Trauma Bond | SOLDIER BOY

❝𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐨❞

The days that followed were a blur—a mess of grey skies, distant explosions of memory, and the quiet thrum of disbelief. Everyone seemed stunned by the events that had unfolded. But not Alexine. No, Alexine was furious. The kind of anger that gnawed at her, twisted her insides until it became a beast she couldn't control. In the plane that had been sent to bring them back to America, she sat rigid, her hands clenching and unclenching in her lap as if the act itself might stop the hurricane of emotions swirling in her chest.

She glanced over at Sean, at the charred patches of flesh on the side of his face, at the soldiers sitting across from her with dead eyes. Her gaze settled on Crimson Countess, that damned red-haired woman who now sat, pale and silent, but not from shock. No. Alexine had seen it—had seen through those crocodile tears during the battle. The sobs, the hysteria. It was all a performance. She had no more tears left for Benjamin than she had for any other lost cause. It made Alexine's blood boil.

Still, she kept her mouth shut. The anger roared inside her, but her lips remained sealed as the plane ascended toward the United States. The thrum of the engines was a hollow sound in her ears, and even as the others filed out after landing, their boots hitting the tarmac of a random military base somewhere in Virginia—she couldn't bring herself to move.

The plane door hung open, the sounds of soldiers greeting each other with gruff voices echoed faintly in the distance, but Alexine stayed seated, staring at the ground below. He's dead, she repeated in her head. Over and over. She tried to process the words, but they felt foreign. Alien.

Their last conversation replayed in her mind like a broken reel of film. Their goodbye was... this? Her telling him off, denying him one final chance? A bitter laugh escaped her throat, sharp and jagged. She had turned her back on him, and now he was dead. Gone. But a part of her refused to accept it, clinging to the belief that any moment now he would swagger back into her life, smug and invincible as always.

Finally, she stood. The weight of her body felt like lead as she made her way to the exit. Her boots hit the tarmac with a heavy thud, and a sickening feeling twisted in her gut—survivor's guilt, the kind that dug into your skin like claws and refused to let go. She was alive, but Benjamin... Benjamin wasn't. The world tilted sideways, the ground beneath her feeling cursed as if her survival had come at too high a price.

For three long days, Alexine drifted aimlessly around the base like a ghost, moving without purpose, without thought. The base was a blur of concrete and camouflage, the faces of the soldiers a mixture of exhaustion and quiet farewells. She watched them say goodbye to their families, watched them embrace and board planes that would take them to distant places—far away from all this. She watched, but she wasn't really seeing. Her eyes were fixed on the sky, searching, hoping, *praying* for some miracle. For a plane to land with Benjamin inside, alive and whole, as if none of this had happened.

But every time another helicopter or cargo plane touched down, it brought with it only the stark reality of his absence. He wasn't coming back. She sat in the rain, letting the water soak her clothes, her hair plastered to her face as she waited. Soldiers walked by, glancing at her with pity in their eyes, offering her food, water—anything. But she refused. She didn't want anything. The gnawing hole in her chest couldn't be filled with bread and water. It couldn't be filled with anything.