A/N: This is a long one-shot that I wrote. I was inspired by a song I performed the other day at church, for a friend that was leaving for Iraq. It's out of the blue, and many years into Cristina & Owen's future, but I couldn't shake it from my head.

I definitely used creative license with war and military stuff, so please bear with me! This is set probably 20 odd years in the future of Owen & Cristina.

I also wrote this all at once, late in the night, and am posting it without a beta, as I do not have one. So please excuse any spelling or grammar errors!

Disclaimer: Grey's is not mine, and neither is Letters from War, by Mark Shultz, which is the song that inspired this!

Enjoy!


The mailbox was something she treasured.

Irrational as it was, it was her link, her lifeline, to the man her world revolved around.

After shifts that started or stretched long into the early hours of the morning, after surgeries that cramped her back for hours, she would return home, and wait. Wait or write. And approach that mailbox like a oasis in her desert.

She had never been very patient, never liked waiting, when there was nothing for her to do, no action to take.

But that was before.

Before Cristina Yang sent a son to war.

She had to laugh at her son. He tried to assure her that everything was normal, not to worry, with small details and normalcy.

Mom,

I miss Seattle so much. I never thought I'd be wishing for rain! You're probably smirking, remembering all my whining growing up. It's just so hot here! The guys and I would die to walk around just our shorts, but if the Sergeant Major caught wind of it, there'd be hell. He's always bitching about the grooming standard. The camp is pretty decent, we train, do PT, and play football. A lot.

I miss you a lot Mom, even your cooking, as weird as that sounds. It's gourmet compared to the crap they give us out in the desert. Know this: when I get home, expect to feed me 24/7. I'm going to need as much edible food on leave as possible before I have to eat Marine food again.

I know you worry, which bugs you, because you never worry. That's always been Aunt Meredith's thing. But I'm here, I'm helping, I'm trying to make a difference. I've thought about Dad here a lot. About his time in the desert, what he went through. I know it was hard time for you guys, in the beginning, but it made Dad into the man he is today. The man I want to someday be.

It sucks that I have to be so far from home, but after everything, please know that I do this for you. For you, Abby, Aunt Meredith. For Dad. I want to serve well, make you proud.

Love,

Dominic

PS: Tell Dad hello, and tell him things are pretty ninja out here. Give my love to Abby, Toby, and Eli, but tell Toby and Eli that if they touch my car, I'll hunt them down from Africa if I have to. Love to Aunt Meredith and Uncle Derek as well, Jennifer and Shawn too.

She loved the letters

Even though she was not the most emotionally expressive with her children, they knew she loved them. Her eldest had grown up to be the same, but these letters; it let them express what might not normally be vocalized.

Cristina Yang definitely did not plan for a child of hers to enlist in the military. After what Owen had went through, after the years of work they put into his recovery, it was the farthest thing from their minds. Not that she had ever planned for children. But with Owen, she changed. Not for him, like with Burke, but because of him. Because of how he made grounded her, how she grounded him.

Their children were surrounded by medicine. From growing up in the hospital nursery, running through the halls of Seattle Grace, to watching in awe from the gallery as their mother or father performed surgeries. She had expected her eldest, most of all, to follow in his parents footsteps. He was just so much like his mother.

He did follow in his father's footsteps, in a way. After four years at Berkeley, instead of applying to medical school Dominic came home and announced that he had enlisted in the Marines. It was peacetime, so the announcement was a surprise, but not a catastrophe. While they had assumed he might pursue medicine like his father in the military, he had chosen to become a rifleman in the Marine Corp. Dominic eventually made it into a high level within the Marines. Owen told her that Reconnaissance Marines were the best of the best in the Corp. She took his word for it.

A few years later, the United States entered into a war with Iran and Syria. Not even twenty years after the US ended their last war in the Middle East, they were there again. This time, America was allied with Israel, defending an all out offensive against the Western country smack dab in the middle of the Muslim states.

Her son was shipped off to war, and was currently in Egypt, waiting.

Weeks later, US military was engaged within Iranian soil.

She wrote letters back to him, small talk about the hospital, the hard time they were having with their youngest son Eli in high school. How Meredith was planning Dom's wedding to Jennifer, even if they were raised liked siblings together. She didn't want him to worry that she was worrying too much. But she ended every letter the same:

Make it home, make is safe.

She had never been very religious. She and Owen had raised the kids in a mesh of Catholic masses and Hanukkah. But she caught herself at night, wrapped up in her husband's arms, sending up reminders to whoever was listening that she saved lives every day. The least they could do was keep him safe.

It was cold outside, rain dribbling freezing mist onto the population of Seattle.

December was drawing to a close. Owen and Cristina had plans to attend the New Years Gala at the hospital, were allowing Abby to attend with a date as well.

She had wandered to the mailbox, absently checking, even though the mail usually came much later in the day.

