Age Gap10 min read
"I almost kissed him, then I went to war"
ButterPicks15 views
"I don't let civilians near the front," Grey said the first time he caught me with a camera.
I dropped my notebook. "You can't order me around," I snapped back, but my voice shook.
He didn't smile. He never smiled. He stood in his full kit like a dark statue, snow on his shoulders, eyes colder than the wind. "You're my niece. Go home."
"You're my uncle," I reminded him. "Not my commander."
He folded his arms. "Same thing here."
I swallowed and did the adult thing: I signed the release forms, put on the helmet, and stayed. He didn't like it. He couldn't make me leave.
"You'll get us both killed," Grey muttered later, when we were alone in a ruined classroom between reports. "You don't know what you signed up for."
"I know enough." I stared at the feed we were sending back. "I know you were there. I know you saved me. I want to show everyone what happens when men like you go into that room."
His jaw worked. "You said that before. Why this fixation with me?"
"You saved me at the theater." I said it like it was fact. "You held me when the blast hit. I can't erase that. I can't pretend it didn't change everything."
He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, almost soft, "You should not have been there."
"Neither should you," I said. "But you were. That's not the point."
He looked at me properly then, as if measuring the small, furious woman across from him. "Promise me one thing," he said. "If you stay, you behave like a journalist. No reckless stunts."
I wanted to laugh and tell him that reckless was my middle name. Instead I nodded. "Deal."
*
Two years before, I had been twenty-one and naive. Jose Owens had been polite and warm in a way I confused with love. He'd invited me to the cinema, told me to wait for him, and then, on the big screen, he and my half-sister Hinata were kissing like they were the lead actors in my life.
"Why did you bring me here?" I'd whispered. My heart felt like it had been carved out.
"Because you begged to see him," my mother said later, like that fixed everything.
I snatched my engagement ring from a velvet box and walked out. I found the train, a ticket, a one-way decision. I didn't cry until the train left the city, then it came hot and ugly and loud.
That night, the cinema exploded. I don't mean "news headline exploded." I mean the theater became a burning coffin.
A man with a black mask held a gun to my throat. A second later, the muzzle pressed against my neck.
I thought I was done.
"Don't move," the man said.
A sharp shot and someone collapsed. A soldier in helmet and snow-dusted armor pulled me back as the world dissolved into smoke and screams.
He moved like a predator and like a doctor at once. He crouched over an electronic box rigged with a clock that counted down to hell and cut wires with hands used to killing and to saving. He told me to squat. He joked at me to not breathe and to stop shaking. He smelled like soap, like sun, like a day's work in a shower. He smelled like safety.
"Who are you?" I had asked him then.
He said one word on a scrap of paper: "Grey."
"Grey who?" I wanted a name, not a move.
He wrote it, slowly. "Grey Gibson."
I didn't know then he would be family.
My mother revealed the truth later in a living-room argument I barely remember: the soldier was her half-brother she hadn't told me about. He arrived at my grandmother Tilda's house the day after the explosion, with a shoulder torn open and a quiet voice. He left bandages and contact numbers and, somehow, the access to a part of me I hadn't known existed.
He was twenty-nine. I was twenty-one. I called him "small uncle" the first time he stood in my grandmother's house. He never corrected me.
He asked me to go back to school. I pretended to. I moved into Tilda's small house like a shadow while the family played their polite games. Hinata glued on sorrow and held her belly; my father Malcolm Lin made speeches about propriety and the charity of the world. Jose Owens announced a polished engagement online and the world moved on.
Grey became a constant, an awkward presence who patched wounds and never smiled. He ate too fast, slept too little, and left early. He returned carrying stories he never told.
"He's dangerous," a cousin whispered once in the kitchen. "For more than one reason."
I laughed to hide the way my stomach dropped.
He was my uncle. He was my rescuer. He was a soldier who made my pulse race and my hands feel wrong in their place.
"I can't go back to pretending," I told my grandmother when I left for the airport. "I have a job. I have a life. I am not someone's ornament."
Tilda handed me a cup of tea and held my hands. "You're stubborn like your mother," she said. "You're brave like your father. But don't be foolish with your heart."
I didn't listen.
*
At the front, the snow makes everything honest. It covers the lies and the made-up faces. The kind of smell you remember is the metallic tang of cold, blood, and diesel. The kind you learn to hate is the warm burnt smell of plastic and the harsher, awful scent of song—people who die with songs in their mouths.
Grey moved through the ruins like he owned the smoke. He had something the others didn't: a look that could find the truth in a shadow. I'm a reporter; my job is to find truth. We were there for the same reason.
