Hello! This time I figured it might help to give you some foreword. Remember Steph and David? If not, allow me to recap:

David is Steph’s new lover and fiancé. New? Yes, let’s just say Steph is a widow and she has three children from her previous husband. Emily, Sarah, and Eric, the last two being twins. It’s been a few months since they met, life has sort of settled into a pattern, and they finally moved into their new house. Steph still finds herself staring at things remembering how things used to be, and David still finds her doing the same. She knows that in time the sting will fade but is afraid of the future and how her feelings might change.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of discovery happening between these two, after all, they met so suddenly with no real background on what the other is like. Both face the fear that the other will find some quirk to be a deal breaker or a million other absurdities; then they talk about it and laugh together, the shared insecurities bringing them closer still. Steph doesn’t like most meat but is ok with chicken, David hates plain water, she wants the bath rug perpendicular to the tub—“so I can walk to the counter and not make a mess”—whereas he just dries off before stepping out. A lifetime of idiosyncratic behaviors to meld, and almost no time spent figuring these things out beforehand.

Which is all just fine for the both of them. After lengthy discussions concerning the best place to put a laundry hamper, one of them gets a little playful, and the other is helpless to resist, giving into the lust and heat of the moment, often having to clean up in the morning, usually giggling about how they managed to break something, often interrupted by a continuation of last night’s passion. At this rate, Steph will be going back to the maternity ward inside of a year.

Ah, but this story, we now continue the dive, exploring their day-to-day lives and here we see a moment of discovery. But first, outside of the exposition of the narrative, Steph and David have come to an arrangement where one gets a day off and the other watches the kids, roughly once a week. It’s kind of like a girls/guys night but all day. Steph gets two before David gets one, because frankly he doesn’t need that much rest and Steph really could use more time to recover. We’ll start off at the end of Steph’s day to watch the kids, where David comes home from a day of doing nothing productive to conclude with, well, sex obviously.

 Let’s watch:

— — —

Steph slumped on the sofa in front of a muted TV. The TV was also off. She was drained. Taking care of the kids by herself for the day was exhausting. The sound of the garage door going up meant she was saved. Tires rolled in, then the garage door started rolling down, and a door opened in the kitchen. She allowed her head to roll to the side and smiled at the man that walked through the door.

“Hey,” she managed.

The sun hadn’t made its way out of the sky yet and the days were getting longer, but she looked like she was ready for bed.

“Or you poor baby~” he cooed as he swooped in around her. He loved wrapping himself around her as much as she did, his nuzzling and probing paws felt magical as she melted in his arms.
Steph moaned as he tenderized her soft body with his firm paws, kneading up under the back of her shirt, working out stress she didn’t even know about. Nuzzling into her neck he inhaled deep the aroma of his dessert, the long breaths drawing air through her soft fur accompanied by a loud purr resonating through her body.

Even though this was his treat, Steph loved every second of getting manhandled, which took the form of an intense massage. David loved working her up, feeling her body temperature rise, fur getting messier, feeling her heart race with his lips as he gently teased her with powerful fangs, the sounds of her moans and gasps filling the quiet living room as she fails to keep them.

She felt the cushions slink away from her as the cool air sent tingles up her spine, the force of his paws and arms pressing her body into his broad chest. She watched disinterestedly as the living room became the hallway and then the bedroom door made the rest of the world disappear.

As she hung around David's neck he slipped his paws under her shorts sliding them off the petite framed rabbit, allowing them to fall to the floor with a pair of wet cotton panties curled up inside. His paw took no time finding its way back up her legs as she finished wrapping herself around him

— — —

Dazed, he blinks and strains his eyes, breathing sharply to try and get some focus on the world not realizing it’s obscured by the falling spray of dirt sent skyward moment earlier by one narrow miss of a high explosive round. As the plume drifts and clears he stares at his shoulder, following it to a paw, which wiggles numbly as the dirt-clogged blood brushes off the pads of his digits. It’s probably still there, he considers as the limb he’s contemplating seems oddly foreign, a dissociative feeling he’ll come to loathe.

