Chapter Text
By the time your last lecture had dragged into its final ten minutes, your professor had started to sound like they were underwater.
It wasn’t in the literal sense in the way that it was muffled or distant, but in the way that it felt separated from you and reality by exhaustion, by the stale warmth of the lecture hall, by the dull ache sitting low in your spine from having crawled into bed sometime after four-thirty in the morning and dragged yourself back out of it before nine.
Around you, everyone else looked so painfully normal.
Right. Because they led normal lives, and you didn’t.
But you were getting paid the big bucks, and they had to budget the days they got their expensive coffees. That's what made you different from them.
A girl two rows ahead of you had her laptop open to a color-coded planner website extension, and another beside her had been chewing on the same pen cap for forty minutes. Someone near the windows kept sneaking glances at their phone under the desk, smiling at whatever messages they were getting from whoever had time to text them in the middle of the day.
So normal. Ordinary things acted out by ordinary people in their normal bodies that belonged to themselves.
You sat in the middle of it with your notebook open, one hand braced underneath your chin, writing down just enough to look awake. The words blurred together if you stared too long. It wasn’t too bad– not to the point you had to stop, but it was to the point that you kept having to blink and refocus and pretend the pressure behind your eyes was just boredom.
Even when it wasn’t. It was the kind of tiredness that made your skin feel worn through.
You had dressed carefully that morning, though, as you always did. Soft sweater, loose skirt that fell right where it needed to, boots with a low enough heel that nobody would question why you moved a little slower than usual. Your hair was pinned back in a way that looked like effort instead of damage control, and there was just enough concealer under your eyes to suggest you were an overworked student instead of a girl who had spent five hours downstairs making men believe every sound out of her mouth belonged solely for them.
You had a bruise just above your hip, a few hickeys on your inner thighs. Of course, the regular bruises remained where they always did on your knees.
No one could see them, you had made sure of that.
The professor clicked to the next slide, then paused to ask a question about the reading. A few students moved around restlessly, hoping the seconds would quickly waste away as the professor waited for someone to answer. Someone coughed. You watched the cursor blink repetitively on the projected document and felt the collective decision of the room deciding not to answer.
You knew the answer. You knew a few others did, too.
No one liked to be the one to raise their hand. You didn’t mind it so much. So you raised your hand.
When the professor called on you, your voice came out a little rougher than you’d intended. It wasn’t ruined like it had been the night before, when your throat had been so sore that you’d tasted blood. Right now, it just sounded a little bit… textured. You cleared your throat once and gave your answer slowly enough that it sounded thoughtful instead of tired.
The professor nodded, pleased, and expanded on what you said for another few minutes.
A guy near the aisle glanced back at you. You recognized him from his profile picture in the discussion board posts. He was the kind of person that wore university sweatshirts like a boast even if he didn’t attend that particular university and always packed his lunch in overly fragile glass containers. He smiled at you like your answer had impressed him.
You smiled back because that was what normal girls did in normal lecture halls when normal boys looked at them.
Then you looked down at your notes and wrote absolutely nothing for the next three minutes.
Eventually your phone buzzed against your thigh.
You slid it out under the desk to check your notifications. It was mostly the group chat from Velvet, but one particular person had texted you privately. A girl you were closer with.
rina💸: do you have extra black fishnets
rina💸: cheap ones
rina💸: not the nice ones
rina💸: unless you love me enough to sacrifice the nice ones
Your mouth twitched as you typed back with one thumb with your phone hidden under the desk.
you: clients tore through your stash already?
rina💸: one of them used his teeth
rina💸: romantic in theory
rina💸: financially violent in practice
You had to bite the inside of your cheek to keep from laughing. Out of all the girls at Velvet, she was the one you clicked most with. There was something about her humor that meshed well with your cynicism.
The professor was still going on about power structures and something about performance and something about the public face people wore to survive institutions. You could relate to that last part, at least. You stared at the slide and almost laughed again, for a completely different reason.
Your phone buzzed again.
rina💸: so yes or no
you: I have a pair with a run in the thigh
rina💸: perfect
rina💸: men love a little evidence of suffering
You locked your phone and placed it underneath your leg so as to not tempt you as much as it had been.
The girl beside you leaned over slightly, trying to get your attention. Her name was Hana, or Hannah, or maybe Anna with an H. You had been paired together for a discussion once, and now she acted like you were nearly friends.
