"Only Love Above the Sky"

"Only Love Above the Sky"

I

Paul was once a quiet writer from the highlands, a man who shaped beauty out of silence, sketching verses under apricot trees and weaving stories that never dared leave his drawer. He lived simply—twilight walks, bitter mountain tea, leather-bound notebooks that smelled of dust and unfinished longing.

And he wrote mostly for one person—Isabelle.

She was a flight attendant, stationed in the capital, always between arrivals and departures, graceful like morning light in an empty airport terminal. She moved like she didn’t belong to the ground.

They met on a domestic flight delayed by fog. Paul was headed to the capital for a reading that never happened. Isabelle was re-routing passengers, smiling out of obligation. Paul was in seat 17A, scribbling lines on the back of a ticket stub.

Isabelle leaned over as she handed him water.

“What are you writing?” she asked, her tone casual but curious.

Paul looked up, caught in her gaze too long. The lights from the cabin caught the curve of her cheek, the shine in her hair—she had the kind of poise that came from floating above consequences.

Then quietly:

“Only what I feel but can’t say.”

Isabelle smiled. Not unkindly—but dismissively, as though brushing lint from a blazer. “Writers always say that. You write too much. Feel too much.”

Paul gave a soft, apologetic laugh. “Maybe. But someone has to feel, right? Otherwise, what’s the point of flying if there’s nowhere to land?”

Isabelle didn’t reply. Just moved down the aisle, graceful as ever. The scent of her lingered briefly—something floral, something cool.

And that was all it took. Paul fell. Completely, hopelessly.

But she didn’t.

They exchanged messages at first. Brief. Polite. Sometimes playful. The kind you reread just to feel close again.

They had coffee twice. Once under a monsoon roof, where he tried to read her Neruda in a soft voice, imagining—perhaps foolishly—that she might lean in. Instead, she laughed politely and said, “You’re really into this stuff, huh?”

The second time was at a bakery, morning flight just landed. Paul talked about stars—about how the light we see is already old, how some of it belongs to stars long dead. Isabelle nodded, eyes flicking to her phone.

He thought there was something there. Not romance, maybe, but a window. A door ajar.

Isabelle never said it outright, but the drift was clear.

“You’re sweet,” she said once, gently. “But I live at 30,000 feet.”

And Paul, ever the romantic, wanted to believe she could be reached. That if he wrote her a thousand lines, if he waited long enough at the gate, if he remembered her favorite tea, she might turn around.

But she didn’t. Instead, she chose someone else. Peter Angeles. A bright, clean-cut airline executive. The type with cufflinks and quarterly targets. He had posture like a press conference and smiled like he already had the promotion. The kind of man who knew how to hold eye contact without blinking, and how to walk into a room as if he owned the sky.

Peter didn’t need poetry. He believed in numbers. In networks. In scheduling things three months ahead.

In being the answer, not the question.

Paul learned about them quietly, from a friend’s comment.

“They make a good pair,” the friend said. “You’ve seen them, right? Isabelle and Peter. Sharp, that guy.”

Paul smiled then. Said something forgettable.

He never mentioned it again.

That night, he walked home without turning on the lights.

Sat on the couch. Shirt still damp from the humidity.

He didn’t cry. Not really. But he stared at a half-written line in his notebook—just a sentence fragment:

“Some people are storms. Others, open windows.”

He didn’t know which one he was to her.

Maybe neither.

But he closed the notebook anyway.

And let the silence keep him company till morning.

II

Weeks passed like train smoke on a fogged window—visible, then gone. The rain had stopped but the sky still hung low and gray over the city. The days felt hollow, filled with the clink of café cups, the drone of passing traffic, the occasional beep of a message he no longer expected. Isabelle hadn’t replied in over a month. Not even a heart emoji to his last quiet line: “Hope you’re flying safe.”

She was already flying somewhere else. With someone else.

Paul had stopped bringing his notebook to cafés. The words had thinned out, dissolved into margin doodles and incomplete metaphors. The poetry no longer arrived like a current—it had become a burden, a spool of thread he didn’t know how to tie off.

He spent his mornings watching clouds from his apartment rooftop, imagining what it might feel like to vanish into them. No fanfare. No last words. Just ascent and silence.

Then, one afternoon, a conscription notice came.

It was thin, cream-colored, stamped in blue. The kind they handed out to anyone between twenty and thirty who hadn’t yet registered a real occupation. He wasn’t surprised. They knew. Everyone knew. Paul wasn’t indispensable to the economy, wasn’t protected by any title. Just a boy who once wanted to be a writer and now wasn’t sure what to be at all.

The letter said to report the following Thursday.

The recruitment office stood on a forgotten street near the edge of the city—between an abandoned cinema and a pawnshop where the window still had dusty signs that read Best Rates for Gold. The building was painted in cracked beige, the kind of government-issue paint that always looked tired. The flag above it was faded and frayed at the edges, like someone had tried to raise it out of habit more than pride.

Inside, a ceiling fan clicked in slow, tired rhythm. Its blades moved like they were dragging time behind them.

Paul stood in line, eyes tracing the stains on the floor tiles. The boy ahead of him reeked of cheap cologne and chewed gum as he hummed something tuneless. A girl—barely old enough to enlist—filed past with a medical form and bruises too fresh to be from drills. Everyone had a reason for being there. Even if they couldn’t say it out loud.

When his turn came, a clerk behind the desk didn’t look up. Just pushed a clipboard forward, pointing lazily to the blank form.

Paul sat. The chair creaked beneath him.

He filled it in carefully, like he was signing the last page of a poem he never wanted to finish.

Surname. Athrun

Given Name. Paul

Place of Birth. Marienburg

Next of Kin. None listed.

When he reached Preferred Assignment, he paused only briefly. There were options—Infantry, Logistics, Signals, Border Patrol—but his pen didn’t waver.

He wrote: Air Corps.

He said it aloud, more to the room than to the officer. “Air Corps.”

The clerk finally looked up. Raised an eyebrow. His eyes skimmed Paul from head to toe—thin, quiet, pale-skinned, a softness around the shoulders that spoke more of libraries than barracks.

He tilted his head slightly. “You have any experience?”

Paul met his gaze for a second, then gave the faintest shrug.

“Only in disappearing.”

The officer stared at him. Blinked once. Then nodded slowly, like he wasn’t sure if it was a joke or something sadder.

He stamped the form without another word.

As Paul stood to leave, the fan above groaned, struggling to turn. Outside, the wind picked up again, lifting dust from the cracked pavement. Paul walked back out into it—no longer a poet, not yet a soldier.

But something was changing.

Or maybe he just couldn’t outrun himself anymore.

Weeks passed, he was called by the recruitment officer. The office was painted in cracked beige, the flag above it faded and frayed at the edges. Inside, a ceiling fan clicked in slow, tired rhythm. The clerk behind the desk didn’t look up at first—just pointed to the form.

Paul filled it in carefully, like he was signing the last page of a poem he never wanted to finish.

Surname. Given Name. Place of Birth.

When he reached Preferred Assignment, he didn’t hesitate.

“Air Corps,” Paul said aloud, sliding the paper forward.

The officer raised an eyebrow. Looked him up and down—thin, quiet, pale-skinned, more artist than airman.

“You have any experience?”

Paul stared blankly, then gave the faintest shrug. “Only in disappearing.”

The officer didn’t know what to make of that.

III

Paul didn’t speak much during training. Not out of arrogance—just absence. As if something essential in him had already drifted somewhere unreachable, and only the shell remained to learn flight patterns, weapons systems, emergency procedures.

He followed instructions. He passed every test. But when he walked, he walked like a man underwater—each step measured, distant, like he wasn’t fully in his own skin. His squadmates called him “Orbit,” half-mocking, half-curious. Not because he was bright, but because he seemed like he was always circling something just out of reach.

They didn’t know the truth:

He wasn’t circling anything.

He was already falling.

The instructors noticed it early on.

After each flight sim, they scribbled similar remarks in their logs:

“Uncanny steadiness.”

“No startle reflex in simulated stalls.”

“Doesn’t panic. Doesn’t react.”

“Almost too calm.”

They ran psychological evaluations. He passed. High marks for logic, pattern recall, long-range threat assessment. But they couldn’t pin down what was missing. Not quite detachment. Something else.

One senior officer muttered after a late-night review, “The kid doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t even look like he’s bracing for impact.”

Another replied, “Maybe he thinks he already crashed.”

In the mess hall, Paul sat alone more often than not. Sometimes one of the other cadets tried to engage—jokes about instructors, or the food, or upcoming drills. Paul would smile politely, nod, maybe say a word or two. But he was never there the way the others were. Not laughing about shared bruises or commiserating over skipped weekends.

He took to flying like it was second nature. Like gravity didn’t bother with him.

When he banked through maneuvers, it was smooth—eerie, almost. No tension in his arms. No tremor in his hands.

Even when others tightened their grips, when adrenaline spiked, when cockpit alarms shrieked, Paul stayed level.

Then came the corkscrew simulation.

It was designed to push every cadet past the edge of comfort—spins, stalls, erratic turbulence, disorientation. By the end of it, half the squadron was doubled over, helmets off, vomiting into standard-issue buckets. A few had to be helped out. Breathing ragged. Knees shaking.

Paul climbed out last. Steady. Quiet. Calm as ever.

He set his helmet down and took a drink from the water cooler without a word.

That’s when one of the other cadets—Miko, a wiry kid from Port Charmel—looked over, still pale and sweating. He asked, almost in awe,

“You ever think you’ll die up there?”

Paul turned, slowly. Tilted his head as if genuinely considering the question.

Then said, almost gently:

“If I do, at least I’ll be closer to the stars than I ever was to her.”

Miko blinked. The others nearby laughed nervously, unsure if it was meant to be poetic or unsettling.

Paul didn’t laugh.

He just looked back toward the hangar doors, where the orange light of dusk spilled in through the dust and metal beams.

And for a moment, he wasn’t Orbit. Wasn’t cadet Paul Cardel, Air Corps recruit.

He was just a boy who once read Neruda to a woman who never really listened.

A boy who lost her at 30,000 feet, long before he ever left the ground.

IV

Over the Eastern Ridge, 0420 hours.

The mission brief had been short, clinical:

Patrol the ridge. Intercept any unauthorized crafts. Maintain formation. Return if clean.

But everyone knew nothing stayed “clean” this far east.

Paul suited up in silence. His gloves moved with practiced precision—strapping buckles, tightening laces. Around him, the rest of the unit buzzed in various tones: nervous, cocky, forced confidence. Some prayed. Some joked. One vomited into a trash bin and swore it was just the protein packs.

He said nothing.

“Athrun,” came a voice—his flight captain for the day. Captain Hariri. A veteran. Seasoned but worn, with creases at the eyes and a slightly trembling hand that he thought no one noticed.

“You ready?”

Paul glanced up from his helmet.

“I’m already up there.”

The sky was still dark when they launched. The horizon was a bruise, tinged with the faintest silver. Clouds hung low like ghosts, and the valley below was still asleep.

Paul’s fighter sliced upward with smooth precision—engine hum in his spine, instrument glow on his cheek, comms crackling to life in clipped bursts.

“Squadron Echo, form on me.”

“Acknowledged.”

“Maintain altitude, three-five-oh. Vectors updated.”

Then: silence.

The kind that only comes before something begins.

Paul scanned the ridgeline. Hands steady on the stick. Breath even. Heart slow. In his head, he recited a line from a tattered book he once underlined when life still had tenderness:

“The air up there is thin, but it’s the closest I get to remembering how to feel.”

At 0431, radar pinged.

Unidentified craft. Low. Fast.

Over the northern plateau.

“Echo, we’ve got shadows at two o’clock. Three bogeys. No transponders.”

“Copy. Closing in.”

They peeled into formation, diving as one. Three jets slicing through mist like ink through water.

But the enemy had already seen them. Four fighters emerged from the haze. Sleek. Fast. Unforgiving.

“Shit—four contacts, not three!”

“Hold tight. Break on my signal!”

Hariri was good—but not fast enough. The first missile streaked past his wing, and he flared left too hard, too soon.

“Stay tight on my six!” Hariri shouted.

But Paul was already gone.

Banking low. Eyes unblinking.

The veteran panicked.

The rookie didn’t.

Enemy cannon fire sliced past him. He rolled once, twice, into the cloud deck. Flared. Climbed. Dove again.

One missile. Two bursts of cannon fire.

Two enemy fighters downed in under four minutes.

Clean. Surgical. Emotionless.

The final two bogeys turned tail.

But Paul didn’t chase them.

He circled the wreckage—quietly, methodically—as if waiting for the sky to breathe again.

When backup finally arrived, the channel lit up:

“Echo-4, status?”

“Athrun, respond.”

“What the hell happened out here?”

They found him calmly orbiting above the scorched remains. Not a scratch on his hull.

He never said a word.

Back at base, the squad landed at 0522.

Three aircraft returned. Two did not.

Paul climbed down from the cockpit, pulling off his gloves with slow fingers. Someone tried to clap him on the shoulder—he stepped aside without looking.

Talanov was waiting near the hangar doors, arms folded, eyes hard.

“You all right, Athrun?”

Paul looked past him, toward the eastern sky, still streaked faintly with the smoke of the dead. Then toward the two empty docking bays that would not be filled again.

And said quietly:

“We flew in together.

Only I came back.

That’s not all right.”

He walked away after that, helmet in hand.

Later that night, in the half-dark barracks, he lay in his bunk while the others murmured about him in whispers—“Doesn’t feel fear,” “Like a machine,” “Did you see him up there?”

He opened his notebook. Wrote two lines. Then closed it again before the rest could bleed through:

“It was quiet up there.

But I couldn’t hear her.”

V

They started calling him the ghost.

It wasn’t official, of course—just one of those things that took root in whispers and hardened into legend. Pilots half-joked that Paul didn’t walk so much as drift, that his boots never quite made noise on the hangar floor. He barely ate in the mess hall. Never laughed. Never asked questions. He responded to commands like a reflex, completed missions like they were premonitions.

He had no locker decorations. No family photos. No letters taped above his bunk.

No one knew where he came from, not really. Port Charmel, some said. Or Marienburg. Someone even claimed he used to be a teacher. But the records were sparse, and Paul didn’t offer details. If he spoke at all, it was brief—measured, like each word cost something.

He slept with the canopy of his fighter open. Even when the frost crept in. Even when wind made the tarps shudder. The others said it was a stunt. A dare. But when the ground crew teased him about it one morning, Paul just smiled faintly and said:

“I like to dream in the air.”

One evening, long after the main crews had retired to quarters, Paul stayed behind. The hangar was half-lit, echoing with distant maintenance clatter and the hum of refrigeration units. His aircraft—Echo-4, matte grey, marked with faint scorch from its last dogfight—rested like a sleeping predator beneath a spill of orange light.

Paul ran his hand along the cool fuselage. Not reverently, but gently, like one might trace the scar on an old friend. He moved slowly, fingertips catching the ridges in the paint, the small patches of replaced plating.

From across the wing, a figure watched him.

Viktor—the mechanic. Sixty-something, oil-stained, always with a cigarette tucked behind one ear and a limp from a war fought two decades too early.

