#she may be... uncovering things about herself...

[blueberry-pies-stuff]

Can someone tell me about what the label "Grayromantic"?

Yknow...for a friend

A friend who...

Lives inside my brain....

Just tryna help that lil guy out👀

[sparklystarrrr]

Butterfly Kisses

Synopsis. Kissing Lohen's face after a bad day at work!

Pairing. Lohen x Fem! Reader

Contains. fluff, sfw, Librarian! Reader( it's not important to the storyline, but it is implied ), very soft Lohen, emphasis on his lil mole cus I don't see enough hype about it( it's SO cute ), tiny suggestive comments, one French kiss, this is a drabble lol

a/n. ALL I CAN THINK ABOUT IS LOHEN

Lohen didn't always get to enjoy his days working as a knight. Most days, he was stuck in his office, forced to do paperwork against his will. And when he was doing something interesting- training, for example- the lackies in his company would shiver in fear, tattle on him to Varka for how he's treating them, and then get sent to solitary confinement with Klee for a couple of hours.

After his confinement, he'd go out on a Hilichurl killing spree to blow off some steam. It usually worked out in his favor. Key word: usually.

Today specifically, hunting Hilichurls was no good. It seemed as though knights had already scanned the area around Mondstadt for all of the largely populated Hilichurl camps. This meant that poor Lohen had to spend extra time finding stray Hilichurls. It didn't relax him the slightest bit!

The walk home was worse. He was hungry, exhausted, and wanted nothing more than to be in the arms of his girlfriend.

Lohen imagined (y/n) was probably doing some reading at home right now. She'd been in the middle of an incredibly thick fantasy romance book, and Lohen caught her reading it every time he came home. He didn't really know it had romance in it until he peeked over her shoulder and saw that (y/n) was reading quite a steamy scene... Needless to say, Lohen teased her about it. Things went south (wink wink) from there.

Anyhow, Lohen opened the front door with a scowl and blood splattered all over his face and outfit. (y/n) was in the living room reading when she practically jumped out of her skin as Lohen walked in with stomping footsteps. She shut her book immediately and gasped, "Oh my Archons! I thought you were a robber or something!"

The young man ignored the comment, letting out an exasperated breath. "I didn't get to do anything today," he whined. "Varka reprimanded me for how I was training the knights. Then, I was sent to solitary with Klee for 4 hours, where I only got to scribble on paper with crayons, and, even worse, the other knights swept through Mondstadt and got every. Single. Hilichurl camp that I wanted to go through. Can you believe it?! Because I can't!"

Lohen slumped right into (y/n)'s lap, his face cushioned on her thighs. She set aside her book and attended to the sulking boy. Her fingers threaded through his fluffy hair, trying to ignore the blood on his face that was smearing onto her legs. "Oh, Lo, don't be upset. The day isn't even over yet. We can still make the most of it, right?"

Her words made him groan. Not because he didn't agree with her, but he was just so tired. It may have only been 5 o'clock in the evening, but he could've fallen asleep right then and there. (y/n) seemed to get the hint, so she helped Lohen up to sit beside her on the sofa, pulling him to rest his weary head on her shoulder. However, as much as she cared for her boyfriend's well-being and comfort, (y/n) couldn't ignore the blood all over him. Sure, it was normal for him to come home like that, but it was starting to get everywhere...

Sacrificing the oversized shirt she was currently wearing, she used her sleeves to wipe some of the blood from Lohen's face, to which he nuzzled his face closer to her hand like a puppy. "You get so much blood on yourself every day... I don't know how you do it," (y/n) muttered, mostly to herself.

The young man smiled as (y/n)'s hand wiped his cheek, uncovering the cheeky little mole beneath his eye. "I'm just passionate about my hobbies, Sweetheart."

(y/n) rolled her eyes, "Yeah, yeah. I should introduce you to some alternative hobbies. I think reading would be good for you."

"I do enough reading at work," Lohen grumbled, his lips forming a pout.

The young woman snorted at his words, pressing a peck to his cheek. "You're right. That means no more peeking over my shoulder while I read my books."

His frown plunged on his face, "You're no fun..."

Another kiss was pressed on Lohen's nose. "Oh hush, I know you'll find a way to do it anyway." Her hands rubbed his soft cheeks as she pulled him in for another kiss on the corner of his mouth. Another on his little mole. And one more on his forehead.

"Hey, are you trying to tell me something?" Lohen teased, relishing the attention he was receiving.

"Nope. Just making your day better," (y/n) said plainly before climbing into his lap, straddling his hips, grabbing his chin, and peppering kisses on his cheek.

It was as though he was getting ambushed with love and appreciation. Lohen's cheeks and ears were bright red, and the frown he had previously had was nowhere to be found. His hands gripped (y/n)'s hips as she wrapped her arms around his neck. Lohen was unable to string together a coherent sentence, sputtering out little giggles as (y/n) attacked his face with her lips.

Lastly, (y/n)'s glossy, plump lips landed right on Lohen's in a deep French kiss. Her hands played with the hair against his neck as she pulled him impossibly closer to him. Tiny groans left his mouth, almost turning into little whimpers. When they pulled away, both of their chests heaved against each other, and their faces were bright pink.

"So, do you feel any better?" (y/n) panted.

"So much better, Bun," Lohen sighed contentedly, pressing a kiss on her cheek. "Also, what are your plans for dinner? I'm starving over here..."

His sheepish expression did nothing but make her snort. "I'll figure something out. You, on the other hand, should probably take a shower..." Her eyes dragged over the dried blood on his clothes and face, also insinuating how sweaty he was from work.

"Now you point that out?" He smirked, "Seriously, you're all over me one moment, then repulsed by me the next."

"I'm not repulsed," (y/n) sighed as she stood up and made a beeline to the kitchen. "You're just stinky, and it's invading my senses."

Lohen snorted at his girlfriend's words. While he did want to annoy her just a bit more, he would do whatever she asked of him in a heartbeat. However, whatever happens after he gets out of the shower is a totally different story...

© sparklystarrrr. do not copy, translate, or reupload my works anywhere.

[vivzeph]

Yandere platonic batfamily X neglected reader X Yandere platonic Leon S Kennedy

REPOST! I messed up the poll earlier, so a lot of people couldn’t vote for the option they actually wanted !

The concept : Based on this post, this will include three small concepts of platonic Batfamily × neglected reader × platonic Leon S. Kennedy, each with different plots. I haven’t started writing the final product yet since I’m still going through RE2, but I finished re9 and I need to start re4. But I still wanted to write some scenarios about this trope so here we Keep in mind that these are rough drafts meant to give an overall sense of direction, so some aspects may change or appear a bit ambiguous to avoid spoiling the full plot. You’ll be able to vote for your favorite, but I’ll ultimately write the one I feel most inspired by. Excuse me if my writing isn't on top I'm still a bit sick.. Hope you will still enjoy it ^^.

Scenario 1 :"The One Left Behind "

You’ve barely been in the Manor long enough to call it home.

Everything feels distant, like you’ve been placed into a life that was never really meant for you. And your "family" doesn't feel like one. They don’t ignore you—but they’re always busy, always vanishing into responsibilities far greater than you. And you… you’re not part of that world.

Bruce had decided to sent you away, shielding you from the shadows of his vigilante work. But beyond this, there was another truth: he didn’t know how to connect with you. Unlike with Dick or Jason—you weren’t part of his secret world of masks and missions. You existed outside it, an anomaly he struggled to bridge.

It was supposed to be brief—only till things settle. It was supposed to be safe.

It wasn't.

The visit to Raccoon City was only meant to last a few days. But no one could have anticipated how quickly the outbreak would spiral out of control. Your classmates didn’t stand a chance. The only reason you survived was because you ran—because some instinct within urged you to keep going, no matter what.

That worked until the moment you found yourself surrounded by zombies. Just as it seemed like the end, an officer intervened, pulling you away from the brink of death. He introduced himself as Leon Kennedy.

He had just barely made it out himself, yet somehow he still decided to protect you.

From there, everything blurs into survival. Allies make themselves known amidst chaos and monsters become another fact of life. Somewhere in that grim fight for survival— childhood slips away entirely, replaced by something far less innocent.

When it’s over, official reports are filed,names are listed. But something is wrong—yours is among the dead.

After all there's too many risks. The child of Bruce Wayne cannot simply reappear after an incident like this! They can't take the risk of you speaking too much.

But don't worry, though written off as dead, the U.S government has other plans for you. The instincts you had honed to survive made you invaluable. Their solution was clear: with intensive training, they would sculpt your raw talent into a weapon—a government agent who will be both precise and obedient. To them, erasing your old life was a small price to pay for gaining such a rare asset.

Leon saw through the charade immediately. This wasn’t about protecting you,it was about turning you into something you hadn’t chosen to become. He saw the cost—the theft of what little innocence you still possessed—and he made himself a promise. Though he couldn’t change your circumstances, he refused to leave you to their whims. If they were dragging you into their world of shadows and violence, then he would stand at your side, guiding and protecting you as best he could—he would not fail you.

Seven years later,Barbara Gordon find herself digging through classified data of bio-organic weapons, she uncovers something buried deep inside— restricted government files: evidence of what really happened in Raccoon City—and proof that you never truly disappeared.

Scenario 2 : "The Unchosen Path "

You gave it your all.

Every ounce of effort, every moment of pain—desperately striving to keep up, to measure up, to prove you belonged. To prove you mattered in a family that only seemed to value strength when it was impossible to overlook. No matter how far you pushed yourself, it was never enough. Not when compared to them.

Then comes the mission. A remote village in Spain. A quick task, they say. Routine. Low-risk. Something simple, something you can handle on your own.

Maybe they just wanted you out of Gotham.

They couldn’t have been more wrong.

Valdelobos isn’t just some quiet, unassuming hamlet tucked away from the chaos of the world—it’s a snare, intricately constructed and teeming with danger beyond the scope of your briefing. The truth unfolds piece by horrifying piece: a village overrun with an insidious infection, invisible forces pulling strings in the shadows and secrets that were clearly never meant for you to uncover.

And just as quickly, you start to understand something else.

How alone you’ve really been.

You woke up restrained, disoriented, chained alongside two strangers—one of them far too calm for the situation, the other far too familiar with it.

From there, survival becomes something harsher, something uglier. The deeper you go, the more you understand that this was never a “minor mission,” and the more that realization settles in, the harder it is to ignore everything that came before.

The distance they kept.

The words unsaid.

The way they only saw you when you made yourself impossible to forget.

When you eventually make it back to Gotham something has shifted.

Gone is the need to fit into their molds, to chase the ever-moving target of their expectations. There’s no more reshaping yourself into something easier for them to live with. You decided to let go of the vigilante life that you once clinged to.

And for the first time, that’s when they really saw you.

It’s in this newfound clarity that another familiar face enters your life again—a calming presence in a world that’s been anything but. Somewhere down the line, your path crosses with Leon once more.

Scenario 3 : “You Were Easier to Forget”

You’ve learned not to expect much.

Not attention, not concern, not the kind of care that’s supposed to come with being part of a family. You exist in the spaces between their priorities, easily overlooked, easily forgotten.

But someone else notices.

And that’s where everything goes wrong.

You disappear without anyone realising it at first.It’s only when Barbara finds something strange—camera footage, fragmented records, enough to suggest something went wrong while no one was looking

By then, it’s already too late.

By then, you’re already somewhere else.

On your side, the world becomes a cycle of experiments, observation, and control. You’re studied like a problem that needs solving, something to be understood and contained.

That is until you meet two people who don’t quite fit into that system either: a DSO agent and an FBI analyst. And suddenly, the situation becomes something much more complicated than anyone anticipated.

The real sondage :

What would you want as a fanfic ?

1 . "The One Left Behind "

2. "The Unchosen Path "

3. “You Were Easier to Forget”

Voting ended onApr 21

[rosemaryhoney27]

Mother's Love, Grief, and Fury part 3 end

With Vlad Masters neutralized, contained, and stripped of his reach, Maddeline Fenton finally allowed herself one full night of sleep.

It didn’t last.

Because when she woke, the anger was still there—quieter now, colder, but vast. Vlad had been a blade aimed directly at Danny’s heart.

The Guys in White?

They were a firing squad.

The GIW had shot at her son. At children. At civilians. At anything that registered as “other,” without hesitation or mercy. They didn’t ask questions. They didn’t care about intent, or age, or collateral damage.

And unlike Vlad, they hid behind badges, budgets, and the illusion of righteousness.

Never again.

Maddie didn’t announce her intentions. She didn’t rage. She didn’t threaten. She simply stopped playing by the assumptions they’d relied on for decades.

Because the GIW had built their empire on one fatal belief:

That Maddeline Fenton was reckless, excitable, and easy to dismiss. All of these things were true. She is who she is.

They forgot that she was also brilliant.

And furious.

She started with paper.

Funding trails. Black budgets. Ghost hunts that ended in “classified incidents” and unmarked graves—human and ghost alike. She followed the tech. Recognized her own designs, stolen and weaponized, twisted into mass-produced tools of execution.

That hurt worse than anything Vlad had ever done. Her inventions, despite everything, had a spot in her heart. How could they not, with the amount of time and effort she had put into them?

And it had been stolen and turned more lethal in an effort to END Phantom END her baby. Unacceptable.

So she documented everything.

Then she leaked it.

Not all at once—no, that would have triggered damage control. She released it in waves to the right people. Scientists who asked uncomfortable questions. Journalists who didn’t scare easily. Oversight committees who lived for the chance to uncover corruption.

Every file was clean. Verifiable. Impossible to bury.

And while the GIW scrambled publicly, Maddie worked privately.

She contacted ghosts who had survived. Families who had lost someone to a “misfire” or a “containment breach.” She helped them organize, speak, be heard. For the first time, the GIW couldn’t just erase their mistakes.

Too many witnesses.

Too much proof.

Jack worried, of course. Jazz understood. Danny—Danny watched her with a complicated mix of fear and awe.

“Mom,” he asked one night, voice careful, “are you going to get hurt?”

Maddie knelt in front of him and took his hands—really took them, running her fingers over the litchenburg scars that covered his left hand. grounding herself in the little warmth that remained dispite his cold touch, the tiny little flutter of his too slow hearbeat aganist her finger tips, the reality of him.

