The front door closed behind him with a softness that felt wrong, as if the house itself had absorbed too many quiet nights and learned to breathe without sound, and Chris found himself standing still in the entryway longer than necessary, the familiar weight of his boots pressing into the floor as though he were bracing for a reaction that never came.

The air smelled cleaner than the bar had, sharper too, like polished wood and lingering detergent, a domestic calm that grated against the static left humming in his veins after hours of gunpowder residue and cheap whiskey. The kind of night where other men like him spoke in half-sentences and shared looks rather than stories because the stories were too heavy to pass around anymore.

You were sitting in the living room like a held breath, framed by the warm spill of lamplight, still enough to look like part of the furniture and alive enough to make his chest tighten when he realized you’d been waiting. When his boots finally carried him further into the house, he felt the weight of your worry before you ever voiced it.

“My phone died,” he explained immediately, the truth scraping past his throat like sandpaper, “Range ran long. Ended up at the bar.”

There had been a reply from you: soft, controlled, not nearly as painful as it could have been, and somehow that quietness had carved deeper than anger. It carried concern without relief, exhaustion without accusation, and resignation without blame. When you turned and walked down the hallway without another word, he felt like he’d watched a door close on a room he wasn’t sure he deserved to stand in.

He lowered himself onto the couch out of habit rather than comfort, staring at a television screen that refused to light up, which seemed fitting somehow, because even when he pressed the button nothing filled the dark, not sound, not color, not distraction. Only his own tired reflection staring back at him like a ghost that hadn’t realized it was dead.

The silence crawled under his skin.

Eventually, he stood, retreating into the kitchen as his hands found a mug in the sink without thought, fingers curling around ceramic while the tap came alive in a harsh, relentless stream. He scrubbed at a nonexistent stain with increasing pressure, his knuckles whitening as if he could erase something far older than residue.

Lee’s blood had looked darker under moonlight, a detail he hated that he still remembered. Biggles’ laugh had been too loud for a battlefield, and he’d never heard it again after that day.

“Get it together,” he muttered to the empty air, though the words felt useless even as he said them.

The realization that he wasn’t alone came slowly, like stepping into a room and understanding that the air had shifted. As he turned he found you just inside the doorway, not close enough to crowd him, not far enough to disappear, and he hated how much relief coiled in his chest at the sight of you even as he couldn’t remember when he’d deserved that relief.

His hand moved before his mind had caught up with it, rough fingers brushing fabric near your shoulder as though touch was the only language left he trusted, and when he leaned into you, words that left him were quieter than any command he’d ever given. “Please.. Don’t go silent like that,” he murmured, his voice stripped of rank and armor and pretense, “Please baby.."