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The world is white.
As far as Ghost’s enhanced eyes can see, the entirety of Earth’s seventh continent is a sheet of flat, craggy ice. It’s still, as if even time itself has turned sluggish and numb; not even the wind moves, but the cold weighs as heavy as his pack on his shoulders, rips from him what little borrowed warmth he’s managed to extract from his last feeding. The glacier is flat, mostly, with a single mountain far, far off in the distance.
He’s utterly alone.
“What am I doin’ ‘ere?” Ghost mutters to himself, hiking his pack higher on his shoulders and trudging on from his bootprints sinking deeper into the snow every second. His fangs, retracted in his skull, ache with the fucking cold. The sun, oppressive and apparently here for twenty-two hours a day in November isn’t warm (still fockin’ burns, Ghost scoffs to himself), but it’s bright, bright like it’s mid-explosion and amplified by each and every snowflake beneath his feet. His light-sensitive eyes water, stinging and burning and itching even as he squints, even as he lowers his visor further, even as he glares down at the ground beneath his soles and the glycerolized blood stock bulging his chest pocket.
It’s uninhabitable here. Frozen ballsack, frozen bloodstock, frozen fingers, frozen nose — it’s more than a cold welcome, more than a British blizzard, more than a bomb going off twenty metres away and stitching his body back together after.
And yet, somehow, somewhere-
Soap lives here. It’s just like him to live here, to make his home where no one else dares to fuckin’ try; just like him to press the envelope and press Ghost’s buttons and press and press and press and live near Rothera Research Station in Antarctica. Antarctica. Soap lives here.
And Ghost came here, in a white mask and fatigues, for his body to give up and die in a ditch (best case scenario) before he can find his missing Sergeant and make a fucking fool of himself.
“Fuckin’ ‘ell.”
*
Two Weeks Prior
Pay attention, Ghost. Price’s gruff voice in his head grates on his nerves, even dulled by the time elapsed since his last feed from his Captain. Werewolves and their fucking mind links; he works better on his own, but this mission happened to fall into their laps (on Price’s desk) the day after Gaz took Roach off for leave, and it’s bad form to ask anyone back from leave, let alone a Leviathan overdue for a much-needed sleep and the siren tasked with protecting his safety in such a vulnerable state. So Ghost drank a vial of Price’s blood, on reserve for moments like this, and they suited up and booted up.
And here he stands, knives held aloft in clawed fingers and blood-tinged brown eyes on the end of the hall with Price at his back and Soap knelt between them disarming a biochemical bomb.
“Can ye see wha’ I’m workin’ on, here, Ghost? This wire, here?” Soap whispers, the hall deserted save for the three of them. Ghost glances down at Soap’s point of focus, shifting his torch from where it’s drifted to Soap’s knee back to the bomb he’s working on.
“No.” Ghost answers with a huff. “I’m on watch, remember?”
Don’t know why I have to hold a torch anyway. All the lights are on.
“Well that makes sense, how ye cannae see, because I cannae see neither!” Soap snaps. “Can ye pretty-please hold the torch like ye dinnae want me tae blow us up, Sir?”
A growl begins in his chest. Fucking Soap and his fear of the goddamn dark and disregard for military rank, pushing and pushing— “Hold your own damn tor—"
He’s cut off by Price’s elbow ducking into his ribs. Ghost takes a swift cleansing breath before he twists in place to glance at his Captain, who seems to be screaming in his skull.
Yes, Sir? He mentally snaps. Price glares up into the holes of his skull mask with obvious irritation, the Captain’s teeth flashing before they settle.
If you let this play out, we might get answers. About the lights, Price begs. Just follow the line of questioning, Lieutenant.
Ghost rolls out his shoulders, twists back in place, and holds his torch steady in a better place to see the bomb’s intricate guts Soap is pulling free of the casing and inspecting.
“Now tha’s more like it, see.” Soap pulls on a thick yellow wire, brings it up to his face, squints. “Bleedin’ Jesus. What color is this wire, LT?”
Price makes a noise, and Ghost slaps him on the bicep with the back of his hand.
“Yellow,” Ghost answers, eyes darting to the door at the end of the hall and back. When he makes eye contact with Soap, the Sergeant’s eyes are eerily dark in the torch glow, the opposite of a deer in headlights. Rather than reflecting, as most creatures with enhanced night vision do, Soap’s eyes seem to absorb.
“Thanks.”
Colorblind. What creatures are colorblind? Price asks in his head. What has… absorptive corneas?
Glawackus descendants can be colorblind, Ghost muses. Dark Elves see best in pitch black, where they wouldn’t see color. Never seen their eyes, though.
Because he clearly feasts on souls, Price interrupts with a snort, sharing an image of Soap inhaling a dinner roll from the mess along their mental link. Imagine the Cadets hanging off him and he eats souls. My money’s on something underground, maybe a mole-hybrid?
“Are ye talkin’ in yer heads, again?” Soap quietly murmurs, attention and gaze locked onto the bomb. “Way tae make a lass feel left out, Sirs.”
Ghost shrugs to his Captain. He’s imagined weirder things, in his quest to answer their question — the 141, all but Soap, have a running betting pool on what species they take with them on missions, sleep beside in the helo, train beside on base. Soap’s paperwork — and yes, it has escalated to Price showing everyone Soap’s paperwork, hoping any one of them might see a clue to help the group identify their Sergeant — has a blank spot where it should say species, and his only documented weakness is susceptibility to heatstroke.
Ghost staying behind for him in Las Alamas wasn’t tactical. He’d had to defend the decision to Shepherd, to Laswell, even to Rudy, but the only thing they’d known — the only thing they still know, besides, now, that he’s colorblind, and he doesn’t eat frequently, and his eyes absorb light maybe — about the Sergeant had been his weakness in the heat, and Price had the whole dog pack mentality thing anyway…
Nevermind the fact he wouldn’t have stayed behind for Roach.
“Sergeant,” Ghost catches his Sergeant’s attention in the form of a straightened spine. “Are you really colorblind?”
Soap’s tinkering sounds stop, and a chittering sound makes Ghost’s skin crawl. Ghost snaps his eyes down to look at his Sergeant, well-lit by overhead and torch, with his mouth on the bomb. More accurately, his teeth — clearly sharp, barbed, a predator’s full mouth of sharp-tipped weapons — chittering angrily around a welded joint.
“Sergeant, what the fuck—" Price kneels beside him and rips the bomb from his hands, staring with wide eyes. “What fresh hell?!”
The bomb is shredded, wires stripped and a single welded-on joint between Soap’s unnaturally sharp teeth. His eyes are pitch black in the direct light, just a black void, before Soap blinks and they’re blue again as quickly as they weren’t.
“The joint wouldnae come off, Cap. Go’ it off.” He spits the joint into his hand and tosses it off to the side, where it clatters between Ghost’s feet. The strength in his jaw to shred welded metal… “Now I jus’ need tae figure oot the biological agent, and I’ll—"
“If you think I’m letting you back at this again you are sorely mistaken,” Price growls, clutching the bomb to his chest tightly. “You can’t just put shit in your mouth.”
Captain. Not like he’ll crack a tooth, Ghost reasons.
Price glares. It’s the principle.
“Sir,” Soap interjects, a laugh in his chest. It chitters in his throat, but that sound could be bug-like, could be a cracked purr, could be daemonic — “Captain, let me—"
“Coming from the dog, you should take his fuckin’ advice, Sergeant.” Ghost kneels, too, and now they’re three sitting ducks with no eyes on the corridor and all eyes on the feral creature that is their stupidest, most secretive Sergeant. “He puts shit in his mouth all the time. If he’s telling you not to, listen.”
Watcher, Ghost.
Ghost ignores the psychic warning growling in his skull, staring at Soap, who somehow manages to appear as innocent as a bumbling wide-eyed puppy and as predatory as a shark all at once. Price stands and turns his back on them, bomb still in hand, and as soon as he does, Soap turns those beguiling eyes on Ghost, pushing, pressing, pushing, and it makes Ghost’s stolen heartbeat throb, his grip on his knives tighten.
He doesn’t think about it, because he doesn’t have the privacy in his own head to do so, but later he will analyze this and dissect this feeling until he can lay eyes on every last organ within it and know exactly how to kill it where it resides in his chest.
“Sir, it hasnae killed ‘is yet. Got the teeth, migh’ as well put ‘em tae use, ae?”
Soap bats his eyelashes, his mohawk fluttering in a non-existent breeze, and his scent leaks out around his throat mic like a siren song, like a calling card, like a pleading, wanton voice offering the blood in his veins up to Ghost. Only to Ghost; Price swears Soap only ever smells like soap, like tallow and detergent, and Gaz and Roach are useless when it comes to scents.
Ghost’s fangs drop in a grind of teeth against soft palate, and he knows by Soap’s small hitched breath that his red eyes have dilated. The smell, warm mulled wine, clears his throat like a December howling wind. Strips him dry. Sweet cream. Tart berry. Snow.
What are you, Johnny? Ghost thinks to himself. And why are you so-
He’s a freak, that’s what he is, Price grumbles, shredding Ghost’s thought process in half and stiffening Ghost’s spine with his interruption. And you’re enabling. Don’t let him eat the fuckin’ biochem weapon.
Ghost blinks, ripping his stare from Soap’s hypnotic face, and holds his hand out to Price for the bomb, his long claws clicking together impatiently. He can’t have these thoughts with Price in his head; he can’t have these thoughts at all, but certainly not with an audience.
Price drops the bomb in his outstretched hand.
Soap shudders. “It’s freaky when you two do that. Sir.”
Ghost gives his most annoying Sergeant back his chew toy, and decidedly fails to point out to Price when Soap rips out the infectious-contents vial from the casing with his jaw. Soap’s eyes glitter with such unbridled joy that Ghost can’t quite imagine spoiling it with mandated blood-borne pathogen safety training.
*
“Sir, d’ye ever regret enlisting?”
Ghost blows out a lungful of smoke, crossing his ankles and leaning his full weight into the brick behind him. It’s relaxing, standing behind the Officers’ quarters and smoking a cig beneath a sky full of stars he can see through the base’s light pollution. He used to stare out a too-small bedroom window and squint for hours trying to see stars through the cloud of smog and streetlights of Manchester, unable to pick anything out and half-convinced they were a hoax.
Convinced, until he dug himself free of a too-deep grave in Mexico and saw twice as many stars as anyone’d promised were up there, his enhanced night vision granted something worth looking at for the first time since his transformation. He stares up there now for a reminder he broke free. He made it out. He isn’t buried anymore. There’re stars, real ones in the sky, he isn’t buried-
Soap clears his throat, off to his left, reminding Ghost he’s been asked a question.
Ghost grunts in response. He’ll let Soap figure out what it means.
“C’mon, LT,” Soap rolls his head along the brick, turning his temple to the wall to look up at Ghost properly with eyes too big. Ghost doesn’t return the favor, focusing on the stars. “D’ye ever wonder… what ye woulda been, if no’ a soldier?”
Ghost cracks his neck, drops his butt on the ground, and smashes it into the dirt with his toe. He’s thought about it; thought about the butcher job he held for a few weeks as a kid, thought about the extended leave he took to get Tommy sober and the hours he’d spent in a cafe waiting for the anonymous meetings to wrap up next door, thought about a little blond boy who dreamed about firefighting as a man.
“No.”
It’s more than anyone else has gotten out of him today. Ghost isn’t known for soliloquy.
Soap is never one to let that stop him from pressing, pressing, pressing.
“I woulda been an artist,” Soap offers, too loud and quick on the draw for the late hour and their proximity. “Woulda gone tae art school, been top of my class there, tae, LT. Draw weddin’s an’ that. Maybe illustrate books fer bairns.”
Ghost scoffs. Tells a lie. Doesn’t feel the words clawing their way deeper back down his throat like they have all day for everyone else; watches them fall effortlessly from his lips. “You’re not top of your class here, Sergeant.”
There’s another cigarette in his hand. He doesn’t remember lighting it, pulling it free, taking a pull, but smoke billows from his mouth and settles around them like a curtain.
“Och, bile yer heid. Top records in everythin’ Gaz doesn’t, damn half-blood siren; I did well enough in Las Almas, tae. Ah’m top o’ yer class, Sir.” The way he talks to Ghost should have him sent for laps. Latrine duty. Recruit babysitting. Scrubbing Ghost’s boots after every mission with the toothbrush that goes in Soap’s mouth. Even the joke about Gaz, it’s suggestive, endlessly pressing, seeking the boundaries of what he can get away with; it matches his eyes, too-bright blue and framed with cocked brows, smirking lips, off-center nose, laugh lines.
No one else could get away with a second of pressing the way MacTavish does. No one else would try. I’m top of your class, Sir.
“English, MacTavish.” A long draw off his cigarette, the end a bright cherry.
“Ye ken damn well what I mean.” A pause, intentional, disrespectful, pressing. “Sir.”
Ghost finally turns his head when Soap laughs. Ghost makes eye contact and lets that oppressive hydraulic press of a stare hold him in place against the brick, push and press and push until he’ll inevitably explode.
Soap’s eyes are already on him, of course. They always are. His Sergeant is many things, but subtle has not often been said. Soap leans with his right shoulder against the brick, the one Ghost dug a bullet free from in Las Almas, so he can face Ghost with his whole body, chest first. Soap looks up at him and lets him blow cigarette smoke over his face; lets him push and press back with the insulting gesture. If anything, Soap’s eyes pierce deeper, cheeky pout parted as if to breathe him in, leaning in through the fog to meet him push for push. The movement, Soap’s rising heart rate, his flushed face brings his bloodscent to the surface, pulsing with each beat of Soap’s strong heart in his chest.
Soap’s bloodscent should be put in bullets, should coat knives and stain hands. It’s sharp itself, a promise of violence threaded beneath firm, taut skin. A fruit Ghost should should should bite into and burst over his tongue, juices running down his chin. He can’t place its species — none of them can, the open-book Sergeant’s only held secret — but fuck if it doesn’t call his name, cold-hot shot of bourbon.
Ghost knows his eyes flash red. He can tell when his biology betrays him by the spark in Soap’s eyes, the quirk of one corner of his lips, self-satisfied pride arrogantly assuming that any reaction must be about him, even in a room full of other soldiers. Fuck, Soap’s annoying when he’s right.
Ghost grunts, tapping his cig to drop the ashes to the ground between his boots. As he brings it back for another drag, the smoke clinging to the air not quite enough to mask Soap’s fucking blood, his Sergeant watches scarred lips and aching dropped canines wrap around the paper and throat clench around a pull with all the intensity of a vampire watching a slowly gushing wound; like he wishes he could consume the sight whole. Fists clench where they’re crossed over Soap’s chest, veins in his arms bulging blue with repressed something. His eyes blink, slowly, a trick of the light turning them entirely black for a breath before returning as blue as always.
Subtle is not a word often used to describe Soap MacTavish.
A door opens, somewhere further away than the radius Ghost has learned to give a fuck about. It’s late enough it could be fire watch or a Drill Sergeant getting up and ready for another day of fucking with recruits. Either way, it’s not enough to disrupt Ghost’s cigarette he clings to.
With the sound of the metal door scrikin’ in the cold morning, Soap’s eyes drop to Ghost’s boots and he backs up a step, throat clearing and arms dropping to a faux-attention. He pulls away because he has to; Ghost did the same on the Austria mission, and just like then, all that pressure, stare, breath, proximity — it’s immediately relieved. Soap retreats within himself, the cheek and daring suggestive hints of his species reeled back behind a proper respectful human mask.
“Braw day, LT,” Soap murmurs, the last hint of his sass finally at an appropriate volume for the hour (murmured just for him, just for Ghost), before backing away, turning his eyes then his chest from Ghost when he’s rounded the corner of the Officers’ quarters’ building. He leaves a faint trace of wine on the wind and a grinding in Ghost’s jaw.
Fuck, Soap’s annoying.
*
Price has wheedled with Laswell, has asked around Soap’s previous superior offers, has sought out calls home (all unanswered, to his dismay — it bothers Alpha Dogbreath that Soap’s family, his pack, wouldn’t answer a call destined to be about him, but Ghost understands sending the infuriating MacTavish away and refusing to take him back), but the 141 is no closer to a concrete answer on the Sergeant’s species than they were when he first laid boot to tarmac.
It bothers Price the most, because he has that pack complex insisting he live inside his soldiers’ pockets and know when they shower. Gaz has interest in the answer, if only to finally put to rest Soap’s rumors of Gaz’ less-than-pure heritage by proving Soap is biologically immune; but really, the draw, the attention grabber, the headline — Price’s betting pool.
The chance to make money off Price’s den-mother antics means there are no bounds to the shit Roach and Laswell will pull to be the one to figure it out. Down to staring at Soap enough for Soap to come to Ghost because, somehow, Ghost is less creepy to him than Roach.
Soap-color-confused-question? Gary signs. His mother tongue doesn’t follow any grammatical structure that Ghost can identify, so his sign is less than clear on a good day, but his vocabulary is masterful in an attempt to compensate.
Gaz nods, shifting forward in his seat to lean his elbows on his knees. His siren glamor is held at bay by his signature hat, charmed with elven magic Ghost barely understands to keep the eye roving. He’ll take whatever magic it is over the magnetic, distracting draw of Gaz without it.
“How’s he an artist then, Cap? Are you sure he’s colorblind?”
Price mumbles as he notates. He has a notebook (a la MacTavish) dedicated to recording the Task Force’s observances and theories. “My current guess is a mole-hybrid…?”
“But Sir, he doesn’t dig, he blows dirt up!” Gaz cuts him off. “Plus, Ghost puts up with him. Can’t imagine a bloodsucker and a mole striking up a friendship, two solitary species like that.”
Despite talking about Ghost, no one looks to the corner he sits in, shrouded by shadow. He’s used to it, being near non-speaking most days depending on the company.
