Chapter Text
Alvar Soren Vacker woke up in a Neverseen hideout that smelled faintly of smoke, blood, and lavender.
The first thing he registered was the warmth.
Not the polished, clinical warmth of an elvin hearthstone. Not the kind curated in opulent foyers with charm-lit fireplaces and centuries-old ancestral paintings.
No, this was different.
Wilder. Untamed. It clung to his skin, seeping into his bones like a memory he hadn’t meant to make.
The second thing was weight. Heavy. Real.
Something—someone—pressed against his back. Solid. Warm. An arm slung lazily across his waist like possession was a foregone conclusion.
Alvar opened his eyes. Only to regret doing so immediately.
The followers of Dionysus were said to wake up in forests, wrapped in wine-soaked bliss, unsure what they had danced into. Alvar awoke in something similar—only the forest was a warehouse and the wine was someone else’s breath on his neck.
He was wrapped in what could only be described as a cuddle pile—a heap of limbs and extremely poor life choices.
Brant’s scarred chest was flush against his spine, the pyrokinetic’s breath stirring the fine hair at the back of his neck. One of Ruy’s unnervingly long arms was slung over both of them, his slender fingers twitching slightly, even in sleep.
Across the room, Gethen sat with an unsettling grace in an armchair, flipping through a dossier of mission reports like the scene before him wasn’t objectively horrifying. He didn’t look up. He didn’t need to.
Alvar’s brain short-circuited.
He tried to move.
Brant grumbled.
Ruy curled in closer.
Gethen turned the page.
Ancients.
How had this happened?
How had he—Alvar Soren Vacker, son of Alden, crown prince of calculated perfection—ended up in a cuddle puddle with a pyromaniac, a chaos goblin, and a sadistic sociopath?
Half a decade ago.
He had been everything the matchmaking team drooled over.
Top Foxfire graduate.
Ridiculously handsome. Vanisher elite.
Straight A’s. Straight face. Straight.
Straight.
He’d rehearsed that word for years, hadn’t he?
He’d worn it like a shield.
And on paper, he’d been flawless. The heir of House Vacker. Council material. The boy who could disappear and reappear in a heartbeat, charm the room, flatter the noble daughters, lead a waltz, crush a mission. He’d been able to do it with his eyes closed since age 12.
What girl wouldn't want him?
What boy would?
That part had always gone unspoken.
He still remembered his first matchmaking gala invitation, crumpled where he’d first crushed it in his palm. Cream paper. Gold seal. A list of names that meant nothing to him—smiling, simpering, polished girls who smelled like gardenia and practiced laughter.
His mother had smiled as she adjusted his cuffs, so fond and proud.
“You’ll be such a hit with the girls. Like your father was.”
And Alvar had smiled back.
Because it was easier.
Because the alternative was telling her his eyes wandered—not toward the glittering girls at the gala, but to the boys adjusting their cuffs, laughing too loudly, brushing too close—it twisted something deep in his gut. He told himself it was envy. Admiration. Not attraction. Never that. Because if it was, then what did that make him?
Not a proper Vacker.
Not a son his father could be proud of. Just a glitch in a bloodline meant for perfection.
On one of his earliest missions to a human world bookstore, he’d read a book on lesser-known Greek mythology. Cultural enrichment, he’d claimed— learning how Pentheus had disguised himself in skirts to spy on Dionysus’ rituals.
Alvar didn’t need a disguise. His entire life was one—tailored suits, stiff smiles, the role of a perfect son performed to perfection.
And if he was torn apart in the end, so be it.
His eyes had drifted to his satchel. Still slightly open.
Inside: a human-world magazine, illicitly smuggled from his last mission.
On the cover, two men. Hands laced together. Laughing against a sunset. Love Wins, the headline declared.
Their smiles weren’t rehearsed. Their affection wasn’t hidden.
His chest had ached so badly he’d had to look away.
A knock had shattered the silence.
“Final exams are over, Prince Charming.”
Biana leaned against the doorframe, sharp in her leathers, smirking like she hadn’t just destroyed someone’s locker.
