Jiss discovered that New York would hire you for anything if you looked like you'd already done it once.
He became a man of small verbs: mop, haul, lift, carry, scrub, deliver. Odd jobs collected around him like iron filings to a magnet: cash-in-hand, no questions, the kind of work that made your hands know the day happened.
Aria called it "stability by elbow grease." He called it "rent for breathing."
We call it hunger with chores, Toxin said, unimpressed, as he shouldered a crate of onions down a diner's back steps.
"Your poetry is getting better," Jiss muttered, then louder for the line cook, "Where do you want these?"
"Cold room," the cook said, busy with a grill that hissed like a parliament. "Stack 'em neat or my mother will climb out of her grave and fire me."
"On it."
The walk-in freezer exhaled cold air on his face. He set the crate, stacked two more, and ignored the little part of him that wanted to grow two extra tendrils and do it in one trip. No showboating, he reminded himself.
Back in the dish pit, a stack of plates leaned like it had made a bad life choice.
Jiss spotted the wobble half a second before it became a crash.
Echo, Toxin murmured, pleased.
"Come on." Jiss said under his breath, but he let a thin tendril slide down his sleeve. Just a touch of help.
The plates steadied. His arm adjusted like it knew better. Disaster passed, silent and invisible, except to him.
The dishwasher Mike, all nicotine and kindness grunted. "You got sticky hands."
"Yep," Jiss said. "I don't like to talk about it."
Mike snorted, flicked ash into a tray no inspector would ever find, and handed Jiss five bucks over the usual pay.
"Sticky bonus," he said.
Jiss pocketed it because dignity didn't argue with groceries.
Deliveries came next: paper bags to people who tipped like saints and devils in alternating doors. Jiss learned blocks by the shapes of their trash cans, learned the hour when dog walkers claimed sidewalks like a union, learned to keep one ear on the city and one on the voice that wasn't his.
Left, Toxin said once, bored, inches before a cyclist invented new physics at the intersection.
Jiss stepped back without thinking. The bike scythed past where his knees had planned to be. "Thanks," he breathed.
We keep the meat vessel safe, Toxin said, proprietary.
"Romantic."
Hungry.
"Always."
He ate on the go half a sandwich Aria had pushed into his hand with "this is non-negotiable," an apple filched with permission from a produce guy who believed in barter, a corner-store burrito that tasted like poor choices. Protein for the other hunger waited in butcher paper at the back of Aria's freezer.
Midafternoon brought a moving job: second-floor walk-up, couch, foreman who had more.
"Fifty for the carry," the foreman said, chewing a toothpick. "Cash at the end. You break, you buy."
"Copy." Jiss and a guy named Raul manhandled the couch down narrow stairs that had been designed by a person who hated couches. At the bend, a foot slipped Raul's, then the couch's, then the future's.
Catch, Toxin said, too eager.
Jiss let just enough not-him flood his fingers to turn grip into clamps. He held. Raul found footing. They pivoted the beast into compliance and finished the descent without adding new holes to the client's wall.
"Good hands," Raul wheezed, grinning. "You play ball?"
"Nope," Jiss said.
The foreman tried to shave ten dollars off at the curb out of habit or sport. Jiss worked the ladder: speak, joke, resist.
"We agreed fifty," he said, polite.
"Did we?" Toothpick bobbed. "Must've been a different guy."
"We did," Jiss said, tone staying low, shoulders relaxed. "And I'd like to work for you again tomorrow for another fifty."
A pause. The promise of future labor turned out to be legal tender. The foreman peeled the bills without further performance. "Tomorrow. Eight."
"See you."
We could have removed his toothpick and some fingers, Toxin offered as they walked away. Faster.
"We're not going to crowd-fund a felony for ten dollars," Jiss said, but he pictured it and hated himself a little for the relief.
You like the picture.
"I like being paid."
Same mouth.
He didn't argue.
He learned the city's bureaucracy by osmosis: which clerks liked jokes, which offices accepted "I lost my ID" as an act of God, which park benches belonged to old men who'd let you sit if you listened to the Yankees' score like a sacrament.
He learned not to stand near cameras. They were everywhere, the little black domes in bodegas, the brighter bubbles in building lobbies, the light poles with eyes. He wore his cap low, not because he expected facial recognition to link him to a DMV photo he didn't have, but because hats were a force field built out of cloth and denial.
We can blur, Toxin said once, curious. Two breaths. Skin forgets light.
"Emergency only," he said. "If we use it, we use it small."
Small teeth.
"Small nothing."
Boring.
"Alive."
He kept messaging with Aria like a person trying to practice being one. Soup kitchen needs hands tonight. You in? / Yes. He learned the names of three regulars and the exact rhythm of the soup line: ladle, nod, smile that wasn't pity.
He slept on the couch again because Aria told him to, and because he wasn't proud enough to go back to hostel snores when a soft human had made space.
He met SHIELD on a Tuesday the way you meet weather turn a corner and it's happening.
The block had police tape strung lazily between parking meters, lights on silent rotate. People gathered with the particular hunger of New Yorkers who know when a story is free. Jiss adjusted his cap and tried to cut around the fringe.
