Page 52 of Carry On

“That’s…” His voice trailed off, proof of exactly why I never told people about this. No one knew how to handle the conversation, and I couldn’t fault them for that. Most people weren’t equipped or ready to handle conversations surrounding military sacrifice. “Are you okay… after all of… that?”

“No, I’m not fucking okay,” I snapped. Fuck, I didn’t even know what okay was.

You should’ve died with them,the voice said.

I knew that too.

“I’m sorry,” Lincoln said once more. An uncomfortable silence settled between us, neither of us knowing what to say. Or maybe he didn’t know what to say.

Me? I just stewed and stared out the window with my heart raging in my chest. I focused on steadying my breathing as I felt the walls vibrate around me. The tattoo on my neck burned painfully.

W.E.C.G.L.D.J.E.M.R.

William, Eli, Carter, Guillermo, Lucas, Duncan, James, Emery, Micah, and Ray.

While I didn’t care about a lot, I had cared about them. I resisted the urge to touch the ink in an attempt to soothe the pain. I knew it was all in my head. A tattoo haunted by the memory of my fallen friends. Why had I survived and they hadn’t? I had a list a mile long of why they should’ve survived. Wives. Kids. Family. Big dreams. The list went on and on. I couldn’t compare to them.

And yet here I was… the last one left. I didn’t deserve it.

“What do I call you?” I asked, desperate to stop my spiraling thoughts, desperate to anchor myself to the sound of his voice.

“Hm?” My gaze flicked in his direction quickly enough to catch the way he arched a brow. “What do you mean?

“You know,” I replied, and he shook his head. “Couples call each other things, so what do I call you?”

“Lincoln is just fine.”

“That’s your name.”

“I’m aware.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I walk around calling you by your first name—”

“Rule number three,” he snapped before I could call him Melvin. I smirked. “And what am I calling you?”

“Most people call me Lucky,” I said. Okay, no one had called me Lucky in a long fucking time because I didn’t talk to people.

People don’t want to talk to you,the voice countered.

Touché. It worked in my favor that no one wanted to. It made it easy not to deal with the world and its continuous chaos.

“Is that where the four-leaf clover comes from?” Lincoln asked. I glanced down to where the simple symbol was etched inside my right wrist. It was all faded lines compared to the rest of my ink.

“It was my first tattoo,” I told him. I didn’t tell him that my mom had the same tattoo or that I paid a guy to give me, a minor, a tattoo to remember her after I was stuck in Pine Creek. That and the guitar were all I had left of her. When she died, I got a backpack from the state while they tried to figure out where to put me. I spent a week with a crappy fucking foster family. I fought like hell to keep her guitar. The fact that my dad agreed to take me in was the only reason I got to. Everything else… I wasn’t sure what happened to the rest of our shit. Years of memories just… gone.

The system was so goddamn broken.

Maybe it’s just you that’s broken,the voice replied.

“I’d call you something other than Lincoln,” I announced, using Lincoln as a distraction from the dark spiral. “What do you want to be called?”

“Lincoln.”

“All right, champ, I’ll figure out something.”

“No.” The annoyance that dripped from his voice made me smirk. Yeah, it’d be fun to poke his buttons.

“We’ll find something,” I assured him. After all, wasn’t that the point of this whole thing? We had to look real to the outside world.