foxborn

i had a dream about you last night.

i remember every single kiss you took from me.

you are my everything.

i feel the same way about you.

where you go, i follow.

you're mine. you've always been mine.

i'm in love with you to the point of breathlessness.

after all this time, you still give me butterflies.

you make it hard to breathe, you know.

you fixed me. you fixed my broken heart.

i will not go another breath without you.

i crave you.

i need to be close to you.

i think i've loved you since the day we met.

i'm with you.

you touched me, and i came alive.

the universe isn't big enough to hold the depths of how i feel for you.

are you sure we're not dreaming?

kiss me again, and don't stop this time.

i can't bear the thought of living without you.

you complete me.

i want all of you. every piece of you.

i won't lose you again.

you're the most important person i have ever known.

the universe gave you to me.

you're the answer to every question i've ever had.

i want you close. i want to feel you sigh.

how am i supposed to do this without you? i can't.

all i love i knew before... it's nothing like the love i have with you.

you changed everything. everything looks different now that you're here.

i'm not ready to let go of you.

i want you safe. i want you close to me.

you fixed all of my broken pieces. you stitched me back together.

nothing will take you away from me.

i love you in every language and in every song.

i need you.

i'd rather die than let you go.

i need a whole day with you, spent in bed, just the two of us.

all that i am and everything i'll ever be belongs to you.

do you have any idea what you do to me?

stop looking at me like that. i can't focus.

you can't expect me to just... wait like this.

don't go. do that again, please.

you are everything i could ever want.

i was an empty shell until we met. i was a haunted house, darkened with pain, and you turned my lights on.

you are the most beautiful person i have ever seen.

i'm always going to be madly in love with you.

if you don't kiss me again, i'll die.

i crave the taste of your kiss.

i can't believe you're real.

if you only knew what you did to me...

there aren't enough words to explain how much i love you.

i love you more than anything.

a life without you isn't a life worth living.

don't let go of me.

you're the only one that matters.

you don't know what you do to me.

pretty sure i've fallen in love with you four times today.

you're my love.

lay with me. be with me.

they don't know you the way i do.

don't give up on me. don't give up on us.

you know what that does to me.

not even the poets could properly describe what you mean to me.

i miss the way it felt to be touched by you.

you are the sun and the stars and every other golden thing in the universe.

am i dreaming? is this real life?

i was living life half-alive until i met you.

i've never needed anyone like i need you.

please take my hand. hold it and never let go.

i love when the sun hits your eyes. you're glowing.

be with me tonight.

send 🗣 for my muse to blurt out the first thing they think of when they see your muse.

"I knew they were siblings... I let the bet happen so I could make cash. It worked."

"I told her the wrong age once and she glared at me for like 2 hours."

"If she and I are talking and you don't know what we said it was probably gossip or judging you."

"She's not the scariest woman I work with but sometimes that glare....eesh."

"Pretty sure she say's its fine to me sometimes so i get annoyed.."

💥|| He does not flinch. That is the first miracle - the thing his body has forgotten how to do around anyone else's hands, this small mercy of stillness instead of flight. Her fingers find his hair and something in him that has been clenched since childhood, since the first time discipline replaced comfort as currency, unclenches by a single degree, then another, like armor being unbuckled plate by plate by someone who has memorized every clasp.

He does not let people touch his hair. This is not vanity - it is architecture. It is the last unconquered territory of a body that has been mapped by scars, catalogued by medics, measured by tailors for armor and coffins both. His hair is the one border he has never surrendered, not to lovers before her, not to the barbers who ask and receive only a nod for length, never for touch.

But her hands arrive as if she has always had clearance, as if some part of him signed the treaty long before his mind caught up to the terms, and he lets her cross the line because she never announced she was crossing it at all. She simply became someone he had already surrendered to, in increments too small to name, until surrender was simply where he lived now.

