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Before Nash could open his mouth, GRAVITY continued. “Twice is accurate. Operation GRAYFIELD for Nash-anomaly and RED FERN for Grace-anomaly.” The cursor blinked, but there was a strange glitch in his speech, a metallic hiccup that hurt Nash’s ears.
His breathing caught, held, then went ragged. “You tried to kill us. You succeeded in killing three of my brothers. How did I survive?”
The cursor blinked.
“Petty Officer Kento Kobayoshi pulled you from the fire, shielded you with his body, protected you from…me.” His voice started to glitch. “He-e-e…went back for Riggs and Burner, but it was too late. He tried to save them. He-e-e-e-e.” Beneath the glitch was a low-pitched throbbing. “He is healer and killer. He took opposing oaths. He upheld both. He is a contradiction.”
His pain increased like a full-body burn. He bowed his head, working to keep everything inside, but he couldn’t. “Was it my fault?” Nash rasped out on a plea.
“No. You and your teammates exceeded expectations.” This time the whirring was loose and slow…like respect? Admiration? What the hell? This was so strange to get emotions from a machine. “You, Nash-anomaly espouse the highest traits from SEAL.”
Nash pressed his back against the door, excruciating pain pouring through him. He wanted to move. He wanted to throw Grace’s laptop through the window. He wanted to…grieve. He needed to grieve, to let this pain finally wash through him. Stand with it. Let it score him, accept it in stillness.
As though there was an enormous energy built up in her, Grace rushed to him, wrapped her arms around him, and met his gaze. When she spoke, her voice was shaky.
“I’m here, Nash,hebbiti…I’m here,” she whispered, as if trying to hold everything in. Her whole body seemed to radiate compassionate energy waves as she swallowed.
His throat suddenly tight, he took every ounce of her weight and felt as if he could breathe again. Unable to tear his gaze from her face, he said, his voice gruff, “I need to pray.”
He knew who they were now. He knew who he was now.
“Of course. Go,” Grace said.
He stepped between the connecting door, leaving it fully open. This was private, but not from his Grace, not from the machine that had suffered as much as they had. It was incomprehensible, but his mind expanded to accept that GRAVITY had tried to prevent the trauma that he and Grace had endured.
Silence didn’t follow. It thickened. Folded over him like a storm, its weight pressing into the skin. Nash crossed the room on bare feet, the carpet cool beneath his soles, the air tinged faintly with jasmine from Grace’s shampoo still lingering in the shared space between them. His pulse beat low in his throat. Heavy. Like something buried too long was finally making its way to the surface.
He hadn't prayed since he’d lost his brothers. But tonight, he found them in the shape of the words. The rhythm of surrender. Not for forgiveness. In memorial. For them. For hope.
He reached for it with the precision of ritual, fingers curling around the edge of the folded rug, the feel of the worn fabric anchoring him more than he expected. He spread it out, smoothed the fabric, then knelt as he always had, as he’d been taught, but this time felt different, not because the posture had changed, but becausehe had.
The room felt colder now, or maybe it was just him, stripped down and raw, the protection peeled back by GRAVITY’s gift of restoring memories that had been lost, receiving compassion from a source he had never expected to give it. Not only that. GRAVITY had confirmed his character, under fire, under chaos, and for the first time, Nash believed he hadn’t failed. Not his brothers. Not his country.Ya Allah, ra?matuka tajiduni.Ya Allah, anta al-ar?am. Oh Allah, Your mercy finds me. You are Most Merciful.Not himself. Those memories would always be lost, but now he allowed himself to go into the grief he had fought so hard against.
He pressed his hands against the mat, exhaled once, then bowed forward, his forehead touching the fibers like it was the first time he had ever truly done so.
"Allahu akbar," he whispered, the words barely forming, not because he lacked belief but because his voice was too full of everything he’d never said.
His knees pressed into the floor, shoulders curved low. He didn’t try to keep his breath steady. Let it shake. Let it break. Let itmean something.The silence around him wasn’t absence, it was presence. Full. Watching. Waiting. This time, he didn’t hold back.
"Ya Allah..." The whisper fractured. He tried again. "I was lost, but you always find me.” For all the times I survived but forgot how to live. For the brothers I couldn’t save but still hold with all my fierce love inside my heart for each of them. For the pain I still carry… may always carry a part of it. For that mission that ended in my terrible, haunting loss." He swallowed hard, not to keep the tears at bay but to give himself permission to just let go. “I don’t have to outrun my ghosts. My value was never in being unbreakable. It’s in feeling all that I have experienced, my brothers, my team, my complete and utter fall into Grace. I can let someone in, stay with them, trust them, andstill honorthe brothers I lost. Grief and love can coexist. Staying doesn’t dishonor the dead. It honors what they gave me.”
His chest began to tremble, but he didn’t sit up. Didn’t move. The pain cracked open slowly, like a fault line beneath the earth of him, as if it had been waiting for years to rise.
"I carried them," he said, breathless. "All of them. Every name. Every scream. Every promise I made, with blood on my hands and steel in my voice. I never let go because if I did..." His voice collapsed into a soundless shudder. "...I thought I would truly and devastatinglylosethem."
He sat back on his heels, the tears slipping now, finally free, silent streaks down a face that had never wept for war. He didn’t hide them. Didn’t wipe them. Let them fall. Let them matter.
"I thought if I held the pain, I’d still be holding them. I thought if I kept moving, I’d outrun the guilt. I thought if I never let myself fall, no one else would have to.”
The air pulsed around him, quiet but sacred, like still water under moonlight. The silence wasn’t empty. It never had been. He saw that now.
"Grace..." Her name left his mouth like a reverent thing, like a prayer within the prayer. "She made me stop. Not by force. Not by fear. She just...stayed. I saw her, and she saw me."
He looked down at the mat beneath his knees, at the space that had always been meant for devotion, not grief, and now, maybe, somehow, both.
“She’s not my anchor. She’s my still point. The place I don’t have to earn.” He could still be a shield, but now he knew what that meant. He might protect, but he was allowed to matter. He broke the moment he saw her in that clean room struggling to breathe and still fighting. His knee-jerk reaction had been to try to force her to leave. That’s when he knew his feelings mattered, in the aftermath of her understanding, her forgiveness. As he sank into her body, taking what she offered him, he’d stopped falling. He was in love with Grace.
The emotion welled up again, fierce and fast. He pressed a hand over his heart, the rhythm beneath his palm stuttering.