It’s 5:28am, and Jack can’t remember how long it’s been since he slept. It’s unfamiliar– the nausea, rolling over him in waves like the ocean against the shoreline. He can’t quite sit still, constantly shifting or moving or fidgeting, because if he pauses he thinks he might freeze. It's 5:28am, and in two minutes his alarm will sound. He hasn't had the willpower to shut it off, because he knows if he takes more than two steps towards his dresser– where his pressed uniform and garrison hat lay untouched, though not disregarded– it makes it all real. The silence helps. He strikes a matchstick and watches the flame flicker, light dancing in the midst of the dark, cold air, and swears he can hear its taunting. He inches his forefinger closer, and it almost feels …show more content…
The line doesn’t stop moving. He watches a head of bright blonde hair, barely a meter’s proximity away, run up to the side of the soldier not only two spaces in front of him. His expression is one of worry and sadness and love, and when the man takes his extended hand, he squeezes it tightly; gently, and Jack feels like he’s intruding on a private moment. “Come home?” he hears him ask. The man hesitates; doesn’t break eye contact. Time appears to have stopped. “Always,” he assures him. But how many implications of forever can be held in that one, two-syllable word, and of promises that can’t always be kept? He tells himself not to be so somber; that he doesn’t have a child, a wife, a family to go home to, and his existence is not nearly half as important as the soldiers who do, so why worry about things that don’t concern him? He’s doing his country a noble service; he’s doing something worthy and righteous by putting his life at risk in chance of benefiting others. He just doesn’t know if it’s enough. Time starts again, but the line was moving the whole