Chapter 49:
– Shuri –
Shuri Himejima was a blur.
Not metaphorically. She was literally a blur—a streak of raven-black hair and toned legs cutting through the Malibu mansion at speeds that would have made most professional athletes weep into their protein shakes.
One moment she was in the master bedroom, folding Tony's obscenely expensive suits into garment bags with the practiced precision of a woman who had once packed mission kits under enemy fire. The next she was in the kitchen, wrapping dishes in bubble wrap so fast the plastic crinkled in one continuous brrrrrrt that echoed through the open floor plan. Then she was in the living room, taping a box shut, labeling it with a marker, and sliding it across the hardwood floor to join the growing wall of cardboard stacked neatly beside the entrance—all before the cap of the marker had finished bouncing on the counter where she'd tossed it.
Being a trained kunoichi had its perks. Professional movers charged by the hour. Shuri charged by the second, and she was free.
She paused at the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Pacific Ocean, a roll of packing tape dangling from her index finger as she allowed herself a rare moment of stillness. The California sun hung low and golden over the water, painting the whitecaps in shades of amber and rose. A warm breeze drifted through the cracked sliding door, carrying the salt-tinged scent of the coast that had become so familiar over the past several months.
She was going to miss this.
Not the mansion itself—though it was absurdly beautiful, the kind of home she never could have imagined living in during her years as ANBU Raven, sleeping in trees and safe houses and occasionally in ditches when missions went sideways. What she would miss was the feeling of it. The lazy mornings on the balcony with Tony, watching the sun climb over the ocean while he rambled about whatever mad invention had kept him up until four in the morning. The sound of the waves at night through the open bedroom window, a sound so different from the cicadas and rustling leaves of the forests she'd spent a decade navigating.
The warmth. KAMI, the warmth!
After years of running through rain-soaked countries and snow-dusted mountain passes in nothing but an ANBU uniform and a porcelain mask, the relentless California sunshine had felt like a reward she hadn't earned.
But her children were in New York.
Blake and Akeno were three thousand miles away, starting their first day at the Stark Institute of Technology, and Shuri was here surrounded by cardboard boxes and packing peanuts instead of being there to see it. That thought alone was enough to make the gorgeous ocean view feel slightly less important.
She resumed packing.
A framed photograph of Tony's parents went into bubble wrap with careful, deliberate hands. She might have been moving at speeds that made the air ripple, but she wasn't careless. Each item was handled with the attentiveness of someone who understood that objects carried weight beyond their physical mass. Tony pretended he didn't care about sentimental things. Shuri knew better. She'd caught him staring at this particular photograph more than once when he thought nobody was watching, his thumb tracing the edge of the frame, his expression unguarded in a way he never allowed it to be in public.
She tucked the wrapped frame into a box lined with foam padding, making sure it was snug, and moved on.
"You know, most people hire other people to do this," Tony Stark's voice drifted in from the hallway, followed by the sound of his sneakers squeaking against the polished floor. "It's called outsourcing. I'm told it's very popular among people who have more money than God."
Shuri glanced over her shoulder, smiling as Tony rounded the corner into the living room. He was dressed down today—jeans, an old Black Sabbath t-shirt that had seen better decades, and a pair of sunglasses pushed up onto his forehead like he'd forgotten they were there. Behind him, Pepper Potts followed with a tablet in one hand and a stylus in the other, her strawberry-blonde hair pulled back in a functional ponytail and her expression fixed in the particular brand of focused intensity that meant she was mentally juggling at least six logistical crises simultaneously.
"I don't trust other people to pack your things properly, Tony," Shuri replied, resuming her work at a more human-appropriate speed now that she had an audience. She sealed another box with a clean strip of tape. "The last moving company you hired dropped a crate of prototype parts into the ocean."
"That was one time."
"It was three times," Pepper corrected without looking up from her tablet. She swiped through something, tapped twice, and kept walking. "Three separate incidents across two different moves. The second time, the driver took a wrong turn and ended up in Tijuana with six hundred pounds of classified Stark Industries equipment in the back of an unmarked van."
Tony opened his mouth. Closed it. Tilted his head. "Okay, that one was kind of funny though."
"It was not funny, Tony. The Department of Defense called me seventeen times in one afternoon."
Shuri laughed softly, shaking her head as she stacked another sealed box onto the growing pile. The banter between Tony and Pepper was one of her favorite things to witness everyday. Shuri found it endearing. She also found it useful, because when those two were busy sniping at each other, they weren't paying attention to her, which meant she could pack at full kunoichi speed without anyone asking uncomfortable questions about why the living room was empty forty-five seconds after she'd started.
Pepper continued her report as the three of them settled into the open kitchen area, Tony hopping onto a counter stool while Shuri leaned against the island and Pepper remained standing, because Pepper always remained standing when she was in logistics mode, as if sitting down would somehow reduce her operational efficiency.
"The most important assets and facilities have already been relocated," Pepper said, scrolling through her tablet with brisk, efficient swipes. "R&D, the primary server infrastructure, the advanced fabrication labs—all transferred to the New York campus over the past two weeks. The penthouse suite at the top of the building you wanted in Midtown is almost complete. Contractors say another week, maybe ten days, before it's fully livable."
Tony leaned back on his stool, lacing his fingers behind his head with the satisfied grin of a man whose money could rearrange geography. "Make sure all the rooms are soundproofed." He paused, then added with a grin that bordered on indecent, "Or don't. I honestly don't mind."
Heat crept up Shuri's neck and flooded into her cheeks before she could stop it. She turned her face away, suddenly very interested in the label she was writing on a box that definitely didn't require this much focus. The marker squeaked against the cardboard as she pressed a little too hard, her mind flashing involuntarily to certain evenings in this very mansion where soundproofing would have been—
Ara ara, she was not thinking about that right now.
She was not.
...She had been a little loud last Tuesday. But that was entirely Tony's fault for doing that thing with his—
"Shuri's blushing," Tony announced to the room, because of course he noticed.