Her palm at his neck rewires something old and animal in him. He is a man built from command - a lifetime of syllables barked into radios, of decisions made in the space between one heartbeat and the next, of watching Two-Six's silence stretch into a possible eulogy - and none of that architecture has ever taught him how to be handled gently.

And yet here, beneath her fingers combing slow paths through hair still damp with the day's sweat and fear, he finds himself fluent in a language he never studied: the language of being cared for without conditions, without debriefing, without the transactional weight of duty repaid.

He thinks - distantly, the way a man thinks of shorelines from far out at sea - that she is the only living witness to the man beneath the commander. Not Harumi's ghost, who knew him before command hollowed him into something efficient and terrible. Not his soldiers, who know only the mask, the voice, the certainty he manufactures because uncertainty gets people killed. Only Miharu, reaching past twenty years of fortification with the patience of someone disarming something dangerous not because she fears it, but because she has decided it is worth disarming carefully, worth keeping intact.

She does not ask him to be less than what the war made him. She simply reaches through it, unafraid of the calluses, unafraid of the silences that used to be filled with whiskey and are now filled with her heartbeat instead, and finds the boy who once existed before Hanzo Hasashi became synonymous with casualties and command structures and grief filed away in unabridged notes no one else will ever read.

Her fingers still moving through his hair, unhurried, reverent - and he exhales, long and broken and grateful, into the quiet cathedral of her chest.

"No one touches this," he murmurs, voice wrecked soft, the words arriving less as command now and entirely as confession. "No one but you. You are the only front I have ever wanted breached."

His eyes close. Somewhere far off, sleep finally begins circling like a soldier deciding, at last, that the perimeter is secure enough to rest inside. 💥||

Here, rest. She will not offer him the it will be okay because war does not allow okay and she has been a soldier under his banner, wearing the same colours as him and she knows now the weight of command, the fraction of it with her own command of pilots, young and ambitious and driven, which is what defines a pilot in the special forces.

The silence is the most honest thing she gives him, because speaking to fill it is an insult to both of them. She responds in a hum, not because she does not have the words, no. They are simply not necessary. No one touches this, he tells her. A quiet confession of a man who is still in the process of arriving, and she does not rush him to finish the confession; the confession of which she will file away in the chambers of her heart, and her thoughts will find the blank pages of her journal on another time. Her fingers continue combing slow paths through his hair - and she recognizes that scent - the scent that is him, and his hair still damp with sweat and fear and grime that still lingers on his skin.

He is thinking - she knows this. She has learned in the years of existing beside him, in the years of reaching through the fortification of himself with her patience, tenderness and stubbornness, that he is thinking. He is always thinking - his mind never turns off - with the vigilance and discipline he cannot unlearn, and this is the intersection at which the man and the general both exist, and she accepts both of them, because they are both sides to him.

He is thinking - she is trying to receive the pieces he sends her in that quiet frequency between them, and she is patient, she is waiting - the waiting is learned from him too, learned from the first day of her own flight, reshaped into something more versatile since transferring to his unit several years ago, and the waiting is now a skill honed like a blade. The same waiting that she has learned when she'd invented her own execute: Viperstrike, which is the coiling before the attack.

This is perhaps the most honest thing to her - that she does not ask him to be less than what the war made him. She has never done that, and she will not ask him now. Because to her, asking him to be less means becoming a different person he cannot be.

She thinks too - the first time he let her hold him. The first night they fell into each other's arms - nothing more than what they can offer, or afford - because she has often been the one who shies away from touch and he has always been the one grounding her mostly. The first night they fell into each other's arms, and he let her hold him without condition, cared for without debrief, without any expectation of the gesture returned. The first night, when he let himself be witnessed while he exhaled like he'd been holding his breath for hours.

She thinks of the first time she deviated from the plan, the first time she realizes he matters - and gods, he already had mattered to her before she could reconcile what should be and what is and she'd confessed to him why he matters. She'd told him then that she'd lost an anchor before, this was the first reason she gave him. The other reasons have begun to compile without her own authorization, and she had been too focused and had ignored the possibility that he may return the sentiment at some point.

