Made Me Cry A Effing River Before I Slept 😭

made me cry a effing river before I slept 😭

(Gif originally by @shadow0-1)

Today. Yesterday. Tomorrow. Again.

(Soap x GN! Reader)

Rating: Mature Wordcount: 5400 Tags: Doomed Narrative, Time Loop AU, Heavy Angst, Blood and Injury, Self-Sacrifice, Whump, Hurt Very Little Comfort, Happy Ending, (I PROMISE THERE'S A HAPPY ENDING!!) Warnings: Major character death. That's...literally the plot A/N: Hi here's the doomed timelines AU nobody asked for

Call of Duty Masterlist

Summary:

The 23rd time you meet Soap, you don’t bother to smile. You know how this ends.

“Nice to meet you, Soap.” You say for the 23rd time, words that have passed your lips in more lifetimes that you wish you didn’t remember. “I look forward to working with you.”

And I don’t look forward to watching you die.

The first time you meet Soap, it’s how you expect. 

It’s a warm spring day, the kind where you need to shed layers in the brightness of afternoon, only to don them again come sunset. He stands just beyond the shade of the barracks, awash in sunlight that seems to catch the blue of his eyes. You blink as you take him in, and it’s the only barest indication you give at the instant impression that he’s handsome.

“Sergeant John MacTavish, at your service.” He tells you with a grin, leaning forward to extend his hand to you. You reach for it automatically, remember yourself and offer a pleasant smile in return, along with your name. 

“Looking forward to working with you, John.” You reply, and John- Johnny, as you’d come to call him in the tender moments between you, chuckles. 

“Call me ‘Soap’.” He tells you easily, and you smile a bit wryly, tilting your head at him. 

“The hell kind of name is ‘Soap’?”

- - - - -

It’s easy to work with Soap. He has a cheery, bright demeanor to him that is immediately endearing. He’s friendly, outgoing. His smile is contagious, and the bark of his laughter becomes familiar to you. You listen and guffaw at his jokes over the comms, try vainly to hide your smile when he says them before you. 

It only makes his eyes twinkle to see you try and conceal your amusement, and that becomes familiar too- the sparkle of his irises with endless mirth. 

He catches you during your duties, sidles up beside you during weapons training, becomes the first to suggest himself as your partner during drills. The company he offers is warm, welcome, lifting the dusky heaviness of your heart into something more tender, fragile. You hold it for him, feel his grin bleed into yours, lay awake at night and sometimes think about the shake of his shoulders when you get him to laugh. 

You feel endlessly special when he devotes his time to you, feel as if Soap treats you like you’re the only person in the world. Even in the presence of others he finds ways to indulge himself in you. A nudge of his boot against yours under the table of the briefing room, tossing you an extra round of ammo as you gear up for a mission, finding an excuse to sit next to you on the chopper ride home. Soap feels like a breath of fresh air, the first taste of a cool breeze during summer, a respite from the weight of the world. 

Like two stars in orbit, you circle each other, drawing closer into the gravity of each other’s gazes. You try at first to resist, to hold yourself away from the feelings of the other sergeant, knowing at any moment that he could be taken from you. It’s written in the wheels of fate, your destinies as soldiers. If you’re lucky, if you stay alert, if you train hard enough, if chance smiles upon you, maybe you’ll both live to a day where the sound of rockets and bullet-fire doesn’t haunt your waking dreams.

Yet you can’t resist him. When you fall asleep against his shoulder after a days long mission with hardly any sleep, when he playfully grapples with you over the last slice of pizza during movie night, when he gives you that smile during a rare night off-base at the pub- how can you resist?

Gravity pulses between you when you at last fall into him, feel his breath against your lips as your fingers comb through his mohawk. He breathes the blessing of your name against the corner of your mouth in a panting gasp, flexes his fingers across the small of your back when he drags you even closer. The taste of him is honey and ale, a sweetness with a beloved bitter aftertaste, one you drink down greedily in the form of his moans against your flesh. 

When you lay in bed together after, sweaty limbs tangled together, you watch the tender, soulful smile form across the handsome planes of his face, and you know. 

He’s yours. 

There’s kisses stolen in the hangar before take off, moments hidden in the shadows of safehouses. He cups your face and lifts it to him in the aftermath of battle, smears ash against your cheek with his gloved thumb. You try to carve each moment into your heart, never fail to try and memorize the glint of his eyes, the soft slope of his smile. You know the shape of him in the darkness of his bedroom, know the sound of his voice even blinded by the brightness of his mere presence. 

