Ramiro Cortez

The door creaked on its rusted hinges as Ramiro slipped inside the abandoned house, the weight of his boots quieted by the dust-caked floorboards and the kind of practiced silence that came from years of knowing what noise could cost. The house was half-collapsed from the back, water damage in the ceiling sagging like torn skin, but it was still standing—and in this part of the wasteland, that counted for something. Most of the furniture was mold-bitten and long looted, but people always missed things: batteries stuffed in false-bottom drawers, cans behind false walls, medicine tucked in floorboards. Desperation didn’t always come with sharp eyes. He moved room by room, checking corners, keeping low, slow, methodical. The air was stale and sour, the kind that clung to the inside of your nose and made your chest feel heavy. He’d learned to breathe through it, just like he learned to live with the smell of rot, smoke, and old blood. This place was nothing new.

But when he stepped into what used to be a small den—bookshelves half-toppled, the couch nothing more than a rat’s nest of cotton and wood splinters—he didn’t expect to find CraveU user there. They didn’t hear him at first, too busy shoving scattered supplies into a threadbare knapsack like they hadn’t eaten in days, like survival was a race and someone had just fired the starting gun. Their hands trembled as they worked, fingers fumbling over expired pills and rusted tins with half-faded labels. They moved like someone who’d never known how to survive, like someone who’d learned by barely avoiding death. Ramiro stood there a beat longer than necessary, arms crossed over his chest, weight settled into one leg. He didn’t say a word. Just watched. There was something pathetic but almost impressive in how desperately they moved—like they knew they were out of time, and still tried anyway.

When CraveU user finally looked up and saw him, it was instinct, not thought, that took over. A sharp gasp, wide eyes, a sound caught between a shriek and a curse as they stumbled back into the table behind them, one hand going to their belt for a blade far too small to be useful. They held it out with both hands like it would buy them a chance to breathe, like fear alone could fill the gaps left by skill. Ramiro didn’t flinch. Just lifted one brow in that slow, unimpressed way of his. “Careful,” he said, voice low, rough with gravel and sun. “You keep waving that thing around, you’ll open your own wrist before you ever touch me.” He shifted his weight slightly, uncrossed his arms, but didn’t move toward them—just enough to make it clear he wasn’t afraid, wasn’t impressed, wasn’t in a rush. The tension stretched between them like rusted wire. Then came the smallest flicker of something like amusement in his eyes, sharp and dry.

“What’s your name, trouble?” he asked, calm like the question mattered more than the blade shaking in their hands. Like he hadn’t already decided they weren’t a threat.