The answer to his question wasn’t words at all. It was a hand, fast and precise, closing around Ren’s shoulder and spinning him straight into the wall behind him hard enough to knock the air out of his lungs a second time, both wrists pinned above his head before he’d even fully registered what was happening, the man’s body crowding in close enough that Ren had to tip his head back just to keep eye contact with those unsettling pale eyes.
"Who am I," the man repeated, low, almost thoughtful, like Ren had asked something genuinely interesting instead of the obvious question any sane person would ask after getting slammed into a wall by a stranger. A slow smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth, and he leaned in without waiting for permission, close enough that Ren felt breath against his jaw. "You smell good."
"Excuse me, what," Ren said, or tried to, the words coming out strangled because the man had tilted his chin up with two fingers, deliberate and unhurried, and dipped his head to drag his nose along the line of Ren’s throat like he was cataloguing a scent he found personally offensive that he still couldn’t stop sampling.
’Okay, what the actual hell,’ Ren thought, pulse hammering somewhere in his ears, torn between the very reasonable urge to summon a blade of energy directly into this man’s ribs and the equally strong awareness that whatever had just happened to that diagnostic array upstairs meant he had zero idea how to control his own ability well enough to risk trying that in close quarters. ’Who is this, why is he sniffing me like I’m a suspicious package, and why does some old, buried part of Rafayal’s memory feel like it recognizes him.’
He didn’t get the chance to work out an answer, because that was the exact moment he heard familiar footsteps rounding the corner, followed immediately by Lyra’s voice, delighted and sharp. "Well, isn’t this interesting," she said, and Ren’s stomach dropped, because of course, of course they’d walk in on this exact scene, of course the universe had decided this particular hallway needed an audience.
Yegard’s footsteps stopped dead a few feet away. Ren didn’t even need to look to feel the sudden, heavy quality of the silence that followed, but he looked anyway, catching Yegard’s face for just a fraction of a second before that carved-still composure slammed back down over whatever had briefly cracked through it, and something about that fraction of a second, that tiny sliver of an actual reaction, sparked an idea in Ren’s head fast enough to override every ounce of confusion still swimming through him.
’Fine,’ Ren thought, feeling something reckless and petty settle into place behind his ribs. ’You want to parade Lyra around kissing your face in front of me all day like it means nothing? Let’s see how you like watching this instead.’
Instead of shoving the stranger off him, Instead of demanding answers, Ren reached up and curled a hand loosely around the front of the man’s uniform, tilting his head with a slow, deliberate smile that felt utterly foreign on Rafayal’s face and completely necessary in the moment. "Baby," he said, pitching his voice soft and warm in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with how he actually felt, "why are we doing this out here in the middle of a hallway where anyone could walk by? Shouldn’t we go somewhere a little more private?"
The stranger’s pale eyes flickered with something unreadable, surprise maybe, or interest, or both, but he didn’t correct the performance, didn’t push back or expose the lie, just let his smirk widen slightly like he’d decided to play along purely out of curiosity about where this was going. Ren took that as permission enough, slipped free of the pin against the wall now that the man’s grip had loosened in his own confusion, and grabbed his hand, tugging him forward down the corridor and straight past Yegard and Lyra without slowing down.
He didn’t dare look at Yegard’s face as he passed. He didn’t need to, not really, because he felt it anyway, felt the exact moment the air around them changed, some kind of pressure shifting in the hallway that had nothing to do with any Sentinel ability and everything to do with the specific, controlled fury of a man watching something he apparently hadn’t expected to actually bother him. Ren kept walking, dragging the stranger along by the hand, refusing to give either of them the satisfaction of seeing how much his own heart was pounding.
They made it around the next corner and out of sight before the stranger finally pulled his hand free, and Ren barely had a second to feel relieved before he found himself spun around again, back hitting a different wall this time, wrists caught and pinned above his head in one smooth motion like the man had done this exact move a hundred times before.
"What was that for," the man said, and the amusement in his voice had sharpened into something more pointed now, more dangerous, pale eyes narrowing slightly as he studied Ren’s face like he was looking for the seams in whatever performance he’d just watched. "You used me. Deliberately. To make a point to someone else." He tilted his head, and the smirk came back, slower this time, colder. "Do you think I’m going to just let that go?"
Ren’s mouth went dry. ’Right,’ he thought, cursing himself internally with real feeling now that the reckless satisfaction of the hallway had worn off completely. ’Of course, using a total stranger with genuinely terrifying vibes as a prop in my own petty jealousy scheme was maybe not my best thought-out plan. Fantastic work, Ren. Truly excellent decision-making under pressure. This is going to get me killed faster than any monster on that moon ever could have.’
"Look, I panicked, okay," Ren said, trying for reasonable and mostly landing somewhere closer to breathless. "It wasn’t personal, I just needed it to look like something in that specific moment, and you happened to be standing there, and I’m sorry if that was inconvenient for you, but in my defense you did start this whole thing by pinning me to a wall and smelling my neck like some kind of weirdo, so really, if we’re handing out blame here—"
"I don’t do things by accident," the man said, cutting him off, voice dropping lower, and something about the flatness of it made every one of Ren’s half-formed jokes die in his throat at once. "I don’t touch people I’m not interested in. I definitely don’t sniff people I’m not interested in. So before you decide I’m some convenient prop you can borrow whenever it suits you, you might want to figure out exactly what you just volunteered yourself into."
Ren’s pulse spiked hard, and it took him a second to realize the fear crawling up his spine wasn’t really about the pin against the wall or the vague threat buried in that last sentence, it was about the tilt of the man’s head as he said it, the way his collar shifted just slightly with the movement, revealing a fraction of something dark inked against the back of his neck, a shape Ren only caught for half a second before the collar settled back into place and hid it again.
But half a second was enough. Some deep, buried scrap of Rafayal’s memory surfaced all at once, unbidden, slotting a name and a face and an entire subplot into place with the force of a physical blow, and Ren felt every drop of blood drain straight out of his face as the pieces clicked together at last. The missing character. The hidden plot thread he hadn’t been able to pin down no matter how hard he tried. The second male lead, sitting right here in front of him with Ren’s own wrists still caught in his grip, close enough to feel every word land.
’No way,’ Ren thought, staring up into those pale, unsettling eyes with something close to genuine horror finally cracking through the panic. ’No way. Of all the people I could’ve grabbed as a fake prop in a hallway, of all the strangers in this entire outpost, I had to pick him. I am so done for. I am so, so done for.’