Chapter Text
The water running down the drain was brown and discolored. Soap wasn’t really surprised considering that it was the first shower he’d taken in weeks, and he’d been up to his hips in muck and muddy water in those weeks. Most of his shower was spent just standing there, letting hot water run down his aching muscles. He probably lost half his body weight in grime as it all ran off of him, and maybe another quarter from lower than normal caloric intake after they ran out of food. He ate better than Ghost at least. Ghost always made sure that he ate first whenever they came into possession of food and gave him the bigger portion. There wasn’t much he could do about the grime he was covered in without running water, but at least his belly wasn’t always completely empty.
Once he was sure he’d used the building’s entire hot water supply after what was probably an hour of standing in the shower, Soap finally got out, dried himself off, and put on some clean clothes that didn’t make him smell like a camel. Ghost was passed out on the bed. He’d managed to stay awake long enough to take his own shower, but had been too exhausted to duplicate the marathon shower that Soap had just had and only took the minimum amount of time that he needed to get clean. It hadn’t been enough to make sure Soap was eating more. He’d also been the first to volunteer for guard duty so that Soap could get some sleep, and would let him sleep for an extra hour or three instead of switching duty at the agreed upon time at the cost of getting any sleep too.
He’d flopped onto the bed shirtless and mumbled, “Your turn,” and had apparently passed out immediately after, because he was in the same exact position that he’d fallen onto the mattress in.
It was rare that Ghost felt comfortable enough with his mask off, so Soap took a moment to admire his features, from the way his damp hair dried in weird, curly positions against the pillow to the massive black eye and bruising on the left side of his face. Three weeks worth of beard growth was left on his face. He’d clearly been too tired to shave, despite complaining about how weird it felt under the mask. Soap wasn’t really complaining much. He thought Ghost looked hot when he was a little scruffy.
There was more bruising on the rest of his body in various stages of healing, particularly along the side of his ribs from a nasty slip down the side of a steep, rocky hill. It didn’t look like he broke any ribs this time at least, though the bruising looked nasty. Soap was sure that he was covered in bruises too. His shin he’d noticed in the shower was black and blue from a similar slip down the same hill. Ghost had bloody scabs all over the side of his right arm from when he caught him and let his arm painfully drag across the rocks as he tried to slow Soap’s fall.
He remembered the look on Ghost’s face, like he wanted to scream but was holding it in to avoid giving away their position, and then he realized how limp Ghost’s arm had gone as he held on tightly to his wrist to avoid falling. He could not move it, and Soap had to quickly pull himself back up himself. Ghost had to climb the rest of the hill one-handed with his shoulder dislocated, and then when they got to safety, Soap tried to figure out how to pop it back in its socket himself. Unfortunately, unlike his cousin Callum, he was not a battlefield medic and Ghost’s shoulder had swelled up, adding to the resistance. He was aware that he was basically torturing Ghost before he finally begged him to stop, and his arm was left hanging limp in a makeshift sling until they reunited with the team at exfil and Nik was able to reset it for him.
Ghost’s shoulder was all bruised up. It had swollen so badly that for a moment they’d wondered if maybe it wasn’t dislocated and was actually broken. Wouldn’t have been the first time. He’d once watched Ghost state, “Huh, I dislocated my finger,” then try to reset it and casually say, “Never mind, I broke it,” and then act like it didn’t hurt, even though he winced every time the gun recoil smashed into it. He never reported the injury, and his left pinky finger healed stiff and slightly crooked as a result.
They’d both been checked out by a proper medic before getting discharged to sleep off their harrowing mission, and Ghost was told not to use his arm so much until it recovered from being dislocated. He then ignored the orders because he was a stubborn jackass, which Soap was sure to cause problems years down the line when all his improperly healed injuries caught up to him.
Soap looked at the bruised part of Ghost’s face, careful not to disturb his sleep. The swelling had gone down at least. Ghost had taken the butt of a rifle to the face, and he hadn’t been very happy about it either, as the guy who hit him found out when he realized he hadn’t successfully knocked him out like he hoped. Like his shoulder, it must have hurt like a bitch, though Ghost didn’t complain, even though Soap could see him periodically touching it and shivering in pain. He’d spent the ride back sitting on the floor of the helicopter’s cargo space with his head in Soap’s lap, Soap holding a lunchbox ice pack wrapped in a towel to his swollen face as he nodded off, Nik and Price giving them a few knowing glances as the contents of Nik’s lunch pail got warm. Ghost had only a collective six hours of broken up sleep spread across the last 48 hours, while he’d made sure Soap had at least twice that.