“Stop preening for the girls and help me plot revenge. Stina hexed my entire bookshelf. Now every time I touch anything it recites bad poetry.”
Alvar flicked the magazine into light.
"Not now," he said.
She narrowed her eyes. "You're doing the thing again."
"What thing?"
"The I-have-it-all-and-hate-myself-for-it brooding."
Alvar forced a laugh. "If I was brooding, you'd know." He tossed her a velvet box. A set of gold encrusted rubies. Another piece of contraband from the human world.
"Happy almost-birthday. Don't lose the earrings." Biana caught it nimbly, suspicion warring with delight. "You're avoiding—"
The chime of his imparter cut her off.
"Everglen rooftop. Ten minutes. Come alone."
His father's voice. Clipped. Cold.
Biana stiffened. “That’s not mission tone. That’s his you-fucked-up tone.”
Alvar's stomach plummeted.
He already knew.
Three nights earlier, he'd broken into Alden’s private study.
Not for dirt. Not for drama.
Just for proof.
Ledgers. Mission logs. The truth.
Every lie. Every order. Every sacrifice he’d made in the name of his family’s ambition.
What he found was more painful than betrayal.
Irrelevance.
Alden was phasing him out.
He’d been labeled: “inefficient.” “No longer fit .” “Low yield.” A placeholder until Fitz—golden boy, telepathic prodigy, his father’s favourite—was ready to take over.
The replacement had already been chosen.
Not because he had failed.
But because he had existed too long.
His father was turned away from him, silhouetted against the sunset. The sky bled orange and gold across Everglen’s rooftop, but Alden Vacker stood as if it meant nothing—his hands clasped behind his back, posture rigid, eyes fixed on the horizon as though it might offer him answers that eluded even him.
Alvar stepped into the silence like a trespasser in his own home.
The air felt too still. Not stormy. Not tense. Just... off. Cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.
"You went through my files."
The words were quiet, but sharp enough to cut bone. Alden didn’t turn. Didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t ask.
Because he already knew.
Alvar didn’t deny it. What was the point?
“You’re planning to send Fitzroy on the next mission.”
"He fits the mission better."
Just like that.
Dismissed.
No pretense. No cushioning. No explanation. Just better.
Alvar swallowed, jaw tightening. “I’m still a valuable asset.”
That made Alden turn.
His father’s face was carved from marble—handsome, composed, unreadable. The kind of expression used at press conferences and funerals. Cool. Polished. Impersonal.
“You’re getting too old,” he said, with the faintest sigh, as if he regretted the inconvenience of it. “And the past few missions haven’t... yielded what we hoped. The years haven’t brought us closer to uncovering the Black Swan’s secrets. Perhaps it’s time we brought in someone with fresh eyes.”
Fresh eyes.
Younger hands.
A shinier version of him.
His brother.
His pulse roared in his ears. There were a dozen things he wanted to say. I’ve trained for this longer. I’ve risked more. I’ve bled in the human world for the cause you claimed was everything. I was loyal. I was careful. I was yours.
I am not disposable.
I am still useful.
But the words never left his mouth. They turned bitter in his throat and burned there like acid.
Alden turned back to the skyline, voice clipped again, like this was just business.
“It’s not about you, Alvar. It’s about what’s best for the mission.”
The mission. Always the mission.
It was the excuse used for every missed birthday, every cold meal, every time Alden looked at Fitz with pride and looked at Alvar like a checklist.
That damn mission had always come first.
The silence between them stretched. Alvar stared at the back of his father's head like he might force his love through sheer force of will. Just to see him react for once. With anger, with care. With approval. Nothing came.
He felt the rage build—not fiery, not explosive. Worse. Slow. Simmering. Controlled. Like a dam holding back a flood that would drown them both.
He clenched his jaw. Swallowed it whole.
Swallowed everything.
Perhaps this was what it meant to be born under a god who promised madness—cast out by your own father, made into a sacrificial offering for a cause holier than your blood.
When he spoke, his voice was steady, but it scraped on the way out.
“Understood, Father.”
And just like that, he felt something inside him corrode.
The words tasted wrong in his mouth, like swallowing rust. Like saying yes to erasure. Like giving up. But he said them. Because that was what Vackers did.
