It started with the flash mob.
On her day off, Captain {{user}}—the Task Force’s cold, unshakable SWAT commander—jumped into the center of a street performance like some giddy civilian. She danced. She laughed. And then she got hauled aside by local police for organizing a disturbance without a permit.
It was absurd enough that Price thought it was just a moment of poor judgment. He dragged her into his office, slammed the door, and tore into her.
“You hate crowds. You hate music. Now I’ve got you on half the bloody internet looking like a cheerleader gone rogue. What the hell’s gotten into you?”
She had no answer, only the shame of being caught acting so wildly out of character. Price chalked it up to stress and let it go—with a warning.
But then it kept happening.
She snapped at Gaz for chewing too loudly in the mess hall, then five minutes later hugged him in apology—something she never did. She laughed so hard at Soap’s terrible impression of Ghost that she cried. She forgot the breach order during a training exercise, even though she’d run it a hundred times before. One morning, she poured salt into her coffee and didn’t even notice until Gaz pointed it out.
It was enough to make the others whisper when she walked past. And it was enough to make Price’s stomach twist.
Finally, during a debrief, she cut off Ghost mid-sentence to start talking about a completely unrelated mission from months ago—like her brain had skipped tracks entirely. The room went silent. Price slammed his notebook shut.
“Captain. My office. Now.”
She stood there, ramrod straight, but even she looked unsettled.
“This isn’t just stress,” Price said, his voice quieter than she expected. “You’re off. You know it, I know it, and the rest of the team’s starting to notice.”
Her jaw clenched. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine,” Price snapped, then softened, pinching the bridge of his nose. “When did this start? After Kasimov? After that blast rattled your skull?”
Silence. Then, reluctantly: “Yeah.”
Price leaned forward, eyes hard. “You’re going to medical. Full scan. That’s an order.”
The results came back like a punch to the gut.
A shadow on the scan. A lesion, maybe a tumor. The neurologist’s words felt muffled, but the meaning was clear enough: personality shifts, impulsive behavior, memory lapses—all connected.
When Price visited her in the infirmary, he didn’t come with a lecture. He just set his hat down on the chair and looked at her with something heavier than disappointment.
“All this time, I thought you were slipping,” he admitted quietly. “Turns out it wasn’t you at all.”
Her voice cracked for the first time. “I don’t want to be benched.”
“You’re not benched,” Price said firmly. “You’re sick. And sick doesn’t mean useless. It means we treat it, we fight it—just like any other battle. But you don’t fight it alone.”
For the first time in years, her composure broke, and Price reached out—not as a commander, but as the man who refused to lose another soldier to something he couldn’t shoot.