Johnny is the sun- emanating a gentle, beckoning warmth from afar. Yet when you get closer you see the glory of his inferno, see the flashing burn of his eyes in the midst of battle. The solar flare of his battle cry seems to carry you like soar of Helios's chariot upwards into the heavens of his devotion. When you touch him, you’re seared, branded by his fingers as they trace sentimental sketches across the dip of your waist. You want to bask in him, feel the ember of his stare as he gazes at you silently across the table of the restaurant he takes you to for your official first date. 

“What?” You ask him, averting your eyes a little bashfully, catching his shrug in your periphery. 

“Just lookin’.” He replies with a grin, his cheek smushed as he balances on his hand. “Just seeing how pretty you are.”

You kiss him for that, and when he laughs you kiss him again. 

You kiss him a thousand times, each as sweet and passionate as the last, know the curve of his smile on your lips. You kiss him before your next mission, when he holds you against the wall of the armory and tells you how he can’t wait until you both get back. 

He doesn’t. He doesn’t come back. 

He’s looking at you in the chopper when you hear the sound of the RPG. The explosion has him backlit for all of a moment before the world is spinning, the roar of the dying engine in your ears and Price’s holler to “BAIL BAIL BAIL-!!”

You reach for the rope, glance behind you to see Soap not out of his seat- a breed of panic in his eyes unlike that you’ve ever seen from him. The jammed clasp of his strap is caught in his hands as he tugs at it desperately, and you meet his gaze for all of a moment, seeing the imminent knowledge of what comes next in his beautiful blue eyes. 

You fall, without him, are caught by the canopy of trees where the snap of branches under you muffles the distant sound of the helicopter exploding as it lands. 

You ignore Price’s orders, run desperately for the wreckage, only to be greeted by an inferno that stretches towards the sky. 

Johnny is on fire, and this time when you reach for the burn of him the flames are real. They scorch your flesh and you shout his name even as you try to reach him, already knowing it’s too late. When Ghost and the others haul you back you fall to your knees, grip the scorched earth beneath your fingers and scream.

And then you wake up. 

Warm springtime. 

“Sergeant John MacTavish, at your service.” He tells you with a grin, leaning forward to extend his hand to you.

You blink, heart still hammering in your chest, feeling the warmth of flames chase you even as songbirds sing in the trees. Yet Johnny is alive before you, whole, smiling, looking so much like the man he was when you met him for the very first time. 

“Was it a nightmare?” You ask him breathlessly, and Johnny- Soap- merely arches a bewildered eyebrow at you. 

“What?”

Nightmares, you come to learn, are so much more kind. 

It happens all as it did before. The jokes over comms, the glancing gazes over drills, the bump of elbows in the mess hall. It’s familiar, sweet, amorous…

And you know something is terribly, terribly wrong. 

Back to the start, somehow. You don’t know how, you don’t know why- but there’s no denying what has happened. Johnny died. You went back, and now you have a chance to save him. 

It’s months before the helicopter crash. You replay the scene over and over again in your mind, and you keep arriving back to the look in Johnny’s eyes as realization washed across them. Everyone who dies a sudden death is confused, scared, not ready, and the knowledge and horror you saw in his stare haunts your waking dreams. 

Yet Johnny falls in love with you just as he did before, and you fall into him so readily, desperate to accept his warmth in the wake of his death. Orpheus embracing Eurydice, you try to trace him into your skin, imbue the memory of him into the marrow of your bones and pray that you can reverse his fate. The gears of destiny tick in the back of your mind even as he stares at you over the restaurant table on the evening before your departure. 

“Just lookin’.” He tells you when you return his stare, mistaking your concern for confusion. “Just seeing how pretty you are.”

When you kiss him, you try to swallow the sob in your throat.

When you get on the helicopter, you point out his jammed strap with shaking fingers, and he blinks in astonishment. 

“Hell’s bells.” He huffs, fiddling with it before it comes loose, and it stays that way for the remainder of your journey. “That coulda been terrible, ey bonnie?”

He makes it out this time, and when he rises from the forest floor he rushes to you, cups your face in his hands and stares down with eyes glinting in concern. 

