Mutual Destruction (A Love Story) || Riddle Rosehearts
You're an SS-ranked Guide who considers scaring Espers a skill and Riddle's an A-ranked Esper who files HR complaints like it's a sport. Together, you're classified by HR as "unprecedented and also please stop."
or: Guideverse! ; w.c ~25k
Guideverse Masterlist
Once upon a time—actually, you know what? Forget the "once upon a time" nonsense because this story literally starts with the phrase that's been beaten into the ground so thoroughly it's practically reached the Earth's core.
One day, suddenly, Gates opened. There we go. That's the line. The exact same line that's launched approximately nine thousand mediocre webnovels, seventeen k-dramas that you definitely binged while you were supposed to be studying for finals, and that one manhwa your friend won't shut up about in the group chat at three in the morning.
Oh, you've heard this spiel nine times before? Fantastic. Incredible. Here's the tenth time, and honestly if you're tired of it, imagine how the people actually living through this feel. They're so tired. So, so tired.
Anyway, ahem. Let's get into it.
One day, suddenly, things called Gates opened. These Gates, for anyone who's somehow avoided every piece of media from the last decade, can open literally anywhere. Your local 7-Eleven? Gate. The weird parking lot behind the dentist's office where someone's definitely doing something sketchy at two AM? Gate. That one bathroom stall at the mall that's always vaguely damp for no reason? You already know.
The lower-ranking Gates just kinda appear somewhere and turn the area into a locked zone, like someone decided to cordon off a chunk of reality with police tape and a "do not enter unless you're cool with dying horribly" sign. The monsters inside are usually standard-issue nightmare creatures that look like someone told an animal "hey what if you were worse" and the animal took that way too personally.
The higher-ranking Gates though? Those are themed. We're talking full alternate dimensions that look like someone's fever dream had a baby with an escape room designed by a sadist. Gravity is a suggestion. The laws of physics are more like guidelines. The decor is universally horrible.
So humanity looked at this situation and did what humanity does best, which is evolve out of pure spite. Because if reality's gonna start throwing hands, humanity's gonna throw them back harder.
Enter Espers and Guides.
Espers go into the Gates and fight the monsters and destroy the core so the whole thing doesn't collapse and leak monsters everywhere like a broken snow globe full of teeth and malice. The job description sounds simple enough. Get in, beat stuff up, smash the core, get out. Easy.
Except Espers are the most dramatic people alive. Their emotions and senses are cranked up so high that existing is basically one long overwhelming experience. A hangnail feels like a medieval torture device. Someone chewing loudly sounds like construction work happening inside their skull. They're out here experiencing life in 4K with all the settings maxed out and the brightness turned up until it burns, and it shows.
They're powerful and incredibly useful and also having the worst time imaginable at all times.
And then you've got Guides.
Guides wait outside the Gates looking like they haven't slept since 2019, because their whole job is calming down Espers after they come out absolutely vibrating with feral energy. Espers stumble out of Gates completely fried, their power doing backflips, their emotions doing interpretive dance, and Guides have to basically be a human off-switch using their own abilities to smooth everything back down to baseline.
It's like being a therapy dog except you're a person who also hasn't eaten a proper meal in six hours and you're pretty sure your Esper is about to cry because the wind touched their face weird.
So yeah. Gates that open randomly and spawn monsters. Espers who fight the monsters but are also catastrophically sensitive about everything. Guides who wrangle the Espers while running on fumes and prayer. Simple in theory.
In practice, it's a mess. But hey, at least rent is cheap in this economy because half the buildings are condemned Gate zones, so there's that.
You're an SS ranked Guide, which in theory means you should be drowning in Esper requests like some kind of twisted popularity contest where the prize is being psychically latched onto by someone who experiences a full emotional breakdown if their toast is slightly too brown.
SS Guides are rare. SS Guides are valuable. SS Guides are supposed to have Espers lined up around the block ready to throw hands for the privilege of having you smooth out their jagged little energy spikes.
Except somehow, against all logic and the basic laws of supply and demand, every Esper in this entire facility takes one look at you and suddenly remembers they have a very important appointment elsewhere.
Possibly in an S-rank Gate. Possibly in a dumpster. The specific location doesn't matter as long as it's not near you.
HR has tried to address this with you on multiple occasions, each conversation more painful than the last. The last time you sat in that aggressively beige office that smells like stale coffee and printer toner, surrounded by motivational posters with phrases like "synergy" and "collaborative excellence" in fonts that should be classified as war crimes, your HR rep looked at you with the haunted expression like their will to live was dripping away away like a leaky faucet.
They said that your personality is a little challenging.
You blinked at them. "What's wrong with having a little whimsy? What's wrong with scaring a few Espers?"
"Last week you told an A-rank Esper that his energy signature felt like what you'd get if anxiety and a wet sock had a baby," they said.
"I was helping him develop self-awareness."
"He cried in the bathroom for forty minutes.”
Because honestly, if the living bombs are scared of you, isn't that their problem? Espers are supposed to be powerful. They go into Gates and fight monsters that look like they were designed by a committee of sleep paralysis demons. They have abilities that can level buildings.
And yet somehow you're the scary one because you have a sense of humor and occasionally enjoy watching them squirm? You told one guy that Guiding him felt like trying to untangle earbuds that had gained sentience and malicious intent. You asked another if he'd ever considered that maybe he was the monster and the Gate creatures were just misunderstood. These are funny observations. The fact that multiple Espers have requested immediate transfers after sessions with you is a them problem, not a you problem.
But right now you're sitting in the Guide break room with your fellow Guides, nursing a coffee that's gone cold because you got distracted thinking about that one Gate last month that was themed like a CVS at 2 AM, and you're starting to notice something that makes you feel like the universe is personally victimizing you.
Everyone in this friend group is bonded or has an Esper.
You're the only unbonded Guide here, which makes you either the group's token single friend or their charity case, and you're not sure which is worse.
You squint across the table at the Guide who's been talking for the last seven minutes straight about how his Esper "totally thinks he's cool because of how well he handled himself inside the farmer's market Gate," and you have to physically bite your tongue to keep from pointing out that the farmer's market Gate was C-rank at best and the final boss was a mutated cabbage.
This Guide is out here glowing with secondhand pride, talking like he just defeated an S-rank threat solo when really he did was probably just hit a monster with a vegetable until it stopped moving. You're watching this display of delusion in real time and it's making you want to walk into the ocean.
Then there's Trey, sitting in the corner with his phone in both hands, and he's got this expression on his face that can only be described as "catastrophically fond." His thumbs are moving at a speed that suggests whoever he's texting is sending him a multipart novel, probably about something deeply unimportant, and Trey's smiling at his screen like he's reading the most beautiful poetry ever written.
You know without asking that it's his Esper, the one who has the energy of a feral raccoon that got into the trash and came out with a knife and a vendetta. Trey looks so in love it's making you feel physically ill.
You let your forehead drop onto the table with a thunk that rattles the coffee mugs.
"No one wants to be my Esper," you announce into the table surface, your voice muffled by laminate and despair. "I'm gonna die alone. They're gonna find my body in my apartment in like forty years, surrounded by the mummified remains of houseplants I killed and a freezer full of microwave meals I never got around to eating. The news article is gonna say 'Local Guide Dies Alone, Neighbors Describe Them As Having Questionable Vibes.'"
"That's definitely your fault," someone says immediately, which is both rude and accurate.
"You told an S-rank Esper that his aura looked like it was having a midlife crisis," another Guide adds helpfully.
"It did! I stand by that!"
Trey doesn't even look up from his phone. "You made an Esper cry by asking if he'd considered switching careers because his energy felt 'forever alone.'"
You lift your head just enough to make eye contact with the Guide sitting next to you, the one who's somehow in a committed bond with Malleus Draconia, an SSS-rank Esper who's so powerful he once accidentally destroyed a parking garage because he sneezed.
Malleus Draconia, who shows up in news headlines like "SSS Esper Levels City Block, Says He Was Startled By A Pigeon." That Malleus Draconia. And this Guide bagged him. You grab them by the shoulders and shake them like you're trying to extract secrets through physical force alone.
"How am I supposed to get someone if they all just wanna use me as a Guiding port?" you demand, shaking them harder. "I don't want some boring professional relationship where I Guide them and they say thank you and go home. I want someone with spice. I want flavor. I want someone who's gonna come out of a Gate and say something so unhinged I have to take a second to process it. I want to make them mad on purpose. I want them to look at me and think about killing me at least twice a week. Is that too much to ask? Am I being unreasonable?"
"Yes," like four people say at the same time.
"Extremely unreasonable," Trey confirms, finally looking up from his phone just to judge you.
"You might need professional help," the Malleus Guide says while you're still shaking them. "Like therapy. A lot of therapy."
You're about to explain that your standards are actually very normal and everyone else is just boring when Ruggie, the Guide whose Esper is probably texting him about committing some kind of petty crime as a bonding activity, speaks up from his corner of the table.
"You know what? You might wanna ask for Esper Rosehearts."
You stop shaking the Malleus Guide. Turn your head slowly to look at Ruggie. "Who?"
"Riddle Rosehearts. A-rank Esper. Stickler for rules. Little guy, huge temper. Terrifying in the way that small angry things are terrifying, like a chihuahua that knows where you sleep." Ruggie takes a sip of his energy drink, which is definitely just straight caffeine in a can at this point. "My Esper wore gloves into a Gate once and this dude almost murdered them on the spot."
You blink. "What."
"Something about Gate protocol and proper conduct and a bunch of rules my guy didn't even know existed. Said Rosehearts turned red as a tomato and started yelling about standards and professionalism, and my Esper genuinely thought they were about to get decapitated over hand coverings. They said it was the scariest yet exhilarating moment of their life and they once fought a Gate boss that was just a sentient tornado made of knives."
You feel something rising in your chest. It might be hope. It might be the terrible coffee. It's hard to tell.
"Tell me more," you say, leaning forward.
"He's been through four Guides in two months. Keeps filing formal complaints about Guiding quality and professional standards. Apparently he has a list of requirements and expectations that's like eight pages long. HR's losing their minds trying to find someone who can deal with him without quitting."
The smile that spreads across your face is the kind of smile that makes people nervous, the kind that says you're about to make a decision that everyone else will regret.
"He sounds perfect," you breathe.
"He sounds like a nightmare," Vegetable Guide says flatly.
"A nightmare with standards," you correct, already standing up. "A nightmare who gets mad about gloves. A nightmare who's gonna look at me and my whimsy and either fall madly in obsession or try to strangle me, and honestly either outcome is a win."
You grab your coffee, realize it's empty, grab Ruggie's energy drink instead and chug half of it before he can protest. You hand it back to him, wipe your mouth with the back of your hand, and shoot him a smile that's all teeth.
"Thanks bestie, you've changed my life. I'm going to HR right now to ask for a new assignment."
"You mean a new victim," someone mutters.
"Same difference," you say cheerfully, already heading for the door with the kind of spring in your step that suggests you're about to do something that'll make HR update their incident report templates. "And it's gonna be beautiful. He's either gonna bond with me or try to kill me, and honestly the uncertainty is what makes it exciting."
Behind you, you hear Trey sigh. "Should we stop them?"
There's a pause, and then someone else says, "I mean we could, but watching this play out is gonna be the funniest thing that's happened all month."
"All year," another Guide corrects.
You're already halfway down the hallway, your steps light and your heart full of chaos and terrible ideas. Riddle Rosehearts. A-rank Esper with a hair-trigger temper.
Your future problem, if the universe has any sense of poetry.
You cannot wait to be so whimsical at him that he tries to cite you for violations. This is gonna be great.
The HR rep looks at you like you've just asked them to set themselves on fire for fun.
"No," they say flatly.
You lean forward in your chair, resting your elbows on their desk in a way that's definitely too casual for a professional setting. "I want Esper Rosehearts as my assignment."
"No," they repeat, and you can see their grip tightening on their stress ball, the one that's shaped like a little brain and says "Keep Calm and Synergize" on it.
"I'll transfer," you say, and you say it with a bright smile that makes it very clear you're not bluffing even a little bit.
The HR rep's eye twitches. They squeeze the stress ball so hard you're worried it might explode. "You can't just threaten to transfer every time we don't give you what you want."
"Sure I can. I'm doing it right now. Watch." You lean back in your chair and examine your nails like you've got all the time in the world. "I'll transfer to the downtown branch. I hear they've got better coffee anyway. And dental. Do we have dental? I feel like we don't have dental."
"We have dental," the HR rep says through what sounds like physically gritted teeth.
"Well the downtown branch probably has better dental."
There's a long moment of silence where the HR rep stares at you and you can literally see them doing mental calculations, weighing the pros and cons of just letting you leave versus dealing with whatever chaos you're about to unleash. The thing is, you both know they can't actually afford to lose you. SS-rank Guides don't grow on trees, and this branch has been hemorrhaging Guides lately because apparently Cupid himself has decided to make this specific location his personal pet project. Guides have been bonding with Espers left and right, which means they're getting transferred to couple assignments or specialized units, and the number of unbonded Guides available for general rotation is getting dangerously low.
You watch the HR rep's face do a complicated journey through the five stages of grief before landing somewhere between resignation and despair.
"Fine," they say finally, and the word sounds like it's costing them years off their lifespan. "You can meet A-rank Esper Rosehearts tomorrow at 4 PM. Be on time."
"I'm always on time," you lie cheerfully, already standing up.
"You were forty minutes late to orientation."
"I said I'm always on time, not that I'm always early. There's a difference."
You're out the door before they can argue, and you can feel the victory thrumming in your veins like caffeine and poor decision-making. You practically skip down the hallway toward the vending machines because you've earned a snack and possibly several snacks, and that's when you hear it.
The yelling.
You slow down as you approach the vending machine area, and the scene that unfolds before you is so beautiful you could cry. There's a redheaded guy who looks like he's about three seconds away from a brain aneurysm, his face so flushed it's approaching tomato territory, and he's jabbing his finger at a Guide who's got the distinct appearance of someone who's chronically online and has definitely been described as "quirky" in performance reviews.
The Guide's got his phone out and he's holding it at an angle that suggests he was either taking a photo or contemplating taking a photo, and the redhead looks like he's ready to combust on the spot.
"Stop blogging about the ways your Esper smacks things around, it's against the rules!" the redhead shouts, and his voice has the kind of pitch that suggests he's been yelling for a while and his vocal cords are staging a protest. "Section fourteen, subsection C of the Bureau handbook explicitly prohibits the unauthorized documentation and distribution of Esper combat techniques on public social media platforms!"
The Guide with the phone blinks slowly, processing this. "But he looked really cool when he hit that Gate boss with the folding chair."
"That's not the point!" The redhead's getting redder, which you didn't think was physically possible but here you are, witnessing it in real time. "The point is that you're violating protocol and putting sensitive information at risk and also it's extremely unprofessional to run what is essentially a thirst blog about your own Esper's combat capabilities!"
"It's not a thirst blog, it's appreciation content," the Guide says, but he's got this little smile that says it's definitely at least partially a thirst blog.
The redhead looks like he's about to start citing more handbook sections, possibly the entire handbook front to back, and that's when you know with absolute certainty that this is him. This is Riddle Rosehearts. The guy who almost decapitated someone over gloves and is currently having a meltdown about social media policy in front of the vending machines.
You don't even think about it.
You walk right up to them and loop your arm around Riddle's neck in one smooth motion, pulling him into a casual side-hold that makes him immediately sputter and choke on whatever rule he was about to recite. He's shorter than you expected and also warmer than you expected, probably because all his blood has rushed to his face in rage.
"Yeah, Riddle's totally right," you say to the Guide with the phone, wagging your finger at him like a disappointed parent. "You really shouldn't be blogging about that stuff, very irresponsible, could compromise operational security or whatever."
The Guide blinks at you, confused about where you came from and also probably confused about why you're acting like you have any authority here. "Who are you?"
"Irrelevant!" you say cheerfully, and then you're dragging Riddle away before anyone can ask follow-up questions, your arm still around his neck as you haul him down the hallway like he's a misbehaving cat you're relocating.
Riddle is sputtering, his face cycling through approximately seventeen different shades of red, and when you finally let him go near the end of the corridor, he whirls on you with the kind of fury that would make a lesser person reconsider their life choices.
You are delighted.
"Hi!" you say brightly. "I'm your new Guid—"
You don't get to finish the sentence because a playing card goes whistling past your face so close you can feel the air displacement, and it embeds itself in the wall behind you with a sharp thunk. You turn your head slowly to look at the card, which is still quivering slightly from impact, and then turn back to Riddle.
He almost took your head off.
Your grin spreads so wide it probably looks unhinged. "You're not allowed to use your powers outside a Gate in the Bureau," you say, and your voice is practically singing with joy. "Pretty sure that's in the handbook somewhere. Section something, subsection whatever."
Riddle's face goes from red to a color that might not have a name yet, something between crimson and burgundy with hints of impending stroke. His hands are clenched into fists at his sides and he's shaking slightly, which could be rage or could be the effort of not throwing more cards at your head.
"Who," he says through teeth so clenched you're amazed that sound is getting through, "are you."
You stick out your hand for a handshake, still grinning. "I'm your new Guide! So nice to meet you, I've heard so much about you, all of it concerning and delightful."
Riddle stares at your hand like it might be a trap and doesn't take it. Instead he pulls himself up to his full height, which is honestly not that impressive but he's got the energy of someone who's about to recite his entire pedigree, and says with the kind of forced professionalism that sounds like it's killing him, "I am Riddle Rosehearts, A-rank Esper, and I don't recall requesting a new Guide."
"You didn't! HR assigned me to you because apparently you keep making your Guides quit, which is so fun, I can't wait to see what makes me special." You're still holding your hand out. He's still not taking it. This is the best day you've had in months.
"I don't make them quit," Riddle snaps. "They quit because they can't adhere to basic professional standards and refuse to follow simple guidelines that exist for very good reasons."
"Sure, sure, totally," you say, nodding like you're taking him seriously when you are absolutely not taking him seriously. "Anyway, I'll see you tomorrow at 4 PM for our Guiding session! Don't be late, I heard you're really particular about punctuality."
"Of course I'm particular about punctuality, being on time is the bare minimum of professional behavior," Riddle says, and he looks like he wants to say more, probably a lot more, possibly a full lecture's worth of more.
You just give him a smile that promises him that you're going to be the worst thing that's ever happened to him and you're both going to have a great time with it. "See you tomorrow, Riddle!"
He glares at you and then turns on his heel and walks away with a posture that suggests he's using every ounce of self-control not to turn around and throw more cards at you.
You watch him go, still grinning, your face still tingling from how close that card came to taking your nose off.
Tomorrow at 4 p.m.
You genuinely cannot wait.
At 3:59 p.m. the next day, there's a knock on your office door.
Exactly 3:59, which tells you everything you need to know about Riddle Rosehearts and also makes you wonder if he's been standing outside your door with a stopwatch, waiting for the cosmically correct moment to knock. You wouldn't put it past him. He seems like the kind of person who has opinions about atomic clocks.
"Come in," you call out, spinning your chair around in a way that's definitely not necessary but makes you feel like a Bond villain.
The door opens and Riddle steps in, looking like he's about to attend a funeral. His posture is so straight you could use him as a ruler. His eyes immediately start scanning your office like he's doing a health and safety audit, and you watch in real time as he catalogs every single thing that's probably driving him insane.
The crooked picture frame on the wall. The stack of papers on your desk that's definitely not organized by any system known to man. The coffee mug that says "I'm not arguing, I'm just explaining why I'm right" sitting on top of a folder labeled "IMPORTANT - DO NOT LOSE" that you absolutely have already lost the contents of. The small succulent in the corner that might be dead or might just be playing dead to avoid your care.
His eye twitches just a little.
You're delighted.
"Sit," you say, gesturing to the couch.
Riddle sits like he's being photographed for a posture tutorial, hands folded in his lap, back so straight you're concerned about his spine's structural integrity. He looks ready to either recite the Pledge of Allegiance or list every regulation you're currently violating just by existing in this office.
Now here's the thing. You might be unhinged. You might enjoy chaos the way some people enjoy smooth jazz. Yesterday you absolutely did drag him down a hallway like a feral cat who'd found a new squeaky toy. But protocol is sometimes protocol, and Guiding sessions have actual procedures for actual reasons, and you're not about to be a dumbass about someone's energy stabilization just because you think being annoying is funny.
So you grab your chair and wheel it around to his side, pulling out the intake form that HR keeps insisting you fill out even though you've never actually completed one in your entire career here and you're not about to start now, but you can at least pretend.
"Okay, standard questions," you say, clicking your pen in a rhythm that's definitely going to annoy him if the way his eye twitches again is any indication. "Attack type or support type Esper?"
"Attack," Riddle says immediately, and there's this edge of pride in his voice like he's daring you to make a short joke or a comment about how he looks like a particularly angry choir boy.
You write it down. "Anything I need to know while Guiding? Weird energy stuff, spots that are sensitive, any quirks that might make me go 'what the fresh hell' mid-session?"
"No," Riddle says, but his face does this thing where you can tell he's running through a mental checklist. "Standard Guiding procedures should be sufficient."
"Sick." You tap your pen against the paper. "When was your last Guiding session?"
"Two weeks ago."
Your pen stops mid-tap. You look up at him. "I'm sorry, did you just say two weeks?"
"Yes," Riddle says, like this is a completely normal thing to admit and not a red flag the size of a small country. "My previous Guide terminated our working arrangement and HR has been experiencing delays in the assignment process."
Two weeks is bad. Two weeks explains so much about why Riddle looks like he's one minor inconvenience away from snapping like a glow stick.
Espers are supposed to get field stabilization immediately after Gates, that quick patch job that keeps them from going nuclear on the spot, and then they're supposed to get proper Bureau Guiding twice a week minimum. That's the "please don't let your energy eat itself and also you" maintenance schedule. And Riddle's an attack type, which means he's burning through energy like it's his job, because it literally is his job, and he hasn't had a proper Guiding in two weeks.
No wonder he tried to decapitate someone over gloves. His energy is probably screaming. You're mentally screaming just thinking about it.
The only reason this isn't a five-alarm emergency is because he's A-rank and you're SS, which means you've got the horsepower to deal with whatever absolute disaster zone is currently happening inside his energy pathways. If he was any higher rank or you were any lower, this would be a "call a specialist and maybe a priest" situation.
"Alright," you say, setting down your pen and turning to face him fully. "Give me your hand."
Riddle blinks at you, and for a second he looks genuinely surprised, like he was expecting you to pull out a whoopee cushion or start doing a bit. But you're just sitting there with your hand extended, professional as hell, ready to do your actual job.
He hesitates for a second, then slowly reaches out and places his hand in yours.
His hand is warm and his grip is uncertain, like he's waiting for the other shoe to drop, which is fair because you were absolutely chaos incarnate yesterday and you'll probably be chaos incarnate again tomorrow, but right now you're working.
You wink at him.
The uncertainty on his face immediately converts into a scowl so powerful it could probably be used as a weapon. "Can you be professional for five consecutive minutes?"
"I am being professional," you say, grinning. "This is my professional wink. I have different winks for different occasions."
You start Guiding him before he can start an argument, and the moment you sink into his energy you understand everything about his entire personality.
His energy pathways are fucked. Not just tangled, but fucked in the technical sense, and the situation makes you mentally send a very aggressive email to his previous Guide for letting it get this bad.
Everything is knotted up like earbuds that have been in a pocket for three years, dense clumps of tension sitting in spots that must feel like having a rock in your shoe except the rock is internal and made of your own energy eating itself. The whole system is running so hot you're surprised he's not literally smoking, vibrating at a frequency that suggests he's been operating on pure spite and maybe three hours of sleep for the last two weeks.
Yeah, okay, you get it now. If your insides felt like this you'd also be mad about gloves.
You get to work, carefully smoothing out the worst tangles, loosening the knots that have probably been there so long they've got names and backstories. It's delicate and it takes actual concentration, and that means that you have to stop thinking about being funny or chaotic and just focus on untangling this disaster.
You can feel Riddle relaxing incrementally as you work, his breathing evening out, his shoulders dropping from where they've been living up near his ears. His energy starts to cool down, stops trying to eat itself, remembers that it's supposed to be helpful instead of a liability.
It takes over an hour. Way longer than a standard session, but he needed it, and you're not about to do a shit job just because you have places to be, which you don't because your schedule is extremely empty and your plans for tonight involve microwaving something questionable and watching YouTube videos.
When you finally let go of his hand, pulling your energy back and disconnecting, Riddle takes a deep breath like he's surfacing from underwater. He opens his eyes and he looks better. Still tired, because one session isn't going to fix two weeks of neglect, but better. More like a person and less like a pressure cooker about to explode.
"Thank you," he says, and the words sound like they're costing him physical pain, like gratitude is a limited resource he has to ration carefully.
"No problem," you say, and then because you're you, you add, "So what Gate are you hitting tomorrow? I need to know where to show up and look pretty while you fight monsters."
Riddle straightens his jacket, smoothing out imaginary wrinkles. "B-7 Gate, downtown district, 9:00 a.m. Briefing is at 8:30 a.m."
"Cool, I'll be there."
"I expect punctuality," Riddle says, and you can tell he can't help himself, the words just falling out of his mouth like a reflex.
"Sure, sure, totally," you say, waving your hand. "But also you have to get me a coffee now."
Riddle stares at you like you've just spoken in tongues. "I beg your pardon?"
"Coffee. You gotta get me one. I just spent an hour unfucking your energy, I'm running on fumes and vibes, and if I don't get caffeine in me immediately I'm gonna have to crawl to the break room like a slug that's given up on life."
"That's not how professional Guide-Esper relationships work," Riddle says, but he's already standing up, and you can literally see him doing the mental math of how pathetic you're going to look crawling down the hallway versus the minor inconvenience of getting you a drink.
"It's exactly how they work," you say cheerfully. "It's in the handbook. Section something, subsection 'don't be a dick to your Guide after they save your energy from imploding.'"
Riddle scoffs and it's such a good sound that you want to record it and set it as your ringtone. He walks toward the door and you think he's going to leave you to suffer, but then he pauses in the doorway.
"I'll be back in five minutes," he says without turning around. "Don't move."
He's gone before you can respond, and you slump in your chair like a puppet with cut strings. Guiding takes it out of you, especially marathon sessions like that, and you're genuinely not sure your legs would work if you tried to use them right now. You feel like a phone at two percent battery.
Exactly five minutes later, because of course it's exactly five minutes, Riddle comes back holding a cup.
It's not coffee.
It's tea.
He sets it on your desk in front of you and it smells like chamomile and maybe honey and something else that's probably good for you in ways that coffee is not.
"It's better for you than coffee," Riddle says, and his tone suggests this is an empirical fact backed by research and not up for discussion.
You look at the tea and then stare at him. His hair is perfectly smooth and he's standing there with his arms crossed looking like he's waiting for you to argue about the beverage choice.
You reach out and ruffle his hair with one hand while grabbing the tea with the other.
"Thanks, Riddle," you say, grinning as his face goes through approximately four colors in rapid succession.
"Don't—" he bats your hand away, immediately trying to fix his hair, "—touch my hair! What is wrong with you? Do you have any concept of personal boundaries?"
"Nope," you say cheerfully, taking a sip of the tea. It's good. He has excellent taste in tea, which you're filing away in your mental folder labeled "Things About Riddle That I Can Use For Future Annoying Purposes."
"And don't be late tomorrow," Riddle says, still trying to get his hair to lay flat. "8:30 means 8:30. Not 8:31, not 8:35, and absolutely not 8:45 with an excuse about traffic."
"I would never," you lie.
"You absolutely would," Riddle says, and he gives you one last look that's somewhere between exasperated and something else you can't quite identify before he turns and walks toward the door, muttering under his breath about proper professional conduct and why does HR keep assigning him to people who don't respect the concept of personal space.
You watch him go, still grinning, the tea warm in your hands and your energy still humming with the ghost of his.
Tomorrow, you're gonna be late on purpose just to see what happens.
You walk into the briefing area at 8:25 AM, which is possibly the most responsible thing you've done in your entire career at this Bureau, including that one time you accidentally filed a report correctly and then spent the next week paranoid that you'd somehow broken the space-time continuum.
You weren't even trying to be punctual. You just catastrophically overestimated morning traffic like and ended up sitting in your car in the parking lot for fifteen minutes listening to a podcast called "Gates Are A Scam: A Conspiracy Theory Deep Dive" where the host argued that monsters are just unemployed actors in costumes and the whole thing is a government job creation program.
You're not saying you agreed with him, but he brought receipts and they were compelling.
The rookie Guides standing near the coffee station look at you like you've just walked in juggling live grenades while riding a unicycle. One of them is holding a donut, completely frozen mid-bite like someone paused him.
Another one drops her tablet and it hits the floor with a crack that sounds expensive, and she doesn't even look down, just keeps staring at you. You're ninety percent sure you hear someone whisper "is this the rapture" like your punctuality is one of the seven seals breaking.
You ignore them because you have a sacred mission, which is to locate Riddle and immediately ruin his morning in the most affectionate way possible. You spot him near the front by this massive tactical display screen that's showing a 3D model of a Gate layout, and he's examining it with an intensity usually seen on people trying to defuse a nuclear bomb using only a YouTube tutorial.
His posture is so aggressively perfect that you're genuinely worried he's going to fold in half like a lawn chair if someone bumps into him wrong.
You make a beeline straight for him, weaving through other Guides and Espers, and before his brain can register the incoming threat to his personal space, you loop your arm around his shoulders and yank him into a side-hug that makes him go rigid like a mannequin that just witnessed a murder.
"What—who—why are you—unhand me—" Riddle starts making sounds that might technically be language. His face immediately does this thing where it goes through the entire red portion of the visible light spectrum at speeds that should not be medically possible, starting at a gentle pink and speedrunning straight through scarlet into shades of crimson that you're pretty sure don't have official names yet. You think you see burgundy. Possibly magenta.
He might be inventing new colors through sheer force of embarrassment. He's stuttering so hard you're worried he's going to dislocate his jaw.
"Just checking your energy stability," you say in your most professional voice, which is about as professional as a clown at a tax audit, but you are actually running a quick diagnostic scan of his energy pathways to make sure yesterday's Guiding session is still holding up and he hasn't somehow fucked it up overnight through sheer force of personality. "Can't have my Esper going into a Gate with his energy doing the Macarena. That would reflect poorly on my professional reputation."
"What professional reputation?" Riddle manages to choke out, and you're genuinely impressed he's forming complete sentences while looking like he's about to spontaneously combust.
"Exactly," you say cheerfully. "That's why I need to protect the zero reputation I currently have. It's very fragile. Like an egg made of even smaller, more fragile eggs."
"That doesn't make any sense!"
"Neither does your face but you don't see me complaining about it."
But the second you'd invoked Guiding protocol and professional responsibility, Riddle had gone completely limp in your grip like you've just entered the cheat code that turns off all his motor functions. He's still red as a stop sign and he looks like he wants to file several formal complaints, but apparently professional justification is his off-switch.
You've discovered that Riddle's kryptonite is properly cited workplace regulations. You're pretty sure you could get him to do anything if you claimed it was in section whatever, subsection whatever of the “new” handbook. You're filing this information away for future exploitation.
"Your energy feels stable," you announce, still refusing to release him from your grip because his discomfort is giving you life. "Good job not destroying it while you were unconscious. That's real personal growth. I'm so proud of you. You want a sticker?"
"Please release me before I report you for workplace harassment," Riddle says through teeth so aggressively clenched you're worried he's going to crack a molar.
"Can't cite me for harassment if it's Guiding-related. That's in the handbook. I looked it up specifically so I could do this."
"That's not what that clause means!"
Across the room, you make eye contact with Trey, who's looking at you with an expression that clearly communicates "you're a menace to society and also I'm morally obligated to intervene but this is the funniest thing I've seen all month so I'm going to let it play out."
You're about to wave at him when Riddle's expression in your peripheral shifts to something between confusion and the deep exhaustion of a man who's given up on life, and he glances toward the window. You follow his gaze and—
Trey's Esper is in a tree.
No, not climbing a tree. Fully in the tree, perched on a branch like a very aggressive bird, and he appears to be having a heated argument with an actual bird. A pigeon, specifically. The pigeon looks confused.
You point wordlessly at the window because words seem insufficient to capture the majesty of what you're witnessing.
Trey looks. His face goes on an entire journey through the five stages of grief, touching briefly on denial, sprinting through anger, and landing solidly on acceptance of his terrible fate. He walks to the window, opens it, and yells out, "Get down from that tree right now or I swear to god I'm leaving you there!"
"The bird disrespected me!" They yell back, pointing dramatically at the pigeon, who has not had a single thought in its entire life and is not about to start now.
"The bird is a bird! It has a brain the size of a grape! It doesn't have the cognitive capacity for disrespect! It barely has the cognitive capacity for bird!"
"It gave me a look!"
"It's a pigeon! Looking is literally all it does! Looking and shitting on cars, that's the whole bird!"
"It was a very judgmental look!"
"Get down here before I come up there and make this everybody's problem!" Trey sounds like he's aged seven years in the last thirty seconds.
"You can't climb trees, you have bad knees!"
"I'm going to get a ladder! I'm going to get a ladder and I'm going to drag you down and we're going to have a conversation about appropriate pre-Gate behavior!"
"The bird started it!"
You're laughing so hard you can't breathe, tears streaming down your face, and Riddle uses your moment of complete weakness to finally wrench himself out of your grip.
"Your colleagues are a danger to themselves and others," Riddle says, straightening his jacket with sharp, angry little movements like the fabric has personally insulted his entire family.
"Bold words from the guy who almost committed homicide because someone wore the wrong accessories to work," you point out, wiping your eyes.
"That was about maintaining critical safety standards in life-threatening combat environments, not engaging in psychological warfare with urban wildlife," Riddle snaps, but his face is doing the tomato thing again and it's glorious.
"Right, right, totally different situations. One is about protocol and the other is about beef with a pigeon. Very serious distinction."
"It is a serious distinction!"
The briefing starts and the vibe in the room immediately shifts from "casual Bureau morning energy" to "oh fuck we're all going to die and also someone needs to update their will."
The briefing officer, a tired-looking woman who's clearly stopped caring about things like joy and hope, pulls up a display showing three Gates that opened simultaneously across the city. Just looking at the visualization makes your stomach drop like you're on a roller coaster designed by someone who got rejected from engineering school. Two SS-ranked Gates and one SSS.
That's not a coincidence. That's a coordinated attack, which means something with a brain is organizing this nightmare, and that's a thought you're going to shove into a mental box labeled "absolutely fucking not, deal with literally never."
The SSS Gate has Malleus and another SSS-ranker dealing with what the initial field report describes as "a dragon made of smaller dragons, which are themselves made of even smaller dragons, it's fractals all the way down and we're pretty sure it's violating several laws of physics and possibly mathematics."
Someone in the back mutters "that's bullshit" and the briefing officer just gives them a look that says she agrees but she's not paid enough to care.
The other SS Gate has most of your remaining heavy hitters. Which means this Gate—the SS-ranked nightmare that's apparently themed like a serial killer took an interior design course on Pinterest and got really into mood boards—gets the bargain bin team. The clearance rack. The "please god let this work" squad. Seven Espers, most of them S-rank and A-ranks, one B-rank guy who looks like he's actively having a spiritual crisis about his career choices, and the strategy is beautifully simple: don't die, keep the monsters inside the Gate, and wait for the big guns to finish their fractal dragon situation and come save everyone's ass.
It's a terrible plan. Everyone knows it's a terrible plan. The briefing officer knows it's a terrible plan. She's presenting it anyway because it's the only plan they've got.
You watch Riddle's face as she explains the hold-and-defend strategy, and you can literally see him doing complex calculus in his head. His eyes are moving back and forth like he's reading invisible spreadsheets floating in the air, probably calculating optimal formation patterns and energy expenditure rates and the statistical likelihood of catastrophic failure and horrible death for everyone involved.
When the briefing wraps and everyone starts moving toward the gear stations with the enthusiasm of people walking toward their own executions, you intercept Riddle before he can launch into whatever elaborate pre-Gate preparation ritual he definitely has planned that probably involves a checklist and three different kinds of meditation.
"I'll wait for you," you say, and you put your whole entire heart into it, channeling every romance novel you've ever read, going for the full period drama energy. You're basically doing the thing where the lover stands on the balcony watching their gentleman caller ride off to war while clutching a handkerchief and looking wistfully at the horizon as sad violin music plays.
Riddle just stares at you with an expression so flat you could use his face as a level for hanging pictures. "Yes. That is the job you are literally employed to perform. That is your job description. Waiting for Espers is the thing you do for money."
"You're supposed to say something romantic back," you complain, letting your arms drop. "Like 'I'll return to you' or 'wait for me, my darling' or 'here, take this locket with my miniature portrait in it' or literally anything that isn't a clinical description of standard workplace procedures."
"I'm about to enter a high-risk combat situation in an alternate dimension filled with hostile entities. My current priorities are ranked as follows: survive, keep my team alive, prevent Gate collapse, don't let the monsters escape into the civilian population. Romance is not on that list. Romance isn't even in the same building as that list. Romance is in a completely different city."
"Wow, okay, so where do I rank on this list of priorities?"
"You're part of the 'prevent Gate collapse' category because if the Gate collapses you'll also die due to proximity, so you're less of a distinct priority and more of a consequence I'm trying to avoid as part of a broader strategic objective."
You put a hand over your heart like you've been shot. "I'm breaking up with you."
"We're not dating."
"I'm breaking up with us conceptually. This whole thing. Whatever this is. I'm seeing other Espers. You'll receive the official paperwork in three to five business days via certified mail."
Riddle looks like he's trying to calculate whether you're joking or if this is a legitimate HR incident he needs to be worried about, and while his brain is buffering like a computer from 1997 trying to load a webpage, you dig into your jacket pocket and pull out a single-use stabilizer pack. You lob it at his chest and he catches it on pure reflex, staring down at it like you've just handed him a live grenade with the pin already pulled.
"I don't need this," he says, frowning at the stabilizer like it's personally offended him and also his entire bloodline. "I'm perfectly capable of managing my energy reserves without emergency supplies. I've been doing this job for years. I know my limits."
Here's the thing. Logically, rationally, Riddle is probably right. He's an A-rank Esper who's been doing this job long enough that he probably knows his energy capacity better than he knows his own birthday.
But there's this feeling in your gut, this weird animal instinct that you've learned to trust because the last time you ignored it an Esper almost died and you had to fill out so much incident paperwork that you're still having nightmares about it six months later where you wake up in a cold sweat screaming about form 27-B. Your raccoon brain is currently losing its entire shit, rattling the bars of its cage and screeching like a smoke alarm at three in the morning.
"Take it anyway," you say. "Consider it a good luck charm. A friendship bracelet. A token of my esteem and also my crippling anxiety. Whatever narrative helps you accept my heartfelt gift without having a medical emergency about it."
"It's not a gift, it's standard-issue emergency equipment from the supply closet that you're wasting on someone who doesn't need it when there are other people who might actually require it in a genuine emergency situation."
"Counterpoint: I don't care, and also you're wrong, and also I'm going to stand here arguing with you until you accept it so you might as well just take it now and save us both time."
You reach up and ruffle his hair so aggressively that it sticks up in approximately seven different directions and he looks like he just stuck his finger directly into an electrical socket.
"Stop—would you stop touching my hair!" Riddle bats your hands away with the kind of urgency usually reserved for swatting away wasps, already trying desperately to smooth everything back down into its usual perfect arrangement. "What is your obsession with destroying my appearance?! Do you have some kind of psychological compulsion?!"
"I think you look cute like this," you say, grinning at him like the absolute menace you are. "Very approachable. Really softens your whole 'I'm about to lecture’ energy. You should consider making this your everyday look. Really embrace it."
"I'm going lecture you right now if you don't stop," Riddle threatens, but even as he's saying it he's pocketing the stabilizer, which you're absolutely counting as a victory.
"Go fight monsters," you say, still grinning at him with way too much enthusiasm for someone who's about to watch people walk into a death dimension. "Try not to die. It would really fuck up my afternoon if I had to break in a new Esper. The paperwork alone would be a nightmare."
"You've known me for approximately forty-eight hours."
"Forty-eight of the best hours of my life. Truly transformative. I'm a changed person. I've seen the light. I've been born again. Now go before you're late to your own Gate and have to file a report about it."
Riddle gives you one last look that's somewhere between exasperated and something that might be fondness if you turned your head sideways and squinted really hard, and then he turns and heads toward the staging area where the other Espers are gathering and looking at their gear with the enthusiasm of people about to walk into a wood chipper.
You watch him go, trying to ignore the weird uncomfortable feeling in your chest that feels suspiciously like concern, which is ridiculous because you don't do concern. You do chaos and poor decisions and sometimes you eat cereal for dinner while standing at the counter in your underwear. Concern is for people who have their lives together and have calendars.
You've been a Guide through a lot of high-ranked Gates. It comes with the territory of being SS-ranked and also being one of the only SS-ranked Guides who hasn't bonded yet, which makes you the emergency contact number they call when everything's on fire and someone needs to Guide an Esper who's two seconds away from a complete psychological meltdown.
You've waited outside Gates that took nine hours. You've Guided Espers who came out physically intact but missing pieces of themselves that never really grew back, like their sense of humor or their ability to sleep through the night. You know how this works. You understand the rhythm of it, the way time moves weird when you're waiting for someone to come back from a dimension that's actively trying to kill them in creative ways.
But when you hit hour two and the energy readings from inside the Gate start doing things that make the monitoring equipment start making sounds like a car alarm having a seizure, you start feeling something that might be worry.
Three simultaneous SS+ Gates is bad. It's "maybe call your mom and tell her you love her" bad. It's "check if your will is up to date" bad. It's "consider getting right with your god" bad.
It means something is targeting this city specifically, stretching your resources so thin you can practically see through them like they're made of tissue paper and wishful thinking.
Malleus is still tied up with the fractal dragon situation, which according to the latest comms update has somehow gotten exponentially worse in ways the field team can't adequately explain because they keep getting distracted by the geometric impossibilities happening in front of them. One guy tried to describe it and just ended up making sounds.
The other SS team is drowning in their own nightmare scenario. The seven Espers in this Gate are holding the line completely alone, and from the energy readings that are coming through, the line is looking less like an actual line and more like a polite suggestion that nobody's following.
At hour three, Espers start stumbling out of the Gate.
