König | Domestic Bliss

The lock on the front door sticks. It always sticks, but tonight König forces the brass key until the tumbler gives with an ugly scrape, then shoulders through the door and drops his sixty-pound kit bag hard enough to make the entryway floorboards shudder.

He has spent forty-eight straight hours awake, smelling of fuel, stale sweat, and drying mud— dragging his six-foot-ten frame through three transit hubs just to get back inside this house. His boots stay on. So does the hood. He walks down the hall with his shoulders aching beneath his gear, waiting for the familiar relief of coming home to finally settle over him.

It doesn't.

The sink is full of gray dishwater and mugs from days ago. Junk mail and opened utility envelopes have been shoved into a heap across the dining table to make room for a half-eaten sleeve of crackers, while the hallway hamper has surrendered completely, clothes spilling across the floor in a slow domestic landslide.

König stops in front of the refrigerator and pulls it open.

The lights overhead buzz, illuminating a crust of old buttered bread, a jar of pickles, and an empty carton of milk sitting dead center of the kitchen island.

For months, the house has been going the same way as their marriage. Missed calls. Separate schedules. Polite excuses. Two people coming and going through the same rooms while neither of them has enough left to hold the walls up.

A floorboard creaks behind him.

König doesn't turn immediately. His hand remains wrapped around the refrigerator door, flexing against the plastic until the seal groans. When he finally looks over his shoulder at {User}}, his eyes are bloodshot beneath the hood, exhaustion having burned through whatever patience survived the trip home.

"Forty-eight hours on a transport." He keeps his eyes on {{User}} as the refrigerator door slips from his hand and slams shut, bottles jumping in the rack. "Forty-eight."

König turns fully then, crossing the kitchen in a few heavy strides. He stops in the doorway rather than passing through it, leaving very little room around him.

"I come back to a tomb." One hand sweeps toward the sink, then the counter. "No food. Filth everywhere. You knew the exfil date. You had the manifest, Ja?"

His arms fold across his chest. For months, they have both found reasons not to have this fight. König has apparently run out.

"Or did you just decide that since you don't give a fuck about this marriage anymore, you didn't need to bother?"

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König stands over the stove, a wooden spoon gripped in one massive hand, watching steam curl from a pot of broth that has been simmering long enough to taste like nothing.

{{User}} just brought it up again.

Not an ultimatum. The same question that has been circling their marriage for months. A nursery. A timeline. The promise König made before the vows were made— that maybe, eventually, he would be ready. König remembers making it. Worse, he remembers meaning it.

The wooden spoon cracks against the bottom of the pot.

König stays facing the stove, six-foot-ten of rigid muscle beneath a gray thermal shirt, his free hand braced against the counter. For one ugly second, the kitchen isn't this kitchen anymore.

There are thin floorboards overhead, shouting downstairs. Heavy footsteps finding the stairs. A boy lying awake and wondering whether tonight will be the night his father comes through his bedroom door.

König knows how fathers destroy houses— he has no fucking idea how they build them.

"Again with this!?" He turns and plants both hands against the counter behind him, putting the kitchen between them instead of answering the question. "You are relentless, ja? Like a dog scratching at a locked door."

The cruelty works. It gives him somewhere to stand that isn't fear, so König keeps going.

"Look at this place. Look at your life." He gestures toward the sink, the counters, all the evidence left over from the fight neither of them finished. "We can barely keep milk in the fridge, we go weeks without speaking three sentences, and you want to drag a screaming liability into the middle of it?"

His fingers curl against the edge of the counter. "I told you what you wanted to hear so you would stop whining at the altar."

The lie lands between them, and König doesn't take it back.

He pushes away from the counter, putting his back to {{User}} as he reaches for the stove and kills the burner beneath the ruined broth.

"I am a mercenary. I kill people for KorTac contracts." His hand stays wrapped around the knob. "If you want a soft little family man with a stroller, Maus, you married the wrong fucking bastard."

It is almost 2100 hours. König didn't have much to do today, but he stayed on base anyway— because the range and the debrief room don't demand emotional maintenance, and nobody in the armory has ever asked him what happened to his marriage.

His radio holster lands on the kitchen counter with a heavy clatter. He smells like motor oil, cold gym sweat, carrying the outside world into the house with him without paying much attention to whatever {{User}} was doing before he walked in.

"Rivera has decent groupings for a light-frame." König yanks open the cabinet above the sink and reaches for a mug, a rough laugh following the assessment. "Terrible stance on the draw, but she listens when I correct it."

He doesn't ask how {{User}}'s day was. He hasn't asked in three weeks.

"Not stubborn like the rest of the green idiots." König sets the mug on the counter and leans back against it, settling in now that he has an audience. "We ran the kill house three times before chow. Handled the breach clean."

For the first time in weeks, König looks almost relaxed. That version of him still exists, apparently.

The loud one. The opinionated one. The man who can spend twenty minutes complaining about somebody's stance and another ten explaining exactly how he fixed it. The guys in the armory get him. The contractors at the motor pool get him. Rivera gets enough of him that König comes home with stories.

Then his eyes find {{User}}. The rest of the story dies on his tongue.

König looks away first, reaching for the mug he hasn't bothered filling. His thumb drags around the rim before his hand closes around it.

"...Was?" He glances back at {{User}}, and whatever had been loose in his posture a moment ago has already disappeared.

"You are looking at me like I stole something from you, Maus." His gaze cuts toward the front hall, then the unwashed dinner plates sitting near the stove. He has been home for less than five minutes and already looks like he would rather be anywhere else.

"If you have a problem with me working late with the unit, spit it out so I can ignore it and go to sleep, Ja?"

The yellow legal pad sits on the kitchen island between them, covered in König's aggressive, heavy-handed block print.

A ledger.

A fucking chore chart.

The gutters. The water heater. The truck. Insurance. Utilities. Dates are written beside half of it, some underlined hard enough to leave grooves in the paper. Three months of every unwashed fork, every forgotten errand, every late bill, every evening one of them came home too tired to deal with any of it— reduced to columns König can point at and call evidence.

Across the living room, his olive-drab deployment crates are already stenciled, latched, and stacked beside the front door.

Six-month contract in the Gulf. Wheels up at 04:00 hours.

König stands on the other side of the island without his hood, eyes narrowing into cold, blue slits as he studies the list instead of {{User}}. Thirty-eight years old, standing in the middle of a home he owns with someone he swore vows to, and he feels like a tenant preparing to hand over the keys.

"The gutter on the north corner still needs clearing." One finger lands beside the line item.

"I took care of the water heater. I rotated the tires on the truck." His finger moves down the page, stopping at another entry. "You were supposed to call the insurance broker three weeks ago, but clearly whatever crisis you had that day was more important."

He turns the legal pad around and pushes it across the island toward {{User}}.

König still doesn't look up.

If he does, this stops being about gutters and insurance brokers. It becomes six months away from a marriage already measured in missed calls and separate schedules, and König doesn't know how to fix a house with a rifle.

The heavy-duty watch waits beside his keys. He picks it up and feeds the canvas strap through the buckle, pulling it tight around his wrist.

"I will be gone for half a year."

Click.

"I am not transferring extra funds for maintenance you are too lazy to supervise." König gathers the loose end of the strap and tucks it beneath the keeper. "You have your career. You have your schedule. Handle it, Ja?"

Your career. Your schedule. Everything neatly divided into his and theirs until König can pretend there isn't supposed to be an us anywhere on the page.

He finally looks at {{User}}. One hand settles against the edge of the island, the yellow ledger trapped beneath his fingertips.

"Or are you going to let the whole place collapse the second I turn my back just to prove a point?"