You first saw him at the funeral. Not just glimpsed, or acknowledged in passing, but really saw him. Before that, Caleb Xia had been nothing more than just another transmission in the static, a faceless name buried in mission logs and fleet dispatches. You had known of him the way one knew of black holes—far-off anomalies, powerful and impersonal. He was a gravitational constant in the Farspace Fleet, orbiting on the edges of your awareness, never quite intersecting your path.

And yet, that was the moment he entered your orbit. Or rather, collided into it, though it didn't feel like a collision then. 

On a day like today, nothing felt like it was supposed to, not with the grief roaring through you like a storm trying to rip through steel. You were too preoccupied with more important things. Like the silence left behind by the only voice you ever truly listened to, and the weight of the small box they placed in your trembling hands, rattling with medals and empty meaning.

Bravery. Honor. Sacrifice.

All the hollow reverence the Farspace Fleet draped over its fallen like ribbons on a corpse. What meaning did such accolades hold for the dead?

You didn't know, but as you stood there, clutching a lacquered box heavy with medallions your little brother would never pin to his coat with that crooked grin of his, something curdled in your stomach.

He would have scoffed at that word—little.

"You're older by what? Five minutes?" he'd say with a grin. "Doesn't count."

But it did count. Five minutes made you the eldest. Five minutes made you his shield and protector. Five minutes meant you were the one who should have died, because otherwise, how shameful was it to be both the first one in and the last one standing? 

Now, you stood in front of an empty grave, accepting hollow honours from an organization that had let him die. Your mouth was pressed into a bloodless line, your eyes dry from failing to cry. The bitterness rising in your throat was corrosive and alive, blooming like acid beneath your skin. 

Then you saw him.

At first, he was just another face in the sea of mourners, wearing the polite solemnity that funerals demanded. He stood a few rows back—deliberately, you suspected. Not so far as to seem absent. Not so close as to draw attention.

But once your gaze found his, it caught. Because Caleb Xia did not cry. He did not bow his head in regret or parrot the same condolences the others did. His gaze alternated between you and your brother's placeholder grave as if he couldn't make up his mind which of you was the bigger curiosity. His gaze carved through your skin and down into the marrow, as if searching for some fault line to split you open.

He stood in full Farspace regalia, his uniform pressed with military precision, the cold glint of medals decorating him like ornaments. One might have mistaken him for a war hero, but you knew better.

That shining title—Colonel—was new. Your brother's blood was barely dry, and already Caleb had been paraded for his very first mission as commanding officer, the very same mission that had left your family in ruin.

You couldn't think of anyone less deserving of the title.

So how dare he stand there as if he had the right to mourn? How dare he pretend, when he was the one who led your brother into the stars and brought back barely enough remains to mourn? 

Every second his eyes remained on you, you fantasized about tearing the medals from your brother's memorial box and ramming them through the sockets of his skull, engraving the consequences of failure right into his goddamn face.

But no, grief wasn't allowed to be ugly. You had to remain composed, and look tragic in just the right way. It was always a performance, because someone was always watching. 

Perhaps what made it worse was the fact that your brother had idolized him. You remembered the way his face used to light up when he said the name. Caleb Xia, the elite pilot with impossible reflexes and a spotless record. Caleb Xia, who had risen through the ranks like a comet. Caleb Xia, who made gravity bend and enemies fold, and young soldiers believe.

Your brother had certainly believed, and he died for it. 

You hadn't paid attention then, too busy to care for the ramblings of a fanboy. Different departments, different lives. You'd told your brother that you'd get him a photocard of his beloved Colonel once as a joke, and now those very same words lodged in your throat like thorns.

You had never imagined you were capable of feeling such immense loathing. You loathed Caleb's composure and the way he didn't pretend to grieve, because that meant he didn't even care enough to perform. Not even for show. 

You had never wanted to be violent so badly in your life.

Eventually, the crowd thinned, their footsteps fading into the vast silence of the hangar-turned-memorial, leaving behind nothing but the scent of cold metal and the flowers you'd never asked for. But of course, the Colonel remained exactly where he was, but this time, you met his gaze deliberately, letting him see the contempt etched into every line of your face.

Words would only dilute the venom, so you glared at him until something shifted. It was barely perceptible, the slightest tick of his jaw that betrayed his otherwise statuesque stillness. He was not made of stone after all.

You almost walked to him then. Almost let your boots carry you across the short but volatile distance. Almost let the resentment do what it had been aching to since the mission report first found your inbox. But you didn't. You exhaled slowly and stayed where you were. 

With luck, this would be the last time you ever saw him—this man with too many accolades and too little soul. Different departments, different lives. The Farspace Fleet was too large for casual run-ins. 

Besides, you had a few days off. Enough time to cage the wildfire in your chest and coax your malice into something you could live with. Something you could survive.

Because if not...

You were the head engineer of your team. Most fleet vessels passed under your approval at least once. You had access to every bolt, circuit, and pressure seal. If you wanted, you could rig his next solo flight to fail so discreetly the black box would read it as a tragic malfunction. It wouldn't even be difficult, and you'd thought about it. You'd thought about it more than you liked to admit. 

No. 

You weren't a killer. You still had some fractured piece of morality you clung to, like wreckage from a shipwrecked past, even if the man standing across from you couldn't say the same.

You were convinced that whatever cruel, indifferent beings sat lounging at the helm of the universe despised you. It was the only reasonable explanation.

The moment you returned from your time off, you found yourself summoned to the office of one of the Fleet's polished brass relics. Admiral Harkins was a man who reeked of privilege and sour cologne, and when he gestured for you to sit in the leather chair across his desk, you did. Optics and self-control were what mattered most in this place. 

He began speaking at once, his temperament carefully calibrated for sympathy. "The loss of your brother was felt deeply across the ranks. A promising young pilot. A tragic sacrifice."

You resisted the urge to roll your eyes. Tragic, indeed. Tragic that no one in this godforsaken institution gave a damn until his body was stardust and his name convenient for morale.

You tuned the rest of his solemn drone out until his next words cleaved through the haze. 

"...which is why we felt it would be most fitting to reassign you. Temporarily, of course."

You sat up straighter. "I wasn't aware there were any issues with my current assignment, sir. I've received no complaints from my division, and I'm deeply invested in my team's current project."

Admiral Harkins offered a placating smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Yes, yes, of course. Your work has been exemplary. This isn't a demotion, I assure you."

"Then where, exactly, am I being reassigned?"

His smile widened, as if he'd been waiting for you to ask. "As I said, it's quite the opportunity. You'll be serving as second-in-command to the Colonel himself."

You very nearly let every ounce of disdain twist your lips into something ferocious, but instead, you folded your hands in your lap and forced yourself to sound professional. "I was under the impression the Colonel already has a second-in-command."

The Admiral gave a sympathetic sigh. "A pity, truly. The same mission that took your brother's life also gravely injured the Colonel's deputy. He's currently in long-term care. His condition is stable, but the doctors insist on complete rest."

"With respect, sir, I fail to see how this is the best use of my skills."

"It's only temporary. A few months at most. It would mean a great deal to the Colonel, I'm sure, to know someone reliable is supporting him. He shouldn't be worrying about work while his former second is recovering, wouldn't you agree?"

Ah. There it was, the guilt trip, delivered with just the right tone of paternal disappointment. It was fucking absurd, and you briefly imagined telling the Admiral that if Caleb wanted support, he was most welcome to jump into a black hole to find it.

"Sir, the project I'm currently leading involves calibrating the new grav-thrusters for the Titan-class vessels. We're already on a tight timeline, and my presence is fairly integral to the process."

Admiral Harkins beamed like he was about to award you a prize. "Yes, I'm very aware. Your teammates speak highly of you, which is exactly why we decided to let you continue your little engineering project as well."

"Sir...?"

"Think of it as wearing two hats!" he declared enthusiastically, as if multitasking two completely incompatible full-time roles was perfectly reasonable. "During the hours Colonel Xia has no direct need of you, you're free to return to your workshop. Split your time accordingly."

Now you really wanted to scream. Two hats? What a nice way to describe a psychological death sentence. They expected you to assist a commanding officer and continue building fleet engines on the side? It was a whole new definition of overtime.

And yet, if it had been any other officer or any other role, you would have taken it without question. Better to drown in work than return to the apartment that had your brother's jacket draped over the back of the couch. Better to never sleep at all than to fall asleep deprived of his stupid jokes. 

When you didn't respond, the Admiral took it as agreement, and he leaned forward, his conspiratorial tone making your skin crawl. "You see, you're the only one we can really trust with this assignment."

"Trust with what, exactly? Taking meeting minutes?"

"After the tragedy that befell your brother, some of us on the board have begun to question the Colonel's judgment."

You stiffened.

He continued smoothly. "We just want someone reliable—someone who's already suffered the cost of a command gone wrong—to be our eyes and ears. Nothing formal, of course. Just let us know if our concerns are unfounded. Help us rest easy, you know."

Now it made sense. This wasn't a promotion, but a leash. They wanted you close enough to see if Caleb was cracking under the burden of his new position. You stared at the Admiral, and he gave you a sympathetic nod. But this was not up for discussion. There was no denying him. 

"Some believe the Colonel may have been directly responsible for how catastrophically the mission deteriorated. I'm sure, given your brother's unfortunate death, you'd want to see this matter resolved. Properly. The transfer documents have already been dealt with."

The implications hung in the air. They were asking you to spy on him, giving you no choice in the matter. And the worst part? They thought they were doing you a favour.

You swallowed hard, nodding stiffly, because to protest further would be to draw attention. "Understood, sir."

The man in front of you clapped once in approval. "Wonderful! You'll be present for mission briefings and tactical updates. You'll sit in on communications between the Colonel and Central Command. Be available during inspections, ship evaluations, and security sweeps. Assist in delegating tasks. Nothing too demanding. Just ensure things run efficiently. I imagine someone of your capabilities can manage that with ease."

"Yes, sir."

"Though, who knows, perhaps your new role will come to an end sooner than we anticipate."

That drew your attention. "If the Colonel's former second recovers quickly?" you asked carefully.

The Admiral gave a casual chuckle. "I meant if the Colonel no longer requires a second-in-command."

