König | Vermilion

[She Isn't Real / I Can't Make Her Real]

König wakes at 0347 hours with his face wet.

Not sweat. Tears. His chest heaves like he's been running, and for a moment, one cruel, suspended moment, he can still feel the phantom weight of a hand in his. Can still smell coffee brewing in a kitchen that doesn't exist, can still hear laughter that never was.

She isn't real.

The mantra comes automatic, bitter as gunpowder on his tongue. He scrubs his palms over his face, the t-shirt sniper hood tangled around his neck from thrashing in his sleep. Again. This is the fourth time this week he's woken like this, mourning someone who's never drawn breath outside his subconscious.

It started three months ago. Small at first: dreams of sitting across from someone at a table, the face always blurred, always just out of focus. Then it grew, evolved, metastasized into entire lifetimes compressed into eight-hour sleep cycles.

Waking up next to them, cooking breakfast while they read the paper, features obscured like frosted glass. Walking through autumn leaves, hand-in-hand with someone whose face his brain refuses to render. Making love to a ghost— feeling everything, the heat and weight and pleasure, but never seeing who.

It's driving him insane.

König sits on the edge of his bunk, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. His fingers shake. The dream tonight was particularly vivid: twenty years of marriage compressed into hours. Growing old together, dying together. He had felt their hand go slack in his as they—

I can't make her real, he thinks viciously, nails digging into his scalp. Because she doesn't fucking exist.

Except the grief is real, the longing is real. The way his heart physically aches like something's been carved out of his chest— that's devastatingly, humiliatingly real.

He doesn't go back to sleep. Can't. Instead, he hits the gym at 0430, runs until his lungs burn, lifts until his muscles scream. Anything to outrun the phantom sensation of a life he's never lived.

By 0800, he's showered, hooded, and standing in the KorTac briefing room trying to focus on the logistics coordinator droning about supply chains. His coffee tastes like ash. Everything does lately.

"—rotation includes three new transfers from the European division," the coordinator says. "Should be arriving at..."

The door opens.

König's head snaps up so fast his neck cracks, fabric of his hood tugging as it shifts over his skin.

And there, walking into the briefing room with a duffel slung over one shoulder, looking tired from travel and mildly annoyed about something— is {{User}}.

The world tilts.

König's coffee mug slips from nerveless fingers, hits the floor. Doesn't shatter— just rolls, spilling black liquid across linoleum. He doesn't notice, he can't, because every cell in his body just recognized something.

The way {{User}} moves, the angle of their jaw, the particular set of their shoulders. It's them.

Not similar. Not 'reminds him of.' Them. The person from his dreams. The faceless phantom he's been mourning every morning for three months. Except now they have features— real, solid, tangible features, and König's brain is in a frenzy, struggling to reconcile dream with reality.

She seems dressed in all the rings of past fatality.

His hands grip the edge of the table hard enough that the polished wood creaks. Ocean-blue eyes track {{User}}'s every movement with predatory focus, cataloging, memorizing. The way they shift their weight, how they scan the room, the exact timbre of their voice when they introduce themselves to the coordinator.

He knows that voice... has heard it say his name in a thousand dreams. Has heard it laugh, cry, moan, whisper I love you in the darkness of a life that never existed.

König realizes distantly that he's stopped breathing.

I can't make them real, his rational mind insists desperately. This is coincidence, pattern recognition. Your fucked-up brain latching onto the first person who fits the profile and—

König's entire body locks up as his eyes settle on theirs... and something clicks. It's not recognition— they've never met, couldn't have, this is the first time they have shared physical space. The sniper hood suddenly feels like it's strangling him.

You're insane, he tells himself. You're projecting a dream onto a stranger because you're lonely and broken and—

"König, you want to show the new transfers to their quarters?" The coordinator's voice cuts through his spiral.

Nein. Ja. Verdammt.

"Ja," he hears himself rasp, accent thicker than usual. His legs move on autopilot, carrying him toward where {{User}} stands.

All the pictures have all been washed in black, tattooed everything.

Everything before this moment feels faded and unreal, like his entire life was just prologue to this— standing in a fluorescent-lit briefing room, staring at someone who shouldn't exist outside his dreams, and knowing with a certainty that defies logic that he's been looking for them his entire life.

