Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Pier Point’s executive boardroom gleamed not unlike a cut gem at the crown of the city. Obsidian walls drank in the light and returned it in razor-thin reflections. Through wide windows, rows of buildings stood ordered and precise. The city's spine rose in straight cuts of steel and glass. Shopping arcades glowed with tasteful neon threads, and the famous Kiliro Fish Restaurant hovered as a glassy eye over the thoroughfare. Above it all, visible even during the earliest system hours, a watermark streaked the sky. Qlipoth’s subspace barrier shimmered; a lattice of distant light that reminded everyone which Aeon the IPC swore to emulate.

Aventurine lounged at the long table as though it were a roulette wheel he owned. His tousled sandy blond hair sat just so, a few strands rebelliously out of place to sell the fantasy of ease. Cyan and magenta irises caught the boardroom lights in full lustre. He was dazzling. That was the point.

The blond kept the smile playing at his lips effortlessly. Even with something sharp pressing beneath his left cuff hard enough to threaten his concentration.

“The public sentiment index dropped another nine points after our involvement in acquiring a third of Penacony's assets,” Jade drawled, not looking up from her data pad. Her voice cut across the boardroom like a crystal knife. “Oti Alfalfa gave three interviews in the past two days regarding our shared stakes in Penacony's assets with the Nameless from the Astral Express. The Families don’t have a penchant for airing their dirty laundry. They whisper about others instead. The whispers are enough.”

To the left of Aventurine, Topaz sat straight-backed, light blue eyes alert beneath the red streak in her silvery hair. Her largely monochromatic uniform, edged in gold with a hint of red, was immaculate even at this cruel hour. Her cape draped just so, brooch gleaming. In her lap, Numby perched on the obsidian surface like a living paperweight; a small Warp Trotter with a jaunty red bow on their back and ears that sparkled a faint purple when they twitched. They tilted their nose toward Aventurine and gave a soft squeak, as if to check his pulse.

Aventurine slipped two fingers under the table and scratched their rounded side in passing. Numby sniffed, pleased. “At least someone at this table appreciates me…” Aventurine murmured under his breath.

Not quite a grin touched Topaz’s lips, though it tried. “They appreciate snacks,” she bit back, dry.

“Perception,” Diamond interrupted, and the room settled. His voice was calm, arriving with the gravity of polished stone. “We do not buy it more than once. We maintain it. And we are, presently, overspending.”

Diamond turned pale eyes on Aventurine; there lay no true heat under the gaze that bore into the blond. Simply a steady application of pressure. Much like a slow-moving glacier deciding what the valley below it would look like in a thousand years. “You are familiar with this matter.”

“Only on champagne,” Aventurine offered politely in jest. The blond's golden cuff link pressed nastily against the forming spine under his skin, and pain shot uncomfortably along his inner arm. It was with a shaking hand that he raised his glass, sipping on water to hide the hiss threatening to move past his lips instead of being controlled as an exhale through his nose.

At Diamond's side, Pearl tucked a stray strand of beige hair behind her shoulder as her eyes whirred gently towards a graph projected across the table. "There is a higher probability our next session with the Families will devolve into an optics theatre. Forty-two percent and rising.”

“Mm,” Aventurine cleared his throat with a hum. “Drama sells, Pearl. Ask any venue.”

“Drama sells tickets, Aventurine,” Jade clipped, finally lifting her gaze. Her pastel blue eyes, slit like a serpent’s, narrowed with interest. A wide-brimmed black hat cast a disciplined shadow across her face. The mantle at her shoulders fell in black and indigo, the underside flashing violet when she shifted at the table to cross her leg to the other side. “Stability, however, sells futures.”

“The Family is not the audience,” Diamond added, unblinking. “They are the critics. We cannot afford a poor review, nor can we risk the public's trust in Penacony.”

Aventurine felt another prick, under the ribs this time, a hot needle of amber angling dangerously toward daylight. “Then perhaps,” he offered lightly, “we rewrite the third act.”

“By not missing your cues?” Jade's gaze was now laser-focused on Aventurine.

Numby squeaked in alarm. Topaz’s eyes slid to Aventurine’s cuff, to the faint glint of gold under white fabric, then back to his face. She didn’t speak on it.

Aventurine stretched his legs under the table, looking unbothered, and threw his two credits across the room. “That’s the rule at Pier Point. And I—”

Diamond lifted one hand to stop Aventurine's speech. “You will repair what is strained.”

There it was. Another clear-cut decision already entered into the ledger.

Sapphire uttered something quiet about guard rotations keeping perfect time; an almost uncomfortable attempt to change the subject in his favour. “Qlipoth’s orbit has not been left unwatched since our charter. We should take care not to break appearances here if Aventurine will continue to weigh on the scales elsewhere.”

The board moved with practised ease; a machine polished enough to imitate grace for the public outside those four walls.

Aventurine played along; spinning a ribbon of jokes and glittering asides to keep the mood from curdling entirely. He didn’t miss the way Jade’s gaze returned to him at each comment like a metronome, or how Topaz’s fingers idly traced the edge of her cape when she thought he wasn’t looking. Numby’s ears kept flicking toward him as if the little trotter could hear the grind under skin.

By the time Diamond said “Adjourned”, Aventurine’s smile ached about as much as a tightly held breath underwater.

The Ten Stonehearts rose from their seats. Jade folded into motion, pendants and ribbons making quiet music as she moved. Topaz carefully scooped Numby up from her lap and into her arms. The warp trotter chirped and stretched, then wriggled to tilt their snout back towards Aventurine with fondness.

“Ma'am,” Aventurine said to Jade in passing, “if your graph angles get any sharper, they’ll cut your fingers.”

“They already have,” Jade replied softly without slowing her stylus. Her eyes remained focused on her data pad as she cleared the room.

Topaz paused beside him, whispering a hushed “Eat something before you start another fire.” The pointed look on her face betrayed any casual nuance in her tone.

Aventurine flashed her a grin that never failed in public and rarely felt as false as it did at the present moment. “Can't argue with that. Breakfast is for winners, after all.”

