The gym door is open.
I shouldn't go in. There's no operational reason to investigate a gym in the middle of the night, and the fact that my feet carry me toward the doorway rather than past it is a data point I should be logging with more concern than I am. The light's on, and the identity of the someone inside isn't a mystery because I've been tracking nocturnal activity patterns in this facility since I arrived and I already know who trains at this hour.
Tommy is at the pull-up bar.
I stop in the doorway. My hand finds the frame, and the grip is harder than it needs to be, because what I'm looking at is rearranging every physical assessment I've made of this man, and the rearrangement is happening fast and without my permission.
No glasses. His eyes are focused on a point on the wall, and the concentration is absolute, stripped of humor and deflection and every layer of performance I've watched him deploy since I arrived. His hair is damp with sweat, pushed back from his forehead, and without the perpetual falling-into-his-eyes quality, his face is different. Older. Harder. The jaw that I noted on day one resolves, under exertion, into something that doesn't need qualifiers.
The t-shirt is soaked through and clinging, and underneath the clinging cotton is a body that contradicts everything I thought I knew about the man behind the screens.
He's built.
The operators on this team carry tactical bulk. Tommy is lean and dense, muscles carved from discipline rather than mission requirements, shoulders broader than his posture ever suggests because he carries himself with the deliberate self-minimization of a man who decided his body was secondary to his brain. The decision is so deeply embedded that even the people who live with him have accepted the premise.
The premise is a lie, and the lie is currently doing pull-ups with perfect form, each rep drawn from dead hang to chin-over-bar with a control that speaks to years of this exact routine. His back muscles move under the wet fabric with mechanical precision, and his forearms flex with each grip shift, and the tendons in his wrists stand out in the harsh overhead light.
I'm gripping the doorframe hard enough to leave marks in my fingerless gloves because the disconnect between the Tommy I've been working beside and the Tommy currently hanging from a steel bar is violent enough to make my breath catch.
I should leave. I should back away from the doorway and return to my quarters and treat this as information I never acquired, because acknowledging it means recalibrating everything, and the current calibration is already complicated enough without adding the visceral, unwelcome awareness that his body is something I want to put my hands on.
I don't leave. My shoulder finds the doorframe, and I lean against it, and I watch him complete the set before he drops from the bar and turns and sees me.
The transition is immediate. Hands reach for the glasses on the weight bench. They're on his face before his breathing has steadied, and the humor surfaces like a system rebooting, quick and practiced, and the barrier goes up between who he is alone and who he is observed.
The shirt's still wet. The body's still visible. The glasses can't cover what I've already seen.
"Midnight tours now come with a gym stop?" His voice is controlled, but the cadence's slightly off, faster than usual, compensating. "I can recommend the scenic route. The corridor past the armory has excellent ambient lighting."
"You train alone."
"I do a lot of things alone. Occupational hazard of being the only person in the building who thinks the middle of the night is a reasonable time to run diagnostics."
"The diagnostics aren't what I'm talking about."
He picks up a towel and drags it across his face and the back of his neck. The movement pulls the wet shirt taut across his chest, and I track the pull with an attention that's abandoned any pretense of clinical objectivity.
The towel comes down, and his expression is more guarded than before I spoke.
"How long were you standing there?"
"Long enough."
"Long enough for what?"
"Long enough to know that nobody on your team has any idea what you look like in the middle of the night."
The words land differently than I intended. I meant them as an observation, but the delivery came out lower than clinical, and the silence that follows is weighted with something I didn't encrypt into the message. His gaze holds mine through the glasses, and the reflected light on the lenses can't quite hide the way his eyes drop to my mouth and back up, quick enough to deny but too slow to miss.
Tommy sits on the weight bench with the towel around his neck. He's still breathing hard, and the rise and fall of his chest under the damp shirt is something I'm studying with an intensity that would embarrass me if I were capable of embarrassment.
"Sit down." He gestures at the bench beside his. "If you're going to interrogate me about my fitness routine, you might as well be comfortable."
I sit. The bench is cold through my leggings. Our knees are close enough that if either of us shifted an inch, they'd touch. Neither of us shifts. The gym smells like sweat and rubber andiron, and underneath it, warm skin and exertion and something that's distinctly Tommy, and my body's logging every molecule.
"Why doesn't anyone know?" The question is direct because I don't do indirect. "You've been doing this for years. The muscle development, the calluses, the fact that your resting heart rate is significantly lower than it should be for someone who supposedly sits behind a desk all day. Your team lives with you. How have they missed it?"
"They haven't missed it. They've accepted the version I give them. There's a difference."