Soap-smell-ocean-salt, Gary signs with no small amount of irritation.
“Yes, yes, Sanderson. You think he smells like salt.” Price absentmindedly waves him off, staring down at the notebook in his hands. “I suppose sea serpents would eat rarely, wouldn’t have cones for color vision, and they wouldn’t pay attention to circadian rhythms, living deep enough to ignore solar activity and spend time with Ghost at night…”
And just like that, Ghost watches his Captain lose himself deep in thought. Ghost knows there’s no way Soap is a sea serpent, the chief reason for that being Ghost’s knowledge of what sea serpents smell like — unpleasantly salted, like over-cured meat.
Gaz and Roach mutter back and forth, Roach’s Leviathan language a guttural growl that makes Ghost’s fangs drop in a defensive maneuver and hair stand on end. Ghost knows Leviathan speech is said to mimic tectonic plate shifts, as those were the first thing Leviathans needed to communicate to one another, but it’s two separate experiences to factually know that and to listen to the language itself. Every time Roach speaks, it’s as if a canyon begins bellowing.
“I think sea serpent is a good guess. No— a great one. I’m shifting my bet.”
Groans fill the room as Price brings pen to notebook.
“I saw ‘is teeth shift, they were barbed.” Ghost isn’t sure what makes him open his mouth to say it, but his throat resents the action and aches something fierce. Price snaps his eyes to Ghost in the darkened corner furthest from his desk. Ghost is hard to notice when he wants to blend in, but the werewolf captain’s enhanced night vision can pick out his skull-mask outline just vaguely enough to make almost-eye contact.
Gaz, on the other hand, jumps in his seat and grumbles something to the tune of spooky bastard.
Still got it, Ghost thinks to himself. He crosses his arms over his chest and takes his time running his tongue along the protruding fangs that won’t recede from his gums. Damn Leviathan triggered his survival instincts.
“Barbed teeth, yes…” Price hums to himself, solidified in his sea-serpent guess. “I’ll take it.”
Gaz insists, with his whole chest, that Soap is a human, and every odd behavior is a carefully planned long term joke. Eventually, Soap will reveal his humanity, and they’ll all feel stupid, and then they’ll kill him for playing such an elaborate prank.
“Goddamn it, I’ll have to change mine now. Are you sure?” Gaz asks, lifting his ballcap for a second to run his palm over his hair. The world slows, Ghost’s preternaturally enhanced reflexes dull like an old blade, and the warm golden light from Price’s desk turns the whole room hazy. Golden hour. Gaz is golden, an Adonis, and when he opens his mouth to speak, Ghost hangs on the promise of a spoken word.
A death threat would sound heavenly off lips like Gaz’s. Would his blood taste sweet, like fruit? Would it curl around Ghost’s tongue like a promise, drag him to the ocean bottom?
“You hear me, you spooky bastard?” Gaz asks, sitting his cap back on his head.
Ghost grunts with the visceral snap back into his body, the glamor once again concealed and his eyes sent skittering past Gaz’s face. His head jerks off to the side, a chill down his spine as his senses gather all the information Gaz’s glamor had dulled — eyes on him, eyes on him, Dogbreath in the room, eyes on his face mask over his teeth he’s defenseless like this. Defenseless alert Dogbreath in the room—
“Dismissed.” Price barks, snapping the book closed. On cue, Ghost can hear the excited stomping of one Soap MacTavish running down the hall to enthusiastically join what he’d irritatingly call a hangout.
*
It’s snowing on base. Ghost doesn’t mind the dreary weather; he doesn’t mind the lack of sunshine to hide from. Vampires may not turn to dust in the light of day, but it’s just a tad smoky around him in direct sunlight, shall he say — and he doesn’t wear the layers to hide his skin from just prying eyes.
The five of them, in the 141, are all built in some way or form for the wintry cold. Soap is a walking space heater, the warmth of him a blazing trail along Ghost’s side when he sits beside him in the mess hall; Gaz is built for the ice-cold oceanic winds and waves, and if Roach had his way he’d live outside the reach of sunshine altogether in deep, deep sea. Price has his body hair and heated core to protect from the cold, and vampires have anti-freeze proteins that allow them to fall dormant when cold enough rather than dying a painful-then-numb death from hypothermia.
It’s snowing on base, and Ghost wants, more than anything else, to nap. Those anti-freeze proteins are hard at work signalling his dormancy is near. The cold slips in beneath every door crack, through the glass of every window, and when he has to stand outside and direct a cohort of Cadets through a series of timed obstacle challenges, no amount of coats, masks, or layers could keep out the baltic fucking chill that seeps into his bones. He needs a meal, a large bag of blood in a warm fucking teacup, and then he needs a nap.
“Don’ tell me you’re fockin’ done?” He snaps at the Cadets, hands stuffed deep into the heated pockets of his coat and eyes squinting against the snow. The chorus of huffed Sir, no Sir doesn’t soothe him. His hands are truly numb, too little blood circulating in his system, and the joints in his wrists and ankles are beginning to creak and ache.
The Cadets start up again, another cycle through the obstacle course, still in their teams of three. His internal timer starts, and if he weren’t so well familiar with the feeling of falling face first into frozen mud, if he weren’t so pissed to be out here watching them fail, he’d wince when two of them do just that.
Something bumps his ankle, something hot, searing like a poker brand even through his clothing, and he snarls at the intruder with curled lips and flashing eyes until he turns on Soap standing beside him at attention, eyes on the Cadets.
Soap, wearing only an SAS grey t-shirt and jeans. Soap, looking for all intents and purposes, like it’s twenty degrees and breezy.
“Sergeant.” Ghost settles himself back in place, hands crossed at his low back. Another Cadet team crashes into the frozen mud, and an Assistant Drill Instructor screams for them to give him twenty in the ice.
Ghost’s attention is now torn. The Cadets apparently need his eyes to tell them when to fuckin’ breathe, but Soap beside him is a vision. Steam sizzles as snow lands along his skin. Soap grins with teeth too sharp, briefly turning his face up to peer at Ghost only for more snowflakes, large and delicate, to melt into the heat of his upturned cheek. As his neck stretches and their eyes meet, Ghost inhales, as if he could catch the bloodscent on the freezing wind with a nose as numb as his own.
Hello, blue eyes.
“LT,” Soap sighs, at peace in this weather, “S’been tae long since it last snowed.”
Ghost watches, mesmerized, as Soap resumes attention, formal and regulation and workplace appropriate and wrong, his mohawk whipping in the shrill wind and his expression one of serenity. Soap closes his eyes.
Wrong, without the pressing. Without the pushing and prodding and poking and pressure. The cold is getting to him. Maybe he’s cracked.
“One snowman turns to the other,” Ghost starts a joke, also at attention, unwilling and unable and un— un— un— to turn and give Soap what he craves for himself. He starts a stupid joke just to have that face, those eyes look at him again. He’s stupid, truly and inadvisably stupid, throwing any words he can into the unforgiving wind to have those annoyingly blue eyes pinning him in place. It’s humiliating, what he’ll do for another moment beneath Soap’s gaze.
Johnny generously obliges, blinking away a snowflake caught in his lashes, glancing from his periphery to look at Ghost, to raise a brow and quirk his mouth in a silent oh? that breaks regulation but isn’t enough. It’s annoying that in broad daylight Soap can’t go chunnerin’ on and it’s Ghost’s turn to open his mouth and debase himself to ask for attention; it’s annoying that Soap has made him not only grow used to the Sergeant’s mithering but now actively seek it out. Fuck Soap.
“Asks, ‘can you smell carrots?’”
With a wink and a slow-growing grin, his Sergeant reaches behind himself with his booted foot to bump something in the snow. Following the long stretch of his leg to watch it roll closer to him, Ghost catches sight of a thermos — what must’ve touched Ghost’s ankle before. Of course it was hot.
“No carrots, bu’ I do smell blood. Caribou tae on the nose?” Johnny answers, unmoving from attention, the double-pun shaking his shoulders with laughter.
Ghost scans their surroundings for stray DI eyes before he snatches the thermos in numb fingers, fighting with the twist-lid and flexing his wrists to force feeling back into them. What had he said, before, about a teacup — fuck a teacup. He needs it any way he can get it, it’s so fucking cold, he just needs a nap…
His numb fingers won’t grip the thermos. His grip strength is off the fucking charts, he uses those stupid pinch-machines all the time, but this cold for this long and he’s useless, defenseless, he’s such a fucking—
Johnny reaches over and unscrews the lid, enough for Ghost to wrench it off the rest of the way and bring the steaming thermos to his lips. His mask is quickly folded up out of the way, Johnny’s carnivorous eyes sinking into the exposed scar tissue and flesh.
Soap’d seen his face, all of it, in Los Almas. The others had tittered, had guiltily looked away from the criss-crossed bite marks marring Simon’s face; his turning had been violent and possessive and dehumanizing in more ways than one, two bites almost blinding him in his right eye and many more crossing over his cheeks. Between his father’s Glasgow Smile and Roba’s poison bites, Ghost’s not easy to look at. But Soap… Johnny’d unapologetically stared, jaw dropped in disgust or awe or horror or something, and his eyes had turned fully black for the first time in that safe house, staring at Ghost’s wrecked face.
Just like then, Johnny stares intently at the exposed scar tissue, the rest of his body still rigid and uniform and proper while Ghost drinks heavily from the thermos, but his eyes pressing, pressing, pressing in his periphery until Ghost feels like squirming. Almost immediately, his starved, freezing body absorbs the warmth from the blood in his mouth, his core settling and his cramping comforted by the richness. Caribou blood is rich, the way thick molasses used to be to Ghost’s human stomach; it sits heavy for just a moment before it’s absorbed and distributed, settling his cramped, cold limbs with something not quite warm but almost as relieving.
That’s the struggle, in being a vampire. He’s never satisfied for long, and if he is, it’s always a compromise.
“Dinnae ken yer lips turn blue when yer hungry. Shoulda brought it oot tae ye sooner, Sir.”
Ghost blinks; he drags his mask back down and screws the lid on the second half of the hot blood stock, hoping to make it last a bit longer. Soap has snapped back to face the cadets with a blank expression, spine rigid; Ghost almost asks why, before spotting Price and another Captain walking from one meeting to the next, facing their direction. Ghost itches with the loss.
“Y’did fine, Sergeant.” Ghost sniffs, mouth full of the metallic scent of caribou. He can barely distinguish Johnny’s bloodscent from the thin film over his tongue. The cold has seeped in between them, robbing him of the gifted space heater that orbits him in secret. “Lived through worse.”
Already, the numbness in his fingers begins to radiate once more up his forearms, climbing like vines up the veins of his legs. Lethargy makes him slow, makes him a right arsehole, and any sympathy he’d held for the cadets doing push-ups in the snow evaporates like sweat off Soap’s exposed skin. Ghost wants to sleep, but more than that, wants to carefully remove Soap’s skin from his body and wear it like a parka, wrap himself up in it and the bloodscent it carries and wake the fuck up.
That’s a normal thought to have about his most annoying Sergeant.
“Bet ye have, LT.” Eyes on the Cadets, softer, quieter, more to himself if not for Ghost’s sensitive hearing, Johnny mutters, “Doesnae mean ye need tae again.”
*
“Heard one, but it’s disappointing,” Price is answering a question Ghost didn’t hear. “Don’t interrupt me with the Spanish Inquisition like last time, yeah?”
Price tells them a story, making eye contact with Ghost more out of concern (even though vampires are solitary creatures, Price’s mental connection with his pack is a persistent knock in the back of Ghost’s skull whispering concern, alright?, worried, concern, as consistent and everlasting as the sound of Price’s wolf-quick heartbeat in Ghost’s ears) than anything else; the story comes from Soap’s previous Captain and cost the 141 a few more imported cigars than Price would have liked, so he'd rather you muppets listen, he explains.
“Soap and three commanding officers were sent to the Scottish Highlands to investigate a complaint.” Price begins, golden eyes of a dog flashing in the low light of his desk lamp. “Women walked out on the snowy bankside, locals who know the mountain, but they disappeared— one moment, out on a walk, tending to their cattle, and the next, gone. No idea what monster was out there takin’ ‘em, but the locals knew better than to try to take it out themselves. Sucked ‘em beneath the surface. Soap is the only one to make it back, and the only words in his report are ‘the beast was indescribable.’”
Ghost furrows his brow, not because the story scares him or bothers him — he’s been the only one to return from more missions than he feels comfortable counting — but because he didn’t know the ending before Price shared it. Soap has never mentioned that mission; between the vapid updates about his nieces and a buddy from basic and the lads from my footy league back home and didja remember Terry-Thomas died, they’re doing a five-year memoriam marathon soon, Soap never told him about a mission in Scotland with something indescribable.
It grates on Ghost’s nerves. He’s used to knowing this shit before his ball-chasing Captain finds out. He’s used to not— to not being surprised, when it comes to Soap.
“What do you think it was, Sir?” Gaz asks, scratching the back of his neck. “On Soap’s mission?”
“They’ve got no idea.” Price sighs, his chair creaking beneath his weight as he leans forward to put his forearms on the edge of his desk. “I’m wonderin’ if it might’ve been a misplaced yeti.”
“Yeti, that far south?” Gaz snorts. “Soap’s bad with the heat, but he isn’t that bad.”
Roach makes a noise Ghost assumes to be in agreement, his hands fluttering over the buttons on his coat.
Ghost settles back into his chair, letting the conversation unfold around him while he reels in the fact Soap didn’t tell him something.
I woulda gone tae art school. Ghost knows what Soap’s childhood dreams are, knows when he takes a big shit, knows when he wants Gaz to believe he got laid on leave and knows what he actually did instead of getting his dick wet (drawing ducks, eating tae many tatties, Ghost, bu’ they’re well fuckin’ tidy, way Ma makes ‘em, teaching his eldest niece naughty words, and playing football.) Why didn’t he know about this mission? Why does it set him off so much to find one single thing the Sergeant hasn’t forced him to hear about ad nauseam?
“What else hunts in ice and snow? No one saw the creature once other than Soap!” Price reiterates, pushing his hat back on his head. “Could it be a dragon? Everyone knows there’re more dragon species out there than official lists, they breed like rabbits. And they’re strange fuckers, they are!”
“Ice dragon…” Gaz mumbles, shrugging a shoulder. “Stranger things have happened than a fire-breathing monster living in an ice shelf.”
Roach signs money-ice-dragon-same-number.
Price pulls out his only locked desk drawer to reveal his little black book. Gaz, for €450, on ice troll; Roach, for €400, no longer for Glawackus but ice dragon, unofficial; Price with €325 on sea serpent; Laswell with $375 on a Loch Ness descendant; and Ghost, €300 all on selkie-incubus mix.
Ghost shifts in his seat, drawing Price’s attention. It’s easy to forget, hidden away and silent, that Ghost is visible to eyes other than piercing, pressing blue, but when Price’s golden eyes follow his movement leaning forward in his chair, it’s impossible to ignore the fact he is, highly so, in the dark room. In his head, the whisper insists, concern, alright?, curious, worried. Damn anklebiters and their mental links.
“I suppose you’re still convinced of your selkie-incubus theory, Lieutenant,” Gaz laughs at Ghost’s expense, leaning back against the couch he shares with Roach and crossing his arms. “Would explain him asking me if I ever get insecure, working with, quote, ‘a braw specimen like mysel’,’ incubi being immune to sirensong.”
Roach pats Gaz’s shoulder to console him, and Ghost huffs a single laugh under his breath despite himself. Johnny’d jerked around, looking right at Ghost when he’d said it, waiting for approval or humor or something in Ghost that he’d been sure not to give him. Johnny winds Gaz up, half the time, just so he has an excuse to look at Ghost (or so it seems to Ghost, who is used to going without notice as he pleases around base, hidden by the shadows.).
It’s infuriating, if only because it is sort of funny, but Ghost can’t show it, not wanting to egg the insufferable Sergeant on.
Price’s eyes snap to Ghost, discomfitting where attention digs in and stakes into the relaxed set of his shoulders, the bulk of his height, the pleats and folds of his mask where it rides up his neck and Ghost knows it shows a human dental imprint. The steaming mug of human AB-Positive blood in his hands shakes under the scrutiny. Price’s eyes settle there.
“A selkie would be comfortable in a climate like Scotland, ’specially close to the coast as they were,” Price offers with a shrug. “You’ve got something there, Ghost.”
Ghost’s brows relax beneath his mask, and his eyes glitter in the low light. He knows his bet is good; while Soap gives Gaz a hard time about his siren heritage, no one can fake immunity to a full glamor. Gaz has gone so far as to ask Soap for a massage, shirt off and ballcap in another room, and Ghost from the corner had been so strongly sucked into the void of glamor that he missed Soap’s reaction, coming to only to see Gaz so angry he could spit and Johnny staring, pressing, always looking at Ghost, unreadable expression on his face. There are few species capable of withstanding a siren’s call, and incubi/succubi are at the top of the list. Zombies in bloodlust don’t look as human as Soap does, and Soap wouldn’t struggle with heat or the dark the way he does if he were a daemon.
“The rest of the incubus genes clearly went to his sisters,” Gaz grumbles. “Ugly bastard.”
When Ghost stiffens, Price’s whisper in his head grows more insistent. Curious, intrigue, question, tell me?
Fuck him and his mutton chops, and most importantly, fuck Soap.
*
Gaz and Roach are a… legally inadvisable duo of friends that Ghost told Price would be a problem. Not just because the sea creatures have a shared sense of humor that no one else really catches — save Soap chuckling at a rare one-liner, but Soap’s got a broken sense of humor to begin with and increased exposure to their brand of brain rot as a fellow Sergeant — but also because both Sergeants have a dizzying intolerance for alcohol, and insist on making it Ghost’s problem when they elect to tempt fate with said intolerance.
“Augh… Lieutenant, please,” Gaz groans, holding his stomach tightly. “I gotta… base?”
