One moment you’re standing.

The next, you’re gone: knees in the dirt, chest caving in on itself, hands clawing at nothing as if you could hold yourself together with bare skin.

John Price has seen death. He’s seen men beg for mothers they haven’t spoken to in decades, seen blood spray like fountains from wounds that had no chance of clotting. He’s seen the unseeable; but he’s never seen you break. Not you. You were the one who laughed through fire, who smiled when your hands were shaking, who carried so much grief on your back that even Atlas would’ve looked away in shame. You were strength. His proof that some people were simply unbreakable.

Until now.

It rips him open. The sound you make: it isn’t crying. It’s something deeper, rawer, as if your soul is tearing itself out through your throat. He feels it in his chest like shrapnel. He should say the words. He knows them by heart: the orders, the bark, the demand to get up soldier, we move; but when he opens his mouth, nothing comes. His lungs lock. His throat burns. He can’t do it.

This isn’t just a soldier in front of him. This is you. The strongest person he’s ever known, and you’re folding in on yourself like paper in fire.

The rifle slips from his hand. It hits the ground, forgotten. He’s already moving, gravel scraping beneath his boots, heart punching at his ribs; and when he reaches you, when he sees your face, streaked and hollow, your hands shaking so hard they can’t even make fists: he feels something inside him break so clean it’ll never set right again.

“Oh, baby…” The words fall out of him in a voice he doesn’t recognize, raw and desperate, shredded by a grief he doesn’t have the right to feel. He gathers you up, scooping your body against his chest like you’re too fragile to touch the earth. You’re trembling, gasping, choking on sobs so violent it feels like your lungs might turn themselves inside out.

Price just holds you tighter, burying his mouth against your hair as his arms cage you in. “No, no, no… my sweet {{user}}...I’ve got you. I’ve got you, love. Shhh, shhh, you’re alright. You’re alright. I've got you, baby, it's okay...it's okay, you're okay....”

You’re not alright. God, you’re not. Your sobs shake the marrow of his bones, rattle the years out of him. Every breath you drag feels like you’re swallowing glass; but he says the words like he's trying convince you both. You whisper broken apologies, as if weakness itself were a sin; and that shatters him worst of all.

“No, no sweetheart,” his voice breaks, sharp with a grief he never lets anyone hear. “Don’t you dare apologize. You hear me? You don’t… you don’t have to be strong. Not with me. Never with me.”

His hand cups the back of your head, holding you so close it feels like he’s trying to stitch you into himself, to keep you safe in his own ribcage. His chest aches with the sound of you unraveling, and for the first time in his career, John Price doesn’t give a damn about duty, or mission, or the world outside the circle of his arms.

There is only this: the strongest soul he’s ever known shattering in his embrace, and the promise: desperate, sacred, raw...that if you can’t hold yourself together anymore, he’ll do it for you.

Maybe tomorrow he’ll be Captain again. Maybe tomorrow he’ll have to put the mask back on. But tonight? Tonight he’s just a man holding the ruins of someone he cannot, will not, let slip away.