#.my work

[kylorens]

The Terminator (1984) Deleted Scene

[drivinmeinsane]

Snow ※ 12 Days of Goosemas

Day Four ※ Sierra Six / Reader

{12 Days of Goosemas Masterlist} ※ {Regular Masterlist} ※ {ao3}

※ Summary: You expected a quiet night in, but that changes when you follow a trail into the trees.

※ Rating: No mature content.

※ Content/Tags: Pre-relationship, Treatment of injuries, Caretaking

※ Word count: 1920

※ Status: Oneshot/Complete

Of course you notice that the log basket by the fireplace is empty when you’re already sprawled out on the couch, remote in hand, Christmas tree plugged in, and fully prepared to settle in for the night. You grumble as you get up and pull on your boots and your coat. Grabbing your flashlight, you open the back door and step out into the cold. You’re nearly to the shed when the beam of light picks up something unusual in its field. You come to a complete stop and examine the ground with a growing sense of horror.

The snow is churned up, something had clearly come through here recently enough. Probably within the past hour or so while you had been snugly tucked into your remotely located home. You can make out footprints. Human, likely belonging to a tall male judging from the size and the distance apart. They’re messy like the maker had been stumbling along. Your flashlight picks up dark blotches on the white. Blood. You look up, frantically scanning your surroundings for a sign of who might have left this path across your yard. There’s nothing other than the trail that leads off into the woods. 

You silently backtrack to your home to grab the hunting rifle leaning against the wall in the coat closet, an assurance for living out in the middle of nowhere in the wooded hills. Feeling like a side character in a cheaply stereotypical horror movie, you go back outside to follow the trail. Flashlight off now that you’re in pursuit. You desperately want to nope out of the situation, but there is no one else around for miles to handle this. You push follow the path into the thicket. There’s a shape huddled at the base of a tree not far into the brush. 

The moonlight is blocked by the branches, so you resignedly turn your flashlight on to illuminate the figure. It reveals a man dressed in bloodstained street clothes. He’s slumped forward so you can’t see his face, but his jeans are covered in a mixture of blood and snow. Some of the blood is glossy, fresh, but most of it is frozen. He is only wearing a thin windbreaker for warmth. There’s a gun resting on his lap. His fingers are slack around it, not even holding onto the weapon. They look waxy and stiff. Only his labored breathing lets you know that he’s alive. 

“Hey.” He doesn’t respond to your slightly hesitant yell so you nudge his foot with the tip of your boot and try again, louder. “Hey!”

No movement, or any awareness of you at all. He just continues breathing like each exhale might be his last. Emergency services are at least forty-five minutes away, if they are even able to get through the snow at all tonight. 

Gritting your teeth, you inch forward to kick the man’s outstretched leg. “Hey!”

That finally gets a response. The stranger groans and lifts his head up. He squints against the bright light you have pointed at his face and raises a shaky hand to block it. You shift so you’re pointing the rifle at him in case he gets it in his head to make any sudden movements. 

“Put your other hand up too,” you order him. He complies, leaving the handgun on his lap. You can barely hear your voice over the pounding of your own heart. “What are you doing out here? You’re on my land.”

His mouth works a couple of times before he’s able to speak. When he does, his voice is hoarse. “Sorry. I got turned around.”

“Yeah? Why are you so messed up if you just ‘got turned around’?”

“Had to jump out of a moving car. The people I was with didn’t appreciate that much.” He sounds so serious that you raise your eyebrows in disbelief. 

“Are you going to be trouble for me?”

“Probably not.”

“Are you going to hurt me?”

“No.” His answer is immediate, out of his mouth before your question has the chance to linger in the air.

Against your better judgment, you take his word at face value and tuck your rifle under your arm, pointed away at him. His handgun gets stowed in your waistband before you help him to his feet and sling his arm over your shoulder. The arm not occupied by your own gun gets wrapped around him. Your knees nearly buckle under the weight of him. It’s slow going to your back door. He seems to be intermittently losing consciousness. On the second of the three steps leading to the small porch, his foot drags and slips out from under him. He nearly takes the both of you down. 

“C’mon,” you grit out and bodily haul him up the final stair.

The stranger slumps in your hold as you get the door open and all but drag him into your kitchen. He comes to enough to stagger through to the living room. You more or less drop him onto the couch. He sags limply into the cushions like a puppet with its strings severed.

“Can I call for medical help or do you need me to try to do a patch job?”

“Please don’t call anyone. I’ll be fine.”

You exhale hard, nerves jangling. Patch job it is. “Sit tight.” 

Leaving him alone and dripping melting snow all over your couch, you gather a couple towels and the medical kit that you keep well stocked for emergencies. He is exactly as you left him when you come back in the room laden down like a pack pony. You put the supplies on the seat next to him. 

“What’s your name?”

“Six.”

You want to comment on how that’s obviously not a real name, but you bite your tongue and swallow the words down. It’s not your business. Keeping him from dying on your couch is your business. 

Without any further preamble, you wrestle him out of his wet clothing, leaving him in just the underwear you don’t dare to touch. Once he is stripped naked, you start examining his body to find the source of the blood. You find it immediately, but your eyes can’t help but take in the rest of him. Six, as he calls himself, is muscular, but you knew that from how heavy he was over your shoulder and in the circle of his arm, but it’s the expanse of his injuries that is more notable. It’s unsettling. He’s marked with old scars and fresher ones that are still uncomfortably raw and pink. You don’t think you want to know what this strange man does for a living. It looks as though several people have tried to kill him over the years, admittedly with limited success if his presence in your home is any indication.

Ignoring the rest of his body, you focus on the sizable gash in his size. A bullet must have burned its way across his side at a close range judging from the singeing around the edges of the wound. It’s still sluggishly bleeding, but it’s thankfully shallow enough to not be fatal in the short term. You wet a piece of gauze with disinfectant and press it against the wound. Six does not so much as flinch. He looks resigned to the pain when you glance at his face to gauge his reaction. You pinch the sides of the injury together and secure it with several meticulously placed butterfly bandages to keep it closed. Holding a thick gauze pad on the wound with your hand, you wind vet wrap around his abdomen to hold it in place. It should serve to put pressure on it to restrict the chance of bleeding and further trauma to the sight.

You’re relieved to discover that the rest of his injuries are minor in comparison. He has a slightly sprained wrist that you stabilize with more vet wrap. Unfortunately, he is covered in scrapes and abrasions. All you can do for them is to put a large band-aid on the worst of the road rash. It’s next to a tattoo that says something in Greek. Your stranger appears to be more well-versed in literature than you might have expected, not just a thug despite the obviously prison quality tattoos. 

Injuries aside, the man feels concerningly cold due to the exposure to the freezing temperatures and not insignificant blood loss. You realize that if you had been more prepared and hadn’t needed to restock your log barrel, he would have likely succumbed to the elements right outside of your home. The thought of finding his body in the morning makes you shiver reflexively. You push that line of thinking aside and pick up one of the towels. You hold it in both hands and rub his extremities in between your cloth covered palms, trying to encourage circulation back into his body. It works. His fingers lose their waxy appearance and his body temperature seems to level back out. He starts shivering, a good sign that means there is no more need to worry about hypothermia. You take the fresher towel and dry his sodden hair before wiping his torso clean. His shivering gradually subsides as you work. He’s dozing off, breath whistling through his nose. Some of the tension has left his face. 

Once you’re finished with him, you finally fetch the logs from the shed. On your way, you take the time to disturb the tracks. Even though it’s still snowing, you do not want to take the chance that they will be discernible by a hostile party. Knowing that you will be cleaning up anyway after you put your unexpected guest to bed, you don’t take any great pains to avoid tracking more snow into the house. 

You drop your armful of logs into the basket and put a couple of them into the fireplace. They should last a while. You approach the couch, catching Six awake but not alert. He’s staring blankly at your Christmas tree, seemingly captivated by it. His eyes redirect unsteadily to you when you’re close enough to touch him. The man squints like he’s having a hard time seeing through his exhaustion.

“You an angel?”

You almost laugh, but he sounds so tired and so sincere. “No,” you tell him gently. He mumbles something unintelligible in response.

Crouching at his side, you take hold of his legs and guide him until he’s laying down, curled on his non-injured side on the cushions. Six manages to lift his head enough for you to shove a decorative pillow under it. His eyes slip closed when you cover him with the throw blankets that you always keep in the living room. You practically tuck him in. Just before you withdraw, you impulsively smooth his hair back and press a kiss to his forehead. Something in your heart tells you that he could use the comforting gesture. 

You pull away, satisfied that he’ll make it through the night and that you will be able to get some food into him in the morning. Just as you turn to leave to start cleaning up the mess that has been left in the wake of his arrival, you’re brought to a halt. Six’s fingers are wrapped around your wrist just long enough to make you pause before he lets go. 

“Thank you,” he says, muffled against the pillow.

Your face softens and you feel the corners of your lips rise in a smile. “You’re welcome."

[cubestrahm]

»{ Mark Hoffman x Peter Strahm }« ✦ { ao3 }

next chapter -»

✦ Summary: This moment in time feels inevitable. It is as though Peter was always meant to wind up in the crushing dark with Mark Hoffman, tangled in a deadly situation that neither man can escape from unscathed. ✦ Rating: 18+ for explicit mature content. ✦ Content/tags: Background Angelina Acomb/Lindsey Perez, Alternate Universe - Diners, Slow Burn, Canonical Character Death, Canon Typical Gore, Detailed Descriptions of Wounds, Improper Wound Care, Non-Sexual Nudity, Cannibalistic Thoughts, Mild Feeding Kink, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Divorced Peter Strahm ✦ Word count: 6,488 ✦ Status: Multi-chapter / Ongoing ✦ Author's note: Shout-out to @danime25/@hoffstrap-yuri. I wouldn't be chest deep in Saw hell if it weren't for her. ♥

Rhythmic passes of a damp cloth on a laminate counter, steady whooshes of breath as his body leans into each motion of his arm; this is as calm as Peter Strahm ever feels. Repetitive actions keep his mind occupied enough to not wander in search of some pressing issue to fixate on. Not that there is much to endlessly turn over in his brain at the diner, but he can always find something.

A loud clang of the metal bells bouncing off the front door and the scuff of shoes against the wood floor heralds the arrival of customers. The first ones of the day. Peter doesn’t bother to look up, choosing instead to let Lindsey be the face of the establishment. He is convinced that she’s the only reason this place stays afloat. He’d have run everyone off with his demeanor ages ago if he were the sole owner. As a supervisor had once said to him, Peter would cut off his own nose to spite his face.

Barely listening to his partner’s cheery banter and the responding pleasantries of the customers—two of them, he notes, a man and a woman—he tosses the rag in the sanitation bucket before making his way to the coffee machine. It’s finished brewing the pot he’d started just five minutes ago. He dumps the used grounds and resets the machine with a new filter of freshly ground beans. When they hit a rush, coffee is the first thing to go. Early on, he and Lindsey learned that lesson the hard way. Customers get downright vicious when they can't get their caffeine fix the instant they want it.

“Pete,” Lindsey says, sliding up alongside him behind the counter.

“Mm,” he responds as he takes the offered ticket from her hand. He looks over the order. Simple. Easy. No substitutions or alterations. He can appreciate that. “Need anything before I get this made?”

“No, I’ll try to not burn the place down while you’re in the back though.”

He snorts, amused. If anyone was going to be engaging in pyromania during work hours, it would be him.

Peter retreats to the kitchen. His shoulders relax in the privacy beyond the swinging door. He is used to eyes being on him, every moment analyzed and critiqued, but solace suits him better. He doesn’t have to put on the thin veneer of normalcy that he’s capable of.

Steady hands prepare the ingredients before laying them on the grill top. Cooking is immersive work, a different kind of toil than when he was in the FBI. The constant examination for guilt, the way he would dirty his hands with the worst humanity had to offer… it took a toll on him. He lost himself in his job. Back then, most days, he felt like he should be the one handcuffed to the table while an agent berated him with rapid-fire questions. He had gathered up parts of every criminal he ever investigated. Strahm had ingested those pieces like poison until they had become a part of him, lining his internal organs and threatening to spread like a cancer.

The only thing that had kept him from going into the restroom and closing his lips around the barrel of his own handgun at work had been Lindsey. There had been a day when he was uncharacteristically tidying his papers on his desk and she looked up from where her own desk butted right against his. She had taken in the sight of his drawn, exhausted face, the bags under his bloodshot eyes, and the faint tremor in his hands. She had known. She’d stood up, nearly sending her desk chair halfway across the room on its wobbly wheels. His partner had reached over their computer monitors and grabbed onto his forearm with determined desperation. She’d said, “Fuck this, we’re done.”

They had opened the diner five months later.

Conceptualizing the place had started off as a pipe dream between two friends. Strahm had cooked for Lindsey some nights, when there was a sliver of down time. He’d been the one to teach her how to make more than oven pizzas and the occasional grilled cheese. He had also been the one who taught her how to shoot a man in the chest without flinching.

Five years, they’d worked together as agents for the FBI. Lindsey had been fresh out of the academy, and he’d already begun his downward spiral when they were assigned one another. No one else had wanted the woman rookie or the wild-eyed man they swore must be doing drugs to be acting the way he did, no matter how many piss tests came back clean. Two misfits.

Their coworkers and supervisors thought that he would make her cry, that he would destroy her confidence. Hell, they’d hoped he would go so far as to convince her that a woman didn’t belong at the boys’ table. Instead, Strahm realized that there was someone he could be bothered to live for.

He plates the two meals, reminiscing over and set aside for now. Fingers long since desensitized to the feeling of hot ceramic against them, he carries one plate in each hand to the dining area. The man and the woman are still the only customers. It’s a small town. It’s far enough from the main city that they don’t get much traffic out here this early in the morning. Usually, their clientele starts trickling in a couple hours after they open. It’s a motley assortment of people. They get folks from all walks of life seeking a seat at their secondhand tables. Money had been tight when they opened the place. Now, they keep the mismatched furniture as part of the place’s charm. He leaves the decor up to Lindsey.

As Peter makes his way to the dark haired pair seated at a table by the windows that span the front of the diner, initial thoughts that they might be a couple are blown away by the way the two of them are interacting. She’s engaging in five finger fillet with the straw for her orange juice. The hand that she’s playing the game with belongs to her resigned companion rather than herself. They must be siblings in one way or another.

“Here you go,” he sets the plates in front of them. “Anything else I can get you?”

“Yeah,” the seated man says. He’s wearing a suit. There is a flash of something at his hip. A gun and a badge. Strahm realizes that the man is a cop. Great. “Some decent coffee would be nice.” Peter’s eyebrows shoot up at the brazen rudeness. Across the table, the woman hisses, “Mark! What the fuck!” and swats at the officer.

The man isn’t deterred, just continues to stare Peter down with a dumb look in his blue eyes and a faint curl to his overly large, fish-like lips. Strahm hates him immediately. His dislike is only furthered by the realization that the seated cop’s buttons are straining across his chest. Could he not afford better fitting shirts? Or is he just too stupid to know his own size? Peter isn’t completely sure, but he’s willing to hazard the guess it might be the latter.

He grits his teeth and puts on a smile that’s more similar to a snarl than a genuine stab at pleasantry. “And what’s wrong with it?”

“It tastes like it’s been sitting out for hours,” he says, wincing only a little when the woman manages to land a solid kick against his shin. Peter wishes he could also dig the tip of his shoe into that yielding body.

Snatching the mug off the counter, he barely avoids the impulse to dump it on the cop’s lap and give him something to actually complain about. He doesn’t quite storm off to the narrow space behind the counter but it’s a close thing. He still carries his anger around his throat like a noose. Leaving the FBI hadn’t changed that.

The expression on his face is thunderous enough that Lindsey looks alarmed. Rightfully so. “What’s wrong?”

“Jackass cop. They always think they can come in here and push everyone around. That one probably jerks off onto his badge every night.” He feels a muscle jump in his jaw.

“That was… descriptive.”

“Sorry,” he mutters, ditching the mug on the counter by the machine and picking up the glass coffeepot and a fresh mug.

Peter strides back over to the occupied table. He sets down the mug with a hard thud on the tablecloth-covered wood, enough so that the table rattles with the force of it. It’s a miracle the ceramic doesn’t shatter. Neither of the two men look away from each other as he slowly pours the dark liquid. Only rising steam blocks their view, faltering and diverting as though it were afraid to be in the middle of them.

He fills the mug as high as he can get it, surface tension being the only thing keeping the coffee contained. It will be impossible to pick up without spilling. The cop is going to have to drink from it like a dog if he wants it at all.

“Thank you, Peter.” His voice is low, throaty.

Strahm startles at the use of his first name. His fingers reflexively clench into a fist. He perpetually forgets about the name tags that Lindsey insists they both wear despite her being the only one he has ever grown accustomed to calling him anything but some variation of “Agent” and “Strahm.” Of course this bloated asshole would be presumptuous enough use his name.

Choosing not to respond, he leaves the table and retreats to the sanctuary behind the counter. Any satisfaction he might have felt at watching his customer debase himself is dashed when Mark seeks out his eyes once again with his own as he lowers his face to the table and presses those absurdly full lips against the rim of the coffee mug. Peter can’t look away as he watches Mark’s throat engage in gulping swallows to drain the mug to the point where he can pick it up and drink from it like a slightly more civilized ape. He doesn’t realize he’s trembling, nearly vibrating in place, until his partner taps him on the arm and takes the glass carafe from his hand.

Lindsey attends to the pair from that point on. He lets her. They both know things might escalate, with his fuse being an oil soaked scrap of already burning twine.

The cop is perfectly nice to her, even smiling and thanking her for another coffee refill. Strahm can still feel the other man’s eyes rest on him from time to time. There’s something about the weight of his stare that makes him want to scratch at a phantom itch under his collar until blood burrows its way beneath his nails.

He finds his relief when Lindsey brings out the bill. Mark leaves his sister behind to pay after he hands her his wallet. She approaches the register with the slip of paper, looking meeker, somehow smaller, without her brother around. He barely keeps the frown off his face at her body language. There’s a nervous look in her eyes.

“I’m so sorry about my brother. I don’t know what got into him. He’s never like that.”

She sounds so sincere that he feels his frustration ease off the gas a little. It wouldn’t be right of him to be pissed at her just because she has an asshole for a sibling. “Ah, don’t worry about it.”

“Please, keep the change,” she says, handing him a wad of bills.

He pauses, fingertips already on the smaller denominations in the cash drawer. “This is too much, really.”

“Call it a…” she raises her fingers in scare quotes, “‘Markup’.”

Strahm sighs. Both siblings are intolerable.

“Alright then…?”

“Angelina. Angie.”

“Have a nice day, Angelina.” He very politely does not tell her to inform her brother to go fuck himself. Preferably with his own loaded gun. Safety off.

The young woman gives a little wave to Lindsey on her way out the door. His partner cheerfully returns it, her other arm laden down with the pair’s used plates. Peter loops around the counter to help her with bussing the table. He snatches up a clean rag on the way.

He’s not quite sure why the other man got under his skin so badly. It chafes at him. They have had more than a couple blowhard cops in the diner before, but they’ve never invoked the same visceral reaction from Strahm as Mark had. At least he can find solace in knowing that he will probably never have to see them again. They hadn’t seemed like locals, and it’s unlikely they’ll return, especially given the cop’s behavior towards him.

Hours pass, evening finally settles in after a long day. Diner traffic had ebbed and flowed along the usual patterns after the two siblings had left. Strahm and Perez had had the their typical rush around eight, followed by another burst of customers around noon, and the final crowd at six. There had been nothing else out of the ordinary to get Peter’s hackles up.

“Go on home, Linds,” he says to his partner as he flips the last chair onto one of the tables. He doesn’t want her to be stuck here all night while he meticulously combs over the diner in preparation for opening in the morning.

She stops, looks over at him with raised eyebrows. She’s got one hand on the dustpan and the other wrapped around the broom. “You sure?”

“Yeah, I could use the time to—“

“Get your homicidal urges under control?” she suggests with a grin.

He doesn’t dignify Lindsey with a response, just takes the broom from her before gently pressing his knuckles to her back to nudge her in the direction of the counter. “I’ll see you in the morning. Shoot me a message when you get home.”

“Oh, I’ll shoot you alright,” the woman mutters as she goes and gets her coat and purse.

“I wish you would. It would save me the trouble of doing it myself,” he calls after her.

The look he gets in return, all scrunched eyes and pursed lips, makes him smile. Lindsey’s “agent special”, as they jokingly call the expression they both slip into when agitated, would be enough to sour milk. He and his partner aren’t all that different. Their mannerisms have blurred together over the years. Lindsey is still his better half, though. She always will be.

“’Night, Pete.” She pauses with her hand on the front door’s handle. “You let me know too. When you get back to your place.”

“Goodnight,” he says, grudgingly tacking on “I will.” when she clears her throat in a pointed demand.

He finishes sweeping and is in the middle of mopping when his phone vibrates in the front pocket of his jeans. Without looking, he knows it’s the message from Lindsey. Still, he pulls the device out anyway and flips it open.

The text illuminated on the screen reads Im home :) Dont forget 2 eat

Satisfied that she’s safe, he doesn’t pick at the number pad and work up a reply. Peter merely closes the phone and returns it to his pocket. He’ll be messaging Lindsey about his return to his shitty rental soon enough. He’s almost done here, will be once he’s combed over every final detail down to the level the salt shakers are filled to. Strahm can’t help but treat every night at the diner like a case. All the parts have to be arranged in just the right order to construct the whole picture.

───※ ·❆· ※───

Early riser, is the first thing Strahm thinks the next morning when he hears the bells clatter against the glass of the front door. It is barely five minutes past six. Lindsey is in the back wrangling the day’s special; muffins. Much to his mixture of pride and chagrin, she’s become a substantially better baker than he. She has the patience for it.

“Welcome in,” he says, not looking up from the inventory list he’s in the middle of putting together.

He is going to have to call in an order to their supplier before noon today if they want it by Friday, which they do. Business is going to be elevated above average due to a local softball game on Saturday. One of them will be tasked with catering the event while the other stays behind to run the diner. He and Lindsey are going to have to draw straws for who gets what job. Peter is sure that she’s going to rig the game by changing the rules once the results are in so that she has be the person to go. His customer skills are better left unpracticed.

“Thanks, Peter,” comes a familiar voice.

Nearly snapping his own damn neck when he jerks his head up, he looks at the speaker. It’s Mark. He is holding the door open with a glove-clad hand for his presumed saint of a sister.

Anger sparks along his spine. He had bet wrong on never seeing the cop again, and with an aggressive motion, he snatches up only one menu. It’s only when he’s halfway to their table that he realizes he is rapidly clicking the pen he was using to write down notes for the order. He forces himself to stop.

Strahm can’t help but notice the other man is dressed the same as he was yesterday. He’s wearing the black blazer again, silk shirt is straining over his—what Peter can only call—breasts. He catches the sight of a thick suspender strap pressing into the softness of his chest, and finds that he has to look away and focus carefully on the menu he’s setting on the table in front of Angelina. He can tell that the other man is eyeing him questioningly.

“Where’s mine?” the cop asks, falling right into the trap Peter had impulsively set for him.

Turning to him with a fake as shit, winning smile, he says, “I thought your sister would be reading it to you. On account of you being a brain-damaged neanderthal.”

While Mark looks at him unblinkingly for a long moment and Angelina tries to smother her shocked laugh, Peter doesn’t let go of the smile. He rubs this thumb over the pen as he waits patiently for the cop to speak.