“I’m doing this so you won’t be,” she said honestly. Danny Blushed and she noticed how his freckles glowed green.

The end didn’t come with explosions. Even though she really wanted to.

It came with hearings.

Arrests.

Facilities shut down under federal order. Tech seized. Leaders removed in handcuffs, their justifications falling apart under scrutiny. The GIW didn’t vanish overnight—but they fractured, hollowed out, rendered powerless.

Their weapons went dark.

Their authority evaporated.

And the world learned what they really were.

When it was over, Maddie stood in her lab, surrounded by dismantled schematics and new designs—tools meant to protect, not destroy.

She knew this didn’t make her a hero.

It didn’t undo the past.

But when Danny flew a little lower these days—less afraid of being shot out of the sky—she felt something ease in her chest.

Maddeline Fenton had spent years hunting ghosts.

Now?

She hunted monsters.

And she made damn sure they never pointed a gun at her baby again. May the gods help them if they do, because she will show no Mercy.

Part 2

[kaliforeigna]

Burning hot face (Stiles Stilinski x Vampire!Fem!Reader)

WordCount: 1.5k

Synopsis: You stay in Beacon Hills with your Holistic aunt in a large dark house only for you two. You've been going to Beacon Hills High School since the 9th grade, and have a grown a liking to the buzzboy Stiles Stilinski. Yet you're unknown to the student body, however more is uncovered as you are a natural born vampire, dealing with your new curse of a transformation.

Exclaimers!!: Mentions of blood, body horror, transformations

Notes: This is the first fic im actually dropping im so exciteddd!! I'm a little tired so i lowkey had to run this thru word and rush to fix a few things but not fully edited lol. Most of these kind of fics are just imagines and daydreams i needed to write out to properly think of the scenarios and i hope in continuing writing fics starting from this one would have a concise plot. And lastly it's more or so hinted that the reader is black but i hope anyone can see themselves in the place of you!! HOPE you enjoy!!

It's burning. Horribly. You feel the heat of flames surrounding your body, as you shift around. There's an unbearable weight on your chest and your body is on fire. Heavy breaths leave you the more you toss and turn, until you hear the door to your room open; your eyes shot open.

Leering your head over towards your door, your aunt stands in the doorway. With furrowed brows, she looks at you with worry. "Honey, why haven't you gotten up for school yet? I thought you'd be ready by now."

Her light blue fuzzy slippers shift across the floor towards you, to get a better look. The wood creaks in the old dark house. Now that she's near you, her brows have dropped and she stares. She realizes it may be time.

The time in every teenage vampire's life, where it might as well be second puberty. Sweat drops down from your face, while you shift uncomfortably in bed.

"You need some tea… Some that will flush out the heat from your body." Your aunt had spoken out loud, but it seems like it wasn't directly to you. More as if she was thinking to herself, your head shifts from looking up at the ceiling to confusion to look at her. Before you could ask how that could possibly work, her slippers slide down the low amber burning halls.

The house was dimly lit; bits of sunlight spilled through your window past the curtains as it signaled it was a new day.

The same sunlight beams bright and widely almost blinding Scott in his eyes, as he tries to focus on his writing. He turns to Stiles, getting ready to complain but sees his eyes wandering outside.

Scott burns a hole in the back of Stiles' head, and he almost feels it causing him to turn and look at his best friend. Mr. Harris sits in front of the classroom giving a lecture about how 'there will be groups given out for a new science project.'

While he starts to call the groups of 3, the two boys hear Scott's name in another group and they both wince. When Mr. Harris gets to Stiles, he explains that due to the uneven number of students in the class he'd be paired up with one partner.

You.

He heard your name but searched for you around the classroom. He's never really put name to face but since nobody had came over, he assumed you weren't there. Mr. Harris saw the same thing, so he tasks Stiles with going to check for you at your house before he starts 'handing out F's.'

The bell rings leading Scott and Stiles to go into the sea of chatter that is the halls of Beacon Hills.

Scott is a footstep ahead of Stiles as he tries to catch up, almost tripping on his own shoelaces. "Hey, have you ever heard of this…" He imminently forgot your name, so did Scott seemingly so.

Scott looks over to Stiles, "No, not really. But maybe Allison knows?" Stiles' brows furrowed further as they enter the two doors to the cafeteria, stomachs ready for cardboard like chicken nuggets and soggy fries.

They sit with Allison, Lydia, and Danny. Stiles starts to complain about his day so far and gets to what happened in science class. Danny perks up and finishes chewing his food to explain to him who you are, "She's the girl that sits on the far left of the room."

The whole table stares at him, and he blinks before he sighs and says your name. A crowd of 'Ohhh's' were heard before everyone resumed the conversation. Stiles still didn't have a chance to properly remember you himself. As Allison mentions seeing you live by Isaac Lahey, he has to go retrieve you so the two of you can start the project.

As the sun nearly sets, you wake up once more during the day. You've woken up several times, either to drink tea, get a cold rag on your forehead, or just cause of the sound of birds chirping outside your window.

But this time, it was because of a knock. You thought it was just the monkey that was in your dream, hitting a drum, but it was followed by a few more knocks until you realized someone was downstairs.

As expected, your aunt answers the door, but you recognize a familiar voice. It was Stiles, the boy you have known since last year. His buzzed hair is becoming slightly longer; he’s possibly letting it grow from now on. He’s come along with his childhood best friend.

You heard a drowned-out version of his question due to him being too far. Soon it was followed by familiar shuffling and your aunt appears, "Honey, a friend from school is here. You never told me you had anyone coming over." You start to question her words, saying "I didn't know anyone coming over myself."

With a short-winded giggle, you start to feel a little embarrassed. "I'm coming!" Your aunt turned from you to walk down to the boys, thinking about how she would possibly explain your current situation.

Now coming downstairs, your aunt once again greets the two boys sitting on the couch. "Would you boys like any tea? I've made some earlier?" They looked at each other then nodded at the gesture.

She sets the black, printed kettle onto the stove to heat the liquid once again. She walks back to the two to strike up conversation— "She's never told me about her friends from school, my niece. She, however, described a boy with a buzzcut. Seeing none of you have one, from the names she’s mentioned one of you must be Stiles I'm guessing?"

Both boys raise their brows surprised at the lucky assumption. "Oh, that's me," Stiles given a small smile. "…What did she mention about me exactly?"

Your aunt smiles back, almost snickering: "Well she seems to have something of a… Crush on you in particular," Stiles then ends up frowning immediately, "Is this some kind of joke? Because if so, it's not a particularly funny one."

Your aunt bites back a blink, "Oh, honey of course not she tells me–" Her dialogue was cut short due to a large shriek that shook the bones of the old home. It was you, yelling any sound you could to alert about the pain occurring.

Scott finally speaks up, "Is she okay? Why hasn't she come down yet?" Your aunt's calm façade fades a bit when she realizes how detrimental your condition is becoming; she scurry's back up the stairs while shouting incoherently about how you just have a 'fever' but clearly Scott and Stiles knew better than that.

Your aunt bursts through the door; you lie on the floor clutching your chest. "I'm hurting–!" Your teeth started to grit as a searing pain bubbles between your nose and chin. Your aunt's face is now fully terrified at what she looks down at. "Your teeth, they're coming in."

Scott moves from his seat to get a better listen on what's happening upstairs, to seek any danger.

Stiles quickly tapped on him to get a reply to his question about 'Who's dying upstairs?'

"I… Heard something about wings coming." Stiles face scrunches in confusion, "Food?? Now is not the time to be talking about food." Scott falls silent for a few more seconds, "No, not food. I think it's shapeshifting kind of wings."

His sentence sounded more like a question, but it encouraged the two to slowly travel up the creaky stairs of the house. They've walked halfway, before Scott stopped.

He tells Stiles to go up all the way because he's 'lighter on his feet.' Stiles continues as he reaches the amber covered hallway; it smells of incense.

He gets on his knees to move more efficiently without being detected, shifting past a small black table with a photo of a familiar face he almost recognized.

He finds himself in front of a room, the door left ajar. Stiles leers his head to the small open gap in the door and takes in the sight before him.

His eyes bulge out of his head as he finally sees the face; he's been looking for this afternoon. However, included in the picture before him, besides you, were the bloodied teeth pulled from your gums as your mouth hangs open in pain. Your right hand shakes as you lift it to your mouth to get a good feel for this new change. Almost pricking yourself you feel two sharp canines stacked against each other on each side of your mouth. Not only that, but it seems that the round ears you're familiar with have became more pointed than normal.

Only a silent shriek leaves you as your body aches in pain. Stiles scrambles on his feet, and rushes down the hall and down the stairs to Scott. "WE NEED TO LEAVE. NOW."

Stiles bursts out the door with his bookbag barely slanging on his shoulder as he frantically starts his Jeep. Scott takes one last look at the top of the stairs, before following behind and getting in the passenger seat.

You and your aunt jolt at the sound of the front door slamming shut, and you look at each other knowing something must be done about your new coming of age.

last notes: asks open ofc

[walshespasses]

My Cousins Captain

Part 3 -> Part 2 -> Part 1

18+ 2.6k Words

“Your wife…?” Alexia looks at you with utter confusion while feeling like her body got slung into another universe

“Yes. Morgan is my wife.”

Jana chimes in “you’ve been married for what, almost 10 years now”

Clinching your jaw “Yes Jana. That’s correct”

Alexia stands up, almost throwing her chair back and Jana and K swing their heads around to look at her

“I am sorry but I have a flight tomorrow and need to pack. Jana this dinner was lovely. K.. it was nice to meet you. Again” and just like that, Alexia grabs her coat and walks out to the front door.

“Did I miss something? She just acted so weird out of nowhere. I could’ve sworn she said her flight was in two days not tomorrow”

“Jana maybe she is just stressed about football, Barca is are in the champions league final right? That must take all her focus”

“Yeah okay you are right. It was just strange. Her whole mood changed”

Meanwhile back at the hotel Alexia is staying at, she got to her room and immediately booked a ticket for the very next flight back to Barcelona. Not wanting to be here any longer than she needed to be. She felt incredibly stupid and like she let herself down. She became so captivated in your words and your body and how she felt. Hearing that you not only have a wife but a wife of almost a decade?? She can’t believe herself. She is not one to be a mistress or the other woman. She won’t be.

“Com puc ser tan estúpid? Què he fet per arribar a aquesta situació? una esposa? què pensarà la Jana si ho descobreix? no em tornarà a parlar mai més”

Alexia gets all her belongings packed up, heads to the car she rented and heads to the airport. Once she’s in her seat and the plane takes off she lets out a tiny sigh of almost relief. Still reeling by what she has just uncovered. She feels betrayed but can’t really think of it as a betrayal due to the fact that you’ve only met K twice. Neither time was a wife mentioned or even a ring on your finger telling her you are taken. This is the last thing she needs to have on her mind right now anyway. She has the final of champions league coming up. A team to captain. To get revenge on their loss last year. Her whole focus needs to be on that and that only.

3 Weeks Later...

Barcelona Femeni are the champions once again!! They have done it! Taking down the big guns of Lyon!

everyone in the stadium are going nuts over the end of the game. Everyone running to their families and loved ones. Irene running to her wife and kids, Cata and Pina embracing each other at mid field. Patri and Kika laying in the confetti doing angels. Mapi walking over to console Ingrid, making sure she is okay before coming back to celebrate with her team. Alexia running over to Eli and Alba, throwing herself into Elis arms and just crumbling into tears, happy tears, exhaustion taking over.

After the trophy ceremony and everyone is in the locker room getting dressed, Cata says that the bar downtown has been bought out just for them. Everyone is invited, family and friends. So they all make the 20 minute drive to go properly celebrate the end of the season.

"Alexia!"

she turns around to see Jana running up to her and giving her a huge hug.

"Jana! I had no idea you were here"

"Of course i am here, i wouldn't miss this for the world"

20 minutes later they are both sat in a booth talking with other people at the table, Jana leans over and says "Kinsey asks about you" Alexia goes still, not sure why she would be asking about her. "I am not sure what happened between you two, I am not stupid either though, A moment happened and she feels sorry about it"

Alexia looks at her "We had a tiny moment and it was broken the second it was stated that she has a whole wife waiting for her at home"

"She has a wife yes but not a marriage"

Alexia looks at her, one eyebrow moving up, confused by that sentiment "There is an art gallery opening next weekend, she will be there. You don't need a ticket or anything to get inside, she wanted me to tell you so she could tell you everything herself"

Alexia shoves that into the back of her mind after downing a couple more vodka shots. Why would Kinsey want to talk to her? What does Jana mean by 'a wife but not a marriage'. She doesnt even know if she should show up to this gallery. What she does know is that after these weeks away, she cant get the thought of Kinsey out of her mind.

One week later...

Kinsey and Morgan are getting dressed in their hotel room. Morgan wearing a beautiful long black gown, Kinsey dressed in long dressed with tiny white dots all over it, hair slicked back into a ponytail. Morgan walks up to her "remember what your duty is tonight, the loving doting wife" Kinsey turns her head to look at her "is your girlfriend going to be there? wouldn't want to scare her away would i?"

Morgan scuffs, "don't be a fool, we are only in this so called marriage because your last name gets me places, once we hit 10 years of this, we both get to be out and I get my payment"

With that being said you both head downstairs to the car waiting for you. You pull up to the gallery and get out of the car, right before you walk in, you reach for Morgans hand and walk in side by side, hands finger linked. Once inside Morgan says "I am going to find something to drink and find the Art director, go mingle or something". You thank your lucky stars and start to follow along with other guests looking at all the pieces of art around the building.

Outside, Alexia is sitting in a limo with Mapi, Patri, Caro, and Marta. They all get out and Patri says "woah, this gallery looks amazing. All the others should be here in 10 minutes". Alexia smooths her white coat and takes a deep breath before walking towards the entrance. She doesn't fully know what she will do or say if she sees you, but deep down she hopes she does run into you. She wants to hear what you have to say.

She is stood there looking at this one painting. Its a simple painting. Three colors one a mid size canvas, nothing else, nothing more.

