You were born of bullet casings and gunsmoke.

That’s the story they tell, anyway. Not a childhood, not a hometown, not even a rumor of lullabies or birthday candles: just a silhouette in a warzone, a myth carved out of shrapnel and quiet rage.

People joke that you didn’t have parents, just a manufacturer’s stamp. That you crawled out of a smoking crater holding a rifle and a vendetta. That you never learned fear because whoever raised you cut that part out to save room for instinct.

And honestly?

You never bothered correcting them.

You move like you were pre-programmed: efficient, surgical, terrifyingly calm. You take cover like it bores you. You reload like you’re rearranging silverware. Bullets snap past your skull and you don’t even flinch: just tilt your head slightly, tracking trajectories like you’re admiring fireworks. Someone once asked if you felt adrenaline. You looked at them like they’d asked if you felt gravity.

It makes you invaluable.

It makes you untouchable.

It makes you empty.

Because somewhere along the way, between the first kill you don’t remember and the hundredth you never bothered counting: something inside you just… shut down. The part that used to spark. The part that used to dream. The part that used to picture something larger than violence, something softer than survival. That person existed once, you think. A different version of you: wide-eyed, hopeful, stupid enough to believe the world wouldn’t chew them up.

That version is gone now.

Swallowed. Starved. Sandblasted smooth.

Then, the 141 walked into your life like a brick through glass.

Price sees it first. Of course he does. Old warhound eyes, clocking the way you never react to anything except mission parameters. How you don’t hesitate on the ops even he would pause on. Black-bag assignments, off-the-books snatches, the kind of shadow runs that stain the soul. You move through them like you’re underwater: slow, graceful, eerily serene. When it’s over, you wipe your blade on your sleeve the same way people shake rain off their hands.

Soap tries to pull you in with jokes. Gaz tries to pull you in with warmth. Ghost tries to pull you in with silence, that careful, patient kind people give to wounded animals.

None of it gets through.

You don’t smile. You don’t startle. You don’t even frown. You just… exist. A ghost that breathes. A prodigy with a pulse. A legend wearing a human shape.

And sometimes, only sometimes, when you’re bone-tired after a mission that should’ve killed you ten different ways, they catch it. A flicker. A distant echo. Something fragile behind your eyes, a memory of the person you were before...

the world wrung the softness out of you like water from a rag.

Weeks pass. Then months. They learn your tells: the way your shoulders tense before a flashback, the way your voice goes flat when something brushes too close to home. They start covering for you quietly, gently, without making a fuss. Soap brings you snacks. Gaz stands a little closer. Price talks to you like he remembers you’re human. Ghost watches you like he’s waiting for you to come back from somewhere far away.

But you stay locked in that numb, silent universe inside your head. Hollow. Desensitized. Gone.

Until...

It’s late. You’re all gathered around a fire in the field. One of those moments of humanity mid-op that remind soldiers what they're fighting for, who they're fighting for.

And you? You’re just sitting there, blank, drifting, not really there.

Soap is bickering with Ghost, sitting on watch, about some tactic; some minor squabble that leads to Soap saying something stupid in an accent thicker than Cranachan and Ghost saying something even dumber in a tone dryer than the desert...

And something in you just... Snaps.

A sound slips out of you. Small. Soft. Pure. A laugh.

Not sarcasm. Not disbelief. A laugh. Like bells. Like sunlight through dust. Like an angel clearing its throat after centuries of silence.

Time. Stops.