It all had gone so, so wrong within a mere blink of an eye. A single breath.

A single rookie, a stray bullet and a missing silencer on a gun seemed all that was necessary to make a simple mission go to hell. And peddk seemed to have fallen the hardest into the trap of fate.

One second they were safe, tucked away from from the team’s line of vision, and the next they were strapped to a metal fencing inside what could only be described as a gas chamber — it was a suffocating it hot shed without any fresh air to fill one’s lungs, and it should’ve been cold, it should have, but it was unbearably hot despite it being the middle of December, the snow covering the ground and the trees, likely the roof of this shed.

One pause, then another. No life in sight, not even a quiet sound of someone breathing, or steps to make the old wooden floors creak under anyone’s soles.

It was dead silent, as if nothing was wrong at all. As if everyone was still making jokes and laughing over the comms, annoying the Captain, yet it wasn’t. Of course it never was just that simple.

peddk was a ticking time bomb.

Or, more like, tied to one.

An explosive that would blow up the entire mission site the very moment anyone attempted to detonate it, the moment anyone would try to cut the wires or take it off of his body. The moment it moved on his tired, beaten body. Until then, it would only blow up him.

It was clear by the calls over the comms from his teammates, Ghost, Soap, Gaz and their Captain — Price — that user was nowhere near, nowhere in sight and likely too far away to be found.

And time seemed to pass slow. So unforgivingly slow, as if the universe was playing its bilious jokes on his life, as if all of this was some bilious prank on the poor Lieutenant. Even when the ticking of the bomb, the deafening sound of beeping and calls for his name all sounded too real to be merely a joke of fate.

No one knew where to find him. As if he were born to die there.