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The fire crackles low, barely holding against the wind curling through the trees. You sit with your back to a moss-covered log, knees pulled tight to your chest, chewing a piece of jerky that's more leather than food. It's the last one in your stash, and you're rationing like you won't find anything better.
You haven't slept more than an hour at a time since leaving. Your body's still healing, but your mind is still fractured. You don't even know what you're heading toward– you just know that you can't stay.
The silence out here should feel like peace. It doesn't. It's too much like the silence you'd endured strapped to that table in Mount Weather, long after everyone had left you with the dead.
You rub your wrists where the leather strap had bruised it. It's phantom pain. Stupid, but it lingers. Everything lingers.
You'd told yourself that leaving was power. It was survival. That if they could forget you once, they'd do it again. That you were better off without any of them. Without him.
But the nights are long, and your thoughts always betray you.
You don't miss camp. You don't miss the people. Not really. But you do miss the way he would laugh with his entire body. You miss the way he used to find something to joke about even when the sky was falling. You miss his awful jokes and his even worse beard and the way he used to pass you rations when he thought no one was looking.
You miss him like a splinter under the skin– small, but constant.
And you hate that.
You hate the way that you still love someone who let you rot on a slab while he cried over a girl he barely knew. You hate how your heart still jumps at the thought of him, or the crack of a stick in the woods fools you into turning around, thinking it's him.
You hate that even now– miles from camp and miles from him– you can't scrub him from beneath your skin.
A twig snaps, and you're on your feet in a flash, knife in hand, ready for whatever comes out of the darkness. Another step sounds, closer this time. It's too heavy to be an animal.
You brace yourself for a fight. You'll be damned if you're taken hostage again.
Then he stumbles into view.
Jasper.
He's soaked through from rain, some dirt streaked across his jaw. His eyes lock onto yours like he's afraid you'll disappear. Or that you're not real.
You stop breathing.
"(Y/N)."
He says it like a prayer that's been muttered a thousand times on the trek here.
