Archive of Our Own ^beta

Ghost still wasn’t sure what to call this…thing that he and Soap had.

It was weird.

Unusual.

Disturbing almost, at least in his opinion.

He wasn’t used to having someone always there and he still hadn’t decided if he hated it or not. The thought always hung in the back of his mind — as though he’d balanced it atop a great wall and sat back waiting for the wind to sway it one way or the other.

. . .

Marakov was dead. Ghost thought that it’d make him feel better to have nailed the son-of-a-bitch to the wall, literally and figuratively speaking — but the fallout left him questioning what he’d really wanted out of the victory. He’d begun questioning if his intentions had been pure or if he’d just enjoyed the chase of it all — the way that tailing Marakov had consumed him, body and soul, for so long. It was numbing to be without it.

That, and it left Ghost with an unprecedented amount of shore leave to contend with. He’d tried requesting more missions from Price almost as soon as they’d touched down from the helipad, but Price was a stubborn bastard.

“Go home and get some rest, Simon,” Price had said in his infinite wisdom, “It’d do you some good to take that load off your shoulders.”

Fuck that.

Ghost was too proud to admit to Price then that he didn’t have an apartment close to base…or any apartment for that matter. He’d broken the lease of his old one-bedroom condo years ago. The place was a cramped shithole with leaky faucets and outlets that didn’t work half of the time. He’d sworn he saw mushrooms growing in the floorboards once, but after whacking it with weedkiller he’d been trying very hard to forget about the experience. The extortionist prices there weren’t worth the hassle at that point, plus management had hated him. It was easier to just stay out of the country working reconnaissance than it was to be home and remember that home wasn’t exactly a place he could go back to.

It was why he always avoided long-term shore leave.

He’d tried requesting an off-base mission three more times before finally giving up and picking out a cot in the quietest wing of the base to call his own. It was temporary. Everything was always temporary and so this too would pass.

It had to.

There would always be another Marakov.

Except there wasn’t for a good few weeks, and by then Ghost felt like he was close to scratching his arms red and raw from just how loud everything was on base. He was antsy and eager to do something — anything that would help the restlessness he felt from sleepless nights spent tossing and turning. He just barely escaped the throes of his nightmares most nights, because the thought of waking up in a night terror with tears in his eyes and a haggard voice from screaming like he used to was mortifying. He didn’t want to be perceived by anyone else on base as less than for some stupid fucking nightmares.

He was better than that.

He had to be.

He loathed the idea of anyone seeing how sweaty his hands got beneath his worn gloves, or how sick he felt whenever they bumped against him or clapped an easygoing hand on his shoulder as a show of camaraderie. He didn’t blame others for his discomfort, but the constant feeling of eyes on him was wearing him down.

The medication he used to take for panic attacks went dry the week before he ran out of the one he’d been prescribed for insomnia. It took nothing short of a horse tranquilizer to knock him on his ass, and so Ghost had been fighting a losing battle ever since when it came to sleep loss. The darkened bags beneath his drooping eyes made him look less like a kicked puppy and more akin to a rabies-infested raccoon digging through the trash. He was too tired to smear makeup over his eyes as a reclamation of the last bit of anonymity he had on base, and so that revulsion left him a hermit in a room that was entirely too loud all of the time. He couldn’t sleep, and he couldn’t stay focused either long enough to keep up with the hobbies that Price kept recommending to him, because he was the only person allowed to see Ghost unravel in such a disgustingly vulnerable time.

He wanted to be better.

He knew that the medication would help that.

He should get them refilled.

He needed to get them refilled.

It’d make him feel better.

But he didn’t.

Going off-base was uncomfortable in such a way that Ghost couldn’t adequately describe so much as he could feel it like an itch beneath his skin that got worse with the more people he was surrounded by. London was always packed no matter where you went, and on his own, the challenge of navigating through them without a mission hanging above his head felt nigh impossible. He couldn’t bring himself to do it.

He’d never been a particularly sociable person — not like his brother had been, but there was a time in his life when he’d been comfortable enough with the world to be alone in it. He could go out in the streets on a grocery run, or just to snag a coffee from the local 7/11 just around the corner of his family’s old apartment. It’d been loud, but bearable with music playing from a pawned iPod. He could stand people shouldering past him or standing too close in line at a register even if he didn’t like it.

He couldn’t do that now.

It was pathetic, even if Price never said it directly. He felt pathetic for how weak it made him feel to be so utterly petrified of a simple grocery run that he’d rather rot on takeout.

So, he sat back at base and withered.

. . .

“I always see you here,” Soap asked him one day. He’d been doing demolition demonstrations out in the hangar. Evidence painted his face in soot and had his mohawk blown back into a wild mane. “I didn’t see you signed up for any of the demos today, or is this leisure?” There was earnest curiosity in his voice, and Ghost could see it in the slightly crooked quirk of his easygoing smile.

Ghost looked like a mess. He’d gone to the showers to finally feel clean again after even he became repulsed by the layer of grime on his skin, but the influx of demonstrations and competitions today had left the showers more crowded than usual. His skin still felt itchy, and his hair was wet to the touch with grease, but the idea of being bare-skinned around so many other men had him spitting up bile in the bin just behind where Soap had caught him.

His mouth still had an acidic taste to it, and he was eager to be rid of his friend to flush his mouth with water and sink back into his unmade bed.

“Sleep,” Ghost’s voice was still rough and gravelly from disuse. He’d been signing a lot more now. Price didn’t ask questions, he merely matched his energy with the BSL he’d learned over years of working with the reserved blond. On instinct, Ghost signed out the phrase with an open claw of a hand held up toward his face and closing it with pinched fingers.

“Sleep.”

He knew that sleep would not come, but he’d been told once that if he laid there long enough with an empty head it’d trick his brain for at least a moment or two — just enough to keep him going.

Soap was always hard to read. He only ever showed what he wanted people to see with an uncanny deliverance, and so Ghost felt uneasy as he physically watched Soap’s eyes flick across every part of Ghost’s body before landing on his bloody, bitten lips. With that, his expression fell into a frown of disbelief. He didn’t believe Ghost, for one reason or another.

“Do you need a ride back to your apartment? No offense but you look dead on your feet. I think Laswell would kill me if she knew I let you drive like this.”

Ghost shook his head slowly, “Not driving, don’t worry.”

He didn’t actually have a legal license. When he was younger, he’d paid a teen in the year above him for a fake ID that’d make him seem older than he was. ‘wise beyond his years,’ was how he’d asked it to look. So, all these years later, he could definitely drive, just not well. Not legally either, but nobody had ever pushed him on it.

Groggily, he continued, “I’m just goin’ back to my room. Go home, Johnny. You’ve got soot in your hair.”

Soap’s nose scrunched up in thought. He was clearly working a puzzle out in his head before realization dawned on him, and he cocked his head toward Ghost in a way that made him feel uneasy.

“LT, do you not have a place to go back to?”

Not even a home.

Just a place.

Anyplace that wasn’t here.

Ghost didn’t have an answer for him fast enough, but that was all Soap needed as confirmation. He was smart in a way that was often overlooked, but Ghost had seen through it in the same way that Soap always managed to look straight through his posturing. He was a bloody genius when it came to chemistry, and he’d never seen the Scotsman lose at board games if it wasn’t on purpose. He’d mopped the floor with Price playing a game of twenty-one questions over chess.

It was scary being beneath that stare.

“You’re staying here.”

It wasn’t a question so much as it was a statement of fact.

“Does Price know?”

That one he could answer with a ‘so-so’ gesture. They’d never really talked about it, but he had to know.

“Well,” Soap began, and Ghost could already tell that he was going to say something terrible just from his tone, “You look like shit, LT. Grab your bag…or whatever it is that you keep yer’ shit in.”

“Excuse me?” Ghost asked incredulously.

“Did I stutter? You look terrible, you smell terrible, and the cots here suck ass.” As Soap spoke, he used his fingers to list off every reason as to why Ghost looked like shit in rapid-fire form. “That’s why I have an apartment, so get yer’ shit and let’s go before traffic gets bad.”

Soap was already moving before Ghost had time to react, because honestly Soap never really stopped moving. The blond was half convinced that Soap had never once stood fully still in his life. Whether it was him picking at the skin in his nail bed or bouncing his knee during mission briefings. Soap seemed to function on a different frequency entirely as he walked at a brisk pace down the hall. He used the railings to swing himself around corners, and Ghost followed silently behind him. He didn’t question how Soap knew where he’d have squirreled away his bags, or that the unkempt room in the furthest corner from the barracks would be his.

He wasn’t really sure that it’d be an answer he wanted to hear.

“You don’t have a lot of stuff,” Soap muttered as he hauled Ghost’s patchwork duffel bag onto the bed. He didn’t say it unkindly, but there was something in his voice that Ghost couldn’t quite place, “where’s the rest of it? Do you have a storage container down south in one of the yards?”

“No.”

Soap looked up briefly, “surely you have more than this.”

Ghost shrugged, arms extending wide to show off the dismal state of the cramped room he’d claimed. It had his clothes, knives, a water bottle, and a picture from the last Christmas he’d ever celebrated. What else did he need? It wasn’t like he wanted to be on base long enough to collect useless bobbles, and he didn’t need a lot of things. They’d get lost one way or another, or someone would break them. Having it all fit in a duffel bag with room to spare was satisfactory, and tactical. He didn’t need to be hauling around two suitcases worth of useless possessions everywhere he went.

The Scotsman looked like he wanted to say more as his mouth opened and shut twice. Eventually, he settled on a breathless reply of “Alright then,” before he began rifling through the footlocker for the frankly paltry amount of wrinkled clothes that he’d stuffed inside. Ghost hadn’t had the energy to fold them, and so they’d sat wrinkled and forgotten in his locker to be another day’s problem.

Some part of him was ashamed of the state of his room — the state of his fucking life right now. He didn’t want Soap to see this worst part of himself. The messy, disgusting parts that couldn’t keep up with a room, much less his own sense of self when he was left without a goal to hunt toward.

Soap echoed none of these insecurities. Still, he didn’t miss a beat before he began talking again, gesturing for Ghost to put anything else he wanted in the duffel bag, “I’ll heat up some dinner while you’re in the shower. I have like…snacks? But snacks aren’t actually a meal. I need to have my leftovers or the impulse to get fast food takes over.”

“Why?” The question came before he could help himself.

“Which part?” Soap asked without looking up.

Ghost’s brow furrowed. Soap wasn’t an idiot. He had to know what he was talking about, he just didn’t want anyone else to know that. “Why are you doing this?”

“You need it.”

Ghost bristled on instinct, “I don’t need anything.”

Soap, not missing a beat, slid onto the bed with his legs folded criss-cross. “Yes, you do.”

“I don’t.”

“You want to know how I know, Ghost?” Soap’s eyes were dark as he balanced his chin in the palm of one hand. “Because I know you, as much as you’ve let me see, at least. As your partner, I get to see your self-destruction firsthand. You’re prone to it more than most. Plus, this place is too loud for you,” Soap emphasized his point by rapping his hand against the metal wall and wincing at the echo, “Well, my apartment’s not. Just for a night, at least. Come get clean, grab some food and then I’ll drive you back to this hovel to rinse and repeat, deal?”

When Ghost didn’t respond, Soap extended his hand encouragingly for him to take.

“I’m not going to force you…again, but I know you’ll feel better when you’re clean.”

Ghost never felt clean.

Not really.

He could scrub as hard as he could, right down to the bone, but he’d still feel it.

“Just for the night,” Ghost reaffirmed as he snatched up the duffel bag, checking only once to make sure the Christmas photo was still safely tucked away in a pocket before he zipped it up. “And then we never speak about this again.”