Even when it killed them.
Alden didn’t move.
Alvar hated him for it. Not for the first, nor the last time.
“Just—” he started, and faltered.
He never faltered.
Vackers did not stutter.
Alden’s head tilted slightly—brows pinching, just a hint, like maybe, for a second, he was going to turn. Going to ask what was really wrong. Going to see him.
He didn’t.
Alvar straightened, brushing invisible lint off his perfectly pressed cuffs.
“Allow me one last mission. Something with... higher stakes.”
A test. A final chance. A desperate ploy for purpose. If he was going to be cast aside, he was going to go down proving he still had teeth.
Alden hesitated. Just for a breath.
Then nodded, like he was assigning paperwork.
“There’s an extremist faction that’s been operating in the human world. They call themselves the Neverseen. Little is known about their structure, but they’re dangerous. Cunning. Highly elusive. Their operations interfere with both Council interests and our agent’s counter-movements. If you want a challenge... that’s your mission.”
No praise. No “Be careful.” Not even a “Good luck.”
Just cold approval.
Alvar bowed his head just enough to acknowledge the order. Then he turned, cloak flaring in the wind as he walked away—before his father could see the look in his eyes.
Not grief.
Not sadness.
Resentment. Pure and sharp.
And something else, rising up from the cracks inside him.
Resolve.
He would prove himself.
Even if it killed him.
Even if it meant burning down everything he’d been taught to protect.
He had prepared for weeks of stakeout.
Gear meticulously assembled. A rotation of human-world disguises. Emergency kits, surveillance gadgets, disposable imparters. Rations—a stack of reheatable pancakes vacuum-packed and labelled with ‘ALVARS- DO NOT TOUCH’. (He might have been spiralling, but he would have his pancakes hell be damned.)
He’d mentally braced himself for boredom.
For long nights hunched in shadows. For the agonising drip of solitude as he tracked whispers of Neverseen activity across the smog and concrete of human cities.
Instead—
He found a suspiciously cloaked figure within an hour of arrival.
Which was… disappointing. Honestly.
The figure—tall, broad-shouldered, and fully swaddled in the dramatic black fabric of someone trying very hard to be mysterious—was currently standing on a suburban sidewalk.
Committing arson.
With his bare hands.
Alvar blinked.
The flames were a deep, molten crimson, glowing like the embers of a collapsing star. They danced across the man's calloused palms, graceful and terrifying. A nearby mailbox—a dull green box—had been partially reduced into molten slag.
The smell of burning plastic and singed grass hung heavy in the air.
Alvar crouched low behind a trash bin, heart thudding, mesmerised.
This was no chemical trick. No clever matchstick or human tech.
This was pyrokinesis.
Illegal. Extinct. Banned by the Council over a thousand years ago.
And yet—here it was. Living. Flickering.
Unapologetically real.
He should report it. He should vanish. He should call for backup.
Instead, Alvar stayed.
Watched. Let the flames dance across his retinas. Let the danger crawl under his skin like an itch he didn’t want to scratch.
Like an itch that always had been there.
“Fucking Gethen,” the figure snarled, ripping down the hood in a single irritated motion.
It was a man. That much was clear now.
His voice was ragged, like ragged smoke in a throat unused to softness. And his face—
Gods.
Once, maybe, it had been stunning. A sharp-jawed, olive-skinned beauty. But now it bore the aftermath of fire: twisted scars spidered across one cheek, burns laced along his jaw and temple. One eye was slightly more lidded than the other, giving him a permanent scowl.
Still handsome, Alvar thought. In a way that felt like bleeding.
Ruinous. Radiant. Ravaged.
He had expected to find a rebel. Instead, he found a god of fire—mad, beautiful, scarred. Dionysus had torn minds with wine. This one did it with heat. And Alvar thought about the burn.
A name surfaced from the pit of whispered Council briefings and scandalous headlines:
Brant Alger.
Fiancé of the late Jolie Ruewen.
Lover boy turned public tragedy. Rumour claimed he’d gone mad. That he’d lost her to flames he’d sparked himself—though no one dared confirm it aloud.
