alex

You wanted to do this when you joined the Hunter Association. You’d been growing your hair out since the Chronorift Catastrophe—most of it had gotten burnt off. As you aged, it grew long and healthy and Caleb was fixated on it, always patting your head, asking to help style it, keeping stray strands out of your face with gentle fingers. But it was long and you needed it out of the way for work, so cutting it was the most obvious thing to do.

And then Caleb died, and it didn’t feel right. To lose him and then cut away the memories of him sitting with you while he took the time to braid it carefully from scalp to ends, of bickering with him and laughing with him and reveling in the feeling of his strong hands turning gentle just for you.

You want to scream. You want to cry for hours and hours. You want to kill him and make sure he’s actually dead, to validate the grief you went through and the grief you’re still experiencing.

When you’re done, the floor around you is carpeted with hair, so much that you can barely see the tiling beneath. It’s just longer than shoulder-length now, enough to tie up so it doesn’t get in your face. You’ve been back home from Skyhaven for maybe an hour. You can still see Caleb on the airway saying goodbye, certain that you hate him for everything he’s done, everything he’s kept from you.

You should hate him. You should. You look at the forgiveness coupon that Caleb slipped into your belongings where you’d set it on your bathroom counter upon getting home. You should, and you sit on the floor in the pile of hair you’ve left behind because you don’t know what else to do.

You should and you can’t. 

You see him again a couple of weeks later and it’s still painful. It’s like seeing a ghost, like you’re hallucinating something you’ve wanted for months. But it’s wrong because it’s real. It’s wrong because it’s not him, somehow, even though it is.

“Pip-squeak—what did you do?” he asks.

You didn’t think you’d run into him here—you’re helping a shopkeeper empty out her store before sale. You were a regular as a child, and you remember her vividly from when you used to coyly ask for a caramel before leaving even though you didn’t have the allowance to pay for it. She usually relented. If she didn’t, Caleb would buy one for you anyway. “Don’t call me that.” 

The nickname is so ridiculous. You’ve always hated it but you hate it even more now, because it’s this new Caleb that’s using it as if he’s anything like your Caleb. He’s a sick imitation at best.

He says your name like this is all a joke, as if you’re just pushing back to push back, as if—surprise!—he’s been fine this whole time and now everything is okay. “Too grown-up for nicknames, huh?” he teases.

You continue your task of packing left-over merchandise into a large box, deciding not to respond. There’s a lump in your throat that’s too thick to swallow around.

“Your hair was so pretty.” He sounds so nostalgic that your brain stutters, your hands stilling for a moment. “Well—still is. Of course you’d look good with any hairstyle,” he says, like that’s the most obvious thing in the world, and he reaches out from where he leans on the counter, watching you, to pull at the ends of your hair.

You flinch back, instinctually moving to push his hand away, but he catches your wrist. You haven’t forgotten the way he held you down in Skyhaven—the things he said. How he wants to keep you, protect you in his odd, twisted way. He managed to hold you completely still without bruising your wrists, and his hold is very similar to what it was then. Firm and unyielding, but not punishing. Not yet. There’s an edge in his eyes that tells you it could get there.

Here is something terrible and secret: as much as you hate him for leaving you, for treating you the way he has since he’s been back in your life, there is some small, rotten part of you that loves it. When you confirmed that he was alive—that he was alive , and you grieved him for so long —your instinct told you to hold him in your jaws and bite down hard. To make sure he could never leave you again without leaving a sizable chunk of flesh behind. It’s a relief to see that mirrored in him. It makes you feel less insane. 

You’ve loved Caleb for your whole life. Of course you have. He’s been everything to you.

You loved him every time he asked you to pretend to be his girlfriend so he could complete his studies in peace. You loved him past his graduation, where you’d kissed his cheek in front of the entirety of his graduating class to stake some sort of claim on him. You loved him when he worked for the DAA, when his hours were so frantically busy that you barely got a phone call from him once a week. You loved him when he was on leave, when he came to visit you and Gran and smiled so brightly at you despite how exhausted you could tell he was. You loved him when he died. Past that. You loved him when he reappeared in your life, when he refused to explain how he survived, why he hadn’t contacted you, the terms of his new employment with a shady agency.

Being touched by him now is hard because it makes you remember this. It makes you remember the way you feel and the way you should feel.

His grip on you loosens, that odd gleam in his eye petering down to only a spark. His thumb, careful and soft, swipes across the inside of your wrist. You pull away before he can realize he’s given you goosebumps. “Why’d you cut your hair?” he asks.

You resume packing the box in front of you, and you hate him. You hate him. You hate him. You remind yourself of this until it feels true. “What are you doing in Linkon?”

“You wanna do a question for a question?” he asks. “That was the only way I was ever able to get any info out of you when we were kids.”

“We’re not kids anymore,” you say, but what you really want to tell him is to stop reminiscing all the time. Stop bringing up the fact that you shared a childhood, that he was the most important person in your life before he died. You had just figured out how to live without him. Only some days. Only some hours, more often than not. You could go a little without thinking about him before you remembered and that same awful feeling of emptiness crept back in. “I cut my hair because it needed to be cut.”

In your peripherals, you see him lean further across the counter. His arms are crossed, fingers of one hand drumming against a toned bicep—he’s still wearing those god-awful sleeveless shirts, even now, as if nothing has changed—and you remember how working out with him had gotten more distracting as you’d gotten older, how you couldn’t stop noticing the way the rest of his body finally began to match his height, how you used to rest your hands on his shoulders before he gave you piggy-back rides and how those same shoulders used to be much less wide than they are now. 

“You seem to be awful deep in thought,” Caleb says, and your hands hadn’t been moving this whole time. “Something you wanna share?”

“You didn’t answer my question.” Your ears are burning. You hate that he makes you feel like a kid, like you’ve done something wrong.

“Oh, so we are playing,” he says, and you don’t have to look to know the grin he’s wearing. You know him like the feeling of your tongue against the roof of your mouth. You know him the way you know a shirt you’ve been wearing beneath a sweater all day. “Would it be a bad thing if I said that I came just to see you?”

“How did you know where I’d be?”

He clicks his tongue at you. “Nuh-uh. You have to answer my question first. That’s how it works.”

You give up on the box you’re packing and stand, turn to look at him. You hadn’t realized how little room was behind the counter. It seemed like such a large place when you were little, the glass jars filled with candies bigger than your whole body. Now, you pick the jars up with ease. Now, the space between you and Caleb is basically infinitesimal with the way he leans towards you, coaxed in like a moon.

You consider his question. “It’s a waste of a trip,” you tell him. “I’m busy. I can’t babysit you today.” You don’t say it’s a bad thing that he came to visit because you’d be lying. Or, in reality: it puts into perspective that it’s actually a terrible thing, because it makes you realize just how badly you want to see him.

“You don’t have to worry about babysitting me. I’m pretty self-sufficient,” he says. “Besides, I’m here to worry about you . Don’t they say that people only cut their hair this dramatically if they’re going through a crisis?” He eyes your hair, fingers curling against his bicep as if to stop himself from reaching out again. To stop himself from wanting to touch. From wanting at all.

Maybe that’s wishful thinking, but you’ve wished for much worse in regards to him. You’ve wanted him to want a lot more from you. “No crisis here,” you tell him, your voice betraying you in its hollowness. “You can go back to Skyhaven.” 

There’s frustration beneath his veneer of good humor. You’ve always been good at pushing Caleb’s buttons—he makes it a competitive sport to push yours. But the difference between the two of you is that he likes when you push his buttons. You’re not doing that right now. You’re not playing. You know from experience that he hates it when you refuse to engage. “What do you want me to do, pip?” The question is exasperated. Wheedling. Genuine, beneath that.

“Do not,” you repeat, voice hard like a coin, “call me that.” You cross your arms, staring a hole into the wooden counter. You hate the fucking nickname. Looking at him is hard. His favorite color is red and you hate making him sad. “And you didn’t answer my question. How did you know I’d be here?”

He shrugs, but now it’s him that won’t meet your eyes. “I have notifications for the neighborhood. I saw the post about this place shutting down and asking for volunteers to help. I figured you’d respond to it.”

It feels too neat. Too simple. You know he’s no longer a stranger to lying to you. But you want to believe him so, so badly—and truly, smothered under layers of common sense, you know that if it was something a little worse, you wouldn’t even mind. If he was keeping tabs on you. The thought puts electricity under your skin, makes you feel heavy the way you did when Caleb used his Evol to keep you in place back in Skyhaven. 

