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The journal is ever-present. Roach isn’t actually sure he’s ever seen Captain MacTavish without it. It’s like a fifth limb that moves about his body. Swaddled against his chest beneath layers upon layers as they hike through an iced over mountain pass, strapped to his thigh as he’s clambering the steps of a Venom and shouting orders over the rotors, retrieved from a bag of explosives. For something so important, the Captain puts it through a lot of punishment. The state of the journal doesn’t seem to matter to him so much as the simple fact of it being there.
Maybe the military and Murphy’s Law are beating superstitions back into him, but sometimes he thinks it’s magically bonded to MacTavish or something. It doesn’t make sense that he hasn’t lost it yet. Good thing though. Roach can’t imagine Captain MacTavish speechless, but he can get close imagining him trying to tell Shepherd that he was carrying around a handy dandy book of military secrets, and now it’s laying somewhere in a Russian valley.
The thought almost makes him laugh, which is how he knows he’s going crazy in this beige room of sweat, pizza boxes, and gun oil. He’s never found Shepherd that funny unless Ghost is doing one of his shit imitations of his droning, sleep aid speeches. The Captain doesn’t find them funny at all – probably one more reason Ghost does them. Roach wishes Ghost was here to do the bit. At least someone would be talking to him.
Four days they’ve been on this stakeout. One of them prowling the underpass by the river at night, and both of them taking shifts at the window during the day. Intel said it would be a quick check – no room for confusion in an urban environment - confirming identity before they move in to tag and bag. Intel says a lot of things. Roach is gonna say a few things to them when they get back too. Or sign things, anyway. They’ll have to get an interpreter to figure out the exact pressure he wishes he could put on their fucking necks for sticking him in this situation.
Normally Roach loves being on missions with just the Captain. MacTavish is the first superior who hasn’t tried to get him to just talk more. He lets Roach be whatever he is, and Roach, increasingly, wants that to be More Like Him.
MacTavish never hesitates to go loud. Any mission with the Captain is either going to be a hell of a story, or a quick thing with one detail Roach will lie awake at night puzzling over. (MacTavish listing the five quickest ways to kill a dog with no hint of remorse. MacTavish dragging him back around a corner and telling him, breathlessly as the air rings around them, exactly how much damage a flashbang too close to the eye will do. MacTavish bleeding, bleeding, bleeding and calling him Griggs for a second, whoever that is, before he shakes it off.) He’s going to be okay if the Captain is there. He knows this as well as he knows his own bones, the breaks and the faded cracks.
Okay. But not necessarily entertained, apparently. MacTavish has spent most of the last 2 days hunched over that journal. Sometimes he mutters to himself, or orders them a new pizza and sends Roach to the door with a fistful of currency. Yesterday he went out for recon and came back with a set of fine, neutral colouring pencils that are now spread out beside him on his hotel bed. If they stay here much longer, maybe he’ll buy some watercolours. Roach has seen the pack of them back at base, where MacTavish calls once a day. But the calls are getting a lot shorter and a lot more Scottish. The rest of the time, he’s intently focused on his paper.
Roach has started keeping a journal too. (Pathetic. He cringes internally. Way too obvious about it. He’d rather be unarmed in a hot zone than have MacTavish spot him writing in it.) But he doesn’t trust himself to keep it safe yet. It’s not routine to him, and he’s not the Captain. He’s Roach. Clumsy and green for all his accuracy with a gun and likely to drop his fancy new journal right into the hands of a nosy Russian. No. The journal stays on base for now. Which means Roach has nothing to do but clean his guns, stare out of the window, and wonder what MacTavish is writing in his journal.
He thinks it’s plans – backups and exfil points and potentials. MacTavish always spends hours in his journal when a mission changes. Sometimes he does it with maps and documents pulled up, or on the radio to command. But that doesn’t explain the pencils, or the slow but repetitive motions his hand makes.
He’d guessed from the watercolours that the Captain liked art. Never broached the subject, obviously. Not the kind of thing you ask a commanding officer, though Roach wishes it was. He wants to know all he can about the Captain. It’ll wear off with the green. Judging by the way he watches Shepherd, MacTavish probably used to sit and stare at his captains and wonder how to become them too.
