He looked at her.
She was still pressed against him — her palms flat on his chest, her pregnant belly warm between them, his cock sandwiched against the dome of it, the last of the cold shower water dripping from both of them onto the tile floor.
Her eyes were still wet.
Her lips were still swollen from the kiss.
She was looking at him with the expression of a woman who has run out of organized positions and is simply standing in the wreckage of all of them, waiting to see what comes next.
He snapped his fingers.
The water on her body — every droplet, every thin running rivulet from her hair to her shoulder to the curve of her belly — converted simultaneously. Not evaporating. *Converting.* The liquid phase releasing directly into diffuse vapor, the water mist rising from her skin in a soft, thin fog that curled upward around her in pale wisps and then dissipated into the bathroom air in under three seconds.
She was dry.
Completely dry. Her hair still damp at the roots but not wet, the water on her skin simply *gone,* her freshly shaved legs and the bare skin of her arms and the curve of her pregnancy all catching the bathroom light without a drop on them.
Her eyes went wide.
Not at the result.
At the *frequency.*
She felt it the way she felt all energy movement — at the base of her spine first, the specific resonance signature of a conversion event registering in her sensitivity before her eyes processed the visual. And the signature was—
*Hers.*
Exactly hers. The same frequency. The same conversion ratio, the same output dispersion pattern, the same cellular-level mechanic she’d spent four months refining in the pocket cell to keep herself and the pregnancy alive.
Identical.
Her hands pressed harder against his chest.
"What—" Her voice came out very small. "How did you—" She stopped. Her eyes moved to his face. The dark eyes sharpening from the wet unfocus of the last several minutes into the specific clarity of a person whose analytical mind has just been handed something it cannot classify. "How were you able to do that."
He looked at her.
The corner of his mouth moved.
"What." The word came out flat and quiet, the cold register trying to reassemble around the raw confusion underneath it.
"I have an ability," he said. "Where I can copy the abilities of others."
The silence lasted exactly four seconds.
He counted them.
Her heart beat in the space between them — he could feel it against his chest through the pressure of her palms, the rhythm of it changing, the specific skip and then hard double-beat of a cardiovascular system receiving information that changes the shape of everything before it.
"You—" Her mouth opened. "You copied—"
"Yes."
"When I was—"
"When you were unconscious." He held her eyes. "I read your frequency while you were out. The favorability system copied the ability from the resonance sync." A pause. "You still have it. I didn’t take it. I copied it."
She was processing.
He could see her processing — the rapid movement behind her eyes, the analytical engine of a woman whose ability had always required her to read energy at a level most people couldn’t perceive, now applying that same precision to the information he’d just handed her.
"Why." The word came out clipped. "Why did you need it."
He chuckled.
The sound came out warm and easy, and she clearly found this irritating, which he found additionally amusing.
He leaned forward.
His face came down to her level — her eyes, her wet-lashed, furious, exposed eyes — and he was close enough that their breath mixed again in the space between.
"Will you allow me," he said, "to be your husband?"
The sentence landed like a dropped plate.
She made a sound.
Not a word. The anterior half of a sound that started in her chest and came out of her mouth as something between "wh—" and "n—" and a short, completely involuntary laugh of pure disbelief.
"What."
"Husband." He said it the same way he said everything — flat, factual, the tone of a man stating a logistical detail. "Your husband. The role comes with certain—"
"What are you," she said. Not asking who. Asking *what* — the specific question of someone trying to determine which category of entity they are standing pressed naked against in a prison bathroom. "What even—"
He picked her up.
His hands went to her hips — both of them, the full grip from before — and simply *lifted,* her weight coming off the tile as she left the ground entirely, her legs dangling, the pregnant belly suddenly very present between them at this height, her boobs bouncing once sharply from the lift before settling.
"WAIT—"
Her hands flew to his shoulders.
"Wait — wait, I will fall—"
"You won’t fall."
"I am pregnant, you cannot just—"
"I’m aware you’re pregnant. I’ve been aware of that for several hours." He was already moving — carrying her toward the bathroom door, her bare body in his arms and his cock swinging heavy between his legs with each step, the whole situation so comprehensively insane that she had apparently stopped producing vocabulary to describe it. "You won’t fall."
She gripped his shoulders.
Her fingers white-knuckling the muscle there, her legs wrapping instinctively around his waist — which pressed the dome of her belly against his abs and sandwiched his cock between them again — her face close to his with the wide eyes of a woman who is being carried naked through a labyrinth prison pocket by a man who just proposed to her and copied her S+ rank ability through favorability resonance.
He stopped at the bathroom door.
Looked at it.
Then at her.
"You are my pregnant wife," he said. Plainly. The way you tell someone the time. "Remember your role."
"Your—" She stared at him. "I don’t have a role, I’m not your—"
He opened the door.
The light that came in was warm.
Not the bathroom light — not the shower’s recessed panels or the ambient glow of the labyrinth’s dimensional architecture. Warm, lived-in light. The specific yellow warmth of a space that had lamps and wooden surfaces and the smell of something cooked earlier in the day.
Her eyes adjusted.
And went wide.
A hall room.
Small. Wooden floors and low ceilings and a short corridor leading to a sitting area where a couch sat under a window that showed darkness and cold outside — actual outside, actual weather, the frost on the glass visible from here. A kitchen shelf to the right. A door to the left. The smell of coffee and old wood and the specific domestic warmth of a small apartment that someone lived in.
She turned her head.
And found the woman.
She was standing in the kitchen area with her back turned, and the back of her was — comprehensive. Blonde hair, thick and straight, falling past her shoulders to the middle of her back. A pair of horns rising from her head — small, curved, the horns of something that wasn’t fully human, ivory-pale and slightly lustrous in the lamp light.
A dress that had clearly been designed for a body two sizes smaller than the body currently wearing it, the fabric stretched drum-tight across the wide spread of her hips and the enormous, impossible roundness of her ass.