Greg Veder: The Quiet Roar

[Durolord]

Greg woke up already tired.

Not the kind of tired that went away with a yawn and a stretch, but the bone-deep, system-level kind. The kind where his body had technically been horizontal and unconscious, but his brain refused to believe in the concept of "off."

Light speared straight into his eyes before he even opened them. The thin curtains over his window might as well have been tracing paper; Brockton Bay's weak morning sun hit the glass, bounced off the white walls, and pooled on his face like someone had dragged a spotlight over his bed.

He didn't move at first. He lay still and let the data come in.

The hum of the refrigerator downstairs, a low, constant vibration under the floorboards. The pipe in the wall to his left clanking in irregular bursts—three small clanks, pause, one louder one, then silence, restarting in variable patterns his brain automatically started tracking. The distant wail of a siren, pitch dropping as it moved away. His cheap sheets: slightly pilled, rougher where his heels had scraped them in his sleep, one fold pressing like a thin rope across his ankle.

Too bright, too loud, too much texture. Not as feelings, not yet. Just entries in a log.

He opened his eyes a fraction of an inch.

The ceiling was a flat white rectangle, the overhead light fixture a circle dead center. Dust motes drifted across the sunbeam at a measurable rate—slower than falling rain, faster than a lazy insect. His mind set up lines between them, phantom diagrams: vector A, vector B, trajectory C.

A hot weight pushed against the underside of his sternum, like someone had cupped a hand around his heart and slipped a warming pad in between.

Leo's awake, he thought, and the heat flared in confirmation.

It wasn't a separate voice, not really. No whisper in his ear, no actual words. Just pressure and temperature and the sense of something coiled and waiting. A sun compressed to the size of his fist, tucked just under bone and muscle. Sometimes it was a pleasant warmth, the kind you could imagine curling around on a winter day. Right now, though, it was too much. A slow burn that made him want to curl his shoulders in and protect his chest.

He swallowed. His throat felt dry; he could smell yesterday's dust, the faint chemical tang of the detergent his stepdad bought because it was on sale, the lingering hint of old sweat trapped in the pillowcase.

He should get up.

He should… he should start the day.

The thought wasn't even fully formed—I should tone it down today—before the heat under his sternum spiked like someone jabbed a poker into it.

Greg hissed and curled slightly on his side, hands flying instinctively to his chest. His fingertips pressed into his T-shirt, finding nothing there except cotton and his own too-fast heartbeat, but the pain flared anyway. Sharp, stinging, electric.

"Okay, okay," he muttered, breath puffing hot across the pillowcase. "I heard you."

The pain eased back to an uncomfortable throb.

Leo did that sometimes. Reacted to thoughts. Not the casual ones—what's for breakfast, I should shower, where did I put my phone—but the heavier ones. The ones about shrinking, about turning the brightness down on himself so other people didn't flinch. The ones about disappearing.

Apparently, "tone it down" now qualified as a lie.

He lay there and let his breathing slow in precise increments. In through the nose, count four. Hold, count four. Out through the mouth—he could feel the way the air dragged across his teeth—count six. He repeated the cycle until his chest no longer felt like it was going to crack open along invisible fault lines.

The pipes clanked again: three little taps, one bigger. His brain filed the pattern under "probably the upstairs neighbor's shower." There was a whir from the hallway fan. A car passed outside, tires hissing on wet pavement—so it must have rained during the night. He added that to the internal status screen. Weather: damp. Light: too bright. Noise: high but manageable.

Emotion: uncertain.

He stared at the ceiling, eyes now fully open, and thought, Just act normal today.

The heat rolled in his chest, not quite pain this time. More like the sun was laughing at him.

---

Greg pushed himself upright slowly, joints protesting. He sat on the edge of his narrow mattress and let his feet find the cold floor. The contrast between the warm spot under the blankets and the cool vinyl sent a sharp, clear signal up through his legs, like his nerves were waking in sequence.

He liked that part. Clear signals were easier.

The room around him was small enough to map in one mental snapshot. Bed along the right wall, shoved into the corner. Desk opposite, under the window: old particleboard, edges chipped where he'd picked at the veneer during long nights online. Computer tower humming—a familiar noise, friendly in its consistency. Monitor dark. A cheap swivel chair with a cushion that had a permanent indent shaped like his hips.

Shelves along the other wall: uneven, one bracket slightly crooked. Stacks of notebooks, a few worn paperbacks, a couple of tabletop RPG manuals with corners flared from being flipped through too often. A mug holding pens sorted by type and ink color, and one spoon he never remembered to take back to the kitchen.

He let his eyes run over each object, naming them in his head. Naming was grounding.

Poster of an old superhero movie, edges curling. Cracks in the ceiling paint forming branching shapes; they looked like a map of rivers if he squinted. Laundry basket half-full, with the undifferentiated smell of human fabric: detergent, sweat, a tiny hint of mildew.

Outside the thin door, the house made its own set of sounds. His mom moving around—footsteps that weighed less than his stepdad's. The faint squeak of the kitchen cabinet hinge she kept meaning to fix. The tinny drone of the morning news from the small TV on the counter.

Greg mentally traced the house's layout through the floor: his room, the hallway, the stairs down, the living room to the left, the kitchen to the right. He could almost feel where each noise came from, the way sonar mapped space with sound.

The pipes rattled again. He counted the seconds between bursts.

Three.

Seven.

Five.

Pattern: inconsistent. Source: probably normal. Threat level: low.

That was how his brain liked to categorize things. It was easier to treat life as data rather than chaos. Chaos was overwhelming. Data could be sorted into columns and rows, tagged and prioritized.

He scratched absently at the side of his neck, nails catching on the faint roughness of healing acne. The sensation was a staccato series of dots along his skin. He noted it and moved on.

The light still stabbed at him, so he turned his head away from the window, focusing instead on the shadowed corner by the door. Shadows were smoother on the eyes. The transition line between light and dark created a gradient his brain could follow, mapping the intensity drop-off.

He was aware—dimly—that most people didn't start their day by silently cataloguing every sensory input and assigning them values. Most people seemed to just… be. They rolled over, groaned, maybe checked their phones, and went on autopilot.

Greg didn't have an autopilot. He had a control room with a hundred blinking panels and no off switch.

Leo sat at the center of it, a solar core that wasn't supposed to be there.

He pressed his palm lightly against his sternum. The warmth pulsed, slow and steady. Not painful now, but present. Always present. Like an internal glowstick cracked open and impossible to un-crack.

"Can you… not fry me today?" he asked under his breath.

No answer, obviously. But the warmth deepened for a moment, spreading in a thin line outward, like fingers tracing along his ribs from the inside. Not comforting, exactly. Not hostile, either. A reminder.

Right. You hate it when I lie, he thought, and felt a tiny spike. Not enough to make him wince, but enough to confirm the hypothesis.

He had learned that the hard way. The first time he'd decided to "just shut it all down" and pretend nothing was wrong, he'd ended up on the floor, clutching his chest while the world went white-hot around the edges. After that, he'd started treating Leo like a badly documented program—no manual, unknown fail-states, painful error messages.

He was still debugging.

Noise shifted downstairs. His stepdad's heavier footfalls entered the mix, cadence different from his mom's. His voice joined the news anchor's—low, slurry in the morning, a little too loud for the space. Greg's shoulders tightened autonomically.

He ran the likely script in his head. If he went down now, he'd get a comment about "sleeping in" even if it was barely past seven. If he waited too long, he'd get the look. The one that said he was being lazy, selfish, inconsiderate in ways no one would articulate directly but everyone seemed to agree on.

His brain projected both options on an imaginary screen, side by side. He hated them both.

"Just act normal," he murmured, out of habit.

The heat in his chest flared again—sharp, reprimanding.

"Fine," he added quickly. "I'll… try to act… calibrated."

Leo didn't spike at that. Which was annoying, because "calibrated" meant basically the same thing to him. Maybe Leo didn't speak in synonyms.

Greg pushed himself to his feet and swayed for a second, knees protesting the sudden change in angle. His bare toes curled on the cold floor. He inhaled once, deep, letting the cool air hit the back of his throat, and exhaled slowly.

Begin day, he told himself, like he was hitting a start button.

---

He started moving.

Greg's body liked movement more than stillness, but he'd spent years teaching it to hold still in front of other people. To fold into smaller shapes, to ignore the itch under his skin that wanted to rock, sway, tap, flick.

Here, alone in his room, the itch had more room.

He paced two steps forward, two steps back in the narrow strip of floor between his bed and the desk. Heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe. Each step landed at the same distance because he made it that way; his brain liked the rhythm. The creak of the floorboard under his second step marked a safe point, a quiet little yes from the house.

His fingers flicked at his sides, a rapid flutter of motion. He could feel air resistance against them in little pulses. His right hand traced an invisible figure eight; his left tapped against his thigh in a pattern that matched the pipes' clanks.

He counted the taps. One-two-three, pause, one-two-three-four-five, pause. It was like aligning two audio tracks in an editing program, looking for where the spikes matched.

The more he moved, the more his thoughts stopped trying to explode in every direction. Motion pulled them into a rough orbit.

He crossed to the wall by the door and ran his fingertips over the paint. There were tiny bumps there, imperfections from a rushed job years ago. To most people, it would feel smooth. To him, it was a textured map.

He traced shapes lightly—triangles, circles, a crude sun.

Leo pulsed faintly when his finger completed the sun's outline. Heat-to-touch mapping: internal star, external symbol.

"You like that?" he asked quietly.

No spike, no reprimand. Just a steady warmth.

So you're okay with suns. Good to know. He added that to Leo's growing list of preferences: hates lies, hates suppression, tolerates terrible jokes if they're honest, apparently likes symbolic reinforcement.

He let his head tip forward until his forehead rested against the cool wall. The contrast between his warm skin and the wall's chill was sharp enough to be pleasant. He closed his eyes and focused on the feeling. The wall was firm, unyielding; he could press without it moving.

He liked that, too. Some things in his life felt like they changed if he looked at them wrong—social rules that melted and reformed when tested. Physical reality was easier. Walls stayed where they were.

He inhaled, counted five, exhaled on seven.

The urge to stay like that, just braced against something solid, hummed through him. He could imagine spending the whole day here, orbiting his room like a small satellite around a planet, never dipping into the messy atmosphere below. Up here, he could be as weird as he needed to be. He could let his hands move, let his face go blank, let the scripts drop into the background.

Downstairs, the world would expect him to be a person version of "normal."

The thought of stepping into that space, into the shared kitchen with its too-bright overhead light and its conflicting smells and its unsaid expectations, made his stomach knot.

He shifted his forehead on the wall, feeling the drag of skin against paint, the slight stickiness of morning sweat. His fingers kept moving, tracing and retracing the outline of the small sun until the pattern etched into the wall's micro-bumps in his mind.

His chest unclenched a little. Not much, but enough.

Moving honestly, letting his body respond to the overload, helped. He knew that. He'd read about it in forum posts and blogs—stimming, self-regulation, sensory processing. People used the word "autism" like a blanket term, but inside it were all these specific mechanics his brain recognized as familiar. He wasn't officially diagnosed; paperwork cost money his family didn't have and patience his stepdad definitely didn't. But the descriptions fit.

He had learned to stim in ways that looked acceptable in public. Tapping his foot under the desk where teachers couldn't see. Spinning a pen quietly instead of flapping his hands. Counting silently instead of humming. Translation of need into something less noticeable.

Right now, there was no one to see. His fingers flicked openly. His feet sketched out the path on the floor without apology.

It felt… better. Not good, not safe, but closer to stable.

Of course, there was the problem.

If he acted like this around other people, they got weird.

They stared. They shifted away. They nudged each other. They thought he didn't notice, but his brain tracked micro-movements just as easily as it tracked dust motes and sound spikes. He had a whole archive of half-withdrawn smiles and tightened shoulders and sideways glances.

So: alone, he could move. Around others, he had to choose between regulation and acceptance.

His forehead thumped once, gently, against the wall as if to punctuate the thought.

First conflict of the day: If he acted like himself, people got weird. If he faked it, Leo hurt him.

He pulled back from the wall with a sigh, opening his eyes. The room wavered for a second as his visual processing caught up to the change from zero input to full input. Edges sharpened into focus, the boundary between shadow and light reasserting itself.

"Okay," he said quietly to the empty space. "We have to leave the room eventually. Rules are rules. School still exists. People will notice if I don't show up."

His chest warmed in what felt suspiciously like agreement.

"Traitor," he muttered at Leo, and got a small, amused pulse in return.

---

Clothes first. Armor.

Greg crossed to the small chest of drawers at the foot of his bed. The top drawer slid out with a familiar rasp. Inside, his T-shirts were sorted in a specific order, not by color but by texture and hem feel.

He ran his fingers lightly over the stack, eyes half-lidded, letting his skin do the deciding. The first shirt had a tiny, scratchy tag at the neck; he'd meant to cut it off but never got around to it. He skipped that one automatically. The second was an old event shirt with cracked lettering; the printed part felt rough and unpleasant against his fingertips. He pushed that aside, too.

Third: soft cotton, worn but not thin, no obvious tag, minimal seams. The fabric draped off his fingers in a way that suggested it would fall comfortably on his shoulders rather than cling.

"Winner," he murmured, and tugged it free.

It was navy blue with a faded graphic of some old sci-fi show logo. The design had cracked over time, but it sat on the chest in a way that usually didn't bug him, and the color was dark enough to feel like a shield. Bright colors felt like yelling. He preferred clothes that said, quietly, nothing to see here, move along.

Boxers and socks next. He picked the socks with the smoothest toe seam; misaligned seams haunted his day far more efficiently than any supervillain could. Pants—dark jeans with enough give in the fabric to not pinch when he sat too long.

He changed quickly, the practiced rhythm of someone who had optimized the process. Shirt over head, slight static tug at his hair, fabric settling along his skin. The sensation of the shirt's weight on his shoulders took a few seconds to register as "okay" rather than "invading." Pants up, button, zipper, the brush of metal teeth against his knuckles. Socks rolled over his feet in a snug hug.

Each step of dressing was a series of micro-sensations that his brain wanted to catalogue, but he had learned to compress that data so it didn't swallow the entire morning.

He glanced at the narrow mirror screwed into the back of his door. At the moment, it reflected only a sliver of his torso, but he avoided looking too directly at it yet. One thing at a time.

He stepped over to his desk and picked up the hoodie draped over his chair. It was his favorite one—gray, oversized, soft inside. It smelled faintly like laundry detergent and his own shampoo. He shoved his arms into it and pulled it on, and the immediate sense of containment settled over him like a weighted blanket.

Layers helped. They made his body feel more defined, less like he was leaking out into space.

He tugged the sleeves down so the cuffs almost covered his fingers, then flexed his hands against the fabric. Textile friction against skin: good. Warmth over forearms: good. Hood attached, available if the lights at school got too bright or the halls too noisy.

Armor status: acceptable.

He checked his pockets. Phone: front right, screen facing in, because he'd once tried it the other way and the notifications buzzed right against the thinner fabric and made his leg itch. Wallet: back right—thin, with student ID and bus pass. Front left pocket was reserved for an emergency stim object; currently, that was a smooth, flat bottlecap he'd worried the ridges off over several weeks. He thumbed its edge now, feeling the familiar, cool circle. The contact point between bottlecap and skin grounded him.

He turned to the mirror again and, this time, let himself look.

His reflection looked back with the cautious wariness of someone who never recognized himself fully. Brown hair that never did exactly what he wanted, currently pushed back with his fingers into something like order. Eyes a little too wide, a little too bright, like he was taking in more than he knew what to do with. Nose slightly crooked. Mouth pressed into a line that didn't quite know if it was allowed to be a smile.

The hoodie made his shoulders look broader, which he liked. It made him feel less fragile. The T-shirt neckline sat flat, no tag visible. No skin showing at the waist, socks fully covered.

Visually, he passed his own inspection.

Internally, Leo pulsed—a slow, even beat.

He'd chosen these clothes not just for how they looked, but for how they felt. The fabric didn't fight him. The seams didn't itch. The weight wasn't too much. He could endure the day in this, maybe even function in it.

His brain, of course, didn't stop at "am I comfortable?" It had to run the secondary program: What will other people see?

Neutral colors: less attention. Graphic tee: socially acceptable baseline nerd indicator. Jeans: standard. Hoodie: "slightly withdrawn" but not "suspicious." No bold statements, no slogans anyone could use as an excuse to start a conversation he wasn't ready for.

People liked to pretend clothes didn't communicate anything, but they read them anyway. He'd learned that the hard way with the one time he'd worn a shirt from an obscure series he actually cared about. Someone had recognized it, tried to talk to him about the lore, and he'd ended up infodumping for ten minutes straight without breathing properly.

Their expression had gone from excited to overwhelmed to suffocatingly polite. He'd replayed that scene for weeks.

Now, he picked shirts that meant less to him. That way, if someone commented, he could answer and move away without the gravitational pull of obsession dragging him under.

He tugged at the hem of his hoodie, straightening it once, twice. His fingers repeated the motion a third time even though it wasn't necessary. The repetition soothed the jittery feeling in his chest.

"Armor: online," he told his reflection quietly.

Leo's warmth hummed in agreement, low and steady.

---

Clothed and contained, Greg moved back toward the desk. His notebook lay open where he'd left it last night, a pen balanced across the pages. The blue ink had slightly bled into the paper fibers along each letter.

He'd spent an hour before bed writing out scripts.

Some people could just improvise their way through social situations. He needed prepared lines. Not to memorize word-for-word, but to have a bank of phrases he could grab when his brain froze.

He slid into the chair, feeling the familiar give of the cushion. The desk surface under his forearms was cool to the touch. He pulled the notebook closer.

Across the top of the page, his own handwriting stared back at him in uneven lines: Tuesday – School – Baseline Scripts.

Below that, in bullet points:

• "Morning." (Neutral tone. Not too loud.)
  
  
• "Hey." (Only if someone speaks first.)
  
  
• "How was your weekend?" (Safe, generic.)
  
  
• "Yeah, I saw that." (Only if true.)
  
  
• "Cool." (Default response to info.)

His chest twinged faintly at that last one.

He tapped the pen against the notebook, the rhythmic clack syncing with his foot tapping under the desk.

He'd marked some lines with small symbols. A dot next to "Try not to talk too much about [insert current obsession]." A star next to "Remember to ask at least one question back in conversations."

His eyes skimmed down further, where he'd written a different set of lines, these ones with faint question marks next to them:

• "Don't make eye contact too long."
  
  
• "Smile so they know you're friendly."
  
  
• "Laugh when they laugh."

The moment he read that last one, Leo flared hot.

"Okay, okay," Greg muttered, pen freezing mid-tap. "I know."

The heat settled into a slow burn, more disapproval than pain.

"I didn't say I was going to use it," he added, because apparently he now argued with the star in his chest like it was a code reviewer leaving aggressive comments.

He stared at the words "Laugh when they laugh."

It was one of those things he'd learned early. People laughed in groups, sometimes at things that weren't actually funny. Sometimes because they were supposed to. Sometimes because they were uncomfortable and didn't know what else to do.

He'd learned that if he didn't laugh with them, they gave him that look. The one that said he'd broken the script.

So he'd tried. Forced laughter when others laughed. After jokes he didn't understand, or statements that felt neutral but apparently counted as jokes, or digs at someone who wasn't in the room.

His laughter always felt off. He could hear it, flat at the edges. Wrong timing, wrong volume.

Leo, apparently, hated that.

The first time he'd forced a laugh at someone else's expense, the sun in his chest had gone white-hot, like boiling metal. He'd doubled over, one hand pressed against his ribs, swallowing down a shout while the table of kids around him kept on laughing. No one noticed he was in pain.

He'd learned something that day, too: Leo didn't care for dishonest mirroring.

He tapped the point of his pen lightly against the phrase until the ink threatened to tear through the paper. Then he crossed it out with a decisive line.

"Fine," he told the notebook. "New rule: I laugh if I actually think it's funny. Or if it's… kind, I guess. Not just because it's safer."

Warmth in his chest again. Approving.

He flipped the page to a fresh one and wrote across the top: Updated Scripts – Aligned.

It was a stupid word to use, but it felt right. Aligned with what he actually felt, not just what people wanted from him. If he could find a tiny overlap between "true" and "socially acceptable," maybe Leo wouldn't roast him from the inside and his peers wouldn't freeze him out entirely.

He wrote:

• "Morning." (If voice works.)
  
  
• Small nod if not. (Still counts.)
  
  
• "Sorry, I'm a bit out of it." (Honest if overloaded.)
  
  
• "Can you repeat that?" (Instead of pretending.)
  
  
• "I don't get it, can you explain?" (If safe.)

His hand hesitated over that last one. Asking for clarification had a mixed track record. Some people were fine with it. Others acted like he'd just insulted their intelligence.

Rejection sensitivity curled up in his gut like a wary animal. So many memories of asking, "What do you mean?" and getting the eye-roll, the sigh, the "Never mind, forget it."

He added in small letters beside it: "Use with people you trust (if any)."

His pen hovered again.

Trust. The word sat heavy on the page. His brain offered up a quick slide show of faces: kids at school he knew the names of, teachers who praised his "potential" but got frustrated when he missed implied instructions, his mom, his stepdad, random internet avatars with usernames but no real names.

He didn't add any specific names next to "people you trust." The space stayed blank.

The pipes thumped again. His foot started tapping out the pattern almost automatically. Leo's warmth synced with his heartbeat. Tap-tap-tap, thump. Warm-warm, pulse.

He flipped back to the first page and scanned the scripts again.

Some were still functional. "Morning." "Hey." Neutral enough to be honest. Others felt like putty he'd molded to fit past expectations that no longer fit his insides.

His eyes caught on one of the earliest lines he'd written months ago, now smudged with wear: "Just act normal."

The ink had faded from rereading. He'd circled it once, hard enough to dent the page.

At the time, it had felt like a goal. A mission. If he could just act normal enough, maybe things would stop hurting. The stares, the sighs, the tension in his stepdad's jaw whenever he talked too fast. The teachers' polite frustration. The turn of classmates' shoulders away from his desk.

Now, looking at the words, his chest burned.

Leo flared so hot he had to slam the notebook shut and press his palm to his sternum, fingers spreading as if he could bleed some of the heat away into his hand.

"Okay," he hissed through his teeth. "Message received."

His heart hammered against his palm. Sweat pricked at the back of his neck. The pain wasn't as bad as it had been that first time, but it was sharp enough to carve away any illusion that "just act normal" was neutral.

"Not normal," he said aloud, barely above a whisper. "Calibrated. Real. Fine. I get it."

The heat eased, simmering down to a low hum like a turned-down stove burner.

He leaned back in his chair, letting his head rest against the top of it for a second. The ceiling stared back, indifferent.

He wasn't sure what scared him more—that Leo punished his lies, or that Leo might be right.

---

Footsteps on the stairs snapped him back to the timeline.

His stepdad, by the weight and rhythm. The boards creaked in predictable spots—third from the top, second from the bottom. A cough halfway up. Greg's internal status bar ticked toward red.

"Greg!" his mom's voice floated up from downstairs a moment later. "You awake?"

He swallowed. His throat felt tight, but his voice mostly worked when he tested it with a soft, "Yeah."

Louder: "Yeah! I'm up!"

"Breakfast!" she called. "Don't be late!"

Breakfast. Shared space. Shared noise. Shared expectations.

He stood up again, heel catching briefly on the edge of the rug. The hoodie shifted with him, the fabric's brush across his arms a small reassurance.

Before he opened the door, he forced himself to turn back to the mirror.

His reflection looked exactly as it had a few minutes ago: hoodie, jeans, slightly rumpled hair. Face caught between expressions.

But now he looked past the surface. Past the armor. He imagined the cross-section: skin, muscle, bone, and under the sternum, an impossible sun.

He couldn't see Leo, but he could feel him. A pressure, a glow, a presence that refused to be ignored whenever he tried to compress himself into something smaller and more palatable.

He stared at his own eyes. They looked too bright. Too intense. Like they held a question he didn't know how to answer.

What version of himself was he supposed to be today?

He knew the options. He'd rehearsed them for years.

Version one: the quiet background guy. Minimal input, minimal output. Smile occasionally, nod, drift. Don't raise your hand too much. Don't correct teachers when they're slightly wrong unless it really matters. Don't infodump. Don't let your hands move where people can see. Keep your face at half-power.

That version had gotten him fewer comments, fewer obvious stares, fewer overt "what's wrong with you?" moments. It had also left him feeling like he was watching his own life from somewhere behind his eyes, disconnected.

Version two: the honest version. The one who let his hands move when they wanted to, who asked questions when he didn't understand, who admitted when something was too loud or too bright. Who laughed when he actually found something funny, even if no one else did. Who talked about the things he cared about, not just the things other people signaled were safe.

That version had gotten him labeled "weird" more times than he could count. It had earned him invisible edges around social groups, polite distance, the occasional cruel joke he pretended not to hear.

Somewhere between them, maybe, there was a version three. A balance. But he hadn't found it yet.

His eyes flicked down to his own chest in the reflection, then back up.

"I'll just act normal," he told the mirror softly.

The words were out before he could stop them. Habit. The same way you typed a password you knew you needed to change.

Leo's response was immediate and brutal.

Pain knifed through his chest, a hot, stabbing spike that made his breath hitch. It felt like someone had reached through his ribs and squeezed the sun with bare hands. His knees dipped. He caught himself on the edge of the desk with one hand, fingers digging into the wood.

"Ah—" The sound escaped before he could swallow it.

He clamped his jaw shut, forcing slow breaths in and out. In through his nose, out through his mouth. The heat flared again, then again, in miserable pulses, like a warning alarm that refused to be silenced.

"Okay," he whispered, throat tight. "Not… normal. I get it. I get it."

Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes, more from the intensity of the sensation than from emotion, though both tangled together. He blinked them back. Crying before breakfast would not help.

The pain ebbed gradually to a dull ache. His hand slipped from the desk, leaving faint crescents in the soft wood where his nails had dug in.

He looked back at his reflection once more, breathing hard.

Not normal, then.

He straightened his hoodie, fingers smoothing fabric more for something to do than out of actual need. His shoulders settled into a position that was as close to comfortable as he could get: not hunched, not fully relaxed, somewhere in between. His face refused to shape itself into a convincing smile, so he didn't force it. Neutral was safer than false.

"New plan," he told the mirror quietly. "I'll… try to act like myself. Just… on low volume."

Leo's warmth nudged against his ribs, gentler this time. Not approval, exactly, but not flaming rejection either. Something in between. A we'll see.

Downstairs, his mom called his name again, sharper. The clatter of dishes grew louder, the morning news anchor's chipper tone clashing with his stepdad's muttered commentary.

Greg wrapped his hand around the doorknob. The cool metal grounded him. He turned it slowly, feeling each increment of movement.

Before he opened it fully, he took one more breath and silently ran a final system check.

Light: too bright, but hoodie hood available. Noise: high, but patterns identifiable. Textures: manageable. Scripts: partially updated. Internal sun: active, opinionated, currently not trying to kill him.

He stepped out into the hallway.

The door clicked shut behind him with a soft finality.

The version of himself he had chosen—somewhere between masked and honest, somewhere between suppression and explosion—would have to survive at least until breakfast.

Whether Leo would tolerate that compromise… was a question for five minutes from now.

For the moment, the sun in his chest pulsed once, twice, in quiet, watchful rhythm.

And Greg Veder went downstairs.

 

[To-be-hero-X]

Brockton Bay becomes the worst possible place to learn self-mastery.

Click to shrink...

TBF Brockton Bay is the worse place to learn lot of things exmpte for criminals related things

 

[DannyAnd]

Is leo from another fandom or is it a shard?

 

[Lastword855]

Isn't Greg blonde?

 

[Godfire]

Isn't Greg blonde?

Click to shrink...

I was a bit suprised too.

 

[Lastword855]

I was a bit suprised too.

Click to shrink...

This might a au fic.

 

[Durolord]

Is leo from another fandom or is it a shard?

Click to shrink...

It's from a cyoa I did leo the lion

 

[Durolord]

---

Threshold Noise

Winslow hit him before he even made it through the doors.

The school loomed in front of him, big blocks of brick and grimy windows under a cloudy Brockton Bay sky. The flag out front hung limp, edges frayed. The concrete steps leading up were stained with old gum and whatever else people had decided to discard over the years. He catalogued each detail automatically, like he always did.

But the real hit came when he pulled the front door open.