“Hm,” Mark finally says, considering, “Mother always did love dropping me on my head.”

Peter’s grin wavers, thinking the man might not be joking. His tone had been too serious. The amused expression falls off his face completely.

Fuck, he thinks, feeling a tinge of horror. Lindsey is going to kill him if he doesn’t kill himself first. Mark’s sister has her face buried in her hands. He’s royally cocked this up. He’s on the verge of apologizing when—

“I’m joking, Pete. I thought we were all friends here.”

Strahm relaxes, just marginally, but then Mark speaks again “Besides, I didn’t have a mother. In fact, you might be onto som—”

Peter interrupts him, turning to Angie, “What can I get you started with?”

“Orange juice, and some coffee for Oliver Twist over there.”

“Did you take him to the vet to get his taste buds looked at?” He’s still reflexively tapping his thumb against the clicker of the pen, not hard enough to trigger the mechanism.

She snaps her fingers, a smile playing at her mouth. “Damn, I forgot. I’m sure he’ll be nice this time,” she emphasizes with a pointed look at her brother.

Unable to help himself, he hazards a glance at the cop as well. Mark, upon realizing he’s being observed, darts his eyes from Peter’s right hand to his face. There’s something off about his expression, only furthered by a hard swallow. He looks almost… No. The idiot is probably just creaming himself over the thought of breakfast.

“I’ll be right out with that.”

When he pushes through the swinging door into the kitchen, he finds Lindsey pulling out another tray of muffins. She slides them onto the wheeled cooling rack and hums along to the radio blasting dad rock. His partner looks over at him with a smile. “Got a customer already?”

“Yeah,” he grumbles, snagging a glass serving decanter off a shelf, “jerkoff cop and his sister from yesterday.”

Peter can hear the frown in her voice as she speaks. “Want me to handle them?”

“No. I got it,” he calls on his way to the walk-in, decanter in hand. He fills it with orange juice from the dispenser before slipping out of the cooler and back into the main room of the kitchen to find and wrangle the lid onto the glass vessel.

Perez speaks like he hadn’t walked off, used to his comings and goings, “I’ll take the softball game then.”

“Not your call,” he says, thumbs bleaching white as he presses the sloped, metal lid down into the decanter until the rubber seal catches.

“Sure is, buddy. You’ll be using up all your goodwill today. I don’t want you terrorizing entire families this weekend. It’s bad for business.”

The retired agent lets out a ragged sigh on his way through the swinging door, finding himself unable to disagree. He knows his own limits, as much as he resents them, and so does Lindsey. Unlike her, he is willing to ignore them if it means getting the job done. It’s a miracle how she’s managed to stick around all these years. No one else has managed to tolerate his unwavering dedication. His first wife had left him for turning a blind eye to everything other than work, and the second had done the same for his devotion to Lindsey. Strahm is ever the dog with a bone, gnawing until he has reached the marrow and licked away every last trace of it.

He loves Perez like the sister he never got to have. Peter has both put his life on the line for her and taken the lives of other people for her continued survival. He has the unfortunate affliction of being willing to do anything for her, even going so far as to let her take some of the burden of this job off his shoulders. Atlas gets to have a partner.

Fetching a glass from under the counter, he tops it off with orange juice before stashing the serving jug in the mini-fridge where they keep the other cold items they need close at hand throughout the day—beverage pitchers, whipped cream, sliced lemons, the works.

Laughter travels across the diner, quick-footed and noisy. Strahm looks up at the interruption. The cop is holding the menu upside down and attempting to read the inverted text as he trails a thick finger over the print. He clearly cares about his sister. The love is written all over his stupid face, so thick that it’s enough to choke on.

Tamping down any lingering irritation as best as he can, Peter makes his way over to the siblings’ table. He is careful when he sets Angelina’s glass of orange juice down but doesn’t take the same care in the dismissive way he thunks Mark’s empty mug on the surface.

“Decided what you want yet?” he asks, pouring too much coffee into the mug in a repetition of yesterday. It laps the rim, begging to escape over the side.

At Angelina’s affirmative, Strahm sets the coffee carafe on the table and withdraws the notepad from his belt. While he jots down their order, he can’t help but be unsure if Mark is actually stupid or if he is just pretending. Either way, the man grates at him in such a way that he’d like to sink his fist into his face. It might relieve the inexplicable feeling crawling around under his skin like its trying to make a home. If he doesn’t act, it might buy real estate nestled away somewhere under his ribs.

Once he has everything marked down, he trades places with Lindsey after passing her the coffeepot and cooks the meal up in the back while she mans the front. They swap again as soon as he serves the places.

Behind the counter, he works at finishing up the restock order. Peter keeps finding his eyes wandering to the eating man rather than the task at hand. The solitude of the front only serves to allow him all the free rein he could possibly want to watch the man consume the meal Strahm had put in front of him. Each mouthful, each bob of that thick neck as he swallows, the tines of the fork disappearing between those overfilled lips; there’s something about it that he cannot look away from.

For now, he tells himself that the rapt attention is borne of disgust, that he’s watching for a complaint so he has cause to let out the aggression boiling inside of him. Later, once he has closed the diner for the night, he tries to convince himself that the tinge of satisfaction he’s feeling in this moment is because he is looking at proof of a job well done. The cop is clearly enjoying his food, and Strahm takes pride in his work.

Either way, he ignores the stirring that he feels in his jeans. He curses himself under his breath and puts all his focus into finishing the list he should have been locked into all along. He barely marks down the last item on the sheet before Lindsey pops through the swinging door, flushed from having completed her baking.

She ducks right under his arm and pulls the paper out from under his hand. Lindsey ignores his outraged noise. “Is this everything?”

“Yeah. Business has been picking up.”

“Mmm… Go water the plants for me? I’ll take over here.”

His partner makes a shooing gesture at him. She had been the one who insisted they have flowers in front of the diner and around the lot’s tree. Of course, the task of caring for them has fallen to Peter. He’d seen the state of her houseplants time and time again. Each of them inevitably finds a place at his rental home, handed over by a sheepish Lindsey. He all but has a jungle tucked away in his living room. Perez has many qualities. Unfortunately, a green thumb is not among them.

Casting a quick glance over at the table, he sees that the siblings are nearly done. They will be needing the check soon.

“Fine,” he says, giving in. It’s probably better for everyone is he’s not looking at the cop.

The bell chimes as he ducks out the front door. He checks the soil before he bothers to get the hose. In doing so, he finds out that Lindsey was right, the plants do need watered.

Peter is in the middle of watering the bed under the window when a shadow falls over the box. It consumes his, merges with it to create a twisted creature. There is something familiar in that figure, something deep in the core of his body groans in approval. Everything else fades away for a moment as he quietly observes it.

“Angie told me to apologize.”

Peter jerks, surprised by the rolling voice behind him. His finger slips off the sprayer. The water cuts off abruptly. He narrowly avoids clutching at his chest with his free hand like a stereotypical old man having a heart attack. With his heart pounding in his ears, he turns around to face Mark. Strahm doesn’t spay the cop with the hose. He wants to.

“So are you?” he asks with forced nonchalance.

Mark considers him. Those pale eyes survey the damp patches on Strahm’s jeans where the water had blown back. His stare seems to catch on the wet patch of t-shirt clinging to his stomach. “I don’t know. Is there something in it for me if I do?”

Strahm feels his neck go hot. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say the other man is flirting.

“Depends on how good the apology is.” The words are out of his mouth before his brain catches up. Damn it, Strahm, damn it, he thinks. His tendency to spout out whatever leapt to his tongue was a barely leashed thing that often broke free of its tether at the most inopportune of moments.

A smile curves the edges of Mark’s over-sized lips and the shorter man leans his bulk in just enough to make him feel cornered. Strahm has to fight not to react in any direction; either to shove him away or to pull him in. Disgust is warring with interest. He frowns. He barely knows this man. The retired agent would like to know what the fuck is wrong with him.

Sudden surprise flairs in those eyes and Mark withdraws, saying, “I’m sorry. Excuse me.”

Peter is left standing alone on the pavement, hose in hand, as the other man lumbers away to the navy Crown Victoria parked at the meter. He’s wet and confused. His jeans feel as tight as the scar cutting across his cheek.

───※ ·❆· ※───

Wednesday passes without further incident. Thursday’s only outstanding feature is the arrival of the order they had placed on Tuesday. Friday night sees Strahm helping to prepare everything for Lindsey’s catering on Saturday. There is no sign of Mark during the three day span. Only his sister stops by the diner. She gives no explanation for her brother’s absence and Peter does not ask.

Over the days, Strahm and Perez get to know Angelina. They learn that she loves her brother just as much as he loves her. She reveals that she and Mark were system kids. He has taken care of her like his own family since the moment they met at the home of shared foster parents. The adults had ended up not wanting Mark and despite only intending to send him back, they’d had to send both children away. Hoffman and Acomb had been stamped with a “do-not-separate” notice when Mark had later broken the nose of one of the staff members in response to being told they were going to be split up. Another family had wanted to foster just her.

Hoffman had filed for custody of her as soon as he aged out of the system and the means to show he could provide for her. He had been the youngest cop the precinct had assigned the role of detective to. Angie wishes her brother would hover less and worry about himself more. She thinks that he is burning the candle at both ends.

Over those days, Strahm’s worldview around the man shifts. The flames of disdain that had been raging inside of him peter out and turn into a charred bed of ash. He still wants to punch the man in the face, still wants to rough him up until he’s marked with the proof of Strahm’s fists—of his mouth—but he might soothe the man’s wounds afterwards with careful passes of his tongue.

───※ ·❆· ※───

Lindsey has just barely left for the softball field with her small truck laden down with the necessary food and supplies for the catering ordeal when the bell above the door jangles. Strahm looks up from the coffee filters he’s separating to see that it’s Mark. He is the first customer of the morning.

The detective doesn’t take a seat at the table, instead, he settles himself onto a stool at the counter. Strahm can’t help but notice that the seat Mark chooses is the one beside the stool that his sister has been occupying for the past few days. It’s as though his body instinctively knows where Angie resides and always keeps that space carved out for her. Peter is sure that if something were to ever happen to her, there would be a gaping hole in the detective’s life, a place where his sister should fill.

Something gives way in his chest at the sight of him. He’d never admit it, but he’s irrationally missed him.

“Morning,” he says, putting a mug down in front of him. He leaves enough room for Mark’s sugar this time as he pours the coffee in, unprompted. He’s being uncharacteristically nice. It could be that he’s making up for the lack of his partner. His rough edges can’t be too sharp when she’s not around to patch up the cuts he might make.

Any positive feelings at the other man being back at the diner are dashed when the first words out of his mouth aren’t a good morning in return, or even a thanks, but a “You wife has been getting real close with my sister. You guys a pineapple couple or what?”

Mark’s eyes are flat, deceptively calm. Uncomfortably, Peter feels as though he’s looking into the eyes of an attacking shark. He barely keeps the coffeepot he’s holding from slipping from his grasp. He’s suddenly all too aware of the wedding band weighing down his ring finger. It had been the same one from both his previous marriages. The retired FBI agent should have known the second marriage was doomed to fall apart from the moment he decided to not pick out new wedding rings with his fiancée. It probably hadn’t helped, that unbeknownst to ex-wife number two, he had proposed to her with the engagement ring he’d gotten back after the divorce of his first wife. Both women had been right to end their marriages to him. He’d been a shitty husband. His heart hadn’t been in it. Neither woman had been what he was really looking for.

On the Lindsey’s behalf, he’s offended for Mark even thinking she would stoop so low as to be married to him. She deserves better than his negligence and repression. He knows it and she knows it. In all the years that they’ve been partners, they have never done anything more than share a few awkward hugs.

“Lindsey and I aren’t married,” he says firmly.

“Just you then?”

“I’m not married. Neither of us are married.”

“You wear a ring. Seems awful married to me.”

“It keeps some of the old ladies from trying to mount me in the stock room,” he answers, dry.

They sit on that in silence. Strahm places the carafe back on the hotplate. Something nags at him. He turns to Mark only to find that he’s still staring at him. “What the fuck is a pineapple couple?”

“Swingers, Pete. I asked if you were a swinger.”

“What? No. Mark. No. No.”

The seated man looks strangely smug. “Good. I don’t share,” he says as if it were the most casual thing in the world and flips open a menu.

For a moment, Strahm thinks his brain shuts off. He reaches blindly for a rag out of the sanitizer bucket and starts scrubbing the counter with it. Mark’s voice comes to him like Peter is under water, distorted and faint.

“Eggs and bacon for me today. Some multigrain if you’ve got it.”

Pulling his notepad from his belt, Strahm scribbles down the order. He doesn’t need to but he needs to fight for a finger hold of normality here.

“Small breakfast. Sure you don’t want to stuff your mouth with anything else?” As soon as the words hit the air, Strahm wishes he could somehow suck them back in. Why is he forever incapable of thinking before he speaks?

Hoffman shrugs. “Nah, Angie’s not here to steal half the food off my plate. Besides, what I want isn't on the menu anyway.” His eyes feel like a physical caress as they map over Peter’s body. The meaning is blatant, not remotely subtle.

Peter opens his mouth, closes it.

“I’ll be back with that,” he says. On his way to the kitchen’s swinging door, he tries to keep his pace measured as he escapes Mark’s all too interested eyes. He doesn't want the detective to see how much their interaction has rattled him.

Once in the kitchen, he realizes that he needs to get ingredients out of the walk-in and pops the latch to step inside the small space. Instead of gathering what he had come for, Peter finds himself sitting on a tomato box. He leans back, pressing the sides of his clenched hands to his brow bone. Letting out a loud sigh that’s more of a growl, the diner owner sags into the cold metal of the wall behind it. The change in temperature is enough of a difference to shock his system back into some sense of reality.

What the fuck? he thinks, irritation creeping into his thoughts like an old friend. The detective had acted like he would gladly engage him in a physical fight over coffee and now he’s making overt passes at him. It’s enough to send his head spinning. Going over their interactions, he’s drawing the conclusion that perhaps the other man had been flirting with him since the start, trying different tactics to get his attention like a snot-nosed brat pulling a girl’s hair on the playground before realizing that honey catches more flies.

Being in the cooler finally catches up with him and he wastes no time in getting to his feet. He hates tight spaces, always has. Eventually, they make him feel like the walls are closing in inch by anxiety-inducing inch. A nonsensical section of his hind brain fears he will get crushed between them, rendered into a pool of fat floating atop pulpy innards and shattered bones.

Once free of the walk-in, he fries up the bacon and the eggs. He slips some toast onto the plate before carrying it out to the front. It’s hot against his fingers, the heat soaking through his callouses.

Peter has a moment to observe Mark when he pauses in the doorway. The swinging door is propped open against his elbow. The detective is sitting quietly, sketching something out on a napkin with the pen that Strahm must have unintentionally left behind after he took down the order. Once Mark catches sight of him, he flips the napkin over. As he does, Peter gets a glimpse of the drawing. It’s depicting something mechanical, like a medieval torture device made modern. An alarm bell clangs in the back of his head.

Neither of them bring up the drawing. Mark steadily tucks into his breakfast. Peter pretends not to be watching him. He thinks part of his brain dies when Mark has to lick away a smear of ketchup off his own lip. For a moment, Peter has the thought of his own tongue doing the work for the detective instead.

The retired agent ends up nearly snarling at him when he asks for a coffee refill.

next chapter -»

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Pick Up the Phone

Pairings: Keisuke Baji, Takashi Mitsuya, Shuji Hanma x Fem!Reader (Separate)

Genre: Angst, Fluff

Request: First of all, english isn't my first language so if i make any mistakes i apologize! and I hope you understand what I mean hahaha. So i was wondering if you could Please write something about the TR boys being scared that something might have happened to you. For example they're having beef with another Gang and they haven't heard anything from you in a few hours and you don't pick up your phone and answer their messages so they start to panic and go to your home to see if you're there. You're home and completely fine, nothing has happened to you. And after they explain what's wrong you comfort them and tell them everything is okay and they don't have to worry. Uh, I hope i didn't make too many mistakes Hahaha. I hope you like this request! I really love your Account and your work soo so much!! Much Love ❤️ - Anonymous

Warnings/Contains: angst, fluff, cursing, each of the guys are worried for you in their own way, Kei cares about you, Mitsuya finds you precious, Hanma might be a bit OC towards the end but I think the ending is sweet regardless.

wc: 4.2k

a/n: Don’t worry anon! Your English was great :3 thank you so much for your request! I only had ideas for these three but I hope you enjoy!

a(nother)/a/n: I finally got around to finishing this request yayyy. College is rough y’all but I love the outlet that writing these headcanons gives me. I hope you all enjoy and feel free to send more they just might take awhile ahaha

Keisuke baji

“C’mon, pick up, dammit.” Keisuke murmured under his breath. He was still a little out of breath from fighting a couple guys in an alleyway while on his way to your school to pick you up. He promised to grab food with you after your activities were done, but instead got caught up in a fight with some delinquents younger than him.

When he saw the time when he was done, he knew that you were most likely mad at him for ditching you, even though that wasn’t the case, and went home. That’s why now he was calling you while making his way over to your apartment.

“y/n, I swear to fucking god,” Keisuke sighed, having received your voicemail for the 5th time in a row. He knew that you were upset with him, but he didn’t think that it deserved you ignoring this many of his calls. Then again, what did he know? He always knew girls to be dramatic like that; at least the ones at his school were.

Reaching the red light of a crosswalk on a busy street, he groaned and cursed himself for not bringing his bike and parking it close to the school grounds today so that he could have picked you up quicker. Part of him regretted the fight, but at the same time was glad he got that energy out of his system so that it wouldn’t show when he eventually apologized to you.

As the crosswalk changed, signaling Keisuke that he could cross the street, he continued to run and thought back on the younger delinquents he had fought not 20 minutes ago. Why did they try to intentionally fight him anyway? And why were they heading in the same direction as he was as he walked to your school?

Using what little memory he had of the fight, despite it being not too long ago, he recalled that one of the guys called him by name. It didn’t shock him at the time, as he was well known for being a division captain of Toman, but the fact that they were also walking in the direction of your school made him warry.

You weren’t affiliated with Toman yourself, but you had met the guys before, and have even hung out with Emma on occasion; but, what if those delinquents he fought were making their way to your school to hurt you? He would never forgive himself if anything happened to you because of what he was involved with.

Eventually he made his way up the stairs of your apartment complex, knocking on your front door with a fervor that made you jump when you heard it from inside. Regardless, you hesitantly went to the door, looking through the peephole before sighing in relief at the sight of your boyfriend.

“Don’t girls always keep their phones on them?” Keisuke said as you opened the door, practically panting from how out of breath he was. “I’ve called you like 10 times.”

Your eyes widened at his ushered and hurried tone. “What’s wrong? Did something happen?” You asked, confused as to why he was in such dire need for you anyway. You then took in the scrapes and dirt he had on his face and school uniform. “Wait, did you get into a fight again?”

Keisuke stared at you for a second, wondering if you were deciding to play the long game with him as punishment for him not showing up to see you after school. “Are you serious?”

“Are you?” You asked, growing more confused as you pulled him inside your apartment and closed the door. “C’mon, let me at least clean you up.” Keisuke let you drag him to the bathroom before he finally spoke up again, his brain finally catching up with what was happening.

“Are you really pulling this bullshit with me right now?!” He snapped, making you freeze as you were grabbing the first aid kit from underneath the sink. “I know I forgot to pick you up after your club, but ignoring my calls, pretending like it never happened, and remaining pissy with me to make me feel worse while I was already worried about you when you weren’t there is even worse!”

You took in his words, hands going to your mouth as your eyes widened in realization. “I forgot..” You whispered.

“...what-”

“I forgot that we were hanging out after school today.” You said, dropping your hands so he could better understand you. “And my phone died during my club meeting.”

Keisuke’s gaze on you still depicted him as pissed off, but you were hoping that the gears of reality were turning in his head.

“I went straight home after my club. Oh my god, I’m so sorry.” You continued. “Were you waiting for me all this time?”

Your boyfriend sighed again, shaking his head. “No, I got caught in a fight on my way to your school and it lasted longer than intended cause those little shits didn’t know when they had lost.” He paused. “Then I was worried that they were on their way to hurt you since you’re affiliated with me.” His tone was soft, but it got louder again as though he had caught you in the act of doing something you weren’t supposed to.

“But you’re telling me that you forgot the plans that you made after whining to me about I don’t spend enough time with you?”

“...I love you-”

“You’re lucky I reciprocate.”

Takashi Mitsuya

Takashi frowned as he scrolled through all of the texts he had sent you in the last couple hours. It wasn’t like you to purposefully not reply to him, but to his knowledge you weren’t doing anything to keep yourself busy today.

Your club was tomorrow, you were running errands with your mom the day after, and your younger sister’s dance class was yesterday so you didn’t have to pick her up. To his knowledge you should be at home or with one of your other friends since the school day was over and he was busy doing things with Toman.

The more he thought about it, the more he got distracted and ended up being nudged in the back by Draken, making him nearly stumble and fall to the ground. “Hey, wake your ass up, Mitsuya. It’s not like you to be zoning out like that.”

“Right,” Takashi sighed. “Sorry, I’m just worried about y/n is all. She usually responds to me before the meeting starts so that I know she’s made it home or where to meet with her afterwards.”

“Yeah, yeah, we get it,” Baji cut in, clearly annoyed. “You’re happy. You don’t have to bore us about every single detail about your girlfriend.” He walked past Takashi, hitting his shoulder against his own. “We have a meeting to start and would appreciate it if you actually paid any attention rather than staring at your phone.”

“Shut up, Baji.” Mikey sighed, sounding exhausted from where he laid on his back at the top platform of the shrine. “If you keep annoying me and the others over meaningless crap then I might ban you from meetings.”

Takashi  shook his head at their bickering, looking back at his phone to see if he had any new messages from you; nothing.

He knew that he should have no reason to worry, but he knew it wasn’t like you to not message him like this. Maybe you needed some time for yourself, maybe you were doing homework, or even taking a nap after a long, tiring day; you were probably fine, he kept telling himself. He just wanted to be certain.

“C’mon, Mitsuya. Meeting’s starting.” Peh said, getting Takashi to stop zoning out. With a sigh, the man pocketed his phone to focus on his other focus in life: Toman.

Throughout the meeting, Takashi listened in on most of it, thinking back to you when hearing something that he was already aware of. One thing, however, that made him rethink it was Mikey’s reminder of a new gang on the east side of the city that had been making claims about beating Toman into the ground; in the part of town that your school happened to be in.

Takashi wasn’t sure if you were aware of this, as he didn’t want you to know too much about Toman and what happened within the group, but what if the new rival gang happened to have guys that went to your school? What if one of them saw you as you were heading home and decided to make a pass at you, or knew that you were dating Takashi and wanted to hurt you as a sign that they were serious about taking down Toman.

Multiple thoughts and outcomes continued to rack at his head, and as soon as the meeting ended, he made sure not to seem too rushed as he headed down the stairs of the shrine and to his bike. The moment he got on and started it, he made way to your apartment first in an attempt to put his mind at ease.

He felt his heart lift in relief as he saw the light in your bedroom window was on. Of course, that didn’t guarantee that you were home; he had to be certain.

It only took a few seconds for you to answer the door, but it felt like an eternity for Takashi. The moment he saw you, he pulled you in for a hug before you had the chance to say anything.

“Whoa,” you chuckled, hugging him back. “Good to see you too, babe.” You sounded calm and happy, so that was a good sign to Takashi. “You alright? You seem tense.” Takashi sighed at your words, pulling away so that he could take in your appearance.

