Chapter Text
The trouble began, as most things did at the Protocol base, with something completely mundane.
It was a Tuesday. Yoru had come back from a night op three hours behind schedule, soaked from the knees down after a canal chase that hadn't gone quite the way he'd planned, and in the kind of mood where speaking to him at all felt like a security risk. Most of the roster had learned, through hard-won experience, to leave him alone when he got back like that — let him disappear into the east wing, do whatever unsettling ritual he did with his knives and his silence, and reappear the next morning marginally more human.
Skye had not gotten that memo. Or she had gotten it and simply decided it didn't apply to her, which was more likely.
She was waiting by the side entrance when he came in, sitting on the low wall with her knees pulled up, her hawk perched quietly on her shoulder, feathers puffed against the cold. She didn't say anything about the mission. Didn't ask what had gone wrong, or comment on the state of his boots, or do any of the things that would have made him bristle on instinct. She just held out a thermos.
"Did you skip dinner?" she asked, already knowing the answer.
He looked at the thermos with the flat, wary suspicion of a man who wasn't used to being handed things without a catch attached. "I'm fine."
"I didn't ask if you were fine. I asked if you skipped dinner." She pushed it another inch toward him. "It's just soup, Yoru. Nobody's tracking you through the broth."
He took it, mostly because arguing with her took more energy than he had left, and mostly because — though he'd never have admitted this to anyone, least of all himself — it was warm, and his hands were not. He drank it standing up, in silence, while she talked at him about something her hawk had done that afternoon, something about stealing a sandwich off Neon's plate mid-conversation with a speed that had apparently impressed everyone present. He didn't respond much. She didn't seem to need him to.
When he finished, she took the empty thermos back, and — because the courtyard was dark and the gravel path back to the dorms was uneven and he'd noticed her favoring her left ankle since the debrief — he fell into step beside her without really deciding to. Walked her the two hundred meters back to her door. Didn't say goodnight, exactly. Just stood there a second too long before turning to leave, the way he did when he wasn't sure what the correct amount of caring was supposed to look like from the outside.
Neither of them thought anything of it.
Raze did.
Raze had been on the roof.
This required no further explanation to anyone who knew her — Raze was regularly on the roof, for reasons that ranged from "testing a new detonator" to "the sunset looked good" to, on one memorable occasion, "I wanted to see how far I could yell." Tonight it had been closer to the second reason, if you counted "waiting for Killjoy to finish soldering something so they could watch the sunset together" as a subcategory of it, which Raze privately did. Killjoy had texted twenty minutes ago that she was almost done. Raze had taken "almost done" as an aspirational estimate rather than a literal one, stretched out on the flat section above the mess hall with half a protein bar in one hand, and settled in to wait. She'd heard voices below and rolled over to look — because Raze looked at everything, it was a personality trait more than a habit — and had seen, with perfect if slightly upside-down clarity, Yoru walking Skye home in the dark, standing at her door a beat too long, the two of them talking quietly in a way that read, from thirty feet up with zero context, exactly like something.
She did not have the context. She did not want the context. The visual alone was enough.
"NO WAY," Raze said, to the empty rooftop, loud enough that a pigeon two buildings over reconsidered its life choices.
She was down the fire escape and through the mess hall doors in under ninety seconds, which — by her own admission, later, under direct and increasingly hostile questioning — was probably too fast for what was, at the time, a completely unconfirmed theory.
Neon was still up, parked at the corner table with her tablet, halfway through a match replay, when Raze skidded into the room with the specific look on her face that everyone had learned meant something was about to happen.
"Okay so this is not confirmed," Raze said, both hands up like she was defusing something, "but I need you to hear me out—"
"You said Cypher was a robot for two weeks," Neon said, not looking up. "I'm not falling for it again."
"This is different. This is Yoru and Skye."
Neon looked up.
"They're dating," Raze said, in the tone of someone laying down a winning hand.
"...Based on what."
"Based on I just saw him walk her all the way to her door and stand there being weird about it, at eleven at night, after he just got back from an op he definitely should've gone straight to bed after."
Neon considered this with the seriousness of a jury deliberating a capital case. "That does sound like something a boyfriend would do."
"Thank you."
