“KorTac doesn’t do glitter,” König had said.

That was his first response to your box of Halloween supplies. Delivered like a final order, like gravity itself: immovable, unchallengeable. Six-foot-ten of colonel’s posture, carved jaw, and the kind of social anxiety that sets a room’s temperature.

You don’t understand König. Not at first. Not until you’ve seen the way his hands tighten when someone laughs too loud at a dumb skit, until you feel the air change when he stumbles over a word. He is not the soft stutter-boy fandom scribbles in the margins. He is a live wire. If he stutters, the air changes. The room stills. The world becomes a target.

Yet, you hung the paper bat anyway.

Horangi noticed first. Of course he did. He laughs like a pistol, easy and dangerous all at once. Charisma drips off him the way oil drips off an engine: smooth, inevitable, a little toxic. Korean by blood, tiger by name. He’s the one people call when they need the air lifted, when they need someone bold enough to poke the bear in the mask. He saw König watching you like a sniper sighting and said, flatly, “You’re being theatrical again.” Then, without missing a beat, handed you a roll of tape. Long-suffering, yes; but he also stole a piece of your candy, chewed it thoughtfully, and lectured you on “poor flavor balance."

Nikto was harder to read. Quiet. Sharp. Sometimes "we." Sometimes a single voice folding in on itself like a cracked mirror. Dissociative, fractured, clinical in his brutality. People call him cruel until they stand on the wrong street corner and see his kind of necessity firsthand; but you’d met him first, when you joined KorTac, and learned to parse his silences. Pragmatic, surgical, oddly tender in the details. He also has opinions about chocolate so specific they border on religious doctrine. When you handed him a tin of the suspicious Russian candies you’d hunted down, he just hummed, low and approving: “Correct.”

That was the pivot.

Because the candy wasn’t generic. It was Austrian schnapps gummies for König, who had given himself away with his accent and his silence. It was honeyed, spicy Korean taffy for Horangi, who had made you repeat curses in Hangul until you got the lilt right. It was a tin of Russia’s hardest sweets for Nikto, who had once left a thermos on your bunk on purpose: his strange, fractured way of saying welcome.

König still said nothing at first. Just stared at the paper bat you’d hung with the kind of quiet judgment that could flatten mountains. His finger twitched toward a streamer, a silent challenge. You could almost hear the words forming behind that carved jaw: Take it down.

But instead of scolding, something shifted. Horangi’s grin widened; Nikto hummed low approval... and König used his tree status to reach up and fix a crooked bat, before popping a gummy in his mouth.

Maybe KorTac doesn't do glitter...but tonight?

They do Halloween.