This was the part civilians never understood. The part that didn't make it into movies or recruitment videos. It wasn't about the firefights or the medals or the high-speed gear. It was about this. Six guys eating mediocre eggs at zero-six-thirty on a Tuesday morning and knowing without question that any one of them would die for the others without hesitation.
That was the real weight of command. Not the tactical decisions or the mission planning or the after-action reports. It was knowing that these five men would follow him into hellbecause he'd asked them to. And if he asked wrong, if he made the call that got one of them killed, he'd have to live with that for the rest of his life.
"You're thinking too hard," Bulldog said around a mouthful of eggs.
Steele blinked. "What?"
"You get that look. Like you're doing math in your head."
"Maybe I am."
"Stop it. You're making me nervous."
Ghost looked up from his phone. "You're always nervous."
"I prefer the term 'appropriately cautious.'"
"You literally breached a door yesterday because you thought it looked at you funny," Risk pointed out.
"It did look at me funny."
Joker leaned back in his chair. "Ten bucks says we get called up in the next forty-eight hours."
"You always say that" Hawk said quietly.
"And I'm right sixty percent of the time."
"That's not the winning percentage you think it is."
They fell back into silence. Finished eating. Bussed their trays. Drifted back toward their team bay because there was nowhere else to be and nothing else to do except wait. Wait for the call. Wait for the op. Wait for the moment when training stopped being hypothetical and became very, very real.
Steele finished his workout alone after the others drifted off to handle their own business. Bulldog to the armory to tinker with some modification he'd been working on. Ghost to his room and whatever digital rabbit holes he disappeared into. Hawk probably to the range because the man shot more rounds in a week than most soldiers did in a year.
The weight room was quiet. Just the clank of metal and the hum of the ancient air conditioning unit that barely kept the temperature below sweltering. Steele worked through anotherset, feeling the burn in his shoulders, the familiar ache that meant he'd pushed hard enough.
He showered. Changed. Found himself standing in his room with nothing particular to do and no desire to do it. This was the hardest part. Not the training or the ops or the violence. The waiting. The in-between spaces where you were just a guy in a room on a military base in North Carolina with too much time to think and nothing productive to think about.
He grabbed his phone. Scrolled through messages he hadn't answered. His sister. His mother. A buddy from Ranger battalion who was trying to organize a reunion. Someone from high school he barely remembered asking if he'd be at the twenty-year. Twenty years since high school. Christ. He'd spent more time in the military than he'd spent being a kid.
Steele tossed the phone on the bed. Looked around his room. Sparse. Functional. Nothing on the walls. Nothing personal except a single photo on the desk. Him and his team after a successful op three years ago. All of them filthy and exhausted and grinning like idiots because they'd done the impossible and lived to tell about it.
That was the thing civilians never understood. The brotherhood. The bond that came from trusting someone with your life on a regular basis. From knowing they'd die for you and you'd do the same without hesitation.
He'd tried to explain it once to a girl he'd been seeing. She'd asked why he kept re-enlisting. Why he didn't just get out and find a normal job. Do normal things. He hadn't known how to tell her that normal felt wrong. That he'd been doing this for so long he didn't remember how to be anything else. That the idea of sitting in an office or working retail or doing any of the thousand things normal people did made his skin crawl.
So, he'd stopped trying to explain. Stopped dating women who wanted him to be someone he wasn't. Stopped pretendingthat eventually he'd settle down and have the white picket fence and the two-point-five kids and the golden retriever.
This was his life. This team. This work. The in-between spaces of waiting for the next call.
He headed back to the common area. Found Risk on the couch, still reading his medical text. Ghost at the table with his laptop. Joker sprawled in a chair, earbuds in, eyes closed. Normal downtime. The comfortable silence of men who didn't need to fill every moment with noise.
Steele dropped into a chair. Picked up the worn paperback someone had left on the side table. Some thriller about a rogue CIA agent. He'd read it before. Didn't matter. It was something to do with his hands while his mind spun through the same loops it always did.
Training schedules. Equipment checks. The thousand small details that kept a team running smoothly. Whether he'd make it home for Christmas this year or if they'd get spun up and he'd be spending the holidays in some desert somewhere eating MREs and pretending it didn't matter. Whether his mother would eventually stop asking when he was going to give her grandchildren. Whether any of this meant something or if they were just professional trigger-pullers going where they were pointed and doing what they were told until they got too old or too slow or too dead to do it anymore.
Risk looked up from his book. "You good?"
"Yeah."