She thinks of the first mission he had let her stay, in the aftermath of it, and it is the same deployment where he'd found her in the hangar, body shaking with adrenaline that has not yet left her veins, and he had found her in the empty one, dim and private and open where nosy mechanics may find them. He'd found her there in that dimmed hangar, quietly relieved and mildly annoyed at her stubbornness, which he learned later that this same stubbornness and precision is what makes her formidable in the air in hostile skies, what makes her the pilot whose execution, whose flight appears like a choreographed dance than a danger, could cast a shadow of fear or a glimmer of admiration depending on who you talked to about Miharu Yamaguchi.

She lets him sleep. The weight of him on her is comforting, grounding. The irrefutable evidence that he is here, and they have made it back, and they have survived another deployment. She does not expect the accounting to be any less costly. But she is here, and she has decided she will remain.

Her own exhaustion finally makes itself known, too. There is a warmth spreading through her chest, heat conducted from his body to hers, warmth shared between their bodies. She closes her eyes, with a quiet relief of knowing that he is safe, that he is here in her arms, that he has not been harmed.

The last thing Alex likes is sending food out late, especially when his name is attached to every plate leaving the kitchen. When the pastry station has to remake a dessert after one of the line cooks fumbles the original, he doesn't say much beyond a quiet, "Take your time. Do it right." Once the replacement is finished, he takes one look at it, makes a small adjustment to the garnish with the tip of a spoon, and lifts the plate himself. If someone's been waiting that long, an apologetic server isn't enough. That's on him.

The menu proved a promising recommendation by a friend, a colleague, an acquaintance: for appetizer, she'd picked the scallop custard with smoked dashi, something that already caught her attention with curiosity. There is a subtle smoke that piqued her interest to the dish, though the simplicity must not go unacknowledged as well. The salad is cold to the palate - cucumber shaped into artful ribbons with sorrel leaves with a sour, fermented vinaigrette, that made her refer back to the menu while she consumed it. She appreciates the lightness of it, lighter than the appetizer, she finds, which is a good contrast considering she'd opted for the salmon for the main entree.

Of course, it must be mentioned that Miharu is not too particular with flavours, but knows how to appreciate food that has been prepared masterfully.

By the time the main entree had come out, Miharu finds herself impressed by the way the salmon is curated and plated with such precision and artistry. There is a warm sauce - she finds this to be creamy, and suspects buttermilk or something similar, and still unsure of the dark green dusting ( she realizes later this might be the charred leek ash ) and small greens finished with a buttered potato crisp. The kind of dish that speaks of quiet restraint and precision. She eats without hurry - it has been quite some time since she'd enjoyed such luxury as this; she barely remembers it, with how busy her life has become, leaving little time to sit back and relax and simply be.

She leaves the dessert to be chosen to the recommendation of the waiter, to the expertise of the chef - which is a quiet challenge and perhaps the exhaustion of deciding for herself that for once she would like to finally enjoy a moment of reprieve - including the decision making for herself. The course has been flawless, until the dessert which, Miharu finds, a bit delayed. She looks around the restaurant: patrons leaving, settling their checks, rising from their tables in pairs, in trios, some with faces a little too flushed from wines consumed in a little bit more than moderation.

I'm sorry for the wait, the voice catches her attention. Miharu is still, and she does not smile, though a ghost of it crosses her expression at the slight tug. She watches as she always has, watches the way he sets the dessert down before her with the sheepish smile on the other's face. She lets the silence settle too, and gives him the small precise nod. The kind that does not simply acknowledge but takes in the details of the dessert he had taken the time and precision to create, before she speaks:

"It looks wonderful. Please," she gestures at the empty seat before her, eyes not yet leaving the dessert. When she looks up, she looks at him in the eye, the ghostly smile expanding, the corners of her lips pulling a little more.

A pause. A recalibration. She had not expected this.