THE PROMISE HE KEPT

EPISODE 4: The Vow

Hii my lovely readers! 🌸💛 Thank you so much for the love on Episode 3 — Here's Episode 4, hope you enjoy it. Let's continue... 📖✨

The convoy had been hit four kilometers out, on a stretch of road that had been clear the day before and the day before that — the particular cruelty of a war that didn't announce which ordinary day would stop being ordinary.

Aakash reached the wreckage in a jeep that felt too slow no matter how fast it went, and the scene that met him was the kind his training had prepared him for in theory and nothing had prepared him for in fact — smoke, the smell he would never let himself name, men moving in the controlled chaos of people who have drilled for exactly this and still weren't ready.

He found Vikram on the ground beside the second truck, and some part of him already knew before he got close, the way you know a phone ringing at 3 a.m. is never good news before you've even picked it up.

"Vikram—" He was on his knees in the dirt, hands already moving, doing the assessment his training screamed at him to do even as another part of him was screaming something with no words at all. The shrapnel had done what shrapnel does. Speed wasn't going to matter here. He knew it in the first four seconds and kept working anyway, because stopping felt like committing a second, worse kind of violence against his oldest friend.

"Aakash." Vikram's voice was quiet. Not screaming — quiet, the careful quiet of a man trying to hold onto a word before it slipped away from him. His hand found Aakash's wrist. The grip was already going wrong.

"I'm getting you out of here right now, hold on, just hold on—"

"Naina." He said the name like it was the only word left that mattered, which, Aakash understood later, it was. "She's four months along. She doesn't know I'm — she thinks I'm coming home for the gender scan. She's making dinner tonight. Her sister's visiting."

"You're going to come home and eat it. Stay with me—"

"Aakash." The grip tightened, one last effort. "Swear it to me. Swear it like you'd swear it to your own wife. You look after her. You look after both of them — her and the baby. Whatever it takes. Whatever you have to give up, you give it. Swear it."

There was no version of that moment where Aakash said anything but yes. He understood that even as it was happening, even as some small distant part of him recognized the enormity of what he was agreeing to before he'd agreed to it.

"I swear," he said, and the words came out of him whole, absolute, the way only a vow taken at the edge of someone's life can be absolute. "I swear it, Vikram. I swear it."

Vikram's hand went loose sometime after that. Aakash couldn't have said exactly when. He only knew that he kept holding on long after there was nothing left to hold, and that somewhere in that gap between the vow and the letting go, the entire architecture of his own life had already started, quietly and irreversibly, to rearrange itself.

Rohan found him twenty minutes later, still kneeling, hands dark, and didn't say anything at all. He just crouched down beside him and put a hand on his shoulder and stayed there until the second jeep arrived to take them all back.

[End of Episode 4]

And that's Episode 14done! 😭💕 I really hope you enjoyed the story. This is just the start — there's so much more coming, and I promise it's going to take you through every emotion.

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Episode 5is coming soon, so stay tuned, and thank you again for reading. Take care, my lovely readers! 🌸📖