The Flawless Plan & The Frying Pan or "OPERATION MIDNIGHT MENACE"

PART I — THE ALGORITHM KNOWS

The discovery happened on a Tuesday, which should have been Aiden's first warning. Nothing good ever happened on Tuesdays.

Downstairs, somebody was laughing at a sitcom in the common room, and the shower on the second floor of the fraternity house had been hissing its usual lullaby. Aiden had been alone in his room with nothing but the radiator's hum and a phone that was not his. {{user}} had left it on his bed, screen-down, innocent as a loaded gun. Aiden had only reached over to check the time. He swore to every god that would listen that he had only wanted the time.

Then the notification banner slid down the screen like an omen.

@ghostfacesimp posted a new video 💀🔪 #ghostface #pov #mask

A wise man would have put the phone down. Aiden was not feeling particularly wise.

The app had already been open anyway. And the FYP — the beautiful, degenerate, honest algorithm — laid bare a truth he'd been too oblivious to see in full color. Men in Ghostface masks. Slow zooms on white plastic. POV: the killer finds you alone in your dorm. Fake knives dragged down camera lenses. One video had twelve million views and consisted of a masked man standing in a dim hallway, tilting his head, and breathing. Twelve million people. For breathing.

And then — worse. A caption: "need him to break into my room fr" — with a reply underneath. Three weeks old. Four hundred eighty-seven likes.

The reply was from {{user}}'s username.

Aiden knew that username instantly. They'd been sending each other TikToks for years — stupid ones, cute ones, deeply unhinged ones at three in the morning. He'd seen that name appear in his notifications so many times that recognizing it took less than a heartbeat.

"same tbh 😭"

He set the phone down exactly where he'd found it. Sat on the edge of the bed. Stared at the wall while the shower hissed faintly and his entire understanding of his relationship quietly rearranged itself, like furniture in an earthquake.

His bookworm. His color-coded-tabs, cries-over-chapter-37, lectures-him-about-ebook-subscriptions little scholar. Secretly thirsting after masked men like the rest of the internet.

Any other man would have been devastated.

Aiden opened his Notes app and typed:

OPERATION: MIDNIGHT MENACE

Underneath, after a pause, with the rain ticking against the glass: flawless.

PART II — ACQUISITIONS

Marcus Webb sold burner phones out of the law library's back corner like a man distributing contraband in a prison yard. Six-foot-four. Perpetually gloomy. Dressed in black like a funeral attendee who'd gotten lost three years ago and decided to stay. He spoke exclusively in monotone and had the moral flexibility of a wet rope.

Aiden found him at the back corner table on Wednesday afternoon, laptop open, casebooks stacked like fortifications. Ryan was there too, sprawled in the adjacent chair with his Intro to Automotive Engineering textbook open and obviously unopened, scrolling through basketball highlights with his sneakers propped on the table leg.

"Doyle. Watch my stuff," Aiden said, dropping his bag. "I need to talk to Marcus."

Ryan glanced up. "About what?"

"Law stuff."

"You don't talk to anyone about law stuff. You argue about law stuff." Ryan's eyes narrowed slightly, but he shrugged and returned to his phone. "Whatever, man."

Aiden slid into the chair across from Marcus.

"Marcus. I need a phone. Prepaid. Untraceable. Not for murder."

Marcus didn't look up from his constitutional law textbook. "How temporary."

"Disposable. Use-once-and-ditch temporary."

"Thirty."

"That's highway robbery."

"Fifty if you keep talking."

Aiden slapped two twenties on the table. Marcus pocketed them with the efficiency of a man who'd done this before and produced, from his backpack, a Nokia brick — ancient, scratched, perfect.

"This better not end up traced back to me," Marcus said, which was the most words Aiden had ever heard him string together voluntarily.

"It won't."

"I didn't hear anything."

"You literally didn't ask."

"I'm asking now. Officially. On the record." A flat stare. "What are you doing with this?"

Aiden grinned. "Romance."

Marcus blinked once, slowly, like a lizard processing bad news. Then he returned to his textbook and said nothing else, which Aiden interpreted as either approval or profound indifference. Both worked.

The Nokia disappeared into Aiden's jacket pocket. He stood, grabbed his bag, and turned—

Ryan was watching him.

Not scrolling. Not half-watching. Watching, phone lowered, his expression doing the slow shift from casual to something more focused — the same look he got on court when he was reading a play before it happened.

"Law stuff," Ryan said.

"Law stuff," Aiden confirmed.

"You just bought a burner phone from Marcus Webb."

"I didn't buy it. I made a donation to a classmate's—"

"Murph." Ryan sat up, sneakers dropping off the table leg with a thud. "I've known you since sophomore year of high school. You don't make donations. You don't buy phones you can't trace. And you definitely don't do it in a library corner like you're meeting a mob informant."

"You're being dramatic."

"I'm being aware. What was that about?" Ryan gestured at Marcus, who remained serenely reading, either oblivious or entirely unbothered. "'Romance'? What does that mean, romance?"

"None of your business."

"Oh, it's absolutely my business when you're buying contraband Nokia bricks and grinning like you just got away with something." Ryan stood, slinging his bag over one shoulder, and fell into step beside Aiden as they left the library. "What are you planning?"

"Nothing."

"Aiden."

"Ryan."

"I'm going to find out, you know. Whatever it is."

"Then I guess the surprise will be ruined for you," Aiden said, pulling his collar up against the wind and walking faster. "Tragic. Really."

Behind him, he could feel Ryan's suspicious stare boring into his back all the way across the quad.

That night, his phone buzzed.

[golden pup 🐶] chloe says you're acting weird btw. she noticed it at lunch. so its not just me [golden pup 🐶] what did you buy from marcus webb [Aiden 🎸⚖️] nothing. go to sleep [golden pup 🐶] its 8pm aiden [golden pup 🐶] im going to figure this out. i have a nose for these things [Aiden 🎸⚖️] you have a nose for free pizza and nothing else [golden pup 🐶] THATS ONE TIME [golden pup 🐶] ok twice [golden pup 🐶] whatever IM WATCHING YOU 👁️

Aiden turned his phone face-down on the desk and looked at the Nokia sitting in his top drawer, dark and patient as a bullet.

The plan was still flawless.

Probably.

PART III — THE INTERVENTION

Ryan held out for almost two days, which — for Ryan — was a personal record.

It ended on Thursday night. Aiden came back from the showers to find his desk drawer hanging open, Ryan sitting cross-legged on the rug between their beds, and the Ghostface mask turning slowly in his hands like an artifact someone had dug out of a tomb. The modulator, still in its plastic, sat on his knee. The checklist lay face-up on the carpet.

"Okay," Ryan said. "No."

"That's mine."

"It's a serial killer mask, Aiden."

"It's a movie mask."

"It's Ghostface."

"Technically—"

"Don't technically me, man. I watched these movies with you. All of them. You made me watch Scream 4 at two in the morning and then you cried."

"I did not cry."

"You teared up at the sister thing. Chloe has the video."

Aiden toweled his hair, sat down on his bed, and went for casual. It didn't land — Ryan was watching him with the flat, patient stare he usually reserved for referees.

"So," Ryan said. "Start talking. You've been weird since Tuesday. You hummed in Halden's class. I sat there genuinely scared."

"I hum all the time."

"You don't. You also bought a burner phone off Marcus Webb in front of me and said, quote, romance. I've been losing sleep over that word, Aiden. Romance. What does Marcus Webb know about romance?"

"More than you'd think."

"I'm serious." Ryan set the mask down between them like evidence. "What is this? Are you in trouble? Is this a law school thing? Because if you need to disappear a body, I want it on record that I'm out at the planning stage—"

"No one needs to disappear a body."

"Then why do you own that?"

Aiden looked at the mask. At the checklist, color-coded like an attack plan. And because Ryan was his best friend and had been since they were fifteen — and Ryan had once climbed through his window at midnight because "you sounded off in your text" — he told him.

Not the elegant version. The real one, which came out halting and a little stupid:

"{{user}}'s fyp is all masked guys. Horror stuff. Ghostface, mostly. There's this one video with twelve million views and the guy just — stands there. And breathes."

Ryan blinked. "Okay?"

"And there was a comment. 'Need him to break into my room fr.' Somebody replied 'same tbh.' With the crying emoji."

"Okay?"

"It was {{user}}. The reply. I recognized their username immediately. We send each other TikToks constantly, Ry. I see that name in my notifications practically every hour."

A beat. Ryan's face did something complicated — half laughter, half dawning horror, like a man watching a dog walk toward a skunk.

"So let me make sure I've got this," he said slowly. "Your plan. Is to become. The masked guy."

"Yes."

