Episode 4 — Red Looks Good On Nobody Except Apparently Both Of Us

The storage room door opened and they stepped back out into the hallway together, walking side by side like two people who had just survived something and were pretending very hard that they hadn't.

Caelum had his hands in his pockets. Wren had her bag pulled over one shoulder. They were talking quietly, the easy back and forth of two people who had years of conversation stored between them, and for exactly four minutes Caelum felt something close to normal.

Then a hand closed around his wrist.

Not gently, not a question. Just a hand that appeared from his left side and stopped him mid stride with a grip that was firm and certain and completely unbothered about the fact that it had no right to be there.

"What are you doing here."

Sylvian's voice. Low and even, the same soft tone he used for everything, which somehow made it more unsettling rather than less.

Caelum looked down at the hand on his wrist. He looked up at Sylvian's face. The expression there was unreadable in the specific way that Sylvian's expressions were always unreadable, like a lake with no visible bottom.

"I was walking," Caelum said. "With my friend."

Sylvian's gaze moved to Wren. It stayed there for a moment, quiet and assessing, and Caelum watched him clock it. The designation. The way Sylvian's eyes settled just slightly, the way people's did in this world when they were reading someone's biological information like a language.

"You're friends with an omega," Sylvian said. Not accusatory. More like genuinely filing it away somewhere. "I didn't know that. I thought you hated omegas."

Wren looked at him with the flattest expression Caelum had ever seen on her face in any universe. "I hate omegas," he said pleasantly. "That doesn't mean I have to hate everyone. She's special."

Sylvian looked at her for a moment. Then something moved in his expression, brief and complicated, and he said, "What's so special about her. Is she your girlfriend?"

"No," Wren said immediately, taking one small step back and holding both hands up. "No. Absolutely not. We are best friends. That is the complete and entire nature of our relationship. Best friends."

Sylvian's face did something then. It was subtle. The temperature behind his eyes dropped just a fraction, like a window closing somewhere behind them, and when he looked back at Caelum the pleasant softness had taken on an edge that hadn't been there before.

He turned to Wren and smiled. It was a perfectly polite smile. "I didn't think a troublemaker like Cal would have friends," he said lightly. "Especially not omega ones."

The air around him dropped two degrees when he said it.

Wren felt it. Caelum could see it in the way she straightened almost imperceptibly and glanced between them with the expression of someone doing very rapid mental calculations about where exactly she wanted to be standing in the next thirty seconds.

"I'll see you later," she said to Caelum, already moving. "Okay? Be safe. Bye."

And she was gone, walking away at a speed that was not technically running but was doing its best impression of it.

Caelum watched her go and then turned back to Sylvian. "What did you just do to her."

"I was standing here," Sylvian said, the picture of calm. "What could I have done."

"She looked like she was escaping a natural disaster."

"Omegas are sensitive." He tilted his head. "By the way. You never told me you had a best friend."

"You never asked."

"If you want a best friend," Sylvian said, and something in his voice had shifted again, lighter now but with a current running underneath it, "why can't I be one."

Caelum stared at him. "Because I hate you."

"Hating someone," Sylvian said thoughtfully, like he was working through a logic problem, "is a feeling. Which means you have feelings for me." He paused. "That means your feelings for me are already established. So really we just need to complete them." Another pause. The corner of his mouth curved. "Do you want me to be your boyfriend."

The hallway was not empty. There were students passing on both sides. Caelum was aware of every single one of them and also of the fact that his face was doing something he could not fully control.

"That," he said, "is the most disgusting conclusion I have ever heard anyone reach in my entire life. Who in the world would want you as their boyfriend."

Sylvian reached out and held Caelum's face in both hands with the gentleness of someone handling something breakable and said, "Oh."

His eyes were warm. Impossibly warm for someone who ran this cold.

"So you want me to be your husband instead."

Caelum grabbed both of Sylvian's wrists and removed his hands from his face with the careful deliberateness of a man dismantling something dangerous. "I don't like betas," he said, and his voice came out steadier than he felt. "If I ever make a partner it'll be an omega. Not a beta."

Sylvian said nothing.

He just watched.

Caelum let go of his wrists and turned and walked in the opposite direction with every bit of composure he had left, which was not very much.

Behind him, unhurried and certain as the tide, Sylvian's voice followed him down the hallway.

"We'll see, darling. There's only one person who can be your partner." A beat of silence. "And it's already been decided."

The announcement came in the afternoon, dropped into the school day like a stone into still water. The teachers said it casually, like it was obvious that everyone had known. Tonight was a party. Valentine's Day. Every student was expected to attend with a partner.

By the time the word spread fully, the results were immediate and slightly chaotic.

Sylvian was tall. Taller than most alphas, taller than every omega and beta on campus by a margin that made him slightly terrifying to approach romantically regardless of how soft his face was. The betas who liked him from a distance decided that distance was fine actually. The omegas who had been giving him chocolates all morning recalculated. Most of them redirected.