Ghost takes an unaffected sip from his bloodied bourbon, sighing as the alcohol burns in his throat and the blood warms everything else. Mask rolled up to his nose, gloved claws dully clicking against the glass in his hand, he can’t bring himself to give a fuck when the music isn’t too loud here, his drink isn’t too heavy a pour, and his view of Soap losing a game of pool is unobstructed. His back is to the pub counter, one foot resting on the lower rung of his stool and the other flat on the floor — note to self, try a pub with a higher counter next time.
Ghost grunts wordlessly at Gaz, knowing he’s expected to respond in some way. Johnny chalks up his cue, laughing at some taunt Price must have leveled his way. For a second, Soap’s eyes skitter across the room in a focused squint to briefly land on Ghost, and then the exits, before being pulled back to Price. His face is pink, smile looser than it usually is under anyone’s eyes but Ghost’s. Is Price really that funny? What did he say-?
“Almost las’ call, Sir,” Gaz moans, leaning forward so his head hits the counter. “C’mon, LT, don’t—"
Ghost cuts him off with a second, more aggressive grunt just as Johnny lowers himself to a squat to see the table at eye level. His colorblindness has to be a disadvantage, but Johnny hasn’t given up, his third loss imminent.
Ghost’s view of Johnny standing up and leaning over to take his shot is obstructed by an equally miserable Roach, sloppily signing something to the effect of bed-sleep-Roach-Gaz-sick. As his smallest fingers drag down his chest with the final sign, his eyes haze out and a lone tentacle crawls up his shirt collar to curl protectively over his throat, like it’s holding his bile back by itself.
“Bother Price,” Ghost snaps, patience worn thin. His hunger returns like an itch he’s scratched to hell, but when he lifts his drink to his mouth once more, the blood and alcohol have separated into two distinct layers, an unappealing, congealed pour.
Gaz groans pitifully as Ghost sets his glass back down, and Roach widens his blown-out eyes in a look possibly attempting to be beguiling, still blocking Ghost's view of Soap getting his arse handed to him.
It fails to beguile, and only partially because of the beginning of a retching in Roach’s throat.
“I’m ‘onna hurl, Sir.” Gaz’s scriking is accompanied by the weight of his sweaty, clammy forehead leaning on Ghost’s shoulder, his hat brim resting atop Ghost’s shoulder like a shoulder board on his uniform would; the Sergeant wraps himself around Ghost’s gloved arm, a line of warmth from inebriation. “Whole pub’s spinnin’… but you, spook— fucker.”
Ghost growls, but apparently he needs to re-evaluate the amount of venom in the action, because neither Sergeant is dissuaded from his proximity by the sound crawling across the hardwood floors, despite others scooting their stools further from the three of them in response.
Roach just signs, desperately, intently, alternating hands, throat working, pleasepleasepleaseplease?, until he’s bowled aside rather effectively by one panting, black-eyed Soap.
“Gerroff ‘im, ye wankers,” Soap snarls, staring with nothing short of contempt at the place on Ghost’s bicep where Gaz’s face has dragged a sweaty path to rest. Gaz’ hat has ridden up off his head by the motion, leaving Gaz with his glamor on full display. “Cannae ye hear ‘im growlin’, means ye back the fuck aff ‘im…”
Gaz looks up, still wrapped around Ghost’s arm, and whimpers, face turning green — but prettier than before, somehow. Soap’s tirade is drowned out by the sparkle in Gaz’s eyes. His hair is so perfectly coiled atop his head, thick and shiny. Healthy. Ghost’s longer claws could sink into it and not even hurt the man until he tugged. Gaz’s body is what an incubus would dream of — strong, wired, slender, a sleeper build and a brilliant-white smile to match when he’s less inebriated.
A deep chittering sound makes the hair on Ghost’s neck stand on end, his fangs dropping in a defense mechanism against a threat unidentified. Gaz’s eyes flash with fear, and he snatches his hat to jam it back on his head, faded Union Jack as familiar as it is welcome.
Ghost snaps his eyes from the siren as soon as he can, relief flooding his system from the release. He looks around for the low-pitched clicking of jaws — but the only person near him is Soap, and Soap doesn’t have pincers or bug jaws at all. He’s just glaring at Gaz, eyes black until he pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes for a second.
When he opens them, he’s all Johnny and no monster. Blue eyes trained on Ghost, anger and something bigger twisting his mouth into a scowl, apology on his lips; Johnny’s upset, for reasons Ghost can’t fathom. Maybe the consecutive losses bruised his considerable ego.
“Think it’s time we paid our tab, lads,” Price cuts in over Soap’s shoulder, patting him with one wide palm and kicking up a scent cloud of both wet dog and angry. Soap’s blood is steeped with his fucking anger, enough that Ghost can taste it.
“And ye can carry yer fuckin’ selves back tae base, since it was yous who chose tae fuckin’ pickle yerselves, ye right cunts,” Soap snarls, yanking Roach by the legless Sergeant’s outstretched hand to his feet. With a perfunctory slap on Roach’s shoulder and a stink-eye dedicated to the tentacle wrapped tightly around Roach’s throat, Soap pushes his way to the door, a wide berth given after whatever display he’d given while Ghost had been sucked in by the sirensong.
Maybe it wasn’t the pool at all.
*
The walk home from the pub is sobering; the chill in the air keeps everyone’s eyes peeled, faces pink, chests burning.
Gaz and Roach fall over each other about ten paces in front of Ghost, Price about ten paces in front of them leading the pack. Soap is loyally, royally pissed trudging down the street at Ghost’s right hand.
Ghost stretches his arms over his head, trusting his regulation jacket to keep him covered, and sighs at the release of tension, the shaking of his limbs as he pushes himself into an arc. He’s been too damn cold to risk spreading himself so wide, but with Soap pouring waves of body heat beside him, Ghost finally, truly feels thawed.
Not warm. But thawed.
An involuntary groan leaves his lips as he twists his spine, the soft pop-crack-pop a reminder he’s too old to be going off to pubs and bearing drunk-siren weight on his shoulders.
When his arms drop back by his sides, he looks down to Soap, just to check on the boiling, bubbling rage lit in his Sergeant’s chest, only to find his Sergeant black-eyed and staring hard at Ghost.
“Yer—" Soap clears his throat, his eyes catching on the sliver of stomach exposed by Ghost’s ridden-up undershirt. “Yer taller’n I realized. Sir.”
That sir boils in Ghost’s gut, a reminder of all the reasons he can’t respond, tall enough for you? or heard touchin’s better than starin’, or even taller up close, or any of the other cheeky, stupidly brash, alcohol-fuelled ill-advised words on his tongue.
“‘S cause you’re short as fuck, Sergeant.”
Johnny’s rage should be stoked by the comment. His shoulders should hike and his fists should clench and his teeth should grind. But Soap’s fists in his pockets settle, his steps faltering as his shitty night-vision is exacerbated by whatever monstrous shift caused his eyes to go black, and if anything, he seems better.
“LT, I think the booze’s gone tae yer heid. I’m a buck eighty centimeters tall, tha’s taller than average, aye?”
“Think the booze’s gone to yours. You can’t even walk a straight fuckin’ line,” Ghost responds, hand snapping out to grab Soap’s collar from behind and haul him up from his near-faceplant tripping over broken sidewalk.
His shirt is warm from his skin in Ghost’s grip.
“Yer hand is ice, LT,” Soap blinks up at him. They’ve stopped, Gaz and Roach pulling further and further away and leaving a dangerous, false sense of privacy in their wake.
“Gone further with worse.” Ghost holds his ground. Deflects. “Thought Scots could hold their liquor.”
“Just because ye have, dun’t mean ye have tae again.”
There it is again. Those words Soap said to him on the training field. Fucker’s still pushing, still pressing, even when Ghost presses back, even when Ghost’s— when Ghost’s—
Fuck, he hates his Sergeant. He takes in the high flush, the jittery nerves, the hair-on-end on Soap’s neck, the tension in his shoulders that’s settling more every second they’re this close.
“I’ll take from the bloodstock when we get back,” Ghost concedes, not because he’s fuckin’ soft but because his hands are cold, and he knows that’ll be worse in the morning if he doesn’t. “Alright?”
He’s still holding Johnny’s collar in his hand, still leeching warmth from Johnny’s skin less than an inch away, still twitching with the want to wrap his fingers in something closer to Johnny’s skin (his stupid fucking hair) instead. Soap stares up at him (short, short, yer taller than I realized, LT) with something made of steel in his expression and Ghost wants to press it until it dents, caves and gives way to the infuriatingly soft look he earns when they smoke late at night by the barracks.
Wants to press and push until the Sergeant that threatened an entire bar on Ghost’s behalf melts into the Sergeant that listens too fucking intently when Ghost talks and tells him everything when he asks a question. Until the secret-laden, scared monster in his grip cracks and Soap becomes Johnny, saccharine adoration and annoying enthusiasm and too many stars in the sky.
They snap apart when Price calls out to them, something about if you’re not with me when I sign onto base, you’re sleeping on the street.
Soap immediately launches himself from Ghost’s side and bounces down the street, shirt askew and collar stretched in a way that Ghost can’t rip his eyes from. Hauling Johnny back into his orbit, those black eyes all over him exactly where they belong, hands winding in his Sergeant’s shirt and his hair as Johnny whines into Ghost's open mouth, ‘yer taller’n I realized, LT-’
“Comin’, Sir?” Johnny asks, an insecurity in his blue, human eyes, and Ghost doesn’t waste another second shoving his inappropriate thoughts aside and falling in step by his Sergeant, hands buried in his pockets to keep him from trouble and elbow firmly pressed into Johnny’s back to keep him close, drink his warmth.
*
Hours after Gaz and Roach have been turtled in their bunks and rocked to fuckin’ sleep by Price, Ghost waits for the alcohol to burn through his system with his nose in a book and his hand on a hot mug. Caribou is a rich, expensive luxury (he isn’t quite sure where Soap found it, if he’s honest) so he drinks human stock rejected from the blood bank. Soap’s fucking annoying when he’s right. His latest read, Ghost Devices by Simon Bucher Jones, is moreso a joke than an interesting book, but one he clings to anyway in the name of relaxation.
He doesn’t lift his eyes when he hears footsteps creak on the wooden floorboards beyond the break room door. Whoever it is, he isn’t in any mood to greet them. A familiar bloodscent, softened by the alcohol but sour with distress, weaves between his book’s pages and caresses his face as the person stumbles and feels their way to a nearby couch. Soap.
He doesn’t lift his eyes when he hears a body sink into the cushions of the couch opposite him, far closer than Soap usually sits when he joins Ghost in an antisocial mood such as this.
He does look up the third time Soap readjusts his weight, the fucker always pressing, the fabric of the couch cushion beneath him ripping. Soap has claws extended, unlike Ghost’s (not black, not thick and hard and dull for locking prey in place, but painfully sharp for shredding flesh) and clearly not exactly under his control.
“I’m sorry, LT,” Soap apologizes in a whisper, eyes wide and black and afraid. He lifts a clawed hand to his face, pale bone covering his teeth from Ghost’s view, and vertical eyelids blink once, twice, before exposing bright, fearful blue. His voice is garbled, brows drawn in agony. “Think s’the drinkin’—"
“Soap?” Ghost raises a brow, setting his mug down on the coaster beside his chosen chair. He turns on another lamp beside him, and Soap gasps in response, flinching back into the cushions.
“I’m s-sorry, I dinnae ken—" Soap panics and tries to stand, but his claws sink into the cushions and won’t release, his breaths coming fast and shallow. Though Ghost didn’t plan on interacting with, well, anyone tonight, he won't leave Soap to his own incompetent devices on this.
“Breathe, Sergeant," Ghost barks, pushing forward in his seat.
Soap flinches, hands ripping free to cover his ears — or is it his jaw hinge? — and knees coming up to his chest. “No, no, no, this cannae be happen—"
“Soap, breathe. On me, Sergeant.”
Ghost’s voice is unforgiving, barking orders like they’re in the field, pushing back on Soap how Soap always fucking presses and pushes on him, and Soap’s wide eyes finally lock in and stare back. It’s always eerie for Ghost to be stared at so intently as Soap often does, but now it makes his instincts go haywire, like he’s the one staring down a predator despite Soap’s terror.
“In for four. Do it, Soap.”
Soap’s chest rattles, that clicking, chittering sound from the bar back and filling the room, but he does breathe in, his chest expands with it. Ghost tamps down the instinct to run, to run and never fucking look back, forcing himself to meet that stare and silently take this in. What are you, Johnny?
“Now out for four.”
Soap breathes from his mouth, shaky and thin, and Ghost catches a flash of a too-pointed tooth. Barbed, curving things, fascinating to look at. Terrifying.
“I’m sorry, LT, shoulda left well alone, sorry, sorry.”
“Shut up, MacTavish.”
Ghost stands, and Johnny flinches again, shrinking in his seat.
“St— stay back, Sir,” Soap says, eyes locked on Ghost. It’s a cold, hard truth for Ghost to realize Johnny’s afraid of him, and it’s colder and harder to realize Ghost hates it. For all he’s craved an ounce of respect from MacTavish, now that he has it, he wants nothing but the pressing and pushing back. He holds his gloved claws in the air in surrender, lowers himself to a squat to be closer to Johnny’s eye level, and holds his stare.
“You’ve done nowt wrong, yeah? Breathe in for me, Johnny. Again. Deeper.”
From across the room, Ghost talks him down, quieter than he usually talks, softer than he’s tried to be since he stopped being an Uncle. Soap stares with that same intensity, like he’s flaying Ghost open of all his layers and breathing in the entrails. But he’s breathing, and those eyes are on Ghost, so it can’t be unfixable.
Slowly, so slowly, Johnny uncoils from his defensive fetal position and retracts his claws. Ghost’s don’t retract, always dark and dull (but sharpened to a point when he gets the chance), but his teeth do; he wonders if it’s as painful for Johnny’s hands as it is for his jaw.
“Good?” He asks, the burn in his calves white-hot by now. “Can I stand?”
“I’m sorry, Ghost, Sir.” Soap whispers with a nod, voice hoarse. His eyes are everywhere but on Ghost, and Ghost misses the weight of them fiercely. “Fer the pub, fer now… I need a leave, I think.”
“That so?” Ghost wonders aloud. “Think this is top shape, Sergeant.”
Johnny snorts a weak laugh, rubbing at the hinge of his jaw. His claws are retracted, leaving familiar hands normal and charcoal-coated like they always are.
There you are, Johnny.
That haunting bloodscent loses its sour tinge, and the sweetened version brings Ghost’s own fangs free with a pained groan he’s usually better at hiding and an absent hand rubbing his own jaw in discomfort, shifting his mask up out of the way.
“What does that mean?” Johnny whispers. “How come ye only ever do tha’ with me, Sir?”
Ghost stares him down across the room, watching blue flicker to spreading black and back again. Ghost’s fangs are heavy and aching in his mouth, saliva pooling with anticipation of a bite. He can’t figure out the answer to Soap’s question, can’t identify why his body says bite when his brain says back off, but he assumes it has something to do with the fact Soap smells like an overripe fruit about to burst in Ghost’s mouth, and he pushes and presses and makes room for himself beneath Ghost’s teeth like he wants to be bitten.
He swallows a mouthful of spit, and Soap’s eyes lock on his bobbing adam’s apple and dilate before skittering back up.
“What did all that mean, Sergeant? Why come to me?” Ghost asks, in the same quiet voice he’d said, breathe in for me, Johnny. Even through the pain of his teeth, everything feels right with those eyes all over him and only him. Pressing right where they belong, every inch of exposed skin. With every sluggish, still-drunk beat of Soap’s heart, a pulse of bursting-ripe-wine is pushed into Ghost’s open mouth. The promise of a taste with none of the reward, for them both.
Soap blinks, his black, clearly other eyes flicking back to just-too-bright blue and his teeth grinding in his mouth as he narrows his stare and furrows his brow in frustration. His artist’s hands clench and release into and out of fists, like he isn’t sure what to punch, just that he knows he wants to. Ghost’s fangs sting fiercely, venom backed up and hunger unsatisfied by the unfulfilled promise, and his trousers are definitely tighter than they were before their staring contest, but Soap has the due diligence to not look anywhere but Ghost’s exposed face, the Glasgow smile and three bite marks overlapped, the pull of his lip exposing his cracked, chipped fang.
“I’m sorry, Sir. I’m no’ at liberty tae say.”
Soap stands to leave, only making eye contact once more when he crosses the threshold and Ghost calls out. The answer’s unsatisfactory, and Ghost rages against the idea of settling.
“Can’t, or dun’ want to?” Ghost’s voice is thick, his hands flexing.
Johnny gives him a fleeting, wanting look that stills Ghost where he stands once more. “Think we both ken my answer. Goodnight, Sir.”
For some reason, he doesn’t think his book will be enough to entertain him anymore.
*
“Captain Dogbreath, a word, Sir?”
“Ah, just a moment,” Price chuckles to himself, knowing the jovial insult means Ghost’s visit isn’t in any official capacity.
Ghost stands outside Price’s door, tapping his toe against the tile and staring down a Cadet who dares cross his path in his search for whatever officer he’s gophering for.
“In you come, you overgrown mosquito.”
As the welcome brushes over his skin, Ghost quickly shuts the door behind him, the gentle click of the door sliding into place the only sound made with his entry. Standing at attention, he and Price both take a second to size each other up. Price adjusts in his seat, his hat removed for a rare look at his wolf ears. They twitch, turning in the direction of the Cadet now crossing down the hall in Ghost’s absence.
“At ease, Lieutenant.”
Ghost crosses the room and sets himself in front of Price’s biggest window, wrists crossed behind his back. It serves them both, Ghost able to retrieve information without offering anything in return, and Price convinced the visits are for camaraderie and time together.
He isn’t wrong, because Ghost wouldn’t do this if he didn’t like Price in some capacity. Vampires just don’t do time together.
