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The day is already bleak when Ghost receives the call.
It’s been overcast the past few days; a dreary, grey sheet of clouds hangs thick in the air with the smell of rain, though droplets never quite breach their containment. It’s been colourless the past few days; everything blends together into one undiscernable mass of ennui as nothing of significance plans its occurrence.
When the phone rings, it’s Ghost’s personal phone.
No one ever calls his personal phone.
He pauses before answering, staring at the device like it’s diseased. It’s rare that fear ever jolts his heart, even for just a beat, and it’s even more rare that fear drives up his spine. He picks up.
“Simon?”
In hindsight, that should have been the final nail in the coffin.
“Price? What is it?”
Soap and Price had been on a mission for the past week in the Middle East, something minor, yet somehow classified enough that even Ghost couldn’t pry the information out of anyone—Soap, specifically. They were estimated to return two days from now. Price shouldn’t be calling, and yet—
And yet.
“Simon,” Price repeats, more firm this time. Reassuring, despite what was to come. “I suggest you sit down for this, son.”
Ghost doesn’t listen. He barely acknowledges the sentiment—all he knows is that if he grips his phone any tighter it might break. Price takes the silence as his cue to continue.
And when Price tells him Soap is dead, Ghost quietly hangs up and sets the phone down as calm as manageable, and walks away. It isn’t that he refuses to accept it—in fact, he accepts it all too quickly. It’s that he doesn’t quite want to process it.
His shutdown is immediate, familiar, and scarily welcomed.
A funeral is arranged in short time; not many are in attendance other than the remainders of 141. Ghost maintains his composure, even wandering up to the closed casket on display at the head of the church. He maintains his composure, even tracing his fingers over the glossy finish of the wood, staring intently at its surface like it’d be enough to revive the deceased.
Ghost knows, particularly at this moment, that he had always had a soft spot for Soap. But now, left without substance, the gap in his heart can only harden with the rest of him.
He remains stoic through ceremony and speech, through tears shed by others and through carrying the coffin to the hearse. The heft of the casket leaves an impression on Ghost’s shoulder, and even after the physical weight is long gone, it never lifts.
Rain greets them at the cemetery after days of holding off, almost like it had been waiting for this moment with cruel anticipation. Cold soaks through Ghost’s blazer as the casket is lowered into the grave. There still isn’t a proper headstone to mark the tomb.
Ghost fades into the rain, unannounced and unnoticed. He’s attended as much as he can bear. It was time to go home.
He breaks once his apartment door is shut. Ghost slumps against it, pressing the heels of his palms to his eyes to relieve the pressure in his head. No tears would well—he had long since lost the ability to cry—but the ache of absence grows overwhelmingly.
Ghost takes a deep breath. He takes his mask off and repeats. Air seems scarce. It breathes thin and suffocating as if he were standing atop Everest. For a while, Ghost wouldn’t know how to understand, let alone describe the feeling. All he knows is that it’s a hurt somehow incomparable to any physical injury he’s ever sustained—and he doesn’t like it one bit.
A shame, as it burrows into his chest as an indefinite fixture. Later, Ghost would realize that feeling is called bereavement, but that’s too long of a word for the moment. For the moment, it is simply grief.
And so it is grief that becomes his newest companion. A friend, to replace one lost, though it’s neither kind nor welcome. It looms like a shadow for days, weeks, months, and Ghost can’t seem to shake it.
After a week, he still mourns openly with himself, stuck with reminders of Soap around his living space, traces left behind for him to clean. After two, he finally resets, and returns to his prior functions. After a month, he visits Soap’s grave for the first time, just a day prior to deployment for a new operation. The morning following, Price would ask about Ghost’s wellbeing, and he would claim he’s the same as always. The lie would be spoken as natural as he’d breathe, and Price would know better than to question it. They’ve all noticed the space left by a dead man. It occupies more room than a physical presence, menacing and difficult to ignore, but still they press on. The wound is still relatively fresh, after all.
The mission goes off without a hitch. Ghost is home again after another month, and the cycle repeats.
He visits Soap’s grave again, but this time he sits.
“I wasn’t supposed to outlive you, Johnny,” Ghost remarks, melancholic. “Thought you knew that.”
It’s all he says. He exists silently for another hour. The weather grows colder, the sky darker. Ghost goes home, and wonders how everything went wrong.
When everything went wrong.
Ghost is back in the field a week later; wash, rinse, repeat, he thinks. Wash, rinse, repeat.
He finds himself more reserved than usual without Soap to make him talk. It really is the small things—the little reminders of how life has been altered in the most inconvenient of moments.
