This is Just a Dream

Chapter 14

The transition from the desert—that hollowed-out, blood-soaked scar in the earth—to the rigid, manicured normalcy of the home base was a disorientation that Garrett Hanson navigated with the precision of a ghost. Here, the landscape was defined by crisp lines, freshly painted barracks, and the eager, unblemished faces of cadets who looked at him with the reverent, terrified eyes of people who had never truly smelled the air of a burning world.

He stood on the edge of the training field, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes scanning the maneuvers with a detachment that bordered on the clinical. He was a veteran of a conflict that the public had largely ceased to track, an instructor tasked with molding raw, naive material into the shape of soldiers who could survive the fire.

His walls were not merely built; they were fortified with the reinforced concrete of twenty years of compartmentalization. Every trauma was a file to be indexed and shelved, every death a line item in a ledger of loss that he refused to audit. He kept count of all the lives he lost.

Then, his phone buzzed.

He pulled it from his pocket, the screen lighting up in the harsh midday glare. A text from Eden.

I feel like I'm trying to learn a language I don't speak, she had written earlier. Everyone is talking about the future, about grades and degrees, and all I can hear is static.

Garrett stood motionless as a squad of cadets sprinted past him, their boots pounding against the earth in a rhythmic, disciplined unison. He stared at the screen, the words searing themselves into his mind. He was used to orders, to tactical reports, to the blunt, transactional communication of the infantry. But this—this raw, jagged splinter of a human heart—felt dangerous. It felt like a flare launched into a darkened ravine, illuminating things he had spent a lifetime trying to leave in the shadows.

He shouldn't reply. It was a breach of protocol, a complication he didn't need, a vulnerability that threatened to undermine the iron structure of his own psyche. But he remembered the way Adam had clutched that photograph. He remembered the promise he had made in the silence of the wadi.

You aren't supposed to understand them after the loss you had, he typed back, his thumbs slow and deliberate. You aren’t supposed to speak grief fluently. You’re just supposed to survive the best that you can

He watched the cadets struggle with a tactical drill, their movements sloppy and uncoordinated. He felt a sudden, familiar surge of impatience—a desire to force them into the shape they needed to be to stay alive. But his mind wasn't on the drill. It was on the girl in the apartment, thousands of miles away, trying to translate the grief of a lifetime into the mundane currency of a college degree.

It’s not just the grief of it all, her reply came almost instantly. It’s that I’m the only one who sees the ground is made of bones. I look at my classmates, and I see people walking on top of a history they don’t understand. Doesn't that make you want to scream? They are worried about coffee orders and essays while there is an entirely different world out there of bullets, chaos, and loss.

Garrett looked up at the sky. It was a vast, indifferent blue, a sky that had looked the same over the desert as it did here over the training field. He thought about the files he had closed, the names he had redacted from his memory, the faces he had collectively folded into the flag.

Every single day, he wrote, and then deleted it.

He didn't want to give her his own darkness. She had enough of her own.

It makes me want to make sure they never have to learn, he settled on. But that is why we do what we do as soldiers, so they don't have to witness the things we do and grieve the way we do.

Is that what you’re doing? she asked.

Garrett watched a cadet trip on a hurdle and scramble to his feet, a look of desperate, terrified urgency on his face.

I’m teaching them how to be hard enough to survive, he wrote. But there’s a cost to that. The harder you get, the more you have to harden your heart. It’s a trade-off. I’m not sure it’s a good one.

He felt a strange, jarring vibration in his chest—a sensation of something long-buried shifting beneath the surface. It was a sense of profound, crushing isolation. Being the commander meant being the arbiter of life and death, but it also meant being the person who was forbidden from feeling the weight of it. With his cadets, he was an institution, a symbol of authority, a man without a name.

With Eden, he was simply the man who had survived.

You’re not hard, she wrote. You brought me that photo. You stayed in that room until the sun came up. A man who was truly hard wouldn't have done that. Adam saw you for what you truly were, he wrote to me about it all the time. He saw you and I saw you.

Garrett stopped typing. He looked at the field, the cadets now forming a perimeter, their faces flushed, their breath coming in short, ragged bursts. He felt the phantom weight of that night in the dorm, the way the air had felt thin and electrified with her suffering.

He had gone into that room thinking he was delivering a standard notification. He had left it feeling as though he had been baptized in a grief that was deeper than his own.

I wasn't hardened that night, he admitted, the words feeling heavy on his thumbs. I was just a man who had reached the limit of his own endurance. You were the only thing that kept me from breaking. I had made a promise to Adam and I intended on fully serving him the only way I knew how.

He hit Send before he could reconsider, the truth hanging in the air like a confession.

The silence that followed was different. It wasn't the silence of a void, but the silence of an understanding. He realized, with a sudden, sharp clarity, that he wasn't just helping her rebuild her bridge; she was helping him look at his own ruins.

I feel like we’re the only two people on earth who know what happened in that valley, she wrote. Even if you were the one who led them, and I was the one who waited. We’re the only ones who truly understood.

That’s part of the burden, Garrett replied. It doesn’t make us special. It just makes us the ones who have to remember.

He watched the drill end. The cadets were being dismissed, their voices rising in a messy, disjointed chorus as they headed toward the barracks. He saw the way they moved—with a casual, unearned confidence—and he felt a sudden, sharp, and protective anger. He wanted to shake them. He wanted to tell them that the ground was, indeed, made of bones.

But he didn't. He checked his phone.

I have to go, she wrote. I have a shift at the library. But thank you, Garrett. For being the only person who doesn’t look at me like I’m a tragedy.

You aren’t a tragedy, Eden, he typed. You’re a survivor. And you’re doing just fine.

He put the phone away, the metal of the casing cold against his palm. He walked toward his own quarters, the barracks echoing with the sounds of a military base at peace. But the silence inside him was gone. It had been replaced by a slow, rhythmic, and persistent awareness of the girl who was learning to walk through grief.

He entered his room, the space spare and utilitarian, a place where a man went to hibernate between missions. He took off his uniform, his movements deliberate and slow, and caught his reflection in the mirror.

The man who stared back was the same, but the eyes—the eyes that had seen the darkness, the eyes that had watched the life leave Adam’s body—felt different. They were less like glass, more like shadows.

He sat on the edge of his cot and picked up his phone again. He looked at the thread of messages, the blue bubbles and the gray, the small, intimate history of a conversation between two people.

He had spent twenty years perfecting the art of building a wall. He had built it to be impenetrable, to be a barrier against the messy, unpredictable, and agonizing nature of human connection. And yet, one text, one moment of raw, unvarnished honesty, had cracked it wide open.

He didn't try to repair it. For the first time in his life, he didn't feel the urge to reinforce the concrete.

He lay back on his cot, the darkness of the room settling over him like a comfortable shroud. He thought of the training field, the cadets, the mission ahead, and Eden.

He was “The Monster”.

He closed his eyes, the image of the photograph—the one he had pried from Adam’s stiffening fingers—floating behind his eyelids. He remembered the blood, the dust, and the silence. And then, he remembered the text.

Good night Eden.

He breathed in, slow and deep, the air feeling cleaner than it had in years.

He was still here. She was still there. Was he a piece of s**t for thinking of Eden and the way the color of her eyes changed in the sunlight?

“f**k” he grumbled and ran his hand across his face.

He reached out and tapped the screen once more.

Goodnight Commander.