be waiting. It sets her hairs on end.
There’s quite a bit of sound for how deep they were. The chitter of rats, the steady drip of water, and an odd humming that gets more noticeable as they press deeper.
Harriet’s voice crackles in their earpieces. “Seeing power spikes in front of you, there’s not just sewage down there. Take your next left and keep pushing forward.”
Myra motions for silence as they round the corner slowly. Piper and Deacon turn their flashlights off, and Myra dims her own.
About three hundred feet in front of them is a large vault door. This tunnel looks more kept than the rest of what they’d seen so far, despite the pool of sludge around it. The concrete walls were uncracked, and the door seemed as though it had been polished recently. There was no graffiti in this tunnel, either.
“How do we get it open?” Deacon whispers as the four creep forward. Myra hands her flashlight to Jake and flips open a control box next to the door. It’s in a language she hasn’t seen before, some sort of riddle if she had to guess.
“Hare?” She asks the earpiece, holding up her watch to scan the panel.
There’s no response, but the scan is received. Myra leans back and rests her hand on her holster. Jake has his rifle drawn, just in case. Deacon and Piper are hanging a few feet back, watching the tunnel exit they’d just come down.
The silence presses in heavier than the stink of the sewer. Myra’s fingers tap impatiently against her thigh as she stares at the vault door. Every drip of water from the ceiling seems too loud. Piper shifts uneasily on her feet, chewing her lip.
“Why isn’t she answering?” Piper whispers, eyes flicking toward Myra like she would know the answer.
“Could be interference,” Jake mutters. He hasn’t lowered his rifle once. His gaze sweeps the tunnel ahead, back, and the vaulted ceiling above.
Deacon crouches beside the sludge pool, drawing lazy circles with the tip of his knife. “Or maybe Hare saw what’s behind door number one and decided to let us find out the fun way.”
“Not helping,” Myra snaps. She’s better at playing it off, but nerves were on end just as much as the rest of them. Something felt off here.
The panel on the control box buzzes faintly, the glyphs rearranging themselves into jagged lines and spirals before freezing again. The hair prickles on the back of her neck. Whatever this language was, it wasn’t just text. It was moving. Breathing.
Jake glances over her shoulder. “That’s not code I’ve ever seen.”
“No kidding.”
The glyphs suddenly blink out, and a new string appears—clear enough for all of them to read.
KNOCK TO BE HEARD. BLEED TO BE SEEN.
Piper recoils. “Nope. Uh-uh. Whatever that means, I vote nope.”
Before anyone can reply, Harriet’s voice finally crackles through the static in their ears, strained and distorted. “Don’t touch it. Whatever you do, don’t—”
The line goes dead.
Jake’s grip on his weapon tightens. His voice is low, calm despite.
WHUMPTOBER is a month-long, prompt-based creation CHALLENGE (think: Inktober, but whumpier). There are four prompts for each day of the month, giving 124 for you to play with! There is also a list of 18 alternative prompts that can be subbed in for any day to give participants as much creative freedom as possible.
All prompts are meant to serve as inspiration without being taken literally (e.g. you don’t have to include the exact wording of prompts into your work). Feel free to run rampant on interpretation. For example, if the prompt is “flame", you could create something with reference to a candle/campfire, your character could have suffered a burn, or the flame could be a reference to an ‘old flame’ - an old relationship. It’s truly down to you!
You can produce work in any media you choose, including but not limited to: writing, visual artwork, photo/video/audio edits, paper crafts and elaborate recommendation lists (not just a list of links). You can participate as much or as little as you want (i.e. you don’t have to do ALL the prompts if you don’t want to) and prompts can be used in any order. They are also free to use even after the event ends.
Please make sure to read the Event Info and FAQ carefully, as most of your questions will be answered there already. For everything else, you are welcome to come to our ask box or ask questions in our Discord server here.
Information on how to TAG is here.
This year’s AO3 Collection can be found here.
This year’s playlist can be found here.
The ‘Anatomy of a Whumptober Prompt’ post can be found here.
And our 'Resources for Writing Sensitive Topics’ post is here.