"You will go home after the morning embedded," Grey said the first night I met him properly in the field headquarters. "You will file what you must and then you will leave."
"No." It was smaller than a shout. "I filed two hours of footage yesterday. It's live in the morning."
He flinched like someone had called his name. "You could have been killed."
"You know," I said, "I would rather report what happens than be what happens to someone else."
He looked at me for a long time. "Then be careful."
He stayed at the perimeter during my first live. He listened. He put his gloved hand over the radio and watched the snow. He was a pillar of dark in the white. When a sniper fired and a rebel walked across the marble square with that stupid, proud way of men who think they are alive because they are dangerous, we watched.
Grey's rifle answered. A soft crack. A body fell. Two breaths later, the gunfire slowed and the rebels retreated. When they did, I saw him in the middle distance, looking at the place the man had fallen. He looked like a man who had paid for life and could not get change.
"You're just a name on our feed now," I told him later, when the footage had hit home. "You are the reason the momentum swung."
He didn't puff up like men do when praised. He gave me one word. "Duty."
And the weird thread between us—complicated and wrong and sharp as a shard—pulled tighter.
"You're still my niece," he said once, in a stable moment at the end of a day when the snow softened. "You must know where that line is."
"I know," I lied.
He saw the lie. He always did. He looked at my hand where it shook with cold. He touched my knuckle with a soldier's tenderness. "Go sleep," he said.
I did, but those moments when his fingers brushed mine kept me awake longer than any battle drum.
*
People talk. In the war, people die and gossip is a luxury. My footage ran on the evening programs back home. People called it "brave" and "raw." I got emails from professors, strangers, and the station editors. Anastasia Fernandes, my editor, wrote: "You got the shot. Don't get yourself killed."
On the third evening, Grey found me crying over a cup of bitter camp coffee.
"You're not crying for the dead," he said.
"I'm crying for what I can't have," I replied. "For what I didn't know I wanted until I almost got killed."
Grey didn't look surprised. He looked tired. "You confuse gratitude and desire," he said carefully. "I've held your life in my hands. That is different from holding your lips in mine."
"You almost kissed me," I said. "You must know I won't be reasonable about this."
"I am not reasonable," he admitted. "But I am still a man with a code. I will not breach it. Not with you."
"Will you stop me?" I asked, softer than I meant to.
He stepped so close our breaths mixed. "I will not make you choose me over what you believe in. I will not ask you to abandon your work." He paused. "But I will not pretend I do not feel something that will ruin us both."
I did not ask him to pretend. I did not ask him to stay.
Instead, I leaned forward and kissed his palm. "Then protect me," I whispered. "Go and do what you must, and come back."
He closed his eyes, fighting a tide of something he could never let loose. "I will come back," he promised, but he did not say when.
*
The day he left was small and enormous.
"Are you sure you want to go that far?" I asked, watching him strap gear.
He nodded. "Orders. Recon. The line is moving."
"If you don't come back," I said, stupidly, "I'll find you."
He turned, half-smile, half-sadness. "That's not a threat."
"Good," I said, and meant every word.
I watched him walk away across the broken courtyard until he became a black line in the white. Then I went to the feed room and edited for eight hours. We sent stories, raw and finished. We did the job.
At night I write his name in my notebook and cross it out because names on paper are weak things.
The attack that nearly killed me months ago had taught me this: the world isn't simpler if we wish it so. You could love someone with the ferocity of a storm and still send them into the rain.
The day he disappeared behind a column to check a grid, a mortar fell in the next block. I did not see him fall. I saw him drop like everything else dropped that day—bells and glass and words.
I kept filming.
My footage cut between the screams and numbers and the block where Grey had last been. Later, after the medic volunteers had done messy miracles, a captain from the United Nations came to the press tent with a list.
"Grey Gibson is...missing in action, reported last contact at 09:21," the captain said. His face was polite and empty.
"Missing?" I said, my voice small and failing like an old radio.
"Probable KIA," the captain finished bluntly.
I remember breathing. I remember recording a live report and talking calmly about coordinates and rescue attempts while my chest caved in like a door with no hinges.
I took the next convoy.
"You can't go alone," Faron Peters the photographer insisted. He was a practical man who ate tin food and cursed luck. "Field rules."
"I am not alone," I said. "My camera is coming."
He sighed and followed me. We were two against the world and my grief, and we pushed through barricades and burning cars, through neighborhoods that had been civilized until a week ago.
At the makeshift clinic, a corporal handed me a torn letter found in the pocket of a uniform. It had Grey's handwriting, blocking and efficient.
