There was something sitting cold in Phei’s chest, and it had been sitting there long enough that he’d stopped being surprised by it and started being quietly, persistently annoyed.

Each time he turned his awareness toward it and he pressed his attention inward reaching to it the thought simply ceased:

His mind would then slide somewhere entirely else with no fade or warning, just Phei standing in one thought and then standing in another with no memory of the crossing.

He’d tried to describe this to Eira earlier, which had been its own particular exercise in futility, because Eira’s response had been a silence so genuine and unsettled it confirmed the worst: whatever fog had been packed around that cold thing was dense enough to run even an ancient Elemental Fairy’s awareness straight off its surface.

She’d started to explain the sensation back to him— it’s like reaching for a specific star by looking directly at—

And then she had simply stopped and she too arrived somewhere else before she finished the sentence because she couldn’t remember beginning it.

"You did it again," he’d said.

"I did what again?" Eira had replied — her indignation arriving fully-formed and entirely fabricated; she had absolutely no memory of the act she was being accused of and was choosing umbrage over admission.

Her voice carried that particular sharp, melodic edge that made irritation sound almost musical.

Phei hadn’t answered...

...There was no answer that wouldn’t loop them straight back into the fog, and he’d already lapped that particular circuit twice:

It was impenetrable, patient and purposeful.

Phei shock his head and turned his attention back to the magnificent disaster unfolding across his bed.

Maddie won with the unbridled magnificence engineered by the universe specifically to triumph in small domestic competitions and rub it in with maximum theatrical commitment.

Her arms went skyward in one fluid, victorious stretch, back arching just enough to pull the thin fabric of her top tight across the full, generous curve of her breasts. Her grin split her face into something radiant and unrestrained, the kind of smile that belonged in illuminated manuscripts under the heading victorious; bright, shameless, and entirely too attractive the morning

"That’s three," she announced, to nobody and everybody. "Three. In a row. Against both of you. Simultaneously."

"The game is broken," Sierra said flatly.

Sierra’s jaw tightened in that specific way it always did when she was constructing a twelve-point argument for why the game was structurally bankrupt. The tension in her throat drew attention to the elegant line of her neck, and the faint flush of competitive frustration only made the sharp, intelligent beauty of her face more striking.

"The game is perfect. You’re broken."

"I want a rematch."

"You said that after the second one."

Delilah had lost so comprehensively and so cheerfully she’d transcended the concept of defeat entirely and was simply laughing, helpless and unguarded, delighted to be in the room at all.

It lit her face from somewhere behind her chest, warmth blooming across her cheeks and making her eyes sparkle with unguarded joy.

She kept looking at him between laughs like she couldn’t quite believe her own luck, and every time her gaze found his it carried that soft, open hunger that made something low and warm tighten in his chest.

Valentina and Patricia occupied their respective edges of the bed with studied composure. Valentina’s mouth kept betraying her — doing that almost-curve, that barely-there dimple she used when Maddie delighted her and she’d rather die than announce it.

The subtle shift of her lips only highlighted the refined, elegant lines of her face.

Patricia had her knees drawn up, coffee cradled in both hands, and every few seconds her eyes found his across the gorgeous wreckage of breakfast and morning and his women’s collective laughter.

In those beats lived something too full and too honest for either of them to say aloud — a quiet, steady heat that made the space between them feel smaller than it was.

He was proud of them.

The warmer, messier pride that came from watching people he loved be entirely, unguardedly themselves in a room he’d built to hold them.

Maddie and Sierra had been one organism since the age of five, their rivalry less a distance between them than the specific mechanism of their fusion — two opposing forces held together by the precise tension of contrast, completing each other’s circuit exactly because they weren’t the same.

Delilah had found her footing in their orbit naturally, already laughing at the right moments, already knowing when to be quiet, already belonging.

Those three required nothing from him to bond; they were already bonded.

Valentina and Patricia were the more interesting study.

Nothing obviously in common. Valentina was architecture — deliberate, precise, her warmth something she extended with full conscious intention, never spilled. Patricia was slower at the edges, still excavating which parts of herself were hers versus debris from everything that had preceded him.

Different velocities, textures and different ways of filling a room. And yet — there they sat, shoulder almost touching shoulder; their differences were less a barrier than a bridge.

It was always the positive and negative that connected.

Never two same sides.

Valentina’s relationship with the younger girls remained the Chapter of this story that amused him most privately.

She’d constructed an elaborate internal architecture to explain how her affection for them was purely structural, purely circumstantial and then proceeded to give it freely, endlessly.

Sierra bathed in it like she’d found the big sister she hadn’t known was missing, and what Sierra found Maddie inherited by the immutable law of their closeness. Even Delilah, even Victoria — Valentina’s affection was oceanic once the floodgates had been breached and touched all the girls in Phei’s circle even going as far as Yuki and Amber.

Valentina had, naturally, attempted to extend this sisterhood to Sienna.

Phei had watched from across the room as Sienna’s eyes went cold and violet; just a flicker and the half-second of her coldness surfacing — before Sienna informed Valentina, with serene finality, that she had no desire in this madness.

Maddie had laughed until her stomach physically hurt while Valentina had retreated with the dignity of a general who’d lost a single skirmish and immediately began planning an entirely different campaign.

She’d come to Phei afterward with her pouty expression — not wounded, just recalibrating — and he’d given her his attention and his hands and reminded her that being rejected by Sienna was frankly an achievement most people didn’t survive not even himself, which had made her laugh and solved the rest.

A win for Val, when properly examined.

Patricia built slower; her relationship with the younger girls occupied a warm, carefully navigated middle ground — warmer than strangers, quieter than sisters, carrying the particular weight of a woman who was still their teacher in the other world.

That didn’t dissolve because she’d shared a cock with them.

She knew it and they knew it. Nobody pushed.

But Melissa held her.

Melissa’s warmth operated at a frequency that bypassed social architecture entirely — she didn’t dismantle awkwardness, she simply radiated something that made awkwardness feel unnecessary — and Patricia had walked into that warmth and stayed, she confided in Melissa.

She found in Melissa the steady, nurturing solidity that made the slower building feel less urgent because there was already somewhere safe to land while she built. And slowly — between Melissa’s steadiness and the girls’ patient acceptance and the accumulated weight of shared mornings like this one — Patricia was finding her footing among them and right now they were really close with Valentina too.

She caught him looking at her.

"Stop," she said quietly, over the rim of her coffee.

"I like to unravel you, love, don’t you?"

She gestured vaguely at his face. "It’s making me feel like you can see things I haven’t said yet, its breach of my privacy."

"Can’t I?"

Patricia held his gaze for a beat that stretched long and warm and slightly devastating. The directness in her eyes, the faint colour rising along her cheekbones, the way her lips parted just slightly before she looked away — it all combined into something quietly, devastatingly attractive.

Then she looked away first, the corner of her mouth doing something she clearly hadn’t given it permission to do.

He smiled. Said nothing.

Soon they’d all be inseparable, all his women.

He could feel it the way he felt a storm before it arrived — that low atmospheric certainty that something large and irreversible was already in motion and had been for some time.

"Maybe then," Eira murmured into the back of his awareness like she had absolutely examined the logical endpoint of this trajectory and was choosing her words with exquisite strategic blamelessness, "you’ll finally get your orgy. I will be part of it!"

He kept his face completely, immaculately neutral.

"You passed out last time I looked at you sideways," he thought back at her. "Let’s walk before we run."

Eira’s silence arrived in a shade of indignant that had no rebuttal and knew it.