“Answer mine now?” It seems like he didn’t want that to be a question, but something in him is a little broken, a little loose. He can be demanding. You’ve seen it firsthand. But in this scenario at least, he’s aware that you can deny him what he wants. “What do you want me to do?”

“You used to tell me you’d never lie to me,” you say. “You promised me.”

“I’m not lying to you.”

“You’re not telling me the whole truth.”

“I’m protecting you,” he says, and the emotion behind those words is so emphatic that you get that heavy feeling in your stomach like you want to cry but can’t. It’s the way you felt the entire time you were in Skyhaven, reeling from the reveal that Caleb had never died. He reaches across the counter, forearm resting on the varnished wood, hand hanging off the edge as if waiting for you to catch it. “You know I’d tell you everything if I could.”

You don’t know that. You would have taken him at his word a year ago. Now, you’re not so sure. “If you’re not going to tell me what I want to know, then at least help me finish packing everything up.”

He nods and steps back from the counter. Gets this complicated look behind his eyes, the same look he used to get when you got older and told him you didn’t want to hang out with him as much. It wasn’t true—you just wanted him to prove how badly he wanted to spend time with you. “As you wish,” he says, back to grinning. The expression is boyish, charming, nothing like the person he was a few moments ago when he claimed to be protecting you. The sudden change gives you whiplash. 

There’s a stack of unfolded boxes leaning against the wall behind him, and he does as you ask—picks one up, folds and tapes the bottom, begins to pack up merchandise. There is only the sound of both of you at work for a few minutes, until Caleb clears his throat. “One more question.”

You try to bite back your sigh and fail massively. “Fine. What.”

“Did you think about me? When I was away?”

Your hands start shaking almost immediately. It’s all anger, all frustration and rage and a deep, cloying sadness that feels like his fingers against your scalp, that feels like him whispering sorry and meaning it. A summer night: you’re nineteen and Caleb is carefully taking apart your long braids during sunset on the porch at Gran’s house, fireflies dotting the sky, the smell of a bonfire and his sweat from playing basketball with his friends from the neighborhood, and it was the first time you ever wanted to kiss him. You felt so guilty, then. You feel the same way now. “Away,” you repeat.

He has stilled entirely. He’s that same boy that sat with you that night and noticed you looking at his lips when he got a little too close, who looked at yours right back, whose grip tightened on your hair enough to let you know that there was something there like want, even though you were never fully sure. He’s that same boy grown up, and at the same time he’s not . But he reacts like that boy would have—his face falls, and he knows he used the wrong words, and he opens his mouth because he always has something to say to fix a situation, to make you feel better.

But you don’t let him speak. “Caleb, you were dead . Do you understand that?”

“I—”

“Look at me,” you say, “and tell me that there is any possible way you could understand what I went through.”

He doesn’t speak.

“You were in Skyhaven becoming a colonel. I was…” You were reeling from the loss of your best friend. The man you quietly loved. You went to work every day and you fought Wanderers and took on missions but you weren’t really there . You weren’t awake. Everything was a dream, something you’d eventually wake up from, something you’d tell Caleb about after you went to his room to curl up in his arms. And he would reassure you, I’m not dead, I’m right here, I’m not going anywhere but you can still hold onto me tight if it makes you feel better , and you’d fall back asleep and never dream about this terrible reality again. 

“Of course I thought about you,” you say, and you don’t want to be telling him this. He doesn’t deserve to hear it.

He says your name very quietly, like an apology.

You can’t look at him. Your hands are still shaking. “You need to—I think you need to leave.”

He hesitates for a moment, seemingly torn between moving towards you to comfort you and keeping his distance because he knows that’s what you need. He’s so easy to read. He’s done the same thing since childhood, his protective instincts warring with logical reason. He settles on quietly asking, “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” you spit, the word a little more venomous than you mean it to be.

“I’m sorry,” he says. You know he means it. He always means it.

You nod. You can’t say anything else or you’re going to break. All you want is for him to hold you right now because nothing has ever calmed you down like his arms wrapped around you, his face in your hair, his big hands curling around your sides. 

He leaves. You sit there for a moment with the weight of his absence, and then you get back to work as if nothing happened. The same thing you’ve done every morning since he died.

˚✧ ﾟ.

The thing you don’t understand is that he really is sorry. Truly, completely, wholly.

When he woke up after the explosion, you were the first thing he thought of. The blood on your sleeve—how did that get there? How did you manage to get hurt when he was looking away for less than a minute? And why were you lying to him about it? He wouldn’t look away again. He wouldn’t let you out of his sight.

And then he felt the pain, and he wasn’t able to think about much else.

He sits in his office. There’s a small picture of you on his desk—now that he’s a colonel and he’s allowed personal effects at work—that he’s had for years. Summer, high school, when he had just graduated and you were about to be a sophomore. You in a pretty yellow dress he’d bought you with his allowance, lace at the neck. Too pretty for you to wear with anyone but him. He’d made you promise him. Only for special occasions with Gran or times when he came back to visit. The bottom right corner is notably matte against the gloss of the rest of the photo, faded from all the times he used to pull it out of his wallet just to look, stroking his thumb across the ruffled material of the knee-length skirt.

You’re at home. He has only one tab up on his computer that’s not Fleet business—the CCTV stream from the camera across from your apartment building. He made sure you got home safe, and now he’s just monitoring. Making sure no one shady shows up. 

You haven’t called or texted him since the last time he saw you, and he doesn’t want to text first to pressure you into coming back to him before you’re ready. He knows that you’re dealing with a lot. Knows that him coming back was hard on you. He’ll let you have the space you need. He just wants to make sure you’re safe.

And it’s not as if he’s watching you all hours of the day. He’s being reasonable. He just makes sure you get to work safe, get back home okay. Checks the messages you send to your colleagues with your post-battle reports to make sure you haven’t been hurt. Really, the messages shouldn’t be sent over an unprotected server, even if the documents themselves are highly encrypted. The Hunter Association should expect people to intercept and decrypt their documents if they’re going to operate with such low security standards.

He doesn’t look at anything personal, obviously. Doesn’t check your messages with other people, even though he sees a lot of suspiciously male names in your inbox. Doesn’t go through your drafts on any social media, even though he could. He wants you to have your privacy. (She would be so scared of you if she knew about this.) He doesn’t want to scare you.

Waiting is difficult. Especially when you post something for the anniversary of Gran’s death and don’t mention him. He understands, though—it’s complicated, now that you know he’s alive.

Gran wasn’t supposed to die that way. It wasn’t how the plan was put to him. It would have been later, when you’d gone back to the Academy, when he was at the DAA. You weren’t supposed to see it, and he certainly wasn’t supposed to get caught in the crossfire.

For a long time, he was so angry that Ever changed the plan. That they [                                    ]. [                                                         ] the trauma it must have inflicted upon you. [                                                                                          ] to help you, but [                                                                                                   ]. 

They had their reasons, he guesses. If you thought he was dead, if he wasn’t allowed to contact you, things would go smoother. He would’ve appreciated some heads up, but that’s not how things shook out. They needed Caleb to uphold his end of the bargain as quickly as possible. Of course, they’d let him see you again—he’d just have to reach a certain rank within the Farspace Fleet first. Attain a position of power so undeniable that the only people who could control him would be the very people that put him on this path. Living under Ever’s thumb.

Whatever they needed him to do he would do. Because you were going to die, and they were the only ones who could fix you.

The position itself doesn’t matter to him. He never cared about being in power. People usually do what he asks regardless. There’s a language to the way people move through the world—they look up to certain personalities, react well to certain stimuli. You used to call it charisma. Caleb would call it something worse, but you had always been the one to see him in a more positive light. 

He didn’t care that they needed him to do whatever was necessary to climb the ranks of the Farspace Fleet, which he did with brutal and vicious speed. He didn’t care when they made him [                                                                                                        ]. He didn’t care that they replaced his arm with cold metal, that they put a chip in his brain that steadily made him lose parts of himself that were deemed too caustic, too empathetic. 

Sometimes, though, he wonders. What’ll be left of him in a year? Five years? He knows there’s a lot missing, things he’ll never get back. He knows that’s the point of the chip. A perfect weapon can’t be appealed to like a human can. 

But if he’s going to be a weapon, he wants to be yours. He seals parts of himself away, constantly using his Evol to protect his brain against Ever’s technology. They don’t know he’s doing it, he doesn’t think. He’ll become whatever they need him to be—but he’ll never become something that could hurt you. He doesn’t care about anything but you. 