"Kyra," it read—he called me by my name, a stolen intimacy. "If I do not come back, remember this: you promised to tell the truth. Don't let my death be a reason to stop telling it. For the living, not for me."
I did not know then whether he was dead. The handwriting blurred. I touched the letters like a prayer.
The field hospital was a cage of shadows. People stitched the living. They placed the dead on tables like objects too expensive to throw away. I looked everywhere for him. I asked for minutes and hours. The reports were a storm of contradictions.
Days later, a soldier came with an identification tag. They had found a body. The tag fit Grey's. The words "probable KIA" became the only answer I could get.
I went to his parents with the tag. Finlay Brandt received the metal like a currency of loss. He sat like a man who paid too much.
"You must tell my sister," Finlay said in a voice like gravel. "Tell her he did well. Tell Kyra to keep doing what she does."
I promised. I lied to be gentle. I told Grey's mother—Halle Becker—what she needed and not what she deserved to know. She cried for a son she had raised rough and honest. I cried for a love that was not allowed.
"Why did you do it?" my mother asked later when Grey's name had become a headline. "Why did you go?"
"Because I loved him," I said. "Because I wanted to know who he was when the world was broken. Because he saved my life and I wanted to save his."
My mother looked at me like an arithmetic problem she could not solve. "He's family," she said. "That's wrong."
I reached for my notebook. I had no defense against the small people's version of morality. I only had stories. "He loved his men," I said. "He loved the chance to be useful. He saved a lot of people. That is what he was."
And perhaps that was all I could say.
*
They held a small ceremony in the courtyard of the base. People stood in silence. There was a band and a flag that looked suddenly thin.
When they lowered the flag, I felt the room tilt.
"Why are you crying for him?" a reporter from another nation asked me after the ceremony, a little too curious for comfort.
"Because we are human," I said. "Because some people change you. Because some men teach you what it means to be brave."
She nodded as if understanding something she secretly wanted to keep from herself. The cameras took the shot. They loved neatness: grief packaged, edited, and sent.
But grief is a messy thing that ruins shots. It makes your hand shake. It makes your chest feel like locked metal.
I kept editing. I kept filing. I kept telling the story of a sniper who flicked the tide. I wrote about trenches and children and food convoys. I made a piece that tried to be as fair as the truth ever lets anyone be.
When the piece aired at home, someone called Anastasia Fernandes.
"You did his story well," she said. "He will be remembered."
"Will that help?" I asked, stupidly.
"It helps the living to remember what was done," she said. "It helps the dead not be forgotten."
Maybe that was what I had to hold: that people mattered enough to be remembered honestly.
I moved from the field after three months. I came home with footage and a new kind of ache—one that tightened when I saw soldiers in crowds and when a camera caught the exact angle of a jawline.
I visited Grey's grave. It was a small stone but it had words that were bigger than the stone deserved.
"Grey Gibson," it read. "For country, for duty."
I read the name like a vow, then pressed my palm flat on the stone and whispered, "I kept my promise."
*
Years passed. I stayed a reporter. I climbed through editors' lists and heavy doors. I carried the war in my eyelids and told the stories that didn't earn medals but did bring food to villages. I married the job. I chose the life that let me travel and write and keep meaning alive.
Occasionally, I go back to the place where he lived. Finlay Brandt gave me an old wristwatch from his son's things—simple, military. "It keeps time," he said. "He wouldn't want it lost."
I wear the watch when I travel. I wind it before I go on air. The second hand ticks like a small drum, a tiny metronome for the rest of my life.
On anniversaries, when the snow falls, I sit by a window and open the files I made. The footage still stings. The smell of that first saved breath still slides into my throat if I close my eyes.
I used to think I could have chosen a different path. I used to think that the thing that hurt the most was the wrongness of wanting him. Now I know the hardest thing was letting go of the idea that desire could be simple.
I still love the man who taught me what courage looked like. I write that sentence and feel it like a bruise. It doesn't make me less human. It makes me more honest.
"I don't want you to become a story," Grey had told me once before he left.
"I don't want you to become a memory I can't touch," I had answered.
We became neither. He became a truth I carried in lines of tape, in captions, in the way I said his name when I told someone about the cost of peace.
If you ask me now if I'd change anything, I'd say no.
"Why?" you'd ask.
"Because I am who I am because of him," I would say. "Because he taught me that if the world is broken, you fix it by telling the thing as it is."
That is the last line of every story I write. It is the last promise I make.
And when I wind his watch, I speak out loud into the cold room.
"Come back to me," I say—because some wishes need saying, even if they never come true.
The watch ticks on. The world keeps breaking and being mended by people who go out into the cold and drag truth into the light.
I keep going.
The End
— Thank you for reading —