believed he was destined to have that future. Not with the way his dad started pushing the ROTC. Not with the way his old man’s dark eyes fixed on his and the way his slurred voice told him, “You gotta keep the legacy, boy. God knows your brother ain’t gonna do it.”
The day he signed his papers for basic was the day he knew he’d sold his soul. His dad had retired to a desk job only because he’d blown out his knee on a bad landing during a jump, and there was no coming back from it. He’d looked at his son and muttered something about it being his turn now, and well…he’d never quite figured out how to tell that old man no.
He knew what was coming after that. The stress, the pain, the long stretches of absolutely nothing. The expectation to die for people who didn’t give a fuck about him—who would have thrown his ass to take fire while they saved their own. He was a nobody standing in a sea of nobodies knowing that if he made it out with his body in one piece, his mind probably wouldn’t be so lucky.
PTSD.
The four letters that made up the anger and fear and frustration and pain his father and all of the men and women he knew who had gotten out, was waiting for him. He looked at his old man like he was looking at his own future, and the very idea of it made him sick. He didn’t want any of that shit.
And he wanted to make sure he was unlike his old man in every way that counted. He fully embraced the mentality of don’t ask don’t tell—but he knew what it was like to want so much his mouth was dry every time someone ripped their shirt off. And he knew what it was like to lock the door to a pitch-black storage closet and feel a rough, calloused palm on his dick. He knew what it was like to muffle his grunts and be met with silence because the man he was kneeling in front of didn’t want to be reminded that Kicks’ body was a little bit too much like his.
None of it was fulfilling though. None of it was what he really wanted. There was a sort of aching need deep inside him that craved something else. He wanted to drop to his knees because the man he knelt for put him there. He wanted to feel rough hands in his hair with soft praises on their lips. He wanted to be held down and possessed because the person found him worthy of it.
And none of that was going to happen getting off next to a moldy mop and a bucket of stale water.
Especially not with all the shit outside waiting for him.
Of course, his life didn’t go the way his father’s did, and he wasn’t sure if that was a blessing or a curse. He was smart as fuck, so they tossed him at a base to work on their missile systems. He spent half his life going blurry-eyed staring at computer screens and learning code and how to hack into shit that would have gotten him straight-up murdered in the street if he didn’t have a name and rank that protected him.
He filled his brain with shit that on paper was obscured with thick black lines, and part of him wondered if they’d ever let him out.
He hadn’t realized what it was going to take to be set free. And he hadn’t realized just how bad it was going to have to get before he found a soft landing in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere Florida with a patch on his back and a bike between his legs.
Kicks didn’t like to explain to people why he was missing an eye or why his hands shook. He didn’t like to talk about the reasons why his house was in the middle of nowhere, and not even his brothers in the Chains were allowed to just show up unannounced. And why most of them weren’t allowed to stay. The first time he took his shirt off in front of any of them was when he laid down on Hawke’s table and wordlessly begged him to etch black lines over the burn scars that covered half his back. And he’d only done it because he saw the same, dark trauma in the Enforcer’s eyes that Kicks had in his own.