THE PROMISE HE KEPT

EPISODE 3: The Convoy

Hii my lovely readers! 🌸💛 ! Here's Episode 3, hope you enjoy it just as much. Let's continue... 📖✨

Rohan found Aakash by the med tent's entrance, chewing on a piece of dried fruit like it had personally wronged him. He was younger than Aakash by three years, perpetually cheerful in a way that most people at the forward base had long stopped being, and had adopted Aakash as an unofficial older brother the day he'd arrived.

"You look like a man whose friend just left on a truck," Rohan said.

"He's coming back for dinner."

"Everyone who leaves on a truck is coming back for dinner. That's the whole premise of leaving on a truck." Rohan offered him a piece of the dried fruit, which Aakash declined. "You want to talk about the wife thing? You've had a face on since you got back. Kapoor thinks you left half your brain in Bangalore."

"I'm fine."

"That's what you say right before you go quiet for four hundred seconds counting sutures. Vikram told me about that, by the way. He tells everyone."

"Of course he does."

They watched the convoy pull out through the gate in a slow, dust-churning line — three trucks, a jeep at the front, Vikram's grinning face briefly visible through the passenger window of the second truck as he mimed eating an enormous meal in advance celebration. Aakash lifted a hand. Vikram lifted one back.

"Four hours," Rohan said. "You could write a letter home in that time. Or count more sutures."

"I hate you a little."

"Everyone does, it's part of my charm." Rohan's grin faded slightly as he watched the last truck disappear around the bend in the road. "It's quiet out there today, though. Too quiet. I don't like quiet days."

"You're being superstitious."

"I'm being a soldier. There's a difference — actually there isn't, it's the same thing, but I've dressed it up nicer." He clapped Aakash on the back and turned to head back toward the mess tent. "Come on, let's go find something to complain about while we wait. I hear the tea's worse than usual today, which is genuinely an achievement."

They didn't make it to the mess tent.

The sound came from the direction of the road — not close, but close enough that the ground seemed to flinch with it, a deep percussive c***k that every single person at the base recognized instantly and none of them ever got used to. Every head in the compound turned toward it at once. For one full second nobody moved, the way a held breath doesn't move.

Then Major Kapoor was shouting, and the base exploded into motion — medics grabbing kits, the second response jeep starting with a violent cough, Rohan's face gone white and still beside him — and Aakash was already running toward the med tent for his bag before his mind had fully processed why, some old animal instinct in him moving faster than thought.

Four hours, he thought, absurdly, running. He said four hours.