You don’t remember making it back to base.

Your boots are still slick with mud and blood. The hallway lights smear into long, pale streaks. The mission plays in fragments—shouts over comms, the crack of rifle fire, the dead silence when it all went wrong. Your head feels too heavy for your neck.

By the time you shut your door, the noise of the barracks has already faded. All that’s left is the hollow, aching hum in your chest.

The drawer in the corner waits.

You stare at it. Something in your chest twists. You can almost feel the weight inside calling to you. It’s been months since you last touched it—months of clawing your way out of the pit you’d lived in for years. You told yourself you were done. Stronger now. You promised Simon.

Your hand twitches at your side.

Don’t.

You push off the door and pace the length of the room, as if movement could scrape the itch out of your skin. You cycle through every reason not to—how far you’ve come, the hell you crawled through to get here, the way Simon looked at you the last time you shattered. Your grip tightens on the desk until your knuckles burn.

But the memories are louder. The shouts over the radio. The stink of smoke. The dead weight in your arms when you dragged someone back who wasn’t breathing.

Your legs carry you toward the drawer before you even decide to move.

You’re better than this. You can stop.

You freeze, pulse thundering. But the silence after that thought is deafening. In that quiet, the craving seeps in—smooth, poisonous, familiar.

Your fingers close around the handle. You tell yourself it’s just to check, just to make sure it’s still there. But the moment you see it, every fight you’ve won against yourself collapses.

You give in.

The rest comes in fragments—a surrender you barely feel until you’re on the floor, the room tilting, thoughts dissolving into a distant hum.

The knock doesn’t register. The door opening barely does. You only notice him when the air shifts, when a shadow cuts the light.

“Bloody hell…” Simon’s voice is low, but there’s a sharp thread in it—fear, maybe. Or fury.