Owen later found her outside, hours later. Dropped to her knees by the mailbox, she was freezing cold. As he carried her inside, he even thought in a panic that she was hypothermic. Her blue lips chattered, and frozen tears stained her face.

She was murmuring something he couldn't understand, and clutching a piece of paper, soaked from the elements, and her tears.

He gently laid her on the couch, throwing blankets on his wife tiny frame, and ran to the kitchen to heat water on the stove.

When he came back to her, he gently took the paper from her hands, as her brown eyes stared blankly at him.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Owen Hunt:

There is no easy way to express this. I would be there in person, but I'm at a military hospital in Germany, and I probably won't be stateside for months. But I promised.

You've never met me, and I'm sorry that this has to come from a stranger.

I was up on a hill, I was out there alone. My small team of Marines had been on a scouting mission, but when the shots all rang out, I was the only one left. I was wounded, I couldn't get off the hillside, and bombs were exploding from both the enemy and our side.

That's when I saw him, he came back from me. There had been on a separate scouting mission, but not too far away. They had been ordered back to the Humvees when we were engaged, but few men from the other team came to look for my team. They carried the bodies of my team down the hillside, and came for me when they saw that I was only wounded.

Mujaheddin began to scale the hillside, and there was little time. A man hid me in some brush, and they swarmed the hillside, and he wasn't fast enough. And though he was captured by the Mujaheddin, that man set me free. That man was your son. Before they came up the hill, he turned to me and asked me to write to you. I told him I would, I swore.

I'm so sorry for your loss. I would give anything to give you your son back. I owe him my life.

My deepest apologies,

Lance Corporal Evan Sommers

He stared at the letter.

It was the last of their letters from war.

Cristina hadn't been the same since December, almost six months ago. She went to work. She performed her duties, and she went home. She sat in her room, and wrote letters.

Meredith tried to bring her out of the shell, tried to gently take the letters from Cristina. But it was impossible. She was a void.

Cristina wrote the same time every time. She wanted to make up for not saying I love you enough, not telling him every morning, every night how proud she was.

… You are good, and you're brave. What a father that you'll be someday…
Make it home. Make it safe. You need to come back to us.

Still she kept writing each day.

It had almost been a year now. Owen was refusing to give up on her. She was slowly getting better. Small steps. But she kept on writing.

She was angry. Someone upstairs had broken their deal. Everyday she saved lives. Her husband saved lives, her best friends saved lives. They lost some, but they saved some too. What one life too much to ask in return? The life of her son.

Owen could feel it. Even though she was getting better, she laughed with Meredith the other day, he could feel her eyes on him sometimes. Seeing features that their son had. Seeing Dominic in their shared facial features, it not their coloring. He also knew that she begrudged him, if only slightly. That their son had become a soldier, like him long ago.

She still wrote the letters. Sent one every day. It had become a routine, and no one discouraged it anymore. It was more of therapy, if anything.

Another year had passed by.

Owen had been promoted to Chief of Surgery, after Bailey had stepped down to take a position across the country. Derek had resented it for awhile, but had come to accept it. Cristina had been proud.

No one would have ever though that Cristina Yang- now Hunt, would have ever given up surgery. She had told Owen years earlier that he would have to pry a scalpel from her cold dead hands. But the disappearance of their son had changed her. The Marines officially listed him as Missing in Action. There was never a body found. There had been rumors of camps deep in the mountains bordering Pakistan, but no solid information. Cristina refused to have a funeral, and no one though to pressure otherwise.

She was in semi-retirement. After losing one child, she was at home now, raising her youngest in his last few years of high school, and attending to her grandchildren from Abby. Toby was in his last year of college, but had transferred home to attend the UW, to be close to his mother. She kept her remaining three children close to her, like a mother hen folding her chicks into her wings.

She was outside in the yard with Abby's eldest Dominic, named after the uncle everyone sorely missed. Tossing around a Frisbee, while their dog Jasper tried to catch it himself.

A black car pulled into the end of their long drive way, in the beginning of the cul-de-sac. She stopped in mid throw as it got closer, no one really came into their secluded neighborhood if they didn't live there.

When the car pulled up, and a man in uniform got out of the driver's seat, she dropped to her knees.

"Nana," the three year old tugged at her sleeve, "Nana, get up!"

From the passenger seat, another man got out.

Out stepped a Captain, where her boy used to stand.

He knelt in front of her,

"Mom, I'm following orders, from all of your letters. I've come home again."

When Owen was paged, he was told that his wife called and asked him to come home immediately.

As he walked in the door, he witnessed his wife crying hysterically in the arms of a man.

His son had finally come home.

As he rushed to envelope his wife and son, he nearly tripped over his son's duffel bag.

Holding all of her letters from war.

Please read & review! Constructive criticism is always, always welcome!