In another mouth, the line would have sounded self-destructive.

“Then have it twice,” Topaz snorted and turned on her heel, Numby nestled firmly against the crook of her arm.

Aventurine lingered an extra moment in the doorway, soaking in his own thoughts to determine if any visible flaws showed before he turned to the corridor, and the doors closed on the boardroom.

His wrist throbs.

He does not look at it.

He does not look at it.

He does not—

The corridor outside the boardroom hummed with the careful quietness of credits hard at work. Assistants occasionally slid past on soft soles, phones softly vibrating with constant alerts. The security at the far end stood in a stillness Aventurine had always privately resented. Sapphire was right. The Pier Point guard had never left their posts under Qlipoth’s orbit. If the Aeon wanted mortal statues, the Amber Lord certainly had picked the right planet.

Aventurine rode the mirrored lift down because everyone else tended to avoid it. The carved glass panels were meant to remind one of who they are and whom they owe. In triplicate, then sextuplicate, each pane catching a slightly different angle until the owner can’t tell which is the original. As Aventurine studied the array of himself, he resisted the impulse to tap each chest as if it were a deck to feel which one had the extra card hidden. In one reflection, his cuff is too smooth. In another, there’s a swelling beneath the linen of his shirt. In the original, the one that breathes the most life, there is a sweetness in his mouth he recognises as blood.

“Still in the game,” he tells himself. The lift approves with a pleasant chime and deposits him into a skyway that smells faintly of cleaning agents.

The blond takes the long path through the shopping district. Not because he needs anything, he owns three of most things and more of the rest. Pier Point’s gloss is a tonic if you stare at it long enough. Displays adjust themselves as he passes, algorithms guessing what Aventurine might want today. A sales executive recognises him and performs the appropriate choreography: a bright greeting, a respectful distance. Absolutely no mention of his status. He acknowledges her attention towards him with a smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes and a noncommittal promise to return.

Far above the residential lofts that threaten to break the sky and the floating shopping districts, the subspace barrier throws a faint, pale geometric filter across the daylight. If it were anyone but Aventurine, it would be easy to allow it to be beautiful. Aventurine remembers instead the moment Preservation crawled into his bones like a promise and a vice. The feeling as his cornerstone cracked before it shattered in a place built for dreams. The way his own hollow laughter sounded in a ruined stage as coins rained from the sky.

He kept walking.

Kiliro Fish glittered at a corner of his vision; dining tables suspended inside a bubble of refracted blue from the shape of an unnerving eye. Aventurine catches his reflection a dozen times in that curve. It almost makes him want to go in, to order something complicated and be seen being unbothered.

Almost.

Instead, Aventurine takes a sky bridge toward the residential towers, where executives live above their own shop as if they were old-world merchants in modern-day suits. The wind here is filtered into a polite breeze. Guards nod without ever quite letting one feel like they’ve registered you personally; this is policy. This was Pier Point. Everyone is important.

No one is special.

The high rise recognises Aventurine's credentials with a chimed greeting. Another lift carries him into silence. The hallway carpet swallows any noise his measured steps make. Aventurine’s door slides open on command, revealing a stark contrast to the plain metal exterior.

Wealth is a shape one can wear, and Aventurine has made a home out of its very outline. Marble floors sprawled well past the foyer, veined in interesting patterns. Velvet curtains spilt gold across glass walls that turn the city into a private aquarium of light. Amongst the remaining walls, ambient panels of wall art shifted constantly through a spectrum of coloured scenery tailored to his preferences. It was almost as if there was very little outside of his persona as a member of the Stonehearts reflected across his home.

The first sound to greet the blond in the otherwise silent apartment was a soft meow.

Heart, Clover, and Spade stirred from the emerald sofa; three black catlike entities with shells that were very reminiscent of Xianzhou pastries. Heart, the smallest yet the bravest, tumbled clumsily over a nearby cushion and rolled until the momentum corrected itself. Clover simply hopped off the couch and circled twice in a diagonal motion, as if dividing the room into manageable quadrants for itself. Spade planted both front little paws onto the cushion, pretending to have been alert the whole time. Large golden eyes from all three blink in affectionate confusion at him.

The trio had been Ruan Mei’s abandoned creations, but they had not come to Aventurine from her hand. Ratio had given them to him, all but dropped on his doorstep after their mission on Penacony without a second thought.

"Enrichment," he'd called them. Aventurine had laughed it off at the time, pretended it was funny. But every evening when the door slid open and these three ridiculous things meowed their greetings, he thought of Ratio first.

“Ah,” Aventurine snapped back to the present, allowing the door to shut behind him as his vision was filled with these three faithful shapes. “My audience~”

The blond dropped his hand to ruffle Spade’s back as he crossed the living room, fingers skimming an etched ridge in the velvety soft shell. The touch steadied him more than it should.

Heart piped up in a bright yowl as Clover meowed something closer to “Stop” in admonishment of the other's outburst. Spade hopped off the couch and planted itself by the blond's ankle with a stubborn "mrrp". Aventurine laughed, his voice wearing thin. “Already critiquing me? What a tough crowd.”

In the bedroom, he unlatched his cuff links; the left one sticks. The blond clicked his tongue and rotated his wrist until the fabric slid free of the swelling. He hung the jacket and loosened his tie only to lay it across a chair haphazardly. In the mirror, the man looking back at Aventurine is still handsome, still filled with a twinkle of mischief in his vivid gaze. He carried the kind of silhouette that prints well in an article.

Aventurine gently pressed his fingers to the place under his ribs where a steady pressure had been building as an overdue debt. “It's fine…” He muttered to himself as he walked back into the living room, where Heart was already clambering up a pillow to be higher. Clover was nosing the edge of a coffee table book as if literacy were imminent for its future.

Aventurine means to pour a drink. He means to put on a song with entirely too much piano and exactly the right number of memories attached. He means to test whether he can ride this body like a well-trained animal through another evening without allowing it to buck.

He doesn’t make it that far.