But then, he became a captain, didn’t he? So maybe that’s actually the right way to go about it. Maybe General MacTavish will be giving Captain Sanderson orders someday. Ghost can stay a lieutenant. He’s good at it. The lone wolf fuckers always are. Responsibility without the real obligation. Meat can get demoted to private, and clean Roach’s fucking toilet. Or Scarecrow. Anyone who’s called him FNG this month. It’s a nice little fantasy. He almost wishes it would last.
But he’s seen MacTavish do stranger things with the journal. A large drop of blood from Mouse, KIA four months back, and the Captain stooping beside her, pressing her thumb into the wet blood like ink. Stamped into the journal. Roach hadn’t asked, doesn’t want to really, if MacTavish always keeps a mark of them in the journal. If death is always that gentle to them. (It isn’t. When MacTavish is a general, Roach’s mark might not be in there. It won’t mean he isn’t dead.)
MacTavish tapes maps and ticket stubs and other stuff past usefulness, like Mouse’s body, into the journal. He holds it tight to his chest after tough missions and scribbles furiously where only Ghost can see. Not that he looks. Sometimes, in the aftermath of a clusterfuck, he scans them all over with these eyes that remind Roach of his middle school principal and jots down notes. The next day, there’s always a new training schedule posted up for them. He shows Ghost things he’s written or stuck in there, and the scary thing is that Ghost laughs that creepy fucking laugh that means he's just seen something absolutely twisted, which means the Captain probably makes the same nauseatingly dark jokes as Ghost.
And now, Roach has found something new MacTavish does in the morbid, horrible, death journal. He’s sat in their lookout chair, selecting pencils from the neat line-up on the bed beside him and drawing over something in the journal he’s balancing on his knee as he ‘watches the window’. The covers on the bed are made with military efficiency, the pencils laid out carefully no matter how many times he picks them up and puts them down. Roach’s own bed on the other side of the tiny room is a mess of extra blankets and his gear. Captain MacTavish is always neat.
Roach had cracked a joke about it once in the mess. Hands flying around without thinking. Nowhere near the Captain but… still. Idiot. Trying to bond with the guys so they’d stop calling him FNG. It was less than an hour before Ghost had him choking on mud in that month’s obstacle course and nailed home two lessons to him.
One: the mask is not just a bit, Ghost is the scariest thing on base.
Two: keep your metaphorical mouth fucking shut if MacTavish organizes his desk by pencil length and puts his boots on twice every single time ‘for luck’, or Ghost will shut your actual mouth for you.
Roach had learned them well.
What he hasn’t learned – despite the stupid fucking codename – is self-preservation.
The boredom is a physical weight. If he sits with his guns anymore he’s going to start naming them, and then Ghost won’t be the craziest fucker on base any longer. This is his justification for how long he’s been watching MacTavish and the journal, for why he’s been slowly inching closer to him whenever he ‘stretches’ around the room.
It’s late afternoon. Soon they’ll order dinner again, MacTavish will call HQ, and the journal will go away. Roach won’t ever find out if MacTavish is sketching the street, or a rat, or cartoon girls with big breasts, or… actually, okay, that would be the worst outcome. Slightly below a detailed drawing of him disembowelling Roach. But he’s pretty sure it’s not either of those things.
He stretches his hands over his head again, making a casual circuit of the room. If MacTavish notices, he doesn’t react. He’s focused on his journal. Of course he is. It’s the most interesting thing in the room and Roach has to find out what’s in it right now, or he’ll explode.
He shifts closer. Each step is as tentative as if he’s passing over a minefield. Infiltrate. ID. Exfil. Simple. Slow. Steady. Roach hates the slow ones. That’s why MacTavish always takes him on them. Exposure therapy.
He isn’t sure what he’s expecting when he’s finally crept up on his captain and peered over his shoulder. He knows for certain, however, that he wasn’t expecting to see a man. Just… a random man. Roach has no idea who he is. He’s got shaggy, sandy blonde hair, like it only gets cut with kitchen scissors instead of the typical military buzzcut, dark eyes, and pale skin that suggests either MacTavish couldn’t find a normal shade or this man has never experienced a suntan. There are deep bags under his eyes that MacTavish has oh so generously drawn great attention to. No scars. No real distinguishing features. It could have been a random man who’d walked past outside. Except for the detail in the features, and MacTavish’s frustrated little scribbles with an arrow pointing at things like the jaw (too sharp!) or the eyes (too wide).
