Too quiet, in the way that spaces became quiet when a person had been present and was no longer — a occupied absence rather than emptiness, the particular acoustic change of a room missing one of its regular sounds.
Tav noticed it before he was fully awake.
He lay in the dark, listening. No movement from the kitchen. No jazz from the living room speaker.
No small domestic sounds from behind the wall that separated their bedrooms, the kind he'd been becoming unconsciously attuned to over the past weeks: Alistair's morning routine mapped across the building's acoustic landscape whether Tav chose to learn it or not.
He got up.
Alistair's bedroom door was shut. Tav stood in the hallway and considered the shut door and the silence coming through it, and recognized — with the specific, unhelpful clarity of someone who had been avoiding clarity for two weeks — that he had been listening for another person's morning routine.
This was a problem.
He put the kettle on.
By the time the coffee was ready, he had moved to the window and was watching the city, which did not offer the insight he was looking for but was at least a neutral place to look.The morning was grey, low cloud sitting on the building tops, the streets below quiet in the way of Saturdays.
• • •
Tav woke the next morning to the smell of coffee.
Alistair appeared in the kitchen doorway wearing clothes that were unmistakably his own rather than whatever he'd been able to grab while managing a knife wound and a late-night operational debrief.
He looked like he'd slept, which Tav noted with a disproportionate sense of relief that he immediately classified and set aside.
He also looked like someone who had been awake for a while, which complicated the relief.
"How long have you been up?" Tav asked.
"Couple of hours." He moved to the coffee without asking, that was by now a fixed feature of their shared mornings. "Wound aches when I lie still for too long. Makes sleep light." He looked at Tav's expression. "Don't. I'm fine."
"I wasn't—"
"You were making the face." Tav did not respond to this.
Alistair poured his coffee and settled at the island, and the morning reassembled itself around them in the way mornings had been assembling since the first week: the two of them in the kitchen in the early hours, the city visible through the window, the space between them compressed by proximity and charged by everything that hadn't been said.
"I want to ask you something," Alistair said.
"Ask."
"What happened to you?" He said it without drama — steady and quiet, the voice of someone who had been thinkingabout how to ask a thing and had landed on directness as the honest choice.
"Not professionally. As a person." He looked at his coffee. "You're the most controlled human being I've ever met, and I've met a lot of controlled people. Something made that." The question landed in the apartment like something placed down carefully.
Tav watched him.
Alistair wasn't performing. He was sitting at the island in the morning light with his injured side and his coffee and the straightforward openness he had decided to be honest and was waiting to see if it would be received.
"You first," Tav said.
A brief exhale. Almost a laugh. "Fair."
Alistair fixed on the window. The grey morning light fell across his face in a way that erased some of the sharpness, left him looking — Tav searched for the word — younger. Not naive. Just less defended.
"I don't like needing people," Alistair said. "I never have. I built a whole professional identity around being pleasant and charming and completely self-sufficient, and for a long time that worked fine."
"And then I came here and — " He stopped.
