Why Does Love Always Feel Like A Battlefield Novels & Stories

"I didn’t know what it would mean to feel the mating bond pulling at me like this—like a rope tied around my heart, pulling in one direction while I try to move in another. It’s unbearable." Aries exhales slowly. "I know." I blink. "You do?" "Of course, I do. I’ve been here before." His voice lowers, losing some of its usual edge. "Love isn’t an easy thing, Delilah. It’s a battlefield. And right now, you and Caspian? You’re both standing on opposite ends, waiting for the other to surrender first." I shake my head, rubbing at my temples. "I don’t want to fight anymore. I’m tired of loving someone who won’t love me back."

What happened just now had been a little shocking. Fane gave a magnanimous grin instead when he heard that. “You’ve never experienced what it’s like on the battlefield. You’ve never seen the entire field and mountain strewn with corpses and missing limbs. You’ve never smelled the stench of blood cloying the air. All of you live behind our shields, leading peaceful lives. On the battlefield, you’re dead if you don’t kill the enemy first!” “That’s true! Who knows how long this war would have lasted if not for people like you!”

The battlefield did not announce itself by sight, but by impact, by the violence of its breath. Apollo lifted his head. And looked down into war. The heat struck him first. It came in waves rolling upward from the fractured earth, each bearing its own signature of burn. Fresh flame bit sharp and immediate. Older heat hung heavier, thick with the scent of charred metal, blood, and something deeper, something that spoke of bodies broken beneath pressure, not merely fire. There was wetness in the stench as well, steam-lifted blood, opened flesh, the copper tang of a field that had devoured soldiers for hours uncounted.

His gaze darkened, but he stayed rooted to the ground and stared back. “I should’ve known love when I saw it,” I scoffed quietly. “Should’ve known the magic. But this doesn’t feel magic, okay? Loving you is messier than that. Twisted and fucked up.” I met his eyes. “It’s warfare waged on my own heart, and I still wake up wanting more of you.” I halted inches from him, palms slick with adrenaline, close enough to count the cracks in his knuckles should I lean in far enough. “I thought it would feel different,” I added through a trembling exhale. “Prettier. Less like I’m losing a war I can’t win.”

He shifted despite the pain and reached for my hand, threading his fingers through mine. “That is not yours to carry alone.” The words hit something fragile inside me, because alone was exactly how I had been carrying every mistake, every death, and every broken decision. As if love meant absorbing all the blame. I let out a shaky breath. “It feels like everything I touch survives at a cost.” His thumb moved slowly over my knuckles. “That is what war does. It lies to you and tells you every consequence is your fault.” I stared at him. “And what does love do?”

His breath is a warm wind against my neck. Silence falls again, heavier than all the city noises. The dust of our love battle settles slowly. And in this silence, the truth crushes me, more brutally than his body ever did. This is not a game. This is not a strategy. This is a war. A war where the battlefield is my own body, my own heart. And I have just lost a crucial battle. I no longer know if I want to win this war, or if I simply want to continue losing myself, again and again, in the fire of his gaze and the brutality of his hands.

I should destroy the files, burn everything and walk away. But I couldn’t. Because beneath the jealousy, beneath the bitterness, there was something far uglier — the fear that maybe I had already lost the war long before it began. The war between us wasn’t about power anymore. It was about love. And love was the one battlefield I never learned how to win. I closed the laptop and rose, walking to the mirror. My reflection stared back, pale and composed, but I could see the cracks. The mask was slipping. Scarlett had my eyes. My fire. My defiance.

Neither the war outside nor the one within their hearts. But for the first time in a long while, they faced it not as leader and liability. But as lovers on the same battlefield.

Reply 'Accept' to confirm. I stared at the words Remains Recovery Unit for a long time. My fingers trembled faintly above the screen. The peacekeeping force was deployed to a battlefield halfway across the world. I would have no one for me there. No parents, no Sam, no Melissa. Only the eternal silence of the dead, and the smell of disinfectant in endless tents. In my previous life, I passed the selection too. But I gave it up in hopes of spending my life with that special someone.