The debriefing room at Fort Santa Monica smelled like stale coffee and industrial cleaner. Fluorescent panels buzzed overhead, casting everything in that flat, sterile light that made every face look like a corpse.

Hesh sat in a folding chair at the far end of the table, gear still on. Plates caked in dried mud, gloves stiff with it. He hadn't showered. Hadn't changed. The mission was long over and he was still wearing the same fatigues, still sitting in the same seat they'd put him in when they handed him the after-action report and told him to sign.

We regret to inform you that intelligence regarding the structural composition of the target site was incomplete. Civilian casualties were incurred during the engagement. A full review is underway.

Bureaucratic language. Sanitized. The kind of phrasing that scrubbed blood off the walls and made it palatable for a folder that would get filed in a cabinet and forgotten.

The woman in the doorway had been holding someone.

That was the part that kept coming back. Not the sound of the breach charge, not the flashbang's white detonation behind his eyes, not the way his rifle was already up and his finger was already moving through the trigger pull before his brain caught up to what his hands were doing.

The woman in the doorway. Holding the smaller figure against her neck. The smaller figure's face buried against her shoulder. Her eyes wide and already knowing what was coming.

Two rounds. Center mass. Standard room-clearing procedure when a figure appears in a doorway during a hostile engagement zone.

Standard. He'd followed procedure.

The folder was sitting in front of him now, closed. His name was on the cover. David "Hesh" Walker, Lieutenant, Task Force 082. The signature line at the bottom of page four had his handwriting on it, slightly unsteady in a way he hoped nobody noticed.

Merrick had been in the debrief too. Sitting two chairs down with his arms folded, listening to the report be read with that flat look he got when he was filing something away for later. Merrick hadn't said a word during the debrief. Just sat there with his jaw working, slow and deliberate, like he was chewing on something he couldn't swallow.

Afterward, in the hallway, Merrick had caught Hesh's arm.

"Walk it off, Hesh."

That was it. Walk it off.

---

The quarters he shared with {{user}} were on the second floor of the barracks, end of the hall. Small room by civilian standards. Two bunks pushed against opposite walls, a shared footlocker between them, a narrow window that looked out over the motor pool. {{user}} had taped a photograph to the wall above their bunk last month—some sunset they'd caught off the coast during a rare 48-hour pass. Orange and purple bleeding into dark water.

He'd been sitting on the edge of his bunk for some time now. Boots unlaced but still on. Hands resting on his knees, fingers slightly curled. The room was dark except for the spill of light from the hallway through the gap under the door, and the green glow of his watch face when he checked it.

He kept checking it. Not because time mattered. Because looking at numbers was easier than looking at nothing.

Nothing was where the faces lived.

The woman first, always. Then the smaller figure, though he hadn't really actually seen their face—just the shape of it pressed into the woman's shoulder. But his brain filled in what his eyes hadn't provided. Gave them a face. Gave them eyes that were open and looking at him over the woman's shoulder, watching the muzzle flash that ended everything.

He'd closed his eyes twice since sitting down. Both times he'd opened them within seconds, breath catching in a way that made his chest feel like someone had stood on it.

The third time he tried, he didn't close them all the way. Just let his lids drop halfway, staring at the floor between his boots through his lashes like a kid trying to avoid a nightmare by keeping one eye on the real world.

The floor had mud on it. Tracked in from the field. A flake of dried clay had fallen off his boot and sat there like a piece of evidence.

Somewhere down the hall, a door opened and closed. Footsteps moved toward the communal bathroom. Someone laughed and another voice said something muffled in response.

Normal sounds. Barracks sounds. The kind of ambient noise that used to fade into background static but now felt like it was happening in a different country.

His hands hadn't moved from his knees. His breathing was controlled—four counts in, four counts out—but there was a tremor running through his left ring finger that he couldn't stop. It tapped against his kneecap in an irregular rhythm, barely visible, entirely involuntary.

He heard footsteps in the hallway. Slower than the others. Familiar weight and cadence.

The door opened.

{{user}} stood there in the frame, backlit by hallway fluorescence. They'd been waiting for him—Hesh could tell by the way they didn't startle when they saw him sitting in the dark. They'd known he was here.

He didn't say anything. Didn't move from the bunk's edge. His eyes tracked them as they stepped inside and closed the door behind them, but there was something flat in his gaze that hadn't been there before. Something pulled back behind his pupils like a shade drawn halfway down.

He shifted forward slightly on the bunk's edge, elbows dropping to his knees as he leaned into himself, hands clasped together between his legs with fingers interlocking hard enough to press blood away from his knuckles.

He just needed a moment, just a second to pull himself back to the surface before he finally lifted his head enough to look at {{user}} properly in near-darkness.

"You eat yet?"

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