Unconfirmed

POV: Ricki

Ricki learned it on his fourth day, standing in line for the noon meal. A shove from behind sent him stumbling into the man ahead of him, and something under his skin lit hot and fast, a flare climbing from his chest to his jaw before he caught his balance. The tray in his hands rattled. For one disorienting second the world sharpened at the edges, sounds too crisp, the fluorescent lights suddenly buzzing loud enough to hurt, the smell of reconstituted eggs turning his stomach into something raw and hungry for a different kind of meal entirely.

"Watch it," the man in front barked, spinning around, shoulders squared for a fight that hadn't started yet.

Ricki opened his mouth to apologize, but the words caught behind something else, a heat pressing up through his throat that had nothing to do with embarrassment. His hands curled into fists without permission. He stared down at them, distantly aware of his own pulse hammering too loud in his ears, and beneath that, a strange clarity, like he could feel exactly where every bone met every knuckle, exactly how much force it would take to cave in a face.

Then it left him. As fast as it came, the heat drained out, and he stood there again, hands loose, chest heaving for no reason he could name. His knees buckled slightly, the aftermath of something his body understood better than his mind did. A guard three feet away, Petrosky, didn't even glance up from her phone.

Griff, three places back, went carefully blank in a way that told Ricki more than any reaction could have. His jaw worked once, a small tic, like a man biting down on chronic pain that never fully quit. A pack bond severed by the suppressants, Ricki would learn later - a phantom limb that ached on schedule.

Ricki looked away first, cheeks burning with a shame he couldn't explain, like he'd been caught doing something obscene in a language he didn't speak.

That was the first time.

The second thing hit an hour later in the yard. A sharp, greasy smell reached him - bacon fat and burnt coffee layered over mildewed carpet - drifting from what had to be two corridors away, some guard's off-duty lunch. The smell arrived so vivid it made his skull throb, made him brace one hand against the fence just to stay upright, nausea lurching through him that had nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with the pills they made him swallow every morning under a guard's watchful eye, pills that turned every meal to ash and now, apparently, weren't doing their job.

"You good?" Simms asked, flat and clinical, watching him the way he watched everything - measuring, cataloguing.

"Yeah." Ricki blinked hard, waiting out the dizziness, willing his face into something ordinary. "Just tired."

Simms let it drop, but his eyes lingered a beat too long, the same way Griff's had, and Ricki understood, with a sinking clarity, that tired wasn't going to cover this much longer.

He found Leon Church later that afternoon. Or rather, Leon found him, already standing at the edge of the yard with that same unhurried stillness, as if Ricki had simply failed to notice him until now. There was something unnerving about the way Leon moved, or didn't move, a stillness that felt rehearsed, the stillness of a man who'd learned long ago that patience unsettled people more than a fist ever could.

"Delano." Leon spoke the name like he already owned it, amused. "Word is you're causing quite a stir."

"I'm not trying to," Ricki said, defensive, hating how young his voice sounded.

"That's usually how the best ones do it," Leon said, dry, almost bored, his eyes moving over Ricki slow and unhurried - the same clinical read he'd gotten from the classification tech, from Warden Redmond, from Griff that first morning. A file compiled somewhere he'd never see, added to with every glance, every clipboard, every whispered word in the chow line.

"You know what I am?" Ricki blurted, urgent, before he could stop himself.

Something flickered across Leon's face and vanished. "I know what you're not," he said, level, almost gentle. "That's not quite the same question."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Ricki demanded, frustration cracking through the composure he'd been trying to hold onto since the trial.

"It means you just asked that question in the middle of an open yard, where anyone could hear," Leon said, quiet now, which made it land harder than shouting would have. "Curiosity like that gets noticed. Logged. And there are people in this building you do not want logging you, Delano. Not yet. Maybe not ever."

"Who?" Ricki pressed, stepping closer without meaning to.

"That's a conversation for somewhere with fewer ears," Leon said, final, his gaze holding Ricki's a beat longer, something almost like pity passing behind his eyes before it disappeared behind the usual flat composure. Then he turned and walked off without another word, past two inmates by the fence conducting business Ricki didn't need Leon's warning to understand, a hand disappearing into a waistband, a commissary card changing palms, the particular economy of a place where nothing, not sex, not safety, not a clean dose, came free.