You feel relief crash over you like a wave for about twelve seconds before you start counting heads. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. You count again because maybe you miscounted, maybe your brain is malfunctioning from stress and caffeine withdrawal and that weird protein bar you ate for breakfast that tasted like cardboard and lies. Still six. You count a third time while your heart starts doing something deeply concerning in your chest that feels like it's trying to escape through your ribs. Six Espers. Definitely six. You count their faces to make sure. Six different faces.
Riddle's face is not among them.
Riddle isn't out.
You start pacing, and pacing turns into wearing an actual trench in the floor, and you're staring at the Gate entrance like you can personally drag him through it using only the power of mounting panic and increasingly unhinged thoughts.
The other Guides are swarming their Espers like very concerned bees, doing emergency field Guiding sessions, everyone tangled up in the desperate work of keeping people from destabilizing and exploding like human fireworks, and you're just standing there vibrating with anxiety and the dawning realization that something is very fucking wrong.
The last Esper stumbles out and it's Trey's Esper, and you're on them so fast they doesn't even have time to register that they're back in normal reality and not currently fighting for their life. You grab them by the shoulders hard enough that you're definitely going to leave marks.
"Where's Riddle?" you demand, and your voice comes out higher and tighter than you intended.
They blinks at you slowly, their eyes unfocused like they're still half in the Gate, their face covered in something that's either blood or Gate residue or some kind of fucked-up combination of both that you don't want to think about too hard. "Oh man, Riddle? Yeah no, he uh, he made us all leave."
Your heart does something that feels like it's trying to climb out of your throat and escape through your mouth. "He fucking what."
"Said protocol requires at least one Esper to maintain Gate stability until backup arrives or core destruction is achieved. Quoted the whole regulation at us, like the full text, word for word, with the amendment numbers and everything, while he was literally beheading something that looked like if a filing cabinet gained sentience and chose violence and also had way too many teeth."
They sway dangerously and Trey materializes out of nowhere to catch them, already starting to pull him away toward a quiet corner for emergency Guiding. "He did the whole commander voice thing. Very authoritative. Kinda hot if you're into that, which I personally—"
"Not the time," Trey says, sounding like he's aged even more in the last three hours.
"I'm just saying, the man has presence—"
"I love you, but please stop talking."
You stare at the Gate entrance. You look at all the Guides who are currently occupied with keeping their Espers from having catastrophic energy meltdowns. You look at the equipment rack where they keep Esper gear that's definitely not rated for Guides and comes with warning labels that specifically say "NOT FOR GUIDES" in big red letters.
Your brain, the logical part that occasionally prevents you from making decisions that end with you in the hospital or in front of HR, says this is a terrible idea.
Your brain says Guides are squishy support units who die if you look at them wrong inside a Gate environment. Your brain says you have no business going in there, that you'll probably die, that this violates approximately forty-seven different safety protocols and possibly several laws. Your brain is listing all the reasons this is bad.
Your brain can go fuck itself because Riddle is in there alone and that's unacceptable on every possible level.
"Fuck it, we ball," you mutter to yourself, and you're already moving toward the gear rack with purpose, grabbing a reinforced jacket that's at least three sizes too big for you and makes you look like a child playing dress-up in their dad's clothes.
You grab a helmet that doesn't fit right and keeps sliding down over your eyes. Gloves that are meant for someone with hands the size of dinner plates. An oxygen canister because Gates are famous for having atmospheres that are less "air you can breathe" and more "exotic poisons we haven't even discovered yet."
"Wait, what are you doing?" one of the rookie Guides yelps at you, his voice cracking with panic.
"Something that's either gonna get me a promotion or get me super fired, and honestly I'm gonna find out which one in real time!" you yell back, already jogging toward the Gate entrance because if you slow down you'll think about it and if you think about it you'll stop.
"You can't go in there, you're a Guide! You'll die! You'll die immediately!" someone screams, and they sound genuinely distressed like they're watching you jump off a bridge.
"Sounds like a skill issue!" you yell back, and then you're at the Gate entrance and you don't let yourself think because thinking will just give your brain time to catch up and tackle you, so you step through.
The transition feels like being shoved through a wall made of angry bees.
The air on the other side hits you like a physical slap from a very large hand, thick and wet and wrong in ways you don't have adjectives for.
It tastes like copper and burnt plastic and something else you can't identify and don't want to. The atmosphere is humid in a way that feels personally malicious, like it's humid specifically to make you uncomfortable, and breathing it is like trying to inhale soup through a coffee stirrer.
The theme of this Gate is what you can only describe as "what if a serial killer got really into arts and crafts and had unlimited funding and also several untreated personality disorders and access to a Pinterest board."
The walls are covered in polaroid pictures that you're actively choosing not to look at because you value your ability to sleep tonight and possibly ever again. The floor is sticky with something you're absolutely refusing to identify or even think about too hard. There's screaming coming from somewhere that might be a sound effect or might be the walls themselves or might be the Gate having feelings. The lighting flickers and you'll never admit it to anyone else but yoy flinch.
You spot Riddle in what looks like the world's most nightmarish kitchen where you'd find a cookbook titled "To Serve Man," and he looks absolutely terrible. His jacket looks like he fought a paper shredder and lost.
There's blood on his face, his hands, his clothes, streaked through his hair, and you can't tell how much of it is his and that thought makes your stomach drop. He's swaying on his feet between kills like a boxer in round twelve, and you can see his energy from here, flickering and sputtering like a candle in a hurricane that's about to go out. He's been solo-tanking an SS-ranked Gate for three fucking hours with no support, and it shows in every movement he makes.
You march right up to him and grab him by the ear.
Riddle spins around and his eyes go so wide you're genuinely worried they're going to fall right out of his skull and roll across the floor. He stares at you for a solid five seconds like his brain is trying to process whether you're real or if he's hallucinating from exhaustion or if you're some new type of monster that's shaped like his worst nightmare come to life.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN HERE?!" he screams, and his voice cracks so hard on the last word that it practically shatters.
"WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE I'M DOING?!" you scream back, already dragging him by the ear toward the exit like you're hauling a misbehaving child out of a grocery store. "I'M MAKING TERRIBLE DECISIONS! IT'S MY HOBBY!"
A monster that looks like someone asked the question "what if a chandelier could murder you" drops from the ceiling directly above your head with terrible intent, and Riddle annihilates it with a card without even looking away from you, his eyes still locked on your face in absolute horror and disbelief.
"You can't be in here! Guides aren't designed for Gate environments! Your energy isn't defensive! You don't have combat training! You're going to die! You're going to die and it's going to be my fault and I'm going to have to file an incident report about how you died and—"
"OH SO YOU'RE WORRIED ABOUT THE PAPERWORK?!" you shriek, yanking harder on his ear hard enough that he has to stumble along with you or lose the ear entirely.
"NO, I'M WORRIED ABOUT YOU BEING DEAD, YOU ABSOLUTE—"
"THEN STOP BEING A SELF-SACRIFICING IDIOT AND GET THE FUCK OUT OF THIS NIGHTMARE KITCHEN!"
"I can't! Protocol clearly states that a Gate must maintain a minimum of one Esper presence until backup arrival or successful core destruction occurs, otherwise the destabilization risk increases by forty-seven percent according to the 2018 comprehensive study by Dr. Stupidface and his team and—"
"I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR FUCKING PROTOCOLS! I DON'T CARE ABOUT DR. STUPIDFACE! I DON'T CARE ABOUT THE TWENTY-WHATEVER STUDY! STOP TRYING TO DIE FOR BUREAUCRACY!"
"It's not bureaucracy, it's evidence-based safety regulations that exist specifically because people died when we didn't have them!" Riddle is killing monsters on complete autopilot while arguing with you, destroying things left and right without even looking, and it would be impressive if you weren't currently having a stress-induced breakdown.
"PEOPLE ARE ALSO GONNA DIE IF YOU COLLAPSE FROM BEING A STUBBORN MORON WITH A DEATH WISH!"
"That's not how statistics work!"
"I'M GOING TO MAKE YOU A STATISTIC IF YOU DON'T SHUT UP AND MOVE YOUR LEGS!"
"You can't threaten me into abandoning my post!"
"WATCH ME!"
You drag him through the Gate entrance using pure adrenaline and spite as fuel, and the second you're back in normal reality you have to immediately slam the oxygen canister to your face and take the most desperate, grateful breath of your entire life.
The air tastes like absolute heaven. Clean and wonderful. Doesn't taste like a crime scene had a baby with a chemical spill.
You're gulping air like you've been drowning for the last ten minutes, which you kind of have been.
The second you have enough oxygen in your system to not immediately pass out, you grab Riddle's hand and start Guiding him right there in the middle of the staging area.
You don't bother finding privacy or a chair or any of the things you're supposed to do according to proper procedure. He needs stabilization right fucking now and you're going to give it to him even if you have to do it in front of the entire Bureau and God himself and also his mom.
Your legs have completely given up on the concept of supporting your body weight and you have to lean your entire existence against Riddle to stay even remotely straight. He catches you automatically, his arms coming up to hold you steady, and you're basically using him as a structural support beam while you work on fixing his disaster of an energy system.
His energy pathways are comprehensively fucked. They're choppy and depleted and there are spots where his energy is literally coming apart at the seams from overuse, fraying like a rope that's been supporting too much weight for too long.
You start smoothing everything out with as much focus as you can muster, and the whole time you're muttering into his shoulder because you're too exhausted to have a filter anymore and your brain-to-mouth pipeline has completely shut down.
"I'm stealing all your candy," you say while untangling a knot that feels like it's been there for six months. "Every single piece. The fancy chocolate you hide in your desk drawer like I don't know it's there. The cookies in the tin with the flowers on it. That weird expensive imported shit you keep locked up like it's the nuclear codes. I'm taking everything brcause it's your fault for making me worry about you."
Riddle tries to start a lecture and you can feel him taking a breath to launch into it. "You violated approximately fifty separate safety regulations by entering that Gate without authorization. You could have been killed. The liability issues alone—"
You pull back just enough to glare at him with as much intensity as you can manage while being held up entirely by his arms, and you must look absolutely feral because he actually stops talking mid-sentence with his mouth still open.
"Stop being stupid and I'll stop walking into Gates," you say, and your voice comes out flat and deadly serious in a way that surprises even you. "That's the deal. You stop trying to martyr yourself for the sake of protocols that are meant to be guidelines and not fucking suicide pacts, and I'll stop doing dumb shit to drag you out. Deal?"
Riddle opens his mouth and closes it. Opens it again like a fish out of water. He looks like he's trying to find a loophole in your logic, searching for some kind of technicality he can exploit, and coming up completely empty-handed.
"That's not how safety regulations are intended to function in a professional environment," he says, but his voice is weak and you can tell his heart isn't in it.
"I don't care. Deal?"
He stares at you for a long moment while something shifts in his expression, something that looks almost like surrender. "...Deal."
"Fantastic," you say, and you finish smoothing out his energy until you're confident he won't spontaneously combust or have his pathways collapse on him in the next few hours. You pat his chest weakly with the hand that isn't actively holding onto him for dear life. "Now you have to give me a piggyback ride to your car and drive me back to the Bureau because my legs have stopped working. This is your penance for making me commit approximately forty-seven felonies."
"I'm not giving you a—" Riddle is sputtering again, cycling through about seven different emotions in the span of three seconds, but you're already trying to climb onto his back like a very determined and uncoordinated koala bear.
Riddle protests and cites workplace conduct policies and makes sputtering sounds about professional boundaries and appropriate behavior, but he still crouches down enough for you to climb on his back properly. He stands up with a sound that might be a sigh or might be his soul leaving his body in real time, adjusting his grip on your legs to make sure you don't fall off.
"This is the single most humiliating thing that's ever happened to me in my entire career," he mutters as he starts walking toward the parking lot, and you can feel how tense his shoulders are.
"This is what you get for being a hero without consulting me first," you say into his shoulder, letting your eyes close because you're so tired you might actually pass out. "I could've been your emotional support. Your cheerleader. Your guy in the chair. Instead I had to be your emergency extraction team, which is a way worse role and doesn't even come with a cool jacket."
"You're completely insane. You're genuinely unhinged. You need professional help."
"Yeah, but you're stuck with me now. I'm like a curse but prettier."
Riddle doesn't respond to that, just keeps walking while carrying you, and you're pretty sure you can feel him doing that thing where he's trying not to smile and failing miserably at it.
You're absolutely stealing every single piece of candy he owns. Every chocolate. Every cookie. That fancy imported shit. All of it. He's earned it.
You did, in fact, end up Gate poisoned.
In your defense, you didn't notice at the time. In your defense, you were running on approximately four percent battery life, pure adrenaline, and the specific flavor of stupid bravery that only activates when someone you've known for forty-eight hours is doing something catastrophically self-sacrificing inside a murder dimension. In your defense, you had bigger things to worry about, like staying upright and remembering to breathe.
None of this is actually a defense. You're Gate poisoned. You did this to yourself.
It announces itself about fifteen minutes into the car ride back to the Bureau, while Riddle is driving with the rigid focus of someone taking their third driving test after failing the first two.
One second you're sitting in the passenger seat feeling vaguely terrible, and the next second your stomach decides it's going to attempt a full escape from your body via your mouth.
"Pull over," you say.
Riddle glances at you. "Why?"
"Pull over right now or I'm going to redecorate your upholstery and you're going to be furious about it."
He pulls over so fast the tires make a sound like a small scream. You barely get the door open in time, and then you're throwing up on the side of the road, which is already bad enough, except you look down and the situation is demonstrably worse than normal vomiting because it's glowing. Faintly. Greenish. Like something that should not be happening to a human person.
Riddle doesn't say anything. You can feel him sitting in the driver's seat, completely silent, probably staring at the glowing situation with an expression you'd rather not see.
You straighten up. "Okay. I'm good. Let's go."
"Are you sure you're—"
"I'm great. Fantastic. Never better. Let's go."
You make it exactly eleven more minutes before you have to ask him to pull over again. This time the glowing situation is more pronounced and Riddle gets out of the car while you're still suffering, walks around to your side with the kind of calm that suggests he's so angry he's looped back around to eerily quiet, and just stands there next to the open door with his arms crossed, waiting for you to finish.
"I'm fine," you say preemptively, wiping your mouth.
"You're glowing," Riddle says.
"I've always had a radiant personality."
"That's Gate poisoning."
"Could be vitamin deficiency."
"It could absolutely not be vitamin deficiency." He reaches into the car and physically extracts you from the seat like you're a particularly stubborn splinter. "We're going to Medical."
"Riddle, genuinely, I don't need—"
"You walked into an SS-ranked Gate as a Guide and breathed unfiltered Gate atmosphere for eight minutes and your vomit is currently bioluminescent," Riddle says, and his voice has this quality like a rubber band stretched so tight it's one more millimeter from snapping. "You're going to Medical if I have to carry you there."
"You just barely piggybacked me to your car an hour ago, you don't have the upper body credibility to make that threat."
"I carried you just fine," he mutters, and he sounds offended, which is the funniest thing that's happened all day.
You're going to tease him about that later. You add it to the mental list.
The Bureau's medical center has this specific smell, like sorrow, and the doctor on duty is a woman who you've interacted with enough times that she has a specific expression reserved just for you. It's the expression of someone who has made peace with the fact that you're going to keep showing up in their medical center, probably forever, doing progressively more elaborate things to yourself.
She takes one look at you and Riddle and then takes one look at the faint green glow you're emitting and just closes her eyes for a moment. Like she's loading patience.
"What did they do this time," she says, and it's not a question.
She opens her eyes and looks at you with an expression that's doing a lot of heavy lifting between "professional medical concern" and "genuine personal disappointment." "Are you trying to die? Is this a pattern? Do I need to refer you to someone?"
"I think I'm fine," you say.
She examines you with brisk efficiency because she's had to deal with you before and has therefore stopped giving you the benefit of the doubt on anything. She shines things in your eyes, takes your vitals, makes sounds like a person reading a very bad restaurant review. Riddle stands beside her and explains what happened, and you watch his face while he talks.
His voice is controlled. His posture is controlled. His face is controlled. His hands are clenched at his sides so hard his knuckles have gone white, which is the only thing that's not controlled, and you watch him doing it while he listens to the doctor explain the full scope of what you've done to yourself.
The look on his face when she gets to the part about Gate toxicity complications is something you're going to think about for a long time.
"Well," the doctor says, snapping off her gloves and giving you the medical equivalent of a disappointed shrug, "the good news is you're not going to die. The bad news is we need to keep you here for a full week on detox protocol and monitoring, because Gate contamination at this exposure level has a small but genuinely unpleasant chance of causing systemic changes if we don't flush it properly."
"Systemic changes," you repeat. "Like, could I get wings? Because I personally wouldn't mind wings. Wings would be incredibly practical. I could fly to work. Save on gas. Never be late again."
"You're not going to get wings," the doctor says.
"You sound very certain about that."
"I am very certain about that."
"Okay but what if—"
"You're not getting wings," Riddle says sharply, and his voice comes out weird, like he's going for annoyed but landing somewhere else entirely.
"You don't know that," you say.
"I know that. Stop trying to find an upside to being Gate poisoned and let the doctor finish talking."
The doctor finishes talking. You're hooked up to a detox setup that involves multiple bags of fluid in colors that you're pretty sure fluids aren't supposed to be in nature, and the whole thing hits you about ten minutes later like a truck that was specifically designed to make you drowsy.
Your limbs go heavy. Your thoughts go soft around the edges. The world gets warm and fuzzy in a way that would be pleasant if you weren't aware that it's because your body is fighting off Gate contamination.
Riddle sits down in the chair next to your bed.
You wait for him to say something. He doesn't. He just sits there with his arms crossed and his jaw set, looking at a fixed point somewhere around the middle distance like he's trying to solve an equation he can't figure out.
"You can leave," you offer, your voice already getting drowsy. "I'm fine. I'm just gonna sleep."
"I'm aware," Riddle says.
"That wasn't an invitation to stay."
"I'm aware," he says again, and he doesn't move even slightly.
You look at him for a moment. He looks at the wall. The detox drugs are wrapping around your brain like a weighted blanket made of exhaustion and mild sedatives, and you're too far gone to push it, too tired to needle him about the look on his face or the way his hands were clenched or the fact that he's sitting in a medical center chair that looks deeply uncomfortable and shows no signs of leaving.
You fall asleep.
When you wake up, the chair is empty.
Visiting hours are over. You stare at the ceiling for a while and try to identify the feeling in your chest, and you can't quite get there, so you eat some of the Jello a nurse brought and go back to sleep.
The next day, Riddle comes back.
You wake up from a nap to find him sitting in the chair next to your bed with a small white box in his hands. He places it on the table beside you and then sits back with his arms crossed, resuming his apparent mission of staring at the middle distance and refusing to speak.
You open the box and find a strawberry tart inside that is so professionally made it looks like it belongs in a pastry magazine. It's definitely from somewhere that clearly charges too much money for small beautiful things, and it's perfect.
"You brought me a tart," you say, and your voice comes out soft from sleep.
Riddle doesn't respond.
"Are you not talking to me?"
Nothing.
"Is this a punishment? You're giving me the silent treatment?"
He adjusts the position of his crossed arms slightly, which you're interpreting as a yes.
"Okay," you say, and you eat the tart, which is genuinely one of the best things you've eaten in your entire life and you're furious about it. "This is incredible by the way. This is a ten out of ten tart. This tart has no business being this good."
Riddle's mouth does something very small that isn't quite a smile and disappears before it can properly form.
This is how the whole week goes.
Every single day, Riddle shows up during visiting hours carrying something from what is clearly a very good and very expensive bakery. Tarts. Mini pies. Little cookies that look like they were assembled by someone who went to school specifically to make tiny perfect cookies. Pastries that have multiple components and probably took three hours to make. He puts whatever he's brought on the table, sits in the chair, doesn't say a single word, and stays until visiting hours are over.
It's absolutely insane. It's genuinely one of the strangest things anyone has ever done in your vicinity. It's also, if you're being completely honest with yourself, making you feel a specific way that you're not going to examine too closely while you're still being drip-fed detox fluids while occasionally glowing.
On the last day, you get visitors.
Trey shows up first with his Esper in tow, and then a few of your other Guide friends filter in, and suddenly your medical room has too many people in it and at least one person is commenting on the absolute spread of baked goods on your bedside table.
"This is insane," Trey's Esper says, picking up a small pie and examining it like evidence. "Someone really went to town on you. Who brought all of this?"
"Riddle," you say, and Riddle, who is in his chair doing his daily impression of a very well-dressed statue, goes very still.
They slowly turn to look at Riddle. Riddle looks back at them with an expression that very clearly says don't.
Trey's Esper has never once in his life responded to don't.
"Every day?" they ask, their eyes lighting up like a pyromaniac who's just found an unattended fireworks display and a lighter.
"Every single day," you confirm, and you watch Riddle's jaw set.
"Riddle," Trey says, in the tone of someone about to perform a public service, "isn't it true that you've also been refusing Gate deployments all week? Because I heard from a very reliable source who works in HR that you've been citing personal commitments every single time they tried to send you out, and that they're starting to think you have a second family somewhere."
The room goes quiet.
You turn to look at Riddle.
Riddle is staring at Trey with an expression of pure, undiluted betrayal, like Trey has just set fire to something that was very important to him.
"Shut your mouth," Riddle says, very quietly.
"He's been here every day," Trey's Esper continues, absolutely not shutting their mouth, clearly delighted by the chaos they're generating, "sitting in that chair, bringing baked goods, turning down deployment after deployment, basically standing vigil like—"
"I said shut your mouth," Riddle says, standing up from his chair so fast it nearly tips over.
"—like a very uptight guardian angel who expresses love through pastry—"
"I'M LEAVING," Riddle announces, and he's already heading for the door with the energy of someone trying to outrun a natural disaster.
"YOU HAVE TO DRIVE ME HOME," you call after him, because you're getting discharged today and he's your ride and also because the look on his face is the single funniest thing you've ever seen. "I'M BEING DISCHARGED TODAY, RIDDLE. RIDDLE. YOU'RE MY RIDE."
He stops in the doorway. His back is to you. His shoulders are somewhere around his ears.
"I'll wait by the car," he says stiffly, and he's gone before anyone can say anything else.
The room is silent for a second and then Trey's Esper absolutely loses it, doubled over laughing, and a couple of the others follow.
Trey is looking at you with the fond exhaustion of a man who's seen too much. "Take it easy on him," he says, which means he absolutely knows you're not going to.
"I will be perfectly kind and reasonable," you say, which is a lie so transparent that Trey doesn't even bother responding to it, just shakes his head and starts helping you gather your things.
The discharge process takes forever because there are forms about Gate exposure and forms about liability and forms that seem to exist purely to make you sign your name a lot, and by the time you actually get out to the parking lot you half expect Riddle to have given up and gone home.
He's leaning against his car with his arms crossed and his face carefully neutral, like he's been standing there composing himself for the last forty-five minutes and has mostly succeeded.
You start walking toward him and he watches you, and you notice almost immediately that his hand does this thing. You're still a little wobbly on your feet, the last dregs of the detox making your legs feel like they're made of that weird foam that's too soft to be useful, and Riddle's hand comes up slightly like he's going to reach out and steady you.
Then he stops himself. His hand just hovers there in the air behind your back, several inches away from actually touching you, committed to neither helping nor not helping, like a man having a full philosophical crisis about whether physical contact is something he's allowed to offer.
You watch this happen and feel something in your chest do a complicated maneuver.
You reach back and take his hand and lace your fingers through his.
The noise Riddle makes is very small and very quickly suppressed, but you heard it. His whole face goes red from the collarbones up like someone slowly filling a thermometer and he looks straight ahead and says absolutely nothing.
But he doesn't pull away.
He walks you to the passenger side, his hand in yours, warm and a little tense and definitely not letting go, and he only releases your hand when you're at the car door and need both hands to get in. He walks back around to the driver's side and gets in while trying very hard to act normal when he's currently not normal even a little bit.
The drive to your apartment is quiet in a way that feels different from the silence in the medical room this week. That silence was loaded with things he wasn't saying. This silence is softer and warmee. The radio is on low and you watch the city go past through the window and occasionally sneak looks at him when you think he's focused on the road.
He catches you looking, twice. Both times he just looks back at the road. Both times his ears go pink.
He parks in front of your building and then—and this is new, this is a Riddle development—gets out and walks you to your door like you're going to dissolve into the hallway carpet if left alone for thirty consecutive seconds. Which is honestly not that unlikely given your week.
You reach your door and turn around to face him, and he's standing there with his hands back in his pockets, looking at a point slightly above your head like it's got something more interesting on it than your face.
"Riddle," you say.
"You should rest," he says, still looking at the point above your head. "Properly. Not just because you're bored. And eat something that isn't pastry."
"Look at me," you say.
He looks at you, which he clearly immediately regrets because you're grinning at him in a way that probably looks unhinged.
"Thank you," you say. "For all the tarts. And the pies. And every single baked good. And for sitting in that extremely uncomfortable chair every single day. And for the hand holding. And for turning down deployments to come stand vigil over my glowing ass."
"I wasn't standing vigil," Riddle says, and the words have no conviction behind them whatsoever.
"Sure," you say generously.
"Take care of yourself," he says, and it comes out stiff and formal, like he's trying to cover something softer underneath, and it's the first full sentence he's said to you since the Gate incident and you're going to absolutely lose your mind about it privately later.
You lean forward and kiss his cheek.
His eyes go wide, and his mouth does something that isn't quite any expression you've seen before, and the red that floods his face is so fast and so complete that it's almost impressive, like someone hit a button.
He stands there, frozen, for a full four seconds.
"Thanks for everything," you say brightly. "You're a good Esper. Very dedicated. Very attentive. Would recommend."
"I—you—" Riddle opens and closes his mouth several times, cycling through partial sentences that don't go anywhere. He turns on his heel and walks away so fast it's almost a jog, and you watch him go with the grin of someone who's just won a competition they invented.
He makes it about ten feet down the hall before he turns back and says, very crisply, "Don't be late tomorrow. 9:00 a.m."
"Is that a threat or a date?" you call after him.
"It's a SCHEDULE!" he yells, his voice cracking on the last word, and then he's gone around the corner so fast you swear you can see cartoon speed lines.
You stand at your door for a moment, grinning at the empty hallway.
Then you go inside, collapse onto your couch, and stare at the ceiling thinking about warm hands and a voice saying take care like it meant something more than the words.
"I'm so normal about this," you say out loud to no one.
You are not normal about this even a little bit.
You come back to work the next day at 9:46 AM, which is only forty-six minutes late, which is frankly a miracle given that you spent the better part of last week being slowly detoxed from Gate poisoning and your body is still operating at about sixty-three percent capacity.
You're counting it as a win. You're counting it as a triumph, actually. You're counting it as evidence of your incredible dedication to this job and to the people in it.
The first Guide you pass in the hallway takes one look at you, puts both hands on your shoulders, and says, "I respect you so much and I need you to never do that again."
"Good morning to you too," you say.
"My Esper," they continue, their eyes haunted, "has started asking me if I would walk into a Gate for him. Unprompted. While we were eating breakfast. He looked me dead in the eyes over his cereal and asked if I loved him enough to get Gate poisoned." They tighten their grip on your shoulders. "I need you to understand what you've done."
"I think that's actually really sweet," you say.
"It's not sweet, it's scary," they say, and lets you go and walks away looking like someone who hasn't slept properly since last week.
You continue down the hallway and the pattern repeats itself with minor variations. Another Guide stops you to say he respects your commitment to your Esper but he's personally not interested in Gate poisoning himself and could you please stop setting precedents.
A third one pulls you aside to say his Esper cried about the story, which he might have found touching except they cried while they were in the middle of a Guiding session and he lost focus and it set them both back twenty minutes.
A fourth one doesn't say anything at all, just gives you a very long look that contains a full paragraph of feelings, and keeps walking.
By the time you reach the briefing room at approximately 10:00 AM, you've been stopped many times, and you're both touched and deeply aware that you've caused a ripple effect in the Guide community that's going to take a while to settle.
You walk in and immediately locate Riddle, who is sitting at the table looking like he's been waiting and calculating exactly how late you are with the precision of someone who's been doing angry mental arithmetic since 9:01. You slide into the seat next to him liek you're right on time.
He turns to you immediately. "You're late," he says, in a whisper that is so aggressive it's basically just talking.
"I was sick recently," you say pleasantly. "Very ill, actually. Quite the ordeal. My whole body hurt. My legs especially. Really rough week."
"You were discharged yesterday with a clean bill of health—"
"Sore, Riddle. I was so sore. You know how I got sick, right? Do you remember how that happened? It was a whole thing. I saved someone's life and then I got Gate poisoned. Very traumatic. My legs are still recovering. It's a miracle I'm here at all, honestly, if you think about—"
He makes a frustrated grunt that comes from somewhere deep in his chest, the sound of a man swallowing all the things he wants to say, and it very clearly promises that he's filing all of this away to deploy at a more strategically convenient moment. But he also closes his mouth and turns back toward the front of the room.
You pat his hand. He stares at your hand on his. You remove your hand. He looks back at the front of the room. His ears are pink.
The briefing officer clicks on the projector, and you settle in expecting the usual Gate updates and deployment logistics.
What comes up on the screen instead makes you sit up very straight.
The PowerPoint presentation is titled, in bold letters that suggest someone made this with genuine distress: PROFESSIONAL BOUNDARIES AND YOU: A REMINDER FOR THE MODERN ESPER-GUIDE PAIRING.
There's clip art. It's a sad clip art man standing very far away from another sad clip art man with a large red X over an arrow between them. Someone put genuine effort into this clip art choice and you respect the commitment.
"As many of you are aware," the briefing officer starts, with the tone of someone who did not get paid enough for this, "this branch has seen an unprecedented rate of Esper-Guide permanent bonding over the past several months."
She clicks to the next slide. It's a bar graph. The bar for this branch is so dramatically taller than every other branch that it looks like a mistake, like someone misread the scale.
"The rate of permanent bonds formed at this branch," she continues, "is currently sitting at four hundred percent above the national average, which is," she pauses, "statistically speaking, not normal."
Someone in the back coughs.
"The issue," she clicks to the next slide, which is a diagram of two Esper-Guide pairs with large arrows indicating that they can no longer be deployed separately, "is that permanently bonded pairs cannot be assigned to different areas in times of crisis. They experience significant distress when separated for extended operational periods, which creates deployment complications that are, to be frank, becoming a logistical nightmare."
You press your lips together very hard.
The next slide says ROMANCE: IS IT WORTH IT? in large letters, under which someone has put a stock photo of a person looking thoughtfully into the distance and another stock photo of a very organized filing cabinet, presented as apparently equivalent options.
Riddle's posture is very correct beside you. He's watching the presentation with his hands folded on the table.
"Romance," the briefing officer says, and she says it like she's reading a word from a foreign language textbook, "while a natural human experience, is not necessary for a fulfilling professional life. Many individuals find deep satisfaction in their careers without pursuing romantic entanglements with their direct professional partners."
The next slide is a bullet point list titled FULFILLING ALTERNATIVES TO ROMANTIC BONDING and the first bullet point is A PRODUCTIVE HOBBY.
"Do you have a productive hobby?" you whisper to Riddle.
"Stop talking," Riddle whispers back.
"I'm just asking. The slide says it's fulfilling."
"I will report you to HR."
"HR is currently busy making this presentation. You'll have to wait."
"I will wait," he hisses.
The second bullet point is PROFESSIONAL ACHIEVEMENT.
"You've got that one covered," you whisper to Riddle. "You're very professionally achieved. Gold star. You don't need romance. You've got protocol."
"I'm going to move seats," Riddle whispers, and his jaw is doing something very tight.
"You won't though," you whisper back, and he doesn't.
The briefing officer clicks to the next slide, which is titled A NOTE ON VIGILS and contains a short paragraph about how remaining on vigil for a partner outside your assigned duties is, while emotionally understandable, operationally disruptive and should be avoided in future situations.
You feel Riddle go completely still next to you.
You don't look at him. You stare at the slide for a long moment. Then you whisper, "She's talking about you specifically."
"She's talking generally," Riddle says through his teeth.
"She put it in the presentation specifically."
"It's a general policy update."
"Someone had to make a slide about vigils because of you specifically."
"I will move seats," he repeats, with slightly more desperation than before.
"You won't," you repeat, and you're right, because he's still sitting right next to you, rigid as a fence post and pink from the ears down.
The next slide is titled YOU ARE ENOUGH: A SELF-SUFFICIENCY REMINDER and contains an extremely unhinged graphic of a person hugging themselves that looks like it was sourced from a 2009 motivational website.
"This," you whisper to Riddle, gesturing at the graphic, "is what we're supposed to do instead of bonding. According to HR."
Riddle makes a sound that is, despite everything, despite all his training and his professional bearing and his deeply held commitment to appropriate conduct in workplace settings, a snort.
It's a tiny snort, barely audible, immediately suppressed, and he looks absolutely mortified the moment it escapes him. His hand comes up to cover his mouth like he can physically put it back. He stares very hard at the presentation. His ears are red.
You feel a grin spread across your face so wide it almost hurts. You look back at the presentation and say absolutely nothing, because sometimes the most powerful move is to let a man sit with the horror of having snorted in a professional setting because of you.
The briefing officer reaches the final slide, which just says PLEASE MAKE BETTER CHOICES and then ends. There's a silence in the room where about thirty Guides and Espers sit with that for a moment.
"Any questions?" the briefing officer asks, with the energy of someone who's praying there aren't.
You raise your hand.
"No," the briefing officer says, and she hasn't even looked at you yet, she just already knows.
You put your hand down.
"Good," she says. "Dismissed.”
Realizations of this magnitude should happen during thunderstorms or at least during something more dramatic than an afternoon while you're eating a mediocre sandwich at your desk and doing absolutely nothing of note.
But there it is. Sudden and clear and slightly horrifying.
You're attached.
Not just attached. Genuinely, specifically, alarmingly in love with one Riddle Rosehearts, A-rank Esper, walking rulebook, owner of an impressive collection of expensive pastries that he pretends are for himself.
You've become attached to the guy who tried to take your head off with a playing card the first time you met him and who you still think about as one of the best first impressions anyone has ever made on you.
You do a mental audit, because this feels like the kind of thing that deserves evidence.
You seek him out in the mornings. Not because you have to or because there's a Guiding session scheduled, but just because you walk past the cafeteria and think oh, Riddle's probably getting his coffee right now, and then you go get coffee you didn't want just to stand next to him and make comments about whatever he's reading until he puts it down and talks to you instead. You've been doing this for weeks. You didn't notice you were doing it until right now.
During breaks, you find reasons to go wherever he is. Sometimes it's real reasons. Sometimes the reason is that you invented a reason. Once the reason was that you wanted to tell him about a dream you had about a Gate shaped like an IKEA, which was not a reason at all, and he listened to the whole thing anyway while pretending to be annoyed, and the IKEA Gate dream went on for seven minutes.
After rough Gates, you almost always end up at dinner together that's never planned. It always just happens because neither of you is ready to stop talking yet, even though technically the talking mostly looks like you saying unhinged things and Riddle responding to them with increasing reluctance to pretend he doesn't find you funny.
So. That's where you are. You're attached. You've gone and gotten attached to the one Esper in this entire facility who has filed more HR complaints than anyone else in Bureau history.
The problem, you think, finishing your mediocre sandwich and staring at the wall, is you.
You're not delusional about yourself. You're aware of what you are. Unhinged raccoon energy is not a vibe that translates universally, and it's already sent approximately six Espers fleeing in the other direction during the year you've been at this Bureau. You walk into Gates you have no business walking into. You ruffle people's hair without warning. Your HR file is probably thicker than some people's novels. You once told an SSS-ranked Esper that his aura looked like it was going through a breakup, and you stand by it, but still.
The point is that Riddle likes rules. Riddle likes order and schedules and things that make sense and can be documented properly. Riddle's entire personality is a very organized filing cabinet of correct behavior, and you are a raccoon who got into the filing cabinet and rearranged everything into a system that only makes sense to you.
If you want to bag this Esper—and you have apparently decided that you do, the sandwich has made this very clear to you—you're going to have to be Normal.
You haven't been Normal since you were a teenager in high school trying very hard to fit in and failing in ways that were character-building in retrospect but deeply unpleasant at the time.
You put on Normal like an uncomfortable coat.
The next morning, you arrive on time. Actual on time. Not 9:46, not 9:31, not the one legendary occasion last month where you arrived at 10:23 and told Riddle you'd been there since nine and simply hadn't been visible.
You arrive at 8:58 and you walk into the briefing room and you find Riddle and you smile at him, a real smile that you've specifically calibrated to be pleasant and not unhinged.
Riddle looks at you like you've grown a second head.
"Good morning," you say, and your voice comes out so measured and normal that it almost sounds like someone else.
"Good morning?" Riddle asks slowly, like he's trying to identify whether the thing in front of him is actually what it appears to be or if it's a trap.
You sit down next to him and look at the front of the room and wait for the briefing to start, and you don't say anything else, and you don't lean on him, and you don't ruffle his hair, and you don't tell him that his energy feels like a very intense symphony today which is a compliment you'd preparedlast week and are now setting aside.
Riddle keeps glancing at you throughout the briefing.
You look at the front of the room and take notes.
At lunch, you sit across from him in the cafeteria and eat your food and make small, normal conversation about normal things, like the Gate reports from this morning and whether the cafeteria's soup has gotten worse recently.
You don't lean across the table. You don't steal food off his plate. You don't tell him that watching him eat a sandwich with that level of structural precision is honestly one of the most fascinating things you've ever seen in your life, which is something you were going to say last week before you started being Normal.
Riddle eats his sandwich with increasing discomfort, glancing at you between bites.
"Are you alright?" he asks.
"I'm great," you say, and you smile pleasantly, and Riddle looks at you for a long moment like you're a math problem he can't solve, and then goes back to his sandwich.
By the end of the day, you're exhausted. Being Normal is genuinely the most tiring thing you've ever done, including the Gate poisoning incident, which at least had the upside of being interesting. You're packing up your office in the early evening, everyone else clearing out around you, and you're thinking about going home and being feral in private where no one can see you, when there's a knock on your office door.
"Come in," you call.
The door opens and it's Riddle.
You blink at him. "Hey. Did we have something scheduled?"
"No," he says, stepping inside with his hands behind his back, and he's got this look on his face like he's come with a specific purpose and he's going to see it through regardless of how it goes. He closes the door behind him. "Are you alright?"
"I'm fine," you say, turning back to your bag and continuing to pack.
"You've been acting strangely today."
"I've been acting normally today."
"That's what's strange," Riddle says, and there's something in his voice that makes you pause. "You didn't say anything this morning. You sat through the entire briefing without making a single comment. At lunch you talked about soup."
"Soup is a valid topic of conversation."
"You once told me during lunch that you thought the Gates might be the universe's way of coping with anxiety and then argued the point for twenty-five minutes when I disagreed," Riddle says. "Today you talked about soup. Something is wrong."
You open your mouth to say something Normal and dismiss it, and then you make the mistake of looking back at him.
He's watching you with this expression, careful and intent, and his eyebrows are doing something worried, and you feel something in your chest go sideways.
"I'm okay," you say, and you mean it to come out light and easy but it comes out softer than that.
Riddle looks at you for another moment, and then he crosses the room, and before you've fully processed that he's moving, he brings both hands down on your desk and cages you in, leaning forward with an expression that's so genuinely concerned it's doing things to your ability to think clearly.
"Are you sick again?" he asks, and the question comes out urgent in a way he probably didn't intend. "Because if you're sick again and you didn't tell anyone I swear I will—"
"I'm not sick," you say.
"Then what happened to you?" He's close enough that you can see the specific shade of his eyes, close enough that when he continues talking it's almost sharp with something that might be frustration but doesn't smell like it. "Did something happen? Did you get another Esper to go harass? Did someone actually manage to—"
And that's when it clicks.
It lands on you with the weight and precision of a piano falling from a great height, right there in your own office with your bag half-packed and the evening light coming through the window at a slant.
This Esper. This specific, infuriating, rule-citing, tart-bringing Esper who you thought was interesting and then realized was fascinating and then somehow, at some point, started specifically wanting to impress—
He likes you.
He came to your office at the end of the day because something was wrong with you and he noticed and it bothered him enough to do something about it. He's been glancing at you all day because the absence of your chaos registered like a missing tooth. He came here and put his hands on your desk and leaned in close and asked if you were sick again in a voice that had panic under it.
Riddle Rosehearts, who has filed more HR complaints than anyone in Bureau history, who tried to take your head off on day one, who gave you the silent treatment for a week and showed up with pastries every single day—
He came to find you.
You lean in.
The remaining distance between you goes from several inches to almost nothing, and Riddle's eyes go a little wide but he doesn't move, doesn't pull back, just stays exactly where he is with his hands on your desk.
"What if I did get another Esper to harass?" you say, and your voice comes out low and easy and absolutely nothing like Normal.
Riddle opens his mouth and what comes out is, "Bureau regulations section twelve, subsection four clearly states that Guides are expected to maintain their assigned partnerships and are not permitted to provide Guiding services to—"
He's saying it almost against your lips. The rulebook, recited from memory, in a voice that's lost about seventy percent of its structural integrity. His hands are still on the desk but they've gone tense in a way that has nothing to do with anger.
You close the remaining distance and kiss him.
For approximately half a second, nothing happens, and then Riddle kisses you back with an enthusiasm that is frankly very surprising from someone who just finished citing subsection four at you, his hands scrambling off the desk to grab onto you instead, pulling you in like you're something he's been trying not to reach for for a while now.
You laugh against his mouth, and you feel him make a sound that's not quite a laugh and not quite anything else, and you think about the bar graph from HR's presentation, the one where this branch's bonded pairs were so far above average the bar looked like a mistake.
You think about how you're about to become another notch on that graph.
Riddle pulls back just far enough to look at you, and his face is red and his hair is slightly less perfect than it was five minutes ago and his expression is doing something complicated that keeps threatening to become a smile.
"This is going to be a problem," he says.
"Massive problem," you agree, still grinning.
"HR is going to—"
"Update the graph, yeah."
He looks at you for another second, and then he does something you've been cataloging and storing and thinking about since approximately the first week you met him. He smiles. A real one, small and a little reluctant and completely genuine, and it lands on his face like it belongs there.
"You're the worst," he says.
"Yeah," you say. "But I'm you're mine now."