"Or," Neon said, "a friend. Being normal."
Raze opened her mouth. Closed it. "Okay, sure, technically. But you didn't see it. There was a whole — a whole vibe."
This, in the end, was the entire evidentiary basis for what would become, within eighteen hours, the single most discussed piece of gossip the Protocol had seen since the infamous "Cypher doesn't actually sleep, he just stands in a corner" incident of the previous spring. By morning, it had technically been mentioned in a mission debrief, entirely off-topic, by an agent who will remain nameless, prompting Brimstone to ask, with real exhaustion, whether anyone present actually wanted to discuss the objective.
Neon did not, technically, promise to keep it quiet.
She lasted four minutes.
By the time Cypher heard about it — secondhand, from Neon, who told him while simultaneously eating breakfast and re-tying her shoe, a combination of tasks that should not have allowed for coherent storytelling but somehow did — the story had already acquired several details that had not, strictly, happened. In one version, Yoru had brought Skye flowers. In another, they'd been holding hands. By lunch, someone was insisting they'd overheard Yoru call her a pet name, which was almost funny enough on its own that Cypher briefly suspected the whole thing was fabricated purely to see if he'd fall for it.
He did not fall for it. He simply approached it, as he approached everything, with rigor.
"Interesting," he said, when Neon finished. He was already pulling up something on his tablet — a private, deeply organized note file that, if anyone had looked closely, contained a suspicious number of pre-existing tabs labeled things like Raze/Killjoy — confirmed, filed under 'personal favorites,' not a professional achievement and Reyna/Sage — highly disputed, zero data points, vibes only, refuse to delete the tab.
He added a new one. Yoru / Skye.
"You're not gonna do the whole — the board thing," Neon said, already knowing the answer.
"I am absolutely going to do the whole board thing."
Within the hour, there was a small betting pool, run out of the corner of the rec room with index cards and a jar labeled, in Cypher's neat handwriting, EVIDENCE ONLY — NO WITHDRAWALS. Odds were being taken on how long it would take for one of them to "admit it." Raze put in twenty. Neon put in the same, plus a bonus wager on which of the two would crack first ("Yoru," she said instantly, "he can't lie for beans, he goes stiff like a board"). Sage, passing through for tea, glanced at the jar, said nothing, and put in ten without comment — which everyone agreed was somehow the most alarming vote of all, because Sage never bet on anything she didn't already suspect the outcome of, and she had the unnerving habit of being right.
Killjoy, arriving last, looked at the jar, looked at the whiteboard Cypher had already half-filled with a genuinely unsettling amount of detail — a timeline, a diagram, a section labeled body language with actual arrows — and said, flatly, "This is the dumbest thing you've ever done and I include the time you tried to build a lie detector out of a toaster."
"That toaster worked," Cypher said, wounded.
"It set off the smoke alarm every time someone said their own name."
"Which proved it was working."
Killjoy did not put money in the jar. She did, however, read the whole whiteboard twice, brow furrowed at the timeline in particular. "Two weeks of nothing and they're suddenly together, overnight? That's not how it usually goes." She didn't say it was wrong, exactly — just filed it away, the way she filed away anything that didn't quite add up, for later. It was, though neither of them knew it yet, the first real crack in the case.
Skye found out first, from Sage, who delivered the news the way she delivered most things — gently, without embellishment, and with the specific calm of someone who found the whole situation more amusing than alarming.
"There's a rumor going around," Sage said, over tea, "that you and Yoru are together."
Skye choked, mid-sip. Set the cup down with a clatter that was louder than she meant it to be. "Together like—"
"Like a couple."
"...Based on what." Her face was already going pink, and she could feel it happening in real time, which somehow made it worse.
"Apparently he walked you to your door last night. Also, depending who you ask, he may have brought you flowers at some point, and somebody's fairly sure you were holding hands the whole way there. Nobody seems to agree on any of it."
"He did not bring me flowers," Skye said, with the flat, wounded conviction of someone defending a point that shouldn't need defending. "I would remember flowers. I would still be holding the flowers. And we were not holding hands, we were just — walking. Normally. Like two people who walk."
"I'm just relaying the intel."
