A/N: For the 100 Times and Nameless challenges ALONG with 20 Word... How the 100 Times challenge (by the lovely sick-at-heartxx) is involved is quite obvious. The Nameless challenge (on the Writing Challenges forum) is more subtle - it is the reason I am not able to mention what character/pairing this is. It's rather obvious, but just in case... review or PM me with your guess.
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Once
He only really loved once.
True, he had been closer than close to three friends. There had been other people in his life who he cared about. But that was always a friendship kind of love, or more rarely a familial love. No, there was one person, only one, who was different.
She had appeared in his world quite by accident - a protégée of someone worth trusting, a young woman in a key place, and yet she was more than that. Had it been her looks that had caught his eye? No; there was nothing particularly striking about hot pink hair, not even on her. Instead, it had been the way she was so ALIVE that caught him by surprise. So young, so deserving of someone more like her, and yet he had realized how much she mattered to him.
A year of seeing each other in passing had been ended by a death, and he had plummeted, fallen deep within himself. As feelings grew stronger, he reminded himself more and more frequently that she deserved so much better than him. She's 13 years younger than you are was the refrain of the next months.
Then another unthinkable death had occurred, along with a near-death that sent the world in another direction. Confronted by another person he trusted, he had admitted his feelings for her. Shockingly, she confessed her own feelings for him, and the world seemed to stop in that moment.
They had ten months together. It was the worst of times; though they themselves remained unharmed through those months, they lived in fear of the moment their lives would end at the hands of the enemy.
On the night it all ended, he told her to stay, to look after their child while he fought. She hadn't listened, the same way he hadn't expected her to. They both breathed their last fighting to make the world a better place.
He only really loved once.