"Pretty boring if you ask me"

The hairs on her neck stand straight up, she knows your voice. She has been itching to hear it but trying to shove it down into her soul. You walk up and stand next to her, not close enough to be touching but close enough to where she can smell the perfume you're wearing. She doesn't look at you but you say "I am glad you have come tonight, I have been meaning to reach out but didn't think you would want to hear what I have to say". You were right, she didn't want to hear from you at first, but after Jana mentioned you at the bar she couldn't think of anything else. She turns to look at you, she is almost taken back by how gorgeous you look. Not like how she has seen you before, here you are perfectly put together, dressed to perfection. "Jana mentioned something that I need clarification on, she called Morgan your wife, but you're not in a marriage, i do not understand" you look at her and motion to the balcony, she follows you out there and you both stand by the railing, looking out at the night lights of a lit up Barcelona.

"Morgan is my wife yes, but we have something far from a marriage. I met her in college, my last year and her in a sophomore year, we immediately hit off and started dating, I was falling in love with her, she on the other hand found out who my parents are and only wanted me for that". Alexia looks at you to continue, you pull out a cigarette, light it and take a big inhale and let it out. "My parents are two of the biggest art directors in America. That is why I went to college there and not here, free tuition because of the money they donated to the university. She found that out and latched onto me like a leech. When i found out i was furious, tried to break it off but she was about to be deported and somehow snaked her way into making my parents love her and the three of them came up with the idea for us to get married to save her from getting sent back to Argentina. My dad came up with the idea that if we could last 10 years, Morgan would be granted citizenship and both of us would get a lump sum of money to split, so i agreed". Kinsey turns to fully look at Alexia and says "So yes, Morgan is my wife, has been since i was 23, 9 years and 10 months of being her wife, but nowhere near having a marriage that i would like, we both have continued to see other people the entire time, the second someone hears that i technically have a wife they run and i wouldn't run after them, but you are different. The two times we have been with each other i feel different, so when Jana mentioned her it scared me. I knew that if the whole team was invited tonight you would come and i would get my chance to tell you the whole story"

Alexia is surprised to hear everything that you have just said. How does she react? What would she say? She just stands there, looking out at the night and doesn't move. Kinsey takes that as her answer and starts to leave but Alexia reaches out and grabs your hand. You look at her and she says "I haven't stopped thinking about you either"

You take her hand in yours and tell her to follow you. You both walk through the crown of people and find a bathroom is the back where only the gallery personel and artists can be. You walk in and lock the door. You turn to Alexia, put your hands on her face, thumbs stroking her cheek bones, and bring you faces together and kiss. She immediately moves her arms around your shoulders and you pick her up and sit her on the sink counter and move to stand between her legs. Both of you are fighting for dominance with your tongues until Alexia gives up and succumbs to you. You grab the back of her hair and yank a little so her neck is available for you to latch your mouth onto her pulse point, Alexia moans at the feeling and says "God how i have missed your mouth". You grin and say "you have no idea". You can tell she starts to move her hips a little so you bunch up her dress just enough and move your hand to meet the fabric of her thong, You move the thong out of the way and start to move a finger along her slit and around her entrance. Alexia tells you to not tease her so you pull back to look at her as you shove your finger into her pussy and she moans loudly before you put your other hand over her mouth "don't be so loud, people out there could hear us". She grabs a hand towel and starts to bite it while you're fingering her and your thumb flicking over her clit, You can feel her orgasm coming so you pull your hand away and sink down and latch your mouth back onto her clit. Alexia throws her head back against the mirror, grab the back of your head and starts to move her hips to get the last bit of friction she needs.

"Oh my god keep going. Fuck I am going to cum. Please let me cum."

You move your hands to the back of her thighs and push her legs to meet her chest and you stand up while still keeping your mouth of her pussy. You yourself are wet enough, you can tell. Hearing Alexia moan keeps pushing you towards your own orgasm without even being touched, although you crave some sort of friction too. You quickly shove your dress over your head, leaving you in a thong and bra, shove the thong down and stand up on the stool in the bathroom and move your cunt level with Alexias. She can tell what you want and nods at you before you start rutting yourself against Alexia. Her head fills with ecstasy and your mind even flutters with the feeling of her clit touching yours. Your breathing starts to get fast and heavy.

"Fuck Alexia! Damn this feels amazing. hearing you was turning me on and making me wet. I had to do something. Are you close? I'm close. Fucking you like this is perfect. Oh my god. Ah! Ah! Ah! Cum with me"

'Fuck yes. I want to cum with you. Please let me come with you. Holy hell yes keep going. I'm cumming right now! Uuhhhhhh!"

You rut a couple more times before you feel Alexias whole body shake and that sends you over the edge. You make an O with your mouth as you cum and Alexia still shaking and quivering grabs your neck and latches onto your neck which sends you into an even greater orgasm and you cum hard with Alexias name on your breath.

You both calm down, you help the other clean off the smell of sex off each other and get your dress back on and fix everything as if you didn't just fuck each other in the bathroom. Before you open the door to leave, Alexia grabs you and kisses you once again. ''I would like to continue this soon, preferably at my house, in my bed, making me scream so loud i lose my voice and forget my name". You blink at her and say "Message me your address and time and I will be there"

Part 4

[cherielux]

The Hidden Variable

Y/N spent her entire life trying to escape her father's shadow. A prodigy civil engineer, she wanted nothing to do with his work—until his involvement in illegal bioweapon experiments was exposed after his death.

Accused of crimes she never committed and imprisoned as a high-risk threat, Y/N escapes custody to find her missing brother and uncover the truth. Now one of the country's most wanted fugitives, she is being hunted by Leon S. Kennedy, the agent assigned to bring her in.

As dangerous secrets surrounding her family begin to surface, the line between hunter and fugitive starts to blur. With trust becoming increasingly difficult—and increasingly impossible to ignore—Y/N and Leon may discover that the truth isn't the only thing drawing them together.

Leon S. Kennedy x Reader

Chapter 1: Controlled Variables 9.5k words

Next Chapter / Masterlist / ao3

The thing about high-security prisons was that they were designed by people who understood architecture only in terms of containment. Walls thick enough to absorb sound. Corridors narrow enough to prevent momentum. Sight lines calculated to eliminate shadow. Lighting positioned not to illuminate but to expose — cold fluorescent strips bolted into reinforced ceilings, angled so that every corner of every cell was visible from the observation window in the door. Every choice, every measurement, every material selected in service of a single objective.

Keep things in.

What the designers rarely accounted for was someone who understood exactly how those choices had been made. Who had made similar choices herself, in another life, for different reasons — and who knew, better than most, that every structural decision was also a structural limitation. That the things built to hold weight were also the things most likely, under the right conditions, to fail.

You understood all of it. You had spent the better part of your adult life studying load-bearing structures, stress fractures, the elegant and unforgiving mathematics of how things held together — and, more importantly, how they didn't. Most people who ended up with a civil engineering degree did so after four years of standard progression, the ordinary accumulation of credits and exams and late nights in the library. You had done it in two and a half, finishing at twenty, because the material had not moved at the pace you needed it to and because sitting still in a classroom while a lecturer explained things you had already understood three weeks prior was a specific kind of torment that you had never fully learned to tolerate gracefully. Your professors had called you exceptional. Your father had called you useful. You had called yourself neither, because you had learned early that people who announced their own intelligence were usually less interested in the thing itself than in the recognition it brought, and recognition had never been what you were after.

What you were after, in those years, was distance. From him. From the work he was doing in laboratories you had never been allowed inside but had understood, in the peripheral, unsettling way of someone who paid attention, was something that should not exist.

The degree had given you the distance. The firm had given you further distance still — real work, government contracts, the clean specific satisfaction of designing things that stood up and held and did what they were supposed to do. For three years it had almost been enough.

Almost.

Sitting on the edge of your cot in Cell Block D of the Hargrove Federal Detention Facility, back straight, feet flat on the cold concrete floor, you were doing what you always did in quiet moments.

Taking inventory.

The cell was eight feet by ten. You had measured it on your first day using your own foot as a reference — size seven, approximately twenty-six centimetres — and confirmed the dimensions against the faint seam lines where the concrete panels met. The walls were poured-in-place reinforced concrete, painted over in that particular shade of institutional off-white that existed nowhere in nature, slightly yellowed now with age and the particular staleness of recycled air. The paint was chipping near the baseboard on the eastern wall, exposing the grey beneath like bone under skin. The floor was the same concrete, sealed but worn smooth by decades of foot traffic, cold even through the thin soles of the facility-issued shoes, which fit badly and gave you blisters on your left heel that you had long since stopped noticing.

The cot was bolted to the wall. Steel frame, thin mattress, a single pillow with the density and comfort of a folded newspaper. The blanket was polyester and carried the faint institutional smell of industrial detergent that never quite washed out no matter how many times it had been through the facility laundry. There was a steel toilet and sink unit in the corner, combined into a single fixture, the kind designed for maximum utility and minimum dignity. A shelf, also steel, bolted above the sink. On it: a toothbrush, government-issue toothpaste, a small bar of soap worn down to a sliver, and the three books you had been permitted — a structural engineering reference text you'd had sent from the outside, a dog-eared paperback thriller someone had left in the common room, and a bible you didn't read but kept because the paper was thin and the act of turning pages gave your hands something to do when your mind needed to move faster than the room allowed.

The crack above your bunk was new. Well — not new. You'd first noticed it on day six, a hairline fracture running diagonally from the upper-left corner of the ceiling toward the centre seam, so fine you'd almost missed it in the fluorescent glare. But it was three millimetres wider than it had been last Tuesday. You knew because you'd marked it — not visibly, nothing that would draw attention — but in the way you'd positioned your reference point, a small water stain two inches to the left that served as your baseline. The settling was ongoing. Not historical. Active.

The facility had been built in 1987, retrofitted in 2003, and the eastern wing — your wing — sat on a foundation that had been showing signs of differential settlement for what you estimated was at least a decade prior to your arrival. You could see it in the way the floor sloped almost imperceptibly toward the far wall, a gradient so slight that no one without your particular eye for it would notice — but you felt it in the soles of your feet every morning when you stood up. You saw it in the way the door to your cell didn't hang quite flush in its frame, a gap of roughly two millimetres along the upper-right hinge that the guards attributed, when they noticed it at all, to humidity and age and the general entropy of old buildings.

They weren't wrong. But they were only partly right, which in structural terms was its own kind of wrong. Humidity and age were symptoms. The cause was in the soil composition beneath the foundation, in the drainage patterns of the land the facility sat on, in over two decades of incremental load shift that the original engineers had either failed to anticipate or had anticipated and deprioritised in favour of budget. You had opinions about that. Strong ones. You kept them to yourself.

You lay back on the cot and folded your hands over your stomach, staring up at the ceiling crack with the focused, unhurried attention of someone with nothing but time and a great deal to think about. The fluorescent light above your cell hummed at a frequency you had long since catalogued — a slightly flat F, if you were being precise, the particular pitch of an aging ballast in need of replacement. It flickered occasionally, a brief stutter every forty minutes or so, regular enough that you'd started using it as a secondary timer.

Outside in the corridor, Officer Reyes was beginning his 9 PM round.

You could set a clock by him. Had been, mentally, for the past eleven weeks and four days. Forty-three seconds from the security checkpoint at the block entrance to your cell. You counted now without thinking about it, the numbers running beneath your other thoughts like a program running in the background — thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty — and then the familiar sound of his footsteps slowing outside your door. Heavier on the left foot than the right. Old knee injury, you suspected, right side, the kind that didn't heal cleanly. He walked with a barely perceptible lean that most people wouldn't notice.

You noticed everything.

The small rectangle of reinforced glass in your door darkened briefly as he looked through it. Four seconds — almost exactly. Long enough to confirm you were present and horizontal and not attempting anything that would require paperwork. Then the lean of his weight shifted, the floorboards in the corridor gave their characteristic groan under his boots — that groan was a settlement issue too, the subflooring in the corridor had a different deflection rate than the cells, something the retrofit had never properly addressed — and he continued down the block toward the next cell.

You listened to his footsteps fade and counted the seconds until they disappeared entirely.

Forty-one seconds to the end of the block.

Then the distant beep of his keycard at the far checkpoint, confirming his position to the control room.

Then silence, relative and institutional, broken only by the hum of the lights and the distant sound of someone three cells down shifting in their sleep.

You stared at the crack in the ceiling and let yourself think.

***

You had been at Hargrove for eleven weeks and four days when they told you about Daniel.

Or rather, when they told you what they didn't know about Daniel — which was, in its own way, the most significant thing anyone had said to you since your arrest.

It was Agent Calloway who delivered the news. She was a woman in her mid-forties with the specific kind of tiredness that came not from lack of sleep but from years of accumulating things she couldn't un-see — it lived in the set of her jaw, in the way her eyes moved with a slight delay when she entered a room, like she was always running a beat behind her own alertness. She was not unkind. That was the thing about Calloway that you had catalogued carefully over eleven weeks of interrogation sessions, because kindness in your current situation was both a data point and a potential leverage point, and you had learned a long time ago not to mistake one for the other.

She sat across the metal table from you in Interrogation Room 2 — the one with the water stain on the ceiling that looked vaguely like the state of Michigan, the one with the air vent that rattled when the system cycled on, which happened every twenty-two minutes — with a manila folder resting closed in front of her, and she told you, in the measured cadence of someone who had rehearsed the delivery, that the status of most individuals connected to the Voss case had been confirmed.

"Confirmed," you repeated. Your voice came out even. It always came out even, these days. Eleven weeks of practice.

"Deceased," she said. "In most cases."

The fluorescent light in Interrogation Room 2 was marginally brighter than the one in your cell, angled from above and slightly forward, designed to make the subject feel exposed and the interviewer feel in control. You were aware of all of this. You sat with your hands flat on the table, fingers relaxed, and kept your face very still and let the silence sit between you like a third person in the room.

"Most cases," you said, after a moment.

Calloway looked at you. In her eyes there was something that occupied the space between sympathy and professional assessment — a look that acknowledged you were a person while also reminding itself, visibly, that you were a person who was also a problem. "Your brother's whereabouts are currently unknown."

Unknown.

