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Ghost had wings once.
Or, correction—Simon Riley had wings once.
Once, they had been his only pride when he had hated everything else about himself, the one thing his father had never managed to ruin just as he had the rest of Simon. Once, they’d been something magnificent, beautiful, powerful, and for a very long time they had been the only reason Simon could ever bear to look at himself in the mirror.
Then he joined the military. Rose in rank. Went on leave, straightened things out at home.
He returned to work. Was betrayed by his Major, then kept prisoner by a man named Manuel Roba. Tortured. Tested and pushed and strung out just to see how far his limits stretched before his mind became malleable as had Vernon’s. As had Sparks’s and Washington’s.
But Simon was unshakeable.
Then in one of the last few efforts to break him, his wings had been painstakingly removed with a hand saw. Smelling salts had been shoved under his nose any time the lure of unconsciousness had dug its talons into Simon’s flesh. He had felt it all.
Roba had burned the appendages in front of him until all that had remained was bone.
Ghost never forgot the smell. Never forgot the pain that burned deep in his chest just as blazing as the flames that danced and flickered about singed feathers until only ash was left.
He was buried alive. Escaped. Found his family and shrink slaughtered back home in Manchester. Sought revenge. Succeeded.
Simon was framed for murder. Set fires.
Died.
Was reborn. Became Ghost.
Lied through his teeth and got his records scrubbed and altered. Was taken under both the metaphorical and literal wing of one Captain John Price.
And not a single soul knew that the Ghost hadn’t always been flightless, because that was now between him and the dead. But the fact never made him any less bitter, even if a man like himself would never be looked at any differently whether or not he had wings.
Over the years, he does his best to swallow the memory, to suppress the phantom aches and twitches that pester him despite severed nerves and muscles forever pulled taut from poorly sutured skin. Ghost clings to the security that is his mask and keeps everything about himself beyond work locked up and stowed somewhere sometimes even he has difficulty remembering where. It works well for him, and maintains his mystery, because no one ever bothers to pry.
No one ever dares to. And it’s safe. He’s content enough with it.
Until Sergeant John “Soap” MacTavish had come along, of course—the most infuriating man Ghost has ever had the displeasure of meeting. The Scotsman is a sharp and jagged thorn in Ghost’s side under his command, entirely unintentionally. He just is.
Soap is bold, sometimes cocky; irritatingly amicable, damn skilled in the field. He’s quick on his feet and loyal to a fault, and he is far too good a man to be treating Ghost like a friend, even when Ghost rejects him.
All the while he flaunts the most incredible wings.
They’d have never necessarily put what Simon had to shame, but they were still striking in their own right, and Ghost would be a liar if he claimed envy had never once poisoned his heart amidst his silent, faraway admiration.
Despite the destructiveness of Soap, his wings are grace, and it has Ghost—Simon—yearning for what he’s lost.
And because of all of it, all of Soap, Ghost decides that he can’t stand the Sergeant. Yet that internal declaration doesn’t keep him from absolute dread when they’re betrayed by Graves, by Shepherd, and Soap is shot, possibly incapacitated, and why isn’t he up and running?
But then he is. Before Ghost has disappeared himself, he sees the awkward twisted angle of one of Soap’s wings as he hops a fence and flees for Las Almas, and finds his earlier dread sinking deep into the pit of his stomach, settling like a heavy stone as he meshes with shadows.
He doesn’t like Soap, didn’t, but his relief is still exultant when Soap lets him know he’s alive, and later when they’re reconvening in a plaza to escape the city, and most importantly when they’ve reached Alejandro’s safehouse and find Rodolfo more than prepared to charge back head first into battle to retrieve his comrade.
Ghost continues to insist to himself that he is not fond of Soap, even as he works delicately to remove the bullet from the Sergeant’s arm, and even as that dampened down part of him, that piece of Simon, is secretly overjoyed that Soap had asked him to patch his wounds, had asked him to wrap his wing.
White-tailed eagle. That’s what Soap tells him. Because the man is as stupidly observant as Ghost, and notices the naked glint of longing in unconcealed eyes as gloved fingers distractedly linger on the deep brown feathers, a colour so stark against the blue of Soap’s irises.