Toward Caelum.

It started with one omega in the corridor outside the gymnasium. Then two betas near the library. By the late afternoon Caelum had been approached seven times with variations of the same question delivered with varying degrees of nervousness and hope and in one case a handwritten poem that he felt genuinely bad about refusing.

He refused all of them.

He wasn't entirely sure why. He told himself it was because he didn't know these people and also because he was a professor in real life and the whole thing felt deeply inappropriate on a level he couldn't fully articulate. He told himself it had nothing to do with anything else.

Across the courtyard, leaning against a pillar with his bag over one shoulder, Sylvian watched every single rejection with an expression that was perfectly neutral and gave absolutely nothing away except for the very slight relaxation around his eyes each time Caelum said no.

He looked almost pleased.

Caelum didn't notice.

Evening came and the main hall had been transformed into something that the university events committee was clearly very proud of. Soft lighting, long tables pushed to the edges, music that was trying to be romantic and mostly succeeding. Students arrived in pairs, dressed up and slightly self conscious, and the whole room had that particular energy of people trying to be more sophisticated than they actually felt.

Caelum stood in front of the dormitory mirror in a black shirt and dark trousers and looked at himself and thought that at least Caelum Voss had decent taste in clothes. He had started in red. He had looked at the red shirt for approximately four seconds, thought about the fact that Sylvian was probably also going to wear something in that colour range because the universe apparently enjoyed these things, and changed to black immediately.

He went downstairs and found Wren waiting near the entrance in a deep green dress that suited her very well and made her look exactly like the kind of person who had been in this world long enough to figure out what worked.

"You look good," she said.

"Thanks." He offered her his arm because thirty years of his father's village manners apparently survived dimensional travel. "Shall we."

She took it. "Very gentlemanly."

"Don't tell anyone."

They walked into the hall together and Caelum was so busy scanning the room for exits and thinking about what Wren had told him about the story changing that he almost didn't see Sylvian arrive.

Almost.

It was the colour that caught his eye first. Blue...a deep clean blue shirt under a black jacket, the combination put together with the effortless precision of someone who didn't have to think about these things because they simply knew. Sylvian walked in and the room did that thing it always did around him, conversations stuttering slightly, eyes following, though nobody could have said exactly why someone who was supposedly just a quiet beta had that effect.

Caelum looked at him for exactly two seconds and then looked away.

He was wearing black. Sylvian was wearing blue. They were not matching. This was not a thing that was happening.

The music shifted. The dancing started. Caelum stood with Wren near the edge of the room and watched the floor fill up and was just beginning to think that maybe the evening would pass without incident when a hand appeared at his side.

Not reaching for him. Just present. Open.

He looked at it. He looked up.

Sylvian stood there in his blue shirt and his easy expression and his golden hair catching the warm light of the hall and he didn't say anything. He just held out his hand the way people do when they already know the answer and are simply waiting for the formality of it to catch up.

At the same moment Wren found herself gently redirected by Sylvian's previous partner, a beta boy with a polite smile who offered his hand with such genuine charm that she blinked twice and took it before she had finished deciding to.

Caelum looked at the hand in front of him.

He looked at Sylvian's face.

(I could say no,) he thought. (I should say no. I told him I don't like him and I hate him. I have been very clear and consistent on this point.)

His hand moved.

It took Sylvian's.

Sylvian drew him onto the floor with the ease of someone who had choreographed this in his head already, one hand settling at Caelum's waist and the other holding his hand and they were moving before Caelum had fully caught up with what was happening, turning slowly in the warm light with the music curling around them and the rest of the room fading into a pleasant irrelevant blur.

Sylvian looked down at him. The smile on his face was small and real and nothing like the polished expressions he wore the rest of the time.

"So," he said quietly, just loud enough to carry between them and nowhere else. "In the end you still came to me."

Caelum kept his eyes forward. "You manoeuvred this."

"I simply made space for what was going to happen anyway."

"That's the same thing."

"Is it." Sylvian turned them gently and his hand at Caelum's waist was warm and steady and infuriatingly certain. "You changed your shirt."

"What about it."

"You were going to wear red."

Caelum said nothing.

Sylvian smiled. "I'm wearing blue."

"I noticed."

"We still ended up matching."

"We are not matching."

"Black and blue," Sylvian said, tilting his head just slightly, looking at him with those eyes that saw everything and reacted to nothing. "We match, darling."

The music kept playing. The room kept turning. And Caelum, who was a professor of twenty eight years old, danced with the male lead of a story he had never asked to be inside, in a body that wasn't his, in a world that kept rearranging itself around him.

And for reasons he was absolutely not going to examine, he didn't let go.

.

.

End of Episode 4 💙🖤

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