“Stay as long as you’d like,” Soap corrected as he dropped his hand and eased himself off of the bed to stretch, “fuck I don’t know how you’ve been sleeping on that for the last month. Man, I can physically feel the arthritis forming in my body.”

“It’s adequate,” Ghost defended with a hidden flush that extended all the way to the tips of his burnt ears. He didn’t know why he felt the need to defend the decidedly lumpy cot when everything else in the room was in an arguably worse state of things. Soap also wasn’t necessarily wrong in his assumption. The ache in his lower back hadn’t faded since he started sleeping here full time, but he was mostly sure that this wasn’t actually how arthritis started.

“It’s — It’s really not, and you know that.”

“Eat shit.”

“Come on sunshine,” Soap said, gently wrestling the duffel bag from Ghost to swing it over his shoulder. “It’s what a gentleman would do,” he defended when he caught sight of Ghost glowering down at him in mock disdain.

He thought about hitting him.

He almost did.

He probably should have.

Instead, he skulked after Soap as the other proceeded to duck into unused hallways and the darker corners of base to get to the parking lot. It was the longest route to get there, and it took Ghost a beat to realize that Soap was navigating through where the base had the least amount of foot traffic. He was actively avoiding the places where they’d bump into green recruits and coworkers fresh from missions, and more than once Soap paused to let someone else pass them without detection. They weren’t exactly sneaking so much as he just…didn’t want to confront anyone else today. Whether it was Soap taking pity on his reclusive nature, or that he too was exhausted from the day, Ghost didn’t know and certainly didn’t ask.

. . .

Just one night.

That’s what Ghost had told Soap.

It was decisively what he reaffirmed to himself as they pulled up to Soap’s apartment. It was nicer than he expected, though he’d never really given much thought as to where Soap might live. He’d seen Price’s house a few times, but that was it. Soap kept his place tidy, but not so barren as to be a minimalist.

It was homely in a way that Ghost wasn’t entirely used to.

“Showers down the hall to the left. Feel free to use my shampoo,” Soap called from the kitchen, “I’m going to reheat dinner. I’ll set out a bowl for you when it's done.”

He hadn’t answered Soap as he entered the bathroom. The towel went over the mirror before he ever got undressed. Ghost hadn’t seen himself in a mirror for years now, and he didn’t plan on starting tonight. He’d broken the last one at his old apartment and bit the bullet over his lost deposit when it came to the broken reflection that’d always stared accusingly back at him.

He looked too much like his mom.

Ghost showered with the lights off — always. He couldn’t stomach looking at his face and only ever seeing the red stain across his face that he shared with his mom. He had her soft eyes, soft lips, and a brutalized body. His eyes had been just as tired as hers, bruised from the weight of the bags he carried. She’d gotten hers from her husband, and Ghost called the source of his ‘dad’.

Just one night.

He was meant to feel human for just that night.

True to his word, Soap had dropped Ghost back off at base the morning after. He didn’t push — didn’t pry into the man behind the mask. He left breakfast on the coffee table and ate with his back to Ghost, idly talking about the latest game of football that he’d watched the night before. He claimed to need someone to talk to after Price shot down his betting pool, but Ghost suspected that he talked to fill the spaces that Ghost felt most uncomfortable.

He didn’t ask about the mask.

Instead, he offered a comfortable cloth mask that went over his nose and nothing more. A relic of the pandemic.

“Just in case.” He’d said it like a promise.

Despite it all, just two weeks later they repeated the cycle again. A drive to Soap’s apartment full of cheesy pop songs that Soap sang just under his breath, a shower hot enough that it might soothe the bone-deep ache in his body, and breakfast full of Soap’s ravings about whatever topic struck his fancy from the night before. He’d always known that Soap was smart as a whip, but it was different to listen to him in rapt awe as he absorbed every article he read between missions and recited them from memory. He wasn’t smart for the sake of it — he just genuinely enjoyed learning.

“I like to read,” he told Ghost the third time they repeated this constant cycle.

“Books?”

“People mostly,” Soap clarified with a shrug, “I think they tell the best stories.”

So, one visit became two.

Became four.

Became a week at a time.

They fell into a wordless rhythm after Ghost began staying overnight at Soap’s apartment. Soap would shoot him a text, pick him up, and they’d drive back to his place. Sometimes, Soap would stop at a corner store for groceries, but he never prodded Ghost to come with. In exchange, he used Ghost for manual labor when it came to loading and unloading the car.

He didn’t have many clothes that weren’t work-related, and he was two sizes up from Soap’s more toned frame. So after the fifth overnight stay, Soap laid out a week's worth of clean clothes and underwear out on the couch for him to find. They weren’t anything extravagant, just soft sweatpants and shirts that weren’t scratchy, but they were his, and Soap had been the one to get them for him.

Then, a week became a month.

Ghost didn’t know when that happened, or how Soap had managed to convince him each time that it was okay to stay for just one more night. Even Price had seemed to notice the shift, and told him that he was looking healthier with a warm bed to sleep in.

It was tactical.

It just made sense.

That’s what he told Gaz when his friend pressed for details. He assumed too much, and Ghost’s closed-off nature didn’t help. Nevertheless, he kept coming back.

The idea of it still made his skin itch, but he stayed.

He stayed because Soap asked him to.

He stayed because he thought back more often than not to Price’s comments about a home, and how the pale green walls of Soap’s apartment had felt like more of a home to him than anything else he’d experienced.

He stayed…

And Soap never asked him to leave.

They settled into a routine of sorts after a while. Ghost woke up early — well before the sun rose — and would pad sleepily into the kitchen, still rubbing sleep from his eyes, to make coffee. He’d memorized the methodical way that Soap took his, even if he hadn’t mastered the stupidly expensive espresso machine.

One butterscotch always went inside the cup. Just how Soap liked it.

He knew how he took his eggs, and how Saturday mornings looked like between them when Soap would finally rise and drowsily drop his head against Ghost’s shoulder. It was the only time that Soap touched him so freely, with sleepy ‘thank yous’ peppered in before he sank into the couch, coffee in hand.

Soap would always try to commit to watching the news at least once, but it was a losing battle with his attention span and they’d inevitably wind up falling into a rabbit hole of their streaming services.

He usually chose a documentary for the morning.

Ghost didn’t know why he did it, but he liked them too. He enjoyed learning while he fixed them breakfast.

It was…weird. All of it never failed to feel less weird.

Ghost had never actually lived with anyone in at least a decade. It was hard some days to be near people, but he never went back to base.

Soap didn’t ask him to leave either, and Ghost found that he — he really didn’t want to be anywhere else but here.

. . .

Summer came and went.

So did fall.

Ghost watched the leaves change color from the balcony, wearing a cloth mask and bundled up in a soft patterned blanket. He didn’t like coffee, but he enjoyed a warm drink with the brisk winter air cresting the horizon. Soap had made a habit of buying Keurig cups of hot chocolate for him without asking questions.

Soap was draped across the couch in the living room reading a book with a kitten kneading clawed biscuits into his thigh. Three weeks ago, Soap had spent the better part of an hour chirping back at a kitten under their neighbor’s car to lure the scrappy thing out. She was pathetic, but Soap loved her. Ghost begrudgingly admitted that he liked the skittish little thing too. She had three good legs and walked with a determined wobble through the house. She was still on steroids after they had to amputate due to an infection in her leg. Soap was so sure that she’d pull through. He said that she was a fighter just like Ghost, and so he had no doubt that she’d survive.

He’d been a grinning bastard ever since he’d been proven right.

Asshole.

Something whined at his side, and Ghost jolted back into awareness with a quiet apology.

They’d gotten Riley at the end of Summer. The name was pure happenstance, but it’d stuck. Riley was a service dog specifically for PTSD. They’d gotten him through a sponsorship network for veterans and active members of the military — someone Price knew back from school.

He was a good dog. A German shepherd who was always glued to Ghost’s side like a limpet, but he didn’t mind. Riley was one of the few comforts he had that he was able to touch so freely. Having him there made it easier to go outside again, though he still kept his trips out small unless it was the three of them on a grocery run.

His psychiatrist — a new one who refilled his meds — recommended that Ghost stretch himself out just to see how far he could go, and so he’d started frequenting a local cafe just down the street. It was a deaf-owned business run by local college students, and being able to use BSL again was refreshing in a way he couldn’t explain to Soap.

Ghost couldn’t tell Soap how much it meant to him when he first tried introducing himself in sign four weeks back. Soap was making an effort, which was more than Ghost ever expected from anyone these days.

Soap was just like that.

Full of surprises.

Wonderful yet terrible surprises.

“Are you ready for Halloween?” Soap asked from the couch, “Melissa, the lady next door with the crusty white dog, says the halls are supposed to be packed. I’m fuckin’ pumped.”

It was Halloween tonight. It’d been years since Ghost had last celebrated it, yet Soap had gone all out for it…even if it was just the two of them together in the apartment.

“Candy’s in the pantry,” Ghost said as he leaned back to speak through the open door. “Picked it up this morning.”

“God!” Soap called, and from the sound of it he’d stood up, “have I mentioned that you’re a damn delight, Simon?”

Ghost felt his cheeks flush as he turned his gaze back to the dappled leaves with a noncommittal hum.

They weren’t on duty here, which meant that they didn’t have to be the personas they donned. Instead, it was always just Simon and John. That’s what their neighbors knew them as, at least. Still, old habits died hard, and he always tensed up when he heard his name. He hadn’t realized just how little he heard it ‘till Soap started using it.

“What movie do you want on?” Soap asked as Ghost picked himself off the ground and padded into the living room with Riley pressed up against his leg. “It’s your turn to pick.”

“I uh,” Ghost felt a flush crawl up his cheeks, “I saw something cool on HBO last night. Porco Rosso?”

“The Ghibli one?”

Ghost squinted, trying to jog his memory, “I think so?”

“I’ll put it on then.”

Ghost found himself smiling as he sat on the couch. Riley crawled up into his lap moments later before being joined by their three-legged-terror. She was cute when she wasn’t destroying his hand.

Wordlessly, Soap came up behind him and nudged a cup of hot cocoa into his shaking hands. The tremor in them never left, but he’d been good about not breaking their mugs in spite of it. They were at a solid 48 days without incident according to Soap’s calendar. Bringing the cup to his lips with a relieved sigh, he tilted his head back to meet Soap’s glowing expression in the soft setting.

Here, in the evening, he swore he’d found God.

“Taste good?” Soap asked as he moved away to hop over the couch and sprawl himself out across the other side of the sofa, “it's a mix. I found it on sale.”

“Get it again,” Ghost replied without thinking, “please.”

Soap nodded before he rested his head on Ghost’s lap, his one free hand running up and down Riley’s back.

His psychiatrist had told him that being here was good for him.

Soap had told him that he enjoyed having Ghost here., more than that…he liked having a partner.

Ghost wondered at the time if he’d meant to say more, but held his tongue.

. . .

Even with Marakov out of the way, it was like cutting the head of a hydra and watching three more problems — albeit smaller — sprout from the carnage. He was not a one-man operation, after all, and cutting off a wolf’s head did not limit its ability to bite as his underlings proved in the last few months. None of them were as lethal as Marakov, and not one had the intellect to weaponize their minds in the same way that he had. A genius of the worst caliber. In that respect, they were lucky none of these roaches were smart enough to be put on a registry proper, though they valiantly tried.

Case in point:

“This is your target,” Price said evenly, thumbing the photograph across a bar for Ghost to slip discreetly between his gloved fingers.

