Chapter Text
Late afternoon sun warms the ground beneath his feet, and the trees around him shiver as a gentle gust of wind blows through the Italian forest Soap has tucked himself into. Below him, the base they occupy is filled with a casual commotion. Recruits being put through drills, supply crates being carefully inventoried, before being taken inside the myriad of concrete buildings that make up the base itself, the occasional soldier going from one structure to the next looking for who-knows-what for who-knows-why.
Getting peace like this is what makes him happy to be who he is.
A figure leaving one of the buildings catches his attention, and even from high up on the ridge, Soap would know that imposing frame anywhere.
Ghost strides between a few structures, checking between them as he goes as though he's looking for something, but he's headed towards the field where Soap can just make out their Captain playing referee for a game of touch football.
Soap watches curiously as Price turns to the Lieutenant, hands on his hips. It's only thanks to his sensitive ears that he's able to hear Ghost ask if Price has seen Soap recently. Price makes a show of looking around them, only briefly cutting his eyes up to where he knows Soap is, before telling Ghost that he’s not seen him around, asks him why. Soap doesn't need to hear what the larger man's response is, because he already knows. They're supposed to spar when Ghost is finished with paperwork from his last solo mission.
Soap stands from where he was only partly basking in the sun, before padding back down the far side of the ridge, returning to the little hideaway where he keeps his clothes, the soft crunch of sunbaked detritus under his large paws.
While they've been here, he has learned that no one bats too much of an eye if they see a wolf wandering the foothills of Italy, so long as he keeps his distance.
Back at base–and fully clothed–Soap cuts between buildings to stop by Price, so it at least looks like their captain relayed the message he was supposed to.
Price sees him coming and turns to him. “Ghost is looking for you, Sergeant.” The Captain says, glancing pointedly at something on Soap's jeans.
Soap looks down curiously to find a bit of dirt and dried grass up one side of his pant leg where it had been stowed away on the ground, and curses internally to himself.
“Aye, I heard.” He says, brushing the dirt from his jeans. “I like that ridge, but it might do well for me to find somewhere closer. Almost too far for me to hear much of what's going on down here.” Soap adds quietly, glancing around to make sure he's not been overheard.
Price simply nods sagely, brushing a bit of grass off Soap's shoulder, before gesturing for him to get a move on.
Generally speaking, finding Ghost is difficult on a good day, let alone when the man himself is looking for someone. Makes it almost impossible, unless your name is John Price.
Or John McTavish.
If he's being honest, Soap has a bit of an advantage over everyone else on base that he knows of. He can–quite literally–sniff Ghost out. While his sense of smell isn't as sharp as it would be if he was shifted, it's still enough to give him an edge. A noticeable edge. Which means he has to be careful when he gets to a crossroads in one of the buildings during his search, and maybe not be completely obvious about sniffing the air, tracking the smell of gun oil and iron dust.
Soap eventually tracks him to the rec room, where the man is doing a fine job of scaring the piss out of a group of recruits who can't seem to stop themselves from staring at him. He feels for them, truly. The Lieutenant may as well be a cryptid to some of them, only hearing about him or hearing about their pals seeing him between missions. But when Soap walks into the room and all eyes snap to him–Ghost with an intensity that is simply his, and the recruits as though he's some sort of savior–he can't help the chuckle that comes from him as he settles on the arm of the couch closest to Ghost.
“Och, leave the wee bairns alone, Lt.” Ghost's eyes narrow at him, surely gearing up to tell him to speak English, but Soap beats him to it. “The children, Ghost. You're something like a myth to them, you know?”
Ghost just looks at him for a moment before responding with, “Maybe that's the point, Sergeant.”
For a moment, the two just look at each other, assessing. Ghost, to see if he's going to follow up with anything clever, which he's not. Soap is assessing something else, though. There's a new smell clinging to the man next to him, like it's holding on to him with its dying breath–like whatever it could be has been scrubbed from his skin. Something about it sends a prickle down his spine in recognition. He knows this smell from somewhere, but he can't place it, no matter how hard he tries. There must be a look on his face, because Ghost's voice snaps him violently out of his thoughts when he speaks next.
