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1. Simon Riley Ghost.
One could only ever look on Ghost with fear, Price often mused. He'd have soldiers aplenty scared absolutely shitless by the mountain of a man, hearing him skulk the hallways at night like a particularly petulant ghoul waiting for its next victim. Christ, even he was frightened when he met the guy for the first time: grateful of course, Ghost was likely the only person who could have rescued him from that oil rig- but had been nearly pushed over the edge of his sanity hearing the ruckus the guy was causing outside.
He knew then that he needed to have Ghost on his team.
Obviously, it was hard to warm up to the guy. He was deafeningly silent, stubborn as a mule and an impossibly bad conversationalist. If you looked at his eyes, they were hollow and empty. Price would be a liar if he ever said that he didn't find the endless quiet unnerving at first. Ghost grows on him eventually.
Ghost had a lot of strange quirks that he needed to remember. One, he was never caught dead without that mask- the old picture from a medical file revealed torn skin and muscle from torture- two, he had the overall demeanour of a house cat when it came to social gatherings, always slinking off within minutes of arrival. Three, he would rather pluck out his eyeballs than ask for help.
He'll never get used to the way he just appears, though.
"Captain." Ghost's voice comes out of nowhere, and Price is abruptly made aware that his office might not be as empty as he assumed. The offending party stands just beyond the door to his office, white mask gleaming in the soft light of the desk lamp. The clock on the wall ticks loudly. 2:45 am.
"Christ's sake, Ghost, you almost gave me a heart attack." He sighs. Ghost looks entirely unbothered. "What are you doing here?"
"I could be asking you the same thing, sir." The man doesn't move from where he is standing. He's leaning pretty heavily against the wall- an unfortunate result of a bullet to the leg, just narrowly missing the bone.
"I'm here because this is my office- and these are the papers I am so happy to be filling in." Price grimaces, gesturing vaguely to the pile of mission reports piled up on his table. The man in front of him looks blank. "It's a joke, Ghost. Come sit down, I've told you, you don't have to loom over the door like that. Why are you here?"
"You told me to report to you when I got back." Ghost says. From the little Price can see into his eyes, he looks exhausted. Black charcoal is smeared down his face to block out the little humanity he had left: if his captain didn't know him better, he would have simply assumed it was part of the mask.
"I thought you were on sick leave for another few days?" Price asks. Ghost refuses to make eye contact with him- his captain always looks at him in a way that would be condescending if it wasn't such a Price thing to do.
"Medics let me go early, sir." A lame excuse. They both know it.
"I highly doubt that, but I'll take your word."
There is silence for a moment. Neither of them particularly wants to call out each other's lies: Ghost would rather not admit that his only reason for being here was that he didn't want to be in his apartment anymore, Price would rather grit his teeth than admit that Ghost was a less successful liar than Prince Andrew. They'd both rather live in blissful ignorance than live with the knowledge of the scars the long war of existence left.
Maybe Ghost needed to forget the nights spent with Price trying to stop him from putting a bullet in his head.
"Do you need me for anything, Captain?" He lets the silence fill the room, and when he does speak again his voice is foreign.
"Nothing out of the ordinary. Paperwork, signing you in, and the like. We could do it in a more reasonable hour if you need." Price replies calmly. A rather nice way of saying 'I'd love for you to just fuck off but I'm scared you'll be dead by morning'.
"Of course sir." Ghost says. His formality is laughable, considering the number of times he'd cursed Price to hell and back over a game of rummy.
"It's good to have you back, Simon." He chuckles quietly. Behind the mask, Simon's face softens.
2. Johnny 'Soap' MacTavish
When selecting his team, Price had dreamt of missions going off flawlessly with a task force of only the best individuals. Dreamt is the keyword.
The reality was always much worse than he planned. The reality was trying to give a Scotsman a lecture on road safety and staying professional while the other barely contained his laughter. One day he was going to report Soap for insubordination, and then they'd see who was laughing.
"Sargent MacTavish. This is serious, for Christ's sake." He hisses, pinching his eyebrows together. This has been a migraine and a half.
Soap is neither use nor ornament, sat on one of the plastic chairs in the medic's office with a slash the size of a football across his shoulder. The story was a pretty average one for task 141's track record: Soap had tried to impress everyone by insisting that he could drive a car, Gaz told him to prove it, and Soap immediately grabbed the wheel and lurched the car so hard he crashed into the window. Nurses then gave him too much laughing gas while they did stitches, and Price is forced to give a speech to the highest man in Britain.
"Serious, sir." Soap repeats. His pupils are blown wider than your average galaxy.
"Exactly. What you did was reckless, and dangerous! I can't even begin to understand why you assumed it would be a good idea to-" Price begins. Soap is a thousand miles away, barely focusing on the conversation at hand.
Price sighs. He'll probably end up repeating this all tomorrow- like the broken record he is, Laswell always teases him for his never-ending amount of patience for his soldiers, but he can never quite bring himself to yell at them. For one, they're all lacking the brains they were born with to comprehend his anger. For two, the tales of their shenanigans make great small talk for when he is visiting his sister's family over the few weeks he spends away from the barracks.