"Are you expecting his workload to drop in the upcoming months, sir?"

"No, you silly girl. Gods above, you really don't use your head for anything besides calculations, do you?"

The words should have slid off you like water off reinforced hull plating. But they didn't. They burrowed deep into old wounds and unhealed bruises. Into that quiet place where rage and memory tangled together like rusted wire.

This wasn't the first time, and it sure as hell wouldn't be the last.

You forced your expression into something unreadable and your spine into something unbreakable. You knew this game because you'd been playing it all your life. You were no stranger to such phrases.

Silly girl.

Feisty thing.

Overreacting.

Too sensitive.

Too cold.

Too difficult to work with.

Too ambitious.

Too much.

You'd heard it in the academy from overzealous classmates who dismissed your calculations, only to fail the thermodynamics simulation while yours earned top marks. You'd heard it in every group project where you ended up doing the heavy lifting, while the boys talked over you and then took credit for the success. You'd even heard it here in the Fleet, from officers who swaggered into your workspace with broken gear and worse attitudes—who questioned your methods, your protocols, your qualifications—until you fixed what they couldn't and sent them back out with their tails tucked between their legs.

They never thanked you.

You remembered one in particular. Commander Rusk had smirked and said, "Didn't think a girl like you'd know your way around a soldering iron."

You had smiled sweetly and replied, "Didn't think a man like you would need so many tries to plug in a simple cable."

You never saw him again, which you considered a victory. 

But the truth was, the constant scrutiny wore you down.  Your competence had to be proven every day, while others were simply assumed to be competent by default. Your voice had to be just authoritative enough to be heard without being called aggressive. Your mistakes, when they happened—because they always did, you weren't flawless—were seen as confirmation of your nature, while men's mistakes were dismissed as anomalies.

"The Colonel might no longer require a second-in-command, because dead men don't need someone to keep their schedule, do they?" Admiral Harkins continued with exaggerated slowness, as if speaking to a child. Then he laughed, like the punchline of a joke he'd told himself a thousand times, and all your initial hostility bled out of you because this was far worse. 

Surely not. Surely, even in an institution as corrupt as the Farspace Fleet, he couldn't be suggesting...

But he was.

"Of course, no one would blame you. No one would even need to know. This isn't part of your duties, naturally. Just something to consider." He winked. "You've suffered a terrible loss. In grief, people do things. Understandable things. And the DeepSpace Tunnels, well, accidents happen in there all the time. It's a miracle half the fleet doesn't get swallowed whole."

It was as if he'd reached inside your skull and pulled out every shameful thought you'd tried to bury since the funeral. Of course, the idea had crossed your mind when you'd caught sight of your brother's favourite mug sitting unwashed in the sink.

But thinking it was one thing, and hearing it spoken aloud by this sleazy man was another. It made you want to claw your way out of this room and this goddamned uniform.

Instead, you stood and saluted. "Understood, sir. Eyes and ears. Got it."

The killing wasn't a part of your job description, and for once, you would try not to go above and beyond expectation. Although if Caleb so much as breathed the wrong way in your direction...

You weren't a saint, but you weren't a murderer either.

"If that's all, I'll be taking my leave, sir."

"Good. You may report immediately."

The Colonel's office was on the upper deck of the command wing, lined with star maps and strategic charts that flickered faintly under harsh lighting. No personal artifacts or clutter, just polished steel and silence.

When you arrived, Caleb was standing with his back to you, seemingly engrossed in a terminal screen. You watched his sharp outline, and nearly grimaced. He was practically carved from discipline. His uniform was flawless, with not a thread out of place, and you were supposed to find a crack in this man's armour? You had the worst luck. 

He turned at the sound of your footsteps. Up close, he was exactly what you'd imagined, and his unreadable stare met yours with the precision of an unsheathed blade.

"Colonel Xia." You gave him a crisp salute that he didn't deserve. "Reporting as ordered."

The man did not speak, and you found your patience wearing thin. 

"I've reviewed the mission logs and communication protocols. I expect I'll be briefed on the remaining duties shortly...sir." You tacked on the honorific belatedly, like an afterthought, and judging by the twitch in his cheek, he noticed. 

Caleb took a deliberate step forward, his long legs eating up the distance between the two of you. "We'll go over those after the inspection tour. You'll shadow me for the next several days."

"Of course."

His gaze lingered on your face, and you saw the awareness in it. He knew why you were really here, or at least he suspected. He looked at you the way a predator studies traps, wondering what lethal thing might be waiting just beneath the surface.

You let your eyes narrow a fraction. Maybe a part of you wanted him to know. Maybe you wanted him to feel as uneasy in your presence as you did in his. 

"If you have any reservations about this arrangement," he said impassively, "I trust you'll speak to Command." The words were polite enough, but the challenge beneath them was unmistakable.

"No reservations, sir. I always follow orders."

"Do you now."

"Always...sir."

A lie, and you both knew it. You were two storms circling each other, measuring windspeed and calculating damage.

Caleb nodded curtly, thrusting a datapad in your direction and walking out the door without waiting to see if you followed. "I expect these to be completed before 1800 hours. If you have questions, don't waste my time."

You hurried after him, scanning the device with a frown. There were a lot of tasks, spread across several departments, including two that were, technically, not under your jurisdiction. It had to be deliberate. He was testing you.

"Busy day," you remarked casually, flipping through the assignments. "Planning to see how quickly I crack?"

He looked over his shoulder. "I have the right to assess the competence of my new assistant, don't I?"

You hated the way he implied he owned the role as if you hadn't been placed there purposefully, like a scalpel beneath his ribs.

"And if I fail the assessment?"

"Then I report that Command made a mistake assigning you here. And I have you removed."

The corner of your mouth twitched in contempt. "How efficient of you."

"I value efficiency. You should, too. Unless you're going to disappoint me before the first cycle ends."

"You'll have to work harder than that if you want to rattle me, Colonel."

You understood his game now. He wanted you to fail. To explode and prove the story he'd already started writing about you. But you weren't going to make it easy for him. 

"After you finish the fighter log discrepancies," he said, clearly moving on, "you'll oversee the diagnostic sweep of Deck Nine."

"That wasn't listed on my assignments."

"Consider it a late addition."

"How convenient."

The rest of the day unfolded like a carefully staged performance, except both lead actors wanted to murder each other. 

You completed Caleb's damn checklist. You reviewed the logs, flagged anomalies, and corrected three manual override entries that looked suspiciously like sabotage masked as human error. You even oversaw the hangar bay logistics with brutal efficiency.

No one could say you weren't doing your job, not even him, and in your delusion, you imagined that if every day passed by as uneventfully as your first, perhaps you'd be able to get through this assignment without losing your mind. 

That was until your last meeting of the day. 

The briefing hall was already full when you entered, the air saturated with recycled oxygen and idle chatter. Officers clustered in tidy rows, muttering among themselves while they waited for the Colonel. 

Caleb himself had stopped to speak to another officer just outside the door, so you entered the room alone, and it was like the air changed the moment you did. It was so subtle that you might've missed it if you weren't already expecting it. 

Heads turned, and conversations stuttered, paused mid-sentence. Several pairs of eyes tracked your path to the front. Most of them didn't know your name, and even fewer could connect it to your face. That was the nature of your usual role. The head of the engineering division was rarely seen outside hangars and repair bays, and certainly not parading through the corridors like she belonged at the Colonel's right hand.

Yet here you were, so it didn't take long for them to leap to the easiest conclusion. You could feel it in the amused smirks and the hushed whispers.

So that's what the Colonel's into. New assistant, or new personal toy?

Then came the voice, low enough to pretend it hadn't meant to be heard, but too clear to be accidental. "Didn't know the Colonel liked his secretaries broody. Do you think she'll last longer than poor Liam?"

The speaker—Ensign Kallan, by the look of his badge—grinned to himself, clearly proud of the comment, even when the men around him shuffled awkwardly. You saw one look away, and another smirk, but no one corrected him. 

The Colonel stood in the doorway now, and although most had registered his presence by now, the idiot who had commented hadn't. Out of the corner of your eye, you saw Caleb's fingers twitch, but he didn't say a word in your defence, or so much as look in Kallan's direction. He only tilted his head at you, waiting for a reaction. 

You could have stayed silent. You should have stayed silent. But silence, you had learned long ago, was a language best wielded on your own terms.

"Ensign Kallan, was it?" You offered a faint, polished smile that didn't reach your eyes.

He straightened slightly, surprised to be addressed. Of course, he expected you to ignore his jibe. "Yes, ma'am?" The last syllable dripped with sarcasm. 

"I understand your confusion. It's easy to mistake capability for ornament when you've never been on the receiving end of either." The room went quiet, but you didn't stop. "But allow me to correct the record. I am not a secretary or a communications officer. I'm the engineer who overhauled the shielding calibration protocol that kept half this fleet from imploding during last cycle's solar breach. My clearance exceeds yours by three levels, so unless you're volunteering to scrub machine shop floors for the next two months, I suggest you remember that."

Kallan paled. "Yes, ma'am." The honorific was uttered with a lot more reverence this time, but you didn't acknowledge it. 

Caleb had finally decided to walk over and stand beside you now, his expression neutral as if nothing had happened at all. But you felt the smallest shift in his posture. Was the subtle inclination of his head approval or amusement? You couldn't tell, and you didn't care. 

For the rest of the briefing, no one dared to mistake you for anything less than what you were.

You dedicated the rest of the meeting to inspecting Caleb, and it only proved what you'd already learned earlier in the day. He was damnably good at what he did, issuing instructions with absolute clarity. No wasted words or repetition. It made you even angrier. For a man so incapable of making mistakes, how had he screwed up chatastrophically enough to end your brother's life. 

You were here to prove his incompetence, and yet he was giving you nothing to work with. You hated how nothing about him ever seemed frayed. He handled crises with the same composure he used to sip his morning coffee, and you tried your best to catalogue every detail. 

Mental Note One: He never fidgeted. Not with his gloves, or his cuffs, or even his comm. Either he was truly calm, or he had mastered stillness so thoroughly it masqueraded as peace.

Mental Note Two: He didn't praise. Not even when a weapons officer reported a 36% efficiency increase. 