We’re very excited to see the community come together for yet another year of Whumptober! Go ham with the prompts, and support your fellow creators - we wish you all the best of luck, but most importantly: HAVE FUN!
Happy whumping,
Mods Vanne, Yenn, Kitty and Surro
Text versions of the prompts, including a google doc format, are posted below the cut!
A Google Doc of the prompts can be found here for easy copy-and-pasting!
Whumptober 2025 Prompt List
No. 1: “Please don’t cry”
Lamb to Slaughter | Ceremony | Beg for Forgiveness
No. 2: “You’ve got a lot of nerve to dredge up all my fears.”
Prophecy | Sewer | Taking Accountability
No. 3: “I look in people’s windows, transfixed by rose golden glows.”
Isolation | Candlelight | Found Family
No. 4: “Don’t be scared, I’ve done this before.”
Non-Human Whumper | Iron Rod | Loss of Powers
No. 5: “My panic’s at the ceiling, but I’m face down on the carpet.”
Quivering | Dream Journal | Phobia
No. 6: “No grave can hold my body down.”
Caught in a Net | Medical Restraints | Pinned to the Wall
No. 7: “Tell me that you’re okay, and I’m fine.”
Trapped with the Enemy | Elevator | Pushed Beyond Breaking Point
No. 8: “Oh horror, oh horror, what did you see?”
Self-Inflicted Injury | Held at Gunpoint | Dissociation
No. 9: “We’ll make it alright to come undone.”
Touch | Flashbacks | Scalding
No. 10: “There’s nothing you can ever say, nothing you can ever do.”
Without Consent | Secrets | Lips Sewn Shut
No. 11: “Can you get through all the pain inside you?”
Hidden Injury | Laceration | Forced Reveal
No. 12: “It’ll be for nothing.”
Cardiac Arrest | Sacred Place | Withholding Medical Treatment
No. 13: “How dull is it to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished.”
Never Enough | Insignia | Forced Retirement
No. 14: “In the end, it’s worthwhile.”
Ignoring an Illness | Body Bag | Wounded Caretaker
No. 15: “You can take a break, if you just tell me that it hurts.”
Failed Rescue Attempt | Body Part in the Mail | Live-Streamed Torture
No. 16: “I’ve had the rug pulled beneath my feet.”
Repressed Trauma | Permanent Marker | Disorientation
No. 17: “Tell me there’s a hope for me.”
Internal Bleeding | Coma | Redemption
No. 18: “As the world caves in.”
Dystopia | Ruins | Environmental Whump
No. 19: “You’re on your own, lost in the wild.”
Dehumanisation | Living Weapon | On Patrol
The medbay lights buzz faintly, too white and too sharp. Raya had already left to fetch more bandages, and the rest of the team had been ordered out. That left Bird alone with Piper, who sits on the edge of the cot, her hands shaking as she presses them into her lap.
Her eyes are red and glassy, and she's grasping her arm tightly to cover up a cut, blood dripping down her arm.
“I’m fine,” Piper says quickly, the words wobbling. “I’m fine, really. Just—just a scratch.”
Bird is sat across from her on a neighboring cot, resting her forearms on her knees. “Pipes…”
“I said I’m fine,” Piper snaps, her voice cracking mid-word. Her shoulders curl inward like she could fold herself small enough to disappear. “It’s stupid, I don’t even know why I—” She cuts herself off, a hot tear sliding down her cheek.
Bird reached out, but stops short of touching her. Piper hated being cornered like this, her insecurities laid out like a museum exhibit.
“Please don’t cry,” Bird says softly. Not a command—just a quiet plea.
Piper huffs out a laugh that isn't really a laugh. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here. You’ve got—like—actual soldiers and geniuses and medics, and then there’s me. I’m just…” She trails off, tears dripping faster now. “I’m just noise.”
Bird's breath visibly hitches, but she keeps her voice calm, steady. “Noise keeps people awake. Noise keeps people from falling asleep at the wheel. You think this team would be standing without you keeping us on our toes?”
Piper shakes her head. “I don’t believe that.”
“Then believe me,” Bird says, her voice sharpening. “Because I wouldn’t waste my time leading a team I didn’t believe in. Especially not you.”