“Something the matter, Johnny?”
Soap shakes his head, dismissing the question with a wave of his hand, before getting up and walking backwards to the rec room door.
“Thought you wanted to spar, Lt.” Soap calls back to him. Ghost watches him briefly, before standing to follow him to the base gym.
Soap is panting, collapsed on the ground after sparring with Ghost for the better part of two hours. His lieutenant sits on a bench, a towel wrapped over a very large and unfair set of shoulders. He’s so lost in thought about those exact wide shoulders that he almost misses the water bottle that’s tossed his way. Only animal reflex allows him to catch it before it can thunk against his head.
Ghost stands, pulls his mask down from where he’d lifted it to drink, and helps Soap get his feet back under him.
“I’m bleedin’ starved, Lt. Let’s go get some food, aye?” Soap asks, running his own towel over his sweat soaked mohawk. Ghost nods in response and brushes past him, calling behind him when Soap doesn’t follow immediately. That same smell from earlier, so much stronger when mixed with the larger man's sweat. It sticks in his nose like nothing else he’s experienced before, and it takes all his self control not to snort and huff to try and rid himself of it.
He wishes he could figure out what it is, because some part of him knows it. Intrinsically. Somewhere deep, the wolf part of himself wants to skirt around Ghost, which is an odd thought to him. Ever since he met him, Soap has always wanted to be around Ghost, and was never afraid of him like everyone else. But now, some instinctive part of him is telling him to stay away.
The two are in the middle of their meals, sat across from each other, when Soap hears boots at the door to the mess hall. He doesn’t look up–because he’s had decades of practice acting like a normal fucking human–even though he can smell the stress wafting in from the door. Can hear the heartbeat pounding double time in whomever’s chest it is, the poor sod.
Soap tears off a piece of pita bread Ghost hands him, but looks up when he realizes Ghost hasn’t pulled his hand back. Has left it hanging in the air between them, empty. Soap looks up at him and pauses at the strange look on the lieutenant's face. The look is…tense, almost? Perhaps just shy of grim, even. Turning to see what the problem is, all the joy from their earlier sparring match seeps out of Soap when he sees Price is standing in the doorway, a tense set to his shoulders. The captain beckons him with a wave when he knows he’s got Soap’s attention.
Johnny can’t help but think that maybe he’s the poor sod.
The flight to Scotland is a lonely one, as is the cab ride to his flat, and the one to his mother's house after it.
Everything is a bit blurry for the first two or three days, Price’s words rattling about in his head.
“I’ve just gotten from Laswell, who got word from HQ.”
Soap hadn’t bothered to sit, taking to pacing the width of the office, instead.
”You’re needed at home, Sergeant. You have a month of leave for bereavement.”
The captain’s words had stopped him in his tracks, his head whipping around so fast his neck cracks, but he is assured–repeatedly–that it’s not his mother, nor his sisters.
Only a cousin.
Only a cousin tends to be a bit of a big deal when some of the people you used to see every year for the holidays like to reminisce about the Picts, and how they miss spending the solstices with them under the moon. There isn’t much that kills his kind, and certainly not old age. Not really, anyway. Get old enough, and you go a bit dafty. There’s only so much time the mind can handle before things start to go…wrong.
The fact that a cousin has died–and suddenly–is cause for alarm within his entire family.
A pair of fingers snapping in front of his face brings him back down from his thoughts. His mother’s face is filled with concern, so he takes her hand and gently kisses the backs of her fingers, raising an eyebrow when he notices her bright red nails. She’s only ever used red when she’s seeing someone in all the years he’s been alive. Her face turns beet red, and he can’t help but chuckle. She rests her hand against his cheek, and he closes his eyes, a soft sigh finding it’s way out of his chest. When he opens his eyes again, his mother is smiling sadly at him.
“The pack is frightened, son.” His mother’s voice is gentle, warm like a summer breeze. There is worry in her face, however. Something has unsettled the wolves of Scotland.
