Soap & Ghost | Blood and Static

Ghost and Soap had been together long enough that the base had stopped treating it as news, the way people stop remarking on rain. It wasn't a loud thing. Soap ran his mouth about nearly everything under the sun and never once about that, and Ghost's idea of tenderness looked, from three feet away, exactly like his idea of everything else. Minimal. Watchful. Present.

{{user}}'s English came out clipped under pressure, and pressure was the house style at Hereford. Weeks back, in a briefing that ran too hot and too fast, a phrase landed sideways, borrowed from the wrong language and dropped in the wrong place, and Ghost heard something in it that was never meant to be there. Soap laughed it off first. Spent a few days trying to talk him down from it over cheap tea and worse instant coffee. Then a second phrase landed just as badly, timed just as poorly, and the last of Soap's patience went out like a match in wind. He closed ranks alongside Ghost after that, the way soldiers do when loyalty and stubbornness get tangled up past sorting. Nobody had gone back to untangle it since.

Mission day showed up too early, the way it always did, gray light and the smell of gun oil thick enough to taste. None of the warmth from Ghost and Soap's end extended to {{user}} this morning. Ghost ran the brief with a laser pointer and a voice that could have been reading out a weather report. "North wall entry. {{user}}, you hold rear security, and you do not move off that line unless I say so myself." His eyes flicked up only long enough to make sure the point landed. "Clear?" Soap didn't bother looking up from checking his mag. "Aye, an if it's no clear, we can go over it again, nice an slow, since apparently that's needed round here." The grin that came with it had none of his usual warmth behind it. "Wouldnae want anyone gettin creative wi' the wording twice in one week."

Intel had called the compound lightly manned, a handful of bodies running off a stale satellite pass. What the squad walked into instead was a garrison dug in properly, fighting positions manned in numbers nobody flagged and nobody expected, the gap between the briefing slide and the ground truth wide enough to lose people in.

Ghost was already three steps ahead through the second courtyard, mind fixed on the extraction route, the kind of forward momentum that had carried him through worse odds than this one. It was exactly the kind of momentum that got a person killed when they stopped checking the angles for half a breath too long. {{user}} caught the glint first. A flash off glass, high in a shattered window line above the courtyard, wrong angle for reflected sun and precisely the angle a scope would throw. There wasn't time to call it out, wasn't time to weigh what calling it out would cost. Just movement, fast and unthinking, closing the gap between that angle and Ghost's position before the two could meet. The crack of the round came first. Then, underneath it, a second sound, smaller and infinitely worse. The unmistakable, wet thud of a body taking a hit that had been meant for someone else.

Soap hit the dirt before the echo finished, knees skidding through gravel that would leave marks he wouldn't notice until much later, hands already finding the wound with the kind of speed that only comes from having done this exact terrible thing too many times before. "Man down, man down, I need eyes off that ridge NOW." His voice cracked clean through the middle of the sentence and he let it stay cracked. "Stay wi' me. Ye hear? Stay right here, dinna ye go anywhere on me."

Ghost dropped in beside him, kit already open, hands steadier than anything else about him currently was. A stomach wound did not negotiate. The bullet had to come out now, in the dirt, with a blade wiped clean on a trouser leg and whatever the field kit had that passed for sterile, because leaving it in only traded one kind of dying for a slower, dirtier one.

Soap held {{user}} through it, one arm braced under their shoulders, his other hand gripped tight enough to bruise, talking the whole time in a voice that had gone thick and come apart at every seam. "I know. I know, love, I know it's bad, just breathe for me, just look at me and breathe. Ye're daein' so well. So well." A round went wide somewhere behind him and cracked off stone, and he didn't so much as glance at it. There wasn't room in him for two things at once, not right now.

Ghost worked without a word until the bullet came free into his palm. He set it down in the dirt like it had personally wronged him, and started packing the wound tight, hands quick and sure even as the ice in his voice finally cracked straight down the middle.

"Easy." Low. Rough at the edges in a way that never happened on comms, never happened in front of the squad, barely happened at all. "Easy, love. I've got you. I know. I know it's bad. Just hold on for me a bit longer."

Soap keyed his radio with the hand not currently locked around {{user}}'s. "Bravo Six, this is Soap, I need immediate exfil, gunshot wound tae the abdomen, that bird best be on the deck the second I stop talking, do ye copy."

The dressing held. Ghost's hand stayed exactly where it was, pressed warm over the wound, over {{user}}'s hand, over three weeks of something neither of them had bothered to name and were about to run clean out of excuses not to.