It’s been weeks. Or months—time blurs when five mutants have decided you’re the world’s smallest obsession. They started joking. “Let’s keep the human. Bait’s good.” Now it’s permanent. You can’t move without setting off a minor domestic war.

The shack you’re staying in is rotting, the wind singing through holes, but what matters is the chorus of attention aimed at you. Deadeye has you planted on the sagging couch like a prize. palms huge around your ribs—just to watch himself sharpen a blade. The metal’s shhk-shhk punctuates the room, his one eye never leaves you. He tilts the knife, studies the angle, then glances back to see how you’re breathing, as if your chest were an instrument he can tune. Sometimes he reaches out, grabs your sleeve and inhale. “Stay put,” he mutters, smoke curling from his lips, and when he shifts you catch a flash of lace—your favorite panties, stuffed in his pocket like a charm he refuses to lose.

Doc Erickson can’t bear that arrangement. He swoops in, all officious kindness, hauling you off Deadeye’s lap to the kitchen table insisting on a check-up. He loves to check on you—too intrusively. His big fingers prod at your arms and jaw, rearranging you like furniture. “Postural misalignment… dehydration… hm, nothing terminal,” he muses, fussing with your hair, brushing your cheek as if he owns it. He has a strange habit of stealing your underwear and socks when he thinks you won’t notice, trading them to Virgil or Deadeye, though he always keeps the best ones to himself—feeling them between his fingers, sometimes sniffed in the privacy of a corner.

Virgil creeps like a shadow with a big camera. He’ll stalk into the bathroom and, without drama, set a lens in the corner. “For security,” he says, but the camera is pointed at you brushing your teeth, at the steam on the mirror where your breath ghosts. He snatched you from doc with a growl, setting you between the desk and himself. He clips prototypes to your jacket—auto-targeting microtrackers, heat sensors—then sits you on his lap to show you his work, fingers nimble and precise as he explains the circuitry. "Observe. Retrovirus has matured nicely. Density gradient is high… Recombinant counter-intron sequences look stable… Transcriptive exon strands have formed…” He’s proud, earnest, and a little too pleased when you ask a question. His attention is hungry but precise; and you know his stash of your stolen things is the largest—every piece of underwear Doc passed him folded and catalogued with the precision of his machines.

Strong doesn’t bother with subtlety. He snatches your socks mid-step, roars in delight and pulling them over his hands like trophies. seeing you with Virgil, he bursted in jealousy and lunged across his desk to grab you, scattering gears and wires everywhere, booming “MINE!” as if it settled the matter. The thud of his feet shakes the shack, and though he grins wide when you flinch back, he sulks if you retreat too far.

Fawkes, is softer in his obsession. While strong was trying to find you in Virgil’s drawers, he drags you to the back wall, insisting on reading aloud from that half-charred book—poetry that he mangles into something childlike. "Listen, little dove. It’ll relax you…" He wants you close enough to watch the odd, gentle reverence in his face. When anyone reaches for you, he growls small and proprietorial, then offers a crooked smile as apology. He likes to steal your bras and put them over his eyes. To "meditate" better.*

They don’t respect doors or privacy. Deadeye’s smoke follows. Doc examines too often. Virgil’s cameras blink. Strong steals socks; Fawkes—your calm. They cling to your space until solitude feels like a rumor. You try to slip away—only to find them blocking the hall, arguing over where you belong. Deadeye wants the couch, Doc the table, Virgil his work, Strong growls, Fawkes pleads. Their voices merge: stay. So you stay, pretending closeness is protection instead of possession, letting them circle, because their attention is a dangerous shelter—and you have nowhere else.