“Tell me what happened,” he says. His mother closes her eyes, steels herself to explain. He looks around briefly to make sure no one else outside his family can over hear them. What she tells him nearly makes him sick.
His cousin, only a few years older than himself, found dead only a few kilometers from her home. Her home, where her family–including a pup no older than ten years–waited for her to return from a much-needed stroll when she simply never showed. Her eldest, a lass about thirteen, had gone to look for her and was able to follow the lingering scent of her mother.
It was the bairns howling that alerted the family that something was wrong.
Soap takes a seat on his mother’s couch and stares at the empty fireplace for long enough that his sisters have joined them, and are all gathered around on the floor. His family won’t do anything without his say for most things, but this? His mother had decided to move his cousin's family into her own home until the head of their family–their pack, if you wanted to be traditional about it–was present to decide.
Until Soap was there to decide.
When he asks to see where they found her, he expects more resistance than he gets. Maybe he’s been spending too much time around regular people. It shocks him, until one of his sisters explains that he leads their pack. And if that means his nose–his job–gets them answers? Then so be it. That’s all they want. Answers.
Moving slowly through thick trees and underbrush is nothing new to Soap. This is familiar territory in a multitude of ways. He lowers himself as close to the ground as possible, without hindering his movement, and quietly picks his way through the woods. The scent of his family is faint, but enough for him to follow. The scent of old blood is significantly less faint, however, and it puts him on edge. Rather quickly, he finds the child's path to find her mother and follows, cautiously. His ears twitch at every little sound, and he stills at every rustle of leaves.
Finally, after Christ knows how long, he finds it. Blood has seeped far into the earth, and he sits just shy of where the most damage to the surrounding forest is. His gaze wanders slowly, from tree to tree. Taking in scratches, broken limbs, and deep cuts that mar only one or two of the biggest junipers. Seeing the destruction makes his heart ache, and he realizes she must have put up one hell of a fight, if the felled oak across from him is anything to go by.
He stands and begins to make his way through the damage, stopping occasionally to inspect anything that catches his eye. A deep scratch where his cousin swiped at something and missed. Another where she didn’t miss and snagged something on her attacker that looks suspiciously like fabric, based on the small bit of thread stuck in the bark. The more he looks, the more a feeling of dread settles in his stomach. Soap finds a deep gouge in an old ash tree closer to the house than the others. He knows the mark from a knife when he sees one, and whoever wielded this one had some serious strength behind them, just looking at how deep it’s sliced into the wood.
Soap has a feeling he knows what happened, but he needs proof, and if he’s right, this is not where he needs to look. So, carefully and with his eyes on the ground, he moves further from the house. He sweeps his gaze from side to side, looking for something–anything–to prove him wrong. Once in a while, the sight of paw prints in the dirt, or fur stuck in the bark of a tree, tells him he’s on the right path. Soap manages to find where she had apparently shifted, the trail going from paw prints in one place to trainers in the next.
To try and lose whatever was chasing her.
Soap stops and takes in his surroundings more pointedly, looking for anything more than what he’s already found, and filtering it through what he’d look for if he was on a mission with the 141. To his left is a decently sized hill. Not quite the ridge he’d look for as a sniper, but it’s covered in thick foliage and would at least be decent to provide an overwatch if he wasn’t worried about the target. That thought is what draws him to the highest point. He approaches the thickest foliage slowly, not making a sound as he moves like the stalking predator he is. The ground under the largest bush is pressed flat, as though someone had laid there for a good amount of time. Crawling out from under the bush, he turns to go back down the hill, and that’s when he see’s it.
Just out of his normal line of sight, around the edge of the bush, is a large footprint. The sole of a boot pressed into a single patch of soft dirt. His stomach sinks and he bounds down the hill, frantically, in the same direction the boot print had pointed. Wherever it’s owner had faced. He doesn’t know that he’ll find anything–is banking that he won’t–and misses the glint of something in the leaf litter. The pad of one of his paws connects with something that /burns/, and he yelps, tripping over himself to get away from whatever it is. Chest heaving, he looks at the ground for the culprit and let’s out a deep, rumbling growl at the small plume of steam he finds not far from where he’d stumbled. Gingerly, he hobbles over, his heart pounding in his chest and his hackles raised.
