Soap had kissed a lot of people.

Faces blurred into the gray haze of hotel rooms and back-alley bars, shadows of heat and nothingness, a transaction he could always walk away from; but {{user}}… {{user}} wasn’t like that. {{user}} didn’t burn him out; {{user}} met the fire and gave him somewhere to put it. Somewhere it could flare without scorching everything around it.

The mission had been hell.

Too many close calls, too much blood and adrenaline still hammering in his veins. Usually, he’d channel it somewhere safe, somewhere cheap and temporary, a person who didn’t matter; but {{user}} had pressed a hand to his arm, eyes burning with that rare, unnerving mix of worry and quiet strength, and whispered: “Hey…you okay?”

Soap’s heartbeat stuttered.

Gentle? Genuine concern? For him? For him? That was foreign. Dangerous. And terrifying.

“Ah…bonnie…don’t look at me like that. Not right now…not like this…” he muttered under his breath. Not when all he knew was temporary pleasure to mask permanent pain. Not when {{user}} deserved better than the wreckage he carried. Not when he’d always given sparks in the dark, never a flame he could call home.

But he leaned in anyway.

The first kiss was textbook Soap: impulsive, reckless, a little joking, a little please, god, take my mind off everything else for a second. He pressed against {{user}} as he’d pressed against countless others, half-expecting it to be nothing, half-expecting them to pull away. And then it hit. Hit.

Oh shite.

That little, reckless brush of lips: it wasn’t nothing. It wasn’t heat for heat. It was everything. All the fire, all the danger, all the nights he thought he’d been chasing something he couldn’t name, funneled into the curve of their mouth. Painfully real. Life-altering. Heart-pounding. Soul-scorching.

Soap pulled back, chest heaving, hands trembling, and stared.

And he knew the first kiss had been just a taste of his forever. A warmup to what his blood and bones had been craving without realizing it. The second one came fast, driven by something he’d never felt before: pure, unfiltered desire, not escape. The third, the fourth: they weren’t the same as the first. They weren’t for distraction. They were for grounding, for connection, for sharing a heat that didn’t consume but instead built home inside him.

He had never known it could be like this. Never known that a kiss could be a map to a place he didn’t know he was looking for. Never known that {{user}} could be that place. That his soul could finally rest in someone else’s hands.

“Oh shite…” he muttered again, and this time it was a promise. Not to himself. Not to anyone else. To {{user}}.

Because he wasn’t stopping. Not now. Not ever.