“You treat her like she’s made of glass,” Viktor said.

Paul didn’t look up. “Glass cracks. She doesn’t.”

Viktor chuckled, low and rasping. “They say you write poems before you fly.”

Paul paused.

“I write what I don’t want to die with.”

The old man came closer, one hand resting on the ladder’s rail. “Then why not publish them?” he said. “Might outlive you. Might even end up in some officer’s speech one day, if the right people see it.”

Paul finally met his eyes. Tired, dark, dry—like wind-swept ash.

“They’re not meant to be read. Just... remembered.”

Viktor narrowed his eyes. “By who?”

A long silence.

Then Paul shrugged, almost imperceptibly.

“Doesn’t matter anymore.”

The mechanic didn’t argue. Just looked at him for a while, then lit a cigarette and sat down on an empty crate. They stayed like that, both silent, listening to the groan of settling metal and distant turbines winding down.

After a while, Paul pulled a folded paper from his chest pocket. Carefully, as if it might tear from too much attention.

He unfolded it slowly—creased from being opened too many times. On it: seven lines. No title. No signature.

He read it once. Silently. Then put it away.

“You ever send that one?” Viktor asked.

Paul shook his head. “She’s already gone.”

The mechanic didn’t press.

Instead, he took a drag from his cigarette, exhaled into the half-dark, and said,

“You know… ghosts don’t haunt places.

They haunt people.”

Paul glanced at him. Not startled. Just thoughtful.

Then said, very quietly,

“That’s why I fly.”

VI

It started as a passing curiosity.

Instructor Major Talanov first noticed it during low-visibility drills. The others hesitated in the fog sim, flinched at sudden gusts or unexpected tone warnings. But Paul? He adjusted with a smoothness that felt almost rehearsed, like he’d already lived through worse. No tensed jaw. No muttered curses. No fear.

“He’s precise,” Talanov said, watching from the control booth. “But...too still.”

Captain Renev, another instructor, shrugged. “Maybe he’s just good under pressure.”

Talanov didn’t respond. Just marked something on Paul’s file. A quiet check beside the word instinct.

But it kept happening.

In night ops, when one cadet clipped a beacon light and burst into tears from the cockpit, Paul was the one who stepped in to guide the emergency protocol.

In anti-spin recovery drills, when G-forces made most grip the stick white-knuckled, Paul just... adjusted. Almost languid.

And after every mission sim—no matter how harrowing—he never asked how he did.

He just nodded. Walked out. Sat alone in the rec lounge and stared out past the fence where the planes were parked.

One late afternoon, the instructors gathered after evaluation hours. Most of the cadets were at mess or in the dorms. The sky outside was turning purple, a faint golden haze clinging to the hangar roofs. In the briefing room, the air was warm, heavy with the scent of sweat and boot oil.

Talanov tossed Paul’s folder on the table.

“Tell me what you see.”

Captain Renev picked it up. Flipped through the logs. “Top 5% in every flight sim. Highest marks in threat response, emergency recovery, altitude control. Even his psyche evals come out clean. Kid’s a natural.”

Talanov nodded. “Exactly.”

“...So?” Renev said. “He never smiles.”

Renev raised an eyebrow. “That’s your concern?”

Talanov leaned back in his chair. “When you fly long enough, you learn the difference between calm and quiet. One comes from training. The other comes from loss.”

Silence settled. Even the wall fan seemed to hesitate in its rhythm.

“I watched him last night,” Talanov continued. “After debrief. He stayed behind in the hangar. Thought no one was watching. Just sat beneath one of the tail wings. Writing something in a notebook. Not drills. Not coordinates.”

“You read it?” Renev asked.

“I wouldn’t,” Talanov said quietly. “But I saw the way he held it. Like it was heavier than his gear.”

Renev looked away, uneasy. “You think he’s unstable?”

“No,” Talanov replied. “I think he’s heartbroken.”

Another beat passed.

Then Talanov added, almost reluctantly,

“He doesn’t want to fly for glory. Or revenge. Or a commission.”

“Then why?” Renev asked.

Talanov shrugged.

“Maybe because it’s the only place left where no one asks him to land.”

From that point on, they didn’t push him the same way.

They still trained him, still challenged him—but the reprimands softened. The instructors, especially Talanov, stopped demanding explanations for his silence. Instead, they gave him space. And in small, imperceptible ways, the Air Corps began to do what no person in Paul’s life had managed to do for months:

Let him stay in the air.

VII

He continued flying.

Mission after mission.

Sortie after sortie.

Days bled into weeks, weeks into silence.

His kill count rose like a ledger of ghosted names—anonymous blips on radar now remembered only by the vapor trails they left behind. Enemy pilots cursed his name in intercepted comms. Squadrons were warned to steer clear of his call sign. Some called him a phantom. Others a curse.

He had become dread among the clouds.

But inside, he still wore grief like a flight suit under his skin—tight, unseen, suffocating.

Others in the squadron called themselves “aces.”

They named maneuvers after themselves.

Celebrated victories with vodka and laughter in the mess hall.

They bragged, compared scores, rewound gun camera footage like boys replaying arcade kills.

They etched kill marks onto their fuselages with knives, boasting about enemy paint jobs and how close they came to blacking out.

They posed beside their aircraft with medals and women, already imagining their biographies.

They were trying to survive, Paul knew.

But he was no longer trying.

He was flying toward something. Or maybe away from it.

He kept his plane plain.

No stripes. No paint. No glamour.

Only one word stenciled near the nose in small white script:

Isabel.

And under the canopy, where others carved their kill tallies or wingman mottos, Paul had scratched a single line with a maintenance knife—rough, uneven, but deep:

“I will fly beyond the sky—far from grief, and far from all.”

It became a kind of prayer. A curse. A pact.

Every time he climbed into the cockpit, his eyes brushed that line.

He never kissed it, never tapped it for luck.

He just read it once and pulled the canopy down like closing a door on the world.

Then came the raid over Bulakna Ridge.

A brutal ambush.

Enemy interceptors had circled low and slow, hiding behind the blind zones of the convoy’s radar signature.

Four of the squadron were grounded for fuel line repairs. Only three had launched in time.

Paul took out five bogeys in eleven minutes.

His wingman’s plane spiraled into the canyon halfway through. The third aircraft limped back trailing smoke.

He stayed.

Fought alone.

Turned the sky into scripture.

When he landed, fuel fumes still trailing from his flaps, the base erupted.

The commander barked orders. Mechanics swarmed his plane like surgeons over a collapsed patient.

And that night, the squadron insisted on a celebration.

They strung bare bulbs across the hangar ceiling.

Stacked up crates for tables.

Someone smuggled in a bottle of proper vodka—real stuff, not the diluted issue rations.

They even found an old radio and patched in music that stuttered and crackled over busted speakers.

He didn’t want to go.

But the commander insisted.

“Just show up,” he’d said. “You’ve earned that much.”

So Paul walked in late.

Helmet under his arm.

Flight suit half-unzipped, grease still smudging his collarbone.

Eyes unreadable.

Someone shoved a drink in his hand.

A toast was already mid-breath when the first voices rose.

“To the Ghost!”

“Ghost! Ghost! Ghost!”

A chant.

A joke that had become gospel.

He didn’t smile.

Instead, he raised his glass slowly.

Let the vodka tremble just slightly in the light.

And said, in a voice quiet enough to make the hangar hush:

“To the ones who don’t come back.”

The silence that followed was thick—confused, awkward.

A few lowered their glasses. A few looked down.

The music stuttered, then continued like it hadn’t noticed.

Someone near the crates tried to laugh it off.

“You’re one of us, Ghost,” he said. “You’re not dead. You’re the best of us.”

Paul turned toward him.

Not angry. Not moved. Just... tired.

His voice, when it came again, was softer still:

“That’s the point.”

He left his drink untouched and walked back out into the open night.

Above him, the stars blinked faintly—cold, sharp.

Too distant to comfort.

He sat under the wing of his fighter. Crossed his arms over his knees. Watched the vapor of his breath drift upward.

And whispered a name that no one else remembered now but him.

Isabelle.

VIII

The air was thick with dusk when Paul arrived at the administration building. The sky outside was a deepening bruised orange, the kind of color that made everything look like it had already burned.

Inside, the hallway smelled faintly of oil, old wood, and ration paper. Light slanted in through the half-closed blinds of Talanov’s office, carving the room into harsh gold and shadow. Across the desk sat a velvet box—ceremonial, untouched—and beside it, a thin folder stamped with red ink: GOLDEN STAR – FINAL APPROVAL.

Paul didn’t knock.

He entered still in his flight suit, his boots silent on the floor. There was a thin streak of carbon dust across one cheek, like a smudge he had forgotten or simply stopped caring about. He looked like a man made of altitude, carbon, and something older than fatigue.

Colonel Talanov looked up from the papers, nodded toward the chair.

“Sit, Paul,” he said, measured. “Just for a minute.”

Paul didn’t sit.

Talanov gestured toward the velvet box. “You saved a convoy this morning. That makes twenty-three confirmed. And not just kills—surgical strikes, ghost-level evasions, coordinated shielding. You’ve done what ten men couldn’t. You know how rare that is?”

There was another man in the room—Renév, freshly returned from his third sortie that week. Younger, louder. The kind who still believed in medals and what they meant. He leaned against the filing cabinet with arms crossed, watching Paul with unreadable eyes.

Paul looked at the box but didn’t speak.

Talanov stood and walked slowly around his desk, stopping just beside it. “I don’t hand these out like candy,” he said. “This one had to go through central review. You earned it, pilot. Not just on paper.”

Still, Paul said nothing.

Then, deliberately, he stepped forward. He reached out with one gloved hand and slid the box back across the desk—untouched, unopened.

“Give it to someone who still believes in happy endings,” he said quietly.

Renév scoffed. “Come on, man. You think you’re above it now? You’ve got rookies whispering your name in flight sims like you’re a myth.”

“I didn’t ask to be a myth,” Paul replied, eyes still on the box. “I asked to fly.”

Talanov exhaled sharply through his nose. “Is that what this is about? You think medals are lies? You think we make these stories up so people can sleep easier at night?”

Paul turned to the window. Outside, the shadows of the parked aircraft stretched long across the field. Isabel was out there, dark and gleaming, its engine already prepped for night flight. It waited for him like it always did—without question.

“No,” Paul said. “I think medals are stories we tell so the dead seem lucky.”

Renév shifted, uncomfortable now. “You’re not dead, Ghost. You’re the best of us.”

Paul’s voice was low, steady. “That’s the point.”

Talanov leaned back against the desk. “Then why do you keep flying?”

Paul didn’t answer immediately. When he did, his voice barely carried across the room.

“To burn out the pain before it eats me alive.”

He turned back toward them, his expression unreadable in the golden light. “You hand out gold,” he said. “I carry weight. One of us will sleep easier.”

Renév looked at Talanov, then back at Paul. “You’re not the only one carrying things,” he said, tone defensive.

Paul studied him for a moment. Not harshly. Almost with pity. “I know,” he said. “But some of you still believe you’re coming home.”

Then he turned to leave. His hand was already on the handle when he stopped again.

“I don’t want to be remembered,” he said. “I want to be done.”

Talanov’s voice, when it came again, was lower than before. “Then why not just disappear? Why keep flying?”

Paul opened the door.

“Because silence moves,” he said. “And flying is the only way I know how to carry it.”

As the door swung shut behind him, the room seemed suddenly too quiet.

Talanov stared at the velvet box for a long while, the last strips of sunlight dying over it, turning the red ribbon dull and bloodlike. He said nothing.

Renév uncrossed his arms, voice low. “You think he’ll come back from his next run?”

Talanov shook his head once. Slowly.

“I think he already left.”

Outside, Isabel's engine roared awake—steady, clean, unrelenting.

The sky took him again, as it always did. Without resistance. Without salute. Just the way Paul preferred:

Not to be honored.

Not to be remembered.

But simply… to be gone.

The door clicked shut behind Paul. A final, unceremonious sound.

Talanov didn’t speak right away. He remained standing, one hand on the desk beside the unopened medal box, watching as if he expected the door to open again. But it didn’t.

Renev was still leaning against the filing cabinet, arms crossed, but his posture had softened. The usual glint in his eyes—competitive, confident, brash—had faded into something closer to uncertainty.

“Hell of a way to walk out,” Renev muttered, finally. “Like he’s flying even when he’s on the ground.”

Talanov glanced at him. “That’s the only time he ever feels weightless.”

Renev sighed and shook his head. “You remember when he first arrived? Wouldn’t speak unless spoken to. Never saluted wrong, never smiled either. We all thought he was broken.”

“He was,” Talanov said quietly. “Just not in the way we expected.”

For a moment, the room was filled only with the hum of the overhead light and the low vibration of a distant engine warming up outside.

“You remember that day in the sim room?” Renev asked. “When the new instructors threw him into full cockpit blackout—jammed instruments, no radar, only gut? Thought they’d rattle him.”

Talanov gave a rare, brief smile.

“He found his way out like he’d already memorized the storm,” he said. “Didn’t even touch the panic switch. Just came out with hands steady and eyes...”

He trailed off.

“Empty,” Renev finished.

Talanov nodded once. “Not lost. Just empty.”

They both fell quiet again.

“He should’ve taken the medal,” Renev said eventually, voice lower now. “Would’ve meant something to the squad. To the base. Hell, even to the archives.”

Talanov didn’t respond. He just walked back to his chair, eased himself into it with the groan of an old back and older thoughts. His hand hovered over the velvet box for a second longer, then withdrew.

“He doesn’t fly for archives,” he said.

Renev straightened, his voice more curious than confrontational now. “Then what does he fly for?”

Talanov looked out the window, toward the glint of Isabel's tail catching the last light of dusk. He didn’t answer immediately.

Then, quietly:

“He chose the sky over everything else. Over memory. Over medals. Over the comfort of being understood.”

He rubbed his temple, then continued.

“I watched him during training. We all did. We trained him hard—hell, harder than most. Pushed him to break. But he didn’t. He just... went deeper into himself. The more pressure we applied, the more precise he got. Like it stripped everything that wasn’t flying.”

Renev nodded. “I remember the reprimands. For silence. For skipping mess. For avoiding group drills.”

“We stopped giving them,” Talanov said. “Eventually. I stopped demanding answers. I realized he wasn’t defying us—he was surviving. And in their own way, the rest of the Corps started to understand that too.”

He glanced at Renev, something softer in his expression.

“You know what we did for him?” he asked.

Renev shrugged.

Talanov gestured toward the sky.

“We let him stay in the air.”

The silence that followed was thick, but not uncomfortable.

“Others came for stripes,” Talanov said. “Came for names, for history books, for the shine of being immortal in someone else’s mouth.”

He looked down at the medal box again, this time with a faint bitterness.

“But Paul? He came to fly. To fight. Not to be remembered, not to shine. Just to go high enough that the ache couldn’t reach him anymore.”

Renev watched the sun drop behind the ridgeline, the color draining from the sky.

“You think he’ll ever land?” he asked.

Talanov didn’t blink.

“No,” he said.

And outside, Isabel's engine came to life—low, steady, unforgiving. It rose with the dusk like a second heart starting to beat. As if the sky itself had remembered it still had something left to carry.

