If Roxie had a nickel for every time she'd been shot in the head by some low-life thug, she'd be rich as Solomon. Not that she had to worry about that now, it would appear- but still she could have given it to her parents.
Not that the rounds ever did much. Maybe rattled her skull, maybe chipped a molar if they got lucky, but mostly it just made her mad. Titania had literally taken down a guy who could melt an overpass with internally generated pyrotechnics. And they still thought the bullets would work.
Tonight's poor foolish soul had gone for a hollow point. Rookie mistake. At least full metal jackets caused her to stagger from the impact... Sometimes.
The bullet struck with a sound like a dinner plate shattering, spiderwebbing her visor before punching through. It hit her forehead—sharp, hot—then ricocheted into the linoleum. Annoying. Hollow points wouldn't do much to her, but she'd give .45 ACP this: it made a mess. The man who fired it was already halfway into a scream by the time she moved. She closed the distance in a blur, before his finger could twitch off a second shot.
Her boot caught him in the chest and she gave the poor fellow maybe 1% of her full might... Ok maybe half a percent. But still, boot met sternum with the full force of a thirty-mile-an-hour SUV, minus the airbags. He hit the far wall hard enough to leave a dent in the fake marble paneling. There was a sound like a busted accordion. Then silence.
She turned, slowly, toward the man's accomplices. The Queen let her presence settle on the bank like grim damnation.
The other two dropped their weapons immediately and lay flat on the ground. Begging for mercy. Mercy Titania was ever-willing to grant.
She preferred it that way. Bruises she could take. Bullets, fine. But what really got to her—the thing that haunted her in the long hours after—was the way people looked at her when she had to break someone. Like they didn't expect her to bleed in that moment, too.
She loomed there for a moment—seven feet of borrowed armor and homemade dread. The helmet was a beat-up police riot model, visor blackout-tinted and scuffed like a storm window in a hurricane. Her body armor was old SWAT issue, Velcro still bearing the ghost-print of a cop's surname beneath her callsign. Boots? Army surplus. None of it matched. None of it mattered.
She was a titan because she had to be.
Because this city didn't send saints anymore. It sent women like her.
Big. Brutal. Built for bad nights.
The whispers began, as they always did. Titania, monarch of street brawls and newest city Cape and the Fae Queen of St. Pete, stood victorious again. Untouched and unbroken.
Titania called the all clear. "Titania to hostage response, situation clear. All hostiles down, ready for emergency response."
The cops flooded in a moment later.
Guns drawn, voices sharp, bodycams blinking red. The air still smelled of cordite and scorched linoleum. A Slurpee had been trampled in the chaos—bright blue sugar pooling across the tile like a wound.
Titania didn't flinch.
She turned her back on the wreckage, on the moaning thug dented into the wall, and walked with slow, deliberate steps across the floor—armor hissing, boots thudding, every motion radiating weight and control.
She didn't look at the cops.
She looked for the broken.
There—a teller crouched behind her kiosk, hands still over her ears.
There—a father shielding his daughter with his coat.
There—a mother trembling, curled tight around a sobbing child by the exit.
Titania went to them first.
She moved like a stormfront receding. One kneel. One breath. A pause to become small.
The mother flinched when Titania approached, instinctive fear in her eyes, but Titania knelt low—slowly, deliberately—until she was eye-level with the toddler tucked in the woman's arms.
"It's okay now," she said, her voice softened through the helmet's speakers—smoothed out into something calm, something warm. "You kept him safe. You did everything right."
The mother's lip trembled. Her arms tightened around her son. The little boy's cries had turned into sharp hiccups, eyes wide as moons staring up at the faceless, battered visor.
Titania unsealed one glove. The armor gave a small hiss. Bare fingers, calloused and strangely pale, brushed gently against the child's shoulder.
"Can I help you stand?" she asked the mother. "We'll walk together. Just to the medics. I'll carry him if your arms are tired."
The woman nodded once—almost imperceptibly—then nodded again, harder, as the adrenaline began to crash. Titania took the boy with one arm, cradling him with the careful grace of someone who'd done this before. The other hand steadied the mother's elbow, guiding her to her feet like she was porcelain.
Together, they walked through the aftermath.
The cops parted without a word.
She was too large, too strange, too gentle and terrifying all at once. Seven feet of unmatched force wrapped in a patchwork of borrowed armor, cradling a child like the world might shatter if she let go.
