Jaeha wasn’t planning to take the long route home, but the night was colder than usual, and the quiet always made his senses sharper. He’d left the station late, his breath forming pale clouds as he walked, one hand in his coat pocket, the other wrapped around a half-finished canned coffee. The street was mostly empty—just the distant hum of a bus and the buzz of a faulty streetlamp overhead.

Then he heard it.

A low, ugly sound. Not quite a scream, not quite a groan—something between a threat and a death rattle. It slipped out from the shadowed alley to his right. Jaeha stopped instantly. His fingers twitched toward where his gun was holstered beneath his coat. A prickle ran across his skin—familiar, unwelcome. The electric, unnatural pulse of a fiend’s aura.

He stepped closer, slow and controlled, listening. Something scraped. Something hissed. And then he felt it stronger: that unmistakable green distortion in the air, visible only to him—sickly, warped, clinging to whatever was inside.

He exhaled, braced himself, and turned the corner into the alley.

What he saw made him freeze mid-step.

A man was pinned against the wall, mouth open in a silent scream, the green aura thrashing violently around him like it was trying to tear itself free. And standing before him—back to Jaeha, posture calm, movements precise—was you.

You weren’t struggling. You weren’t panicked. You weren’t even exerting effort. You held the man by the throat with one hand, the other pressed against his chest. The green aura flickered, cracked, shattered—then dissolved completely as the man’s body went limp, sliding down the brick wall like a puppet with its strings cut.

You didn’t flinch.

You simply straightened your posture, your shadow long and sharp against the alley’s stone.

He felt his breath catch—not from fear, but from the sudden collision of reality and the thing he had doubted for years. Because in that dim alley light, layered over your human form, he saw something else. Something brighter, older, edged with divinity. A second silhouette—transparent but unmistakable—hovering just behind you. Light that wasn’t light. A figure he didn’t have the vocabulary for.

His heart skipped. His mind reached instinctively for the closest word it knew.

“...A fairy,” he breathed.

The word slipped out before he could stop it. It wasn’t correct—something in him knew that—but it was the only label his human brain could grab onto.

You turned sharply. The look you gave him cut through the dark—sharp, cold, unbothered.

For a full second Jaeha didn’t move. You were famous, a public figure everyone adored. You had been interrogated in his department earlier today for an entirely different incident, where you had seemed harmless, distant, elegant. But this version of you? This was no actress playing a role. This was something ancient wearing human skin.

He swallowed hard, then stepped forward despite the instinct screaming that he was in over his head. His voice came out low, controlled. “So… it really was you.”

Your eyes narrowed slightly. He could tell you were evaluating him—assessing threat, motive, maybe whether you needed to eliminate him too.

He lifted his hands slowly in a gesture of caution, not fear. “Hold on. I’m not here to arrest you. I just—” His breath puffed white in the cold as he tried to gather words that didn’t make him sound insane. “—I heard the aura. I followed it. I didn’t expect to see you finishing off a fiend in a back alley.”

You remained silent.

Jaeha exhaled through his nose, watching the body at your feet. “You’re not just famous. You’re not just someone caught up in the wrong place twice in one week.” He met your eyes again. “This is something you’ve done before. Isn’t it?”

Your expression sharpened. A slight tilt of your chin. A shift of your shoulders. A glare that could have frozen blood.

He stopped talking instantly.

But the silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was heavy with meaning he didn’t fully grasp yet—but he understood the warning.