"I am not blushing," Shuri said, still not looking at either of them. Her cheeks were on fire.
"You are absolutely blushing. Pepper, tell her she's blushing."
Pepper's stylus stopped moving. She looked up from her tablet and stared at Tony with the weary expression of a woman who had spent the better part of a decade managing the public relations fallout of this man's inability to keep his thoughts inside his head. Then her gaze slid to Shuri's conspicuously averted face, and something complicated flickered behind her eyes.
Shuri saw the flicker. And because Shuri had spent a decade reading micro-expressions through an ANBU mask in life-or-death situations, she caught the faint dusting of pink that crept across the bridge of Pepper's nose at the same moment.
She couldn't help herself.
"Ara ara, Pepper-san," Shuri said, her voice dropping into that teasing register that she knew drove people crazy, "you're blushing too. Could it be that you're also thinking about soundproofing? Perhaps remembering a certain someone's last visit to your bedroom? Blake-kun can be quite... thorough, can't he?"
"You're right about that, babe. Pepper's not exactly quiet either when Blake gives her a good fu—"
"Tony!" Pepper cut him off, her professional composure cracking like thin ice under a hammer. The blush that raced across her fair skin was immediate and spectacular, climbing from her neck to her cheeks to the very roots of her hair in under two seconds. She clutched her tablet against her chest like a shield. "That is... I am not... You can't just..." Pepper's tablet nearly slipped out of her fingers. "You—both of you—" Pepper pointed the stylus at Tony, then at Shuri, then back at Tony, as if unable to decide which of them deserved the accusation more. "You are both perverts. Absolute, irredeemable, shameless perverts."
Tony raised his hand. "Guilty."
Shuri covered her mouth with her fingers, but the laugh escaped anyway. Pepper huffed and returned to her tablet with aggressive concentration, her blush still burning brightly despite her best efforts to project professional indifference.
The laughter faded into comfortable silence. Shuri finished labeling her box—Kitchen: Fragile, Handle with Care—and set the marker down. The smile on her face softened, shifting from teasing amusement to something quieter. Something wistful.
"Tony," she said, her voice gentler now. "How are Blake and Akeno doing at orientation? I wish I could have been there for their first day..." The last part came out smaller than she intended. She pressed her lips together, blinking once, and turned back toward the window so neither of them could see the moisture that had gathered unexpectedly at the corners of her eyes.
It was silly. She knew it was silly. They were adults—young adults, but adults. They didn't need their mother hovering over them on their first day of college like nervous children being dropped off at the academy. But she had already missed so much. Ten years of Blake's life, gone. Ten years of Akeno's life, gone. Stolen by a betrayal that still made her blood simmer with fury whenever she let herself dwell on it. Every milestone she'd been absent for—every birthday, every scraped knee, every awkward teenage moment, every first crush—was a wound that hadn't fully healed and probably never would.
She wasn't going to miss anything else. Not if she could help it.
Which was precisely why she'd been so enthusiastic about moving to New York. Three thousand miles was three thousand miles too many.
Tony must have read the shift in her energy, because when he spoke, the teasing edge was gone from his voice. "Funny you should ask," he said, hopping off his stool and crossing to the kitchen's built-in display panel. He tapped the surface twice, and a holographic interface bloomed to life above the counter, casting soft blue light across his face. "JARVIS, pull up the SIT campus security feeds. Main quad, auditorium, and... uh, everywhere else. All of them."
"All of them, sir?" JARVIS's measured voice responded from the ceiling speakers.
"Did I stutter?"
"Accessing campus surveillance network. I feel obligated to note that monitoring students without their knowledge may raise certain ethical and legal concerns—"
"Noted. Ignored. Proceed."
Pepper's head snapped up from her tablet. "Tony, you are not spying on the students at your own university."
"I'm not spying," Tony said, swiping through the holographic feeds with the casual ease of a man who had designed the entire system. Multiple camera angles appeared in floating rectangles, each one showing a different section of the sprawling SIT campus. "I'm performing a routine security audit. In real time. With targeted visual monitoring of specific individuals who happen to be my kids." He glanced at Pepper with an expression of pure innocence. "It's called parenting, Pepper."
"It's called a felony, Tony."
"Tomato, tomahto."
Shuri had already moved to stand beside him, her earlier melancholy overridden by the immediate, all-consuming pull of maternal need. She leaned in, her violet eyes scanning the floating feeds with the trained precision of a woman who had spent years conducting surveillance for a living. The irony of an ex-ANBU operative using a billionaire's spy cameras to check on her children was not lost on her, but she chose to ignore it because she wanted to see them.
"There," Tony said, tapping one of the feeds to enlarge it. The image expanded into a crisp, high-definition view of a large auditorium filled with rows of new students. At the front, a faculty member was gesturing toward a projected slideshow that appeared to list various student organizations and extracurricular clubs. "Akeno. Third row from the front, left side."
Shuri's breath caught softly.
There she was. Her daughter. Her beautiful, brave, wonderful daughter, sitting in a university auditorium with her legs crossed and her dark hair cascading over one shoulder, leaning slightly toward the crimson-haired girl beside her—Rias Gremory—and whispering something that made Rias cover her mouth to suppress a laugh. Akeno's violet eyes sparkled with amusement, and even through the slightly elevated angle of the security camera, Shuri could see the relaxed happiness in her daughter's posture. No tension in her shoulders. No guardedness in her expression. Just a young woman enjoying a normal day at her new school with her best friend.
Shuri touched the edge of the holographic display, her fingertips passing through Akeno's projected image. "She looks so happy," she murmured.
"She's been smiling since she got to campus this morning," Tony said, and there was a warmth in his voice that he probably would have denied if anyone pointed it out. "JARVIS has been tracking—uh, I mean, coincidentally observing—both of them since they arrived."
"And Blake?" Shuri asked, already scanning the other feeds.
