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Commander Samuel Flak (Sam to his friends, Samuel to his mother and the military) is on the battlements of a football-sized training arena, watching the newest batch of enhanced recruits blunder through another training exercise.
It’s painful to watch.
The men are following directions about as well as can be expected, considering they’re coming up on thirty-six hours of sleep deprivation. But it isn’t good enough to keep them alive if this were a real-life encounter. Sam is sympathetic, though sympathy won’t keep him from yelling at the men when the time comes. The goal is to keep them alive, not coddle them.
Assuming Sam can stay awake and do his job properly.
Sleep deprivation was a lot easier before he turned thirty. Now he’s thirty-five, and the temptation to crawl into a corner and sleep is almost irresistible. And all he’s doing is watching the recruits do the hard work!
The air conditioning is cranking away to cool the offices on the battlements where Sam is, but down below, in the training arena, the temperature is close to one hundred degrees. Dominants are already a few degrees warmer than unaltered men, but you put those poor bastards in full combat gear, too, and the conditions are fucking miserable.
“I think I’m getting too old for this,” Sam says and gives up on stifling a yawn.
“You always say that,” Jim retorts, grinning at him. He has huge dark circles under his eyes and looks even worse than Sam feels.
“I do not.” Does he? Maybe he does. “Okay, fine, but this time I mean it.”
“Sure,” Jim says too easily. “And what would you do if you resigned your commission?”
Sam snorts. “As if they’d let me. But I could open a cafe, maybe climb Everest.”
“I know you well enough to know you have no desire to do either of those things. Maybe they wouldn’t let you go, but you could opt out of this sort of bullshit if you really wanted to. Move to Designation Resources. Robert is desperate to get you over there.”
“If it’s so great, then you go.”
“I’m not the one complaining. And they don’t want me.”
Is he complaining? Shit, maybe he is. “I hate being up here. Watching them do the work and then writing up a report about what they did while I sat around and drank mud masquerading as coffee is not something to take pride in.”
“You want to be down there, trying to stay awake while carrying fifty pounds on your back?”
“Maybe.”
“You just want to Dom them.”
He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
“Go to Designation, and you can Dom all kinds of people. Hot subs and ornery Dominant recruits.”
Sam takes a sip of coffee instead of answering. He knows he’s in a unique situation and that any other Dominant would kill to work in the D/s equivalent of human resources, but the truth is that he doesn’t really want to help lots of submissives.
He wants to help and control one submissive. His own. He’s spent enough cycles with submissives he doesn’t get to keep (for one reason or another), and he suspects it’s beginning to take a toll.
Sam tries not to be too obvious about his next yawn, but Jim notices and bumps him with an elbow. Jim’s own coffee mug is overly full and sloshes dangerously from the mild impact.
“You’re trying to make me fucking crazy,” Sam growls.
Jim gets a napkin to wipe up the spilled coffee. This is the sort of thing that makes Sam annoyed at the calmest of times. An overly filled coffee cup is a pet peeve of his that he can typically ignore, but after thirty-six hours of no sleep and two of his men already yanked from the exercise, he’s going to snap at any old bullshit.
“You can’t get a fucking lid?”
Jim is great. He’s a fantastic partner, strategist, and tactician, but goddamn, Sam can’t figure out why he just won’t fill a cup to the proper level.
It pings at the back of Sam’s mind that his reaction is excessive. His annoyance is not rational.
“Shit. I’m really close to my cycle. Sorry.” The tension is starting to get to him. He’s almost through his build cycle, and he’s going to need to schedule his release leave. Some Dominants, like Sam, have hormones that build up in their system and need to come out periodically in order to stay healthy. The hormones build up over the course of several weeks, and then he expresses them through sex and dominance until he’s returned to a baseline of calm and good health. The process of expressing those hormones is called release, and he’ll be given several days off to work it out of his system with a submissive who has a similar cycle that’s based around submission.
