Kiss or Kill | A Slimeknight AU

01-Avery

I didn't sleep the night before my first day.

That wasn't new. I hadn't slept properly in weeks, not since the chamber, not since the floor of that facility, not since I'd held something warm that turned cold in my hands and learned what permanent actually felt like. Sleep had become a negotiation I usually lost. I'd lie down, close my eyes, and my brain would take me back there with the specific cruelty of a mind that had decided forgetting wasn't something I'd earned yet.

So I lay on the narrow bunk they'd assigned me in the Foundation's intake quarters and stared at the ceiling and waited for morning to decide to arrive.

It did. Eventually. Everything did.

The orientation briefing was at 0500. Fluorescent lights and grey walls and eleven other recruits sitting in identical chairs, all of us wearing the same dark uniform for the first time, all of us carrying whatever we'd brought through the door with us and not talking about it. That was the thing I noticed first, nobody asked anybody else why they were here. There was an unspoken agreement that questions like that cost more than any of us wanted to spend before 6 AM.

I sat in the second row and kept my hands flat on my thighs and looked at the front of the room.

A woman ran the briefing. Senior enforcer, three years in, the kind of face that had learned to stay neutral under conditions I probably hadn't encountered yet. She talked for forty minutes without notes. Protocol. Chain of command. Classification levels. What we were allowed to know at our current clearance, which wasn't much. What we were never allowed to discuss outside sanctioned channels, which was everything.

"You will encounter things in this work," she said, toward the end, "that you don't have language for. That's expected. That's the nature of the job. Your role isn't to understand. Your role is to contain, prevent, and when necessary, remove. Understanding is above your clearance level and above your pay grade. Do the job. Go home. Don't talk about it. That's it."

Someone in the back row raised their hand. "What if we can't go home?"

A pause. "Then someone else does the job," she said simply. And moved on.

I wrote nothing down. I didn't need to. I'd been paying attention to the Foundation long enough before I walked through their door that most of what she said was confirmation rather than new information. I'd spent three weeks after finding that card doing nothing but learning everything I could about the organization from the outside, which wasn't much, because they were exceptionally good at not being known about. But enough. Enough to understand the shape of what I was walking into.

Enough to know that the Shadowy Figure existed within this structure somewhere. That he had authority here. That the chain of command eventually led to him.

That was what I needed to know.

The thing I hadn't told anyone, not that there was anyone left to tell, was that joining hadn't been a difficult decision. That was the part that sat in me uncomfortably, the part I turned over sometimes in the small hours when sleep wasn't happening. I'd stood in my dorm room with a card in my shaking hand and thought about Derek, and the grief had been enormous and real and had taken up every available space inside me.

But underneath it, something else.

Something colder. More purposeful. Something that had looked at the grief and the rage and the complete absence of any good option and said: 'this way.'

I wasn't naive about what that meant. I knew what I was doing. I was walking into the organization that had been responsible for, that had been present when, I stopped the sentence before it finished, the way I'd learned to. The way you learned to handle things that were too large to look at directly. You looked slightly to the side of them. You acknowledged their shape without meeting them head-on.