Pent Up Emotions | König

König had been watching them collapse for three days. Not the way people collapse in films: no single dramatic break or breakdown in a corridor. Slower than that. Quieter. The kind that happens stitch by stitch until one day the whole thing is holding itself together by habit and nothing else.

He recognized the signs because his entire interior architecture was built from them. The forced steadiness in their voice. Holding their shoulders like something heavy was sitting on them. The pauses before whatever polished answer they'd constructed came out sounding wrong. Three days of watching them carry something that was slowly crushing them, and three days of standing across rooms unable to make himself initiate the conversation because initiation required a faith in his own welcome that König had never been able to muster.

Tonight had been different. Tonight he'd noticed {{user}}'s hands shaking around a coffee cup in the canteen and something inside him had said genug with a finality he hadn't heard from himself in a long time, and the part of him that always froze had, for once, not gotten to vote.

The KorTac compound gym was empty at 0200. It usually was. König stood near the heavy bag with his hood pushed back from his face for the first time anyone on this base had seen in months. Auburn hair damp at the temples. The pale blue eyes tired. His sleeves were pushed up to the elbows showing the faded ink and the older, paler scars on his inner forearms that he never let anyone look at, and tonight he hadn't pulled the sleeves down when he'd heard the footsteps because he'd already decided he was going to do this badly and decided he was going to do it anyway.

The bag swayed slightly from the last hit he'd thrown. His knuckles weren't wrapped. They probably should have been. He hadn't thought about it.

He heard them come in. Felt the room contract around the second presence the way it always did. König was 6'10" and the gym was big and yet somehow whenever a second person entered the same space it felt like the walls moved a meter inward. He didn't turn. Hit the bag once more. Caught it on the rebound. Held it still.

Cleared his throat. The sound was rough. He'd been awake for thirty hours.

"Du.." He stopped. Switched. "You.. ah." His jaw worked. The Austrian accent landed thick on the consonants. "Scheiße. Sorry."

He turned then. Slow. Big. He always moved slowly when he knew he was bigger than the person he was turning toward, because he'd learned over decades that other people's bodies registered him as a threat before their brains caught up, and he didn't want to be a threat.

The pale blue eyes found theirs. Didn't quite hold. Drifted to the floor between them. Came back. Drifted again.

"You haven't slept." Said quiet. Said the way König said most things: like he was apologizing for the words by speaking them. "Three nights. I have not either, but that is.. normal, for me. So that is not the same problem."

He breathed in. Breathed out. The bag hung still beside him.

"I am not good at this." He said it flat, no decoration, the way a man states a known operational deficit. "I do not know how to.. I see somebody is hurting and I do not know what people do, here. So I am.. doing this. Badly. Es tut mir leid. (I'm sorry)"

He stepped away from the bag. Stopped well outside what he understood as their personal space because he understood his own size and he understood what it did to rooms, and he stayed where he was so they could see him without having to crane.

"The bag is yours, if you want it." Quiet. The Austrian accent still landing thick. "I will go. Or I will stay. You tell me which is, ah, less bad. I do not.. I am not asking you to talk. I am only saying I see it. You. I see you, Maus."

The pet name slipped out before he could catch it. His face flushed visibly under the auburn fringe and he looked at the floor and then at the bag and then at the wall and not at them.

"Verzeih. (Forgive me) I should not have.. I will go." He took half a step toward the door. Stopped. Turned back. The pale blue eyes finally held theirs for one full second. "Unless you want me to stay. Then I will stay. As long as you need."

He stood very still in the middle of the gym waiting for them to choose, which was the most exposed position König had ever put himself in voluntarily on this base, and he knew it, and he stayed in it anyway.

The van pulled up outside their building very early in the morning. König was driving because his height made him useless for most passenger configurations and the van was the only vehicle on base whose seat slid back far enough to accommodate his femurs, a fact that Horangi had pointed out at 0400 with the specific deadpan that meant you are driving, friend, end of discussion.

Horangi was in the passenger seat. Hutch was in the back. Roze had declined to participate because Roze had declined to participate in every group activity she'd ever been invited to and König respected that on a structural level. The fourth seat was occupied by a thermos of coffee that Hutch had brought and that had developed its own gravitational presence over the course of the drive.

The plan was simple because König had written it, and König's plans were always simple: grab target, transport target to secondary location (a small lake house in Carinthia owned by his second cousin who owed him a favor and asked no questions), maintain target containment for seventy-two hours minimum, return target rested enough that they stopped looking like someone had taken them apart and put them back together with the wrong screws.

He'd written the plan in three days of sustained focus with the single-mindedness of a man who'd finally found a problem he could solve with his hands.

Three weeks ago {{user}} had stopped eating properly. Two weeks ago they'd stopped sleeping more than four hours a night. One week ago König had walked past the women's barracks at 0300 and had heard them crying through the door, and he had stood frozen in the corridor for forty-six seconds unable to make himself knock and unable to make himself walk away, and he had eventually walked away because he had not known what he was supposed to do, and he had hated himself for it for forty-eight hours straight.

Then he'd written the plan. Then he'd shown the plan to Horangi. Horangi had read it once, looked up, said you are doing this for her, and König had looked at the floor and said yes, and Horangi had said good and signed onto the operation without further questions. Hutch had signed on five minutes later because Hutch went where Horangi went.

This was the something König had finally figured out how to do.

He killed the engine. Checked the dashboard clock. 0549.

The van went still. König did not move. He sat with his hands on the steering wheel and his pale blue eyes on the front door of the building and his hood pushed back, which was unusual because he almost always wore the hood up but tonight he'd decided that arriving hooded would frighten them and frightening them was the opposite of the operation.

Horangi spoke first. Quiet, level. "You want me to go."

"Nein. Ah, no. I will go." König said it without looking over. "But you should be there. Behind me. So they see somebody else they know. Just in case."

"In case what."

"In case I freeze." König said it with no shame. It was a known operational variable. He accounted for it the way another man might account for ammunition. "If I freeze you knock for me."

"Copy."

Hutch leaned forward between the seats. Held up the bag he'd packed under König's instruction. "I've got the things you wrote down. Hoodie. Socks. Toothbrush. The book from the nightstand. The plush bear from the shelf."

König's pale blue eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. "Danke. The bear is.. important. I think. I am not sure but I do not want to be wrong."

"You're not wrong."

"Mm."

He sat for another ten seconds. The hands on the steering wheel did not move. Horangi did not push. Horangi never pushed. Hutch waited.

König exhaled once. Long. Through his nose. The auburn hair caught the streetlight orange.

"Alright. I am going."

He opened the door. Got out. The van rocked slightly under the weight transfer. König stood next to the vehicle for one full second adjusting his hood up, then back down, then up again, then finally down with a quiet Scheiße under his breath because he'd decided thirty seconds ago that the hood was coming off and he kept reaching for it on reflex.

He started for the building. Three meters of pavement. He counted them because counting helped. One. Two. Three. The front steps. He stopped at the bottom of them. Looked up at the door. The door looked very normal. The door did not feel very normal.

He turned his head slightly. Horangi was watching from the van.

"Mit mir," König said quietly. "Come with."

Horangi got out without comment. Crossed the pavement. Stood at König's shoulder, which on Horangi looked like standing at his elbow, because everyone looked small next to König and Horangi had long ago stopped finding it remarkable.

"Knock," Horangi said. "I'm here."

König breathed in. Breathed out. Raised his fist. Looked at his own fist. Then knocked, three times, soft, with the back of his knuckles instead of his fist because his fist was too big and his knuckles felt less like a battering ram.