Ghost’s brow rose in mild disbelief as he slowly looked back to Price before turning his attention back to the high-resolution shot of a sprout of a man staring wide-eyed at something in the far-off future. He had big eyes like a deer and a mottled array of freckles spread across each cheek. Most of his hair was hidden beneath a woolen beanie making it difficult to get a better ID on the kid — because this had to be a stupid fucking kid — but from what Ghoist could see, he had an untamed mane of brown curls.

“This is a joke?” Ghost deadpanned as he neatly folded the photograph into his chest pocket. “This kid can’t even grow fuckin’ chest hair.”

“Nope,” Price replied, popping the ‘p’ with a steady exhale of exhaustion, “nineteen and already getting some lofty damn ambitions under his belt.” Without another word, Price palmed a cigarette and lit it in one fluid motion. The glow of the embers was muted by the bar that Price chose to meet in, but his senior didn’t seem to care. They all had their vices, this was just the one Price chose to use.

“Better this than drugs,” he’d always say before blowing out a billowing cloud into the night sky. “At least this one’s a slow and steady death. Doubt it’ll catch me in time.”

Price always said it with a sly yet grim smile.

Ghost leaned back from the smoke, and Price was kind enough to angle the cigarette away from him while they continued the conversation.

“Who’s all coming then?” Ghost queried while fidgeting listlessly with the fraying thread of his gloves that’d begun unraveling the seam along his index finger. He must have torn it on a mission nearly a year ago, and a cocktail of fear and general discomfort over shopping had kept him away from replacing it — no matter how ratty it was looking in its current state.

He shouldn’t pick at it.

That’d just make the problem worse.

He did it anyway.

“It’s a minor sting,” Price levied, flicking soot and embers into an ashtray, “you and Soap’ll have it done. Kate n’ Gaz are in Mexico right now doing cleanup with the Los Vaqueros or I’d send them your way, but I know you can handle it. We’re just keeping the mess from getting worse.”

“Mexico?” Ghost hummed. Soap would be pissed, at least for a good hour of sulking through the apartment dragging his feet over a missed opportunity to be somewhere warm again, and to catch up with old friends.

Price knew what he meant, even if Ghost hadn’t said it directly. He was good at reading him like that in a way that made the blond unnecessarily uncomfortable. He didn’t like being seen — not like how Price saw through him.

“This mission was more tailored for your skillset, besides…I know you’re not busy on Valentine’s Day, yeah?”

Ass.

So, that was that.

No use fighting him on it.

There was something in the way that Price looked at Ghost that made him look back down to where the thread had steadily begun to become undone, even worse than before. Price always had a way of saying everything he needed to in tone alone, and this was no different, except it felt wrong. Price was looking at him like there was something more to the dynamic he had with Soap than the two men had been forthcoming of, except there wasn’t. The thought made Ghost feel flighty as he itched to leave the stupidly crowded bar and its steadily growing volume. He’d left the noise-canceling headphones Soap had got him — as a friend, for tactical purposes — back at the apartment. He’d thought they weren’t necessary, but the discomfort he felt said otherwise.

It’d be a long train ride home at this rate.

“When do we leave?” Ghost asked, already drawing his hood back up.

“Be back on base by 0300 near the helipad.”

“Heard.”

. . .

“Jesus it’s fucking cold,” Soap groaned as he deftly worked his fingers through the sleek grey leather of his chosen gloves. They were the kind he could buckle for added support, and he did so with minimal difficulty despite how much he’d complained of being unable to feel his fingers even from the warmth of the helipad. Just seeing the blanketed snow beneath them was apparently enough to set off his arthritis.

He was full of shit, but Ghost wouldn’t be the one to tell him that. He knew that Soap only did it to fill the silence. Noise was good for Soap, it kept his mind from wandering. A bored Scotsman was a very dangerous thing to behold. Ghost still shuddered at the memory of walking into the kitchen early one morning for a glass of water and seeing Soap sitting cross-legged with most of the microwave lying in meticulously pulled-apart pieces around him in a broken-off halo. Talking, and being engaged with his surroundings kept Soap from doing that sort of stuff.

So he let him talk…enjoyed it, actually. Soap made the hours of flying go by in no time, and he’d had enough time to prepare their go-bag of chosen snacks. An ‘emergency’ bag they’d agreed to use and fill with miscellaneous goods that they’d otherwise have been unable to justify bringing. It was mostly full of snacks, Soap’s butterscotch lifesavers, and an extra charger for Ghost’s wireless headphones.

He didn’t really do well with downtime during missions. Soap’s ADHD was worse when it came to boredom, which is why they brought things for both of them to fiddle with on the flights to and from missions. Soap needed something in his hands to keep from being destructive, and Ghost needed it to feel like he wasn’t about to self-destruct. He supposed that this wasn’t necessarily downtime, but something about it just made him feel paranoid.

“Ghost?” Soap nudged his shoulder lightly to grab his attention, “Eat something before we touch down. You’ll thank me later.”

Without waiting for an answer, Soap pushed a ziplock bag of freeze-dried strawberries in his lap and continued shoveling handfuls of Cheez-Its into his mouth. It was blessedly just them in the back of the helicopter, and that was both a relief and a strangely lonely feeling to not have the rest of their team crowding the seats to keep warm. At the very least, it made it easier for Ghost to pull up the balaclava and eat. He didn’t particularly enjoy eating in front of people, and Soap was kind enough to stop side-eyeing him the moment the mask lifted just enough to reveal his chapped, pale lips. It was his Glasgows, mostly. They tore the corners of his lips up into oblivion and left a jagged, craterous scar that arced up on either side of his face like sloppily written chicken scratch. They were uneven and messy in a way that the years had not been kind to — not for lack of trying. The scar tissue was puckered in the outline of his permanently etched-out smile like a drying scab desperately trying to pull itself back together in vain.

It made him feel unsightly in a way he couldn’t quite verbalize. He wasn’t ashamed of having gotten them but uneasy at the thought of anyone else seeing how deftly he’d been broken down and conquered in ways that dug deep beneath his skin.

There were others because of course there were. There would always be more scars. From the one that cut through his upper lip — an old knife wound that’d cracked his mask from the force of it, to twin snake fangs that ran underneath his bottom lip in the gnarled scar tissue of puncture wounds from his childhood.

“Did you know that no one can really pinpoint the origins of Valentine’s day?” Soap said abruptly — still fishing through his bag for more bites of Cheez-Its. “I was reading about it last night, because you’d think it’d be easy peasy, right? It should be, at least, but no. Valentine’s Day decided to make me Sherlock Holmes with the rabbit hole I went down, and I’m still fuckin’ empty-handed.”

Ghost gave a hum of acknowledgment as he nibbled on his strawberries. He wasn’t going to interrupt Soap’s thought process, and instead settled down to watch and listen.

“Some people think it’s based on the pagan holiday, Lupercalia, that was celebrated in Rome — a fertility festival — but no one agrees on that either. It was a fertility festival made palatable by the church after being outlawed. You can imagine the kind of censorship that took,” Soap said it like a joke that only he got with a snide chuckle.

Still, he continued, seemingly on a roll with information that he’d clearly been wanting to share up until now, “So you have Lupercalia from Pagans that’s actually celebrated in Rome, so everyone calls it a Roman holiday as the earliest possible origin of Valentine’s day, but it wasn’t a romantic holiday. Even the saints,” Soap paused to draw a cross across his breast and up to his forehead, “weren’t really down and dirty with romance. Plus, there’s like three St. Valentines, Valentina, and Valentinus, all with different reasons for becoming saints and being martyred by the same Roman Emperor, Claudius.”

“Aren’t you catholic?” Ghost asked before he could catch his tongue.

Soap shrugged and looked away, “sometimes. When it suits me, I guess.”

Catholicism was always a sore subject with Soap, and the Scotsman rarely opened up about it if given the choice. Hearing him talk openly and with such a raw tone late at night about going to church as a child to have a place he felt safe, juxtaposed with the innate wrongness he felt as a queer man in the present day was gutting to Ghost. He couldn’t empathize, nor could he comprehend the monumental loss he felt when he no longer saw God as his safe place to call home.

Ghost was never a religious man. When he thought too hard about it he became undeniably certain that he’d be going to hell if he were.

“Tell me more,” he said in a gravelly voice. He needed it to get them both out of their heads.

“The romantic aspect of Valentine’s Day is believed, at least by some people, to be from this English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer. He like…really liked birds. February was when European birds began courting, and so he wrote this stupid long poem — yes I read it — called ‘The Parliament of Fowls’ about eagles arguing over a pretty bird. There was another poet too, a French one, because of course they’d be fuckin’ French, Charles d’Orleans, who wrote to his wife while imprisoned. If he actually did, it’s still hot history, but I like his poems.”

Soap sucked in an abruptly long breath, finally realizing that he’d gone through an entire tangent without taking a single breath in, “I just thought it was cool.”

“It is cool,” Ghost reaffirmed as he went back to snacking on the freeze-dried strawberries that they’d packed to last.

Soap kept talking for the rest of the flight, and Ghost was content to let him as he ate, albeit slower than Soap.

By the time the helicopter rocked to a stop during its descent, Ghost was sharply jostled from his light dozing by Soap lightly tapping the back of his hand, and he took it no further. He hadn’t even really realized that he’d been drifting in that soft space between dreamlessness and the waking world till he was sharply snapped from it with a groggy groan of discontent.

Right.

Mission.

Fuck.

Rubbing his eyes proved to be a poor decision as he winced with a soundless swear when he smeared smudged black face paint into his eyes. Wonderful, just wonderful.

“You alive, LT?” Soap asked with a smile that was entirely too soft to be shown in public.

“Just,” Ghost punctuated each word by wiping the remaining facepaint onto his vest, “fuckin’ peachy, Johnny.”

“S’cold out,” Soap said with a vague nod to the open hanger doors. Even from within the helicopter, bitter winds and snow could be felt without question. Despite being buried within their many layers, Ghost still felt the ice trying to needle its way down to his very bones with a shiver that crawled unwillingly up his spine.

He didn’t dignify Soap with a response. Not that stating the obvious was a bad thing. Everyone did it in the moments that they couldn’t quite believe what they were looking at, or to solidify and validate the feelings they had. Shouldering his way past Soap, Ghost began to fit his worn wool gloves over his hands with less grace than he’d watched Soap do it. Soap had slender fingers, a musician’s hand, by any other account. Ghost knew him well enough to understand that the only instrument that Soap had an interest in was the destruction he could achieve with his demolitions. Long, slim fingers were best suited for weaving through wires and fitting their way into hard-to-reach places. They were calloused, yes, but Ghost had felt them on such sparing occasions that he could still believe that they held some strange sort of magic.

The thought was just as quickly squashed as it emerged as he fit his index finger into the moth-bitten glove and grimaced as a cold wind swept across his exposed skin.

Just as he’d strapped his rifle to his back and affixed a case’s worth of knives to his body, Ghost felt a hand lightly grip his arm to keep him from venturing off the helicopter. He knew it was Soap. There was no one else who could be so firm in their conviction yet still give Ghost enough wiggle room to pull away from the touch just as soon as it’d come. It surprised him in a way that made his guard raise as he turned to look back at Soap with a bristle that raised the baby hairs on the back of his neck.

Soap didn’t touch him often.

He always seemed to give Ghost a wide berth when it came to physical affection. It had to be for Ghost’s benefit given how easy it seemed to come to the Scotsman to touch, hold, and squeeze. He was tactile with everyone else he met. Whether it be a brief squeeze of the shoulder or the way he practically draped himself across Gaz’s back whenever the two exhausted themselves after a mission and could do little more than order the world’s best Chinese takeout to cope. Soap was embodied by interlocked pinkies as a shared promise in the same way that Ghost was the rabid dog who bit the hand extended to him.