Mental Note Three: He listened with a predator's patience. He never interrupted, but only because he didn't need to. The moment he so much as opened his mouth, the person speaking would fall silent, and all eyes would be on him. 

You loathed how your mind kept tracking him this way. It was like studying the schematics of an engine you'd sworn to dismantle, and knowing a system inside and out just so you could find where best to break it.

He was watching you as well, and you let him. Let him wonder if you were the knife in his ribs or the hand that would stop someone else from twisting it deeper. You had been assigned to him after his previous second-in-command nearly died. He knew the game as well as you did.

When the meeting finally ended, and the officers began to file out, Caleb handed you his datapad dismissively.

"You kept up," he observed.

You smiled tightly. "And you didn't collapse from the weight of your own ego. We're both full of surprises."

Shit. 

You didn't mean to let that slip on your first day, but the hours had been long, and you still had a second job to attend to while your pompous superior was probably going to go home and sleep off his tyranny. 

There was a long pause, and Caleb gave you an odd look, like he wasn't sure whether to reprimand you or laugh.

"You'll compile today's summary logs and deliver them to me by tomorrow morning."

"Understood, sir." Though your tone was polite, you looked at the datapad like it might explode in your hands.

But orders were orders, and you had every intention of doing this so perfectly that not even he could find fault. Maybe you should have messed up on purpose, just so he'd take you off the job, but your ego wouldn't let you do that. If anyone would lose this game, it'd be him. 

"0600, tomorrow. Outer docking ring. Don't be late."

You inclined your head. "Wouldn't dream of it, Colonel."

You departed before he could say anything else, the cold burn of his stare following you down the corridor. Tomorrow would be worse, you already knew, but so would you.

After that briefing incident, Caleb's assignments took a noticeable turn, and suddenly, your duties as second-in-command bore an uncanny resemblance to administrative drudgery.

He never mocked you overtly, but you could see it in the slight raise of his brow when he handed you your daily task list. The almost-smirk that tugged at his mouth, never quite reaching a full expression, just a faint twitch, like he knew.

The list included vital responsibilities as:

- Sorting and reformatting decades-old combat logs "for archival purposes"

- Fetching and organizing requisition orders for ships you didn't even work on

- Coordinating meal rotations for his squadron as if you were a glorified cafeteria assistant

- Printing, binding, and physically delivering daily mission transcripts to his office, even though all data was stored digitally

- Scheduling appointments with officers you had no business interacting with

- And, on one especially insulting afternoon, compiling a list of docking bay lightbulbs that needed replacing

Lightbulbs.

You were an aerospace engineer, not a glorified secretary, yet here you were, jotting down broken corridor lights and organizing dinner times for grown men.

And the Colonel? He was taking some sort of sick pleasure out of all this. Sometimes he'd ask you with that irritating calm, "I trust that your new role is treating you well?" 

You weren't sure what burned more, your indignation or your pride. He wasn't just being petty. No, it was too calculated for that. You began to wonder if this was his way of pushing you out. Of stacking enough insults that you'd give up and storm off. Little did he know, you had no choice but to stick around. 

But the pettier his orders became, the less guilty you felt about your weekly check-ins with Admiral Harkins. You always had something for him, even if it was nothing damning or meaningful. You told him about Caleb's routines—the strange consistency of his hours, the precise loops he walked during patrol shifts, and the way he reviewed the reports no one else bothered with. You even told him how the man kept his office locked behind triple authentication when he wasn't in it.

It wasn't enough, and you knew it, because the Admiral was growing impatient. But a part of you relished that. Men like the Harkins and Caleb had made your entire life unbearable, so you deserved to enjoy their discomfort a little too. It was only fair. 

Caleb's next order came while you weren't even in his office. You had assumed he was done for the day, and you were in your own lab by now, your mind busy with orbital mechanics. 

A junior officer approached you sheepishly, his shoulders curled inward like he was bracing for impact. "Colonel Xia requests that his usual coffee be brought to his office. He said...you'd know how he takes it."

You blinked. "Excuse me? You want me...to fetch the Colonel's coffee?"

"Yes, ma'am. Those were his words."

It took a full second for the words to land, and then you almost laughed. "It's almost midnight. I'm off the clock," you snapped impatiently. 

The junior officer looked pained. "I...he insisted it be you."

You turned on your heel and stalked to the breakroom so fast you nearly knocked the poor bastard flat. Then you made the damn drink, the coffee machine hissing too cheerfully for your mood. You stared at it like it had personally betrayed you.

Your pride was stacked like dynamite behind your ribs, and the bitter scent of roasted beans filled the sterile room. You stared at the steaming cup in your hand and considered dumping engine oil in it. You were making coffee for a man who'd once stood three feet away from your brother's sealed casket without a single word of remorse.

Then another petty thought slithered into your mind, inspired by the elementary school version of you who held grudges like oaths. You could spit in his coffee and he'd be none the wiser. But no, you were not a child. 

When you arrived at his office, Caleb looked up from his desk suspiciously. 

You set his drink down with more force than necessary, just shy of a slam. "Orders up."

He didn't thank you, staring down with an intensity that could've peeled paint from steel.

"What? You think I poisoned it?" You raised a brow. "Maybe you shouldn't ask people you don't trust to handle your beverages."

His gaze narrowed. "If it's harmless, you wouldn't mind taking the first sip."

The audacity. First, a glorified errand girl, and now his personal food tester?

"If I wanted to kill you, Colonel, I wouldn't use something so juvenile as poison."

You considered throwing the cup in his face, but you had never been one for theatrical displays. When he pushed it toward you, you lifted it to your lips, letting the vile liquid scald your tongue. 

You grimaced. "You really drink this sludge willingly? What are you, part engine?"

Without responding, he stood to take the cup back, his fingers brushing the spot your lips had touched. Then, without breaking eye contact, he drank from the same place you had.

He met your glare without flinching, as if saying, I see your anger, and I will raise you discomfort until you shatter.

"Good to know I can trust your judgment, even with coffee."

Your next words were out of your mouth before you could stop yourself. "Sir, I'm beginning to wonder whether I was assigned as your second-in-command or your executive assistant."

Caleb's lips twitched. "Is there a problem?"

"I just want to be certain I'm fulfilling the expectations of the role."

"You are. Perfectly."

You searched his face for anything—malice or mockery—but his expression was impassive.

After the coffee incident, something in you fractured. You didn't start out trying to be petty, but you were tired, and tired people did reckless things. Especially tired people with full access to every system Caleb Xia touched. In hindsight, that was an unrealistic level of trust for someone he clearly suspected. 

You'd been pulling double shifts for weeks now, spending your days enduring the Colonel's smug orders and your nights half-conscious in the reactor lab, trying to keep your side project alive.

So when you stared down at the endless stack of reports he expected you to sift through—personnel evaluations, damage assessments, duty rosters—all of it something he could've reviewed digitally in half the time, you decided to stop being a doormat. 

You slipped one file into the wrong pile, marking a requisition form from two months ago with a red tag that made it look urgent. It was completely unrelated to anything happening now, but enough to waste twenty minutes of Caleb's precious time and make him bark at the wrong officer.

Next, when his weekly mission report got sent to the wrong printer, accidentally of course, you didn't correct it. You just let it sit five floors away, and when he messaged asking where the hell it went, you took your sweet time replying. 

"Must've been a routing glitch, sir. Maybe the system's lagging. You could always walk down and retrieve it. Stretch your legs."

Then came the real fun.

You started adjusting his calendar. Three-minute overlaps. Swapping meeting rooms and forcing him to sprint across two floors to make it on time. He started arriving early to everything just in case.

It was easy to feign ignorance, but you noticed the way he would glare at you in those moments, like he was waiting for you to confess. 

He was a man of precision, so during every mission briefing, you made sure his mic's calibration was just slightly off. The feedback was a little too sharp, and it was enough to draw a few startled glances. He fixed it within seconds, of course, but you caught the tick in his jaw.

By the third month, the bags under your eyes had gone from subtle shadows to outright bruises. Caleb had stopped trying to hide the way he studied you, half calculation, half curiosity, like he was trying to crack a cipher and was starting to hate the code.

Because you still got the work done. You still filed your reports, showed up at every meeting and every duty rotation, even if your eyelids fluttered and your voice was growing thinner with each passing day.

The more tired you got, the pettier you became.

You started rerouting his door sensors so they opened half a second late. Not enough to trigger a repair report, but enough to annoy him. You delayed his comm signal one cycle, so his input always came in a fraction after someone else had already spoken, and his alerts pinged five seconds later than usual, long enough to miss the first call. You subtly changed the temperature setting in his office by a few degrees. One day slightly too cold, the next barely too warm. You even programmed the hallway lights outside the room to flicker, but only when he walked past.

They were all childishly insignificant rebellions, but they were immensely satisfying. 

Maybe you wanted to see him feel something for once, even if it was frustration. Maybe you just wanted proof that he was human, because right now, you hated him too much for him to be anything else.

Caleb, on the other hand, never directly confronted you, but he started giving you longer, unnecessarily complicated errands that took you through the most inconvenient routes. Then there was the coffee, of course. You thought you'd made your point after that humiliating performance, but the man was incorrigible. He'd request it again every few days. Never directly. Always through another officer, and always with an air of plausible deniability.

You made it every time, and when you delivered it to his desk, he'd watch you with those goddamn eyes and make you take the first sip. Then, like a ritual, he'd drink from the exact same place your lips had touched.

He was enjoying this too. 

It was well past midnight, and you sat hunched over a circuit board, the smell of solder and melting alloy thick in your nostrils, your fingers trembling from a cocktail of caffeine, overexertion, and sleeplessness. The light above your workstation flickered faintly, casting dull gold across the edges of your tools.

In the background, looping through the static-clogged speaker of the overhead system, your brother's favourite song played again. It had been on repeat for several hours now, and you both loathed and needed it in equal measure. 

It was like picking at a wound every time it would scab over, but the silence was worse. You couldn't bear it, especially in this place that he used to linger in after hours, where he teased you for being too much of a perfectionist. 

His hours as a junior officer were more humane than yours, but he always stuck around waiting for you. In fact, the only reason he had even been here was because it was your dream to work for one of the nation's most prestigious organizations. It was your dream that killed him. 

