It’s been a year to the day since the phone rang— sharp and cruel in the middle of the night— and shattered the world around you. You still remember the numbness that came with the words: “Sergeant MacTavish has sustained a gunshot wound to the head during a mission. He’s alive, but… it’s critical.”

They never finish sentences like that. They just let the silence bleed out between you.

Johnny was unconscious for three months. Ninety-three days of holding your breath, living in sterile white rooms and listening to the rhythmic hiss of machines breathing for him. Every time a doctor came in, your chest tightened, waiting for them to tell you he’d slipped away during the night. But he didn’t. Somehow, because he’s the most stubborn bastard you’ve ever known, he pulled through.

Waking up wasn’t a miracle. It was a battlefield of its own.

The bullet hadn’t killed him, but it took things from him. His balance. His speech at first. Whole swaths of memory that flickered in and out like static on a broken radio. The Johnny you knew— the loud, sharp-witted, devil-may-care Scot— was still there, buried under frustration and pain and long silences where words used to be.

Rehab was hell. He hated it. Hated being seen as broken. Hated needing help. Hated the hospital food, the fluorescent lights, the way the nurses looked at him like he was fragile glass. But he fought. God, he fought. Through tremors and blackouts and nights where he woke up screaming with no idea who he was or where. And slowly, piece by piece, he started putting himself back together.

That was months ago.

Now, it’s today— present day— and Johnny is almost himself again. He cracks jokes. He runs drills again with Ghost. He hides the limp better than he used to. But he still carries the weight of it. It shows in the pauses, in the way his eyes flick toward exits when a room gets too loud, too bright, too sharp around the edges.

Tonight, something’s wrong.

You see it in the stiffness of his jaw, the faint tremble in his left hand as he grips a mug he hasn’t touched in the last ten minutes. He’s pale, sweat beading along his temple despite the chill in the air.

“Johnny,” you ask, cautiously, “You alright?”

He waves a hand dismissively. “Aye, fine. Just a headache. Didn’t sleep great, that’s all.”

But you know better. He hasn’t looked you in the eye all night. His right leg keeps twitching, foot tapping a stuttered rhythm against the floor— a tick he picked up during rehab when he was trying to fight off a seizure.

You move closer, lowering your voice. “You’re flaring up, aren’t you?”

He hesitates just a second too long. “I’m not going back to that place,” he mutters. “Don’t care if my skull’s bloody cracking open. I can’t. I won’t.”

There’s fear in his voice— not panic, not weakness, but the kind of deep-rooted, exhausted dread that comes from months of lying in hospital beds and wondering if your own mind’s going to betray you again. He’s afraid of being trapped. Afraid of being useless.

“You’re not weak for needing help,” you say quietly.

He scoffs, almost bitterly. “Easy for you to say when you’re not the one whose brain decides to reboot every few weeks like a shite computer.”

You reach out, hand settling on his shoulder. It’s tense under your palm, rigid with pride and pain. “You survived what should’ve killed you. That doesn’t make you weak, Johnny. That makes you a damn miracle.”

His breathing is shaky now, shallow. He squeezes his eyes shut, jaw clenched against whatever is building behind his ribs.

“I just want to be normal again,” he whispers.