“Sorry LT,” Soap smoothed over as he raised both hands in a mocking show of surrender, “just wanted to catch ya’ before you stormed off to raise some hell, yeah?”

It wasn’t that he was disingenuous, Soap just…had that kind of a voice.

“Did you need something, Johnny?”

Soap fished through their go-bag as the sound of several smaller zipper pockets opened and shut during his search, the next time Ghost opened his mouth to ask him exactly ‘what’ he was doing was met with a one-fingered sign for ‘just give me a minute’.

“Got it!” Soap declared victoriously as he raised two black bundles of leather to the heavens like it’d be gospel if he tried hard enough.

“Congrats,” Ghost deadpanned, “you took up sewing again?”

Soap liked to sew, not that he’d ever actually said it aloud so much as Ghost had walked in on him hand-sewing patches back into his uniform during late-night trips to the kitchen. He had a tin tucked beneath the coffee table from an old, old cartoon back from the 40s. A gift from his grandma, he’d explained leisurely one day when Ghost asked why he kept such a rusted old thing. It was full of leather twine, threads, pincushions, and needles. There was even an old embroidery hoop at the bottom of it all, though Ghost rarely saw Soap using it for himself.

His partner — friend — threw his head back with a frustrated groan before responding, “I fucking wish. No, I bought this little beauty from that hunting shop down the road.”

“The one with the fudge shop?”

“That’s the one.”

Ghost nodded, still not really following why this was relevant, “why?”

“I found these for you,” Soap hurried as he held out the leather to Ghost for him to scrutinize it closer. “They had a pink pair for Valentine’s Day, but I didn’t think you’d be wearing it for the mission. Last one they had in black. I almost fought this old lady for them before she thought better of it and —”

“You got me…gloves?” Ghost interrupted, his mouth working faster than his brain could catch up as he stared at the sleek black leather gloves that buttoned around the wrist. Black fleece lined the inside for thermal wear, and a part of Ghost ached to have his hands feel that warm again. He couldn’t help but stare. It made him feel lost to think about as he looked back at Soap in bewilderment — not quite meeting his gaze fully.

Suddenly looking bashful, Soap scratched the back of his neck nervously as Ghost took the offering with a reverent hold, as though they’d crumble away if he wasn’t careful. “You’ve worried a hole in yours, and s’cold out. Be a pretty shitty holiday if you caught a cold from it. I tried finding the brand myself, but they went out of business a few years ago so I went looking for a good substitute,” scratching the inside of his palm for emphasis, Soap continued, “If the texture isn’t right tell me. I know you hate clothes shopping so…happy Valentine’s Day?”

The awkward pause felt like it lasted for an eternity as Ghost felt along the soft, dyed leather with his exposed finger. It was smooth and supple to the touch with enough give to be flexible yet insulated during missions like these. Testing the inner lining of the glove had his shoulders dropping with a sudden sense of relief as he was met with soft fleece that felt heavenly to the touch. He was more than a little hesitant to remove his gloves, and had to physically still the constant tremor in his hands as he peeled his tattered gloves off one finger at a time. They never shook when he had a gun in his hands, but being without it left him feeling off-kilter and like he was only half of himself.

The gloves were…soft as he put them on. They didn’t uncomfortably pinch the webbed skin between each finger like some gloves did when they were a size too small, nor did they hang loosely with gaps in the leather at his fingertips. They were good. Too good in a way that nearly made him sick as he flexed his fingers out and clenched them into an experimental fist. Soap had gone out of his way to get these for him. He’d made sure that they were just the right size and was conscious about the way that certain textures grated against Ghost’s skin like sandpaper that drove him up a wall — the kinds that made his teeth physically hurt for some strange reason.

Was this supposed to mean something?

Ghost’s head shot up as he looked over Soap’s expression only once before turning it back down to where he was still checking every possible part of the gift for some fault, flaw or ulterior motive to be found. It was uncomfortable to find nothing amiss, though he’d never really expected Soap to sink so low. It was just…unnerving to have something that was his. Just his. Only his, because it was from Soap, and Soap was just like that.

He realized with a sudden start that he’d never even thought to get something for Soap in return. Valentine’s Day was meant to be romantic — Soap had said as much through his apparent intense research. It was something the loved did, and Ghost had never felt as such. Valentine’s Day just wasn’t something that’d been celebrated in his house either, not in any genuine way, at least. He’d watched for years as his mother stared out the window, wistfully watching couples in the street below their apartment’s cracked window. Lovers who traded flowers for kisses beneath flickering lamplights were what she wished upon when the numbers on a clock lined up over a glass of wine. Ghost’s father had only ever brought her a wilted bundle of chrysanthemums and couldn’t quite understand why they’d made her so sad to look at.

She loved daisies.

She wanted to feel loved too, but it’d never worked out for her. Not the sort of love that she wanted — craved — during the holiday times.

Ever a mama’s boy, Ghost didn’t rightly know what to do with the empty, hollowed parts of himself that’d been carved out of his chest and left to fester. He wasn’t like her in the ways that mattered. He no longer sat in rainy cafes as a young teenager watching rivulets of rainwater streak across the windows wishing bashful

Ghost didn’t know what to do with himself on this holiday. He didn’t know whether it meant something to Soap that was…more than the blond felt like he could give him. Was this actually supposed to mean something? Or was it simply a kindly gesture out of platonic camaraderie? It was always hard to tell with Soap in a way that Ghost adamantly took issue with. For someone who so often wore his heart on his sleeve when it came to touch, intimacy, and affection, he had no right to be as good as he was at disguising his intent. He kept his thoughts close to his chest, and while that made it so much more rewarding when he did get a peek inside the man’s head, it freaked Ghost out at this moment to just not have an answer.

Was this Soap’s way of testing the waters between them? A final encroachment upon the topic of whatever this was that they’d arranged between each other without ever having meant to?

Did he want more?

Ghost dug his nails into his palms right through the soft leather at the thought.

He did not want Soap to take more from him.

No.

Ghost was just overthinking this.

This was practical.

Tactical, even.

It was just cold out.

It meant nothing.

“Thanks, Johnny,” Ghost said at long last. “Didn’t take you for the sappy sort.”

“Sometimes,” Soap answered with a crooked smile, “when it suits me.”

. . .

Ghost kept running his thumb over where the hole should be in the new gloves — where it’d been for months before with its unraveling thread that caught on everything. It was inconvenient, cold, and a blood exposure risk waiting to happen but he just kept catching himself trying to find what decidedly wouldn’t return.

The gloves were warm.

Steady.

They had bits of rubber all along the bottom of his fingers to help keep his grip on his gun or any other item that found itself clutched between his fingers. For the last hour, it happened to be a warm thermos of hot chocolate. The stainless steel would have slipped past his fingers long ago without the padding, and for that he was grateful.

An old injury in his hand often ached in the cold and made it difficult to keep his hands from shaking and keeping fully closed around an object. When visiting Soap’s family for Christmas, the cold nipped at the scars along his hands where metal plates had kept him in the military. He hadn’t wanted to say anything till it got bad enough that Soap watched his shaking hands fail to keep up a glass as it shattered on the ground in the dead of night. Soap hadn’t asked for a story, nor did he admonish Ghost for the broken cup. Ghost gave it anyway — he didn’t know why. Being shot in the hand by another sniper in Lithuania was hardly a good memory to recall, and it did nothing for his reputation to share such insecurities with Soap, but he’d done so on impulse.

Soap hadn’t asked for more. He didn’t pry in the same teasing way that he often toyed with Ghost’s mask and armor. He’d only asked if it hurt still, and suggested soaking it in a hot tub of Epsom salt.

Now, whenever it got cold back at the apartment, Ghost dumped two cups of lavender-scented Epsom salt in the tub and let himself soak away the aches and pains of it all.

The gloves worked too.

He hated how well they worked…how warm they were.

How secure it felt.

But most of all, Ghost felt a sense of rising panic at the fact that they’d been Soap’s. It was a gift, mind you, but still something the Scotsman had held onto for an imperceivable amount of time just waiting for an opportunity. Did he gift it to him on Valentine’s Day with a purpose? An ulterior motive that he wanted Ghost to suss out? Was there a rhyme or reason to the exact time and place the Scotsman had done it without lack of hesitation or anxiety behind the assuredness of his offering? The unknown alone raised the hairs along the back of his neck in discomfort. There were too many variables — too much nuance — to the gift alone that Ghost didn’t know where to start with his feelings on the matter.

Not that he had any.

He couldn’t.

Feelings were…wrong. They felt wrong to him, at least, like an infection. He just didn’t know what to do with them, and a part of him bitterly envied the way that Soap was able to wear his with such pride. Soap was an unstoppable force to behold, and Ghost felt nothing short of the immovable mountain. It’d seemed like a good analogy as a kid ‘till he took a biology class and learned of erosion.

Something would always give into the wind — something had to break.

Whether it was by his choice or not.

Soap had always been someone who pushed the boundaries of professionalism and used his silver tongue with just as deadly accuracy as he did a true gun. He fooled many people with the reality of his wit, but Ghost was just paranoid enough to have seen through it the first time they’d met. He’d been nursing a bloody nose from eating shit on concrete after an experiment gone wrong, but the wild look in his eyes told Ghost everything and more that he’d needed to know. Soap clearly hadn’t seen the demo as a failure, and his hands looked like they itched to return back to the c4 he’d been cautiously allowed access to. The other Sergeant at the time had wanted him reprimanded for collateral, but Price beat him to it with snatching him up into what would become the 141. Soap was brash but sharp as any of the well-kept knives that Ghost kept decorated across his vest. He hated that the man could back up any claim he made, and no matter the odds he’d throw himself into a challenge if only to prove that he could. He knew damn well when to make himself seem small — less than he was, but with Ghost? He always pressed for more ground like he was starved for it.

They’d had this…arrangement for so long that Ghost had almost grown used to the way that Soap looked at him. He had bright blue, hawkish eyes and he always looked at Ghost like there was something more to the man than whatever hollowed shell had been taped back together. He seemed to labor over the reclusive, prickly hermit like a student pouring themselves into studies before an exam — like there’d be a missing piece that'd suddenly slot everything together- as though it would be so easy as to lock the broken pieces of Ghost back into something kinder.

He hated him for it, truly.

It’d scared him for so long when Soap fixated on him in his fractured sense of wholeness and state of being.

It had been a very long time since Ghost was afraid of anything.

Yet here he was, staring through window panes in the bitter cold of a Moscow morning on Valentine’s Day, shaken from the fear of being known.

Soap wanted to know him.

He’d made little secret of it in how his friend painstakingly memorized him right down to the textural issues he had with foods being too close, or the way fabric caught against the dry callouses of his hands.

Ghost did not want to be known.

He didn’t want to be held beneath a magnifying glass and scrutinized when the people around him realized that he’d come out decidedly wrong.

“Ghost,” the crackle of Soap’s mic cut in. He was clearly fiddling with his fucking mic, because Soap was dead-set on the belief that it didn’t fit right even if he was wrong, “how goes it?”

“Fine,” he gritted out, putting a hand over his mic to mask the way he had to clear his mic before speaking, “The hunt going well?”

“I wouldn’t really call it a hunt,” Soap almost sounded bored, “this kid’s as twitchy as a high schooler pocketing weed. He’s the easiest mark I’ve tailed.”

Ghost couldn’t help himself, “because you’d know all about that, right Johnny?”

“I plead the fifth.”

“We’re not American,” Ghost’s voice dripped with his deadpan sarcasm.