Ricki stood there with more questions than he'd started with, and one new certainty sitting cold in his gut: he'd already made a mistake he hadn't known enough to avoid, and Leon had just shown him exactly how easy that mistake was to spot.

That evening, Ricki sat on the end of a bench in the common area, half-listening to the drone of a television bolted behind wire mesh, when the man beside him, an older inmate named Doyle who smelled of menthol cigarettes and instant coffee, leaned in without looking over.

"You're the unconfirmed," Doyle said, not a question, working something out from between his teeth. "Heard about a guy like you, two years back. Cell block C."

"What happened to him?" Ricki asked, careful, not wanting to spook whatever this was before it gave him something real.

"Got handled." Doyle said it flat, like a man reciting a fact he'd long since stopped being surprised by. "Ambiguous classification, they called it. One week he's asking questions same as you. Next week his bunk's empty and nobody's got a story."

"Handled how?" Ricki pressed, leaning closer despite himself. "Handled by who?"

Doyle's face closed like a door swinging shut. "Didn't say," he muttered, already pushing up off the bench, done with the conversation the moment it required him to know something specific. "Just said. Best you don't go asking around, is what I heard."

"Wait," Ricki said, but Doyle had already drifted off toward the far wall, hands in his pockets, whistling something tuneless, and nobody else in the room met Ricki's eyes when he looked for someone, anyone, willing to finish what Doyle had started. Nobody wanted to say it aloud, the same way nobody had wanted to talk about the Deep End on the bus. The silence itself felt like an answer, one Ricki didn't want to hear confirmed.

He lay awake that night, staring at the ceiling, running his palms over his forearms as though he might find some visible proof of whatever lived beneath his skin, some seam where the ordinary Ricki ended and this other thing began. His mouth tasted faintly of copper, the same taste he got before the surges, like he'd bitten the inside of his cheek, though he hadn't. Somewhere down the block, a radiator ticked as it cooled, the same small, patient sound Jules used to leave the porch light humming on for him, and for a moment he let himself picture her hands, steady and sure, adjusting his collar before the verdict, and Liz's face crumbling in the gallery when the word "guilty" landed. He wondered what they'd make of him now, flinching at shadows, learning the grammar of a world with no name for what he'd become. Then he pushed the thought down where the rest of them lived, because there wasn't room here for anything that soft.

He was still awake when footsteps came down the hall on evening rounds, unhurried, methodical, stopping outside his cell a beat longer than routine required. He recognized her from the roster the guards had rattled off that morning. Officer Blackwood.

"Delano." She didn't look at him fully, her eyes fixed somewhere past his shoulder, the particular not-looking of someone saying something she wasn't supposed to say. "Confirmation hearing's in two weeks."

"Okay." He sat up, hope flickering despite himself. "That's good, right? They'll figure out what I am."

She didn't answer that directly, and the silence stretched long enough that Ricki's hope curdled into something closer to dread. "Word of advice," she said, voice dropped low, careful in a way that raised the hair on his arms, the same way the Deep End corridor had. "Figure out what you are before they decide it for you."

"What does that mean?" Ricki asked, voice cracking slightly on the last word.

She was already moving, flashlight beam sweeping to the next cell, boots striking concrete in the same steady rhythm as before, as if the conversation had never happened, as if she hadn't just handed him something heavier than any verdict the jury had read aloud. Her footsteps faded down the corridor.

The heat came again, faster this time, sharper, climbing his throat in a rush that flared the edges of his vision strange and bright. His hand shot out and caught the bunk frame, gripping hard enough that the metal groaned, actually groaned, a low tortured sound like a door hinge under too much weight. When he finally let go, five small crescents stayed pressed into the steel where his fingers had dug in like it was nothing more than wet clay.

He sat with that heat until it passed, until his breathing evened out and the corridor went quiet again, until the only sound left was his own heartbeat slowing by degrees. Then, in the dark, he made a decision, small and silent and entirely his own. He was done waiting for someone else to hand him the answer. Whatever he was, he would find it himself, before Blackwood's warning had the chance to come true, before the machinery of this place could decide his fate the way the courtroom already had, without ever asking him what he wanted to be.