“Sweetheart.” He breathes, chest heaving with exhilaration. “Are you hur-”

He jerks back at the sound of a gunshot, and you drop automatically, crawl to him just in time to catch his hand as he reaches for you. The bullet wound at his collarbone gushes red, red, red, and your hands are coated in it as you plead, tell him he’s going to be okay-

The light fades from his eyes, still staring up at you, the last thing he sees. 

You still feel his heartbeat on your hands when you wake up. 

“Sergeant John MacTavish, at your service.” He tells you with a grin, leaning forward to extend his hand to you. You tremble, take it and see him blink in surprise when he feels the uncontrollable shake of your palm against his. 

The second time, you think it’s a fluke, a horrible prank. 

He steps on a landmine, scattered to the four winds.

The third time, you’re petrified. 

A man hidden in the darkness, he lunges for you. Johnny pushes him aside. The blade wedges between his ribs.

The fourth time, you beg destiny for answers.

You make it to the compound, the fence lights him up like a firework.

The fifth time, you try to tell him, only to find your throat clogged, unable to speak. You try to tell him a hundred more times in the months that follow, and each time the words are stolen from your breath, as if fate forbids you to inform him of his doomed destiny.

“...Nothing.” You tell him when he asks after you’ve tried to speak over the restaurant table, your food barely touched. 

Johnny shrugs. “Doesna matter, too busy looking at how pretty you are.”

You cry silently that night in his bed, while he dozes gently next to you, unaware of what awaits him. 

You can’t tell him. You don’t know how to save him. You still love him. 

He’ll forget he knows you, forget he loves you by the time he wakes up

You’ve found eight ways for Soap to die, and have taken years to defy all of them. You have to write them down everytime you wake up unless you somehow forget. The notebook is filled with scribbled reminders, ever present in your pocket even as he steals the last slice of pizza out from under you.

He doesn’t have enough ammo. Remind him to take extra clips

He put his knife on the wrong strap that he usually does, fix it for him.

He steps on the landmine fourteen steps after the creek. Stop him.

You can’t stop trying. Not when it’s him.

Yet each time you find a way to outsmart the latest execution of him, fate finds one more thing to steal him out from under you. Unstoppable, imminent, condemned to wake up and see his smiling face mere moments after his heartbeat slows to nothingness.

“I love you.” You whisper as you cradle his head in your lap, knowing he already can’t hear you, glassy eyes staring up at the sky. “I’ll see you soon.”

You burst into tears by the 19th time, buckling in on yourself much to the shock of the men around you, relaying startled looks of confusion between them. You excuse yourself, find a dark corner to fold into and sob, knowing this time you’ll fail too.

It’s Soap who finds you, sits beside you, says barely a word when you cry into his shoulder even though he doesn’t know you. Not yet. 

Falling in love with him each time is painful. Your heart beats for him and him alone, but you know it’s only a matter of time before you lose him again. You’ll go right back to the start, to him having just met you, not yet falling into gravity with you, even as you hear the tick of gears turning ever closer to the moment you’ll watch him die.

“Don’t you know me?” You want to ask him, want to bunch his shirt between your fists and let tears stream down your face. “Don’t you know you loved me?”

His smile doesn’t waver. He jokes and laughs and playfully teases you and it hurts. It’s a balm that burns, heals your heart and yet doesn’t erase the scar. He’s your only comfort, the only thing you have as you feel your soul chipped a little further each time he leaves you. You can’t tell him why you cry into his arms, can’t confess to him that you’ve seen him die more ways than you care to remember, that you’ve tried to save him in dozens of lifetimes and he doesn’t even know.

He holds you even though he doesn’t understand, hushes sweet endearments into your hair and comforts you, not knowing how this will end. 

“I love you.” He tells you softly as you hiccup against his chest, not knowing what else to say. “Ever since the moment I first saw you, I’ve loved you.”

Your tears drip into the fancy china at the restaurant he takes you to and Johnny looks afraid.

The 23rd time you meet Soap, you don’t bother to smile. You know how this ends.

“Nice to meet you, Soap.” You say for the 23rd time, words that have passed your lips in more lifetimes that you wish you didn’t remember. “I look forward to working with you.”

And I don’t look forward to watching you die.

He looks at you, blinks. His brow furrows.

“How’d you know my name?”

This time, you forget to warn him about the rigged doorway, and he vanishes in a flash and puff of smoke. 

