Somewhere in the third hour Mountain clocks a problem at table seven.
two weeks ago @bloodfin answered this mcpf au ask and as is my nature, i fixated on two throwaway lines and drew a bunch of nonsense about swiss and mountain struggling to behave on the job because 1. they are extremely in love, 2. mountain cannot help but Look at his husband, and 3. i have a problem
thankfully(?) kay shares this problem and wrote an entire fic to exorcise our demons! many of the details/design choices here are directly inspired by the snippets they sent to torment me because the only thing we know how to do is make each other worse; read it go go go go find out what it is swiss and mountain are being extremely responsible about in this nicely lit bathroom
full version below the cut:
LMAO JUST KIDDING the real thing's on AO3
edit: agh i forgot to mention but ifrit’s mural is a riff on mucha’s la danse in case anyone was wondering!
My partner and I are going to an Evanescence themed drag night (drag me back to life) and I was wondering.... Would tempt ever have an emo/goth night?
hell yeah have so much fun!! that sounds amazing!!
tempt would ABSOLUTELY do an emo/goth night. let's talk about it 😈
the vibe:
all the warm amber lighting gets swapped for deep violet and cold white
cumulus runs a themed cocktail menu, of course. there's a "you're so last summer" (blackberry, mezcal, bitters) and a "bela lugosi" (black vodka, elderflower, genuinely unsettling) and one she just called "my chemical" that is exactly as chaotic as it sounds
fog machine fog machine fog machine
swiss at the door in all black looking exactly like he always does, which means he fits in perfectly and is vaguely threatening about it
the outfits:
rain -- black mesh crop top, tiny leather shorts, thigh-high boots with a block heel instead of the usual stilettos. he has swapped all his jewelry for steel and has on a black leather o-ring choker. red eyeliner. he has done absolutely nothing else different and its genuinely unfair
phantom -- they have been waiting for this night their ENTIRE career. full corpse paint but make it couture. ripped fishnet tights, a structured black corset, platform boots that make them almost six feet tall. big dramatic sleeves that flare when they spin
cirrus -- floor-length black silk with a slit alllllll the way up. her air magic makes it move like it's haunted. she's wearing one dark red jewel at her throat that matches her lipstick and nothing else and it's the most gothic thing anyone has ever seen. aurora tells her she looks like a vampire and cirrus says thank you
aurora -- she tried SO hard and the result is that she got the winged liner exactly right and is also wearing small silver star earrings and a black dress that is slightly too cute, despite barely covering her ass. everyone tells her she looks amazing because she does. she vibrates with excitement the entire night
mountain -- is wearing black. that's it. that's the look. it's enough
swiss -- sharp black turtleneck. one gold chain. looks like a bouncer at the most exclusive club in hell. mountain cannot focus
mist -- was not informed this was a themed night and showed up looking exactly like she does every day. she is very pleased
some songs:
phantom opens with knife party -- "boss mode." full theatrical commitment. there is a moment in the middle where they stop moving entirely for a difficult hold and the crowd goes silent and then the drop hits and it is genuinely unhinged. phantom considers this a success
cirrus -- siouxsie and the banshees, "spellbound." her air magic lifts the silk around her she looks genuinely supernatural. the fog machine was made for this moment
aurora -- evanescence, "bring me to life," because she thinks it goes hard and she is correct. she's pulling tricks that require committing so completely that there is no halfway, only through. she is going to feel this tomorrow, the pole bruises map her whole left side, a constellation of earned evidence she'll find in the mirror after her shower and feel something fierce about. worth it
rain -- depeche mode, "stripped." the lights go almost entirely out except for one cold white spot and rain does the whole set like he's the only person in the room. it's deeply uncomfortable to watch in the best possible way. there's a moment he pauses, hand barely gracing the pole, and he just... waits. the audience understands instinctively that this IS the performance -- the stillness is the point. that's what the song is underneath everything: come on and show me. rain holds it so long the room starts to feel it personally. he finishes the set like no one in the building has a single claim on his attention
dew content because you know i have to:
Dew shows up in black on black -- which is, he would like it noted, what he always wears. What he does not always wear, however, are the brushed silver bat collar pins. He’s worn them exactly once, for a Halloween party, and hasn’t touched them since.
Phantom spots them within four seconds of arriving and makes a sound like they've been given an early birthday present.
"Don't," Dew says.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to."
"I was going to say," Phantom says, hand to chest, "that you look amazing. That's all. Very on theme."
"I'm not on theme."
"The bats--"
"Go warm up, Phantom."
The other problem -- the separate, unrelated, entirely not his fault problem -- is the fog machine.
Tempt already runs a little warm. Dew runs warmer. The fog machine is positioned directly stage left and doing its job beautifully for everyone in the building except the fire ghoul standing in its radius, around whom the dry ice clears in a neat three foot circle like the atmosphere itself is giving him a wide berth.
Bell relocates him twice. Dew acquires his own small personal clearing both times.
By the third relocation Bell simply finds him a position near the back bar where the fog is thin anyway and leaves him there without comment. Dew stands with his drink and his bat collar pins and his own personal weather system and watches the room behave correctly around everyone except him.
Then Rain walks out for his set.
The fog radius expands by approximately two feet.
Bell, standing six feet to his left, makes a note on his tablet.
Summary: In which everyone is fully composed, thank you. Dew is fine. Bell is unbothered. Rain still isn't thinking about anything. It's good for business.
Warnings: mutual pining and idiocy, emotional constipation, cold showers (literal), masturbation, fantasizing, unresolved sexual tension, oh no, and he might've gotten away with it too if it weren't for you meddling ghouls, workplace shenanigans
Song: Little Death (slowed/reverb) by The Neighborhood
a/n: rip tumblr at least we have ao3. i love that this website crashes whenever i decide to run my mouth... maybe i should take that as a sign... nah. have fun watching dew lose every last shred of dignity!
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
It's barely six.
The apartment is dark in the way Dew likes it — the long living-room windows untreated, the city outside doing its easy blue pre-dawn thing stories below, the kettle on the induction burner already starting its quiet climb. He has nowhere to be for three hours. He's given himself nowhere to be for three hours. He'd built the morning around a slow start to the week, the assumption underneath being that the ghoul using the morning would be a reasonable party.
The ghoul, however, is not.
The jacket is on the hook by the door.
He hasn't gone within four feet of it since hanging it there. He has, in fact, been so deliberate about not going near it that he's caught himself rerouting through his own apartment, taking the long way to the kitchen, the long way back.
He clicks the burner off, pours the water and stands at the counter with both hands flat on the marble, a small thread of steam coming off his cup and a small thread of something else coming off the back of his neck. He made tea instead of espresso, which should have been a warning.
He doesn't look at the hook.
He knows what's in the breast pocket of the jacket. He folded it himself.
Quarters.
He picks up the tea and drinks it without sitting down.
He is, and this is the professional diagnosis, catastrophically off his game.
The morning hasn't yet seen another ghoul. The morning hasn't yet seen sunlight. The morning has, technically, barely even contained morning.
He's already losing to it.
He sets the cup down and goes to take a shower.
The bathroom is all black stone, low warm sconces, a glass-walled shower the size of a small treatment room. He'd built it for steam and quiet. It has reliably delivered.
He runs the water hot.
He's a fire ghoul whose nervous system is nine clicks above operating range, and the direct route to a regulated baseline is more heat. Drive the temperature up until the body resets. It's how this works. It has always worked.
He steps in.
The water hits him and steam blooms thick around the glass and his shoulders come down a quarter inch.
For the first six seconds, it works the way it always does. His discipline finds its footing, his body remembers it has a job. He tips his head back and lets the water run hot down his throat and his sternum and his stomach and he tells himself, very calmly, that this is completely, totally, utterly —
His brain offers Rain.
No announcement. No slow phase-in. His brain just — produces him. Rain, on the table at Helion. Face down, the long line of his back exposed from waist to nape, the lamp warm on the cool grey-blue of his skin, Delta pressing into the knot high in his shoulder… the sound Rain made when it gave.
Dew's hand goes flat against the tile.
That sound is not something he should have memorized, and yet he has. He could reproduce it. The low chest-deep crack of mnh-fuck breaking apart in the middle of the word, the breathless little laugh after, embarrassed and unbothered all at once. The little 'sorry,' like Rain had been apologizing for showing Dew exactly what he sounded like when something locked finally gave in.
The water is very hot.
His body is still, somehow, hotter.
The scorched-sugar edge of him licks up off his shoulders into the steam, and the discipline he was counting on is not coming back online. It is, in fact, getting worse because the heat is reading as permission. The heat is his body going yes, this, go on, making it easier to think about Rain naked on a table and not harder.
Great.
He shuts the hot off and turns the cold all the way on.
The water goes cold in stages — warm, lukewarm, cool, cold. Dew braces his forearm against the tile and takes the first wave of it across his shoulders and gasps, because his body hasn't had water this cold on it in living memory, because fire ghouls don't voluntarily do this. The shock is enormous. The shock is also, for one merciful second, completely effective.
His brain goes white. His brain goes blank. He stands under cold water in his own shower and feels his heart rate drop and his thoughts go finally quiet and thinks there. There. Good.
Then his brain, helpfully, points out the temperature.
It points out, in a tone so neutral it borders on amused, that the water currently running across Dew's shoulders is roughly the temperature of—
Dew's eyes fly open.
Water ghouls run cool. A water ghoul's hand on a fire ghoul's skin feels like this. A water ghoul's mouth. A water ghoul lying on a fire ghoul, the long cool line of him pressed down the long hot line of himself, every inch of contact conducting clean —
Dew makes a sound against the tile.
It's a small involuntary punched-out fuck. He hears it leave his mouth and immediately presses his forehead to the cold stone and stays there.
The cold water keeps running.
He stays under it because the alternative is turning it off and seeing the jacket on the hook, and he knows himself. He knows exactly what he'll do the second he stops bracing against tile, and it will involve his own hand and a name he has been extremely careful not to think while doing this, and he is not — he is not — going to be the kind of ghoul who fucks his own hand in the shower thinking about an employee.
He's going to be the kind of ghoul who stands under cold water for another forty-five seconds and waits this out.
He waits it out badly.
He counts backwards from sixty in a language he hasn't spoken in a long time, forehead on the stone, cold running down his back, his other hand braced flat against the tile because if he lets it go anywhere else he will lose. He refuses to lose before nine in the morning, not over a phantom temperature he ran on himself.
He gets to seventeen before his brain delivers, unbidden and crystalline:
nice hands
He gets to four and turns the water off.
He stands in the shower dripping and breathing for a count he doesn't take. His body is calmer, technically, by every measurable physiological metric. Heart rate down. Core temperature down. The scorched-sugar edge mostly dissipated, scrubbed thin by cold.
What is not down, what has not dissipated and is in fact still extremely and inconveniently present — is the rest of him.
Dew looks down at himself.
"Oh, fuck off," he tells it.
It does not fuck off.
He gets out of the shower and towels off in a series of short irritated motions.
Fine. Fine.
This is a… logistics problem. Logistics problems have solutions. He'll apply the solution, he'll get dressed, he'll go to work, he'll conduct the rest of his morning like a functional ghoul, and he will do it all without thinking about anyone specific by name, face, sound, scent, or any other identifying feature. He is capable of this. He runs a business.
Several.
He hangs the towel and braces one hand on the edge of the counter and looks himself dead in the eye in the mirror — wet hair, jaw set, water still beading on his shoulders — and lays it out.
This isn't about anyone.
This is… hygiene.
His reflection looks unconvinced.
He closes his eyes. That helps.
The mirror was a tactical error. Eyes closed, he is just a ghoul in a bathroom doing a private maintenance task on a Tuesday morning, and there's no requirement he think about anything at all. He's going to think about literally anything else. The Helion procurement numbers, the disco-night cocktail menu Cumulus is drafting, the radiator click in his office, the lighting program in the salt corridor, or —
His hand moves.
He keeps his eyes closed.
He thinks about the radiator click. He thinks hard about the radiator click. The small reliable mechanical sound it makes when the building is empty, the way it punctuated yesterday, the —
The round bed.
The round bed comes up out of nowhere and lands in the center of his skull fully formed and he's suddenly, entirely against his will, against the explicit terms he laid out thirty seconds ago.
He's picturing Rain across the dark velvet, laid out, hands behind his head, the gold barbell at his stomach catching the overhead, one knee up, the other leg fallen open, looking up at the ceiling mirror with the unhurried appreciation of a ghoul who knows exactly what he looks like from above.
"No," Dew says, out loud, to nobody.
His hand has, regrettably, not received the memo.
He tries to course-correct. He tries to swap the round bed for literally any other surface in his apartment. He gets, briefly, the kitchen counter — so much worse — then his own bed — catastrophically worse — and his brain, apparently delighted to have his attention, discards both and goes back to the round bed because the round bed is where it wants to be, the round bed has the ceiling mirror, the round bed has —
The sound.
Of course it has the sound. His brain is not being subtle this morning. His brain has decided the round bed and the massage sound belong together, has spliced them together in his head, and now he is picturing Rain on the round bed making the low cracked-open unh —
Dew braces.
He keeps his eyes closed because opening them now would mean looking at his own face doing this, and he's not doing that on top of everything else.
His breathing has gone short. The scorched-sugar edge is back full strength, rising off his shoulders into the cool bathroom air. The cold shower has been fully defeated. The cold shower was a waste of plumbing.
The sound. He keeps coming back to the sound.
He tells himself, with the last operational lobe of his brain, that the sound is generic, what any ghoul makes when a knot gives, that it wasn't for him, it was for Delta, who actually had hands on him —
His brain offers Delta's hands and promptly swaps them with his own.
He gets very, very close.
His brain, gleeful, vicious, off the leash now, produces his name. Produces his name and slots it neatly in Rain's pretty mouth. His brain is giving him Rain on the round bed in the lounge looking up at the ceiling mirror and making that sound and saying Dew —
He comes with his forehead pressed to the cool stone of the counter and a sound in the back of his throat that he refuses, immediately and forever, to acknowledge.
The bathroom is very quiet after.
His breathing is loud in it.
He stands there stupid, is the thing. He stands there just — stupid. Eyes still closed, hand on the counter, whole body ringing with what just happened and no way he can pretend it didn't. He just came to a mental image of an employee saying his first name. In his own bathroom. Before seven in the morning on a Tuesday.
He opens his eyes and looks at himself in the mirror.
His reflection looks exactly as unconvinced as it did before he started.
"That," Dew tells it, "did not count."
His reflection says nothing.
It doesn't have to.
He gets dressed fast, because slow is worse. Underwear. Socks. The slacks, black, knife-creased, off the hanger and on in one motion. The shirt, black, second-from-the-left, the one whose buttons he can do without thinking. He tucks. He buckles. He cuffs the sleeves to the second fold, the way he always does, and by the time he's most of the way into a jacket-less approximation of himself he almost feels like he lives here again.
The collar pins are on the dresser.
He picks them up. Small gold lightning bolts. He weighs them in his palm for a beat and threads them through the points of his collar and turns toward the door.
The jacket is on the hook.
He has half a dozen jackets in the closet. He could take any of them. He could leave this one on the hook with the card in it and go to work in something else and not have a piece of cardstock against his ribs for the next twelve hours. That would be the sane play. That would be the play of a ghoul who has just had a productive conversation with himself in a mirror and made better decisions about the shape of his day.
Dew stands in his own kitchen looking at the jacket on the hook and understands, with a clarity that genuinely irritates him, that he is going to take this jacket.
Fine.
Fine.
He crosses to the hook, shrugs it on. He does up the buttons, steps into his shoes, picks up his keys. He does not put a hand to the breast pocket. He knows the card is still in it. He can feel it against his ribs, the small flat shape of it, exactly where he left it.
The card is showing only to him.
He pulls the door shut behind him with a low growl, locks it, and goes to work.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
Dew comes in through the back.
Tempt is quiet. The shades on the avenue side are still down from the close, filtering the daylight down to amber. The bar is wiped. The chairs are still up on the tables in the front section. The back of house is doing the small things — the hum of the walk-in, the dishwasher running one belated cycle from the weekend, no music yet.
He has a perfectly serviceable office at Helion, quieter, less prone to interruption. He has his private office, larger and more familiar. He'd considered both options this morning while pulling his shoes on and something in him had said Tempt, firmly, without argument, and he'd stopped asking himself questions and taken the shorter walk.
The card against his ribs the entire way.
He is not going to examine why.
He climbs the stairs quietly and hangs his coat on the hook in his office. Sits at his desk, opens the folio that knows him better than any living thing.
He lets time… crawl.
Schedules for Tempt, schedules for Helion. New hires, a retirement package. Confirming physicals, staring out the window, doing everything in his power to forget the events of the morning.
It goes well, until a track kicks on downstairs at working volume. Slow disco bassline. He checks his watch. It's barely noon.
He gets through approximately eleven minutes of a supplier revision on the Helion linen order before his own brain betrays him.
Dew looks at his folio.
His folio looks back.
He'd been perfectly ready to spend the day up here. He is perfectly ready. He doesn't need to go downstairs. He's a functioning businessghoul with a linen supplier revision in front of him and a bottle of water at his elbow and absolutely no reason to leave his office.
He closes his eyes and then his folio and he goes downstairs.
He finds himself almost relieved to see that it's Aurora on the stage.
He'd be completely relieved, really, if there wasn't a nagging disappointment crawling up his throat.
Aurora's got the work lights up and a track running low. She's at the pole, mid-pass, the line of her body long and considered and visibly thinking.
The room is empty in front of her except for one occupied chair stage-right.
Phantom.
They have propped both feet up on the chair in front of them, phone face-down on their thigh, full attention on Aurora with the intent expression of a fight trainer in the corner of a ring.
"Toe," Phantom calls.
Aurora adjusts.
"Better. Hold it. Hold it."
Aurora holds.
"Yes, baby, that's exactly it!"
At the bar, Cirrus is leaning on her elbows, Cumulus tucked against her side with one arm slung loose around her waist. Neither of them is coaching from over there. Both of them are watching, but at a deliberate distance — the kind of distance you give a junior dancer being worked with by someone you mostly trust to do it right.
"Phantom," Cirrus says, mild, without looking away from the stage. "You're not allowed to make her routine weird."
Phantom puts a hand to their own chest.
"Excuse me."
"You heard me."
"I'm being responsible."
"You're being Phantom," Cirrus says, and Cumulus snorts into her water.
"I'll have you know I have not made one single inappropriate suggestion in nine minutes."
"That's the longest you've gone in your life."
"I'm growing."
Aurora lets the line go and dismounts in a slow controlled slide, landing on bare feet slightly out of breath. She tucks her hair behind her ear with the small embarrassed motion of a ghoul who has just heard herself praised twice in the last twenty seconds. "I'm not — it's the third pass, I'm still finding it —"
"You're finding it well," Cirrus says, calm. "Run it again from the top."
Aurora nods and waits for Cumulus to restart her track.
Dew has stopped at the back of the room.
He hadn't meant to stop. He'd meant to walk through, exchange the appropriate number of nods, conduct a perfectly normal Tuesday. He stopped because Aurora is, in fact, doing better than well, and the small clean warmth that lands in his chest is, frankly, a relief after the morning he's had. Something in him that isn't compromised.
Something he can look at directly.
He watches her run the pass with his folio held against his chest and lets it sit. A real minute of being a ghoul who runs a club and is happy with his roster. No spiral. No card. No itch. Just the floor working the way he wants it to.
He almost makes the full minute.
Then his eye, entirely against his explicit instructions, slides toward the back hallway.
It's a small motion. Less than a glance. Anyone in the room could have missed it, would have missed it, did miss it — except Phantom, who notices everything, who has been on the receiving end of a hundred of these looks and has stopped counting, and who — without breaking eye contact with Aurora on the stage — says:
"Rain's upstairs."
Dew's whole face does not move.
"In the lounge," Phantom adds, helpfully. "Working out the new room. Been up there since I got here. Door's open."
"I wasn't —"
"I didn't say you were."
Phantom says it cheerfully without turning around.
Dew is left standing at the back of his own club with his composure listing several degrees to starboard.
"Your toe again," Phantom calls, mildly. "Perfect, baby. Hold it."
Bell appears at Dew's elbow.
Bell does this. Dew has stopped registering it as a surprise, but he has not stopped registering it as a condition — the change in atmospheric pressure that means Bell has decided something is about to happen to Dew's day.
Bell has a bottle.
He's holding it loose by the neck, the way you hold something you've already determined the weight of, and his face is doing absolutely nothing.
"Mister Delmere."
"Bell."
"Cumulus flagged a gap in the lounge bar setup over the weekend. Another vodka option, premium tier. The order came in this morning." He extends the bottle. "If you're heading back up."
Dew looks at the bottle. Looks at Bell.
Bell looks at Dew with the precise and untraceable neutrality of a ghoul who is, in fact, doing absolutely nothing right now and is offended at the implication that he could be.
"…Right," Dew says.
He takes the bottle.
He can't say no, Bell, you take it up. He can't say no, Bell, send anyone else. He can't say no, Bell, I'm specifically trying not to go up to the lounge right now without explaining why. Explaining why is the one thing he is incapable of doing because Bell would receive it with the same blank face he's currently wearing and file it under as previously suspected.
Bell nods once. "Thank you, sir."
"Mhm."
Phantom, on the chair, calls another toe correction.
Dew turns toward the back hallway with a folio under one arm and a bottle in the other hand and the growing suspicion that he has just been delivered.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
Dew should stop at his office on the second floor because that's what a functional ghoul would do. Set the folio down, log the vodka in the lounge inventory, come back down after. That's the version of the next four minutes that involves the most stairs and the least amount of Rain.
He, of course, doesn't do any of this.
He keeps the folio in one hand and the bottle in the other and he turns for the lounge stairs. He doesn't examine any part of that decision either.
The music reaches him halfway up.
It's coming from the lounge, low and wrong somehow. A song slowed down past the point a song wants to go, every edge of it dragged soft. A man's voice somewhere inside the reverb, stretched so far the words have come apart. It sounds like the idea of a track, played underwater.
Dew slows on the stairs.
He could announce himself. There's a version of the next ten seconds where he says something from the hallway, clears his throat, and behaves like a ghoul who owns the building and not a ghoul sneaking up on it. That version is right there. Free. Available.
He doesn't do that, either.
He stops at the curtain instead, where the gap is, and he looks.
Rain has the room.
He's not dressed for it. Joggers slung low, a tank gone soft and shapeless with age, bare feet quiet on the floor he renovated. No collar. No rhinestones. None of the usual armor.
He's marking something out — Dew can see that much, can see it's work and not performance, the choreography taken down to half its speed and run without any of the shine on it. An arm going slow through a line. A turn started, stopped, started again. He's not selling anything. He's not even warm. He's just finding where the room wants him to be.
And that, Dew thinks, with the curtain edge caught between two fingers and his own pulse somewhere it shouldn't be — that is the problem.
He's watched Rain perform a dozen times. He's been aimed at. He knows what it is to be the thing Rain's body is pointed toward, and he's survived it (mostly) by understanding it as a transaction with the room.
This isn't that.
Nobody's being aimed at. Rain is alone, slow, unglossed, working a private craft in an empty room, and Dew is standing in the dark of the hallway watching him do it, and there is no transaction here to hide behind.
Just Rain.
Just the want, sitting in Dew's chest with no name on it and no excuse attached.
He should go.
The part of his brain responsible for good decision making didn't clock in today.
Rain crosses to the pole.
He walks the perimeter of it first. One hand trailing the brass, the contact light, almost incidental — the way a musician says hello to an instrument before asking anything of it. He's checking something. Tightness, maybe. Temperature. The pole has been sitting in the cold of the unheated lounge all weekend and he's letting his palm tell him about it.
Then he sets his feet.
The mount is unhurried. He doesn't jump it, doesn't haul. He just takes the pole, both hands, and the long lean line of his body lifts, ankles crossing neat at the brass, the whole motion costing him nothing visible. He hangs for a beat upside down, looking at the room from the wrong angle, head tipped back, throat exposed, considering.
Dew has stopped breathing in any organized way.
The bottle is warm in his hand. He hadn't realized he was holding it too tight.
It isn't, yet, the thing his brain wants to make it. It's good. It's elegant the way a sentence is elegant, structurally — every part doing exactly the work it was built for; no wasted motion, no announcement of effort. Rain's body lifts and pivots and the pole holds him and the whole thing happens at the speed the slowed-down song wants, which is barely any speed at all.
He rotates. One leg unfolds, finds a hook, settles. The other extends long into the air, toes pointed soft. He's not arched. He's just finding the line, adjusting a half inch, holding it, adjusting again, listening to what his body is telling him about the angle.
It must tell him something he doesn't like. He drops out of the hold, lands on bare feet without a sound. Walks the perimeter of the pole again.
Tries it again.
The second time the line is cleaner. He holds it longer. His head tips back further, the long pale line of his throat opening up to the ceiling mirror, and Dew's eye goes up, reflexively, the same coward's reflex as last time, the same safe-place lie.
The mirror gives him Rain a second time, from above, the slow rotation of him laid out flat against the dark of the ceiling.
