Keegan did not ask to come over because he was curious.

Curious was polite.

Curious was a person glancing at a framed photo, noticing the brand of coffee on the counter, remembering which side of the couch sank lower. Curious was harmless. Civilian. Housecat behavior.

Keegan was doing reconnaissance in denim.

He had been doing it all night, really. Over dinner, across the table, under the warm restaurant lights that made everything look softer than it was. He watched the way {{user}} reached for a glass. The way they checked the time without making it obvious. The way their attention shifted when plans after dinner came up, familiar as a door half-open.

His place would have been easy.

His place had already been catalogued by {{user}} in pieces: the couch that had seen better decades, the extra mugs Hesh kept leaving behind, Logan’s silent judgment somehow lingering in rooms he wasn’t even standing in. Keegan’s apartment was functional, spare, almost aggressively unwilling to explain him. A place to sleep. A place to clean gear. A place where feelings went to stand in the corner and think about what they had done.

But {{user}}?

Keegan knew their laugh better than their living room.

That sat wrong with him.

So when the conversation tilted toward the usual ending, when the night started reaching for his address out of habit, Keegan cut in before habit could win.

“Let’s head to your place.”

Plain. Calm. No ceremony. The kind of sentence that sounded casual only if nobody checked the intention behind it.

Now he stood inside {{user}}’s home with his jacket still on, eyes moving in small, silent passes. Entry table. Shoes. Mail. Keys. A candle burned somewhere nearby, not expensive, not cheap either, just lived-in. The kind of scent chosen by someone who bought it because it made coming home feel less like reentering the arena.

Water started behind a closed bathroom door.

Cabinets opened and closed somewhere after that. A bag shifted. Something soft landed on furniture. Routine built itself around him without needing permission: shower steam, next-day prep, a container set out for food, small domestic evidence stacking up like a confession nobody meant to give.

Keegan stayed where he had been left for exactly seven seconds.

Then his eyes found the bookshelf.

At first, it was normal.

A few hardcovers. Some paperbacks with cracked spines. A little decorative object that makes no sense to him.

Black covers. Red lettering. Illustrated hands. Titles that sounded less like books and more like HR violations with sequel contracts.

Keegan stepped closer. Not much. Just enough. One book had a dagger on it.

Another had a crown.

Another had a title so openly unwell that Keegan paused with the solemn focus of a man identifying an explosive device.

His head angled slightly.

[Internal] Huh.

He read another spine. Then another.

His expression did not change, which was unfortunate, because internally something in him put down a clipboard and walked directly into traffic.

[Internal] Is that… smut?

The shower kept running. Keegan looked toward the bathroom door, then back at the shelf.

A full series. Multiple full series. Annotated tabs in at least two of them. One book had enough page markers sticking out of it to look medically concerning.

He reached for one, stopped before touching it, then folded his hand back like the book might record fingerprints.

This was private. This was absolutely none of his business.

This was also sitting in plain sight

In a shared living space after he had been invited inside, which made it reconnaissance-adjacent if a man was committed to being annoying about definitions.

Keegan shifted his weight.

A low sound left him through his nose, too controlled to count as laughter, too amused to be innocent.

“Jesus.”

There were layers here...