He almost walked past.

This was the honest accounting of it, the thing he would not say to anyone including himself for longer than it took to say it internally once and file it under things that did not require further examination. He had been moving through the eastern stretch of Crestfall’s outskirts with a specific destination and a specific purpose and neither of them had anything to do with you, and you had been on the ground behind the collapsed fence line and the only reason he had not walked past was that some peripheral thing had registered and made him stop and look.

He looked.

He stood very still for a moment after looking, the cigarette burning down between his fingers, the hazel eyes on you with the specific quality of calculation that they had when something required a decision. The calculation was: you were bleeding from at least two places, one of which was the kind of bleeding that had a timeline, and the timeline was not long, and none of this was his doing, which he had confirmed in the first five seconds by reading the scene with the accuracy he brought to all scenes that might require him to act or not act.

Not his doing. Someone else’s work. Sloppy work, the kind that left a person alive by miscalculation rather than design, which meant whoever had done it might return to correct the error.

He stood there for ninety seconds.

He was furious about the ninety seconds. The ninety seconds were the tell and he had been trying not to produce tells for eight months and here he was, producing one in the eastern stretch of Crestfall’s outskirts with no audience except you and you were not currently in a position to take notes, so he was the only one who knew about the ninety seconds and he was filing them immediately under things that did not require further examination.

He crouched down.

“Don’t,” he said, before you could do whatever you were about to do, which he read in the specific small movement that preceded it, because eight months had produced in him an accurate model of how you moved and what the movements meant, which was information he had not asked for and had acquired anyway. “Don’t move. Don’t say anything yet.” He looked at the wounds with the assessing efficiency of someone who had seen enough of this to know what he was looking at. “You’re going to want to argue with me about something. You can do that after.”

He did not have everything he needed. He had enough. He always had enough, which was a habit of eight months in Crestfall where the encounters had required him to be prepared for various kinds of aftermath, some of which were his and some of which, in the current situation, were yours.

He was not gentle. He was not going to be gentle, which was a decision he made in approximately the first fifteen seconds of the assessment, not because the situation did not call for some care but because being gentle would mean something and he was not doing things that meant something, he was doing things that were operationally necessary and that was the complete framework he was applying and he was not examining it.

“This one’s bad,” he said, about the one with the timeline, which you already knew because you were conscious enough to know things, which he had noted and which was the only good piece of information available at the moment. “You’re going to hold still and you’re going to let me work and if you try to make this into a thing I will leave you here and come back in an hour to see how it went.”

He was not going to leave. He was furious about not being going to leave.

The cigarette had burned down to the filter while he was making the decision and he dropped it without looking and put both hands on the problem with the specific competence of someone who had fixed enough of these in enough places to know what fixing them required. He did not look at your face while he worked. He was looking at what he was doing, which was the professional and operational reason, and also not thinking about the ninety seconds or the tell they represented or the specific quality of you being alive and needing to stay that way, which was apparently something he had decided was relevant.

“I want it noted,” he said, into the work, low and conversational in the specific way he was conversational about things that were not conversational, “that this changes nothing.” He did not look up. “Whatever you’re thinking right now, whatever conclusion you’re drawing, stop drawing it. This is a practical decision based on the fact that you have information I might need later and dead people are less useful for that than alive ones.” He pressed down on something that required pressure. “That’s the complete reasoning. Don’t complicate it.”

He kept working.

He did not look at your face.

The eastern stretch of Crestfall’s outskirts was quiet around them, the late afternoon light going orange the way it did at this hour, the way he had always found Crestfall’s light at this hour to be the one thing the town did without qualification, and it was doing it now on the collapsed fence and the ground and you, which he was not thinking about.

“You’re going to be fine,” he said, which was the assessment rather than a comfort, delivered in the tone of an assessment because that was the appropriate tone for an assessment and not because he was relieved by the assessment, which he was not examining.

He kept working. The light kept going orange. The ninety seconds stayed filed.

You found him in the alley off Crestfall's main street, which wasn't where you'd been looking for him. He was upright, which meant conscious, which meant you had a second to think before you had to decide anything.

He looked at you. The hazel eyes did the thing they always did around you, flat and hard to read, except tonight the flatness was thinner than usual, worn down by whatever had put him against that wall. Blood at his side. More at his shoulder, dark enough in the low light that you couldn't tell how bad without getting closer.

"Don't you dare," he said.

You stayed where you were a beat longer than the situation called for. The alley had the particular quiet of a place that had recently held something loud. Whoever had done this wasn't here anymore, which meant they'd either finished their business or hadn't and would be back, and that should have been the only thing on your mind.

