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. Kael 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—the ones that made it back— 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.

A slight murmur of acknowledgement flickered through the group.

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. 

Kael 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 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. “Kael, 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—advances, fallback routes, choke points. 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—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. Kael would try—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, when he earned a knife wound to his ribs, he’d woken up in the medic tent to the gentle sound of humming. There was a man who’d bandaged him with kind, soft hands, lingering a little too long on the wrappings. A touch Toric had noticed, but pretended not to. His name was Jalen. And he’d sat next to him afterward, talking to him quietly, coating him out of his fever. It didn’t matter what about—just letting the silence fall on them both.

Toric had been awake. Hearing every word, but didn’t allow himself to acknowledge the kindness. So he just closed his eyes, and pretended to be asleep until Jalen left. 

A few days later, Jalen died. Torn apart by the blast of a rogue mine while attending men in the field. Just a field medic in the wrong place at the wrong time. Toric heard it come through the radio in pieces, and saw his name in the blast report about a week later. Once they had pieced together all the bodies. 

The moment Toric had heard, he stepped out into the alley behind the field tent and vomited in the snow. Sat down hard on his bunk later that night and jammed fist into his eyes. 

And for the first time in years, he allowed himself to cry. It was nothing loud. Not the sound of a man unraveling, just barely there breaths as he buried his face in his hands. Maybe it could’ve been something. If he hadn’t been such a coward. 

There was a time—not too long ago—when men like him had to hide to live. The Unified Government had made it illegal. Anything that didn’t fit into their rigid standard was called  deviance. Even perversion—the kind that had no place in buttoned up, proper society.

He could still recall the public arrests and the punishments that fell after. The first time he understood what he was, he’d quickly forced himself to ignore it. Even now, even after he’d defected, even after he joined a rebellion that opposed everything the regime stood for, that training hadn’t left him. 

He still carried the self loathing and internalized bigotry. The belief that wanting men made him weak. He’d convinced himself that his own troops would deem him weak. That Michael and Ravi would see him in a different light if they knew. That the loyalty they had in him was founded on an illusion—disciplined, controlled, and untouched by want. Because if they saw him as he really was… would they still follow him into the fire? 

He tried. God, how he tried to shake it off. To believe that the freedom they were fighting for was also for him. But shame didn’t go away just because laws do.  

So here he was, alone under the flickering depot lights, with the map now forgotten beneath his hands. And it wasn’t the day’s losses that were haunting him. It was Vox. 

It wasn't the threat of his god-like powers, or even his threat to the rebellion. But rather the way he’d looked at Toric—not as an enemy but a man. 

When Vox spoke, in that low voice full of recognition, it didn’t feel like he was manipulating him. It felt honest, an honesty that stripped him bare. It was that alone that terrified Toric more than anything else. Because for the first time, perhaps in his whole life, Toric wasn’t confident he could keep that part of himself tucked away. The part that wanted to give in. 

Whether Vox was aware or not—and Toric had reason to suspect he was—the easiest way to draw him under was not through strategy, through fear or intimidation. Not with selfish promises of empowerment or hushed threats in the dark. No, the most dangerous thing Vox could offer to Toric was temptation.

Not the kind that could be rationalized or barricaded away by dogma alone. But the kind of desire that had been forged in him when he was young—hot and humiliating.

Vox was made to ruin him. He looked like judgment incarnate.

Tall, slow, collected in the way only truly dangerous people are. He wasn’t pompous, but he moved as if the world was his playground and the only question was whether or not you had earned your spot in it. He possessed a kind of strange grace. Every step, purposeful. Every look, premeditated.

That tunic he wore—all white, lined with clean folds and no insignia—should have made him look soft. Something modest, a scholar. But it didn’t. It made him look otherworldly. 

Like a dream. Like one of Toric’s oldest, most secret fantasies, when he was fourteen and terrified.

He could remember kneeling at his bunk inside the Unified barracks, whispering silent prayers into his hands. Fix me. Please. Just fix me. As if a sufficient amount of devotion could smother something that which had begun to stir within him—watching the way the older cadets undressed in the showers, the way his heart beat faster for all the wrong reasons.

And Vox, with pale skin, golden hair, high cheekbones, and a sharp mouth that always seemed to curl at the edges—looked like the answer he wanted, and the punishment he deserved, all in one.

An exact replica of the angels he’d imagined as a child. The ones who were supposed to come down and deliver him of the thing inside of him he couldn’t name.

Every part of him said don’t trust him—but 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, cosmic joke. Like someone had clawed through the ash of Toric’s repression, ripped him to the core unearthing his deepest, most unwanted hunger, and pulled out a man shaped exactly to ruin him.

And what had all that restraint bought him?

He’d watched better men die screaming. The noble kind, righteous hearted bastards torn apart in alleys, gunned down protecting civilians. Made 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 weakness. Maybe the weakness was lying about it.

But he was here. Alone, in the dim light, looking at the map with eyes that had gone blurry. He knew that the war was still going on outside the safety of their new territory, and yet—all he could think of was the shape of Vox’s mouth. How he’d looked at him with sharp eyes boring into him, almost like he knew the answer, and that he didn’t judge him for it.