can I get the mic little higher

buck realizes, when he’s pulling up to the curb outside athena’s place to drop off maddie and chim and eddie, that maybe he shouldn’t have been driving—if these are even his hands on the steering wheel.

when he tells them all good night, it sounds like someone else is speaking. he can feel the vibrations of his voice in his chest, his throat, his mouth, and he must say the right thing because no one looks at him weird, but he can’t help but wonder if, instead of a man, he’s an inanimate speaker, and always has been, and everyone’s just been too polite to say anything to him about it.

this isn’t the first time he’s felt like this, like he should know that he’s real, but it feels like he’s watching his life happen to someone else, like his life is a movie, like he’s a robot trapped on the inside of a bag of meat, like if he tries hard enough he’ll wake up and realize none of this really happened, and the realness can finally begin.

the thing is, he used to be able to text bobby when it happened, for a dose of reality, and now he can’t, and that’s the problem.

if he says anything about it, it’ll be, oh, buck’s making everything about himself again, or, buck’s having a mental break and should be fired from his job (and lose his health insurance) without a second thought. because that’s what chim said tonight, wasn’t it? if buck had a problem that affected his work, no questions asked, fired. or—would it be because he didn’t speak up about it the first time it happened, because anything past that would be lying?

nobody asked me, hen had asserted. nobody checked in after bobby died, because everyone was in their own bubbles, and she didn’t want to add to anyone’s grief. but—buck is pretty sure that wasn’t true. he remembers checking in with everyone, trying to get a read on what they might need.

because bobby had said they were going to need buck.

but—what if he hadn’t, actually? what if he’d just thought he had? what if he’d dreamed it? he’s pretty sure it was real, but what if it wasn’t? her words could have been his words. was she wrong, or has he totally misremembered the past year?

he probably shouldn’t drive the rest of the way home like this. he should probably leave his truck here and get an uber. but that would only lead to more questions, that might result in him being fired, and he can’t—

he can’t text bobby, so he does the next best thing, which is to put on the greatest hits of springsteen, and roll his windows down to let in some fresh—as fresh as it can get in LA—air, and head toward a drive-thru for a root beer and some fries.

— —

he makes it home. he showers and brushes his teeth and tries not to think about how uncomfortable it is to look himself in the face in the mirror. who is this man. he locks up the house for the night and burrows into his sweatshirt and finally feels like he’s not going to shake apart by looking for answers.

he takes in a deep breath, then lets it out.

his text chain with ravi is probably the safest to start. ravi wasn’t there tonight, he’s on vacation, so it feels like a more neutral place to start. buck scrolls back, back, back some more until—there.

ravi hadn’t really taken buck up on his repeated offers to talk about it, but just as buck remembered doing, there it is, in print: asking how ravi’s doing, how he’s feeling, if he needs anything, offering support. buck doesn’t really get why ravi wouldn’t talk to him about it—after all, why not talk to someone who was there, who understands?—but the guy’s work/life boundaries are pretty ironclad, so maybe that’s just part of it.

chim, athena, maddie, may, harry, even karen: it’s the same story. for the most part, he didn’t get much in the way of nibbles on the line, but he tried. at least he got bachelor mondays with may and harry out of it.

he sees the letters and words on the screen and they all make sense. they look real. and that wouldn’t be true if this was a dream, right? if this wasn’t real?

he feels a surge of trepidation as he stares down the threads he has with eddie and hen, the two people who have made him doubt his perception of reality about this. eddie was mad, back in the spring, that buck didn’t specifically ask how it felt to get the phone call about bobby—but if that was bothering eddie, how that felt, then why didn’t he just mention it when buck asked how he was doing, if he wanted to talk about anything?

and hen, who buck had trusted countless times over the years for her honesty and understanding, had obviously lost patience every time she saw buck coming to ask her how she was doing, every time she replied to one of his texts. how does she get away with telling him, buck, you need to stop, then being angry that he took her at her word and stopped? was he supposed to violate the boundary she set? and—how is he supposed to know, if someone is telling him the opposite of what they want?

how is he supposed to know what’s real and what isn’t, if the information he has to process isn’t true? if everything is the opposite of what it appears? people care, but will take away your job without a second thought? people get mad at you for asking how they’re doing, then say that you never asked in the first place? people say they’re your best friend, your family, but don’t seem to actually like anything about you?

buck burrows further into his blankets and crams his pillow around his ears and wishes, truly, that this is just another coma dream.

but: he can’t deny that it’s night, right now.

