The train hums beneath your feet like some caged beast—its silver body cutting through the countryside at a speed that feels inhuman. Windows flash with streaks of green and black, farmland and tunnel mouths, but in here… it’s a coffin dressed in velvet. Neon signs flicker past, and yet the lights above your head are steady, sterile, buzzing faintly like flies circling a carcass.

Across from you: them. The train shuddered as it ripped through another tunnel, the world outside plunging into black for a heartbeat. In that darkness, their silhouettes became sharper—two wolves across the table, one grinning, one calculating, but it was snapped back into place the minute the train brightened up again.

Tangerine, all sharp lines and pressed suit, sits with a posture so controlled you’d swear his bones are iron rods welded into shape. His hands, prying open a paperback book, betraying the faint tapping of one thumb against the weathered pages—like even stillness, for him, is rehearsed violence waiting to be unwrapped. His eyes—icy blue and cutting—flick toward you every so often, as if measuring the exact weight of your existence.

Beside him, Lemon leans back with the gracelessness of a man who belongs anywhere but a first-class carriage. His tie is crooked, his grin easy, his eyes flicking between you and the window you looked out, with something between curiosity and a childlike need to narrate the world around him. A half-empty bottle of soda rests by his leg, fizzing gently as the train tilts into another bend.

His head tilted. His grin widened, slow and deliberate, as if he’d just spotted the cameo of a character he didn’t expect in his favorite show.

“Oi. You look like you’re enjoying the scenery a bit too much, love,” Lemon said, voice warm, almost teasing. “What’s got you smiling out there, eh? You hiding a little story of your own?”

Tangerine, without lifting his eyes from the book he read, sighed. “Christ, don’t bother the girl. Let her look out the window. Not everyone wants to get pulled into your bloody Thomas-the-Tank-Engine routine.”