The uncomfortable pressure in his ribs becomes insistence, and insistence becomes a prickle of pain. Aventurine inhales to steady himself, and the inhale is a mistake because his breath moves his ribs the wrong way against the amber growing where lungs do not approve. The first sharp pain is hot enough to white out the room for completely. By the time his vision returned, Heart had stopped mid-scramble and sat staring up at him with golden, serious eyes.

“Don’t—” Aventurine tells the air, the city, Qlipoth, himself. The word breaks on the last syllable. He steadies a hand on the back of the sofa. The apartment obliges and dims the lights a half-step, mistaking his tone for a preference.

Aventurine peels a cuff back, just enough to see, and there it was. A threatening amber glimmer under the thin membrane of his skin. He covers it with the heel of his palm and forces himself steady.

Realistically, Aventurine should go to the bathroom. He should fetch the small metal file from the second drawer where it's tucked away as a dirty secret. He should change into silk that won’t hold a crease of blood the way fine wool of his suit will.

'In a moment…' he thinks to himself.

He exhales, and the held line snaps.

Pain lances from his ribs to his spine. Aventurine folds hard against the bar cart before the sound fully leaves his throat. Clover now circled in anxious loops, and Spade pressed firmly against his shoe as if anchoring him together.

The mask of Aventurine had done its job. It had gotten him home. There are no assistants here. No board. No Jade with her serpent eyes and surgical vocabulary. No Topaz, who would see too much and say too little until the exact word he needed from her actually mattered. Not even Diamond to ledger the offence and assign the fine. Just himself, three ridiculous creatures, and the high yet thin sound the air makes when it passes through his clenched teeth.

The blond straightens with a tremble, slow enough to keep his footing steady, and gestures for the room to follow his lead. The lights dimmed in response, and the temperature cooled. Aventurine walked toward the bathroom in careful, measured steps. Behind him, claws click and a set of bouncing thuds can be heard softly on marble as Heart, Clover, and Spade follow after their human.

The door swings open on a sink that washed away his mistakes when he would come home bleeding and bruised from an assignment. Aventurine reached for the second drawer with his good hand. As his fingers close around the file, as his reflection lifts its imperfect face to observe the next part of the performance, the first shard pushes through.

Aventurine braced himself against the marble counter, the reflection that met him in the mirror already a stranger. His shirt clung damp against his skin in places. His chest glittered faintly under the collar, not with sweat but with thin splinters of amber breaking through beneath skin too fragile to hold them.

The cat cakes had followed him. Heart squeezed through the door first, determined, letting out a sharp meow. Clover waddled after with a nervous trill, and Spade came last of all, pausing in the doorway like a guard deciding if the fight was worth joining.

Shaking fingers pressed the file against the jagged surface pushing up from his wrist and drew it down with care. Fire shot up his arm. Aventurine ground his teeth, working with measured strokes, steady, methodical. It was easier if he imagined chips of amber he picked out of his body as poker chips, clattering into stacks, dust as gold flour on a casino floor.

Heart meowed sharply, scrambling closer to his ankle. Aventurine kept going, ignoring the ache blooming across his ribs when he got around to picking out the remaining slivers near his sternum. A shard pushed through his palm, piercing the soft web of skin between thumb and finger. He hissed and pressed his forehead to the cool mirror, breath fogging the surface.

With a trembling free hand, Aventurine pulled the shard out, long and slick, glowing faintly even as blood ran down his wrist. He held it up for a moment to stare in disgust, a tally of failure. Then he dropped it into the tumbler by the sink. The shard hit glass with a sharp plink. Fractures formed cracks that looked similar to a spider's web across the vessel, threatening to give out under the weight of too many collected splinters.

When at last his arms trembled too much to keep steady, Aventurine carelessly abandoned the file into the sink. It landed with a dull clatter, lost temporarily beneath the mound of dust. The blond slid down to the floor, back against the cold wall, chest heaving.

Heart climbed immediately onto his lap, meowing in hesitance. Clover nestled against his hip, trilling a fretful whine, and Spade pressed into his thigh with a low, grounding purr. Their voices overlapped like a broken chorus, too earnest to ignore.

Aventurine tipped his head back against the wall, eyes burning. “Still in the game,” he whispered.

After the pain ebbed to a manageable throb, he sat crumpled on the bathroom floor until the chill of the marble tile crept through his clothes. Heart dozed with their shell warm against his thigh, Clover’s soft purr vibrated through his bones. Spade, meanwhile, stubbornly anchored his knee like a paperweight. The tumbler on the counter held only six new shards and a web of cracks that looked one flinch from surrender.

Eventually, the blond moved once he was certain there would be no more shards. Aventurine rinsed the basin, watching as the gold dust swirled down the drain and washed away any evidence of his struggle. He disinfected the file and wrapped it in linen again, the ritual steadying his hands far more than the warm water did. Pressing a cool cloth to the torn places on his wrist and palm, Aventurine lied to himself internally about how well each crescent that marked his skin would close.

The apartment dimmed to night mode at a gesture. He stretched out on the emerald sofa; bleeding on the bed felt like a bad idea. Heart, Clover, and Spade clambered on top of him and settled, purring and meowing in a harmony of tender affection that was far more than he deserved. Clover offered a gentle meow, and Spade pressed in close with a quiet sniff at his injuries. Aventurine bit back a laugh. They were meant as enrichment; Ratio’s ridiculous gift. And yet, in this silence, they felt more like his refuge.

Vivid eyes fluttered closed as he tried to breathe the way he had coached so many liars in the company to breathe. In for the count, out for the show.

Behind his eyelids, the light shifted as his thoughts plagued him. The boardroom’s oppressive atmosphere. The elevator’s mirrors. Gloved hands signing contracts he hadn’t read. A laugh in a ruined casino that wasn’t his. A name he refused to think of for more than a brief moment, lost on the desert wind.

He drifted for a while, biding his time between now and morning.

Dawn cut Pier Point with little fanfare, precisely as the clock struck the appropriate system hour. The glass wall shifted colours from black to cobalt to a washed pearl glow; the subspace barrier took on a faint, impossible hue beyond Preservation's latticed cage. Down in the arteries, workers moved like red blood cells. Up where Aventurine lay, however, the air was cleaner, colder. That was the miracle of money. It lifted one above their own consequences.