He didn’t care that Ever needed to tear him apart physically to turn him into what he is now, and he didn’t care that they wanted Gran dead. He was well aware that the two of you were little more than scapegoats for her, her guilt assuaged by your upbringing. She was the reason you were going to die, anyway. The experiments she and her group of scientists performed to augment the aether core in your heart did something unalterable, nigh impossible to fix. You’re a star on the edge of implosion, ready to rip itself apart with its own terrible power.

Your heart will give out in the next ten years, they told him, unless the aether core within is stabilized. Ever had the only scientists, the only doctors that could help you. They just needed a weapon in return. 

And Josephine hadn’t only created you, the angel that you are.

Sometimes he considers what he might have been like if he’d grown up unaltered by Gran’s experiments. If he’d have been able to crush a man’s heart, leaving no external wounds behind. If he’d have had the ability to flatten a spaceship in orbit. If his body would have been built to withstand the kind of G-force that could fatally pressurize the organs of a weaker man. 

Would you have liked him like that? Physically smaller, altogether weaker? (She only deserves the best. You have to be perfect for her.) Do his looks matter to you? Do you like him now, as he is? When other boys, looked at you at school, he [                                                                                          ]. [                                                               ] wouldn’t hurt them—for you. You wouldn’t want him to. But [                                                                                                                                           ]. He would walk you home and you would put your hand in his and he would always think: so beautiful. Of course he would protect you for the rest of his life. 

He sees the light in your apartment go on. Your bedroom, he thinks, but he really tries his best not to look. He wants to learn the layout of your apartment on your terms, when you invite him there yourself.

The report he needs to finish before he leaves the office sits in the same state it has for the past twenty minutes. He should finish it. He should go home, where he doesn’t have access to you like this. Where he can’t go through official channels and use the power he clawed into his own hands to assure your safety.

Because you wouldn’t like it. He knows you wouldn’t. (You’re going to scare her.) He should finish this report and go home and leave you to whatever it is you’re doing with the lights on in your bedroom this late. There’s a car outside the building, one he didn’t see pull up while he was zoned out, thinking about you. And now you’re awake, the light on in your bedroom. Potentially with someone else.

[                         ] your [                                                                 ]. You [                                                                                     ] your home [                                                                       ]. [                                                                   ]. [                                                                                                                 ]. [                                                                                                    ] treat you like you deserve. [                                                                                                                                                     ]. [                                                                                              ]. [                                                                 ] yours. Just yours. [                                                                                                                                                                        ]. [                                                 ] because you were pretty when you were younger but now you’ve grown into the kind of beauty he wants to feel on his tongue, and if [                                                                                                                                      ].

He’s on his knees on the floor of his office, lungs burning. His metal hand has rent a chunk of splintered wood from his desk. Breathe. He knows. This is what he has to do. Slowly, deep. Until he can feel the air touching the bottom of his lungs. He brings a gloved hand to his face, wipes away tears. This always happens when the neurons are burnt away. It’s an autonomic reaction, the way eyes water when the nose is hit hard enough. 

Sometimes the memories come back. Usually they don’t. Either way, he always feels a sort of emptiness in his head, a heavy weight of nothingness that will always remind him that he has masters he must answer to.

When his breathing evens out, he stands. Clears his throat. Places the jagged piece of wood torn from his desk on top of the void left in its absence, as if he could slide it back into place. As if his mistakes could be fixed that easily. 

His phone rings. He considers not even checking who’s calling him, but old habits are hard to quit. And he’s glad he listens to his gut—because your face is on his screen. The reason for the habit. His contact picture for you is from his graduation, when you’d worn the yellow dress he bought you and he nearly lost his mind watching other people notice you in it. (You have to keep her away from men that stare too much.) You’re standing next to Caleb, your arm looped through his, his uniform hat on your head. Looking up at him, smiling. And the way he’s looking down at you—he often doubts that there’s any way the people around the two of you could have been blind to his feelings. He wore them plain, looked at you like there was nothing more special in the universe. Because there isn’t.

He’s spent a long time in the Deepspace Tunnel. He knows the ins and outs of this universe better than many others. Nothing is as beautiful or precious as you. And you’re calling him after weeks of radio silence.

No one else is at your apartment. Just you. Calling him.

It doesn’t matter that parts of Caleb are being cleaved away like rotten meat. It doesn’t matter that he’s been stressed, barely sleeping, staying at the office much too late to keep an eye on you. It doesn’t matter that you needed so much more space than he thought you would. 

You’re coming back to him. He’ll take whatever pieces you allow him to have. Eventually, all of them will fall back into place—with him, where every part of you belongs.

˚✧ ﾟ.

When Caleb was at the DAA, you would call him when you had nightmares. You used to get them a lot—regular stress from everyday life compounded with the PTSD from the Chronorift Catastrophe. When your grandmother sent you to a therapist and you were diagnosed, you always secretly believed they were lying. Sure, your entire body locked up during thunderstorms because the cacophonous sounds reminded you of a Wanderer’s roar, and sure, you sometimes couldn’t feel comfortable in crowded places because of the increased vulnerability to attack, but those were regular anxieties that everyone had. They must be.

When Caleb left for Skyhaven, you realized how right the therapist was. Caleb’s familiarity granted you a sort of security blanket that kept you from the worst of your trauma, and you hadn’t realized that. You hadn’t understood how necessary it was to you that he was there, just one room over, in case you needed to sleep in his bed next to him when you were scared. Without him at home, things got exponentially worse.

You woke up one night heaving, sobbing at the memory of it all. At the feeling of your own broken bones, the sight of scattered limbs and the sound of screaming—the sound of burning. You’d never known that burning could be so loud. 

Calling Caleb was instinct, even though he was at the DAA. He had an exam the next day. You felt awful. But he stayed on the phone with you until you could breathe normally, until the tears stopped. He offered to fly home to be with you if you needed him, despite the fact that he was in no way allowed to do that.

And you had needed him, but you knew there were limits. You couldn’t need him right by your side forever. There was going to be a point where you would have to let him go. And you’d thought, then, that you would one day reach that point. That it wouldn’t hurt. That it would be logical and reasonable and your heart would allow you to follow the logic and reason as it usually did.

But things were different with Caleb. Logic and reason never won out. It was always feeling, instinct. 

This nightmare is different. It’s Caleb right before the explosion, looking at you and telling you that he isn’t going to cover for you anymore. The blood on your sleeve, your wrist held in one big hand, like when you were kids. Except you’re not both coming home from the store, like you were in real life. It’s you and he on the porch after he undid your braids, after you turned and looked at his lips for too long and he stared back. It’s after he let himself hold your face gently, as if he could want the same thing you did. What’s going through your head, baby? he asked. The first time he ever called you that. You were thinking about him kissing you.

But he didn’t. He didn’t kiss you then because he didn’t want to. And then you both went inside.

In the dream, it’s you in that house with them. It’s the explosion sending Caleb’s body flailing back, completely aflame, hitting the wall of the house loud enough to crack most of the bones in his body. It’s your name croaked out, hoarse and broken, by the remains of his throat. And the sound of burning that’s a constant in your memories. You know it the way you know a song you've heard too many times. An earworm, your Grandma used to call them. Burning, burning, burning.

Your phone is in your hands and dialing before you’re fully conscious, realizing it’s too late to undo what you’ve just done. He picks up on the second ring, says your name confused, his voice too close to the way it sounded in your dream for comfort.

“Caleb?” you ask, and it’s a plea and a question and something so much more than that. 

“What’s wrong?” he asks, the confusion stripped from his voice when he realizes you’re calling for something important, that you’re calling in the middle of the longest silence there has ever been between you two barring the absence after his death.

It doesn’t matter what Caleb he is right now—yours, or this new, strange man you feel so distant from—it’s still somehow him. “I had a nightmare,” you say, but you can hear the receding tide of panic that still steals its way into your breathing. “Can you talk to me? I know it's... it's childish. For me to ask.”

“It's not childish. We can talk,” he says, because he always makes time for you. “Or—you know what? Give me twenty minutes. I can fly down there. We can stay on the phone.”

There are about sixty airspace regulations that would make it extremely illegal and impossible for him to fly his personal plane down to Linkon and park anywhere near your apartment. And yet, for a moment, the thought tempts you. “No, you don’t have to do that. Please, just—talk to me. About anything.”