Two of him.
This is, Dew realizes, becoming a recurring problem.
The thought is meant to be dry. It comes out worse than that — comes out somewhere closer to fond. The heat in his chest tips a degree further toward something he is not going to name, not in this hall, not while standing in the dark watching a ghoul who doesn't know he's being watched do something that isn't even for him —
Rain unhooks. Slides down the pole. Lands quiet.
He shakes out one wrist. Tips his head side to side, considering. Crosses to the speakers on bare feet to start the song over.
Dew should really leave.
His feet stay planted on the ground.
Rain restarts the song.
The slowed thing fills the room again, that underwater dragged-soft voice, the bass coming through the floor more than the air. He stretches one arm overhead. Then the other. Rolls his neck. Walks back to the pole.
Sets up for the mount again.
This time he's not testing. This time he's running it — the slow walk-in, the hands going to the brass, the lift that costs him nothing, the rotation, the leg unfolding into the hook. He holds the line. Holds it longer. His eyes close.
His eyes close.
Dew watches Rain dance with his eyes closed and feels something shift behind his sternum. Something he'd been operating, for a long time now, under the assumption he was done with.
He'd been wrong about that.
Rain's leg comes down. He dismounts in a slow controlled slide, the long line of his body unspooling against the brass, and his eyes open exactly as his bare feet touch the floor. He shakes out his shoulders. Considers the pole. Walks the perimeter again.
He's going to do it again.
He is going to run that line a third time and Dew is going to stand in this hallway and watch and there is no version of the rest of his afternoon in which he has not stood in the dark and watched Rain dance with his eyes closed and liked it and —
His phone buzzes.
It buzzes against his thigh inside his slacks pocket, the small mechanical hum of it absurdly loud in the slowed-song quiet, and Dew's whole body goes rigid because he knows, knows the second it starts, that the sound has carried.
Rain stops mid-step.
His head turns toward the curtain.
The phone buzzes again. And again. And again.
Not a notification, a flood — the staggered rapid-fire of a calendar tool dumping a queue of confirmations into his inbox one after another after another, each buzz a separate event, each event a booking, each booking a stranger.
Rain's eyes find the gap in the curtain.
Find Dew in it.
Dew, standing in the dark of his own hallway watching a ghoul on his own payroll do private work in a room he himself renovated, with a folio in one hand and a bottle of premium vodka in the other and a phone buzzing in his pocket that is currently announcing, in real time, that the room has just sold out for the next five weeks.
The phone buzzes a seventh time.
Rain raises one eyebrow.
"I —" Dew says.
He pushes the curtain aside because hiding behind it would be worse — a confession with fabric in front of it. He steps into the lounge with composure, a ghoul arriving somewhere on purpose, which he… is, technically. He's going to be extremely clear about that, he has a purpose to coming up here in the first place.
The purpose.
He'd had… a… purpose.
"I came up to —" His eyes do a fast desperate sweep of the room for a noun. They land on the bar setup. "— check the bottles."
Rain looks at him.
"The bottles," Rain repeats.
"Inventory." Dew's mouth has decided to keep going without consulting him. "For the bookings. I need to confirm the bar is — stocked. Appropriately. For the bookings."
His phone buzzes again. Eighth. He doesn't look at it.
Rain hasn't moved off the pole. He's standing with one hand still loose around the brass, hip cocked, head tipped, looking at Dew with the unhurried attention of a ghoul who's just watched the most controlled being he knows produce the word bottles under duress and has decided this is the best day he's had in weeks.
"You came up," Rain says, "to check the bottles."
"Yes."
"From the hallway."
"I —"
"You were checking the bottles," Rain says, "from behind the curtain. In the dark."
The phone buzzes. Ninth.
Dew, who has the vodka right there in his hand, who could, theoretically, just hold it up as a defense exhibit, doesn't.
Doing so would mean admitting that Bell handed him the vodka specifically to be walked up here right now, which would mean admitting Bell knew, which would mean admitting there was something for Bell to have known about. Dew has been in this room for approximately forty seconds and is already fighting a war on three fronts.
"It's a busy day," Dew says weakly.
Rain lets that sit. He lets it sit long, longer than is kind, the slowed song still dragging its soft underwater way through the speakers behind him. He doesn't stop looking at Dew, and Dew understands, standing there in his own tailoring with a folio pinned to his ribs and a bottle sweating in his palm, that Rain could say the true thing and is choosing not to.
That's almost worse.
"Mhm," Rain says, finally.
He pushes off the pole and crosses the room toward him, unhurried, bare feet quiet on the floor. Dew's nervous system briefs him with the calm professionalism of a ghoul reporting a fire.
He does not retreat. Retreating would also mean something.
Rain stops an arm's length away. Closer than colleagues. Not as close as the shuttle. He smells like clean sweat and the cold ghost of outside still in his hair, and he tips his head at the phone still buzzing against Dew's thigh.
"You gonna get that?"
Dew finally sets the folio down.
He pulls the phone out and the screen is a wall. A stacked column of confirmation banners, one on top of the next, the calendar tool's cheerful chime icon repeated down the whole display. He thumbs it open. The lounge calendar loads.
It's full.
Not full like a good night. Full like a month. The grid has gone solid — every available slot, claimed and confirmed and paid, five weeks deep, the white space he'd built into the schedule for sanitation turnover the only breathing room left on the page.
"Huh," Dew says.
"Yeah?"
"The lounge." He turns the screen briefly, then thinks better of showing Rain the specifics and turns it back. "It's. Booked."
"Already?"
"Opened the schedule this morning." His own voice sounds strange to him. "It's… booked. Through the end of next month."
Something flickers across Rain's face. Brief. Gone before Dew can read it, which is its own kind of information — Rain doesn't usually let things flicker. He covers it by glancing at the pole, then the bed, then the room at large. The room he was, ninety seconds ago, learning the bones of.
"Guess people want the new thing," Rain says.
"Guess so."
"That's good. For business." A beat. "Right?"
"It's very good for business," Dew says.
It is. It's extremely good for business. It's the single most successful product launch of his ownership and the numbers are going to make Mist do the thing where she almost smiles, and Dew is standing in the middle of his triumph holding the phone that proves it and feeling, distinctly, like he swallowed something cold.
Because the bookings have names attached.
He didn't read them. He turned the screen away before he could. But they're there, a column of strangers five weeks deep, and every one of them booked this room — the round bed, the ceiling mirror, the pole Rain just closed his eyes on — for sixty to ninety private minutes with a dancer of their choosing.
Rain is the headliner, and Rain is right here, and Dew built every part of this on purpose with his own two hands and his own signature and he cannot, for reasons he is also not going to examine, make the cold thing in his chest go away.
This isn't jealousy.
He wants to be clear with himself about that. It can't be jealousy, because jealousy would require a claim, and he has no claim. He… he doesn't want a claim. He wants — operational excellence. A safe room.
A profitable launch.
A happy headliner.
He wants Rain to not spend the next five weeks alone with strangers in the room Dew can't stop picturing him in.
For safety reasons.
"New boss."
He looks up.
Rain's expression has gone quiet and careful, and Dew realizes he's been silent for several seconds with his jaw doing something and the scorched-sugar smell of his own slipping control thick enough now that the water ghoul standing an arm's length away has definitely, definitely noticed it.
"You're burning," Rain says.
It's not a question. It's an observation, delivered flat, the way he noted that the lighting was wrong.
"It's warm in here," Dew says.
"It's not." Rain's eyes don't move off him. "Heat's barely on up here." A pause, unhurried, almost clinical. "That's you."
The scorched-sugar edge of him is, at this point, undeniable. There's no version of it's warm in here that survives a water ghoul standing close enough to read his actual temperature, and they both know it. Rain is just — letting it sit there. Not teasing. Not pushing. Holding the fact of it up to the light where Dew has to look at it.
That's you.
This is, Dew thinks, the most naked he's felt in his life, and he's fully clothed. The only thing Rain has done is correctly identify the ambient temperature.
He folds.
Not visibly — at least, he'd like to believe not visibly. He pockets the phone. Adjusts a collar pin and picks his folio back up.
"Bottles look fine," Dew says.
"You didn't check them."
"They look fine from here." He's already moving for the curtain. "Carry on. Good — the choreography. It's good."
He hears it leave his mouth. He can't recall it. It's good, the choreography, said by the ghoul who claimed under oath thirty seconds ago to have come up here for inventory and not, under any circumstances, to watch.
Rain says nothing.
Dew doesn't look back to find out what Rain's face is doing. Looking back would mean something and he's done enough meaning for one morning.
He pushes through the curtain and takes the stairs down at a pace that is not quite a retreat and lands in the empty second-floor landing with his heart going and the smell of his own control still clinging to him and a calendar in his pocket full of strangers and the bottle of vodka he was supposed to be delivering still in his hand.
He doesn't go back up.
He also does not, technically, complete the errand.
Bell's going to notice.
Bell is going to notice and Bell is going to say absolutely nothing about it, which is worse.
𖥸
Upstairs, Rain stands in the quiet a moment after the curtain falls.
The slowed song is still going, the same eight bars come back around. He looks at the curtain. Then at the phone-shaped absence in the air where the new boss had stood radiating heat and lying about it.
Burning. Over a booking calendar.
Rain files it under none of my business, which is where it belongs, which is where he is going to keep it.
He walks back to the pole.
He sets his feet. He takes the brass — cool under his palms, exactly as cool as it should be, no one else's temperature anywhere near it. He lifts, and he finds the line, and he runs the set again from the top.
He's not thinking about it.
He runs it twice more, clean, and absolutely doesn't think about it either time.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
There are four people Bell could have asked to retrieve the mirror ball.
Mountain, who could carry it down one-handed. Swiss, who owes a favor and wouldn't have spoken for the entire drive. Cumulus, who knows the storage facility's layout better than Bell does and would have located the thing in half the time. Or Cirrus, whose presence is restful.
Bell has a list. Bell always has a list. The list, in this instance, contains four entirely sensible names, ranked by suitability, each of whom Phantom outranks for no defensible reason whatsoever.
Phantom didn't ask, technically. Phantom announced. They appeared at Bell's elbow, vibrating, and said the words 'I heard you're getting the disco ball from storage' with the reverence of a pilgrim who's finally located the shrine, and Bell had said yes, because it was true, and the rest simply happened to him.
Now they're in Dew's company SUV, and Phantom has the aux.
"This," Phantom says, holding their phone aloft, "is a song about a horse."
"I did not ask."
"You're going to want context."
"I assure you I will not."
Phantom plays the song about the horse.
Bell drives at the speed limit, keeps both hands on the wheel. He's found that there's no situation Phantom can construct that can't be survived through the simple application of not engaging, and he intends to apply it now, comprehensively, for the full duration of the errand.
"You're tapping," Phantom says.
Bell stops.
He hadn't been aware that he was tapping.
This is, he reflects, exactly the problem with Phantom: they notice things. They notice the small involuntary things a ghoul does when his composure is operating at ninety-eight percent and not one hundred. They notice, and then they announce, and the announcing is somehow worse than the noticing. Bell has spent several weeks now constructing a face that gives them nothing and he's no longer confident it's working.
"It's a good song," Phantom says, gentler, like they're letting him off the hook.
Bell doesn't thank them for it.
But he doesn't, against every instinct he has, change the song.
The mirror ball was not, as it turned out, in the back room at Tempt.
Phantom had been so sure. Bell, who reconciled the off-site inventory when the acquisition went through, had not corrected them, and is choosing not to examine why. There's a list of things Bell is choosing not to examine today. It's already had additions.
So: the facility. Twenty minutes north, with Phantom and the aux and a song, now, about a different horse.
"Okay, but this one's a metaphorical horse," Phantom is saying.
"They're all metaphorical horses."
"See, you are getting it!"
Bell takes the exit. Phantom has both feet up on the dash, which Bell has decided, after a brief internal negotiation, not to fight, because the alternative is a conversation about it and a conversation about it is what Phantom wants.
He gives them, instead, silence.
Phantom fills it. He figured they would.
They fill it with the metaphorical horse and then with a theory about the disco theme costuming and then with an unsolicited ranking of everyone at Tempt by how well they'd survive the apocalypse (Mountain first, obviously; Bell, alarmingly, second; Phantom places themself last with the cheerful fatalism of a ghoul who knows their strengths are social).
Bell drives.
He doesn't participate.
He does, somewhere around the third horse, stop actively not listening, and by the time the storage facility comes into view he could, if pressed, reproduce Phantom's entire apocalypse ranking from memory.
He won't be pressed. But he could do it anyways.
The facility is a long low building full of other people's forgotten decisions.
Bell signs them in and the attendant waves them back without comment, though his eyes track Phantom for a moment with the wariness of a man who's seen what enthusiasm does to climate-controlled storage.
Unit 14 is at the end of the third row.
Bell rolls the door up and the smell of it comes out to meet them — cool, dry, a little dusty, the museum-hush of objects that have outlived their use and are simply waiting to become relevant again. Tempt's history lives in here, boxed and shelved and labeled.
Old staging. Retired signage. A rack of costumes from eras Bell has only read about in the ledgers. Aether's things, some of them, still — Bell has never had the heart, or the instruction, to clear them.
Phantom goes very quiet.
It's the quietest they've been since leaving the club. Bell turns to check on them out of something that isn't concern, it's… purely operational vigilance. The responsible monitoring of a known variable in an enclosed space.
Phantom is standing just inside the door with their hands clasped under their chin, looking down the length of the unit with their whole face lit up.
"Bell," they breathe. "It's a time capsule."
"It's a storage unit."
"It's the attic of the gay little club."
"Mirror ball," Bell says. "Far shelf. We're here for the mirror ball."
But Phantom's already gone down the row, trailing a hand along the shelving, reading labels out loud in a hushed delighted voice, and Bell, against the entire architecture of his self-discipline, doesn't call them back immediately.
He gives them a moment.
He tells himself it's because the mirror ball is heavy and he'd rather locate it precisely than rush. He tells himself they have plenty of time. He tells himself… several things, in hopes that maybe one of them will be true.
He follows Phantom down the row at an unhurried distance and watches them discover Tempt's whole forgotten history one label at a time. The unit is cool and quiet and smells like dust and waiting, and Phantom's voice is the only warm thing in it.
The mirror ball is exactly where Bell knew it would be.
Hanging from a far shelf, third unit, behind a rolling rack of garment bags and beneath a fitted dust cover. He could have walked directly to it. He could have had it in the SUV in four minutes flat.
He locates Phantom instead, three shelves deep, holding up a sequined something against their own chest and turning to catch the overhead light.
"Bell. Bell. Tell me this isn't the most beautiful thing you've ever seen."
"That is a 2014 Pride costume. The sequins shed."
"So it's retired."
"It's biohazard-adjacent."
"It's vintage." Phantom holds it higher, reverent. "This has history, Bell. Someone danced in this. Someone had the night of their life in this." They lower it, suddenly thoughtful. "Or a terrible night. Either way. Stakes."
Bell takes the costume out of their hands and returns it to its box, because the alternative is that it comes home with them. He files the small flare of something he feels watching Phantom's face fall — not regret, he tells himself, simply the natural conclusion of a logistics decision — at the bottom of the list, with the others.
The list is getting long today.
"Mirror ball," he says. "It's over here. Help me with the cover."
And Phantom, who's spent the entire errand resisting every single instruction Bell has issued, immediately and without complaint crosses the unit to help.
They lift the dust cover together. Phantom takes one side, Bell the other, and they pull it off in one motion. The mirror ball comes out from under the canvas all at once, catches the single overhead bulb, and throws it.
The whole unit goes to light.
A thousand small squares of it, spinning slow off the surface as the ball turns on its hook, scattering across the shelves and the garment bags and the boxed-up history and the dust hanging in the cool air. Across Aether's old boxes.
Across Phantom's whole upturned, delighted, little face.
Phantom makes a small involuntary sound. Not a laugh. Not a look at that. Just a soft oh — the sound of a ghoul who's been ambushed.
They tip their head back further, hands slack at their sides, watching the ball turn. The bit is gone. The horse is gone. The performance is gone. There's only a ghoul with slow squares of light moving across their face, looking at something more beautiful than they expected to find, and Bell —
Bell has stopped moving.
He'd meant to say good, it works, let's go. He'd meant to check the fixture point, run the cable, note the ball for the cleaner in the morning. Those are the actions he came here to perform. They're on the list. He's aware of the list.
He's aware, further, that he's not currently performing any of them, and that this failure of action is being observed by nobody, since Phantom is looking at the ball, and Bell is looking at Phantom, and more specifically at the small squares of light that are moving across Phantom's cheekbone and their throat and the hollow at the base of their neck, where their pulse has gone slow and —
He doesn't know what to file this under. He is also, in fact, aware, with a small and specific alarm, that no folder for this exists. The list has failed entirely.
The composure hasn't failed, technically, in that his face hasn't moved and his hands are still at his sides and he's still breathing. But the composure is a shell around something Bell can't name, and that something has weight, and that something is looking at Phantom looking at the light.
Oh, Phantom says again, quieter, speaking to no one.
The unit turns slowly around them.
Bell should say something. There's a sentence appropriate to the moment. The sentence would restore the errand, would return them both to the list of tasks that got them here. He could, with a small application of will, locate the sentence, produce it, get the mirror ball into the SUV and be back at Tempt before the next hour ends.
He chooses to watch Phantom watch the ball instead.
The ball turns. The light moves. His whole life is a list and this is not on it.
He is aware, distantly, that he's going to have to sit with this later. Alone. When he has time to look at it properly, in daylight, with his file open and a pen in his hand and some kind of infrastructure around him.
But for now, the ball turns. He doesn't stop it. Phantom doesn't stop it. Nobody in the unit says anything for what is, by Bell's internal count, an unusually long time.
He should really say something.
He doesn't.
"Can I ask you something," Phantom says, eventually.
They're still looking up at the ball. The light moves across their face in slow squares. It's the least performed Bell has ever heard them — no setup, no bit, no horse. Just the question, set down quietly in the dust.
"You may ask," Bell says. "I make no guarantee of an answer."
"Yeah. I figured that part." Phantom turns one of the little squares of light over on the back of their hand, watching it slide. "It's about Rain."
Bell says nothing. This is, he's found, the most reliable way to get information and to give none: people fill silence. He's built a career in the spaces other people rush to fill.
Phantom does as expected.
"Something's up with him." They say it carefully. "And it's not — it's not a bad thing, I don't think. He's not in trouble. He's just." They frown, searching. "He's off. He gets this look. I've known him a long time, Bell, I know all his looks, and this is a new one, and it shows up — " they stop. Start again. "It shows up around a… specific subject. And I think you know what the subject is. And I think you've known longer than me, because you know everything, which by the way is deeply annoying."
Bell considers the mirror ball.
He has, in fact, known longer than Phantom. He's known since the very beginning, when Mister Delmere sent an email with a purchase request a little too late at night. He's watched it accumulate: the careful nods, the dressing room, the nine days, the comment card folded into quarters that Mister Delmere doesn't know Bell knows about. He has a complete and ordered file. He could brief Phantom in under ninety seconds.
He won't.
"I'm not certain I follow," Bell says.
Phantom turns and looks at him directly. The light slides off the ball across both of them now, and their expression is not fooled in the slightest.
"You follow," they say. "You're Bell. You follow everything."
"I don't speculate about Mister Delmere's personal affairs."
Phantom's eyebrows go up.
"I didn't say it was about the boss."
Bell doesn't react. Not reacting is the single most developed muscle he has. He doesn't react and he keeps not reacting through the entire long delighted silence in which Phantom realizes exactly what he's just done, their whole face opening up like the unit did when the cover came off.
"Bell."
"The cover goes into the bin by the shelf."
"Bell. You just — that was a confirmation, you realize that, that was —"
"I confirmed nothing."
"You confirmed everything. That's worse. That's so much worse than confirming, that's —" Phantom presses both hands to their own chest, wounded with joy. "Oh, this is delicious. They're both — unholy shit. They're both idiots —"
"I am going to carry the mirror ball to the vehicle," Bell says, with enormous dignity, "and you are going to bring the dust cover, and we are not going to discuss this on the drive."
"We are absolutely going to discuss this on the drive."
"We are not."
The drive back to Tempt could be described as many things.
Silent would not be one of them.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
Phantom finds him in the dressing room before the evening shift.
Rain knows it's bad the second they come through the door, because they don't say anything. Phantom not saying anything is a weather event. They just drift in, drop onto the vanity edge, pick up his setting spray, examine the label like it's a puzzle they're solving, and wait.
Rain keeps doing his liner.
"You're glittering," he says, to the mirror. There's actual glitter on them. Caught in their hair, dusted across one cheekbone, sitting bright on the underside of their jaw. "Why are you glittering."
"Storage run. Disco ball. Long story." They set the spray down. Pick it back up. "Bell drove."
"Ah."
"Bell's a good driver."
The good is doing something. Rain lets it pass.
"Mhm."
Rain finishes the wing on his left eye. Switches to the right. He can feel Phantom looking at him in the mirror — not the usual gossip-incoming look, but something underneath it. Something with intent.
He's known Phantom a long time. He knows when they've decided something about him. He knows the tell of it, the way Phantom holds a piece of information they haven't been given permission to hold — the way their mouth goes soft at one corner while the rest of their face works very hard at nothing.
Their mouth is soft at one corner.
"What," Rain says.
"Nothing." A beat, delicately measured. "How's the new room?"
His hand doesn't slip. He's good; his hand doesn't slip. But there's a half-second where the brush hovers a hair off his lash line before it touches down, and the thing about doing your eyes in a mirror with your best friend watching you in the same mirror is that there is nowhere to put a half-second where it won't be seen.
Phantom does not remark on it, which is the second most alarming thing Phantom has done in the last minute.
"It's a room," Rain says.
"It booked out?"
"Heard it did."
"Five weeks, Bell said." Phantom is very casual. Phantom is never casual. "Bet the boss is thrilled. All that… business."
Rain sets the brush down.
He looks at Phantom in the mirror. Phantom looks back, glitter on their cheek, expression open and terrible and kind. There's a shape underneath it all that Rain, if he were less careful with himself, would have to admit looks a lot like a pin Phantom is currently choosing not to pull.
Rain understands that Phantom knows something. He doesn't know how much. He doesn't know what shape it is in their head. But they've got a piece of it, and they're holding it out, and they're waiting to see if he'll take it.
He doesn't.
"Good for business," Rain says.
It's the new boss's line. He hears it leave his own mouth in the new boss's flat careful cadence and he could die. Phantom hears it too — he watches them hear it, watches the corner of their mouth pull with the specific effort of a ghoul not saying the thing they came here to say.
Phantom holds it. For a whole beat. For a whole two beats, long enough that Rain's stomach does something he's going to also not examine.
Then Phantom sets it down.
"Sure," they say, gently. "Good for business."
They hop off the counter. Drop a kiss on the top of Rain's head, glitter and all, and they leave it there, whatever they came in carrying. They set it down and they leave it, which is the single kindest thing Phantom knows how to do and they do it so rarely that Rain feels the weight of being spared.
"Make someone stupid tonight," they say brightly at the door.
"Always do."
And then they're gone, and Rain is alone with the mirror and the wing he hasn't finished and the thing he just heard himself say.
Good for business.
He picks the brush back up.
The new boss had stood in the lounge that morning, radiating heat over a booking calendar, lying about it, fleeing down the stairs at a pace that wasn't his usual. Over numbers. Over the room doing well.
Except Rain had run the set twice more after he left and he'd felt it the whole time — the warm shape of where the new boss had stood. The way the heat had pointed at him and not the calendar. He knows what it is to be aimed at. He's made a career out of reading exactly where want is pointed in a room.
It hadn't been pointed at the numbers.
Rain finishes the wing.
He doesn't let the thought finish. He's good at this — better than the new boss, who wears it on his skin where any cold-blooded ghoul can read it. Rain keeps his under. Keeps it where the float tank found it, deep, behind the sternum. He puts it back there. He closes the drawer on it.
He has a set to run. He has a floor to work. He has, starting next week, a brand-new room with his name in the booking grid, ninety private minutes at a time, strangers paying for what he does better than anyone in the building.
It's good for business.
He caps the liner. Checks himself in the mirror — collar on, rhinestones catching, the BABY sitting bright at his throat where two hot fingers had once fixed the catch.
The armor's on. The face is right.
He goes to work.
What he doesn't do — what he won't, not in the mirror, not on the floor, not for one cold-blooded second of the entire night — is let himself stand in the warm spot the want left and admit it's still there.
you know what? I'm getting in early. Pretty please can we see a Bell sidequest for the field trip? 🖤
Oh but of COURSE we can, beloved!! (also, my sincere apologies, I'm not sure if you're already asleep--if you are, something sweet to start your day <3)
Anyways -- field trip day, Bell's point of view!
𖥸
Sidequest: Field Trip
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
There was a seating logic.
Bell had worked it out shortly after picking up the shuttle, systematically, before the relevant parties got a chance to complicate anything.
