POV: Max
⸻
Pain I can handle.
The bullet barely grazed me — a clean tear across the shoulder. Nothing deep. Nothing permanent.
But the look on Nat's face when I hit the ground?
That's the part that won't leave me alone.
He wasn't scared of the courier.
He was scared for me.
And I don't know what to do with that.
⸻
The safehouse is quiet when we return. Lin's message was short: mission deemed incomplete. Courier escaped. Data corrupted. Debrief pending.
Translation: we failed.
I sit on the bathroom counter, shirt off, trying to clean the wound myself. I've done worse. Stitched myself up with a knife once. This is nothing.
Still, my hand trembles when I reach for the antiseptic.
Not from pain.
From him.
The door creaks open.
I don't look.
But I know it's Nat.
"I can do that," he says, voice low.
"I've got it."
Silence. Then footsteps.
He takes the bottle from my hand anyway. Doesn't ask again. Just starts dabbing gently at the blood. His fingers are warm. Too gentle.
I hate how careful he is.
"How bad does it hurt?" he asks.
"Doesn't."
He chuckles once, dry. "Of course it doesn't. You're not real, remember?"
I glance at him. Finally.
He's not smiling.
He's angry.
Not loud, not dramatic — just quietly shaken. Like he's still carrying the moment I took that bullet for him.
"You didn't have to do that," he says.
I stay quiet.
"I had it under control," he adds, more forcefully now.
"You didn't."
His hands freeze.
He meets my eyes.
And it's all there — confusion, anger, something too close to grief.
"Then why didn't you let me fall?" he asks.
I don't answer.
Because I don't know how to say:
Because watching you break would destroy something I didn't know I still had inside me.
So I lie.
Coldly. Cruelly.
"You're my mission, Nat. That's all."
He stares at me like I just hit him harder than the bullet ever did.
And then he leaves.
⸻
I sit there in the silence afterward, blood drying on my shoulder, heart louder than it should be.
And I wonder when this started to feel like more than survival.