I don’t know if he made it to base.
I don’t know if he’s alive.
No texts.
No calls.
No updates.
Just… silence.
Maybe that’s what I deserve.
Maybe that’s what happens when you hold back the truth until it becomes a weapon but none of that makes it easier to breathe.
Especially not today.
I sit in the sterile white of the medical briefing room, the walls humming with fluorescent light, the air too sharp, too cold, too clean—as if it’s trying to erase every trace of softness left inside me.
Voices murmur around me, clipped and distant, like I’m underwater.
The nurse checking my vitals frowns softly, taps her pen against her clipboard. Then she wraps the cuff around my arm again like she’s not convinced my first reading wasn’t a malfunction.
She shouldn’t be convinced.
My heart isn’t beating right.
It’s been beating wrong since the morning he left because part of it isn’t here anymore.
“You ever been under fire before?” The medic’s voice cuts into the fog, calm and impersonal in a way that makes it worse somehow.
I blink back into myself. “No,” I say quietly. “Not yet.”
He nods like the answer has weight he’s heard too many times. Like he’s already watched girls with eyes too soft for war walk into what I’m walking into.
He checks my pupils. My reflexes. My cycle. My sleep.
My trauma history.
I lie through half of it.
“I’m fine,” I say with a smile that isn’t a smile.
“You sure?” he asks gently, eyes narrowing. “The deployments—especially where you’re going—they can break even the ones who think they’re prepared.”
I smile again. It stretches wrong across my face. “I’ve already been broken. This is just the aftermath.”
He doesn’t argue.
Doesn’t agree.
Just clears me for deployment like he’s stamping a passport into hell.
In the locker room, I sit on the cold metal bench with my knees pulled to my chest. Steam curls from the showers, fogging the mirrors until the reflections bleed into one another. My uniform is folded beside me. Crisp. Stiff. Waiting.
Dog tags sit in my palm.
Cold.