… And the fact there are five small sketches of the man’s face on one page, and two large drawings on the other. Both sides are accompanied by features like the eyes and nose drawn smaller, more often, like practice. Like the drills MacTavish runs back at base.
MacTavish is colouring the largest drawing. It’s halfway there, and he’s adding fucking shading, so focused on it he somehow hasn’t noticed Roach now blatantly leaning over his shoulder. His tongue is between his lips with focus as his dark grey pencil brushes the edges of the mystery man’s shoulders. He follows the lines like a sacred creed.
Roach shifts slightly. There’s a creeping feeling moving up his spine, worrying at the base of his skull and whispering up into his ear that this is… not for him to see. The dedication MacTavish is using is a lot, even without seeing the full focus in his eyes. Whoever this guy is he’s important, and Roach has no business… well, he didn’t- it wasn’t… He’s used to being speechless, used to feeling guilty about it. He’s not used to wondering if it’s deserved.
Unfortunately, shifting away is entirely the wrong thing to do. The movement is too quick. MacTavish twitches. He glances back at Roach. Their eyes meet.
There’s so much happening suddenly, in the still, silent room. Roach doesn’t have time to react, to reassure. MacTavish barks something unintelligible. He twists around. He slams the journal shut and throws it at his bed, away from Roach. It thumps against the wall and slides down to awkwardly rest against the pillows.
Roach holds his hands up, surrendering, apologetic. MacTavish’s eyes are horror-wide, only his impeccable self-restraint keeping his fight or flight from throwing Roach through the window on instinct. If Roach has any doubts about his theory, the colour draining from MacTavish’s face confirms it.
Okay Roach signs, going for quick reassurance.
MacTavish doesn’t blink. “It’s-” the colour comes back now. A fierce, uncharacteristic blush. “Roach!”
Roach apologizes immediately because, yeah, he feels shitty now. But then he keeps going because he’s an idiot and there’s no coming back, and… maybe it’s presumptuous, but there’s panic in MacTavish’s eyes. The real fear Roach glimpses for a second when a mission goes South, right before the shutters come down. He doesn’t need to put himself in the Captain’s place to figure out what he’s thinking. He’d need a sign that Roach isn’t old school military machismo, that he isn’t going to go complain to Shepherd about being made to share a room with a pervert. Roach has seen it all before, the bullshit and the prejudice.
Who is he? He asks, smiling pleasantly for good measure.
MacTavish blinks at that. Unexpected. He glances at the journal, then back to Roach like he’s trying to puzzle something out. Roach sees the exact moment something heavy lifts from him. He laughs at something, maybe it’s just a relieved noise and not a laugh at all, and he shakes his head. “We need to get you a fuckin’ bell, Sergeant.” His accent is all thick, and he’s avoiding the question, but he’s smiling slightly.
Roach tastes gossip. Maybe he can make it to the end of this hellish stakeout if MacTavish tells him all about his boring civilian boyfriend. Maybe it’ll be good for MacTavish to tell someone. Who? He repeats.
There’s a moment where he thinks, awed, that MacTavish is actually going to tell him. He opens his mouth and looks back at the journal. He hesitates.
Finally, and to Roach’s disappointment but total understanding, he shrugs. “Nobody. Just a friend back home.” He closes off the moment of sentiment with authority. Roach is about to sign something cringeworthy and cliché about being a friend of Dorothy, like the fucking SAS types ever understand what that means, when MacTavish’s radio clicks to life and identifies someone they don’t need a codename for.
“Intel’s shit.”
There’s that relieved laugh again as the message comes through. “Ghost,” MacTavish greets his saviour. “Your timing’s impeccable.”
“That bad in there?” Ghost sounds like he’s smirking. Even if he were here, Roach supposes you wouldn’t be able to prove it. He wonders if Ghost knows who mystery man is, but he never brings it up again. Not the kind of thing you ask your commanding officer about.
