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As soon as the alarms started blaring to indicate a breach, Glass couldn’t help but freeze even as his coworkers jumped into action. There was a protocol they had to follow for their safety, and after the shock wore off, he stood up to join them.
Until he saw Dimitri- no, Bright, break away from the group.
Bright stood out in his plainclothes, but there hadn’t been time between his reappearance and now to insist he follow the dress code. However, the height of the body he was in made it very easy to glance over if you weren’t actively looking for him.
If not for the very real danger they were all in, he would address the pain in his chest when he had to think of the former specialist in past tense and replace his name with someone else’s. The shock of seeing him still alive had been doused in the cold horror of realizing that it was his body being piloted by someone else.
As for Bright, there was a huge feeling of relief and disappointment. On one hand, he had worried over Bright, despite his immortality, but on the other, he had hoped that if Bright had managed to escape, then he wouldn’t come back. He knew Bright hated working here, and he wasn’t sure how much of that hatred existed before The Incident.
The longer he stood there staring, the further Bright got, and in a haze of fear, concern, and curiosity, he tried to follow.
Tried being the operative word.
Bright moved with purpose and in the chaos of trying to dodge around researchers and MTF agents, Glass soon lost sight of his target.
Where the hell is he going?
The question didn’t want to leave, even as an MTF agent shirt-collared him to follow a group. Unwilling to anger one of the trigger happy soldiers, he dutifully followed, even as he kept looking over his shoulder to see if there were any signs of where Bright went.
Then he heard something he had only ever heard during safety drills.
“MASSIVE CONTAINMENT BREACH”
The floor felt like it shook under his feet, and in a blink and miss moment, something was thrown through the ceiling, and even though the object missed him, the near impact knocked him over.
He couldn’t catch his breath enough to call out, and even if he could, the others were running. He knew they wouldn’t come back for him. It was practically written in the rules that you were supposed to take care of yourself and no one else.
Even though this facility was one of the safer ones, everyone knew and followed that rule. Sure, he didn’t like it, but everyone was quick to jump on reminding him about how it didn’t matter if he liked it or not.
At least nothing grabbed him while he recovered from the near miss, but by this point, he wasn’t sure where he could go. Without the cover of gunfire, he was a sitting duck. While he had tried to treat all of his clients with kindness, he wouldn’t be surprised if they deemed him an unavoidable casualty.
And the facility carried more than just the Euclid and Safe humanoids. Especially after the Keter facility breach.
The knowledge that he was probably going to die was hovering near the back of his mind as he considered his options.
He heard screaming down the hallway that the others had run, so he promptly turned on his heel and ran in the other direction. The flashing warning lights and distant screams only increased the feeling of impending doom.
Eventually, he made it to where he had lost Bright in the first place, and the direction he had been going finally clicked in his mind.
“Bright, why do you keep wanting to work here when you hate it so much?” The question had popped up many times during their sessions, and this was another attempt of many to finally get an answer. This was an impromptu session after an… Awfully convenient death of Bright’s last host.
“Simon.” The use of Glass’s first name startled him. “You work with the kids sometimes, right?”
Bright knew that he could get away with calling the children what they were. While Glass would officially follow the Foundation’s codes when writing his reports down, he had a bad habit of not maintaining them in verbal conversations. He didn’t want to stop thinking of his clients as people even as his coworkers would correct him.
Unsure of where this was going, since Bright should know the answer, he said, “Yes?”
“You haven’t noticed anything,” he paused before waving a hand in an unsure motion, “I dunno, familiar?”
“You know I work with a lot of people, and I can’t tell you who, even if you ask.”
Ever unhelpful, Bright simply stated, “Pay more attention when you go to the kid section, then, and you might figure it out.”
The session wasn’t fruitful beyond that, but that command stuck in Glass’s mind for weeks afterwards. It took him a while to finally get the time and clearance to do a little digging, but the answer was incredibly obvious once he knew to look.
TJ Bright.
Bright was going to TJ. The brother that had been locked up here sometime before Glass got to this position. The confusion surrounding the breach would be an easy way to cover up the illegal interaction.
Did Bright plan this? This was far too convenient for it to be anything else, and he had seen in the file that Bright was a flight risk if left around his brother for too long.
If this hypothesis was correct, Glass was left with a dilemma. Assuming that Bright was not killed on the way over, Glass had a strong feeling that he was going to break his sibling out.
Was that a bad thing? Despite Jack Bright’s Euclid designation, he was never malicious, and TJ was more likely to be hurt than to cause hurt.
… He knew the answer to that question. He had questioned this many times about his clients, and he was always told the same thing. It’s for the greater good.
Despite seeing all of them slowly degrade mentally as they were tested on and isolated, he was told the same thing.
He knew it shouldn’t be this way, and even started to argue more. And that was before pulling in Dimitri to help with Stella’s neurodivergency.
Dimitri was loud about his opinions on the treatment of the starry-eyed child, but the foundation had thought telling him to shut up would work.
It didn’t. In fact, it had emboldened his attempts at fighting for more humane treatment for the people there. Glass didn’t know how far Dimitri would go, and the stunt with Iris was almost successful.
And he couldn’t help but feel what happened to Dimitri was also a pointed threat to him.
...
It would be funny if the children Dimitri had fought so hard for escaped as well, wouldn’t it?
Maybe he could catch Bright and convince him to take a few more kids along.