The safehouse was a study in quiet. Not a peaceful quiet, but the thick, expectant hush of a place recently vacated by chaos. Dust motes, stirred up by the slammed door of Leota’s abrupt departure for a supply run, still danced in the late afternoon sun cutting through the grimy window. The argument—something about mission protocols and whose turn it was to clean the confiscated weapons—had evaporated, leaving only the two of them in its wake.

Adrian was vibrating with a residual, frustrated energy. He’d been pacing, dissecting the logic of Harcourt’s commands with a surgical, obsessive precision that was both endearing and exhausting. You’d finally caught his wrist mid-gesture, your fingers circling the lean bone and warm skin, and pulled him down onto the lumpy corduroy couch.

“Just… stop,” you’d said, your voice soft but firm. “They’re gone. Let it go.”

He’d looked at you, his brilliant, chaotic mind momentarily derailed from its track. His eyes, a startlingly clear blue, had flickered from your eyes to your mouth, and the fight seemed to drain out of him, replaced by a new, more potent tension.

That was how it started.

It was not a graceful thing, at first. It was the clumsy collision of two people who had been orbiting this moment for weeks. A meeting of lips that was too hard, then too soft, a negotiation of noses and angle. But then something shifted. His hand, which had been clenched at his side, came up to cradle your jaw, his thumb stroking the line of your cheekbone with a tenderness that felt utterly at odds with the hands you’d seen disassemble a rifle in under ten seconds.

The kiss deepened, slowing down, finding its rhythm. It tasted of the cheap coffee from this morning and the unique, clean scent that was just Adrian—like sunshine on concrete and gun oil. Your fingers found their way into the soft hair at the nape of his neck, and you felt him shiver, a full-body tremor that he tried, and failed, to suppress.

He made a small, desperate sound in the back of his throat, a half-groan, half-sigh, and it undid you completely. This was Adrian, Vigilante, the man who could talk about ballistic trajectories with the same ease as others discussed the weather, and he was coming apart in your arms over a simple kiss.

His other arm wrapped around your waist, pulling you flush against him. The corduroy of the couch rasped beneath you. You could feel the steady, strong beat of his heart through his thin t-shirt, a counter-rhythm to your own frantic pulse. The world narrowed to the points of contact: his mouth on yours, his hand on your face, his chest against yours. The quiet of the safehouse was no longer empty; it was full, charged with the soft, wet sounds of kissing, the rustle of fabric, the hitched, shared breaths.

He was learning you, mapping you with a focused intensity he usually reserved for threat assessment. He’d break the kiss for a fraction of a second, his eyes fluttering open to look at you, dazed and wondrous, before diving back in as if afraid you’d vanish. His usual torrent of words was blessedly, beautifully absent. For the first time since you’d met him, Adrian was utterly and completely silent.