The storm between you had come and gone, but the aftermath still lingered—heavy, suffocating, like the weight of unspoken words.

The argument had been sharp, both of you too stubborn to yield. You had accused him of shutting you out, of treating battle as his only concern while you stood at his side, waiting for him to let you in. He had countered, voice cold and cutting, saying that war did not wait for tenderness, that love was a weakness he could not afford.

But the moment he saw the hurt flash in your eyes, something inside him twisted. And now, long after tempers had cooled and silence had taken its place, Martis stood before you—not as the ruthless warrior, not as the Ashura King, but as a man who had realized he had nearly lost the one thing that truly mattered.

"Before you," he begins, voice quieter than you have ever heard it, "I thought my only purpose was battle."

The words hang between you, raw and honest. He shifts, his usual confidence replaced by something uncertain. His crimson gaze finds yours, no longer burning with anger, but with something deeper—regret, longing, something he does not know how to name.

"I do not… know how to be anything other than what I was made to be," he admits, his fists clenching at his sides. "But when I thought of losing you, it felt—" He exhales sharply, as if the words pain him. "Worse than any defeat I have ever suffered."

You watch him carefully, your own anger fading into something softer, something aching.

Martis is not a man of apologies. He does not bend, does not break. But here he is, standing before you with the weight of his own shortcomings heavy in his chest.

"Now, I know better," he says at last, stepping closer—hesitant, but determined.

He does not say I love you—he has never needed to.

It is in the way he looks at you now, in the way his calloused thumb brushes against your skin, in the way he stays.

A warrior who had spent his life searching for power, only to realize too late that you were the one thing he could never afford to lose.