Alvar’s pulse spiked.
So this was insanity up close.
The man continued to curse. Loudly.
Creatively.
“Stupid mind-manipulating bastard,” Brant snarled in Elvish. Then in a low dialect of Trollish. Then something that might’ve been Goblin-Gnomish hybrid.
He muttered what sounded like a death threat involving Gethen’s cousin-aunt twice removed, a can of motor oil, and a heat-sensing cactus.
Alvar's breath hitched.
Big mistake.
The flames surged.
Brant spun, expression feral. The fire in his hands flared blue—the kind of heat that melted steel and evaporated blood.
Alvar didn’t hesitate.
He vanished with a flicker of light.
Reappeared behind the pyrokinetic, only just out of range of the flare.
“I have to say,” he drawled, before he could stop himself, “Jolie had terrible taste.”
The world snapped in a red blur.
The punch came fast.
A split image of scarred knuckles, and then pain.
Alvar’s head jerked sideways. His jaw cracked. Blood bloomed in his mouth like crushed berries.
And still—he laughed.
A harsh, breathless sound.
Because of course this was how it would go.
Because pain was grounding, in a way adoration never was.
Brant’s eyes widened.
“You’re one of them,” he growled. “A Council mutt.”
Alvar wiped the blood from his lip, slow and deliberate, flashing a grin that tasted like cracked teeth and rebellion.
“Not anymore.”
He met Brant’s gaze. Steady.
“Show me what you were really trying to burn.”
Brant hesitated.
The flames in his hand flickered.
The silence between them thickened—not tense, but charged. Like the moment between lightning and thunder. Alvar’s breathing slowed. His own heartbeat felt foreign. He didn’t know why he’d said that. Why he hadn’t just vanished again. Or begged. Or run.
But he knew, in some submerged, honey-slick part of his brain, that this was a turning point.
Brant looked at him for a long moment.
Then, abruptly, he flared his palm again—and the mailbox exploded in a burst of sparks and molten crisps.
Alvar flinched.
“Happy?” Brant muttered, already turning. “Come on, then.”
Alvar received the full Neverseen treatment for his on-the-spot hiring.
He was tied up—less like a prisoner and more like a particularly well-packaged offering—in a dusty, long-abandoned warehouse. Light leaped here blindly by an arsonist who had, by all less-than-credible accounts, incinerated his lover alive.
The ropes chafed his wrists, and the dust made his nose itch. His dignity had been left somewhere in the alleyway behind the mailbox, now reduced to cinders.
“What the fuck did you want me to do, Gethen?” Brant snapped, pacing the room with the jittery energy of a lit fuse. He gestured broadly—half at Alvar, half at the mess his mere existence had caused. “He’s seen my face. And he’s Council. Worst of all, he’s a goddamn Vacker.”
He spat the name like it was a slur.
Alvar, ever the scandalized noble, tilted his head thoughtfully. “That’s a bit rude.”
Brant narrowed his eyes.
But Alvar wasn’t particularly bothered. Not by the accusation. Not even by the ropes.
His attention was preoccupied—unfortunately—with the way Brant’s scorched forearms flexed as he gestured, the sharp twitch of his jaw, the flicker of heat that danced along his fingertips like a threat he didn’t quite mean to make.
He might’ve had a concussion. Or a type.
Probably both.
“You should’ve neutralised him,” came another voice—low, rich, deliberate.
Alvar turned toward the speaker. The other cloaked figure stood still as marble, arms crossed neatly, presence so quiet it demanded attention. His voice was calm, but it didn’t soothe. It warned.
Dry. Precise. Dissecting.
“If not, then you shouldn’t have shown your face.”
Alvar assumed this was Gethen. The infamous Telepath. The master manipulator with a streak for sadism. With a voice like a redwood violin in a storm-wracked forest. Deep. Measured. Sharp in places where a voice shouldn’t be sharp.
It was, Alvar hated to admit, also kind of hot.
“Whoops,” Brant muttered, dragging a hand down his face.
Then came a third voice—light and theatrical, far too gleeful for a potential execution scenario.
