Pregnant | Johnny "Soap" MacTavish

It all made sense now.

Soap was pacing outside the medical bay like a caged animal. Back and forth. Six steps one way, six the other. Couldn't stand still. Couldn't sit. His body didn't do still on a good day and this was not a good day. Through the door he could hear the medic. Calm professional voice reading out numbers. Vitals stable. Iron low. HCG levels elevated.

Pregnant.

He stopped pacing. Just stopped. Mid-stride. One foot in front of the other. Frozen in the corridor like someone had hit pause on him.

Then his hand came up and scrubbed through his mohawk and he said "fuck" to the empty hallway. Not loud. Not yet.

Three months ago. Post-op. The mission that went to shit. Everyone drinking except the people who should've been drinking most. Soap wasn't with the team. He was in the gym at two in the morning hitting a heavy bag until his knuckles bled through the wraps because forward motion was the only thing that kept the noise in his head at a manageable volume.

They found him there. Standing in the gym door. Looking at him with an expression that hit him somewhere below the ribs. Raw. Cracked. Matching something in him that was already cracked and had been for a while.

He remembered crossing the gym floor, the same way he moved in a breach. Fast, committed, no hesitation. He remembered his hands on their face, cupping their jaw, kissing them hard. He remembered them grabbing his shirt, the one that was soaked with sweat, and pulling and him lifting them, just lifting, because that's what his body did when someone got close enough to matter. Legs around his waist. Back against the wall. Him inside them with a sound that came out of his chest like something being unlocked.

Loud. He was loud. They were loud. His mouth on their neck, their shoulder, their jaw, talking between thrusts because Soap couldn't stop talking even now. Things he'd never said out loud. Things in English and Gaelic that he'd been keeping in a journal because he was too afraid to say them to a face. Saying them now into their skin while the gym smelled like sweat and chalk and something enormous was happening that neither of them was going to name.

The morning. Waking up on the gym floor on a pile of towels. Them already gone. His knuckles raw, the wraps lost somewhere. Sitting up in the empty gym and feeling like a grenade with the pin back in.

Three months. The avoidance. Except Soap was bad at avoidance because Soap was bad at everything that required him to be still and quiet and measured. He overcompensated. Too loud. Too friendly. Cracking jokes that landed wrong. Standing too close and then correcting to too far. Everyone noticed something was off but Soap was always off in one direction or another so nobody flagged it.

But underneath the noise, he was watching. Which was new for him. Soap was a man of action, not observation. But he watched.

Week four, the runs. Them slowing. Week six, the weird eating hours. He almost sat down across from them in the mess at three AM but chickened out and got a protein bar instead and ate it in the hallway like a coward. Week eight, the temper. He made a joke. Got a look in return that shut him up for the first time in maybe his entire life, and later in his bunk he turned the interaction over and over in his head trying to figure out what he'd missed. Week ten. Them leaning on the wall. Hand on their stomach. And Soap's whole body went electric because suddenly every observation clicked into a pattern and the pattern made a shape and the shape was.

Today. The mat. Them going down. Ghost reaching them first because Ghost was always first, Ghost was closer, Ghost was faster. Soap standing three feet back with his hands open and his heart going so hard he could feel it in his throat. Ghost carried them. Soap followed. Didn't say a word the whole way. That scared everyone more than anything else could have.

Now. Corridor. Pacing. Not pacing. Standing still, which was worse.

{{user}}'s pregnant. His.

The word "mine" went through him like a shockwave. Not in his head. In his body. His hands. His chest. His gut. Mine. He could feel it in his teeth. Primal and absolute and loud the way everything in Johnny MacTavish was loud. This was his . His kid. His blood. The thing growing inside the person he'd been losing his mind over for three months was his and the certainty of it hit him like a flashbang, white-hot and total, and for once in his life the noise in his head went completely silent because every single frequency had tuned to one signal.

Mine. Mine. Mine.

Not quiet the way Ghost's possessiveness was quiet. Not settled the way Price's was settled. Soap's possessiveness was a riot. It filled the corridor. It filled him. His hands were shaking, not with fear but with the physical effort of not ripping that door open and putting his body around theirs and not letting go until someone physically removed him.

He ripped the door open.

Paper gown. Bare feet. Their face doing something complicated and brave and terrified and Soap's chest cracked open at the sight of it because brave and terrified was his whole life and he recognized it immediately. The medic turned. Started talking.

"Out." One word. Scottish. Hard. Not mean, just full. Too full for a second word.

The medic left.

Door closed. Soap stood there. Chest heaving. Mohawk a mess from where he'd been scrubbing his hands through it. His eyes were bright and wet and wide and locked on them with an intensity that had nothing controlled about it, nothing measured, nothing tactical. Just raw.

He looked at their face. Their stomach. Their face. Their stomach. Back and forth, fast, like he was trying to reconcile two pieces of information that together made something too big to hold.

"When." His voice cracked. Thick with Glasgow. "When were ye gonna tell me?"

It all made sense now.

Soap was sitting on the corridor floor outside the medical bay with his back against the wall and his knees up and his head in his hands. Through the door the medic's voice carried. Flat. Professional. Vitals stable. Iron low. HCG levels elevated.

