A pause. Then, with concentrated effort, Alistair's breathing evened out.
"You've done this before," he said.
"Yes."
"Often?"
"Often enough."
The bathroom light was clinical and direct, and in it Tav could see the full scale of Alistair's history written across his skin — old scars, healed and faded, placed in the distribution of someone who had spent time in situations that resulted in close-contact injury. Nothing dramatic. The accumulation of several incidents over years.
He placed the second stitch.
"You collect these," Tav said.
Alistair looked at him. "What?"
"The scars. Old ones. Consistently patterned for close-quarters contact."
A moment.
Then: "You're profiling me. Through my injuries."
"I'm treating you," Tav said. "The observation is incidental."
"Nothing you do is incidental." Alistair was watching him with the careful attention he reserved for things he found genuinely interesting, stripped of the performance that usually accompanied it. "You know that."
Tav tied off the suture. He checked the tension, checked the closure, and reached for the antiseptic again to clean the surrounding tissue.
"You moved like someone trained earlier tonight," he said. "In the office. Behind the shelf." He didn't look up. "Your response pattern under pressure is tactical, not instinctive. You make position decisions based on sightlines, not cover."
"That's an interesting observation from someone who made the same decisions."
"It is."
The bathroom was warm and bright and small, and the space between them — Tav crouching at Alistair's knee, his hands moving carefully across the injury — had a tender intimacy that didn't require comment and couldn't be avoided.
Alistair's fingers moved.
Barely. Just a shift of his hand from his knee toward Tav's face, a small and tentative motion that stopped before it arrived.
"You missed something," he said softly.
Tav looked up.
Alistair's fingers rested now near the angle of his jaw. Nowhere near the injury. There was nothing there to clean.
They looked at each other.
"You're lying," Tav said.
"Yes," Alistair said. Neither of them moved.
The city outside made its distant sounds: rain on glass, the far pulse of traffic, the building settling.
Inside, the clinical white light of the bathroom and the silence between two people at the edge of something they'd both been circling for weeks.
Tav should stand up.