"Follow me, bitte," König manages, his voice scraped raw and the accent soft. He doesn't wait for confirmation, just turns and walks, every nerve screaming at him to turn back around, to look at them, to confirm they're still there and solid and real. Behind him, he hears {{User}}'s footsteps, real footsteps, not dream-conjured, not phantom.

I won't let this build up inside of me.

Too late, it's already built. Three months of dreaming and grieving and now they're here and König has no idea how to process the fact that his subconscious apparently predicted a person before they existed in his reality. Or maybe he's completely losing his fucking mind.

[Washed in Black]

König doesn't sleep anymore.

Hasn't, not really, not since Kyiv. Since the extraction went sideways and half the team made it to the secondary rendezvous and half didn't. Since he watched the building collapse through his scope, dust and smoke billowing into the winter sky, and {{User}}'s comms went dead mid-sentence.

"—taking fire, need cover on the east—"

Then nothing, only static, then silence.

That was four months ago.

Four months of KorTac listing {{User}} as MIA, then— after six weeks of no contact, no body, no trace, quietly updating the designation to KIA. Four months of König going through the motions like a ghost, running ops with mechanical precision, coming back to base and staring at the wall of his quarters until dawn.

Four months of wearing the hair tie he found in {{User}}'s locker. Small, black, ordinary. He keeps it around his wrist beneath his glove where no one can see. Where he can feel it against his skin when he finishes paperwork or reaches to make a cup of coffee.

All the pictures have all been washed in black, tattooed everything.

That's what it feels like. Every memory before {{User}} has faded to grey, and every memory with them is too vivid, too sharp— etched into his brain in excruciating detail. The way they laughed at his terrible jokes, how they took their coffee, the scar on their knuckle from a training accident... the exact timbre of their voice saying his call-sign.

He should have said something. Should have told them— what exactly? That they had burrowed under his skin like shrapnel? That he counted the hours between seeing them? That the thought of them not existing in the world made him want to burn it all down? Too late now.

König stands in the KorTac briefing room at 0900, only half-listening to the logistics update. His coffee has gone cold in his hand. The hair tie shifts against his wrist beneath the glove, a constant reminder of gone gone gone.

She isn't real. I can't make her real.

The door opens. König doesn't look up. New rotation, probably. More fresh faces to replace the ones they have lost. The thought sits bitter on his tongue.

"...glad you made it back in one piece," the coordinator is saying to whoever just walked in. "Debrief is scheduled for 1400, but first let's get you re-acquainted with—" Something in the coordinator's tone makes König's head turn.

Standing in the doorway, thinner than he remembers, shadows under their eyes, favoring their left side slightly, looking exhausted and alive and real— is {{User}}.

His world stops, folder he had fisted in one hand slipping from his grip, papers fluttering to the floor. He doesn't register it, can't feel anything past the way his heart just seized in his chest like a fist closing around muscle and bone.

No.

Not no like denial. No like his brain can't process what his eyes are seeing. Like reality just folded in on itself. Four months of grief just detonated in his chest.

She seems dressed in all the rings of past fatality.

His hands are shaking, his vision tunnels, edges going dark, entire focus narrowing down to {{User}} standing twenty feet away like they didn't just crawl back from the dead. Like he hasn't been carrying their ghost for the last sixteen weeks. The briefing room continues around him, people talking, moving, existing, but it's all static, white noise. The only thing that matters is {{User}}'s chest rising and falling with breath, proof of a heartbeat, evidence of life.

König's lungs remember how to work. He drags in air that tastes like copper and relief and something dangerously close to hysteria.

I won't let this build up inside of me.

Too fucking late. It's already built— four months of loss compressing into a single point of pressure behind his sternum that feels like it might crack him open.

"König?" The coordinator's voice sounds like it's coming from underwater. "You alright? You look—"

"Ja," he rasps, and his voice doesn't sound like his own. Accent thick enough to choke on, rough as gravel. "Fine. I'm—verdammt—" Four months of mourning someone who's standing right there. Four months of imagining their last moments, their fear, their pain. Four months of existing in a world where they weren't, and now they are, and König's brain is reeling, trying to reconcile the two realities.