Archive of Our Own ^beta

There used to be a pair of doves that nestled themselves within a gnarled knot on the Apple tree in his backyard. The memories he shared of them were a watercolor landscape of childlike bliss to combat the bleakness of his situation inside the house. Everything always seemed to have more color when he was able to sit outside and study the world as scholars told in documentaries he just barely understood as a child.

For his eighth birthday, his mother got him a camera. In hindsight, it was a flimsy disk of plastic that took blurred photographs just barely worthy of their space on the fridge, but it was Simon’s and that alone was worth its weight in gold. He treasured it for the months he had it. All of the pocket change he collected went to new reels of film for documented evidence of his journeys.

He loved to take pictures of the birds.

He remembered a dog-eared book as big as his chest with each species native to England outlined down to the smallest of details. While his mother hadn’t been happy to see the highlight margins and scribbled dates when he spotted certain species, she didn’t dare reprimand him for their quiet joys in the world.

Simon caught them just as they took flight, and vainly thought that he might be able to fly too with enough determination. One broken arm later and that dream was just as quickly crushed, but it never took away the reverence with which he watched the nesting doves fly each morning. He mourned them when they left, but always waited for them when they returned with the warming seasons.

It was something to look forward to when it became too cold to venture out, and his cheek became a mottled mess of a constant bruise. Simon couldn’t always pinpoint what he had done wrong, and in hindsight…he suspected that it was because his father saw very little of himself in his youngest son. He was the picturesque figure of his mother- with soft cheeks and full lashes that gave him a doe-eyed appearance as a young boy. ‘Owlish’ his brother would call him in their brief moments of camaraderie between weathered books they traded like pilfered trophies.

Nothing he ever did was enough for his father, not for lack of trying, and eventually, Simon got the hint that he was just born with a face too soft to be anything but hated. It took him until next spring to understand the gravity of what being gentle meant in this world, and that very rarely were the softest things in the world allowed to flourish.

When the doves came back, he was ready. He was dizzy from a backhanded slap that left his cheek split open just far enough to reveal the yellow of baby fat on his cheeks. His mother had put all the broken pieces of her son back together with a bandaid and a promise that ‘no, sweet boy…it isn’t you.’

It didn’t matter, because the birds were back and that always meant that better days were coming.

Weeks went by, and his cheek healed, because it always would. Wounds healed and scars faded into the obscure mishmash of memories that he couldn’t quite recall after the fact. He watched the lovebirds build their nest back together- their life slotting against one another like a fairytale he couldn’t quite grasp. He wondered, vaguely, how they could seem so happy when the house they built their nest beside was anything but.

He was happy for the company.

Until he saw the snake…

Simon’s chest shuddered with a strangled sob. His arm dripped with blood from where he’d been bitten. He hadn’t even meant to grab the snake hard enough to hurt it, because he didn’t want to! He just wanted to keep it away from the eggs. Distantly, he could hear his father shouting over the broken symphony of wailing doves and their wings beating high above him. They wailed against his ears as he cried harder into his hands- his bloodied hands dripping with yolk. A halo of cracked eggshells surrounded the grass around Simon as he tried in vain to scoop back whatever fragile innocence he still had, but it didn’t work.

The eggs were still shattered, and it was his fault. He’d crushed them.

A sharp pain in his ear had him beating his slick fists against his father’s leg as he was hauled from the ground and the puddled remnants of happier times that he’d never get back. He spat vitriol at his father for the stupid snake, for his freshly busted lip so soon after his cheek healed, and for everything yet nothing at all. It was a rare moment of defiance that his father would have looked down upon with respect had it been his brother.

But it wasn’t Tommy and his indomitable spirit…it was just Simon. Only ever just Simon- with a face too much like his mother and eyes colder than his father could ever hope to match.

“You hurt her feelings, boy,” his father whispered close to his ear, like some secret hurt the both of them shared. The tone had Simon freezing the moment he heard it, because it was gentle, and that was a bad thing to be with his father.

“She killed my birds,” he whispered with a sniffle. He knew it was useless to argue, but still he did it. There was a stubborn seed of malice in place of any kinder birthright, and for once he held fast to it.

“How do you plan on making this right, huh?” his father replied as Simon watched brilliant green scales slide across his father’s arm like an extension of his iron-clad will. Kaleidoscope eyes watched him throughout it all.

He threw up that night, not for the first time, after the kiss left him feeling cold. Like something rotting out in the garden or festering with ants like the puddle of what would have become baby doves that lay just outside of the cursed apple tree. Many years later there would be more serpentine lips on his and he was just as unwilling each and every time. He shuddered into them as a grown man chained to the sun with fangs that tore his lips apart with the silence he maintained all the while. He did not weep as he had when he was a child, but his stomach heaved against everything and nothing at all when the ghost of scaly hands danced upon his neck.

He didn’t go outside much for the rest of that year, and he could feel nothing for the way he looked down upon a smashed camera left at his feet like a dead trophy.

He cleaned it up…and moved on.

Because that’s what he was good at.

He always got back up.

Life moved on, and while both Simon and the apple tree grew it never did bear fruit. He’d identified it through books a hundred times as he grew, yet never did it produce any fruit. He thought it was useless most of his life after the birds stopped coming to his windowsill, as though they could sense the serpentine predator at his bedside. Eventually, Ghost buried that boy beside a hollow tree, and he never looked back. If he faltered for even a second or lost focus then he worried about what would crawl back from the roots or ruin and rot.

He had faced many skeletons in his time, plenty of which with half a mind left from the bullet he put through their heads, but his own echo was not a monster he sought to bring back. That broken body had to stay out of sight.

Focus.

Ghost took a deep breath in before each shot. It helped to steady the barely-there tremor in his fingertips. It had gotten better over the years, but never quite went away. The stims he downed by the dozen did nothing to help the insistent waiver of his hands, but it was manageable. Ghost had to remind himself that the quaking of his hands that nicked his cheek each time he tried to shave was manageable. He would live. He always did.

Ghost was better than that.

Better than most in fact as he released his breath just as his finger hit the trigger with pinpoint accuracy. He didn’t miss.

That was simply a fact born of youthful talent. No one dared to deny the man his excellence in the field, and there were few who could keep pace with him to the extent that it left him breathless. He had a sharpshooter"s eye was what long-dead trainers and nameless coaches told him as they squeezed his shoulders in lax camaraderie. Many people asked about it when he was still young enough to wear a cocky smile that showed far too many teeth. He always gave the same dickish response before he knew better than to entertain the world as a lapdog.

S K I L L

He would fingerspell it out for people and mouth it for good measure with all the haughty air of a boy who knew where his talents lay, and far beyond it.

He buried that version of himself too. Another echo was silenced by his own blade as he dug his grave and tossed the arrogant child he once was into the pit with every other broken part that couldn’t be taped back together.

One more mercenary fell, and all the masked man felt was the brief jolt of the recoil shooting through his shoulder blade. The jostle of it had long since become something of a comfort as he took in another deep breath and steadied himself once again for the steady jolt that shot through his arms.

Soap, the bastard, once asked Ghost months ago what he felt when he shot, and the man hadn’t paused in his reply. Perhaps he should have- to show that the man at least felt something other than grim satisfaction, but it would be a lie he didn’t wish to tell.

“The recoil.”

“That’s it?” Soap’s tone hadn’t been accusatory, but it wasn’t warm either. He wore a poor imitation of his usual cocky grin, and that alone set Ghost on edge as he side-eyed the other with a dismissive stare.

“Did you expect something else?” he shot back, entirely ready to end the conversation.

Soap opened his mouth twice and shut it just as fast before he gave a hoarse laugh, “I guess not if it’s coming from you.”

Ghost always found himself drawn back to the conversation. It hadn’t been unkind and was by far one of the nicer spirits to drape across his shoulders like an animal’s stolen skin. Soap had always been like that, infuriatingly so from day one.

He’d gotten Soap’s dossier before the Sergeant had even been informed of his placement. Ghost made it a point to know people. Information was an underutilized currency, and he made it a goal to have enough on each person in his life to put them in the grave. He’d expected something…bigger. Soap was a downright feral presence that demanded to be seen, but the first time he’d laid eyes on the man Ghost had watched firsthand as the Soon-to-be Sergeant ate shit on concrete and walked it off with only a minor stumble.

He’d doubted the man then, and several times again before their paths crossed into familiarity with their most recent mission.

Soap was someone who pushed the boundaries of professionalism and used his silver tongue with just as deadly accuracy as he did a true gun. 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 draw himself back, but with Ghost? He always pressed for more ground. There was a glittering prize to be found in the way that Soap trapezed across the walls Ghost had put up for himself as though the man knew the phantom would catch him if he fell.

He hated him for it, truly.

Soap looked at Ghost like there was something more to the man than whatever hollowed shell had been taped back together. He studied Ghost like a student pouring over textbooks before an exam looking for that missing piece to slot everything together- as though it would be so easy as to lock the broken pieces of Ghost back into something kinder.

It scared him.

What scared him worse were the dreams. Intrusive echoes of the monstrosity he might have become, and the man he might still be. There were always parts of himself that he couldn’t quite place in origin. Whether his cruelty was manufactured or something dug out of his cold heart…he didn’t know.

Ghost had nightmares a lot after the Roba’s facility. The whistle of hollowed bones echoed through his ears like rushing water when he woke up soaked with sweat and his hands closing around a phantom throat. He never- never took a woman to bed for fear of hurting them. He dreamed of it sometimes…hurting them. He’d begged his late psychiatrist for a cure to heal the crack they’d dug into his mind and filled with such vile venom that he kept a bucket by his bed to heave his disgust into after each nightmare.

He’d almost gotten rid of the bucket till he met Soap, and the nightmares began anew. He was afraid of hurting the man even in his sleep.

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

Price had been the only one to ever truly read Ghost with such ease, and that was won through a lost tooth and a brutal fight that left the both of them heaving for breath as Price spat out a molar Ghost had knocked clean from his jaw. They didn’t speak of that day often, only that Price had somehow managed to slot together whatever puzzle he’d been working out with Ghost by the end of it. That should have sent him running, and Ghost had wanted to. The primal urge to flee sent him on edge the minute Price offered him a hand, but he was a stubborn man at heart. He took the bastard"s hand and sold himself to the only one seemingly capable of pulling Ghost back from the edge he so precariously danced upon.

Respect born from spilled blood seemed to be the only way Ghost had ever cemented himself into memory.

He sucked in another sharp breath and held it for mere milliseconds before two Shadows were crumbling to the ground. He double-tapped for good measure as he watched one of their bodies skid to a bloody stop.

“Ghost, that you?” the comm rattled to life with the familiar crackle of Soap’s thick accented voice.

“In the flesh.”

“Nice shooting partner,” the Seargent whispered into the comms in a pisspoor southern accent he’d surely picked up from the Old Westerns Price had tucked in the break room. He’d been practicing it every so often on air, and each time he managed to goad Ghost into the wispy bark of a laugh that made the comm line short circuit.

“Still awful,” he shot back without missing a beat.

“You like it.”

He did.

