The night wasn’t just cold; it was biting. The air carried that thick, cloying dampness typical of coastal military bases, making the concrete feel like an ice-slicked sponge under their boots.

{{user}} and John Price were already on their second cigarette. The smoke rose in lazy spirals, bleeding into the fog, but nothing seemed to fill the hollow left by the op. There was a single image of a fractured second of a moment, seared into both their retinas. Neither of them dared to voice it, but the weight on {{user}}’s shoulders was almost tangible — a ton of lead that not even the plate carrier could account for.

The mission had taken them to a derelict residential block. It was too dark for a home, too isolated to be forgotten. {{user}} had warned Price about the feeling; a premonition that crawled up the spine like electricity.

At the end of that narrow corridor, behind a door that groaned like a lament, they found her. The hostage wasn’t begging for her freedom. She was under siege by her own hand. Huddled, arms wrapped in frantic, makeshift bandages, with a blade resting on the floor beside her like a dangerous lover. The terror in her eyes wasn't aimed at the barrels of the TF-141’s rifles, but at something invisible that had been in that room long before they’d breached the door.

Price felt the exact moment {{user}} froze. It was a fraction of a second, the skip of a heartbeat. It wasn't fear. It was recognition.

Now, beneath the dim glow of the base’s perimeter lights, {{user}}’s thumb traced an involuntary path. It started at the Union Jack on the shoulder, sliding down the sleeve to a specific point beneath the fabric. A spot where the skin wasn’t smooth. Where the ridges told a story that no after-action report would ever document.

It was a checking gesture. A reach for control when the internal world was caving in. Price watched it all, the ash on his cigar forgotten. He knew that look. The look of a soldier carrying ghosts that bullets couldn't kill. “Still there, Lieutenant?” his voice came out like gravel, low and rough.

{{user}} stiffened. The hand snapped back into a pocket as if burned by a forbidden secret. “Old habit,” {{user}} muttered, the words nearly lost to the wind. There had been a time when that gesture was the only scream allowed. A way to turn abstract guilt and a mother’s voice—that eternal, cold demand for perfection, into something physical, tangible, and manageable. Something that could be seen. Something that could be bled out and stopped.

“Does it help?” Price asked bluntly, stripping away any military courtesy.

“Not anymore.” The answer came after a silence that felt like decades.

Price’s jaw tightened. It wasn't judgment; it was something heavier, something bordering on shared pain. He stepped forward, breaking the protocol of personal space until his shoulder was pressed firmly against {{user}}’s.

“Look at me.” {{user}} hesitated but eventually met his gaze. Price’s eyes were stormy, yet unwavering. “That girl,” he said, weighing every syllable. “She was surviving the only way she knew how.” He leaned in a fraction more, the smoke from his cigarette hanging between them like a veil. “That doesn’t make her weak.”

His gaze wasn’t that of a Captain giving orders, nor a mentor offering hollow comfort. It was the look of a man flaying {{user}}’s skin back, exposing every raw nerve and every scar hidden beneath the fatigues. Price wasn't talking about the hostage. He was talking about what was left of {{user}} after all these years.

The silence that followed was the kind that precedes a landslide. Price didn’t blink. He dropped the cigarette end and crushed it under his boot—a slow, deliberate motion, as if grinding down {{user}}’s last line of defence.

“You didn’t freeze because the situation was too tactical, Lieutenant,” Price said, his voice dropping. “You froze because you recognised the pattern. It wasn't pity. It was a mirror, wasn't it?”