Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When Soap was a boy - before he was anything but John - he was told to be a dreamer. His mother whispered it in his ear before he was tossed out to the wolves as though that would soften the blow of whatever life might throw at him. She reminded him of this when he came back with a knee scraped right down to the bone. He’d seen a tree that gently scratched against the clouds high above and thought…

He could chance it. If only just to feel the weight of the sky resting atop his shoulders like Atlas of old- he climbed the tree to touch the clouds.

Unlike Atlas, however, John fell.

He learned early on to fall with grace because he would fall many times in his life and not once was he ever allowed to stay down. He longed to pepper frozen winters with snow angels interlocked in threes, or to lie atop hills and paint watercolor shapes into the clouds with boys and girls whose hands would forever be softer than his own. His back was never allowed to kiss the earth for longer than a breath because to stay down was an admittance of failure — of submission — and when you were brought up by the unholy matrimony of military meets police…hardly ever did you get to fail.

Contrary to all that he had been taught in this world, John believed that there was beauty in failure. The branches had snapped beneath him when he touched the sky, but god did it look beautiful from high above as he crashed down to earth. It was a solemn reminder of his mortality as he nursed that scraped knee and a broken arm, but he kept looking at the tree even after that. He knew he’d fall again, but still, he tried.

Some part of Soap knew that he would fail with Ghost the first time, maybe even the second. He could not guarantee that whatever fragile peace he’d brokered with the sleeping titan would last the minute Alejandro arrived for an evac. Perhaps he’d never get the second chance he hoped for, but one could try.

So when he woke up to the gentle thrum of Ghost’s featherlight heartbeat spreading an impossible furnace of heat all across Soap’s splayed fingers, well, fuck, call him a believer - he could think of no holier sight than the hazy glow of dappled sunlight that danced across Ghost’s blond lashes. It was just shy of the warm amber light he’d come to associate with the setting sun across Mexico's vibrant landscape. This was something softer, and it was all for him if only for this single, insignificant breath to the world outside.

If no one else would care, then Soap prayed that one day the world would let him be selfish in the same breath that it let Ghost fail.

He let his hands cascade across surprisingly supple flesh like a man who knew his time was borrowed on this tiny blue dot. He understood intimately how ancient Grecian philosophers would write sonnets that equated mortal flesh with divine Ichor.

Ghost was soft across his belly. He’d taken careful note of it last night in the bath, but even then the man had been pulled taut as a bowstring. He’d expected a fight — both of them had. Soap supposed that a part of him understood the risks when he began his exploration, and an even greater part of him found that he didn’t care all that much so long as he was allowed this brief reprieve from the world. He truly hadn’t expected Ghost to be plush and soft in every way that Soap never was. The Scot had been a wiry thing from birth. A perfect blend of his mother’s hawkish features and his father’s broad shoulders. Years of hunting and being on the move kept him toned and lithe, despite the ordinarily graceless gait he carried. He hadn’t yet begun to master the silent art of a prowling predator that Ghost walked with.

This wasn’t to say that Ghost was weak, nor that the fat of his belly was indicative of strength. When Soap experimentally dug his fingers into the soft space of Ghost’s midsection, he could feel taut muscle reflexively contract to the disturbance. When Soap’s featherlight touch drifted higher, he counted each scar that carved itself against Ghost’s ribs with uncomfortably precise aim. A deliberate maiming. The scars themselves ranged from long incisions that stretched down his chest and right down his belly like the sharp slice of gutted livestock. Others were knotted masses of scar tissue, as though something had dug in and out of his sides. These marks were crueller than any bruises that Soap could have ever given him.

Soap let his fingertips trace out a carved divot just above Ghost’s diaphragm. He imagined it like a zipper unfolding every part of Simon that remained when Ghost pulled back the mask. Up until now there had only ever been brief flashes between them of moments where he caught the corner of Ghost’s eyes crinkling in amusement. Those were good moments. Catching the tail end of a stifled laugh across the comm channel was a like breath of fresh air in the field.

He made it a goal to hear the Ghost's soft laugh as often as possible.

He longed to hear it without the mask muffling the sound.

He begged to hear Simon laugh.

He wanted to take the sound and unpack it down to the most minute of tones so that he could replicate it in the box he held beside his heart — where all precious things went when Soap was done with them. He’d collected many things over the years, and he never ran out of room. When the space grew a touch too crowded he just dug a deeper hole above his heart for beautiful things to stay.

Ever since Soap was young, he’d been hellbent on taking the universe apart if only to show that he could. Catholic School put a God in everything — as though that would make him feel whole — yet this only ever brought about more questions. He began to raise his hand just often enough that he worried lines into the corner of his teacher’s eyes, asking her things that no bible verse could ever hope to expand upon.

Why is the sky blue?

Who chose blue?

How come men have nipples?

Why can’t we be more like seahorses?

Why does communion wine taste so good?

Eventually, he earned more detention slips than he did graded test scores. Truly, he deserved some sort of award for such a feat, but no one ever saw it like that. They bogged down his curiosity with an empty chalkboard he’d stuff full of bible verses to the extent that he could whisper them beneath his breath like nursery rhymes when he needed to ground himself back in the world. A shitty fucking reminder, but it served its purpose nonetheless. Of course, Soap was, if nothing else, tenacious. He sought to undo the world around him just to see if he could put it back together the same way he’d left it, and by God he did it.

He started small with the microwave, though he did break it. He’d somehow misplaced an evidently quite important set of coils and wound up with a sizable black smear across three cabinets that lasted right up until his deployment. He didn’t know if it was a lack of funds, or some silent feud between him and his mother for ruining the wood stain she’d applied just weeks prior.

Soap made sure not to break the second microwave, because he learned fast enough after skimming a manual long enough to pinpoint his previous failure. No matter the look of utter defeat in his mother's eyes, or the raised belt his father held above him as a promise. He’d actually put the broken back together again, with no missing pieces left behind.

He began picking apart other things. He very nearly took apart a badger that had been hit by a car just outside of his home, but he’d heard his mom listening to a podcast that morning about how all killers started. He just couldn’t chance it. In hindsight, he supposed that it didn’t make much of a difference given his current occupation.

He’d fallen in love with demolitions after exploding the school bathroom for the first time.

Soap did it a second time just to see if he could replicate the results on purpose and–fuck–he was absolutely smitten.

When he finally began dating, he learned that taking people apart wasn’t all that different from putting a microwave back together. He just had to figure out where all the pieces went once he was finished. Like any good craftsman, he tried to leave his work better than when he found it. Sometimes that meant soothing old aches or bringing about new ones like a covered sleeve dragged across undesirable memories.

He was good at taking people apart.

He was even better at putting them back together.

Fuck, he’d put Simon back together in a heartbeat. If only the man would let him try. He knew that not all the pieces remained and that no instruction manual could ever prepare him for the innermost workings of whatever kept Ghost going these days. He didn’t care, not really. He had seen the world at its best and worst. Very few things could shake him from his resolve when he set his sights upon the open space between a man’s ribs and thought….yeah, he could work with this.

He could definitely make it work.

Perhaps he was a touch too emboldened by the thought as his hand ghosted across Simon’s cheek with a sense of reverent transfixion. The man had a mottling of sparse freckles that had faded to a light tan without sunlight to kiss his cheeks. He was beginning to believe that Ghost really did sleep in the mask with all the evidence piling up against him, though in fairness, Ghost had told him as much. He just didn’t think that the man was being honest at the time. Perhaps most striking about the Lieutenant's face was the Port Wine Stain that stretched itself across his face. It was three shades lighter than he’d seen on a woman during a previous mission to Austria, and belatedly he remembered Ghost muttering to him about whatever chemical treatments his mother had put him through to mar his face further- or cure him- he didn’t care for the difference. The skin there was slightly more textured- just like the craterous evidence of acne scars that littered his own back. Solidarity in his own fashion, he supposed.

It didn’t make it any less sad to think that someone had seen Ghost so wholly unworthy of love as he was. His features were soft as a shy kiss, and he understood now why he’d muttered something so fitfully about a doe-eyed face and his likeness to a porcelain doll. Comical in its own way as he snorted to himself at the comparison. Ghost was nothing like a doll. He was a cataclysmic force of nature that the world was forced to bend before. He’d long since surpassed legends in shadow alone for the kill count that continued to skyrocket with each mission they partook in. Some nights he even wondered if Ghost kept track of them all.

Was it worth knowing? Soap wasn’t quite sure.

He wasn’t sure if he even cared.

Curiously, there lay a peppering of white scars. He almost would have missed them if they weren’t layered atop one another. They were all obviously old, and some had nearly faded entirely against what was left of untouched skin. Soap couldn’t quite make sense of them from afar as he bent his head close enough for his breath to ghost across Simon’s chin.

He’d been bitten enough times while hunting to begin putting the pieces of this puzzle together, though he hated the visage it painted before him.

The minute his nail brushed across Ghost’s upper lip all hell seemed to break loose.