You sniffled, hastily brushing your wrist over your cheek. You had no time for this. You were rushing to finish your team's prototype before sunrise, knowing you'd miss the presentation tomorrow. The final unveiling of something you'd worked so hard to build. And why? Because you had to attend some mind-numbing strategy meeting as Colonel Xia's fucking secretary.

The thought made your soldering hand twitch too hard, nearly frying a wire and burning your fingers in the process. You let out a string of expletives. 

When the door slid open, you didn't even look up. You knew the cadence of that stride too well by now, and you were halfway to biting your own tongue off before the fury spilled out of you.

"Of course," you muttered, "why wouldn't the Colonel show up to ruin what little peace I have left?"

Caleb didn't reply right away, stopping just inside the threshold to survey the space. "Enjoying yourself, are you?" His frigid tone made the temperature in the room drop by several degrees. 

"Oh, immensely," you drawled, glancing at him over your shoulder. "Who doesn't love getting metal fumes in their eyes at two in the morning?"

You set your soldering iron down and blinked rapidly. The burning sting reminded you—too late—that you had forgotten to put on your safety goggles again. Your watering eyes betrayed you, and you blinked harder, pretending to inspect a nearby tool so he wouldn't see the redness or the sheen gathering in the corners of your lashes.

Caleb took a step closer. "You've been busy lately."

"Yes. My workload has doubled thanks to you."

"That's not what I meant."

"Then enlighten me, sir."

"The scheduling errors. The misrouted transmissions. The false alarm in Bay Six."

"Sounds like a lot of administrative chaos. You might want to speak to your secretary about that. Your actual secretary."

"I am," he returned coolly. "And I'm observing a pattern. You tampered with the launch logs today."

"I fixed a misfiled routing loop. You're welcome."

His tone sharpened. "You don't have that kind of clearance as my—"

"But I do have that sort of clearance!" Your eyes were really burning now, and you weren't sure if it was the soldering fumes, the lack of sleep, or that awful tendency from childhood to cry whenever you were frustrated. "You keep on forgetting that I'm not just here to fetch your coffee and arrange your calendar. I was running propulsion schematics while you were still..."

Caleb's lips twitched with amusement. "Is this where you say, while I was still learning how to walk?"

"Judging by your competence, that was probably last year, so yes. Yes, I was."

"Perhaps you should've stayed in your workshop if you wanted to avoid responsibility."

As if you had a choice. 

"You've got some fucking nerve," you snapped. "Coming into my space at this hour to scold me like I'm one of your little soldiers."

Caleb shrugged. "I came because I expected professionalism. Forgive me for assuming we could have a mature discussion about your antics."

That was the last straw, and you stood so suddenly your stool screeched against the floor. "Professionalism? You mean the professionalism I show when I make your drinks? Or the reports you make me deliver in person, because God forbid you send an email like a normal person? Or do you mean the professionalism I've shown while letting you humiliate me in front of every officer in this fleet? You let them call me every name in the book and say nothing at all, and mind you, I do not need you to defend me, but everyone knows they'll only stop if a man tells them to!"

Caleb's face remained stoic, but his silence was telling. You were getting to him. 

Good. 

"I have one place where I can breathe freely," you continued. "One place where I still feel like I'm doing the job I worked so hard for. So you can't just come in here and defile it, simply because you feel like it."

When he took a step forward, you matched it, refusing to be cornered.

"You think this is a game?" he inquired softly.

"No, I think this is a job. In fact, I'm doing two of them, and I'm doing a hell of a better job than you are. All you do is get people killed and pretend it's leadership."

Caleb's expression darkened with the kind of danger that only existed in the seconds after a gun misfired.

There was no other warning before the very air collapsed inward, as though a singularity had bloomed in the center of the room. Your ears popped, and the pressure struck you from every direction at once.

When your legs buckled beneath the impossible weight, you reached out instinctively to catch yourself, your hand fumbling against the cluttered edge of your workstation. A solder scraper tore a gash into your palm, and you slipped anyway, the blood-slicked metal clattering to the ground as your knees slammed hard against the floor. The gravity was unbearable, like the air itself wanted to crush you.

When you looked up at Caleb, trembling under the invisible force he commanded, he was serene. 

“Say that again,” he ordered. “Go on. Tell me more about what I do. About who I kill.”

You bared your teeth, but then he tilted his head in contemplation. 

“You know, it’s funny. The way you talk, anyone would think you weren’t the one who pushed your brother into joining the Fleet.”

Your blood ran cold. “What?”

He stepped closer, and you could feel your joints ache beneath the force of his will. “What, you think I haven't read your files. You were the golden one, weren’t you? He just wanted to keep up. Wanted to impress you. Look where that got him.”

“Shut up.”

Caleb smiled faintly. “Maybe the guilt you’re so desperate to dump on me belongs to you. Not the first time I've been made a scapegoat for someone else's inadequacy.”

Your vision went white. “Don’t you dare pretend you know anything about me.”

“Oh, but I think I do. You talk like I held the gun, but really, he died chasing your shadow.”

“You were his hero," you snarled. "He followed you into that mission with stars in his goddamn eyes, and you let him die like he was nothing.”

Caleb flinched. The gravity around you warped tighter than before, pinning your arms to your sides. "No, you made him want to be a hero. I simply let him try. Too bad he didn't have it in him.”

Your stomach turned. The air kept pressing down, and your vision blurred from the pain in your hand and the shame clawing its way up your gullet. 

“He died under your command,” you hissed. “And the only reason you’re still standing is because I haven’t put you in the ground yet.”

For a moment, neither of you moved, and the only sound was your brother’s music, still looping behind you, soft and sweet and impossibly cruel.

You barely had time to flinch before Caleb was right above you. His presence pressed against your skin like violence waiting to be unleashed, and his hands hovered near your head, twitching with hesitation. He looked like he didn’t know what he wanted: to cradle your face like something precious, or to grab a fistful of your hair and wrench your head back until your neck snapped to attention.

What he ended up doing was something halfway. His fingers threaded into your hair with an unexpected intimacy, tightening just enough to sting. “Oh? Is that your grand plan now? Kill me? Put me in the ground right next to your brother and call it justice?”

You didn’t answer, but the flicker in your expression must’ve betrayed something, because his smirk widened, venomous and knowing.

He leaned closer, and his breath grazed your cheek. “I know all about you. Your late-night meetings with the Admiral. The hours you spend in his office, talking about me.”

"I don't know what you're talking about—"

His grip tightened, and when he spoke again, it was darker. If it had been anyone else but him, you might have thought that was...jealousy in his tone? But it couldn't possibly be. 

“You get cozy in his office, feeding him reports about how I'm unfit and dangerous. What does he do in return, hmm?” Caleb's lip curled maliciously. “Does he stroke your ego? Or does he stroke something else?”

Disgust flared in your throat. “What the fuck did you just say—”

“Come now, don’t act innocent. You play all the parts so well. Loyal soldier, mourning sister, reluctant assistant. But let’s not forget how you got this position in the first place.” He crouched, eyes locked to yours. “You nearly killed Liam.”

The accusation struck like a slap, and you scowled. “What? I didn’t even know him. Why the hell would I—”

The moment the denial left your lips, the density around you became overwhelming. Your bones protested against the strain, achingly close to crumbling to dust. Caleb's hand slid lower, almost digging into the soft flesh of your jaw. Your face was tilted up, forced to meet his eyes. 

“Do. Not. Lie to me.” He had lost all pretense of calm. “I don’t appreciate liars. And I despise traitors.”

A strangled sound left your throat, but you could do little else. 

“You think you're the first person who’s tried to kill me?” he whispered. “You’re not. Do you want to know what happened to the last few?”

You didn’t answer, and he didn’t wait.

“Do you know what it feels like to have every bone in your body pulverized at once?”

Your blood ran cold.

“Most people assume it to be quick. Merciful and instant.” A quiet chuckle vibrated against your cheek. “It’s not. The ribs go first. You can actually hear them crack. Then your lungs collapse. Can’t scream without lungs, can you?”

You couldn't help the shudder that went through you.

“Next come the limbs. They don’t shatter all at once. Your own skeleton turns against you, and the skull…it doesn't explode, like in the movies. It implodes. Like a delicate egg in a fist.”

"You—"

“I’ve done it before,” he added lazily. “So, tell me, Engineer, which method would you prefer?”

His gloved fingers brushed over the bloodied lower lip you'd been chewing on, prying it from between your teeth. Then they trailed higher, up your cheekbone, and over the ridge beneath your eye.

“Or shall I come up with something new, just for you?”

A single tear slipped free and trailed down your cheek. You didn't even know it had fallen until Caleb caught it with his thumb. 

“Ah,” he murmured, studying your mouth like it was something he could read, “so there is something left inside you after all.”

Without a word, he took your hand. You didn’t give it to him. You couldn’t have, but he took it anyway. The same hand you’d sliced open rested in his palm now, dwarfed and vulnerable, like a broken wing.

"Still bleeding," Caleb noted to himself.

You tried to snatch it back, but the gravity around you pulsed tighter, slamming you back into stillness.

“Don’t. Let me see what you’ve done to yourself.”

Then he pressed his thumb directly into the cut.

A gasp tore from your throat, and if you had been allowed any movement, your spine would have arched in pain. The kind of pain that hijacked your pulse and burned through your veins. Your vision blurred again, not from rage this time, but from the fresh tears threatening to spill over.

Caleb's expression didn’t change, eagerly studying the way your lashes fluttered with the effort not to give him the satisfaction. His thumb dragged lazily through the torn flesh of your palm, where the blood had pooled, half-dried and tacky. The sting was unbearable, but you refused to cry out, swallowing the sound, which seemed to annoy him greatly. 

"Didn't expect you to bleed so easily," he muttered. "Didn't think traitors could...feel."

You bit your tongue so hard you tasted iron. “Get your hands off me.”

He ignored you, pressing the wound again, just hard enough to be cruel. When he raised his hand to examine his fingertips, he almost looked revenant. Then, without breaking eye contact, he brought it to his own mouth.