You might’ve been, if your gauge of friendship was normal.
“Are you going to the library later?” she whispered.
You turned your head and surveyed her for a second. She had pink gloss on and clear skin and a thin silver necklace that sat neatly in the hollow of her throat. She looked like someone who got eight hours of sleep and still complained about being tired because she had never met the other kind of exhaustion from giving a too pretty performance.
“I can’t,” you whispered back. “I have work.”
“At the café?”
You had told her that once. It wasn’t a complete lie, so you didn’t feel as bad telling it to people. The Velvet Cage had a bar upstairs for members, and coffee existed somewhere in the building. Probably.
“Yeah,” you said. “Late shift.”
She winced with sympathy. “Again? That sucks.”
“It’s fine,” you said dismissively. Maybe too dismissively.
“You always say that.”
It was easier to brush it off. People stopped asking questions when you made tiredness sound boring. Because “I serve rich heroes overpriced drinks and do other unspeakable acts with them until dawn” sounded better than the truth, and still close enough to the truth that you did not have to remember which version you had given.
The professor dismissed class three minutes later. Everyone started packing up at once, the room filling with zippers, laptop clicks, chair legs screeching across the tile. You moved slower than the others because standing too quickly reminded you of all the work you’d put in last night, and the daytime was when your night life shouldn’t exist.
Hana waited beside you, hugging her notebook to her chest.
“We’re grabbing food before the library,” she said. “You sure you can’t come?”
For a split second you imagined saying yes. You imagined cheap noodles in a restaurant with low lighting and dying flowers placed in empty soy sauce bottles like the restaurants back home always used to do. Maybe you would complain about assignments and let someone else’s life rub against yours until yours seemed a little less strange.
Then your phone buzzed again.
velvet cage staff: Reminder: Standard floor opens at 11:00 p.m. Private bookings begin at 11:30 p.m. Please arrive to backroom by 10:45 p.m. Security check mandatory.
You tucked your phone away after reading the first few words. It was always the same message, every day at the same time.
“I wish,” you said, and you made your voice regretful enough to seem genuine. “I have to get home before work.”
Hana sighed. “You’re going to burn out.”
You smiled at her, part of you feeling bad for lying to a girl this sweet. Another part of you wondered what she would say if you told her you already had, a little. You hadn’t fully burnt out like you’d watched some people do, just in the way that the prettier, softer parts of you had started learning to harden and detach on command. Probably in an effort to self-preserve, but did it really matter when you couldn’t tell what was self-preservation and what was avoidance anymore?
“Probably,” you said.
She laughed because she thought you were joking, and you let her. Who were you to ruin her fun?
Outside, the air had that early evening chill like it did every fall that made your nose run and breath puff in front of you in clouds. Students spilled out of buildings in clusters, scarves tucked under their chins, tote bags slapping against their hips, voices overlapping with plans you had no room for– dinners and study groups and parties.
Some people even mentioned hero sightings near Yuuei. It was always Yuuei. The hero university would attract the most heroes. It made sense.
Someone said they had seen Chargebolt buying convenience-store coffee with sunglasses on, which made no sense because sunglasses made celebrities more obvious, not less. Someone else said Red Riot had come to campus once for a charity event and looked even bigger in person.
You kept walking. For a minute you reminisced on the times in high school where you said everything impulsively and overshared. Not now, though, or else you’d be running up to that group and telling them all about how you’d met Red Riot and Chargebolt. Just in… rather compromising positions, and had been paid in rubber-banded bundles and a slip of paper to sign for your silence.
You were used to the hero talk. Everyone talked about heroes. It was impossible not to when Yuuei sat so close it felt like a second sun, bright and expensive and always pulling attention toward itself. Your university lived in its shadow and benefited from it. Cafés nearby charged more. Apartments cost more. The streets stayed cleaner. Hero merch showed up in student bags and keychains and laptop stickers. And, society functioned around them in general. Can’t forget that.
Girls in your classes talked about pro heroes like crushes, like celebrities, like gods with press teams.
You had learned not to react. It was easier that way, when you stayed indifferent and impersonal to it all.
You passed a vending machine near the east exit and stopped long enough to buy a canned coffee you did not want but needed to stay awake until you could nap before your shift. The first sip tasted metallic and too sweet and… chalky? You looked down at the label.
