He followed Tav to the kitchen.
Tav sat him down at the island and retrieved the medical kit — their medical kit now, essentially, given how frequently it had become relevant — and unwrapped the sleeve carefully. The graze was longer than the positioning had suggested, running across the outer forearm from wrist to mid-arm, shallow but bleeding. Not serious. Still.
He cleaned it without comment.
Alistair watched him work in the quiet he had made several emotional thoughts in the last few minutes and was waiting to see where they settled.
"You're gentler than you think," Alistair said.
"I'm precise."
"Same thing, when precision looks like care." He watched Tav press gauze against the wound to stop the bleeding. "You were up waiting for me."
"I couldn't sleep."
"You sleep fine. I've heard you." A pause. "You were waiting."
Tav didn't respond.
"Tav," Alistair said. More quietly now. "What scared you enough to become this controlled?"
The question arrived for the second time — the same question he'd asked at the beginning of their conversation the previous morning, deflected then, present now with a different weight. Tav looked at him. At the careful honesty in his face, the genuine curiosity without agenda.
He applied a length of surgical tape.
"People," he said. "Specifically the fear of losing them."
"So you became someone they couldn't reach," Alistair said.
"So I became someone who could protect them. And then found there was no one left to protect." He checked the tape. "Ablation found me at the end of that. Control seemed like the rational response."
"Control over what?"
"Everything I could reach." Tav looked at his hands, which had been steady through all of this — the cleaning, the bandaging — with the steadiness of trained hands. "Starting with myself."
Alistair was quiet.
"And now?" he said.
Tav found his face.
Alistair was sitting at Tav's kitchen island at three in the morning with a knife graze and a damp jacket and eyes that were tired and patient and completely, dangerously honest.
"Now," Tav said, "I'm finding that control is easier with some variables than others."
Alistair studied him.
Then, carefully: "Am I a variable?"
Tav put the medical kit away.
When he turned back, Alistair was watching him with an expression he hadn't seen before — not warm, not challenging, not performing anything. Just present. Just himself, in the kitchen, at three in the morning, waiting.
"No," Tav said.
And there it was — in the way Alistair exhaled, in the way something in his shoulders released slightly that he hadn't appeared to be holding — Relief that came from a thing being said that had been needed.
"Go to bed," Tav said.
