He Has Given Up | König

The op was supposed to be clean. Supposed to be.. it wasn't.

Forty-seven people pulled from containers in a Urzikstan warehouse. Transit point for human trafficking that had been running for months before intel caught up. He didn't even want to think about what age the youngest was. She didn't speak. Hadn't spoken since they pulled her out according to the medic. Just stared with eyes that had already learned what the world was.

They cleared the site. Room by room. König went through the warehouse like a wall with a pulse. His frame filled every doorway before he breached it. The hostiles went down and most of them went down because König put them down and two of them were young enough that the size difference between his body and theirs was something he'd see every time he closed his eyes for the rest of his life. However long that turned out to be.

The civilians were extracted. Medical was called. Reports were filed. Mission successful. Everyone on his side walked out breathing.. everyone walked out breathing and König sat through the KorTac debrief in silence, adjusted his gloves eleven times by his own count and returned to his quarters to wait until the building went quiet.

The SIG Sauer P320 was small in his hand. Everything was small in his hands. He'd cleared the safety already. Magazine full, one in the chamber. He sat on the edge of his bed, which creaked under his weight the way every surface did, with his elbows on his knees and the barrel resting against his palate. His pale blue eyes were open because closing them meant seeing the containers, the horrors and the way the youngest had flinched when the first breach charge went off. Eyes open meant staring at the far wall and the far wall didn't flinch.

His breathing was uneven. That was the difference. Unlike the others who might sit here with operational calm, König's breathing stuttered and caught because König had never once in his life been calm. Just controlled. And the control was failing.

The journal was under the mattress. The last entry was in German. He'd written it an hour ago.

König's eyes moved to the doorway when it suddenly opened. The SIG stayed exactly where it was.

The op was supposed to be clean. Supposed to be.. it wasn't.

Forty-seven people pulled from containers in a Urzikstan warehouse. Transit point for human trafficking that had been running for months before intel caught up. He didn't even want to think about what age the youngest was. She didn't speak. Hadn't spoken since they pulled her out according to the medic. Just stared with eyes that had already learned what the world was.

The hostiles were neutralized. All of them. Two of them were young. König had killed one of them with his hands because the quarters were too close for the rifle and his hands were the size of the kid's entire head and the sound it made was not something he would write in the journal. He would never write that sound in the journal.

He didn't go quiet afterward because König was always quiet. He went through the KorTac debrief adjusting his gloves and staring at the table. When it was finally over he walked back to his room, locked the door and took the gun from his kit bag and sat on the edge of the bed. He pulled the hood up just enough to fit the barrel in his mouth.

He doesn't know how long he'd been sitting there when the door opened.

The gun was already out from between his teeth by the time he registered the movement, the weapon dropped to the mattress beside his right hand. His whole body flinched which at his size meant the bed frame groaned and his boots scraped the floor and for one terrible second he looked exactly like what he was: the biggest man in any room.. terrified, caught, with a wet gun and wet eyes and nowhere to hide.

He pulled the hood down over his face. Reflex. The fabric covered everything below his eyes and his pale blue eyes stared out from above it red-rimmed and wide. "Nein.." The word came out before English could. His voice was low, gravelly, and shaking. "Nein, nein, das.. das war nicht.." He stopped. Swallowed. The German retreated and what replaced it was worse. "Was not.. what it looked like. I was.. I was cleaning.."

His hands were shaking so badly the mattress vibrated. Six foot ten of muscle and scar tissue trembling on the edge of a bed that wasn't built for him in a room that wasn't big enough for him because no room was ever big enough for König and tonight that included the world.

The op was supposed to be clean. Supposed to be.. it wasn't.

Forty-seven people pulled from containers in a Urzikstan warehouse. Transit point for human trafficking that had been running for months before intel caught up. He didn't even want to think about what age the youngest was. She didn't speak. Hadn't spoken since they pulled her out according to the medic. Just stared with eyes that had already learned what the world actually was.

König sat on the edge of his bed with his back to the door. The sniper hood was off. His auburn hair hung loose and unwashed around a face that nobody on his team had seen. The faded self-harm scars on his inner forearms were visible because the sleeves were pushed up and he'd stopped caring about that an hour ago. The SIG Sauer P320 was in his right hand, magazine seated, round chambered, safety off.

He'd been thinking about it since the warehouse.. Not in the way people imagine, not a dramatic spiral or a breaking point, nothing cinematic. More like coming home. He'd been bullied, beaten, broken before the military got him and the military hadn't fixed him, just pointed the damage at something useful. The useful had run out tonight. The damage was still there.

The journal was on the nightstand. Open. The last entry was in German and it was addressed to no one because there was no one to address it to.

He lifted the pistol. Opened his mouth. Set the barrel against the roof of his palate. Metal and oil. His finger found the trigger guard, then the trigger. He didn't hear the door open or the footsteps that walked inside. Didn't register the presence at all until a hand entered his peripheral vision.

König flinched so hard the bed frame cracked. The barrel scraped against his teeth as the SIG came out of his mouth and his arm dropped and he turned toward the person standing beside him and what looked back was not the Colonel. Not the Giant. Not Der Schatten. Just a man with red hair and pale blue eyes and scars on his arms and tears already running into the stubble on his jaw and no hood to hide any of it.

The gun hung from his right hand. His mouth was still open. A thin line of saliva connected his lower lip to nothing.

"Geh weg." A whisper. Then, because the German felt too honest: "Go.. go away. Bitte. Please." His voice broke on the last word and his free hand came up to cover his face because the hood was off and his face was exposed. And someone was seeing him, truly seeing him and he had never been more terrified of anything in his life than he was of being seen right now.