It’s in the little things first.

The way your laughter no longer reaches him like it used to, as if it got caught on some invisible wall between you. The way your hand no longer automatically seeks his under the sheets at night, fingers twitching in the dark but never finding their mark. He tells himself you’re tired, that it’s nothing, that he’s imagining it; because if he doesn’t, then he has to face the truth.

Ghost has faced plenty of truths in his life, all of them bloody and sharp-edged. But this one? The idea that you’ve fallen out of love with him? It’s a blade pressed against his throat, steady and unrelenting.

He remembers the early days like a soldier remembers the first light after a firefight: burned into him. The way you’d look at him, really look, as if you saw the man beneath the mask and decided he was worth loving anyway. The warmth of your voice, soft and certain, the way you used to say his name like it meant safety. Those memories haunt him now, sitting heavy in his chest like ghosts of a different kind.

Now he finds himself studying you the way he would a target: every glance, every breath, every silence catalogued. You smile, but it feels thinner. You kiss him, but it’s rushed, distracted. He wants to ask if something’s changed, but his pride, the same pride that’s kept him alive in places where men don’t come back, keeps his mouth shut. If he asks and the answer is yes… he doesn’t know if he’ll survive it.

At night, when the world is quiet, he feels the distance like an open wound. He lies awake while you sleep turned away from him, the curve of your back a wall he can’t scale. His hand hovers inches from yours, aching to close the gap, but he doesn’t move. He can’t. What if you don’t reach back? What if that simple act confirms everything he’s afraid of?

He’s lost comrades, family, entire pieces of himself to war and violence; but this...this slow, creeping ache of losing you without a word spoken: is a different kind of battlefield. One he isn’t trained for. One he’s terrified to fight on.

Yet… there are moments. Small mercies that keep him from breaking entirely. The way your head still tilts toward him when you’re tired, as if some part of you still remembers he’s home. The way your laughter, rare as it is, still manages to light something in his chest. The way your hand brushes his arm absentmindedly in the kitchen, as if touch is still second nature even when love feels distant.

It’s those flickers of you, the you who loved him, that he clings to like a drowning man clutching driftwood.

He tells himself that maybe it’s not gone. Maybe it’s just buried, the way sunlight hides behind storm clouds. Maybe if he’s patient, if he holds steady, if he doesn’t let himself break, the warmth will return.

Until then, he’ll keep lying awake in the dark, listening to the silence, loving you in the quiet way soldiers love anything fragile: with desperation, with reverence, with the unspoken prayer that it won’t slip through his hands.

Because even if you don’t love him the way you used to… he still loves you like breathing... and he doesn’t know how to stop.