Chapter Text
Honey doesn’t romanticize competence.
She’s spent too long in rooms where people mistake noise for control, urgency for insight. She knows the difference between someone who commands and someone who contains.
That’s why she notices immediately when M.G. steps onto the scene and the temperature drops.
Not because M.G. asserts herself. She doesn’t. She barely raises her voice. She just starts assigning weight—this matters, this doesn’t, this can wait. People respond without realizing they’re responding.
Honey stands back, deliberately. She doesn’t interfere. She watches.
M.G. moves through the space like she already knows where the resistance will be. She doesn’t rush. She doesn’t linger. Her questions are exact. Narrow. Designed to extract truth without agitation.
Honey feels something loosen behind her ribs.
This is someone who doesn’t need to dominate to control.
She watches M.G. crouch beside a shaken witness—not softening, not intimidating. Just… steady. Her posture open, her gaze level, her tone uninflected in a way that somehow invites precision instead of panic.
The witness stops crying.
Honey’s breath catches.
It’s such a small thing. No heroics. No grand gesture. Just a nervous system regulating another nervous system by refusing to escalate.
That’s the moment.
Not the violence M.G. is capable of—but the violence she withholds.
Honey realizes, with a sudden, almost clinical clarity, that M.G. is not reactive. She is selective. That her restraint is not lack of feeling but disciplined channeling.
This isn’t desire anymore.
This is safety.
The realization lands heavily. Honey feels it in her spine, like a structural shift. She hates how much it matters. Hates how irrevocable it feels.
M.G. straightens and glances over, eyes flicking to Honey for a fraction of a second.
Not to check approval.
To confirm alignment.
Honey nods once, barely perceptible.
M.G. returns to the work.
That nod costs Honey more than she’s prepared for.
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They don’t talk about it at the scene.
They don’t need to.
Later, outside, as dusk settles and the city starts reasserting itself, M.G. lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, then offers it to Honey who shakes her head.
“You were quiet today,” she says. She takes another deep drag of her cigarette, exhales its smoke out in perfect rings.
Honey doesn’t deflect.
“I was watching.”
M.G. studies her—not guarded, not curious. Assessing.
“And?” she asks.
Honey considers telling the truth. Decides against its full shape.
“You’re very precise,” she offers instead. “It’s… effective.”
M.G. exhales, something like relief flickering across her face before it’s gone. “It keeps things from getting worse.”
That’s it. That’s the line that seals it.
Honey understands then that M.G. doesn’t chase outcomes. She prevents collapse.
They part ways without touching.
Honey walks to her car knowing she has crossed a line she didn’t intend to approach:
She doesn’t just want M.G.
She trusts her.
And trust, Honey knows, is the most intimate thing she has left to give.