Noise.

It slammed into him as if the door was holding it back and he'd just broken the seal. Overlapping conversations, locker doors banging, shoes squeaking on linoleum, the too-high whine of some ancient fluorescent light, the rumble of the ventilation system, the occasional sharp bark of laughter that cut through the rest like a siren.

Smell.

Sweat, deodorant, cheap perfume, stale cafeteria oil finding its way into the hallway somehow. Paper and cleaning chemicals. Wet fabric, because some people hadn't dried fully from the morning rain.

Light.

Flickering tubes overhead, some too bright, some dim and buzzing like they resented being asked to function. The stutter-flicker created little hits of change in the corner of his vision, as if reality was briefly cutting to a different frame and back.

His brain did what it always did in response to overload: it started mapping.

Okay. Main corridor: long, crowded, sloping slightly downward from the front doors toward the central intersection. Left branch: science wing, with that one water fountain that sputtered. Right branch: admin offices, guidance, nurse. Straight ahead: lockers, then classrooms.

He stepped to the side immediately after coming through the door, pressing his back briefly against the cool metal of the nearest locker bank. Don't stop in the middle, don't block the flow—that was one of the unwritten rules he'd learned fast. People moved like water here; if you stood in the wrong place, you got knocked around.

He let his gaze scan the corridor in slices.

Safe zones:

• The patch by the trophy case where traffic split and slowed.
  
  
• The nook near the janitor's closet where the lights were dimmer and people only passed through, not lingered.
  
  
• The seat at the far end of the main staircase landing where you could see both up and down but most people's eyes slid past you.
  

Hostile clusters:

• The knot of boys by the central lockers who liked to "accidentally" shoulder-check anyone smaller.
  
  
• The group of girls near the drinking fountain whose laughter had that particular sharp edge that meant they were laughing at, not with.
  
  
• The cluster by the entrance to the girls' bathroom—Emma's group, sometimes with that athletic girl, Sophia, orbiting close.
  

He didn't need to get close to any of them to know the risk zones. Their sound signatures were distinct. The way they filled space, too—bodies angled out, occupying more room than necessary, bags dropped where people would have to step around them. Passive-aggressive territory marking.

His chest hummed with heat, Leo's presence shifting, reacting to his micro-spikes of anxiety. Not painful, just a constant awareness that the sun under his sternum was paying attention.

He adjusted his backpack straps, making sure the weight was distributed evenly. One strap slightly higher than the other would bug him all day. Right now, it lay flat across both shoulders, the weight centered. Acceptable.

He stepped into the flow.

The hallway pressed around him immediately. Shoulders brushed shoulders. Backpacks bumped. Someone's elbow nearly caught his side; he shifted half a step sideways without thinking, moving into a gap that only existed for a fraction of a second.

He kept his eyes moving. Not in wild darts—that drew attention—but in a constant, scanning pattern that let him know where the threats were without locking onto anyone long enough to make them uncomfortable.

Snatches of conversation hit his ears and tried to stick.

"…told you, he totally—"

"—can't believe my mom—"

"—homework? Nah, I just—"

He filtered most of it out. Background noise. Non-critical. What mattered was the flow.

Don't stop in the middle. Don't block the flow. Angle your shoulders when passing someone coming the other way. Don't cut across someone's path unless you're sure of the gap. Don't walk too fast; you'll bump into people. Don't walk too slow; they'll bump into you.

Rules no one had written down but everyone seemed to know instinctively.

Everyone except people like him.

He'd learned them by trial and error. The first day, he'd stopped dead three steps inside the main hall to get his bearings and immediately got a shoulder in the back and a muttered "watch it, idiot." He'd spent the rest of that day with the imprint of that word replaying in his head along with the jolt of impact.

Now, he moved like he was slipping through a maze. Left, pause. Right, adjust. Shorten stride to avoid collision with a kid who'd dropped their binder. Lengthen stride to get past a slow-moving cluster before they could box him in.

His head buzzed faintly with the effort of tracking so many variables at once, but he preferred that to the alternative: being static in a moving space.

He passed the trophy case. The glass was smudged, reflecting the hallway in warped fragments. The old trophies inside—track, football, something from two decades ago—stood like relics of a school that maybe cared more once.

He kept going.

At the central intersection, the volume rose. More doors, more voices, more slamming metal. A locker door banged open to his right, the sharp metallic clang sending a flare of irritation up his spine. He flinched internally but kept his face neutral.

Don't react too much. Another unwritten rule. Reacting marked you as a target.

Overhead, one light flickered three times and then steadied. His eyes tracked the pattern despite himself. Three flickers, one long, two short—if he tried, he could map it to Morse code, give it meaning it didn't actually have. His brain liked doing that.

He pulled his hood up halfway—not enough to obscure his face fully, just enough to narrow his field of vision and dampen some of the worst of the overhead glare. The fabric muffled some sound as it brushed against his ears. Slightly better.

"Greg!"

The sudden sound of his name yanked his attention sideways. His heart jumped.

He turned to see who'd said it, already running through possible scripts.

The voice belonged to Mrs. Avery, one of the English teachers. She stood near her classroom door, stack of papers in one hand, coffee mug in the other. Late thirties, frizzy hair trying to escape a loose clip, glasses perched at the end of her nose. She had a tendency to talk like everything was a joke, even when it wasn't.

His brain flipped to the subroutine for teacher interaction before he'd fully faced her.

---

Homeroom Calibration

"Morning, Greg," Mrs. Avery said, giving him a quick once-over that he recognized: checking for obvious signs of truancy, exhaustion, or trouble.

There were three acceptable responses to a teacher's casual greeting in this context.

Option A: "Morning." Neutral, safe.
Option B: Nod and smile. Low verbal load, but might be read as rude if the teacher valued verbal responses.
Option C: Add a polite question back: "How are you?" Risk of follow-up conversation he wasn't ready for.

He picked A with a small add-on, because his brain liked precision.

"Good morning, Mrs. Avery," he said.

He heard the tiny hitch in his own voice—a little too formal, a little too crisp compared to the languid, careless "mornin'" echoing around from other students. His volume came out slightly higher than he'd intended, clipping the noise floor and attracting a flicker of attention from a kid walking past.

Mrs. Avery raised an eyebrow, a quirk that might have meant amusement or might have meant nothing. "You're here early for once," she said.

He wasn't, technically. He'd arrived at his usual time, which was five minutes before the bell, which was statistically slightly earlier than the median but well within the expected range. His brain calculated that without effort.

"I left home at the same time as usual," he answered. "Traffic was lighter by approximately nine percent. I didn't get stuck at the light on—"

He stopped himself when her expression shifted.

It was subtle. The corners of her mouth stayed up—they didn't drop into a frown—but her eyes unfocused a little, the way people's did when they were listening-but-not. A faint tension smoothed into her forehead like she'd just remembered a to-do list item mid-conversation.

Right. Too much detail.

He could see, in the periphery, two kids slowing slightly as they walked by, glancing over. One of them smirked in that particular way that said, oh, it's him.

The "odd" vibe. The invisible tag that some people carried at this school: Not Cool. Not Quite Right. Easy Target.

Greg felt it like a temperature drop on the back of his neck. His chest warmed in response, Leo pressing outward against his ribs in what could have been annoyance or solidarity; he hadn't figured out the difference yet.

Mrs. Avery recovered with a small chuckle. "Well, glad you made it on time," she said. "Ready for the quiz later?"

Her tone was light. Probably a joke. Definitely a test.

Greg's brain, unfortunately, took the words at face value first.

"There's no quiz scheduled for today," he said. "Not unless you changed the plan since yesterday. You said we'd be starting the poetry unit, and quizzes usually happen after at least one lecture or handout, not before, unless it's a diagnostic to measure prior knowledge, which you usually tell us about ahead of time, so—"

He saw it this time as he talked: the exact moment her expression shifted from conversational to that tight, micro wince. Her smile froze a degree too stiff. One of the kids going past snorted quietly.

"Relax, I was kidding," she cut in. "It was a joke, Greg."

His words stuttered to a halt. The hallway noise surged back in, loud and undefined, as if someone had turned the background up.

"Oh," he said. "Okay."

He tried to adjust his tone, make the word lighter. It came out too flat instead. Like a test tone on a speaker.

A laugh—not hers, someone else's—popped nearby. He couldn't tell if it was directed at him or just laughing at something else entirely. His rejection sensitivity immediately assumed it was about him. The skin on his face went hot.

His chest flared, but not from embarrassment alone. Leo's heat rose, sharp and prickly.

It wasn't wrong, he thought defensively at the warmth. She said "quiz." There wasn't one.

The heat shifted, not into pain but into a kind of restless simmer. Maybe not disapproval. Maybe just agitation.

"Anyway," Mrs. Avery said, already half-turning back toward her classroom. "Get to homeroom. Bell's about to ring."

"Right," he said. That came out too sharp, as if he was snapping at her when he wasn't. He winced internally.

He started walking again before the interaction could stretch any further. His shoulders tightened of their own accord, his steps going slightly stiff.

Behind him, he could feel—without looking—the echo of that small, subtle ugh, him vibe from the kids who'd been close enough to hear. Not hatred, not outright cruelty. Just that creeping dismissal. The way people's eyes slid off him like he was a mildly unpleasant topic they didn't want to engage with.

He hated that more than open hostility sometimes. At least when someone yelled at you, you knew where you stood.

He rejoined the hallway flow, recalculating his route. Homeroom, then English, then… his brain slotted the day's schedule into a familiar grid, overlaying it on the map of the building.

Leo simmered at his core like a small, impatient star.

---

Locker Vectors

His locker stood in the middle section of the hall, three down from a chipped support pillar, two across from a water fountain that dripped continuously into a rust-stained basin. Not ideal, but not worst-case either.

He timed his approach carefully. Too early, and the cluster of kids from the bus would still be there, talking loudly and swinging their bags into the thin space between lockers. Too late, and he'd get caught in the post-bell rush as everyone shoved books into metal boxes at the same time.

He hit it at the almost-quiet moment—noise still loud, but movement a little slower as people filtered into homerooms. He spun the combination lock with practiced speed. 12, 32, 7. The metal dial was cool under his fingers, edges biting faintly into his skin. The mechanism clicked in satisfying sequence.

He opened the locker door, its hinge giving the familiar squeak on the last inch.

Inside, everything was arranged in a way that calmed a tiny part of his overloaded brain. Top shelf: notebooks stacked by subject, spines facing out, labels written in the same pen, same angle. Middle: textbooks, ordered by weight so the smaller ones didn't get crushed. Bottom: gym shoes in a plastic bag, emergency granola bar, a small tin holding earplugs.

He swapped out his books quickly, sliding yesterday's math into the space and pulling out English and history. His fingers brushed the edge of the earplug tin and paused.

He considered it. The hall was loud. The day would probably be louder. Teachers sometimes complained if you wore earplugs in class because it "looked rude," even if you could still hear them just fine. His chest twinged.

He left the tin where it was. Calculated risk: less immediate sensory relief, lower chance of confrontation. For now.

He was closing the locker when he heard it.

"…I'm telling you, it was disgusting."

The words cut through the ambient noise with that specific nasty tone people used when they enjoyed what they were describing.

Greg's hand froze on the locker handle.

Sound source: behind him, offset by thirty degrees. Distance: maybe three meters. Voices: female, two primary, one secondary. He recognized the primary ones from prior mapping.

Emma Barnes. Red hair, clean clothes that somehow always looked new, laughter that bent too easily into cruelty. Associated cluster: social high tier. Probability of direct engagement with him: low, but not negligible if he did something to attract attention.

Sophia Hess. Dark hair, athlete. Moved like she owned the hallway. Always seemed bored and vaguely irritated with everything. The type who could hurt someone and make it look like an accident.

He didn't turn around fully. That would signal interest. Instead, he adjusted his stance, angling his ear slightly while pretending to fuss with the binders in his locker.

"Should've heard her," Emma said. Her voice had that bright, amused quality that set Greg's teeth on edge. "She totally lost it."

"Like, actual screaming?" one of the other girls asked. He didn't know her name; his brain hadn't tagged her as central to any pattern yet.

Sophia snorted. "Like a dying animal. It was pathetic."

A cluster of giggles. Greg's fingers tightened involuntarily on the edge of a textbook.

Data: they were talking about someone. Some event. Past tense? Present? His brain searched for context. There had been murmurings at school recently. Snatches of "did you hear about…" and "no way, that's gross." He hadn't had enough pieces yet to assemble a full picture.

"'Please,'" Emma said in a high, mocking whine. "'Stop, please, let me out.'" She laughed. "Like anyone cared."

"Locker freak," Sophia added. "Should've stayed in there."

"Yeah," another girl chimed in. "Seriously. The freak in the locker."

The phrase dropped into the noise like a stone into still water.

Greg heard it and something in his brain snapped to attention.

The freak in the locker.

Words formed units. Units formed patterns. Some patterns stood out as wrong.

His thoughts immediately started sorting.

Locker: confined space, usually small, used for storage, not people. Freak: socially assigned label for someone who doesn't fit norms, often used to justify mistreatment. In the locker: prepositional phrase indicating physical location. A person, locked inside, being called a freak for being there rather than for what put them there.

Should've heard her. She totally lost it.

He didn't have a visual for this event. His brain tried to generate one anyway—cramped metal, darkness, the muffled sound of someone shouting while footsteps walked away.

The skin on his arms prickled under his hoodie.

He risked a glance over his shoulder.

Emma stood with her back to his general direction, facing Sophia and the others. Her expression was animated, eyes bright, mouth curved in delight as she relived the story. Sophia leaned against the lockers with her arms crossed, smirk in place. The other girls hovered close, some laughing outright, others doing that half-smile people did when they weren't sure if it was entirely okay to enjoy what they were hearing but went along anyway.

He wasn't close enough to see all their faces clearly, but the posture was enough.

They weren't disturbed. They were entertained.

His chest tightened.

Leo's heat spiked suddenly, not like the punishing flare when Greg lied, but like the first blast of air when an oven door opened. Fierce, directed, angry.

Angry?

It took him a second to label it. The sensation didn't come with words, just with intensity. His heartbeat kicked up. He could feel the pulse in his throat.

He swallowed, forcing his gaze away before anyone noticed he was listening. The rules here were clear: eavesdropping on the powerful social clusters and then getting caught meant making yourself a target.

He shut his locker, the metal door clanging shut.

The sound rang louder in his skull than it should have. The phrase echoed with it in his mind.

The freak in the locker. The freak in the locker. The freak—

He wanted to file it away neatly, tag it as "mean girls being mean" and move on, like he did with most hallway cruelty. But something about this wouldn't slot into the usual category. It snagged.

Maybe it was the word "locker." Maybe it was the way Emma mimicked someone pleading. Maybe it was the faint, instinctive revulsion he felt at the idea of someone being locked in a small, dark space and mocked for their reaction rather than help.

His own experiences brushed up against that mental image. Not identical, but adjacent. Being cornered, mocked, unable to leave because the social rules said you'd be making it worse if you pushed past. Being stuck in conversations where everything hurt but walking away meant more whispers later.

He stepped away from his locker, heading down the hall toward homeroom. As he walked, the noise of other conversations washed in and out. None stuck the way that phrase did.

The freak in the locker.

His brain stamped it as something else: not just gossip. Narrative anomaly. Event hook. A piece of data that didn't fit the usual pattern of petty Winslow cruelty.

He didn't know why yet.

But he felt Leo burning hotter with every repetition.

---

Pattern Lock

Homeroom was in one of the older classrooms on the second floor, with yellowing posters on the walls and a whiteboard that still showed faint ghost marks from old notes never fully erased. Desks in uneven rows. Fluorescent lights buzzing overhead; one in the corner flickered at random intervals like it was trying to send a distress signal.

Greg slid into his usual seat—second row from the back, near the window. From here, he could see both the front of the room and the door. Two sightlines, fewer surprises.

The murmurs of other students washed around him. People talking about TV shows, weekend drama, someone's party. Words blurred into a low hum, but certain phrases still jumped out as his brain scanned for relevance.

"…did you hear—"

"…gross, man, I would've—"

"…they said she—"

Each time he thought he heard the beginning of something about the locker, his attention sharpened and then sank again when it turned into something else. Half-formed rumors, sideways references with no names.

He pulled out his English notebook, flipping past the neat notes from last week until he found a blank margin. His pen hovered, then started moving almost without conscious decision.

locker incident?
victim? student or teacher?
timeframe: recent (tone of voices = fresh gossip)
participants: Emma, Sophia, unknown others
motive: amusement? punishment? something else?

He underlined "victim" twice.

He should have been reviewing his notes on metaphors and similes. Mrs. Avery would definitely go over them again today if they were starting poetry, and a diagnostic quiz was not out of the question even if she had technically been joking earlier.

Instead, his pen kept circling back to the same patch of paper.

freak in locker
why "freak"?
why locker?

His chest throbbed in time with the words. Leo's heat sat like a solid weight.

The teacher for homeroom—Mr. Dahmer, math, monotone voice—took attendance in the background. Greg responded when his name was called, the automatic "here" sliding out of his mouth with practiced ease, and then his brain dove back under the surface of the room and into the pattern.

Locker as confinement. Social label "freak" currently applied loosely to various students, including himself, but context here felt… harsher. There was a difference between someone muttering "freak" under their breath as he walked by and someone laughing about a "freak in the locker" who had screamed to be let out.

He wrote, in small letters:

panic response ≠ freak

His skull throbbed at the temples, a tingling pressure like static building up. Too much sensory input plus too much internal processing: bad combo.

The room felt slightly too bright, the hum of the lights a little too high frequency. A pen clicked repeatedly from two rows over, each click a needle. Someone behind him tapped their foot arrhythmically. His brain tried to sync to the pattern and failed, creating internal dissonance.

He dug his nails lightly into the underside of the desk, grounding himself in the sharp sensation.

The freak in the locker.

He didn't know who "she" was. Emma had said "her," and Sophia had said "she." Female student, likely. His brain started scrolling through the mental roster of girls at Winslow, cross-referencing with known targets of cruelty.

Plenty of names popped up. Some he only knew as faces. Some he'd seen being whispered about. None clicked immediately.

Still, the phrase felt wrong. Not just because of the cruelty, but because of the mismatch between label and situation. If someone had been locked in a locker against their will—and that's what his brain had constructed, deliberate or not—the wrongness lay with whoever put them there, not with the girl who panicked in a dark, confined space.

His sense of injustice didn't always match the intensity of everyone else's. Sometimes people got outraged about things that felt fuzzy and abstract to him. But this? This slotted straight into a part of his brain that recognized cruelty as a glitch in the system.

He tapped his pen in the margin, dot-dot-dot, dash, dot-dot.

Leo pulsed once, sharply, when he wrote:

maybe tell someone?

The idea felt… big. Dangerous. His history with "telling someone" wasn't great. On the occasions he'd reported something—cheating on a test, kids throwing things at another kid's head when teachers weren't looking—it had ended with him being labeled a snitch, or with the adults nodding and doing nothing he could see.

Still. He wrote:

if pattern escalates → action?

His handwriting got messier as his head pounded. Sensory overload plus fixation equals headache—that was a known equation.

He forced himself to close the notebook halfway through another speculative line. The paper rasped under his fingertips. He tucked the pen under the metal groove at the top of the desk and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes for a second, applying steady pressure.

Hot colors bloomed behind his eyelids. Patterns of red and gold and white, like miniature suns.

When he let go, the room snapped back into focus: dull posters, flickering lights, slumped students. Mr. Dahmer's voice droned on about lateness policies and reminders for some school assembly later in the week.

Greg tried to shift gears. His brain resisted.

The freak in the locker sat in the center of his mental map like a glowing error icon.

He flipped to the back of the notebook and, in tiny letters, wrote:

event hook: locker
flagged.

The word "hook" came from the online stories he read sometimes, the ones that started with something weird and then spiraled into bigger narrative events. He didn't think his life was a story, exactly, but sometimes it helped to think of it in terms of structure. Setups and payoffs. Foreshadowing.

Maybe this was nothing. Maybe it was just Winslow being Winslow, another cruel story that would wash out in a week.

His chest said otherwise.

Leo's heat pressed outward, insistent.

---

Pressure in the Air

The bell rang.

It was a jarring sound, a metallic clang with a frequency that seemed specifically engineered to punch through whatever you were thinking about and shred it. Conversation snapped on and off around the room. Chairs scraped. Backpacks rustled.

Greg's skull throbbed in time with the bell's echo.

He slid his notebook into his bag, the motion practiced enough that he didn't have to look. His hand brushed the rough cardboard of a folder; the texture scraped unpleasantly across his fingertips, sending a brief shiver up his arm. He shoved the folder aside and zipped the bag.

Students funneled toward the door in a loose line that immediately dissolved the second they hit the hallway. The volume in the corridor surged, bouncing off the cinderblock walls.

He stepped out of the classroom and into the stream.

Something felt… different.

He couldn't quantify it at first. The hallway looked the same—same lockers, same posters peeling at the edges, same army of teenagers moving in every direction. The sounds were at their usual deafening level. The smells hadn't improved.

But there was an undercurrent.

Like the air had thickened half a degree. Like the background noise had picked up a new thread that didn't match the rest.

His brain tried to pin it down as he walked.

More hushed tones than usual in some clusters. Not quieter overall—just pockets of tight, intent conversation, heads bent. A few glances toward one particular section of hallway, quickly averted when someone noticed someone else looking.

He followed the vector of those glances without meaning to. They converged near one of the rows of lockers, two turns down from where his own was. The air there felt… denser. Like humidity without the actual moisture.

Leo's heat rose, subtle at first, then stronger with each step he took in that direction.

He wasn't heading there deliberately; his route to English happened to pass close. Still, the closer he got, the more his skin prickled. Noise seemed to warp around that section of the hall, like people were talking around something rather than about it directly.

"…so gross—"

"—seriously, they should've—"

"—how long was she—"

He couldn't catch full sentences, just fragments. His brain filled in possibilities, each one worse than the last.

The freak in the locker.

He swallowed, throat suddenly dry. The strap of his backpack felt heavier on his shoulder.

Leo burned in his chest, a low, constant flame.

He reached the corner that would take him toward English and hesitated for half a second, eyes flicking down the other branch where the density of students was higher, compressed around something he couldn't see.

His fingers twitched at his side.

He wasn't late yet. He could afford three seconds. Three seconds to just… look.

His feet shifted.

And then, even before he could take those three seconds, even before he could round the corner enough to see clearly, the hallway changed.

It was in the way sound dipped and then spiked, like a crowd reacting to something unexpected. In the way bodies shifted position, a ripple moving through the mass. In the sudden sharpness of someone's shout, cutting through the rest.

His brain registered it as a pre-echo, the split-second before something happens that you can never fully articulate afterward but always remember.

Something's wrong.

He didn't know what, not yet. He only knew that the air tasted different on his tongue, metallic and tense, and Leo's heat flared so abruptly he almost staggered.

For a heartbeat, the image from his notes flashed in his mind—locker, victim, word "freak" like a stamp—and collided with the sensory present.

He stepped forward, into the branching corridor, as the system inside his head went from mapping to alarm.

He didn't know her name yet.

He didn't know that, thirty feet away, someone was about to be shoved.

He didn't know that this moment, this bell, this hallway, would end up as one of the pivot points on his internal timeline.

All he knew was that something about the pattern of Winslow had just shifted, and the sun in his chest reacted like it had been waiting for this exact glitch.

The freak in the locker, he thought again, and for the first time, the phrase didn't just lodge as wrong.

It felt like an accusation against the entire hallway.

He stepped into the new vector.

The story twisted.

And somewhere ahead, Taylor Hebert moved into position.

 

[Lastword855]

Guess this is a slow burn fic.

 

[Godfire]

Awesome. Thanks for the update. Excellent as always.

Greg has 'tisms, milord. Xd xd

His thought process is like watching the inside of a thinker. Kinda cool actually.

 

[Durolord]

Threshold Noise

Winslow hit him before he even made it through the doors.

The school loomed in front of him, big blocks of brick and grimy windows under a cloudy Brockton Bay sky. The flag out front hung limp, edges frayed. The concrete steps leading up were stained with old gum and whatever else people had decided to discard over the years. He catalogued each detail automatically, like he always did.

But the real hit came when he pulled the front door open.

Noise.

It slammed into him as if the door was holding it back and he'd just broken the seal. Overlapping conversations, locker doors banging, shoes squeaking on linoleum, the too-high whine of some ancient fluorescent light, the rumble of the ventilation system, the occasional sharp bark of laughter that cut through the rest like a siren.

Smell.

Sweat, deodorant, cheap perfume, stale cafeteria oil finding its way into the hallway somehow. Paper and cleaning chemicals. Wet fabric, because some people hadn't dried fully from the morning rain.

Light.

Flickering tubes overhead, some too bright, some dim and buzzing like they resented being asked to function. The stutter-flicker created little hits of change in the corner of his vision, as if reality was briefly cutting to a different frame and back.

His brain did what it always did in response to overload: it started mapping.

Okay. Main corridor: long, crowded, sloping slightly downward from the front doors toward the central intersection. Left branch: science wing, with that one water fountain that sputtered. Right branch: admin offices, guidance, nurse. Straight ahead: lockers, then classrooms.

He stepped to the side immediately after coming through the door, pressing his back briefly against the cool metal of the nearest locker bank. Don't stop in the middle, don't block the flow—that was one of the unwritten rules he'd learned fast. People moved like water here; if you stood in the wrong place, you got knocked around.

He let his gaze scan the corridor in slices.

Safe zones:

• The patch by the trophy case where traffic split and slowed.
  
  
• The nook near the janitor's closet where the lights were dimmer and people only passed through, not lingered.
  
  
• The seat at the far end of the main staircase landing where you could see both up and down but most people's eyes slid past you.
  

Hostile clusters:

• The knot of boys by the central lockers who liked to "accidentally" shoulder-check anyone smaller.
  
  
• The group of girls near the drinking fountain whose laughter had that particular sharp edge that meant they were laughing at, not with.
  
  
• The cluster by the entrance to the girls' bathroom—Emma's group, sometimes with that athletic girl, Sophia, orbiting close.
  

He didn't need to get close to any of them to know the risk zones. Their sound signatures were distinct. The way they filled space, too—bodies angled out, occupying more room than necessary, bags dropped where people would have to step around them. Passive-aggressive territory marking.

His chest hummed with heat, Leo's presence shifting, reacting to his micro-spikes of anxiety. Not painful, just a constant awareness that the sun under his sternum was paying attention.

He adjusted his backpack straps, making sure the weight was distributed evenly. One strap slightly higher than the other would bug him all day. Right now, it lay flat across both shoulders, the weight centered. Acceptable.

He stepped into the flow.

The hallway pressed around him immediately. Shoulders brushed shoulders. Backpacks bumped. Someone's elbow nearly caught his side; he shifted half a step sideways without thinking, moving into a gap that only existed for a fraction of a second.

He kept his eyes moving. Not in wild darts—that drew attention—but in a constant, scanning pattern that let him know where the threats were without locking onto anyone long enough to make them uncomfortable.

Snatches of conversation hit his ears and tried to stick.

"…told you, he totally—"

"—can't believe my mom—"

"—homework? Nah, I just—"

He filtered most of it out. Background noise. Non-critical. What mattered was the flow.

Don't stop in the middle. Don't block the flow. Angle your shoulders when passing someone coming the other way. Don't cut across someone's path unless you're sure of the gap. Don't walk too fast; you'll bump into people. Don't walk too slow; they'll bump into you.

Rules no one had written down but everyone seemed to know instinctively.

Everyone except people like him.

He'd learned them by trial and error. The first day, he'd stopped dead three steps inside the main hall to get his bearings and immediately got a shoulder in the back and a muttered "watch it, idiot." He'd spent the rest of that day with the imprint of that word replaying in his head along with the jolt of impact.

Now, he moved like he was slipping through a maze. Left, pause. Right, adjust. Shorten stride to avoid collision with a kid who'd dropped their binder. Lengthen stride to get past a slow-moving cluster before they could box him in.

His head buzzed faintly with the effort of tracking so many variables at once, but he preferred that to the alternative: being static in a moving space.

He passed the trophy case. The glass was smudged, reflecting the hallway in warped fragments. The old trophies inside—track, football, something from two decades ago—stood like relics of a school that maybe cared more once.

He kept going.

At the central intersection, the volume rose. More doors, more voices, more slamming metal. A locker door banged open to his right, the sharp metallic clang sending a flare of irritation up his spine. He flinched internally but kept his face neutral.

