Tony S.
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Everything posted by Tony S.
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What can I say? I love the twins so let's explore the time when they are teenagers. The timeline may not match with Safe Distance but let's overlook that, shall we? 🤣
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At Saint Gabriel’s, shy and reserved Nick navigates high school life alongside a close-knit group of friends, facing love, friendship, family, heartbreak, and the uncertainty of growing up as they slowly discover who they want to become.
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By the beginning of tenth grade, Nick Anderson no longer had to wonder who at Saint Gabriel’s High School knew he was gay. Everyone knew. Some students probably remembered exactly how they had found out. Others had only heard the story after it traveled through classrooms, lunch tables, group chats, and whispered conversations in the hallways. By now, most people likely carried the information around as one more fact attached to his name, no more remarkable than his short black hair, h
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Spring arrived so quietly that none of us noticed it at first. The mornings were still cold enough to leave our breath hanging in the air, but the snow that had clung stubbornly to the distant mountains had begun to retreat. The afternoons grew warmer. Dust returned to the roads. The wind carried less of winter's bite and more of the dry earth that had become as familiar to us as the smell of gun oil. Time slipped by the same way it always did out there. Measured less by calendars
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The first letter I wrote after the ambush took much longer than it should have. It wasn't because I didn't know what I wanted to say. The words came easily enough. It was my shoulder that refused to cooperate. Every few lines, a dull ache spread down my arm until I had to set the pen aside, flex my fingers, and wait for the stiffness to ease before trying again. The doctor had warned me it would take time before everything felt normal. He hadn't mentioned how frustrating that would be.
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Military physical therapy sounds brutal! 😆
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Morning arrived quietly. I woke before the rest of the ward, not because I'd slept particularly well, but because every time I rolled the wrong way, my shoulder reminded me exactly why I shouldn't. The pain had changed overnight. It no longer felt like fire tearing through my back. Instead, it had settled into a deep, stubborn ache that stretched from my shoulder blade to the side of my ribs, flaring only when I forgot myself and reached for something with my right arm. I made tha
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Randy. Looking terrified. For a long moment, I couldn't understand why. The firefight was over. The insurgent lay motionless in front of him. I could still hear voices echoing through the compound, boots pounding across packed dirt, radios crackling with overlapping reports, but they all sounded strangely distant now, as though someone had buried the world beneath layers of thick canvas. Randy was still holding onto me. Or... Maybe I was holding onto him.
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Someone shook my shoulder. “Kent.” I opened my eyes to darkness. For a second, I couldn’t remember where I was. Then the canvas ceiling above me came into focus, low and shadowed, the faint red glow of someone’s flashlight moving between rows of cots. “Time?” I asked. “Zero three forty-five.” Owen’s voice was as calm as if he were announcing breakfast. He was already dressed, body armor strapped on, rifle slung across one shoulder, helmet tucked beneath his arm
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For the next week, the phone call stayed with me in pieces. Not all of it. Not clearly. Fifteen minutes was too small a container for the amount of life we had tried to pour into it, and afterward the conversation scattered through my memory in fragments: Mom pretending she had not cried, Dad pretending he had not read my letter, Ken laughing through static like distance was something he could mock into submission. I carried those pieces with me through patrol briefings, weapons cleani
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The generator coughed once, rattled violently, and died. For a moment, nobody said anything. Then Miguel sighed toward the cloudless Afghan sky as though personally betrayed. "I gave you everything," he announced to the silent machine. "Everything." Eric didn't even bother looking up from the toolbox beside his boots. "You gave it a kick." "It was an encouraging kick." "It was barely a concussion." Miguel folded his arms. "Shows what you know." I wiped the
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Morning arrived with the same familiar sounds that had been waking us for months. Somewhere outside, an engine coughed reluctantly to life before settling into its steady diesel rhythm. Boots crunched over frozen gravel between the rows of canvas tents while voices drifted through the cold air, half swallowed by the wind that never seemed to stop crossing the valley. Inside our tent, the portable heater rattled noisily in the corner, fighting a battle against the December cold that it never
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Apparently, I need to lean how to comment with a tease but without a spoiler.
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The one that turns you on, obviously, Lawrence.
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Seems like everyone can't wait for the deployment to finish. But oh no... not yet, folks. It's gonna be a little more while. Hang in there and Kent will be rejoined with Ken soon... or not.
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By December, the routines had become so deeply ingrained that we hardly noticed them anymore. Five months earlier, every patrol had begun with nervous hands checking and rechecking equipment because we were afraid of forgetting something. Now the inspections happened almost without thought. Fingers tugged on shoulder straps, magazines were counted by touch instead of sight, radios were tested while conversations drifted from one subject to another. We had learned that no one caught every mi
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I like seeing this side of Anton. Kinda unexpected but welcoming.
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November arrived so quietly that none of us could have pointed to the day it happened. The mountains changed first. Their sharp brown ridges faded beneath a pale morning haze, and each week the wind carried a little more bite than the week before. By the time we noticed ourselves reaching for jackets before dawn, the season had already slipped past us. Deployment did that. Time no longer moved according to calendars. It moved from patrol to patrol. From Sunday mail calls to Wednes
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Oh, somebody is going to make the first move soon, indeed. 😁 But who?
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My ankle kept me off patrol for three days. That sounded better than it felt. On paper, light duty meant rest. In practice, it meant inventory sheets, radio batteries, supply crates, and enough small chores to make me suspect Mason had personally decided immobility was bad for morale. Miguel called it my retirement. “You had a good run,” he said solemnly while I sat outside the tent cleaning dust from the grooves of a radio handset. “Short career. Inspiring, though.” “I twisted my
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The morale phones only worked when everything else decided to cooperate. Power. Satellite. Weather. Nobody ever seemed to know exactly why they were available one week and silent the next, so whenever word spread that the phones were up, Marines drifted toward the plywood shack near the PX almost instinctively. Some walked in smiling. Not many walked out that way. I joined the line after breakfast. There were only four phones inside, separated by thin plyw
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You're right! That makes much more sense. Thanks for pointing out.
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The assignment sounded simple enough. A team of engineers needed to inspect a damaged culvert several miles from the base before repairs could begin the following morning. Our job wasn't to repair anything. We were there to make sure everyone went home. The convoy dropped us off just before sunset. The engineers immediately disappeared beneath the bridge with flashlights and measuring equipment while Mason established a security perimeter around the shallow valley. The place
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