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The rec room looked like a Halloween aisle detonated. Plastic tablecloths clung to folding tables, orange and black bunting sagged off the ceiling vents, flatering lights hung up in a rush, and a suspicious slow-cooker of 'spiced' apple cider burbled like a bog. Someone, definitely Gaz, had put fake cobwebs over the telly and in random awkward places. Someone else, Soap, had added a plastic spider the size of a dinner plate, a fake plastic rat with red eyes, and a suspicious rubber snake.
There was a tray of snacks—store-brand biscuits, crisps, and those miniature mummy lookin' sausages no one could quite identify that sweated under the fluorescent lights.
“Right,” Price announced, clapping his hands once, silently, rubbing them together, “Pumpkin carving contest. No power tools. No explosives. No firing pins. No medical evacuations.”
Johnny's blue eyes already twinkled, a smirk tracing on his lips, "Define explosives.”
“MacTavish-" Laswell warned from the far end, spreading a drop cloth with the grim focus of a crime scene tech. Her pumpkin sat pristine, set aside perfectly.
Ghost picked the biggest pumpkin on the table, rolled it toward him like ordnance, and sat. He produced a short carving knife and a permanent marker and drew a perfect circle for a moon and the arched silhouette of a black cat. Then he leaned in, shoulders boxing out a defensive perimeter.
“Touch this,” he said, voice sandpaper dry through the mask, “and you’ll pull back a stump.” He wasn’t joking. He also wasn’t… not joking.
Soap grinned around a cup of cider. “Aww, look at ye. Domestic.”
Ghost grunted. It was definitely a warning. Gaz was up to his elbows in pumpkin guts within seconds. “Why is it warm,” he demanded, scandalized. “Why is it slimy and warm. I don't like this-"
“Nature,” Price said lowly, clearly amused by Kyle's discomfort and was uncapping a black marker. He drew precisely two dots and a smile on his pumpkin, then crowned it with his boonie cap. “Done.” Price leaned back, checking it out proudly.
Laswell set out brushes and got to work painting clean black swathes over her pumpkin, crisp white moon, neat stencil letters stenciled: CLASSIFIED. She didn’t carve a thing. It looked like a museum placard that had opinions, and many of them at that.
Ghost carved with surgical intensity, breath hitching, low in his chest. Every so often, he emitted a tiny growl, more a vibration than a sound. When the blade snagged on a stringy rough bit, he muttered, “Fuckin' hell- Come on.." like he was negotiating with a detonator. He was somehow both entirely still and radiating aggression in a one meter radius. Everyone saw. Noticed.
“Si-” Soap said, leaning over for a peek, voice low in a whisper in only a tone that Simon could hear.
“Boundary violation,” Ghost said without looking, focused, tongue sticking out slightly behind his mask. “One more and I get involved-"
"I'd no mind if ye did-" Johnny teased but got no response from a focused Simon. Johnny leaned back, chuckling lowly, focusing on the cup of cider he sipped at in the black plastic cup. The cider tasted… wrong. Like someone had whispered apples over jet fuel. He loved it.
Gaz, meanwhile, yelped, “Ow- bloody- Ah!” and held up a finger suddenly red at the tip.
Ghost’s head snapped over. Just looked briefly. Laswell came over with a bandage as Kyle was being a little bitch. Simon didn't bother as he focused on his carving of the pumpkin. He returned to his cat and moon like a predator to a half finished meal.
By the half hour mark, the rec room hummed. Price was leaning back in a chair smoking a cigar, hands held together on the back of his head, looking at the proud marker face pumpkin, hat brim cocked like a crown. Laswell’s paint job had turned sleek and minimal, the moon so precise it looked printed. Gaz, bandaged, had attempted an ambitious skyline. It listed to one side like the city had seen things. It was neatly rough.
Johnny's pumpkin had internal components. He’d cut a jagged maw and stuck a paper tube through the back like a cannon. He fed a length of fuse looking twine into it, then stuffed the cavity with seeds. He smirked, looking down at it and lightly patted the sides of the pumpkin.
“MacTavish-" Price said lowly, brow slightly arched, tone of a man haunted by past experience. “What is this-?" The Captain asked, eyes narrowed and sharp.
“A pumpkin-,” Soap answered dryly, beaming.
“You said no explosives. Ye didna’ say no pressure differentials.”
“Absolutely not,” Laswell said without looking up as she chimed in after overhearing the conversation.
Johnny gave her his sweetest innocent face and returned to packing seeds with the concentration of a wildman. Ghost watched him with flat suspicion and then went right back to carving. Didn’t care. He was in it deep. The cat’s back curved like a drawn bow, tail up, one paw lifted. The full moon behind it was cut thin enough for light to sing through.
“Judgin' in five,” Price said. “Points for creativity, craftsmanship, and—”
Soap struck a lighter.
“—compliance with-" MACTAVISH-" Price huffed out, watching, cutting Soap’s words off.
“Three,” Soap said, grin like a lit fuse. “Two....One!"
He touched flame to the twine. It fizzed, vanished into the pumpkin’s throat. For half a second, nothing happened.
