Chapter Text
Stiles has never forgotten what it was that they were pursuing… who they were hunting. It’s not that Monroe is the only enemy left, not exactly, though in some ways she is exactly that. In the years that have passed since the creation of the SCU all known hunter clans have either been taken to trial or cleaned house themselves. And while they’ve gone after other supernatural beings a few times, that hasn’t happened anywhere near as often. Proving perhaps once and for all that hunters, rather than being the ones protecting innocents, have long since (perhaps even always) been the real danger in the shadow-world.
The team knows they’re not perfect. They don’t always manage to catch every single person involved with a crime. And while some are caught later, or even simply found dead somewhere, some seem to vanish into thin air; only reappearing later on, as part of a group attacking yet another pack, enclave, or some other supernatural settlement. They all know what it means: Monroe and her growing army.
It’s ironic really, that in their attempts to bring justice, they’ve also somehow led all their enemies to gather into a single group. A group that keeps growing, their threat becoming worse with every passing year. The worst part is that no matter how hard they try, the team cannot seem to be able to find them.
Until it happens. In Los Angeles, California of all places!
It actually begins a little earlier, and in an entirely different city.
Their latest case takes a completely unexpected turn when a demon (an actual freaking demon!) turns out to be involved. Hunters, werewolves, witches the team can handle just fine, demons… Even having no idea how to handle this enemy, the team just refuses to give up. Things go downhill really quickly, and it’s only thanks to Mel calling in her brothers that they manage to survive. After most of them get transported to what appears to be the demon’s own dimension, a place where the very air they breathe hurts the team’s lungs…. And then there’s Kira, who takes a wound that’d have been fatal had Wyatt Halliwell not had the power to heal and used it to save her (and Stiles had never before seen a magical healing that didn’t just heal damage, but effectively undid it!).
Jack also ends up badly hurt, both due to the poisonous air, and an athame the demon stabs his leg with. It’s in fact him going down that causes Mel to panic and call Wyatt and Chris, shortly before Kira herself is injured while protecting Mel. After the fight is over, the Halliwell siblings insist on the team taking a moment to rest and recuperate, and thus they’re transported to Halliwell manor in San Francisco to do just that.
Piper Halliwell, the siblings’ mother, whips up a potion that clears their bodies of the various ill-effects caused by breathing the air in that other dimension (the underworld, they call it). Then she insists on them staying for lunch and even preparing it herself (she just loves cooking) before her sons get them all back to where they must be. That being the East Coast, where Ashley and the locals assisting them with the case, still are.
It’s perhaps not entirely surprising when Mel’s two aunts: Phoebe and Paige, decide to drop by. It’s hard to tell whether they’re there to check the team out, or Jack. But whichever the case, they all have a pretty good time. At least until Stiles goes to shake Phoebe’s hand as they’re about to leave, and they’re both pulled into a vision:
A building collapsing… A forest on fire.
A black dog… A black wolf.
Cracked stone and dust. Blackened trees and ash.
A woman in black holding a rifle. Another holding a bow.
Men and women in jeans and leather holding guns. Creatures encased in old armor holding swords.
A shot. An arrow.
Screams… blood… howling…
Darkness, and a tiny glowing light somehow even more oppressive than the darkness itself.
Shadow and fire, so much fire and… red eyes.
The vision comes to an end and both Stiles and Phoebe pull back, away from each other, almost violently. As if they’ve just torn themselves out of it.
“What was that…?” Stiles gasps, his mind running a mile a minute.
He’s rubbing a thumb almost rhythmically over the tattoos on the inner wrist of the opposite hand. Switching hands with every mental iteration of his mantra (the sun, the moon, the truth) as he fights to control himself, to not fall into some insane spiral, or worse, a panic attack. He doesn’t even know why he’s on the edge of a panic attack! It makes absolutely no sense!
“A vision,” Phoebe states the obvious. “I… we just had a vision.”
“What the hell?!” Several more people call out, shocked.
“Phoebe’s a precog, visions are kind of her thing,” Paige points out.
“Yeah, her thing, not Stiles’,” Kira retorts.
Which is exactly the point Stiles didn’t quite know how to make. Visions aren’t his thing, they never have been, at all. So how the hell…
“What did you see?” Jack asks, phone out, ready to take notes.
“I… I don’t know…” Stiles begins, trying to make sense of any of it.