He’d reached the maximum level of exhaustion he could suffer before nothing short of a grizzly bear attack could wake him again. Last time they’d come back after a mission like this, Price had sent a corporal to Ghost’s tent with instructions to wake him for dinner, and the corporal had run back screaming that Ghost was dead. He obviously wasn’t dead, but no one could wake him, and he ended up sleeping almost two days straight and couldn’t be awoken in that time. He’d managed to sleep through Gaz dropping a cast iron skillet onto rocks, the routine testing of the camp’s emergency alert sirens, and the defective crate of explosives that had detonated themselves in the back of an unoccupied vehicle.
Soap knew Ghost would probably be asleep for a while, so he effectively had the room to himself, but first, he had to call his parents. Ma MacTavish frequently worried about her youngest child, and always feared the worst. Anytime she found out about a violent conflict somewhere, she’d leave him messages on a phone that he often didn’t even have with him, panicking that every car that was reported blown up in the Middle East or every British embassy that was invaded might have had him inside. He wanted to tell his mother that if she heard about it on the news, he probably wasn’t there, but his operations had to remain clandestine to everyone, including his family, unless the unlikely event the Army decided to make them public knowledge. That probably wouldn’t help, anyway. If the civil unrest she heard about on the evening news was scary, what he was actually doing was three times more terrifying, especially to an overbearing mother of four who didn’t even want him to join the military to begin with.
He heard his mother’s voice tentatively ask “Hello?” She wouldn’t have recognized this number. Technically he shouldn’t be using one of his burner phones, but the phone in the room didn’t appear to be working properly. He’d have to decommission this one immediately after as a safety precaution so his mother couldn’t try to call him back on it in the middle of combat.
The second he said, “Hello, Ma,” she immediately started screeching in his ear. He had to hold the phone a distance away from his face to avoid hurting his ears.
“Where are ya? Did someone hurt ye? Were ye shot? Did ye die?”
“Ma, how would ah be talking to ye if ah’m dead?” Soap asked.
“They can bring people back from the dead now, ah’ve seen the technology on the news!”
Then why was she always worried about his life when she thought the British government was secretly harboring magic resurrection technology, and where could he find it? He had several pets, friends, and relatives he’d love to see again for just one day.
“Ah saw on the news, there was an airport, and a lot of people died…please tell me ye weren’t at that airport?”
“Ah wasn’t there, Ma. Promise.” He was actually someplace worse, but he wasn’t about to tell his mother that. She still didn’t know about the gunshot to the arm in Las Almas, and she was never going to find out, because she’d probably wrap him in a bubble the second she knew.
He heard his father in the background, telling his mother to stop worrying and just trust that their son knew what he was doing and would be okay. She shouted something back at him about not encouraging him, and then it got louder when presumably she took her hand off the phone mouthpiece.
“Listen Ma, my battery is aboot to die and ah don’t have a charger, so we have to make this conversation quick.”
“That’s fine, John. When are ye coming home?” she asked. “The family misses ye. Yer sisters haven’t seen ye in so long, and ye have a nephew that ya never met yet.”
“That’s what ah wanted to talk to ye aboot, Ma. Ah might have some time off coming up and…”
He pulled the phone away from his ear when she shrieked again, this time with joy. He envied Ghost and his ability to go into a four year coma from whence he could never wake until his hibernation was complete and he was ready to emerge from his chrysalis of blankets right about now.
“Tell me when? Ah’ll invite the whole family! We’ll have a get together and…” He could hear his father telling her that Soap probably would prefer just to see the immediate family and not get overwhelmed the second he got home. “Nonsense, John will be fine. Won’t ya?”
He was already overwhelmed, and so far his mother was the only one he’d had a chance to speak to. “…that sounds lovely, Ma.”
“Oh, and there’s something else,” she said. “Ah know ya’ve been single fer a while…” Oh no. “So ah’ve been looking, and…”
“Ma, ah’m sure she’s a really nice girl and all, but ah’m not interested in an arranged marriage,” Soap said.
