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You were grateful for the nights you got to tangle your body with his. The nights you whispered promises into his skin, ones that you never intended to keep. Nights when the cold air that bit at your spine didn’t matter, because he was pressed against you and the familiar weight filled you with warmth.
The accident had been avoidable.
It was a simple recon mission, and he’d managed to get hurt. You knew that he wasn’t used to the whole ‘mortality’ thing, but it angered you. Irrationally. God, you knew it was irrational. But you didn’t care; you still yelled at him.
He didn’t react – just sat there and took it, like he always did while he bled slowly onto the old afghan. One of the many he’d trekked into the cabin over the years.
You lost your train of thought mid-sentence and asked yourself why it mattered. If he wanted to get himself killed, well, that was his business, wasn’t it? His life wasn’t yours to waste. Wasn’t yours to endanger or keep safe. So why did it matter?
You wish you didn’t know the answer. And so you just clamped your mouth shut and grabbed the whiskey, poured it over his wound and washed it out. He flinched but his expression didn’t change. You lift his leg and tie a makeshift bandage around his thigh. You push lightly on his chest and he falls back, turning onto his side and pulled the afghan around his own shoulders.
For a moment, you remember how it used to be. For a moment, you forget that everything’s fucked, forget that just outside your door a war is raging on with humanity pitted against itself, forget that you’re losing a fight that was damned from the start.
For a moment, you forget everything except those four walls. The world, the war, heaven, and hell all fall away and leave just a cabin, stranded in space and time.
Your crawl onto the other side of the bed and wrap him up in your arms, tangling yourselves together. You were always grateful for these nights.