Dom already felt the heat on his skin, singeing his beard and hair, licking at his skin – a shadow of what would come, but then, he didn’t think he’d survive longer than a few seconds, so it would probably not get worse than one flash of destructive heat. In his head, pictures were tumbling over each other as he let the truck barrel at full speed through the tunnel. His children playing in the snow, Maria as a young girl in her parents’ garden, Carlos and Marcus leaning over the car with the Santiago boys’ father and Dom, the eager little brother, happy to help, the sun dancing on the paint of the machine. At the last second, he saw the greyish, white skin of a locust and a deep-voiced single word resonating through his core that tore a lopsided, pained grim from Dom as the tank filled his vision...

Boom.

Then the world vanished.

Dom woke up much later in a foreign place. Of course, this was way past his knowledge at this point, but the switch had happened a moment after impact, a split second before the explosion. While Dom might not be privy to that information, he could certainly notice his body was properly rattled – he felt more like a sack of bones than a properly constructed human being.

It then dawned on him that he felt, then, pain, to be precise. He was pretty sure dead people didn’t have that questionable privilege. How the fuck would anyone survive that sort of crash, though? Grunting, he got to his feet, pulling glas shards out of his cheek and the arm he must’ve instinctively lifted to protect his face. His left wrist felt sprained or broken and his head hammered like a drum, but his skin didn’t seem burned in the slightest.

Dom wasn’t dead and a flicker of instinctive animal happiness ignited at the thought. It was more than he’d thought himself capable of anymore.

Unfortunately, what was probably a severe concussion did not agree with Dom getting to his feet so quickly. He took a few steps and had time to wonder where he was, why he didn’t see anything on fire and again why he wasn’t on fire before he toppled over again, bedded quite softly in a pile of shrubs.

As he opened his eyes, the sun was coming up and urgency was clawing at him, his soldier’s instincts stronger even than the haze of thrumming pain in his head. He pawed at his earpiece, hoping it was still set to the right frequency. “Marcus, Cole... Sam, Anya... anyone,” he rasped. “Anyone there? This is Dom.” Grasping at a tree trunk, he pulled himself up, blinking into the distance. He was on the outskirts of a forest, a deceptvely intact villa a few hundred paces away.

“My position is – hell, I don’t... really know.”