Archive of Our Own

“God, what’s happened?”

Simon can barely hear the words over the blaring sound of shrapnel exploding. Instinctively, he ducks his head, willing his feet to charge across the battlefield even just that much faster. His ankle twists on a bad stride. Plumes of ashen dirt kick up when another mortar hits the field along the way. The sky is blackened with stale smoke and still-burning flames, overshadowing even the brightest of the universe’s stars. Tonight, the battle rages on. In front of him, it roils, but in his mind, the earth rocks ever harder.

“Price!” He screams over the gunfire, raising his gun above his head to catch the man’s eye, “Price, m’here! M’here now!”

“Simon?” Price raises his head, down on his knees in an inky crater, “Simon! Fuck, I tried to wait for you!”

“I know—I know,” he pants, sliding to his knees next to Price as the ground quakes with yet another blast, “Fuckin’ air support missed their target. Had to do another run. Lost—lost a few men back there.”

“How many?” Price’s face falls. The wafts of ash in the air stick in his beard, hiding the terse set of his mouth, holding back tears—or perhaps, a scream.

At that, Simon can only hang his head, struggling to breathe against the weight that sits on his shoulders.

“I…” he bites his lip; the blood feels like justice when the taste hits his tongue, “I couldn’t count…”

“Fuck,” Price whispers, voice and sentiment swallowed up in the burning fires that rage around them. For a long moment, that’s all the two of them can manage to do. Look out across the wasteland, across the viscera of this broken world, down into its hollow blackened soul, where the men who he had once called brothers went to die.

Simon watches the sight of it contort Price’s face, watches his hands wrench in the material of his pant leg. Beside his kneeled form lies a young man, face pale and white with blood loss. The front of his shirt is completely saturated in red and his eyes were hopelessly glassy. At the look in his irises, blank and unspeaking, Simon’s breath hitches. The man—whoever he was before he took that shot to the heart—he was gone now. Or, at least, he would be soon. Despite the way his eyes are dead, without moor in a sea of blackness, his chest rises still. Clinging onto life, even when there was none of it left. The world just couldn’t let him out of its grasp just yet, no matter how cruel its grip.

“Who’s the kid?” Simon asks, coming closer.

“I dunno—I just found him like this,” Price yanks off his helmet, running hand through his hair. Before long, however, he goes back to staring at the young man by his side, some hopeless look in his eye, almost as if he were capable of recognizing the unfamiliar face. Or, perhaps, was seeing someone else’s face in its place.

Without speaking a word, Price reaches for the boy’s hand, giving it a hard squeeze. Just barely, the whitened fingers manage to move in his grip. The final sign of life. The mark of death.

Simon watches his lungs expand, watches the boy look up at the burning atmosphere one last time, before it all collapses in on itself. His eyes flutter. His lungs rattle. And with little more than a tiny, quiet breath, there is nothing left of the boy to prove his existence to history any longer. In the face of two strangers, however, his memory remains. It’s a cold, damp weight.

Listlessly, Simon looks on.

That is, until a voice across the way catches his attention. It’s yelling something, just barely louder than the thundering explosions that rock across the earth. Slowly, he rises, peering above the edges of the crater they sit in.

“Hey!”

He furrows his brow, peering through the smoke. His lungs, all at once, fill themselves with life. Your silhouette—shadowed in ash and dirt—stumbles through the fog. The second his face comes into view, you stall in your mindless pursuit, eyes wide.

“Simon?” You mumble, mindlessly picking up into a run, “Simon!”

Before he can even register what’s happening, you’re barreling towards him, sliding down the edges of the crater without even blinking at the bullets that whizz by. At the sight—at the unfamiliar, almost nostalgic notion of it—he freezes, arms raised only halfway, as if he were trying to ward off an attack he couldn’t see.

However, when you throw yourself into his arms, burying your face in the crook of his neck, all the life he’d just inhaled flees him at once. His lungs, heart, brain, they all go blank. Hell, even his bloodstream seems to cease the minute your arms wrap around his neck, and when you yank him down to your height, muffling crazed worries against shirt, he can do nothing more than stand there limply, unable to do a single thing. His mouth opens and closes uselessly. His hands hover over your back. They’re shaking.

How long had it been?

Why now? Why are you here, calling his name, like you hadn’t wished him dead mere weeks ago?

Do you remember what you said to him last time? What it did to him?

What he did to you?

His mind uselessly tries to come up to speed. Distantly, he registers you’re saying something, but all he can do is stand there and feel your body against his own, feel your heart racing against his own. Somehow, the mere sensation of it is enough to make a lump as hard as steel form inside of his throat. Shakily, he wraps his arm around your waist, trying valiantly to draw the scent of your hair into your lungs.

Over your shoulder, he meets Price’s eye. The Captain’s brows are furrowed, jaw hanging open in near disbelief. He cocks his head, sending Simon a confused look.