A pair of irises find their way to a sky only slightly more blue and just as cloudy, as a second paw trespasses into view, flexing and curling into a fist, OK yeah that’s mine.

The victory of having one, maybe two, attached limbs—arms, no less—is abruptly shunted out of his mind as he slams into a large something. Another narrow miss, a fear-induced shell of desperation sent down range and landing again too close to the well tenderized feline. A raised fist! How could he even be alive?! What is this monster? All great questions the few tank commanders remaining on the winning side were asking themselves and each other, as they pelted this and other survivors dismantled the encroaching main battle tank brigade on foot during the last seventeen hours.

E888

He knew what had hit him in the face: it was his tank, or more accurately, his armored recovery vehicle. This was the chunk he had picked up after one well placed shot turned his squad leader and fellow mechanics into the unfortunate soup now occupying a seventy ton explosion. He was lucky that he had merely fallen on top of the tank after being blown off another; one where he managed to pluck a few singed dog tags to ensure that loved ones back home would at least be able to mourne.

The blood had dried in the tufts that would otherwise keep his ears clean; his eardrums had been burst and at best he heard the first of a lifetime of screams. His eyes, nose, mouth, all told the same story of soft tissue damage, anything that could bleed tried and if it was too successful it wouldn’t take long before another round filled the crimson with dirt. Specialist Hamilton, D. Leonidas would later be told that had the enemy stopped firing long enough for him to bleed out they might have stood a chance.

Picking up the makeshift shield, and holding true to his namesake, he roared, or so he hoped, and charged in a direction where he thought a shell had been launched. The corner of his HERCULES withstood another HE shell better than the poor soul carrying it, as his knees buckled under the pressure, the instinct to catch himself falling caused his body to convulse in anticipation of the ground rushing up to meet him.

His eyes adjusted rapidly to the darkened room, and were met by worry. Wrapped in his arms, Steph couldn’t help but wake up as his night terrors broke the still of the bedroom. He took a deep, shaky breath, sighed and smiled, nuzzling the concerned woman reassuredly.

“I… You have to let me in…”

She had lost as many a restful sleep to his demons and the sorrow in her voice was no less moving now then the first morning she asked. He knew she was right.

“Do you remember the twenty hour war?”

“Yeah, but,” she hesitated, confused at him asking about a war that happened when she was four, a war with only eleven survivors, “you couldn’t have been there, right?”

It wasn’t a question so much as another plea: she was hoping that he wasn’t one of the survivors who had faced down overwhelming numbers of tanks and held the line to the point where the defending army stood down in fear of the horrors that might show up next. Of the eleven that didn’t die on the battlefield, two died in route to the medics, one died on the table, and five commited suicide. The word itself a misnomer, as nobody actually survived that battle.

“My middle name is Leonidas.”

“No~ no no no…” she shushed the giant and ran her paws over his muzzle, through his fur, looking for some way to express how well she understood what it was tormenting him. Steph had seen the clips deemed safe for public consumption of the drone surveillance of the masacre, HE and AP rounds smashing into the one that first called his fellow mechanics left in the fight to take up wrenches against the incumbent tanks. Twenty-eight men charged the line, all brothers that SPC Hamilton himself wouldn’t give a second thought to die defending.

“You’re OK now, you won,” she cried, begging it to be ok, remembering the news stories that talked about how damaged he would have to be, the inescapable reality of where a psyche has to go just to be able to make the decision to run at tanks with a crowbar hoisting a bloody shirt as some kind of war banner.

“It’s fine, here.” He wiped the tears out of her eyes and beamed at her. “I’m awake, I know it’s fine, I can manage while I’m awake. It’s just dreams. I can’t control those.”