Not at the front, not tucked behind cover. On the edge, like he wanted the space to bounce on the balls of his feet, chute bag slung lazy, grin too bright for the heat. He spun his dog tags in a loop that clicked against the chain, a boyish tic that should’ve belonged anywhere but here.

“Bird looks tight, Ghost,” Buckley called, voice cutting through turbine scream as if volume had never been a problem for him. “Fingers crossed you can keep up.”

Cocky. Too pretty. Too fucking young.

Tommy slid his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose, slow enough to make it an insult. Let the kid see the flat, predator stillness in his eyes. “Bird’s not the one I’m worried about falling out of the sky,” he said, pitched low for the crew chief on intercom.

The rookie didn’t blink. He flashed two fingers in a lazy salute, insolent as hell.

“Easy, Buck,” Mace drawled, voice carrying over the engines. “Don’t piss off the man with the keys to our ride. Again.”

“What’s the matter, Mace?” Rook chimed in without looking up from his screen. “Scared he’ll finally leave your charming ass behind?”

Hawk clapped a hand to Rook’s shoulder, steering him toward the ramp. “Focus, children.” His eyes met Tommy’s, assessing. He gave a nod before he followed his team aboard.

The crew chief’s voice crackled in Tommy’s ear. “The blond? That’s the rookie?”

“Looks like it.” Tommy’s gaze lingered as the SEALs flowed up the ramp around him. The kid’s energy bled into the team like voltage, sparking off all of them, and none seemed to mind. Dangerous.

He didn’t add what they were both thinking: rookies got good men killed.

The bird lifted clean, nose tipping into the wind. Tommy felt the thrum in his teeth, the cyclic talking in his hand like it always did, every vibration a word only he understood. He tucked them low over the valley, nap of the earth, no lights. The air was clean at this altitude, cool rushing through open doors, turbine scream steady in his bones.

In the back, the team shifted into silence. Hawk bent to murmur in Rook’s ear, one last reminder. Mace rolled his shoulders before pointing out the bird. Torres stood easy, right hand loose, calm as stone. And Buckley sat on the edge of the bench, his tags spinning in a lazy circle around his finger before dropping them around his neck. A grin still on his face like he hadn’t learned yet that grinning was a thing men stop doing in-country.

Tommy told himself he didn’t care. He kept his eyes forward, followed the valley’s curve, felt the rotor disk cut the air clean.

“Two-zero out,” he called when the skids kissed dirt. Perfect set-down, smooth as silk. He almost smiled.

The ramp dropped. The team spilled from his bird, dark shapes swallowed by darker ground. In the ghostly green of his NVGs, he tracked them. Hawk and Mace peeling left, Rook’s smaller form tucked tight behind, Torres a solid shadow in the center. And then Buckley, already sliding wide, a restless blur that made Tommy’s jaw tighten. Stay in formation, damn it.

Tommy eased the cyclic back, lifting the nose, tucking the bird behind a spine of rock that painted a jagged line across his goggles. His left hand hovered over the collective, ready to slam power if Torres’s calm voice called for it.

The first gun crack shattered the silence, sharp as a whip right next to his ear. Then three more. Then the stuttering chatter of belt-fed fire, a sound that felt like teeth grinding on metal.

“Contact, roof, three o’clock.” Hawk’s voice was a flat, calm line in his headset, a direct contrast to the chaos outside.

“Moving left flank,” Mace snapped, and Tommy saw the corresponding shift of shadows in his limited field of view.

Then a curse, tight and breathless, ripped through the comms. Mace’s voice. “Rook’s down! Leg… fuck, it’s bad, really fuckin’ bad.”

No.

“Say again?” Tommy barked into the mic, a reflex, a useless hope against the static-laced report.

As if in answer, rounds walked across the ridge directly above the canopy. He flinched as rock splinters ticked against the Plexiglas. Too close. He nudged the cyclic, shifting the bird two feet right, feeling the rotor disk bite into new air, buying a sliver of an angle.

Then a different voice, sharp and cutting through the panic. That voice. “I’ve got him! Hawk, cover!”

Tommy’s gut clenched. Buckley. Of course. The swagger in the tone was unmistakable even through the distortion.

“You break my formation, I swear to God,” Tommy hissed to the empty cockpit, and shoved the nose forward, exposing them.

