Whenever the world of espionage became too loud—between the thunder of gunfire and the clinical silence of a SHIELD briefing room—I never sought the sun. I didn't fly to exotic beaches or lose myself in the hollow music of city bars.
I came to Umbrella. I came to the quiet building at the edge of the city, and to the old house behind it where the man who once saved my life used to live before his health began to fail. It wasn't a habit born of duty; it was a sanctuary built on pure, unadulterated gratitude.
Umbrella was the only soil on earth where I didn't have to be Agent 13. There were no code names here. No weapons hidden beneath the sharp lines of a tailored jacket. Here, I could sit in the garden and drink tea, listening to the wind move through the trees, pretending—just for an hour—that the world wasn't constantly trying to kill me.
The old man liked to say, "A person needs one place where no one expects anything from them." He was the only one who never asked about my missions.
I had known about Aryan for years, but I had never met him. That wasn't an accident. The old man had been careful, shielding the boy like a sacred flame.
"He's busy," he would say whenever I asked. "Studying. Working. Too tired today."
Once, I smiled and said, "You're protecting him." He had smiled back, a weary, knowing look. "Yes." I understood that better than anyone. I worked in a world where people disappeared for knowing too much.
I had seen Aryan only in photographs. On the mantle, in framed family pictures along the hallway, in graduation photos sent from MIT. Blue eyes. Dark hair. A calm, intellectual expression that looked far older than his years. I remembered studying one photo in particular: Aryan standing beside his grandfather, both dressed formally. The old man's hand was resting on the boy's shoulder. Proud. Protective.
"He doesn't smile much," I remarked once.
The old man had chuckled. "He smiles when he thinks no one is watching."
One evening, after a mission that had gone bloodily wrong, I sat in that living room, bleeding through my sleeve. The old man stitched the wound himself, his hands steady despite his age.
"You shouldn't be doing this anymore," he said gently. I only offered a tired smile. Then, unexpectedly, he looked at me and said: "If something happens to me… look after him."
"He won't ask for help," the old man continued. "He'll pretend he doesn't need anyone. He thinks the world is always trying to take something from him. He's lonely, Sharon. He doesn't have anyone his age. No friends. Only work."
Then he asked me the question that would change the course of my life: "Would you be his friend?" Just... be there. I hesitated, then I nodded.
When the news of his passing reached me, I came to the funeral in civilian clothes. I stood at the very back, a ghost among the mourners. I watched the young man with the blue eyes and black hair stand alone—composed, distant, and looking exactly like someone who had just lost the only person he ever trusted.
I didn't approach him. Not yet.
Now, I work at Umbrella. I sit across from him in meetings, I bring him coffee, and I try to start conversations that he always ends with a polite, cold finality. He doesn't recognize me. He doesn't know that I am the girl who once broke down crying in his grandfather's garden, or that the old man sat with me for an hour in silence, handing me a handkerchief and saying, "You're alive. That's what matters."
He doesn't know the kitchen prepares the food he likes because I tell them to. He doesn't know that when I bring him coffee he didn't ask for, or when I prattle on about movies and trivial nonsense, I am deliberately dragging him back from the edge of the void.
The office was a tomb of glass and silence, and as I watched Aryan from my desk in the anteroom, I realized I was witnessing the slow disappearance of a human soul.
I had been watching him for months now—not with the predatory eyes of a SHIELD operative, but with the aching familiarity of someone who knew the ghosts that haunted his lineage. I observed the way he sat at his desk: back perfectly straight, fingers moving over the keys with rhythmic, mechanical precision that felt less like work and more like a ritual. He existed in a state of permanent, high-tensile tension, like a wire stretched until it was humming at a frequency no one else could hear.
I am not investigating him. Not really. I am keeping a promise to the man who called me 'child' and gave me a place to breathe.
I know Aryan thinks my friendliness is a tactic, a probe from a SHIELD operative. He sees a threat where there is only an inheritance. He doesn't realize that I am not standing in his office to watch him for Fury.
I noticed the small things—the things the board members and the tech journalists missed. I noticed that he never looked at the photos of his grandfather anymore. He had turned them slightly away, not out of disrespect, but as if the weight of those kind, painted eyes was more than his iron-clad heart could bear.
I watched the way he ate—if he ate at all. It was functional. Fuel for the engine. There was no joy in the taste, no pause for the scent. He was consuming the world, and in exchange, he was letting the world consume him.
"He thinks he's building an empire," I whispered to the empty air of my office. "But he's really building a fortress to keep himself in."
I remembered the old man's voice, raspy and soft in the twilight of the Spencer garden: "He believes that if he owns enough of the world, it can never hurt him again. He doesn't realize that the more you own, the more you have to lose."
There were moments, rare and fleeting as a spark in the dark, when the mask slipped. I would walk in with a file or a fresh cup of coffee, catching him staring out the window at the skyline. For a heartbeat, his shoulders would drop, and the predatory stillness would soften into something that looked like profound, ancient exhaustion.
In those seconds, he didn't look like the "Resurgent Heir" or the mastermind behind the Umbrella expansion. He looked like the boy in the graduation photo—the one who smiled when he thought no one was watching.
"Aryan," I had said once, stepping closer than the professional distance allowed. "The sun is down. The staff has gone home. The building is empty."
"The world doesn't sleep, Sharon," he had replied, not looking at me. "And neither does Umbrella."
"Umbrella is a company," I countered. "You are a man."
He finally looked at me then, and for a terrifying second, I felt like he was seeing through my skin, through my badge, and into the very promise I had made to his grandfather.
That was the moment I realized the depth of my task. I wasn't just there to keep him company; I was there to remind him that he was still made of flesh and blood.
I deliberately introduced chaos into his perfect, sterile world. I brought him tea that was slightly too hot so he would have to wait. I left magazines about art and history on his desk, obscuring the technical manuals. I spoke of the smell of the rain and the taste of the street food in Queens, dragging the mundane into his celestial calculations.
I saw the way the employees looked at him—with a mixture of awe and genuine terror. They saw a god in a tailored suit. But I saw the man who had lost his only anchor. I saw the way his hand would occasionally hover over the empty space on his desk where a family photo used to sit, before he caught himself and turned the movement into a reach for a pen. He was a masterpiece of self-denial.
And so, I stayed. I endured the coldness, the dismissals, and the silence. I played the part of the slightly-too-earnest secretary, the one who cared too much, because if I didn't, there would be no one left in his life who wasn't afraid of him.
I am there because a dead man asked me to make sure his grandson didn't have to walk through the dark alone. And as I watched his car disappear into the rain, I felt the weight of that promise. He's brilliant, he's powerful, and he's more dangerous than he knows—but he is also exactly what his grandfather said he was. He is lonely. And as long as I am standing, he won't be.
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