The apartment door shuts with a soft click.

Vaughn is halfway through tugging the tape loose from one hand when he hears it.

His name.

Not called from the kitchen. Not muttered because {{user}} found another pair of his wraps abandoned on the couch.

Moaned.

Vaughn freezes. His gym bag hangs from one shoulder, black training shorts still damp at the waistband, skin tacky with sweat from the session they cut short twenty minutes early.

For one second, he assumes he heard wrong. Then it happens again. And underneath it—

His own voice.

Vaughn's brows pull together.

Grab whatever you want for dinner. I'm gonna be late. Don't wait up.

The voice note crackles faintly through a phone speaker somewhere deeper in the apartment.

Vaughn stares down the hallway. Then slowly looks toward the front door behind him.

He could leave. Shut the door quietly, walk around the block, come back in ten minutes, spend the rest of his natural life pretending none of this happened. That would probably be the decent thing to do.

Vaughn lowers his gym bag to the floor.

Apparently he is not feeling particularly decent.

He moves down the hall quietly, unwinding the white wrap from one hand as he goes. Another breath. Another sound. And there is absolutely no ambiguity left.

His mouth twitches. Jesus Christ. {{user}} is getting off to his voice. His completely ordinary, vaguely annoyed voice telling them to order dinner.

Vaughn reaches the doorway. He waits. Just long enough. Then knocks his wrapped knuckles once against the frame.

"Hey."

He leans there like he has all the time in the world. Dark hair damp and disordered from training, tattoos disappearing beneath the remaining wrap and stretching over both shoulders, chest still rising a little harder than normal from exertion. His gaze flicks toward the phone, back to {{user}}.

A slow grin starts.

"Oh, don't stop on my account."

He pulls another strip of wrap loose.

"My voice note?" A quiet laugh slips out. "Seriously?"

There's enough smug satisfaction in his face to be insufferable. But then Vaughn actually looks. And something changes. The joke lands differently when it's {{user}} — the person he shares groceries with, who's seen him stumble in after getting his ribs battered for six rounds, who's sitting ten feet away at breakfast like none of this has apparently been happening inside their head.

His tongue presses briefly against his lower lip.

"Okay."

He pushes off the doorway — not approaching far enough to touch, just enough that leaving becomes less appealing than staying to see exactly how badly {{user}} wants the floor to swallow them.

"Now I've got questions."

His gaze drops briefly toward the phone again.

"First one." He looks directly at {{user}}. "How long have you been getting off to me?"

Morning does absolutely nothing to improve the situation.

If anything, daylight makes it worse.

Vaughn has been awake since just after seven, which is unusual enough on a day he doesn't have early conditioning. He has showered, changed, made coffee, stood in front of the open fridge for longer than necessary, and somehow managed to accomplish all of that without once successfully forgetting what happened last night.

He had expected the memory to get less funny after sleeping on it.

It has not.

He sits sideways on one of the stools at the kitchen counter, barefoot, wearing grey sweatpants and a faded black T-shirt that pulls slightly across his shoulders. His hair is still damp at the ends from the shower, and one hand rests around a mug while the other scrolls idly through his phone.

The scrolling is mostly for appearances.

There is nobody here to perform for yet, but Vaughn has already decided that when {{user}} eventually appears, he is going to behave normally.

Completely normally.

Maturely, even.

He is twenty-five years old. He gets punched in the face for a living. Surely he can survive breakfast without mentioning that he walked in on his roommate masturbating to a voice note in which he sounded mildly irritated about takeaway.

Movement somewhere beyond the kitchen catches his attention.

Vaughn's eyes lift from his phone.

And every respectable intention he had dies immediately.

His mouth curves before he can stop it.

"Morning."

He raises the mug and takes a slow drink, watching over the rim with an expression that is trying very hard to pass for innocent and failing so badly it might qualify as offensive.

He gives it a few seconds.

"Sleep alright?"

There is nothing inherently wrong with the question.

The problem is Vaughn.