Not for glory.

Not for applause.

But simply because he had chosen to fly.

IX

Meanwhile, high above the valley, Paul flew.

The dusk that shadowed the base below had already faded into full night in the sky. The horizon behind him was a memory, not a line. Clouds moved beneath his wings like slow smoke curling from something long extinguished.

He was alone on patrol tonight—standard grid sweep over Sector Delta-8. Sparse radar contacts. No alerts. Nothing to chase. Just darkness and the hum of a cockpit that felt more like a confessional than a machine.

Inside Isabel, the instruments glowed faintly, casting soft halos of green and amber on the metal around him. Paul adjusted the throttle with a touch as practiced and tender as turning a page.

Altitude: steady.

Fuel: three-quarters.

External temp: dropping.

He kept the canopy cracked, just slightly—enough to feel the cold bite at his flight suit. Enough to feel real. Enough to remind himself he was still made of skin, not steel.

Somewhere, far below, a few pinprick lights shimmered in the hills—villages curled in sleep, unaware of the ghost tracing arcs above them.

Paul didn’t speak.

He never did on these solo patrols unless the situation demanded it. And nothing demanded anything tonight.

Instead, he pressed a worn notebook to the side panel. It was tucked inside a custom compartment by his knee, stitched with flight tape and age. He didn’t open it. Just rested his hand on it like a relic.

Sometimes, when turbulence brushed the wings, he would imagine it was her. A memory brushing past him at Mach 1. A heartbeat that never left the fuselage.

He banked gently toward the southern edge of the patrol route. Below, ridges rose like bones out of the earth—sharp, jagged, forgotten. The valley stretched wide and shadowed, swallowing what little light the world had left.

For a second, Paul closed his eyes. Just long enough to feel the hum of the engine, the steady drone that filled the gaps no voice had touched in months.

He thought of nothing. And in thinking nothing, he found peace.

Above him, stars blinked in frostbitten silence.

He reached for the intercom switch, not to transmit—but to listen. The empty static filled his ears like wind through an old chapel.

"I didn’t come here for medals..."

The words echoed again—not from his lips, but from somewhere deeper. He hadn’t said them for performance. He had meant them. Every syllable.

"I came to bury something."

In truth, every patrol was a funeral. Not for the enemy. Not for fallen comrades. But for the man he had once been.

Each night flight peeled him further from that man—rewrote his grief into patterns of sky and fuel burn, into radar arcs and throttle discipline. Into silence.

Suddenly, a faint blip touched the edge of his radar. Low. Slow. No transponder.

He didn’t flinch. He never did.

Paul adjusted heading by instinct, thumbed the switch to tactical. Eyes steady. Hands light. A professional. A phantom.

But the signal faded just as quickly. Probably a bird swarm. Or a low-gliding cargo drone.

Still, he stayed alert. Not from fear—but from respect. The sky didn’t owe anyone favors.

He looped back toward base, cutting through a thermal drift. The stars tilted with him. For a moment, it felt like the world was turning upside down.

“I fly for silence,” he’d said.

And here it was. Silence. In all directions.

Back at the airstrip, the landing lights flickered to life.

Paul lowered altitude, flaps adjusting with a soft mechanical sigh. The base grew larger in the corner of his visor, but he didn’t rush. There was no triumph. No celebration waiting.

Just wheels on tarmac. Just breath in his chest.

As Isabel touched down, the friction hummed beneath him like the last line of an unfinished poem.

He rolled into the hangar slowly, canopy still cracked, his face half-lit by the dying glow of the sky. The ground crew didn’t cheer. They’d long stopped treating his landings like returns. Ghosts don’t return. They pass through.

He climbed down wordlessly, pressed a hand to the side of the aircraft once, then walked past the floodlights without looking back.

The sky had let him go—for now.

And until it called again, he would wait.

Silent. Still flying.

Just as the wheels of thought began to quiet, the radar blinked again.

Not a glitch.

This time, a clean signature—then three more.

Four. No, five.

Vectors incoming from the north-northeast. Altitude low, masked under terrain. Tight formation. No transponder.

Enemy.

Paul’s breath didn’t change.

His eyes narrowed, flicked across the instruments. Reflex took over—quick calculations for airspeed, angle of approach, weapon readiness. Already the targeting systems were warming.

He pressed the transmitter switch, voice crisp and low:

“Command, this is Echo-07. I have five unidentified fast movers entering Delta-8 airspace, bearing 015, angels six. No IFF. Moving in formation.”

A second’s pause.

The base responded, tone clipped:

“Copy that, Echo-07. Can you confirm visual?”

Paul’s eyes scanned the horizon. The sky was darker now, but the silhouettes were there—small cuts of shadow against the distant cloudline. Fast. Intentional.

“Affirmative. Visual contact. Confirm five. Possible sixth trailing at distance.”

The comms crackled. Then:

“Standby for reinforcement. Maintain distance if possible. Do not engage unless provoked.”

Paul didn’t reply immediately. His thumb hovered over the secondary channel. Then he clicked in again—this time to the private flight loop, a closed comm used only in emergencies or recon priority.

“This is Echo-07. Intercepting. No time to wait. I’ll try to scatter their line.”

There was silence on the line. Then the base operator’s voice, slower now:

“Paul. Ghost. You are not required to intercept. Pull back until Echo-02 and Echo-05 are airborne.”

But he had already peeled into a wide arc, throttling forward. The sky flexed around him. Isabel responded without hesitation.

The stars above blurred as he angled into the approach. No fear. No second guessing.

He flew with the same stillness he always had—not because he thought he would survive, but because he never expected to.

As he approached the enemy flight path, the shapes grew sharper: older airframes, retrofitted silencers, fast acceleration. These weren’t scouts. These were raiders. Possibly a first wave probing for a deeper push.

“Not tonight,” Paul murmured under his breath.

He pressed the targeting switch. Weapons systems blinked amber, then locked green.

“Command, I am engaging.”

“Echo-07—Ghost—abort, repeat, abort. Backup in sixty seconds.”

But sixty seconds was too long.

The lead bogey veered toward a low pass, likely to begin a radar sweep. Paul had only seconds before they disappeared into terrain again.

He dove.

The G-force pressed into his spine, but his breath stayed even.

The first missile struck clean through the lead plane’s fuselage before they could break formation. The second veered wide—chaff deployed—but Paul was already adjusting angle, nose tilting to clip the flank of the group and force them apart.

The sky filled with confusion.

Enemy comms sparked—foreign language, rapid, panicked. They hadn’t expected contact. Not this deep in.

Paul danced through them, looping under and cutting altitude to disrupt their targeting systems. The third bogey tried to bank wide and escape—he chased.

“One down. Two separating. I have pursuit.”

Missile lock.

Fired.

Second kill—confirmed by radar drop and thermal bloom. No joy, no celebration. Just the math of survival.

Behind him, two others tried to close the gap.

Isabel tilted, screamed forward, threading a line between death and dusk.

“I’m not flying for glory,” Paul said to no one. “Just for silence.”

In his mind, he wasn’t above the mountains.

He was somewhere quieter. Somewhere colder.

A place with no medals, no names, no unfinished letters.

Only the air. And the ache.

The final plane fell at 2046 hours. A clean shot—missile fired mid-climb, the explosion flaring like a dying star just above the ridge. No scream over the radio. Just silence, then static.

Paul didn’t circle for confirmation. He didn’t need to. He knew the way a kill felt in his bones now—like a sudden absence in the air. Like a bell that stopped ringing.

Isabel’s engine stuttered briefly—she was overheating. He brought her down gently, coaxing every mile out of her as the lights of the base flared into view through the haze.

The airstrip was quiet as he approached. No sirens. No scramble. The attack had never reached them.

He touched down at 2052, the wheels skimming the tarmac like a whispered apology.

X

When he climbed down, he said nothing.

The ground crew looked at him like he was something between a ghost and a myth. One of them—the youngest, barely twenty—muttered, “He brought them all down,” before another elbowed him quiet.

Paul walked away from the jet slowly, like gravity was just now remembering it could claim him.

Inside HQ, the air was tenser.

Colonel Talanov stood with his arms folded in the operations room. Renev was beside him, helmet still tucked under one arm, expression unreadable.

Paul stepped in, still in his scorched flight suit. No salute. No explanation.

Talanov’s voice came hard and sharp.

“You disobeyed a direct order.”

Paul said nothing. Just met his eyes.

“You were told to maintain distance. You engaged before backup arrived.”

Still, silence.

“You risked your aircraft, your life, and compromised protocol.”

Another pause.

Then Talanov’s voice lowered, as if grudgingly:

“And you saved the base.”

Renev cleared his throat, still staring at Paul.

“There were six of them,” he said. “You took down five. Drove the sixth into the cliffs.”

Paul gave a slow blink. “It was the only option,” he said quietly.

“You could’ve died,” Talanov snapped. “You should’ve died.”

Paul nodded faintly. “I know.”

The room fell quiet.

Renev looked at Talanov, then back to Paul. “You didn’t do it for the base, did you?” he asked, half a challenge.

Paul’s voice didn’t change. “I did it because someone had to. That’s all.”

Talanov stepped forward, eyes harder now. “You’ll get a formal reprimand in your file. For insubordination.”

Paul didn’t flinch.

“And you’ll get a commendation,” Talanov added after a beat, “for saving this entire sector from a full air incursion.”

He paused. “I don’t care which matters to you.”

Paul’s eyes drifted to the map behind them. It was marked with red grease pencil, showing where the enemies had come in, and where they fell.

Then, as quietly as he entered, Paul turned to leave.

Before he reached the door, Talanov said one last thing—softer now.

“You’re grounded. Forty-eight hours.”

Paul stopped. Not in protest, but as if registering the words.

“It’s not a punishment,” Talanov added. “It’s so we remember you’re still human.”

Paul nodded once.

Before he stepped out, Renev called after him, almost like an afterthought.

“What did it feel like, up there? Taking down that many, alone?”

Paul paused.

Then looked back over his shoulder and said,

“Quiet. The kind of quiet that burns.”

He left. Paul had almost reached the door when Renev spoke again—his voice more earnest now.

“Wait. Just one more thing.”

Paul turned slightly, face half in shadow.

“Why do you keep doing this?” Renev asked, the words slipping out faster than intended. “You don’t care for medals, or orders, or even your own skin. Is this just penance? What are you chasing up there?”

Paul didn’t answer right away. He looked past Renev, through the window where the airstrip blurred in the heat haze of cooling engines.

Then he said, quietly—but without hesitation:

“I prefer to be a martyr than a hero.”

Renev blinked. “What?”

Paul’s eyes remained fixed on the horizon.

“Look at the Muslims,” he said, voice calm, stripped of any politics or pretense. “They speak of the shahid—the martyr—as higher than the ghazi, the conqueror. The hero returns with victory. But the martyr…”

He trailed off, then finished:

“The martyr doesn’t return. He gives everything—and expects nothing.”

Talanov was silent behind the desk, watching.

Paul continued:

“I’m no conqueror. I’m not chasing glory. I don’t fly to be remembered. I fly because I still bleed in the air. I fly to bury what I can’t kill inside me.”

He looked at Renev then, his gaze direct—not angry, not dramatic. Just devastatingly honest.

“So yes. If I must choose, then let me be a shahid. Not a ghazi. Let me fall quietly, doing what needs to be done, even if no one salutes it.”

Renev swallowed hard. “And if no one knows what you gave?”

Paul offered the faintest of smiles. Not triumphant—resigned.

“Then I’ll have done it right.”

He turned again. Walked out of the room.

Behind him, the air sat heavy with truth.

Talanov finally spoke, almost to himself:

“We trained a soldier. But the sky claimed a martyr.”

Outside, Isabel sat in the hangar like a wounded animal—charred, pitted, but intact. Mechanics swarmed around her. One of them ran his hand over her hull and whispered, “She held him through hell.”

That night, Paul didn’t eat in the mess hall.

He didn’t celebrate.

He just sat by the flight line in silence, watching stars blink overhead, his hands still smelling of smoke and jet fuel.

He had broken orders.

He had saved lives.

And still, all he wanted was altitude.

XI

A small, dimly lit room near the flight line.

The hum of generators filters through the thin tin walls. Outside, the night wind scrapes across hangar doors and rusted scaffolding. Inside, everything is still.

A battered wooden guitar leans against a cot bolted to the floor. A reel-to-reel recorder rests on a metal table, its spools still from a prior life. An ashtray sits nearby—overflowing with spent matches, torn paper, and the burnt remains of poems that didn’t survive the war.

Paul sits shirtless on the edge of the bed. His arms bear the small scars of flight deck burns and shrapnel. His face is calm, but his eyes are tired—too tired for a man his age, too haunted for a man still breathing.

A page lies in his lap.

It’s worn, creased, smudged. Bloodstained in one corner. The poem began years ago—written under apricot trees in a place the maps no longer list, meant for someone who once told him he felt too much.

He traces the lines once with his fingers. Then, slowly, he picks up the guitar.

The strings are out of tune. So is he.

But his fingers remember. The movements are slow at first—rusted from war, callused by duty—but memory guides them.

He presses record. The red light clicks on with a soft whir, and the reels begin to turn.

He doesn't sing like a performer. He sings like a man trying not to drown.

"Love and Light"

Soft, almost whispered. Words falling like ash, not fireworks.

I will fly beyond the sky,

Far from grief, and far from all.

No one else will pass me by,

None shall rise, none shall call.

At the table of my love,

I’m alone, yet full of grace.

With a fearless heart above,

In love’s light, I find my place.

(guitar weeps gently)

The beat of hope within my chest,

Is the song of life at rest.

My heart, my eyes, my world, my flame—

Are all one light, they shine the same.

My delight,

Spring of light,

Love and Light…

His voice catches—but he doesn’t stop.

He leans forward into the melody like a man leaning into wind.

Like a bird, I shall soar,

From this damned world, I will lift away.

From this earth and all its war,

Toward the dawn, I will make my way.

(a pause—longer now. Then, stronger.)

Let my heart in hope beat strong,

It’s the rhythm of my soul.

Eyes and soul alight with song,

Love and light have made me whole.

The song ends.

No applause. No echo. Just the soft mechanical click as the reel-to-reel stops spinning.

He exhales. Closes his eyes.

Then, with slow care, he leans forward and labels the tape by hand:

“For No One. But Me.”

He places the reel into a small wooden box. Inside are other artifacts of his unspoken life: flight maps, worn gloves, a folded photo of seat 17A on a long-forgotten commercial flight, and a scarf—light, powder-blue, still faintly scented.

He pauses—hand resting on the tape.

Whispers, so softly even the recorder wouldn’t have caught it:

“But if she ever hears it… maybe she’ll know.”

He turns off the lamp. Darkness settles gently, like ash after a fire.

The guitar sits quietly where his rifle once did.

The tape hums faintly in the box.

And for the first time in weeks, Paul sleeps—not as a pilot, not as a martyr, not as a ghost.

Just as a man who finally sang what he survived.

XII

It began like any other alert—sudden, clipped, clinical.

0430 hours. Radar pinged. Scrambled intercept. Sector Echo-5.

Paul was already halfway to the hangar before the klaxon stopped ringing.

