Felicity had started to notice that Victor's hand was always there.
It never announced itself, never demanded acknowledgment, just appeared at her elbow when the terrain turned uneven and steadied her waist when rubble forced a climb and rested at the small of her back during the flat stretches like it had simply decided that was where it lived now and had stopped asking permission about it, and she had started thinking of it less as protection and more as a very large very warm reminder that gravity was currently on her side, which was honestly more comforting than she expected from a hand.
He does this a lot, she thought, and felt fond about it, which was probably information about herself she should examine later when she had a free minute, which at the current rate of apocalypse was never.
They camped midday in the remains of a park, playground equipment tangled and rusted, a spiral slide crushed under a fallen tree in a shape that barely remembered being joyful, and Felicity stared at it a second too long thinking about kids shrieking down it and someone waiting at the bottom pretending they might miss the catch, and then shook herself back to the present where everyone around her was being extremely competent and she was standing still having feelings about playground equipment like a person with entirely misplaced priorities.
Finch strung tripwires between broken benches, humming off-key to himself. Giddy cleared sightlines with enormous cheerful kicks that sent debris flying with absolutely zero structural awareness, and Voss snapped the neck of a passing zombie with one hand, barely slowing, then turned with blood still on his mouth and grinned directly at Felicity with the full unrepentant energy of a man at a talent show waiting for his score.
"See that?" he called, loud enough for everyone and aimed entirely at her. "That's how you handle a pest where I'm from."
Felicity blinked. That was showing off. That was a grown man who had just killed something with his bare hands and then immediately checked if she'd noticed, and she had noticed, and she had absolutely no idea what the correct response was, so she smiled politely and hoped for the best.
Victor wiped his blade clean and said nothing, but the look he gave Voss had the quality of a territorial weather forecast, and the look he gave Felicity afterwards had the quality of a question she didn't know how to answer out loud.
Movement flickered near the monkey bars, low and quick, and Felicity's magic fizzed in her chest before her brain caught up, and she thought zombie raccoons, that feels deeply unfair to raccoons as a species, and then she thought okay focus, picture the target, spool from the belly not the chest because Rose said that mattered, and please work and please don't blow up the playground, people used to love this playground.
Golden light flared from her palms, cleaner and more controlled than last time, arcing outward and catching the raccoon-things mid-leap, bodies locking and twitching, and Victor was already moving with fire roaring to finish them before they recovered, and silence snapped back into place and every head in Snow Team turned toward her at once and Felicity thought oh no was that rude, did I steal someone's thing, is there a rule about that, there's probably a rule about that.
Voss let out a laugh sharp enough to startle something out of the trees. "See?" he said, pointing at her like she'd just scored the winning goal. "The fox has teeth."
Her ears went hot enough to be visible from a distance.
Victor stepped close and cupped the back of her neck and massaged warmth into her skin with a steadiness that stopped the adrenaline spike before it started, and said "nice, slow and stun, Fel" in a voice low enough that it felt private, and her chest did a small embarrassing flip because he had used her nickname and apparently her entire nervous system had been waiting for that specifically and had a lot of feelings about it.
Rose whistled, impressed despite herself, and even Giddy paused mid-destruction with his tail flicking in something that looked suspiciously close to respect, and Felicity smiled at everyone, bright and unguarded and completely unaware that she was accidentally doing something to the men around her that could not be undone, several of whom were quietly and permanently rearranging their priorities without being asked or thanked for it.
The afternoon blurred into motion and rules she kept trying to memorise, never ignore the perimeter, never approach a sleeping male from behind unless you wanted consequences, never stand between two males measuring each other unless you wanted to become the unit of measurement, and always accept praise with downcast eyes and visible humility, which she kept forgetting because people kept saying nice things to her and her face kept doing grateful things back before she remembered she wasn't supposed to, and the results of this were visible in the way Snow Team kept finding new reasons to say nice things again.
Victor moved through it all like a force of nature, and Felicity walked in his wake, thinking I think I did something wrong. Was the lightning rude? Did I smile too much again, and then he stepped close without breaking stride and tipped two fingers under her chin and pressed a brief kiss to her forehead, and her internal monologue stopped completely.
"Oh," she said softly, to nobody.
Voss appeared at her other side four minutes later with the patience of a man who had been waiting for his window, loomed briefly the way large men loomed when they had made a decision, and patted her head with the slow deliberateness of someone completing a task they had been planning for some time. "Good work," he said, completely unapologetic about all of it.
She smiled up at him immediately. "Thank you."
Victor's hand tightened at her back by one very specific degree.
Voss withdrew, waited approximately five minutes, and tried again, and Rose watched this from eight feet away with the expression of a woman updating a mental file she had titled ongoing problems.
When the adrenaline finally dropped, Felicity's thoughts came out in a rush, the way they always did when she'd been holding them in too long. "Oh my god, I'm so sorry," she said, spinning toward Victor, "I didn't mean to mess up the formation, and I think I shocked Finch a little bit, and Rose looked at me like I kicked her favourite knife, and I genuinely didn't mean to do any of it."
"Fel," Victor said, and she stopped. "You did fine. You followed instructions, you didn't freeze, you didn't overextend. That look from Rose means she was impressed."
"It does?"
"Yes."
"Oh." She turned that over. "Oh, that's actually really nice. I thought she was mad at me."
Voss patted her head again, slower and more contemplative, like he was thinking about what he was doing and had decided he approved of it. "Strong fox," he said, and Victor looked at him with the flat red-eyed patience of a man adding something to a list, and Voss looked back and did not move his hand.
Rose turned around with the energy of a woman who had given a situation enough time to resolve itself and had concluded it wasn't going to. "Fox," she said, "you're going to get yourself killed if you keep assuming everything is your fault."
"I just don't want anyone to be mad at me," Felicity said, with complete sincerity, and something moved through Rose's expression that was almost painful to watch.
"Yeah," Rose said quietly. "That's exactly what worries me." She looked at Victor's hand on Felicity's back, at Voss with his hand still on her head, and at the rest of Snow Team performing extremely unconvincing versions of doing other things. "You trust fast. You apologise first. It's sweet, but it will get you hurt."
Felicity nodded solemnly while Voss's hand migrated from the top of her head to the back of it in a slow, exploratory way, and Victor's jaw moved by one very controlled degree.
"Stay close to him," Rose said, pointing at Victor, then at herself, "and me," and deliberately nowhere else, and Voss noted this with the calm of a man who had already decided that particular instruction didn't apply to him personally.
They moved on, Felicity walking between Victor and Voss with warm cheeks and a full heart, entirely unaware that she was being treated like the most important thing any of them had encountered since Tuesday, which she was, and entirely unaware that the number of men who had quietly and independently decided she was specifically theirs to protect was now at a figure that would have alarmed her considerably.
Rose looked back once with her jaw tight, watching her walk between those two enormous bodies like she was just taking a pleasant afternoon stroll through the apocalypse.
She really thinks everyone is kind, Rose thought, and that, more than the lightning or the magic or the way grown men kept patting her head like she was something sacred, was what made Felicity the most dangerous thing left in the city.