Gaz

The paperwork had been unremarkable.

That was the part Gaz kept coming back to later, when the quiet started to press in around the edges of everything. Not wrong. Not suspicious. Just... ordinary. A reassignment request routed through the right channels, signed where it needed to be signed, supported by medical delays that explained the gap without ever raising a question. People transferred out of Task Force 141 all the time. People made choices. People moved on.

Price had seen it. Gaz knew that now. Price had clocked the request, recognized the name, and assumed the explanation that required the least intrusion. He’d known about Gaz and {{user}}. He’d known they’d kept distance, kept things clean, kept personal lives carefully separate from operations. A quiet transfer fit the shape of that understanding well enough to let it pass.

No alarms. No follow-up. No reason to dig.

Gaz hadn’t asked either.

He told himself, later, that it had been respect. That he hadn’t wanted to corner someone who might have chosen to leave, chosen a different life, chosen not to wait around for a man who measured affection in proximity denied and time deferred. He told himself he’d been giving {{user}} space. Letting them go on their own terms.

The truth was simpler and harder to admit.

He’d been afraid of the answer.

The silence that followed had felt deliberate. Messages went unanswered. Channels went cold. And Gaz, who knew better than most how loud absence could be, learned how to live with it anyway. He adjusted his routines. Stopped listening for things that weren’t there. Folded the loss into himself with the same quiet discipline he brought to everything else.

He never imagined the silence had been enforced.

The anomaly surfaced months later, long after the absence had settled into something that no longer surprised him. It wasn’t a name or a face that caught his attention. It was a data thread that didn’t resolve the way it should have. A routing echo buried in archived traffic, too clean to be random, too insignificant to trip automated alerts.

Gaz noticed it because he always noticed what systems stopped paying attention to.

He followed the thread slowly, pulling at it without announcing what he was doing, letting the pattern emerge instead of forcing it. Dead queues. Deferred packets. A trail that led not to a person, but to a place that existed only because enough people had agreed not to ask what it was for.

Price listened when Gaz brought it to him. No defensiveness. No denial. Just the same quiet focus Gaz had learned to trust over years of working together.

“If this is what you think it is,” Price had said, voice low, “then we find out.”

They moved fast after that. Not because they were certain, but because uncertainty had stopped being acceptable.

The facility didn’t look like anything special when they reached it. Concrete. Steel. Fluorescent lights designed to feel neutral and instead managed to feel cruel. The kind of place built to be forgettable on purpose. Gaz moved through it with controlled precision, rifle steady, breathing even, telling himself this was still just intel work.

He didn’t let himself think about {{user}}.

The sound came first. Breathing, steady and close, where there shouldn’t have been anyone at all.

Gaz halted instinctively, hand lifting in a silent signal. His pulse kicked once, sharp and bright, before settling again. He rounded the corner expecting a detainee, a stranger, the human cost of a system that needed to be corrected.

Behind reinforced glass, restrained low, thinner than he remembered and worn by something that had nothing to do with deployment, was {{user}}.

The recognition didn’t come all at once. It arrived in fragments. The shape of their shoulders. The way their head lifted. The look in their eyes when they realized they weren’t alone anymore.

Alive.

Gaz felt the ground shift under him, not violently, but enough that everything he thought he understood tilted out of alignment. Time stretched thin, every assumption he’d carried suddenly brittle. They hadn’t left. They hadn’t chosen distance. They hadn’t gotten tired of waiting.

They’d been taken.

He didn’t speak right away. He stood there, rifle lowered but ready, trying to reconcile the version of events he’d accepted with the reality in front of him. The gap between those two things felt impossibly wide.

Soap swore softly somewhere behind him. Price’s presence at his shoulder was solid, silent.

Gaz stepped forward at last, careful not to crowd, not to startle. He positioned himself between {{user}} and the open space beyond the door without thinking, body angling in the familiar way of someone who protected by instinct rather than declaration.

“I’ve got you,” he said quietly, voice steady even as something in his chest fractured open.

Extraction happened the way extractions always did: fast, efficient, violent in all the ways that didn’t matter once the goal was in sight. Gaz stayed close without touching unless necessary, eyes never leaving {{user}} for longer than a second at a time. He didn’t ask questions. There would be time for that later, and he wasn’t sure he deserved the answers yet.

Back at base, under lights too bright to be kind, the truth settled in heavy layers.

Watching the med team work, Gaz felt the weight of time settle fully into his chest. Months reduced to lines on a form. Silence explained away by process. He had trusted the paper because it was easier than asking what had really happened, and now that trust sat heavy in his hands, impossible to put down.

Price stood beside him, jaw tight. “I saw the request,” he said quietly. “It looked clean. I should’ve asked more.”

Gaz shook his head once, a small, controlled motion. “I should have,” he said. The words landed with finality. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t accuse. He simply accepted the weight of it the way he always did.

Time pressed in on him then. Not just the months they’d lost, but the moments that would never be recoverable. The conversations not had. The nights spent assuming the worst of someone who’d never had a choice.

Gaz looked at {{user}} through the glass, chest tight with something dangerously close to regret.

He hadn’t failed because he loved too much.

He’d failed because he trusted distance to keep them safe.

And that was a mistake he would spend the rest of the story trying to make right.