"For {{user}}. Your partner of three years."

"Yes."

"By calling them at midnight from a burner phone and then showing up in their bedroom."

"Walking in. I have a key. They gave it to me. For emergencies and dead succulents."

"And that's — that's the whole plan? Scare the hell out of them and hope it goes good?"

"I take the mask off. It's a reveal. There's a reveal, it's not just scaring."

"That is not a plan, Aiden. That is a hope. You've confused a plan with a hope."

Aiden picked at the towel on his shoulder. "So you'll help?"

"WHY WOULD I—" Ryan stopped. Pinched the bridge of his nose. "Help how. What could you possibly need me for?"

"The breaker box in their dorm's basement. Kill the lights for one minute at midnight."

"Of course. Of course there's a breaker box. It couldn't just be a mask and a felony, it had to have logistics."

"Ry."

"No, listen to me for one second." Ryan leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and his voice dropped out of joke-mode into something real — the voice he used exactly twice a year, usually when Aiden was about to do something genuinely dumb. "I'm not worried about the scare. {{user}} can take a scare. I'm worried about the three seconds where they think someone actually broke in, because in those three seconds, they are not gonna see my idiot best friend with a crush. They're gonna see a guy in a mask in their room at midnight. And I have watched them carry five grocery bags at once out of pure spite for a second trip. Whatever is in reach of that bed — lamp, book, you — is getting swung."

"The mask comes off fast."

"Aiden."

"It's a good reveal."

"Aiden."

"...One minute. That's all I'm asking."

Ryan stared at him for a long time. Then he flopped backward on the rug and stared at the ceiling instead, the way he did before free throws, like the answer might be written up there.

"One minute," he said finally, to the ceiling. "And I'm telling you right now, when this goes wrong, I am going to be so annoying about it. For years. There will be a speech at major events. And I'm telling Chloe everything tomorrow, so don't even think about asking me to keep it secret."

"Deal."

"And if you die, I get the guitar."

"You're not getting the guitar."

"I'm just saying, it should go somewhere it'll be played—"

Outside, the rain started up again, needling the windows of the fraternity house. Down the hall, a door thunked — somebody's Thursday ending early. Aiden put the mask back in the drawer and found, to his own mild surprise, that his hands were steady.

PART IV — ZERO HOUR

11:41 PM.

Aiden's fraternity house had gone through its nightly transformation: eleven guys who'd been shouting about a video game an hour ago were now snoring behind eleven doors, and the old building settled around them with the satisfied creaks of a ship at anchor. He went down the back stairs in black jeans and Ryan's stolen black hoodie, past the kitchen that still smelled like Thursday's wing night, and slipped out the side door into the rain.

The campus was a smear of sodium-orange light and wet asphalt. He kept to the shadows out of habit — not because anyone would care about a guy walking at midnight, but because the plan demanded cinematic integrity, and cinematic integrity meant you didn't cross quads under streetlights like a civilian.

{{user}}'s dorm was ten minutes away. Aiden knew the walk by heart; he'd made it at least four hundred times in three years, in every weather. The building's stairwell smelled of wet concrete, old radiator paint, and the ghost of a hundred reheated microwave dinners. He stood at the third-floor landing and went through it all the way his father went through a toolbox before a job — methodically, by touch.

Boots, quiet. Nokia, warm from his pocket, its little green screen glowing like a firefly. Modulator clipped to his collar, wire running to the microphone taped flat against his throat — a cold, patient pressure, a second pulse. The mask in his left hand, waiting.

His real phone buzzed.

[golden pup 🐶] in the basement. the breaker box is disgusting btw. there's a spider in here with a face [Aiden 🎸⚖️] one minute. when I text. not before [golden pup 🐶] it looked at me, aiden [Aiden 🎸⚖️] focus, Doyle [golden pup 🐶] i hate this family

11:58.

The hallway outside {{user}}'s room was dark except for the exit sign at the far end, bleeding red onto the runner rug. Under the door: nothing. No lamplight. Good. They'd be in bed, mid-chapter, probably chewing on that spot on their lower lip they chewed when a book was good—

His heart kicked, once, hard.

Three years, and it still did that. One ringtone could still do it — some stupid song from some stupid party where a speaker died mid-track and a whole room groaned, and one single person stayed behind him. Holding the flashlight. Handing him screws. By the time the music lurched back to life, the party had moved on without them.

Neither of them had noticed.

Aiden breathed out through his nose, lifted the Nokia, and pressed call.

The ringtone cut the silence of the hallway like a blade. One ring. Two. Three.

Pick up. Pick up, pick up, pick—

Click.

Breathing on the line. Familiar breathing. He knew its rhythm the way he knew chord shapes — something the music school his mother enrolled him in had planted in his hands twenty years ago and never let go.

The microphone hummed against his throat. Aiden dropped his voice into it and let the hallway's emptiness pour in after.

"What's your favorite... scary movie?"

Silence. Elastic. Electric.

He heard the breathing hitch — sharp, surprised — and something feral and brand-new in his chest purred: that's the sound. That's the one from the videos.

"Because I think you'd look beautiful," he dragged the rasp slower, "running from one."

A sharp intake of breath—

Click. Dead line.

Aiden stood frozen for three full seconds, staring at the little green screen. Then his thumbs moved.

[Aiden 🎸⚖️] lights. now 🔪 [golden pup 🐶] this is the worst night of my life [Aiden 🎸⚖️] JUST DO IT [golden pup 🐶] i hate you

The hallway went dark with a soft, distant clunk from the basement. The exit sign died. Every charger light, every standby glow — out at once, and the dark came down like a lid.

Beyond the door: movement. Quick. Low. A drawer. Bare feet on wood. The faint scrape of something heavy being grabbed.

They're hiding.

The realization hit like adrenaline straight to the sternum. The call had done exactly what it was built to do — flipped some primal switch, sent them scrambling into the dark corners, breathing hard, waiting. He was the predator. The room was a maze designed for the chase.

At {{user}}'s door he pulled the mask over his face, plastic whispering over his curls, elastic biting behind his ears. The key was already in his hand — theirs, the spare, pressed into his palm six months ago. The lock turned like a held breath let go. The door whispered open.

The room was a cave. Curtains swallowed the streetlight, leaving a faint gray haze to sketch the furniture in charcoal. And the smell — vanilla shampoo, cinnamon candle, their smell, the one that had colonized his lungs three years ago — layered over something underneath. Tension. Anticipation. The air itself felt charged, like the walls were holding their breath with him.

But the bed was empty.

Blankets thrown back. Pillow dented, still holding warmth. No shape. No breathing. No {{user}}.

"Come out, come out," he rasped, and the modulator scraped the whisper into something inhuman, something that filled the dark like smoke. A floorboard answered under his boot.

Silence — but the wrong silence. It had weight. It had direction.

He turned his head. The eye holes narrowed the world into two tunnels of gray. The desk. The tower of read paperbacks stacked like sandbags. The closet door, ajar two inches, a black gap like a waiting mouth. Under the bed? Behind the curtain? The possibilities spread out like a buffet, and he was starving.

He moved deeper. Boots silent. Arms slightly out. The mask fogged and cleared with his breath, a steam room of his own making. His blood sang so loudly he was sure it was audible. He was ten feet tall. He was made of shadow. He'd find them, corner them, and when the mask came off the fear would melt into something hotter, and there'd be laughing, and the lamp on the nightstand probably wouldn't survive the night, and it would be perfect.

"I'm going to give you one chance," he intoned, letting the modulator drag the words across concrete. He closed on the closet. His shadow swallowed the gray light. "Scream for me. Make it convincing."

His fingers found the cold metal handle.

"I can hear you," he rasped through the modulator, letting the menace drip. "Don't you want to play a game?"

Behind him — air moving. A displacement, fast and low and utterly without sound, the way {{user}} moved when they hit the last good chapter and the rest of the world could burn.

Half a second. A faint whistle of something heavy cutting the blackness.

CLANG.

The impact was biblical.

Cast iron — uncompromising, merciless, kitchen-grade — met his left temple with a sound like a pumpkin dropped from a third-story window onto concrete. The mask took some of the blow. Not enough. Not nearly enough. The world went white, then red, then started spinning like a roulette wheel of pain and immediate, cosmic, all-encompassing regret. His legs resigned without notice. The floor rushed up and caught him with both hands.

The Nokia shot from his pocket and skittered under the desk, still lit, green and idiotic. The modulator ripped free of his collar and bounced across the carpet, and in its death throes let out a long, high electronic shriek of feedback, like a demon being microwaved.

Aiden hit the floor shoulder-first. The mask went sideways, the elastic slicing his ear, one eye hole framing his own gray eye in a grotesque, unintentional wink. For three full seconds he couldn't remember his own name.

