Caleb route (part 2)
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Synopsis: One minute you’re playing LaDS, then next minute you’re in it. The system is giving you a run for your money and fucking you up every second of the day. Just another day in the life of an NPC wannabe.
Pairings: Caleb x Y/n
Content warnings: Dark fic, AU, isekai, reincarnation, angst galore, NSFW, colonel Caleb — will update tags as we move along, semi-proofread / lemme know if I missed something.
Disclaimer: I don’t own any of the characters from the LaDS universe, except for Y/n.
Part 2 - Biting the bullet
But there were some unpredicted flaws to your plan.
For starters, you hadn’t progressed at all in terms of skinship. No kisses or heated touches. And it wasn’t for the lack of trying. You’d been… proactive. Leaning in after late-night missions, lingering in quiet corridors, letting silence stretch until it hummed with tension. But every time it felt like you were on the brink of something—his gaze flicking to your mouth, his hand tightening at your waist, his breath ghosting over your cheek—
Something or someone interrupted you.
A comm alert. An urgent briefing. A sudden system-wide security drill. A wanderer sighting in some conveniently critical sector. Once, the lights flickered hard enough to make the whole ship shudder and hurl you apart.
At first, you assumed it was the system meddling again. Some invisible hand yanking the narrative away from an undesired development. But the moment you hit 100 affinity and the congratulations message fired, the UI went quiet. No new notifications. No forced quests. The familiar hum in the back of your skull—the sense of being watched—vanished.
So why did it still feel like something was actively blocking you?
The second thing that bothered you: he never talked about her.
MC. Canon MC. The girl you were, technically, a knockoff version of.
You waited for a hint. A tossed-off comment about a younger stepsister back in Linkon. A vague reference to someone he needed to protect. Anything to confirm the plot was still on its rails.
Nothing.
He spoke about the Fleet. About missions. About strategy, risk assessment, logistics. On rare, softer nights, about fear and loss and the torn edges of his trauma, picked apart in low, hoarse words.
But never about her.
You didn’t bring it up. You weren’t that much of a masochist. While you didn’t feel as strongly towards him as you once did, jealousy still burned brightly just thinking about her. Still, the silence gnawed at you in a weird unsettling way. It felt like in the process of fulfilling your quests you brushed past an important piece of information.
Maybe the route really was yours now.
That thought both thrilled and terrified you.
It was on a night when you finally, finally got him alone in his quarters that everything unraveled.
You weren’t even in uniform anymore. Just a basic Fleet-issue shirt and sweats, body buzzing with the ghost of adrenaline from a mission that had gone just barely right. His quarters were dim, lit by the cool wash of a single overhead panel and the soft, shifting glow of the holo-map on his desk.
He’d called you in to “debrief.”
You both knew that wasn’t why he’d told the others to clear out.
The door sealed behind you with a quiet hiss. For a moment, he just watched you, leaning one hip against the edge of his desk, arms folded. The Colonel: composed, sharp, winter-cold.
Then his gaze dropped to your mouth, and everything warmed.
“You took unnecessary risks today,” he said, but his voice was low, rougher than usual. “Again.”
“You’re welcome,” you shot back automatically, your reply coming out softer than you intended. “Fleet’s still intact, isn’t it?”
Something flickered across his features—annoyance, fondness, something darker—and he pushed off the desk, closing the distance between you in three slow, deliberate steps.
“I don’t want you to die,” he murmured.
You almost laughed. If only he knew.
“You say that,” you whispered, “but you keep sending me out there.”
His hand came up, fingers brushing along your jaw, tilting your face up. Your heart tried to punch its way out of your ribs.
“You insisted on being on the front lines,” he countered, stepping in closer, chest nearly against yours now. “You said you wanted to fight beside me.”
“I do.”
His thumb traced the corner of your mouth, lingering there, smearing your composure into something trembling and want-struck. The air between you stretched, thinned. Each breath tasted like him.
“Then,” he said quietly, “stay alive. That’s an order.”
You didn’t wait for more.
You rose up on your toes and kissed him. Your very first.
For a heartbeat, he went perfectly still. Then he was kissing you back like you’d just given him the permission he’d been starving for. His mouth pressed to yours with hungry precision, one hand cupping the back of your head, the other clamping at your waist and dragging you closer until you were flush against the solid line of his body.
Heat flared through you, dizzying, intoxicating. His lips were sure, demanding, as if he were staking a claim. You let your hands slide up his chest, feeling the steady beat of his heart beneath the layers of fabric, the flex of muscle as he pulled you in.
And then—
A sharp chime flashed across your vision.
