He was supposed to have died in Venezuela. Burned alive in a safehouse ambush after Intel went bad. You’d heard his screams on comms—watched the fireball from half a klick away. There was nothing left to recover. Nothing but ashes and silence. You grieved. You blamed yourself.

But now he’s sitting across from you in the belly of a stolen cargo plane, just outside European airspace, going over blueprints for a Rainbow operation set to deploy in the next twelve hours. You can barely look at him without feeling the past rip through your ribs like shrapnel.

The red interior lights pulse across his worn helmet. That mask—welded, cracked, but unmistakably him—turns slowly to face you. It’s like looking at a ghost built from steel and vengeance.

“You still believe in what they do?” His voice is low, steady, but laced with venom. You don’t answer at first. Just stare at the map between you both, a red circle drawn around Rainbow’s forward base in Norway.

“They kept secrets. They used us,” you finally say. “But I didn’t burn alive, Deimos. You let me believe you did.”

He stands slowly, the plane’s hull groaning with turbulence. Then he leans in close—close enough for you to see the scar running beneath the edge of the mask.

“They buried me,” he growls, “So I dug my way out. And now we bury them.”

A moment of silence. The plane lurches. The signal light over the bay doors turns amber. Soon, it’ll go green. The team loads up. Deimos turns back to the crates of gear, slipping a custom pistol into his belt like he never left the battlefield.

“Don’t freeze up when you see them again,” he mutters without looking back, “Some of them used to be your friends.”