Soap also tells him, you’re good at wrapping wings for someone without them, and while that tiny part of Ghost wishes to tell the Sergeant why that is, his instincts instead steel themselves and Soap is again far from his good graces without much convincing.
They complete the mission after days of gruelling work. Ghost tries not to think so much. He tries to force space between him and Soap, eager and earnest Soap, but the task is near impossible with the Sergeant’s seemingly natural gravitation to the Lieutenant. Especially after they’re back safe on base.
Especially after Ghost had saved Soap’s life.
Ghost isn’t fully certain how everything that followed happened, maybe never would be. But what he knows, what he learns, is that perhaps he had never disliked Soap at all in the first place. How could he have, when he had so affectionately called the man Johnny from the start , and had been allowed such a privilege where anyone else was effectively shut down. How could he have, when he let Soap’s stray touches and friendly pats find him so easily, and had always been so okay with it, while he had reeled back from everyone else. It was always obvious. It should have always been obvious.
Perhaps Ghost had just been blinded by a juvenile jealousy.
He doesn’t see why he wouldn’t have been. Soap had incidentally dredged up that part of him with his abrupt entrance into the Lieutenant’s life, the part Ghost thought he had left behind in an empty grave many years ago.
Soap is an intruder into everything Ghost had built up walls for, but Ghost had let him in so, so easily, without ever realizing. His stupid smile and charm and those wings.
Those wings.
And suddenly Ghost is more than alright with having Soap as a friend. He finds that gravitation to become something vaguely mutual. He’s all too conscious of it, and thinks Soap is as well.
They’re in the mess hall. Soap has been talking his ear off about nothing for the better part of an hour. Ghost sits beside him, watching. Observing too closely.
Ghost stares too much. He’s very aware of the habit. But it catches Soap’s attention, and everything is toppling like dominoes, and suddenly Ghost thinks he’d give up any secret to Soap if asked as soon as Soap’s gaze meets his.
“There something I can help you with, LT?”
Ghost blinks back into the present. Soap is fixing him with an odd look, curious, but never judgemental. He tips a nearly healed wing into Ghost’s space when Ghost never responds. “Like somethin’ you see?”
He’s teasing. Always teasing. Ghost nearly flinches when outstretched feathers brush his arm.
Ghost deflects instead of indulging. “How’s it feeling?”
“I—” Soap’s sudden hesitance is palpable, but behind it the man is uncharacteristically unreadable. He retracts his wing. “Stiff.”
There isn’t much thought driving Ghost’s actions as he gets up and moves to stand behind Soap. The Sergeant is frozen, visibly tense as Ghost’s hands hover the patagium of the injured wing.
This is too much. He’s doing too much.
“Do you mind?” Ghost asks quietly.
Soap swallows. Shakes his head.
Ghost’s touch is gentle. He knows the wings are as fragile as they are strong. He keeps one hand at the scapulars and trails the other, slowly, to the alulas. He extends the wing to its full span without resistance, holds, then lets the limb relax.
He repeats. Quietly instructs, “You want to do this a few times a day, so you don’t lose mobility.”
Soap is silent, more still than Ghost has ever seen him as he allows the Lieutenant to continue stretching his wing. Unconsciously, fixated on the motions, Ghost feels the unused muscles in his back attempt to flex with each pull.
The Sergeant only speaks again when Ghost forces himself away and back to his spot on the table’s bench far enough from Soap that the tips of feathers couldn’t reach him on their own. Soap’s eyes bore holes into Ghost’s mask.
“How do you—”
“Don’t,” Ghost grits. “Not today.”
He wishes Soap wouldn’t respect him so much. He wishes the man was more naïve, more persistent. Then maybe it’d be easier to detach himself from the Sergeant and the bizarre feeling that swirls in his chest.
It isn’t just the wings. Something had changed, at some point, but Ghost knows it’s no longer just the wings.
Soap feels like his end, his demise, and yet also like his second chance at being Simon. Being human.
