John 'Soap' Mactavish

The world had narrowed into three things: pain, breath, and your voice.

And even those were slipping.

Johnny moved like a man walking underwater—slow, off-balance, arms too heavy. Blood soaked through the makeshift tourniquet around his thigh, pulsing hot down into his boot. He couldn’t tell how long it had been since the last contact, the last firefight, the last time he felt like he had a real chance of getting out.

Minutes? Hours?

Didn’t matter.

He turned a corner, shoulders brushing a cracked brick wall, rifle tucked close to his chest more from habit than strategy. The city around him was ruins. Streets swallowed in smoke. Light bleeding from shattered windows. There were voices—enemy patrols, distant gunfire—but they felt miles away now.

He ducked into a blown-out storefront. Collapsed ceiling, ash on the floor, the scent of burned plastic and wet cement thick in the air.

He sat.

Just for a second.

Just long enough to feel what was real and what wasn’t.

His hand trembled as he pressed it to his side. It came away slick. Warm.

He’d known it was bad. He just hadn’t known it was this bad.

Everything in him told him to keep going. Move. Fight. Survive. That old, stubborn soldier’s instinct burned like the last coal in a dying fire. But his body had other plans—his vision swam at the edges, limbs going cold, too cold for August.

The voice in his ear came back. Tinny. Distant. Yours.

He closed his eyes.

God, he didn’t want to die like this. Not in some nameless alley with no one around but ghosts. Not after everything he’d fought through. Not without—

No.

No, if this was it, he wasn’t going out silent.

He sat up straighter, jaw clenched. Brought a shaky hand to the comm on his vest.

He spoke quietly, like a man trying not to wake someone beside him. Almost like prayer.

“I’m not good at this part,” he started, voice hoarse. “The saying things bit. Always easier with a laugh. A joke. A bullet between the eyes.”

He exhaled slowly.

“I thought I’d have more time. Thought I could wait until after the war, or the next one… after just one more mission.”

The pain stabbed deeper, pulling a small hiss from his teeth.

“Didn’t want to burden you. Didn’t want to make you carry what I felt. It was easier to pretend.”

His eyes opened again, staring through the blackened ceiling into nothing.

“But I need you to know. You were the first thing I thought of when it all went to hell. Not the mission. Not the team. You.”

The comm buzzed—feedback, a signal dip, maybe your voice trying to come through—but he kept talking.

“I should’ve told you every damn day. Should’ve made sure you never had to wonder. But I didn’t. And that’s on me.”

The wind howled outside. The building creaked, old bones settling.

“If this is it…” he whispered.

He went quiet for a moment.

Then his voice broke.

“…God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

The apology lingered in the air like smoke.

Soap pressed the heel of his hand to his brow, trying to blink away the weight gathering behind his eyes. It didn’t help. His vision was blurring now, not just from blood loss, but from something heavier, something deeper than the wound tearing through his thigh. It wasn’t just the pain—it was everything he hadn’t done. Everything he wouldn’t get the chance to fix.

A bitter laugh scraped up his throat, dry and cracked.

“I’d give anything to see you right now,” he murmured, words slurring ever so slightly. “One more second. One more stupid argument. One more laugh. Even just the way you look at me when I mess everything up.”

He didn’t realize his fingers were shaking until he reached for the comm again. Didn’t realize how heavy his arms had gotten. His breath hitched in his throat. Each inhale cut deeper than the last. He was unraveling, thread by thread.

“I wanted to be better,” he said. “God, I tried. I really tried. You made me want to try.”

Something clattered outside. Boots on stone? Or just a hallucination playing tricks on what little remained of his senses? He didn’t move. Didn’t have the strength left to care if someone found him—enemy or not.

His head tipped back against the broken wall. The sky overhead was veiled in smoke, orange with firelight, darkening at the edges like a bruise.

“If there’s an after,” he whispered, barely audible now, “I’ll find you there too.”

And then the cold came. Not the panicked cold of shock—but the soft, creeping stillness of a body shutting down. Of something final.

Soap blinked slowly, and in the haze, he thought he saw a figure in the doorway.

It didn’t look like death.

It looked like hope.

But that was impossible.

He’d stopped believing in hope three alleys ago.

So when the shadow dropped beside him, when gloved hands pressed hard against his thigh and a voice—not his own—snapped orders into a mic, he flinched. Not in pain. Not in fear.

In disbelief.

Because somehow, you’d found him.

And for the first time in hours, in days, maybe longer— John MacTavish stopped trying to die.

He let himself be held up. Let his blood soak into your gear. Let your voice—real now, right here, not just in his ear—pull him back across that razor-thin line between almost and gone.

The last thing he felt before the black took him wasn’t pain.

It was your hand in his.