“You know I’m good at that,” he says. You hear him lean back in a chair and you wonder what part of his house he’s in. Whether you woke him from sleep or not. “I was actually just thinking about when I graduated from the DAA. You remember that?”

“It wasn’t that long ago,” you tell him.

“You have a famously bad memory, pip.”

“Remember when I called you dirt-boy when we were kids because you couldn’t stop getting food on your shirt every time you ate?” you ask. “That’s still very vivid. I can go back to doing that, if you want to carry on with the nicknames.”

“There it is. Second only to the famously bad memory: the famously bad attitude,” he teases, and he doesn’t have to be here for you to see the curve of his smile, the way his eyebrows quirk upwards in delight, the way his whole face lights up when he’s having a good time talking to you. “Guess even a rude awakening can’t dull your tongue.”

You see: Caleb’s body, the house burning, blood and ash on your hands. His hands on your face. The first time he called you baby. “I guess not.”

The line is quiet for a moment. You wonder if, in the weeks of silence, he’s been laying in the bed where you slept during your brief stay at his home. You wonder if he’s washed the sheets, whether or not they smell like you. “It was a pretty bad one, huh?”

“They’re all bad,” you say.

He’s quiet for a moment. You hear the shifting of clothes, a door opening and closing. “I’m coming down there. If I’m on the phone it’ll take twenty. If I’m off I can make it in fifteen. Can you be patient for me?”

“Caleb—it’s not a good idea. You know it’ll be a pain.”

He chuckles, brushing it off. Endless confidence. “Nothing’s a big enough pain to stop me when you’re involved,” he says. “Besides, the colonel gets some privileges.”

“And he’s going to use them to come see me after I have a nightmare?”

“What else would I use them for?” he asks—and he sounds so achingly sincere, like there’s nothing else he could think to do with his ability to bend the rules, to slightly abuse his power. “Fifteen minutes. I promise.”

He makes it in thirteen.

You meet him in the living room after you hear him let himself inside. He must still have the spare key you'd given him when you'd first reunited, before the questions started creeping in. When he pulls you to his chest, you follow automatically. A big hand cradles your head, fingers curling into your hair. His arms are so firm around you, just like they always used to be—he has a solidity to him that can’t be denied, a strength he carries in every line of his body. He’s in his uniform, strangely enough. 

You wrap your arms around him, fingers tugging at the starched material of his long coat. You want to bunch it up in your hands, stretch it out, leave an undeniable mark that he came here, tonight, to comfort you, just like he would have when he was at school and you still lived with your grandmother. He even smells the same—like worn leather and mineral oil from maintaining his plane’s engines and sharp, clean aftershave.

He rests the side of his face against the crown of your head, breathes in deep. You wonder if you smell the same too, just how he remembers. You wonder if you can both pretend that nothing has changed, if you could let him back into your life and forgive the time he spent away from you and overlook his lies and everything else he’s done to you since returning that hasn’t sat right. His fingers tug at the newly short strands of your hair—the only thing that truly ruins the mirage of your perfect, happy life with Caleb. 

Things have changed. They always will. You pull away from him.

He still keeps you in his arms, giving you distance but only so much. He gets more reluctant to allow space the further you pull away. “Thanks for hanging in there for me,” he says.

You nod because you don’t want to acknowledge out loud that you’ve done anything for him. It doesn’t matter whether he showed up or not. You would still be here, awake, thinking about things you wish you could forget. Your hand fists the material of his coat, tugging its starched lines into a wrinkled mess. “I hate that you’re wearing this.”

Without a word, he steps back from you, takes his coat off and throws it across the back of your couch. The metal armband, the badges and chains of rank, the embroidered sigil of the Fleet—all cast aside to reveal the man underneath. Caleb, in a dress shirt and slacks and tall boots. Caleb as he could have been if he’d stayed with the DAA, coming home to you after a long day at his normal job that he loved so passionately.

Not that he’d be coming home to you. It’s an odd way for your brain to put it. But the thought sticks there, push-pinned to the way you currently feel about him. Warm at his insistence on being there for you. Relieved that he’s alive, as if after the last time you saw him the universe would fess up to its tricks, reveal that it was all one long hallucination, and the Caleb you knew is still buried in the graveyard where you left him. The pieces of him that they were able to find.

Parts of him are still there. Buried, even now. Sometimes you don’t recognize the man in front of you. 

He lifts a hand to your face and you lean into his touch—it’s instinctual. Something you’ve done a million times. He takes this as permission to get closer to you again, to wrap you up in his arms, and this time you give in completely. This time it’s just your Caleb, the Caleb you love so dearly, protecting you from your bad dreams. 

“Let’s sit you down on the couch and I’ll make you some tea,” he says, a gloved hand cradling the back of your head. “That sound okay?”

You hate the layers keeping him away from you. You pull away from him, take his hand in yours and peel his glove off. Make him give you his other hand, do the same to that one. Then you just hold them, your palms against the backs of his hands, his fingers slightly outstretched, as if allowing you to scrutinize fully. He still has calluses from lifting weights, from handling guns so frequently. You curl his fingers and look at his nails, all uniformly cut, cuticles slightly overgrown but healthy. The same scars from growing up with him: a puckered circle on the knuckle of his right thumb from a nasty fall on the basketball court, a long line down his left ring finger from knocking the absolute daylights out of a kid that tore out a chunk of your hair on the playground.

It had been your stake on him. The finger where most people wore jewelry to state that they belonged to someone else. You had done him one better, despite the fact that his actions were his own. A scar instead of a ring. A claim that couldn’t be taken off and hidden in a drawer somewhere.

“I want to be in the kitchen with you,” you tell him. If you say it quietly, you think he maybe won’t hear the slight panic at the idea of being apart from him right now. 

He smiles, the expression quieter than usual but just as effusive. “We can make that happen,” he says, and before you can stop him, he loops an arm beneath your thighs and lifts you, makes you wrap your arms around his neck in surprise. He must have used his Evol to make it so easy, but you didn’t even sense it. “My tea service comes with complimentary delivery. And if I’m not delivering the tea to you, I guess I’ll have to deliver you to the kitchen.”

You let him carry you. Play with the ends of his hair, where it’s slightly longer in the back. He places you on the kitchen counter next to the electric kettle and gets to work. He’s never been to your apartment before, but there are things he intuits easily. The fact that you’d still have an electric kettle, like you used to at Grandma’s. The fact that your tea is kept in the cupboard above the sink. He narrows his eyes, tentatively points to the cupboard next to the fridge before asking, “...mugs?” And he’s right, because that’s where they used to be at home, too.

Moving out was hard—another layer of familiarity stripped away, another safety blanket removed from the pile. You tried to keep things as close to normal for you as possible, as if you could turn this new, unfamiliar apartment into a simulacrum of the house in which you grew up.

None of it brought Caleb back, which is what you’d really wanted. But now here he is. Making tea for you again, like he used to when you were younger. Carrying you around like nothing’s changed.

When the tea is done, it’s nearly two in the morning. You know how military organizations work—know how early he’ll have to be back at it tomorrow morning. You’ve got it bad, too, but at least you’re home. He hands you the steaming cup—chamomile, because maybe it’ll help you fit a good night’s sleep into a couple hours —and finally allows himself to relax somewhat. Stands in front of you and takes off his tie, the metal ring that fits under his collar. Undoes the first two buttons of his shirt.

You look. The edge of his collar bones, the divot in between, the long line of his throat. Steam touches your face. There was a point where you stopped being able to look away from him like this. After that moment on the porch, your first vacation from the Hunter Academy. Caleb’s hands on your face. What’s going through your head, baby? You wish it hadn’t been a part of your nightmare. Even though he didn’t kiss you—made it clear that he didn’t think of you like that—you still look back on that memory fondly.

The closest you’ve ever gotten to what you want. 

Your skin feels hot. Your eyes dart upwards to his and he’s seen you looking. Something dances in his gaze—mirth, maybe, though it’s hard to tell with him. It could be something darker. You used to be able to read him like your favorite book, the words etched into your brain so deeply that you barely needed light to follow along the page. 

He gets closer and your breath shallows, stops. Puts his big hands against the countertop on either side of you, leans in gently. Still tall enough that he’s looking down at you. “Take a sip,” he tells you. “I wanna know if it needs anything else.”