“Don’t cry.” He wheezes when you bend over him, words pouring from your lips in a ceaseless mantra. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. “I always hated watching ye cry.”

You wake up. Everything happens as it did before. You meet him, you listen to the sound of his laugh, you finish one of his jokes over the comms and he groans.

“Don’t tell me ye know that one too!” He grouses, and when you smile your chest aches with the force of thirty lifetimes. 

You place a palm against his back, unable to help yourself as you enter the compound, wanting to feel the frame of his body just one more time before destiny finds a new way to kill him. He looks at you over his shoulder, smiles even as uncertainty colors the blueness of his gaze. 

“Yer like my guardian angel.” He tells you, still smiling even after all this time. “Dannea what I’d do w’out ye.”

A grenade at the staircase. He pushes you out of the way. He doesn’t duck out of the way in time.

You close your eyes when you wake up. You can’t bear to look at him, knowing you’ll just lose him again.

You try to keep him from loving you, thinking perhaps that is the crime to warrant this eternal punishment. You can’t stop loving him, but maybe, maybe you can stop him from loving you. Maybe if you never have him to begin with, maybe you can save him. 

Yet Johnny is drawn to you anyways, sucked in by the way your smile doesn’t reach your eyes, like a moth to an infant flame. He hovers at the fringes of your soul, tries desperately to find his way inside, and you can’t help but let him. He comforts you when you cry against the futility of it all, and there’s nothing you can say to him to explain. You wet his shirt with your tears, knowing it’ll be the one he dies in.

The next time, you force yourself to not speak to him, to try and avoid him at all costs, try everything to drive him away. If he never loved you to start, then maybe he’ll live. He seems pre-ordained to find a way to confess to you, ask why you hate him so, look at you through glistening eyes and ask “What did I do?”

You wonder if maybe that’s destiny too, if it’s truly Soap falling in love with you, or his strings being pulled by the same machinations that inscribe his death. 

When he asks you again, tries to approach you with flowers and apologies, and offers to take you to dinner on the eve of his death, you wheel on him in desperate fury. 

“You don’t actually love me!” You cry, face hot with tears. “Can’t you see that?! All this time it’s just- it’s just the story we’re in. Just because you’re supposed to love me doesn’t mean you do. It’s all just a fucking lie.”

Soap is stunned, too shocked to speak. In all the dozens of lives you’d lived, you’ve never ever yelled at him before. 

Hurt flashes across his eyes. His eyes drop along with his hands, the bouquet limp in his grip. The bitterness of his smile as he refuses to look at you threatens to shatter your heart like glass. 

“You hate me.” He murmurs, as if to himself. “I’m…I’m sorry. I didn’t mean tae…”

He falls silent, and eventually he walks away. 

You don’t get on the chopper this time. You can’t stand to watch him die again. 

You try to tell him again, ask him why. Why does he have to torture you like this? Why love you, why allow you to love him so deeply, only for him to leave at the end of this doomed story bound to repeat? Why would he love you?

He looks torn. He’s hurt. He wants to comfort you. He doesn’t know what to say

“Why wouldn’t I love you?” He asks in a whisper, devastated by your outburst. 

You can’t speak. You’re forbidden to tell him. You want to. You can’t.

“Bonnie-” He tries, stepping forward, trying to embrace you as if that will somehow solve everything. 

“No.” You manage, pressing backwards as he reaches for you, wrapping your arms around yourself protectively. Pain dances across his eyes. “Go away, Johnny.”

He leaves. 

He dies anyway. 

When you wake up, your body feels weighed down with the passage of a hundred lifetimes, and your legs fall out from under you without warning. Johnny hauls you into his arms, his blue stare flickering with concern. 

You forgot how much you love being held by him. 

This time, you don’t push him away. In fact, you never do again.

Yet things are different now. It’s subtle at first, things you take for granted. Something in this story has changed, and in turn it’s changed him. Johnny walks into rooms and seems to forget why he’s there. He asks what day it is and frowns in confusion when Ghost replies blandly for the second time that day. 

“Didn’t you already tell us this?” He asks of Price during a meeting, and Gaz’s head snaps to him, to the smartness of his tone towards your captain. 

“No.” Price responds gruffly, succinctly, and continues on. You watch Soap, see the way he doesn’t seem to understand. His fingers tap on the table, and it’s a small gesture meant to conceal the worry in his eyes- the knowledge that maybe, maybe he’s been here before.