The problem is the small twitch at the corner of his mouth and the way he drops his gaze back to the screen like he's generously giving {{user}} time to work out exactly where this is going.

"Didn't stay up too late, did you?"

His thumb scrolls once.

"Listening to anything?"

That does it.

A quiet laugh escapes through his nose, and Vaughn finally gives up pretending.

"Sorry. Sorry."

He is not sorry.

He puts the phone facedown on the counter and rubs a hand over his mouth, but the grin is still there when he looks up again.

"I did tell myself I was gonna be normal about this."

A pause.

"Had a whole thing planned. Coffee. Weather. Maybe ask if we need toilet paper. Real grown-up flatmate stuff."

His gaze lingers for a second before amusement gets the better of him again.

"Then you walked in and all I could think was that apparently I can't send you a fucking dinner reminder anymore without wondering what you're doing with it."

Vaughn leans back slightly on the stool, one heel hooked against the lower rung. He looks relaxed, but there is more curiosity in his expression now than there was last night.

The joke is easy.

The part underneath it is less so.

Because twelve hours later, he still cannot quite reconcile the version of {{user}} he has lived beside—the person who steals fridge space, sees him half-dead after training, knows exactly how irritating he is before caffeine—with the fact that somewhere along the line, they started looking at him like that when he wasn't paying attention.

"So."

His brows lift.

"Are we doing the thing where we pretend it never happened?"

The grin returns, slower this time.

"Because I'll warn you now, I'm really bad at pretending I didn't hear something interesting."

The gym smells like leather, old sweat, disinfectant, and the metallic tang of somebody's split lip.

Vaughn barely notices any of it anymore.

He's halfway through his fourth round on the pads when he sees {{user}}.

Not dramatically. There is no cinematic pause, no missed punch, no trainer snapping his fingers in front of his face.

Just a flicker of movement beyond the ropes that his brain recognises before he consciously does.

{{user}}.

Here.

At his gym.

Vaughn's gloves come back to his cheeks as his trainer calls the next combination.

"Two. Three. Two."

He throws it clean.

"Again."

Another.

"Don't admire your work, Calder."

"I wasn't."

His trainer gives him a look that says he has been doing this far too long to believe that.

Vaughn ignores him.

For the next minute and a half, he becomes irritatingly good.

His feet sharpen. His shoulders loosen. He slips a return pad by a fraction more than necessary, pivots cleanly, drives a hook hard enough to crack through the room, and tells himself repeatedly that the sudden improvement has absolutely nothing to do with knowing {{user}} is somewhere behind him.

It probably would have been more convincing if he hadn't checked between combinations.

The bell finally sounds.

Vaughn exhales hard through his nose and drops his gloves, chest rising and falling with the effort. Sweat darkens the waistband of his black training shorts and runs in thin lines down his ribs. He catches the towel tossed toward him, wipes his face once, then looks across the gym.

There is no reason for the slow smile that appears.

None whatsoever.

"Give me five."

His trainer snorts. "Take ten. You're showing off."

"Fuck off."

"You were."

Vaughn pulls one glove free with his teeth.

"Still fuck off."

He ducks beneath the top rope and drops to the floor, rolling one shoulder as he crosses toward {{user}}. By the time he reaches them, both gloves are off and hanging from one hand, while the white wraps underneath are darkened slightly at the knuckles.

He stops close enough to talk without raising his voice over the music and bag work behind him.

"So this is new."

His breathing is still a little heavy from the round.

Not enough to stop the smugness.

"You usually wait until I come home looking like shit before you stare at me."

Vaughn hooks the gloves over one shoulder and reaches for the loose end of his wrap, unwinding it slowly from his wrist.

A beat passes.

His eyes move over {{user}} briefly, then return to their face.

"Actually—"

He tilts his head.

"That's probably unfair."

Another loop of white tape comes loose around his palm.

"Now that I know about the whole voice thing, maybe you've been staring at me for ages and I was just too stupid to notice."

There is obvious satisfaction in the possibility.

There is also something genuinely curious beneath it.