His thumb dragged across the curve of his lower lip with a gentleness that made your stomach churn. Now, his mouth was stained red too—not quite a kiss, not quite a cut—but something blasphemous between the two.

“Now we match,” he hummed.

And you did. No one else had ever been this close. No one had dared, and maybe he knew it. Maybe he was staking his claim before anyone else could. Before anyone else could trace their mouth with your wound and make your pain feel so horribly personal.

He was your grotesque mirror of sorts, until he licked his lips, and the blood dispersed. 

Your eyes widened in alarm, but Caleb's burned with an unexpected hunger, like something inside him had finally stirred.

"I wonder what you'll tell the Admiral during your meeting tomorrow," he mused. "If you wanted me dead, you should’ve tried a little harder. I expected better from our resident overachiever."

Then, the pressure vanished, and his hand dropped from your face, as if he’d never touched you at all. When he stood, composure wrapped around him like a second uniform once more. 

You collapsed forward, catching yourself with trembling hands, gasping in shallow breaths. Blood from your sliced hand smeared across the metal flooring, the scent of it mixing with solder and machine oil. 

You resisted the urge to retch, and when you looked up again, he was already halfway to the door. He paused there momentarily, like he, too, was trying to remember how to breathe.

"I didn't come here to fight you," he stated in place of a farewell, and you nearly flung a wrench at his head. 

"Then maybe next time, stay the fuck out of my workshop," you grunted hoarsely. 

He was gone before you had a chance to say anything else, leaving you on your knees in the ruin of what used to be your safe haven, the imprint of his hand burning on your skin, and your lungs rattling in your chest.

Eventually, your shaky breaths turned to gasps. Then sobs. Then something far worse.

You clutched your wounded hand close, wishing it could anchor you and stop the shaking in your ribs. But it couldn’t. The sting of torn flesh now burned with something fouler, as if Caleb's touch had left an infection behind. Not of the body, but the soul.

Your brother’s favourite song still played in the background, sounding so heartbreakingly bright against the wreck that you’d become.

You hadn’t cried when the message had first come, or when they handed you his medals and buried what was left of him with the wrong flowers. You'd held it all in for months, but now you were unravelling, unable to stop the ugly sobs that tore out of you. You collapsed onto your forearms, forehead against the cold floor where your blood was smeared in a shameful halo, and wept.

Everything hurt. Your body, your bones, and your pride. Your chest felt like it had caved in, and something enormous and invisible was sitting on it, refusing to move. You didn’t even know what you were crying for anymore. The pain? The humiliation? The fear? Or your little brother, whom you were supposed to protect?

Maybe Caleb was right, and he had died chasing after you. Maybe he just wanted to make you proud, and instead, you let him run toward his death. 

This was all your fault.

You should have just taken that other offer after graduation—the miserable, low-paying tech repair job. You’d have been bored out of your mind, but alive. Your brother would have been alive. 

If only you’d had the courage to say no to Admiral Harkins and his smug conspiracies. This stupid spy game of his would kill you one way or another, you were sure of it. Either he would make good on his threats when your updates remained empty and useless, or Caleb would finish what he started today. 

But maybe you deserved to die. 

You had nothing. No family. No safety. No one in your corner.

Just the memory of the Colonel's fingers in your wounds, and the Admiral’s leash around your throat. You were made entirely of memory.

The song overhead reset again, a backdrop to your weeping as you rotted away in the shadow of the one person you couldn't save.

Taglist: @astudyoftimeywimeystuff @mi-yaw @userjunhuii @yahumankdj @twismare @missybabes @elielielira @kazbrkker @sylusgirlie7 @velvtcherie

“This thing is so ugly,” you whine, picking at your cast as he walks you back home. “Do you think I’m gross now, Caleb?”

“It’s not ugly. You need it to get better.”

“I thought you’d fall in love with me if I went high enough,” you sniffle fake tears, which he reads in an instant. “I did go pretty high up, though. So maybe you like me at least.”

He laughs, and you scowl, insisting that you aren’t joking. So instead, he smiles and holds your free hand in his again. Your heart skips a beat. A childish, but innocent love fluttering in your chest. “Come on, splints. Let’s go watch TV, and I can sign your cast.”

The broken wrist is so worth it.

With MC being two grades lower than the two of you and thus having a different schedule, it doesn’t take long before you’re doing practically everything with Caleb. He’s your seatmate in class, the two of you walk to and from school, and there doesn’t seem to be a moment where you aren’t glued at the hip. Throughout all of this, you make sure you shoot your shot whenever the chance arises—even when it doesn’t arise at all.

“You get any chocolates for Valentine’s?” you ask as you plop down in your seat with your lunch, not-so-conspicuously eyeing his desk as his friends begin to crowd around the two of you. It didn’t take long for Caleb to adjust to ordinary school life. After his initial bumpy introduction where he seemed hesitant to get close to anyone his grandma would introduce him to, he was quick to adjust to a level of charisma even you haven’t gotten to. 

By now, he’s charisma personified. You, yourself, have no idea how quickly he adapts to things. Though, you do recall that after an exam measuring his intelligence, he was told he couldn’t lower his grade by two years to be with MC. So you suppose he’s rather bright—almost as much as his face.

“Too many,” one of his friends groan, dragging his hand down the side of his face. “Life’s so not fair, dude.”

“Just a few,” Caleb laughs, turning to feel me stare at him expectantly. “Most of them are obligatory. I just helped a couple people out during gym.”

You glance at his friends. “How many is a few?”

“At least five,” another one grins. He wiggles his eyebrows at you, and his friend snickers at his shoulder. “You jealous?”

It’s not like your crush on Caleb is new news. In fact, it’s practically common knowledge at your school, given how open you are with your affection with him. Asking him out with a giant poster on orientation day, sending him notes with hearts littered everywhere during class, and refusing to be subtle when you’re discussing it with your friends…it tends to add up. Most people believe your relationship to be strange, but those who matter thought of it as the norm, so it doesn’t really matter. 

“Jealous? I don’t think so, why?”

“Most girls would be if their boyfriend got a bunch of chocolates,” he responds, to which Caleb immediately reminds him that you’re not dating. Then his friend sighs. “It’s cute when girls get jealous, isn’t it?”

At this, your ears perk.

“Should I be jealous?” you ask Caleb, making his friends erupt into snickers. “Do you think it’s cute too?”

He rolls his eyes and flicks your forehead softly. “Do you ever ask normal questions, splints?”

Throughout your childhood together, everything involves him. Family dinners, graduation, holidays, all of it. Of course, this means that MC is there for all of it too. You’re helplessly in love, but you’re not stupid. You know what love looks like from the movies their grandma would play on their TV. He cares for her with a different look in his eyes. He protects her with a lovingness in his voice that he doesn’t spare for you. 

The same fingers that flick your forehead touch her arm gingerly, like she could crack in half if he holds too hard. He doesn’t touch her very easily either, whereas he often falls asleep with his head fully leaning against your shoulder on the bus ride home. He wakes up at the crack of dawn to make her lunch, while the two of you munch on sandwiches from the school cafeteria during lunch breaks. He scolds you when your clothes are tossed on the ground while he folds hers without her having to ask. He never enters her room to protect her privacy while he lounges in yours like he owns the place.

Your Caleb, you have found, is different from MC’s Caleb. 

MC’s Caleb is easy to depend on. Trustworthy, perfect, and never makes a mistake for the life of him. He never loses his cool in front of her, never has a hair out of place, lets her win at all the board games, and always has this clear but dazed look in his pretty purple eyes. Your Caleb has none of that. Your Caleb teases you mercilessly when you lose the card game for the fifth time in a row. Your Caleb passes out on his desk while studying for an exam, essentially drooling on his notebook to lie to MC that he’s naturally talented at math. Your Caleb sends you stupid videos about plane models and forces you to sit through a thirty-minute explanation about it.

You know he likes her. He knows you know he likes her. She doesn’t know anything at all. All jumbled up, like a wordless pact ready to crumble at any moment. 

Of course, this means that he prioritizes her over you at times. All the time. It’s to be expected. She’s family, you’re not. You’ve grown used to it, and so has he.

MC doesn’t notice though, because she doesn’t have to. Because to her, Caleb is just a slightly nagging but cool adoptive brother. Nothing more, nothing less. And you’re one of her childhood friends, and Caleb’s best friend. Nothing more, nothing less.

The first year after you graduate high school is a dramatic shift from your cozy hometown. You somehow manage to get into the same college as Caleb–and you attribute his tutoring to be the main culprit—though in different majors. It’s a lot to convince him to go so far from home given that MC is still at home, but after a lot of reluctant discussion, he agrees.

“Take off your shoes at the door,” he reminds you as you barge into his dorm room after a particularly difficult exam for one of your classes. You do as he asks, grumbling about how he has no mercy for the fallen, tossing them haphazardly beside the door and prancing past him. He takes the time to tidy them up, as if he’s expecting it. “How was your exam?”

“Awful. I went through war.”

Caleb grins as he sits down at the coffee table beside you, watching as you bury your face into your arms. “And whose fault is it that they didn’t want to study?”

“Yours.”

“Funny,” he snorts, and you feel his large hand ruffling the top of your head. “It’s alright, splints. I can tutor you a bit earlier on the next one.”

“Even you can’t save me for this class.”

“Is that a challenge?”

He ends up cooking up something quick in his makeshift kitchen (essentially just a rice cooker), while you laze around on his bed, scrolling aimlessly on your phone. Once he’s finished, you scarf down his food like a man starved, lips stretching widely. At times like these, you’re oddly grateful for his hopeless love toward MC. How else would he have learned to cook such good food?  “You should honestly be a chef, Caleb. Actually, no, that would mean other people would eat your food. I guess you can just be my personal chef when we’re married.”

Caleb remains completely unaffected, wordlessly cleaning the plate in front of you. “I didn’t realize I was engaged.”

“Well, now you know. Not sure if you remember, but I had fireworks for you and everything when I proposed. Plus an orchestra.”

He hums, looking up as if he’s in thought, and then nods. “Now that you mention it, that does sound familiar, splints. How could I forget?”

You shrug. “You tell me.”

His face falls as you pace to the door and begin to put your shoes back on. “Where are you going? Aren’t you done with class?”