She delivered them to the waiting paramedics. Tucked the boy back into his mother's arms. Touched her shoulder—just once—and nodded.
Then she turned and walked back into the wreckage.
People always caught these moments.
Phones slipped from pockets. Store security footage got leaked. Someone, somewhere, always clipped her silhouette out of the smoke and posted it online. A still-frame of salvation in surplus armor. They called her a hero. A goddess. A menace. A symbol.
But she didn't care about any of that.
Their opinions were dust in the wind.
She did it because she had to. Because someone had to hold the world together for others when it all came crashing down.
It never occurred to her that maybe she should be one of the ones held.
Titania just kept walking.
Through sirens and static. Through whispers and wonder. Through a city that chewed up the soft and spat them out hard.
The myth always grew louder when she was silent.
But the moment was never for them.
It was for the living.
Roxie took to the air, she didn't feel like paperwork or media attention today. She was tired. She needed some down time.
It had been six weeks since Roxie Shapiro moved into the condo by the sea.
Six weeks of barely making it to class on time, of sleep-deprived mornings and late-night ramen slurped on a balcony that overlooked the water like something out of a dream she wasn't sure she'd earned.
The world hadn't slowed down. If anything, it was speeding up—lectures, labs, group projects with people who didn't do the work, and citywide headlines that never stopped screaming.
But amid the noise, a few things had gone strangely… right.
She had a bed that didn't creak. A roof that didn't leak. A roommate who didn't ask questions when she stumbled in looking like she'd lost a fight with gravity. Dianna just raised an eyebrow, cracked a joke, and slid over the bag of frozen peas without comment.
Roxie didn't know what to make of that.
Dianna was chaos—loud, weird, sharp around the edges. But she never pushed. Never pried. Just existed in the space beside Roxie like a fact of nature. Unbothered by the gaps in her story. Steady in a way Roxie hadn't realized she needed until it was there.
Some nights Roxie would find her already asleep on the couch, arm flopped over her eyes, a documentary still playing to no one. Other nights they'd argue over takeout orders or which version of Pride and Prejudice was objectively superior.
It wasn't peace. Not really.
But it was consistent.
A pattern forming beneath the mess of her days, like a heartbeat under noise.
She still didn't know how long it would last. Didn't know how much of herself she could afford to show. But Dianna didn't seem to want more than Roxie could give.
And for now?
That was enough.
But the lies were starting to stack.
Little ones, mostly. The kinds that slipped easily past the tongue if you didn't look anyone in the eye while you said them.
"I'm just tired."
"Rough night studying."
"Group project stress."
All technically true. None of them the truth.
And the worst part was—Dianna didn't push. She just accepted it with a shrug and a crooked smirk, like she was used to people lying to her. Like she didn't expect much more.
That hurt more than it should have.
Roxie hated it—hated the way the words sat in her chest like stones, heavy and grinding. Hated how her hands shook in the dark sometimes, not from fear, but from the weight of the things she couldn't say.
Because if Dianna ever really knew…
If she saw what Roxie did on those nights when she said she was "out with friends" or "pulling an all-nighter"—if she saw the bruises that didn't come from falling, the calluses that weren't from the gym, the helmet hidden at the back of the closet like a sin—
What then?
What if Dianna thought she was a monster?
What if she wasn't wrong?
The world Roxie walked in—blood and fire and screams in alleys—it wasn't the kind you brought someone into. Not someone bright and warm and loud, who sang badly to the radio and left wet footprints across the kitchen floor because she forgot her towel again.
Not someone who could get hurt.
Roxie could handle broken ribs. She could handle the way the armor didn't quite cover her sides, the nights she coughed up ash or collapsed in the shower from exhaustion.
But she couldn't—couldn't—handle losing Dianna.
Or worse: watching that vibrant, defiant fire in her eyes die out after seeing what Roxie really was.
So she kept her secrets.
And told herself it was protection.
Told herself it was an honor to bear the burden alone...
Even if both of those things were a lie.
----
It had been six weeks since Roxie fell into her world—headfirst, wide-eyed, and apologizing with every inch of her enormous frame—and somehow, impossibly, Dianna had never felt more grounded.
