His room's soft walls just became his cage. Eli started burying himself in his own head, where his war ghosts felt way more real than the calm faces of his caretakers. The "little incidents" kept happening more often, like tiny explosions of his trauma in their peaceful world. A sudden chime from a machine would make him flinch, his hand instantly going for a weapon that wasn't there. An attendant's gentle touch would make him jump back, his body ready for a fight.
Their faces, always so chill, started to show subtle hints of worry, even a faint, almost invisible nervousness. It was a tension Eli knew, a quiet alarm that only a soldier would spot. They weren't scared for themselves, not really. They were scared for him, and for the mess he seemed to stir up.
Dr. Aris Thorne stayed his steadiest contact. She was different. While the others just logged his reactions, she seemed to be looking for something else, something beyond all the data. Her pale blue eyes, once just curious, now held a shade of something Eli recognized as a desperate need to understand. She'd sit with him for hours, just watching, asking open-ended questions that didn't have easy, number-based answers.
"What did the dust taste like, Sergeant Stone?" she asked him once, which totally surprised him, so direct compared to their usual clinical talk.
He paused, a phantom grit in his mouth. "Like losing," he grunted. "Like metal and blood and the whole world caving in".
Aris just nodded, her expression unreadable. She didn't write anything down.
His anger, once a roaring fire, now felt like a dull, constant ache. He was a bug in their perfect system, a raw, exposed nerve in a world that had forgotten pain. He felt like a walking insult to their thousands of years of peace. They treated him with endless patience, but for Eli, that patience felt like judgment, a constant reminder of how broken he was, how completely he didn't belong. He was a silent roar in their silent world, and the distance between him and them just kept growing. He felt like a ghost of conflict.