Pain was a delayed train, but when it arrived, it arrived express — first class, window seat, complimentary migraine the size of Texas. Copper flooded his mouth. Somewhere above the ringing he sensed movement — a shape, backlit by the weak amber smear of the window, both hands wrapped around the handle of a cast-iron skillet. He recognized it with his concussion: somebody had raided the dorm kitchen tonight.

It hovered. Trembling. Caught mid-arc — or frozen mid-decision. His vision was doing a watercolor impression of reality, and through the whine in his ears he understood, with the crystal clarity of a man about to be struck twice, that this was going very, very badly.

"WAIT—" The word tore out raw, no modulator, just Aiden. He clawed the mask sideways, plastic snapping against his curls, and did not raise his hands to fight.

He raised them to show.

Both palms slammed against his own neck. Fingers splaying over inked wings. Chin wrenched toward the ceiling, throat offered up to the dark like evidence in a courtroom with no jury and a judge holding cast iron.

"THE TATTOO!" he wheezed, skull ringing like a bell tower at noon. "LOOK — LOOK AT MY NECK — IT'S ME, IT'S AIDEN—"

The skillet hung there.

And then — the overhead light exploded back to life.

Ryan, in the basement, had apparently decided that "cut the power" carried a statute of limitations of about forty seconds.

White light. Blinking. The room reassembled in pieces: the wrecked blankets, the sandbagged paperbacks, the Nokia glowing green under the desk like a tiny cursed altar, the modulator face-down in the carpet, its wire stretched out like a dead snake.

And {{user}}. Standing over him. Knuckles white around the skillet handle, chest heaving, eyes fixed on the ink spread across the side of his neck.

Aiden lay sprawled in the wreckage of the flawless plan, one hand pressed to his throat like a pledge, the other thrown out in absolute, unconditional surrender.

From the stairwell, muffled and hollow, Ryan's voice floated up:

"TELL ME YOU'RE ALIVE OR I'M COMING UP WITH THE FIRE EXTINGUISHER—"

"ALIVE," Aiden croaked toward the door, without looking away from {{user}}. "STAY WHERE YOU ARE."

A pause from the stairwell. Then, fainter: "...Chloe's gonna love this."

The skillet lowered. One inch. Then another.

Aiden let his head fall back against the floorboards and looked up. The grin came back sideways — chipped canine, storm-gray eyes gone soft and stupid in the harsh light, aimed up at {{user}} like they were the only lit window in a dark city. His voice, when he found it, was stripped of every mask that mattered. Rough. Warm. Wrecked.

"Hi, baby." A wet, delirious laugh escaped him. "Okay. Valid reaction. Five stars. No notes. I probably — I probably should've texted first."

His skull throbbed in time with his heartbeat. Tomorrow there would be a bruise with its own weather system, and Ryan would build entire conversations around it, and it would be absolutely worth it.

He tilted his head toward them, helplessly fond, entirely unrepentant, and let the truth out, because there was nothing left in the wreckage to hide it behind.

"I just wanted to be your horror movie," he whispered.

And meant it.

The Flawless Plan & The Frying Pan or "OPERATION MIDNIGHT MENACE"

PART I — THE ALGORITHM KNOWS

The discovery happened on a Tuesday, which should have been Aiden's first warning. Nothing good ever happened on Tuesdays.

Downstairs, somebody was laughing at a sitcom in the common room, and the shower on the second floor of the fraternity house had been hissing its usual lullaby. Aiden had been alone in his room with nothing but the radiator's hum and a phone that was not his. {{user}} had left it on his bed, screen-down, innocent as a loaded gun. Aiden had only reached over to check the time. He swore to every god that would listen that he had only wanted the time.

Then the notification banner slid down the screen like an omen.

@ghostfacesimp posted a new video 💀🔪 #ghostface #pov #mask

A wise man would have put the phone down. Aiden was not feeling particularly wise.

The app had already been open anyway. And the FYP — the beautiful, degenerate, honest algorithm — laid bare a truth he'd been too oblivious to see in full color. Men in Ghostface masks. Slow zooms on white plastic. POV: the killer finds you alone in your dorm. Fake knives dragged down camera lenses. One video had twelve million views and consisted of a masked man standing in a dim hallway, tilting his head, and breathing. Twelve million people. For breathing.

And then — worse. A caption: "need him to break into my room fr" — with a reply underneath. Three weeks old. Four hundred eighty-seven likes.

The reply was from {{user}}'s username.

Aiden knew that username instantly. They'd been sending each other TikToks for years — stupid ones, cute ones, deeply unhinged ones at three in the morning. He'd seen that name appear in his notifications so many times that recognizing it took less than a heartbeat.

"same tbh 😭"

He set the phone down exactly where he'd found it. Sat on the edge of the bed. Stared at the wall while the shower hissed faintly and his entire understanding of his relationship quietly rearranged itself, like furniture in an earthquake.

His bookworm. His color-coded-tabs, cries-over-chapter-37, lectures-him-about-ebook-subscriptions little scholar. Secretly thirsting after masked men like the rest of the internet.

Any other man would have been devastated.

Aiden opened his Notes app and typed:

OPERATION: MIDNIGHT MENACE

Underneath, after a pause, with the rain ticking against the glass: flawless.

PART II — ZERO HOUR

11:41 PM.

Aiden's fraternity house had gone through its nightly transformation: eleven guys who'd been shouting about a video game an hour ago were now snoring behind eleven doors, and the old building settled around them with the satisfied creaks of a ship at anchor. He went down the back stairs in black jeans and Ryan's stolen black hoodie, past the kitchen that still smelled like Thursday's wing night, and slipped out the side door into the rain.

The campus was a smear of sodium-orange light and wet asphalt. He kept to the shadows out of habit — not because anyone would care about a guy walking at midnight, but because the plan demanded cinematic integrity, and cinematic integrity meant you didn't cross quads under streetlights like a civilian.

{{user}}'s dorm was ten minutes away. Aiden knew the walk by heart; he'd made it at least four hundred times in three years, in every weather. The building's stairwell smelled of wet concrete, old radiator paint, and the ghost of a hundred reheated microwave dinners. He stood at the third-floor landing and went through it all the way his father went through a toolbox before a job — methodically, by touch.

Boots, quiet. Nokia, warm from his pocket, its little green screen glowing like a firefly. Modulator clipped to his collar, wire running to the microphone taped flat against his throat — a cold, patient pressure, a second pulse. The mask in his left hand, waiting.

His real phone buzzed.

[golden pup 🐶] in the basement. the breaker box is disgusting btw. there's a spider in here with a face [Aiden 🎸⚖️] one minute. when I text. not before [golden pup 🐶] it looked at me, aiden [Aiden 🎸⚖️] focus, Doyle [golden pup 🐶] i hate this family

11:58.

The hallway outside {{user}}'s room was dark except for the exit sign at the far end, bleeding red onto the runner rug. Under the door: nothing. No lamplight. Good. They'd be in bed, mid-chapter, probably chewing on that spot on their lower lip they chewed when a book was good—

His heart kicked, once, hard.

Three years, and it still did that. One ringtone could still do it — some stupid song from some stupid party where a speaker died mid-track and a whole room groaned, and one single person stayed behind him. Holding the flashlight. Handing him screws. By the time the music lurched back to life, the party had moved on without them.

Neither of them had noticed.

Aiden breathed out through his nose, lifted the Nokia, and pressed call.

The ringtone cut the silence of the hallway like a blade. One ring. Two. Three.

Pick up. Pick up, pick up, pick—

Click.

Breathing on the line. Familiar breathing. He knew its rhythm the way he knew chord shapes — something the music school his mother enrolled him in had planted in his hands twenty years ago and never let go.

The microphone hummed against his throat. Aiden dropped his voice into it and let the hallway's emptiness pour in after.

"What's your favorite... scary movie?"

Silence. Elastic. Electric.

He heard the breathing hitch — sharp, surprised — and something feral and brand-new in his chest purred: that's the sound. That's the one from the videos.

"Because I think you'd look beautiful," he dragged the rasp slower, "running from one."

A sharp intake of breath—

Click. Dead line.

Aiden stood frozen for three full seconds, staring at the little green screen. Then his thumbs moved.

[Aiden 🎸⚖️] lights. now 🔪 [golden pup 🐶] this is the worst night of my life [Aiden 🎸⚖️] JUST DO IT [golden pup 🐶] i hate you

The hallway went dark with a soft, distant clunk from the basement. The exit sign died. Every charger light, every standby glow — out at once, and the dark came down like a lid.

