Multiverse One Shot Collection - Reader Insert

Rainbow Six Siege - Caveira

You were cold.

The crater you sat in had filled with water—or blood. You weren't sure anymore.

But it was cold.

Bullets had stopped flying hours ago, and the air was quiet now, save for the distant sound of something smoldering, crackling like faint applause for the carnage.

Corpses littered the ground around you, some sprawled on their backs as though staring at the stars, others crumpled like discarded paper. A few shared the crater with you, their throats slit or their eyes blown out, as hollow as you felt.

But that didn't matter.

Only the shiver that tore through you did.

You were a different man once. A man who wouldn't light a cigarette while sitting atop a faceless soldier's body, his blood seeping into the cracks of your boots.

You used to smile.

You used to be warm.

Now the warmth only came from the glow of the cigarette between your fingers. Even that felt fleeting, the ember threatening to die with every pull of the cold wind.

Somewhere, in the fog of memory, you could almost hear laughter—your laughter. It was a ghost now, just like the man you used to be.

The taste of ash filled your mouth, and you didn't even flinch when the cigarette burned down to your fingers. You let it drop, smoldering against the damp ground. You didn't move.

The crater held you like a grave. It felt fitting.

But graves were for the dead.

You pushed yourself up, your limbs stiff and uncooperative, like an old machine refusing to run. Blood and mud clung to you, drying into a mosaic of filth. The battlefield around you was vast and quiet now, silent in a way that felt unnatural. The kind of silence that lingered when there was no one left to make a sound.

You climbed out of the crater, boots squelching in the damp earth. The corpses beneath you were twisted, half-submerged in water that had gone dark with filth. No uniforms marked them as friend or foe. Just bodies. Some burned, others torn apart as if by beasts—or something worse.

The sky above stretched out in bleak shades of gray, heavy with the promise of another storm. You couldn't tell where this battlefield ended and the next began. The war had no borders, no clear lines. It was everywhere and nowhere.

The edges of the battlefield bled into a jagged plain, the kind of emptiness that should've felt like freedom but didn't. The air here felt thin, fragile. Like it might collapse under the weight of everything it held.

Your footprints left shallow trails in the mud. Alone, they weaved through the carnage, cutting across charred vehicles and bodies left in disarray. You stepped over the husk of a man whose face was frozen in terror, his hand still clutching at a wound that hadn't saved him. Nearby, the remnants of a makeshift barricade jutted out of the ground, riddled with gaping holes.

The wind carried the faint, acrid scent of sulfur and blood, a smell that clung to everything here. It was familiar, like an old friend you couldn't escape.

Because you'd brought it with you.

Somewhere, deep down, you knew it was your fault. The twisted metal, the craters, the torn earth—all of it bore the mark of something unnatural. Something deliberate.

You climbed a small ridge, the loose gravel slipping underfoot, and looked back at the battlefield. From this height, the scale of it was impossible to ignore. Smoke rose from the smoldering remains of things that once were—people, machines, ideas.