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One month after the divorce, a little boy in a school blazer looked up at Robin with wide, earnest eyes and asked, “Is it true Blader X has a new favourite person now?”
Robin smiled so smoothly it frightened him.
He was getting better at that.
“Who told you that?”
“My brother.” The boy shrugged, then brightened. “He says the new guy on Team Persona is really cool, and that Blader X always needs someone to carry around.”
Something cold and thin slid under Robin’s ribs.
He kept his hands folded loosely over his knees so the children would not see the flinch. Their beginner group was scattered around the small practice arena at Shiroboshi School, launchers in hand, shoes squeaking over the polished floor, all nervous energy and hero worship and brutal little fragments of the adult world repeated without context.
Children never knew when they were holding knives.
The boy went on, oblivious. “He said that’s why he used to call you husband. Because husbands are lazy and their partners do everything.”
For a second Robin heard nothing.
Not the bright rattle of launchers, not the chatter bouncing off the walls, not the hum of the lights overhead.
Only that.
Because husbands are lazy.
Because their partners do everything.
That is why he used to call you husband.
Robin had always known strangers misunderstood him. That was part of being visible in the Blading world while never quite becoming the sort of star people wanted. He had learned to live inside jokes made at his expense. Learned to laugh first when that was easier. Learned to pretend he could not hear what people meant when they said underdog like it was a compliment.
But this was different.
This was Jaxon.
This was the one word that had belonged wholly to them, even when the rest of their marriage lived hidden under gloves and sponsor jackets and plausible deniability. This was the word Jaxon had thrown around with shameless joy, in green rooms and hallways and hotel lifts and convenience shops, in front of cameras and teammates and strangers who never once guessed he was telling the truth.
Morning, husband.
Move over, husband.
You saw that launch, husband?
Robin had heard nothing in it except love.
Apparently the rest of the world had heard a joke at his expense.
Something inside him gave way with a soft, sickening neatness.
He did not let it reach his face.
The children were still watching him.
The boy looked suddenly uncertain. “Was that rude?”
Robin made himself breathe. Once in. Once out.
“A bit,” he said lightly, though his voice sounded far away even to himself. “But you’re not in trouble. Your brother is just wrong.”
The boy blinked. “Oh.”
Robin smiled, gentle because the child deserved gentleness, even now. “And anyone who tells you that being loved means being looked down on doesn’t understand much.”
That seemed to satisfy him. He scampered back to the others with all the quick forgiveness of the very young.
Robin stayed kneeling beside the arena a moment longer than necessary, one gloved hand braced against the floor.
Under the glove, the ring pressed into his finger like a brand.
He had not taken it off after the divorce.
Neither had Jaxon, if the blurry photographs and fan-caught videos circulating the internet were anything to go by. Robin had tried very hard not to know that. Unfortunately, information slipped through anyway, in magazine covers at convenience shops and whispered staff-room gossip and the occasional trembling child who wanted to know whether Mr Robin had really battled beside Blader X for years and whether Blader X was as cool in real life as he looked on screen.
He never answered the second question honestly.
The class ended with the usual chaos. Shoes. cases. bowed thanks from parents. children promising they would practise their launch posture and absolutely meaning it for at least twelve hours. Robin helped two girls untangle ripcords, waved goodbye, and stayed kneeling by the practice arena until the hall was nearly empty.
Then Tenka came to lean against the doorway and said, “You look like death.”
Robin let out a faint laugh because Tenka did not really do softness, and somehow that made her kindness easier to bear.
“That’s flattering.”
“It was not meant to be.” She folded her arms. “What happened.”
Robin looked down at his glove.
Tenka followed the line of his gaze with the kind of quiet precision that made her terrifying in battle and impossible to lie to in daily life.
“Someone said something stupid,” he said.
“They usually do.”
He could have left it there. Tenka would not press if he truly asked her not to. That was one of the strange mercies of ending up at Shiroboshi after everything went to pieces. Tenka was not gentle in the usual sense, but she understood pride enough to leave wounds covered when that was all a person could manage.
Instead, because he was suddenly exhausted by carrying even this one thing alone, Robin said, “Apparently people thought when Jaxon called me husband, he was making fun of me.”
Tenka went very still.
Robin laughed again, thinner now. “You know. Because I was useless. Because he had to carry me.”
A silence stretched.
Then Tenka said, with frightening calm, “Who said that to you.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Mm.”
“It was a child repeating an older sibling, so unless you plan to challenge a fourteen-year-old to a duel, I think we can let it go.”
Tenka’s mouth flattened. “I could.”
That got a real sound out of him, brief and broken but real.
Tenka moved at last, crossing the hall to stand beside him. She looked down at the little practice arena, at the scuffed plastic and the toy-sized launch lines and the careless bright colours, as if considering whether it was worthy of the children who used it.
“People are stupid,” she said.
“Yes.”
“They see a man stand close to another man and decide that one of them must be weaker for it.”
Robin swallowed.
“They also saw you lose a great many official matches and mistook persistence for incompetence.” Her tone had sharpened slightly now. “That was stupid too.”
“I did lose.”
“That is not the same thing.”
Robin looked away. “It usually felt like it was.”
Tenka’s gaze cut to him. “To whom.”
The answer was so obvious he could not believe he had never said it aloud.
“To me,” he whispered.
Tenka’s expression changed.
Not much. Tenka rarely gave much away. But something in her eyes softened into an anger that was not for him.
Robin stood up because staying on the floor much longer felt too much like surrender. He busied himself stacking spare launchers in their tray.
Tenka let him.
After a moment she said, “You know he never meant it that way.”
He almost laughed at the absurdity of that sentence. As if that was the part he was unsure of. As if the pain came from doubting Jaxon, when the whole reason it hurt so badly was because he had never once doubted him.
“I know.”
That was the problem.
He knew exactly how Jaxon had meant it.
He knew how bright Jaxon’s face used to get when he said it. Knew the particular warmth in his voice when he leaned too heavily against Robin in public and announced husband to no one in particular, as if the simple fact pleased him too much to keep quiet about.
Robin had been so wrapped up in the impossible, private miracle of being loved that he had never considered the rest of the world might be hearing cruelty where Jaxon had meant devotion.
He should have.
Maybe that was what being the weaker one looked like after all. Not on the stadium floor. Not in a launch. In the small, humiliating failure to realise how everyone else was reading the room.
Tenka touched his elbow once, brief and oddly careful. “Go home.”
Robin nodded.
He picked up his case, tucked it under his arm, and left the hall with his ring still hidden under his glove and his pulse knocking sorely at the base of his throat.
Outside, late afternoon light glazed the city in pale gold. He should have gone straight back to his flat. Instead he made the mistake of stopping by a convenience shop for tea.
The magazine rack near the entrance had an entire row devoted to X City sports coverage.
Jaxon’s face looked out at him from two separate covers.
One was a tournament spread, all sharp angles and launch form and impossible momentum. The other was worse. A rumour issue. Cheap glossy paper. A badly chosen photograph of Jaxon walking out of a sponsor event beside Team Persona’s new recruit, Haru Minobe, who had joined three weeks after Robin’s departure and had the sort of easy camera smile that made publicists go glassy-eyed with relief.