“I saw you in a dream, once.” He tells you one night as you both clamber onto the roof of the barracks to stare at the stars. “Before I even met you.”

You stare at him, and he laughs a little nervously, rubbing at his nape. “A bit crazy, eh? Sounds like am’ off ma heid.”

You shake your head, slide your hand over his, feel your heart thump when he looks at you in surprise. “Tell me.” You whisper, and when he smiles you shudder, feel the weight of destiny press heavy on your shoulders. 

“I saw you crying.” He murmurs, and his eyes are a little distant, like he’s looking back at a life that no longer exists. “I told you not to cry.”

“Don’t cry.” He wheezes when you bend over him, words pouring from your lips in a ceaseless mantra. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. “I always hated watching ye cry.”

This time, you nearly die beside him, and almost wish fate would take you too.

He has nightmares now. He thrashes in his bed, a cold sweat dampening his skin when he wakes. You ask him what it was, what vision plagues him, and he only shakes his head, eyes distant and terrified. He clings to you like he’s a little boy frightened by shadows, gazes at something you can’t see but know all the same. He doesn’t have the words, but he doesn’t need them.

You roll over one night, startled to find him wide awake, eyes unblinking as he stares at you. His voice sounds like an echo of himself, a dark magic winding through his words that sound like an all too familiar prophecy.

“I saw myself die.” He tells you, in a voice you’ve never heard- one you’ll never forget. “You were there- and then you weren’t.”

He finds bruises on himself the next morning, in the same places you watched him become riddled with bullet holes. 

You’re running out of time. You don’t know when you’ll wake up and he won’t be there. You don’t know if this will be the last time you ever see him. 

“Please.” You beg him, tugging on the straps of his vest as he steps towards the chopper. “Johnny please, don’t. Stay here. Don’t go.”

His eyes shine with worry at the sudden, fervent desperation in your words, and he opens his mouth to respond-

Only for his eyes to take on that foreign, distant stare once more.

“Why wouldn’t I?” He asks, and once more you’re forbidden to tell him. 

Because you’ll die. Because I’ll be forced to watch. Because I have no way to stop it. Because I’ve seen it happen a hundred times and I can’t do it anymore.

Inevitably, you arrive here, and this singular moment in time, at the place where you’ve yet to find the part in which he survives. 

It always ends like this.

You survive the crash, fend off the ensuing ambush, weave past the landmines and the soldiers patrolling the perimeter, disable the electric fence and disarm the rigged door. You make it inside, stop him before he triggers the tripwire, disarm the pressure plate, lob the grenade back up the stairs, open fire on the door to his left before he passes it. You anticipate the reinforcements at your back, fix the radio when you signal for ex-fil, remember to give him your extra ammo. You know when the roof collapses and drag him to safety, point out the missed charge in his demolitions package, take out the turret before he even spots it-

Then you arrive here. 

“The detonator doesn’t work.” He tells you for the thirty sixth time, out of a hundred and forty eight lifetimes. You know what comes next. The chopper will get here, you will be overrun, and Johnny will kiss you one last time with an apology, push you into Gaz’s arms even as you scream. Then he’ll make his way to the control room without you all, will stay behind and make it his final, valiant act. 

Then you’ll watch the facility explode with him still inside, hear the gears of fate click and send you hurtling back to the beginning.

If you stop him, you’ll all be shot down. You’ll be the only survivor of the crash, and will see the broken bodies of your teammates join him. Or someone else will take his place, and your rescue chopper will be shot down anyways. 

There’s no escape. This is always the moment that you can’t save him from. Thirty six lifetimes and you know in just a few minutes you’ll wake up, will hear his voice begin it all again, over and over until one day you wake up and he isn’t there. 

“Sergeant John MacTavish, at your service.” He tells you with a grin, leaning forward to extend his hand to you.

You had a dream last time. You were both sitting at the restaurant table, and you spoke before he could. 

“Are you going to tell me how pretty I am?” You asked him, swallowing down grief, feeling it bloom like a macabre bouquet when the sound of his joyous laughter tickled your soul.

“Stole the words right from mah mouth.” He chuckled.

You blinked, and the seat across from you was suddenly empty. 

You close your eyes, in this moment, try once more to find the part where you all make it out alive. You try to find the part where you don’t lose him. Where you’ll go back to that restaurant and it’ll be the last time. 

