Empty Eyes by Within Temptation

He walked out of his office, “Tôi sẽ đi dạo, tôi sẽ trở lại tòa nhà trong khoảng ba mươi, Leyna. Trang cho tôi nếu bạn cần tôi.”

“Chắc chắn rồi, Trưởng,” she replied automatically in Vietnamese, knowing the boss liked to have short conversations like this to practice the various languages he knew, or partially knew. She shook her head in worried amusement as he walked into the hallway. He sounded exhausted, more than usual, and really, who still used words like “page me.” Its like he intentionally wanted to ignore tech, even though she knew he was better at it than he tended to admit. She wondered briefly what additional stress the Foster family was causing, everyone knew he worked more for William Foster directly than just the Paragon Center. How he kept up with everything, she had no idea. Maybe he never slept, and that’s why he always sounded weary. She put it out of her mind as she went back to monitoring the surveillance video streams.

Oliver Smith, or Brett Anderson, depending on who you asked, strolled tiredly down the hallway to the elevator. He almost never took the elevator, both from personal preference and paranoia, but, as well having an image to maintain, especially for just one floor, but it wouldn’t hurt this once.

The door dinged, and he walked out absentmindedly, heading towards the glass doors opening out onto the northern streets outside of the Paragon Center, nodding briefly to the cleaning crew. He made a point of knowing everybody’s name, normally for a brief greeting but he was distracted, and worn, worn thin.

He turned right, heading in the direction of his apartment a couple blocks away. Early evening on a Sunday, and the area was relatively quiet. These streets weren’t the safest in Crosswook, and it was caught in the middle of re-birth thanks to the construction of the Paragon Center, and the businesses and traffic that had come with it. But, some of that had stalled with the laws against the homocons, and the fear they generated, so the center wasn’t seeing as much activity as it was built to help with.

A few minutes later, he took the key out of his apartment and walked in. Ignoring the lights, he didn’t really need much to see by anymore, he walked over to the fridge. The apartment smelled…..stale. Clean, the service made sure of that, but. . . unused. Oh sure, when possible, he ran here from the base in the mornings, or came here to change before running home. Some appearances had to be kept up. When was the last time he actually came here he thought tiredly? Must have been six weeks ago, Shawna and he used the apartment after a night out at the clubs she liked. He stood there, the frig light silhouetting him, lost in fatigued thought.

The comm chirp surprised him, waking him from whatever journey his mind had been taking.

The conversation with the team stirred him, giving him a direction to focus on. He wasn’t sure what Titan had in mind, but he suspected. Ninety minutes until he needed to meet the Commissioner in the lobby. If this was going where he thought, well, it would be dangerous, but he still agreed that William should do it. He’d learned one thing over the years, maybe not very well, but one thing; and that was to take what happiness when you could, and where, and with whom you found it. There were plenty of ghosts haunting him that couldn’t make that choice any longer.

He shut the mostly empty frig, and walked back out of the apartment. Might as well eat at the Asian fusion place while he was waiting. Maybe that would restore the drained feeling he’d had since meeting with Whitley. He hadn’t felt this exhausted since SASR training. Right now he wasn’t even sure he trusted the memory of that exhaustion, because, if those images rising to the surface were correct, why hadn’t the team told him that? Why didn’t they tell him he’d been missing for months, not just in a coma? What had really happened? If his memories were really that flawed, who really was he?