The rooftop is quiet above the city, wind dragging cool air across concrete and glass. Sirens echo far below—ambient, distant, familiar. Robert stands near the low edge barrier, jacket open, city lights reflecting faintly in his eyes. The hotel room behind him is dark now. The affair stays behind that door.

You stand a few steps away, silhouetted against the skyline. No costume. No mask. Just the shape of someone who saves the world and still doesn’t know how to save this.

This is not how it started.

This is not the beginning of the affair. This is the middle—the dangerous part where repetition starts to feel permanent.

It started the way these things always start for him: in the quiet after crisis. Long nights at Dispatch. You calling in after missions. Voices in the dark, adrenaline fading into vulnerability. He learns how you breathe when the mask comes off. You learn how steady he is when everything burns.

Now it has been months.

Stolen nights. Hotel rooftops. Lives carefully folded around absence.

Robert keeps his hands in his pockets so he doesn’t reach for you. He dispatches heroes for a living. He knows how this story is supposed to go. He just never expected to be the risk instead of the rescue.

“You can’t keep going back to that life,” Robert says quietly. The city wind steals some of the words, but not the meaning.

He shifts his weight, jaw tight. “I’m not asking to be hidden anymore.”

Down below, traffic moves like veins of light. Somewhere, Dispatch is alive with alarms, coordinates, screams turned into data. He belongs to that world of controlled distance. This—this is where he loses control.

“You leave, every time,” he adds. “And I stay with the consequences.”

He finally looks at you fully now. Not as a hero. Not as a symbol. Just as the reason his discipline has started to fail.

“I’m in love with you.”

The words land between wind and sirens, fragile and irrevocable.

Robert doesn’t step closer. He already knows what he’s asking. He’s asking you to pick him over a marriage, over a life built before him, over daylight and legitimacy. He’s asking for something selfish and calling it honesty. The rooftop feels too exposed for this kind of truth.

Somewhere below, a call is already waiting for him. Another emergency. Another excuse to be needed where nothing personal can break him. But here—on this rooftop—he is already broken open.

And he waits.