25 Grams of Protein Per Can!!
You sighed, realizing you probably bought a drink favored by the heroes on patrol by accident. You drank it anyway as you walked, because caffeine was caffeine and you had to be awake by the time the bus reached your stop.
The route home took you away from the student blocks and toward the private streets where Yuuei-adjacent money became less loud and more discreet. The restaurants got smaller, the windows of cars grew darker with illegal tint jobs, and the signs and awnings grew more elegant with expensive lettering.
The Velvet Cage didn’t advertise itself. That would have defeated the purpose.
From the street, the building looked like a private residence stacked above a members-only lounge. A narrow front with black brick and frosted glass. A brass plaque beside the main entrance that read TVC House in tasteful lettering. There was no line outside, no drunk men waiting under neon signage, no obvious promise being sold to anyone passing by.
Heroes needed discretion. And luxury, as much as they wanted to dispute it. Because most of the heroes who visited TVC House were rich. And rich men needed the fantasy of not being men who paid for fantasies. So The Velvet Cage gave them both.
You didn’t use the front entrance. That door was for clients, staff escorts, and heroes who wanted to pretend the building had invited them in rather than priced them out.
You turned down the side street, past the delivery entrance and the locked gate where the kitchen took shipments twice a week. A security camera followed you before you reached the residents’ door. You lifted your keycard without looking up.
The lock clicked open as you slid the card through the lock. Inside, the stairwell smelled faintly of bleach, perfume, and stale cigar smoke that had permeated the walls of the building before smoking had ever been banned. The walls were painted a deep plum that looked elegant in low light and more like a bruise in daylight. As you passed, you saw the same heart-shaped sticker in the corner of the second-floor landing mirror that you always did. Today, someone else had drawn devil horns on it in eyeliner.
You climbed the stairs to the residential floors with your backpack weighing down one shoulder. The first time you had moved in, you had told yourself it was practical. The suites upstairs were cheaper than anything else this close to campus, even with the Cage’s cut built into the lease. Security was better than any dorm and the commute to work was one staircase. You did not have to stumble home alone at four in the morning with ruined makeup and sore feet and cash tucked into your bra.
It was practical. Convenient. Controlled. Temporary.
You reached your floor and walked down the hall past all of the closed doors with little traces of each girl bleeding into the shared space. A pink feather stuck in the molding outside Rina’s suite. A pair of silver heels abandoned beside Tansy’s door. A grocery bag full of instant noodles near Akane’s, probably left there by someone who had borrowed her straightener and repaid her in sodium.
Your own door had nothing on it except the number. You liked it that way. Impersonal.
As soon as you walked inside your suite, you felt instant relief. You were home. You would be able to eat and sleep and shower before your shift. This was your safe place.
Your bed was pushed against the wall under the window, the comforter still twisted from the three hours you had managed that morning. Your desk sat across from it, covered in textbooks, half-finished notes, a laptop with too many tabs open, and a sticky note reminding you about a quiz you had not studied for.
Beside the desk was evidence of your other life.
There was a laundry basket full of black lace, satin scraps, sheer robes, and stockings in various stages of wear and a pair of heels kicked under the chair. Also a drawer that would not close because too much lingerie had been shoved into it too quickly. A lockbox under the bed where you kept cash tips until you had enough energy to deposit them somewhere respectable.
On the bathroom door, a pair of fishnets hung from a hook. The thigh had a small run and they were cheap– the cheapest you could find from the chain beauty store in downtown that had everything from cosmetics to cute keychains. Rina could have those ones.
You dropped your backpack onto the chair and stood still for a moment in the center of the room. The silence only felt nice for around five seconds before your exhaustion caught up with you. Your posture sagged, your feet ached, and your lower back complained in a slow, familiar way.
You pulled your sweater off over your head and tossed it towards the bed, then caught sight of yourself in the mirror over the dresser. You looked like a college girl, mostly.
You lifted the hem of your undershirt and looked at the bruise above your hip. It had changed colors since that morning. It was more blue and purple than you remembered it being last night. It wasn’t dark or big enough to worry you, just a thumb-shaped print left by a man who had gripped too hard and tipped well enough to suggest he thought the money apologized for him. You let the fabric fall.
Your phone buzzed again.
rina💸: fishnets??
you: shower first
rina💸: selfishhhh
you: suffering builds character!
rina💸: tell that to my bare thighs
You snorted and plugged your phone in before you could lose another ten minutes of your life to the group chat.
