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I slipped up beside him, cradled his head to my chest and then down to my lap, shushing him, soothing him, whispering whatever came to mind. "Hey, hey, hey. You were dreaming. It's just a dream, Jax. It's not real. You're not there anymore. You're safe. I'm safe."

His long arms octopussed around my middle and he clung to me and just…shook, for several minutes. And all I could do was drag my fingernails through his thick brown hair and whisper inane, repetitive reassurances.

The pain and fear I felt and heard in him cut me to the quick, left my eyes burning and my stomach feeling hollow.

And some other, heretofore unknown part of me felt…aggressively protective.

Of him.

After a time I couldn't accurately measure, but which felt like around thirty or forty-five minutes, Jax seemed to calm a bit and tried to sit up.

I applied gentle pressure to keep him where he was, and he slumped back down. "Hey, just relax. I've got you now."

"I'm sorry," he rasped, the words half-sobbed, half-gasped. "I'm sorry."

"For?" I queried, looking down at him, genuinely puzzled.

"F-falling—shit,” he cleared his throat. "Falling apart like th-this.”

My fingers did weird, dumb, problematic-to-think-about things, such as stroking his temples and jawline, not just his hair. Meanwhile, my stomach was flipping, and my heart was pounding, and I had sweat dotting my upper lip, and I couldn't figure out why for any of it.

"You have nothing to apologize for."

His head twisted on my lap in a negative gesture. "No, I do. It's…I'm not—" he puffed in frustration. "I bet the people you served with never fell apart like this."

I barked a sarcastic laugh. “Well, then, you'd be flat wrong, bub. Everyone falls apart at some point. Everyone. The trick is to not fall apart until after shit is handled. Which is exactly what you've done." I felt sure I understood where he was coming from, and tried to address his fears and insecurities with as much tact and compassion as I could; stop laughing, damn you, I’m not that much of a bitch. "I've watched some seriously frosty dudes bawl their eyes out, Jax. On the helo en route back to base. In their bunk alone. In the latrine, or the canteen. Sitting watch at the perimeter. You have to deal with shit, Jax. You have to. No one is invulnerable. No one is impervious to pain or fear or horror or any of that. Not the sane ones, at least. If you went through what you've been through in the last forty-eight hours and didn't have so much as a single bad dream, I'd worry you were a sociopath or something. Courage isn't not feeling fear; it’s doing what's right and necessary anyway. And strength isn't about not feeling the trauma but rather dealing with it appropriately."

He just sighed, a long, slow outbreath meant to steady his nerves. “Thanks."

"What I’m saying, Jax, is that it's okay not to be okay. I don't think less of you for this. Just the opposite."

He just shuddered.

"Tell me," I said.

He sucked in a breath, let it out again. "It's all…vague and fuzzy, now. It was…it was all tangled up. The crash, the bear. I kept…I kept seeing the bear get you. I kept seeing the crash. The tree branches smashing against the windows and sides. I felt the impact like it just happened. I could smell the fuckin' bear's breath." He swallowed audibly. "I thought I was okay."

"It doesn't always hit you right away," I said. "After the crash in Afghanistan, I was initially so caught up in…well…grief, that I didn't really process the rest of it. Not right away, I mean. I didn't truly feel the emotional effects of the actual crash and losing Terry and Boulder and the rest of the team until weeks later. I just started having nightmares. Every night, I'd wake up like you just did, screaming, sweating, crying. I'd be in the helo taking fire. I'd watch Daisy’s neck snap. I saw that again and again, because I watched it happen in real life. I was looking at Daisy when we hit, and I saw…" I choked. "I saw his neck snap. Why didn't mine? I don't know. I don’t know. But it didn't. The worst—fuck. The worst was walking away from Terry, knowing his life could have been saved but wouldn't be. You can't know what it's like to be on the other side of a ridge and hearing gunfire and knowing it means someone you care about is dead. That really fucking sucks."

"Jesus, Tea," he whispered.

"I'm not trying to, like, one-up you on trauma, Jax. It's not like I think I alone have the market cornered on that shit. I'm just saying, I fucking get it. I fell apart. When I rotated out and flew home after Luke's funeral, I spent, shit, three days in Tania's bed, unable to move. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t…All I was capable of was lying there and crying."

"Hard to envision you crying."

"Doesn’t happen often."

"I bet." A pause. "Will…will you tell me about him?"

“Who, Luke?" I asked.

He nodded his head on my lap. "I get it if you can't."

I let out another long sigh. "As good a time as any, I guess."

"You don't have to."

"You've more than earned the right to ask about that, I guess.” I let my fingers trail through his hair, studiously avoiding thinking about why it felt so soothing to me to do that. "It’s hard to explain my relationship with Luke. I don't mean to keep saying ‘you don’t get it,’ but sometimes it's just true. And this is one of them. He was an Army Ranger. I…well, for one, I wasn't even supposed to be the pilot for that mission in the first place. Their original pilot came down with a wicked case of food poisoning, and I was tapped to replace him. We, uh…well, you have to understand that it's forbidden. Relationships like that, I mean. It complicates things, generally, especially at a FOB during wartime deployments like that. But there’s regs and then there's reality. When you have humans living in close quarters like that, dealing with isolation and high-stress situations, it's impossible to stop it from happening. It's human nature. It's stress relief. Companionship. Blowing off steam in the most natural way possible with the only people available." I held my breath for a beat or two, then let it out. "That's how it started with Luke and me. Luke was…he was larger than life. A real-life G.I. Joe type. Square jaw, massive shoulders, blue eyes and blond hair, the whole deal. Hell of a soldier. He had commendations coming out his ass." I waffled, and then just let it all flop out, the whole sordid truth. "It was extraordinarily unusual for me to even hook up with Luke that first time. I'm a rule follower. I tend to see most things as black and white. You're either following rules and orders and regs, or you're not. There's no sort of or almost. It's binary."