Chapter Text
reasons to not kiss him:
1. you weren't raised to love tender
You were trained to be a killer: ruthless, merciless, heartless. You exchanged your soul for the safety of your country—or so you fooled yourself into believing.
It doesn’t stop the monsters from clawing your mind at night just before sleep claims you, making you half-wish you won’t ever have to open your eyes again. But you do, and it’s the curse of waking up alive instead of dead, and you realise that these are the nightmares no one deserves to share.
You can’t love him because it means giving him your heart, and it’s the one thing you don’t have. It’s the one thing you trained yourself into not having.
(You refuse to consider that it might be because he already has it.)
—
You trained yourself to be alone.
You don’t know how to let anyone in, because anyone who tries always, inevitably, get hurt. And so you keep everyone at arm’s length, citing privacy as your reason, too cowardly to admit that it’s simply because you don’t understand the human heart.
You wonder, sometimes, if you are even human enough, when you understand machines and codes better than human interaction. You try everyday, and yet you always seem to fail the ones you’ve cared for the most. You may categorically be a genius, but you’ve utterly failed as a human being. So you’ve learned to be cold and aloof, because ice can burn just as searingly as fire, and sometimes burning them is the only way to protect them.
(You refuse to acknowledge that his intoxicating fire is beginning to thaw your frozen heart.)