Fireplace ,Truths

Jarrah's POV

The whiskey burned less than the silence did.

I poured a second glass I didn't need, just to have something for my hands to do besides reach for her. Across the low table, she'd curled into the corner of the couch with her knees drawn up, the firelight catching the side of her face in a way that made it hard to keep my voice steady, let alone my thoughts.

"You don't have to tell me," she said. Soft. Too soft, like she already knew I was about to anyway.

"I know." I turned the glass in my hand, watching the amber catch the flames. "That's the problem. I want to."

Outside, the wind pushed against the shutters, a low groan that matched something in my chest. I'd spent six years learning how to say nothing about what happened over there how to smile at dinners, shake hands at ceremonies, let people call me a hero without correcting them. It was easier that way. Easier to be the man they needed at the border talks, steady and unshaken, than to be the man who still woke some nights with his hand already reaching for a weapon that wasn't there.

But she was watching me now with those eyes that never let me get away with the easy version of anything.

"There was a village," I started, and already my voice didn't sound like mine. "Small. Maybe forty families. We were told it was clear."

She didn't move. Didn't reach for her glass, didn't look away. Just let me talk, which was somehow worse and better than anything else she could have done.

"It wasn't clear."

I told her about the noise first, because the noise was easier than the rest the particular silence that comes after gunfire, thick and wrong, like the whole world is holding its breath in shame. I told her about carrying a boy who couldn't have been older than ten, how light he was, how that lightness was the thing that came back to me most, some nights, more than the blood. I told her how I still didn't know his name, and how that not-knowing had become its own kind of wound, one that never quite closed because there was nothing to stitch it shut with.

"I keep the peace now," I said, and heard the bitterness crack through, "because I don't know how to live with myself otherwise. Every treaty I broker, every border I hold it's not diplomacy. It's penance. Ren, I don't know how to explain that to anyone who hasn't"

"Try," she said.

So I did. I told her about the weight of being the man everyone looked to when the room went quiet and the decisions got hard, how they called it leadership, called it strength, when half the time it just felt like drowning slowly enough that no one noticed. I told her about the scar along my ribs, the one she'd asked about once and I'd brushed off with a joke, and how it wasn't from the explosion at all but from the week after, when I'd stopped caring whether I made it out of the next patrol alive.

Her breath caught at that. Just slightly. Just enough that I heard it over the fire.

"You wanted to die," she said. Not a question.

"For a while." The admission cost me more than I expected it to. I'd never said it aloud, not to the therapists, not to the men who'd been there with me and understood without needing the words. "Not anymore. But for a while, yes."

She was quiet for a long moment, and I braced myself for pity, for the careful, managed sympathy people offered when they didn't know what else to do with a truth this heavy. Instead she moved closed the space between us on the couch, close enough that I could feel the warmth of her, close enough that the whiskey in my hand suddenly felt like the least steadying thing in the room.

"Thank you," she said, "for trusting me with that."

"I haven't told anyone. Not like this." My voice cracked on the last word, and I hated how exposed it made me feel, and I hated more how much I didn't want to take it back. "You make it feel less like a confession and more like just... telling the truth."

Her hand found mine on the couch cushion, fingers lacing through mine like she'd done it a hundred times before, though this was the first. The fire popped and settled, throwing shadows that softened the hard lines of her face, and for one unguarded moment I let myself believe that maybe this her, this fire, this fragile unburdening was the beginning of something I hadn't let myself want in years.

"Jarrah." My name in her mouth always undid something in me. "Whatever happened over there, whatever you carry it doesn't change how I see you. If anything"

The knock at the door came sharp and fast, three hard raps that had no business happening at this hour, in this weather, in a house that only three people alive knew the location of.

She was still beside me. I felt her hand tighten around mine.

I was already reaching for the blade I kept beneath the side table before conscious thought caught up with instinct, old habits surfacing like they'd never left. The fire cracked again behind us, and beyond the shutters the wind howled on, indifferent, while I crossed the room with my pulse hammering somewhere in my throat.

I opened the door to find no one there.

Only a folded note, pinned to the frame with a knife I recognized. A knife that belonged to a man I had personally watched die three years ago, in a village whose name I had spent every day since trying to forget.

My hands were not steady when I picked it up.