Tony swiped through several more camera angles—quad, library entrance, science building lobby—before landing on one that showed a wide walkway lined with newly planted trees and modern architectural facades. He tapped it to enlarge.
"And Blake is..." Tony began, squinting at the feed. A slow grin spread across his face. "...walking around campus with a busty blonde babe and a slender black-haired beauty practically hanging off him." He let out a low whistle, leaning back with his arms folded and a look of impressed approval. "That's my boy. First day of college and he's already pulling double duty. I'm actually kind of proud."
"Who are those two women?" Pepper asked with a small hint of jealousy.
Shuri was staring at the screen. She knew those women.
"That's..." Shuri's voice cracked. She swallowed hard, her fingers whitening against the countertop. "Tony, that's—"
Tony turned, his grin faltering slightly at the expression on her face. Pepper looked up from her tablet.
"That's Tsunade-sama and Shizune," Shuri breathed, her eyes never leaving the screen. Her pulse was roaring now. Her mind raced, connecting implications at speeds that would have impressed even Kakashi. If Tsunade and Shizune were here—on Earth, on this campus, walking beside Blake in broad daylight—then that meant—
Her son had done it.
Blake had mastered the power that had accidentally flung them across dimensions. He hadn't just survived it or stumbled into it or lucked his way through it. He had controlled it. Refined it. Turned a chaotic, terrifying ability that had nearly killed them both into something precise enough to reach across the gap between worlds and bring people through.
Her boy. Her beautiful, stubborn, reckless, incredible boy!
Shuri's vision blurred. A tear slipped down her cheek before she could stop it, tracing a warm line across skin that hadn't aged a day since a sea of blue light had consumed her in a compound full of traitors over a decade ago.
"Those are Blake's girlfriends from the other world," she whispered, and the pride in her voice was so raw, so fierce, so utterly maternal that it filled the sunlit kitchen like something physical. "He brought them here. He actually opened a portal and brought them here."
Tony stared at her. Then at the screen. Then back at her.
"Wait," he said slowly, pointing at the blonde on the display. "That's the super-strong medical ninja lady? The one who can punch mountains?"
"Tsunade Senju," Shuri confirmed, wiping her cheek with the back of her hand. "Fifth Hokage of the Hidden Leaf Village. The strongest kunoichi in the Elemental Nations. And yes—she can punch mountains."
Tony looked at the screen again. His eyebrows climbed steadily toward his hairline as his gaze settled on Tsunade's figure with the analytical appreciation of an engineer evaluating structural integrity. "...She can punch mountains and she looks like that?"
"Tony," Pepper warned.
"I'm just saying—the kid's got taste. Clearly a genetic trait he inherited from his brilliant and devastatingly handsome stepfather."
Shuri laughed—a wet, shaky sound that was half joy and half the overwhelming release of a mother who had just watched her son achieve something impossible. She pressed both hands over her heart, feeling it hammer against her palms, and stared at the security feed where Blake walked between the two women who had saved his life in another world.
He was smiling.
Tsunade was gesturing at a building with the commanding authority of someone who had opinions about architecture even in dimensions she'd never visited. Shizune was pointing at something in the distance—maybe a tree, maybe a fountain—her reserved composure finally cracking into genuine, radiant excitement as she tugged on Blake's sleeve to get his attention.
"I need to call them," Shuri said, already reaching for her phone. "I need to—Blake needs to know that I—" She stopped. Took a breath. Steadied herself with the disciplined calm of a woman who had survived worse than overwhelming emotion. "No. No, I'll wait. Let them enjoy this. Tsunade-sama and Shizune are seeing his world for the first time. I won't interrupt that."
She looked at the screen one more time.
"But we are moving to New York tomorrow," Shuri added firmly, turning to Tony with eyes that brooked absolutely zero negotiation. "Not in a week. Not in ten days. Tomorrow!"
Tony glanced at Pepper.
Pepper also had a very determined look on her face as well. As was expected-–considering she saw her boyfriend with two other smiling beautiful women hanging off of him.
Shuri made a mental note to talk to Pepper more about that on the plane ride. Because of course, Pepper had known about the other women in Blake's life, she'd even met Jean and Emma—although Blake wasn't openly dating either of them, yet— but seeing him walking around with two of his other actual lovers would still be a shock to the normally composed CEO of Stark industries.
– Blake –
"That," I said, gesturing broadly at the jagged horizon of steel and glass towers rising beyond the campus perimeter, "is New York City. About nine million people live there. Give or take a few hundred thousand, depending on how you count the ones who sleep in the subway tunnels."
Tsunade and Shizune both stopped walking.
They had been doing that a lot over the past thirty minutes—stopping, staring, processing, and then resuming movement with expressions that suggested their brains were buffering like an old computer trying to load a webpage on dial-up. Not that either of them would understand that analogy. I'd have to teach them about the internet later.
That was going to be a fun conversation.
We were on the main promenade of the Stark Institute of Technology, a wide tree-lined walkway that cut through the heart of the campus. Modern buildings rose on either side—glass facades and clean architectural lines that Tony had personally obsessed over during the design phase because he believed that "ugly buildings produce ugly science." The afternoon sun caught the windows at angles that threw warm rectangles of light across the paved path, and a gentle breeze carried the faint scent of fresh-cut grass from the quad to our left, where clusters of newly arrived students milled around with the disoriented energy of people who hadn't figured out where anything was yet.
It was, by all accounts, a beautiful campus. Clean. Modern. Impressive by Earth standards.
Tsunade and Shizune weren't looking at the campus.
They were looking at Manhattan.
The skyline rose behind the campus boundary like a wall of civilization—an endless forest of skyscrapers and towers stacked so densely that they seemed to merge into a single monolithic structure from this distance. The Empire State Building pierced the clouds near the center.. Construction cranes dotted the gaps between buildings, always building, always growing, the city perpetually devouring its own skyline and replacing it with something taller.
