I suppose there are two kinds of silence in war: the silence that hums because everyone is listening for the next order, and the silence that screams because someone you love might already be gone. That morning the clinic had the second kind.
I was finishing a late intake—an older corporal with a jaw that clicked when he chewed—when Daiwik slipped into the tent. He never moved the way civilians do when they have news about a patient: he moved like a man who'd been carrying a weight and finally could not hold it any longer. His breath clouded in the cold air as he shut the flap behind him. For a second I could not place his expression—was that dread or a desperate steadiness? I realized then that he had been awake all night.
"Kavya," he said, and his voice broke like someone stepping onto thin ice. "There was an ambush at Checkpoint Nine."
My pen fell from my fingers and skittered across the table. I had trained myself for triage, for treating crushed lungs and shattered limbs, for holding the hands of men who would not return home. I had not trained myself for the knowledge that the man whose letters I kept in my coat pocket could be one of the walking wounded.
"Shashwat?" The name came out brittle and too loud.
Daiwik's eyes avoided mine for a heartbeat. It was a look I'd seen on him the night he'd lied about Shash's status, when his guilt had been a living thing. "His unit took fire during their withdrawal. They lost radio for a few hours. They brought in casualties. He... he's been hit."
That world, the one where he existed as more than an echo on paper, constricted until it hurt. The clinic dissolved. I shoved my gloves on, my fingers clumsy with cold and adrenaline. I forgot protocols. I forgot to breathe in the measured way I taught my patients. I ran.
The snow chewed at my boots as I crossed the camp, lanterns a blur. The field hospital was a different animal at morning—stark, bright, a place that could not hide its truths. Tents were full, the air thick with antiseptic and hot breath. Stretchers lined up like surrender flags. Men shouted, nurses directed, and the wounded screamed in voices I knew would echo in my nightmares.
I found the triage area first; the medic in charge, a woman with hands like river stones, waved me in as if I belonged there, as if my panic could be useful.
"Major Rajput?" I asked before the word could rearrange itself into prayer. My throat was sandpaper.
She didn't hesitate. "We've got a Major Rajput stabilized in bay three. He came in with shrapnel to the left thorax. Conscious. He's been through surgery—two hours ago. He's bleeding but stable. We closed the wound. He should be waking."
My knees nearly failed. "Is he—can I see him?"
She looked at me the way people look at other people who are allowed small miracles. "Yes. But only for a moment. The family policy—" She hesitated, and in that pause I felt the thin wire of the world snap.
I pushed past triage curtains, past the antiseptic smell that seemed to cling to my mouth. There he was: the Major who had looked at me from letters and lantern lights, storm-gray eyes half open beneath a tangle of blood-damp hair. He looked smaller than in my memories, like winter had taken him and left him thinned at the edges. Monitors mapped his breathing in soft beeps. Tubes decorated his arms like foreign vines. He was a landscape I could not read.
"Shash," I breathed.
His eyes found me, a sliver of recognition cutting through sweat and morphine fog. For a moment the world collapsed into that look—the message of relief I'd been waiting on for days. I reached for his hand, fingers trembling, and he flinched as if heat had been suddenly applied to his skin.
"Kavya," he murmured, but it wasn't a sound full of my name. It was a sound like a man who had to remind himself of ground beneath his feet. When I leaned in, breath fogging between us, his fingers twitched away from mine and he shoved my hand off with more force than the wound warranted.
He did not yell. He simply pushed—short, measured, like someone who had practiced the movement so many times he could perform it without fully feeling it. But the push landed like a slap to my ribs.
"Don't," he said. The word was small, bullet-thin. "You shouldn't be here."
I blinked, hurt and fury choked together. "I'm your doctor and—"
"No." He cut me off, eyes hardening as if he were fitting them into the helmet of duty. "You're—" He searched for the word as if an answer would make the wound less real—"You're not for this."