The HR department of this Bureau occupies a corner that always smells like printer toner and the specific brand of institutional despair that comes from spending your career managing people who regularly fight monsters for a living and have the emotional regulation to match.
The motivational posters are still there. "Synergy." "Excellence Through Collaboration." The little stress brain that says "Keep Calm and Synergize" which you're pretty sure your HR rep has squeezed so many times it's developed PTSD.
You walk in at 9:00 AM, which is early for you, because some occasions demand punctuality and this is absolutely one of them.
Riddle walks in beside you, his posture immaculate, his jacket perfectly pressed, his face doing the thing where it's trying very hard to be neutral and only partially succeeding because the tips of his ears are red and have been red since the day you bonded and you're not sure they've fully recovered.
You have the look of absolute victory. You're not trying to hide it. You've never been less interested in hiding anything in your entire life.
The HR rep looks up from her computer when you walk in, and you watch the exact moment she takes in the two of you together, side by side, you with your shit-eating grin and Riddle with his red ears, and you watch her face do the full journey. Recognition. Comprehension. Denial. Grief.
She closes her eyes.
"Don't," she says, and her voice has the quality of someone who's been through a war. "Whatever you're about to say, don't say it. I'm asking you, as a person, as a human being who has done nothing to deserve this, please don't say it."
You take a breath.
Her eye twitches preemptively.
"We're permanently bonded," you announce, with the full radiant energy of someone setting off fireworks indoors, "and cannot be separated for operational deployment under Bureau regulation, which I'm told is very important and should be respected."
You notice Riddle go slightly redder beside you at the sound of regulations being used by you, which is a bonus you hadn't fully anticipated and which makes this moment even better than you planned.
The HR rep makes a sound that falls in the category of sounds that humans make when they've exceeded their processing capacity and their brain is buffering, like a computer fan spinning very fast before the whole thing shuts down.
She picks up the stress brain from her desk and squeezes it. She squeezes it for a long time. She squeezes it with the focused intention of someone who is using it as a proxy for squeezing the universe.
"You," she says finally, opening her eyes and pointing at you, "have been the subject of more incident reports, HR complaints, liability waivers, and what I can only describe as interpretive medical documentation than anyone else in this Bureau's history."
"Thank you," you say.
"That wasn't a compliment."
She turns to Riddle. "And you," she says, and her voice shifts into a different register, the register of someone who has watched a slow-motion catastrophe develop over several months and is now watching it reach its inevitable conclusion, "have filed more formal complaints about Guide conduct than anyone in Bureau history. You filed three complaints about your previous Guide for, and I'm reading from the document here, 'insufficient commitment to regulatory frameworks and a troubling disregard for section nine subsection two of the Gate Operations Manual.'"
"That's accurate," Riddle says, with complete dignity.
"And now," she says, setting the document down and looking at the two of you with an expression that contains seven different emotions and none of them are happy, "you're telling me that you've permanently bonded with the Guide who walked into an SS-ranked Gate unequipped and unprotected and came out glowing."
"They also," Riddle says, and then he stops, and you look at him, "saved my life. So."
There's a pause.
"So," the HR rep repeats.
"So," Riddle confirms, with the air of someone who's prepared to defend this position in writing if necessary.
The HR rep looks at the two of you for a long moment. Then she opens her desk drawer, takes out what appears to be a much larger stress ball than the brain one, shaped like a sun with a little smiley face on it, and begins squeezing that one instead.
"I have to update the graph," she says, mostly to herself.
"I know," you say sympathetically.
"The PowerPoint I made specifically to prevent this from happening," she continues, "the one with the clip art and the bullet points about productive hobbies—"
"The self-hugging graphic was a really nice touch," you offer.
"—apparently did nothing," she finishes, as though you hadn't spoken.
"In fairness," you say, "the filing cabinet was not a compelling alternative to him specifically. Have you seen him? He brought me tarts every day for a week. The filing cabinet wasn't going to do that."
Riddle makes a sound beside you that might be him swallowing a smile and might be him swallowing a complaint, you genuinely cannot tell anymore and that's one of your favorite things about him.
The HR rep pulls out a form from her drawer like she's been doing this so often she keeps the forms within reach now. She slides it across the desk.
"Permanent bond declaration," she says. "Sign here, here, and initial here. You'll be assigned as a permanent pair, which means joint deployment scheduling, shared operational briefings, and," she pauses and looks at you specifically, "a shared incident report file, which given your individual histories is going to be the most alarming document in this building."
"Great," you say, picking up the pen.
"This is not great," she says.
You sign. You pass the pen to Riddle, and he takes it, and he signs too. You watch him sign and feel something warm and slightly stupid settle in your chest.
He caps the pen and slides the form back across the desk.
The HR rep picks it up and looks at it for a moment, the two signatures sitting there next to each other, and then she puts it in a folder and puts the folder in her filing cabinet and closes the drawer.
"The graph," she says, to no one in particular.
"Fourth entry this month?" you ask.
"Fifth," she says. "Trey's pair finalized last night"
"He didn't tell me," you say, genuinely delighted. "I have so much to text him."
"Please leave my office," the HR rep says, and she's already turning back to her like she's trying to pretend she works in a normal building where normal things happen.
You stand up. Riddle stands up beside you with perfect posture, straightening his jacket with those small precise movements that you've catalogued and memorized and will probably find endearing until you're very old.
"Thank you," you tell the HR rep sincerely.
"I want you to know," she says, without turning around, "that I'm going to make the new slide specifically about you two. It's going to have your names on it. People are going to study it in onboarding."
"I'm honored," you say.
"It's not meant to be an honor."
"I know," you say, and you follow Riddle out the door.
In the hallway, Riddle exhales, long and slow, and you look at him and he looks at you and he's got that expression again, the one that keeps threatening to become a smile and then becomes one anyway before he can stop himself.
"I hate you," he says, which means something entirely different now than it would have meant three months ago, and you both know it.
"No you don't," you say.
"No," he agrees, after a moment, and his ears are red again. "I don't."
You take his hand as you walk down the hallway, mostly because you can now, and he lets you, mostly because he wants to, and somewhere on the behind you, your HR rep is opening a new PowerPoint and beginning to type, with the grim determination of someone who knows they're losing a war but intends to document it thoroughly anyway.
The graph gets updated by end of day.
Life, as it turns out, goes on.
This is not a profound observation.But there's something about the specific part of your life now that feels worth noting, if only because you spent a long time being the only unbonded Guide in your friend group and eating cereal for dinner alone in your apartment and thinking that maybe your personality was simply too much of a thing for anyone to want to be around consistently.
Turns out you just needed to find someone whose personality was also too much of a thing. You needed someone whose too-much-ness happened to fit against your too-much-ness like two completely unhinged puzzle pieces that somehow complete the same picture.
Who could have predicted it would be the guy who cited a subsection at you while you were trying to kiss him.
Actually, you could have predicted that. That was very predictable. You were just too busy being delighted by him to connect the dots.
So life goes on, and it goes like this.
You ragebait him when the mood strikes, which is frequently, because the mood is almost always striking.
But somewhere in the last few weeks something has shifted in the calibration of your chaos, and you've started to notice that the things you do have drifted from things that make him flustered and irritated toward things that make him try very hard not to smile and fail completely.
Last week you left a small carved wooden duck on his desk with a note that said "office support animal, bureau regulation, do not remove" and he spent the entire morning pretending he hadn't noticed it while the wooden duck sat there on his desk and watched him work, and when you walked past his office at noon it had been moved to a slightly more prominent position near his monitor.
The duck stays.
A few days after the Normal Incident, as you've started thinking of your brief and deeply uncomfortable foray into being a regulated human being, Riddle finds you during a break and stands next to you with his arms crossed and says, looking at a point just past your shoulder, "You don't have to do that."
"Do what?" you say.
"The." He makes a gesture that encompasses, apparently, your entire personality. "The being different. The Normal, as you call it. The coming on time and not saying things and eating lunch without—" He stops and looks at his shoes for a moment and then looks back up.
"It's unsettling," he says, which is the Riddle way of saying it worried me and I didn't like it and please don't do it again. "You're." Another pause, and his jaw works slightly like he's chewing through the words to get to the right ones. "You're fine. As you are. The way you actually are."
You look at him for a second. He's looking somewhere slightly to the left of your face with the expression of someone who has said a vulnerable thing and is bracing for the consequences.
"Riddle," you say.
"Don't make it weird," he says immediately.
"I'm going to make it a little weird."
"Please don't."
"That's one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me," you tell him, and you mean it, and you can see the moment he realizes you mean it because something in his face goes soft before he gets it back under control.
"It was an observation," he says, with absolutely zero conviction.
"Sure," you say.
"It was."
"Of course."
"Stop smiling at me like that."
"I can't help it," you say, which is true. "It's my face. It does this. You just said you like my face as it is, so."
Riddle makes the frustrated grunt that you've come to understand means you've won but he's not going to admit it, and he goes back to his office, and you watch him go and think that you are absolutely going to tease him about this for the rest of your natural life and he's going to let you, which is its own kind of love language.
So you stay yourself, which is easy because you've never successfully been anyone else, and he stays himself, which means that before every Gate he finds you and tells you at least five times, with escalating intensity, not to step into the Gate under any circumstances.
It's become a ritual.
"Don't step into the Gate," he says at the staging area, not looking at you, checking his gear with practiced efficiency.
"I make no promises," you say, which is your ritual response.
"I mean it." He checks his jacket. "Under no circumstances. No matter what happens inside. You stay out here."
"Riddle, I hear your words."
"That's not a promise."
"It's an acknowledgment."
"I need a promise."
"I promise," you say, "to think very hard about not stepping into the Gate before I make any decisions."
He turns to look at you with an expression that says he knows exactly what you're doing. "That's not—"
"It's the best you're getting," you say pleasantly.
He makes the grunt. He goes into the Gate. Every time.
And every time he comes out, you're there, and these days the Guiding sessions have evolved into something that would probably make the Bureau's original Guiding manual raise several concerned eyebrows. There's just supposed to be hand contact.
What actually happens is that Riddle comes out of the Gate and walks directly toward you and you open your arms and he steps into them and you Guide him like that, your arms around him and his face somewhere in the vicinity of your shoulder, his energy unwinding slowly like something that's been held too tight finally getting to let go.
It started gradually, the distance between you closing in increments so small you barely noticed until one day you looked down and realized you were just hugging your Esper while you worked and he was hugging you back.
You're very pleased about this development.
He's never commented on it, which is his way of saying he's very pleased about it too.
And then you go home.
Home is, at this point, a somewhat flexible concept. Technically you have an apartment. It has your furniture in it and your plants that are mostly alive and your inexplicable collection of things you've acquired and never thrown away. Technically Riddle has his own place, which is neat and organized and smells like expensive tea and has exactly the right number of things in it and not one more.
But also, sometimes home is his passenger seat on the drive back from a late Gate, the city sliding past the windows while you tell him about something stupid that happened during your morning briefing and he responds with increasing reluctance to pretend he's not listening.
Sometimes home is his kitchen at nine PM eating whatever he's made, which is always good because Riddle approaches cooking the same way he approaches everything, with complete commitment and a frankly unnecessary level of skill, while you sit on the counter and provide commentary that he keeps telling you to stop providing.
Sometimes home is your couch, the two of you on opposite ends with the TV on, and the opposite ends becoming less opposite as the night goes on until at some point you look down and he's fallen asleep with his head somewhere near your shoulder and you're not sure when that happened.
You have a sneaking suspicion he feels the same way. That home has become a portable thing for him too, something he carries around in the general vicinity of wherever you are.
You base this suspicion on evidence. Specifically, the way he tracks you in a room without appearing to. The way he redirects conversations toward you without making it obvious. The way he falls asleep on your couch with such complete ease, which for Riddle, who once told you he has trouble sleeping in unfamiliar places because his brain doesn't quiet down, means something considerable.
You haven't said any of this out loud to him. You don't have to. This is one of the things you've learned about Riddle, that he communicates in a dialect of small precise actions that you've been translating with increasing fluency. A tart on your desk on a bad day. Showing up at your office door when something's off. Telling you you're fine as you are while looking studiously at his shoes.
You've also gotten better at talking back in the same language. Leaving wooden ducks in prominent positions. Making no promises but always, always being there when he comes out. Letting the car rides go long even when you're tired because neither of you wants to be the one to say goodnight.
It's a good life. You think about the version of you from a few months ago sitting in the break room, slamming your face on the table because you were the only unbonded Guide in the friend group, shaking the Malleus Guide by the shoulders and demanding to know how to get someone with spice.
You got someone with spice. You got someone with spice and rules and a bark that's worse than his bite, which is still pretty bad, and a tendency to show up when it matters in ways that he'd never describe as showing up because he'd call it protocol compliance or operational necessity.
You got Riddle, who tried to take your head off with a playing card on day one and then brought you strawberry tarts every day for a week when you were sick.
Worth it, you think, watching him fall asleep on your couch with his shoes still on because he always insists he's not tired and then immediately proves himself wrong, his face smoothed out and quiet in a way it rarely is when he's awake.
You reach over and, very carefully, ruffle his hair.
He doesn't wake up. But the corner of his mouth moves, just slightly, in a way that makes you think he might not be completely asleep.
You grin at the ceiling.
Yeah. This is your life now.
You're very okay with this.
You are, without question, the worst thing that has ever happened to Riddle Rosehearts.
He wants to be clear about that. He wants that established upfront, on the record, documented properly with the correct date and time and filed in triplicate. The worst thing.
Worse than the B-rank Gate that collapsed on him in his second year and he had to fight his way out of with a sprained wrist and no backup. Worse than the time his previous Guide filed a counter-complaint against his complaint and HR had to mediate for three hours. Worse than every single professional inconvenience he's ever experienced stacked on top of each other in a tower of suffering.
You are worse than all of it.
And he is so completely, catastrophically, irreversibly gone on you that it's been keeping him up at night for months.
But let's start at the beginning, because Riddle is a person who believes in proper chronology and also because the beginning is important for understanding how thoroughly you dismantled every single thing he thought he knew about himself.
Riddle's relationship with Guides has historically been complicated, which is a polite way of saying it's been a disaster.
He knows he's difficult. He's not delusional about it. He has standards, and his standards are high, and his standards exist because people get hurt when standards aren't maintained and he refuses to be responsible for that. His previous Guides had all, in various ways, failed to understand this. They thought he was being difficult for the sake of it. They thought his insistence on protocol was a personality flaw to be managed rather than a feature of someone who genuinely, deeply cared about everyone coming home alive.
So they left. One by one. He filed the complaints because the complaints were warranted and he stands by that, and they left because apparently basic operational standards were too much to ask, and Riddle ended up cycling through four Guides in two months, which was a record, and which HR was very unhappy about, and which Riddle was also unhappy about but would not admit because admitting it felt like conceding something he wasn't ready to concede.
He was alone. He was fine with being alone. He'd always been fine with being alone.
And then HR sent him you.
He meets you for the first time near the vending machines, which is not a location he'd have chosen for a significant life event, but apparently the universe doesn't ask.
He's in the middle of a very legitimate and entirely necessary confrontation with a Guide who's been running what can only be described as a documentation blog about his Esper's combat techniques, which is a clear violation of Bureau operational security policies and also deeply undignified, and he's mid-citation when an arm appears from nowhere and drops around his neck.
He starts making sounds that are not quite words yet because his brain is trying to process the fact that a stranger has just grabbed him and is now, inexplicably, agreeing with him. A stranger who appeared from nowhere and is nodding along with his regulatory citations like they're personally invested, and who is now winking at him, and who smells faintly like coffee and Redbull, and who is dragging him down the hallway before he's fully understood what's happening.
"Hi, I'm your new Guid—"
A playing card leaves his hand.
He doesn't remember making the decision to throw it. His body just did it on his behalf, which is embarrassing, because the card goes past your face close enough to move your hair and you don't flinch. You just turn and look at the card embedded in the wall, and then turn back to him, and you're grinning.
You're grinning.
Riddle has made grown adults cry with less. He once made a Gate monster retreat with his tone alone. And you're standing there looking at the card that just nearly removed your nose and you're grinning at him like he's just done something delightful.
He doesn't know what to do with that. He goes home that night and lies on his ceiling and stares at his bed and tries to figure out what to do with that.
He comes up empty.
The next day he shows up at your office for Guiding and then you're just. Normal. You sit beside him and ask proper intake questions and when you take his hand to start Guiding, you wink at him, and he's about to say something about it, but then you actually start and he forgets what he was going to say because.
His energy has been a mess for two weeks. He knew it was a mess. He'd been managing it, compensating for it, running at reduced capacity and refusing to acknowledge what that meant. But the moment you start Guiding him, the moment your energy starts moving through his pathways, it's like every tangled awful thing he's been carrying starts to loosen. Like someone found all the knots and started undoing them one by one with patient careful hands.
He didn't know it could feel like that.
He's had four Guides. Not one of them made it feel like that.
He sits there for over an hour while you work and he can feel his own edges softening, the constant hum of something wrong going quiet for the first time in weeks, and he stares at his own hands and tries to understand why his eyes are doing something embarrassing.
When it's done, he thanks you stiffly, because he's Riddle and stiffly is the only register available to him when he's feeling something he can't categorize. You immediately ask him for coffee. He immediately scoffs. He comes back with tea because you just spent an hour fixing his insides and coffee would be bad for your recovery and that's just logic, that's just practical thinking, that has nothing to do with anything.
You ruffle his hair, and he grumbles, and he walks back to his office and sits at his desk and stares at nothing for a while.
He thinks: this is going to be a problem.
He is correct.
Here is something Riddle has never admitted to anyone and will take to his grave unless circumstances force it out of him: he has always been difficult to like.
He knows this. He's known it since he was a child when his exacting nature was already fully formed and already making other children uncomfortable and already making him eat lunch alone because nobody wanted to sit with the kid who'd report you for running in the hallways. He learned early that being correct was often indistinguishable from being unpleasant, and that the way he cared about things—intensely, totally, without knowing how to modulate it—made people tired.
He accommodated this. He built his life around it. If people were going to find him difficult, he would at least ensure that his difficulty was in service of something real.
What he did not accommodate for, because how could he have, was you.
You, who walked into his professional orbit and immediately started treating his exactingness like it was funny. And it wasn't dismissive—the way people laughed at him. You genuinely found him entertaining.
You cited his own subsections back at him with a grin like they were inside jokes. You showed up to things he was at and immediately positioned yourself next to him like that was the obvious place to be.
Every event. Every briefing. Every awkward professional gathering where Riddle stood slightly apart from the group because he'd never quite learned the mechanics of casual social presence. You found him every time, and you stayed, and you never once looked around to check if there was someone more interesting to talk to instead.
He noticed. He noticed and he filed it away in the mental drawer he keeps for things he's not ready to examine yet, right next to the folder labeled what you said about his aura on day one that he definitely doesn't think about, and the sub-folder titled the way you laugh when he says something that's technically an insult but you take as a compliment.
He noticed and he told himself it was just your nature. You were like this with everyone. It didn't mean anything specific.
He kept telling himself this right up until the Gate.
The Gate is the part of the story that Riddle cannot get through without his jaw doing something tight and his hands wanting to find something to hold onto.
He was following protocol. He wants to be very clear about that. He stayed inside the Gate because protocol requires a minimum Esper presence until backup or core destruction, and the protocol exists because people died when it wasn't followed, and he has never been able to make himself choose his own safety over a rule that was written in someone else's blood.
He was managing. He was exhausted and he was running on fumes and his energy was doing things that felt concerning, but he was managing, and the backup would come, and he would hold the line until it did.
And then you walked in.
He sees you and his brain just.Stops. Because there's no file in his mental catalogue for this. There's no protocol for the eventuality of his Guide walking into an SS-ranked Gate in gear that doesn't fit, carrying an oxygen canister like a weapon, looking absolutely furious and also somehow like the best thing he's ever seen in his life.
You grab him by the ear.
He should be more offended by that than he is.
He's yelling at you. He can hear himself yelling at you, telling you to get out, telling you that you're going to die, telling you that this is insane and you're insane and you need to leave right now. And you're yelling back, something about terrible decisions being your hobby, and you're dragging him by the ear toward the exit while he's still fighting monsters on autopilot, and somewhere in the middle of all of this there's a feeling in his chest that he doesn't have a name for yet.
He'll find a name for it later. He has a lot of time to find a name for it.
You drag him out. You immediately get on the oxygen canister. You take his hand and start Guiding him right there in the staging area while using him as structural support because your legs have decided to stop working, and he holds you up, and he can feel your energy working through his pathways even while you're clearly running on nothing, and he thinks, with a clarity that's almost violent:
He doesn't want anyone else to do this.
Ever.
The thought arrives fully formed, not as a slow realization but as a fact that's apparently always been true and just needed the right moment to become visible. He doesn't want another Guide's hands on his energy. He doesn't want to come out of a Gate and look for a different face. The idea of it makes something in him recoil so hard it's almost physical.
He wants you. Only you. This specific raccoon who walks into death dimensions for people they've known for two days and makes no promises but means all of them.
He doesn't say any of this. He drives you and you throw up on the side of the road twice, and the glowing situation makes his hands shake in a way he hides by gripping the steering wheel very hard.
The hospital is where it gets bad.
He comes every day because the alternative is not coming every day, and he cannot do that. He cannot sit in his apartment knowing you're in a hospital bed being detoxed from Gate poisoning you got from walking into a Gate for him. He brings things. Tarts and pies and the expensive cookies from the bakery on fourth street because you mentioned once in passing that you liked them and he filed it away in the part of his brain that apparently keeps very detailed records about you specifically.
He doesn't talk to you. He can't, because if he opens his mouth he's not sure what's going to come out, and whatever it is will probably not be appropriate for a medical setting and possibly not for any setting. So he sits. He sits and he watches you sleep and he watches you make faces in your sleep because you're the kind of person who has extremely expressive dreams apparently, and at one point you make a small sound that might be discomfort and he grips the arm of the chair hard enough that the plastic creaks.
He turns down every deployment they offer him.
He does not examine why very carefully because he doesn't need to.
When you get discharged and you're still a little wobbly on your feet and his hand comes up automatically to catch you before his brain has even decided to do it, and then stops because he's not sure if he's allowed, and then you reach back and take his hand—
He doesn't breathe for a moment.
He drives you home. He walks you to your door. He tells you to take care of yourself and the words feel completely inadequate for what they're actually trying to say, and then you kiss his cheek and his brain files immediately offline, all systems down, no one home, please leave a message.
He walks away and gets in his car and sits there for five minutes before he's recovered enough to drive.
Come on time tomorrow, he'd said.
What he meant was: please exist near me tomorrow. Please keep existing. Please don't walk into any more Gates and please be careful, be there.
There's a moment, a specific one, that he keeps coming back to.
It's the day you tried to be Normal.
He noticed immediately. Something was wrong from the second you walked into the briefing room, wrong in a way that bypassed his brain and went straight to his chest. You were on time, which should have been good, and you were quiet, which should have been fine, and you ate lunch across from him and talked about soup, and the whole time he sat there with this low-level alarm going off somewhere in his ribcage that he couldn't silence.
You, being you, had apparently decided that the way to appeal to him was to become someone else entirely. You had looked at yourself—your raccoon self, your chaotic wonderful completely exhausting self—and thought that wasn't right for him. That he needed something different. That you needed to sand yourself down into a shape he'd find more acceptable.
The thought makes something in his chest hurt in a way he doesn't fully have words for, even now.
He'd found you in your office at the end of the day because he couldn't not. He'd put his hands on your desk because his body made that decision before his brain could intervene. And when you'd asked what if you did get another Esper to harass and he'd started citing subsection four at you—which he was doing from muscle memory at that point, his mouth on autopilot while his entire nervous system was doing something completely different—
You kissed him.
And he kissed you back, immediately, with an enthusiasm that would have embarrassed him if he'd had any capacity left for embarrassment, and you laughed against his mouth, and he pulled you closer because there was nowhere else to put his hands that made any sense.
His type, it turns out, was never a thing that existed until you.
So this is his life now.
You ragebait him with the focused intention of a professional, and he takes the bait every single time, and you look so delighted about it that he can't even maintain proper outrage. You leave inexplicable objects on his desk. The duck is still there. He's moved it twice, both times to slightly more prominent positions, and he's not going to examine that.
Before every Gate he tells you no fewer than five times not to walk in. This is non-negotiable. This is the one thing he will not budge on. You make no promises, which means you'll think about it, which means you're probably not going to do it but he can't rule it out, and that uncertainty is both the most frustrating and the most you thing about you.
He comes out of Gates now and goes directly to you, and somewhere in the last few months the professional hand-holding of proper Guiding has evolved into just being held.
He walks out and you open your arms and he steps into them and you work while you hold him, your energy doing the thing that only yours does, smoothing out all the jagged edges, and he can feel the exact moment he stops being an Esper managing his post-Gate state and starts just being a man who's very glad to be in the arms of the love of his life.
He's never going to admit how much he looks forward to it.
He thinks you know anyway.
Home is wherever you are. He's made his peace with this. He's made his peace with the fact that your couch is more comfortable than his even though it's objectively worse furniture, and that your terrible taste in television is something he now has opinions about, and that the cereal you keep in your cabinet that's shaped like little colored rings and has the nutritional value of cardboard has somehow ended up in his cabinet too, right next to his tea.
He has a ring in a drawer in his apartment.
He looks at it sometimes when you're not there. He thinks about the fact that you're already permanently bonded by Bureau documentation, that there's a form with both your signatures sitting in HR's filing cabinet, that you're legally and professionally and in every bureaucratic sense already his.
He wants it on paper that has nothing to do with the Bureau.
He wants it because you went into a Gate for him before you had any obligation to, before there was any rule that said you had to, and you came out glowing and sick and still managing to make jokes about wings. He wants it because you've never once looked at his prickly exterior and decided it was too much work. He wants it because you find him at every event and stay beside him and the version of himself that ate lunch alone has been so thoroughly replaced by the version that has you leaning on his shoulder making unhinged observations about whatever's in front of you that he can't even remember what the loneliness felt like anymore.
He wants it because home is wherever you are and he'd like that to be official.
The ring stays in the drawer.
For now.
He's waiting for the right moment, which for Riddle means he's overplanning it and second-guessing himself and probably going to end up doing it impulsively at a completely random moment, like in the car on the way back from a Gate, or over dinner in your kitchen, or on your terrible couch in front of your terrible television.
Somewhere where it's just the two of you, and it's quiet, and you're being exactly yourself, exactly the raccoon you've always been, exactly the person who ruined his life completely and gave him a better one in its place.
He'll know the moment when it comes.
He hopes you'll say yes.
He thinks you will.
You did promise, after all, to think very hard about not stepping into Gates before making any decisions.
He's choosing to interpret that as a yes to everything.
Mutual Destruction (A Love Story) || Riddle Rosehearts
You're an SS-ranked Guide who considers scaring Espers a skill and Riddle's an A-ranked Esper who files HR complaints like it's a sport. Together, you're classified by HR as "unprecedented and also please stop."
or: Guideverse! ; w.c ~25k
Guideverse Masterlist
Once upon a time—actually, you know what? Forget the "once upon a time" nonsense because this story literally starts with the phrase that's been beaten into the ground so thoroughly it's practically reached the Earth's core.
One day, suddenly, Gates opened. There we go. That's the line. The exact same line that's launched approximately nine thousand mediocre webnovels, seventeen k-dramas that you definitely binged while you were supposed to be studying for finals, and that one manhwa your friend won't shut up about in the group chat at three in the morning.
Oh, you've heard this spiel nine times before? Fantastic. Incredible. Here's the tenth time, and honestly if you're tired of it, imagine how the people actually living through this feel. They're so tired. So, so tired.
Anyway, ahem. Let's get into it.
One day, suddenly, things called Gates opened. These Gates, for anyone who's somehow avoided every piece of media from the last decade, can open literally anywhere. Your local 7-Eleven? Gate. The weird parking lot behind the dentist's office where someone's definitely doing something sketchy at two AM? Gate. That one bathroom stall at the mall that's always vaguely damp for no reason? You already know.
The lower-ranking Gates just kinda appear somewhere and turn the area into a locked zone, like someone decided to cordon off a chunk of reality with police tape and a "do not enter unless you're cool with dying horribly" sign. The monsters inside are usually standard-issue nightmare creatures that look like someone told an animal "hey what if you were worse" and the animal took that way too personally.
The higher-ranking Gates though? Those are themed. We're talking full alternate dimensions that look like someone's fever dream had a baby with an escape room designed by a sadist. Gravity is a suggestion. The laws of physics are more like guidelines. The decor is universally horrible.
So humanity looked at this situation and did what humanity does best, which is evolve out of pure spite. Because if reality's gonna start throwing hands, humanity's gonna throw them back harder.
Enter Espers and Guides.
Espers go into the Gates and fight the monsters and destroy the core so the whole thing doesn't collapse and leak monsters everywhere like a broken snow globe full of teeth and malice. The job description sounds simple enough. Get in, beat stuff up, smash the core, get out. Easy.
Except Espers are the most dramatic people alive. Their emotions and senses are cranked up so high that existing is basically one long overwhelming experience. A hangnail feels like a medieval torture device. Someone chewing loudly sounds like construction work happening inside their skull. They're out here experiencing life in 4K with all the settings maxed out and the brightness turned up until it burns, and it shows.
They're powerful and incredibly useful and also having the worst time imaginable at all times.
And then you've got Guides.
Guides wait outside the Gates looking like they haven't slept since 2019, because their whole job is calming down Espers after they come out absolutely vibrating with feral energy. Espers stumble out of Gates completely fried, their power doing backflips, their emotions doing interpretive dance, and Guides have to basically be a human off-switch using their own abilities to smooth everything back down to baseline.
It's like being a therapy dog except you're a person who also hasn't eaten a proper meal in six hours and you're pretty sure your Esper is about to cry because the wind touched their face weird.
So yeah. Gates that open randomly and spawn monsters. Espers who fight the monsters but are also catastrophically sensitive about everything. Guides who wrangle the Espers while running on fumes and prayer. Simple in theory.
In practice, it's a mess. But hey, at least rent is cheap in this economy because half the buildings are condemned Gate zones, so there's that.
You're an SS ranked Guide, which in theory means you should be drowning in Esper requests like some kind of twisted popularity contest where the prize is being psychically latched onto by someone who experiences a full emotional breakdown if their toast is slightly too brown.
SS Guides are rare. SS Guides are valuable. SS Guides are supposed to have Espers lined up around the block ready to throw hands for the privilege of having you smooth out their jagged little energy spikes.
Except somehow, against all logic and the basic laws of supply and demand, every Esper in this entire facility takes one look at you and suddenly remembers they have a very important appointment elsewhere.
Possibly in an S-rank Gate. Possibly in a dumpster. The specific location doesn't matter as long as it's not near you.
HR has tried to address this with you on multiple occasions, each conversation more painful than the last. The last time you sat in that aggressively beige office that smells like stale coffee and printer toner, surrounded by motivational posters with phrases like "synergy" and "collaborative excellence" in fonts that should be classified as war crimes, your HR rep looked at you with the haunted expression like their will to live was dripping away away like a leaky faucet.
They said that your personality is a little challenging.
You blinked at them. "What's wrong with having a little whimsy? What's wrong with scaring a few Espers?"
"Last week you told an A-rank Esper that his energy signature felt like what you'd get if anxiety and a wet sock had a baby," they said.
"I was helping him develop self-awareness."
"He cried in the bathroom for forty minutes.”
Because honestly, if the living bombs are scared of you, isn't that their problem? Espers are supposed to be powerful. They go into Gates and fight monsters that look like they were designed by a committee of sleep paralysis demons. They have abilities that can level buildings.
And yet somehow you're the scary one because you have a sense of humor and occasionally enjoy watching them squirm? You told one guy that Guiding him felt like trying to untangle earbuds that had gained sentience and malicious intent. You asked another if he'd ever considered that maybe he was the monster and the Gate creatures were just misunderstood. These are funny observations. The fact that multiple Espers have requested immediate transfers after sessions with you is a them problem, not a you problem.
But right now you're sitting in the Guide break room with your fellow Guides, nursing a coffee that's gone cold because you got distracted thinking about that one Gate last month that was themed like a CVS at 2 AM, and you're starting to notice something that makes you feel like the universe is personally victimizing you.
Everyone in this friend group is bonded or has an Esper.
You're the only unbonded Guide here, which makes you either the group's token single friend or their charity case, and you're not sure which is worse.
You squint across the table at the Guide who's been talking for the last seven minutes straight about how his Esper "totally thinks he's cool because of how well he handled himself inside the farmer's market Gate," and you have to physically bite your tongue to keep from pointing out that the farmer's market Gate was C-rank at best and the final boss was a mutated cabbage.
This Guide is out here glowing with secondhand pride, talking like he just defeated an S-rank threat solo when really he did was probably just hit a monster with a vegetable until it stopped moving. You're watching this display of delusion in real time and it's making you want to walk into the ocean.
Then there's Trey, sitting in the corner with his phone in both hands, and he's got this expression on his face that can only be described as "catastrophically fond." His thumbs are moving at a speed that suggests whoever he's texting is sending him a multipart novel, probably about something deeply unimportant, and Trey's smiling at his screen like he's reading the most beautiful poetry ever written.
You know without asking that it's his Esper, the one who has the energy of a feral raccoon that got into the trash and came out with a knife and a vendetta. Trey looks so in love it's making you feel physically ill.
You let your forehead drop onto the table with a thunk that rattles the coffee mugs.
"No one wants to be my Esper," you announce into the table surface, your voice muffled by laminate and despair. "I'm gonna die alone. They're gonna find my body in my apartment in like forty years, surrounded by the mummified remains of houseplants I killed and a freezer full of microwave meals I never got around to eating. The news article is gonna say 'Local Guide Dies Alone, Neighbors Describe Them As Having Questionable Vibes.'"
"That's definitely your fault," someone says immediately, which is both rude and accurate.
"You told an S-rank Esper that his aura looked like it was having a midlife crisis," another Guide adds helpfully.
"It did! I stand by that!"
Trey doesn't even look up from his phone. "You made an Esper cry by asking if he'd considered switching careers because his energy felt 'forever alone.'"
You lift your head just enough to make eye contact with the Guide sitting next to you, the one who's somehow in a committed bond with Malleus Draconia, an SSS-rank Esper who's so powerful he once accidentally destroyed a parking garage because he sneezed.
Malleus Draconia, who shows up in news headlines like "SSS Esper Levels City Block, Says He Was Startled By A Pigeon." That Malleus Draconia. And this Guide bagged him. You grab them by the shoulders and shake them like you're trying to extract secrets through physical force alone.
"How am I supposed to get someone if they all just wanna use me as a Guiding port?" you demand, shaking them harder. "I don't want some boring professional relationship where I Guide them and they say thank you and go home. I want someone with spice. I want flavor. I want someone who's gonna come out of a Gate and say something so unhinged I have to take a second to process it. I want to make them mad on purpose. I want them to look at me and think about killing me at least twice a week. Is that too much to ask? Am I being unreasonable?"
"Yes," like four people say at the same time.
"Extremely unreasonable," Trey confirms, finally looking up from his phone just to judge you.
"You might need professional help," the Malleus Guide says while you're still shaking them. "Like therapy. A lot of therapy."
You're about to explain that your standards are actually very normal and everyone else is just boring when Ruggie, the Guide whose Esper is probably texting him about committing some kind of petty crime as a bonding activity, speaks up from his corner of the table.
"You know what? You might wanna ask for Esper Rosehearts."
You stop shaking the Malleus Guide. Turn your head slowly to look at Ruggie. "Who?"
"Riddle Rosehearts. A-rank Esper. Stickler for rules. Little guy, huge temper. Terrifying in the way that small angry things are terrifying, like a chihuahua that knows where you sleep." Ruggie takes a sip of his energy drink, which is definitely just straight caffeine in a can at this point. "My Esper wore gloves into a Gate once and this dude almost murdered them on the spot."
You blink. "What."
"Something about Gate protocol and proper conduct and a bunch of rules my guy didn't even know existed. Said Rosehearts turned red as a tomato and started yelling about standards and professionalism, and my Esper genuinely thought they were about to get decapitated over hand coverings. They said it was the scariest yet exhilarating moment of their life and they once fought a Gate boss that was just a sentient tornado made of knives."
You feel something rising in your chest. It might be hope. It might be the terrible coffee. It's hard to tell.
"Tell me more," you say, leaning forward.
"He's been through four Guides in two months. Keeps filing formal complaints about Guiding quality and professional standards. Apparently he has a list of requirements and expectations that's like eight pages long. HR's losing their minds trying to find someone who can deal with him without quitting."
The smile that spreads across your face is the kind of smile that makes people nervous, the kind that says you're about to make a decision that everyone else will regret.
"He sounds perfect," you breathe.
"He sounds like a nightmare," Vegetable Guide says flatly.
"A nightmare with standards," you correct, already standing up. "A nightmare who gets mad about gloves. A nightmare who's gonna look at me and my whimsy and either fall madly in obsession or try to strangle me, and honestly either outcome is a win."
You grab your coffee, realize it's empty, grab Ruggie's energy drink instead and chug half of it before he can protest. You hand it back to him, wipe your mouth with the back of your hand, and shoot him a smile that's all teeth.
"Thanks bestie, you've changed my life. I'm going to HR right now to ask for a new assignment."
"You mean a new victim," someone mutters.
"Same difference," you say cheerfully, already heading for the door with the kind of spring in your step that suggests you're about to do something that'll make HR update their incident report templates. "And it's gonna be beautiful. He's either gonna bond with me or try to kill me, and honestly the uncertainty is what makes it exciting."
Behind you, you hear Trey sigh. "Should we stop them?"
There's a pause, and then someone else says, "I mean we could, but watching this play out is gonna be the funniest thing that's happened all month."
"All year," another Guide corrects.
You're already halfway down the hallway, your steps light and your heart full of chaos and terrible ideas. Riddle Rosehearts. A-rank Esper with a hair-trigger temper.
Your future problem, if the universe has any sense of poetry.
You cannot wait to be so whimsical at him that he tries to cite you for violations. This is gonna be great.
The HR rep looks at you like you've just asked them to set themselves on fire for fun.
"No," they say flatly.
You lean forward in your chair, resting your elbows on their desk in a way that's definitely too casual for a professional setting. "I want Esper Rosehearts as my assignment."
"No," they repeat, and you can see their grip tightening on their stress ball, the one that's shaped like a little brain and says "Keep Calm and Synergize" on it.
"I'll transfer," you say, and you say it with a bright smile that makes it very clear you're not bluffing even a little bit.
The HR rep's eye twitches. They squeeze the stress ball so hard you're worried it might explode. "You can't just threaten to transfer every time we don't give you what you want."
"Sure I can. I'm doing it right now. Watch." You lean back in your chair and examine your nails like you've got all the time in the world. "I'll transfer to the downtown branch. I hear they've got better coffee anyway. And dental. Do we have dental? I feel like we don't have dental."
"We have dental," the HR rep says through what sounds like physically gritted teeth.
"Well the downtown branch probably has better dental."
There's a long moment of silence where the HR rep stares at you and you can literally see them doing mental calculations, weighing the pros and cons of just letting you leave versus dealing with whatever chaos you're about to unleash. The thing is, you both know they can't actually afford to lose you. SS-rank Guides don't grow on trees, and this branch has been hemorrhaging Guides lately because apparently Cupid himself has decided to make this specific location his personal pet project. Guides have been bonding with Espers left and right, which means they're getting transferred to couple assignments or specialized units, and the number of unbonded Guides available for general rotation is getting dangerously low.
You watch the HR rep's face do a complicated journey through the five stages of grief before landing somewhere between resignation and despair.
"Fine," they say finally, and the word sounds like it's costing them years off their lifespan. "You can meet A-rank Esper Rosehearts tomorrow at 4 PM. Be on time."
"I'm always on time," you lie cheerfully, already standing up.
"You were forty minutes late to orientation."
"I said I'm always on time, not that I'm always early. There's a difference."
You're out the door before they can argue, and you can feel the victory thrumming in your veins like caffeine and poor decision-making. You practically skip down the hallway toward the vending machines because you've earned a snack and possibly several snacks, and that's when you hear it.
The yelling.
You slow down as you approach the vending machine area, and the scene that unfolds before you is so beautiful you could cry. There's a redheaded guy who looks like he's about three seconds away from a brain aneurysm, his face so flushed it's approaching tomato territory, and he's jabbing his finger at a Guide who's got the distinct appearance of someone who's chronically online and has definitely been described as "quirky" in performance reviews.
The Guide's got his phone out and he's holding it at an angle that suggests he was either taking a photo or contemplating taking a photo, and the redhead looks like he's ready to combust on the spot.
"Stop blogging about the ways your Esper smacks things around, it's against the rules!" the redhead shouts, and his voice has the kind of pitch that suggests he's been yelling for a while and his vocal cords are staging a protest. "Section fourteen, subsection C of the Bureau handbook explicitly prohibits the unauthorized documentation and distribution of Esper combat techniques on public social media platforms!"
The Guide with the phone blinks slowly, processing this. "But he looked really cool when he hit that Gate boss with the folding chair."
"That's not the point!" The redhead's getting redder, which you didn't think was physically possible but here you are, witnessing it in real time. "The point is that you're violating protocol and putting sensitive information at risk and also it's extremely unprofessional to run what is essentially a thirst blog about your own Esper's combat capabilities!"
"It's not a thirst blog, it's appreciation content," the Guide says, but he's got this little smile that says it's definitely at least partially a thirst blog.
The redhead looks like he's about to start citing more handbook sections, possibly the entire handbook front to back, and that's when you know with absolute certainty that this is him. This is Riddle Rosehearts. The guy who almost decapitated someone over gloves and is currently having a meltdown about social media policy in front of the vending machines.
You don't even think about it.
You walk right up to them and loop your arm around Riddle's neck in one smooth motion, pulling him into a casual side-hold that makes him immediately sputter and choke on whatever rule he was about to recite. He's shorter than you expected and also warmer than you expected, probably because all his blood has rushed to his face in rage.
"Yeah, Riddle's totally right," you say to the Guide with the phone, wagging your finger at him like a disappointed parent. "You really shouldn't be blogging about that stuff, very irresponsible, could compromise operational security or whatever."
The Guide blinks at you, confused about where you came from and also probably confused about why you're acting like you have any authority here. "Who are you?"