Mister Delmere in the front, so they could go over the tour layout. Swiss and Mountain behind them, leg room, for the big ghouls. Aurora, Mist, and Phantom, in the back; plenty of room for the smallest of the bunch. Leaving Rain, Cirrus, and Cumulus to occupy the middle.
It was a sound logic. Everyone would have the appropriate amount of space, Mist could keep an eye on the brewing chaos storm known as Phantom, and all would be well.
Simple, really.
Phantom announced shotgun before they even left the lounge.
So: Phantom in the front seat, then. The rest of the logic reorganizes around its single point of deviation. Dew, last in, takes the only remaining space in row two. Bell notices this with the professional detachment of someone who has been paid, for a very long time, not to react to the things he notices.
He pulls from the curb at exactly the speed limit.
Phantom has the aux.
The first song is in a language Bell doesn't speak, with a bass line that makes the door panel vibrate. Phantom is mouthing the words at Bell like maybe that will get their meaning across. Bell adjusts the rearview mirror.
"Phantom."
"What."
"Volume."
"This is on volume five, Bell."
"Volume four."
"Volume four is for cowards."
"Volume four, Phantom."
Phantom brings it to four with a sigh that implies genuine personal sacrifice. Bell notes this and says nothing, because that would constitute engagement, and engagement is the thing Phantom has been trying to produce since they first laid eyes on him, appearing with those shots that they took so easily, their throat bobbing —
He moves his eyes back to the road.
Swiss says, quietly, from the far back: "Phantom. If you play that song you played in the dressing room last Saturday I will walk to Helion."
"It's not on this playlist."
"It better not be."
"…I'll skip it."
"Mhm."
Bell's mouth doesn't move.
The van makes a gentle left. Bell has his eyes on the road and is watching traffic. From row two there is a sound. Small. Barely there. The kind of sound a ghoul makes when ambushed by their own nervous system. Bell is making no record of this.
He adjusts the rearview mirror again.
In row two, Mister Delmere is experiencing what Bell has categorized, conservatively, as an ongoing… situation. It has the quality of something that intends to become a scheduling problem and is simply waiting on the relevant parties to cooperate with it.
Bell has been managing Dew's situations long enough to recognize the posture: the careful stillness, the folio on the lap, the scrupulously neutral expression of a ghoul who is having no reactions.
Rain isn't doing anything. This is the consistent feature of the situation. He doesn't have to try, since all the trying is on the other end. Bell watches Mister Delmere sit at attention and feels the long-suffering fondness of a ghoul who has watched his boss systematically avoid and deny every good thing to fall into his lap, for the simple fact that he thinks he doesn't deserve it.
Well.
Bell tilts his head. Less lap, more leg pressed to leg. Interesting.
"You drive like a demon, Bell," Phantom says, recovering.
"I drive at the speed limit."
"You are a latent menace, Bell."
The corner of Bell's mouth moves. The very corner — a twitch, involuntary, the kind of thing that years of professional composure should have eliminated and apparently has not —
"Cowbell Bell Ghoul," Phantom says, delighted. "Was that a smile?"
"That is not my name."
"But that was a smile."
"It was not."
Bell keeps his eyes forward and his expression neutral, Phantom's quick movements small flashes in his peripherals.
Laughter rolls through the shuttle, Phantom leaning closer now, voice low enough that no one else can hear. Bell can smell their ozone, the clean cut of mint.
"That was absolutely a smile and I want it acknowledged —"
"Helion's on the next block," Bell says, after a beat. "Coming up on the right."
He signals. He checks his mirrors. He does all of this with perfect composure and does not examine the fact that his composure has a crack in it that is Phantom-shaped and has been there for longer than he is prepared to acknowledge.
"Helion."
Bell puts the van in park. The doors open. Cold air comes in, the van empties — Phantom first, everyone filing out, Cumulus and Cirrus already talking, Aurora in the middle of both conversations. Bell stays at the wheel a moment, as he always does. Long enough to confirm the hazards. Long enough to check the mirrors one final time.
He sees Rain, holding the door into Helion. The look back over his shoulder at Dew.
Dew on the sidewalk with his folio, looking like a ghoul who has forgotten what hands are for.
Bell gets out.
"Mister Delmere."
"Bell."
"After you."
𖥸
The tour takes exactly as long as planned.
Bell spends most of that time in the margins. This is his preferred position on excursions. Present, available, unobtrusive. He has a clipboard with the feedback forms and a mental accounting of everyone's position at all times, which is useful when what he is observing is Mister Delmere conducting a soft-open for a group of ghouls who cannot, collectively, maintain a straight line through a corridor.
They are not bad guests. They are simply a lot of them.
Phantom is a lot of them by themself.
Bell tracks Phantom through the building the way he tracks all variables. It's not fixation, more… asset management.
The ground floor is a loss — Phantom finds the moss wall immediately and Bell isn't close enough to hear the exchange but can reconstruct it from context: Dew's shoulders going incrementally rigid, Phantom's hands going up in a gesture that is technically compliance. The second floor, however, does something to Phantom that Bell doesn't have a ready category for.
The light changes, the sound falls differently, and something about it stops Phantom mid-step at the landing in a way that Bell would, in a different register, call struck. They stand there for a moment, not performing anything, just standing with their face doing something private in the direction of the float tank corridor.
Bell finds something on his clipboard that requires attention.
He gives them the moment.
He gives them, in fact, several moments — long enough that by the time he looks up, the group has relocated and Phantom is currently doing something Bell would categorize as a professional threat assessment of Omega, who has the particular misfortune of being both objectively attractive and currently within Phantom's sightline.
Bell looks at this for exactly as long as is necessary.
He coughs.
Then he catches Phantom's eye and gives them an expression that says absolutely not without moving a single facial muscle.
Phantom's eyebrow goes up a quarter inch, the specific Phantom expression that means really — and holds there for a beat.
Bell holds their gaze. His clipboard remains level. His expression remains neutral.
Phantom looks back at him for one more moment.
Then they look away from Omega entirely.
Bell returns to his clipboard. He makes a note about the recovery suite lighting that does not need to be made. He's aware, in a peripheral and entirely non-urgent way, that his ears have gone warm — copper, if anyone were positioned to notice. Phantom is no longer looking at Omega and Bell is not examining why that is the outcome he wanted.
He has several reasons it was the appropriate professional call.
He is, if he is being precise about it, still adding to the list.
𖥸
The comment cards are Bell's idea. They are a practical solution to a practical problem — Helion's feedback architecture exists for clinical purposes, and the soft-open represents an early informal data set. They are also, and Bell will own this privately, a way to move a group of performing artists toward a vehicle by framing departure as a transaction.
Everyone fills a card out. That's the price of being driven home.
It works, which Bell considers a success.
He collects them by the front entrance as the group assembles — clipboard in hand, pens provided. Aurora fills all four prompts in handwriting that includes small flowers on the capital letters, and thanks Bell directly when she hands it over. He acknowledges this with a nod and a mental note that she is, unambiguously, a sweetheart of a ghoul.
Mountain's is two words. Good towels. Bell makes a note. Mountain is a ghoul who knows what matters.
Swiss's runs longer: Tell whoever did the salt corridor I'm willing to fight them for the recipe. I have never breathed like that in my life. Mountain says the towels were good. He's right. Bell marks this for the facilities team.
Mist's: Tell Pebble their hands are a gift to the industry. Bell underlines it. He will be telling Dew, who will certainly inform Pebble.
Rain takes the card and pen and writes without hesitating, the behavior of a ghoul who arrived knowing what he wanted to say. He hands it back face-down. Bell turns it over.
Two words. Small, precise handwriting.
Nice hands.
Bell's expression doesn't change. He puts this where he puts everything belonging to Mister Delmere's ongoing situation: the back of his mind, labeled, somewhere he will not be tripping over it in the dark.
He turns to Phantom.
Phantom is still writing.
They've been writing, Bell realizes, for slightly longer than anyone else, bent over the card with focused, deliberate attention, which is not an energy Bell typically associates with Phantom.
He waits. He is, among many other things, very patient.
Phantom finishes and looks up.
They hold the card out directly, fingers on one end, the other end aimed at Bell. Bell takes it because there is nothing else to do, and he reads it because the alternative is standing there holding an unread card, which is not something Bell does.
What we did well: The driver. Both hands on the wheel the entire time. Very professional.
What we could do better: Volume four.
Anything else: [a string of digits] — Ph.
Optional contact information: see above. keep up.
Bell is aware that his ears have gone warm again.
He doesn't look up immediately. This is not because he needs more time with the card — he has read it, in full, twice now. But because there's information on his face he's not prepared to share with anyone yet, and Phantom is still there, watching him the way they watch things they find interesting, directly and without any apparent self-consciousness.
Bell finally looks up.
Phantom winks.
"I'm sitting shotgun again," they announce.
Not a question.
Bell says nothing. He watches Phantom turn and walk toward Helion's front door with the easy confidence of a ghoul who has just made a move and knows exactly where it landed, and then he looks back down at the card.
He opens his inner jacket pocket and places the card inside.
He finds Mister Delmere near the lobby in quiet conversation with one of the Helion staff, folio open, doing what he does best, which is to say: not stopping. He holds out the stack when Dew glances up.
"Overwhelming praise, sir," Bell says, making sure Rain's card is on the bottom of the pile.
Dew takes the stack. "Thank you, Bell."
Bell has found, over a long professional history, that Mister Delmere occasionally benefits from a reminder of what he's built. He has also found that Mister Delmere is considerably more receptive to such reminders when they arrive sideways.
"And how was Delta's new protocol?"
He watches Dew's left eyelid tremor and feels, faintly, a spark of pride.
"Effective."
"Mm." Bell closes his tablet. "I'm heading out to do drop-offs."
"See you tomorrow, Bell."
He leaves before Dew can say anything further, which is, Bell has found, the optimal exit. He does not look back at Mister Delmere standing alone in the lobby of the thing he built.
𖥸
Phantom is already in the front seat when Bell reaches the van.
Of course they are.
Bell gets in and adjusts his mirrors and does not remark on the fact that they have resumed their exact positions as though the intervening excursion was a commercial break.
Phantom has the aux plugged into their phone.
Bell says nothing about the volume.
Phantom turns it to four anyway as he pulls away from the curb.
After a short while Aurora tips sideways against Cirrus's shoulder. Swiss and Mountain are arranged in the back row with the stillness of two ghouls who have reached maximum relaxation. Cumulus, Rain and Mist all look about thirty seconds from sleep, which the city potholes do their duty to prevent.
Phantom changes the song. Something in a language Bell doesn't speak, which is, at this point, a theme.
"What's this one about," Bell says.
Phantom turns to look at him. Slowly.
"Bell," they say, cautiously.
"It's a reasonable question."
"It's a… love song," Phantom says, in the tone of someone who is not, technically, lying.
Bell drives. The bass does something through the door panels.
"Mm," he says.
Phantom faces front again, and Bell can hear the smile in it without looking.
The route home is longer than the route out. Individual drop-offs — Bell has everyone's addresses already mapped in his tablet in the most efficient order, because of course he does — and the van empties by degrees. Mist first, a quiet thank you at her door. Then Swiss and Mountain, Mountain unfolding from the back row while Swiss's hand trails down his arm as he follows. Aurora, Cirrus, and Cumulus in a cluster, Cirrus and Cumulus already drifting toward each other on the walk to the door, Cumulus saying something that makes Cirrus tip her head and laugh. Rain last of the group, lifting two fingers in a brief half-wave from the sidewalk before turning down the block.
Then it's just Phantom in the front seat, a few miles left, and the music still at four.
"You're quieter," Phantom says.
"I'm always quiet."
"You're quieter than your quiet." A beat. "The card okay?"
Bell doesn't look at them.
"The cards were a useful data collection mechanism," he says. "I expect Mister Delmere will find them informative."
They settle back in the seat, feet off the dash for once, quiet in a way that does not feel like running out of things to say.
"I meant mine," Phantom says.
Bell takes the turn. Regulation speed. Both hands on the wheel.
"It was noted," he says.
A small sound from Phantom. Bell is fairly certain it's a smile. He doesn't look. He doesn't need to. He has sufficient data.
"This is you," Bell says, pulling to the curb.
Phantom collects their things unhurriedly, in the specific way of someone who has nowhere else to be and is choosing not to be there yet. They pause with their hand on the door.
"The rental return is three blocks away," Bell says.
Phantom waits.
"Next time I'll just pick you up."
A beat.
Bell is aware, approximately one second after saying this, of precisely what he has said.
Phantom turns back. Their mouth has done something just shy of terrible.
"Next time, huh?" they say.
"For… the shuttle," Bell says.
"Right," Phantom says, in the tone of someone who is not, by any measure, agreeing with him.
They get out. Bell watches the door close. Watches Phantom reach the steps of their building and glance back once, just once, and then he puts the van in drive.
He returns the shuttle, signs the paperwork, and gets in his car. Sits for a moment with his hands in his lap before he drives home at exactly the speed limit.
He decides, as the engine goes quiet in the garage and the building settles around him, that he will not be looking at it tonight.
His hand finds his jacket pocket without being asked. He will not take the card out.
This is, he notes, probably not true.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
The teal, Phantom has decided, is better for the shoulders, but the gold does something to their eyes, and both of these things are true simultaneously, which is the fundamental problem with having taste.
"You're not helping," they tell Rain.
Rain's face, small in the corner of the phone screen, tilts slightly. "I said the gold."
"You said it like someone who wants to stop talking about it."
"I do want to stop talking about it."
"That's not help, that's surrender." Phantom spins once — the gold catches the light, which is a point in its favor — then back the other way to check the difference. Rain watches.
This is the arrangement: Phantom performs, Rain observes, and both of them get something out of it that neither would name on a quiet Monday night.
Their phone buzzes.
Phantom doesn't look immediately, could be anything, usually is anything, the group chat runs at a volume that would concern a less seasoned person. But the notification is from an unknown number, and Phantom's heart skips.
They pick up the phone.
This is Bell. Thank you for the feedback.
Phantom's face, caught before they can do anything useful with it, goes quiet. The softness around their eyes, their chin tipping down just slightly, like something landing rather than being taken. It's quick. It's real.
Rain doesn't miss it. Rain never misses it.
"Phantom," he says.
"It's Bell." Their voice comes out genuine, which was not the plan, and then they laugh, good-natured, a little helpless, full of something warm.
They pick the phone up from the dresser and hold it too close to their face. "'Thank you for the feedback,' Rain. He —" Another laugh. "That is so —"
"Yeah," Rain says.
"He texted."
"I see that."
Phantom looks back at their own face in the mirror. The teal, the gold, none of it especially load-bearing anymore. They didn't know until just now how much they were waiting.
"Should I send him my tits in this? Maybe he'll have more of an opinion than you."
"Lucifer's left nut, Phantom."
They both laugh, and Phantom goes quiet again.
"...what do I actually say to him."
Rain looks at them for a moment through the screen. At Phantom's face in the mirror, unguarded, the gold top still catching the light.
dearest kay: if you can spare the time i would love to hear all about the swissalps security detail, who have certainly seen some Things and Events during their tenure
Good news ! I survived the dentist
Bad news ! I live to run my mouth another day.
Anyways I love them your honor and I am thrilled to shine the spot light on my favorite little security couple for a bit 🤍
𖥸
Sidequest: Twenty After Two
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
Phantom is on bar duty tonight, which is to say Phantom is supposed to be wiping down the bar and is instead leaning against it with a damp rag in one hand and a maraschino cherry between their teeth, watching Swiss flip chairs onto tabletops with the bored efficiency of someone who's done this exact motion ten thousand times.
It's twenty past two.
The house lights are up. The music's off. Tempt at this hour belongs to the staff in a way it doesn't at any other — softer than daylight, quieter than service, the velvet still warm from the night. Every seam visible. The poles catching the overheads. The kind of hour where the club stops performing and just sits there with you, spent and a little loose-lipped.
Mountain is sweeping methodically with his whole body, like the broom is a tool he respects and the floor is something he'd like to do a good job by.
"So," Phantom says, around the cherry stem.
Swiss doesn't look up. Flips another chair. "No."
"You don't even know what I was going to say."
"You were going to ask a question."
"No, I was going to ask a question."
"Same thing."
Phantom plucks the stem out of their mouth — tied, naturally, they're not going to waste a perfectly good party trick — and flicks it into the trash bin behind the bar. "What's the wildest thing you've seen here? As a security professional. For posterity."
Swiss flips another chair. "No."
Phantom sets their sights on Mountain instead.
"Mountain. Your turn."
Mountain looks up from his sweeping. He has a smudge of glitter on his cheek that nobody has told him about. Phantom is going to let him keep it.
"Hm?"
"What's the wildest thing you've seen while working here?"
Mountain considers. He leans on his broom in a way that suggests he is taking this question with the gravity it deserves.
"Swiss," he says after a moment.
Phantom blinks. "Swiss what."
"Swiss is the wildest thing I've seen here."
Across the room, Swiss goes very still over a chair he was halfway to lifting.
Mountain, oblivious, goes back to sweeping. There is now, somehow, an even softer expression on his face than there was thirty seconds ago. The ghoul looks like he's remembering a sunrise.
Phantom sets down the rag.
This is, they decide, the most important moment of their professional life.
"Mountain," they say, deeply calm, the way one approaches a feral cat one wants to befriend.
"Explain."
𖥸
Here is what Phantom learns, over the next fifteen minutes of cleanup, which they will stretch into thirty because Mountain is talking now and Swiss has accepted his fate with the resignation of a ghoul who has been outed by his husband in front of Lucifer and the bar runner turned baby dancer:
Swiss used to be on the other side of the pole.
"Three years," Mountain says, like he's reciting a sacred number. "Three and a half if you count the last few months when he was mostly training the new hires."
"He was a dancer," Phantom says, dumbfounded.
"Headliner," Swiss says, dryly from across the room.
Phantom, who has not dropped a glass in all their years of service topside, picks up a clean rocks glass and almost — almost — fumbles it onto the bar. They recover. Barely.
"Swiss."
"I know."
"Swiss —"
"Phantom, I am asking you, as a colleague—"
"You were a headliner."
Swiss flips a chair with what can only be described as repressive force. "It was a different life."
"You're predominantly earth."
"Yes."
"You did strip routines."
"Yes."
"As an earth ghoul."
"Phantom." Swiss finally looks at them. He has the calm, faintly haunted expression of a ghoul who knew this day would come and made his peace with it long ago. "I have a little fire. A little quint. I made it work."
"He did fire routines," Mountain says, dreamily, to the broom.
Phantom turns to him so fast their tail nearly clips the bar.
"He did what?"
The fire routine, as Mountain tells it, was less a routine and more an event. Swiss had a signature — Mountain calls it that, signature, with the reverence other people reserve for vintage wine — that involved a length of black silk, a controlled flame, and what Mountain describes, with his hands, as "the part where he goes—" and then stops, because the gesture he's making cannot be reproduced in mixed company, or any company at all, for that matter.
Phantom is staring.
Swiss is stacking chairs at a rate that suggests he would like to leave this dimension.
"Earth predominant," Mountain continues, sweeping a careful arc around a sticky patch near the rail seating. "So the grounding was insane. He could hold a pose for like — minutes. And then the fire'd come up through the silk and the quint'd carry the static so the whole room felt it—"
"Mountain," Swiss grumbles.
"What? They asked."
"They asked about security."
"This is about security," Mountain says, with the unshakable confidence of a ghoul making a point he's going to win. "I'm explaining why you're good at your job. You know the room from both sides."
Swiss puts a chair down very gently and pinches the bridge of his nose.
"You're not wrong," he admits, to the floor.
Phantom feels themself ascending.
𖥸
There is, eventually, a story.
Mountain tells it while Swiss visibly resigns himself to it. He's stopped lifting chairs. He's just leaning on a stack of them now, arms folded, watching his husband from across the room with an expression Phantom is logging for later use against him.
It was Swiss's last night.
"Not planned to be," Mountain says. "He wasn't quitting. He just — that's when it happened."
A bachelor party. Loud, drunk, the kind that thinks the velvet rope is a suggestion. One of them — the groom, naturally, because the groom is always the worst — decided halfway through Swiss's set that he was going to climb up.
"Onto the stage?" Phantom asks.
"Onto Swiss," Mountain says.
Phantom puts the rag down again.
The bouncer at the time, Mountain can't remember his name, was three steps too slow. The groom got a hand on Swiss's ankle. Swiss was mid-routine. The silk was draped along his jaw, smoldering soft against his cheek, the kind of slow drag he was famous for.
"And?" Phantom prompts.
Swiss says, without looking up: "I slapped him."
"With?"
"My hand."
Phantom blinks.
"Swiss."
"He was on my ankle, Phantom."
"Swiss."
"Phantom, what was I supposed to do."
"He was fondling himself with fire," Mountain says with the awe of a ghoul witnessing miracles. "He had the silk against his jaw and the flame was doing the thing and then this guy grabs his ankle and Swiss just —"
Mountain makes a gesture with his broom that approximates a backhand of devastating elegance.
"— didn't even break tempo."
"It was a clean hit," Swiss shrugs.
"It was perfect," Mountain sighs fondly, like he's remembering a dream.
"Mountain." Phantom can't help the giggle that bubbles out of their chest.
"He didn't even drop the silk."
"I didn't drop the silk," Swiss confirms, faintly proud despite himself.
"Aether came out from the back," Mountain says, "and he watched the whole rest of the set before he called for medical. Just watched. And after, when Swiss was off-shift, Aether walked up to him with a coffee and offered him a job on the door."
"On the spot?"
"On the spot."
"Aether said—" Swiss starts.
"Aether said," Mountain interrupts, because he is going to deliver the punchline himself if it kills him, "'I think you'd like the view from this side.'"
Phantom exhales a long slow breath into the cool club air. "Iconic."
"He took two weeks to think about it," Mountain says.
"I took two weeks to negotiate," Swiss corrects.
"Same thing."
"Different thing."
They look at each other across the room. Mountain is openly smiling now, soft and crooked. Swiss is doing the thing he does where his mouth doesn't move but his eyes do, the small private dimming that on him counts as unbearably soft.
Phantom looks away. Some things aren't for them.
𖥸
The cleanup is mostly done.
Phantom is restocking the well, mostly so they have a reason to stay close enough to keep prompting. Swiss has gone back to chairs, but the resignation has lifted. He is, Phantom notes with quiet delight, in the post-confession glow of a ghoul who didn't want to talk and now sort of does.
"Okay," Phantom says. "Security stories. Real ones. Hit me."
Swiss flips a chair. Considers.
"Couple proposed from the rail seats once."
"To each other?"
"To Cirrus."
Phantom pauses with their hand in the ice bin.
"Like — together?"
"Together. Got down on one knee in tandem. Brought a ring."
"And?"
"She said no."
"Gently?"
"Cirrus said no the way Cirrus says anything. They went home crying but they tipped on the way out."
Mountain hums in agreement from across the room.
"What else?"
Swiss thinks. The pause is long enough that Phantom suspects he is editing — picking the one he'll actually tell, out of a much larger archive he never will.
"Two guys got into a fight at the bar," he says, eventually. "Long while ago."
"Over?"
"Whether Cumulus's bourbon list was alphabetized by distillery or by region."
Phantom stares.
"It was alphabetized by distillery," Swiss adds, like this is an important footnote.
"They fought?"
"Full on threw hands."
"Over—"
"Over the bourbon list. One of them had a printout. He brought a printout to the bar to prove a point. Apparently they had argued over it before."
Phantom is laughing now. They're trying not to, but they're failing.
"What happened?"
Swiss flips the last chair onto the table. Sets it down. Leans on his forearm against the seat back and lets himself, finally, smile — small and crooked and entirely for Mountain.
"Mountain picked them both up."
"Both at once?"
"One in each hand."
"By the collar?"
"By the jacket."
Across the room, Mountain leans on his broom and looks at the floor with the modest pleasure of a ghoul whose husband is bragging about him.
"Held them like that," Swiss continues, "for about — what, six seconds?"
"Ten," Mountain says.
"Ten seconds. Just held them. Off the floor. Made them apologize to Cumulus and to each other and finish their drinks at separate ends of the bar."
"And then?"
"They tipped Cumulus a hundred each and left in the same cab."
Phantom looks between them.
Mountain is still studying the floor with that small modest smile. Swiss is still leaning on the chair he just stacked, watching his husband across an empty club at nearly three in the morning, glitter on Mountain's cheek that still nobody has told him about and a sweep mark on the floor in a careful arc around the rail.
Phantom has spent years in this club. They know what a love story looks like in this room. They have catalogued every variation.
This one, they decide, is their favorite.
"Hot," they say, decisively.
Swiss turns red from the collar up.
"Phantom."
"What. I'm just saying. The man picks people up like grocery bags. Acknowledge it."
"Acknowledged," Mountain says happily, to the floor.
Swiss puts his face in his hands.
Phantom finishes the well, hangs up the rag, and leaves them to lock up — pausing at the door to glance back one more time at the two of them across the empty club, the lights still up, the chairs all stacked, the music off.
Mountain says something Phantom can't quite hear.
Swiss laughs.
It's a quiet sound. Phantom has heard it maybe three times over.
