"Absolutely Not."

Chapter 22: Content

Tucked away in the solace of his bed, the serenity of the still night covered what bare flesh the loose blanket draped across us didn't. It was like we weren't on base at all anymore but elsewhere. It could have been anywhere. His apartment or mine, a hotel or a patch of grass, I almost forgot the intensity behind why I had been dragged into the fight again.

Face-to-face, heavy eyelids stayed peeled open just for the sake of making up for lost time. Head propped up by an elbow denting the mattress, Simon watched with an amused expression as I tried my damnedest to stay awake.

Lazily, his hand caressed the back of my thigh as my leg hooked around his, ensuring some part of me was touching him at all times. It seemed he was doing the same, brushing his textured fingertips against my soft skin while he still could.

I wanted to stay here.

I wanted time to stop and for morning to not arrive. Not in a 'cease to live' kind of way, but I yearned for a more than temporary kind of peace. Where we could just be like this in the comfort of tranquility.

Where war did not lurk in the shadows, coaxing me to join so that I could have my satisfy a thirst I'd not indulged in quite some time.

The two of us had our demons we tried to strangle daily, snuff out so it was easier to live, but how could I breathe comfortably when shadows were everywhere? While there was light, there would always be shadows. Thus, my thirst for more violent tendencies... was practically immortal. Unquenchable.

But it was his hands that reeled me back in every time.

As he savored each goosebump that rippled across my skin, feeling the prickled flesh while innocently basking in the fact that he could do this again, he unknowingly kept me sane.

Or maybe he did have an idea.

Behind the small squeeze he gave my thigh, perhaps was the memory of us betraying our minds' better judgment and disclosing our darkest secrets, and he was consciously guaranteeing my sanity to not slip again.

----

"Do you ever feel like there's a part of you that can't... regulate?" I asked as we sat by his modest dining room table, hands wrapped around a mug of tea he'd just steeped. The autumn's chill bit into what skin had been exposed during our walk, making our cheeks flushed and our fingers stiff.

He raised a questioning brow in my direction before he answered. "Random. But I guess? It depends in what context."

My teeth found a tasty part of my cheek to chew on, and my eyes couldn't meet his curious gaze, revealing my nervousness about the conversation that I now had to finish.

"Like on a mission," I started, fingers adjusting their hold on the warm mug, "You ever find yourself sometimes having to slow yourself? It's not the adrenaline of it all that I'm talking about. It's the- fuck, I don't wanna say that I get excited about slicing throats, but the satisfaction of wielding death's scythe is... intoxicating."

----

Another light squeeze, a little closer to my ass this time, brought me back to his bed, and I realized I'd unintentionally paused mid-tracing the deep scar that ran from the end of his eyebrow to his jaw.

"You know you can sleep here. You're safe," he mumbled before pulling my hips closer to his.

----

A safe place, that was what Simon had given me. Bringing me back to his flat so that I didn't have to heal in solitude, he also provided unbiased ears and rational answers.