His phone chimed. One pulse, precise. Devoid of Diamond’s bruising pale blue icon.

Jade.

Aventurine read the message without moving his head:

No subject line. No pleasantries. Lady Bonajade understood the value of a clean ledger.

Aventurine exhaled carefully so his ribs would not protest. The cat cakes stirred. Both Heart and Clover blinked up whilst Spade yawned a tiny "mrrp" so sincere he had to laugh. The blond peeled himself off the sofa and began to work on the only thing about himself he could still make presentable.

A shower was in order, one as cold as he could possibly bear at first to wake his senses. It was only once he was awake that Aventurine could dial it to the hottest setting to soothe his bodily aches. The blond watched pink flow in ribbons from his wrist only to vanish down the brass mouth of the drain, then turned the temperature up another degree out of spite.

The mirror, now wiped away of its condensation, reflected Aventurine's visage brightly and threw the damage last night had wrought right back at him. The worst of the spines had been filed down and picked out, leaving raw, empty pockets and crescents littered along pale planes in their wake. With great care, he daubed a thin layer of numbing antiseptic over the torn skin. One problem down. The remaining problem solved itself as he cut two narrow bands of a black silk tie from a drawer and tied them low over his wrists. Fashion could be anything if one wore it with conviction. Ratio would probably call that a logical fallacy.

Aventurine carefully chose a shirt with enough structure to disguise what breathing occasionally did when it rattled his chest. A jacket cut in clean lines followed, guiding the eye elsewhere. Cuff links heavy enough to keep the fabric where he wanted it, one shade duller than usual so the gaze would stay up, not down.

When he opened the closet for shoes, the blond found Heart sitting solemnly on the toe of one like a very small guard. “You're being an occupational hazard,” he informed them, trying not to smile. Clover batted at a tassel on his more notable jacket with a tentative huff through its nose while Spade pretended they had not been lovingly cleaning Aventurine’s spare wristwatch with their mouth for the last five minutes. “Hold the fort. Anyone tries to sell you a timeshare, bite them.”

The elevator carried him up and in, not down and out, and the direction of it still felt wrong on his stomach. The mirrored walls offered back a dozen Aventurines prepared to meet a serpent in a glass room. He made a game of ranking them: the one at two o’clock had the best smile; the one at seven o’clock hid the tremor best; the one right in front of him belonged most convincingly.

He thought, instead, about Jade’s summons. Why fifteen minutes? Because fifteen minutes is enough time to see whether you were already ready. Jade deplored the performatively late. She wanted you as you were before the rehearsal. She wanted tells instead of performances.

Aventurine’s mouth pursed as his stomach soured at the thought.

The lounge opened itself to glass underfoot, glass on every side, and a horizon line where city and sky argued about who deserved the spotlight. He arrived early by a minute that only mattered to the obsessive and the frightened. He was neither. The blond didn’t sit. The chairs were a trap. Too low or too high, both designed to make you adjust yourself in the way a lesser negotiator believes is inconsequential. Aventurine made his way to the window and placed two fingers on the cool pane instead, dragging them down against the spotless surface as if to mar it.

The phone in his pocket vibrated once; an automated reminder of their meeting he had no intention of checking or needing. He turned the screen off without looking.

The door sighed again.

Jade stepped through with confidence as the brim of her black hat threw an indigo shadow across the top half of her face. Her mantle fell in a deep prismatic blue that turned violet where the light tested it. Gold and jade accents chimed together in a quiet, almost musical tone as each one shifted. Her pastel eyes found him.

“Aventurine,” she greeted, and the morning continued as if she’d uttered nothing at all.

The blond turned from the window at her voice. Moving toward the nearest leather chair, he chose to rest his hand on its back instead of taking a seat.

“Start with the congratulations,” Aventurine's lips curled into a smile that did not reach his eyes. “I got out of bed before noon. Surely there’s an award for that.”

Jade did not sit immediately. She crossed the mezzanine lounge. The entire room was built for her stride alone as every ornament in her attire made a quiet conversation with the glass in how it echoed. A gold chain at her throat glinted once under the light when she lowered herself into a chair across from Aventurine.

“You’ve been sloppy, Aventurine,” she hummed, folding one arm into her lap. While her smile met him politely, her eyes roved across his form.

The words were delivered in a voice calm enough to register as a weather report, yet Aventurine felt the weight of them ringing in his ears. He laughed, leaning a little too comfortably against the back of the opposite chair he stood behind. Aventurine carefully adjusted his sleeve so the silk band at his wrist showed as an accessory. As if he had nothing to hide. “Sloppy? Please, Lady Jade. I’m the tidiest disaster this company’s ever had.”

Her pastel gaze cut through the poor banter like a scalpel. Jade ignored the bait. She tapped a finger against her data pad, where projections flickered to life on the nearby window: graphs, figures, jagged red lines intersecting smoother blues. The city beneath them shone through the transparent display, making the losses look like they’d been carved into Pier Point’s skyline itself.

“Your returns are narrowing. Your risks increase. And luck—” she paused delicately, though the pause itself was out of character, “luck is not a strategy.”

Aventurine felt a prick sharply under his cuff, a hot pressure desperate to break through. He shifted his hand onto the table, draping it casually as if wholly at ease. The pulse under his skin burned hotter. He forced his grin to widen.

“Not a strategy, you're right,” he agreed smoothly, “but it does make the strategy prettier. Besides, you’ve seen me gamble before. I’m not just lucky; I’m charming about it.”

“Charm doesn’t always tip the balance in your favour. You'll need more than luck or charm,” Her eyes tracked his face, not his hands, though Aventurine could swear she saw the tension in his fingers anyway. “You used to understand that.”

The grin faltered at the edges. He covered it with a laugh, tipping back as if he found her sternness delightful. “And you used to smile at my jokes. Time changes us all.”

Jade blinked slowly, a serpent acknowledging prey. She closed the projection with a flick, graphs dissolving into light. “Do you know what time changes most consistently, Aventurine?”

He raised his brows, mock anticipation painted across his features. “Surprise me.”