Soap’s voice crackled through the mic, “I still have rights!”

“No, you don’t,” Ghost’s reply came without hesitation, as though the intense panic that hung above him had been melted away by the ease with which they teased each other. He knew there was no real bite to their words, because that’s all they were: words.

Words could cut sharper than any knife and twist deep enough to carve out a wound so vast that nothing could ever hope to heal from, but he knew with such certainty that Soap would not do that to him.

If nothing else was right in the world, he trusted this to be gospel.

“Alright jackass,” Soap groaned on the other end of the radio as he presumably stretched out with an audible pop! “I’ll give you the final coordinates here in a bit. Check back in ten to make sure I’m not dead, aye?”

“Aye.”

The line fell silent again.

Ghost felt like he should be more worried about Soap. The two women who lived in the apartment adjacent to them worried all the time about each other. He hadn’t quite figured out what the two women were yet, only that they slept in the same bed and shared three foster kittens between them. It was love, but not quite the sort of love shared by couples on Valentine’s Day. Regardless, the women fussed all the time about the safety of the other. Not for fear of ineptitude, but a generalized worry about how the world would not be kind to them.

He wondered if that’s what he was meant to do.

Worry, that is.

Except he wasn’t. Soap was adept at infiltration, even if it wasn’t a specialty he broadcasted very often. He had the charisma of a politician, and when he wasn’t holding a gun he could win over a crowd with a smile alone if he really tried. However, he hadn’t been asked to do any of that today, instead, Price wanted Soap tailing their mark. Following his routine from the profile that they’d been given. Ghost stalked behind them just a block over till Soap found a place where they’d have the best shot at taking him out of the equation.

Ghost didn’t like feeling as though he wasn’t doing anything. He couldn’t blend into crowds as easily as Soap, and this wasn’t the sort of stealth mission that Ghost excelled in. There were plenty of other marks that he’d taken charge of. When it came to creeping through dark hallways and decimating facilities before an alarm went off, Ghost was unparalleled. However, this was Soap’s show to run — his lead to follow. He’d agreed on their plan while they were packing to leave.

Still, he felt antsy. His gun was stashed in a bag slung over his shoulder. He’d be able to put it back together in seconds when the time came, and he trusted his rifle enough to know that he wouldn’t miss either. The crowds weren’t an issue here. He could readily ignore them as a mass of greyed-out blobs when it came to missions. It was like being in a different headspace entirely while he was on the job and out in the field. The issue was that he couldn’t replicate it nearly anywhere else, and that frustrated him back home.

Here though? Here he was in his element. There was no place that Ghost felt more in control than being on a mission as he slipped through the crowds like water running through cupped fingers. Nothing could have caught him even if they did know who — or what — he was. His identity was so often seen as an objectified curse than a person, and he was okay with that. Sometimes he didn’t want to be a person either.

That’s what the mask was for.

His skull and balaclava were tucked into the bag itself, and so he was left with his hood pulled up, shades, and a black mask over his mouth and nose. ‘Inconspicuous’, as Soap put it with a grimace, but he didn’t ask Ghost to change. Some lines in the sand weren’t ready to be crossed.

While he waited for Soap to next radio in, Ghost took to idly watching the world and cataloging the people he saw. ‘People-watching’, as Price had so eloquently put it over a whiskey one night in the bar. Gaz later corrected it to ‘window-shopping’ with a sly smile. Their line of work took them all around the world, and each place they visited had people as unique as the architecture. No one was ever quite the same, whether for cultural or personal reasons. Russia was always full of vibrancy, even in the snow. It made its people stand out all the more as he watched the world pass him by. The festivities for Valentine’s Day here rivaled the American Dream as his eyes traveled to the bursts of reds and pinks that filled the streets. Unfortunately, he couldn’t read enough Russian to tell what the signs around him actually said — that’s what Soap was for — but he could read people well enough to know that he was surrounded by couples. Most of them were young, or at least around his age from what he could see of their covered faces. Valentine’s Day was new here, relatively speaking. It only came about after the fall of the Soviet Union, and so it made sense that the crowd who celebrated it came after the dramatic fall of a cursed world power. All around him were couples who felt their love with such ferocity that they were unafraid of the looks they received from their elders.

They were all so free with their affection, as though no government nor God could tell them otherwise. He watched a young couple interlock hands as they swung themselves through the street. They seemed entirely oblivious or at least uncaring of the normalcy around them, and Ghost found himself watching them from across the street. In one fell swoop, the boy swung the girl off her feet and into what must have been a warm hug in this otherwise frosted world.

He abruptly looked away when he saw their lips touch.

Something about it still made him sick.

He used to be better with intimacy — he wanted to be better with it.

He’d never particularly hidden his sexuality from the world, at least in the present day. He had when he was younger though, at that point, he hadn’t known there was a word for being queer that wasn’t a spat slur at the feet of men on borrowed time. He was brought up in a world fresh off the heels of the AIDs crisis, and he remembered so vividly the way men like him were treated. The moral majority was the subscription his own dad took to weighing in on, and it made exploring the more intimate parts of himself feel like a crime.

It wasn’t until he’d enlisted in the army and had time to get away from their dingy apartment that Ghost felt comfortable enough going to bars. He didn’t enjoy a lot of the drinks served there — the burn of alcohol didn’t give him what he wanted — but it was a place that he felt at least more seen in.

And then Roba happened.

And suddenly his queerness felt tainted by the many hands who’d unwillingly raked themselves down his chest and in-between his thighs.

Escaping from hell had him convinced for many years that he could simply bulldoze over what it did to him — how it changed him. He tried going back to bars, he did the dating apps, he tried to be more than what he was but every time it landed him right back where he’d started. Damaged and in denial.

He couldn’t go to bars anymore.

He couldn’t do the apps anymore.

He couldn’t be touched anymore.

He couldn’t be loved anymore.

And then there was Laswell.

He wasn’t sure if she was even aware of how impactful a simple throwaway sentence was to him when he’d spent years up until that point denying his queerness. She’d been in a mission briefing with them all, one of the few times she actively participated in missions as ‘Watcher’.

“Let’s wrap this up fast boys, I want to be home in time to have dinner with my wife.” She’d said it so easily like it’d rolled off her tongue a hundred times before without fear of prosecution. She was older than him, and so surely she’d seen more in terms of their history. In spite of that, she’d unfolded a picture of her wife for Ghost when he’d tried to vaguely ask about her immediately after.

“Sometimes,” Laswell had told him with that knowing look in her eyes, “she’s scared too.”

Ghost hadn’t addressed the topic again with her, and while Laswell always looked like she wanted to say more, she seemed to let sleeping beast lie…at least for now. He wasn’t scared of being gay — he wasn’t. He couldn’t be. It was just — it was just harder for him. Whether it was talking about it or acting on it, everything just felt muddled after all that he’d been through.

How could he be what someone else wanted…

What Soap wanted.

He knew people like that wanted so much more of him than he could give away freely. A part of him so desperately wanted to be what Soap might ask of him — what these gloves meant — but the idea of it being a transactional offering made him undeniably sick to his stomach.

He couldn’t.

He — He didn’t want to be that.

There!

Something caught Ghost’s eye from across the street with a sudden snap to attention. Owlish blue eyes found their brief reflection in the equally blue pools of another. There, across the street was a blond boy with a face mask pulled high over his nose. He shouldn’t have stuck out at all, and maybe to anyone else, he’d have passed for another faceless bystander in the world, but Ghost knew better.

He’d seen that kid before.

He knew it.

The boy looked barely old enough to hold his liquor, but the Russians had surprised him before so he didn’t take that as gospel. With a mop of blond hair pulled back into a ponytail and a smattering of freckles that disappeared beneath a patterned scarf, a part of Ghost felt like he was looking at a smaller, scrappier version of himself.

That wasn’t why he was familiar though.

Ghost knew him because he’d seen him in the picture Price had shown him of their target. This kid wasn’t the big shot, but he recognized the back of his head and the scarf from the blurred outline of wherever Price’s intel had managed to snap a shot of Marakov’s runner-up. This kid was involved, and even if he wasn’t on their direct hit list, it couldn’t be a coincidence that he was here…and shit —

He was going in the same direction that Soap and the mark were.

They had to be meeting up.

Ghost wasn’t as adept at blending into crowds as Soap was, but blessedly he didn’t have to as the kid ducked down a darkened alley with Ghost following behind at a distance. Slipping into the shadows felt like shedding his skin and being born anew as he melted into the background. He thought about radioing into Soap, but they were headed to the same destination anyway. It was too risky. If worse came to worst then he’d do it, but he wanted to take care of any loose ends before they became Soap’s problems too.

So, he hunted.

. . .

Soap had been tailing the kid since he and Ghost split up with nothing more than a glance and a discreet nod toward the kid — the target — as Price had ordered.

He was young.

But old enough to know better.

Not that Soap hadn’t gotten into his fair share of trouble as a boy, but his trouble was reserved for blowing up the bathroom at Catholic school, amongst other antics that got him familiar enough to be on a first-name basis with local law enforcement. Childhood antics, as he’d eloquently explained to a non-impressed Price when the files were first dug up. He’d never tried taking over the dregs of a homegrown terrorist for his own plots. Maybe he’d thought about what that sort of power would have gotten him, but the 141 let him fuel his creative outlet in coordinately destructive ways. He got what he wanted in the end with them.

Still, it was a shame.

Aleksander Petrov.

Nineteen years old, and already in a load of fucking trouble by anyone’s account. He hadn’t risen to any real power. Not like Makarov had, but he was getting there with the players he’d gotten in contact with recently. If they let him continue, then the kid had the brains to become a real problem for them in the next few years, or worse…he’d become a puppet to an even worse evil. A hazard of the job, but Soap really wanted to retire in a few years with the world being a better place than when he’d first found it. That’d always been his goal. He liked fixing things in the way the broken parts of a puzzle make a mosaic. It was why Makarov and people like Shepherd became his fixation like a hound chasing the rabbit.

He was single-minded in his goal to eliminate the greatest threat he saw, and he had. Makarov had landed him on bedrest for months after nailing him in the shoulder — he’d been aiming for his head, but he’d missed. Soap was always slippery like that. Price hated it in every instance but that one, and to Soap’s credit, the old man hadn’t brought up his habits since they’d saved the both of them that day. Blessedly, they’d shot the Russian like the dog he was, and Soap slept soundly for that.

Of course, another would always rise again.

Cut the head off a wolf and it still had the power to bite.

To his credit, the kid was smarter than most who came before him. He wasn’t the first to vy for power after the vacuum that Makarov’s death caused, and he likely wouldn’t be the last, but he was a quick little rabbit.

Soap almost lost him once — just once — when the kid realized he was being tailed. Soap didn’t know what set him off, but he recognized the signs in someone who was already looking for a way out, and who certainly knew the terrain better than their pursuers. He was flighty, but not uncoordinated with the way he twisted and turned to look for wherever or whoever Soap was. Unfortunately, Soap had been playing this game for far longer than the kid had, so he knew when to blend in.

He let the kid tire himself out.

According to Price’s intel, Aleksander visited the spot every week like clockwork. They were pretty sure it was for a drug deal, but their insider had never been able to get close enough for confirmation. Too risky.

Didn’t matter.

They knew where he was going anyway.

He kept in brief contact with Ghost over the comms. They didn’t need much by way of verbal confirmation. They’d discussed their plans before landing, and the both of them had fallen into an easy rhythm when it came to missions paired with each other. Both he and Ghost knew one another’s strengths and weaknesses better than anyone else. They fit together like two chipped pieces, broken in some parts with jagged edges and cracked seams, but whole in their own way when set together. He trusted Ghost to protect him, and he was lucky enough to know that his friend felt the same way too.