“I thought…” his eyes begin to say, but they trail off, leaving the most hurtful words to silence. However, Simon can hear them anyway. The Captain said it to him every time your name so much as came up in conversation.

I thought we weren’t doing this anymore.

“We’re not,” Simon mouths, but there’s something missing from the declaration: conviction. For now, there’s only confusion. That, and an aching wound in place of his heart.

You pull back before he’s ready, and his hands clench around the harness on your waist.

Please, don’t go. Don’t leave me. Not yet, at least.

“Simon, God,” your chest rises and falls rapidly, warm hands flying over his shoulder and cheeks, searching him for injuries, “I—fuck, I thought you were dead. But you’re—you’re here. Thank god, you’re here.”

You curl into him again, fingers pressing into his clothes, almost as if you were trying to convince yourself that he was real. Without hesitation, Simon collapses into the heat of your hands, into the vitality of your touch, into the deepest, blackest hole that had ever been imprinted on his soul. When tears begin to fall, hidden beneath the mask, he doesn’t tell you…even when he can feel your tears against his neck, too.

Price clears his throat, sending Simon a tactful look. He turns his back, giving the two of you privacy. However, the message is clear.

Get this over with. It’s better that way.

The sentiment stings like acid against his skin, no matter how true it may be, but when you pull back to look into his eye, cupping his cheeks like you were capable of loving a thing like him, it all falls away. The wounds heal themselves, and for a single instance, Simon can pretend like this mess had never happened in the first place.

“You’re okay,” you whisper, pulling down his collar with one finger, “You’re—you’re not hurt, are you?”

You ask him to speak, but the words are caught in his throat, heavy with emotion. When he finally manages to summon the courage, his voice is weak and wet. Pleading. Begging, almost.

“No, I’m—” he swallows, trying to muster a comforting smile beneath the mask, “I’m fine.”

At that, something breaks in you as well. Its cracks paint over the pained expression you wear, but somehow, it’s not a bad thing. It’s just unfamiliar.

It’s so unlike you, he thinks, to be so emotional, especially over him.

Or, perhaps, he’d only grown too accustomed to your coldness. That was all that remained between you these days. But like this, holding onto him like you had on your wedding day, it’s almost like it was back then…back when he had fallen in love with you, and you had fallen in love with him. Somewhere along the line, he’d realized it was a lie. Though, that’s not entirely true. You’d told him that it was one—that whatever had existed back then was lost now, that perhaps it had never really existed in the first place.

However, standing here now, on the cusp of your lips and with the world ending around the two of you, he has no doubt that at one point it had.

That somewhere in the oblivion, it had been cradled in the palm of his hands, the most precious thing he’d ever owned. He’d counted its petals, traced them with his calloused fingers, tested its strength, before he plucked them.

One by one. Day by day.

The thing that it once was—beautiful and flowering—was so long forgotten he almost couldn’t recognize it, could barely remember it. But its memory, its hollow, rotten core, was still with him now, buried so deep inside he had to dig through spiderwebs and dust just to pry it out. And when you touch him again, wash away the battlefield with nothing more than a single whispered word, he retreats there again, even if the set of the scene is dark and quiet, completely abandoned by now.

-

SIX YEARS EARLIER

“Who are you under there?”

His heart picks up, racing inside of his chest. Something he hadn’t felt in years, maybe decades, swells inside of him, plucked like a string underneath a harpist’s finger. Underneath your thumb like this, standing mere inches from one another, while the raging downpour beats down on the overhang above your head.

His shirt is damp with rain. The November chill permeates the jacket on your shoulders. The fluorescent light against the wall buzzes. The smoke of the cigarettes linger in his mouth, but nothing is so all-consuming as the blackness of the wilderness that lays out beyond the two of you. It’s almost as if he were trapped there, under that singular spotlight, on a stage for all the world to see.

His mask is pulled up over his mouth, but you don’t flinch at the sight of his face.

His heart thrums with nervousness when you place your hand against his chest, but you don’t back away.

The questions are unwelcome, but you’re not afraid to ask them.

The world is cold and dark, and so is he. But you don’t leave him. At least, not now. Not here.

“I’m just me,” he says, if nothing else.

The words are weak, just like the thing curling in his heart, making a home inside of his head. They’re inconsequential and unfamiliar, just like the feeling of your jacket when he raises his arm to grasp your bicep.

Warm. Soft. Feminine. Sweet.

Something he’d never known before, not until you stood here, posed inside of his embrace like sculpted figure skaters in a snow globe.

“You’re just you,” you smile, a giggle escaping your lips.

It’s something new and hot to the touch, something laced with the ice of winter, but full of life in and of itself. Full of him and you and the feeling that dances between you. Buzzing. Building. Growing. Flowering.

Until its tendrils pull him down from his precarious height, mouth just inches from yours.