“Value,” She said, leaning back, mantle shifting as her gaze dipped briefly to Aventurine's wrist. “And damage is never neutral.”

For the briefest moment, Aventurine's eyes caught Jade's without the veil of performance. He felt small in that instance. Then he looked away, allowing his gaze to slide toward the horizon beyond the glass. Pier Point’s towers glittered in the dawn, unfaltering, mercilessly stable.

Silence balanced itself thinly between them. Jade let it stand until Aventurine’s smile edged toward impatience. Only then did she move.

“Show me your hand,” she demanded flatly.

Aventurine’s grin held. Somewhere inside him, something staggered.

“My hand?” the blond repeated. “You’ll have to buy in first, Ma'am.”

Jade extended her right hand across the glass table, palm up. A serpent’s courtesy. The jade bracelet on her wrist clinked softly against a silver band that coiled up her arm. Her violet lacquered nails caught a slice of light and threw it back at him in accusation.

“You’re hiding something,” she said. “I dislike unknowns.”

He could have made three jokes before she breathed again. He could have leaned forward and kissed her glove like a penitent, signed a new contract with his mouth. Aventurine bore his gaze into her hand and felt the thin membrane of self he wore every day grow uncomfortably tight.

Under the cuff, a golden spine already managed to split the skin. The silk band was damp and tacky, and his heartbeat throbbed painfully against his veins. He imagined, for a moment, peeling the fine silk back, picturing the little wince she wouldn’t quite allow herself to show, and the report she would file afterwards in language so precise it would bruise even Diamond's ego.

He imagined how good it would feel to stop pretending for once.

Aventurine let the fantasy crest and break in his mind. He tipped his head, laughed softly, and did not place his hand in hers. “I’m flattered, truly,” he said. “But the mystery for you is half my margin.”

“Aventurine.”

She didn’t raise her voice on his name, but he heard what other people never did. The space where familiarity might have been, carefully kept empty in a warning. She waited for exactly one painfully long moment more, then withdrew her hand and allowed it to rest on the data pad in her lap. Jade's movement dismissed him more completely than any verbal rebuke in that moment would.

Jade considered him the way one considers a column of numbers that will not, for love or terror, add. “Your luck isn’t just thinning. You’re misplaying into it. You are over-leveraged on charm, under-collateral on discipline,” Her eyes cut to his wrist and back so quickly he nearly missed it. “If you crumble now, you will take Jelena down with you.”

For a moment, the smile dropped. He didn’t let it fall far, but he felt the muscles in his face refuse obedience. The shard in his wrist pulsed uncomfortably as it pressed up into the fabric. “Topaz knows how to play the table,” he said, too quickly.

“She knows how to count,” Jade said. “Counting doesn’t save you if the house is on fire.”

He could retort in a hundred ways. That he had never once let a flame touch Topaz, that he would burn himself to the bone before he let her feel the heat. He said none of them. He leaned back instead, loose-limbed and smiling as he funnelled the ache into a half-laugh. “You wound me. This is all sounding very… earnest.” He tasted the word as if it were foreign on his tongue. “I thought you admired spectacle when it profits.”

“I admire control and accountability,” Jade said. “Yours is… performative.”

He clapped once, softly; she’d delivered the line he’d been waiting to hear all morning. “Performative? I’m Pier Point’s patron saint of performance. We built an empire on the art of seeming.”

“We maintained an empire on the art of being,” she corrected, and somehow the coolness in her tone wavered and warmed at the same time. “The Alfalfa interviews made a narrative out of your absence. Diamond will clean the surface, but the stain is still there. If you require help, you will ask for it.”

The word sat there between them, offensive in its simplicity.

“Help?” Aventurine repeated, pitch tilted just enough to turn it into theatre. “From whom? From you?”

A shadow of something passed under her eyes; annoyance, or perhaps the acceptance that he would circle, not approach. “Ask me,” Jade said, “and I will oblige. Failing that, ask anyone you trust.”

The blond smiled wryly at the admission. “Fortunately, I don’t need it.”

“A pity,” she said, and rose.

Her mantle flowed into place as she stood; the wide-brimmed hat clouded her eyes once more in the slope of an indigo shadow. The jade pendants at her waist chimed once as if in agreement with her movement. For all the ornament, nothing about her seemed excessive.

Aventurine straightened as well, every inch of him posturing in false ease. He could feel the warm stickiness at his wrist soaking further into silk. He adjusted the cuff as if he were simply twisting his cuff link back into place, trying his hardest not to flinch.

Jade glanced at the city beyond them as her head turned. The subspace barrier laid its pale net across the morning. “Fifteen minutes,” she said, “and you arrived within them. I expected as much.”

“Imagine what I could do with just a minute more,” he said, softly.

“Imagine what you could do with honesty,” she returned.

For the briefest instant, so brief in fact he would later convince himself he’d imagined it, her gaze dipped back to his wrist and her thin brows scrunched. Then she turned her back to him, and the click of her heels on the glass floor punctuated the expression she did not verbalise.

She paused at the door. “One more thing,” The reflection in the polished metal framed both Aventurine in his practised dazzle and Jade in her curated coldness. Two of a kind. “If you intend to bluff,” she said without looking back, “do not forget that you’re playing against a mirror,” The door sighed open. “It knows your tells.”

The panel slid shut, and Jade vanished through, midnight brim and all. A deafening silence flowed in behind her.

Aventurine allowed the grin to bleed off his face inch by inch. He looked down at his hand on the table. The silk band was darkening at the edge; a thin, gleaming line of red had crept past the weave to kiss his palm. He flexed his fingers only for pain to climb hot and sharp along his forearm.

He lowered his gaze to the floor.

Glass peered back. His reflection hovered above Pier Point’s glitter. The image twitched, and amber lines climbed across its face; smoothing his mouth into something inhuman, filling his eyes with crystallised gold. His ribs ached in sympathy. Aventurine told himself it was an artefact of the light, a refraction through too many panes.

The image held for longer than he'd like. Then, it was only him again.

He breathed, carefully.

