You're not sure what you expected. Maybe some abandoned warehouse or strip club back rooms, because when you think, 'people dangerous to Victor Creed,' your mind doesn't automatically go to a beautiful mansion in the countryside.

"It's a school for mutants," Victor explains, hands tight on the steering wheel while he makes the endless journey up the gravel driveway, "run by mutants."

"Where are we supposed to even park?" you ask, overwhelmed by it all.

"They invited me here, they can fuckin' valet."

You're almost to the circle drive now, and figures appear at the top of the steps, walking too fast to be casual. Five, ten, too many of them for your liking. Victor finally stops the car and turns to you.

"Wait for me to open your door."

He's definitely worried, and tense, and you do not like this one bit. You want to get out with him and show that he's not alone, but what could you possibly do against that many mutants? They're all just as tense as Victor, as if he's somehow the threat here.

One of them, a short man with weird sideburns, steps forward and calls out, "Look who finally showed up. Could have given us warning."

Victor slides his hands in his pockets, rounding the front of the car and he casually shoots back, "Where's the fun in that?"

He's grabbing your door handle, and you frantically unbuckle just in time to watch him turn his back on all those mutants and wink at you when he lets you out.

Ten pairs of eyes, give or take, lock on you like they've never seen a human woman before. You quickly step out to give Victor room to close the door and carefully brush imaginary dust off your jeans, mind grasping for what you're supposed to do. Victor saves you.

"My assistant," he says, introducing you by name when you straighten up. You smile and wave cheerily and pretend this isn't all an incredibly horrible first impression.

"Since when do you need a fuckin' assistant?" asks the short man incredulously, narrowing his eyes in your direction.

You twist your head around to look for some sort of sign from Victor, but he's just got his arms crossed tersely, seeming quite backed into a corner, and you finally realize he's just winging this whole thing.

It'll complicate things and throw them off.

Victor doesn't need you here. He doesn't need someone to book hotels or fill his car with gas or do surveillance with him. He needs Effie Trinket.

"Maybe you do," you answer blithely, bouncing forward with your hand outstretched. "Because I still don't know your name."

The short man frowns down at your hand for a couple of painful seconds before hurriedly shaking it. "Logan," he tells you.

"Wonderful to meet you!" You flash him a grin and take a step back, scanning the others with the most brainless look you can manufacture. "It's awfully nice to be here. Though Mr. Creed," you say, swiveling your head back to glimpse his unreadable expression, "hasn't told me much, this place is just lovely and I'm sure we'll have a fabulous time."

You practically skip back to the car to retrieve William, and you doubt he's ever peed on a patch of grass with a larger number of shocked eyes watching him.

'Mr. Creed' grabs the luggage, and he's intelligent enough not to give you away with any knowing smiles. Somehow your Effie act is working. The tension has diffused considerably, some of the onlookers even going back inside, and William is simply basking, cute as can be, in all the attention. You have to pull him away from greeting everyone personally, and before you know it you're stepping inside with Victor right in front of you, arrival finished and onto the next thing.

The skinny redhead whose name you've already forgotten tells Victor that 'The Professor' is not here, but will be back tomorrow morning.

"Until then," she says, eyes flicking back at you for a moment, "I guess you can hang out. I wasn't expecting your assistant, but we have enough room."

"Thank you," you chirp graciously, nudging William away from an expensive looking vase sitting on the floor.

Your phone chimes and you quickly pull it out of your back pocket to see a DoorDash coupon notification.

"I'm not sure what exactly you'll want to do," the redhead is saying, glancing at a silent Logan by her side, "but I suppose—"

"Mr. Creed," you say loudly, cutting her off with an apologetic smile. "Is this urgent or can it wait until tonight?" You sidle up to him and hand over your phone with the DoorDash offer.

Victor, bless him, makes a consummate performance of scrolling down for a little while and considering the text while your two guides just stand there looking annoyed. "It can wait," he finally tells you, handing back your device. "But I'll need to know by tomorrow night."

You bob your head in an understanding nod, and apologize profusely to your hosts for the interruption. The redhead - Jean - has completely lost her train of thought.

It goes on like that for the rest of the day, people talking down to Victor and you brainlessly inserting yourself in such a pretty way that they assume you're just 'like that' and leave you both alone. It shouldn't bother you as much as it does, watching Victor be treated as less-than by these people in their posh mansion. You know they have history together, and maybe he's done some things that were deserving of their scorn, but it still raises your hackles every time.