Skye stared at her for a long moment — a full, horrified, unblinking moment — then put her face in her hands and laughed, high and slightly panicked, the kind of laugh that had a little bit of horror mixed into it. "He gave me his jacket once because I said I was cold and it's turned into an entire thing, hasn't it. Oh my god. Oh my god, Sage."
"There's a betting jar," Sage said, sipping her tea, utterly serene. "I put in ten."
"SAGE."
"I like good odds."
Yoru found out roughly twenty minutes later, in a considerably less gentle fashion, when Raze cornered him in the hallway outside the armory with the subtlety of a controlled demolition.
"So," Raze said, arms crossed, grinning in a way that made him instantly suspicious, "how long has this been going on."
"How long has what been going on." He said it too fast, and he knew it the second it left his mouth.
"You and Skye."
He looked at her for three full seconds, processing, the way he processed most social ambushes — carefully, skeptically, like he was waiting to be told it was a joke. His ears had gone faintly, betrayingly red, a detail he was in no position to hide and no position to explain. "There is no 'me and Skye.'"
"Uh-huh."
"There isn't."
"Uh-huh."
"Raze."
"I'm just saying," Raze said, backing away with her hands up, already halfway down the corridor, clearly done delivering the message and thoroughly satisfied with the reaction, "we saw you two. Walking home together, all cozy, standing at her door being weird about it for way longer than a normal goodnight requires. The whole base thinks otherwise, and honestly? Kind of a cute couple. Just saying."
She was gone before he could respond, which was, in retrospect, probably intentional.
Yoru stood in the hallway a long moment, jaw tight, running back through every recent interaction with Skye with the focused paranoia of a man building a case file against his own life. The soup. The walk home. The jacket — right, the jacket, that had been a mistake, that had clearly been read as something — and he felt, for possibly the first time in his career at the Protocol, genuinely and completely outmaneuvered by absolutely nothing at all.
He found Skye twenty minutes later in the greenhouse, elbow-deep in a raised bed of something green and stubborn, her hawk perched on the frame beside her, chirping intermittently. She looked up when he came in, and the look on both their faces must have matched, because she started laughing before he'd even said a word.
"You heard," she said.
"I heard..."
"There's a jar, Yoru. Cypher made a board."
He went very still. "...A board."
"A whole board. Timeline. Diagrams. There's a section labeled body language with arrows on it." She watched his expression sour in real time with something like sympathy. "Yeah. I know."
"There's a jar."
"People are betting on us, Yoru."
She sat back on her heels, wiping dirt off one hand onto her knee, and looked up at him with an expression that was trying very hard to be businesslike and mostly failing. "Okay. So. What do we do about it."
He crossed his arms, already turning the problem over the way he turned over everything — for weaknesses, for angles, for the fastest way out. "It'll die down on its own if we ignore it."
"Will it, though?" She raised an eyebrow. "This is Raze and Neon we're talking about. And Cypher has a board, Yoru. This isn't dying down, this is escalating whether we help it or not."
He hated, more than almost anything, being right about people and wrong about a plan. He was quiet a moment, thinking, and when he spoke again it came out slower, more reluctant, like every word cost him something.
"...There is a way to kill a rumor faster than ignoring it."
Skye tilted her head. "Which is?"
"Confirm it. Badly. Publicly. For a few days." He said it like he was reading it off a mission brief he didn't particularly like the odds on. "People get bored of things that stop being interesting. If we're obviously, unremarkably a couple, there's nothing left to gossip about. It burns out faster than a denial ever will."
Skye stared at him for a long moment — long enough that he almost took it back — and then a slow grin spread across her face, the exact grin that meant, in Skye terms, this is either brilliant or the worst idea either of us has ever had, and I am delighted either way.
"Fake dating," she said, "to make the fake dating rumors stop."
"...Yes."
"That's either genius or extremely stupid."
"It's efficient."
"Sure," she said, standing, brushing the last of the dirt off her palms and holding one out to him, business-like, sealing it — an oddly formal gesture for something so absurd. "Efficient. Let's do it, partner."
He shook her hand. It lasted half a second too long, neither of them quite noticing, both of them far too busy congratulating themselves on a plan that was, in every possible way, doomed from the start.