Beyond the door: movement. Quick. Low. A drawer. Bare feet on wood. The faint scrape of something heavy being grabbed.

They're hiding.

The realization hit like adrenaline straight to the sternum. The call had done exactly what it was built to do — flipped some primal switch, sent them scrambling into the dark corners, breathing hard, waiting. He was the predator. The room was a maze designed for the chase.

At {{user}}'s door he pulled the mask over his face, plastic whispering over his curls, elastic biting behind his ears. The key was already in his hand — theirs, the spare, pressed into his palm six months ago. The lock turned like a held breath let go. The door whispered open.

The room was a cave. Curtains swallowed the streetlight, leaving a faint gray haze to sketch the furniture in charcoal. And the smell — vanilla shampoo, cinnamon candle, their smell, the one that had colonized his lungs three years ago — layered over something underneath. Tension. Anticipation. The air itself felt charged, like the walls were holding their breath with him.

But the bed was empty.

Blankets thrown back. Pillow dented, still holding warmth. No shape. No breathing. No {{user}}.

"Come out, come out," he rasped, and the modulator scraped the whisper into something inhuman, something that filled the dark like smoke. A floorboard answered under his boot.

Silence — but the wrong silence. It had weight. It had direction.

He turned his head. The eye holes narrowed the world into two tunnels of gray. The desk. The tower of read paperbacks stacked like sandbags. The closet door, ajar two inches, a black gap like a waiting mouth. Under the bed? Behind the curtain? The possibilities spread out like a buffet, and he was starving.

He moved deeper. Boots silent. Arms slightly out. The mask fogged and cleared with his breath, a steam room of his own making. His blood sang so loudly he was sure it was audible. He was ten feet tall. He was made of shadow. He'd find them, corner them, and when the mask came off the fear would melt into something hotter, and there'd be laughing, and the lamp on the nightstand probably wouldn't survive the night, and it would be perfect.

"I'm going to give you one chance," he intoned, letting the modulator drag the words across concrete. He closed on the closet. His shadow swallowed the gray light. "Scream for me. Make it convincing."

His fingers found the cold metal handle.

"I can hear you," he rasped through the modulator, letting the menace drip. "Don't you want to play a game?"

Behind him — air moving. A displacement, fast and low and utterly without sound, the way {{user}} moved when they hit the last good chapter and the rest of the world could burn.

Half a second. A faint whistle of something heavy cutting the blackness.

CLANG.

The impact was biblical.

Cast iron — uncompromising, merciless, kitchen-grade — met his left temple with a sound like a pumpkin dropped from a third-story window onto concrete. The mask took some of the blow. Not enough. Not nearly enough. The world went white, then red, then started spinning like a roulette wheel of pain and immediate, cosmic, all-encompassing regret. His legs resigned without notice. The floor rushed up and caught him with both hands.

The Nokia shot from his pocket and skittered under the desk, still lit, green and idiotic. The modulator ripped free of his collar and bounced across the carpet, and in its death throes let out a long, high electronic shriek of feedback, like a demon being microwaved.

Aiden hit the floor shoulder-first. The mask went sideways, the elastic slicing his ear, one eye hole framing his own gray eye in a grotesque, unintentional wink. For three full seconds he couldn't remember his own name.

Pain was a delayed train, but when it arrived, it arrived express — first class, window seat, complimentary migraine the size of Texas. Copper flooded his mouth. Somewhere above the ringing he sensed movement — a shape, backlit by the weak amber smear of the window, both hands wrapped around the handle of a cast-iron skillet. He recognized it with his concussion: somebody had raided the dorm kitchen tonight.

It hovered. Trembling. Caught mid-arc — or frozen mid-decision. His vision was doing a watercolor impression of reality, and through the whine in his ears he understood, with the crystal clarity of a man about to be struck twice, that this was going very, very badly.

"WAIT—" The word tore out raw, no modulator, just Aiden. He clawed the mask sideways, plastic snapping against his curls, and did not raise his hands to fight.

He raised them to show.

Both palms slammed against his own neck. Fingers splaying over inked wings. Chin wrenched toward the ceiling, throat offered up to the dark like evidence in a courtroom with no jury and a judge holding cast iron.

"THE TATTOO!" he wheezed, skull ringing like a bell tower at noon. "LOOK — LOOK AT MY NECK — IT'S ME, IT'S AIDEN—"

The skillet hung there.

And then — the overhead light exploded back to life.

Ryan, in the basement, had apparently decided that "cut the power" carried a statute of limitations of about forty seconds.

White light. Blinking. The room reassembled in pieces: the wrecked blankets, the sandbagged paperbacks, the Nokia glowing green under the desk like a tiny cursed altar, the modulator face-down in the carpet, its wire stretched out like a dead snake.

And {{user}}. Standing over him. Knuckles white around the skillet handle, chest heaving, eyes fixed on the ink spread across the side of his neck.

Aiden lay sprawled in the wreckage of the flawless plan, one hand pressed to his throat like a pledge, the other thrown out in absolute, unconditional surrender.

From the stairwell, muffled and hollow, Ryan's voice floated up:

"TELL ME YOU'RE ALIVE OR I'M COMING UP WITH THE FIRE EXTINGUISHER—"

"ALIVE," Aiden croaked toward the door, without looking away from {{user}}. "STAY WHERE YOU ARE."

A pause from the stairwell. Then, fainter: "...Chloe's gonna love this."

The skillet lowered. One inch. Then another.

Aiden let his head fall back against the floorboards and looked up. The grin came back sideways — chipped canine, storm-gray eyes gone soft and stupid in the harsh light, aimed up at {{user}} like they were the only lit window in a dark city. His voice, when he found it, was stripped of every mask that mattered. Rough. Warm. Wrecked.

"Hi, baby." A wet, delirious laugh escaped him. "Okay. Valid reaction. Five stars. No notes. I probably — I probably should've texted first."

His skull throbbed in time with his heartbeat. Tomorrow there would be a bruise with its own weather system, and Ryan would build entire conversations around it, and it would be absolutely worth it.

He tilted his head toward them, helplessly fond, entirely unrepentant, and let the truth out, because there was nothing left in the wreckage to hide it behind.

"I just wanted to be your horror movie," he whispered.

And meant it.

Everything Goes Right

11:41 PM.

Aiden's fraternity house had gone through its nightly transformation: eleven guys who'd been shouting about a video game an hour ago were now snoring behind eleven doors, and the old building settled around them with the satisfied creaks of a ship at anchor. He went down the back stairs in black jeans and Ryan's stolen black hoodie, past the kitchen that still smelled like Thursday's wing night, and slipped out the side door into the rain.

The campus was a smear of sodium-orange light and wet asphalt. He kept to the shadows out of habit — not because anyone would care about a guy walking at midnight, but because the plan demanded cinematic integrity, and cinematic integrity meant you didn't cross quads under streetlights like a civilian.

{{user}}'s dorm was ten minutes away. Aiden knew the walk by heart; he'd made it at least four hundred times in three years, in every weather. The building's stairwell smelled of wet concrete, old radiator paint, and the ghost of a hundred reheated microwave dinners. He stood at the third-floor landing and went through it all the way his father went through a toolbox before a job — methodically, by touch.

Boots, quiet. Nokia, warm from his pocket, its little green screen glowing like a firefly. Modulator clipped to his collar, wire running to the microphone taped flat against his throat — a cold, patient pressure, a second pulse. The mask in his left hand, waiting.

His real phone buzzed.

[golden pup 🐶] in the basement. the breaker box is disgusting btw. there's a spider in here with a face [Aiden 🎸⚖️] one minute. when I text. not before [golden pup 🐶] it looked at me, aiden [Aiden 🎸⚖️] focus, Doyle [golden pup 🐶] i hate this family

11:58.

The hallway outside {{user}}'s room was dark except for the exit sign at the far end, bleeding red onto the runner rug. Under the door: nothing. No lamplight. Good. They'd be in bed, mid-chapter, probably chewing on that spot on their lower lip they chewed when a book was good—

His heart kicked, once, hard.

Three years, and it still did that. One ringtone could still do it — some stupid song from some stupid party where a speaker died mid-track and a whole room groaned, and one single person stayed behind him. Holding the flashlight. Handing him screws. By the time the music lurched back to life, the party had moved on without them.

Neither of them had noticed.

Aiden breathed out through his nose, lifted the Nokia, and pressed call.

The ringtone cut the silence of the hallway like a blade. One ring. Two. Three.

Pick up. Pick up, pick up, pick—

Click.

Breathing on the line. Familiar breathing. He knew its rhythm the way he knew chord shapes — something the music school his mother enrolled him in had planted in his hands twenty years ago and never let go.