“Keep movin’, Johnny. I’m spotting you.”

“Copy, Lt.”

Despite every alarm that should have told Soap to stay away from Ghost as many others understood, the man didn’t. If anything, he seemed to chase the danger of it with quips and banter that left a wry smile on Ghost’s face when no one else could see him. He laughed when he was nervous because he didn’t know how to cry. No one had taught him how, and so he spilled his poor humor out to lessen whatever tension his very presence formed.

And Johnny matched him blow for stubborn blow.

“Knock knock,” Ghost said after his next shot nearly went south.

There was a crackle of something he suspected was Soap putting his head against a wall, “absolutely not.”

“I said knock knock, Johnny,” Ghost prodded in a smug voice.

After a long sigh, Soap finally radioed back in defeat, “who’s there?”

“Hatch.”

“Hatch who?” Soap replied slowly. Ghost could hear the cogs turning as a confused ‘what the fuck’ was whispered just away from the mic.

“God bless you, Johnny boy,” Ghost finished with a smirk.

Soap stopped answering his jokes after that.

He dispatched men as he found them, and Ghost had an eye for finding things when he damn well chose to. Only when he was certain that he’d paved a way for Soap’s reconnaissance did Ghost relax with a breathy chuckle. He knew men back at the base whose hands shook at the thought of taking a life, and many more haunted by the ones they had already been forced to take. Ghost supposed that when you were waist-deep in evidence of your inhumanity that you had to find humor in the little things, otherwise you’d wind up dead.

His concentration broke momentarily as his hand hovered over his breast pocket for a breathless few seconds. He fished out a crumpled photograph with more wrinkles than he could ever hope to count- many of which he felt guilty over for not having taken care of the picture as the rest of his team had. That being said? It was an awful picture.

Gaz had snapped a blurred picture of Soap leaning over a stove. The man’s sleeves were rolled up and the sheen of sweat on his brow caught the camera’s glare. His arms were decorated in bandaids from where grease did far worse damage to his shaking hands than an enemy knife ever could. It was a brief reprieve from the world that they shared back on the base. Too little time to get blackout drunk, but just enough time for Soap to scrounge together a dinner in mimicry of the family none of them got to see.

Soap was wearing an utterly garish pink apron embroidered messily with ‘Kiss the Cook’ from an old White Elephant trade. All of the team had the blurry picture on their persons with a cheesy promise to come home from the war, and Soap would be waiting by the stove for them. Some picturesque Hollywood dream they’d all laughed at when they’d printed the pictures out, but there was something sentimental to the way he’d worried a hole through its corner from where his thumb had rubbed up against the picture during moments when his nerves caught fire.

The shifting of a loose tile had Ghost whipping around with his rifle drawn. He expected a merc with a knife raised high above their head to greet him, and he was ready for it with his finger hovering dangerously atop the trigger.

Except it wasn’t a grown merc with more brawn than brains.

It was a young boy.

His face was sunken in from hunger pangs with eyes dark enough to swallow up the sunlight that caught on the webbing of his darker lashes. His skin was dark as scorched terracotta with reddened patches from where the sun beat down on exposed flesh. He had choppily cut hair that had been shorn short at the base of his neck. An inexperienced hand had left thin nicks behind his batty ears. Truly, he looked in need of more than a few hearty meals to put enough meat on his wiry body to resemble anything close to healthy.

Abruptly, Ghost began fishing around one of his pockets for the homemade granola bars he’d found from a local vendor that Alejandro recommended during their brief downtime. An ‘exchange of cultures’ was what he had called it, but Ghost knew better.

“English?” Ghost asked as he held out the granola bar like an olive branch between the both of them. He’d have to get back to the window soon enough, but if the kid had made it this far without being seen then surely he was deserving of some sort of reward. Dimly, Ghost worried that this derelict crypt would have been the child’s home had the battering of war not broken his door down and stolen away what little childhood he had left.

The boy gave him a so-so gesture as he shakily seized the offered snack greedily.

Nodding, Ghost pointed to himself with a curt, “Ghost,” to satisfy introductions before he gestured to the boy in exchange.

“Me llamo Otto,” the boy–Otto–replied shyly.

“Dónde está su familia?” Ghost queried after a brief pause to wrack his brain for the broken textbooks Alejandro had offered him.

He had always picked up languages fast enough. BSL became an extension of himself for many years, and while being on the team had diluted it down to blunted signs and fingerspelled insults, he still liked to learn. He even liked kids.

His brother’s periodical spells in rehab meant that Simon—Ghost—would be the one home for weeks at a time with a baby who never spoke hanging off his hip. So he got acquainted with learning the subtle cues of his little nephew and how to best communicate with someone who seemed to shut the world around him out in favor of sketching out memories to be plastered across steadily overflowing fridge space. His sister-in-law was hesitant to call Joseph autistic, as though the very word was a burden to be saddled with in their family. In some ways, she was right.

People did treat Joseph differently after that, but never Ghost. He understood to some degree, even if he couldn’t quite see the world from down at Joseph’s level he still tried. He was patient because Joseph’s mother needed someone in the family who could bring her son back down from the world he’d concocted high up in the clouds, and Ghost was happy to do so. He was happy to feel trusted.

Joseph never looked up at Ghost in fear, no matter how much time passed between visits.

So, Ghost used to be good with kids at least, though many years had passed since then as he watched Otto’s lip tremble at the phantom’s overcast shadow. The boy was afraid of Ghost.

Except it wasn’t Ghost’s shadow that stretched all across the walls like the open jaws of some long-dead beast. Everything clicked into place with startling clarity as Ghost whipped around on god-given instinct.

“I am sorry, Ghost,” Otto sobbed out in broken English.

He didn’t see them until the very last second. The sharp stab of a dart sank into the barely-there exposed bit of cloth at his side. He tore it out and sent it deep into the arm of an approaching merc. His distraction had been a moment of weakness that would haunt the man as he cracked the butt of his gun across a shadow’s masked face. His assailant was good, but Ghost was better. He sent the man sprawling before a knife very nearly embedded itself beside the Shadow’s throat. He was quick enough to remedy this as another blade sank itself into the fatty flesh of the man’s arm. He’d meant to strike somewhere more centralized, but he didn’t have the chance.

His shaking fingers ghosted across one of the many knives he had strapped against his vest as he drew it with a pointed twirl of challenge. In the cramped office space, Ghost was forced to lurch back as he truly began to take in the totality of how fucked he was. He admonished himself for having become so preoccupied with a fool more than capable of becoming a one-man army if given even the slightest amount of explosives.

“It doesn"t have to be this way, hermano,” one of the mercs bit out with a barely-there smile.

Ghost cocked his head at the question, with one hand still fisting a knife he used his free side to spell out as simple a sign as he could convey;

F U C K O F F

He hoped that the accompanying gesture was as universal as he’d been led to believe because Ghost didn’t give them time to think it through before he was in motion. One of his knives cast a splatter of blood upon the walls as his knee crunched into a man"s groin hard enough to send one of his attackers to the ground with a weak wheeze of agony. People like Soap and Price fought well enough, even Alejandro had enough sense to carry himself with dignity in a fight. Ghost had no such pretenses.

He fought dirty. He fisted debris-filled dust from the crumbling walls and sent it into a man’s eyes before cracking an empty bottle across their face. It was fast-paced and ugly, but Ghost knew no other way to finish this fight with any hope of winning. He was down six knives within mere moments, and none of them were left wasted.

Truly, Ghost was holding his own for the whole of the fight. They had numbers, but he’d faced worse odds in grade school and still come forth victorious. He might have even won if he’d been able to pull his pistol from his belt before a bullet landed square in his shoulder. It wasn’t a clean shot by any means, and it sent Ghost sprawling with a gasp of surprise at the surge of pain that radiated from where his shoulder smacked against the wall with a painful jostle.

He was just barely back on his feet before something cracked against the back of his head with enough force to send him straight back to his knees. He was seeing double as he fought to get back on his feet, because he refused to submit. He would not surrender, and his bitten-off snarl was enough evidence of that as he looked up at the remaining mercs with a look that ought to burn them where they stood.

It didn’t work.

A burst of blood dribbled past his clenched teeth as a boot smeared his face into the rotten wood beneath them for good measure.

“A ghost?” he heard the dizzying voice above scoff, “this is a corpse.”

. . .

“Ghost, what"s your position, how copy?” Soap tried again. He’d been on and off the radio since Ghost’s impromptu radio silence.

Nothing.

“Ghost, do you copy?”

Silence.

“Cunt.”

He was damn near ready to crush the malfunctioning piece of wires and circuit boards beneath his boot for all the good it would do him. It would have at least made him feel better about the precarious situation he’d been put in after he found their rendezvous point entirely empty. Ghost had been a good ways ahead of Soap when they started off, and it wasn’t like him to be late. If anything, Soap had never known a time when the phantom of a man wasn’t the first to arrive. Even if he didn’t always make himself known, Soap could pick him out of the shadows with ease that made the other squirm.

Serves the absolute ass right for all the times Soap watched Ghost creep behind people for the sheer sake of watching them jump.

Ghost had only ever managed to scare Soap once, and that was their first time meeting. Since then Soap had made it a point to memorize the light footfalls of his friend- the way the world seemed to still whenever Ghost was present. He’d grown up a hunter- toddling after his father and drunken friends during weekend trips for jerky they’d share with the whole neighborhood. He got good at reading the world around him down to the minute changes in the air.

The world bent to Ghost as though he were a predator lying in wait, and that made him easier to find when you knew what to look for.

This was exactly how Soap knew that Ghost was gone before he’d even reached the top of his friend’s chosen perch. Never mind the fact that Ghost adamantly denied the very notion of him ‘perching’ like a damned bird when he decided to brood. It didn’t matter, no matter how funny it was to get Ghost’s feathers ruffled, what mattered was that the fucking apparition was gone.

He’d left a trail of carnage in his wake, because that’s just how Ghost sought to leave the world when he was finished with it. He was the judge, jury, and executioner of his own world. God help any man bold enough to be caught in his scope, or unlucky enough to be a target with a name to match his paycheck. Better men would fight for honor, and perhaps Soap still hoped that he did, but there were times with Ghost that he saw the man hesitate.

He kept the world at an arm"s length, and no matter the banter they shared, a part of Soap still understood that he knew less than nothing about the pieced-together man who crushed a broken world in the palm of his gloved hand.

That being said, it didn’t erase the telltale signs that Ghost had been here, and that he had most certainly left without Soap.

There were six bodies that he could count in the room with knives embedded with pinpoint accuracy into their chests. It wasn’t a clean kill, and that made Soap purse his lips in thought as his gaze traveled across the room far enough to find the final twin nails in the coffin.

His rifle.

And Soap’s picture.

Two things Ghost never seemed to part from- for fucks sake he swore the sniper slept with his damn gun more nights than he left it in a locker.

Creak!

Soap drew his pistol to where a cabinet door squealed shut with a faint ‘thud’ the minute that the Sergeant seemed to come to attention. He didn’t quite lower his gun, but his shoulders did lose some of their tension in place of utter confusion as he crept towards the makeshift crawl space amidst the rubble.

