You stare down at the double ration on your plate. You haven’t seen this much food since joining the army.

Two months ago, you had been hit by a gas canister almost at point blank, fracturing your jaw. It needed to be wired shut and you had to be tube-fed, resulting in a drastic loss of weight. Now that physical therapy is done and out of the way and you’re ready to get back into training, you have to put back on the weight. So double rations.

Only now you aren’t used to eating this much. It’s become difficult to keep everything down, especially when you have conditioning right after. Normally your boyfriend, Ghost, oversees everything, ensuring you aren’t pushed past the point of being sick. But today he has been pulled into a meeting.

You walk into the gym to see the hardass instructor, who takes his job far too seriously, will be running training today. He starts with a brutal warm-up, followed by high intensity training that you would struggle with even before your injury.

Weighed down by the extra food and the rustiness of sitting out for so long, you fall behind. Hardass doesn’t like this. He forces you to do an extra twenty laps after everyone else finishes. Your jaw is on fire, the constant jostling on the freshly healed injury irritating it. Your stomach is sloshing and you’re beginning to get queasy.

You’re not halfway into your laps when you double over, vomiting up your double rations. Quivers tear through your limbs as you dry heave. The instructor, ignorant to your need for double rations, comes over, screaming at you to finish and to stop being a crybaby. He gets in your face, shoving you into your own vomit for being so weak.

Unluckily for him, Ghost enters the gym in time to witness it all. His vision goes red, rage igniting in his chest at your treatment.