Until you’re up on your tip toes, the collar of his uniform grasped between your fingers.

Until your tongue is tied with his, hopelessly intertwined from where your lips meet down to where your shoe accidentally steps on the toe of his boot to scoot closer—when you reach for him like he had the cure to your every need, want, and desire.

God, if only you’d known it then…

If only you’d known that you were the answer to every half-hearted prayer he’d ever said, then perhaps he could have lived in the feeling of it for just a little bit longer.

-

Your arms hug him like a vice, like he were a lifesaver against the blackened canvas of a stormy sea. In that moment, he’s just him. He’s not some long-abandoned memory. He’s not the spilled wine or the angry tears. He’s not the sound of knuckles rapping against the door, a merciless whisper left right on your doorstep.

“It’s me. I’m here. Again,” it says.

“You’re really okay?” You ask him, a sob in your voice.

“Yes—yes, love,” he answers, no less anguished, “I promise I’m okay.”

He can feel you nod against his shoulder, and hesitantly, you pull back, grasping his biceps as if you couldn’t dare to go any further. Price’s confused face falls into the background. And in the midst of this crater, he finds that it’s almost like it was all those years ago, standing in the singular four-walled world of a flickering overhead lamp.

“What about you?” He looks over you head to toe, “You’re—you’re not hurt, are you?”

“No, no, I’m okay,” you assure him, “Just…”

You take a moment to gather your words, tongue flitting over your bottom lip. Absently, you eyes fall to the still body of the other soldier on the ground, something dull overcoming your gaze. The red background of your medic’s patch seems all the starker when compared to the scarlet pool of blood that collects in pit of the crater.

“Haven’t saved anybody today,” you admit to him—and he knows the strength that those words bear on your heart, on your very soul. Back then, you would have whispered it to him in the safety of that old four poster bed, swallowed up in blankets and ratty t-shirts. And he would have cradled you from behind, pressing a wordless kiss against your bare shoulder, where the stretched collar of his shirt failed to cover your skin.

He’d forgotten that, too. Just like everything else. That had always been the problem, hadn’t it? Forgetting the things that had come before. Or, at least, not remembering them.

It pains him now. Like a bullet to the chest, it pierces him through. This time, he doesn’t settle for a wordless kiss. That would be much too presumptuous.

You hadn’t looked his way for seven months.

You hadn’t come back to work for five.

You hadn’t said his name for three.

You hadn’t even talked to him for two.

Only in the last month did you stand to work alongside him—only then could you pretend like it had never existed. The photos, the cake, the music, the laughs. The memories, love, and rings.

You’d thrown the rings at his feet when he’d come back home. The diamond in the middle was scuffed from the impact. He’d never gotten it fixed.

He wore it on his neck now, right next to his dog tags, but you didn’t know that. The only person who did was Price—like always. Price was the only one who’d understand, the only who who could bear to take his side. Though, when Simon had shown up at work one day with the ring on his chain, Price had nearly sent him home right then and there.

“Simon, you have no right—no bloody right to do that,” he’d flicked his finger against the ring, scoffing at his audacity, “I know that it’s a mess, but do I need to remind you of what she said to me in that meeting when she came back?”

“I know, Price, I know—”

“Do you?” He’d come close then, speaking with sincerity, “Simon, just because she had second thoughts doesn’t mean you’re meant to be together. It’s almost been a year. And even if she mentioned it once or twice, that doesn’t mean she was being serious. And that,” he’d pointed to the ring then, “That just proves her point. She doesn’t deserve that and you know it.”

Simon knows.

He knew it then and he knew it now.

You didn’t deserve this—didn’t deserve to be subjected to him, even if you’d almost gone back on your words once or twice.

“I thought about it again,” you’d say every once in a while, “I’d thought about you.”

I thought about us.

I thought about what happened.

I thought…that maybe I was sorry. That it wasn’t supposed to end like that.

You’d said that to him twice now. Once, between cups, the other, between tears. The first, you’d pulled him out of the rain and into your bed, clutching at his shirt like you’d die if he pulled away. And he never did, even when the rain-soaked patches on his jeans got the sheets all wet.

The second, you’d called him late at night. There was no ‘hello.’ There were only sobs, long and deep. They were angry. They were pleading. They were everything and nothing all at the same time.

They started under different circumstances, but they’d both ended the same way.

You, with your puffy, raw cheeks and tears in your eyes, unable to even look at him without some horrible pain overcoming your chest.

“Go,” you’d tell him, “Just—don’t come back.”

But he always did, no matter how many times you’d wish he’d quit. No matter how many times you’d screamed at him to go, that this would be the last time. That the next time, you’d call the police and have them take him away, have them prove that the feelings you’d never had for him had been just that: nonexistent.

But it never came to pass.