His world narrowed to the green circle of his goggles. Muzzle flashes bloomed like toxic flowers. In the swirling dust, two figures broke cover. One was a limp weight. The other was Buckley, hauling Rook’s arm over his shoulder, stumbling across open dirt. Fire kicked up around their boots, each impact a punctuation mark to Tommy’s hammering heart.

“Suppressing!” Hawk barked, rifle snapping like punctuation.

“Keep moving, Buck!” Mace’s voice, raw with quiet panic.

Tommy dumped collective, slammed steel into dirt. The skids bounced once. The crew chief leaned half out, braced against the door frame, arms reaching.

Buckley shoved Rook forward with a shout. “Take him!”

Hands grabbed. Rook vanished into the dark belly of the bird. Buck did not hesitate. He vaulted for the skid, a round sparking off the rail by his boot. He swung up, boots thudding inside just as Tommy yanked them clear, rotors clawing air.

The valley blurred past in streaks of shadow and firelight. Door gun raked the ridge, brass spitting in long arcs. The crew chief yelled something, half lost under the roar.

“All accounted for,” Hawk clipped, cool as if they hadn’t just dragged one of their own out of hell.

Mace was cursing like prayer. Rook screamed once, cut short when someone pressed gauze deep.

Under it, Tommy heard Buckley’s voice, low and steady, bent close to his teammate. “Hey, look at me, Leo. You’re fine. You’re fine. Just a scratch. We’ve got you. You’re fine.”

The words crawled under Tommy’s skin and stayed there.

Back on the strip, wheels kissed and rolled. Medics swarmed, pulling Rook out first, their voices clipped. The rest of the team spilled around, forming a loose perimeter of presence more than protection, eyes sharp while they watched their brother disappear toward triage.

Buckley staggered down last, blood streaking his forearm where a round had barely grazed him, shirt torn and blackened with smoke. He brushed off the first medic who tried to pull him aside, shoved Rook’s pack into their hands, then ripped tape with his teeth and started binding his own arm like pain was just background noise.

Tommy found himself walking toward him before his brain caught up.

“You don’t pull that shit on my aircraft,” he said, voice low, flat. No hello. No how bad.

Buckley didn’t look up from his arm. “Next time I’ll let him bleed out neat so your approach looks pretty.”

Mace stepped past with a lit cigarette, blowing smoke out of the corner of his mouth. “Was a good pull, Buck,” he said.

Buck tore another strip of tape, teeth bared. “You don’t like me,” he said, curious more than anything.

Tommy stared back. “You’re green. And you think you’re special.”

Buck laughed. “Enlisted at seventeen. Pinned trident before I could legally buy a beer. Ask me what I think about special.”

The kid wasn’t green. He was the heart of the pack, and everyone around him knew it.

And Tommy hated how much that scared him.

The hangar was half-dark, the air thick with grease and turbine exhaust, the kind of smell that never washed out of clothes. Tommy should have been in the ready room finishing paperwork, or in the chow line choking down something gray on rice. Instead, his feet carried him back to his bird.

He’d told himself he was checking the machine. That was the line. A tail rotor panel could’ve taken a pebble, the skids might’ve bent on that slam landing. He was just making sure.

But his hands slid over rivet seams he already knew were clean, his fingers tracing metal as if the skin of the helicopter could answer questions he couldn’t ask.

“You sleep here?”

Tommy didn’t turn. The voice was unmistakable, too young, too insolent, already lodged under his ribs. “You get lost on the way to your own barracks, sailor?”

“Jesus,” Buckley said, stepping into the spill of red light from the exit sign. His forearm was still bandaged, tape crooked and sloppy. He moved like the adrenaline hadn’t worn off yet, all energy bleeding sideways. “And they say we’re the mouthy ones.”

He leaned a hip against the skid, casual as if he belonged in the shadow of Tommy’s bird. “You’re mad because I didn’t get killed.”

Red light from the exit sign bled across Buck’s face, turning the sweat on his cheekbones into war paint. He was still breathing hard, chest rising and falling like he’d sprinted the whole valley instead of two hundred meters of open dirt.

Tommy stepped in until the toes of their boots almost touched. Close enough to smell cordite in Buck’s hair, copper on his breath.

