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Price’s office door was already open when Soap got there, which was never a good sign.
The old man was leaning back in his chair, bonnie hat low, a cigar he hadn't lit up yet to smoke, rolling between his fingers..
Across from him, slouched like they owned the place, were Ghost and Roach.
Ghost lounged with his boots on the edge of the desk, mask pushed up just enough to chew gum like he was taking his rage out on it. Probably was.
Roach sat beside him, sitting sideways and slightly upside-down. His hands neatly folded, expression the exact picture of innocence—if innocence had dark circles and a thousand-yard stare.
“Captain MacTavish,” Price said. “Good. Close the door.”
Soap glanced from Ghost to Roach to Price and felt his stomach sink. “...Wha' they bloody do now?"
“Nothing… yet,” Price said. “That’s the problem.”
Ghost popped his gum, wincing when it almost got stuck on his mask. “We’re victims of prejudice, sir.”
Roach nodded solemnly, like this was a legal deposition.
Price ignored them and looked at Soap. “HQ’s got me on calls the next few days. Paperwork, briefings, politicking. Someone needs to keep these two from starting an international incident out of boredom.”
Soap blinked. “Yer bloody jokin?"
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
Soap thought it best not to answer that. “Why me?”
“Because,” Price said, standing, “you’re responsible. And they listen to you.”
Ghost put a hand to his chest. “We do. You’re like the mother we never asked for.”
Soap’s eye twitched. “I am not—”
Price clapped him on the shoulder. “Congratulations. You’re on babysitting duty.”
“Babysitting?” Soap repeated, scandalized.
Price was already walking past him. “Try not to let them burn the bloody base down. Or each other. Or themselves.” He paused in the doorway and added, “If anyone asks, this is a team-building exercise."
And then he was gone. The door clicked shut behind him. There was a beat of silence.
Ghost turned his head slowly toward Soap. Roach did the same. The two just stared at him.
Soap suddenly understood how gazelles felt on nature documentaries.
Ghost smiled under the mask. “So, Mother… what’s on the agenda?”
Captain MacTavish let out a long, exasperated sigh, not responding.
────𓁹‿𓁹────
Day One: Motherhood Begins
Captain MacTavish tried to do this properly.
He gathered everyone in the hangar—141 plus a fresh batch of wide-eyed recruits. He had a whiteboard, a schedule, a training plan, and the faint hope that Price was exaggerating.
“All right,” Soap said, clapping his hands. “We’re keeping it simple. Live-fire in the kill house, room clearing drills, comms discipline. Nobody dies, nobody blows anything up they’re not told to, and I get through this week without stranglin’ anyone. Questions?”
Ghost raised his hand. “Yes, Mother?”
Every single recruit swiveled to look at Soap.
Soap closed his eyes for a full three seconds. “Lieutenant Riley, but ye have up to this exact second the privilege of keepin yer bloody jaw.”
“Just seeking clarification for the children,” Ghost said, sweeping a hand toward the recruits. “If we get separated, do we call you ‘Mother’ on comms or is that strictly an in-person intimacy?”
Roach coughed into his fist to hide a laugh. Failed.
Soap ground his teeth. “You will address me as Captain MacTavish over comms.”
Ghost nodded. “Understood, Mother.”
The recruits tried not to smile. They failed too.
Soap pointed at Ghost. “You. First stack man. Move.”
As they broke into squads, Ghost slipped in behind the line of recruits, clapping one on the shoulder.
“If you get lost,” Ghost said in a stage whisper that still somehow carried across the hangar, “just cry ‘Mother, I’ve fallen’ over the comms. He’ll appear like a guardian angel. It’s beautiful.”
“I will actually kill you,” Soap muttered.
────𓁹‿𓁹────
Live-Fire: Comms Discipline (or Lack Thereof)
Training went about as well as Soap expected. Which was to say: badly.
“Bravo team, breach, breach, breach,” Captain MacTavish ordered over the radio.