Dust doesn’t settle for another three months. Soap’s death moves to the back-burner, but it doesn’t dare disappear just yet. Ghost might compare it to a plague, but perhaps that was speaking ill of the dead in some strange, incomprehensible way.
Though, it doesn’t quite help when Soap is the only thing on Ghost’s mind nearly every 3A.M., a time he regularly finds himself awake, laying in bed, staring up at an unchanging ceiling. Even in the afterlife, it seems, Soap persists in being a nuisance.
(A lie, but Ghost rests easy in the lighthearted accusation.)
It’s a clouding thought, foggy and inescapable since Ghost has nothing else to turn to at such an hour. It’s the hour of pondering, and the hour of being trapped in a self-contained loop either burst by sleep or the rising sun. This time, however, by the near inaudible sound of jangling keys and poor tries at jamming them into the lock.
Ghost frowns. He’s up in an instant, snapped to attention as if he were in the field and not his own home. He slips a knife from the block in his kitchen on his way to the door, his footsteps hasty, yet silent. The attempted intruder whispers curses after the telltale sound of keys dropping to the floor.
Ghost presses to the wall next to the hinges of the door, arm outstretched. His thumb hooks under the handle, his index finger positioned to flick the lock open. When he swings the door back in one swift motion, the world falls silent.
As the dead, some might say.
There is no movement from anyone or anything for an eternity, no shuffling of feet, no rustle of clothes. Ghost is poised to attack, but he never finds the need.
Because when he finally peers around the door, pure, genuine shock blossoms in his chest while realization encroaches fiercely from the edges. The knife falls from his grip, clattering deafeningly against the hardwood. Ghost would curse himself for the reaction later, but now it stands that the impossible had been accomplished: catching him off guard, and to the extent that it renders him speechless.
The idiot standing opposite of him has the gall to smile.
“What’s wrong, Simon?” Soap asks, a teasing lilt to his voice. “You look like you’ve seen… well. A ghost.”
Ghost feels naked in that moment, just briefly. As Soap’s eyes bore into his own, bore into his face, he can’t help but feel exposed.
Of course, his first instinct is to sock Soap in the jaw, because goddamnit it’s what he deserves, but Ghost doesn’t act on the urge. Instead he falls—almost collapses—forward, wrapping his arms unbearably tight around the source of his heartache. Soap never falters. He never tenses.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” Ghost utters flatly, voice thin and distant. He squeezes then relaxes, but he does not let go.
“I am.” Soap nods, chin digging into Ghost’s shoulder. He has managed to worm his arms around Ghost’s middle, though his biceps remain pinned to his sides. “I’m sorry.”
The silence that lays between them is long, drawn-out—but comfortable. In the wee hours, as the rest of their world sleeps, they stay quiet, avoidant of disturbance. Eventually, Ghost finally takes a reluctant step back, hesitant as if the break in tether would cost him Soap’s presence.
He’s had similar nightmares before, with others. But this feels too real to be a figment. It is too real to be fleeting.
“You have a lot to explain,” Ghost states plainly. It’s an order, not a request, but it holds no urgency at this moment.
Again, Soap nods. “I know,” he concurs, just as plainly. “Laswell needed me to fake my—”
Ghost shakes his head. “Not now,” he says. “Maybe in a few hours. When the sun is up. Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” Soap echoes. He’s smiling again, but this one does not radiate mirth. It’s reserved, almost timid. In a way, sheepish. With a curt nod, Ghost will accept it as an apology as much as he’ll accept what Soap has spoken prior, because he’s a man of few words, but also of profound understanding. He moves behind the door to let Soap in.
Soap glances at the floor when he finally enters the apartment. He points to the chef’s knife on the ground, and his usual humour resurfaces. “Were you planning to kill me with that?”
“Maybe.” Ghost shrugs, looking briefly at Soap before he bends down to retrieve his lost weapon. “Maybe you should work on fumbling your keys less. That was rather embarrassing, Johnny.”
“I’ve just been raised from the dead, don’t you know?” Soap laughs. “Berate me another time, Simon. I need to sleep. It’s been a long trip.”
Soap moves past Ghost with practiced grace and familiarity. Ghost reaches out just to touch Soap in passing, to graze his fingers over warm skin and loose fabric to reassure himself. Soap pauses a moment, soft fondness carved into his expression, before he continues on toward their bedroom.
“I’ll meet you,” Ghost says quietly, his voice just above a whisper like he’d been afraid of putting forth the idea. Even so, Soap hears, and Soap nods.
“I’ll count on it.”