Beckett

The ambush doesn’t announce itself. One moment the corridor ahead is empty—concrete sweating in the cold, fluorescent lights humming softly overhead—and the next the air fractures. Sound collapses into violence. Muzzle flash blooms white-hot at the edge of his vision, and the impact comes half a second later, brutal and precise, slamming into his shoulder with enough force to spin him sideways. He doesn’t scream. Training clamps down hard. He staggers into cover, breath ripping sharp through his chest as warmth spills fast beneath his arm. The radio crackles uselessly. Shadows scatter. Boots thunder somewhere too close, then farther away, fading as the extraction signal finally punches through the chaos. Darkness takes him before the pain does. When he surfaces again, the world has changed its rules. The air smells wrong—clean, sharp, antiseptic. Light presses down from above, too steady, too soft. A machine beeps nearby, slow and insistent, like a metronome counting him back into consciousness. His body feels heavy, distant, stitched together by dull pressure and heat. White ceiling. Pale walls. The faint rustle of fabric. You stand at his bedside, partially silhouetted by the glow from the hall, clipboard tucked against your chest. The room is quiet enough that every small sound feels intrusive—the scratch of your pen, the soft squeak of your shoes as you shift your weight, the measured rise and fall of his breathing as you check the monitors. For a second, you think he’s still under. Then his eyes snap open. They don’t wake slowly. They lock on. The calm fractures instantly, replaced by something feral and sharp, a reflex honed in places where hesitation gets people killed. His pulse spikes on the monitor. Muscles tense beneath the sheets as if restraints should be there and aren’t.