They let the door swing shut behind them and head home through the cool dark, tail flicking, already composing the text to Rain.
Warnings: rain and Dew talk. and touch. just once. Tension and yearning. General phantom shenanigans. Rain being unbearably hot in an Outfit. Non-explicit fwb smut at the end
Song: Private by The Neighbourhood
a/n: before you ask what's wrong with me, consider that I also have no idea
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
Dew is not trying.
He's established this clearly. To himself, in the mirror, when his day started at seven forty-five. AM.
He's going to be casual and that means…
No tie — that's the whole point, the tie is the thing. The tie says trying and he is not trying.
He is simply a business owner visiting his business on a Friday.
His.
Almost officially.
The paperwork's not signed yet, but…
Details.
The collar pins, however, are non-negotiable.
He'd grabbed them without thinking — one gold star, one white enamel tuberose, linked by a fine custom chain. They're asymmetric.
And that means casual.
The folio is practical. He's the owner.
Prospective owner, rather.
He needs... documents. A place to take notes.
Beside him, Bell looks like he's about to present quarterly earnings to a stadium. Charcoal suit, crisp pocket square, shoes catching the violet bleed of Tempt's sign off the wet pavement as they approach.
The neon stains everything purple. The street smells like last night's rain and cigarettes and something sweet underneath — sugar and dry ice bleeding through the club's vents even now, even hours before opening, like the place can't help itself.
Dew does not have a reaction to this.
The chain catches the neon as they approach, a brief gold glint against black fabric.
Bell looks at the pins, just once.
"Tuberose," he observes.
"It's part of the shirt."
He looks at Dew.
"Mhm."
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
The club at five o'clock on a Friday evening hums like something coiling.
Not loud yet. Not the full-body bass thrum of a packed house, not the laser-bright chaos of peak hours. Just — alive. The low warm glow of prep lighting catching brass rails and velvet booths. Someone running a sound check in short bursts, bass notes dropping like stones into still water. The smell of the fog machine warming up underneath the sweetness of whatever Phantom's eating.
Which is, Dew clocks immediately, Chinese takeout.
At the bar.
His bar.
Rain and Phantom are installed right in the middle like they've been there for hours, possibly days, possibly since the dawn of time. Little white boxes open between them, chopsticks, a constellation of sauce packets neither of them has touched. Phantom's laughing at something on Rain's phone, one hand pressed to their chest like it's the funniest thing they've ever seen.
Rain is smiling.
Not the smirk from the alley or the hallway or the stage. Something quieter. More real. The kind of smile that happens when nobody's performing.
Dew stops walking without meaning to.
Bell doesn't. He just steps neatly around him and continues toward the bar like a ghoul that remembers he has a job to do.
Rain's gaze lifts and finds Dew across the room.
Holds there for exactly one beat — unhurried, assessing, that ocean-eyed catalogue that means Rain is paying attention even when he looks like he isn't.
Then he looks back down at his takeout box.
"Mystery man is back," he says with a low hum.
Phantom looks up and grins wide enough to be dangerous.
"I bet you he bought it," they say, vibrating with energy.
Rain picks up a dumpling with his chopsticks. Unbothered. Domestic. Like Dew standing in the middle of a club holding a leather folio at five on a Friday is the most ordinary thing in the world.
"Mm," Rain says.
He takes a bite.
Aether materializes from the back hallway with the timing of someone who's been watching from a distance and decided now is the moment.
"Gentlemen."
Aether’s voice is warm, bracelets chiming as he crosses the floor. He claps Dew once on the shoulder and turns toward the bar. "Come on — I want you to meet Cumulus. You'll want to know her."
He leads them down the length of the bar, which means they pass right by Rain and Phantom.
Dew keeps his eyes forward, measured and professional.
He almost makes it.
Rain's phone is face-up on the bar between the takeout boxes, screen bright. Phantom's leaning over it, chopsticks abandoned, one finger scrolling. The listing loads in full just as Dew draws level—
Oxblood leather. Brass hardware. A chest harness, waist belt, thigh straps, studded collar. The custom kind of thing that costs more than most people's rent and looks like it was designed specifically to—
Dew looks at it for a second before he looks away. Keeps walking.
Behind him, Phantom finally looks up from Rain's phone and finds Bell.
Bell, who is already looking at them with those perfectly calm grey eyes, tablet under one arm, expression revealing precisely nothing. All six feet four inches of charcoal suiting and mild attention.
Phantom, for perhaps the first time in their life, goes very still. Their grin spreads slow and certain, like sunrise.
'Oh,' they think. 'Oh that's a problem.'
Dew doesn't see any of this.
He's already at the end of the bar where Cumulus is prepping for the night — big blonde curls piled high, moving through her setup with the quiet authority of someone who has done this a thousand times and could do it a thousand more, likely with her eyes closed.
She runs the bar, the music, the announcements, the atmosphere — basically everything that isn't the stage itself.
That belongs to her wife.
The whole room runs through her even now, even empty, like she's already tuning it.
"Hi," she says, and even that single syllable fills the space around it.
Dew blinks.
"Hi," he says.
Aether is already smiling.
Cumulus waves a hand like pleasantries are beside the point and slides a drink across the bar — something dark. "I have opinions. Several of them. About the supplier contracts, the music rotation, the bar stock and the vermouth situation specifically. Want them?"
"All of them," Dew says.
She nods once, satisfied, like he's passed some sort of test.
She pulls out a tablet, hers sleeker than Bell's, with a custom case that has a little gold star and a heart that says C&C on it — and turns it toward him. "Music rotation first. Aether let me build the full system two years ago. Curated by performer, by night, by crowd energy. It's not broken so I'd prefer we don't fix it."
"I wasn't planning to."
"Good." She flips to the next screen. "Vermouth. We're using the wrong one. I've been saying this for eight months."
"Change it."
Something in her expression shifts toward warmth, a smile growing across her cheeks.
"You'll do," she says, mostly to herself.
Dew opens his folio.
This, at least, he can handle.
His brain, however, is still three feet back.
Oxblood leather.
Brass hardware.
Rain wearing that while he—
Focus.
He's three questions deep into the vermouth situation — Cumulus not kidding about having opinions, and all correct, of course — when movement down the bar catches his eye.
He doesn't look.
The stock list, the page right in front of him, is very interesting.
Rain sets his chopsticks down, tips his head toward the back hallway, and Phantom reads it instantly — that wordless shorthand of two people who've spent enough time together to stop needing sentences.
He stretches as he stands.
Both arms overhead, spine arching long, the hem of his hoodie riding up to flash a strip of grey-blue skin, the little dip of his waist catching the prep lighting. His neck rolls to one side, then the other. Slow. Easy. The movement of someone completely at home in themself.
They start gathering takeout boxes, Phantom stacking the containers one too high before Rain rescues them with a fond eyeroll.
Dew looks back at the stock list.
The stock list is… very interesting.
"—which is why I think we should reconsider the well options entirely," Cumulus is saying.
"Agreed," Dew says, with great conviction. About the stock list.
Rain and Phantom drift past the bar toward the back hallway, takeout boxes balanced, Phantom's voice carrying just enough to catch.
"So what's tonight's fit—"
"Still deciding."
"Ooh, let me do your liner."
"You always make it too sharp."
"Because soft liner is a crime and you know it—"
Their voices blur into the hallway noise, the door swinging shut behind them with a soft thud.
Dew stares at his folio.
'Supplier contracts,' he thinks firmly.
Vermouth.
Work.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
The dressing room smells like hairspray and warm skin and the faint sweetness of setting spray — a specific smell, Dew is learning, that means performers getting ready. The lighting's warm and close, vanity mirrors ringed with bulbs casting everything in amber. Costume rails packed tight along one wall. A half-open door showing the steam-tiled edge of the showers beyond.
It's warm in a way his apartment isn't.
Lived-in. Claimed. Every surface belonging to someone specific — a locker left half open, a costume rail organized by color, the little photo tucked into the corner of someone's mirror. The kind of space that holds people.
Dew stands in the doorway and doesn't examine the feeling that gives him.
Rain's vanity is immediately identifiable — the neatest one, which somehow makes it the most devastating.
Stage makeup arranged with quiet precision. A small jade roller. Two different setting sprays. A lineup of lip products that might as well be a foreign language.
Phantom perched on the edge of it.
Obviously.
Like they belong there.
Liner pencil in hand, head tilted, in the middle of angling toward Rain's face with intensely focused energy. Rain has his chin tipped up with the resigned patience of someone who has been through this before and knows resistance is functionally useless.
Aether clears his throat.
"Everyone, a moment—"
The room shifts. Aurora looks up from her lashes. Cirrus pauses mid-adjustment on the costume rail. Swiss materializes from somewhere near the back wall, arms folded, sleeves rolled.
Phantom glances toward the door.
Up.
And up.
And up.
Their gaze lands, with great specificity, on Bell's pocket square.
Three perfect points. Geometric. Deliberate. Folded to within a millimeter of its life.
Rain glances sideways at them and reads the situation in approximately half a second.
Not like this.
He reaches up and puts his headphones on, volume maxed.
Phantom, betrayed, turns to him.
Rain's eyes stay forward.
Phantom grabs his wrist. Squeezes — once, twice, the urgent morse code of are you fucking seeing this.
Rain pats their hand once.
He does not remove his headphones.
Aether, unbothered, raises his voice slightly.
"—pleased to introduce the incoming owner of Tempt. He'll be shadowing operations while the paperwork finalizes—"
Phantom is not listening to Aether.
Phantom is watching Bell with an intensity that has nothing to do with professionalism and everything to do with that pocket square.
Bell, for his part, is doing a quiet, methodical inventory of the room with those calm grey eyes and has not looked at Phantom once.
This is, somehow, worse.
Phantom leans toward Rain's ear, headphones and all.
Rain reaches up without looking and pushes their face gently away.
Phantom allows it and grabs his wrist again anyway.
"—so please make them feel welcome," Aether finishes.
Dew, standing in the doorway of his almost-club watching his almost-employees, catches the tail end of Cirrus's knowing smile. Aurora's wide eyes. Swiss's single acknowledging nod.
Rain has heard precisely nothing.
Which is, Dew suspects, entirely on purpose.
Aether's already steering Dew back toward the door.
"Let's get back to the floor, Cumulus should have the rotation pulled up—"
Dew follows, folio tucked under his arm.
Very professional.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
Rain pulls the headphones down around his neck when the door swings shut.
The silence lasts approximately half a second before Phantom launches.
"Okay—"
"Finish my liner first."
"Rain—"
"Liner. Then talking."
Phantom makes a noise of profound suffering but picks up the pencil anyway, tilting Rain's chin up with two fingers, already talking at full speed.
"Did you see him—"
"Saw him."
"He's so tall—"
"Phantom."
"Like unreasonably, aggressively, personally offensively tall—" Phantom's hand doesn't even waver, the liner staying perfect despite the monologue, "—and that suit, Rain, that suit, who wears a suit like that—"
"Someone who gets paid to wear suits."
"I want to ruin it."
"Obviously."
"I want to find out what's underneath the pocket square."
"More suit, probably."
"Rain." Phantom pulls back, pencil hovering, expression deadly serious. "I want to climb that ghoul like a very expensive, very well-dressed tree."
Rain considers his reflection.
"Done," he says, about the liner.
"Did you hear what I said—"
"I heard you." Rain reaches for his setting spray. "Go check Aurora's makeup. It's her premiere night."
Phantom looks at Rain. At his setting spray. At the very deliberate way he's not quite meeting their eyes in the mirror.
Their expression shifts — the manic Bell-induced energy settling into something quieter. Sharper. The look of someone who has known a person long enough to read the spaces between what they say.
"I know what you are," Phantom says.
It's not unkind, or even teasing.
Just. True.
"Aurora," Rain says again. "Go."
Phantom slides off the vanity and smooths their outfit.
"She's going to be so good tonight," they say about Aurora, watching Cirrus adjust her costume across the way.
"I know," Rain says.
They go with a knowing little smirk — floating across the dressing room toward Aurora's vanity, already switching gears, already warm and focused and present in the way Phantom is when something actually matters to them.
Rain watches them in the mirror for a moment before he opens the small drawer at the base of his vanity.
Collars. A neat row of them — different widths, different materials, different energies. He thumbs through slowly. The black velvet ribbon, the red satin, the delicate gold chain, the thin leather with the silver clasp—
His fingers pause.
There.
Black. Simple. The individual letters slid along the band, each one a small square of dark enamel, set with tiny rhinestones that catch even the warm vanity lighting.
B. A. B. Y.
He picks it up and turns it once in his hand. Sets it on the vanity in front of him.
He looks at his reflection for a long moment — liner perfect, curls loose, body shimmer catching the light. His expression does something small and private that he doesn't bother to name.
He reaches for the setting spray.
He'll need an extra spritz or two.
Good night to bring out that old wooden chair.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
By six-fifteen, Dew has filled two pages of notes.
Real notes. Good notes. The kind that justify the collar pins and the showing up to a club on a Friday with a leather portfolio.
Bar stock — well managed. Cumulus runs tight inventory.
Security rotation — Mountain on door, Swiss floor coverage. Efficient.
Sound system — upgraded recently. Good bass distribution.
Lighting rig — ask about maintenance schedule.
Staff morale — high. Retention makes sense.
He clicks his pen and then clicks it again. Writes:
Fog machine — check filter schedule.
Bell, beside him, is already three emails deep into supplier contract comparisons. He hasn't said anything in forty minutes.
This, Dew has decided, is the ideal working environment.
𖥸
The floor fills slowly. Bar staff arriving, taking their positions. Mist moving through the space with quiet authority, checking sightlines, adjusting a spotlight with the focus of someone who has opinions about angles.
Aurora is doing something with her hair in the mirror behind the bar and catching Dew's eye every thirty seconds like she's waiting for him to announce something.
He doesn't.
She goes back to her hair.
It's fine. Everything's fine. He's good at this — the operational side, the systems, the numbers. This is his language. The club in prep hour speaks it fluently and he's finding the rhythm of it, the logic underneath the glitter and velvet.
He can do this.
He is doing this.
Phantom materializes at his elbow.
"You know," they say, conversationally, "Aether would send song suggestions."
Dew looks at them. "Pardon?"
"For the dancers." Phantom leans against the bar, arms folded, the picture of casual. "Every few weeks he'd send something through. Just a track or two, no explanation. Always fun to see what he picked." A pause. "Gave the sets a different energy, you know? Like a little window into what the owner was thinking."
Dew looks at them for a long moment.
Phantom looks back, innocent as anything.
"I'll think about it," Dew says.
"Sure," Phantom says. "No rush."
They push off the bar and drift away, all loose limbs and easy grace.
Dew looks down at his folio.
He's not going to overthink this.
It's a professional courtesy. A continuation of established precedent. Aether did it, it worked, it's simply good ownership practice to be aware of the energy you're curating—
He goes to tear a page from the back of his folio and thinks better of it, reaches for a bar napkin instead.
Writes three songs down in his usual handwriting — precise, small, slightly too neat for someone who claims to not be thinking about it.
He taps his pen and starts to add a fourth song before crossing it out, deciding that hearing it here may lead to a fire code issue and moves on like a normal, well-adjusted ghoul.
When Phantom drifts past again he holds it out without looking up from his notes.
"The song thing," he says. "For consideration."
Phantom takes it.
Dew is already writing something else down, no longer paying them any mind.
Phantom unfolds the napkin and reads it once. Reads it again. Their expression does absolutely nothing.
"Great," they say. "Thanks."
They fold it back along the original crease and tuck it into their waistband, drifting away to finish the last of their prep.
They get exactly twelve feet into the room before the smile becomes a problem.
They fix it before anyone sees.
Mostly.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
The doors open promptly at seven and Tempt exhales.
That's the only way to describe it — like the building has been holding its breath all day and finally, finally lets go. The fog machines sigh to life, dry ice curling low across the floor. The lighting rig shifts from prep warmth to something deeper, more deliberate — pink and violet bleeding into each other along the walls. The sound system stops testing and starts meaning it, bass settling into the floor like a second heartbeat.
People filter in. Then more people. Then enough people that the bar has a three-deep queue and Swiss has relocated to the stage rail without anyone asking him to.
Dew watches all of this from his position near the east wall and feels, cautiously, like he might be fine.
Aurora takes the stage first.
She's good. Nerves translating into something electric — a little raw, a little eager, but the crowd responds, leans into it. She works the pole with careful precision, having clearly drilled it a thousand times in an empty room and is now discovering what it feels like to run a routine with an audience breathing beneath her. There's something real in it. Something that doesn't need polish yet because the honesty is doing the work.
Dew watches her land a transition cleanly and feels something that might be professionally adjacent to proud.
He makes a note.
Aurora — strong debut energy. Crowd engagement high. Watch for confidence development over next quarter.
He pauses and adds: Congratulate her on a strong open.
A real note. A good note. The kind of note a business owner makes.
He makes several more.
East rail at capacity by 7:40 — consider expanded seating configuration.
Bar queue peaks at 7:45, clears by 8:05 — Cumulus runs efficient turnaround.
Mountain ID checks averaging under ninety seconds — no bottleneck.
Bell appears at his shoulder with a water. Dew accepts it without comment. Bell always knows, and Dew stopped questioning that a long time ago.
"Thoughts?" Bell asks.
"It's a well-run operation," Dew says.
"Mm." Bell looks out at the floor. "Aether built something good."
"He did."
A pause.
"You're going to make it better," Bell says simply. Like a fact.
Dew doesn't answer.
But he clicks his pen and keeps writing.
Staff communication — seamless. No visible gaps in coverage.
Crowd demographics — diverse, high spend, strong return rate evident from staff recognition of regulars.
Atmosphere—
He pauses on that one.
Writes: effective.
Underlines it.
He looks out at the floor — the fog curling at ankle height, the lights doing something warm and deliberately sinful to every surface, the bass in his chest like a second pulse — and thinks that effective is perhaps the most catastrophic understatement he's ever committed to paper.
But it'll do.
He's fine.
Everything's fine.
He's been fine for hours.
Days.
Everything is absolutely fine.
𖥸
By eight-thirty they've migrated to the bar — Bell's suggestion, practical as always, better sightlines to the floor. Dew doesn't even register the move consciously, mid-note about crowd flow in the northeast corner.
Phantom materializes at Bell's elbow the way they materialize everywhere — suddenly, completely, like they were always there and the rest of the world simply failed to notice.
They set two shot glasses down on the bar.
Something amber and top shelf, catching the flashing lights.
"You've been working this whole time," Phantom observes.
Bell doesn't look up from his tablet. "I have."
"That's a tragedy." They nudge one glass toward him. "Drink with me."
"I'm on the clock."
Phantom considers this briefly.
"Mmn."
They pick up both shots and knock the first back neat, setting the glass down with a delicate click. They hold the second up between two fingers like a question.
Bell looks at them with a raised eyebrow and makes no move to take their little offering.
Phantom shrugs and knocks that one back, too.
They turn to go, pausing to look over their shoulder, eyes catching the light.
"Let me know if you want a taste."
They disappear back into the crowd.
Bell looks at the empty shot glasses.
He is a professional. He is on the clock. He is here in a strictly professional capacity and Phantom is—
Five foot five and made entirely of chaos and very precise eyeliner.
He returns to his tablet.
His ears, if anyone were looking closely enough, have gone slightly copper.
Dew is writing something about seating at the center rail and has noticed nothing.
This is, Bell decides, fine.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
Dew is mid-note about the back bar lighting when Cumulus steps up to the mic.
He doesn't notice her step away from the bar until the air changes. A shift — literal, physical, the atmosphere in the room changing pressure like a storm gathering. Her air magic moves through the club in a warm current, lifting the fog just slightly.
The crowd feels it, her voice dropping into the silence like something inevitable.
"My beautiful disasters—"
Just that. Just those three words, and the whole room leans forward.
Dew's pen stills on the page.
"The headliner for the evening."
The lighting shifts — everything else dimming, a single spot blooming at center stage where a chair sits alone. Simple. Wooden. Angled just slightly toward the audience.
Dew looks at the chair and then back to his notes.
Back bar lighting —
"Please welcome to the stage—"
The bass drops to almost nothing. Just pulse. Just the suggestion of a beat, lazy and low.
"—our Rainy baby."
The curtain moves and Dew's pen stops working entirely.
Rain comes out slow.
Like he has nowhere to be and all night to get there.
Different tonight — black, thigh high seamed stockings, held up by the black straps of a garter belt visible below the hem of the tiny pleated skirt sitting low on his hips. A white button down on top, oversized, collar open, two buttons already undone like he started getting dressed and simply lost interest.
The BABY collar sits at his throat, rhinestones catching the single spotlight. Just below it, where the collar ends and skin begins, the faint lines of his neck gills sit smooth and closed.
Dew clocks the garter straps immediately. He does not process them.
His brain files it somewhere under later and moves on because processing that fully right now would mean game over and he is a professional and this is a business observation and—
He looks back at the BABY collar, sparkling under the lights.
'Oh no,' Dew thinks.
Rain reaches the chair but doesn't sit in it yet.
He puts one lazy hand on the back of it and lets the opening notes of something slow and deliberate curl through the speakers—
You radiate in shades of grey—
Dew's notepad hits the bar.
He doesn't notice.
Rain turns the chair backwards and straddles it — thighs spreading wide on either side, the skirt riding up with the movement, garter straps pulling taut against his thighs, stockings flexing where they sit. He settles his forearms on the back of the chair, casual and comfortable, like he's getting ready to have a conversation.
His eyes find Dew immediately.
Like he already knew exactly where to look.
Dew picks his folio back up.
Bar renovation — back lighting, under-shelf fixtures currently—
Rain rolls his hips once against the back of the chair, slow and deliberate. His thighs flex with it, the inner flesh shifting just above where the stocking band sits, the elastic pressing into that devastating place where Rain is soft — spilling just slightly over the top and Dew is going to—
His pen stops moving. He doesn't need to write that down.
Not gonna change your mind when it's made—
Bent out of shape, hey—
Shh.
Rain lifts one finger to his lips. The shush gesture small, precise, aimed like a dart straight at Dew's chest. His head tilts with it, the collar rhinestones catching the light, and just beneath — the neck gills, still closed, still smooth, still secret.
Dew stares at his notepad.
Bar service, he writes. Cumulus — efficient. Turnaround time—
Rain stands. Steps around the chair. One hand trails the back of it as he moves, and with the other — unhurried, eyes tracking back to Dew's without quite landing there — he undoes the third and fourth buttons.
The shirt swings open another inch. A sliver of grey-blue sternum. The first glint of shimmer sitting just below his collarbones — and below that, where the shirt falls open further, the suggestion of ribs. Of the gill lines there, smooth and closed, catching the light just enough to be visible.
Rain turns and gives the audience his back, the skirt doing something criminal when he walks.
You've got a way, contagious in a room—
He drops to a crouch.
Both hands to the floor. Head bowing forward, curls falling loose. And then his spine curves up, hips lifting, the whole long line of him arching — the skirt riding higher, garter straps pulling taut, the shirt falling open as gravity gets involved.
He holds the arch.
His breathing deepens with the effort, chest expanding — and at his ribs, just visible through the open shirt, the gill lines flutter.
Once. Twice.
Opening just slightly, pulling in air, the delicate movement of something that doesn't perform. Something that just. happens.
Dew sees it.
Dew sees it and his brain goes completely, catastrophically offline.
He is going to ruin his briefs. He is already ruining his briefs. He is a business owner and a professional and he is absolutely, completely, irreversibly ruining his briefs over a water ghoul's rib gills catching the spotlight in a chair routine and there is nothing he can do about it—
Bell doesn't look up from his tablet.
Rain rises. Rolls his neck — the gills there fluttering briefly with the deep breath he takes, just once, just enough — before they close again. He reaches up with both hands and undoes a fifth button. A sixth. The shirt falling fully open now, the belly ring finally visible, a tiny glinting centerpiece, and on either side of his ribs the gill lines close again, quiet as an exhale.
He doesn't take the shirt off, instead lets it hang open.
Hallucinate when I'm dancin' for you—
Rain turns back to the chair.
Sits forward-facing — one leg hooked over the arm, the skirt riding up completely on that side, the full length of garter strap visible from hip to stocking. Elbow propped on his knee, chin in his hand, like he's thinking about something mildly interesting.
His eyes find Dew again, pinning him in his gaze.
You want this, his expression says. Don't you.
Then he lifts that finger.
Shh.
Dew writes something.
He will not be able to read it later.
Rain's — and then something that might be stage presence except it looks more like the way that elastic band is pressing into the give of his thigh right where the garter strap connects—
Dew's pen is getting warm.
He switches his grip and keeps writing.
All that it takes is a taste—
Rain stands from the chair in one fluid motion and steps back. One hand finds the zipper at his hip.
Draws it down.
The skirt drops.
Hits the floor. Done.
The black garter belt sits low on his hips, straps running down to the stockings, framing everything they were only suggesting before.
The crowd makes a sound like a single organism forgetting how to breathe.
Dew has forgotten considerably more than that.