“Ah dinnae say ye had to marry the girl! Ah just think ye should talk to her, and…”
“The marriage was implied, Ma,” Soap sighed.
Leave it to Ma MacTavish to turn her son’s visit into an attempt to set him up with some nice Catholic girl. She was probably hoping he’d fall so hopelessly in love that he’d decide to leave the military for her, get married, and pump out babies. He didn’t know why she was still trying it after his sister’s divorce from the husband she’d set her up with that literally everyone hated now. Ma said that in her defense, her job was only to set them up, once they got to the altar, they were on their own.
“Ah just don’t want ye to be lonely,” she said. “Ye and Moira are my only two babies that haven’t gotten married yet, and ah often worry aboot ya.”
“Two out of four aren’t bad, Ma,” Soap said.
“Just meet the girl. If ye don’t want a relationship after that, then ye can…”
Soap knew his mother wasn’t going to drop this. She’d been trying to find him a bride for years now in hopes that it would convince him to come home and leave his dangerous career. She’d never wanted him to join the army. She wanted him to stay home, take over the family store, and live a boring life free of any excitement, a perfectly milquetoast existence the likes of which Radiohead sang about in No Surprises. She probably also wanted grandkids, but she already had seven between two of his sisters, so she could wait to get them from him. Besides, he’d tried a relationship with a girl that she’d picked out for him once and it had left him completely brokenhearted, and now she was the thing that nobody in the MacTavish household was allowed to bring up. If Ghost found out what his mother was trying to do, he would likely…
Soap looked at Ghost, hard asleep beside him. His fingers on one hand clenched and unclenched as he seemed to be dreaming, the only way that Soap could tell that he was even still alive in his sleep coma and not passed on into the ether. He ran a hand through Ghost’s hair, still slightly damp from his shower and down his face, tracing the outer edges of his bruising delicately. He couldn’t even imagine just humoring his mother by pretending to show interest in a girl, knowing that Ghost was waiting for him at home. Even just talking to her already knowing he wasn’t interested felt like a form of cheating.
He interrupted her spiel, “Ma, ah already met someone.”
This time he preemptively held the phone away from his ear before she started screeching, and the only other thing he could hear was his father saying, “Keep it down, woman!” and the sound of a baby crying, probably his baby nephew. His parents were probably babysitting while his sister and her husband were at work.
“Well then that settles it. Ye need to bring her over immediately! Text me when yer available, and ah’ll start planning!”
“Uh, Ma…” he tried to interrupt.
“How long have ye been seeing her?”
Well it was time. He had to bite the bullet and tell her. He had not been looking forward to this, but he knew it had to happen. “Ma, um…it’s not a she. It’s a he. Ah’m seeing a man.” She went silent. He waited for her to start screaming at him, or crying, or something, anything but silence. “Ma? Please say something. Ma?”
He looked at his phone and realized the battery was dead. Fuck. At what point did the battery actually die? How much did she hear? He wasn’t sure what would be worse, the thought that she heard his response right before it cut off and was left to process this in silence, or the thought that she’d missed it and was about to excitedly tell his father and the entire family that their son had a girlfriend.
He looked back at Ghost, still asleep beside him, and traced the outline of one of Ghost’s numerous tattoos, the one located on the side of his stomach, with the tip of a finger while he pondered to himself. It was a childish scribble drawing of a snail, made to look like it was drawn and colored with crayon. The story Ghost gave was that his three year old nephew, while admiring his sleeve, had asked him if he could draw him a tattoo, and apparently his brother was surprised when he actually went out and got the crayon drawing inked on him.
Was he even going to be down with meeting his family? He wasn’t even out to his own family yet. Maybe it would be easier to come out with Soap to his family because it wasn’t his own, but…then again, Ghost was an extremely private individual who didn’t like giving any of his personal information to random strangers, and that’s what his family would be to him, strangers.
Well, they could burn that bridge when they came to it, a week from now, when Ghost woke up and asked what year it was. Soap kissed him and tried to lay down next to him for some sleep of his own. He could eat when he woke up, and maybe figure out what he was going to say to Ghost when he woke up too. Maybe it would give him a chance to figure out what he was going to say to his mother, especially if he couldn’t get Ghost on board.