Don't react too much. Another unwritten rule. Reacting marked you as a target.

Overhead, one light flickered three times and then steadied. His eyes tracked the pattern despite himself. Three flickers, one long, two short—if he tried, he could map it to Morse code, give it meaning it didn't actually have. His brain liked doing that.

He pulled his hood up halfway—not enough to obscure his face fully, just enough to narrow his field of vision and dampen some of the worst of the overhead glare. The fabric muffled some sound as it brushed against his ears. Slightly better.

"Greg!"

The sudden sound of his name yanked his attention sideways. His heart jumped.

He turned to see who'd said it, already running through possible scripts.

The voice belonged to Mrs. Avery, one of the English teachers. She stood near her classroom door, stack of papers in one hand, coffee mug in the other. Late thirties, frizzy hair trying to escape a loose clip, glasses perched at the end of her nose. She had a tendency to talk like everything was a joke, even when it wasn't.

His brain flipped to the subroutine for teacher interaction before he'd fully faced her.

---

Homeroom Calibration

"Morning, Greg," Mrs. Avery said, giving him a quick once-over that he recognized: checking for obvious signs of truancy, exhaustion, or trouble.

There were three acceptable responses to a teacher's casual greeting in this context.

Option A: "Morning." Neutral, safe.
Option B: Nod and smile. Low verbal load, but might be read as rude if the teacher valued verbal responses.
Option C: Add a polite question back: "How are you?" Risk of follow-up conversation he wasn't ready for.

He picked A with a small add-on, because his brain liked precision.

"Good morning, Mrs. Avery," he said.

He heard the tiny hitch in his own voice—a little too formal, a little too crisp compared to the languid, careless "mornin'" echoing around from other students. His volume came out slightly higher than he'd intended, clipping the noise floor and attracting a flicker of attention from a kid walking past.

Mrs. Avery raised an eyebrow, a quirk that might have meant amusement or might have meant nothing. "You're here early for once," she said.

He wasn't, technically. He'd arrived at his usual time, which was five minutes before the bell, which was statistically slightly earlier than the median but well within the expected range. His brain calculated that without effort.

"I left home at the same time as usual," he answered. "Traffic was lighter by approximately nine percent. I didn't get stuck at the light on—"

He stopped himself when her expression shifted.

It was subtle. The corners of her mouth stayed up—they didn't drop into a frown—but her eyes unfocused a little, the way people's did when they were listening-but-not. A faint tension smoothed into her forehead like she'd just remembered a to-do list item mid-conversation.

Right. Too much detail.

He could see, in the periphery, two kids slowing slightly as they walked by, glancing over. One of them smirked in that particular way that said, oh, it's him.

The "odd" vibe. The invisible tag that some people carried at this school: Not Cool. Not Quite Right. Easy Target.

Greg felt it like a temperature drop on the back of his neck. His chest warmed in response, Leo pressing outward against his ribs in what could have been annoyance or solidarity; he hadn't figured out the difference yet.

Mrs. Avery recovered with a small chuckle. "Well, glad you made it on time," she said. "Ready for the quiz later?"

Her tone was light. Probably a joke. Definitely a test.

Greg's brain, unfortunately, took the words at face value first.

"There's no quiz scheduled for today," he said. "Not unless you changed the plan since yesterday. You said we'd be starting the poetry unit, and quizzes usually happen after at least one lecture or handout, not before, unless it's a diagnostic to measure prior knowledge, which you usually tell us about ahead of time, so—"

He saw it this time as he talked: the exact moment her expression shifted from conversational to that tight, micro wince. Her smile froze a degree too stiff. One of the kids going past snorted quietly.

"Relax, I was kidding," she cut in. "It was a joke, Greg."

His words stuttered to a halt. The hallway noise surged back in, loud and undefined, as if someone had turned the background up.

"Oh," he said. "Okay."

He tried to adjust his tone, make the word lighter. It came out too flat instead. Like a test tone on a speaker.

A laugh—not hers, someone else's—popped nearby. He couldn't tell if it was directed at him or just laughing at something else entirely. His rejection sensitivity immediately assumed it was about him. The skin on his face went hot.

His chest flared, but not from embarrassment alone. Leo's heat rose, sharp and prickly.

It wasn't wrong, he thought defensively at the warmth. She said "quiz." There wasn't one.

The heat shifted, not into pain but into a kind of restless simmer. Maybe not disapproval. Maybe just agitation.

"Anyway," Mrs. Avery said, already half-turning back toward her classroom. "Get to homeroom. Bell's about to ring."

"Right," he said. That came out too sharp, as if he was snapping at her when he wasn't. He winced internally.

He started walking again before the interaction could stretch any further. His shoulders tightened of their own accord, his steps going slightly stiff.

Behind him, he could feel—without looking—the echo of that small, subtle ugh, him vibe from the kids who'd been close enough to hear. Not hatred, not outright cruelty. Just that creeping dismissal. The way people's eyes slid off him like he was a mildly unpleasant topic they didn't want to engage with.

He hated that more than open hostility sometimes. At least when someone yelled at you, you knew where you stood.

He rejoined the hallway flow, recalculating his route. Homeroom, then English, then… his brain slotted the day's schedule into a familiar grid, overlaying it on the map of the building.

Leo simmered at his core like a small, impatient star.

---

Locker Vectors

His locker stood in the middle section of the hall, three down from a chipped support pillar, two across from a water fountain that dripped continuously into a rust-stained basin. Not ideal, but not worst-case either.

He timed his approach carefully. Too early, and the cluster of kids from the bus would still be there, talking loudly and swinging their bags into the thin space between lockers. Too late, and he'd get caught in the post-bell rush as everyone shoved books into metal boxes at the same time.

He hit it at the almost-quiet moment—noise still loud, but movement a little slower as people filtered into homerooms. He spun the combination lock with practiced speed. 12, 32, 7. The metal dial was cool under his fingers, edges biting faintly into his skin. The mechanism clicked in satisfying sequence.

He opened the locker door, its hinge giving the familiar squeak on the last inch.

Inside, everything was arranged in a way that calmed a tiny part of his overloaded brain. Top shelf: notebooks stacked by subject, spines facing out, labels written in the same pen, same angle. Middle: textbooks, ordered by weight so the smaller ones didn't get crushed. Bottom: gym shoes in a plastic bag, emergency granola bar, a small tin holding earplugs.

He swapped out his books quickly, sliding yesterday's math into the space and pulling out English and history. His fingers brushed the edge of the earplug tin and paused.

He considered it. The hall was loud. The day would probably be louder. Teachers sometimes complained if you wore earplugs in class because it "looked rude," even if you could still hear them just fine. His chest twinged.

He left the tin where it was. Calculated risk: less immediate sensory relief, lower chance of confrontation. For now.

He was closing the locker when he heard it.

"…I'm telling you, it was disgusting."

The words cut through the ambient noise with that specific nasty tone people used when they enjoyed what they were describing.

Greg's hand froze on the locker handle.

Sound source: behind him, offset by thirty degrees. Distance: maybe three meters. Voices: female, two primary, one secondary. He recognized the primary ones from prior mapping.

Emma Barnes. Red hair, clean clothes that somehow always looked new, laughter that bent too easily into cruelty. Associated cluster: social high tier. Probability of direct engagement with him: low, but not negligible if he did something to attract attention.

Sophia Hess. Dark hair, athlete. Moved like she owned the hallway. Always seemed bored and vaguely irritated with everything. The type who could hurt someone and make it look like an accident.

He didn't turn around fully. That would signal interest. Instead, he adjusted his stance, angling his ear slightly while pretending to fuss with the binders in his locker.

"Should've heard her," Emma said. Her voice had that bright, amused quality that set Greg's teeth on edge. "She totally lost it."

"Like, actual screaming?" one of the other girls asked. He didn't know her name; his brain hadn't tagged her as central to any pattern yet.

Sophia snorted. "Like a dying animal. It was pathetic."

A cluster of giggles. Greg's fingers tightened involuntarily on the edge of a textbook.

Data: they were talking about someone. Some event. Past tense? Present? His brain searched for context. There had been murmurings at school recently. Snatches of "did you hear about…" and "no way, that's gross." He hadn't had enough pieces yet to assemble a full picture.

"'Please,'" Emma said in a high, mocking whine. "'Stop, please, let me out.'" She laughed. "Like anyone cared."

"Locker freak," Sophia added. "Should've stayed in there."

"Yeah," another girl chimed in. "Seriously. The freak in the locker."

The phrase dropped into the noise like a stone into still water.

Greg heard it and something in his brain snapped to attention.

The freak in the locker.

Words formed units. Units formed patterns. Some patterns stood out as wrong.

His thoughts immediately started sorting.

Locker: confined space, usually small, used for storage, not people. Freak: socially assigned label for someone who doesn't fit norms, often used to justify mistreatment. In the locker: prepositional phrase indicating physical location. A person, locked inside, being called a freak for being there rather than for what put them there.

Should've heard her. She totally lost it.

He didn't have a visual for this event. His brain tried to generate one anyway—cramped metal, darkness, the muffled sound of someone shouting while footsteps walked away.

The skin on his arms prickled under his hoodie.

He risked a glance over his shoulder.

Emma stood with her back to his general direction, facing Sophia and the others. Her expression was animated, eyes bright, mouth curved in delight as she relived the story. Sophia leaned against the lockers with her arms crossed, smirk in place. The other girls hovered close, some laughing outright, others doing that half-smile people did when they weren't sure if it was entirely okay to enjoy what they were hearing but went along anyway.

He wasn't close enough to see all their faces clearly, but the posture was enough.

They weren't disturbed. They were entertained.

His chest tightened.

Leo's heat spiked suddenly, not like the punishing flare when Greg lied, but like the first blast of air when an oven door opened. Fierce, directed, angry.

Angry?

It took him a second to label it. The sensation didn't come with words, just with intensity. His heartbeat kicked up. He could feel the pulse in his throat.

He swallowed, forcing his gaze away before anyone noticed he was listening. The rules here were clear: eavesdropping on the powerful social clusters and then getting caught meant making yourself a target.

He shut his locker, the metal door clanging shut.

The sound rang louder in his skull than it should have. The phrase echoed with it in his mind.

The freak in the locker. The freak in the locker. The freak—

He wanted to file it away neatly, tag it as "mean girls being mean" and move on, like he did with most hallway cruelty. But something about this wouldn't slot into the usual category. It snagged.

Maybe it was the word "locker." Maybe it was the way Emma mimicked someone pleading. Maybe it was the faint, instinctive revulsion he felt at the idea of someone being locked in a small, dark space and mocked for their reaction rather than help.

His own experiences brushed up against that mental image. Not identical, but adjacent. Being cornered, mocked, unable to leave because the social rules said you'd be making it worse if you pushed past. Being stuck in conversations where everything hurt but walking away meant more whispers later.

He stepped away from his locker, heading down the hall toward homeroom. As he walked, the noise of other conversations washed in and out. None stuck the way that phrase did.

The freak in the locker.

His brain stamped it as something else: not just gossip. Narrative anomaly. Event hook. A piece of data that didn't fit the usual pattern of petty Winslow cruelty.

He didn't know why yet.

But he felt Leo burning hotter with every repetition.

---

Pattern Lock

Homeroom was in one of the older classrooms on the second floor, with yellowing posters on the walls and a whiteboard that still showed faint ghost marks from old notes never fully erased. Desks in uneven rows. Fluorescent lights buzzing overhead; one in the corner flickered at random intervals like it was trying to send a distress signal.

Greg slid into his usual seat—second row from the back, near the window. From here, he could see both the front of the room and the door. Two sightlines, fewer surprises.

The murmurs of other students washed around him. People talking about TV shows, weekend drama, someone's party. Words blurred into a low hum, but certain phrases still jumped out as his brain scanned for relevance.

"…did you hear—"

"…gross, man, I would've—"

"…they said she—"

Each time he thought he heard the beginning of something about the locker, his attention sharpened and then sank again when it turned into something else. Half-formed rumors, sideways references with no names.

He pulled out his English notebook, flipping past the neat notes from last week until he found a blank margin. His pen hovered, then started moving almost without conscious decision.

locker incident?
victim? student or teacher?
timeframe: recent (tone of voices = fresh gossip)
participants: Emma, Sophia, unknown others
motive: amusement? punishment? something else?

He underlined "victim" twice.

He should have been reviewing his notes on metaphors and similes. Mrs. Avery would definitely go over them again today if they were starting poetry, and a diagnostic quiz was not out of the question even if she had technically been joking earlier.

Instead, his pen kept circling back to the same patch of paper.

freak in locker
why "freak"?
why locker?

His chest throbbed in time with the words. Leo's heat sat like a solid weight.

The teacher for homeroom—Mr. Dahmer, math, monotone voice—took attendance in the background. Greg responded when his name was called, the automatic "here" sliding out of his mouth with practiced ease, and then his brain dove back under the surface of the room and into the pattern.

Locker as confinement. Social label "freak" currently applied loosely to various students, including himself, but context here felt… harsher. There was a difference between someone muttering "freak" under their breath as he walked by and someone laughing about a "freak in the locker" who had screamed to be let out.

He wrote, in small letters:

panic response ≠ freak

His skull throbbed at the temples, a tingling pressure like static building up. Too much sensory input plus too much internal processing: bad combo.

The room felt slightly too bright, the hum of the lights a little too high frequency. A pen clicked repeatedly from two rows over, each click a needle. Someone behind him tapped their foot arrhythmically. His brain tried to sync to the pattern and failed, creating internal dissonance.

He dug his nails lightly into the underside of the desk, grounding himself in the sharp sensation.

The freak in the locker.

He didn't know who "she" was. Emma had said "her," and Sophia had said "she." Female student, likely. His brain started scrolling through the mental roster of girls at Winslow, cross-referencing with known targets of cruelty.

Plenty of names popped up. Some he only knew as faces. Some he'd seen being whispered about. None clicked immediately.

Still, the phrase felt wrong. Not just because of the cruelty, but because of the mismatch between label and situation. If someone had been locked in a locker against their will—and that's what his brain had constructed, deliberate or not—the wrongness lay with whoever put them there, not with the girl who panicked in a dark, confined space.

His sense of injustice didn't always match the intensity of everyone else's. Sometimes people got outraged about things that felt fuzzy and abstract to him. But this? This slotted straight into a part of his brain that recognized cruelty as a glitch in the system.

He tapped his pen in the margin, dot-dot-dot, dash, dot-dot.

Leo pulsed once, sharply, when he wrote:

maybe tell someone?

The idea felt… big. Dangerous. His history with "telling someone" wasn't great. On the occasions he'd reported something—cheating on a test, kids throwing things at another kid's head when teachers weren't looking—it had ended with him being labeled a snitch, or with the adults nodding and doing nothing he could see.

Still. He wrote:

if pattern escalates → action?

His handwriting got messier as his head pounded. Sensory overload plus fixation equals headache—that was a known equation.

He forced himself to close the notebook halfway through another speculative line. The paper rasped under his fingertips. He tucked the pen under the metal groove at the top of the desk and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes for a second, applying steady pressure.

Hot colors bloomed behind his eyelids. Patterns of red and gold and white, like miniature suns.

When he let go, the room snapped back into focus: dull posters, flickering lights, slumped students. Mr. Dahmer's voice droned on about lateness policies and reminders for some school assembly later in the week.

Greg tried to shift gears. His brain resisted.

The freak in the locker sat in the center of his mental map like a glowing error icon.

He flipped to the back of the notebook and, in tiny letters, wrote:

event hook: locker
flagged.

The word "hook" came from the online stories he read sometimes, the ones that started with something weird and then spiraled into bigger narrative events. He didn't think his life was a story, exactly, but sometimes it helped to think of it in terms of structure. Setups and payoffs. Foreshadowing.

Maybe this was nothing. Maybe it was just Winslow being Winslow, another cruel story that would wash out in a week.

His chest said otherwise.

Leo's heat pressed outward, insistent.

---

Pressure in the Air

The bell rang.

It was a jarring sound, a metallic clang with a frequency that seemed specifically engineered to punch through whatever you were thinking about and shred it. Conversation snapped on and off around the room. Chairs scraped. Backpacks rustled.

Greg's skull throbbed in time with the bell's echo.

He slid his notebook into his bag, the motion practiced enough that he didn't have to look. His hand brushed the rough cardboard of a folder; the texture scraped unpleasantly across his fingertips, sending a brief shiver up his arm. He shoved the folder aside and zipped the bag.

Students funneled toward the door in a loose line that immediately dissolved the second they hit the hallway. The volume in the corridor surged, bouncing off the cinderblock walls.

He stepped out of the classroom and into the stream.

Something felt… different.

He couldn't quantify it at first. The hallway looked the same—same lockers, same posters peeling at the edges, same army of teenagers moving in every direction. The sounds were at their usual deafening level. The smells hadn't improved.

But there was an undercurrent.

Like the air had thickened half a degree. Like the background noise had picked up a new thread that didn't match the rest.

His brain tried to pin it down as he walked.

More hushed tones than usual in some clusters. Not quieter overall—just pockets of tight, intent conversation, heads bent. A few glances toward one particular section of hallway, quickly averted when someone noticed someone else looking.

He followed the vector of those glances without meaning to. They converged near one of the rows of lockers, two turns down from where his own was. The air there felt… denser. Like humidity without the actual moisture.

Leo's heat rose, subtle at first, then stronger with each step he took in that direction.

He wasn't heading there deliberately; his route to English happened to pass close. Still, the closer he got, the more his skin prickled. Noise seemed to warp around that section of the hall, like people were talking around something rather than about it directly.

"…so gross—"

"—seriously, they should've—"

"—how long was she—"

He couldn't catch full sentences, just fragments. His brain filled in possibilities, each one worse than the last.

The freak in the locker.

He swallowed, throat suddenly dry. The strap of his backpack felt heavier on his shoulder.

Leo burned in his chest, a low, constant flame.

He reached the corner that would take him toward English and hesitated for half a second, eyes flicking down the other branch where the density of students was higher, compressed around something he couldn't see.

His fingers twitched at his side.

He wasn't late yet. He could afford three seconds. Three seconds to just… look.

His feet shifted.

And then, even before he could take those three seconds, even before he could round the corner enough to see clearly, the hallway changed.

It was in the way sound dipped and then spiked, like a crowd reacting to something unexpected. In the way bodies shifted position, a ripple moving through the mass. In the sudden sharpness of someone's shout, cutting through the rest.

His brain registered it as a pre-echo, the split-second before something happens that you can never fully articulate afterward but always remember.

Something's wrong.

He didn't know what, not yet. He only knew that the air tasted different on his tongue, metallic and tense, and Leo's heat flared so abruptly he almost staggered.

For a heartbeat, the image from his notes flashed in his mind—locker, victim, word "freak" like a stamp—and collided with the sensory present.

He stepped forward, into the branching corridor, as the system inside his head went from mapping to alarm.

He didn't know her name yet.

He didn't know that, thirty feet away, someone was about to be shoved.

He didn't know that this moment, this bell, this hallway, would end up as one of the pivot points on his internal timeline.

All he knew was that something about the pattern of Winslow had just shifted, and the sun in his chest reacted like it had been waiting for this exact glitch.

The freak in the locker, he thought again, and for the first time, the phrase didn't just lodge as wrong.

It felt like an accusation against the entire hallway.

He stepped into the new vector.

The story twisted.

And somewhere ahead, Taylor Hebert moved into position.

 

[Durolord]

The Trigger Echo

The moment before it hit him was ordinary in every way that counted.

Greg was navigating Winslow's morning hallway on practiced autopilot—eyes tracking gaps in the crowd, ears filtering through noise that sounded like ten radio stations playing at once. Locker slams registering as short sharp spikes. Overlapping conversations forming a chaotic spectrogram. The uneven flicker of a fluorescent two units down creating strobing patches in his peripheral vision.

Normal Winslow. Normal sensory overload. Normal battle-route mapping.

He had just shifted his backpack straps to distribute weight evenly—because one strap sitting half an inch lower would throw off how he moved through space for the entire day—when something tore through him.

Not physically.

Worse.

Inside.

The world didn't darken or slow. It didn't explode. It just—

hit.

A spike of sensation that didn't belong to him lanced down his spine so violently that his knees nearly buckled. He grabbed the nearest locker door, fingers pressing into cold metal. Electricity—or something like it—ran up his arm as if the locker itself were vibrating with wrongness.

For half a second he thought: panic attack.

But no.

This wasn't from him.

This was incoming.

A sensory surge punched through him, so sudden and alien he sucked air through his teeth. His brain scrambled to categorize, to sort, to find a template—

Nothing matched.

His vision blurred. The hallway noise dimmed—not because the volume dropped, but because his nervous system had redirected everything toward something else. Something crashing through every sense at once.

A jolt. A squeeze. A suffocating pulse of terror that wasn't his.

The echo wasn't auditory. It didn't come through his ears. It pulsed straight through his nerves, vibrating in time with a fear he had no source for.

Then came the impressions—too fast, too jagged for coherent pictures, but sharp enough to cut:

Metal interior. Dark. No space. Breath rebounding off walls. A rising panic. Something crawling. Something skittering. Something sharp brushing past the skin of someone else's arm. A claustrophobic, choking terror so intense it felt animal.

His breath faltered. His hand slipped on the locker door. The hallway tilted.

He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to breathe through it, but even his own lungs felt foreign—each inhale broken up by the phantom rhythm of someone else's gasping.

His heart raced. Too fast. Too uneven. Too scared.

A scream pressed at the edges of his skull. Muffled. Distorted. The way someone would sound if they were screaming into metal.

He heard it. He felt it. He knew it was real—not imagined, not metaphorical.

Someone near him was experiencing absolute terror.

And it had bled into him like a broadcast.

His fingers spasmed on the latch. He bent forward so suddenly he bumped a passing student, who swore at him and kept walking, unaware of the way Greg's whole body shuddered in place.

In the center of his chest, Leo detonated.

The sun under his sternum flared with a heat so intense he staggered sideways until his shoulder hit the wall. Pressure expanded outward—down his ribs, up into his throat, around his heart.

Not punishment. Not pain from lying.

Urgent.

An alarm.

Leo wasn't neutral. Leo wasn't calm.

The heat pulsed rapidly, like a heart squeezed by a burning hand:

Go. Go now. Go.

He forced one breath. Then another. Then another. When he reopened his eyes, everything around him felt slightly unreal.

Students walking with careless indifference. Laughter bouncing off walls. Cheap perfume and old sweat and flickering lights. And layered over all of it—wrongness. A fog of panic clinging to the air like static after a storm.

Greg pushed off the wall. His fingers tingled. His chest throbbed with leftover heat.

He didn't consciously decide to follow it. He didn't analyze or calculate a route. He just turned and moved. His senses were still half-glitched, half-tuned to something else, navigating by instinct rather than mapping—shoulders turning, feet weaving between gaps, chest pulling him forward like something magnetic.

He turned down the next hallway.

And then—he felt it. Like walking into a warm room after being outside in winter. Like stepping across a threshold.

The echo intensified. He was getting closer.

He turned another corner—

—and found the aftermath.

A knot of students. Whispering. Laughing. Staring at a locker several feet ahead with its door slightly ajar.

Bent out of shape.

The smell hit him first—a metallic taint his brain registered as contaminant, distress marker, wrong. Then the residual panic, still clinging to the metal like static discharge.

Greg froze.

He didn't hear the hallway anymore. Everything else was noise. All he focused on was that locker—warped metal, a faint smear on the inside lip of the door, the aura of terror radiating from it like heat from a cooling engine.

His whole body reacted. Not with fear.

With recognition.

Not of the person—he didn't know who it had been yet. But of the event pattern.

Someone had been inside. Someone had been terrified. Someone had screamed. And no one had helped.

Something in Greg's stomach twisted.

Leo pulsed again—Go. Find. Understand.

Greg stumbled forward.

---

Trying to Investigate

He pushed toward the cluster of students, moving through bodies with a strangely automatic urgency. The echo of panic still reverberated under his skin, making his muscles feel electric and wrong. It was like being carried by a wave—fight it and you'd drown in the undertow.

The crowd was thickest right where two hallways met. The loitering had a predatory quality, like birds gathering near a carcass rather than people chatting.

Whispers reached him as he approached—quick, wet with fascination:

"—no way she actually—" "—I swear, she freaked—" "—smelled like—" "—did you see her face—"

Every fragment that alluded to her fear fed back into the echo in his mind. His chest tightened. Leo burned hotter.

He slipped between two taller students, emerged into the inner ring of the crowd, and faced the locker.

Clearly forced open. Metal warped outward. Paint scratched by something sharp and frantic. The inside smeared with dark, damp streaks he didn't want to identify because his brain was already generating too many possibilities.

His throat closed. His breath hitched. Leo thrummed like a live wire.

A hand blocked his chest.

"Greg." Mr. Gladly's voice—annoyed, trying to sound kind. "Back up, please."

Greg's eyes darted from the teacher's hand to the locker door.

Someone had fought to get out.

The ghost-scream pulsed through him again, faint but real. He swallowed and tried to line his thoughts into something functional.

He needed facts. He raised his chin.

"Who was in the locker?"

Whispering paused. Nearby kids shifted their attention. A few smirked automatically.

Mr. Gladly sighed. "Greg, it's handled. Please go to class."

"That's not an answer," Greg said, voice flat, precise. "Someone was inside. Someone was very afraid. Do you need to call emergency services? Panic can cause—"

A snort cut through his sentence. A boy in a Letterman jacket looked him up and down. "You're seriously still talking? Mind your own business, dude."

Greg blinked, stunned less by the rudeness than by the dismissal. "Someone was trapped. Something happened. Ignoring it doesn't change reality."

Laughter. Soft snickers first, then louder.

"He felt something?" "Oh my God, his freaky psychic act." "Bro, you need therapy."

Greg flinched at the volume more than the words. Group laughter always hit him wrong—vibrating inside his skull with jagged edges.

"Greg," Mr. Gladly said again, tone tightening. "This isn't your concern. Go to class."

Greg talked over him—something he almost never did. "It's not safe to pretend nothing happened. Someone was locked in there. Someone was screaming."

His voice cracked on the last word.

Another wave of snickers rippled through.

"Did the locker talk to you?" "Creeeeepy."

His stomach turned. The detachment was worse than the cruelty. He didn't understand how they could see the bent door, smell what lingered, hear the whispers of what happened—and shrug.

Leo pressed outward against his ribs like claws of heat gripping from inside.

"Who was inside?" he asked again, clipped, like he was solving an equation.

A girl in a tight ponytail sighed dramatically. "Oh my God. Fine. It was Hebert."

She said the name like something she wanted to drop.

Greg's breath stalled. The air felt charged.

But before that could settle, another voice chimed in—harsh, amused, pleased:

"Taylor Hebert. The freak. Totally lost it."

Emma Barnes. Red hair, perfect posture, eyes sharp and cruel. She leaned against a locker with performative ease, enjoying the attention as she reenacted something for her group.

"Hear me out," she said, smirking. "'Please—someone—help me!'" She pitched her voice high and trembling. "Like a total psycho."

Greg's stomach lurched.

The words shot out before he could stop them: "You put her in there?"

The crowd erupted.

"Dude!" "What the hell?" "Greg, shut up!"

Emma froze for a heartbeat—surprised, then amused, then venomous. "Are you asking if I shoved some weirdo in a locker? I'm not a psycho. Unlike some people." Her eyes flicked pointedly to him. Her friends giggled on cue.

Greg's jaw tightened. He didn't break eye contact. "I didn't say you did. I asked if you knew who did."

Emma scoffed. "Wow. Helpful distinction."

His ears burned. Not from shame—from anger layered over confusion.

"Someone should call for help," he said to no one in particular. "Check if she's okay. Call her parents. Or—"

The Letterman jacket guy barked a laugh. "Her parents? Dude, what planet are you on?"

"The one where someone was hurt," Greg said.

That only made him laugh harder. "You're such a weirdo, man."

Weirdo. Old sting. Older pattern. Greg winced—not at the insult itself but at the mismatch between the seriousness of the situation and the ridiculousness of everyone's response.

Why wasn't anyone upset? Why wasn't anyone calling for help? Why—

A loud clap cut through the noise.

Mr. Gladly had stopped trying to herd politely.

"Okay. Enough. Everyone to class. Now. This situation is under control."

Greg stared at him.

Nothing was under control. Nothing had even been acknowledged.