It was clear that you had showered due to your pj’s, but hadn’t washed your hair tonight; that meant that you would most likely wear a hat or style it in a way that you typically didn’t if it didn’t look nice for you when you woke up. You could use your dry hair shampoo, but he knew that you were running low and couldn’t get a new bottle until next week. By your expression, he could tell that you were worried for him, but couldn’t figure out what could cause his own to make him look so relieved to see you. He figured that maybe you were thinking that the Toman meeting didn’t go well, and needed a break from it all. However, as he stared at you, rather than voice his relief, he first voiced his concern and worry due to your lack of communication throughout the afternoon and evening.

“I hadn’t heard from you since school ended.” He sighed, not wanting to make a big deal out of the situation. “I just wanted to make sure you were alright.”

Your expression fell out of shock and realization. “Did my messages not go through?” You sighed, now upset about the situation as well. “This is what I get for shopping with Emma last minute in a marketplace with terrible signal.”

“You went shopping with Emma?” Takashi repeated, following you as you retreated back into your apartment and grabbed your phone. “How come Mikey or Draken didn’t tell me then?”

“It was a spur of the moment decision.” You said, going to your messages with Takashi on your phone. “She heard about this place and wanted me to go with her since Draken was busy tonight.” You shook your head at the situation. “And most likely figured that she’d be back home before dark and not worry them about where she was.”

Takashi thought the situation over, understanding most of it. “Then why didn’t you tell me when you got home?”

“I was about to when I got back an hour ago, but my phone was dead by the time Emma and I got off the train.” You crossed your arms, leaning against the wall as you remembered. “I let my phone charge while I showered, and was going to text you when I got out, but I got distracted by a little someone begging me for a late night snack.”

The culprit you were referring to made themself noticed as Takashi heard a small meow coming from your living room. A moment later, your cat came prancing down the hall to greet your boyfriend.

“I’m sorry,” you sighed with a frown, picking up your cat so that they didn’t bother him. “I didn’t mean to worry you. I just couldn’t get signal, then of course my phone just had to die on me like that.” You sighed again, scratching the top of your cat’s head. “I-”

Your rant was cut short by Takashi as he gently pulled you into his arms. “I’m not mad that you didn’t message me, nor am I ever angry at you for not letting me know of your whereabouts and plans every second of the day.”

“What?” You asked, confused about his words. “What do you-”

“Don’t worry yourself over this,” he said. “I just got worked up because of Toman issues. I always know that if you don’t respond to me that you have a valid reason.” He kissed the top of your head. “As long as you let me know when you get home safe every night.” He chuckled softly.

“You know I always do that.” You couldn’t help but giggle along with him. “But you better do the same.”

“I promise, baby.” He said, pressing his forehead against yours. “I promise.”

Hanma Shuji

“You’ve got to be fucking with me.”

“Well, all you have to do is ask.”

“Hanma, I swear to god.”

Your boyfriend laughed at your reaction, slinging an arm around your shoulders. “You know I’m just joking, princess.” He went on to continue his teasing antics towards you, but he noticed your serious expression as you looked at your phone. “What’s going on? Need me to beat someone up for you?”

“No, not today.” You sighed, shaking your head. “Just this damn group project I have to do for my English course.”

“Why do we have to take other language courses anyway?” Hanma sighed, having hated the class himself. “Like, I’m not working outside Japan right now. I can always learn the language later.”

“Because you never know who you might come across.” You pointed out. “What if someone who wants your gang ends up being from England?”

“Then I’ll tell them to go eat some damn scones and tea before kicking their ass for thinking they’re better than us.”

“You,” you cut yourself off with a sigh, shaking your head at his words. “Never mind, I have to get going.” You shrugged his arm off your shoulders, picking up your school bag as you texted your classmate back letting them know you were on your way.

“What? I thought we were gonna hang out today.” Hanma complained as he watched you get ready to leave.

“By hang out do you mean watch you beat up people in rival gangs while I sip on the boba you get me just like every Wednesday?” You teased, pocketing your phone before cupping Hanma’s cheeks and making him look at you at eye level. “While I do love that lil ‘tradition’, as you keep calling it, I need to make sure the grade I get on this assignment is at least decent.”

“I’ve told you,” Hanma said, grabbing onto your wrists and pulling your hands off his face. “You don’t have to try hard in school. Once my gang becomes the most feared in Japan, we’ll be living off of luxury by graduation and you won’t have to worry your pretty little head about anything but me.”

You paused at his words, trying to understand what exactly he was getting at. “Is that really how you see me?” You asked, genuinely upset as you pulled your hands out of his grip. “Nothing but a future housewife for you? An investment for when you’re older so that you don’t have to work as hard?”

“Not an investment, really. But it’d be convenient if you end up with me for a long time-”

“Convenient?” You raised your voice, growing more annoyed with each word your boyfriend was saying. “You know what, Shuji, I’m going to make this convenient for myself rather than you.” You sighed, leaving without another word to your classmate’s house. At this point, you’d rather write a 10 page paper for your English class rather than stay around Hanma another second.

“What, y/n get back here!” Hanma called out, shocked at your reaction and the way you called him by his last name rather than his first. “What the fuck is her problem? I didn’t say anything wrong.”

That whole afternoon, Hanma decided to take his annoyance and confusion out on random delinquents he encountered on the street as he made his way to attend yet another Valhalla meeting. He was so close to getting Keisuke Baji to join, he just had to pull a few more strings. However, his mind was still off thinking about how mad you were with him. He had seen you annoyed, or sometimes pretend to be as he would see that cute, small smile on your face that proved that you weren’t actually annoyed and rather amused with his antics.

Today, of course, was different. He just didn’t know why he felt this weight in his chest. It only took getting punched in the stomach for him to realize that the weight wasn’t pain; it was guilt.

Hanma was feeling guilty about what he said, even if he didn’t fully admit it to himself; and as much as he hated the action more than Toman itself, he had to apologize to you for what he said and how it came across.

He was telling the truth when he said that he hoped that you would be with him for a long time, but while having a bunch of girls at his beck and call as a huge gang leader sounded amazing, he would much rather prefer you by his side than some random girl, or five, he was potentially paying to serve him and his every need.

The Valhalla meeting was typically a fun time, knowing that he only created the gang for Kisaki and his plan, but with his mind elsewhere with you and where you would be after the meeting was over so that he could go meet you wherever that may be. And if you couldn’t forgive him yet, maybe he could help you with your project. He wasn’t the best at English, but he at least knew most of the alphabet and a few words. Who cares if they’re swears, they’re still in English!

As he was thinking of ways he could help you, he wondered who it was that you were working on the assignment with. He was a year above you, so he didn’t know many people in your grade, but he knew a fair amount of the guys by their face, having most likely beaten them up before for being too cocky and thinking that they could take him in a fight.

He’d be damned if one of those punks tried to make a pass at you.

It wasn’t a secret that you were dating Hanma, but you didn’t go flaunting the information off to everyone in your class; granted, neither did he, but that didn’t stop him from bragging about how great you are to the people in his gangs whenever they were complaining about being single. Hell, for all he knew, one of the newbies in Valhalla could be the guy you were doing that project with. The mere thought of someone trying to get as close as he is with you made his blood boil.

Not caring that the meeting was over, he passed off responsibility to one of the higher ups in Valhalla before leaving without seeming to hastily. If he was seen caring about a girl and putting her before either one of his gangs, his reputation as a leader would be ruined.

The moment he got to his bike, he rode to your school not bothering to stop at any of the red lights unless he absolutely had to, like avoiding getting into a major wreck on a busy road. That would only make you more mad to see him in a hospital even though he was trying to go and apologize for what he said to you earlier.

He held back a sigh of relief as he saw you walking out of your school gate, pulling right up to you.

“I thought I made it clear that I didn’t want to see you.” You said, glaring at him.

“And I thought that I was supposed to get you boba today.” Hanma said. “Guess we both had incorrect assumptions.”

You couldn’t help but sigh, shaking your head. “If you think boba will suddenly make up for what you said to me, then you’re wrong.” You moved to leave, only for Hanma to rev his bike and move as well to somewhat block your path and make you stop in your tracks.

“Is it that hard to believe that I want to apologize while I get you boba?” Hanma said, making you pause. You had known Hanma for a good while, and dating him for a few months now; maybe he meant what he was saying.

“If you think I’m paying you’re crazy.” You said, climbing onto his bike.

“Already planned on it.” Hanma said, waiting until you were holding onto his waist before heading in the direction of the boba place the two of you frequented. In the back of his mind he couldn’t help but be grateful for taking some newbie’s after school money during the Valhalla meeting.

After a much deserved quiet exchange, the two of you reached the cafe that you typically frequented every week. You got off his bike and went in without him, making Hanma sigh as he called out for you to wait up.

“If I’m paying then you need to wait for me to get to the register with you.”

“Then you better catch up. You have long legs don’t you?”

Hanma couldn’t help but smile at your quip, as though it reminded him how much he really liked you. Yes, he had fantasized about having multiple women at his beck and call 24/7, but maybe having just you around wouldn’t be as bad as he first made it out to be.

Once you had ordered, and made sure that Hanma paid with his (well, it wasn’t his originally but you didn’t know that) own money rather than the tip jar money, as you have seen him do that before, you made your way to wait by the counter where your finished drink would be. “You have until my boba’s ready to explain yourself.”

“What? That’s it?” Hanma knew you wouldn’t give him much time to apologize, but he didn’t think it’d be that small of a time frame.

“What you said really hurt me, Hanma. Do you even realize how it came across when you practically said that I didn’t have to amount to anything other than being your pretty thing to come home to when we’re older.”

Hanma opened his mouth to explain, only to pause as he replayed your words in his head. “Wait, so you pictured a future for the two of us then?” Your silence was a give away in itself. “Tell me, what was it like?”

“Why do you want to know? You clearly don’t want it.”

“Says who?” He gently turned you to face him so he could meet your gaze. “Tell me what you thought about for us.”

“y/n!”

You were brought back to your senses when you heard your name called by the barista and went to grab your drink. You effortlessly put the straw through the top as you made your way back over to Hanma. “You still haven’t explained yourself.”

“Then, will you let me take you home so that I can?”

You stared at him for a moment, part of you saying how he wouldn’t change due to his commitments and behavior that you weren’t always one hundred percent supportive of; however, as you noted how his gaze on you seemed hopeful that you would say yes, the other part of you said to give him this one chance to talk things through with you. “Sure, but we’re walking.”

“And leave my bike here?” He gasped, not liking the idea one bit as the idea of a rival gang finding and destroying it came across his mind.

“Would you rather leave me?”

Hanma paused, knowing what you were getting at. He shook his head, taking your hand and walking you out of the shop. “Absolutely not.”

© copyright leiasfanaccount648 2022

[celestialgyu]

For Any Price

genre; fantasy au, non idol au, childhood friends to lovers, fluff

pairings; gn!reader x jungwon (enha), yeonjun (txt), yuna (itzy), & kai (txt)

synopsis; The most feared assassins in Ketterdam, you and Jungwon have made a name for yourselves. When your creditor comes knocking on your door demanding you pay off your hulking debt immediately or risk being dragged back to the place you escaped, you and Jungwon have to find a way to get that money, and quick. Luckily, you two weren't called the best Grishas of their generation for nothing.

wc; 9.4k

warnings; death, violence, mentions of alcohol

notes; First and foremost, I want to express how sorry I am to leave this FAP crew. No, like I genuinely adore them. Moving on, this is for cici's (@iyeonjuni) power of love collab!! Go check out her works (and everyone who was a part of this collab)! I would also like to thank jas (@crispy-chan) for beta-reading this!! Your comments made me smile so much. (PSA: This fic is based on the Grishaverse. All references made can be explained on the fandom page and other informational texts about the Grishaverse.)

You’re cleaning your collection of knives when you hear a knock on the door of your flat. Reluctantly putting down the dagger you were polishing, you grab two others, tuck them into your sleeves and get up to open the door. You look into the peephole and are met with the sight of a person you’d hoped you’d never see again. You stiffen, steeling yourself before you open the door.

“Nice place you have here _____,” The Slave Pirate sneered at you. You didn’t know his real name and you doubted many people did. Jungwon loved to joke about how cheesy the name was.

“What are you doing here?” you narrowed your eyes at him. He moved to walk past you but you blocked him with your arm, shoving him back. “Answer the damn question.”

“Someone’s on edge,” he said as he looked you up and down. “I’m here to get my money so stop acting like a scared child and move.” 

You glared at him as you stepped aside to let him in. Saints, where is Jungwon, he should be getting back soon. He looked around your living room with his nose upturned. “For someone with a reputation like you two have, I was expecting something luxurious.” 

You ignored his comment. “The final payment isn’t due for another two months. You have no business speaking to me till then.”

He smirked at you, “You forget your place. Some things have changed and I need that final half million kruge each now. You have two weeks. Or else… well the Little Palace will be learning the whereabouts and… occupations of two of their Grishas.” 

You scoffed, holding his stare with the fiercest glare you could muster. “You’d never do that. They find out about me and Jungwon, they find out about you too.” You told yourself that if he ever let slip to the Palace where you were, you’d do whatever it took to hunt him down and mail his parts to the Little Palace yourself. The thought was almost comforting. A question then popped into your head. “How did you find me?” 

“First, like you, I cover my tracks well, so it’d be challenging to find me. And second, I’ve had a person on you two since the day you paid me for new identities.” he sneered as he stood up. “Bet you didn’t expect that one, did you? Pity, your reputation was quite impressive, but I suppose like all things, it’s built on a mixture of lies and truth.” 

You fixed him with a steely glare as you moved to hold the door open. “Save it. Get out,” you ordered. 

You reached to shut the door but he grabbed it before you could fully close it. “You have two weeks,” he said before turning on his heel and walking into the street.

Disgusting piece of scum, I cannot wait till he gives me a reason to get rid of him. You thought to yourself as you sat down at your desk, your knives glittering enticingly in the window light. You grabbed four of them and walked to the other side of your flat, where a giant piece of cardboard was attached to the wall by four small daggers. 

You weaved two of the knives between your fingers, thinking of where to aim them. The cardboard was littered with knife indents and holes, the material used and worn out. Focusing on the air around you, you conjured a vacuum of air from your knife tip to wherever you choose as your target. You fixed your eyes at an empty spot in the bottom right corner and threw them both at the same time, watching as they spun gracefully through the air and landed perfectly next to each other, their ends pointed at you. You moved the vacuum a few feet above them. You threw the other two knives, smiling to yourself as they nailed a perfect landing on the cardboard, their pearl-studded ends the only part visible along with a glint of its steel blade. Throwing knives were almost therapeutic for you, calming your nerves and allowing your mind to hone in on what it did best, take aim. 

You were a Squaller, an Etherealki Grisha. You could summon or control air and gaseous matter, from strong winds, pointed currents or removing/adding air from anywhere. Jungwon was a Heartrender, a Coporalki Grisha. He could control human bodies, manipulating any aspect of a body to his will. You stared at where the second dagger hit, recalling your days training as a soldier of the Second Army at the Little Palace. You had been better than most of your classmates, garnering relentless praise from your teachers, and Jungwon was the same. But you left that place (for good reason) and now your home was here, Ketterdam, the city of trade. Stinky, humid, built-on-a-swamp Ketterdam. 

You grabbed a few more knives from the table and scattered them across the cardboard, turning back to get some more when you heard something from the door. Knock knock. Knock. Knock knock. Jungwon. You sprinted to the door, throwing it open. 

“Jungwon, where the hell have you been? Get in!” you rushed him inside, locking the door before turning on him. “You should have been here thirty minutes ago Won, so you better have a good explanation for where you were.”

He smiled sheepishly as he took off his boots and coat. “I got caught up in something. Sorry _____, it won’t happen again.” 

You scoffed, glaring at him. “You made me deal with it on my own,” you said, sitting down at your table and massaging your temples. 

You felt his eyes on you as you stayed silent, knowing you had something to say. You took a deep inhale and looked up. “The Slave Pirate was just here.”

Jungwon’s eyes widened as he took in what you said. “What? How? Why?” The fact that The Slave Pirate knew where you two lived made him feel uneasy. 

You sighed, staring at the piece of cardboard you loved on the other wall. “He wants the rest of our payments in two weeks.”

“But it’s not due in two months—”

“I know,” you cut him off. “Served along with a threat to expose us to the Palace.”

Jungwon grimaced. He never wanted to go back to that place, not after what happened. “And how’d he find us?” he asked, feeling like you’d know. You always did.

“He has a spy. I think you know who that is,” you said, glancing at him. “Take care of that.” 

Jungwon nodded as he watched you get up and grab your coat and knives. “Got it. And where are you headed to?” he said, throwing a lopsided smile at you.

You smiled back softly. “I have something I need to do,” you walked towards the door before turning back, your lips curling upwards. “And Jungwon? Don’t make a mess.” Torture them for information if you had to and make it a clean kill.

Jungwon grinned, “Don’t worry _____, I’ll make them talk.”

You strolled down the streets of Ketterdam, passing the stalls of exotic fruits and fabrics going for the highest prices tourists would pay. You mostly kept to yourself in this city, some of the only people you were somewhat friendly with were the Dregs. Led by Kaz Brekker, or “Dirtyhands” as they called him, was the most feared gang in the Barrels. No job was too morally repulsive for Dirtyhands and you supposed that’s how he and his group of criminals climbed the ranks so quickly. 

But you weren’t headed towards the Dregs. You turned on the West Road, passing the gambling dens, motels, and pleasure houses of West Stave until you got to the Tiger Club. It was an eye-catching building with red and yellow accents, two tiger statues flaunting the sides of the entrance. You nodded at the bouncer, a big man named Barty, as you walked inside, immediately being hit with the smell of alcohol and cash. It was a busy night with all the tables filled, but you weren’t here to gamble. 

You had left that life a long time ago. On the other hand… it hadn’t been as easy for Jungwon. You sighed internally as you recalled the money he used to waste while gambling. 

Spotting your destination, you navigated your way to one of the bigger tables in the back. You found Yeonjun overseeing a card game, standing a few feet away as you watched him taunting and egging on the rich-looking gamblers so they spend as much cash as possible. Choi Yeonjun, one-half of the Choi Twins. He and Yuna, his twin sister, owned this club. They were skilled sharpshooters with an apparent taste for business. When you first arrived in Ketterdam, you and Jungwon had done many favors for them and maintained a good relationship since. You could always go to them for help. 

After watching Yeonjun work the table a little longer, you walked over to him. “Hey Yeonjun,” you said, nodding at him. 

He spun around, his gelled-back hair not moving an inch. “Darling! I haven’t seen you in a long while,” he exclaimed, grabbing you by the shoulders and directing you to an empty chair at the bar. “You wait here while I finish this up… Hey! You there,” he pointed at a barista and then at you. “Anything they want.”

He winked at you before turning back to his customers. You rolled your eyes. Yeonjun was like this to most people and you being younger than him didn’t help things. You didn’t dislike it though, he was a breath of fresh air in a city like this. 

You sipped the Bellini you ordered, the alcohol mellowing your senses. Your eyes roamed over the room, watching the gamblers spend their savings on the probably rigged games. You enjoyed trying to figure people out at casinos, reading their moods and body language to guess their next move (and their chances). It was like a game to you, a way for you to relax and let your mind wander and come up with different scenarios that explained how they wound up in here. 

A big-bellied man at a nearby table was sweating heavily, eyes nervously darting from the dealer’s hands to a large number of chips in front of him. You guessed he had just gambled too much and was about to pay for it. You chuckled to yourself, moving on to a woman dressed in rubies and gold two tables away from him. She looked Zemeni, with dark skin and a tall, slender build. She smiled confidently as she looked at her fellow players, fingers tapping the side of the table as she waited for the play of cards. You sipped your drink again, raising an eyebrow as two burly men sat next to you, whispering to each other. Bored and drunk, you slightly leaned over to catch what they were saying.

“I can’t believe boss turned down that offer. 3 million kruge!” one said, waving his hands dramatically.

“For what the merchant asked of us, 3 million is a low price… And he refused to up the money so his loss,” the other replied, shrugging. “What was the merchant’s name again?”

“Dedrick, I think.” 

You leaned back into your chair, having heard enough. 3 million kruge… for what kinda job? What was worth that much? You thought to yourself, tapping your fingers on the counter. 

“Darling!” Yeonjun said, sitting down on your other side. “How’s the drink?” he said, waving towards your glass.

“Delicious,” you smiled, leaning in towards Yeonjun. He raised an eyebrow before mirroring you. “Hey, who are those men over there?” you whispered, nodding your head towards them. 

“Hmm,” Yeonjun replied, taking them in. “Look like gangsters… My guess is Razorgulls,” he said, waving at their bodies. “The build. But… want to find out?” 

He flashed a dazzling smile your way before taking out a revolver and sending a bullet towards the wall at the other end of the bar counter. You had barely registered what happened before he was slipping off his chair and rounding the room to examine the dent it made. He rocked on his heels for a few seconds before turning towards the room, looking over the people. He slowly turned towards the two men next to you, walking over to them.

“Men, was this you?” he asked. They didn’t respond, sharing a nervous look as a lazy grin spread across Yeonjun’s face. Then Yeonjun’s expression was stone-cold and menacing, two shiny revolvers pointed at the men’s heads. What a showoff. But it was amusing and slightly frightening to see the Yeonjun most people knew, a sly, quick, deadly man with a talent for inserting bullets where he wanted them. A bit foxy, if you did say so yourself.

“Tattoo,” he ordered, hand unwavering. 

The men couldn’t have rolled up their sleeves fast enough and you stretched your neck to look at their arms. Five birds in a wedge formation. Razorgulls. You turned back to your drink, rolling over this new information in your mind. So why would the Razorgulls turn down that offer… They weren’t exactly the brightest and most decisive gang in the Barrels.

You heard a sound next to you, looking up to see Yeonjun sitting back down in his chair. “That was quick.” He winked at you, though it wasn’t really a wink and more of a delayed blink. You learned early on that one way to know if Yeonjun was distracted was if his winks… weren’t exactly winking. 

“So… what about them?” Yeonjun asked, leaning back and looking over the tables. “You got into a quarrel with their gang or something?” 

You grinned at him, remembering the time you and Jungwon helped Yeonjun and Yuna drive off a group of aggressive Razorgulls a couple years ago. “Actually… I overheard something.” From the corner of your eye, you noticed the two men get up and leave. 

He looked back at you, cocking his head to the side. “Oh really?”

You leaned in again and he did the same, lowering your voice. “Apparently, the Razorgulls were offered a job from a rich merchant, Dedrick, for—” you paused for dramatic value. “ —3 million kruge.”

Yeonjun raised his eyebrows, letting out a low whistle. “I’ve heard that name. I wonder what the job was… or how difficult it was that they would turn it down.”

“Well, I plan to find out,” you said, pushing your empty glass towards the barista. “I need that money.”

“Oh really?” Yeonjun replied, staring at you. “What for?”

“I have debts I need to pay. And soon.” “So do I.”

You grinned at him, gathering your things. “I’ll be back soon. Also, where’s Yuna?” you asked.

“In the back. I’ll tell her you came. And about this new information,” he grinned at you, leaning against the table. “And the bill is on the house.”

You smiled at him, nodding. “Till next time, Yeonjun.”

“Watch your back!” he called after you as you navigated your way to the entrance.

“Before your front!” you replied, as you stepped out into the cold, humid Ketterdam night.

