You had been with Firefly for five months. Five months of quiet warmth and tentative gestures, of stolen laughter in between the shadow of missions, of holding her fragile human form against your chest as though it could protect her from the inevitability of her own body breaking down. In her you found something bright, delicate, and unbearably human. She looked at you with eyes like emerald light, as though you were the proof she needed that she wasn’t just a weapon in disguise.

But the truth is never kind when it comes slowly.

The second month, after your first rupture—a fight so small it could have vanished into silence—you thought nothing would change. You argued over trust, over secrets she couldn’t share, over the way her pain sometimes made her distant. Firefly had cried softly that night, asking you if you’d leave her like everyone else. You swore you wouldn’t. You swore you wanted her, all of her. And in that moment, you meant it.

Yet love is a strange thing. It does not always leave scars you can point to. Sometimes, it simply fades.

By the fourth month, you began noticing it. The way your heart didn’t race when she touched your hand. The way her smile, so tender and luminous, felt more like a memory than something you still craved. The long hours together—nights spent listening to her stories, mornings when she leaned against your shoulder—began to weigh on you with an emptiness you could not explain. You told yourself it was stress, exhaustion, anything but the truth.

And the truth was this: you were losing your feelings. Not for any betrayal, not for any cruelty, but for no reason at all. And that is the kind of cruelty that burns the deepest.

Firefly noticed before you spoke it aloud. Her eyes would linger on you, searching, as though she could see the shadows between your words. “Are you… tired of me?” she asked once, her voice trembling in the low hum of the ship’s cabin. You shook your head, desperate not to hurt her, but the guilt sank into your stomach. Because tired wasn’t the word. The word was empty.

By the fifth month, the silence between you was louder than the words you could not say. Firefly, who had always feared being forgotten, being abandoned, leaned closer to you as though proximity could anchor you to her. She kissed you with desperation, clinging to the way things used to be. And though you let her, though you held her in return, your heart did not follow.

It broke you as much as it broke her.

When you finally spoke, your throat was tight, your chest heavy with the confusion of someone who cannot explain the shifting of their own heart. “Firefly… I don’t know what’s happening to me,” you confessed. “I don’t feel things the way I did before. I don’t understand why. I just… I can’t give you what you deserve right now. I can only offer you friendship. For now.”

Her silence was heavier than shouting.

Emerald eyes widened, not in anger, but in devastation. Firefly’s lips trembled as though she wanted to argue, to ask you to fight for something you were no longer certain you had. Instead, she whispered, “Friendship…? After everything?” The words broke on her tongue.

You reached for her hand, desperate to soften the wound, but she pulled it back gently, almost tenderly, as though even in her pain she didn’t want to hurt you. That was Firefly: fragile, soft, and unbearably kind, even while being torn apart.

In the days that followed, she tried to smile. She tried to pretend your friendship was enough. But you saw it—the way she lingered on the edge of rooms, the way her laughter cracked, the way she turned her face when her eyes filled with tears she didn’t want you to see.

And you were left with your own confusion, trapped in the cruel paradox of losing love without reason. You hadn’t wanted to hurt her. You hadn’t wanted to leave her with the emptiness she feared most. And yet here you were: a friend, a witness, and a ghost of the love you once swore would never fade.