This is Just a Dream

Chapter 16

The shift from digital to vocal was a threshold more daunting than any tactical maneuver Garrett had ever faced. They had been texting for months now, it felt as if he had a secret pen pal no one knew about, she was his secret for the better part of a year. After the funeral, he left her to be, on her own, with the safety net that if she needed him he was there, but he understood how grief worked. For him, it worked best alone. Alone was exactly how she handled her grief as well. For all of three months, three months is how long it took for her grief to become unmanageable. Texting was safe, texting was familiar; it was buffered, measured, and stripped of the betrayals of tone, breath, and inflection. It allowed for a measure of control. But a phone call was raw, unedited, and dangerously immediate.

It happened on a Tuesday, at 11:00 PM, when Eden’s fingers simply stopped typing.

It’s too much for the screen, she had written, followed by a long, trailing silence.

Garrett sat in the quiet of his quarters, the air conditioning humming a low, steady drone. He looked at the message, then at the "Call" icon. His thumb hovered. He thought of the wadi, of the silence that followed the gunfire, and of the terrifying, fragile way he had opened himself to her. He pressed the icon.

The connection tone was a hollow, digital heartbeat. When she answered, her voice was not the light, resilient sound he had come to expect from her texts. It was fractured, thin, and heavy with the exhaustion of a day that had demanded more than she had to give, it was real.

"Hello?" she whispered.

"I’m here," Garrett said. His own voice sounded deeper, more resonant in the small room than it ever did on the training field. "You said it was too much for the screen to text."

"I just..." She took a shaky breath, the sound of it sharp and intimate in his ear. "I had a moment today, Garrett. One of the kids, Leo, asked me if I could make his daddy come back from 'away.' He didn't understand why his dad was gone, and he thought that because I knew about 'away,' I could fix it. And I stood there, looking at this four-year-old with marker on his face, and I realized I wasn't just grieving for Adam anymore. I was grieving for every single person who has to learn that there are places you can't come back from."

Garrett leaned back against the wall, his eyes closing.

"They look to us for answers," Garrett said, his voice steady. "They look at us—the teachers, the commanders—and they think we have the map. But the truth is, we’re just as lost as they are. We’re just better at faking the path."

"Is that all it is?" Eden asked, a bitterness creeping into her tone. "Just faking the path? Because I don't know how to do it anymore. I don't know how to stand in front of those kids and talk about 'future' and 'growth' when I feel like I'm standing in a graveyard."

"You do it everyday and one day you'll realize you aren't pretending anymore," Garrett replied. He found himself speaking more openly than he ever had to another human being. "When you're in the field, you don't look at the war. You don't look at the policy or the tragedy or the political failure. You look at the guy to your left and the guy to your right. You look at the perimeter. You focus on the immediate, tangible truth of the moment. You teach those kids because they need to know how to see the world, and that is a light that doesn't go out, even when the rest of it does."

Eden was silent for a long time. He could hear her breathing—a soft, rhythmic sound that anchored him in the dark.

"Is that how you survive, Garrett?" she asked, her voice dropping to a whisper.

Garrett looked at his reflection in the dark window. He saw his scars, his tattoos, his muscles that had taken years of rigour training, control, and discipline. He was a man who had dedicated his life to protecting his teams, a man who had made a profession out of standing between the chaos and the order. But lately, everything had shifted. It no longer consisted of rifles and sandbags. It consisted of this girl, this beautiful, crazy, funny girl.

"I’ve spent almost twenty years in this chaos," Garrett admitted. "I’ve spent my life making sure the people under my command came home, or at least, that their stories were told properly. But there’s a cost to that, Eden. You become the wall. And the thing about being a wall is that nothing ever gets in, and nothing ever gets out."

"I let you in," Eden said.

"Yes," Garrett breathed. "You did."

"Tell me," she said, her voice turning curious, inviting. "Tell me about the burdens, Garrett. You’re always talking about the mission, the drill, the tactical reality. But what do you carry when you’re not the commander? When you’re just... you?"

It was a question he had never been asked, and one he had never dared to answer. He sat up, the room feeling smaller, more claustrophobic.