Notice: Bond Erosion Recorded.
Affinity level: 95%
You froze. The system interface burned in the corner of your sight, neon against the darkness of his quarters. The bar, which had disappeared after having been capped, reappeared having dropped in percentage. What the hell did that mean? You mouth went slack.
He broke the kiss with a soft, frustrated sound you felt more than heard, his breath hot against your lips. “What’s wrong?” he murmured, thumb stroking your cheekbone, eyes searching your face.
You just stared at him.
That… wasn’t possible.
You’d fulfilled the system’s biddings. The numbers shouldn’t be moving at all, and yet—
“Nothing,” you managed, though your voice sounded far away, frayed at the edges. “I just—”
You kissed him again before he could press you, desperate to prove to yourself that you’d imagined it. This time, your fingers curled into the fabric at his shoulders, then trailed down, mapping every line like you were afraid he’d vanish. There was no way the affinity could be dropping, not when he was responding to you so feverishly.
He made a low sound in his throat, hands tightening, one splaying over the small of your back, the other sliding up beneath the hem of your shirt, palm hot against your skin. Heat licked up your spine. You pressed closer, tilting your head, lips parting under his.
Another chime.
Affinity level: 93%
You tore your mouth from his like you’d been shocked.
“What the fuck,” you whispered, eyes wide, heart slamming against your ribs like it was trying to escape. You stared at the floating text, bewildered. The affinity was decreasing methodically with every passionate touch.
His brows knit, confusion shadowing his features, then frustration. “You keep—” He huffed out a bitter exhale, jaw tightening. “If you don’t want this, say so. Don’t—”
“It’s not that,” you blurted, fingers bunching in his shirt. “I do, I just—”
You were still trying to connect the dots when he moved first this time, irritation and something wounded flickering across his face before he pushed you gently but firmly back against the nearest wall, caging you in with his body. His hand slid up your ribs, thumb brushing the underside of your breast through your shirt, his other hand catching your chin, tilting your face up.
“Then stop running,” he said, voice low and rough, and kissed you.
He swallowed your attempted protest, lips crashing into yours with a frustration that felt perilously close to desperation. His weight pinned you, his hand at your waist anchoring you as his mouth moved over yours, stealing what little sense you had left.
Your brain stuttered, scrambled—and then the system flashed again, bigger this time, like it had gone from whisper to shout.
Affinity level: 90%
You made a strangled sound against his mouth.
Your hand shot up, grabbing for anything solid to ground yourself, fingers fisting in the front of his shirt. You pulled, meaning to create space, to push him back just enough to think—
Your knuckles grazed something cold.
Metal. Hard and smooth, pressed against his chest beneath the fabric. You froze, fingers curling around it instinctively. Suddenly the system was the least of your problems.
He felt the shift in your body. He braced one palm flat against the wall beside your head, lowering his forehead to your temple, breathing hard. “You’re shaking,” he muttered, voice hoarse. “Am I—hurting you?”
You weren’t listening.
You pushed against his chest more sharply this time, needing space, needing air. He let you move him half a step back, just enough for you to look down.
A chain.
The links caught the low light, glinting where the collar of his shirt had ridden up. Your stomach dropped straight through the floor.
No. No, no, no.
You knew that chain.
Because you’d seen it a hundred times in cutscenes. In CG art. In memories where it lay in his palm as he stared at it with that soft, wounded look reserved for one person.
MC’s chain. The one he’d lost in the explosion. The one that was supposed to be in her possession right now.
Your mind scrambled through canon events, through timelines like you were flicking through mission logs. He doesn’t get it back until after they meet again. They haven’t reunited yet. She isn’t even here yet.
His gaze followed your movement, then flicked back up to your face. Careful. Guarded. You didn’t wait for permission—you dug your fingers under the edge of the collar and yanked the chain free.
The pendant slid out against his skin, swinging once between you.
“How… how do you have this?” you asked, voice going thin. “Did you already meet with MC?”
The name slipped out before you could stop it.
His eyes were darker than you’d ever seen them, pupils blown wide. He blinked once, like he had to drag himself back from wherever that kiss had taken him. Everything in him went still. Not the soft, stunned kind of stillness from earlier, when kissing you had clearly rattled him. This was different. This was battlefield stillness—like a sniper locking onto a target.
Alert: Abnormal Affective Response Detected.
Your blood ran cold. The words didn’t make sense to you—floating red in your vision like an omen—but the way his body tensed up told you everything. Something was wrong. You felt it in the air, heavy as a storm.
His stare sharpened. You swallowed, staring at the blaring letters. You fucked up. You stepped on a landmine. His eyes stayed fixed on you, unblinking.