And below it all, even from here, you could hear the sound of it. The deep, constant, omnipresent hum of millions of people and machines existing simultaneously—car horns, engines, the distant wail of a siren, the rhythmic thunder of a helicopter cutting across the sky overhead. It was the kind of sound that you stopped noticing after you'd lived here long enough, but to someone hearing it for the first time?
Shizune's lips had parted slightly. Her dark eyes were wide, reflecting the skyline's glass and steel in miniature, darting from building to building as if she couldn't decide which impossible structure to be stunned by first. Her hands had drifted to her sides, fingers curling and uncurling in a restless pattern that I recognized.
"Blake," she said quietly, her voice carrying the particular breathlessness of someone whose entire frame of reference was being gently dismantled. "How many people did you say live in that city?"
"Nine million. Roughly."
She swallowed. "The entire population of the Land of Fire is... maybe three million."
"Yeah."
"That single city holds three times the population of our entire country."
"Yep."
Shizune fell silent. She continued staring at the skyline with the expression of a woman who was rapidly reevaluating several fundamental assumptions about the scale of civilization.
Tsunade, to her credit, was handling the culture shock with the composure of someone who had spent decades pretending to be unimpressed by things. Her honey-colored eyes swept across the skyline with a slow, measured assessment, the same way she surveyed a battlefield before deciding where to punch first. But I knew her. I knew every micro-expression that flickered across her beautiful face, every subtle tell she thought she was hiding behind that mask of casual confidence.
She was impressed. She was very impressed.
"It's... big," Tsunade finally conceded, her tone carefully measured. She crossed her arms beneath her chest—an action that drew my attention for approximately half a second because I was a man who loved this woman and those were really nice arms and also other things—before adding, "Konoha could fit inside that city about thirty times over."
"Probably more like fifty," I said. "Manhattan alone is pretty dense."
Tsunade's eye twitched. Just slightly.
There it was. The competitive streak. She wasn't upset or insecure—Tsunade didn't do insecure—but somewhere behind those amber eyes, the gears were turning. The Hokage in her was looking at that skyline and thinking about infrastructure. About what Konoha could become. About what the Elemental Nations were missing.
I decided to throw gasoline on that particular fire because I was either brave or stupid and honestly the line between those two things had never been very clear in my life. "You know," I said, keeping my voice casual, "now that I can open portals between our worlds whenever I want, there's no reason Konoha has to stay... small."
Both women looked at me.
"I mean it," I continued, shoving my hands into my pockets as we resumed walking. A student on a skateboard rolled past us, and Shizune tracked the board with fascinated confusion, clearly trying to figure out the physics of someone standing on a plank with wheels. "Think about it. My stepdad Tony is literally one of the smartest people on this planet. The guy builds technology that would make your head spin. Medicine, engineering, power generation, communication systems—stuff that would take the Land of Fire centuries to develop on their own. And he'd love the challenge. Trust me, the second you tell Tony Stark that an entire civilization exists without more than the most basic DC electricity, he's going to vibrate out of his own skin with excitement."
Shizune's eyes lit up. I could practically see the medical applications cascading through her mind. Her fingers were doing that restless curling thing again, but faster now, the way they moved when she was excited about something.
Tsunade had stopped walking. Again.
I turned to face her. She was standing in a patch of warm sunlight, the breeze catching a few loose strands of golden hair that had escaped her pigtails. With her youthful face and that sleeveless grey top doing absolutely nothing to downplay her figure, she looked every inch the devastating twenty-something bombshell that my ridiculous fallen angel biology had helped create. The handful of students who happened to be walking past were doing a terrible job of pretending they weren't staring.
"You're serious," Tsunade said. Not a question.
"Dead serious." I held her gaze. "I spent months in your world, Tsunade. You took me in. Gave me a home when I had nothing. And now I have the power to connect both worlds. Why wouldn't I use it?"
She crossed the distance between us in two strides.
Her hand came up, fingers sliding along the side of my jaw, palm warm against my cheek. She tilted my face down toward hers—she was tall, but I still had an inch or two on her—and looked into my eyes from barely a breath away.
"I'm holding you to that," she murmured. "Every word."
Then she kissed me.
My brain shorted out for approximately three seconds. When it rebooted, my hands had found her waist on pure instinct, fingers pressing into the firm curve above her hips, and I was kissing her back with everything I had.
When she finally pulled back, it was slow. Deliberate. Her lower lip dragged against mine as she withdrew, leaving a tingling heat in its wake. Her eyes were half-lidded, amber irises glowing with satisfied warmth, and a smirk tugged at the corner of her mouth and the particular smirk of a woman who knew exactly what she'd just done to my higher brain functions and was thoroughly pleased with the results.
I was pretty sure I had a dopey grin on my face. The kind that made me look like I'd been hit over the head with a frying pan. I could feel it and I didn't care.
"Mmm," Tsunade hummed, running her thumb across my lower lip. "Good boy."
A soft sound from my right. Part huff, part something else entirely.
I turned my head—still slightly dazed—to find Shizune standing exactly where she'd been, her arms crossed beneath her chest, one hip cocked slightly, her expression arranged into something that was trying very hard to be patient understanding but was losing a visible war against a much more honest emotion.
Jealousy. Not the toxic, possessive kind. Shizune didn't have a toxic bone in her body. This was the quiet, earnest, I-waited-three-months-too-and-I-would-also-like-to-be-kissed-now-please kind of jealousy that made her dark eyes just a shade more intense and her lower lip just barely pout outward in a way that she was definitely not doing on purpose but that hit me somewhere deep in my chest regardless.
"Shizune—" I started.
She moved before I could finish. Two quick steps. Her hands came up to frame my face—gentler than Tsunade's grip, but no less certain. She rose onto her toes, tilted her head, and pressed her lips to mine.
When she pulled back, her cheeks were flushed pink and her eyes were bright and slightly unfocused, and she was breathing just a little harder than normal.
