See You at Breakfast
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 11: Landstuhl
The flight to Germany passed in a haze of engine noise and half-sleep, Megan strapped into a seat aboard a military transport for the first time since the crash, and though she’d expected the sound of aircraft to unsettle her, she found instead that it steadied her — a reminder that the sky still belonged to people who flew for reasons that had nothing to do with what had been done to her on the ground.
Landstuhl Regional Medical Center rose up out of the German countryside like something from a different world entirely, all clean lines and orderly hallways, nurses moving with brisk purpose instead of the erratic dread she’d learned to read in every set of footsteps at the compound. Her CO was waiting when she landed, standing at the edge of the tarmac with an expression that cracked, briefly, into something unguarded before he caught himself and saluted her, formal and correct, the way she needed him to be until the moment she stepped close enough that he pulled her into an embrace instead, gruff and brief and entirely sincere.
“Whole company’s been asking after you,” he said, into the top of her head. “Ruiz’s crew chief hasn’t stopped talking about him since we got word. Says nobody’s ever going to fly with someone who tells better taco stories.”
She laughed, unexpectedly, a real laugh that startled her with how normal it felt in her own chest, and understood, in that small unguarded moment, that some part of her that Hassan and Abu Talib had tried to take was still there, waiting to be used again.
The physical evaluation took two full days — the shoulder, the ribs, a dozen smaller injuries catalogued and treated by doctors who moved through the process with the same patient, permission-asking care the field hospital nurse had shown her, never assuming, always asking, until her body slowly began believing what her mind had already started to accept. The bruises would fade. The rib would heal clean. The shoulder would need physical therapy but would, in time, hold a cyclic again the way it always had.
She spent the evenings of that first week in a small room with a window that had no bars on it, a fact she found herself noticing every night before she slept, checking it the way another patient might check a lock — not out of fear, exactly, but out of a need to keep confirming that the absence of bars was real and not something her mind had constructed to survive another night. A nurse named Corporal Reyes started stopping by after her shift most evenings, not officially assigned to Megan’s care, just a woman near her own age who’d noticed her sitting alone and decided that wasn’t going to continue on her watch. They talked about nothing important — Reyes’s sisters back in Texas, a television show Megan had missed three months of, the terrible coffee in the mess hall — and Megan found that the nothing-important conversations did something the debrief and the evaluations couldn’t, reminding her that a version of ordinary life still existed and was, eventually, going to include her again.
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