"Not for this?" My voice rose without permission. Behind me, monitors kept their indifferent rhythm. "I'm who you came to when you broke your arm in training and when you couldn't sleep in Kupwara. I am—"
He closed his eyes and swallowed. "I fight for this country," he said, and there it was: the wall he had always carried. "I fight for soldiers. I bring their bodies back to a map of home and memory. I don't—" He broke. "I can't—" He turned his face away, hands clenching the blanket, knuckles white. "I can't drag you into—into my fall."
I had expected the soldier's stoicism, the refusal to be saved. I had not expected the cruelty of it, the way his love sharpened into a blade and tried to cut me loose. His voice, always a shelter in letters, now bulldozed through the shelter and rearranged everything in rubble.
"Shashwat," I said, steping closer despite the push. "You are not a fall I can't bear—"
He spat out a bitter laugh. "You're a vulnerability."
The word echoed in the tent like a verdict. I recall every time he had said—jokingly, or darkly—that love made soldiers weak. There had been a kernel of flattery inside it then; the danger romanticized the idea. Now the kernel had cracked into cold, hardened stone. He meant it with all the gravity of a man who had seen friends die because they dared to feel.
"You think my waiting makes you safer?" I asked, voice small. "You think leaving me will save me from the world you live in?"
He stared at me as if I had offered him the moon. "If I die—if I die—God, Kavya, do you know what it will be to watch you wither? To see the person I love—" He clamped his jaw, swallowing. The machine's beeping grew louder, and so did the ringing in my ears. "I'm your nightmare."
"I'm your choice," I said, and for a terrible second I wondered whether he understood the difference between an inevitable fate and a decision one could change.
He hardened again, eyes shutting as though to lock away the softness. "Then promise me you'll find someone who comes home every night. Promise me you'll let me be what I must for my men—my duty—without the fear that I am losing you."
I had no map for that conversation. Love, when it is tested by distance and danger, becomes a question and a command at the same time. His words were both. I had to choose whether to obey or defy.
"I won't leave," I said, and it was not an answer to his plea but a refusal to let his fear determine my boundaries. "I will treat you. I will be with you. You have no right to push me away because you fear loss."
He looked at me then with something split between shame and command. For a moment the Major and the man wrestled under his skin. I had always known he wore rank like armor; I had never seen it attempt to keep out the very thing that made him human.
"You don't understand what this does to a man," he whispered. "Love is a distraction. It becomes a chain when the enemy is waiting for any sign of weakness." He turned his face away again. "Go. Please. Let me be a soldier."
My hands ached to touch him. Instead I reached for my journal, because if I had to salvage anything from chaos it would be his words and mine. I wanted to record him, to pin him down so this moment could not dissolve into rumor.
Daiwik hovered in the doorway, pale as paper. He had that look again—the look of a man who had already counted casualties in his head and couldn't reconcile them with the man who also loved the same woman. He approached softly, "Kavya—"
"Stay," Shash said, and the need in his tone was immediate. He must have seen the way Daiwik's eyes lingered. Any reassurance between men trembled with the weight of silence. "Please."
Daiwik nodded and moved away to the supply table, his jaw working.
My chest felt like it was being rewritten with every beat. I had been careful to guard my professional role, to stand as healer first. Now the roles blurred until they were indistinct. I leaned forward and whispered, "You're going to be okay. You're not alone."
He pressed his palm flat against my hand then, a move without words that contained both apology and something like a benediction. I felt the heat of him through the blankets—real, trembling, human.
The surgeon came in then, brisk and efficient. There was no room for drama in her step. She checked his vitals, barked orders at the nurses, and in minutes the space reformed into a place of work, not confession. She asked me clinical questions—blood loss, respiratory rate, sedation—and I answered on autopilot, my mind looping back to the way his eyes had looked when he'd pushed me away.
After she left, the buzzing collective reality returned: monitors beeped, men moved, the clinic continued. I sat on the stool beside him and tried to make sense of the violent grief and love the morning had produced.