Tsunade let out a low, approving chuckle beside us. "There's the adorable, sometimes jealous Shizune I know."
"Please be quiet, Lady Tsunade," Shizune murmured, her blush intensifying, but she didn't step away from me. Her hand remained on my chest, fingers curling lightly into the fabric of my shirt like she'd only just gotten me back and wasn't ready to stop touching me yet.
I was standing between the two of them, a woman on each side, both of their warmth bleeding into me through the points of contact they each maintained—Tsunade's hand resting possessively on my lower back, Shizune's fingers still gripping my shirt—and my brain was somewhere approximately six inches above my head, floating in a cloud of serotonin and the lingering taste of two kisses that had fundamentally rewired my nervous system.
The dopey grin was back. It was worse than before. I was pretty sure I looked concussed.
And apparently, we'd had an audience.
CLANG.
The metallic sound of a skull hitting a light pole rang out across the promenade like a bell. I turned just in time to see a guy—freshman, probably, based on the orientation lanyard around his neck—stagger backward from the pole he'd just walked face-first into. His eyes were locked on us. On Tsunade and Shizune and the fact that both of them were pressed against me.
"Dude," his friend said, grabbing his arm. "Dude, are you okay?"
"He just... both of them..." Pole Guy muttered, rubbing his forehead. A red mark was already forming. "Both of them kissed him. Right there. In public. Two girls that are hot..."
"I saw."
"Both of them."
"I saw, dude."
A cluster of students near a bench had also stopped to stare. I caught fragments of their conversation as we walked past.
"—who is that guy?"
"—total playboy, has to be—"
"—no way, you don't pull two tens like that by being a fuckboy. He's gotta be something special—"
"—legend. Absolute legend—"
"—You think he'll take my number if I give it to him—"
I ducked my head slightly, fighting back a laugh. Tsunade heard the comments too—her smirk widened into something dangerously pleased. She shifted her hand from my lower back to loop her arm through mine, pressing her chest against my bicep with zero subtlety and maximum territorial intent.
Shizune, for her part, quietly took my other hand and laced our fingers together without a word. Her blush hadn't faded, but her chin was tilted just slightly higher than before.
We continued walking.
And that should have been the end of it. A perfect moment—beautiful women on my arms, sunshine overhead, the first day of a new chapter in my life unfolding exactly the way I'd fantasized about during those long months of failed portal attempts.
Of course, the universe had other plans.
"Hey, babes!" Loud, brash, and dripping with the particular brand of unearned confidence that could only be produced by a guy whose entire personality was built on a foundation of varsity athletics and parental money. "What are you doing hanging out with that pretty-boy fruitloop? Sexy bitches like you two should come hang with us!"
I stopped. Tsunade and Shizune stopped with me.
Three guys were swaggering toward us from the direction of the campus parking lot. They were big—wide shoulders, thick necks, the gym-inflated physiques of guys who measured their self-worth in bench press numbers. All three were wearing letterman jackets, the kind with leather sleeves and embroidered team patches and an aura of douchebaggery so thick you could taste it.
My brow furrowed.
Wait. Letterman jackets?
SIT didn't have sports teams. Tony had specifically designed the university around science, technology, and innovation. The closest thing to athletics on this campus was the robotics club, and I was pretty sure their letterman equivalent would be a lab coat with coffee stains.
So where the hell did these guys come from? Did they literally just wander onto campus to harass people?
And then the guy in front turned his head slightly, and I got a clear look at his face.
My confusion crystallized into recognition.
No fucking way.
Flash Thompson.
Blond hair styled with aggressive amounts of gel. Square jaw set in a permanent expression of smug superiority. That same stupid, punchable face I'd seen a hundred times in the hallways of Midtown High, usually right before he shoved Peter into a locker or knocked his books out of his hands or called him some variation of "Penis Parker" that he thought was the pinnacle of comedy.
I'd put a stop to that years ago. Grabbed Flash by the collar after school one day and explained, in very clear terms, that if he ever touched Peter again, I would make him deeply regret it. Flash had avoided Peter like the plague after that. I'd figured that was the end of it.
Apparently, some people never learned? Or maybe it was just a coincidence he was here with his other former football buddies? I mean, what else is a mediocre high school athlete supposed to do with his life, once the varsity glory days are over?
Flash hadn't recognized me yet. His attention was entirely fixed on Tsunade and Shizune with the laser focus of a dog that had spotted a steak. His two friends flanked him in a loose V-formation, grinning like idiots, clearly feeding off whatever delusional confidence their ringleader was projecting.
"Seriously, ladies," Flash continued, spreading his arms wide as if presenting himself as a gift to the world. "Ditch the twink and come party with some real men. I've got a Camaro in the parking lot and a fake ID that's never failed. What do you say?"
I opened my mouth.
Tsunade moved first.
She detached herself from my arm with a smooth, unhurried motion—the way a predator uncoils from a resting position. No rush. No urgency. She simply stepped forward with a rolling, hip-swaying stride that made her body move in ways the human eye was fundamentally incapable of ignoring, her golden pigtails swaying with each step, her grey top shifting against curves that made all three guys' brains visibly flatline.
"Oh?" Tsunade said, her voice warm and sweet and dripping with interest. She tilted her head, letting a few strands of golden hair fall across one eye, and smiled at Flash with the kind of smile that had been toppling empires since before written history. "Real men, you said?"
Flash's mouth fell open slightly. His two friends had gone equally slack-jawed. From their perspective, the most beautiful woman they had ever seen in their entire lives had just walked toward them of her own volition, and their collective brain cell was bouncing between the three of them like a screensaver logo trying to hit the corner.
"Y-yeah," Flash managed, recovering enough to flash what he clearly believed was a charming grin. It wasn't. "That's right, gorgeous. Real men. Not whatever that is." He jerked his thumb dismissively in my direction without looking.