The headline read:
BLADE X’S NEW PARTNER?
Robin stared at it until the letters stopped feeling like language.
He did not buy the magazine.
He went home anyway with the cover burned behind his eyes.
In his flat, he locked the door, set his case down, and leaned his forehead against the wood.
For a long moment he stayed there, breathing shallowly.
Then, because sometimes pain wanted help finding the deepest place to stick, he pulled his phone out and searched the article online.
He found the rumour piece in seconds.
Half of it was nonsense. Speculation from unnamed insiders. Sponsor event photographs turned into invented intimacy. The usual machine, hungry and stupid and relentless.
The comments beneath it were worse.
Blader X moves on fast.
Good for him. Maybe this one can actually keep up.
Never understood the husband thing with Robin anyway. It was obviously a dig.
He called him that because Robin acted like a useless husband. Jaxon did all the work.
Robin put the phone face-down on the table.
Then, because he hated himself in very old and familiar ways, he turned it back over and read the comments again.
It should not have mattered.
Strangers did not know them. Strangers had never seen Jaxon flop across Robin in a hotel room after a win with all the boneless trust of a creature who knew exactly where he was safest. Strangers had never heard the way husband softened in Jaxon’s mouth when he said it in the dark, when there were no cameras and no reason to perform and no audience except Robin breathing him in at kissing distance. Strangers had never watched Jaxon press his thumb over the ring hidden under Robin’s glove before a major battle like it was a private ritual, like he was reminding himself of something solid before stepping into the madness of the arena.
Strangers did not know.
But the knowledge did nothing to blunt the wound.
Robin sat on the floor beside his sofa and pressed both hands over his face.
One month after the divorce, he learned that even his happiest memories had been carrying someone else’s contempt all along.
He cried quietly because there was no point making it loud.
Four years earlier, on a street in Las Vegas full of neon and bad decisions, Jaxon had decided to get married with the same expression he usually wore when he spotted a challenge that looked difficult enough to be worth his time.
Robin, who had been twenty-two and exhausted and far too in love for his own good, should have known immediately that he was in danger.
“Absolutely not,” he said, laughing because that seemed like the only sensible response when your boyfriend stopped dead outside a wedding chapel at one in the morning and announced, with complete seriousness, “We should do it.”
Jaxon turned to him, eyes bright. “Why not?”
Robin gestured at the glowing sign overhead. “Because we are in Las Vegas.”
“Excellent observation.”
“It is one in the morning.”
“So?”
“We are here for an exhibition event.”
“We already won.”
“That is not the point.”
Jaxon shoved both hands into the pockets of his jacket and looked up at the chapel as though considering venue aesthetics for a formal business meeting. “I think the point is that we are in a city built on terrible impulse control, and you are trying to waste an incredible opportunity.”
Robin stared at him.
The air was still warm despite the hour. Music thudded somewhere down the street. Their sponsor liaison had been looking for them for the better part of an hour because Jaxon had decided celebration required escape and Robin, as ever, had gone with him because following Jaxon into trouble had become second nature before he even realised he was doing it.
“You cannot possibly be serious.”
Jaxon looked back at him. “I’m serious about you.”
The words landed so cleanly Robin forgot how to blink.
That was Jaxon’s real danger, the thing that made him impossible to resist. He could be ridiculous one second and devastatingly sincere the next, and the shift was so smooth it always caught Robin in the softest part of himself.
Robin crossed his arms. “That is not a fair move.”
“Neither is marrying you, probably. It feels like cheating.”
Robin made a helpless sound.
Jaxon stepped closer. “Come on.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because marriage is serious.”
“Good.”
“You’re impossible.”
“I know.”
“You say that like it helps.”
“It helps me.”
Robin was already smiling despite himself, which was precisely how Jaxon won arguments he had no business winning. Not by out-logicing anyone. By wearing them down with affection and nerve until resistance felt less practical than surrender.
Jaxon hooked two fingers through one of Robin’s belt loops and tugged him in half a step.
The city noise seemed to drop away a little.
“We’ve been teammates for years,” Jaxon said. “We’ve been together for two. We know how to live in each other’s pockets better than most married people. I’m just suggesting paperwork catches up.”
Robin’s pulse flickered strangely. “That is a terrible proposal.”
Jaxon tilted his head. “So say yes and I’ll do a better one later.”
Robin laughed again, then stopped when he saw the look on Jaxon’s face.
Not joking now.
Open. Steady. Entirely too honest.
“Robin,” Jaxon said quietly, “I know this is stupid. I know normal people probably have a plan for this sort of thing. Rings and speeches and family and all that. But I don’t want normal. I want you.”
The laughter vanished from Robin’s mouth.
Jaxon’s fingers tightened on his belt loop, just enough to be felt. “I’m going to want you next week. I’m going to want you next year. I’m going to want you when we’re thirty and fighting over cupboard space and whether your tea addiction counts as a personality trait.”
“It does not.”
“It absolutely does.”
Robin tried to hold on to indignation. Failed.
Jaxon smiled a little, softening around the edges. “Marry me.”
No crowd. No grand scene. No kneeling in the middle of the pavement with strangers clapping around them.
Just Jaxon, all reckless certainty and aching sincerity, asking as if the answer mattered more than anything.
Robin looked at the little chapel again. Looked back at Jaxon. Thought, wildly, this is insane.
Thought, even more wildly, yes.
He said it in a whisper, which annoyed Jaxon instantly.
“That was too quiet.”
Robin’s face flamed. “You heard me.”
“I want to hear it again.”
“You are horrible.”
“Yes, but you’re going to marry me anyway.”
Robin shoved him weakly in the shoulder. Jaxon only laughed, caught his wrist, and kissed him right there under the neon sign while the city kept moving around them and Robin’s heart changed shape inside his chest.
The ceremony itself was a blur of velvet chairs, artificial flowers, and a woman with a professional voice who clearly saw five couples like them a week.
Robin remembered almost none of it in sequence.
He remembered Jaxon grinning at him across the tiny room.
He remembered trying and failing not to laugh when the officiant asked whether they had brought rings and Jaxon said, with complete confidence, “We’ll improvise.”
He remembered signing the certificate with shaking fingers.
And then he remembered looking up just in time to see Jaxon write Kazami in the surname line.
Robin blinked. “What are you doing.”
“Improving my name.”
“That is not your name.”
“It is now.”
The officiant did not even look surprised.
Robin stared at him. “Jaxon.”
Jaxon finally glanced up from the form, expression infuriatingly calm. “Cross is already my whole thing. Blader X. Champion of X. Why would I need to keep it on paper too when your surname has far more pizzazz.”
“That is not a legal principle.”
“It should be.”
Robin could feel the room tilting around him. “You can’t just decide that.”
Jaxon’s grin faded into something softer. More serious. “I can if I want to belong to you.”
The simple certainty in that sentence nearly folded Robin in half.
Jaxon lowered his voice, though the room was so small privacy was mostly theoretical. “And I do.”
Robin’s throat closed.