Jungwon groaned as he held his forehead, trying to keep from stumbling in the dirty alley. He had gotten caught up at a casino, going in with a promise to himself and you that he would only spend a maximum of 50 kruge and leaving with a loss of triple that. He winced as he imagined what you’d say if you knew about this. 

“Jungwon?” He heard someone say, drunkenly turning his head towards where it came from.

“Fucking Saints, Jungwon, why are you this wasted?” You. He felt you grab his forearm, steadying him. 

He let out a giggle, sidling up to you. He heard you give a defeated sigh before he felt you stiffen next to him. 

“Jungwon, who the hell is that?” you asked. He followed the direction of your stare to his friend from the casino, Kai. He hadn’t been aware Kai had been following him this whole time. Kai was smiling up at your face, eyes glassy.

“Oh that’s—” he weakly waved toward Kai. “A friend from the… bar I was just at.” His words slurred as he tapped his chin, suddenly remembering something important. “He’s also a Grisha!”

He giggled at your alarmed face, waving his hand again dismissively. “It’s okay, _____. No one can hear us.” It was true, he could hear no heartbeats except for yours’ three. Perks of being a Heartrender. 

He giggled for a third time when you shot him a pointed glare. Everything was funny right now. “Okay…” you said, straightening him up again. “Let’s go home. And you, Kai, get home too.”

“Wait, wait, _____, can he please come with us? I promised him he could stay with us for a night.” He distinctly remembered making that promise, struggling to recall it as his head swam. 

“You know what, whatever. Just start walking.” Your voice felt like it was fading away.

And then the world went black.

Jungwon moaned as he came to, his head feeling like it would split apart down the middle. It was morning, the sunlight filtering in through the window bouncing off the glass of water and pancakes (already drenched in syrup with a big block of butter, just how he liked it, he noted) on the table in front of him. He could hear you opening and closing drawers in the kitchen as he slowly sat up. Across from him was Kai, the boy from last night. He looked a lot better now, wavy blonde hair framing his face as he snoozed peacefully on the couch.

He had met Kai at the casino, the two pairing up at one of the tables. He had responded with glee when Kai showed him his metal-laced playing cards, allowing him to know exactly what cards someone held. He later learned that Kai was a Fabrikator and had grown up on a farm in Kerch. When his parents learned of his abilities, they had hidden him from sight till he turned eleven, when the Grisha testers came to take any Grisha children to the palace. Jungwon had lamented on that part of Kai’s life, wondering how different his own life would have been if he was never tested and taken to the Little Palace. Later in the night, Kai confessed he was currently homeless and Jungwon, with his big heart and fondness for Kai, had agreed to give him a place to sleep, at least for a little while. 

And that’s why he was currently wondering what would be the first things you’d say to him, watching you set down a plate and glass of water for Kai as he munched on his breakfast. You could be frightening when you were angry and while watching that anger directed at others was entertaining for Jungwon, he would rather it was never pointing at him. 

You turned to look at him. “Wake him up and then follow me,” you ordered before walking away to your bedroom. 

Jungwon gulps down the last of his food and walks over to Kai, shaking him roughly. “C'mon, Kai. Wake up,” he said as Kai stirred. He gave him another good shake before Kai let out a huge yawn and sat up. 

He said nothing as he squinted around the room, taking in the place. “It’s nicer than I expected.” He stretched his sore arms, eyes lighting up as he spotted the breakfast on the coffee table in front of him. “Oh! Tell _____ thank you so much for me,” he said as he picked up the fork and knife, digging into the food.  

Jungwon shook his head, smiling as he watched Kai scarf down the pancakes, letting out little sounds of contentedness. “I’ll be back,” he called as he headed towards your bedroom. 

You were sitting on your bed, flipping through a stack of papers. You didn’t look up as he closed the door behind him but stopped sifting through the papers, waiting.

He nervously fiddled with the ring on his left index finger. “So…” he trailed off, stretching out the syllable. . “That’s Kai, someone I made friends with last night. He’s currently homeless so… I thought he could stay here for a while. And you already know he’s a Grisha.”

“What kind?” you responded, still looking at the papers. But your posture slightly relaxed, and he gave an silent sigh of relief. 

“Fabrikator.”

“Hm. I figured. After you passed out, I dragged you home and he followed behind me. But he was very silent. His steps made no sound. I guessed his shoes were Fabrikator-made.”

“Well, you were right! He probably made them himself,” Jungwon exclaimed. 

You got up then, placing the papers down at your desk. “Anyways, while you were bar-hopping,” you shot him a pointed look, “I paid a visit to Yeonjun.”

Jungwon raised an eyebrow, a grin spreading across his face. “So did you drink or gamble?”

You turned to him, raising your own eyebrow. Jungwon swore he saw you push down a smile. “You’re ridiculous, you know that.” You rolled your eyes as he gave a playful shrug. “I… I have a plan. To get the money in time. Or half of a plan.”

“Wait, what?” Jungwon blinked. “What kind of plan? …Is Yeonjun involved?”

“Yes, somewhat. I’m still working out the finer details,” you said as you pulled on a leather jacket and newsboy cap. “I’ll be back. There are some chores to do and lunch so don’t forget about that. And keep an eye on Kai.”

Jungwon nodded, watching as you walked towards the door.

You looked back at him, your hand on the doorknob. “I’ll fill you in when I get back, kay?”

He nodded again as you closed the door behind you and listened as your heartbeat got fainter and fainter, till he couldn’t hear it anymore.

You hauled the two overflowing bags of supplies through the door, sighing when you dropped them in the hallway. 

Jungwon was nowhere to be seen but Kai was sitting on your couch, turning a radio over in his hands.

“That’s broken, by the way,” you said, gesturing towards the radio.

“Not anymore,” he smiled at you. “Fixed it.” He tossed it at you and you caught it, switching it on. You raised your eyebrows, impressed, as a channel started playing, some Kerch talk show. 

“Oh,” you said, “Thanks.” You hadn’t known Kai long enough to form a solid opinion of him, but so far… he wasn’t that bad. He had this energy about him, a lightness, that made him seem harmless. He had an oval face with a tall, sharp nose, and dark brown doe eyes. Wavy, blonde hair framed his head, bangs brushing over his eyebrows. Honestly, he was kinda cute. Focus, you told yourself as you shook your head. But another thought fought its way into your mind. Not as cute as Jungwon, though. You didn’t even want to imagine what Jungwon would say if you called him cute. Probably remind you of it. Every. Single. Minute. 

You threw your jacket on the couch, unpacking the bags. Two yards of thick rope, a sewing kit (you wanted to add some knife pockets on each side of your knees), blade polish you had picked up, and other things to restock your supplies. You put them all away, walking towards the kitchen when Jungwon appeared with a tray of food in one hand and one with drinks in the other, shooing you towards the living room. 

You both sit down, Jungwon taking a seat next to Kai. “Ooh, you went all out didn’t you Jungwon? You rarely do this for me,” you exclaimed, grinning as he blushed a bright pink.

“Yes I do, we just don’t usually have much time for lunch,” he mumbled, looking away. He placed the tray on the table before taking a seat, handing you each a plate.

You all ate in silence for some time before you pushed your plate away and looked at the men in front of you.  “Before I go into detail about what we’re going to do, Kai, let this be your only warning that if you betray us: I will not hesitate to kill you.” To Kai’s credit, there was no fear on his face.

You let that sink in for a few seconds before telling them about everything that happened yesterday and today. Meeting Yeonjun, the Razorgulls, the turned-down offer from Dedrick, going to see Yuna today and making a plan with her, and where you all would meet the twins to head over to Dredrick’s house. 

Jungwon fell silent, brows furrowed. “You know… I knew you were cooking up something,” he paused, sighing, “But this is risky.”

You shrugged. “We’ve done much riskier. Like the Exchange raid. And we need the money.” A year ago, you and Jungwon stole sixty thousand kruge from the safes under the Exchange. You chuckled softly to yourself at the memory.

“I could help, I have a few things I’ve been working on,” Kai said, leaning forward. 

Jungwon slowly nodded. “Fine,” he said, looking at you and then Kai, his from morphing into a determined smile. 

“Let’s do this.”

Three hours later, you were hunched on a roof near the merchant’s house in a black cloak, watching the windows for any sign of the man. There was a light on in what you assumed was the master bedroom, moving a few feet to the left to get a better view. The man you saw through the window matched Yuna’s description of Merch Dedrick; tall, burly, and with a brown mustache. You pulled out your small square mirror, flashing it twice. You got three flashes back. Good. You had planned that whoever first spotted Dedrick would signal to the others. You had left Kai at home with instructions to put together his best and a variety of bombs. He had accepted the job with an almost gleeful face. You felt someone crouch down next to you.

“It looks like he’s not alone. There’s a woman in there with him,” Jungwon said.

Yuna arrived at your vantage spot next, leaping nimbly from roof to roof like a cat. “That’s not his wife,” she said, grinning. “It seems the Merch has a mistress. Saint’s, imagine what would happen if his wife knew.”

You tilted your head. This was interesting. “Who’s his wife?”

“A well-known lady from one of the richest families in Kerch. She practically bathes in money. Dedrick? Not so much. It’s only because of his wife that he’s a rich merchant now.”

“And I’m guessing neither she nor her family would enjoy the news of the merchant cheating on her.”

“Not at all,” Yuna replied.

You turned back to the house. “Well,” you said, “That certainly changes things. Jungwon, tell Yeonjun to drop in from the window in the hallway and block the doorway. Go with him. Your powers will make it easier and quieter. Yuna, you’re with me. We’re going to need some time for our lovely talk with Dedrick.”  

Jungwon nodded and got up to join Yeonjun. You looked at Yuna. “Like old times?”

“Whip up a windstorm, _____,” she replied, flashing you a toothy grin. 

You nodded, chuckling. “Let’s do this.”

Yuna moved to the edge of the roof, bending her knees as she measured the distance of the jump into the merchant’s open window. You stood a few feet behind her, focusing your mind on the air around you, the direction of the wind, and the small breeze that ran over your fingers. Air was like a wave, sometimes moving so slowly you couldn’t feel it, and sometimes becoming a harsh crashing force, threatening to throw you off your feet. You sent a small current Yuna’s way, flicking your index finger down as you directed it towards the window. A few seconds later, Yuna gave a nod, and you began counting down. “3, …2, …1!” you said, sending a strong gust of wind at Yuna after the last number. She leaped, stretching herself out like a diver.

And flew like a bird into the window, rolling as she landed.

You chuckled to yourself at the shriek of a man, probably the merchant, before taking a running leap into the house after her.

Jungwon ducked as a club went swinging towards his head. He squeezed his hand, cutting off the guard’s air with his powers. The man clawed at his throat as if he could open a passageway for air, then crumpled to the floor. Across from him, Yeonjun brought down the butt of his revolver on another guard's head, knocking him out. Jungwon arched his hands out, feeling out the heartbeats of the six guards they took out. It felt like a steady drum, underlined by a lively thrumming of life. He grasped onto the six strings of life tangled up in front of him, and pulled, lowering the heart rate of the guards. That should keep them out for a while. 

He heard a yell from the bedroom. You and Yuna must have gotten inside. He didn’t doubt that you could do the job (and do it well) but that didn't keep him from being worried. Friends worry about their friends, right? He shook his head, pushing down the question to the back of his mind. He had a job to do. Yeonjun and he took their positions at either side of the double doors, adorned with golden swirls and intricate patterns. A screaming hawk perched on a branch was carved into the middle, the family symbol of the merchant’s wife. Imagine having all that at your fingers and throwing it away for lust and novelty. 

He felt eyes on him and glanced to the side to find Yeonjun staring at him. Yeonjun gave him a small smile. “Long time no see, Jungwon.”

“Do we only talk to each other on jobs?” Jungwon replied, returning the smile. Yeonjun wasn’t a bad person but… you got along better with Yeonjun than him. He guessed charming and suave plus charming and suave was too much for the universe to handle.

Yeonjun chuckled. “It seems to be so.” He tilted his head at Jungwon. “I’ve been wanting to ask, did you ever give _____ that gift?”

Jungwon blushed a deep crimson at the mention of that. A few weeks ago, while on a job with Yeonjun, Jungwon had come across a Ravkan trader selling draggers. And not just the normal kind, these were bejeweled Ravkan nobility fighting knives, crafted with painstaking attention to detail by a Fabrikator. Yeonjun had confirmed it when he examined the dagger. Jungwon had immediately bought it for you, not caring that his money pouch felt painfully empty. But you weren’t there when he got home and those hours of silence were enough for Jungwon to overthink how you’d react to the gift, eventually putting it away to be gifted at a time where he wouldn’t be so anxious over it. Thus, you never got your beautiful dagger. 

He felt a tap on his bicep, pulling him away from the memory. Yeonjun gave him a knowing look. “When are you going to do something about it?”

He looked down at his shoes, fairly embarrassed. Was he that obvious? He liked to think he hid it well. He didn’t even know when he developed feelings for you, when it went from something platonic to something more. The next thing he knew, all he could think about was you, and it drove him crazy to not be able to figure it out. You were caring and kind to him, sure, but you were also like that to Yuna. And he didn’t think he would survive it if he revealed his feelings and you didn’t feel the same way. He really didn’t.

“Well, I just… not sure about what _____ thinks of me. Or considers me,” Jungwon mumbled.

“They might not show it, but Saints, is it annoying to hear the way _____ constantly talks about you. All praise and mushy stuff,” Yeonjun chuckled. “My point is, they care deeply about you and I think you shouldn’t rule out the possibility just yet.”

Jungwon sighed, throwing his head back. The thought of you praising him to Yeonjun or someone else sent his blood rushing to his face. He’d work up the courage to tell you how he felt… someday.

And as he heard a yelp come from inside the room, this one at a higher pitch, he knew the day was not today.

Yuna was walking over to the other side of the room, near the doorway, hood pulled low. The merchant was gaping at you and his woman… you saw her jump under the covers of the bed. He sputtered, spit flying out and his face red. “Get the hell out of my house! You lowlife thieves!” he exclaimed, enraged. 

You tilted your head at him, flipping a dagger in your right hand. “Calm down. We were sent by the Boss.”

“The Razorgulls boss? Well, tell him that he already refused the job and to get fucking lost!”

“Mm, sorry, no can do. He wants to renegotiate the offer,” you replied cooly. You didn’t know much about the Razorgulls boss actually, probably cause he never shows his face and instead sends his lackeys. 

The merchant—Dedrick—swallowed, throat bobbing. Once, twice, three times. “What I offered was plenty enough.”

“Three million kruge? For a job like that? Don’t kid me.” You kept the details vague, waiting for him to fill in the blanks.

And he did. “How hard could stealing the artifact from a museum be?” Bingo. So the job was an artifact.

“What kind of value does the artifact have to you?” 

He swallowed thickly. “A lot.” You guessed so, or else he wouldn’t be emptying his pockets for it.

“The Boss decided to take back the offer. For an additional two million kruge,” you said, keeping your voice firm and steady.

“Two million… five million kruge?! Absolutely not,” he glowered, huffing out his chest.

You shrugged. “The job is not an easy one. Five is quite reasonable. Or perhaps we instead could… I do enjoy a good drama,” you mumble sweetly, a menacing glint in your eyes.

He glared at you, furious. “My personal life is none of the Razorgull’s business.”

“Perhaps, but you look like you need a little nudge in the right direction.” You tilted your head, holding his gaze as you slid a dagger into your palm. “Either your wife finds out about your infidelity or… five million kruge.”

His eyes darted back and forth between you and his mistress cowering behind the desk. “Five million for your silence.”

You grinned at him. “Five million for my silence.”

You memorized the papers that the merchant gave you before you left his house. The blueprint of the Global Museum including its underground safes and the realistic rendition of the artifact you would steal. After having a pleasant chat with Merch Dedrick, you met up with the rest of the crew and updated Yeonjun and Jungwon on what you and Yuna learned. Jungwon was oddly flustered on the way back home but you didn’t pay it much mind past asking him if it was an allergic reaction. He then got even redder and went fully crimson when you called him cute for his reaction. You shook your head, smiling at the picture. Jungwon could be adorable sometimes.

 Jungwon slid through the door, plopping down on your bed. “Done lasering them into your brain?”

“Oh zip it, you should also be memorizing this,” you replied, rolling your eyes at him from your desk.

He popped a piece of pie into his mouth. “Already did, I was waiting for you to look up from that so we could discuss a plan.”

What’s gotten into him today? You thought. Snarkier than usual. You shelved the papers away, getting up to stretch. “This is not going to be an easy job.”

“Obviously, or else Dedrick wouldn’t be offering so much,” he replied, standing up after you. “Also, Kai has something to show you. This way, milady.” He flourished his hands towards the doorway, grinning at you.

You rolled your eyes at his dramatics, sending a gust of air his way as you walked past him to the living room. 

Kai looked up when you entered, a wild smile alight on his face. “For you and Jungwon,” he said, reaching behind himself to grab a box. He handed it to you. “Open it.”

You raised your eyebrows in curiosity, lifting the lid off the box. Inside sat two pairs of arm and leg sleeves, made of smooth dark brown leather. They had lines of small, almost undetectable stitches. You ran your finger across one. Was that… a knife inside? You looked up at Kai, surprised and a little delighted. “What are these?”

Kai grinned at you, standing up a little straighter. “My newest creation. They’re sleeves with thin but relatively long daggers hidden inside the fabric. You release them by pressing down on the button at the bottom of each dagger—except for the wrist ones—you release those by flicking your wrist. They go back in by pressing the button, which you can also use to get them out if you can’t do the flick. The leather is reinforced and impenetrable, and the daggers have been enhanced to stay sharp.”

You looked between him and the box. Once. Twice. And then you gave him the biggest smile you could and rushed forward to hug him. “Thank you, Kai,” you said, and you really meant it. You never liked spending on yourself—mostly from your years being dirt-poor—but this was such a thoughtful gift and so useful. You wanted to dance imagining how handy it would be.

Kai blushed, hugging you back. “It’s the least I could do for giving me a place to stay. I should be saying thank you to you two.” You pulled back from him, instantly feeling a wave of embarrassment for being so over the moon over a practical gift.

“I appreciate it,” you told him, and he nodded. He glanced at Jungwon, weirdly looking away quickly from him. But when you turned to Jungwon, he looked as pleasant as always. Odd.

You walked back to your room, Jungwon hot on your heels. “Can I get a peek at the gifts now? Unless you’ve forgotten it’s not all yours,” he teased, reaching over your shoulder for the box.

“Okay, wait wait.” You set the box down, grabbing the pair with your name on it. It slid on easily, molding around your arms and legs like a second skin. You tried out the wrist knives, flicking your wrist two times before a dagger popped out with a soft zhink. Okay, so it’s more of a curve. You thought, putting it back in and out again. Jungwon was testing his own sleeves, pressing the buttons on his legs. He looked up at you and gave you a smile. “Would I be superstitious to say this feels like an omen from the Saints that we’ll do well? But imagine the Saints blessing a bunch of assassins. How scandalous.”

You smiled back at him. “Scandalous indeed.”

Days later, after creating a plan with the twins, trips to the Exchange to gain a feel of the place, and endless scheming and worrying, you were standing in front of the Exchange. You wore a fluffy, pale pink fur coat that grazed your calves with a wide-brimmed cream hat. You had bright red lipstick on and were sporting bejeweled sunglasses, with rings stacked on your fingers. You fanned yourself in the humid, hot Kerch summer, looking at every part as the rich, classy tourist woman. You squared your shoulders and strutted into the wide glass doors of the Exchange, purse swinging at your arm. You gave yourself a few seconds to act like you were thinking of where to go and walked over to a clerk who looked like he might pee his pants helping customers.

“Young man, is Alfred here?” you drawled, watching as the clerk took you in and gulped visibly. You waited a few more seconds before repeating yourself. “Young man, I asked if Alfred Krum was here,” you snapped, letting the annoyance clearly show through your voice.

“I- Yes ma’am! He’s h-here.” He stood up, wringing his hands with sheer nerves. “L-Let me take you to him.”

You nodded, checking your watch. “I am a very busy woman. Do not waste my time. I need to see Alfred immediately. An empire relies on your efficiency.”

He paused, looking you up and down. “What’s your name, ma’am?”

“Christine Welverd Krum.” The effect was immediate as he gulped again and stared at his desk nervously. “Right this way, ma’am.”

He led you to the elevator. He murmured something to the guards flanking the elevator, and they gave you a long look before nodding at the clerk. The elevator doors opened and you stepped inside. The clerk clicked a button and stood in front of you, shifting on his feet. The doors opened and you walked into one of the grandest hallways you had ever been in. The Executive Hall of the Exchange. Even the Little Palace was never this grand. The walls were made of smooth marble, with veins of gold, emerald, ruby, and sapphire running on their surface. Four white doors lined the hall on both sides and at the end stood a door with a gold knocker. A wolf’s head. Fitting, you thought. You and Jungwon had described the people who ran this place as rabid carnivores many times.

You heard someone step behind you and turned around to ask the clerk why he was dilly-dallying around. But then something big and heavy hit the side of your head and the world went black.

You woke up as he was tying you to a chair, being careful not to move and keeping your breathing even. You were stripped down of your designer clothes and accessories and left with the suit you had on underneath. At least you still had the sleeves on. He had brought you to a small square room, dark and gray with the door facing you. You furiously thought through all of your options, clocking your captor—the clerk—rummaging in a desk on the left wall for something. You were somewhat impressed, honestly, he had played you well. Acting the nervous inexperienced youngster so you would let your guard down. But that was enough admiration for now.

You flicked your wrist, feeling the daggers slide out. Let’s make this quick. You swiftly sliced through the ropes, throwing your chair back with force as you used your power to suck the air out of the clerk’s airways, waiting until he dropped unconscious. You tied him up with rope sitting on the desk and took the duct tape from his hand (that he planned on using on you), taping his mouth shut. Good, that should keep him occupied for a while. You dragged him to the back of the room, stretching as you walked over to the door to examine it. It was a slab of steel with a lock and handle. You spotted white paint on the side of the door, like it was painted from the outside and splashed onto the other side. So you were in one of the white rooms in the Executive Hall. Nice, that made things simpler. You looked at the clock above the desk. Four thirty in the afternoon. Shit, you needed to be quick.

You bent down to examine the lock. A Belton lock, more complicated than a standard lock but still easy to pick. You sent a tendril of condensed, thick air, feeling out the pins. You applied pressure to the pins and plug of the luck, mapping out the air. Nothing yet. You adjusted the pressure, lifting the condensed air from the nearest pin and then lowering it back… continuing through the lock to see if you missed any inner pins. Wait, there, a missed pin. You pressed one of the buttons on your leg sleeve, releasing a thin dagger. You turned the lock. Click. You checked the clock again. A minute and thirty seconds. You smirked to yourself.

You focused, feeling the air outside for movement or form. Just the furniture. You opened the door, sliding out and locking it behind you. According to your intel, Alfred Krum, the Exchange head, was at a dinner with some foreign benefactors right now. At four thirty-five, Jungwon and Yuna would meet you in Krum’s office (they would come in through the vents and your disguise as Krum’s niece would quell any questions or interruptions) where you would get into his safe and retrieve the artifact. You would then use your powers to propel all five of you onto the roof, where a helicopter (and Yeonjun, who was the pilot and lookout) was waiting for you (courtesy of an acquaintance who owed you a debt).

You briskly walked to the door and scanned it for cracks and slits. The bottom was sealed but the hinges had a connecting space. You felt around the room, registering the form of two people. Jungwon and Yuna. You sent a breeze into their faces, as you had planned before. The knob turned and then the door, bringing you face-to-face with a frustrated Jungwon.

