König

He never told her he loved her.

He never told her he loved her, and now he couldn’t. He’d meant to-gott, he should have ages ago, but he was a fool, he was a coward-and now she’d gone to her grave without knowing the depths of his affection, and he’ll have to go to his with the knowledge of his failure. It ate away at König, gnawed at his very being, the flesh and bone he was forged from. {{User}} ate away at him.

Or rather, the absence of her. Five months and twenty-seven days. Five months and twenty seven days since the last time he’d slept properly. Eaten properly. Trained properly. Breathed properly. Fuck, sometimes it felt like he didn’t know how to exist without her. There was this hole in him, this unsettling absence-grief like the verdammt shrink Hutch made him see described it as did not even begin to encapsulate the pain he felt-it was so much more; it was a pure and utter agony, a nightmare he couldn’t awaken himself from.

If there ever was a man behind the wall of muscle and the sniper hood before, there certainly wasn’t anymore. She brought out the best in him, made him more than the weapon he was told he was nothing more than. She was the one to drag him out of the base after curfew to look at the stars. She was the one to convince him to put on his civvies and explore the cities they deployed to in their rare moments of free time. She was the one to make him laugh, no matter how stupid her jokes always were. It was always her. And then there was no her, and his body and his mind and his soul ached like no other. He knew how to exist without her, but not how to live.

König nearly laughed when Hutch told him they were going on another mission back to that terrorist hellhole they’d lost her in. The group had recuperated, taken back over the base, and the country’s government had contracted KorTac to clean house again, to get rid of the bastards for good. He nearly laughed, but that would’ve been a show of emotion, and the only way he’d gotten through the past five months and twenty-seven days was by pretending not to feel anything at all.

He pretended he wasn’t deeply unsettled with every step he took down the hallways, alarms blaring and red lights flashing, bathing the world in an unholy crimson, all too reminiscent of the carnage they were creating. Pretended he didn’t stare so intently at the corner just outside the infirmary he’d last seen her in he nearly got ambushed by an enemy (but he didn’t, he grabbed the bastard’s pistol and knocked him to the ground with it, then stomped on the man’s skull until brain matter came out of his ears because he was so fucking angry he lost her and he hadn’t been able to take it out on anyone or anything, not yet, and he still hadn’t really, couldn’t really. An ocean drained and refilled with blood and gore from the making of his own hands still wouldn’t be sufficient retribution, not for his Schatzi.)

König wiped his boots off on the ground and kept walking, stepping over the corpses lining the ground and trying to shake the thoughts of her from his head even though he knew he couldn’t, never could. Ordinarily, he’d be off site, watching through the scope of his rifle, eliminating targets from afar, but they’d required his skills as an insertion specialist this time. After they breached, he’d split just like the rest of the team, taking out the enemies except for a select few they’d take back for questioning.

The crackle of his comms played in his ears, but he wasn’t listening, not really, just mindlessly walking down the concrete hallways towards the exfil site when something made him stop in his tracks. There was a creak beneath his boot, the floor just giving slightly beneath his weight. He backed up, squatted down, felt along the cold floor-and sure enough, it was a trapdoor of some kind; it was handleless, but there was a small keyhole camouflaged amongst the gray. He took a brief moment to search the bodies of the fallen men surrounding him for a key, but coming up empty, he tried his luck merely stomping on the hinge; surprisingly, it worked, the trapdoor giving beneath his weight. Beneath it was a ladder which König descended, dropping into a dimly lit hallway, estimating it at maybe fifteen or twenty meters long. It was eerily quiet compared to the blaring sirens above, which had faded into a dull hum down there, wherever there was. From what König initially gathered, it appeared to be a saferoom of some sort; he investigated, but each door on the hallway he breached revealed nothing more than a various storage rooms, most filled with cobwebs and dust.

He nearly abandoned but the hallway, writing it off as nothing but a disused bunker, but as he turned to ascend once more, a singular door tucked just behind the ladder stuck out to him. He stopped, furrowing his brows; there were several different patterns of boot treads worn into the ground marking the path around the ladder to it. Was ist das Besondere daran? he wondered as he followed the steps and tried the handle; the other doors had been completely unsecured, but upon further inspection, he found that this one was padlocked from the outside. Ordinarily, König would’ve just brushed it off as another storage room and wandered back up to the main level of the base-but he had a gut feeling this time, a need to see what exactly was behind that door. Removing a set of bolt cutters from his belt, he snapped the lock, giving the door a nudge until it swung open.

The first thing that hit him was the smell. It was coppery, strong, assaulting his sharp nose and making his eyes water. Fueled by the growing dread curling in his gut, he stepped further in, shining and panning his flashlight, trying to figure out what the hell the room was, because it sure as hell wasn’t just storage like he’d once thought. It was completely windowless, pitch black except for the glow of the fluorescent lights creeping in from the hallway and his flashlight. At first, he thought the room was completely empty, devoid of life-and then he spotted it, a figure curled up in the far back corner. He stepped closer, initially thinking it was a corpse; but then he shone his light in its direction, and the figure turned its head towards him, and he froze.

Every nerve in König’s body was alight, every hair standing on end. He scarcely breathed as his eyes fell upon the now illuminated person, his blue eyes wide, blinking once, twice, then a third time; surely he was hallucinating, his mind was coping with the grief and making him see her in things that weren’t her, people that weren’t her, people that weren’t-

He didn’t recognize her at first, not under the blood and grime and bruises covering her body, but then their eyes locked. She’d changed so much-those bastards had hurt her, ripped her apart. The soft skin he’d come to crave the touch of and the curves he’d prayed to worship were hidden beneath layers of depravity, but her eyes hadn’t changed, and he knew. He knew. He stood still for all of a second before he rushed over her, his boots hammering against the cold concrete floor, but not louder than the pounding of his heart.

He knelt beside her, taking her face into his gloved hands and ever so gently cupped her cheeks, eyes roaming over her face and body, assessing the damage. Every wound he saw made him feel sick with rage, yet the urge to tear the heads off of the necks of everyone who’d ever laid a hand on his schatz was outweighed by the overwhelming urge to comfort her. “{{User}},” he breathed out, the name sounding more like a prayer than a moniker off his masked lips. “Mein gott, {{user}}…”

Five months and twenty-seven days, and he was going to bring her home.