He was twenty-four the time it all happened.
He was just sitting in the back of a club that smelled like expensive cologne and bad decisions, watching his friends completely lose their minds over women who were, objectively, everywhere.
The club was loud. The kind of loud that gets into your chest and stays there. Lights doing things that lights shouldn't do. Music that had abandoned the concept of melody entirely.
Ruaan sat in the corner booth with a cocktail he'd been nursing for forty minutes and his phone under the table.
His friends were gone. Not physically — they were right there, technically. But mentally, emotionally, and in every other way, they had departed the moment the women arrived. Jamal had two of them on his lap. Keston was whispering something into a girl's ear that made her laugh too loudly. Derek had simply disappeared into a dark corner with someone and hadn't been seen since.
Ruaan sipped his cocktail, still with his phone, under the table, he had a browser open.
The site wasn't anything dramatic. Just a forum. Gay men, mostly his age, were talking about the kind of things his friends were currently doing loudly around him except with men instead. He'd found it three weeks ago and had been reading it every night since with attention like someone who had finally found a book written in a language they already knew.
A hand landed on his thigh.
He looked up.
A beautiful woman had materialised beside him — wearing something that left very little room for imagination. She smiled at him and let her hand slide slightly higher and said something he couldn't hear over the music.
Ruaan looked at her hand and shot her a death glare.
"Get lost," he said.
She flinched and wanted to say something.
The guy in the booth next to Ruaan — Marcus, who had known Ruaan since they were fifteen — reached over and physically redirected her toward himself without looking up from his own drink. "Don't bother with him," Marcus said pleasantly. "He doesn't like women."
"Marcus."
"What? It's true. Everyone here knows."
Ruaan looked back at his phone.
It was true. He had never hidden it specifically — had never announced it either, had never sat anyone down and made it a conversation, it had simply become an understood thing among the people who knew him. Ruaan doesn't like women. Move on.
His friends had moved on fine.
He was the one still figuring out where to go.
He was scrolling, half-present, when the notification appeared.
'GROUP EVENT — Friday night. First meetup for new members. Come as you are. Address in DM.'
He sat up.
He had been in the group chat for two months. Lurking, mostly. Reading. Occasionally typing something and deleting it. He had never met any of them in person.
A party.
He looked at his friends and looked at the notification.
He left without telling anyone.
.
Friday came before anyone knew it...
Ruaan dressed carefully for it.
Not his best — that was the thing. He thought about this deliberately. No designer labels visible. No watch that costs more than most people's cars. He took his second cheapest car, which still looked like it cost a significant amount of money but less so than the others.
He didn't want to walk in looking like money. Money made people weird. He wanted to just be a person at a party for once.
The address was a house in a quiet street. Music coming from inside, lights warm through the windows. Normal and nice.
He walked in.
And it was fine. Actually fine. People were eating and drinking and talking and three separate men had drifted toward him within the first twenty minutes, which had never happened to him at Jamal's clubs where he was invisible by preference.
He was talking. Actually talking. Laughing at something one of them said. Feeling something that might, generously, be described as relaxed.
There were four of them around him by then.
He heard it under the music. Between one laugh and the next.
"How long do you think the newbie lasts?"
"Look at him. Cute. Probably thinks this is a regular party."
Ruaan kept his face exactly where it was.
'Oh,' he thought. 'This is the wrong party.'
He did not move immediately. Moving immediately meant they'd know he'd heard. He finished the sentence he was saying, laughed, excused himself to get a drink, walked to the kitchen, walked through the kitchen, found the back door, and was in his car three minutes later.
He drove out of the vicinity fast. Too fast probably. His heart was pounding rapidly because he had done something stupid.
He wasn't watching the road the way he should have been. He saw the other car too late.
He heard the impact.
And then he made a decision he had spent two years pretending wasn't a decision.
.
Ruaan opened his eyes as he gasped back to reality.
White ceiling. The smell hit him first — antiseptic and underneath it, unmistakably, cigarette smoke.
He blinked.
This was not his cell.
The ceiling was higher. The light was different with actual bulbs instead of the flat grey of cell block lighting. He turned his head and saw a row of beds, most of them occupied. Bandages. IV lines. One man asleep sitting up.
Infirmary.
He looked down at himself. Both hands were wrapped. His right one was throbbing in a way that suggested Cullen's shoe had done more than it looked like it had done.
He flexed his fingers carefully and immediately regretted it.
The cigarette smell got stronger.
He frowned and looked around. "How do people get cigarettes in here? We're in a prison—"
"Keep your questions to yourself," said the person in the next bed.
Ruaan turned.
The person hadn't looked up. They were sitting cross-legged on their mattress, fully absorbed in whatever they were reading. The book was large, paperback, the cover facing outward.
Ruaan looked at the cover.
Two men. Very close together. Art style he recognised immediately from three years of reading them under his blanket at home with his brightness turned all the way down.
A BL comic.
And this man was just sitting there, in public with the cover fully visible.
The person holding it had round half-broken glasses held together at one hinge with what appeared to be a piece of tape.
"Who are you?" Ruaan asked.
The person looked up. He closed the book with one hand. Slipped the other hand slowly into his hair, pushing it back in a way that was clearly meant to be dramatic and finally adjusted his broken glasses.
Then he began.
"My name is of little importance in the grand scheme of what you are about to face here." A pause for effect. "My rank is irrelevant because rank is a construct I have chosen not to participate in." Another pause. "What matters is what I know." He let that sit for a full three seconds. "And I know everything." He tilted his head. "You may call me—"
He pointed at himself.
"—the Blackmere Professor."
Silence.
Ruaan stared at him.
'Why,' he thought, with profound exhaustion, 'did they put me next to this psycho?'