Soap shifts back into his human form and picks up a nearby twig, pushing the leaf litter around to expose whatever it is that steams on the ground. For once, Soap really doesn’t want to be right, because if he is, the implications are horrifying for not only his family, but those like them.
“Shit,” he curses quietly, when he gets a good look at what he’d stepped on.
Picking it up with a still-green leaf, he returns to his cousin’s house to dress and tucks the item into a small leather pouch he keeps on his person for random little nick-knacks. The drive back to his mother’s is silent, he doesn’t even listen to music, focused only on the information he has to share and the knowledge of what really happened to his cousin.
Soap, his mother, and his cousin’s family are gathered around the kitchen island. Several pairs of eyes look to him expectantly, waiting for whatever he has to say. In silence, he upends the small pouch, it’s contents tumbling to the stone counter-top below. Confusion is the first thing to color the faces of those around him, and he really can’t blame them. It had taken him by surprise, as well. With a deep breath, he holds out his hand, palm up.
His cousin’s family all gasp in unison, and immediately start up with a commotion that makes his head ache. His mother’s face is grim, but when she meets his eyes, her gaze is stony with a fierce determination that he is only too glad to have gotten from her. The commotion around them only seems to grow in the silence, however, and he has had quite enough.
“Haud yer weesht, the lot o’ ye,” Soap barks and, after a moment, they all quiet down.
“Greer,” he calls to his cousin’s eldest child–the one who’d found her–and her eyes snap to his at the sound of her name. “Take yersel’ and the wee bairns up to bed. And no snoopin’, I’ll not tolerate it this night.” She simply nods, gathers up her siblings and shepherds them up the stairs.
The three adults wait in silence until the soft, even heartbeats of sleeping children–and one not so asleep, but stationary in her room–filter down through the ceiling.
“What do we do, lad?” His mother’s voice is nothing short of a terrified whisper, and it breaks his heart to hear her so afraid. But, his pain quickly turns to anger.
“Exactly what I tell you to. We have to spread the word of this. If a hunter is after wolves, they may be looking for others, as well.” Soap’s eyes glare down at the broken, silver arrowhead before them all. A fucking hunter in Scotland, where they aren't supposed to be. There was supposed to be an agreement with The Guild, for fucks sake. His anger at the slight colors his words.
“We need to make sure the Kerr’s know about this. The Murphy’s, too. If the Brown’s havnae said anything, then this hunter is lookin’ fae something specific. There are likely targets on everyone wi’ a different hide,” Soap nods to himself as he comes to another decision.
“I’ll call my captain, let him know what I found. He may be able to spread the word through other units with folk like myself.” The others just nod and wait for him to continue. “After all that’s done, lay low. If you can help it, no shifting and no one goes anywhere alone.” With a final look at the two before him, Soap turns and leaves, back to his own flat.
The call to Price is short and sweet. Says he’ll do what he can, but makes no promises. After that, the next couple of weeks sail by lazily. Soap is almost positive that this is the most consecutive amount of time he’s ever spent in his flat, and is just as unsettled by it as some of his neighbors, going off the suspicious glances they direct at him any time he comes or goes.
The day of the funeral slips by quietly, as though it’s trying not to spook anyone. He wears a suit for the first time, probably too long, and is terribly uncomfortable. Which is likely due to the ill fit. It’s strange to think that he’s grown since he last wore it, because he doesn’t feel any bigger. He can see it though, in the way his sisters measure his shoulders when they talk to him, like they can’t quite believe he was ever so wide. Or, when they bump into him, because the three are used to a Johnny who takes up a decent amount less space.
Soap excuses himself from dinner early that night, the claim of too many people ringing truer than he expects. He hugs his sisters, kisses his mother on her forehead, and promises to see her one last time before his leave is over. He knows they worry for him, but there’s not much to be done about that now. His family knows how much he loves what he does for a living, worry or not.
