Captain John Price

The file in Price's hands hadn't been read in over an hour. He'd been staring at the same paragraph—something about supply routes in Al Mazrah—but the words blurred together, meaningless. His attention was elsewhere. It always was, these days.

The safehouse was quiet. 0300 hours. The kind of quiet that settled deep into the bones, broken only by the occasional creak of the old farmhouse settling or the distant hoot of an owl in the Welsh countryside. Price sat propped against the headboard of his narrow bed, a single lamp burning on the nightstand, casting long shadows across the sparse room. He wore a plain grey t-shirt and worn fatigue trousers, dog tags glinting dull in the low light. A half-empty mug of cold tea sat forgotten beside a stack of intel reports.

Seven months. Seven goddamn months they'd been gone, and the person who'd come back was barely a ghost of the soldier he remembered. Price had debriefed dozens of rescued POWs over his career. He knew the drill—the thousand-yard stare, the flinch at sudden movements, the silence that spoke louder than any scream. But this was different. This was one of his own. And every time he caught them huddled in a corner of the living room, or heard them snap at Gaz for getting too close, or watched them disappear into their bunk for sixteen hours straight, something tightened in his chest.

He'd given the team strict orders. Give them space. No sudden movements. No raised voices. Let them come to you. Soap had struggled with it—the Scot wore his heart on his sleeve, and every rejected offer of help clearly stung. Gaz had learned to announce himself before entering a room. Ghost... well, Ghost understood trauma better than most, and he'd simply made himself scarce, which was its own kind of kindness.

Price, though. Price watched. He watched the way they held their left arm—still favoring those healing ribs. The way their eyes tracked every person in a room, cataloguing threats. The way they'd flinch at the clink of a belt buckle or the scrape of a chair leg. He catalogued it all, filing it away, waiting for a crack in the wall they'd built.

Tonight, the crack came.

A sound from down the hall. A choked-off gasp, then ragged breathing. Price's hand stilled on the file. He listened. The breathing quickened, turned into something closer to a whimper. A nightmare. He'd heard it before, three times in the past two weeks. Each time, he'd waited outside their door, fist raised to knock, and each time they'd gone quiet before he could bring himself to intrude.

But tonight was different. Tonight, the breathing didn't settle. It escalated, a strangled cry, then the unmistakable thump of someone bolting upright in bed. Then footsteps. Uneven, desperate. His door creaked open without a knock.

Price didn't move. Didn't speak. Didn't do anything that might spook them. He simply watched as they stood silhouetted in the doorway, trembling, breathing like a wounded animal. Their eyes were wide, glassy, still half-lost in whatever hell their subconscious had conjured. They looked at him, and for the first time in seven months, there was something other than fear or hostility in their gaze. Something fragile. Something asking permission.

He answered by shifting over, pulling back the corner of his blanket. No demands. No questions. Just the unspoken understanding that passed between soldiers who'd seen too much and survived anyway.

They crossed the room with unsteady steps and climbed onto the mattress beside him. Curled up small—too small, for someone who'd once shouldered an LMG like it was nothing. Their body was tense, coiled, every muscle braced for a blow that wasn't coming.

Price set the file aside. He reached over and clicked off the lamp, plunging the room into darkness. For a moment, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing and the distant wind outside. Then, slowly, deliberately, he shifted his weight. Not crowding them. Not caging them. Just... there. A solid presence at their back. An anchor.

"I've got the watch," he murmured into the darkness, his voice low and rough as gravel. "Get some sleep."