We stand there, two soldiers past our prime pretending this isn’t goodbye. Pretending this is temporary. Pretending I’m not cutting out a piece of the structure that’s held Greenport up in the dark for years.
“I don’t hate you,” he says quietly.
“I know,” I reply.
“I just hate that she’s the reason you’re still fighting,” he admits.
I meet his gaze.
“She’s the reason I’m still human.”
That shuts him up.
Not because he agrees. Because he understands exactly what it costs me to say it out loud.
I extend my hand.
He looks at it for a long time. At the offer. At the insult buried in it. At the history.
Then he takes it.
We grip tight.
No ceremony. No speech. Just two men who survived too much and know exactly how close they came to not surviving this part either. His hand is rough, bruised, blood tacky at the knuckles. Mine isn’t much better. It feels less like a handshake and more like holding a fault line shut with bare fingers.
“I’ll see you around, Cap,” he murmurs.
“You better,” I answer.
He lets go first.
Then he leaves without looking back.
And I stand there long after the door shuts, staring at the place where he was, wondering how many good soldiers this war is going to take from me before it’s done.
Chapter 29
Delilah Barrinheart
The med bay doesn’t feel like a punishment anymore.
It surprises me how easily that realization settles into my chest, how little resistance it meets when it lands there. The first time Jon benched me here, I felt like a caged animal—pacing white floors that looked too much like surrender, resentful of every soldier who walked out with clearance papers while I stayed behind under fluorescent lights and forced breathing exercises, pretending recovery didn’t feel like a prettier word for weakness. Every monitor beep had sounded like judgment. Every curtained bed had felt like proof that I was being handled instead of trusted.
Now?
Now after just a few months it feels… steady.
Predictable.
The antiseptic scent no longer claws at the back of my throat. The steady hum of machines sounds less like confinement and more like rhythm. The drawers are always stocked the same way. The instruments always gleam under the same too-bright lights.The routines repeat until they become their own kind of comfort. Clean. Assess. Wrap. Reassure. Move.
I move between beds with quiet efficiency, checking dressings, replacing IV bags, handing out anti-inflammatories and dry sarcasm in equal measure. A medic with less experience than confidence trails me for part of the morning until I make him rewrap a wrist splint three times because “good enough” is how people end up reinjuring themselves two hours later and blaming everybody but their own stupidity. He stops trying to charm me after that.
The soldiers talk like I’m not listening.
They always do.
Maybe it’s because I don’t interrupt much anymore. Maybe it’s because people assume if you’re quiet, you’re detached. Maybe it’s just that men with bruises and stitches love hearing themselves talk even when someone’s literally holding their tendons together.
