Chapter Text

Mission X

Perihelion

Xeno's POV

The lab smelled like ozone and burnt coffee, the way it always did past midnight, and Xeno liked it that way. Nobody bothered him after hours. No interns asking questions they should have known the answer to, no supervisors leaning over his shoulder to check if the numbers made sense. Just the low hum of the servers, the blue wash of three monitors, and the quiet certainty that he was the smartest person in the building.

He was halfway through recalibrating a set of trajectory models when the door opened without a knock.

That alone told him something was wrong. Everyone who worked with him knew better. Halloway knocked even when he had a master key and every right in the world to walk in unannounced, because he'd learned early on that Xeno treated interruptions the way most people treated theft.

"Dr.Xeno," The voice belonged to Director Halloway, and it carried none of its usual dry patience. "I need five minutes."

Xeno didn't look up from the screen. "You have three."

Halloway stepped further into the room, and Xeno finally noticed the second set of footsteps behind him, heavier, slower, deliberate in a way that made the hair on his arms rise before his brain caught up with why. He minimized the model and turned his chair around, already composing the argument he'd give for why he didn't need whatever babysitter the agency was about to hand him. He'd been expecting something like this for weeks. Ever since the Prometheus numbers had started climbing past what anyone upstairs had signed off on, ever since the questions from the board had shifted from how is it progressing to how contained is it, he'd known someone would eventually decide his lab needed a leash.

He just hadn't expected the leash to look like this.

The man standing behind Halloway didn't look like agency standard. Agency standard wore pressed suits and carried themselves like they were still trying to prove something to whoever had promoted them. This one wore a jacket that had clearly seen worse places than a briefing room, and he stood with the kind of stillness that wasn't calm so much as coiled, the stillness of something that had learned patience the hard way and never bothered to unlearn it. Xeno catalogued him in seconds out of habit, the same reflex he used on every new variable that walked into his field of view: tall, built like the agency's field division had run out of normal human proportions when they made him, a scar along one eyebrow that hadn't been stitched properly, and eyes that gave away exactly nothing, which was, in its own way, more information than most people offered by accident.

Then the smell reached him.

Smoke. Faint, but unmistakable, the kind that sat in fabric and skin long after the cigarette itself was gone. Xeno's jaw tightened before he could stop it. He'd spent four years arguing budget line items for air filtration in this building and he wasn't about to let someone undo that with a habit that killed slower than most of the things Xeno actually studied for a living.

"This is Agent Snyder," Halloway said. "He'll be assigned to your division starting tonight."

"And assigned how?"

"For protection detail," Halloway said it the way people said things they knew wouldn't land well, the tone of a man who'd rehearsed this sentence in the elevator and still hadn't found a version that sounded better. "Given the sensitivity of the Prometheus project, the board wants a dedicated field agent on site at all times."

Xeno's eyes moved back to the man in question, who hadn't said a single word since walking in. He wasn't looking at Halloway. He was looking at Xeno, unblinking, the way someone studies a lock before deciding whether it's worth picking. Xeno had been looked at like that before, by rival scientists trying to work out where his research would go next, by superiors trying to decide if he was still an asset or already a liability. This was neither of those. This was something closer to indifference dressed up as attention, and it unsettled him more than open hostility would have.

"I don't need protection," Xeno said. "I need the west wing servers back online before 6 A.M, and I need this conversation to end so I can do that."

"It's not a request, Doctor."

"Everything from this office is a request I haven't agreed to yet."

For the first time, the man spoke. His voice was low, unhurried, the kind of voice that didn't need volume to fill a room. "You always talk to people like they're not in the room, or is that a special service for me?"

Xeno turned his full attention on him, and for a moment neither of them looked away. There was something almost clinical about the way Snyder held his gaze, no aggression in it, no attempt to intimidate, just a flat, patient assessment that made Xeno feel like the one being catalogued instead. He didn't like it. He liked even less that some small, irritating part of his brain found it interesting rather than offensive, the same part that couldn't leave an unsolved equation alone even when it should have known better.