"Irrelevant!" you say cheerfully, and then you're dragging Riddle away before anyone can ask follow-up questions, your arm still around his neck as you haul him down the hallway like he's a misbehaving cat you're relocating.
Riddle is sputtering, his face cycling through approximately seventeen different shades of red, and when you finally let him go near the end of the corridor, he whirls on you with the kind of fury that would make a lesser person reconsider their life choices.
You are delighted.
"Hi!" you say brightly. "I'm your new Guid—"
You don't get to finish the sentence because a playing card goes whistling past your face so close you can feel the air displacement, and it embeds itself in the wall behind you with a sharp thunk. You turn your head slowly to look at the card, which is still quivering slightly from impact, and then turn back to Riddle.
He almost took your head off.
Your grin spreads so wide it probably looks unhinged. "You're not allowed to use your powers outside a Gate in the Bureau," you say, and your voice is practically singing with joy. "Pretty sure that's in the handbook somewhere. Section something, subsection whatever."
Riddle's face goes from red to a color that might not have a name yet, something between crimson and burgundy with hints of impending stroke. His hands are clenched into fists at his sides and he's shaking slightly, which could be rage or could be the effort of not throwing more cards at your head.
"Who," he says through teeth so clenched you're amazed that sound is getting through, "are you."
You stick out your hand for a handshake, still grinning. "I'm your new Guide! So nice to meet you, I've heard so much about you, all of it concerning and delightful."
Riddle stares at your hand like it might be a trap and doesn't take it. Instead he pulls himself up to his full height, which is honestly not that impressive but he's got the energy of someone who's about to recite his entire pedigree, and says with the kind of forced professionalism that sounds like it's killing him, "I am Riddle Rosehearts, A-rank Esper, and I don't recall requesting a new Guide."
"You didn't! HR assigned me to you because apparently you keep making your Guides quit, which is so fun, I can't wait to see what makes me special." You're still holding your hand out. He's still not taking it. This is the best day you've had in months.
"I don't make them quit," Riddle snaps. "They quit because they can't adhere to basic professional standards and refuse to follow simple guidelines that exist for very good reasons."
"Sure, sure, totally," you say, nodding like you're taking him seriously when you are absolutely not taking him seriously. "Anyway, I'll see you tomorrow at 4 PM for our Guiding session! Don't be late, I heard you're really particular about punctuality."
"Of course I'm particular about punctuality, being on time is the bare minimum of professional behavior," Riddle says, and he looks like he wants to say more, probably a lot more, possibly a full lecture's worth of more.
You just give him a smile that promises him that you're going to be the worst thing that's ever happened to him and you're both going to have a great time with it. "See you tomorrow, Riddle!"
He glares at you and then turns on his heel and walks away with a posture that suggests he's using every ounce of self-control not to turn around and throw more cards at you.
You watch him go, still grinning, your face still tingling from how close that card came to taking your nose off.
Tomorrow at 4 p.m.
You genuinely cannot wait.
At 3:59 p.m. the next day, there's a knock on your office door.
Exactly 3:59, which tells you everything you need to know about Riddle Rosehearts and also makes you wonder if he's been standing outside your door with a stopwatch, waiting for the cosmically correct moment to knock. You wouldn't put it past him. He seems like the kind of person who has opinions about atomic clocks.
"Come in," you call out, spinning your chair around in a way that's definitely not necessary but makes you feel like a Bond villain.
The door opens and Riddle steps in, looking like he's about to attend a funeral. His posture is so straight you could use him as a ruler. His eyes immediately start scanning your office like he's doing a health and safety audit, and you watch in real time as he catalogs every single thing that's probably driving him insane.
The crooked picture frame on the wall. The stack of papers on your desk that's definitely not organized by any system known to man. The coffee mug that says "I'm not arguing, I'm just explaining why I'm right" sitting on top of a folder labeled "IMPORTANT - DO NOT LOSE" that you absolutely have already lost the contents of. The small succulent in the corner that might be dead or might just be playing dead to avoid your care.
His eye twitches just a little.
You're delighted.
"Sit," you say, gesturing to the couch.
Riddle sits like he's being photographed for a posture tutorial, hands folded in his lap, back so straight you're concerned about his spine's structural integrity. He looks ready to either recite the Pledge of Allegiance or list every regulation you're currently violating just by existing in this office.
Now here's the thing. You might be unhinged. You might enjoy chaos the way some people enjoy smooth jazz. Yesterday you absolutely did drag him down a hallway like a feral cat who'd found a new squeaky toy. But protocol is sometimes protocol, and Guiding sessions have actual procedures for actual reasons, and you're not about to be a dumbass about someone's energy stabilization just because you think being annoying is funny.
So you grab your chair and wheel it around to his side, pulling out the intake form that HR keeps insisting you fill out even though you've never actually completed one in your entire career here and you're not about to start now, but you can at least pretend.
"Okay, standard questions," you say, clicking your pen in a rhythm that's definitely going to annoy him if the way his eye twitches again is any indication. "Attack type or support type Esper?"
"Attack," Riddle says immediately, and there's this edge of pride in his voice like he's daring you to make a short joke or a comment about how he looks like a particularly angry choir boy.
You write it down. "Anything I need to know while Guiding? Weird energy stuff, spots that are sensitive, any quirks that might make me go 'what the fresh hell' mid-session?"
"No," Riddle says, but his face does this thing where you can tell he's running through a mental checklist. "Standard Guiding procedures should be sufficient."
"Sick." You tap your pen against the paper. "When was your last Guiding session?"
"Two weeks ago."
Your pen stops mid-tap. You look up at him. "I'm sorry, did you just say two weeks?"
"Yes," Riddle says, like this is a completely normal thing to admit and not a red flag the size of a small country. "My previous Guide terminated our working arrangement and HR has been experiencing delays in the assignment process."
Two weeks is bad. Two weeks explains so much about why Riddle looks like he's one minor inconvenience away from snapping like a glow stick.
Espers are supposed to get field stabilization immediately after Gates, that quick patch job that keeps them from going nuclear on the spot, and then they're supposed to get proper Bureau Guiding twice a week minimum. That's the "please don't let your energy eat itself and also you" maintenance schedule. And Riddle's an attack type, which means he's burning through energy like it's his job, because it literally is his job, and he hasn't had a proper Guiding in two weeks.
No wonder he tried to decapitate someone over gloves. His energy is probably screaming. You're mentally screaming just thinking about it.
The only reason this isn't a five-alarm emergency is because he's A-rank and you're SS, which means you've got the horsepower to deal with whatever absolute disaster zone is currently happening inside his energy pathways. If he was any higher rank or you were any lower, this would be a "call a specialist and maybe a priest" situation.
"Alright," you say, setting down your pen and turning to face him fully. "Give me your hand."
Riddle blinks at you, and for a second he looks genuinely surprised, like he was expecting you to pull out a whoopee cushion or start doing a bit. But you're just sitting there with your hand extended, professional as hell, ready to do your actual job.
He hesitates for a second, then slowly reaches out and places his hand in yours.
His hand is warm and his grip is uncertain, like he's waiting for the other shoe to drop, which is fair because you were absolutely chaos incarnate yesterday and you'll probably be chaos incarnate again tomorrow, but right now you're working.
You wink at him.
The uncertainty on his face immediately converts into a scowl so powerful it could probably be used as a weapon. "Can you be professional for five consecutive minutes?"
"I am being professional," you say, grinning. "This is my professional wink. I have different winks for different occasions."
You start Guiding him before he can start an argument, and the moment you sink into his energy you understand everything about his entire personality.
His energy pathways are fucked. Not just tangled, but fucked in the technical sense, and the situation makes you mentally send a very aggressive email to his previous Guide for letting it get this bad.
Everything is knotted up like earbuds that have been in a pocket for three years, dense clumps of tension sitting in spots that must feel like having a rock in your shoe except the rock is internal and made of your own energy eating itself. The whole system is running so hot you're surprised he's not literally smoking, vibrating at a frequency that suggests he's been operating on pure spite and maybe three hours of sleep for the last two weeks.
Yeah, okay, you get it now. If your insides felt like this you'd also be mad about gloves.
You get to work, carefully smoothing out the worst tangles, loosening the knots that have probably been there so long they've got names and backstories. It's delicate and it takes actual concentration, and that means that you have to stop thinking about being funny or chaotic and just focus on untangling this disaster.
You can feel Riddle relaxing incrementally as you work, his breathing evening out, his shoulders dropping from where they've been living up near his ears. His energy starts to cool down, stops trying to eat itself, remembers that it's supposed to be helpful instead of a liability.
It takes over an hour. Way longer than a standard session, but he needed it, and you're not about to do a shit job just because you have places to be, which you don't because your schedule is extremely empty and your plans for tonight involve microwaving something questionable and watching YouTube videos.
When you finally let go of his hand, pulling your energy back and disconnecting, Riddle takes a deep breath like he's surfacing from underwater. He opens his eyes and he looks better. Still tired, because one session isn't going to fix two weeks of neglect, but better. More like a person and less like a pressure cooker about to explode.
"Thank you," he says, and the words sound like they're costing him physical pain, like gratitude is a limited resource he has to ration carefully.
"No problem," you say, and then because you're you, you add, "So what Gate are you hitting tomorrow? I need to know where to show up and look pretty while you fight monsters."
Riddle straightens his jacket, smoothing out imaginary wrinkles. "B-7 Gate, downtown district, 9:00 a.m. Briefing is at 8:30 a.m."
"Cool, I'll be there."
"I expect punctuality," Riddle says, and you can tell he can't help himself, the words just falling out of his mouth like a reflex.
"Sure, sure, totally," you say, waving your hand. "But also you have to get me a coffee now."
Riddle stares at you like you've just spoken in tongues. "I beg your pardon?"
"Coffee. You gotta get me one. I just spent an hour unfucking your energy, I'm running on fumes and vibes, and if I don't get caffeine in me immediately I'm gonna have to crawl to the break room like a slug that's given up on life."
"That's not how professional Guide-Esper relationships work," Riddle says, but he's already standing up, and you can literally see him doing the mental math of how pathetic you're going to look crawling down the hallway versus the minor inconvenience of getting you a drink.
"It's exactly how they work," you say cheerfully. "It's in the handbook. Section something, subsection 'don't be a dick to your Guide after they save your energy from imploding.'"
Riddle scoffs and it's such a good sound that you want to record it and set it as your ringtone. He walks toward the door and you think he's going to leave you to suffer, but then he pauses in the doorway.
"I'll be back in five minutes," he says without turning around. "Don't move."
He's gone before you can respond, and you slump in your chair like a puppet with cut strings. Guiding takes it out of you, especially marathon sessions like that, and you're genuinely not sure your legs would work if you tried to use them right now. You feel like a phone at two percent battery.
Exactly five minutes later, because of course it's exactly five minutes, Riddle comes back holding a cup.
It's not coffee.
It's tea.
He sets it on your desk in front of you and it smells like chamomile and maybe honey and something else that's probably good for you in ways that coffee is not.
"It's better for you than coffee," Riddle says, and his tone suggests this is an empirical fact backed by research and not up for discussion.
You look at the tea and then stare at him. His hair is perfectly smooth and he's standing there with his arms crossed looking like he's waiting for you to argue about the beverage choice.
You reach out and ruffle his hair with one hand while grabbing the tea with the other.
"Thanks, Riddle," you say, grinning as his face goes through approximately four colors in rapid succession.
"Don't—" he bats your hand away, immediately trying to fix his hair, "—touch my hair! What is wrong with you? Do you have any concept of personal boundaries?"
"Nope," you say cheerfully, taking a sip of the tea. It's good. He has excellent taste in tea, which you're filing away in your mental folder labeled "Things About Riddle That I Can Use For Future Annoying Purposes."
"And don't be late tomorrow," Riddle says, still trying to get his hair to lay flat. "8:30 means 8:30. Not 8:31, not 8:35, and absolutely not 8:45 with an excuse about traffic."
"I would never," you lie.
"You absolutely would," Riddle says, and he gives you one last look that's somewhere between exasperated and something else you can't quite identify before he turns and walks toward the door, muttering under his breath about proper professional conduct and why does HR keep assigning him to people who don't respect the concept of personal space.
You watch him go, still grinning, the tea warm in your hands and your energy still humming with the ghost of his.
Tomorrow, you're gonna be late on purpose just to see what happens.
You walk into the briefing area at 8:25 AM, which is possibly the most responsible thing you've done in your entire career at this Bureau, including that one time you accidentally filed a report correctly and then spent the next week paranoid that you'd somehow broken the space-time continuum.
You weren't even trying to be punctual. You just catastrophically overestimated morning traffic like and ended up sitting in your car in the parking lot for fifteen minutes listening to a podcast called "Gates Are A Scam: A Conspiracy Theory Deep Dive" where the host argued that monsters are just unemployed actors in costumes and the whole thing is a government job creation program.
You're not saying you agreed with him, but he brought receipts and they were compelling.
The rookie Guides standing near the coffee station look at you like you've just walked in juggling live grenades while riding a unicycle. One of them is holding a donut, completely frozen mid-bite like someone paused him.
Another one drops her tablet and it hits the floor with a crack that sounds expensive, and she doesn't even look down, just keeps staring at you. You're ninety percent sure you hear someone whisper "is this the rapture" like your punctuality is one of the seven seals breaking.
You ignore them because you have a sacred mission, which is to locate Riddle and immediately ruin his morning in the most affectionate way possible. You spot him near the front by this massive tactical display screen that's showing a 3D model of a Gate layout, and he's examining it with an intensity usually seen on people trying to defuse a nuclear bomb using only a YouTube tutorial.
His posture is so aggressively perfect that you're genuinely worried he's going to fold in half like a lawn chair if someone bumps into him wrong.
You make a beeline straight for him, weaving through other Guides and Espers, and before his brain can register the incoming threat to his personal space, you loop your arm around his shoulders and yank him into a side-hug that makes him go rigid like a mannequin that just witnessed a murder.
"What—who—why are you—unhand me—" Riddle starts making sounds that might technically be language. His face immediately does this thing where it goes through the entire red portion of the visible light spectrum at speeds that should not be medically possible, starting at a gentle pink and speedrunning straight through scarlet into shades of crimson that you're pretty sure don't have official names yet. You think you see burgundy. Possibly magenta.
He might be inventing new colors through sheer force of embarrassment. He's stuttering so hard you're worried he's going to dislocate his jaw.
"Just checking your energy stability," you say in your most professional voice, which is about as professional as a clown at a tax audit, but you are actually running a quick diagnostic scan of his energy pathways to make sure yesterday's Guiding session is still holding up and he hasn't somehow fucked it up overnight through sheer force of personality. "Can't have my Esper going into a Gate with his energy doing the Macarena. That would reflect poorly on my professional reputation."
"What professional reputation?" Riddle manages to choke out, and you're genuinely impressed he's forming complete sentences while looking like he's about to spontaneously combust.
"Exactly," you say cheerfully. "That's why I need to protect the zero reputation I currently have. It's very fragile. Like an egg made of even smaller, more fragile eggs."
"That doesn't make any sense!"
"Neither does your face but you don't see me complaining about it."
But the second you'd invoked Guiding protocol and professional responsibility, Riddle had gone completely limp in your grip like you've just entered the cheat code that turns off all his motor functions. He's still red as a stop sign and he looks like he wants to file several formal complaints, but apparently professional justification is his off-switch.
You've discovered that Riddle's kryptonite is properly cited workplace regulations. You're pretty sure you could get him to do anything if you claimed it was in section whatever, subsection whatever of the “new” handbook. You're filing this information away for future exploitation.
"Your energy feels stable," you announce, still refusing to release him from your grip because his discomfort is giving you life. "Good job not destroying it while you were unconscious. That's real personal growth. I'm so proud of you. You want a sticker?"
"Please release me before I report you for workplace harassment," Riddle says through teeth so aggressively clenched you're worried he's going to crack a molar.
"Can't cite me for harassment if it's Guiding-related. That's in the handbook. I looked it up specifically so I could do this."
"That's not what that clause means!"
Across the room, you make eye contact with Trey, who's looking at you with an expression that clearly communicates "you're a menace to society and also I'm morally obligated to intervene but this is the funniest thing I've seen all month so I'm going to let it play out."
You're about to wave at him when Riddle's expression in your peripheral shifts to something between confusion and the deep exhaustion of a man who's given up on life, and he glances toward the window. You follow his gaze and—
Trey's Esper is in a tree.
No, not climbing a tree. Fully in the tree, perched on a branch like a very aggressive bird, and he appears to be having a heated argument with an actual bird. A pigeon, specifically. The pigeon looks confused.
You point wordlessly at the window because words seem insufficient to capture the majesty of what you're witnessing.
Trey looks. His face goes on an entire journey through the five stages of grief, touching briefly on denial, sprinting through anger, and landing solidly on acceptance of his terrible fate. He walks to the window, opens it, and yells out, "Get down from that tree right now or I swear to god I'm leaving you there!"
"The bird disrespected me!" They yell back, pointing dramatically at the pigeon, who has not had a single thought in its entire life and is not about to start now.
"The bird is a bird! It has a brain the size of a grape! It doesn't have the cognitive capacity for disrespect! It barely has the cognitive capacity for bird!"
"It gave me a look!"
"It's a pigeon! Looking is literally all it does! Looking and shitting on cars, that's the whole bird!"
"It was a very judgmental look!"
"Get down here before I come up there and make this everybody's problem!" Trey sounds like he's aged seven years in the last thirty seconds.
"You can't climb trees, you have bad knees!"
"I'm going to get a ladder! I'm going to get a ladder and I'm going to drag you down and we're going to have a conversation about appropriate pre-Gate behavior!"
"The bird started it!"
You're laughing so hard you can't breathe, tears streaming down your face, and Riddle uses your moment of complete weakness to finally wrench himself out of your grip.
"Your colleagues are a danger to themselves and others," Riddle says, straightening his jacket with sharp, angry little movements like the fabric has personally insulted his entire family.
"Bold words from the guy who almost committed homicide because someone wore the wrong accessories to work," you point out, wiping your eyes.
"That was about maintaining critical safety standards in life-threatening combat environments, not engaging in psychological warfare with urban wildlife," Riddle snaps, but his face is doing the tomato thing again and it's glorious.
"Right, right, totally different situations. One is about protocol and the other is about beef with a pigeon. Very serious distinction."
"It is a serious distinction!"
The briefing starts and the vibe in the room immediately shifts from "casual Bureau morning energy" to "oh fuck we're all going to die and also someone needs to update their will."
The briefing officer, a tired-looking woman who's clearly stopped caring about things like joy and hope, pulls up a display showing three Gates that opened simultaneously across the city. Just looking at the visualization makes your stomach drop like you're on a roller coaster designed by someone who got rejected from engineering school. Two SS-ranked Gates and one SSS.
That's not a coincidence. That's a coordinated attack, which means something with a brain is organizing this nightmare, and that's a thought you're going to shove into a mental box labeled "absolutely fucking not, deal with literally never."
The SSS Gate has Malleus and another SSS-ranker dealing with what the initial field report describes as "a dragon made of smaller dragons, which are themselves made of even smaller dragons, it's fractals all the way down and we're pretty sure it's violating several laws of physics and possibly mathematics."
Someone in the back mutters "that's bullshit" and the briefing officer just gives them a look that says she agrees but she's not paid enough to care.
The other SS Gate has most of your remaining heavy hitters. Which means this Gate—the SS-ranked nightmare that's apparently themed like a serial killer took an interior design course on Pinterest and got really into mood boards—gets the bargain bin team. The clearance rack. The "please god let this work" squad. Seven Espers, most of them S-rank and A-ranks, one B-rank guy who looks like he's actively having a spiritual crisis about his career choices, and the strategy is beautifully simple: don't die, keep the monsters inside the Gate, and wait for the big guns to finish their fractal dragon situation and come save everyone's ass.
It's a terrible plan. Everyone knows it's a terrible plan. The briefing officer knows it's a terrible plan. She's presenting it anyway because it's the only plan they've got.
You watch Riddle's face as she explains the hold-and-defend strategy, and you can literally see him doing complex calculus in his head. His eyes are moving back and forth like he's reading invisible spreadsheets floating in the air, probably calculating optimal formation patterns and energy expenditure rates and the statistical likelihood of catastrophic failure and horrible death for everyone involved.
When the briefing wraps and everyone starts moving toward the gear stations with the enthusiasm of people walking toward their own executions, you intercept Riddle before he can launch into whatever elaborate pre-Gate preparation ritual he definitely has planned that probably involves a checklist and three different kinds of meditation.
"I'll wait for you," you say, and you put your whole entire heart into it, channeling every romance novel you've ever read, going for the full period drama energy. You're basically doing the thing where the lover stands on the balcony watching their gentleman caller ride off to war while clutching a handkerchief and looking wistfully at the horizon as sad violin music plays.
Riddle just stares at you with an expression so flat you could use his face as a level for hanging pictures. "Yes. That is the job you are literally employed to perform. That is your job description. Waiting for Espers is the thing you do for money."
"You're supposed to say something romantic back," you complain, letting your arms drop. "Like 'I'll return to you' or 'wait for me, my darling' or 'here, take this locket with my miniature portrait in it' or literally anything that isn't a clinical description of standard workplace procedures."
"I'm about to enter a high-risk combat situation in an alternate dimension filled with hostile entities. My current priorities are ranked as follows: survive, keep my team alive, prevent Gate collapse, don't let the monsters escape into the civilian population. Romance is not on that list. Romance isn't even in the same building as that list. Romance is in a completely different city."
"Wow, okay, so where do I rank on this list of priorities?"
"You're part of the 'prevent Gate collapse' category because if the Gate collapses you'll also die due to proximity, so you're less of a distinct priority and more of a consequence I'm trying to avoid as part of a broader strategic objective."
You put a hand over your heart like you've been shot. "I'm breaking up with you."
"We're not dating."
"I'm breaking up with us conceptually. This whole thing. Whatever this is. I'm seeing other Espers. You'll receive the official paperwork in three to five business days via certified mail."
Riddle looks like he's trying to calculate whether you're joking or if this is a legitimate HR incident he needs to be worried about, and while his brain is buffering like a computer from 1997 trying to load a webpage, you dig into your jacket pocket and pull out a single-use stabilizer pack. You lob it at his chest and he catches it on pure reflex, staring down at it like you've just handed him a live grenade with the pin already pulled.
"I don't need this," he says, frowning at the stabilizer like it's personally offended him and also his entire bloodline. "I'm perfectly capable of managing my energy reserves without emergency supplies. I've been doing this job for years. I know my limits."
Here's the thing. Logically, rationally, Riddle is probably right. He's an A-rank Esper who's been doing this job long enough that he probably knows his energy capacity better than he knows his own birthday.
But there's this feeling in your gut, this weird animal instinct that you've learned to trust because the last time you ignored it an Esper almost died and you had to fill out so much incident paperwork that you're still having nightmares about it six months later where you wake up in a cold sweat screaming about form 27-B. Your raccoon brain is currently losing its entire shit, rattling the bars of its cage and screeching like a smoke alarm at three in the morning.
"Take it anyway," you say. "Consider it a good luck charm. A friendship bracelet. A token of my esteem and also my crippling anxiety. Whatever narrative helps you accept my heartfelt gift without having a medical emergency about it."
"It's not a gift, it's standard-issue emergency equipment from the supply closet that you're wasting on someone who doesn't need it when there are other people who might actually require it in a genuine emergency situation."
"Counterpoint: I don't care, and also you're wrong, and also I'm going to stand here arguing with you until you accept it so you might as well just take it now and save us both time."
You reach up and ruffle his hair so aggressively that it sticks up in approximately seven different directions and he looks like he just stuck his finger directly into an electrical socket.
"Stop—would you stop touching my hair!" Riddle bats your hands away with the kind of urgency usually reserved for swatting away wasps, already trying desperately to smooth everything back down into its usual perfect arrangement. "What is your obsession with destroying my appearance?! Do you have some kind of psychological compulsion?!"
"I think you look cute like this," you say, grinning at him like the absolute menace you are. "Very approachable. Really softens your whole 'I'm about to lecture’ energy. You should consider making this your everyday look. Really embrace it."
"I'm going lecture you right now if you don't stop," Riddle threatens, but even as he's saying it he's pocketing the stabilizer, which you're absolutely counting as a victory.
"Go fight monsters," you say, still grinning at him with way too much enthusiasm for someone who's about to watch people walk into a death dimension. "Try not to die. It would really fuck up my afternoon if I had to break in a new Esper. The paperwork alone would be a nightmare."
"You've known me for approximately forty-eight hours."
"Forty-eight of the best hours of my life. Truly transformative. I'm a changed person. I've seen the light. I've been born again. Now go before you're late to your own Gate and have to file a report about it."
Riddle gives you one last look that's somewhere between exasperated and something that might be fondness if you turned your head sideways and squinted really hard, and then he turns and heads toward the staging area where the other Espers are gathering and looking at their gear with the enthusiasm of people about to walk into a wood chipper.
You watch him go, trying to ignore the weird uncomfortable feeling in your chest that feels suspiciously like concern, which is ridiculous because you don't do concern. You do chaos and poor decisions and sometimes you eat cereal for dinner while standing at the counter in your underwear. Concern is for people who have their lives together and have calendars.
You've been a Guide through a lot of high-ranked Gates. It comes with the territory of being SS-ranked and also being one of the only SS-ranked Guides who hasn't bonded yet, which makes you the emergency contact number they call when everything's on fire and someone needs to Guide an Esper who's two seconds away from a complete psychological meltdown.
You've waited outside Gates that took nine hours. You've Guided Espers who came out physically intact but missing pieces of themselves that never really grew back, like their sense of humor or their ability to sleep through the night. You know how this works. You understand the rhythm of it, the way time moves weird when you're waiting for someone to come back from a dimension that's actively trying to kill them in creative ways.
But when you hit hour two and the energy readings from inside the Gate start doing things that make the monitoring equipment start making sounds like a car alarm having a seizure, you start feeling something that might be worry.
Three simultaneous SS+ Gates is bad. It's "maybe call your mom and tell her you love her" bad. It's "check if your will is up to date" bad. It's "consider getting right with your god" bad.
It means something is targeting this city specifically, stretching your resources so thin you can practically see through them like they're made of tissue paper and wishful thinking.
Malleus is still tied up with the fractal dragon situation, which according to the latest comms update has somehow gotten exponentially worse in ways the field team can't adequately explain because they keep getting distracted by the geometric impossibilities happening in front of them. One guy tried to describe it and just ended up making sounds.
The other SS team is drowning in their own nightmare scenario. The seven Espers in this Gate are holding the line completely alone, and from the energy readings that are coming through, the line is looking less like an actual line and more like a polite suggestion that nobody's following.
At hour three, Espers start stumbling out of the Gate.
You feel relief crash over you like a wave for about twelve seconds before you start counting heads. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. You count again because maybe you miscounted, maybe your brain is malfunctioning from stress and caffeine withdrawal and that weird protein bar you ate for breakfast that tasted like cardboard and lies. Still six. You count a third time while your heart starts doing something deeply concerning in your chest that feels like it's trying to escape through your ribs. Six Espers. Definitely six. You count their faces to make sure. Six different faces.
Riddle's face is not among them.
Riddle isn't out.
You start pacing, and pacing turns into wearing an actual trench in the floor, and you're staring at the Gate entrance like you can personally drag him through it using only the power of mounting panic and increasingly unhinged thoughts.
The other Guides are swarming their Espers like very concerned bees, doing emergency field Guiding sessions, everyone tangled up in the desperate work of keeping people from destabilizing and exploding like human fireworks, and you're just standing there vibrating with anxiety and the dawning realization that something is very fucking wrong.
The last Esper stumbles out and it's Trey's Esper, and you're on them so fast they doesn't even have time to register that they're back in normal reality and not currently fighting for their life. You grab them by the shoulders hard enough that you're definitely going to leave marks.
"Where's Riddle?" you demand, and your voice comes out higher and tighter than you intended.
They blinks at you slowly, their eyes unfocused like they're still half in the Gate, their face covered in something that's either blood or Gate residue or some kind of fucked-up combination of both that you don't want to think about too hard. "Oh man, Riddle? Yeah no, he uh, he made us all leave."
Your heart does something that feels like it's trying to climb out of your throat and escape through your mouth. "He fucking what."
"Said protocol requires at least one Esper to maintain Gate stability until backup arrives or core destruction is achieved. Quoted the whole regulation at us, like the full text, word for word, with the amendment numbers and everything, while he was literally beheading something that looked like if a filing cabinet gained sentience and chose violence and also had way too many teeth."
They sway dangerously and Trey materializes out of nowhere to catch them, already starting to pull him away toward a quiet corner for emergency Guiding. "He did the whole commander voice thing. Very authoritative. Kinda hot if you're into that, which I personally—"
"Not the time," Trey says, sounding like he's aged even more in the last three hours.
"I'm just saying, the man has presence—"
"I love you, but please stop talking."
You stare at the Gate entrance. You look at all the Guides who are currently occupied with keeping their Espers from having catastrophic energy meltdowns. You look at the equipment rack where they keep Esper gear that's definitely not rated for Guides and comes with warning labels that specifically say "NOT FOR GUIDES" in big red letters.
Your brain, the logical part that occasionally prevents you from making decisions that end with you in the hospital or in front of HR, says this is a terrible idea.
Your brain says Guides are squishy support units who die if you look at them wrong inside a Gate environment. Your brain says you have no business going in there, that you'll probably die, that this violates approximately forty-seven different safety protocols and possibly several laws. Your brain is listing all the reasons this is bad.
Your brain can go fuck itself because Riddle is in there alone and that's unacceptable on every possible level.
"Fuck it, we ball," you mutter to yourself, and you're already moving toward the gear rack with purpose, grabbing a reinforced jacket that's at least three sizes too big for you and makes you look like a child playing dress-up in their dad's clothes.
You grab a helmet that doesn't fit right and keeps sliding down over your eyes. Gloves that are meant for someone with hands the size of dinner plates. An oxygen canister because Gates are famous for having atmospheres that are less "air you can breathe" and more "exotic poisons we haven't even discovered yet."
"Wait, what are you doing?" one of the rookie Guides yelps at you, his voice cracking with panic.
"Something that's either gonna get me a promotion or get me super fired, and honestly I'm gonna find out which one in real time!" you yell back, already jogging toward the Gate entrance because if you slow down you'll think about it and if you think about it you'll stop.
"You can't go in there, you're a Guide! You'll die! You'll die immediately!" someone screams, and they sound genuinely distressed like they're watching you jump off a bridge.
"Sounds like a skill issue!" you yell back, and then you're at the Gate entrance and you don't let yourself think because thinking will just give your brain time to catch up and tackle you, so you step through.
The transition feels like being shoved through a wall made of angry bees.
The air on the other side hits you like a physical slap from a very large hand, thick and wet and wrong in ways you don't have adjectives for.
It tastes like copper and burnt plastic and something else you can't identify and don't want to. The atmosphere is humid in a way that feels personally malicious, like it's humid specifically to make you uncomfortable, and breathing it is like trying to inhale soup through a coffee stirrer.
The theme of this Gate is what you can only describe as "what if a serial killer got really into arts and crafts and had unlimited funding and also several untreated personality disorders and access to a Pinterest board."
The walls are covered in polaroid pictures that you're actively choosing not to look at because you value your ability to sleep tonight and possibly ever again. The floor is sticky with something you're absolutely refusing to identify or even think about too hard. There's screaming coming from somewhere that might be a sound effect or might be the walls themselves or might be the Gate having feelings. The lighting flickers and you'll never admit it to anyone else but yoy flinch.
You spot Riddle in what looks like the world's most nightmarish kitchen where you'd find a cookbook titled "To Serve Man," and he looks absolutely terrible. His jacket looks like he fought a paper shredder and lost.
There's blood on his face, his hands, his clothes, streaked through his hair, and you can't tell how much of it is his and that thought makes your stomach drop. He's swaying on his feet between kills like a boxer in round twelve, and you can see his energy from here, flickering and sputtering like a candle in a hurricane that's about to go out. He's been solo-tanking an SS-ranked Gate for three fucking hours with no support, and it shows in every movement he makes.
You march right up to him and grab him by the ear.
Riddle spins around and his eyes go so wide you're genuinely worried they're going to fall right out of his skull and roll across the floor. He stares at you for a solid five seconds like his brain is trying to process whether you're real or if he's hallucinating from exhaustion or if you're some new type of monster that's shaped like his worst nightmare come to life.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN HERE?!" he screams, and his voice cracks so hard on the last word that it practically shatters.
"WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE I'M DOING?!" you scream back, already dragging him by the ear toward the exit like you're hauling a misbehaving child out of a grocery store. "I'M MAKING TERRIBLE DECISIONS! IT'S MY HOBBY!"
A monster that looks like someone asked the question "what if a chandelier could murder you" drops from the ceiling directly above your head with terrible intent, and Riddle annihilates it with a card without even looking away from you, his eyes still locked on your face in absolute horror and disbelief.
"You can't be in here! Guides aren't designed for Gate environments! Your energy isn't defensive! You don't have combat training! You're going to die! You're going to die and it's going to be my fault and I'm going to have to file an incident report about how you died and—"
"OH SO YOU'RE WORRIED ABOUT THE PAPERWORK?!" you shriek, yanking harder on his ear hard enough that he has to stumble along with you or lose the ear entirely.
"NO, I'M WORRIED ABOUT YOU BEING DEAD, YOU ABSOLUTE—"
"THEN STOP BEING A SELF-SACRIFICING IDIOT AND GET THE FUCK OUT OF THIS NIGHTMARE KITCHEN!"
"I can't! Protocol clearly states that a Gate must maintain a minimum of one Esper presence until backup arrival or successful core destruction occurs, otherwise the destabilization risk increases by forty-seven percent according to the 2018 comprehensive study by Dr. Stupidface and his team and—"
"I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR FUCKING PROTOCOLS! I DON'T CARE ABOUT DR. STUPIDFACE! I DON'T CARE ABOUT THE TWENTY-WHATEVER STUDY! STOP TRYING TO DIE FOR BUREAUCRACY!"
"It's not bureaucracy, it's evidence-based safety regulations that exist specifically because people died when we didn't have them!" Riddle is killing monsters on complete autopilot while arguing with you, destroying things left and right without even looking, and it would be impressive if you weren't currently having a stress-induced breakdown.
"PEOPLE ARE ALSO GONNA DIE IF YOU COLLAPSE FROM BEING A STUBBORN MORON WITH A DEATH WISH!"
"That's not how statistics work!"
"I'M GOING TO MAKE YOU A STATISTIC IF YOU DON'T SHUT UP AND MOVE YOUR LEGS!"
"You can't threaten me into abandoning my post!"
"WATCH ME!"
You drag him through the Gate entrance using pure adrenaline and spite as fuel, and the second you're back in normal reality you have to immediately slam the oxygen canister to your face and take the most desperate, grateful breath of your entire life.
The air tastes like absolute heaven. Clean and wonderful. Doesn't taste like a crime scene had a baby with a chemical spill.
You're gulping air like you've been drowning for the last ten minutes, which you kind of have been.
The second you have enough oxygen in your system to not immediately pass out, you grab Riddle's hand and start Guiding him right there in the middle of the staging area.
You don't bother finding privacy or a chair or any of the things you're supposed to do according to proper procedure. He needs stabilization right fucking now and you're going to give it to him even if you have to do it in front of the entire Bureau and God himself and also his mom.
Your legs have completely given up on the concept of supporting your body weight and you have to lean your entire existence against Riddle to stay even remotely straight. He catches you automatically, his arms coming up to hold you steady, and you're basically using him as a structural support beam while you work on fixing his disaster of an energy system.
His energy pathways are comprehensively fucked. They're choppy and depleted and there are spots where his energy is literally coming apart at the seams from overuse, fraying like a rope that's been supporting too much weight for too long.
You start smoothing everything out with as much focus as you can muster, and the whole time you're muttering into his shoulder because you're too exhausted to have a filter anymore and your brain-to-mouth pipeline has completely shut down.
"I'm stealing all your candy," you say while untangling a knot that feels like it's been there for six months. "Every single piece. The fancy chocolate you hide in your desk drawer like I don't know it's there. The cookies in the tin with the flowers on it. That weird expensive imported shit you keep locked up like it's the nuclear codes. I'm taking everything brcause it's your fault for making me worry about you."
Riddle tries to start a lecture and you can feel him taking a breath to launch into it. "You violated approximately fifty separate safety regulations by entering that Gate without authorization. You could have been killed. The liability issues alone—"
You pull back just enough to glare at him with as much intensity as you can manage while being held up entirely by his arms, and you must look absolutely feral because he actually stops talking mid-sentence with his mouth still open.
"Stop being stupid and I'll stop walking into Gates," you say, and your voice comes out flat and deadly serious in a way that surprises even you. "That's the deal. You stop trying to martyr yourself for the sake of protocols that are meant to be guidelines and not fucking suicide pacts, and I'll stop doing dumb shit to drag you out. Deal?"
Riddle opens his mouth and closes it. Opens it again like a fish out of water. He looks like he's trying to find a loophole in your logic, searching for some kind of technicality he can exploit, and coming up completely empty-handed.
"That's not how safety regulations are intended to function in a professional environment," he says, but his voice is weak and you can tell his heart isn't in it.
"I don't care. Deal?"
He stares at you for a long moment while something shifts in his expression, something that looks almost like surrender. "...Deal."
"Fantastic," you say, and you finish smoothing out his energy until you're confident he won't spontaneously combust or have his pathways collapse on him in the next few hours. You pat his chest weakly with the hand that isn't actively holding onto him for dear life. "Now you have to give me a piggyback ride to your car and drive me back to the Bureau because my legs have stopped working. This is your penance for making me commit approximately forty-seven felonies."
"I'm not giving you a—" Riddle is sputtering again, cycling through about seven different emotions in the span of three seconds, but you're already trying to climb onto his back like a very determined and uncoordinated koala bear.
Riddle protests and cites workplace conduct policies and makes sputtering sounds about professional boundaries and appropriate behavior, but he still crouches down enough for you to climb on his back properly. He stands up with a sound that might be a sigh or might be his soul leaving his body in real time, adjusting his grip on your legs to make sure you don't fall off.
"This is the single most humiliating thing that's ever happened to me in my entire career," he mutters as he starts walking toward the parking lot, and you can feel how tense his shoulders are.
"This is what you get for being a hero without consulting me first," you say into his shoulder, letting your eyes close because you're so tired you might actually pass out. "I could've been your emotional support. Your cheerleader. Your guy in the chair. Instead I had to be your emergency extraction team, which is a way worse role and doesn't even come with a cool jacket."
"You're completely insane. You're genuinely unhinged. You need professional help."
"Yeah, but you're stuck with me now. I'm like a curse but prettier."
Riddle doesn't respond to that, just keeps walking while carrying you, and you're pretty sure you can feel him doing that thing where he's trying not to smile and failing miserably at it.
You're absolutely stealing every single piece of candy he owns. Every chocolate. Every cookie. That fancy imported shit. All of it. He's earned it.
You did, in fact, end up Gate poisoned.
In your defense, you didn't notice at the time. In your defense, you were running on approximately four percent battery life, pure adrenaline, and the specific flavor of stupid bravery that only activates when someone you've known for forty-eight hours is doing something catastrophically self-sacrificing inside a murder dimension. In your defense, you had bigger things to worry about, like staying upright and remembering to breathe.
None of this is actually a defense. You're Gate poisoned. You did this to yourself.
It announces itself about fifteen minutes into the car ride back to the Bureau, while Riddle is driving with the rigid focus of someone taking their third driving test after failing the first two.
One second you're sitting in the passenger seat feeling vaguely terrible, and the next second your stomach decides it's going to attempt a full escape from your body via your mouth.
"Pull over," you say.
Riddle glances at you. "Why?"
"Pull over right now or I'm going to redecorate your upholstery and you're going to be furious about it."
He pulls over so fast the tires make a sound like a small scream. You barely get the door open in time, and then you're throwing up on the side of the road, which is already bad enough, except you look down and the situation is demonstrably worse than normal vomiting because it's glowing. Faintly. Greenish. Like something that should not be happening to a human person.
Riddle doesn't say anything. You can feel him sitting in the driver's seat, completely silent, probably staring at the glowing situation with an expression you'd rather not see.
You straighten up. "Okay. I'm good. Let's go."
"Are you sure you're—"
"I'm great. Fantastic. Never better. Let's go."
You make it exactly eleven more minutes before you have to ask him to pull over again. This time the glowing situation is more pronounced and Riddle gets out of the car while you're still suffering, walks around to your side with the kind of calm that suggests he's so angry he's looped back around to eerily quiet, and just stands there next to the open door with his arms crossed, waiting for you to finish.
"I'm fine," you say preemptively, wiping your mouth.
"You're glowing," Riddle says.
"I've always had a radiant personality."
"That's Gate poisoning."
"Could be vitamin deficiency."
"It could absolutely not be vitamin deficiency." He reaches into the car and physically extracts you from the seat like you're a particularly stubborn splinter. "We're going to Medical."
"Riddle, genuinely, I don't need—"
"You walked into an SS-ranked Gate as a Guide and breathed unfiltered Gate atmosphere for eight minutes and your vomit is currently bioluminescent," Riddle says, and his voice has this quality like a rubber band stretched so tight it's one more millimeter from snapping. "You're going to Medical if I have to carry you there."
"You just barely piggybacked me to your car an hour ago, you don't have the upper body credibility to make that threat."
"I carried you just fine," he mutters, and he sounds offended, which is the funniest thing that's happened all day.
You're going to tease him about that later. You add it to the mental list.
The Bureau's medical center has this specific smell, like sorrow, and the doctor on duty is a woman who you've interacted with enough times that she has a specific expression reserved just for you. It's the expression of someone who has made peace with the fact that you're going to keep showing up in their medical center, probably forever, doing progressively more elaborate things to yourself.
She takes one look at you and Riddle and then takes one look at the faint green glow you're emitting and just closes her eyes for a moment. Like she's loading patience.
"What did they do this time," she says, and it's not a question.
She opens her eyes and looks at you with an expression that's doing a lot of heavy lifting between "professional medical concern" and "genuine personal disappointment." "Are you trying to die? Is this a pattern? Do I need to refer you to someone?"
"I think I'm fine," you say.