You’re sure it’s perfect. He’s made your tea for decades now, knows how picky you are about brewing time and sugar ratio. You do what he asks regardless, bitter and sweet crossing paths on your tongue. There were nights like this where he would make you tea and you would drink it and cling to him after, not content to go to sleep unless it would be by his side. You’re so close to him that you can imagine yourself feeling the heat of his body, as if it’s unconsciously radiating outwards to comfort you. To wrap you up, keep you safe. You finish about half the cup before saying, “It’s good.”

“Sure you don’t want anything else?” he asks. When his voice gets quiet like this, it’s always a little more nasal, a little more hoarse. You used to find it endearing before you got older and started feeling something entirely different deep in your gut whenever he spoke this way. “The name of the tea service is misleading. I can do food, too. Massage, if your shoulders are stiff. Just tell me what you need and I’ll do it.”

What you need is for him to stay. Sleep next to you, like he used to when you were both kids. But maybe—more than that. When he talks to you like this, acts this way with you—it’s confusing. You swallow audibly, nervous, not willing to think about why you’re feeling so on edge this close to him, trapped on all sides. “Don’t you have work pretty early tomorrow?”

“Why?” he asks. “Do you need me to stay?”

Of course he knows. Just like he was your favorite book, you’ve always been his. He probably knew that you wanted him to stay from the second he got here—from the second he answered your call. But he wasn’t going to do anything about it until you asked. Giving you control, in a slight way, even though he already knew how this evening was going to pan out. 

“No,” you say. You both know you’re lying. But since he died, you’ve dealt with your nightmares all on your own. He wasn’t there to turn to. He left you to exist by yourself, to figure it all out without his hand there to take. “No,” you repeat, with more resolve this time, “but it was nice of you to come all this way.”

He looks—disappointed, maybe. His eyes narrow slightly, mouth pulling tight, but it’s such a small expression that it could be missed by someone that doesn’t watch him the way you do. He’s smiling again before you know it, easy and wide. Something about him seems farther away even though he’s still got his arms on either side of you, so close that you could reach out and put your entire palm on his chest. “You needed me,” he says. “Of course I was gonna come to you.”

You needed me . Had it been need? Or was it a want so bone-deep that the two feelings could easily be confused, switched out for one another? “Stay while I finish my tea.”

The laugh this receives is small, warm. Pleased at your command. He raises two fingers to his temple, flicks his wrist in a lazy mock-salute. “Yes, ma’am. Permission to move you to the couch so you can sit comfortably?” When he lowers his hand, it doesn’t return to the countertop. He spreads it across your thigh, graceful fingers splayed down the side, thumb lightly moving back and forth across the top. Skin to skin. You only really wear shorts and large shirts to sleep—his shirts. You hadn't even thought about it. It's just something you started doing after he died, after all of his surviving belongings from the DAA were parceled up and sent to you. His hand is so big that you feel a little breathless looking at it against your leg, swallowing up space so effortlessly. 

There’s no way he doesn’t feel this too. You know that. You know it more now than you did at nineteen, with his gentle hands holding your face. There’s something there, undeniable, that sits between the two of you. You love him. Of that much, you’re sure. But you don’t know what it means coupled with the heat you feel underneath your skin every time he touches you, with the heaviness of his gaze when he looks at you this close.

He could want everything from you. He could want nothing. You really wouldn’t know. He’s always kept his cards too close to the chest, even when you were begging him to show his hand.

“Permission granted, soldier.” You don’t do a very good job of hiding the way you’re feeling, but he doesn’t call you on it. Just smiles, smiles, smiles, quiet and smug and satisfied. 

The hand on your thigh loops beneath your legs, and he gives you a squeeze, as if to say: this is what the touch was for. There was a purpose to it. I knew you were going to let me carry you. Innocent, see? Just like everything else I do. Like the way he pulled away from you when you were nineteen, leaning into his touch. His Evol takes the mug from your hands, steadily allows your tea to follow the two of you to the couch. He floats it back over to you when you’re comfortable, the tendrils of his power slick against your hands.

It used to scare you when you were little. The feel of it—like oil floating in water, and your hands passing through it. But you got used to it after a while. It was comforting, gentle. His Evol, in its iridescence and its softness, was something you considered beautiful. Something you still consider beautiful. You would never tell him this because it’s maybe the oddest thing you can think about an innate, intangible power.

“Sit,” you tell him. Pat the couch next to you. He does as you ask and you melt into his side, comforted by his familiar scent, his gentle warmth. His dress shirt is scratchy beneath your cheek. You wish it wasn’t there, that your face could lie against his chest skin-to-skin, that you could feel his heartbeat solidly in the place where you’re connected to him.

His arm curls behind you, hand smoothing down your hair. With his long, graceful fingers, he traces your hairline, the curve of your ear, the line of your neck. Then his touch trails back up the way it came. Again and again, until you could imagine that there was nothing more to existence than this. “Sure you don’t want me to stay?”

“You work early.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he says. Presses his lips to the crown of your head, breathes in deeply. His voice is serious, but the serious you like—where he wants to express that he cares. Needs you to know that even though he teases about a lot of things, he doesn’t tease about this. “If you don’t mind me leaving early, I’m all yours.”

It’s selfish, you know. But Caleb has always seemed to encourage that. Has always seemed to want you to be selfish with his time, with the things he can give you. “You can’t take up the whole bed,” you say. A decision. An easier thing to say than yes, stay here, and since you’ll be here, please hold me while I sleep .

“I’ll shrink myself down,” he tells you. You can feel him smile against your hair—or maybe you’re imagining the feeling, but regardless, you know it to be true. He always smiled when you asked him to sleep next to you. Grinned wide before telling you that there’s nothing he’d like more.

You love the feel of him next to you in bed. Taking up so much space, his power evident in the size of his body, the packed muscle of it. “I want you pocket-sized.”

“What if you crush me in your sleep?”

“Too bad,” you say. “Shouldn’t have been so big in the first place. Then we wouldn’t have to shrink you.”

“Don’t lie to me,” he teases. “You like it.”

Your skin feels hot, clammy. Somehow both. You don’t like how easily he said that, and how easily he’s letting it sit in the silence between you. “No I don’t,” you say, because contesting everything he says is an instinct, something that resides in your bones.

Easily, he plucks you from your seat, Evol carrying your tea to the coffee table. Situates you on the couch between his legs, facing away from him. Allowing you, at least, the mercy to not have to look at him right now. He wraps his arms around you, pulls you back against his powerful chest. His arms are so long that he can loop the width of you with just one. Your head slips easily under his chin, and you’re so contained—so protected by him that you feel like you could suffocate. One hand comes up to cup your face—the one you haven’t claimed with your ring-finger scar. It’s colder than the rest of him, even though you keep your apartment at a pretty reasonable temperature. Or maybe it’s your face, burning, too hot against his unflustered touch.

“I said don’t lie. You like that I can hold you like this,” he says. Brushes his thumb over the skin right below your bottom lip. “Am I right?”

When you were younger, he’d wrap you up in his arms like this when you were having a panic attack. Held you so close that it felt like you were a part of him. No longer an external body—his veins connected to yours, your hearts beating in tandem. You loved it. Sometimes you asked him to do this when you weren’t even having a panic attack—you just wanted him so close that it felt like your edges were blending together. You stay quiet, because there’s no way you can tell him this. No way you’d want to.

“You don’t have to say it.” He holds you for a few more moments, arms firm yet gentle. The way he breathes out makes it sounds like he’s relieved, like there was something weighing on him that he couldn’t let go of until he had you in his hold. “I couldn’t do this if I was pocket-sized, though. So maybe we skip the shrinking for tonight?”

“Fine,” you say. “Take me to bed?” The way you say this—is it on purpose or not? You couldn’t tell him if he asked. You won’t even let yourself know. It has an effect, though. 

His arms tighten around you slightly, a little too firm to be classified as gentle anymore. His breathing goes from relieved to something heavier. “How could I say no to that?”

You wonder if he sees it too. The weight beneath the words. No, that’s not right—it’s not a case of whether he sees it, because it’s impossible to ignore. You’re not nineteen anymore, and he’s not twenty-two. 

The weight is there. The feelings are there. And you’re terribly sure that there will come a point, sooner than later, where you’ll both have to decide what those feelings are.

˚✧ ﾟ.

It’s not until you’re sleeping that he allows himself to really let his mind wander. He tries to be good—really, he does, but you make it difficult. He just loves you so deeply that some days he can’t breathe, the feeling taking up so much space in his body that there’s no room for air. 

So many things are endearing about you. Your first instinct after a nightmare being to call him. His clothes all neatly folded in their own drawers in your closet, like you’ve been keeping a space for him to come back to all this time. The way you wanted him to stay so badly that he could hear it in every word you said, even when you were telling him to go home. 