You turned the word over slowly, the way you turned structural problems over, examining each face of it before committing to an interpretation. Not deceased. Not confirmed. Unknown. Which meant one of three things: Daniel was dead somewhere they hadn't found him yet, which given the nature of your father's operations was not implausible. Or Daniel had disappeared deliberately, which given what you knew of your brother's temperament and his complicated relationship with your father's work was considerably more plausible than Calloway probably realised. Or someone was keeping Daniel's location from the investigation for reasons that had nothing to do with ignorance.

You didn't let yourself settle on which one you believed. Not here. Not in this room, under these lights, across from a woman who was very good at reading faces.

"And my father?" you asked. The question was largely formality.

"Confirmed deceased." She paused — the small, deliberate kind, the kind people used when they wanted to signal that what came next mattered. "The lab fire—"

"I know what it was." The edge came into your voice before you could fully prevent it. You filed that away — a small failure of control, noted, to be managed better going forward. You smoothed your tone back out. "I've read the reports you've shown me."

"You've read the redacted versions."

"I've read what was between the redactions too." You met her gaze steadily across the table. "There's quite a lot of information in what people choose to remove. The shape of a gap tells you almost as much as the content would."

Calloway studied you for a moment with an expression that was difficult to read precisely — not surprise, exactly, more like the adjustment a person made when they confirmed something they'd already suspected. She clicked her pen once. Didn't open the folder.

"Miss Voss," she said, and the way she said it — careful, measured, with a particular weight on the title — told you that what came next was also something she'd rehearsed. "I want you to understand the position you're in."

"I'm in a federal detention facility," you said. "On charges that have not yet resulted in formal indictment, which suggests that the evidentiary basis is thinner than whoever authorised my arrest initially believed. I've been here for eleven weeks, which is a long time to hold someone without charge, which further suggests either that the case against me is being built in real time — which would imply it didn't fully exist at the point of arrest — or that someone in the chain of command believes my presence here serves a purpose beyond prosecution." You tilted your head slightly. "I understand my position quite well, Agent Calloway. What I'm less clear on is yours."

The silence that followed was longer than the ones before it.

Calloway looked at you. And then, very slightly, she did something you hadn't seen her do in eleven weeks of interrogation sessions.

She almost smiled.

"You're right," she said. "About the evidence." She finally opened the folder — not to show you anything, just resting her hands on the pages. "You were arrested on association. Proximity to the research. Knowledge of your father's operations."

"Knowledge I had because I spent years trying to build a case against him through legitimate channels," you said. "Which is documented."

"Also documented," she said evenly, "is the fact that you were at the secondary facility in West Virginia fourteen months ago."

"I was there to confront my father." Your hands stayed flat and still on the table. "Not to participate."

"We only have your account of that."

"You have my account, my father's financial records showing I refused every transfer he ever attempted to make to me, my employment history at a structural engineering firm with government contracts that required full background clearance, and the documented testimony of three former associates of my father's who confirmed I had no operational role." You paused. "You have all of that, Agent Calloway. You've had it since week two. Which brings me back to my earlier point about what my continued presence here is actually in service of."

Calloway closed the folder. She was quiet for a moment. Outside the room, somewhere down the facility corridor, a door closed with the heavy magnetic thud of electronic locking.

"There are people," she said finally, slowly, "who believe your brother may still be in contact with individuals connected to the remaining aspects of your father's research programme." She looked at you directly. "And that you may be a point of contact."

There it was.

You had suspected it for weeks — the real architecture of why you were here. Not evidence of what you'd done. Insurance against what Daniel might do. You were a variable they were keeping controlled while they tried to account for the one they'd lost.

"Daniel believed my father was trying to help people," you said, and you kept your voice very careful and very neutral because this part — this part required the most precise management of all, because this was the part where what you felt and what you showed had to be entirely separate things. "He was twenty-six when he started working with him. He studied biology because he genuinely wanted to understand living systems, how they worked, how they failed, how they could be repaired. He was brilliant and he was idealistic and my father was very good at finding those two things in people and bending them toward his own purposes." You looked at the closed folder between Calloway's hands. "I haven't spoken to my brother in fourteen months. I don't know where he is. And I would very much like to find out."

Calloway watched you for a long moment.

"There's one more thing," she said. "Given the nature of the case — the bioweapon classification, the international implications — a specialist has been assigned to oversee aspects of the investigation going forward." She paused. "You may have heard of him. Leon Kennedy."

The name landed in the room with a particular kind of weight.

You had heard of him. Everyone had heard of him, in the way that certain names became shorthand for things that were almost too large to fit into ordinary conversation. Raccoon City, 1998 — his second day on the job as a police officer, a city reduced to catastrophe overnight, the kind of event that ended careers before they started and apparently, in Kennedy's case, had instead launched one into a trajectory that had taken him through a decade of government work that the public record was deliberately vague about. The President's daughter, a few years back, recovered from circumstances that the official briefings described with the careful understatement of people who had decided the full account was not for general consumption.

A man who had been walking into unsurvivable situations since he was twenty-one and walking back out of them with the specific, seasoned resilience of someone who had long since made his peace with the odds. Thirty-four now, by your rough calculation. Thirteen years of that behind him.

You wondered, briefly and without expression, what thirteen years of that did to a person.

"I've heard of him," you said.

"He'll want to speak with you." Calloway stood, smoothing her jacket with the precise efficiency of someone ending a meeting on their own terms. "I'd encourage you to cooperate."

"I always cooperate," you said pleasantly. "I simply do it on my own terms."

Calloway looked at you for one more moment. Then she picked up her folder and left, and the door sealed behind her with the magnetic certainty of something that believed it was permanent.

You sat alone in Interrogation Room 2 and looked at the water stain on the ceiling that looked like Michigan and thought about Leon Kennedy and variables and the crack above your bunk that was three millimetres wider than it had been last Tuesday.

Then you stood up, smoothed your facility clothes, and waited for the guard to take you back to your cell.

You had planning to do.

***

Block D's common room existed in the two-hour window between the end of dinner service and evening lockdown, and it was, in your assessment, the most strategically interesting space in the facility.

Not because of what it contained — bolted-down tables, a mounted television behind scratched plastic, a shelf of donated paperbacks with broken spines, two vending machines that accepted only the facility's internal currency system — but because of what it required. The common room was the one space in Hargrove where the geometry of containment briefly relaxed. Where the enforced isolation of individual cells gave way to something that approximated, however distantly, the ordinary friction of human proximity.

You used it carefully.

You had identified, in your first week, the dominant social architecture of Block D. Every contained population organised itself — it was a function of human nature operating under pressure, the same force that made water find the path of least resistance. There were three primary clusters, loosely affiliated along lines of history and temperament. You didn't belong to any of them, which was a choice you had made deliberately and maintained with patience, because belonging to a group in here meant obligations, and obligations meant variables you couldn't fully control.

What you were was adjacent. Observant. Occasionally useful to people in small ways that cost you nothing — a word of advice, a small courtesy, the precise deployment of appearing not to notice things that people preferred not to be noticed. You had cultivated a reputation as someone who kept to herself, which was accurate, and as someone who was not worth the trouble of bothering, which required more active maintenance.

Mara Vega had provided the opportunity to establish that reputation definitively, in week three.

Mara was serving eight years for financial fraud of a scale that had genuinely impressed you when you'd pieced together the details from corridor conversation — a multi-jurisdictional scheme of real architectural elegance, the kind that required both intelligence and a total comfort with risk. Under different circumstances you might have found her interesting. Under these circumstances, she had decided, in the way that dominant personalities in contained environments sometimes decided, that testing the boundaries of the quiet new arrival was a worthwhile exercise.

The common room. Tuesday evening. Mara had come to stand at your table with two members of her cluster flanking her at the specific angles of people performing backup rather than providing it — a blocking formation that was more theatrical than functional, positioned for audience effect rather than actual threat containment.

You had looked up from your book.

"You've been watching Reyes," Mara said. Not a question.

"I watch everything," you said. "It's a habit."

"In here, that kind of habit gets people thinking you're working an angle."

"I'm always working an angle," you said pleasantly. "So are you. So is everyone in this room. The difference is I'm not pretending otherwise."

Mara had studied you with the flat, evaluating look of someone recalibrating. Then she'd leaned down, both hands on your table, close enough that the conversation became private. "Word is you're in here because of bioweapons. Government case, high classification." Her eyes were sharp and not unintelligent. "That makes you interesting, and in here interesting is the same thing as being a problem."

You had closed your book. Marked your page first — a small, deliberate act of unhurriedness that you knew would register.

"I'm a structural engineer, Mara." You kept your voice very quiet and very even. "I understand exactly how much pressure a given thing can take before it fails. I apply that understanding to buildings." You looked up at her. "I apply it to other things too."

The look that passed between you in the following three seconds was the kind that didn't require elaboration.

Mara straightened up. There was a beat of silence — the common room's ambient noise continuing around you, no one visibly watching but everyone aware — and then she made the small, almost imperceptible adjustment of someone deciding that a particular piece of territory wasn't worth the cost of claiming it.

She moved away.

What she didn't know — what you had been counting on her not knowing — was that the positioning of her lean, hands on the table, weight forward, had brought her within reach of the small metal hair pin clipped to the left side of her head. A simple thing. Thin steel, maybe five centimetres, the kind of object so ordinary it barely registered as an object at all. The kind of object that, in a facility where every item was catalogued and potential tools were restricted, was worth considerably more than its weight.

You had taken it in the moment of her leaning in, your left hand moving in the same beat as your right hand closing your book — not a sleight of hand, exactly, more like the application of a principle you had understood since you were old enough to understand anything: people in confrontational moments focused on faces. On eyes. On the signals of dominance and submission they were trying to read. They did not focus on hands.

The pin was in the hem of your waistband before Mara had finished straightening up.

You opened your book again and found your page and read three more paragraphs before you allowed yourself to feel the small, contained satisfaction of a variable successfully acquired.

Officer Tanner worked the morning shift on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and he was twenty-six years old and had the very specific combination of qualities that made him, in your careful assessment, the most manageable guard in Block D.

He was not stupid. That was important — stupid people were unreliable, their responses difficult to calibrate because they were driven more by impulse than by pattern. Tanner was intelligent enough to be predictable, which was the ideal. He was also, beneath the careful professional neutrality required by his position, lonely in the particular way of young men who had ended up in jobs that isolated them socially — the odd hours, the context that made ordinary conversation difficult at parties — and who compensated for that loneliness with a hunger for engagement that they were usually too disciplined to indulge on shift.

Usually.

You had been managing the calibration of his almost-indulgences for six weeks. Small things. A comment about something on the news that he couldn't help responding to, because it was the kind of comment that landed precisely in the territory of things he had opinions about. A question about the facility's water pressure issues framed as genuine curiosity about building management, because it turned out Tanner had studied mechanical engineering for two years before switching to criminal justice and he missed talking about it. A smile deployed with surgical precision — not flirtatious, not yet, just warm, just the specific warmth of someone who was genuinely interested in what he was saying, which was the most effective version because it was the hardest to dismiss as manipulation.

The thing about flirtation as an information-gathering tool was that it worked best when it didn't look like what it was. Overt flirtation triggered defences. What you were doing was something quieter and more effective: you were making Tanner feel seen. Competent. Like talking to you was the most interesting three minutes of his shift.

It was working.

"The east corridor flooding," you said one Thursday morning, keeping your voice casual, hands wrapped around your facility-issued coffee cup, leaning against the wall near the block entrance in the window between breakfast and morning lockdown that you had identified as Tanner's lowest-supervision period. "Third time this month, right? I heard the crew was down there again yesterday."

Tanner glanced around — the automatic, habitual check of someone aware they were bending toward conversation they weren't supposed to have. "Drainage's been a problem since last winter," he said, with the slight loosening of someone who couldn't quite resist. "Sub-basement. The new intake processing area backed up again."

Sub-basement. New intake processing. You filed both away behind an expression of mild, sympathetic interest.

"Makes sense," you said thoughtfully. "The soil composition around here — if the original drainage design didn't account for seasonal saturation, you'd see exactly that. Cyclical backup every time you get significant rainfall." You looked at him with the expression of someone thinking out loud rather than extracting information. "Is the access to the sub-basement from the east corridor or the service corridor off the maintenance wing?"

"Service corridor," he said, and then caught himself. A small frown — the frown of someone a beat behind their own instincts. "Why?"

You tilted your head. Smiled — small, self-deprecating. "Old habit. I spend three years looking at drainage plans and I can't look at a puddle without trying to figure out where it came from." You sipped your coffee. "Occupational damage."

He relaxed. Smiled back, the way people did when they'd been given permission to find something charming. "Yeah, I get that."

"Does the service corridor run the full length of the wing or does it terminate at the maintenance checkpoint?" You kept your voice entirely conversational, the tone of someone passing time with small talk, the question buried between the smile and the coffee cup.

Tanner opened his mouth.

Then his radio crackled, and the moment broke, and he stepped back into the professional distance of his role with the slightly self-conscious air of someone who'd let themselves drift too far from shore. "I should — yeah." He gestured vaguely toward the corridor.

"Of course," you said easily. Turned back toward your cell.

The full length. His body language before the radio had given you the answer his mouth hadn't finished giving. The micro-lean forward, the slight intake of breath before the word that the interruption had cut off — he'd been about to confirm it. Body language didn't lie the way voices could. You'd known that since you were sixteen and had spent a year learning to read your father's dinner table silences before they became something worse.

The service corridor ran the full length of the wing.

You walked back to your cell with your coffee and sat on the edge of your cot and looked at the ceiling and let the map you'd been building for eleven weeks add one more corridor to its architecture.

***

It was the water that gave you the final piece.

Three days before you moved, there was another flooding incident in the east corridor — more significant than the previous ones, enough to require a maintenance crew of four working through the late evening, which disrupted the standard guard rotation by pulling two officers from their regular posts to manage facility access for the crew.

You watched this from the common room, chin resting on your hand, apparently reading, tracking through your peripheral vision the way the disruption propagated through the block's routines like a pressure differential moving through a closed system.

Reyes was pulled to manage the maintenance access on the service corridor side. His replacement for the evening round was Officer Castillo, who did not have Reyes's consistency and whose round timing varied by up to eight minutes depending on what was happening elsewhere in the block.

Eight minutes was an enormous window.

