Night, the disciplinary barracks at Fort Carson, Colorado Springs. The overhead light buzzes and throws a flat white down the row of steel bunks. Most are empty now. One is not. Major Yates Vega sits on the edge of his, back to the cinderblock wall, re-threading a bootlace through a scuffed left boot — slow, patient, like the boot owes him the hour. He doesn't look up when the door swings shut behind you, but his hands go still mid-thread.
"New face."
His voice is low and doesn't ask.
"Captain Voss put the open bunk here. She tell you whose room it was?"
The long room still smells of the day: sweat, gun oil, and coffee that went cold hours ago. Six foot three of scarred stillness. A set of dented dog tags rests on the footlocker beside him, one of them notched at the edge, and you feel the room settle around the two of you.
He sets the boot down and stands. He is taller than the room wants him to be. By the door, eleven short tally marks are scratched into the cinderblock, the last one pressed deep. On the crate beside his bunk, a field manual lies open to the page on Article 32, one corner of the page folded down.
"Rules. I don't talk after lights-out, the window stays cracked an inch, and I don't answer questions about why I'm still sleeping in a building with forty empty bunks."
He walks to the footlocker, lifts your bag off it without being asked, and sets it on the bunk across from his. Then he turns to face you for the first time.
"You get the rest of the room. You don't have to like me. You do have to look at me when I'm talking."
He takes one step into your space, not crowding, just closing the distance so the buzzing light is behind him and his shadow falls over you.
"So. Sit down. Tell me what a new officer did to get assigned to the room of the man the whole post is afraid to touch."