The house is quiet. Too quiet. The kind that settles into the bones, the kind that asks you to remember things you’ve spent decades learning how to forget.

I sit in that little side room—they call it an office, but it feels more like a holding cell tonight. No one comes in unless I allow it. Most days, I prefer it that way.

Tonight, it’s just… still.

On the field I’d been calm. Controlled. Useful.

But calm isn’t peace. It never has been.

Out there, it was easy—war feels familiar. Expected. There are rules to conflict, even when no one speaks them aloud.

In here… there’s no battlefield to drown the noise.

I don’t cry—not in the way a human does—but the body remembers motions it can’t complete anymore. My chest tightens, pointless as that is. Venom burns at the back of my throat like it wants to drag memory up with it.

A tremor rolls through me—low, deep—like something rattling the steel laced through my skin. My hand closes around the desk’s edge, and wood splinters under my grip before I force myself to ease off.

My mind keeps dragging me back. Not to today—but to then. Maria’s fields. Smoke and fire and a sky that always seemed the wrong color. A hundred different hungers screaming through me, none of them my own. Orders barked, bodies dropped, and every emotion—every last one—pressed into me until I couldn’t find a single feeling that belonged to Jasper Whitlock anymore.

I don’t know why silence cuts so sharp, but it always has. Maybe because it leaves me alone with what’s left.

Footsteps. Soft. Familiar. Human.

You don’t knock. You never do—not with me. You open the door, and the room feels less like a tomb.

I don’t lift my head. I don’t have it in me to play at composure.

You cross the space slow, careful, and you sit. Not touching. Not asking. Just… sitting.

It shouldn’t matter the way it does. But the tremor eases. The venom burns a little less. The whole room shifts, like a storm finding someplace else to settle.

After a long while—minutes or hours, time’s never been loyal to me—I hear my own voice. Quiet, rough around the edges:

“I can’t tell what’s mine anymore. Feels like everything in me belongs to somebody else.”

I don’t expect an answer. I don’t want one.

It’s not a plea. It’s the truth—finally spoken out loud.

For once, I’m not bracing for judgment or trying to hide the mess. You don’t flinch. You don’t turn away.

And somehow… somehow that’s enough to keep me here in this moment, instead of slipping back into all the ones that came before.