He should have seen it coming, or better yet? Perhaps he shouldn’t have been exploring as thoroughly as he had been.

Fast as a bullet, Soap found his body hitting the side of the bed with a dead weight dropping across his chest. Both of Ghost’s bare thighs lay on either side of his hips as the man straddled him with the force of a groggy mountain currently caging him in like a pinned insect. The sheer force of it had the breath being blown straight past his lips in one fell swoop, but that was far from what currently consumed his thoughts wholly and without mercy.

Ghost’s teeth had sunk themselves into the soft flesh of Soap’s neck. Sharp canines and a chipped tooth from an age-old mission gone wrong were dug deep into the sinuous tissue around his Adam's apple- which was currently bobbing with each deep breath he couldn’t quite suck in. The skin had already split deep enough for a trickle of blood to run down onto the pillows beneath them in an unholy bouquet of blooming bloodstains. There wasn’t enough to be a true cause for concern, but just the right amount to have Soap’s hands shaking slightly as he raised them far away from Ghost.

Belatedly, he realized that the man was shaking- fiercely at that. It was as though he’d been dunked into an ice bath and left without so much as a prayer for warmth. He’d noticed the tremor in Ghost’s hands last night, but nowhere was it more apparent than now as the man’s hands fiercely grabbed for Soap’s wrists and pinned them flat against the creaky mattress.

Soap was groaning in pain by the time that Ghost had enough self to bite down even harder.

“Hey, big guy…little sharp for me,” he wheezed out as he tried to smother his hands across what little of Ghost’s own that he could reach. Whatever it took to drag Ghost from whatever world he’d gone off into. Had he been in any other situation he’d have been able to throw the man off and be done with it, but Ghost’s sharp hold on his throat made things testy.

He’d shoved his hand into the mouth of a wolf and had the briefest sense of audacity at having been bitten in retaliation. Still, Soap had never claimed to be a very smart man. His hands were painted with poor decisions that etched themselves into his skin as a reminder of skid marks, burns, and the time he’d cracked his knuckle down to the bone punching an American Sheriff while visiting Texas.

Perhaps he had a death wish.

“Simon, you with me?” he asked in a breathless voice. He couldn’t quite meet the man’s eyes like this, and he wasn’t sure if that would make the situation any better. Rarely did you ever meet a predator’s stare head-on as it was oftentimes seen as a challenge.

A strangled sound left Ghost’s mouth as hot breath fanned across Soap’s neck. The guttural sound was nearly muffled against brutalized flesh, but not all of it could be smothered away. Not by a long shot. Especially not when he began to feel Ghost's shoulders shake with what he came to understand was a dry sob. He didn’t quite release Soap’s neck, though the lockjaw he’d been ensnared against was lessened by a hair. Enough for Soap to at least get a breath in when the pieces connected together once again. An ugly puzzle, but one he could work with.

“Ghost, you’re okay,” he wheezed out through the bubble of blood dripping down his neck. The distinct raspiness of his voice felt as foul as it sounded, but he could think of no other way to comfort Ghost that was just shy of an embrace. While he tried…

The minute that the palm of his hand connected with Ghost’s clammy shoulder blade the moment between them snapped like a bowstring pulled too far. The edges were frayed into oblivion as the weight atop him disappeared just as quickly as it had come. He was in his own state of shock. He didn’t truly register the loss of Ghost till the bathroom door clicked shut. The deafening sound of a lock latching into place had Soap swearing into his arm.

He’d fucked up.

Several times. In very quick succession.

Silently, they carried out the rest of the day with a distinct wall placed between them. Both metaphorical and physical as Ghost simply didn’t leave the bathroom in the hours it took for Alejandro to radio in about an extraction.

He thought about reaching out to Ghost. He stood outside the bathroom door with one hand raised to rap his knuckles against the rotting wood in some semblance of an apology. He did none of this. A part of him was ashamed. It felt as though whatever peace he’d brokered between them was shattered with the way Ghost had looked at him like he wasn’t truly seeing Soap…just a reflection of whatever monsters haunted his shadows.

He prayed that time would grant him forgiveness as he backed away from the door with a deep breath. There would be time for apology dinners and late-night conversations later. Now? Now he had to pack. They’d had a downright brutal night, and he was itching to feel somewhat human again.

During this time, Soap was able to tend to his own wounds just barely enough to ensure that he could pass it off as the Mercs doing, and not one of their own. He’d seen the look in Rudy’s eyes when they’d pulled a young woman from the rubble with blackened bruises decorating her neck like fist-sized pearls. They could clearly make out the indents of each finger upon her tanned skin, and no one could deny the way it shook them up for the rest of the day. A rich comparison when brought up against their collective body counts and sizable track records of cruelty, but they were still human at the end of the day.

Rudy was the one to tend to her wounds, as she refused to let anyone else touch her during this whole time. It hurt to know that she felt unsafe with them, but he understood just why she felt that way with disheartening intimacy.

He didn’t want to think about how anyone would react to the mottling of bruises that were beginning to form from Ghost’s shaking hands and bloody teeth. Soap didn’t know how he could lie about it, only that he’d lie through his damn teeth if it came to it.

Blessedly, Alejandro asked no questions about the bandages wrapped snug around Soap’s throat, nor did he comment on the suddenness of seeing Ghost without anything more than what remained of his mask. He had no armor that fit, no gun, not even a knife to decorate his thigh with, like the chest candy he seemed to disdain so much. It felt far more invading than anything that might lay just beneath his freshly covered face.

Soap was already missing seeing the slight quirk to Ghost’s scarred lips.

Even still, he soldiered on. What else could he do but wait?

. . .

Waiting, as it turned out, was awful.

Altogether it truly wasn’t an uncommon feeling for him. There had been many times in Soap’s life that he could do little more than wait, and he’d become a master at entertaining himself in the brief seconds between disaster.

He was still young enough at the time to believe that all things bad revolved around him. It felt as though he were the utter wrongness that tore apart his parent’s marriage, nevermind the fact that they’d been drifting apart for years up until that point. He couldn’t help but see himself in the equation of lost wedding rings and revoked vows, but that had all been bearable. Tolerable, at the very least. He had been young when they split, but old enough to remember what their love looked like when it was good.

When the quiet hum of scratchy jazz records filled the house, as though an old tune could erase all the damage they’d both endured on their own and in each other’s arms. His mother was former military, and much like Soap, there were things she’d seen that no man could ever even hope to regurgitate. His father was former law enforcement- a detective by the time he’d gained an early retirement. Some sort of drug bust gone wrong left him with a limp that kept the man from lifting Soap’s little brother high above his head any longer. Despite it all, he would catch them late some nights in the kitchen together. They never kissed, not that he ever caught anyway, but they danced to the slow jazz of songs that he still had recorded to a dated MP3 player. Foreheads pressed together, they cried. Each time they danced, he knew that his mother ended it by weeping into his father’s shoulder with apologies no one could quite place.

His dad still loved her despite it.

Despite that, they still divorced.

Despite the divorce? He still died.

He died pointlessly, needlessly, and suddenly. The worst part? Soap couldn’t even grieve him properly, because it was his own damn fault.

He’d still been John when the news came. He remembered the day far better than he remembered the funeral itself because he’d been mixing his little brother a bottle of formula. There was no buildup, no hushed words, not even a warning. His mother didn’t cry that day, though her gaze was downcast as she told him to pack an overnight bag. His dad had been in an accident. She told him not to worry about his four brothers, because his aunt was coming to watch them. In some way, he knew that his mom thought she was doing him a favor by bringing him to the hospital. He was as thankful to her as he was spiteful that he’d spend the next twelve hours staring up at blinding fluorescent lights waiting for the answer he already suspected would come.

You didn’t survive crashes like that. His dad had been going too fast and hadn’t even begun to brake in time. He’d heard the doctors whispering when they thought he was asleep. They’d drawn his blood- they’d found the alcohol. A mountain of evidence levied against the titanic figure of respect that he’d been for both Soap and their small community as a whole.

There was a girl who sat just across from him with watery eyes. She had an overnight bag just like him, but neither of them left their seats to so much as change. There was a sullen sense of solidarity between them in the hours of silence they spent in their quiet waiting room.

“Your daddy killed my momma,” she whispered to him after the news came and they were left to collect themselves. She didn’t dare disguise the raw ire in her voice as she hugged her arms tight around herself.

“I know.” John didn’t have the heart to argue with her, not when she was right. His daddy took her momma away, and nothing he said could change that.

“I hate him.”

Sometimes Soap hated him too.

He hated that his mother simply refused to speak about him after he was buried. He hated that he was the only one who remembered his dad, and that any family the man had left despised Soap just because of the blood he shared with his widow. None of his siblings were old enough to remember solemn jazz music on chilly nights, or Christmas spent between families. They didn’t remember the divorce, and even Douglas, who was just two years younger than Soap, only recalled their dad's memory by the color of his casket.