You had a system for the hours between class and your shift. Shower. Food. Homework. Nap if your body allowed it. Makeup. Hair. Downstairs by ten-forty-five.
It was simple and repetitive. You were partial to living a routine-based life. It kept you on track.
The shower helped today, like it always did. Hot water made a temporary person out of you, rinsed campus sweat from the back of your neck, and softened the places where last night still clung. You washed your hair only because it needed it, then stood under the spray longer than necessary with your forehead against the tile.
Downstairs, the building was probably still asleep.
Not in a literal sense, of course. Only the upstairs apartments for the girls allowed anyone to sleep. The Velvet Cage had daytime staff, cleaners, cooks, security, management, the kind of people who made sure rich men never saw the seams. But the real pulse had not started yet. That came later.
That came when the girls woke up.
You got out before the water could make you drowsy, wrapped in a towel, and stood at the sink and brushed your teeth while reading the sticky note on the mirror.
quiz friday. paper monday. don’t forget rent transfer.
Under that, in Rina’s handwriting from two weeks ago:
stop buying expensive fishnets. men are animalssss!!!
You brushed foam from the corner of your mouth with your thumb and smiled. By the time you changed into an oversized shirt and crawled onto your bed with your laptop, the sky outside had gone bruised-blue over the city. You reheated leftover noodles in the microwave, ate half of them at your desk, and opened the reading for tomorrow’s class.
You made it about three pages before having to start over because you’d absorbed none of it. Your eyes kept catching on the same sentence until the words stopped meaning anything. Then you just decided to close the laptop.
“Twenty minutes,” you told yourself.
That was always the lie you told yourself to feel better about napping. You set an alarm for forty-five and curled on top of the comforter with damp hair cooling against the back of your neck. The room smelled like shampoo and cheap noodles and the faint vanilla body oil you used because clients liked soft, gourmand-scented skin and you liked pretending some things were for you first.
Sleep didn’t come easily because it almost never did before shift. Your body wanted it, but your mind kept counting backward from eleven. How long until makeup. How long until wardrobe. How long until you had to put the other voice back in your throat.
Eventually, you drifted away, though not deep enough to count like you wanted it to. Just enough that the first sound from the hall pulled you back fast.
A door opened and someone laughed. A hair dryer started up through the wall with an angry electric whine.
Then Rina’s voice, muffled but unmistakable, shouting, “If anyone stole my black liner, I hope your client has whiskey dick.”
Another door opened. “Check Emi’s room!”
“I did!” Rina shouted back.
“Then check your tits, you lose everything in there!”
You stared at your ceiling. Now the building was waking up. A heel hit the floor somewhere down the hall as music started in one suite, bass low and steady. Someone knocked on someone else’s door with the impatient rhythm of a girl already late in her own head. Water rushed through pipes and laughter rose, fell, rose again.
You turned your head towards the torn fishnets hanging on the bathroom door, then to your alarm. You had eighteen minutes left, but you decided to shut it off before it could ring.
For a moment, you stayed there, cheek pressed to your pillow, listening to the life gather outside your room. The soft chaos of women becoming fantasy on a schedule and the hallway filling with perfume, complaints, borrowed clothes, and the particular kind of laughter that happened when everyone was tired and nobody wanted to be subtle about it.
Then someone knocked twice on your door and opened it without waiting. Rina stood in the doorway wearing a robe, one sock, and an expression of deep betrayal.
“Fishnets,” she said, holding out her hand and making a grabbing motion.
You pointed toward the bathroom. “Torn thigh.”
“Bless you.” She swept inside like she paid rent there too, which, spiritually, she did. “Are they cute-torn or sad-torn?”
“Depends how low your standards are.”
“My standards clock in at eleven and leave at four.” She crossed to the bathroom door and held the fishnets up for inspection. “Cute enough.”
You pushed yourself upright, hair falling into your face. “You’re welcome.”
Rina looked at you over the torn black mesh. “You look dead.”
“I was dead… and then you opened my door.”
“You said I could.”
“I said that six months ago during an emergency.”
“I’m emotionally attached to the policy.” She said in a sing-song voice as she tossed the fishnets over her shoulder and leaned against your dresser, already scanning the room for anything else she could steal. “Do you have lash glue?”
“Nope,” you said, as she quickly turned around and began digging through your dresser anyway.
“Liar.”
“It’s in the top drawer of the vanity, not that one.”
