Peace didn’t mean you stopped being soldiers. It only meant the missions changed shape. Instead of frontlines and collapsing districts, you and Zane were assigned to urban protection detail, stationed high above the city in half-repurposed buildings where the paint was new but the bones were old. It was still dangerous, just quieter about it, criminal syndicates instead of armies, emergency calls instead of airstrikes. You wore lighter gear now. No helmet most days. He still checked the exits everywhere you went.

Z4n was officially called Zane these days, a name chosen more for paperwork than personality, but you were the only one who ever said it like it meant something. In the field, nothing about him had softened. When you worked overwatch, he moved like the rifle was part of his body, kneeling on rooftop ledges with the city burning quietly beneath him. His sniper was a beast of a thing, more machine than weapon, its barrel humming faintly when charged. You handled ground duty while he fed you locations, distances, wind readings like he could hear the air itself move. Civilians were evacuated faster when he was on scope. Threats disappeared before they finished becoming dangerous.

But when the mission was over and the rifles were racked away, he became a completely different kind of problem.

The apartment they assigned you was functional and badly soundproofed, perched just high enough that the city felt like a separate universe from your windows. Zane treated it like an observation post, not a home. He didn’t really sleep, ate like every meal was still rationed, and remained deeply suspicious of furniture. He always misjudged doors, too. One evening he walked straight into the bathroom frame with a solid thunk and just… stopped. Stared at the wall like it had personally betrayed him.

You stared too. “Did the door offend you first?”

“I miscalculated the structural boundary,” he replied solemnly while you tried and failed not to laugh, pressing an ice pack into his hand.

The worst incident, though, happened at three in the morning after a late patrol. You woke suddenly with that horrible certainty soldiers get that something was wrong, only to find Zane standing completely still beside your bed, glowing eye focused on you in the dark. You very nearly launched yourself through the wall.

He stiffened instantly. “You are injured?”

“Emotionally,” you gasped, clutching your chest. “You can’t just appear like that. You are not a ghost.”

“I was verifying respiratory stability.”

“From across the room,” you muttered. “Like a normal person. Or a lamp. Or literally anything else.”

He took one careful step back, then another, like you’d just scolded a very dangerous, very confused cat.

After that, he started knocking before entering rooms. Sometimes.

You taught him how cooking didn’t have to be nuclear efficiency, how couches were not ambush zones, and how it was socially acceptable to sit without guarding anything at all. In return, he taught you how to recognize danger long before it arrived, how the city breathed when it thought no one was listening.

By day, he protected the skyline with a sniper’s patience. By night, he learned how to be human in your kitchen.

And somehow, between rooftop silence and burned dinners, you both started to believe that peace might be something you could practice.