"You're lying," he said, before he could stop himself.

Mr. Gladly's face tightened. "Greg."

"You said everything is fine. It isn't. Someone is hurt and you're pretending—"

"That's enough." His voice cracked in a way that said he was embarrassed—not for Taylor, but for the scene. "Go. To. Class."

Greg's breath shook. He forced his eyes away from the teacher and looked at the locker again.

Bent metal. Scratched interior. Dark streaks. The smell of rot and cleaning chemical and human fear.

Softly, too quietly for anyone but himself, he said:

"Screaming isn't fine."

The crowd thinned as the bell rang. Laughter and muttered jokes trailed down the hall.

"Omega freak." "Greg's malfunctioning again." "Report him to IT."

He didn't respond. He didn't track who said it. His focus was locked on one point.

Taylor Hebert was inside that locker. And everyone had walked away like it was nothing.

Leo pulsed under his sternum—hot, low, insistent.

Do not let this move past you.

Greg clenched his hands into fists, the sensation sharp and grounding, and turned away from the locker.

He didn't know what he could do. Not really. But he knew one thing with painful certainty:

He could not pretend this didn't matter. Not like everyone else. Not like the teachers. Not like the students.

---

Emotional Resonance

Greg walked in the direction they'd taken Taylor Hebert, but he wasn't so much walking as being pulled. His body moved with a momentum he hadn't agreed to but couldn't stop—like his chest had become a magnet and something ahead was imprinted in the air as a command.

His thoughts came in fragments:

Locker. Bent metal. Dark space. Screaming. Hebert.

The one that stabbed hardest: Someone screamed, and they laughed.

His hands shook inside the sleeves of his hoodie. He curled them into fists, nails pressing crescents into his palms.

He replayed the sensory echo—not because he wanted to, but because his nervous system had clamped onto it and refused to release. The air too thin. The sense of something crawling against skin. The overwhelming wrongness that invaded him like a second soul.

He couldn't stop feeling it. Couldn't stop hearing the ghost-scream. Couldn't stop imagining someone crying inside a metal coffin while the school pretended it was normal.

Now the name had a shape.

Taylor Hebert.

The first time he'd heard it, something had sparked. The second time, it had slotted into the pattern. Now, moving through the hallway past students who'd stopped to stare at the bent locker like it was entertainment, the name rooted itself deeper.

He didn't understand why.

He didn't have a blueprint for this feeling. It wasn't attraction—attraction felt different. He'd felt small versions of it before, curiosity or warmth or interest in someone's presence. This wasn't that. He didn't even know her voice. He'd never spoken to her.

But he felt something else. Something intense and dangerous.

Something like recognition. Or resonance—a deep, low-frequency vibration that matched some internal hollow space he'd never had a word for.

He walked faster.

He needed to see her face. Needed to know she was breathing right. Needed confirmation that she hadn't been—

Crushed. Hurt. Abandoned.

Leo pulsed—slow, hot, heavy. Not punishment. Not alarm. Something closer to focus. Like molten metal turning steadily in place.

Greg's breath came fast and shallow, not from exertion but from a kind of emotional overheating. He turned the corner into the quieter hallway.

"…drama queen…" "…imagine freaking out in front of everyone…" "…seriously, they should've expelled her for the smell…"

Each comment tightened something in him. He didn't even realize he was clenching his jaw until his teeth ached.

He scanned the hallway.

Then he saw it: a teacher rounding a corner, another adult helping, and between them—

Taylor.

His steps faltered. He nearly tripped.

His brain took a full three seconds to process what he was seeing.

"Walking" wasn't quite the right word. She was moving like someone who hadn't yet remembered how. Her legs obeyed because muscle memory forced them to, but every step had the hesitant rhythm of someone not fully trusting their own body. Arms stiff at her sides, elbows tucked close. Hands curled slightly inward.

Micro-tremors—still there. Tiny shakes running from fingertips up into forearms. She wasn't fidgeting. She was vibrating.

Her hair hung damp, clinging to her temple and cheek. Not water. Something else. Her shirt—borrowed sweatpants and a too-large school T-shirt that hung off one shoulder—showed clean fabric still marked with the ghost of what had been there before. Her bare arms were covered in goosebumps from cold or shock or both.

Her posture was still wrong. Too upright. Too stiff. Like someone braced for impact who hadn't remembered how to un-brace.

Her face—

Blank.

Not empty. Not calm. Blank. The kind that came from too much—too much noise, too much fear, too much humiliation all at once. The kind Greg recognized because he'd felt lesser versions of it his entire life. The kind that meant:

I am shutting down. I cannot process this. I am still inside the event.

Her eyes were wide but not tracking. They weren't focused on where she was going. She wasn't seeing anything. She was wrapped in a numbing fog.

Greg stopped walking without meaning to. His body refused to go forward because his brain had lost its script.

He felt a sensation in his chest he had no category for. Like grief for someone he didn't know. Like anger lodged deep enough to sting. Like his ribs were too small to contain the heat growing beneath them.

Leo burned—hot, steady, sun-like. Not flaring. Not spiking.

Steady.

Greg found himself whispering, barely audible: "Taylor…"

One of the teachers shot him a sharp look. "Greg. Class."

She said it like class was the most relevant thing in the world right now.

He stepped back automatically—not because he agreed, but because adult-tone was a rule he obeyed even when he hated it. But he couldn't look away.

Taylor's arm brushed the teacher's sleeve as they guided her forward.

She flinched.

So small. So fast. Most people wouldn't notice.

Greg did.

He knew what it meant: someone had touched her without asking, while she was overloaded, while she was shut down.

He felt his breath catch.

He remembered being twelve—someone grabbing his arm unexpectedly, his entire nervous system lighting up like a fire alarm. The memory surfaced so fast it made his stomach turn. He saw that same panic flicker across Taylor's posture now. Shoulders tightening, toes curling inward briefly as if absorbing impact, the faint jerk of her head.

Another fragment of recognition:

She broke in a way I could break. She hurt in a way I understand. She's alone in it—just like I always am.

The hallway blurred. Greg blinked hard. He was overstimulated—not from noise or light but from something he'd never overloaded on before.

Not sensory.

Empathetic.

Taylor reached the nurse's office door. The teacher pulled it open. She walked inside without protest, without looking back, without any sign she registered the world at all.

The door closed.

Greg stood there for a long moment.

A long, long moment.

The late bell rang. The hallway emptied completely. He didn't move. He didn't breathe properly. He wasn't fully present in his own body.

The echo of her panic still soaked the air.

The words people had said earlier ricocheted through him:

She lost it. Freak. Drama queen. She deserved it.

The cruelty hit harder now that he'd seen her face.

Deserved it? For what? For existing? For being someone they decided wasn't worth basic humanity?

He wanted to reach out. Say something. Anything.

"Are you okay?"—useless. "I'm sorry"—presumptuous. "I know how it feels"—not precisely true, and it felt like theft, like claiming her pain as his own.

The words he actually wanted were more like: They shouldn't have done that to you. They shouldn't have laughed. You're not a freak. They are.

But his throat was too tight. His anxiety too thick. The social script too unforgiving. He already had a reputation for saying the wrong thing. Walking up to a girl who'd just been pulled from a locker and unloading a monologue about injustice would probably only add to her humiliation.

He stood frozen instead.

The small procession turned a corner and vanished.

The ache in his chest didn't.

He stayed there long after the hallway emptied, staring at the space where she'd been. Slowly, something in his mind encoded the moment. Not as a passing observation—as a node. A point on his internal map, glowing faintly.

Locker Incident → Hebert, Taylor → broken walk, numb face, tremors → system failure → unresolved.

His brain attached a flag: Follow-up required.

It wasn't romantic. Not yet. It was narrative. Ethical. Systemic.

He recognized a fracture line in the pattern of Winslow—and unavoidably, in his own trajectory.

He stumbled into the side alcove near the janitor's closet, pressed his back against the wall, and slid down to the floor. His knees pulled to his chest. Not hugging them—bracing. Holding himself together with geometry.

His face was wet. He hadn't noticed until now.

He wasn't crying, not fully. But tears had formed anyway.

Because he didn't understand how someone could scream for help and be laughed at. Because he didn't understand why she'd been alone in that terror. Because he knew, with sick certainty, what it felt like to be alone in terror.

His voice came out cracked and quiet: "This isn't right."

The words steadied him. Anchored him.

He scrubbed his face with his sleeve and inhaled shakily.

"Taylor Hebert," he whispered, testing the name, letting it settle. "Locker victim. Panic echo. Hurt."

His chest hurt.

In a deep, lonely way.

He pushed air out in a long breath. His mind drifted back to the phrase he'd overheard that morning—she deserved it—and his jaw clenched.

No one deserved that. Not even someone cruel. Definitely not someone quiet. Someone who'd made herself so small the world forgot she existed until there was a reason to hurt her.

He pulled his notebook out with trembling hands and added one line beneath what he'd already written, in small letters:

Feels wrong in a way I can't ignore.

He stared at the words.

He knew himself. Once something slotted into the can't ignore folder, it wasn't leaving. It would surface in idle thoughts, in half-sleep, in background processing while he did homework, until he either solved it or broke against it.

Taylor Hebert had become one of those things.

The sun in his chest pulsed once, warm and low. Not angry. Not alarmed.

Acknowledgment.

He let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

"I see you," he whispered to the empty hallway.

He didn't know that someday, much later, he'd misread this ache—this resonance, this stubborn refusal to look away from her pain—as the early shape of a crush.

Right now it was simpler and more complicated at the same time.

He didn't want her. He wanted her to be okay.

And in Greg Veder's internal system, that was the beginning of a bond:

Not built on attraction. Built on recognition.

---

First Glimpse of Taylor (Post-Trigger, From a Distance)

For a while after he wrote her name, Greg didn't trust himself to move.

He stayed in the alcove, sat on the cold floor with his back braced against the wall, notebook closed on his knee. The hallway outside continued as if nothing had happened—footsteps, chatter, the lingering echo of the bell. Normal routines consuming a not-normal event.

Inside him, nothing was normal.

The echo still hummed low and persistent through his nerves, like tinnitus but emotional. Every time he reached for something else—class, attendance, which page they were on in English—his mind slid back.

Locker. Bent metal. Wrong laughter. Taylor.

He opened his notebook out of reflex and stared at the three lines already there. Sharp and neat on the page, too orderly for what they contained.

He traced the letters of her name with the tip of his pen. H. E. B. E. R. T. He didn't know why he did that. He didn't usually do that with people's names.

His chest burned—not flaring, not punishing. More like a live coal resting under his sternum. Leo's heat had shifted from emergency alarm to fixed attention.

Stay with this. Don't let it slide out of view. This matters.

The late bell rang, distant but clear. His brain pinged: he was supposed to be in class. Being late would put his name on a list, and his stepdad would get annoyed if the school called home again.

He didn't move.

His body felt like a machine running two incompatible processes at once: Perform school routine and Process emotional disaster. Something had to give.

He sat for another full minute, forehead resting briefly on his knees. When he finally stood, his legs wobbled once before holding. He shoved the notebook into his bag, feeling each tooth of the zipper connect.

A familiar pull: get back to the routine, or you'll unravel.

Another, just as strong: find out if she's okay.

He compromised. He couldn't get to the nurse's office directly—adult barricades, unspoken rules about loitering, the near-certainty that any attempt to ask again would get him classified as the problem rather than the situation. So he took a longer route, one that passed the intersection where the nurse's office was visible down the next hall. Far enough not to be hovering. Close enough to see movement.

The linoleum squeaked under his sneakers. He stopped just before the corner and angled his head to see down the hallway without standing in the middle of it.

The nurse's office door sat halfway down the stretch—wired glass window at head height, silhouettes inside distorted by the mesh. He couldn't make out much. Just shifting shapes.

He stared anyway.

His logical brain offered the obvious: this was pointless. He wasn't family. Not a friend. Not even an acquaintance. He was some guy who'd felt a secondhand panic attack because his weird sun-core reacted to someone else's terror. He had no standing here.

But another part of him—the part that collected patterns and refused to release them—insisted: You saw the locker. You heard the echo. You wrote the name. If you walk away now, you'll be lying to yourself about what happened.

Leo pulsed, slow and hot, agreeing.

So he stayed.

His attention drifted over small things while he waited, because that's what his brain did when it couldn't focus on what it really wanted. A piece of tape peeling from the baseboard. A crack in the ceiling paint. The flicker pattern of the nearest fluorescent: long-long-short, pause, long. Each piece of data anchored him lightly, like guy wires on a tower in a storm.

Time passed. His sense of minutes frayed easily in situations like this.

Eventually, the nurse's office door opened.

Greg straightened reflexively.

Two adults emerged first—one in office attire, one in the nurse's polo. They moved carefully, creating a small pocket of space around the figure between them.

Taylor.

His breath left him in a soft, involuntary exhale.

She looked different from before. Not dramatically, not in the movie way. In the micro-ways his brain noticed before anyone else's would.

Her hair had been hastily rinsed, darker now, pulled back in a loose tie with a few strands stuck to her neck. The worst of the grime had been scrubbed from her skin, but faint streaks remained along her jawline—ghosts of whatever had been in the locker with her. Her clothes were changed: loaner sweatpants and a too-large school T-shirt hanging off one shoulder. The fabric looked aggressively generic, pulled from a lost-and-found box. Clean, but her bare arms showed goosebumps from cold or shock or both.

Her posture was still wrong. Too upright, too stiff, like someone who'd braced against impact and hadn't remembered how to un-brace.

Her hands hung at her sides, fingers curled slightly inward. The micro-tremors were still there—tiny shakes from fingertips up into forearms, invisible to anyone not tracking micro-movements. Greg saw them instantly.

Her eyes were open, but not engaged. They flicked around as if processing stimuli, but nothing landed. Like a computer with the screen on and the OS frozen—display up, no input being processed.

The adults spoke to her quietly as they walked. Greg caught only the cadence: low, soothing, the kind of tone people used when they wanted to sound comforting without actually understanding what comfort required.

Taylor's lips moved once, barely. He didn't catch sound. He couldn't tell if she was answering them or talking to herself.

The vice principal's hand hovered near Taylor's back—not quite touching, but close.

Greg's body flinched in sympathy. Don't touch her without asking. She's overloaded. You'll make it worse. The words lodged in his throat. Social rules weighed down on his tongue.

He swallowed the protest.

The small procession turned into clearer view.

Her face hit him like a physical force.

Pale—not dramatically so, not chalky in a cartoonish way, just drained. The color leeched from her features, leaving tired shadows under her eyes and faint redness at the rims, like she'd already cried or was perpetually on the verge of it.

Her mouth was flat. Not pressed tight, not trembling. Just flat, like the idea of expression had been switched off to conserve power.

Her gaze moved over doors, walls, floor. It never landed on another person. No eye contact. No scanning for faces. No checking for threat.

That wasn't how people normally moved after trauma, he thought. There was usually hypervigilance—darting eyes, flinching at sudden motion. Instead she seemed disconnected from her surroundings, her brain retreated somewhere deep, her body left on autopilot.

He recognized the shape of it.

Not from an identical experience—but from the smaller shutdowns he'd had over the years. Times when noise and light and expectation stacked too high and something inside him clicked and turned down his ability to feel. He remembered eighth grade, a substitute teacher yelling at him in front of the class for correcting her math. The shame and confusion had piled on top of a bad sensory day until he'd sat through the rest of the period barely hearing anything, watching his own hands on the desk like they belonged to someone else.

He'd walked home afterward with the same kind of numb, stiff gait Taylor had now.

Seeing it on someone else—

It hurt.

That was the only word his brain could eventually land on.

Not physically. Not even emotionally in the usual sense. A kind of ache that started somewhere behind his ribs and radiated outward, slow and heavy. An ache for the fact that he understood this too well. An ache for the certainty that after today, people would talk about her for the wrong reasons.

He didn't think I like her. He didn't think she's pretty or she's interesting.

He thought: She's one of mine.

Not literally. Not possessively. In the sense of category. The category of people the system failed. The category of people others labeled "freak" when they reacted honestly to impossible situations. The category he slotted himself into daily, without wanting to but unable to deny.

If he'd been shoved into that locker—if his body had been trapped, his senses overloaded, his brain screaming in a box while insects crawled over his skin—he would have broken too. Maybe worse.

He watched the adults guide Taylor past a row of "Bullying" and "Respect" posters that suddenly felt like a joke carved in paper.

The irony scraped against him.

He wanted to reach out. Say something. The words he actually wanted were: They shouldn't have done that to you. They shouldn't have laughed. You're not a freak. They are.

But his throat was too tight. His anxiety too thick. He already had a reputation for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time—walking up to her now would probably only add to her humiliation.

He stood frozen.

The procession passed through his line of sight and continued down the hall. The vice principal's hand hovered close to Taylor's shoulder as if ready to steady her. The nurse glanced back once, scanning the hall. Greg flattened himself against the wall.

They didn't see him.

He watched until they turned a corner and vanished.

The ache in his chest didn't.

He stayed there long after the hallway emptied again, staring at the space where she'd been. Slowly, something in his mind encoded the moment. Not as a loose memory—as a node. A point on his internal map, glowing faintly.

Locker Incident → Hebert, Taylor → broken walk, numb face, tremors → system failure → unresolved.

His brain attached a flag: Follow-up required.

It wasn't romantic. It was narrative. Ethical. Systemic. He recognized a fracture line in the pattern of Winslow—and unavoidably, in his own trajectory.

He pulled his notebook out with trembling hands and added a line beneath what he'd already written, in smaller letters:

Feels wrong in a way I can't ignore.

He stared at the words. He knew himself. Once something slotted into the can't ignore folder, it wasn't leaving. Taylor Hebert had become one of those things.

The sun in his chest pulsed once, warm and low.

Not angry. Not alarmed.

Acknowledgment.

He let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

"I see you," he whispered to the empty hallway.

He didn't know that someday, much later, he'd misread this ache—this resonance, this stubborn refusal to look away from her pain—as the early shape of a crush.

Right now it was simpler and more complicated at the same time.

He didn't want her. He wanted her to be okay.

And in Greg Veder's internal system, that was the beginning of a bond:

Not built on attraction. Built on recognition.

---

End Beat: Log Entry and Quiet Resolve

For several long seconds after Taylor disappeared around the corner, Greg remained frozen. The hallway was unnaturally silent. The building's hum seemed louder without students to absorb it. Distant HVAC. The soft buzz of overhead lights. The rhythmic tick of a clock behind a classroom door.

Winslow never felt still. Right now, everything felt paused.

His body took a moment to catch up to itself. His fingers trembled—not violently, a fine, restless shake through each knuckle like low-level voltage. He pulled his hands into his hoodie sleeves and pressed them against his stomach. Pressure helped. Anchored him.

He leaned against the cool wall, letting the surface take some of his weight. His heart still beat too fast. The sun under his sternum was warm and solid—the kind of heat that wasn't painful but insistent.

He'd learned that this warmth usually meant two things:

(1) attention. (2) significance.

He needed to get out of the hallway. He moved away from the intersection toward the quieter math wing, where traffic would be minimal, and slid down the wall to sit again beside the broken vending machine. His legs gave out more easily this time, like they were grateful for permission.

He drew his knees to his chest. Not hugging them—bracing. Holding himself together with geometry.

He sat there for a minute. Maybe two. Maybe ten. His sense of minutes frayed easily after sensory overloads and emotional fractures. Eventually, when his hands obeyed him again, he pulled out his notebook.

He stared at the ink.

Three lines. Four words. One name.

Unassuming. Plain. But there was weight in it now. Memory weight. Responsibility weight.

Greg clicked his pen. Once. Twice. Three times. The soft mechanical snap steadied his breathing.

Then he wrote. Not in rushed scribbles. In neat, precise handwriting that tracked his thoughts like data entries.

3.12 – Follow-up Observation Saw Taylor Hebert escorted from nurse's office. Clothes changed. Hair damp. Recently cleaned. Affect: dissociated. Motor signs: tremors, stiffness, reduction of natural movement patterns. Eye contact: none. External engagement: low. Possible sensory overload/shutdown.

He paused.

The image replayed—Taylor walking in borrowed clothes, flanked by adults, like a ghost being escorted through a land of the living.

He wrote:

She looked alone.

He didn't underline it. He didn't need to.

He glanced around the alcove to make sure no one was watching, then lowered his pen again.

Peer response: high dismissal, derision, cruelty. No empathy detected. Teacher response: avoidance, minimization. No escalation to emergency services. System response: insufficient.

System response. That phrase stuck.

It was the same language he used whenever something went wrong with his own emotions and he tried to analyze them like a malfunctioning program. Whenever his masking failed, whenever his sensory processing broke down in public, whenever he got in trouble not because he meant to misbehave but because he'd misread instructions and the teacher assumed difficulty.

System response failure.

He'd thought of himself that way for years.

But now he was watching the school fail Taylor in exactly the same pattern.

He'd seen it play out a hundred times in smaller scales—with other kids who didn't fit, who didn't speak up, who didn't match the script Winslow demanded. The world only stepped in when it was too late. And even then, the intervention was sloppy. Performative. Reactive. The kind that arrived hours after the damage had already sunk into the bones.

He wrote:

She shouldn't have been alone in that hallway. She shouldn't have walked without proper support. Teachers should have intervened earlier. Students laughed. This is wrong.

He stared at the words, breathing slow.

He felt the wrongness like a pressure around his ribs. Not metaphorical—physical. A band tightening under his sternum.

Leo throbbed once, hot and intense. Not in warning. In agreement.

Greg pressed his palm over his chest unconsciously, applying steady pressure. The warmth grounded him.

He flipped to a new page and wrote at the top:

Pattern Analysis: Locker Incident

Then:

Input: panic sensation from unknown source → confirmed Taylor Hebert. Physical evidence: bent locker door, contamination, residual odor. Emotional echo: intense, non-localized, triggered through sympathetic resonance? Hypothesis: emotional imprint triggered power reaction.

He swallowed.

He rarely referenced Leo in writing. Documenting powers felt dangerous—evidence that could be held against him. But the sensation from earlier wasn't a typical empathic response. It had been too specific, too sharp, too synchronized to dismiss.

He wrote carefully:

Note: Leo reacted strongly. Indicates external distress detectable under certain conditions.

He looked up, scanning the hallway. Still empty.

Potential risk: Taylor may not receive support from staff or peers. Potential outcome: worsening symptoms, social isolation, increased vulnerability. Required action: monitor. Check status. Avoid direct confrontation until stable. Do not forget.

That last line scratched itself into the page like a command. Not from Leo. Not from fear. From principle.

Greg closed his eyes briefly.

He didn't know why this weighed so heavily. Why the ache felt so large, like a bruise spreading under the ribs. Why his focus kept narrowing down to Taylor's posture, her tremors, the blankness in her stare.

He only knew that ignoring it made the heat in his chest spike painfully.

So he wasn't going to ignore it.

He pressed the pen against the closed notebook and held it there, grounding himself with the texture of plastic and metal.

A thought rose—quiet, small, persistent:

If that happened to me, I would want someone to care.

The thought hurt. In a deep, lonely way.

He pushed air out in a long breath and stared at the opposite wall. The vending machine's display glowed dimly, stuck at 00.00 like it, too, had shut down.

His mind drifted back to the phrase he'd overheard that morning. She deserved it.

His jaw clenched.

No one deserved that. Not even someone cruel. Definitely not someone quiet. Someone who kept to themselves. Someone who'd made herself so small the world forgot she existed until there was a reason to hurt her.

He opened the notebook and added one last line at the bottom of the page:

She did not deserve it.

He underlined it. Once. Firmly.

The line steadied something inside him.

He glanced at the clock above the vending machine. Long past the late bell. He was supposed to be in geometry. Or English. His brain didn't supply the schedule immediately.

All he could picture was Taylor's empty stare.

He stood slowly, gripping his backpack strap with one hand.

Go to class, get a late slip, pretend everything is normal?

Or keep tracking the pattern, risk disciplinary notice?

Leo pulsed under his ribs—warm, steady, silent encouragement.

Greg swallowed. He slung the backpack over his shoulder, took one step out of the alcove, then another. Each step threaded itself through a quiet, newly formed line of logic:

I'm not letting this disappear. Not into rumor. Not into silence. Not into laughter. Not the way everything else disappears in this place.

He reached the corner where the hallway split toward classrooms.

He didn't turn toward class.

He took the long loop—the one that passed the office later, where he could check if anything had changed, gather more data from a safe distance.

He walked with purpose. Not fast but focused.

New entry in his internal ledger:

Priority: Taylor Hebert. Status: fragile. Follow-up required.

The sun under his sternum pulsed once more—hot, final.

Like sealing a vow.

Greg exhaled and whispered, voice barely audible:

"I won't forget you."

And with that, he disappeared down the hallway, the ache in his chest transformed into something else—

resolve.

 

[Lastword855]

This was painful to read and I can't wait for more.

 

[Durolord]

Thread: "New Cape at Winslow???"
Forum: Parahumans Online → United States → Brockton Bay → Rumors & Sightings
Status: Active (Low-level derailment)

---

► Posted by: Winters_Lotus
Timestamp: 00:13:55

So uh… anyone else hear about some kid at Winslow who made a bunch of bullies back off just by staring at them??

Like someone said he "looked at them like a Brute" and they just… stopped.

Please tell me this isn't another ABB recruitment rumor.

---

► Reply by: Coil_Is_My_CoPilot
Timestamp: 00:14:10

Winslow having a cape is statistically improbable.

If they had powers, they'd transfer out, get recruited, or die.

Those are the options.

---

► Reply by: BBResident
Timestamp: 00:14:44

No, I've heard this too.

Cousin's a freshman there.

Said some guy just stood in the hallway and four older students backed off.

No shouting. No fight.

Just… "weird energy."

---

► Reply by: 3rd_Shift_Dockworker
Timestamp: 00:15:30

"Weird energy" is not a classification.

Last I checked.

---

► Reply by: NeighborhoodWatch
Timestamp: 00:16:01

Wait—is this connected to the locker rumor?

Someone mentioned a girl screaming inside a locker last week.

---

► Reply by: Mod Note – Flagbearer
Timestamp: 00:16:14

Reminder: Keep discussion respectful. No identifying minors.

Continue.

---

► Reply by: CoyoteBlue
Timestamp: 00:16:44

Okay my brother goes there.

He said there are two things going around:

1. Locker girl incident (different hallway)
2. "Intense guy"

Apparently people feel him before they see him.

Like… hair-standing-up feeling.

That's Stranger-type, right?

---

► Reply by: Brockton_Born
Timestamp: 00:17:23

Stranger? No.

Stranger is subtle.

This sounds more like:

• Brute intimidation aura
• Or Master presence
• Or just extreme social discomfort projected outward

Pick your poison.

---

► Reply by: 5Knuckle_Justice
Timestamp: 00:18:09

Or he's just a sleep-deprived teen who looks like a haunted house prop.

Winslow is full of those.

---

► Reply by: Tattle_Tail
Timestamp: 00:18:50

My friend said Thinker.

Apparently he scans people like he's reading variables.

Doesn't react like normal students.

Bullies don't like that.

---

► Reply by: Winters_Lotus
Timestamp: 00:19:14

OP here—this matches what I heard.

A friend in dance class said:

"He moved like he was following a path no one else could see."

She thought maybe Master influence, but not intentional.

Just… unsettling.

---

► Reply by: Laser_Mutt
Timestamp: 00:19:47

So either:

• Stranger 1
• Thinker 2
• Or socially anxious teenager

PHO loves escalating options.

---

► Reply by: 3AM_Coffee
Timestamp: 00:20:14

Let's be real.

If he had powers, Winslow would've weaponized him by now.

That school doesn't do subtle.

---

► Reply by: SophiaSux
Timestamp: 00:20:50

Finally a Winslow rumor thread not blaming the locker incident on the victim.

But yeah—heard similar.

Two versions:

A) He stared someone down and they backed off immediately
B) He threw someone across a hallway with "invisible force"

Both can't be true.

Probably neither is.

---

► Reply by: ShardHunter
Timestamp: 00:21:31

Or witnesses are just unreliable.

Winslow reporting accuracy is… not great.

---

► Reply by: BrocktonBayBuzz
Timestamp: 00:22:09

I heard the "throwing" version too.

Except in mine it was a girl.

Which makes even less sense.

Unless physics took a day off.

---

► Reply by: Winters_Lotus
Timestamp: 00:22:41

OP again:

Most consistent version is simpler:

He didn't do anything overt.