Out of curiosity, he rapped his knuckles against the countertop with an experimental hum of intrigue.

Soap half expected a starved opossum to come racing from the cupboards at his probing. That would have been easier to stomach than the doe-like eyes that looked up at him with a mixture of complete terror and all-consuming guilt.

He didn’t need to hear the kid out…he already knew.

He felt his heart stop as his comm came to life on autopilot, “we have a real fuckin’ situation. Alejandro, I need you for a civilian extraction ASAP. It’s one of yours.”

. . .

Ghost was floating somewhere between too much and too little all at once. The world came back to him slowly at first with the way the world danced across his vision like tangled bodies pressed together in disharmonious synchrony. There were soft colors that came with the fuzzy feeling of delirium that he was uncomfortably well acquainted with.

He had to have been drugged. Whether it was the dart or something else, he was uncomfortably familiar with the ghostly presence currently draped across his back. She was a mistress of all things hedonistic, and had led many better men to their deaths with just one more hit…

The dizzying vibrancy of every memory he fought to keep away had his head pounding in pain. His half-lidded eyes stung from where his makeup had bled down into his mask. He knew the black streaks it would leave against his lashes as he fully began focusing on the world around him. He was seeing double as two sets of hands began snapping just beside his ear. He caught it in his peripherals as he gave a low growl of warning for the sharp sound ricocheting through his head.

Of course, he fought.

He was motherfucking Ghost. The only law he obeyed was death and then some days he defied that too as he surged forward. His world was a blur of colors and shocked voices as he managed to crack his elbow across a man’s face who was just barely close enough to seize. He felt the man- he had to be young- claw at Ghost’s arms as he managed to loop one of the buckles of his vest around the merc’s throat.

He squeezed as a warning. There were far better men than him that would be lenient to idiotic youth, but not him. He could hardly afford that kind of a risk as he glared up at the remaining cartel clustered together. He could practically hear the cogs in their mind whirring as they began to put a price on the boy currently held hostage by Ghost’s sheer tenacity to get back on his feet again.

They were debating if he was worth the kill.

The minute Ghost caught one of them reaching for their gun he went to snap the merc’s neck. He didn’t know if he succeeded as his head was wrenched back with a painful crackle.

“Temper, dog,” was the only warning he got before a calloused hand fisted his cowl with a sizable chunk of his hidden curls wrapped in unkind hands that twisted for good measure.

“Bite me,” Ghost shot back dryly.

The hand holding him by his hair ground his face back into the floor for some show of power. It didn’t matter. He was going to fucking kill all of them.

The masked man made some sort of a gesture that Ghost couldn’t quite catch. He soon understood with horrifying clarity as he felt the first buckle of his vest come undone. Ghost tried to pull back as a ragged breath caught in his chest, but the hand at his head kept him from doing the damage he so desperately wished to inflict. When he caught sight of them going for one of the holsters strapped to his thigh he began to struggle in earnest. His hands clawed at the bindings he’d been wrapped in, and a ragged sound of fury was torn forcibly from his throat as it. Did. Nothing.

More hands were on him just to keep him still, and that just made it all the worse as he felt them smooth themselves across his pant leg, his arms, and the small of his back just beneath where his vest lifted from his undershirt.

Belatedly he realized that the constant shine in his peripherals was a phone camera catching in the sun. It reminded him so sickly of a conversation he’d shared with Soap a lifetime ago.

“You get caught out there, they’ll kill you slow...”

“Mercs or the Narcos?”

“Narcos? They’ll take videos…- I won’t watch ‘em. More than once anyway.”

He hoped Soap wouldn’t have to watch.

He couldn’t even move.

The next buckle came undone.

Ghost stopped breathing.

The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth buckles all came undone one after another. He didn’t even have time to react before his tactical vest was being peeled from him.

And he just… stopped…existing.

Ghost could pinpoint the exact moment that he checked out of his body, though it had been years since he’d last done it. The minute one of their hands grazed gently across the inside of his arm, however unintentionally, Ghost’s body went lax as the dead. He let it happen. He couldn’t get away even if he wanted to, and he’d tried. They’d taken his armor- his second skin. The one buffer he had against the world and the way warm flesh felt just like blunt fingernails dragging up his arms with the coaxing whisper to be let in.

His glossy eyes blinked in a daze, and his breathing slowed to the point he felt someone press their hand to his masked mouth just to check that he was still with them. On some level, he had to be because he could still understand that they were meticulously taking him apart. Piece by piece, brick by agonizing brick, they were undoing the walls he’d built up with layers upon layers of lethality.

And they took it all away. He knew that, logically, it was the only way to ensure that he was truly barren of weapons. Even that was a stretch as they never let his hands go. They understood that he was a threat by nature, whether he had a knife in one hand or bitten back nails in the other.He would have done the same thing in their shoes.

Except it was him.

And their hands were sprawled across his back with only a thin shirt now to keep the warmth of their touch away. It burnt enough to draw a whimper from his lips that had the whole room freezing at the sound. They were surprised that something so human yet primal could come from him- an untouchable myth brought down into mortal bonds and stripped of whatever divinity he’d built up for himself.

It all came crashing down with a hoarse sob when he felt gentle fingertips coaxing the edges of his skull mask free from his face. It had been pressed so tightly to his cheeks that he was sure that the sharper edges would leave indented bruises against his mottled cheeks.

“Stop,” he whispered as the skull was tossed haphazardly to the side. It left him in just his balaclava and the streaky black paint around his eyes.

To their credit, they did stop. The whole world seemed to let Ghost take a haggard breath in as his spirit came crashing back into his body. He didn’t cry. He’d have sooner thrown himself on their blades than let a tear fall, but his shoulders did shake with phantom tremors of hands still ghosting across his flesh. He knew that not every pair of hands had to be real, but there had been a time when they felt physical enough to leave such scars.

They haunted him like hounds nipping at his heels, and he uselessly sagged against the hand holding him up by his pinched cowl.

A voice was close enough to his ear that he could feel the heat of their breath even with his coverings.”

“Not until we’ve unmasked the Ghost.”

Their nails touched his collarbone as they began to slowly lift the balaclava from where he’d tucked it into his shirt. The pace was torturously slow, as though they knew that no physical damage they did to him could be worse than this. He could take a stabbing, even a bullet or two, but this? This was hellish. Their fingertips tagged against his throat as they scratched against his unshaven stubble.

He had scars just beneath his lips from a snake taking his lips apart for an injustice he wanted no part in. When he ran his tongue across the inside of his mouth he could still feel the indentations from where her teeth had forced stitches had forced him into silence.

He remembered waking up to bloodied lips ghosting across his mouth and painting him with every bloodied promise they would have him enact once his submission was something won. It was never an ‘if’, only ever a when. Though the blood had long since been washed away, it felt as though he could never truly rid himself of the feeling- the taste- of men and women alike. All those he refused to touch, and every one of them who refused to listen to his whispered pleas.

He didn’t beg for these men.

Simon Riley might have sobbed, but Ghost did not so much as give them a whine when the beginnings of the mottled port wine stain that stretched across his cheek like swirling clouds.

All of that and more was being peeled back as they paused at his nose to smile down at him. The merc slowly released Ghost’s cowl from the back to clap him gently on the cheek like you would a child who just didn’t get it. Spittle ran down his exposed lips as his cold eyes met the merc’s black stare.

“What?” his attacker cooed, “cat got your tongue, Ghostie?”

Ghost bit him.

Hard.

He hadn’t even realized what he was doing till he had the man’s index finger crushed against his molars with a series of decisive cracks that sent the room into another wave of hellish panic. He bit down even when worse hands began to try and pull the man away and others tried to pry him away like some rabid dog you could force back into a kennel. It rose to a halt when the man screamed loud enough for the very Gods to have turned their attention to the scene as Ghost spat a bloodied wad of what remained of the man’s mutilated finger.

He took satisfaction in the resounding look of horror on the shadow merc’s faces as they looked down upon the beast they’d stripped bare for all that he was. Utterly inhuman.

Some part of him fought to be seen as such when he offered them a bloody smile before using his chin to forcibly roll the balaclava back over his chin.

He needed no further prodding about his opening as he slammed his head back and up into the nose of one of the men holding him. It would be a bold-faced lie to say that he didn’t enjoy it as he managed to drag himself away from any further prying hands. He just had to find a way out. A door…a window…a

Fuck.

A window.

Ghost didn’t think twice once his gaze snagged on the cracked window. He didn’t even care what was beyond it, just that it had to be better than this room. If he stayed he’d die, or worse.

So he ran.

His shoulder took the brunt of the damage as a halo of glass and bullets rained out around him, and a rushing sound came faster than he’d ever thought possible. It was only when he twisted himself as far as his bound hands and feet would allow him to better soften the blow that he realized his problem.

It was a river.

Ghost hit the surface, hard. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten how to swim, only that the rapids he’d landed in managed to sweep him entirely off whatever ground he might have gained as he weakly kicked out as best as he could. It was a constant effort just to keep his head above water from the way his bound hands flapped weakly in the torrential current.

When the first bullet whizzed by the water, Ghost dared to look up at the mercs firing down at him. One grazed the water near his hand, and another landed…somewhere. He didn’t have time to focus on that, and whatever drugs they’d injected him with still left the world soft enough to stave off the immediate shock of whatever wounds he’d been dealt.

He let himself sink.

It was all he could do to keep his head from bashing itself against rocks or getting caught in the debris littering the riverbed as he kicked out as best as he could to keep himself from being bludgeoned by the unforgiving waters when he was just this close to making it out alive.

He could damn well taste freedom like the kiss he never got to savor as his lungs burned with enough urgency for him to reach out to the surface like a man starved for holy light.

Except he couldn’t reach it. With increasing panic, Ghost realized that he couldn’t kick his legs enough with the bindings to reach the surface again. Instead, he was sinking. Even without his gear and every security net he’d ever built up to keep people away from him, he still sunk to the bottom of the river like the heaviest of sins.

That gravity of his situation weighed him down worse than any chains as he weakly clawed for the salvation he knew himself to be undeserving of. There were skeletal hands dragging him down like stray branches tangling in the tightened zip ties that bore purpling bruises into his wrists. The touch of death and all the cruel things he’d brought into this world were not gentle, nor was kind. Ghost seldom ever gave anyone a death like that, and it felt fitting that he saw none either as his lungs burned for air he couldn’t quite reach.

He let himself sink if only for momentary defeat as water flooded his mouth and burnt his nose.

He didn’t—Ghost didn’t want to die.

He just didn’t know how to live either.

. . .

“The boy doesn’t know anything else,” Alejandro’s voice radioed in with a solemness that felt unbecoming of his newly acquainted friend. Ghost told him you made teammates out in the field- not friends- but Soap saw little difference with their ragtag arrangement.

He’d been told as a child that humans would pack bond with anything, and he took that to heart at the tender age of twelve.

“Well I could guess that much,” Soap replied sardonically into the mic, “I kind of fucked up any contacts he did ‘ave.”