Somewhere, in the darkest depths of his soul, he likes to think that it’s because you wanted him to come back. Because, secretly, you liked it when he was there, knocking miserably at your door, even when you couldn’t admit it to yourself.

It didn’t used to be like that, but it was now. There was no changing that. Here, as he looks you over, the ring still sits heavily against his collarbones, hidden safely underneath his shirt.

-

FOUR YEARS EARLIER

“Marry me.”

The silence is heavy, and even if he’d expected it to be so, he can’t help the nervousness that climbs up his back. He shifts on his knee, steeling his hands around the heart-shaped box. The lights are off, but the moonlight that streams through the gaps in the blinds glints off of the cut of the diamond.

“Marry me, please,” he asks you, something wretched and needy in his voice—something that was full of imagined hurt and pain, something so full of devotion there was no doubt in its pronunciation. It just was. He just was.

“This mission they got us going on…I was planning to wait until we came back, but, love, you have to know that I’m just not sure that…” he trails off, swallowing. Shocked, you raise a hand to your mouth. The smallest of teardrops falls against the wooden floorboards.

The silence remains, but the words are obvious.

I’m just not sure we’ll make it back.

“Look,” he reaches for your trembling hand, pushing it against the plains his collar and dog tags, against his very heart, “These years that I’ve loved you…they’ve been the most precious of my entire life. I—I couldn’t dare to forget them, love. Never. Even if—even if something happens on that mission...worst case scenario. I want to know that I gave you everything I’d ever had. That—that my name would be right next to yours when they wrote them in the paper, or—or when they carved them into stone.”

With every word, every syllable, your body shivers and aches, fingers fidgeting in his grasp. Resisting it is an exercise in futility, and gently, you fall to your knees right in front of him, reaching for his face before he’s even done talking.

“So marry me,” he whispers, and it’s painted with tears. They drip down his face, coloring his words, “Please have me. Please, let me give myself to you.”

The breaths shoot out of you like you’d taken a punch to the chest, his voice echoing in the chambers of your heart like an ill-fated prayer. This time, when you lean in, it’s not unfamiliar.

It’s practiced. It’s common. It’s beautiful, warm, and sweet—just like everything else had been, right from the beginning.

“Yes,” you declare, the salt of his tears on your tongue, “Yes, Simon, I’ll marry you.”

-

He remembers it now, can feel the words inscribed on his very bones—on the tombstone he would someday have. For that, he grasps at your arms all the tighter, not daring to look at where Price stands over your shoulder. The man would only drag him away. He’d only make him see sense.

There was no sense in this, in this hopeless game the two of you have been playing. One in which you threw his name to the ground, tossed your rings at his feet, told him you hated him, that you regretted ever having met him…only to worship the syllables of his name when he showed up at your doorstep once more.

There was no sense in it. In loving a woman who couldn’t love him back—one who refused to love him back. But love he still did. Even if you yelled and screamed at him when he showed up at your home. Even if you told him you didn’t want to see him again. Even if you told him you wanted to marry him again after a few cups of whiskey, only to kick him out the morning next.

It wasn’t rational, what existed between you and him. It was shattered, left to fragments. Something in which he could still see his reflection, but could never put back together. That’s how it was with you, like picking through broken glass, not sure which piece would manage to cut you this time.

“Get out of here. Get. Out. I won’t tell you again.”

“I thought we were going to be polite. Like coworkers.”

“You were never sorry, were you?”

“You remember now but you couldn’t remember then?”

“Stay. Please. Just…for tonight. I promise.”

The words you said to him weren’t truthful. They didn’t mean anything. But when you spoke to him in that sugared voice, like you had when you’d spoken your vows, how could lies sound any better than they did then? When they were the truth?

Hopelessly, he looks down at your messy face, can feel the patch of your medic’s uniform bend underneath his fingertips. And all of a sudden, he’s overcome with words. Words he didn’t have seven months ago, words he couldn’t say when you’d handed him the papers, words he never spoke when you’d pushed the pen into his hands.

Words he couldn’t stand when you’d walked out the door of your shared home for the last time, your suitcase rolling behind you.

But here, in the midst of what feels like the apocalypse, he lives inside of your memory, inside of the hope that you gave him in a heart-shaped box six years ago. They overwhelm him. They consume him.

“Love,” he breathes, stepping closer to cup your face, “I know that—that we haven’t talked in a few weeks. And I know that I haven’t been doing what I should these past few months. I’m just—I’m sorry for what I’ve done. I’ve told you that before, but I swear to god I mean it now.”

He pulls your hand off of his arm, placing it over his heart, right next to where your empty wedding rings dangle.

“Love, I want you to know that I…” he begins, all but blind to the scene around the two of you.

That is, until something fiery and orange catches on the edge of his vision—until he can hear it blazing off to his left. He turns his head, trying to locate it. However, just when it registers in his mind, it’s already too late.

