scars do heal

4. he saw red

"The fuck were you thinking? Going behind my back, stealing a helo, forcing one of my pilots to fly you exactly where I said not to. And all for what, huh? Fucking nothing!" Graves paced the floor, the 141 stood in the briefing room, angry and defeated. "You wasted military equipment, searching for a dead rookie who wasn't even where you thought she would be. Now I've got General Shepherd on my ass asking questions and I'm well within my right to fuck you all over and get you shipped back home without a second thought."

"Watch who you're speaking to, pendejo," Vargas warned, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. "We don't answer to you. You're not the person in charge of us here. This is our base. So watch your mouth."

Nobody was in the mood to be reprimanded for their little mission last night. They were all too hell bent on getting back out there for you. But you weren't there. At firs,t they were a little relieved, thinking you'd managed to escape, but you'd just reached the evac point too late. So perhaps you'd found somewhere to hide out until you found a way to contact them, or maybe found some way to get back to the base. But what they found when they did reach your lookout point, most of their hope for you had suddenly been sucked from them.

-

"If she isn't out here, Price, how are we gonna explain this to Graves?" Gaz asked as they made their way through the familiar territory they were at not twenty four hours ago.

"She'll be here, she has to." That was all Price said. He didn't want to think that you wouldn't be there, because then he wouldn't know how to find you. But you were resourceful, you could have left a clue or a note of where you would be heading in case they did come back to look for you.

He led the excursion, and everyone else followed behind him in suit. Ghost and Alejandro looked at eachother knowingly, they were thinking the same thing. As much as everyone wanted you to be there, after what happened at the extraction point, bullets flying and the 141 being left in the shit and then losing Hassan, they were losing hope by the second.

Making it to the top of the hill, Price made his way over to where he left you yesterday. You weren't around. He couldn't see any footprints of which direction you could have headed, no indication that you'd left a clue to where you'd gone. "Shit," he muttered, crouching as he thought of his next move.

"Um, Captain?" Soap called over hesitantly, standing further into the trees, shielded from the sun by the enveloping canopy of thick branches and leaves above him. "Guys, you need to take a look over here." The team were all immediately filled with worry as they turned to where Soap was looking down behind a thick tree trunk. They made their way over, and Price followed behind them. The boys made a gap for their Captain to look at what Soap was indicating to show them.

Your helmet, your pack, your rifle. All strewn on the grassy forest floor. Price saw your radio and bent down to pick it up. It was smashed to pieces. He thought back to when he had tried to contact you at the helo, how not even static made it through his comms. Now it all made sense. Someone had done this to your radio. Someone was up here with you.

"Fuck," Ghost said, focusing everyone's attention on him as he picked up your helmet, looking at it intently.

"What is it, Ghost?" Price asked, tossing the broken radio to the floor with a soft thump. Ghost turned the helmet over in his gloved hand, and the boys' eyes widened simultaneously. Blood. Flecks of it all over your helmet. There was quite a bit of it. The red flecks scattered to your pack too, dried into the camo material, flaking off from the heat of the sun.

Nobody wanted to say it. There wasn't a body to prove it. But they were all thinking it.

"She's not dead," Price said, practically reading his team's minds, not sure if he was trying to convince his men, or himself. Probably both. "She's not."