And he was telling the truth. Soap stood before a room of carnage like an angel amongst the rapture. He was all that remained, and he’d hardly wasted any bullets to get it done as he began collecting the loose wire he’d rigged around the house for good measure. He was a demolitions expert before being a damn good sniper, and he longed to put his skills back to the test as he wiped his hands clean of all trace of sin.

“Evidence?” Alejandro asked with lax intrigue.

“Not for long,” Soap promised with venom dripping from his silver tongue as he held Ghost’s abandoned skull mask in both hands.

He’d found it quick enough which was both a blessing and a curse in too many ways. The comms were still shot dead, and still Soap hadn’t yet stopped trying to reach Simon. It was desperate, but he needed to keep it up as some form of routine.

“Ghost…do you copy?” he whispered hoarsely as his fingers traced the dips in the mask his friend seemed so fond of.

The silence was his beloathed lover all the while as he let out a string of swears colorful enough to make the angels blush, and the forgotten cross at his neck burn with red hot shame.

“The mask…” he’d cooed into the comms like a challenge. He’d licked his lips with a foxish grin when he said it. “Take it off.”

“Show my face?” Ghost had replied. They easily fell into this banter, even if the both of them still kept each other at arm"s length.

“Yes, sir.”

“Negative.”

Soap’s smile was wicked with curiosity as he pried further, “are you ugly?”

“Quite the opposite,” was the smug bastard’s cocky reply.

He thought back to it more often than sometimes. He and Ghost were smart enough to know when the other was deflecting, and both too quick to catch onto each other’s bullshit. Yet they did it often enough- or at least in Ghost’s case- enough to know that every other word he said was either a lie…or a half-truth. Sometimes just as bad when you got down into the grit of it.

He wished he had pried more just as he knew it would have gotten him nowhere at all.

There were things in Simon Riley’s patchwork folder that didn’t add up, and mannerisms Soap caught onto that spoke louder than any screaming match the man could have had for all the times that Soap dared the Lieutenant to tell him exactly what he’d done wrong.

He knew all this and more as he collected the leftover pieces of Ghost’s armor, a phone he didn’t dare look at too closely, and all the broken parts that had been left behind in the broken halo of glass that surrounded a busted-out window.

No…

He wouldn’t have.

Soap’s head whipped around to the half-empty box of zip ties that had been left behind. Fuck. He raced to the window and looked out over the edge that dipped down into a torrential river. It was flooded from recent rainfall that left the banks muddy enough to sink you down to the knee if you weren’t careful enough, and judging by the trail of blood dripping from the window? Ghost hadn’t cared.

“Alejandro, I’ve got a lead. I’ll keep in touch,” was all the warning Soap gave before he was vaulting himself down the stairs and down to the riverbed where all precious things wound up eventually.

He didn’t care to hear Alejandro’s stuttered response before Soap was skidding down a mudbank and praying to Gods he’d long since abandoned. Never mind the fact that his mother took him to church every damn Sunday since he was born like a gift amongst men, he’d stopped praying soon after joining the army. It felt almost…sacrilegious to offer a prayer before dinner when surrounded by the men God had almost certainly let slip through the cracks.

He was fucking praying now.

He didn’t even know what exactly he ought to be praying for as his feet danced upon the slippery banks of the river. Hell, he didn’t exactly know what he was looking for when it came to identifying Ghost amongst the swollen brown river. Debris had been kicked up in the storm and it had left the engorged river flooded with muddy sediment. He knew that the current had to be worse beneath what he could see, and that scared him. If—fuck—if Ghost was in the river…Soap didn’t know if his friend would have been able to make it back out alive.

Still, he kept searching. No one told him shit about Ghost, but Soap was a smart man. If he’d learned at least one thing from the Lieutenant it was that the son of a bitch would look Death in the face and spit. He was the best and worst of what comes from being a survivor.

So Soap refused to think that the river alone would be what took the phantom from this world.

“Ghost!” he began to shout off into the wildlands. His accent grew thicker the hoarser he got.

Every now and again he’d test the comms.

“Ghost this is Soap, how copy?”

A beat of silence, and then firmer…

“Simon this is Johnny, how copy you bloody fuckin’ cunt?” he swore into the comms with a hiss of frustration.

Still, he soldiered on. If Ghost was alive then he must have drifted further downriver. So deeper into the wilderness Soap went with his cross heavy around his neck as he prayed for a man who wore sin like a mantle to hide behind. If Soap was the reckoning few saw coming, then Ghost was the cleansing fire that came before.

There was nothing for a long while. Only the static feedback of his looping comm and the steadily quieting call of cicadas. The deeper Soap went, the quieter the world became. He couldn’t exactly pinpoint when the silence began, but once his sharp ear caught the abnormal muteness of the forest he knew. It would have been different if it were any other predator but this was the distinct silence that Ghost carried with him. Few could ever pinpoint his presence with the accuracy of Soap, because he watched…he waited…and he listened.

“Ghost, how copy?” Soap’s voice was strained as he whispered it into the comms with a bated breath.

The line was a stream of static that had him wincing back at the sudden burst of rustling and the shrill scrape of metal on metal as the feedback evened out, and Soap could have kissed whoever listened to his pleas this one time as Ghost’s scratchy voice echoed back at him.

“I copy.”

“Ghost, this is Soap. Where are you?” he tried to keep the urgency from his voice as he immediately began to backtrack once he heard the telltale orchestra of crickets kicking back up. He’d missed Ghost along the way, but he knew his friend was there.

The comm line was still open, but Ghost didn’t respond. Once again, Soap was left in radio silence save for the crackle of Ghost’s shallow breathing overtaken by the roar of water sloshing just beneath wherever Ghost had his comm link positioned.

Finally, impossibly even, Soap caught sight of a black blot caught in a nest of branches that had been dragged from the canopy above during the storm. Ghost was halfway dragged up onto the shoreline by the current itself. His clothes were streaked with mud and a distinct puddle of blood had dug creeks into the mudbank that surrounded his motionless friend. He was lying on his side with one hand pressed stubbornly against a waterlogged comm set that crackled dangerously from where his friend’s bare hand was shakily holding it down.

Soap slowed his approach the closer he got. A look of concern painted across his features as he truly took in the sight of his friend and the state he’d been left in. Ghost looked…small. Hardly ever would that word be used to describe the titanic presence the phantom carried himself with. He was the unyielding mountain to Soap’s persistent winds. Yet he never bent to anyone else, and even his concessions with Soap were a double-edged blade.

So he took it slow and steady as he bent himself down low enough that his hand could graze across the soaked fabric stuck against Ghost’s forearm. His touch was featherlight as a passing wisp, and he thought that would make the transition easier as Soap leaned across Ghost to make sure his friend was breathing.

It was a barely there rattle, but blessedly present as he watched the shaking rise and fall of Ghost’s chest in the otherwise quiet riverbank. Only the currents dared intrude upon this moment, and even that was short-lived as Soap was thrown back in surprise as Ghost’s eyes flew open.

He watched his friend frantically pull at his balaclava till his mouth was free before he began to dry heave. Only when Soap tried to lay a soothing hand on his friend’s back did Ghost truly begin to grow sick with a strangled sob.

It was a sound that broke what little resolve Soap had left as he pulled his hand away like he’d been burnt. Only then did Ghost slump to the ground in defeat- just narrowly missing the puddle of bile that stung Soap’s eyes from where he had to pull his friend up by the back of his shirt.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Soap interrupted in a soft voice, “let me see those pretty baby blues, yeah?”

Ghost groaned out what was most certainly a swear as he swatted a bruised hand at Soap’s chest.

“I don’t want—I don’t—” Ghost whispered fitfully as the insistent prodding against his chest became sharper as Ghost’s nails dug into whatever skin he could reach. He didn’t finish the thought beyond the sharp sting of muddied nails tearing thin holes into Soap’s shirt. To be honest, Soap wasn’t sure he could stomach whatever truth he found in his assumptions. He was usually right about them, but he dearly hoped himself to be mistaken at this moment alone.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Ghost. Can you stand?”

The return of silence had Soap pursing his lips into a thin line of thought.

“No, of course, you can’t,” Soap finished unhelpfully as he finally felt Ghost’s sharp hold go lax. Whatever bout of unconsciousness his friend had been dragged into, he doubted it was an enjoyable experience.

He just—fuck—he just had to get them to one of the safehouses Alejandro marked down for him before Soap set off earlier.

. . .

When Ghost was still Simon, he remembered how he used to lie beneath the apple tree. It never bore fruit, but it always flowered. He remembered his father grabbing fistfuls of Simon’s curly hair and mocking him for the way he watched the seasons change and the blossoms wax and wane with the coming weeks. He collected their branches in cracked vases he’d duct-taped back together for his mom because they seemed to make her happy.

He wished she could have stayed happy.

He could recall the way the doves gathered at his hands whenever he offered up handfuls of pilfered feed from his neighbor"s chicken coop. They knew him well enough to land upon his shoulders with a curious coo each time he ventured outside. They were soft with him- softer than anyone had ever been with him at any age. So they died too.

And most of all? He wished that he didn’t have to kill Simon, but pretty things couldn’t survive just like broken birds with their sorrowful songs.

This was why the featherlight touches glancing off his arms and ghosting across his cheeks had the man whining in the back of his throat. He didn’t dare move, because he knew he’d be cruel just as he knew he could do nothing against them.

So he stayed floating in the dim reality between consciousness and oblivion as though a strong wind might pull him one way or another. He thought about dead doves and all the beautiful things they took with him when their bones became little more than ancient debris of a time he couldn’t quite remember anymore.

A part of him hated that he forgot the details he once held so dear to his chest, and another wished that he’d forgotten all about rotten apples and a halo of bloodied feathers that haunted him as a boy. He’d faced many nightmares since then, and many more angry spirits sat at his bedside and reminded him of all the awful things a single touch could bring.

But it was the doves that greeted him again.

So he sat at the edge of existence with their broken babies clustered in a bloodied puddle cupped between both hands. Of all the stains and scars that peppered his body, this was the one he had the hardest time looking at. Perhaps it was because it was the first time his face had been shoved into the evidence so that egg yolk hung from his cheeks in fat globs later that night.

He wanted—he wanted to leave. He didn’t know where he could go, so instead, he brought his knees up to his bare chest and waited with lidded eyes for a future he never thought he’d live to see.

He couldn’t even scream yet.

“Ghost?” a faint voice called out to him. It was an insistent pinch at the back of his hand to bring him from his stupor as the voice repeated again, firmer this time, “Ghost, where’s your head at, man?”

Soap.

“I need you to come back to me for a minute,” Soap continued with the stubbornness of a stuck burr.

Fuck. Ghost wanted just as much as he caught himself on the tail-end of sickness at the very thought of being so close to the man. It was all he could do to weakly shake his head.

“Ghost, I need to remove the bullet,” Soap was whispering in an agonized voice that tugged at something in Ghost’s chest he’d long since carved out.

