AKA the outcome I imagined when I first saw a money, cigarettes, power, fame teaser of the slumber party scene. @bloodfin this is both for you and also your fault <3 (and ty for the reference photos for rain's outfit)
tumblr's gonna eat this so their faces minus extra lighting beneath a cut x
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.
Question: how did Dew get so rich? Like what kind of business is he in (outside of tempt ofc) cuz I was really curious.
HELL YEAH LETS GO (I love that y'all are letting me ramble omg 🥹)
𖥸
Dewdrop Delmere did not come from money.
He came from a borrowed couch, a handwritten proposal, and the type of spite that only cultivates in people who have been repeatedly underestimated at close range and decided to take it personally.
He was younger than he should have been when he started working at a small bathhouse on the edge of a ghoul neighborhood that couldn't quite decide if it was up-and-coming or just exhausted. The owner was a human woman named Maren — warm, unhurried, the kind of person who has earned every grey hair and knows it.
The books weren't pretty. The clientele was steady, enough of a trickle to keep the lights on. Mostly human. Mostly unbothered by the presence of ghouls.
But Dew noticed something. He's always noticing something, really. It's his most useful quality and his most annoying one, depending on who you ask.
What he noticed was this: the ghoul community around them was starving for somewhere to go. Not somewhere that tolerated them. Somewhere built for them.
Treatment rooms that ran hot enough for a fire ghoul without someone filing a complaint. Hydrotherapy actually calibrated for water elementals. Proper mud and air quality. Sensory deprivation tanks for the quints. Ceiling clearance that didn't make horns a liability. Space for a tail.
Basic things.
Obvious things, once you saw them.
He wrote up a proposal on his nights off. Three drafts. Tried to make the final one look effortless and slid it across Maren's desk on a Tuesday morning and said, very casually, I think we're missing something.
She read it twice.
Said yes.
Six weeks later there was a waitlist four weeks out. Six months after that the human clientele had doubled, pulled in by a reputation the ghoul community had built entirely by word of mouth, because that's what happens when you give people something they actually need — they tell everyone they've ever met. Within a year, Maren called him into her office, slid a very different kind of paperwork across the desk, and told him she couldn't think of better hands.
He said he couldn't afford it.
She showed him the terms.
He didn't say anything for an embarrassingly long time.
(He still has the original proposal. He will deny this if asked.)
That was Helion — the first one, anyway.
Before it expanded, before it got written up in places that use the word "curated" without irony, before it became the flagship of a portfolio that also includes several mixed-use buildings he started panic-buying when the neighborhood started getting expensive and he got protective about it. He's got an art gallery, several investments that bring in great returns, and, most recently, a strip club acquisition that he swears is strictly good business decision.
He doesn't fully believe he earned any of it. He's pretty sure it was an accident that just kept going and one day someone's going to notice and ask for it back.
He thinks about Maren and that moment every time he does something similar for someone else. The stable rents in the mixed-use buildings. The vacant storefront he handed to Ifrit with a two-week deadline and no real plan; just the instructions to make it less of an eyesore. Now it's a genuine community anchor, a gallery featuring all ghoul artists with a great bar and live music on Thursdays. The benefits package he's already quietly drafting in the margins of his Tempt acquisition notes, because dancers are athletes and athletes need to be taken care of and someone should have thought of this sooner.
What he hasn't figured out yet — what Bell has been trying to tell him for years in the patient language of optimized Fridays and hazard pay and you built this, you earned it — is that noticing the gap has always been the skill. Noticing what people need before they've named it. Finding the way to meet it.
It was the skill when he was scrubbing treatment rooms. It's the skill now.
He just doesn't know how to apply it to himself yet.