Infuriating still suits Soap. He gets under Ghost’s skin in all the worst ways imaginable, but the terrifying part is that somewhere along the line Ghost stops fighting it. Starts letting him, and it all spirals. Everything comes crashing and Soap becomes a part of Ghost’s space more so than he invades it. They teeter on the fringe between friends and something else entirely and Ghost selfishly hoards every last moment.
Days blend together. No matter where or when, Soap is the best and worst kind of company.
On one day in particular, especially.
“Why do you get your own private shower?”
Ghost doesn’t know why he ever let Soap into his quarters.
“Stupid question, Johnny,” he replies. Soap whirls around like he’s trying to take in every detail of the near barren room while Ghost searches for… something. He’s halfway forgotten. “Try not to knock anything over, would you? Fuckin’ hell.”
“Sorry,” Soap apologizes. His grin says he’s anything but.
Ghost huffs. He hears Soap step closer, peering over his shoulder as he roots through a drawer. He’s really forgotten now, with Soap’s warmth. His proximity. The way one of his wings wraps around Ghost without meaning to.
“Find it?”
Ghost pauses, then shuts the drawer a bit harshly. “No,” he says curtly. “I don’t think it’s here.”
Soap clicks his tongue. “Bummer.”
“Are you going to keep breathing down my neck, Sergeant?”
Soap falls away immediately, the tips of his ears and peaks of his cheekbones flushed red. Ghost’s cot creaks as Soap finds a seat there. The Lieutenant braces his arms on the dresser, fingers drumming an irregular pattern on its surface.
The air in their brief silence is weird, but Soap never takes long to bounce back.
“Wanna go spar?”
Ghost grunts. The affirmation seems clear enough for Soap.
But even with such a simple question, Ghost doesn’t know if he could say no.
He should have that time. Just one no. Because it would’ve saved him from the bumbling stumble out of the safe territory of friendship and into something far more confusing. Complicated. It would have saved him from his distant newfound dependency on Soap, the taste of him, the feel of him. The resentment and adoration and every sentiment between.
Saying no wouldn’t have given him an excuse to touch Soap’s wings whenever he wanted, and saying no wouldn’t have given Soap an excuse to peel back Ghost’s mask to expose Simon whenever he pleased.
The worst of it is that Soap still doesn’t know about Ghost’s past in its entirety. He doesn’t know what truly matters. Yet Ghost can’t ever bear to tell him.
Saying no would have saved Ghost from the need to overcome that obstacle.
If Ghost never lets Soap’s hands wander as their relationship blossoms, the latter never mentions it. Soap never questions when Ghost seldom has his shirt off around him, and even then has never had his back to the Sergeant. Because Soap is too considerate. And still far too good for Ghost.
Ghost supposes the discovery is inevitable. If only he had said no.
Mandatory leave has always been the bane of Ghost’s existence. Soap makes it tolerable, the first time they’re ever together, alone, in Soap’s cabin in the middle of nowhere, Scotland. But even in the rare moment of tranquillity, guilt festers in Ghost with no work to distract him. No lack of privacy to make excuses or keep him from overwhelming, devouring thoughts.
The shame is unrelenting, obnoxious. It rears its ugly head when it’s most unwanted—when Ghost is obligingly preening Soap’s feathers every time he’s asked. When Ghost helps stretch them, even when Soap has long since healed.
When Soap is splayed out below Ghost, wings spread and twitching with pleasure as he keeps his arms dutifully hooked around Ghost’s neck and nowhere else as Ghost lays him into the mattress. When Soap is above Ghost, head thrown back in rapture, the column of his throat fully exposed, and his wings thrown outward to their full expanse as he does to Ghost just the same.
Maybe it wasn’t just his wings anymore, but that certainly never meant Ghost had lost the obsession. And getting to appreciate them with such intimacy was hardly any help. It ruins him. Nourishes the guilt.
Soap discovers Ghost’s secret in a very Soap way. That is to say, incredibly stupid.
And Ghost was partially at fault for it.