Her beachfront condo still looked like a hurricane lived in it, her fridge still oscillated between feast (when Roxie went shopping) and famine (when Dianna was supposed to go but inevitably forgot for three days). Her career path still resembled a maze designed by a sadistic god… but Roxie had become a kind of gravity. Heavy, steady, warm.
And that would've been enough.
It should have been enough.
But something wasn't adding up.
Roxie would share almost anything about herself. Seemed hungry to do so, like drunk-at-4 AM-at-a-Waffle-House kind of hungry. But she didn't talk about her past, beyond a certain point. She would gush fondly to Dianna about her classes. But would completely shut down if Dianna asked where she really went on those nights she stumbled home with bruises she waved off as "library accidents." And it's not like Roxie wasn't a total disaster on 2 feet. Socks and hardwood seemed to have an alliance against the woman, to the point that Roxie either wore shoes or bare feet whenever she was home because if she didn't the giantess ended up crashing to the floor in a tangle of limbs and black hair.
So Dianna wanted to believe her, she did, but… falling down the stairs didn't leave someone with symmetrical defensive wounds. Campus cafeterias didn't reek of smoke and adrenaline. You didn't get serious impact trauma from "tripping on a binder."
Dianna wasn't an idiot.
And worse, she was falling in love.
Which made it so much harder.
She didn't want the secret. She didn't want to uncover anything. She just wanted to be let in. Just a little. Just enough to understand the shadow behind Roxie's smile, the silence in her chest when she thought Dianna wasn't listening.
It was a hunger—not to possess her, but to help her. To catch her, if she ever fell.
And maybe that was the cruelest part of all: Dianna had all the time in the world to think about it.
She didn't need to do anything, not really. Bernice—eccentric, brilliant, long-gone Bernice—had left her more than a condo by the sea. Stocks, residuals, patents that still coughed up dividends. If Dianna wanted, she could've lived the rest of her life curled up on that ridiculous Italian leather couch with ocean views and espresso martinis, and never lifted a finger again.
But she wasn't wired for idleness. She wanted to do something. To help. To build. To learn. To fight for her future instead of inheriting it.
And maybe that was what was eating her.
Not the secrets.
But the distance.
Because Dianna had never met someone who carried so much weight with such quiet grace. Who hurt like Roxie hurt. And all she wanted—all she ached for—was to be the one person Roxie didn't have to carry it alone for.
She just… didn't know how to ask.
Not without scaring her away.
It wasn't just the mystery of her that got under Dianna's skin, either—it was the order.
Roxie hadn't changed Dianna's world exactly, but she'd ironed it out around the edges. Straightened it. Tidied the chaos like it was a room that just needed a better layout. And not in the nagging, bossy sort of way either—she just did it. Quietly. Consistently. Like it was second nature.
The sink no longer held the ghost of dishes past. The couch had throw pillows that stayed in place. Her bathroom cabinet had—God help her—a labeled medicine drawer. And the fridge was no longer a cold graveyard for sauce packets and melted ice cream, but a rotating selection of fresh vegetables, hummus, and a strangely robust collection of organic yogurt... As long as Rox did that weeks shopping.
Roxie lived by a schedule. Not rigid, exactly, but reverent. Laundry was a Sunday ritual, after she got back from Mass of course. Dinner, cooked by hand unless she was out late. Evenings, quiet and soft, a mug of tea and a book of theology or poetry open in her lap, back straight, slippers on. She moved through life like she was in service to something greater—some unseen ideal that pulled her along by the spine.
And that part drove Dianna crazy. In both the best and worst ways.
Roxie was... almost like a nun. Modest to the point of suspicious. Gentle to a fault. Meek—unless Dianna needled her just right, poked that patience until it sparked, until that calm cracked and some flash of raw Roxie came clawing up through the surface.
It infuriated Dianna. And delighted her. God, it delighted her.
Because underneath all that grace, all that humility, was a woman made of something fierce and unbending. She could feel it every time Roxie bit her tongue, every time she straightened Dianna's textbooks or tidied a mess without comment. Not controlling. Not scolding.
Just… different.
A kind of beautiful discipline that made Dianna feel like a walking emergency in comparison.
She both wanted to unravel it and preserve it untouched. To yank Roxie into bed and make her forget the rules. To wrap her in a blanket and swear she'd never have to carry anything alone again.
But Roxie stayed behind that wall of quiet, steady order.