And we'll know what we should do—
Rain moves back to the chair. Doesn't sit. Both hands on the back of it, shirt sliding off one shoulder with the motion, and he drops his head forward — letting the curls fall, letting the spotlight find the back of his neck.
He looks back over his shoulder.
Right at Dew.
Too soon to say, better behave—
Shh—
He rolls his hips.
Slow. Devastating. Building into something relentless.
His thighs flex with it — the skin above the bands shifting, pressing against the elastic, the garter straps pulling taut and releasing, taut and releasing — and then deliberately, specifically, with the particular cruelty of someone who knows exactly what they're doing—
He lets his thighs jiggle.
Just above the band.
Right where the elastic sits.
The flesh there moves with a gravity that has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with Rain being entirely fucking devastating—
The pen melts.
The barrel softens in Dew's grip, ink going warm, the thing losing structural integrity one slow degree at a time until Dew is holding something that used to be a pen and is now just evidence.
He sets it down on the bar with great care.
Bell produces a replacement from his breast pocket without looking up.
Dew takes it without a word.
Rain does it again.
Keeping it private—
His breathing has deepened now, the work of it showing — chest rising and falling, with every breath. At his ribs, the gill lines flutter open again. Pulling in air. Working. The delicate movement of something involuntary and private and utterly, completely annihilating to witness from three feet away at a bar where Dew is supposed to be taking professional notes—
The neck gills flutter too. Just once.
Dew swallows a sound that will follow him to his grave.
Bell, to his infernal credit, does not react. Not even slightly.
Why does it feel like we're hiding—
Rain lets the shirt fall away.
It's just him now. Just the garter belt and the stockings and the collar and the belly ring and the gills and everything else Dew is going to be thinking about for the rest of his natural life.
The curse of immortality.
Rain tips his weight back and drops into a backbend.
Full and controlled. Spine curving in a long impossible arc, thigh highs planted, arms extending overhead until his fingertips brush the stage. The belly ring catches light. The gill lines at his ribs flutter open with the effort, working hard now, visible with every heave of his chest — open, flutter, open —
The first bills hit the stage.
Rain doesn't acknowledge them. Just holds the arch, chest heaving, gills working, the spotlight catching every point of sweat on his body.
Dew is gripping the bar like he'll do something stupid if he doesn't tether himself.
The second pen is somewhere on the floor, probably.
Rain comes back up slow. Vertebra by vertebra. Head last, curls falling back from his face.
He looks directly at Dew like he timed it.
One corner of his mouth curves.
He lifts his finger one last time.
Shh.
More bills. The stage is starting to mean it.
He turns back to the chair for the final sequence — steps around it once, hand trailing the back, hips finding the beat again. Every step deliberate. Every movement building. He rolls his body forward into the chair back, slow and deep, thighs flexing, the garter straps pulling —
Bills slide across the rail.
Rain rolls again. Deeper. Elastic bands pressing in, the skin above shifting, and he looks out across the crowd with the expression of someone who has never once been surprised by their own power—
His eyes find Dew at the bar.
Gripping it with both hands. Knuckles gone pale. The expression of a ghoul who has made a structural commitment to this piece of furniture and cannot be moved.
Rain drops to his knees in front of the chair. The descent sends his thighs settling back against his heels, the stockings pressing in, the soft jiggle with the movement—
He looks up through his lashes.
At the crowd.
At Dew.
And they bow down, and they bow down—
The bills come in earnest now. A wave of them. Sliding across the rail, catching the last of the spotlight, landing soft across the stage around him like something inevitable.
Rain doesn't look away from Dew.
Not once.
Not even when he reaches out and gathers a few bills with two fingers like he has all the time in the world to be paid.
He holds it for exactly one breath.
Then the lights cut to black.
The room explodes.
Dew stands very still in the noise and the dark and the aftermath and becomes aware of several things simultaneously:
One. The folio is still on the bar, which is the only thing that he could control tonight.
Two. He has no idea where the pen went.
Three. His briefs are a lost cause and have been for some time and he is not examining when exactly that happened.
Four. The harness listing is still sitting in his brain, patient as anything, and it has been sitting there this entire time.
Bell sets the replacement pen back on the bar next to him without looking up.
Dew picks it up and writes. Measured. Thoughtful.
Not a single tremor of his hand.
Rain — strong performer. High crowd engagement.
He takes a steadying breath and adds a line.
Asset to the club.
He nods and scribbles a tiny little note in the corner, just to himself.
Send Bell that link tonight.
Bell, reading over his shoulder, produces the melted pen from his breast pocket and sets it on the bar, too.
"Understandable reaction," he says. He looks up and sighs, tucking the melted pen back into his pocket. "Phantom's heading this way."
Dew looks up.
Phantom is weaving through the crowd toward them, grinning like they've won something, eyes bright with delight.
"So," they say, arriving in front of Dew with a gleeful lack of boundaries. "New boss."
Dew straightens.
"Rain wants to meet you."
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
The dressing room is even warmer than the floor.
Closer. The vanity lights doing something too-intimate to the air, the steam bleeding through the shut bathroom door making everything feel slightly more alive than it should.
Rain is seated at his vanity.
Of course he is.
He's redressed, applying more glitter along his collarbone, looking at Dew's reflection in the doorway like it's a mildly interesting development and not the direct result of a targeted campaign.
He doesn't turn around. Just meets Dew's eyes in the mirror.
"New boss," he says.
"Rain," Dew says.
Rain sets his makeup brush down, reaches for his water bottle and takes a nice long sip, throat bobbing with every pull.
"So," he says, still to the mirror. "What did it for you this time."
The room is very quiet.
"I'm here in a professional capacity," Dew says.
Rain turns on his stool.
Slow. All the way around, one knee pulled up, elbow resting on it. Completely at ease in his own space, in his own skin. The skirt shifts with the movement, fabric settling soft against his thighs.
Dew does not look at his thighs.
"That's not an answer," Rain says pleasantly.
"It's the only one you're getting."
Rain considers him. Does the catalogue thing — noticing that Dew is holding his folio in front of himself with both hands at exactly the kind of height to not be coincidental.
"Backbend," he decides. "You stopped blinking."
Dew's jaw tightens. "I was taking notes."
"Was it just your pen that melted?"
"The—"
"Climate control in this building is excellent," Rain says simply.
Dew stares at him.
Rain stares back, perfectly pleasant, like he hasn't just surgically removed Dew's last defense.
"Was there a reason you wanted to meet me," Dew says, "or did you just want to watch me stand here."
Something flickers across Rain's face. Not the smirk — something more genuine, quickly contained.
"Can't it be both?"
"I have a full house to observe."
"You were observing pretty hard from the bar." Rain tilts his head. "Thought we should make it official."
Dew looks at him for a long moment and shifts his weight.
"Five years," he says, moving into the room properly, letting the door fall mostly shut behind him. "Aether says you built half the regular clientele yourself."
Rain's expression shifts fractionally.
"He talks too much," he says.
"He respects you."
Rain looks down at his water bottle. Turns it once in his hands.
The silence that follows is different from the ones before it. Less charged. More careful.
"This place matters," Rain says quietly. Saying it the way you say things that are true and slightly inconvenient to admit. "What happens to it matters. To all of us."
He says it to the water bottle, mostly.
"I know," Dew says. Quiet enough to match. "That's why I'm here."
Rain looks up.
Really looks at him, like he's trying to read something written very small.
The moment stretches.
Dew swallows like he's about to say something more when Rain glances back to the mirror.
He tilts his head.
The Y is crooked.
He looks at it for a moment. Then his eyes slide, slow and deliberate, from his own reflection to Dew's.
"Mind straightening that for me?" he says. "New boss."
'This is a trap,' Dew thinks, despite already moving.
He crosses to Rain in three steps, sets the folio on the bench without looking at it, and reaches for the collar with fingers that are definitely steady.
Mostly, nearly, definitely — steady.
Rain's eyes drop.
Just for a second. Just long enough to see the angle of suit fabric that hasn't had time to be properly rearranged.
Back up before Dew's fingers reach the collar.
The Y is warm from Rain's skin. The little rhinestones catch the light up close, each letter precise and deliberate and sitting right there at the hollow of Rain's throat where his pulse is visible if Dew looks, which he is not doing, he is looking at the letter, just the letter, just the—
His thumb grazes Rain's throat in the process.
One brief, electric second of contact.
Neither of them moves.
Rain is watching him the entire time — cataloguing every micro-expression, every slight unsteadiness, every place the composure is held together with collar pins and professional courtesy and not much else.
Dew steps back.
Clasps his hands in front of him so they have somewhere to be. No other reason.
Rain looks at his reflection.
The collar sits perfect. B. A. B. Y. Rhinestones catching the light in a neat, devastating line.
The corner of his mouth curves.
For more than one reason.
"Thanks," he says.
His eyes flick towards the clock on the wall. "Got a client."
He stands and moves toward the door — past Dew, close enough that Dew can't help but think of the alley, when he could've, should've—
Rain pauses with his hand on the frame; doesn't look back.
"New boss," he says quietly.
And then he's gone.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
Dew walks back to the bar and finds Cowbell exactly where he left him — standing behind it, posture perfect, scrolling numbers and contracts and all the little things Dew insists he can handle himself, but Cowbell does anyway.
Phantom is leaning against it from the other side with their full attention trained on Bell, chin propped in their hand, doing something with their eyes that could only be described as a proposition.
They don't pause when Dew appears.
"—all I'm saying," they're telling Bell, "is that your tie has seen a lot tonight and deserves to be loosened—"
Bell looks up like he can sense Dew approaching.
"Mister Delmere," he says, sounding almost bored. "Productive meeting?"
"Mhm," Dew says, tight lipped.
Phantom looks between them and is about to open their mouth — likely to say something abjectly awful — when the universe decides to throw Dew a small helping of kindness.
Aether rounds the corner with his signature gold fanged smile, bumping Dew gently on the shoulder.
"Good timing," he says. "Come up to the office — I want to show you how we run the counts. Every performer gets their split precounted, house cut already off the top. It's a whole thing, you'll want to see it in person."
He's already moving toward the stairs.
Dew follows, Bell falling into step behind him with quiet efficiency, opening a new spreadsheet.
Phantom watches Bell go.
Their eye twitches.
They have deployed the shot maneuver. They have deployed the eyeliner. They have deployed the shoulder lean and the chin prop and the eyes and none of it — not a single piece of it — landed anywhere.
Bell barely even looked back.
Phantom turns back to the bar and finds Cumulus is already looking at them.
She's not even trying to hide it. Leaning against the back counter with her arms folded and a smile that's been growing for the last ten minutes.
"Don't," Phantom says.
"I didn't say anything," Cumulus shrugs.
"You're saying it with your face."
"My face," she says pleasantly, "is saying nothing."
Phantom sets down the glass they picked up for no reason.
"He's just," they start.
Cumulus waits.
"He's very—"
She waits.
Phantom's jaw tightens.
"That pocket square," they say finally, with great dignity, "was very nicely folded."
Cumulus laughs. It's not unkind, just full of love and knowing and that she absolutely cannot wait to see what they try next.
Phantom points at her.
"Not a word."
"Not a single one," she agrees, still smiling, turning back to her bar prep like she wasn't just witness to something historic.
Phantom goes back to work.
Their eye twitches again.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
Aether's office is quieter than the floor but not silent.
The bass comes up through it — muffled, persistent, the suggestion of a beat rather than the thing itself. Like the club is breathing beneath them.
Dew is aware of it immediately.
He opens his folio anyway.
The counting system is clean. Elegant, even — a whole infrastructure built around making sure every performer knows exactly what they've earned before the night is out. Stage bills collected after each set, sorted, counted, house cut pulled cleanly off the top before the stack ever changes hands.
Dew looks at the process and immediately understands why retention is so high.
"You built trust into the system," he says.
Aether looks pleased. "Exactly."
Dew makes a note.
Bell, beside him, is already cross-referencing something on his tablet with the focused quiet of a ghoul in his natural habitat.
"We run the counts after every set," Aether continues, pulling up the night's figures. "Everything gets logged and given to Mist, who distributes at the end of the night. Rain's up again at eleven-thirty — his second set always pulls higher than the first. Crowd's warmed up by then."
Dew looks at the numbers from last Friday.
They're good. Better than good.
The bass shifts below them.
Something darker. Slower.
He looks back at the spreadsheet. He's not going to think about it.
"What's the variance between his first and second set?" he asks.
Aether tells him. Dew listens, asks the right questions, makes the right notes. The numbers make sense — more than sense, they tell a story about a performer who knows exactly how to pace a room, how to let the energy build, how to make the second set land harder than the first.
He writes: analyze set timing across all performers — optimize scheduling around peak crowd energy.
He underlines it.
The bass shifts again below them, deeper now, and Dew's pen slows without his permission.
He's not wondering about the client Rain is currently entertaining.
He keeps writing.
Aether says nothing.
He reaches for his glass, takes a slow sip, and watches the way Dew's jaw tightens every time the floor moves beneath them.
"Revenue's always up on nights Rain runs multiple sets," he offers, conversationally.
"It is," Dew says, scrolling the financial data like he hasn't already studied it.
"He's good for the place."
"The numbers suggest that, yes."
The bass drops to something low and patient below them. Dew writes something in the margin of his folio that he immediately crosses out.
Aether smiles at his glass.
They work for another hour.
The bass keeps going.
Dew keeps not mentioning it.
Aether keeps not mentioning that Dew keeps not mentioning it.
Bell optimizes something quietly in the corner.
It is, by every measurable standard, an extremely productive meeting.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
By one-thirty, Tempt has exhaled again.
The crowd's thinned to the faithful — the ones who always stay too long, nursing last drinks, not ready to let the night close around them. The fog's settled low, barely moving now. The lighting's shifted warmer, more amber than violet, like the club itself is winding down.
Dew is at the bar, pen in hand, making his last call observations after having sent Bell home.
Bar service maintains efficiency at reduced volume.
Atmosphere shifts post-peak — more intimate. Warmer.
He taps his pen once.
Twice.
Writes: Revenue tail-off begins approx. 1AM. Consider late programming to extend—
"You're still here."
Dew turns his pen in his hand and closes his folio.
Rain slides onto the barstool beside him like he was always going to end up there. Less put together now, button-up over bare skin, hair slightly undone, a small run crawling up the back of his stocking. Closer to the version Dew caught glimpses of in the dressing room than anything he's seen on stage.
He smells like the end of a long night. Warm skin and the ghost of perfume and something underneath that's just Rain.
He flags Cumulus down without looking. "Two of whatever he's having."
"I'm not—" Dew starts.
"You are now," Rain says simply.
The drinks arrive. Rain wraps both hands around his glass and looks out at the thinning floor. Not performing. Just — there, taking up exactly the amount of space he actually occupies for once.
It's disorienting.
Dew looks at his folio. Doesn't open it.
They sit like that for a moment — the club winding down around them, the fog low, the lights warm, the bass finally quiet.
"You stayed later than I expected," Rain says eventually. Not quite a question.
"I had notes to finish," Dew says.
Rain hums. Takes a sip. His eyes stay on the floor.
"How'd we do?"
Dew looks at him. "Hm?"
Rain tilts his head slightly. "The club. How'd we do. You've been watching all night."
Rain looks at him then — that ocean-eyed catalogue, brief and assessing. Whatever he finds he keeps to himself.
He looks back at the floor.
"Good," he says simply.
And that's all.
They sip their drinks in something that isn't quite silence and isn't quite comfortable and is, Dew thinks, probably the most dangerous thing that's happened to him all night.
Which is saying something.
"Go home, businessman," Rain says eventually, setting his glass down. "You've done enough damage to your pen collection for one night."
And before Dew can do anything with the weight of that —
The door opens.
Ifrit, who had dinner reservations at seven, drinks with another client at nine, and has been planning to end the night here since approximately the moment Dew said 'it's just a business observation' this morning.
"Hope I'm not interrupting," he says, in the tone of someone who absolutely knows he's interrupting.
"You're not," Dew says flatly.
"Great." Ifrit slides onto the barstool on Dew's other side, clapping him once on the back. He looks past Dew at Rain. "Hey."
"Hi," Rain says easily. Sweetly.
Dew stands.
He does this with great dignity. With the energy of a ghoul who is leaving because he has somewhere to be and not because the two beings on either side of him are a little too comfortable with each other and he needs air.
"I'll—" he starts.
Rain looks up at him.
He puts on his coat instead.
Ifrit, who has been waiting all night to debrief, looks personally robbed.
"I'll walk you out," he offers.
"Stay," Dew says.
His eyes flick to Rain for just a fraction of a second when he says it.
Rain's expression can only be described as pleased.
"Night, new boss," he says softly.
Dew leaves.
The door swings shut behind him.
Ifrit picks up Dew's abandoned drink, takes a sip, and turns to Rain with a smile far too broad for the hour.
"You know," he says, "his name is—"
Rain lifts one finger.
Doesn't look at Ifrit.
Just. One finger.
Ifrit closes his mouth.
Silence.
Rain picks up his own drink and takes a sip. Looks out at the last of the crowd like nothing happened.
"Show me what you're working on," he says eventually. "Aether said you had something new."
Ifrit considers him for a moment — the deliberate stillness of him, the finger, the complete composure — and decides, wisely, to let it go.
He pulls out his phone and opens up the Helion project.
"Mural," he says. "Still early but—"
He turns the screen toward Rain.
It's not Ifrit's usual work — no bold abstraction, no riotous color. Something quieter.
A meadow rendered in careful detail, wildflowers and long grass, a small pond catching painted light. The kind of thing that takes patience. That takes looking at something softly for a long time before you put it down.
And there, tucked into the corner — a rabbit. Drawn with the same care as everything around it. Ears long, one paw lifted like it's about to bolt, caught mid-decision between staying and running.
Rain stares at it.
Something moves across his face, quick and unguarded. Gone before it fully forms — but it was there, the half-second where something got through before he could catch it.
He looks up.
"Calming, yeah?" Ifrit says innocently, looking at his own work with pride.
Rain looks back at the mural.
His jaw does something small and controlled.
"Yeah," he says.
He takes a sip of his drink.
"It is."
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
Rain's apartment is quiet.
Cool sheets. Low light. The city doing its ambient thing outside his window — distant sirens, the occasional bass thrum from some car a few blocks over.
He's showered. Changed. Cotton sleep pants and nothing else, curls damp against his neck, skin clean.
He is, by every measurable standard, done with the evening.
He's fine.
And then his phone buzzes.
👻:
okay so
I need to process something
✨️professionally✨️
--
Rain exhales through his nose. Picks up the phone.
it's three in the morning
go to sleep
--
👻:
Rain
that ghoul's palm is the size of my FACE
DO YOU SEE THE PROBLEM
--
Rain sets his phone face down on his chest and lets it chime with every one of Phantom's rapid-fire thoughts.
He looks at the ceiling.
He is not thinking about black on black suits.
Or collar pins.
Or that little fire ghoul's face as he watched his pen melt in his hands.
Rain picks the phone back up.
👻: '
are you even reading this
--
unfortunately
--
👻:
so how big do we think his—
--
Rain closes the thread before he finishes reading. He does not want to think about that right now.
But he also doesn't want to think about the collar pins.
Or the way he had stood in the dressing room, folio clutched in front of his pants, and said I know quietly enough that it meant something. The way he'd absorbed every hit Rain gave him and stayed standing anyway.
That's why I'm here.
Rain exhales and rolls onto his side.
A distraction. That's all he needs.
He opens the thread back up.
--
come over
--
The reply is immediate.
--
👻:
on my way
do NOT start without me
--
Rain sets the phone down.
Closes his eyes and waits.
Phantom arrives in eleven minutes, which is frankly impressive given the distance, still in their club clothes with eyeliner slightly smudged and an expression that says they have a lot of feelings and have decided Rain is the appropriate venue for them.
They don't say anything.
Neither does Rain.
That's the thing about knowing someone this long — the words become optional. Phantom drops their jacket on the chair and kicks their boots off. Rain shifts to make room and that's the whole negotiation.
They've done this before.
They'll do it again.
It doesn't mean anything, except that it means everything in the small way that best friends who have known each other's bodies as long as they've known each other's minds can mean something without meaning that.
Phantom climbs in, cold from the outside air still clinging to their skin, and Rain makes a noise of protest when they press their feet against his calves.
"Your feet are freezing."
"Warm them up then," Phantom says, completely without shame.
"I hate you."
"You called me."
Rain pulls the sheet up over both of them.
They lie there for a moment in the dark, shoulders touching, looking at the ceiling the way they always do when the world is loud and this, this specific quiet, is the only thing that makes it manageable.
"His hands," Phantom says, to the ceiling.
"Mhm," Rain says.
"Rain. His hands."
"I know, Phantom."
A beat.
"The collar pins," Rain says, to the ceiling.
Phantom turns their head. Studies his profile in the low light.
"Yeah," they say softly. "I know, too."
Phantom shifts — rolls toward him, chin propped on Rain's shoulder, the way they always do that no longer needs any explanation.
"Hi," they say.
Rain looks at them.
"Hi," he says.
Phantom smiles. Small and real and nothing like their work smile.
Rain's hand comes up. Pushes a piece of eyeliner-smudged hair away from their face, gentle.
Phantom catches his wrist.
Holds it.
Just holds it, just for a second, like they're both acknowledging something without saying it.
The night.
The feelings with nowhere good to go.
The ache of wanting something you haven't figured out how to reach for yet.
Phantom tips their chin up.
Rain meets them halfway.
It starts soft.
Familiar as breathing — the press of it, the ease of it, the way they fit together like something that's been done enough times to find its own logic. Phantom makes a small sound against his mouth, almost a laugh, and Rain feels his own mouth curve in response because that's just how they are, that's just what this is, warm and a little silly and theirs.
Phantom pulls back just far enough to say, "You're thinking about him."
"And you're thinking about Bell."
"...Fair."
Rain pulls them back in.
Less soft this time.
Phantom goes easily — always does, always has — fingers curling into Rain's shoulder, and for a moment it's still warm, still familiar, still the comfortable architecture of something well-practiced—
Then Rain's fang catches Phantom's lower lip.
Not hard. Not breaking anything.
Just — catching. Dragging. A bright edge of sensation that tips the whole thing sideways.
Phantom makes a sound.
Something lower. Something that starts in their chest and comes out with an edge on it, a rough little exhale that's half-surprise and half — not surprise at all, actually, because they know each other, because Phantom knows exactly what Rain's fangs feel like and Rain knows exactly what that sound means.
The heat cranks. Immediately. All the way.
Phantom's hand fists in Rain's hair and Rain makes a sound of his own and suddenly the careful soft familiar thing has become something with real urgency to it, something that takes the want that's had nowhere to go all evening and gives it somewhere, finally, to land.
Even if neither of them is quite thinking about the other.
Even if that's always been okay.
𖥸
After, Phantom is asleep inside of ten minutes.
Curled toward Rain's side of the bed, one hand loose near their face, eyeliner finally, fully wrecked, looking peaceful in a way they never do anywhere else. Their breathing evens out slow and deep while Rain watches the ceiling and listens to the city and lets the quiet settle back around him.
He picks up his phone.
Opens the listing.
That oxblood leather. The matte brass hardware. The chest harness, the waist belt, the thigh straps, the studded collar.
Rain looks at it for a long time.
He wants it. Has wanted it for weeks — the weight of the leather, the cool press of brass, the way it would sit against his skin under stage lights. He can picture it exactly. Has been picturing it, if he's honest, since the moment he first saw it.
A few more good Fridays.
He'll get there.
He always gets what he wants, in the end.
He sets his phone on his nightstand and looks at his ceiling in the dark, with Phantom breathing soft beside him.
He lets his thoughts wander.
The dressing room. The heat of that thumb at his throat — right where his gills sit, fingers hot enough to burn just for one unsteady second before he stepped back.
Professional.
His chest does something he's not going to examine too closely as his hand drifts low.
He probably shouldn't be thinking about his new boss like this.
He closes his hand and lets his thumb drag a slow path.
Summary: Phantom makes their debut. The front row doesn't survive. Neither does the mezzanine railing, but that's Dew's problem.
Warnings: Phantom and Rain dancing, character development, did you miss the enemies to oh no tag, jealousy, a wet dream (like, 5/10 on the spice scale)
Songs: Slumber Party (the Rain Paris cover), Tantrum by Ashnikko, Manners by Ashnikko
a/n: i got a nosebleed writing that dance section :D enjoy!
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
The paperwork closed on a Wednesday.
By Thursday, Dew had been to Tempt twice.
He told himself the first time was operational — walkthrough, repeat staff introductions, a conversation with Mist about the wellness rollout that ran forty minutes and accomplished everything it needed to.
Legitimate.
Necessary.
The kind of thing a new owner does.
The second time was also operational.
At least, that's what he told himself.
By Friday he'd stopped constructing reasons and started just — arriving. Collar pins straight, folio under his arm, nodding at Swiss on the door like he belongs there. Which he does, legally, with documentation to support it, and if some part of the reason he keeps coming back has nothing to do with operations or documentation or the extremely legitimate business interest he has in monitoring peak hour performance—
Well.