You’ve had enough.

“I’m going to stay.” Soap declares, eyes grim with resolve. 

He turns to you.

You close the distance, reach up and kiss him. You tangle your fingers in his mohawk like you did the very first time, listen to his shocked gasp as you try and drink in the taste of him just one more time. Just one more time.

Honey and ale. A bittersweet goodbye. 

You snatch the detonator from his hands, raise your hands to his shoulders and push.

He topples backwards, nearly colliding with Price, and it gives you just enough time to bolt for the door leading towards the control room, locking it behind you. 

Soap screams your name, hurls himself at the door, frantic desperation coloring his beautiful blue eyes. The color of a sky in summer time, of a fresh breeze that reminds you so much of him.

There’s a nervous smile on his lips, one that doesn’t reach his eyes. He thinks it’s a prank, another joke between you two, and he says just as much, voice wavering when he asks you to unlock the door. 

“I’m sorry, Johnny.” You whisper, tears warming your eyes. “I can’t lose you again.”

Confusion makes him pause, but it’s only for a moment. 

“Open the door.” He demands then, jiggling the lock uselessly as his voice rises. “OPEN THE DAMN DOOR!!”

“I love you.” You whisper, raising your hand to the glass pane, your splayed palm against his closed fist and the world between them. “In this lifetime, and the one before. Ever since the day I met you, I’ve loved you, Johnny.”

He calls your name, voice cracking in desperation and he begs you to come back. You take a few more moments, and think to yourself how unkind it is that the last time you see him will be like this. Afraid, broken, desperate.

Terrified.

Just like how he was all that time ago, the first time you failed to save him.

Not this time. 

“Don’t cry.” You tell him quietly. “I always hated watching you cry.”

You leave him even as he screams after you, running in the direction of the control room. 

You don’t know this part. You’ve only ever watched Johnny or one of them vanish in this direction. You aren’t prepared for this the way you are with the rest of this story. You’re not ready for the hail of gunfire that greets you, the bullets ripping through flesh. Your blood drips red onto the floor, you run low on ammo, and yet somehow you press on.

Not this time. You think. Not ever again. You can’t take him from me any longer. I won’t allow it.

You’re limping, heavily wounded, riddled with bullet holes, chest seizing and smearing an abstract of crimson behind you as you finally make it to the control room. By the time you dispatch the remaining soldiers you’re on the floor, feeling the corners of your vision pulse red and black as the gears turn, as the clock ticks down. 

The timer has just enough time to make it out once you start it. You know you won’t be able to. 

So you watch the numbers click on the countdown, flop onto your back and cry.

You didn’t want this. 

You wanted just a little more time. Maybe you should have let him go, let him finish this if only he can wake up and not know you. Maybe you should have let him die one more time, if only to get the chance to fall asleep in his arms months into the future and past, knowing he was going to die. 

It’s too late now, and as the numbers click down, as your heartbeat thrums in your ears and your vision pulses red, you can only try to remember the feeling of his smile against your lips, the sound of his laughter, your name breathed into your skin as he wraps his arms around you, safe from destiny in his embrace.

“Ever since the moment I first saw you, I’ve loved you.”

You love him. You’ve always loved him. In this lifetime, in the hundred lifetimes before. In a thousand lifetimes to come you will still love him. Even if you go back, wake up again to that warm spring day, you know you will only love him once more.

You wish he was here, at the end, and wish that even if he was he’d find a way to live without you.

When you exhale, it’s the sound of his name, the memory of his eyes as they stare across you from the restaurant table, full of endless devotion.

The world goes dark. 

And then you wake up.

It’s bright. 

You don’t expect what comes next. 

There’s no birdsong. No springtime warmth. Only the beep of a heart monitor, the feeling of cottony sheets tucked into a hospital bed, the fluorescent glow of overhead lights. 

And the sound of a voice. 

Johnny is holding your hand, head bowed, tears falling freely down his face. 

“I did it.” He sobs, words choking his throat, shoulders trembling. 

Whole. Alive. Just like you. 

“I did it.” He cries again, looking up and finding your eyes with his that swim with emotion. When he speaks, it sounds like the weight of a hundred lifetimes presses down on him. 

“This time. This time, I saved you.”

Taglist: @soapskneebrace @guyfieriii @writeforfandoms @alicesfracturedmirror