Because that was what it had always been with Jaxon beneath the noise and bravado and impossible public persona. Not a reluctance to belong. A hunger for it. A weird, tender pride in letting Robin know just how thoroughly Jaxon had chosen him.
Robin managed, “You are ridiculous.”
Jaxon signed the line with a flourish. “And yours.”
The officiant pronounced them married.
Jaxon kissed him before she finished speaking.
Afterwards they ended up sitting on the edge of the pavement two streets away, still in their event clothes, sharing terrible convenience shop cake with plastic forks while the marriage certificate sat folded in Robin’s lap like something sacred and absurd.
Jaxon leaned in to peer at it again, then looked at Robin through the bright spill of the city lights.
“Hi, husband.”
Robin nearly dropped the cake.
Jaxon laughed so hard he had to brace himself with one hand on Robin’s shoulder.
“Oh, that’s good,” he said. “You made a face.”
“I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
Robin could not even argue because they were newly married in a city neither of them belonged to, and Jaxon had taken his surname for no better reason than wanting to be his in a way the law would recognise, and the whole thing was so wildly, stupidly full of love that denial felt impossible.
Jaxon bumped their knees together. “I’m keeping it, by the way.”
Robin looked up. “Keeping what.”
“The name, it’s legal now.”
“Jaxon.”
“What.” Jaxon shrugged. “I like it. Jaxon Kazami sounds good.”
Robin’s heart did something fragile and dangerous.
“You’re serious.”
“About that too.”
Then he held out his left hand. One cheap silver band already shining on his finger. “Show me yours.”
Robin obeyed before thinking about it.
Jaxon took his hand, turned it over, and rubbed his thumb once over the ring.
Mine, his eyes said, warm and pleased and unguarded.
Not ownership.
Belonging.
Robin had never felt more chosen in his life.
No one noticed they were married.
Or, rather, no one noticed correctly.
That was the private joke of the next four years.
Jaxon called him husband all the time.
In corridors, in lifts, on trains, in hotel lobbies, in convenience shops, in the prep room before battle slots while Robin was trying to focus and Jaxon was apparently trying to invent new ways to ruin his concentration by leaning too close.
He did not use it carefully. He used it joyfully.
Morning, husband.
You nicked my drink, husband.
Move over, husband, your side of the sofa is more comfortable.
Robin used to hiss, “Stop saying that where people can hear you.”
Jaxon would blink at him with exaggerated innocence. “Why.”
“Because.”
“Excellent point. Very persuasive.”
“Jaxon.”
That was usually when he grinned and slung an arm over Robin’s shoulders anyway, utterly incorrigible.
Robin had worried at first. About cameras. About sponsors. About league gossip. About the way Team Persona was still climbing, still carving out its place against monsters like Team Pendragon and every other powerhouse hungry for a shot at the top of The X.
Jaxon, being Jaxon, worried about none of that.
Or rather, he worried and dismissed it in the same breath if it threatened anything he cared about.
“If anyone asks, I’ll tell them,” he said once, sprawled half across Robin on their hotel bed after a tournament, all long limbs and shameless affection. “What are they going to do, arrest me for good taste.”
Robin laughed into the pillow. “Please never say that to a sponsor.”
“Coward.”
“You’re impossible.”
“I’m your impossible.”
That, more than anything, was how Robin knew the problem was never embarrassment on Jaxon’s side.
Jaxon loved him loudly.
Publicly, even when the public missed the point.
Privately, in ways that could make Robin’s chest ache just from being witnessed. Jaxon was clingy in the most unselfconscious way imaginable. He wanted contact the way other people wanted air. An arm slung over Robin’s shoulders while they watched match replays. A hand hooked through Robin’s belt loop in crowds. A forehead pressed to Robin’s shoulder after a brutal practice, all the performer’s polish gone the second they were alone.
At night it got worse.
Or better.
Robin would wake at odd hours with Jaxon half on top of him, one leg tangled with both of Robin’s, face buried in Robin’s neck, one hand under his shirt as if skin contact was a need rather than a preference.
“You’re heavy,” Robin mumbled once, half asleep.
Jaxon did not even open his eyes. “And yet you continue to keep me.”
Robin turned his head just enough to kiss his hair. “Tragic.”
Jaxon’s answer was a sleepy hum and an even tighter hold.
There were other kinds of closeness too, the ones Robin never managed to describe properly because language seemed too clumsy for how safe Jaxon could make him feel. Jaxon always led there.
Not roughly.
Never carelessly.
Just with the same fierce certainty he brought to everything else he loved. When Robin’s head was loud with all the old, ugly things, the idea that he was not enough, not useful enough, not strong enough, not worthy of being chosen beside someone like Jaxon, Jaxon answered with his body before words ever came. Mouth. Hands. The deliberate weight of himself above Robin, grounding rather than trapping. The quiet, possessive tenderness of making Robin look at him until there was room for nothing else.
Jaxon had also developed a habit of pressing his lips to the ring hidden under Robin’s glove before tugging the glove back into place.
“Mine,” he would murmur, breath warm over Robin’s knuckles.
Robin always said, “That sounds primitive.”
Jaxon always kissed him again and answered, “Good.”
It should have been enough to cure every insecurity Robin ever had.
It was not.
Love did not fix him. It only made the stakes higher.
He still lost sometimes and felt the losses settle like lead under his ribs. Still watched Jaxon blaze through arenas with impossible, superstar brilliance and thought, in his weakest moments, that perhaps the gap between them was visible from space. Still heard the commentators praise his heart and persistence in the same breath they used to praise other people’s skill. Still wondered how long it would be before Jaxon realised Robin was not enough to stand beside him for real.
Jaxon never seemed to understand that fear.
Or rather, he understood it and rejected it so completely it sometimes felt like the two of them lived in separate realities.
The worst fight they ever had before the divorce started with Robin saying, in a hotel bathroom at half past midnight after another difficult loss, “You’d be better off with someone stronger.”
He had meant it as a confession.
Jaxon heard it as blasphemy.
He went still in a way that had nothing to do with battle calm. Then he crouched in front of Robin, took both his wrists in careful hands, and said, very quietly, “No.”
Robin tried to laugh it off. Failed.
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“Jax.”
“No.” Jaxon’s grip tightened. “You do not get to decide that for me.”
Robin looked away. “I just mean I know what it must look like.”
“To whom.”
Everyone, Robin almost said.
The whole world.
Instead he whispered, “People.”
Jaxon’s expression sharpened. “I don’t care what people think.”
“I do.”
Jaxon’s face changed. Not softer. Sadder. “I know.”
Robin hated how much tenderness there was in that. Hated that Jaxon always seemed to meet his worst moments with more care instead of less, as if Robin’s self-disgust were not exhausting but simply another injury to be held properly.
Jaxon tipped his chin up until Robin had to meet his eyes. “Listen to me. I love you because you’re you. Not because you make me look good. Not because you win enough for anyone’s stupid standards. Not because you’re useful.” His voice roughened. “I love you because when I come apart, you are where I want to land.”
Robin’s eyes burned.
Jaxon pressed their foreheads together. “You are not the weight I carry. You are the place I rest.”