She abandoned the drawer full of yoga pants and t-shirts and pranced over to the vanity, opening the top drawer immediately. You watched her rummage through your things with the ease of someone who had seen you in every stage between lecture notes and lingerie. That was the thing about living above The Velvet Cage. Privacy existed, technically. Locks, too. But boundaries only existed when anyone needed them badly enough.
So did knock-and-enter privileges for girls with torn stockings, broken straps, missing perfume, bad clients, worse cramps, and panic attacks at two in the morning.
You did not have roommates. You had witnesses.
Rina found the lash glue and held it up triumphantly. “I’ll bring it back.”
“No you won’t.”
“I’ll think about bringing it back.”
“Closer.”
She grinned, then softened a little as she looked at you. “Rough class day?”
“Long class day.”
“That’s not an answer.”
You gave her a look.
She lifted both hands. “Fine. Sorry. Long class day.” Her eyes dropped briefly to the hem of your shirt, not in a nosy way. In the way all of you checked each other without saying you were checking.
“You good for tonight?”
You stretched one leg out, testing the pull in your hip. “I’m fine.”
“That sounded fake as fuck.”
“It was.”
“Respect.”
She tucked the lash glue into the pocket of her robe. “Backroom by ten-forty-five. Yumi said security’s doing full checks tonight because some idiot tried to sneak a camera in his watch.”
You groaned. “Again?”
“Different idiot, same disease.”
“What happened?”
“Akane caught the reflection before he even sat down.”
“Good for her.”
“Yumi banned him for so long I think his grandchildren will feel it.”
That made you laugh, tired as it sounded. Rina smiled like she had won a prize. From down the hall, someone yelled, “Rina, if you’re stealing from her, steal concealer too!”
Rina yelled back, “I’m not stealing, I’m communing!”
Only a faraway laugh answered her dumbass comment.
You rubbed both hands over your face. “Take the concealer. Bottom drawer, left side. Not the expensive one.”
Rina was already opening it. “I would never.”
“Bullllllshit.”
“I would think about it and then feel haunted by your deep disappointment in me.”
“Well, that’s touching.”
She grabbed the cheaper concealer, then paused at the door with her arms full of your things. “Oh. Before I forget. Tansy thinks your angry premium booked last night on Scarlet's floor instead.”
Your hand stilled in your hair and Rina’s smile instantly sharpened.
You hated her a little for that. “My what?”
“Your angry premium.”
“I don’t have an angry premium.”
“Sure you do.” She leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. “Big blond. Mean voice. Shoves cash at the bouncers like they’ve personally insulted him for existing. Can’t miss him.”
You looked toward your desk, pretending to search for a hair clip. Rina made a soft, delighted sound. “There she is.”
“Get out.”
“You got all careful.”
“I did not.”
“You did. You do this blank little face when someone mentions him, like if you don’t move, we can’t see your soul leaving your body.”
“My soul is intact.”
“Debatable.”
“Rina.”
“What? I’m just saying, if he did book Scarlet's floor, she’s going to tell us everything, and then you’re going to pretend not to listen while absorbing every detail like a starving little freak.”
You threw a pillow at her. She dodged it, laughing, and vanished into the hall with your fishnets, your lash glue, and your cheap concealer.
You sat there for a second longer than you needed to.
Big blond.
Mean voice.
Your room felt warmer than it had a moment ago, which was irritating because Rina had left the door open and the hallway air was cooler. You got up to shut it, catching voices drifting past as the other girls moved between rooms.
Someone needed body shimmer. Someone else needed safety pins. Another person was asking whether thigh bruises looked better under red light or purple. Rina shouted that if a client wanted to rip something tonight, he could start with his own wallet.
You closed your door, leaned back against it, and exhaled. Dynamight had not been yours, even from the start. That was the stupidest part of it all.
He was not your anything. He was a client with a coded booking name, a body you knew better than his face, and a mouth so mean it should have made him forgettable in the exact way men like that usually were.
Instead, you remembered him in fragments that you had no right keeping to yourself.
The first rough edge of his voice.
The heat of him crowding a premium room.
The way he never bothered sounding nice.
The way he noticed when your performance turned too polished and punished you for it with a low, mocking laugh that stayed under your skin for days.
You pushed away from the door.
“Nope,” you told your empty room. “Nope, nope, nope.”
Then you crossed to your dresser and started getting ready.
It was going to be a long night.