Chapter 33
I See You
Lucan
Midnight in the bunker has a different texture.
The systems hum lower, like they are conserving energy.
The air is cooler, drier. This is my hour—the one where precision comes easiest, where the world narrows to glass and steel and labeled containers.
I stand at the long counter in my workspace, sleeves rolled, gloves on, reorganizing my liquids with meticulous care.
Vials of clear, amber, milky suspensions.
Pressurized canisters aligned by volatility, not alphabet.
Gases calibrated, valves tested twice. Everything exactly where it should be.
I update concentrations, adjust ratios by fractions that would be meaningless to anyone else. One of the serums, an older compound, needs to be stabilized. I correct it without thinking, muscle memory guiding the work. This is what I am good at. This is where the world makes sense.
And yet she is here, in my head, in my peripheral awareness, like a variable I cannot isolate.
I am measuring out a reagent when I feel it.
That shift.
It is subtle, but I know her well enough now to recognize it the way I recognize pressure changes. The hair at the back of my neck lifts. The space behind me is no longer empty. I do not turn immediately. I finish the pour, cap the vial, log the adjustment. Only then do I glance over my shoulder.
She is standing in the doorway of the workspace, barefoot, wrapped in one of the thick blankets from the fire pit area.
Her hair is damp, darker than usual, curling less at the ends where it hasn’t fully dried.
She looks clean in the way people look after they’ve been scrubbed raw; like the water took something with it.
Her arms are folded tightly around herself, not cold, but contained.
Something is wrong.
Her breathing is shallow. Her eyes are bright in a way I don’t like; not fear, not exactly. Something closer to grief held just below the surface, disciplined but straining.
I pull my gloves off slowly and set them aside. “What is it?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer right away. She steps into the room instead, the blanket trailing behind her like a shadow she can’t quite shake.
Her skin looks pale under the fluorescent light; washed out, almost translucent, and the sight of it registers in me with the same sharp precision as a warning indicator blinking red.
She doesn’t look injured. She looks depleted.
There’s a difference. Injury is a system failure.
This is a system running too long without rest.
“I can’t sleep,” she says finally. Her voice is steady in the way people sound when they’ve already exhausted the panic and landed somewhere quieter, more dangerous. “I haven’t slept. Not really.”
I study her without disguising it. Her pupils are slightly dilated. Her shoulders are held too high. She’s conserving energy, bracing for something that hasn’t happened yet. “How long?” I ask.
She shrugs. A small movement, dismissive. “Days.”
She crosses the room and sits on the edge of my table without asking, the cold metal biting through the thin layer of fabric between her and the surface.
She doesn’t flinch. She plants her hands on either side of her hips and stares past me, at the wall, at nothing.
It is the posture of someone who has stopped expecting comfort.
“Do you have something?” she asks. “For sleep. Something that will make it… stop.” She gestures vaguely toward her head, then lets her hand fall. “Just for a while.”
The request lands heavier than she knows. Not because I don’t have options. I have too many. But because she didn’t phrase it as demand or desperation. She asked the way people ask when they’ve already accepted refusal.
I don’t answer immediately. I step closer instead, enough that she can see me in her peripheral vision. Enough that she knows she’s not alone in the room. “Sleep is not a switch,” I say. “It’s a process.”
Her mouth curves faintly. Not a smile. “Everything is a process to you.”
“Yes,” I say. “That’s why you’re asking me.”
Her gaze flicks to me, sharp for a moment, then dulls again. She looks tired in a way that goes deeper than muscles. This is not about exhaustion. This is about pressure building behind the eyes, about thoughts that won’t loosen their grip.
“Is there something,” she asks again, more quietly now, “for my head? For the ache. The… weight.”
I feel something shift in my chest at the word weight. I know that sensation. I know how it accumulates, how it presses inward until thinking becomes effort and silence feels like mercy.
“Yes,” I say. I don’t elaborate. I don’t name it. I don’t need to. “But not yet.”
She frowns faintly. “Why not?”
“Because you’re not sleeping,” I say. “You’re spiraling.”
Her fingers curl against the metal edge of the table. “You say that like it’s a diagnosis.”
“It is,” I reply calmly. “One I recognize.”
She goes still. “From where?”
I consider the question, then answer honestly. “From feeling it happen.”
She nods once, as if that confirms something she already suspected. The silence stretches between us, thick but not hostile.
“When was the last time you ate?” I ask.