He thought that digging it out by the roots of his heart would ensure nothing ever grew in the empty space left behind. He squashed budding flowers each time they rose without fail, but he was tired. His whole body was on fire for every wrong nerve ending that burst to life with the way he knew he was propped up against Soap’s chest. In any other life, it would have been a comical sight considering the size difference between the two of them.

Ghost was strong, but softened with fat in all the places Soap decidedly wasn’t.

“Please, I need you to know what I’m going to do. I don’t want you waking up to this alone,” Soap continued to talk in that wisp of a voice that dragged out the thickest edges of his accent in every place Ghost had already cemented to his memory.

His lashes fluttered as he blinked up in a daze at Soap.

“Hey, are you with me?” Soap asked quietly as he crowded closer to Ghost- as though he could shield the man through sheer force of will alone.

Ghost didn’t respond- he couldn’t. He could beat his fists against the invisible wall keeping him hemmed into paralysis as much as he wanted, but it did nothing. He was shackled to his fear as long as he could feel the steady rise and fall of Soap’s chest pressed against his bony back. No one in their right mind would ever call Ghost weak. The very thought felt treasonously contradictory to the untouchable persona he put forth. Not all of it was a lie either, but just enough of the fractured reality was falling through his fingers that he felt his breath stutter at the way Soap was looking at him.

He watched Ghost like he was able to methodically pick him apart through a glance alone.

“Can you take your shirt off?” Soap asked as he gently eased Ghost off of his chest. While he did it at a snail"s pace, the light jostling still had Ghost’s head swimming with a grunt of pain.

Even still, he shook his head.

“No you can’t do it on your own or no you don’t want to take off your shirt?” Soap challenged with pinpoint accuracy to the tension set in his friend’s jaw.

Ghost didn’t need to speak for Soap to know the answer as he tried to lean himself back from the Scot’s sharp stare. He was afraid of the way Soap looked at him, like this there was no comm link to hide behind or even the security of his many layers to cushion himself against prying eyes. He was unwillingly dressed down to a soaking long-sleeved shirt that hid nothing in the way of the constant tremors that shot through his shoulders- his hands- everywhere. There was never a moment where Ghost wasn’t shaking.

The worst part was that he didn’t know the cause of it. He could collect pieces to put together why he only ever held himself still as stone when he was behind a rifle, but it would never fix the issue. It couldn’t undo the way a knife had cut apart his hands and pieced him back together enough times that the nerves at his fingertips never fully came back. Or the way a dozen scorpion stings left a slight twitch to his right arm that medication only ever seemed to take the barest edge off.

There were other reasons. An electric shock that shot up his spine or a hundred dead hands grabbing for exposed flesh with enough insistence to draw black ichor from whatever slow beat his heart had left.

It didn’t matter.

He. Never. Stopped. Shaking.

And now Soap could see it too—hell—he could feel it. There was no way to miss it, and Soap hardly missed anything the minute the Scot’s unwavering focus came into question.

“Ghost,” Soap continued as he pried apart whatever fragile shield the phantom of a man had managed to put up for himself, “that bullet needs to come out. I can’t get to it with your shirt on.”

He’d rather keep the bullet in if it meant no one would be touching him anymore. It was different without the security of his gloves, and that it was being done to him. He would have been able to shoulder any other burden until it came to bare hands snaking across his scarred skin like they could connect the parts of him that told an even worse story.

“Please, Simon. Let me help you,” Soap’s voice was lowered into a breathless plea as Ghost managed to stumble to his feet with a huff of frustration.

He didn’t need help. He was fine. He was Ghost, and he had to be untouchable to be respected. Despite this, his legs nearly buckled beneath the surprise of holding up his own weight, but he refused to fall. Not when Soap looked all too eager to catch the man as he stumbled back into a wall as far away from the Sergeant as he could get.

He had one of his hands outstretched with his fingers splayed out to keep the approaching silhouette as far away as he could.

Frantically, he began to fingerspell out a message. He couldn’t trust his voice, and he worried that if he tried then he’d just wind up spitting even more bile onto the floorboards with whatever acid was left broiling in his stomach.

L E A V E

“Ghost, I’m not going anywhere.”

N O

For emphasis, he pressed his back flush to the wall and glared down at Soap from afar.

“That bullet is coming out so that I can clean the wound. That water was fucking filthy and you know it. If it doesn’t come out then you’ll get an infection. Do you want to die like that, Ghost?” Soap spat out as he gestured pointedly to Ghost’s shoulder.

No.

Ghost didn’t want to die, yet he didn’t know how to live either.

Eventually, Soap stopped his constant pace around Ghost. They had been dancing around each other with Ghost’s outstretched hand to keep the Scot at bay. Even wounded as he was, he was still a damn threat to any man who sought to test him and thought they’d come away unscathed. The temporary ceasefire between the two of them had Ghost crumpling against the wall with a whine as he began to assess the damage for himself. He didn’t think Soap knew the whole extent of it, and up until now the drugs Ghost had been laced with had done their best at keeping him unawares of the truly unsightly nature of his appearance.

His shirt was stuck to the bullethole that shot straight into his shoulder- with no exit wound in sight- and peeling it back was a pained process as his breath whistled past clenched teeth in pain. He fought back the need to cry out as tackily drying scabs were ripped off in his effort to assess the damage for himself.

The bleeding was still going at a small trickle that plastered his entire torso a muddied mess of dirt and grime-filled blood.

All the while, Soap watched and waited. He was looking at Ghost as though he’d already won whatever battle of wills they’d just waged. He hated that Soap was right too as Ghost’s haggard breathing filled the room.

H U R T

“No shit,” Soap shot back as he began to approach again. He swooped in like vultures across flailing livestock as Ghost flinched back with a snarl.

He didn’t touch Ghost. Not yet. But he would soon, whether Ghost was ready or not that damned bullet was coming out. If he had any less sense or any more fight left in him, he might have tried fishing it out himself. He almost still wanted to.

“It’s okay, Ghost, and I’m sorry,” Soap sounded genuine in his apology as his hands gently pried Ghost from the wall just enough to swap their positions. The motions of it all left Ghost feeling queasy as he sagged in defeat against Soap’s waiting chest. His friend was hesitant to touch him as though he were keenly aware of the full-body tremors that wreaked havoc on Ghost’s psyche each time the Scot so much as shifted a hair closer.

A hand tugged lightly at the hem of Ghost’s last shirt as a warning.

“I’m going to take this off and nothing else, okay?” Soap coaxed gently.

He didn’t start till he felt the last of Ghost’s remaining breath leave his chest.

“You’re okay, Ghost,” Soap said this each time the man stiffened with a sharp inhale when the fabric pinched against his wounds or Soap’s fingertips brushed against every inch of skin he never wanted anyone else to see.

It was ugly, scarred, and marred with a menagerie of bruises and burns that told enough stories to last a lifetime and then some. They were earned unkindly, just as gentle nails had once dragged themselves across freshly laid bandages as they swore to carve their initials into his skin in flesh-colored ink. No one else would see the evidence, but he would always feel them when another’s touch came anywhere near the mauled flesh he called his own.

“Please,” Ghost finally pled as Soap paused at the bunched fabric around Ghost’s chest.

“After,” Soap said in a pained voice as the shirt finally came off with a wet squelch for whenever it had been haphazardly thrown.

Cold air washed across Ghost as he instinctively squeezed the arm Soap had preemptively thrown across Ghost’s chest, as though he expected the Lieutenant to try and flee once again now that everything and more was laid out upon the table. There would be no hidden card stashed up his sleeve, and the utter defeat of it all left Ghost’s teeth chattering in thinly veiled fear.

“I’m going to take the bullet out now,” Soap continued without missing a beat, “it’s going to hurt like a bitch. I’m sorry.”

Ghost was—he was ready for it. He had faced worse before, and he suspected that he’d face worse yet in the world. At the very least, Soap was kind to him throughout it all. The ironclad arm he had across Ghost’s chest kept the barren man hemmed close enough to cradle, but he was not cruel with it.

There was no countdown to give Ghost time to tense up and make the process go that much slower, only the sudden snap of Soap’s hand covering Ghost’s clothed mouth to smother the brutalized scream he gave when tweezers dove into the torn flesh of his shoulder.

If he’d thought that Soap wanted to take him apart beforehand, it was nothing compared to the real thing as he felt the tweezers dive through fat and sinuous muscle that had been split by the burning bullet lodged somewhere between a rock and a hard place. While his bitten-back gouged out crescent-shaped divots into the arm Soap offered him, he didn’t cry. The sounds he made were perhaps worse because of it as hoarse whines forcibly tore themselves from his chest like the final snap of the tethering thread holding him steady.

He knew he was squirming, however involuntarily from the way, Soap fought to keep Ghost pressed flush as a second skin to his chest. He was as stubborn as Ghost was unyielding, and he hated the man for it just as much as he saw the necessity of it.

“You’re doing so good,” Soap told him as a particular tug of the tweezers choked out a primal shriek from deep within Ghost’s chest. He felt like he was going to throw up again for the way Soap’s fingertips coaxed Ghost’s head to rest limply in the crook of the Scot’s neck- as though that space was any safer than the hellish fire burning a hole through his shoulder.

While it felt like it had gone on for a lifetime and then some, the bullet slid free with a sickeningly wet pop! within the tweezer’s now bloodied claws. As soon as it left his body, Soap was pressing a compress tightly against the spurting wound with enough pressure to form a dull ache. It had been a long time since he’d last seen so much of his own blood, and the revelation of his own mortality was a cathartic reminder as he felt all the tension leave Soap’s shoulders with a long sigh. He’d dropped the hand from where he was smothering Ghost’s wailing hiccups, but he didn’t let up.

“Are you still with me?” Soap asked after a long stretch of silence.

Ghost nodded weakly.

“I’m going to help you stand so we can get to the bathroom, can you keep the pressure on your shoulder?”

He nodded again, miserably at that.

Ghost didn’t remember the entirety of the trip to the bathroom, only that just as they crossed the doorway did Soap shove a trash can into Ghost’s numb fingertips just in time to catch the man from spitting up what felt like gallons from the week of skipped dinners and barely-filling rations he’d been surviving off until now. He felt clammy from the feverish tint to his cheeks and truly grimy from the river water that left caked mud drying against his lashes. The dribble of spittle-filled acid now connecting his lips to the bucket did nothing to quell his uneasy stomach as Soap’s hand rubbed gentle circles into his back.

If anything the touch only made it worse as he went for another round of outright retching.

“I’m going to move my hand away to get the first aid kit and then we’ll flush the wound with water,” Soap parroted everything he said, and Ghost didn’t care so long as the hands left him to his own horrid devices.

He was content to let the last dregs of his strength be sapped away as his head dropped miserably against the lip of the designated vomit-bin. What a fucking life he was leading indeed.

Ghost knew that Soap was moving around, and dimly he found his eyes trailing after his fellow soldier"s every step like a puppy frozen in spot. His head was still draped depressingly across the bucket, and he wasn’t particularly motivated to move from where he was rooted in the doorway, so he watched Soap busy himself around the garishly decorated bathroom with muted interest.