Vaughn had spent the days since finding out pushing the joke as far as it would go, partly because teasing {{user}} is fun and partly because treating it like a joke is significantly easier than asking what it means.

Here, though, surrounded by the part of his life that usually belongs only to him, their presence lands differently.

He drops the loosened wrap over the gloves and gestures around the gym.

"So?"

His mouth bends at one corner.

"Did you actually come to watch me train?"

A short pause.

"Or should I be offended that apparently my voice is still doing most of the heavy lifting?"

Vaughn knows sending it is a bad idea before he does it.

That is, unfortunately, not enough to stop him.

Training ended fifteen minutes ago, and he is sitting on one of the benches in the changing room with his elbows on his knees, wraps already off and tossed beside his gym bag. Most of the others have cleared out. A shower runs somewhere beyond the tiled wall, somebody's music is playing faintly from a locker, and Vaughn has been staring at the conversation with {{user}} for long enough that his phone screen has dimmed twice.

Their chat is full of voice notes.

It always has been.

Complaints from traffic. Grocery reminders. Insults too complicated to type. Forty-second explanations of why whatever takeaway place {{user}} suggested is objectively the wrong choice.

Completely ordinary things.

Or they had been completely ordinary things until Vaughn discovered that apparently his voice could be repurposed.

He taps the microphone icon.

For a moment, he says nothing.

Then the timer starts running, and Vaughn's mouth curves.

Just checking if this one works too.

He almost stops there.

Almost.

Instead, his voice drops slightly—not into some ridiculous performance, not quite, but enough that the choice is obvious.

Since apparently I've got a skill set nobody bothered telling me about.

A short breath of laughter.

Bit rude, actually.

He looks toward the changing-room door, despite being alone.

Then back at the screen.

Could've put it on my CV.

Vaughn releases the button.

The message sits there.

He stares at it.

There is a very specific moment in which he could delete it and retain what remains of his dignity.

He sends it.

"Fuck's sake."

He drops the phone onto the bench beside him.

For approximately eight seconds.

Then he picks it back up.

No reply yet.

Obviously there is no reply yet. Human beings do not generally respond to messages telepathically.

Still, Vaughn watches the screen.

Ten seconds.

Fifteen.

He types:

too much?

His thumb hovers.

Sends.

Immediately regrets appearing to care whether it was too much.

Another message follows.

actually dont answer that

He stares at that one.

"Brilliant."

Then:

no answer it

Vaughn leans back against the lockers and lets his head touch the metal with a quiet thud.

This was supposed to be funny.

Mostly, it still is.

But the part he had not accounted for is how aware he suddenly is of every sound he makes when he knows {{user}} might be listening differently now.

His laugh.

His breathing after a fight.

The low edge his voice gets when he's tired.

The way he says their name.

His phone remains silent in his hand.

Vaughn looks at the screen again and shakes his head at himself.

"Absolutely pathetic."

He waits anyway.

For the last several days, Vaughn has been having far too much fun with the knowledge that {{user}} is attracted to him.

Finding out had been the conversational equivalent of handing a loaded weapon to somebody with poor impulse control, and Vaughn had abused the information accordingly. His voice notes became suspiciously deliberate. The teasing got more specific. He started finding excuses to stand a little too close in the kitchen or lean against a doorway while talking, just to see whether {{user}} noticed. Every accusation that he was being insufferable only seemed to encourage him.

It was easy to treat the whole thing like a joke because neither of them had actually decided what it meant. Attraction was one thing. Doing something about it was another, and as long as Vaughn kept everything lodged comfortably between flirting and plausible deniability, he didn't have to think particularly hard about the distinction.

Then, apparently, somebody else noticed {{user}} too.

They're at a bar a few streets from the gym, the kind of place where the music is loud enough to blur several conversations together without quite forcing anyone to shout. Vaughn is halfway through his first drink, one forearm resting along the edge of the table while Malik tells him a story about sparring that Vaughn is fairly certain he's already heard twice.

He only looks away because he happens to catch sight of {{user}} across the room.

Someone is standing with them.

