Over the hours that followed, soldiers rearranged crates and half crushed produce boxes,  clearing just enough room for a small nook in the depot. A makeshift briefing space. It was barely wide enough for a battered table and a scatter of mismatched chairs. The captains slumped into them with heavy limbs and tired boots kicked out. Two bare bulbs swung from the rafters softly pulsing, illuminating strips of thin light across the space, stretching shadows tall against the walls. 

The air was still hot, layered with the stench of spent explosives, and the sour-sweet rot of overripe produce. Busted fruits and vegetables that the Unified guards had abandoned to spoil along the mainway.

Toric leaned his palms against the weathered wood at the head of the table. His shoulders were still tense from the fight, the sweat still creeping up his spine. Across from him sat Sector Three Commander, Ivan Taylor, leaning forward at the edge of his chair, expression tightly clenched. Grime was smeared deeply into the fine lines etched around his eyes. Kaielle stood beside him with her arms folded, her own sharp features set with fatigue.

The other captains, Michael, Gideon, as well as Ivan's subordinates were also gathered around the table. Heavy eyes scanning a map that was laid flat under their hands. Bright markers were stabbed into the paper, beside scrawled lines denoting contested intersections and tenuous holds. Nothing definitive yet, but worth noting. Small victories.

Ivan spoke first, his tone sharp and direct. He was tall, all bulk and muscle, with a face carved by long campaigns and eyes like razors under a furrowed brow. “Word is you were separated from your squad during the final push for nearly an hour. What happened?”

Toric remained unfazed. “The metahuman showed up.”

The entire room went still. The words fell heavy, like a blade dropped on the table.

“He didn’t intervene,” Toric continued. “He just made his point.”

Ivan pressed on, “And what point was that?”

Toric’s jaw set tightly, revealing nothing. “That he is still in play.” His voice lowered an octave, and became flat. “I told him the same thing I’ve told all of you. He’s not an ally.”

He didn’t mention the religious bones Vox took him to. The table that was piled high with temptation and sin that was waiting for him. He didn’t mention the quiet, deliberate cadence of his voice. Or the way those magnetic eyes looked at him like something nocturnal, as if they already knew what Toric would ultimately decide.

Toric was hiding the truth from them for morale purposes, nothing more. The last thing he needed was the Bloodsparrows thinking that their field commander had been painted as the person Vox selected for private discussions. That he’d allied himself with him. Let them believe it was just another confrontation with a rival. 

No one needed to know what it actually felt like.

Toric could still feel it, the way Vox had looked at him, like a splinter submerged too far to extract.

Because he knew what Vox had seen. He knew it in the same way he knew how to gut a room in five seconds, or how to plot an escape route with lives on the line. He didn’t allow himself to put words to it, but it sat there, coiling under his ribs. He’d spent years ignoring it. Something he buried and packed so deeply beneath he thought maybe it had stopped existing.

Vox just looked at him just once and found the thing Toric couldn't admit. Not to his men or allies. Not even to himself. 

Kaielle leaned forward, tapping the surface of the map with the one blunt fingernail. “We’ve got to get ahead of what he’s building publically. We need to build a narrative before he develops his own. We could hand out flyers, transmit radio reports. Let it be known what he really is: a threat. Not some kind of savior.”

Ivan nodded sharply. “Agreed. If he’s being that visible, he’s establishing his grounds, trying to build something. We can’t let our people go chasing after a miracle and forget who’s really fighting for them.”

Toric nodded, expression inscrutable. “Do it.” he said. “Kaielle, take lead. I want warnings running on every open channel by nightfall. Frame it tight. His intentions are unclear, and as far as we know, his loyalties are nonexistent. Civilians are not to approach. He is not one of us.”

He didn’t blink as he said it. He didn’t want to let anything damning slip out.

It was close to midnight when the meeting finally disbanded, the hum of conversation trailing off as boots scraped across concrete and bodies filed out into the night.

Toric stared down at the paper map, trying to focus on the scrawled notes and pinned markers, but he wasn’t really seeing any of it.

He was seeing a ruined hall, dimly illuminated golden from a shattered atrium, overflowing with stolen luxuries spilling over mahogany. Toric still felt Vox in his ear; low and precise in the space behind his shoulder, each word placed like a knife.

Vox had disarmed him; not just physically, but in the quiet way that his presence had dismantled every practiced pretense Toric had ever made. 

That last breath in his ear, the mess of things unsaid, hanging suspended in the room, until Vox finally, deliberately pulled back, breaking the spell.

He stayed there while the bulbs above him flickered weakly, casting the map in sputtering shadow. His hands remained on the table, fingertips going white from the strain. Eyes fixed on nothing.

Whatever it was that Vox had disturbed in him was not new. Ancient, more like. The way shame sometimes is. Something buried so deep that Toric built his entire life around keeping it sealed without never even naming it. 

He didn’t need to as long as he kept busy. Strategizing and reviewing inventory and patrolling the perimeter. Climbing rank fast, and being a role model for bravery and dedication to the cause. He worked longer hours than anyone else and liked it that way. Discipline. That’s what he called it. His captains just called him uptight. Kaielle would try by handing him a drink after a difficult combat and flashing him that warm half grin, saying, “Come on Tor, unwind for once. The world isn’t watching.”

Maybe the world wasn’t, but he was always watching himself. Worried that the wrong thing might slip if he fully dropped his guard. He wouldn’t allow that.

After a victory, when the fires finally died down and easy laughter echoed through the barracks, he’d occasionally join them just long enough to be seen. He’d allow himself to nod, or crack a smile that never quite reached his eyes. Only ever having a single drink, and never finding himself inebriated to the point of inhibition. 