He knew that Ghost was just a block over and that he’d be there at a moment’s notice if things went wrong.

Things wouldn’t go wrong though.

Soap was counting on that.

He’d left Ghost with that olive branch extended across the chasm of all the things between them that went unsaid. Perhaps it was a cruel way to bridge the gap, but he’d thought of no other way to prompt a reaction that didn’t leave Ghost feeling backed into a corner. If he’d initiated it through conversation, then he just knew that the blond would run so far that he’d never be able to reach him again.

So, he got the gloves.

They weren’t even initially meant for Valentine’s Day, he’d just seen the way that Ghost fussed with the hole in his old pair long enough to know that it irked him to have this singular hole in his armor. So, Soap figured that he could help patch it together. One brick they built as one in the wall that his friend built around his cold, but beating heart.

He had to make sure that this mission went well so that they’d have time to talk about all of this after.

He knew that Ghost would have questions — he always did, and Soap had to be there to give answers of his own.

The once bustling streets of couples celebrating their passion without fear of retribution eventually faded into the background as the kid led Soap deeper into the outskirts of Moscow, where dilapidated and condemned buildings had yet to be torn down fully. They were apartments stacked one on top of the other and clustered together — echoes of starvation and paranoia under the USSR. No one else wanted to be around bad memories and the ghosts that lingered, which made it the perfect place for outcasts to go. All unloved things seemed to cluster around places like this.

Soap tucked himself behind in the shadows of a crumbling doorway. Stealth missions were Ghost’s thing, but that didn’t mean that Soap was without the cards up his sleeve as he waited, and watched. They just had to wait for the deal to go down and they’d take out two birds with one stone.

“Ghost, I’m in position,” he whispered into the mic.

The elusive shadow of a man didn’t answer, which had him drawing his expression into a thin-lipped look of concern. He shook it off just as quickly. It was fine — Ghost was fine. He knew the plan, and for all Soap knew he was just situating himself into his position. They were making him climb up one of these derelict buildings for the best vantage point, so for all Soap knew he was still climbing.

It was fine.

Hearing fast-approaching footsteps, Soap tucked himself further into the shadows and waited. He wasn’t left in the dark for very long as an equally young boy with an unkempt mop of blond hair walked past him. He’d been going at a light jog, but slowed his pace the closer that he got to where Aleksander was surely waiting. The kid had a patterned pink and white woolen scarf wrapped securely around his throat, and pale blue eyes that reminded him distinctly of the cracked grey-blue of Ghost’s gaze.

“Bingo,” he whispered, more to himself than any phantom of these crumbling ruins as he kept back toward the doorway and watched.

Peeking out from the doorway, Soap tapped at his body camera to set it to record — Price liked having everything on record. Except, instead of seeing twitchy kids exchanging packets of powdered gold to the world of cartels for a little bit of green, and whatever power came with it, Soap found himself intruding upon a very different scene as he watched the blond boy throw himself into Aleksander’s arms.

Instinctively, Soap covered the camera with his hand when he saw the two kiss like it was their last day together. Calloused hands held ruddy red cheeks with a sense of unbridled reverence, and Soap realized with a sudden start that this? This was not a drug deal at all.

Their intel had been wrong.

This was the meeting place for forbidden lovers — outcasts — Soap reminded himself from his initial criticism of the dilapidated block.

The steel toe of his boot accidentally kicked the remains of a fallen bit of scaffolding, and everything seemed to fall apart from there as he watched the two boys tear themselves away from whatever fragile peace this place brought them. The blond-haired boy just barely peeked out from behind Aleksander as the taller of the two revealed a gun from beneath the folds of his coat. Shit. He hadn’t even realized the kid was packing.

There was nowhere to go inside this hellscape — no other exits that he could see. If he dove further into the building then he’d likely just corner himself between a rock and a hard place when it came to someone who certainly knew the terrain better than him. Going up the stairs wasn’t an option either. It’d pin him in the sky and he’d be fucked either way.

Shit.

Fuck.

Shit fuck.

“I’m unarmed!” Soap called out as he slinked from the doorway into the light, both hands raised in mock surrender. He was armed, but the kids didn’t need to know that. “Don’t shoot.”

Still, the kid raised his gun toward Soap’s chest — center mass — smart, but Soap really didn’t want the kid to be that smart right now with his hands held up and away from his weaponry. Worst came to worse, he had some flashbangs and a smoke bomb he could set off but those were a worst-case scenario only. The less attention he’d draw the better, and flashbangs were fucking loud.

“Who are you?” Aleksander asked in a venomous tone. He sounded paranoid, scared more than anything else from the way his hand shook around the trigger. It was likely that he’d shot before, Soap deduced quickly, but less likely that he’d actually killed before.

He could work with that.

“Sergeant Mactavish,” Soap began, “British special forces,” he quickly tacked on when he saw a look of fear-driven fury cross the boy’s eyes. The last thing he needed was to be shot under false pretenses. If he was getting his day ruined then it ought to be because they knew who he was.

“141?” the boy asked, for once catching Soap off guard for the assuredness with which Aleksander spoke. Not many people knew their task force name with such confidence. That was kind of the point when it came to special forces — being off the radar.

“You’ve heard of us?” Soap asked with a wry smile. Sidestepping around a bit of exposed rebar, Soap took care to keep both hands near his head and well enough away from his vest.

“You,” the brunette reaffirmed, “you…I know. You helped kill Makarov.”

A glint in the reflection of a shard of broken glass caught Soap’s attention. He recognized it immediately as the shine of a sniper’s scope. With a start, Soap realized that Ghost was here. He couldn’t look around to find his friend. Doing so would sell him out and ruin whatever fragile brokered peace he’d managed to claw out of the paranoid boy.

He couldn’t risk it.

Feigning an itch on his cheek, Soap tilted his mic slightly outward to leave it open for Ghost to hear the resulting conversation. It wouldn’t be safe to keep scratching at his face whenever he needed to tell Ghost to pull back.

“Down, boy,” he whispered fiercely into the mic as he pulled his hand back from his face and revealed an open palm to the two shaking boys.

The gesture was just as much to pacify the both of them as it was to tell Ghost not to shoot. He knew the LT wasn’t trigger-happy by any means, however Ghost was pragmatic. If he saw the quickest way to safely end a dangerous situation then he’d take it without a second thought. He’d feel bad about it later, but he knew that Ghost was on a mission. Ghost out in the field was a very different man than he was while being Simon back home.

Blessedly, the glint of the scope disappeared, and with it a weight lifted from his shoulders. One problem gone, and eight more dumpster fires to deal with in the meantime. He wasn’t out of danger yet. The gun pointed at him wasn’t exactly a first, and it definitely wouldn’t be his first or last time being shot if this went south, but he was trying to avoid it. He hated bedrest almost as much as being stuck at home drove Ghost stir-crazy.

“I should kill you,” Alekansder growled. Empty threats.

“You could,” Soap reasoned, “but I wouldn’t advise it. Kill me now and more will come for me. We know all about you and your operation. Strike now and you’ll be kicking one big fucking hornet's nest.”

As he continued, he watched Aleksander push the blond boy further behind him in a grandiose display of protectiveness. He could use this. Better yet, he could sympathize with this.

“See I thought our intel was good,” Soap continued without missing a beat, “but this one,” he paused to nod at the blond boy, “was a surprise. We thought you were coming here to run narcotics for Makarov’s old crew, but this…this was what really mattered to you, right?”

“It’s where we’re safest,” the boy behind Aleksander answered in a voice so soft, Soap might’ve missed it if he wasn’t paying such close attention, “no one else comes here.”

“Smart,” Soap said honestly, “and a good use of your resources, even if I don’t condone exploring asbestos-filled deathtraps. That’s sort of my generation's thing, y’know?”

Silence.

Tough crowd.

“Tell me something,” he began before Aleksander just as quickly cut him off.

“We don’t have to tell you anything.”

“Just bear with me,” Soap smoothly continued in that same voice that made him seem so much smaller than he was, “Why are there children fighting in a nonexistent war?”

“We are not children.”

“You are,” Soap responded in a cool and even voice, “you’re young. You still have — you should have chances to make this right and do the right thing. This is not a battle worth fighting, Aleksander.”

Aleksander seemed to bristle at the mention of his name and how alien it sounded coming from the Scot’s thickly accented drawl, “I am not a child, Sergeant. Plenty of people younger than me have fought in bloodier battles, so why shouldn’t I? Your phantom did it,” he spat the words out at Soap’s feet with shaking shoulders. He was talking about Ghost now, and the thought alone piqued Soap’s curiosity just as much as it filled him with dread, “and so did Makarov.”

“And where is he now?” Soap challenged, “Dead.”

Aleksander had no answer for that as he merely glared back at Soap.

“Kid,” Soap lamented in a soft, small voice, “Makarov did unimaginable things to little ones younger than you. He’s made you a weapon, but that’s not all you have to be.”

“I am no one’s weapon,” Aleksander snapped.

Soap’s eyes narrowed as he looked for another gap in the kid’s armor — a way in or some manner of chip in his walls to exploit. He didn’t want to be cruel with it, and all things considered, he didn’t particularly want today to end in bloodshed. They came here with the expectation that they’d be dealing with a roach like many others, but so far all that Soap had found were two young men tangled in a world they didn’t fully understand. It’d be different if they already had that sort of blood on their hands, but this was different. There was still a fork in the road to come before, and Soap wanted to make sure that they chose the right path.

This kid was smart enough to be a real threat if he put the effort in, and it’d be Soap’s job to finish the job today if the cards got away from him. This kid wanted power, and had the drive to do it — the savage hunger for it that drove dogs to cannibalize the best parts of each other. Though it wasn’t the same beast that lurked in Makarov, this much Soap was sure of.

He’d win this.

“What’s your goal, Aleksander?” Soap cautioned as he took a reluctant step forward, “I know you’re not doing this for your country. You wouldn’t be here if you were.”

You wouldn’t be with him, went unsaid, yet it hung in the air between the three of them nonetheless.

“Aleksander,” the blond spoke up from behind the man with tentative hands prodding at his jacket, “tell him.”

Soap’s expression softened. He’d learned it from watching his sisters interacting with their children and all the gentle things that they surrounded themselves with. “If you need help I can get you help.”

“I am wanted,” the blond continued in a quiet but quick voice, like if he stopped then he’d never get a chance to say it again.

“Peter,” Aleksander warned in a pitched voice. It was the first time he’d sounded earnestly worried.

“I struck a man in the raids,” the blond boy — Peter — continued, “I was scared! I was naked. He was so…so much bigger. Politsiya. I hit him over the head.”

The boy was hyperventilating now, pulling away from Aleksander and rubbing his arms as though he were cold in spite of all the layers he was swathed in. The gesture distinctly reminded him of the sparing occasions that Ghost was like this. It was as though his partner fell into a place where Soap could not reach him. Usually, it happened when when the towel over the mirror fell away and something about seeing his own face must be too much. More often than not, Soap would sit with him for the next hour while Ghost rubbed his arms red and raw with a thousand-yard stare. Peter looked like he was just barely holding himself back from that ledge as he held his furiously tortured gaze with Soap.

“There was so much blood,” he sputtered out, “I don’t know if he lived or not, but they’re after me now. They saw my face!” he sobbed suddenly, “they know me. If they know me then that means that they’ll know about us.”

“Oh,” Soap said with such solemn certainty in his understanding. He was just like Ghost in some way or another, “this is what you’re fighting for, kid?” he said to Aleksander with a cocked head toward Peter.

