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Ghost jerks awake, twisted up in sweaty sheets. He wrestles himself free, breathing hard, a creeping sense of dread set in his bones—another nightmare. He can’t even remember what it had been about, now, the images turning into a slurry of color and sound in his memory before petering out entirely.
He sighs, rubbing at his forehead. The first hints of a headache were beginning to rear its ugly head, pressure squeezing around his temples before releasing. Not enough to do much more than annoy him, at the moment, but Ghost knew all too well that it was only going to get worse. His best bet was to take some medication, hydrate and get back to bed; and hope that he sleeps through the worst of it before morning.
The blurry red numbers of his alarm clock informs him that it was fifteen after one, so he has a few hours.
Ghost heaves himself out of bed, leaving his sweat-damp sheets strewn across the floor to allow for them to air out as he blindly fumbles around his dark room for the bathroom. Flicking on the bathroom light is almost worse—he feels like he’s been hit with a flashbang, temporarily blind to his surroundings until his vision comes slowly back into focus. He grabs the ibuprofen off of the counter and wrestles with a lid for a moment before it unscrews and he shakes two pills out into his hand. He dry-swallows them and chases them with water from the faucet, drinking out of the same cup he used to hold the water he used to rinse after brushing.
Medicine and water ingested, he tries to go back to bed, picking his sheets up off of the floor, now cool and mostly dry, rather than warm and damp with sweat. Once he was back in bed, he closes his eyes and tries to sleep.
He really wishes he could shake the sense of dread.
-
The second time Ghost jerks awake, he knows something is wrong. He’s sweaty again, tangled in his sheets once again. The sense of dread is worse, and Ghost finds himself gripped with the irrational idea that something bad was about to happen.
Before he could get out of bed, his stomach cramps so badly that he folds in on himself, an involuntary groan forcing its way past his lips. He tries to breathe through it, his abdomen feeling like it was caught in an invisible vice, winding tighter and tighter before it finally released. Fuck, what was wrong with him? Another cramp seizes him, worse than the first, his eyes bugging out as a gag forces its way up his throat.
Unproductive, thankfully. Ghost forces himself out of bed, tries to navigate his room as it spins around him and the ground moves beneath his feet. He stumbles around with all of the grace of a newborn deer, by the time he reached the bathroom he was practically crawling. He does crawl across the bathroom floor, cool tile biting through his sweatpants. He doesn’t care. He just needs to reach the fucking toilet before he pukes all over the floor.
He pulls the mask off and chucks it in some random direction, white-knuckling the toilet seat like a man clinging to a raft for dear life. He was clinging to it for dear life. He’s going to die. He’s going to puke up his fucking toenails and then he’s going to fucking die.
Another heave rips its way through him and he shoves his head into the toilet, successive retches bringing up the water he drank earlier, whatever was left of the ibuprofen and the ruminants of his dinner. He vomits so hard it leaves him gasping for breath between heaves, sharp and desperate before another cramp seizes him and he’s pulled back down once again.
Finally, finally, after what felt like a small eternity, the heaves start to taper off. The only thing he had left to bring up was sour bile and saliva, the taste lingering in his mouth. Ghost spits one final time into the toilet bowl before he closes the lid and flushes. He’s shaking. He pulls off a wad of toilet paper from the roll and wipes his face. He throws the soiled toilet paper into the toilet and flushes that too. Then he lays down on the bathroom floor.
The cool tile felt good on his hot skin. And when did he get so hot? What the fuck was going on? Was he sick? He should probably get up and tell somebody, but he can’t bring himself to. He’ll do it when he starts feeling a little better.
Ghost closes his eyes and falls asleep.
-
A nasty case of food poisoning was sweeping through the base. Soap woke up that morning to find the mess half-empty. One of the few people to escape unscathed like himself was speculating it was the coleslaw—and Soap pats himself on the back for being rightly disgusted by that particular food.
It does not, however, inspire confidence in him to eat breakfast in the mess. He gets a thorough apology from the staff and eats breakfast anyway, trying to put his sudden paranoia aside.
He’s going to be fine, everything he’s eating has been properly prepared and cooked. It’s fine.
Once he’s done with breakfast, he heads to the meeting Price had scheduled a few days prior, and hopes that he’ll find everyone else there.
He get’s there and the meeting room is dark. Shit.
Two minutes later, a very frazzled looking Price comes walking up the hall. “Hey Soap,” he says, almost as an afterthought as he opens the door, “Gaz is on the way, he didn’t want to eat in the mess this morning.”
“Don’t blame him,” Soap says, following the Captain into the meeting room, flipping on the lights behind him.
Gaz comes running up the hall a few minutes later, bursting into the room. He apologizes for being late, but Price is quick to forgive him this morning. Apparently everything was in upheaval, so many people were down with food poisoning that the higher ups were considering simply giving everyone the day off.
“Damn, that bad?” Soap asks.
“It’s fuckin’ bad,” Price says as he writes on the whiteboard hung on the wall. “... where’s Ghost?”
Soap and Gaz look at each other, as if each expected the other to have the answer. Then they both shrug, and in unison they say, “dunno,” “don’t know Captain,”.
