I never would've pegged her as the type to cuddle up when she slept. But then, chances are pretty good that she doesn't know it either. What a night. Morning coffee's not quite so bitter when you're sharing it with someone, the yard's less washed out in the light, less faded when there's someone walking it with you.

I didn't even know I was lonely until I wasn't any more.

The feeling's always been there, the urge to fight, to shift lives and either push them towards something better or make them face the truth of their shortcomings. I never questioned it, not with how natural it was, never wondered if maybe it gave me so much solace because nothing else did. I never had anything to lose.

Been waiting to die since I was... twenty-five, maybe. First deployment, the Austrian border. Hostile teritory, overseeing the construction of a firebase and instructing the battalions on how to use my weapons systems. You never knew when it might happen, if some fat-bellied Heinkel 177 might rumble overhead and leave that growing shriek mixing with its' contrails as the payloads dropped. Munitions like that, by the time you could hear them you had no chance of outrunning the blast radius.

But I didn't die, did I? Made it to First Lieu by the time I was back in-country, a handful of medals shining on my tit. So I figured, maybe in D.C.. The weapons range, the squints and I scratching out equations of blast power and velocity targeting on blackboards so high we had a stepladder. In the factory, designing new gear, you never knew when a mixture would turn volatile or a warhead would trigger prematurely. One variable on those looming blackboards factored wrong, and the lot of us would've been painting the walls of the workshop.

Still, I walked out alive. Better, I was the only Corps member of the project, and a multi-warhead delivery system was enough for the brass to bump me to Captain. Slap on another medal, watch the paycheck grow, start drinking the good stuff downtown with the other officers, dicks that they were.

Second tour, I knew I was tempting fate. The probability of coming home alive, intact, and sane literally gets cut in half with every tour past the first, and that's if I'd had the same station in the same war. War changes though, every day. Every new soldier on either side shifts things, every bullet fired spins that wheel that just might stop on your last moments. But I went anyway.

It was a bad mission, twenty-eight years old and I'm watching men younger than me get cut down, and I'm thinking that they're kids. Training or no, they hadn't seen this yet. They'd never learn how cold and ugly the logic of their commanding officers was. Maybe they were lucky for that. I just know that after I watched our tactics fail, spent every night hearing sobs from the medic's tent as I tried to sleep, or listened to the chaplains shovel bullshit down their throats? I was done waiting to die.

We broke the enemy's choke hold with blood and tears and rage so pure that you could get three more steps out after you took the round that technically killed you, maybe even work the bayonet one last time. And I came home. They stayed to fight and die and be forgotten, and I came home. Major Eric Martens now, Special Liason to the Second.

It all broke six months later, starting with three of my fingers and a General's jaw and zygomatic process. One month in the brig, tribunal hearing, and a discharge. Not the worst sentence a man can get for seiditious behavior, or putting someone in a coma. Civilian life again, just Eric now. Still a Marine, dammit.

I just realized I've never written this down, and if anyone read it? I could get locked up again just for putting the words to paper. But no one cares about a scrap merchant who used to be a soldier, and I liked that. I liked all eight years of it. I think I did, at least.

I could do what Eily asked when I was the only one in the fight. I'm not any more, and god damn does it tangle things up. I don't want December to ever look at me and see the dark she's talking about, the monster. The Tyger. My own little boogeyman that I wish I could take back, just so it didn't have a name. This work, my work is clinging to her, wearing her down. It's showing her just how bad that last tour was without any context, just raw nerves and twitching sinew. It's drawing her in.

And that's drawing me in, seeing the compulsion in her that forces her to try and understand, to look into the dark and give the shadows a name. I recognize it, but it's so natural for her. Just thinking about it makes me want her here, want to talk to her, get those moments when she drops the barbed-wire fence around herself and just talks. I want to laugh over her cynicism, remind her that she's not the only one with all the tact of a hammer. I want to keep testing what she said, that there'll always be more to learn about her. And if she's wrong? I want to know I know it all.

She's too close. I'm too close. Same damned words, totally different meanings. Between her and Trent, they'll form a list of suspects. Even if I'm not on the first draft, it's just a matter of time before she wonders if I'm capable of the mess she's had to clean up. I need to finish this fight before she asks me that question, before I have to try and tell someone that I need to be the devil just a while longer. It has to be done before whatever there is between us breaks. Before she's gone.

Two moves, I can do this in two moves minimum. Hit their wallet, cut off the head, watch the feet kick and dance as death sets in and the cops sweep up the rest. Then Eily can grieve, I can just be a junkyard nobody again, and maybe hold on to whatever last night was. Assuming I'm not some fool old man who's struck dumb by what happened, assuming it wasn't a one-time thing.

The feeling's always been there. It's done me well for two decades now. I'm just not sure what it is any more, what it's making me into. Maybe I'll know when it's over. Maybe I already do. Is this how it feels when you have something to lose?