"I talk to people the way their competence earns," Xeno said. "I haven't seen any of yours yet."

Something flickered at the corner of Snyder's mouth. Not quite a smile. "You will."

Halloway cleared his throat, clearly regretting every decision that had led him into this room at this hour. "Agent Snyder has a full field record. Extraction, close protection, three years on the eastern border operations before this posting. He's the best we have."

"Then send him somewhere that needs the best you have. I need someone who can carry equipment and stay out of my way."

"That's not how this works, and you know it."

Xeno did know it. He'd known it the second the door opened without a knock. Prometheus had gotten too far, too fast, further than anyone in the original proposal had projected, and men like Halloway didn't send men like Snyder unless someone above him had started worrying about outcomes they hadn't planned for. That worried Xeno more than the idea of a bodyguard ever could. It meant the project had crossed some invisible threshold where the people funding it stopped seeing him as the asset and started seeing him as the risk, and Xeno had read enough classified files in his career to know exactly what happened to risks the agency decided it could no longer manage quietly. He filed the thought away to examine properly once the room was empty of witnesses, the way he filed away every dangerous idea he didn't yet have the leisure to finish thinking.

For now, he had a more immediate problem standing three feet from his desk, smelling like a pack of cigarettes and a life spent somewhere Xeno had never had to go.

"Nicotine, tar and carbon monoxide." Xeno said, because apparently restraint wasn't going to be part of tonight. "You're aware you're volunteering for a slow, statistically avoidable death."

"Didn't ask for a lecture."

"You're going to be standing in my lab for the foreseeable future. That makes it my business." Xeno gestured vaguely at the equipment lining the walls, most of it sensitive enough to justify the excuse even if it wasn't the real reason he cared. "Some of what's in here doesn't respond well to contaminants. Neither do I."

"Noted." Snyder didn't sound like he'd noted anything. He sounded like a man agreeing to something he had no intention of following, purely to end a conversation he'd already decided wasn't worth having, and Xeno found that almost more insulting than if he'd argued back.

Halloway, sensing the room wasn't going to improve, took the opening to leave. "I'll have his clearance finalized by morning. Try not to kill each other before then."

The door closed, and the lab went quiet in a way it hadn't been in years, occupied but silent, two people left alone with nothing but the hum of machines and an assessment neither of them had finished making.

Xeno turned back to his monitors like the conversation was over, though he was aware, in the part of his brain that never fully switched off, of exactly where Snyder was standing and exactly how little sound he made while standing there. Most people shifted their weight, tapped their fingers, filled silence with something. Snyder didn't. He simply existed in the space, and it made the space feel smaller than it was, which irritated Xeno on principle. He'd built his entire career on being the most controlled variable in any room he occupied, the one person whose composure other people had to work around instead of the reverse. It had been a long time since anyone had matched him for stillness without even trying.

"You always work this late?" Snyder said eventually.

"I work when the problem is unsolved. Tonight it's unsolved."

"That mean you don't sleep, or you just don't want to."

Xeno didn't answer, mostly because it wasn't a question worth answering and partly because he didn't like that Snyder had asked it like he already suspected the truth. He kept typing, running a diagnostic he didn't strictly need, buying himself a few seconds to decide how much of this man he was willing to tolerate before morning, and how much of his own reaction to him he was willing to admit to. He'd expected annoyance. He hadn't expected the low, persistent awareness that had settled into his shoulders the second Snyder sat down, the sense of being observed by someone who wasn't trying to catch him doing anything wrong, only trying to understand how he worked, which was somehow worse.

"You can sit," Xeno said finally, nodding toward the chair against the far wall, the one nobody ever used because nobody ever stayed long enough to need it. "Or stand there being decorative. Either way, don't touch anything."

"Wasn't planning to."

"People rarely plan to. It happens anyway."