The mezzanine’s sudden hush made him too aware of himself; he could feel the edges of his mask as fine wire along his tightened jaw. Aventurine adjusted the lapels of his jacket and finally turned from the table. The room’s sensors, pleased, warmed the light a fraction to flatter him. He did not accept the flattery. The blond crossed to the door and allowed the hallway's air-conditioned chill to ease the heat radiating from his skin.

The walk back through Pier Point became another maze of reflections. He gave them all a winning smile, because that was the unspoken rule. He hurried his pace past the curated art, past the executive skyway where salespeople rehearsed their warmth for those beyond the lattice. In the mirrored elevator, a dozen false Aventurines yet again arranged themselves before him. He studied them for a count of three, four, five, and ranked them again. The one dead centre looked closest to telling the truth and therefore most dangerous.

“Still in the game,” he told them, and the car, ever eager to please, chimed its agreement once more.

When the doors opened on his floor, the pain under his cuff made itself known once more.

He didn’t break stride.

He wouldn’t. Not in a hallway with cameras, not in a lift with mirrors, not anywhere there was a witness except the ones he’d chosen. He let the apartment recognise him with a soft chime as it scanned his credentials. He let the door shut on the city; allowing silence to vault itself back into place.

Only then would he look down at his wrist.

Only then would he go looking for the file.

The apartment greeted the blond with its usual calm silence. Aventurine didn’t return the courtesy. Instead, he peeled himself out of his jacket. Examining the silk lining of his cut-up tie sticking to his wrist, he noticed where a thin spine had already forced itself through. Aventurine sighed in frustration and discarded the stained garment, watching it crumple haphazardly to the floor.

Heart, Clover, and Spade stirred from their corner. Heart tumbled forward with a determined meow whilst Spade and Clover waddled stiffly to block his path stubbornly, as though the two creatures no larger than a decorative lounge cushion could hold him upright when they pressed into his leg.

“Damn…” Aventurine muttered, tugging at his cuff link and ignoring the creatures until the swollen seam surrendered and parted. He undid his shirt buttons in a neat line, pausing only when the material pulled taut over his body and caught on his arm, earning a hiss through his teeth. He changed deliberately despite the day still being early, as if that could slow the inevitable. The remainder of the suit returned to its hanger, and the silk pyjamas took their place once more.

The bathroom lit itself at his entrance, and Aventurine leaned carefully on the wall next to the stone counter. His reflection blinked back with cyan-and-magenta eyes too sharp, a grin stretched too thin, skin glittering where golden spines jutted up through the crescents empty earlier in the morning.

He flippantly yanked on the second drawer, fingers closing on the linen-wrapped file. Heart meowed at the door whilst Clover and Spade took their post at his ankle. He smirked weakly at them. “Fine. Just don’t heckle.”

He set the flat side of metal to his wrist where a spine pushed at the skin and braced himself to draw down—

The communicator in the study hummed to life.

Aventurine flinched at the sound. The chime wasn't one he wanted to hear. Blue light dimly flooded into the hallway, a pulse that painted the tiles with a cold hue. The holographic seal of Diamond’s office flickered into being, lines crisp, cold, then vanished. Silence. Another loud chime. Another glow.

Aventurine tossed the file to the counter, quickly washing off the worst of the mess from his hands. He considered the silk band previously at his wrist, now ruined and discarded on the foyer floor. A fresh band from what remained of his tie in the drawer made a neat loop, black on black. Heart meowed, affronted on his behalf. Spade nudged the cabinet with headbutts that read as "Do something".

“I am,” Aventurine huffed to the creatures. He sounded almost amused. “I’m deciding how I want to look doing it.”

The communicator at his desk chimed again. He could almost feel the low vibration in the floor from the device, or maybe he imagined it because imagining things lately was preferable to allowing his current reality to settle. Aventurine turned away from the bathroom and studied his apartment quickly for the best place to answer the call.

The desk. Perfect, but the angle put his body fully in the frame if he stood where he usually stood to look powerful. The sofa… Too intimate. The bar cart. A joke that wrote itself and he didn’t trust Diamond to laugh. The window. Too much city, too much chance of catching the lattice behind his head like a halo he didn’t want.

He picked a diagonal backdrop.

Half in the study’s mouth, half in the living room’s inviting lights. He thumbed the room controls and adjusted the light twice before stopping himself. The blond stood where the silk fabric's geometric pattern looked like it belonged under museum glass and not on the skin of a man who had just filed himself down to fit inside it.

He looked at his hands. Steadier now, in that dead calm that follows taking a blade to what a blade cannot fix. He flexed the fingers once; pain ebbed briefly. Not enough to double him over.

Heart bumped his ankle. He looked down and saw the three of them arranged with such serious intention that he had to smile. Heart front and centre, Clover flanking, Spade already inching toward the study desk like they could body-block Diamond’s seal with their shell.

“No,” he said gently, and nudged Spade back with his toe. “Optics. I can’t have you unionising my backdrop.”

Numby would have squeaked at a line like that. Topaz would have aligned her worry with the few cards he still held to his chest and would play pretend for as long as it took to win the house. Aventurine’s mouth shaped around those names and did not say them.

He checked himself one more time; sleeves rolled, bands neat, collar open but folded neatly. He pushed a strand of hair behind one ear and let two more strands fall back where they wished. He breathed in. Counted. Breathed out.

The communicator chimed once more. “Last ring,” Aventurine promised himself, and the sentence felt like a hand he slapped over his own mouth.

He stepped further into the study and stopped just shy of the desk. The hologram sprang obediently to life, Diamond’s seal waiting like a final card face down. The blue painted him in cool hues, killing all traces of gold on his skin. Aventurine touched two controls on the underside of the desk until the projection framed him from mid-chest, turned the skyline to a blurred elegance over his shoulder.

“Smile,” he told himself. He did, and it reached his eyes because he told it to.

His thumb hovered over the accept key. The blue light from Qlipoth’s lattice pressed itself against his cheekbones. Somewhere behind the bright cage, THEY measured him and made a note.

Aventurine thought, irrelevantly and therefore honestly. 'Don’t say his name first. Let him talk.' Then he pressed his thumb down.