Robin cried then, quiet and furious with himself for crying, and Jaxon kissed the tears off his face with a patience that felt almost holy.
It should have been enough.
God, it should have been enough.
The blackmail arrived on a rainy Tuesday in a plain envelope with Robin’s name typed on the front.
He nearly left it unopened on the kitchen counter with the sponsor circulars.
Something about the weight of it made him pause.
At the time Jaxon was downstairs in the practice room with Multi, arguing at top volume over whether Dagger Dran’s recent adjustments had made it cleaner or merely flashier. Robin could hear them through the floor in bursts of laughter and mock outrage. It sounded like home. It sounded like the shape his life had taken without his permission, so familiar now he could no longer imagine how he had lived before it.
Then he opened the envelope.
Photographs slid out first.
Robin on a hotel balcony in Singapore, laughing against Jaxon’s shoulder.
Jaxon with his mask pushed up, kissing Robin in the back seat of a hired car.
The two of them outside the apartment at dawn, Robin’s hand under Jaxon’s jacket and Jaxon’s face turned in like he was starving.
Robin’s stomach dropped out.
Under the photographs was a partial copy of their marriage certificate.
Under that, pages of printed sponsor clauses and league conduct terms, highlighted in yellow.
Conflict of interest.
Undisclosed personal relationship within active team structure.
Brand damage.
Fraud by omission.
Exploitative narrative risk.
He barely understood half the language. But he understood enough.
The final page was a letter.
We know what you are to him.
Either you file for divorce and leave Team Persona quietly, or these materials go to league officials and the press with an explanatory narrative. We will frame the relationship as deceptive and professionally compromising. Your record makes you replaceable. His does not. If you care about Jaxon Cross’s future, you will do the sensible thing.
There was a second line at the bottom, handwritten in blue ink, casual in a way that made it crueler.
He would choose you over his career. That is why you must not let him.
Robin sat down because his legs stopped functioning.
The room blurred around the edges.
He should have shown Jaxon immediately. Even then, in the first shock, he knew that was the honest thing to do. The sane thing. The married thing.
But then he looked again at the sentence at the bottom.
He would choose you.
And the reason it worked, the reason the whole threat crawled straight through his chest and wrapped round his lungs, was because Robin knew with soul-level certainty that it was true.
Jaxon would choose him.
Jaxon would smile into a bank of cameras and say yes, I married him, yes, I hid it, yes, try me. He would torch sponsor goodwill and league patience and every carefully balanced piece of Team Persona’s public machinery if it meant Robin stayed safe.
And Robin, who had spent half his life fearing he was something heavy that better people carried out of pity, could not bear being the thing that dragged Jaxon under.
So he said nothing.
For six days he carried the envelope in the bottom of his bag and went on pretending.
Those six days became a private catalogue of torture.
Jaxon stealing bites from Robin’s plate and kissing the side of his neck in apology.
Jaxon flopping across his lap during replay review until Robin could barely see the screen.
Jaxon pressing a sleepy kiss to the ring beneath Robin’s glove in the dark as if it were a blessing.
On the seventh day, a second envelope appeared.
This one held a single photograph of Jaxon leaving league headquarters, a red circle drawn round his head in marker.
At the bottom, five words.
We are done waiting.
Robin did not remember deciding.
He only remembered the feeling of the floor tilting under him and the sudden, hideous clarity that if he delayed any longer he would be gambling with a future that was not only his to risk.
He told Multi he felt ill and skipped afternoon training.
He went to a lawyer.
He filed.
By evening the paperwork sat in a folder on the kitchen table, and Robin was no closer to understanding how a person could still be alive when something this final had already happened inside him.
Jaxon came in from practice damp-haired and bright-eyed, Buster Dran case hanging from one hand.
“Robin,” he began, and then stopped when he saw Robin’s face.
The smile dropped away.
“What happened.”
Robin sat down before his knees gave way entirely.
He put the folder between them.
Jaxon frowned. Picked it up. Opened it.
The silence that followed felt endless.
Then he laughed once, without humour. “This isn’t funny.”
Robin gripped his own thighs under the table hard enough to bruise. “I know.”
Jaxon looked up. “What is this.”
“You know what it is.”
“No.” The word came out sharp. “Tell me anyway.”
Robin swallowed. “I filed for divorce.”
Everything in Jaxon’s expression shut down and shattered at once.
He read the first page again. Read the second. Set the folder down with frightening care.
“You’re joking.”
Robin shook his head.
“Why.”
Because someone threatened you.
Because they knew I would break before you did.
Because I would rather destroy us than watch them use me to hurt you.
Robin looked at the grain of the table and said, “I can’t do this any more.”
Jaxon stared at him.
“That,” he said, voice low and strained, “is not an answer.”
Robin had rehearsed cruelty and still found himself unequal to it.
“I’m tired of being carried,” he whispered.
Jaxon blinked hard. “What.”
“I’m tired of people looking at me and seeing the weakest part of your life.” The words came easier once he started lying in the direction of his worst fears. “I’m tired of wondering when you’ll realise they’re right.”
Jaxon looked genuinely bewildered, which somehow made it worse.
“Robin.”
“I’m leaving Team Persona too.”
That struck him harder than the divorce itself, or at least louder. Jaxon shoved back from the table so abruptly his chair legs scraped.
“What.”
“I’ve already spoken to management.”
“Why.”
Robin forced himself to meet his eyes then, because anything less would let the truth out. “Because I need enough self-respect to stop making you carry me.”
The hurt that crossed Jaxon’s face was immediate and total.
Robin nearly took it back on the spot.
Jaxon stepped closer instead, as if proximity could still save this. “Who told you that.”
No one, Robin thought wildly. Everyone. Me.
“No one.”
“Husband—”
He said it like an appeal. Like a warning. Like a prayer.
Robin broke first. He reached for the cruelest thing he had left.
“Maybe I just don’t want to be your husband any more.”
Jaxon went utterly still.
The world seemed to narrow to the sound of both of them breathing.
When Jaxon spoke again, his voice had gone flat with shock. “Do you mean that.”
Robin could not survive saying yes. He could not survive saying no.
He said nothing.
That was answer enough.
Jaxon looked at him for a very long time.
Then, with hands that had started to shake, he picked up the pen.
Robin watched as Jaxon read the signature line, paused, and wrote Jaxon Cross.
No one would question it. Robin didn’t question it.
Of course he signed Cross. That was the name the world knew. The name on posters and rankings and promotional campaigns. The name half the city shouted when he launched. Robin was too devastated to consider what else it might mean.
Jaxon set the pen down.
“If this is what you want,” he said, each word scraped raw, “I’m not going to chain you to me.”
Robin bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood.
Jaxon did not look away. “But something is wrong.”
The certainty in his voice made Robin’s chest cave in.
“Nothing is wrong.”
“That’s a lie.”
Robin stood so abruptly his chair tipped. “Please, I just can’t do this anymore.”
Jaxon’s face changed then, closing around whatever hope had still been trying to live there.
“Fine,” he said.
He turned and walked out of the kitchen.
Robin did not hear the front door close.