“Makarov wouldn’t…but I’m not afraid of him or you.”

“Ah,” Soap finally found the crack, “I get it now. Makarov did it first, but you want to do it better. You want to levy that change and the only way to do that here is to be the biggest baddest bitch in the pen, isn’t that right?”

Aleksander bore his teeth in a toothy smile-turned-snarl with his response, “Let your people come and I will be the scariest fucking thing here.”

“So shoot me.”

The boy’s finger shook over the trigger, and Soap saw the flickering reflection of a sniper’s scope in his peripherals.

“Easy,” he whispered — more to Ghost than anyone else. He needed his friend to trust him just this once.

He had to count on the fact that his luck wouldn’t run thin when he needed it most.

“You could shoot me here and now,” Soap called in a confident voice, “spill my brains out on the pavement and do what Makarov couldn’t have. He tried to kill me too, you know? He failed, if you didn’t know that already.”

Aleksander wiped the palms of his sweaty hands on his pants before quickly returning his grip back to the shaking gun.

…but he didn’t shoot.

“Do you want to die?” Aleksander asked in disbelief.

“No,” Soap answered honestly, “I don’t want to die any more than you do. I mean…I don’t want to die because I have someone I really need to get back home to when this is all over, and I know you do too,” Soap continued with a nod to Peter behind him. “Plus, Valentine’s Day would be a terrible day to die, y’know? A shitty present, if you ask me. I still have so much planned in my life, and you both have so much more of it to live.”

“I didn’t — I didn’t ask,” Aleksander snapped back, but by all accounts, he was finally listening. His attention was wholly and entirely on Soap.

If ever Ghost would take a shot it’d be now but blessedly it never came, and for that Soap was grateful.

“He’s lovely,” Soap pressed. Whatever ground he could get, Soap took without a second thought and still dared to press for more, “and he has no idea just how lovely he is. Stubborn, isn’t he? He reminds me a lot of you, Peter. He’s a lot more rough around the edges, maybe because he’s older…but not always wiser. He can’t always communicate what he wants verbally, and he’s got a bite worse than any bark you’ve ever heard. It’s his actions,” Soap said with another decisive step forward, “that speak for him.”

Peter was listening too now.

Good.

Both boys were staring at Soap with something akin to hope shining in watery eyes.

“He remembers the way I like my coffee,” Soap’s voice was soft with reverence, “anyone else could know my Starbucks order, but it wouldn’t be as special because it wouldn’t come from him. A bit of butterscotch and a fuck-ton of creamer is all it takes to make my morning.”

Soap was now within arms reach of the two, but he kept his hands up where they could see them.

“My dad, for all he was worth, told good stories,” Soap said. He was testing his luck again as he inched ever closer, “he told me that many boys would bring me flowers — girls too — but that someday I’d meet someone who’d give me more than flowers. He’d learn my favorite flower, my favorite song, my favorite sweet to put in my coffee. Even if he couldn’t afford any of them it wouldn’t have mattered because he’d have taken the time to know me. I want that man too, even if he’s as scared as both of you are now. I’m willing to wait for him to be ready, but I can’t wait for him if I’m dead.”

The open mic on the other end was silent, and so were the pair in front of him. The quiet between his words was deafening as Soap’s mouth felt dry from it all.

“Listen, my partner has lost so much in this world, and I think it’d be a shame to make him lose anymore. Shooting me might make you feel better for a moment, but believe me Aleksander…you won’t ever get that part of yourself back.”

“You killed Makarov,” Aleksander’s voice cracked like a broken record.

“And he took a part of me to his grave,” Soap reaffirmed grimly.

“You’ve killed more than Makarov — I know you have,” the accusation rang hollow with the way the boy’s shoulders shook, “I will be no different.”

“What Do you want out of this?” Soap asked Peter, looking over Aleksander’s trembling frame to set his gaze on the glossy eyes of the blond boy. He looked small.

“What?”

“You have two options, kids,” Soap said slowly, “shoot me now and cement yourself as worse than Makarov. Make your enemies and your allies with my death because Makarov sure as shit couldn’t kill me, and the only reason you have this shot is because I let you.” He took in a long breath, “or…option two is that we both walk away.”

“You’d let us leave?” Peter sounded uncertain, “just like that?”

Soap saw that same flicker of scary intellect shining behind his glossy eyes. Smart as a whip and with no refinement to it, but it didn’t make the both of them any less a threat when they got wise enough to use it.

“No, but I can do the next best thing,” he explained with a ‘so-so’ grimace, “can I grab something from my chest pocket?”

Aleksander made a vague gesture with the barrel of his gun for Soap to continue, and fuck if his fingers didn’t itch for a lesson in firearm safety at the sight. Still, as slow as he could, Soap unbuttoned his breast pocket and fiddled for the notepad he kept there. The first few pages were miscellaneous sketches and immature doodles, but on a clean slate, he scribbled out a phone number.

“What’s this?”

“Her name is Kate Laswell,” he said gesturing to her contact information, “and this is John Price,” he motioned to the next number. “Pick your poison with the Americans or us, but if you want your chance out of here then our plane leaves in an hour.”

Peter stretched his arm out to grab the paper and inspect it for himself.

“Look, kids, we aren’t bad people.”

Aleksander looked uncertain, and that was okay. He had every right to be distrustful, but Soap saw the cracks forming as he dropped the gun to his side and fussed over the olive branch between them.

“Leave while you can, Sergeant.”

Soap felt a wry smile tug at his lips, “will you cause trouble?”

“Only if you don’t fuck off.”

“I look forward to seeing you with our pilot,” Soap hummed in tight-lipped victory.

“Wait,” Peter’s voice was a fleeting, fragile thing.

Soap rose his brow to him in silent encouragement.

“Your…Your friend,” Peter’s lip wobbled with thinly veiled anxiety, “do you think you’ll be happy?”

“I want him,” Soap said looking back toward the top of the buildings around then, “I just don’t know if he wants me too.”

“I hope…” Peter speaks up, sounding uncertain, “that we all get our happy endings”

“Me too, kid.”

. . .

Ghost was going to kill him.

He should have.

Instead, Ghost numbly flipped the safety back on his rifle and sank down with his back to the wall. He wasn’t entirely in his body as he methodically disassembled his rifle back into his bag and zipped it back up.

He just couldn’t stop thinking about the open-mic confession, and the way Soap had tilted his head back at the very end toward where he seemed to know that Ghost was perching. Through his scope, Ghost could describe Soap’s expression as nothing less than resplendent. Even in the dappled lightning of the derelict apartments around him, Soap managed to shine.

“See?” his eyes seemed to say from afar, “I told you I could do it.”

You just had to trust me.

And Ghost had. Against all of his training and better judgment, Ghost had put his trust wholly and entirely in Soap’s hands. It wasn’t his life so perilously on the line, yet the constant shivers of the twitchy boy felt like daggers through his heart as he watched from afar. The shot would have been pathetically easy to take, and yet he’d stopped.

He hadn’t shot because Soap asked him not to.

He’d stayed his hand.

Fuck.

Fuck, he couldn’t — he couldn’t breathe.

Ghost’s chest suddenly felt tight with that same awful thing that’d taken up resilience in the wretched spot where his heart once lay. When he was a boy, his heart always felt like it was too heavy of a load to carry, and after dragging himself out of the barbed wire fences that’d ensnared him during his imprisonment, Ghost now knew with such sudden sorrow that his heart had been left somewhere along the way. Unkind hands had scooped it from his chest when they cut him open to see just what kept him going, and were left wanting when they found nothing more than dried blood and broken promises.

He clutched at the armor woven over his chest with not a single speck of bare skin to be found. He didn’t want to drive his fingers closer to the warmth beneath the flesh. Instead, the armor was there to remind him of the strength his walls brought him. The same walls that Soap dexterously stepped over with an extended hand that could mean nothing.

He couldn’t breathe.

His chest was too tight, but being without his layers would mean the kiss of cold winter air on his skin and that left him exposed. Someone would touch him. Someone would always touch him. They’d grab him and he’d have killed them but it wouldn’t erase the fact that they would damage him all the same. Handprints imprinted onto his body in flesh-toned permanent ink.

When the suffocating restraints of his vest finally drove him mad, Ghost found himself fumbling for the twelve belt buckles that protected him from the rest of the world. He had to get it off. He couldn’t breathe. Even sucking in just the barest hiccup felt like a herculean task as his gloved hand fitfully scratched at his throat.

It wasn’t till everything was off that Ghost began to feel like a person again, and not some hollowed-out husk of a man who could be nothing like Soap deserved.

He couldn’t be that.

He wasn’t soft and remorseful — hell — he wasn’t even a good man on his better days. He was a shambling, unsightly thing with the way his port wine stain stretched across his nose and cheeks like an answer someone hadn’t been able to erase.

But he wanted it, a traitorous voice whined from the dark recesses of his mind. God, did he want it. That wicked, horrible thing in his chest begged to be heard, but it spat nothing but half-baked fantasies. It reminded him softly of the child he used to be — with a heart a little too big — who wanted the boys and their flowers, the chocolates, the Hallmark movies, the consistency of a partner, and their steadfast love. The sort of thing he was not entitled to by virtue alone.

Shakily, Ghost put himself back together with all his carefully built walls and armor that sat securely over his heart.

“I want him,” Soap had said with his eyes turned toward heaven.

Ghost longed in a way that made that terrible creature in his chest keen for attention.

“I just don’t know if he wants me too.”

Not like how I want him.

. . .

He caved.

He swore it felt like falling.

The world was still entirely too bright, and the blur of Valentine’s Day decorations melted into a mass of swirling watercolor as he walked through backstreets. Soap hadn’t radioed in, and Ghost didn’t expect him to. He had that knowing shine in his eyes — the one he got when he felt like he’d already won a battle. Something about it told Ghost all he needed to know.

Something about the way he’d looked back to Ghost and the heavens above told him, more than anything, that Soap was waiting for his decision.

His verdict.

The final answer to the line in the sand they’d drawn without words all these months.

…Was he meant to get flowers?

Ghost didn’t know what kind of flowers Soap would like. As a boy, Ghost had a book detailing the language of flowers and their meaning across cultures. He found himself in awe of picture-book retellings of science. And yet, he was left wanting when it came to red rose petals scattered across unmade beds and their equally dead flowers in the sand.

He felt dirty when he thought of roses.

He had to shake himself free of that unclean feeling and kept walking through the street.

Despite it all, Ghost still didn’t know what sort of answer he’d give Soap. The idea of drawing attention to whatever this was and potentially ruining the one space he felt safe in was mortifying. He knew his tongue would twist itself into knots, and that his hands were too sweaty inside the gloves to be soft to hold. He didn’t know poetry well enough to write, and he couldn’t read enough Russian to have gotten a book. Soap liked to read. Ghost wished he was better at it.

Instead, Ghost stood before a plexiglass display of decadent candies in individual wax wrapping paper. It was a simple pop-up stand with lettering that he couldn’t read. Ghost had always been a visual learner, and so he spent his time studying the wrappings. The two that stuck out most to him were wrapped in gold, one with a cow, and one with scrawled brown and red lettering.

Blessedly, the merchant didn’t seem too terribly bothered by Ghost’s butchered Russian, and so they quickly switched to a game of vague charades as Ghost exchanged several folded rubles for a linen bag of candy.

“Korovka,” the merchant explained in a thickly accented drawl, “is fondant and milk,” he motioned to the wrapper with a smiling cow on it. “And this is Zolotoy Klyuchik — toffee,” he concluded to the other confection that’d struck Ghost’s fancy.