She examines you with brisk efficiency because she's had to deal with you before and has therefore stopped giving you the benefit of the doubt on anything. She shines things in your eyes, takes your vitals, makes sounds like a person reading a very bad restaurant review. Riddle stands beside her and explains what happened, and you watch his face while he talks.
His voice is controlled. His posture is controlled. His face is controlled. His hands are clenched at his sides so hard his knuckles have gone white, which is the only thing that's not controlled, and you watch him doing it while he listens to the doctor explain the full scope of what you've done to yourself.
The look on his face when she gets to the part about Gate toxicity complications is something you're going to think about for a long time.
"Well," the doctor says, snapping off her gloves and giving you the medical equivalent of a disappointed shrug, "the good news is you're not going to die. The bad news is we need to keep you here for a full week on detox protocol and monitoring, because Gate contamination at this exposure level has a small but genuinely unpleasant chance of causing systemic changes if we don't flush it properly."
"Systemic changes," you repeat. "Like, could I get wings? Because I personally wouldn't mind wings. Wings would be incredibly practical. I could fly to work. Save on gas. Never be late again."
"You're not going to get wings," the doctor says.
"You sound very certain about that."
"I am very certain about that."
"Okay but what if—"
"You're not getting wings," Riddle says sharply, and his voice comes out weird, like he's going for annoyed but landing somewhere else entirely.
"You don't know that," you say.
"I know that. Stop trying to find an upside to being Gate poisoned and let the doctor finish talking."
The doctor finishes talking. You're hooked up to a detox setup that involves multiple bags of fluid in colors that you're pretty sure fluids aren't supposed to be in nature, and the whole thing hits you about ten minutes later like a truck that was specifically designed to make you drowsy.
Your limbs go heavy. Your thoughts go soft around the edges. The world gets warm and fuzzy in a way that would be pleasant if you weren't aware that it's because your body is fighting off Gate contamination.
Riddle sits down in the chair next to your bed.
You wait for him to say something. He doesn't. He just sits there with his arms crossed and his jaw set, looking at a fixed point somewhere around the middle distance like he's trying to solve an equation he can't figure out.
"You can leave," you offer, your voice already getting drowsy. "I'm fine. I'm just gonna sleep."
"I'm aware," Riddle says.
"That wasn't an invitation to stay."
"I'm aware," he says again, and he doesn't move even slightly.
You look at him for a moment. He looks at the wall. The detox drugs are wrapping around your brain like a weighted blanket made of exhaustion and mild sedatives, and you're too far gone to push it, too tired to needle him about the look on his face or the way his hands were clenched or the fact that he's sitting in a medical center chair that looks deeply uncomfortable and shows no signs of leaving.
You fall asleep.
When you wake up, the chair is empty.
Visiting hours are over. You stare at the ceiling for a while and try to identify the feeling in your chest, and you can't quite get there, so you eat some of the Jello a nurse brought and go back to sleep.
The next day, Riddle comes back.
You wake up from a nap to find him sitting in the chair next to your bed with a small white box in his hands. He places it on the table beside you and then sits back with his arms crossed, resuming his apparent mission of staring at the middle distance and refusing to speak.
You open the box and find a strawberry tart inside that is so professionally made it looks like it belongs in a pastry magazine. It's definitely from somewhere that clearly charges too much money for small beautiful things, and it's perfect.
"You brought me a tart," you say, and your voice comes out soft from sleep.
Riddle doesn't respond.
"Are you not talking to me?"
Nothing.
"Is this a punishment? You're giving me the silent treatment?"
He adjusts the position of his crossed arms slightly, which you're interpreting as a yes.
"Okay," you say, and you eat the tart, which is genuinely one of the best things you've eaten in your entire life and you're furious about it. "This is incredible by the way. This is a ten out of ten tart. This tart has no business being this good."
Riddle's mouth does something very small that isn't quite a smile and disappears before it can properly form.
This is how the whole week goes.
Every single day, Riddle shows up during visiting hours carrying something from what is clearly a very good and very expensive bakery. Tarts. Mini pies. Little cookies that look like they were assembled by someone who went to school specifically to make tiny perfect cookies. Pastries that have multiple components and probably took three hours to make. He puts whatever he's brought on the table, sits in the chair, doesn't say a single word, and stays until visiting hours are over.
It's absolutely insane. It's genuinely one of the strangest things anyone has ever done in your vicinity. It's also, if you're being completely honest with yourself, making you feel a specific way that you're not going to examine too closely while you're still being drip-fed detox fluids while occasionally glowing.
On the last day, you get visitors.
Trey shows up first with his Esper in tow, and then a few of your other Guide friends filter in, and suddenly your medical room has too many people in it and at least one person is commenting on the absolute spread of baked goods on your bedside table.
"This is insane," Trey's Esper says, picking up a small pie and examining it like evidence. "Someone really went to town on you. Who brought all of this?"
"Riddle," you say, and Riddle, who is in his chair doing his daily impression of a very well-dressed statue, goes very still.
They slowly turn to look at Riddle. Riddle looks back at them with an expression that very clearly says don't.
Trey's Esper has never once in his life responded to don't.
"Every day?" they ask, their eyes lighting up like a pyromaniac who's just found an unattended fireworks display and a lighter.
"Every single day," you confirm, and you watch Riddle's jaw set.
"Riddle," Trey says, in the tone of someone about to perform a public service, "isn't it true that you've also been refusing Gate deployments all week? Because I heard from a very reliable source who works in HR that you've been citing personal commitments every single time they tried to send you out, and that they're starting to think you have a second family somewhere."
The room goes quiet.
You turn to look at Riddle.
Riddle is staring at Trey with an expression of pure, undiluted betrayal, like Trey has just set fire to something that was very important to him.
"Shut your mouth," Riddle says, very quietly.
"He's been here every day," Trey's Esper continues, absolutely not shutting their mouth, clearly delighted by the chaos they're generating, "sitting in that chair, bringing baked goods, turning down deployment after deployment, basically standing vigil like—"
"I said shut your mouth," Riddle says, standing up from his chair so fast it nearly tips over.
"—like a very uptight guardian angel who expresses love through pastry—"
"I'M LEAVING," Riddle announces, and he's already heading for the door with the energy of someone trying to outrun a natural disaster.
"YOU HAVE TO DRIVE ME HOME," you call after him, because you're getting discharged today and he's your ride and also because the look on his face is the single funniest thing you've ever seen. "I'M BEING DISCHARGED TODAY, RIDDLE. RIDDLE. YOU'RE MY RIDE."
He stops in the doorway. His back is to you. His shoulders are somewhere around his ears.
"I'll wait by the car," he says stiffly, and he's gone before anyone can say anything else.
The room is silent for a second and then Trey's Esper absolutely loses it, doubled over laughing, and a couple of the others follow.
Trey is looking at you with the fond exhaustion of a man who's seen too much. "Take it easy on him," he says, which means he absolutely knows you're not going to.
"I will be perfectly kind and reasonable," you say, which is a lie so transparent that Trey doesn't even bother responding to it, just shakes his head and starts helping you gather your things.
The discharge process takes forever because there are forms about Gate exposure and forms about liability and forms that seem to exist purely to make you sign your name a lot, and by the time you actually get out to the parking lot you half expect Riddle to have given up and gone home.
He's leaning against his car with his arms crossed and his face carefully neutral, like he's been standing there composing himself for the last forty-five minutes and has mostly succeeded.
You start walking toward him and he watches you, and you notice almost immediately that his hand does this thing. You're still a little wobbly on your feet, the last dregs of the detox making your legs feel like they're made of that weird foam that's too soft to be useful, and Riddle's hand comes up slightly like he's going to reach out and steady you.
Then he stops himself. His hand just hovers there in the air behind your back, several inches away from actually touching you, committed to neither helping nor not helping, like a man having a full philosophical crisis about whether physical contact is something he's allowed to offer.
You watch this happen and feel something in your chest do a complicated maneuver.
You reach back and take his hand and lace your fingers through his.
The noise Riddle makes is very small and very quickly suppressed, but you heard it. His whole face goes red from the collarbones up like someone slowly filling a thermometer and he looks straight ahead and says absolutely nothing.
But he doesn't pull away.
He walks you to the passenger side, his hand in yours, warm and a little tense and definitely not letting go, and he only releases your hand when you're at the car door and need both hands to get in. He walks back around to the driver's side and gets in while trying very hard to act normal when he's currently not normal even a little bit.
The drive to your apartment is quiet in a way that feels different from the silence in the medical room this week. That silence was loaded with things he wasn't saying. This silence is softer and warmee. The radio is on low and you watch the city go past through the window and occasionally sneak looks at him when you think he's focused on the road.
He catches you looking, twice. Both times he just looks back at the road. Both times his ears go pink.
He parks in front of your building and then—and this is new, this is a Riddle development—gets out and walks you to your door like you're going to dissolve into the hallway carpet if left alone for thirty consecutive seconds. Which is honestly not that unlikely given your week.
You reach your door and turn around to face him, and he's standing there with his hands back in his pockets, looking at a point slightly above your head like it's got something more interesting on it than your face.
"Riddle," you say.
"You should rest," he says, still looking at the point above your head. "Properly. Not just because you're bored. And eat something that isn't pastry."
"Look at me," you say.
He looks at you, which he clearly immediately regrets because you're grinning at him in a way that probably looks unhinged.
"Thank you," you say. "For all the tarts. And the pies. And every single baked good. And for sitting in that extremely uncomfortable chair every single day. And for the hand holding. And for turning down deployments to come stand vigil over my glowing ass."
"I wasn't standing vigil," Riddle says, and the words have no conviction behind them whatsoever.
"Sure," you say generously.
"Take care of yourself," he says, and it comes out stiff and formal, like he's trying to cover something softer underneath, and it's the first full sentence he's said to you since the Gate incident and you're going to absolutely lose your mind about it privately later.
You lean forward and kiss his cheek.
His eyes go wide, and his mouth does something that isn't quite any expression you've seen before, and the red that floods his face is so fast and so complete that it's almost impressive, like someone hit a button.
He stands there, frozen, for a full four seconds.
"Thanks for everything," you say brightly. "You're a good Esper. Very dedicated. Very attentive. Would recommend."
"I—you—" Riddle opens and closes his mouth several times, cycling through partial sentences that don't go anywhere. He turns on his heel and walks away so fast it's almost a jog, and you watch him go with the grin of someone who's just won a competition they invented.
He makes it about ten feet down the hall before he turns back and says, very crisply, "Don't be late tomorrow. 9:00 a.m."
"Is that a threat or a date?" you call after him.
"It's a SCHEDULE!" he yells, his voice cracking on the last word, and then he's gone around the corner so fast you swear you can see cartoon speed lines.
You stand at your door for a moment, grinning at the empty hallway.
Then you go inside, collapse onto your couch, and stare at the ceiling thinking about warm hands and a voice saying take care like it meant something more than the words.
"I'm so normal about this," you say out loud to no one.
You are not normal about this even a little bit.
You come back to work the next day at 9:46 AM, which is only forty-six minutes late, which is frankly a miracle given that you spent the better part of last week being slowly detoxed from Gate poisoning and your body is still operating at about sixty-three percent capacity.
You're counting it as a win. You're counting it as a triumph, actually. You're counting it as evidence of your incredible dedication to this job and to the people in it.
The first Guide you pass in the hallway takes one look at you, puts both hands on your shoulders, and says, "I respect you so much and I need you to never do that again."
"Good morning to you too," you say.
"My Esper," they continue, their eyes haunted, "has started asking me if I would walk into a Gate for him. Unprompted. While we were eating breakfast. He looked me dead in the eyes over his cereal and asked if I loved him enough to get Gate poisoned." They tighten their grip on your shoulders. "I need you to understand what you've done."
"I think that's actually really sweet," you say.
"It's not sweet, it's scary," they say, and lets you go and walks away looking like someone who hasn't slept properly since last week.
You continue down the hallway and the pattern repeats itself with minor variations. Another Guide stops you to say he respects your commitment to your Esper but he's personally not interested in Gate poisoning himself and could you please stop setting precedents.
A third one pulls you aside to say his Esper cried about the story, which he might have found touching except they cried while they were in the middle of a Guiding session and he lost focus and it set them both back twenty minutes.
A fourth one doesn't say anything at all, just gives you a very long look that contains a full paragraph of feelings, and keeps walking.
By the time you reach the briefing room at approximately 10:00 AM, you've been stopped many times, and you're both touched and deeply aware that you've caused a ripple effect in the Guide community that's going to take a while to settle.
You walk in and immediately locate Riddle, who is sitting at the table looking like he's been waiting and calculating exactly how late you are with the precision of someone who's been doing angry mental arithmetic since 9:01. You slide into the seat next to him liek you're right on time.
He turns to you immediately. "You're late," he says, in a whisper that is so aggressive it's basically just talking.
"I was sick recently," you say pleasantly. "Very ill, actually. Quite the ordeal. My whole body hurt. My legs especially. Really rough week."
"You were discharged yesterday with a clean bill of health—"
"Sore, Riddle. I was so sore. You know how I got sick, right? Do you remember how that happened? It was a whole thing. I saved someone's life and then I got Gate poisoned. Very traumatic. My legs are still recovering. It's a miracle I'm here at all, honestly, if you think about—"
He makes a frustrated grunt that comes from somewhere deep in his chest, the sound of a man swallowing all the things he wants to say, and it very clearly promises that he's filing all of this away to deploy at a more strategically convenient moment. But he also closes his mouth and turns back toward the front of the room.
You pat his hand. He stares at your hand on his. You remove your hand. He looks back at the front of the room. His ears are pink.
The briefing officer clicks on the projector, and you settle in expecting the usual Gate updates and deployment logistics.
What comes up on the screen instead makes you sit up very straight.
The PowerPoint presentation is titled, in bold letters that suggest someone made this with genuine distress: PROFESSIONAL BOUNDARIES AND YOU: A REMINDER FOR THE MODERN ESPER-GUIDE PAIRING.
There's clip art. It's a sad clip art man standing very far away from another sad clip art man with a large red X over an arrow between them. Someone put genuine effort into this clip art choice and you respect the commitment.
"As many of you are aware," the briefing officer starts, with the tone of someone who did not get paid enough for this, "this branch has seen an unprecedented rate of Esper-Guide permanent bonding over the past several months."
She clicks to the next slide. It's a bar graph. The bar for this branch is so dramatically taller than every other branch that it looks like a mistake, like someone misread the scale.
"The rate of permanent bonds formed at this branch," she continues, "is currently sitting at four hundred percent above the national average, which is," she pauses, "statistically speaking, not normal."
Someone in the back coughs.
"The issue," she clicks to the next slide, which is a diagram of two Esper-Guide pairs with large arrows indicating that they can no longer be deployed separately, "is that permanently bonded pairs cannot be assigned to different areas in times of crisis. They experience significant distress when separated for extended operational periods, which creates deployment complications that are, to be frank, becoming a logistical nightmare."
You press your lips together very hard.
The next slide says ROMANCE: IS IT WORTH IT? in large letters, under which someone has put a stock photo of a person looking thoughtfully into the distance and another stock photo of a very organized filing cabinet, presented as apparently equivalent options.
Riddle's posture is very correct beside you. He's watching the presentation with his hands folded on the table.
"Romance," the briefing officer says, and she says it like she's reading a word from a foreign language textbook, "while a natural human experience, is not necessary for a fulfilling professional life. Many individuals find deep satisfaction in their careers without pursuing romantic entanglements with their direct professional partners."
The next slide is a bullet point list titled FULFILLING ALTERNATIVES TO ROMANTIC BONDING and the first bullet point is A PRODUCTIVE HOBBY.
"Do you have a productive hobby?" you whisper to Riddle.
"Stop talking," Riddle whispers back.
"I'm just asking. The slide says it's fulfilling."
"I will report you to HR."
"HR is currently busy making this presentation. You'll have to wait."
"I will wait," he hisses.
The second bullet point is PROFESSIONAL ACHIEVEMENT.
"You've got that one covered," you whisper to Riddle. "You're very professionally achieved. Gold star. You don't need romance. You've got protocol."
"I'm going to move seats," Riddle whispers, and his jaw is doing something very tight.
"You won't though," you whisper back, and he doesn't.
The briefing officer clicks to the next slide, which is titled A NOTE ON VIGILS and contains a short paragraph about how remaining on vigil for a partner outside your assigned duties is, while emotionally understandable, operationally disruptive and should be avoided in future situations.
You feel Riddle go completely still next to you.
You don't look at him. You stare at the slide for a long moment. Then you whisper, "She's talking about you specifically."
"She's talking generally," Riddle says through his teeth.
"She put it in the presentation specifically."
"It's a general policy update."
"Someone had to make a slide about vigils because of you specifically."
"I will move seats," he repeats, with slightly more desperation than before.
"You won't," you repeat, and you're right, because he's still sitting right next to you, rigid as a fence post and pink from the ears down.
The next slide is titled YOU ARE ENOUGH: A SELF-SUFFICIENCY REMINDER and contains an extremely unhinged graphic of a person hugging themselves that looks like it was sourced from a 2009 motivational website.
"This," you whisper to Riddle, gesturing at the graphic, "is what we're supposed to do instead of bonding. According to HR."
Riddle makes a sound that is, despite everything, despite all his training and his professional bearing and his deeply held commitment to appropriate conduct in workplace settings, a snort.
It's a tiny snort, barely audible, immediately suppressed, and he looks absolutely mortified the moment it escapes him. His hand comes up to cover his mouth like he can physically put it back. He stares very hard at the presentation. His ears are red.
You feel a grin spread across your face so wide it almost hurts. You look back at the presentation and say absolutely nothing, because sometimes the most powerful move is to let a man sit with the horror of having snorted in a professional setting because of you.
The briefing officer reaches the final slide, which just says PLEASE MAKE BETTER CHOICES and then ends. There's a silence in the room where about thirty Guides and Espers sit with that for a moment.
"Any questions?" the briefing officer asks, with the energy of someone who's praying there aren't.
You raise your hand.
"No," the briefing officer says, and she hasn't even looked at you yet, she just already knows.
You put your hand down.
"Good," she says. "Dismissed.”
Realizations of this magnitude should happen during thunderstorms or at least during something more dramatic than an afternoon while you're eating a mediocre sandwich at your desk and doing absolutely nothing of note.
But there it is. Sudden and clear and slightly horrifying.
You're attached.
Not just attached. Genuinely, specifically, alarmingly in love with one Riddle Rosehearts, A-rank Esper, walking rulebook, owner of an impressive collection of expensive pastries that he pretends are for himself.
You've become attached to the guy who tried to take your head off with a playing card the first time you met him and who you still think about as one of the best first impressions anyone has ever made on you.
You do a mental audit, because this feels like the kind of thing that deserves evidence.
You seek him out in the mornings. Not because you have to or because there's a Guiding session scheduled, but just because you walk past the cafeteria and think oh, Riddle's probably getting his coffee right now, and then you go get coffee you didn't want just to stand next to him and make comments about whatever he's reading until he puts it down and talks to you instead. You've been doing this for weeks. You didn't notice you were doing it until right now.
During breaks, you find reasons to go wherever he is. Sometimes it's real reasons. Sometimes the reason is that you invented a reason. Once the reason was that you wanted to tell him about a dream you had about a Gate shaped like an IKEA, which was not a reason at all, and he listened to the whole thing anyway while pretending to be annoyed, and the IKEA Gate dream went on for seven minutes.
After rough Gates, you almost always end up at dinner together that's never planned. It always just happens because neither of you is ready to stop talking yet, even though technically the talking mostly looks like you saying unhinged things and Riddle responding to them with increasing reluctance to pretend he doesn't find you funny.
So. That's where you are. You're attached. You've gone and gotten attached to the one Esper in this entire facility who has filed more HR complaints than anyone else in Bureau history.
The problem, you think, finishing your mediocre sandwich and staring at the wall, is you.
You're not delusional about yourself. You're aware of what you are. Unhinged raccoon energy is not a vibe that translates universally, and it's already sent approximately six Espers fleeing in the other direction during the year you've been at this Bureau. You walk into Gates you have no business walking into. You ruffle people's hair without warning. Your HR file is probably thicker than some people's novels. You once told an SSS-ranked Esper that his aura looked like it was going through a breakup, and you stand by it, but still.
The point is that Riddle likes rules. Riddle likes order and schedules and things that make sense and can be documented properly. Riddle's entire personality is a very organized filing cabinet of correct behavior, and you are a raccoon who got into the filing cabinet and rearranged everything into a system that only makes sense to you.
If you want to bag this Esper—and you have apparently decided that you do, the sandwich has made this very clear to you—you're going to have to be Normal.
You haven't been Normal since you were a teenager in high school trying very hard to fit in and failing in ways that were character-building in retrospect but deeply unpleasant at the time.
You put on Normal like an uncomfortable coat.
The next morning, you arrive on time. Actual on time. Not 9:46, not 9:31, not the one legendary occasion last month where you arrived at 10:23 and told Riddle you'd been there since nine and simply hadn't been visible.
You arrive at 8:58 and you walk into the briefing room and you find Riddle and you smile at him, a real smile that you've specifically calibrated to be pleasant and not unhinged.
Riddle looks at you like you've grown a second head.
"Good morning," you say, and your voice comes out so measured and normal that it almost sounds like someone else.
"Good morning?" Riddle asks slowly, like he's trying to identify whether the thing in front of him is actually what it appears to be or if it's a trap.
You sit down next to him and look at the front of the room and wait for the briefing to start, and you don't say anything else, and you don't lean on him, and you don't ruffle his hair, and you don't tell him that his energy feels like a very intense symphony today which is a compliment you'd preparedlast week and are now setting aside.
Riddle keeps glancing at you throughout the briefing.
You look at the front of the room and take notes.
At lunch, you sit across from him in the cafeteria and eat your food and make small, normal conversation about normal things, like the Gate reports from this morning and whether the cafeteria's soup has gotten worse recently.
You don't lean across the table. You don't steal food off his plate. You don't tell him that watching him eat a sandwich with that level of structural precision is honestly one of the most fascinating things you've ever seen in your life, which is something you were going to say last week before you started being Normal.
Riddle eats his sandwich with increasing discomfort, glancing at you between bites.
"Are you alright?" he asks.
"I'm great," you say, and you smile pleasantly, and Riddle looks at you for a long moment like you're a math problem he can't solve, and then goes back to his sandwich.
By the end of the day, you're exhausted. Being Normal is genuinely the most tiring thing you've ever done, including the Gate poisoning incident, which at least had the upside of being interesting. You're packing up your office in the early evening, everyone else clearing out around you, and you're thinking about going home and being feral in private where no one can see you, when there's a knock on your office door.
"Come in," you call.
The door opens and it's Riddle.
You blink at him. "Hey. Did we have something scheduled?"
"No," he says, stepping inside with his hands behind his back, and he's got this look on his face like he's come with a specific purpose and he's going to see it through regardless of how it goes. He closes the door behind him. "Are you alright?"
"I'm fine," you say, turning back to your bag and continuing to pack.
"You've been acting strangely today."
"I've been acting normally today."
"That's what's strange," Riddle says, and there's something in his voice that makes you pause. "You didn't say anything this morning. You sat through the entire briefing without making a single comment. At lunch you talked about soup."
"Soup is a valid topic of conversation."
"You once told me during lunch that you thought the Gates might be the universe's way of coping with anxiety and then argued the point for twenty-five minutes when I disagreed," Riddle says. "Today you talked about soup. Something is wrong."
You open your mouth to say something Normal and dismiss it, and then you make the mistake of looking back at him.
He's watching you with this expression, careful and intent, and his eyebrows are doing something worried, and you feel something in your chest go sideways.
"I'm okay," you say, and you mean it to come out light and easy but it comes out softer than that.
Riddle looks at you for another moment, and then he crosses the room, and before you've fully processed that he's moving, he brings both hands down on your desk and cages you in, leaning forward with an expression that's so genuinely concerned it's doing things to your ability to think clearly.
"Are you sick again?" he asks, and the question comes out urgent in a way he probably didn't intend. "Because if you're sick again and you didn't tell anyone I swear I will—"
"I'm not sick," you say.
"Then what happened to you?" He's close enough that you can see the specific shade of his eyes, close enough that when he continues talking it's almost sharp with something that might be frustration but doesn't smell like it. "Did something happen? Did you get another Esper to go harass? Did someone actually manage to—"
And that's when it clicks.
It lands on you with the weight and precision of a piano falling from a great height, right there in your own office with your bag half-packed and the evening light coming through the window at a slant.
This Esper. This specific, infuriating, rule-citing, tart-bringing Esper who you thought was interesting and then realized was fascinating and then somehow, at some point, started specifically wanting to impress—
He likes you.
He came to your office at the end of the day because something was wrong with you and he noticed and it bothered him enough to do something about it. He's been glancing at you all day because the absence of your chaos registered like a missing tooth. He came here and put his hands on your desk and leaned in close and asked if you were sick again in a voice that had panic under it.
Riddle Rosehearts, who has filed more HR complaints than anyone in Bureau history, who tried to take your head off on day one, who gave you the silent treatment for a week and showed up with pastries every single day—
He came to find you.
You lean in.
The remaining distance between you goes from several inches to almost nothing, and Riddle's eyes go a little wide but he doesn't move, doesn't pull back, just stays exactly where he is with his hands on your desk.
"What if I did get another Esper to harass?" you say, and your voice comes out low and easy and absolutely nothing like Normal.
Riddle opens his mouth and what comes out is, "Bureau regulations section twelve, subsection four clearly states that Guides are expected to maintain their assigned partnerships and are not permitted to provide Guiding services to—"
He's saying it almost against your lips. The rulebook, recited from memory, in a voice that's lost about seventy percent of its structural integrity. His hands are still on the desk but they've gone tense in a way that has nothing to do with anger.
You close the remaining distance and kiss him.
For approximately half a second, nothing happens, and then Riddle kisses you back with an enthusiasm that is frankly very surprising from someone who just finished citing subsection four at you, his hands scrambling off the desk to grab onto you instead, pulling you in like you're something he's been trying not to reach for for a while now.
You laugh against his mouth, and you feel him make a sound that's not quite a laugh and not quite anything else, and you think about the bar graph from HR's presentation, the one where this branch's bonded pairs were so far above average the bar looked like a mistake.
You think about how you're about to become another notch on that graph.
Riddle pulls back just far enough to look at you, and his face is red and his hair is slightly less perfect than it was five minutes ago and his expression is doing something complicated that keeps threatening to become a smile.
"This is going to be a problem," he says.
"Massive problem," you agree, still grinning.
"HR is going to—"
"Update the graph, yeah."
He looks at you for another second, and then he does something you've been cataloging and storing and thinking about since approximately the first week you met him. He smiles. A real one, small and a little reluctant and completely genuine, and it lands on his face like it belongs there.
"You're the worst," he says.
"Yeah," you say. "But I'm you're mine now."
The HR department of this Bureau occupies a corner that always smells like printer toner and the specific brand of institutional despair that comes from spending your career managing people who regularly fight monsters for a living and have the emotional regulation to match.
The motivational posters are still there. "Synergy." "Excellence Through Collaboration." The little stress brain that says "Keep Calm and Synergize" which you're pretty sure your HR rep has squeezed so many times it's developed PTSD.
You walk in at 9:00 AM, which is early for you, because some occasions demand punctuality and this is absolutely one of them.
Riddle walks in beside you, his posture immaculate, his jacket perfectly pressed, his face doing the thing where it's trying very hard to be neutral and only partially succeeding because the tips of his ears are red and have been red since the day you bonded and you're not sure they've fully recovered.
You have the look of absolute victory. You're not trying to hide it. You've never been less interested in hiding anything in your entire life.
The HR rep looks up from her computer when you walk in, and you watch the exact moment she takes in the two of you together, side by side, you with your shit-eating grin and Riddle with his red ears, and you watch her face do the full journey. Recognition. Comprehension. Denial. Grief.
She closes her eyes.
"Don't," she says, and her voice has the quality of someone who's been through a war. "Whatever you're about to say, don't say it. I'm asking you, as a person, as a human being who has done nothing to deserve this, please don't say it."
You take a breath.
Her eye twitches preemptively.
"We're permanently bonded," you announce, with the full radiant energy of someone setting off fireworks indoors, "and cannot be separated for operational deployment under Bureau regulation, which I'm told is very important and should be respected."
You notice Riddle go slightly redder beside you at the sound of regulations being used by you, which is a bonus you hadn't fully anticipated and which makes this moment even better than you planned.
The HR rep makes a sound that falls in the category of sounds that humans make when they've exceeded their processing capacity and their brain is buffering, like a computer fan spinning very fast before the whole thing shuts down.
She picks up the stress brain from her desk and squeezes it. She squeezes it for a long time. She squeezes it with the focused intention of someone who is using it as a proxy for squeezing the universe.
"You," she says finally, opening her eyes and pointing at you, "have been the subject of more incident reports, HR complaints, liability waivers, and what I can only describe as interpretive medical documentation than anyone else in this Bureau's history."
"Thank you," you say.
"That wasn't a compliment."
She turns to Riddle. "And you," she says, and her voice shifts into a different register, the register of someone who has watched a slow-motion catastrophe develop over several months and is now watching it reach its inevitable conclusion, "have filed more formal complaints about Guide conduct than anyone in Bureau history. You filed three complaints about your previous Guide for, and I'm reading from the document here, 'insufficient commitment to regulatory frameworks and a troubling disregard for section nine subsection two of the Gate Operations Manual.'"
"That's accurate," Riddle says, with complete dignity.
"And now," she says, setting the document down and looking at the two of you with an expression that contains seven different emotions and none of them are happy, "you're telling me that you've permanently bonded with the Guide who walked into an SS-ranked Gate unequipped and unprotected and came out glowing."
"They also," Riddle says, and then he stops, and you look at him, "saved my life. So."
There's a pause.
"So," the HR rep repeats.
"So," Riddle confirms, with the air of someone who's prepared to defend this position in writing if necessary.
The HR rep looks at the two of you for a long moment. Then she opens her desk drawer, takes out what appears to be a much larger stress ball than the brain one, shaped like a sun with a little smiley face on it, and begins squeezing that one instead.
"I have to update the graph," she says, mostly to herself.
"I know," you say sympathetically.
"The PowerPoint I made specifically to prevent this from happening," she continues, "the one with the clip art and the bullet points about productive hobbies—"
"The self-hugging graphic was a really nice touch," you offer.
"—apparently did nothing," she finishes, as though you hadn't spoken.
"In fairness," you say, "the filing cabinet was not a compelling alternative to him specifically. Have you seen him? He brought me tarts every day for a week. The filing cabinet wasn't going to do that."
Riddle makes a sound beside you that might be him swallowing a smile and might be him swallowing a complaint, you genuinely cannot tell anymore and that's one of your favorite things about him.
The HR rep pulls out a form from her drawer like she's been doing this so often she keeps the forms within reach now. She slides it across the desk.
"Permanent bond declaration," she says. "Sign here, here, and initial here. You'll be assigned as a permanent pair, which means joint deployment scheduling, shared operational briefings, and," she pauses and looks at you specifically, "a shared incident report file, which given your individual histories is going to be the most alarming document in this building."
"Great," you say, picking up the pen.
"This is not great," she says.
You sign. You pass the pen to Riddle, and he takes it, and he signs too. You watch him sign and feel something warm and slightly stupid settle in your chest.
He caps the pen and slides the form back across the desk.
The HR rep picks it up and looks at it for a moment, the two signatures sitting there next to each other, and then she puts it in a folder and puts the folder in her filing cabinet and closes the drawer.
"The graph," she says, to no one in particular.
"Fourth entry this month?" you ask.
"Fifth," she says. "Trey's pair finalized last night"
"He didn't tell me," you say, genuinely delighted. "I have so much to text him."
"Please leave my office," the HR rep says, and she's already turning back to her like she's trying to pretend she works in a normal building where normal things happen.
You stand up. Riddle stands up beside you with perfect posture, straightening his jacket with those small precise movements that you've catalogued and memorized and will probably find endearing until you're very old.
"Thank you," you tell the HR rep sincerely.
"I want you to know," she says, without turning around, "that I'm going to make the new slide specifically about you two. It's going to have your names on it. People are going to study it in onboarding."
"I'm honored," you say.
"It's not meant to be an honor."
"I know," you say, and you follow Riddle out the door.
In the hallway, Riddle exhales, long and slow, and you look at him and he looks at you and he's got that expression again, the one that keeps threatening to become a smile and then becomes one anyway before he can stop himself.
"I hate you," he says, which means something entirely different now than it would have meant three months ago, and you both know it.
"No you don't," you say.
"No," he agrees, after a moment, and his ears are red again. "I don't."
You take his hand as you walk down the hallway, mostly because you can now, and he lets you, mostly because he wants to, and somewhere on the behind you, your HR rep is opening a new PowerPoint and beginning to type, with the grim determination of someone who knows they're losing a war but intends to document it thoroughly anyway.
The graph gets updated by end of day.
Life, as it turns out, goes on.
This is not a profound observation.But there's something about the specific part of your life now that feels worth noting, if only because you spent a long time being the only unbonded Guide in your friend group and eating cereal for dinner alone in your apartment and thinking that maybe your personality was simply too much of a thing for anyone to want to be around consistently.
Turns out you just needed to find someone whose personality was also too much of a thing. You needed someone whose too-much-ness happened to fit against your too-much-ness like two completely unhinged puzzle pieces that somehow complete the same picture.
Who could have predicted it would be the guy who cited a subsection at you while you were trying to kiss him.
Actually, you could have predicted that. That was very predictable. You were just too busy being delighted by him to connect the dots.
So life goes on, and it goes like this.
You ragebait him when the mood strikes, which is frequently, because the mood is almost always striking.
But somewhere in the last few weeks something has shifted in the calibration of your chaos, and you've started to notice that the things you do have drifted from things that make him flustered and irritated toward things that make him try very hard not to smile and fail completely.
Last week you left a small carved wooden duck on his desk with a note that said "office support animal, bureau regulation, do not remove" and he spent the entire morning pretending he hadn't noticed it while the wooden duck sat there on his desk and watched him work, and when you walked past his office at noon it had been moved to a slightly more prominent position near his monitor.
The duck stays.
A few days after the Normal Incident, as you've started thinking of your brief and deeply uncomfortable foray into being a regulated human being, Riddle finds you during a break and stands next to you with his arms crossed and says, looking at a point just past your shoulder, "You don't have to do that."
"Do what?" you say.
"The." He makes a gesture that encompasses, apparently, your entire personality. "The being different. The Normal, as you call it. The coming on time and not saying things and eating lunch without—" He stops and looks at his shoes for a moment and then looks back up.
"It's unsettling," he says, which is the Riddle way of saying it worried me and I didn't like it and please don't do it again. "You're." Another pause, and his jaw works slightly like he's chewing through the words to get to the right ones. "You're fine. As you are. The way you actually are."
You look at him for a second. He's looking somewhere slightly to the left of your face with the expression of someone who has said a vulnerable thing and is bracing for the consequences.
"Riddle," you say.
"Don't make it weird," he says immediately.
"I'm going to make it a little weird."
"Please don't."
"That's one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me," you tell him, and you mean it, and you can see the moment he realizes you mean it because something in his face goes soft before he gets it back under control.
"It was an observation," he says, with absolutely zero conviction.
"Sure," you say.
"It was."
"Of course."
"Stop smiling at me like that."
"I can't help it," you say, which is true. "It's my face. It does this. You just said you like my face as it is, so."
Riddle makes the frustrated grunt that you've come to understand means you've won but he's not going to admit it, and he goes back to his office, and you watch him go and think that you are absolutely going to tease him about this for the rest of your natural life and he's going to let you, which is its own kind of love language.
So you stay yourself, which is easy because you've never successfully been anyone else, and he stays himself, which means that before every Gate he finds you and tells you at least five times, with escalating intensity, not to step into the Gate under any circumstances.
It's become a ritual.
"Don't step into the Gate," he says at the staging area, not looking at you, checking his gear with practiced efficiency.
"I make no promises," you say, which is your ritual response.
"I mean it." He checks his jacket. "Under no circumstances. No matter what happens inside. You stay out here."
"Riddle, I hear your words."
"That's not a promise."
"It's an acknowledgment."
"I need a promise."
"I promise," you say, "to think very hard about not stepping into the Gate before I make any decisions."
He turns to look at you with an expression that says he knows exactly what you're doing. "That's not—"
"It's the best you're getting," you say pleasantly.
He makes the grunt. He goes into the Gate. Every time.
And every time he comes out, you're there, and these days the Guiding sessions have evolved into something that would probably make the Bureau's original Guiding manual raise several concerned eyebrows. There's just supposed to be hand contact.
What actually happens is that Riddle comes out of the Gate and walks directly toward you and you open your arms and he steps into them and you Guide him like that, your arms around him and his face somewhere in the vicinity of your shoulder, his energy unwinding slowly like something that's been held too tight finally getting to let go.
It started gradually, the distance between you closing in increments so small you barely noticed until one day you looked down and realized you were just hugging your Esper while you worked and he was hugging you back.
You're very pleased about this development.
He's never commented on it, which is his way of saying he's very pleased about it too.
And then you go home.
Home is, at this point, a somewhat flexible concept. Technically you have an apartment. It has your furniture in it and your plants that are mostly alive and your inexplicable collection of things you've acquired and never thrown away. Technically Riddle has his own place, which is neat and organized and smells like expensive tea and has exactly the right number of things in it and not one more.
But also, sometimes home is his passenger seat on the drive back from a late Gate, the city sliding past the windows while you tell him about something stupid that happened during your morning briefing and he responds with increasing reluctance to pretend he's not listening.
Sometimes home is his kitchen at nine PM eating whatever he's made, which is always good because Riddle approaches cooking the same way he approaches everything, with complete commitment and a frankly unnecessary level of skill, while you sit on the counter and provide commentary that he keeps telling you to stop providing.
Sometimes home is your couch, the two of you on opposite ends with the TV on, and the opposite ends becoming less opposite as the night goes on until at some point you look down and he's fallen asleep with his head somewhere near your shoulder and you're not sure when that happened.
You have a sneaking suspicion he feels the same way. That home has become a portable thing for him too, something he carries around in the general vicinity of wherever you are.
You base this suspicion on evidence. Specifically, the way he tracks you in a room without appearing to. The way he redirects conversations toward you without making it obvious. The way he falls asleep on your couch with such complete ease, which for Riddle, who once told you he has trouble sleeping in unfamiliar places because his brain doesn't quiet down, means something considerable.
You haven't said any of this out loud to him. You don't have to. This is one of the things you've learned about Riddle, that he communicates in a dialect of small precise actions that you've been translating with increasing fluency. A tart on your desk on a bad day. Showing up at your office door when something's off. Telling you you're fine as you are while looking studiously at his shoes.
You've also gotten better at talking back in the same language. Leaving wooden ducks in prominent positions. Making no promises but always, always being there when he comes out. Letting the car rides go long even when you're tired because neither of you wants to be the one to say goodnight.
It's a good life. You think about the version of you from a few months ago sitting in the break room, slamming your face on the table because you were the only unbonded Guide in the friend group, shaking the Malleus Guide by the shoulders and demanding to know how to get someone with spice.
You got someone with spice. You got someone with spice and rules and a bark that's worse than his bite, which is still pretty bad, and a tendency to show up when it matters in ways that he'd never describe as showing up because he'd call it protocol compliance or operational necessity.
You got Riddle, who tried to take your head off with a playing card on day one and then brought you strawberry tarts every day for a week when you were sick.
Worth it, you think, watching him fall asleep on your couch with his shoes still on because he always insists he's not tired and then immediately proves himself wrong, his face smoothed out and quiet in a way it rarely is when he's awake.
You reach over and, very carefully, ruffle his hair.
He doesn't wake up. But the corner of his mouth moves, just slightly, in a way that makes you think he might not be completely asleep.
You grin at the ceiling.
Yeah. This is your life now.
You're very okay with this.
You are, without question, the worst thing that has ever happened to Riddle Rosehearts.
He wants to be clear about that. He wants that established upfront, on the record, documented properly with the correct date and time and filed in triplicate. The worst thing.
Worse than the B-rank Gate that collapsed on him in his second year and he had to fight his way out of with a sprained wrist and no backup. Worse than the time his previous Guide filed a counter-complaint against his complaint and HR had to mediate for three hours. Worse than every single professional inconvenience he's ever experienced stacked on top of each other in a tower of suffering.
You are worse than all of it.
And he is so completely, catastrophically, irreversibly gone on you that it's been keeping him up at night for months.
But let's start at the beginning, because Riddle is a person who believes in proper chronology and also because the beginning is important for understanding how thoroughly you dismantled every single thing he thought he knew about himself.
Riddle's relationship with Guides has historically been complicated, which is a polite way of saying it's been a disaster.
He knows he's difficult. He's not delusional about it. He has standards, and his standards are high, and his standards exist because people get hurt when standards aren't maintained and he refuses to be responsible for that. His previous Guides had all, in various ways, failed to understand this. They thought he was being difficult for the sake of it. They thought his insistence on protocol was a personality flaw to be managed rather than a feature of someone who genuinely, deeply cared about everyone coming home alive.
So they left. One by one. He filed the complaints because the complaints were warranted and he stands by that, and they left because apparently basic operational standards were too much to ask, and Riddle ended up cycling through four Guides in two months, which was a record, and which HR was very unhappy about, and which Riddle was also unhappy about but would not admit because admitting it felt like conceding something he wasn't ready to concede.
He was alone. He was fine with being alone. He'd always been fine with being alone.
And then HR sent him you.
He meets you for the first time near the vending machines, which is not a location he'd have chosen for a significant life event, but apparently the universe doesn't ask.
He's in the middle of a very legitimate and entirely necessary confrontation with a Guide who's been running what can only be described as a documentation blog about his Esper's combat techniques, which is a clear violation of Bureau operational security policies and also deeply undignified, and he's mid-citation when an arm appears from nowhere and drops around his neck.
He starts making sounds that are not quite words yet because his brain is trying to process the fact that a stranger has just grabbed him and is now, inexplicably, agreeing with him. A stranger who appeared from nowhere and is nodding along with his regulatory citations like they're personally invested, and who is now winking at him, and who smells faintly like coffee and Redbull, and who is dragging him down the hallway before he's fully understood what's happening.
"Hi, I'm your new Guid—"
A playing card leaves his hand.
He doesn't remember making the decision to throw it. His body just did it on his behalf, which is embarrassing, because the card goes past your face close enough to move your hair and you don't flinch. You just turn and look at the card embedded in the wall, and then turn back to him, and you're grinning.