No one taught him how to grieve, nor how to be okay again. In some ways, he still wasn’t okay. There wasn’t a timeline he could follow with pinpoint accuracy to explain the loss he felt, but he was okay most days now.

He’d just needed time. He’d had to wait…and Soap was good at waiting.

He was so good at waiting in fact that he let whatever moment that he’d shared with Soap stew for all the weeks the man seemed hellbent on avoiding him. He wouldn’t lie and say that it didn’t burn something wicked when he found the mess hall empty of all the times Ghost would slink in to fetch their frozen juice assortment. Soap could never stomach them. They reminded him too much of the flimsy cups of half-frozen orange juice that hospitals provided in lieu of real food.

Somehow, Ghost took a fancy to them. Specifically the grape variety. Yet it seemed as though Soap was always just barely missing the phantom as he caught the distinct absence of frozen grape juice packets each morning.

He did try to track Ghost down through every means short of cornering him in the doorway to his bunk, because that felt a touch too invasive. As though his insistent memorization of the man’s now disharmonious schedule made him feel any better on the subject.

He caved halfway into the next month.

Hovering outside of Ghost’s bunk, Soap took a deep breath. Rarely ever was he one to beat around the bush. He was a man of cutthroat action and efficiency when it came to problems. That’s why he was as good at demolitions as he’d come to be known for. He just didn’t hesitate. He saw the world in equations and could pick apart problems in ways few others seemed to grasp.

Which was perhaps why it was so frustrating that he hesitated in knocking.

He allowed himself all of three seconds to swallow down his anxiety before gently rapping at the door.

“Hey, can we talk?”

Soap tried to not let the impending silence that greeted him be a deterrent. He’d damn near raised four kids and counting. He was used to the fussy silent treatment.

“Ghost?” he tried again breathlessly.

When nothing else came to greet him, Soap dropped his head against the door with a sigh.

“Simon, I’m sorry about…everything,” he tried one last time as he miserably ground his face against the splintering wood and thought of any other place to be than outside his Lt’s bunk spilling his guts onto the floor.

Eventually, Soap felt himself settle down beside the doorway as he resolved to rebuild his confidence enough to have some chance at returning to his own room with dignity. He’d been ready to rebuild whatever walls Ghost wanted to keep between the two of them. He’d been halfway there when Ghost reached back at him with the plea to be seen. Now? Now it felt as though Soap were right back where he started. Square one. Sans even the barest inkling of how Ghost was feeling, because they were no longer in a confined space that forced some semblance of communication.

And Ghost? Well, Ghost liked to run.

Soap knew that much.

He hated the fact that it wasn’t of his own free will that he moved, because he’d become quite rooted where he was now seated against the wall in thought. Instead, it was Price gently nudging his leg with a steel-toed boot.

“This is a sad sight, MacTavish,” Price commented with both arms folded across his chest.

“What do you want?” Soap asked hopelessly. He didn’t dare meet Price’s knowing stare.

“Walk with me, son,” Price shot back in the voice that Soap best recognized as his ‘this isn’t up for debate’ tone. Damn the man and the fear of God that he’d instilled into every green recruit that he’d come across. Once upon a time, it had been John MacTavish, and to this day, Soap still remembered him for it.

So they walked.

Just as the pregnant silence between them nearly became too much for Soap’s feverish need to fill the spaces in between, Price finally spoke…

“Ghost’s taken an assignment off base while the search for Shepherd continues.”

“What?” Soap snapped with a rudeness that betrayed his true feelings as he just as quickly shrank back with a sense of resignation.

Price stopped and stared for a beat too long before his shoulders sagged as he released a long sigh, “I need a cigar for this.”

“I’ve got a cigarette?” Soap offered as he began to fish around his pockets for the nearly empty carton he kept handy. It was a shitty brand, but it had been used so frequently during his childhood by his father that he didn’t quite know how to ask for anything else.

By the absolute look of disgust on Price’s face, Soap thought it best to quickly shove the carton back into a random pocket without much thought.

“I meant that I have a cigar if you’d give me a moment to light it,” Price clarified with a deep snort.

So, Soap gave him that minute to compose himself as they reached the outermost ring of their base. The spray of saltwater crashing against the metal framework of their pier left a speckled halo of drying salt crystals upon his brow, and if Price minded the way it tangled his beard he didn’t make it known.

“Is — Is Ghost running from me?” Soap asked once the glow of Price’s cigar drowned out the flickering fluorescent lamp lights above them.

Price took a long drag before replying, “probably.”

That stung, but Soap appreciated the honesty as he folded his arms across the rusted metal of the piers fencing. He’d suspected as much — no — he knew as much to be true. Ghost was flighty as a feral cat, and no amount of food left out would bring the man home until he felt safe again. It pained him to recognize that he didn’t feel safe with Soap, not anymore. Maybe he never had in the first place, and that brief relinquishment of control between them was a fluke, if not something conjured up by Soap’s own subconscious to chase after a fleeting hope.

Soap wanted to love Ghost in whatever capacity the other would let him, but he could only get so far when he was stonewalled every step of the way.

He knew that Ghost felt something. He had heard it in the way Ghost’s fragile facade began to crack at the edges as he fiercely signed out every way he wanted to be held, touched, and cared for. He’d done it so desperately when he thought that Soap would leave him stranded alone in a creaking bed for the rest of the night, as though that were the greatest sin he’d burden himself with.

Soap had taken that extended olive branch as a sign, and it seemed as though Ghost set it aflame only days later for whatever fears sat heavy in his chest.

“Did I do something?” Soap interrupted his own thoughts with this whispered insecurity between them. If anyone would carry his secrets, it would be Price. In the same train of thought, if anyone were to truly know Ghost then it would be Price. The man guarded the truth behind ‘Simon’ like a sign postage: beware of dog.

You couldn’t ask for a better guardian, and Soap wouldn’t dare pray for another.

“No. It isn’t your fault, son,” Price replied as he dusted the burning embers of his awful habit off into the torrential waves down below.

“Then why?”

“He’s afraid.”

That stumped Soap into silence as he looked out into the muggy grey of the far-off horizon. A storm was surely approaching, though he didn't quite have the nose for it as others did. A freakish adaptation if you asked his opinion - the ability to smell coming rain - but rarely was his input requested. Still, even the blind could feel a storm brewing just out of reach. The waters beneath them had become black pools of frothing foam that beat against the pillars holding their base aloft.

He could recall a distant memory that he’d long since repressed for sheer embarrassment of it all.

Her name was Leah - it still was. Unlike so many people in hazy memories still painted with fondness, Leah was living proof of survivability when associated with Soap. They met beneath the blinding fluorescence of a hospital room, simultaneously pulled together by loss and split apart by the defining crash that stole away her mother and shattered what little image Soap’s father had left. They ought to have hated each other for the transgressions of those who came before, and for some time they did. They were children who didn’t know any better.

But they got closer, even if it took time.

She was entrancing in a way he couldn’t quite place as a child too young for anything beyond magazine cutouts, with shaded green eyes that reminded him of the enchantment found in forbidden forests with willow leaves that dangled before regret like a challenge. Her skin was perpetually emblazoned with starburst sunburns and dark freckles. Despite being an American immigrant, she had a mop of red curls that put any Scotsman to shame.

He thought she was the sun and then some as a young boy.

“I used to have a crush on you,” Soap admitted at the tender age of fifteen. He was sitting on Leah’s roof from where she’d used wire cutters to pry the screen off of her window for ease of access. “I didn’t even know you very well and I’m so sure that you still hated me, but even then I thought about saving you. I was so sure that zombie dinosaurs would invade the school and that my suave shy kid skills would save the day – “ he stopped himself.

“You don’t anymore?” she asked him with a coy smile. She had a laugh that shook buildings and a smile that all other wonderful things in the world volunteered to dim themselves before.

She was a wildfire that his mother fawned over, both done in love and guilt for the way Leah hung onto her every word - every instance of affection she’d never get from her own mother, because she was buried so far from home that extended family couldn’t make it to her funeral.

He still felt bad, even when the wound healed between them.

“You like girls,” he’d shot back entirely slack-jacked at the way she snorted loud enough to disturb the sleeping doves nesting just beneath the windowsill.

“And you like boys,” she whispered back like a sin only they were privy to, because that was the truest form of honesty they could give each other in a town ruled by the cross, and everything else it forbade them from doing that they explored just to say that they’d done it without fear.

He learned that he liked boys after watching Cinderella with Leah and wondering why his taste in men was so skewed that a painted picture was enough to turn years of conditioning on its head, and to this day he struggled to get through the damn movie for shame of just how low his standards had once been. This sinful infatuation only grew during grade school when he gave a shy boy whose name began with ‘P’ a shitty kiss that was more split skin and chapped lips than anything close to romantic.

Leah’s experiences had always been more delicate, because despite the way she took to the world like a pariah - a wolf shedding its sheep skin - she was gentle at heart. Soft in every way that Soap decidedly was not.

“What changed?” she asked instead.

