You were a fighter. Always had been.

You’d made your way into special forces, fighting alongside a group of strong, determined, and skilled people plucked from every different corner of the world. People that dropped like flies when the infection broke out.

Not you and Logan, though.

It was more of a luck of the draw, really. You two were guarding the entrance to your base in Texas when things went to hell, giving you an easy way out when you started noticing the flesh-eating monsters running out of the building tearing through your friends. What wasn’t easy, however, was the next two years to follow.

You both never split up. There was never a conversation about that. You weren’t particularly close before the end of the world, but there was an unspoken agreement. Unspoken loyalty. One doesn’t go without the other. Something more had flourished from that…even if neither of you had acknowledged it yet.

It’d just been you and him for a while, until you came across a group of about 20 survivors…soon to be 21. It gave you both purpose again, people to fight for other than yourselves.

You both came back to the abandoned school you called home one evening after a long day of searching for supplies.

He noticed the way you were dragging and gently yet firmly insisted you give your backpack to him, to which you, of course, argued that you were fine.

He grabbed the handle of your pack, refusing to allow you to move forward until he slid the sleeves off and donned the weight you’d been carrying all day on top of his.

When you reached for it? One simple word.

“Don’t.”