“I’m mad,” Tommy said, voice low enough the turbines outside couldn’t steal it, “because you turned a clean exfil into a fucking circus.” The words came out sharper than intended, barbed with something that had nothing to do with procedure. “Your job is to get to the LZ. My job is to have the bird ready to fly. You go rogue, you make my bird a stationary target. You get my crew killed for an unnecessary risk.”

Buck’s chin came up. The grin was still there, but it had teeth now. “Unnecessary?” He laughed short and ugly. “That was my teammate.”

“And I’m the one who brings the whole team home,” Tommy shot back, stepping closer. His pulse was too loud in his ears. “Not just the one you are carrying. You risked all of it. So, don’t. Don’t make my choice about who gets left behind.”

For the first time all day, Buck’s expression shifted. The grin fell away, replaced by something harder, darker. “I don’t leave my team.”

“Neither do I.” Tommy hadn’t meant to confess it.

He took a step back.

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was thick, charged, the hum of turbine blades left in the walls. Somewhere outside, a door slammed, boots crunching gravel. Inside the hangar, just the two of them and a machine that had already kept their secrets.

“You think I’m green,” Buck said finally, eyes steady, chin tilted. “You look at my face and see a body bag waiting to happen.”

Tommy’s jaw worked. He didn’t confirm it. He didn’t have to.

“Rook’s gonna keep his leg,” Buck went on. “Says he owes me a beer. Mace says I owe him one for scaring the shit out of him.”

Tommy should have ended it there. Should have shoved him out the door, walked away, rebuilt the wall brick by brick. Instead, he stepped forward again. Close enough that the kid’s grin came back, daring and dangerous.

Tommy slammed his hand against the bulkhead an inch from Buck’s head.

“Stay off my deck if you can’t follow orders,” Tommy said, voice low and stripped of pretense. “You pull that cowboy shit again, I will…”

“Do what?” Buck cut in, climbing the words like a ladder. His mouth curved, reckless. “Yell at me? Write me up, Captain? Leave me out there so your approach stays clean?”

Tommy’s throat went dry. His pulse was a drumline under his skin. “Drag you in by your goddamn collar myself and end your fucking career myself.”

“So goddamn dramatic, Ghost,” Buck murmured.

The last inch vanished.

Their mouths hit like a collision, brutal, uncalculated. Teeth, heat, a groan ripped from deep in Tommy’s chest before pride could choke it down. Buck caught the front of his flight suit and yanked, answering with the same ferocity, biting his lower lip until they both tasted copper.

It wasn’t a kiss, not really. It was violence, desperation disguised as anger. Tommy shoved him against the bulkhead, metal rattling. Buck arched into him, meeting force with force, like he’d been waiting for this.

Hands landed hard on hip, ribs, throat, mapping territory, claiming without promise. Tommy’s body knew the rhythm before his brain did. This was the fight they hadn’t finished on the strip. This was the war they weren’t allowed to wage anywhere else.

When Tommy finally tore back, both of them were breathing like they’d sprinted a mile. His hand still fisted in Buck’s shirt, his mouth swollen, blood on both their tongues.

“Get the fuck out,” Tommy rasped.

Buck’s eyes flicked over his face, searching, before he rocked back on his heels, he straightened Tommy's collar with one hand, then stepped back and threw up that same insolent two-finger salute.

“See ya in the morning, Ghost.”

He pushed off the skid and walked out into the night, leaving footprints of dust across the hangar floor.

Tommy stayed frozen where he was. He told himself it was nothing, just stress, heat, a pressure valve blowing.

It would never happen again.

His hand slid down the seam of his flight suit. Once. Twice. The ritual betrayed him.

Months stacked like sandbags, each one indistinguishable from the last except for the tally marks carved into helmets, the scars deepening in skin, and the way the rituals rooted until they felt like laws of nature.

Tommy ran his hand down the seam of his flight suit, once, twice, before every lift. And Buck? Buck slapped the fuselage twice on his way up the ramp, a casual thump thump that settled in Tommy’s chest like a second heartbeat. It started as cocky habit. By month two, it was code. Tommy realized his body wasn’t relaxing until he heard it.

They got a new body on rotation at the start of the third month. Not a kid fresh from BUD/S, which was what Tommy expected, but a stocky man in his thirties with close-cropped hair and the kind of nervous energy you saw in people who’d been good at something else before the Navy turned them into something new.

“Toto,” he introduced himself to the team, extending a hand that hovered a second too long in the space between offering and apologizing. “Name’s Anthony Totorelli. But everyone calls me…”

Mace snorted. “No relation to the Captain, thank Christ.”