You're grinning.
Riddle has made grown adults cry with less. He once made a Gate monster retreat with his tone alone. And you're standing there looking at the card that just nearly removed your nose and you're grinning at him like he's just done something delightful.
He doesn't know what to do with that. He goes home that night and lies on his ceiling and stares at his bed and tries to figure out what to do with that.
He comes up empty.
The next day he shows up at your office for Guiding and then you're just. Normal. You sit beside him and ask proper intake questions and when you take his hand to start Guiding, you wink at him, and he's about to say something about it, but then you actually start and he forgets what he was going to say because.
His energy has been a mess for two weeks. He knew it was a mess. He'd been managing it, compensating for it, running at reduced capacity and refusing to acknowledge what that meant. But the moment you start Guiding him, the moment your energy starts moving through his pathways, it's like every tangled awful thing he's been carrying starts to loosen. Like someone found all the knots and started undoing them one by one with patient careful hands.
He didn't know it could feel like that.
He's had four Guides. Not one of them made it feel like that.
He sits there for over an hour while you work and he can feel his own edges softening, the constant hum of something wrong going quiet for the first time in weeks, and he stares at his own hands and tries to understand why his eyes are doing something embarrassing.
When it's done, he thanks you stiffly, because he's Riddle and stiffly is the only register available to him when he's feeling something he can't categorize. You immediately ask him for coffee. He immediately scoffs. He comes back with tea because you just spent an hour fixing his insides and coffee would be bad for your recovery and that's just logic, that's just practical thinking, that has nothing to do with anything.
You ruffle his hair, and he grumbles, and he walks back to his office and sits at his desk and stares at nothing for a while.
He thinks: this is going to be a problem.
He is correct.
Here is something Riddle has never admitted to anyone and will take to his grave unless circumstances force it out of him: he has always been difficult to like.
He knows this. He's known it since he was a child when his exacting nature was already fully formed and already making other children uncomfortable and already making him eat lunch alone because nobody wanted to sit with the kid who'd report you for running in the hallways. He learned early that being correct was often indistinguishable from being unpleasant, and that the way he cared about things—intensely, totally, without knowing how to modulate it—made people tired.
He accommodated this. He built his life around it. If people were going to find him difficult, he would at least ensure that his difficulty was in service of something real.
What he did not accommodate for, because how could he have, was you.
You, who walked into his professional orbit and immediately started treating his exactingness like it was funny. And it wasn't dismissive—the way people laughed at him. You genuinely found him entertaining.
You cited his own subsections back at him with a grin like they were inside jokes. You showed up to things he was at and immediately positioned yourself next to him like that was the obvious place to be.
Every event. Every briefing. Every awkward professional gathering where Riddle stood slightly apart from the group because he'd never quite learned the mechanics of casual social presence. You found him every time, and you stayed, and you never once looked around to check if there was someone more interesting to talk to instead.
He noticed. He noticed and he filed it away in the mental drawer he keeps for things he's not ready to examine yet, right next to the folder labeled what you said about his aura on day one that he definitely doesn't think about, and the sub-folder titled the way you laugh when he says something that's technically an insult but you take as a compliment.
He noticed and he told himself it was just your nature. You were like this with everyone. It didn't mean anything specific.
He kept telling himself this right up until the Gate.
The Gate is the part of the story that Riddle cannot get through without his jaw doing something tight and his hands wanting to find something to hold onto.
He was following protocol. He wants to be very clear about that. He stayed inside the Gate because protocol requires a minimum Esper presence until backup or core destruction, and the protocol exists because people died when it wasn't followed, and he has never been able to make himself choose his own safety over a rule that was written in someone else's blood.
He was managing. He was exhausted and he was running on fumes and his energy was doing things that felt concerning, but he was managing, and the backup would come, and he would hold the line until it did.
And then you walked in.
He sees you and his brain just.Stops. Because there's no file in his mental catalogue for this. There's no protocol for the eventuality of his Guide walking into an SS-ranked Gate in gear that doesn't fit, carrying an oxygen canister like a weapon, looking absolutely furious and also somehow like the best thing he's ever seen in his life.
You grab him by the ear.
He should be more offended by that than he is.
He's yelling at you. He can hear himself yelling at you, telling you to get out, telling you that you're going to die, telling you that this is insane and you're insane and you need to leave right now. And you're yelling back, something about terrible decisions being your hobby, and you're dragging him by the ear toward the exit while he's still fighting monsters on autopilot, and somewhere in the middle of all of this there's a feeling in his chest that he doesn't have a name for yet.
He'll find a name for it later. He has a lot of time to find a name for it.
You drag him out. You immediately get on the oxygen canister. You take his hand and start Guiding him right there in the staging area while using him as structural support because your legs have decided to stop working, and he holds you up, and he can feel your energy working through his pathways even while you're clearly running on nothing, and he thinks, with a clarity that's almost violent:
He doesn't want anyone else to do this.
Ever.
The thought arrives fully formed, not as a slow realization but as a fact that's apparently always been true and just needed the right moment to become visible. He doesn't want another Guide's hands on his energy. He doesn't want to come out of a Gate and look for a different face. The idea of it makes something in him recoil so hard it's almost physical.
He wants you. Only you. This specific raccoon who walks into death dimensions for people they've known for two days and makes no promises but means all of them.
He doesn't say any of this. He drives you and you throw up on the side of the road twice, and the glowing situation makes his hands shake in a way he hides by gripping the steering wheel very hard.
The hospital is where it gets bad.
He comes every day because the alternative is not coming every day, and he cannot do that. He cannot sit in his apartment knowing you're in a hospital bed being detoxed from Gate poisoning you got from walking into a Gate for him. He brings things. Tarts and pies and the expensive cookies from the bakery on fourth street because you mentioned once in passing that you liked them and he filed it away in the part of his brain that apparently keeps very detailed records about you specifically.
He doesn't talk to you. He can't, because if he opens his mouth he's not sure what's going to come out, and whatever it is will probably not be appropriate for a medical setting and possibly not for any setting. So he sits. He sits and he watches you sleep and he watches you make faces in your sleep because you're the kind of person who has extremely expressive dreams apparently, and at one point you make a small sound that might be discomfort and he grips the arm of the chair hard enough that the plastic creaks.
He turns down every deployment they offer him.
He does not examine why very carefully because he doesn't need to.
When you get discharged and you're still a little wobbly on your feet and his hand comes up automatically to catch you before his brain has even decided to do it, and then stops because he's not sure if he's allowed, and then you reach back and take his hand—
He doesn't breathe for a moment.
He drives you home. He walks you to your door. He tells you to take care of yourself and the words feel completely inadequate for what they're actually trying to say, and then you kiss his cheek and his brain files immediately offline, all systems down, no one home, please leave a message.
He walks away and gets in his car and sits there for five minutes before he's recovered enough to drive.
Come on time tomorrow, he'd said.
What he meant was: please exist near me tomorrow. Please keep existing. Please don't walk into any more Gates and please be careful, be there.
There's a moment, a specific one, that he keeps coming back to.
It's the day you tried to be Normal.
He noticed immediately. Something was wrong from the second you walked into the briefing room, wrong in a way that bypassed his brain and went straight to his chest. You were on time, which should have been good, and you were quiet, which should have been fine, and you ate lunch across from him and talked about soup, and the whole time he sat there with this low-level alarm going off somewhere in his ribcage that he couldn't silence.
You, being you, had apparently decided that the way to appeal to him was to become someone else entirely. You had looked at yourself—your raccoon self, your chaotic wonderful completely exhausting self—and thought that wasn't right for him. That he needed something different. That you needed to sand yourself down into a shape he'd find more acceptable.
The thought makes something in his chest hurt in a way he doesn't fully have words for, even now.
He'd found you in your office at the end of the day because he couldn't not. He'd put his hands on your desk because his body made that decision before his brain could intervene. And when you'd asked what if you did get another Esper to harass and he'd started citing subsection four at you—which he was doing from muscle memory at that point, his mouth on autopilot while his entire nervous system was doing something completely different—
You kissed him.
And he kissed you back, immediately, with an enthusiasm that would have embarrassed him if he'd had any capacity left for embarrassment, and you laughed against his mouth, and he pulled you closer because there was nowhere else to put his hands that made any sense.
His type, it turns out, was never a thing that existed until you.
So this is his life now.
You ragebait him with the focused intention of a professional, and he takes the bait every single time, and you look so delighted about it that he can't even maintain proper outrage. You leave inexplicable objects on his desk. The duck is still there. He's moved it twice, both times to slightly more prominent positions, and he's not going to examine that.
Before every Gate he tells you no fewer than five times not to walk in. This is non-negotiable. This is the one thing he will not budge on. You make no promises, which means you'll think about it, which means you're probably not going to do it but he can't rule it out, and that uncertainty is both the most frustrating and the most you thing about you.
He comes out of Gates now and goes directly to you, and somewhere in the last few months the professional hand-holding of proper Guiding has evolved into just being held.
He walks out and you open your arms and he steps into them and you work while you hold him, your energy doing the thing that only yours does, smoothing out all the jagged edges, and he can feel the exact moment he stops being an Esper managing his post-Gate state and starts just being a man who's very glad to be in the arms of the love of his life.
He's never going to admit how much he looks forward to it.
He thinks you know anyway.
Home is wherever you are. He's made his peace with this. He's made his peace with the fact that your couch is more comfortable than his even though it's objectively worse furniture, and that your terrible taste in television is something he now has opinions about, and that the cereal you keep in your cabinet that's shaped like little colored rings and has the nutritional value of cardboard has somehow ended up in his cabinet too, right next to his tea.
He has a ring in a drawer in his apartment.
He looks at it sometimes when you're not there. He thinks about the fact that you're already permanently bonded by Bureau documentation, that there's a form with both your signatures sitting in HR's filing cabinet, that you're legally and professionally and in every bureaucratic sense already his.
He wants it on paper that has nothing to do with the Bureau.
He wants it because you went into a Gate for him before you had any obligation to, before there was any rule that said you had to, and you came out glowing and sick and still managing to make jokes about wings. He wants it because you've never once looked at his prickly exterior and decided it was too much work. He wants it because you find him at every event and stay beside him and the version of himself that ate lunch alone has been so thoroughly replaced by the version that has you leaning on his shoulder making unhinged observations about whatever's in front of you that he can't even remember what the loneliness felt like anymore.
He wants it because home is wherever you are and he'd like that to be official.
The ring stays in the drawer.
For now.
He's waiting for the right moment, which for Riddle means he's overplanning it and second-guessing himself and probably going to end up doing it impulsively at a completely random moment, like in the car on the way back from a Gate, or over dinner in your kitchen, or on your terrible couch in front of your terrible television.
Somewhere where it's just the two of you, and it's quiet, and you're being exactly yourself, exactly the raccoon you've always been, exactly the person who ruined his life completely and gave him a better one in its place.
He'll know the moment when it comes.
He hopes you'll say yes.
He thinks you will.
You did promise, after all, to think very hard about not stepping into Gates before making any decisions.
He's choosing to interpret that as a yes to everything.
can u do a bluelock smau where the reader sends spicy pics while their at practice??? do wtv characters u want but pls include bunny, hiori, and ness 🥹
PRACTICE CAN WAIT
in which you send them interesting pics while they're at practice
pairings: hugo x gn! reader ft. his older sister, charles, loki
synopsis: hugo is certain, absolutely and resolutely, that you’re fated to be his. you, on the other hand, don’t share the same sentiments. his attempts to rizz you up, however, seem to convince you otherwise.
contents and warnings: hugo is whipped for you, again, comedy and chaos, fluff, hugo wants your creamy éclair bad and not the ones you find at the patisserie </3, hugo is just honestly a mess, performative hugo, slightly suggestive at the end, Hugo sibling dynamic, Charles and Loki and Hugo interaction, running gag that hugo's teammates think he has a gf besides that it’s gender-neutral, reader is lwk a tsun tsun but then also not...
word count: 4.5k
a/n: after many requests, part two of fictional crush is FINALLY out!!! i gen was so excited to write pathetic hugo bc what is the point of a man if he’s not pathetic, hehe, yesterday i had a dream that i sumbitted my essay 5 mins late and it still haunts me, ALSO SUPER HAPPY HUGO INFORMATION DROPPED OUT IN TIME FOR THIS AHAHHHH, apologies for all the typos… ill fix them when I get the chance, anyway, happy reading <3
main! masterlist
bllk! masterlist
"Marry me."
He shamelessly grabbed your hands over the counter and encased them in his much larger ones. Lashes fluttering with desperation, he pleaded for you to return his love.
"Uh…. WHAT?!"
You blinked, once, and then twice. Even a third time in bewilder as he remained eerily calm, not at all bothered with what had just come out of his mouth.
A deafening silence ensued right after his sudden marriage proposal, the welcomed peace helping you slowly process the warmth of his hands that held yours with ardent determination.
"Marry me, as in—" He tried to repeat his request only to be hurriedly shut down by your growing embarrassment.
"Yes." You interrupted him with a quick nod, only to backtrack immediately when he perked up excitedly at your misleading response. "No— I mean, yes as in I heard what you said, so no need to explain…"
"Ah." His shoulders sagged with the slightest bit of disappointment at the misinterpretation before looking back at you with an expectant gaze. "So then your answer is—?"
"Um— well," you floundered about with jitter under his pointed stare, still in a state of disbelief at his earlier question.
There was no way he said that, right?
You were just hearing things, weren't you?
How could a random man, extremely handsome to boot, with the prettiest and longest lashes you've ever seen, possibly be asking, or rather demanding, that you marry him?
Yeah, there was just no way—
"It's because I didn't go down on one knee when I proposed, right?"
His voice, smooth and adorned with soft charm, effectively snapped you out of your raging thoughts.
"Huh?" A noise of puzzlement left you in tandem at his strange question.
And it wasn't until you felt yourself be pulled forward, arm stretching uncomfortably towards him as your body bent awkwardly over the counter separating you both that you finally understood what he meant.
"Would you please," dropping down on one knee before you, he held your hand with pious gentleness and lifted his reverent gaze up to meets yours.
An aura of flowers and everything nice bloomed around him as he batted his unfairly long lashes at you — the sight resembling a shy maiden professing her undying love to her longtime crush.
"Would you please grant me the great honour of marrying you?"
"…."
"Please." He added sweetly, following his marriage proposal with a chaste kiss over your knuckles.
WHAT??????
Collective gasps of shock resounded from your growing audience, both amused and mortified at his abrupt display of love. You bristled with discomfort at the numerous stares pinning down on the two of you with unconcealed intrigue.
Shit, shit! SHIT!
"Did you see that?! He just proposed!" A woman turned to her friend with a hand clasped over her mouth to restrain her squeal of unbridled excitement.
"Eeeek! Oh my God!" The friend replied with equal amounts of enthusiam, pulling out her phone to record the romantic moment. "Need to take a picture of this!!"
"What a brazen young man! Haha!" An older man swiped the bottom of his nose with fatherly pride. "Balls made of steel, I tell ya!"
No— no! Please don't entertain this!!!
Your desperate wishes went cruelly ignored by the higher being responsible for this absolute nonsense.
"Well?" He tilted his head to side with the patience of a saint, the length of his pink-toned red hair falling softly from the movement.
"It's a no." You answered him through clenched teeth as your muscles twitched with embarrassment.
"Wait, what—" He blinked incredulously, taken aback by your abrupt refusal. "Is it because I don't have a ring— shit, I knew I should've brought one—"
"No!" You declined with fluster, unable to meet the crumbling expression you were sure he would be sporting at your rejection.
"But—"
"No..! Please, just— no…" You stumbled on your words, head hanging low with shame as your ears flushed with heat from the gathered crowd's disapproving looks.
The aura of flowers surrounding him dropped comically, only to be replaced with the suffocating air of his despair.
"But you and I are- we are—"
"Please leave." You muttered curtly, eyes scrunching shut with mild disgust as you continued to avoid his longing gaze.
"…."
And just like that, in an instance, the warmth encasing your hands were no longer there. In its place, the ghost of his touch lingered with a strange, melancholic buzz.
Well, that's that I guess…
Somehow, him backing off that quickly felt a little… anticlimactic?
No, this is what I wanted—!
"Eeep!"
Thoughts cut short, you yelped abruptly when something tugged hard at your arm, the noise of your surprise, shrill and full of fright.
Gaze flying on instinct to identify the suspect, your eyes widened with comical disbelief at the sight of your bangles snagging on the loose thread of his long sleeved sweater — the scene straight out of a Bollywood film!
Oh no—! Heaven forbid!
One look at this and any delusional person would think that this was something pulled out of a romcom! A sign of fate!
Fate's cruel mockery towards you if you had anything to say about it!
"Oh."
Shit.
You begrudgingly lifted your head to meet his equally surprised stare, buckets of sweat accumulating all over you as you mentally prepared yourself for whatever bullshit he was going to spout at you now.
"It's almost like…" his words trailed of dreamily as his eyes glowed with what you could only perceive as dim-witted delusion. "We are fated to—"
"Not another word." You spat distastefully, watching with mild relief as his posture drooped with sadness, the sight of him sulking unbelievably pitiful.
"Oh…"
Despite being freakishly tall and the definition of a giant, he became so small when his shoulders curled in on themselves at your cruel rejection.
It was almost… cute.
Pathetically so.
"Hugo?"
No response followed Charles' call, not a hum of acknowledgment nor a slight nudge of his head, absolutely nothing.
Charles carefully took in the pitiful disposition of his teammate: a hunched back, an expression that looked visibly constipated, and a stormy cloud that seemed to permanently follow him since he came into practice today.
It didn't take a complete genius to figure out what kind of dilemma the usually 'cool' and 'nonchalant' midfielder was going through.
Biting back a cheeky grin, Charles suavely took a seat next to sulking boy, the twinkle of mischief bright and ever glowing in his eyes as he tried to appear discreet.
"Did your girlfriend break up with you or something?"
It was just supposed to be a taunt.
A little joke to lighten up his dampened mood.
What Charles didn't account for, however, was Hugo's brusque honesty.
"Yeah… something like that."
Even when he mumbled those words, quiet and destitute of soul, Charles, along with every other player in the training room, could hear him loud and clear.
Their reaction was immediate, gasps of shock and whispers of condolences for both this mysterious girlfriend and Hugo alike resounding with fervour.
"What?! Hugo's chick broke up with him?!"
"The prettiest boy in all of France?!"
"Well… when you think about his extremely high standards, it's a surprise she didn't break up with sooner…"
"He must be heartbroken…."
"Well, clearly. Just look at the state of him…"
And if Hugo's pitiful behaviour wasn't jaw dropping enough, his next words, chocked with an uncharacteristic sob, broke them all.
"I proposed and got rejected…"
Everybody watched with horror, as tears of sorrow comically poured down the six foot one athlete's face following his admission to a failed confession.
"Oh my God! He's crying! He's actually crying! Someone film this for later!"
"Shit! He can be an asshole at times with his blunt nature, but it breaks my heart to see him cry like that!"
"Don't cry Vivian! There's more sea in the fish!"
"You dumbass! It's more fish in the sea!"
"Oh— is it?"
Amidst the hoots and hollers of the hoodlums around him, Loki, the only one mature despite his young age, approached the midfielder with a consoling smile.
The forward placed a comforting hand over his hunched shoulder and plopped down on the other, unoccupied seat beside Hugo.
"If it isn't fate, then you will both go your separate ways."
Then, with a firm pat to his back, not enough to hurt but enough to snap him back to his senses, Loki gave him words of his unparalleled wisdom.
"And if it is fate, then you will both come together again."
Hugo finally looked up to meet the steady gaze of his captain, comical tears welling up in his usually blank eyes as he took in Loki's air of brilliance. "J-Julian—!"
"Eugh— don't get your snot on me!"
"Heh heh heh! And I have just the thing to make you get her back!" Wrapping his arm around the broad-shouldered athlete, Charles added on with an impish grin.
Hugo's gaze dropped from Loki to the article opened on Charles' phone, the title read: 'wikiHow: Effective Expert-Backed Ways To Rizz Up Your Crush'.
With a phledgmy sniff, he cast Charles a glance that reeked of dubiety. "You really, sniff, you really think I can do this?"
"Well, of course!" Charles was quick to shoot down Hugo's worries, completely ignoring the doubtful look Loki threw at him. "And now, all that's left is courage!"
Hugo nearly cried a river at Charles's clever use of Cyborg 009's best line.
He decided, then and there, that letting their support go to waste was not an option.
"You're here… again."
"Uh— yeah."
Hugo bristled under your cold tone and icy glare, the courage he'd been building up for this exact moment fleeing at the mere sight of your sublime beauty.
Play it cool! Cool! Just like wikiHow said to!
Steeling his resolve once more, his fists clenched tight beside him, a gesture he became accustomed to at the thought of speaking with you — his long time crush.
"What do you want?" Brows furrowed, you cut to the chase.
"To— I mean, an éclair, the chocolate ones. Please." Hugo stumbled on his words, everything that he had mentally planned to say nowhere to be found in the turmoil of his mind.
You eyed him dubiously before backing down when he showed no signs of doing anything stupid again. "Sure…"
"Thank you…"
"Hm," you softened slightly, tense shoulders easing as your guard dropped following his rather docile approach. "Anything else?"
Apologise! Quick! Be normal and then ask for a second chance!
"Uh-! Truthfully, I came here to actually apologise!"
You blinked, momentarily taken aback by his sudden outburst.
For a moment, he was doing so well, acting normal and calm, but now, he wants to remind you of your past horrors?
"Ah, um—" You quickly shrunk under the pressure of his hopeful eyes, praying that no one would be paying attention to your strange interaction. "I have work right now, I can't—"
"I can wait." He urged with what looked to be a pout, his expression the perfect mirror of kicked puppy's. "I don't mind waiting… if- if you don't mind that is…"
"…."
Curse you and your inability to refuse that stupidly pathetic expression of his.
Stupid man and his stupid expression!
Despite your doubts, however, he really did wait for you to finish your shift.
What was once the early hours of the morning was now the late hours of the afternoon.
"So? You wanted to say something?" You pulled the chair across from him and promptly sat down whilst carefully pushing the plate of today's unsold éclairs closer towards him.
He visibly brightened at your kind gesture, the sight of his delight tugging at your heartstrings.
Damn it! Stupid man…
Muttering a grateful thanks, he turned to meet you head one, his gaze unbelievably earnest.
Keep eye contact, remain steady, and now, all that's left is courage!
"I want to apologise for that day— I was too forward and made you uncomfortable, I'm sorry, truly."
You watched him for a moment, the way he twiddled with his thumbs nervously and the way his head hung low with remorse. "Well, as long as you know that…"
"You forgive me?!" He nearly jumped out of his seat from excitement, the tuffs of his hair bouncing in tandem at your forgiveness.
"I suppose…" You immediately regretted your words as you watched a guileful glint form in his dark eyes.
"Then, if— if I may be so shameless, ahem, can we start over again? Please."
For goodness sake! How the hell were you supposed to remain stone cold when his eyes were glittering with so much hope?!
And that pathetic 'please' he just had to add right at the end?!
This stupid man knows what he's doing!
"Eugh— fine…" Begrudgingly, you huffed out your compliance as your ears tinged with heat.
"I'm Vivian Hugo, by the way." He introduced with buzzing enthusiasm, holding his hand out for you to shake.
"Y/n…" You stared at him for moment before accepting his outstretched hand.
"It's nice to meet you, Y/n."
"You too..."
"…."
"Um, are you going to let go?"
"Ah- yes!"
You regretted bringing it up seeing as how he immediately let go of your hand, the warmth of him fading away too quickly for your liking.
An awkward bout of silence ensued following your introductions.
"So," gathering courage, he stuffed a whole éclair into his mouth and blurted out his next thoughts. "What's ywor fwavourite fwood?"
"Uh… I don't have a favourite food in general, but I do like chocolate." You cringed as he spoke with a full mouth, not missing the way his gaze lingered on your hands.
Gulping down dramatically, he continued the conversation. "I like éclairs."
"I… I can see that."
Another bout of awkward silence followed his poor skills of conversing.
"So, Y/n." He started off again, tone trailing off with something that smelled of trouble.
"Hm?"
"What's your type in men?"
"…."
You stood up from the chair, any pity you had left for him now no longer existent. “Get out.”
"What—"
"Out."
"But— I want to adjust my character to match your type so that we can marry—!"
"Now."
"Okay…"
That specific tip from wikiHow did NOT work as planned.
Fuck.
But fortunately for Hugo and unfortunately for you, wikiHow didn't just have one piece of advice regarding the courtship of a crush, but multiple.
If asking you what your type was and becoming said type was out of the question, then it was time to spoil you with gifts.
Clothes, jewellery, hell, even books with actual writing. Hugo didn't know of the word stingy when it came to spending a fortune on you— his self-proclaimed soulmate.
The extra modelling gigs he picked up to fund your presents showed in the many billboards across the streets of France with his face plastered on.
For fuck's sake!
He even agreed to eat avocado for some promotional ad a famous restaurant had to offer him!
Avocado!
That awfully mushy and grass tasting fruit! The thing that felt like it's been eaten, swallowed and puked right back out!
But despite trying to woo you over with his financial assets, you remained unyielding, showing no signs of returning his feelings! If anything, you seemed even more cross with him!
So if monetary means had no affect on you, then surely a couple of sweet words would convince you otherwise, right?
Wrong.
He was wrong.
So wrong it now looked like you no longer wanted anything to do with him — not like you wanted anything to do with him to begin with, but still!
Apparently trying to serenade you with an off tune guitar, a red rose between his teeth whilst monotonously reciting ancient idioms — "your beauty makes the birds fall and the fish drown, hides the moon and shames the flower" — was not the way to go when trying to win over your crush's affection!
It was just— all so fucking hopeless!
So hopeless, that he was actively seeking out the advice of his big sister! The one person he would rather die then swallow his pride for and ask for help.
"What do you want now?" Her tone was disgruntled, sleep etched onto each syllable as she lay on her bed, drenched with fatigue.
"…." He didn't answer her straight away, instead, he chose to linger in her room whilst examining every little trinket she owned, a habit he didn't think he would ever grow out of.
"Vivi?"
"Hm," he finally turned to face her, expression schooled into one of apathy despite the countless worries raging inside of him.
"Ew, you're quiet for once." She muttered, rubbing the sleep off of her eyes as she continued scrolling on her phone. "It's creeping me out."
Give it to his big sister to immediately notice that there was something wrong with him.
And rather than responding to her insult with one of his own, he began flexing his muscles in front of the large mirror across the room before asking her a question that would most definitely send her over the edge.
"Are you still bitchless?"
"What." Her voice was sharp, edged with veiled threat.
"I asked if you're still—"
"You bastard!" Enraged, she wasted no time throwing a cheetah printed pillow in his direction.
Unfortunately for her, however, Hugo was an athlete with incredible reaction time. Evading an airborne object like that was a piece of cake.
"Pfft— missed."
"Ugh! A muscled meathead like you isn't a lady's man anyway!"
"What are you talking about?" He questioned her sarcastically, one arm going around her neck in a painless headlock as the other one went to scruff her reddish toned hair.
"A respectful man who is honest gets the lady's going! That's not— ugh," she tried to push him off of her, something that would've been easier when they were younger, only to huff with defeat when her efforts were in vein. "Get off of me!"
"I'm honest though."
"But you're not respectful!" She pinched the flesh of his arm and then pointed at him to prove her point. "Look at you! Disrespecting your big sister when I was the one who saved you from having to eat the avacados you wouldn't eat when you were younger."
"…." His grip around her weakened as he mulled over her words.
"Plus, you're such a pathetic guy. Simping over that fictional character, yuck."
A respectful man, was it…?
Hugo had inkling of what that could be, perhaps he should change his approach to wooing you altogether.
"Ah-! Vivian, close the door on your way— VIVIAN! I TOLD YOU TO CLOSE THE FUCKING DOOR!"
Something… was wrong.
Something was terribly wrong.
You were convinced, with absolute certainty, that the current Vivian Hugo was a fake, a clone— a fucking skin walker!
Because out of simply nowhere, he changed.
Gone was the pathetically yearning Hugo who showered you in endless affection, the man who tried serenading you by reciting ancient idioms at seven in the fucking morning, the same man who kept the bakery afloat by buying the whole stock of éclairs!
That man— the man you once knew was no more, and now, was replaced with the persona of despicable nonchalance, a stupid tote bag, the bakery's horrible matcha, and that jarringly irritating book he never seemed to be able to put down!
Fuck, as much as you hated to admit it, you missed him— ardently so.
Putting on the best smile you had in you, pearly whites framed with soft lips, your gaze settled on him intensely.
"Do you want to try the new pistachio and dark chocolate filled éclair—?"
"No, I'd like the matcha."
"…."
Matcha? MATCHA???? Seriously?! The same matcha that was ranked the worst here out of all Parisian bakeries?!
What was wrong with him?!
You were butthurt, he never ordered anymore of the éclairs anymore! They were your speciality, something you took great pride in baking! And he was just refusing to have them so he could have the fucking matcha instead?!
"Are you sure you want to have the matcha?" You whispered whilst covering the side of your mouth, voice dropping an octave as you shared the bakery's hushed secret. "I really wouldn't recommend it, pretty sure that stuff is low-grade—"
"Yeah, I'm sure."
"…oh, um… okay."
Yeah, his newfound nonchalance towards you really fucking hurt.
"I'll be with you shortly…"
"Yeah, thanks."
Thanks? Thanks— THAT'S IT???
He used to say thank you whilst holding your hands and gazing up at you like you hung the stars high up in the sky! What the hell was up with these short and curt answers?!
Had you done something to hurt him? Was that why he was suddenly quiet around you?
If that was the case, then you ought to apologise to him!
Turning to face one of your colleagues, you clasped your hands together and gave her your best puppy eyes — hoping the pitiful sight would urge her to keep an eye out on the counter in your stead.
And just as you prayed, she returned the gesture with an encouraging smirk and a thumbs up.
How could she refuse if it meant getting back their generously loyal customer?
With a plate full of éclairs and a racing heart, you made your merry way over to the far table Hugo was sitting at.
"Vivian?" You called out softly, voice smooth and mellifluous. "Can I sit here?"
It took him a good while for him to respond, and when he did, curtly and dismissively, still not looking up from the book that had him rapt with attention, you resisted the urge to curse the living shit out of him out.
"…Sure."
"Thanks— thank you." You plopped down on the chair in front of him, heart hammering from your growing anxiety. "Here, by the way."
He looked up for a brief moment, eyes following the plate of éclairs you kindly decided to give him before they fell back on that stupid book.
"…Thanks."
"Of course…" Your words trailed off pitifully as you watched his attention return to the book of your nightmares.
One moment you were the centre of his attention, the sole being he focused on. And now, because you were too embarrassed to return his affection, you were fighting against a no-named book for first place in the category of his attention.
It was so pathetic.
"You've always got your nose buried in that book," you started off with a casual drawl, hoping he would take the hint and began his usual yapping of its content.
But contrary to your wishes, he played the fool and didn't bother expanding, choosing to fill his mouth with one of the éclairs, something that seemed to do it for you.
"Hmph." Huffing, you turned your head to avoid his gaze as your ears flushed with heat from his lack of interest. "Should've been buried between my legs instead…"
"…Huh, what—"
Now, he decides to finally look up.
"What." You cast him a sideway glance, chin resting on your palm as you guarded his frazzled appearance with a glare.
"Uh- um nothing…" He shook his head with a stammer, quickly returning back to that stupid fucking book again.
Just what the hell was he reading so intently?
"…You reading porn or what?" You sneered, expression contorting with disgust at the implication.
"No…" His response was hesitant and filled with suspiciousness.
"You totally are!" You argued with certainty in your tone as you pointed at him accusingly.
"I'm not, I swear—" Holding the book close to his chest, he tried to keep it out of your reach.
"Let me see then!" You leaned over the table, closing the distance between the two of you as you reached for the book.
"No, wait— Y/n, don't-"
Fuck, how was he supposed to keep the book away from you when you were so damn close to his proximity?!
"I got it! Huh—?" Your victory cheer was cut unfairly short when you opened the book, confusion growing tenfold as you began to peruse its contents. "What's this? An empty book?"
"…." Hugo's shoulders sagged with mortified defeat as you flicked through each page with puzzlement written all over your face.
"You've been reading an empty book this whole time?!"
"I- uh, yeah…"
"What— why?!"
Now, you were angry. Had you seriously been competing with nothing for his attention?
"Well— you, you make me nervous, and I—I uh, um… I can dialogue with myself and uh… organise my thoughts when I look at blank pages— I don't want to look like a fool in front of you, yeah…"
"…." You watched him twiddle his thumbs and fix his collar with disbelief.
Oh.
Oh.
So that's why he seemed to be constantly looking down at the book before responding to you. He was… a nervous wreck the whole time in your presence…!
The realisation sent a crawl of excitement down your spine, urging your gaze to trace his lovely expression: flushed pink cheeks, dilated eyes and fluttering lashes — all telling signs of his growing fluster.
You would be a fool to let this chance go to waste!
"Vivian," you called out tentatively, stretching each syllable with beguiled intent.
"Y-yeah?"
"You’ve got some chocolate here." Eyes curving with mischief, you gestured to the corner of his lips where some chocolate ganache remained.
Rubbing at the spot furiously, he turned to face you again for approval. "Is it gone—?"
You didn't answer him, instead, you took the initiative for the first time.
Using one hand to push back his hand that remained close to his mouth, you used your other hand to swipe away the residue chocolate.
Your thumb dragged across his bottom lip at an agonisingly slow pace, the touch sending heat across his ears and dying their pale colour a pretty pink.
Gaze fixed solely on him, you watched with enamour as his breath hitched from fluster.
"There. All gone, Vivian."
Falling back onto your seat with a huff, you brought your thumb over to your mouth, and without breaking eye contact, you licked away at the remaining ganache.
"…." His eyes could only widen at your lewd display of affection.
There was no way you just did that, right?
Did that mean that you were also into—
"What? I told you I liked chocolate, didn't I? Did you forget already—"
Hugo, for the life of him, couldn't hold it back anymore.
With absolutely no warning, he smashed his head right onto the plate before him. The untouched éclairs flattened under the force of his swinging head as the plate shattered with a sickening crack.
"Vivian?! Are you— oh my God- are you okay?!"
Fuck, and now you were all concerned for him. Did you seriously intend to short-circuit him with your worry?
Lifting his head up to meet your solicitous expression, he shakily pointed to the ganache smeared all over his face.
"Y-you missed a spot, Y/n…"
"Vivian!" You shrieked as your trembling hands cupped his face. "You're bleeding out your nose and your first thought is for me to— to, you stupid man!"
"Don't worry…" he sighed blissfully, leaning into the warmth of your hands, a sensation he'd desperately craved for. "I'm just… hah- really excited, papillon."
The blood dribbling down his nose wasn't the only place where hot blood was rushing south.
"You'll- you'll fix this issue for me, yeah? Please, pretty."
taglist: @shinoagriche @nerdjoenjoyer @ailouleem @allieluvsh @rainbowchili @levihanmyotp @akatuenk @si11ymotherfucker @maryberry2711 @vanillaadots @kimiiyoru @lllaw @owltrace @strwbrrynade @licl0ud @virtualprincessrosiana @minafrost @fleuritsum @aeonianangel @officiallylucky @ohio-gyatt-mega-sigma-rizzler @laeliaflores @angelnessss i think that's everyone who mentioned wanting a part two or showed enthusiasm for it...
also, this is just me rambling, but once during french lesson, @vampy11x (or someone else i cant remember) was asked by our teacher how to say 'i'm excited' in french and she said 'je suis excité' and our teacher lost it bc that's how u say ur horny in french 😂😂😂
and if you haven't read it yet, i say read mr. velcro man as part three for this
synopsis . You can’t handle a kiss from your boyfriend because he has a really weird fixation with your mouth. content . afab!reader, established relationship, oral fixation, taunting, begging, mock sympathy, finger sucking, he’s kinda mean, light brat taming, choking, etc. (answering this request)
You’re not sure when it started but it seems as though your dear Hugo has taken quite the liking to your mouth.
You noticed within your first few kisses that something was different in the way his lips would weigh into yours. There was never anything brief about his mouth aligning with your own, but what really gave away his fixation with your mouth was when you caught the way he stared your lips down prior to taking them against his own.
It was as though he’d mapped out every curve and crevice of your mouth into his head, and then made sure to greet each bit with a greedy slip of his tongue.
At first, you wanted to say he was just a really passionate kisser. Then he started to pop a finger into your mouth in between them—watching and feeling the way you hum in surprise of his thumb intruding the connection.
Hugo wasn’t a man of many expressions but only when he took you by surprise mid-kiss did you feel a smirk threaten him. How could you not expect him to do something so obvious? One of his fingers was practically destined to enter your mouth at some point.
Even so, by the time your lips departed from his, he’d still have that neutral face with you which revealed absolutely nothing about what he was thinking. And accompanying this would be that thumb of his, pressing further down the center of your tongue whilst his eyes met yours.
The moment your gaze went wide, something low vibrated out from the back of his throat—so low you nearly missed it. Then his head would tip off to the left in a manner so slow you could feel your self shrinking in size from the gesture alone.
“You look cute like this,” The statement seemed innocent at first, honestly. But you saw it in his eyes how his mind was far, far elsewhere—and this realization was confirmed the moment he followed that up with, “Now suck.”
Even though you did—and quite diligently, at that—something in him still seemed unsatisfied with your performance. You figured that perhaps there wasn’t enough in your mouth?
Hugo, being many steps ahead of you as he always was, let his thumb produce a different angle within your orifice before he plucked it out past your lips. Then he wiped your own salvia across your bottom lip and tutted.
“You enjoyed that, huh?” An observation wrapped in a question, of which he already knew the answer to. When you nod, his eyes narrow. “Say it then,” his finger moved to your chin to tip your head further up, “Tell me how you liked having my finger in your mouth—how you enjoyed sucking on it simply because I told you to.”
Your lips moved to do exactly that, the words were prepared against your tongue—and yet, he interrupted you ever so rudely.
Hugo possesses a lot of qualities that can’t be described as anything else aside from thick. His fingers are no exception, and you’re made acutely aware of it as his index and pointer shove their way into your mouth before you could properly obey him.
He doesn’t smile, but you can still see how pleased his by seeing you like this. Especially as you begin to hum gibberish around his digits.
Can he understand a word you’re saying? Technically no. Does he try to have a conversation with you anyway since he cares little about the concept of silence around you? Well, yes.
“What was that?” His eyebrows lift ever so slightly and you swear he’s fighting the urge to smile at you, “You said you love having my fingers in your mouth, and that listening to me is your favorite thing to do? Aw.”
Your head shakes, and for a moment you debate on nibbling at his fingers. You don’t though, considering how he watches your mouth move to pout and how your eyes glare at him instead.
Hugo nods his head, “I see, I see. So then,” his eyes leave yours and find your mouth again. His cock twitches once he feels your tongue dancing in between his fingers, followed by a wet suck as he drives them in just a bit deeper. “Did you want my fingers elsewhere? Do you-, hah..” His words escape him once your hand grabs at his wrist and you bob your head back and forth a little.
The way your mouth feels enveloping his two fingers, how your tongue slathers all around them, the mixed sensation of wetness and warmth—all of these factors nearly give him the desire to give you what he knows you want. But more than that, he wants the impossible out of you first. He wants to hear you beg for what you want, and he wants to hear it clearly.
All while his fingers are in your mouth.
“Do you need my fingers elsewhere, perhaps?” His eyes narrow further on you and you push yourself forward just so you can gag on his fingers as if to answer him. That’s when he grins, “You do, don’t you? It’s a shame you can’t seem to beg me for it.”
“Mmmh,” a stubborn array of grumbles fly his way, but instead of making things easier for you, he merely thrusts his fingertips further. “Mmph?” the cadence of that hum is most obviously meant to be a please—he knows how you beg far too well.
Even so, he can’t find himself to care that you’re struggling to do what’s asked of you. You look far too cute like this.
“Fuck, was that your best attempt at begging? Can you really not say it any clearer than that? Poor thing.” He hums, pulling his fingers away from your mouth slowly just to watch the way you almost-drunkenly chase after him.
The moment his digits escape your lips, your hold on his wrist gets a little tighter and you pant, “Please?”
Hugo raises a brow and wipes his fingertips across your bottom lip, “Please, what?”
Your mouth opens and he fights the urge to just laugh at you as he interrupts you again. Your grip on his wrist is lost as he finger-fucks your throat properly this time around—watching the mess he makes of you whilst drool leaks out from the corner of your lips.
Then you make the stupid mistake of trying to pull your head away from him so you can ask for what you want, and he scoffs as if annoyed before using that free hand of his to bring it up to your throat.
“A couple fingers in your mouth makes you do really dumb things, huh. I’ll give you what you want when I feel like it,” Hugo breathes out, cock swelling between his legs, “You understand that much, yes?”
You nod, but words couldn’t describe how much he adored it when you tried to act like a brat with him. He loved putting you in your place more than anything. And that glossy look of need in your eyes… fuck, he had half a mind to quit teasing you and splay you out against the nearest surface available.
“All you have for me is a nod?” Hugo scoffs, “Am I annoying you, chérie?”
You can’t help but whine this time—there was no way of winning him over when he got like this. He’d drag out this teasing until you physically couldn’t take it anymore if you’d let him.
Even so, the whine from you prompts him to look down at the way you’re squeezing your legs together, and he lets out a sigh. One could say he might even feel bad for you considering he knows you’ve likely soaked through your panties by this point.
“Fine, fine,” His fingers leave your mouth but the hand at your throat remains as he gives it a light squeeze. “You’re lucky I’m in a good mood today. Strip.”
banner art by rororogi mogera || author’s note: this is for the biggest hugo fan ik @inciseleviathan <3
The elevator ride to the penthouse was silent, save for the faint hum of machinery. Rin watched the floor numbers climb on the digital display, his reflection caught in the polished chrome of the doors. He looked the same as he always did, sharp, severe, a bit too tense, but the air in his lungs felt thin.
Sae had reached out. That was the anomaly. A text message, devoid of any pleasantries, providing an address and a time. “I’m in Tokyo for the week. Come by at seven.”