Then Soap’s pumpkin detonated like a squashy confetti grenade.
“BOOM, BABY!” Soap whooped, as the room disappeared under a rainstorm of strings and seeds. Price’s hat slid off his pumpkin’s head at the shockwave and landed brim first in the cider. Gaz shrieked, slipping on a slick of pulp and falling down to the ground. Laswell did not move, but every molecule of her being radiated murder.
Ghost stood very slowly, pumpkin seeds clinging to his mask like freckles. It was hilarious. He slowly turned his head to Soap. He did not speak. He did not need to. The glare said entire novels. It was the glare of a man who had meticulously carved a cat and a moon only to be baptised in pumpkin guts.
Soap, breathless with laughter, raised both hands. “Art is pain, Lt.” He said as he caught Simon's gaze under the mask.
Ghost growled so long and hard it had verbs in it.
Price retrieved his hat from the cider, wrung it out and settled it back atop his doodled pumpkin. It was drenched and floppy. “Points deducted for assaulting my headwear.”
Soap looked offended but he smirked, wiping seeds off Ghost’s shoulder with a guilty tenderness that only he could get away with. Ghost swatted the hand away, too late to disguise the flicker of not hating it.
“Alright,” Laswell said crisply, setting her brush down. “Judging.” She said. She was clearly done with this shit.
They lined the pumpkins up on the table: Price’s marker face, jaunty under the “bonnie” hat. Laswell’s sleek painted pumpkin and Gaz’s wounded skyline. Soap’s… or what remained of it, a vegetable crime scene, and Ghost’s, a cat poised in perfect silhouette against a meticulously thinned full moon, light glowing from the hollow like a lantern found in a haunted field.
There was a brief argument about criteria and who should clearly win.
But then Laswell, eyes narrowed, simply tapped her own painted pumpkin with a brush handle. “This one wins.”
“What?” Gaz protested. “She didn’t even carve!”
“It’s mixed media,” Laswell said, proud of what she did.
“Nay! Not fair!” Soap yelled out very loudly.
Ghost folded his arms. “I should’ve won,” he said, not for the first time, and not loudly, but with the kind of iron certainty that made everyone else’s volume feel cheap. “Mine has thematic cohesion. Negative space. Restraint.”
“Also an audience of seeds,” Gaz muttered, flicking another off his sleeve.
Price clapped Ghost on the shoulder. “Second place, then."
Ghost gave a noise that sat between a grunt and a sulk. Behind the mask, his eyes cut to the side, his posture changed by a millimeter, the sort of microscopic deflation you’d have to know him to catch. Soap did. The big bastard was pouting. Aggressively behind his mask. Like he’d weaponized disappointment.
Soap’s mouth tilted. “It’s brilliant, Si-” he said, softer, and for a second Ghost looked at him like a cat caught being admired and didn’t know where to put its paws.
Price, satisfied no one was currently on fire, declared the contest concluded. He took his doodled pumpkin under one arm and his cider under the other and marched off muttering, “Could’ve been simple. Could’ve been civil. Should’ve known better.”
The crowd broke. Gaz went to mop, swearing vengeance on gourds. Laswell packed her brushes with the serenity of a woman who had outmaneuvered chaos by refusing to play its game. Soap scooped seeds off the floor with a dustpan, glancing over, grinning helplessly as Ghost continued to smolder over second place like a storm cloud with arms.
When the room had thinned to background noise and the string lights hummed low, Soap drifted to Ghost’s side. The cat and moon glowed steady on the table between them, throwing a clean circle of light that cut the mess into something almost cozy.
“C’mon,” Johnny said, bumping Ghost’s elbow. “Walk me back ‘fore, aye?"
Ghost made a low noise that meant fine and led the way down the corridor, boots echoing on concrete. The air smelled like steel and spice and the faint faded scent of pumpkin. Soap let their shoulders brush once, twice, like an accident he kept on having.
At the bend where the noise from the rec room fell away, Johnny stopped him with a hand on his sleeve. Ghost turned, head tilting, eyes dark behind the skull.
Soap smiled, crooked, stupid, full of the night, and leaned in to press a quick, decisive kiss to the outside of the mask.
It was nothing. It was everything. The fabric under his lips was cool- the man under it was not.
Ghost went very still.
Soap stepped back half a pace, smugness blooming like a bruise he would enjoy pressing later. “Second place, aye? But first in my book.”
Ghost stared at him. It took a heartbeat, two, and then the faintest exhale fogged the inside of the mask. “You’re insufferable,” he said, and somehow it was almost fond.
“And you’re cleaning the rec room.”
“Aye, aye.” Johnny lifted both hands in surrender, still grinning. “But… ye liked the kiss.”
Ghost began walking again. “Don’t push your luck.”
Soap fell into step, humming something that might have been a victory song. Behind them, the rec room glowed orange and ridiculous. Ahead, the corridor ran long and quiet, two shadows moving in easy parallel, a carved cat and a full moon still burning in the Scotsman’s eyes. And Simon’s shoulder bumped his once more, just lightly, a gravitational mistake, neither of them mentioned it.