The weight behind it reaches past tactical training, all the way to a wife and daughter buried under Committee rubble.
"I lost my family because attachment has a cost in this life, and the Committee doesn't care who pays it." The sentence isflat and practiced and carries the polish of words that have been spoken to himself so many times they've worn smooth, and the smoothness cuts.
Dylan's wife Lisa and his daughter Maya died in a Committee bombing years before he ever walked through Echo Base's blast door. It was a targeted strike designed to eliminate witnesses to a Syrian operation. They were collateral damage, wrong place at the wrong time.
By the time Kane recruited him, Dylan had already hunted down everyone responsible, already gone back to work for the Committee, already spent years disappearing people into rooms he built because the grief had eaten through every boundary between what he was and what they needed him to become. He arrived at this mountain with the loss calcified into his bones, old enough to carry quietly and permanent enough that it shaped every corridor he walked through.
Reagan changed that. Not by fixing him, not by erasing the loss, but by walking into it with her eyes open and choosing to stay. Dylan chose love again after burying everything that mattered, and that's why his question about my judgment carries the weight it does.
He's not warning me from the wreckage. He's warning me from the other side of it.
I know what it looks like when it surfaces because I've watched, through the feeds, from behind my screens. It's the only way I know how to keep vigil for people whose pain I can't touch.
The first anniversary after Dylan arrived at Echo Base, I was running routine security sweeps on the internal cameras and found him in the corridor outside his quarters in the dead hours. His hands hung between his knees. His eyes were fixed on a point in the stone wall that I'm certain he's still looking at somewhere inside his head.
His face was a thing I've never been able to delete from my memory despite years of trying. It wasn't fresh grief. It was something worse, a man revisiting a wound so familiar he knows its exact dimensions, pressing the bruise to remind himself it's real.
I watched because someone had to make sure he didn't walk out of the mountain and not come back. Kane was watching too, but Kane was doing it in person. I was doing it the way I do everything: through glass, at a distance, useful and useless in equal measure.
It happened every year. It was always the same night, the same corridor, the same point on the wall. I stopped checking because it felt like trespassing, but I never stopped making sure the external sensors were running clean those nights in case he decided to walk.
"Everyone in this mountain is someone I can't afford to lose. I need to know that the people making decisions about who comes through that door are making those decisions with their heads."
"My head is fine."
"Your head redesigned an entire relay protocol overnight because she pointed out a flaw. Your head, Tommy."
The counter lands because it's accurate. I did redesign the relay overnight. I told myself it was operational necessity, that the vulnerability she identified needed immediate remediation, that any competent systems architect would've done the same. All of that's true.
None of it's the whole truth. Dylan's standing in front of me with the eyes of a man who's buried a wife and a daughter, asking me to be honest because the cost of dishonesty in this place is measured in bodies.
"I don't know." The admission comes out quieter than I intend. "I don't know if my judgment's compromised, Dylan. Iknow she's the most technically capable person I've ever worked with. I know the weapon aimed at this base requires her skills to counter. I know I can't solve this without her, and I know that assessment is operational, and I know it's also possible that it isn't entirely operational, and I haven't figured out where the line is yet."
The silence that follows is the most honest sound in the corridor. Dylan holds it, holds my gaze, and then nods once with the tight economy of a man who received the answer he expected.
"Figure it out. Before the Committee figures it out for you."
He turns the corner. I stand in the armory corridor with my glasses in my hand and the taste of an admission I wasn't ready to make sitting on my tongue.
I put my glasses back on and walk to dinner because the alternative is standing in this corridor until the stone absorbs me, and Dylan's right about one thing: I don't have time for that.
The communal area is full when I arrive. The team operates on a schedule that's half military discipline and half family habit, and the evening meal is the closest thing Echo Base has to a ritual that doesn't involve weapons or encrypted communications.
Kane sits at the head of the long table because he always sits at the head. Willa's beside him, and her laugh carries across the room with the warmth of a woman who's seen the worst of what this life offers and still finds reasons to find things funny.
Stryker's loading his plate with the single-minded focus of a man who treats calories as ammunition. Rachel's beside him, telling a story involving Lucas and a mud puddle that has Stryker's mouth twitching despite his efforts at stoic indifference.
Dylan sits across from them with Reagan at his side, and he doesn't look at me when I take my seat, doesn't acknowledgethe corridor. The absence of acknowledgment is its own kind of pressure, and his sightline covering my chair and the doorway tells me the evaluation didn't end when he turned the corner.
Roman eats with the focused economy of a man who treats mealtimes as refueling, his attention split between his plate and the doorway Victoria hasn't walked through. She takes meals in her quarters more often than not, and Roman's awareness of the empty chair beside him is the loudest thing he isn't saying.
Mercer and Delaney are at the far end, arguing about something involving jurisdiction and federal sentencing guidelines with the comfortable rhythm of two people who fight about the same things because the arguing itself is the intimacy, even if neither of them would call it that.
Sarah catches my eye as I sit down. Micah's beside her, close enough that their shoulders almost touch, and thealmostis doing a lot of work. Sarah's expression asks a question I don't want to answer. I give her a look that sayslater, and she accepts it with the fractional nod of someone who's learned thatlaterfrom me meansI'll tell you when I've figured out what to tell you.
Then Dar walks in.
She stands in the doorway for a beat that's barely perceptible, a fractional hesitation that someone who wasn't watching for it would miss entirely. She's still wearing the black hoodie from the workspace, the fingerless gloves, the boots. The hoodie's unzipped over a dark tank top. The collarbone visible above the neckline is sharp enough to cut, and her rainbow hair catches the overhead light and throws color against the stone walls.