The ground explodes in a mass of dirt, plants, and blood. Smoke billows like clouds rolling across the horizon, but he doesn’t feel anything for a long, singular moment. Just until he comes falling back down, his back skidding across sharp gravel and rocks. The material of his jacket rips. His shirt sticks to his arms with the blood. A muttered curse leaves his mouth, but it’s quiet against the sound of the aftershock.

The mask suddenly feels like a prison, ears ringing, reducing the world to nothing more than the grey rubble in front of his eyes and the turning night sky above his head.

Bruises mottle his pale white skin. Dazedly, he coughs up blood, the world spinning on its axis. And this time, when he tries to pull in a breath, he suffocates for minutes on end until his broken body finally deigns to cooperate.

“Love,” he rasps, mind shocking back to awareness. In a haze, he tries to pull himself up, clutching at his side when it refuses to submit to his will.

“Love?” He manages, but it’s cut off with a yelp as he comes to stand. Looking down at himself, he doesn’t see any broken bones, but perhaps the dust was still settling. It whirls around him like a tornado, like a lonely chasm, like the one you’d left him in seven months ago.

“Love?” He shouts louder, stumbling about the rocks and chunks of earth that were kicked up in the wake of the bomb.

But then, he hears it.

A cough.

A small, weak cough.

Breath hitching, he whips around on his heels, spying your familiar silhouette against the ground some ways away.

“Love!” He yells for you, hurriedly scrambling across the burning grass and flak. Several times, he catches himself before he falls, and once, he doesn’t. With a grunt, he falls to his knees, gritting his teeth through the blinding pain that surges up his side.

Between bitten curses, he yanks his shirt out from under his belt, scrutinizing the skin below. All the way up his side, cut through by pale slices where his ribs lay underneath, is a giant swollen mark. It stretches from his armpit to his hip, and no doubt goes further. Every step, every lungful, feels like a hurdle, but it’s not life threatening. Not yet.

He takes a deep breath, dropping the shirt, steeling himself to keep going. He closes his eyes, preparing for the pain. And with a huff, he pulls himself back up onto his knees, forcing himself to stagger towards you.

With every stunted move, your body becomes clearer and clearer. The smoke soon washes away, pulling back the curtain for the final scene.

And he finds you there, laying in an entirely new crater, medic patch dyed with an entirely new shade of red.

His eyes widen. He crawls faster. His voice is begging now.

“Love!” He screams, wrenching his hands into your jacket.

Your words are swallowed in a gurgle of blood when you try to speak to him, your warm hands clawing at your neck, swallowed in a riptide of bleeding red.

Instantly, his entire world falls out from under him.

His entire world ends, right then and there.

Through the force of the tears that well up in his eyes, he looks at where you lay—at where you clutch the split flesh at the front of your neck, holding your skin together with nothing more than your meager grasp. Trembling, he reaches for your hand, pulling it away.

Instantly, a waterfall of blood cascades over your neck, leaving a mushy, gaping gash in its wake. He gasps, hurriedly using both of his hands to try and push the wound closed—to try and make the red stop rushing. For a minute, it works. For a minute, you look just like you always did, hideous wound hidden beneath his gloves.

But soon enough, and with each hyperventilating breath that he takes, the façade falls through.

Your blood saturates his palms.

His tears begin to fall onto your face, onto the back of his hands, where he watches his hopes and dreams crumble into dust.

You begin to choke, eyes wavering where they stare up at his face.

And just when he can almost convince himself that it will be alright, that maybe he can stitch you up or pack the wound, it all falls apart.

Slowly, blood begins to seep from beneath his hands. The true speed at which it gushes is hidden by his palms. He rocks on his knees, trying not to vomit.

“It’s—it’s okay,” he tells you, trying to sound sure of himself, but it all comes out as a wobbly mess instead, “It’s okay. You’re—you’re okay. You’re okay, love. Just—just gotta stop this bleeding, yeah? Then—then we’ll—” a sob chokes him off, but he hides it well enough underneath the mask, “We’ll get you a doctor. There’s—there’s someone who can help you. Yeah, just gotta hold on for me. Just—for a while, okay?”

Dazedly, almost hypnotically, you nod, splatters of blood painting your lips when you cough. For a second, your eyes are clear, looking at him as if you had something to say, but just couldn’t pronounce it. However, your head suddenly lolls and your eyes fall closed—just like the boy he’d seen when he’d gotten here.

“Hey—hey,” he yanks your chin back up, haphazardly pressing down on the gash when it begins to bleed once more, “Hey—keep your eyes open, love. Can you hear me? Keep your eyes open. Just—don’t fall asleep. Please, for me, keep your eyes open, love. Please.”

“For you,” a gurgle comes out of your mouth, but it’s unfocused and confused. Your eyes flutter open, looking right through him—like you couldn’t even see him. Clumsily, you close your hand around his wrist. Your grip is weak, barely alive.

