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No one had seen Dylan for a few hours.
With the way everyone was reacting, you’d think they had a Mold infestation in the Watchtower. Zoe had three different people ask if she’d seen him within the span of fifteen minutes. The last person to ask was the Security and Operations Chief, Simon Arish. Zoe wasn’t sure how she felt about the guy. On the one hand, he seemed to have a decent amount of common sense, cared about keeping people alive, and did a good job keeping the nerds in Research from derailing ops with any superfluous bullshit.
On the other hand, he had a sort of live wire vibe to his interpersonal interactions that made him hard to read. A lot of Lockdown survivors were twitchy that way, stuck in a level of survival mode that Zoe couldn't begin to fathom, but it felt heavier coming from Arish. And he really, really didn’t like Dylan. Lots of people didn't, but there was an animosity between those two that felt almost personal. Honestly, under any other circumstance, Zoe might've considered lying just to spare both men the increased heart pressure.
Today, though, she didn't have to.
“I haven’t seen him since he got back.” she said. Arish kept pacing back and forth like a caged tiger in her shoebox office. She could almost hear his teeth grinding from here. “I thought you’d called him for something?”
“He walked out of the conversation. No one knows where he went. Can you try radioing him?”
Zoe liked nothing about this conversation, but Arish’s tone said this wasn’t a request. Zoe nodded and dialed her radio over to Dylan’s frequency. “Hey, Dylan, it’s Zoe. Where’d you run off to, man?”
No response.
Arish cursed under his breath and went for the door. “Keep an eye out for him, okay? We need to know where he is.”
“Okay, but what…” The door slammed shut. "…happened…okay. Fuck me, I guess." Zoe sighed heavily and rubbed her eyes. That was about how most of her conversations about Dylan went these days. She was getting kind of tired of it.
For once, though, she had a piece of information the FBC didn’t have.
Zoe waited until she was sure Arish was a good distance away from the office before she slipped out and headed to Dylan’s hideout. She had to backtrack a few times after taking a wrong turn, and taking the outside construction supports solo nearly gave her a damn heart attack, but she somehow made it without dying. “OhthankGod,” she breathed before straightening up and raising her voice. “Dylan?”
The space was dead silent, or so she thought. As she moved through it, Zoe could faintly hear the hitching, hiccuping breathing of someone on the tail end of a sobbing session. It wasn't coming from the place where they'd sat before; it was coming from behind a random pile of construction materials, just out of sight. “Dylan?” Zoe called again. “It’s Zoe. I just wanted to find you before someone else did.” She did have the fleeting thought that maybe she wasn’t hearing Dylan, that she was hearing a stray Hiss or Molded that had somehow gotten up here. She took a leap of faith and kept her hand away from her pistol as she approached. “I’m gonna come over, okay?”
She was relieved, at first, to see that the figure hunched over and clutching a wadded-up blanket to his chest was Dylan and not a threat. That relief was immediately replaced by panic when she saw the state he was in.
Here was the thing: she’d seen Dylan in a lot of states. Throwing up from migraine pain. Limping back to the Watchtower after being tossed multiple city blocks like a rag doll. Bloodied and bruised after escaping life or death situations by the skin of his teeth. Shaking with barely-repressed anger whenever someone stared at him for too long. Every time he’d shrugged off his pain, or any emotional distress he might’ve felt, and got back to work. She’d never seen him cry. Not once.
Whatever had happened with Arish had reduced him to an absolute wreck.
What she could see of his face was a tear-streaked, snotty mess, and his broken sobs sounded hoarse and raw. His eyes were tightly shut at first, but when they finally opened and registered her, he shrank away like he thought she was going to punch him. She expected another outburst, like back when she’d only known him as P6, but instead, he looked afraid. Ashamed, even. “What the fuck?” Zoe breathed as she crouched in front of him. She reached out for him without thinking, caught herself, almost drew back. When he didn't flinch away, she took that as an okay to brush the hair out of his face and use the cuff of her jacket sleeve to wipe some of the mess off his face. “What happened? Are you hurt?”
Dylan stared at her like she’d grown an extra head. Zoe tried again: “Did Arish say something to you?”
A bitter noise, barely a laugh but not a sob, burst out of Dylan. “Nothing that wasn’t true.”
Oh. I don’t like that. “I’m gonna need to know what he said before I can judge that.”
Dylan shrank into himself more, but not away from her. He actually leaned into her hand. He looked like someone soaking up one last second of warmth before they had to step out into blistering cold. “Have they told you my name yet?” he asked.
“Your…full name?” She pushed her hand more firmly against his cheek. I’m not going anywhere, so stop acting like I will. “No. I keep asking for your full file but they haven’t – “
“Faden.”
“What?”
