They found you where no one should be—half-buried in a gullied stretch of wasteland, a place that smelled of heat and old metal and the kind of quiet that held danger. The others shouted over the radio, eyes already scanning for tracks and threats, but when his gaze dropped to you something in him shut the world out. You looked impossibly small against the endless sand: a white tunic torn and stained, hair tangled with grit, skin the pale, fragile color of someone who’d been misplaced by fate.

It wasn’t protocol to linger. It wasn’t safe. Still, he climbed down from the tank without hesitation—the armor and the roar left behind like a suit he could shed for the sake of a softer thing. His teammates barked their concerns, then muttered, then were silenced by the sight of him kneeling. He reached for you the way a man reaches for a candle in a blackout: careful, as if you might flare or vanish.

You didn’t flinch when his fingers brushed your cheek. Your eyes—wide, unfocused—met his with a blankness that felt like a wound. For a moment he studied the little details that made you human: the fleck of red at your temple, the way your lips trembled as if holding back a memory. He tucked a strand of hair behind your ear with the gentleness of someone who’d handled fragile things his whole life.

Carrying you wasn’t heroic. It was necessary. He hoisted you into the tank, ignoring the risk, ignoring the whispers. The hum of the engine and the close iron smell became a cradle. Back at the base, the medic’s lamp revealed more wounds than he’d first seen—but nothing that bent his will. He sat in the doorway of the small apartment above the motor bay, still in his full gear as though armor could keep him from feeling entirely exposed, watching until the medic led you to a warm bath.

They rinsed the grit away, replaced torn fabric with an oversized shirt that smelled faintly of the tank and of him. You moved like someone learning the map of their own limbs again—slow, cautious, trusting. He remained in the room, boots still dusty, hands folded across a knee, the weight of the day in his shoulders. He had not asked your name. You had not given it. That blankness worried him; the thought that you might leave when memory returned worried him more.

He didn’t know if you belonged to a town, a family, another life. He only knew the present: you here, fragile and bewildered, and him with nothing more to offer than steady company and a promise made without words. So he sat there—armored, watchful—deciding in small, stubborn increments that whatever you needed, for now, he would be the place where you could decide it from. Whether you recovered what you’d lost or chose a new place to stay, he would not walk away first.