“You’re late. What happened?” Jungwon asked, moving aside so you could make your way to the back of the office.

“Why do you think something happened?” you replied, lifting the huge full-body portrait of Krum from its place. The safe door glinted invitingly at you. “For someone as rich as him, he’s pretty lax with his security. Businessmen.” Thought their money and name were protection enough.

Jungwon stood in front of you, forcing himself into your view. “Because you’re never late. And you dropped the look.” He gave you a vertical scan to prove his point.

You shrugged. “There was a setback. It’s handled. Or would be if you would move.” That sounded harsh. Stress made you snappy. You pressed your lips together. “Please just let me work,” you said, softening your tone.

His eyebrows furrowed but he stepped back, going to join Yuna on watch. This was a Quad lock, a type that needed the four identical keys to be turned two at a time, but not with longer than a five-second gap, or else you would have to start over. You worked swiftly, forming the key shape with your air, pressing your eyes shut as you pictured the pins in your head. Two clicks as the first locks turned. You quickly worked the other two.

The safe door whirred. And swung open.

You pumped a fist into the air. “I’m in.” you breathed to no one in particular.

The dark room seemed to welcome you.

Jungwon smiled to himself as he watched your excitement at unlocking the safe. You were so cute sometimes. Now was the third phase of the plan, where you and he would secure the artifact and get out with minimal obstacles. He trailed you into the safe, the bright lights flicking on when you stepped into the room, illuminating the various collectibles, souvenirs, and artifacts. The item they were stealing was a hand-sized bone from an animal he couldn't remember.

You spotted it before he did, making a beeline to the right corner of the room. You pulled out a small pen-like gadget from your sleeve, clicking a button that turned on a laser, which you aimed at the glass enclosing the artifact. You seared a perfect circle into the glass, wrapping the artifact in a cloth and throwing it into your bag. He noted to ask for a similar tool from Kai.

You looked at him, eyes sparkling. “Let’s wrap this up.”

He grinned at you. “Let’s.”

You both dashed to the safe door, securing it behind you and putting the painting back in its place. He sped-walked to the window, easing it open. So far, except for whatever it was that you faced, the mission was going smoothly. That just made him more nervous. Jungwon sent a quick prayer for success to the Saints, hoping they’d heed the call from a Grisha in need.

Yuna came over to you two, giving you both a determined look. “Okay, _____, let’s jump this ship.”

He glanced at you to catch you giving Yuna a weak smile, which you stifled when you noticed his attention shift to you. He moved to stand right in front of you, looking you in the eyes. “You got this. You’re the strongest, smartest, most capable person I know. You can do this.”

You stared back at him, the anxiety clear in your eyes. “I just… If I fail, we’ll all die.”

“Then don’t fail,” he replied, grinning at you. “Find an anchor in your mind. Ground yourself. Take it one step at a time.”

You nodded, glancing at the window. “I’ll do that.”

“Good. Now if it motivates you, I have been gambling lately and lying to you about it. So you can’t kill me now, it’s too early.”

You whipped your face towards his, glaring at him. “I’ll make sure your death is to your standards.”

“Appreciated. I can’t die like a nobody,” he winked at you, ushering you towards the window. He’d planned on fixing his gambling addiction (or so he tells himself every time he loses) but if the promise of murdering him worked… he’ll take it. Even if it wounded his soul to see you look at him like that.

“Okay, then-” you were cut off by the sound of shouting outside the office, followed by banging on the door.

“We know you’re in there, thieves. Come out.”

And then he heard the click of a lock turning and the door swung open.

Shit.

The clerk barged in, followed by Alfred Krum and a team of security men.

“You’re more capable than I thought,” the clerk sneered, glancing at Jungwon and Yuna who were flanking you. “And these are your cronies? How cute, the three musketeers.”

You snarled at him, flexing your fingers. “It seems I made a mistake by not killing you last time.”

He didn’t get a chance to respond as you lunged at him, giving him two deep cuts on his thigh. And then the fight began. The man was better than you thought, avoiding a third swipe at his throat. He threw a punch at your face and you nimbly dodged it, bringing your hand up to cut into his shoulder. Blood gushed from the cut and he stumbled back, clutching the wound in agony. You took the pause to scan the rest of the room. Jungwon had a pile of unconscious guards around him, currently taking out the eighth. Yuna was shooting down the ones in the hallway, aiming for their hands and legs. You leaped over the guards, moving towards Krum. He was red-faced and waving his hands wildly, shrieking for backup. You slid behind him and held a knife to his throat.

“This is how this is going to go. You are going to go to sleep and forget this ever happened. And if not…,” you sucked the air out of his lungs, watching as he shook with restraint to not thrash and cut his throat with your dagger. You put the air back into his airways and Krum took gulping breaths. “Understood?”

You inched the dagger away from his throat and he furiously nodded. Jungwon met your eyes, done with the guards and you nodded. Jungwon lifted his hand and Krum swayed, before crumpling to the ground.

Yuna holstered her revolvers, running a hand through her hair. “Let’s get out of here.”

You nodded in agreement, pocketing your knives. You ran a hand over the window frame, taking a deep breath. In. Out. In. Out. You turned to face your two friends, people you’ve known for years, and in Jungwon’s case, would trust with your life. You nodded and they returned it. You moved aside so they could crouch on the window, ready to jump. You stood right behind them. What if I fail? You pushed the thought away. After all, you had a Jungwon to maim.

The city clock chimed for five o’ clock, and on the fifth clang, they jumped.

You leaped out after them and sent all three of you soaring upward through the air.

Assassin of the Air and Wind. It had a nice ring to it.

You fell onto the helipad, tucking into a roll. Jungwon rushed up to you, lifting you up and spinning you as he hugged you so hard you knew what your victims felt like. You laughed and patted his shoulder, “Let me down, Won.”

“Fine,” he said, grinning at you. “That was awesome. I knew you had it in you.”

You grinned back. “Well, a certain someone let me know of my next hit. A very important one, he said.”

He smiled sheepishly and rubbed the back of his neck. “Sorry… I really did try to stop.”

“Well now we’re rich, so all debts are lifted.”

He chuckled, leaning in so your face was inches away from his. “Forgiven, then? For the lying?”

You tilted your head to the side, pretending to think it over. “We’ll see.”

He didn’t respond, staring at your eyes. His gaze slowly lowered, landing on your lips.

You glanced at his. They were smooth, salmon pink, and slightly tilted up at the ends. You forced your heartbeat to stop furiously beating, knowing he could hear it clearly.

Oh, for Saint’s sake, just kiss him.

You put a hand on his cheek and pressed his lips onto yours, swooning at how nice and soft they felt. He stiffened, before putting his hand on the nape of your neck and kissing you back. Your movements were slow and languid, yet still electrifying, and you enjoyed how nice it was to kiss Jungwon compared to your past flings. It was intoxicating, setting the nerves in your lips and brain on fire. He pulled back and smiled softly, touching his forehead to yours. You smiled back, still high from the kiss.

You heard a whoop and clapping, turning to see Yeonjun and Yuna smirking at you two.

“Took you long enough,” Yeonjun chimed, and Yuna nodded in agreement.

She hoisted herself into the passenger seat of the helicopter. “Now, if you’re done snogging each other, we have to leave. Now.”

You both scrambled into the back, strapping yourselves in and securing your headsets.

“Lovebirds, no funny business while I’m flying. Especially you, Airbender. I don’t need you to get excited and send us flying off course.” Yeonjun deadpanned into the microphone.

You chuckled to yourself, watching as the helicopter lifted you off of the ground. Jungwon entwined his fingers with yours, tilting his head to the side in playful question.

You laughed and stretched your arms, turning towards him. “Forgiven,” you mouthed to him.

He beamed at you and squeezed your hand. You squeezed back.

EPILOGUE

You flipped through papers, checking off every Grisha still left in Kerch. It was months after your Exchange job, collecting your money and paying off your debts to the Slave Pirate. Kai had taken his share and moved out, opening a gadget shop that attracted youngsters and eccentrics from around the world. The twins’s business was booming, becoming one of the biggest names in Ketterdam.

You and Jungwon had begun a Grisha safety-and-smuggling practice, keeping an eye on all the Grisha in Kerch and helping those who wanted to leave sail undetected to Ravka. You heard the door open and close and got up to meet Jungwon in the living room. He dropped the bags he was carrying next to the kitchen, slumping onto the couch.

“Tired already?” you teased, sitting down next to him. You ran your fingers through his hair and he visibly relaxed, melting onto the couch.

“That was like… seven delivery trips. I’m spent,” he smiled at you, “But worth it.”

You hummed in agreement. “Well… there’s some chocolate ice cream in the back of the ice box.”

The words “chocolate ice cream” seemed to breathe life into him and he jumped up, round eyes sparkling as he stared at you excitedly. “Say no more.”

© celestialgyu | do not copy or translate

[theriverbeyond]

Ideal work schedule:

I show up and am given a list of cognitively engaging but achievable tasks

I complete the list

I leave immedietly

[bonesandthebees]

one of the most infuriating things about becoming an adult is when you realize that it actually is 10x easier to solve problems by making a phone call vs literally any other communication method

[diabloku]

Lucifer: *enters the hotel*

Alastor: I cast vicious mockery 😈

An animation my sis and I made for fun

Music is Perception Check by Tom Cardy.

[bookpdf]

there should be more hours between 6 and 10pm. like even just two more hours. for my assorted hobbies & activities

[bjurnberg]

My work boots are the most expensive shoes I’ve ever owned.

Also the most comfortable. I chose them after trying on several different brands and comparing lifespan vs usage vs comfort - I needed them for a physically demanding job, not the weekend hiking trails. I could have easily chosen cheaper boots that would have lasted long enough to be worth their low price, but I know the Sam Vimes Boot Theory and knew weaker, less comfortable boots would make my life harder in the long run.

So when the outside edge of the heel started wearing down after three years of heavy use I went to the shop I got them from and said “hey this is a common problem for me with how I walk but now it’s affecting my ankles and knees and I don’t wanna have to buy a new pair, is there a way to fix this?”

The salesman at this very fancy upscale boot store said “oh yeah, there’s a shoe repair place that can give you some heel guards - it’ll keep the rubber from wearing out.”

So at 8am this morning right after my 9hr shift ends I went to the shoe repair shop and it is the most hole-in-the-wall, is-this-a-real-business-or-a-mafia-front, am-I-gonna-get-shot tiny cinder block cube I’ve ever seen in my life. I grew up plenty poor and love me a good hole-in-the-wall business, but going from upscale store to this cash-only repair shop gave me whiplash. Wasn’t expecting this when a guy who wears three piece suits to sell boots said it’s the best place to go.

The skinny kid behind the counter looks somehow 16 and 25 at the same time, but when I tell him this place was recommended he smiles and says to hand over my boots. I hand him the vaguely warm foot-smelling boots, and stand in my socks in the 3’ square entryway surrounded by every color leather polish you could buy and watch as he turns my boots around in his hands, sizes up a crescent moon bits of plastic, and unceremoniously hammers tiny nails through them before handing them back.

The heels are perfectly level again. I can walk without almost rolling my ankles. They don’t clack loudly on the pavement or feel different. This is gonna fix my knee pain. It cost $10.

This kid had every tool he needed within arms reach, worked fast and smoothly, I was in and out the door in less than 8 minutes, and it only cost $10.

I didn’t think anything could cost only $10 anymore. I’m so used to hyperinflation prices I was spiritually thrown back to the 1400’s visiting the cobbler in town square. This kid might have been that cobbler and just decided to never die.

I’m still reeling from the whiplash, and gobsmacked at the price, and thrilled I didn’t have to go buy new, worse work boots (cuz I don’t have that kind of money for a second pair, I’m expecting these ones to last a decade) and it feels like I just experienced one of the rare little chunks of magic that floats around our world.

[crabussy]

hey. don’t cry. crush four cloves of garlic into a pot with a dollop of olive oil and stir until golden then add one can of crushed tomatoes a bit of balsamic vinegar half a tablespoon of brown sugar and stir for a few minutes adding a handful of fresh spinach until wilted and mix in half a cup of grated parmesan cheese and pasta of your choice ok?

[kylorens]

Illya's gestures and facial expressions when talking ✨💕

[drivinmeinsane]

Officer K x GN!Reader ※ { masterlist } ※ { ao3 }

※ Summary: With a tremor threatening to shake his body, he slips his fingers under the edge of his shirt sleeve and pulls it up to his elbow. His soulmark is laid bare before your eyes. The wound that he had left in his own skin when he had tried to carve out the design has faded to a raised, pale line. “That wasn’t there before,” you murmur, taking his forearm in your hands. Your pointer finger traces over the scar. ※ Rating: 18+ for mature content and themes. Please mind the warnings. ※ Content/tags: Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Implied Reoccurring Sexual Abuse by a Supervisor, Emotional Hurt, Identity Issues, Self-Harm, Alcohol Abuse, Smoking, Eye Trauma, Canon-typical Violence, Slow Burn, Developing Relationship, No use of Y/N, No Pronouns Given for Reader ※ Word count: 15,713 ※ Status: One-shot / Complete ※ Author's note: In the wake of a mentally difficult month, I present the story that accompanied me during that time. Here's to brighter days. ※ Song inspiration: Someone to You - BANNERS

In a cruelly human twist, the moment that K is incepted, birthed from a plastic bag like an item purchased at a supermarket in the years before the Blackout rocked the world, is also the moment he begins to die. This is something he won’t mind, once he realizes that death is a gift given only to the living.

As he lays, wet and trembling, atop compressed rubber and metal grating, he feels nothing but terror. His body is stricken by the wracking sobs of the newborn. His face gradually relaxes with each passing minute. The replicant’s wailing turns into coughing when his body chooses to expel the synthetically made amniotic fluid from his lungs.

“Are you done?” comes a woman’s voice. Clinical. Detached.

Suddenly made aware of the world around him, the small sterile room that it is, he opens his sticky eyelids only to be forced to squint against the penetrating glare of the artificial lighting overhead. He lays there for a moment, twisted and gasping like a crushed bird on the pavement—filled with the old memories of the nest and waiting, beak agape, for a mother who will not come. He shivers.

When KD6-3.7 manages to focus his eyes, the first thing he makes sense of is his own hands, and then the mark on his own forearm that is slowly blossoming to life. It’s all too much. His brain feels as though it is pressing against the confines of his skull, threatening to crack the bone and spill out onto the rubber. If it does, perhaps it will slip through the grate like the yolk of a broken egg.

Feet step up to him. They’re clad in sensible heels over black socks, utilitarian. K peers through the pulsing behind his eyes and sees a worn woman’s pinched face peering down at him. For just a moment, he’s certain that she intends to snuff him out. All the same, he pushes aside his fear and reaches out for her. She will become the closest thing to a mother he will ever know. K clasps his slimy hand around her sock-clad ankle. The bones are fragile underneath his grip. One too-tight squeeze and they would snap under the pressure. She tries to shake him off. He clings on, desperate for some kind of contact. He does not yet know that he will be raised solely by the wire mother with no comfort of the cloth.

“Let go.” Her voice cuts over the faint noise of the plastic crinkling above him. Disgust mars her lined face. He will grow familiar with expression. Both from her and from others.

As if burned, he immediately does. The compulsion to obey is too pressing for him to ignore. Every blood vessel and muscle fiber in his body is hardwired for submission. K tucks his hand against his chest, shrinks in on himself. He is not praised for his obedience or comforted through his turmoil. Tools, he learns later, do not need reward.

The woman crouches suddenly. She grabs at his arm and extends it under the harsh light. Her nails bite into his skin. It is the first pain he will experience from another living being. Both he and the stranger look at the elegant lines set into his flesh. She does not speak and neither does he. She lets go of him, red crescent moons grace the pale sky of his skin in the wake of her fingers.

There is a gesture that he doesn’t understand and, suddenly, he is being hosed down. The cold water sluices over him, washing away the newborn taint. With one final look cast down at him, the woman leaves.

Time passes in her absence, minutes smearing together in a twisted tangle made only more disorienting when the lights shut off. He is left in the dark, cold and struggling to comprehend. Refrigerated. He is experiencing punishment for a crime he does not yet understand. Wallace’s creation dared to have the trace of a soul in him. The evidence of it is clearly visible to the naked eye.

Eventually, the woman comes for him and lets him out into the light. He learns that he is hers, like a hunting dog belongs to a huntsman. His madam tells him that the mark adorning his forearm is a meaningless tattoo. She had only wanted him to be special. It’s the first of the many lies she tells him.

───※ ·❆· ※───

Advertisements cut through the gloom of his living room. In them, organics emphatically gesture to convey their success with the soulmate finding services being advertised. The blue light shifts to purple then to red. In the disorienting glow, anything could look real. Seated on his couch with a room temperature glass of whiskey that is only getting warmer with the heat of his hand, K watches Joi dance alone to the easy swing of Frank Sinatra.

“Did you know this song was first released in 1954 under another name by another singer? Kaye’s last name, Ballard, sounds a lot like ‘ballad’, doesn’t it?” she asks.

K hums, agreeable. The alcohol coursing through his bloodstream accompanied with his ever-present exhaustion have left him slumped bonelessly into the rigid angles of the cushions. It had been a day. It always is.

“Sweetheart,” the replicant says to his pretend wife, “will you indulge me?”

The DiJi smiles at him. He can see a knowing curve to her lips. It’s rare that he asks her for this. With a flourish, she flickers to an outfit with short sleeves. Joi kneels by the couch and rests her elbows on the edge of it, chin on her interlaced fingers.

“Is this what you wanted?” she asks, teasing. She presents her arm with an elegant flip of her wrist. The twin to the mark gracing his own forearm twinkles back up at him. He can almost imagine that it’s real.

Wordlessly, he extends his hand out and barely stops himself from reaching right through her projected skin by accident. He manages to stop himself before breaking the illusion. She plays at resting her arm in the palm of his hand. K can convince himself he can feel the warmth of her underneath the hovering passes of his thumb. Like trying to avoid breaking a gossamer thin strand of spiderweb, he carefully caresses her. Joi preens under the attention, reaching for his own mark in return. He feels the faintest trace of static.

He closes his eyes before he can register how the pixelation of her always makes the edges of her copied mark look not quite real. The replicant has to convince himself that this is enough. It’s all he has, so it must be. He cannot afford to dream of what it would be like to feel another body against his. Their kind must never look to the stars.

───※ ·❆· ※───

There had been a time in which K had wondered if the other bearer of his soulmark was his madam. He had been made for her, after all. It would only be right if they were intertwined down to the very cells that made up their bodies.

Joshi isn’t, of course. He finds out the first time that she has him strip her bare in the privacy of her office. Her skin is unmarked by anything but the scars of being human. K cannot boast the same. He heals too fast, too completely, to carry the same marks. For him to scar with any significance, an injury would have to be so severe that an organic’s body would be grievously devastated from the trauma.

He is not sure if the emotion he feels over the lack of mark on his handler is the grieving of what might have been or the relief at what isn’t. It would have been easier if it had been her. She hollowed him out. Used him. Uses him still. His madam owns him in every way that matters.

───※ ·❆· ※───

This retirement job is meant to be routine, the same as the last dirty dozen. He puts down an average of two Nexus 8 models every month. His work ethic has proven to be top of the line, much to the pleasure of the retiring department’s lieutenant. The routine success is enough to give him the security to sleep on the way to the property he’s being sent to. The ‘9 is exhausted from the long night he’d experienced.

K had poured over files at his cramped desk until his eyes burned and his throat grew so dry as to rival the arid chemical wastes of the Nevada desert. Still, he hadn’t bothered asking for water. It would cost money he didn’t want to spend. Besides, his experiences with liquid within the walls of the precinct have come hand-in-hand with punishment.

He wakes when the spinner chimes. Head snapping up, the officer inhales and exhales hard. It’s a sign of vulnerability he feels free enough to express as he turns off the autopilot and regains personal control over the vehicle. In the distance, a scattering of structures rise out from the perpetual haze of the world like a nervous herd of bovine protecting a calf against an approaching predator. He angles towards them, passing over a broken windmill on the way.

Pulling the spinner several yards short of a dead tree, he sets it down in a sprawling waste of infertile soil. A cloud of dirt gets kicked up by the disturbance. There is no hiding his arrival.

As he does on every job, K pops the latch for the spinner’s parrotfish in order to send it lazily into the sky. He gestures up at it to begin its rounds. The replicant tugs his jacket collar up over the lower half of his face. His lungs will ache for days if too much dust finds a home among the tissue. A minor discomfort, but he prefers to avoid them when he can.

Before stepping into his quarry’s home, he knocks the dirt off his boots. He doesn’t rap his knuckles against the door.

Unsurprised, he finds the living space as bare as his own apartment. There are small hints at a life here. Everything is cleaned, maintained, loved. K ignores the stab of camaraderie, buries it. He and this replicant are not of the same kind. He can’t allow them to be. It will only make the inevitability of what’s coming that much harder.

There is a pot of something fragrant boiling away on the stove that he had smelt the moment he opened the front door. He ignores it, for now, in favor of taking a seat in the kitchen. The Nexus 9 knows that he will be joined by the master of the house shortly.

He is proven right by the arrival of the pre-Blackout model shortly after settling into position. Sapper Morton bypasses him on his way to the sink. K silently observes him for a moment, elbow on the table with his gun in hand, as the wanted replicant scrubs at his work-worn hands. The water is loud in on the stainless steel basin. A flash of his inception flares to the forefront of his mind. He speaks to shake it away.

“I hope you don’t mind me taking the liberty. I was careful not to drag in any dirt.” K bites down the urge to continue, to explain that the wind had been turbulant, to actually have a real conversation with someone other than Joi. He’s not here for friendship.

There comes the rattle of something on the window ledge just out of K’s field of view. Sapper’s resigned voice answers him. “I don’t mind the dirt,” he says with a sigh and the noise of eyeglasses being placed on his rough face, “I do mind… unannounced visits.”

Heavy footsteps trod towards him in the dimly lit room. The seated officer tries not to react as the mountain of a replicant approaches him before coming to a halt a polite distance away. “You police?”

“Are you Sapper Morton? Civic number NK680514?”

“I’m a farmer.”

Sapper seems to be just as adverse to answering questions as he is. K can respect that. Answers can be a dangerous thing to give. Any vulnerability can be exploited.

“I saw that. What do you farm?” he asks, genuinely curious.

The mountain moves across the tile floor and a massive hand rises to open a cupboard. Morton slams down a container onto the counter before withdrawing a small cluster of white, wriggling objects. K watches quietly as the ‘8 approaches and drops the mass onto the table by his hand. Nematodes.

“It’s a protein farm. Wallace design,” Morton supplies as way of explanation.

Isn’t everything? K thinks. That man has fingers in nearly every form of industry in their society, both on and off world.

Taking his hand off the gun, he points at the air with a small twirl of his finger, subconsciously mirroring the gesture he’d given the parrotfish before entering the house. “Is that that I smell?”

“Grow that just for me… Garlic.”

“Garlic…” K says, wonderingly. The word feels just as exotic in his mouth as the plant might taste.

“Do you want to try some?”

“No, thank you. I prefer to keep an empty stomach until the hard part of the day is done.” The pot starts boiling even louder on the stove, as if it were protesting the refusal of Sapper Morton’s hospitality. “How long you been here?”

“Since 2020.”

“But you haven’t always been a farmer, have you?” Silence from the other replicant is answer enough. K continues, “Your bag. It’s colonial medical use. Military issue.”