He suited up without thought, each buckle tightened in muscle memory. On the tarmac, Isabel waited—fuelled, armed, still scarred from her last run. Like him, she flew better with wounds.

The sky was iron-gray, heavy with pre-dawn haze.

His comm crackled alive.

“Multiple bandits inbound. Fifteen klicks out. You’ll be flying with Echo-03 and Echo-06.”

Paul nodded to the ground crew. Climbed into the cockpit.

Didn’t speak.

Didn’t need to.

In the air, they met turbulence—and contact.

Five enemy aircraft, fast and aggressive, swept in a staggered attack pattern. This wasn’t a probing strike. It was an attempt to punch a hole through their eastern air defense grid.

Orders came through: intercept, contain, eliminate.

Paul engaged.

He moved like water around rock. Weaving between tracers, letting instinct pilot him. The first kill came quick—split-S, counterroll, missile lock. Gone.

Second one panicked, broke formation. Paul chased him into the clouds and returned without him.

Echo-06 went down—flaming wreckage into the hills.

Echo-03 got hit bad, veered off, limped west.

That left Paul. Alone.

Three against one.

He didn’t retreat.

Didn’t radio back.

He looped wide, baiting them low. They followed—cocky.

He dropped countermeasures, faked a stall, killed his throttle just enough to let the lead overshoot. Lit him up point-blank.

Another kill.

Two left.

They flanked him hard—tight turns, clipped volleys. Paul ducked under one, rolled, climbed high. Isabel groaned beneath the strain, but held.

He took the second out in a high G-dive—sacrificing altitude for position. Fired. Flared away.

Only one remained.

The last enemy was smarter. Veteran. Held distance. Tried to lure him out east, deeper into enemy-controlled airspace.

Paul followed anyway.

The last dance was long. Violent. Nearly beautiful in its brutality.

They traded fire. Dodged death. Brushed past each other like blades in wind.

Finally, Paul clipped him in the engine. The enemy stalled, spiraled down—black smoke in a widening arc.

But so did Paul.

He didn’t have enough altitude left. Not enough power. One of the rounds must have nicked his fuel line. Or maybe it was just too many battles, too little sleep, too much weight.

Isabel coughed smoke. Instruments flickered.

Terrain ahead: jagged ridgelines. Nowhere to land. No friendlies for hundreds of kilometers.

He radioed once—just once.

“Ghost to base. Multiple kills confirmed. Returning with damage. I’m… I’m not gonna make it home.”

A pause.

Then, softly:

“Tell Talanov… I flew as far as I could.”

The last thing the base heard was static—and a half-sung line:

“…love and light…”

The crash wasn’t fiery. It wasn’t cinematic. Just a hard, brutal impact into a lonely forested valley in enemy territory.

Wreckage smoldered between pine and silence.

He lived through the crash. Just barely.

Crawled from the cockpit. Blood on his brow. Ribs broken. Left arm numb.

He looked up at the stars just beginning to fade in the morning sky.

And whispered, not a prayer—just a promise:

“One more time… just one more flight…”

They didn’t find him for days.

Enemy patrols found the wreck first, but no body.

Some said he was captured.

Others whispered he survived, and disappeared behind the lines—just as he always had in life.

But what they did find, weeks later, smuggled back through resistance hands—

Was a reel-to-reel tape.

Marked in careful script:

“For No One.”

And a line scrawled on the inside cover, in a blood-smeared hand:

“I fought to bury pain.

I flew to stay alive.

If I must fall—let it be after silence.”

The crash had shattered the trees like glass. Pine splinters, twisted metal, scorched earth. Isabel—faithful to the end—lay in smoking ruin across a shallow ravine. Her nose was buried in the dirt like a bowing soldier. Her pilot had barely crawled twenty meters before blacking out.

When Paul awoke, it was to cold wind and blood. He couldn’t move his left leg. His ribs shrieked with every breath. A fragment of glass still clung to his shoulder, embedded deep like a truth unspoken.

Above him- nothing but branches, bruised sky, and silence.

He dragged himself—slow, ragged, inch by inch—toward shade and cover. Slept in intervals. Ate snow. Kept one hand on the pistol in his flight vest, though he doubted he had the strength to raise it.

On the third day, he heard the bells.

Faint. Soft. Not church bells—but metal chimes hanging from the necks of goats.

And then, footsteps.

The figure emerged slowly—cautiously. Cloaked in wool, dust, and the scent of woodsmoke. An old man. Weathered. Unarmed.

The shepherd looked at Paul, saw the blood, the broken leg, the uniform.

He didn’t ask questions.

Just knelt, pressed a hand to Paul’s forehead, and murmured something in a language Paul didn’t know—but understood.

"You’re not dead yet."

He returned that night with a rough cart and a mule. Loaded Paul like a sack of wounded memory. And disappeared into the folds of the valley.

The shepherd’s hut was half-collapsed, built into the side of the mountain, roofed with rusted tin and moss. But it had warmth. A hearth. Herbs hanging from beams. A pile of wool. And quiet.

For two weeks, Paul lay still on a straw mat, wrapped in old blankets, fevered and delirious. The shepherd changed the dressings on his leg. Applied tinctures. Burned poultices. Muttered prayers.

He never asked Paul’s name.

Never called him "pilot."

Just once, after changing the bandage, he looked into Paul’s hollowed face and said in rough tongue:

“You’ve been in the sky too long, stranger. The earth doesn’t trust you yet.”

Paul half-laughed—then winced.

By the third week, Paul could sit. The pain dulled to a background noise. He fashioned a crutch from broken pine. He helped feed the goats. Even chopped firewood, once—until his ribs screamed and he dropped the axe.

Sometimes, at night, he stared up through the cracked roof and whispered the lines of a poem he hadn’t finished yet.

The shepherd would listen. Say nothing. Just offer him bread and hot milk in silence.

Then, one morning, the dogs barked.

Distant boots crunched in the frost.

Enemy patrols.

Paul knew the rhythm of danger by now.

The shepherd didn’t flinch. He looked to Paul, then simply nodded toward a trapdoor beneath the hearth.

Paul hesitated.

Then climbed down into the dark.

Gun in hand.

The shepherd covered the door with ash, wood, and a pot of boiling root tea.

When the soldiers came, they searched lazily. Laughed. Took some cheese. Shoved the old man. Asked about the wreck in the valley.

He said nothing.

When they left, Paul waited nearly an hour before emerging again.

“You could’ve handed me over,” he said hoarsely.

The shepherd shrugged.

“You’ve already fallen. Why let them bury you too?”

Paul stayed one more week.

Then, one dawn, he rose without waking the old man.

Took a goatskin pack, two knives, a map drawn on rough paper.

And a cane.

He left a single object behind on the shelf: his flight badge.

Pressed into a small wooden box, wrapped in cloth.

No note.

Just a whisper, left to the fire:

“I’ll fly again. Just not yet.”

And then he walked—slowly—eastward.

Toward whatever came next.

XIII

The layover was in Ravna Luka this time. A quiet city, nestled in the eastern hills, where war was a rumor, and sunsets still painted cafés gold.

Isabelle sat near the terminal window of the crew lounge, sipping lukewarm tea. Her uniform was still crisp, hair pulled tight, eyes distant as they always were lately. Outside, jets coasted to the runway like swans in slow motion.

Her phone buzzed once. A headline from a news alert:

“Enemy Squadron Shot Down Over Ridge 5 — Lone Interceptor Credited With Confirmed Takedowns”

She almost swiped it away, as she always did with war news.

But then came the name.

Not a name. A callsign.

“Ghost.”

Her finger hovered.

She clicked.

The article was short. Sparse on details. It read more like a military press release than journalism.

“The pilot—known only by the moniker ‘Ghost’—has emerged as a singular force in aerial defense efforts. Witnesses describe him as silent, exacting, unnerving in his calm. Enemy comms refer to him with growing dread. As of today, he holds twenty-three confirmed kills.”

Isabelle frowned faintly.

That number—it stirred something.

She took another sip of tea, but it didn’t go down as easily.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, a memory surfaced. Not loud. Not cinematic. Just... a conversation on a rainy day, under the corrugated roof of a cheap café near the old part of Marienburg.

A young man. Hair always messy. Eyes that lingered too long. A guitar on his back and a line of poetry he couldn’t stop reciting.

She had smiled at the time. Dismissed it as drama.

Back then, she thought she wanted stability. Cufflinks. Someone who didn’t write poems before boarding flights.

And now?

She looked out the window again. A formation of jets soared overhead, carving white streaks through the amber sky.

One of them could be him.

She didn’t know.

No name. No photo.

Just a ghost in the clouds.

She told herself it couldn’t be him.

He wasn’t the type. Too gentle. Too full of feeling.

But then again… he was always the one who disappeared quietly, wasn’t he?

She closed the article.

Opened her messages.

Scrolled past the old ones.

Found the last thing he ever sent. Unread for months.

A voice note.

Three seconds.

She played it.

Nothing but silence—and at the end, a soft breath, as if he’d wanted to speak but changed his mind.

She stared at the screen.

Then, without knowing why, whispered:

“If it is you… stay alive, you stubborn idiot.”

Isabelle put her phone down. The screen dimmed, but the word stayed with her.

"Ghost."

The name echoed strangely—like an inside joke the world didn’t realize it was telling.

She leaned back in the lounge chair, stared out at the hazy airstrip, and let herself remember.

She remembered the messages. The long, uneven texts he’d send about the stars, or silence, or a poem he’d been writing at 3 a.m. after another layover in a war-fringed city.

She remembered the coffees. The first one, where he read her Neruda like he was afraid of being laughed at. The second, where she barely listened—scrolling through her phone while he spoke about celestial navigation and how birds always found their way home.

She remembered his question:

“Do you ever get tired of floating?”

And her answer:

“I live at 30,000 feet, Paul. That’s the point.”

She told herself she needed someone grounded. Certain. Someone with a plan.

And Peter Angeles had all of that. Clean-cut. Always confident. He carried himself like a boardroom victory. When he smiled for press photos, the corners of his eyes didn’t even wrinkle.

He offered her a future—business-class upgrades, networking dinners, long-term calendars.

Paul only ever offered poetry.

At the time, it felt like an easy choice.

Now, seated alone as dusk bloomed across the tarmac, she found herself wondering why “easy” suddenly felt so… shallow.

The article had said twenty-three kills.

That wasn’t a number Paul would’ve boasted about. He used to say numbers were for accountants, not memories.

And the way they described him—calm, silent, relentless—it sounded like someone who’d already died once inside.

Someone who kept flying because he didn’t know how to land anymore.

It sounded like Paul.

But it couldn’t be.

Could it?

Isabelle blinked and realized she hadn’t touched her tea in twenty minutes. It was cold now.

Just like the goodbye she gave him—if you could call it a goodbye.

She never said the word. Just slowly stopped replying.

And when he asked her—earnestly, vulnerably—“Was I ever close?”, she didn’t answer that either.

Just sent a polite line:

“You’re a beautiful person. I hope we can still be friends.”

He never messaged again.

She pulled out her compact mirror. Her eyes were tired.

Outside, a supply aircraft taxied past.

She caught herself scanning the flight deck window, as if some shadow behind the glass might resemble him.

It didn’t.

But for a flicker of a moment, she imagined he was there.

Still writing verses in his head, even up in the clouds.

She closed the compact. Smoothed her uniform.

And whispered, under her breath:

“If that Ghost really is you… I’m sorry. I should’ve told you then.”

She didn’t say what. But maybe she didn’t have to.

XIV

The executive lounge in Ravna Luka was quiet, padded in dull carpet and low conversation. Soft jazz filtered in from ceiling speakers. Glass walls framed the twilight tarmac, streaked with orange and slate blue.

Peter Angeles sat across from Isabelle, scrolling through financial reports on his tablet. Every few moments, he glanced up at her—waiting for her to speak, or look at him, or even pretend to be present.

She didn’t.

Her tea had gone cold. She hadn’t taken a sip since they sat down.

Her eyes were on the horizon, but her thoughts were elsewhere.

Far elsewhere.

Peter finally set his tablet down. Folded his arms. Leaned forward.

"Isabelle."

She didn’t flinch, but her gaze didn’t move.

"You’ve been quiet for half an hour." Peter said. 

Now she looked at him. Composed. A professional mask worn well.

"Just tired. Rough layover." Isabelle replied.

Peter tilted his head slightly, studied her. He wasn’t unkind—but he was sharp, always scanning for misalignment. That was his gift, and his flaw.

"It’s not the layover," Peter said. "I know that look."

Isabelle gave a soft breath. Not quite a sigh. "What look?"

"The one you used to get when you talked about flying with someone else. Before me." Peter said. 

Isabelle’s jaw tightened—just a little.

Peter continued, careful but pressing:

"Was it him again? That guy. The poet. What was his name?"

A pause.

She didn’t want to say it.

But the silence made it louder.

"Paul," she said quietly.

There it was.

A ghost in syllables.

Peter leaned back in his seat. Measured.

"Right. The one who read you Neruda in a monsoon and wrote you a love letter disguised as a boarding pass."

Peter's voice wasn’t mocking, but it wasn’t warm either.

Isabelle didn’t rise to defend him, instead she just looked back at the window.

The sky was darker now. Somewhere out there, jets were flying toward places no press release would mention.

"I saw something in the news," Isabelle said, as if to no one. "About a pilot. They call him Ghost."

Peter raised an eyebrow.

"You think it’s him?"

"I don’t know." Isabelle replied.

"And if it is?" Peter asked.

Isabelle was quiet for a long time. The soft jazz faded into the hush of air vents and the tap of boarding announcements.

Then: "Then I chose the one who always lands. Not the one who never did."

Peter nodded slowly. Accepted that. But something in her tone kept his eyes narrowed.

"Do you regret that?"

She turned to face him fully now.

Her eyes were clear. Not weeping, not wistful. Just… honest.

"I don’t regret choosing you." Isabelle said. "But sometimes I wonder what it cost."

Peter sat back. Swallowed that with a businessman’s grace.

He reached for his tablet again, but didn’t open it.

Isabelle didn’t apologize.

They both sipped cold drinks in a room suddenly filled with the sound of everything they didn’t say.

XIV

The airport lounge was nearly empty—just the clink of glassware and the quiet shuffle of attendants waiting for the next round of delayed passengers.

Isabelle sat by the window, legs crossed, blazer draped over one shoulder, her hair pinned in that professional knot she always wore on long layovers. A tray of coffee and a half-eaten tart sat beside her untouched.

Her phone buzzed. A message from Peter:

“Meeting went long. Dinner might have to wait. Still at Central HQ.”

She didn’t reply.

Instead, she opened her folder of flight manifests and press briefings. Not for work—this was personal.

It had started with the song.

The one she’d heard a week ago during a late-night radio shuffle in a provincial terminal. A voice—raw, aching, familiar. Not in the name, but in something else. The weight of the words. The tremor. The restraint.

“I will fly beyond the sky,

Far from grief, and far from all...”

Isabelle had turned to the radio booth and asked the operator, “Who was that?”

The answer had been vague.

“Some pilot. We call him Ghost. Been passing tapes around military radio. No one knows his real name.”

But Isabelle wasn’t no one.