Sometimes you say things that make him so hard he can’t see straight. He could take you to bed, just like you asked—he could lie you out and worship you, he could show you just how much he loves you with actions instead of words. 

He thinks about the way you taste so often that he could be jailed for it. Would you like that—his head between your thighs, praising you? For him to be gentle, loving, to ready you with his tongue before he does something even worse? He imagines you saying his name while he’s inside of you and he has to pull away from you a little, hold his jaw tightly with his mechanical hand. 

A little pressure, a little punishment. (You’re disgusting. You’re disgusting.) There’s a nonzero chance he could finish untouched just from thinking about you like this. He feels so guilty when he gets this way, especially when you’re in such close proximity, basically still in his arms. It’s a betrayal of trust. 

If you woke up and he was fully awake, ridiculously hard in nothing but a pair of sweats—how would he even justify that to you? He could make you feel so good, though. He could learn your body so quickly, figure you out like he always does—but he doesn’t know if you would want that. And the guilt, the idea of you trusting him to be a good man, and him beside you, thinking about the things he would do for you if you’d just let him—

More important than anything physical is the fact that he doesn’t want you in that way only. If he were to finally have you, he’d need to have all of you. A taste isn’t enough. He wants you to be his and happy about it. He wants to be the only guy you text and the only person you come home to and the only man to whom you ever say I love you . 

Your brow furrows in your sleep, delicate. He moves his hand from his face to yours. Cold metal and grafted skin. Another part of him, gone. This and all the gaps in his head. He doesn’t feel like the Caleb that was yours anymore and it scares him because that’s all he wants to be. 

Despite the fact that he can’t feel your skin against his palm, despite the inorganic nature of what he’s becoming, his touch seems to quiet you. Your face evens out into an expression that’s so serene that it manages to calm him, too. He could kiss you like this and you wouldn’t even know.

He won’t. He won’t. He’s not a good man. He [                                                                          ]. [                                                                                                                  ]. But he won’t.

Those are the bad thoughts that he can’t control, the ones that sometimes leap out of nowhere. He doesn’t know if he had them before, but even if he did, they were never this bad. Never this [                                                                                                 ], intent on breaking your trust so he can take something he wants. 

What he really wants is you safe, always. Even from him.

He settles for cradling your head with his hand, pulling you closer so he can kiss your hairline, smell the shampoo you use, feel the texture of your hair against his lips. It’s enough. So much more than enough when he’s almost positive that he’ll never be able to have what he actually wants.

He’s not unaware of your feelings. He sees the way you look at him, sometimes. Notices the way you react to his touch, his words when he speaks to you in certain tones. But if he tried something and found out you only wanted him physically, he thinks that he would die. 

You breathe out deep, melt further into his embrace. He would die for sure. He can’t live without you. He can’t do this without you. He thinks of what he has to do for Ever, the [                                                                                        ] and the people he’s killed and the [                                                             ]. Guilt is something he knows the way he knows his favorite gun. Muzzle to his temple, finger on the trigger. He would die. You wouldn’t forgive him if you knew some of the things he’s done since leaving you. You’re barely forgiving him now. 

It’s all for you. He just wants you to live. 

There are tears on his face again. His head aches so painfully, so deeply that it feels like he’ll never know a reality where it doesn’t. His breathing is too shallow, and his hand is maybe a little too tight on your hair, and he can’t [                                                          ] he can’t, he can’t, it’s [                                                                                                                          ] and he hates it, he hates [                                                                                   ], [                                                                                          ]—

“Caleb?” you ask, groggy, and he fucked up. (Don’t swear in front of her. Be a good example.) Thought too much. Burnt up too much of his brain. Woke you up when you need rest, when all he wants to do is provide you with what you need and he failed even at that. “Hey—oh my god, Caleb —what’s wrong?”

Your hands are on his face and you’ve felt the tears. It’s dark in your room. The lighting outside isn’t great—something he’s noticed while taking care of you, something he doesn’t like about your apartment. He doesn’t have the breath in his lungs to tell you he wasn’t crying, that there’s nothing to worry about. (She’s gonna think you’re weak.) He hates that you’re seeing him like this.

“Look at me. Hey, please—please look at me.” You’re sitting up now, both hands on his face urging him to look at you, and he can’t.

He can’t. You shouldn’t see him like this. His head hurts so much and you shouldn’t know that he gets like this. Because he’s here to comfort you , to protect you , and now you’re worried over him , and what if you don’t call him next time? “I’m okay,” he says, and the pain is still splitting him apart. His vision is blurred at the edges.

“You’re not,” you say, voice gone a little hard. “Caleb—this is an order. Look at me.”

There’s not a chance he can ever disoblige when you order him to do something. When you tell him plainly: I’m commanding you, and you’re in a position where you’re supposed to listen. It’s addicting, hearing that solid edge to your voice. It’s irresistible. 

You’re worried. He has worried you. His vision feels a little more solid when he looks at you, his breathing suddenly evening out. His brain still pounds against his skull, but he can bear it. You’re so gorgeous when you’re worried about him. All the time, in fact. He’s never seen anyone prettier—doesn’t believe it’s possible.

His hands go to your wrists. They’re so small in his grasp. He can wrap a hand around one and still have room in his grip to spare. Taking a deep breath is easier in your hold. It makes him feel infinitely more grounded. “I’m fine. This looks way worse than it is.”

“What happened?”

He debates telling you. Debates it heavily. Before, he didn’t because it was for your protection. Close to the Farspace Fleet, close to Ever. If they got their hands on you, found out you knew too much about the chip in his head, wiping out pieces of him in a steady stream—he doesn’t want to know what they’d do to you. (Remember what they did to her when you were younger? When you didn’t protect her?) “Bad dream,” he lies. Tries to laugh it off, despite the way light pulses in his vision along to the beat of the drums in his head. “What are the chances, huh?”

You’re primed not to believe him, and he can’t blame you for that. There’s so much he’s keeping from you. He was dead for months before he was able to come back to you. Of course your first instinct would be to not trust him.

But it’s a palatable excuse, something that makes sense in context. It’s not like he doesn’t get bad dreams. He rarely sleeps anymore without something terrible projecting itself in his mind—and alongside it, you: the way you looked at him right before he walked back into the house, before the explosion cracked his body open like one of the pomegranates he used to buy you every year in early autumn. You loved the taste, hated the way the seeds got stuck in your teeth.

“Do you wanna talk about it?” you ask. Your hands go from his face to the sides of his neck, fingers curling into the hair at his nape. A reassuring caress. He’s going to think about this touch for weeks— months to come, and you have no idea.

In another life, you could be his, and this could be you about to kiss him. In another life, you both could have avoided the trauma of your childhoods. In another life, he could simply be yours in any way you would have him, and it would be so much more than enough.

“No,” he says, but kindly. You understand. The dreams sometimes feel more real if they’re spoken aloud. He pulls you back to him so you’re once again in his arms—and this is the most unbelievable part of his lie. Because how could he ever sleep poorly with you beside him like this? “You need your rest. And I’ll be okay. Just gotta hold you tighter.”

You don’t respond—instead snake your arms around him, hold him close against you. (Closer. Please get closer.) As if wordlessly promising that you won’t let it happen again. That you’ll protect him from his bad dreams.

He’s the one that’s supposed to protect you. You should never have to worry about him like this. But it’s late, and he’s tired and his head hurts, and you’re so warm against him.

“Love you,” you tell him, and he knows in what way you mean it.

“I love you, too.” The way he says it to you is different, because it always has been.

˚✧ ﾟ.

Your hands are shaking the entire train ride to Skyhaven. The past hour: Caleb returning home after a reunion lunch with Gideon, his roommate and co-pilot at the DAA; the Wanderer attack on the Coelum Express that almost ripped the entire train apart; calling Caleb ten times back-to-back and only getting voicemail.

There were no casualties. That’s what the news report said. But he wasn’t picking up his phone, so he must have been injured, and that’s what made you call Gideon. All you really took from that phone call was badly hurt, wouldn’t go to the hospital. You were on the next train to Skyhaven without thinking.

You have to pay for a private passenger plane to take you to Caleb’s home, and everything is taking too long. It’s been nearly an hour since you and Gideon talked on the phone. By the time you make it to his house, you can’t sit still—you’re vibrating out of your skin, you’ve texted Caleb more times than seems sane.