The seal dissolved. The line connected, and the blue hue finally became a face.

Diamond’s features resolved out of the light in elegance. The hologram framed him from the sternum up; coat as immaculate as his pale eyes with a heavy weight. The sound from the transmission arrived a half-second later, cool and level.

“Aventurine.”

Aventurine returned the smile he’d rehearsed in the doorway; a precise, expensive thing that reached his eyes because he’d told it to. "You’re up early. Or late. With you, it’s always both.”

“I do not rest when work remains.” He paused in courtesy, though Diamond’s courtesies always landed like terms. “You look well.”

Aventurine shifted slightly on the balls of his feet intentionally. “I am well. Pier Point agrees with me. You know how it is; the city worships a winner.”

“Winners worship the city, if they intend to keep winning.” The correction arrived without an edge, which seemingly sharpened the way it cut. “Sit, if you prefer.”

“I’m comfortable.”

“Stand, then.”

Neither moved. In the doorway directly behind Aventurine, Heart, Clover, and Spade held a solemn little line just out of sight. He could feel Heart’s tiny weight against his leg. Clover trilled once, low and nervous.

Diamond did not consult a screen when he finally began his address. If there were numbers he were looking at, he clearly wore them behind his eyelids. “The Alfalfa Family pressed their advantage this morning. Oti Alfalfa has discovered the utility of disappointment. Public amplification on his part continues. The stability of the situation has not improved since yesterday.”

“Disappointment pulls at the people's hearts more so than their purse strings,” Aventurine snorted lightly. “He’s just moving bad product in the only way he knows how. I can hardly fault a man for understanding his market.”

“You can fault yourself for supplying him with the inventory,” Diamond chose to announce both the cause and the effect instead of pressing judgement. “The board will adjust the narrative. But we will not be assisted by any additional missteps.”

Aventurine tipped his chin, as if considering the reward of his own restraint. “Noted. I’ll try to limit my missteps to the ones that look good in photographs.”

Diamond regarded him. With anyone else it would have been called a stare; on Aventurine, it felt more like gravity doubling its weight. “You are more than a spectacle for others.”

The line threaded itself into his bones before Aventurine could dodge. He smiled with his mouth and not at all anywhere else. “Flattery, this early in the week? We’re off to a dangerous start.”

“This is not flattery.” Diamond’s tone did not shift, which is how Aventurine knew it wasn’t. “Jade is precise. Topaz is loyal. The others are reliable, if not predictable, in their turns. You are the piece that moves when the board is jammed. You are used when spectacle must resolve into a result. That is your function.”

Favourite, Aventurine thought, hating that the word held a temperature in the way Diamond left it unspoken. Favourites do not get to be ordinary.

“My function,” The blond parroted in mock relief. “Good. I was worried I’d drifted into being decor.”

A breath that was not quite a sigh passed through the hologram. “You dislike being measured.”

“I dislike being mis-measured.” Aventurine eased his weight subtly from his right foot to his left. The raw crescents along his arms tugged, and the silk band at his wrist rubbed uncomfortably.

Diamond’s gaze shifted to the side by a half-degree, as if reading a footnote behind Aventurine’s left shoulder. “You are leaning into variance instead of controlling it. That is unacceptable.”

“It looks like variance from where you sit,” Aventurine hummed cheerfully. “From here it’s… finesse.”

“From anywhere, it is friction.” Diamond allowed the smallest pause, and in that pause, there was something Aventurine had never permitted himself to investigate. Not fondness, not warmth; investment, perhaps, held at a temperature where it wouldn’t spoil. “You do not get to corrode.”

The word found him exactly where he was weakest. He kept the wince behind his eyes and let his mouth admire the phrasing. “Poetic.”

“Accurate.” Diamond’s mouth moved slowly. “You will present stability for the IPC until we have stability. You will not lose yourself in the appearance of it.”

Aventurine’s laugh was almost delighted. “Now that is unfair. Appearance is my philanthropy. I donate it to the public for free.”

“It is also your liability,” Diamond said. “And mine.”

There it was: the other edge of being the favourite.

If Aventurine tarnished, the hand that had kept him polished for years got dirty first. Aventurine felt a bright, small anger flare in him and sickened. It would be so easy to break something in this room on purpose. He folded the anger into a smile. “Come now. If I were truly a liability, you’d replace me.”

“No,” Diamond corrected. “I do not replace function. I correct it.”

Aventurine heard the unspoken end of that sentence. 'I will correct you.' He filed the sound of it next to the memory of Jade’s patient demands and Topaz’s quiet looks. He made a game of not blinking.

“Then correct me,” the blond hummed. “Direct me to the table. I’ll settle the accounts for our clients.”

“For the people who believe in you,” Diamond said. No emphasis. None needed. “And for the ones who will not, until they are given reason.”

Aventurine’s smile held steady around something brittle. “And you?”

“I do not need to believe,” Diamond said. “I am rarely wrong.”

Of course, he wasn’t. That was his whole liturgy. Aventurine let his posture ease enough to read as grace. “Then assess me useful. You know how I play when I am watched.”

“Yes.” Diamond’s gaze sharpened in a way that would have been called fondness in someone who permitted themselves human categories. “You play to win.”

“Always.”

The blue halo of the projection cooled a shade. The subspace lattice beyond Aventurine’s window etched itself a touch clearer, as if the call had tuned the room to a frequency where THEY could hear better. He did not look away from the hologram.

Diamond’s pale gaze finally turned away as if to read from a report for the first time. “Jade assumed negotiations with the Alfalfa Family. Topaz contained the Oak Family after Sunday’s fall. And the final report, the one the Families cite when they ask why the IPC still has a seat at their table, was delivered by Dr. Veritas Ratio.”

The name landed like a card flipped face-up. Aventurine’s throat locked. He forced his laugh too quickly. “Ah. Ratio. Yes. He does enjoy his homework.”

“He completed your work,” Diamond said. “Efficiently. Publicly. Without error.”

