There's a reckoning a-coming
Jacob Lewis is the most respected outcast in the school when the Jameson family comes to town. He's carefully average in class, and while being the school quarterback grants him access to the popular cliques, he prefers to keep to himself.
Darcy Jameson is on Advanced Placement and at sixteen even curvier than the Home Ec teacher, with a mean right hook to match. Jake's half in lust before she even opens her mouth, and then she lets loose a torrent of sarcasm that leaves Mr Rollins (universally acknowledged chauvinistic asshole) sputtering and he's just gone.
It takes him six months to convince her to give him a chance, but by the time he graduates they're the couple. He asks for her father's blessing and permission - at seventeen Darcy is still too young to marry without it - but with no job and his father's debts he's dismissed out of hand.
He skips prom to drive to the nearest Army recruitment centre and signs his life on the dotted line.
*****
Jake has always been quick to pick up on anything anyone would teach him, and Basic proves to be no different. Most of the military brats already know half the course, but he outstrips the lazy and the mediocre within a fortnight, and the glory seekers start keeping him at arm's length; the good ones, with service in their bones, teach him everything they know. By the time they have to pick their specialty, officers are quietly fighting over who gets him first.
When he gets his first paycheck, half goes towards settling his father's debts; the other half is enclosed in a letter for Darcy.
*****
Extra work and connections earn him leave for Darcy's prom, and the look on her face when he shows up in his dress uniform is worth everything. The next day he talks to her father again, shows him everything he's done to settle the Lewis debts and his plans for the future, and once again asks for his blessing. But he will never be good enough for Darcy's father, and Jake apologises - Darcy has already packed everything she can't live without, and by the time the Jamesons wake up the next morning Jake and Darcy will be long gone.
They get married on base by the chaplain, witnessed by a few of Jake's training buddies. Private and Mrs Jacob Lewis send a notice to the Jamesons, and quietly move into Army housing. Darcy gets a job at an IT firm nearby, and is quickly promoted. Neither of them spend much, so their savings grow rapidly, and Darcy sends money back to her sister, whom she calls once a week.
Officers are still fighting over Jake, and he is accepted to Special Forces training only two years into his service. Jake buys Darcy the newest iPod with the largest capacity, because it's the longest period they've gone without talking to each other since they met, and Darcy doesn't like being alone. She occupies herself with work and study, applying for an IT degree at a nearby university. By the time semester actually starts she's already six months ahead in her studies; by Christmas she's shaved a year off her degree.
*****
Jake comes home bruised, battered, and exhausted, but he comes home. They celebrate his success, share stories and mementos of the year they have been apart, and generally act like newlyweds again. In some ways they are; of the two years they have been married, he's been home for less than one.
Jake goes away on missions, and when he comes back sometimes he can tell her what he was doing and where, and sometimes he can't. Sometimes he doesn't talk at all. One night she wakes up to find him doing katas in the lounge, and he confesses that he's having trouble sleeping at night, haunted by the people he's killed. She tells him that when he doesn't have trouble sleeping she'll be worried about him, but until then he's still her husband, still her Jake. They stay up until dawn talking, and she calls in sick so they can spend the day making love.
*****
Darcy has nearly finished her degree when the base's chaplain - the man who, nearly three years earlier, had made her Mrs Lewis - comes to her door and she knows, she knows in her bones, her husband is never coming home.
She makes it through the funeral, straight-backed and grim, as she accepts Jake's effects from the man who brought them back; she is black clothes and white skin, her only colour a violent slash of bright red lipstick that had been his favourite shade.
After the funeral, she falls apart. For a week she alternately cries and rages, and for the next six months she's just numb. She goes back to work, finishes the last few units of her degree, but her heart isn't in it any more. She goes to stay with her newly married sister, and their happiness hurts the places where Jake used to be. She doesn't know what to do.