“It was strange,” Phoebe murmurs, thinking back on things.
“A jumble,” Stiles offers.
“Yeah,” Phoebe agrees. “Like… like two visions meshed together.”
They spend a while talking about what they saw. Trying to make out the two very different scenes. Some things are pretty easy: like connecting the cracked stone and dust with the collapsing building, the blackened trees and ash with the forest fire. The black dog is far more likely to be found in a building, the wolf in a forest. The people… well, hunters can be found everywhere, really, but the armor seems really supernatural, and would probably be too much for a city. The real issue comes at the very end, with the blood, the howls, the darkness and tiny, terrible light, because there doesn’t seem to be any clear split there. Nothing particularly distinct, which makes things all the more confusing. Also, why two visions meshed together like that? Are the two things connected somehow? And if so, how exactly?
“I think I recognize the city.” Chris’s statement takes everyone by surprise. “Remember that I told you all about my new charge?”
“The young boy who was in the foster system?” Paige asks, curious.
“Yeah, him.” Chris agrees. “He has a passion for photography, and like, human interest stories. Well, one of his recent stories was about this old building. Apparently it used to be a hotel before becoming an apartment building for low-income families. The owner tried to sell it to some corporation sometime last year but failed when the building got declared of historic importance or something. I remember it because he’s very proud of the pictures he took of the building, and that some of them were bought by a number of local publications, when the story reached mainstream media.”
“And where is this great building?” Wyatt asks in a drawl.
“L.A.”
That makes them all jump to their feet, Stiles’s hand going to his phone as he considers who he ought to be calling first. Ashley, their boss, Skye? Or maybe someone from his network who might be closer to where… whatever it was that was happening in their vision went down?
“Guys, there’s something else you probably need to know.” Phoebe speaking up again pulls all the attention straight back to her.
She has a tablet in hand, Mel’s. Having been looking through some pictures… and not just any pictures, the team realizes as soon as they take a glance at it, it’s the directory Stiles put together about known threats in the shadow world. What’s more, she has it on one photo, a very specific photo:
“I know you might not have been able to see her clearly, Stiles,” Phoebe continues. “The woman holding the sniper rifle. But I did. This was her.”
Tamora Monroe.
xXx
New plans get made. Instead of getting taken to the East Coast, Wyatt and Chris instead get Stiles and the team straight to L.A. They also insist on staying and helping as much as they can.
By the time they make it into the FBI building it’s already a flurry of motion as the local teams use traffic cameras and whatever security footage they might have access to from around the city to try and find not just Monroe, but her better known followers.
It takes several hours, just long enough for Hotch, Ashley and the Red Cell team (the only full team available and willing to join the manhunt) to arrive in the city. They’re joined by a SWAT team, lead by Sergeant II Daniel ‘Hondo’ Harrelson.
They manage to track Monroe’s hunters to an old office building near the highway. The place seems to be completely abandoned, with windows either broken, boarded up, or both. A chain link fence and a big padlock keeping the property presumably locked from outsiders. They might have even believed that, what with there not even being any vehicles nearby, if it weren’t for a few things:
“That padlock is way too new,” Ashley points out.
“Also, look at the cement walkways, at the leaves and rocks and random debris on it,” one of the local FBI agents adds. “You see the way they’re all closer to the edge of the path, leaving most of the actual path clear? That either happened because there was a lot of foot transit…”
“Or someone dragged something big down that path not too long ago,” Hondo finishes.
“Don’t forget that the utilities are connected in the building,” Skye points out from where she’s attending the meeting through Skype. “If the building were truly empty they definitely wouldn’t be.”
Yeah, because no one’s crazy enough to pay for water and electricity for an abandoned building, especially in a city as expensive as Los Angeles.
“What I wanna know is what these guys are even doing in this city,” Deacon, Hondo’s second in command, states. “From what you’ve told us, they’ve been on the move for years. As good as domestic terrorists, they are. Causing death, destruction and mayhem everywhere they go. Never staying in any one place long enough to be caught. So why here? Why now?”
That’s the question, isn’t it?
It hits Stiles in a moment and he turns to look at Kira. There’s not even any need for the question to come out of his mouth, the way she’s staring at him, all open mouth and wide-eyes, shows that she’s thinking the exact same thing as him.
“You know…” Hondo mutters, sharp.
“Rather, we suspect,” Stiles corrects, running a hand through his hair as he contemplates things.