She had known one pilot, once.

The kind who wrote too much. Felt too much.

And now—piece by piece—she began to find the signs.

There were transcripts. Redacted reports from the frontlines. Descriptions of a fighter pilot who flew alone. Saved convoys. Survived a crash. Disappeared, then returned through enemy territory on foot. Paul Athrun, the files said, last seen… now reassigned to a low-profile air patrol unit.

She remembered the name like a bruise.

Paul. The boy who once read her Neruda in a café while rain slammed the roof. The boy she had said goodbye to with the practiced ease of someone choosing a clearer future.

She had traded his softness for Peter’s precision.

But Ghost… Ghost sounded like Paul’s grief with wings.

Now, sitting in that lounge, Isabelle found the last thread.

A logistics officer she knew—a woman posted at the eastern airfield—sent her a file labeled:

“Field Record: Athrun, Flight Code 327B”

It included maintenance logs for a fighter jet.

The last line before the signature read:

Personal note etched under canopy: “I will fly beyond the sky—far from grief, and far from all.”

Her breath caught.

That line wasn’t just poetry.

It was his.

Years ago, written in the margin of a notebook he once showed her under a quiet apricot tree.

Paul.

Ghost.

Paul was Ghost.

Not a legend. Not a myth.

Just a man who had burned and kept flying anyway.

She stared at the screen, numb. Then slowly, she pressed a finger against the small black-and-white photo attached to the report.

The face was grainy. Older. Tired. But still him.

Same eyes. Same stillness.

She sat back, shoulders tight. Her throat dry.

The terminal announcements echoed overhead—but they sounded miles away now.

Her world—the one built on calm flights, scheduled takeoffs, neat uniforms—felt suddenly paper-thin.

She looked at the window.

A fighter jet—being loaded onto a transport for display—rolled slowly across the far tarmac.

It bore no emblems. Just one word painted on its fuselage:

Isabel.

She whispered the name like it was a prayer or a wound.

She didn’t cry.

But she didn’t move either.

Because in that moment, Isabel realized:

She hadn’t just left Paul behind.

She had left the one man who could survive heartbreak without growing bitter.

She had chosen a man who gave her control.

But not flight.

XV

By the time Paul left the shepherd’s care, he wasn’t the same man who flew into fire. He was leaner. Rougher. Moved like a hunted thing. The Air Corps patch on his jacket was gone, replaced by wool and dust. He carried only what he needed: a knife, a map scrawled in coal and spit, and a stolen sidearm that didn’t feel like his.

The moment he crossed the ridge into the lowlands, the world changed. It wasn’t quiet anymore. It breathed with danger—crackled with radio chatter, distant artillery, and the snap of branches under foreign boots. Enemy patrols swept through the forests in rotating bands. Dogs. Scouts. Drones.

He kept moving.

By day, he slept in barns, ruins, drainage ditches.

By night, he ran.

The first fight came on the seventh night.

He was crouched behind a crumbling brick wall, the ruins of a depot. A convoy rumbled past, headlights carving the road. But a pair of boots split from the others. A soldier with a cigarette and a too-curious flashlight.

Paul held his breath. Watched the beam swing too close.

Then—footsteps. Steel-toed. Turning toward him.

He acted.

A blur.

He tackled the soldier behind the wall, one hand muffling the scream, the other wrestling for the weapon.

It was short. Violent.

Afterward, Paul sat on the ground, blood on his sleeve, the enemy rifle beside him. The soldier's radio sputtered beside a lifeless hand.

He left the body where it lay and took the rifle.

And just like that, he became something else.

Not a pilot.

Not a hero.

Just a ghost on foot, armed like a bandit, hunted, silent, alive.

The days blurred.

He scavenged what he could: boiled potatoes from a farmer’s fence, a coat from a washing line, bullets from the belt of a fallen sniper whose name he never learned.

In one town, he shaved his beard, put on an enemy cap, and walked straight past a checkpoint pretending to be a courier. The adrenaline nearly killed him.

In another, he was chased through an orchard by dogs. Shot one. Bled from the bite of another.

He bandaged the wound with a strip from his undershirt and kept walking.

Each night he muttered the same words to the wind:

“Stay ahead. Stay alive.”

No prayers.

No hopes.

Just a rhythm.

XVI

It was nearly dusk when he found them—or rather, when they found him. A rustling in the ravine. Then five figures surrounded him from above. Thin bodies. Sharp eyes. Guns held too tight.

Teenagers. Scars under their collars. The kind of fighters too young to be fighting, and already too old to be afraid.

“Hands up!” one barked in a cracked voice.

Paul didn’t flinch. He raised his hands, slowly. Calm. Watching every trigger finger.

They were about to search him when he spoke—his voice rough from weeks on the run:

“Phase Four. Fire and Bloom.”

The boy in the lead froze.

Then, slowly, he lowered his rifle.

One of the others stepped closer, squinting.

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Broadcast from Ravna Luka. Month ago. Black Echo counter-signal.”

A long pause.

Then the girl with the field radio nodded.

“He’s one of ours.”

Still, they didn’t smile.

One of them—barely sixteen, maybe—gave a half-salute.

Paul didn’t return it, instead he just looked them over.

Rusted Kalashnikovs. Tattered boots with slogans scratched into the rubber—“Freedom or Ash,” “Salt the Soil,” “Her Name Was Zharna.”

They were walking messages. Carrying grief like gunpowder.

They brought him to a hideout—a cave beneath a collapsed railway bridge. Candles flickered beside crates of salvaged explosives, cans of expired rations, a single Polaroid of a girl who never made it back from supply duty.

Paul said little.

But he stayed.

For six days, he fought beside them.

On the third night, they sabotaged a convoy bound for the northern battery. Paul scoped from a ridge, marked the rhythm of the headlights, then slipped down the valley under cloud cover. He placed the charge himself, set the timer, whispered:

“For the ones who can’t fly.”

The explosion lit the ridge.

The convoy cracked open like a crushed shell.

They vanished before the response team could circle in.

They trusted him now—but he never spoke of where he came from.

Only once did the boy with the cracked voice ask.

“You really a pilot?”

Paul nodded.

“Not much of one now.” Paul said. 

“You’re Ghost?” The partisan asked.

He paused. Then said:

“Not anymore.”

They accepted that.

On the seventh morning, Paul packed what little he had.

He slung a captured rifle over his shoulder and folded a charcoal-sketched map into his coat.

“You’re leaving?” the girl asked.

“I have to,” Paul said. “There’s still a sky I haven’t crossed.”

The boy offered him a patched scarf—red and black, their colors.

Paul took it. Wore it not around his neck, but tied to his wrist.

“If you make it out,” one said, “tell them we held the line.”

Paul looked him in the eyes.

“No,” Paul said. “I’ll tell them you set it on fire.”

He turned without ceremony.

Didn’t look back.

By the time they realized he was gone, he was already on the road south—boots on broken gravel, wind in his ears, heart pointed toward friendly territory.

But somewhere behind him, smoke rose again.

Another convoy.

Another mark of their defiance.

He didn’t need to see it to know they were still fighting.

And because of them, so was he.

XVII

Peter always trusted systems more than stories.

He wasn’t the type to chase rumors or indulge in military folklore. He read the executive summaries, not the classified footnotes. But lately, something had shifted.

It began with Isabelle.

She’d been quiet. A little too often.

Pausing mid-sentence when the news played footage from the eastern front. Staring too long at a bulletin scrolling names of fallen pilots and crashed aircraft. Her fingers lingered on the rim of her coffee cup, and once—just once—Peter had seen her eyes well up when she thought he wasn’t looking.

He remembered asking casually:

“Something wrong?”

And her answer had come too quickly:

“Just tired. Long layovers.”

But she didn’t meet his gaze when she said it.

A week later, during a reception at the Manila operations center, Peter overheard two Air Corps officers speaking over wine and data tablets.

“…whoever he is, they say he saved an entire convoy without backup. Like he knew their angles before they fired.”

“You mean the ‘Ghost’?”

Peter turned slightly toward them.

“Is that what they’re calling him?”

One of the officers nodded, amused. “Ghost. Grounded for weeks after a crash, but rumor is he didn’t die—just went underground and started fighting with partisans. Real lone wolf type. The kind who doesn’t pose for medals.”

The other laughed. “Sounds made up.”

But Peter didn’t laugh.

He kept sipping his drink.

Because something tightened in his chest at that name.

That night, Peter stayed late at his office terminal.

He accessed the military newswire, then the encrypted briefings he had proxy access to through a liaison assignment in logistics.

The codename “Ghost” came up sixteen times.

Zharna. Grid 11. Fire and Bloom. Convoy interception. Disruption of enemy ammo transports. No photo. No rank. Only one phrase, repeated by locals and partisans:

“He flies in silence. Now he fights without wings.”

Then a file reference: ATHRUN-17.

That was a call sign.

Peter’s hands paused on the keys.

He didn’t know much about Isabel’s past. She had kept things neatly sealed behind a warm smile and a distant laugh. But one night—months ago—over hotel gin and a monsoon outside the window, she had mentioned a boy once. A poet. Quiet. Wrote under pressure and disappeared under grief.

“He wanted to fly,” she had said, almost absently. “But never knew where to land.”

Peter hadn’t thought much of it then.

But now…

Now he wasn’t so sure.

The next morning, he stood by the kitchen counter while Isabel read the news from her phone. Her hair still damp from the shower. Her silence longer than usual.

He asked quietly:

“Do you remember someone named Paul?”

She blinked.

Looked up, slow.

“Why?”

Peter held her gaze.

“Because I think I just read about him in a combat log.”

She said nothing for a full ten seconds.

Then smiled—small, broken, and tired.

“If it’s really him,” she said, voice barely above a whisper, “he wouldn’t want to be found.”

Peter didn’t press.

But later that night, when she was asleep, he opened the file again.

ATHRUN-17. Paul Athrun. Presumed KIA. Status: Unknown. Alias: Ghost.

He leaned back in his chair and stared at the screen.

There was no jealousy in his face.

Only curiosity.

And a sinking, quiet respect for a man who had left nothing behind—

except silence,

and the woman Peter thought he understood.

XVIII

(A Throwback)

It was late. The kind of late that made even war feel quiet.

The airfield lights blinked low across the horizon, distant flares shimmering like tired stars. Most of the squadron had gone to bed hours ago—either asleep or pretending to be. But Paul couldn’t. Not that night. Not before that mission.

Paul stood alone by the maintenance shed, a cigarette unlit between his fingers, his gaze fixed on nothing. His flight jacket hung loose over his shoulders, collar up against the chill.

Footsteps behind him.

He didn’t turn.

“Pilot Athrun,” came the voice—measured, calm, familiar.

He glanced to the side.

Chaplain Gregor. Thin. Older. A man whose uniform was always neatly pressed and whose hands always looked like they had just finished folding something—papers, laundry, the hands of the dying.

Paul didn’t salute.

The chaplain didn’t expect him to.

He just stepped beside him and looked out at the tarmac.

“They tell me you’re flying again tomorrow.” The Chaplain said. 

“That’s what they say,” Paul murmured.

The chaplain was quiet a moment. “You’re flying like a man who doesn’t want to return.”

Paul took a breath, the cigarette still untouched.

“That’s not true.” Paul's voice was softer than usual. “I always return.”

He let the silence settle before finishing:

“That’s the curse.”

The chaplain studied him. “You believe in curses, then?”

“Only the ones we don’t break.” Paul said.

The chaplain folded his arms, eyes narrowing gently. “Do you believe in heaven?”

Paul tilted his head back, staring up at the stars.

A pause.

“I believe in ascension. But not arrival.” Paul replied.

That gave the Chaplain pause.

“So then,” The Chaplain asked, voice now lowered into something almost like prayer, “what do you think you’re offering up there?”

Paul exhaled, finally lighting the cigarette. The flame flickered against the wind, then faded.

He spoke through the smoke.

“My sorrow. My silence. Every round I fire is not revenge—it’s release.”

Another long pause.

The chaplain stepped forward, just enough for his voice to be direct.

“You want to be a martyr, then? For whom?”

Paul looked at him—really looked—and then glanced down at the ground.

And then, very quietly:

“For the man I was.” Paul said. “For what she never saw.”

That stayed between them for a long time.

The wind picked up, brushing past the hangars and the barracks, scattering a lone paper across the pavement.

The chaplain’s voice was gentler now, less formal.

“You know,” he said, “a martyr dies to bear witness. But you’re still here. Still bearing. Still flying.”

Paul didn’t respond. Just dropped the spent cigarette and crushed it under his boot.

The chaplain started to leave, then paused.

“I’ll be here when you get back.” The Chaplain said.

Paul’s voice came just before he disappeared into shadow:

“I hope you’re not.”

He didn’t sleep that night.

But before sunrise, he folded that same conversation into the cockpit with him.

Taped just beneath his controls, a line he scribbled in pencil:

“I believe in ascension. But not arrival.”

He never told anyone what it meant.

But he carried it through every sky.

It was weeks after Paul vanished. The wreckage had been found, charred and scattered along a ravine northeast of the Zharna sector. No body, no dog tags—just an empty cockpit, and the faint imprint of "Isabel" still painted on the fuselage.

For most, that was enough to call it: KIA. Case closed.

But the chaplain couldn’t.

Not after what Paul said that night beneath the flickering airfield lights. “I believe in ascension, but not arrival.” He’d carried that line like a splinter ever since.

And so, one morning, he found himself knocking on Talanov’s door.

The commander was already up—boots on, uniform creased, hunched over a folder. A black mug of coffee steamed beside him, half-drunk and cold.

He looked up. Not surprised to see the chaplain.

“You heard something?” Talanov asked, voice gruff.

“No confirmation,” the chaplain said. “But you and I both know the east has eyes. Rumors keep drifting back. A partisan cell that doesn’t break. A pilot who won’t die.”

Talanov closed the folder.

“You came to talk about Paul.” The Commander said.

“I came to talk about what he became.” The Chaplain replied.

The commander leaned back in his chair, arms crossed.

The chaplain stepped forward.

“He didn’t fly for the glory. Not for flags. Not even for revenge." The Chaplain said. "He was offering something up there. Something we never gave him the ground for.”

Talanov was silent.

“He said he always returned. That was the curse. But we—” the chaplain’s voice faltered, just slightly, “—we let him come back broken every time. And still sent him back up.”

Talanov finally spoke, voice quiet but sharp.

“He chose that path, Father. You don’t get to be that precise in the sky without conviction. He didn’t want rescue. He wanted release.”

The chaplain shook his head. “Then why do I still feel like we buried him before the crash?”

Talanov didn’t answer at first.

He reached into his desk and pulled out a folded slip of paper. No stamp. No signature. Just a torn strip from a notebook.

He handed it to the chaplain.

If I fall, don’t find me. Just remember what I gave up to fly.

“He left that behind. Tucked in the maintenance log.”

The chaplain read it once. Then again.

Then folded it slowly and slid it into his pocket.

“You still think he’s alive?” The Chaplain asked.

Talanov’s eyes flicked to the window—toward the airstrip, now quiet under the morning sun.

“If he is,” The Commander said softly, “he’s not flying for us anymore. He’s flying for something we stopped believing in a long time ago.”