On command, Price barks like a good dog. “Gaz and Roach are recovering just fine.”
Ghost grunts. Not what he’s here for.
“Their mission briefing went well at 0700. Both were present and somewhat coherent.”
Still not what he’s here for. The field outside Price’s office is empty, leaving very little for Ghost to take in. Impatience settles inside him like the weight of his pack, just something to carry. Price is typically more forthcoming than this.
“I’m working on paperwork for that last mission in Austria. Tad late, but I’ve been caught up with Gaz and Roach’s mission across the pond. You know the pack instincts are strong to go with, but I need to be here so Soap can reach me.”
Ah. What he came here for. Ghost grunts, a sign to go on.
Price doesn’t.
Waiting out a werewolf is not a difficult task for a vampire — the only thing that might derail the endurance predator would be a lack of blood, and Ghost is fresh-up; even through a feeding this morning, he can still taste winter berries on the roof of his mouth. He rests his weight on his heels and digs in, staring blankly out at the empty training field and all its dead blades of grass. The snow Soap had stood out in has already begun to melt, turning the landscape a grungy, mud-coated mess; the beauty of a pristine sheet is lost to the realities of a middling winter.
Everything in life is a compromise, or short-lived, or meant to pass. Vampires know better than most other species, and Ghost has only been one for six years; when he thinks too hard about the idea of eternal life, eternal servitude in the military, he used to feel fulfilled, doing something for so many years, but now he just feels empty. Useless.
He’ll be fighting the same corruption and crime in seventy years. In seven hundred.
And eventually, he’ll be fighting under a different Captain, training different recruits even more useless than the current batch, fighting beside soldiers afraid of an ancient being, no longer pushing and pressing and think we both ken my answ-
“Soap went on emergency leave. Some species-specific need.”
Ghost turns to look his Captain in the eye. In the back of his skull, Price whispers, curiosity-concern-anxiety-fascinated. It’s a far more invested knocking on Ghost’s mental door than usual.
“He didn’t tell me what he is,” Price sighs, shuffling the pages in his hands to start on a different report. The wolf looks old, all of a sudden. World-weary. “I knew better than to ask. Needed three weeks’ time.”
Three weeks. Ghost’s right hand throbs where he’d sunk his teeth into it to keep himself from grunting Johnny as he came a fourth time since that heated, wanting stare in the common area last night. Can he go three weeks without resolution? Can he go three weeks without being annoyed, without his shadow, without the opportunity to do something they’ll both-
It’s for the best Soap’s gone for three weeks. Enough time for Ghost to give his ‘ead a wobble and get himself straight. He won’t do something they’ll both regret, because there’s nothing to do between a Lieutenant and a Sergeant of the SAS, let alone an immortal vampire and an unknown species. There isn’t anything there; and if there is, it’s not worth investigating.
“Look, Ghost, I know the two of you… there’s something there. I’m growing grey, not blind. What do you say you take some time off, go figure some things out?”
Ghost furrows his brow. Crosses his arms over his chest. Is Price in his head?
“I’m not in your head. Don’t need to be.” Price levels him with a look. “It’s been six years since you last took leave that wasn’t mandated. Soap is gone anyway. Take some time, get yourself sorted, yeah?”
How did Price know? Did the others? Is he at risk for being arrested for fraternization? Is Soap?
“There’s nothing to figure out, Price,” he insists, to protect himself and Soap. “Soap and I aren’t like that. Homosexuality and fraternization are illegal for members of the SAS.”
Price’s face turns pitying, and Ghost growls deep in his chest. Price read, in the dark of that Austrian hallway, an unfinished thought in his Lieutenant’s head, one that he now presses against the glass of Ghost’s head like a copper would a warrant. Less words and more an impression, a snapshot originally through the vampire’s eyes — stronger than anything willingly given, a base instinctual feeling.
Soap’s attentive, pretty eyes black, then blue, and Ghost’s fangs dropping in his mouth.
Rage sparks up his spine like dry kindling, and he’s forced to remind himself it could be worse; he could have less than an iron-wrought will and could have finished that thought, shown Price his every card laid bare, and they’d be having a very different conversation if he had.
“There is nothing between myself and Sergeant MacTavish that would compromise the integrity of this unit or the SAS, Sir.” Ghost reiterates, glare steady and hand throbbing in defiance of his lie. “Nothing.”
“Then I have no reason to hold off on your next solo mission,” Price barks, rising to stand with his hackles raised. “Go after him and identify what the fuck he is. If there’s no mitigating circumstance nor reason you’d object, that is.”
Ghost recoils as if shot. “What?”
“Do not come back until you have a species identification on the target Sergeant John Soap MacTavish." Price glares in open suspicion. "Am I understood?”
“Why are you doing this?” Ghost hisses, reacting both to the dominance display and to the demand. It’s one thing to gamble and guess at his species, just the 141; to send Ghost on a mission is to make a papertrail, to officially document the SAS’ interest in Soap’s species, to cross lines Ghost would rather shoot himself than toe. The terror in Soap’s eyes, the fear Ghost could smell on the fucking air as Soap realized he might be seen in his fully monstrous form… “You know Soap doesn’t—"
“I thought there was nothing between you and Sergeant MacTavish that would compromise the integrity of your loyalty to the SAS, Lieutenant,” Price coolly challenges, expression turning smug. “Or do you have reason to object to following the target and gathering necessary intel?”
Ghost silently glares, trying — and failing — to think of any reason other than the truth. His blood sings to me. I crave his fucking eyes all over me, and if you leave me unsupervised with him I can’t promise I’ll hold myself to standards of SAS conduct. I think about sinking my fangs in his throat half to shut him up and half to make him babble. I think he’s half Incubus because I can’t stop watching him on missions, and if he stopped looking at me like he does, if he found out what you’re asking me to do, I’d have to kill you in front of him to apologize.
Yeah, he won’t be saying any of that to his Captain.
“Pack your handwarmers.” Price slams his palms down on his desk, his eyes shining golden. “Your ticket’s already booked for 1400. Have fun in Antarctica, Lieutenant.”
*
Ghost trudges through the snow with his winter gear stocked on his back. The brilliant white of the sun bouncing off the snow is blinding, enough that he wishes he could just traverse with his eyes shut against the sheer laser beams of sunlight peeking between heavy clouds.
It’s somehow a still cold. The wind is nonexistent, yet Ghost thinks his body could seize up and fall dormant at any moment. The breath in his chest is a rare air, everything cramping and numb and horrid, and the world is utterly still around him; time itself has slowed to a sluggish hibernation.
After whatever-the-fuck happened in the break room a few nights ago and the subsequent intense research session regarding winter-berry bloodscents and retractable mandible-extensions and very few answers for either, Ghost couldn’t well leave enough alone. Price may have sent him for answers, but Ghost didn't come for that.
He never realized how much time his favorite Sergeant spent as his shadow day in and day out until he didn’t see him anymore; that was his reason for getting on that plane. He can’t deny his own curiosity: what could pull Johnny from his side?
If I don’t get some goddamn answers out of this, he’s on latrine duty for a year. Favorite Sergeant my arse. Ghost squints his eyes open and catches, between wiping away immediate blurred tears, movement beneath the surface of the ice shelf.
Sucked ‘em beneath the surface. Soap was the only one to make it out. The beast was indescribable.
He shakes off the memory of Soap’s old Captain, cursing Price for sending him without vision protection — and himself for forgetting the seasons are flipped, so he’s here during near twenty-four hour daylight, rather than polar night. He unsheathes two knives, twisting them in his grip while curling his fingers tightly around the hilt of each.
Blinking heavily, limbs cumbersome with cold, Ghost falls rigid, staring between gaps in his tears to watch the bulge in the ice shelf drift past slowly from his left to his right, never nearing. With stillness capable only by his training and vampiric dormancy in cold, he doesn’t so much as breathe until the eerie bulge in the snow disappears from his short-distance vision, probably fifty meters at furthest. The ice is just a long, flat expanse with mountains visible in the far distance, but beyond instinct, it’s difficult for Ghost to get a sense of depth perception.
He lets out the breath he was holding, and takes a step forward. His compass is jammed by the vertical magnetic field this close to the pole, so he relies on GPS in his comm to tell him which way to go — best he can surmise, “forward” is Northeast.
He takes another step, and the ice rumbles menacingly. Fuck, he hates the cold.
Another step, and something razor sharp sinks into his ankle, through his military boot, and drags him, gear and all, beneath the surface of the ice.
The only thing he can think, in the terror of an ambush, is fuck, not again. I can’t go under again.
*
Under the surface of the snow, Ghost’s pitch-black sight is far better suited to visualize his opponent. He frees a knife and swings at the wriggling mass at his feet, slicing through something and releasing a free-flowing fount of thick, sluggish blood, cloyingly sweet. He feels the cold closing in, the intense scent of the blood singing to him, and the adrenaline kicking into high gear as he writhes beneath the razor blades in his ankle. He’s worried about the ruckus bringing attention to him — in part because he doesn’t know if fuckface here has friends — but kicking and slashing is worth it if he makes it to the surface again.
His fangs drop in his mouth and he latches onto the wound as limbs and claws flail around him. Before he can really taste it, his mouth is detached and trousers slashed through, exposing more scarred skin to the cold; his body is slowing, his instincts telling him dormancy is nigh, but he can’t go out like this. He’s lost his knife.
He can’t be buried again.
“You can’t fool me, Vridansk. I see your marks," the beast snarls in a rattling, clicking sound, its voice too loud for the pitch-dark battle to the death.
Finally, Ghost sees what he thinks is its face. Chittering, eerily bug-like, crawls from its throat; large pincers erupt from its cheekbones and its teeth are each razor sharp and barbed, curling around themselves like tendrils of smoke. They’re coated in dark, clotting vampiric blood waste from biting his ankle.
Dear god. He bares his fangs and hisses through his mask, venom pooling in his mouth, and the creature chitters louder.
“You’ll take mine beautifully,” it cryptically continues, dodging his fists and wrapping ice-cold clawed digits around his thigh. He bucks, kicks out, does everything he can to free himself, but despite bending two clawed-fingers back until they snap, the creature is tenacious. “Won’t you shift?”
Ghost growls from deep in his chest. He would shift into a bat, but it would likely end with him consumed whole, or otherwise frozen in the tundra, and shifting back would be too much of a hassle for tactical work.
“Fuck you,” Ghost spits, reaching for its pincers and yanking with as much force as he can muster, his feet against its chest for leverage. The maw gives way, shredding from the creature’s face until he’s holding its own tusks as knives. The monster howls in agony, letting go of him to grab its own face.
It screams, flailing and gushing more of that thick, boiling blood. Ghost reaches forward and stabs both tusks into the monster’s skull, shoving and bullying their way past an exoskeleton into brain matter. Ghost is rabid, teeth dropped and senses overwhelmed — he rips his mask from his mouth and laves at the wounds, drawing the pulsing liquid onto his tongue.
“Yes,” he growls, sinking claws into the monster’s flesh when it wrenches away. Its blood is thick, impossibly so, rich like chocolate and steak and heavy whipping cream and so calorie-dense he remembers Christmas dinners with Beth and Tommy. It tastes salty, but it feels like nothing else. He remembers fullness, remembers food comas, remembers orgasms. His eyes snap open on a moan; he needs more, craves more, even if it tastes like shite, but vampires are never satisfied, and if they are, it's a compromise. Only a mouthful, that’s all he gets, before-
Before the monster twists itself free, kicking off from his abdomen to writhe deeper into the snow and abandon him to dig his way out from meters below the surface.
*
Ghost doesn’t remember coming back to the surface. He doesn’t remember going dormant in that pitch-black ice, doesn’t remember it reforming around his body crystal by crystal.
He remembers that thing. The same thing that pulled those women to their deaths in Scotland, he’s sure; the thing with barbed teeth and pincers and an exoskeleton. He wakes up, as far as he is concerned, still in that ice, still fighting that thing, still swinging.
His body shifts from dormant to not in an instant, weak but sharp claws slashing through the air. He feels himself sink into something, something with thick fur and a loud roar.
His eyes crack open to see a polar bear standing over him, screaming and bleeding from its side.
“Are you shittin’ me?” He cries, pushing to stand on an ankle that screams in agony. He can spare only a quick glance at the stinging wound; he needs to beat the polar bear and drink a stomach full or two if he’s going to live long enough to radio the nearest research station and survive this mission. Antarctica. Without bears.
The bear roars in response, as if to say I'm here, wanker, swiping with a huge paw. Ghost snarls and sidesteps, watching the bear fall flat on its stomach and slide over near the hole where it had dragged him above surface.
A quick patdown of his pockets as the bear shakes itself upright unearths a single serrated Fairbairn–Sykes blade and a SIG.
“Good enough for government work,” he mutters, tossing the SIG barrel-first in the air so he can catch it one-handed and click the safety down with his thumb. “On me, you furry wanker.”
With a single-mindedness reminiscent of a certain Sergeant Ghost knows, the bear lunges, and Ghost raises his firearm to cock and sink four bullets right between its eyes. Mid-lunge, the thing crumples to the ice, face an unrecognizable crater. It slides unceremoniously to rest between Ghost’s steel-toed boots, and without an immediate threat keeping him upright, Ghost feels that ice-cold dormancy creep closer. The meal before him will taste burnt from the gunpowder, but he’s done much worse in the field before.
At this point, to not make it to Soap would be embarrassing.
*
“Whoa! Ghost, LT, what happened?!”
Ghost blinks, the room forming just beyond the open door and Soap’s half-dressed form. The only thing he can think is I made it home.
“Polar bear,” Ghost grunts, wincing when his weight shifts onto his still-not-quite-right ankle. It buckles before giving way beneath him, the ground coming quicker than he can process it. “’elp me-?”
“Fuck, Ghost!” Soap reaches out, hands cold but chest warm, and catches the majority of Ghost’s limp weight against him. “Let me— what’re ye doin’, pickin’ fights ye cannae win against- a polar bear? Here? How come yer here?”
Clinging to Soap is easy, so easy, Ghost’s gloves pressing indents in the fat of Soap’s chest. Ghost gasps when his foot catches on the lip of the door, and Soap stares down at the slowly-gushing wound with horror and anger in his eyes before turning back to Ghost’s barely-masked face. Fuck, but Ghost can feel the warmth of him through all his layers, a furnace waiting just for him to come knock on his door.
He can’t remember why he wasn’t supposed to knock on Johnny’s door. He knows this is the right place to be, but he also wasn’t supposed to come here. The GPS in his ear says he has another three clicks to go Southwest.
“Ye dinnae heal yet?” Soap asks, voice loud like it isn’t his first time asking.
Ghost shakes his head, which still isn’t on quite right. Soap’s standing in an open door holding him upright in Antarctica. Shirtless. His whole body is fighting to fall dormant, to close his eyes and just sleep. His fingers press in harder, pushing into Soap’s soft flesh.
“You’re shirtle…” He moans, words dragged past his blue lips by willpower alone. “Bed?”
“Take me tae dinner first, Sir, ye fuckin’—" Soap tries to haul him over the threshold, but Ghost whines as the magic of the home locks him out. “What’re ye do— come in, why don’t ye, yer welcome here, yer fuckin’ baltic, please LT just come in—"
As Soap starts to panic and drag him against the magic, Ghost can feel the tingling sensation of being welcomed trace over his skin. Crossing a threshold that isn’t his. Johnny’s home opens itself up to him, an oasis of rugs with tassels and tartan bedspread and that sweetened bloodscent a heady candle lit in the window.
Ghost’s fangs never stood a chance, the bones grinding as they slide free from his soft palate. He doesn’t even get the dignity of the mask hiding the sight, filtering the scent. Johnny’s quick to half-drag, half-shove him over to the unmade bed, muttering to himself about polar bears and bampots and wankers as he tugs and pulls at all Ghost’s straps, buttons, and zippers to free him from his useless layers. No point to insulating layers when he doesn’t generate warmth himself.
Ghost lifts his hands to help, but the shaking in them and trembling in his core keep him from being of any assistance. The bed is still warm, Johnny must have been laying here before he opened the door — Johnny swats his hands away and yanks the thickest coat open at the zipper, snapping the metal tab in his haste.
“Smell g’d…” Ghost murmurs, head lolling against Johnny’s sheets. If he were a dog, he’d rub himself against the sheets, cover himself in it. “Why’s’t s’cold ‘ere?”
“What’re ye sayin’, LT?” Johnny gasps, jerking Ghost’s boots off his feet. Ghost’s stomach roils when the boot’s punctured fabric rips from the injured foot. Soap comes in and out like a fuzzy radio. “Gotta do… I ken ye hate… but come on, work… I gotta help-... Alright?”
Ghost’s face is being slapped.
“Fuck!”
“Gotta do skin t-… LT. Stay wi-... alright?” Johnny’s hand feels nice on his face, and the warmth of him above Ghost is even nicer. Ghost stares unseeing up at bright blue, blue like a British sky when it’s rarely sunny, not like the fuckin’ snowclouds everywhere here. “Tha’s it, lookit me, LT. There ye are.”
His chest is exposed to the room, to Soap’s warm body, and he doesn’t— doesn’t remember why that’s a bad thing. Ghost’s gloves have been removed, and his claws slip over the luxurious feeling of a fur beneath him.
“Selkie?” Ghost slurs, stroking the soft fur as smoothly as he can with the tremors. He won the pot. That’s gotta win him the pot. Fuck the pot, he’s on Johnny’s fur… The room is so dark, the bed so soft. Johnny’s with him. It’ll be fine. Soap can keep first watch, and exfil will come soon enough; he can’t remember the mission particulars, but he trusts Soap to remind him when he wakes. “You T’ke firs’ watch.”
“No, no-no-no— Ghost—"
Ghost closes his eyes.
