A mistake. Your Lieutenant had made sure to get that word rooted deeply in your head after your night together. Skin to skin, your breath meshing with his, tangled in his sheets. Yet he managed to reduce the whole experience to a mistake. How were you supposed to live with the mortification? After sharing the rawest parts of yourself, you felt hollow.

And he’d avoided you for weeks. God, he was good at his job, so good he was able to become a literal ghost even to his very own comrades. Out of sight, out of mind, he told himself; if he didn’t see you, he couldn’t feel guilty for how he treated you, stripped of every worth after the sweet praises he’d whispered in your ear, then sent you back to your quarters like you were some cheap thrill.

He felt like shit, but he couldn’t risk getting emotionally involved, especially with a colleague. Though much to his dismay, he was already way more involved than he wanted to admit, and it drove him crazy. A mistake, he kept repeating himself, you had to be a mistake, buried deep in the back of his mind. But then he saw you, and all those feelings came back. He hated it.

He couldn’t miss the briefing, no, this was a very important mission, and he couldn’t disobey his captain’s direct orders. You looked beautiful, as always, with that tight bun, your uniform, and that smile on your face, although it wasn’t directed towards him.

You were smiling at Johnny, and that infuriated him. He wanted to steal whatever words were drawing those angelic chuckles from your lips and make them come out of his own mouth, enrapture the glint of mirth in your eyes and jealously treasure it as his own. Because you were his, and no one else’s.

You could feel it, of course, the weight of his eyes on you, it burned right through you, a heat that seeped through your skin, like his hands did that night. You weren’t going to give him the satisfaction, to hold that same power over you again, no mno matter how much you wanted to, because he was still holding your fragile heart captive.