Steph knew he was damaged. He talked about his broken home, and asked questions that she found peculiar about her mundane and average family, and she knew he had some kind of martial arts training, which she guessed was probably self-imposed to toughen up based on his descriptions of being weak and bullied as a child. What she didn’t know was a literal bombshell. To be exact, 37 direct hits to his ‘shield,’ and 84 indirect blasts that toppled him, all sustained after he began his hand-to-tank assault; the first and only known instance.

“That was twenty years ago,” she rounded up a few years but it mattered little to her point. “Will they ever go away?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, having long ago come to terms with his hearing loss, tinnitus, scarred body, and the hellish nightmares he dismisses as ‘dreams.’ “I tried taking pills to sleep, but they only work so well.”

Steph tried holding back her own pains, this is nothing compared to what he lives with, she thought to herself. Thinking is all she could manage, however, as no words made it to her mouth. His smile seemed genuine, if he was faking it she couldn’t tell, and if he could even pretend to be happy after what she and the world knew he had been through then the least she could do was not put herself first this time.

“You don’t have to be brave for me,” he stole the words from her, a permission to grieve which Steph wished she had the chance to offer, “I’ve found you, and you make everything better.”

As she calmed down the gravity of this revelation came into view. “You’re a legend, you know?”

“I mean,” he shied away from the flattery, “all I did was say ‘fuck it’ first… I wasn’t alone, I didn’t deserve any of those awards.”

He meant what he said. He stood there for the award ceremonies, performed the DNC and shook the hands, but in every interview, every PR event, he insisted that he wasn’t special at all, that he was “ordinary” and the proof was how many did the exact same thing he did but didn’t make it back to their families. The families that thanked him for bringing back scraps of metal with the names of their dead husbands and fathers, they only served to remind him of how he failed to being one more home.

“I was trying to make my death meaningful, I couldn’t have known I would live through that.”

She put a stop to his second guessing with a kiss, pulling him down and back under the covers, proud of her war hero. He welcomed back the comfort of sleeping intertwined with her warmth and tenderness, and would save the thoughts for another day.

— — —

It’s a boring process, really. Getting through PTSD. While this highly impossible type of mind-crippling war is obviously a strawman, real soldiers have to become mentally prepared to make life or death decisions as reactions, no thought behind the action at all. This means throwing yourself into the line of fire because that’s your role. Combat tank mechanics are a real thing, they’re called line teams, and they really do have to face tank battles. If a tank on your side goes down, they’re the ones that go to the battlefield and repair or recover the downed tank.

Lives depend on the nerve of these line teams to jump out of heavily armored recovery vehicles while under enemy tank fire. They train for that and hope that they never have to use that training, but it’s there.

Nobody that gets trained to be able to competently participate in war makes it out with a mindset that’s compatible with civilian life. A person might lie to themself or convince themself, using sound bites that allow them to live an almost normal life; make no mistake, they aren’t the same person as they would have been prior to serving.

Here we see one tragic consequence of facing real danger and the psyche change to be able to ‘survive’ that danger. Nearly twenty years later he’s still reliving moments he faced without fear because he was well past the point of self-preservation. If this happened in real life, he’d be awarded the medal of honor and then quietly disappear from the public eye. Do you know the name SSG Giunta? No? That’s our David, who has faded from the memory of the public. SSG Giunta had this to say about being awarded the medal of honor:

“I'm not at peace with that at all, and coming and talking about it and people wanting to shake my hand because of it, it hurts me, because it's not what I want. And to be with so many people doing so much stuff and then to be singled out—and put forward. I mean, everyone did something.”

“If I'm a hero, every man that stands around me, every woman in the military, everyone who goes into the unknown is a hero.”

Today we have many tools for dealing with PTSD, and a veteran can live an almost normal life. David will, much like SSG Giunta, get the help he needs in time, all boring stuff you don’t want to read about, but neither our fictional hero nor our real life example will ever forget the ones that don’t get the chance to come home. That’s a small part of what makes David a monster.