There was a faint ringing in his ears from the shock of it all, and it was only when Soap’s hands gently caught Ghost from where he was teetering side to side that he realized he’d been falling.

“Please don’ crack your head open after I spent all that time prying a damn bullet out of you,” Soap’s voice was laden with his thickened accent but still just playful enough to lessen the taut tension in the room.

Ghost grumbled something unintelligible at that as he signed along to the universal gesture of ‘fuck off’.

“Mature, Lt.”

Ghost snorted weakly.

The cleanup process was entirely silent, which felt strange all things considered. There were hardly ever moments that Soap could keep his commentary to himself, and the minute that Ghost felt one of Soap’s hands tangling into his hair he had checked back out of his body. He fought to just have one claw dug into consciousness as he lolled uselessly against the wall, still holding the putrid bucket in a death grip whilst his wound was painfully attended to.

“Not a medic,” Ghost slurred just to remind himself of anything but the ringing in his ears.

“Aye?” Soap replied as he patted down the tender entry wound. “I’m not a medic.”

“Oh,” he whispered breathlessly. He didn’t exactly know where he wanted to go with that thought, just that he’d had it at all.

“My mom was a field medic for a time,” Soap continued without further prodding, as though he could feel Ghost’s unease during the touch-ups to his detrimental state of being, “she taught me to put myself back together when I started gettin’ good at doin’ stupid shit.”

Ghost hummed for Soap to continue.

“I got good at it with four little siblings to help practice on when they got bruised from a tumble.”

Somehow that made sense. Ghost knew that Soap had a big family. It was outlined within Soap’s file in telltale militaristic detail, but it was different to hear Soap speak about it himself. While they’d all seen the letters he got or smuggled packages he sent out for Christmas, if the Scot didn’t want to talk about it then everyone gave a wide berth to the subject, just as they did with Ghost.

Still, Soap spoke about them with unfathomable depth of true adoration.

“Where is this?” Ghost rasped because thinking about family was out of the question.

“One of Alejandro’s safe houses.”

“More than one?” Ghost wheezed out with muffled interest.

“It was a need-to-know basis only.”

“Ass,” Ghost hissed back with as much humor as his wrecked voice could manage.

“You’re really fucking dirty,” Soap shot back without missing another beat.

Ghost was inclined to agree as he smothered his face against the fragile peace between Soap’s shoulders and neck- where nowhere else in the world could touch him but Soap, and even that felt like a double-edged sword he continued to bleed out on as Soap’s hands eased Ghost into a shaking hobble. He didn’t know where he was being led, nor did he particularly care.

It was difficult to care about anything right now with the way his half-lidded eyes lazily saw double in the world.

Soap was talking again, but Ghost wasn’t listening. He couldn’t focus with the light brush of Soap’s hands at the base of his blessedly covered neck. But it was still too close for comfort– too near to the most vulnerable parts of his being. Soap’s other guided the ordinarily stoic sniper onto the lip of a deep bathtub.

And then Soap began to experimentally tug at the waistband of Ghost’s jeans, and he—Ghost was sick.

All at once, he became aware of the way Soap was running his long nails up and down Ghost’s arm. The simultaneous push and pull of want and fear had him surging back with a snarl as he toppled back into the tub with a pained yelp of surprise.

“Ghost?” Soap queried softly. His voice was full of that same honeyed hesitance that people wore when they wanted something but didn’t dare say it aloud till they knew they’d get what they wanted.

Ghost’s teeth rattled as he tried to push himself up onto his elbows from where he was nearly upside down in the tub.

Soap was a patient man, perhaps more than Ghost’s feverish mind deserved as the man came to sit beside the tub with his arms folded across the top of it. He had an apologetic somber air about him as the Scot let his head rest in the palm of one hand.

“I should have checked to make sure you were listening. I didn’t mean to startle you,” Soap spoke gently, as though talking to the feral cats he’d begun befriending in the alleyway outside of their main base. “I was going to help you into a bath. I want to make sure you don’t have any other wounds that the dirt’s been hiding, okay?”

Ghost didn’t answer right away. He didn’t know how.

“You can leave your boxers on if that makes it any better. I’m just going to put your clothes in the dryer so that they’ll be warm for later,” Soap continued without missing a beat, as though his bartering made any difference to Ghost’s addled mind.

Abruptly, his friend paused and began to stand up again. “I left water on the stove. If you don’t want to get clean that’s…fine. I’ll be back in a few minutes and you can let me know, yeah?”

Ghost blinked slowly up at him, and that had to be answer enough until he lifted one hand and dragged it across his cheek in a flicking motion.

“I understand”

Soap made a circular motion across his chest before pointing to his lips and gesturing back out to Ghost.

“Sorry. Thank you.”

He was thankful that Soap slipped so easily back into late-night gossip held entirely through short sign language and slang. It was a comfort he’d almost forgotten when he wasn’t using it for the sheer purpose of irritating the world around him. It had once been a legitimate comfort that he spent years learning and perfecting in turn.

He began with it just to communicate with Joseph because words were hard for the boy. While others his age were joining choirs or sobbing out their woes, he was silent as a mouse. He could speak eloquently when he wanted to, but no one in the family dared encroach upon the boundaries their late father once violently trespassed across. For a while, after that, he volunteered where he could, because he liked having a purpose even when he was on administrative leave. Oftentimes it was working with kids like Joseph who saw so sharply into Ghost’s innermost psyche that a shiver chased him late into the night.

He’d never been…formally diagnosed on paper. Several had tried, but Ghost barred them every step of the way. He wouldn’t let it get in the way of returning to the field, and even now, despite Price’s constant reassurances, he refused to acknowledge it. He didn’t want there to be something wrong with him- worse than what had already been forcibly ripped from his flesh. He didn’t understand what penance he still had to pay, and what debts were fast approaching.

Despite everything.

Despite every tremor that ran through his fingertips like electricity telling him to run- to flee- to fight- Ghost unbuckled the belt around his jeans. It took some shimmying to get them fully off from where the uncomfortable texture had begun drying against his legs like a stubborn burr. His efforts to kick off his shoes and a knotted pant leg were beyond graceless, but hardly anything about Ghost in this moment was particularly elegant. If you put the man behind a rifle he could decimate the world without breaking a sweat, but sans a good bullet, he was left off-kilter. Like a declawed cat, he stumbled about on unsteady legs, as though uncertain as to what to do with himself without the unholy promise of lethality to keep the world at bay.

If Soap was surprised to see Ghost half-naked and draped across the inside then he didn’t make it known, or at least Ghost wasn"t watching him. Soap was too close to the mirror for Ghost to feel safe enough to make eye contact. So he didn’t, and instead let his eyes drift closed from where he was curled on his uninjured side. Like this, he wasn’t able to keep his back guarded against Soap, but he didn’t dare try to roll over and risk popping open the butterfly stitches plastered onto his skin.

“I’m going to turn on the water, do you want to scooch up a bit?”

Ghost obeyed blindly as he shifted enough so that his neck kissed the cold lip of the tub, and he could safely look up at Soap’s focused expression. He wasn’t looking at Ghost now, so the sniper felt safe enough to stare. Above him, Soap was filtering through several sachets and shampoos he was deciphering through whatever seemed to smell the best. He mouthed out the general sound of the labels even though he couldn’t read its exact description. Eventually, the Scot settled on a nutty blend of vanilla-scented perfumes to use as he put away whatever other soaps had been left out in the house. He dwelled on that thought longer than necessary for whatever queer reason. Usually, Soap seemed to favor a generic brand of cologne that Ghost was beginning to suspect he’d been ordering online all these years. There wasn’t a smell quite like it at any store Ghost checked- not that he made a habit of checking whenever they had leave. A shower of bath salts was spilled out into the hot water currently rising around Ghost’s thighs. If Soap wanted help, he didn’t say it.

However, he did hum.

Quietly at first, but without a grumble from the placid phantom beneath him, Soap seemed to grow laxer as the bathroom filled itself with the low hum of a song he’d heard on the radio days before.

It was peaceful in its own way.

“Oh, fuck, forgot the stopper,” Soap swore under his breath as he leaned partially across Ghost to properly latch the bath’s stopper from wasting any further water.

And it was peaceful.

Almost.

Soap’s hand landed on Ghost’s thigh, right beside a menagerie of thinned-out dots intermingled with arcing stretch marks.

“Ghost, were you drugged?” Soap’s voice was mortified, but his touch grew firmer at that. It hurt.

And Ghost bit Soap…hard.

. . .

Soap never wanted to hear the ugly sob that tore from his friend’s chest again.

. . .

There were hands on his cheeks like an angel"s wings kicking up wind through his curly hair, except he knew that there were no cooing doves to greet him a second longer. Only bony fingertips raked themselves across his chest with fishing wire drawn in between each rib to form a netting that caught his rabbit-fast heart from beating straight out of his chest. They trailed across his lips in a ghost of an icy kiss that smeared blood from cheek to cheek with peppered love bites and bruises from glassy-eyed women.

Serpent scales dragged across his thighs and he couldn’t move.

He wanted to move.

Why couldn’t he move?

There was a woman with her hands on his shoulders and a hollow laugh echoing on either side of his ears. A thin trail of white had smeared itself beneath her nose, and he could smell alcohol heavy on her breath because She. Never. Went. Away.

None of them did.

They grabbed at his flesh with ice-cold hands, and Simon could do nothing but lie there. He never wanted to hurt anyone or do to them what he was forced to swallow in spite of it all. It became a branding burnt like hot iron into the flesh of his stomach, just as the scars around his lips told anyone who ever thought to love him that there was something monstrous within him- right down to the bone.

“Will you beg, beautiful?” a man whispered into his right ear.

“Will you cry?” a woman coaxed to his left.

“Will you bend?” Another asked from beside his shaking leg.

“Will you break?” hoarsely asked the voice whose hands raked red ribbons down his arms.

No.

Ghost hadn’t been broken. That was why they pressured him so heavily. That was why he’d been strung up to the sun and asked if the Gods would still take pity on his sullied flesh.

“Simon,” a voice begged him.

He couldn’t answer. Simon was a dead man’s name whose skin had been marred by women and men alike.

“Ghost!”

Ghost’s eyes opened with a sharp inhale that turned into ugly gasping as he peeled his balaclava up enough so that he could spit out mouthfuls of acidic water that burnt the back of his throat. He bent over the lid of the bathtub and spat out the remnants of watery bile from the last dregs of what remained in his stomach.

He felt sick.

Several feet away from Ghost and his evidence of disharmony sat a disheveled Soap. The man didn’t look afraid of Ghost, but there was fear in his eyes for Ghost. The distinction was minor phrasing, but it meant all the difference as the sniper hung his head in defeat.

Weakly, he lifted a hand to spell out.

L E A V E

And Soap left.

Ghost worried that the man had carved something heavy from his chest, because there was a hollowness in the silence that Soap left in its wake. The same kind of silence haunted Ghost’s every step in the world as he sank down into the water and realized with startling clarity that his mask was floating uselessly between his legs. He had torn it off when he woke up…all the way off. He tossed it out of the bath weakly, and sat.

He didn’t know what else he could do.