He slept fitfully, hands twitching. At one point he reached out in a dream and clutched at the air where my face had been. I wanted to be there when he woke, to read his fears aloud and set them on fire with truth. But the soldier in him had left a wound that told him to keep me safe by distance, and the man in him begged to be held.
Later, when the sedation lightened and he opened his eyes again, the clarity was terrible. He saw me and there was gratitude and a shame that humbled me. "Kavya," he said, voice thin. "I—"
"Don't mean it," I told him before he could finish with the apology. "Don't let guilt make you cruel. You almost died. You aren't making me weaker by living."
He closed his eyes again, tears gathering at the rims. "I don't want to make you a widow in slow motion," he whispered. "There are men out there—boys—who look up to me. They need me to be unburdened, not tied to something that could be used against them."
"That's not your decision to make alone," I said. "Love doesn't make you weak; fear of losing love makes you reckless with it. Let me be reckless too. I will stand at your side. If you are afraid, tell me. Don't push me away."
His jaw worked. I could see the army's code—duty, sacrifice, stoicism—like iron filings under his skin. I thought of the frostbitten coin Sepoy Yadav had given him once, the map pendant he kept. Objects of superstition and memory. He lived for rituals and for orders, but some rituals had nothing to do with service—our lanterns in the grove, the letters we exchanged. They were their own forms of defence.
He touched the locket at his throat, fingers gentle. "I promised my father—" He stopped. The weight of inheritance settled between us. "Promises are complicated."
They were. My father had told me once that promises were the bones on which life built itself. If they were complicated, it was because each of us chose our own arrangement of bone and flesh. He had chosen the country; I had chosen him. We could never uncouple those decisions. We could only decide how to live with the contradictions.
The rest of the day blurred in the way urgent days blur. I wrote my notes, I assured medics that his recovery plan needed to include both physical therapy and the careful tending of the dread that had nearly taken him. I sent word to Colonel Rajput with measured updates and a plea that Shash be assigned to a less exposed post for now—this I did not say aloud until I had the courage to.
When the evening settled, Daiwik walked me to the grove. He did not speak of the way Shash had shoved me at the hospital, or of the guilt that lodged in his chest like a bullet he'd never removed. He simply handed me a paper cup of tea and said, "You did what you had to do."
I looked into the lantern-lit branches and let the tears come. They were not only for what Shash had suffered or what I had felt when he'd pushed me away. They were for the knowledge that even love—wild, luminous, fierce as it was—could not always keep a man from returning to the place where his demons lurked.
"You'll stay?" I asked Daiwik finally, voice small.
He nodded. "I'll stay. For both of you."
The confession wrapped around me like a cloak: his loyalty, his hidden longing, the poison that had pulsed between duty and desire. I owed him gratitude for the care he'd shown me, but that gratitude complicated in my chest when I thought of how he watched Shash's retreat with an ache he did not name.
That night, I wrote until the sky turned indigo. I wrote letters to patients who had lost brothers, to sepoys whose hands always shook, and to Shash—lines that promised to be steady even if he insisted on being a dividing cliff.
Come back whole to me, I wrote. Not because I cannot bear loss, but because I choose you, every restless, terrified day.
I folded the page into the envelope and sealed it. Before I handed it to a runner at the shift change, I pressed my palm against the paper like a blessing.
When I returned to the ward, he slept. His breaths were slow, regular—an ordinary miracle. I sat beside him, hands folded in my lap, and waited for morning to tell me what to hold and what to let go.
When dawn came, the light was thin and fragile, like the voice of a man who had promised everything and had yet to understand the cost. I resolved then, with the absurd belief of anyone who loves, that I would not be pushed aside. I would stand in the wind with letters in my pocket and lanterns at my back. I would stay.
Because the alternative—letting fear make my love disappear—was a far colder fate than any ridge could mete out.