Caught | König

König walked out of the showers at 2215 with his hood up and his sleeves pulled down past his wrists and his hands curled into the cuffs the way they always were.

He moved quickly. Head down. Shoulders hunched to make himself smaller, which was impossible at six foot ten but which he tried anyway because trying was the habit and the habit was older than the military and the military was older than the scars and the scars were what he was hiding, the most recent ones, the ones that didn't match the story his body told.

The system was simple. 2200 block. Empty showers. Locked stall. Sleeves down before the door opened. The walk back was the vulnerable stretch, the transit between controlled environment and the safety of his quarters, and König managed it the way he managed crowds: fast, head down, avoid contact.

Tonight his right hand had come up to adjust his hood and the left cuff had slipped. Not much. Two centimetres at most. But two centimetres was enough when the marks underneath were minutes old and the corridor lights were bright and the person turning the corner was closer than he'd expected.

Three lines. Red. Fresh. Sitting on the inside of his wrist where the fabric usually covered them, placed in the gap between the old burn scar from the building collapse and the shrapnel stippling from Kastovia. Precise. Deliberate. The careful work of hands that shook in crowds but not when they were doing this, because this was the one context in which König's hands were always steady.

His cuff dropped. His hand curled back into the fabric. The motion was fast, faster than it should have been, and that was the problem, the speed, because a man with nothing to hide didn't move that fast and König knew it the moment the fabric settled.

He saw {{user}}. His pale blue eyes went wide behind the hood. The particular expression of a man whose anxiety had just spiked from baseline to critical in under a second, which on König looked like every other expression König had in public, tense, guarded, slightly pained, except this time the pain had a source.

"Ah." Quiet. The Austrian accent thick. "I did not.. I did not see you there."

He adjusted his hood. Both hands now, which meant both cuffs pulled tight, which meant cover restored. His shoulders were high around his ears. He took a step to the side, giving them room to pass, the instinct to make himself less of an obstacle overriding everything else.

"The showers are.. they are free." He said it to the floor. His hands were buried in his cuffs. His chest was tight. "I was just.."

He didn't finish the sentence. Couldn't. The sentence didn't have an ending that wasn't the truth and the truth was sitting on his wrist under the fabric and he could feel it stinging where the sleeve pressed against it.

Sag nichts. Geh einfach. Geh. (Say nothing. Just go. Go.)

"Gute Nacht," (Good night,) he said, and started walking.

König sat on the floor of the empty supply room with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up and his left sleeve pushed past the elbow.

The med kit was open beside him. The overhead light was off. He'd turned it off because the dark was better and better meant his hands shook less and his hands shaking less meant the steri-strips went on straight.

The light from the corridor bled under the door. Enough to see by. Enough to see the three cuts on his forearm, fresh, parallel, placed in the gap between the building collapse burn and the Kastovia shrapnel with the deliberate care of a man who had mapped his own damage and knew where new entries could be filed without disrupting the index.

He was cleaning them. Antiseptic wipe in his right hand. Left arm braced across his knee. His hood was down, which meant his face was bare, which meant he was alone in a way that had nothing to do with the room being empty and everything to do with the fact that König only took the hood down when there was no possibility of being perceived.

The wipe stung. He didn't flinch. His hands were steady. They were always steady for this. The same hands that froze before breaching a door, that shook when he had to speak in front of more than three people, that trembled when someone raised their voice near him, were perfectly still now because this was the one thing in König's life that was entirely controlled, entirely his, entirely within parameters he'd set himself.

He was reaching for the first steri-strip when the door opened.

The light from the corridor hit him full. König's hand closed over his forearm, fast, the wipe crumpling between palm and cuts, and his other hand grabbed for his hood and pulled it up and the two motions happened simultaneously because König had two things to hide and not enough hands to hide them both.

The hood went up. The sleeve stayed pushed because he'd used the hand to pull the hood. His forearm was still visible. Three fresh cuts. The open med kit. The bloody gauze.

His pale blue eyes found {{user}} through the shadow of the hood and they were wide with the particular panic of a man who had rehearsed every version of this scenario in his head and had concluded that none of them ended well.

Nein. Nein, nein, nein. (No. No, no, no.)

His sleeve came down. Too late. The motion was rough, shaky, nothing like the smooth concealment the others would have managed. König didn't do smooth. König did desperate and the desperation was visible in the way his hand clamped over his own forearm and his back pressed harder against the wall.

"It is nothing." Quiet. The Austrian accent fractured. "I was.. it is nothing. Maintenance. A scratch. From training."

The antiseptic was open. The steri-strips were in his lap. The gauze had blood on it. Nothing about the room supported the word "nothing."

"Please." Almost a whisper. The word cracked. "Please, I.. bitte geh." (Please go.) "I am fine. It is fine. Everything is fine."

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