"And I missed eleven." He pushes his glasses up. The tell. The stalling mechanism, the barrier between himself and whatever's making him feel exposed. "You must have been disappointed."
"I was terrified. Missing eleven meant your systems had vulnerabilities I needed to know about. Catching four and ignoring two meant you saw me and chose restraint over confrontation. Both of those things were useful data. Neither of them was the thing I actually wanted to know."
"Which was?"
"Whether you'd still look at me the same way once you found out I was testing you."
The silence is dense with the hum of servers and the weight of weeks.
"Your turn," I say.
He looks at me. Takes off his glasses.
Without them, his eyes are dark and direct and carrying something I've been watching him hide behind lenses for weeks. The face underneath is the one I've learned in the gym and in his bed and at 3 AM in the server room, sharp and serious and belonging to a man who takes himself apart for other people and never lets anyone watch him reassemble.
I'm watching now. The vulnerability of his bare face in this light makes my hands itch to touch him, trace the jaw that belongs on someone harder, someone who hasn't spent years disguising his edges behind chocolate and humor and the easy warmth he distributes like oxygen.
"You know about the subroutine," he says.
"I found it in the countermeasures weeks ago. The failsafe protecting my systems specifically."
"That wasn't all of it." He stands. Crosses to his small workstation in the corner of the room. Pulls up a file and turns the monitor so I can see.
Lines of code fill the screen. Weeks of modifications, environmental adjustments, and systemic accommodations, all documented with meticulous version control.
"The lighting in the workspace," he says. "I dropped the lumens by twelve percent on your side because your productivity metrics increased in lower ambient light. The HVAC in the server room. I adjusted the airflow pattern so the cold drafts away from your station because you hunch your shoulders when you're cold and it disrupts your typing rhythm."
He scrolls. More entries. More adjustments. The log stretches back to my third day at Echo Base, and the scope of it tightens something low in my stomach that has nothing to do with guilt and everything to do with the particular devastation of being studied this thoroughly by someone whose attention feels like sunlight through a magnifying glass.
"The Mountain Dew. I keep three cans in the mini-fridge behind my console, rotated every forty-eight hours so they're always cold. The dark chocolate I started leaving on your keyboard in the mornings isn't mine. I ordered it from the supply run because you eat it when you're deep in a problem and I noticed your blood sugar drops after six consecutive hours without food and your error rate increases by four percent."
He stops scrolling. Turns to face me.
He's standing close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off him in the server-cooled air of his quarters. His eyes without the glasses are unguarded in a way the rest of him never is, and the combination of his confession and his proximity and the bare, unprotected expression on his face makes my pulse hammer in a way that seventeen system probes never managed.
"I built you into the infrastructure of this base. Every environmental variable I could control, I optimized for you. I told myself it was efficiency. Operational necessity. Collaboration support."
His jaw tightens.
"It was care. And care without consent is control, and I should have told you instead of letting you discover it like an anomaly in a system you didn't authorize."
"Four percent error rate increase," I say. My voice comes out rougher than I expect.
"What?"
"You tracked my error rate relative to my blood sugar. Over six-hour intervals."
"I track everyone's performance metrics. It's part of operational support."
"Do you adjust the HVAC for everyone's typing rhythm?"
The silence that follows is its own answer.
"So," I say. "You built a habitat around me without asking. And I ran surveillance on your integrity without telling you."
"Same wound. Same response. Both of us building systems instead of having conversations."
"Because systems are predictable."
