Dylan West had never thought of himself as particularly brave.
He fixed engines. He kept schedules. He paid his bills on time and made sure the shop lights were off before he locked up. Bravery, in his mind, belonged to people who chased danger or stood on stages or threw punches. Dylan preferred things that stayed where you put them—bolts tightened to spec, engines that responded to logic, problems that could be solved if you listened closely enough.
If something broke, it usually meant it had been pushed too hard.
That belief shaped most of his life.
He'd grown up in the same city he lived in now, raised by a single mother who worked double shifts at the hospital and an uncle who smelled like motor oil and peppermint candy. His uncle Ray had owned the shop back when it barely broke even, and he'd taught Dylan two important lessons: how to tell when an engine was lying to you, and how to mind your business unless someone asked for help.
Dylan had learned both well.
He was introverted in the way that people often mistook for shyness. He didn't mind talking—he just preferred it to mean something. Small talk exhausted him. Silence didn't. Silence let him think, and Dylan did a lot of thinking, even if he rarely shared the results.
The shop suited him because machines were honest. They didn't pretend to be better than they were. If they failed, it was for a reason. You could trace that reason back, fix it, and move forward. People, on the other hand, carried invisible damage. You never knew what kind of pressure they'd been under before they came apart.
Carl Creel had walked into the shop like someone carrying too much weight.
Dylan noticed things. He noticed how Carl kept his hands tucked away, how he leaned on wooden surfaces instead of metal ones, how his eyes tracked exits without looking like he was doing it. None of it screamed *danger* to Dylan. It screamed *control*.
That was what caught his attention.
Most men Carl's size broadcasted confidence or aggression. Carl did neither. He moved like someone afraid of breaking the world if he wasn't careful. Dylan recognized that kind of restraint because he'd lived with it himself—just in a quieter way.
After the fight outside the shop, Dylan didn't sleep much.
Not because he was scared.
Because things finally made sense.
The way Carl flinched at sudden noise. The way he spoke about the past in careful, incomplete sentences. The way he watched Dylan work like he was memorizing something he didn't trust himself to keep.
Dylan replayed the moment when Carl had stood between him and those men, absorbing blows that should've broken bone, turning harder than stone without losing himself entirely. There had been power there, yes—but more than that, there had been *choice*.
Carl could've leveled the street.
He hadn't.
That mattered.
Dylan made coffee the next morning and went to the shop early. Routine was how he processed things. He opened the bay doors, turned on the radio, and waited. When Carl showed up just after nine, looking like he hadn't slept either, Dylan didn't pretend nothing had happened.
"You don't have to tell me everything," Dylan said, leaning against the workbench. "But I need to know what I'm signing up for."
Carl looked like he might leave. Then he didn't.
So Carl talked. Not about names or headlines, not about villains or heroes. He talked about losing control. About becoming something people feared. About wanting—desperately—not to be that person anymore.
Dylan listened.
He didn't interrupt. He didn't ask for proof. He didn't offer forgiveness Carl hadn't asked for. He just listened, the same way he listened to engines that rattled before they failed.
When Carl finished, Dylan nodded once. "Okay," he said again. "We can work with that."
*We.*
The word stuck with Carl. Dylan saw it land.
From then on, their relationship settled into something careful and unspoken. They didn't label it. They shared meals in silence, late-night conversations about nothing and everything, and a slow accumulation of trust that felt earned rather than assumed.
Dylan didn't romanticize Carl's power. He didn't ask to see it. He didn't treat it like a secret weapon or a party trick. To Dylan, it was just another dangerous tool—one that required respect and maintenance and clear boundaries.
In that way, Carl's abilities didn't scare him.
What scared Dylan was how alone Carl had been before.
And that fear—quiet, steady, and deeply inconvenient—did something unexpected.
It made Dylan choose.
He chose to stay late at the shop when Carl needed a place to sit and think. He chose to stand his ground when rumors started circulating about fights and strange men asking questions. He chose to trust that a man trying this hard to be better deserved the chance.
Dylan didn't see himself as a savior. He knew better than that. You couldn't fix people the way you fixed engines.
But you could stand nearby.
You could hand them the right tools.
And sometimes, if you were lucky, you could be the reason they didn't give up when things started to shake loose.
As Dylan locked up the shop one night, Carl waiting quietly beside him, Dylan realized something that unsettled him more than the violence, more than the secrets.
He wasn't just accepting Carl's past.
He was imagining a future with him in it.
And for someone who avoided risk whenever possible, that might have been the bravest thing Dylan West had ever done.