It wasn't an olive branch; it was a summons. But for Rin, it was the closest thing to a conversation they’d had that didn't involve a pitch and a ball. He told himself he was going there to gauge the gap between them, to see if the prodigy of Spain had grown soft in his old age. He didn't admit, even to the silence of the elevator, that he’d actually checked the time every ten minutes since six o'clock.
The doors chimed and slid open.
The hallway was quiet, carpeted in a deep charcoal that muffled his footsteps. When he reached the door, he didn’t knock. He wasn't a guest; he was blood. He pressed his thumb to the scanner, Sae must have registered his prints beforehand, and the lock clicked with a heavy, expensive sound.
The apartment was exactly what he expected of his brother. Minimalist, expensive, and cold. High ceilings, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the glittering sprawl of the Minato skyline, and furniture that looked more like sculptures than things meant for sitting.
“You’re late,” Sae’s voice drifted from the kitchen area. He was leaning against the marble island, a glass of water in his hand. He looked casual in a way that felt like a provocation, black cashmere sweater, hair slightly mussed, the usual bored expression fixed firmly in place.
“Traffic was lukewarm,” Rin replied, shutting the door behind him. He kicked off his shoes, lining them up with habitual precision. “And you’re the one who chose a place in the middle of the city.”
Sae didn't offer a rebuttal. He just tilted his head toward the living room. “Sit down. I’m finishing some calls.”
Rin rolled his eyes, crossing the expanse of the hardwood floor. He was ready to find a spot on the rigid designer sofa and wait in a brooding silence until Sae decided he was worthy of attention.
He stopped short at the edge of the rug.
There was someone on the couch.
A girl was curled up at the far end of the long sectional, a thick knit blanket draped over her legs and a tablet propped up against her knees. She didn't look up immediately, her thumb scrolling through what looked like a digital manuscript or a textbook. Beside her sat a mug that smelled faintly of cinnamon and expensive roast.
Rin stood frozen. The air in the room shifted. He felt a surge of immediate, reflexive hostility, the kind he reserved for anything that disrupted his focus.
“Sae,” Rin said, his voice dropping an octave, laced with a sharp, questioning edge.
Sae walked over from the kitchen, not even bothering to look up from his phone. “What?”
Rin gestured vaguely, his hand rigid. “Who is this?”
The girl looked up then. She didn't jump, didn't stammer, and didn't look even remotely intimidated by the six-foot-plus professional athlete standing in the middle of the room with a murderous scowl. Instead, she offered a small, easy smile.
“Oh, you’re here,” she said. Her voice was calm, settling into the room like it belonged there. “We were wondering if the rain would hold you up.”
Rin’s eyes snapped back to Sae, who was now standing next to the couch. Without a word, Sae reached down and moved the girl’s feet so he could sit on the edge of the cushion. It was a casual, tactile gesture, one that spoke of a thousand shared afternoons.
“My girlfriend,” Sae said. The words were flat, delivered with the same weight he might use to describe the weather or a tactical formation. “Don't stand there like a statue. You’re blocking the view.”
Rin felt like he’d been hit with a blindside tackle. 'Girlfriend.' The word didn't fit in his vocabulary when it came to Sae. Sae was a machine. Sae was a midfielder who saw the world in lines of efficiency and cold logic. Sae didn't have 'people'. He had subordinates, rivals, and a brother he delighted in tormenting.
“Since when do you have a girlfriend?” Rin demanded, though he kept his voice controlled. He wouldn't give Sae the satisfaction of seeing him lose his cool in front of a stranger.
“Since before I came back to Japan this time,” Sae said vaguely, waving a hand.
The girl set her tablet down on the coffee table. “I’m glad to finally meet you, Rin. Sae’s mentioned you’re a bit of a handful, but he didn't mention you were so tall.” She stood up, wrapping the blanket tighter around her shoulders for a moment before letting it drop onto the sofa. She moved through the space with an effortless familiarity, heading toward the kitchen. “Are you hungry? I was going to order something, but Sae insisted on making something light since you’re in training.”
Rin didn't answer. He couldn't. He watched her walk into the kitchen and reach for a specific cupboard, the one where the high-protein pasta was kept. She didn't ask where things were. She didn't fumble with the complicated European stovetop. She moved around Sae’s space as if she’d designed it herself.
“Sit, Rin,” Sae repeated, his voice taking on that familiar, impatient bite. “You’re giving off a pathetic aura. It’s annoying.”
Rin sat. He chose the armchair furthest from the couch, his back straight, his eyes tracking every movement in the kitchen.
The next hour was one of the most surreal experiences of Rin’s life.
He had come here expecting a psychological war, a battle of wills where they would trade barbs about their respective seasons in Europe and the state of the national team. Instead, he was watching a domestic tableau that felt like a glitch in the matrix.
The girl, Rin still hadn't quite processed her name, his brain filtering it out in his initial shock,bwas hummed a low tune as she moved between the island and the fridge.
“Sae, the salt is low,” she called out.
“Bottom drawer, behind the espresso pods,” Sae replied without looking up from his tablet.
“Found it. Do you want the usual roast for later, or are you trying to actually sleep tonight?”
“The usual. We have a film to watch.”
She made a soft sound of disapproval. “You’re going to give yourself an ulcer. Rin, does he always work this hard when he’s home, or is he just showing off for you?”
Rin stiffened as the question was directed at him. He looked at her, searching for any sign of mockery, any hint of the sycophantic behavior people usually displayed around the Itoshi brothers. He found none. Her eyes were bright, curious, and genuinely relaxed.
“He’s always been obsessed,” Rin said stiffly. “It’s the only thing he’s good for.”
She laughed. It wasn't a loud sound, just a soft, melodic huff of amusement. “Fair enough. At least he’s consistent.”
She brought over a tray of water and a bowl of sliced fruit, setting it on the coffee table between them. As she leaned over, Sae reached out, almost subconsciously, and tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear.
Rin’s grip tightened on the armrest of his chair.
He’d seen Sae be many things. He’d seen him be cruel, arrogant, brilliant, and dismissive. But he had never seen him be 'gentle'. The way Sae’s fingers lingered for a fraction of a second against her temple, the way his sharp, teal eyes softened just a fraction when she looked at him, it was nauseating. It was fascinating.
“You’re staring, Rin,” Sae said, his gaze shifting to his brother. “It’s creepy.”
“I’m not staring,” Rin snapped. “I’m wondering why you brought a civilian into this.”
“She’s not a ‘civilian,’” Sae said, his voice cooling. “She’s the only person in this country who doesn't talk to me about football the second I wake up. Which makes her significantly more valuable than you.”
The girl poked Sae in the ribs with the back of her hand. “Be nice. He’s your brother.”
“He’s a brat,” Sae countered, but he didn't pull away from her touch. In fact, he leaned slightly into her space.
As the evening progressed, the evidence of their longevity only piled up. She knew that Sae hated the sound of the ice maker, so she’d turned it off before they sat down. She knew exactly how much honey he liked in his tea when he had a slight cough, which Rin realized now, hearing Sae’s faint rasp, that Sae actually had. She even knew where Sae kept the spare charging cables for the specific model of tablet Rin used.
“Here,” she said, handing Rin a cable. “Your battery light is red. It’ll die before you leave.”
Rin took it, his fingers brushing hers. She felt warm. Real. “Thanks.”
“No problem.” She smiled at him again, and for a second, Rin saw what Sae saw. There was a groundedness to her. She wasn't a fan, and she wasn't an athlete. She was a tether.
By nine o'clock, the girl stood up and stretched, her oversized sweater slipping off one shoulder. “I’m going to head into the office for a bit to finish that project. You two should talk. Try not to break anything.”
She leaned down, and to Rin’s horror, she pressed a quick, casual kiss to the corner of Sae’s mouth.
“Don't stay up too late,” she murmured.
“I won't,” Sae said.
She waved at Rin. “It was nice meeting you, Rin. Don't let him bully you too much.”
Rin just nodded, paralyzed. He waited until he heard the door to the far room, the one Sae used as a home office, click shut.
The silence that followed was heavy. Sae picked up his water, taking a slow sip, looking entirely too unbothered.
“What the hell was that?” Rin hissed, leaning forward.
Sae raised an eyebrow. “A conversation. Food. You’ve seen humans interact before, haven't you? Or did Blue Lock turn you into a complete animal?”
“Don't mess with me,” Rin said, his voice vibrating with suppressed indignation. “Who is she? Really?”
“I told you. My girlfriend.”
“How long?” Rin demanded. “How long has she been living here? How long has she been... in your life?”
Sae set the glass down. He looked at the closed office door for a moment, his expression unreadable, before looking back at Rin. “About a year. Give or take.”
Rin felt a physical jolt of offense. “A year?”
“Roughly.”
“We played in the Champions League qualifiers six months ago,” Rin said, his voice rising despite himself. “We were in the same city for three days. You didn't say a word. You didn't even hint that you weren't alone.”
“Why would I?” Sae asked, his voice maddeningly calm. “It wasn't relevant to the match.”
“It’s relevant to 'everything'!” Rin stood up, pacing the small space between the chair and the sofa. “You’ve spent the last three years telling me that I’m too emotional, that I’m too tied to people, that my football is lukewarm because I can't stand alone. And all this time, you’ve had... 'that'? You’ve been playing the part of the solitary genius while someone else is making your coffee and knowing your habits?”
Sae watched him, his gaze cool and analytical. He didn't get angry. He didn't get defensive. He just waited for Rin to stop vibrating with rage.
“You’re missing the point, as usual,” Sae said quietly. “She isn't a crutch, Rin. She’s a choice.”
“A choice you kept from me.”
“I keep a lot of things from you. You’re obsessed with me. If I’d told you a year ago, you would have spent every match trying to figure out how she changed my center of gravity or how she affected my vision. You would have made it about football.” Sae stood up, walking toward the window. The lights of Tokyo reflected in his teal eyes. “She has nothing to do with the pitch. That’s why she’s there.”
Rin stopped pacing. The anger was still there, simmering, but it was being overtaken by a strange, hollow realization. He had spent his entire life studying Sae, trying to dismantle him, trying to understand the clockwork of his brother’s mind so he could eventually break it.
And yet, he hadn't known this. He hadn't known that Sae liked cinnamon in his kitchen, or that he allowed someone to see him when he was tired, or that he was capable of holding a relationship together for an entire year without destroying it with his arrogance.
“Does she know?” Rin asked suddenly.
“Know what?”
“What you’re really like. How much of a bastard you are.”
Sae turned back, a faint, almost imperceptible smirk tugging at the corner of his lips. “She knows better than you do, Rin. She’s seen me lose. She’s seen me when I can’t sleep because my ankle is acting up. She doesn't care about the New Generation XI. She thinks the lower eyelashes are a genetic quirk, not a brand.”
Rin looked at the office door again. He felt a weird, prickly sensation in his chest. It wasn't the hatred he was used to. It was something else, a realization that the brother he was chasing wasn't just a goalpost to be reached. He was a person with a life that Rin wasn't the center of.
“She’s too good for you,” Rin muttered, crossing his arms over his chest.
Sae actually let out a short, dry chuckle. It was the most human sound Rin had heard from him in years.
“I know,” Sae said. “Now sit down. If you’re going to be offended, do it while we look at these set-piece VODs. You’re still telegraphing your inside curves.”
Rin grumbled, but he sat back down. The tension in the room had changed. It wasn't gone, it would never be gone between them, but the sharp, jagged edges had been buffed down by the presence of the girl in the other room.
A few minutes later, the office door opened slightly, and she poked her head out.
“Sae, I can't find the blue folder. Did you move it?”
Sae didn't even look up from the screen he was holding. “Second shelf, under the anatomy textbook.”
“Got it! Thanks, love!”
The door shut again.
Rin looked at Sae, who was already highlighting a defensive lapse on the video. Sae looked calm. He looked settled.
For the first time in a decade, Rin didn't feel like he had to break his brother to understand him; he just had to accept that there were parts of Sae Itoshi that didn't belong to football, and they certainly didn't belong to Rin.
“Your positioning here is trash,” Sae said, pointing at the screen.
“Shut up,” Rin replied, but his voice lacked its usual venom. He leaned in, peering at the screen, as the smell of coffee began to waft from the kitchen once more.
The world was still cold, and the rivalry was still there, but in the quiet of the apartment, the ice had begun, very slowly, to melt.
Rin realized then that for all his talk of destroying Sae, he was glad there was someone there to pick up the pieces when the game was over.
FaceTiming Blue lock characters for the first time as their online best friend
𑄝੭ : Isagi Yoichi, Bachira Meguru, Seishiro Nagi , Rin Itoshi, Ryusei Shidou, Sae Itoshi, Michael Kaiser
— isagi Yoichi
“Hey!”, Isagi called out, his voice carrying a little more excitement than necessary. You, though, have known him long enough to notice the slight shaking in his voice, and how he stumbled over his words more than usual.
You chuckled a little, watching those familiar blue eyes wander around awkwardly. In truth, he had shown his face ages ago, often sending pictures of him holding trophies or medals anytime he’d win something. You, on the other hand, always felt too awkward. Ironic, since he’d always be the first person you’d text whenever something exciting happened.
It took him months to even get you on the phone. He’d ask questions about the dumbest things, just to hear your voice, so imagine his face when you finally turned on your camera.
He stared at your face for a while, which was getting hotter every second, completely starstrucked. “Isagi..”, you managed to mumble out.
“ .. so cute.”, he whispered a little too loudly, immediately covering his mouth. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!!”, he apologized over and over again, looking genuinely horrified.
You, again, couldn’t help but laugh. Needless to say, you definitely got an ego boost.
— Meguru Bachira
Bachira was always very .. vocal about what he wanted. He never hinted at wanting to FaceTime, he made it veeery clear he wanted to. “The Monster’s also curious! It tells me It wants to see you now, before It gets impatient..”, he’d say.
“Y/nnnnn?? Oh, hey there!!”, was the first thing he said after you picked up.
You rubbed your eyes, terrifyingly quiet. “Bachira, it is 3 in the morning. If you don’t tell me what’s so important in exactly 3 seconds, I’ll end you AND your monster.”.
“Hey, that’s not very nice!”, he giggled. “The monster told me that it wants to see you now!! It’ll get angry if it has to wait any longer.”, he laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world. You were THIS close to— .. oh okay, never mind! You did actually slam your phone against the wall. Well, at least tried to.
As if you weren’t angry enough, while lifting your arm, your phone fell out of your hand, making it drop to the floor. You felt your blood pressure rising by the second, actually considering just letting him stay there on the phone while going back to sleep. Little did you know, while picking up the phone, you would accidentally press on the camera button, which turned the camera on. Only after you faced your phone did you realize you had flashed your tired face, including your bed hair and chiikawa pyjama.
For once, Bachira went silent. Although not for long. He immediately started bombarding you with questions right after
“How dare you hide this face from me, you’re so selfish! You would cure Yukimiya’s blindness!!”.
None of you went to sleep that night.
— Seishiro Nagi
Surprise Surprise, you were actually the one mentioning wanting to face reveal.
Nagi being Nagi, obviously declined, saying it was a hassle. He wouldn’t gain anything from it, and just thought it was unnecessary.
“What do you mean “unnecessary” ?!”, you asked him through voice chat while playing some shooting game, kinda offended.
“Dunno .. can we just focus on the game? Talking’s a hassle ..”, he said lazily.
“Nagi, I’ll never help you with socialising ever again, if you don’t do this one thing for me!”. At this point you didn’t even care about the face reveal anymore. Your ego was hurt and that’s all you cared about.
He sighed, smart enough to know you’d just keep dragging it if he wouldn’t agree. Hesitantly, he turned on his camera, scratching his neck. Meanwhile you were still trying to convince Nagi, not even realizing he turned his camera on ages ago.
“Y/n.”, he called out, slightly annoyed. “You talk a lot. Would you just shut up.”.
“Who the heck are you telling to—!” .. you audibly gasped. Silenced. You didn’t even dare breathe, because what if the air would blow this hot guy away through the screen!? What if—!
“.. you there? Why didn’t you attack the enemy.”
Gulp. “.. wait, what..?
“You’re acting weird. I’ll turn off my cam—“
”NO!”
— Rin Itoshi
“.. what?”, you laughed awkwardly, fidgeting with your hands. Was there something in between your teeth? Why was Rin just staring at you?
He looked away almost immediately, clearing his throat. “Nothing. You just don’t look like your profile picture, that’s all”.
You felt your heart drop. “Oh. Sorry, I—“, .. hey, now hold on a minute. You have a cat as your profile picture!
“What do you mean “different”? I have my cat as my profile picture. Did you expect me to be a cat or something..”
“I mean, kind of? I don’t know!”, if only you knew how red Rin’s ears have gotten.
You blinked, processing his words. “Are you serious?”
”I just didn’t expect you to look like … that!!”
“Like what? Tell me now! If you think I’m ugly, at least say it to my face!”
Both of you were just going back and forth, until Rin said something that would haunt him for the rest of his life, and perhaps would be the best mistake he could’ve ever made .. in a way?
”No, what?! You look .. you look lukewarm, okay! You look OK!”. He groaned, burying his face into his hands. “.. you’re pretty.”. If only his hands were big enough to cover his whole face, including his bright red cheeks. Yeah, he’s definitely the youngest.
— Ryusei Shidou
“Yo, turn on your camera.”, Shidou smirked, knowing exactly how shy you were. “What, ya scared? Of ‘lil old me??”, he said mockingly.
It was obvious he was only wearing his boxers too, which he definitely made clear multiple times, and only got you feeling more anxious. Part of you felt a little more relaxed, knowing he was comfortable enough around you to only wear his boxers though. Good thing you don’t know he’s like this around everyone.
”Ryu, promise you wont laugh..!”
”Yeah yeah, whatever, cupcake.”
”Ryusei, promise me!”
He scoffs. “I swear on my lucky underwear, and daddy long lashes.”. He doesn’t know why you’re making such a big deal out of this. “Look, I’d love to bust a nut to your voice, but I gotta—“
You turned your camera on. As soon as Shidou laid his eyes on you, he burst out laughing, tears filling his eyes.
“You’re so fucking adorable! Ya look like a chipmunk!! Do I call you sweet cheeks now??”, he was dying of laughter.
You roll your eyes. Although for just a second, you swear you saw his eyes softening, and that answered all of your questions.
— Sae Itoshi
It was a Thursday afternoon, and you were bored out of your mind. Sae should be home from by practice now, right? You decided to test your luck, calling him.
“Hello?”. Sae was in the middle of a traffic jam. If it weren’t for your call, he probably would’ve fallen asleep.
You jumped, hearing his voice. “Sae, Hi!! Are you still at practice? Wait, obviously not .. I meant! .. Sorry, are you home yet?”, you blurt out, not expecting him to actually pick up.
He chuckled. Internally, of course. “No, not yet, but I can stay on the phone if that’s what you want..”,
”Yes, please! I’ve been wanting to tell you about this coworker—“
“.. under one condition.”, he interrupted. “You show me your face.”.
Who would’ve known that sae itoshi thought about you every day, and what you could might look like.
”.. well, that was random.”, and with just a tap on the camera icon, you were now face to face with him.
He just nodded. That’s it.
You smiled, continuing to talk about your annoying coworker, though something was off. You could physically feel him stare, like he was counting the amount of eyelashes you had.
Sae was so concentrated, he didn’t even hear the cars behind him honking and cursing at him. Whoops ..
— Michael Kaiser
“Kaiser, are you in Berlin next weekend?”, was the first thing you asked when he answered the phone.
“Wow, Good morning to you too. Why are you asking, love?”
”It’s not like that, Michael. I just so happen to be in Germany next week because of work.”, you rolled your eyes as he let out a laugh. To be honest, all you heard was the rustling of money, and the sound of a champagne bottle being opened.
”Oh, is that right? Well then, liebling, make sure they give you first class seats, or whatever. I wouldn’t know, I fly private.”
You scoff. Are all German’s like him?
“Anyways, will you finally let me see that face of yours? Or are you going to make me wait till you land and pick you up at the airport myself.”
You were about to argue, but he did have a point. He’s definitely not been subtle about wanting to finally see you. And since you’d probably meet him next week anyway, why not just show him. It’s not like it’s some big secret, you just refused because that’s the only thing you could do to piss him off.
While he was complaining about whatever made him mad this time, you turned on your camera.
“Bastard. Wenn ich ihn in die Finger kriege..”, kaiser mumbled. “You agree with me, right, Schatz—“, his eyes widened just a little, before his smug expression took over again.
“Ah, wasn’t that hard now, was it? After months of begging, my little blueberry cupcake muff—“
”MICHAEL!!”
Not proofread, so if there are any mistakes .. no there aren’t
you were currently seated across sae in a worn down red booth, glaring at him with the most serious face you could muster. even you knew this entire act was foolish and that your efforts would be futile, but you still had to try.
“it won’t hurt, i promise.” you say, pinching the skinny, greasy potato and slowly inching it closer to his lips.
sae on the other hand, had his arms crossed against his chest, staring back at you as if you’d lost your head.
“i know it won’t hurt, it’s.. a fry.” he quirked an eyebrow at your statement, still mustering that deadpan look on his face before a small realization crossed his mind, “though, it might hurt a little. it’s definitely unhealthy.”
you let out a defeated huff, your elbow still in its position on the table and the fry still just inches away from his mouth.
“i know you like them sae, you told me so! what if they’re a little unhealthy? you train everyday so, technically you’re burning the calories you’re so scared of intaking..” you paused, not knowing if what you just said was correct. it sounded factual enough, enough for sae to eat the fry. “right?”
“.. there’s more to it than that.” he said, voice unwavering.
rolling your eyes, and relaxing your very failed attempt at a death glare, your arm hit the table as you dropped your head.
a beat passed before sae decided to speak again.
“what’s wrong?”
“.. you won’t eat the fry.” you slowly raised your head to meet sae’s eyes, of course they were showing zero emotion, which led you to wonder if he was even enjoying the time being spent right now.
“i know you have football and stuff and you’re a world-class athlete so you have to be in shape but..” you turned your head away, facing any direction that wouldn’t have sae’s teal eyes boring in your soul as you continued, “i kind of just wanted you to eat a basket of fries with me, you know?”
and for the first time today, sae’s eyes spoke louder than he ever could. he watched as a small pout started to form on your lips, as well as your face looking at anything but him.
he couldn’t stand it. for some odd reason, sae couldn’t bear to see even a hint of sadness prying at your features. that’s why he was about to go out of his way, just for you.
letting out a sigh, he smoothly made his way over to your side of the booth, grabbing a fry from the checkered plastic basket and brought it to his lips. though, he only centered the fry halfway into his mouth, the other half pointing in your direction.
as you felt the seat sink next to you with the added weight, you whipped your head around to see sae with a fry poking out of his mouth.
you looked at him in confusion before he spoke.
“so we can eat it together.” even with the restriction to some of the syllables as he continued to speak, you understood perfectly what he meant.
he watched your eyes light up with joy, the sparkle coming back just as quickly as it’d left. not to get cocky but,
he did that.
“really?”
he glared, but there was no real fire behind it. just… adoration. “yes, really. now take a bite, you’ve got me looking like an idiot.”
without another second to lose, you leaned in close enough that your lips brushed against his. you could feel the soft flutter of his lashes against your cheek as you two made eye contact for one brief moment before you pulled away, taking the other half of the fry between your teeth.
you slowly chewed on the fry, the perfect mixture of salt and grease gracing your taste buds. then you looked at sae.
“how’s it taste?” you truly couldn’t tell if it liked it or not. sure he told you, but you’d never really seen him eat one before.
“salty,
“uh huh…”
“greasy…”
“mm..”
“and.. like you.”
you stopped your chewing and instead focused all your energy into looking bewildered.
“so.. good?”
and it definitely seems like you were winning today, because you noticed a small twitch in the corner of sae’s lips.
he let out a small huff, his shoulders relaxing just a smidge. “yeah.. good.”
although sae didn’t finish the entire basket with you, he did let himself have a generous handful.
even if it may have costed him, if it made you smile, he’d indulge in your silly little antics. just this once. maybe for the rest of his life.
Defending Rin from Sae at a family reunion // fluff, suggestive
Sae x F!reader
Family reunions are complicated for most people. The Itoshis weren’t an exception, as everyone knows.
You love Sae’s family, even if your boyfriend has a difficult relationship with every member, but family reunions with them are one of your least favorite things.
Not really because of his parents, who have put way too much pressure on Sae from a very young age or because of Rin, no.
You’re embarrassed how your boyfriend behaves around his little brother. Even after years of not talking to each other frequently, Sae still doesn’t understand that Rin is seriously hurt from his actions and keeps on nagging him, in this cold, autistic Sae-way.
It’s been getting on your nerves since a long while but every time you wanted to talk to Sae about it, he didn’t take you seriously.
‘Rin’s just a teenage mess’,
‘He’ll come to his senses when he turns eighteen’,
‘His hormonal changes are none of my business and whatever emotions he feels aren’t either,’ were usually the explanation for Rin’s homicidal tendencies.
This year for Rin’s birthday, you just couldn’t keep quiet any longer.
After hours and hours of Rin and Sae spitting insults at each other over dinner or extremely uncomfortable silence, you pull Sae into his old childhood bedroom.
The door bangs behind you two, your hand on his collar, pulling him down to you. “Listen up, you trash can of a brother; if you don’t stop being a giant dick to your little brother, I’m gonna put you on a 12 month sex ban. I’m sick and tired of you hurting a child, that obviously idolizes you. You’re an adult and you have to act like one.”
You look and are furious. Seeing Rin getting hurt really does something to you, maybe it’s your maternal instinct, maybe you’re just siding with Rin because you are also frequently a victim of Sae’s untreated stupidness.
Sae is pressed against the wall, your finger in his face, your hand still on his collar.
You expected him to be his usual nonchalant, cold self, but he’s…different. His eyes are big and he looks at you with a mix of anger, awe and…need?
Now that you got your anger out, you realize how close you are and that something hard presses against you…
What a pathetic excuse of a man.
a/n: english isn’t my first language, criticism is welcomed but please be nice. Likes, comments and reblogs are highly appreciated! Do not steal or copy my work.
n: yes, this is projection. yes, i would defend rin.
after a year in spain, sae had already adjusted to the environment around him. his situation of being in a whole new country was getting less and less difficult with each passing week. however, the difference of japan's and spain's timezones did quite trouble him. the time you would wake up for school was the time he would be getting ready for bed. by the time your school ends, he would already be training. it was hard to communicate, but waking up to your messages did make him feel happy.
the second to third year in spain, he had already gotten used to the schedule the program had given him. he had already gotten used to spain. sae would witness japan's language evolution through your texts. it hurt to see small changes of the country when he was so far away; he was sad he couldn't witness it himself.
but he is in spain now, and there was no way to learn how locals in japan spoke when he wasn't even there; he had also witnessed the small shift in how people speak within the country. he found it beautiful, how people adapt languages and how they grow over the years.
sae had gotten so used to speaking spanish, he would sometimes most of the time forget some words in japanese when talking to you on the phone.
when the plane back to japan landed, he felt even more excited. he would finally see you again. the walk out to the arrival gate was nerve-wracking for him. what if you lost your way to the airport? what if something came up and you couldn't come to see him?
his thoughts were interrupted by you calling out his name. he looked around for you and saw you holding a small bouquet of flowers. sae walked faster to hug you, kiss you.
when you broke the hug to give him the flowers, you were examining him and how much he had changed.
"you've gotten taller, sae." you commented, holding a hand up to his height. "i didn't notice it when you would send photos, since i only ever see your face." your laughs stopped when he looked confused. "hm? sae? what's wrong?"
he hadn't thought about how odd it was to hear his native language after not hearing it for years. he could make out some words, enough to have an idea of what of you said. "yes. i got tall."
you give him a tight hug. "yes, tall. you have gotten very very tall. you're basically towering over me. i haven't seen you in forever, you have to come see me here more often. i missed you a lot. you must have been training so hard, sae."
all he could do was bury his face in your neck and not let go. he could barely understand what you were saying, but by the way you hugged him, he assumed everything about it was sweet. and like a parrot, he muttered out the words he had been wanting to say face to face the moment he landed, the words "i miss you" over and over until you would eventually let go.
just me talking: i was going to strong with so much words to type, then at the end it's like womp womp. i’ve never had a moment like this (airport things), and i can’t properly put it into words☹️ im sad that i think in english
steal or ai = you gonna catch these hands (doi, not saying my work is good enough for that, but please dont)
In which the paparazzi caught you and Sae shopping in a jewelry boutique (inspired by mbappe and ester lol)
Itoshi Sae x fem reader
warning! mildy? r-rated; Sae gets cockblocked by the worst news possible; Itoshi Sae is whipped your honor
Word count: 2.7k it’s not that long i promise
Your relationship with Sae had never been open to the public, much less discussed - just private. Everyone knew he had a girlfriend, but no one knew who you were. No one knew it was you. You were a complete mystery. Until today, that is.
When rumours started swirling a year ago that he had a girlfriend - mind you his fanbase was already deranged as it was, he immediately confirmed the rumours without hesitation - though indirectly. You weren't sure whether that was bold or reckless. Then again, Sae was hardly hyperaware of his fanbase, much less paid attention to it.
You remembered that interview that went viral overnight. A reporter had the audacity to ask Sae about the rumours right after his match. You remembered Sae taking a pause, his eyebrows scrunching slightly to convey his confusion, before his expression shifed to annoyance.
He answered with that ever so monotone voice of his, 'Ah? So what if I have? I fail to see how this is any of your businesses' - irritation flickering in his eyes. That was all he said before walking out of the pitch, seeing as the interview was no longer about football. He didn't want to entertain gossip.
Any further attempt to ask about his dating life was completely shut down. Sometimes he would say, 'Next question' - or he would simply walk out with pure indifference.
After that, the media learned to stop asking.
His patience was a luxury. He scared the reporters that way. His reputation had long been built on his character, seemingly the same both on and off the pitch. Cold. Sharp-tongued. Intimidating.
The rumours escalated when a photo was leaked a few months ago - a picture of you and Sae taking a stroll at the beach with your hands intertwined. It was dark in the evening, your backs turned against the camera, so neither of your faces were visible. For Sae on the other hand, no one could mistake his silhouette - his strong physique and his reddish-brown hair standing out despite the dark background.
The fans absolutely went into a frenzy. The comments were utterly bipolar. Some people were crying, angry or boldly delusional. If you weren't Sae Itoshi's girlfriend, you would've laughed at their stupidity. You mostly couldn't fathom how some of them directed their anger at a faceless girl they didn't even know.
A bead of sweat dropped as you imagined yourself getting jumped by his fans. You shivered.
Sae ultimately valued protecting your privacy over his own, always keeping your dates subtle. He was protective in that way. So when a paparazzi finally caught your face, clear as day in the camera - everything went straight down to the gutter.
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30 hours before present time
You had been lounging on the couch, legs up, hugging a pillow on your chest, and lazily scrolling on your phone, looking for new things to buy.
Your thumb went to a stop when something caught your eye. It was a dainty, diamond pendant necklace. It was absolutely lovely. Very simple yet elegant.
You chuckled to yourself like a maniac, knowing this would hurt your bank account. But you simply must have it.
"You want that one?" a deep voice spoke from behind your shoulder, pulling you out of your own world. You looked up and saw Sae behind the couch, bending down slightly to see your screen.
He had just come back from the gym, hair slightly mussed, with white t-shirt perfectly hugging his muscles, the sleeves seemingly tight over his biceps, grey sweat-shorts, and his gym bag slung over his shoulder.
Perfect timing. You faced him with much excitement, your eyes twinkling expressively.
"Sae, what do you think about this one? Isn’t this lovely?" you raised your arm a bit so he could see your screen better.
He looked at it with indifference. "Hm, it's fine"
You gave him an unimpressed look. "Are you saying it's fine because I like it, or you saying it's fine because you think it's ugly and you just want to agree with me?"
"I like everything you like"
"Then I don't want it" you turned your back against him dramatically, unimpressed.
Sae wanted to deadpan at your antics, though there was an amused look on his face. He leaned down to kiss your cheek. "Are you upset? What did I say?" he murmured.
"I want you to be honest" you pouted, your head turning away from him.
Two seconds passed by.
"You make it look better." That was just that, short and sharp. It took a second before his words registered in your brain. You knew fully well what Sae meant - the necklace wasn’t anything special, but you, yourself make it look special.
His words hit harder than they should have, and your breath caught a little as your cheeks warmed up. "And yes, I like it. I think it would suit you." He added.
You slowly lifted your gaze at him. Well... if he put it that way then...
"Okay then! I'll go visit the shop and see it for myself", you said, your voice much lighter now, clearly excited.
You hopped off the couch to go get ready.
"Where are you going?"
"I'm gonna get dressed"
"I'll come with you. Wait."
You turned towards him and blinked. You gave him a confused look, an eyebrow slighty raising. "It’s broad daylight. People will see us.”
Your boyfriend stayed indifferent.
"Hm." He pulled out his phone. "I'll call the shop. They can reserve the place for us."
You stared. "Sae, is that really necessary? It would just bother them" you said. "It's fine, I can go alone"
But Sae was already tapping on his phone. "It's Cartier right."
You immediately grabbed his arm, stopping him. "Really, it's okay. I won't be long"
"I'll ask them to open after their closing time," he said simply. "There won't be people around then."
Your lips parted. Huh? Is that even possible?
Before you could even protest, he was already lifting his phone to his ear.
"W-wait"
"Yes, hello" Sae spoke calmly into the receiver.
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The morning after, 1 hour before present time
Both your legs rested on the sofa, locking Sae in between. You were straddling him, sitting on his lap comfortably.
The brand new necklace resting on your skin, and Sae’s hand holding the pendant, inspecting it.
“I could’ve payed for this myself you know.”
He looked at you dead in the eyes with disbelief, as if you just insulted him in the face.
Like hell he would let you pay for yourself. Who were you kidding? He would spend more money on you than himself.
“It’s like you’re calling me poor.” Your boyfriend lifted an eyebrow.
You let out a chuckle. He looked so offended.
“Alright, I’m sorry” You cupped his face, giving him a light kiss on the lips.
”Sorry?” Your boyfriend stared flatly at you, clearly expecting more.
You rolled your eyes at his pettiness, a smile grazing your lips.
So you showered him with rapid kisses all over his face, twice on his cheeks, his forehead, his nose and finally a long peck on his lips.
“Am I forgiven now?” You smiled prettily at him.
“Hm, not quite.”
Then Sae cupped your neck and pulled you to meet his lips.
He kissed you slowly. His kisses were soft and gentle, trying to show how precious you were. You couldn’t help but smile as you reciprocate the kiss with the same motion.
He sucked your bottom lip, and your lips automatically parted, gaining him access to slip his tongue in. Pretty soon his kisses gradually got deeper, his hunger taking over - his tongue wrestling your own.
He was thirsty. He couldn't get enough of you.
Your head drew back from his intensity, lips still locking. So you wrapped your arms around his broad shoulders to steady yourself. You thrusted your hip forward, pressing on him as if it was reflex - pressing on his hardened groin.
He groaned on the contact, fuck. He wouldn’t let you get away with that.
His hands travelled downwards to cup your bottom, giving them a squeeze. That's right, he had always had a fetish with your bottom cheeks. And you would be damned if it didn’t lit a fire within you.
You smirked in the kiss and pulled away, "Well then do something about it."
Instantly, Sae went rigid. You saw his jaw clenched so tightly. He knew well what you were insinuating.
You looked directly into his eyes, a sly look on your face as you brushed your fingers on his chest, then slowly going down to rest your warm hand on his bulge.
You leaned into his ear carefully, "please", your lips brushing his ear.
A beat.
He did not need you telling twice after that.
Before you could even react, you were instantly thrown down on the sofa, and you let a gasp in shock.
Sae took advantage of your parted lips to plunge his tongue in - wanting to bruise your lips, with a hunger so strong you’d think he hadn't been fed for a long time.
Your hands traveled under his shirt, feeling his muscular core.
Sae's warm hand caressed your exposed thigh, sending a shiver down your spine. His touch burned.
His mouth parted from yours then started trailing down kisses to your neck, giving you a moment to breathe - barely.
His hand creeped inside your shirt and found its way to your breast. He lifted your shirt with his other hand, just enough to expose your breasts. Then Sae bended down to suck.
He nibbled on your right nipple, his warm, wet tongue making it more sensitive. His other hand massaging your other breast. You shut your eyes tightly at the sensation, lips parting at how good it felt. An embarrassing sound escaped your lips - you were practically mewling.
He made his way up again to meet your lips once more.
His hips thrusted forward, and you gasped at the pressure, feeling his hardened bulge between your legs.
You wanted to ignite his hunger even further… so you gripped on his maroon hair tight - and started moaning his name into his mouth.
Your ploy seemed to work as Sae kissed you even harder, devouring your lips, making you breathe heavily through the nose.
He thrusted and pressed even harder on you, making your legs grow weak.
Sae slowly descended his hand on your stomach, then lower - until he reached between your thighs.
You sucked your breath, anticipating, your legs tightening around Sae.
Then as lightning struck down earth, a sudden, consistent buzz froze you both.
Sure enough, the buzzing stopped. He leaned down his head and resumed kissing you again fervently, his fingers slowly lifting down your underwear.
His lips descended down from your neck, giving you wet kisses in between your breast, down to your lower stomach.
Lower - lower. You could practically feel how you were soaking wet - and he would finally get a sweet taste of that.
Buzz Buzz
You and Sae froze again.
What in the fuck could they possibly want right now, Sae thought, letting out a groan in annoyance.
This time you halted, and cupped his face to bring him up to your level. Somehow you had this gut feeling that something didn't sit right. "What if it's important?" you gave a worried look at Sae.
Sae gave an irritated huff, resting his forehead on yours.
The buzzing stopped once more, then resumed again after a beat.
“Sae, take it.”
"I swear if it's Shidou, I'll cut his throat out and feed it to the dogs" He spoke with a gruff, his expression darkening.
Sae reluctantly got off you and reached for his phone on the coffee table. He immediately swiped, not even bothering to read who the caller is.
"You better not waste my ti-"
"Sae-chan!" A frantic voice spoke. It's Girolan. "Thank goodness."
Sae paused at Girolan's tone, he was clearly panicking but Sae couldn’t give two shits at the moment.
What the fuck? Sae pinched the bridge of his nose, not understanding any bull for shit.
His jaw tightened, his fist clenching tightly as If he was going to punch someone. He swore he was going to pull all his hair out for ruining his good goddamn morning. I don't deserve this shit. He'd never felt this much rage before since Bunny Iglesias.
Sae took a deep breath, loosing his temper, clenching and unclenching his fists. He wanted to hit something.
Yet he gathered all composure he could muster before speaking, "Girolan, I don't understand what you're saying, speak slowly." He manages to speak calmy, contrary to his outrage.
A beat.
"Someone caught you both last night. They leaked the pictures just a few minutes ago."
…
Shit.
All the anger died down in a split of a second, now replaced with shock.
Sae turned to look at you with wide eyes, strikingly opposite of his usual aloof expression.
What? What? What happened. Dread creeping in.
Sae parted his lips, trying to find the right words, anger slowly seeping in again.
His eyes didn't leave you, and it took a few seconds before he spoke again to the receiver. "Call back the agency. Find out who's responsible." He spoke slowly, his voice deep and cold, seemingly collected.
Inside, he was boiling. How could he be so careless. In all 2 years of being with you, he swore to himself to protect you - to not let you get taken advantage of malicious cameras or harassed by the media. And he just created an opportunity for that, now that the world knows what you look like.
He gritted his teeth in anger. He would personally take care of the person responsible for those pictures - murder in his mind.
He ran his fingers to his hair tightly. "And shut all those pictures down." He added darkly.
You looked up at him in disbelief. Pictures?
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Present time
You sat on the sofa as you scroll through your laptop, seeing both your face and Sae’s plastered in your big screen. On top of the article, written in big, bold letters - Sae Itoshi Spotted With His Girlfriend Last Night.
One picture showed Sae standing behind you, clasping the necklace around your neck. Another picture showed you both looking at a display, with Sae’s hand resting on your waist. The third was you speaking to an associate of the shop, with the pendant gleaming softly against your skin.
The pictures were carefully zoomed in, taken from outside the windows. It felt too intrusive, enough to make your stomach drop.
You rubbed the space between your eyebrows, dreading the worst as you scroll down to the comments.
saeforlife: No way this is true, I'm so heartbroken
urtea_towel_:The girls are all crying rn
its.daniel24: Idk why this is relevant to football'
defnotmadz: Somebody stole my nonchalant man
user6677: This must be AI
lizzyhopeee: Bro she's a baddie omg
tu_tuvelo!!: They look good together what’s the problem
cacababy111: Gold-digger lol
Excuse me? That last comment caught you off-guard. And you let out a scoff of anger. How dare–
In the corner of your eyes you saw your phone continuously blinking with endless notifications. You took a peek at your screen.
Oh my goodness, they found your Insta already. You hastily threw away your phone on the couch, horrified.
You heard footsteps and you looked up to Sae approaching, tapping the end button on his phone. He had been busy talking with PR team.
Sae was fuming. One of his managers in his PR team suggested he post an official statement, but Sae was no goddamn popstar. He wasn’t obligated to spoon feed the public. He couldn’t care less of what others think of him but he’d draw the line the moment your privacy is crossed. He wouldn’t stand for paparazzi following you, harassing your privacy, especially when you’re alone.
The thought of your private, intimate moments being plastered all over the internet made his jaw tighten.
Sae stopped in front of you and bent down on on his knee to meet you, his eyes apologetic. “I’m sorry, amor”
You gave him a sympathetic smile “There’s nothing to be sorry about, Sae."
“No, it’s all my fault. I should’ve been more cautious.”
“Sae, we both knew this would happen at some point. It’s not your fault.” It was true. It was bound to happen.
He averted his gaze from you, lips pursing.
But you cupped his face and forced him to look at you. You kissed him softly on the lips.
“Do you know what this means?” You asked with a slight smirk, attempting to lift the mood. “We can go to disney world now.”
Sae let out an unbelieving huff. Of all damn things..
You lifted an eyebrow and forced your face to keep straight. “I’m serious. We should wear matching shirts and those cute headbands.”
Sae put two of his fingers on your forehead and pushed your head back lightly
“Oww” you exclaimed dramatically.
In all honesty, Sae felt relieved too. It was over now, no more walking on eggshells on the street. No more hiding. He could now freely show his girl off to the world, walk hand in hand outside in broad daylight without pretending to be subtle, and take you out on dates in public places you’d always wished for.