Black makeup streamed down his face from tear tracks that tore canyons through every false sense of grandeur and fear he’d built from the ground up.

His breath caught on a hiccup, but other than that his tears were silent. Ghost had never been taught to cry, not really. What he had been taught, however, was how to cry quietly.

His father tolerated nothing less, and it served him throughout the rest of his life. He was able to mold a mask thick enough to fool hell itself twice over.

A light knocking from the doorway had Ghost lifting a hand to offer a less-than-approachable gesture of understanding.

Soap had never before been deterred by any of Ghost’s grandstanding, and the stubborn Scot didn’t seem keen on starting today as he offered the sulking figure an unintelligible string of swears in return. He made a point to avoid Ghost’s mess on the floor as he came to crouch beside the lip of the tub that he’d staked his claim over since they began this whole mess.

While Ghost couldn’t bear to lift his head and be seen in such a state, Soap didn’t seem to care. At the very least, he didn’t tolerate it as a cold water bottle was wedged into Ghost’s clenched fist with no small amount of herculean strength to get the titan to so much as budge.

But move he did as Soap’s sharp eyes caught Ghost’s hollowed stare.

“You had a panic attack, and considering how sick you’ve been I think you’re dehydrated. Drink.”

It was not a question, but rather a statement of fact. That, and he was damn certain that Soap was ready to force two more bottled things of water down Ghost’s throat if he didn’t do it himself. It was at least a small concession compared to every other thing Soap could have taken from the man in such a state.

True to Soap’s assessment, Ghost went through three more cold bottles of water before he was anywhere close to feeling clear-headed again. Even at that point he was still weakly sipping the last bottle that had been pressed into his hands like liquid gold.

When all was said and done, it was Soap’s turn to watch Ghost with uncomfortable clarity.

“I bit you,” Ghost finally settled on as he looked out at the bandage wrapped snug against Soap’s arm. If he focused hard enough he was certain that he could pick out bits of flesh between his teeth. He could at least put a name to the blood speckled across his lips now.

“I’m not mad at you.”

Ghost didn’t know how to process that yet as they lapsed back into a period of suffocating stillness in the steadily cooling bath.

“Did you…do anything?” Ghost couldn’t help but whisper. The quiet with Soap was so much different than the silence he felt when suffocated on his own.

Soap’s face pinched into a confused frown before an outright scowl of disgust as he reeled back.

“No, never,” he spat out with those first few bits of venom dripping from his ordinarily silver tongue. Almost as soon as the words had left his lips did Soap have a sudden fierceness to his expression, as though a puzzle had suddenly been worked through. “Ghost, did you think that I was going to touch you when you were like that?”

“You were already touching me,” Ghost replied in a hoarse voice, “I thought–”

“You thought I was going to go further,” Soap finished solemnly.

Ghost looked at him and back down at his own scarred hands in shame.

The downright defeated look Ghost gave Soap spoke volumes for the way he watched his friend’s face twist into something utterly heartbreaking.

“I should have realized that you were having a panic attack, Ghost. The signs were there I just—I’m sorry,” Soap finally settled on, as though whatever revelation they had was too broad a topic to encroach upon at this very second. It was clear that Soap wanted to pry, to grab, to hold, to kill. The look was familiar enough to Ghost that he could spot the twinge of bloodlust glittering in some dark space of Soap"s innermost thoughts.

Ghost leaned back against the side of the tub, but didn’t dare lift his head. He couldn’t stand the thought of catching his reflection staring back at him. The accusatory face of a dead man. So he kept his head buried between the knees he’d drawn up to his chest as a mimicry of the vest he longed to touch again.

“Do you want to get out of the bath? I…I can find you some clothes?” Soap suggested the moment he seemed to catch onto Ghost sinking back into whatever cesspool his mind receded back into when all else was lost.

“What were you going to do to me?” Ghost asked instead. The question was twisting his empty stomach into knots as he thought about all the things that could have happened- all the details that grew too foggy too fast to be normal.

“I was going to wash your hair,” Soap said from where he was beginning to stand.

“And?”

The question had Soap cautiously sitting back on the towel he’d lain out for himself.

“And maybe get rid of the blood on your face, but nothing else. You aren’t with me, Simon. Your head’s somewhere I can’t reach, and I’m not going to take advantage of you like that,” Soap reaffirmed with enough stubborn iron-clad willpower that Ghost wanted to believe him.

“And,” Ghost paused to steady his breathing, “if I was in the right headspace?”

“No.”

That caught the both of them off guard as Soap immediately began to backpedal- or at least to give further explanation to his bluntness.

“You don’t trust me. I don’t want you to wake up next to me and wonder all the ways that you’d have to kill me if given the chance. So, no, Ghost. I would not take you under false pretenses. I want—I want you to at least try and trust me before I have my dick in your mouth.”

The sudden vulgarness of Soap’s tone caught Ghost off guard as he watched his friend run an anxious hand through his hair.

“I’ve been too many shitty people to people to lower myself, and while I’d so fucking gladly have you…I won’t do a thing until you want me too,” Soap finished firmly.

He hated that Soap was right in some ways. Ghost hardly knew how to trust Price every other day. It was a constant warring battle between the two of them to bring Simon back from the unmarked grave Ghost kept burying him beneath. Price was the closest he came to trust in the workplace. Even closer to friendship, because Ghost learned early enough that trust and camaraderie were concepts he could easily cut right down the middle.

He could dance around personal details with expertise carved from his self-imposed visage of intimidation. Few seemed to mind the quiet force of nature he came to be, and even fewer persisted with the stubborn urge to know Ghost.

Except for Soap.

He wanted Soap in ways that made his breath hitch at the thought of running teeth along bare skin he’d only ever felt on the field and in dreams he didn’t dare consider in the waking hours of the day. At the same time, Ghost felt that he didn’t truly know how to want. To desire. To lust.

The unfathomably stubborn Scot with a forked tongue had stood before Ghost since day one and declared unapologetically the truths that he believed, and seldom ever hesitated to remind Ghost of this fact. They waged wars over the comms about differences in ideals just as he entertained Ghost’s dry humor. Had he known the jokes were the only olive branch that the man had left to give?

Fuck, probably. Nothing got past the bastard.

Despite this. Despite everything else that Ghost had done and all the beautiful things he’d buried just to remind Soap of what he should hate, the man remained undaunted.

“I want…I want to trust you,” Ghost decided in a strained voice.

“Not all at once, Ghost…just give me a place to start, please,” Soap whispered as he leaned his head against the side of the bath in order to catch Ghost’s blue eyes from where they were darting across the peppered scars of his mottled hands.

“Can,” Ghost felt his breath catch in his chest before he could even get the words out, “can you help me with my hair, like before?”

Soap had enough kindness to look startled at the question rather than masking whatever surprise he felt for all the other things that Ghost had laid bare before the man tonight.

“Yeah, I can do that for you. I’m just going to drain the water a bit and fill it back up with some more hot water.”

Ghost gave a small nod. The mere thought of Soap’s hands in his hair had his throat tightening in alarm already. He had to swallow the pit caught in his throat with a wheeze just to feel whole again. Blessedly, Soap didn’t touch him without warning.

“I’m going to touch your hair.”

“Just my hair,” Ghost reaffirmed as though it were a line in the sand that he dared the other to read across. To be given a reason to shatter whatever fragile trust he was putting in him.

But Soap was a kinder man than most as his nails raked across Ghost’s head as he tangled his fingers into the damp curls that plastered themselves against Ghost’s face from the balaclava’s constant strain.

“Dip your head for me, okay?” Soap coaxed once the tub had been filled once again.

It had been a long time since Ghost truly found himself doing…this. Something bordering on relaxing as water rushed to greet him from the way Soap guided Ghost’s head beneath the water for mere seconds before he brought him back to the light. Ghost had been baptized before in blood and soil- tested against raging water that sloshed within his lungs late into the night- but never before had he been held in the water with the same tenderness that Soap offered him.

And he took it no further.

They went through the cycle of Soap dragging his nails through Ghost’s tangled hair till it had thickened into a lather. Rinse and repeat twice more till Soap seemed at least somewhat content with the state of Ghost’s admittedly unkempt hair.

“You’re very pretty,” Soap muttered absently as he took a comb to a particular rats’ nest that had knotted itself at the back of his head.

“I hate being pretty,” Ghost mumbled in turn. He’d closed his eyes long before to avoid the way that Soap looked down at him every so often.

Soap hummed in encouragement for Ghost to continue, though quickly rounded it into an apology after he accidentally tugged at Ghost’s hair hard enough to have the both of them wincing back.

“I have my mother’s face,” Ghost couldn’t place why he said it. He could recall a conversation years old with a dead psychiatrist telling her as much. He couldn’t decide if he liked the way men at bars looked at his face- they told him he looked like a doll. Something fragile to hold between their hands and treasure, but he didn’t quite get it. A porcelain doll would shatter if you squeezed tight enough, and too many men with their calloused hands had left cracks riddled across his body like webbing.

“Is that such a bad thing?”

Bad enough that he hadn’t seen himself in a mirror in over four years. He’d broken the last one and only ever showered with the lights off. He couldn’t stomach looking at his face and finally seeing where his mother’s wrinkles outlined all the abuse she’d endured. Her eyes were just as tired as his, only he was younger when he’d earned them. He didn’t want to face himself and see a husk standing in a library and waiting for a man who sucked face with whores and laughed at their demise. Or worse- he didn’t want to give himself the chance at becoming that kind of a man.

A part of his mother always feared that he would, even if she wouldn’t dare say it to his face. He heard her whisper…he knew.

“Please don’t tell them,” Ghost settled on in lieu of a true answer, “I’m not ready yet.”

“I won’t,” Soap replied as he dunked Ghost’s head a final time. “You’ve got my word.”

“You’re not a liar, MacTavish,” he replied quietly. It was more to himself than the man above him, but still, he caught Soap’s smile in the brief moment that Ghost’s eyes fluttered open.

“Scot’s promise,” Soap replied cheekily.

“Scout’s promise?” he corrected with a confused snort.

“Nah, Scot’s word is the law.”

When Soap’s thumb swept across Ghost’s forehead, he felt himself stiffen instinctually, and almost immediately the touch was gone as Soap dove back into Ghost’s hair to continue massaging his scalp into a dizzying sense of euphoria.

“Did you want to touch my face?” Ghost whispered into the peaceful quiet between them.

“Kind of. You’ve got paint on your eyes and a bit of blood on your cheek. Would you let me get it off?” Soap cautioned after a brief pause to consider exactly how he wanted to explain to the man that he had been mapping out the sparse mottling of freckles that plastered themselves around the coarser skin that made up his port-wine stain. It was speckled across his crooked nose and swept across his right eye to dip low on his cheekbones.

When he was younger, his mother sought treatment for him to lessen the very thing that his father used against her. She thought that his worth as a pretty little thing would be defined only by the marring of his face. He didn’t mind it as much as she did, but then again, he wore a mask for more than one reason.

“Yes, you can touch my face,” Ghost settled on as he took in a deep breath to steel himself for the cautionary brush of Soap’s knuckles across his cheeks.