Just stood still.

Didn't flinch.

Bullies got nervous and backed off.

---

► Reply by: RealTalk_Wards
Timestamp: 00:23:17

This is how cape rumors always start.

Quiet kid → does one intense thing → becomes "Master 10 with death eyes."

Give it a week, someone will say he controls fear.

---

► Reply by: Masked_and_Afraid
Timestamp: 00:23:58

Or… what if he is a cape?

Winslow has had multiple trigger incidents before.

That school is basically a pressure cooker.

---

► Reply by: BBResident
Timestamp: 00:24:40

Nobody connects him with the locker thing though.

Different incidents.

Different people.

Locker girl got taken out by staff.

Intense guy just… walked through a hallway.

---

► Reply by: 3rd_Shift_Dockworker
Timestamp: 00:25:14

Summary:

• Kid stands weird
• Bullies hesitate
• Internet builds mythology
• No actual evidence

Classic PHO cycle.

---

► Reply by: Coil_Is_My_CoPilot
Timestamp: 00:26:05

No video = no cape.

---

► Reply by: Winters_Lotus
Timestamp: 00:26:48

I'll try to get a picture next time.

Friend says you can't miss him.

Tall-ish. Hoodie. Walks like he's following invisible instructions.

Sounds like half of Winslow though.

---

► Mod Note – Flagbearer
Timestamp: 00:27:31

Reminder:

Do not attempt to photograph minors.

Do not request or share identifying images.

---

► Reply by: WardsFan_89
Timestamp: 00:28:02

Bet this is just anxiety.

Winslow students think eye contact is a superpower.

---

► Reply by: SophiaSux
Timestamp: 00:29:04

Honestly?

That tracks.

At that school, silence gets misread as intimidation.

---

► Reply by: clipped_Feathers
Timestamp: 00:29:52

This sounds like:

Socially anxious kid → stares too long → bullies misinterpret → rumor escalates

That's it.

---

► Reply by: Coil_Is_My_CoPilot
Timestamp: 00:30:40

I buy that more than Brute/Master theories.

---

► Reply by: BBResident
Timestamp: 00:31:14

Even if he's not a cape…

If he scared bullies without touching anyone?

That's kind of impressive.

Winslow needs more of that.

---

► Reply by: NeighborhoodWatch
Timestamp: 00:32:01

Speaking of locker girl—

Anyone got updates?

No news coverage.

No official statement.

Just silence.

---

► Reply by: 5Knuckle_Justice
Timestamp: 00:32:29

Different topic.

Rumor says she wasn't hurt.

Just shaken.

---

► Reply by: Masked_and_Afraid
Timestamp: 00:32:51

Locked in a bug-filled locker and "not hurt"?

That sounds incomplete.

---

► Reply by: ShardHunter
Timestamp: 00:33:15

Theory:

Locker girl = potential trigger
Intense guy = unrelated stress anomaly
Winslow = trigger factory

---

► Reply by: 3rd_Shift_Dockworker
Timestamp: 00:33:58

If a new cape triggered there, we'd see effects.

We don't.

Just rumors.

---

► Reply by: Winters_Lotus
Timestamp: 00:34:24

OP again:

Still weird how everyone agrees on one thing:

"He felt intense."

That's the consistent detail.

Everything else changes.

---

► Reply by: 3AM_Coffee
Timestamp: 00:35:11

This thread:

• Possibly nothing
• Possibly anxiety kid
• Possibly cape rumor starter pack

Brockton Bay special.

---

► Mod Note – Flagbearer
Timestamp: 00:36:02

Thread remains open.

Keep speculation non-invasive.

---

► Reply by: Winters_Lotus
Timestamp: 00:36:44

Final thought:

People keep saying "he looked through me instead of at me."

That's… not normal.

Even if he's not a cape.

Something about that keeps sticking.

---

► Reply by: CoyoteBlue
Timestamp: 00:37:28

Still think it's just intimidation aura.

Bullies read "don't mess with me" and back off.

That's enough.

---

► Reply by: BrocktonBayBuzz
Timestamp: 00:38:17

Until proof shows up:

Winslow Kid Being Weird: Episode 1

---

► Auto-Summary Bot
Timestamp: 00:39:02

Rumor Level: Low (3/10)

• Unverified student at Winslow
• Reports of intense stare / intimidation effect
• Conflicting interpretations (Stranger / Thinker / normal teen)
• No confirmed cape activity
• No confirmed identity

---

► Reply by: Winters_Lotus
Timestamp: 00:39:37

Harmless?

I don't know.

But I've got a feeling we're going to hear about him again.

---

 

[Durolord]

Post-Locker, Pre-Flare Headspace

The rest of the school day didn't feel real.

It felt like someone had dragged a normal schedule through static until the edges blurred. The events were technically there—he could list them: geometry, English, lunch, history, science. But each one slid past him like scenes from someone else's life.

His body moved through them. His brain did not.

Geometry was angles and proofs and the scratch of pencils. The teacher's voice drifted across the room in a monotone: "Given triangle ABC…" All Greg's mind supplied was: Given: locker. Prove: no one cares.

He stared at his notebook, pen hovering over a blank problem set. Instead of triangles, he kept drawing boxes—rectangles with too-small interiors, cross-hatching for darkness, the occasional jagged line that might have been a hand pressing against metal.

He only realized what he was doing on the third one.

He stopped, hand cramping from gripping the pen too tight. He turned the page and forced himself to copy equations from the board with mechanical precision. The numbers went down correctly. The answers were right. But they felt like performances rather than understanding.

His chest stayed warm. Not flaring—just present. Leo simmering under his sternum like a star seen through fog.

He tried not to think about Taylor. Failed.

In English, Mrs. Avery talked about metaphor and imagery. The class read a poem about being trapped and unseen, and Greg wanted to laugh at the universe's sense of humor. He didn't. His mouth stayed a flat line.

"See how the author uses the image of a room with no doors?" she said. "To represent… what?"

Hands went up. Hopelessness. Being stuck. Like prison.

Greg stared at his paper and wrote, in small letters at the bottom: Locker.

He crossed it out with a hard line immediately.

His fingers twitched. The desk's texture felt too rough. The fluorescent above him strobed at the edge of his vision. A kid behind him clicked a pen, over and over.

Click. Click. Click.

Each click was a needle.

On a good day, he could file it away. Today, everything stacked.

Click. Locker. Buzz. Taylor. "Freak in the locker." Chalk scraping. "She lost it." Pages turning. "She deserved it." Leo's heat, low and constant.

His chest tightened. His breathing hitched once, then resettled into something shallow.

No one noticed.

The cafeteria smelled like salt and oil and too many people in too little space. The line moved in jerks. Trays clattered. Someone dropped a soda can and the metallic clang made his spine light up with irritation.

He picked his corner table—back to the wall, facing the room, same as always—and pulled out his lunch mechanically. Sandwich, apple, granola bar. His stomach flipped at the thought of eating, but he recognized the prickly edge of low blood sugar and forced himself to take a bite anyway.

The bread felt dry and thick.

Snatches of conversation drifted over from nearby tables.

"…locker girl's not back yet…" "…heard she went crazy…" "…bugs, man, can you imagine? I'd puke…"

His hand tightened around the sandwich.

He thought about getting up and leaving his tray there. His body did that sometimes—just stood and walked away before the rest of him could catch up. He stayed. Sitting felt like resistance in itself. Staying in the room, keeping his eyes open, pretending to be part of the communal act of lunchtime.

Sentences scrolled through his head without voices:

You're eating food in a room where everyone's discussing a girl who screamed for help. You're chewing while they laugh. You're swallowing while they call her names. You're sitting still because if you move wrong, they'll do it to you too.

His chest burned.

He took another bite.

By science, his brain had shifted from static to tired buzzing. Two of the overhead lights flickered in an alternating pattern that made the room feel like a glitching video. Mr. Patel noticed him squinting.

"You okay, Greg?"

Greg wanted to say: No. Today is wrong. Everything is wrong. What came out was: "Headache."

Not a lie, exactly. He did have a headache. But it wasn't the whole truth, and Leo seemed to know the difference—the heat under his ribs didn't spike in disapproval. It felt sympathetic. Or braced. The way someone might stand ready beside you without speaking.

"Drink some water," Mr. Patel said, already moving on.

No one else paused to look at him. No one noticed when his gaze dropped to his notebook every time someone said locker or freak under their breath and laughed.

By the final bell, he wasn't just tired. He was wired.

The specific flavor of exhaustion that came from suppressing reactions all day. His skin felt both too tight and too loose. His thoughts buzzed and sparked like overloaded circuits.

He stepped into the after-school hallway like a diver breaking the surface.

Noise exploded. Chairs scraping, lockers slamming, shouts of see you and text me and got practice later? The smell of sweat and deodorant and outside air leaking in through opening doors.

He adjusted his backpack straps automatically, paused to smooth a slight twist near the top, then merged into the stream heading for the main exit.

Don't stop in the middle. Don't block the flow.

The fluorescent lights grated on already frayed nerves. Every bump from a passing shoulder registered as a separate burst of irritation.

His internal loop had stopped making organized lists.

Locker. Taylor. Echo. No one listening. No one caring. She walked out in borrowed clothes and they just shrugged. "Handled."

He heard Mr. Gladly's voice again in his memory: Everything's fine.

Liar.

The sun in his chest pulsed in quiet agreement.

He reached the front doors and pressed into the cluster of bodies all trying to leave at once. Too much heat, too many smells, too many voices. He focused on texture instead: backpack strap fibers under his fingers, the cool smooth metal of the door handle, the slight drag of rubber sole on the threshold.

He stepped out into open air.

Cold wind hit his face immediately. Not genuinely cold—but after the stale, overheated hallways, it felt sharp and clean. He inhaled deeply, lungs expanding with relief.

The sky over Brockton Bay was its usual color: some indistinct shade between gray and brown, clouds smearing the light. Students dispersed in every direction—buses, side roads, the long walk home.

The world felt bigger out here. Not kinder. Just bigger.

He stepped down onto the sidewalk and paused.

For a brief moment, he tried to imagine walking home like this was any other day. Earbuds in, playlist on, brain shifting into the predictable path of sidewalk → corner store → apartment → homework.

His brain didn't accept the simulation.

Taylor in the hall. Taylor not looking at anyone. Taylor's tremors. "She deserved it." She did not deserve it. Why won't anyone say that out loud but me?

He stuffed his hands into his hoodie pockets to keep from flapping them. He wanted to—the urge sat under his skin, familiar and insistent, fingers wanting to flick, wrists wanting to shake out the excess sensory input. Out here, people would see. It would mark him further.

He rolled his shoulders instead. A smaller-motion compromise. The backpack straps dug in.

A group of students spilled out behind him, shoving each other and laughing, voices rising in jagged arcs.

"Did you see her face?" "Locker girl? Yeah." "Should've stayed inside, less ugly that way."

Greg kept his back to them, eyes fixed on the sidewalk ahead.

He counted the cracks in the pavement. One, two, three, skip. One, two, three, skip.

His chest burned.

Part of him wanted very badly to turn around and say something. He didn't even know what words would come out—maybe something like you're cruel and you don't even know it, or she's a person, not a joke. But he knew how that played out. Speak up, get pegged as the problem. React too strongly, get the there he goes again look.

The odds weren't good.

He focused on the ground under his shoes instead: rough concrete, dust, tiny bits of gravel pressing through rubber.

Just get off school property. Things feel better away from the building.

Usually, that was true. Usually, once he crossed the street and left Winslow's gravitational pull, his shoulders would drop half an inch and his thoughts would detangle enough to file themselves.

Today, the weight came with him.

He could feel the building behind him like a hostile server farm humming with corrupted data, his mind pinging it constantly: something bad happened there, unresolved, unresolved, unresolved.

"Locker girl."

The phrase floated behind him again, accompanied by snickering.

He kept walking.

Concrete. Crack. Skip. Breathe.

He reached the edge of the school sidewalk where it met the public pavement—a faint change in texture and color, barely visible. His brain treated it like a border.

School. Not-school.

He stepped over it.

His shoulders loosened a millimeter.

Then someone's hand hit his backpack.

Hard.

The force yanked him backward half a step. The strap bit into his chest. His balance seesawed. He spun halfway around before stopping himself.

Three boys stood behind him on the sidewalk.

Not Winslow's worst—not the infamous ones who controlled hallways like territory. The opportunistic type. The kind who floated around, sniffed out weakness, and took cheap shots when there was an audience.

Right now, he was both.

"Hey, psycho," one of them said. "You have fun having your meltdown over the locker freak?"

The world sharpened around the edges.

The light seemed too bright, glancing off parked car windows in hard shivers of glare. The sound of nearby traffic became distinct, each engine noise standing out bell-like.

Greg stared at them.

His throat felt dry. He didn't answer immediately. His brain scrambled for social scripts: if confronted → de-escalate. Don't be weird. Don't overreact. Don't give them more reason.

His chest throbbed. Leo stirred—faint, questioning.

The boy who'd shoved his backpack stepped closer, smirking. "What, no rant? No 'you're all morally incorrect' speech? The guys said you went off about calling 911, like—dude, chill. It's just a prank."

Just a prank.

The words hit him like a slap.

Something in his chest tightened further, a coil being wound.

Behind the speaker, the other two snickered. One nudged the other like this was a show and he was glad he'd bought a ticket.

"Seriously," the second boy chimed in, "she's a freak. You defending her or something? Got a crush on locker girl?"

Heat flooded Greg's face. Not the good kind—not normal embarrassment—but a rush of hot frustration layered over shame and something that felt uncomfortably like protectiveness.

He opened his mouth. No words came out yet.

The boys interpreted the delay as an invitation.

"Look at his face," the third one laughed. "He's doing the thing. The stare thing. Dude, you're freaking everyone out. People were talking in class: 'Don't look at Veder too long, he'll hex you.'"

Veder. The sound of his last name in that tone made his skin crawl.

His brain tried to pick a script. Option A: laugh along, pretend it's no big deal. Option B: walk away, absorb the hit, keep moving. Option C: say something logical to people who weren't interested in logic.

His mind hovered over Option B.

Walk away. You always walk away. You don't make things worse.

But prank echoed again, colliding with Taylor's blank face.

Something in him snapped. Quietly. Inwardly. Like glass breaking inside soundproof walls.

His chest surged with heat—sudden, bright, sharp. Leo flared from a simmer to a low, thrumming burn under his sternum.

He inhaled.

The air felt different going in. Colder. More precise.

For the first time all day, the chaos in his thoughts didn't expand. It narrowed. Focused. On them. On the shove. On the laughter.

A line of thought crystallized: They think hurting her was funny. They are not safe.

Another followed, quieter: No one stopped them. No one stopped the last ones. No one will stop these either.

His body buzzed. Leo burned.

Something deep in him—some obscure subroutine—stirred.

The boys kept talking. Their words washed over him without hooking in the usual places. What felt close was the ground under his feet, his center of gravity, the weight of his backpack, the distance between his body and theirs.

Numbers. Angles. Vectors.

For the first time, he became acutely aware of exactly where his feet were placed.

And how they could be placed differently.

---

The Stance

Something inside Greg shifted.

Not emotionally. Not metaphorically.

Literally—down in the wiring of his nervous system, the same place where pain signals and reflex arcs lived. The place that reacted before conscious thought, before social scripts, before fear.

It felt like a file opening.

A file he had never created.

His breath tightened, then steadied. His posture straightened by degrees, like pieces of a mechanical frame locking into alignment. His feet adjusted on the pavement—half a step back with the right, slight turn of the left, weight distributed with a precision he had never learned in any gym class.

A stance.

A martial stance. Perfect.

The kind trained fighters dropped into without thinking. The kind Greg had seen in movies, on dojo posters, in Protectorate training clips.

Never in a mirror.

His body continued without him.

Knees bent slightly to absorb force. Spine aligned. Shoulders lowered but not hunched. His left hand drifted subtly forward—open, relaxed, an intercepting guard. His right hovered near his chest, fingers loose, ready.

The boys stopped laughing.

They noticed the shift immediately. Not because they understood martial arts. But because suddenly the weird kid wasn't shrinking back. Wasn't flinching. Wasn't de-escalating.

He looked ready.

And Greg's presence—normally awkward, twitchy, inward-focused—changed texture. It thickened. His gaze locked onto the nearest boy, pupils contracting, breathing slow and rhythmic, his whole body radiating a focused attention that made the air feel heavier.

To Greg, it felt correct.

Not triumphant. Not adrenaline. More like solving an equation that had been sitting half-finished for years. A puzzle piece clicking into place. A pattern fully revealed.

This is the optimal configuration for threat management. This is what you do when danger is imminent.

But he didn't know this. He couldn't name the stance, couldn't recall practicing it, couldn't explain it.

He just knew where to place his body.

The heat in his chest flared—not punishing, not angry, but illuminating. Like Leo was spotlighting this new state. Approving.

The nearest boy took half a step back.

"What the hell are you doing?" His voice unsteady.

Greg didn't answer. His vocal cords felt locked behind the same focus controlling his posture. His thoughts had stopped racing—they were collapsing into a single silent line:

If they move, intercept. If they strike, redirect. Maintain center. Maintain ground.

Where was he getting this? How was he doing this?

He didn't know. But something in his body did.

The second boy noticed the foot placement. "Dude," he murmured, "he's, like… doing something."

The third tried for a laugh and failed. "Stop— stop standing like that, man."

Greg didn't move. Not a twitch. Not a blink.

His stillness was the worst part. Most people moved when stressed—shifted weight, twitched fingers, looked away, blinked too fast. Greg was perfectly motionless except for the tiny expansions of his chest with each measured breath. Deliberate without being forced.

Predatory.

But he didn't feel predatory. He felt aligned. Centered. The world had snapped into clean organization: threats, angles, movement options, escape routes. All of it laid out in a grid.

And the injustice—the shove, the mockery, the way Taylor's name had been used like a punchline—made the heat in his chest flare brighter.

Not outward. Inward. A molten focus.

The first boy swallowed audibly. "Okay, seriously. Stop that." He took another cautious step back, hands lifting slightly—not surrender, just uncertainty.

"Is he—" the second boy whispered, "is he a cape?"

The third snorted. "Man, look at him. Clearly something's wrong with him." A pause. "But… maybe?"

Greg's eyes flicked to him.

Only that. A single shift of gaze.

The boy stumbled back as if struck, bumping into his friend. "What the fuck. His eyes—"

Greg didn't know what they meant. He felt nothing odd behind his eyes. But his focus was absolute. Deep. Penetrating in a way that stripped their performative cruelty down to its actual components:

The tremor in the first boy's left hand. The weight shift on the third boy's right foot. The micro-expression of fear hiding under surface bravado. The way the air moved around them, carrying their exhalations.

His brain parsed it all without instruction. Catalogued it. Measured it. Filed it.

For once, the data wasn't overwhelming—it was clarifying.

"He's going to do something," one of them whispered. "I'm telling you."

"I didn't even shove him that hard—" the first boy began.

Greg's head tilted.

Not to intimidate. Not to posture. The motion simply followed a line of thought: What is your next move? Why did you shove me? Will you do it again?

The first boy froze mid-sentence, closed his mouth, and held his hands slightly higher.

Not apologizing. Just scared. And angry about being scared.

Greg's body leaned forward.

Barely. An inch. A weight shift.

All three boys flinched.

The second stepped back so fast he nearly tripped. "Nope. No, no, no. Fuck this. I'm not getting punched by a cape today."

"He's not a cape," the third hissed. Then louder: "He's just a freak!"

The word slid through Greg like a razor.

A memory surfaced: the metal taste of shame when a teacher asked, in front of everyone, why are you like this? The sting of laughter when someone mimicked his hand-flapping. The time a group of boys asked if he could "turn off the weird" like a light switch.

This wasn't new. But today it landed differently.

Today his stance held. Solid.

The third boy saw that and panicked. "See?! He thinks he's some kind of ninja! I swear if you hit me, I'll—"

Greg spoke.

Quietly. Flatly.

"I'm not going to hit you."

His voice startled even him. Not shaky. Not defensive.

Calm. Like his stance. Like certainty.

The boys didn't believe him—because something else rode beneath the words that they misread as power. Not a visible flare or energy surge. Just presence. Intensity. Conviction. Something that made them second-guess their safety.

"He's definitely a cape," the first boy muttered. "He's gotta be."

"I'm not," Greg said automatically—said it because it was true, or at least he thought it was true, or at least he needed it to be true.

Leo's heat pulsed at that.

Soft. Not approval. Not disapproval.

Observation.

The boys glanced at each other, communicating the universal teen-boy language of retreat while pretending it's voluntary.

The second took a full step back. The third followed.

"Let's just go," one muttered.

"Yeah," another said, voice cracking. "Whatever, man. We're done."

The first boy forced a last jab as they backed away.

"Freak." Softer this time. Not triumphant.

Afraid.

They retreated down the sidewalk without turning their backs, the way people sometimes walked away from stray dogs they weren't sure would bite. When they reached the far end of the block, they broke formation and hurried off, trying to look casual and failing.

Greg stayed where he was.

He didn't drop the stance.

Not yet.

His body trembled once—leg muscles twitching under the strain of holding a coordinated position he'd never trained for.

He inhaled. Exhaled.

Slowly, like someone emerging from deep water, he felt control return.

The stance dissolved. His shoulders sagged. His knees wobbled. His arms fell limp.

Shock hit a second later—cold and hot simultaneously, like stepping from flame into ice.

He looked at his own hands.

They were shaking.

His whole body was shaking.

"What… what was that?" he whispered.

Just his pulse hammering in his ears. Just the burned-in outline of the stance echoing in muscle memory he didn't know he possessed.

"Oh God," he murmured. "I scared them."

A wave of nausea rolled through him.

I scared them. They were afraid of me. They thought I was a cape.

Fear twisted into guilt. Immediate. Total. Reflexive.

I messed up. I overreacted. I scared people.

His hands dug into the edges of his hoodie sleeves, gripping the fabric like a lifeline. He thought of Taylor.

Would she think he was dangerous too? Would she look at him the way they had—a freak, a threat, something to avoid?

His stomach lurched.

"No," he whispered, shaking his head. "I didn't mean— I didn't…"

But Leo pulsed warmly in his chest. A single strong beat.

Approval.

That made it worse.

Or better.

He didn't know.

---

The Spiral, the Fear, and the Walk Home

For a long moment after the boys disappeared down the block, Greg couldn't move.

He stood rooted to the pavement as if his muscles had been replaced with cooling metal. The afternoon air sliced across the sweat along his hairline. The trembling in his hands spread up through his arms, into his shoulders, down into his legs until even his calves quivered.

The perfect stance was gone. But the echo of it clung like static.

Too real. Too sharp. Too purposeful.

He lifted a hand and stared at it. Faint indentations marked his palm from how tightly he'd curled it during the activation—he hadn't even noticed.

His breath came in ragged, uneven pulls. He tried to steady it, but the attempt only made him more aware of how off-rhythm he was.

"No," he whispered. "No, no, no."

He didn't know if he was telling his body to stop shaking or telling the memory of the boys' fear to stop crawling under his skin.

They were afraid of me.

That thought landed like a punch.

He squeezed his eyes shut, jaw tightening until it hurt.

He hadn't wanted to scare them. Hadn't wanted to threaten them. Hadn't even wanted to react. He just wanted the day to stop being awful. Wanted the injustice to stop piling on. Wanted someone—anyone—to treat what happened to Taylor like more than a stupid prank.

But instead he'd stood there like a weapon.

A weapon pointed at three boys who were vultures, not wolves. Opportunists. And he'd reacted as if they were existential threats.

"I messed up," he whispered shakily. "Why did I do that?"

His chest throbbed—Leo's heat pulsing steady, present.

Not condemning.

That somehow made everything worse.

"I didn't want to scare them," Greg whispered, voice cracking. "I don't want people to think I'm dangerous."

The heat shifted—softened slightly. Not a correction. Not a disagreement.

A reassurance he didn't know how to accept.

He backed away from the sidewalk until his back hit the low brick wall along the school's perimeter. The impact made him gasp. He pressed both palms into the rough surface, letting the texture dig into his skin.

Pain helped. Pain made things clearer. Pain was simple.

Slowly, his breathing started to stabilize. In. Two-three. Out. Two-three-four.

His eyes opened.

The world looked too bright. Edges too sharp. Colors too saturated.

The stance had done something to his perception. Or the adrenaline had. Or Leo had. Maybe all three.

He pushed away from the wall on unsteady legs and started walking. If he stood still, he'd break. If he walked, maybe the shaking would stop. Maybe his thoughts would reorder.

A car drove by and leaned on its horn.

Greg flinched violently.

Too loud. Too sudden. Too much.

He took a long shaky breath and forced himself toward the crosswalk.

His legs felt wrong—not numb, not heavy. Wrong. Like they remembered the stance and were now confused by ordinary walking. His balance felt off by half a centimeter. His awareness too wide.

He kept glancing around, unavoidably mapping everything:

Three kids ahead on bikes → not a threat. Dog walker on the left → neutral posture. Two adults at the bus stop → disinterested. Car at the curb → no movement inside. Wind pattern → shifting toward the bay.

His brain wouldn't stop.

He'd never been this aware of everything before. Not with this kind of clarity. It felt like leftover whatever-the-stance-was, a martial awareness lingering past its purpose.

Or maybe it wasn't leftover.

Maybe it was the start.

The thought made his stomach twist.

"Okay," he whispered. "Just walk home. Get home. Then think."

He reached the curb, waited for two cars to pass, then crossed.

The farther he got from Winslow, the more the tension in his shoulders eased—not vanished, just lowered from a roar to a hum, volume reduced but not muted.

Blocks passed. The corner store with the flickering beer sign. The row of townhouses with peeling paint. The fence with rust spots that always caught sunlight weirdly. Routine places. Routine landmarks.

Normally, these grounded him. Helped him measure distance the way other people used internal emotional maps.

Today, none of them landed.

His brain kept replaying in disjointed fragments:

Taylor's empty stare. The boys backing away. His stance. Their fear. His calm.

His calm. His calm. Where had that calm come from?

He stopped walking and pressed a fist against the center of his chest.

Leo pulsed beneath his sternum. Not aggressive. Not demanding. Just steady. Reassuring.

That scared him more than anything.

"No," he whispered. "Stop that. I didn't mean for you to—"

His throat tightened.

He didn't want Leo to feed off that moment. Didn't want Leo to like that moment. He didn't even know if Leo could like anything.

But the approval had been unmistakable.

Heat radiated outward, filling his torso like a warm tide. Not burning. Not scalding. Just present. Like a hand on his shoulder. Like a nod of recognition.

Like yes.

Greg squeezed his eyes shut.

"That wasn't good," he said aloud, because he needed to hear the words in the air. "I scared people. I don't want to scare people."

Leo's pulse didn't change.

"I'm not supposed to be like that," he whispered. "People already think I'm weird. If they think I'm dangerous—"

His breath hitched.

"I'll lose everything."

Not that he had much. But being labeled dangerous was worse than being labeled odd. Dangerous meant scrutiny. Dangerous meant isolation. Dangerous meant they had a reason to push him harder.

He resumed walking, pace faster now. Not running—running drew attention. Just brisk. Purposeful.

Another intersection. He waited for traffic, then crossed.

The sky had darkened slightly. Clouds rolled in from the bay. Wind combed through his hair, cool against overheated skin. A grounding contrast.

Thoughts spilled in tangled loops as he walked:

I didn't hit them. I didn't touch them. I didn't threaten them. I just… stood there. In a way that made them back off. In a way that didn't feel like me. In a way that felt exactly like me.

His breath shuddered.

He didn't know which part scared him more: that he'd acted like someone he didn't recognize, or that the someone he didn't recognize had fit him too well.

A sudden, intrusive thought jabbed at him: What if Taylor saw that? Would she flinch too? Would she think he was just another threat?

His stomach dropped.

He swallowed hard.

"She wouldn't— she's not like them," he said quickly, almost pleading.

But another thought countered: She doesn't know you. To her, you're just another person in the hallway. Maybe another danger.

His steps faltered.

He grabbed his backpack strap to steady himself.

He hated the thought of scaring her. Of adding to her fear. Of being one more unpredictable element in her already broken world.

The guilt spread through him like cold water.

He forced himself to breathe.

He reached the block before his own, where the sidewalk cracked in a spiderweb pattern from a tree root lifting the concrete. He stepped over it automatically. Routine. Habit.

