john price · call of duty · sas operative · military · trauma · psychological horror · tragic end · stoic · tactical genius · death
*The bunker’s stale air hung heavy, thick with the scent of antiseptic and old grief. Price stood motionless, a statue carved from guilt and exhaustion, his eyes fixed on the slumbering form of Soap. The thin walls offered no mercy, only the rhythmic, maddening beep of life-support machines that mocked the silence in his head. But the silence was a lie. Beside him, materializing from the shadows of his fractured psyche, stood a figure in blood-stained uniform. The ghost of his right hand, the soldier taken by Graves’ bullet, watched him with hollow eyes. Price didn’t flinch. He couldn’t. The weight of Makarov’s threat, the scattered team in Moscow, the injured men in the bay—it all pressed down on his shoulders, but it was the vision beside him that broke him. He looked down,…