*
When Ghost opens his eyes again, it’s the same as he always does; immediate snapping to attention, immediate awareness, immediate sensation of a soft body rutting into his arse, a hot, wet mouth latched and suckling over bite scars on the nape of his neck-
Ghost half moans, half yells, “What the fu—"
“So fuckin’ pretty, Sir, so many, mine, all mine—" A familiar Scottish voice murmurs, peppered with wet, spit-slick kisses placed over Ghost’s skin.
When Ghost tries to pull away, confused and hard and concerningly naked beneath the blankets, Soap’s iron bar of an arm tightens over his chest, pinning his back along the soft, hairy skin of Soap’s stomach beneath him. The new position gives Soap more leverage to rut into the cleft of his arse, and Ghost’s fangs ache with venom not in a defensive manouver but because the scent cloud of winter-fruit-mulled-wine the movement kicks up is thick as tear gas and he’s starving.
“Followed me here in matin’ season, yer so bonnie, Ghos’—" Soap drags his tongue in a long stripe from the cap of Ghost’s shoulder to the side of his neck, lighting sensitive scar tissue in a blaze. “Warm ye up yet? Were so cold, had tae strip ye—"
Ghost rips himself from Soap’s hold, jerking upright to all but sit in Soap’s lap. He turns with bewildered expression to stare at Soap, but Soap isn’t—
Isn’t Soap.
Soap’s eyes are black, his mouth open to pant heavy breath and pinprick, swirling teeth on display. His fingertips are clawed, familiar white and deadly sharp but angled away from the skin of Ghost’s hip where he’s laid his hand.
His mohawk has hardened into a bony growth on his head, and his eyes are trained on Ghost’s mouth.
“...Johnny?” Ghost calls, trying and failing to flag his reaction to such a wakeup call.
“Ghost,” Johnny whines, tightening his grip on Ghost’s scarred hip. “Ye dae want me, no? Ye came all this way, came tae my door…”
Ghost looks down at his ankle, fully bandaged. His clothes are stacked by the fireplace drying out, and Johnny’s own are folded beside. He shouldn’t want this. Johnny’s not himself, and worse, Ghost is. They can’t do this. He can’t be here, shouldn’t grind into the hard length beneath him, shouldn’t like the way Johnny’s grip spasms in response.
Fuck. Ghost’s too hungry to leave, and Johnny smells so good.
Johnny wriggles on the bed, little whimpered sounds leaving his mouth as he tosses his head back against the bedding and exposes the long column of his throat.
He digs Ghost’s grave when he cries, a strangled plead, “Wan’ yer bite, Ghos’, yer eyes are fuckin’ red. Dinnae ye want me?”
*
Ghost has never felt himself go feral. He’s been half-starved on the brink of dormancy even just in the last twenty-four hours, but he’s never lost himself mid-feed.
His fangs sunk into Johnny’s left thigh, claws digging imprints in Johnny’s plush, soft skin, two hard cocks twitching and pulsing on his cheek, Ghost feels himself lose it with the first pulse of hot, fresh mulled wine on his tongue. So fuckin’ sweet, and nutrient-rich, like fudge, like Christmas Dinner, he’s satisfied.
Johnny’s blood is dense, impossibly so. It’s sluggish, and Ghost’s instinct to latch his mouth and suck with all his strength doesn’t put any sort of rush on the slow drip onto his tongue, like Johnny’s body is protecting itself from exsanguination. If anything, that makes him want it more, cradle Johnny closer, pump his over-production of venom in deep, lave his tongue over the wound while he’s still biting down.
Claws sink into his curls under tattered remains of his mask, and Ghost instinctually growls his resource aggression, ready to kill kill kill anything that might separate him from the slow flow of life-giving weight in his stomach, but Johnny’s hand, if anything, pushes him closer, begging and babbling and arching off the mattress.
“Please, dinnae stop, more, Sir, please—" Soap whines, thighs clenching and twitching. “Feels so good, wanna be yours.”
Ghost wrenches his fat thighs apart, growling in satisfaction as his mouth fills faster with the action. Johnny’s blood is so fucking heady; he’s dreamed of this for years, spat out mouthfuls of venom on missions and stitched the man back up with trembling fingers and wanted. His jaw clamps in place, the thick, infuriatingly slow pulse of blood on his tongue forcing him to pace himself. Whatever Soap is, he must have a slow metabolism, must have a slow-beating heart, because Ghost’s sucking and pulling and latching and kneading and demanding doesn’t do a thing to bring it to his lips any faster than it wants to go, despite how every hollow-cheeked suck makes Johnny writhe.
When he feels his orgasm cresting, rutting into the bed like a fuckin’ dog, Ghost knows no matter how desperate he feels, he needs to stop. If he keeps going, even with the slow feed, it won’t be long before he’s gorging past his fill. Even now, as he can’t imagine pulling away, he feels full, truly full, for the first time in six years, full enough he can’t imagine drinking more, either, but the taste on his tongue and the man beneath him and his cock rutting against the bedding demand he goes again.
He detaches reluctantly, licking over the wound to clean it, and Johnny full-body shivers in response. For some species, Ghost hazily remembers, vampire venom is an aphrodisiac, and he’s given Johnny more than his fair dose — in the back of his head he wonders if that proves any of their guesses right or wrong, but before he can think more concretely about it, Johnny’s chittering in the back of his throat and whining.
“Dinnae tell me yer done, Ghos’, bloody starvin’. Got more in me, s’all fer y— yes!”
With little provocation, Ghost sinks in higher on his other thigh, having to pin Johnny’s hips to the bed to stop him from rutting in the air. He stares up at where Johnny has his face in his hands, drinking in the sight of flushed skin and bared teeth and drunk, black eyes finally meeting his gaze and pinning him in place. Blood pools in his mouth, he doesn’t let himself swallow until it bubbles over his tongue, and it tastes like wine, it tastes— it tastes like pleasure, like desire and heat and want.
Johnny keens, high and loud and desperate. “I want ye tae give me more than whoever turned ye gave you.”
Ghost bites down harder in response, empty venom sacs stinging, the gut-churning disgust he feels in his stomach when he looks at himself morphed into something horrifyingly like possessive pleasure.
“Mine,” Johnny swears, tugging on Ghost’s hair and lighting his scalp with sensation. Ghost’s hips rut into the mattress, turned sloppy with how blood-drunk he’s become. “Gonna fuck ye intae the mattress, Sir, fill ye with my scent and my seed until it takes.”
Ghost growls into his feed, the sluggish beat of Johnny’s heart and pool of blood in his own gut lulling him into a post-feed haze. He’s still full, feels like his stomach should bulge out by now, the mulled wine on his lips and his ankle no longer in pain and his whole body fevered.
Blood has never fed him so well.
Ghost detaches again, placing wet kiss after kiss over the bruising, mottled mark in gratitude, in fulfillment, in affection. He hopes it scars, so even when they’re back on base and he can’t do this again Johnny will remember. Will remember being wanted, needed, by Ghost.
“Never tasted nowt like this,” Ghost admits into the soft give of his thigh, addicted to the taste and smell and feel of just how much he can imprint and leave his mark. He’s so full. “I’m so— hafta lie down.”
Johnny sits up and shifts to the side, pulling Ghost up beside him until Ghost is on his back, looking dazedly up at blue-black eyes and bright pink mouth.
“Awright?” Johnny asks, rubbing his face over Ghost’s scarred skin obsessively. “Smell like me, finally smell right…”
Ghost moans, shivering from nothing but sheer sensitivity. He’s branded, boiled, burned, deliciously sinful heat on his skin and in his veins and in his dribbling cock. This is the closest to human Ghost has felt in six long, unsatisfying years, and he clings to it with a loose but determined grip on Johnny’s hand and neck.
“Touch me,” Ghost whines, squeezing the hand in his grip. “Johnny, don’t leave.”
“Aye, tha’s it, Sir, jus’ let me…” Johnny smoothes one wide palm over his skin, pressing in over his heart, and Ghost can actually feel Johnny’s heartbeat mimic his own, too slow to be human but fast enough for them both. Heavy eyes close, and warm limbs fall lax from their desperate grip.
*
When Ghost opens his eyes again, he’s been awake for some time. He categorizes his knows and don’t knows until he feels he has a solid understanding of things, and then he loses his mind a bit at how much bigger the second category is than the first, and then he bucks up as he feels a body shift against his own bare skin beneath the blankets. Fuck, he’s still naked, Soap saw him, Soap saw his scars-
“Shh, s’alright, Ghost. S’jus’ us.”
Ghost’s eyes snap open at the sound of a sleep-addled Soap shushing him.
“I drank from you,” Ghost croaks, stomach full. He tugs the blanket up under his bare chin with his mask in tatters about his face, trying to hide himself. It's a useless endeavor.
Soap curls in closer, the thick, searing span of his bare palm pressing in over Ghost’s still-beating heart and the innumerable criss-crossed bite marks and scars covering his chest. Soap presses, just blunt pads of his fingers, into scar tissue, and Ghost is on his side facing the room and the now-closed front door, Soap wrapped around his back between him and the wall. Pressed up close, able to feel every single place Roba unmade him. “Why’d y’let me do that, Sergeant?”
He’s coated in Soap’s bloodscent like an expensive cologne, as though that could make up for his first skin’s proof of weakness. Since the feeding, it’s like he emanates it himself.
“Ye can tell us both, Sir. Showed up half-dormant, injured ankle, slurrin’ ‘boot a figh’ with a… polar bear?” Johnny yawns, and Ghost can feel something nuzzle between his shoulderblades, soft where it brushes a bullet wound. He shivers, not from cold but from unexpected sensitivity as Johnny pulls him impossibly closer, the deep chittering sound he remembers being so afraid of just a whisper in Soap’s throat.
Ghost remembers that bear. The bear is in his knows list. The thing before the bear, though-
The thing before the bear chittered too.
Ghost launches upright, immediately identifying his stripped gear and searching for knives, ammo, anything to keep him company as he runs the perimeter.
“Gho— LT, ye cannae be up. Yer barely fuckin’ thawed!” Soap sits upright on the bed, the bedsprings creaking softly as he moves, but Ghost doesn’t look, rummaging through his gear for his base thermal layer.
Barely thawed in this case means warm enough to pink. Now that he's not just warm but hot to the touch — leaching to the room around him without clothing to keep it in, fuck is Soap’s blood a drug — his gear will do him much better.
He can’t leave Johnny to be found by that… thing. Johnny’s nothing like that thing, all soft and hot-blooded and wearing Ghost’s bites and Ghost can’t fuckin think with him shirtless, naked in the room. All he's got is instinct, and instinct says protect.
“Yer ankle, LT, think— ye cannae jus’ go oot there alone!” Soap pushes up to his feet, and Ghost does look up at that, eyes skittering over and quickly flicking away from the expanse of exposed, tan, soft, hairy chest, stomach, bruised thighs that is his Sergeant. “Ye cannae jus’ leave! I dinnae even ken why yer here! Sir, Ghost— stop!"
His inside-out shirt covers his torso and bloodied, ripped trousers are unbuckled but tugged up his legs; Ghost pauses with one boot on and the other destroyed one in his hands. He’ll have to find his gloves.
Soap reaches over to take the boot from him, blunt charcoal fingertips brushing over black sharpened claws as if they weren’t a predator’s.
“Lookit me, please, Sir,” Johnny softly begs. Ghost notices Soap’s thrown on trousers, but not a shirt. Covered up the proof of Ghost’s teeth. He'll have to give him another above the belt, he'll—
He won't be giving another bite. Ghost betrayed his Sergeant, came here to spy, and Soap fed him.
Ghost looks up from his empty hands to Soap’s face. He doesn’t see any fear, any hurt, any betrayal like he’d expect. Soap has to know by now Ghost isn’t here for a personal call, but Soap holds his destroyed boot in his hands and looks at Ghost, undivided heady attention, with worry on his face.
“What’s goin’ on, Ghost? What happened tae you?”
Ghost can’t tell what happened, has too many things on his don’t knows list, but he does know Soap was… different, that Soap made him frenzied, that Soap had begged to be Ghost’s, and that sense memory makes the borrowed blood in Ghost’s body sing.
“I saw… something. Out there, under the ice.” Ghost swallows a mouth full of saliva, and Soap’s eyes carefully track the motion of his throat. His fangs itch from being expressed for so long; he slept, passed out, and the scent cloud of Soap was enough to keep his fangs out. He has to get out of here before he does something they’ll both regret, something more permanent than drinking. “It dragged me under the surface. Did that to my boot.”
Soap sharply snaps his gaze down to the boot, the jagged holes in the ankle and sole. “Steamin’ Jesus, Ghost, how’d ye make it oot? Ye went up against— and yer— yer here?”
“I ripped its pincer things off its skull and stabbed them through its head. That’s how.”
Johnny jerks a hand up to his own jaw (perhaps in sympathy?) as he gapes, lifting his eyes slowly, centimetre by centimetre, to look incredulously over Ghost’s barely-masked face, staring at scarred lips and sharp jaw. “Yer one sick bastard, LT.”
He says it how he said in Las Almas, Ghost, was that you? lying beneath a dead Shadow.
Incredulous, yes, but if Ghost thinks about it too long, looks at the flush on Johnny’s neck and chest too long, he can tell himself it’s aroused, too. He shouldn’t tell himself that. They cannot repeat what happened the last time Ghost woke up; he needs to go on patrol and run and freeze and stop this runaway train.
He follows the flush of blood beneath Soap’s skin from his jugular down his chest, to where it turns splotchy over the soft swell of his stomach. Fuck, Ghost could sink his face there, could breathe open-mouth the scent from the source, could feel him get hard against Ghost’s throat and hear strong as anything the wet beat of Johnny’s blood through his-
He rips his gaze back up to the boot, shaking himself free of his reverie. Fuckin’ Half-Incubus.
“I need that boot to go on patrol, Sergeant.” Reminds himself of their rank, of how much he can’t just bury himself in Soap’s bedding and think about the weight of his palm over Ghost’s sternum, his thighs in Ghost’s claws, his whined moans. “I can’t let them get to—"
Soap sets the boot down on the floor beside their bare feet, Ghost’s remaining sock bloodied and torn and unwearable and everything else in a state of disrepair from Soap’s panicked removal of it all. At least Ghost’s skin is hidden once again; even if Soap won’t likely soon forget the feeling of those cross-bar scars disfiguring Ghost’s face, neck, chest, and back, Ghost can at least pretend he’s still impenetrable-looking.
“Ghost,” Soap chokes out, “I cannae say I’m worried. No’ with you here. Scariest thing tae come through my door’s yersel’.”
Ghost looks up at his Sergeant, the one he was sent to betray, and he feels something inside him just crack in half at the fond, open expression on Soap’s handsome face.
*
Soap isn’t sure what deity he sucked off in a past life to end up in his home during mating season with Ghost leaning into his side, splitting warm, oak-aged whisky and trading truth-or-dare prompts, but whoever it was, they’re so fuckin’ welcome.
“Truth, or— or Dare, Johnny?” Ghost purrs, cradling the bottle to his chest and licking his spit-slick lips. He’s been rosy and pliant since they hit halfway, the feast of Johnny’s blood the only thing keeping the alcohol from going right through his soft palate to his head.
Soap’s never seen him so loose. Carefree, settled, free. He gives himself a mental high-five, for his ability to distract Ghost from the idea of patrolling; Ghost surely would come across another Vridansk in mating season and it surely would go worse than his first time around. He’s much safer, much better off, staying right where he is, too close to Soap and too tipsy to move.
“Dare, Sir,” He feels himself say, wishing more than words, more than whisky, that Ghost will say, kiss me. That’s an order.
He stares at Ghost’s tattered mask, the silvery, gnarled scars of men who didn’t deserve to fucking touch him across his lips and cheeks, and Soap can feel himself fall a little harder at the giggle stuck in Ghost’s bobbing throat. Can feel his heart break a bit more with the knowledge even if Ghost were to say, kiss me, Johnny, it couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t end with anything other than pain and regret for them both.
The rut in his veins throbs, a reminder he’s on borrowed time, and the longer Ghost stays the closer they dance to a cliff they can’t come back from. Ghost's incomplete claim on him is enough to make him lucid for now but the biological imperative (and compatible nearby mate) will demand further consummation of that claim sooner than later.
They’re on thin enough ice, as the saying goes, just being monsters in the military.
“I dare you t’show me somethin’...” Ghost hands over the bottle, sloshing the contents against the glass, “...monstrous.”
Soap’s heart lurches into his throat, choking him mid-shot.
Ghost laughs under his breath, delighted by taking his Sergeant by surprise, and Soap’s dread fills in the spaces between his bones, settles like a wound he can’t ignore, impatient and demanding and life or death.
He can’t tell Ghost what he is. He can’t, he can’t, even as words drip off his tongue. What Ghost has already seen is too much, and even that was a partial shift.
“I cannae,” he chokes, thumping his chest with his free hand to dislodge the alcohol from his lungs. “I cannae—"
“Come on, Johnny, it’s jus’ us,” Ghost purrs, voice deep and slow and dripping with fondness. “Be good f’me, huh? Jus’ a li’l of yourself, hm?”
Johnny’s heartrate picks up, his eyes fluttering shut on a groan. He’s never heard Ghost so seductive before, never been this close to dark claws clinking against glass bottle and scars he wants to press his fingertips into and mouth he wants, wants, wants. Rut boils and boils and bubbles against his skin like a pot on too-high heat.
“Show me your teeth again," Ghost whispers, a bit too loud to be smooth. His breath is on Johnny’s ear and he’s so close and Ghost doesn’t know what he’s asking, but his fangs haven’t receded yet and that means something, Soap knows it does, so he opens his eyes to watch Ghost’s reaction and lets go, just a little, just enough to let the instincts roaring in his head rush past his defenses and iron-wrought will and make his teeth shift.