“It’s not a secret that when Monroe’s little, domestic terrorist group, as Sergeant Kay has dubbed them, first showed up, their first attack happened in Beacon Hills, back in 2013,” Ashley elaborates.
“There were actually two attempted attacks, from that group, early on in their existence, one in 2013, the other two years later.” Hotch’s own explanation is more detailed. “Both in Beacon Hills. Also, on both occasions they were thwarted, in no small part thanks to a small group of people led by a young man called Scott McCall.”
“Police?” A local agent wants to know.
“No,” Stiles takes a deep breath, mentally thanking that for whatever the reason all the people in the room have been read-in on the supernatural already (there’s a reason why only one of the local FBI agents, and two of the SWAT team are present). “He was a high-school senior back in 2013, college student on a school-break two years later. The official version is that he was a leader of a ‘take-back-the-night’ kind of group that formed back in 2011, during the worst crime-spree Beacon Hills has ever seen. The truth is that he was the alpha of the local pack and…”
“And as such it was his responsibility,” Hondo finishes for him.
“Who leaves a teenager in charge of the safety of a whole town?” Deacon scoffs.
“It’s not like it was Scott’s choice, or any of ours really,” Stiles shrugs. “We did what we had to, what we could. After the loss of the Hales, the original pack and protectors of the territory… we didn’t have a lot of options.”
Everyone in the room knows the name Hale. They also all know how most of them came to be lost. No more questions are asked in that vein.
“Should we warn him?” Kira asks quietly. “He could be in danger.”
“He probably is,” Stiles spits, then exhales. “Why else would Monroe be in LA at all? She’s made a point not to stay in any big city, in any place with the kind of technology that could be used to track her and her army.”
“She could be getting sloppy?” Jack offers. “It’s been, what, fifteen years?”
“Yeah…” Stiles supposes it could be possible.
Still, better not to take the chance.
xXx
It takes no effort at all to find not just Scott McCall, but also Alan Deaton. The latter lives in a townhouse in one of the suburbs, the former seems to be living in a studio apartment in the same building where both of them have their businesses: a veterinary and an animal shelter. Considering the ease with which they found him (no hacking being needed!) they have no doubt Monroe must have done the same. So an agent in civilian garb is sent to warn both men of the risk and suggest they might want to close shop for a few days, perhaps even leave town for a day or two, until the SCU has dealt with Monroe and her followers.
Unsurprisingly, most of the hunters are active in the night, which is why, aside from sending some of their best to keep track of them to ensure they aren’t attacking anyone just yet, the plan is to storm the building where they’re staying in the late morning. When most of the hunters can be expected to be sleeping, or at the very least resting. They also plan on having Wyatt and Chris orb Stiles’s team to the roof, so they can come at the hunters from above, while SWAT and the FBI storm the building from the doors at floor level.
At first the plan seems to be going beautifully. But of course, like the saying goes: no plan survives contact with the enemy. It’s soon made obvious that the hunters have no intention of going quietly, they have no intention of going at all. When the first of the local FBI Agents goes down to a bullet of a caliber high enough to punch right through his kevlar vest… it’s like a switch is flipped. Until that moment only the SCU truly knew what the hunters were capable of, their absolute disregard for people’s lives: shifters, mundanes, innocents, none matter to them. The realization of how little the people they’re there to take down care for the lives of anyone, even their own… the gloves come off. If Stiles had to compare it to something, he’d say it’s like when police track down a cop-killer. They’re not looking to arrest anymore, just to take the enemy down…
(When it’s all said and done and Agent Carroll is found with a couple of broken ribs and a badly bruised kidney, yet miraculously alive, some people will chalk it up to everyone having seen wrong and remarkable luck on his part. The few people aware enough of things, will never say a thing.)
At some point during the confrontation, Stiles finds himself standing back to back with Ashley as they fight off a group of particularly vicious and resilient hunters. Stiles is mostly busy shielding from some high-caliber shots with one hand (making sure not to make the shield visible, as he doesn’t want to call undue attention to his magic), while at the same time shooting his own gun, when he notices someone behind all those hunters. It’s none other than Tamora Monroe, in black jeans, combat boots, a simple top and a tight-fitting jacket, lining a shot at…
“Abunai!” Stiles yells, automatically switching to Japanese.
