Chapter 8
Elias
The anniversary landed on a Tuesday, same as the blast itself, which felt like a cruelty specifically engineered by whatever force governs calendars.
I woke up already braced for it. Eight months, and my body still remembered the date before my mind fully caught up — a tightness in my chest before I'd even opened my eyes, some old instinct counting down to a moment I'd never fully leave behind.
I told myself I could handle it. I'd survived seven other hard days since coming home. This was just one more.
Then my phone rang at nine in the morning, and it was Marcus, one of the guys from my old unit, and the second I heard his voice I knew before he said a single word that this call was going to break something in me that I hadn't braced hard enough for.
"It's Sanchez," he said. "Fourth man from our unit.
Made it all the way home, El. Made it eight months, same as you.
He didn't — " Marcus's voice cracked, and I heard him take a breath, steadying himself the way soldiers learn to steady themselves for exactly this kind of news. "He didn't make it past this morning."
I don't remember much of the next hour. I remember sitting down hard on my kitchen floor, phone still in my hand, the room tilting in a way that had nothing to do with my leg and everything to do with the sudden, total collapse of every careful piece of ground I'd been standing on.
"El? You still there?" Marcus's voice, small and far away through the phone.
"I'm here," I managed.
"I'm sorry to be the one to tell you. Figured you'd rather hear it from me than see it online somewhere, some article, cold and impersonal like he was just a statistic instead of a person."
"How's his family?"
"Wrecked. Same as you'd expect. Same as any of us would be." Marcus's voice cracked again. "Look, I know today's already hard for you regardless. I didn't want to make it harder. But I figured you deserved to know from someone who actually cared, not some headline."
"Thank you for calling."
"Take care of yourself, El. I mean that. Whatever that takes today."
I hung up and sat there a long while, phone screen going dark in my hand, the ordinary sounds of my kitchen — the refrigerator humming, a bird somewhere outside — suddenly unbearably loud against the silence inside my own head.
Sanchez. Quiet guy. Steady hands. The kind of soldier nobody worried about because he never seemed like the kind who'd struggle.
Just like Doc never seemed like he'd die in the dirt. Just like Sanchez never seemed like he'd lose a war that officially ended months ago.
Four men now. Three in the field, one at home, and the math of it broke something loose in me that eight months of careful, hard-won progress hadn't managed to fully hold together.
I didn't answer Saoirse's texts that day. I told myself I needed space, needed to process alone, needed to protect her from whatever ugly thing was rising up in me that I didn't trust myself to hand to anyone else.
That was the lie. I know that now. At the time, it felt like the only responsible choice left to me.
By evening, I'd gone dark in every sense of the word — phone off, blinds drawn, the same silence that used to fill my house in the first weeks home now flooding back in, thick and suffocating, carrying every name I'd tried so hard to learn how to hold differently.
Rodriguez. Petrov. Doc. Sanchez.
Four chairs kept somewhere, and I was the only one still sitting in mine, and for the first time in months, I couldn't find a single good reason why that should be true.
I don't know how long I sat in the dark before I heard the knock.
I didn't answer it. Whoever it was knocked again, harder, and then I heard a key turn in the lock — Boone's spare key, the one Gemma had, the one I'd forgotten I'd given the club permission to use — and then Saoirse was standing in my dark living room, and I couldn't even find the strength to be angry that she'd let herself in.
"Elias."
"I need you to leave," I said, not looking at her. "I'm not good company right now."
"I'm not leaving." She sat down on the floor next to me, not on the couch, not standing over me — down on the floor, at my level, the way she'd learned to meet Danny Ochoa where he was instead of where she wished he'd be.
"I heard about Sanchez. Marcus called Gemma when he couldn't reach you. I'm so sorry, Elias."
"Four," I said, voice rough, barely recognizable to my own ears. "Four men now. And I'm still here. I keep being still here, and I don't understand why, and today I don't have it in me to pretend I have any peace made with that at all."
"You don't have to have peace made with it tonight. Nobody's asking that of you."