Two weeks into leave is when Soap decides he wants to draw Ghost, which isn’t at all a strange request. The problem only lies in this times’ reason, of which Soap does not tell Ghost until it's too late—though perhaps Ghost should have been suspicious when Soap asked to draw his back profile.
It was too odd an ask for Ghost to have not been skeptical. But he’d still said yes because Soap hadn’t asked any more than that. And, of course, because it was Soap.
“Si?”
“Hm?”
The quiet scratch of Soap’s pencil pauses. “Do you have a favourite bird?”
Ghost tenses. He can feel Soap’s eyes on him, much too consciously.
He’d had one, once, by principle of his wingssake. But that was a long time ago.
The Lieutenant shakes his head. “No.” Ghost pauses, considering. “White-tailed eagle.”
Soap snorts, and his drawing resumes. “You’re just sayin’ that.”
Ghost angles himself to the side, so he wouldn’t have to crane his neck to look at Soap. The pencil stops again.
“I’m not,” Ghost says.
Soap rolls his eyes, ducking his head and peering intently at the image created by his hands. “You are,” he insists. He slots the nub of eraser between his teeth, pondering something. “I’m thinking raven.”
Ghost furrows his brows, adjusting himself to completely face Soap. “What?”
“If you had wings,” Soap explains, muses, almost. Staring closer at the sketch, Ghost sees the beginning outlines of the bend of no specific kind of wings protruding from what Soap had drawn of his back. His heart catches in his throat. “They’d be raven’s, I think. Because that’s what you’re like. Cunning. Graceful. An omen of death. An arsehole.”
Perhaps Ghost was more than just partially at fault.
“I disagree,” Ghost tells him. He bites his tongue before he can say any more.
Soap blinks up at him. “Then what would you say?”
Ghost swallows. His teeth grind together as his jaw clenches. He’s made a mistake.
In the end, Ghost just shrugs.
“I just disagree.” Ghost eyes the journal. “Draw whatever you want.”
He readies himself to leave the room. His scars suddenly pull tight on his skin, sore and aching like they get on rainy days.
Soap trails after him, drawing abandoned. He catches Ghost’s wrist, his expression pleading. “Did I do something wrong, Simon?” He asks.
Ghost can’t look him in the eye.
Soap presses onward. “Is it about drawing you with wings? ‘Cause I ken some flightless dinnae—“
“It’s not that,” Ghost mutters.
Soap discovering his secret was, in truth, entirely his own fault. It always would be; it only made sense. Soap had been the one to start unravelling Ghost, but Ghost would always be his own undoing.
Soap’s thumb rubs careful circles into the tattooed skin of Ghost’s forearm before it slips away and finds a home on Ghost’s cheek. “Then what is it?”
Ghost leans into the touch, lifting his own hand to cup the warmth Soap lends him. He turns his head to kiss Soap’s palm, desperate to calm his pounding heart.
He takes Soap’s other hand and pulls it to rest on the small of his back.
“Go ahead,” Ghost whispers.
Soap frowns. “Si, I—“
Wordlessly, Ghost just pulls Soap closer. Soap tucks his head in the crook of Ghost’s neck as was only natural, his other hand falling to join the other on Ghost’s back.
His fingers travel up slowly, uncertain. It’s a mangled sort of hug with the way Soap’s hands explore the fabric of Ghost’s shirt, applying only enough pressure to feel the divots and bumps of old scars.
Soap avoids the space between Ghost’s shoulder blades until last. Ghost can’t decide whether or not it’s on purpose that he does this, and he never plans on asking.
Ghost feels when Soap’s breath hitches, when he comes across the thick and gnarled lines Ghost had loathed for so long. Still loathed, with all his being.
Soap pulls away, though his hands linger. His face reads only a deep sadness. No pity. No impossible sympathy.
“Oh, Simon,” he murmurs.
“Asio flammeus,” Ghost recites weakly, finally able to match Soap’s gaze. “That’s what they were. Short-eared owl.”
“I bet they were gorgeous,” Soap says. Though his eyes still shine with something sorrowful, the teasing lilt of his voice builds again. “Right bonnie, just like the rest of you.”