A fresh spine pressed under Aventurine’s skin at the ribs, spiking hot as if the word itself had teeth. He fought not to shift, not to clutch the front of his night shirt. “A report is not a negotiation,” he said lightly. “He wasn’t even on the payroll.”

“Correct. He did it regardless.”

“You think I should thank him then?” he asked, mock delight in his tone. “Send flowers? Ratio doesn’t strike me as the floral type.”

“I think you should understand,” Diamond said evenly, “that the public does not care who is on payroll. They care who holds the line. In Penacony, it was not you.”

The words scalded. Jade’s blade had cut this morning, but Diamond’s ledger pinned him to the table. Aventurine grinned wider, teeth too white, jaw aching. “I thought you liked that I was memorable, Sir.”

“You are memorable,” Diamond said. “That is why your failures are as well.”

The silk at Aventurine’s wrist dampened, warm. He pressed his hand flat against the desk as if pressure alone could stop the seep. Behind him, Heart gave a tiny meow of protest, and Spade offered a solemn mrrp, as if echoing the truth he refused to voice.

“And yet, here I stand,” Aventurine said, flashing his best smile despite the growing discomfort. “Still dazzling. Still the favourite.”

“Favourites do not falter,” Diamond said. His tone did not sharpen, but the weight behind the words crushed anyway. “They do not spend themselves thin. They endure. Preservation demands nothing less.”

The word “Preservation” throbbed in Aventurine’s chest like a second pulse. He thought of the spines he’d shaved from his ribs mere hours ago, of dust swirling down the drain. His laugh cracked at the edge.

“Endure?” he said. “Easy for stone. Harder for men.”

Diamond inclined his head a fraction in acknowledgement without offering concession. “That is why you must not confuse yourself with other men.”

Aventurine thought, irrelevantly, of Ratio’s eyes, cold and yet sharp and oh so infuriatingly curious, and hated himself for it. Every time he tried to shake the thought, it would reappear. Every time he lingered on the thought, his body eventually responded with hot, blinding pain.

He swallowed, smile steady, voice sugary. “So, what now? Am I to be leashed? Or will you simply nail me to the board and call it an oversight?”

Diamond answered without pause. “You will be supervised. Your performance will be measured. Your failures will not repeat.”

“By whom?” Aventurine asked, though he knew. Some desperate part of him hoped for any other name.

“Dr. Veritas Ratio,” Diamond answered; his voice calm and inevitable. “Effective immediately.”

Aventurine’s smile almost split. For a moment, he couldn’t tell if it was breaking or baring teeth. His ribs screamed with pressure; the silk at his wrist ached with warmth. Heart whimpered. Clover circled in agitation. He forced the grin higher, pushed the words out smoothly.

“Wonderful,” the blond shaped the words carefully past his lips. “I adore an audience.”

The hologram dissolved into nothing as Diamond ended the call without another word. The blue hue faded away from the apartment, leaving only the faint glow of Qlipoth’s lattice etched faintly across the windowpanes. Silence filled every corner of the apartment with a pressure almost worse than the sound of his own breathing. Aventurine remained where he was, smile frozen on his mouth. A card trick he’d forgotten the ending to. His wrist burned under fabric; his ribs felt tight, spines threatening under the surface of skin. He breathed once, carefully, and allowed his smile to collapse.

The room seemed to close in on him with each breath.

Shakily, the blond pressed both palms flat to his desk, staring down at the surface blankly. His reflection seemed skewed, hair a little undone, eyes fever-bright. For a moment, yellow veins crawled across the reflection’s face, webbing over the cheekbones into a mask he hadn’t agreed to wear. Aventurine closed his eyes, opened them again, and the reflection staring back seemed more like his own.

Ratio’s name still burned in his ears, louder in his head than it had been in Diamond’s voice. Dr. Veritas Ratio. Efficient. Public. Without error. The words clung like grit between his teeth.

He hated him for it.

His chest clenched hard. Pain bloomed in pricks underneath his skin.

Aventurine hated that more.

Aventurine snarled in a manner that sounded too raw to pass for laughter, and shoved himself off the desk. The communicator had been powered off for minutes now, but Aventurine swore he could still feel Diamond’s gaze in the room.

He staggered toward the bathroom, ignoring the three creatures hot on his heels. The hallway mirror caught him mid-stride, and he almost didn’t recognise himself. His cyan and magenta eyes blazed too hot, his pupils narrowed to pinpricks, his smile missing entirely. Across his chest, just under the pyjama silk, a single golden spine had begun to bud again. The ache felt worse than a knife carving into his flesh ever did.

He yanked the shirt open. The fabric tore down the seam. Empty crescents littered his skin in irregular patterns, some half-formed, others still filled halfway with filed-down gold nubs. They glittered when he moved, catching the light as jewellery he hadn’t chosen. Each breath dragged them against his ribs, slicing from the inside.

The bloody file lay on the bathroom counter where he left it, still damp from earlier use. He seized it with his trembling hand and slammed the tip against the nearest shard, picking it out with the sharp end until it pulled free. His vision tunnelled as he worked on the rest with abandon. He picked around at his skin until his grip weakened from the pulses of pain and he nearly dropped the file, the final shard giving way with a jagged snap as it tumbled into the sink.

Aventurine stared at the mess through blurred vision, chest heaving, sweat sticking his shirt to his back. His other hand clawed at his own thigh just to anchor himself in something that wasn't made of stone.

“I hate him,” he gasped aloud. The words echoed against marble, raw and ugly. “I hate him.”

Heart meowed again, plaintive. Clover hummed like a note stretched to breaking. Spade pressed their whole little body against the front of his shin, grounding him with a steady rubbing motion.

Aventurine barked a laugh that broke into a sob.

“You don’t believe me,” he told them, voice shaking.

Aventurine pressed a now bloody palm to the mirror, leaving a print over his own reflection. Gold gleamed through the smudge, tracing across his ribs in veins. He thought of Ratio’s face, cool and exasperated in the way it would settle on him. The spines seemed to dig deeper into his skin, as if the thought itself gave them root.

Aventurine sagged forward against the marble counter, forehead to the glass, shoulders trembling.

The mirror didn’t argue.