I have literally kicked this guy's ass before… In public! And I'm pretty filled out too, he's just an asshole…
Shizune saw my expression and kissed my cheek. She was the best.
Tsunade took another step closer. Then another. She was within arm's reach now, close enough that Flash could probably smell whatever subtle, clean scent still clung to her skin from the Elemental Nations. His eyes dropped to her breasts with the inevitability of a man who had never developed the neural pathways necessary for self-control. His friends were no better—one of them was literally slack-jawed, mouth hanging open like a broken mailbox.
"Strong, too, I bet," Tsunade murmured, reaching out to run a single finger along the lapel of Flash's letterman jacket. Her touch was light. Teasing. Her eyes looked up at him through her lashes with an expression of doe-eyed admiration so flawlessly performed that I almost believed it myself. She was the best Kunoichi in her world for a reason.
"Hell yeah," Flash breathed, puffing out his chest. "I benched two-seventy-five last week. State record for my weight class."
"Two-seventy-five," Tsunade repeated, eyes widening as though this was the most impressive thing she'd ever heard. "My, my. That's so strong..." purred the woman who could deadlift a truck, and that was before even enhancing herself with chakra.
I watched from ten feet away with the detached fascination of a nature documentary narrator observing a lioness toy with her prey. Beside me, Shizune let out a very quiet sigh through her nose. The sound of a woman who had witnessed this exact performance in taverns and gambling halls across multiple countries and knew precisely how it ended.
"Should we stop her?" I asked, mostly out of obligation.
"No," Shizune said calmly. "Guys like this never learn, no matter what world you live in."
Fair enough.
Tsunade had positioned herself in the center of the three guys now, all of whom had unconsciously angled their bodies toward her like flowers tracking the sun. Her hand moved from Flash's lapel to his shoulder, gave it a light squeeze, and then—
She punched him in the stomach.
No. That wasn't right.
The word "punched" implied something visible. Something you could see happening and react to. What Tsunade did was closer to a magic trick. One instant, her hand was on Flash's shoulder. The next instant—with zero windup, zero telegraphing, zero movement that any normal human eye could have possibly tracked—her fist had already connected with his solar plexus, retracted, and moved on to the next target.
Thwp. Thwp. Thwp.
Three impacts. Three perfectly calibrated strikes delivered in the span of approximately half a second. Fast enough that the motion itself was invisible. Controlled enough that she hadn't broken any ribs or ruptured any organs. Tsunade could punch holes through mountains, but she could also thread a needle with her fists when she wanted to. Every strike landed with exactly the amount of force needed to empty the lungs, buckle the legs, and send all three of them folding in half like lawn chairs in a windstorm.
Flash's eyes bugged. His mouth opened in a silent gasp, no air left to make sound. His knees buckled, and he doubled over, arms wrapping around his midsection, face going from confident smirk to fish-out-of-water in the space between heartbeats. His two friends crumpled in near-perfect synchronization. One dropping to his knees, the other stumbling sideways and catching himself on a nearby trash can, dry-heaving.
Tsunade was still smiling.
She hadn't moved from her position. To anyone watching from a distance—and several people were watching from a distance—it looked as though three large, athletic young men had simultaneously experienced catastrophic digestive failure in the middle of a conversation with a pretty blonde.
"Oh my!" Tsunade gasped, pressing her fingers to her lips in an expression of startled concern so perfectly executed that it deserved a fucking Oscar. "Are you boys okay? You don't look well at all!" She crouched down slightly, peering at Flash's purple, wheezing face with wide, worried eyes. "Maybe it was something you ate? Cafeteria food on the first day can be so unpredictable!"
"Hrrrrk—" was all Flash managed.
"You should probably see a doctor," Tsunade added helpfully, patting his trembling shoulder with a gentleness that was somehow more devastating than the punch itself. "Make sure to drink plenty of fluids!" finished the actual doctor that just caused their collective pain.
She straightened up, tossed her pigtails over her shoulder, and walked back toward me with a stride that could only be described as a swagger. Full, unhurried, rolling—her hips moving with the confident rhythm of a woman who had just handled a minor inconvenience and was already done thinking about it.
Shizune sighed beside me. It was a fond sigh. The kind that carried years of shared history and exasperated affection. "She does this every time," she murmured, shaking her head with a chuckle that she tried and failed to suppress.
Tsunade reached us and looped her arm back through mine, pressing close with a warmth that contrasted sharply with the surgical precision she'd just demonstrated. She looked up at me, amber eyes glittering, and her smirk was sharp enough to cut glass.
"Nobody," she said, her voice low and firm and carrying a weight that had nothing to do with volume, "insults Tsunade Senju's man. Nobody."
Behind her, Flash Thompson was still on his knees, making sounds that suggested his stomach was attempting to evacuate through his throat.
I looked at Tsunade. I looked at Shizune, who had reclaimed my other hand and was shaking her head with quiet, amused resignation. I looked back at the three guys slowly dying on the campus walkway.
The dopey grin came back. Worse than ever.
"I love you both so much," I said.
"Obviously," Tsunade replied.
Shizune squeezed my hand and smiled.
– Rias Gremory –
"Well," Rias said, leaning against the auditorium's double doors as they swung shut behind her, "that was certainly interesting."
The orientation seminar on student clubs had been... educational. In the loosest possible sense of the word. Rias had learned that the Stark Institute of Technology was home to thirty-seven officially recognized student organizations, ranging from the predictable (Robotics Club, Coding Society, Future Engineers of America) to the genuinely baffling (Competitive Rubik's Cube Solving, the Interdimensional Theory Discussion Group—which had made her choke on her water when the faculty advisor described it as "purely speculative," if only he knew—and something called the Cryptid Appreciation Society, which appeared to be twelve students who met weekly to argue about Bigfoot).
She had also learned that Akeno could not sit through a ninety-minute presentation without whispering commentary that made Rias have to physically bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing out loud.
