“How can you condone what she did!?” A woman at the front of the pack shrieked the words, her face a mask of crimson fury.
The man paused. He was a massive, weathered pillar of a human, his shoulders currently slumped as if bearing the physical weight of the atmosphere. He took a slow, deliberate breath—the kind that whistles through the teeth and settles deep in the chest—and straightened. When he turned, the sheer scale of him forced the nearest agitators to recoil.
“I don’t condone it, madam,” he said. His voice was a low-frequency hum, a sound that didn’t fight the din so much as vibrate beneath it. The yelling faltered as people strained to hear.
“You see a silhouette cut out of a news cycle,” he continued, his hands clasped loosely at his front. “You see a week of actions stripped of their ‘why’ and fed to the pundits. You see a headline.”
He stopped, his gaze drifting upward toward the gray horizon, his expression softening into something private and distant.
“I see the girl who loses the battle with a suppressed laugh in a silent library. I see the woman whose fingernails are permanently stained with the grease and soil of the projects she builds to clear her head. I see the person who spends her kindness on those who would never think to thank her.” He looked back at the crowd, his eyes refocusing, clear and heavy with grief. “I see a lifetime of a person. You only see an afternoon.”
He let the silence hang for a heartbeat.
“No, I do not condone what she has done,” he whispered, “but I will provide the shelter she needs to face it. I will give her the space to reckon with herself while the law does its work.”
He stepped back, turning his massive frame toward the woman being led away in cuffs. “If that makes me a target for your judgment, then so be it. She has earned my protection a million times over.”
A strange, fragile hush fell over the street. For a second, the man’s stillness acted as a psychic anchor, dragging the fever pitch of the mob down to a somber, reflective lull.
Then, a jagged piece of slate whistled through the air.
It struck his shoulder with a dull thud. He winced, a momentary ripple of pain crossing his features, but he didn’t raise a hand to the wound. He simply accepted it. As a second and third stone followed, he turned his back to the crowd, hunching his massive frame into a living shield. He became a wall of flesh and coat, absorbing the blows to ensure the figure walking before him remained untouched.
The silence broke. The dam of the crowd’s restraint shattered, and the roar returned—not as a protest, but as a tidal wave of renewed, senseless fury.