This time, the sobs can’t be stopped—especially not when your eyes flutter once more, grip going weak.

“Love—” he heaves, voice getting louder by the minute, “Love? Don’t fall asleep on me. Don’t you dare fall asleep!!”

He’s yelling now, pinning your head to the ground with his ruthless grip. Stuttering, drowning breaths emanate from your lungs, soaked in your own life blood.

“Fuck—c’mon,” he yanks your vest apart, searching for bandages, “C’mon, love, c’mon. C’mon. C’mon. C’mon—don’t you dare die like this! Don’t you dare fucking die like this! Don’t you dare!”

He keels over you, the sound of his voice ringing across the battlefield.

“Don’t you dare fucking do this to me!” He screeches, crying so hard he can’t even open his eyes, “Don’t you dare fucking leave me again! You can’t—fuck, love, you ca-an’t—”

A dry, heaving breath. More sobs. More blood underneath his gloves. Those blank, glassy eyes look up at him still, watching his silhouette helplessly rock against the fiery background of the sky. For just an instant, your fingers squeeze around his arm, trying to comfort him.

“Price!” He screams manically, whipping his head this way and that, “Price, help me!”

-

EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER

“Where were you?”

The words don’t mean anything anymore. When had they ever? Truthfully, he can’t remember the day. Instead of acknowledging them, he only shucks off his jacket, idly plucking the cigarette from his mouth. As he kicks the door shut behind him, he stubs the cig out in the ashtray on the entry table, and small plumes of smoke curl like incense in the air.

“I asked you a question,” you say though grit teeth, becoming more incensed by the minute, “Where were you?”

One more word, one more syllable, and you’ll have grated his already short nerves. The bourbon had done its job well enough, had eaten as much of the cancer inside of him as could be expected. But if you say one more sentence—if you dare to say that stupid, goddamn question one more time—he doesn’t think he could reign in his loose tongue if he even tried. The snarl is already curved over his lips. Poised. Ready to pounce. Just like it always is these days.

“You already know where the fuck I’ve been,” he hisses, looking mournfully down at the cigarette in the ashtray.

God, couldn’t he just leave? Just go back to the bar? Back to the streets, where he could smoke, drink, and simmer in his own mind without some bird yanking at his jacket sleeve?

A scoff emanates from behind his turned back, and that, too, is a woefully familiar sound. Like sandpaper, it singes his skin, rubbing it dry. His back bristles beneath his shirt and he grips the edge of the entry table all the harder—nearly hard enough to imprint his rain-soaked fingerprints into the hardwood itself.

“God,” you laugh mockingly, no doubt shaking your head with crossed arms, “You were drinking. Again.”

Your displeasure is evident in the way you speak the words, in the way you dutifully play this game, like you hadn’t done this every night for the past month. You didn’t need to know where he was. You already knew. And you damn well didn’t need him to admit it out loud. You knew the effect it had on him, the way it twisted his heart and mind. You only wanted to humiliate him now. He’s not entirely sure he deserves it.

His hands clench further.

“What the hell did I expect?” You speak more to yourself than him, “‘Love, I won’t do it again, I promise’ or ‘Swear it’s only one more glass,’” you suck your teeth, smiling ruefully through the tears in your eyes, “Fuck, you just can’t help yourself, can you, Simon? Can’t even look your own fucking wife in her face when she’s talking to you.”

The veins in his wrists pop. He wrenches his eyes shut. Anger like a wildfire blazes up his spine.

“Look at me,” you whisper.

He doesn’t move. He can only uselessly swallow the feeling that’s slowly consuming him, the one he must have gotten from his father, because this is all to similar to what he used to see when he was a small boy, looking down from atop the stairs. It’s like his entire life was only a series of repeated scenes and sounds. Though, the movie was quickly getting old.

“Look. At. Me.” You seethe, and this time, the sob you release isn’t hidden under that carefully curated mask of aloofness.

He yearns to look at it, if only so that he could memorize the hurt on your face—the one that he put there. For some reason, he doesn’t feel bad about it. In a way, it’s almost comforting. Almost as familiar as your kisses used to be.

Another scoff. This time, you turn on your heel, padding back through the hallway towards the kitchen. You mumble something under your breath, something enraged and sharp. He only catches the end of the sentence, but even if you only toss the meager words over your shoulder, they cut deeper than any other knife you could have thrown at him.

“…doubt you’re even wearing your fucking wedding ring anymore.”

The wood splinters beneath his hands, and he whips his head around to face you.

“What did you just say to me?” He huffs.

The floorboards creak when you pause in your place. When you turn to look at him, the anger is thinly veiled and waning, just barely hanging on through the force of the tears in your eyes. But still, the pitiful act isn’t enough to convince his rage to cease. No, it only burns hotter. And when he stalks up to you, chest puffed in pure and utter hostility, you’re too petrified to do anything more than stand there in horror when he grabs a blistering handful of your bicep, jostling you where you stand.