His home is empty when you let yourself in. Quiet. You immediately switch to investigative mode—your hand drifting towards your holstered gun as if you’re going to find a threat in his home that he’s been hiding in closets, in the wedges of darkness behind open doors. Maybe it’s not a Wanderer lurking within his home, but he’s definitely been hiding something from you—in his living room, one panel of his wall is slightly ajar, and from your vantage point, you can see a room inside. The soft glow of machines, the sound of pained breaths.

What you find makes you feel sick. 

Caleb, sitting on a table in the middle of the room, his arm—a mechanical limb, metal and bunched wires and deep red lights—plugged into the machines you could see from his living room. It can’t be right. You saw him today. You touched his skin today, pinched the meat of his palm hard between your fingers. Real and rough and a little clammy. Nervous from you being so close, you had thought. Hoped, more like.

“What’re you doing here, pip?” he asks—not even turning to look at you, not even offering you an expression asking for forgiveness—and he has the gall to sound bashful. Oh, this? Just my prosthetic arm. Don’t look, it’s not proper. 

You’re going to kill him. You’re going to kill him.

You’re so angry you can’t speak. Your hands are balled into uncomfortable fists at your side, and you stalk across the room, your body moving faster than your head can keep up with. Your face is hot, everything bubbling up inside you, feelings rolling into a boil. When you’re standing in front of him, you get a good, full look at what has replaced the arm he used to carry you with, that even today he used to pull you into a hug. Fingers that tugged at the ends of your hair, still obsessed with its new length. His skin had felt so real. “What is this?”

He laughs, a little self-deprecating. “Not my best look.”

“Your best look?” You’re going to kill him. You’re going to strangle him with his own fucking arm. “You’re worried about optics right now? About whether you’re—” You have to cut yourself off, have to put a fist in front of your mouth in case you need to bite something. “I can’t believe you.”

“I wanted to tell you,” he says. Which means he knows he should have, knows that you wouldn’t appreciate something like this being kept from you. But he did it anyway.

You’re so tired. So tired of being angry at him. So tired of finding out something else and having everything you’ve built between you since his death crumble. How many times are you going to have to restart with him? Fatigue fills you like lead, your body heavy, your legs so exhausted that standing feels like effort. Your face is hot, your eyes welling with tears—and you hate that it’s not even because you’re still grieving. It’s not because you’re sad. You’re tired . You’re so tired you want to cry.

He panics when he sees tears, like he always used to. He unplugs his arm from the machines, reaches towards you. You can hear the metal joints clink against each other when he moves. “I’m sorry. Oh, baby, I’m sorry. Come over here—please?”

It’s hard to resist him when he calls you that. A weakness planted within you when you almost got everything you had ever wanted at nineteen. You let him wrap you up in his arms, the metal cold even through your clothes. So at odds with his overly-hot skin. He’s always run warm. You loved sitting on the porch with him in late summer, watching the leaves turn, listening to the cicada-buzz that would soon quiet once it got too cold. That’s what you think about when you think of warmth—his arms around you, holding you just the way you liked, and the way you felt close but never felt that it was close enough. 

“I’m not crying because of you,” you tell him.

He’s quiet for a second. “It’s okay if you are.”

“I’ve cried over you enough. This is just—I’m tired.” And maybe it’s the exhaustion that allows you to relax into him. To take the comfort he offers you so freely. Nothing you’ve felt since his return has been small. Everything has been so large: relief, anger, fear. Too big to process quickly. Your body is tired from trying to keep up. Your mind has been tired since he closed the door behind him and left you outside your childhood home. “Tell me why you kept this from me,” you say. “At least that.”

He’s quiet. Keeps holding you, his large hand cradling the back of your head. “It’s complicated.”

A strangled, frustrated noise comes from your chest. “I don’t care if it’s complicated.”

“It’s dangerous for you to know too much.”

You try to pull back but he doesn’t let you. You know you could turn this conversation your way if you could just look him in the eyes. When you were little and Caleb said no to you, all it took were some strategically placed pouts and extended eye contact to get him to break. 

Unfortunately, he knows your tactics just as well as you. He’s not going to let you have the upper hand without a fight. 

“You can’t keep telling me it’s dangerous without telling me who I’m in danger from,” you say. Maybe appealing to logic will work. “Is it the Fleet? Is it the DAA? At least let me know who my enemy is so I can protect myself.”

“I’m protecting you,” he says, “so you don’t have to worry yourself about all that. No one’s gonna put a hand on you unless they want to lose it.”

The words make you shiver. There’s a warmth you feel at his insistence on protecting you—but also something a little more hair-raising. The sensation of being one step removed from control, like you’re in the cockpit but don’t have a say in where the plane is taking you. 

When you pull away this time, he lets you. Because he thinks you’ve accepted his protection, thinks that you’re done asking questions. You’ll stay away from the big ones for now. You can catch him at a time when he’s less emotionally guarded. Less prone to defend because he’s been caught in a vulnerable position. You reach out to his new arm—pause, checking his reaction, waiting for him to stop you. 

He doesn’t. It seems like he wants you to touch. Wants you to reconcile that this is a part of him now that he can’t remove. 

The metal is cold, even as there’s a slight buzz when your fingertips ghost across exposed wiring. The touch is a caress. You can’t help it—even with the unfamiliarity of the metal, the shock that came with seeing it, you can never touch him with anything other than love. This is a part of him. “Can you feel this?”

“No,” he says, and he sounds devastated at that fact. He captures your fingers with his metal hand—cold and constricting. Nothing like the touch of the boy you knew in childhood. “I can feel pressure because it’s necessary. I can feel pain.”

Metal fingers the color of tungsten bullets. Darker than regular steel. Better for large artillery weapons because it can shred other metals easily. “...is that necessary, too?”

He doesn’t answer. Instead, moves your hand over his heart, presses your palm to his chest. The way he closes his eyes and breathes out when he can finally feel your touch again—you couldn’t call it anything other than relieved. “Couldn’t wait ‘til tomorrow to see me?” he asks, teasing. Deflecting. “Missed me that bad?”

“Caleb,” you say. Will calling him on his hollow defense make anything better? Will it make him tell you anything you actually want to know? It would have, before. He would have crumbled in an instant, told you everything.

Or maybe that’s what he tricked you into thinking when you were younger. Part of you has come to believe that he’s always kept secrets from you. That he’s always been very good at convincing you that he tells you everything.

Instead of asking what you want to know, you say, “Your arm was… normal earlier.”

He nods. “Go wait for me in the living room. I’ll show you. And then we can go to bed, okay?”

If it’ll give you any sort of answers, you’ll easily do what he asks. You only sit for a few minutes before he comes out and joins you, still shirtless but different—his arm as it was when he came to Linkon to see you. Flesh and blood, by all appearances.

He joins you on the couch and your reaction is instant, your hands wrapping around his forearm, pulling him closer to you. The cold—you still feel it, but it’s muted by the skin. Everything feels so real, so soft beneath your fingers. His arm still has a fine layer of dark hair that it always did. You turn his hand in yours, palm up, and trace the vein that runs from his wrist to the crook of his elbow. You can feel the ridge of it, the slight warmth—but not his pulse, you realize. 

You drop his hand, pull away. The difference makes you feel lightheaded. 

“It’s a skin graft,” he tells you. “They grew it from my cells.”

“So you have to… put it on?”

He grimaces at that. “Yeah, it’s not pretty. But don’t worry. Not gonna make you see that.”

You can’t help yourself—after your brief dizziness subsides, you take his arm between your hands again, turn it over for inspection. He still has a scar on the knuckle of his thumb. A bad fall on the asphalt of your neighborhood park’s basketball court. You remember him coming home bleeding, promising you he was alright even as he looked close to tears. He must have been twelve, maybe thirteen. You smooth your thumb over the scar just to feel its smoothness, the way you used to when you were younger. “How do you still have this?”

He shrugs, then must notice how much this response seems to frighten you—the idea of someone creating this elaborate sleeve of skin for him and somehow knowing his scars as intimately as he did. As you did. “I asked for it,” he tells you. “I wanted everything to be… right.”

“Right how?”

“I liked the way it was before,” he says. Shrugs too nonchalantly, enough that you know he’s lying. One of his bad tells. “Call it vanity.”

There is a stone in your throat. “Did you want it to be identical because you wanted to keep it a secret from me?”

He shakes his head emphatically. The way he used to when you were younger and you asked him the important questions. Do you think my bad dreams could come true? Could I die in my sleep if I get too anxious? Are you ever going to leave me? 

