The bell had barely finished rattling when trouble found its favorite playground: the third-floor hallway by the lockers. A cluster of sophomores circled like vultures, whispering and laughing. In the middle of the circle a smaller kid—fresh-faced, cheeks red—stood with his head pressed down by one of the bigger boys. Someone had jammed a cigarette into the side of his cap and nobody had the decency to put it out.
Elijah had been clearing gym equipment into the storage room when the noise reached him. He wiped his hands on a towel and walked out into the corridor with the same slow, unhurried gait that made everyone feel like nothing could possibly go wrong… until it did. His voice, when he spoke, never needed to be loud to cut through a room.
"Hey," he said, casually leaning against the locker bank. "Whose cigarette is that?"
Silence snapped like a rubber band. The ringleader—a tall kid with arrogance for days—looked up, lips curling. "None of your business, old man."
"Mr. Green," someone whispered, and Elijah's jaw twitched with the kind of patient amusement that made kids want to be both careful and adored.
The ringleader shoved his victim's cap down harder, grinning as the cigarette burned close to skin. That was the moment Elijah stepped in.
He didn't shout. He didn't lunge. He simply walked forward, reached into his back pocket, and plucked a student's phone out of the air—Aiko's, who'd been aiming to take a snap for reasons of morality and entertainment in equal measure. The screen lit up in his hand.
"You're recording," the ringleader spat. "Delete it."
Elijah raised an eyebrow. "I'm recording to prove you're an idiot," he said, and tapped the record button. Then he did something unexpected: he handed the phone back to Aiko. "Make it good."
Aiko's fingers shook with excitement as she aimed, whispering, "Mr. Green—what are you doing?"
"Teaching," he said. "Now get a clear shot."
The ringleader pushed the kid too far. Someone in the circle—maybe sympathy, maybe stupidity—decided to pull the victim's shorts down as a joke. Except the world likes to be poetic: the kid's underwear had obviously seen better days. There was an obvious, mortifying discoloration, and in that long, horrible second the hallway turned into a live comedy roast.
The reaction was electric. Some kids gasped. Others doubled over laughing. The ringleader's smirk cracked. Elijah didn't flinch. He waited just a hair longer than polite, then gently took the edge of the ringleader's hoodie and tugged—hard enough to tip him forward and completely off balance, soft enough not to bruise. The bully sprawled into a locker door with a pratfall that would've been impressive in a slapstick movie.
Elijah planted a knee on the floor as if to help him up and instead reached forward, grabbed the bully's waistband, and—purely theatrical—gave a quick tug that produced a wedgie so dramatic the entire hallway howled. Aiko's recording caught the whole thing: the look of astonishment on the bully's face, the reveal of the unfortunate stains, the sudden silence from the crowd, and finally, the ringleader's red, humiliated retreat.
Elijah's eyes were warm as he helped the victim to his feet. "You okay?" he asked. The smaller boy nodded, trying to smile through tears of mortification and relief.
"You," Elijah told the ringleader, voice soft but absolute, "apologize. And you come to lunch detention for a week. You'll help fix the equipment in the gym after school. You'll look people in the eye when you speak to them. You will not touch anyone's head like that."
The bully's pride had evaporated; humiliation filled the gap. He subsided into a muttered, half-hearted "sorry," and shambled away. The recording went viral inside the student body within an hour—on lock screen, in dorm chats, and carved into the school's unofficial legend. For days that kid would be known as "the wedgie boy," and not in a flattering way.
That night, Elijah sat alone in the dim glow of his living room, thinking it should have felt more satisfying. It didn't. He'd defused a small injustice and made the school marginally safer. But the phone sensation, the laughter—none of it touched the deeper itch that had been scratching his back for a long time: the idea that his past could wander into this quiet life and ruin the routine he'd fought so hard to keep.
They came for him two days later at dusk.
Elijah was back in the gym, arranging cones in a pattern for a dribbling drill, when the lights at the far end flicked like a staccato warning. He didn't look up. The gym doors opened soundlessly and a man walked in like someone used to not needing permission. He was lean but wiry, dressed in a cheap suit that had seen better days. A faint silver revolver rested in a holster on his hip like an accessory instead of a threat.
They recognized each other.
Silas Reed—ranked 191 on whatever web of rankings old men with grudges used—smiled in a way that didn't reach his eyes. He had been Elijah's partner once, back when the world had a different shape and choices were simpler and meaner. Silas was all cold math and small indulgences; he treated violence like a manicure—necessary and precise. He flipped the revolver in his hand out of habit, as if checking grooves for nostalgia.
"Elijah," Silas said. "Still playing teacher? That's… new."
Elijah set down a cone and leaned against the wall. "Silas," he replied. "You brought a gun to a school. Brave."