That part doesn't get a voice.
It's Saturday now.
Dew is at his desk in the small office Mist had shown him off the mezzanine — compact, efficiently organized, smelling faintly of the club's signature amber and whatever Cirrus burns before warm ups. His folio is open. His laptop is open. There are three tabs he's been meaning to close for two hours.
Something shifts above them. A heavy drag of furniture across the floor, muffled through the ceiling, followed by a thud that makes the lamp on Dew's desk shiver.
Bell makes a note on his tablet without looking up. "Conversion's ahead of schedule."
"Good," Dew says, and turns a page he hasn't been reading.
Bell does not make a note about how quickly this particular renovation got scheduled.
The office goes quiet again, the ceiling settles.
The bass, however, doesn't.
On the corner of the desk, propped against the lamp, is a small envelope that shivers with a beat drop.
Cream paper. Neat handwriting. A little flower drawn in the corner in pink pen, slightly wobbly, entirely sincere.
Thank you for making my debut feel like it mattered. — A
He'd sent flowers the next day. The arrangement had been tasteful. The card had taken four drafts.
She'd drawn him a flower back, and somehow that's the one that got him.
Dew has moved it twice. Once when it arrived, into the top drawer. Once this morning, back out again, for no reason he can articulate.
It sits there now. He looks at it occasionally.
Bell looks back up at him.
"Bar stock delivery confirmed for Monday," he says, with the ease of someone who has made himself at home in significantly more hostile environments. "Helion sent the revised lighting quote — it's better but not good, I've flagged the line items. Saturday roster's full, Mist expects capacity shortly."
Dew nods and tries to pretend his folio hasn't been purely decorative for the last hour.
Bell scrolls.
The office hums quietly around them, the steady thrum of bass punctuated by the heavy clunk of furniture.
"Bell," Dew says.
"Mmn?"
"That order." He keeps his eyes on the folio. "Did it come in?"
Bell looks up.
His expression does the thing it does — the thing where it reveals nothing and somehow communicates everything.
"There have been a number of orders to come in this week," he says pleasantly. "Between Helion and the Tempt restock and the materials for the office conversion—"
"Bell."
"—not to mention the branded amenity update, which I do think was the right call regardless of what legal said about the timeline—"
"The order," Dew says, and his voice is very flat and very even and giving absolutely nothing away, "that I sent you a link for. At—" he pauses. "—at night."
"At one forty-seven in the morning," Bell confirms, helpfully.
"That order," Dew says, his left eye doing something small and involuntary.
Bell holds the moment for exactly one beat longer than necessary. The link had arrived with zero context and zero explanation and he has been waiting for this conversation to become unavoidable.
"Ohh, that order," Bell says. "Yes. Beautiful piece, actually. Very well made." He makes a small note on his tablet. "I'll have it delivered to Rain this evening."
He says Rain's name with careful neutrality.
Dew looks at the folio.
"Thank you," he says.
"Of course," Bell says. And then, because he's Bell and cannot entirely help himself: "Shall I include a note?"
The look Dew gives him could etch glass.
"No note," Dew says.
"Very mysterious," Bell agrees. "Very—"
"Bell."
"Shall we?" Bell says, already rising, straightening his jacket. "Mist said the mezzanine view is best when it's busy and it sounds like it's filling up."
Dew closes the folio and stands.
Straightens a collar pin that doesn't need straightening, brass today. Simple bars, the smallest concession to a Saturday that Dew was apparently willing to make.
"Lead the way," he says, with great dignity.
Bell does.
His smile, just barely there, stays exactly where it is.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
The view hits different on a Saturday.
Dew clocks it immediately — the density of the crowd below, the way the noise has a different texture to it, thicker, more heat, bodies packed three deep at the rail and still more coming through the door. Swiss has backup tonight. Aurora is working the floor in something gold and strappy, moving through the crowd with a tray. She's really found her footing since the debut and it shows.
Mist was right about capacity.
Dew leans on the rail. Bell settles beside him, tablet open, making actual notes because one of them has to.
Below, the night moves.
Dew watches it with the focused attention of a ghoul doing operational oversight and not, absolutely not, cataloguing the back corridor for a specific silhouette. He's been here four days running and he has a feel for the rhythm of the place now — when the energy peaks, when it dips, how the crowd moves when a performer hits the stage versus when the floor is open.
He's very professional about all of this.
His eyes drift to the curtain.
Drift back.
Cumulus's voice rolls warm through the club.
"We've got something a little special for you tonight—"
The crowd shifts. Orients. The instinct of a room that has learned to pay attention when that particular tone enters the mic.
"—straight from your favourite water ghoul—"
The curtain stirs but doesn't open.
A voice comes through instead — low and warm and pulled close to the mic like a confidence, amplified through every speaker in the building until it's less a sound and more a weather event.
"So," Rain says, into the packed and breathing room, "I've been keeping something from you."
Dew's hands find the rail.
Laughter ripples through the crowd. Someone yells something from the back that tips the voice into a smile — audible even through the speakers.
"I know, I know." A pause, unhurried, in complete control of the room without being in it at all. "But I think you're ready now."
Dew is gripping the rail.
He was not aware of his hands tightening. That's simply where they live now.
"They've been working hard," Rain says. "They've been ready for a while, honestly. I just wanted to make sure you deserved them."
The crowd laughs. Rain lets them.
"Tempt — meet the reason your weekends are about to get more complicated. Say hello to Phantom."
The lights drop with the curtain.
𖥸
A single spot, warm gold, hits the stage.
Two figures.
Dew's brain performs a very fast inventory and arrives at: oversized t-shirts. White. The kind that hits mid-thigh, the kind that looks like it belongs to someone else, the kind that has absolutely no business being worn on a stage except that somehow, on these two ghouls, it looks—
The crowd laughs. Delighted. Confused.
Phantom plants their hands on their hips and looks out at the audience with the expression of someone who has planned something terrible and is extremely pleased about it.
Rain stands beside them with his fingers curled in the shirt's hem, the picture of innocence.
The song starts.
Slow. Rock-dark. A guitar that drags its feet.
I'm shy—
Phantom mouths it at the crowd, hand pressed to their chest, the picture of sincerity.
I'm so fucking shy—
They turn to Rain with the back of one hand dramatically pressed to their forehead.
Rain shrugs, mouth curling around the next line, shoulders shaking with something that's almost a laugh as they look at each other.
I'm not shy, I'll say it—
I've been picturing you naked—
The synchronized grab of the shirt hem happens on the next beat, smooth and practiced, one motion — and then the shirts are gone, tossed somewhere offstage, and the crowd makes a sound like a collective exhale that tips immediately into noise.
Dew's knuckles blanch.
Rain in gold chain and pearl — the harness structured across his chest and shoulders, strands of pearl swinging with every breath. A skirt of the same falls in loose layers from his hips, a pearl collar gleaming at his throat. Even his belly ring had been swapped out for a dangling pearl, everything catching the light like he was assembled solely to be looked at.
Phantom's in black.
Leather wings spanning their chest — broad and dramatic, silver-boned, one sweeping over each small breast. A single chain swoops between the wings, dipping low across their sternum like a signature. A matching micro mini sits on their hips, silver chains draped over it in loose falls.
The whole effect is sharp. Edged. The dark mirror of Rain's softness.
Together they look like something that was designed.
She looks like the type to break it—
Bell's tablet lowers approximately two inches.
Dew does not comment on this.
Below him, the crowd is already losing it — bills appearing, people leaning forward, the fever of a room that knows it's watching something it'll be talking about tomorrow.
Rain moves into the first chorus and it's — warm. That's the word Dew keeps coming back to, the word that lodges in his chest. Rain is warm with Phantom in a way that has nothing to do with the performance and everything to do with the person, moving toward them with the ease of someone who has spent a thousand casual hours in this orbit and shows it in every line of his body.
Big doe eyes, amazin'. She's everything I've been prayin'—
Rain puts his hands together.
Actual praying hands, aimed at Phantom. Mouthing every word with the conviction of a ghoul who means every syllable, eyes big and reverent and absolutely full of shit—
Phantom points at him like you're going to pay for this later and Rain's face splits into something that isn't a performance smile and isn't a weapon and isn't the version he turns on rooms full of people who want something from him.
It's just — delight.
Dew has seen that smile exactly once, briefly, from further away than this. He has been thinking about it ever since.
Something in his chest does something he doesn't have a name for yet.
It's not want. Or not only want.
It's the ache of watching someone be easy with another person. Of seeing warmth distributed freely to someone who gets to simply receive it, who doesn't have to earn it or wait for it or wonder what it would cost—
My heart palpitation. She looks like the type to break it—
Dew exhales through his nose.
He is fine.
He is completely fine.
He is a ghoul watching his employees do their jobs excellently and feeling nothing except professional satisfaction at the quality of the entertainment on offer at his establishment.
This, of course, lasts until the chorus.
Me and your girlfriend playing dress up in my house—
Rain and Phantom orbit each other and Dew is hit with the feeling that he should, perhaps, for his professional reputation and sanity, look away.
He, however, has never been great about self preservation.
I gave your girlfriend cunnilingus on my couch—
Rain drops.
Knees hitting the stage clean, right in front of Phantom, looking up at them with the praying hands and the commitment of someone who has been waiting for this specific bit since the song started—
Phantom's hand lands on his head and pulls him close.
The crowd doesn't so much lose its mind as evacuate it entirely.
Dew makes a sound that he will be taking to his grave.
He's so hard it's a problem.
Bell has not taken a single note.
They break and Phantom steps forward for the second verse.
The shift is immediate. The warm intimacy of the first chorus evaporates and something else takes its place — Phantom expanding into the space Rain clears for them, filling it with a completely different energy, all sharp edges and deliberate heat.
I'm the Nelly in the party with some rocks for ears—
Phantom rolls their hips once, slow and deliberate, the silver chains on their skirt catching the light in a wave.
The crowd responds like they've been given permission as Rain leans against his pole, looking for all the world proud.
I'm a slave for you baby, Ms. Britney Spears—
They take their pole like it's been waiting for them — one leg hooking clean, body arching back in a slow invert that earns a wall of noise from the front row. They hold it.
Let the crowd look.
Then they unwind with the unhurried control of someone who has spent months learning exactly how much they can make a room suffer and land soft.
They stalk to the edge of the stage.
Drop into a crouch at the rail — eye level with the front row, chains swinging forward, silver catching every light in the building — and just. Look at them. One beat. Two.
It's an all girls, party clothing optional—
Phantom stands and reaches back.
The bat wing bra releases in one clean motion and slides away, and underneath — X's, black tape, deliberate and devastating, lifting the small swell of their tits in a way that is wholly indecent despite being within club guidelines.
Dew hears something beside him.
Very small.
Professionally deniable.
He turns and finds Bell watching the stage.
Bell, who has been at Dew's side for years, through client disasters and acquisition negotiations and at least three separate incidents that required the phrase "we don't need to discuss this again." Bell, whose expression has exactly two settings in professional contexts — mild approval and mild disapproval, deployed interchangeably as a control mechanism.
The same Bell, who is currently watching Phantom stand at the edge of the stage in chains and tape and absolute authority with an expression that could generously be described as professionally evaluative and cannot, under any honest assessment, be described as that at all.
His tablet has drifted approximately forty-five degrees from its usual position.
He hasn't noticed.
Dew stares at him.
Bell does not notice Dew staring at him.
This is unprecedented.
Dew turns back to the stage and says nothing. Files it in the same drawer where Bell has been filing all of his disasters, locks it, throws away the key.
They will never speak of this.
This is their implicit non-disclosure agreement being forged in real time over the mezzanine rail.
Below them, Phantom does something with their hips that makes three separate people in the front row forget they have drinks in their hands and then Rain joins them, rolling through another devastating chorus.
The third verse starts with Rain.
He takes the stage back from Phantom with the ease of someone reclaiming something that was always theirs — not competing, not even particularly trying, just stepping into the light and letting the light do what it does. The pearl skirt swings at his hips. The chains catch and scatter gold across the stage floor.
My girl look like Wednesday Addams—
Rain moves through it with a smile that's for the room and also, somehow, for no one — private and pleased and catastrophically sure of itself.
Eyes go black when she orgasms—
The crowd is frenzied now, bills hitting the stage in a steady rain.
My butt cheeks—
Rain turns.
Presents.
—she likes to grab them.
He says it with his whole body, with the pearl skirt framing everything it's theoretically covering, with the shameless confidence of someone who is extremely aware that they have an extraordinary ass and considers this information public domain.
Phantom's hands land.
Both of them.
Sure and immediate, like they've been waiting patiently for this lyric, like the whole song has been building to this specific moment of choreographed audacity.
The crowd detonates.
Rain laughs, quick and bright and horribly real and lets it happen, lets Phantom have the moment, and then the pearl skirt comes loose in one clean motion, sliding away in a shimmer of chain and pearl, and Rain is…
Significantly less covered than he was, the tight black shorts underneath doing the absolute minimum.
Dew feels his heart hammer against his ribs.
He owns this building.
He has the paperwork.
It means nothing, his brain supplies, helpfully. It has never meant anything, you bought the building and he still owns every room in it—
The final bars of the song build.
Rain dances through them easy and unhurried and then, with the same energy as someone leaving a party while it's still good, he simply — goes. One last roll of his hips, one hand trailing down the pole as he passes it, and then he's in the wings and the stage belongs to Phantom and the crowd is still screaming for both of them.
Rain didn't look up.
Not once, the entire set.
He knows Dew is here — of course he knows, Dew owns the building, Mist would have mentioned if he wasn't — and he simply. Doesn't look for him.
Tonight isn't about that. Tonight is about Phantom, about putting them in front of a room that's going to love them, about having the kind of fun that has nothing to do with games or clients or whoever's watching from the mezzanine with white knuckles on the rail.
Dew's not even a factor.
That's the thing.
That's the thing he's going to be lying awake thinking about.
Not the pearls. Not the skirt. Not Phantom's hands landing on that perfect ass while the crowd lost its mind.
The fact that Rain knew he was watching.
And had something better to do.
𖥸
The guitar drag of Slumber Party is gone, replaced by something jagged and gleeful and slightly unhinged, and Phantom rises to it.
The heavy breathing of the intro bleeds through the speakers.
Phantom stands perfectly still at center stage, X's out, arms loose, silver chains catching the light with every shallow breath. The room holds its breath with them, three hundred people collectively forgetting what they were doing a second ago.
Then the beat drops, Tantrum kicking in like a car alarm at three in the morning.
They take the pole like they have a score to settle — up fast, one leg hooking clean, body whipping into an invert that earns a wall of noise before they've even fully settled into it. They release with a spin, unwinding fast, and they land on their feet and immediately drop to their knees, sliding forward across the stage on the momentum, chin lifted, chest out, completely unbothered by any of it.
Then they go to the rail.
This is, it turns out, a declaration of war.
They work it slow — crouching, rising, letting people look, letting hands hover just close enough — and the bills come. One at a time, then in a steady stream, tucked into their waistband by fingers that tremble slightly, which Phantom acknowledges each time with a smile that could strip paint.
The front row doesn't stand a chance.
They never did.
Phantom does something in the bridge that should be anatomically impossible and Bell exhales through his nose.
"I need to—" he starts.
Stops.
Dew doesn't look at him. "So… how'd you get Rain's measurements for that set?"
A beat.
"I asked Phantom," Bell says, with great neutrality.
"Mhm," Dew says.
Bell looks at the stage.
He does not need to elaborate because the elaboration is currently doing a hip roll at the front rail with someone's twenty dollar bill in their waistband.
Dew's phone buzzes.
fire hazard🔥:
what is HAPPENING up there tonight
dewdrop delmere I can see you on the mezzanine
you look insane btw
Dew puts his phone face-down on the rail.
"We should discuss the bar rotation," he says, to the middle distance.
"Mm," Bell says, to the stage.
Neither of them moves as Phantom takes the pole again.
They climb fast. All the way. Thighs locked, hands sure, chains clinking against the chrome. At the top they pause — one beat — two — and then they invert again, spine curving, one leg extending long, head tipping back until their hair brushes the air below them and the whole club collectively forgets to breathe.
They hold it.
Hold it.
Then they release — unwinding into a drop spin that brings them all the way to the floor, landing on their back in a sprawl that's half intention and half momentum and entirely, catastrophically effective.
They lie there for a second, chest heaving.
They flex their hands and they feel it, the bills.
Which are — numerous. Which have been accumulating, apparently, while Phantom was busy being aerodynamic.
It is, if they're being honest, an embarrassing quantity of money to be lying in.
Phantom's mouth curves.
They spread their arms wide and just. Lie in it. Let the lights hit them. Let the crowd scream.
One knee bends, one hand trails slow up their own stomach, and they look up at the ceiling with the expression of someone who has just realized something important about the direction their life is going and finds it deeply acceptable.
They roll — deliberate now, unhurried, hips dropping into the beat from the floor while their hands drag through the bills, letting them scatter and resettle. Their back arches up and they move through it like the stage is a bed and the tips are the sheets and this is theirs, this intersection of sweat and silver and an absolutely ungodly quantity of ones and twenties.
Someone throws a fifty.
Phantom finds it and holds it up.
Kisses it.
Gets on their knees and puts it in their waistband with great satisfaction, knowing they earned every cent of it.
They stay there — knees spread wide on the stage, chest still heaving, silver chains swinging forward, every fang in their head catching the light.
They know exactly what they're about to do.
The crowd is unwell, and it only gets worse as the last song in Phantom's set starts up.
Manners opens slower than Tantrum, and Phantom lets the energy resettle into something sharp but considered.
Holier than the ozone layer—
They stay on their knees as the prayer hands come out.
Aimed at the ceiling.
Solemn.
Reverent.
Completely unhinged.
Eyes bigger than the headlights, dear—
They blink at the front row, big and slow. Innocent as anything.
How the fucking hell did I get here?
They stumble as they stand.
Just one step — perfectly timed, a little wobble, looking down at their own feet like they've betrayed them, and the crowd laughs, loud and delighted, because it's so deliberately stupid and so perfectly delivered—
Brown liquor made the memory clear—
Phantom straightens and smooths the chains on their skirt. Dignity fully restored.
I'm a weird bitch, suck my toes—
They extend one leg over the rail, dragging their toes slow along the brass — ankle cocked, letting the front row look at what they can't have.
And oh, do those lucky seats look.
Got me dripping like a runny nose—
They pull their leg back and drag a hand up their own throat.
I want all of that and one of those—
Someone at the rail reaches for them.
Phantom steps back again.
Titties out—
Both hands come up.
Frame and present.
The X's have never looked more intentional.
Little tummy showin'—
One hand trails down their chest, fingertips grazing their stomach while they look out at the room with the expression of someone who is extremely pleased with themselves and would like you to know it.
They turn.
Dancin' in the moonlight, no pajamas—
Shake their hips once and the skirt goes with it, unclipped in one motion and dropped without ceremony or a backward glance. What's underneath are black micro shorts that leave absolutely nothing to the imagination with PROBLEM across the ass in white block letters.
The crowd reads it.
The crowd agrees.
Phantom prowls the stage like they own it, and finds someone in the front row.
Looks directly at them.
You can't have this, their whole body says. Isn't that fun.
A pull from Rain's play book, quickly followed by another as Phantom's gaze drifts up.
Not to the mezzanine exactly. Just — up. And to the left. With a smile that knows something.
Beside Dew, Bell goes very still.
Not the tablet-drifting stillness of before. The kind that happens when prey senses the proximity of a predator and the only response is to not move at all and wait for it to pass.
It does not pass.
Phantom's smile sharpens at the corners, satisfied, and moves on.
They move through the song, bursts of energy in the chorus. And while the lyrics do feel perhaps a little too applicable, what's abundantly obvious to Bell and everyone else watching is that Phantom is having fun.
And they look simply devastating as they do.
The stage lights were made for them, or maybe it's the other way around — lavender skin catching every color thrown at it, the lightning patterns that run across their shoulders and down their arms illuminated gold in one sweep of the spot, silver the next. Their horns catch it differently, iridescent black that shifts like a galaxy when they move, depth upon depth of color that has no business existing on something that sharp. Their hair, the same iridescent black, a shock of it falling across their forehead when they spin — throws light back at the room like a challenge.
The florals on their thigh are designed with delicate linework, soft and deliberate, climbing from their knee toward the hem of their shorts. The softness of it feels like it shouldn't survive the chaos of Phantom's storm but the beauty persists anyway.
And when they turn, when they flip their hair forward and then snap it back, the back of their neck reads BITE ME in fine clean letters that a person would have to be very close to read.
Several people at the rail are trying very hard to get close enough to read it.
Bell is not squinting trying to figure out what the mark says. He is looking at the stage generally.
This is his position and he is maintaining it, despite his ongoing losing battle with his lower half.
Phantom takes the pole again.
Climbs slow — bare feet finding the chrome with the sureness of practice. The room watches with bated breath.
At the top they pause.
The hold is pretty, flashy, shows off their body in a way that makes them feel incredible but it's always been the dismount—
One breath.
Rain's voice in the back of their head, 'do it with intention.'
They flip.
Clean rotation, body tucking and snapping long, feet clearing the pole — and they land. Both feet on the stage floor. The impact sharp and solid and completely, catastrophically controlled.
The room takes a second.
It needs the second.
Then it absolutely does not survive.
Bills hit the stage in a wave. Someone in the back is standing. Swiss, from his post near the door, uncrosses his arms.
From the wings, a head appears at the curtain's edge.
Rain.
Leaning out with one hand braced on the fabric and the other cupped around his mouth — because he knew it was coming, because he was there every time Phantom ate this exact move on this exact stage, and he has been waiting to see them nail it in front of a packed house—
"Ah, that's hot!"
He shouts it in perfect time with the song.
The crowd screams.
Phantom doesn't look at him. Just points once — you're embarrassing yourself — and Rain's grin splits wider and then he's gone, back into the dark, like he was never there.
Dew stares at the curtain a beat too long.
That grin. Unguarded, bright, aimed at Phantom and nobody else. The kind of smile that doesn't know it's being watched because it wasn't meant for anyone to see.
Dew's hands tighten on the rail.
The brass warms under his time softened calluses. Then gets warmer. Then reaches a temperature that is, technically, a liability issue at his own establishment.
He files the smile before his brain can do something worse with it.
He does not file the heat.
It has nowhere to go.
He clears his throat.
"I'm going back to the office," he says to Bell. "Start the counts. Phantom's done well tonight."
He lets go of the rail and looks down at it.
The brass is warped. Two perfect handprints pressed soft into the metal like it forgot to be solid for a moment.
He looks at Bell.
Bell is watching the stage and probably hasn't blinked in three minutes.
He straightens his cuffs and goes.
Bell doesn't watch him leave.
Instead he watches the rest of Phantom's performance. The way they move with reckless abandon, but he can tell there is intentionality with it. Each shake, each shimmy, each bend and snap and roll into greedy fingers is done with purpose. Even if they move like wildfire consuming the stage.
They know what they're doing.
They know they look hot while doing it.
Bell can't help the upward tick of the corner of his mouth when the last lyric lands, the perfect bookend to the way it started.
I'm so shy—
Phantom stops on center stage, takes in the crowd.
And then the laughter starts. Low, building, absolutely evil, rolling through the speakers until it fills every corner of the club—
Phantom spreads their arms wide, shaking with laughter of their own.
They bow, and the room detonates.
𖥸
The office, however, is quiet.
Relatively speaking, at least. The bass still hums up through the floor and into the soles of Dew's shoes, but the crowd is below him and the curtain has closed and everything up here is just numbers. Clean.
Manageable.
The bill counter whirs on the desk, Phantom's take for the night feeding through it in a steady stream that is, frankly, extraordinary. Dew runs another stack through and writes down the number and his brain goes pleasantly, mercifully quiet.
Something he can control.
Good.
Bell appears in the doorway after the applause comes down, tablet open, jacket immaculate. He takes one look at Dew's general situation — the collar pin slightly askew, the color still high in his cheeks, the focused way he's feeding bills into the counter like it's the only thing keeping him tethered to the earth — and says nothing.
He pours two glasses of ice water from the small credenza by the door. Sets one at Dew's elbow without comment. Keeps the other for himself as he rounds the desk and sits.
Adjusts his position with the careful neutrality of a ghoul who also had an evening and is not discussing it.
They work in companionable silence for a moment. The counter whirs. Bell opens something on his tablet. The bass hums.
"Strong debut," Dew says eventually, to the stack of bills in his hand.
"Very," Bell agrees, to his tablet.
Another stack through the counter. Another number written down.
There's a knock at the door and Cirrus steps in without waiting for an answer, the last of Phantom's stage tips gathered neatly in her hands. She sets them on the desk and looks between Dew and Bell.
She says nothing, which is arguably worse. Her expression says it for her, a type of knowing that she can't help but smirk about as she leaves and lets the door click shut behind her.
"Mist keeps a wardrobe file," Bell says, after a moment. Conversationally. "Measurements, fit notes, preferences. Very thorough."
"I'm not surprised," Dew says.
"I didn't have to ask anyone anything," Bell adds, in exactly the same tone.