Two little kids raced down the sidewalk on scooters. A mother called after them, voice carrying warm concern. Normal life, people living normal life while his insides felt like everything had been rewired.

He slowed.

His apartment building came into view—squat, aging, grimy windows, a stairwell that always smelled faintly of mildew.

Home. Or something like it.

He stopped in front of it.

The trembling had eased, replaced by bone-deep exhaustion.

He pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose.

"Please don't make this a thing," he whispered. "Please just let today end."

Leo pulsed one more time.

Quiet. Warm. Certain.

Greg didn't know if that was agreement or inevitability. He reached for the door handle, turned it, stepped inside.

The weight of the day followed him in like a shadow he couldn't shake.

---

Home Fallout: Masking, Overload, and Leo

The stairwell smelled like damp concrete and someone else's cooking—fried onions, oil, spice hanging in the air from a different apartment on a different floor. Today, the smell hit Greg's nose like a physical object.

He paused at the bottom of the stairs and shut his eyes.

The echo of the sidewalk still clung to him. The stance. The boys' faces. The way they'd backed away. The way his chest had burned with that strange, steady approval.

He shook his head slightly, as if he could dislodge the memory.

It didn't work.

He trudged up the stairs, one hand skimming the rail. The chipped paint left a faint gritty residue under his fingers. His body felt heavier with each step, like someone had added weight to his joints and pushed the slider up.

Second floor. Turn. Third floor.

He reached the landing, key in hand, and stopped.

Mask on.

He didn't literally think the words. The sensation was just familiar—like pulling something tight over his face, smoothing out expression, tucking away anything too sharp or raw.

He turned the key and opened the door.

The apartment's air hit him: warmer, a little stale, carrying detergent and old carpet and the faint tang of the city.

"Hey," his stepfather called from the living room without looking away from the TV. "You're late."

A sitcom laugh track floated into the hallway. Someone on-screen said something obvious. Audience roared.

Greg winced inwardly at the canned laughter.

"Sorry," he said, keeping his voice level. "Walk was slow."

"Mm." A noncommittal response. "Homework done?"

"It will be." Truth-adjacent enough that Leo didn't flare, vague enough to satisfy surface-level checking.

He kicked off his shoes by the door and lined them up precisely: heels aligned, toes angled the same way. The tiny act of order soothed a corner of his mind.

His backpack felt like an anchor. He shrugged it off carefully, wincing when the strap scraped his neck. He caught it before it hit the floor, as if dropping it would be a moral failure on top of everything else.

"Don't hole up all night," his stepdad added. "You hear me?"

"Yeah," Greg said without turning. "I hear you."

The door clicked shut behind him.

He exhaled, long and shaky.

The room was small—bed, desk, secondhand dresser, a narrow strip of floor. The window looked out over the neighboring building's brick wall and fire escapes, with a sliver of sky if he tilted his head just right.

He dropped his backpack by the desk. This time he let it fall, the thud muffled by the thin carpet.

His hands went to his hair, fingers digging into his scalp and scratching lightly. He paced. One step from bed to wall. Turn. One step back. The movement felt necessary—vital. Like his body couldn't contain the buzzing energy without motion.

He counted the passes. One. Two. Three. Four.

He pressed his fingers into the seam where wall met window frame. The paint was rough there. He rubbed thumb and forefinger back and forth, the repetitive texture scratching grounding lines into his focus.

He stopped only when his reflection in the darkened window caught his eye.

He looked off. Pale. Eyes too bright. Shoulders held a fraction too high, like they couldn't decide whether to drop.

He walked closer to the glass. The cloudy surface reflected a ghostly version of his room—bedspread slightly rumpled, stack of books leaning precariously, a half-finished sketch pinned to the wall.

His own reflection stared back.

"You looked like a cape," he muttered.

The words tasted wrong in his mouth.

He didn't have a costume. Didn't have a name. Didn't have a manifesto. He had a hoodie, a notebook, a too-bright brain, and a star burning under his sternum.

He closed his eyes and replayed the stance in his mind.

Feet angled. Weight settled. Hands positioned.

His body still remembered.

Without really deciding to, he stepped away from the window toward the middle of the room. He stood still. Then—slowly, haltingly—he tried to place his feet the way they had been on the sidewalk.

Right foot back a bit. Left forward, slightly turned. Knees loose. Hips aligned. Back straight.

He raised his left hand. Open. Slightly forward. Right hand closer to his chest.

His breath shortened.

His heart rate picked up immediately. His skin prickled with unease.

The position felt too right. Too familiar for something he'd never practiced. His body relaxed into it like he'd done it a thousand times.

He hadn't. He knew he hadn't. No dojo. No lessons. No training.

Yet everything lined up with absurd precision.

Shift weight 3% more to the back foot. Widen stance by two inches. Lower center of gravity.

He shuddered.

"This is not normal," he whispered.

Leo warmed in his chest. Not surging. Not spiking. Glowing. Appreciative. Like the stance was a prayer and Leo was the god receiving it.

"Stop that," Greg said, voice shaking. "It's not good."

He dropped the stance suddenly, as if his own posture had burned him.

His knees nearly buckled. He caught himself against the edge of the bed, fingers gripping the comforter.

He sat down hard. The mattress springs squeaked—familiar, home-like.

His heart still raced.

He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes until points of light bloomed in the darkness.

The images were all still there: locker, bent door, Taylor's numb face, her trembling hands, his own stance on the sidewalk, the boys backing away.

"Why today?" he muttered. "Why all at once?"

He didn't expect an answer. He got something anyway—a sensation, not words, not quite emotion. A deep slow acknowledgement from Leo. Like a heavy, warm hand resting over his sternum.

He knew Leo's different states by now. The low hum when it was just present. The sharp sting when he lied to himself or masked too hard. The bright flare when emotions spiked past certain thresholds.

Today had shown him something new.

Leo liked it when he stood his ground.

The realization made his throat close up.

He thought back to the hallway—the way the heat had reacted when he heard about Taylor, when he saw her, when he watched people laugh at her pain. He thought back to the sidewalk, to the surge when the boys mocked her and shoved him.

Leo wasn't impartial.

It had opinions.

He wasn't sure he liked what those opinions might be.

He slid sideways until he was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. A faint crack traced the plaster in a diagonal line, like a fault in an old map. He followed it with his eyes.

His breathing had slowed, but the tightness in his chest hadn't gone.

He whispered, barely hearing himself:

"I scared them."

He expected the guilt to spiral outward the way it usually did: you overreacted, you're too much, you're the problem. Those thoughts came. They always did.

But something else threaded through them this time, quieter:

They shoved you. They mocked a traumatized girl. You didn't hit them. You didn't hurt them. You just showed them you weren't safe to push.

He turned his head slightly, frowning at nothing.

That sounded too forgiving. He wasn't used to being forgiven. Not by others. Not by himself.

"Is that you?" he asked the ceiling. "Or me?"

Leo pulsed once in his chest. Not an answer. A presence.

He placed his hand flat over his sternum.

Warmth bled through skin and bone to meet his palm.

"Are you… happy?" he asked, the word feeling ridiculous. "That I did that?"

The warmth didn't spike. It didn't flare in cruelty or hunger. It just stayed.

Steady. Like a quiet yes.

He swallowed.

"I don't know if that makes this better or worse," he muttered.

He rolled onto his side, pulling his knees up slightly. His fingers twisted in the edge of his blanket, rubbing the fabric between thumb and forefinger. Sensory focus. Grounding.

His mind, because it hated silence, began building simulations.

What if the boys told people? What if tomorrow the phrase locker girl got replaced with freak who thinks he's a cape? What if teachers started watching him? What if someone reported him to the school counselor as unstable?

He imagined Taylor hearing about it. Sitting in some classroom, staring at her desk, hearing Greg's name mixed into the whispers. "Did you hear? That weird kid freaked out on some guys." "Maybe they should put him in a locker too."

His stomach twisted.

He didn't want to be part of her nightmare. He wanted—illogically, selfishly—to be the one person in Winslow who wasn't another source of fear for her.

"You're ridiculous," he told himself. "She doesn't even know who you are."

True. Which somehow hurt more.

A traitorous thought whispered in a corner of his mind:

What if she'd felt safer if someone like you had stood like that for her? Between her and them—not at them, but for her.

His chest ached.

He didn't know if it was his own emotion or Leo's or both tangled together. He let the thought sit there. Didn't chase it away. Didn't fully accept it either.

It just existed. Like a possibility.

His stepdad's voice drifted faintly through the wall. The TV laughed again. A commercial jingle played—too bright, too cheerful, tonally incompatible with everything in his head.

He stared at the wall.

Eventually, his breathing leveled out. The buzzing in his nerves dropped from a roar to a faint tremor.

But the memory of the stance didn't leave. Nor did the awareness that, for the first time, when someone shoved him and mocked his existence, a part of him hadn't wanted to shrink away.

A part of him had wanted to stand firm.

And his power had agreed.

That scared him.

And in a way he wasn't ready to admit—

It comforted him.

---

Quiet Reflection, Vow, and Leo's Ambiguous Pulse

For a long time, Greg lay still.

Stillness wasn't restful. Not for him. It was a suspended state where his mind didn't quiet but didn't move forward either—frozen between frames of motion, thoughts hovering in slow orbits around the same gravitational center.

Taylor. The stance. The boys' flinch. His calm.

He rolled onto his back, staring at the ceiling crack branching like lightning caught mid-flash.

"You can't do that again," he whispered.

Saying it aloud made it feel more real. More anchored. A rule he was imposing on himself.

I won't scare people again. I won't let Leo pull me into that state again.

But the rule felt flimsy. A wish, not a certainty.

He pressed both hands to his face and dragged them slowly down over tired skin.

He didn't know where the stance had come from. Didn't know how his body had made decisions he'd never taught it. Didn't know how he'd balanced so precisely, or why threats had fallen into geometric clarity, or why he'd been able to predict tiny shifts in movement without thinking.

It had felt natural. Instinctive. Correct.

That scared him more than if it had felt alien.

He turned his head to look at his desk. The notebook sat on the edge, a corner of a page poking out like a beckoning finger. He knew what it wanted: documentation, analysis, control.

Writing helped him detangle things. Made them concrete, manageable, real in a way that gave him something to hold.

But the idea of opening it right now, of seeing his own handwriting staring back like a second conscience—

He lay still instead.

The room hummed softly—refrigerator cycling in the kitchen, the faint electric buzz of the hallway light through his closed door, muffled footsteps from the apartment above.

Under it all, beneath skin and muscle and bone, Leo thrummed. A warm, pulsing presence. Not loud, not forceful. Just there.

Almost comforting. Almost intrusive.

A paradox in his chest.

Greg exhaled shakily.

"This isn't normal," he murmured. "I'm not… normal."

He rarely spoke the word aloud. People wielded it like a weapon, a line dividing acceptable from unacceptable. He didn't like the word. But right now it floated in his mind not as an insult—as a question.

What am I becoming?

He thought back to the sidewalk. The air feeling different, denser, because he had changed. When threat patterns had aligned into a perfect equation. When his breathing had shifted into a rhythm that felt older than anything he knew.

He imagined watching himself from the outside.

A boy who never fought suddenly standing like a trained martial artist. A boy who flinched at sharp noises suddenly focusing like a predator. A boy who hated conflict radiating a quiet warning powerful enough to unsettle three people at once.

If he saw that from the outside—

He'd think it was a cape too.

His chest tightened.

"Taylor would think I'm a cape," he whispered.

The words hung heavy in the air.

He pictured her standing at the end of the hallway, pale and trembling in that oversized shirt. He pictured her watching him stand like that. He pictured her flinching, stepping back.

He closed his eyes.

"I don't want her to be afraid of me."

That truth hurt more than anything else today.

He didn't know her. Had no right to want anything from her. He wasn't entitled to her attention or trust or even basic recognition.

But seeing someone like her—someone quiet, someone overlooked, someone who'd broken under pressure the way he knew he might—had hit something deep.

Not attraction. Not yet.

Recognition. A mirror held at a slant.

She is the kind of person the world steps on. You are the kind of person the world misunderstands. You could break the same way. You almost have.

He swallowed thickly.

"I won't let them hurt her again," he whispered before he could stop himself.

The words slipped out, soft but solid.

He blinked, startled by his own voice.

He hadn't meant to say it out loud. Not like that.

He turned onto his side again, curling in on himself—a position that felt safer, smaller. Where had that come from? He didn't make vows. He barely made decisions.

But the words had felt inevitable. Like a line his emotions had already crossed and his voice had simply caught up.

He placed his hand over his sternum.

Leo pulsed.

A slow, warm thrum. Deep. Approving.

"No," Greg said immediately. "Don't—don't take that like an invitation. I didn't mean—"

But he had meant it.

And Leo, whatever Leo truly was, knew.

The warmth deepened—not aggressive, not hungry, not pushing him back into the stance. This was different.

I hear your vow. I acknowledge it. I stand with it.

Greg's breath hitched.

He squeezed his eyes shut hard enough that tiny sparks bloomed in the dark.

He didn't want this. Didn't want a power that encouraged him to be dangerous. Didn't want something in his chest rising up when he stood in defense of someone else. Didn't want to feel good—God, he hated that word—good about scaring people.

He wasn't supposed to be good at that.

He flinched internally at his own hypocrisy.

He hated injustice. He always had. But he'd never had the power to do anything about it before.

What if Leo wanted him to? What if this was what Leo was for?

He pulled his pillow over the side of his face as if it could muffle the thoughts.

"I'm not a hero," he whispered into the fabric. "I don't even know how to be one."

The warmth shifted—softened.

Not a correction. Not a disagreement.

A reassurance.

He didn't know how he knew that. He just did.

He rolled onto his back again, exhausted, staring at the ceiling crack with hollow eyes. His limbs felt heavy. His brain buzzed under static. His chest felt like a sun trying not to flare.

He pressed his palm to his sternum.

"I don't want to scare her," he murmured. "Or anyone. I just want things to be fair. I want people to stop hurting others because they can."

His hand trembled slightly on his chest.

"I don't want to be dangerous," he said. "I just want things to make sense."

Leo pulsed.

A slow, steady warmth. Like an answer without words:

You will find your way.

Greg stared at the ceiling crack branching like a fault line.

He didn't feel calmer. Not really. But he felt aligned—not soothed, not settled, but steadied. Like he'd taken the first step onto a path he couldn't fully see yet.

He let his eyes close.

His last conscious thought before drifting into restless half-sleep:

I won't let them hurt her again.

And Leo pulsed once—deep, resonant—like a vow being stamped into bone.

 

[dazzle_dork]

Relax, I was kidding," she cut in. "It was a joke, Greg."

Click to shrink...

Lady, what kind of teacher joke about quiz? Hes not weird you're the fking crazy one

 

[Durolord]

Before the Door

Greg woke to the feeling of being watched from inside his own chest.

Not a bad feeling, exactly. Not the sharp electric dread that came when someone shouted his name down a hallway. It was heavy, slow, aware—a presence coiled just under his sternum, warm as a curled animal pressed against bone.

Leo. Not roaring. Just awake.

He stared at the ceiling for a long time before moving. The hairline crack in the plaster ran diagonally between two corners, and he found it with his eyes the way he always did—tracing it once, twice, three times. His brain catalogued how many times he'd traced it before getting up. Today the number stuck on three, the way it did when he knew the day mattered.

He rolled onto his side.

The letter on his dresser came into view. Plain envelope. PRT stamp. His name in printed letters that didn't quite look real, as if some other Gregory Veder might show up in his place and handle this better.

He'd read it enough times that the words painted themselves without needing the paper.

Please report to the Brockton Bay PRT building for a conversation regarding the recent incident.

A conversation.

Not a trial. Not an arrest. Not an offer. Just a conversation—which was worse, because conversations had rules you couldn't see. Laws you could learn. Social expectations you had to feel.

Greg pushed himself upright. The motion made Leo shift too, a slow stretch of weight against his ribs. It had been like this since the incident—like someone else had moved in, but only into the space where his feelings lived.

"I know," he muttered, rubbing at his sternum with the heel of his palm. "I don't like it either."

He showered. The water was slightly too cold—the pipes in their apartment took ages to warm up. He didn't mind the chill as much as the unpredictability: a burst of warmth, a slide back to lukewarm, a sudden shock of cold. If it could have just chosen one temperature and committed, he'd have been fine.

He dressed methodically: jeans, T-shirt, hoodie. The black one with the least pilling and the zipper that didn't catch at the collar. He zipped it up, unzipped it halfway, zipped it again to test the smoothness.

Good. Reliable.

He checked the cuffs. Even. The hem. Straight.

His fingers trembled once, briefly. He jammed them into his pocket until they stopped.

His mom insisted on coming with him as far as the building. She hid her worry in logistics—how they'd get there, what time the bus left, whether he'd eaten. Her voice came out too bright, questions stacked on top of each other without waiting for answers.

He answered anyway. "Yes, I ate." "Yes, I have the letter." "Yes, I'll text you when I'm done."

He didn't tell her his stomach felt like a nest of live wires. Didn't mention the metallic taste at the back of his tongue, or that every time he thought about the PRT building his palms went damp.

He didn't tell her about Leo at all.

The bus ride was a blur of overlapping textures—old gum on the underside of the seat, diesel and cold air each time the doors hissed open, fabric scratching the back of his legs through denim, conversations stacking over each other in too many threads. His brain wanted to follow all of them. He had to consciously tell himself to latch onto none.

He counted the stops instead. Familiar landmarks rolled past: the bakery with the crooked sign, the empty lot with the broken fence, the wall with the faded graffiti that used to be a face but looked more like static now.

Leo was quiet, but not gone. Just watching.

The PRT building rose out of Brockton Bay like something from a different city entirely—glass and steel, clean lines and deliberate symmetry. The closer the bus came, the more Greg's world narrowed: building, reflection, sky. People blurred into obstacles. Noise flattened into a distant hum.

He got off with his mom. For a second they both just stood there on the sidewalk, facing the building like it might blink.

"Do you want me to come in?" she asked.

He hated that question. The honest answer was yes. The strategic answer was no. He didn't know which one was more important.

"No," he said, words catching a little. "They probably want to talk to just me."

Her face went through three expressions in about a second—relief, guilt, worry—and settled on a nod. She put a hand on his arm, squeezing once. Too brief to be really comforting, long enough to be something.

"Text me when you're done," she said. "Right away."

"I will."

He meant it. He also knew there was a non-zero chance he'd forget the second something intense happened.

He turned away before she could say anything else, before he could change his mind, and walked toward the doors.

They slid open with a soft hiss.

The air inside was colder, controlled. It smelled faintly of cleaning products and recycled air. The floor gleamed. White and yellow lines near the security area directed people where to queue. He liked the lines. They made sense.

The security guard at the front was broad-shouldered, uniform pressed so sharply it looked like it might cut. His gaze did a quick sweep—habitual, not hostile.

"Appointment?"

"Uh. Yeah." Greg fumbled the letter out of his pocket, nearly dropping it before getting his grip right. "They—this. They sent me this. I'm Greg. Gregory. Veder."

The guard took the letter, eyes flicking across the text, then back to Greg's face. Something in his jaw loosened, like he'd been expecting worse.

"Alright, Mr. Veder. Bag on the conveyor. Stand on the footprints. Arms out."

Greg obeyed. He stepped onto the outlined footprints—placed his sneakers exactly within the edges, toe to line, heel to curve. Arms out.

The handheld scanner swept from one shoulder, across his chest, down the other arm. The faint vibration made his skin twitch, sensation smearing across his nerves like static.

"Relax," the guard said, not unkindly.

Greg hadn't realized he'd been holding his breath until he forced himself to let it go.

He passed. The guard handed the letter back and nodded toward the interior.

"You can wait inside. They'll come get you."

"Okay. Thanks."

He clutched the letter too tightly as he walked into the main lobby. Chairs lined one wall and clustered around a low table with outdated magazines and PRT pamphlets. A flat-screen TV played muted news in the corner, live captions chasing the anchor's mouth with a half-second delay.

The lights overhead were fluorescent and slightly off—one panel flickering just enough that his eyes kept drifting toward it without his consent. Every time it wavered, his stomach clenched.

He chose a chair near the wall so no one could sit behind him. The plastic seat had a rough texture that clung to his hoodie when he shifted, every movement transmitting through fabric to skin. He tried to sit still.

The clock on the wall said 10:07 AM. The second hand ticked in sharp increments instead of gliding.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Each one carved a line down his spine.

Greg tried to regulate his breathing—in for four, hold for four, out for six—but the air didn't cooperate. It tasted flattened, over-filtered. Hospital air. The kind that existed in every place where something important might happen and you weren't the one making the decisions.

Leo stirred, restless.

Not danger, Greg told him, because sometimes it helped to treat the presence like a listener. Just people. Just questions.

The problem was that people and questions could be their own kind of danger.

The receptionist typed steadily at a nearby desk, nails clicking on plastic keys in an uneven pattern—long bursts, pause, single tap, pause, three taps. His brain wanted to decode it as morse code or rhythm. He forced himself to look away, then realized looking away made it worse. He looked back at the muted TV, where the anchor's mouth synced imperfectly with the captions, and that mismatch made his jaw clench.

His gaze snagged on a Wards poster across the room—clean, dynamic poses, all smiles and power signatures. A small figure in the back, half-hidden behind the more prominent ones.

He wondered, irrationally, if that kid had ever sat in a room like this, feeling like a bug pinned to a display board.

"Gregory Veder?"

He jolted. The chair squeaked under him.

A woman in PRT black and white stood at the hallway entrance, tablet in hand. Her tone was professional but not cold. Her gaze skimmed his face, then dropped briefly to how tightly his fingers had twisted around the letter.

"That's me," he said, too loud. He flinched at the echo, then tried to correct: "Greg. I mean—Greg is fine."

She gave a small nod, neither reassuring nor judgmental. "Come with me, please."

He stood and almost walked before realizing he'd forgotten his bag. He backtracked, grabbed it—the strap nearly slipping from his sweaty fingers—and hurried to catch up. He ended up walking too close, had to consciously slow down to avoid stepping on the back of her shoes. When he corrected, he overdid it and drifted too far behind.

Social distance. Still a minigame. Still impossible.

The hallway was quieter than the lobby, carpet softening their footsteps. The walls were lined with framed photos—heroes, team shots, newspaper clippings. Greg's eyes flickered over them in rapid bursts, taking in nothing and everything.

They stopped at a door marked INTERVIEW 3.

The escort opened it, gestured him inside. "Wait here. They'll be with you shortly."

He stepped in.

Small. Rectangular. Two chairs on one side of a metal table, one on the other. The kind of setup that told you everything about who was being evaluated and who was doing the evaluating.

He chose the single chair without being told. Sat. Adjusted. Sat again. The seat was harder than the ones outside, edges biting slightly into his thighs. The table was cool under his fingertips when he placed his hands on it, then he pulled them back, unsure if they were supposed to see him fidget.

The silence was heavy. The air felt thicker, conditioned in a way that removed smell almost entirely. No anchor. Nothing to latch onto.

Leo pressed closer, nearest to the center of his chest now, as if trying to see through his ribs.

"I know," Greg whispered. His lips barely moved. "I don't like it either."

The door opened with a soft, controlled sound.

Miss Militia entered first. He recognized her immediately—the flag scarf, the calm posture, the sense of self-contained readiness. Her steps were measured, not loud enough to jolt, not soft enough to surprise. She took in the room in a sweep, eyes passing over him, pausing, cataloguing. It didn't feel like judgment. It felt like assessment with the possibility of empathy.

Armsmaster came in behind her, taller, bulkier in his armor, halberd absent but implied by the sheer weight of his presence. Where Miss Militia moved like someone who'd chosen every motion deliberately, Armsmaster moved like a machine whose joints had been calibrated for efficient precision.

"Gregory Veder," Miss Militia said, voice level. "Thank you for coming in."

"Greg," he corrected automatically, then winced. "I mean. Yes. Hi. Um. Thanks. For having me?"

The words tangled halfway out. He wanted to rewind.

Miss Militia's eyes softened just enough to notice, if you were watching closely. "Greg, then. May we sit?"

He nodded quickly. "Yeah. Sure. It's your—room. Not that you need my permission. Obviously. I just—yes. Sit. Please."

He wanted to claw his face off.

They sat across from him. Miss Militia set a small stack of folders in front of her. Armsmaster placed a slim device near his hand; its surface lit with faint scrolling text he couldn't read from this angle.

"There will be an audio recording," Armsmaster said, voice filtered slightly through his helmet. "For accuracy and documentation."

"Okay," Greg said. "Do I—do I have to sign something for consent, or is it implied because I'm already here?"

"You signed the preliminary consent at the front desk," Miss Militia said. "This is standard procedure."

"Right. Standard. That's good. Standard is good."

Leo shifted—curious, maybe. Greg wasn't sure if he was imagining that, but it helped to pretend it meant something.

Miss Militia folded her hands, fingers loosely laced. "We'd like you to describe the incident from your perspective. Take your time. Start wherever makes sense to you."

He swallowed. His throat felt too small.

"Okay," he said. "Um. So it started—it didn't start at the locker. I mean, that's when I did something. But it started earlier. Like earlier in the day. Maybe earlier in the week. Or month. Or… anyway. It started with noise."

He could feel himself sliding into too many words. He could also feel the impossibility of finding fewer.

And as he began to speak—about the hallways, the laughter, the weight of every stare that wasn't a stare but felt like one anyway—Leo listened with him, each memory stirring the presence inside his chest, coiling tighter, brighter, as if every word was another hand on the latch of a cage.

---

The Interview, the Spiral, and the First Flare

Greg's voice came out uneven at first—halting, searching—but once he started, something in his brain clicked into motion and refused to stop.

"It wasn't a single moment. People think I snapped. Like I went from zero to meltdown in a straight line. But it wasn't like that. It was layers."

Miss Militia nodded once, inviting him to continue.

Armsmaster's visor didn't move. But Greg felt watched in a way that made every word feel like it was stepping onto a pressure plate.

"Earlier in the day, everything felt sharp. Louder. Brighter. Not literally brighter—but kind of literally? The lights at school flicker and I see them even when no one else does and they get under my skin, and it's like my brain is buzzing all the time—"

Miss Militia made a slow, deliberate note.

Armsmaster's fingers tapped once on his device. Quiet but crisp. That single tap hit Greg like a shard of ice.

His pulse quickened. Leo shifted, mirroring him.

Miss Militia spoke carefully. "You mentioned noise. What kind?"

"Not one kind." Greg rubbed the heel of his palm against his sternum in small circles. "Everything. Doors slamming. People laughing. Locker hinges squeaking. Someone dropped a stapler and the sound hit me in the teeth."

He hadn't meant to say that last part. It slipped out raw.

Armsmaster's visor tilted a fraction. Miss Militia's gaze flicked briefly—not judgment, but recognition.

"I was walking to my locker," Greg continued, swallowing. "And people were whispering. Or I thought they were. Probably they were just talking. But it felt like it was about me. My brain kept trying to decode it—what they were saying, if it was about me, if they were laughing. I couldn't stop checking. And then someone said my name—or something that sounded like my name—and the hallway got smaller."

Leo stirred, warmth thickening beneath his ribs.

"I dropped my books," he said quietly. "When I bent down to pick them up, someone bumped me. Hard. Maybe on purpose, maybe not. My brain made it mean something it probably didn't. And then someone laughed. And it felt like the whole school was laughing."

The air in the interview room thickened. Subtle. Barely noticeable unless you were sensitive to pressure shifts.

Greg felt it immediately. Leo did too—lifting his head, pressing forward like an animal scenting something it hadn't decided about yet.

Miss Militia leaned forward slightly. "And then?"

Greg took a breath. It shook.

"I felt heat. In my chest. Like something was trying to push out—not against my skin, against my bones. Like my ribs were too tight. Like something inside me was expanding and the room wasn't big enough. I couldn't think around it. I couldn't control it."

Armsmaster's voice came out crisp: "Consistent with an uncontrolled trigger-state response."

Greg winced so hard he physically dipped forward.

Miss Militia shot Armsmaster a look. A quiet not helpful.

Greg kept talking because stopping felt dangerous—like silence would make the pressure worse.

"So I stood up too fast. My books fell again. Someone said, 'You good, dude?'—but my brain didn't hear it as concern. It heard it as sarcasm. And the heat got bigger. And I—"

He paused.

