Dylan, like any soldier, knew better than to pull a weapon he's not prepared to use. That didn't mean he was about to shoot.

It did mean that if Gaheris made just one move that made Dylan think he was in for a repeat performance, he would.

He'd shot Gaheris. They'd fought on the command deck of the Andromeda with Dawn's body still slumped in the pilot's chair. He'd held Gaheris while he died as a battle raged around them and as everything he knew and believed in started to fall apart. Somewhere, inside, where he almost never let it show, even to himself, he hated himself for that almost as much as he'd hated Gaheris, at times, for what he'd done.

Though Dylan's stare was harder than Gaheris had once been used to seeing and his hand was perfectly steady on his weapon, Gaheris was, of course, right.

Dylan was never a man who could shoot someone cold as he walked away, offering no immediate threat and with no weapon in his hand. Not even if it could change history. If he ever became that man, he'd have crossed a line he never wanted to cross.

Still, for almost nobody else would he, in that moment, have slid the force lance back into its holster. Gaheris had always had a way of speaking as if whatever he suggested was the only logical option and anyone else, including Dylan, was a fool for thinking otherwise.

This time, he was right. But it took a lot for a Nietzschean, especially one as paranoid as Gaheris, to deliberately turn his back on a man with a weapon drawn on him. It was a simple, potent move, and it called a bluff Dylan hadn't really meant to play.

"You know I can't," he said, one small concession to that fact.