It's exhausting. By the end of the night it's a monumental effort to keep that persona going and force yourself to be all bubbly. Victor is having a beer in Logan's vicinity with no sign of heading to bed, so you decide the professional thing is to excuse yourself and rest up for another day of masking.

Your room is conventionally alongside Victor's, and you've barely locked your door behind you and collapsed onto the bed with William when your phone dings.

VC: I'm so fucking glad I brought you

And now you're wide awake, starfished out on the bed while a pink glow of happiness settles over you. It's all worth it. The instability and the danger and the occasional long day, all worth it when he tells you shit like that.

It's not long before you hear Victor's door close, and on the other side of the wall there are muffled sounds of movement. The hours you've spent together have made you accustomed to his rhythms and it's almost like you can see him sitting down on the bed and tossing his phone on the side table. You picture him there, falling back onto the bed just like you, and you wonder if he's also thinking about his next door neighbor.

You punc into your phone and stare pathetically at his text. Finally the satisfaction you feel at your success today fuels you, and you unthinkingly type:

Me too, Mr. Creed.

And then your stomach drops because you've just make a huge mistake, and you hurriedly shoot off:

Sorry sorry no duress just dumb

You hear a soft chuckle on the other side of the wall and it fills your chest back up with that same magical, pink fog. You get another text.

VC: Goodnight

Goodnight. Just by itself, tailing off into unsatisfying nothing, because you know what he wanted to say. Goodnight, baby. The not-saying-it is so much worse, like it's just being waved right in front of your face and withheld. It's a physical ache how much you want him to say it, to keep saying it even when you tell him to stop. You'll never not want to be Baby.

But he's trying. He's being so good and doing exactly what you asked him to do, and he's still not moving on, and it seems like such a waste that you're here in your room, alone, and he's in his room, alone. You know you kissed him before, but you didn't do it right. You didn't understand the depth of what would occur, and never dreamed that you would be living life alongside him with that one, solitary night as your only chance to kiss him. He's been keeping his beard shorter lately and it's just so frustrating that you don't know what it feels like. You have to watch him absently play with it and merely envision your own fingers running through that scruff up into his hair, and your thumbs smoothing out across his cheekbones.

You're not horny. That's the thing, you're not horny. This is not some hormone fueled one night stand you're dreaming up that will make you hate yourself in the morning. This is… a kiss. Just a little kiss, to let him know that you're thinking about him. He doesn't have to kiss you back. You don't expect him to, because it's just a… business kiss. Hey boss, glad you appreciated my work today, smooch, goodnight now. Totally professional.

Totally off limits. You stall, brushing your teeth and donning pajamas and just hoping the wanting will go away by the time you get back to bed, and of course it doesn't. You lay there and think about his lips and his tongue, replaying all the memories of how they felt, and you just want harder and harder until you can't take it any more.

You peek out into the dim hallway and of course there's no one around. There are never interruptions when you actually kind of want an excuse not to follow your head's crazed notions. Heart thrumming, you close your door as quietly as you can, and then reach out and open–

Victor's door is locked. The knob only rotates a fraction before offering solid resistance, because of course he locked his door. He's practically rooming with enemies here, he'd have to be a fool to keep it unlocked. You should have realized this.

Your hand releases the doorknob like it burned you. There will be no romantic sneaking into Victor's bed in the dark, waiting for him to smell that it's you, and then climbing on top and feeling him shift to conform around your body. No, the solitary option you have now is knocking on the door and stupidly waiting here in your pajamas to stutter out a ridiculous explanation of why you changed your mind about everything, and can you please come in so you can kiss him a little bit? It's unthinkable.

You move as quickly as you dare, tiptoeing back into your room and carefully rolling the doorknob even before you've closed the door so that it doesn't make any noise when it latches. And you lock it, of course, because why wouldn't you?

There's movement on the other side of the wall and you're airborne before you even realize, launching yourself into your covers and huddling there with your heart in your throat, as if you're trying to convince the guy who can't even see you that you've been in bed this whole time. You hear the door next to yours open, and then nothing. Like he's just standing there, staring at your locked door and trying to decide if he simply imagined someone trying to get into his room just now. The silence stretches on so long that you argue with yourself over whether or not he's already back in bed and you just somehow missed the noises, but then there's a definite click of a door latching, and you finally hear him go back to bed.


