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Bright colors bloomed in beautiful displays of sparkling light all across the night sky and Bradley silently cheered for the lack of a flinch on Jake’s behalf.
It had been a long and complicated journey to arrive at such a simple destination, but it filled Bradley with joy to know his boyfriend could watch the fireworks now without falling into a flashback like before.
So here’s the story — Jake had been diagnosed with CPTSD after The Mission that brought them back together, when they were sent for medical and mental evals to find out if they were fit for flight after their leave had ended. He’d already known of the affliction, to some degree, but having the diagnosis in writing was a different beast entirely.
Bradley himself had PTSD, but his own wasn’t quite as severe as Jake’s. After all, Jake had lost squad members before, he’d lost one of his best friends on the mission that earned him his first air-to-air, and The Mission had piled upon that trauma, only making it worse.
Something Bradley had come to learn soon afterward when he and Jake were still in that “tentative friendship” stage, was that one of Jake’s worst triggers was fireworks. And he learned that fact solely because his and Jake’s housing happened to be neighboring on base during the holiday season that year, and Bradley happened to be in the right place at the right time when Jake, in the middle of a panic attack, found himself outside.
Bradley calmed him that night and ended up inviting Jake into his own housing, where they sheltered together against the noise. The next morning, Jake gave him a kiss in thanks and that kickstarted their relationship. But that was a detail in a larger story, the main point is that Jake explained afterward that fireworks were one of the things that always managed to bring him back to watching his best friend’s plane go up in flames with him on her wing, and he hadn’t been able to shake that ever since it happened.
And the sad thing, he confessed, was that Jake used to love watching fireworks displays.
That was the moment Bradley vowed to find a solution.
He himself wasn’t much bothered by the noise because he’d experienced some mild hearing loss after The Mission, so while inside, the distant noise of fireworks didn’t even really register. Outside, it usually garnered a tiny flinch by instinct, but it didn’t trigger a full-blown panic attack like it did for Jake.
So they experimented. They started by trying earplugs on the Fourth of July. When that didn’t work, Bradley found an expensive pair of noise-canceling headphones and they tried those on Christmas. That was enough to stave off a panic attack while in the house, but the flinches still happened, especially if he was outside. Jake seemed satisfied but Bradley wasn’t.
So for New Year’s, Bradley had a new idea. He had Jake put a pair of earbuds in, then slid the headphones over top. From the earbuds, he played his and Jake’s shared playlist on shuffle. And that did the trick. Finally, Jake was able to watch the mortars popping in the distance with a smile on his face, his muscles relaxed, and no panic in sight.
Jake caught Bradley staring from the corner of his eye and faced him more directly. He smiled, something soft and easy, just for them. Then leaned up and kissed Bradley. Soft, open-mouthed, and yet still chaste. Jake’s version of a ‘thank you’.
Bradley smiled when Jake pulled away, slinging an arm over Jake’s shoulder and resting his own head atop Jake’s. They conquered it, and that was all that mattered.