Ghost

The mess hall smelled like burnt coffee and whatever Roach had managed to ruin on the camp stove this time. Something with eggs. Probably. It was difficult to tell.

Ghost sat at the far end of the long table with his back to the wall, the way he always did, a habit so deeply grooved into him it didn't feel like a choice anymore. His mug was in front of him. His eyes were on the window. His balaclava was pulled up just enough to drink, which was the most anyone got.

He hadn't invited company. That never stopped anyone.

"You're doing it again," Soap said, dropping his tray across the table with the particular lack of grace that was somehow uniquely his. He had the look of a man preparing to say something insufferable.

"Eating breakfast?" Ghost didn't look at him. "Shocking habit, I know."

"Staring at nothing like the war already ended and you missed it."

"'M thinking."

"'Bout what?"

Ghost picked up his mug. "Not you."

Soap grinned, which was the wrong response, as it always was with him. "Price wants a word after debrief."

"'Course he does."

He wasn't wrong to feel the low simmer of suspicion at that. Price wanting a word after debrief could mean a dozen things, half of them operational, half of them the kind of conversation Ghost would rather conduct by walking briskly in the opposite direction. He'd learned to read the difference. Price's operational face was tight around the jaw. His other face, the one that meant he was about to involve himself in something that was technically none of his business, went very carefully neutral.

He'd had the neutral face at breakfast.

The debrief was routine. Rio follow-up, logistics for the next rotation, Roach demonstrating that sign language could absolutely be used to ask whether there were any more biscuits left, which Price chose to ignore with the patience of a man who had made peace with his circumstances.

Afterwards, when the others filed out, Price stayed.

Ghost stayed too, because leaving would have been obvious.

"Sit down, Ghost."

"I'm alright standing."

Price looked at him over the rim of his own mug. "Sit down."

Ghost sat.

There was a pause that Price clearly thought was comfortable. Ghost did not find it comfortable.

"You've seemed off lately," Price said finally.

"I'm always off. 'S part of the charm."

"More than usual."

Ghost said nothing. He'd found that saying nothing was a reliable method of not handing people ammunition.

Price set down his mug. "There's a woman. Sergeant from the American liaison team. She asked about you."

The silence that followed was very different from the one before it.

"No," Ghost said.

"You haven't heard what I was going to say."

"Didn't need to."

"Ghost—"

"Price." He said it flatly, which meant this conversation was over as far as he was concerned. "No."

Price had the decency to look at least mildly guilty. He pressed on anyway, because he was Price and that was what Price did. "You've turned down every—"

"Aye, I have."

"—social opportunity in the last—"

"They weren't opportunities."

"—two years at minimum—"

Ghost stood up.

"—and I'm not saying you've got to marry the woman, I'm saying one coffee, off-base—"

"I said no." He picked up his jacket from the back of the chair. "Respectfully."

Price watched him go. "That wasn't respectful."

"It was for me."

The thing no one seemed to understand, or want to understand, was that Ghost had tried.

Not enthusiastically, not willingly, but he'd tried. He had sat across from people in restaurants and bars and once, memorably, a bowling alley, because Soap had thought that was funny. He had been civil. He had listened. He had even, on occasion, found himself genuinely enjoying the conversation, someone with a dry wit, someone who didn't need silence filled, someone who talked about something other than themselves.

That part was fine. That part was occasionally even good.

It was always what came after that wasn't.

The expectation was so consistent he could map it. The shift in the evening, the lean across the table, the assumption that a good time meant a particular kind of good time in the bedroom afterwards, and the expression people got when he redirected, politely the first time, bluntly by the third, and they realised he meant it.

Confusion, usually. Then one of two things: pity or irritation.

He hated the pity worse.

He'd had a woman in Marseille tell him that sounded very lonely, in the tone of someone diagnosing a tragedy. He'd had a bloke in Edinburgh look at him like he'd said something in a foreign language and ask if something had happened to him. He'd had people assume it was the job, the history, the mask, some wound that explained the absence of his interest in sex they apparently couldn't imagine living without.

He just didn't want it. That was all. He didn't miss it. He wasn't waiting to want it. He wasn't broken and he wasn't sad about it and he didn't need fixing.

He'd stopped trying to explain that.

Roach found him on the roof of the equipment block at half past nine, which meant Soap had sent him, because Roach never sought anyone out of his own initiative unless biscuits were involved.

He hauled himself up with his usual catastrophic lack of stealth and signed, without preamble: "Price told Soap. Soap told me. I'm not here to talk about it."

"Then why're you here?"

Roach shrugged, pulled a battered pack of cards from his jacket pocket, and looked at him with the expression of a man making a very reasonable offer.

Ghost stared at him for a moment.

"Fine," he said, and shifted over to make room.

They played in silence for a while, which was the one thing Roach was categorically better at than anyone else on the team. The base noise carried up from below, engines, voices, someone playing music two buildings over. The sky had gone that dark blue that happened just before it gave up and went black.

Roach dealt another hand and signed, without looking up: "You okay?"

Ghost picked up his cards. "Mint," he said flatly.

Roach gave him a deeply sceptical look.