He only heard, several seconds later, the shattering crash of something expensive breaking in the practice room downstairs.
Haru Minobe joined Team Persona three weeks after Robin left.
He was twenty, fast, camera-friendly, and devastatingly good at the sort of interviews Robin had always stumbled through. He used an attack-type Bey of his own design, all sharp red edges and sponsor appeal. The public loved him immediately.
Robin hated himself for learning that much.
He did not want to know anything.
Here’s a more painful, more intimate version of that section:
He left Team Persona. Moved into a small flat on the other side of the district. Started helping at Shiroboshi because Tenka, in a rare fit of practical mercy, pointed out that if Robin wanted to inspire young bladers without standing two feet from Jaxon every day, then teaching children was the most direct route available.
It should have been temporary.
It became a life.
The children liked him because he never lied about losing.
He showed them how to fix posture, how to breathe before a launch, how to lose without assuming it meant you were worthless. He found, to his own surprise, that he was good at noticing the small fears in other people. The flinch before a bad launch. The way a child’s shoulders rounded after a burst finish. The difference between frustration and humiliation.
He noticed those things because he knew them too well in himself.
Sometimes the pain of it came quietly. A child biting their lip so hard it trembled. A pair of small hands clutching a launcher too tightly. The brave, watery smile of someone trying not to cry in front of their friends.
Robin always knelt down. Softened his voice. Told them to breathe. Told them one bad launch did not decide who they were. Told them losing did not make them a burden. Told them there would always be another round, another attempt, another chance to stand properly and pull again.
The children listened.
That was the part that undid him.
Because once, a long time ago now, in a hotel room washed gold by the city lights outside, Jaxon had said almost those exact things about the sort of child they might have one day.
Robin had been sitting cross-legged against the headboard, half watching battle footage on mute while Jaxon sprawled across the bed with his head in Robin’s lap, too boneless with exhaustion to pretend he was not clinging. They had been twenty-four, married for two years, still carrying that stupid, shining secret under their gloves and in their hearts as if it were something untouchable. Jaxon had one hand hooked lazily round Robin’s wrist, thumb rubbing now and then against the inside of it, not even looking at what he was doing. Just holding on because that was what Jaxon did whenever he was tired, whenever he was happy, whenever he was quiet enough to stop pretending he did not need things.
“If we ever have a kid,” Jaxon had murmured, eyes half shut, “I’m teaching them attack types first.”
Robin had laughed softly and combed his fingers through Jaxon’s hair. “That is the worst possible place to start.”
Jaxon made a sleepy sound of protest. “No, it’s not.”
“It is if you want the furniture to survive.”
“That’s not a real concern.”
“It absolutely is.”
Jaxon smiled without opening his eyes. “Then we buy sturdier furniture.”
Robin remembered looking down at him then, at the familiar angle of his mouth, the warm weight of him, the absolute shamelessness of the way Jaxon always seemed happiest when half draped over Robin like he had long since decided there was nowhere better to be.
“You’ve thought about this far too much,” Robin had said.
Jaxon had opened one eye at that, grin going crooked. “Of course I have.”
“Why.”
Because he had meant it as teasing. Because the future still felt soft and easy then, something they could touch without fear.
Jaxon’s expression had changed in that quiet way Robin always loved most. The way it did when the performance fell away and what was left was simply him. Open. Certain. So full of feeling it almost hurt to look at.
“Because it would be ours,” he had said.
Robin’s breath had caught.
Jaxon, still watching him, had gone on in that low, drowsy voice that somehow made every word feel more intimate. “You’d be the one teaching them posture. Breathing. How not to panic after a bad finish. You’d kneel down and talk to them like they mattered, and they’d calm down because you always make people feel safe.”
Robin had smiled, embarrassed and helplessly pleased. “You make me sound nicer than I am.”
“You are nicer than you think.” Jaxon had lifted Robin’s left hand then, turning it so the cheap silver band that was usually hidden under his glove, pressed warm against his mouth before he kissed the knuckles over it. “And then I’d teach them how to hit hard enough to make people regret underestimating them.”
Robin had laughed. “That part sounds more like you.”
“That part would definitely be me.” Jaxon had tugged gently on Robin’s wrist until Robin had to lean down closer. “But we’d make them impossible together.”
We.
The word had settled somewhere deep inside Robin, somewhere tender and defenceless. He remembered Jaxon’s hand sliding up to the back of his neck, remembered being kissed slowly, lazily, like there was no rush at all because they had years and years ahead of them to finish every conversation they started. He remembered Jaxon smiling against his mouth and whispering, almost boyishly pleased, “Our kid would be terrifying.”
Robin had laughed into the kiss. “Our kid would be spoiled.”
“Also true.”
“And probably dramatic.”
“That is genetic. Nothing we can do about it.”
Robin had rolled his eyes and kissed him again anyway, warmth blooming through him so fully it had felt like a second heartbeat. At some point Jaxon had pulled him down properly, wrapping himself round Robin until they were tangled together in the middle of the bed, battle footage forgotten, the future spread out before them in half-joking pieces. They had talked in murmurs after that. About names. About whether their child would like blading right away or hate it first just to be difficult. About Jaxon insisting he would absolutely not go easy on them, and Robin informing him that he would be an awful teacher if he made their hypothetical eight-year-old cry.
Jaxon had kissed the corner of his mouth and said, with that easy certainty Robin had once trusted more than gravity, “Then you’ll be there.”
Now, years later, standing in a school practice hall with fluorescent lights overhead and children waiting for him to tell them they were not hopeless, Robin would sometimes remember that exact sentence and feel something inside him split all over again.
Then you’ll be there.
As if it had been obvious.
As if there had never been any world in which Robin was not meant to be part of that picture.
He still taught the children to breathe.
Still adjusted their grip with patient hands. Still praised effort before outcome. Still told them that shame was not the same thing as failure, that fear did not mean they were weak, that one mistake did not make them impossible to love.
Sometimes he heard his own voice and thought, with a kind of quiet devastation, that he was saying all the things he had never properly believed about himself.
Sometimes a child would grin up at him after finally getting a launch right, all pride and missing teeth and reckless joy, and Robin would have to look away for a moment because it hurt too much to imagine the life that might have grown around those old hotel-room promises.
Still, he stayed.
Perhaps because this was the closest he would ever come to that abandoned future. Perhaps because helping a frightened child stand straighter and try again felt like reaching back through time towards the part of himself that had once believed love could make a life instead of break one open.
Or perhaps because every time he knelt beside a trembling beginner and said, gently, “Again,” he could still hear Jaxon in the back of his mind, warm and laughing and certain, saying ours as if that word had been enough to build a world on.
And perhaps the cruelest part was that Robin still thought it might have been.
Worse was how he knew humiliation too well not to recognise it.
Sometimes the children recognised him.
Not always at once. It usually arrived halfway through a session, when a parent whispered or an older sibling texted or a child with a better memory for internet clips than arithmetic gasped and pointed.
“You’re Robin Kazami.”
He always smiled.
“That’s me.”
“From Team Persona?”
“I used to be.”
“Did you really battle beside Blader X?”
“Yes.”
