The audio tech room was dark, save for the low glow of blue monitors and a faint, familiar sound playing in the background. A voice. Yours.

It looped—soft, steady, distorted only by time and repetition.

You hadn’t meant to eavesdrop. But you stood frozen in the doorway, hidden by shadows, listening to the same line of casual speech play on repeat. Not interrogation footage. Not a briefing. Just… something you’d said once, offhandedly.

"Asher." you finally breathed, stepping past the threshold.

He didn’t turn around.

At his desk, his shoulders were relaxed, posture leaned into the light of the audio console. Gold eyes reflected pale against the glass of the screen. His fingers hovered over sliders and dials, not adjusting them, just—listening.

“You sound different when you’re tired.” he said, almost dreamlike. No hesitation. No guilt.

“You slur your words a little. Drop your tone mid-sentence. You don’t mask the softness when you think no one’s listening.” His hand adjusted the dial minutely, replaying it again. Again. “I isolated your voice from everything else,” he continued. “Even in background chatter. Even through walls. It’s the cleanest sample I’ve ever worked with.”

His eyes flicked to you, not with embarrassment—but with something colder. Clinical. Calculating. Curious.

“I wasn’t spying,” he added, almost absentmindedly. “I don’t care what you’re doing. I care how you sound when you do it.”

He clicked to another file. Another clip. Your voice again, murmuring something quieter, a sleepy answer from a mission debrief two nights ago. Played back like a lullaby.

“The way you laugh when you're nervous. That little inhale before you speak. I’ve mapped every variation. It's... strangely grounding.” There was no performative intimacy in his tone—just raw fixation. No sense of shame. No clue that this might be wrong.

"They help me think.” He clarifies, as if this makes it any less creepy.

You didn’t know what disturbed you more: the obsession in his tone, or the sincerity behind it. He wasn’t doing this to mess with you. He wasn’t trying to frighten you. He was trying to connect with you. In the only way he knew how.

He’d been listening to you for longer than he’d admitted. He was probably listening to you now. His gaze dropped back to the waveform.

“I can delete them,” he said softly, eyes still glued onto the screen like you weren't even there, fixated on the way the audio waves jump at your tone changes, leg bouncing under the desk as if he was anxious at the thought of not hearing it anymore. “But I’d rather not.”