Toto flushed, rubbing a hand across the back of his neck. “Right. Yeah. Toto is fine.”

He stood a little too straight, boots too clean, pack straps tightened like he’d cinched them using a checklist. Older, yes. But green as desert grass.

Buck eyeballed him, head tilted like he was reading a manual only he could see. Then Buck stepped forward, bumped his shoulder lightly against Toto’s.

“You stick near me,” Buck said, easy. “Hawk’s the quiet sniper, Mace bites, and Rook talked too much until he stopped being here to talk. I’m the fun one.”

Tommy felt the words hit the group like a small stone dropped into a still pond.

Toto was still processing the last sentence when Buck flashed that grin, too bright for a war zone, the one that made men overlook how dangerous he really was.

“Fun is relative,” Hawk muttered.

Buck pointed at Toto’s overstuffed pack. “First lesson. Drop the weight. You’re carrying half a CVS in there. You won’t need it.”

“I thought…” Toto began.

“Thinking is good.” Buck squeezed his shoulder. “Overthinking gets you killed. Come on.”

He stripped Toto’s pack apart in thirty seconds flat, tossing out duplicate bandages, an unnecessary second canteen, and at least three items nobody could identify.

Mace held up a sealed shrink-wrapped blister pack. “Why the hell do you have foot warmers?”

Toto flushed again. “Someone online said they help circulation in high-altitude jumps.”

Buck laughed. “Brother, we’re not going skiing. Keep one. Toss the rest.”

Tommy watched all of it, arms crossed. Buck wasn’t supposed to be the one training the rookie. That was Torres’s job, or Hawk’s, or anyone with rank older than a decade. Not the loud dirty blond who bounced between brilliance and recklessness.

But Toto followed Buck across the tarmac anyway, footsteps syncing to Buck’s rhythm almost immediately. And when Buck smacked the fuselage twice before hopping up the ramp that night, Toto hesitated, looked at Buck, then did the same.

Thump. Thump.

The sound echoed strangely in Tommy’s chest.

The team leaned into it too. Hawk, deadpan: “Cadence good. We’re live.” Mace grumbled about “idiot superstitions” even as he tapped his own rifle stock in time. Even Torres, who never indulged in nonsense, allowed the rhythm to exist unchallenged. Toto picked it up instinctively, falling in step behind Buck like the sound meant safety.

It became their good luck. Their way home.

Tommy and Buck clashed still. That never went away. Buck would swagger in with a grin too big for the dirt on his boots, and Tommy would shut him down cold with one look. They’d bicker over nothing, how fast a turn in should be, who was crowding the ramp, the definition of “cover fire.”

But the edge dulled. The arguments slid into banter, a rhythm of their own.

Buck needled, Tommy growled back, and somewhere in the middle a truce lived.

By the fifth month, Tommy caught himself looking forward to it. The kid’s grin was too bright for a war zone, but it lit something in the team, and God help him, it steadied something in Tommy too.

The break did not come all at once. It came after too many nights of watching Buck lean into the team like he was their center of gravity. After too many ops where Tommy swore he felt Buck’s presence even through steel and rotor wash. After too many mornings where the fuselage slapped twice and his pulse settled because of it.

It came after a long night op that turned into a fourteen-hour clusterfuck. Ambush in a valley, too many civilians, too little intel. The kind of mission that left everyone streaked with grime and vibrating from the effort of not dying.

Back at base, the team dispersed. Hawk muttered something about showers. Mace hunted cigarettes. Toto limped off toward his bunk to crash. Torres disappeared like smoke.

Buck peeled away too, not toward the barracks, but to the far edge of camp. Tommy saw it from the corner of his eye, the tilt of blond head under low light, the dog tags spinning restless around his finger. He shouldn’t have followed.

He did anyway.

The clerk’s tent was half-forgotten, canvas sagging, cot shoved against one wall. It smelled of dust, paper, and sweat. Buck sat on the edge, boots still on, spinning his tags like the metal could hypnotize him. He looked up when Tommy filled the doorway, blue eyes rimmed red.

“Torres has me sleep out here,” Buck grunted, “so he doesn’t have to report the nightmares.”

Tommy’s gut twisted. He didn’t answer. He stepped inside, the flap falling closed behind him.

Tommy should’ve left. He didn’t. He crossed the space in three strides. “You’re too damn young to be this broken.”