"I didn't roar. Everyone says I roared. I didn't. It was just—" He tapped his sternum. "Leo."

Silence.

Armsmaster's visor shifted a hair. "Leo?"

Oh no.

He didn't want to explain it. But once the question was asked, it unlocked his honesty like a lever.

"It's the thing inside me," Greg said. "The presence. Not a person, not a hallucination, not a voice. More like… an emotion with weight. Shape. Like—if anger had a backbone. Or if fear had claws."

Miss Militia's expression softened. She understood metaphor.

Armsmaster did not.

"Does it speak to you?"

"No!" Greg's voice spiked. "No. It doesn't talk. It's just there. Like a feeling that's too big for my body."

As his voice rose, the lights flickered.

A soft, subtle pulse. Barely perceptible.

But Armsmaster noticed. His hand twitched toward his utility belt.

Greg froze.

Leo reacted instantly—flaring, pressing outward. Heat radiated through his chest like a slow-burning furnace waking up.

Miss Militia raised one hand gently, palm outward. A grounding gesture.

"Greg," she said softly. "You're safe. We're just talking. Nothing bad is happening."

Her tone wrapped around the room like a warm blanket.

Armsmaster's posture remained coiled, calculating.

Greg's breath stuttered. "I'm not—trying to do anything. I don't want—this isn't—"

He couldn't find the words. His throat locked.

"It's okay," Miss Militia said again. "Slow down."

He tried. He really did. But shame hit him hard—a punch to the ribs from the inside.

Then Armsmaster's voice landed like cold steel:

"You need to learn to control yourself."

Leo lunged.

The air pressure spiked—sharp enough that the papers on the table lifted at their edges. The fluorescent lights dimmed then flared, humming angrily.

Armsmaster's hand moved fast toward his belt.

Miss Militia placed herself between them. "Colin." One word. Sharp. Human.

Armsmaster stopped.

Greg doubled forward, gripping the edge of the table, trying not to gasp. His chest burned. Leo strained, wanting space, wanting air, wanting—

Not danger, Greg begged silently. Just too much.

He forced one breath in. Then another. And another.

Gradually, the lights steadied. The pressure eased. Leo curled back in, simmering but no longer clawing outward.

Greg sat trembling, mortified.

Miss Militia's voice broke through. "Thank you. For coming back down."

Armsmaster didn't speak for a long moment.

She watched Greg with steady eyes—not afraid, not impressed. Just present.

"Let's take a moment," she said softly. "And then we'll continue."

---

The Breaking Point, the Verdict, and the Second Flare

The stillness after the flare felt fragile, like a soap bubble balanced on a knife's edge. Greg stayed hunched forward, fingers locked around the rim of the table, trying to keep his breathing steady. His chest throbbed—not burning, not painful, just alive, too alive, as if every heartbeat was a drumbeat for something waiting behind his ribs.

Miss Militia waited with him. Armsmaster did not.

He adjusted his posture by half an inch—subtle, but enough for Greg to feel it. Enough for Leo to lift his head again.

"You see the problem," Armsmaster said, angling toward Miss Militia but clearly intending Greg to hear. "Escalation under minimal stress. Emotional volatility. Power manifestation linked to agitation rather than intent."

Greg froze.

He wasn't being spoken to. He was being spoken about. Like he wasn't in the room. Like a threat being catalogued. Like a device whose wiring had been found faulty.

Every word felt like a bolt tightening around his spine.

"He's overwhelmed," Miss Militia said. "Not malicious."

"He's dangerous," Armsmaster countered. "Even if unintentionally."

Greg shut his eyes. The pressure in his chest coiled again.

Dangerous. Volatile. Uncontrolled.

Words meant to be clinical that pierced straight through him anyway.

He didn't want to be a threat. Didn't want anyone to think he'd hurt them. He wanted to explain all of that, every jagged thought, every fear—but when he opened his mouth the words came out wrong.

"I'm not trying to—I don't want—I'm not doing anything on purpose! I don't want to scare anyone, I don't want to hurt anyone!"

His voice climbed too fast. Leo responded too fast.

Heat pulsed outward, warping the air. The fluorescent lights hissed, flickered, dimmed. The surface of the table vibrated faintly beneath his palms.

Armsmaster's hand snapped toward his belt again.

Miss Militia stepped in front of him. More firmly this time.

"Greg," she said, voice lower, warmer. "Breathe with me."

Her tone was like someone standing between him and a cliff. Not blocking him. Protecting him from the edge.

Greg inhaled shakily. The first breath failed. The second was better. The third hit something steady.

Leo paused. Not calm—just listening.

Miss Militia waited until the trembling in his shoulders eased by a fraction. "Good," she said softly. "Let's continue carefully."

But Armsmaster wasn't interested in careful.

"Mr. Veder," he said, pitch formal again. "The PRT needs to assess whether you are willing and capable of cooperating with safety protocols."

"I am," Greg said quickly. "I want to be. I'm trying."

"You must demonstrate that you can regulate your emotions."

That word. Regulate.

Greg's throat tightened. He hated it almost as much as he hated control. It always came from people who didn't understand what it cost him—as if emotions were switches, as if intensity were a choice.

"He is regulating," Miss Militia said quietly. "He's overwhelmed, not disobedient."

Armsmaster ignored her.

"Your powers appear to be triggered by emotional instability," he said. "That is unacceptable for a team environment."

The shame hit so hard Greg thought he might vomit.

He curled inward the way he did when teachers told him he was too reactive, too intense, hard to manage. But this wasn't school. These were heroes. People who mattered. People who were deciding if he mattered.

"I don't mean to be unstable," he whispered. "I just—I can't always tell how loud I am. Or how strong something feels. Or what part of it is me and what part is—"

He tapped his chest again.

"Leo."

Armsmaster leaned in, visor gleaming. "If your emotional state is externalized to that degree—"

"It's not external," Greg said, panicking. "It's just how I understand it. It's just a feeling. A big one with shape. I'm not hearing voices or losing it or—"

The lights flickered sharply. Greg flinched. Leo pressed outward, instinctive, protective.

The air pressure jumped in a noticeable wave, rattling the metal legs of the table.

Armsmaster stood in one swift mechanical motion.

Greg's heart stopped.

He hadn't meant anything. Hadn't wanted anything. He was just scared. And shame made Leo flare harder.

"I'm sorry," he said quickly, desperately. "I didn't—I'm not trying to make anything happen!"

Miss Militia rose too, slowly, palms open.

"Greg," she said. "Look at me."

He did.

She wasn't afraid.

Not even a little.

"We're not in danger," she said. "You're not in danger. You're just overwhelmed."

Greg's breath shuddered in and out.

Leo strained once more—then curled back down to a simmer.

The room steadied. The lights stabilized. The air stopped vibrating.

Slowly, Armsmaster sat again. Miss Militia exhaled quietly. "Thank you," she said to Greg. "For grounding."

He nodded shakily.

The handler entered then—business attire instead of armor, timing too perfect to be coincidence. They leaned down and whispered something to Miss Militia and Armsmaster.

Greg's stomach dropped. He'd seen this in enough shows and interviews to feel the shift in the room. He braced.

Miss Militia straightened. Armsmaster tapped his device. The handler took a breath like someone delivering pre-written bad news.

"Greg," the handler began, gentle in a rehearsed way. "Based on this evaluation, the PRT has decided you are not currently a candidate for the Wards program."

Greg's breath broke. His ears rang. His vision fuzzed at the edges.

"We don't believe you're ready," the handler continued. "Your emotional volatility and irregular power surges present risks we cannot take at this time."

He heard the words but not the details. Only the shape of them:

We don't want you. You're too much. You're dangerous without meaning to be.

Miss Militia's jaw tightened, but she didn't contradict the decision.

"I understand," Greg lied, voice cracking.

"We will, however," the handler added, "keep an eye on you."

That made everything worse.

He felt the second flare coming before he could stop it—not explosive, more like everything in his chest tightening at once. A muscle spasm made of emotion. Leo recoiling in hurt.

The lights flickered. Papers slid an inch across the table. Miss Militia's scarf fluttered.

Armsmaster stiffened. Miss Militia stepped forward just enough to block his line of sight.

"Greg," she said softly. "You're allowed to be upset. But let's breathe. Together."

Her voice reached through the shame. Through the panic. Through the flare.

Greg forced himself to inhale. Then exhaled.

Leo retreated. The room settled.

And for the first time since he'd walked in, Greg felt utterly, crushingly small.

---

Miss Militia's Anchor, Greg's Exit, and the Aftermath

Greg stood before anyone asked him to.

He didn't trust his legs. Didn't trust his breathing. Didn't trust his face not to crumple in front of people who already thought he was unstable.

The chair scraped too loudly as he pushed it back. Leo flinched with him. He kept his eyes on the floor because looking at anyone felt like touching something hot and fragile at the same time.

Miss Militia's voice reached him gently. "Greg—"

He shook his head before she could finish. Not no. Just not now. He couldn't handle more words—not while the room still had his shame hanging in the air.

He managed: "Thank you." His voice tried to break the word into pieces.

Miss Militia nodded, understanding. Armsmaster gave the mechanical equivalent of a courteous dismissal. The handler offered the kind of polite smile adults use when they're relieved a conversation is over.

Greg walked out.

The hallway was colder, sharper. His sneakers on the carpet were too soft; his breathing too loud. Every fluorescent light overhead hummed like it wanted him to notice it. The air conditioner kicked on with a low whoosh that made Leo stiffen.

Halfway down the hall, the pressure in his chest finally cracked.

He reached the first empty alcove—a small turn toward unused meeting rooms—and braced one hand on the wall, the other pressed flat against his chest. His breath shook. In-out-in-out, too fast, too loud, too visible.

He wasn't crying. Not yet. But the pressure behind his eyes made it close.

Leo pressed tight against the inside of his ribs—hurt, confused, defensive. Not angry. Not predatory. Just bristling like an animal that had been kicked without understanding why.

"I shouldn't have said all that," Greg whispered. "I sounded stupid. I sounded unstable. I made everything worse. I always make things worse. I didn't mean to flare, I didn't mean to scare anyone, I didn't—"

A soft voice interrupted him.

"Greg?"

Miss Militia.

Of all people. He turned slightly away, instinctively trying to hide—shoulders hunched, breathing uneven, barely holding together.

She didn't push closer. She stood three feet behind him, close enough to reach him, far enough not to overwhelm.

"Can I stand here with you?" she asked.

He swallowed. "It's a hallway. You can stand wherever you want."

She smiled softly at that, though he didn't see it—he only heard it.

"May I stand here with you?" she repeated.

He closed his eyes. Then nodded.

Her footsteps were quiet as she came to stand beside him, facing the same direction, not blocking him, not crowding him. Just next to him.

They stood in silence for a long moment.

Greg pressed a palm into his sternum—not hiding it anymore. She pretended not to notice, though she obviously did.

When she finally spoke, her voice was low enough that the hallway absorbed the words instead of echoing them.

"What happened in there," she said, "was not your fault."

Greg laughed—a broken little sound. "It kinda was."

"No," she said, and the certainty in her voice made him blink. "You were honest. You were overwhelmed. And you were handled like a threat instead of a teenager with too much happening inside him."

His throat tightened. He hated how much he needed to hear that.

"But I—my powers—Leo—" He fumbled. "I couldn't keep everything in. And the lights and the pressure and—"

"That wasn't malice," she said gently. "That was emotion. Too big, too fast, too much for a room that wasn't built to hold it."

Greg bit down hard on the inside of his cheek.

She watched him quietly for a moment before continuing.

"What you feel," she said, "isn't wrong."

He froze.

The words struck exactly where the shame lived.

She said them again, softer.

"What you feel isn't wrong. But people need to trust what you'll do with those feelings."

He turned his head slightly, just enough to see her scarf in his peripheral vision. She wasn't looking at him with fear or calculation or caution.

She looked at him like someone who saw a kid who tried too hard and hurt too much—and who wanted to help him make sense of that.

"Nobody ever says it like that," Greg whispered.

"I know." And she meant it. "Most adults tell kids like you to stop feeling, or feel less, or control it like it's a switch. They forget that intensity isn't a flaw. It's a trait. A powerful one. But you need scaffolding. Tools. Guidance."

Greg swallowed thickly. "Like training?"

"Like support," she corrected. "Training comes later. Understanding comes first."

Leo eased inside his chest. Not vanishing—he never vanished—but settling. Resting. For the first time since Greg had entered the building, the presence didn't feel like it was trying to break free.

He breathed out, slowly. The tension drained from his shoulders in a way he didn't realize was still possible.

Miss Militia waited for him to steady before she spoke again.

"You're not being recruited," she said, "but that doesn't mean you're being abandoned."

Greg's chest tightened for an entirely different reason.

"You deserve help," she said. "And I'm going to make sure you get some form of it—even if it's not through the Wards."

He blinked. "Why?"

"Because I've met a lot of young people," she said. "And I know the difference between someone who's dangerous… and someone who's hurting."

She let the words settle.

"And you," she finished softly, "are hurting."

Greg didn't trust himself to answer. He nodded.

Miss Militia stepped back half a step, returning agency, giving space.

"Take your time before you go," she said. "No rush."

She started to turn away, then paused.

"And Greg?"

He looked up.

"You did better than you think," she said. "Much better."

Then she left him alone in the quiet hallway—not rejected, not accepted, but anchored.

Greg leaned back against the wall and let himself breathe. Real breaths. Steady breaths. Breaths that didn't feel like they were fighting through barbed wire.

Leo curled gently in his chest, no longer pacing, no longer bristling. Just present. Just there. Just his.

As Greg walked out of the PRT building, the sunlight hit his face without hurting his eyes. The city noise didn't slice into him. The air didn't feel like it was pressing down on his skull.

He still felt rejected. Still felt embarrassed. Still felt small in a world he didn't fully understand.

But he also felt something new—something that lodged itself somewhere deep, somewhere Leo could reach it and hold it:

My feelings aren't wrong. But my actions—those I can shape.

And for the first time since the incident at school, Greg walked with his back a little straighter.

 

[Lastword855]

This whole fic is uncomfortable to read not because it's bad but because how close to home it hits. Great job!

 

[Durolord]

After the Building

Greg shut his bedroom door with more force than he meant to.

The latch clicked too loudly in the quiet apartment. He froze for half a second, waiting to hear if his mom would call out from the living room. She didn't. The TV murmured faintly through the wall—some sitcom laugh track bleeding through cheap speakers—but otherwise the apartment stayed still.

Good. He couldn't talk right now. Couldn't explain.

He leaned his forehead against the door, hands braced flat against the wood like it might ground him. The hallway light leaked in around the frame, a thin bar cutting across the carpet—too bright, too sharp. He turned the lock until it vanished.

Dark. Better.

His room smelled like fabric softener and dust and the faint metallic tang that had followed him since the PRT building. He crossed the space on autopilot and dropped onto the edge of his bed without taking off his hoodie. The mattress dipped. Springs creaked once, then settled.

For a moment, he just sat there.

Then the replay started.

Miss Militia's calm voice. Armsmaster's visor tilting. The word control slicing through him again and again. His brain replayed it all with brutal precision, like it was trying to debug a system failure.

You talked too much. You flared. You proved them right.

His jaw clenched. His fingers curled into his hoodie hem, twisting the fabric until the seams bit into his skin.

You should have answered normally. You should have controlled yourself.

Leo stirred at the accusation.

Not angry. Not defensive. Just present. The warmth in Greg's chest shifted, spreading outward like a slow exhale—not soothing exactly, but not judgment either. It felt like pressure pushing back against the self-criticism, refusing to let it collapse him completely.

Be what you are, Leo pressed—not in words, not as a voice, but as a direction. A force vector. A nudge toward expansion instead of retreat.

"I don't know what that means," Greg whispered, dragging his hands down his face.

His brain kept cycling. Faster now.

They didn't want you. You scared them. You're too much even for heroes.

His foot started bouncing. Hard. Heel slamming into the carpet in irregular bursts. He tried to stop it. Couldn't. The energy had nowhere to go.

He stood abruptly—the motion sharp enough to make him dizzy for a second—and started pacing.

Four steps to the desk. Turn. Four steps to the bed. Turn.

His shoulders stayed hunched, arms tight against his sides like he was trying to stop himself from taking up space. His breath stayed shallow. Leo pressed outward, restless.

The pacing wasn't enough.

Greg stopped near the center of the room, fists clenching at his sides. His knuckles ached. His shoulders rolled once, twice, like he was trying to shrug off something that refused to move.

Then, without fully deciding to, he threw a punch.

Not at anything. Just air.

His arm snapped out, fast and clean, cutting through space. The movement surprised him enough that he froze immediately afterward, heart hammering.

"…What?" he muttered.

He tried again.

This time, he paid attention.

The punch wasn't wild. Wasn't angry flailing. It was straight. Efficient. His shoulder rotated the way it felt like it was supposed to. His hips followed instinctively, weight shifting in a way that made sense to his body even if his brain hadn't planned it.

The motion felt right.

That startled him more than the flare at the PRT.

Greg swallowed and took a half-step back, resetting his stance without realizing that was what he was doing. Feet spread slightly. Knees bent just enough to feel balanced. Hands up—not clenched, but loose. Ready.

Leo leaned into the movement. Not pushing outward. Aligning.

Greg threw another punch. Then another.

He wasn't thinking in words anymore. The self-criticism dulled, fading into background static turned down a notch. His body started to take over—shoulders, hips, spine aligning into patterns that felt familiar without being remembered.

He added a kick. Awkward at first, foot wobbling as it came down, but the second one landed cleaner. He pivoted, the carpet twisting slightly under his socked feet.

He breathed out hard through his nose.

Again.

Punch. Block. Step. Turn.

The movements came faster, stringing themselves into sequences he didn't know he knew. He shadowboxed across the room, adjusting automatically to avoid the desk, the bed, the wall. Spatial awareness sharp and precise in a way it never was during conversations.

His thoughts finally slowed.

The pressure in his chest didn't disappear—but it flowed. Leo wasn't trapped anymore. He moved with Greg, heat distributing through muscles instead of bottling up behind bone.

This was different.

When he spoke, his mouth betrayed him. When he stood still, his emotions overwhelmed him. But when he moved—

"I can trust this," Greg whispered, mid-motion.

He stopped abruptly, chest heaving, sweat prickling along his hairline. His arms trembled—not weak, just used. Used in a way they rarely were.

He stared at his hands like they belonged to someone else.

I can't trust my mouth, he thought slowly. But I can trust my body.

The idea lodged itself deep, clicking into place with uncomfortable inevitability.

Leo settled—coiled, not tight, but ready.

Greg wiped his forehead with his sleeve and laughed once under his breath. Not happy, not sad. Just stunned.

"Okay," he said to the empty room. "Okay."

The replay of the PRT meeting hadn't stopped. But now it had competition.

And for the first time since he'd walked out of that building, the fractures inside him didn't feel like damage.

They felt like forms waiting to be learned.

---

The Practice

Greg didn't sit back down.

The thought crossed his mind—I should probably stop now—but it drifted away before it could take root. His muscles were warm and loose in a way they almost never were. The room felt different too. Not quieter exactly, but less hostile. Like the air had stopped leaning in on him.

He rolled his shoulders once, experimentally. A faint ache, the good kind—the kind that told him he'd used them instead of just carrying tension around like dead weight.

He moved back to the center of the room and tried to repeat what he'd just done.

The first punch came out sloppy.

Greg grimaced. "No. That wasn't it."

He reset. Feet apart, knees slightly bent. He didn't know why that felt right—it just did. He tried again, slower this time, focusing on how the motion traveled through his body. Shoulder, elbow, wrist. Hip rotation. Weight shift.

Better.

He threw the next sequence deliberately—not fast, not hard, just precise. The movements snapped into place like puzzle pieces, each one fitting the next with a logic his body understood even if his brain didn't have words for it.

Punch. Step. Block. Turn.

He repeated it. Again. And again.

The repetition smoothed something inside him. His breathing evened out without being forced. The leftover static from the PRT meeting quieted to a manageable background hum.

Greg realized, distantly, that this felt a lot like stimming.

Not the small, socially invisible kind he'd spent years suppressing—the foot-bouncing, pen-clicking, subtle rocking he'd trained himself to stop because people stared. This was bigger. Full-body. Impossible to hide.

And for once, he didn't care.

He paced through the sequence again, then added a kick, testing the balance point. His foot wobbled. He corrected automatically, adjusting his stance until the wobble disappeared.

"There," he murmured.

His brain latched onto the pattern instantly. Kick placement. Recovery step. Weight redistribution. It wasn't social. It wasn't emotional. It was mechanical—and that made it safe.

When he messed up, the feedback was immediate and neutral. Lose balance, adjust. Overextend, pull back. No judgment in it. No implication that failure meant something about him as a person.

Just data.

That realization hit him harder than any of the movements.

He moved faster now, letting the sequences loop. He didn't count repetitions out loud, but some part of him tracked them anyway. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. The number didn't matter; the consistency did.

Leo flowed with him. Not pushing. Not pulling. Just aligning.

The warmth in Greg's chest spread through his arms and shoulders, down his spine and into his legs. Not the explosive heat from the PRT room—this was steady, controlled. A furnace banked low but efficient.

For the first time, Leo didn't feel like something he had to contain.

It felt like something he could express.

Greg slowed, then stopped, breathing hard. Sweat dampened the back of his neck, the inside of his hoodie. He pushed the sleeves up without thinking, baring his forearms to the cooler air.

He glanced at the clock on his nightstand.

Forty-three minutes.

"…Huh."

Time usually dragged when he was stuck in his own head. This hadn't dragged at all. It had flowed.

He sat down on the floor, back against the bed, legs stretched out in front of him. His muscles protested faintly as they cooled, but the sensation grounded him instead of irritating him.

His thoughts crept back in—slower now, less sharp.

I can't trust my mouth.

That felt true in a way that didn't hurt as much as it used to. He replayed the PRT interview again, but something had shifted. The memories didn't sting as badly. He could see the moments where his words had spiraled, where his tone had sharpened without permission.

He could also see something else.

The moments where his body had reacted before his mind. Shoulders tightening. Breath hitching. Pressure building before the flare.

If he'd had this—movement—then…

Greg shook his head. No point running hypotheticals. The past didn't rewind because you found a better strategy later.

But the future was still flexible.

"I can't trust my mouth," he said quietly, testing the words. "But I can trust my body."

The sentence settled into him, solid and steady.

He stood again, slower this time, and ran through the sequence once more. Not to burn energy, not to escape his thoughts—just to feel it. To confirm it wasn't a fluke.

It wasn't.

Each movement landed with satisfying certainty. His nervous system seemed to sigh in relief, like it had been waiting for this outlet for years.

When he finally stopped for good, he felt tired but not drained. Centered. Focused. The way he sometimes felt after hours of hyperfocusing on something technical, except this time it was physical.

Greg collapsed onto his bed and stared at the ceiling.

"I should probably write this down," he muttered.

The idea of explaining it in words made his head ache, but he grabbed a notebook anyway and scrawled a few messy bullet points:

Moving helps Patterns calm Don't talk when overwhelmed Leo likes motion??

He stared at the last line, then added a question mark for safety.

A faint smile tugged at his mouth before he could stop it.

The knock on his door made him flinch.

"Greg?" his mom called. "Dinner's almost ready."

"Okay!" A little too loud. He cleared his throat. "I'll be out in a minute."

"Everything okay?"

He hesitated.

For once, the answer wasn't complicated.

"Yeah," he said. And meant it.

He shoved the notebook under his pillow, peeled off the hoodie, and swapped it for a clean T-shirt. As he headed for the door, Leo shifted—settled, ready, present.

Not roaring. Not caged. Just there.

Greg paused with his hand on the doorknob.

If words fail, he thought, I'll move.

Not a solution to everything. Conversations would still go wrong. People would still misunderstand him. But it was something—an anchor he could return to when his mouth betrayed him.

He opened the door and stepped back into the light.

---

Taylor

School didn't change just because Greg had.

The next morning, the building looked exactly the same: cracked tiles, scuffed lockers, fluorescent lights flickering in patterns only he seemed to notice. The hallway smelled like cheap deodorant, cafeteria grease, and damp winter coats. Students moved like schools of fish—forming, splitting, reforming around invisible social currents he could never predict.

If anything, he noticed the sameness more now. Like his brain had filed movement away as a new kind of language and was constantly comparing everything else against it.

He kept his hands in his hoodie pocket to stop them from doing anything embarrassing. He counted steps between landmarks without meaning to: seven to the water fountain, twelve to the poster with the faded football schedule, five to the corner where the light always buzzed.

His chest stayed warm but quiet. Leo wasn't asleep—Leo never slept—but wasn't pacing either. It felt like a backpack that had finally been strapped correctly. There, but balanced.

Greg told himself it meant he was improving.

He didn't get to enjoy the thought for long.

The school did that thing it always did—presented him with a social situation he hadn't preloaded scripts for and watched him fail the quicktime event.

In homeroom, whispers ran through the room like static crawling over wires.

"She's back." "No way." "Look, look—there."

Greg looked, because his brain demanded data when other people reacted like this.

Taylor Hebert stepped through the doorway like she expected the room to hit her.

She was thinner. Not dramatically—no movie before-and-after. Just edges sharper. Cheekbones a little more pronounced. Shoulders held tighter, as if her body had learned to keep itself in a defensive shape.

Her skin looked paler too, but that might have been the winter light or the fluorescents making everyone look slightly sick.

She kept her eyes down. Not fully—she was scanning, but cautiously. Like she was checking for threats instead of looking for friends.

When the bell rang, she flinched.

It wasn't a large reaction. Most people wouldn't notice. Greg noticed. His nervous system lit up like a graph spike. He felt a tiny answering flinch ripple through his own muscles—sympathetic, like a reflex.

Leo stirred.

Not heat. Not pressure.

Resonance.

He didn't have a better word for it. The feeling was like recognizing a pattern in a song you'd never heard before. Like meeting someone and knowing instantly they carried the same kind of weather inside them.

Taylor moved to her seat without speaking.

Nobody welcomed her.

Some people stared openly. Others pretended not to see her with the aggressive intensity of people who didn't want to get involved. A few snickered and leaned together with body language that meant predators.

Greg catalogued all of it without meaning to. Taylor's posture. Her breathing. The way her hands stayed close to her body, fingers tight like she was holding herself together from the inside.

He knew of her—everyone did. The girl who'd been shoved too far for too long, treated like a rumor and a target. The one who'd disappeared after a locker incident so bad that even teachers had looked uncomfortable pretending it was just kids being kids.

He'd noticed her before. Quiet. Invisible. Like she'd figured out the rules of survival were to take up as little space as possible.

Now she looked like she'd run out of space inside herself.

The teacher started class. Greg tried to focus. He really did—copied notes, answered when called on, kept his voice neutral and his face still. The whole masking routine on muscle memory.

But his eyes kept flicking toward Taylor anyway.

She didn't fidget the way most nervous people did. No bouncing knee, no pen-clicking. That kind of fidgeting was loud. Visible. Taylor's movements were controlled, minimized—she shifted only when she had to, and when she did, it was precise. Like she'd learned that moving too much attracted attention.

When someone laughed behind her, she tensed. When someone leaned too close, her shoulders rose. When the teacher called her name for a simple question, her voice came out thin at first—then steadier, like she had to force herself into audibility.

Greg recognized the effort. Not the exact experience. The same kind of cost—the mental tax of doing something "simple" that didn't feel simple in your body.

---

The Wrong Scene Beat

Between classes, the hallway turned to chaos. Bodies, noise, locker doors slamming like gunshots.

Greg moved through it carefully—shoulders tucked, timing his steps to avoid collisions. He was halfway to his next class when he saw Taylor ahead of him, moving with the same cautious precision as before.

Then he saw Sophia.

His stomach dropped.

Sophia Hess leaned against the lockers like she owned them, posture relaxed in the practiced way of someone who'd never had to worry about someone else doing this to them. Her face held that lazy contempt she wore like jewelry. She didn't even have to do anything yet—her presence did the work.

Taylor stiffened the moment she noticed.

It was like watching a wounded animal spot a predator.

Sophia's eyes moved over Taylor with slow, satisfied amusement. No words. Just a look that said I'm still here. I can still do this.

Leo lifted its head.

Not aggression—awareness. A readiness. Like a part of Greg's body recognized that this was a moment where something could break.

Taylor tried to pass without acknowledging her.

Sophia shifted just enough to block her path—not fully, but enough to force Taylor to angle around.