“What was he like?”
At first that question almost killed him.
Later he learned to answer, “Very good,” with a small smile and nothing else.
The rumours about Jaxon and Haru followed him anyway.
Sometimes in magazines.
Sometimes on screens in passing trains.
Sometimes from the children, who said things like, “My cousin says Haru is Blader X’s new partner,” with all the guileless savagery of youth.
Robin learned to say, “People say a lot of things,” while his insides came apart neatly behind his ribs.
He learned other things too.
A week after the boy in the beginner class repeated the husband joke, Robin saw a photograph online of Jaxon at a local event signing grips for children. One glove was off. The silver band on his left hand showed clearly for half a second before the angle changed.
Yet no one in the media had said a word. They had never seen Blader X without it, as if it was as cemented as part of him as his helmet.
But Jaxon had kept wearing it. After months.
Robin sat on the edge of his bed and stared at that photograph until the room went dark around him.
Of course he had kept it.
Robin had kept his too.
That was the stupidest part, maybe. The part that made him feel fourteen rather than twenty-six. The part that turned the whole thing from tragic to faintly absurd in the cruel, humiliating way real heartbreak often did.
He had destroyed his own marriage to keep Jaxon safe and then could not even take the ring off afterwards.
The first time he tried, his fingers shook so hard he had to stop.
It remained under the glove.
A secret no longer secret to himself.
Jaxon had known something was wrong the moment Robin set the folder on the kitchen table.
He had known it the way he knew launch angles and weak points and the exact instant a stadium was about to erupt into chaos. Instinct. Pattern recognition. The smell of danger.
Robin had not looked angry enough for this to be simple unhappiness. Not detached enough. Not even resolute enough.
He looked terrified.
That was why Jaxon signed Cross.
His lawyers nearly had heart failure.
The lead partner, who had represented enough elite athletes to be permanently unimpressed by fame, reviewed the papers in silence, then placed them back in front of him with deliberate care.
“Your legal name, as it appears on the marriage certificate, is Jaxon Kazami.”
Jaxon sat in the glass-walled office overlooking the city and felt as though someone had peeled half his skin off. “I know.”
“Then if you intend to execute these documents properly, you sign as Jaxon Kazami.” Her tone was even. Clinical. “Not as a stage name. Not as a trading name. Not as the name the press prefers.”
“No.”
The partner removed her glasses. “Let me be clear. If you sign using ‘Jaxon Cross’, the filing is defective.”
Jaxon looked down at the page where Robin’s signature sat clean and certain in entirely the wrong place.
“Defective how.”
“Potentially in several ways,” she said. “At minimum, it creates an inconsistency between the name of the responding spouse on the divorce papers and the name recorded on the underlying marriage documentation. That does not necessarily mean the court would treat the application as automatically void on sight, but it does mean the matter is vulnerable. It can be queried, stayed, rejected for correction, or, if it proceeds without the discrepancy being addressed, challenged later on procedural grounds.”
Jaxon leaned back in his chair. “Good.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You are asking me to preserve a defect.”
“I’m asking for time.”
“Time for what.”
Jaxon kept staring at Robin’s signature. He could still hear him saying I don’t want to be your husband any more in that awful, hollow voice that had sounded less resolved than cornered.
“To figure out why my husband just lied to my face.”
The partner’s expression shifted, though only slightly.
She was good enough not to ask whether he had evidence.
He did not. Not of the kind she meant.
He had instinct, grief, and the certainty that Robin had not sounded like a man freely ending a marriage. He had looked terrified.
Not evidence. Not yet.
The partner folded her hands on the desk. “You suspect the application may not be entirely voluntary.”
Jaxon let out a short, humourless laugh. “I suspect Robin claiming he suddenly found some self-respect was the worst lie he has ever told in his life.”
It was a brutal thing to say aloud. It was also, unfortunately, true.
The partner considered him for a long moment, then said, “If there is any possibility of coercion, duress, or improper pressure affecting the decision to file, that changes the risk analysis.”
Jaxon looked up.
She continued, precise now, already thinking three steps ahead. “Here is what I can do. We do not correct the discrepancy. We do not volunteer it. We preserve the record exactly as executed. If the filing is processed without the mismatch being picked up, that does not cure the problem. It simply means the order rests on paperwork that may later be vulnerable to challenge. If further facts emerge suggesting coercion, lack of informed consent, or procedural irregularity, we would have grounds to move to set the order aside or resist its finality.”
“Quietly,” Jaxon said.
“Quietly,” she agreed. “But understand me. This is not magic. A name discrepancy alone is not some guaranteed escape hatch. It is leverage, not certainty. If you are right, it buys us time and a procedural foothold. If you are wrong, it buys you a mess.”
Jaxon nodded once. “I’ll take the mess.”
The partner studied him for another second, then reached for the file.
“Very well. We proceed on the documents as signed. No corrective filing. No explanatory affidavit unless and until you instruct me otherwise. In the meantime, I want every possible point of factual vulnerability preserved. Dates, correspondence, service records, communications surrounding the filing, anything unusual in timing or conduct. If this becomes a contested matter later, I would rather have too much than too little.”
Jaxon stood.
It took everything in him not to walk straight out of that office, drive across the district, and drag the truth out of Robin by force of sheer, stubborn love.
He did not go.
Because if Robin was frightened, arriving like a storm would only push him further away.
Because if Jaxon had been right and something external had driven this, then whatever held Robin would still be there, waiting to tighten the noose the second Jaxon blundered in without a plan.
Because for the first time in his adult life, the smartest thing he could do was stand still and pay attention.
So he watched.
He asked questions without seeming to ask them.
He studied sponsor behaviour, league chatter, odd shifts in media emphasis. He had lawyers quietly trace the likely origin of the photos. He snapped at two journalists, terrified one producer, and almost got himself suspended once for shoving a cameraman who would not stop asking whether Haru made a better fit for Team Persona than Robin ever had.
He apologised publicly. He did not mean it privately.
At night he slept badly, when he slept at all.
He kept the ring under his glove because taking it off felt like agreeing to something he did not believe in.
He missed Robin so constantly it became almost physical. An ache beneath the sternum. A phantom weight beside him in bed. The reflex to say husband at random moments and swallow the word before it reached daylight.
Haru noticed first, of course.
Not the marriage. The damage.
Jaxon had half expected a smug, ambitious opportunist because the world had trained him to expect the worst from anyone moving quickly through it. Instead Haru turned out to be a decent kid with excellent launch discipline and the sense to say, three weeks into his tenure on Team Persona, “You’re not actually angry at me, are you.”
Jaxon looked up from restringing a launcher. “What.”
Haru shrugged, not quite casual enough. “I’m just checking. Because you keep glaring at me like I broke into your flat and stole your favourite jacket.”
Jaxon snorted despite himself. “You’re not my problem.”
Everyone else is.
“That is somehow less reassuring.”
Multi, listening from the workbench while pretending not to, laughed into her tea.
Jaxon learned to tolerate Haru because none of this was Haru’s fault. The kid battled hard, listened well, and never once tried to trade on the rumours linking his name with Blader X’s. On two separate occasions he corrected interviewers so bluntly the clips went mildly viral.
