"I don't like needing people," he said.
He said it to the window. The city lights, the pre-dawn blue, the slow brightening at the horizon's edge.
"I know," Tav said.
"I've built — I've spent a long time building a way of being that doesn't require it. Doesn't expose the requirement." "Not because I don't feel it. I've always felt it. People who perform independence the way I perform it usually feel the requirement most sharply." He studied his coffee. "But I learned early that needing people was a vulnerability that cost more than the other kind."
Tav leaned against the counter beside him.
"What kind of early?" he said.
Alistair glanced at him. Not surprised by the question — Tav asked direct questions and Alistair had long since stopped being surprised by the directness.
"My parents," he said. "Not in a dramatic way. Just — they were people who needed things from each other and from Lucien and from me, and the needing was louder than the care. You learned quickly to be the person who was needed rather than the person who needed." "And then Ablation found me and
gave me a framework where that was a feature rather than a defense mechanism." He fixed on the window. "Until now."
"Until now," Tav said.
"Until you." He said it with the flatness of someone stating a fact rather than performing an admission.
"You have — you make it very difficult to maintain the architecture." He glanced sideways. "You know that."
"Yes," Tav said.
"You don't do it deliberately."
"No."
"Which is worse," Alistair said. "If you were doing it deliberately I could categorize it as a tactic." He watched his coffee. "You're just — you're like this. Naturally."
Tav drank his coffee.
"What happened to you," Alistair said. Not a question. A return — to the conversation they'd started at three in the morning weeks ago and had been navigating around since.
"You asked me before," Tav said.
"You told me you'd lost people. I didn't ask for the specifics." "I'm asking for them now."
Tav watched the window.
"There was a person," he said. "Before Ablation." He stopped. "Two people, really. A partner and — and someone I was responsible for. Younger." "I made decisions that I believed were correct and they were not, and the people I was responsible for didn't survive the decisions."
Alistair was very still.
"Not a mission," Tav said. "Not an operational context. I was twenty-two. I didn't have a mission. I was just—" "Someone who thought they understood the situation and didn't, and someone paid for that with their life, and someone else paid in a different way that lasted longer." He studied the counter. "Ablation found me eighteen months after that. I had very few remaining options and considerable motivation to be useful."
"You've been punishing yourself since you were twenty-two," Alistair said.
Tav studied him.
"That's not—"
"The control," Alistair said quietly. "The precision. The way you hold yourself to standards that you don't hold anyone else to." He met his eyes. "You're not doing it to be excellent. You're doing it because you decided that the cost of a mistake was too high to ever make another one."
The kitchen was very still.
Tav could feel the accuracy of the statement landing in the way that accurate things landed — not painfully, but with the weight of something that had been visible from the outside when you couldn't see it from the inside.
