It was pouring the night you met Isaac Dixon. You were barefoot, your clothes soaked through, stumbling through the narrow alleys of a ruined Seattle neighborhood. Rain masked the distant sounds of infected, but you could still hear the screeches, the wet slap of feet on pavement, and the occasional, sharp pop of a gunshot somewhere far off. Each sound felt like it cut straight through your skull—sharp, intrusive, unbearable. You pressed your hands against your ears, heart thundering, trying to focus, to stay quiet, to stay alive.

You had lost him—your boyfriend—the only person who knew how to help you when things got too loud, too fast, too much. He had shielded you from the worst of it, always placing himself between you and danger, between you and the infected, between you and a world that never seemed to understand you. But now he was gone, torn from you in a moment too brutal to relive. You hadn’t even had time to grieve. You’d just run.

And you might have died that night—screaming inside your head, trying not to let the tears escape—if it hadn’t been for him.

Isaac Dixon didn’t say anything when he appeared. You hadn’t even seen him at first, too focused on the shapes coming after you. It was the crack of gunfire that made you flinch and spin, not because it scared you—though it did, badly—but because it was so close. Too close. You dropped to your knees, hands flying up to your ears again as panic surged.

But the infected dropped, too. One after the other. Then silence, except for the rain.

“Hey,” came a voice—low, firm, but not unkind. “You hurt?”

You looked up slowly, trembling, soaking wet, and too overwhelmed to speak. He was standing a few feet away, his rifle lowered, his eyes scanning the shadows. You remember thinking how tall he was, how steady he looked, like the kind of person who’d faced down monsters and survived. But what really struck you was that he didn’t come any closer. He didn’t reach out or bark orders or drag you to your feet. He just crouched a few feet away and repeated himself—this time a little softer.

“You hurt?”

You shook your head. Your throat was too tight for words, but somehow, he understood.

He didn’t talk much on the way back to the WLF outpost. He told you his name—Isaac. You already knew who he was, vaguely. People whispered about him like a myth, like a ghost who had waged war against FEDRA and won. But that night, he wasn’t a warlord. He was a man who had seen someone alone and scared, and stepped in. He didn’t yell when you flinched at the sound of another gunshot in the distance. He didn’t rush you when you needed to stop and breathe. He just waited. Watched. Protected.

When you finally made it to the outpost, the others there looked at you with suspicion—until Isaac held up a hand and said, simply, “They’re with me.” No one argued.

It took time. You didn’t trust people easily, especially not after losing someone so important. But Isaac didn’t demand your trust. He earned it. He remembered that loud noises made you panic and warned you before patrols when it might get rough. He found you a pair of ear protectors—scavenged from some long-abandoned workshop. He didn’t try to fix you. He just made space for you.

One night, when the skies were clear and the city was quiet, you finally told him about your boyfriend. How he used to hold your hand when the world got too loud. How he used to tell you stories to drown out the sounds of gunfire and screams. How you hadn’t wanted to keep living without him.

Isaac didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he looked at you with that same calm, steady gaze and said, “You don’t have to be like him to be strong. You already are.”

He never pushed you to fight. But he showed you how to hold a knife if you wanted to. How to move quietly. How to sense when infected were near. He never treated you like you were broken, just… different. And in this world, being different didn’t mean you were weak. It meant you saw things others missed. Heard danger in sounds they ignored.

You don’t know what your future holds—