The scent of cookies clung to your hands like a memory — warm, fragile, fleeting. It trailed after you as you made your way down the sterile hallways of S.W.A.T. headquarters, where metal and concrete swallowed sound, where laughter was a rare and fleeting thing. You’d baked them for him, of course — not because he asked, but because he never did. Because somewhere between the bulletproof vests and the blood, you wanted to remind him that sweetness still existed.

The tin in your hands felt heavier with each step.

You knew this place. You’d been here before, sitting quietly in the corners of the lounge as the team joked and bickered. They had welcomed you — Luca’s easy warmth, Tan’s teasing, Chris’s smile. But Deacon… Deacon always made you feel like you didn’t quite belong in his world, even when he pulled you into it with the tenderness of a man who didn’t want to let go.

You turned the corner, about to step into the lounge — and froze.

His voice — low, steady, familiar — threaded through the air.

“She’s not Annie,” Deacon said.

A pause. A silence so complete it hummed.

“She’s… she’s not Annie,” he repeated, softer this time, as though confessing it to himself. “Annie smiled more. She laughed easier. She lit up a room without even trying. She…” His voice faltered, caught somewhere between guilt and nostalgia. “She made me feel like I could be a good man.”

Luca’s voice, gentle but uncertain, filled the void. “Deac, come on—”

But Deacon went on. Quietly. Thoughtfully. “I love her, I do. God, I do. But sometimes… sometimes it feels like I’m chasing a ghost. Like no matter how much I try, I’m still trying to get back to something I lost.”

The tin slipped slightly in your grip. You caught it before it fell, but the sound — the small, trembling scrape of metal against your ring — felt deafening.

You stood there, hidden by the corner, the sweetness in your hands turning bitter. The cookies still smelled like cinnamon and butter and comfort — the same way they had the first time you baked them for him — but now, that scent made you ache.

He wasn’t cruel. Deacon was never cruel. That was the cruelest part of all.

You knew he loved you — you had felt it in every glance, every brush of his hand, every time he looked at you as though you were the only thing keeping him tethered. But you also knew that love was not always enough. Sometimes, love was just a man standing in a kitchen at dawn, staring at his coffee and wishing the ghost of another woman would let him rest.