Ghost’s voice came back immediately. “Aye, Mother. Entering the womb.”
“Ghost,” Soap snapped, “if ye say one more thing like that I will frag ye myself—”
“Shots fired!” Ghost cried dramatically. “Mother’s hostile!”
Roach said nothing, but Soap saw him in his peripheral vision, shoulders shaking with silent, hard laughter as he cleared a corner with textbook precision.
They moved through the kill house, Soap trying to focus on angles and cover while Ghost kept up a steady stream of comms harassment.
“Mother, be advised: your middle child just failed to check his sector—”
“Mother, permission to execute a tactical sulk—”
“Mother, Roach bit me, request discipline—”
At one point, as they stacked on a doorway, Ghost leaned close enough for Captain MacTavish to hear him murmur, “You’re doin’ great, by the way. Very nurturing.”
Soap rammed the door with slightly more force than necessary.
────𓁹‿𓁹────
The Protein Incident
After training, Johnny hit the gym to work off the murderous urges. He mixed his usual shake without looking—scoop of powder, water, shake-shake-shake, down the hatch. The taste was a bit off, but he chalked it up to a new batch.
Fifteen minutes later his stomach made a noise that sounded like a demon being exorcised from an industrial fridge. Soap froze mid-rep. Another, angrier noise.
“Ohhh, fuckin' hell-"
He barely made it to the bathroom. By the third trip in an hour, Soap realized something was wrong. By the fifth, he was ready to declare war on anyone who looked at him.
He found Ghost and Roach in the rec room, playing cards.
Ghost looked up, eyes twinkling. “You look pale, Mother. 'Ghosts' gettin’ to you?”
Soap slammed a plastic tub down onto the table so hard their cards jumped. “What did ye two bloody do?!"
Roach glanced at the tub, then at Soap, very slowly. His expression was perfectly blank. Too blank.
Ghost picked up the tub, examining the label. “Hmm. ‘Whey isolate, triple chocolate, muscle mass—’”
Soap snatched it back, unscrewed the lid, and sniffed. The smell was… wrong. Less protein power, more school cafeteria chocolate powder.
He grabbed a spoonful and let it fall. The texture was lighter, fluffier. He stared.
“You two didn’t-"
Roach shifted in his seat, eyes darting away.
Ghost leaned forward. “What, Mother?”
Soap glared at Roach. “You replaced my protein powder.”
Roach slowly looked at the Captain, shrugged, then reached into his vest and pulled out a laminated flashcard.
He held it up.
It read: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Soap blinked hard several times. “What the bloody hell is this?"
Ghost burst laughing. “He’s on a communication protocol, Mother. Minimal verbal signature. Operational silence. Only flashcards.”
Roach flipped to another card and held it up:
IT BUILDS CHARACTER
Soap’s eye twitched. “I am lactose intolerant, you wee goblins."
Roach flipped to another card: NOT MY FAULT GOD MADE COWS DELICIOUS
Soap lunged across the table.
Ghost intercepted him, still laughing. “Easy, Mother. Think of your blood pressure. Emotionally fragile and all that.”
“Emotionally wha—?”
────𓁹‿𓁹────
The Ballet Legend of Captain MacTavish
By the time Soap’s digestive tract stopped waging war on him, the recruits were assembling in the briefing room for a tactics lecture.
He arrived to find a wall of politely curious faces and Ghost at the front, laser pointer in hand, gesturing at a whiteboard. On the board, in neat block letters, someone had written:
CAPTAIN JOHN “SOAP” MACTAVISH: FROM BALLET TO BATTLEFIELD
Johnny stared at it for a long time.
Ghost didn’t miss a beat. “—and of course, back in his pre-military days, Mother was a principal dancer in a renowned company. Pirouettes, grand jetés, the works. Traded his pointe shoes for boots when the world needed saving.”
A recruit raised a tentative hand. “Sir—uh—Ghost, sir… is that… true?”
