Chapter Text
Okay so the mission was supposed to be easy: arrive, enter without no one noticing your presence, get the data from the main computer (data that could stop big terrorists from starting WW III), and get out without a fly seeing you.
Easy. You could do it with your eyes closed.
Yet...things went to shit pretty fast.
You don’t remember much except the essential: Price sending you with Ghost to retrieve the data from the main computer on base and then getting assaulted by terrorists. Between the transfer screen and download, Ghost being a freak killing hostiles, and bullets flying everywhere at some point you lost track of time, especially when someone decided to bloody fucking stab you.
The deed didn’t go unpunished, but it took you at least thirty seconds to realize that you had a fucking knife in your right leg. And that you were bleeding pretty bad, and that the adrenaline was starting to become pain.
A lot of fuckin’ pain.
As a soldier, you should be used to knives and bullets, but if you were honest, you were more of a desk soldier than a field one. You were the nerdy one that liked computers way too much and that may or may not have hacked important places and had to serve a sentence in the military because of it.
So yeah, you were not used to wounds at all and you were doing your best to remember your training and not fuckin’ panic.
Your heart and lungs said otherwise.
“Oi, how is the transfer –?”, Ghost startles you, appearing from thin air.
You almost shoot at him, until your mind caught the familiarity of the skull mask. (And to think you thought it was fucking weird the first time you saw him).
He stops but doesn’t say or do anything until he looks at you in your eyes and recognizes the panic ‘cause he rushes to your side faster than you would think possible.
“Stay still, breathe”, he simply says and when he crouches beside you and sees the knife and the blood, he doesn’t look in the slightest bothered.
It would have been funny if you weren’t in so much fucking pain.
“Yeah, 'cause is that fuckin’ easy”, you sarcastically say.
He gives you a look, his You-better-shut-up-now look before he returns to the knife and the blood again.
“We need this out if we want you to walk”, and just when you were going to ask what he wanted out, he gets the knife out without a warning.
You let out a flamboyant wave of curses before finally calming down a little, remembering that you were not supposed to act like this.
“Believe me, ‘his better than a bullet”, he then throws the knife away and while you moan and groan and curse in pain again, he calmly gets out some bandages and rolls them around your wound, tying them way too tight in your leg.
He then put his hand over your helmet and made you look him in the eyes.
“Focus, soldier”.
And the contact kind of makes your heart beat even faster since he has never touched you before, even if that was not technically an actual touch since he touched your helmet, not your head.
Ghost and you were not friends and since you arrived at the task force, he has always been kind of hostile with you. Soap has told you that he is hostile with everyone and that you shouldn’t take it personally, so the fact that that act felt…very gentle and…cute…it was fuckin’ weird.
You have never seen him being gentle with anyone. Even less with the person he argued about football and Manchester United every time he had the chance.
You blink and he has disappeared, and you are alone on the floor. He goes to the computer to see how the transfer is going and you take that moment to breathe in and breathe out and tell you that you somehow had to get used to the whole thing (the stabbing and blood thing not the gentle Ghost thing).
You look at your leg and the blood tainting the bandages, but you tell yourself that you need to put the blood and the pain aside if you wanted to get out of there.
As Ghost said, you needed to focus.
Your mission was getting the data, rendezvous with Price and get the hell out, and, with a good or bad leg, you were fucking doing that.
“Bravo 0-6, how do you copy?”, Ghost says on the comms while you stand up and limp in his direction, not without the casual groan of pain.
There is some static before Price’s voice appears.
“Bravo 0-7, I copy. What’s your status?”
You breathe relieved since, five minutes before everything went to shit, the two of you lost contact with Price and the rest of the task force.
“We have the data. We are on our way to the rendezvous point”, Ghost answers, giving you the drive.
Your gloved fingers brush with his in the exchange, and you blush like a damn teenager, but you hide it pretty well by turning a little and securing the drive in one of your three thousand vest pockets.
“Copy, we will see you at the rendezvous point. We have been exposed, so be careful on your way there”.
“We will, over and out”, Ghost then looks at you and you gulp before looking at him in the eye. “Can you walk on your own?”
“I can fuckin’ defeat the whole Man United”, you say and for a second or two you swear there is an amusing light in his eyes but is gone when he blinks.
“I am not joking, soldier”.
“Neither I am, Lt”, and to not have to look at him anymore, you make a show of grabbing a riffle and walking (more like limping) to the exit.
Ghost doesn’t follow immediately, but he eventually catches up and doesn’t say anything, at least in the beginning.