"I pulled away from you today because I was scared," I said, the words coming faster now, some dam finally breaking after eight months of careful containment.
"Scared of what I might become if the dark actually won.
Scared of doing to you what this did to you three years ago — becoming one more silence you have to carry, one more empty chair you have to explain to people for the rest of your life. "
"Elias, look at me."
I made myself look at her. Her face was streaked with tears she wasn't bothering to hide, steady despite them, present in a way that told me she wasn't going anywhere no matter how far into the dark I'd already gone.
"I am not going to lose you," she said, fierce and certain, "the way I lost him. I refuse. Do you hear me? I refuse."
"You can't just refuse something like this by wanting it hard enough."
"No. I can't do it alone. Neither can you.
" She took my hand, gripping it hard enough to ground both of us.
"But I'm not asking you to survive this by yourself, and I'm not going to let you convince yourself that pulling away from everyone who loves you is protecting us.
It's not protection, Elias. It's exactly the thing that killed my brother — the belief that carrying it alone is somehow noble instead of just dangerous. "
My phone buzzed against the floor. Then again. Then a third time.
"That's Knox," Saoirse said, glancing at the screen. "And Gemma. And I think that's Titan. They've been trying to reach you for hours."
"I turned it off."
"I know. Gemma called me when she couldn't get through, and I came straight here, and on the way I called Knox, because I wasn't about to let you do this alone even if you'd locked every door in the house."
There was another knock, softer this time, and then the door opened again — Knox this time, Gemma right behind him, both of them stepping into my dark living room without waiting for an invitation, the way family does when the moment calls for it.
"Brother," Knox said, crouching down in front of me, voice low and steady. "We're here. Whole club's on standby if you need them. But right now it's just us, and we're not going anywhere."
"I don't deserve — "
"Don't," Knox said, firm, cutting me off before I could finish the sentence.
"Don't you dare finish that thought. You don't get to decide what you deserve tonight.
That's not your call to make alone, not in this state, and every single one of us in this room is here specifically because we get a vote too. "
Gemma knelt down on my other side, taking my free hand, and for a long moment none of us said anything at all — just four people sitting together on a dark living room floor, holding the weight of something too heavy for any one person to carry by themselves.
"I called Marcus back," Saoirse said eventually, quiet.
"He gave me the number for the veterans' peer-support network — the one connected to the VA, the one with actual counselors who specialize in exactly this.
I want you to call them tomorrow. Not instead of us.
Alongside us. This isn't a love-alone problem, Elias.
It needs more than love. It needs real support, professional support, people trained specifically for this kind of dark. "
"I know a guy there," Knox added. "Combat vet himself, does the intake calls personally for cases the club refers. I already texted him. He's expecting your call whenever you're ready, today, tomorrow, whenever — no pressure on timing, just so you know the door's open."
I looked around the room — Saoirse's hand in mine, Knox steady and unwavering in front of me, Gemma's grip firm and unshaking on my other side — and felt something shift, slow and enormous, the darkness that had felt so total an hour earlier suddenly, undeniably, not the only thing in the room.
"I almost let it take me tonight," I admitted, voice breaking on the words.
"Not — not like Sanchez. I want to be clear about that.
But I felt the pull of it. The logic of it, twisted as it sounds.
The thought that maybe the kindest thing I could do for everyone who loves me was just to disappear quietly into the dark and stop being a burden they have to keep managing. "
"You are not a burden," Gemma said, fierce. "You have never once been a burden, Elias Vance, and I will fight you on this fact for as long as it takes for you to believe it."
"The thing that pulled me back," I said, looking at Saoirse now, "wasn't being strong.
I want you to know that. It wasn't some heroic act of willpower.
It was knowing that if I went dark, really dark, I'd be doing to you exactly what Rory's loss did to you.
And I couldn't. I could not be one more empty chair in your life. I couldn't do that to you."
"You didn't," she said, crying openly now, gripping my hand like an anchor. "You're here. You called us — you let us in. That's not nothing, Elias. That's everything."