"I carry the silence," he said. "I carry the names of the men I couldn't keep inside the wire. I carry the memory of the light in their eyes before they go out, and I carry the weight of the phone calls I’ve had to make to their families. People think the hardest part of command is the battle. It isn't. The hardest part is the aftermath—the slow, grinding realization that the world keeps turning, and that the sacrifice you asked of them was only a footnote in someone else’s history."

Eden didn't speak. She just listened, her presence a silent, unwavering witness.

"And then," he continued, his voice deepening, "there’s the question of whether it was worth it. Whether the cost of it all was ever justified. I look at those cadets, and I see them wanting to be heroes, and I want to warn them. I want to tell them that there are no heroes in this war. There are only people who did what they were asked, and people who didn't come home."

"But Adam was a hero," Eden said, her voice firm. "He protected his team. He gave everything he had for someone else. That’s not a footnote, Garrett. That’s everything."

"He was," Garrett agreed, his voice thick. "He was the best I ever saw. But even heroes die in the dust. And it’s my job to make sure the dust doesn't win."

"That’s why you do it," Eden said. "That’s why you stay. You’re not just training them to fight. You’re training them to be the ones who remember."

They talked for hours. The conversation ebbed and flowed, moving from the philosophical to the agonizingly mundane, from the trauma of the past to the tentative, frightening shape of their shared future. They talked until the night outside began to soften into the gray, tentative light of pre-dawn.

Garrett found himself describing the small, forgotten details of his life—the smell of the desert after a rare rain, the taste of the coffee they shared, the way the silence felt in the hours before an operation. Eden described the dreams she still had—the classrooms she would one day fill, the way she imagined the life she had promised Adam would manifest in the lives of the children she would teach.

They weren't just talking; they were connecting, a deep connection that was establishing that they were completely unaware of. It was a space they were creating between them.

"I’m tired, Garrett," Eden said, her voice sleepy and soft.

"Sleep," he replied. "I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be here when you wake up."

"I don't want to wake up alone," she whispered.

Garrett looked at the clock. 4:30 AM. He had a briefing in three hours. He had to lead a training exercise, to be the muscle, the monster, the commander. But the thought of hanging up, of retreating back into the sterile, utilitarian silence of his quarters, felt like a loss he didnt want.

"I’m not hanging up," Garrett said. "I’ll stay on the line. I’ll be here."

He laid down, his head on the pillow, the phone held close to his ear. He listened to the soft, rhythmic sound of her breathing, a sound that was more grounding, more tactical, more vital than any order he had ever given.

The sun began to bleed into the sky, the world waking up around them, the birds singing, the base stirring into the familiar, mechanical rhythm of the day. But for Garrett, the morning didn't feel like a departure. It felt like a continuation.

He drifted into a light, calm sleep, the phone still pressed to his ear, his hand draped over the edge of the bed. He was no longer carrying the burden of the dead alone. He was sharing the weight with the girl who had loved the a boy that was lost to the war, but he was starting to realize that with every text and phone call she was becoming more to him and there was a fine line between panic and excitement that he felt.

He woke an hour later to the sound of her stirring, the movement faint and distant.

"Garrett?" she whispered.

"I’m here," he said, his voice deep and clear. "I’m still here."

"I had a dream," she said, her voice sounding clearer, more grounded than it had in months. "I dreamt about the porch. But this time, you were there. We were building something. I don't know what it was, but you were there."

Garrett felt a sudden surge in his chest. His heart has skipped a beat and his lung miscalculated the intake of air. She dreamed of him.

"We’ll build it," he said. "One step at a time. One day at a time. Whatever it is, we’ll build it. If that's what you want"

“I think I do” she said.

His hand drifted to his chest, over his heart. He needed to make sure he was truly still alive.

"Talk tomorrow?" he asked her.

"You got it, Commander" she replied in a soft serene tone.

He hung up, the silence of the room no longer feeling like a void. He stood up, his movements fluid and purposeful. He felt the weight of his uniform, the weight of his responsibility, and the weight of the vow he had made in the desert.

He walked out of his quarters, the morning air crisp and clean. He looked out over the training field, the cadets waiting, the rifles ready, the mission demanding his full, undivided attention.

He took a breath, the air filling his lungs, his heart beating with a steady, stubborn rhythm. He walked into the day, the memory of the wadi behind him, the image of the photograph in his pocket, and the sound of her voice ringing in his ears.

The mission had changed.