It’s not often that John’s internal clock, trained as well as the rest of him, will let him stay awake after midnight. The room is bathed in silvery grey, a tunnel in an aquarium. Unrecognisable. Red folders are turned a muted blue, the whiskey bottles indistinguishable from scotch. If John squints right now he can make out the few little signs that this is His Room. The notes on the corkboard, Queen tapes stacked on the shelves beside classified documents. His room gets the most moonlight of all the officers quarters. He wishes he could say he noticed the privilege and picked it on purpose, but it was pure luck. He hadn’t needed it then. Not for this.
Having the blinds and curtains drawn wide is a risk. A huge risk. But you can’t really make out shapes or people in the dark, and it’s not like he can turn the light on. The rewards are worth the occasional, paranoid little cramping in his stomach. He’ll close them when he puts his journal down, before he settles down for bed proper.
Before Simon, still as a rock on the bed beside him, sleeping as quietly as he does everything else, ever notices what a sentimental idiot he’s being.
He clutches his journal in one hand, propped up on the pillows at an angle. He’s been sitting like that for so long that his elbow’s starting to ache, upper arm complaining as he holds the journal stiff and solid. His other hand carefully moves his pen across the paper, avoiding shadows and other trickery of the dark. It’s hard to see what he’s drawing like this, but it’s also the easiest opportunity he has to do this. It’s much more difficult frantically scribbling down Simon’s features while he has the mask off for 3 minutes, 5, in the daylight. He has to get it done before he notices, before he puts the mask back on, before some other shit hits the fan. This is easier, even if it will all look slightly off in the morning.
It's embarrassing more than anything else, imagining Simon catching him doing this. He’d tease him forever about going soft on him. They don’t do soft. Not in words or big things like this. They sit with their thighs pressed together after a long mission. They fall asleep on each other’s shoulders and acknowledge it with a grunt when they wake up. They sign with their hands things they can’t afford to say out loud to each other. Sometimes there are forehead kisses. More often there are grabbing hands, John shoving Simon down onto his bed, wrestling control until he gets it and Simon relaxes, both of them at ease for a rare but needed hour.
That was how it started. Hard, brutal fucking from the only other person who could take and give it as rough as they needed, who understood when violence and sex had strung themselves together. Control and submission. Something for John to channel all his overflowing focus and energy into until it didn’t feel quite so chaotic, and something to let Simon go blank and unguarded, no responsibilities and lurking nightmares.
… And yeah, psychology aside, mind blowing sex when you can barely get it up the rest of the time is pretty fucking great too.
There are bruises all over Simon’s neck that won’t make it into this sketch. Not out of shame, or because they’d ruin the drawing, but because those aren’t Simon. Those are Simon-And-John. Little thumb shaped marks and rings of bites that go down to his shoulders. New bruises on his hips bringing colour to the field of pale white scars. Scratches on his ass that John’s got a matching set to on his back. They’re already fading peacefully under the anti-bac. Simon will bitch about it not stinging enough tomorrow. John wouldn’t leave it though, even if he is being soft.
He watches the fan of Simon’s eyelashes, outrageously long and light. You can’t convey that with a pen. John shakes his head, adding the long strokes in black ink anyway.
He does that a lot these days, sentimentality. Simon won’t admit it, but he’s been doing it too. It’s been creeping in. A lot has been creeping into their arrangement. Feelings that John knows they can’t put a name to, don’t need to. He’s been cuddling Simon to his chest on nights like this for a year. And this, the urge to draw Simon’s face, to enshrine it somewhere he can find it again.
It’s a familiar feeling. He remembers blearily drawing Price from memory in the hospital room in Russia. Weary hands and wearier eyes, but he’d needed to finish the sketch while Price was still fresh in his mind, while he could still see him. The nurses took the journal and pen away eventually, said he was working himself up. He was, but that was his prerogative. He had to bribe Nikolai with alcohol to get some paper and shitty graphite to sketch with. It’s glued into the journal, over a page of confused, drugged up ramblings about catching Zakhaev’s son, about being a second quicker, about-
Dim. Thinking. John reminds himself.