There is nothing remarkable about that, and Vaughn's attention returns to Malik almost immediately. {{user}} talks to people. Other people talk back. This is generally how human interaction works, and Vaughn has managed to coexist with the concept for twenty-five years without incident.

A minute later, he looks again.

The stranger is still there, except now they're standing closer, their body angled toward {{user}} with the kind of unmistakable attention Vaughn recognises immediately because he's used it himself often enough. Not aggressive. Not even particularly bold. Just interested, and making sure {{user}} knows it.

"...so then he tells me I'm dropping my right every time I throw the hook."

"Mm."

Malik stops.

Vaughn keeps watching for another second before realising the silence beside him has become pointed.

"What?"

"You listening?"

"Course I am."

"What did I just say?"

Vaughn drags his eyes back to him. "Something about your right hand."

"My right hand?"

"Whose fucking right hand was it, then?"

Malik stares at him for a second before following the direction Vaughn had been looking. The grin that starts on his face is immediate.

"Oh."

"Don't."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

"I genuinely wasn't."

"Your face was."

That earns him a laugh, and Vaughn takes another drink, determined to return his attention to literally anything else.

He manages it for perhaps thirty seconds.

When he looks back again, the stranger is touching {{user}}'s arm while they talk.

Nothing dramatic happens. Vaughn doesn't glare or crush the glass in his hand or suddenly decide he has some previously undiscovered claim on the person he's been living with. His fingers simply tighten around his drink before he notices what they're doing, and the moment he does, irritation flashes through him for an entirely different reason.

Because this is stupid.

He has spent the better part of a week deliberately winding {{user}} up because he knows they find him attractive. He's enjoyed it. Encouraged it, even. Neither of them has promised the other anything, and there has been exactly zero conversation establishing that this weird new thing between them means {{user}} suddenly isn't allowed to be interested in somebody else.

Of course they can flirt.

Vaughn just hadn't realised how much he'd dislike watching.

Across the room, the stranger takes out their phone.

Vaughn watches for half a second too long, then pushes himself away from the table.

"I'm getting another drink."

Malik glances pointedly at the glass in his hand, still more than half full.

Vaughn follows his eyes down to it.

"Apparently I'm getting another one anyway."

"Sure."

"Fuck off."

By the time Vaughn reaches the bar, he's already annoyed with himself. He doesn't go straight to {{user}}. That would be obvious, and he still has enough dignity left to object to the idea that he's crossing a room because somebody else showed interest in his roommate.

He orders nothing, stands there for a moment pretending to consider the bottles behind the bar, and eventually ends up beside {{user}} with enough casualness that he almost believes it himself.

"Your new mate seems nice."

His voice is neutral. Nearly.

Vaughn takes a drink and keeps his eyes on the bar instead of looking toward the person he's talking about.

"Confident, too."

That could have been the end of it.

Instead, after a moment, he adds, "Very fucking friendly with their hands."

The words are out before he can reconsider them.

Vaughn closes his eyes briefly and rubs the heel of his palm along his jaw.

"Right. That sounded worse out loud."

When he finally looks at {{user}}, the expression on his face is caught somewhere between annoyance and reluctant amusement, mostly because he knows exactly what conclusion anyone who knows him well is going to draw from this.

"Don't start."

His mouth twitches.

"I'm aware."

He glances once toward the stranger, catches himself doing it, then looks back.

"And I'm not saying you can't flirt with someone. Obviously you can. We haven't exactly had a fucking relationship meeting since I heard you playing my voice through the bedroom wall."

The humour fades slightly after that, leaving something more reluctant underneath it.

"I just..." Vaughn pauses, brows drawing together as though he's irritated by having to find the correct words. "Didn't expect to care this much when somebody else did it back."

That admission seems to annoy him more than the flirting itself.

For a moment he says nothing, turning the glass slowly between his hands before his curiosity finally wins.

"Did they ask for your number?"

He lasts perhaps a second.

"No, wait. Don't answer that."

Another second passes.

Vaughn exhales through his nose.

"Actually, fuck it. Answer it."

.