🐾 Icy Eyes, Broken Chains
ACT I — The Rot Doesn’t Care
There are cells designed to keep prisoners contained.
This was not one of them.
The air was dead. The walls bled rust. And TF141—once elite, once operational—had been discarded like bruised meat. No guards. No interrogations. No threats. Just silence. A damp, rotting box with no light and no water, where bodies would decay into forgotten uniforms.
They’d stopped counting days when the hallucinations began.
Ghost hadn’t spoken in over thirty-six hours. His mask was torn, but he wore it still—eyes dull, lips cracked, hands folded like he might still be useful.
Soap mumbled fractured thoughts. Names. Coordinates. Bits of Scotland. His voice was fading.
Price’s skin was yellowed, blistering. Dehydration had started killing his organs. But he watched the door like a wolf denied death.
Gaz paced until his calves seized. Then he just sat. Eyes wide open.
Roach stared at the ceiling. It leaked. That was all.
Others filled the corners. Farah, curled into her scarf. Krueger and Nikto, silent shadows. Laswell, gaunt and stubborn, mouthed strategies in her sleep. Alejandro and Rodolfo, knuckles split, still trying to pick the lock with broken metal. Alex, Kamarov, Nikolai—no longer soldiers, just mass.
They were starving. Not metaphorically.
Starving.
Then came the noise.
Not boots. Not breath.
Claws.
Scratching softly against the far wall. A slither of white fur passing through the door seam. A shape too small to threaten, too strange to ignore.
Ghost lifted his head, slow as death.
“That’s a tiger cub,” he rasped.
ACT II — The Cub & The Corpse
She wasn’t supposed to be here.
A juvenile white tiger with eyes like frozen rivers. Her coat was dulled with dirt and old blood. Her ribs jutted out beneath tufts of fur. She didn’t roar. She didn’t growl.
She simply returned.
Night after night, slipping through a hole in her cage. Walking across the empty compound. Sniffing at scraps. Dragging small kills. And always—always—pressing herself against the dead form of her mother.
It was grotesque, and sacred.
She nudged the corpse with her head like it might respond. Curled beside it as if warmth could be conjured from memory. Left half-eaten mice beside her muzzle like offerings.
She wasn’t wild. She wasn’t tame.
She was ritual.
TF141 watched her crawl back through the hole again, long after midnight. She paused at the edge of their cell, ears alert, watching them through bent iron.
Soap knelt and whispered.
“She gets in…”
Laswell didn’t blink.
“She gets out.”
Price coughed.
“Then she’s our key."
Not a pet. Not a tool.
An ally.
ACT III — The Fire Between Teeth
They didn’t tame her.
They learned her.
Soap offered cloth—his shirt sleeve, frayed. She sniffed and took it. Gaz left thread from his uniform. She twined it between her claws.
Ghost scraped symbols in dirt—circles, slashes, jagged teeth. She pawed at them. Farah whispered words in Persian. Laswell used gestures—slow, deliberate. Rodolfo hummed lullabies, worn and fractured.
She started bringing things.
Leaves. Insects. Dry bark. Then rats. Then birds.
They offered nothing but gratitude, quiet and constant. Alejandro whispered praise. Nikto gave her water when he could find it. Roach tied fibers into shapes—gifts. She accepted them all.
One morning, she brought fire. Or, at least, the idea of it.
A shred of cloth and shard of metal from a half-burnt curtain in the compound’s wreckage. Dropped gently at Ghost’s feet.
He used it.
Price struck metal. They sparked a flame. Not strong, but real. Enough to cook for on a bent chest plate.