“Going out. I deserve it after that exam.”

“With your friends?”

“No, with four guys,” you joke, but he doesn’t seem to find it very funny. “I’m just going to a club. I won’t be back too late.”

He’s already grabbing his jacket. “I can come.”

You push him back with your finger by the nose, and he blinks in surprise, making you laugh. “No need. You have exams too, y’know.”

“I’m done studying.”

“Liar.”

Though it takes some convincing, you eventually have him sit at his desk once more. He manages to nag a whole lot as you leave, reminding you to call him once you’re done so he can pick you up, but you just wave him off as you leave out the door. You take your time getting ready–dolling yourself up to hide the dark circles beneath your eyes. As you get ready, you video call MC, where she asks how you and Caleb have been doing in her absence. She rants about her days with her grandma, complaining about how quiet the house is when Caleb isn’t home, though she indulged in the beginning. She asks you to show her your outfit once you’re done, and she beams brightly in your screen, squealing about how you’d likely get a boyfriend soon that you can tell her all about.

You just smile, because you don’t know how to tell her that the only boy you want is wrapped around her unknowing hand.

The club is loud. Where the music rumbles through your feet to the tips of your fingertips, and the lights are flashing in a dimly lit room. Your friends flock to a table and order drinks while you let yourself feel the music and crack a joke or two once in a while.

A group of guys approaches you with easy smiles and louder voices than necessary—confidence sharpened by cheap cologne. One of them leans against your table like he’s done it a hundred times before, asking your name, where you’re from, if you come here often. The usual.

You answer, choking out a laugh to humor his unfunny jokes alongside your friends, while the swigs you take from your drink become deeper and deeper. 

He’s not bad at flirting, you think. Subtle, and not too glaring about it. But you don’t particularly enjoy humoring it, and it becomes gradually more apparent as your eyes keep drifting elsewhere and you keep having to ask him to repeat himself. You’re growing bored. Irritated.

Because he’s not Caleb.

It hits you in strange, inconvenient flashes. The way this guy stands just a little too far away. The way his voice doesn’t quite reach you over the music, even when he’s close. The way you don’t feel that familiar, grounding presence like an anchor holding you to the ground.

You find yourself glancing past his shoulder. Half-wishing to see Caleb there. Watching. Hovering.

But there’s only strangers. Blurred faces and flashing lights.

“You okay?” the guy asks, tilting his head.

“Yeah,” you say too quickly. “Long week.”

He grins, like that’s an invitation. Says something else—something about getting you another drink, maybe dancing, maybe getting out of here.

You nod again. Smile again.

Across the room, your friends are already disappearing into the crowd, dragged toward the dance floor by laughter and hands you don’t recognize. One of them glances back at you, gives you a look that asks ‘you’re good, right?’ before she’s gone.

You sit back down at the table when the guy steps away. Maybe to grab drinks, maybe because he senses your attention drifting. You don’t really care which.

The music swells in your chest. The lights flicker. You wish you could enjoy yourself, but it’s particularly hard today.

You take another sip. Then another. Your phone rests face-down on the table, but you flip it over anyway.

No messages.

Of course not. He cares, but not like that. Not in the way that he would spam MC’s phone whenever he didn’t know where she was or how she was doing. No, not like that at all.

Another sip. The glass is nearly empty now.

And suddenly, you’re pressing send before you can even register what’s happening.

[you]: hi

The answer comes immediately, the grey bubbles popping up on his end of the screen.

[futre hubs <333]: do you need me to come pick you up?

[futre hubs <333]: i can

You’re not sure why you feel like shit, but you hate it. In moments like these—moments where the alcohol lets you lower your walls and truly think—it hits you like a truck, like a deeply sinking feeling in your chest. The years of rejection after rejection that the two of you frame like a bit—as if your feelings have become so miniscule that it no longer even phases him. 

It hurts, a bit. More than you let yourself feel.

You’re not sure how much time passes. Maybe minutes or maybe an hour. There’s buzzing throughout your body. The grip on your waist belonging to the man you’ve been half-heartedly entertaining suddenly becomes harsher, snapping you out of your trance. It feels unlike Caleb, but you let it sit anyway. However, the hand moves to your wrist, and you’re being pulled out of the crowd towards the wall.

Too touchy. He’s saying something into your ear, and you feel his breath against your skin. You don’t like it. Too close. The buzzing feeling feels more like an alarm now.

The words either go unheard due to the music or don’t deter him. You want to go back. Back to Caleb. In the moment, you begin to think—almost as if the world is in slow motion. Perhaps the drinks, you think. You wonder if Caleb will leave you. You wonder if he’ll leave to go be with MC. You wonder if the years you’ve spent expressing your love to him meant as much to him as it did to you, or if he just found it plain annoying. You wonder if now that you’re in college, he’d want to explore other people, and he’ll finally find an outlet to get rid of you for good. 

But you know he wouldn’t. Because he cares for you. Just not as much as he cares for her.

You wonder if he’s ever looked at you with the same softness he does with MC.

Someone pulls you away from the man and into their chest, and the worries dissipate in an instant. His scent. His warmth. You knew he’d come. He always does. It only takes a warning glare from Caleb before the man disappears into the crowd again, and you feel the grip on your wrist loosen. Caleb stares down at you, your back still to his chest as you blink wearily, almost in slow motion, and he sighs. He doesn’t give you the same smile he gives to MC when she’s in trouble. 

A part of you wishes he wasn’t always there for you—not when it’s so different from how he’s there for her. 

You sit idly in front of a convenience store parking lot while Caleb fetches you some water and ice cream. You have your knees to your chest, arms pulling them close as you shiver against the cold autumn breeze. You should’ve brought a jacket. The buzzing, hot feeling of the alcohol is subsiding too quickly.

“Drink.” You feel a water bottle press against your cheek from behind, and Caleb plops down beside you with a plastic bag. He notices how you’re holding yourself together and frowns. “Are you cold?”

“No.”

“I told you to grab a jacket.”

“You nag too much.”

He snickers and twists open the cap of the water bottle for you to drink, which you sip carefully. He strips his jacket off and drapes it over your shoulders, and you immediately bury yourself in it. It smells like him.

“What kind of woman do you like, Caleb?”

“You and your questions.”

“I want to know.”

He shifts to face you, motioning for you to lift your arms. He grabs either side of his jacket and pulls it shut, fumbling with the zipper until he manages to zip it to your chin. You can barely claw your hands out of his sleeves—the fabric almost engulfs you—but he just laughs. “My type? A woman who brings jackets when it’s cold.”

You scowl, making his laugh echo louder. “Other than that.”

“A woman who goes to class in the morning.”

“...Other than that.”

“A woman who doesn’t leave her clothes all over my floor when she feels like sleeping over.”

“Something else.”

“A woman who eats healthy, balanced meals. A woman who doesn’t steal all my pens and then still ends up asking me for more. Maybe someone who doesn’t pass out drooling on my pillow. Or someone who doesn’t let half the world know that they like someone—hell, maybe even the entire world.”

Caleb glances at you, chuckling to himself, but stops the moment he sees that you’re not laughing with him. Your head hangs low, your feet shuffling anxiously. His face twists, and suddenly the air thickens.  “Splints?”

You pick at your sleeves. “So just not me?”

“I was just kidding around.”

“Jokes have some truth to them.”

“Not all of them. I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s okay, Caleb,” you finally meet his eyes again, and shrug. “I know you like someone else. I’m not an idiot.”

Silence commences, like a bell dropping on your head.

Caleb shifts his weight, one hand coming up to rub the back of his neck. It’s a nervous habit you’ve seen a hundred times—usually followed by some half-joke, something to smooth things over.

But nothing comes.

The space between you suddenly feels too small and too big all at once. You try to act normal. You really do.

You fiddle with your sleeve again, smoothing it down, then pulling at it, then smoothing it again. Anything to give your hands something to do, so they don’t reach for him out of instinct. 

Caleb glances at you. Then away.

Then back again, like he’s trying to solve something written across your face but can’t quite make out the words.

“Hey,” he starts, softer this time.

You hum in response, not trusting your voice yet.

Another pause. God, it’s awkward.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he mutters again, quieter now. Not defensive. Unsure. “You know I think you’re amazing.”

Just not enough.

“I am pretty great,” but it comes out too soft.

Neither of you knows what to do with another stretch of silence. So you opt to drink some more water instead.

“Why do you like me so much?” He eventually mutters out as he bites his bottom lip, eyes falling to the ground like he can’t bear to watch your expression. “You could do a lot better.”

You smile, but it’s half-hearted. “How could I not?”

He pauses, as if choosing his words carefully before his voice comes out in a soft whisper. “You mean so much to me. You’re smart, beautiful, and everything good in between—whoever gets to call you theirs is the luckiest person I know. And you know I’d do anything for you.”

Despite their sweetness, his words feel like judgement wrapping around your heart in vines, squeezing just before it’s about to pop. You wish you could block your ears out for what comes next.

“But it can’t be me.” Caleb’s lips purse, brows furrowing as he looks away. “I can’t give you what you want.”

The rejection hurts more than you realized it would. You want to tell him that it’s not fair to treat you the way he does and expect you not to fall for him. That holding your hair when you vomit, falling asleep at your bedside when you’re sick, and his eyes closing in on you in any room that you’re in is not fair. 

Instead, you nod. And you swear to yourself that you’ll swallow this sickening lump in your throat that makes you want to hurl and sob at the same time. That you’ll bury it deep in a graveyard within you that even the closest person to you would never know of. Especially him.  

“I don’t want it, either,” you snort back, immediately perking up to slap his back in what results in a jolt. His shoulders tense as he blinks wide at you, unsure of the sudden shift in atmosphere. “I don’t want feelings that belong to someone else, dumbass.”

Once it sinks in that you mean it, a smile finds its way onto his face, though something flickers beneath it, like a flash of something you don’t want to look too far into.

Not because you still had hope, but because whatever existed between you had never been something as simple as a crush. It had roots—tangled deep into your souls and impossible to pull free without tearing something open. You wanted to keep what was left. Even if it lingered just a little longer, and even if you pretended not to see the splintering strands in the string tying you together.

So you let it settle. Let it rot somewhere you couldn’t feel it.