Sometimes, John tries to remember their faces. All of them, the 22nd and Griggs, but Gaz and Price especially. But five years is a long time. It’s… blurry. The faces aren’t there, but they are. He has to look at pictures to remember, and it fucking stings. These men who were so important to him, his brothers, are so long gone that he can barely recall their features. It feels like killing them all over again. The nauseating push and pull in his stomach urging him to obey his orders and to break them, to tell Gaz’s family things they can never know, is as clear as if it happened yesterday, but Gaz’s nose is frosted over behind smudged glass. Price’s drawling sarcasm, the details on his hat… what colour were his eyes again? Even now, he has to think about it, and another little piece of Price withers away with the crush of his concentration.
There are no pictures of Simon’s face. Not anymore. Simon saw to that himself. All that’s left is Ghost, and a fucking skull mask. Nobody has seen his face since the mask became a thing. Except John. He can tell it’s just him from the uncomfortable pinch of Ghost’s brows when he pulls the mask off, the coaxing and patience it takes to get eye contact back. There’s always a moment where Ghost becomes Simon, and the vulnerability of it is so intense – squeezing at his chest like rock and dirt walls trapping him in place, stealing all the air - that even John can feel the pinch of it.
When- if- when- if (it’s ghost)- when he loses him, he won’t have photos to jog his memory. Simon’s face will grow blurry, maybe even faster than Price and Gaz’s faces did. Maybe in a year. He’ll forget what he looked like. He won’t be able to remember his soft lips, his dry skin, the sweep of his nose, how easily he blushed, or that this - Simon in his bed, bare and warm, more human than ghost - was real. It’ll fade away until all that’s left is the mask.
He can’t let that happen. No pictures? Fine. Whatever Simon wants. But he needs to remember, and if he can’t trust his own mind then he can trust his hands. He won’t put a name beside the drawings (he doesn’t need to) and he won’t tell anyone that they exist or what they are. They’re just for him. A rare little mercy he’s granted himself.
He pauses. Beside him, Simon shifts, his face turning away. John squints at the journal, trying to assess the features he’s drawn, but they’re all fuzzy in the low light. Blurred lines and shapes he can’t quite make out but still knows are there. Unspoken and unlabelled but right there in front of him.
Fuck it’s definitely too late to be up if he’s thinking like that. He runs a hand over his face, closes the journal, and quietly tucks it under the pillow. Guarding it – Simon – like he protects everything else.
Protecting. Right.
He drags himself from bed, padding over tiles to close the curtains and blinds firmly. The room snaps from an otherworldly silvery grey to a more familiar pitch black. His eyesight adjusts slowly, and then he picks his way back across the room to the bed. (His floor is clean. There’s nothing to trip on. There never is. Still, caution in abundance. That’s just his style.)
When he slips back into bed, silent enough that Simon would be proud, the other man jerks closer to him with an annoyed huff. Being silent isn’t enough to fool Simon. The pressure of the bed, the air moving to fill the gap John left. Any of these things could have woken him. “Where’d you go?”
“Bathroom,” John lies, because they don’t talk about it.
Simon reaches out, eyes only half-open, and bats with his hand until he finds John’s arm. Goosebumps come up where he strokes over it. “You’re freezing,” Simon mutters, accent thick with sleep and the “you’re” slurred almost beyond recognition. It’s adorable. That’s not a word that should be in John’s vocabulary anymore.
“Sorry.” John’s smiling. He’s always smiling when he’s with Simon. Fond and sappy and weak. It scares him, heart clenching even as it warms. He can’t afford to let it leave this room.
Simon’s smiling too. Even in the total darkness, John can make it out. It’s too precious and rare to miss. “Should be,” he mutters as he presses close, bringing his warmth with him. The terrifying lieutenant of the 141, Captain MacTavish’s right-hand man, Ghost. Simon. He’s very far from the grave right now.
“You’ve gotta let it go son.”
The only reason Price doesn’t pick up the bottle of scotch and smash it is that MacMillan would slam his face down onto the shards for ruining a good drink.
Instead, he takes another swig and drops it a little too heavily on the table. The glass clangs dangerously, satisfyingly.