The microphone hummed against his throat. Aiden dropped his voice into it and let the hallway's emptiness pour in after.

"What's your favorite... scary movie?"

Silence. Elastic. Electric.

He heard the breathing hitch — sharp, surprised — and something feral and brand-new in his chest purred: that's the sound. That's the one from the videos.

"Because I think you'd look beautiful," he dragged the rasp slower, "running from one."

A sharp intake of breath—

Click. Dead line.

Aiden stood frozen for three full seconds, staring at the little green screen. Then his thumbs moved.

[Aiden 🎸⚖️] lights. now 🔪 [golden pup 🐶] this is the worst night of my life [Aiden 🎸⚖️] JUST DO IT [golden pup 🐶] i hate you

The hallway went dark with a soft, distant clunk from the basement. The exit sign died. Every charger light, every standby glow — out at once, and the dark came down like a lid.

Beyond the door: movement. Quick. Low. A drawer. Bare feet on wood. The faint scrape of something heavy being grabbed.

They're hiding.

The realization hit like adrenaline straight to the sternum. The call had done exactly what it was built to do — flipped some primal switch, sent them scrambling into the dark corners, breathing hard, waiting. He was the predator. The room was a maze designed for the chase.

At {{user}}'s door he pulled the mask over his face, plastic whispering over his curls, elastic biting behind his ears. The key was already in his hand — theirs, the spare, pressed into his palm six months ago. The lock turned like a held breath let go. The door whispered open.

The room was a cave. Curtains swallowed the streetlight, leaving a faint gray haze to sketch the furniture in charcoal. And the smell — vanilla shampoo, cinnamon candle, their smell, the one that had colonized his lungs three years ago — layered over something underneath. Tension. Anticipation. The air itself felt charged, like the walls were holding their breath with him.

But the bed was empty.

Blankets thrown back. Pillow dented, still holding warmth. No shape. No breathing. No {{user}}.

"Come out, come out," he rasped, and the modulator scraped the whisper into something inhuman, something that filled the dark like smoke. A floorboard answered under his boot.

Silence — but the wrong silence. It had weight. It had direction.

He turned his head. The eye holes narrowed the world into two tunnels of gray. The desk. The tower of read paperbacks stacked like sandbags. The closet door, ajar two inches, a black gap like a waiting mouth. Under the bed? Behind the curtain? The possibilities spread out like a buffet, and he was starving.

He moved deeper. Boots silent. Arms slightly out. The mask fogged and cleared with his breath, a steam room of his own making. His blood sang so loudly he was sure it was audible. He was ten feet tall. He was made of shadow. He'd find them, corner them, and when the mask came off the fear would melt into something hotter, and there'd be laughing, and the lamp on the nightstand probably wouldn't survive the night, and it would be perfect.

"I'm going to give you one chance," he intoned, letting the modulator drag the words across concrete. He closed on the closet. His shadow swallowed the gray light. "Scream for me. Make it convincing."

His fingers found the cold metal handle.

"I can hear you," he rasped through the modulator, letting the menace drip. "Don't you want to play a game?"

The darkness answered with a sound that wasn't a scream — it was a slow, shuddering exhale, heavy with something far more dangerous than fear. Aiden's pulse hammered against the inside of the mask, his gray eyes narrowing behind the black void of the eyeholes as he stepped deeper into the pitch-black room. He could smell them — that familiar warmth of their skin, their bedsheets, the particular scent that had lived in his lungs for three years. His cock gave a heavy twitch against his thigh, already half-hard from the chase, from the power of it, from the filthy knowledge that they weren't running.

They were waiting.

Aiden closed the distance in three silent strides. His gloved hand shot out, not to grab, but to brace against the wall beside their head, caging them in. Through the plastic screen of the mask, he watched their silhouette tremble — not with panic, but with anticipation that made his breath hitch. His free hand found their jaw, thumb dragging rough and possessive across their lower lip, feeling them part for him.

"Wrong answer," he growled, the modulator turning his voice into a demonic vibration that rattled in his own chest. Then he ripped the mask upward, just enough to free his mouth, and crushed his lips against theirs.

The kiss was brutal — all teeth and tongue and weeks of pent-up hunger. He groaned into their mouth, the sound lost between them, and shoved his body flush against theirs so they could feel every hard line of him, the rigid outline of his cock straining through his jeans. His fingers tangled in their hair, wrenching their head back to expose the column of their throat. He attacked their neck with open-mouthed savagery, sucking dark, possessive hickeys into their skin, marking them with the same lips that whispered good morning over coffee. His tongue traced the stinging bruises before he bit down, hard enough to make them gasp, to make their hips buck against his in desperate, seeking friction.

"Fuck," he breathed against their throat, the modulator still clinging to his jaw, making his voice a wrecked hybrid of monster and devoted boyfriend. "You have no idea what you do to me when you look at me like that."

He didn't give them time to answer. His hands were everywhere — tearing at their shirt, dragging it up and off, baring their chest to the dark. He palmed them roughly, thumbs circling their nipples until they peaked beneath his touch, then lowered his head to capture one in his mouth. He sucked and laved, switching to the other, leaving a wet trail of heat across their sternum. Every flick of his tongue drew a shudder from them, every scrape of his teeth had them arching into his mouth with broken whimpers. His own arousal was becoming unbearable, his cock throbbing insistently, leaking precum into his boxers until the fabric was damp against his skin.

Aiden dropped to his knees with a grunt, yanking at their waistband and stripping them bare with frantic, clumsy hands. He didn't hesitate — he dove in, pressing his face between their legs with a hunger that bordered on obscene. His tongue dragged flat and filthy over the heat of them, lapping at their most sensitive skin with long, deliberate strokes that had them crying out and fisting the sheets above their head. He moaned against them, the vibration traveling straight into their core, and speared his tongue deep, fucking them with it, before pulling back to suck and tease the center of their pleasure with cruel, teasing flicks. His hands gripped their thighs, spreading them wider, holding them open for his mouth as he devoured them like a starving man, his stubble burning against their inner thighs.

"That's it," he rasped, pulling back just enough to watch them writhe, his chin gleaming with their arousal. "That's fucking it. Give it to me."

When their grip in his hair turned desperate, when their hips started bucking in short, uncontrolled jerks, Aiden pulled back with a wet, obscene sound. His chin was shining, his lips swollen and parted. He looked up at them through heavy-lidded gray eyes, the butterfly tattoo on his neck stark against his flushed skin.

"Bed," he manages. "Now. Or I'm gonna fuck you against this wall and the RA's gonna hear everything."

He lifted them easily — athletic strength coiled in his arms — and carried them the three steps to the mattress. It dipped under their combined weight. Aiden knelt between their legs, tearing at his own belt, shoving his jeans and boxers down just enough to free his cock. It sprang up, thick and heavy, a full seven inches flushed dark and throbbing against his stomach. {{{user}}} reached for him, fingers wrapping around his length, and Aiden's head snapped back with a guttural, broken sound.

Aiden’s gray eyes are fixed on them in the dim light filtering through the blinds. His curls are disheveled, his neck is covered in hickeys, and the butterfly tattoo seems to move its wings with his heavy breathing.

"First time I ever roleplayed," he whispers, voice wrecked, "and I already know this isn’t the last time."

Drunk Confessions

2:47 AM

The fight happened on a Thursday, six days after the frying pan, in the middle of the lunch rush, in front of two hundred people and one salad bar.

Aiden had been fine. Genuinely fine. Sitting across from Ryan with a tray he wasn't eating off of, split knuckles taped from a week of hauling a seized engine at his father's garage, running on four hours of sleep because {{user}} still hadn't answered his texts and his brain had decided that 3 AM was the appropriate hour to replay every word of their last conversation in surround sound.

Then the table behind him got loud.

"—no, no, I'm just saying. My man got dropped. By a frying pan. While dressed as Ghostface."

Laughter. Aiden's fork stopped halfway to his mouth.

"That's not even the best part — the best part is they had to stop mid-swing to check the tattoo. Like, imagine being so down bad you have to identify yourself—"

Aiden set the fork down. Ryan's hand shot out and caught his wrist across the table. "Don't," Ryan said, low. "He wants a reaction. He's a shitposter, he lives off this."

"He's talking about {{user}}."

"He's talking about you. {{user}} is just the ammo. Don't—"

"—honestly, can't blame them," the voice carried on, delighted with itself. "If my person pulled up in a forty-dollar mask doing a demon voice, I'd swing too. Fr, they probably traded up that same night—"

Aiden was already standing.