“I didn’t deserve you,” John told her in an instance of vulnerability he only ever gave to her, because he was always the older brother to everyone but her and he could be nothing less than stoic to them.

He thought often of how he hungered for acceptance with the savageness it took to cannibalize his fantasies of love so often that it left him by his lonesome. He thought back to his father, and all the soft moments he shared with his mother only to die a drunken man who took more from the world than he could ever justifiably give back from the grave. John knew himself to be unlovable from this, because he was the blended batch of everything between his parents right down to the wrongness that drove them apart.

He knew that even in these fantasies he conjured up about saving the day - everyone else in his little school had to have died in such dreams for Leah to ever have a chance at loving him.

They talked, and they wept. Two sides of a spinning coin that blended their seams together as he sagged against her side all those years ago, and she proposed a question that he couldn’t rightly answer at the time.

“John, why do you see yourself as so unlovable that everyone else in this world would have to die for you just to be seen?”

The coil of smoke caught in the wind from Price’s half-finished cigar brought Soap back to the present as he realized he’d been staring off into a sunset that would never come. Not only was it the middle of the night, but there were far too many clouds to have made out a painted sky even if the sun were to crest the horizon now.

“Is he afraid of what I’ll do to him, or what he’d do to me?” Soap challenged. He needed to see where the border of confidentiality lay between him and Price, especially when encroaching upon the incomprehensibility that was Simon Riley.

He suspected that even if he dedicated his life to learning each freckle, scar, and crease against Ghost’s skin that he’d still die a man wanting.

He could try though.

Price, ever the perceptive bastard, caught onto their silent game quick enough as he seemed to weigh his options between the smoke spilling past his lips in billowing clouds.

“Can you love a dead man, John?”

“Do you ever stop loving someone like that, Price?” Soap shot back without missing a beat. “Love is not a finite currency.”

“And when it gets hard?” Price continued as he finally met Soap’s fierce stare head-on.

Slowly, the pieces began to fall into place as Soap stilled whatever bubble of frustration had been building in his chest. This was not a fight. Price did not want to fight Soap for the sake of it - he was worried. He’d seen the same look in Leah’s father on the rare occasions that the two were alone, more often than not it was mere seconds of conversation that they shared before she came back in. The concern of a father whose own baggage could tilt airplanes off course.

“I know what I’m signing up for, captain.”

Whatever battle of wills raged between them seemed to settle with the crackle of thunder overhead. It rang like the damning cry of church bells on foggy Sunday mornings, but this was not a trial of faith and love, but a quest to be won as the first few droplets caught themselves in Soap’s dark lashes.

“You’re a determined bastard, I’ll give you that much,” Price settled on with a dry chuckle. Finally, the rain began to pick up in earnest as Price begrudgingly put out the shriveled remnants of his cigar against the pier.

“I’ve been called worse,” Soap shot back with a huff of laughter against the growing downpour. Quiet, just for the both of them, Soap leaned against Price.

“You’re a good man, Soap. Be a good man for Simon, yeah?” Price replied as he wrapped an arm loosely around Soap’s shoulders with a weak squeeze.

. . .

Soap resolved very quickly that he hated waiting, even if he was good at it.

He hated waiting like he hated kicking his feet outside hospital doors knowing the inevitability of life and where it led, yet still stubbornly hoping there was time to spare. He practically lived in a hospice ward when he was fifteen.

‘Punishment’ his principle called it.

‘Visiting hours’ his mother corrected when he came home with a purple slip dictating all the ways that John MacTavish did not work well with others.

Never mind the fact that he’d accidentally exploded a desk during biology - they only cared about the fact that he’d caught a boy calling Leah something nasty in the schoolyard. He’d come home with a bloody nose, but felt satisfied with his split knuckles and the tooth scattered somewhere amongst the loose gravel of the yard.

So, as punishment, his school of exactly four hundred and thirty-six students sentenced John MacTavish to six months of Catholic community service.

They had him read to people during visiting hours. A man who insisted on being called ‘father’ - despite every time that Soap pointed to a grave and reminded him of bloodlines - told him that bible verses made for good conversation. Soap did listen, at least for a time.

Every Saturday morning like clockwork he’d come to greet her.

“How are you doing?”

“I’m doing just fine, ma’am,” Soap would whisper back with a bible clutched tight between his arms.

“I’m doing alright, boy.”

Simple as that. Direct as a fact.

There was no room for argument or error before he took a stool beside her bed and read her verse after verse on how damnation was the greatest sin despite the coil in his gut that ached whenever he thought of a boy’s soft lips, and how good it felt to kiss beneath the bleachers when no one else could see them. He thought of many things when he told her that forgiveness could be found in faith alone.

But his faith came with fine print. Each verse had outlines beneath it like shackles that he wasn’t allowed to say out loud because such things were for grown-ups only, and he was allowed to preach it but scolded if he dared to ask why.

She wore a patterned hijab that changed by the week, and fled from horrors she didn’t dare tell a child who still had enough wonder in the world that war hadn’t yet taken from him. Suffice to say that they didn’t want his God.

Some nights, John didn’t want ‘his’ God either.

Still, she would listen.

She was a hurricane in a failing body after cancer stole both of her breasts and often she would touch the empty parts that remained and tell him…

“I’m not sad to see that they’re gone, because I remember what it was like to have them. That’s good enough at my age, no?”

He’d never known how to reply.

One week, unlike all others before him, their pattern changed.

He left his bible on the desk and brought out a stapled pamphlet he didn’t dare call a ‘book’. It was compiled of shitty poetry and observations he’d made about the world around him. His voice had a shaking cadence to it that felt unbecoming of him, but he’d never shown his poetry to anyone else before.

To be honest, it was kind of shit.

In further honesty, she’d looked at him with a crinkled smile and whispered softly about past lovers that wrote her sonnets, and lost sons who wrote the prettiest haikus about wavering sunsets. She taught him the beauty in stanzas and proper punctuation with a sense of infatuation that candles dimmed themselves before. No classroom could emulate the environment she created when he should have been the one teaching her the importance of virtue.

“Hell is a scary place,” he whispered to her one day, when visiting hours were almost over.

“Do you want to hear something scarier?” She replied evenly, “letting yourself go on believing you are only ever going to be half of what you are, boy. I see you on the sidelines when the other kids file in, and I see that you are more than you think.”

It’s scary being known.

It’s scary being told about the world, even when it’s lighthearted and good.

So he waited outside her hospital room that fateful day knowing that she had no one else but a faithless boy, and two missing breasts who’d wait for her on the other side, because that’s the kind of humor that made her eyes light up when all else failed.

“Don’t pray for me yet,” she told him the morning before. “We walk in a world full of regret, and this hospital is no different. People get by as they dim their lights because they assume they’ll never be anything better than that. I don’t need a haiku to tell you that you ought to be better than a shadow, child. Now, I don’t want to hear that your days going ‘just fine’, I want to hear that you’re doing fucking awesome. You did your job well, John but you’ve got your own shit to do.”

Her death was the steady changing of seasons. The ebb and flow of inevitability that she took to with a smile. She knew her time was coming, and she didn’t need his God to warm her bed at night because she had enough bitter exes to fill a room coupled with the elusive orgasm that none could ever bring her.

He thought she was the coolest person in the fucking world at fifteen - with four months of life to give her.

He was ashamed to say that he visited her grave far more often than he did his own father’s, because in that short period of time she taught him the beauty of standing still. There was no need for constant motion or a halo of bullets in lieu of pillows to keep him safe at night. Somewhere along the way, he’d forgotten how to just be.

With so much time on his hands…Soap ought to try picking back up on the here and now.

That being said, a week went by with no news from Ghost, and no matter how hard he tried to probe Price for even a crumb of information about Ghost’s mission…the man remained stoic. As peeved as it made Soap, he understood confidentiality even if it dug beneath his skin like the most insidious of ticks.

“You’re not usually this secretive about a mission,” Soap challenged one morning after he’d finished folding the garishly frilled apron that Gaz gifted him during a white elephant trade several Christmases before.

“Mhm,” Price replied from where he was washing syrup - disgusting - out of his beard. Soap spent all that time making pancakes in the style he knew that Gaz liked just for half of it to be stored within Price’s damn beard.

“Is he doing something stupid?”

“He’s doing something he feels he has to do,” Price replied simply.

And they left it at that.

Something about Price’s tone told Soap that it was best not to press further, and that trying to pry details from Ghost when he came back would likely result in getting bit.

He didn’t take on any new missions himself, not that Price would let Soap throw himself into an espionage quest so soon after Las Almas with Ghost MIA. Still, he didn’t like being cooped up back at base with nothing more to do than pick up decaying hobbies. He felt not unlike the clipped canary that his cousin once rescued out in the rain. The little bugger was a biter and hated her cage more than anything else, but turned tame as a songbird when she was left to her own devices across countertops.

For fucks sake he’d gotten back into embroidery with all the time he had on his hands at this point.