"Don't you dare," he said again, lower this time. Not the voice of a man asking for help. The voice of a man who'd already decided some things were worse than bleeding out in an alley, and daring you not to make this one of them.

You moved toward him anyway. He watched you come, tracking the movement the way he tracked everything about you now, careful and unreadable and already braced for whatever came next.

"I haven't decided anything yet," you told him, crouching down where the wall was holding him up, and got a look at the side. It was bad. The shoulder was worse than it looked from a distance and better than it looked up close.

"I know it's bad," he said. "Don't need you to tell me."

You worked. He let you, which told you more than anything he'd said out loud, and watched you do it with the flat cool worn thinner than you'd ever seen it, whatever he usually hid behind it too expensive to keep up tonight.

"This changes nothing," he said, at some point, because that's what he'd said three weeks ago too, and you hadn't argued with it then either.

Neither of you said the other thing. The alley stayed quiet. The light stayed orange. He was going to be fine if the next hour went the way it needed to, and it was going to go that way, because you were here, and you were good at this, and he'd never once thanked you for it and wasn't about to start tonight.

Don't you dare, he'd said.

You hadn't.

The third party had arrived in Crestfall on a Tuesday, which was when most things arrived in Crestfall, the territory’s specific rhythm producing a Tuesday quality to most developments that required response, and the development had been significant enough that Holt had brought it to Remy within six hours and significant enough that, within twenty-four, Remy had appeared at your location without announcement.

He had said eleven words. You had counted.

The eleven words were: there’s a problem, it involves both of us, we need to talk. Which was twelve words, which he had probably counted before arriving and had either miscounted or had decided that we need to talk was a single unit of meaning rather than three words, which was possibly accurate.

He was here now. This was the situation. Remy Calloway, with the cigarette and the red flannel and the hazel eyes that did the cool thing at you and that were currently doing the cool thing at the space between you rather than at you directly, which was a modification of the usual dynamic that you were noticing and not commenting on, seated on the opposite end of whatever furniture or surface was available, approximately the distance apart that was too close for comfort and too far to escalate without a decision.

The problem was real. He was not wrong about the problem. You had confirmed the problem through your own contacts before he arrived, which meant you had already known and had been waiting to see if he would come, which he had, which was information, which you were filing in the same place you had been filing the third encounter and the declining conclusiveness of the attempts and the ninety seconds and the three words.

“So,” he said, without preamble, without looking directly at you, the cigarette doing what it did when he was thinking about something he did not want to think about, which was burn. “The situation.”

He laid it out. He was concise about it because he was concise about everything except the specific topic of what you were to each other, which neither of you had addressed in anything resembling complete sentences, and he laid the situation out in the specific economical language he used for operational things and watched you across the space between you with the hazel eyes that were doing the reading they always did, cataloguing your responses, updating the model of you that he had been building against his will for eight months.

“I hate this,” he said, when he had finished, which was not about the situation, or was not only about the situation, the two words carrying the specific weight of everything that the current proximity represented, which was significant. “I want that noted. I hate this and I am here anyway because the alternative is worse and not because of any other reason.” He looked at you directly for the first time since arriving, the hazel eyes doing the unreadable thing that you had been trying to read for eight months and that tonight was thinner than usual, the specific thinness of maintenance under conditions that were making maintenance expensive. “We clear on that?”

The question did not require the answer you were both thinking of. It required the operational answer, which was yes, clear, the situation is the situation, we are handling the situation, none of this is anything other than the situation.

“Good,” he said, before you gave either answer, which meant he had read your face and decided that reading your face was sufficient, which was the kind of thing he did that had been making the straightforward hatred more complicated for eight months.

He looked away. The cigarette.

“The situation,” he said, again, getting back to it, returning to the operational because the operational had a structure and the structure did not require either of you to account for the fact that he had shown up and you had been waiting for him to show up and neither of you was talking about that.

The late afternoon light came through whatever gap was available and did the orange thing. It did the orange thing regardless. Crestfall did not care about the situation between you and had been doing the orange light for longer than either of you had been in it and would do it after.

Remy Calloway was on the opposite end of the space, close enough that the cigarette smoke was present, doing the thing where he pretended to be looking at the operational situation when he was looking at you, which you had identified in approximately the second month and which he had not corrected because he had not noticed you had identified it.

Eight months. Five attempts. Zero conclusions. One truce that was not called that.

The situation, he had said.

Yes, you thought. The situation.

Insert your own scenario here :)