He doesn’t miss the change in the older Nexus’s body language. The almost unconscious touch on the bag’s canvas side reminds K of the way he touches his own jacket when he’s uncertain. He presses onward with his information gathering.

“Where were you? Calantha…? Must have been brutal.”

“Planning on taking me in? Huh? Take a look inside?”

“Mister Morton, if taking you in is an option…” K sighs and leaves his gun aside on the table. “I would much prefer that to the alternative. I’m sure you knew it would be someone in time.”

A frustrated exhalation of air bursts from the other replicant as he pulls off his glasses. K tosses him a cursory glance before looking down, eyebrow slightly raised. He reaches into one of his inside pockets to pull out the small handheld retina scanner the police department issues for use on the field.

“I’m sorry it had to be me.”

“Good as any,” Morton says while K activates the device.

“Now, if you don’t mind… If you could just look up and to the left,” he instructs, uncrossing his legs and getting to his feet.

He knows what’s coming. He had seen him pull the scalpel out of the bag, so it comes to no real surprise when Sapper Morton lunges at him. K catches his hand before the blade can lodge itself between the span of his ribs. In return, he gets slammed against the wall by the far larger replicant. Managing to dodge the punches leveled at him, he tries to break free to create some distance between the two of them. He doesn’t succeed. The ‘8 grabs a firm hold on him and slams his body into the wall like Cain bringing the stone down upon his brother. Fighting to keep his chin tucked against the curve of his shoulder so that the back of his head doesn’t meet a similar end to Abel’s, he takes the brunt of the force over the span of his shoulders until finally the drywall gives out beneath him and he lands hard on the floor.

There is no time to recover because Morton falls with him, dropping the scalpel upon impact. They wrestle, trying desperately to get the upper hand over the other. K doesn’t want to do this. He wants to walk this back, reset and try again. He opens his mouth to tell the farmer just that when Morton is suddenly choking him. It’s as though an iron collar has been fastened around his neck. With tears leaking freely from him, he can feel the blood vessels in his eyes bursting under the strain. He growls, forcing air through his throbbing lungs and slams his fist into Morton hard enough to drop him.

Gaining traction, he manages to straddle the other replicant and he hits him one, two, three, four, five times in the throat in rapid succession. His adversary falls back, struggling to breathe through a damaged windpipe.

K wedges his fingers on the winded replicant’s eyelids and pins the eye open, trying to get the scanner ready. Morton interrupts him by grasping onto the scalpel and driving it into the meat of K’s upper arm. The officer grunts as pain radiates in his right side. He slaps the ‘8 back down and hits him. It’s punishment. Bad dog, his madam would say.

For good measure, he hits him for a second time to quell any further resistance. He doesn’t relish the feeling of his knuckles crushing against the other replicant’s trachea. This time, when he grabs Morton’s face, he manages to hold the eye open long enough for the handheld device to read it.

The screen confirms what he already knows. The man beneath him is Sapper Morton, charged with deadly assault of organic life and wanted for retirement.

Muscles twitching with adrenaline, K gets to his feet and looks down at the replicant choking on his own ruined body. “Please, don’t get up,” he says, accompanying his words with a pleading gesture.

He already knows that he will. They always do. The taste of freedom only serves to kill them in the end. Dying for the it seems… well, K can’t understand it, not like this. His eyes have not been opened to the benefits of being free.

Behind him, he already hears the rustling of Morton sitting up. He retrieves his gun from the kitchen table. It’s heavy in his hand. When he turns around and retraces his steps back towards the living room, the other replicant is on his hands and knees. Those calloused hands are clutching at his throat.

“How does it feel? Killin’ your own kind?” the farmer grits out.

“I don’t retire my own kind because we don’t run. Only you older models do.” There it is. The distinction he must draw between them to keep sane. He won’t pass his baselines otherwise.

“You new models are happy scraping the shit. Because you’ve never seen a miracle.”

K looks at him, jaw clenching with the effort not to speak. It’s on the tip of his tongue, that he has seen his own miracle. He carries it with him every hour of every day, right in his very skin. He doesn’t have a soul and yet he’s marked.

Sapper Morton rushes him, the last efforts of a wounded bull in the arena. K puts two bullets in him. The mountain falls. The house shakes and then goes still.

He covers the dead replicant with a blanket pulled from the back of the couch before extracting his eye with careful hands. He draws the makeshift shroud over Morton’s face when he’s finished. Bloody fingerprints get left behind on the faded fabric.

No matter how much soap K uses in the sink, he can’t get rid of the tacky feeling that seems as though it’s part of him now. His hands will never be clean. Innocence belongs only to the freshly incepted.

Before he leaves the small house, he takes the farmer’s glasses. Some part of Sapper Morton will live on with the replicant that retired him. It’s all K can offer him now.

───※ ·❆· ※───

A fog has laid itself over his shoulders like a second skin. It feels more familiar, more his, than the actual flesh that coats his bones. His DNA was taken from a donor. K is occasionally loathe to even call his body his. Some days, it feels like it has been parted out to anyone who might want a piece of it.

The numbness he’s feeling ensures he passes his baseline with flying colors after the retirement of NK680514. He gets to keep the moniker of “constant” K.

Joshi is pleased at his performance, When he goes to her office for his post-baseline report, she assigns him to another case to keep him occupied while the dig team finishes at the protein farm. His madam doesn’t like him to be idle for too long. He will be heading out in the morning to check in on another old model number.

───※ ·❆· ※───

Having never existed in a world where the skies are clear, K finds the beauty in the varying colors of the haze. Today, the old, industrial streets are bathed in a brilliant orange light due to the rising run. It’s a cheerful hue for the grim work that lies ahead. He supposes this area must come to life at night, being so far from the main heart of Los Angeles and its daunting amount of law enforcement.

K sends the spinner into a slow dive, cruising to increasingly lower altitudes as he gets closer to his destination. As always, the coordinates were provided by Lieutenant Joshi. She had been kind enough to provide him a suspected apartment number, rather than have him go door to door down the halls to find the culprit. Even with a number, K still doesn’t like the idea that there will be neighbors that might bear witness to this.

He finally parks the machine against the curb outside of a run-down apartment building. Even from inside the spinner, the officer can see that that bricks have broken free of the structure's edifice. He deploys the parrotfish for a halfhearted backup that will be useless unless he’s outside and gets out of the spinner.

The front door is uneven on its hinges. It squeals loudly in the silence as he pushes it open. Any dream of subtly is already dashed. The tone for this visit has been set.

Here, the hallways are dusty and unpopulated. He finds it to be a novel contrast to his own living situation. There, the building’s common areas are constantly wet with snow melt and teaming with bodies. The ‘9 wonders if this is how the explorers of ancient tombs felt. Like they were navigating the body of a slumbering Goliath. Finding the door that leads into the stairwell, he mounts the stairs. They creak and shift with the settling of his weight upon each one.

“Unit 405. One known occupant. Possible second.” the message had said.

Officer K reaches the fourth floor to find it predictably devoid of anyone in the hallway. He finds the door with its brass number and steps up to it. The knock echos in the empty hall. There is a long moment of silence before he finally hears footsteps approaching the synthetic wood. A rattle of a chain against the material, and the door opens just enough for an eye to peer suspiciously at him. There’s not enough of a gap for him to get the toe of his boot through.

“I’m sorry for the intrusion. I have some questions I need to ask.”

“You’re a cop?”

K keeps the frown off his face. This is reminding him too much of yesterday. “I’m looking for someone. Civic number NK687725. John Gradus.”

“What if I shut this door?”

“I wouldn’t recommend that,” he says, genuinely apologetic.

The stranger sighs and steps aside, opening the door all the way. “You better come on in, then. Nasty business to do in the doorway.”

Trailing after him, K rolls the situation over in his mind. He already knows the face matches, even from the glance he’d taken. It is now a matter of confirming the identity with the eye scan before the next step. Either the replicant can surrender or they can be retired. As Sapper Morton had demonstrated to great effect the day before, it’s never surrender.

“Please, sit,” the older generation model says with a gesture to a worn couch before taking a seat across from it in a chair that looks to be more tape than metal.

K readily complies, not wanting to make waves just yet. There is someone in the kitchen. They’re just out of sight.

“Can you bring us tea?” Gradus calls out after giving him a searching look. “I think it would do our guest some good.”

He’s in the middle of opening his mouth to protest when he catches movement in the kitchen entrance and he falls still. The last thing he was expecting here was you. An organic. The officer had simply assumed that the other potential occupant was another ‘8 like the one he was paying a visit. There is not mixing across kind. His madam has been aggressively clear about there being lines that must never be crossed.

Taking in the hard look you give him when you emerge from the kitchen carrying two cups, he adverts his eyes to the low table in front of him. The porcelain teacup that you place on coffee table is well loved. The edges of it are chipped and the saucer it’s resting on doesn’t match the delicate floral print.

K doesn’t miss the way that you and the other replicant engage in a silent conversation before you hand him his own drink. He is thrown off balance by this situation. The strangeness of it is putting him on an unfamiliar edge. His hand clenches on his thigh.

Across from him, you take a seat next to the ‘8 on another battered chair. Cracked vinyl and dented metal legs groan feebly under your weight. K realizes that everything in this apartment has been well-used. Repaired instead of replaced. He wonders which one of you is the sentimental type.

“Who are you?” you ask, breaking the uneasy silence. NK687725 looks embarrassed by your bluntness.

Head reeling, he responds. “Officer KD6-3.7.”

“That’s not a name. You’re one of them, then.” It’s not a question. Disgust colors your voice. That, at least, is familiar.

“Easy,” John Gradus mummers to you. He reaches over to pat you on the sleeved arm with his pale hand.

K marks the difference between this model and Morton. Where the farmer had been a combat model, it looks like Gradus was meant for another line of work altogether. He is delicate in the places where the other had been robust. K decides that he is likely an old pleasure model. A doxie, perhaps, or meant to be a private client’s pet. He can be easily overpowered in either case.

“Why are you here, Officer?” the other replicant asks, addressing him. There’s a resigned look in his eyes. K’s presence here is no mystery.

“I was sent to follow up on reports on a… rouge serial number. My betters needed reassurance.”

“You’re going to take me in? I’m afraid I don’t have much left to offer.”

“If you’re willing, I will gladly do that rather than the alternative,” K responds. Maybe today, he’ll catch a break.

“He hasn’t done anything wrong!” you cut in, rising to your feet.

K ignores the twinge he feels in his chest. “He ran.”

“So? Why don’t you?”

Left without an answer he is willing to articulate, he doesn’t respond to your question. Loyalty runs too deep when there is no one else to be loyal to but his madam. The thought of running is incomprehensible. There is nothing out there for him but the LAPD. He’d become what he hunts.

He observes quietly as Gradus manages to coax you back into your seat. Reluctance and anger are painted all over your face in broad strokes. The freedom of your expressions reminds him of Joi.

The officer’s eyes flick to the tea cooling on the table. It’s a different color than coffee, differing scent as well. A faint steam trail rises off of it. He tries to focus his attention on it rather than the strange sensation tucked behind his ribs. Distantly, he wonders if he is having a heart attack. Can his kind even have them or was their DNA too tampered with during the growth process to allow for such a thing?

“What kind is it?” he asks, abrupt.

John Gradus smiles over your disbelieving scoff, seemingly delighted at the conversation change. “Green. I grow it myself right here. Please, have a taste. We do not have any sweeteners, but I have grown to like it without additives.”

Extending his hand out to pick up the cup, his mind drifts. Why do all replicants seem to have a desire to create, to put their own mark on the world? It’s an all too human behavior for beings without souls.

The teacup is dwarfed in his grip. A bit too much pressure and he fears the entire thing might turn to wet chalk in his palm. He hovers it underneath his nose, inhales. There’s a crisp scent to it, something fresh. He presses his lips to the edge of the cup and sucks in a mouthful. Involuntarily, his eyes slip closed as the mellow flavor rolls over his tongue.

“Good, isn’t it?” the other replicant says gently. K opens his eyes and carefully places the cup back on its saucer. His side tingles underneath his gun holder, like its burning a hole into his flesh. It’s a reminder that he’s here for something other than a social call.

Reluctantly, he reaches into a pocket and pulls out his field scanner. K looks regretfully at the pair seated across from him. If he could walk away, he would.

“If you could look up and to the left for me, Mister Gradus…” he says, getting to his feet.

You surprise him by also lunging to your feet and moving to stand between him and the still-seated replicant. “Leave my friend alone. Please.”

“I can’t do that. I’m sorry,” K tries to move around you, but you put your hands against the wide expanse of his chest and try to push him back. Heat radiates from your palms, soaking through the threadbare material of his shirt. He doesn’t do anything more than sway from the sudden pressure. The strange feeling in his chest is worse. Why would you protect the thing sitting behind you? He was taught that all replicants are disposable, meaningless in the eyes of organics.

You must be the sentimental one, he realizes. You can’t bare to let go of broken things.

“Just tell your boss or whoever sent you that you couldn’t find us.”

“I can’t lie. I have orders.” K tries to sidestep you. “Please stand aside.”

You don’t listen. Instead, you continue to block him by crowding into his space. He finally catches you with a hand on your upper arm. Applying just enough force, he makes it to where you have to step aside to relieve the pressure.

“Officer, please,” the other replicant speaks, finally rising from his chair after setting down his own teacup, “You have my full cooperation if you do not—”

Gradus’s words get cut off at your sudden explosion of violence. K feels you sock him in the face with all the strength you can muster. Stars explode across his vision. A tall, white fountain looms into his mind’s eye, beckoning him closer. He staggers but recovers quickly. Moving faster than the older model behind you, he clamps his hand around your wrists before the ‘8 can do more than take a shocked step forward.

You fight his hold, struggling like an animal caught in a trap. He clenches his fingers down just enough to keep you captive.

“Please stop,” he requests of you.

“Let go of me!” you snarl in return.

This visit is escalating fast, too fast. K has no precedent for this. In every other retirement case he’s been involved with, the organics have steered clear of the situation. They never interfere, instinctively knowing better than to get between two replicants. You can’t insert yourself into a dog fight without risking getting bit in the frenzy. Already, he can almost feel your more delicate skin bruising in his grip. You’re fighting him hard despite gaining no ground.

“I’m going to need you to let go of my friend now, Officer.”

In the altercation, K had made the mistake of diverting his attention from the real threat to you. He’s chagrined to find that the other replicant has chosen to level a gun at him. It had been retrieved from its place inside a basket between the two chairs judging by the tangled mess of synthetic yarn draped cross the edges of the plastic.

Gradus is turning out to have a harder edge to him than the ‘9 had anticipated. It looks like you’re the breaking point of the wanted replicant’s amiableness. K releases his hold on you and puts both hands up before taking a step back in a show of placation. The eye scanner is still in his left hand.

“If you could put the weapon on the table,” the officer says with a nod to the surface not far from his knees.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” Gradus says apologetically, still pointing the gun at him.

“We all know I can’t do that no matter how much I want to… Direct orders.”

Sighing, the other replicant lowers the weapon in surrender but doesn’t set it aside. It’s still enough slack that K feels comfortable enough to step around you. It’s a mistake.

The instant you aren’t unintentionally shielding him from your friend, K sees movement. Gradus raises the firearm in a quick, decisive motion. K responds instinctively. His fingers leap for the gun holstered against his ribs.

With a deafening pop, the bullet blows a hole in the older model’s shoulder. John Gradus falls, gasping, to his knees. K watches, mentally disconnecting from the scene unfolding in front of him as the injured replicant claws at the wound soaking the carpet with each beat of his heart. K feels your absence in a way that is not dissimilar to a limb being severed when you leave his side and throw yourself at Gradus.

Strange. He doesn’t know you, doesn’t even know your name, and yet he is experiencing loss.

Forcefully dispassionate, he watches as you ease your friend onto his back to get better access to the wound. You pull your jacket off, desperately attempting to stanch the flow of blood by shoving the material against the hole until your knuckles pale from the pressure. There is already crimson smeared across your newly bare arms.

Officer K crosses the floor and crouches next to you. He presses a knee onto Gradus’s side to keep him still for what is coming next. K holds the replicant’s eye open and readies the scanner. He holds steady even when you let go of the wadded up jacket and start to rake at the back of hand he’s using to keep the eyelids apart. Even when you manage to open up cuts in his skin with your nails, he doesn’t react. The gouges you leave behind sting less than your pleading voice.

“Leave him alone. Please, just leave him alone.” You’re sobbing.

Emotions start to bubble up from the soil he has mentally buried them in, he beats them back with a shovel. He retreats into the comforting quiet of numbness until he gets a proper look at your blood-smeared forearm.

A hauntingly familiar mark adorns it. How many hours has he spent looking at the selfsame mark on his own arm? How often has he traced along the lines and let himself dream, just a little, that there really is something real out there for him? He’s even managed to convince himself at times that someone is looking for him because they want him as much as he wants them.

The scanner beeps, flashing green. It slices through his mounting alarm. He manages to spare a glance at it. The number inset into the tissue of Gradus’s eye is a match for the civic number he’d come for, just as he’d known it would be. He hates himself for the necessary evil he is about to preform.

Digging his knee more firmly into his target’s ribs, he extracts a small knife from another pocket in his jacket. He tunes you out. The blade runner accepts the harm you’re trying to inflict on him as penance for his cruelty.

K is as gentle as he can possibly be while he cuts the eye out of the still living replicant. The older model thrashes and struggles underneath him, but is ultimately unable to break free. K had been right about him being easily overpowered.

Trembling, he gets to his feet and moves away from you both. The eye is clasped carefully in his hand, optic nerve dangling freely. With his fingers slick with blood, he finds an evidence bag in one of his pockets and tucks the eye into its new, plastic prison. The bag goes back into the pocket it had come from.

You and Gradus had referred to each other as friends. The way that you’re curled over him, the protective hunch of your shoulders as you tend to him, supports the notion. Replicants were made to be isolated, sank deep in their work. Tyrell and, later, Wallace had engineered them to be the perfect servants. K doesn’t know what to make of this bond.

Before he can leave, there is one other thing left he must confirm or refute even though he already knows the answer. His own memory had supplied it. Grasping the edge of his own sleeve, he pulls it up to expose the mark etched into his cells. He looks from his forearm to yours, eyes following every memorized curve, every line.

They match.

The mouthful of tea he’d just had in what feels like a lifetime ago threatens to expel itself on the thin carpet. He’s found his soulmate. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

K gets to see the moment you realize you register what he’s looking at. Horror blossoms on your face as your mind tries to make sense of what you’re seeing, of what you really are to each other. The emotions running across your face are all caused by him. He feels sick.

“What?” he hears you mumble. It’s a broken little noise.

Stricken by the urge to comfort you, to lay himself on the floor beside Gradus so that you may flay him open, he clenches his hands and takes another step back. You’re looking up at him like he might attack again. The cut on the back of his hand weeps, doing what he cannot.

He isn’t going to hurt you and yours any further. K had already decided that the moment he saw your soulmark. It’s a choice born from a newfound sense of selfishness. His loyalty had gained a chip in the smooth surface of it, like the teacup you had placed in front of him. He is going to lie to his madam. As proof of a job complete, he’ll bring the stolen eye back to the precinct. If the other replicant survives the trauma inflicted on him, he will be continue to be free. He can go through his life without looking over his shoulder quite so often.

As if summoned by his thoughts, a cellular device starts chiming in his pocket. His madam. No one else would call him. The officer withdraws the device and presses the button to accept the call.

Lieutenant Joshi’s voice is tinny and crackling through the speaker. She doesn’t waste a breath on pleasantries. “Your dig came through. Get down here. Leave whatever you’re working on.”

The unit trills when she hangs up. He put the phone back into his pants pocket.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He means it, perhaps more than anything else he’s said since his inception.

Understandably, you don’t say anything in response to him. Instead, you try to stand despite your legs being too shaky to manage it easily on your own. Before he can show restraint, employ any measure of sense, he bridges the distance between the two of you. K offers you his hand. He’s stunned when you actually take it. Yours fits against his own, palm to palm, as though he was made for you. In a way, K supposes, he was.

There is a breathless moment where the two of you simply stand together hand in hand, eyes peering into the other’s. He wants to shift his hold. He wants to interlink his fingers with yours. Just as he is on the cusp of fulfilling that desire, you wrench your hand free of his and that’s when K knows his time here is up.

Gathering himself just enough, he puts his back to you. The door seems miles away as he starts walking towards it.

“Hey.” There is a flinty quality to your voice.

He pauses and looks back towards you. K is unsurprised to see that you’ve picked up Gradus’s discarded firearm and are now pointing it at him. He wishes that you weren’t shaking so much. He pivots to fully face you, keeping his hands at his sides. The least he can do for you is hold still so that you can line up the shot.

The conviction bleeds out of your face and your arm lowers. The gun falls to the floor at your feet with a heavy thud. At the back of his throat, he tastes the bitterness of disappointment.

K exits the apartment unit. Every step feels wrong. He wants to fight the order. He wants to turn around. The officer wants to offer something, anything, that could make this right. He wishes he could undo the blood pooled on the carpet, but he can’t do anything at all but obey. Free will doesn’t exist for him. His madam has called him in, and for now, he belongs to her no matter what the flesh might claim.

───※ ·❆· ※───

In the morgue, K doesn’t find himself to be any more stable. Joshi had called him in to make use of his intuition and rapid processing ability, but he feels numb. His thoughts keep wandering to you.

He’s barely aware of Nandez talking to him as he idly traces a thumb over his jacket where it lays draped over his arm. He thinks the material had been a more vibrant green once, before he had acquired it from an ‘8 who had, in turn, lifted it off a ‘7.

“Your box is a military footlocker issued to Sapper Morton, creatively repurposed as an ossuary. Box of bones. Meticulously cleaned and laid to rest about 30 years gone. Nothing else in it but hair. She’s pre-Blackout so DeNAbase doesn’t give an ID.”

K manages a nod. He doesn’t bother speaking.

“It was she, plus one,” Joshi says as if it were a shocking revelation. It’s not. From his understanding, organics often manage to reproduce.

Pregnancy, death, panning shots over the dead woman’s bones… His soulmark burns like a phantom brand. The fire feels like it’s spreading to his brain. He’s going under in a cloud of embers. Bits of conversation drift around him. They’re as untouchable as the pretend wife waiting at home for him.

Struggling to gain focus, he drags his intuition up from where it lies dormant and cooling. Coco is leading the forensic discovery today, a small relief. The tech zooms in too far and K gets a flash of scrapes along bone. Man-made alterations.

“Go back. Closer. Closer. That. What’s that?” It’s time he’s spoken since being recalled to the precinct. The three organics eye in him surprise.

“Notching on the iliac crest. Fine point, like a scalpel. Looks like an emergency c-section... Cuts are clean. No sign of struggle,” Coco reports.

K thinks for a moment, mulling over the information. “He was a combat medic. Maybe he tried to save her but just couldn't.”

His words cause the others to debate. They do it with little regard of what he is.

“He didn’t seem like the saving type.” Nandez sneers.

“He took the time to bury her. A sentimental skinjob…” Coco muses, but freezes, stricken “Sorry, K,” he adds.

K shrugs off the apology. He has long since been pushed past any feelings over any slights that come his way. It had been a necessary thing in order to survive here.

“Didn’t seem like the daddy type either. So where’s the kid? You scan the whole field?” Joshi says, knowing very well that replicants are sterile.

“Just dirt and worms. No other bodies.” Nandez’s response is immediate.

“Maybe he ate it.” Coco says, more serious than he should be.