The switch in language serves a double purpose, as most people there don’t actually understand Japanese. Kira does though, and she understands that the warning is meant for her. She manages to react just fast enough, dropping her gun and spinning around on one knee at the same time she reaches for her own belt, it slipping off her waist and transforming into her katana just in time for her to bring it up, cutting right through the special bullet that’s just been fired at her.
The move works perfectly to save her from Monroe’s shot. It also serves to reveal to Monroe that supernaturals are involved in the take-down of her and her army. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that’s when she chooses to flee, instead of standing her ground. Stiles hesitates all of a handful of seconds before…
“What are you waiting for?” Ashley demands. “Go after her!”
So he does exactly that.
It all happens so fast… Stiles knows that a handful of hunters follow him and Monroe, but he trusts Jack and Mel, who follow as well, to keep them off his back. He’s slowly but surely gaining ground, getting closer and closer to the fleeing Monroe. It’s clear she wasn’t prepared for them, not this time. She doesn’t have a convenient getaway vehicle, apparently not even a proper escape plan.
Eventually she becomes aware of Stiles, prompting her to raise her gun and shoot at him, rushed shots, barely turning around, not even aiming properly. One misses him entirely and the other, while closer, Stiles has no trouble dodging. And then she seems to run out of bullets. Stiles guesses she must not have any ammo on her, since instead of changing the clip, she throws the gun at him. If they weren’t on an op, he might even find it funny.
Her next attempt to get rid of him comes in the shape of a grenade that she throws his way. It’s a strange one, big (bigger than the military issue ones), it also looks odd, roughly made, not at all like the Argent-issue weapons Monroe seemed to favor for the most part. He wonders if that means that they’re keeping the Argent weapons elsewhere, or if perhaps the group has finally run out of the armament they managed to steal from the old Argent armories prior to the trial (and the Hale pack taking possession of those). Obviously formal weapon dealers wouldn’t be selling to them (even those who might not really care to follow the letter of the law, usually, won’t want to get in trouble with all the recent trials against ‘domestic cult-like terrorist groups’, as the public has dubbed the hunter clans), which would explain the homemade grenade. The problem is that with such weapons, you can never know how good or bad they’ll end up being. That proves especially problematic just a few seconds later…
When Monroe throws the grenade his way, Stiles doesn’t even stop to think about it before he deflects it. A part of his brain takes a look at it, cataloging its rough made and the implications, but the greater part of his brain is already on the next thing: focusing on the end of the block, on the buildings at both sides of the street, the busy street two blocks down, contemplating his chances of catching up with her before she makes it that far. Currently they’re on a mostly empty street, if that changes things will only become harder. Not just for Stiles to keep sight of Monroe, but he has no doubt that she’d have no trouble using innocent passersby if it benefits her.
Then the explosion happens.
It’s powerful enough it throws not just him but also Monroe off their feet. Clearly taken off-guard, the huntress ends up on a sprawl, temporarily breathless and disoriented. Stiles reacts instinctively, going into a roll to absorb the impact as best he can. Still, it’s not easy, one of his legs twinging, ears are ringing and his head’s pounding; his magic sense feels off somehow and he has no idea as to why.
“Freeze!” Stiles yells as he jumps to his feet, when he sees Monroe start to move. “Keep your hands where I can see them!”
Stiles doesn’t see the danger coming until it all goes black.
xXx
When Stiles recovers consciousness his head’s still pounding and there’s a certain dampness and itchiness behind his left ear that lets him know he took a blow to the head. It’s already healing though, same as his leg, which no longer pains him. He can hear voices nearby, and with just a tiny bit of magic directed to his ears, he’s able to make out what they’re saying:
“How did they find us?” a female voice, Monroe, is demanding. “And him? How could he follow me? You told me that your… that you’d made me untraceable!”
“Untraceable, yes,” a quiet, cultured male voice replies. “But he wasn’t tracking you, he was following you. He must have seen you leave the building and went after you. It is not the same thing.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Monroe states coldly. “He must die.”
“And he will,” the man assures her. “But not just yet. There’s so much information we could yet gain from a mind such as his. Someone so deeply entrenched in the mundane agency that has made it their goal to go after supernaturals and hunters alike…”
“You sound almost like you admire him,” Monroe scoffs. “He’s just another freak.”