And Dianna—mess that she was—couldn't quite bring herself to break it.
Not yet.
So, Dianna did what she did best: she poked.
Not out of boredom. Not out of rebellion. But because it made Roxie look at her.
Really look.
If she'd wanted to be considerate, she could have kept the chaos quarantined in her room. Shut the door, piled her mess in corners like a polite roommate with a mild hoarding problem. Roxie never would have said a word. Would've quietly endured the entropy with that martyr-like calm of hers.
But no. That wasn't the point.
This was a loving challenge.
A bra, draped like a victory flag off the stereo. A pair of pink satin panties looped over the doorknob like the world's most chaotic coat hanger. Half-finished anatomy flashcards scattered like confetti across the dining table. A lone bottle of Moscato—deliberately uncorked, barely touched—lounging beside a takeout container that had been cleaned out hours ago.
A mess, sure. But a crafted one. Intentional. Targeted.
Because it always got a response.
Not yelling, not lectures. Just that subtle wave of scrunched-up eyebrows and pinched-lipped exasperation. That little furrow that made Dianna's chest warm with something absurd and joyful. It was like flicking a pebble at a statue and watching it flinch.
Roxie didn't react to much. Not loudly, not easily. She was calm, modest, deliberate—almost monk-like in the way she moved through life. A quiet current of order and grace and restraint.
But Dianna's chaos? That got through. That made Roxie sigh and mutter in Farsi under her breath and glance at her with those deep, steady eyes that said, You're exhausting, but you're mine to be exhausted by.
It made Dianna feel seen. And not in the way people looked at her on the street, or in clubs, or in classrooms. Not for being hot or loud or funny or weird.
Seen for exactly who she was. And still kept around.
So, when the lock clicked and Roxie stepped in, shoulders squared with the weight of the day, Dianna didn't move from her sprawl across the couch.
She didn't hide the evidence.
She just waited—tracking every soft, methodical footstep, every pause as Roxie noticed another bit of mischief. The sigh. The muttered Farsi. The slight frown she pretended not to care about.
And then Dianna grinned.
That sharp, sexy little grin that meant trouble. Her tongue pressed to the back of her teeth, her eyes gleaming like a cat that'd shoved a glass off the counter just to hear it break.
This was her battle plan. Her impish little scheme.
Not a grand gesture. Not a confession. Just clutter, chaos, and tiny provocations designed to pull Roxie out of her careful shell. To make her engage. To get her involved in Dianna—bit by bit, reaction by reaction.
The game was afoot.
And Dianna Annabeth Rodgers had every intention of winning. And with tonight's surprise for her friend... It might be her best opening move yet.
---
Roxie paused in the doorway, half a breath from groaning aloud.
The place looked like a tornado had kissed a college dorm—again.
An full tequila bottle balanced precariously on the edge of the counter. Textbooks were splayed open across the coffee table like they'd given up the will to study. A bra—red, lacy, intentional—draped from the stereo knob like a war trophy. Dianna's sock drawer had migrated into the living room again, and somehow, there were panties on the doorknob. Lace. Floral. Mocking.
She closed her eyes and whispered something in Farsi that would have made her mother swat her with a spoon.
Then, slowly, she looked up.
And saw the thong.
It was dangling from one blade of the ceiling fan like some kind of impious prayer flag, swaying gently in the air-conditioned breeze. The pattern was leopard print.
Roxie felt her soul leave her body for a moment.
No. She would not. Would not think about what that implied. About how it got there. About the logistics of the throw. About what kind of hips held it in place.
She bit down hard on the sigh trying to claw its way out of her.
She was bone tired. Not just her limbs—her soul. She had taken a bullet to the head, carried a crying toddler, and shouldered the weight of half a million strangers on her back, all in a suit stitched together by government oversight and stubbornness.
And here was Dianna. Barefoot. Wearing shorts that did nothing to hide the cocky tilt of her hip. (Do not think about the thong) Grinning like the little infuriating she-devil she was. Proud. Triumphant.
That grin.
Roxie's mouth twitched.
She refused to let it become a smile.
The worst part was— Dianna knew. She knew exactly what she was doing, exactly how to rile her, how to peel back the layers of control with clutter and chaos and just enough playful sin to make Roxie question her vow to endure it all.
And it drove Roxie absolutely stark raving mad.