You looked at the crack in the ceiling above the common room — sister to the one above your bunk, same diagonal orientation, same differential settlement pattern — and followed its trajectory with your eyes to where it terminated near the air intake vent mounted high on the east wall. The vent cover was standard institutional specification. Four screws, Phillips head, painted over twice, the second coat slightly thicker on the lower-left screw than the others, which meant the lower-left screw had been replaced more recently than the rest, which meant its thread engagement was shallower, which meant it required less torque to disengage.

The pin in your waistband hem had been straightened and re-bent over six days of patient work, using the edge of the metal bed frame to shape it, until it was no longer a hair pin but something more functional. Not a key. You didn't need a key. What you needed was a tool of approximately the right diameter to fit the head of a Phillips screw that had been painted over and had never been particularly well-seated to begin with.

The vent connected to the facility's maintenance shaft network.

You had known this for four weeks. You had spent those four weeks using every available observation window to map, as precisely as possible, the shaft's likely routing — from the vent coverage patterns you could observe, from the air pressure differentials you could feel when shafts were blocked or cleared during maintenance, from two overheard conversations between facility staff that you had absorbed and cross-referenced and used to fill gaps in your model. You had done the calculations in your head, at night, in the dark, running load and dimension estimates with the focused methodical pleasure of someone doing the thing they were made for under circumstances that were trying very hard to make everything impossible.

The model was not perfect. Structural models never were. But it was good enough.

Good enough to act on.

***

You moved on a Thursday.

Not because Thursday was special, but because Thursday was when Tanner worked the morning shift and Reyes was reassigned to intake processing due to a staffing gap, which moved Officer Park to D Block, and Park had a pattern of extending his break by twelve minutes on Thursdays when the shift supervisor was doing administrative work, a pattern so consistent you had tracked it over five consecutive weeks without him ever seeming to notice that anyone was paying attention.

Twelve minutes.

You had calculated that you needed eleven.

The night before, you lay on your cot in the dark — lights-out at ten, the fluorescent strips cutting off with a mechanical click you felt as much as heard — and ran the sequence one more time in full, the way you had always run structural load calculations before a project began. Every step. Every timing dependency. Every contingency. You found three weak points and developed responses to each. You found one point where the timing was tight enough to be concerning and accepted that it was the price of the available window and that tighter-than-ideal was not the same as unworkable.

You did not sleep well. You hadn't slept well in eleven weeks. You had learned to function on the hours you got, to run clear and sharp on less than you would have chosen, and you filed the fatigue in the category of variables you could not change and therefore would not spend energy on.

At 6:47 AM, thirteen minutes before the shift change that would put Park on break, you got up.

You moved through the morning routine — bathroom, face washed, facility clothes straightened — with the same pace as every other morning. Same sequence. Same timing. You had been performing consistency for eleven weeks and the performance was now indistinguishable from the thing itself, which was its own kind of discipline that you suspected would take some time to un-learn, on the other side of this.

At 6:58, you retrieved the modified pin from the hem of your waistband.

At 7:02, the shift change registered on the block — the distant beep of keycards, the sound of boots, the abbreviated exchange of two men handing off responsibility for a block of people who were not supposed to be thinking about any of this.

At 7:09, Park's footsteps moved toward the break room.

At 7:09 and approximately thirty seconds, you stood on your cot — weight distributed carefully to avoid the frame's creak, which was loudest under the right-side support — and reached up to the air vent.

The lower-left screw gave in forty seconds. The other three took longer. You worked steadily and without hurrying, because hurrying caused errors and errors in structural work cascaded in ways that were difficult to recover from, and you had not spent eleven weeks building this model to lose it to impatience in the final minutes.

The vent cover came free. You caught it before it could swing, held it, eased it away from the wall and set it flat on the mattress.

The shaft beyond was dark and narrow and smelled of old dust and recycled air and the distant mechanical breath of the facility's ventilation system. Approximately fifty centimetres by fifty centimetres. Tight, but workable. You had measured your own shoulder width using the door frame as a reference, a calculation you had updated carefully as the weeks had passed and the facility diet and restricted movement had incrementally reduced your dimensions from their baseline — a grim arithmetic, but a useful one.

You put the vent cover back in partial position, angled to look undisturbed from the observation window. Checked the angle twice.

Then you went up.

The shaft system was almost exactly as you had modelled it.

Almost.

The deviation was in the third junction, where you had projected a southward branch that wasn't there — the shaft continued east only, which meant your initial routing needed to adjust. You stopped at the junction, pressed flat against the metal, breathed slowly and deliberately, and recalculated. A structural problem. A routing problem. You had solved more complex ones on less information and under less pressure, and you had solved them in the specific way you always solved problems, which was by not panicking and by looking at what was actually there rather than what you had expected to find.

The eastward routing, if the shaft maintained its current trajectory and the facility's footprint was as you'd estimated, would bring you out near the service corridor rather than the maintenance wing exit you'd planned for. That was not worse. It was different. You adjusted.

You moved through the dark with your hands reading the shaft walls, tracking turns, feeling for the vibration changes that indicated proximity to different facility zones. Your arms ached. The metal edges caught at your clothing and once at the skin of your forearm, a thin bright line of pain that you noted and set aside. The dust was thick enough to taste.

At what you estimated was the nine-minute mark, you felt the shaft angle downward and saw, at its end, the thin grey rectangle of a different kind of light.

The service corridor vent.

The vent cover at the sub-basement end was older, the screws more corroded, which meant they were also more brittle. The lower two gave almost immediately. The upper two required more pressure, and you applied it carefully, aware that the shaft amplified sound and that careful was the only operating mode available to you right now.

The cover came free.

You dropped into the service corridor of the sub-basement — a narrow utilitarian space, overhead pipes, bare concrete, the smell of standing water from the recent drainage issue. Dim maintenance lighting, the kind that ran on a separate circuit from the main facility systems. No cameras, because the sub-basement pre-dated the camera upgrade in 2003 and the renovation budget hadn't extended this far down.

You had confirmed the camera gap six weeks ago through a conversation with the maintenance crew lead working the drainage problem, a man named Hector who liked talking about the facility's mechanical failings to anyone who gave him a sufficiently sympathetic ear. You had given him a very sympathetic ear.

You straightened up in the corridor. Pressed your back against the wall. Listened.

Heard only the drip of a pipe and the low hum of the ventilation system returning through the shaft above.

Eleven minutes and forty seconds since Park had left for break.

You moved.

The external security breach took another four minutes, longer than planned, because the emergency exit in the east-facing utility area had been fitted with a more recent magnetic lock than the rest of the sub-basement — a newer model, a different mechanism, one your original method needed adapting for. You found the adaptation in the junction box twelve feet from the door — an old relay, incompletely sealed, accessible with the modified pin to the contact point that triggered the lock's fail-safe.

Buildings had a logic. They always had a logic. You just had to speak the right language.

The door opened. Cold air hit you — real air, the specific quality of outside, carrying with it the smell of grass and exhaust and the particular bite of a morning that hadn't yet committed to its temperature. You were looking at the facility's eastern maintenance yard. Chain-link fence, eight feet, topped with wire. Security camera on the north post, rotating cycle. On the south post — fixed. Stationary.

The fixed camera pointed north.

You went south.

The alarm went off four minutes after you cleared the fence.

You heard it from two hundred metres away, the flat urgent pulse of a security breach propagating through the facility and out into the morning air, and you didn't stop walking. You had already removed your facility-issue outer layer and turned it inside out — the lining was a pale grey that read as civilian at distance — and the hat you'd constructed over three weeks from fabric carefully accumulated from the common room lost-and-found was pulled low over your hair.

You walked toward the tree line and didn't run, because running was a signal and you were not, at this moment, interested in signals.

Behind you, the facility would be initiating lockdown. Block count. Camera review. They would find the vent, eventually. They would find that you had anticipated the camera angles, that your cell had been arranged to read as occupied from the observation window for the first critical minutes — the three books positioned under the angled blanket with the particular deliberateness of someone who had spent eleven weeks learning exactly how the human eye interpreted a sleeping form at a glance through a narrow rectangle of glass.

What they would also find, if they looked carefully enough — and they would; you were counting on them looking carefully enough — was the note tucked inside the bible, written in the margin of a page with the studied casualness of something that had been there a while.

Southeast access, maintenance window, Tuesday.

Tuesday was four days away. Southeast access was the opposite side of the facility from the route you'd taken. The maintenance window was a fabrication assembled from fragments of real conversation, real timing, real infrastructure detail — plausible enough to hold up under a first pass, specific enough to feel like genuine intelligence.

Let them watch the southeast side on Tuesday. Let them split their attention, allocate resources to a ghost. Let the timeline reconstruction spend days trying to reconcile the surveillance log gap you'd created with the note that pointed in the wrong direction entirely. Let the investigators argue about which thread was real.

You reached the tree line and walked into it and kept walking, and behind you the alarm continued its flat, urgent pulse into the empty morning air.

***

The news broke by afternoon.

You heard it first through a radio drifting from an open farmhouse window as you passed at careful distance, and then more clearly at the edge of a small town forty minutes' walk from the facility — the kind of town with a diner and a gas station and a hardware store and, blessedly, a Goodwill donation bin outside that hadn't been emptied yet.

You dressed behind a truck in the hardware store parking lot. Jeans two sizes too large, belted with a piece of cord. A plaid overshirt, soft from years of washing. Work boots that fit well enough. A baseball cap in faded blue that you pulled down over your hair. You caught your reflection in the truck's window and looked at yourself for a moment — the face they would be broadcasting, the high-threat suspect, the dangerous associate of bioweapon research.

You looked tired and ordinary and nothing like the firm ID photograph they would have on file. You looked like someone who drove a truck like this one and bought things at a hardware store and did not have her face on the news.

You bought a coffee from the gas station with the emergency cash you'd kept folded behind the binding of the engineering reference text — a contingency that had felt almost embarrassingly paranoid when you'd set it up, three months before your arrest, in the general spirit of a person who had spent years adjacent to her father's work and understood that the gap between ordinary life and its complete unravelling could close very fast and without warning. Now it felt like the most sensible thing you had ever done.

You sat at one of the outdoor tables and held your coffee cup and listened to what they were saying about you through the open door of the gas station.

Violent. You pressed your lips together. Unstable. You looked at your hands on the cup, the scrape on your forearm from the shaft wall, the split skin on two of your knuckles from the corroded screws. Known associate of bioweapon development with potential access to sensitive classified research.

The voice on the radio read from what sounded like an official statement, the particular cadence of language that had been carefully constructed to be both alarming and vague, and you listened to it with the same attention you gave to redacted documents — reading the gaps, noting the choices, marking what the language was doing that the words weren't saying outright. They weren't describing you. They were describing a threat profile. A category. Something that justified the response already being assembled, the agencies scrambling, the resources reallocating.

They had made you into something larger than yourself.

You finished your coffee and walked to the bus station. That was, in its own way, useful.

Washington D.C. from West Virginia was three hours on a good day. You took two buses and a short stretch on foot between them, changing your hat at the second stop, buying a pair of cheap sunglasses from a rack outside a pharmacy. You kept your head down in the way of someone tired rather than hiding — the specific posture of an early commuter, a person with somewhere ordinary to be, the human camouflage of unremarkability.

You were good at unremarkable. You had been practising it, in one form or another, for most of your life.

The apartment was in a neighbourhood in Northeast D.C. that had been gentrifying in the slow, uneven way of city blocks that couldn't quite decide what they were becoming — renovated rowhouses beside ones untouched since the eighties, new coffee shops beside corner stores that had been there for thirty years, enough foot traffic that strangers were ordinary and nobody looked twice. The apartment itself was registered under the name of a shell LLC you had established four years ago, not in direct anticipation of this moment, exactly, but in the general spirit of someone who had spent enough time in proximity to catastrophe to understand that exits needed to be prepared before you needed them.

The key was where you'd left it, behind the loose brick on the right side of the door frame, fourth up from the ground.

The lock turned.

You pushed the door open and stood for a moment in the threshold of the apartment's closed-up air — two months of no one, the specific quality of a space that had been waiting — and then you stepped inside and closed the door behind you and stood in the small hallway and let yourself be still for thirty seconds.

Thirty seconds was what you allowed. Then you moved.

The apartment was small and furnished with the deliberate practicality of a space that served a function rather than a life — a sofa, a table, a kitchen with non-perishable supplies maintained on a rotation schedule, a laptop in the kitchen drawer, cash in an envelope taped to the underside of the bathroom sink. You showered. Changed into real clothes — yours, the specific small relief of fabric that fit your body correctly. Ate something from the cupboard standing over the sink, not tasting it, running through what needed to happen next in the same methodical way you'd run through the shaft routing in the dark.

Then you turned on the television.

Your face looked back at you from the screen.

The firm ID photograph, as you'd expected — slightly blown up, slightly pixelated from the scaling, set against a red chyron that read ESCAPED FEDERAL PRISONER — CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS. The anchor was saying something about bioweapons research and active federal manhunt and multiple agencies coordinating response. The word violent appeared again, attributed to an unnamed source close to the investigation.

You looked at yourself on the screen. At the face of someone the news had decided was a particular kind of story.

Then you picked up the remote and turned the volume down to nothing, leaving the picture running on the kitchen counter like company you hadn't asked for, and you sat at the table and opened the laptop and started working.

Daniel was somewhere. People left traces — not always the traces they intended to leave, not always in the places the people looking for them thought to check, but traces nonetheless. Systems recorded everything. The question was always knowing what you were looking at when you found it.

You were going to find your brother.

And if the people assigned to stop you happened to be very good at their jobs — if someone like Leon Kennedy happened to be very good at his job, which by all accounts he was — then that was a variable you would account for when it became relevant.

You reached up and put your sunglasses back on, and your hat. Looked down at the screen.

For now, you had work to do.

***

The briefing room on the fourth floor of the federal building smelled of burnt coffee and the particular staleness of a space that had hosted too many late nights to fully air out. It was 7 AM and the room held six people and a tension that had the specific quality of a situation already in motion — decisions already made, wheels already turning, everyone in the room slightly behind the pace of events.