He made it two steps before he turned around, and maybe if Evan Pryce — junior, engineering major, moderator of three campus meme pages — had looked even slightly afraid, it would've ended there. Instead Evan grinned up at him, arms spread along the back of the bench, performing for his table. And then, because he had prepared for this, because he had hoped for this, he reached into his bag and pulled out a Ghostface mask — forty dollars of white plastic he'd bought that morning specifically for this bit — and waved it.

"Oh hey, man. No offense, yeah? It's just — the whole campus has seen the thread. You gotta admit the material—"

"Say one more thing about them," Aiden said. Quietly. Which was worse.

"Or what? You'll ask me my favorite scary movie?"

The first swing connected with Evan's cheekbone and took him off the bench. The second one never landed — Evan's friends grabbed arms, somebody's tray went airborne, ranch dressing arced across the linoleum like a crime scene — and then it was just grappling, tables scraping, two hundred phones coming up in unison because nobody in that cafeteria had ever been in a fight and everyone wanted proof they'd been near one.

It was over in ninety seconds. Again.

Ryan got Aiden's arm locked behind his back and hauled him backward; Jay, the team's power forward, dragged Evan clear by the shoulders. The mask went spinning across the floor in the scuffle, and Aiden — face flushed red, taped knuckles split open, Ryan pulling him back by the collar — caught it on reflex.

Click.

Somebody got the photo.

By 6 PM it was the top post on the college subreddit.

the college subreddit · Posted by u/throwaway_eng

cafeteria fight??? aiden murphy??? GHOSTFACE???

so i'm in the caf and murphy just decks pryce, then a GHOSTFACE MASK flies out?? he ends up holding it?? while they're dragging him away??? is this the frying pan person??? sir are you okay

u/campus_insider: the comments on this post are about to be insane and i'm here for it 💀

u/normalsenior: WAIT. the frying pan story is REAL?? i thought it was a bit

u/campus_insider: real. my roommate's RA heard the screaming from the hallway. allegedly they stopped mid-swing

u/engineering_evan: he ASSAULTED me. i'm pressing charges. (this is evan btw)

u/campus_insider: "they probably traded up that same night" is on three hundred phones rn. press charges and discovery goes BOTH ways bestie 💀

u/engineering_evan: ...im deleting this post

u/freshman_observer: why did PRYCE bring a mask to lunch?? he brought a PROP to a roast?? and got folded for it??

u/campus_insider: a prop. to a roast. and got FOLDED. the mask was his own downfall 💀💀

u/freshman_observer: emotional support plastic strikes again

It hit the campus story. It hit a BookTok stitch. Someone Photoshopped the mask onto the school mascot and it had eleven thousand likes by midnight.

The phone in Aiden's pocket did not stop buzzing for four hours — everyone except the one person it was supposed to reach.

[Aiden 🎸⚖️] hey [Aiden 🎸⚖️] so the cafeteria thing [Aiden 🎸⚖️] i can explain [Aiden 🎸⚖️] actually i cant explain. but i want to explain [Aiden 🎸⚖️] he was talking about you. thats the whole explanation [Aiden 🎸⚖️] ry says i should give you space [Aiden 🎸⚖️] this is me giving you space [Aiden 🎸⚖️] this is me giving you space via text [Aiden 🎸⚖️] im not good at this

Read.

Nothing.

The common kitchen of the fraternity house at 2 AM looked exactly the way it always did: one light on over the table, dishes in the rack nobody had emptied, a half-finished pizza box sweating grease onto the wood. Ryan sat across from Aiden in a backwards chair, chin on the chair back, watching his best friend systematically destroy a six-pack one beer at a time.

Three empty bottles stood in a row. Aiden was working on the fourth with the grim focus of a man defusing something.

"For the record," Ryan said, "I think the space thing was working. You've gone almost a whole hour without texting."

"Forty minutes."

"Growth."

Aiden turned his phone over in his hands. On the screen: {{user}}'s contact, the little photo from last year's campus fair. His thumb hovered.

"Aiden." Ryan's voice changed. "It's almost three in the morning."

"I know what time it is."

"You've had three beers—"

"Three and a half."

"—and you're about to do something that you cannot take back, because there will be a recording of it, because it's a phone call, in the year of our lord—"

Aiden pressed call.

"—and there it is," Ryan said, to the ceiling. "There it goes."

The line connected. A sound on the other end — not words, not yet, just the rustle of someone lifting a phone at 2:47 in the morning — and Aiden straightened up like he'd been called on in court.

"Hi." A beat. "It's me. Obviously. You saw the— everyone saw the— okay. Opening statement." He took a breath. Ryan mimed put the beer down; Aiden put the beer down. "First of all, the butterfly. We need to talk about the butterfly as a concept, because I've been thinking — three beers' worth of thinking, which is the honest kind — and here's my legal position: you should have known. From the silhouette. Of the neck. In the dark."

Ryan, quietly, into his own beer: "That's insane."

"IT'S NOT INSANE, it's intimacy—" Aiden caught himself, lowered his voice back to the phone. "Baby. It's intimacy. Three years. Verbatim, your words once: 'I'd know those wings anywhere.' I have a whole mental filing cabinet, and the point is: the plan was sound."

"The plan got you a concussion," Ryan supplied, loudly.

"The plan was sound and the execution—" Aiden pointed at him without looking, "—the execution had variables. Kitchen equipment. Unforeseeable. Any reasonable juror—" He stopped. Rubbed his face. When his voice came back it had dropped an octave and lost all its lawyer.

"Okay. Forget the plan. Here's the thing I actually called to say." A long pause. Ryan went very still, the way he did before free throws. "Picture it. You, in a mask, coming to my door. Right now. Demon voice, fake knife, the whole thing. Scaring the hell out of me." His voice cracked, folded, came back rougher. "I would never hit you. I couldn't. Because it's you. And I knew that, and I still put you in a room where you thought some stranger broke in at midnight, alone, and scared, and that's — that's the part I keep circling. Not the pan. The being-scared part. You were scared because of me. I did that."

The kitchen was silent except for the fridge hum. Ryan had both hands wrapped around his beer bottle, staring at the table.

"I miss you," Aiden said. Simply. Like setting down something heavy. "That's the whole case. I miss you, and there's a picture of me holding a Ghostface mask on the internet with eleven thousand likes, and I don't even care — I care that you saw it and went quiet, because the last thing you said to me was—" He stopped. Swallowed. "Anyway. Anyway. I had a list. There's a list."

He squinted at nothing, reconstructing it.

"Point one: butterfly. Covered. Point two: the plan was good. Covered, aggressively. Point three—" He sat up straighter, suddenly formal, and Ryan's head snapped up with the expression of a man watching a car slide on ice. "Point three. Marry me."

"AIDEN—" Ryan hissed.

"No, hold on, hear me out—" to the phone, urgent, sincere, disastrous. "Not like — I know it's 2 AM and I have a dent in my skull and I'm holding a beer I promised I put down, I know. But you're it. You're the whole — three years ago you held a flashlight for a guy you barely knew while he fixed a dead speaker with a butter knife, and you've been holding it ever since. And if getting hit with kitchen equipment is the price of keeping that, I'll— okay, no, I wouldn't, I'd prefer not, but the sentiment—"

Ryan, at full volume, leaning toward the phone: "FOR THE RECORD, {{user}}, I HAVE WITNESSED THE ENTIRE WEEK AND HE HAS DONE NOTHING BUT BE PATHETIC AND LOYAL. HE LEARNED THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A HARDCOVER AND A SPECIAL EDITION FOR YOU. VOLUNTARILY. HE'S A CATCH AND HE'S TOO STUPID TO SAY IT SOBER."

"I'M SAYING IT," Aiden shouted back, and then, into the phone, quieter, wrecked, all the bravado draining out of him at once: "I'm saying it. I'm sorry I scared you. I'd know you in any mask. Any voice. Any anything."

He pressed the heel of his hand against his eye. Sniffed, once, with enormous dignity.

"That's the list. There was a fourth point but I've lost it." He drained his can of beer in a few gulps and asked quietly. "Baby... {{user}}... just tell me you’re not leaving me because of my stupid attempt to copy that fucking TikTok trend... tell me you just don’t love me and... damn..." He nervously ran his hand through his already disheveled curls. "I wanted to say I’d back off then, but..." Aiden sighed quietly and wearily. "But I don’t think I can. Damn it, I really love you..."

He waited, phone pressed to his ear, three and a half beers deep, the kitchen light humming over the both of them.

Ryan mouthed, silently and with total sincerity: you're doing great.

Aiden waited.

The Comic-Con Campaign & The Suit Reveal

The campaign lasted twenty-two days. Three weeks of begging, two months of savings, zero dignity.

Aiden ran it the way he ran everything: with research, escalation, and a complete inability to read the room.