Silas's smile widened. "I need a favor. One job. You retire, but things get complicated. I want to take one of your old debts off your ledger. I'll do it clean. Quick."
"School's not a ledger," Elijah said. "And I don't do favors for people who come in through the back door."
Silas shrugged. "So you'll shoot me. Or I'll make trouble for someone you like." He let the understatement hang between them like a knife. "Either way, I get what I want."
Kids on the sidewalk kept passing by the big gym windows, oblivious to the cold calculus in the dim light. Elijah's voice was calm, the kind of calm that made planets seem like light bulbs.
"Sit down," Elijah said.
Silas barked a short laugh. "You think you can take me?"
That was the mistake. Silence fell. Then motion happened so fast it looked like a bad edit.
Elijah moved like a pendulum carrying an entire city. He folded forward: a low sweep that knocked Silas's pistol free of his hand and sent it skittering across the polished floor. Silas lunged for it. Elijah's hand closed around his wrist with the force of a vise. The world bent. Silas cried out—only a sound, not a scream—and then Elijah had him pinned against the climbing ropes, limbs immobilized in a posture that was both impossible and poetic.
Breathing hard, Silas met Elijah's eyes and saw the quiet threat there: not just strength, but the infinite patience behind it. Elijah could kill him in a dozen ways with no sign. He could snap his neck and the world would explain it away in a headline. But that wasn't the point. Elijah wanted leverage, not a corpse.
"You want my past cleared?" Elijah asked softly. "You want to do business?"
Silas spat silently, ragged. "I want money. I want power. I want…" He broke off. "I used to be someone who did the taking. I can still—"
"You're rank 191," Elijah said, as if reciting his résumé. "Not impressive enough to convince anyone who matters. But you're resourceful. You know the roads. You can find things. You can be useful."
Silas's face crumpled with a half-smile of disgust. "Useful? To you? In a school?"
Elijah's ungloved hand tightened for a heartbeat. "You either make trouble for me and the people in this school, or you work here. Clean equipment. Fix lockers. Supervise after-school detention. You get food, room to sleep in the supply closet if you need it, and I'll make sure no old enemies come sniffing around you. You do this for a year, and when it's over, I'll give you a letter of—"
"Employment?" Silas rasped.
"A cover," Elijah finished. "And you'll be paid from a source that won't ask questions. You'll be on my payroll. You will not touch a weapon on school grounds. If you break that rule, I won't have to decide anymore — consequences will happen."
Silas swallowed. His eyes flicked past Elijah toward the row of gym windows and the world beyond: kids laughing in the courtyard, a detention notice pinned to the office door, a life that didn't require measuring worth in bullets. The offer was humiliating, but it was also life.
"You're making me a janitor," he said, bitter laughter strangling it. "You can't be serious."
Elijah's grin was almost fond. "You need a lesson in humility. The school needs a handyman. Consider it vocational training."
He snapped Silas's wrist lightly to loosen the hold and then shoved him toward the supply closet with a shove that was more control than force. The revolver lay on the floor where it had landed. Silas picked it up slowly, staring at it like an old lover, then locked it away in a pocket he'd pretend to forget existed.
"Start tomorrow," Elijah said. "You'll be introduced to Principal Nakamura as an alumnus helping out—tonight you sleep in the supply closet, and next month you get your own locker. If you try anything, the video from Aiko's phone will be just the beginning. I have friends who remember names like yours."
Silas laughed once—half a sob, half a sneer—then nodded. Pride died in stages.
Word traveled fast.
On Monday Silas showed up, rubbing sore shoulders and wearing an oversized sweatshirt students joked was a uniform for the doomed. He worked the earliest shift, collecting balls, fixing treadmills with reluctant competence, and bringing a smug, bitter commentary that made the kids think he had daddy issues. Elijah watched him like a man watching a bonsai grow: pruning, patient, practiced.
The students loved the drama. To them, it was classic television—old enemies turned janitor, the beloved teacher who can beat any man yet still make a kid feel like a champion. The fact that Silas sometimes snapped into a focused, cold expression when a real threat showed (or when a suspicious man approached the front gates) made him both feared and oddly fascinating. He was a villain in training, an ally in begrudging form, and a character that would be hard to forget.
For Elijah, the arrangement was a small, private victory. He'd turned a potential threat into an asset, bought himself a measure of safety for the school, and given a broken man a chance—one that would not be soft, but might keep the worst of his old life at bay.
And in the back of his head, as he walked the campus at dusk and listened to the distant laughter of students, Elijah felt something like contentment. He'd taken a bully down with a wedgie and a phone, turned a revolver into a broom, and kept the school intact, at least for now.
What neither he nor the kids knew yet was how much the world outside the school's walls was watching, waiting to see whether the man who'd once been called Shadow Fist could keep his past quiet long enough for a classroom to become a sanctuary.