Stiles wonders if she realizes that she’s calling him a freak, before a man who’s probably magical himself considering that he apparently did something to conceal Monroe from any tracking. And she calls Stiles a freak while working with a magic-user… Like, he knew Monroe was more than a little crazy, but this is ridiculous!
“Do whatever you want, just make sure to kill him when you’re done,” Monroe demands.
“You leaving now?” The man questions.
“There’s a reason we came to LA, I will finish the mission and leave the city,” Monroe states.
“You still believe you can make it work?” The man doesn’t sound surprised just… intrigued. “Your army is lost.”
“That is a setback, yes,” Monroe admits. “But there have always been people willing to hunt the beasts. And this… when it becomes known that I have killed this Alpha, they will all come to me…”
“A True Huntress, to kill the True Alpha…”
Monroe cackles in obvious glee, but Stiles can only wonder if she cannot hear the disdain in the man as he says those words, the mocking in his tone…
Stiles knows he hasn’t been unconscious for long. He knows. Because if he had been, his team would have found him already. He has no doubt that between Mel’s incredible power, and Jack’s own minor but no less important power (the younger man’s magic might be limited, but he’s as resourceful as his dad) they can find him. Or they could, but Stiles doesn’t intend to wait for a rescue when he can rescue himself.
The man that steps into the room is tall (several inches taller than Stiles, in fact), with tanned skin. He’s wearing oxford-blue slacks, with a royal-blue button-up, with sleeves rolled up to his elbows and black boots. He looks almost lanky, all long limbs and a narrow waist, but the muscles on his bare arms are evident. As are the scars, and the Celtic tattoos. The latter makes it quite obvious that he has some sort of druidic connection, though Stiles knows as he looks at the man that he’s missing something, even if he cannot figure out what, exactly.
It’s clear the moment the druid realizes things haven’t gone according to plan. As he fully steps into the room and realizes Stiles is no longer hanging from where he left him. Even then, he doesn’t realize it in time to be able to do anything as the mage steps out of the shadows where he concealed himself and delivers a kick powerful enough to knock him down.
Stiles is mentally patting himself in the back, satisfied for a job well done, when the loud crack of a shot reaches his ears. And not just any shot, but a high-caliber one.
“Shit!” he curses, half-absently throwing a sleeping spell at the druid before rushing out of the room.
As he soon realizes, he’s in yet another abandoned building (how are there always so many of those?) this time one that looks like a motel of some kind. Though that’s not the part that keeps his attention. Following his instincts and magic more than anything else he soon makes it outside, to the back of the building. The door leads to a small, overgrown backyard, and more importantly, an outlook. There are dusty stone benches and a half-crumbled railing before the edge of the cliff-side.
There he finds Monroe, in a crumpled heap. The answer to the question of what exactly happened comes a second later as Jack and Mel come running from around the corner of the building, clearly having gone around instead of through it. Jack still has his gun in hand, and Stiles knows without asking that he was the one to take Monroe down, once and for all. What he doesn’t expect is what the younger agent says next:
“I’m sorry!” He calls out. “I couldn’t get a clear shot before she fired!”
Stiles feels like cursing again. Because yeah, he heard the shot, didn’t he? That wasn’t a shot from Jack’s glock, but clearly from the high-caliber rifle he can see on the ground, not far from Monroe herself. She managed to shoot once, but at what? Or whom?
Stiles rushes to the edge of the cliff, his two teammates on his heels. It takes him a moment to realize what he’s looking at exactly: a half-crumbled building. It looks familiar, but he doesn’t understand why exactly, until it hits him: it’s the same building from his vision. And not just that, that’s the building they were running past when Monroe threw that grenade at him!
It’s clear that the grenade caused a great deal of destruction. Emergency services are already in the area, which makes Stiles wonder just how long he was out, exactly. He’s vaguely taking note of the police-vans, ambulance and fire-fighter’s truck in the area when he notices something else, a black bike that seems to just not belong among the rest of the vehicles. And then he sees him. The man walking down the steps leading to the damaged building… Scott McCall.
Stiles curses. Long, and colorful, and loud.
“Wow…” Jack actually whistles when he’s done. “Something’s really annoying you.”
Yeah, annoying, because he knows that when Stiles is truly angry he doesn’t bother with cursing, instead going straight to attacking.
“Yeah, at idiot people who cannot listen to others even when it’s for their own good,” Stiles mutters.
He wishes he could say he’s surprised, but he’s really, really not.