Leon Kennedy arrived four minutes after the briefing was supposed to start, which was not because he was late but because he had spent those four minutes in the corridor reading the incident report that had been handed to him on the way in, and he had wanted to finish it before he sat down. He had a policy about briefings: walk in knowing more than they think you do. It made the gaps in what they told you more visible.

He sat. Poured coffee he didn't particularly want. Looked at the photograph on the screen.

Firm ID badge. A young woman — early twenties, he registered, which was younger than he'd been expecting given the weight of what the file was implying — with the composed, direct expression of someone who had learned to present themselves with a particular kind of deliberate neutrality. Not blank. Deliberate. There was a difference and it was legible, if you'd spent enough years reading people in rooms they didn't want to be in.

"Leon Kennedy," said the man at the front of the room, which was presumably an introduction even though everyone in the room already knew who he was. "Thank you for coming on short notice. I'm Deputy Director Marsh."

Leon nodded once. Looked at the photograph.

"The subject is Y/N Voss," Marsh continued. "Twenty-three years old. She escaped federal custody this morning from the Hargrove Facility in West Virginia. She has been in detention for eleven weeks in connection with the Voss bioweapons case." He clicked to the next slide — the incident report summary, which Leon had already read. "The escape was—" Marsh paused, in the way of someone choosing a word carefully, "— sophisticated."

"That's one way to put it," said someone across the table. Leon didn't look up from the photograph.

"Walk me through her background," he said.

Marsh glanced at the agent to his left, a woman Leon recognised as Calloway from the case file — the primary interviewer, eleven weeks of sessions. She had the look of someone who had formed opinions and was being careful about which ones she shared in this room.

"Civil engineering," Calloway said. "She completed her degree at twenty — full four-year programme in two and a half years, top of her cohort by a significant margin. Her academic record is—" she paused, and Leon heard the weight of understatement in the pause, "— notable. She was offered doctoral positions at three institutions on graduation and turned all of them down."

"Why?"

"She went into practice instead. Joined a structural engineering firm at twenty, made associate level within eighteen months." Calloway looked at the photograph with the expression of someone who had spent eleven weeks in a room with its subject and was still processing the experience. "The firm held government contracts. She had full background clearance. By all accounts she was — is — exceptionally good at her work."

"Exceptionally good," Leon repeated. He looked at Calloway directly. "That's the second time someone in this room has used a word that's doing a lot of work. What does exceptionally good actually mean, in her case?"

A short silence. Then Calloway said, evenly: "It means that in eleven weeks of detention she mentally mapped a facility she had never been in before, identified a structural weakness in the foundation that our own maintenance team hadn't formally flagged, used that weakness to plan and execute an escape through the ventilation shaft network, created a fifteen-minute gap in our surveillance record, and left behind a deliberately misleading decoy note pointing investigators toward a fabricated secondary exit point on the opposite side of the facility." She paused. "She did all of this without any materials, any outside contact, and apparently while also conducting normal social interactions in the common room and attending eleven weeks of interrogation sessions without giving anything away." Another pause. "So when I say exceptionally good, I mean she is one of the most spatially and analytically intelligent people I have encountered in twenty years in this work, and she is twenty-three years old."

The room was quiet for a moment.

Leon looked at the photograph. At the face of a twenty-three year old who had walked into a federal detention facility and spent eleven weeks quietly taking it apart.

He thought about what eleven weeks in a cell did to a person at twenty-three. What it did to your relationship with walls. With time. With the particular grinding quality of institutional powerlessness that he knew something about, from years of walking into situations that other people had designed to contain outcomes they didn't like.

"Her connection to the case," he said.

"Her father, Dr. Edmund Voss, was the lead researcher on a programme that was—" Marsh moved to the next slide, which was heavily annotated and partially redacted, "— of serious concern to multiple agencies before the lab fire terminated the primary operation. Bioweapon development. Mutation research. The kind of work that doesn't stop being a problem just because the man who started it is dead." He looked at Leon. "There are aspects of the programme that we believe are ongoing, through associates who survived the original operation."

"And the brother."

"Daniel Voss. Twenty-six. Biological sciences background — studied under two of Voss Senior's former colleagues before joining the father's programme directly. Believed to have been a significant contributor to the research before the lab fire." Marsh's expression was carefully neutral in a way that Leon had learned to read as covering for gaps. "Current whereabouts unknown."

"Unknown as in you don't know, or unknown as in you have a theory you can't confirm?"

Marsh's neutral expression held. "Unknown as in we don't know."

Leon looked at him for a moment. Then back at the photograph.

"She's going to look for him," said Calloway, from across the table. She said it with the quiet certainty of someone who had spent eleven weeks building a model and was confident in the output. "That's what she said she wanted. In the last session. I believed her then. I believe it more now, given—" she gestured at the incident report summary on the screen.

"Given that she engineered an escape specifically to be able to do it," Leon said.

"Yes."

He was quiet for a moment. The coffee in front of him had gone from hot to warm. He picked it up anyway.

"She's not heading away from D.C.," he said. "She's heading toward it, or she's already there. The brother's trail, whatever's left of it, runs through the people and locations connected to the original case, most of which are D.C.-adjacent." He set the cup down. "She knows that. She's been in a cell for eleven weeks thinking about nothing else."

"Which makes her trajectory predictable," said someone down the table — an analyst type, younger, the kind of confident that came from not having been wrong about enough things yet.

"Predictable isn't the same as easy to find," Leon said, without particular inflection. "Someone who can create a fifteen-minute surveillance gap and a decoy trail before she's even out of the building isn't going to make her movements easy to track." He looked at the photograph one more time. "What assets does she have on the outside? Safe locations, financial, anything that didn't show up in the initial asset freeze?"

Marsh and Calloway exchanged a look — the brief, loaded kind.

"We froze what we could find," Calloway said, carefully. "But given her — given her profile, it's possible she had contingency arrangements that weren't registered under her name."

"It's possible," Leon said, "or it's likely."

The silence confirmed which one they thought it was.

He picked up his jacket from the back of the chair. Looked at the photograph one final time — at the face of a twenty-three year old prodigy who had spent eleven weeks in a federal cell turning it into a structural diagram and had then walked out of it like she'd always known she would.

"Send me everything on the brother," he said. "And everything on the father's remaining associates. And the full unredacted incident report from this morning."

He looked at Calloway. "She said she wanted to find Daniel. What else did she say?"

Calloway considered for a moment. "She said she wanted the truth." A pause. "She said those two things like they were the same thing."

Leon thought about that.

Then he walked out of the briefing room and into the corridor, where the morning was already fully underway outside the windows and somewhere in the city — or heading toward it — a twenty-three year old who had already outthought a federal facility was looking for her brother and leaving, he suspected, very little for him to find.

He had found people who didn't want to be found before. In churches in rural Spain. In overrun government complexes. In situations with considerably higher body counts than this one.

He found them anyway.

All right, Leon thought quietly, reading the first page of Daniel Voss's file as he walked.

Let's go.

[fushitoru]

chapter 7: the rebound a bridgerton au

pairing ⸺ duke!satoru gojo x fem!reader

summary ⸺ dearest gentle reader, a new season is upon us as the ton gets ready for a season filled with drama, heartbreak, and passion. after being crowned diamond of the season, duke gojo⸺only looking to marry just to secure his inheritance⸺has his sights set on you, the easiest (and most obvious) option. later, when you catch his saying unsavory things about you on a terrace when he least suspected it, you swear to never marry gojo. as london's fashionable set goes through yet another wedding season, will there be hope for scandalous gossip, hate, and thinly veiled insults, or will we witness blooming love and passion?

warnings ⸺ nsfw, enemies to lovers, bridgerton au, angst, fluff, SUGGESTIVE, eventual smut, jealousy, misogyny, description of injury, concussion, blood, regency era au, gojo being infuriating, reader also being infuriating, both of them are clueless honestly

chapter summary ⸺ after the arrival of your dearest brother, you pursue a new angle to the season, one to prove that you, the diamond, will not be scorned. new opportunities with duke nanami arise and with it jealousy and bitterness fester in the ballroom. (6.8k)

prev. the house party | next. the lake

general masterlist | series masterlist

Once again, dear Reader, this humble Author finds herself vindicated. Country house parties, as ever, remain the fertile soil from which the most delicious scandals bloom. And today’s revelation is no exception.

Yes, indeed, you read it here first: the dashing and ever-elusive Lord Satoru Gojo will not be marrying Miss Itadori, this season’s most celebrated diamond. The murmurs have already begun spreading like wildfire, bringing sighs of relief from hopeful ladies and knowing smirks from their watchful chaperones. The eligible Duke-to-be’s sudden return to certified bachelorhood is, no doubt, a development many find most agreeable.

But what, pray, has caused this sudden turn of events? The dissolution of an arrangement so seemingly perfect? Alas, even this Author—a tireless seeker of truths—has found the particulars elusive. Was it a clash of personalities? A misstep at the ball? Or perhaps, a secret grievance unearthed during those long, candlelit evenings at the country estate?

What this Author can confirm is that the ballroom whispers point to Lord Gojo’s own doing, based upon the countenances and actions of the pair at the ball. Did the ever-charming lord tire of his diamond’s sparkle, or has he found a more alluring treasure elsewhere? The possibilities are endless, and so, it seems, is the intrigue surrounding the pair.

One thing remains certain: while Miss Itadori may have stumbled in this engagement, she remains a diamond among gems—brilliant, resilient, and admired. What paths now await her are anyone’s guess, but if this Author knows anything, it is that diamonds shine brightest under pressure.

As for Lord Gojo, the question lingers: will his rakish reputation survive this latest scandal unscathed? Or has he, at last, met a match too dazzling even for him to outshine? Rest assured, dear Reader, this Author will remain ever-vigilant, pen poised and ready to uncover the truth.

⸻ LADY WHISTLEDOWN’S SOCIETY PAPERS

You could have had a bit more tact when informing Sukuna of the events of the past few days, for the reaction you gained made you realize that you may have made a misstep.

“What?!” Sukuna roared, looking at the three of you with fury. Yuji jumped, while you and Choso grimaced.  “He did what?!”

“Now, now, brother,” Choso stood up nervously to pat his younger brother on the shoulder. “It is all good and well, for I have arranged for a better match for our dear sister—”

“A duel!” Sukuna bellowed, standing up from his seat on the couch to stomp his way to the door. “I will challenge that Gojo fellow to a duel—” It was only until Yuji ran and tackled him to the ground that he was waylaid to God knows what he was going to do to Lord Gojo. You and Choso could only watch the scene, too perforce to the strength of bulls that your brothers had to be able to interrupt. 

A few scratches and awfully purple looking bruises later, Sukuna and Yuji were seated on the couch once again, thanks to Choso’s plead for nonviolence. It was then that Choso started explaining what had occurred in the season so far. “Mother insisted,” he sighed, shaking his head. “She seemed to have struck a mutual…entente with the Duchess of Gojo. It was only a matter of time before Mother forced her ways. Now that it has not redound in her favor, I have even more rationale to have my…way with Sister’s matches. For God’s sake, Sukuna stop glaring at me Mother left me behind on the first ball—”

Sukuna did not stop glaring; in fact, he chose that moment to take a long slurp of his tea while staring fiercely at him while Choso shifted nervously. After a long bout of silence, he finally offered, “I understand Mother can be very pushy, and that you, Choso, are not fierce enough to withstand her.” Choso did not even protest, just offered a deadpan. “But I, however, will not be a feather to a simple blow of the wind that Mother is. It is time our dear sister lived up to her reputation, what she has prepared so hard for.” He looks upon you with a soft gaze—that is, a soft gaze for Sukuna. “No matter how tactless Gojo’s estrangement was, Sister will recover, so long as her morale has not lessened.  Sukuna’s head turned sharply to you, “It has not weakened, right Sister? He has not left you heartbroken?”

You could hear your heart as you looked at your brother, dumbfounded. His perceptive gaze disarmed you, but you blurted out a “Of course not” and turned to hastily grab a pastry from the table next to the loveseat you were seated at.. When you looked back at your brother, you jumped as his gaze lingered on you then nonetheless turned to glare at your brother when Yuji opened his mouth, undoubtedly ready to irritatedly remark on his denseness.

No matter, you think to yourself. Whatever you feel about Gojo is of no matter. The visit at the manor was only a delay and a small obstacle for your season. It was time to attend to the matter at hand: finding a husband. 

The dewy grass kissed the hem of your nightgown as you wandered to the old swing set on the far edge of the manor grounds—a relic of your childhood, weathered but enduring. The creak of the chains was a sound that had long since embedded itself in your memory, a reminder of simpler days when duty had yet to tighten its grip.

You had not been able to sleep.

The house was still, the hush of midnight settling over its grand halls and sprawling grounds. Yet sleep evaded you, your thoughts as restless as the autumn breeze that stirred the curtains of your chamber. In the quiet, the weight of your obligations pressed heavily upon you, a familiar but unwelcome companion. Deciding that solitude under the stars might grant clarity where the confines of your room could not, you slipped on a shawl and had ventured outside.

“Couldn’t sleep either?” Sukuna’s voice cut through the quiet, low and teasing. He was seated on a swing with his big frame illustrating a comical sight on the small seat. His silhouette was faintly illuminated by the dim glow of his cigarillo, and the faint ember cast fleeting shadows across his sharp features, making his smirk all the more pronounced.

The unexpected sight of him startled you for a moment, though you quickly masked your surprise. You drew your shawl tighter around your shoulders, the chill of the night settling into your skin, and stepped closer. “And here I thought I was the only one who sought refuge in our old playground at such an hour,” you replied lightly, though your voice carried the faint weight of sleeplessness. “What brings you here?”

He took a long, deliberate drag from the cigarillo before discarding it into the damp grass, the embers hissing softly as they extinguished. Straightening, he gestured to the empty swing beside him. “Thinking,” he said simply. “And you? Or do I even need to ask?”

You hesitated for only a moment before lowering yourself onto the swing, your fingers grazing the cold chains as you pushed back slightly. The seat creaked beneath your weight, swaying gently with your movements. The motion stirred a familiar ache of nostalgia—a reminder of days when life felt less complicated. “What else could it be but the endless circus of expectations Mother has so kindly bestowed upon me?”