He’d hover at the edge of the noise, his eyes flicking toward exits more than faces, with posture too straight for celebration. Then, when no one was really watching, he’d slip down the hall with a muttered excuse. Something about filling reports or rotations. Something easy he could play off if anyone questioned him.

The truth was, he wasn’t uptight. Actually, he deeply missed the connection, the camaraderie, the kind of ease that came from years spent side by side with the same faces. He missed it so badly, some nights he struggled to sleep. 

Once he’d been promoted to Commander of Seven, he stopped pretending he could still be soft with anyone. It wasn’t because he didn't want to, but because he feared the moment he was, they’d see the truth, and they’d stop believing in him.

He remembered a night, early in the war, before he was promoted to Commander, before the resistance had even gained a full sector. He and another soldier were holed up in a burned-out chapel in the outer districts with rain hammering on the roof. Their bodies soaked through, bone tired, riding high on the adrenaline of just surviving. The man’s name was Bastian, from Sector Two, and the pair of them had taken the second watch together, perched in a broken steeple with rifles across their laps.

Bastian was laughing about something, leaning close, their breath fogging together in the cold, between the shivers. With intention, Bastion let his leg graze lightly against Toric’s. Toric turned very slightly, with heart thumping into his ears, and stole a glimpse of the soft swell of Bastian’s lips.

For one moment he thought to close the distance, but didn’t.

Toric just straightened up, secured his jacket, and claimed he heard movement out by the east gate. He didn’t let himself look back.

Another time, after a supply run went sideways and he took a knife wound to the ribs, he'd woken in the medic tent to the gentle sound of humming. A man had bandaged him with kind, soft hands, lingering a little too long on the wrappings, a touch Toric noticed and pretended not to. His name was Otis. He'd sat beside him afterward, talking quietly, coaxing him out of a fever. It hadn't mattered what about. Just letting the words fall over both of them.

Toric had been awake for all of it, hearing every word, and hadn't let himself acknowledge the kindness. He'd closed his eyes and faked sleep until Otis left.

A few days later, Otis died. An ambush during a supply raid gone sideways, an improvised charge the Unified had rigged into a checkpoint his squad had been sent to clear. Just a field medic in the wrong place at the wrong time. Toric heard it come through the radio in pieces, saw the name in a casualty report about a week later, once they'd finished accounting for the dead.

The moment he heard, he stepped into the alley behind the field tent and was sick in the snow. He sat down hard on his bunk that night and pressed his fists into his eyes. For the first time in years, he let himself cry. Nothing loud. Just barely-there breaths behind his hands. It might have been something, if he hadn't been such a coward.

Despite that, or maybe because of it, he kept pulling away before anyone could mean too much. Never letting anyone close enough to matter. Closeness was a risk, and softness got people killed.

There had been a time, not long ago, when men like him had to hide just to live. The Unified Government had made it illegal. Anything that didn't fit their rigid standard got called deviance. Perversion, even, the kind that had no place in a buttoned-up, proper society.

He could still recall the public arrests and the punishments that followed them. The first time he'd understood what he was, he'd forced himself to bury it, fast. Even now, even after defecting, even after joining a rebellion that opposed everything the regime stood for, that training hadn't left him.

He still carried the self-loathing. The belief that wanting men made him weak. He'd convinced himself his own troops would see it the same way, that Michael and Ravi would look at him differently if they knew, that their loyalty was built on an illusion, disciplined, controlled, untouched by want. If they saw him as he really was, would they still follow him into the fire?

He'd tried. He'd genuinely tried to shake it off, to believe the freedom they were fighting for was also his to have. But shame doesn't disappear just because laws do.

He could still remember kneeling at the edge of his bunk in the Unified barracks, hands pressed together out of habit more than belief, muttering the same useless plea into the dark. Fix me. Please. Just fix me. He hadn't been talking to anything in particular. There was nothing left in Carvek to talk to, not since the old gods had been legislated out of relevance along with everything else the state found inconvenient. He'd just needed somewhere to put the words, some shape to throw them at, as if enough repetition might smother the thing that had already begun to stir in him, the way he watched the older cadets undress in the showers, the way his heart beat faster for all the wrong reasons.

And Vox, pale-skinned, golden-haired, high cheekbones, a sharp mouth that always seemed to curl at the edges, looked like the answer to a plea Toric had long since stopped believing anyone was listening to. The punishment he deserved and the deliverance he'd once begged for, both wearing the same face.

Some half-formed shape from childhood, some idea of what a savior should look like if the universe had ever bothered to make one. The kind of thing he'd stopped letting himself imagine long before he stopped wanting it.

Every part of his mind said don't trust him. His body didn't listen. His chest still clenched with want. His gut still knotted. Heat still pooled low, betraying him.

It was a sick joke. Like someone had clawed through the ash of his repression, ripped him open to the core, unearthed his deepest, most unwanted hunger, and pulled out a man shaped exactly to ruin him.

But what had all that restraint actually gotten him?

He'd watched better men die screaming. The noble kind, the righteous-hearted bastards torn apart in alleys, gunned down protecting civilians, turned into martyrs. And the evil ones? The regime's smiling predators? They died surrounded by wealth. Got to fuck beautiful people. Slept in clean sheets. Lived to see their fifth and sixth promotions.

So maybe desire wasn't the weakness. Maybe the weakness was lying about it. But he was here, alone, in the dim light, staring at a map with eyes gone blurry, the fighting still going on somewhere outside the safety of their new territory, and all he could think of was the shape of Vox's mouth.

Toric wasn't sure what terrified him more. The memory of that gaze. Or how badly he wanted to see it again.