MacMillan watches him through narrowed eyes from the other side of the kitchen table. His bad leg stretches out towards the sink, his cane resting against his chair. Somehow, he looks the most respectable of the two of them. Price isn’t sure how that’s possible. He always remembers MacMillan as more beard than man, scruffy and chain-smoking, always with a bottle of something stashed away on him. Now he looks like he works a bloody office job. The beard has been tamed, and he sits in a clean kitchen wearing slacks and a button-up. The only sign that it’s still Price’s old Captain are the three undone buttons at the top of the shirt and the sweaty, hairy chest poking out. Has he really changed that much? Has he?
Price pushes the journal across the table like they’re doing a drug deal. “There’s gotta be someone-”
“How long have you been searching? A year?”
And eight months, three days, give or take a couple hours. Price has been counting them since Soap died, but his memory’s a little fuzzy with the scotch and the bourbon and the beer and… He thinks he started ordering Gaz’s favourite eventually. Force of habit, even all these years later.
Without answering MacMillan he opens Soap’s journal.
This used to be difficult to do. He had to force himself to open it the first time. Soap deserved his privacy, but more than that Soap deserved some sort of fitting end. Did he have last wishes? Was there anyone back home who needed telling? It’s funny, and it really isn’t, that for all Soap meant to him, for all Price feels he knew him, the list of things he knows about Soap’s life could be checked off on one hand. They always seemed to talk more about death than life.
Price regrets it. Along with almost everything else.
MacMillan looks down at the journal impassively, the face of the man Price has spent a year trying to find stares back at them. The face is in his dreams, in his nightmares, behind his eyelids when he blinks, and MacMillan just fucking stares at it like it’s a restaurant menu.
“This man is real.” Price tells himself he’s speaking more to convince MacMillan than to reassure himself. He’s never seen this face before. The drawings start just after the Russians locked him up in their gulag, so he knows he’s never seen this face before. Soap met him after him, after Zakhaev. Soap had a whole life those five years and Price knows nothing about it. He feels like he’s going to be sick. “Soap drew him fifty-seven times, not counting the tiny details.” It’s almost like, no matter how many times Soap sketched him, he was never happy with it. Perfectionist that boy. Price is honestly surprised it wasn’t the death of him.
You were the death of him the mystery man seems to say without a voice, accusing him from the pages. And you were always gonna be.
“He’s important,” Price continues when he realises he’s been staring at the journal, dumbstruck and furious and devastated, for too long. MacMillan still isn’t saying anything. He’s just watching. “Whoever he is, he’s important. There’s no record. I can’t find a name or a next of kin. But Soap would want him told.”
MacMillan watches the journal for a few more minutes. When he looks up at Price his eyes are hard. “He could be dead.”
Price actually hears himself growl, like a fucking dog. MacMillan laughs. Price grabs at the drink and gulps down another five swigs without breathing, and MacMillan is still fucking laughing. “He can’t be.”
“He’s either army,” MacMillan begins, stretching out his bad leg, “or civilian. And either way, we just had a war John. Lots of casualties.”
“I’ve looked.” Price stares at the journal. He can’t look at MacMillan.
“At all of them?” MacMillan asks, disbelieving. At Price’s tense silence – his inability to lie to his old mentor – MacMillan shakes his head. “For all you know this guys just another ghost haunting you like Soap is.”
Price shakes his head. “He’s not dead Mac. He can’t be.” If he’s dead, if he can’t find him, there’s nothing he can do. Soap died in a shithole because Price couldn’t help him, and now Price can’t even give him this. His head feels heavy when it drops, resting awkwardly on one hand.
He feels MacMillan’s eyes burning into him. He looks fucking pathetic now. Drunk and shivering from the cold, from wandering around the streets holding up the sketch to people and asking if they knew the man. If there’s one thing he’s always wanted, it’s MacMillan’s respect. There’s few ways to earn it and a million ways to lose it, and Price is sure he’s invented a few new ones tonight. But desperation is a funny thing. This is it. Whatever MacMillan says, whatever he says, this is it, isn’t it? He's hit the wall. There aren’t any leads and he’s going to fail Soap, like he failed everyone.
“… Aye,” MacMillan finally speaks again, voice unusually soft. “Soap saw to that.” At Price’s confused look he nods at the journal. “Immortality, eh?”
Immortality. Price stares into dark eyes under shaggy, sandy hair, and feels his chest twitch in sympathy. It’s fucking lonely.