The bitterness in your tone was impossible to conceal, and Sukuna chuckled darkly. He reached up to push a hand through his disheveled hair, his movements purposeful, almost theatrical. “Ah, yes,” he said mockingly. “The marriage parade. The grand auctioning of one’s life for the sake of the family name. What a fine role you’ve been cast in, dear sister. I don’t envy you.”

You gave a dry laugh, your voice quiet yet tinged with resolve. “Unfortunately, dear brother,” you began, staring into the star-dappled sky, “it is my duty to be wed.”

Sukuna turned to you sharply, his brow furrowing. “It is not your duty, least of all when it robs you of your freedom.”

A protest began to form on his lips, but you held up a hand, your expression soft yet resolute. “Let me finish,” you said, your tone firm but affectionate. Taking a deep breath, you continued, “If I were to grow old into a spinster, there would be no one to take care of me. You and Yuji would inherit our lands and manors, and Choso is the viscount; there would be no space for me except with some of our aunts.”

At the mention of your aunts, both of you shuddered involuntarily. The thought of their overbearing presence, their sharp tongues and endless criticisms, was enough to unite even the most quarrelsome of siblings.

“You cannot take care of me forever,” you said softly, your gaze dropping to the ground. The swing swayed faintly as you spoke, the motion as restless as your thoughts. “One day, you—or any of our brothers—might choose to start a family with someone you love. It would be intrusive of me to remain dependent on you all.”

Sukuna scoffed, his voice rising slightly with indignation. “You know better than anyone that I aim to travel the world. I cannot be chained to a family or a manor—not now, not ever.”

You turned to him, your eyes softening as you regarded his familiar fire, the same defiance that had always set him apart from the others. “Sukuna,” you said gently, your voice tinged with fondness, “you may do as you please, and I would never wish to impede you. But I cannot rely on you indefinitely. You deserve to live freely, to make your own choices without the burden of my future weighing on your conscience.”

Once again, silence enveloped you both, broken only by the faint creak of the swings and the rustle of the wind through the trees. Then, Sukuna eventually broke the quiet with a heavy sigh. “Then we must make sure to do well and find you a husband on your terms.”

You turned to him, brow arched in curiosity. “Whatever do you mean?”

“I mean,” he said, his lips curling into a mischievous smirk, “that you must stop playing the part Mother has assigned you. Demure and meek may be what she wants, but it’s hardly the truth of you. Besides,” he added, leaning closer as if to share a conspiracy, “do you think the kind of husband you’d want would fall for such a facade?”

His words caught you off guard, and you frowned slightly. “Are you implying I’m to frighten potential suitors away?”

“Not frighten,” Sukuna corrected, his tone amused. “But consider this: if a man is drawn to meekness, might that not suggest he wishes to dominate or control? Would you truly wish to tether yourself to such a person? Or would you rather find someone who can appreciate your independence, who will meet you as an equal?”

His reasoning gave you pause. The image of a husband who might respect your will, who might value the sharpness of your mind and the strength of your character, was tempting—if not entirely what you needed. “And how, pray tell, do you suggest I go about finding such a man?”

Sukuna’s grin widened. “Start by being yourself, unapologetically. Let them see the wit, the fire, the resolve that I know so well. Let them see you, and if they can’t handle it, then they aren’t worth your time.”

You smiled faintly, your heart lighter from his words. After all, this scheming was due on your part; you were only grateful this shift occurred with Sukuna as your humble advisor. “It’s a daring plan, brother. Let us hope it does not lead to my complete social ruin.”

Sukuna laughed, the sound rich and unrestrained. “If it does, then you shall travel the world with me. Who needs societal approval when there’s an entire world to explore?”

For a moment, the weight of your burdens felt a little easier to bear. Under the vast, starlit sky, you allowed yourself to hope that perhaps, just perhaps, there was a future where duty and happiness could coexist.

Despite the peace conversing with Sukuna had granted you, sleep evaded you still, leaving you to roll onto your side, the cool fabric of the pillow offering no solace. Your thoughts had been louder than ever these past weeks, and one name in particular echoed through your mind like a stubborn refrain: Gojo.

His face came unbidden, as vivid as if he were standing at the foot of your bed. That insufferable smirk, the casual way he tilted his head as if always in on some grand secret. He saw through you—that much was undeniable, no matter how much you abhorred it. It wasn’t just the way his piercing gaze seemed to cut through your defenses, stripping away the layers of pleasantries and propriety until you were left exposed. It was his words, too—sharp, direct, and unyielding. Unlike everyone else, he wasn’t content to let you be the demure and dutiful daughter your mother had so painstakingly sculpted.

You turned onto your back, staring up at the shadowed canopy above, the weight of his judgment pressing against your chest. “He wouldn’t want to marry me either,” you thought bitterly, biting your lip to suppress a laugh that was more self-deprecating than amused. Why would he? I am only but a pathological people-pleaser—a woman who smiles and nods and folds herself into whatever shape is required of her. It was a role you had perfected, a mask you wore so often that you sometimes forgot it wasn’t your face. And yet, he saw through it.

That was the part that unsettled you most—not his arrogance, not his sharp tongue, but his ability to cut through your defenses as though they were paper. He saw you, in all your contradictions and uncertainties, and somehow, you suspected that he pitied you for them. Or worse, respected you less for it.

Your stomach twisted at the thought, and you turned onto your other side, burying your face into the pillow. No wonder I’m still unmarried. The thought came unbidden, sharp and cruel. What man would want a wife who couldn’t even decide who she wanted to be?

But that wasn’t fair—not entirely. You had a plan, didn’t you? A bold, liberating plan that would take you far from the shadow of your mother’s expectations. You could already picture her face when you told her—calm, composed, and quietly furious, as though your refusal to obey were a personal affront. The thought brought the faintest flicker of satisfaction, but it was fleeting.

The plan wasn’t perfect, nor was it foolproof. It hinged on one pivotal point: finding a husband who could be an equal partner rather than a master. A man who could grant you the freedom to forge your own path in peace, without the constant weight of disapproval bearing down on you.

Your thoughts wandered to Duke Nanami. Equal in power to Gojo, fair-minded, and kind—a man with no appetite for games or artifice. If you manage to secure a match with him, the ton would not view your…blunder with Gojo with such amusement. Insofar your interactions this season, he had always treated you with quiet respect, never pressing you into conversations you didn’t wish to have or cornering you with expectations. He would be a good man to marry, you thought. A safe choice.

And yet, even as you considered him, Gojo’s face intruded once more, unwelcome and unavoidable. Duke Nanami was everything Gojo wasn’t—measured, steady, predictable. But it was Gojo who set your mind alight, who made you question things you had long accepted as unchangeable truths. He irritated you, challenged you, unnerved you in a way no one else did.

You sighed, turning again, the sheets tangling around your legs like restraints. The very fact that Gojo occupied your thoughts at all was infuriating. He had no place there, no right to linger in the quiet moments when you were supposed to find peace. And yet, here he was, as persistent in your mind as he was in person.

The plan. You needed to focus on the plan. Liberating yourself from your mother’s expectations wasn’t about Gojo or Duke Nanami or anyone else. It was about reclaiming yourself, about becoming a woman who didn’t need to twist herself into shapes for anyone—not your mother, not a potential husband, and certainly not Gojo.

And it would start at your wardrobe.

You give the most polite smile you can muster, but you do not need the mirror in front of you to know that your countenance is strained, the edges of your smile not reaching your eyes. “Lower it even further.”

A beat passes in the room as the modiste, your mother, and Sukuna stare at you in incredulity.  The bustline to your dress is low. Of course, it is not yet teetering on the edge of what is socially acceptable, and that is the position you want it to be. Hence, you gesture to Sukuna, prompting him to regain his senses and snap his head towards Momo. “Please attend to my sister’s request.”

You could smell what you mother was about to say, even if she had not yet done so. “My dear,” she began, “I hardly think that’s appro–” Sukuna’s glares reorients itself now to focus on your mother, and she purses her lips with what appears to be arduous effort, knowing a quarrel with Sukuna would escalate quite quickly, both immediate and unwise.  

Madame Momo, for the better, offers no protest as she lowers the deep, wine red fabric she was upholding against your body. If you were not wearing your regular clothes, you would know that quite a bit of the swell of your breasts would be framed by the dress. However, it wasn’t enough. “A bit lower.”

The modiste lets out a small sigh, her needle poised mid-air as she hesitates. “My lady, to lower it further would risk—” she pauses delicately, “—compromising the structural integrity of the gown.”

“I appreciate your insight, Madame, and know that you are quite skilled at your craft,” you flash her a semi-apologetic smile. After all, she is the one that has to attend to your…rebranding crisis and revamp a majority of your wardrobe. “However, I am afraid that I’d like to do something new this season. Something eye-catching.”

A faint chuckle escapes her lips, no doubt spurred on by the flattery. With a practiced hand, she adjusts the fabric once more, lowering it to the precise balance of scandalous and sophisticated. She steps back, her critical eye assessing her own handiwork. “Well, it will definitely be eye-catching.”

“Precisely.” You nod in approval, smoothing the line of the fabric with your fingers. “I believe Lady Whistledown,” you add, your voice tinged with knowing confidence, “will ensure that the modiste responsible for the diamond’s striking attire becomes the talk of the season.”

Momo’s lips twitch into a smile, and she dips her head in acknowledgment, already returning to her work with renewed purpose. Sukuna, standing to the side, folds his arms and smirks at the scene, clearly entertained by your audacity.

Your mother, meanwhile, remains silent, though her pursed lips betray her disapproval. Let her simmer, you think, satisfaction curling in your chest. This season is yours to command, and you will not be overlooked.

I cannot do this. I cannot I cannot I cannot I cann—

“Sister!” Sukuna called out. You regained your senses, snapping your head at once to look at him, who was holding out his hand. Swallowing, you grabbed it so he could assist you out of the carriage. What had you in a tizzy was the sheer amount of people. Yet again, you were attending your first party after the events in the countryside but this time without your mother and Yuuji. Not only had the people you were accompanied with changed, but also different attire. A red silk dress fell over your curves gracefully, the draping across your chest a bit lower than usual. It is the dress of your dreams—one that you would have worn if not for your mother and her beliefs regarding your image. Now, your clothing was still socially acceptable but nevertheless daring—exactly the image you wanted to present. 

However, it was safe to say that after the events of the house party, venturing out in another—with so much of your chest exposed—had you nervous. Oh God, perhaps this wasn’t the brightest of my ideas— (a/n she’s just a girl :( )

“Presenting Miss Itadori, Mister Itadori, and the Right Honorable The Viscount Itadori!” As you were announced to the room, with your brothers linking arms on either side of you, you smiled—trying not to let the nerves show. At the sound of your name, the buzz of conversation faltered, dozens of heads turning toward you. You felt the weight of their gazes—sharp, judgmental, curious. You were certain half of them were eager to witness the fallout of Whistledown’s latest scandal, while the other half seemed transfixed by the boldness of your attire.

Your eyes flitted over the sea of faces as you moved through the room. There were gasps, poorly veiled whispers, and even a few widened eyes aimed at Sukuna, but what truly set your nerves alight was the attention fixed squarely on you. You resisted the urge to fidget, to adjust the neckline of your gown, to shrink under their scrutiny.

Then, amid the crowd, your gaze locked onto a familiar figure with a piercing stare—Suguru Geto.

He was lounging by the far wall, a glass of wine in hand, his dark eyes gleaming with mirth. An amused smirk tugged at the corner of his lips as he shook his head, clearly entertained. Your heart stuttered, the heat rushing to your cheeks making your nerves spike further. Am I being mocked?

Before the thought could consume you, he raised his glass in a mock salute, a gesture of acknowledgment—perhaps even respect. He then nudged the man standing next to him, none other than Duke Nanami.

Your pulse quickened at the sight of the Duke, his composed demeanor a stark contrast to Geto’s casual amusement. The weight of Nanami’s steady, discerning gaze was one you weren’t prepared to meet—not tonight. In the periphery, you caught Geto slipping toward the courtyard, his laughter soft but audible as he disappeared into the night.

You tore your gaze away just in time, focusing straight ahead as you approached the Queen. Your shoulders stiffened, the intricate beading of your gown catching in the light. The murmurs grew fainter, the towering figure of Her Majesty now looming just ahead. With each step, your pulse thundered louder in your ears, but you kept your chin high, determined not to falter.

When you and your brothers reached the foot of the throne, you slipped your arms free from theirs and sank into the deepest curtsy you could manage. "Your Majesty," you murmured, lowering your head to avoid the weight of her gaze. The richness of the room—gold-trimmed drapes, towering portraits, and the hum of whispered conversations—did little to steady your nerves.

"Rise," the Queen commanded, her tone clipped and dismissive, the single word laced with impatience. You obeyed, your movements deliberate and slow, feeling the weight of every eye in the chamber on your shoulders. When you met her gaze, she was already appraising you, her sharp eyes scanning you from head to toe. Her scrutiny was clinical, and when she sighed audibly, it was clear her judgment was far from favorable.

“I have not been…pleased by the recent affairs, diamond,” the Queen began, her voice cold and detached, like a blade gliding through silk. A sniff punctuated her words, and the lump in your throat grew harder to swallow. “I fear this is a failure to the crown.”

The room seemed to tilt, your heartbeat quickening in your chest. The Queen’s disappointment carried a weight that could crush reputations, and yours was teetering precariously on the edge of her approval.

“However,” her tone shifted ever so slightly, and you found yourself snapping to attention, clinging to that single word like a lifeline. “Your recent change in…style is fitting.”

You blinked, unsure if you had heard her correctly. The Queen’s gaze lingered on the daring neckline of your gown, the rich red fabric catching the light in just the right way to emphasize its boldness. “You are not a simple and bland gem, Miss Itadori.” Her words were deliberate, measured, and the faintest hint of approval gleamed in her sharp eyes. “You are a diamond, and you must start to shine like it.”

For a moment, you were too stunned to respond. The Queen’s words were praise, yes, but they also carried an implicit warning: a diamond that failed to sparkle was of no use to anyone, least of all the crown.

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” you said, your voice steady but quiet, and you curtsied again, the fabric of your gown whispering against the marble floor. The Queen’s gaze swept over you once more before she turned her attention elsewhere, her dismissal unspoken but clear. As you rose again, Choso placed a reassuring hand on your elbow, a subtle anchor in the sea of your swirling thoughts.

