She is moving when she talks. That is the first thing Viktor notices.
Delaney does not usually move when she talks. She sits, or she stands in one place, or she leans against something : she is a person who occupies space with intention, who does not pace, who does not fidget. He has lived with her for long enough to know the specific grammar of her body and this is not it.
She is moving.
Kitchen to living room. Living room to window. Window back to the kitchen. Her hands doing something each time ; picking up a mug she doesn't drink from, setting it down, picking up her phone, putting it in her pocket, taking it out again.
Viktor is on the couch. He has his laptop open. He is not looking at the screen.
"The cameras stopped working," she says. Matter of fact. The tone she used when she told him the WiFi password had changed or that she'd be back after seven. "The ones at the apartment. They've been dark for a few days. I don't know if he found them or if it's a signal issue or—" She stops. Starts moving again. "Doesn't matter. I couldn't go back to remove them because I didn't know if I'd have the window and then I didn't and now—" Another stop. "It's fine. It doesn't change anything."
Viktor looks at her.
He has a specific expression he uses when he doesn't know what to do with what he's seeing ; a slight stillness in his face, a careful neutrality, the look of someone who is processing faster than he wants to let on. Delaney used to read it as blankness. She knows better now.
Okay, he types. He has his phone out — he uses it sometimes when talking feels like too much, which is often. He holds it up so she can see the screen.
She glances at it and keeps moving.
✻ ✻ ✻
"The doctor," she says, from the window now. Looking at the street. "He won't be reachable for a while. I made sure of that." She says it the way you say I made sure the door was locked. A precaution. A reasonable thing. "He can't refill anything for at least two weeks. By then—"
She doesn't finish the sentence.
Viktor watches her not finish it.
By then is a place she goes sometimes in her sentences — a destination she approaches and then doesn't land at, the words cutting off just before the thing she is actually saying. He has noticed this more in the last week. The sentences getting shorter. The stops coming faster. The by thens multiplying.
are you okay
She turns from the window and looks at him and for a moment her face does something complicated — not quite a smile, not quite anything he has a name for.
"I'm focused," she says. "There's a difference."
He looks at her.
She holds his gaze for a second and then looks away, which is how he knows she could feel what was in it.
✻ ✻ ✻
She sits down. Finally. On the chair across from the couch, not the one she usually takes — small displacement, the body making small wrong calculations. She puts her phone on her knee. Looks at it. Looks up.
"The article is doing what it needs to do," she says. "The response has been—" Her hand moves. Vague gesture. "People are asking questions. About her. About him. About the — about the pattern. Which is the point. Which was always the point." She picks up the mug again. Doesn't drink. "Some people are defending her which is — that's expected. That's part of it. You put something true in front of people and some of them will — they need to — it takes time for—"
She stops.
Puts the mug down.
Starts again.
"The next part has to be more visible," she says. "More — it has to land differently than the article. The article was documentation. The next part is—" She looks at her phone. Looks at Viktor. "I have a plan."
what plan
"A good one," she says.
He waits.
She doesn't say anything else.
✻ ✻ ✻
This is what Viktor has learned about Delaney, over the months: she does not lie to him. This is not virtue exactly — it is more that she has never felt the need to, that he has been, for most of his life in this penthouse, simply furniture she trusted not to repeat things. She told him about the article before it published. She told him about Marcus. She has told him things she has not told anyone because he is fourteen and non-verbal and she has made a calculation, somewhere, that this means the information is safe.
He has never decided how he feels about that calculation.
He watches her now — the moving, the unfinished sentences, the mug she keeps picking up, the phone that comes in and out of her pocket with no purpose — and he feels something he doesn't have a clean word for. Not quite fear. Not quite worry. Something in the territory between them, something that lives in the chest and makes the air taste different.
She is still Delaney. She is still precise and controlled and certain. But there is something happening underneath it, something that is pushing up through the precision the way water pushes through concrete — slow, patient, and eventually unstoppable.
He has felt it for weeks. It is stronger tonight.
you should sleep
She looks at the screen. Something crosses her face — almost amusement, almost something else.
"Probably," she says.
She doesn't move.
Viktor closes his laptop. He sits there for a moment, not doing anything, just present in the room with her, which is the only thing he knows how to offer and which he offers anyway.
Outside the penthouse the city is doing its nighttime things — lights and traffic and the specific hum of Chicago not caring what happens inside any particular window.
Delaney picks up her phone.
Opens a document.
Her eyes go to the screen and her face goes to the place it goes when she is working — flat, closed, the expression that means she has left the room without leaving the room.
Viktor watches her for a moment longer.
Then he picks up his laptop and goes to his bedroom and closes the door and sits on his bed in the dark and thinks about the cameras that stopped working and the doctor who won't be reachable and the sentence that ended at by then and the plan she called good without saying what it was.
He thinks about the Fighter's apartment. The cabinet above the glasses.
He thinks about Elena's face in a photograph on a phone on a street.
He is fourteen years old and he is very good at noticing things and right now he wishes, quietly and completely, that he was not.
He opens his laptop.
He starts looking for something.
He doesn't know yet what.
✻ ✻ ✻
The static is getting louder. Someone has to listen.
> Chapter complete. Static rising. Continue to next chapter? [Y/N]