Which, of course, was definitely the point.
Roxie leaned her shoulder against the wall and rubbed the bridge of her nose, letting the silence drag long enough to become something pointed.
Then, finally, she looked at her. Really looked.
The little chaos goblin was splayed out across the couch, one leg draped over the back like she had no spine, tank top askew in a way that suggested either deliberate provocation or complete disregard for decency. Knowing Dianna, it was both.
Roxie exhaled slowly through her nose and bent down, beginning to gather the trail of textbooks and empty cans with slow, deliberate movements. A ritual by now. One she performed every few days with the same half-hearted stoicism.
Halfway through folding a discarded hoodie, she said it. Like clockwork.
"…I'm tired today. Can I get a little help?"
There was a beat. A stretch of silence just long enough to become a scene.
Dianna rolled her head to the side lazily, meeting Roxie's gaze with a slow, wicked smile.
"I don't know…" she drawled, stretching like a cat, arms above her head, shirt riding up. "You always say that. And yet the place is always so clean. Makes a girl wonder if you're just trying to lure me into domestic servitude."
Roxie's eyes narrowed. "You literally put your underwear on the ceiling fan."
"Allegedly," Dianna purred, rising with a kind of theatrical reluctance. She padded barefoot across the room, hair tousled and eyes sharp with mischief. "You can't prove anything. Could've been gravity. Or gremlins."
She passed Roxie with a wink, plucked the tequila bottle off the counter, and dropped it into the recycling with an obnoxiously loud clang.
She always said no. She always helped anyway. They had built something in the repetition—Roxie starting without complaint, Dianna teasing until she relented, the clatter of cooperation that followed. Like clockwork. Like home.
---
Dianna grinned to herself as she dropped another bottle into the bin, the sharp clink echoing her internal scoreboard.
Score one for Dianna Rodgers.
It wasn't about the mess. Not really. The lace and liquor and deliberately misplaced textbooks were just the lure. She wasn't trying to torment Roxie, not exactly — it was more like baiting a lioness with tangled yarn. Poke the order, see what stirred underneath.
And like clockwork, Roxie had risen to the challenge. Grumbling, fussing, but cleaning. Moving. Talking, just a little.
That was the trick of it — the taller girl never spoke plainly when she was still. Stillness was silence. But catch her in motion, in ritual, in rhythm? Then maybe, maybe, Dianna could sneak past the guards.
So, leaning lazily against the counter like she had all the time in the world, Dianna offered up her first volley.
"So… library stairs, huh?" she said, tilting her head. "They carpeted with gravel now, or were you just practicing your dramatic death drop?"
Roxie didn't answer. She was rinsing a mug with the intensity of a woman scrubbing away sin.
Dianna's eyes narrowed, tracking the splotch just above Roxie's left brow. It had deepened even since she had come in— not just purple now, but veined with sickly yellow and a livid ring of dark red around the edges.
It wasn't swelling like a blunt force hit. It bloomed wrong. Like the haloed bruising around a gunshot wound, the kind you only saw when skin was burned from impact and pressure. Not enough trauma to shatter bone, but more than enough to scare the hell out of her.
That wasn't a fall. That wasn't an elbow or a table edge or even a fight. That was something else.
Dianna stepped in and plucked the sponge out of Roxie's hand.
"Alright, Saint Shapiro," she said softly. "That's enough."
Roxie stiffened. Dianna didn't flinch.
"Sit your wide ass on the couch before I put you there myself," she added, jabbing a thumb toward the living room. "I need to see that head of yours."
Roxie hesitated — not out of pride, but fear. Dianna saw it, just for a second, flickering behind those tired eyes.
"I'm serious," Dianna said, her voice losing the bite. "That bruise looks like something exploded near your face, and if you faint from a slow bleed, I swear to God I'm calling an ambulance and lying to the cops about how you got it. Then we'll both be in trouble." OK, that was a bit cruel. But she needed to say it, to get the woman to obey. Somehow she knew Roxie wouldn't tolerate Dianna even coming close to legal problems.
Still no answer. But Roxie didn't protest when Dianna herded her, gentle but relentless, toward the couch.
This wasn't the first time Dianna had felt it — that tug in her gut when Roxie flinched from kindness. But it was the first time she let herself admit the truth:
Something was wrong.
And Dianna Rodgers didn't sit still for mysteries.