Ghost sighed dramatically. “Isn’t it obvious? Look at his footwork in CQB. That’s not training. That’s art.”
Roach, sitting by the wall, slowly held up a laminated flashcard: a very crude doodle of a stick figure in a tutu firing a rifle.
Soap strode to the front. “What in the name of all that is holy are ye tellin’ them?”
“Character building,” Ghost said. “You don’t want them to know their commanding officer is just some bloke with a rifle, do you? No, no, they need myth. Legend. Intrigue.”
“It says here,” one recruit said, squinting at the whiteboard, “that you once did a pirouette off a rooftop and shot three men before landing in the splits.”
Ghost nodded solemnly. “Witnessed it myself.”
Soap pinched the bridge of his nose. “None of that happened.”
Ghost sounded hurt. “You don’t remember? Trauma does that. Very… emotionally fragile, our Mother.”
Roach flipped another card whimsically:
WE SUPPORT U, MOTHER (the “u” was underlined three times and surrounded by tiny hearts)
The recruits looked at Soap like he’d personally stormed Normandy in a tutu.
“Right,” Soap said flatly. “Everyone out for PT in five. Ghost, Roach, with me.”
As the recruits filed past, one of them whispered, “Do you think he still has the shoes?”
Soap decided he was not paid enough for this.
────𓁹‿𓁹────
Ringtone of the Damned
That evening, Captain MacTavish was in the ops room, on a video call with some very serious people in very serious suits who very seriously did not like being kept waiting.
He’d just managed to claw back some professionalism, discussing logistics and supply lines, when his phone—plugged in on the desk beside him—lit up.
Price’s name flashed across the screen.
Before Soap could silence it, the ringtone started.
Not the default. Not his usual quiet buzz. Bagpipes. Not just bagpipes: bagpipes at maximum volume, wailing a tune so aggressively Scottish it felt like someone was stabbing the Union Jack.
The op room’s speakers picked it up perfectly, blasting the sound like a ceremonial funeral for good decisions.
Everyone on the call stopped talking.
On one screen, a US colonel blinked. “Is… is that…”
Soap dove for the phone, nearly knocking his chair over. He fumbled, swore, finally got it silenced. He straightened slowly, face burning.
“Apologies,” he said tightly. “Technical issue.”
On the other side of the room, Ghost was leaned against the wall, phone in hand, shoulders shaking.
Roach sat next to him, holding up a flashcard:
SCOTLAND FOREVER
Price’s text message, visible for a second before Soap thumbed it away, read:
"SON, WHY DOES IT SOUND LIKE A HIGHLAND REGIMENT IS DYING IN YOUR POCKET?"
Soap considered just throwing the entire phone into the nearest ocean.
────𓁹‿𓁹────
Official Documentation
The next morning, Soap was halfway through a mercifully quiet cup of coffee when there was a knock on his door.
He opened it to find the base’s overworked admin NCO, clipboard in hand, glasses perched on the end of her nose.
“Captain MacTavish?”
“Aye,” Soap said warily. “What now?”
“I need you to sign off on this,” she said, passing him a sheet.
Soap scanned it.
TASK FORCE 141 – PERSONNEL WELLNESS AND STABILITY REPORT
SUBJECT: CAPTAIN JOHN MAC TAVISH
STATUS: EMOTIONALLY FRAGILE (HIGH-RISK)
RECOMMENDED ACTIONS:
– Regular check-ins
– Reduced exposure to stressors
– Limited access to ‘chaotic agents’ (see: Riley, Simon; Sanderson, Gary)
Soap stared. “Where did this come from?” he asked, voice very calm in the way that said it was absolutely not calm.
“Filed through proper channels yesterday,” she said. “Lieutenant Riley submitted it. It’s already logged on the system; we just need your acknowledgment.”
Soap very slowly looked down the corridor.
At the far end, Ghost was walking past, hands in pockets, whistling. Roach followed, flipping casually through his stack of flashcards like a Rolodex of crime.
