Felicity's Beast World Apocalypse-Chapter 146: Leaf Team POV

Leaf Team POV

Tonight the place felt wrong.

Not weak. Not shaken. Wrong in the specific way a predator den felt wrong when one of the animals inside it had found the scent of something it could not forget.

Lucan was gone.

Not dead, not lost, not even far, if distance were measured in roads and concrete instead of the stranger territory the evening had opened between the two teams. He had simply left with Snow Team as if the decision had never belonged to anyone else. No request, no report, one moment he had been standing with Leaf Team in the wake of the duels, black panther stillness wrapped around all that acceleration and violence, and the next he had crossed the line and stayed on the other side of it.

That was what sat in the room now.

Dimitri stood at the long steel table in the center of the warehouse and rested both hands on its edge. He was not looking at any of the maps spread there. He was looking through them, past them, through the night and the city and the walls and the little apartment where Snow Team had taken their impossible fox back to bed.

The overhead lights bleached his hair nearly white. Albino snow leopard. Pale lashes. pale skin. eyes like diluted blood and old ice. There were men in the world who looked inhuman because they had become monstrous. Dimitri looked inhuman because he had become exact. Nothing in him wasted itself if it could be sharpened instead. Even his stillness had structure. It pressed on a room and taught it how to behave.

Silence Domain was not active, it did not need to be. No one in Leaf Team mistook quiet for weakness.

Exile did not sit.

He had tried standing still for perhaps twenty seconds after they came in, then abandoned the effort like it had personally offended him. Now he slithered the length of the open floor between the shutter door and the weapons racks, The anaconda in him made even agitation look sinuous. Long body, too smooth in the shoulders, dark hair hanging loose after the fight, eyes sharp with the sort of frustration that bordered on embarrassment because he knew exactly how obvious he was being and could not stop anyway.

Richard sat on a reinforced crate to the left of the table with his forearms braced on his thighs and his hands loosely clasped. Orca. Huge without needing theatrics. He had the sort of weight to him that made furniture look temporary. He watched Exile pace with the detached patience of a man observing weather. Richard rarely hurried his thoughts into speech. He let them gather mass first.

Dawn stood near the far pillar, arms folded, one boot hooked lightly against the base of the steel support, bull shark. Dark eyed, calm in the particular way territorial predators were calm not relaxed, simply convinced that anything entering range could be dealt with when it got there. His power seemed to leave a residue in every room he occupied. Territorial saturation was not visible, but it changed how space felt. More crowded. More claimed. More expensive to trespass in.

Thane was at the back near the old loading bay office, where shadow cut the light into strips across his face and shoulders. The golden eagle in him always made him look slightly too awake even when exhausted, as if some part of him remained perched above the room watching from a cleaner altitude than the rest of them could reach. That distance was lying tonight. He looked wrong, not weak, not injured, wrong in the way seers looked when the future had become too loud to sort into useful lines.

Lucan should have been leaning against the wall beside the stairs by now, listening without seeming to, taking up his own slice of the room with that panther focus of his. Instead there was an absence there that every instinct in the warehouse kept tripping over.

Exile finally stopped moving long enough to say, "We’re just waiting."

No one answered.

He looked at Dimitri’s back. "That’s the plan."

Dimitri did not turn. "That is the current action."

"That’s not the same thing."

"No."

Exile made a short sound through his nose, halfway between a laugh and a threat. "Good, glad we’re all aware."

Richard rolled one shoulder. "You’ve been aware very loudly for the last fifteen minutes."

Exile pointed at him without looking away from Dimitri. "You’re irritating."

"And yet correct."

Dawn’s mouth twitched, barely Thane did not move.

Exile dragged both hands over his face and let them fall. "Lucan left with them."

"Yes," Dimitri said.

"He left with her."

Dimitri turned then, slow as a blade lifted off velvet.

"Yes." Exile stared, "and we are doing nothing."

"We are not doing nothing, we are choosing not to move yet."

"Same difference."

"It is not." That settled over the room with the usual force Dimitri’s answers carried.

Exile was strong enough. He was also too agitated to appreciate the distinction.

"Victor’s smart," he said. "If Snow Team thinks we’re going to sit here politely while one of ours stays behind with them."

Dimitri cut across him. "Victor is smart."

The repetition made Exile stop.

