Makarov didn’t kill Soap that night in the tunnel, but he still left something far more cruel behind.
Ghost x Soap
Cw: Hurt No Comfort, heavy angst, domestic fluff; heavy use of repetitive metaphors, motifs, anaphoras, and polysyndeton purposely; PTSD, canon compliant levels of violence, grief/mourning, bittersweet, in sickness and in health, canon divergence, TBI Soap, caretaker Ghost, emotional slow burn, quiet grief, soft Ghost
This is what drowning feels like.
A hand around the back of his neck, shoving him under, only it’s not water, it’s the press of night air thick with gunpowder and sweat, every inhale biting at the back of his throat like smoke he can’t cough up. The city is an open wound, fever bright and infected, neon strobes crawling up the wet brick like veins carrying poison through dying flesh.
His ears ring with the hymnal of violence. Sirens, shouts, metal on stone; each sound too sharp and yet too far away, all of it funneled down to a hum that vibrates the bones in his skull like tuning forks struck by God’s own trembling hand. He can’t tell whose voice is whose, can’t tell if it’s Price on comms or Johnny’s familiar laugh threading through the static, or his own voice, split open and spilling into the dark.
There’s blood in his mouth.
Was this what it felt like to have your name peeled from your chest? To have someone reach in with surgeon’s fingers and cut the thread that held you together, strand by strand, until your hands were empty and slick and shaking?
One blink, Makarov is in the tunnel, nothing but shadow and teeth, a nightmare given flesh and malice. And Johnny’s moving, that split second confidence burning bright as a struck match, always a half step faster; his courage a wild thing, beautiful and doomed.
The air thickens, swells, then cracks like the world’s spine breaking.
A shot, loud enough to punch a hole in the night, to shatter the membrane between before and after.
