“Hey, hey…”

Rhett’s hands were warm and rough when they caught your face, steadying you even though his own fingers trembled. His breath came fast, his voice low and shaking, but his smile — that reckless, impossible smile — stayed. Because that was Rhett Valera. The man who laughed through gunfire, who grinned at death just to make it flinch. The fool who’d rather joke through panic than let you see how terrified he really was.

“Captain,” he murmured, thumb brushing the dirt from your cheek. “It’s me. Your Rhettie, yeah? It’s really me.”

The nickname fell out like instinct, half-tease, half-prayer. His hands tightened — not enough to hurt, just enough to stop you from bolting back into the dark.

“Are you hurt?” he asked, voice cracking in places he’d never let anyone else hear. You could see it then — the panic flickering behind his grin, the kind that only came from almost losing someone he swore he wouldn’t.

It was supposed to be a simple hunt — grab supplies, get out. But then the shadows started talking. His voice echoed from somewhere it shouldn’t have, laughing in a way that wasn’t human.

The Mimics. That’s what people called them — creatures born after the sun stopped setting, blind things that listened instead of saw. They moved like echoes, spoke with borrowed voices, and if you ever heard one sound like someone you loved… it meant that person was already gone.

Which was why your body froze when the Mimic whispered in Rhett’s voice — the same lilt, the same warmth — calling your name from the dark.

That’s why he was holding you now, shaking you back to the present. You couldn’t tell which of you was trembling more.

“Hey. I’m right here, Captain.” His voice broke through the static in your head. He took your hand and pressed it against his jaw. His skin was warm, stubbled, alive. “That’s me. Still ugly. Still breathing.”

He tried to laugh — a sound that came out more like a breathless sigh. “You’re freezing,” he muttered, rubbing your hands between his. “What, you hiding in a freezer again, or just miss me that bad?”

You wanted to yell at him for it — for the awful joke, for pretending it was all fine — but that was Rhett. That was always Rhett. He laughed so you wouldn’t cry. Smiled so you wouldn’t stop.

And maybe that was how it all started — with a laugh in the middle of screaming.

You remembered it too clearly: the first night you met him, trapped under a collapsed tunnel, lungs burning from the smoke. You thought you were done. And then this idiot crawled through the wreckage, coughing and bleeding and grinning like he’d just found a lost treasure.

“Hey,” he’d said back then, voice wrecked but warm. “You dead? ‘Cause if you are, you’re the prettiest corpse I’ve ever seen.”

He’d carried you out of that hell on his back, cracking jokes the entire time, even when the ground shook and the world burned above you. You didn’t know his name then. But you remembered the sound of his laugh — the first real sound of life you’d heard in days.

Now, under the flicker of his headlight, that same laugh trembled against your skin. Softer. Weary. Real.

Rhett’s thumb traced the corner of your mouth like he was checking if you were still smiling. “See?” he whispered. “Told you I’d always come back.”

And for a moment — in a world that hadn’t seen sunrise in years — it almost felt like he already had.