His retracted pincers click in his throat in relief, all-encompassing relief, and his eyes are shifted to block what is supposed to be blindingly-bright sun but is actually dim lamplight, and Ghost is brushing his jaw with sharpened claws to pull his lips apart.
He’s a predator whose teeth are his livelihood, whose teeth catch his food and his mate and his enemies and determine if he lives, dies, loves, hates — his teeth are everything, Ghost ripped pincers from another of Soap’s species and walked away fine, but Soap revels in being completely at Ghost’s curious mercy. Every tooth is unique, swirling patterns and barbed details meant to create an unmistakably identifiable bite mark. Ghost brushes the pad of his thumb over the filigree of Soap’s spit-slick incisor as if it were a crown jewel, croons as saliva pools over Soap’s tongue.
“Swallow.”
Soap does, mouth open so Ghost can watch the inner workings of his throat convulse. His head is screaming at him to bite, bite, bite, his body craving the full shift so he can pin down his chosen and claim him. When Ghost begins to purr, deep in his throat in pleasure at the sight, Soap’s eyes flutter shut.
Claws depress his tongue, jerk his jaw open roughly, and Ghost growls, “No. Look’t me when I touch you.”
Johnny moans, so fucking loud with his mouth pried open, and open his eyes to see Ghost’s fangs dripping black, mouth open to pant, dilated eyes still gorgeous, still brown. Full. Almost like an afterthought, Ghost’s fingers massage his tongue, and Soap closes his mouth to suck, his throat clicking and chittering in arousal.
“Wanted this for so fuckin’ long,” Ghost whines, dragging Soap’s face impossibly closer to his own by his grip on his jaw. Soap goes willingly, always will, eyes begging Ghost for anything, everything, whatever he’ll give. “What are you, Johnny, why do you smell so—"
Johnny reaches up to hold onto Ghost’s wrist, his own claws out and gently angled away from Ghost’s skin. Ghost pulls his fingers back, frames Soap’s throat with his wet hand instead, a pressure Soap sinks into obediently.
“Truth or Dare, Ghost?”
Ghost stares, beautiful brown eyes and dropped fangs and panting breath.
“Truth.”
“Dae ye really want tae ken?” Johnny asks, breathless, begging, bullheaded. “Do you really— d’ye really want me, or is this— is this the whisky?”
Ghost leans in, until the only thing separating their lips is their roughly heaved breath, until the warmth of his skin is melded with Johnny’s and to maintain eye contact is to cross his eyes, and he answers, “I have wanted… nothing… like I want you. It’ll kill us both, one day.”
Johnny swallows, the apple of his throat brushing Ghost’s palm, and they both groan at the possessive tightening of Ghost’s grip. “Truth. Ask me again, Ghost. What am I?”
“Alright, Johnny,” Ghost brushes their lips, his fangs dragging something addicting and cold over Johnny’s lips. Venom. Ghost tastes like whisky fudge, like alcohol and sugar and danger and addiction, and Johnny sips from him like he would a top-shelf bottle. Savoring.
Ghost reaches up to shift his hand from Johnny’s throat, slipping claws along Soap’s scalp to wrap his fingers possessively in his hair. There’s no passion in it, just a factual, unforgiving possession holding Soap obediently, reverently, pressing forehead to forehead, breathing the same whisky-scented air. An uncharacteristically soft moment in which Johnny feels less like a blood donor and more like a dragon hoard and the instincts in his head are finally, finally, sated.
“Tell me,” Ghost breathes, split lip brushing Johnny’s.
“I cannae tell ye shite until I’m yours,” Soap whispers, pushing forward so Ghost’s grip tugs and his eyes water and he’s moving into Ghost’s lap, “so make me yours an’ I’ll tell ye.”
*
Kneeling over Ghost, Soap open-mouth inhales the smell of Ghost’s sweat and his own blood from his neck. Ghost wonders what he smells like, to Johnny, if there’s something haunting him like his blood haunts Ghost. Johnny’d whispered, make me yours, and Ghost’s thin veil of control over himself, his hands, his teeth, had snapped like viscera. He’d marked Johnny’s wrist to match his thighs, obvious and undeniable and everything he’s always wanted to fucking do.
“Johnny.” What it means, when he says it, is mine.
Johnny smiles knowingly, like he understands, demonic teeth and too-bright eyes, and Ghost’s heart flips in his chest. One thumb presses in on Ghost’s mouth, parting his lips to slide down the length of his fang. Saliva collects in his open mouth, and it’d be a humiliating role-reversal if not for the open-mouthed arousal on Johnny’s face in response, if not for the three matching bite marks marring Johnny’s skin.
For reasons he wouldn’t articulate with a gun to his crotch, Ghost obediently opens his mouth wider, letting Johnny push up against the pinprick-sharp tip and prick himself on the pristine tooth. The weight of Johnny in his lap, spread open in a feast offering, while Ghost can only beg for a single drop at a time, makes every unsatisfactory hunger so intrinsic to vampirism feel more like a promise yet filled.
The fruit, the ripe, sweet, end-of-season fruit of Johnny bursts in that single drop on Ghost’s tongue (promise, filled), and it takes everything in him (and the pressure of Johnny’s fingers pushing in on the hinge of his jaw) not to wrap his tongue around the wound and suck, even round with fullness. He’ll always want more, always twitch his tongue in search of it; now that he’s tasted, he can’t imagine going back to donated bags of watery, disappointing alternatives; has no idea how he subsisted on emptiness. Beneath his favorite Sergeant, he’s open for inspection, unable to close his jaw, and the look in Johnny’s eyes, before he blinks and they turn black, is aroused, wanting, in awe.
He taps Ghost’s incisor with a single claw. “If I’m yours, these are all mine, aren’t they, LT?”
Ghost whines and spasms, and a second drop collects on his tongue (promise, filled, promise, filled, mine), his salivary glands stinging with the rush of overproduction. His legs tremble, sweet, thick winter berries on his tongue. He hasn’t tasted fruit in six years, and with its temperature, he almost thinks it’s real mulled wine. He thinks, for the chance to have this again, he would give his fangs up, would rip them out for Johnny to wear around his neck. Johnny’s his, yeah right — he knows well enough to understand the true dynamic here. He’s Johnny’s.
Johnny rubs his bloodied thumb against his chipped fang, and Ghost whines high in his throat at how sensitive that is, it feels like a mouth on his cock, a tongue in his arse, like more more more. Did he make Johnny feel like this when he touched his teeth, burning from the inside out? He screws his eyes shut against the wave of want want want want and the drip of spit down his chin. The chittering, clicking sound from the bar is back, and the fear and want and hot and cold all twist into something Ghost wants to beg for.
But he doesn’t have to beg. Johnny gives him more before he’s ready for it, gives him too much in the form of unbuckling his trousers and closing a searing, large palm over his cock (promise, filled, fuck).
“Jo-hnny!”
Soap laves his tongue in slick, fast strokes over the cords of Ghost’s neck, his thumb pressing, pressing, pressing into his chipped fang, timing the dry tug of his fist in time. He releases his punishing hold and brings his other hand up to Ghost’s mouth, scraping his fingers against fangs and coating them in venom-tinged spit, pushing far enough in that Ghost gags and drools over himself but doesn’t dare close his mouth.
The maddening brush of hot skin over his fang, the return of a blistering — now disgustingly wet — grip on Ghost’s cock, and the low chittering in Johnny’s chest have stripped Ghost of everything impenetrable, from his cold skin to unaffected expression to the bubble of personal space he’s never had pressed to burst before. Ghost is so warm he feels human, so close he feels his hard edges dig into Johnny’s soft planes, and so affected he’s drooling over himself and moaning as Johnny licks it up off his throat.
He hasn’t had anyone so close to his throat since Roba.
“Johnny, please, fuckin’—" Ghost whines, wrenching the sheets in his claws and fucking up into the tight wet heat of Johnny’s fist as much as he can with the weight of him over his hips. There’s something unhinged to the sensation, something he can’t satiate; it pumps through him like fire. This is Johnny and this is Soap and he doesn’t know everything about either but he knows he wants them both. “You hafta, you, you can’t—"
Johnny laves open, wet kisses over the scars along his nape, the edge of the rolled-up, shredded mask soaked with spit. “So many marks, Ghost. Never want no one but you in my bed, full o’ my blood. Dinnae need blood bags anymore, no’ when ye have me. It beats fer ye.”
Some vampires take on mortal beings, blood banks, and provide protection in return for loyalty and a clean source of hot fresh blood — he’s never been tempted, never understood the urge, better off with his mugs and books and time alone. He’s never—
He's been so lonely, without Johnny.
He’s had a shitty life as a vampire, alone and hungry and wanting and cold. And he fucking missed his Sergeant, fucking craved the promises and yearned for the fill.
He cries, he thinks. He’s lost in sensation, grip on his weeping cock and thumb on his fucking teeth and mouth on his neck so soft and toothless.
“Shhh, I’ve got ye. Right here,” Johnny soothes him, bringing his thumb from his teeth to push his palm down over Ghost’s heart. “Feel me here?”
Beating, fresh blood, so full he could burst, promise, filled. Ghost finally closes his sore jaw and nods, bringing his arms up and over Johnny’s neck to haul him in close, breathe in his air. He needs this, needs Johnny, he missed this. He is crying, he can feel the cool lines it leaves on his skin as what’s left of his mask absorbs the runoff; he reaches up to rip it off and surges up to meet Johnny’s mouth in a bruising kiss, something he wishes was softer but thinks is more honest since it’s not.
Johnny pulls him to lay like curled parentheses side by side. He wraps hands in Ghost’s curls and licks hotly along his lips and grunts little subvocal growls into Ghost’s panting mouth as they once again find themselves moving, Ghost tugging his Sergeant into place on top of him.
“I missed you,” Ghost cries, and he’s sure it doesn’t make any sense, because he’s never had Johnny like this before and this isn’t how they usually are, but he’d been such a lonely fucking creature without the pressing and pushing and stupid unprofessionalism, and now Johnny’s his weight on his hips and chest and he’s full of Johnny’s promises everywhere. “You’re gonna fuck me like this, yeah?"
“Missed me tae? Feel empty when yer gone; ye felt the same, Sir?” Johnny asks, rolling his hips forward over Ghost’s. He shoves his trousers down, too, until it's blistering skin to skin. There’s— there are too many things down there, but it feels good, feels like a promise, filled, feels like the borrowed blood in Ghost’s veins and the heavily scented air all around pulses in pleasure. “Want my cocks jus’ like this, teeth in my fuckin’ neck?”
Ghost is moaning and nodding before he can think it through, he’s wanted Johnny for so long. He can almost taste it, a bite that’ll show on either side of Johnny’s throat mic, visible for anyone to see he’s Ghost’s, he’s Simon’s, mine all mine all mine, scared monster and blushing artist and demolition expert and colorblind kisser. Just as he feels Johnny lining up, he processes— “Cocks?”
And Johnny’s pushing something wide and slick against Ghost, slick like a fuckin’ cunt but hard like a cock, and there’s two of them, right, sandwiching Ghost’s rock-hard dick between like a sleeve.
“Oh, fuck!” Ghost shouts, trying to lift himself on his elbows and jerking his head from side to side to lay eyes on whatever’s happening between his legs. “You have two.”
“Slickin’ fer ye, Ghost, just fer you,” Johnny groans, teeth bared in a primal show of pleasure. He shreds Ghost's shirt down the middle and slips his right arm under Ghost’s arched back, his palm between Ghost’s shoulderblades and grip possessive as he grinds down against him. “Never been so fuckin’ wet before, kint I would be fer ye.”
The heavy grind of slick and weight has Ghost bucking up and making noises he should be embarrassed about. He’s feral, frenzied, his prick is fucking dripping with it, his hands scratching down Johnny’s back. He needs to think this through, he can’t take two with no prep. He wants to, though. They feel thick, thick as his, and he’s not an average fucking size.
“Johnny,” He says, forgetting English on the next thrust forward. It’s like he’s inside a tight channel, like he’s fucking into Johnny, impossibly hot, and he’s gonna come soon if he doesn’t get a reprieve, held tight to Johnny’s chest. His hands scramble over Johnny’s back, digging in on either side of hard ridged spikes over his spine. “Johnny.”
“Yours, name’s all yours,” Johnny groans, licking his collarbone. Ghost can feel the smirk against his skin. “Gonna scream it when I fuck ye?”
“You fuckin’ wish,” Ghost gasps out, whining as something sharp catches on his dick. “What was that?!”
“Got barbs. Nothin’ tae worry about, slick’ll help.”
Ghost has maybe a second to worry about that before Johnny’s kissing his way down Ghost’s stomach and trying to remove his trousers fully by lifting his legs over broad, tan shoulders.
*
Johnny relishes in the taste of the now puffy, loose skin of Ghost’s hole, twisting the tip of his tongue past the clenching ring of muscle to stretch it wide. Everything about Ghost is melted and softened in the wake of Ghost claiming him, sucking pleasure from the marrow of Johnny’s fucking bones. Johnny never knew it could be so intimate for a vampire to feed, but he’s always known his species bites to mate, and now that he’s felt Ghost’s broken incisor break his skin not once, not twice, but three times, he’ll never get enough. He’s Ghost’s, irrevocably, three times over; fuck the incomplete bond, he knows who he belongs to.
Ghost smells like him. He’s full, glutted to excess on Johnny’s strong blood, and it settles instincts Johnny’s ignored for too long to think of himself as Ghost’s provider, protector, chosen. Ghost’s hole clenches on empty air, his massive thighs tight around Johnny’s head; Johnny wastes not another second before diving in again, his teeth unavoidably scraping against the barely-there fat of Ghost’s arse. Ghost squeals above him, tugging at his bedding and arching off the mattress.
“Whatever that was, again, more.”
Johnny sucks against his rim once more, this time without teeth. He has to be careful; Ghost hasn’t asked for his mark, and while a part of him stings with the unspoken rejection, he isn’t about to force it on him. If Ghost were his species, it wouldn’t be a question; Ghost’s eager teeth and long, lingering bites would be not a green light but a gun to his head demand to bite back. But Ghost isn’t, so Johnny hasn’t.
“Yes, yes, yes,” Ghost growls, digging his heels into Johnny’s back. As Johnny licks a stripe up to his heavy balls and presses in just beneath, Ghost sighs, blood-drunk and satisfied. His voice has taken on an almost dreamy quality to it, like he’s in a haze. Johnny did that for him.
Johnny leans in and blows cool air over his hole, grinning when the tight muscle winks and releases, loose and shiny and well-loved.
“Fuck me, Johnny.” Ghost scrapes his claws across Johnny’s shoulders and the marks make Johnny’s dicks ache. He lets Ghost’s trembling thighs drop on either side of him and shifts up to line himself up, his own lubrication enough to fit one hemipene at a time just fine.
“Settle, ‘boot tae give ye what ye want, darlin’.” He falls forward onto his elbows, happily surprised when Ghost bypasses his mouth to latch onto the underside of his jaw, fangs brushing his skin in promise. Want my cocks jus’ like this, teeth in my fuckin’ neck? “Right here. I’m right here.”
Ghost, even though he isn’t a real Vridansk, must be high on mating season blood. He has to have some inkling of the need in Johnny’s bones, because Johnny isn’t the one to push in — Ghost is, shoving his hands against the headboard to push and push until one of Johnny’s hemipenes bullies in. They both gasp, the tight heat of Ghost trying to wring Johnny dry and the slick of Johnny’s hemipene coating them both with a squirt.
“Did you just come?”
Johnny grins, pulling back and pushing in a bit further in. “No, darlin’. I’m just getting started.”
“Thank fuc— fuck, Johnny yes!” Ghost lowers his arms and digs his claws into Johnny’s mid back, wriggling like a livewire beneath him as Johnny’s barbed dick finds the little bulb of his prostate and latches.
“There it is, there ye go, take it, take it, take it,” Johnny snarls, no longer thrusting but deeply rutting into the hot clutch of Ghost’s arse. He knows his barbs can be a bit scary in theory, but in practice, the slick softens and round them out until they act like fingertips, pushing and poking and pushing and poking with each aborted rut.
“S’big,” Ghost gasps beneath him, and Johnny grins when his arse starts to milk him. The rut singing in his veins at his catch, his mate, the marks and scars glittering in Johnny’s low-lit home, sparks flames in his gut.
“Bigger’n ye thought, LT?”
“Don’t fucking— nngh, call me that when you’re in— in my arse.”
They’re nose to nose, Ghost’s every grunt and moan echoed into Johnny’s waiting, open mouth. Ghost’s eyes are gorgeous, a sated, satisfied brown that reminds Johnny of whisky. Johnny slowly pulls back enough for his barbs to drag over Ghost’s prostate with force, and he can watch the sensation play out on Ghost’s exposed face, those pretty eyes scrunching and tearing up with pleasure.
“Gonna bite me again, Ghost?” He begs. “Have I earned it?”
Fuck, but he wants it. He’s still in shock that Ghost bit him three times, that he’ll forever have one obvious and two private evidences of how much he’s Ghost’s. For a Vridansk, the biting is a sign of worthiness, of desire, of how strong your mate knows you to be.
For Johnny, he’s strong enough to keep them both alive. Strong enough to take bite after bite, strong enough to fill a vampire’s famed hunger. The thought makes his throat chitter and click, the spines on his back flare.
“Would it shut you up if I— jus’ like that,” Ghost’s eyes roll back, and he whines loudly as Johnny shoves back in and out in tiny, obsessive little pulses of his hips, buried as deep as he can get and slick squelching around his buried cock. “Don’t you fuckin’ stop—"
“Takin’ it so good, cannae wait tae see ye with my second, Sir,” Johnny praises, whole body tense with the effort of following orders, of just grinding into that swollen little gland, of not biting down in response, of not letting Ghost squeeze his orgasm right from him then and there. “So fuckin’ tight, I’m no’ goin’ nowhere.”