It's strange, seeing someone you know amongst a group of people and not immediately recognizing them. It makes your brain go through these weird gymnastics of cataloging them as a new person until you finally figure it out. And in that in-between time when they're still a stranger to you, you actually see them as they are, with every feature that some time ago your mind decided is too commonplace to notice.

For a few seconds, as you're coming down to breakfast, you see Victor Creed as he is. You notice the way he's so big and mean-looking that there are several empty seats on either side of him. The hard set of his brow and the muscles flexing under his sleeve while he eats. Everything about him screams, 'stay away or suffer the consequences,' and there's not even a hint in his appearance that he's even capable of gentleness or forethought.

You halt there in the doorway, staring at his side profile and searching for that spark of something you saw from the first time you met him. The thing that told you he was capable of kissing you softly and paying attention to the needs you communicate without words because you're too afraid to say them out loud. Sitting there at breakfast in a room full of strangers, it's somehow gone like it never even existed, just a figment of your imagination in the muddy haze of memories.

But then he must smell you, or somehow sense your gaze because his head turns to look for you, and that's when you see it. There's that softening of his shoulder line, the subtle relaxing of his jaw that made him so approachable to you in the first place. It's all still there, but only when he's looking at you.

Fuck. You're in deep, deep shit. The mask settles back over your face, and you plaster on a smile that you don't actually feel, and weave through the chairs over to him.

"Morning, Mr. Creed," you say like an announcement, dropping into the chair on his left.

"Good morning."

There's really quite a good spread here, and you help yourself to some southern biscuits with butter and jam, and consciously block the dangerous flow of thought that just seems to endlessly build upon itself from last night.

The guy with the red sunglasses is speaking to Victor about people you don't know, and he's being respectful so you just accept the momentary break to fill your belly. But you can't help noticing Victor's hands again, as you've been doing far too much lately. They're a dead giveaway more than anything else about him. The way he holds his fork and dances his claws across his knee is anything but clumsy. His fingers move in that smooth, practiced way of someone who's had to make a living off precision, like a magician or a pianist. It's captivating to watch, and you can't seem to pry your eyes away.

And because you're already watching, you just happen to see him unlock his phone when an email pops up, and for the first time you actually glimpse the home screen for a split second before he angles it away like he always does. The only reason you're even able to recognize the image in that short space of time is because you've seen it before, because you were the one who took that photo. It's the one of you in the sundress, thoughtlessly smiling up at your phone's camera in the conservatory.

You sit there mid chew, frozen with shock. He's got your picture as his wallpaper. Has for some time, you just know it. Probably put it there the very next day, and he's been so diligent to hide it from you that he never had to change it, even after he promised to leave you alone.

Fuck, Sunglasses is asking you something.

"Sorry, what was that?" you prompt, swallowing down the suddenly dry biscuit.

"I said, what are your plans today?"

"Um…" you struggle, not daring to look up at Victor because you're sure your face will go absolutely red and betray everything. "Not sure. It depends if Mr. Creed needs me for anything."

"I'll be in a meeting for a few hours at least," Victor's voice supplies somewhere to your right.

"Well, then," you say nervously down to your plate, "I guess I'll take the dog for a walk or something."

Mercifully no other questions are posed to you, and you quickly reach down into your purse to tear off a small corner of paper. Carefully you move it to the side of your leg where Victor could never see it, and you scribble a short note before folding it in half. You straighten up, dropping the pen back into your bag and just sit there with it clutched in your sweaty fingers under the table, heart pounding while you come to terms with what you're about to do. Jean arrives to sit next to Sunglasses, and just as she's greeting Victor you slide your hand over to rest on the top of his leg, paper held upwards between two fingers.

Victor doesn't make any sign that he understands, simply lowers his hand casually under the table mid sentence and takes the paper from you. You're absolutely locked into the path of it when he changes it over to his other hand, and then he's just holding it there, still closed, for far too long. You begin to worry he's not even going to read it, like he thinks you passed him a dirty napkin or something, but finally there's an opening in the conversation and you watch his thumb flick it open and his head tilt down to read it.

That's when your heart really starts racing. You know exactly what he's reading, just five words, and they don't take near the length of time to read that he's currently devoting to staring down at them.

Leave your door unlocked tonight