Nobody asked where Dimitri had been.

That was the first rule of operating near a man whose silence had its own gravitational field: you did not ask questions that the silence was already answering, and the silence coming off Dimitri as he emerged from the tree line was answering several questions simultaneously, and none of them was comfortable.

He was wet from the stream, which was notable. His expression was the same as it always was, which was to say completely unreadable, which was also notable given that the last forty minutes had involved the systematic and thorough destruction of every hyena in the immediate vicinity and then a period of time in the undergrowth that nobody was going to mention.

He walked back into the clearing with the measured, unhurried stride of a man who had dealt with a situation and considered it dealt with, and Leaf Team, who had been waiting with the specific, careful patience of people who had learned not to hover, straightened without being told.

Snow Team, who had caught up during the cleanup, were doing something similar, though with the added tension of men who were currently processing the fact that Felicity was not present, Lucan was not present, and Dimitri had just emerged from the bush smelling like stream water and something else that several of them had the instincts to clock and the collective wisdom not to comment on.

Several of them.

"So," Tommy said, looking up from where he had been sitting on a rock with the thoughtful expression of a man working through a puzzle. "You were in there for a while."

Sarge closed his eyes briefly.

"The hyenas," Dimitri said, which was technically true and comprehensively incomplete.

"Right," Tommy said, nodding slowly. "And then after the hyenas."

"Tommy," Kai said.

"I’m just saying it was a long time to be in a bush."

"Tommy."

"And you smell different from when you went in."

"Thomas," Sarge said, with the weight of a man who had survived an apocalypse and was beginning to suspect the greater threat was this conversation.

Tommy looked between them with the genuine innocent confusion of someone who had identified an anomaly and felt strongly that anomalies deserved to be named out loud. "I’m not being weird about it," he said. "I’m being observational. There’s a difference."

"There isn’t," Richard said, from the back, and then immediately looked like he wished he hadn’t because several heads turned toward him with expressions that suggested he had not yet fully recovered his social credit from the stray incident and should probably be quieter.

Dimitri looked at Tommy for exactly two seconds with the flat gold patience of a man who had spent his career making hostile governments uncomfortable and found that skill transferring well to this moment, and Tommy’s observational instincts apparently had a limit because he found something interesting to look at on the ground and stayed there.

"We move," Dimitri said, to everyone and no one specifically. "Full speed to bowral ee catch up to Snow Team’s advance."

He meant Felicity. Everyone knew he meant Felicity but nobody said he meant Felicity.

Leaf Team moved immediately, because Leaf Team had been operating under Dimitri’s command long enough to know that full speed meant now and not in a moment and definitely not after finishing the current conversation, and they fell into formation with the efficiency of people who had drilled this until it was muscle memory.

Snow Team took approximately one second longer, which was the time required for Voss’s second in command to look at Dimitri and arrive at several conclusions and file all of them away under not my business, and then they moved too.

Richard moved to the back and tried to be invisible, which was the correct instinct.

They were three minutes into the march, moving through the thin early morning light with the ashlands giving way to scrub and the distant sound of birds that had survived the apocalypse by being small and fast and uninteresting, when Tommy fell into step beside Sarge with the expression of someone who had been sitting on something and had decided he couldn’t anymore.

"I just want to note," Tommy said, keeping his voice low and his eyes forward, "that I know what that smell was."

"I know you do," Sarge said.

"And I’m not judging."

"Good."

"I’m just saying that of all the places and times."

"Tommy."

"A bush... During an active field operation."

"Thomas, I am going to say this once," Sarge said, in the tone he reserved for moments of great personal endurance. "There is one woman to five hundred men in this world. Every single one of us is operating on instincts that were not designed for these conditions. You yourself cried into a puddle three days ago because Felicity told you your water manipulation was improving."

Tommy opened his mouth.

"You cried," Sarge said.

"That was emotional regulation." 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

"My point," Sarge continued, "is that none of us are functioning normally and the man at the front of this column is functioning more normally than most despite the fact that he has been in proximity to her for months and has not once, not once, done anything except stand near her and catch her hair on a branch, and if he needed five minutes in a bush then that is frankly the most restrained thing I have witnessed since the world ended and I will not have it commented upon."

Tommy was quiet for a moment.

"That’s actually a really good point," he said.

"Yes," Sarge said.

"He really is very restrained."

"Remarkably."

"You’d think he’d just tell her."

Sarge looked at the back of Dimitri’s head, the white fur catching the early light, the absolute stillness of a man who was moving at full speed toward a woman he had followed across the country without ever once admitting out loud why, and felt something in his chest that was adjacent to sympathy and also adjacent to exhaustion.