Dew looks up at him.
"The discretion is always appreciated," he says.
"Mm."
A comfortable beat. Neither of them looks at the other.
"Rain stepped back well tonight," Bell says. "Let Phantom have it completely."
Dew writes down a number.
"He's good at that," Bell continues, mildly. "Knowing when the room needs something else. Knowing when to be the most interesting thing in it and when to just—" a small pause, "—make space."
The counter clunks through the last stack.
Dew clicks his pen.
"I should find Mist," he says. "Check in about the VIP reservations."
"Ah," Bell says, still looking at his tablet. "She'll be in her office."
Dew stands. Straightens his collar pins out of habit — the brass bars, slightly warm still, from nothing worth mentioning.
He pauses at the door with his hand on the frame.
"I'll probably be a while," he says, to the hallway. "Finding Mist."
"Take your time," Bell says, with great professionalism.
"The VIP situation is — complex."
"Quite," Bell agrees. "I'll hold down the office."
"Good."
Dew exhales through his nose.
"Bell."
"Sir."
"Lock the door."
Dew has always offered excellent employee benefits.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
He finds the dressing room before he finds Mist.
The back corridor is a maze he hasn't learned yet — doors that look identical, signage that assumes familiarity. He's two doors in when he pushes through one that opens onto warmth and vanity lights and the smell of clove smoke and realizes, approximately one second too late, that he has made a significant navigational error.
The scene resolves itself in pieces.
Rain on the couch.
Phantom mostly in his lap, which is the generous way to describe it — really it's more that they're in each other, Phantom's legs bracketing Rain's hips, Rain's hands on their waist, both of them flushed and breathless and mid-something that Dew has very clearly interrupted. The pearl choker catches the vanity light. The tape X's are doing the same. Phantom's fingers are in Rain's hair and Dew's brain is performing an emergency shutdown trying to figure out what to say.
They break apart.
Both look up.
There is a beat of absolute silence in which Dew considers, briefly, whether the corridor might swallow him.
It shows him no such kindness.
"Wrong door," he says. His voice is admirably level. "Looking for Mist."
Rain looks at him.
His mouth is kiss-bitten. His hair is wrecked. The pearl choker sits at his throat and he is wearing absolutely nothing else and he is looking at Dew with an expression that is — not the game face, not the weapon. Just Rain, slightly undone, reading the room with those ocean dark eyes like he always does.
"Bar office," Rain says. Like Dew has walked in on nothing. Like this is a completely unremarkable Saturday. "Back the way you came. Second left."
"Right," Dew says.
He should leave.
He's going to leave.
Phantom tips their head, smile curving slow and knowing. "You don't have to stand in the doorway," they say, warm and completely unrepentant. "We don't bite."
They glance at Rain.
"Usually."
And Rain — Rain glances up at Dew, and something shifts in his expression, something that isn't quite performing and isn't quite unguarded, somewhere in the space between. Patient. Watching. Curious what Dew does with this.
Dew looks at them.
At Rain's hands still loose at Phantom's waist. At the total effortless ease of it — Rain just existing in this room, with this person, in this way that costs him absolutely nothing. Warm with Phantom the way he hasn't been with anyone else. The way Dew has been watching all night from above and filing carefully under things he isn't examining.
The thing in his chest that he refuses to name does something sharp and involuntary.
"It's not about the distance," he says.
It comes out quieter than he means it to. More honest. Slightly too real for a deflection, too vague for a confession — a splinter of something he can't stop from getting out, a single sentence that lands in the room and sits there.
Phantom goes very still.
Rain's eyes don't move from Dew's face.
"Second left," Dew says.
He goes.
𖥸
The bar office is exactly where Rain said it would be.
Dew locates Mist and has a perfectly functional conversation with her. Signs what needs signing. Answers what needs answering. Does all of it with steady hands and a level voice and absolutely no indication that approximately ninety seconds ago he said something he shouldn't have to two ghouls who are almost certainly still sitting in that dressing room with it.
He almost clicks his pen.
"The VIP rotation," he says. "Walk me through tonight's bookings."
Mist pulls up the screen without blinking. She has survived multiple ownership transitions and learned not to read anything into anything. She simply shows him the page.
It's full.
Rain: booked out. Every slot. Back to back, a waiting list that trails off the bottom of the screen.
Phantom: booked out. First night on the floor and already packed.
Dew looks at the rest of the roster. The other dancers have bookings, good ones, and the numbers are clean and this is good, this is what he wanted, this is the whole point—
Rain. Booked out.
"Distribution looks uneven," he says, which is true.
"It's Rain's effect," Mist says, which is also true. "New talent benefits when they're adjacent to him. Phantom will pull their own weight by next weekend."
Dew nods and makes a note that is definitely about revenue distribution.
"Ensure the other dancers are being offered equivalent visibility," he says. "We should rotate the stage placement. I don't want anyone buried in the schedule."
"Of course," Mist says, in the tone of someone who has already been doing exactly that and doesn't need to be told.
Dew hands the tablet back.
"Thank you," he says, and walks back out into the noise of the club like a ghoul with somewhere to be.
He shoves the waiting list from his mind.
He thinks about it the entire way home.
𖥸
In the dressing room, Phantom and Rain sit in the quiet after the door clicks shut.
Phantom is the first to move.
They untangle themself from the couch, having decided that this moment is over and it's time to get ready for the next one. They adjust their shorts, step into their skirt. Find Rain's pearl harness on the vanity and hold it out without comment.
Rain takes it. Fastens it at his sternum. Sits back down.
Phantom pulls up a stool, picks up an eyeshadow brush, tilts Rain's chin up with two fingers the way they always do.
"Hold still," they say.
Rain does. It's easier than thinking.
Phantom works in silence for a moment. Brush. Blend. The soft press of a sponge at Rain's temple.
"Hey," Phantom says, eventually. Just asking.
Rain's eyes stay closed.
"It's not about the distance," he says, turning it over. Feeling where the seam is.
Phantom says nothing. Keeps blending.
Rain opens his eyes.
"He's not scared of me," he says. Which isn't quite what he means, but is close enough to be worth examining. "Most people are scared of me. Or they want something from me. Or both."
Phantom hums and adjusts the tight wing of his liner. They tilt Rain's chin once more, checking the line.
"No," they agree. "He's more than that."
Rain looks at himself in the mirror for a moment.
He looks — the same. Pearl choker. Hair fixed. Phantom's work precise as always.
"He didn't say it to get something," Rain says. "He said it and then left."
Phantom starts to pack up their makeup kit.
Rain looks at his hands.
"Interesting," he says.
Phantom knows when to push, and now is not that time.
The knock comes before either of them has fully resurfaced.
Bell opens the door without waiting — tablet under one arm, a slim black box tied with a simple black ribbon in his hands. He crosses the room. Sets it down in front of Rain.
"For you," he says.
He straightens and glances at Phantom.
The corner of his mouth moves. Just barely. Just once. The fraction of a smile that a ghoul like Bell does not hand out without having decided to.
"You were extraordinary tonight," he says simply. Factual, like he was providing an evening weather report.
And then he's gone, the door clicking shut behind him.
Phantom stares at it.
Their mouth opens.
Closes.
"Did he just—" they start.
"Yes," Rain says, already loosening the ribbon.
"He just—"
"Yes."
"I need a minute."
"Take it," Rain says, distracted now, fingers finding the edge of the lid.
He opens the box.
The oxblood leather looks almost black in the vanity light. Rich and deep, brass hardware catching the glow like it was made for exactly this light, in exactly this room. Rain lifts one strap of the chest harness, the weight of it real and considered, every detail deliberate.
He turns the strap in his hands.
He'd opened the listing once. Shown Phantom, just for a second, over takeout at the bar. Hadn't said anything about it to anyone else. He remembers Dew walking past and not stopping.
That must have been it. A glance at a screen that couldn't have lasted more than three seconds, and then Dew had kept walking like he hadn't seen anything at all.
No note.
No credit.
No expectation of anything in return.
Rain sits with it in his lap and feels, quietly and without permission, the oddly specific vertigo of being known by someone who wasn't supposed to be paying that kind of attention.
His face does something Phantom has never seen on it before.
They don't ask.
They already know this is the beginning of something bigger than either of them anticipated.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
In the late hours after Tempt has closed, Dew finds himself becoming intimately acquainted with his ceiling.
He can't sleep.
This is not, in itself, unusual. Dew has never been what anyone would call a natural sleeper — his brain doesn't have an off switch so much as a dimmer that requires significant manual effort to turn down.
Most nights he reads until his eyes give out, or he works until Bell sends him a passive aggressive calendar reminder titled "sleep, (mandatory)" or he lies in the dark and runs numbers until they blur into something that approximates rest.
Tonight the numbers won't cooperate.
Helion. One and a half weeks to opening and the foyer lighting rig is still a conversation, which is contractor-speak for a problem we are charging you to have feelings about. The soft launch guest list needs final approval. The branded glassware is backordered from the supplier and the replacement option is twelve percent cheaper and fifteen percent worse and he cannot decide if that matters.
He stares at the ceiling.
Tempt. Staff roster reviewed, contracts restructured, Mist has already sent three follow-up emails regarding the wellness package rollout, which still needs a timeline. The extras policy documentation needs a legal pass. The dancers need to be protected. Rain—
He closes his eyes.
Opens them.
The ceiling is very white.
The ceiling has never done anything to help him.
He rolls onto his side.
The city hums distantly beyond the floor-to-ceiling glass, neon bleeding through the curtains in thin lines. His phone is face-down on the nightstand where he put it forty minutes ago. The sheets are expensive and he cannot get comfortable in them and this is fine, this is a normal night, he has had worse nights—
I can be your new disease—
A lyric bleeds through his brain. A song, from the list he gave Phantom, all those days ago.
He doesn't know why he picked it. He's not examining why he picked it. Phantom mentioned the tradition and he'd looked at his phone and his thumb had just — moved. Music is a business decision.
Everything about Tempt is a business decision.
He rolls onto his other side.
The lighting rig. The guest list. The glassware.
The way Rain looks at him across the club floor — that small upward tilt of his chin, that half-second of attention that says I see you and is then withdrawn like a stubbed out cigarette.
The way Rain looks at Phantom.
Which is different.
Which is… warmer. Easier. The kind of look that doesn't cost anything because it's freely given. The way Rain's mouth wrapped around Phantom's name when he introduced them. The way he was on his knees in front of them with praying hands like it was the most natural thing in the world, the way he was standing in the wings because he needed to see them nail it—
Dew stares at the ceiling.
He's not — it's not—
It's not that he begrudges Phantom any of it. That's not what this is.
It's that he wants to know what he would have to do to be looked at like that. Not the stage look. Not the weapon. The real one. The one Rain doesn't perform.
The one he has to earn.
Dew closes his eyes.
Sleep, he tells himself, with the authority of a ghoul who has bent entire market sectors to his will. Now.
His brain, deeply unimpressed with his authority, offers him one last inventory — three unanswered emails, one unresolved lighting rig, one very specific smile that wasn't meant for him and might never be — and then, finally, mercifully, drops him into the dark.
𖥸
The stage is wrong.
The lights are warmer than they should be. The crowd is there but not, a texture rather than a presence, sound without shape.
Rain is on the pole.
He's wearing leather, dark red and rich, straps crossing his collarbones and chest in a pattern that doesn't quite resolve but his brain decides it doesn't matter. Brass hardware. Black briefs. The waist belt sitting low on his hips, thigh belts below. A studded choker at his throat, bunny tail high on his ass. Moving like he always does — like he invented the concept of being watched.
Dew is in the crowd.
Then he isn't.
The stage dissolves at the edges and suddenly it's just the two of them and the warm amber light and Rain sliding down the pole like gravity is something he tolerates rather than obeys.
He steps off the stage and walks toward Dew.
"You're still thinking," Rain says.
His voice is the same as it always is — that low register that bypasses Dew's ears and goes straight south. He stops in front of him and tilts his head.
"I can tell," Rain says. "You're always thinking."
Dew opens his mouth.
"Don't fight this," Rain says, almost gently.
He reaches out.
Even in the dream Dew's brain gets this part right — renders it with the specificity of something it has been obsessing over since the alley, since Rain leaned in close to take a light and the warmth rolling off him was edged with something cool underneath, something that cut against the heat of Dew's own skin in a way he hasn't stopped thinking about since.
Water ghoul. Of course.
Rain's hand is at Dew's jaw — just fingertips, just the suggestion of pressure — and the cool of his skin burns like ice.
Dew goes entirely still.
Not what he performs in boardrooms. Not the facade of control.
It's the stillness of stopping.
Of a machine that has forgotten what it sounds like when it's off — and then someone finds the switch, and the silence registers as violence before it feels like relief.
Dew's eyes close.
He doesn't decide to close them.
All he knows is the cool press of Rain's fingers at his jaw, holding him in place so gently it almost isn't holding at all.
"That's it," Rain says quietly.
His thumb traces once along Dew's cheekbone and something in his chest cracks along a fault line he didn't know was there.
"You're so tense," Rain murmurs. "You're always so tense."
He adjusts his grip, lets his hand curl around the cut of Dew's jaw.
"Hush," he says. "You don't have to think."
The cool hand tips his head back and Dew goes with it. Just like that.
No argument. No calculation. Just his head tipping back like it's the most natural thing he's ever done.
Rain leans in.
Dew can feel the temperature of him — that cool that belongs to Rain specifically, cutting against the heat of Dew's own skin. The leather is warm under Dew's hands where they've found it without being told to, fingers curling around the straps, the hardware grounding him while everything else goes soft.
Well.
Almost everything.
Rain takes him apart slowly. No audience. No crowd. No performance with a calculated end.
Just Rain, and his cool hands, and the relief of not having to think.
The heat builds at the base of his spine — low and gathering, too steady to resist. Rain's hands moving like they've already mapped every frequency. Every place that makes Dew's breath catch, his thighs go loose, his head tip back.
He receives.
The hardware is warm between his fingers like he's been holding it for hours. Time doesn't work right in here. Nothing does, except Rain's hands — finding every place Dew has knotted himself tight and smoothing it out, patient as water.
Rain's mouth traces down his jaw. His throat. The soft press of lips at his pulse point, unhurried, like they have nowhere else to be.
Dew makes a sound that belongs to no version of himself that has ever had to be the sharpest person in the room.
Rain doesn't stop.
The pressure builds. Focused. Deliberate. Rain's hand wrapping around him sure and slow, working him with the same patience he brings to everything — and Dew who has been holding himself together for so long just… doesn't. His hips roll forward. His breath goes ragged. The brass bites into his palm and he holds on.
He's so close to—
Rain's mouth at his ear.
"Good," he murmurs. "Just like that."
The heat crests.
Slowly. Luxuriously. Like Rain is the one deciding when — and Dew, Dew who decides everything, who has been deciding everything since he was young and hungry and had nothing but the refusal to let anyone else hold the wheel —
Lets him.
Every number gone. Every lighting rig. Every room.
Just the low broken sound he makes when it finally breaks over him, and Rain's hands, and the extraordinary mercy of not having to hold anything together for once.
Rain's mouth at his ear.
"Dewdrop."
He says it soft.
Like a reward.
Like permission to rest.
Like he finally did something right.
𖥸
He comes awake like he's been pulled from the water, gasping, tangled in his sheets, cheek pressed into the pillow.
He lies there for a moment.
Becomes, with slow and absolute clarity, aware of the mattress beneath him.
Of what he's been doing to it.
He closes his eyes again. This does not help. The dream is already going soft at the edges the way dreams do but the shape of it remains — the leather, the warmth, the cool press of fingers at his jaw, the way Rain said his name like it was something earned rather than simply given.
He opens his eyes.
Five fifty-three. The inky dark of pre-dawn. Sunday.
Sunday.
He has nowhere to be for several hours.
This is, as it turns out, the worst possible news.
"Fuck," he says, directly into the pillow.
He lies there for a while. Longer than thirty seconds. Long enough that the city outside his windows starts to go from dark to grey, long enough that the sheets cool beneath him, long enough that he runs out of window to stare at and has to start actually dealing with the fact that he is a grown ghoul who just had a dream about his employee and ground himself against his own mattress like a teenager and is now lying in the evidence of it.
He peels himself off the bed.
Strips it with a growl. Bundles everything into the hamper without looking at it and pads to the bathroom.
He turns the shower to cold and stands in it until he stops feeling warm.
It doesn't help.
It was never going to help.
But at least now he's clean and miserable instead of just miserable.
He wraps a towel around his waist and stands in the middle of his bathroom for a moment, dripping on the tile, trying to remember what normal ghouls do on Sunday mornings.
His brain, unhelpfully, offers him Rain's hands.
He screws his eyes shut and shakes his head clear. Walks to the closet instead.
He's not sure why. Muscle memory, maybe. He opens the door and stands there in the early morning light, eyes moving over the neat rows of shirts, the organized rack of ties, the folio already packed for tomorrow—
And the guitar case. Propped in the back corner where he put it. Months ago. Maybe longer.
He looks at it.
He thinks about Rain's cool hands. About the dream. About the smile aimed at Phantom and the want that lives in his chest that he can't name, because naming it gives it power, and he simply cannot allow that.
He looks at the guitar case for a long time.
Then he closes the closet.
There is nothing to be done about any of it except put on a casual outfit and go to Helion and be functional. Art walkthrough with Ifrit at ten, brunch after. The murals need a final sign-off before the soft launch and Dew is going to look at them with fresh eyes and professional detachment and absolutely not think about anything else.
He is fully capable of functionality.
His phone buzzes on the nightstand.
He looks at it.
fire hazard🔥:
good morning sunshine ☀️
how'd you sleep
Summary: This meeting definitely should have been an e-mail.
Warnings: Rain in various assorted outfits and compromising positions; Rain stretching; Phantom making An Attempt; Dew's general embarrassment and related hard-ons; a new bombshell enters the villa (actually two! three? i've lost count)
a/n: my hobbies include cuticle care and making Dewdrop suffer
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
Dew is fine.
He's been fine since eleven-fifteen last night, when he walked home, showered, and went to bed like a normal ghoul. He was fine when he woke up. He's fine right now, standing in the hallway mirror adjusting his cuff with steady hands and absolutely no memory of velvet shorts burned into the back of his eyelids.
Fine.
The espresso machine hisses from the kitchen as he returns to his phone, scrolling through overnight reports with one hand.
His hair's still damp from the shower, combed back neat and ruthless. Black button-down tucked into tailored slacks. Black silk tie tight and sharp, gold sigil collar pins gleaming in the light.
He is immaculate. Efficient. Completely in control of himself and his morning and the fact that he is absolutely not—
His phone buzzes.
He flinches.
One text from Ifrit away from spiraling.
Cowbell's already at the kitchen island, tablet in one hand, Dew's triple espresso in the other. He doesn't bother looking up.
"Morning. Espresso, no sugar, because you hate joy. I moved your meeting with legal to Monday and slotted a check-in with acquisitions at eleven."
He finally glances up, clocking the suit. "Nice collar pins. Shame about the attitude."
Dew grunts, takes the espresso, and downs half of it in one drag. "Keep going," he says, deadpan. "I'm so close."
Bell scrolls without missing a beat. "You're due uptown at nine to review the Helion project. Three p.m. is Aether—he's having you meet onsite. Dinner with Ifrit and the investors is still at seven."
Dew goes very still.
"Onsite," he repeats.
"Onsite," Bell confirms, scrolling. "He seemed quite enthusiastic about it. Said something about wanting you to get a feel for the atmosphere." He doesn't look up. "I believe his exact words were 'tell him to dress down.'"
The eye that twitches is the left one. Always the left.
"...Does he know I was there last night."
"I couldn't possibly say." Bell tucks the tablet under his arm and looks up to find Dew looking three steps away from something that resembles prayer.
"I'm firing Ifrit, how hard could it be to find a new concept artist," Dew growls to himself, poking at his phone.
Bell has the grace to pretend he doesn't hear.
"Am I driving, or are you taking the wheel today?"
Dew finally meets his eyes. "I'm driving."
"Very well," Bell nods. "Helion first, a visit to the office for some decompression time, and then your meeting at Tempt."
He says it lightly. Carefully. Like he doesn't want to die but is absolutely willing to risk it.
Dew says nothing for exactly one second too long.
"It's just a business meeting."
"Of course," Bell says sweetly. "And last night's visit was… anthropology, then?"
He tilts the tablet slightly, just enough to catch the reflection of Dew’s face.
“Do tell—how was the field study?”
Dew sets the empty cup down with quiet finality and reaches for the lacquered valet tray near the door. His rings catch the light as he rifles through it.
"Remind me to revisit your salary structure," he grumbles.
Bell doesn't even blink. "Yes, I've been meaning to talk with you about my hazard pay."
Dew pulls the Alfa key with a mostly fond roll of his eyes. Bell slides his leather portfolio across the countertop.
"By the way, Ifrit said you left quite an impression."
Dew exhales slowly. "Ifrit says a lot of things. None of them actionable."
Bell reaches for his jacket with a mild snort.
"Come on, Mister Delmere. Let's go look at your next empire."
Dew doesn't answer.
He tugs on his coat—soft worn leather, meticulously tailored to his small frame—and shoulders it like armor. Like something that might hold him together for the rest of the day.
He walks out the door.
Bell follows, already smiling at his screen.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
The morning's sharp-edged and too bright.
Dew slides into the driver's seat of the Alfa and exhales through his nose as the engine purrs to life—clean, quiet, powerful.
Like him.
Like he's supposed to be.
He sits for a moment before pulling out, breath fogging faint on the window. Lets the silence hold him as Bell climbs wordlessly into the passenger seat.
The car, at least, doesn't ask anything of him.
He decides to take the long way.
He needs the motion. The control.
He tells himself it's just to clear his head.
It's not.
He adjusts the heat. Rolls his neck.
Tells himself it doesn't matter that his first business exploded overnight all those years ago. Doesn't matter that he was barely old enough to drink when he signed his first licensing deal. Doesn't matter that every room he walks into still expects him to be either charming or cutthroat, and he hasn't decided which mask fits better.
He's earned this.
The cars. The corner office. The stupid collar pins.
Hasn't he?
His fingers tighten on the wheel. The tie around his throat feels a little too tight.
Or maybe it's the memory of lips parting around a cigarette filter, smoke curling sweet, a stranger—not a stranger, stop it—looking at him from under his lashes like he was a problem worth unraveling.
He shifts gears without thinking. Lets the engine roar just once on the freeway curve before sliding clean back into quiet.
By the time Helion rises in the distance, his jaw's unclenched.
Almost enough to forget how he feels.
Almost.
"You're doing it again," Bell says from the passenger seat.
Dew doesn't answer.
"The whole 'I'm a lucky fluke and any day now they'll figure me out' thing." A pause. "You know. That one."
Dew's lips twitch—just a little. "Didn't ask for commentary."
"You didn't have to. I've seen that grip on the wheel before. Usually before quarterly reports."
The car slows at the curb. Dew shifts into park but doesn't move to get out.
Bell's tone softens—only slightly. Just enough for Dew to hear the steel beneath it.
"This is yours," he says. "You built it. You earned it. And no one gets to take that away—not even you."
Dew says nothing.
"Besides," Bell sniffs, like sentiment is a virus he refuses to catch, "if you implode now, I'll have to reschedule your whole week. And I just optimized your Friday."
Dew huffs a quiet breath that might qualify as a laugh.
Bell reaches for the handle. Pauses.
"You're going to be alright, you know."
He says it simply. Like a fact. Like he's already checked the numbers and this is just the result.
Then he's out of the car, tablet in hand, not looking back.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
The day moves fast. It has to.
Helion is crisp and spotless, all white marble and silent luxury. The renderings are clean, the budget's tighter than projected, and Ifrit's visuals—well. They're showy, but on-brand. Dew signs off with a few restrained nods, leaving Bell to handle the minutiae while he keeps the rest of the schedule on rails.
Just before he goes, Ifrit flips to the back of the portfolio.
"Been playing with a few mural ideas," he says, breezy. "Nothing official."
Dew glances down, already halfway toward the door and freezes.
Tucked in the corner of the last page: a sketch in sharp ink, loose and fast, clearly a warmup. Just a rabbit. Cartoonish. Overly long ears. Big eyes. One paw lifted like it's about to bolt.
Not meant to mean anything.
But it means everything.
Dew shuts the folio a little too fast. Smooths a hand over the cover like that'll help.
"Maybe outside," he says. "On the west wall. Something calming."
Ifrit clicks his pen. Writes something in the margin. Then, very gently, turns the page back toward Dew.
He's drawn a little meadow around the rabbit.
"Very calming," Ifrit agrees.
Dew looks at him for a long moment.
"You're fired."
He walks out.
Ifrit's grin follows him all the way to his car.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
Dew makes it through the rest of the morning on momentum alone.
Drive to his office. Check-in with acquisitions. Half-hour conference call with finance. Thirty minutes carved out to review contracts from legal—except he only makes it twenty before his attention splinters and he's standing at his floor-to-ceiling window with no memory of getting there.