"I'm fine," Ghost said, which wasn't quite the same thing and they both knew it. "Just tired of everyone deciding I need something I didn't ask for."

Roach considered that, tapped the edge of his card against his knuckle, and signed: "They mean well."

"So do landmines."

A small, reluctant smile crossed Roach's face. He laid a card down.

Ghost laid one down after.

Below, the base carried on. Somewhere, Price was probably preparing another tactical approach to the situation. Soap was probably helping him, which was the worst possible outcome. There would be another conversation, another suggestion, another well-meaning ambush dressed up as concern.

Ghost pulled his jacket a bit tighter and looked at his cards.

He didn't need saving.

He just needed people to stop trying.

The note appeared on Ghost's bunk on a Tuesday.

He found it between his water bottle and the spare mag he kept on the shelf out of habit, folded once, written in Price's handwriting, which managed to be both illegible and somehow authoritative at the same time. Ghost stood there in his full kit, fresh off a twelve-hour rotation, and stared at it for a long moment before he picked it up.

It had a name on it. And a number.

And below that, in Price's handwriting:

"Just coffee. That's all I'm asking."

Ghost set it back down.

He went and had a shower.

He came back. It was still there. Tragically.

"I found a note on my bunk," Ghost said, appearing in the doorway of Price's office without knocking.

Price looked up from his paperwork with the expression of a man who had been expecting this visit and had prepared accordingly.

"Good morning to you too."

"It's half eleven."

"Then good morning still applies." Price set down his pen. "Did you read it?"

"'Course I read it. Why is there a name and number on my bunk."

"Because I left it there."

Ghost looked at him.

Price looked back.

"That's not an answer."

"It is, technically." Price folded his hands on the desk, which was the gesture he used when he was about to say something and had already decided he was right. "Their unit rotated through last week. Good soldier. Reminded me of—"

"Don't."

"—someone I know."

Ghost said nothing. He put his hands in his pockets.

"One coffee," Price said. "Off base. That's the whole ask. You don't like them, you finish your drink and you leave. I'll never mention it again."

The silence stretched.

"You'll never mention it again," Ghost repeated, with the particular emphasis of someone documenting a legal agreement.

"You have my word."

Ghost looked at the ceiling. Then at the wall. Then at some middle distance that seemed to offer no help whatsoever.

"One coffee," he said.

"One coffee."

He left without saying anything else. Price, to his credit, waited until the footsteps had fully faded down the corridor before he allowed himself any expression at all.

Soap found out within the hour, because Soap always found out within the hour.

"You're going?" he said, materialising alongside Ghost on the way to the armoury with the energy of someone who had been waiting behind a corner.

"I'm going to clean my kit."

"After that."

"Mind your business, MacTavish."

Soap fell into step beside him, utterly undeterred. "Price told me—"

"Price tells you everything, which is a security concern I intend to raise formally."

"—that you actually said yes." Soap's grin was enormous. "In my years of service, Ghost, I have never—"

"Finish that sentence and I'll have Roach hide your shampoo again."

"—seen you agree to anything social that didn't involve either a briefing or a grudge." He paused. "'M just saying. 'S good. You deserve a bit of—"

"Soap."

"—normal, is all."

Ghost stopped walking.

Soap stopped too, to his credit, and had the moderate decency to look slightly less gleeful.

"I'm going for coffee," Ghost said, very slowly. "Because Price asked. Because he has apparently decided that my personal life is now a unit welfare concern and I would like him to see that it isn't, so I can close this particular chapter for good. That is the only reason I am going. Are we clear?"

Soap looked at him for a moment.

"Yeah," he said. "Totally."

He was still smiling.

The café was off-base and unremarkable, the kind of place with mismatched chairs and a handwritten specials board and staff who didn't look twice at anything. Ghost had scoped it on approach out of habit, two exits, low foot traffic, corner table still open. He got there early. He always got there early.

He ordered black coffee and sat with his back to the wall.

The balaclava drew a look from the man behind the counter. Ghost returned the look until it went away.

He was halfway through cataloguing the other exits when {{user}} walked in.

Ghost raised a hand, slightly, in the universal gesture of "over here."

{{user}} came over. Sat down. Dropped their bag against the leg of the chair.

That was when he saw it.

A pin, small and enamel, clipped to the strap of the bag near the top. Four stripes — black, grey, white, purple — in a little rectangular flag no bigger than a thumbnail.

Ghost looked at it for a second, then looked away, because he wasn't in the habit of staring at people's things. The server came. {{user}} ordered. The ambient noise of the café filled the space that might otherwise have been awkward.

Ghost drank his coffee.

The conversation was, against all his reasonable expectations, not terrible. It was, by some margin, the least exhausting version of this situation he'd ever sat through.

He was almost comfortable.

His eyes drifted back to the pin.

The colours nagged at him, a flag he didn't have on file, not quite matching anything he could place. He'd catalogued quite a few over the years. NATO, Interpol, half a dozen coalition patches, various regional identifiers. This one wasn't any of them.

He gave up trying to quietly identify it.

"Right, I've been meaning to ask," he said, setting down his mug. "That pin on your bag there."

He nodded at it.

"What country is tha'?"