Two black SUVs idled with their windows up. A half-dozen people in suits and windbreakers moved through the scene in brisk lines. They were not cops. They did not hustle like EMTs.
A woman with a clipboard pointed at a scorch mark on brick, then at a small device someone in gloves tucked into a case. The wind carried a fragment of conversation past Jiss's ear: "…S.H.I.E.L.D. wants this at the Triskelion by..."
He didn't catch the time because his stomach turned over at the acronym coming out of a stranger's mouth.
S…H…I…E…L…D.
Bad letters, Toxin said, low and immediate.
The nearest suit had a shoulder patch: an eagle that wanted to be a logo. The guy's hair didn't move in the wind. His eyes moved on gears, clicking on faces, clicking off. Jiss angled himself behind a taller bystander because invisibility that lasted two seconds was less useful than a human shield who lasted the whole formation.
"Move along," a uniformed cop said, bored but firm. "Nothing to see."
People never believe that sentence. Jiss did. He moved.
A man in a suit took a picture of the scorch mark with a camera that didn't belong to any civilian store. Another agent talked into his cuff with patience. Words drifted again: "…asset retrieval… containment protocols…"
Jiss's shoulder muscles cinched like a jacket two sizes too small.
We leave, Toxin said.
"We leave," Jiss echoed, and did, before curiosity could make a fool out of him.
He cut down two blocks, then three, then another for good measure, mapping the exits he hadn't needed but liked to know were there. In the calm after the adrenaline, he saw how close he'd come to becoming a thing the suits were here for. Not because he'd done anything loud, but because loud found you and then the world came looking.
We avoid eagles, Toxin said, filing a new rule without argument.
"We avoid anything that looks like a three-letter acronym," Jiss said. "Even if it's just the YMCA."
We like soup.
"Exception for soup."
Back at the market, the owner's cousin was telling the cashier a story that had the exact shape of a rumor with a receipt. "and the lady in the suit? She flashed a badge fast enough to cause a paper cut. Said 'Strategic Homeland whatever, whatever Division.' Told Johnny to hand over the footage. Johnny said, 'Can I get a copy?' Agent said, 'You can get a coffee.'"
The cashier laughed. "They want your tapes, they take 'em."
"Yeah," the owner said, wry. "They want your grandma, they take her too."
Jiss bought soap and rice and kept his hands visible, his breathing even. Every camera bubble felt like an eye with a long memory.
That night, he and Aria chopped vegetables to the rhythm of a podcast she liked about people who successfully did not die doing foolish things. He told her about the scene with the suits in broad strokes the tape, the scorch, the eagle but kept his pulse out of his voice.
"SHIELD," she said, making a face like the word was a lemon seed. "They showed up when the hammer thing happened. And when Harlem… did that. And when a lab uptown had, like, a 'falling apart under the weight of science' situation. They look like FBI had a baby with a catalog."
"You trust them?"
"I don't trust anyone whose title needs that many syllables to say 'we're in charge.' But also—sometimes people need someone to be in charge." She slid diced onion into the pan. "I just hope they're good at not breaking the people they're trying to protect."
He turned that over the way you turn another person's worry to see the facets. "If they asked you for your tapes?"
"I'd ask to see a warrant," she said. "Then I'd make a copy and hide it in a plant, because my aunt Carmen taught me paranoia that tastes like practicality."
He smiled. "What plant?"
"As if I'd tell you."
They ate on the couch because the table had declared itself a bookshelf that day. On the news, the eagle logo showed up behind a podium and said nothing meaningful in perfect sentences.
Aria rolled her eyes. "It's like they hired a thesaurus and forgot the human."
"Maybe being human makes it messy," he said.
"Messy is my brand." She looked at him over the rim of her mug. "You okay?"
"Yeah." He set his own mug down. "I think my plan is: don't be interesting near them."
"Good plan." She bumped his foot with hers. "Let the posters be for other people."
"Always was."
Hide from suits; bite kettles, Toxin said, ridiculously satisfied with its version of the doctrine.
"No kettles," Jiss thought, finally amused.
We will discuss.
After dishes, Aria went to study and Jiss went to the sink to let the water run over his hands until his nerves stopped buzzing. He stared at his reflection in the window faint, superimposed over another window in another building where someone did a puzzle for no reason except that they wanted to finish it.
He imagined an agent with hair that didn't move saying, Come with us. He imagined saying no with his mouth.
We avoid them, Toxin said again, reading what he didn't say.
"Yeah," he whispered. "We avoid them."
He wrote it on the back of Aria's map with a cheap pen because rules were stronger when they left your head.
No eating people.
No killing if we can help it.
No showboating.
Listen to me when I say stop.
No SHIELD. No cameras. No suits. No acronyms. Leave early.
He underlined the last one until the paper went soft. It was caution.
Aria stuck her head out of her room, pen behind her ear, hair a mess of focus. "You good?"
"I have a list," he said.
"Of course you do." Her smile was soft. "If you sleep bad, knock."
"I will."
He lay down on the couch with the city's hum at a volume he could stand.
We blend, Toxin murmured, drowsy. We are boring.
"Best superpower," he said.
We will try.
He closed his eyes.