“What the fuck did you just say to me?” He bends down to get in your face, to even the odds, to make you understand well and good what you’d just done to him, “What the fuck did you just say?”

“You heard what I said,” you reply, crying and weak in the face of his untoward aggression, but you don’t back down. Your body shakes in his arms, like something fragile and afraid, but he doesn’t let you go. No, he only corners you against the wall, squeezing your arm as hard as he dared to.

“Is that what you think I’ve been doing out there? That I’ve been cheating on you? On my own fucking wife?!” The words are whisper-yelled right up against your cheekbone, spoken with a sort of offense you’d thought him incapable of, “You think that low of me?”

“Simon, if you wanted a wife, you wouldn’t be drinking yourself blind on your fourth anniversary,” you say the words calmly. Like you’d rehearsed them. Like you’d been thinking them for months. Like they were a bitter, familiar stain on your very soul.

However, to Simon, they shock him still like a bucket of ice water to the face. Wordlessly, his eyes go wider, and he straightens up to peer at the calendar stuck to the side of the fridge. Sure enough, circled in red marker and drawn hearts, is today’s date—yesterday’s date, actually. It was well past one in the morning by now.

Horrified, he drops your arm, mouth opening and closing relentlessly, as if he were capable of coming up with an excuse to fool you. But you were far too gone by now. You only back away from his stuttering form, struggling to maintain the wobbly smile on your lips as you drive the final stake through his heart.

“Here,” you manage, voice choked, “I’ll help you out.”

Without losing his eye contact, you pry the diamond ring off of your finger, holding it up for him to look at. With a final, defeated scoff, you toss it at his feet, watching with bitter satisfaction as it skids across the tiles of the kitchen floor. At the sound, his stomach drops, terrified eyes shocking back to look at your face.

“Go,” you shove past his shoulder, grabbing your purse off of the entry table, “Drink as much as you want. You don’t have a wife to stop you anymore.”

Without another word, you pull the front door open, walking into the pouring rain before he can even think to stop you. Stunned, it takes him nearly half a minute to charge after you, to do anything more than stare down at the scuffed diamond ring and broken promises that lay at his feet. When he turns on his heel, hurriedly racing after you, the floorboards shake with his desolation.

-

“Simon—hold pressure there. Don’t let go. Don’t fucking let go,” Price commands, hurriedly reaching for Simon’s hand when he’s too distraught to lift it himself.

Price shoves it up against your bleeding neck, squeezing the back of Simon’s hand even though he’s hardly lucid enough to do anything more than rock on his knees, kneeling in agony over your broken body.

“Don’t you dare leave me!” He screams, sobbing once more, “Keep your eyes open, love, please—please, for me, just do it! Just stay awake!”

Price hears every hoarse, shouted word, feels them all rattle in his chest like a final, distant calling. Dutifully, he runs through blood-soaked gauze and thread, practically ripping your your vest and pockets apart at the seams to search for more medical supplies. Simon, however, is beyond listening to reason anymore.

No, he can only rock maniacally where he kneels, grasping at your body like you might disappear if he lifted even a single finger off of you. Price himself isn’t much better, staring down at you with pale, wavering vision, almost like he were looking at a ghost.

“Please—please, god, please,” Simon begs, wrenching his fists in your shirt, “Please don’t go.”

His voice trails off into thundering, listless cries mere seconds after, almost as if he were waiting for you to reply. However, instead of words, all that bubbles to your lips is another wash of shining, red blood. Simon watches it spill over your lips in a hopeless pallor, clinging onto your every gurgling breath.

Your jaw opens and closes, lips barely able to form the sound.

“For you,” you say again, unconsciously.

And Simon can do nothing more than watch, petrified, as you reach a single shaking hand towards his collar. Sickly, and with horrible condemnation in your eyes, you drag his shirt down, just enough for his dog tags to fall out. Almost like you’d known it was there—like you knew he couldn’t let you go—your resignation is stiff as they hover above your teary face.

The two wedding rings clink like bells against the metal, and with a horrid, drowning inhale, you watch the diamond shine against the backdrop of whizzing bullets. Trembling, you reach out to them, closing your hand around the jewelry. Bile fills his mouth at the soft touch, and he can barely breathe when you palm slips off of the metal from the blood.

Swipes of plasma paint his shirt. Down, down, down—until your hand collapses weakly onto the ground, the blood, scarlet rings dancing with his every unseated movement.

This time, when your eyes close, his touch isn’t enough to make you stay.

“No,” his eyes flick hurriedly over your body, “No, no, no, no, no—”

He shoves price out of the way, planting his hands on your chest to start CPR.

“No, no, no,” he chants, tears washing down his face like a waterfall, “You’re not leaving—you’re not dying here, love!! You’re staying—staying here with me!”

