Ash Fields Never Forgot Them
Ash Fields was quiet the day Suiv and Oops All Beans got married.
Not peaceful—nothing ever was—but quiet in the way only a battlefield can be when the guns have paused to reload and the dead have already been counted. The ground was still scarred with shell craters, the air still tasted faintly of sulfur, and someone had forgotten to clear a wrecked Warden halftrack smoldering near the treeline. But the sun broke through the smoke just enough to make it feel… intentional.
The 420st Regiment stood in a loose semicircle, combat boots planted in mud and ash, rifles slung instead of raised. Someone had hung tattered green banners between two ruined pillboxes. Another soldier—no one ever figured out who—had placed wildflowers in empty ammo crates to line the aisle.
Suiv wore a standard Colonial uniform, patched and faded, but freshly cleaned for once. Oops All Beans had kept their helmet on, not out of superstition, but because the last time artillery came in during a “safe moment,” three people had learned a very permanent lesson.
Vows were exchanged quickly. No speeches. No priest. Just promises shouted over the wind.
“If I die,” Suiv said, voice steady, “I’ll find my way back to you.”
“If I die,” Beans replied, “loot my body and keep fighting.”
That earned a laugh—short, sharp, real. Then a cheer from the 420st, followed immediately by someone yelling “INCOMING!” out of pure reflex.
They kissed anyway.
The war didn’t care about weddings.
By nightfall, Ash Fields was burning again.
The Wardens pushed hard that week—armor columns rolling in under fog, artillery walking forward like it had learned the terrain by heart. Suiv was stationed on the line, coordinating infantry pushes through shattered trenches, while Oops All Beans ran logistics like a force of nature—scrap to refinery, refinery to factory, factory to front, over and over, never stopping long enough to feel tired.
They met when they could.
Five minutes in a bunker while shells landed outside.
Thirty seconds at a relic base while crates were unloaded.
Once, just a glance across a bridge before it was blown to hell.
Every battle tested them.
When the 420st held the line at three percent structural integrity and no shirts left, Suiv fought like someone who refused to leave unfinished business behind. When Beans watched a fully loaded truck disappear in a Warden ambush, they turned around, grabbed another hammer, and started over without saying a word.
Love in Foxhole wasn’t soft.
It was shared canteens.
Bandaging each other in the dark.
Dragging bodies out of artillery fire while screaming names into the smoke.
Weeks later, Ash Fields fell.
Then it was retaken.
Then lost again.
But someone—some stubborn, sentimental bastard—kept rebuilding a small sign near the old pillboxes. It was shot up, burned, replaced, rebuilt again.
ASH FIELDS
420ST
FOREVER
The Wardens never understood why that position was always contested harder than it needed to be. Why Colonials would counterpush at impossible hours, with impossible coordination, just to hold scorched dirt for another day.
They didn’t need to.
Ash Fields remembered.
And as long as the war kept going, so would Suiv and Oops All Beans—lovers, soldiers, survivors of a battlefield wedding that refused to be forgotten.