He lied about the last one. He could be lying about this. 

Thoughts can never be your own when you’re with Caleb. He knows you too well. Can see it clear that you don’t believe him. “No. I was always gonna tell you. I wouldn’t have—no.” 

His large hands curl around your upper arms—an embrace from afar. Not pushing his luck. He considers his words, a pained expression on his face. How much should he reveal? That’s always the framework for how he answers you now and you hate it. You want him to tell you everything because he wants to. Because he can. 

“I didn’t want you to see me differently,” he finally says.

“I wouldn’t,” you say. You can’t stop yourself. You can’t even truly parse that he thinks your opinion of him would change over something so far out of his control. “I don’t.”

He laughs at that, but it’s hollow. You both know why. Of course you see him differently now. Not because of the arm—but everything else. It’s impossible not to. His hands tighten on your arms just a little, and you wonder how careful he has to be with his prosthesis. Whether its power matches his natural strength, or if its capabilities go far beyond. 

“I would’ve known, anyway,” you say. Touching him feels paramount to everything else. Your fingers have to keep running up the expanse of lab-grown skin to find all its incongruencies with the Caleb you once knew. 

“Yeah?” he asks. Keeps his eyes on your fingers and their hesitant touch. A trick of sound, maybe: his breath coming shallow and shaky. 

The skin of his shoulder is smooth under your hand. There’s no seam—no obvious place where the grafted skin meets the natural—but the curve just above his underarm is soft in a way it hasn’t been since early childhood. “Your stretch marks are gone,” you say, and you sound like you miss them because you do. Because you liked the evidence of him growing up beside you, of his skin struggling to keep up during his initial growth spurt, and then later, after high school, when he started putting on muscle at the DAA at a rate that seemed too fast for you to comprehend. One winter vacation, he came home and he was suddenly big. Shoulders wide in a way you wouldn’t have associated with Caleb before then.

“Didn’t realize you were paying such close attention,” he says. Takes your hand in his once again, moves it from inorganic to organic. The stretch marks on his other shoulder, jagged white lines that spear up to the curve of his arm from the very top of his bicep. Proof that he’s real. “I still have these ones.”

There’s a long moment where you just allow yourself to touch him. Where his hands around your arms go slack, feeling you instead of holding you. The both of you sitting together, mesmerized by skin touching skin, by details that prove you’re still here. Still the person you’ve always been. 

Your hands go to his face like instinct—because you need to see him. You need to look him in the eye. And he lets you hold his face, nuzzles into your touch, closes his eyes and breathes out heavy and slow, a sound that screams relief. Comfort. He takes one hand in his, skin warm and real against yours, and burrows deeper. Like he can live in your hold, a ship come to dock. He looks up at you from beneath his thick lashes, sunset eyes gazing at you fondly. 

It’s like the moment between the two of you on the porch in reverse. Caleb’s face in your hands. His eyes dropping to your lips like he can’t help it. And that same feeling—a deep longing, something you didn’t understand at nineteen but that you can define now. You love him in a different way than you loved him growing up. 

Your breaths come shaky, just like his. Standing at this precipice is frightening but familiar. Comforting the way only a freefall can be: regardless of what happens along the way, you’re going to hit the ground. 

But not now. Maybe you’re a coward for pulling away, for creating a little more space. Maybe it’s self-preservation. Maybe one of those things is innate to the other, and whatever category you fall into has a piece of both.

He understands, like always—now is the time to diffuse the tension. Now is the time for things to go back to normal. He allows your hands to slip from his face—but does do one thing differently. He holds your palm to his cheek for a moment longer than normal, and before he lets it go, his lips ghost across your palm. A small kiss. A token of something like affection. 

Your hands are shaking when you get them back. Balling them into fists in your lap makes this easier to ignore.

“Why’d you come visit, pip?” he asks. Pulls at the ends of your hair, annoying, with a little grin on his face. The spitting image of the boy you grew up with, now a man with secrets. “Not that I’m complaining.”

“I heard about what happened on the Coelum. There were injuries, and you weren’t picking up your phone…”

“I’m sorry,” he says, genuine. Like always. Even if he lies to you, no matter how bad things get, you’re somehow positive that he would never apologize to you if he didn’t mean it. “I should’ve sent a text, but I didn’t think you’d hear about it ‘til tomorrow.”

“It was on the news. But I probably wouldn’t have known for sure it was your train that was attacked if I didn’t call Gideon.”

He doesn’t respond immediately. Sometimes you forget that Caleb is a trained weapon, that his body looks the way it does for more than just his own aesthetic reasons. The way he tenses puts you on edge, similar to how you feel when someone holding a gun turns the safety off—but you know he wouldn’t hurt you. You’re just surprised that his reaction is this. He clears his throat, like that’ll displace any of the strained emotion you can hear in his voice when he speaks. “You have his number? I didn’t realize you two were that close.”

“We’re not,” you say, shrugging. “We—after you… died, we—he was at the funeral.”

“After I died, you… what?” This is the kind of cold you hear when Caleb is being the Colonel. Not the kind of cold he is with you. Well—the kind he never was with you. He’s always been the warmest person you know. A ray of sunshine, an endearing dork with a handsome face, the life of whatever party he was invited to. 

It scares you when he’s like this. Whatever might have physically changed about him—his new arm, the replicated scars and the ones left only in memory—if it was to placate you, it would never work. Not when he’s capable of being like this. Talking to you with this tone of voice, the way he never used to.

“We talked a little,” you say. “It was hard to deal with alone.”

He rubs at his temple with his inorganic hand—the pressure turns his skin white, leaves a small red mark behind on his forehead after. He swallows, seems to calm himself. “I’m glad you had someone that understood,” he says, and his voice is almost back to normal. Like he’s forcing himself to get there but not quite reaching. “Gideon’s a really great guy. And he’s always known how important you are to me.”

“He told me the way you used to talk about me at school.” There were so many things you’d never known. That Caleb kissed the tag of the necklace you’d given him before every flight, that he kept a framed picture of you on his desk and a polaroid of you in his wallet, that it got to a point where he would talk about you so much at parties that it would scare girls off for the other guys, that they started begging him to stay at the dorms or shut up about you just for one night. “It helped.”

“I’m glad he didn’t forget about me when you guys were talking.” He still sounds tense. Still sounds cold. 

And maybe this is too much of a presumption. But you know it’s not. Really, deep down, you know that even if Caleb doesn’t want you in the way you want him, he wants you in some capacity. He’s a man, despite everything. Quietly, you say, “Caleb. I didn’t sleep with him.”

He inhales sharp, quick. His jaw tightens. He looks cornered, so surprised and alarmed that you’ve breached this territory that neither of you are brave enough to cross into. Slowly, he unravels himself. Loosens his muscles, becomes more like a man than a weapon. “And you didn’t…?”

“We didn’t do anything. He was just looking out for me because you weren’t there to do it yourself.”

Slowly, he nods. More to himself than you. Leans back against the couch and presses his thumb and index finger against his eyes, like he’s trying to block out everything. Or keep everything in. “I don’t know what we’re…” He shakes his head. Bites his lip. Then says your name, quiet and heavy.

You can’t do this right now. You can’t confront your feelings. Can’t confront his feelings. Because when it’s finally, plainly revealed to you that Caleb doesn’t love you in the way you love him, you think something within you will dull forever. “We should go to bed.”

When he looks at you—you know what it looks like when Caleb is in pain. You’ve seen it enough in your lifetime. But never pain as deep as this. He says your name again. More insistent.

“Will you sleep with me tonight?”

This stops him, like you knew it would. He can never deny the opportunity to be close to you. To hold you in his arms when you sleep. And it’s more than a bribe to get him to stop moving things into territory you’re not sure you can handle right now. 

You want him close. You want to hold him and know all the parts of him that are holding you. You want to run your fingers over the smooth skin where his stretch marks are supposed to be and allow yourself to come to terms with it.

But you can’t say that out loud. Instead, you gaze up at him—give him that look that always wins arguments. That gets you whatever you want when it comes to him.

You know you’ve won when he sighs and rolls his eyes, unable to stop the corners of his lips from turning up. Maybe he likes it when you ask him for things, or maybe he’s just happy at the prospect of sleeping beside you. It’s something you can’t ask him to tell you. Instead, you follow him to his bedroom and allow yourself to dream of the many things you can’t ask for. The things you’re afraid he’d tell you and the things you’re afraid he wouldn’t.