Page 4 of Boomer
Boomer blinked, staggered.
“Goddammit, Kelly. Where the hell did you come from?”
Breakneck winced, rubbing his jaw. “The place where you need me to be, brother.”
Twenty minutes later, Boomer didn’t say much on the ride home. Just leaned against the passenger-side window like the glass was the only thing holding him up. Breakneck parked out front, helped him inside, got him water and ibuprofen.Helped him strip off his boots. Boomer mumbled something that might’ve been thanks.
Breakneck got him to the bed, dragged the blanket over him.
He could’ve left.
Didn’t.
He dropped onto the couch and stared into the dark. He didn’t turn on the TV. Didn’t scroll his phone. Just…sat. Listening to the silence creak around the apartment like grief with nowhere to go.
His mind wandered, like it always did when things got too still.
He remembered the sound of his mother’s crying. The way it echoed down the hallway on quiet nights. She thought he didn’t hear. Or didn’t understand. She always wiped her eyes and told him everything was okay.
He might have been young, but he wasn’t blind.
He was seven when his dad died and would have welcomed a chance to talk about it. But she thought she was protecting him from the reality of death, and all she was doing was making it harder to understand how to grieve. All he wanted was for someone to tell the truth. That it hurt. That it was unfair. That it was okay to be angry, to feel like someone had ripped the center out of his world and left a hollow that nothing could fill.
But instead, his mom gave him tight smiles that never touched her eyes and lies like lullabies.
And so he’d learned early, pain is private. Feelings are fuel. Discipline is the only thing that doesn’t lie to you.
He found Stoicism at sixteen, in a battered library copy ofMeditations. Read it three times before he could even grow a real beard. Then came Seneca. Then Epictetus.
Control your response. Accept what is. Do the right thing, even when it hurts.
It made sense.
Unlike grief.
A sound shattered the quiet, muffled shouting. Then thrashing. The unmistakable groan of mattress springs under struggle.
Breakneck was up in a breath. He crossed to the bedroom door, paused, then pushed it open.
Boomer was fighting the air, tangled in sheets, sweat glistening across his back. His voice fractured into unintelligible words, pleading and broken.
He was aware men carried stuff from the battlefield. He carried stuff too. He remembered every face he’d put in his crosshairs. Every breath he’d ended. But it never came back to haunt him.
He wondered if that made him a stone-cold killer. He took lives for the good of the team, for his brothers. The mission was what they were there for, but his brothers were who he protected. That's why they did what they did...for each other. He'd never had a nightmare about an op, and he'd never felt regrets. He didn't know how to handle this because he didn't understand it. So, he did what he thought was right.
Action.
He lunged forward, grabbed Boomer’s flailing limbs, and crushed him down into the mattress, pinning his chest with steady weight.
“You’re having a nightmare, Carter,” he said, voice calm but hard. “It’s not real. Wake up.”
Boomer’s eyes snapped open, wild and glassy, pupils blown wide. He stared at Breakneck for a heartbeat that felt like a fist wrapped around both their throats.
Then he shoved him off. Rolled away. Curled up like he wanted to disappear. His voice cracked apart as he whispered, “I’m okay. Just…go. Please.”
But Breakneck didn’t move. His chest burned. Something inside him, tight and brittle, snapped.
“No, you’re not,” he barked. “Saying it doesn’t make it real. Fuck you, Boomer. I’m not leaving.”