Ghost scoffs. “You’re insufferable, Johnny.”
“You love it.” Soap grins—and does Ghost ever.
Ghost watches as Soap’s grin morphs into something softer, before he leans forward to kiss Ghost.
It begins kind, caring, gentle. Ghost loses himself in Soap, his lips, his smell. The way Soap’s wings curl around them both, shielding them from the world outside. From anything not Ghost or Soap. Simon or Johnny.
Then Soap’s hands find the scars again, and Ghost is set alight with the touch. Ghost deepens the kiss, gasping into Soap’s lips as the Sergeant digs his fingers into fabric, into skin where Ghost had thought the nerves had died completely.
He should’ve told Soap sooner, if only to have felt this ages ago.
When Soap breaks from him, Ghost chases the kiss until Soap’s smile is too wide to make him of any use.
The cabin is silent, save for the quiet panting as they catch their breath. Any later in the evening, the crackle of a fire might also be present, and any earlier in the day, the whistle of a kettle heating as morning tea is prepared.
But now, it’s only them.
“Let me see them,” Soap says. He tugs lightly on the hem of Ghost’s shirt. “Let me see you.”
Ghost nods. He couldn’t ever deny Soap.
Sex later would be tender. Slow. Soap would take care of Ghost—Simon—like he really always had, but right at this moment, Soap’s request is nothing beyond the words themselves.
Ghost sits on the edge of their bed, Soap just a bit further behind. His legs bracket Ghost’s hips, pressed tight as his chest is flush against the Lieutenant’s back, chin perched on a clothed shoulder.
Soap’s hand brushes over Ghost’s bicep, breath warm on Ghost’s neck. “Whenever you’re ready, Simon.”
Ghost’s movements are stilted as he lifts his arms to grab the back collar of his shirt. He pulls it swiftly off, but keeps it bunched in a fist at his side as Soap sits back and takes in the broad expanse of pale, scarred skin.
Soap’s touch is phantom, skirting cautiously over every mark. Again, he avoids the two vertical slashes until the very end.
“God,” Soap mumbles as he traces a thumb over one of the scars. Simon’s right wing—the first he had lost. “I’d threaten to kill the bastards that did this, but knowing you…”
A soft laugh is punched from Ghost’s lungs. “What I did was far worse.”
“I’m sure.” Soap presses a kiss to Ghost’s shoulder. His arms fall to wrap tightly around Ghost’s waist, gradually working his way across Ghost’s back with more light kisses on every scar that litters the space.
He takes his time on the two ugliest of them all, angry and pink still after so many years. Soap’s careful work sends a shiver up Ghost’s spine, and he revels in the attention.
No one has ever made him feel so loved, Ghost realizes.
Then innocence and love become impurity and passion in a blurred turning point as gentle kisses lose to the barest scraping of teeth and a tongue laving over skin never yet explored. Soap’s hold tightens, and Ghost follows him into oblivion.
Soap would later fall asleep with his face pressed into the space between the scars, the rest of his body entangled with Ghost in every sense. Ghost finds slumber in Soap’s quiet snoring and the even rise and fall of his chest.
Ghost had made a promise in the aftermath of tangled sheets and bruising kisses, to search for one of the few pictures he had kept of himself, prior to Roba. When he’d been fresh faced in the military, too naïve to know just yet what he had gotten into. Too clueless about the amount of trust he should have actually put in those alongside him in those photos.
Soap wanted to see, wanted to draw, properly, whatever image he’d already been conjuring in his head since that afternoon. And Ghost, now with such a significant weight lifted from his shoulders, his soul, is almost curious to know what exactly that may have been.
He’s almost curious to know if Soap could finally revivify that piece of Simon. Lord knows Ghost would put that faith in Soap.
He already has, in many ways. Speaking Soap’s name is a prayer in and of itself.
Ghost had wings once. So did Simon Riley. And maybe once they’d been something to behold, and something to keep him sane. Maybe they’d once been something to remind him that he was not his father, and never would be.
But regardless of who he is, or what he has, Ghost doesn’t think any of it matters, so long as Soap has him.
So long as he has Soap.