Chapter Text
Soap had always been loud. Throughout his life, people had told him, yelled at him, hushed him. Soap knew he was loud, but he never bothered to stay quiet. What was the point? He had no family to tell him what to do anymore, and he was a demolitions expert. If people said he was a little boisterous, he could always blame the hearing loss.
Soap had been working for the SAS for a while now. He had worked as a demolitions expert and was a sought-after team member. Soap got along with many people; he was easy to talk to and resilient under pressure. Maybe that was why he was out in the middle of nowhere, Serbia.
Rumour had it this was the mission that killed the elusive Ghost.
Soap was trudging through the dark, shivers racking his body when he crested a hill, or at least he thought it was a hill. Seconds later, he was falling at a rate he couldn't begin to fathom, down towards a death he didn't expect.
But Soap was a trained soldier, and he knew this day would come, so he closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable.
Death didn't meet him.
As Soap lay on a table, his entire body burned, red-hot and dour. The blinding light overhead was scorching on his sensitive irises, and he struggled to think through the fog of helpless fear.
Soap began to weakly struggle, only to find his hands and his feet bound to an uncomfortably rigid surface. Panic in full swing now, Soap truly began to fight the restraints. Shifting from side to side, he struggled, eyes open but unseeing, as he blindly tried to get away.
Eventually, all the struggling did him some good as Soap unbound both a hand and his foot. The only problem was they both released at the same time, and Soap went tumbling down at a speed he did not expect, only to smack onto the ground gracelessly.
He only allowed himself a second to recover; however, he knew his short-lived unobserved freedom wouldn't last so long. Soap struggled with his free hand to undo the last bindings on his hand and the rather shoddy one on his ankle before standing up.
Adrenaline had flooded his system; however, Soap still noticed the mild ache as if he had been still for a long time. He brushed it off, ready to explore and hopefully plan a path to escape.
‘Was it the Serbian terrorists?’ Soap pondered as he observed the painfully sterile room. It was like a doctor's office and science lab, the table Soap had been strapped to was hard and shiny at the centre of the space.
Soap lapped the room till he found a strange door, not like a normal door, maybe they were underground? It was carved into the wall and lifted half a foot off the ground. Soap carefully walked around corners, checking for hostiles while keeping his breathing even.
Wherever he had been taken, it was painfully sterile. The corridors bled into one another, and the doors lining the walls all looked like the type you'd find deep in a ship. Soap was a smart man, he didn't like to boast, but he knew a lot of random stuff, and this architecture was unlike the normal military style. It almost looked state of the art, but he didn't understand why some Serbian terrorist group would have it.
If the powers that be wanted Soap, they didn't need to kidnap him; he would've come happily if anyone asked. So where the heck was he?
One corridor he passed had a figure stood a distance down, their back was facing Soap, so all he needed to do was duck to hide from them. However, he noticed something peculiar.
The person at the end of the corridor was a startling red colour, small in stature, not wearing any clothes…
Soap watched them shuffle away from him; they—it was not a person, it was strange and alien.
Soap decided to double back, hopefully outrun whatever the hell that thing was. He wandered down a different path, and that's when he saw it, a window.
Ships don't usually have windows, though this could be an underground lab. What would be the point of an underground window, though?
Soap glanced side to side, checking the coast was clear, and this wasn't some kind of trap, and then walked up to the window.
It was big, taller than Soap from floor to ceiling, it stood an impressive 3 metres tall and possibly 6 across. It looked out on a sea of stars, like those postcards you can send from novelty websites but so much more. The night sky reflected back at Soap, a place to get lost in.
Growing up, Soap had been a little nuisance, but he had also been quick, and one of the things he got good at was physics. You need it to build bombs, he would assure himself from time to time, but really, Soap loved the stars.
Scotland when he was little was amazing at night when the cloud cover lifted; you could pick out every single star and see out into the night sky. Soap had lain on his roof a thousand times just to see them twinkle back at him. It was wonderful, it was everything he needed.
Now Soap stared out at strange stars. He didn't know any of the alignments, and he wondered where he was. This wasn't his home; they were staring out at a nebula that was a stranger to human eyes. Soap wanted to collapse, wanted to cry.
If he had died falling off that cliff, Soap could deal with it. If he had been taken to an enemy facility and tortured, Soap could take the pain. But now Soap was a person lost in space, on a spaceship, an alien spaceship, and he didn't know what to do.
