The sentence didn't need finishing.
Tav understood the shape of it.
"And then," Tav said.
Alistair looked at him directly. "And then."
The kitchen was warm and the coffee was good and the city outside had begun its slow Saturday movement. Tav looked at Alistair and felt the complicated compound feeling that had been building since approximately the first morning — the recognition, the wariness, warmth that came from proximity tosomeone you had started to understand — and let himself be honest about it.
"Losing people," Tav said.
Alistair went still.
"That's what made me this." Tav watched the window. "I was not always—" He paused, searching for accurate language. "I had a different relationship with trust once. With caring about outcomes beyond my own." He looked back at Alistair. "I was very young. I was not careful enough.
And Ablation found me when I had no good options left." Silence spread between them like water finding its level.
"And they taught you control," Alistair said.
"They taught me that control was the alternative to loss."
"And now?"
Tav found his face. At the careful attention and the quiet honesty and the scar on his jaw and the silver rings that caught the morning light, the fact that he was here, in Tav's kitchen, in a city neither of them belonged to, for reasons neither of them had been told.
He looked down at the kitchen island. That was when he saw it.
Partially exposed beneath the edge of Alistair's jacket — which he'd draped over the stool beside him — a card was visible. Black. Matte. With silver numbering along one edge.
Tav had seen cards exactly like it before.
Ablation issue.
Not stolen. Not fabricated. The weight and finish and number format were exactly what Tav was familiar with from his own.
He looked at it. Looked at Alistair.
Alistair had followed his gaze.
The kitchen went very quiet.
Tav met his eyes.
"You belong to Ablation," he said.
Interesting, Tav thought.
Very compromised indeed.
And the morning, which had been almost peaceful for a few minutes, became something else entirely.
• • •
• • •
At 11:47 p.m. Tav was reading when Alistair came home.
He had been sitting in the kitchen with the book and the reading lamp for approximately two hours — not because he couldn't sleep, but because the apartment in the evening had a quality he'd found himself extending his awake hours to inhabit. The warmth of a space that had become genuinely occupied. The sounds of the city below, reduced to their minimal nocturnal version. The way the kitchen felt different from any kitchen he'd been in since he was twenty-two and had stopped having places that belonged to him.