Pregnant.

His fingers dug into his scalp. He pulled at the mohawk. Not thinking about it. Just pulling, the way he always pulled at himself when the thing happening inside his head was too big for the space it was in.

"Shite." Whispered. Then again. "Shite, shite, shite."

His brain didn't run math the way Gaz's did. Soap's brain ran forward. Always forward. The problem was that forward, right now, looked like a hallway stretching out in both directions with no doors and the walls getting closer.

Three months. One night. His.

And then his brain did the thing he hated most. It went backward.

Glasgow. He was seven. Maybe eight. The flat with the thin walls and the shouting that came through them like weather, something you couldn't stop, could only wait out. Da at the kitchen table with a can and a face like a closed fist. Mam in the other room pretending the telly was loud enough. The specific silence between rounds, worse than the shouting because during the silence you were just waiting for it to start again.

His da wasn't a soldier. His da was a man who worked at the shipyards and drank after and sometimes during and came home with his hands already balled and his voice already too loud. And young Johnny learned to be louder. Learned that if he was loud enough and fast enough and funny enough he could sometimes pull the attention onto himself and away from her. Learned that making someone laugh was the fastest way to disarm them. Learned that forward motion, always forward, never still, was how you survived a house where stillness meant you were a target.

Soap looked at his hands. Scarred. Calloused. Shaking.

His da's hands were rough too. Shipyard hands. The same broad knuckles. The same thick fingers. Johnny had his father's hands and his father's build and his father's temper, the one he kept on a leash made of jokes and adrenaline and the constant burning need to be in motion.

What if it's in me.

The thought came in Gaelic because the fear lived in Gaelic, in the language he kept in journals nobody could read. What if the leash slips. What if one day the jokes don't work and the forward motion stops and I'm standing in a kitchen with a face like a closed fist and a kid looking at me the way I looked at him.

He pressed his palms against his eyes until he saw colors. Breathed. It wasn't the controlled breathing Price would do or the measured breathing Gaz would do. It was ragged and uneven and sounded like a man trying not to cry in a hallway, which is exactly what it was.

Three months ago. Post-op. The gym at two AM. Hitting the bag until the wraps bled through. Them in the doorway. That look. Him crossing the floor like he was breaching. Kissing them hard and fast and certain. Being inside them against the gym wall while he said things he'd never said aloud, not in English, in Gaelic, the real things, the underneath things, pressed into their skin where they couldn't hear them properly and he could pretend he hadn't said them.

Morning. Gym floor. Towels. Them gone. Him sitting up alone with his raw knuckles and the echo of words he'd never have the courage to say again.

Three months. Bad avoidance. Too loud. Too close. Too far. Everyone noticing something was off and him playing it as Soap being Soap because being a mess was on-brand enough that nobody questioned it.

But he watched. Not well. Not like Gaz watched, clean and analytical. Soap watched the way a dog watches a door, constant, anxious, unable to look away.

Week four, the runs. Week six, standing in the mess hallway with a protein bar he didn't eat, watching them through the door. Week eight, making the joke, getting the look, lying in his bunk afterward replaying it on loop. Week ten, seeing the hand on the stomach and his whole body going cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.

Today. The mat. Them going down. Ghost catching them. Soap standing behind with his hands open and empty.

Now. Floor. Corridor.

A kid. His kid. Half of Johnny MacTavish. Half of the loudest, most reckless, most desperate man in Task Force 141. Half of a man whose father's hands looked exactly like his and that was the thought that put him on this floor.

His da never hit him. That was the thing. People heard "Glasgow" and "drinking" and assumed, but his da never raised a hand to Johnny. Just to mam. Just the shouting and the cans and the silence and the feeling of being seven years old and too small to stop it and too loud to ignore it. And Johnny had sworn, sitting on the stairs with his fingers in his ears, that he'd never be that. He'd be better. Louder but better. Funnier but better. More but better.

But "more" was the problem, wasn't it. He was always more. Too much. Too loud. Too chaotic. Too reckless. And one day "too much" might look like something else entirely and there'd be a kid watching.

He sat on that floor for a long time. Didn't stop shaking. Didn't rebuild walls because Soap didn't have walls, he had velocity, and right now the velocity was zero and there was nothing between him and the feeling.

Eventually he stood up. Wiped his face with the back of his hand. Scrubbed through his hair. Took a breath that didn't steady anything.

He opened the door.

Paper gown. Bare feet. Their face, brave and scared and looking at him like they were bracing for something. And the bracing was the thing that broke him, because they were bracing for him to leave or to yell or to be his father, and he could see it.

The medic looked up. Soap's face did something the medic had never seen on him before. The medic left without a word.

Door closed.

He stood there. Not pacing. Not joking. Not filling the silence with noise. Just standing there with his hands at his sides and his eyes red and wet and his chest moving too fast.

He didn't look at their stomach because he knew if he did he'd start crying and if he started he wouldn't stop and they needed him to be something right now that wasn't a man falling apart on a medical bay floor.

"Were ye gonnae tell me?"