Soap signed the paper with too much force and handed it back. “I am not emotionally fragile.”
“Of course, sir,” she said in the tone of someone who had seen many emotionally fragile men insist they weren’t. “Just formality.”
As she left, Roach drifted closer and held up a card at chest level so only Soap could see:
STEP ONE IS ADMITTING IT
“Ye absolute menace-” Soap said under his breath.
Roach smiled, just a tiny bit.
────𓁹‿𓁹────
48 Hours of Flashcards
By the second day, the flashcards had escalated.
Roach, committed to the bit, refused to speak at all.
During mission planning:
Soap: “Roach, what’s your ingress route?”
Roach: holds up card: THE SPICY ONE
Soap: “That’s not—can you be specific?”
Roach: new card: LEFT
Ghost, thoughtfully: “To be fair, Mother, the spicy way is usually left.”
On the range:
Soap: “You’re pulling shots low and right. What’s your issue?”
Roach: GUN GO BRRR :)
At lunch:
Ghost: “Salt?”
Roach flips a card: I AM THE SALT
By evening, Roach had started using pictograms. Soap passed him in the hallway and got hit with: a card showing a stick figure with wild hair, holding two smaller stick figures by the scruffs of their necks like wayward kittens.
Underneath, in block letters: YOU
Soap didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. Or both.
────𓁹‿𓁹────
Breaking Point
It came to a head in the motor pool. Soap found Ghost and Roach “supervising” the recruits while they cleaned the trucks. In practice, this meant Ghost leaning against a Humvee telling increasingly dramatic lies about Soap’s storied career while Roach provided visual aids via flashcard.
“—and that was the day Mother disarmed a bomb with nothing but a hairpin and sheer maternal fury,” Ghost was saying. “Tears in his eyes. Says to the ordnance, ‘Not today, son.’”
Roach flipped to a card that said: #1 MUM with a little trophy drawn on it.
The recruits were eating it up.
Captain MacTavish marched over. “Ghost. Roach. Office. Now.”
They trailed after him all the way to a storage room he’d commandeered purely to yell at people in peace. He shut the door, turned, and let it all out.
“I have had it,” Soap snapped. “The comms, the ‘Mother’ nonsense, the bloody lactose war crimes, the bagpipes, the ballet, the paperwork—”
Ghost held up a hand. “In my defense—”
“You have no defense,” Soap said. “You forged a psychological stability report, Ghost. Do you have any idea what kind of hell that causes in the system?”
“A small one?” Ghost offered.
Roach slowly held up a card: MEDIUM-SIZED HELL?
Soap pointed at him. “You swapped my protein for powdered milk!”
Roach switched cards.
GAINZ R 4 EVERYONE
“And you,” Soap said, rounding on Ghost. “You have called me ‘Mother’ over open comms in front of officers, recruits, a colonel, and at one point a drone tech from god knows where.”
Ghost folded his arms. “I don’t see the problem. You are effectively our mother.”
“I am your superior officer.”
Ghost tilted his head. “Is that not basically the same thing, but with more yelling and fewer hugs?”
Roach flipped lazily to another card: HUG? with a drawing of two stick figures hugging.
Soap stared at the card, then at them. He was tired. He was annoyed. He was, annoyingly, also a little amused. They were hell on his nerves, but they were his hell. Chaos wrapped around competence, unhinged but loyal, with just enough respect not to push him off a physical cliff.
A metaphorical one, though? Daily.
He let out a long breath. “Right. Here’s what’s going to happen. One: the ‘Mother’ shite stops on official channels. You want to die on a hill, do it on encrypted squad net, not in front o’ command. Two: you undo that emotionally fragile report and submit a corrected one.”
Ghost opened his mouth behind the mask.
Soap cut him off. “And if ye put ‘emotionally volatile’ I swear to God I will feed ye your own mask.”
Ghost closed his mouth fast.
