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“Oh, here you are, I have been looking for you”, you said, stopping a few feet from him.
He looks up at you with a confused face, before he sits up and gets his earphones off.
“What happened?”, he signed, still making a confused face.
“Nothin’, I just came to disturb you. What ya doin’?”
He frows at you, fairly suspicious.
“Did Soap make another bad prank and you are running away from the embarrassment he sure is going to live?”
You sigh.
“How is it that I can’t hide anything from you?”, you said, slightly annoyed.
He smiles, pleased.
“Oh, Sugar, is ‘cause I know ya well”.
And as always, you are thankful that he can’t talk because you are sure that his Texan accent will be ten times worse if you could hear it.
(It will melt your insides and Gaz’s teasing will be fundamental and you were still in denial. Very much in denial. It was enough having to see his handsome face every day, with his nice perfect hair and his freckles, and don’t even mention his brown eyes.
What’s up with brown-eyed men being beautiful?
Were they made by Aphrodite herself or something?)
“Anyway, what ya doing?”
“Hiding from the extroverts”.
“Ah, I’m an introvert too, can I join?”
“No”.
“Why?”, you fake a hurt tone.
“You just want to disturb me”.
“I come in peace; I promise”.
He gives you a look like he doesn’t believe you, but he ends up lying down again. You take it as a good sign and end up lying next to him.
The grass is a little bit ticklish under you, even if you are wearing your uniform. The sky faces you with white clouds and a mantel of blue that reminds you of your home for a moment. It’s a nice view and since it's kind of far from the buildings that are the base, you get why Roach decided to hide there.
You steal a glance from him and find that the light breeze is moving his hair, which somehow, sparks under the daylight, with the three thousand and thirty-three freckles across the bridge of his nose and cheeks. (Not like you counted them, but they were very impressive and hard to miss).
You knew Roach was a handsome man, even if he preferred to hide his face under a balaclava most of the time. Honestly, who were you kidding? You knew he was handsome since the first time you met him, and he put his 5’10” self in front of you and gave you a bright smile before welcoming you to the team.
He has been the kindest and still was, even if he now mixed it with teasing and sarcasm from time to time.
You were friends, teammates, you would die any day in any situation for each other and, that was probably why you convinced yourself every day that what you felt for him was a simple crush and that it would go away like the breeze eventually.
(Except that it has been almost two years).
You sighed, facing the sky again, closing your eyes for a second like he did beside you.
You feel him eye you for a moment before you feel him move beside you. When you open your eyes to see what he is doing, you feel something in your ear. He catches your hand before it can get to your ear, and he silently shows you that is just his earphone.
He was sharing his earphones with you.
You blink, a little bit surprised, because you have never seen him share his earphones with anyone.
He was very protective of his earphones, his phone, his notebook, and his pens. Everything of him had a little plastic band with tape with his name because Ghost and the Captain always liked to take his pens and not return them, and because Soap was a very known earphone thief.
He took your surprise as a good affirmation before his earphone made its way to the hollow of your ear. It settled pretty well and to no one’s surprise, the first thing you heard was a country song.
“Seriously?”
You don’t know why you ask when you knew for a fact that the only thing Roach could hear was country music, indie rock, and punk rock. You also knew that he liked to write songs in that notebook he always carried around and that he was good with the guitar. He doesn’t say much of his past, even when you ask politely, so you stopped asking a long time ago.
“Listen and shut up”, he simply signed, before he faced the sky again and closed his eyes.
You chuckled but did as he told you.
You faced the sky and listened to the country songs playing in your ear.
(Americans and their terrible taste in music).
The song was nice, to be honest, you just had an attitude towards it to annoy him. You suspected that he was very sensible about it because it had ties back home. You understood that but teasing him back for what he teases you was fun, most of the time.
When the song finished, another started, and then another and another and you soon lost count. Some songs changed from a slow nice rhythm to a quick catchy one, but most of them fit the mood of the moment and fit Roach as a person too.
(Most of them were Dolly Parton too, which you could understand).
Through it all you both stayed in silence, spread out in the grass, with your uniforms still on. The breeze was flowing, and it was peaceful.
You think you could even fall asleep.
At some point, you closed your eyes and just enjoyed the softness of it all until you felt him move again and a firm weight in your arm.
Still as a board, you opened your eyes a little to see that Roach himself, had moved his head to lay it on your arm. You looked at him for a moment, with your heart giving little skips that you were sure were not normal, before you decided to ignore it and return to whatever daydream you had been having.
You don’t know how much time passes. You think it could have been an hour or so. All you know is that you fell asleep in the grass and that someone took offense to it since something woke you with a kick on your boots.
You woke up exalted, almost about to stand on attention, looking everywhere.
But then you saw a skull balaclava not so far and you sighed.
“Ya aren’t on a holiday”, he said in a gruff voice with hard eyes.
You thought of answering him back, but you knew for a fact that that wouldn’t work at all.
“Sorry sir”, you simply said.
“Get up, we have a briefing in fifteen”.
“Yes sir”, and just like that, he turned around and created distance. When you saw him disappear into the nearest building you rolled your eyes and sighed annoyed. “Ghost never knows how to have fun”.
And then you tried to sit up, but you realized that Roach was still sleeping in your arm and that he hadn’t woken up, which meant that Ghost had only kicked you.
You looked at him, nuzzling your arm like it was a pillow, slightly hugging you. You gulped, suddenly nervous, before you used your other hand to touch his head.
To your surprise, his short hair was soft, so before you could stop yourself, you were running your hands through it.
He purred like a cat.
It made you chuckle, slightly hard, before you realized that he had been awake all this time.
He slowly detached from you, before stretching in the grass, pretty much like a dog or a cat will do.
(You have always thought that Roach had the looks of a golden retriever, but his personality wasn’t like one. He honestly was a mix between a golden retriever and a black cat).
“That was a nice nap”, he signed.
“You were awake?”
“He kicked you too hard”.
You roll your eyes and get the earphone off before sitting down.
You sighed. He was right, the nap had been nice, even if you were now full of grass and God knows what else.
Roach got his earphone off and put them away in one of the many pockets of his uniform trousers before the two of you stood up at the same time.
He shook some grass off your uniform, and you did the same for him until you started walking back to the buildings.
Just when you were about to enter, Roach’s hand landed on yours.
You looked at him confused.
“Thanks for staying”, he signed.
You blinked confused.
“It would have been rude to leave”.
He smiles, and for a moment you think he knows that you are a terrible liar and that that was a pretty dumb excuse.
“I had a nice nap. You are a good pillow”.
“Yes, you are very welcome, my arm is sore and numb now thanks to that”.
He chuckles and opens the door. You follow him inside like you will follow him for the rest of your life if you could.