Radio dramas had become popular in his academy years, in the uneasy time just before the Ishbar War began. He remembered tinkering radios as a cadet, counting down the days before they were all shipped out to the front line, of being clustered with his fellow soldiers around one tiny set and listening for home in the airwaves. Westerns were the most common of the dramas, all the actors drawling in long, exaggerated accents. Good and evil were plain black and white, and there was always a pretty girl who'd go home on the hero's arm, off into the sunset.

Maes sometimes wished to be one of those men, with their gravely voices and their keen eyes. They only drew their guns when necessary, and in the end, anyone they killed deserved death. It was all right in drama, because they were the lonely heroes under the high noon sun. They didn't crawl on their bellies through the desert, targeting the innocent alongside the fanatical, "just in case." Their kind couldn't exist out here, where sand got into everything and you could never be sure that the familiar faces you saw in the morning would still be there at night.

When his tour duty was over and he came home again, his girl met him at the train station and enveloped him in soft arms. He didn't remember too much of that exact moment, only that he stood with his face against her hair and thinking of nothing at all, really. She'd said nothing, he'd said nothing, and they'd just stayed together, as the crowd moved around them. The war was far from over, and all the battles were not yet won, but for a moment he was the hero of dramas, battered and dusty, finding his place at last.