Chapter Text
Eliot Spencer is eighteen years old. He has made promises to a girl, swears up and down that he’ll marry her—and he thinks he will, of course, because he’s young and dumb and broke, and he is in love with her.
The girl promises back--she'll wait for him, always and forever--and she thinks she will, of course, because she doesn't know any better, and because she is in love with him.
Well, as it turns out, neither of them really know what love is. Because Eliot wants to move out of his boring, small Oklahoma hometown, same as he has for the past five years, because it’s cramped and traditional and reminds him too much of a father he wants to forget about. He wants to see the world--won't dare say it out loud, swallowing the words back down, but he does.
But Aimee Martin wants to stay.
So she does, and he doesn't.
He enlists in the army, goes off to war, and starts moving up the ranks. He trains hard, determined to prove to people he doesn’t know that he ain’t nothing like his blood. They believe him.
He gets stronger, too, endurance and wit alike. The training is brutal, hours and hours spent outside under a sun that does not care about the swear pouring down his back. He learns how to fire a gun and follow orders and make sure that his army buddies are safe.
It’s loyalty, he tells himself, reloading his gun, killing these people is loyalty.
As the battles get tougher, he gets stronger, and soon he’s part of Task Force Green, a higher ranking role than his original position. It feels good–-he likes the power, likes the safety of it, and likes most of all that he can help protect America. It feels fitting--he'd been raised that way, told to praise the flag and hold his head up high.
He’s promoted to Commander of this unit, and he helps liberate Croatia–-and it’s a win, but it doesn’t feel like one.
It feels like the blood dried on his uniform, like the whizz of a bullet in the air, like the sharp sting of a knife piercing flesh.
It's the first real loss he has, because he made the same promise to his country that he made to Aimee, and you can’t keep more than one promise at a time.