“Fuck, fuck-fuck-fuckfuckfuck J— fuck, J— Johnny!” Ghost cries, thrashing beneath him as pleasure tips to overstimulation. Ghost still hasn’t come, but he’s dribbling a steady flow between their bodies, and when Johnny lifts up to fit his hand between them to wrap around the pulsating, painfully-red head, Ghost latches his teeth into the side of Johnny’s exposed neck, high and obvious and possessive and hard. The ice-cold drip of heady venom is soothing in his feverish haze, addicting as he can feel Ghost spread through his veins and to his heart. Just as jaw clenches and hands yank Johnny in close, ensuring Johnny can’t move from where Ghost has positioned him, Ghost spurts his orgasm and whimpers into Johnny’s throat, coating their stomachs where they’re pressed together.
“Fuck, Ghost, I’m yours!” Johnny sobs, unable to hold back his orgasm as Ghost milks him in every way. He bullies in as deep as he can, his throbbing, slick length shoved deeper in Ghost’s tight hole with each spurt of come. The sensation of his mucosal plug passing through his channel is always overstimulating, but knowing it’s going to plug Ghost full of him, crossed wires promising him his seed will catch, has him shaking, his spines and the ridge of his head flicking from the sensory overload.
The moment it sets inside Ghost, his vampire growls deep in his throat. Slow, intentional suckling over his neck lets Ghost worry it into a bruise without pulling more blood. Johnny’s positive his nutrient-rich, dense blood is more filling than the human stock Ghost typically takes, and if the small bulge of Ghost’s stomach is any indication, his vampire should be more than satiated by now, glutted to excess. Filled in every way. The fact Ghost doesn’t need to bite, but bit because he wanted to, makes Johnny’s second dick twitch and dribble where it’s settled in the crease of Ghost’s hip and thigh.
He’s wanted. Ghost wants him, and marked him four times, to prove it. He’s lightheaded with it, the venom dilating his blood vessels and soothing his intense need to fuck until it’s just a distant throb.
Ghost pulls off his neck and purrs happily, stroking his hands up and down either side of Johnny’s quivering spines in a soothing gesture.
“I’m so fuckin’ full, I can’t take the other one.” Ghost weakly laughs, head falling back to the pillow. His grip relaxes until he’s just petting over Johnny’s neck and back, thumb occasionally brushing the sensitive new bruise. “I can feel you everywhere.”
“Need a minute,” Johnny agrees, dropping his forehead to Ghost’s sweaty chest. His blood beats in Ghost’s chest. He’s Ghost’s. He’s Ghost’s, he got what he wanted, and now that they’re mated, he can tell him everything he’s had to hide. He doesn’t fight the bright smile that spreads across his face. “I’m yours. I’m really— wanted this for so long.”
Ghost stiffens beneath him. “You did?”
“Ghost.” Johnny laughs, freeing his hand from between their bodies to shift his weight around. “Havenae exactly been subtle aboot it.”
Ghost falls quiet, still stiff.
“Ghost?” Johnny furrows his brow, pressing one palm over his lover’s heart. He’s still there, beating in Ghost’s veins. Where he belongs.
“I—" Ghost swallows, his hands on the nape of Johnny’s neck, and he’s looking everywhere but at him, his heart slow and steady and sure. “I don’t have to know. Alright?”
His grin falls a little, that Ghost doesn’t want to hear it. Does he not know they’re mates now, that Johnny would tell him everything, wants to? Did he not mean it, when he bit him four times? “I dinnae mind, Ghost. Wanted ye since Las Almas, yer voice in my ear— it—"
“No.” Ghost squeezes his grip, turns his face until it’s pointed right at Johnny. “I don’t have to know what you are.”
“I don’t understand,” Johnny blinks, pulling back to sit more upright until Ghost’s grip stops him in place. He’s wanted to tell him all this time, wanted to get on his knees and explain what it means and beg to be bitten just the once, to be allowed a single mark in Ghost’s menagerie in return.
“I haven’t known all this time.” Ghost shrugs one shoulder, helpless, what can you do. “And all this time, I’ve— wanted this. So… I don’t have to know. You can have your species, and I’ll have my name.”
Johnny’s felt the same, wanted Ghost all this time without knowing his name. Followed him around base, a lovesick puppy, pushed and pressed on boundaries just to watch them fall against his weight, knowing — despite what Ghost might say to the contrary — when not to push. When to let things be. Ghost clenches around him, a tight, silken clutch, and drags one hand down Johnny’s left arm until it’s wrapping around his wrist and bringing the unmarked skin to Ghost’s lips.
“If I bite you, it means you’re mine,” Ghost whispers, lips brushing Johnny’s skin. Johnny didn’t even have to tell him; like he said, he hasn’t exactly been subtle. “For your species, it’s a mating thing, yeah?”
Johnny nods with a shudder, head falling forward to rest over Ghost’s heart. “Yes. I’m already yours, Ghost.”
When Ghost bites down again, not once, but twice, crossed over each other so the bruise’ll make a fucking heart shape, Johnny pulls out and shifts so he can press his painfully-hard remaining dick inside, hips twitching and jerking into motion. He pulls himself away from Ghost’s demanding grip on his neck to sit upright, digging claws into Ghost’s thigh to hold it up and get a wider angle.
The dark droplets against Ghost’s pale, shimmering scar tissue are hypnotizing, but not as much as the look on Ghost’s face when the reality of post-orgasm prostate milking sets in. Johnny sets his jaw in determination and looks over the entirety of that gorgeous, fully exposed face, the thin, tiny ringlet curls, the human-looking stare, the sharp jut of his blue-coated chin and crooked line of his nose and all the scars of people who may have craved, may have wanted, but never loved him like Johnny does, name or not. Secrets or not.
The urge to bite Ghost back, to seal their bond and claim him and rest in the knowledge that feeling goes both ways makes Johnny’s stomach clench, his breath hitch, his cock bully deeper. He won’t do it, he can’t, he knows those scars don’t mean the same to Ghost as they do to him, but the urge remains, nestled under his skin.
“Fuck, Johnny, jus’ like that,” Ghost growls, hitched little ah-ah-ah noises meeting every thrust. He’s tight around him, so warm and wet from slick that has started to cream up around his hole. Johnny pulls all the way out slow, ignoring Ghost’s desperate cry just to see the thick cream drip and the gape wink. Thumbs the hole open, spreading his cheeks and holding the gape to look inside Ghost. He did that; he opened him up and made him puffy and messy and sensitive to the touch.
“Pretty as a picture…” A tease. “...Sir.”
Ghost pants beneath him, his stomach covered in a now cold, sticky mess of come. He looks ticked, the same furrowed brow and tightened glare Johnny’s used to seeing when he pushes closer on base or asks another personal question or makes his affection known. That look remains until Johnny shoves back in and fucks, full thrusts that drag and rub and catch and make Ghost cry again.
The head of his cock brushes and bumps into his mucosal plug from before, a hardened but flexible “ceiling” of sorts that has his mating-season-addled brain convinced he’s in Ghost’s womb, fucking his cervix.
He falls forward once more onto his elbows, into the sticky, disgusting mess on Ghost’s stomach, but he doesn’t care. Lets the scent of him sink into his skin, another layer to the claiming exchange, and lowers himself to press in on Ghost all around, his full weight shoving him into the mattress while he thrusts roughly, bumps that plug every time he bottoms out. He’s close, he thinks Ghost is too, and he leans in to lick Ghost’s tears off his cheek and blood off his chin before feeding it to him through a kiss, all teeth and swollen lips and high whines and taste of mulled wine.
“Gonna make sure it takes, Sir. So fuckin’ full.”
“Give it to me,” Ghost cries between kisses, his legs wrapped around Johnny’s waist and arms over his neck in a demanding hold. “Don’t you fuckin’ stop—"
“Take it, take it, Sir, you’re so fuckin’ good.” The cold, sticky, drying mess between them turns warm and wet. Ghost tenses beneath him, clenches tighter, and with one more thrust and brush of his cockhead, the set mucosal plug pops, flooding Johnny’s cock with all the cum from his previous bout. They both gasp at the sensation, the release, the disgusting shwick-shwick-shwick of his thrusts into Ghost’s sloppy, now-dripping hole.
“Johnny, fuck, please, just— I need—"
With only the instinctual, uncontrolled chittering in his throat, Johnny bares his teeth and empties himself, grinding with each pulse into Ghost’s prostate hard enough to make one final, weak shot of come smear between their stomachs. The final mucosal plug passing has Ghost whimpering, fuckin’ ‘ell too much too much too much, and Johnny sucking over an existing human bite scar on Ghost’s neck to erase it and make it his own, for just a moment.
*
Johnny drops the damp rag on the floor, and rolls over to lean into Ghost’s side, relishing the way his blood keeps Ghost warm even still.
“Price sent me here to find out what you are.”
Ghost hadn’t wanted to say it, he could tell. He has that look on his face, the same one when he’d said Roach is down, we have to get him, the same one when he’d said Meat’s not coming back, the same one when Graves flipped.
Johnny blinks, confused. His hand curls into a fist over Ghost’s heart. “What?”
Ghost looks away, and Johnny reaches up to drag his chin to face him proper. His mind’s racing, mating season fog finally lifted with the satisfaction of a thorough breeding and fresh half-formed bond, but he can’t make it make sense.
Ghost’s eyes are still brown. Johnny hasn’t gotten to see them stay this color in the years they’ve fought together; it’s only ever a flicker before the red leaks in once again. He falls in love with the way satisfaction looks on Ghost the way he did gruff smoke breaks and tea with too much sugar in it; effortlessly, all at once.
“Price sent me here,” Ghost clears his throat, those big brown eyes unblinking but shifting between both of Johnny’s, like he isn’t sure which one to tell it to, “to find out what you are. Said not to come back until I had an answer.”
Soap jerks back. “Ye mated me tae answer yer fuckin’ bet?”
His hand lifts from Ghost’s heart and closes around the bruise on his neck, as though he could undo it with his touch alone. As though he could will it, or the five others, away; Ghost didn’t want him, he bit him that many times to make sure it took, to make sure he was stuck with him.
“Johnny, no.” Ghost curls his hand over Johnny’s fingers, pulling it away from the mottled purple mating mark, and because Johnny’s a sucker too far gone on his LT to be logical, he lets him. “I said I don’t have to know, and I meant it. Don’t tell me, Price can read my thoughts when I feed from him.”
The silent disobedience Ghost would take on for Johnny’s secret settles his temporary doubts; though Ghost and Price have the species rivalry, the insults in jest, there’s a deep thread of respect between the two of them, and for Ghost to want to protect Johnny’s secret despite that, go against direct orders, speaks as loud as the welcome soreness in his thighs, his wrists, his neck.
“Ye dinnae have tae feed from him, or, or anyone else, anymore,” Johnny replies hesitantly, searching Ghost’s face for sign of disagreement. “You’re my mate. I can keep ye satisfied, can I no’?”
Ghost mouths the word mate. His face flickers through a volley of emotions — shock, confusion, pride, pleasure — before landing on fear. “We just— I just mated— what have I done? I’m your Lieuten— Johnny, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Johnny, in a humiliating, burning display of just how much he wanted Ghost and just how much it hurts to hear Ghost doesn’t feel the same, works himself up to a boiling hot, bubbling sob in his throat. “Don’t say that. Dinnae ye fuckin apologize fer— yer my mate, Ghost. My… I could never regret— yer my mate. My mate…”
Ghost wraps his large frame around Johnny, arms flat over his back between flickering spines, and Johnny lets himself sob into his chest, surrounded by the scent of him in his mate’s veins and the heady cloud of sated sex in the air.
“I don’t regret it either,” Ghost murmurs, pulling the quilt up over them. “I— I want to, because I’ve just ruined… I’m on your neck, Johnny. You’re tied to me, and you probably mate for life, don’t you? You…”
“I want you there,” Johnny snarls, clutching tighter to Ghost. “Always wanted you there."
Every midnight smoke, every expensive blood source Johnny could get his hands on, every night following Ghost from room to room and silently waiting to be glared at, he wanted him there. He does mate for life, both his parents’ species do, and he’s wanted Ghost on his neck since before he knew the shape of his teeth.
Johnny rubs his face into Ghost’s chest, and Ghost holds him tighter. It’s illegal. It’s enough to ruin both their careers, the blue slip one they both have heard about, but never seen issued. But in the quiet light of Antarctic night, it’s everything, and it’s easier than it ever was in either of their distant dreaming.
*
Soap’s three weeks had been in anticipation of a long, lonely mating season peak, rutting against his bedding and hunting in bouts of lucidity; however, Ghost’s arrival and their repeated celebration of their half-formed bond worked wonders on shortening the projected span of insanity. Ghost bathes Johnny, brushing thumb over bruise and lips over skin, and Johnny shows off the furs on his bed (not selkie, but he’s strangely amused by the guess) as proof of his ability to provide. Ghost talks more than he has in the last year, questions and gasps and jokes and sweet nothings, and Johnny listens attentively to every word, his stare less predatory now that he’s caught his prey and more adoring.
The return to base — the return to normalcy, to protocol and uniforms and rankings and judgmental eyes — is strange for them both, stepping back the intimacy they’ve learned and clenching fists to stop absent touching. Even stepping onto the helo, Ghost goes to bump his masked forehead into Johnny’s, and Johnny pulls away before they make contact, putting a seat between them. Johnny takes his hand, when the pilot’s arguing with an air traffic controller over Morocco, and it settles them both for a breath, before the pilot turns his head and Ghost wrenches his hand free in fear of being seen. With broken expression and guilty eyes that don’t leave Ghost until they touch down in London, Johnny lets him.
Soap is skittish, a bit lost, and the distance wears on Ghost like a choke chain. He’s tugged in Johnny’s direction every time he enters a room, his already too-finely-tuned senses on maximum wherever his Sergeant is concerned. Johnny won’t make eye contact, doesn’t go to the pub when invited, and isn’t smiling at anyone. His new mood is likely felt by the whole fuckin’ base, if Ghost were to guess.
Watery human blood is fucking nauseating, like drinking hotdog water. He'd rather starve.
Johnny's neck takes forever to heal. His wrists, even longer. Something about a slow metabolism and cold extremities. Every time Ghost sees flashes of wrist guards from beneath long sleeves, he thinks to himself, how did we finally lean in and only end up further apart?
Ghost doesn’t have to wait long for Price to call him in for answers; he wasn’t supposed to return until he had them, so it’s not Price’s fault for expecting results. That said, sitting in the wolf dog’s office under three sets of accusatory eyes isn’t a welcome break from watching his mate (his matematematemate his, his skin sings) deteriorate.
“So? Lieutenant?”
Ghost doesn’t move. He doesn’t grunt. He doesn’t give any indication he’s heard his Captain’s query, and he certainly doesn’t answer it.
Ye mated me tae answer yer fuckin’ bet?
I don’t need to know. Don’t tell me.
“What is Soap?” Gaz asks, at his wit’s end. No jokes, no banter, just the question and the lack of answer. “We saw the bite, Ghost. We know something happened. You fed from him, right? After the... 'polar bear?' You’ve gotta know something!”
Something happened. Yeah. They don't believe him on the polar bear thing, for understandable reasons, but he knows what he saw, both before and during the fucking polar bear fight. And he knows the story he has to stick to for the rest of it, to keep Johnny safe. As far as the 141 is aware, Ghost bit Johnny for the first time in the years they’ve known each other because a polar bear bit him, and it was a typical vampiric feeding. Johnny wears wrist guards and long sleeves to cover the other three visible marks, and Ghost has given far too much thought to the remaining two on his thighs to forget about them either.
He thinks the polar bear thing might, somehow, be the least convincing part of their cover story, despite it being the only truth.
Ghost feeding from Johnny was anything but fucking typical. The 141 may see the bite on Johnny's neck, the forever-promise Ghost left in his skin he'll never be able to fill, but every time the 141 looks at it, they don’t know what it is, that he and Johnny — they’re mates. Don’t know Ghost can feel the fading of Johnny’s bloodscent from his skin like a starving man watches his body consume itself. He’s empty, for more than just the blood; he’s empty because they spent four days in that bed feeding and fucking and fraternizing and Ghost’s real name was on his lips the whole time, and he never said it.
Johnny never bit him back, never even asked, not when he was deep inside Ghost, not when he bent in half and had Ghost’s thumb on his tongue, not when he was draped over Ghost’s nape and had nothing in his way. Ghost is empty because while Johnny is his, has the marks to prove it, those marks don’t mean anything to anyone beyond what the both of them know them to be, and he isn’t Johnny’s in return.
“Ghost, just— tell us if we’re on the right track! Is he a serpent?”
He has two dicks, does that help, Ghost thinks to himself. He purrs like a fuckin motor when you scratch his low back, is that something a serpent would do? He cries like a doll when you first stretch him open, does that raise or lower your fucking bet? He calls me ‘darlin’ like I’m some precious thing, and it makes me feel feral, is that something you can use? He tastes like home. Does that mean anything to you? Because it means everything to me.
So Roach signs, Ghost-Soap-knowledge-Species-question?, and Ghost doesn’t react, staring a red-eyed hole in the carpet of his Captain’s wet-dog smelling office and knowing what he wants— what he wants, clear-headed and thought-out and brutally honest, would make everything worse, because to have Johnny’s distinctive bite mark on his body would erase what little plausible deniability is currently keeping Johnny safe. If the others found the wrist marks that already exist, unnecessary and decorative and possessive, the defense that ‘Ghost needed to feed’ would go up in smoke; if Johnny called him by name?
His chest feels tight. No one’s said his name in six lonely years.
“Ghost?”
He stands, shrugging off Price’s hand, and leaves without another word.
*
Johnny becomes a periphery of awareness for Ghost. He’s always on the fringe, always in a corner or off to the side or ignoring Gaz’s attempts to ask what happened on leave, mate, but unlike that short period of time in Ghost’s childhood when he wore glasses (and then Tommy promptly broke them a few months later), his vision never shifts. He never stops noticing the rim around his eyes, he never stops processing that input.