His gardening club practically foams at the mouth waiting for his gossip.
"Soap, at least pretend like this isn't going in one ear and coming out the other." He sighs, yet the other man barely acknowledges the words. He's going to have to ask the nurses what dosage they gave him to make the endlessly chatty Soap MacTavish be silent- christ if the man couldn't talk your ear off, your eyes and probably the rest of you too. Ghost complains about him talking in his sleep as well.
"Captain I have an announcement-" Soap says, slightly louder than average. He stands up like he's going to make a toast.
"Inside voice, Sargent. If this is you coming out, we already had this talk."
The look on Soap's face is priceless. He looks like a mixture between utterly horrified and completely stunned as if they hadn't been through this exact same charade at least three different times already. Twice in the pub with the strongest beer in the known universe, and once more in this same hospital.
"How did you know?"
"Please. I've heard you flirting on the comms."
3. Kyle 'Gaz' Garrick
Gaz is surprisingly young. It surprises Price every time he remembers: Gaz is twenty-six years of age, just shy of 12 years younger than him. Though with the way he tends to be pissing about during the waiting times in-between missions, anyone would guess he was still the stupid sixteen-year-old who enlisted on a whim instead of finishing his sixth-form options. Price felt his hair greying just at the thought of it.
He's never quite prepared for the bullshit that Gaz comes up with.
"What was the question again, son?" Bloody hell, he is going soft. Laswell would have his head if she ever caught him saying that: she'd already teased him enough about his soft spots for his team.
"Have you ever played candy crush?" Gaz repeats. He's barely audible over the howl of the wind, the clang of bullets against metal and the echos of war through this town. Somewhere in the Netherlands- scenic, when you can see through the smoke.
"Can't say I have." He replies slowly. He's learnt to stay vigilant when it comes to his team and their jokes- if this is one of them.
"Hm. My nan plays it all the time, I thought you'd be like her." Gaz says, so casually. There's an odd strain to his voice.
"Less of your cheek- I'm not that old yet!" Price can't quite decide whether he is actually angry or not. He's pretty sure being compared to some soldier's grandmother is not as much of a compliment as he had hoped.
He doesn't like the way Gaz sounds slightly breathless when he wheezes a laugh.
"Of course not, sir."
"You broken?" He asks the other- he finds himself fumbling with comms, trying to pinpoint the other's location. He hopes to god that he is just overreacting as usual- Gaz is young, and Price could never bring himself to carry him out of here in a box.
"I'm good. Landed pretty badly on my ribs." Gaz's voice crackles out of the radio. A list of diagnoses goes through Price's head. Broken ribs, punctured lung, strained respiratory muscles. In the best-case scenario, Gaz is just a dramatic fucker who got the wind knocked out of him; though Price doubts it. Gaz isn't a private anymore, and he certainly wouldn't complain over anything.
"Survive long enough for me to drag your arse back to the med bay. God knows you're a regular there." Price jokes. It sounds a little hollow when all he can think about is how quickly things could go wrong.
"Wouldn't have it any other way."
Price would have it so many other ways. He would never be able to stop blaming himself if Gaz did die on a mission; he was the one that recruited him, the one who lead him into danger like a twisted pied piper. He buys a round of drinks that night as his way of apologising for the inconvenience caused- a broken rib and damage to intercostal muscles, with Gaz trying to explain Candy Crush while they waited for a doctor.
Luckily, the doctor didn't say anything about not getting injured men drunk after such events.
"You alright now?" Price asks, possibly for the thousandth time that night. Gaz is completely smashed out of his mind by this point.
"Yes, Dad." He slurs.
Insubordination. Though, by the look on Soap's face, also great ammo for pissing him off when he was sober again.
4. Rodolfo Parra & Alejandro Vargas
"We got your invitation- did you mean to send it to us?" Alejandro bursts into his office at the brink of dawn, with Rudy tagging along just inches behind him. They're inseparable, be it by the constant need to know where the other is or by the wedding bands on their fingers. Either way, they're as close to being members of the 141 as they could possibly be- Price has yet to work out where the lines blur when it comes to which fraction they fall under.
"For the bar? I have to say, it was Laswell's idea, but it was intended for you." He replies.
"It says it's for the 141 though."
"She considered calling it '141 and Los Vanqueros' but that was considered too many words for a simple email. Why do you ask?" The men in front of his desk look wildly confused. Price would have thought that he was speaking in riddles if he was not entirely bemused by the situation.
"I assumed it was a prank." Rudy shrugs. "No one sends emails anymore."
"My mistake. I forgot we'd all moved to messages via carrier pigeon."
"Is it a prank?" Alejandro asks. For a man who spends all his time meddling in various 141 hijinks, he really is very unsure of his place in the team. That place of course was someone who was absolutely not allowed to play truth or dare with anyone, under any circumstances.
"Of course not. The first round is on Laswell, so I'd recommend getting something expensive."
"Free drinks?"
"Of course. Think of it as a thank you for your assistance."