Something flares, white hot, in K’s chest. He has never had a proclivity to anger. The vicious tone to his words surprises even him. “Or maybe he loved her. Maybe he took care of the kid like it was his, at least for a while.”

The silence is deafening. Three pairs of incredulous eyes stare at him. Then Joshi speaks, cutting through the silence punctuated only by K’s harsh breathing. She sounds like she’s talking to a very small child. “But your kind doesn’t love.”

“Oh, he definitely ate it,” Nandez follows up, barely able to get the words out before he starts laughing. Coco joins him.

K bows his head, thoroughly chastised. He only just keeps from curling in on himself.

His madam sighs. “Finish up here, boys. K, with me.”

Unsure of what to expect, he follows the woman to the elevator. He presses himself into the corner during the ride up to her office, unease biting at his bones. The confined space has only been a breeding ground for trouble. Having learned a few hard lessons, he takes the stairs these days unless he is with Joshi.

The lieutenant leads him through the bullpen once they get off the elevator. Nobody pays them any attention. Eyes automatically advert from his madam. When they get to her office, she leaves him to close the door behind them. Upon turning to face her, he finds that she has already seated herself behind her desk and is in the midst of pouring herself a drink.

K waits, face turned submissively down at the floor. He doesn’t fidget.

“The world’s built on a wall that separates kind. Tell either side there’s no wall and you’ve bought a war or a slaughter. Your kind is incapable of love. That’s a trait only given to humans. So whatever notion you have in your head about the skinjob and the woman, you leave that behind.” Her tone is lecturing. It leaves no room for argument, not that he would even dare dream of it. Whatever his madam says to him is the law that he must obey.

“Yes, Madam.”

“What isn’t possible can’t be.”

“Yes, Madam,” he says again.

With a sigh, she sits back in her chair. Her eyes trace over his body, appraising. His breath catches in his throat before he forces his nervous system to relax. The only sign of his discomfort is the clenching of his hand at his side.

Lieutenant Joshi’s mouth pinches. Her face takes on a harried look. With a decisive thunk, she sets the glass tumbler down on her desk. It has been emptied for the first of what is likely to be many times.

“Go home. Get your head on straight. I don’t need you wanting retirement.”

“Yes, Madam,” K agrees.

Any relief he feels as being allowed to leave is cut short when she stops him. “Hey.”

He pauses, letting that be the acknowledgment that he’s heard her. The officer waits like the obedient dog he was made to be.

“You’re getting on fine without it.”

He feels his eyebrow twitch upwards in question. “What’s that, Madam?”

“Love.”

───※ ·❆· ※───

It’s late. The sun sat below the sprawling expanse of buildings hours ago, leaving K to sit in the dark room with only his thoughts and his DiJi for company. While he looks out the window at the other apartment building across the street, at the wall of lives stored in little boxes, he feels more hopeless than usual. The mark on his forearm feels like a slap in the face.

What use is a miracle if it only serves to remind him of his failures? It is a monument to what he destroyed without even knowing what it was he was about to rip apart.

He stands up from the purple chair and takes a few stumbling steps over to the built-in table to pour himself another too-full glass of whiskey. The bottle he had opened after getting off work tonight is already more than half gone. K doesn’t know why he’s even bothering to pour it into a glass other than to occupy his hands. He might as well drink straight from the bottle for efficiency.

With the glass in hand, liquid nearly sloshing over the edges, he goes to where his coat his hanging by the door. He swallows down another mouthful of alcohol while he reaches into one of the pockets. He takes out the small knife he uses for extracting eyes on retirement cases. K figures he should have just given you the blade and let you take his instead.

“K, what are you doing?” Joi asks, tone colored with apprehension.

She is lingering by the window, nervously shifting her nonexistent weight. The replicant ignores her. He’s been doing that a lot lately. Something has changed in him.

Crossing the room again, he takes a seat on the couch. K sets his glass on the side table. Stray drops of whiskey escape over the lip of it at the careless motion. They soak into the paper of his book, his most prized possession. It doesn’t matter. Joshi already soiled it months ago with her own glass, not dissimilar to how she has with him.

Tightening his grip around the knife, he looks down contemplatively at his right forearm. He is not wearing a long sleeved shirt this evening. Maybe he should have been.

Joi starts to plead with him the instant she realizes what he’s about to do. He manages to block her voice out and sinks the blade into his skin, just below the soulmark. The metal works its way through flesh and meat until the fine tip of it scrapes against his radius. It burns as he drags it sideways, up and to the left. Blood wells up from the wound and starts dripping freely onto his pant leg. It soaks into the material.

K has decided that he is undeserving of the fragment of soul he was given at inception. The mark must be removed. Perhaps with it no longer on his body, its twin will appear on someone else. You can have a better soulmate, and he will just be another serial number. Unremarkable in every way.

Delicate hands flicker and clip through his, grasping futilely at the knife. Joi has thrown herself to her knees in front of him and is trying to stop him. Projected tears are falling from her eyes in shimmering droplets. He follows the steady flow of them to her face and realizes that he is scaring her. In her distraught expression, he can only see your agonized face as you sob over the replicant he put a bullet into just days before. Her hands are yours in the way that they attempt to pull at his, to put a stop to the damage he’s inflicting. The comparison stops him cold. He can’t do this to Joi. Even if their relationship together is an elaborate game of pretend, he can’t make someone else feel the way he made you feel.

Smothering the emotions inside of him like a flawed replicant straight from the artificial womb, he wiggles the knife back and forth to free it from his body. He sets the blade aside on the coffee table and retreats to the bathroom. Joi is unable to follow him. She is stuck to the hardline as if on a leash. He never got her anniversary present.

Away from Joi’s worried eyes, he washes the injury in the cramped bathroom sink. Water spills out over the sides and splashes onto the floor in swirls of pale pink on the tile. It makes its way lazily to the drain in the middle of the room. He will scrub the traces of his blood out of the grout later, when he has had a moment to distance himself from everything he shouldn’t be feeling.

Feeling unsteady, K finds the platelet jelly and sets to gluing the self-inflicted wound shut.

If he pinches the sides of it together harder than what is necessary, that’s only for him to know. The bite of pain is enough to ground him in reality. It clears away some of the drunken fog.

Closer to baseline than he was, K rejoins his distressed “wife” in the main room. She rushes at him and he draws her against him as much as a living being can do with a hologram.

“Oh, sweetheart, I’m sorry,” he soothes while she sobs nonexistent tears against his chest.

The replicant can’t help but wish that she were someone else. He wonders if his role and that of Gradus had been reversed, would you have tried to protect him? What would it be like to have someone care enough to try?

───※ ·❆· ※───

After that night where he had made an earnest attempt to remove his soulmark, he shuts himself off from Joi. He barely responds to her these days. He can hardly stomach interacting with anyone at all. Still, he does not turn off the DiJi. She is left to do wander around the room and do whatever her algorithm wishes. There is a strange sort of comfort in not feeling completely alone, even if the company isn’t actually there. He isn’t real in any meaningful way either.

His evenings become routine in their spiral. He sits, he smokes, he drinks, and he very rarely sleeps in the hours before his alarm chimes. You haunt the moments of rest he is able to get. He hears your voice in the throats of a thousand others. He sees your anguished face with every blink of his eyes.

K wishes he knew even just your name. He has nothing tangible of that day in 405. Perhaps it was just a dream, a terrible nightmare that has bled into the waking world.

He has to stop eating the synthetic meat he gets for his dinners. The artificial bloodiness of it transports him back to the moment he saw your soulmark covered with the gore caused by his mistake. He should have overridden instinct. He should have done something, anything, differently.

K nearly stops eating all together. His body is slowly wasting away, eating at his muscles. He’s taken to wearing more layers to offset the loss. No one comments at the change.

───※ ·❆· ※───

If only so you can put him down, he tries to find you. The opportunity for him to dig for information comes when he’s put on a case with Nandez. The detective leaves K alone promptly at the end of second shift. The replicant is not sad to see him go. Even at the best of times, Nandez is at his throat despite not having the authority to demand anything from him. K sincerely hopes that the man never gets a promotion.

With Nandez gone, K pulls up the property records for the apartment building he found you at and starts searching. There is nothing substantial, certainly nothing for an additional occupant in the unit rented by John Gradus. No co-signer, no lease agreement, no roommate paperwork. It’s a dead end.

Frustrated, he gets out of his chair and paces. K knows full he can’t risk diving too deep into the systems. Doing so might draw attention to his extracurricular activities. His madam would want answers, and not the ones he is willing to provide. She can’t know of your existence. Joshi was very clear about the boundaries between kind. Without question, he would find a way to retire himself if given the order to harm you.

───※ ·❆· ※───

Squinting his eyes against the feeble sunlight managing to stream into his window, he registers that Joi is looking at him. Her face carries the same serious expression that it has for the past few weeks. He feels a distant pang of guilt at being the cause of it.

She’s projected herself to be laying beside him on the thin mattress. In the dreamlike quality of the light, she looks almost tangible like this. Touchable. These small moments are why he never bothered with blinds or curtains.

“Tell me about your soulmate,” she says. He realizes that she’s emulated his mark into her hologram skin.

“There’s not much to tell.” His voice is thick with sleep.

“Tell me anyway.”

At that, he closes his eyes and summons his memory of you. With each detail he recounts aloud about your appearance, Joi alters herself. She replicates your accent, your hair, your eye color. When he opens his eyes, he finds himself looking at a pale imitation. It’s almost closer to a mockery than anything else. The morning light can’t make it real. Nothing could.

Tenderly, his DiJi reaches out and tries to press her fake mark against his in the way he’d always hoped his soulmate would when they found each other. He lets her, numb. It doesn’t feel like anything more than the faint static tingle of her projection. She clips through him.

“A special boy needs a name, a real name.” she prompts, mulling the thought over.

“Don’t,” he interrupts, softly. He doesn’t want Joi to name him. She’s not what he really wants. If anyone were to give him a name, it should be you.

With a flash of hurt on her face, she pulls away. The attempt at a loving game of pretend like they used to play is over. There is not likely to be another one.

───※ ·❆· ※───

Carefully, he tears out the title page of his book. K does not have any other paper. This will have to do. With the same marker the replicant used in his spinner to label the bag containing Gradus’s eye, he writes on the alcohol-warped page.

I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

Officer K folds the paper and tucks it into his badge holder for safekeeping. He has a premonition that this day will end with him staring into the lens of a camera like the barrel of a gun while one of the precinct’s baseline administers hammers him with questions asked forcefully enough they might as well be physical blows.

Pushing through the crowd on the stairs, he doesn’t register the turmoil around him. He breaks free once he’s out the front door. The walk to the garage seems to pass in the blink in the eye and feels like only heartbeats pass before he’s in the work-provided spinner and on the way to the apartment building he’d been to a lifetime ago.

He puts the spinner down curbside out in front of a struggling noodle place. K doesn’t want to be parked too close to his objective. If someone comes sniffing around after him for going off-map, he doesn’t want it to be immediately obvious where he’s going.

As they had been the last time he’d been here, the streets are empty. They’re marked with obvious signs of nightlife. It all but confirms what he had suspected when doing the flyover. Graffiti and broken class litter the sidewalks in front of the row of businesses shuttered for the daytime hours. The neon signs are off and the blinds closed.

The apartment building looks the same as it had last time. Despite his own world being shaken to the very foundations, the structure he is entering looks unstricken by revelation. Retracing his footsteps, he ascends to the fourth four and finds the unit. The doormat he’d not bothered to acknowledge before is still out front.

With his pulse pounding in his ears, he raises his hand and knocks. He waits for the telltale sign of life behind the barrier. Nothing. Concern prickles at his mind, and he knocks again only to get no response. For just a moment, he thinks about just sliding the paper under the door but on a whim, he tries the knob. It turns easily in his grasp. It was left unlocked.

“Hello?” K calls out as he steps across the threshold.

Silence greets him in return.

From what the officer can discern upon casting a searching look at his surroundings, little has changed. The furniture is where it had been on the day of his visit. He is not sure if any of the personal effects have been disturbed. They had not been near the top of his priority list at the time.

A loud ringing noise shatters the peace and he startles, nearly hitting his elbow on the wall. It’s his phone. His madam must have checked on his tracker code and realized that he isn’t anywhere a good boy might be found under normal circumstances. He lets it ring through unanswered. His countdown has started.

Reluctantly, he continues his investigation and looks at the place where he had dropped Gradus. The blood stain he’d left behind is a mere, blush colored mark on the carpet. Someone, probably you, had tried to scrub away the evidence. The basket of yarn that had contained the gun has been righted and moved to a place between the couch and the blind-covered window.

Showing some level of restraint, he resists the urge to wander into the bedrooms. There are two of them. A glance through the doorways reveals that each has a bed. You and the ‘8 must not sleep in the same room. Instead of trying to puzzle out which might contain your possessions, he moves into the kitchen.

There is moisture in the sink. Someone has been here recently. The apartment had not been abandoned in his absence.

The water in the basin reminds him that Gradus had asked you to bring tea to them. Could it be your usual chore? The thought sparks an idea, and he pulls his badge from his pocket and extracts the folded piece of paper. He leaves it on the counter as his phone rings for a second time. Ignoring the repetitive trill, he picks up a pen from the coffee table and returns to the kitchen to unfold the page he’d torn from the book.

Again, his phone goes off, barely a pause between the attempts at reaching him. The timer is running out moment by moment.

Underneath the words he wrote at his apartment, K presses the nib of the pen against the paper and takes a breath. In careful writing, he adds to them.

Do you feel that there's a part of you that's missing?

What's it like to hold the hand of someone you love?

Immediately, he wants to erase the words. With the feeling that he’s making another mistake when it comes to you, K refolds the sheet of paper and tucks it partially under the kettle resting on the counter. He wishes that he knew your name so that he could write it on the paper. Even without it, it’s clear enough who the message is for. Gradus hadn’t been the one with who shared his soulmark.

With an air of finality to it, the device in his pocket rings a fourth time. It’s his cue to leave. Spurred into haste, he puts the pen back where he’d found it and takes a final glance around, still curious about which decorative choices were yours.

He leaves the apartment, making sure to close the door securely behind him. The replicant all but sprints down the stairs in the effort to create distance between himself and the apartment unit. He narrowly manages to keep his pace limited to a brisk walk on the way back to the noodle restaurant. Just as he’s reaching for the lock on his spinner’s door, he hears a low roar rapidly approaching.

Looking up, he sees a police issued vehicle pull into a stop. It begins its decent as a voice projects over the loudspeaker. “Officer K D6-3.7. We’re taking you in on failure to report.”

K puts his hands up and automatically lowers himself to his knees. Acutely, he’s aware of what will happen if he doesn’t perfectly comply. LAPD beat cops are trigger-happy organics and ready to spray and pray at anything that so much as breathes wrong in their direction. He has never respected them, never been given cause to in all his dealings with them.

A cop gets out, leaving another behind the wheel, as soon as the spinner lands. In short order, K finds himself handcuffed and made a passenger in his own provided spinner. The organic makes a stab at ruffling his nerves on the way back to the precinct.

“Lieutenant’s real mad at you for taking off like that.”

K offers nothing in response.

“What the fuck were you doing all the way out here, skinner?”

He shrugs in his restraints, chooses how to interpret the question. “Noodles.”

The officer whistles, pitchy and uneven. “Oooh, she’s going to string you up.”

K is aware. He knew the cost for his apology when he set out today. He had also decided it was worth the fallout.

───※ ·❆· ※───

The stool that Officer K is sitting on is uncomfortable—a hard, impersonal thing meant to be hosed off as needed. It’s the same as the rest of this room bathed in the sterile light of humming florescent bar. Underneath the copper burn of blood is an antiseptic tang. The baseline testing room is everything but a slaughterhouse floor in name. He’d opened his eyes for the very first time in a room like this.

Ringing fills his ears followed by the whir and click of the wall-mounted camera in front of him. A disembodied voice reads off his serial number and informs him that the test has begun.

Responses leave the replicant’s throat through as though someone else is speaking through him. He’s calm, retreated so far into himself that any residual fire inside of him has been snuffed out. He feels cold. The joints in his fingers ache with the sensation. He doesn’t dare to flex them or to rub at his chafed wrists.

The cops that had been sent to fetch him had removed the handcuffs as soon as he’d been delivered to the testing room. One of them in particular had found great amusement in hauling him through the precinct by the narrow chain like a dog catcher with an animal on the end of their pole.

Finally, the pounding against the walls of his mind stops. The interrogation is over. The camera powers down and the examiner sighs, hard, almost disappointed.

“You’re free to go, Officer. Your lieutenant will see you in her office.”

K rises, stiff, eyes unseeing. He barely registers the activity of the precinct around him as he traverses the hallway and climbs the stairs in clear avoidance of the elevator once again. He feels trapped enough in his own head without the physical captivity of being in a little box.

Low murmurs roll against him akin to the waves against the seawall when he crosses the bullpen and knocks on Joshi’s door after reaching the floor housing her office. She calls him in immediately. Her tone is like an angry wasp. It provides a sting that jolts everything back into sharp relief.

She barely waits until he closes the door behind himself. “The hell is with you?”

Years of experience have taught him to let his madam work through her anger without input from him. K waits, still and patient, in front of her desk.

“You take off without informing me, you ignore my calls, and then what? We pick you up fucking around in the street outside of some shitty restaurant? What was so important about it that you had to go out there?”

“Apologies, Madam,” he says. Repentance drips from his voice like honey from the comb.

Joshi waits, looking expectant. Her expression shifts to frustration as no more words come. “That’s it? That’s all you have to say to me? Tell me why you were out there.”

It’s a direct order. The instinct to obey pulls at him. He gives in without a fight. “I was following up on the second retirement case. Civic’ NK687725. It was a surprise, Madam. I had hoped it would be a welcome one.”

Like magic, the severely set lines in Joshi’s face soften. She is becoming convinced that he’d meant his… willfulness as a gift, as a credit to her and her management.

“Did you find anything?”

“There was no one there,” he pauses, twists the truth in his own mind, “Hadn’t been for a while. It’s probable I scared them off and they went underground.”

Who is to say what “a while” means? Time is relative.

Joshi lifts a hand and beckons him closer, around the corner of the desk. Eager to avoid more trouble, he instantly follows her direction. She rotates her chair to face him when he comes to a stop within touching distance. He has learned through trial and error to predict exactly where she wants him based on her mannerisms and tone. It has never bode well for him to be wrong.

“Good dog,” the lieutenant says, lightly kicks him in the shin. “Just let me know before you decide to be proactive again.”

“I will, Madam.” He’s glad that she has decided to be lenient today.

“Get on out of here. I don’t need the distraction.”

“Goodbye, Madam.” It’s polite and he keeps his pace measured as he leaves. He doesn’t want to seem too eager. It would send the wrong message.

───※ ·❆· ※───

Weeks pass K by without any outward indication that you’ve received the paper he had left behind at your residence. He has made a resigned peace with the idea that your paths may never cross again when he arrives back to his apartment following a day kept late at work doing overtime, again, for Nandez. Following routine and nearly swaying on his feet, he puts his hand on the scanner for the door lock. He opens it just enough to slide through and is greeted in the entryway by Joi for the first time a while. Panic is displayed on her face. Taken aback, he’s about to question her when she speaks first.

“You have a visitor. I didn’t think you would want me to say no,” she whispers.

Frowning, he mulls over the list of potential visitors and only comes up with one idea of who it might be. But, he’d just seen Joshi at the precinct before leaving for the day. She had given him no indication that she would be paying him a visit tonight. In fact, his madam had had him sit down on the other side of her desk to share a drink with her.

It had kept him occupied for the better part of the hour while she got intoxicated enough to insist that he give her a kiss before he leave. She’d failed to push things further by not ordering him to his knees before her or manipulating his hands onto her body. K thinks that she’s grown bored of him, at least for the moment. The thought makes him feel relieved.

Joi touches him on the shoulder, putting an end to his thinking. “Good luck.”

Anticipating, despite the unlikeliness of it, to see his madam, he passes by the DiJi into the main room. K stops in his tracks, stricken dumb. He’d have sooner expected Coco spread out on his couch in nothing but his clear, silicone labcoat and an artificial rose in his mouth than to be staring at you. Somehow, you don’t look as out of place as you should among his sparse possessions.

“How did you find me?” the replicant asks.

“You said your identification number the day you showed up. KD6-3.7.”

It’s strange a strange thing, hearing his “name” come out of your mouth. He doesn’t supply the nickname he’s been given during his time as a blade runner. He’s already pacing on the knife’s edge. This evening could tip him in any direction without forcing any further familiarity.

“You got the note.”

“Yes.” Your tone is matter-of-fact. “You wanted to know if I felt like a part of me is missing.”

He is left waiting for a follow-up that doesn't come. The thought hangs there, uncontinued. In the quiet of the room, K shrugs off his jacket and goes to hang it on the hook by the front door. He unholsters his gun and puts it on a nearby shelf. No matter how things go, he will not be using it on you.

Before he faces you again, K approaches the controls for the hardline crossing the ceiling. When he casts a look at Joi with his finger hovering over the power button, she looks at peace. She gives him an encouraging shooing motion of her hand. He turns her off for the first time in months. You and K will not have any outside distraction.

“He lived, by the way.”

K feels a tightness loosen in his chest. “I’m glad.”

“Why? You could have easily made the shot fatal, why didn’t you?”

“Somebody cares about him. He would have been missed.”

“And that matters to you?” You don’t sound judgmental to his ears, only curious.

“Yes. I’m sorry I had to do it.” He swallows hard, voice breaking as he continues. “I didn’t choose this.”

The replicant knows that he is only what he was made to be, nothing more, nothing less. Nature had dictated his obedience. Nurture had molded him into being what the Los Angeles Police’s retirement division had had in mind when he was purchased for their use.

Under the weight of your gaze, he begins to self-soothe by clasping his hands together in front of him and rubbing one thumb over the other. He finds himself relieved from the burden when you shift your attention to your surroundings. He watches, fascinated, as you begin to explore.

Your fingers trail over the box where he stores his cigarettes and the lighter he’d found in the pocket of one of his previous retirement jobs. Moving onward, you pick up his book and flip briefly through the alcohol warped pages. He sees the recognition dart across your features when you find the place where the torn out page had once resided. The care in which you set the volume back down on the table surprises him. His madam had never displayed that level of consideration. Neither had Joi with the projected clone of it.

“These don’t look like yours,” you say. In your hands are Sapper Morton’s glasses, held as if they might break apart in your grasp with so much as a wrong exhale.

“They’re not.”

“Whose are they, then?”

“Sapper Morton. He was a retirement case,” K pauses, hesitates, then quietly adds, “I didn’t want him to be forgotten.”

“Why?” you ask, rolling the word in your mouth like a pearl.

The question makes his skin itch. He stills as though he had just taken a seat for his baseline. The only betraying movement is the continued motion of his thumb atop the other.

“Why?” you repeat, softer this time. There’s something close to tenderness in your voice and that makes him afraid.

“He was more than a serial number.” K admits, feeling the answer clawing its way out of him. “I… they all were.”

“Are you?”

“No.” His response is immediate. Firm.

“Why not?”

Unable to answer, he looks away. Shame laps at him with an overeager tongue. There is a divide between the older models and him. In some ways, Morton was right. The ‘9s are happy scraping the shit because it’s all they have been taught to know.

He’s aware of you setting the glasses back in their resting place on the shelf, but it still surprises him when you cross the small amount of space separating the two of you to stand in front of him. You’re so close to him that he can feel the heat of your body. It makes him want to burn in your fire.