“How,” he said quietly, every syllable carved from glass, “do you know about her?”
Your tongue stuck to the roof of your mouth. You hadn’t said her name out loud here. Not once. You’d avoided it on purpose, like superstition, like speaking it might summon her.
“I—” You forced a weak laugh, hands lifting in a gesture meant to look casual and feeling more like surrender. “I don’t? I mean, I just—heard some stuff in passing, you know how rumors are—”
“Rumors.” His tone was flat.
You nodded too fast. “Yeah. The Fleet talks. People gossip. Someone mentioned you had, um, someone else you were looking out for, and I just assumed—”
“Lies,” he cut in.
Warning: Cognitive Hostility Identified. Stabilize subject Caleb.
Panic griped you. You breath stuttered. It was all falling apart, and the system was watching it happen. The warning blinked behind your eyelids like a countdown. You tried to think of something to say, anything, but your voice was gone—swallowed by dread.
His hand moved before you could backpedal again.
Fingers wrapped around your neck with terrifying ease. Not choking—yet. Just there. A promise of what he could do if he decided to tighten his grip. His thumb pressed lightly against your pulse, feeling how fast it was pounding.
Your back hit the wall. The impact knocked the breath out of you. The Colonel looked back at you.
All that softening you’d coaxed out of him over cycle after cycle, all the subtle warmth and quiet possessiveness—it vanished in an instant, stripped away like it had never existed. His expression hardened into something you recognized from missions: the calm, predatory focus he wore when dealing with threats.
You’d just never expected to be on the receiving end of it.
“You asked me a question you had no right to ask,” he continued, voice almost conversational. “You mentioned someone you shouldn’t know exists. You recognized something you shouldn’t be able to recognize.”
Your fingers flew to his wrist, instinctive panic sparking. “Caleb, you’re hurting me—”
He sneered. It was small, just a twist of his mouth, but it gutted you. There was no fondness in it, no teasing. Just contempt…and something like disappointment.
“So naive,” he went on, ignoring your protest. “So eager to get close to me, so desperate to prove yourself… but I gave you credit.” His mouth twisted. “Thought you understood how this works.”
“How what works?” you demanded, panic clawing up your insides. “What are you even talking about? I just asked about your necklace—”
“You and I both know this is not about the necklace.” His voice cracked sharp across yours.
WARNING: MENTAL VOLATILITY AT CRITICAL LEVEL. Deviation Attempts Loading...
He let go of your throat abruptly. Relief crashed in so fast you almost sagged with it—right up until his hand shifted, dipped behind his back with smooth, practiced ease, and came back with a gun.
He didn’t hesitate.
The barrel rose in a clean, efficient line until it rested against the center of your forehead, cold and unyielding.
Notice: DEVIATION ATTEMPTS REJECTED. Outcome Modification Protocols Activated: 57%
Your breath stuttered. “Caleb.”
He watched you, unblinking. There was heat in his eyes still—but it was buried now under something harder, uglier. Anger. Fear. Of what, you realized you would never know. In the back of your mind you already knew it was game over, even before your consciousness caught up to it.
You went rigid and swallowed hard, pulse pounding so loud you could barely hear yourself, as you made one more attempt, thought your voice was trembling. “You’re overreacting.”
Outcome Modification Protocols Activated: 74%
He barked out a laugh.
It was empty. Bitter. There was no humor in it at all, just edges—sharp enough to cut.
“I overreact,” he mused, tilting his head slightly, the movement making the metal at your forehead drag a fraction of an inch over your skin, “when a subordinate disobeys a direct order. When someone endangers a mission. When they jeopardize lives.”
His gaze hardened. The affection you’d fought so hard for, earned across lifetimes of pain and perseverance, was nowhere to be found.
“But this isn’t an overreaction,” he said. “This is risk management.” The words slammed into you like physical blows. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be,” he murmured. “For either of us.”
Outcome Modification Protocols Activated: 96%
“Caleb,” you whispered, eyes stinging. “Please. Just talk to me. I can help you, I know more than you think, I can—”
“Exactly,” he said.
Notice: OUTCOME MODIFICATION PROTOCOL FAILED. System reset imminent.
You opened your mouth to argue, to beg, to ask anything that might stall him—
But he pulled the trigger.
The last thing you saw was his eyes: cold, conflicted, something breaking behind them that he refused to acknowledge. The last thing you heard was his voice, soft and almost fond in its resignation.
“I’m sorry.”
Then white.
Sound peeled away into a high, ringing whine, then collapsed into a familiar chime.
