Inlovewiththedeepsea - Nana Evans

"Quite the necklace you have there." He points to the greenish bruises on my throat.

"Thank you. It was expensive." I lift my chin.

"Cost someone their life."

My wife Violet Sorrengail

The Quiet Between Battles

A Brennan Sorrengail x Reader One-Shot

The war was coming faster than any of them had planned. That was the problem with battle—no matter how many strategies you poured over, no matter how many sleepless nights you carved into your soul—it came anyway.

Brennan Sorrengail hadn’t slept in… gods, how long had it been? Three days? Four?

His rank—Lieutenant Colonel—still felt like a cruel joke every time someone said it aloud. He had earned it through death. Not valor. Not time. Just... survival. And the empty spaces left behind by people who hadn’t - by living through the battles that had claimed the lives of others, the ones who had fought beside him and never returned.

He was reading reports by candlelight again. The air in the room was still, heavy with parchment and ink and guilt.

And then she appeared. Again.

“Gods, sorry,” she said, breathless, clutching a satchel against her hip.

“Didn’t think anyone else would be out here this late.”

That was the third time this week.

She was a healer, technically. But she’d been raised in a fight ring and taught to defend with as much precision as she could mend. People said she could read a man better than she could stitch one up—and Brennan was starting to believe it.

Because she always showed up just before he shattered.

--Three weeks ago

The room was thick with the smell of ink, dust, and burnt candle wax.

Brennan Sorrengail sat hunched over the map-strewn table, his brow furrowed in concentration as he studied the battle reports laid out before him. His eyes, bloodshot and hollow from days of sleeplessness, scanned the documents again and again, seeking answers that refused to materialize.

He hadn’t slept in days; time didn’t matter anymore.

The maps before him were a tangled mess of ink and fear, with red markings indicating enemy positions and blue dots representing the rebellion own forces. He traced his finger over the lines, eyes darting between locations, calculating, recalculating, but the fatigue clouded his mind. The weight of everything was too much for one person to bear, yet here he was, trying to carry it all.

A quiet noise at the door made him pause. The soft shuffle of footsteps, deliberate but unhurried, caught his attention, though he didn’t immediately look up. His mind was too deep in the strategy to bother with interruptions. Yet the presence lingered—an unfamiliar weight in the room.

Then, the door creaked open.

Brennan’s hand froze over the map as a woman stepped into the room.

She wasn’t one of his officers. She wasn’t someone from his command.

He didn’t recognize her, and she wasn’t wearing the standard uniform of a soldier. Instead, she wore a simple tunic, with a worn leather belt and a satchel hanging from her hip. Her hair, dark and tangled, was pulled back in a messy braid. But what struck him the most was the look in her eyes—sharp, watchful, as if she were sizing him up without a word.

“Sorry,” she said, her voice calm, almost too calm. “Didn’t realize someone else would be in here this late.”

Brennan blinked; his first instinct was to send her away. He didn’t need interruptions, especially not now. But something about her presence—a strange quiet that wasn’t afraid to fill the space—made him pause.

He didn’t know why her arrival felt almost… inevitable. The room had been so empty, so suffocating, until she appeared.

He looked up at her then, his voice hoarse from lack of use.

“What do you want?”

The woman hesitated for only a fraction of a second before she stepped farther into the room, closing the door behind her with a soft click. There was no hesitation in her movements, no nervousness. She moved with a quiet purpose, like someone used to taking control of whatever situation they found themselves in.

“I’m not sure what I want,” she said, her lips quirking up slightly as if she found the question amusing. “But I know I’m not going to leave you alone in here until you rest.”

Brennan’s brow furrowed, his eyes narrowing in suspicion. “I don’t need help.”

Her gaze softened, but there was no pity in it, only something else— something knowing, something he couldn’t quite place- why was she there?

“I’m not here to help. I’m just here to make sure you don’t collapse on top of all these maps...”

For a moment, he was taken aback. This wasn’t an officer or a soldier. It was just a woman—one he had never talked before. And yet, there she was, completely unbothered by his presence, as if she had every right to be here.

He didn’t reply right away, his lips pressing into a thin line as he stared at her. She wasn’t some messenger. She wasn’t here to report to him or give him new information. She was just… there.

“I can’t rest,” he said finally, the words tasting like failure as they left his mouth. “There’s too much at stake.”