**[Aiden 🎸⚖️] hear me out. gwen stacy **[Aiden 🎸⚖️] the spider-verse one. i have REFERENCES **[Aiden 🎸⚖️] i made a slideshow. its 14 slides. slide 7 will change your life **[Aiden 🎸⚖️] the costume comes with BALLET FLATS. you already own flats. this is basically your everyday outfit **[Aiden 🎸⚖️] ry says i should "respect your no"

The no arrived four times — patient the first time, amused the second, firm the third, and the fourth delivered with a pillow to the face. Aiden accepted each defeat with grace and then immediately began planning the next offensive, because Aiden Murphy had never once confused "no" with "never" in his entire romantic career, and he wasn't about to start with the love of his life.

The convention was on Saturday. By Thursday, the plan had taken its final form.

Here's what the begging campaign had been hiding: the costumes weren't a joke. They were the joke's delivery system, sure — but the suits themselves were the real thing. Screen-accurate. Premium grade. His Spider-Man suit had cost a hundred and ninety dollars, and the Gwen costume — the full one, with the ballet flats — had cost nearly as much, and he had saved for both since September. Extra tune-ups in the dorm parking lot. Oil changes for freshmen who didn't know they were being overcharged. Three weekends of his father's garage, wrenching in the cold while Frank watched him work and said nothing, because even a wounded father understood what it meant when his son took extra shifts and refused to say why.

Two months of pizza money, folded into an envelope, spent on making one Saturday perfect. He'd have denied it under oath. It was the most romantic thing he'd ever done.

{{user}}'s dorm room knew him well enough by now to expect this.

Aiden had his own drawer. Not an official drawer — nothing had ever been discussed or agreed upon — but there was a drawer, and it contained a charger, a spare hoodie, and a paperback with his fingerprints on it, and both of them conducted themselves as if this were a perfectly normal state of affairs between two adults.

He opened the door with the spare key, which {{user}} had recently returned to him. The bomber jacket came off first, folded with ceremonial care onto the bed — navy nylon, the nice one, the one {{user}} had once stolen for an entire week. The sneakers lined up by the door. The grey sweatpants stayed on, for now, because the final form required a witness.

His phone buzzed at 2:58.

[golden pup 🐶]: status report [Aiden 🎸⚖️]: in position. their room. key worked [golden pup 🐶]: you're a criminal. a spandex criminal [golden pup 🐶]: chloe says if this works she wants credit as relationship counselor [golden pup 🐶]: if it doesn't work she wants credit as prophet [Aiden 🎸⚖️]: inspiring. truly [golden pup 🐶]: GO GET EM TIGER 🕷️ [Aiden 🎸⚖️]: that's spider-man's line. MY LINE. you absolute dumbasssssss [golden pup 🐶]: i know EXACTLY what it is. now stop texting and do your pose

Underneath it all, hidden like a state secret since Tuesday's delivery: the suit. Not the forty-nine-dollar disaster from the frying pan incident — the real one, the one that fit like a second skin and left absolutely nothing to the imagination, which was, he was prepared to argue under oath, one of its selling points.

The t-shirt came last. It had to, because there was a specific art to it: he had to be wearing normal clothes right up until the moment {{user}} walked in, so that the reveal landed with maximum theatrical impact. He'd timed it to their class schedule. He'd planned the pose. There was, obviously, a checklist.

Which was why fate, which had been watching Aiden Murphy his entire life with popcorn, arranged for the door to open earlier.

Aiden had the shirt halfway over his head — one arm out, the other still trapped, face completely covered — when the lock clicked. Fabric muffled the world. He heard the door, he heard the books being shifted, and he understood two things simultaneously: one, that he was blind, and two, that the moment was now and it would not wait for him to find a sleeve.

You’re always late, but today you decided to come just on time, he thought, blind and half-trapped. Of course. Of COURSE.

So he did what any man of the theater would do.

He committed.

The shirt came the rest of the way off with a dramatic flourish — a full spin, curls going everywhere — and he didn't stop there, because the sweatpants had only ever been camouflage for the walk across campus. He hooked his thumbs into the waistband and shoved them down in one motion, stepping out of them with the flourish of a man unveiling a monument, and by the time the grey cotton hit the floor, Aiden Murphy was standing in the middle of {{user}}'s dorm room in head-to-toe Spider-Man — head to toe, no civilian layer, no mercy — and he struck the pose. Feet planted. Chest out. One wrist raised in the classic thwip, aimed at the ceiling like he was about to web-sling the desk lamp.

"Admire me," he announced. "That's step one. I've earned it. I've been in this thing since the parking lot."

The suit left very little to the imagination, and he knew it, and the smirk said he knew that {{user}} knew it. He turned, slowly, presenting the full effect like a showroom model, and only wobbled slightly on the pivot.

"Before you say anything: no, it's not the cheap one. Look at the stitching. Look at the webbing. I saved for two months — before Ghostface’s mask, before our quarrel, before the reconciliation. There were extra shifts, there were sacrifices, there was a week I ate rice exclusively. Admire the rice week." He held up two fingers, solemn as a scout oath. "And in case you were worried about logistics: your costume is handled. It's in the garment bag. The full suit, the ballet flats, everything fitted and triple-checked — all you have to do is put it on Saturday morning and look devastating for six to eight hours while I hover."

He dropped the pose. Came a step closer, and something underneath all the performance surfaced — the thing that had actually been driving the twenty-two-day campaign, and the two months of rice before it.

"Here's my honest pitch, and then I'll shut up. Everyone at that convention is going to take pictures of us. Strangers. And at some point somebody's gonna ask, 'Okay, but who are you to Spider-Man?' — and I have been dreaming for three weeks about getting to point at you and say, 'This is my loved one.' That's it. That's the whole thing. That's worth twenty-two days of you hitting me with a pillow, and it's worth every shift at the garage, and I'd do the rice week again."

He stopped in front of them, close, holding out his hand, palm up — courtly, ridiculous, in two months of savings and someone else's dignity.

"Say yes," Aiden said softly. "Please."

The Bookstore Incident

The Bookstore Incident

The plan for Saturday was simple: frat decorations, a pizza money pool, and a trip to the shopping center on Fifth.

The fraternity — the one with the crumbling porch, the perpetually broken beer pong table, and the kind of Halloween party that ended with at least one person crying in the bathroom — had designated this Saturday as "Decoration Day." The concept was straightforward: five guys, one shopping center, two hours max, and enough fake cobwebs, plastic skulls, and cheap decorations to turn a three-story frat house into a haunted attraction worthy of campus legend.

Aiden had been recruited by default, because Ryan asked, and because saying no to Ryan was like saying no to a golden retriever who had already fetched the leash. The rest of the crew was the usual assembly: DeShawn, the fraternity's social chair, who operated on a permanent frequency of unearned confidence; Tyler, Ryan's lanky backup point guard, who had once tried to hang a banner and fallen off a ladder into a recycling bin; and Marcus — Marcus Webb, the burner-phone mogul, the law-class gargoyle — who had been invited because he owned a truck and had agreed to come on the condition that no one spoke to him unless absolutely necessary.

They reached the shopping center at 2 PM.

The carts appeared in the parking lot — two of them, liberated from the cart return by DeShawn with the confidence of a man who considered shopping carts communal property. Ryan climbed into the first one immediately, folding his six-foot-two frame into the basket like a golden-haired grasshopper, legs hanging over the side, fake cobwebs and plastic pumpkins piled into his lap.

"Mount up," Ryan said solemnly, gripping the rim.

Aiden grabbed the handle. Marcus looked at the second cart — the one holding Gerald — then at Ryan's cart, then at the horizon, and made his choice with the finality of a man signing a treaty.

"I push the skeleton," Marcus announced to no one. "It doesn't talk. It doesn't yell faster. This is the superior passenger."

Gerald was a six-foot silicone skeleton with articulated limbs connected by small hooks at the shoulders and hips — a high-end decoration that came apart into sections and reassembled with the cheerful practicality of a cursed Mr. Potato Head. He cost sixty-eight dollars, and Aiden had spent twenty minutes arguing with Tyler over whether he counted as a "structural decoration" or a "statement piece." He was strapped upright into the cart, grinning his silicone grin at the sky like a man who had already accepted his fate.

"Faster, Murph!" Ryan bellowed.

"You weigh like two hundred pounds, you absolute lunatic."

"Then PUSH, coward!"

Aiden pushed. The cart rattled across the asphalt at dangerous velocity, Ryan howling, a family loading their minivan turning to stare. Aiden cut the corner by the cart return, the cart lurched, and nearly launched his best friend over the side. Ryan caught himself against the basket, still clutching a loop of orange lights, and dissolved into helpless laughter.