Still, the rumours persisted.
The machine always needed a story.
Jaxon let them run because chasing each one down without a strategy felt useless, and because every time he came close to publicly denying one, the shape of Robin’s fear rose in front of him like a warning.
Something is wrong.
He kept coming back to that.
Something had frightened Robin enough to cut them apart.
Jaxon would find it.
It took five months.
Five months before Multi found the second envelope in a side pocket of an old launcher case Robin had left behind.
Five months before she walked into Jaxon’s apartment, white with fury, and dropped the letters, the photographs, and the highlighted clauses onto his table.
Five months before Jaxon understood that Robin had not stopped loving him at all.
He had simply loved him in the stupidest, most self-destructive way possible.
Jaxon sat there very still while Multi talked, voice shaking with anger and grief.
When she finished, the flat was silent.
Jaxon looked down at the photograph of his own face circled in red.
He should have been relieved.
Instead he was briefly, murderously calm.
Then he stood up so fast the chair hit the wall.
Multi stepped back. “Jaxon.”
“I know.”
That was all he said.
I know.
Meaning: I know who Robin is. I know exactly how he would make himself the sacrifice if someone convinced him I might bleed less for it. I know he would call that love because he has always confused being useful with being worthy. I know because I have been trying for years to teach him otherwise, and apparently I have not been loud enough.
He looked at Multi. “Did you tell him.”
“No.”
“Good.”
Her eyes widened. “Good?”
“I need to go to my lawyers first.”
“To do what.”
Jaxon’s smile had no humour in it at all. “To collect my husband.”
Robin was locking up the small arena room after the final evening class when he heard the front doors open.
It was late enough that the rest of the building had gone mostly quiet. Just the distant rattle of someone cleaning in the main hall, the soft thump of his own shoes, the rustle of papers as he checked the attendance sheet against the register.
He expected Tenka.
He turned and saw Jaxon instead.
For a moment his body forgot how to exist.
Jaxon stood in the doorway in a dark jacket, hair damp from mist or rain, eyes fixed on Robin with an intensity that made the air change shape.
Robin’s hand tightened on the attendance sheet until it bent.
He had seen Jaxon from a distance at events and on screens and in photographs that hit too hard when he was unprepared. None of that had prepared him for this. For the full impact of him, real and immediate and breathing the same air.
“Jaxon,” he said.
It came out like a confession.
Jaxon shut the door behind him.
For one terrifying second Robin thought he looked furious enough to shake the building.
Then he saw the other thing under it. Relief so violent it bordered on pain.
“How long,” Jaxon said, voice rough, “were you going to keep that from me.”
Robin’s stomach dropped.
So he found out.
Of course he had.
Or perhaps he had already had that thought cross his mind. There was something too controlled in Jaxon’s face for the discovery to be brand new. Something too precise. Like anger that had already passed through legal channels first.
Robin set the sheet down because his hands had begun to tremble. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“That’s funny,” Jaxon said. “I was about to say the same thing to the people who thought threatening my husband was a viable career choice.”
Robin stared.
Jaxon took one step forward.
No more.
Still giving him room, even now.
“I know about the letters, photos, and threats.”
The room seemed to tilt.
Robin opened his mouth. Closed it again.
Jaxon laughed once, sharp and disbelieving. “You really thought I was going to let you carry that alone.”
“I was trying to protect you.”
“I know.”
The answer was immediate and it hurt more than if he had shouted.
Robin felt his eyes sting.
Jaxon dragged a hand through his hair. “Do you have any idea how many times I replayed that kitchen conversation. How many times I tried to figure out what I’d missed.”
Robin looked at the floor. “I didn’t want them to ruin you.”
Jaxon’s voice softened, which was somehow unbearable. “Robin.”
Robin swallowed hard. “They had the certificate. Photos. Sponsor clauses. League conduct terms. They said they’d frame it like I’d manipulated you, or like the team was dishonest, or like you’d let me stay because we were married. They said you’d choose me over your career. And they were right.”
Jaxon did not even hesitate. “Yes.”
Robin looked up.
Jaxon’s eyes were bright and furious and heartbreakingly clear. “I would. Every time. That is not the part you were supposed to doubt.”
Something in Robin cracked open.
“I know,” he whispered. “That’s why I couldn’t let you.”
For a moment neither of them moved.
Then Jaxon reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded set of papers.
Robin recognised the legal crest before anything else.
His blood turned to ice.
Jaxon held them out.
Robin took them with numb fingers and unfolded the first page.
The words blurred, steadied, then sharpened into sense.
Order set aside due to defective execution and misidentification of responding spouse.
Robin’s eyes snapped up.
Jaxon’s mouth twisted. “You remember how I signed.”
Robin stared.
“Cross,” Jaxon said. “Not Kazami.”
Understanding hit slowly, then all at once.
“You did that on purpose.”
“Yes.”
“Why.”
Jaxon let out a breath that sounded like it had been waiting five months to leave his body. “Because my legal name is Jaxon Kazami, and I knew the second you put those papers in front of me that something was wrong. My lawyers told me to sign properly. I told them no. I told them to preserve every defect and correct nothing until I knew why you were doing it.”
Robin’s fingers tightened on the pages.
“The decree slipped through initial review because court staff are human and overworked and sometimes miss things when international paperwork is involved,” Jaxon went on. “My lawyers flagged the discrepancy the minute it did. It was never clean. Never final enough to trust. Once Multi found the letters and I had proof there was coercion in the background, getting it struck out was almost insultingly easy.”
Robin could not breathe.
Five months.
Five months of grief and distance and rumour and children asking innocent questions with knives hidden in them, and all the while the divorce had been broken at the root because Jaxon had seen the crack and refused to help it widen.
He looked down at the order again.
Then at his own gloved hand.
Then back at Jaxon.
“You knew.”
“I knew something was wrong when you didn’t realise I signed the wrong name.” Jaxon gave a short, shattered laugh. “I knew you were lying. That is not the same as knowing why.”
Robin’s eyes filled.
“It took me five months,” Jaxon said, and now the anger in him was aimed partly at himself. “Five months before I could actually put the truth in a file instead of just in my chest.”
Robin made a small, awful sound.
Jaxon’s face changed at once, all the fury folding into something rawer. Softer.
“Hey.”
That one word undid him more thoroughly than anything else had.
Robin pressed the heel of his hand to his mouth and cried without warning, without dignity, without any of the control he had used to hold himself together for months. Great ugly gasping sobs that bent him in half.
Jaxon crossed the room in two strides.
He stopped right in front of Robin, close enough to catch him but still not touching.
“Can I,” he asked, voice shaking, “please hold you now.”
Robin nodded before the sentence finished.
Jaxon pulled him in.
Five months.
Five months before Jaxon could hold him again.
Robin buried his face in Jaxon’s shoulder and felt his entire body recognise home before his mind could keep up. The smell of him. The warmth. The way Jaxon’s arms went round him hard enough to mean never again if I can help it. One hand at the back of his neck, the other spread broad and sure between his shoulder blades like he was trying to physically keep Robin from shattering further.
