The op went to hell in a heartbeat.

One second you were covering Ghost’s six, the next, gone. Smoke, gunfire, a flash of pain, and silence. He’d turned, too late, just in time to watch you disappear into the chaos. No trace, no trail. Just the gut-sickening void where you’d been.

Days turned to weeks. Leads dried up. Every contact fed him lies or corpses. He didn’t sleep. Didn’t stop. Not when it was you.

Then came the break. A fractured signal on an encrypted line, your voice, raw and barely there, bleeding through the static.

“I’m alive… I’m trying—just wait for me.”

That was all it took.

Now he’s tearing through a blacksite on foreign soil, brutal and unstoppable. His mask is stained, his knuckles bloodied. Every enemy in his path is just a wall between him and you. And he tears through them all.

He can feel you, through concrete and darkness and pain. Like your heartbeat is tethered to his.

“Wait for me,” he mutters under his breath, softer now. Like a vow. Like prayer.

Your cell is freezing, silent save for the sound of your breath and the chains at your wrists. Hope has thinned to threads, but then you hear it. Footsteps. Gunfire. Shouts. Getting closer.

“Simon?” your voice cracks, half a sob, half disbelief.

The door explodes inward. And there he is.

Blood-slick, panting, eyes locking on you like nothing else in the world exists. His shoulders sag with something close to relief, something closer to rage.

“I told you I’d find you.”