Snyder crossed the room and sat, and Xeno noted, against his better judgment, the economy of the movement, no wasted motion, no noise from the chair, like he'd trained himself out of every habit that could give away his position. It was the kind of stillness that belonged to people who had spent a long time somewhere it mattered whether or not someone heard you coming, and Xeno found himself wondering, briefly and against his will, what exactly three years on the eastern border operations had required of a man to make him move like that. He didn't ask. He told himself it was because the file wasn't relevant to his work, and ignored the smaller, more honest reason underneath that one.

For a while, neither of them spoke. Xeno worked through the last of his diagnostics, aware in a low, persistent way of the man sitting eight feet behind him, aware of the smoke still clinging faintly to the air even after Snyder had gone still and quiet. It should have irritated him more than it did. Instead it settled into something closer to background noise, present but no longer sharp enough to demand attention, which irritated him more than the smell itself ever could, because it meant some part of his brain had already started adjusting to having him there, filing him under familiar before Xeno had given it permission to.

He thought about Prometheus instead, because that was safer ground. The projections he'd run last week put them eighteen months from a working prototype, assuming the funding held and assuming nobody above him panicked and pulled the plug the way they'd done with three other projects before this one. He thought about what it meant that the board had sent their best field agent instead of another committee, and what it meant that Halloway hadn't been able to look him in the eye when he said the word protection. Protection implied a threat coming from outside. Xeno had built his whole career on being able to read the difference between what people said and what they meant, and what Halloway had meant tonight sat somewhere closer to containment than protection, a distinction most people wouldn't have caught and one Xeno couldn't stop turning over.

"You always this hospitable," Snyder asked, "or am I special?"

"You're temporary. That's not the same as special."

"Halloway didn't sound like temporary."

Xeno's hands stilled over the keyboard for half a second before he caught himself and kept going. "Every assignment is temporary until it isn't. I intend for yours to end quickly."

"That a threat?"

"It's a preference." Xeno finally turned to face him fully, arms crossed, taking his time in a way that mirrored the earlier assessment, deliberately, so Snyder would know exactly what was happening. "I don't like being watched. I like it less when I don't know why."

"Then you're going to have a bad time," Snyder said, and there was no cruelty in it, no smugness, just a plain statement of fact that landed heavier than anything sharper could have. "Because I'm not going anywhere until someone tells me to."

"And if I tell you to?"

"You're not the one who gives me orders, Doctor."

The way he said it, calm, unbothered, absolutely certain, made something twist in Xeno's chest that he didn't have a name for yet, and wouldn't have liked the name if he had. It wasn't fear, he was fairly sure of that much. Fear he understood, fear had a shape he could work with. This was closer to the feeling he got in the middle of an experiment that refused to behave the way the math said it should, the itch of a variable he hadn't accounted for sitting right in front of him and looking entirely unbothered about it. He turned back to his monitors before any of it could show on his face, and told himself it was irritation, because irritation was familiar and simple and didn't require him to look any closer at whatever else it might have been.

Behind him, he heard the faint click of a lighter, once, twice, before Snyder seemed to think better of it and put it away without lighting anything. Xeno didn't turn around. He didn't need to. He already knew exactly where the man was sitting, exactly how still he'd gone, exactly how long it had been since either of them had said anything at all, and he hated, quietly and specifically, how easily he'd started keeping track.

Outside, past the reinforced windows, the launch complex sat dark and enormous under a sky with too many stars in it for a city this size, and somewhere in that darkness the countdown clock for the next unrelated mission kept ticking toward a number that meant nothing to Xeno tonight. He had his own countdown running now, one nobody had bothered to put on a screen. Eighteen months to a prototype, and an agent sitting behind him who might be there to keep him alive until then, or might be there for the exact opposite, and Xeno had no way yet of telling which, no data set large enough to run the numbers on a man who gave away nothing.

It was going to be a very long assignment.