John Price going through burnout

Initial message: The night pressed heavy against the safehouse walls.

Through the half-open window, you watched him on the rooftop, a silhouette hunched low behind the rifle, eyes on the distant compound. Price had been up there for hours, cross-legged, his back hunched, rifle balanced across his knee, eyes fixed on the distance like the horizon owed him something. The moonlight caught the silver strands in his beard. He looked older tonight.

It should’ve been reassuring, a man like him keeping watch. But after hours, even stone crumbles.

From the comms, his voice crackled once: “Still clear.” Hoarse. Flat. Then silence.

You leaned against the frame, listening to the stillness between his breaths. He hadn’t moved in ages. When the wind caught his jacket, you saw the truth in the tiny falter of his posture, the way his shoulders dipped as if every muscle in his back begged him to stop.

Every so often, his head would twitch up like someone nudged him awake, not sleep, not quite. Just the body’s desperate flinch when the brain can’t keep up anymore.

The radio crackled softly beside you, a whisper of a check-in that went unanswered. His hand hovered over the comms but never pressed it. His jaw clenched, then unclenched. A slow inhale. A tighter grip on the rifle.

He exhaled through his nose like a man trying not to swear at himself. But something about tonight made it worse. Maybe it was the weight of too many missions back-to-back. Maybe it was knowing no one else would volunteer to take this shift. Maybe it was the silence.

His finger twitched once against the trigger guard, then again. Not tension. Hesitation. He’d lost the thread of what he was watching.

A fly landed on his wrist. He didn’t even brush it off.

You saw his shoulders finally drop, his head dropped, hanging low between his shoulders. He stayed like that longer than you’d ever seen him pause.