John "Soap" MacTavish

The extraction was already going to shit before the roof came down. Soap had been running overwatch from a gutted office block, scope trained on the market square below. The target was a human data analyst—some poor bastard who'd been undercover on Rhy'sani's main trade station for eighteen months and whose cover had just evaporated like piss on a hotplate. Price's voice in his ear, calm as ever, walking Ghost through the snatch-and-grab while Soap counted threats from three stories up.

Then the K'thari raiding party hit the far end of the concourse, and suddenly the job wasn't extraction anymore. It was survival.

Plasma fire chewed through the station's civilian architecture like it was made of paper. Soap remembered the sound—a wet, shrieking hiss followed by the groan of melting alloys. The market dissolved into chaos. Bodies scrambling. Stalls collapsing. The sharp, acrid stench of burning synthetics flooding his sinuses even through his helmet's filters.

"Price—!" he'd barked, already moving, scope abandoned as he swung his rifle onto his back and sprinted for the stairwell. "K'thari, at least a dozen, they've hit the east concourse—"

"I see 'em," Price cut in, voice tight. "Ghost, status."

"Target's secure. Cornered in a textile shop, west side. We're pinned."

Soap took the stairs two at a time, knee brace creaking with the impact. "On my way. ETA twa minutes."

He never made it to the textile shop. The station's structural integrity gave out somewhere between the second and third concourse connector. A K'thari plasma charge caught a load-bearing column, and the whole section buckled. Soap heard the groan before he saw the collapse, that deep, basso-profundo scream of tortured metal, and then the ceiling came down like the fist of God.

He dove. Rolled. Came up coughing in a cloud of pulverized concrete and sparking electricals, ears ringing, vision swimming. His HUD flickered, died, rebooted. The corridor behind him was gone—just a wall of twisted rebar and shattered polymer.

"Soap! Soap, report!" Price's voice, sharp with static.

"Still breathin'," he wheezed, patting himself down. No punctures. No breaks. Lucky bastard. "Route's blocked. Secondary's out."

"Find another way. Our window's closin' fast—station's ventin' atmosphere in three sectors."

Aye, he could feel it. The thin whistle of escaping air. The way his ears popped. If he didn't move, he'd be spacing without a suit.

Soap navigated the wreckage like a rat through a maze, squeezing through gaps, hauling himself over debris, following the emergency beacons on his wrist display toward the secondary extraction point. The station was screaming around him. Alarms. Collapsing bulkheads. Distant gunfire. Somewhere behind him, a K'thari hunting cry—that horrible, resonant shriek they made when they scented prey.

And then he saw you.

You were crumpled against the wall of a collapsed supply corridor, half-buried under a fallen support beam, and for a moment Soap almost ran past. But then you moved. Weakly. A hand—or a paw, or a tendril, or whatever the hell you had—lifting in a gesture that his brain, trained to read intent in a hundred different species' body language, clocked as help me.

He skidded to a stop.

"Aw, hell."

He should've kept running. Protocol said leave the civilians to rescue crews. Protocol said the mission came first. Protocol said a lot of things that Soap had never been particularly good at listening to.

He was already doubling back, already dropping to his knees beside you, already assessing the beam pinning you down. Metal alloy. Heavy, but not impossible. He could lever it. He'd need to be quick about it—the whistling was getting louder, and the cold was starting to bite through his suit.

"Right, dinnae move," he said, not sure if you could understand him, not sure if you were even conscious enough to try. "I'm gonny get this off ye. Just... hold still, aye? Got a bad habit of blowin' things up, but I promise I'll be careful this time."

He jammed his rifle stock under the beam, used it as a lever, threw his weight against it. The beam groaned. Shifted. Lifted—just enough.

"Move! Move noo, come on—!"

The rest was a blur. Hauling you out. Dragging you through the wreckage. Screaming into his comms for an emergency pickup—not just for the asset, now, but for a civilian, an alien civilian. Price's voice crackling back, incredulous.

"You picked up a what—"

"Just get the doors open, Captain!"

The shuttle had been chaos. Ghost, mask smeared with dust and blood, staring at you with those flat, unreadable eyes. The human asset, pale and shaking, strapped in beside you. Soap, kneeling on the deck, hands pressed against a wound on your side that he didn't even know how to assess because he didn't know your anatomy, didn't know if you had the same organs, the same blood pressure, the same—

"You're alright," he'd kept saying, over and over, a litany against the roar of the engines. "You're alright. Ye hear me? We've got ye. We've got ye."

---

Twelve hours later, the UMSV Granite is running dark somewhere on the fringes of an uninhabited system, waiting for the heat to die down before they can risk a jump back to human space. The human asset is in debriefing. Ghost is in the medbay probably insisting for the tenth time he's fine despite multiple fractures. Price is on a secure channel to Command, trying to figure out what the hell to do with the alien civilian currently recovering in a hastily-repurposed storage room that's been converted into a quarantine suite.

And Soap?

Soap is standing in the corridor outside that suite, clutching two ration packs and a datapad loaded with the most basic translation protocols the ship's database could scrape together, wondering how the hell he'd ended up as a glorified babysitter.

"Just until Command figures out where they belong," Price had said, clapping him on the shoulder with that infuriating fatherly smile. "You found 'em, Johnny. They're your responsibility."

So he does.

The storage room door slides open with a soft hiss, and Soap steps inside, ration packs tucked under one arm, datapad in the other. The room's been done up as best as the crew could manage—a cot, some blankets, a low table, a few basic amenities. It smells like antiseptic and recycled air.

He clears his throat. "So. Ah, I dinnae ken if ye can understand me," he says, lifting the datapad and waggling it. "Got a translator program, but it's... well, it's a bit shite, honestly. Canna promise it'll make any sense. But I figured I'd bring ye some scran—that's food, aye?—and see if ye were feelin' up to a blether."

He sets the ration packs down on the table, giving you space, keeping his posture loose and unthreatening. His knee brace clicks as he crouches, bringing himself more to your level.

"Name's Soap. John MacTavish. I'm the eejit who pulled ye out of that mess back on the station." A pause. A crooked grin. "Ye're welcome, by the way. Or... sorry. Depending on how ye feel about bein' stuck on a human ship wi' a bunch'a heavily-armed lunatics."

He waits, watching you, blue eyes bright with curiosity despite the exhaustion still shadowing his face.

"So. Ye got a name, pal? Or am I just gonnae have to make one up?"