“Yeah,” she said with a shrug, moving toward a chair by the window and setting down with an almost deliberate slowness. “There always is. But you’re not doing anyone any good if you’re running on empty. You know that, right?” She chuckles

Brennan didn’t respond immediately, his gaze flickering back to the papers in front of him. The room had gone silent again, but it wasn’t a comfortable silence. It felt like an intrusion, a breach of some invisible barrier he’d made around himself.

He didn’t know who this woman was, but he could feel her eyes on him, watching, waiting for him to acknowledge her presence. And for some reason, he couldn’t push her away, he couldn’t not do so. There was something about her steady gaze that made him want to hide all the cracks in his armor, but he didn’t know how to. Not anymore.

“I’ve got a war to help to win,” he muttered, his voice barely above a whisper, as though speaking it aloud might make it more real than it already was. Why did he feel he could just pore everything else? She had just walked into his life and somehow it seemed she had always been there.

She chuckled lightly, though it wasn’t mocking—more like she understood the weight of it.

“And you think it’s going to be won by one man with a desk full of maps?” she asked, her voice smooth, but with an edge of disbelief. “Come on. It’s not just on you.”

Her words were a small crack in the wall he’d built around himself, and the unspoken truth of them made him bristle, even as they sunk in. He hadn’t realized how much he’d been carrying until just now, with this stranger, in this quiet room.

He looked at her, really looked at her for the first time, noticing the way her eyes held his without flinching, the way her posture didn’t break under his stare. She wasn’t intimidated. She wasn’t afraid. And somehow, that felt like the weight he didn’t know how to carry was being taken by her.

“I don’t need anyone to tell me what to do,” he said, his tone defensive, though he didn’t have the energy to be as harsh as he wanted to be.

Her expression softened, and for the briefest moment, he thought he saw something like sympathy flicker in her gaze—but it was gone just as quickly.

“Then don’t let me tell you what to do,” she said, standing up and crossing toward him. She reached out, her hand hovering for a moment over the pile of reports on his desk. “Just take a damn break, Colonel. Or you’ll end up with nothing left to fight for.”

For a moment, Brennan didn’t move. He didn’t know what to do with her words, didn’t know how to handle the simple honesty in her voice. But before he could respond, she turned and made her way toward the door, pausing with her hand on the handle.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” she said over her shoulder, her tone unexpectedly gentle. “You can keep pretending you don’t need sleep. But I’m still here. Whether you want me to be or not.”

And with that, she was gone.

Brennan sat in the silence she left behind, staring at the door, feeling something inside of him stir—something long buried, something he didn’t know how to deal with.

For the first time in a long time, he didn’t feel quite so alone.

---

“I was just finishing up,” he lied, folding the report close.

“You’re lying,” she said, not cruelly. Just… honest. “You haven’t slept and you weren’t going to. Again.”

He tried to smile and failed miserably. “You checking up on me, Healer?”

She shrugged, looking up at him from under lashes longer than anyone burdened with war should have. “Just happened to be nearby.”

He snorted softly, the sound foreign in his own throat. “You always happen to be nearby.”

Something flickered in her expression, like maybe she’d been caught.

But instead of backpedaling, she leaned in. “Someone has to make sure you don’t keel over mid-strategy meeting.”

He stared at her. This woman who always smelled faintly of dried herbs and firepowder. Who patched him up, in more ways than one, without asking questions, who pressed tea to help him sleep into his hand when he forgot how to ask for help.

“You know you don’t have to do this,” he said quietly. “I’m not your responsibility.”

Her eyes softened. “You’re not a responsibility, Brennan. You’re a person.

One who’s drowning and doesn’t even see the tide rising.”

And gods help him, something in him cracked.

—

I've been wanting to post this little fanfic for a while now! I've got some other one shots that revolve around this story, maybe if people like this I'll post those too.

I'm also currently working on another fanfic in a modern AU and that is taking me so longggg. If I do ever finish it I'll post it here too.

the world (me) needs 100000% more brennan sorrengail x reader fics

She does this every time Amity comes back from a business trip lol

I don't think he exists anymore. He died about the same time as your father.

generals quarters and the two bugs that keep weaseling their way in

Something wholesome for once.

May The 4th Be With You 💫

sharing stories

look at that.

these 22-23 year old are saving the world and riding dragons...

what am i doing at my crisp age of 23?

rotting.

rotting in bed.