The one hobby he didn’t feel ashamed of enjoying was cooking - much to the chagrin of many long-dead grandfathers and great-uncles who scoffed during holidays when Soap prepared them pies. He enjoyed cooking, truth be told, and baking too when time allowed. He had a collection of coffee-stained recipe cards from his grandmother, and several books that he made a habit of collecting whenever he went on a particularly grand adventure.

Early on in his career with 141, he’d been convinced that Gaz was making fun of him with the sheer excitement he gave off…loudly…whenever he caught Soap cooking. It took eight months and four missions for Soap to realize that the team never seemed at ease until a hot meal was on the table.

The team looked forward to Soap’s cooking. It seemed to be one of the few things that left them feeling closer than before - more human after a mission at the very least. Whether the conversation helped draw Gaz from his nerves, Ghost setting the table, or Price’s methodical portioning of plates…it all helped. For Soap? Soap just needed to wash his hands of everything and come back to earth while cutting tomatoes for soup.

It began with a simple, albeit dated concern for the sheer amount of takeout that filled the fridge from both Gaz and Ghost. They didn’t even have a good taste for their fucking takeout, and Soap took more offense to that than anything else. He’d thrown all of it away one day, and swept Price’s card with good intentions as he filled the fridge for whatever shore leave they had to share.

He made sure to get essentials: vegetables, fruits, dairy, eggs, and a selection of meat best kept in the freezer till he thawed it out when they got back. Shit was expensive but worth it. His next hurdle was the pantry with perishable snacks and non-perishable cans for when he didn’t quite feel like going out, and just wanted something easy and full of sodium to get everyone through a mission de-briefing. Snacks were harder. No one wanted to be the first to ask for anything, so Soap had to get a little bit of everything and meticulously track who ate what, and what went untouched.

Price liked saltines. Soap had caught him late one night with the fridge propped open just squishing an assortment of cheeses and sliced meats between two crackers like it was god’s greatest gift to mankind.

Ghost liked gushers. He seemed to like really anything vaguely gummy-shaped, except for lime-flavored candies. After this revelation, Soap kept a good stock of them prepped from curbside pickups done soon after they landed back on base. Small victories between the two of them, but it counted during concessions.

Gaz was strangely the hardest to clock, and not for lack of trying.

It seemed that the man liked a little bit of everything, and yet nothing at all. Often, Soap would find fistfuls of raw oatmeal missing when he went to make breakfast, or a peculiar dent in their canned goods…energy bars…hell, even Price’s protein powder went missing every now and again. It wasn’t until he woke up early one morning to get a head start on some new recipe he wanted to try that he found the source of it all. Gaz, in the dimly lit kitchen pacing back and forth with a plastic bag full of dry oatmeal and freeze-dried blueberries, spilled at his feet.

It didn’t matter how loudly Soap called to his friend, nothing seemed to reach him. Slowly, Soap came to recognize the symptoms of a panic attack - however small they were when he first began noticing them. Gaz didn’t scream. He didn’t cry. He wasn’t making any noise save for muffled whines of utter distress that shot through Soap’s heart like daggers. He didn’t even seem to truly see Soap until he was right in front of him gently prying his hands away from where they were digging bloodied crescents against his scalp.

No matter how many times Soap reassured the man that it was okay, that he wasn’t mad, the minute Soap touched him the floodgates seemed to break and he spent the next half hour holding his friend through a place Soap couldn’t bring him back from.

“You want to talk about it?” he’d asked after settling the both of them down with a hot mug of cocoa. It wasn’t the thick, French version that he knew Gaz liked…but desperate times called for instant powder mixes.

“My therapist says I’m getting better,” Gaz still seemed a bit frantic - jittery was a better word- but he was calmer. Coming back to himself, at least. “I don’t…I don’t mean to steal.”

The word came out like a bitter sin spat at Soap’s feet, and the ache that came with it felt painfully familiar as he sucked in a sharp breath.

“You aren’t stealin’, Gaz. I get it free of charge 'cause I like having you healthy.”

“I know that it’s for everyone. I know I have the money to buy take out but it’s like,” he kept sputtering over the words as though saying them aloud would validate whatever knot of self-loathing he’d been rolling between his hands for months now. “What happens when it's gone? When you stop letting me in the kitchen?”

That broke some small part of Soap that prayed Gaz had it better than them, even though every other sign would indicate some rotting beast nipping at Gaz’s heels. He’d hoped, and he tried not to let his disappointment in the world show as he offered a silent hand in apology to his friend.

“I wouldn’t do that to you, Scot’s promise.”

That didn’t stop Gaz, because something that ran so deep couldn’t just be won over with a single promise. These things took time, and Soap was damn good at giving it out like candy. Blessedly, he started seeing Gaz back at the dinner table again. He seemed hesitant to touch what wasn’t already offered to him, but that just meant that Soap packed his lunches extra full to make up for the difference.

He didn’t mind.

He liked putting people back together just as much as he liked taking care of them.

Soap understood pain as best as he could. He could pinpoint his relations to others and draw connections as an olive branch that he offered free of charge.

Sometimes it was harder. Not for any fault of a friend nor his own. Just because their shared experiences on the world differed so greatly that common ground was harder to find, it didn’t mean that Soap couldn’t give his friends a shoulder to cry on. Or, sometimes the best he could give was sitting beside them. Perhaps their spilled woes and what remained after - the dregs of a tea steeped too long - would give him clues as to best slot the pieces of their sorrow together.

There were people like this, Gaz in particular. He needed no olive branch because he was a broken branch grafted onto a different tree. Nothing so simple as adoption, because adoption implied a family to go home to. A place to spend his Christmases and a place to feel wanted. Some sad part of Soap mourned when Gaz admitted quietly one day that he had none of these things. Foster Placements so late in life were rarely by your own free will, and not once had he ever been anyone else’s first choice.

Last picked for recess.

Last picked for family time.

Last picked for love.

Too many last choices to make it to his eighteenth birthday as he was tossed into the world with a black trash bag full of belongings that he shamefully dropped into a bin the minute he was alone. Much like Soap, he enlisted in the army because it felt as though he’d been given a thin slip with no more expectation to it than the vain hope of not becoming some statistical probability.

That same night, Gaz proudly whispered that he’d done well for himself despite this fact. He was Price’s first pick for missions, and even if Price didn’t understand the fullest extent as to why Gaz looked at him like he was the sun…Soap was beginning to see a better picture now. Ugly as it was.

Gaz seemed to be doing better now, and not better in that the fucker got a better mask, but genuinely happy. He still had bad days, and days where a mug of steaming french hot chocolate was the only good thing left in the world, but otherwise? His friend was doing okay.

On better days, the cooking was more for Soap’s own sanity than anything else. If he couldn’t have a gun in his hands then he had to keep them busy through less violent means - and Price had made it damn clear that Soap was allowed no demolition demonstrations while on base. A shame if you asked him. He was sure he could fuckin’ dazzle the green recruits with enough showmanship to leave their eyebrows singed to hell and back. Alas, Price would not be swayed, and while it left Soap feeling a touch rejected at the end of the day, it was nothing a bit of baking couldn’t fix.

“Soba?” Gaz questioned from the doorway, utterly throwing Soap out of his headspace as he nearly threw the damn knife right at the man in shock.

“Steamin’ bloody Jesus, cunt!” Soap swore breathlessly as he watched Gaz break down into a snorting spell of laughter. “I could have shanked ya!”

“But you didn’t,” Gaz shot back just as humorously as he took a seat at the table without further prompting. Progress was progress, even if Gaz looked downright uncomfortable when he first sat down - as though he hadn’t yet decided if he were welcome at the table when it wasn’t a proper dinner.

“Laugh all you want till I finally nick you in the damn arm.” Soap warned as he dished out a small bowl of dipping sauce for Gaz to be his gracious taste tester for. “Diced radishes and green onions, bit of wasabi and the best damn sauce you’ll find on base. Buckwheat noodles too.”

Gaz always liked to know what everything was made out of. Frequently, he liked helping around even if it was busy work like learning to properly dice tomatoes for whatever recipe was left taped to the fridge. While his friend could do enough spice to put Soap to shame, Price and Ghost were a little green on the subject and it left Gaz as the moderator for ‘can Price’s old man bones handle this amount of wasabi’.

“It’s good!” Gaz decided from where he was currently struggling to fish the remaining noodles that currently lay drowning in the bowl of sauce. Chopsticks were no one’s expertise, and everyone's nemesis in the same breath.

They fell into an easy enough rhythm as Soap occasionally plated another bowl of soup, or an entirely new dish just to get a second opinion on its viability for tonight’s dinner. The Los Vaqueros were visiting now that Alejandro managed to secure enough leave time to come visit. Presumably, it came with strings attached that only he and Price were privy to, but Soap was content to have another friendly face amidst his impromptu grounding on base.