Every shove of his hands on your chest feels like justice, like vengeance. His entire body aches with something horrible, something rotten and decayed, eating his soul from the inside out. But he can’t stop, not even when his sweat begins to drip faster than his tears. Not even when he feels some unbearable stabbing pain in his side, something bursting inside of him.

When Price shoves at his chest, he nearly strikes the man across the face when he dares to try and pull his hands off of you.

“No, Price, no—” he shrieks, trying to return to his task.

“Simon—fuck, let me take over!” The man shouts, pushing his hands away to restart CPR.

Simon watches, hypnotized, as Price beats your heart for you. Count for count, number by number, Price does it methodically, whispering unheard words under his breath. Simon, however, sits on his knees beside you, completely and utterly helpless to do anything more than watch the world pry your life out of his cold, dead hands.

Distraught, he can’t stand any longer.

No, he bends over your body, burying his face in your shirt, like your scent could be etched into his very being if he breathed enough of it in.

“Please—please, God,” he says, speaking the words mindlessly.

A knee-jerk.

A last resort.

Simon never prayed.

There was no God that he believed in.

But if there was, if by even the slimmest of margins, God or Heaven truly existed, then there was nothing more that he could do than get down on his knees and beg—beg for a forgiveness he never deserved in the first place.

“Please don’t take her from me,” he sobs pitifully, words broken through by heaving breaths.

Price is panting now, hands shaking with every push. He can’t do CPR much longer.

“Please, please, don’t take her from me, God,” he pleads, tightening his hand in your shirt, “Please, I’ll be a better husband—a better man. I’ll be anything you want me to be, just—just don’t take her away from me again. She’s all I have left—”

Miserably, he flattens his cheek against your vest, staring through the tears in his eyes to look up at your lifeless face. He mindlessly reaches for your hand, clutching it to his chest, right next to the rings against his throat.

“Please,” he whispers to the universe in and of itself, “Please, don’t take her. Please.”

-

FIVE MONTHS EARLIER

The rain is so ferocious is nearly drowns him. With every step, his boots slosh with water and mud, barely able to hold up his weight any longer.

The night is dark and long, so is the façade of the house in front of him. It had been months since he’d last seen it. The last time he’d been here had been the day he’s signed the divorce papers, mindlessly scrabbling his signature across pages and pages and black ink. You’d watched it all with some unreadable look in your eye, something sickly and pale, just like the hands you’d warmed around your mug of tea.

He remembers the way the clock had ticked, how quiet the house had been when he’d gotten to the final page, when only the noise of the ball point rolling had remained. In that moment, looking at you swallow another mouthful of tea, he’d felt entirely hollow, like some great big chasm had opened up in the center of his chest.

Now, he knew that the pit was never ending, that it receded so far into his being that not even the center of the earth could compare.

Miserably, he climbs the steps leading to the front porch, watching the boards bend under his weight. They creak just the same way they had when he’d carried you over the threshold in your wedding dress. Only now, he’d never have the right to hold you in his arms again.

The door looms over him like a beast, so tall and menacing—more than he remembers. However, despite the fear in his throat, he still raises his hand to the door. He hesitates only for a millisecond before he knocks.

One rap.

Then a second.

Silence follows.

“Love,” he says, a whispered prayer that somewhere in there—beyond the lines of ink and the rings hidden underneath his collar—you’d hear him somehow.

“Love…”

The words fall from his mouth like drops of liquor, like the very thing that had torn apart your marriage. It had been five months and he hadn’t seen the inside of the bar since. Though, perhaps it had never been the drink to begin with. The words were always more hurtful anyway.

“It’s me. I’m here,” he starts, just like he always does, “Again.”

There is no answer. There is only the icy, dark doorway in front of him, a barrier locking him out of the only home he’d ever had.

“Are you there?” He asks no one in particular. Crickets answer him, and he can only swallow with some sort of grim acceptance. It settles in his throat like cough medicine, sticking in his lungs. Being here, it’s a salve, but the taste is much too bitter.

“Will you talk to me?” He continues, leaning forward towards the door. Unlike you, the plains of wood don’t reject him, even if they feel hopelessly cold against his body, soaked through in the rain. Broken, he presses his forehead against it, like maybe if he pushed hard enough, he might be able to walk right through it.

“You can spit at my feet...can slap me across the face,” he huffs, unbidden tears beginning to gather in his eyes, “You can yell, or argue, or scream, or whatever you want. I know that’s what you want—it’s the only thing we like to do anymore.”

Gently, he brushes his palms over the door, leaning into its embrace like an old remember friend. And perhaps it was. Perhaps it was the only friend he had left.

“We can do it all,” he whispers to himself, vision blurring, “Just please…let me in.”

No one answers.

No one speaks.

No one leaves.

No one comes.

He only remains there, soaked through by rain, with his soul buried in a heart-shaped box.