Chapter Text
At first, he thought it was a trick of the light. It only ever appeared at the edges of his vision - a shadow, a silhouette, something that shouldn’t be there - and of course he’d look. He’d look and it was gone. He could have written it off as his eyes tricking him from overworking himself, stare too long at paperwork, at numbers and logistics, and eventually you’d start seeing them in your sleep. But it kept happening again and again.
And the fact is that he knew exactly what the shadow was but he couldn’t bring himself to even acknowledge it.
He keeps trying to convince himself that whatever it was wasn’t what it was.
It wasn’t her.
It wasn’t her haunting him.
He knows self-restraint better than any man, even if others would claim otherwise due to his impulsive and reckless behavior written in records painted with black lines. It was always calculated. He knew when to act, the others just never knew when to expect it from him. Expect the unexpected , as one would say.
He knows self-restraint. When the shadow appears once more, he keeps his vision steady ahead of him. Doesn’t let his eyes flick to where it is. Somehow - somehow this shadow becomes more than what it is. Somehow his mind fills in the gaps despite it being stuck to his periphery.
“The mind is a creative thing,” she had said once after recalling a nightmare. “I see it when I close my eyes. I see it when my eyes are open. The jungle. The fires. The bodies. The smell.”
The mind is a creative thing considering she was never there in the first place. He took some sick sense of pride, found it humorous even, that she was able to recall the smell of burnt bodies struck by napalm. He supposed that he had described his own nightmares in great detail, found small victories in being such a great storyteller as he dissected her mind and implanted whatever he wanted.
The mind is a creative thing. Without looking, he always knew what it was doing.
She would stare at him. He would let her, amused by this crush that had developed as a byproduct of feeding her lies that they were friends. That they were close. That, at the end of the day, she would do anything for him because of a bond made in war.
She would stare, enamored, and when he looked, she would look away with embarrassment. The way her cheeks flushed looked better on her than any blush she would powder her skin with.
It would not look at him. It made him feel like it was taunting him to look, as if it was just playing hard to get . He steadied his gaze to figure out what the hell this was, and whatever it was wanted to play house, it seemed. He would be reading the paper over breakfast and it would be leaning against his kitchen island, back facing him, hands wrapped around a mug. He would be enjoying a smoke while he watched the news and it would be leaning against the open window with a cigarette between its fingers. It would read while he did paperwork in his home office. It would be in his bathroom fixing its hair and makeup. It would stare at the paintings on his wall.
These are things he never witnessed her do, not in his home, and yet –
Yet he pictures it perfectly without seeing it.
He tried to catch it the first few times, but it would always disappear with nothing in its place to signify anything was there in the first place.
After that he waited to see what it would do. It made him impatient. It never came close to him. It never said anything. It was trying to co-exist with him in his own home.
“What are you going to do when this is all over?” She had asked with a big smile on her face.
“I don’t know, Bell,” he hummed playfully, tapping a cigarette out of its carton, “I figure I’ll go back to Langley and pick up another assignment.”
She wrinkled her nose at him, it obviously not being the answer she wanted to hear from him. “You’re a damn work-a-holic, you know that? Do you do anything to relax?”
He shrugged and stayed silent as he lit up his cigarette to take a deep drag. She watched him exhale a plume of smoke, mesmerized for a moment before looking at him expectantly again for an answer he wasn’t going to give. Eventually she caught on and shoved at his side playfully, him chuckling softly as he swatted her hand away.
“Of course I do.”
“... And what do you do?”
“What do you think I do?”
“Can’t you ever answer my questions without making it a mind game?”
“I just like keeping you on your toes, Bell.”
She rolled her eyes at him and pursed her lips to the side of her face. She got quiet again, presumably thinking about what he would do in his free time. “I think,” she finally started, making him glance over at her, “I think you would invite me to the bar for a drink.”
He sputtered out a laugh at that, especially with how she looked so damn proud of herself. “You really thought long and hard about that one, huh, Bell?” She pouted at him again, embarrassed, cheeks turning pink like they usually do. He already knows that she was trying to get the courage to ask to meet him after the operation was over in the first place. He took another drag and watched as she became hypnotized again. “We’ll see.”
“We’ll see?”
“We’ll see.”
The answer seemed to satisfy her enough, though he knew that she always wanted more from him. Already, he knew that her mind was getting ahead of itself, imagining them going home together to –
He doesn’t acknowledge it. He doesn’t speak to it. He doesn’t demand to know why it’s here. He pretends it's not there despite how acutely aware he is of it. On occasion, he’ll purposefully look at it, not because he wants to see it - but just to make it go away and leave him the hell alone. He hates how his stomach twists when it does disappear. Hates the regret afterwards for making it leave.
Hates that feeling of wanting it to come back.
His fault for looking.
His fault for it being there.