Sebastien and Emre

They are never going to be friends, and Sebastien reaches this conclusion on a Tuesday evening in the Greymantle townhouse, watching Emre drop off a file, stay twenty minutes, and produce in Sebastien three separate urges to say something he chooses not to and two moments where what he does say is civil without being the civil version of what he's actually thinking.

It isn't entirely about her anymore. It's more structural two people whose relationship to the same person is built from such different material that there's no useful overlap, no common ground that doesn't put one of them at a disadvantage just by standing on it.

What Emre did for eight years is a thing Sebastien has genuine difficulty locating in any recognisable category of behaviour. Not the worst thing anyone's done objectively, given the surveillance team and the elimination order, it isn't. But it's so specific and so sustained and so quietly confident in its own righteousness that it produces in Sebastien a frustration with nowhere clean to land.

He knows part of this is his own failure staring back at him. He had an intelligence report in a drawer for six months and called the not-telling protection, which is structurally the same mistake as Emre's, just smaller and shorter. He doesn't get to be angry at Emre on principle.

He can still find him difficult to be in a room with.

"How long were you going to keep the Sundays going," he asks, when Emre is clearly preparing to leave.

Emre looks at him. "What."

"The restaurant. Three tables away. Four years. If she hadn't left, if the situation hadn't broken open how long."

A pause. "I don't know."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the honest one."

Sebastien looks at him. "She deserved to know you existed."

"Yes."

"You knew that."

"Yes."

"And you chose the distance anyway."

"I chose what I thought I could manage without damaging her. The honest version is: I chose what I could manage. Not the same thing."

Sebastien sits with that. He doesn't like the sitting-with-it, because there's something in what I could manage that he recognises from his own choices the gravity of choosing what you can live with over what's right.

"She's going to be alright," he says.

"She was always going to be alright. That was never the question."

"What was the question."

A pause, something moving in Emre's face and quickly controlled. "Whether I was going to be the person who helped her be alright or the person who complicated it." He picks up his coat. "I spent eight years being the second thing while telling myself I was the first. I'd like to change that. I don't know yet if I'm capable of it."

The flatness in his voice isn't indifference. It's honesty about a question he hasn't answered.

"For what it's worth," Sebastien says. "The memory restoration. When she's ready don't do it alone. Have someone there she trusts."

"I know."

"I'm not offering."

"I know that too."

A pause that isn't comfortable and isn't hostile two people who are never going to be friends discovering the specific shape of what that means, where it starts, where it ends, what occupies the middle ground.

"She trusts Roman," Sebastien says.

"Yes."

"Adaeze's getting there."

"Yes."

"Joon-Ho's better than he was."

"Significantly."

Sebastien looks at the file Emre's brought. "Geneva."

"Geneva."

"You're coming."

"She asked."

"She's going to need the neutral Folklore read. Vassenheim specifically he responds to third-party framing that doesn't come from the five bloodlines directly."

"I know. I've worked with him before." A pause. "He responds to historical evidence without political framing. The Isadora documentation, handled right, will move him."

"Roman's hands."

"But Roman needs Vassenheim's specific historical objection briefed first. He has a theory about the founding compact's legal derivation that needs addressing directly, not rhetorically."

"Can you brief him."

"I can brief all of you."

Sebastien looks at him. This is, he recognises, the actual shape of the working relationship: not warmth, not personal trust, but the specific functional respect of two people who are each very good at different things and have found a reason to point both sets of things at the same problem.

"Wednesday. Council room. Eight."

"I'll be there," Emre says, and goes.

Sebastien sits at his desk after the door closes. He thinks about thirty-one people in the dark for three weeks. Marcus in Inverness, the familiar texture of his anxiety returning like a shape he'd forgotten the outline of. The pack bond as furniture the thing you don't notice until the room's empty and you have to navigate without it.

He thinks about Veira standing in a restaurant garden in the cold, choosing.

He picks up his phone. Sends: Geneva preparation. Wednesday. Council room. I need you there.

She responds in forty seconds: I'll be there. Bring coffee. The council room always smells like it's been five hundred years since anyone made any.

He looks at the message. Types: The smell is atmospheric.

She types: The smell is a health risk.

He puts the phone down. He is, quietly, smiling. Not performing it. Just having it.