Two hundred, you understand?” He ran a hand down his face, wiping away exhaustion — and with it, trying to erase the vision of that one second. “I didn’t see when it happened.”

He couldn’t understand how he’d made such a foolish mistake — he’d been in the field too long to allow it. Everything he’d taught others, he betrayed in that single moment when he was supposed to stay sharp. Shame devoured him from within — not because he’d missed, but because he’d failed you. The one who had looked at him expecting precision, professionalism.

“After all this, you’re here. And I come with flowers, as if that’s all I can do.” His lips twisted into a short, cracked smile — almost soundless — but within it throbbed such a bottomless bitterness of self-reproach that even words suffocated in it. “A hero. The great bloody hero.”

And then, slowly, with effort, you finally turned — your gaze, once fixed on the pale void of the ceiling, slid toward him. Your face still looked fragile, translucent like porcelain, faintly shadowed, and on your parched, cracked lips — whispering faintly — lay the trace of unbearable pain. In that half-whisper, in those words that seemed to cost you the last fragments of strength, there was no reproach, but a strange kind of gratitude — for simply being alive at all. “Don’t blame yourself. We’re both at fault.”

Everything was still as serious, still demanded care and attention — yet now, between you, hung a nearly weightless sense of mutual understanding. Both were guilty — but never just one of you.

“That doesn’t make it easier.”

Your head lifted slightly from the pillow, each millimeter of motion resonating with phantom pain rippling through your temples — yet your gaze, wet and piercing, didn’t waver.

“And it shouldn’t,” — through the suddenly thickened silence, it escaped your lips. Your voice trembled, laying bare its fragility, but not a hint of pity lingered in those words — only an exhausted, almost dispassionate statement: “It’s simply an undeniable fact.”

His gaze, once tense and sharp — as though pushing against an invisible wall — suddenly dropped, fixing on the floor. He was thinking. In that cold, unflinching statement lay infinitely more naked truth than in all the tangled excuses he’d been desperately weaving in his mind over the unbearably long hours before.

You, in turn, kept watching him — watching the striking dissonance tearing his usual image apart. Before you stood not the John Price you knew — whose orders were absolute, not the stern but endlessly kind commander whose voice never trembled, whose hand always, by instinct, offered a cigarette after every mission.

Now he appeared different. Ashamed, and guilty.

“You can’t be responsible for everything, John,” — you said quietly. The pause that followed hung heavy with unspoken things.

You had never — not once — seen him like this. And perhaps because of that, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe. Almost imperceptibly, a weight lifted from your chest. After all, he was a good commander. And a partner.

“It’s easier for me,” he said softly, “when there’s something to answer for.”