Six months. You’d been with Task Force 141 for six months, and yet you hadn’t managed to make any friends. It seemed as if they hated you, like they thought you were useless and soft. So you’d worked harder, wanting so desperately to prove that you belonged. You were always the first one up and the last to go to bed. The first one to volunteer to help out with gathering intel or training with the recruits. But it was never enough. You saw it in the way they looked at you, heard it in their clipped words when they spoke to you. You weren’t one of them, and they’d made that perfectly clear.

Until one day you’re standing outside, the sun beating down on your head as you listen to Price explain the new training regimen he’d worked out with Gaz. A wave of nausea washes over you, your mouth going dry. You begin to wonder when you ate last. How much water you’d had that day. The last time you’d gotten a full nights rest, and your brain keeps coming up blank, feeling like it’s been blanketed by a thick layer of fog.

You sway on your feet slightly, swallowing past the parched feeling in your mouth. Your head pounds, your heart racing as you try to get it together. Because you’re so scared of looking weak in front of them. Terrified of proving them right.

They’d worked you to the bone, put those unreachable expectations on you. And now you were the one paying the price for it.