“Dylan Faden. That’s my name. Director Faden…” He said those words like they hurt him. “Jesse is my sister.”
Zoe needed a minute to chew on that one.
Assuming Dylan was telling the truth—and that was a really insane thing to lie about, especially from a guy who was more inclined to not answer a question than he was to lie—at least one of Zoe’s questions was now half-answered. Of course there would be an air of secrecy around Dylan’s past; if whatever he’d done was really that awful, it could reflect badly on the office of the Director if the wrong people knew.
But it still didn’t explain what Dylan had done.
“Okay,” Zoe said. “The Director is your sister.” She didn’t want to completely break contact, not for too long, not if it meant making Dylan face the cold alone. She only moved her hand away from his cheek long enough to move it to his shoulder. From there, she ran her hand down his arm, took his hand, and squeezed it tightly. “How’d she end up Director while you were in the uh, mental hospital fit?”
Dylan looked down at their clasped hands. Zoe thought he was going to start crying again; he really looked like he was going to. Instead, she watched in real time as Dylan breathed in, arranged all his facial features into a mask of dull neutrality, and breathed out. When he spoke again, his voice was flat and dull.
“Have you ever heard of the Ordinary AWE?”
From there, he told her the story of two siblings who had the bad luck of finding an OoP: a slide projector that could be used to open Thresholds. They explored the worlds on the other side, because they were kids who didn't know better, and found more than they bargained for. A monster from the other side swallowed up all the adults in their town, and brought some of the other kids under her thrall. They were able to drive the monsters back with the help of an entity called Polaris, and close most of the doors for good.
Then the FBC found them—two children who had been through hell. Two children with paranatural potential on a Northmoor level. Two children who were the potential answer to a problem that had been hanging over the FBC for years.
“Trench didn’t want another power gap,” Dylan explained, “and since the Board is picky about who gets the job, they were trying to narrow their options down to powerful parautilitarians. But, y’know, there’s risks to just picking a random guy up off the street, so why not start young?” A hint of bitterness entered his voice. “Not like we had anywhere else to go.”
The implication hit like a truck. “They kidnapped you two?”
Dylan looked genuinely surprised at her choice of words, enough so that it took him a moment to keep talking. “They tried. Jesse got away. They only got me. Prime Candidate Six.”
“…how old…?”
“Ten.”
“What the fuck?!” No, reign it in. “Sorry. Sorry, that’s just…” She squeezed his hand again. “Dylan, I’m – “
“Don’t,” he said quietly. “Don’t, not yet. Story’s not over.”
Zoe couldn’t think of a damn thing that would negate the whole kidnapping a ten-year-old part, but she shut up and kept listening. Dylan wanted to tell the whole story. She should let him. It was only fair.
He spent the next six years as part of the Prime Candidate Program under the “care” of Doctor Casper Darling—or just Casper, as Dylan called him, his tone quietly mocking. Dylan was naturally gifted, but by his account, that didn’t mean things were easy. He described it as trying to redirect water coming out of a hose at max pressure. Everything flooded his brain all at once. He always held himself back, afraid of what might happen if he didn’t, until his sixth year at the Bureau. What should’ve been a standard telekinesis test ended with someone dead. Doctor Roberts.
“I didn’t mean to. I swear, I didn’t…” Dylan stopped himself and shook his head. “But it didn’t matter if I meant to or not. That was when they stopped seeing me as a candidate and started seeing me as a bomb. The program got dialed back. Casper stopped coming around. They still ran tests sometimes, but most of the time I was just…up in my cell.” He rubbed his eyes with his free hand. “Jesse wasn’t coming for me. Polaris wasn’t helping. It was like that for four years until I realized…” Despite the way his chin started trembling again, he laughed. “I was twenty. There was a calendar in one of the medical offices during my checkup. First one I’d seen in years. It was a week past my birthday and no one was coming for me and if they didn't let me go when I was eighteen, they definitely weren't going to then. When they tried to take me back to my cell, I couldn’t…I wasn’t going back in there. I wanted out. One way or another.”
His grip on her hand loosened.
“I didn’t get the full casualty number, but it was at least seven.”
He pulled away completely and wrapped his arms around himself.
“You’d think they would’ve used lethal force after three, but they didn’t even have the decency to…” He huffed. “Guess that would’ve been better than what I deserved.”
One way or another.
“But you wanted that,” Zoe said hesitantly. “Was that it? You either get out of the House or…”
Dylan didn’t answer verbally. He didn’t have to. Zoe had been recruited specifically because the Bureau had been courting people with a psychology background, wannabe behavioral analysts and forensic psychologists. It was why they’d assigned her Dylan; they'd figured she was best suited to handle the emotionally unstable man that so many of their hopes rested on.
She wondered if anyone at the FBC realized that instability extended to suicidal ideation.