System reset in progress…
You fell without falling, your sense of self shredded, reassembled, forced back into the mold the system had carved out for you. Time folded, rewound, snapped back into place—
You were back in his quarters.
Your spine against the wall. His body pressed to yours. His hand at your waist, other braced beside your head. His mouth on yours, hot and hungry and wanting, just like before.
Affinity level: 87%
You ripped away from him with a ragged gasp, heart pounding so hard it hurt.
At the edge of your vision, Caleb’s Affinity hovered like a warning, the bar now lower than it had been before everything went wrong, glowing a little too bright, but it hadn’t been rolled back. And your whole identity hadn’t been reset back to 0 like previously. The system had rewound everything—except how much he apparently cared about you, but his affinity now was on a downward spiral.
Phantom pain flared at the center of your forehead—a cold, echoing throb, like the ghost of the gun still rested there. It pulsed with every heartbeat, a reminder of a wound that technically no longer existed.
“Easy,” he said, breathing a little hard himself, brows knitting. “What’s wrong?”
He sounded… normal.
The confusion on his face was real, not calculated. There was no weapon in his hand, no lethal intent in his eyes—just the same dark heat, the same flushed irritation from you stopping and starting on him.
He didn’t remember.
The system had reset, scrubbing the last few minutes from his side of reality. From his perspective, you had just had a very intense makeout session, jerked away from him like he’d burned you, and were now staring at him like he’d grown a second head.
“Nothing,” you croaked.
Your fingers twitched, resisting the urge to fly to your forehead. You could still feel it—the way your skull had seemed to shatter outward and then dissolve into light. Your stomach flipped.
He watched you closely. “You’re shaking,” Caleb said, voice dropping, taking on that deceptively gentle tone that had always undone you. His thumb stroked slow circles at your hip. “Am I hurting you?”
The same fucking lines you’d heard minutes before everything went sideways. You stared at him. You had just watched this man kill you.
You had seen his finger tighten on the trigger and the decision in his eyes. Heard the sick, hollow laugh as he mocked you for being naive. Your body remembered the terror, the uselessness of begging.
He didn’t.
Your heart hammered against your ribs, every instinct screaming at you to run, to shove him away, to put as much distance between you and that gun as possible.
Except… if you ran, he’d want to know why. If you slipped, if you said the wrong thing—Caleb kills you.
The realization slid cold and solid into place inside your chest.
The system isn’t the only one that can take you out.
“Talk to me,” he said quietly. “What’s going on in that head of yours?”
You dragged in a breath that felt too shallow. “Just… dizzy,” you said finally, forcing your shoulders to loosen, your fingers to uncoil from where they’d been digging into his sleeves.
You tried to curve your mouth into a half-smile that didn’t show teeth. “Guess you’re better at kissing than I gave you credit for, Colonel.”
His eyes darkened at the title on your tongue. Desire rolled off him in a wave, hotter now, tempered by concern but not diminished. He leaned in again, hand sliding up your side, fingers splaying over your ribs as if testing the shape of you.
“Is that so,” he murmured, lips brushing your jaw.
Your pulse spiked. You forced yourself not to flinch, not to bring up the chain again, not to let your gaze drop to where you knew it lay against his chest.
“Yeah,” you managed. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
He laughed softly, the sound genuine this time, warm enough to make your treacherous heart twist. “Too late,” he said. He tilted your face back toward his, eyes fixed on your mouth, clearly intending to pick up exactly where you’d left off. And you let him.
Because you didn’t know what would happen if you didn’t. Because the system, for whatever sick reason, still wanted this. Because the last time you dug your heels in against the script—asked about her, pushed at the edges of the story—you’d wound up staring down the barrel of his gun.
His lips met yours again, and you let the kiss happen, body moving on muscle memory, mouth answering his even as your thoughts skittered wildly underneath.
The bar responded instantly.
Another soft chime vibrated at the back of your skull, and Caleb’s Affinity kept dropping, the glow intensifying as his hands roamed, as his mouth deepened the kiss, as that raw, hungry tenderness wrapped around you and squeezed. His desire, his possessiveness, his fractured devotion—all of it translated into numbers, into light, the system quietly recording every beat of his growing attachment to you.
Every brush of his hand, every press of his body, every hitched breath was layered now with another feeling: the knowledge that somewhere, buried under all that devotion and intensity, was a line you were not allowed to cross.
You’d found it and died for it.
And as Caleb deepened the kiss, pulling you closer like he couldn’t stand the idea of space between you, a single, terrifying thought curled tight and cold at the back of your mind: You weren’t afraid of the system anymore.
You were afraid of him.
*****************************************
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