It didn’t happen all at once. It never does. It began in fragments—small, almost invisible fractures in the life Tommy once knew. A sharpness in his tone that hadn’t been there before. Calls left unanswered, not out of forgetfulness, but avoidance. Bottles opened earlier each day, then never really closed at all. Hours lost to empty staring, as if the world had turned to static and he was simply waiting for it to come back into focus. And then one morning, he stood in front of the mirror and realized the cruelest part of it all. The man staring back wasn’t a stranger. That was the horror. He was hollowed out, as if something essential had been quietly taken while he wasn’t looking. His eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with exhaustion that no amount of sleep seemed able to cure—though sleep had become its own kind of battlefield anyway. Nights were worse than days. In dreams, he wasn’t alone. In dreams, he saw them. So, he stopped sleeping. His appearance had unraveled in the same quiet way everything else had. Beard grown out in uneven neglect. Hair no longer kept in regulation but left to fall wherever it wanted. Clothes worn too many days in a row, stained and forgotten—not because he didn’t notice, but because noticing felt like effort, he no longer had to give. Even laundry had become a decision too heavy to make. Empty. That was the word that kept returning. Not sadness. Not even pain. Empty—like something had burned through him and left nothing behind but the shape of a man. His hand trembled as he stood there, staring at his reflection. Tears gathered without permission, blurring the edges of his face until even he seemed uncertain where he ended and the glass began. In that wavering reflection, the past came rushing back—not gently, not kindly, but all at once. Faces. Voices. Brotherhood. Loss. It all pressed in until there was no air left in the room. He raised the pistol on instinct more than thought, his breath caught somewhere between memory and surrender. Time seemed too slow, thick and distant, as if even the world itself didn’t want to witness the next second. The sound that followed was small. Wrong. A hollow click that didn’t belong to an ending. Tommy froze. For a moment, there was nothing—no relief, no resolution, only the unbearable continuation of being alive. He exhaled shakily, as though his body had forgotten how. A new round. A mechanical motion. Another breath that felt borrowed rather than owned. Again, he raised it. Again, the silence answered him with the same empty refusal. And then something in him broke open—not cleanly, not neatly, but violently, like a dam giving way after too much pressure held for too long. A raw, fractured sound tore out of him, carrying every name he refused to forget, every night he had survived instead of lived. And then— They were there. Not as memory alone, but as presence. Collins. Ramirez. Harris. Standing behind him like they always had when the world still made sense. When he still felt like part of something larger than his own pain. He spun, desperate, searching the room, but there was nothing behind him. Only the weight of silence. When he turned back to the mirror, they were still there. Watching him. Not with accusation—but with the quiet steadiness of men who refused to let him disappear. Something in him cracked open again, but this time it wasn’t destruction. It was recognition. Slowly, almost reverently, the pistol fell from his hand and struck the floor with a finality that felt different than before. Not an ending—but a release. He reached for his shaving kit with shaking hands.Blade by blade, he began to undo the man he had become. The beard gone, stroked by careful stroke. The hair trimmed back into something familiar—something that belonged to a version of him that still believed in tomorrow. And as he stood there, looking at himself again, he didn’t see a soldier, or a ghost, or a broken man. He saw someone who had survived far too much to stop now. That was the day he chose, quietly and painfully, to get help.