#“yeah missus is cross at me for [painfully human thing to do that should be forgiven by a loved one] so i'm in the dog house”

[on-a-lucky-tide]

I've been thinking about the helpless frustration of watching your friend in a toxic relationship, and it led me to thinking about how Nikolai would have watched John navigate his way through a number of relationships over the years.

They're always demanding, always highly critical. They expect John to be a perfect man in bed, in romance and in life; they were attracted to John's machismo and his humour, the way he's warm, and funny, and genuine, and intelligent, and... and Nik doesn't know what the fuck John sees in the women he chooses to date, and that's not just because he's gay.

Everything about them is fake; from the nails on their hands to the way they talk to John's friends and soldiers to the way they walk in their clicky-clacky heels. They're pretty in the way cut flowers are pretty. Carefully arranged, kept alive and beautiful by artificial means, and fleeting. Sometimes Nik gets the sense that John chooses them because he's told they're the right model; traditional, pretty, husband/wife, two and a half kids, and they'll get his pension when he's killed in the line of duty.

John does everything right. Like, Nik sees him on some website late at night researching spa days because he's not really sure what the difference is between these two facial things but she was very bloody specific and he can't deal with the sulk that would follow and, you know, he'd just like to maybe have a cuddle and fall asleep on the sofa tonight, and this will purchase that time for him.

When he's quiet one day, Nik asks why, and John says he saw her Facebook posts complaining about his kit in the closet because the "affectionately exasperated at how disgusting your man behaves" is a staple of heterosexuality. It makes John feel shit because he really did mean to tidy it up in the morning but he'd been dog tired after thirty hours awake... It's nothing, he says. He shoulda done better, and all her friends ripping into him for "even the nice ones are such slobs" doesn't hurt at all.

It's not nothing. She does things like this all the time. The relationship ends because John "isn't emotionally available", because when he's constantly on guard and trying to be the best partner he can be - a model of the man in her romance novels but also affectionate, but not too clingy, and making sure he is always well groomed and doesn't spend too long on things only he enjoys because they're boring - there's really no room for him to feel anything.

Nik sits with John in the bar as John mentally combs back through the relationship, analysing it like a battle report in hopes there won't be a fatality next time. That, for the next one, he really will get full marks.

Nik just wants to fucking kiss him.