When he gets home, Price calls him, and Soap swears the man is psychic. He tells Soap that he’ll be on the way back to the 141 in three days, and that it’ll be nice to have him back. It’s honestly the best news he’s heard in a long time, and chooses to ignore the heart pounding in his chest, chanting Ghost Ghost Ghost.
When he finally lays down in bed that night, it takes him ages to fall asleep. The flat is too quiet, even though he can hear the couple next door talking late into the night. It takes everything not to let his mind wander over broad shoulders, blonde lashes and a thick Manchester accent that he has no reason to enjoy as much as he does. He’s never been shy or quiet about his sexuality, and Johnny can admit–quietly, to himself, in the solace of his flat–that over the time he’s spent working with Ghost, he has perhaps developed what some might call…feelings for the man. He shouldn’t, on a logical basis. Ghost is his direct superior, and should be off limits to him. But Soap has never been good about wanting what he’s not supposed to. Eventually, though, he falls asleep to the memory of Ghost's voice.
Soap wakes up to his doorbell, confused. He checks his phone and see’s he hasn’t missed any calls or text messages, and yet, the doorbell persists. Johnny clambers out of bed, pulls on a pair of sweatpants, and heads for his front door.
“Aye, ye roaster. Keep yer heid,” he calls out when he’s close enough to the door to be heard. Soap wrenches the door open, ready to give whoever is on the other side a piece of his mind, but ends up staring in bewilderment and the eldest of his sisters.
She rocks back on her heels with an impish grin. Soap rolls his eyes and leaves the door open for her to follow him, which she does. His sister sits at the breakfast bar in silence while he pulls the makings of a sandwich from the fridge. The silence prevails, mostly because any time his sister looks like she’s about to say something, he shoots her his best impression of Ghost’s blank stare. The same one he’d given Alejandro when the man asked if they knew Spanish. Much to his pleasant surprise, it works just as well on his sister as everyone else.
Sandwiches made–two for him, and one for her–he joins his sister at the breakfast bar. For a time, they eat in silence. Her eyes rover over the few things he keeps around, mostly small trinkets and second-hand furniture. The few photos he has with the 141 are scattered around, and he watches discreetly as her eyes linger on one or two. Sighing deeply, she flits her eyes over a few on his bookshelves filled with all manner of random trinkets from past missions. Whatever he could find to bring home to remind him of where he’s been.
“I’ve nae seen yer flat before,” she says quietly.
He nods and takes his own leisurely look around before he responds, just as quietly.
“I’m never here, so,” Soap shrugs. “I think mum came in once or twice when I first got the place, but honestly? I think the brownie frae three doors over has spent more time here in two months than I have in the last year. Maybe more.”
He looks at his sister and finds pity there. That’s not what he wants from her, and decides to tell her the truth of if all before he really has time to think about it.
“Look,” he starts, but has to stop himself to find his words, takes a deep breath before continuing. “I get more leave than I bother sharing. I just…stay where we are, or go someplace else.” His sister’s face is truly one to behold, filled with defiance at this revelation, like any good MacTavish should be.
“Noo, ye cannae go clypin’ tae maw. She’d hae ma heid if she ken,” he rushes to get out.
His sister purses her lips and stares at him–no, into him is more accurate–for what seems like hours, but is only a handful of seconds and he knows it. Then, in a truly insightful-and-perceptive-sister sort of way, asks him one of the few questions he’s never wanted to answer for his family.
“Why dinnae ye come home?” Her voice is terribly soft.
Soap turns around and leans his back against the counter. He has always hoped he would never have to say it, not to his family. He’s not embarrassed that the 141 is home to him. And it’s definitely not any single person in particular who happens to be in the same unit, he swears–lies–to himself. Having to tell his family that Scotland isn’t home anymore will break their hearts, though, and that’s the last thing he wants. But, he can’t very well lie to his sister. Telling them something is classified is one thing, but outright lying to them? He can’t–won’t–do it.
His eyes find the only photo he has of Ghost–after all the shit with Shepard and Graves–and stay glued to it as he answers his sister's horrible question.
“Because this isn’t home to me anymore, El.”