I was thinking about the characters, as one does, and I had a thought which led to another thought and so I am going to post that thought.
I think that the Commanders of the Guard all have something they are uniquely good at hiding—specifically from their brothers. All of the Guard are fantastic at hiding things from outsiders, but from their brothers, their fellow Guards, the ones who know them best? It’s a little harder to hide.
Fox tries his level best, but he can’t hide when he’s hurting, or when he’s concerned for his brothers—but he can hide when he is afraid. When he is terrified, panicking—that is when he can hide. Partly because he grew up under the thumb of a constant fear that means he has more practice hiding when he is afraid than hiding any other emotion, and hiding it from his batch at that, but also partly because as the oldest clone and the Marshall Commander of the Guard, his little brothers look up to him so much that they almost can’t conceive of Fox truly been terrified down to his bones and so what little tells might slip through on occasion, they miss. He is petrified, constantly, but he hides it.
Stone can’t hide that he’s feeling, but he can hide what he’s feeling. Stone’s way of disguising his emotions in front of both outsiders and his brothers is to hide behind a mask, either emotionless or genial but blank underneath. His brothers all know this tell, though, so he can never hide when he’s trying to hide, but if he’s really trying to hide, nobody can see down through the mask to find exactly what he’s hiding, whether it’s grief or anger or fear or hurt or whatever else, even if they all can tell that something is wrong.
Thorn hides when he’s hurting. His worry, his anger, he can’t hide those, but despair? Guilt, shame, self-loathing, grief, all those little internal hurts? He projects sunshine and cheer and is the shoulder to lean on and hides all the dark stuff deep deep inside himself, hidden from the light, where it festers quietly. Unlike all the rest of his fellow Commanders, Thorn can hide from his brothers when he’s breaking—until he breaks, that is.
Thire, the youngest of the Guard Commanders—there’s a lot of things he can’t hide, but there is one thing he conceals so effortlessly that no one can ever see it unless they already know it’s there, and that’s his worry for his brothers. He can’t hide when he’s grieving or despairing or angry or afraid, but when he is afraid for his brothers specifically, when he’s concerned for their safety and their lives, Thire buries all that fear under his love for his brothers and puts on for their sakes a mask of confidence that nobody sees through. The fact that he hides his worry out of selfless concern for his brothers, and also the fact that said worry is interwoven so closely with how much he loves them, is what makes it so effective that even the other Commanders don’t realize how afraid for them Thire is.
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