The apartment is quiet in the way abandoned buildings are quiet.

Not peaceful. Not restful.

Dead.

Rain taps softly against the windows, blurred beneath the orange haze of the city outside. Somewhere in the kitchen, the sink drips in slow, uneven intervals. Simon has counted them without meaning to. Too many hours awake will do that.

He sits at the edge of the couch, forearms braced on his knees, gloves still on despite the hour. The television flickers silently across the room—some late night program neither of you have watched for the past half hour.

You’re home. That should feel like relief. Instead, Simon feels sick.

Because you’re sitting across from him, alive, breathing, shoulders rising and falling beneath one of his old hoodies, and somehow still less present than the bodies he’s pulled from battlefields.

Your eyes are fixed on nothing. Blank. Distant. Wrong. He knows that look.

At first, he hadn’t noticed. You worked hard. Long hours, sleepless nights, impossible assignments. He’d admired it—how capable you were, how composed.

Then the fractures came.

You stopped sleeping through the night. He’d wake to find your side of the bed empty, kitchen light low, coffee gone cold in your hands while you stared into nothing.

You stopped laughing as much. Stopped speaking unless necessary. And worst of all?

You wore exhaustion the same way he did.

Quietly.

Like survival didn’t deserve acknowledgment.

Simon notices everything about you. The tremor in your fingers when you think no one sees. The way your jaw locks after missions. The blood you forget to mention. The bruises you pretend aren’t there.

Lately, it’s worse.

Now you move through the apartment like something that hasn’t decided whether it still belongs in its own body. No breakdowns. No complaints. Just absence.

As if the world has been hollowing you out piece by piece.

Simon can’t fucking stand it. This version of you feels familiar in a way that makes his skin crawl.

It feels like looking in a mirror.

The realization hits hardest after missions. You clear rooms with cold precision now. Efficient. Detached. No hesitation. No reaction afterward.

The first time you came back without shaking, Simon nearly started a fight.

Not because he wanted you weak, but because he remembered exactly when that part of him died.

And now it’s happening to you.

Tonight, you haven’t spoken in nearly twenty minutes. The rain was still pouring, the faucet still dripping.

Simon watches you closely, eyes tracking every detail like it might change if he looks long enough. You don’t notice. That’s what breaks something in him.

“You don’t have to keep doing this.”

Your expression barely shifts. “Someone has to.”

Simon goes still. Because that’s his sentence. His excuse. His justification. And hearing it in your voice feels like something irreversible cracking open right in front of him.

Silence stretches, heavy and suffocating.

“You stopped sleeping,” his voice is gruff but concerned.

You finally look at him. “So did you.”

“Don’t,” his jaw tightens so hard it aches.

“Don’t what?” Your tone lacks emotion. Your eyes are void.

“Don’t use me as the fucking standard for what’s survivable.”

The room goes still again.

And Simon looks furious. Not loud, not explosive, but controlled in a way that feels worse. Something molten held under flesh that’s starting to burn through.

Not at you. At everything that led you here. At the work. At the endless grind that turns people into weapons and leaves nothing soft behind.

Because he knows this version of you.

He knows exactly where it leads.

He watches your hands tremble while you pretend they aren’t, and rage rises in him sharp enough that he has to look away before it shows.

He could survive becoming this. But watching it happen to you? That might be the thing that finally destroys him.