The two of you fall into the kind of closeness that you’ve always had, and time passes as if it was always meant to be this way. It’s easier this way. For a while, it does work, but nothing ever really stays under wraps. Despite your incessant protests in telling yourself it’s fading, the scars he’s inflicted on you are just that. Scars. Unmoving yet subtle.

The thinning thread finally snaps a few years later, when MC develops feelings for a coworker in the Hunter’s Association. The day the cracks in the glass bridge holding you together shatter beneath your feet into a million different pieces.

“When’s the last time you’ve slept?”

He’s sprawled shirtless on the couch of his apartment in Skyhaven, freshly out of the shower after you arrived to visit him for the first time in months—only to see that he’s nearly overworking himself to death. Despite him going off to the DAA after college, you’d kept close contact, the connection between the two of you never wavering regardless of your restricted time. It only changed after news of MC broke out. Worried, you’d rushed to Skyhaven to make sure he was doing okay, which you’re clearly glad you did now. You’d practically had to drag him to the shower to keep him from passing out next to the front door in his gear.

Caleb, clearly, is off. You suppose you don’t blame him. The woman he loves is yearning for another. Almost poetic, really, but you don’t like seeing him this way. Especially when you know what it feels like yourself, even if you’ve gotten used to it. Gotten over it. He looks like a kicked puppy. Hurt, like a dog who’s just been scratched by its owner. 

“I dunno.”

You peer into the empty abyss that is his fridge and frown. There’s a few measly apples sitting inside, and a half-eaten protein bar that’s been there for god knows how long. “What the hell have you been eating?”

He responds with a grunt, letting his head fall back against the sofa. You decide to make do with the instant noodles he has stashed in one of the cupboards and bring it over to him once it seems mostly done. With a fork, you stick out a few noodles to his face, urging him. “Eat.”

“Not hungry,” he mutters.

“Don’t care. Sit up.”

He opens one of his eyes to peek at you, which somehow urges him forward. There’s darkness beneath his eyes—even stubble littering his chin from a few days worth of not shaving. You want to reach out and poke fun at him, but the state he’s in deters you. Instead, you silently feed him, watching him chew his food while staring at your hands. It makes you wish you put on a fresh set of polish before you came.

You twirl another small forkful and hold it out. He leans forward this time without being told, taking it quietly. His shoulder brushes yours as he settles back against the couch, and you can feel his skin through your shirt.

“Thanks,” he mutters, voice rough from disuse more than anything. “For coming.”

“Yeah,” you say, quieter now. “Someone had to make sure you didn’t rot in here.”

He huffs a faint laugh, though it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Probably would’ve. Dramatic way to go out, huh?”

You nudge his knee with yours. “Starving to death in your own apartment? Real heroic.”

A ghost of a smile flickers across his face. It makes your heart flutter. Stupid feelings.

“…thanks for coming, splints,” he says.

Your chest tightens—sharp and sudden. It feels like it’s threatening to feel something that’s not yours to feel. So instead, you look down at the bowl, pretending to focus on separating another bite. You twirl your fork, more carefully this time. “I had to. You weren’t responding, so I thought you died, or something. Open.”

He rolls his eyes, but obeys anyway. “Bossy.”

“Learned from the best.”

His lids flutter shut, voice dropping to a lower hum. “I missed this.”

Your hand stills. “What?”

He shrugs, eyes still closed. “You being here.”

His hair is sticking to his forehead, still damp from the shower. Before you realize what you’re doing, you brush a stray strand of hair off his forehead. You speak quietly. “You look like shit.”

“Wow,” he mutters. “You have a way with words.”

You frown, and without thinking, your hand lingers at his temple for just a second longer than it should. His skin is warm, still hot from the shower.

“Idiot,” you whisper.

He catches your wrist. Not tight, not stopping you. Simply holding it there for a moment that feels too long and not long enough at once. Your eyes meet for a fleeting moment, and then you’re looking away, setting the mostly finished bowl of noodles onto the coffee table to pull away.

“Don’t make this a habit. I’m not flying out here every time you forget to eat.”

“Could,” he murmurs. “You would.”

You don’t respond to that, because he’s not wrong.

“…Is she okay?”

It slips out of him like instinct. Like breathing. And just like that, everything shifts. You don’t answer right away—instead, your fingers tighten slightly around the fork.

“She’s fine,” you say eventually. Leave it, you plead in your head.

“Did she say anything?” he asks, sitting up a little more now. There’s something in his eyes, like he’s searching. “When you talked to her.”

You shrug, trying to keep your tone even. “Just normal stuff.” Stop, you think. Please stop talking.

“Like what?”

“Like her job. Her grandma. Nothing serious.” Shit.

He frowns slightly. “She didn’t mention him?”

There it is. It’s always about her.

You know he’s in a vulnerable spot right now, but it does nothing to ease the sudden flame roaring in your chest. Whether it’s from years of repressed hurt or shame, all it amounts to is a relentless ball of rage inside of you that leaves your nails digging crescents into the palms of your hands. You stare at him, chewing on the inside of your cheek as you inch away from him. 

“Does it matter?”

Caleb’s face relaxes. “What?”

“Why does it matter what she thinks about him? She likes him, end of story, no?”

“I just want to know if he’s a decent guy.”

Your ass. “That’s not really your business, Caleb, but sure. He’s a great guy. Amazing, honestly. He’s really gentlemanly and checks every single box. He lives above her apartment, so they’re right next to each other. He treats her gently, too. I’d bet every girl would jump at a chance to date a guy like that.”

You’re not sure where the words are tumbling out of, but it’s too late to go back. Neither do you want to.

“I wonder if he has a brother. Maybe MC could set me up or something.”

“Oh. Is he…” Caleb’s back straightens, and you notice his fingers digging into his thighs. “...handsome?”

“Didn’t you hear me? I’m telling you, he’s perfect. His face could pay for the Linkon rent by itself.”

He suddenly stands, and you glare up at him through your eyebrows. “Why are you talking like that?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” you scoff.

He narrows his eyes. It’s something you haven’t seen in a while, since Caleb rarely gets upset at you. “You know exactly what I’m talking about, splints.”

“Can you just spit it out? What am I saying differently?”

“You’re angry.”

You stand, following suit. He looms over you to have his shadow essentially engulf you, and you wish you could kick his ankle so he falls to the ground. “Maybe if you weren’t so irritating, I wouldn’t feel so annoyed right now.”

“What?”

“It’s hard to watch, Caleb,” you hiss out in exasperation, throwing your hands into the air. “It’s always pipsqueak this, pipsqueak that, pipsqueak what. Seriously, we’re not kids anymore, you need to get over it!”

You’re not sure if you’re talking to him or yourself anymore.

“Can we calm down and talk? If I’ve been talking too much about it, I can stop, so—”

“We haven’t seen each other in months, Caleb! And all you want to ask me about is how she’s been? Why don’t you ask her yourself, if you’re so curious? Oh, but you can’t, because you always have to be perfect in front of her. So instead, you dump all of this on me. Your goods and bads, all of it, just for me to get kicked to the curb like I’m some dispensable object.”

“What?” his balks. “Dispensible? Are you serious? As if I haven’t gotten you out of every little thing you’ve gotten yourself into the past decade of our lives? As if I haven’t picked you up every weekend from your friends’ places at three in the morning? Like I haven’t called you every single week—”

“Well, I want you to stop that!” your words spit at him like weak knives, growing louder by the second. 

“You didn’t seem very against it the last forty times.”

“I am now.”

“What has gotten into you, splints?”

“Don’t call me that right now,” you glower, and you try to ignore the hurt flashing across his expression. “I’m just sick of seeing you follow her around like some wet dog. She doesn’t see you like that, can’t you see that?”

Your breathing begins to stutter, and you suck in a deep breath through your nose. Your chest stings, and you pray that you don’t lose composure so the tears threatening to bubble at the corners of your eyes remain hidden.

“You told me that you couldn’t give me what I wanted. Well, she can’t either,” you bore holes into his chest, too afraid of what you might see if you look up. “If I can get over my stupid feelings, so can you.”

But you’re not over it. Not at all.

He opens his mouth to respond, but nothing comes out. For the first time in a while, you’ve rendered him speechless, and it feels even worse than what it felt to be rejected years ago. You’re not sure how your nails haven’t drawn blood at this point. You’d rather that they do, so you have some excuse to use the restroom.

“It’s not fair what you do, Caleb,” you try to will your tears to stay at bay, but you can’t help them. They sting, blurring your vision as you drop your head in some pathetic hope that he won’t face them head on. “How you treat me when you don’t like me like that is not fair. At least MC doesn’t know, but you—you know, and yet you—”

The rational part of you says that it’s not entirely his fault. Sure, you insisted on staying by his side. Sure, you insisted that you could push down your feelings. Sure, you’ve promised a lot of things, but it’s his fault too, for being the way he is—so kind, so thoughtful, just so him. 

You wipe desperately at your tears. It was a lost cause from the start.

“Please don’t cry.” His face drains of color, apparent even against the dim lighting in his apartment. He steps towards you, and you take a step back. “Please don’t cry, splints, just not that.”

But when your tears refuse to cease dripping down your cheeks, your face flushing in humiliation, you feel both his hands cupping either side of it. He tilts your gaze up, and you realize that he’s only inches away from you, so much so that you can feel his breath against your skin. It’s moments like these that you lose yourself in his beauty. The deepness of his eyes that seem to peer into your very soul is one of the first features that you fell in love with as a child, and it hasn’t changed since. Damn him. You blink, eyes wide while his own flicker to your lips. 

“Be as mad as you want. Hit me, hate me even,” he whispers, his nose almost touching yours now. His thumb pad smooths your tears away. “But don’t waste your tears on someone like me.”

You think you might be imagining things. Because with the tension that nearly suffocates you and his lashes almost fluttering against your skin, you think he might be about to kiss you.

A sharp pain jabs you in the chest. Is it pity? A consolation prize dressed up as something softer? Is it to smooth things over, to make this moment easier for him to leave behind? Or is it rebellion? Something reckless from the fact that he can’t have her? Your tears have dried up, but the rest of your body seems to weep, as no excitement, no butterflies course through your veins. 

