The forward aid station lived in a forgotten corner of the West Lot, tucked between a stack of shipping containers and a half-dead tree that no one had bothered to cut down.
The tarp walls flapped softly in the night wind. Inside, harsh white light turned everything flat and clinical.
FULCRUM sat on a folding cot, armor plates off, undershirt damp at the collar. His helmet rested at his feet, respirator unclipped and hanging like a second jaw.
Across from him, PATCH$1 wrapped a blood pressure cuff around his arm.
"I'm fine," FULCRUM said.
"That's nice," PATCH$1 replied, voice soft and steady. "I'm still taking your vitals."
The cuff hissed as it inflated. He watched her work: practiced hands, gentle but precise, nothing wasted. It reminded him uncomfortably of himself.
"Minor compulsion tick," she murmured, half to herself, reading the numbers. "You stepped back fast enough, that probably helped. Any lingering urge? Images? Music?"
"Just the memory of wanting to see more," FULCRUM said. "I recognize the feeling. I'm not letting it pick the next move."
She nodded. "That tracks."
Her eyes flicked up to meet his—warm, concerned, entirely professional. He felt the way people looked at him, sometimes; the little extra weight behind their attention.
He filed it away, like everything else. A datum. Not something to move around for.
Outside the tent, the low murmur of radios and idling engines pulsed like distant surf.
On the other side of the station, a portable monitor glowed in front of FUSE. He sat half-turned toward them, one earbud in, fingers tapping through camera feeds and line-of-sight overlays from the building they'd just cleared.
His gaze kept slipping back to the cot.
"How many times did you feel like looking?" PATCH$1 asked quietly.
"Once," FULCRUM said. "Maybe twice, if you count the half-thought before I moved."
"And that's all?" she pressed, checking his pupils with a penlight. "No echo? No… itch?"
He let himself consider it honestly for a heartbeat.
"No," he said. "Just… anticipation. That's on me, not the SCP."
She smiled, just a little. "Good. We like it when the SCP gets less credit."
The tent flap opened. A gust of cold air came with VANTAGE, who dropped onto the next cot with a groan.
"Officer's stable," he reported. "Local EMTs handed off to our people. They're not happy about the amnestic paperwork, but OWL says that's a tomorrow problem."
"Everything's a tomorrow problem for OWL," RATCHET muttered from where he was dismantling his tablet on a metal tray. "Except our debriefs. Those are a 'right now, why are you five minutes late' problem."
"Nu-7, TEAM 1," OWL's voice came over the local net just then, as if summoned. Calm, level, edged with that perpetual hint of dry disapproval. "Status report from forward aid."
"FULCRUM is clean," PATCH$1 answered before anyone else could step on it. "Minor compulsion noted, no ongoing effect. The rest of TEAM 1 are norm baseline."
"Logged," OWL said. "You've got ten minutes to reset before you roll to Objective Two. Geometric anomalies three blocks east. Possible ZERO-NINE-SEVEN-ZERO contact." A pause. "Nice work on zero-one-two. You didn't give ETA-10 anything extra to photograph."
"Thank you, sir," FULCRUM said.
He meant it, but he didn't feel anything like pride. Just a quiet reset of the ledger: no losses, no new ghosts.
The channel clicked off.
"See?" PATCH$1 said. "Praise. That means you're not allowed to collapse on my cot just yet."
"Wouldn't dream of it," FULCRUM said.
He knew she cared more than she said. He saw it in the little things—the way her shoulders relaxed half a centimeter after she cleared him, the way she always answered his check-ins first. He knew FUSE noticed that, too.
"Hey," FUSE called without looking, eyes still on the monitors. "You done poking my breacher?"
"Your breacher?" HARROW snorted from somewhere behind the curtain. "Pretty sure the patch says FOUNDATION, not 'Property of FUSE.'"
"Semantics," FUSE said. "Status, Patch."
"FULCRUM is cleared," PATCH$1 said. "He can go break more architecture for you."
"Good," FUSE replied. "Because the architecture down the block is already offended. Stairs looping on CCTV, doors not where they were thirty minutes ago. Whole building's throwing a tantrum."
He flicked to another feed, jaw tightening. On one of the screens, FULCRUM's helmet cam icon blinked in standby.
"You ever get the feeling you've seen this move before?" FUSE muttered, mostly to himself. "Different city, different team, same kind of guy walking into the weird with a shotgun and a calm voice."
"Who?" RATCHET asked idly, not looking up.
"Forget it," FUSE said quickly. "Old brief. Wrong squad."
Inside, FULCRUM slid off the cot, rolling his shoulder as PATCH$1 finished logging his vitals.
"You're fine," she said. "Medically, at least. Psychologically… we'll pretend you're fine and see what DOCSTRING says later."
"I prefer your evaluation," FULCRUM said.
She huffed a small laugh. "You shouldn't. I'm biased toward you not falling apart on my shift."
He met her eyes again for a fraction of a second. There was affection there—soft, unguarded in that PATCH$1 way. Not romantic, not from her. But still weighty, still an extra thread in the knot of expectations that everyone seemed determined to tie around his neck.
He admired it. He did not pick it up.
"Then I'll keep not falling apart," he said.
"Do that," she replied.
As he stepped past FUSE, the IMINT specialist gave him a long, sideways look.
"You good?" FUSE asked.
"I'm operational," FULCRUM said.
"That wasn't the question," FUSE said, too quickly, then shrugged it off. "Whatever. Try not to break any loops before I get you a clean map. I don't want to redraw geometry from memory because you decided to be a hero."
"I don't do heroics," FULCRUM said. "I do containment."
He stepped out into the cold night again, helmet in hand, the city's noise washing around the tent like distant static.
Behind him, in the aid station, PATCH$1 watched him go for a moment longer than she needed to.
FUSE saw that in the reflection of his monitor, jaw clenching, eyes narrowing just briefly.
"I'm right here, you know," he said.
"I know," she answered, turning to him with a smile that was only his. "I was just checking his gait. Compulsions can show up as motor glitches."
He relaxed a fraction. "Right. Sure. Motor glitches."
She reached out, squeezing his wrist gently.
"Hey," she said. "I'm serious. I'm fine. He's fine. You're… loudly fine."
He snorted. "That's the worst compliment I've ever gotten."
She laughed, and for a moment the tent felt almost warm.
Outside, FULCRUM fell back into formation with TEAM 1, the world narrowing again to angles and stairwells and the next wrong door they had to walk through.
Behind all of it, unseen to any of them, a different pair of eyes watched his vitals scroll across a separate feed in a secured room—someone who had once seen another breacher-medic walk the edge of the knife with the same steady, measured steps.
But that was an arc for later. For now, there was just a man, a team, and a building that had decided to stop obeying the rules of space.