A light, “You all are dismissed.”

The cool night air wrapped around Suguru Geto as he strolled into the courtyard, his boots crunching softly against the gravel path. The faint strains of the ballroom's orchestra followed him, muffled now by the grand walls of the manor. A slow, self-satisfied smile crept across his lips as he glanced up at the stars. The night felt ripe with possibility, though it was the scene he had just left that truly amused him.

He exhaled, letting the crisp air settle over him, before taking another measured step toward the fountain at the courtyard’s center. His fingers grazed the cool stone edge, the chill a welcome change from the warmth of the crowded ballroom. He savored the silence, only for it to be broken by the familiar sound of approaching footsteps.

“Geto,” a voice called out, casual but clipped.

Suguru turned slowly, almost lazily, as though he hadn’t already recognized the speaker. Gojo Satoru emerged from the shadows of the colonnade, his silver hair glowing faintly in the moonlight. He moved with his usual languid ease, though his sharp blue gaze belied his carefree demeanor.

“Well, well,” Suguru greeted, his tone light but edged with something sharp. “You’re out here. Don’t tell me you’ve finally tired of the fawning crowds?”

Gojo came to a stop a few paces away, crossing his arms as he leaned against one of the marble columns. “Needed some air. The room’s packed with too many people pretending to like each other.” His gaze flicked to Suguru, scrutinizing. “And you? Slipping out to avoid trouble, or cause it?”

Suguru chuckled, swirling the wine in his glass before taking a slow sip. “Oh, you wound me, Satoru. Can’t a man enjoy a moment of peace without being accused of scheming?”

“You?” Gojo raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Not a chance. So, what’s your angle this time?”

Suguru let the question hang, savoring the quiet tension between them. He set his glass down on the fountain’s edge, turning to fully face Gojo. His smirk widened as he finally spoke. “No angle. Just admiring the company tonight. Speaking of which…” He paused for dramatic effect, brushing an imaginary speck of dust from his sleeve. “Miss Itadori made quite the entrance.”

Gojo’s expression didn’t change immediately, but Suguru saw the faint flicker of something—irritation, maybe, or something more carefully hidden. Gojo’s mouth twitched into a scoff, though the sound was faint, almost perfunctory.

“What about her?” Gojo asked, his tone deliberately disinterested, but Suguru noted how his fingers flexed briefly before he shoved his hands into his pockets.

Suguru hummed thoughtfully, his gaze drifting toward the sky as if considering his next words carefully. “She looked… radiant tonight. Stunning, really. I can’t imagine half the room wasn’t staring. Though, I must say, some seemed more surprised than others.” His eyes darted back to Gojo, watching for a reaction.

Gojo rolled his eyes, though there was a tightness in his jaw that Suguru didn’t miss. “She’s just another debutante. Why would I care what she’s wearing?”

“Why indeed?” Suguru replied, his voice deceptively mild. He stepped closer, leaning against the fountain with an easy grace. “But it does make one wonder—what kind of man would care? Surely someone with a sharp eye for detail. Someone with… let’s say, a bustful interest.”

Gojo stiffened slightly, a flicker of irritation crossing his face. “You’re imagining things.”

“Am I?” Suguru tilted his head, studying Gojo with an intensity that bordered on playful. “Because I could swear you seemed a little distracted back there. And not by the Queen, mind you. Why did you leave as soon as the Itadoris were announced?”

“Drop it, Geto.” Gojo’s voice was sharper now, but there was an edge of unease beneath the command.

Suguru’s smirk deepened as he tried to fight the urge to snicker at his friend, but he let the moment linger, letting Gojo stew in his discomfort. He picked up his wine glass again, swirling the liquid idly before taking another slow sip. Finally, he straightened, his tone turning lighter, though no less pointed.

“Well, whatever it is—or isn’t—you’d better sort it out soon.” He started to walk past Gojo, his footsteps deliberately slow. Just as he passed, he paused, his voice dropping to a low murmur. “Because if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re in danger of losing your famously cool head.”

Gojo didn’t respond immediately, but Suguru didn’t need him to. The slight narrowing of his eyes, the subtle clench of his jaw—those were all the confirmation he needed for his plan.

Suguru chuckled softly, a sound more amused than mocking, and continued on his way, his voice drifting back over his shoulder. “Enjoy the rest of the night, Satoru. Something tells me it’s going to be… illuminating.”

Left alone, Gojo exhaled sharply, running a hand through his hair as he glared at the retreating figure. “Bastard,” he muttered under his breath, though his voice lacked fervor. Still, Suguru’s words lingered, circling his mind like an itch he couldn’t quite scratch. He turned his gaze back toward the ballroom, his thoughts uncomfortably crowded with images of a certain young lady and the maddening smirk of a man who always seemed to know too much.

It appears that you and Duke Nanami have much in common, for you are able to hold a most pleasant conversation with him.

The din of the ballroom fades to a dull murmur as you stand near the refreshment table, your gaze politely fixed on the Duke. His presence is commanding yet unassuming—a rare quality that draws you in. Dressed in a deep navy coat that matches the intensity of his solemn eyes, he inclines his head slightly as he speaks, the weight of his words tempered by the gentleness in his tone.

The arrangement is perfect. You have successfully caught your target, much to the chagrin of ladies. After all, it was not all days that Duke Nanami took interest in a lady. You would have to credit Choso; he had researched that HIs Grace did not like overbearing mamas accompanying their girls—a most rational opinion. Posing fiery opinions without the presence of anyone except yourself, it seemed that you had hit the mark.

“I find, Miss Itadori,” he says, his voice smooth yet deliberate, “that many in our circles underestimate the joy of simple pursuits. They mistake extravagance for fulfillment.” He takes a measured sip from his glass, his gloved fingers resting lightly on its stem.

You nod, a genuine smile forming on your lips. “I could not agree more, Your Grace. There is a certain comfort in the unadorned pleasures of life. A good book, a quiet morning—these seem to me the most worthwhile indulgences.”

The corner of his mouth quirks up in what might pass as a rare smile. “Indeed. Though I daresay, quiet mornings are hard to come by when the season is in full swing.”

You let out a soft laugh, the sound almost swallowed by the music that swells across the room. “Quite so. I suppose we are all too busy chasing the next waltz or whispering about the latest Whistledown missive.”

At the mention of Whistledown, the Duke raises a brow, his expression a mixture of amusement and intrigue. “Ah, yes. Our ever-watchful chronicler. One wonders if she, too, finds time for quiet mornings.”

“I imagine she must,” you reply. “After all, how else would she craft such keen observations? A mind as sharp as hers surely requires moments of reflection.”

“Reflection, yes,” he murmurs, his gaze drifting briefly to the chandelier above, as if lost in thought. Then, returning his attention to you, he asks, “And what of you, Miss Itadori? Amidst the bustle, do you find moments to reflect?”

The question catches you off guard—not because it is intrusive, but because it is sincere. Few have ever asked you such things. You hesitate, then answer truthfully. “I try, Your Grace. Though I must admit, the season has left little room for it. It seems my every step is watched, my every word weighed. I sometimes wonder if I have forgotten how to simply be.”

His expression softens, and for a moment, you feel as though he truly sees you—not as the diamond of the season, not as the subject of idle gossip, but as a person. “That is a heavy burden to bear,” he says quietly. “Perhaps it is time you allowed yourself a reprieve. Even diamonds require care, lest they lose their brilliance.”

The words settle over you like a balm, and you find yourself holding his gaze longer than propriety might dictate. There is no judgment in his eyes, only understanding. It is both comforting and disarming. Before you can respond, a burst of laughter from a nearby group breaks the spell. You glance away, suddenly aware of your surroundings once more. “You are kind to say so, Your Grace,” you murmur, your voice steadier than you feel.

“I merely speak the truth, Miss Itadori,” he replies, bowing his head slightly.

A pause lingers between you, not uncomfortable but weighty with unspoken thoughts. Finally, he clears his throat, his tone lighter as he says, “Would you care to take a turn about the room? I find the air here grows rather stifling.”

You smile, grateful for the excuse to move. “I would like that very much.”

As he offers his arm, you place your hand lightly upon it, allowing him to guide you into the throng. The music swells once more, and though the room is as noisy and crowded as ever, the world feels a little quieter with Duke Nanami by your side. You can see it—early mornings with Nanami, enjoying gentle banter as he returned your thoughts without any ire, without snark or judgment. Quiet respect and gentle affection filling your days. A life free of chaos, where your worries dissipate into the steady calm of his demeanor. Perhaps this could be happiness. A steady, uncomplicated happiness.

But then you see him.

You abhor your traitorous heart for lurching ever so slightly at the sight of Gojo. He is standing near the edge of the ballroom, the golden light catching on his shock of silver hair as though it had been crafted to draw attention. His smile—always so bright, so effortless—makes the lady beside him laugh. She looks at him with a sultry, yet detached and amused expression, her fan flicking lazily as if to dismiss her own growing interest.

Your chest tightens. You know this scene well. It is one you have observed too many times, and yet you have never been able to steel yourself against the sting it brings. The way he leans ever so slightly toward the lady, as though she were the only person in the room. The way his laughter echoes, a sound full of mirth and mischief, as if he had no weight upon his shoulders.

You tell yourself it doesn’t matter. You tell yourself he doesn’t matter.

But then, as though he feels the weight of your gaze, Gojo turns his head. Your pulse quickens as his eyes widen, the usual lazy charm momentarily replaced by something sharper, something you can’t quite place.

First, his gaze lands on your face, his eyes sweeping over it with a quickness that feels like a jolt to your chest. Then, they drop lower, and you feel the heat of his scrutiny settle uncomfortably on your chest. A flicker of something crosses his expression—shock, perhaps, or something else entirely—but before you can decipher it, his gaze moves again, lower still, to where your hand rests upon the Duke’s arm.

It is subtle, the way his jaw tightens. The way his smile falters, only to return a moment later, forced and brittle. He shifts his weight, turning back toward the lady at his side, but not before you catch the way his fingers twitch at his side.

You force yourself to look away, to focus instead on Duke Nanami’s steady presence beside you. He has not noticed the exchange—or if he has, he is far too polite to show it.

And yet, the moment lingers. Gojo’s image burns in your mind like the fading glow of a candle, stubbornly refusing to extinguish. You loathe the way your heart betrays you, its treacherous rhythm quickened not by the Duke’s calm assurance, but by the mere sight of a man who has always been more trouble than he’s worth.

Nanami’s voice cuts through your tumultuous thoughts, soft and grounding. “You seem distracted, Miss Itadori,” he remarks, his gaze kind but curious.

You manage a small smile, tightening your grip on his arm as though it might anchor you. “Not at all, Your Grace. Perhaps just…overwhelmed by the crowd.”

He nods, accepting your answer without pressing further. “Understandable. These gatherings can be rather tiresome.”

“Yes,” you murmur, casting one last glance in Gojo’s direction before forcing your focus back to the Duke. “Tiresome indeed.”

But even as you walk beside Nanami, his presence a welcome reprieve from the chaos of the evening, you cannot help but feel the weight of Gojo’s lingering gaze, the memory of his startled expression etched into your thoughts like a brand. You cannot help but observe the situation. Tonight, you would be ending the night on Duke Nanami’s arm, and Gojo with another woman.

Is this not what you both wanted?

Today, it seems that the usual trio at White’s is only a duo. The blonde and raven head swirl their alcohol in their shimmering glasses while sharing a comfortable silence. That is, until one interrupts.

“How do we know we’re not simply toying with her?” The blonde man’s voice is steady but tinged with unease, his lips pressed into a thin line as he glances toward his companion. “It would not be honorable of me to pursue Miss Itadori under the pretense of riling Gojo, as you seem intent on doing—”

“Kento!” The raven-haired man—Lord Geto—throws his head back in laughter, the sound rich and unapologetically amused. He leans forward slightly, propping his elbow on the armrest, as his grin widens. “So confident in your lady-pleasing and romancing abilities, aren’t you?” Nanami’s frown deepens, but Geto merely waves him off, his laughter subsiding to a mischievous chuckle. “No, no—don’t worry. You misunderstand me. This isn’t about Miss Itadori falling for you, though,” he smirks, “I’m sure you’d manage well enough.” His tone is teasing, but his words lack any true malice.

“Then what is it about?” Nanami’s voice carries a note of exasperation, though he remains as composed as ever, swirling his drink in quiet contemplation.

Geto straightens, a glint of something sharper flashing in his dark eyes. “It’s about them. They’re idiots, Kento—idiots in love, the both of them. And it is our duty, as Satoru’s friends,” he pauses, meeting Nanami’s gaze with deliberate emphasis, “to help him realize what he truly desires.”

Nanami snorts, setting his glass down with a muted clink. “You just want to toy with them, to orchestrate the ton and its leading source of gossip.”

The corner of Geto’s mouth quirks upward in a sly smile, one that practically oozes self-satisfaction. “That, my dear friend,” he says, his voice low and conspiratorial, “I cannot deny.”

They lapse into silence once more, the kind that only years of friendship can create, as the firelight flickers and dances on the walls around them. Nanami tips his glass back, savoring the warmth of the whiskey as he contemplates Geto’s words—and the inevitable chaos that would follow in their wake.

prev. the house party | next. the lake

general masterlist | series masterlist

a/n HEYYY POOKIES IT'S HERE IT'S HERE WHAT DID WE THINK. also here is the bridgerton!gojo playlist if anyone is interested!!! i apologize it is 99% taylor swift but i will be adding more diverse songs

despite the miss itadori hate in recent times our girl is BOUNCING BACKK #mogged i cant wait for her to become even more of a diva in the next few chapterssss!!!! (not rn shes going through her sad girl era or wtvr)

suguru (left) and nanami (right) at this whole drama

also i hope none of you WHORESSSS simped for geto when we made eye contact with him (im looking at zaynesbathrobe anon and all those anons that are obsessed with bridgerton!geto). stay FOCUSED girls gays and theys

thank you for readinggggg. a hot new bombshell will be entering the villa in the next few chapters can we guess who he is??? hint he has huge tits and smelly balls

comment and reblog to let me know ur thots ;3

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