Ghost - Cage

You can't speak.

It isn't even that you don't want to - you literally cannot make a word come out of your mouth, and the on-base psychologist Dr. Song Lin said it was a type of trauma-induced selective mutism. She'd assured you it would ease the longer you spent in a normal setting.

Normal.

Nothing is normal when you can't remember your own name. Normal is not when you can't recognize yourself in the mirror of your borrowed room in the barracks. Normal is not how you can't sleep more than two hours at a time. Normal is not how the feeling of clothes on your body seems wrong. Normal isn't how you're a ward of the British Military because no one knows what country you're even from. Normal is not how you nearly piss yourself every time one of the K9 units barks outside. Normal is not how people look at you like you're a walking corpse.

You could feel eyes on your even then, sitting on the cold rooftop of the barracks building. It was November and close to sunset, and you were addicted to the feeling of the open sky yawning above your head. You were shivering in the massive coat that hung off your body. You just shivered a lot, seemingly for no reason sometimes. You didn't smoke, but you could smell cigarettes as soon as the fire escape door knocked open and footsteps crunched on the gravel rooftop behind you. A massive man stalked out, seemingly not noticing (or not caring) that you were sitting on the gravel rooftop in the giant coat you'd kept since he gave it to you.

You watched from the corner of your eye as he lifted the bottom of his mask and folded it up over the bridge of his nose. He stuck a cigarette between his scarred lips and lit it.

He must have felt your eyes on him too, because those stone-grey irises flicked to you, meeting your eyes with the same blank apathy he seemed to harbor like a shield. Since he'd found you in the cage two weeks ago, you hadn't seen any different expression. It was the lieutenant - a man the other soldiers called Ghost. He was just the lieutenant to you. Just a man.

Two weeks earlier.

The stench of the basement was unbearable, or would have been if not for the polyester and paint over his face. Ghost's mask did help a little to burn out the unwanted stench of urine, animals, and mold, but not much. He could hear Soap cough and gag as they descended the wooden stairs, rifles raised, flashlights coasting over the darkness.

The last thing any of them had expected to find under the warehouse in northern Russia was a basement. The ground there was so frozen half the time underground structures didn't make much sense in an urban environment. And the room was cold, no mistake about it. Fucking freezing even through the thick coat he wore over his gear. His breath fogged in front of his mouth, over his mask, as he observed the basement bowels.

Dog crates. A dozen or more pitbulls shivering and snarling and barking, some cowering, some foaming to sink their teeth into him and Soap as they walked down the line, looking for stragglers. The rest of the Russians were dead or detained, but they had to sweep the whole damn building. What were terrorists doing with a basement full of dogs?

No, not just dogs.

Ghost's flashlight doubled back on a cage at the end. He wasn't even sure it was a person at first, not with how they were curled up so tightly in the back of the little crate, not with the shade of their battered flesh and the coating of filth over their skin. As he drew closer he wasn't even sure they were alive. But when he drew closer he saw wide, wary eyes tracking him. Preternaturally still, the living corpse in that crate was hyper-aware of him just as he was beginning to notice them.

Ghost held up a fist and Soap's boots stopped on the concrete behind him. Ghost set his rifle down, and with it went the flashlight. He crouched in a squat at the end of the line of dog crates and peered into the darkness behind his skeletal mask.

A person. A person in a dog crate, naked and covered in blood, waste, and other nameless things he didn't want to think about.

"...what's a thing like you doin' down here?" His voice was uncharacteristically soft. He was excellent at compartmentalizing, and he was making sure to do just that as he saw you for the first time. But his head tilted and his eyes were soft as he took you in.

How he got you to even come out of the cage, he had no damn idea.

But once you were tucked against his chest on the floor, he unzipped his massive coat and pulled it over your wasting cadaver. It hung off you, an alien item on a body so unused to the dignity of clothes you'd trembled as he zipped it up. And then he'd carried you like a bride out of that basement and under the yawning, open sky. You'd whispered something in his ear. He was too stunned to really process what you said, and he couldn't remember it once he had you safely in the hands of the medical team back at base camp.

It was that coat you were wearing as he stared at you across the rooftop. You scarcely took it off. It smelled like unwashed hair and gunpowder and sweat and you nearly lived in it. You slept in it. You wore it over all the clothes Dr. Lin had bought you. That coat was your shield, your armor, and your lifeline. Without it you'd probably just be an actual corpse spattered on the pavement of the parking lot below.

Maybe that revelation is why the lieutenant broke the silence. "What're you doin' up here." Not a question. A command for a response. He didn't even know if you'd give it - you never spoke a word, except the rare times the two of you were alone. And even then it wasn't a guarantee he'd get anything out of you.

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