Piper blinks at her through blurred lashes, and for once, she doesn't have a snappy retort. She sniffles, nods once, and wiped her cheek with the back of her sleeve.
Bird finally puts a hand on her knee, grounding, steady. “Please don’t cry,” she repeats, gentler this time. “Not because it’s weakness. But because if you keep going, I might start. And I don’t think either of us would stop.”
That earns the smallest, wet laugh from Piper. And maybe, just maybe, it was enough.
Trying to condense down how many works I have on the masterlist, but that means longer multiple scene posts. Do y'all prefer more shorter snippet posts, or fewer posts with longer/more scenes?
Masterlist
~~~
“I’ve been out of the game too long.” Myra slumps in the passenger seat of the car, rubbing her head. “I’d forgotten how utterly useless informants are.”
Harriet hums from the backseat. She’s got her laptop open, the soft glow illuminating her face. Milo is sitting on the opposite side in the dark, staring out the window.
Bird has her gaze fixed on the road. Most roads would be empty at this hour of the night, but there was still a good amount of traffic around here. Most of the clubs in this area were owned by the Torchlights, a cell notorious for holding the most egregious parties behind the club curtains at all hours of every day.
“He knows who we’re looking for,” Bird mutters. “He said she wants us to ‘figure it out for ourselves’. The fake-out said something similar at the Blood Jacker’s pit.”
“Yeah, but who is she?” Myra grumbles. She pulls her mask down and frowns at Bird. “After that letter and the dumb informant, it’s obvious-”
Myra’s complaints are interrupted by the ringing of a phone. Bird picks it up and glances at it. It’s not their personal phones, but the encrypted one.
Unknown Number
“Hare, track it?” Bird says as she swipes answer. Only a very few people outside of the team had the encrypted number, and they were all saved in the phone.
The line is silent at first. The car waits in anticipatory silence. Then, just as Bird moves her thumb to the end call button, there’s static.
The sound of a crowd builds like a steady wave.
Cheering, roaring, chanting, voices echoing like a thousand feet marching.
Trial of blood! Trial of blood! Trial of blood!
The sounds grows and grows until it’s almost unbearable. West and Myra have their hands clasped over their ears. Harriet is frantically typing, trying to push through the sound. Bird pulls the car over into a parking lot and stares at the phone in disbelief.
Her hands are tight around the wheel, but her palms are slick with sweat. Trial of Blood. The same trial the informant had mentioned? Something else?
The line goes dead, and the car is left in ear-ringing silence. Only the low growl of the car engine and the occasional passing of traffic.
“Message received,” Milo says dryly. Bird can hear his foot tapping against the mat, contrasting the unbothered expression she sees in the mirror.
Bird drops the phone into the cupholder and leans her head back against the head rest. Harriet is still typing in the back. The sound of the keyboard felt too loud, now.
Harriet’s typing is sharp and fast, but it’s only a moment before she slams the laptop shut with a huff of frustration. “That shouldn’t be possible. No one should be able to cut us off, not like that.”
The leader pushes the phone down and closes the cupholder, like that would cut off the lingering weight of the call.
Myra turns in her seat to look at her. “But someone did. And we don’t know who.” She rubs her forehead harder, like the sound had burrowed itself into her brain.
Bird puts the car back in gear and makes the turn onto the main road. Her chest is tight, the city lights ahead hazy in the windshield. Whoever she was, she knew their number. Their signals. Potentially their names, if she wanted.
This was someone more unpredictable and dangerous than anyone Bird had faced with the team yet.
~~~
“I’m just saying-”
“-You’ve been ‘just saying’ for the past hour,” Myra snaps. “We get it!”
Bird’s eyelid is twitching. The tension in the room is thick, like something lodged deep in the throat. She can hear the eye roll Laura gives Myra.
She rolls her shoulders, before turning to face the room.
“Alright, let’s just start over,” she says, waving her hand. A couple people mutter protests, but no one speaks up to be heard. “We’re getting nowhere with this. Let’s talk about the phone call.”
“Talk?” Jake asks. He leans forward, arms folded tight across his chest. “Bird, that was a direct threat. They know our numbers, how to get past our encryption. Maybe even our location. We should be moving bases tonight.”