He takes lunch standing at his desk with a mountain of emails for company.
By one-thirty, he's outside. Alone. Phone in one hand, cigarette in the other.
He tries not to smoke more than one a day.
He watches the tip of a second one burn red. Exhales in a long, steady stream and lets the city blur gold around the edges. The scent of it makes something uncoil behind his ribs with the way it curls, sweet and familiar, into the back of his throat.
Got a light, mystery man?
Dew crushes the cigarette out and stomps back inside.
He pulls the Alfa around at quarter to three.
Bell is waiting at the curb. Of course he is. He folds himself into the passenger seat and blissfully says nothing about the destination.
The console glows gentle under Dew's hand. His folio's behind him, every document in perfect order. His tie's still straight. His shoes still shine.
And yet his heart still kicks once, hard, when the club's violet neon slices through the midafternoon haze.
Tempt.
He tells himself it's just a business meeting, but his knuckles are white on the wheel.
He parks clean at the curb, kills the ignition, collects the folio, steadies his breath.
Bell gives him a smile that knows too much.
"I'll stay in the car for this one. Call if you need me."
Dew looks at him for a long moment before checking his reflection in the rearview mirror. He straightens a collar pin that didn't need to be adjusted and gets out without a word.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
The club looks different in daylight.
No haze machines. No laser strobes. No bass shaking the walls. Just tinted skylights filtering soft sun across velvet booths and brass rails. Dark wood floors gleaming like water, polished so clean they catch the light.
Without the noise and bodies, the club feels disarmed—stripped down to muscle and bone. The faint whirr of a vacuum backstage. The soft clink of glass as someone preps syrups behind the bar.
Dew steps deeper in, letting his eyes adjust to the gold-tinged gloom.
The place is opulent, designed to seduce. The artwork's not signed, but it doesn't have to be. Every inch of it feels like being inside Ifrit's head—bold and sharp and hungry. Burnished gold leaf flickers along the ceiling trim. Murals curl across the back wall in blood-red and black, all hunger and motion. A phoenix motif etched into a mirrored column near the lounge. Dew immediately recognizes it from the Helion portfolio.
Of course he's been using the place as a private gallery.
Ridiculous. Gorgeous. So over the top it nearly loops back around to brilliance.
He's barely taken three more steps before he's stopped by the stage. His eyes land on it without his permission.
In the heat of last night it was a different world. Now it's just—wood and chrome and brass. Empty.
Quiet.
Somehow that's worse. Because his brain fills it in anyway.
The afternoon light shifts and catches the pole.
He thinks about the way Rain looked wrapped around it—thighs gripping the chrome, spine curved, head tipped back like gravity was something that happened to other people.
The side door thuds shut.
Dew's brain empties like someone pulled a plug.
Rain.
Stepping into the club, gym bag on one shoulder, headphones looped around his neck, mid-laugh at something on his phone.
Devastating in daylight. Worse, somehow, without the stage lights and the bass and the merciful cover of darkness. Just him—loose joggers slung low, cropped hoodie riding up over a line of taut stomach, curls soft from the shower with a few still damp and clinging to his temple. Shimmer dust caught in the hollow of his collarbone like he couldn't quite scrub the night off.
He doesn't notice Dew at first. He's mid-step, jaw working, thumb flying across his screen.
Dew stays exactly where he is. Professional. Measured. Entirely in control of himself.
His pulse says otherwise.
Rain's gaze lifts and lands squarely on him.
One long beat.
His head tips slightly, the motion loose like he's got all the time in the world. He lets his eyes drag down the length of Dew's body.
Clenched jaw. Collar pins. The white-knuckled grip on the portfolio.
The immaculate line of his slacks.
Right back up again, even slower.
Dew looks—professionally, of course.
That's when he sees it—a small gold bar catching the afternoon light, a blue stone swaying just above the waistband. It winks once when Rain shifts his weight.
Dew's eyes snap up.
Too slow.
Rain's brow lifts just a fraction more.
The barest flicker of acknowledgment, like Dew is a curiosity. An interesting problem someone left… unsupervised.
Then the corner of his mouth curls sharp and knowing and completely, catastrophically unhurried. Like he already knows the answer to a question Dew hasn't figured out he's asking yet.
He keeps walking.
Brushes past him close enough that the scent of clove and mint and warm skin hits Dew square in the chest like a fist. Close enough that Dew could reach out and—
"Mister Delmere."
Mist appears at his elbow like a conjuration—silver piercings flashing, bob immaculate, phone in hand.
Dew turns. Very calmly. Definitely not caught red-handed by his own brain.
"Boss is expecting you."
She turns on her heel before he can reply.
Dew looks back.
Rain doesn't.
He adjusts the cuff of his already perfect sleeve and tightens the grip on his folio.
"This way," Mist says, already moving.
He follows, just barely catching the shimmer of movement where Rain disappears behind the curtains.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
Rain lets the curtain fall shut behind him.
He drops his gym bag on the dressing room bench, kicks his slides off, and lasts approximately twelve seconds before his phone is out.
--
you will NEVER guess who's at the club rn
before opening
in a full suit
--
👻:
don't say little mr. meltdown
don't say it
i am begging you
--
black button-down 💀
gold collar pins
trying SO hard not to stare
--
👻:
I WILL BE THERE IN 12 MINUTES
do NOT eat him alive until I can witness it with my own eyes
DON'T RUIN THIS FOR ME
--
no promises 💅
--
👻:
RAIN
--
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
The elevator ride to Aether's office is short and silent. Mist stands beside Dew like a loaded weapon—phone tucked close, mouth set in an unreadable line.
She steps out first when the doors open, heels noiseless on the matte flooring.
The hall is narrow, dimmer up here. Walls lined with vintage gig posters and framed photographs, their corners softened by time and low light.
Dew follows, folio tucked under one arm, already running numbers in his head. Square footage. Revenue per square foot. Projected—
He stops.
On the wall between two vintage gig posters, framed in simple black, is a photograph.
Promotional, probably. The kind of high-definition, carefully lit image that's meant to sell something.
Doing its job flawlessly.
Rain, mid-routine, a chair beneath him like a throne. Head tipped back, throat exposed, the line of his neck caught in dramatic light. One hand trailing slow up his own inner thigh, fingertips just brushing the hem of his shorts. The other arm extended long, showing the full lean stretch of his torso—stomach taut, that gold bar catching the light like it was placed there deliberately.
Like everything about him is placed deliberately.
The bold glitter along his collarbone. The damp curl stuck to his temple. The way his mouth is just barely open.
The way the barely there fabric is doing absolutely criminal work across the full, unmistakable—
Dew's folio hits the wall.
He doesn't remember walking closer.
"Mister Delmere."
Mist, from the end of the hall. Not looking back.
Dew swallows thickly and keeps walking.
Aether's office smells like sandalwood and old leather. The couch along the far wall is plush—slouch-worn, well-loved, the kind that holds a thousand secrets. Behind the desk, wide windows look down over the club floor, empty for now but glittering in the shifting half-light.
Aether's already there. Sleeves pushed up, bracelets stacked on his forearms, a grin pulling at one corner of his mouth.
Dew steps inside.
"I was starting to think you'd gotten lost," Aether says, warm as anything. "Can I get you a drink? You look like you need one."
"It's barely past three."
Aether gestures at the low table anyway. Two glasses already waiting. Cut crystal, golden liquid catching the light.
"You're in full funeral drag," he adds. "Least I can do is offer a toast."
Dew's mouth twitches, just barely. He crosses to the couch, folio still under his arm.
He doesn't sit.
Aether watches him. Expression shifting into something quieter.
"Been a long time," he says. "Last time I saw you, you were panicking over fire code violations and crying into an expired lease."
"I don't panic."
"Right. You pivot. Violently." Aether grins. "Usually into success. Which is why I called you."
Dew sets the folio on the table but stays standing. He folds his hands like he's closing an argument.
Aether softens. Just enough to mean it.
"You look good," he says. "Sharp. Little taller than I remember."
Dew huffs quietly. "Same couch. Same bad lighting."
"Different ghoul."
"Have to be," Dew says. "I couldn't build something on borrowed ground. There wasn't a safety net."
Aether meets his eyes. "You had me."
"I know."
The quiet that follows is heavy with the weight of years and distance and everything that dissolved without either of them meaning it to.
Aether reaches for his glass. Nudges the second one an inch closer to Dew.
"Still taking it neat?"
Dew looks at the glass. Doesn't touch it.
"It's efficient."
Aether looks at him for a moment. Just looks. The way you look at someone when you knew them before they had anything to protect.
"You used to take it however it came," he chuckles quietly. "As long as it was free."
Aether meets Dew’s eyes.
"Sit down, Dewdrop."
Something old and unguarded flickers across Dew's face. There and gone.
He sits.
Not all the way back. Perched at the edge of the cushion like he might need to leave quickly. But he sits. And after a moment, almost against his own better judgment, he reaches for the glass.
Holds it too tight in his palm.
Aether doesn't comment. Just lets him have the moment.
"I wasn't sure you'd actually come yourself," he says eventually.
"I owed you that much."
Aether's mouth curves. Soft. "You don't owe me anything."
"I know," Dew says again. Quieter this time. "That's not what I meant."
Another silence passes between them. Heavier than the last one.
Aether swirls the amber in his glass, watching it catch the light.
"Protein bars and spite," he says, mostly to himself. "You remember that stretch? Three months on my couch. Wouldn't sleep until the mood lighting was sorted."
"The branded robes were your idea."
"They were a joke."
"They tested well."
Aether laughs. Genuine and warm, filling the office like smoke. "God, you were insufferable."
"I was motivated."
"Same thing."
Dew's nose crinkles. Just the smallest bit. Something loosening despite himself.
"There he is," Aether grins, softer now.
"I didn't come here for nostalgia."
"I know." Aether leans back, studying him. "But it's good to see you. Really."
He means it. It lands.
Dew looks down at the glass in his hands. Finally takes the smallest sip, like it's a concession he's making to an older version of himself.
"It's good to see you too," he says.
He doesn't say: I should have come sooner. He doesn't say: I didn't know how to reach out. He doesn't say: I kept meaning to.
Aether already knows.
"Well," he says, setting his glass down and rising with a faint crack of joints, "come on then. Let me show you what you'd be taking on."
They move through the office door and back into the low-lit hallway, Mist nowhere in sight. Aether walks unhurried, one hand brushing the wall as they pass framed vintage posters, sepia-toned shots of earlier nights: sequins and shadows, ghouls in stages of glittering transformation.
That picture of Rain that's probably illegal in six countries.
Aether leads him down a half-hidden staircase at the end of the hall, the kind you'd miss if you didn't know to look.
Ifrit's got art here, too. One of the canvases in the stairwell is unmistakably his—red and gold and riotous, a flame that never stops licking the edge of its own frame.
They descend into the mezzanine, just above the floor. No lights flashing yet, no music—but Dew can't help glancing down at it.
He looks away before his brain can supply something helpful again.
Aether leans on the railing, arms folded.
"She's held up."
Dew lifts a brow. "She, huh?"
"The club. The energy. The madness. I built this place to feel like a spell, you know? One foot in this world, one foot in something hotter." He smiles to himself. "Sometimes I think I succeeded too well."
Dew hums. "You've never been one to do anything halfway."
Aether glances sideways at him. "And you were never one to rest, even once."
Another beat of silence.
"You know I don't just want to sell," Aether continues. "I want to pass it on. To someone who understands what it is."
"You could pass it to anyone. You've got half the Ministry neighborhood in your contacts."
"But I didn't call them. I called you." He taps a finger against the rail. "I know what you looked like with nothing. Everyone else would run this place. You'd understand it, the heartbeat. And I think that you'd protect it."
A flicker of emotion crosses Dew's face. Gone in a blink.
"This place is different," Aether goes on. "It's alive. It needs someone who understands that power isn't just spectacle—it's curation. Restraint. Intention."
He looks out across the quiet floor, voice softer.
"It needs someone who won't just run it. Someone who'll love it."
Dew is quiet for a moment. Then, almost despite himself, he looks out across the floor. Lets himself consider the potential, the future, the growth.
"When would you want to move forward?"
Aether's about to answer when footsteps on the mezzanine stairs announce a new arrival.
Cirrus appears at the top, tablet tucked under one arm, hair pinned in clean loops, dressed down in soft slate leggings and a deep violet tank. Her ballet flats barely make a sound as she steps onto the landing.
She stops when she sees them.
"Sorry," she says, polite and direct, eyes moving to Aether. "Mist said you were up here. I need you to sign off on Aurora's schedule adjustment before tonight."
Her gaze slowly travels back to Dew. His hair. The rings. The generally pressed and stressed appearance. Her smile curves slow and knowing.
"We've seen each other," she says pleasantly. "Haven't we."
Aether glances between them, already enjoying himself—catching the way Dew's jaw goes just slightly tight.
"Cirrus, this is Dewdrop Delmere. He's looking at acquiring Tempt."
Cirrus goes still for just a fraction of a second.
"Of course he is," she says plainly.
Dew goes very still.
This is totally normal, a typical response to meeting a prospective buyer.
One of Aether’s brows lift with barely concealed delight. He takes the tablet from Cirrus and signs without looking at the screen.
She takes it back and tucks it under her arm, turning to go.
And just when Dew thinks he might be allowed to breathe again, she pauses in the doorway and looks directly at him.
"You've made quite the impression," she says, almost kindly. "Strange that I'm only now hearing your name."
Then she's gone, ballet flats silent on the stairs.
Aether's brows have left his face entirely.
"...Well," he says eventually. "That's interesting."
Dew doesn't look up.
"Numbers," he says, instead. "We're talking numbers now."
"Right," Aether says, still far too amused. "Numbers."
They stay at the railing.
Aether settles against it like he's got all the time in the world, bracelets chiming soft as he folds his arms. Below them, the floor hums with the quiet industry of pre-opening—the soft thwack of a mop, the clink of glassware, the distant thump of someone testing the sound system one bass note at a time.
"In all seriousness," Aether says. "Tempt's profitable. Always has been. But I want it in good hands. Someone who understands what it is and what it could be. Not just the numbers."
Dew nods, eyes on his folio. "I've reviewed the last five years. Projections are clean. Profit margins steady. Staff turnover's low. Brand loyalty's high."
"And?"
"And if I'm in, I'd want full creative control." He flips a page. "House takes a 30% cut. We can lower it to 25% after six months, assuming revenue increases post-rebrand."
"You planning some big changes?"
"Not structural. But I'd like to expand wellness perks for contracted dancers. Coverage at Helion—massage, PT, manicures. Physicals and labs too—"
Aether whistles. "Luxury benefits? You trying to put me out of business before you even buy it?"
"It's good for retention. Better performances. Marketable, too."
He flips another page and stops.
"Something wrong?" Aether asks.
Dew's voice is very flat. "...What is your extras policy."
"My what?"
"Private attention. Companion services. Envelope dropped at the table without a word."
Aether gives him a look that says he's put together a little too much.
"...So you have visited the club."
It's not a question.
Dew's jaw tightens. "I was doing preliminary research."
"Preliminary research," Aether repeats, like he's tasting the words. His smile is slow and absolutely criminal. "Right. And you got Phantom'd, didn't you."
"I got offered a service."
"Same thing."
"I didn't accept," Dew mutters.
Aether clutches his heart. "Tragic."
Dew closes the folio with unnecessary force. "This entire establishment could become a hazard to my professional credibility."
"Phantom's a menace, but they only proposition people they think can take it."
"I said no."
"Which only makes them hungrier."
Dew's jaw tightens. "And your official policy?"
"Extras are at personal discretion. Some do, some don't. I don't require it, I don't ask. They set their own rates, boundaries, and preferences. Mist keeps the client registry locked up tighter than her jawline."
Dew taps his pen and nods. Exhales slow.
"Your highest earner—" Dew flips to a fresh page, pen ready, very busy, very professional. "I'd want to use their contract as a benchmark. Restructure the others around it. Every dancer should have access to the same earning potential."
"Rain," Aether says without hesitation.
Dew writes something down that is probably not a real word.
Aether watches Dew very carefully.
"...Tell me about his contract."
"Rain's... picky," Aether says, far too smug. "Very high return rate. Doesn't take just anyone, doesn't perform unless he feels like it. But when he does—" He whistles low. "Moneymaker. We always sell out when he's on the floor. Got regulars flying in just to watch him stretch."
Motion at the stage catches Dew’s eye.
Curtains ripple and Rain steps out onto the floor like he owns it.
Which, Dew is increasingly aware, he might.
He's changed—skin-tight black workout set, breathable fabric clinging everywhere it shouldn't. He moves across the stage with the unhurried ease of someone completely at home in their body, leans in to press a kiss to Cirrus's cheek, soft and familiar, and rolls his neck once before dropping into a stretch.
Dew does not look.
He is absolutely, professionally, not looking at the way the fabric pulls across Rain's thighs as he folds forward. He is not noticing the way sweat is already blooming at the base of his spine. He is not noticing anything at all.
Aether says something about back-end percentages.
"Mhm," Dew says.
Rain shifts into a deep squat, says something to Cirrus that makes her roll her eyes and smile. His thighs flex. The fabric does something criminal.
"—cut's been stable for six months," Aether continues. "Phantom flirts with the line, but Rain anchors the numbers."
Dew's knuckles go white around his pen.
"He seems like a valuable asset," he says.
"Oh, absolutely." Aether doesn't even try to hide the smirk. "He knows it, too."
Stability, Dew thinks desperately, is important.
Rain drops into a pushup without warning—legs sliding back into a full plank, then lowering to the floor with practiced ease. Up. Down. Up. Down. Slow and controlled.
Like he knows someone's watching.
Cirrus glances up at the mezzanine, only once. Then back down at Rain with a smile that knows entirely too much.
Dew exhales through his nose and loosens his tie one fraction of an inch.
"You alright there, Dew?"
"Fine," Dew says. Too fast. "Perfectly focused."
Aether hums. Looks back down at the floor. "Would you like to come back tomorrow, then? See the club at its peak? Friday's are packed."
Dew doesn't take his eyes off the middle distance.
"Yes," he says. "Absolutely."
A pause.
"For an… observation."
"Right," Aether says. "Observation."
Below them, Rain flows back up to standing, completely unbothered, and reaches both arms overhead in a long, devastating stretch.
Dew closes the folio.
"My team will be in touch," he says, with the energy of a man fleeing a burning building in a very expensive suit.
"No rush," Aether smiles, watching the floor with the quiet satisfaction of someone who built something good.
It's alive with prep hour energy.
Near the far pole, Cirrus has Aurora upside down in a split, one hand on her ankle making minute adjustments with the patience of someone who has done this a thousand times. Aurora wobbles. Cirrus waits.
A few feet away, Phantom is working through a routine with genuine focus—hips rolling into the pole, form surprisingly clean, something Rain-like in the line of their body.
Rain himself is now stretched long across the stage, one leg extended, spine curved forward, completely in his own world.
Three separate disasters in various stages of assembly.
Dew grips the railing.
The moment is broken when a bass beat hits like a dropped body.
“Whoooo wants to see what I've been practicing?” Phantom yells, spinning toward the others with a wicked grin.
Rain raises a single unimpressed eyebrow as distorted synth and heavy trap drums swell through the empty club.
"Do we get a choice?" Cirrus winces, clearly reconsidering all of the decisions that led to this moment.
The drop kicks in—something slinky and aggressive, the kind of remix that sounds like it was designed specifically to get someone arrested on the Garden State Parkway.
Rain sits up and tilts his head. “Did you find this on a playlist titled 'songs for getting fingered in a mall parking lot'?”
“Yes,” Phantom beams. “That’s exactly what I’m going for.”
Cirrus sighs. “This is not what I meant when I said ‘practice together.’”
“Too late,” Phantom grins. “You invited chaos and I RSVP’d.”
"Phantom's been training seriously for about six months," Aether says, almost conversationally. "Started as a dishwasher and couldn't keep them off the stage. Something about the attention, but Rain really took them under his wing."
Dew makes a noncommittal sound.
Below them, it's immediately apparent that some of it has stuck.
Phantom moves to the pole with actual purpose—hips rolling into it, one leg hooking clean, body arching back in a slow invert that's genuinely, objectively, devastating. Their form is good. Better than good, honestly. There's real heat to it, real control.
Cirrus releases Aurora's ankle with a quiet word and she rolls to dismount, landing soft.
Aurora has forgotten to catch her breath entirely while Cirrus watches with her arms folded, both of them studying Phantom's form with very different expressions.
Rain takes a sip from his water bottle, watching Phantom work. He says something just loud enough to be heard over the music and Phantom adjusts their grip, extends the line of their leg, and the whole thing suddenly becomes twenty percent more lethal.
"Perfect," Rain says.
Phantom positively glows.
"They're getting good," Aether says lightly, from somewhere beside him.
"Mm," Dew says.
Aether nudges him with one elbow. Very gently. Just enough.
Dew's jaw tightens.
"Phantom," Rain calls, "show me the transition."
Phantom cracks their knuckles. Rolls their neck. Backs up to the pole with the energy of someone who has absolutely trained for this moment and is choosing, deliberately, to leave preparation at the door anyway.
They leap—
grip—
and immediately—
thud.
The spin evaporates entirely. Legs flail. Knees connect with the stage floor in a clatter that makes Cirrus actually wince.
Swiss, behind the bar, does not look up. Just exhales through his nose.
Dew watches the whole disaster from the mezzanine railing and feels something loosen in his chest for the first time all day.
He is not the biggest disaster in this building.
It's genuinely, pathetically, comforting.
"You okay, sweetheart?" Rain calls.
Phantom throws two thumbs up from the floor. "Nailed it."
"You know you're supposed to stay on the pole," Rain says, already moving toward them.
"Maybe I like being on my knees," Phantom purrs.
Rain crouches beside them, unimpressed. "Then do it with intention."
He rises slow. Grips the pole one-handed.
And then he just—does it. The exact move. Clean and controlled and sickeningly effortless, body moving like the pole is an extension of something he was born understanding. Up. Around. The hold. Down.
He lands soft.
Doesn't even look winded.
"That's it," Cirrus says, from somewhere below. She doesn't even glance up from adjusting Aurora's form.
"God, I love when Daddy shows off," Phantom sighs dramatically from the floor.
"Don't make it weird, you little nightmare," Rain huffs.
"Don't make it hot!" Phantom shoots back. "With your stupid, perfect form and your skin-tight pants and your devastating core strength."
"And he's not even wearing the ears," Cirrus adds, still not looking up.
"Justice for the ears," Phantom echoes mournfully.
Rain leans into the pole, smug as original sin. "Just imagine if I was."
He glances up, casual and unhurried, like he already knew exactly where to look.
His eyes find Dew at the railing—folio clutched to his chest, tie loosened one fraction of an inch, the expression of a ghoul who has been holding very still for a very long time and is running out of reasons to keep doing it.
Rain's mouth curves.
That same smirk from the hallway. From the alley. The one that says still watching, mystery man?
He holds it for exactly one second.
Then turns back to the pole. Back to Phantom. Back to a room that already belongs to him.
Like Dew is a detail he'll get back to later.
Beside him, Aether says nothing.
Just watches Dew's knuckles blanch.
Dew clears his throat.
"I'll get the paperwork to you within a week," he tells Aether.
He does not run.
He walks.
Quickly.
With purpose.
Folio tight to his chest like a shield, heading for the exit like a ghoul with somewhere extremely important to be that is not here, not this room, not anywhere near that smile.
The door swings shut behind him.
Aether looks back at the stage, where Rain has already turned away, already back to correcting Phantom's grip, already completely unbothered.
He smiles to himself.
Interesting, he thinks. Very interesting indeed.
· · · — 𖥸 · 𓃹 · 𖥸 — · · ·
Dew returns to the Alfa with a devastating lack of grace and a flush high across his cheeks.
He pulls the door closed, a little too hard. Lets the folio hit the floor behind the passenger seat and tosses his phone into the cupholder with a little more force than necessary.
Bell looks him over once before returning his attention to his tablet, the email to acquisitions already prepped and ready.
Dew's jaw is tight, one hand white-knuckled on the wheel as he pulls away from the curb, the other dragging through his hair like that'll somehow erase the feel of Rain's gaze tracking him across the room.
He shouldn't still be spiraling.
He shouldn't be this affected by a fucking look.
The city unfolds in gentle streaks of gold and grey. The light turns red. He stops.
Stares at the middle distance.
Not at smug blue eyes. Not at the little upnod. The glint of knowing. The smirk that said everything without saying a single word.
The light turns green. He doesn't move.
His pulse is still in his throat.
He hits call. Ifrit picks up on the second ring.
“I’m moving forward with the acquisition,” Dew says, flat and absolutely professional. "It's a good opportunity."
He can practically hear Ifrit grinning through the phone.
“Mmhmm. And how much of that decision was influenced by the view?”
Dew does not answer the question.
"See you at seven," he growls, smashing the disconnect button on his steering wheel with the pad of his thumb.
He glances over at Bell, immediately clocking a grin that could power an entire city block.
"Not a fucking word."
Bell says nothing, but his smile stays exactly where it is.