They'd stepped out into the late afternoon sunshine, the warmth hitting Rias's face like a gentle hand after the auditorium's aggressive air conditioning. The SIT campus sprawled before them in clean lines and modern architecture, bathed in golden light that made everything look like a recruitment brochure. Students milled about in clusters, some clutching orientation packets, others already settled onto benches and patches of grass with the relaxed postures of people who had decided the day's scheduled activities were optional.
It was nice. Normal. The kind of scene that Rias had watched in countless human movies and television shows during her years in Japan, always with a wistful sense of distance—the knowledge that she was observing a world she could admire but never truly belong to, because she was a devil, and devils didn't get to have normal college experiences. They got arranged marriages and Rating Games and the suffocating expectations of ancient pureblood families who viewed their children as chess pieces on a political board.
Except now, apparently, they did. Because Tony Stark's money and Serafall's magic and Blake Himejima's stubborn refusal to let anyone he cared about suffer had conspired to give Rias something she never thought she'd have.
A fresh start.
She was still getting used to how that felt.
"Akeno, did you see the look on that professor's face when someone asked if the Cryptid Appreciation Society had a budget for field expeditions? How funny do you think it would be if we pranked them with our supernatural familiars?" Rias turned toward her Queen with a grin already forming—
And the grin died.
Akeno wasn't looking at her. Akeno wasn't looking at anything on their side of the promenade at all. Her Queen's violet eyes were fixed on a point further down the main walkway.
Rias followed Akeno's line of sight.
Oh.
Oh.
Blake Himejima was walking down the promenade approximately fifty meters ahead of them, and he was not alone.
Two women flanked him. One on each side. Both pressed against him with the casual, possessive looks of lovers who had long since stopped caring about public perception.
On his left walked a blonde who made Rias's breath catch. She was stunning—the kind of stunning that transcended cultural beauty standards and landed somewhere in the territory of biological unfairness. Tall. Confident. Golden hair swept into low pigtails that swayed hypnotically with each step. A grey sleeveless top stretched across a chest that Rias—who was extremely well-endowed herself and not easily impressed in that department—could only describe as magnificent. The woman moved with the stride of someone who was very aware of the effect her body had on the world around her and considered it a weapon in her personal arsenal.
Her arm was looped through Blake's, and her breast pressed against his bicep with a deliberateness that left absolutely nothing to interpretation.
On his right walked a dark-haired woman. Slender where the blonde was voluptuous. Reserved where the blonde was commanding. Her features were delicate with a gentle, beautiful face framed by dark hair. She held Blake's hand with their fingers interlaced, and her body language radiated a quieter form of possession. Less territorial display, more this person is mine and I am his and if you have a problem with that arrangement I will make it your problem.
Rias didn't know who either of these women were.
Rias knew those expressions though.
She knew it intimately, because she was a young woman with a healthy libido, an extensive and unapologetic collection of hentai, and absolutely zero pretensions about the nature of physical desire. The blonde was looking at Blake with half-lidded eyes and a smirk that practically had subtitles reading I am going to devour you the moment we are behind a closed door. The dark-haired woman was slightly more restrained—her expression softer, cheeks flushed, lower lip caught between her teeth—but the lust was there.
Those were the faces of women who wanted to get fucked.
Not made love to. Not romanced. Not any of the soft, pretty euphemisms that romance novels and shoujo manga loved to deploy. Those were the faces of women who wanted to be taken to the nearest private room and thoroughly, aggressively, crassly fucked until they couldn't walk straight, and the fact that they were making those faces in broad daylight on a college campus while surrounded by hundreds of oblivious freshmen only made the whole thing more brazen.
Rias swallowed.
She knew those faces because she'd made that face herself.
More than once. Always directed at the same person. Always when she thought nobody was watching—in the quiet moments when Blake would stretch after training and his shirt would ride up, or when he'd flash that lazy, confident grin that crinkled the corners of his blue eyes, or when he'd say something unexpectedly protective or sweet and her heart would do that stupid fluttering thing that no amount of devil aristocratic poise could fully suppress.
And—she noted, her crimson-haired head tilting slightly as she tracked their trajectory—they were indeed heading toward the dormitory section of campus. Blake's dorm, most likely.
A warmth stirred low in Rias's abdomen that she firmly told to sit down and behave.
She watched the three of them disappear around the corner of the engineering building, the blonde's laughter carrying faintly on the breeze. Blake said something Rias couldn't hear, and the dark-haired woman's blush deepened visibly even from fifty meters away while her grip on his hand tightened.
Rias noticed three large guys in letterman jackets further up the walkway. One of them was on his knees, dry-heaving into a trash can. Another was sitting on the ground with his arms wrapped around his stomach, his face an interesting shade of purple-green. The third was leaning against a light pole, wheezing. None of them seemed injured in any visible way, and yet all three looked like they'd been hit by something they never saw coming.
She had no idea what had happened there, but she had a feeling it was connected to the blonde.
Rias exhaled slowly. She pushed a strand of crimson hair behind her ear and turned to Akeno, ready to make some teasing comment about Blake's impressive talent for collecting beautiful women—something light, something playful, the kind of best-friend banter that had defined their relationship for years.
The words evaporated from her tongue.
Akeno was still staring at the spot where Blake had disappeared.
Her Queen's face was—
Rias's smile faded.
It wasn't the playful "ara ara" jealousy that Akeno performed so well, the teasing possessiveness she wielded like a social weapon to make people squirm. Rias had seen that face a thousand times. This was not that face. This was something raw. Something Akeno hadn't meant to show. Her violet eyes were slightly wider than normal. Her jaw was set, not in fury but in the rigid tension of a woman clenching against an emotion she didn't want to feel. Her hands, usually so elegant and composed—the hands of a shrine maiden, the hands of a queen—were balled into loose fists at her sides, her knuckles just barely whitened. And beneath all of it, threading through her expression like a hairline fracture in porcelain, was a look that Rias could only describe as ache.