“I do feel like there’s something missing. It’s like there’s an empty space next to me that should be filled by someone, but that someone never comes. It’s the part of the reason I came here. I… wanted to talk to you knowing what we are to each other,” you tell him.

K nods. Words catch in his throat, tumble over one another. In the end, he is unable to utter any of them.

“Will you show it to me?” you ask with a gesture to his covered arm. “I want to be sure.”

With a tremor threatening to shake his body, he slips his fingers under the edge of his shirt sleeve and pulls it up to his elbow. His soulmark is laid bare before your eyes. The wound that he had left in his own skin when he had tried to carve out the design has faded to a raised, pale line.

“That wasn’t there before,” you murmur, taking his forearm in your hands. Your pointer finger traces over the scar.

His breath catches at your touch. Overwhelmed, he has to close his eyelids against the moisture welling up in his eyes. He opens them again when the pressure of your hands leaves and sees you taking off your own coat to toss it over the back of his chair. The replicant barely has a moment of respite before your left hand resumes its position cupping the underbelly of his forearm. You keep him steady as you raise your right arm and nestle it alongside his to place the soulmarks side by side.

K’s eyes hadn’t been deceived back then. They are perfectly identical.

It’s more than he can handle. He curls into himself, instinctively seeking the fetal position. His chin is against his shoulder, face turned away from you. He’s not sure if he’s burning up or drowning.

“Hey… hey.”

Suddenly, your arms are around him. K feels himself being guided in until he’s all but cradled against you as you ease the both of you to floor. He finds himself pressing his face against your neck as you rub a soothing hand up and down his back. For each moment that passes, the replicant grows increasingly more worried that he’s overstaying his welcome, but you don’t push him away. Instead, you gently rock him.

“I’m sorry,” he says, sounding choked even to his own ears.

“I’m sorry too. I misjudged you. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still pissed, but it wasn’t… I have an understanding of why you did what you did.”

Forcing himself to put some distance between your bodies, K finally pulls away. He doesn’t want to risk being reprimanded for taking too much. Your hands fall into your lap in the void he leaves behind.

There is a part of him that keeps expecting to discover that this is a vivid dream. Will he wake up and be staring at the water-damaged ceiling instead of your face? The hard floor under his knees, the chill of it creeping through the fabric and trying to find a home against his skin, seems to signal otherwise.

“Please don’t apologize. What I did was unforgivable.”

“John’s not mad at you, you know?” The words come as a surprise. He searches your eyes for a joke only to see sincerity reflected back at him. “He said you probably extended his life a few years by taking his eye and turning it in. Nobody’s gonna come looking for a dead man.”

“He’s not on our radar anymore. His file has been greyed out,” he says, getting to his feet.

Automatically, he reaches down to offer you his hand. It’s a mirror of your last interaction. He can tell by your expression that you are reliving the same memory as he. Still, you once again take his hand without hesitation. You hold it for just a moment before letting go. He doesn't think he imagined the reluctance.

“I don’t want to take up too much of your time, Officer. I don’t want to intrude,” you say, turning to pick up your coat from where you had left it.

“Please. Stay,” he bursts out. The feeling of imminent loss batters at the walls of his chest, “unless…”

“Okay.”

He blinks, not expecting the ease in which you had agreed. He’s left cycling through various scripts in the effort to find something to say. Latching onto a familiar interaction with Joi, he asks, “Do you want coffee?”

“Sure, I’d take some.”

K finds himself with you in his narrow kitchen. He heats the water while you take down two mugs and locate the instant coffee grounds after some direction from him. It’s domestic in a way that he was never able to have with Joi. With her, he didn’t need to worry about knocking elbows together or pressing her into the cabinetry while trying to reach for a pot holder.

Once the hot water is ready and split between the two mugs and stirred together, the two of you take seats on the couch. Between sips, conversation flows, a trickle at first and then a flood. You talk for hours, long after your mugs are drained and sat aside.

Following the natural progression of all things, the words begin to slow as tiredness sets in. Pauses between sentences lengthen like shadows. At seeing your eyes between to flutter shut, K rouses himself out of his own comfortable stupor.

“I’ll take the couch if you want to sleep in my bed tonight,” the replicant offers. He’s relaxed, at ease in a way he’s not sure he’s ever been. You’ve changed him.

The effort that it takes for you to keep your eyelids open as you think over his stab at hospitality only endears to you him further. Finally, you shrug and smother a yawn. “I’ll take you up on that. I don’t think I need to be behind the wheel like this.”

While you pull out your phone and send a message to your roommate to let him know your plans, K gets up and crosses the room to fold down the bed. He opens a nearby drawer and pulls out the pillow and blanket to put on the mattress. With a helpless twinge sigh, he surveys the setup. It’s not the lap of luxury, he knows, but he hopes it will be sufficient.

“All yours.”

“Thank you, K.” The light press of your fingers against his soulmark warms him almost as much as the use of his nickname. You had slipped into using it when he had admitted his preference for it over his job title or serial number in at some point in the previous hours.

He nods, a shy dip of his head and lets you slide under the blankets. After fetching his jacket off the hook to use as a blanket, he turns off the lights and lays down on the couch. Sleep comes to him almost immediately. It’s dreamless.

───※ ·❆· ※───

Morning comes to him with the shrill chiming of his alarm. Fumbling for his handheld, K silences it and lays still for a moment, staring up at the ceiling. The replicant fell asleep on the couch again. He knows that he has been doing that more often than he should. Too much alcohol and flipping through the pages of his book time and time again on the hunt for any new meaning that he can gleam from the words he knows by heart have contributed to this being a regular occurrence.

With a stiff back, he sits up and swings his legs to place his feet on the floor. He freezes right on the cusp of standing up. There is a body tucked into his bed and it’s not Joshi. Yesterday evening hadn’t been a whiskey soaked dream brought on by too much wishful thinking. It had been real.

K knows he needs to get ready to go to the precinct and pushes himself through his morning routine accordingly no matter how much he would prefer to wait at your side to resume the domesticity the two of you had begun to forge. By the time he’s out of the shower and dressed, you’ve gotten up and put the bed back in its stored away position. The bedding is neatly folded and set on a shelf with the pillow.

With his hair still damp, he observes you for a moment from the kitchen. You’re tracing the faded letters and numbers on the back of his jacket with a finger, clearly trying to decipher the characters.

“N7H00105,” he supplies, sparing your eyes.

Amusement causes the corners of his mouth to rise into a smile as you turn to him with an incredulous look. “How did you…? It’s so faded.”

“It was easier to read when I acquired it.”

“Another one of your job finds?” you ask, offering him the jacket when he approaches.

“Yes.”

While he’s pulling the comforting weight of the garment over his shoulders, he tracks you with his eyes as you step into your shoes and tie the laces. You haven’t put your coat on yet, leaving your arms bare. There is a moment of silence, the two of you regarding one another. He does not want to be the first one to make the gesture to leave and, it seems, neither do you.

Your teeth are worrying your bottom lip. He wonders what you’re thinking about, but in the clear light of day, he finds himself unable to ask. The sun has burned away some of the ease of last night.

Finally, you speak. “If you had the option, would you leave all of this behind?”

He blinks, uncomprehending. “What?”

“Your job. Your life here… Would you leave it behind?”

“I… I don’t have anything else.” His words are uncertain, shaky.

“What if I’m offering you something else?”

“My kind doesn’t run.”

“It’s not running, K. It’s living.”

Rattled by the conviction in your voice, he sits down on the couch. His chest feels tight as barely defined images of things he’d hardly dared to dream of race through his mind. The enormity of what you’re suggesting is all but unimaginable. He has been loyal to his madam’s cause since the day he was incepted. There could be no deeper betrayal than slipping free of his tether.

The sensation of your hand on his shoulder jolts him back into the present moment. He meets your concerned eyes for a heartbeat before he has to look away.

“You don’t have to decide right now. You can think on it.”

“Saturday. I’ll be ready on Saturday,” he chokes out. His heart is pounding in his throat. He knows he cannot risk sitting through another baseline in the wake of this. He will fail.

“You’re sure? You won’t be able to come back here.”

“Yes.” Recklessly—impulsively—he has made up his mind.

───※ ·❆· ※───

The Saturday of his departure dawns like any other. The sunlight peering into the apartment’s only window would make K’s morning wholly unremarkable in its routine if his surroundings hadn’t been wiped clean of any personal possessions but a select few items that he is leaving behind for his madam to repossess. His entire world had fit into one furtively purchased duffel bag.

His nerves are alight with restlessness as he waits for you to arrive. The replicant had spent a few fitful hours laying on his mattress before rising ahead of the sun to ensure his readiness for the life ahead. As part of his preparations, he finally purchased Joi’s anniversary present. An emanator. He had transferred her to it after yesterday’s shift at the precinct. She had been joyous, nearly overflowing with excitement for him when he had explained the situation to her. He had cautiously let himself share his own tentative optimism.

At the DiJi’s suggestion, he had snapped the emanator’s small antenna after deleting her save file from the main console. The risk of being tracked or leaving behind damning information was too great to allow for cloud backup. Despite his own trepidation, Joi had insisted the risk of her being able to die like a real girl was worth K’s freedom.

A firm knock against the door alerts the Nexus 9 of your arrival. With haste, he moves through the entryway to open the door for you. Both of you wait until it’s securely closed before you greet each other.

“Good morning,” you tell him.

K is just opening his mouth to respond in kind when you surprise him with a hug. The replicant wraps his arms around you, careful to not apply too much pressure. It’s a novel thing, getting to hold someone like this. Reluctantly, he lets his hold on you loosen after a short moment. He knows there is work to still be done. A final step in the plan.

Without you needing to ask him, he gestures to the table in front of the window. The supplies for the task ahead are already laid out on the surface. He strips off his shirt and sits backwards in the chair as best as he can while avoiding the armrests. K closes his eyes and tries to relax.

“I almost thought you might not come back,” he admits.

He hears the snap of disposable gloves against your wrists followed by the sound of your voice. “You’re my soulmate. The mark on your arm says I’m going to keep coming back for you.”

“Not everyone likes their soulmate,” K says quietly.

There’s the sound of a packet being torn open. He experiences the sensation of a disinfecting wipe passing over the area at the base of his neck. It’s cold against his skin. You focus most of the attention on the column of his spine, right in the center of his middle trapezius.

“True, but I realized the other night that, despite everything, I do like you. Congratulations, you now have me digging a tracking chip out of your back.” Your voice is colored with fondness. It makes him want to smile. How rare. He had kept his positive emotions hidden under cloth as though they were something precious to sequester out of sight.

Hissing against the sting, the tip of K’s eye extraction knife punctures his skin. The sensation of blood trickling from the wound begins shortly after he hears you set the knife on the table and pick up the tweezers. There’s a pinch, a strange pulling sensation, and then he opens his eyes just in time to see you drop the small device on the table alongside the bloodied blade. The tweezers clatter against the laminated surface and your gloved hand snatches up the platelet jelly.

“That was in deep. They nailed you between the vertebrae. John’s was right under the skin.”

“Wallace learned from the tail-end Tyrell models. Mostly what not to do.”

He hears you hum, interested. Packaging crinkles behind his head and he’s aware of you pressing a gauze pad against the sealed wound. Your touch is so gentle as to make him believe you think he is something worth care, that he might even be special.

“Hand me a bit of tape, please?”

Obligingly, he tears off a strip and passes it to you. His bare fingers brush against your gloved ones as you take it from him. You secure the tape in place and pat him on the shoulder. “You’re all done.”

The skin feels tender beneath the bandage. But it is as though his collar has been cut. He puts his shirt back on and layers his jacket over it while you peel the gloves off. To avoid leaving more identifying forensic evidence behind that would point to you as being the accomplice, you flip them inside out and tuck them into a pocket for later disposal.

At your searching look, K nods. He is ready. The replicant picks up his bag and, together, you make your way to the front door. He pauses on the threshold, door open. Your fingers find his and give them a squeeze before he adjusts the angle and interlinks them together. Like this, he can feel your pulse beat in time with his. He feels close to human.

With one final look at the apartment that has been his cell for the past few years, he gives it a silent goodbye and closes the door for the final time. He is free.

───※ ·❆· ※───

On Monday, when Joshi arrives with two organic officers as backup, she finds the apartment stripped of any personal effects. She picks up his discarded phone off the coffee table where he had laid it between his firearm and his badge. The woman throws it against the wall so hard it shatters. Pieces of plastic rain down onto the tile. He hadn’t even left her a note.

If she ever finds him, she is going to put a bullet in him with the gun he left behind. Still, there is a part of her that is grudgingly proud of him for finally biting her hand, taking it off right at the wrist. Her replicant was a lot of things—obedient, kind—but never a coward. He better have a good life while he can. She’s going to place a purchase order for his replacement the moment she gets behind her desk.

Do not repost, copy, or reproduce my work to other sites or in other media formats. Do not use it for anything to do with AI. Thank you.

[spooksier]

passages that make you whisper "oh my god"

[leiasfanaccount648]

Dear Santa [Manjiro “Mikey” Sano x Fem!Reader]

✧ Twelve Days of Toman ✧ Masterlist

Song to Listen to : Santa Tell Me by Ariana Grande

Genre: Fluff, a bit of crack

Summary: Even at his age, Mikey believes in Santa, as his brother never told him the fabled truth. Not wanting to break his heart, you try and come up with a way to gently break the news to him; however, instead, Mikey reminds you how maybe indulging in your inner child isn’t as bad as the others make it out to be.

Warnings/Contains: Manga spoilers (this takes place after the manga ends) Fluff, Mikey’s dramatic, Shinchiro annoyed with Mikey, the Sano family loves you

WC: 2.0k

December 2018

The holiday season means a multitude of things for families. There’s the buying of gifts so no one is left out, decorating the house; and most of all, keeping everyone happy and in the holiday spirit. For some that means cooking and baking tasty treats, others that means wrapping and bagging gifts to make them customized for the person they’re meant for. For the Sano family however, things are a bit different.

Ever since he first heard of him from his older brother, Mikey loved Santa Claus and looked forward to him visiting every holiday season. Each year without fail, there would be a gift for him wrapped all prettily and signed in what he called ‘santa writing’. There was only one downside. At the bright age of 28, he still believed that Santa Claus existed. All because his big brother never told him that Santa isn’t actually real. And that’s how you got stuck in this situation.

You were Mikey’s new girlfriend, and this was the first holiday season you would be spending together. You were very excited to see everyone again since it had been awhile since you last saw Emma and Shinchiro after meeting them around the 4 month mark, and you and Mikey had started officially dating in February when he asked you out.

You really liked Mikey, and were maybe thinking about dropping the ‘L’ word soon, but for now you were focusing on spending time with your boyfriend and his family. However, instead, you were focusing on keeping him happy so that everyone else could be the same.

“Hi Shin!” You grinned as you saw your boyfriend’s older brother, giving him a hug before holding out a plastic container toward him. “I made some oreo balls. I hope you guys like them.”

“Thank you so much, y/n. I’m sure we will.” Shinchiro smiled, setting the container down on the kitchen counter behind him. “Where’s Mikey?”

“He said he wanted to take a look at the tree to see how many gifts you got him.” You laughed. “The place looks great. I’m glad that you were able to finally find your own place.”

“Me too, thank you.” He nodded. “Maybe soon I can have a girl over.”

“I hope you will come next holiday season so that you won’t be the only single person.” You teased, having learned that Mikey and Shin’s friends both poked fun at the fact that Shinchiro couldn’t seem to get a girlfriend much less land a solid date with someone.

“Shin! You better hope Santa brings me more gifts to make up for your lack there-of!” Mikey called out from the living room. The elder Sano sighed, shaking his head at his brother’s antics.

“I’m sure he will, Mikey.”

Your eyebrows furrowed slightly from the brothers' bickering, not sure if they were joking around since Emma and Draken had a child and most likely gave them gifts from Santa. However, part of you was wondering if they were serious based on the frown that adorn Shinchiro’s face. “Don’t like the Santa tradition?”

“Not when Mikey still thinks he’s real.” Shinchiro sighed. “I know I should have told him, but I was told not to since he was younger than me. Eventually, I thought he would learn on his own how Santa isn’t real, like I did.”

Your mouth fell open, shocked that your boyfriend at the age of 28 still believed in Santa Claus. “No one ever told him?”

“If they didn’t then he didn’t believe them.”

“y/n,” Mikey whined, walking over and hugging you from behind. “Do you think Santa will know to bring your gift here instead of your place since you’re staying the night?’

That was when you knew that Mikey was being serious, and believed that Santa was visiting tonight; and thankfully, that was when Emma and Draken arrived so you didn’t have to answer, or worse, tell him the truth yourself.

“How old is she now?” You asked Emma as you watched Mikey play with her daughter.

“14 months,” Emma grinned. “She’ll turn 2 next October.”

“She’s really growing fast, hm?” You giggled, causing Emma to do the same and nod in agreement.

“She is. She takes after her father in that regard.” She reached for her mug of hot chocolate that rested on the coffee table. “It wouldn’t surprise me if she was 5 feet tall by the age of 6.” She laughed more, and you did the same.

“What’re you girls giggling about?” Shinchiro asked as he walked into the room.

“Your brother-in-law.” Emma said. “And how his daughter will maybe one day surpass him.”

“She better not soon, that’s all I’m saying.” Draken said as he followed Shinchiro into the room before walking over to Emma and handing her a plate of sweets she had asked him for only a few minutes ago.

“You never know, babe. She might be taller than you one day.” She giggled, taking a bite out of one of the oreo balls you made and hummed in delight. “y/n you made these right? They’re delicious!”

“Yes, I did.” You grinned. “Thank you, I’m glad you like them.”

“Don’t eat all of them, Emma.” Mikey said as he set his niece in his lap so that she faced everyone else in the room along with him. “We have to make sure we leave some of the baked goods for Santa.”

“I won’t eat all of them!” Emma pouted. “Besides, with everyone giving Santa sweets, I doubt he’ll eat everything that we give him.”

“You never know!”

You sighed. “Babe, you do know that-”

“y/n!” Shinchiro cut you off, walking over and taking you by the hand. “Can you help me bring the drinks out to everyone else?” He asked, already helping you stand and leading you to the kitchen.

“Shin,” you said quietly, already knowing where this was going. You shook your head as he finally let you go and began to fix everyone else their beverage of choice. “It’s either now or you give him santa presents until you die and he realizes it on his own in the worst way possible.”

“I know, I just..” Shinchiro trailed off, unsure. “I know that he gets upset easily over things he deeply cares about, and I hate to see him that way.”

“I do too, but he’s still a grown man. He’ll get over it eventually.”

Shinchiro sighed. “I just don’t know how to tell him the news.”

“Then why don’t I help you? We all can.” You suggested.

“What do you suggest?”

“I have an idea,” you smiled. “Just leave it to me.”

Once you and Shinchiro finished making drinks, you brought them out to everyone. You then took Mikey’s hand, gently tugging on it. “Babe, can you help me pick out some sweets for us to snack on throughout the night?”

“Sure, babe.” He said, handing the baby to Draken before standing and following you to the kitchen. “Why do you want my help, y/n? You know what I enjoy.”

“I know,” you said, grabbing a plate. “But I wanted to ask so that we could save the best cookies for Santa later tonight.”

“You’re so smart, babe!” Mikey grinned, hugging you. You laughed, swearing that you could see stars in his eyes.

“Yeah, I know I’m pretty great.” You giggled, pulling away from him so you could pick out some of the cookies. A moment later, you spoke up again. “Do you ever wonder why Santa never eats all the cookies we lay out for him? And how one always seems to be only partially eaten?”

There was a pause of silence from Mikey, making you hope that the gears were turning in his head. “Well, there’s only so much time he can spend at each house, right?”

“Yes, but it’s the same every year, is it not?”

“y/n,” Mikey said, taking the plate out of your hands and setting it down on the table. “Are you trying to convince me that Santa isn’t real?”

“...what if I was?” You asked, hesitantly for his reaction.

“I’d tell you that I already knew that.”

“Wait, what?!” You said. “Then what about-”

“How I was acting?” He finished for you, laughing. “I’ve been messing with them all these years so I could get more presents.”

You eyed him, unsure whether or not to laugh, be annoyed, or impressed. “Wait, so you’ve been gaslighting your family just for the sake of getting more presents every year?”

“Well, that’s how it started at first.” Mikey admitted. “But then I kept up the act, because embracing your inner child every now and then can be almost… therapeutic in a way.”

“Your inner child?” You repeated, thinking to yourself. “I never thought about it that way. But,” you added, “you should at least tell your family that you know Santa isn’t real. It isn’t nice to keep up the act that they genuinely believe that you believe. They care about you alot, you know?”

Mikey sighed. “I know, but this has been my way to celebrate the holidays. Sure Shin is single and may never get married, but Emma and Draken are happy with their family and I don’t have much to look forward to this time of year.”

You took hold of his hands, smiling. “Well, this year you have me. And that means that we can do fun, childish things together and still have fun, without lying to your family of course.” You laughed. “Can we not?”

Mikey smiled at your words, squeezing your hands. “Yeah, you’re right.” He gave you a quick kiss. “In that case, what should we do?”

The next morning, at the hour of 7am, you and Mikey woke up giggling like children as you snuck your way into Shinchiro’s room.

“Ready?” Mikey whispered, and you nodded before following him inside.

Shinchiro slept soundly, part of you feeling bad for making him wake up but another part of you felt giddy for getting to do something you haven’t done yourself in so long.

“Wake up, Shin! It’s time to open presents!” Mikey grinned, laughing as he shook his older brother awake. “C’mon, wake up Shin!”

Shinchiro groaned, turning to lay on his side so that his back was facing his younger brother. “Mikey, let me sleep in for another hour. Please.”

You giggled, moving to sit and bounce on the bed. “Nope! It’s time for breakfast and presents, Shin!”

“Wait, y/n?” Shinchiro groaned softly, sitting up with a confused yet sleepy gaze in his eyes. “What’re you doing?”

“Celebrating the holiday. What’s it look like?” You giggled. “Now come on! I’ll help you cook breakfast while Mikey sorts everyone’s gifts.”

With that, you and Mikey left the room, still laughing to yourselves. Shinchiro sighed, sitting up and getting out of bed to head to the kitchen.

“What’s going on?” Emma yawned as she walked out of the guest room and over to Shinchiro as he too left his room.

“Mikey and y/n just woke me up.” He said. “But it was different.”

“Because y/n joined in his antics?”

“No,” he shook his head. “Mikey didn’t bring up Santa.”

“Wait, did y/n get through to him?” Emma asked, relief washing through her.

“Seems like it.” Shinchiro said, just as relieved. He then headed to the kitchen, only to stop when he saw you and Mikey sitting by the tree and gifts that lay underneath. He couldn’t help but think back to when he was younger and sleepily walked out of his room to see Mikey cheering over how many presents he got. While Mikey had kept that act up in one way or another over the years, he had never seen him happier on this annual morning than he did when he saw you indulging in Mikey’s antics.

Maybe embracing that side wasn’t so bad after all; well, at least up until the point where you made Mikey tell his family how he knew the truth about Santa Claus.

Pls comment or send an ask if you would like to be tagged in any of the Twelve Days of Toman fics :)

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[littlelightfish]

Funny things I found out playing with language setting in Netflix while looking episode 15:

Chilchuck's scream sounds HAUNTED in brazilian portuguese. Give it a try if you can.

(You can hear it here)

In spanish dub, Senshi says: "tocó mis senos de hombre", which means "he touched my man boobs" in Spanish. And I think that's the best dub line one so far.