"Why give them an incomplete version?"
"Because the complete version complicates things." He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and the position closes the distance between us to something my spatial awareness classifies as intimate. I can see individual drops of sweat along his hairline, the vein in his neck still pulsing from exertion, the way his hands hang between his knees, loose and capable and close enough to touch mine if I let them.
"The team has a structure. Kane commands. The operators kick in doors and handle the fieldwork. Sarah runs signals. I run systems. Everyone has a lane, and the lanes work because they're defined. If I start showing up to team PT looking like I actually give a damn about my bench press, that raises questions about what else I'm not telling them."
"Questions about what?"
He looks at me. The glasses are between us, reflective, and I can see my own face in them, doubled and distorted, the rainbow hair turned to smudged color in the curved lenses.
"About why I train in the middle of the night instead of sleeping. About what runs through my head when the base is quiet and the screens are dark and I don't have twelve concurrent processes to hide behind. About the form of insomnia that comes from spending your career watching thingshappen to people you care about through a camera feed and never being the one who walks through the door."
The last sentence strips something away that the humor usually covers, and the room changes. Honest. The temperature of two people sitting close enough to feel each other's body heat in a cold room, telling the truth because the hour makes lying feel like too much work.
"You watch them." I say it carefully, as recognition rather than accusation. "Through the feeds. Every mission. Every extraction. Every firefight."
"Every one."
"And you've never been in the field."
"Not recently. I drove a couple of times, early on, when the team was small and every body counted. Kane has offered since but I said no because I was more valuable behind the screens, and that was true, and it was also the excuse I needed to stay where it was safe, and I've never been able to separate the operational logic from the cowardice."
"It isn't cowardice."
"You don't know that."
"I know that the encryption holding this facility together is the most sophisticated defensive system I've encountered in years of professional offensive operations, and the man who built it from secondhand hardware and salvaged parts isn't lacking in courage. He's lacking in the particular brand of stupidity that makes people run toward gunfire."
He reaches for the humor. I can see the effort, the muscle memory of deflection activating the way a damaged system attempts a routine reboot. His mouth starts to shape something, a joke, a redirect, the party trick of converting vulnerability into something the room can laugh at.
It doesn't come. The shape collapses before it becomes words, and he looks away, jaw working, and the failure of thedeflection is more revealing than anything he's actually said tonight. I've watched this man joke his way through technical briefings, and tactical crises. The humor is his operating system. It runs everything.
It isn't running now. What replaces it is raw, and the rawness on a face I've only seen behind glass and deflection makes my chest ache in a way I don't have a diagnostic for.
He scrubs a hand through his damp hair, pushing it back from his forehead, and the movement leaves it standing in rough angles that make him look younger and less defended. I track the gesture, track the way the muscles in his forearm flex during the motion, track the damp line of his neck where the towel missed, and every piece of data my observation produces makes the ache in my chest worse.
"You're not what I expected." He says it quietly, almost to himself, eyes fixed on the far wall.
"What did you expect?"
"Someone I could keep at a distance." He looks back at me, and the honesty in his expression is so unprotected that I want to look away and can't.
I don't have a response for that. The admission mirrors something I haven't said out loud, and the symmetry of it sits between us like a live wire neither of us is willing to touch.
He lets the silence hold for a long moment before his voice drops lower, quieter, the rapid-fire cadence slowed to something deliberate where each word carries weight it doesn't usually carry. "Why did you send the warning? The real reason."
I turn the question over, examine it from angles, run it through the filter that separates what I tell people from what I know about myself.
"Because your encryption signature is the most elegant thing I've found in years of mapping ugly systems, and I didn't want to watch someone destroy it." The answer comes out beforethe filter catches it, raw and unprocessed, and the honesty sits between us with the discomfort of something that was supposed to stay encrypted.
The gym is so quiet I can hear his breathing change. The rhythm that was still settling from exertion shifts into something slower, more deliberate, as if the words I just said rearranged something in his chest and his lungs are adjusting to the new configuration.
My eyes drop to his collarbone where the t-shirt's pulled to one side, to the line of sweat still drying there, and the urge to press my thumb against that spot, to feel his pulse through skin, is so strong my hand twitches on the bench. The distance between my fingers and his thigh is inches, close enough to feel the warmth coming off him in waves that my cold hands track the way sensors track heat signatures.
Neither of us moves. The not-moving is a decision, and the decision is costing both of us something, and the cost is visible in the way his jaw tightens and my fingers curl against the bench surface and the air between us holds its breath.
Tommy takes off his glasses, folds them carefully, and sets them on the bench beside his thigh. Without them, his face is the unguarded version, and he's choosing it. He's removing the barrier on purpose, and the purpose is to let me see him the way I just saw his body: completely, without the protective layer he shows everyone else.
His eyes are brown, warm in a way that contradicts the cold competence of his code.