You can take a weapon out of a soldier's hands, but you cannot stop them from doing their job.
Soap had always been told to stay quiet, to stop being so loud. He was ready to follow that advice perfectly.
Walking with newfound purpose, the human man marched through the ship. When he came across alien faces speaking words he couldn't understand, Soap effortlessly took them down. When they shocked him with little prods, he didn't feel the burn; he just felt their windpipes splinter under his gun-calloused hands.
At one point, he faced off against a group of three. They looked like guards, big and buff. One looked like a narrow-faced bear with four arms, the other two hard-scaled lizards, shorter than Soap but just as buff. No lab coats to speak of, one of the lizards had a flimsy-looking gun.
Soap knocked it out of his hand with a swift kick, hopefully delaying the time it would take for them to attack him full force. Soap, in the seconds between, threw himself at the lizard, smacking its skull against the ground.
The sudden movement had the other two closing in on the assailant. Soap was quick, however, and dispatched the lizard with a sharp elbow to the stomach, the blunt focus winding him hopefully as he spun them and knocked him down.
Soap was fighting weaponless, and with the seconds ticking down, he was getting more agitated. Finally, he headbutted the second lizard and felt the satisfying give of bone beneath his own skull. Soap pulled back and grinned as the body fell to the ground with a dull thud.
Then the bear assaulted him, and Soap was once again on the attack, teeth and hands scratching for purchase. Soap found his way to their throat and with a vicious pull, latched onto the alien's throat and pulled. A gush of tangy blood filled his mouth, and Soap was free to keep moving.
When Soap had marched through the entire sterile ship, past empty cages and unknown equipment, he came upon the final door, a captain's room, a palace of calm and control.
Soap kicked down the door, hands crusted with alien blood, mouth tasting foul.
He came upon a room with one single alien, a slimy little thing mostly made of a gelatin-like substance. It stood maybe 5'5 and cowered away from Soap as he approached. Rage was not an emotion Soap felt often; he was a pretty laid-back guy. He let things go by with an ease most soldiers found weird, but now he was here, lost in space.
The thing shot at him with one of those stupid guns they all seemed to have. Soap felt the injury through the side of his gut, but he was so hopped up on adrenaline he didn't really notice. In a flash, he knocked the weapon out of the alien's hand.
Soap didn't like feeling alone, and he felt alone. He also didn't like feeling cornered, and whatever goal Soap had with killing every alien on this stupid ship, he knew for a fact he was not going to let himself be cornered again.
.o0O0o.
Soap remembered crashing the ship; he remembered the captain alien's screech of fear; he remembered everything. Now Soap was laid out on the ground, a smouldering wreck somewhere to the side of him, and wondered if this was it. Was it over? Could Soap finally die?
He had wondered if death was just around the corner a lot through his life. In the dark of night at his old family house, he had wondered in the dark what death felt like. Then his family kicked it, and he stopped thinking about it, buried himself in work.
The military was always soaked in blood and bile, in all the things so human and yet so separate. Soap even then didn't think about his own death, not much to think about. He was not a praying man, though he hoped a god was out there.
Could a god reach him here? If he died, would he get to see his mum in heaven again? Or had he done too much? Would he get that happy ending?
No, no, Soap wasn't dying here. He refused; he wouldn't.
Soap rolled over, his body aching like he had been hit with a ton of bricks or been exploded out of a falling spaceship, he supposed, eyeing the smouldering wreck.
Slowly, carefully, Soap stood and began to stumble away. Away, he needed to get away.
What had he done?
The question rattled unbidden around his burning skull. Soap walked through an unfamiliar forest, away from the destruction. He had killed a lot of aliens. Was someone going to come after him? Had he signed his own death warrant?
Soap's gut burned where the weird space gun had shot. No gaping wound was apparent, but the feeling of cooked flesh remained. Maybe it was a heat ray or something? Soap didn't know; he kept moving.
Eventually, Soap stumbled upon a possible Hail Mary. A ship, not like the last one; this one was made of sleek black metal. It was smaller but not by a lot, and the way it was constructed made Soap hopeful. Maybe he would get home, maybe he wouldn't. Soap didn't have many answers, but right now, he knew one answer: keep his head up, keep moving, and stay quiet on his own volition.