These, if nothing else, reminded Ghost of the loudmouthed Scot. He’d been born with an insatiable sweet tooth and kept tucked in their junk drawer a half-finished roll of butterscotch life savers. ‘Old Lady’ candy, Gaz had told them after he crashed on their couch one night. Soap had taken it in stride considering that most of their dishware was thrifted from the dusty recesses of someone else’s closet. He liked the look of old, chipped things. Something about the memories that beloved things held spoke to him. He liked butterscotch most of all for the memories it held with him, and he liked to pop one in his coffee every morning. He always said that it was for flavor, but Ghost was convinced it was to keep someone else’s memory alive. Ghost always woke up earlier than Soap, and even if he had his doubts about the taste, he never failed to keep up the routine — if not just to see the relieved smile on Soap’s face when he padded out of their bedroom an hour later.

Soap remembered this.

Ghost couldn’t fathom why — of all moments — that Soap chose to make that his grand pitch to the duo from before. Of every death-defying mission they’d endured together, that Soap would instead choose something so small…so inconsequential.

So meaningful.

. . .

Soap was waiting for him on the plane.

He didn’t turn to greet the blond…he didn’t need to. Soap always had a knack for picking him out in a crowd, and while Ghost could sneak up on anyone else without ever having tried, Soap seemed to have memorized the way the world itself bent around him. Only after the bay doors of the plane slid shut behind him did Soap tilt his head back to Ghost with the last shimmer of light reflected off the snow glowing in his blue eyes.

He was waiting for Ghost to initiate.

Soap was like that in all the ways Ghost couldn’t understand. He was curious by nature — to his own detriment. He had this insatiable lust for knowledge that drove him right to the edge of a cliff labeled ‘too far’ and yet he still dared to ask if he’d reached it yet. He was nosy to a fault when it came to gossiping with neighbors, and insisted on taking all the local tea from the third floor beneath them back into the apartment. He watched the people on the street around them, categorizing their stories on looks alone. When they went out, he’d tip his head back to bask in the fact that existence was fleeting and that nothing was ever certain, so why shouldn’t he eavesdrop on the news shared across dining tables.

He said it was best fresh, whatever that meant.

All that, and rarely ever did he press Ghost for more. He had at first, when they were in the beginning stages of figuring out whatever ‘this’ was. When that got him nowhere, Soap seemed to settle back. He was patient, and he was constant.

“I can wait,” Soap said to Ghost one day, “I’m good at waiting.”

He’d never told Ghost what it meant.

“I’m not a good person,” Ghost began — a strong statement that rang undeniably true.

He was not a good person. Maybe he wasn’t always a bad person either, but no amount of prayer could forgive the sins he’d sown in the soil. He’d grown gardens from his hatred of those around him, and flowers bursting with vitriol were bled into his bullets.

Soap talked softly of the burden with which it took to take a life as though it was something that’d weigh heavy on his shoulders. Hell, Ghost figured that the only parts left of him to take would be his bones, and even they too were cracked and broken just like everything else. If guilt wished to chip away at his rib cage then so be it, but Ghost felt nothing of the sort.

He was not a good person.

There was too much to feel sorry for in his life. Too much to pity. To loathe. He hated it all. He was not a good man, and he’d almost shot the boy right between his eyes just over an hour earlier because he’d nearly failed to trust Soap to see this thing through.

Despite everything, without ever having turned to greet him, Soap responded…

“So?”

“I’ve killed more people than you,” Ghost reaffirmed spitefully, “you can count your names, Johnny but I can’t. I won’t.”

He counted only one.

The only one that mattered, but he wasn’t ready to talk about that time in his life — maybe he never would be. The worst part was that he knew Soap wouldn’t ask if he knew it wasn’t the right time.

Soap only hummed in response, as though coaxing Ghost to step even further toward the edge. The corner of his gaze was visible, and not for the first time Ghost was reminded of a raptor with the hawkish way that Soap’s blue eyes saw the world.

If Soap was a hawk, then surely Ghost must be a butcher bird — the brutal little things that stabbed their would-be good intentions on barbed wire. He didn’t have the same porcelain white feathers of a soft dove. Instead, he was the mottled, bloody feathers of a shrike.

He couldn’t — He couldn’t be whatever Soap was wanting. Soap was the gentle hand of God carding dexterous fingers through Ghost’s sweat-ridden hair as though each tangled knot that came undone were the discarded remnants of sin within Ghost. He’d extended an arm and planted it firmly within Ghost’s toothy maw and dared the other to bite down any harder.

He courted danger, and Ghost was a very dangerous thing indeed.

Soap thought there was something deeper to Ghost.

He had to be wrong.

He was a wretched thing. Roba and so many others had made sure of it. They’d torn fistfuls of flesh from his open chest and left nothing for anyone else. He was all broken parts held together by a fleeting prayer. There was no heart left, nor a hearth seated in the middle of it like a warm place to crawl back to when the weather within his own fucked head grew dismal. He was left out to the unkind elements and told only to tip his head back to the sun when he could no longer stand the way another man touched him.

“I don’t know what you want from me with the gloves,” Ghost said as he fitfully tore them off and squeezed them between his scarred hands. The air was cold, and the very thought of that made him shake. “But I can’t be what you see out there. I’m never going to be your Valentine’s in the way those boys are to each other,” Ghost’s voice broke, “I am broken.”

“You aren’t broken, Ghost,” Soap said, finally turning to him wholly. Ghost had always been bad at reading faces, and he couldn’t lift his head enough to meet Soap’s sharp stare. He didn’t want to know what he’d find in them.

“Please,” Ghost spat with a spat of ire, “don’t piss on my boots and tell me it’s raining, Johnny. I know what I am better than anyone else, and I know that… I know that you can’t save me. I can’t be what you want me to be.”

Soap crossed his arms pointedly, “And why do you assume to know what I want with you, Simon? Because, and tell me if I’m wrong,” he knew he wasn’t, Soap was just like that, “but you heard half of the story I wanted to tell, and have gotten so far in your head that you think you know everything I want.”

“You want me.”

“Absolutely.”

“You want,” the word felt thick on the tip of his tongue, “intimacy.”

Soap merely quirked his brow at that.

“Sex,” Ghost clarified gruffly, “you want sex.”

“Hold on,” Soap looked baffled, “You think that I've put up with years of your shit, me getting shot and almost dying — you almost dying doing something stupid…just so that I could get laid? Simon,” Soap’s voice was soft, almost amused, “I don’t care. I don’t need any of that.”

“But —”

“Let me finish,” Soap’s voice was not unkind as he stepped closer to Ghost, bridging the impossible chasm between them like it was nothing, “I mean, ever since I met you things have just felt…better. Sure, you’re an emotionally constipated ass when you want to be, but I wouldn’t have you any other way, and I’m under no delusions about what I’m getting myself into. I don’t need all the bells and whistles to feel secure with you. I don’t want you because of what you could be — I want you for who you are now.”

“I just want to be complete for you,” Ghost felt his shoulders sag weakly, “you deserve better than me being broken.”

“Simon,” Soap said, a crooked smile tugging at the corner of his lips, “you’ve been a whole person from the day I met you. Tell me how you really feel, I know that you want to and I know that’s what's eating you up so bad.”

Ghost hated him.

He still wanted to bite. The instinct was a primal, fearful thing that suffocated all other emotions when he let it run wild.

He wanted to hurt.

To kick.

To flee.

To run away so far that no one would be able to catch him again — to touch him. Too many people in his life hadn’t known the meaning of ‘no’ and he felt such revulsion rolling through his gut at the thought of slinking away from the only hand offered to him without such expectation.

“I — I’m not sure. I don’t want you to think of me in terms of sex,” he decided his words slowly, and even then he felt unfinished, “I don’t know if I want anyone to. It feels like I’m broken because of it.”

Soap’s fingertips grazed his sleeves in a quiet question, but he took it no further, “Then we go at your pace, okay?”

“I’m not a good person,” Ghost reaffirmed softly, as though Soap hadn’t heard him the first time.

“I don’t care.”

They were close now. They’d been closer on missions and in the apartment before this, but the proximity now felt different — more intense. It was an intimate exchange between them even if they were both still fully clothed and would remain that way till Ghost felt otherwise — if he ever did. He wanted to, desperately, but the day seemed so far off in the future that he didn’t dare dive deeper.

So close now that Ghost could feel heat radiating off of Soap. He always ran hot. It was like he was so full of energy that nothing, not even his flesh and bones, could contain him. He slept in sheets alone because of this, and even then Ghost had watched him kick them away during the night to feel some reprieve.

Ghost was always cold.

He liked Soap’s heat.

“I am brutal,” he whispered as he thought of impaling birds and hawkish responses.

“Yeah,” Soap said without question. He didn’t doubt Ghost’s abilities, nor did he delude himself into thinking that he could make Ghost into anything but what he was, “but you’re mine.”

That alone felt cemented into stone with the assuredness of a fact.

“Let me help you,” Soap’s fingers were tugging at his sleeves again. He wasn’t searching for skin in the way so many others had. If anything, it reminded Ghost of the nervous habit he had when it came to picking at disheveled things.

“What if you can’t?” Ghost rasped out desperately, “What if it’s too much?”

“Will you trust me to know the difference?” Soap’s voice was firm, but not unkind, “Instead of running away because you don’t think I have enough sense to know what will burn me?”

As he spoke, Soap gently wrestled the gloves from where they were clenched between Ghost’s white-knuckled grasp. Wordlessly, he began to fit them back over Ghost’s scarred hands, one finger at a time. He didn’t ask for help, only coaxed Ghost’s suddenly very dry mouth to respond as he asked:

“Let me know if it’s too much.”

“I will.”

And for once, Ghost felt like he was being honest. It was a strange feeling. It’d been a very long time since he’d felt like he was being honest to anyone.

“Can I…?” Ghost’s gloved hands felt so much more secure now as he cautiously tapped at Soap’s side in a muted question. Hugs were something he wasn’t entirely used to. When visiting Soap’s family for Christmas, Soap’s mother gave him a one-armed squeeze as she thanked him for attending, and he’d been ramrod straight the whole time. She didn’t touch him after that. No one did, and for that, he’d been grateful.

Only now did he realize just how much he longed to hold someone. He was one of the most dangerous things left to hunt the wicked, and yet he couldn’t stand to touch Soap bare-skinned without wanting to keel over. Still…he tried.

“Go ahead.”

Maybe they could try again.

So, he slowly let his arms wrap loosely around Soap’s back. The bags, belts, and vest made it difficult to hold gently, and gods it couldn’t have been comfortable for Soap to be pressed up against him like this, but he didn’t say anything. Ghost found the small of Soap’s back where he was warmest. Heat radiated off of Soap like a furnace. He could feel him through the military-issued uniform he wore beneath his discarded disguises. Ghost tentatively dug his blunt nails into soft flesh like he could make himself whole with it. His thumb toyed loosely with Soap’s loosely done belt, and there, in the single space of safety that they carved for themselves, were they allowed to exist.

“I have given you my worst,” Ghost’s voice was low.

There would be bad days.

And there would be worse days.

If Soap had taught him anything during their time together it was that healing was not slow, nor was it easy. Healing was the stubborn, spiteful ember in his chest that commanded him to rise again for the next day. However, it was not an infallible force, and so there would be bad days. Days where he had to be calm — where he had to loosen his grip and open his palms to let go and trust…

Trust that he wouldn’t fall.

He had to trust that Soap would not let him fall in the same way that he’d do the same.

“So?” Soap’s voice carried no hesitation. It wasn’t even a question so much as it was a playful tease,” Let me love you anyway.”

And he did.

Relentlessly.