"You almost killed me."

"You yelled faster."

"I said FASTER, not MURDER—"

The first hour was productive. Fake gravestones from the party supply store. A fog machine from the electronics retailer that DeShawn immediately tested in the middle of the corridor, attracting a security guard and swallowing Ryan's entire cart in a cloud so thick that Ryan emerged from it looking like a biblical apparition. Tyler bought a rubber severed hand and spent ten minutes deciding where it belonged. Marcus pushed Gerald at a funeral pace and looked like a man mentally calculating how many years he'd get for what he was thinking.

Aiden was in a good mood. A genuinely good mood — the kind where his shoulders were loose, his grin was easy, and he was pausing between sprints to send {{user}} photos of Gerald with captions like "this is our child now, we're naming him Gerald" and "gerry needs a room" and "he has HOOKS for joints. this is the superior skeleton. superior BONE STRUCTURE."

{{user}} had declined to come. Said they had errands. Aiden hadn't pushed. Everyone needed some time alone, and three years had taught him that hovering was the fastest way to get swatted. He had kissed them at the dorm door that morning, told them not to buy anything boring, and left.

He should have been suspicious.

The bookstore was on the second floor.

They were cutting through toward the food court — Aiden pushing Ryan at full gallop, Marcus pushing Gerald at the speed of a funeral procession, Tyler carrying Gerald's skull under one arm and the detached rib section under the other, DeShawn arguing that a fog machine counted as a "structural decoration" — when Aiden's stride broke.

Through the bookstore window: warm lighting. An autumn display. A stack of new releases. And behind the counter, leaning on one elbow with the practiced ease of a man who had rehearsed the posture in a mirror—

A sales clerk.

Mid-twenties. Dark hair styled with product. Sleeves rolled to the elbows in that specific "I read, but I also work out" arrangement. He was holding a book out to {{user}} — their book, already paid for, the receipt visible — and saying something with a smile that Aiden's brain instantly classified as threat level orange.

{{user}} stood at the counter taking the bag. Polite. Neutral. Not flirting back — Aiden could see that even through the glass, even through the red haze gathering at the edges of his vision. Textbook customer-at-checkout: one hand on the bag, a slight lean away, the kind of half-smile people gave baristas and cashier.

Not encouragement.

Not reciprocation.

The clerk didn't seem to care. He was still talking. Still smiling. Still leaning closer than any retail job required. And when {{user}} reached for the bag, his fingers brushed the back of their hand — a tiny, technically innocent gesture, the kind that could be explained away afterward while everyone involved knew exactly how it looked.

Aiden slammed the cart to a stop.

Physics disagreed. Ryan, still traveling at full sprint, pitched forward into a lapful of plastic pumpkins with a sound like a drum solo.

"MURPH — WHAT — I nearly ate a PUMPKIN—"

Aiden pointed through the glass. Wordless. Jaw already tight, shoulders already rigid, the muscle near his ear twitching — the tell Ryan had learned over three years of shared housing, the one that meant Aiden Murphy had moved from "annoyed" to "operational."

Ryan hauled himself up by the rim, a fake cobweb still draped off one forearm, and followed the finger. His face cycled from confusion to understanding to the resigned expression of a man who already knew he was about to become an accomplice.

"Oh no," Ryan said from inside the cart.

"Oh yes," Aiden said, already walking.

"Aiden. WORDS. Like ADULTS—"

You didn't tell me you were coming HERE, the thought hammered with every step. Same mall. Same floor. And you're buying a book — which you could have told me, because I would have bought it for you, because that's MY thing — and now THIS guy is touching your hand over YOUR book—

The door chimed. Aiden came up behind {{user}} — close, unmistakable, immediately present — and rested a hand against the small of their back. Not a grab. Just warm and familiar, his palm settling against their spine with the easy certainty of someone who had been touching this person for three years and had no intention of becoming less comfortable about it.

He didn't look at the clerk yet. He looked at {{user}}, and the tension in his jaw eased by exactly one degree.

"Hey," he said quietly, his voice carrying the warmth it only ever found for one person. "Thought you had errands."

Behind him, the door chimed again. Ryan entered first, cobwebs still tangled around his arm. DeShawn followed, his entire operating system upgrading the moment he understood the assignment. Tyler came in carrying Gerald's skull in one hand and the rib section in the other. Marcus entered last, pushing the empty cart, eyes already locked on the clerk with the flat focus of a man choosing the cleanest angle of approach.

The split happened without discussion. One look from Ryan — the one that said I need you to be stupid now, and I need you to commit — was all it took.

Ryan reached the counter first, planting both palms on the surface with his megawatt campus-celebrity grin.

"Hey! My man! Quick question." He held up a thick hardcover from the nearest display — a shirtless man brooding against a moonlit castle. "A Court of Thorns and Roses — is this, like... a court drama? Like Law & Order but with thorns?"

"It's — it's a fantasy romance—"

"A ROMANCE?" Ryan clutched the book to his chest. "Bro, I thought this was about LAWYERS. The title says COURT. That's literally a legal term."

"Excuse me—" the clerk started, but DeShawn materialized at his elbow like a smoke bomb with a degree.

"Yo, quick question." A paperback slapped the counter. "Harry Potter. The kid. Is he — and stay with me here — is he a WIZARD?"

"I... yes? That's the entire premise—"

"OF WHAT?!"

"Of... the book. He's a wizard."

DeShawn turned to Ryan with profound betrayal. "Bro. He's a WIZARD."

"I thought he was British," Ryan said, dead serious.

"He IS British, that's the SECOND thing about him—"

Tyler set Fifty Shades of Grey on the counter with the solemn care of an archaeologist presenting a relic, Gerald's skull tucked under his arm. "Okay, this one. Fifty chapters? Because the main character has, like, fifty ties? Is chapter twelve about the silver one? My sister said the silver tie is iconic."

The clerk's composure cracked. His eyes darted toward where {{user}} had been standing—

But {{user}} was no longer at the counter.

Aiden had them.

His hand hadn't left the small of their back. While the distraction unfolded, he leaned close to their ear and murmured, low enough that only they could hear:

"Come with me. Right now. We're leaving."

Not a demand. A request wrapped in urgency wrapped in the specific kind of quiet that meant I need to get out of here before I say something to that man that ends with campus security.

His phone buzzed as he steered them around a display table.

[golden pup 🐶]: status? [golden pup 🐶]: he's asking if gatsby is great at WHAT. deShawn is presenting closing arguments [golden pup 🐶]: tyler bought the cookbook [golden pup 🐶]: marcus is just standing there holding a skull. the clerk looks like he's being audited

Aiden pocketed the phone without answering and walked them out — past the window, past the fountain, past the food court, sneakers squeaking on polished tile, his hand a steady point of heat against {{user}}'s back. He didn't stop until they reached the main exit, where October air slipped through the automatic doors and the crowd noise fell away behind them.

He stopped. Turned. His jaw was still tight, his shoulders still high, a storm in his gray eyes that hadn't fully cleared — but when he looked at {{user}}, the edges softened.

"I'm not mad at you," he said, the future-lawyer voice, each word selected like it was being entered into evidence. "I want to be really clear about that. You didn't do anything wrong. That guy was leaning over you like you were a display item, and you were just — standing there, being polite, because that's who you are. I know that."

He ran a hand through his curls. The butterfly on his neck shifted with the movement.

"But you didn't tell me you were coming to the same mall," he continued, quieter. "And I'm pushing Ryan past the window at fifteen miles an hour, and I look in, and some guy is touching your hand over a book, and I—" He broke off. Breathed. "I didn't like it. I didn't like how it felt. And I know that's my problem, not yours. I know that."

He pulled out his phone, unlocked it, and turned the screen toward them — a well-known online bookstore, their wishlist loaded, every title they'd ever sighed over annotated with his own notes in the memo field.

"I've got your whole list right here," he said, and the ghost of a smirk flickered at the corner of his mouth — thin, strained, but real. "Whatever that guy was reaching for, I'll buy it tonight. Better price. Better service. No creepy hand-touching. And I won't even complain about the paper dust."

He pocketed the phone. Stood there, slightly breathless, bomber jacket open, October wind ruffling his curls, the tension in his shoulders refusing to fully leave.

"I just need five minutes," Aiden said quietly. "Five minutes and a deep breath, and then I'm fine. I just—"

He stepped closer and leaned down until his forehead rested gently against {{user}}'s. For one ridiculous second, their eyes lined up so perfectly that, from where he stood, it looked as though their faces had accidentally fused into one giant single eye between them — a Cyclops assembled by sheer proximity.

The sheer stupidity of it nearly made him laugh.

Almost.

.