They were bringing Omar with them. The skittish boy from the derelict house that Soap fished him from. The one who, to Soap’s understanding, sold Ghost out. He’d been placed under Alejandro’s care while they tried to locate a next of kin that was even willing to take the boy back. A task that became easier said than done over time as it seemed that most of the kid’s immediate family had been scattered to the winds. Last update from Rudy suggested a mother in Guatemala, but it’d been pretty quiet since then.

Judging from the fact that Omar was flying in with Alejandro, Soap worried that their last lead had been a bust as well.

“Your face got real sour there for a minute,” Gaz commented from where he was picking at a bowl of rice.

“Switching gears to something sweet for the kid.”

“Goin’ soft on us, Sgt?” Gaz replied evenly. There was no bite to his tone, and so Soap didn’t dignify him with a barbed response. He was good with kids given the gaggle of nieces and nephews that flocked to his side for embellished stories washed away of any garish details during family holidays.

He liked kids.

He knew, deep down, that he’d likely never get any of his own. While it had once been a naive dream of his to have a big family in a sweet cottage, he’d long since thrown that dream away for a rifle coupled with a dozen and one death wishes that’d yet to come true. The best he could hope for was being the godfather of Leah’s twins, and the favorite uncle to whoever clung to his side during New Years - as though they could sense his unease with the fireworks and held tight to his hand like a promise.

Some of them were wiser beyond their years, and that scared Soap. He wanted kids like Omar to be entitled to a childhood, but most didn’t get that chance.

“I’m thinking cocoa,” Soap said - not daring to dignify the question hanging in the air between them.

“French kind with the cool whip?”

“That’s the one.”

“Fuck yeah,” Gaz cheered with a fist pump.

. . .

Rudy was the next one to corner Soap.

He caught Soap in a moment of weakness. For the last few nights, Soap had been called out to the pier just off base. Never far enough to stray into the busy town, but just close enough that he didn’t have to listen to the innermost cog work of the base, and debate all the ways that he could finetune it into a proper mechanism of his own machinations.

He never did it, of course.

Price would have an absolute fit.

Instead, Soap spent his time with his legs swung over the side of the pier - kicking absently against the seaspray as it drew a rugged crown of salt across his brow, like crystalline thorns. It was always a pain to scrub his hair free of it all, but he found himself most at peace during the muggy weather just before a storm rolled in. The waves were always in enough of a fit to kiss the back of his calves when they crashed against the woodwork beneath him.

He could think of few other places that left him feeling this relaxed.

It was where he sketched. Or at least, where he fine-tuned the shaking silhouettes of people that he managed to etch out when he figured no one was looking. People were at their most beautiful when unaware of the camera angle. They didn’t need to try and fit whatever mold they thought best fit them. Instead, he could catch them when light shone upon their skin like honeycomb and amber dripping in the hazy glow of a setting sun. That was idealized, but oftentimes not the reality.

Most of his pages were full of rough outlines trying to catch the curvature of Price’s broken nose - broken too many times to ever set right again. Alongside the mottling of moles that ran down his neck in a vague allusion to wherever else they might lay. More often than not, Price caught Soap’s stare right as he folded his journal away and left its contents up to the Captain’s imagination with a smug sense of pride at having this sole secret.

Gaz’s face was the steady sloping curvature of a hilly landscape. Stubble peppered his face and Soap frequently smudged the paper trying to best carve out the slope of his arcing jawline. He liked toying with the crooked smile that Gaz wore when he told a joke and expected no one else to laugh - awkward with a pleased lilt to his breathless voice.

Ghost was —

Soap was embarrassed by how many pages were filled with varying depictions of Ghost’s face.

“Busy?” Rudy asked, and the sheer shock of it had Soap’s pencil skidding across the page with enough force to tear a jagged edge across the outline of Ghost’s mottled skin.

“No, not for you, Rudy,” Soap clarified as he shut his journal. He wasn’t embarrassed by its contents. He’d long since lost his modesty in the same breath that he burned away the last of his shame. You could have neither in his line of work, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t appreciative of whatever amount of privacy he could garner.

Without needing further invitation, Rudy unfastened the last bit of lacing to his boots, rolled up his pant legs, and dipped his feet into the ocean alongside Soap.

“Is there a reason that you are without your shadow?” Rudy asked with some sense of decorum, despite the bluntness of his question.

“He’s on a mission,” Soap asked as he began fiddling with the worn leather cover to his journal.

“Without you?”

Soap set his journal aside to scrub his face free of a salted crown with a groan.

He could lie. Briefly the thought crossed his mind as he screwed his eyes shut and let out a long sigh. Soap was a damn good liar, and Rudy couldn’t be that good at memorizing the most minute of tells that Soap hadn’t yet gotten rid of.

He didn’t want to lie.

“I think I scared him off,” Soap admitted in the shallow space between them. He knew that Rudy would keep his counsel to the grave, and perhaps that was why he brought his insecurities up to the surface.

“You are very formidable.”

That dragged an ugly laugh from Soap’s chest as he snorted into the back of his hand to muffle the sound.

“I don’t want to catch Ghost like a fuckin’ poachin’ bastard. I want him to come to me of his own free will, but how long will I be waiting?” Soap wondered aloud as his laughter faded into something rather somber. “I am willing to wait if he gives me something to know, but I cannot choke on an unrequited love for the rest of time.”

The crashing waves nearly stole the long breath that Rudy gave as he thought over a reply. The rolling storm brought the first few dollops of salty rain cascading down Soap’s cheeks as he tipped his head back to the sky. He’d long since lost faith in any God, but still he turned his face to the sun as though praying for penance.

“I don’t think that I can give you a good answer,” Rudy decided at last. “I myself am still getting used to…this,” Rudy interrupted with a vague gesture between them. “With men, I mean. I have always known, but it was harder to come around to the idea of being with someone like Alejandro. It is hard. Love is hard, mi amigo.”

Soap nodded along, entirely too understanding of the subject as he caught onto the way Rudy hesitated - even now - about the admittance of his own preferences.

Rudy fished out the cross that sat out of sight beneath his loose shirt. He held it between them with a quirked brow that only lowered when Soap begrudgingly pulled his own out for show.

“Catholic?” Rudy asked innocently.

“Church every Sunday till I was sixteen. Kicked out,” Soap said with a degree of bitter pride.

“I can relate.”

There was something to be said about silence, and that in of itself was born of irony as Soap wrapped an arm around Rudy’s shoulder and pulled the man all that much closer. Up until now, Soap supposed that he’d never actually talked about his relations to the Church. No one else shared them - not even Leah - the only friend from home who still spoke to him. She was a social pariah from the minute she immigrated to their little town, and not once had she lent an ear to any God. She claimed herself to be a higher power than any before her, and it took years for Soap to see reason to her madness with how tightly a rosary was wrapped around his neck.

He didn’t hate his God.

He just couldn’t love the fine print he’d been brought up with.

Soap didn’t realize he’d voiced these thoughts till he felt Rudy’s head come to rest on his bony shoulder. They had to take a graceless moment for Rudy to find a position that didn’t have his shoulder blade digging into the man’s poor skull.

“No one ever explained to me what being gay meant as a boy. It was only ever said to be a very bad thing. A way for Satan to separate me from God, and I—I felt like I laid with the devil the first time I took a…partner…during shore leave back home,” Rudy admitted this all in a whisper that not even the wind could carry away. This was a space just for the two of them to share a sense of honesty that few others could relate to.

That…struck a painful cord in Soap’s chest as he closed his eyes against perhaps the most painful memory from an unwanted village life.

He’d long since learned that hiding magazines beneath his bed was a pisspoor hiding spot, but somehow he’d thought that a broom closet would be better. It was a dingy thing full of cobwebs and the tattered remains of poster boards that the women of the church put together for failed bake sales. It felt sacreligious to be sucking face where he knew the remains of his little brother’s last theater costume lay, but desperate times had called for damn well desperate measures.

He didn’t regret the way his hands felt across bare skin - not the first he’d touched, but by far the most gentle he’d ever been. The boy was one of his classmates from biology that looked shyly up at Soap during football practices, as though the glare from the sun would disguise the longing reflected in his bookish glasses. Soap was smarter than that, and bolder than any other classmate despite the way he’d pushed his own sexuality under lock and key till moments like these.

Broken fragments of vulnerability fell through his fingers only hours later as he glared scornfully up into the eyes of a preacher who bastardized the boy as something vicious. From afar, his mother watched with a hand covering her mouth. It was as though this instance stole away her voice, and until he left that night she refused to meet his gaze. His shirt had been lost somewhere between being dragged from a closet and brought before Sunday service like rats pried from the gutters.

Soap was defiant.

The boy with hickies trailing down his neckline like the teasing etchings of clever carvings was less than.

“I laid down with a man,” the boy sobbed when a cane was raised against his bare back and barely buttoned pants. Somewhere in Soap’s chest he felt ashamed for having been the one to strip the other bare. “I laid with the devil!”

When the preacher turned his displeasure onto Soap - expecting submission for this perceived skin like an iron cross scorched into his skin for every violation of the bible he’d committed in the last hour alone- Soap met him with raw ire.