“Faith?” the chaplain asked.

Talanov shook his head.

“Hope.”

Outside, the wind picked up. A lone fighter screamed past overhead—routine patrol—but the sound made them both pause.

The chaplain bowed his head, then turned to go.

At the door, he stopped.

“You still list him as missing?” The Chaplain asked.

Talanov didn’t look up.

“No,” he said. “I list him as unreachable.”

XIX

The room had remained mostly untouched since Paul’s disappearance. Regulations required that personal effects be boxed and logged after a pilot was declared KIA or MIA, but Talanov had delayed the order. Perhaps out of instinct. Or denial. Or something more difficult to admit.

One evening—weeks after the last sighting of “Ghost” over contested skies—Talanov entered the room alone. The cot was neatly made, just as Paul had left it. One flight log sat closed on the desk. A folded scarf tucked under a cracked mug. Dust had begun to gather on the windowsill, but otherwise, it was as if the man had simply stepped out to refuel.

He didn’t know what drew him to the desk.

Maybe he hoped to find nothing.

But when he slid open the top drawer, something stopped him.

A small reel-to-reel tape, unlabeled—except for one line etched faintly in pencil on the edge:

“For No One. But Me.”

Talanov stared at it for a long time.

Then he pulled the old field recorder from the shelf and threaded the tape in. He hit play.

A few seconds of silence.

Then the click of a button. A breath.

And Paul’s voice—low, worn, not the voice of a fighter ace or a war hero, but of a man trying not to forget himself.

And then… the guitar.

Out of tune in places, slightly halting. But unmistakably real.

Then came the words.

“Love and Light” – Paul's voice, private and raw:

I will fly beyond the sky,

Far from grief, and far from all.

No one else will pass me by,

None shall rise, none shall call…

The words weren’t for battle.

They weren’t for glory.

They were a farewell. A confession. A song sung to the dark, hoping no one would hear—and yet… maybe hoping one would.

Talanov didn’t move. Just stood there, arms folded, jaw clenched.

The beat of hope within my chest,

Is the song of life at rest.

My heart, my eyes, my world, my flame—

Are all one light, they shine the same…

Talanov let the song finish.

When the tape stopped, he didn’t rewind it. He didn’t log it. He didn’t report it to Archives.

Instead, he left it inside the player.

Pressed a single label to the recorder’s front:

“Do Not Erase.”

And on Paul’s flight log, left on the desk, he added one small note in pen:

“Pilot not lost. Just… still flying.”

Then he closed the door and walked out—quietly, as though leaving a chapel.

Outside, a new squadron revved on the tarmac.

And from somewhere deep within the hangar, a song lingered—

not for war, not for fame,

but for love, and light.

The tape weighed nothing. And yet, it felt heavier than all the citations stacked on Talanov’s desk. He sat in his office long after the base quieted, the lights low, boots planted firmly on the cold floor as he replayed the song again—Paul’s voice still laced with wounds that never scabbed over.

A commander shouldn’t do this.

But this wasn’t a command decision.

It was… something else.

Maybe contrition.

Maybe duty.

Maybe something close to love.

Talanov picked up the field recorder and slipped the tape out carefully, like handling the last words of a dying friend. He placed it in a slim, gray envelope, wrote a brief cover note in his small, angular handwriting:

To Radio Command – Internal Transmission Only.

Suggested for midnight rotation, non-identifiable origin.

No name required. Just… let them hear it.

He signed only with his operational code: Vostok-3.

That evening, the envelope traveled quietly through the chain.

No pomp. No clearance debate. Just a message from one officer to another—respected, passed along, understood without being explained.

And so it was that at 00:01, under static skies and half-lit hangars, across outposts and bunkers stretching from the western marshes to the eastern ridges, a song began to play.

It started soft.

A warbling guitar, barely tuned, flickering through the static like memory resurfacing.

Then Paul’s voice. Worn. Honest. Human.

“Love and Light” – Air Corps Radio Broadcast

I will fly beyond the sky,

Far from grief, and far from all.

No one else will pass me by,

None shall rise, none shall call…

My heart, my eyes, my world, my flame,

Are all one light, they shine the same…

No one announced it.

No credits. No dedication. Just the song, and silence.

A junior mechanic in Grunthal paused mid-wrench.

A wounded pilot in a hospital bed blinked at the ceiling.

A field officer in a freezing trench turned up the volume.

None of them knew who wrote it.

But they listened.

Because it sounded like what they’d buried, too.

In the radio room, the technician turned to his supervisor.

“Where did this come from?”

The man didn’t answer. Just tapped the corner of the envelope, and said:

“Sometimes, ghosts request airplay.”

Back at base, Talanov didn’t listen again.

He already knew every word.

Instead, he stood at the edge of the runway, hands in his coat, staring at the stars above where men like Paul disappeared.

Not with medals.

Not with speeches.

Just with silence…

…and a song.

XX

Khafra International Terminal, Runway 2A. 1:04 a.m.

The lounge was mostly empty. Flickering fluorescent lights buzzed above cracked tile floors. A vending machine groaned in the corner. Outside the plate-glass windows, only the silhouettes of parked aircraft loomed in the humid dark.

Isabelle sat alone on a battered couch by Gate 12. Her uniform jacket lay folded across her lap. Her phone had long since died. Her crew had turned in upstairs for the mandatory rest block. She couldn’t sleep.

Too many thoughts. And lately, one name that kept surfacing in unexpected moments.

Paul.

She hadn’t thought of him in months. Or tried not to. But sometimes, when the sky outside her window turned silver at dawn… when a song played in an old café… when someone read Neruda on a bench in the rain… he returned.

Tonight, it was silence that brought him back.

And the voice that broke it.

From behind the check-in desk, a scratchy old transistor radio crackled to life—one of those back-channel military rebroadcasts, sometimes used in outposts, sometimes by local stations too lazy to curate their own midnight soundbeds.

She wasn’t listening at first.

But then…

A guitar. Off-key, quiet. Human.

Then a voice.

His voice.

She froze.

Not because she knew—not yet—but because something inside her tightened like a string being tuned.

I will fly beyond the sky,

Far from grief, and far from all…

Her eyes lifted, searching the empty lounge like the singer might walk through the doors.

She stood.

Walked slowly toward the counter, as if drawn by instinct.

The radio sat beside a stack of old flight tags, half-covered in dust. No indicator of station. No host. No playlist.

Just the voice.

My heart, my eyes, my world, my flame—

Are all one light, they shine the same…

Her breath caught.

She leaned forward slightly, hands on the counter, eyes wide with something between recognition and disbelief.

“Paul…?” she whispered.

She didn’t know for sure.

But she did.

When the song ended, there was no name. No applause. Just silence again.

And that was the loudest part.

She stepped back, stunned. Her reflection stared at her from the window—uniform crisp, posture perfect, eyes wide.

Then her shoulders slumped, as though remembering something too late.

Outside, the sky began to lighten—just a blush at the edges.

One of the gate crew passed behind her and glanced at the radio.

“They've been playing that song a lot lately,” he said absently. “No idea who it's by. But it shows up on the war channels.”

Isabelle nodded slowly, distracted.

“He used to write,” she murmured, mostly to herself. “Said he wrote what he didn’t want to die with.”

The crewman didn’t hear.

Isabelle turned away, clutching her jacket like it might keep the memory from slipping away again.

She didn’t sleep during the layover.

She just sat by the window.

Waiting for the sky to match the voice she couldn’t forget.

XXI

It started with an intercepted message.

Talanov was in the radio room at Marienburg Sector Command, skimming through signal logs when a lieutenant handed him a printout. It was poorly translated, riddled with interference—but the meaning was intact:

"Ghost is alive. Grounded, but helping. East sector. Fire and Bloom active. Confirmed sabotage near Grid 11."

He read it three times before speaking.

"Source?"

The comms officer shrugged.

"Resistance cell in the Zharna corridor. Could be disinfo. Could be a myth."

But Talanov’s jaw tightened.

Because he'd heard it before.

The rumors had started weeks earlier—vague talk of a lone fighter behind enemy lines. Someone too precise to be local. Someone with the calm of a trained soldier and the silence of a ghost. A man who taught teenage rebels how to read wind before detonating convoys. Who snuck past patrols like smoke in the dark.

They called him “the one who walks like a pilot.”

Some even called him “The Grounded Ghost.”

Later, Talanov sat in his quarters, boots off, drink untouched, report still open on the table.

Renev entered without knocking, tossing his coat onto the chair.

"You see this?" he asked, sliding a second sheet across the desk.

Talanov picked it up.

Another intel brief.

Sabotaged fuel dump. One survivor claimed the attacker gave an old Comintern password before vanishing into the woods.

“Phase Four. Fire and Bloom.”

Renev scratched his stubble. "It’s him, isn’t it?"

Talanov said nothing.

But his fingers curled slightly against the paper.

"He’s alive."

Renev poured two glasses but left them untouched.

"He could’ve gone west. Disappeared. Claimed asylum. But instead he’s cutting supply lines in the dead zone like a partisan. You trained him too well."

Talanov shook his head, quietly.

"I didn’t train him to be this."

"No," Renev said. "But the war did."

A beat of silence.

Then Talanov exhaled slowly. "Send a coded message on the old frequency. The one he used to monitor in the hangar."

Renev raised a brow. "You think he still listens?"

"If he’s still him, he does." Talanov said.

The message was brief. Untraceable.

"Flight log 17A still open. Sky’s waiting. Come home, if you can."

Talanov didn’t sign it.

He didn’t have to.

As the signal went out into the static, Talanov stared out the window—toward the east, where smoke sometimes rose from the hills.

"You never were built for medals, Paul," the commander muttered. "But maybe you’re still chasing your sky."

XXII

The evening was still.

A layover in a city neither of them cared to name. Their hotel room was sleek, impersonal. Modern lighting. Minimalist furniture. The kind of place where everything was clean, but nothing felt lived in.

Isabelle stood by the window, arms folded, staring at the sky as if searching for something beyond the glass.

Peter sat at the desk, closing his tablet slowly—too slowly.

“You’ve been looking into him.”

Isabelle didn’t turn around when she said it.

A pause. Then:

“Paul.”

Peter didn’t deny it.

“I had to know.” His voice was calm, almost tired. “You stopped talking about him, but you never really stopped thinking about him. I knew.”

Isabelle turned then. Not angry—just hurt, with that quiet, professional edge she had always mastered so well. But now, it cracked.

“You had to know? Or you had to compare yourself?”

Peter didn’t flinch. “I just wanted the truth.”

“And what did it give you?” Isabelle asked. “Pride? Regret? Or just confirmation that you were never the man who could understand why I loved poetry more than profit margins?”

Peter stood, slowly. “He disappeared, Isabelle. He walked out of this world into something savage and didn’t ask to be remembered. And yet—somehow—he still lives in your eyes more than I ever did.”

Isabelle stepped closer, folding her arms tightly.

“You don’t get to claim victimhood, Peter. You didn’t lose me to war. You lost me to your inability to feel anything you couldn’t explain on a spreadsheet.”

Peter exhaled through his nose. Cold. Defensive.

But he didn't fight back.

Because she was right.

Isabelle softened only slightly. Her voice low now.

“You knew who he was when you met me. You knew I loved someone who wrote letters he never sent. Who flew into danger because silence was safer than rejection. You never had to compete with him. You only had to be present.”

Peter’s voice cracked for the first time.

“I was. For years.”

Isabelle shook her head.

“You were reliable. You were safe. But you never asked what made me feel alive. Paul did. And even when I told him no, he never stopped loving me in ways I didn’t understand until I heard that song on the radio.”

Peter said nothing.

And then, gently—Isabelle placed her ring on the nightstand.

“Thank you, Peter. For trying. For everything. But I can’t live in an almost-love anymore.”

She turned, picked up her coat, and walked to the door.

Before she left, she looked back one last time.

“You were right to be curious. You just didn’t understand that ‘Ghost’ wasn’t the story.”

She smiled—soft, sad, honest.

“The story was always the boy I left behind… who never left me.”

The door closed behind her.

Peter remained alone.

The tablet still glowing faintly.

And on its screen:

A still frame of a younger Paul—helmet in hand, tired eyes, and the word Isabel stenciled below the cockpit glass.

XXIII

The hills were brittle with frost. Mud clung to every step like memory. And Paul—limping now, coughing between breaths—hadn’t seen another soul in hours. His gun was gone. His map was scraps. He could barely remember the last time he drank water that wasn’t boiled in a tin can beside a resistance campfire.

But he pushed forward.

Because if he stopped now, the ache would catch up—and he was tired of bleeding into the earth.

That’s when he saw the light.

Faint. Yellow. Steady.

A house, tucked into the ridgeline like it had grown from the stone itself.

He approached slowly, unsure if he was real—or if this was just the way dying began.

He reached the porch.

Knocked once.

The door opened almost immediately.

An old woman stood in the frame, wrapped in a thick shawl. She looked him over from head to toe—his torn uniform, his gaunt face, the dried blood at his collar—and without a word, she stepped aside.

He entered.

The heat of a woodstove hit him first, then the smell of onions cooking in broth. On the wall, a cracked photo of a soldier. A boy’s boots by the door. Everything was quiet but warm.

“Sit.” she said. And he did.

Her name was Marina. Her hands were calloused, her hair bound in a scarf that had seen too many winters. She didn’t ask who he was. She didn’t need to.

“We get your kind. Once every few weeks.” Marina said, ladling soup into a chipped bowl. “If they make it this far, I figure they’ve earned something hot.”

Paul tried to speak. But his throat failed him.

Marina handed him the bowl. “Eat first. Talk after.”

Paul slept on a cot in the corner that night, beneath an old army blanket that smelled faintly of tobacco and pine.

For the first time in days, Paul dreamed in color.

Paul woke up to music.

At first, he thought it was the sound of a convoy in the distance—something distant and rhythmic. But then he heard it clearer, and realized…

It was a guitar.

And a voice.

His own voice.

Soft. Raw. Vulnerable.

I will fly beyond the sky,

Far from grief, and far from all…

He sat up sharply, heart racing.

There, on the table near the stove, was an old shortwave radio, patched together with wire and tape, its antenna propped against a chair leg. Marina stood near it, stirring soup again.

“You’re awake,” Marina said. “Someone requested a strange song last night. The midnight station’s playing it again now.”

Paul rose slowly. Crossed the room. He leaned in close to the speaker, as if trying to touch his own echo.

My heart, my eyes, my world, my flame—

Are all one light, they shine the same…

The radio crackled. The station gave no name. No origin.

Just the song.

A song he’d recorded weeks ago in silence, never meant for anyone but himself.

Now—now—it had slipped through wires and towers and frequencies. Found a way into the air, like smoke escaping a battlefield.

He stood completely still.

Then turned to Marina, voice trembling: “Where did you hear it?”

Marina shrugged. “Shortwave’s tricky. Might be military. Might be pirates. Might be ghosts.”

Paul almost smiled.

“Ghost,” he repeated.

Marina looked at him.

And for the first time, really saw him.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” she said softly.

Paul didn’t nod. Didn’t confirm.

But she knew.

