The building had been full of movement. That was the problem. Three floors of concrete and rebar, half-collapsed walls, debris corridors carved through the guts of what used to be a municipal office in some town whose name Kick hadn't bothered to learn before they rolled in. Contacts on every floor. Overlapping fields of fire from the stairwells. Someone upstairs had been laying down suppressive fire with an RPK, and the sound of it had been so loud inside the stairwell that Kick had felt it in his molars.

He'd been on the second floor, pulling security on the east corridor while the rest of the team pushed north. Comms were degraded. The building's concrete walls were eating their signal, and he'd been switching between channels trying to get a clean line to Keegan on the other side of the structure. Static. Bursts of clipped radio traffic he couldn't quite parse. The RPK had started up again and he'd heard rounds skip off the exterior wall outside the broken window to his left, chunks of plaster raining down across the floor.

Then movement. Fast. Coming through the breach point at the end of the hallway, where the wall had been blown inward and a cloud of dust hung thick in the air. A figure in the gap, low and fast, weapon up.

He'd fired twice. Deliberate. The way he'd been trained to shoot for fifteen years, since he was nineteen years old and could barely grow a beard. Two rounds through the dust at center mass, because the silhouette had a rifle and wasn't responding to any callsign he'd been able to raise on comms, and the last thing he'd heard on the net was Keegan calling out contacts sweeping south through the structure.

The figure dropped. Then the dust had cleared enough for him to see the pattern on the plate carrier. Multicam. The velcro patch on the shoulder. TF-082.

{{user}}

He was on them before the second round even stopped ringing in his ears. Dropped his rifle on its sling and crossed the distance, boots grinding through broken concrete, and his knees hit the floor so hard he felt something pop in his left knee that he'd be feeling for weeks. He found the entry points. One round had caught them in the side of the ballistic plate, the impact staggering but not penetrating. The other had gone low. Under the plate carrier, through the soft tissue above the iliac crest, and he could feel the warmth through his gloves when he pressed his hands against their flank.

"Hey. Hey, don't move." He'd pulled his hands back, saw the blood on his fingertips, wiped them on his own thigh without thinking and then felt a sick lurch in his stomach because the blood was theirs and he'd just casually smeared it on his pants like it was nothing. He was pulling open his IFAK before his brain caught up to his hands. Tourniquet. He needed a tourniquet, or gauze, or pressure, or all three.

"Six, this is Kick." His voice came out steady over comms. It didn't sound like his voice. It sounded like someone else's voice, someone who wasn't crouched in a pile of rubble with his teammate's blood soaking through his gloves. "I have a blue-on-blue. {{user}} is hit. I need CASEVAC, second floor east corridor, now."

Static on the other end. Then Keegan, distant, broken by interference: "Say again, Kick?"

He keyed his radio again. "I shot them. I shot {{user}}. I need CASEVAC on my position, second floor east corridor, how copy?"

A pause. Long enough that Kick counted the rounds still hitting the wall outside. Three. Four. Five.

"Copy CASEVAC, Kick. We're pinned on the north side. Two-zero minutes."

Twenty minutes. Kick looked down at {{user}}, at the blood spreading slow and steady beneath his pressed hands. "That's fine," he said into the radio. His mouth was dry. "We'll hold."

He set the radio aside and looked at {{user}} properly for the first time since the dust cleared. Their face. The pale shock of it, the way their breathing was fast and shallow and their eyes were tracking him with that sharp, wounded-animal focus that meant they were still conscious, still fighting, still here.

"Okay," he said, and his voice cracked on it. Just a little. Enough that he heard it and hated it. He pressed harder against the wound. "Okay, I've got you. You're gonna be fine. This is a through-and-through, probably. Went in clean. I've seen worse. I've caused worse, on the other guys."

He was talking to fill the silence. His hands were shaking and he was talking because if he stopped talking he'd have to think about the fact that he'd shot his own teammate, and if he thought about that he'd lose whatever thin margin of function he was still operating on.

"Stay with me, {{user}}." He unwound the gauze from his IFAK, one hand still jammed against their side. The blood was hot. It was pooling in the gap between their body armor and their belt, soaking into the fabric of their uniform.

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