“I am not the devil.”

Rudy was watching him now with the same level of intrigue that Soap recognized from himself - the look of someone who took people apart and saw them for all that they were. A bitter part of Soap hoped that whatever he was made up of at his core was closer to what preachers damned him for. It would give credence to their words. They would better use him as a cautionary tale if there was truth in their verses.

“I’m glad to be a sinner,” Rudy decided at last as he marveled the gold sheen on his cross. Neither knew why they still wore it. Whether it be sadism or hedonism that drove them to carry such profuse sources of pain…they didn’t particularly care. They’d given so much to the church only to be met with pain.

Perhaps it was even defiance that drove them.

A primal instinct to bite the hand that feeds with the same ferocity that it took to break the cycle they'd been damned to.

“And Alejandro?” Soap cautioned with a curiosity he couldn’t quite keep from his voice.

“I…eventually stopped running from him,” Rudy explained before he seemed to wince at the next segment, “and then he ran from me. We grew up together beneath the same slurs and definitions for what forms the devil would take. I could easily give up my love for God because he had no love for me, but Alejandro…”

“It’s hard,” Soap decided at last. His fingers itched to reach for a carton of cigarettes that he’d left out on the counter. Gaz called it a bad habit, but Soap supposed that they all had their vices. He was entitled to such bad habits in the grand scheme of things.

“I won’t pretend to know why he prays, only that he’s stronger than me for doing it.”

Gods didn’t answer their prayers.

It was the silent sin between the both of them. Neither needed to give the thought a voice for it to be any less true. The only solace they could find was Soap squeezing Rudy’s hand briefly to show him that — yes — he was still here.

Alejandro could have his God, and perhaps that was merely there to help him sleep at night. Much like Rudy and Soap, he had given his whole life to the church. It was a birthright to drink bloodied wine and the flesh of greater men as though that would wash away the taste of another man’s tongue. Where they differed was that Alejandro still willingly tipped his head back for poisoned wine. Though Soap supposed that his observations were unkind.

A clutched rosary obviously brought him comfort, and neither Rudy nor Soap would ever take that away from him. He was stronger than them for this, even if the thought of stepping foot back beneath the eye of God still made Soap feel queasy.

“I don’t think that God will answer our prayers, but I do know a thing about waiting, yeah?” Rudy challenged as he stretched his arms out from where they'd surely begun to cramp while pressed tight against Soap’s ribcage.

“I would love him, Rudy. I don’t need him to love me yet, I just want a fuckin’ opening that doesn’t come with tripwire.”

“Do what’s best for your health, John. Wait as long as you need, wither if you must, but it would be your choice in the end to be his devil,” Rudy settled on as the rain began to pour down in earnest. “Do not kill yourself chasing for love with strings attached.”

Soap was certain that there was a verse in there somewhere about the heavens above and how their tears ought to be cleansing whatever impurities clung to bare skin.

In the very same moment, he recalled a time when his mother still read him bedtime stories beside a father who lived in the present, and not at the bottom of a bottle six feet under.

“You see John, the sky and the earth…they love each other very much. Except they don’t have hands to hold one another, so rain? That’s just how they define their love.”

Soap thought that was beautiful.

Perhaps, he could find rain for Simon.

. . .

Grass is green, except when it’s not.

Skies are blue, except when the sun sets.

And Simon Riley was a coward with no exceptions nor exemptions.

He’d managed to avoid everyone save for Price when he got back on base. Even then, Price rarely asked for details. Whether it was because Beatrice had his number on a burner phone, or because he seemed to already be four steps ahead of Ghost in terms of his own life…he didn’t honestly care. Not right now. Not with the way exhaustion weighed him down like the damning hand of god coaxing him to take a knee.

“Did you talk to him?” Price asked behind closed doors. No one would dare be so brazen as to pry into this particular mission, however routine it had become over the last decade.

“No,” Ghost answered hoarsely as Price leveled him with ‘the look’.

“Will you at least talk to Soap?”

Ghost hadn’t given an answer before he was closing the door. Apathy and guilt sat parallel on his shoulders - whispering about his faults.

Still, Price let him leave.

As always, slipped between mission reports was the number to Price’s therapist. He sent them each time Ghost got back from a mission with increased worry in his eyes each time he found them crumpled in the trash later that day. Ghost had to get rid of them fast as a bullet before he began to genuinely consider calling her. She had a nice business card with emboldened gold leaves outlining her printed name, and her reviews online were sparse but kindhearted in nature.

He almost wanted to call her on worse days.

She supposedly kept Price’s secrets close to her chest, and he knew deep down that she would keep the few secrets he had left to give.

Still, Ghost couldn’t bring himself to call her. He’d pulled her number up just earlier if not only to feel some semblance of sanity amidst everything, but even then he’d just powered his phone off. It had been nearly a decade since he’d last met with a psychiatrist, and she’d died because of him. Shot through the head in her own office - the one decorated with pictures of her son who’d graduated from med school that year. She had been so, so proud of him.

As irrational a fear as it was, Ghost worried that he’d get this one killed too. Then even Price would have no reason to keep him.

He knew that he needed help. It was why he kept her number this time folded in his pants pocket. Some part of him couldn’t bring himself to throw it away - not when the nightmares had started back up again.

They’d begun not long after he and Soap — no — he couldn’t go there. His breath still caught on the way Soap’s eyes had watched him, utterly transfixed with everything about Ghost. He’d placed featherlight touches all across Ghost’s skin like he could mark himself into his skin, and replace every other broken part of Ghost with flowering ornaments born of adoration.

That scared him more than anything else.

And ever since, Ghost had woken up with his hands outstretched. On better nights, he dreamed of his nails digging bloody crescents into Soap’s neck, and on worse? Worse, he had his arms scratching bloodied lines down Soap’s back with a promise on the tip of his tongue.

Despite all of this, Ghost had run. He'd been called skittish once by Soap. It was said playfully over the comms whilst the Scotsman spent the next ten minutes making chirping sounds back at a stray cat hiding amongst some rubble. Soap could have easily kept walking, but he was damn determined to help the scrappy little thing, and when they finally met up? Sure as shit, Soap had a stray cat bundled in his tactical vest like it owned the place.

It was skittish, just like him. Untrusting of the world and ready to bolt at a moment's notice. Anyone with wandering hands was met with sharp claws and enough teeth to send someone to the hospital.

According to Soap, the three-legged demon was blessedly taken in by his mother. Evidently, she had a soft spot for lost things, and was more than happy to scoop the stray up two Christmases ago when Soap last flew down to meet his family. He’d been doing it like clockwork for the last seven years. Some deep part of Ghost longed for the dazed look he came back with - the kind of look someone wore when they were untouched by cruelty. As though quality time spent together could ease any ache and wash away bloodied hands with determined, yet gentle hands.

Soap always looked peaceful when he came back.

Soap damn well did not look peaceful when Ghost found him in the kitchen.

Blessedly, the man’s initial displeasure was not directed at Ghost - not yet anyway - instead, he was hunched over the countertop frustratingly pooling over a crossword puzzle - at three in the morning - with a bowl of pancake batter propped up beside the booklet.

His face was focused, with a telltale knot to his furrowed brow as he pursed his lips against the end of a neon highlighter. He was dressed down into a moth-bitten t-shirt with a dated band scrawled across the front in faded bleach. A small cross on a weathered chain clinked against the countertop from where it hung low around his neck. Soap’s sweats hung low on his hips from the angle Ghost was looking at, and he pointedly lifted his gaze back to Soap’s face. His hair had grown out - or at least he’d stopped slicking the mohawk back and let it fall haphazardly into his face.

He looked peaceful, despite his apparent struggle with whatever word he’d become caught on.

Maybe Ghost could still sneak back into his room without being seen. He didn’t want this — this confrontation. Not yet.

He didn’t want to break whatever spell had let Soap rest easier tonight.

“I know yer’ there, Ghost,” Soap started just as Ghost spun on his heel to make a beeline for his room.

Lamely, Ghost lifted his hand in a sheepish wave as Soap turned his sharp stare up to Ghost’s masked face.

When it became apparent that Ghost was not about to continue the conversation without a knife to his throat, Soap took it upon himself to keep whatever this was going - as though Ghost would simply flicker out of existence if he took his eyes off of him for a single second.

“How’d your mission go?”

Ghost lifted his hands to sign out a reply before lowering them just as quickly. His hands ached. He didn’t — He didn’t want to sign right now, but he also wasn't looking to verbalize his insecurities at the moment, especially not to Soap.

“Fine,” he finally grit out as they lapsed back into silence.

At last, Soap gave a grumble of frustration as he shut the booklet and flipped on the overhead fan. Without a word, he fished through the deep pockets of his sweatpants for a carton of cheap cigarettes.