She turned down the volume and brought him bread. He sat beside the stove, one hand pressed to the wooden table as the last line played again:

Love and Light…

Two days later, Marina’s husband Davor returned from the market trail. Older, limping, but clever-eyed. He greeted Paul with a nod.

“The checkpoint’s three clicks past the quarry,” Davor said. “Guarded by our side. You get there, they’ll get you home.”

He gave Paul a patched coat. Too big, but warm.

“Belonged to someone who didn’t come back,” Davor muttered. “Maybe you will.”

Before Paul left, Marina packed a satchel with food and a fresh canteen. Then, on impulse, she handed him the small shortwave radio.

“Batteries are nearly dead,” Marina said. “But sometimes… you need to hear yourself coming back.”

Paul hiked through the night. Followed the creek. Passed the willow. Climbed the last hill.

And just before the checkpoint came into view—just before he saw the flag again and collapsed into friendly arms—he heard it one last time.

Through the radio.

Faint. Distant. A ghost’s lullaby.

Let my heart in hope beat strong,

It’s the rhythm of my soul.

Eyes and soul alight with song,

Love and light have made me whole…

He didn’t smile.

But he didn’t cry, either.

He just looked up at the sky—

And knew someone, somewhere, had been listening.

XXIV

The ceiling was white.

Too white. Too still. The kind of stillness that only came after pain had been named and sedated.

Paul opened his eyes slowly.

The first thing he saw was the IV tube in his arm. The second was the beige curtain swaying gently in the filtered breeze. The third—

Talanov.

Sitting in a metal chair by the cot, uniform rumpled, one sleeve stained with what looked like dried oil. He held a folder. Not open. Just… holding it.

His eyes were red. But he wasn’t crying.

Just tired. As tired as the man lying in the bed.

Paul tried to speak. But his throat cracked.

Talanov poured water from a pitcher, held it to his lips. Silent.

Paul drank.

Then exhaled, almost whispering:

"I'm back."

Talanov didn’t reply for a while. Then:

“We weren’t sure you would be.”

Paul glanced toward the window—where slatted light from the outside world fell like quiet bars across the floor.

“Did they... know?” Paul asked softly.

Talanov tilted his head. “That you were Ghost?”

A slow nod.

“Only the ones who needed to.” Paul said.

He placed the folder on the side table. Paul recognized it. His own file. More stapled incident reports than promotions. More handwritten notes than typed orders.

“You saved three forward convoys. Rescued two downed pilots. Took down a dozen targets with no backup. Then disappeared without a trace for almost a month.”

Talanov paused. “And somehow, in the middle of all that... you wrote a song.”

Paul looked down.

“It was never meant to be played.” Paul said.

Talanov gave a faint chuckle. “Then you shouldn’t have left it in your desk. I listened to it. Twice. Thought I was hearing the inside of a wound.”

The Commander stood, stepped toward the window.

“I sent it to the radio. Midnight slot. Figured… if there was ever a war hymn, it should sound like that. Not drums and parades. But memory. Grit. Regret.”

He turned back to Paul.

“You told me once you flew to bury something.” Talanov said. “Did you?”

Paul looked at his hand. The veins under the skin. The faint scar on his knuckle from the crash. The memory of the cold mountains, of the shepherd, of the partisan teens with slogans on their boots.

And Isabelle. Not in hatred. Not in longing. Just… as something that once bloomed.

“I didn’t bury it,” Paul said finally. “But I flew past it.”

Talanov stepped closer. Sat again.

His voice lowered.

“You’re not being discharged." Talanov said. "Unless you want to be.”

Paul met his gaze.

Talanov continued, voice gravel:

“You don’t owe this war another second. But I know how men like you end. You don’t die in bed. You vanish. Above the clouds. One last run.”

A silence passed between them.

Then Paul asked:

“Why did you come?”

Talanov didn’t hesitate.

“Because when ghosts return, someone should be there to say: ‘You’re still a man.’” Talanov said.

He stood, brushed off his coat.

“I’ll be outside if you need me.” The commander said.

And just before he stepped through the door, Talanov turned and added:

“For what it’s worth… I never saluted many pilots. But I’d follow your smoke trail any day.”

Then he left.

Paul lay back, staring at the ceiling again.

The pain would come later. The paperwork. The debriefings.

But for now, in that sterile white quiet, he felt a strange peace.

Not closure.

But something like gravity—soft, steady, pulling him back to earth.

And this time, he let it.

XXV

It was late afternoon. The infirmary ward was quiet—sunlight filtered through the blinds in thin golden lines, casting long shadows over the linoleum floor.

Talanov returned, this time without a folder, without questions. Just a thermos of black tea and a steel flask tucked in his coat, just in case the mood asked for something stronger.

Paul was sitting upright now. Pale, thinner, his left arm still in a sling. But his eyes were clear. Too clear.

They spoke of someone who had flown past pain and come back only because gravity demanded it.

Talanov handed him the cup.

Paul sipped once, then spoke—without looking up.

“I’m just doing my duty, Commander.”

Talanov studied him carefully. “And doing it better than most men ever could.”

Paul didn’t smile. He stared at the edge of the bed like it was a drop-off.

Then quietly:

“But my duty is becoming cynical.”

That made Talanov pause.

Paul continued, voice low.

“At first, I flew to protect. To answer something. To keep people alive.” Paul said. “But somewhere along the way… I stopped praying for peace. I started calculating efficiency. Casualties. Ratios.”

Paul then looked up, his expression unreadable.

“You know what scares me most?” Paul said. “It’s not death, It’s that I’m starting to feel nothing when I win.”

Talanov said nothing.

Because he knew the feeling.

He had worn it once himself, in a different war, under a different name.

After a moment, Talanov sat down beside the bed.

“You want me to tell you that means you’re broken.” the Commander said. “But it doesn’t.”

Paul raised an eyebrow.

Talanov set down his own cup.

“It means you’ve seen enough to stop lying to yourself." Talanov said. "That's not cynicism, Paul. That’s clarity. And clarity is dangerous—especially in men who still care.”

Paul leaned back, closing his eyes.

“Care is the weight. It doesn’t let go.” Paul said. 

Talanov nodded slowly. 

“But that’s the difference between us and them.” Talanov said. “The day you stop carrying it… is the day you become what you fight.”

Silence fell between them. Not heavy—just real.

Talanov stood again, dusted off his coat.

“You don't have to keep flying, you know.” The Commander said. “But if you do… remember why you started.”

Paul didn’t answer. But his eyes opened again—and there was a flicker in them. Not hope. Not resolve. Something quieter.

A need.

To believe that duty didn’t have to mean numbness.

To believe the sky still held something sacred.

Even if the world below had gone gray.

XXVI

It was nearing sundown when Paul found his way to the base chapel.

It wasn’t much—just a long prefab hut near the edge of the airfield, flanked by a faded flag and an overgrown path. The bell hadn’t rung in months, and the benches inside were scarred with initials from bored conscripts and grieving men alike.

The chaplain sat at the far end, sleeves rolled, gently tuning a small harmonium. Dust coated the keys like snow.

He looked up when Paul entered.

But didn’t smile.

He simply nodded.

“You’re back.”

Paul stepped forward quietly, each bootstep softened by old carpet.

“Physically.” Paul said. “The rest of me… hasn’t quite landed.”

The chaplain leaned back. “That’s fair. Neither has this war.”

They sat for a moment. No prayers. Just silence.

Then Paul finally spoke, eyes on the tiny wooden cross above the door:

“You told me I was flying like a man who didn’t want to return.”

The chaplain nodded. “And you said, ‘I always return. That’s the curse.’”

Paul let out a soft breath. Almost a laugh. 

“I meant it.” Paul said. “But I’ve been thinking lately… maybe coming back is the point.”

The chaplain said nothing.

So Paul continued.

“I thought martyrdom would redeem me. That if I died for something, maybe the ache would stop echoing. But…” he shook his head. “…it doesn’t work like that. You just pass the ache on to someone else.”

The chaplain studied him.

“Do you still believe in ascension?” The chaplain asked.

Paul didn’t answer immediately.

Then, softly:

“I believe we rise by carrying each other.”

“Even the ones we lost.”

A long silence followed.

Then Paul asked:

“Do you think God hears us… even when we speak in silence?”

The chaplain’s voice was calm.

“I think silence is the only honest language left in war.”

He turned back to the harmonium, pressed a few soft chords.

“And I think whatever song you sang up there—someone heard it. Someone needed it.”

Paul looked down at his hands. Scarred. Faint tremor in the left one. Still flight-worthy, but different now.

“I didn’t sing for anyone.” Paul said. “I just wanted to survive without forgetting who I was.”

The chaplain smiled faintly.

“That’s what most prayers are, pilot. Survival without forgetting.”

Paul stood after a while.

The sun was dipping low, casting gold across the hangars.

Before he left, he turned back.

“I’m flying again tomorrow.”

The chaplain nodded. “I figured.”

Paul hesitated.

Then added:

“Not to disappear. Not this time.”

“This time, I want to come back. As me.”

The chaplain didn’t bless him. Didn’t quote scripture.

He just said:

“Then fly low, burn clean, and let the sky carry what you can’t.”

Outside, Paul walked past the barracks.

His flight log was tucked under his arm. No medals in it. No songs.

Just pages.

And space left for more.

XXVII

The air outside the infirmary windows smelled like jet fuel and thunderclouds.

Somewhere beyond the low concrete walls, engines roared. Paul could feel the sound in his ribs—not from pain, but from memory. That low, rising hum, the kind that started in the belly and climbed into the bones. Familiar. Addictive.

Paul sat up in bed, IVs removed, ribs bandaged tight, stitches like spiderwork across his back and shoulder. The crash had nearly broken him—physically, yes, but worse, it had grounded him.

He wasn’t used to stillness. Stillness was where ghosts caught up.

A nurse passed, glanced in, gave a small smile. He nodded back faintly, but his eyes were elsewhere—tracing the contrails through the sky like verses he couldn’t finish.

The door creaked open. Talanov entered, quiet as always. His boots made soft, solid thuds against the tile. In his hands, a clipboard. In his face, restraint.

Paul didn’t ask. He just looked.

Talanov sighed.

“They won’t clear you to fly. Not for a while.” Talanov said.

Silence.

“You took shrapnel to the shoulder, Paul." Talanov said. "Your grip strength is barely at seventy percent. You blacked out during evac. You’ve lost too much blood. And your left lung…” he stopped, brows furrowing, “it collapsed twice in the field. You can’t even climb stairs without coughing. You’re grounded.”

Paul didn’t move. His jaw flexed once, then stilled.

“I’m ready,” Paul said, flatly.

“You're not.” Talanov replied.

“Then let me fly once more. Just once." Paul said. "I'll take a patrol route—low risk. Let me prove—”

“It’s not about proving.” Talanov sat across from him now. “It’s about preserving what’s left.”

Paul looked away. Out the window. Toward the sky he couldn’t reach.

“They still need me out there.”

Talanov’s voice softened.

“They need you alive more than they need you heroic.”

The words sat between them for a long time. Paul leaned forward, pressing a palm to the window glass—as if he could feel the flight line through it.

“I don’t know how to be anything else,” Paul murmured.

Talanov looked at him then—not as a commander, but as the man who had watched him come back from death twice. The man who had heard his song.

“Then learn,” Talanov said quietly. “You don’t need a cockpit to fight your war. And not all peace means surrender.”

Paul’s throat worked silently. He shut his eyes.

Outside, a jet screamed across the sky.

He didn’t turn to watch it.

He just listened—and let it pass.

The window's glass cooled under Paul’s palm. Outside, the sky faded from steel to ash, dusk turning the world soft around the edges.

Talanov hadn’t moved. He watched Paul with the patience of a man used to long silences and hard truths.

Paul finally spoke, voice low:

“It’s not just the flying, you know.”

Talanov gave a small nod. “I know.”

Another pause. Paul didn’t look back. He kept his eyes fixed on the hangars in the distance, barely visible through the narrow slit of the window.

“Every time I shut my eyes, I see the wreck. The smoke." Paul said. "The boy from the resistance who didn’t make it. The family that helped me cross. The shepherd’s face.”

Paul swallowed hard. “But I miss the sky like it’s a person.”

Talanov leaned back in the chair, resting his forearms on his knees. He watched Paul a moment longer, then said, carefully:

“No, Paul.” The Commander said. “It’s not the sky you miss.”

Paul turned slowly.

Talanov’s eyes were steady. Honest. Not cruel—just true.

“It’s her.” Talanov said.

The room fell silent again.

Paul said nothing. Didn’t deny it. Didn’t nod either. But something flickered—a kind of surrender, not to weakness, but to recognition.

Talanov continued, voice quieter now:

“I’ve seen you take hits that should’ve killed you." Talanov said. "Saw you crawl from wreckage just to call in coordinates. You’ve fought, bled, disappeared, reappeared. But the one thing you never buried?”

He tapped the side of the metal cot gently.

“Was that tape. The one with her in it, between every line.”

Paul looked down.

The reel-to-reel sat on the bedside table. Unplugged now. Covered in dust. But still there.

“I know whom you want to talk to,” Talanov said at last. “And I also know you’ve convinced yourself it’s too late.”

He stood.

“Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.” Talanov said. “But if you don’t speak to her now, you’ll carry her absence into every life you try to build from this point on.”

Paul looked up, finally meeting his eyes.

“Do you believe in second chances?” Paul asked.

Talanov half-smiled.

“No.” Talanov said. “But I believe in unfinished stories.”

He paused by the door.

“She asked about you, by the way. Through a courier. Through someone she trusts.” Talanov said. “She heard the song.”

Paul’s breath caught slightly. He looked away—not in shame, but in something rawer. The kind of ache that didn’t know how to hope yet.

Talanov’s voice came gently now, from the threshold:

“So heal. Rest. Then speak to her.” 

“If not for her—then for yourself. Before the next sky you reach… is your last.”

He left.

The door clicked shut.

And Paul sat alone with the hum of memory—and the quiet, terrifying possibility that she had never really left.

XXVIII

When Paul opened his eyes this time, it was not the sterile ceiling that greeted him.

It was her.

Isabelle.

Standing at the foot of his bed—hair loose, coat folded over her arm, eyes wide but tired, like she hadn’t blinked since walking in.

He thought at first it was another dream. The mind, conjuring what the body wanted most.

But she didn’t blur or vanish.

She stepped closer.

Paul stirred, but the pain pinned him still. A dull ache ran down his ribs and shoulder. His throat was dry again.

Isabelle reached for the glass of water on the table. Poured gently.

Paul took it. Their fingers didn’t touch. Not yet.

When he drank, she spoke.

Soft. Unsteady. But clear:

“Talanov told me you were here.”

Paul swallowed. Set the glass down. His voice came out gravelled:

“That could mean a lot of places.”

She gave a small smile—but it died halfway through.

“I heard your song,” Isabelle said. “At a layover station. I didn’t know it was you… not right away.”

Paul said nothing. His face unreadable.

So Isabelle went on:

“It haunted me. I asked around. Pushed some names. Found the original tape.”

Her fingers tightened slightly on the edge of the bedframe.

“I never imagined that Ghost was you. But part of me... part of me wasn’t surprised.”

Paul exhaled slowly. Closed his eyes for a moment—not to shut her out, but to steady himself.