“Paranoid much?” Milo drawls, slouched so far down in his chair he looks boneless. “It was noise and theater. Scare tactics. Relax.”
Ridge sets his elbow on the table and leans his head into his hand. “You can never be too paranoid, Milo. I can’t tell you how many paranoid people used to walk into my hospital because they felt the smallest bit of pain, and found out something major was wrong with them.”
Milo shoots a glare across the table, but a few are nodding in silent agreement.
Bird sets both hands on the table and purses her lips. She glances around the room. Maybe it was a smart idea to move bases tonight, but to where? They didn’t have any sort of backups available. And moving would leave them vulnerable, anyways.
Piper, who’s perched on the edge of her chair, raises her hand. “Sorry if I’m like, the only one not following here, but what trial? Like, a pit fight? A test? Are we the trial?”
The room goes still at that. Only Harriet continues without pause. She’s got an earbud in and hasn’t said anything the entire meeting, Bird isn’t sure if she’s even listening or not.
“Good question,” Harriet replies. Her reading glasses reflect a dozen open tabs. “I’ve been running cross-checks since I got the signal un-jammed. There are whispers in older Blood Jacker chatter. Phrases like ‘champions of blood’ and ‘witch trials’. Always tied to Red Ring pit fights.”
Bird doesn’t like the sound of any of it. Piper made a good point. They very well could be the trial. The phone call had seemed like a summons, of sorts. Myra had taken the letter-the invitation, as it was described-and it had only been a day before they got the phone call.
Raya picks up a pen and taps it on the notebook in front of her. “It’s like pouring boiling water down an ant hill,” she says softly. “They’re trying to put pressure on us and flush us out. I think we should stay, for the time being.”
“I agree,” Myra says with a nod. “But we should probably have a backup ready, just in case. Anyone opposed?”
No one speaks up. Even Jake seems somewhat agreeable with the decision. Bird looks over at a map of the city hung on the wall.
Every spot that was a known pit was marked with a red pin. Clubs were marked with blue, gang and cell territories were circled and marked in black pen. There’s still a corner of the map unmarked, the top right. They hadn’t had time to send a recon team out there yet, as it was fenced off and heavily guarded from every angle.
“I just think,” Nate begins, pulling her from her thoughts, “That if we want to find anything, we outta get our hands dirty.”
“He’s got a point,” Laura says over the sighs and groans. “To know how the pits work, we gotta be in the pits.”
Will shakes his head quickly. “Nope. Absolutely not. You want a big red target on your back, that’s how you get one.”
Nate punches his hand into his fist, grinning. “You just have no love for the game, Willy.”
“I want to be on the front lines as much as the rest of you,” Jake growls, “But even I don’t agree with joining the pits. We’d be stooping to their level.”
The room splits in two. Nate leans forward, elbows on his knees, practically vibrating with the idea. Laura mirrors him, that wild light in her eyes. On the other side, Will’s jaw is locked, his arms crossed like stone, while Jake looms in the middle, caught between the fire and the frost.
Bird pulls her chair over and sits down. Sometimes, it was better to let the wick burn a bit before snuffing it out. Something productive usually came out of it, if you knew how to listen.
Ridge speaks up again. “The pits will chew you up. We’ve seen enough bodies to prove it.”
“Yeah, yeah, doom and gloom,” Piper says, propping her feet up on the table. “But admit it—you’re all a little curious. What’re they hiding down there that we haven’t already seen?”
Harriet doesn’t look up from her laptop. “Statistically speaking, you’d have a better chance of surviving a plane crash than lasting in a pit fight. I’m not recommending it.”
“Not recommending?” Nate smirks. “So you’re not saying no.”
Bird’s fingers drum against the armrest of her chair, a steady rhythm. When the bickering reaches its loudest point, she stands once again.
“We’re not stepping into the pits.” Her voice cuts through everything, calm but firm. “Not yet. If this mystery person wants blood, she’s not getting ours. We play smarter than that.”
The silence that follows is thick—half frustrated, half relieved. No one argues, but she knows better by now than to not expect someone to follow up this meeting with a stupid decision.
turnnoffyourmind
romaincrisis
baratheonpilled
gracieabrams
