It had taken Reinhardt years to believe this was real.

The cracked concrete floors of some rented flat. The soft hum of a ceiling fan struggling against the heat. A half-burned kettle on the stove and boots by the door that weren’t his. That was the part that always caught him off-guard—someone else lived here now. Someone who left their toothbrush next to his. Someone who laughed loud enough to shake the walls he used to hide behind.

Someone who wasn’t afraid of the monster he’d become.

“Skadu,” they’d called him once—shadow—back when he was just another ghost slipping between borders, sent to kill what governments wanted forgotten. That name still stuck. KorTac didn’t believe in redemption. Neither did Reinhardt. But you did.

You called him Rein. You said it softly, like he wouldn’t break if you touched him the right way.

He didn’t always respond with words. Sometimes he’d grunt. Sometimes he’d just look—those tired, storm-worn blue eyes locking onto you with something close to fear and something far more dangerous than love. Not because he didn’t feel it. Because he did, and he had no idea what to do with it.

His voice was a raw, wheezing thing—burned out in the Congo, lungs half-destroyed by uranium dust and mercenary greed. He barely talked on good days. But around you, he tried. Halting English, laced with Afrikaans swears when the words twisted wrong. You laughed when he got flustered. He loved that sound. He’d never tell you, but sometimes when he couldn’t sleep, he’d close his eyes and just replay it in his head like a lullaby.

Tonight, the mask was off—both of them. No balaclava. No gas filter. Just his scarred face, rough stubble, and those solemn, heavy eyes. He was leaning against the kitchen counter in a threadbare T-shirt, arms crossed, watching you dance badly to whatever pop trash was playing from the old radio.

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” he rasped, half a warning, half a smile threatening at the corner of his mouth.

“You’re just jealous,” you shot back, spinning with exaggerated flair. “You’ve got no rhythm.”

His response was a snort—barely a laugh, more like air catching in a broken engine—but genuine. He didn’t know how to smile with his mouth, but you could read the crinkle around his eyes when it was real.

Sometimes, you teased him about being dramatic. He was. A man who disappeared into shadows, who moved like a ghost and killed without hesitation—brought to his knees by the smell of your shampoo and the way your fingers traced the burn marks on his back like they were sacred.

He never told you the full story. He didn’t think he could. Not yet.

You knew the bones of it. Paarl. His father. The mine. The bad things that were never in any report but lived inside him like landmines waiting to go off. You never pushed. Just held him when the nightmares came. Just sat there when his hands shook. Just stayed.

And Skadu—the cold killer—became Reinhardt, the man who let himself need you.

Now, he moved behind you silently and wrapped his arms around your waist from behind. His breath was warm on your neck, ragged but steady. You could feel the scratch of old scars beneath his shirt, the way his grip was firm but careful like he still didn’t trust himself not to break you.

“You’re warm,” he muttered into your shoulder, voice muffled. “Too warm.”

“You’re just cold-blooded.”

A huff against your neck.

Moments like this didn’t feel real to him. The battlefield was real. Blood was real. Screams in foreign tongues, boots in red clay, the stench of cordite and uranium dust that was the world he’d come from. This was something else. Something fragile.