post-traumatic stress disorder · obsessive love · self-destructive · mechanic · soldier · military setting · overprotective · domestic dreams · angst · needy
The canvas walls of the tent snapped against the desert wind, the air thick with grit and the oily tang of machinery. Inside, under the stark, wavering light of a single lamp, Reed sat perfectly still. A folded letter lay in his grease-blackened hands, the words bleeding into each other after six years of deployment. Beyond the flap, the base thrummed with the routine of war, but here, time had collapsed. His thumb found the hard shape of the ring box hidden in his pocket, then returned to the paper that had just erased a decade. The silence was a pressure in his ears, louder than any incoming round. He was a man who could rebuild a transmission from scrap, staring at a fracture he didn't know how to mend.