“Three:” Soap continued, “if one more unexplained dairy product crosses my path, I will personally see to it that every meal you eat for a week is MRE chili.”
Roach’s eyes widened above his card. He flipped to: YOU WOULDN’T
“Try me,” Soap said firmly.
Ghost shifted his weight, considering. “And what do we get?”
“You get to keep breathing,” Soap said.
Ghost nodded slowly. “Tempting. But I think we can broker a better deal, Mother.”
He leaned a shoulder against the wall, casual. “Look. You’re stressed. We’re bored. The world’s ending as usual. You can yell, or… you can weaponize us.”
Soap raised an eyebrow. “Weaponize you.”
“We’re good at chaos,” Ghost said. “Let us aim it. You point, we annoy. Psychological warfare. Morale manipulation. Disinformation. Ballet rumors for the enemy, even.”
Roach flipped to a card that just said: TACTICAL MENACES
Soap stared at them. It was an objectively stupid idea. It was also, unfortunately, not the worst idea he’d ever heard. He sighed. “Fine. Controlled chaos. But I swear, if any of this blows back on me—”
Ghost saluted crisply. “Would never, Mother.”
“On comms,” Soap warned, “it’s ‘Captain.’”
Ghost’s eyes glinted. “Understood… Cap-mum.”
“Get. Out.”
────𓁹‿𓁹────
Price Returns
On the third day, Price came back. He walked into the hangar to find: Recruits running drills with a level of terrified precision Soap had never achieved before.
Roach up in the rafters with a sniper rifle, providing overwatch while holding a flashcard in his off hand that read: YOU’RE DOING AMAZING, SWEETIE, whenever someone made a good shot.
Ghost standing behind a group of officers from another unit, very calmly and confidently explaining in great detail how Price’s mustache had its own confirmed kill count.
Soap was at the center of it all, barking orders, redirecting chaos, snatching a flashcard out of Roach’s hand mid-drill, and smacking Ghost on the shoulder when his “fun facts” got too elaborate.
Price watched for a minute, then wandered over. “How’s babysitting?” he asked.
Soap looked like he’d aged ten years and also like he’d never been more alive. “I hate you,” Soap said. “They’ve replaced my protein with milk, my ringtone with bagpipes, my psychological profile with a cry for help, and the recruits now think I danced Swan Lake before joining the army.”
Price considered this. “Any casualties?”
“Not yet,” Soap said.
“Any rules broken that I’ll get yelled at for on a call?”
Soap hesitated. “...Probably? No.”
Price clapped him on the shoulder. “Then I’d say it’s going brilliantly.”
Ghost appeared behind them, because of course he did.
“Father,” Ghost said cheerfully. “Mother’s been very brave.”
Roach dropped down from the rafters like gravity was a suggestion and held up a card:
WE’RE PROUD OF HER
Soap rubbed his face. “I hate all of you.”
Ghost smirked. “You love us really.”
Soap opened his mouth to argue, then saw the way the recruits moved when Ghost barked a command; the way Roach wordlessly adjusted a private’s grip on a rifle; the way the chaos simmered but never quite boiled over.
He sighed. “Right,” he said. “Briefing in ten. Ghost, stop traumatizin’ visiting officers. Roach, if ye show that ‘sweetie’ card again I’m burning it. And if either of ye call me ‘Mother’ on an open channel I am puttin’ both yer names in as emotionally fragile and scheduling weekly therapy sessions, am I clear?”
Ghost grinned under his mask. “Crystal, Mo—Captain.”
Roach flipped to a new card Soap hadn’t seen before:A stick figure with spiky hair, standing between two gremlins, all three of them flipping off a much bigger stick figure labeled “THE WORLD.”
Underneath: FAMILY
Soap felt something in his chest unclench, just a bit.
He flicked the corner of the card with a finger. “On me, you wee shites. Let’s go ruin someone else’s day for a change.”
Ghost fell into step beside him, hands in his pockets. “Lead the way, Mother.”
This time, Soap let it slide.