Dimitri’s pale gaze held his without flickering. "That is precisely why we wait."

Richard’s eyes shifted up at that. Dawn unfolded one arm. Thane finally pushed himself off the wall by a fraction.

Dimitri continued, "Victor knows what this looks like from our side, he knows Lucan’s choice creates pressure, he knows anything done too quickly from either direction becomes a declaration before either team has decided what it wants to declare. So no, we do not run to Snow Team’s door because instinct is loud, we wait, because Victor is smart. And because if Snow Team wants structure, they will come to us first."

Richard’s mouth moved first, the beginning of a smile that didn’t quite become one. "So we are following Snow Team then."

Exile snapped toward him, dawn’s eyes narrowed with interest. Thane looked as if he had heard the line five minutes ago in some other version of the room and was now waiting to see what came after.

Dimitri did not answer immediately, that was answer enough to all of them.

Richard leaned back a little on the crate, studying him. "Not with our feet fine, but you’re already tracking the line."

Dimitri looked at the map now, finally, fingertips brushing the edge of the city grid. "I am tracking all lines."

"That one more than the rest."

A long silence followed, and in it the entire team felt the same thing from different angles, that the center of the board had shifted the moment Felicity had appeared, and none of them were men stupid enough to pretend otherwise.

Dimitri’s voice, when it came, was level. "We need her buffs" that landed harder than if he had shouted.

Exile stopped moving entirely.

Richard’s expression changed by a degree. Dawn straightened off the pillar. Even Thane’s attention sharpened from whatever distant pressure the future had been exerting on him.

Dimitri kept his gaze on the map "We need her," he said. "She makes me see over the mountain of level ninety five."

There were things Leaf Team understood without speech. Dimitri did not sentimentalize power. He did not chase fascination because it was novel, he did not let want blur function for him to state a need at all was unusual, for him to state it in those terms plainly, without dressing it in strategy jargon or command language was something else.

Exile looked almost offended by the honesty of it. "You feel it too."

Dimitri’s eyes flicked up to him. "Obviously."

That should not have been satisfying, it was.

Thane let out a slow breath and looked down at his hands, his fingers were trembling faintly, not with fear, but from the small ruinous strain of too many future episodes without enough rest.

Richard said, "It’s not just her power."

It would have been easier if it were.

If Felicity were only useful, only rare, only politically valuable, the problem would be ordinary in the way apocalypse problems could still be ordinary. A team would assess, negotiate, threaten, or leave. Leaf Team knew how to do all of those things. What she was doing to the space around those options was more irritating. She stepped into a room and men’s instincts rose to meet her before their thoughts could form a proper queue. She was not merely female, though that alone was enough to rip through the tidy self-control most evolved men liked to imagine they possessed. She was female in a world that had starved two teams of that axis entirely. She was strange enough to get past Dimitri’s nullification, radiant enough to feel like a pressure point in reality, and powerful enough that Snow Team had reoriented around her with shocking speed.

Exile laughed once, low and ugly. "Mine."

Richard ever the shit stirrer poked the snake where it hurt. "That’s what your head keeps saying."

Exile looked at him. "Yes."

"And you’re coping beautifully."

"Go crush yourself."

Dawn’s voice slid into the room before Richard could respond. "She probably won’t accept you all at once, i mean as husbands like what Lucan is now probably."

Every eye turned to him. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

Dawn had not moved much, but something in his posture had changed. Less detached now. more interested, territorial power made him possessive of spaces long before he became possessive of anything inside them, and Felicity represented not just an individual but an entire shift in what kinds of territory a team could become. He continued, voice flat enough to be almost conversational. "If this becomes anything, it’ll probably be team before individuals. You as a structure first, not as much as Lucan."

The last line snapped through Exile like a wire pulled too tight. "What the fuck does that mean."

Dawn looked at him as if the answer were self evident. "It means Lucan got there first and committed in front of everyone."

"That doesn’t mean more" Exile hissed.

"It means visible investment, it means proximity. It means he crossed the line while the rest of us came home to stand in a warehouse and think about it."

Exile took a step forward, pressure gathered in the air before he consciously used it, small dense pockets of force making dust twitch on the concrete "You think I don’t know that."

"I think you know it too well."

Exile’s jaw flexed. "Watch yourself."

Dawn unfolded fully from the pillar, not aggressive yet, but no longer lazy either. "Or what."