Why is it always something else? Why is it never you? It only hurts—because even now, you’re just the place he empties everything he feels for her.

Instinctively, you press your palm into his lips to push him away, and it feels like the air itself has stilled.

His breath lingers against your skin. Yours stutters like it’s forgotten how to exist in the same space as him. The air is so thick you could slice it with a knife.

Eventually, he pulls away. Caleb stares at you with an expression you haven’t seen before, though you don’t look long enough to analyze it. Wordlessly, you gather your things, stuffing your jacket into your bag and stumble over to the door—all while he stays locked in a petrified state, like he’s processing what he just did. Your gaze remains fixated on the wooden panels of the floor while you pack, refusing to look any higher in case you might see anything other than his feet.

“Don’t follow me,” you tell him as you leave. 

You don’t wait to see if he hears you.

The journey home feels like there’s a gaping hole in your chest, and all you can do is stare out the window as you feel the vibrations of the train through your fingertips. Outside, the world blurs past in streaks of dim lights and shadowed shapes, and you wish that your feelings were as fleeting as the buildings blurring by. 

You try to count the number of trees you see. Not on the warmth of his breath against your palm. Not on how close he’d been. Not on the fact that, for a second, you almost let him.

If you hadn’t pushed him away, would it have meant anything? Or would you have just been a mistake he’d regret in the morning?

Your phone buzzes frantically in your pocket, and you pull it out to see his name in big bold letters. He’s texting you simultaneously, apologizing in so many different ways that they all start to blend into one message you don’t plan on reading. You refuse to give into what your heart wants. It’s hurt you too much in the past. So instead, your thumb hovers above the ‘mute’ button.

You press it and shut your eyes.

Even if it’s difficult to adjust the first few weeks without him, you can’t bear to face him either. He shows up at your door. Nearly every day for some time, knocking softly and asking if you’d be willing to talk. When you simply plug in your earbuds and bury yourself into your bed, he apologizes through the door and leaves you something to eat. You tend to throw it out at first, but after a while, you figure it’s just a waste. Just like that, a month goes by. And then another. Then another. Until you can’t count them on one hand anymore. He comes by once every two weeks or so now, likely busy with his work.

Despite how much your body seems to miss his presence, you wonder if you should distance Caleb permanently. It’s a daunting idea. One that you never would’ve thought just a few years ago, but the embarrassment runs deeper than you want to admit. The feelings you’ve tried so hard to hide clearly aren’t hidden. Is this sustainable? 

Regardless of what you think, he comes around like clockwork.

“Are you in there?” He knocks gently on your door, voice soft. He probably knows you are.

“No.”

He chuckles from the other end. “Right. Happy birthday, splints.”

You glance at your phone calendar. He’s right. 

As usual, he begins to talk about random events in his life that he hasn’t had the opportunity to tell you, and while you usually muffle it out, you decide to quietly shuffle over to the door today. To tell him, maybe, that you don’t want to keep doing this. Or maybe just to hear his voice, you don’t know. Either way, you slide your back down the door where he’s on the other side, pulling your knees into your chest.

“I don’t know if you’ve read my text, but–”

“I don’t read them.”

Caleb stops, and you can almost hear his breath hitch. You usually don’t give him more than a few words, much less a full sentence, so it seems to have taken him aback. After the brief remission, you hear him clear your throat. “Splints, can you open the door? I want to talk—apologize to you.”

Silence.

“Or I can do it out here. That’s fine,” he sighs. “I want you to know that it’s okay if you want to hate me forever after this. I won’t keep clinging to you if you at listen to what I have to say, but I really just—I need to say that this is my fault.”

You half-heartedly hear his words drone on, his confidence wavering every so often while you pull up his chats on your phone. You have no idea how you hadn’t folded and read his chats until now, though it might’ve been more so for your own peace than anything. There’s too many to scroll up to, so you read the most recent messages, squinting in the dark against the light of your phone. 

[1:41PM]

[caleb]: are you eating well?

[caleb]: i made this today

[caleb]: [image attached]

[caleb]: your favorite dishes :) i’ll drop them off at your place later

[caleb]: i hope you’re not just throwing them out…wouldn’t blame you tho

[caleb]: at least take care of yourself :)

[8:13AM]

[caleb]: hi splints :)

[caleb]: you probably watched it already but that movie you wanted to see came out a week ago. I went to go see it

[caleb]: i still think it’s kind of bad…but it was entertaining

[caleb]: unless you wanna argue about it ?? :3

[5:32PM]

[caleb]: ranked first today

[caleb]: i was excited to celebrate it with you and then remembered :/

[caleb]: it doesn’t feel as good when i can’t tell you lol

[caleb]: hope you’re okay

[11:23PM]

[caleb]: i wish i hadn’t been so stupid

[caleb]: i didn’t deserve you back then

[caleb]: i still don’t

[caleb]: i shouldn’t have lost my cool when you were over here. didn’t like hearing you talk about that guy like that

[caleb]: im sure he’s a good looking guy, and i know you’re particularly weak to good looking guys…

[caleb]: i was being childish and i wish i could’ve explained it to you then

[caleb]: i know you don’t owe me anything and you don’t have to listen to what i have to say

[caleb]: but i never wanted to make you feel used, and i never did. if that even sounds believable lol

[caleb]: it was never about her

[caleb]: there’s so much more i want to say but i’ll say it in person

[caleb]: miss you a lot

[caleb]: sleep tight

You wish the tightness in your chest would go away. You wish you didn’t feel his sorrow through him. And you wish you didn’t care about your own feelings for him.

“I love you, splints,” he murmurs, and your attention tears away from the chats, your phone nearly clattering onto the floor. Your eyes widen, suddenly regretting that you missed the first half of his speech. 

“Not in the way you say it to your friends, or the way you say it to family. You’re my life, and you’ve been my life since the day you gave me that ring. I care for MC, but what I feel for you is different. It’s always been different. I realized that years ago, but I was afraid that it wouldn’t be fair for you. I thought you deserved someone better than someone who doesn’t know how to understand their own feelings.” Your throat dries. “I thought it wasn’t fair because I’d already put you through so much.”

“At the same time, I’m a selfish guy, you know? I couldn’t let you go either, because I couldn’t bear to see you with someone else. I wanted it to be us, and the only way I could think of existing without feeling like I was ruining you was to stay how we were. Stagnant, I guess,” he chuckles, but it feels sad. Weak. “I’m an idiot when it comes to you, you know.”

You don’t respond.

Not because you don’t have anything to say—if anything, there’s too much. It crowds your throat, every word scraping against the next until none of them can make it out. Your fingers hover uselessly over your phone, screen still lit with a conversation you can’t even remember reading.

‘I love you.’

The words echo, but they don’t land the way you once dreamed they would. They don’t bloom or soften or fix anything. They just sit. Too heavy. Too late.

Your chest tightens, aching outward like it’s trying to break free. Because you’ve wanted this—God, you’ve wanted this—for so long that you stopped letting yourself imagine it could ever actually happen. It should feel like relief. Instead, it feels real, but fragile.

Because you remember too much. The almosts. The waiting. The way you learned how to swallow your emotions when he built a wall between the two of you—and that doesn’t disappear just because he finally found the words.

Your hand curls slightly against the door, fingers brushing the cool surface.

Even with all that, you still miss the warmth of his skin. How his hair felt through a towel as you dried it. How he’d flick your forehead when you’d get a question wrong during one of his tutoring sessions. How he’d tease you about your grades or interests, and learn more about them anyway. How he’d message you throughout the day about random endeavors. How he’d always be there. How with just a call of his name, he would’ve crossed the continents for you. His eyes. His lips. His face. His painfully handsome face.

You remember him in all parts of your life—and not a single moment you’ve spared has gone without him. You remember how he held your hand when you’d broken your arm, and the way he’d lifted you into the air and embraced you when you were accepted into the same college as him. You remember how he’d pet your hair as you complained about him going too far for the DAA, promising he’d visit often. And he did. He always kept his promises.

Your body moves on its own, as if this was how it was always meant to be. The door slowly creaks open.

“…We’re a mess.”

A faint, tired smile is all you can give him. Still, when he sees you, the world seems to stop for just the two of you, and it takes him a moment to fully register that you’re really there. That you’re not just a figment of his imagination, and he hasn’t truly lost you forever as he’d feared. “This doesn’t mean you’re completely out of the woods. I’m still mad.”

“You should be,” he whispers out, nearly breathless.

Hesitantly, you step towards him. He reaches his arm out, brows furrowed cautiously like he’s not sure if he’s allowed to even blink right now. The tips of his fingers twitch towards you. You raise a brow, and he swallows the lump in his throat, retracting back until you nod. 

Realizing you don’t have shoes, you step onto the fronts of his shoes one foot at a time, taking his hand until you’re flush against him and he’s already engulfing you into a crushing embrace. His arms wrap around you, strong and warm. He smells good. Though you can’t confidently say the same for yourself given the state you’re in, he drops his chin into the crook of your neck and inhales deeply, like a man starved.

“Note to self,” you mumble. “Don’t propose to any handsome guy you see.”

Caleb laughs, airy this time, and you feel it against your collarbone. “I thought you were going to leave your husband out here to die in the cold.”

“I should divorce you. We’re not even married yet.”

He grins, lopsided. “You should.”

“I won’t.”

“I know.

You bury your face into his chest, fingers digging into the fabric on his back. “I don’t want a version of my life without you, Caleb. As annoying as you are.”

He pulls away for a brief moment and places a kiss on your cheek, his own dusting red. Flowers feel like they’re blooming on the spot he pecked, but somehow, it feels natural. You’ve always been close to him physically throughout your upbringing, even if it never involved lips–that was new territory. You cross your arms, relying on his hands around your waist to keep you upright. “Tell me more.”

“You nag too much.”

He kisses your nose. “Hm?”

“You’re emotionally repressed.”

“Ouch.” He kisses your temple.

“You’re too good at things you don’t try at.”

Your jawline.

“You’re unstable. You’re too protective. You’re stupid.”

“I love you,” he says, pressing his forehead against yours. His lips hover above your own, just centimeters away.

Your lashes flutter against his. “Then prove it to me.”