“You’re serious?” I ask more quietly.
He nods and turns his gaze back toward the horizon. “We’re set for life. Between contracts, pensions, and about a thousand favors owed, we’d be fine.”
My heart lifts before I can stop it. “Like really fine?”
He glances at me, and his voice softens. “Like summers on the beach with your parents. Barbecues. No radios. No blood. No one calling in the middle of the night because somebody opened the wrong crate in the wrong country. Just life.”
Something in my throat tightens at that. The way he says it makes it sound less like a fantasy and more like a blueprint he’s been quietly building in his head for a while now.
“And visits from Moe and Raylen,” I add, because if I let myself sit in the tenderness of his words too long, I’m going to do something embarrassing like cry. “Without anyone side-eyeing us like it’s weird that I’m basically his age.”
Jon chuckles. “Still weird.”
“Rude.”
He bumps his shoulder against mine. “True.”
I imagine it then, not in pieces, but all at once. I imagine long days where the ocean is louder than gunfire and the only thing in my hair is salt instead of ash. I imagine my mom forcing Jon into family photos while pretending she isn’t secretly thrilled she finally gets to keep him in them. I imagine my dad grumbling about him on principle and then asking him to help fix everything around the house anyway. I imagine Moe and Raylen showing up with all the chaos they carry between them and somehow making it feel like home. I imagine King, rumor finally confirmed, showing up one day in civilian clothes with some woman from Seaborn at his side and his mask missing often enough to prove he finally learned how to live without it. I imagine Larkin still running Greenport like an iron queen, terrifying recruits and saving lives in equal measure. I imagine Jon remembered forever as the captain who won wars no one will ever write books about. I imagine myself standing beside him, not because I was forced there, not because war backed me into it, but because I chose him and he chose me.
A life built on something other than survival. A life shaped by choice.
“I’d go with you,” I say, and I don’t even need to think about it.
He turns to look at me then, really look at me, his expression unreadable for a beat. “You wouldn’t miss this?”
I let my eyes drift around the base, over the soldiers, the flags, the machinery, the endless and familiar choreography of conflict. This place made me. It sharpened me. It tested me. Ithurt me, too. But for the first time in a long time, I don’t feel owned by it.
“I’ve given enough to it,” I say softly. “I’d like to give something to myself now.”
His hand finds mine and squeezes. His palm is warm, rough, familiar, and the touch feels like a promise neither of us needs to say out loud. We fall quiet again after that, and this time the silence feels full instead of unfinished.
Later, when the base lights begin flickering on one by one and the world settles into another uneasy night, my thoughts drift backward to a place they have returned to more times than I can count. Back to the beginning. Back to the first time I sat on the floor of his office and asked him a question I had no business asking.
“What’s war like?”
The words slipped out before I could second-guess them, before I could soften them into something safer or easier to dismiss. They hung in the air between us, reckless and fragile, and for half a second I wondered if I had just crossed a line I wouldn’t know how to step back from.
I was sitting cross-legged on the polished hardwood floor beside his desk, my back against the cool wood, my boots kicked off and resting somewhere behind me. I probably looked completely out of place in there, too young and too curious and too soft for a room that smelled faintly of gun oil, leather, old paper, and too much responsibility. I remember glancing up at the man behind the desk and thinking that up close, Captain Jonathan Cash looked even more intimidating than the stories had made him seem.
He was all sharp edges and quiet authority, broad shoulders straining slightly against his uniform, brown hair already touched with silver at the temples, jaw set so hard it lookedlike it might crack if he ever let himself relax. He looked tired in the way only certain men ever do—not sleepy tired, but soul tired, like exhaustion had seeped into his bones and built a home there.
“I don’t think you need to worry that pretty little head of yours about it,” he muttered without looking up, his eyes still fixed on the paperwork spread across his desk.
His tone was dismissive and protective and a little condescending, enough of all three that I didn’t know whether I wanted to smile or roll my eyes. Instead, I pressed my lips together and tapped my fingernails against the floor in a slow, deliberate rhythm. Not because I was nervous. Because I was thinking. I have always been thinking. Thinking about things I wasn’t supposed to, about worlds my parents tried to keep hidden from me like they were afraid curiosity itself might get me killed.
“Come on, old man,” I said, tipping my head back to look at him. “I want to hear the war stories. It’s boring out there.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. Barely. A smirk he definitely had not meant to give me.
God help me, I noticed. I noticed everything. The way his shoulders loosened a fraction. The way his fingers stilled over the report like he’d forgotten what he was doing. The way his eyes finally lifted to mine, sharp and assessing and far too aware.
“You’re a bold one,” he said, studying me now. “Waltzing into my office like you own the place, and I’ve never even seen your face around here. What are you? A new recruit with more guts than sense?”
My heart fluttered, not with fear but with possibility.
“One can only hope,” I murmured, and my voice came out softer and more honest than I meant it to.
Something shifted in his expression then, like that answer had landed somewhere unexpected.