The man took it slow as he paused at each faded freckle and acne scar that peppered Ghost’s textured face. He chuckled lightly at the unshaved peak fuzz that scratched at the back of his friend’s hands when he began tracing along the Brit’s jawline experimentally. It was intimate and just shy of overwhelming as the slightest shift in pressure sent Ghost’s whole body shuddering in barely contained fear.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Soap reminded him like a mantra when Ghost’s shaking hand shot out of the water to grab his wrist when Soap accidentally strayed too close to his neck.

He only moved again when Ghost reluctantly dropped his hand in muted submission. He had to believe that Soap would be kind to him or else they’d get nowhere with…whatever this was.

Soap began to hum again as he methodically wiped away years of caked paint, and all the vile touches that stained themselves against Ghost’s face in flesh-colored ink. Some he didn’t realize were even still there, but not any longer. Soap washed them down the drain without even knowing they existed in the first place. Other touches were stubborn enough to remain despite it all, and he knew they wouldn’t come out the next time- if there was a next time.

Some wounds didn’t heal.

They scarred…but scars faded at the very least. He had to count on that much.

“A birthmark?’ Soap asked eventually as his nail glanced across the divide between reddened skin and pink flesh.

“Is it that ugly?” Ghost shot back defensively.

“Nope,” Soap popped the ‘p’ without an ounce of regret, nor did he rise the bait of Ghost’s challenge. “I think you look…”

Pretty.

“Kind.”

When was the last time anyone had ever thought him to be kind?

The rest of the experience was silent save for Soap humming along to pop songs that Alejandro blasted on the radio. Occasionally he’d pepper in a lyric he’d memorized along the way, but it was a sparse collection.

He only left Ghost alone very briefly to grab a change of clothes, and to throw a towel across the mirror, an act that did not go unnoticed as the man’s eyes widened at the welcoming sight of blessed privacy from his own reflection. He had faced many things today, but his own shadow was not one that he felt brave enough facing tonight.

“I brought some sweats, but your shirt and everything else is still in the dryer. I’d rather you not sleep in wet boxers so…comando?” Soap began as he tossed a pair of black sweats on the countertop.

He was gentle when he led Ghost from the bath, already mindful of the wounds that littered the Lieutenant"s body as he carefully dressed them. He was meticulously putting Ghost back together with pieces he’d collected over the years. Some didn’t fit right, as though the hole they’d left behind had been rebuilt again and again in an effort to find a way to move on. It didn’t make him feel whole, but the effort alone was something he’d never known.

Ghost had always had to be the rock. He was a force of nature in his own right, and no man alive could deny him this right. Anyone who’d dared in the past was dead for a fucking reason. It was hard because of that to be held. He didn’t know what to do with himself, or how to keep still when his instinct was to drift away from the slightest inkling of an embrace. Soap didn’t hold him like he was fragile, but still, he touched him as though he were far more precious than his most jagged of edges.

It was terrifying.

He craved more of it as he arched his head back into Soap’s waiting touch with a brush that coaxed out any remaining tangles from his freshly washed hair. He felt clean. When was the last time that he truly felt clean? Fuck, he could cry at the utter relief he felt for truly barren skin.

“I’ll help you to the bed, okay?”

And he did. He did just that and nothing more as he eased Ghost onto the quilted covers. The texture was coarse enough that he could run his palms across the surface of the bed and feel the pinpricks of handwoven embroidery cascading across his calloused hands. He’d wanted to get into embroidery at one point or another. He’d been good with his hands as a boy fresh in the army, and no matter the insistent teasing, he valued being able to rebuild his uniform no matter the damage done. It was a reminder of how he stitched himself back together when no one else could. A needle and thread were his binding elements as a boy to knit back the broken shards the world beat out of him.

He’d forgotten the intricacies of sewing not long after...everything. His hands were too shaky to thread a needle again, and he hadn’t tried since.

“I’ll be right back, Ghost. I’m just going to clean up the bathroom and grab some ibuprofen from the first aid kit.”

So he waited on the cusp of whatever Soap was offering him and all the fears that kept Ghost from taking the plunge. The only thing that kept him from teetering back into the void that called to him longingly was the promise that Soap didn’t want absolutes. He only wanted a chance. Ghost hardly ever dealt in second chances, or in this case a poorly executed first chance. He knew they were merely opportunities for betrayal, but he wanted…he wanted many things.

Soap was one of those many beautiful things he longed to have in his life.

As though the devil himself had heard his name whispered on a dead man’s tongue, Soap reappeared in the doorway. He was squinting down suspiciously at the expiration date on the bottle of pain relievers before his head snapped up to give Ghost a smile that’d melt glaciers and then some.

“I’m like…pretty sure these are still good,” the man admitted sheepishly. His ears always burnt a flushed red when he was nervous, and this time was no different as he offered Ghost three tablets and a chipped glass of water to down them in one go.

“We’ll see if I wake up from this then,” Ghost shot back with a chuckle.

“I’ll pray for you,” Soap joked as he sat on the opposite side of the bed. He made an obvious point of giving Ghost enough space to feel safe with the invisible wall now between them.

“Didn’t strike you for the praying type,” Ghost admitted as he watched Soap rebuild the walls Ghost had been the one to lay out.

“My mom was.”

“But you aren’t?” he couldn’t help but pry. A man after his own heart who wore half-truths and carefully worded promises like a weapon.

“I am when it suits me, and it rarely does in this line of work.” Soap sounded almost guilty when he said it, as though the truth were the final nails on whatever crucifix he’d bound himself to.

He wanted to tell him that he understood- that he could listen to whatever burdens Soap bore just as his friend had given him the same shoulder. He didn’t get the chance as Soap set the last brick between them in place.

“I’ll go ahead and take the couch. Price knows where we are, and Alejandro will come to pick us up when the heat dies down,” Soap was standing now and hanging between the bed and the door, as though daring Ghost to try. He saw the ledge the brit stood upon and dared him to come closer, as though he could catch the man when he inevitably fell to one side or the other.

Godamnit.

He hated him, truly he did.

Shaking, Ghost lifted both hands and gestured downwards to sign the most simplistic form of begging he’d ever willingly given.

“Stay?”

Soap regarded him carefully, and Ghost knew that he was read like an open book now. With no mask to hide behind his face was marred by whatever fleeting emotion passed through his head and heart in tandem. He could hide nothing like this, and it was terrifying. He slept soundly with his mask for this very reason, and Soap just watched all the while.

He was deciding if it was worth it.

The olive branch held across the ravine that divided their lives- the opening he’d been asked to give. A promise to try.

“Can I hold you?” was a hushed challenge to test the newfound boundaries between them as Soap’s hand hovered near the door.

He wanted Soap to promise that he wouldn’t break what was left of Simon- of the dead boy he mourned in the mirror who wanted nothing more than to take pictures of the birds on warm spring days. He begged for something physical that would remind him that Soap would not hurt him as others had done before. He nearly drew up every careful wall he’d been lowering at the question because it felt like too much. Just shy of the instinct he had to flee at the softest inclination of an embrace.

But he had to try.

He might fail, but to fail and fall back to earth would at least remind Ghost that he’d had something worth fighting for at all.

P L E A S E

He spelled it out once, twice, and the third time with a panicked wheeze at the worry that Soap didn’t understand- or wouldn’t accept this answer as good enough. He wanted to plead with the man and tell him every sweet poem he never got to give him back when nightmares and dreams blurred together. He knew that they were stashed somewhere the sun would never find them, but he couldn’t reach for them in this hideaway any better than he could give voice to his increasing panic.

“Hey,” Soap began as he interlocked his fingers with Ghost’s to keep the man from breaking down on his next insistent sign, “I believe you.”

Ghost dropped his head against his chest with a shuddering exhale. The position was painful given his bandaged shoulder, and perhaps a bit comical considering the differences in their build. It didn’t matter, because it had been enough for Soap.

That was more than enough for Simon.

He didn’t know how to lay with someone. He’d never stayed long enough with a man to know how to properly hold one another, and any experiences he’d had since then were bruising at best and bloody at their worst. He didn’t want to tear at Soap’s chest and curl himself in the hollowed chest that lay within. He wanted to make a home in the nestled nook where his neck met his shoulders. There, he would find peace. He knew that much to be true from books his sister-in-law gifted him every Christmas with a wink of encouragement. They were awful, but he loved them.

The copies he’d kept were damaged and held together with duct tape and a bastardized plea to the bloodied remnants of Gods he’d lain waste to in his exploits, but they were his to hold.

He was Soap’s to hold for this night alone, and any other night that the man would have him so long as the touch was like this…gentle.

“Come closer,” Soap said once he’d buried them beneath the covers.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Ghost replied sheepishly.

“I promise my ass is bonier than yours, and then there’s nothing you can do that I wouldn’t ask for, or that I would have probably deserved,” he shot back with the same smile he wore when he knew he’d won before the argument even began. Shit. Eating. Grin.

What an ass.

Still, he let Soap’s arms encircle his bare chest to bring him flush against the other’s beating heart.

“Is that your heartbeat?” Soap began after a while. His hand was spread across Ghost’s bare chest with his fingers splayed upon faded stretch marks that arced beneath his armpit.

Ghost shivered at the question before nodding. He’d almost hoped that Soap wouldn’t catch onto the way his heart was threatening to beat straight from his chest. The constant putter patter of his racing thoughts had his body unwillingly curled right around that bundle of conflict.

He was reminded wholly of a conversation they shared over the comms late one night- on a mission that seemed to be going wrong every step of the way. From the rain battering down on Ghost’s back to the blood in the air.

“A man after my own heart,” Ghost had teased with a silent chuckle that the mics never quite caught.

“You have a heart?” Soap replied in earnest surprise.

“A cold one.”

“Are you afraid?” Soap pried Ghost from the memory with the innocuous question. He’d begun running his nails lightly across the space between scars.

He almost lied. It would have been easy to do, and even if Soap caught onto the deception it would mean that he’d know where Ghost’s discomfort began and ended.

Instead, Ghost lifted an impossibly shaky hand to smother his calloused palm across the back of Soap’s with a trembling squeeze.

“Always.”

They curled themselves into question marks as they mapped out individual constellations across each other"s bodies. From tightly woven scars to dark freckles. The both of them knew that these were star systems none before had ever studied.

He begged to know the line between too far and not nearly close enough as a featherlight kiss pressed itself into the back of his neck, and nothing more afterward. Only the slight shifting of fabric as Soap settled himself fully into the bed with Ghost cradled in his arms like he might protect him from whatever haunted his nipped heels.

Teach me to love, Ghost begged into the silence as Soap squeezed the soft fat around his stomach.

He wanted desperately a tutorial on how to etch the definition of adoration into his waking moments as he thought of all the perfect ways to tell Soap that he trusted him as best as he knew how. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t even good, but it was his to have.

“You’re thinking too loud, Simon.”

“Cunt.”

“You love it,” Soap sleepily swore against Simon’s neck like the damning final sermon of an Angel.

He wanted to.