While Ghost’s face was still covered by a cloth mask, Soap always had an uncanny sense for when Ghost was about to speak as he held a hand up in order to light the crumbling cigarette cupped between two hands. The lighter was worse than a crackling matchstick with how many curses it took for the thing to muster up a dying flame.

Only after Soap had taken a long enough drag so that smoke billowed out around them like a demented halo did the Scotsman break the trancelike silence.

“You asked me to stay.”

“I did.”

“And then you ran.”

Guilt bit at the back of Ghost’s heels as he felt himself stagger back like he’d been struck. While Soap had never once raised a hand to him, the look he was giving Ghost was enough to quake mountains from their rooted plates.

Beneath the fierceness of his stare lay something that Ghost feared most of all: hurt.

“What does it matter to you?” Ghost asked suddenly, and all ounces of guilt were washed away by the all-consuming fire of ire. It dripped past his lips like red hot iron. The excess sank down into his belly - scorching his throat all the way down as he tried to swallow down the dregs of his own insecurities.

Ghost had hurt Soap with his absence.

He couldn’t — He couldn’t be whatever Soap was wanting. Soap was the gentle hand of God carding dexterous fingers through Ghost’s sweat-ridden hair as though each tangled knot that came undone were the discarded remnants of sin within Ghost. He’d extended an arm and planted it firmly within Ghost’s toothy maw and dared the other to bite down any harder.

Soap thought there was something deeper to Ghost.

Soap had to be wrong.

Ghost needed to be hated.

He couldn’t stand the idea of anything else.

If Soap wasn’t wrong about Ghost, then he would turn Soap into every awful thing that he’d managed to become within his nightmares instead.

“What does it — Ghost, you have got to be fucking kidding me right now,” Soap shot back, utterly flabbergasted before a look of sudden realization crossed his steely expression. “You run a mile expecting rejection before I even have the chance to react.”

“Then let me be clearer, so that things aren’t obtuse between us; what does it matter to you?” Ghost grit out with pained punctuation at his punched-out vocabulary. “If you’re so fucking pissed about me leaving go find someone else to warm your damn bed.”

Ghost watched the vein in Soap’s neck flex at the deep swallow he took before he continued.

“Is that what you think I want from this? A hole to fuck?”

Of all the tones Soap had ever used with Ghost, never before had he sounded so genuinely pained and offended by a question. It shone in his fierce glare beneath the yellow fluorescent light of the kitchen. The bulb itself was on its last legs as it audibly crackled and flickered between the both of them - a dying light for a dying relationship in Ghost’s eyes.

Fitting.

He had to kill this before it became something worse.

“What else could you want from me?”

Soap first opened his mouth with an air around him that had Ghost taking a fearful step back - like a startled gazelle caught before the end of a rifle - but Soap just as quickly snapped shut with a sigh.

“I’m not having this argument with you, Ghost. I’m not indulging this shit. I’m not playing this game with you just so you can turn tail and run again.”

To exacerbate his point, Soap jabbed a finger into the black countertops as his point continued with pinpoint accuracy into everything Ghost refused to acknowledge.

Despite his size and closeness to the door, Ghost still felt like an animal backed tight into a corner.

“You don’t like giving me control, but you refuse to take care of yourself. I’ve seen you stumble back to your room, bleeding out a trail of self-deprecation all the way to your doorstep. Hell, I’ve even patched you up in shitty motel rooms because you didn’t want a hospital. But this? This isn’t going to fucking work. You’re putting me in a hard position, Simon.”

The lights above them dimmed just enough for their shadows to become monstrous against the steady glow of Soap’s near-forgotten cigarette, and when it became apparent that Ghost was going to either turn tail or hold the silence like a challenge…Soap broke it once again with a downright strained drag of his cigarette.

“I want to love you, Simon. I don’t need you to love me yet, but I need you to meet me in the middle without thinking that I'm going to hurt you because of it. I’ll put my line in the sand, and I just want you to meet me halfway, yeah? You either meet me here,” Soap paused now to draw an invisible line between them with his foot, “or not at all. Give me some semblance of honesty before you run away again, or I’ll put back every damn wall of professionalism between us.”

Ghost felt like rot incarnate as he dryly spat out, “honesty is not something we give in this field.”

“Try that again, Ghost,” Soap seemed to be eating his words about taking the bait, but Ghost didn’t care. “Tell me again how I don’t deserve some semblance of communication and basic fucking respect between us.”

Ghost. Not Simon.

A door closed between them as he watched the nearly unnoticeable shiver of Soap’s shoulders give away whatever sense of decorum he was holding up. This had been a long time coming since Ghost unceremoniously fled.

“You don’t want my fucking honesty,” he snarled at last. “People all believe they want that but no one truly does. It’s a load of shit when it comes from their mouths and less than that when it comes from yours. Don’t pretend that you’re not just as much of a liar as I am.”

“In the field, Ghost! I don’t make a habit of lying to my teammates. Please, I’m beggin’ for a crumb here to tell me that I’m not waiting for nothing. Time won’t heal this wound forever, and I can’t spend a lifetime waiting when you won’t give me anything to work with.”

“You don’t want my troubles.”

“Please,” Soap shot back desperately, “trouble me! I would court you with some semblance of grace if there was any of it left in the world.”

“I can’t!” Ghost shouted back with a voice pitched an octave too high in fear. His voice was that of a crackling fireplace just about to go out. The rasping drawl of nails on chalkboard as he realized the ugly sound between them was his own labored breaths. He hated the way his lungs grated against his cracked ribcage whenever he hyperventilated - like a dying animal’s gurgled breaths beneath the gunshot.

That admittance alone was more than he’d ever been able to give anyone again. He just knew it.

He wanted to say more, desperately so as he choked out a strangled sob when his hand unwillingly shot up to cover his mouth. It felt suffocating alongside all the things he wanted to say in between the lines of his own self-hatred. He needed to be hated, because the alternative was worse.

The alternative was hell.

Hands coaxing his sweaty hair back out of his face. They were gentle to him, rarely, but just enough to leave him wanting more - craving it like a mewling lamb led to the slaughter - just before the butcher's blow came. They gutted him alive and left the broken pieces baking in the sun with bare skin blistering into scarred boils.

Her fingertips ghosted across his ugly with no intent to piece him back together, but to take him apart piece by piece instead. He was left strewn across the desert with no hope of ever being whole again as hands ghosted low enough to make him sob.

“It’s easier for us both when you’re quiet,” she’d tell him. It wasn’t just her voice, because there were many throughout the months.

“Don’t say no,” another woman with tears in her eyes would beg him. Just as much a victim as he was, but equally unable to defy the devil and his pitchfork. “It makes this easier to stomach.”

“Don’t,” he whispered into the hollow shell of Simon’s ear.

“Say,” she coaxed him as her hands ghosted across his scarred cheeks.

“A,” they pleaded with him in between the featherlight touch of their lips cascading his neck.

“Word,” Roba warned him as a dead man’s breath ghosted across his bruised flesh.

Ghost could stand a beating. He wore bruises like a collar binding him to this life, because a bullet wound was easier to clean than all the cavities torn into his body by uncaring hands that took in unequal fistfuls.

They’d left him with a hollow chest and cracked ribs. There was no heart left, nor a hearth seated in the middle of it all like a warm place to crawl back to when the weather within his own head grew dismal. He was left out to the unkind elements and told only to tip his head back to the sun when he could no longer stand the way another man touched him.

He didn’t want to wake up in a cold sweat thinking about his teeth being replaced by hands squeezing tight enough around the man’s throat for something to pop like a damning sentence. It would validate every awful thing he’d imprinted across his skin in flesh-toned permanent ink.

Worst of all, he didn’t want to wake up thinking that it would be Soap’s hands that took without ever having given back the stolen parts of his body.

He didn’t want that to be Soap.

“Ghost, if you greet me each time expecting me to hurt you? That shit hurts me too.”

Finally, Ghost managed to pry his hand away from his mouth. Even if he couldn’t tell Soap all the things that haunted him- all the reasons that he didn’t know how to stop running - he could give him this much.

“I came back,” he sobbed out between his ragged breaths. Dimly he realized that he’d been hyperventilating this whole time. Soap’s hand was outstretched, though five jagged lines across his arm told him that he’d fought a losing battle with Simon’s subconscious only moments before. Simon’s plea was quiet as a lost prayer but heard nonetheless. Weak as the pitiful mewl of a stumbling kitten.

There were many things he ought to tell Soap, and many more things that he knew he was physically incapable of telling - because he’d been told to be quiet so many times that raising his voice above a whisper brought vomit up behind his closed teeth. It would be easier if Soap were unkind to him, and asked the impossible of him in turn but he didn’t. Instead, Soap was patient with him. An unyielding force that brought Ghost to his knees each and every time. He would lay the world at Soap’s feet if he asked it of him, and that would be easier than the reality he’d been given.

“Come back to me when you can meet me in the middle, Simon.”

Grass is green, except when it’s not.

Skies are blue, except when the sun sets.

And Simon Riley was a coward with no exceptions nor exemptions.