For the first time the world saw you. And he would damn show to the world that he was only yours.
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End notes: lmao shidou as the prime suspect sae thought of first. Also, gang did yall see mbappe posted ester on his ig like 3 or 4 days ago?? And the lyrics on his song choice was like ‘she has blonde hair my baby is the prettiest..’ I was gagged, that def inspired me to write.
Summary: A gigantic Sea King decides you are its beloved and tries to court you
A/N: 2am brainstorming is something else
Masterlist
The first sign something was wrong was the shadow. Well, wrong maybe wasn't the correct term. The massive shape gliding beneath the Sunny had the whole crew bracing for impact. You clung to the railing, squinting at the murky outline.
The water erupted. A monstrous head, bigger than the Sunny figurehead, rose from the waves. Scales like polished jade. Whiskers long enough to touch the deck. Eyes huge, glistening, and locked directly on you.
No one moved. Every muscle on the ship went taut, ready to attack. Then the Sea King let out a sound that could only be described as… a chirp? A happy chirp?
“(Y/N), it says you are really pretty.” Chopper said, coming out from behind Robin.
You looked at the Sea King and then back to Chopper. "What?"
Chopper approached you and the sea king made a couple of more chirping noises, "He thinks you pretty and would like to be his mate."
Luffy’s eyes sparkled. “WOAH! It likes you!”
“What?” Nami yelped, plastering herself to the mast. The creature lowered its head toward the ship, nuzzling the hull with a rumble that shook the floorboards. A gentle wave sloshed over the deck.
Zoro pointed at you accusingly. “What did you do?”
“I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING!” You protested, hands in the air.
The Sea King blinked slowly, adoringly and then nudged you, this time with enough force to nearly knock you over the railing. Sanji caught you around the waist with a horrified gasp. “BACK OFF, SCALES-FOR-BRAINS!” he barked, “YOU THINK YOU CAN STEAL OUR PRECIOUS (Y/N)?!”
Brook pipped up from atop a barrel. “Yohohoho! They seem to be his type!”
Franky shoved his sunglasses up his nose. “That’s SUPER weird.”
Robin smiled like she was watching a nature documentary. “Interesting. It seems to be courting behavior.”
“COURTING?!” Usopp yelped.
You turned back to the Sea King, waving your hands frantically. “Hey! Buddy! I appreciate it, but I’m not… uh… available? To giant sea monsters?” The Sea King’s enormous face scrunched into something heartbreakingly pitiful.
Jinbe sighed sympathetically. “You should let it down gently.”
You took a deep breath and patted it nose. “I’m flattered. Really, you seem lovely. But our relationship wouldn’t work. I don’t even know your migration schedule. I’m sure there is another Sea King out there that would be perfect for you.” The Sea King let out a soft, warbling moan. Then, dramatically, very dramatically, it sank beneath the waves, disappearing with a splash that drenched the deck.
The ship was silent for all of ten seconds before Luffy yelled, “YOU BROKE ITS HEART!”
You groaned. “PLEASE don’t tell anyone I rejected a Sea King.”
Chopper sniffled. “It just wanted love.”
Zoro crossed his arms. “Next island, we’re buying you Sea King repellent.”
Nami jabbed a finger at you. “And you’re banned from standing near the railing!”
Sanji sighed dreamily. “At least now we know your beauty transcends species.”
You dropped your face into your hands as the crew descended into utter chaos behind you. You were never living this down.
Hello this is my first request and English is not my mother tongue, sorry for the mistakes or if you have trouble understanding…..
I read your one shot with a sea king who has a crush, I loved it and I wanted to know if it was possible to do it with the whitebeard crew??
That's it and I love your way of writing I often look at your writings on the characters of one piece!!!!
A Sea King with a Crush
Characters: Whitebeard Pirates (Platonic)
Summary: A Sea King decides to court you and your crew is no help.
A/N: Your English is good and I had no trouble understanding. Honestly, I have had this idea half-finished in my drafts for over a month, and I had forgotten about it. This request reminded me and motivated me to finish it. And thank you! I'm so happy you enjoy my writing!
Masterlist
The Moby Dick cut through the calm ocean like a giant whale swimming across the sea. The deck buzzed with the usual chaos of pirates laughing, arguing, and drinking long before noon. You leaned over the railing, enjoying the breeze. Life aboard the ship of Edward Newgate was never boring.
“Oi! Y/N!” Someone shouted. You turned to see Ace waving a skewer of grilled meat. “Want some?” He grinned.
Before you could answer, Marco swooped down beside him with a sigh. “Ace, that’s the fifth time you’ve tried to bribe them with food today, yoi.”
“It’s called generosity!” Ace protested.
From the captain’s chair, Whitebeard laughed deeply. “Gurarararara! Let the kid breathe, Ace!”
You smiled, being part of this crew meant being constantly surrounded by loud, ridiculous family members. Which is exactly why no one noticed the massive shadow rising from the sea, wntil the water exploded.
SPLASH!
A gigantic head burst out of the ocean beside the ship.
“SEA KING!!” Someone shouted. Pirates scrambled everywhere. Swords were drawn; guns were cocked, and someone spilled an entire barrel of sake. The creature was enormous, green scales, sharp teeth, and eyes the size of cannonballs. But instead of roaring, it blinked and then it stared directly at you.
“Why is it looking at Y/N?” Ace whispered.
The Sea King slowly lowered its giant head, until it was level with the railing and then it made a strange noise. “Grrr… rrroo…”
Marco tilted his head. “Is it purring?”
The massive creature nudged the side of the ship gently and the entire Moby Dick rocked. “HEY!!” pirates shouted attempting to stay upright.
You stared at the Sea King. “…Uh. Hi?”
The Sea King’s eyes lit up, and it splashed happily. Ace squinted. “Why does it look excited?”
Before anyone could react, the creature dove underwater. “Did… it leave?” someone asked.
A moment later, the Sea King resurfaced, holding something in its mouth.
A giant fish.
It carefully placed the fish on the deck, tight in front of you. Silence fell across the ship as everyone looked at you then the fish and back at the Sea King.
Ace slowly turned. “Did it just bring Y/N a gift?”
Marco rubbed his temples. “Oh no.”
The Sea King stared at you expectantly. You looked at the fish and back at the creature that could cause some major damage if it wanted to. “Thank you?” The creature made a delighted rumbling sound.
Whitebeard burst out laughing. “GURARARARARA!! Looks like you’ve got yourself an admirer!”
Ace doubled over. “Y/N got proposed to by a Sea King!!”
“I DID NOT!”
Another splash.
The Sea King disappeared again.
Marco sighed, "I have a bad feeling about this.”
Not a minute later the Sea King returned, with an even bigger fish. It gently dropped the offering beside the first one.
Ace wiped tears from his eyes. “Oh my god it’s trying harder.”
“STOP ENCOURAGING IT!!” You yelled.
The Sea King waited. You let a sight and then you awkwardly patted its nose. The creature nearly flipped the ship with excitement. Pirates tumbled everywhere. “WE’RE GONNA SINK!!”
“ACE STOP LAUGHING AND HELP!!”
Whitebeard leaned back, shaking with laughter. “Never thought I’d see the day one of my crew charmed a Sea King.”
Marco sighed again. “This is going to become a problem, yoi.” As if on cue, three more Sea Kings rose from the water, each holding fish. Ace went silent for all of five seconds before dropping into the ground laughing. Marco facepalmed. “It told its friends.”
You stared at the growing pile of fish on deck, then at the four enormous Sea Kings staring lovingly at you. "Marco.”
“Yeah?”
“Help.”
Ace still collapsed on the deck laughing, shouted. “Y/N started a REVERSE SEA KING HAREM!!!”
Whitebeard roared with laughter, loud enough to shake the ocean, and somewhere in the chaos the first Sea King proudly nudged your shoulder again. Apparently very pleased with its new favorite human.
Behind you, Ace was laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe nor was laughter even coming out anymore. “You’ve got admirers!” He wheezed.
From the captain’s chair, Whitebread roared with laughter. “GURARARARA! Looks like the ocean itself favors my kid!”
Just then, a voice cut through the chaos. “WHAT IN THE GRAND LINE IS THIS?!” Everyone turned, standing at the galley door was Thatch, holding a cooking knife in one hand. He stared at the deck.
Fish.
More fish.
Even more fish.
“Why,” he said slowly, “are there so many fish on deck?”
You pointed weakly at the Sea Kings. “They brought them.”
Thatch blinked. “They WHAT?”
The closest Sea King lifted another fish and gently set it beside you.
Thatch stared, then he turned to Marco. “Can we keep them?”
Marco nearly choked. “NO!”
Thatch crossed his arms thoughtfully. "Think about it though. Unlimited seafood supply.”
“THATCH!”
Another voice spoke calmly from the railing. “You all seem remarkably excited.” Everyone looked up, perched elegantly on the side of the ship was Izou, arms folded. He glanced from the Sea Kings, to the pile of fish and then to you. “Why are Sea Kings courting Y/N?”
One of the Sea Kings leaned closer to the railing. Izou slowly reached for his pistols. The Sea King froze, then gently placed a fish on the deck it front of him. Izou stared at the offering. “It bribed me.”
“IT’S BRIBING EVERYONE!” You cried.
Thatch was already dragging fish toward the kitchen. “Don’t mind if I do.”
Marco grabbed him by the collar. “You’re encouraging them!”
“I’m being resourceful!”
Suddenly, a fifth Sea King surfaced.
Ace stopped laughing. “Why are there more?”
The first Sea King proudly nudged the ship. Izou narrowed his eyes. “Did it recruit others?”
Marco sighed. “Of course it did.”
The newest Sea King rose from the water. In its mouth, a giant pearl the size of a barrel. It gently placed it at your feet. Thatch whistled. “Y/N, that one’s rich.”
Ace wiped tears from his eyes. “You’re getting upgrades!”
“I DON’T WANT UPGRADES!”
Whitebeard leaned forward, amused. “Well, kid,” he chuckled, “looks like you’ve conquered the sea without even trying.”
You looked around desperately. Five Sea Kings now surrounded the ship, each staring at you like an excited puppy.
Izou sighed. “This is your life now.”
Marco nodded grimly. “You’re the Sea King Whisperer.”
Ace pointed dramatically. “Y/N, Ruler of the Sea Kings!”
“I HATE ALL OF YOU!”
The first Sea King purred happily and nudged the ship again. The Moby Dick rocked dangerously. "STOP HITTING THE BOAT!!” Someone screamed.
Whitebeard’s laughter echoed across the sea. “GURARARARARA!!”
Summary: You’re stuck in a small space together, and the close proximity leads to accidental touches and teasing remarks.
Masterlist / Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
A/N: Hints of spicy but nothing to hot
💙🎪Buggy :
You’d made the mistake of rushing into what seemed like a perfect hiding spot, until you realized Buggy had followed you. And now, there you both were pressed into an incredibly tight storage room with barely enough room to breathe, let alone move.
Buggy’s exaggerated presence filled the small space, and you were painfully aware of how much space he was taking up. His flashy outfit, his tall hat, and his eccentric personality were all crammed into this tiny little cupboard with you.
His eyes flicked to you with a mix of confusion and irritation. “What is this?! What is this?! You call this a hiding spot?!”
“Buggy,” you muttered, trying to adjust, but there was nowhere to go. “We don’t have time for this. The patrol’s right outside. Stay quiet!”
Buggy shot you a glare, his voice rising slightly. “I’m trying to stay quiet, but you’re squashing me! This is ridiculous! I’m Buggy the Clown! I deserve more respect than this!” He puffed out his chest, but the cramped space only made it look even funnier.
You shifted awkwardly, trying to avoid touching him, but with his constant shifting and exaggerated movements, it was impossible. You were both too big for this tiny space, and every time you moved, you ended up bumping into him.
“I’m not the one who picked this place,” you said with an exasperated sigh. “But it’s either this or get caught. So please, for once, stop complaining.”
Buggy stopped for a second, eyes narrowing as he seemed to process what you said. “Oh, so you’re blaming me now, huh? This is your fault for dragging me in here! I could’ve been out there causing chaos like I do best, but noooo... now I’m stuck in here with you!”
You opened your mouth to respond but stopped when you heard footsteps approaching. Instantly, you both froze. Buggy, though, was clearly trying to keep his temper in check.
“Great,” he muttered, “we’re going to die in here. This is how my life ends. Squashed into a cupboard....” His voice trailed off, and you could practically feel his indignation rolling off him.
You couldn’t help but let out a small chuckle despite the situation. Buggy might be obnoxious, but the way he was reacting to the cramped space was pretty funny. Still, you couldn’t let your guard down too much. You shifted a little, trying to make yourself more comfortable, but in doing so, you accidentally brushed against him. His reaction was immediate.
“Hey! Watch it! I’m not some kind of pillow you can just lean on!” Buggy's voice went from a low growl to an exaggerated yelp. “What do you think this is? You think you can just...”
You tried to hush him, but it was no use. Every time he moved, you bumped into each other again, and it only made the situation worse. The space was so small that you could barely turn without ending up in even closer contact.
“Listen, I don’t want to be pressed against you, either,” you whispered urgently, still trying to hold in your laughter at his ridiculousness. “But we’ve got no choice, alright?”
Buggy puffed up his chest again, completely ignoring the fact that the two of you were practically sharing the same air. “Well, fine. But I swear, if I get any closer to you, I’m going to lose it. I’m Buggy the Clown, not some... some... hiding animal!”
You rolled your eyes. “You’re literally hiding right now, Buggy.”
Buggy’s ego seemed to deflate a little at that, and he crossed his arms with a huff. “I don’t need this. You’re lucky I’m doing this. But when we get out of here, I demand a proper reward for my troubles!”
You couldn’t help but laugh, even though you both were still practically crammed into the tiny space together. “Sure, Buggy. Whatever you say,” you said with a teasing grin, trying to ease the tension.
But Buggy wasn’t finished yet. “And no more accidental touching! I don’t know what kind of person you think I am, but I do not roll like that!”
You nearly snorted at his dramatic tone, but quickly suppressed it. “Buggy, you’re the one that’s been shifting around this whole time.”
“That’s different!” Buggy snapped. “I’m trying to make sure you’re not... you know... doing... things!”
You blinked at him, a little taken aback by his words. “...What things?”
He paused, a bit flustered for a second. “You know what I mean! I’m just making sure you’re not getting too comfortable! You’re lucky I’m here protecting your dignity! What if I accidentally touch you? Huh? I’d be ruined! You’d be ruined!”
His dramatic rambling almost made you laugh again. It was clear that he had no idea how much his exaggerated reactions made him look ridiculous, but at the same time, you couldn’t help but admire the way his pride never wavered, even in this situation.
You were about to respond when you heard the patrol footsteps growing closer again. Instinctively, you both froze, trying to breathe as quietly as possible. But as you waited in silence, you were keenly aware of the way his body was pressed against yours again.
Buggy noticed the change in your posture, and even though he didn’t say anything, you could feel his tension. For a moment, the chaos faded away. It wasn’t the most comfortable, but somehow, being stuck in a tiny space with Buggy didn’t feel as bad as it did at first. Despite his bluster and constant complaints, he was, in his own way, trying to make the best of the situation.
When the footsteps passed, you let out a quiet sigh of relief, but you couldn’t help the small smirk that tugged at your lips.
Buggy quickly straightened up, fixing his hat with exaggerated flair. “See? Told you I had everything under control. Now, I think we can finally get out of here.”
“Yeah, sure,” you said, still grinning. “Next time, maybe pick a bigger spot to hide in.”
Buggy huffed dramatically but gave you a smirk of his own. “You’re lucky I’m being so gracious right now. But I will accept a proper thank-you once we’re out of here. I’m doing this for you, after all.”
“Of course, Buggy. You’re a true hero,” you replied dryly.
❤️🍖Monkey D. Luffy:
The sound of footsteps above echoed through the ship, and you quickly ducked into the nearest hiding place. The enemy patrol was only moments away, and you didn’t have a lot of time to think. So when Luffy followed you in, you didn’t even have a chance to process it before the two of you were crammed into a small storage closet.
The room was full of crates and barrels, leaving barely enough space for the two of you to stand. Luffy with his usual playful grin, didn’t exactly help the situation. The tight space was becoming unbearable. Every time you tried to shift, you ended up bumping into Luffy. You were both stuck there, with barely any room to move, and it was starting to get uncomfortable. You could feel his warmth radiating from his body every time you moved even a little.
"I really don't think there's enough space for the both of us in here, Luffy," you muttered, shifting again, trying not to press too hard against him.
Luffy blinked at you, looking entirely unbothered by the situation. He scratched his head and gave you a sheepish grin. "I know, it's pretty tight," he agreed, then, without any hesitation, he put a hand on your shoulder, gently pulling you toward him. "I know! You can sit on my lap, and we’ll have more room!"
You froze for a second, eyes widening. "Wait, what?!"
Luffy’s grin was as wide as ever, his hands already pulling you closer. “Don’t worry! You’ll have more room to move if you sit here. It’s totally fine!”
Before you could react or protest, you were in his lap, perched there awkwardly. Luffy didn’t even seem to notice the closeness; he was just so calm and unbothered, like this was the most normal thing in the world. He adjusted his position, making sure you were comfortable, which only made the whole situation more uncomfortably intimate.
“There,” Luffy said happily, “Now there’s more space for both of us, see?”
You were sitting on his lap, his body pressing into yours, but the way he looked at you was just... so innocent. He honestly seemed like he thought this was the best solution, and the more he smiled at you, the more you found yourself trying to suppress your nervous laughter. This was Luffy, after all. He probably wasn’t even aware of the kind of effect this would have on you.
"Uhm, Luffy..." you said, feeling your face heat up. "I don't know if this is exactly what I had in mind... But, uh, it’s better than standing like this, I guess."
Luffy tilted his head, still grinning like a goof. “See? I told you it’d work! Now there’s plenty of space! You’re comfortable, right?”
"Comfortable" wasn’t the word for it, but you didn’t want to burst his bubble. “Yeah, sure,” you said quickly, trying to sound nonchalant, even though the situation was anything but.
Luffy didn’t seem to notice the awkwardness at all, instead looking very pleased with himself. “Great! I like this! Feels much better than being all squished against the crates, right?”
You tried to adjust yourself again, but it was still hard to ignore the way his arms were wrapped around you. Luffy was always like this, completely carefree and oblivious to anything that might make the situation awkward. It was almost refreshing, in a way. His complete honesty and lack of awareness made everything feel lighter, even if the closeness was overwhelming.
Luffy shifted underneath you, making himself more comfortable as he stretched his arms out behind him. “See? This is great. And you’re not squished anymore, right?”
“I’m not squished,” you agreed, but it came out sounding more like a question than an answer. The truth was, you were still trying to wrap your mind around how normal Luffy made everything feel, even when you were sitting on his lap, cramped into a tiny space with barely any room to breathe. He wasn’t doing anything inappropriate; he was just trying to make the best of the situation in his own way.
“And,” Luffy continued, his voice softening a little as his tone became more serious for a brief moment, “I like being around you. It feels... nice, being this close. So we can do this more if you want. I think I could get used to it!”
You looked up at him, surprised at his sudden seriousness. But as you met his gaze, you saw that Luffy wasn’t saying it out of any ulterior motive. He just really liked the feeling of closeness, like he always did with the people he cared about.
“Okay, Luffy,” you said finally, letting out a small laugh. “Maybe, when we have no other choice. But we’ll see about doing some other times.”
Luffy gave you a huge grin. “Great! I’m glad you agree!” He squeezed you a little tighter, making you jump slightly, before settling back into the small, cramped space. “This is fun! We should do this more often, definitely.”
You couldn’t help but laugh again, even if your heart was still racing in your chest. It was a chaotic, awkward situation, but it was Luffy. And when it came to him, everything felt a little more carefree than it should have. So for now, you just decided to go with it, even if you weren’t entirely sure what the future held. At least in Luffy’s world, things were always more fun than complicated.
🩵🥋Jinbei:
The sound of footsteps echoed down the hallway, and without thinking, you pulled Jinbei into the narrow supply closet with you. There was barely enough room to move, everything was stacked high with crates and barrels, making it feel even smaller than it actually was.
Jinbei's massive frame immediately made it obvious how tight the space was. You’d both fit, but only if you stood really close together.
Jinbei, ever the calm and composed one, didn’t immediately say anything. He just nodded once, his brow furrowing slightly as he looked around the cramped space. You could feel the heat of his body close to yours, but he didn’t make any move to adjust. “We’ll have to wait here for a moment,” Jinbei said in his usual deep, soothing voice. His eyes flicked to the doorway to make sure no one had seen you.
You nodded, but couldn’t help but feel the awkwardness of the situation creeping in. There was nowhere to stand that didn’t involve being in very close proximity to him, and even though you knew he wasn’t trying to make things awkward, the fact that he was so big and solidly built made the tight space feel even more intimate.
“I, uh...” You cleared your throat, trying to shift your position, but it was hard when his body was so close. “This is... a little close, huh?”
Jinbei turned his head slowly to look at you. His expression was as calm as ever, but you could tell he was trying to be careful with his movements. “I apologize,” he said, his voice low but sincere. “I did not expect to be in such a small space. I will make sure I do not encroach on your space.”
You quickly waved him off, trying to hide your unease. “No, it’s okay, Jinbe. It’s just that… well, you're a little bigger than me, and this is kinda tight.”
“I understand.” His expression softened a little, and for a brief moment, you noticed a hint of discomfort in his eyes. “I am sorry if I have made you feel uncomfortable.”
His usual composure didn’t waver, but you could tell he was trying hard to be considerate. The way he moved just slightly, trying not to brush against you too much, was actually a little endearing. He didn’t want to invade your space, but the cramped conditions made it hard for either of you to escape the closeness.
“I really don’t mind,” you said, though your voice betrayed you. The proximity was making it hard to ignore the warmth radiating off of him, and you could feel the weight of his presence, his muscles, just a few inches away.
Jinbei seemed to sense that the air had shifted, and he nodded again. “You are very kind. I will try to adjust, but I must be honest; I do not think I can make much more room in here.”
You chuckled nervously, realizing that both of you were kind of in this awkward situation together. “I figured as much,” you replied, looking around the small space. “It’s just... I’m not used to being this close to someone who’s this big. It’s kind of hard to ignore.”
Jinbei remained silent for a moment, his thoughtful expression never leaving his face. He could sense your discomfort but didn’t want to make a bigger deal out of it. “If it helps,” he said finally, “I will remain as still as possible. My presence should not overwhelm you.”
It was such a Jinbei thing to say, always considering the other person’s feelings and making sure they felt comfortable, even when he was stuck in an uncomfortable situation himself. But there was only so much stillness could do. Every shift you made, trying to create a little more space, seemed to only bring you closer to him. The tight space was unavoidable, and with Jinbei so close, you could feel the subtle pressure of his body against yours. His broad shoulders, his large frame... it was a lot to take in, especially when you had nowhere to move.
“I’ll try to stop fidgeting,” you said with a forced laugh, but it was hard to ignore how cramped you were. “This isn’t really what I had in mind when I thought of ‘hiding.’”
A slight smile breaking through his usually serious demeanor. “I did not expect our hiding spot to be so... limited in space either.” His eyes softened. “I can see how this might be uncomfortable for you. If you need a break from the closeness, feel free to let me know.” Despite his towering size, his voice was gentle and considerate, as if he truly wanted you to be at ease. He wasn’t making a big deal of the situation, but it was clear he wanted to respect your boundaries.
“It’s fine, really,” you said quickly, trying to reassure him, even though the tightness was becoming harder to ignore. “I just... didn’t think it’d be this close. You’re so tall. I feel like I’m almost... leaning into you.”
Jinbei seemed to think about that for a second, his gaze flicking down at you. His lips parted as if he were going to say something, but then he paused, and his gaze softened. “I suppose, under the circumstances, you are correct,” he said with a quiet chuckle, though it was almost more of a knowing smile. “We are quite... close, aren’t we?”
You were about to say something else, but just then, the sound of footsteps drew closer, and you both froze, silently holding your breath. The moment passed quickly, and you both let out a soft sigh of relief, but now the tension in the air was different. The enemy had passed, but the quiet, almost unspoken understanding between you and Jinbe hung there for a moment longer.
Jinbei shifted, his body just slightly adjusting, but still, he was close. His warmth surrounded you, and for a brief moment, you realized that the space between you wasn’t entirely uncomfortable anymore. It was a strange kind of closeness, but one that you weren’t sure how to label.
After a moment of silence, Jinbei’s deep voice rumbled softly. “I am not used to being so close to someone like this. I hope it hasn’t caused you too much discomfort.”
You found yourself nodding, your voice quieter than usual. “I think we’re okay. I mean, I wasn’t expecting it, but... it’s not so bad.”
Jinbei gave a quiet nod in return, his large hand gently resting near you, as if offering a sense of security. “Good. I am grateful for your patience.”
Summary: You’re stuck in a small space together, and the close proximity leads to accidental touches and teasing remarks.
Masterlist / Part 1, Part 2, Part 4
A/N: Hints of spicy but nothing to hot
💜 🎴Basil Hawkins:
The ship was quiet for a moment, the creaking of the planks the only sound as you slipped into the small storage closet, with Basil Hawkins following behind you. You didn’t have much time, footsteps were getting closer, the enemy patrol too near. There was only one small hiding place left.
“You’ve chosen an… interesting place to hide,” Hawkins remarked, his voice soft and almost too smooth. His eyes flicked over to you, and for a moment, there was a slight shift in his posture, but he didn’t move away.
You shifted uncomfortably, trying to keep your composure in the small space. “Well,” you muttered. “limited options.”
Hawkins raised an eyebrow slightly, his lips curving into a faint, almost unreadable smile. “True,” he replied, but his voice carried that strange, detached quality that was uniquely his. “But now we’re here… Let’s make the most of it.”
Every time Hawkins moved, even just a little, the air seemed to tighten, the space between you shrinking even more. His presence was comforting in a way. You could feel his gaze on you, even when he wasn’t directly looking at you.
“You’re too quiet for my liking,” you said, trying to break the silence, but Hawkins only gave you the smallest of glances before looking away again.
“You’re too fidgety for my liking,” he replied calmly, “If you move too much, you’ll only draw attention.”
You couldn’t argue with that. Something about being so close to Hawkins made your pulse quicken. It wasn’t just the physical proximity it was the strange energy he gave off. His stillness, his focus, his quiet observation.
“I’m not fidgeting,” you said, trying to sound more confident than you felt. But the way Hawkins stood there, not reacting to the closeness at all, made you feel even more exposed.
“I can feel you moving,” Hawkins murmured, his voice low and almost gentle, though it carried an undeniable edge. He shifted slightly, his body just barely brushing against yours. “You can’t hide it.”
The words sent a jolt through you, and despite yourself, you couldn’t help but shift, trying to get a little more space between you. But the room was too small, and the more you tried, the more you felt his presence looming over you. “Does it bother you?” You asked, your voice barely above a whisper.
Hawkins’ gaze flicked to you again, his eyes unreadable. “Bother me?” His lips curled just slightly, as if amused by your question. “Not even a little.
The words lingered in the air for a moment.
“It’s just... I don’t want to invade your space.” You admitted, your voice betraying the nervousness you were trying to hide.
Hawkins nodded, as if he’d expected that response, his eyes gleaming with quiet understanding. “I don’t mind it,” he replied, his voice still low. Suddenly, Hawkins shifted just enough to be a little closer. His body almost pressed against yours.
“You’re making it worse,” you muttered, trying to back up, but there wasn’t much room. Hawkins didn’t move. Instead, he simply watched you with that inscrutable gaze, his expression softening ever so slightly.
You felt the heat between you both, the space almost too small for either of you. And for a moment, it felt like neither of you were just hiding from the enemy anymore, you were hiding from something else. The footsteps on deck grew quieter, and Hawkins didn’t move, his presence still looming over you. “We’re clear for now,” he said simply, his voice returning to its usual calm, detached tone.
You let out a breath you hadn’t realized you were holding. “Guess we survived.”
Hawkins’ smile remained faint, unreadable. “We’ll have to see how long we can last in such close proximity, next time.”
💜🍩Katakuri:
You didn’t expect your hiding spot to be quite this, small. The game of hide and seek instigated by one of the younger Big Mom’s kids caused you to stuck in a cramped pantry on the Big Mom Pirates’ ship, trying to not be found first. You leaned back against the wall, trying to make yourself as small as possible. But the real problem? Katakuri.
Katakuri, with his towering height and broad shoulders, didn’t exactly fit in the narrow space. His tall form was pressed up against the shelves, and even though he tried to adjust to make it work, there was only so much room.
“This is… not ideal,” you muttered, looking up at him.
Katakuri’s voice, always calm and composed, rumbled through the tight space. “I know.” His piercing, deep-set eyes glanced down at you, the ever-present calmness in them not quite hiding the slight annoyance. “It seems we’ve both been put in an uncomfortable position.”
You chuckled nervously. “Uncomfortable? That’s an understatement. You’re basically blocking the entire pantry.”
He let out a small, quiet sigh, though it didn’t sound like he was frustrated, just resigned to the situation. “It’s not ideal,” he repeated, “but it’s better than being found first.”
That was true. As uncomfortable as it was, being in a tight space with Katakuri meant a better chance of staying hidden. His imposing size was difficult to miss, but the tight quarters meant his sibling would likely pass by without checking since they would most likely be searching for him first.
There wasn’t any real room to move, but the more you tried to shift to get a bit of space, the more you bumped into him. His shoulder brushed against yours, his knee brushed against your leg, and every time you moved, he had to adjust just to keep you both from being too visible. “This is a little ridiculous,” you muttered, but Katakuri’s quiet chuckle interrupted your complaint.
Katakuri tilted his head slightly. “I don’t often find myself in these situations.” His voice softened, his tone still controlled but there was an almost... thoughtful quality to it. “You’re just unlucky enough to be with me.”
You looked up at him, his towering figure standing so close that it was hard to ignore the fact that he was much larger than anyone else on the ship. “Unlucky, huh?” You muttered, though your voice carried a hint of amusement. “I wouldn’t really say that.”
Katakuri’s face remained serious, but you could see the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Maybe not that unlucky.” He shifted his weight slightly, trying not to push into you.
The heat from him was noticeable, and it only added to the intensity of the situation. You couldn’t move, not without bumping into him again, and every shift seemed to bring you closer to him. The more you tried to adjust, the more you realized that there was nowhere to go except closer.
“Katakuri,” you whispered, your voice tight from your nerves, “I...this is...”
Before you could finish, his voice cut through the tension, quieter than usual. “I know,” he said simply. “I’m trying to make the best of it.” For a brief moment, you caught a glimpse of something in his eyes, something that was usually hidden behind his stoic expression. There was a flicker of something deeper, an understanding perhaps.
You swallowed, trying to ignore how his body was practically touching yours in every way. “I’m not really... used to being this close to someone.”
His gaze lingered on you for a moment, though he didn’t move away. “Neither am I,” he murmured.
You heard the footsteps of his sibling pass by, their voice fading into the distance. Katakuri remained perfectly still, his gaze focused on the door, the muscles in his arms subtly flexing as he held his position. Once the threat passed, Katakuri let out a soft exhale, his body slightly relaxing.
“I guess we’re safe,” you muttered, still a little out of breath from the tension, and the fact that you were still pressed so closely together.
Katakuri nodded, his expression softening ever so slightly. “For now. Let’s get out of here.” But neither of you moved right away. And as awkward as it was, you couldn’t help but notice how strangely, comfortable you felt, despite everything. Maybe it wasn’t so bad being stuck with Katakuri after all.
🩵🐦🔥Marco:
The enemy’s footsteps echoed on the deck, and you quickly ducked into a small storage room on the ship, with Marco following close behind. The moment the door slammed shut behind you, you realized just how small the space was. The room was barely big enough for the two of you, filled with crates and barrels that left barely any space between you and him.
You shifted awkwardly, trying to give Marco some space, but the way the room was arranged meant your backs were almost pressed together, your sides brushing every time either of you moved. You glanced over at Marco, trying to stay cool despite the situation.
“This… doesn’t feel like the best hiding spot,” you murmured, looking around at the cramped space. “I’m not exactly comfortable with this much closeness.”
Marco, standing just a little too close, gave a soft chuckle. His usual calm demeanor was still intact, though you could see a faint hint of amusement in his blue eyes. “Yeah, it’s not ideal. But at least we’ll be safe here for a while,” he said, his voice low and soothing.
Despite his calm tone, you could feel the space between you two growing more charged by the second. Every time you tried to shift, you ended up pressing into him slightly, his warm body just inches away from yours. His presence was calming in a way, but the confined space made everything feel more intense than it probably should have.
As you stood there, shifting slightly to try and get a bit of breathing room, Marco’s arm brushed against yours. You both froze for a moment. His gaze flicked over to you, and his lips twitched into the smallest of smiles.
“Sorry about that,” he said softly, though his voice was still steady and calm. “Didn’t mean to crowd you.”
“It’s okay,” you replied, though you couldn’t help but feel a little flustered.
Marco’s blue eyes softened, and he leaned back against one of the crates, adjusting his position so that he wasn’t as pressed up against you. “I know it’s uncomfortable,” he said quietly. “But we’ll be fine. I’ll keep you safe.”
You could hear the sincerity in his words, but the way his voice lingered, just a little too close to your ear, sent a small thrill through you. His presence was always reassuring, but it was hard to ignore how his proximity made everything feel… different.
“I’m not worried,” you said with a small grin, trying to play it off. “Just not used to being this close to someone in a tiny room.”
Marco’s smile softened, and for a moment, you saw a flicker of something protective in his gaze. He leaned in slightly, just enough for you to feel his warmth. “You don’t need to worry,” he said, his voice low and steady, like a whisper meant just for you. “I won’t let anything happen.”
For a moment, the only sound was the soft creaking of the ship, and the tension between you two grew palpable. The closeness, the way his shoulder brushed against yours with every subtle shift, felt like something more than just hiding from enemies, it felt like something else, something you couldn’t quite place.
“Marco…” you began, but the words caught in your throat as he leaned in just a little closer, his breath warm against your skin. His closeness was almost too much to handle, yet you didn’t want him to back away.
“Shh,” Marco whispered gently, his fingers grazing your hand as if to reassure you. His eyes softened, and the gentle, calming energy around him felt almost like a balm to your racing heart. “We’re safe here, alright?”
You nodded, though the way your heart thudded against your chest didn’t exactly feel like safety. But it was Marco, and there was something about his quiet confidence and the way he stood there, so near, that made you feel like you could trust him with anything.
The sound of footsteps above faded, and the tension slowly began to loosen, but neither of you moved far. Marco’s fingers brushed lightly against yours again, and this time, you didn’t pull away. Instead, you let your hand linger next to his, almost as if the proximity had created a new kind of connection between you two.
He cleared his throat, straightening slightly, though his hand still hovered near yours. “Looks like we’re clear for now. But I’m not in any rush to get out of here,” he said softly. The teasing undertone to his words barely audible.
You couldn’t help but smile. “Neither am I.” Marco’s smile mirrored yours, and for a brief moment, the tension of the small room between you both faded into something that felt just a little more comfortable, even if you both knew it was still far from over.
❤️🗡️Red-Haired Shanks:
You and Shanks were in the middle of an impromptu hideout. The sound of footsteps outside made it clear that you couldn’t just waltz back to the main deck. The only available space? A tiny, cramped corner in one of the ship’s side rooms, tucked between barrels and ropes.
“You really think this is the best place to hide?” You whispered, leaning back against one of the barrels, feeling the heat of the space already starting to close in. It was too small for both of you. Shanks was much taller than you, and even as he shifted, his body kept brushing against yours.
Shanks chuckled softly, the sound rumbling deep in his chest. “You got a better idea? We don’t exactly have time for picking the perfect hiding spot.”
You couldn’t help but roll your eyes at his casual attitude. Of course, Shanks would be this relaxed in a situation like this, he always seemed to be so at ease, even when things were tense. “No,” you muttered, trying to ignore how close his shoulder was to yours. “But I’m starting to think you like these situations.”
Shanks’ amber eyes gleamed with amusement. He moved ever so slightly, the shift bringing him even closer to you. “You think I like being stuck in a small space?” he asked, his tone teasing yet with an edge of sincerity. “I prefer being around good company.” His smile widened, and for a moment, it felt like he was saying something more than just the words.
You raised an eyebrow, trying to keep your cool despite the heat of the moment. “Oh? And you think I’m good company?”
The grin Shanks gave you was wide and full of mischief. “Absolutely. But that’s not the point, is it?”
No, the point was that you were trapped in this tiny corner, with only the two of you and the growing, almost tangible tension between you. Every time he moved, even slightly, his body brushed against yours. You felt the heat radiating from him, and it was overwhelming.
“You’re making this harder than it has to be,” you whispered, trying to play it off like you weren’t affected by the closeness. The way Shanks’ chest was so close to you made it almost impossible to ignore the racing of your heart.
Shanks leaned in, his breath warm against your ear. “Harder?” His voice was low, smooth, and just teasing enough to make your skin flush. “I think you’re enjoying the closeness more than you’re letting on.”
You tried to focus, tried to push back the growing tension in the air, but it was impossible to deny. His hand brushed against your arm, and the contact sent a spark down your spine.
“I’m not complaining,” you murmured, your voice betraying you, the words escaping before you could stop them.
Shanks chuckled, the sound deep and rich with amusement. “Good to know,” he said, taking a step closer until you were almost pressed together. You could feel the heat of his body through the layers of your clothes, the proximity too intimate for comfort.
For a brief moment, the ship’s creaking was the only sound you could hear, and everything else faded into the background. The tension was palpable, there was something charged in the air between you two. Even with Shanks’ usual carefree demeanor, you could sense something deeper, something unspoken. His amber eyes flicked to yours, locking in with that rare, soft intensity.
“You know…” Shanks whispered, his voice dipping lower, just enough to make your pulse quicken. “In moments like these, I tend to think the closeness might be the best part.”
You swallowed, your heartbeat thudding in your ears. “Is that so?”
“Mm-hmm,” Shanks murmured, leaning in just a little closer, his lips brushing near your ear. “But you’re not exactly complaining either, are you?”
There was a long pause, the air between you thick with something neither of you had quite said, but both knew. You could feel his chest rise and fall with each breath, his body so close you
could barely think straight.
Before you could answer, the sound of the enemy footsteps grew distant, signaling that the danger had passed. Shanks straightened, the intensity of the moment not completely dissipating, but the closeness between you both remained. He shot you that trademark, easy grin, though there was something more to it now.
“Well,” he said, letting out a small chuckle, “seems like we survived. But next time…” He let the words trail off, a mischievous glint in his eyes. “I wouldn’t mind being stuck with you again.”
You shook your head, though you couldn’t help but smile. “Next time, huh?” Shanks’ grin only widened as he made his way to the door.
🤍💨Smoker:
The ship groaned as it rocked gently, the sound of footsteps fading overhead. You and Smoker had barely made it into the small storage room before the enemy patrol passed by. The room was tight and now you found yourself pressed against the wall, with Smoker standing barely inches away from you.
His imposing figure filled most of the space. Even though he was trying to keep his usual calm, serious demeanor, the situation was anything but calm. His presence felt suffocating, almost like it was taking up all the air in the small room. You shifted uncomfortably, but that only made things worse, as you ended up even closer to him.
“Should’ve known better than to pick a spot like this,” Smoker muttered under his breath, though it wasn’t directed at you. He ran a hand through his white hair, his expression still cool, but you could sense the tension in the way he stood, just a little too still.
“I didn’t exactly have a choice,” you said, trying to lighten the mood, though your voice came out a little shakier than you intended. “Didn’t see any other options.”
Smoker shot you a sharp glance, his piercing eyes studying you for a moment before he sighed, running a hand down his face. “Guess you’re right,” he muttered, crossing his arms, though his body was still practically blocking you in the small space. “But this is ridiculous.”
You couldn’t deny it. The closeness was undeniable. Every time Smoker shifted, even slightly, his body brushed against yours. The heat from his chest was enough to make the already thick air feel even thicker, the proximity making it harder to breathe. But no matter how uncomfortable it was, he didn’t seem to show any signs of irritation or anger, just calm, contained tension.
“I’m used to tight spaces,” you said, trying to joke, though it didn’t feel like it was working. “Not so much when I’m stuck with a giant like you.”
Smoker’s lips twitched at the corners in what might have been a smirk, though he quickly masked it with that ever-serious expression. Smoker didn’t move away. In fact, he stepped just a little closer, making it clear that there wasn’t much space left. He leaned in slightly, his breath warm against your cheek. “I don’t exactly have the luxury of moving around much in here,” he said, voice low, almost a growl. “But I’ll make do.”
You could feel the tension in the air, thick and heavy. Smoker’s focus was sharp, his body tense, and you could tell he wasn’t exactly comfortable with the situation, despite his usual calm. The silence between you two stretched for what felt like an eternity, neither of you daring to make the first move.
“You’re not complaining,” Smoker said after a long pause, his voice still rough but carrying a hint of something softer than usual.
You swallowed, trying to keep your voice steady. “Wouldn’t be much point in complaining. We’re stuck here either way.”
Smoker gave a quiet chuckle, though it was low and rough. “Yeah,” he agreed, his voice low. “And if I weren’t here with you…” He let the words hang in the air for a moment before finishing with a small, almost amused, grunt. “Well, I’d say you’d be in more trouble than you realize.”
You couldn’t help but smile a little. The way Smoker always managed to stay calm in these situations, even when the air was thick with tension, was impressive. “I’m starting to think I’m lucky to be stuck with you.”
For the first time, Smoker looked at you fully, his gaze flicking to yours. There was a moment of quiet between you two, his expression softening slightly, “Yeah,” he said quietly, his tone steady but carrying something you couldn’t quite place. “Lucky.”
The sound of footsteps on the deck above suddenly disappeared, signaling that the danger had passed. Smoker stepped back, and the air seemed to lighten just a little, though the weight of the moment still hung in the small space between you. “Guess we’re clear for now,” Smoker muttered, though his voice had a different edge to it now. “But don’t get too comfortable. We still need to get out of here.”
You nodded, feeling the heat of the moment still lingering. “Right. Just... next time, let’s aim for something with a little more room.”
Smoker let out a low laugh, the first one you’d heard from him in a while. “Next time, huh?”
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