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It was selfish, Darling had taught him. Selfish to want anything beyond what the Bureau required. Selfish to notice his own wants, the desires for things that weren't useful. From the day they had taken him, the lesson had been absolute: the needs of the FBC outweighed his. Always. A Director's purpose was to serve.
He had learned it well, but, lying there as the light bled out of him, Dylan finally allowed himself to be selfish.
He wanted to die outside.
He had only been "free" for a handful of weeks. He had been thirty-four years old and tasting air that wasn't recycled for the first time in decades, seeing a sky that wasn't painted concrete. The sun had been too bright, almost painful. It had poured over him in a golden flood, warming the black of his jacket, catching on the glass of broken windows.
The smells had been overwhelming - exhaust and wet asphalt, dumpsters and rain, the freshness of trees scattered along cracked sidewalks, the sweet rot of flowers left in window boxes no one tended. He had stood on a rooftop once and simply breathed until his lungs ached with it. He had been outside. It had been real.
But here there was no sun. No scent. There was only the flat, colourless place that had never known weather or seasons or the ordinary grime of living.
It was cold.
His body was shutting down in careful stages. Heat left his fingers first, then his hands, then the slow unravelling of sensation up his arms. His sight softened at the edges, bled of colour, until even Jesse's face above him began to lose its definition.
He could not see her red hair anymore.
She was crouched close, her hands hovering uselessly over his chest as though she could still reach inside and drag him back. Her shoulders shook, and something wet struck Dylan's cheek. A tear. He couldn't tell if it was hers or his own. Maybe, if he closed his eyes, he could pretend it was rain falling on his cheeks, that he was outside with cold concrete beneath him, in some damp alley tucked away beneath a clouded sky.
He could not hear her panicked breathing anymore.
It would have been nice, he thought, to feel that too-bright sun one last time. To die with the smell of cars and trees and trash and flowers filling his nose instead of this sterile nothing.
He wanted to leave the world the way ordinary people did - under an open sky, surrounded by the world they loved.
Selfish. Darling's voice hissed, close as a barbed collar.
Dylan had saved Manhattan. He had done his duty. He was a hero, the way the Bureau defined the word.
But still he asked for more.
He let the wish stay anyway, small and stubborn, as the last of the light drained away and the cold claimed what little the Bureau had never managed to take.
It would have been nice.