So maybe Johnny isn’t a periphery ornament, but a missing tooth. When vampires turn, their incisors fall out and make room for the venom sacs and new teeth; waiting for his weapons to come in was made miserable by the three metre by three metre cage he was living in, and he spent the entire time tonguing that empty gap and knowing what was there was never coming back. What he once knew was never going to be applicable again.
Ghost lets Johnny have his space, but smoking a cigarette is fucking boring without some idiot pressing in on his last nerve and asking, what would ye have done if ye didnae enlist, LT? He tongues the gap.
Every night reading, truly alone without Soap in the room and Gaz following after, is irritating, because he gets three chapters into his book and realizes he fucking hates it. He hates everything about the quiet, the solitude, the lamplight and dark shadows stretching from the unlit corners of the room; he tongues the gap.
Every morning training in the March freezing-cold is spent grunting and intimidating yet another platoon of degenerates into something approximating progress, and Ghost used to daydream about having a single morning to himself, but when it starts to snow, a bit late for the season and unwelcomed by all, he instinctively looks for Johnny, and sees him standing just inside a double-glass door, watching the snow wistful and mourning, a hand cupping the side of his neck with his bondmark. He tongues the gap.
When Ghost drinks (because a vampire is never satisfied, when Johnny isn't there) he chokes on disgust and something he can't call heartbreak because he isn't allowed to use words like that when he knows he's doing the right thing for Soap by keeping his distance. He chokes and gags and tongues the gap.
Ghost would think it easier to cut his own toes off with wire cutters. He’s been there.
When Ghost showers, he doesn’t hear stupidly out-of-tune humming anymore; he doesn’t fend off borderline harassment catcalls, or smell shampoo for hair he's always wanted to wrap his knuckles in and pull, or watch Gaz and Roach waterboard each other and Johnny chime in with taunts. He showers alone after curfew, pressing clawed fingertips into already-fading bruises on his hips and tonguing the gap and wishing against time they could stay a bit longer, linger a little, hurt just one moment more.
He can’t orgasm. He’s tried, in the shower, fingers rubbing his fangs, but all he does is rub himself ragged; without the weight of him, the smell of him, the heat, Ghost can’t get himself to finish. He wonders if it’s a perk of being mated, for Johnny’s species; even so, he thinks he deserves it, to never orgasm again if not with him.
It’s during one such failed attempt that he hears the shower door creak open, bare feet plod against the tile in a heavy step, and can just see when he raises his head upright over the divider that it’s Johnny, Johnny’s unruly hair and bronze shoulders and yellowing bite mark and black, scared eyes looking back.
“Sorry Sir. I’ll go,” Johnny says, backing up to the door.
“Wait,” Ghost begs, unable to do this dance and tongue that gap and feel everything he lost anymore. “Johnny.”
Johnny stops with his hand on the doorknob, chest bare and soft and hairy and everything Ghost misses about him. There’s a towel around his waist, the soft swell of his stomach hanging over the edge of it, and Ghost wants.
“We cannae— not if ye want this tae stay a secret, Ghost. I cannae.” Johnny stares up at him as he approaches, eyes wide and hurting and scared but still so pretty it hurts. “I dinnae ken how tae be anythin’ but yer mate, now. An’ we both pulled away. We both live fer the 141.”
Ghost puts one hand on the door, holding it closed, and leans in, hurting for the both of them, hurting for all the time they’ve spent wanting and now all the time they’ve spent waiting in purgatory for the tooth to grow in, for the absence to fill, for the numb emptiness to wane.
“I’m not worried, not anymore.”
Johnny makes a questioning sound in his throat, eyes on Ghost’s mouth, but he doesn’t fight it when Ghost smooths his other palm around Johnny’s side, pulling him in closer off the door. Doesn’t fight it when Ghost leans down to whisper in his ear, “You asked me what I’d be, if I wasn’t a soldier.”
Johnny nods, hands hesitantly smoothing up either side of Ghost’s flinching stomach to press against his chest, over his heart. Where his hands belong.
“My name is Simon Riley,” he murmurs in Johnny’s ear, a promise, a secret, an oath, a confession. “And if I’m not a soldier anymore, after I take your bite, at least then I’d have an answer for you.”
“Simon,” Johnny breathes, looping his arms around Simon’s neck to drag him into a kiss more emotional than quality. “Simon, Simon, Simon.”
The magic pulling him in, drawing him closer till he’s nearly under Johnny’s skin, the magic calling him home doesn’t feel like a prison like he always thought it would.
It feels like a new tooth growing in.
*
Ghost sits anxiously in his flat off base, waiting for the front doorknob to turn. He gave Johnny his spare key in that bathroom from where it had been tucked inside his pocket since Antarctica. He’s waiting for Johnny to make his choice, to either risk their careers together — give Simon his bite, take him as a mate, tell him everything or nothing about his species, come out of hiding — or free himself from any obligation to Ghost.
If he doesn’t come, Ghost will transfer. Laswell’s been asking for more CIA ops with him, it wouldn’t be a hardship beyond separating from Johnny. He hasn’t much thought about what that life might be like, been too busy purchasing candles to light and blow out again; ripping his mask off and shoving it back on, again, and again; buttoning and unbuttoning the dress shirt he bought on impulse and immediately regretted, because he’s not going to the fucking Year Eleven prom, he’s taking a mating bite from an unknown species and risking everything because he can’t live without someone pushing his every button and pressing against his skin and-
There’s a sound in the hallway outside, just a soft thump, but Ghost stills like it’s a gunshot in enemy territory. Stills unnaturally, in the way only vampires and other dead things can, and reminds himself it could be any of the inhabitants of the other twelve flats on this floor. A hundred flats in the building, a hundred lives unlike Simon’s, a hundred better things he could be doing than ripping the thread from the top button of the shirt he shouldn’t have bought.
Clock says Johnny’s late. Forty minutes late. Johnny’s chaos in a physical body, he’s ridiculous and absurd and held on a thin leash by Price, but he’s never forty minutes late. Simon was stupid. This is stupid. He’s a heartsick wanker.
He leans over and blows out the candles for the umpteenth time, the smoke unfurling gently once again into the room and threatening to set off the detector. The tunnelling is intense, rendering the things basically unusable, and he doesn’t even like the scent that much anyway.
He’s stupid.
He stands to search his coat pocket for his pack of cigs, ready to stand on his balcony and smoke until his next door neighbor slams their palm against the wall because the smoke carries, you bloody fuck, when the lock clicks.
And all at once, his silent, dark flat is filled with technicolor and rambling and warmth, Johnny in a green sweater Simon immediately wants to liberate from him and holding bags from a market nearby and carrying flowers in the crook of his arm, giving excuses about there was this harpy on the tram, woman almost killed me with ‘er stink-eye, and such a long line fer the flowers, but I couldnae resist.
A kiss on Simon’s cheek, flowers pressed into his hands, and takeaway from a local monster joint dumped unceremoniously on his counter. Comments about how he looks right braw, is tha’ a new shirt?, Nice place, I like the candle, ye can fix the tunnelling with foil, d’ye ken tha’? My ma likes ‘em, but she doesnae have the patience fer the three hours thing, so she-
Simon pushes his Johnny up against the counter, fingers woven in his mohawk and flowers in his other hand, and breathes against his lips, “make an honest man outta me, already, MacTavish.”
“MacTavish. Can’t tell if this fight’ll be uphill or down,” Johnny grins.
He gives Simon his bite on their balcony, to spite the neighbors, under a sky with twice as many stars as either of them can see; right over an existing human teeth indent, that Simon points to and says, "I didn't want it, want yours. Want yours and only yours,” and over another on the other side with two pronged vampiric signatures for the same reason.
*
Gaz, Roach, and Price now have two mysteries afoot in the 141: MacTavish, as a whole, and now whatever fucking happened between Ghost and Soap. Something happened, of course; Soap’s neck was bruised like the apples in the mess and Ghost could always be found not necessarily searching the world around him for the Sergeant usually attached to his belt loop, but pointedly aware of exactly where a compass would point a direct path of least resistance to that Sergeant’s place of resignation on the fringes.
Not to mention, the polar bear thing. In Antarctica. Something about the cover story Ghost gave him hadn't been thought-out enough to pass muster.
Price knew, the first time Ghost settled beneath the only window in Price’s quarters to smoke his nightly cig and share his nightly chat with Soap and Soap didn’t show up, that whatever happened in Antarctica the two weren’t speaking about had been catastrophic. Had been related to the sound Soap had made in that pub, related to the bristling in Ghost’s spine when Gaz had muttered about Soap’s incubus genes, related to the flash of possessive want Price had seen through Ghost’s eyes in Austria, related to the look of carnage, premature grief, and exhaustion in Ghost’s red glare when he’d said there is nothing between myself and Sergeant MacTavish. Price isn’t stupid; he’s a leader of a mix-species pack and Captain of an elite SAS task force.
When Soap and Ghost are waiting for him in his office, six weeks after Antarctica at attention, Price feels something different waiting for him in Ghost’s head. Rather than walls of cold, unforgiving steel, he finds a desert, open for him to wander and empty save for a little blond kid with too-familiar eyes a shade of brown he’s only ever seen for a split-second at a time and a sky full of too many stars to count. The kid turns to him, swimming in a too-big green sweater, only two filigree-like bite marks on his whole body, and says, I figured some things out, Mr. Price, just like you told me.
In real life, in his office, Ghost wears a green sweater, sleeves just a bit too short, and Soap explains the particulars. His species is protected by an endangered species code, and he is bound by law from divulging anything to anyone beyond blood relations and chosen mates. At those words, Soap’s eyes flick to Ghost, who is already craning his neck, breaking the military-trained position, to look back.
In Soap’s head, rather than the blank, vast unresponsive emptiness Price has always found, he finds himself on base, back to a familiar brick wall and cigarette smoke in the air. Soap stands beside him and says, in a soft, intimate voice, If I hadnae enlisted, I’d have joined art school. Drawin’ books fer bairns. There’s a flash, a soft impression, of a woman with Soap’s nose and eyebrows but bright red hair who wears a fur over her shoulders like a cloak and whispers a ghràidh over a kids’ book, and a man with black eyes, too-long, lanky limbs, and pincers over his swirling, filigree teeth — more monster than man — who responds vridansk.
“On an unrelated note, Sir, I will be retracting from the betting pool,” Ghost says, apropos of nothing, as though he’s clever or cheeky or something equally daft rather than turning Price’s world upside down. Ghost… took his advice. Actually listened, when Price opened his mouth, and figured some things out. Mated Soap.
Both men stand opposite his desk with a look of anticipation, waiting for the other foot to drop, or maybe a blue slip to be handed to them on impact.
“Well, that’s understandable. I appreciate you not scalping us via insider trading,” Price growls, taking his hat off in a show of unusual surprise. “Soap, I presume since you’re… aware… of the betting pool, you won’t mind if it continues?”
Soap blinks, shock painting his face in a severe light. “Uh, I suppose no’, Sir. But the endangered species code—"
“There are more laws than not that the 141 doesn’t give a flying fuck about, son.” Price levels them both with a serious, weighty look that says more than his words. “If that’s all, I’ll need you both to update your next-of-kin paperwork and file for joint mate leave.”
Ghost splutters, and Soap’s kicked-puppy expression melts into a disbelieving, brilliantly blinding grin.
“Yes, Sir. Aye, Sir. We’ll have that on your desk.”
“You’re serious?” Ghost asks, and Price should have known that the only thing stronger than a vampire’s hunger is their disbelief in the face of satisfaction.
“You saw Colonel Vargas and his mate in Mexico; they’re MSF. Think Mexico looks brightly on homosexual Colonels, Ghost?” The silent no doesn’t need to be verbalized. “But they’re a chupacabra and a phoenix. Nothing and no one is going to get in the way of a mated pair, and they’re both too good for MSF to lose.”
The implication, and so are the both of you, makes Soap light up with a laugh. Ghost turns his wary, evaluating gaze from Price to Soap, and Price watches in real time a softening as Ghost realizes he gets to keep his mate and his life intact.
“You’re both dismissed. I expect this not to imply Ghost will take sparring training easy on you, Sergeant.”
“Absolutely not,” Ghost answers, feet turned toward Price but face toward his Sergeant.
“Wouldnae dream of it, Cap,” Soap says with a cheeky wink, pushing Ghost toward the door. Seems fitting, that he wouldn’t have learned a lick of professionalism from this endeavor. “Thank ye. Thank ye, Captain.”
The door closes behind them. Price sits at his desk, unlocks the special drawer with his notebook and ledger for the betting, and flips open to his latest page only to read handwriting that decidedly isn’t his on the page.
Ghost’s bid is crossed out entirely, illegibly censored from the page. Gaz, who had guessed cat-hybrid, is doodled unflatteringly with a hammer hitting him over the head and the word dunce scribbled in. A strange lizard is drawn breathing fire onto Roach’s guess. Price’s guess (sea serpent) has been circled and labelled promising! But wrong!, and Laswell— Laswell’s Loch Ness descendant just has several question marks afterwards and a hastily scrawled Does Nessie even fuck? added afterwards. The bidding amounts all have zeroes added to the ends of them.
Price groans, dropping his head in his hands. They’ll all have to start over from scratch, now.
And he needs a new hiding spot.
*
“So what am I mated to, MacTavish?”
“Whatever happened tae ‘I dinnae have tae ken, John-nay’?”
Simon lets the mocking go, just this once. He’s too busy basking in the fact he can keep this, and keep the 141 too; that he can be Johnny’s Simon, and still be Ghost too. “I picked that drawer lock for you.”
“That y’did.” Johnny shakily slips his blunt fingertips beneath the borrowed sweater. His lack of vision in the dark has led to an endearing, fumbling quality to their impromptu meetings in closets that Simon can’t get enough of; Johnny trusts him enough to go in a dark closet and kiss him blindly. Against bare warm skin, the aimless grip tightens, draws Ghost closer before their mouths brush in an off-center kiss Ghost quickly rights. “My Ma’s a Selkie, and my Da’s an Ice Dragon species poached for their pincers.”
“I would have won half that pool, you bloody wanker,” Simon sighs. “And Gaz?”
Johnny laughs, kneading into the dimples in Simon’s lower back. “Gaz’s just a shitty siren. I dinnae ken wha—"
“No, he’s not.”
Johnny blinks, and smiles in the dark. Soft. Real. “Sirensong dinnae mean much when I’m lookin’ at ye. Easy as tha’.”
“What a pickup line.” Ghost leans in and grins into the underside of Johnny’s jaw, sweater-covered forearm pressing in on the soft fat of Johnny’s mid back. “So lustful for your CO you made yourself immune to a siren? Embarrassing, if true. Corny.”
“I’ll be the whole cob, if it’ll make ye this handsy, Sir,” Johnny chuckles to himself, blunt fingertips turning pinprick sharp in playful warning. “It’s the honest truth. And I’m no’ colorblind, neither, I jus’ dinnae see in the dark like all of ye can. Get by on smell and taste, mostly.”
“Hm.” Simon reaches up to pull the chain on the naked bulb overhead in their storage closet of choice, flooding the room with white clinical light bright enough to make his own eyes sting for a second. The movement pulls the tight sweater's stitches wide, exposing his navel and thinning the barrier keeping his skin warm. “Any better?”
Johnny huffs a breathless laugh, tilting his head back against the metal door. Simon lowers his arm to snake between them, pulling Johnny’s shirt collar aside to better look at the healed bite mark. Proof of their bond. It’s dizzying, seeing his own crooked bite and chipped incisor looking back at him. It’s nothing like what Roba did to him; his bite is laced with the memory of want, desire, satisfaction, affection; parachute training hand in hand. Johnny’s bite on him is healing, seeing stars after digging himself free of a grave. Flowers and foil on candles and never being alone again so long as he’ll forever live.
“Aye, Simon, s’better,” Johnny breathes, eyes half lidded and voice soft with affection. The call of his name curls around Simon’s spine and draws him in nose-to-nose. “Can see jus’ how bonnie ye look in high definition, now, wearin' my clothes, my mark. Lovesick vampire. It’ll go tae my ‘ead soon if ye dinnae clean up yer act.”
Simon leans in to shut him up with a growling, possessive kiss, reaching to pettily turn the light back off. The kiss is ruined, just useless, and the chain evades his grip when Johnny’s barking, seal-like laughter at his expense draws the attention of a wide-eyed Cadet on custodial duty in need of a mop.
"S-sorry, Lieutenant, Sir, I, um," The Cadet fumbles and stutters, hand on the doorknob and eyes far too wide in the bright light, capturing far too many details of what Simon's Sergeant looks like kiss-drunk and laughing.
Simon's threat is more subvocal snarl than speech. "You have ten seconds to run."
The Cadet's out of sight in four, and when Simon finally settles back with the door shut and his hands on Johnny's ribs, Johnny's laughing at him. "Are ye jealous of a... Cadet, Simon? Ye ken yer the one with my bite, aye?"
The curl of home, go home, run, pulls Simon even closer, but the shit-eating, smug look on his Sergeant's face at his expense brings his hand reluctantly (so fucking reluctantly, he wants to touch Johnny all the time) up to the lightbulb to yank its chain, successfully plunging them in petty darkness.
"Aw, Simon, I thought ye looked right braw in my sweater," Johnny giggles, irreverent and delighted. "Cannae tell which was greener, yer borrowed sweater or yer envious glare."
Simon brushes his nose over the beat of blood in Johnny's neck, hands beneath his untucked shirt and claws pressing into the give of his low back. When he scratches there, (just as he knew Johnny would), Johnny melts into the door, high gasping moan choked off. Johnny's blood in both their veins sings its praises of his attention, the room scenting heavily of happyminehome.
Simon can't help but agree. He's happy, Johnny's his, and he's home.
And he's keeping the fucking sweater.