Her jaw tightens. “I’m not hungry.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
She exhales slowly through her nose. “Dinner,” she says. “Yesterday.”
I step closer and rest my hip against the table, not touching her, but anchoring myself near. “You don’t get to starve and ask for sedation,” I say, not unkindly. “That’s not care. That’s avoidance.”
Her head turns toward me, eyes dull but so lively blue. “I didn’t ask you to take care of me.”
“No,” I agree. “You asked me to make it stop.”
She looks away. The blanket slips slightly from her shoulder, revealing the curve of her collarbone. She looks fragile in a way she would hate being named.
“Why are you awake?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does,” I say. “Because sleep doesn’t leave without reason.”
“You want me to explain insomnia to you?”
“I want you to explain this,” I reply, and I gesture vaguely toward her; her posture, her pallor, the way she seems to be folding inward around something she doesn’t want to touch. “You look… empty.”
The word lands. I see it in the way her shoulders sag a fraction, the way the tension in her jaw loosens as if something has finally been named.
“I’m tired,” she says. “Of thinking. Of… feeling.”
Dissociation, my mind supplies automatically. A coping mechanism. A warning sign.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I ask.
She is quiet for a long time after that. I don’t expect her to want to talk to me about it. When she speaks again, her voice is lower, flatter, like she’s reading from something etched too deeply to erase.
“I guess it started when I was young, I didn’t have friends. Not really. I was the kid teachers forgot to pair up. The one who got moved around because no one would complain.”
I say nothing. Silence is not absence here. It’s permission.
“It didn’t change,” she continues. “Not in high school. Not in college.” A faint, humorless smile touches her mouth and disappears just as fast. “People looked through me. Past me. Like I was furniture. Useful sometimes. Never necessary.” She shrugs, small and tired. “I guess I was easy to miss.”
My jaw tightens. A feeling settles into something heavier. Protective. Possessive in a way I don’t like naming.
“I learned early that if no one was looking,” she goes on, “you could get away with things. With disappearing.” Her fingers tighten slightly. “No one noticed if I didn’t eat. Not for a day. Not for two. I could go quiet, small, empty—and it didn’t ring any alarms.”
I don’t interrupt.
“My parents were always fighting,” she says, as if it’s a footnote instead of a fault line. “Not screaming. Worse than that. Cold. Long silences. Words that were sharpened just enough to cut but not enough to bleed.” Her gaze drifts somewhere distant.
She exhales slowly. “That’s when I realized I wasn’t like the rest. Other kids got angry.
Or sad. Or loud. I just… folded inward.” Her voice wavers, barely.
“That’s when the depression started. I didn’t know what it was then.
I just knew I felt wrong. Heavy. Like I was made of something denser than everyone else. ”
She pauses, then adds, almost clinically, “I got very good at hiding it.”
Of course she did.
“I found dead things around that time,” she says.
“Animals. Insects. Plants.” Her eyes flick to the crate of specimens still sitting nearby.
“They made sense to me. They were quiet. Still. Honest. Nothing expected from them. I could look at them without having to perform. I bonded with my father over them, it’s something we had in common. ” She swallows.
I feel something shift in my chest, not revulsion, not fear. Understanding. Too much of it.
“They didn’t ask me to be different,” she adds. “Or brighter. Or happier. They just… were.”
“Journalism made sense,” she continues, letting her have her monologue.
“I was already good at disappearing into the background. At listening. At noticing what other people missed because they were too busy being loud.” Her shoulders lift and fall.
“Journalism rewarded that. It turned my detachment into a skill, and the people matched me more.”
I nod once, her eyes are glossy now. Once I’m certain she’s finished; I speak.
“I don’t think you were easy to miss,” I begin. “I think you were surrounded by people who didn’t know how to look.”
She blinks at that.
Once. Twice. Like the sentence doesn’t fit the shape she’s used to carrying.
Her mouth opens, then closes again. When she finally speaks, her voice is quiet, uneven; not breaking, but close. “If enough people don’t see you,” she states, “at some point you start wondering if maybe there’s just… not much there to see, you know?”
A single tear slips free despite her effort to hold it back. It tracks slowly down her cheek, catching the light, deliberate in the way only real grief is. She doesn’t wipe it away.
“I know,” I say. I understand, all too well.
“For what it’s worth,” I say, and I choose the phrase deliberately, knowing it carries weight only if it’s earned, “I do see you.”