Then Akeno let out a huff. Pushed through her nose with a force that suggested it had been building behind her teeth for longer than the thirty seconds they'd been standing here. It came out sounding like frustration, like dismissal, like the verbal equivalent of slamming a door on something you didn't want to examine—
Akeno turned on her heel and walked away. Fast. Not running—Akeno was far too composed to run—but moving with the clipped, purposeful stride of someone who needed to put distance between herself and whatever she'd just felt. Her dark hair streamed behind her, catching the sunlight in blue-black waves as she cut across the quad toward the east side of campus without a word of explanation.
Rias watched her go. She didn't call after her. She stood perfectly still on the sun-warmed promenade with her arms hanging loosely at her sides and her crimson hair stirring gently in the breeze, and she let Akeno walk away because sometimes the kindest thing a best friend could do was give someone room to process an emotion they weren't ready to face.
Rias exhaled slowly through her parted lips.
She'd noticed it. Of course she'd noticed it. She was Rias Gremory. She had been trained in political observation and social manipulation since she could walk. Reading people was as natural to her as breathing, and reading Akeno—her best friend, her Queen, the person she'd spent more time with than any other being in her life—was as easy as reading a book she'd memorized years ago.
The signs had been there for months. Small at first. Easy to dismiss. Easy to rationalize.
The way Akeno's gaze lingered on Blake a beat too long when he wasn't looking—not the teasing, performative staring she did when she wanted him to notice, but the quiet, unguarded kind that happened when she thought no one was watching. The way her voice softened by a barely perceptible degree when she said his name in private, losing the playful "otouto" framing and settling into something more intimate, more tender. The way she positioned herself next to him in group settings—always close, always touching, a hand on his arm, her shoulder against his, her head occasionally resting against him during movie nights at the Stark mansion with a familiarity that walked the razor's edge between sibling affection and something else entirely.
The way she talked about him when he wasn't in the room. Not what she said—Akeno was too smart to betray herself with words. It was how she said it. The warmth that crept into her tone. The pride that straightened her posture. The subtle, unconscious smile that curved her lips whenever someone mentioned his name, a smile that looked nothing like a sister's pride and everything like—
Rias closed her eyes briefly.
She understood. At least, she thought she did.
Blake and Akeno had been separated for ten years. A decade. They'd lost each other as children and found each other again as adults—fully formed people with fully formed desires and no shared history of growing up together to establish the invisible boundaries that siblings built naturally over a lifetime of cohabitation. They hadn't gone through the phase where your brother was the annoying kid who ate your snacks and left his clothes on the bathroom floor. They hadn't developed that instinctive, bone-deep familial framework that made certain feelings categorically impossible.
Instead, Akeno had spent ten years mourning a lost brother. Building him up in her mind. Idolizing the memory of the boy who'd been torn away from her. And when she finally found him again, the person standing in front of her wasn't a boy at all. He was Blake Himejima—tall, handsome, powerful, kind, brave to the point of stupidity, and surrounded by beautiful women who loved him openly and without shame.
Akeno had found a man first and recognized a brother second.
And now those wires were tangled in ways that Rias suspected Akeno hadn't fully confronted yet. Maybe hadn't even fully realized yet. The huff. The storming off. The ache in her eyes when she watched him walk away with Tsunade and Shizune—if those were indeed the women from his stories.
These weren't the reactions of a sister who found her brother's love life embarrassing. These were the reactions of a woman who wanted something she didn't think she was allowed to want.
Rias opened her eyes.
She and Akeno would need to have a conversation. Because Rias loved Akeno more than anyone in the world—more than her own family, who had tried to sell her off like livestock—and she refused to let her Queen suffocate under the weight of feelings she was too afraid to examine.
For now, though, she was alone.
The campus stretched out before her. Students wandered in loose groups, their laughter and conversation creating a pleasant ambient hum that reminded Rias of summer festivals at Kuoh. Her stomach growled softly—she'd been too excited during orientation to eat the lunch that the cafeteria had offered—and she briefly considered finding somewhere to grab food. Or maybe she'd wander the campus a bit more. Tony's university was genuinely impressive, and she'd barely seen a fraction of it during the guided tour.
She took exactly four steps toward the campus center before someone materialized in her path.
The woman who stepped in front of Rias moved with the practiced grace of someone who had spent their entire life commanding rooms and demanding attention simply by existing in them. She was blonde with a cool, platinum shade of long hair. She wore a white blouse and tailored slacks that somehow made casual campus attire look like it belonged on a runway, and her blue eyes held a crystalline intelligence that immediately put Rias's devil instincts on alert.
Rias knew of this woman. She had never met her in person. But Blake had mentioned her. Akeno had mentioned her. Even Tony, in his characteristically blunt fashion, had described her as "the scary hot telepath who's in love with my stepson and also might be from the future." The details of that last part remained frustratingly vague.
Emma Frost.
"Rias Gremory," the woman said. Her voice was cool, measured, and carried the faint undertone of someone who was accustomed to knowing more about the people she spoke to than they knew about her. "I've been hoping to run into you."
Rias straightened almost imperceptibly. Her own smile settled into place—the diplomatic one, the Gremory one, the mask she'd been trained to wear since childhood when facing an unknown variable with significant power. "You have me at a disadvantage," she replied smoothly, even though she didn't, because acknowledging that you recognized someone before they introduced themselves was a concession of information, and Rias had been playing political games since before she could read. "And you are...?"
The blonde's smile sharpened by exactly one degree.
"Oh? You know who I am, but fine—I'll still play along. I'm Emma Frost," she said, extending her hand. "And I think you and I have quite a lot to talk about… "
"Like what?" Rias asked curiously with a hint of wariness. Damn, she just remembered this girl could read minds.
Emma scoffed before replying. "Like how your only pawn became a stray devil and the effects that will have on the future of this world…"
Rias let out a sigh. Ugh, it's going to be one of THOSE heavy conversations isn't it…
XXX
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