“Ah shit.” Price swears, turning away from the whiteboard, “he wasn’t in medical either—one of us needs to go find him.”
Soap volunteers himself almost immediately. “I will, sir!”
Price nods. “Alright son, go on. Text me when you find him.”
Soap exits the meeting room and makes a beeline for Ghost’s barrack. There’s no other place he could be—Ghost was punctual when it came to important things like meetings and briefings. With the exception of his after-mission naps where he might opt to forgo a meal in favor of getting more sleep, Ghost always followed his schedules to a T.
Which meant he was probably in his barrack, and he probably had food poisoning, just like everyone else. Did Ghost eat the coleslaw last night? Now that he thought about it, Soap is pretty sure he did—eugh.
He makes sure to stop by his own barrack to grab the spare key to Ghost’s room before making his way over. He knocks on the door once, twice, three times and receives no response; so he announces that he would be coming in and unlocks the door, letting himself inside.
But the room is empty. The room was completely dark. There’s nothing on the bed except a twisted comforter and sheets. Soap flips on the lights and makes his way around the room. “Ghost?”
The door to the bathroom is ajar.
Soap pushes it open and flips on the lights in there too, only to be met with the most pathetic noise he thinks he’s ever heard. There, curled up on the floor, was Ghost; pale, maskless and sweaty. And when Soap turned on the lights, he whimpered.
Despite his pitiful state, his voice hasn’t lost any bite, despite how wrecked he sounded. “Turn that shit off, MacTavish.” He growls. Soap flips the lights back off and he hears Ghost audibly sigh. “Thank you,” he murmurs, significantly less bite in his tone.
“You sick?” Soap asks, pulling out his phone to tell Price he’s found Ghost.
“Yeah.” Ghost grumbles.
“So’s like—half of everyone else on base too,” Soap reports, “food poisoning. Heard some people saying it might’ve been the coleslaw.”
“Fucking ‘course it was...” Ghost groans, “you gonna take me to medical?”
“Will you go to medical?” Soap asks, putting his phone away. He’s still standing in the bathroom doorway.
“No.” He answers, “not unless I have to.”
There’s no sense in trying unless it was necessary. Medical was probably swamped right now and Ghost was a stubborn bastard. The one other time he had been sick, he had hidden away and no one saw him for two days. Then he emerged as if nothing had happened.
“Well unless you start getting really dehydrated I don’t see a reason to force you to go. You been drinking water?”
“Been kinda focused on not dying, Soap.”
Of course. “One sec.” He disappears from the doorway in search of Ghost’s water bottle. He retrieves it from the nightstand and comes back. “Got your water bottle.”
“Thanks,” Ghost murmurs as Soap puts it on the floor next to him.
“Drink,” Soap says, sounding dangerously close to an order; “and you have to fill it back up once it’s empty.”
Ghost’s head finally perks up, one eye open so he could stare at Soap. “Got somewhere to be, Sergeant? Don’t remember telling you to leave.”
“I thought you didn’t like being around people when you were sick—last time you up and hid and none of us could find you.”
“I don’t.” Ghost says, laying his head back down on the bathroom floor. “But you can stay.”
“Only if you want me to,” Soap says, but he’s already pulling out his phone to tell Price he might not be coming back to the meeting. It turns out, he doesn’t need to—the Captain has already called it off. No sense in having the meeting if Ghost wouldn’t be able to attend. He shoots Price a quick text letting him know he got it. “You’re in luck, Price just called off the meeting we had this morning.”
Ghost groans again. “Fuck, completely forgot about that...”
“You’re sick, LT, it’s fine—and it’s cancelled now anyway.” Soap soothes, lowering himself to the floor of the dark bathroom, sitting cross-legged next to Ghost’s curled form. “Heard they might just give everyone the day off while they wait for this to run it’s course.”
“Bloody fuckin’ preposterous, they’d never do that.”
“Should’ve seen the mess this morning, Ghost, it was fuckin’ empty. The kitchen staff apologized to me. It’s bad.”
“Sounds bloody apocalyptic out there,” and Soap thinks he detects a hint of humor returning to his lieutenant’s voice. That was a good sign.
“Do you wanna get off the floor? Could get you back in your bed, maybe watch something on my phone if you want.”
“No,” Ghost says, curling up tighter, “comfortable where I am.”
“If you’re sure.”
“And get over here, Sergeant,” Ghost’s eye opens again, fixing Soap with a hazy glare. More annoyed than angry. “That’s an order.”
“Alright, alright, I’m comin’—” Soap shuffles over to Ghost, trying to shimmy himself between Ghost’s feverish body and the wall. The bathroom wasn’t that big to begin with, it could barely fit one grown man, let alone two, but Soap managed to position himself behind Ghost, laying an arm gently across his torso.
After about a minute, Ghost twists in his hold, flipping himself over so that he was facing Soap. He pressed his face into Soap’s chest, hands grabbing at his shirt as if to pull him impossibly closer. Soap smiles to himself, rubbing his hand up and down Ghost’s back.
He presses a kiss to Ghost’s hair. “Get some sleep, LT.”