Not wanting to think further about Scott, he turns his attention to Monroe. A quick check confirms that she’s most definitely dead.
“I’m sorry,” Jack murmurs quietly.
“Don’t be,” Stiles shakes his head. “She wouldn’t have come quietly.”
“Maybe not,” Jack admits. “But still, it feels wrong, to have just shot her like that, from the back…”
“She’d have done that and much worse to you, to all of us,” Stiles reminds him. “She’s been doing it to shifters, magic-users and even humans across the world for fifteen years.” He exhales. “Don’t think about what you did to her, think of all the lives you saved by doing so.”
He can tell that that does help as Jack relaxes minutely.
“Was she the last one?” Mel wants to know.
“There’s a guy in there.” Stiles waves his hand back at the building. “I knocked him out, physically and magically. Still, be careful. He’s some kind of magic user. A druid maybe.”
For all answer Mel fishes one of her sets of cuffs from her utility belt. A set spelled to work against magic-users (she has a different one for shifters and other supernaturals with similar skill-sets, but no magic). Jack follows her, a hand on his gun as they go into the building.
Stiles meanwhile remains where he’s standing. Looking at Scott in the distance. Wondering how much of an idiot one has to be to ignore warnings given by authorities, by people trying to keep him safe… He knows how stubborn his once-friend can be, but he’d have thought that after so long Scott might have finally grown-up…
He shakes his head, turning and walking away. He supposes it doesn’t matter anymore. Monroe is dead, as are most of those in her army. Those who might have survived the op will be spending a very long time in jail, including the old druid who planned on killing him. It’s over.
It’s finally all over.
xXx
Stiles drops on his back on the bed as soon as he makes it into the hotel bedroom for the night.
It’s been a very, very long day. What with that insane almost-failed Op, followed by a team debriefing, followed by yet another debriefing, this time with the local FBI office, and SWAT (and keeping the separate stories straight in his mind took some effort, though he’s probably lucky he didn’t have to deal with a concussion at the same time). And then there were the written reports they all had to fill. Jack at least wasn’t going to be in trouble for shooting Monroe. It’s not like it’s a secret how dangerous the woman was. Even those who know nothing of the supernatural are well aware that the number of deaths she’s been involved in, even tangentially, is longer than most serial-killers! If anything Jack’s probably going to get a commendation for his quick thinking, and the fact that his actions protected the lives of civilians (everyone knows Monroe was responsible for what happened to that building, and it’s assumed that it was Jack’s shot that made her own sniper-shot miss… either that or she was a terrible-shot, and that one is unlikely).
After a big dinner in a nearby restaurant and some drinks in the hotel bar, the team finally split into the rooms the FBI rented for them for the night, since they decided it was too late to fly back to Virginia; Stiles is convinced that was just because their bosses were planning on making them go to the office and go through yet another debriefing the moment they get back to Quantico.
He is half-asleep when the ringing of his phone has him on full-alert in an instant. He doesn’t even need to look at the screen to know it’s Derek calling. He knows Stiles is alright, of course. Stiles had the time, and presence of mind to send a couple of quick texts to him and his dad after the Op, especially since he suspected Derek would have felt at least some of what Stiles went through.
“Hey sourwolf…” Derek knows Stiles is alright when the younger man calls him by that nickname.
It’s sort-of their thing: Stiles calls Derek ‘sourwolf’, he calls the human ‘Mischief’ in return. Each of them being the only one who gets away with using those nicknames with the other.
It’s… saying ‘I love you’ is not easy for either of them, for so many reasons. Derek heard the words from the mouth of a psychotic bitch who later burned most of his family alive. Her heart never gave away a lie. And yeah, he knows people can learn how to control themselves enough to lie to wolves, and hunters especially like to learn to do so, but still. What trust can he put on love declarations when he was already tricked once. And Stiles… he’s been let down by every single person he’s loved, and who claimed to love him: his mom, his dad, Scott… and granted, it might not have been entirely their fault, at least not for most of them. But still.
With two men for whom the words ‘I love you’ are so hard, and mean so little, perhaps it’s unsurprising that they’d find other ways to express such feelings. There are many love languages after all: from gentle touches, to kisses, to acts of service and protection, to using and allowing simple, funny nicknames like they do with no one else.
When the choice comes it doesn’t even feel like a choice at all, instead it feels like the most natural thing in the world:
“I’m ready to come home…”