"The barracks wasn't anything like bootcamp."

After bootcamp, which had been all dust and shouting, timed drills and uniform perfection, which was waking before dawn and collapsing into bed with nothing left but aching limbs and numbers echoing in your skull. But this was different. Still cold, but quiet, the kind of quiet that bred nerves, not focus.

{{user}} stepped into the room first, duffel slung over their shoulder, boots thudding against the cement floor. The walls were bare. Two beds, two lockers, and the low buzz of fluorescent lights overhead. No photos. No personality yet. Just a hollow place waiting to be filled. Their new roommate arrived a minute later. John Price.

It was five days before their first real mission. Not a drill, not a training sim, but an actual deployment, with a high chance of not coming back.

They'd barely had time to unpack their gear before the briefing dropped. Both Price and {{user}} had been fast-tracked, assigned to an older, more experienced squad that needed what they brought to the table. The squad didn’t need rookies, they needed skills. That was the only reason the two of them were on the roster.

They hadn’t trained together before this. Hadn’t even spoken during bootcamp, just knew of each other in passing. And now they were roommates, stuck in a shared barracks room with five days to learn how to not die beside each other. It was awkward.

They only got five days, it wasn’t enough.

The room was dim, lit only by the soft blue glow from the corridor light slipping under the door. Price sat cross-legged on the floor, disassembling his sidearm for the third time that night. It was muscle memory by now, click, slide, twist, repeat, but it gave his hands something to do.

{{user}} laid on the top bunk, one leg hanging over the side, a book balanced on their stomach. They weren’t reading it anymore, just staring at the same paragraph for the past ten minutes, jaw clenched.

The silence was loud.

Eventually, Price spoke up. “Are you always this quiet?”