She wondered if anyone cared.
"It doesn't matter," Dylan said finally. "It doesn't change what happened. I lived. The FBC locked me away for years. Forgot about me. I was in the top floor of the Panopticon, alone, until…until the Hiss. They found me there. Promised me things." He paused, his eyes growing distant and harsh. "You've always been the new you. You want this to be true."
Zoe tried not to flinch away at the words. Dylan fell silent again quickly, his face twisting into a nauseous look. He rubbed his right eye. "Doesn't feel good anymore. It felt good back then. The Hiss was a way out. The only one I had, or…I thought it was. Jesse found me not long after. If I'd just waited, if I'd listened to Polaris, if I hadn't…" His voice broke. "I helped them. I don't remember all of it, but I helped enough. And if Marshall had just put me down after the second time - "
"No. No, no, don't say that. What happened with the Hiss…"
"Don't. Don't. I might not have let them in, but I helped them stick around. And if I hadn't been there, Jesse wouldn't have come looking and she'd be happy somewhere else. She'd be safe. It should've died with me, but Trench got what he wanted. One of his precious fucking candidates in that stupid chair."
He punctuated the last words by slamming the heel of his palm into his temple, twice, hard. Zoe immediately grabbed his hand, held it tightly. "Don't do that. Don't."
"Why the fuck do you care, why do you…" His tone was harsh, but not angry, and he didn't pull his hand away. "Please. Please, don't, don't, if Arish sent you up here…"
"Arish doesn't know I'm here. No one does. I came because I was worried." Dylan shook his head, refusing to meet her eyes. Zoe twined her fingers with his and squeezed tightly. "I'm sorry, Dylan. I'm sorry we did that to you. It wasn't right, and it wasn't fair. You never should've been in that position. Never."
"But I was, and I did those things…"
"I don't care. I don't." Maybe she should have, but she kept picturing Dylan at ten years old, torn away from everything he'd ever known and loved, and wondered how things could have turned out any different. Even if fewer people had died along the way, he was ruined from the start. Fuck up happened too long ago to fix.
Maybe it had. But she had to try and fix something.
"People can change. The past doesn't matter. I don't care about who that Dylan was. Who are you today?"
Dylan finally looked up at her, disbelief etched onto his face. His lips parted, before the disbelief crumbled away. Grief took its place. "I don't know," he whispered. "I don't know anymore."
Of course he doesn't. How could he?
"I'm sure you're sick of people trying to tell you," Zoe said carefully, "but is it okay if I offer a little input?" She waited until Dylan nodded before she kept going. "I think you're a guy who could've run away when the Lockdown fell, but didn't. I think you're someone who has been doing everything he can to help. I think…you stayed up with me when I was scared and helped a bird who couldn't even thank you for it." She tried to smile past the ache in her cheset. "That guy seems pretty okay to me."
Dylan's stare was disbelieving as ever, exactly what she was used to. But something else was slowly starting to bloom in his eyes: fragile, painful hope. That she wasn't lying to him, perhaps, that someone saw him as something other than the things he'd done. That today could be better, and tomorrow better than that.
She hoped he believed it. She'd meant every word.
Dylan's lips parted, as if he was going to say something; instead, his face crumpled and he curled up on himself again, words reduced to a fresh round of sobs. Zoe meant to move slowly, but the second she put one arm around his shoulders, he reached out to her, clinging to her desperately. Zoe clung back just as tightly.
I'm not going anywhere. I promise, I'm not.
She wasn't sure how long it was before he calmed back down again. Honestly, Zoe would've been fine to stay up there forever if that was what it took, but Dylan had other ideas. "We should…" He slowly straightened up and wiped the tears away. "We should get back."
"We can stay…"
"No, they're gonna freak out if I'm gone any longer. That would be worse. I don't want you to get in trouble." Despite his words, he hesitated to actually stand. "Zoe, I…"
"If you're going to apologize for being a little feral at the start, I think you earned it." She squeezed his shoulder. "Seriously. Don't worry about it."
Dylan hesitated, then, to her shock, smiled. It was small and hesitant, but genuine. "Thank you," he said, "for everything."
"You're welcome."
It occurred to her as they started back that she'd never found out what Arish had said to him, exactly. Nothing that wasn't true wasn't a very promising summary, though. Considering the state Dylan had been in, what he thought of himself, and the fact that Arish didn't like him much, it must have been bad. Maybe it would be better if she didn't know. He was her commanding officer, for now at least. She didn't want the specifics of what he'd said to cloud her judgment.
That wasn't going to stop her from protecting Dylan, though, from Arish and everyone else who had something to say. From himself, if she had to. The FBC owed him so much more than she could ever make up to him on her own, but she was going to try.
She had to try.