Buck’s mouth curved into something smaller, darker. “Been broken long before I ever was a frogman.”

The words weren’t defensive nor were they dramatic. They were plain and offered without flinch.

Something in Tommy went still.

“Who did that to you?” he asked. It came out low, scraped from a place deeper than anger.

Buck gave a breath of a laugh, sharp and empty. “Does it matter? I enlisted at seventeen. The Navy just put better names on the damage.”

His dog tags spun once around his finger. Tommy recognized the motion for what it was, a tic, a self soothing ritual.

“You think what’s out there is the worst I’ve seen?” Buck nodded toward the desert, the gunfire, all of it. “War’s predictable. Makes more sense than home ever did.”

Tommy stepped closer without meaning to. “And what doesn’t make sense?”

Buck met his eyes. Tired. Older than he should have been. “Being safe,” he said softly. “That’s the part I never figured out.”

“You’re not supposed to be afraid of dying,” Tommy murmured. “But you are supposed to want to live.”

Buck’s eyes lifted to his, blue, so fucking blue. “Tell me how.” The words weren’t a challenge. They were a plea.

Tommy’s hand hit the pillow beside Buck’s head, caging him in.

“You don’t run straight into gunfire,” Tommy grunted roughly. “You don’t haul every wounded man across open dirt like you’re invincible. You don’t…” The last words chipped loose from the pit of desperation in his chest. “You don’t throw yourself away just because nobody taught you you’re not disposable.”

Buck swallowed, his breath catching. The room felt too small, the air too tight, the space between them charged like the second before a trigger pull.

Buck’s breath stuttered, shallow and unsure, like he was standing on the edge of something he had never been shown how to survive.

“Tommy?"

That was all it took.

Tommy leaned in until their foreheads brushed. Buck tilted up to meet him like it was instinct.

Their mouths locked together, tongue and heat and the sharp taste of need. Buck fisted Tommy’s flight suit, yanking him closer, Tommy’s pulse hammered in his ears as his hand slid from the pillow to Buck’s jaw, grip rough, thumb dragging over stubble and sweat.

Buck arched into him, hungry, answering force with force until the two of them were breathing in the same ragged rhythm.

“You don’t know what you want.”

“I know what I need.” Buck leaned up so close the tags brushed Tommy’s chest. His voice dropped. “You… you keep my head quiet. That’s enough.”

Tommy’s growled, eyes narrowing. “You made me choose between you and the rest of them. Don’t ever do that again.”

“You think I’m reckless. You think I’m some kid with a death wish.”

“Aren’t you?”

“No.” Buck leaned up, catching his mouth again. Tommy yanked his zipper down. Buck laughed breathless, then choked on it when Tommy’s teeth marked his shoulder. “Fuck,” he gasped, muffling it against his fist. “Fuck, yes…”

“Shut up,” Tommy growled, twisting Buck onto his stomach. He reached for the squat jar on the floor. Vaseline. Not meant for this. Used for this anyway. He slicked his fingers, pressed past heat until Buck shuddered, fists white-knuckled on the frame.

It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t kind. It was need, rhythm pounded out like survival. Tommy pressed in slow enough not to break him, then drove hard, the cot rattling against the dirt floor. Buck met him every thrust, sweat streaking grime, Tommy's dog tags ticking between them like a fucked up metronome.

When Buck came, it was with his teeth sunk in his pillow, Tommy’s name torn from his throat. When Tommy followed, he swore into Buck’s nape, arms shaking with the effort of not crushing him.

Buck rolled onto his side, ankle tangled with Tommy’s. He was asleep before Tommy even caught his breath, body surrendering the way it never did.

Tommy stared at him in the dim light, chest heaving. The kid’s face, slack in sleep, looked too damn young. His finger traced the ink of the trident on Buck’s skin. He saw not a soldier, but a boy who had spent every year of his adult life in sand and blood and fire.

Tommy realized with a hollow, gut-deep certainty that Buck hadn’t needed the fight, the sex, the burn. He’d needed this. Something solid pressed against his chaos until the noise shut up.

Tommy lay awake under that truth, mouth still tasting like blood and Buck, every nerve buzzing with what he shouldn’t want. He told himself it was the first and the last. That he’d draw the line again in the morning, build the wall back.

But his hand slid down his flight suit seam once, twice, because he knew better.

He was already the line the kid was tying himself to. And God help him, he wasn’t going to cut the rope.