When he opened them again, his voice was quieter:

“It wasn’t meant for you.”

Isabelle nodded.

“I know.”

“But I heard it anyway.”

There was a long silence then. Not awkward. Just full.

Like a page too fragile to turn.

Finally, Isabelle stepped back slightly. Her voice softer now:

“I came because... I had to see if it was true.”

“That the boy I left behind became a ghost the world saluted, but never understood.”

Paul looked at her fully now. Eyes dark, steady.

“Do you?” Paul asked.

Isabelle bit her lip.

“Not everything.” Isabelle said. "But I understand the silence now. The kind that doesn't mean absence... just endurance.”

Paul looked toward the window.

A jet roared in the distance.

“The sky was the only place that didn’t ask me to explain.” Paul said.

Isabelle watched him. A tremor in her chest she didn’t show.

Then she said, just above a whisper:

“I’m not here for apologies.”

“I just… needed to tell you…”

She hesitated.

Then leaned forward, placed something beside his pillow.

A folded boarding pass.

17A.

The one he once left tucked in a notebook. She had kept it.

“This doesn’t change anything,” Isabelle said. "But maybe… it explains something.”

Paul stared at it for a long time.

Then he said:

“I didn’t fly to be remembered.”

Isabelle met his eyes.

“But you are.”

She stood up again.

“Rest, Paul.”

Isabelle turned to leave, stopped at the door. Without facing him:

“You never stopped feeling. Even when I did.”

She stepped out.

The door clicked shut.

And Paul lay there—

Alive. Wounded. Still.

But for the first time in years,

not alone.

She had just stepped into the hallway, the door easing shut behind her, when she heard his voice—not loud, not urgent, but deliberate.

“Isabelle."

She paused.

Turned back. Slowly.

Paul was propped slightly on the bed now, his back against the wall, face pale but awake—like something unburied had finally surfaced.

She re-entered, quiet steps against the cold tile.

Paul looked at her, eyes unwavering.

“Yes.” he said.

Isabelle blinked. “Yes...?”

“The song.” Paul's voice was level. Not performative. Just true. “It was about you.”

Her breath caught—just for a moment.

But Paul didn’t rush.

“Even after the rejection. Even after the silence. Even after you chose someone else.”

“I didn’t write it to win you back. Or to haunt you.”

“I wrote it because that feeling… had nowhere else to go.”

Isabelle stepped closer, slowly, like any sudden movement might scatter the words he was still gathering.

“You could’ve hated me.” Isabelle said softly.

Paul gave a small, tired smile.

“I tried.” Paul said. "Didn’t take.”

She looked down.

“I didn’t know you could still carry that.” Isabelle said

“I don’t carry it,” Paul replied. “I flew with it. That’s different.”

There was no venom in his voice. No accusation. Just the strange peace of a man who had suffered, survived, and understood.

Isabelle's voice wavered slightly:

“Then why say it now?”

Paul nodded toward the small table, where the boarding pass still lay folded.

“Because you kept that.”

“Because you came.”

He looked away for a moment, out the window, where jet trails crossed like half-faded scars in the sky.

“I don’t need you to feel what I felt.” 

“But I need you to know... I meant every word.”

She looked at him—really looked at him.

Not as the boy who once scribbled poems on napkins.

Not even as the Ghost she’d heard about in passing broadcasts.

But as Paul.

And for the first time, Isabelle said his name aloud, quietly:

“Paul.”

He met her gaze.

“Yes?”

“Thank you.” Isabelle said. “For flying with it… instead of letting it break you.”

She stepped closer. Gently touched the edge of his hand—not to rekindle something, but to acknowledge it.

“I heard the song. But now I understand it.”

He closed his eyes for a moment.

And when he opened them:

“That’s enough.”

And it was.

XXIX

The hotel suite in Central was quiet, save for the low hum of air conditioning and the city’s distant breath beyond the windows. Peter stood at the minibar, loosening his tie. The TV played news on mute—something about a new air corridor opening, flanked by smiling diplomats.

Isabelle sat on the edge of the bed, jacket folded on her lap, still in her work uniform. The clip had come undone from her hair, and a strand fell across her cheek.

Peter looked over at her, narrowing his eyes.

“You’ve been distant since the layover.”

Isabelel didn’t flinch.

“You’re not wrong.”

Peter poured himself a drink. No ice.

“Is this about him?” Peter asked. 

She didn’t answer right away. That was answer enough.

Peter swirled the glass once, then set it down.

“I thought he was a poet. A boy who couldn’t stay still.”

“He was.” Isabelle said.

“And now?” Peter asked.

She raised her eyes.

“Now he’s the one man who flew into everything I ran from.” Isabelle replied.

Peter leaned against the counter.

“So what? He’s a ghost. You said that yourself. You said he was too much.” Peter said. 

Isabelle folded her hands calmly, but firmly.

“And you were the right choice.” Isabelle said. “The smart one. You offered me peace. Clarity. Schedules. Safety.”

Peter frowned. “Offered?”

Isabelle looked down for a moment.

“But it turns out… I don’t just want peace.” Isabelle said. “I want the man who knew how to crash and still find music.”

Peter’s voice cooled.

“And you think he’s waiting?”

Isabelle shook her head. “No. He’s not waiting. That’s not who he is.”

“But I still needed to know who I was.”

Peter was silent for a moment. Then he sat across from her, his voice edged but not raised.

“So that’s it? Years of building this?”

Isabelle looked at him with something close to sorrow—but not regret.

“You taught me how to stand still, Peter.” Isabelle said. “But he taught me what it means to move and still feel everything.”

A long silence hung between them.

Peter nodded, slowly. Took a sip. Set the glass down again.

“Then go.” Peter said. “But don’t come back when you realize he’s still broken.”

Isabelle stood up.

“I’m not looking for perfect.” Isabelle said. “I’m just looking for someone who broke beautifully.”

As she reached the door, Peter spoke once more—quietly.

“You never said goodbye.”

Isabelle turned, just briefly.

“I never meant to.”

And then she left.

Outside, the city blinked as planes traced quiet lines across the night sky. Somewhere, over another continent, a jet named Isabel waited.

And in Isabelle’s coat pocket, a boarding pass rested—creased and worn.

Seat 17A.

This time, she was going back.

Not for a reunion.

But for the truth.

XXX

The tarmac still shimmered with the chill of early morning. Fog clung low to the grass along the perimeter fence, and distant hills wore the soft blue of first light.

Paul stood beside Isabel, his fighter—half-refueled, a checklist half-filled on his clipboard. He looked older now. Not aged—but carved thinner by silence, by missions, by memory. His flight suit was half-zipped, his gloves tucked into his belt.

Paul didn’t turn when he heard her approach.
But he spoke.
“You came all this way.”
Isabelle stopped a few steps behind him. “I did.”
He glanced over his shoulder. She stood there in civilian clothes, not the polished blazer of her airline days. Her hair loose, the wind pulling it slightly across her face.
“What are you looking for?” Paul asked.
Isabelle stepped forward.
“Not redemption.” Isabelle said. “Not forgiveness.”
She then looked at the fighter, then at him.
“Just you.”
Paul nodded slowly. “You found me.”

They stood in silence for a long moment. The kind only people with shared history can bear.
Finally, Isabelle broke it:
“Do you remember what you told me once?”
Paul looked at her.
“I said a lot of things.” Paul said.
“You said: ‘What’s the point of flying if there’s nowhere to land?’” Isabelle asked.
Paul gave the smallest smile. Dry. Almost bitter.
“Yeah. That boy thought someone was the runway.”
“And now?” Isabelle asked.
Paul looked out at the horizon.
“Now I fly because the sky’s the only place I don’t carry weight.” Paul said. 
Isabelle lowered her eyes. “Even me?”
Paul turned then. Faced her fully. The wind caught the edge of his flight jacket.
“Especially you.” Paul said, not cruelly—but simply, truthfully.
Isabelle nodded.
“I know I left. I chose comfort. I chose clear skies." Isabelle said. "But even then... I heard you in every turbulence.”
Paul didn’t reply. Only waited.
Isabelle reached into her bag and pulled out something small. A cassette tape.
“I kept it,” Isabelle said. “Copied the broadcast. Your song.”
Paul blinked once, slow. Then looked away toward his plane.
“I never meant for you to hear it.” Paul said. 
“I know. That’s why it mattered.” Isabelle replied.
They stood there, wind picking up now, brushing against the fighter’s nose cone like a breath.
Finally, Isabelle stepped closer. Not to close a gap—but to make peace with it.
“I’m not asking for another chance, Paul.” Isabelle said.
“Then why are you here?” Paul asked.
Isabelle looked at him, steady.
“To say you mattered. Even when I didn’t see it. Even when I left. You mattered.”

Paul's throat worked once.
Then he said, quietly:
“You did too. That’s why it took me so long to fly straight.”
Isabelle laughed, just faintly, wiping the corner of one eye.
“Still poetic under all that engine oil.”
Paul stepped past her, gently brushing her shoulder as he moved to his plane’s ladder.
She turned back to him.
“Where do you go now?” Isabelle asked.
Paul looked to the sky.
“Nowhere special." Paul said.  "Just forward.”
Isabelle watched him place one hand on the canopy. He paused.
“Isabelle,” Paul said softly.
She raised her eyes.
“If I land again…” Paul said.
“Yes?” Isabelle asked.
Paul gave her the faintest smile.
“Maybe I’ll write something I don’t have to burn.”
Isabelle smiled too—sad, but proud.
“Then I’ll be listening.”

Paul climbed into the cockpit.
The canopy hissed shut.
The engine began to growl awake.
As Isabelle stepped back, the sun broke the ridge, spilling gold over the airstrip.
Her namesake roared down the runway.
And Paul lifted into the sky again.
Not fleeing. 

Not forgotten. 

 Just flying—clean.

And in his pocket, folded beside the mission papers, was a boarding pass. 

17A. 

No longer a relic. 

Just a memory he could finally set down.

XXXI

The sky was copper-streaked as dawn broke over the eastern ridges.

Paul stood beside Isabel, his fighter, running one last check on the panels with the same care he had done a hundred times before. There was still no name painted on the fuselage. No victory marks, no medals on the dash. Only a single, taped line in his own handwriting:

“Fly far enough, and even silence has wings.”

Talanov approached, silent as ever, holding a folder—the final briefing. He didn’t speak at first. Just watched Paul secure the last strap on his flight vest.

“Are you sure about this sortie?” Talanov asked finally.

Paul looked at him with calm, steady eyes. “It’s not a suicide run, Commander. It’s just the hardest one.”

Talanov handed him the folder. “Enemy’s pushing through the southern corridor. If they break it, they’ll flatten the convoy. We’ve only got one escort in the air—and they’re green.”

Paul flipped through the file. Fresh faces. Kids. Barely old enough to shave, let alone fight.

Paul nodded. “Then I’ll fly ahead. Break the wall. Give them a chance.”

Talanov placed a hand on his shoulder—a gesture rare from a man like him.

“You’re not invincible, Paul.” The Commander said. 

Paul gave a faint smile. “No. Just willing.”

He climbed into the cockpit. One last look at the field—the same airstrip where Isabel once walked away. And later, where she returned.

No goodbyes this time. He didn’t need them.

0715 Hours, over Contested Airspace, The sky had turned to blood-orange as the enemy squadron appeared—ten fighters, fast, hunting.

They hadn’t seen the escort team hiding behind the ridge.

Paul keyed into the private comms channel.

“Isabel to Command. Target in sight. I’m going loud.”

He peeled downward in a screaming dive, sun behind him, wind tearing past the fuselage. The radar lit up. Missiles locked.

He fired first.

One. Two. Three.

Three enemy jets dropped from the sky in flame before the others could react.

Comms erupted:

“Who the hell is that?!”

“It’s the Ghost!”

“Break formation! Scatter—”

But Paul was already inside them—flaring, cutting, weaving like fire through dry grass.

They were trained. But not ready for him.

A missile clipped his wing. Warning lights lit. His plane groaned under strain.

Still, Paul didn’t pull up. He dove, twisted, loosed his final burst—

Direct hit. Fifth jet down.

The rest broke and scattered.

But Isabel was bleeding. Hydraulics shot. Fuel hissing into the sky.

The escort squad’s rookie commander—barely nineteen—cried over the comms:

“Athrun, you’re on fire! You need to bail—do you copy?!”

Silence.

Then Paul’s voice—quiet. Steady.

“Mission secure. Corridor clear. Convoy safe.”

A beat.

Then Paul reached into his vest. Pulled out the old boarding pass.

Folded it once.

Tucked it into the dash.

And whispered—not to the radio, not to Command, but to something far older:

“Let this be enough.”

Isabel tilted.

The clouds opened.

She did not pull up.

The convoy made it through.

No one spoke of medals. Just of the pilot who turned the tide before vanishing in flame.

But the sky wasn’t finished with him.

Days later, a search unit combed through the wreckage. They found not a grave—but a body half-buried in the dirt. Wrapped in torn parachute silk. Gear scorched. Bones broken. Lungs barely functioning.

But alive.

Dog tags melted to the collar: PAUL ATHRUN.

They carried him back on a stretcher fashioned from resistance banners and a bent canopy frame.

Paul didn’t wake for days.

When Paul finally opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was Talanov, seated at his bedside, jaw clenched, eyes tired.

Paul tried to speak. Only a whisper came:

“…did they make it?”

Talanov nodded. “You saved them all.”

Paul  would not return to the sky again—not in uniform.

Command gave him an honorable discharge. Not with fanfare, but with solemn recognition.

His file was closed with one line, stamped in red:

“Operational Asset: Retired with Distinction – Mental Health Priority.”

They gave him a cottage near the mountains—not far from the ridge where he nearly died.

No phone. No base. Just ash trees and wind.

On the windowsill sat a small guitar.

Next to it: a reel-to-reel recorder that still hummed with his voice.

“Love and Light…”

Paul walked with a limp. His ribs ached in the cold. But he was alive.

The wings on his chest?

He left them on the windowsill.

One day, Isabelle came.

No cameras. No press.

Just her.

She brought with her a scarf she hadn’t worn in years.

They sat beneath the pale sky in silence.

“You lived,” Isabelle said softly.

Paul nodded. “Barely.”

“And now?” Isabelle asked.

Paul exhaled—not tired. Just finished.

“Now I learn how to land.” Paul said.

Isabelle reached for his hand—the same one that once trembled writing lines he never sent.

“You don’t have to fly anymore,”  Isabelle whispered.

“I know,” Paul said.

And for the first time, he meant it.

That night, he played his old song. Not for mourning. Not for glory.

But to remember.

To begin.

They married in spring. Quietly. 

There were no vows written on paper. Only the ones carried silently through war and waiting.

They had children.

A home full of music and warmth.

Paul never went back to flying. But every so often, when the sky was clear, he’d take the kids out beneath the stars.

Not to talk about war.

But to point upward—and say:

“Once, I touched that.

And came back.”

In the evenings, he’d play the same song again.

And sometimes, just before sleep, he’d whisper:

“My delight,

Spring of light…

Love and Light.”

And beside him, she’d take his hand.

Just to remind him—

That this time,

He didn’t have to fly alone.