Prompt Fills Vol. 3

[troublewillfindme]

ask-manda-of-the-6 asked: Strikhedonia - The pleasure of being able to say “to hell with it”. (This strikes as a Central thing to say) ;)

 

At night, he dreams. He dreams of brushing the stray lock of her hair back from her face in the cold, empty conference room, the warmth of her skin under his fingers. He still knows the feel of her, soft and steady, better than he should, certainly better that he was ever supposed to.

When he thinks of Berlin, he refuses to feel regret. Most of the time, he tries to feel nothing at all. That’s sort of the point of the booze.

(It was always bigger than that one incident; they both knew that.)

There’s a whole bushel of reasons he could give for joining the Navy: honor, duty, devotion to country, a perverse need to win approval from a father who never once looked up from his pursuit of oblivion at the bottom of a bottle — the irony of which is not lost on him — or a need to be as far removed from Kansas as humanly possible.

There is one reason he stayed on as XCOM’s Central Officer.

But he was young and life moved quickly, and he’s only ever been able to sort things like that out in hindsight. They had blended together, congealed into some tangle of orders and regulations and sound career choices.

He’d laugh, but it’s really not funny.

In dreams, he says to her Lizzie, let’s get out of this life.

Get out of this life. Get away from globetrotting and aliens. Leave. Settle down. Have a life.

Have a family.

The things that should have mattered. The things that matter now, now that she’s gone and the world has followed her to hell.

(God, please let her not be there.)

But instead, it was about duty and dereliction thereof. It was about responsibility and the greater good. It was about starting a job and finishing it, about owning up and accepting the consequences of your choices.

(The happiest moments of his life have always been the ones where he’d allowed himself a moment of disregard, the chance to say screw it and pursue what he’d wanted.) 

In dreams, her eyes light up, the same mischievous glint that first set his blood to singing. You mean it? She asks.

We could walk away. We’ve paid our dues.

There is a rush, a kick of happiness and terror and a belief in the possibility of what if. His heart pounds in his chest and blood rushes in his ears and a grin cracks across her face and —

He always wakes before she can respond.