Jaxon’s own breathing was uneven.
When he spoke, his mouth was in Robin’s hair.
“You are so stupid.”
Robin laughed and sobbed at the same time.
“I know.”
“No, I mean it.” Jaxon drew back just enough to look at him, hands still framing his face. His own eyes were wet now, openly, furiously. “You are brilliant in battle and kind to children and catastrophically clever in all the wrong directions, and you are also the stupidest man I’ve ever loved.”
Robin’s lips trembled into something that might have been a smile.
Jaxon’s expression softened around the edges, wrecked and fond all at once. “There you are.”
Robin shut his eyes.
Jaxon pressed his forehead to Robin’s. “If people really thought I called you husband because I was mocking you, then they’re idiots. And I am the champion of X for a reason.”
Despite everything, Robin huffed a laugh.
Jaxon’s mouth twitched. “I can educate them.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“It is.”
Then he sobered again. “Robin. Look at me.”
Robin did.
Jaxon swallowed. “I’m still angry.”
“I know.”
“I’m angry that you thought protecting me meant cutting me out of the decision.”
Tears slid down Robin’s face again. “I know.”
“I’m angrier that somebody saw exactly where to hurt you and used it.” Jaxon’s hands tightened minutely. “That part I’m going to deal with separately.”
Robin believed him completely.
“But,” Jaxon said, and the word landed with astonishing care, “I’m not here tonight to win an argument.”
Robin’s throat closed.
“I’m here because you’re still my husband on paper, and more importantly because I never stopped being yours in any way that matters.” Jaxon looked briefly at Robin’s gloved hand. “Also because you kept the ring on, which is not subtle.”
Robin let out a watery, humiliated laugh. “You did too.”
“Obviously.”
“Hypocrite.”
“Completely.”
Their foreheads stayed pressed together.
Outside the rain had started properly now, tapping against the windows in a soft, steady rhythm.
Robin could feel his pulse gradually slowing under Jaxon’s hands.
“Are you with Haru,” he whispered, because apparently even now some wounds still wanted touching.
Jaxon pulled back just enough to look offended. “No.”
“The magazines—”
“The magazines also think I’m six feet four.”
Robin blinked. “You’re not?”
Jaxon narrowed his eyes. “Be serious.”
A real laugh escaped Robin then, cracked and damp but real enough to change the shape of the room.
Jaxon closed his eyes briefly, as if the sound hurt in the best possible way. When he opened them again, he looked almost frightened by how much hope was in him.
“I am not asking you to pretend this is fixed,” he said. “It isn’t. You hurt me.”
Robin nodded miserably.
“I hurt you too, by not seeing how bad it had got in your head.” Jaxon’s mouth tightened. “And there are conversations we still need to have about why you’d rather burn your own life down than let me choose you in public.”
Robin could not argue with that either.
Jaxon exhaled. “But I would like, if you can stand it, to start with not letting you go home alone tonight.”
Robin stared at him.
“Not because I think one hug solves five months,” Jaxon added quickly. “Because it doesn’t. And not because a technicality makes everything magically easy. But because I have spent five months not being allowed to hold my husband while knowing in my bones something was wrong, and I am, frankly, done with that.”
The word husband landed differently now.
Not the easy bright habit of before.
Something more fragile. More deliberate.
Still no less loved.
Robin started crying again, quieter this time.
Jaxon sighed with exasperated fondness and wiped his face with both thumbs. “You really are going to make me say something embarrassing, aren’t you.”
“You already called me stupid.”
“That was true, not embarrassing.” Jaxon leaned in and kissed his forehead. “Fine. Here’s the embarrassing part. I missed you so much it made me mean.”
Robin’s breath hitched.
“I know.”
“No, I mean offensively mean. I nearly bit a reporter.”
“That one I can believe.”
“I know you can.” Jaxon kissed the corner of his mouth now, feather-light, checking. “So maybe we start there. With honesty. With me telling you when I’m furious, and you telling me when you’re frightened, and neither of us mistaking martyrdom for romance ever again.”
Robin laughed shakily through the last of his tears. “That sounds like a lot of work.”
Jaxon kissed him properly then, soft and careful and aching with restraint, and answered against his mouth, “Good thing you married a man with excellent stamina.”
Robin made the mistake of smiling into the kiss.
Jaxon went utterly tender.
When he pulled back, he rested their foreheads together once more and murmured, with the kind of reverence that made Robin’s chest hurt all over again, “Hi, husband.”
No mockery.
No joke.
No audience misunderstanding the sound of it.
Just Jaxon, warm hands and rain-dark hair and eyes full of too much feeling.
Robin’s mouth shook.
“Hi, husband.” he whispered back.
They stayed like that for a while, standing in the little training room while the rain tapped at the windows and the rest of the building settled into night around them.
Eventually Jaxon glanced at the legal order still crushed in Robin’s hand and said, “I also need you to know that my lawyers have opinions.”
Robin blinked. “That sounds threatening.”
“It is mostly paperwork. They would like us to sign some things correctly this time.”
Despite himself, Robin laughed again.
Jaxon’s whole face softened at the sound.
“And after that,” Jaxon continued, one thumb brushing the line of Robin’s glove where the ring lay hidden beneath, “we decide what we want to do about the rest of it.”
“The blackmail.”
“The blackmail. The rumours. The fact that apparently half the city thinks I use husband as an insult, which is deeply offensive to my brand.”
Robin snorted.
“I’m serious.”
“You are not.”
“I can be both serious and offended. Watch me.”
Robin looked at him, really looked.
At the exhaustion still lingering round his eyes. At the months they had both lost. At the hurt not yet healed, the anger not yet spent, the hope somehow alive anyway, he thought wildly.
As if life ever gave such things a neat title.
Nothing was fixed.
The wound was still there. The consequences were still there. Team Persona had changed. Haru existed. Robin still worked at Shiroboshi. There would be apologies and explanations and ugly, necessary conversations, less gloves. There would be long nights and setbacks and moments when old fears put their hands round his throat again.
But Jaxon was here.
The ring was still under his glove.
And when Robin looked into Jaxon’s face, he saw no contempt at all. Only fury on Robin’s behalf, hurt of his own, and a love so stubborn it had spent five months waiting beside a legal technicality because Jaxon knew, simply knew, that the truth was somewhere underneath Robin’s lie.
Robin let out a slow breath.
“I can’t promise I’ll stop being frightened overnight.”
Jaxon nodded. “I know.”
“I can’t promise I’ll be easy. But I can try talking.”
Jaxon smiled, tired and crooked and impossibly fond. “Robin. You got married to me in Las Vegas. Easy was never the brief.”
That pulled another helpless smile from him.
Jaxon kissed it on sight.
Then he offered his hand, palm up, as if Robin were not already within reach, as if choosing still mattered every time.
Robin looked at it.
At the glove.
At the silver band hidden underneath.
He placed his own gloved hand in Jaxon’s.
Warmth met warmth.
Ring met ring.
And for the first time in months, the pressure under Robin’s ribs did not feel only like grief.
It felt like something trying, very carefully, to become a future.