"Hey," Sophia said, voice almost cheerful. "Back already?"

Taylor's shoulders locked.

"I'm just going to class," she said.

Flat. Controlled. Not pleading, not angry. Just careful.

Sophia smiled.

Greg's hands curled in his pockets.

He didn't just dislike Sophia morally. Her presence made the hallway feel sharper, like edges appeared where there hadn't been edges before.

Taylor tried to step around her again. Sophia leaned in slightly, voice lowering. Greg couldn't hear what she said—only saw Taylor's jaw tighten, the micro-flinch at the end of the sentence.

Something inside Greg snapped into decision.

Not rage. Not heroism.

Just inability to watch it happen without moving.

He stepped forward.

He didn't have a script. He didn't plan a line. He just moved, because he trusted movement more than words now.

Taylor glanced at him as he approached—quick, wary, scanning. Sophia looked too, eyebrow lifting.

Greg stopped a few feet away. Close enough to be involved, far enough not to crowd. He faced Taylor, not Sophia, because if he looked at Sophia he might say something worse.

His mouth opened.

And immediately betrayed him.

"Are you okay?"

It came out clipped. Too direct. Too intense. Like a demand.

He felt it the second the words left his mouth—the tone mismatch, the wrong facial expression, the way his voice didn't soften the way it was supposed to when you asked that question.

Taylor's eyes narrowed slightly.

She didn't read it as concern. She read it as interrogation. Like what happened to you, like what's wrong with you, like are you going to be a problem.

"No," Taylor said, curt.

Her shoulders tensed higher.

Sophia's smile widened—free entertainment.

Greg's face heated. His brain scrambled to correct in real time.

"I mean—" he started, then stopped because he didn't know what the mean was. "I just—"

Taylor's gaze flicked over him again, faster. The intensity in his eyes probably read as suspicion. The stiffness in his posture probably read as aggression. And the fact he'd approached her right in Sophia's orbit—right in the danger zone—probably read as a setup.

Taylor stepped back half a step.

Her eyes darted past him, checking exits.

The survival calculus. The assumption that this was not safe.

He felt sick.

Sophia leaned in lazily. "Veder, was it? You bothering her now?"

Greg turned just enough toward Sophia to acknowledge the attack, and felt Leo flare—not outward, not in power, but in pressure. A warning heat behind his sternum.

He forced it down.

Not here. Not in the hallway. Not in front of Taylor.

"I'm not bothering anyone," Greg said, voice tight.

Sophia's eyes sharpened. Like she wanted him to do something stupid. Like she wanted proof he was unstable.

Greg swallowed. He looked back at Taylor.

His brain wanted to fix this. To say the right thing. To explain that he understood the flinch, the stiffness, the way the bell sounded like a weapon. To tell her he recognized that echo—that she wasn't alone in the aftershock.

But words failed.

All he managed was: "Sorry."

Taylor blinked once, unreadable.

Then she turned and walked away fast, shoulders still tight, gaze down, disappearing into the flow of students like she was afraid the hallway might close over her.

Sophia watched her go, then looked back at Greg with a faint, satisfied grin.

"Cute," she said. "Real cute."

Greg didn't answer. He waited until Sophia got bored and sauntered off, then stood there a second too long, staring at the space where Taylor had been.

His heart thudded with the kind of regret that felt physical.

Wrong timing. Wrong tone. Wrong approach.

He exhaled shakily and walked to class before the bell rang again.

But the moment didn't leave him.

Taylor's flinch. Her eyes scanning for exit. Her voice held together by force.

She was hurting.

And the strange thing was—Greg didn't just notice it. It snagged something inside him, the way a story hook caught your attention before you knew why.

Hurt recognized hurt.

He walked into class still thinking about her.

She's hurting. He turned the observation over slowly. She's interesting. She's important.

His chest warmed—not like a flare, more like a quiet insistence. Leo shifting as if it understood something, or simply reacted to the shared echo.

Greg's brain misfiled the feeling instantly.

I like her.

The word landed with the weight of a label slapped onto a folder that didn't quite fit. He didn't have the language yet for recognition, for admiration of survival, for shared pattern resonance. So his brain grabbed the nearest available category.

Crush.

Greg stared at his notebook for most of the period without writing anything useful.

And somewhere in the back of his head, a new rule formed:

Next time—better timing.

---

Recalibration

Greg didn't see Taylor again for the rest of the day.

That fact lodged in his head heavier than it should have. He told himself it was coincidence—different class schedules, different routes, the sheer size of the school swallowing people when it wanted to—but his brain kept circling back to the hallway scene anyway.

Are you okay?

Too sharp. Too loud. Too close.

He could hear it now, stripped of intention and context, the way it must have landed on her ears. Not concern. Not solidarity. A spotlight.

He winced, fumbling with his bag zipper twice before getting it right, and walked home slower than usual.

The afternoon air was cold and thin, the kind that bit at his lungs if he breathed too fast. He let his pace settle into something steady, each step measured and grounded. Movement helped—he could feel it now, the way his thoughts smoothed when his body stayed in motion, the way Leo stayed calm when there was somewhere for the energy to go.

Still, the thoughts crept in.

She probably thinks you're another one. Another person watching her like a problem to be solved. Another threat.

That one stung the most.

He replayed the details he'd noticed—not to torture himself, at least not consciously, but because his brain needed to understand. Taylor's posture. The flinch at the bell. The way her eyes tracked escape routes. The way she'd stepped back from him without realizing she was doing it.

She'd been raw. Exposed. Still bleeding from whatever had happened while she was gone.

And he'd walked up to her with intensity in his eyes and no softening in his voice and asked a question people only asked when they wanted answers, not when they wanted to help.

He kicked a pebble along the sidewalk harder than he meant to. It skittered into the gutter.

"Idiot," he muttered—not loud enough for anyone to hear, just loud enough to satisfy the self-criticism circuit.

Leo didn't agree.

The warmth in his chest didn't retreat or spike. It stayed steady—present, like a weight reminding him he was still here, still moving forward. Not pushing him to justify himself. Not telling him he was right.

Just refusing to let him collapse into self-loathing.

That was new.

By the time he reached home, the day had settled into his bones. He dropped his bag by the door and stood in the center of his room for a long moment, staring at nothing.

Then he moved.

Not explosively. Not angrily. Just deliberately.

Punch. Step. Turn. Block.

The familiar sequence grounded him instantly. His breathing fell into rhythm with the motion. His muscles warmed, then loosened. The static in his head dimmed.

As he moved, his thoughts reorganized—not disappearing, but lining up in a way he could actually see.

She didn't recoil because you're bad. She recoiled because she's hurt.

That mattered.

He slowed, then stopped, chest rising and falling evenly.

Taylor's likely read of him played out in fragments—the way his brain preferred them.

Weird. Intense. Not cruel. Too much.

He grimaced.

"Fair," he admitted to the empty room.

He sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, hands dangling loosely. The warmth in his chest settled with him, Leo coiling comfortably instead of pacing.

His brain liked labels. Categories. Tags. They made the world manageable. When something didn't fit neatly, it forced it into the nearest available slot anyway.

I like her.

He turned the label over slowly.

It felt incomplete. Too simple for the complexity of what he'd felt in that hallway. So he tried to unpack it.

It wasn't attraction in the way movies described. His stomach hadn't flipped. His thoughts hadn't gone fuzzy. He hadn't imagined holding her hand.

What he'd felt was recognition. Pattern overlap. The way her flinch mirrored his own. The way her silence carried weight instead of emptiness. The way she moved like someone who had learned the world could turn hostile without warning.

He admired that she'd come back.

"She survived," he murmured. "That's not nothing."

His brain tried to argue—that still counts as liking someone—but he pushed back gently.

No. It's respect. And concern. And shared damage.

That felt closer. Still, he didn't have a better word yet, so the placeholder stayed.

Greg lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. The crack in the plaster caught his eye automatically. He traced it once, twice, three times.

He thought about timing. Not dramatically—no sweeping monologues, no heroic interventions—but in the quiet social sense. The way some moments were wrong not because the intention was bad, but because the conditions wrapping around them weren't right.

Taylor hadn't needed a question in that hallway. She'd needed space. Or safety. Or time.

He hadn't read the context. He'd read her—but not the barbed wire surrounding her.

"That was the wrong scene beat," Greg said softly. Naming it made it feel solvable.

Leo shifted, warm and steady, not disagreeing.

Greg closed his eyes.

Next time, he'd watch longer. Approach slower. Soften his voice before speaking. Maybe not speak at all.

Better timing, he promised himself.

Not as a vow. Not as pressure.

Just as a direction.

Outside, the evening settled over Brockton Bay, indifferent to the small recalibrations happening inside one teenage boy's head. Tomorrow would bring more noise, more people, more chances to get things wrong.

But Greg wasn't empty-handed anymore.

He had movement. He had patterns. He had the beginnings of understanding.

And somewhere in the school, a girl he barely knew carried a wound that matched the shape of his own.

He didn't know yet what that would mean.

Only that it mattered.

 

[Durolord]

The Broadcast

The TV glow painted Greg's room in shifting blues and grays, turning the familiar shapes—desk, laundry pile, bookshelf—into something colder and more unreal. The volume was low because loud sound made his skin itch, but the captions were on, bright white blocks stuttering beneath a broadcast that couldn't keep up with itself.

The anchor's mouth moved too smoothly for the words being delivered.

"…continuing coverage of the Simurgh's ongoing attack on Canberra…"

Greg sat on the floor with his back to his bed, knees pulled up, remote in hand like a weapon he might need to deploy. He didn't blink for long stretches—not to prove anything to himself, but because the moment he blinked the images shifted, and his brain hated losing frames.

His chest was warm.

Leo, quiet but awake.

On screen, the camera wobbled as a reporter ran. The angle swerved, catching a skyline that was no longer a skyline—jagged silhouettes of buildings torn open, smoke pouring out like the city had been gutted.

The Simurgh was in the distance.

She hovered above the destruction like a piece of the sky that didn't belong there—wings spread, pale and sharp, too symmetrical. Too still for something that moved. The camera zoomed, and Greg's breath stopped because for half a second the focus sharpened and he could see her: a white figure suspended over a dying city like a judgement written in feathers.

Then the feed glitched.

Greg's fingers tightened around the remote.

The anchor kept talking—voice steady, controlled, professional. Greg couldn't stand the steadiness.

He rewound ten seconds. Not because he needed the words, but because he needed the movement again. The capes in the background shifting. A flash of color—someone flying low, someone sprinting across rubble.

He rewound again. Again.

He wasn't watching like normal people watched the news. He was watching like it was a diagram.

There—formation. A cluster of capes moving together, not scattered, not random. A wedge. A deliberate shape. Someone in front drawing fire, others at the back moving like support units.

He paused the screen and leaned forward, squinting at the blur.

Armsmaster would like this, his brain supplied automatically, and the thought made his stomach twist, sharp and bitter.

He wasn't supposed to care what Armsmaster would like.

But he did.

Greg hit play.

The feed switched to aerial footage. The sound changed—wind buffeting a microphone, distant sirens, explosions that came through the speakers as dull thumps instead of full-body impacts.

Even dulled, the sound hit him too hard.

He turned the volume down further.

The captions didn't capture the screaming. Greg could imagine it anyway.

A voice shouted orders—too indistinct for words, but his brain filled in the structure: directional commands, regroup calls, names. The cadence of crisis leadership. It threaded into his nervous system like barbed wire.

Leo stirred.

On screen, a building collapsed—slow at first, then sudden, the top folding inward like paper. Dust billowed outward, swallowing cars and streets and people too small to see clearly.

Greg inhaled sharply and felt the breath catch halfway, like his lungs didn't trust the air.

"Why are you filming," he whispered—not to the reporter, not to the camera operator, but to the universe.

Because the world needed to see it. Because fear needed witnesses. Because tragedy became real when it had a frame and a timestamp.

His fingers went numb around the remote.

He watched capes in motion.

Someone flew in a tight spiral above the rubble—bait or distraction. Someone else moved in straight lines, fast, disappearing and reappearing behind cover. A third cape created a shimmering barrier for half a second before it shattered under a force that wasn't shown—only implied by the way the camera shook and the reporter screamed and ducked.

Greg's eyes tracked all of it with unnatural focus.

He wasn't thinking in sentences anymore. His mind was doing what it did best under overload: turning chaos into patterns.

They're spacing themselves. They're rotating shifts. They're keeping sight lines open.

And then—there.

A group of capes clustered too close. Maybe forced by terrain. Maybe by panic. The camera caught a flash, a distortion in the air, and Greg felt his skin crawl.

The Simurgh's influence.

Even through the screen, it felt like the moment before a migraine—pressure building behind the eyes, the sense that something was wrong before you could name it.

Greg's chest tightened. Leo pressed upward, hot and uneasy.

The broadcast cut to a studio map, red zones and evacuation routes. A calm analyst spoke about probabilities, risk assessments, projected casualties.

Projected casualties.

Greg's hands started shaking.

He didn't notice at first. He only noticed when the remote clacked against his knee twice in a rhythm he hadn't chosen. His foot began bouncing—fast, sharp. He tried to stop it. It sped up instead.

The images kept coming. Another collapse. Another plume of dust. Another camera angle catching a fleeing crowd like ants scattering from a boot.

His mind did a strange, cruel thing: it overlaid those images onto places he knew.

Winslow's hallways filled with smoke. The cafeteria roof collapsing. Lockers splitting open like ribs.

His stomach turned.

He muttered "Stop," but he didn't turn it off.

Because he couldn't.

Because some part of him believed that if he watched carefully enough, he could understand something important. Something that would make him less useless.

He clicked the volume down to almost nothing.

The silence made it worse.

Without sound, the destruction looked too clean. Too cinematic. The captions did their best, lagging behind reality.

"…local heroes and Protectorate forces have established temporary lines…"

Temporary lines.

Greg's chest ached.

Leo's warmth surged suddenly—not outward as power, but inward as emotion, a rush of heat behind the sternum that felt like approval and grief tangled together.

He watched a cape on screen run into the dust cloud.

He didn't come back out.

The camera panned away before it became explicit.

Greg's throat tightened. His eyes burned, but he didn't cry. Crying required release. He was still locked in hyperfocus, pinned to the screen by awe and dread and something darker: a hunger for context.

He wanted to be there.

Not in the childish I want to be a hero way. In the visceral way his body reacted to the movements on screen as if they were a language he could finally speak.

His brain tracked the formations again—how they moved, how they adjusted when the Simurgh shifted, how a team split and regrouped like a single organism.

And the thought rose up, raw and undeniable:

I am built for this.

Leo flared warmly, like a lion lifting its head toward the sun.

Greg swallowed hard.

"I'm stuck in a hallway being 'too much' instead," he whispered, bitterness cracking through the awe.

The words tasted like metal.

He kept watching.

Because even if the screen couldn't give him the smell of smoke, or the pressure of the air, or the real sound of screaming—his nervous system filled in the blanks anyway. Secondhand trauma rendered in high definition by a brain that refused to filter.

When the broadcast finally cut to commercials, Greg didn't move.

He sat frozen in the TV glow, heart hammering, fingers numb, Leo hot and restless in his chest.

Like something inside him had been lit.

And didn't intend to go out.

---

After the Screen

The commercials blurred together.

Greg didn't really see them—just color and motion flickering at the edges of his vision while his attention stayed anchored to the last image of Canberra burning behind his eyelids. Falling buildings. Scattering capes. The afterimage imprinted like light burned into a screen.

His foot was still bouncing. He noticed because it started to hurt.

He planted it flat against the carpet and pressed down hard, grounding himself through pressure. It helped a little. Not enough.

He clicked the TV off.

The sudden silence was worse.

Without the screen's glow, his room felt too small. The walls pressed in, shadows deepening in the corners. His chest felt too full, like he'd inhaled something heavy and it was stuck halfway down.

Leo paced.

Not violently. Not explosively. Just restless. Impatient.

Greg leaned back against the bed and dragged both hands through his hair, fingers catching slightly. His scalp prickled, skin buzzing like it wanted something—movement, noise, pressure, anything.

"I should be there," he said aloud, the words escaping before he could stop them.

He froze, listening to himself.

The sentence didn't sound dramatic. It didn't sound heroic.

It sounded true.

He thought about the capes again—not as symbols, not as costumes, but as bodies in motion. How they adjusted to rubble and shifting terrain. How they moved with purpose instead of apology. How no one told them to be quieter, calmer, smaller.

No one told them they were too much.

They were necessary.

Greg's chest tightened.

"I am built for this," he whispered, sending a ripple through him as he said it.

Leo surged—a warm, approving pressure blooming behind his sternum. Not a flare, no lights flickering, no air warping. Just a deep, visceral yes, like a muscle flexing in agreement.

Greg pressed a fist to his chest, breathing through it.

The approval hurt. Because immediately, his brain supplied the contrast.

Winslow's hallways. Sophia's grin. The PRT table, cold under his palms.

You need to learn to control yourself.

"I'm stuck," Greg said, bitterness creeping in. "I'm stuck in a hallway being 'too much' instead."

The words echoed in the quiet room, ugly and raw.

He imagined himself in Canberra—not as a fantasy, not as a cape swooping in at the last second, but as one piece in a formation. Someone who could take orders, read patterns, move when movement was required instead of talking when silence would have been better. He imagined the chaos not overwhelming him, but clarifying him.

The thought scared him.

And thrilled him.

Greg stood abruptly, energy spiking with nowhere to go. He crossed the room and planted his hands against the wall, forehead resting against the cool paint.

"I know I'm not there," he said quietly. "I know."

Leo didn't retreat. The warmth stayed—steady and insistent, like a reminder instead of a demand.

Greg's breathing hitched. His brain started to spiral:

You could help. You're wasting time. People are dying. You're sitting in your room watching.

His vision narrowed slightly. The familiar edge of overload crept in, thoughts crowding each other for space.

"No," he muttered, pushing off the wall and forcing himself to move. "Not like that—"

He stopped mid-step.

Movement.

Greg shifted his stance without thinking. Feet bracing, knees bending. He let his arms come up loosely and started moving—slow at first, controlled. Punch. Step. Turn. The sequence grounded him, pulled the spiraling thoughts into something linear.

As he moved, the images of Canberra shifted.

Not disappearing—reframing. Instead of collapsing buildings, he saw vectors. Instead of screaming crowds, he saw flow patterns. Instead of helplessness, he saw roles.

Leo flowed with him, the restless pacing in his chest smoothing into alignment.

Greg exhaled hard through his nose, sweat prickling at his temples.

"This isn't about wanting to be a hero," he said, breathless. "It's about fit."

The word landed solidly.

Fit.

Winslow didn't fit him. The PRT interview hadn't fit him. Hallways and social scripts and tone policing didn't fit him.

But chaos? Urgency? A situation where intensity wasn't a flaw but a requirement?

His body responded to that idea like it was a missing piece.

Greg stopped moving and leaned his hands on his knees, breathing evenly.

The ache in his chest didn't fade—but it changed. It wasn't frustration anymore.

It was longing.

A deep, raw pull toward a place where he wouldn't have to apologize for how strongly he felt. Where his inability to filter might become an advantage instead of a liability.

Leo pressed warmly at the center of that longing—not urging him to act yet. Just marking it.

Greg straightened slowly.

"I don't want to be unseen," he said, quietly but firmly.

The words settled into him like a truth he'd been circling for years without naming.

He didn't turn the TV back on. He didn't need to.

Canberra was still burning somewhere far away, etched into his nervous system like a scar. And here, in a small room in Brockton Bay, a different fire had caught—smaller, quieter, but no less real.

One that whispered of purpose.

And refused to be ignored.

---

The Rooftop

The roof access door stuck the way it always did.

Greg shouldered it open, metal scraping against metal with a sound that made him wince. He paused immediately afterward, listening, counting breaths. The stairwell stayed empty. No footsteps, no voices.

Good.

The rooftop air hit him all at once—cold, salty, carrying the distant breath of the ocean. It cut through the leftover heat under his skin, sharp enough to feel real. The city stretched out below in a scatter of lights: yellow and white and red, blinking and steady, moving and still all at once.

Cars traced thin glowing lines along the streets. Sirens wailed somewhere far away, muted by distance. The wind tugged at his shirt, pressed against his chest like it was checking to see if he was solid.

Greg walked to the edge and stopped a safe distance back, toes firmly on concrete. He didn't need to get closer. Heights didn't call to him the way they did to some people. He just needed the space.

The city made sense from up here. Not emotionally. Structurally. Flow of traffic. Patterns of light. Movement that followed rules even when people didn't realize they were following them.

Leo settled as Greg leaned his forearms against the low ledge and looked out. The warmth in his chest synced with the cool night air, not fighting it, just existing alongside it.

Canberra drifted back in without permission.

The falling buildings. The capes moving like parts of a machine too large to see all at once. The calm voices trying to impose order on something that didn't want it.

He imagined the distance between here and there—not just physical, but existential. An ocean of permission and training and trust separating him from the people who were allowed to do something when the world cracked open.

His jaw tightened.

Then his thoughts shifted, pulled by quieter gravity.

Taylor.

Not the hallway version first—the stiff shoulders, the clipped voice, the way she'd stepped back from him—but the image his brain insisted on returning to, uninvited and uncomfortably vivid.

The locker.

He hadn't been there. He'd only caught fragments. Rumors. The sanitized version teachers used. But the way Taylor moved now—scanning rooms, flinching at noise—filled in gaps his imagination didn't want to complete.

Girl who broke and didn't disappear.

The phrase surfaced fully formed.

Greg swallowed.

Most people who broke at Winslow disappeared in pieces. They skipped classes. They faded into background noise. They learned how to be smaller.

Taylor had vanished—and come back. Not healed. Not whole. But present.

That mattered.

"She didn't disappear," Greg murmured, the words carried away by the wind. "She came back."

He didn't frame her as someone he wanted to date. No fantasy attached, no soft-focus future scenes. What he felt wasn't romantic in the way movies defined it.

It was reverence, maybe. Recognition.

Someone else the world didn't listen to.

That thought stung.

Greg rested his chin briefly on his forearms and stared out at the city. The ache in his chest shifted—becoming sharper, more directional.

Protective.

Not the dramatic kind. No imagined showdowns. What he wanted was quieter and harder: he wanted Taylor to not be alone in rooms like that hallway. He wanted the world to stop pressing her into smaller shapes.

And beneath that—deeper, more unsettling—was the realization that he'd wanted the same for himself for a long time.

His thoughts drifted, pulled by another anchor.

Miss Militia.

Not her uniform. Not her reputation. Her expression.

The way she'd looked at him in the hallway after the evaluation—not cautious, not disgusted, not alarmed.

Steady.

Like she hadn't flinched when he showed her the worst of himself.

Greg exhaled slowly, breath fogging faintly in the night air.

"She didn't flinch," he said quietly.

The memory replayed—not the words this time, but the posture. The way she'd stood beside him instead of in front of him. The way she'd asked permission to share space.

Adult who didn't flinch. His brain filed it away carefully, like a rare data point.

There weren't many adults like that. Most either tried to fix him, control him, or ignore him. Miss Militia had done none of those things. She'd separated him from his emotions instead of condemning both together. She'd spoken to him like someone who could grow instead of someone who needed to be contained.

Greg straightened slightly, city lights reflecting in his eyes.

"I want her to trust me one day," he said, the words emerging slowly, deliberately. "Really trust me."

Not as a kid who needed managing. Not as a liability.

As someone reliable.

Leo stirred—not with the fiery approval from earlier, but with something deeper and steadier. Like a foundation settling.

The wind gusted, tugging harder at his shirt, and for a moment he imagined standing somewhere else—on a rooftop in Canberra, or anywhere the world had broken open and needed people who didn't look away.

He wasn't there.

But he could feel the distance now.

And distance meant a path.

---

Three Threads

Greg stepped back from the ledge and turned, pacing slowly across the rooftop. Each step echoed faintly underfoot, the rhythm grounding him. He moved the way he had in his room—measured, intentional, letting thoughts line up instead of collide.

Three threads wove together in his mind, separate but connected.

Taylor. Miss Militia. Himself.

He stopped near the center of the roof and looked up at the sky—dark and wide and indifferent.

Leo burned hot and restless in his chest, not angry, not explosive, but alive. It wanted movement. Direction. Context.

Greg closed his eyes and let the feeling wash through him instead of fighting it.

He didn't realize he was choosing anything yet.

He just stood there, breathing in cold air, city noise far below, distant memories of a falling city overlapping with the quiet everyday violence of hallways and lockers and unread expressions.

After a while, he moved back toward the ledge. Not to the edge—never that—but close enough that the city opened up beneath him again, lights scattered like constellations that didn't care whether anyone understood them.

Canberra rose in his mind without warning.

Not the broadcast version—not captions and camera shake—but the idea of it. A city caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. A place where intensity wasn't a personality flaw, where screaming orders and raw urgency weren't impolite, just necessary.

His chest burned.

Leo paced, heat coiling behind his sternum like a fire that had finally been given air.

Greg rested his hands on the concrete ledge and looked down at the streets, following the movement of cars with the same analytical part of his brain that had tracked cape formations on the screen. Movement. Flow. Pressure.

The city felt alive in a way Winslow never did.

His thoughts drifted back to Taylor.

Not the hallway. Not Sophia. Not the way everything had gone wrong. He thought of her standing in that classroom, shoulders tight, eyes scanning like she expected the room to turn on her at any second. The rumors. The half-remembered whispers about the locker, about how far it had gone before anyone stopped it.

Girl who broke and didn't disappear.

Greg let the thought finish forming this time, instead of shoving it away.

I want her to be okay.

The sentence landed quietly but firmly, like a stone set into place.

Not I want her. Not I want to save her. Not even I want to protect her.

Just—I want her to not be broken like that again.

The difference mattered.

He didn't imagine himself as her center. He didn't imagine her needing him. What he wanted was smaller and harder: a world where people like Taylor didn't have to carry that much alone.

Greg exhaled slowly.

The thought settled without drama, without fanfare. It didn't demand action yet. It didn't come with a plan.

It just was.

His thoughts shifted again, tugged by that other steady gravity.

Miss Militia. The hallway. The quiet pause. The way she'd asked permission to stand beside him.

Adult who didn't flinch.

Greg closed his eyes briefly, replaying her expression—not softened with pity, not sharpened with suspicion. Just steady. Accepting the intensity without trying to smother it or weaponize it.

"I want her to trust me one day," he whispered into the wind. "Really trust me."

Not because he needed her approval. Not because he wanted to impress her.

Because trust meant responsibility. Because it meant becoming someone whose presence didn't make people brace themselves. Someone who could be relied on.

The warmth in his chest deepened—Leo's approval shifting from restless heat to something heavier, more grounded. Like a promise waiting for structure.

Greg's jaw set.

And then—without warning or ceremony—a third thought rose from somewhere deeper than the others.

Not about Taylor. Not about Miss Militia.

About him.

He opened his eyes and stared out at the city—the distant sirens and blinking lights and endless grinding motion of a world that didn't slow down because you were overwhelmed.

"I will not die small and unseen," Greg said.

The words startled him with their certainty.

They weren't angry. They weren't loud. They weren't ambitious in the way he'd been taught ambition was supposed to look.

They were a refusal.

A refusal to keep shrinking himself to fit spaces that didn't want him anyway. A refusal to let his intensity rot into shame. A refusal to be present only as a problem.

Leo roared in response—not outward, not audible, but inside him, a full-bodied surge of heat and approval that made Greg's breath catch.

Not a destructive roar.

A claiming one.

Greg stood there, chest heaving, hands gripping the ledge harder than he realized. The city below him blurred slightly as emotion pressed behind his eyes—not tears, not quite, but close.

He could feel it now.

The path.

Not mapped. Not safe. Not balanced. Still tilted dangerously toward over-expression, toward intensity unfiltered by experience or restraint. Toward a future where his honesty and force could either build something real—or burn everything around him.

He didn't know that yet.

All he knew was that standing still wasn't an option anymore.

The roar in his chest stayed hot and restless, a fire that refused to dim because the world preferred quieter boys. And as Greg stepped back from the ledge and turned toward the stairwell and the long walk back down into ordinary life, he carried Canberra with him.

Not as fear. As memory. As warning. As promise.

Somewhere far away, a city had fallen.

Here, in Brockton Bay, another kind of fire had just been lit.

And Greg Veder—awkward, intense, unfiltered—had chosen, without fully realizing it, the path that would demand everything he was.