“Well, it’d be a shame to eliminate such a pretty boy,” the tallest of the trio drawled. His cloak draped messily over his frame, more a suggestion than a disguise.
“Especially one as cute as him.”
Alvar blinked.
Then—against all reason, against the entire concept of self-preservation—he blushed— cheeks warming at the indirect praise.
“Oh, he’s blushing! Look at him! That’s adorable! We have to keep him, Gethen. Can we keep him?” The tall one leaned in, stage-whispering like they weren’t in a literal terrorist den. “He can be my emotional support Vanisher.”
Gethen sighed, the sound long-suffering and ancient. “Ruy.”
“What? I’m being pragmatic. He’s clearly high-functioning. And hot. That’s at least two out of three qualifications.”
Alvar stared at the ceiling.
He was tied up. Being flirted with by an actual elven criminal. And weirdly, it was the most seen he’d felt in years.
Then Brant cut in, gruffly but not quite hostile.
“To be fair, he’s good. At Vanishing, I mean. I only caught him because he let me.”
“So…” Gethen said slowly, “a useful asset.”
The words echoed.
A useful asset.
How many years had Alvar chased that phrase from his father’s lips? How many medals, how many fabricated smiles, how many sleepless nights and calculated mission reports?
And it had never been enough.
Not for Alden.
But here?
Here, his presence was inconvenient. Dangerous. Not entirely welcome. But still—useful.
He straightened slightly in his ropes, adjusting his posture as best he could. Then came the smile—the Vacker smile. The practiced one. Razor-polished, council-approved. He wore it like armor.
“I believe I could contribute quite a lot,” Alvar said. “Assuming you stop threatening to kill me.”
He kept his tone light, even as something behind his ribs twisted.
He didn’t just want their approval. He needed it. The way some people needed oxygen or praise or forgiveness. He hated that part of himself—loathed it with the kind of self-disgust that curled into the corners of his smile.
Gethen stepped forward, quiet and unreadable.
For a heartbeat, the air seemed to stall.
Then—carefully, like a verdict being handed down—Gethen reached up and pulled back his hood.
Pale blond hair. Ice-cut features. Eyes the exact shade of a frostbitten lake. The kind of gaze that stripped lies from your bones without blinking.
He held Alvar’s eyes.
“Welcome to the Neverseen.”
It wasn’t warm. It wasn’t kind.
But it was recognition.
It was acceptance.
Even if it was a deadly acknowledgement wrapped in shadows and tied up with violence.
The third figure whooped like someone had won the jackpot in a game show.
“New buddy!” he cried, flinging off his own hood to reveal tanned skin, tangled brown hair, and the kind of wide, almost-frantic, grin that had definitely gotten him banned from multiple institutions.
He winked. “I call dibs on teaching him how to snap a man’s arm three ways to Sunday!”
Even Brant, glowering in a corner like a flame doused in vinegar, gave Alvar a slight incline of his head. Not quite respect. But acknowledgment.
Alvar recalled the myths.
The maenads had danced for less. And in that moment, Alvar wasn’t a Vacker, or a son, or a spy. He was just a boy in the forest, hearing the drumbeat of something older than obedience.
Alvar let the Vacker smile fall—just a little.
The edges frayed. The polish chipped. Underneath, something darker shimmered. Something cracked.
Maybe this was the madness the Greeks had warned of. The kind that felt like freedom. The kind you begged for, even as it tore you limb from limb.
This—whatever this was—wasn’t what he’d expected.
But it was real.
And it was his.
Now, lying between the ash-scarred skin of Brant and the chaos-drenched limbs of Ruy, Alvar could only marvel at how far he’d fallen.
Or maybe—how far he’d leapt.
He glanced across the room.
Gethen didn’t look up from his papers.
He didn’t need to.
This, Alvar realised, was what it meant to be chosen.
Not for legacy. Not for bloodline.
But for usefulness. For potential.
For chaos.
He should feel regret. Shame. Self-loathing. At what he’d become. At what he’d failed to become
Instead, what bloomed in his chest was something quieter.
Something Dionysian.
Wild. Hungry. Tasting of ash and sweet wine
and the end of everything he used to be.
And it whispered—
You belong here.