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Johnny knows when everything goes south.
He can feel it in his bones, a slow, dawning realization that not all of them are going to make it out of this mess alive. To say he is scared would be an understatement.
Johnny MacTavish is terrified.
Casualties are a part of the job, he knows this. It isn’t the first time he’s seen his comrades drop like flies around him, bodies limp and riddled with bullet holes. It isn’t the first time he himself has had a brush with death.
He just doesn’t expect it to hurt so little.
When Makarov twists his captain’s arm and shoves him to the ground, Johnny makes his decision.
When Makarov raises his gun and levels it with John Price’s face, Soap moves.
He launches himself up, Ghost’s knife in his hand, and aims for the soft, vulnerable hollow of the Russian warlord’s neck.
Makarov is fast, faster than Soap, faster than all of them.
His fist wraps around Soap’s arm and his foot sweeps his bad knee out from under him. The agony shooting up Soap’s leg elicits a shout of pain from him. He yanks at Makarov’s hold on him, trying to twist away. But even as the Russian’s boot slams into the side of Price’s face, Johnny knows he’s already dead.
His eyes slide past Makarov, zeroing in on the opening of the tunnel he’d run in from, and sees Ghost charging across the tracks. He sees the acute terror in Simon Riley’s eyes.
No, Johnny thinks.
After this, there won’t be anyone to take the fallout. Ghost will be alone, Simon will be alone, by choice and by force respectively. To spare him watching Johnny die would be a small mercy, but a mercy nonetheless.
A small, selfish part of Johnny is painfully happy that Simon will be the last thing he sees.
He feels the cold, round muzzle of Makarov’s pistol against his temple.
He hears the start of a shout tear from Simon’s throat, echoing around the chunnel.
The clink of a bullet falling into its chamber, the click of a trigger being pulled.
The bullet that slides behind his eyes barely hurts, nothing more than a gentle, insistent press, like the beginnings of a tension headache.
And then there is nothing.
It’s meaningless after Johnny is gone. The world grows cold and dark and lifeless, and he cannot find it within himself to care. He never slept much to begin with, but now he stops entirely. The captain tries to get him to rest, tries to bench him, but the brass need men like him, cold and unfeeling and ruthless, to fight their battles.
Distantly, he wonders how they all continue to work and function and worry and fuss like this all matters somehow.
So he takes his orders like the good little attack dog they’ve trained him to be, eyes glazed and face blank, and comes back coated in a shroud of scarlet he cannot feel.
There is a wound in his chest.
Too big to be a bullet hole, too misshapen to be a knife wound.
Nobody else can see it.
Nobody else can see the congealed blood it leaks, spilling down his front, ruining all his shirts. It stains his crimson shroud, though he is not sure how he knows, for the shroud does not exist, and he cannot feel it on his shoulders. He does not bother to go to medical to get it checked.
He simply sits on the edge of his bed, stuffs an old t-shirt that smells vaguely familiar into the hole, and waits for infection to take him.
The infection never takes root, never leaves him cold and shaking and delirious. Or maybe it does, and he never notices.
It does not get infected, but it does begin to rot. He steps into his room after a mission one day and drops his tac vest to find maggots crawling across his skin, gnawing away the blackening flesh of his chest. Instinctual disgust rises at the back of his throat, and he reaches up and plucks one off him. It wriggles between his index and thumb, and he watches it carefully, as it starts to change, hardening and smoothening into a little piece of gold metal, streaked with the same scarlet that stains his shroud.
He studies it, tilting his head.
Oh.
Laughter bubbles up like bile, and he stumbles with the weight of it. The maggot slips from his fingers.
The bullet hits the ground with a quiet plink, and Simon Riley laughs and laughs and laughs as blood starts to bubble from his lips.
It's only after they find him kneeling in a shallow, half-dug grave, shovel in hand, face blank, does the wound really start to fester and putrefy.
“Simon?” Price says softly, wary, as he kneels there in the cold dirt, feeling nothing at all. “Son, what are you doing?”
He cannot say anything. He does not know what he’s doing.
He belongs here. That's all he knows, and god, does he know. He knows it like he knows the sky is blue and his knuckles bleed red and Johnny is gone.
He belongs here, in rotting soil and cold damp, belongs six feet in the earth, in the grave he’d once so rashly dug himself out of.
He remembers the taste of the dirt in his mouth, thick and cloying and sticking to the back of his throat.
He welcomes it now, as he pulls the edge of his mask up over his nose, and lifts a handful of soil to his mouth.
Price calls him into his office one evening. The room is smoky from the captain’s cigar, the older man’s eyes heavy and tired. His wrinkles are deeper now, bone deep weariness etched permanently into his skin.
A ghost– the Ghost– stands before the desk, and waits.
He is on edge, a buzz under his skin, which doesn’t sit quite right on his bones anymore. But maybe it’s just the maggots squirming around under his hoodie, burrowing around in the cavity of his chest.
He basks in the feeling of them growing and multiplying and eating away at him.
Price leans forward and puts his elbows on the table, runs his hand down his face. He sighs, takes a pull from a glass of amber liquid. The Ghost– a ghost– waits.
“Simon,” Price says, finally. He sounds so tired, and Ghost reaches into himself, rooting around in his maggot-filled, bullet-hole-riddled chest for the remorse and guilt he knows he should feel.
He comes up empty.
“Son,” Price says. “I'm worried about you.”
Ghost digs a little harder. He's scooping handfuls of mud out of the way now, ignoring the not-there shroud that pulls on his shoulders, the stain it’s leaving on his fingers. “This… this isn’t healthy. I know—“ The man halts a little, running his tongue over his teeth as if tasting the words.
Ghost rips back a chunk of flesh, peering under it, observing the wriggling mass of worms and decay that he is now made of with disinterest.
“God, Simon," Price sighs, throwing back the rest of his drink. “I know you miss him. I miss him too.”
The ghost– a ghost– frowns a little.
Miss who?
Something is crawling up his spine.
“But this,” Price continues, gesturing at him, at the mess of his chest and the pit of rotten flesh that makes up his entire being. “This isn’t healthy. Destroying yourself isn’t going to help anyone.”
Destroying himself? The ghost wants to laugh, but the maggots and the dirt have filled his throat, blocking his airway and chewing through his vocal cords. How… .selfish of him.
The thing on his back has reached the nape of his neck. He can feel the scuttle of its feet, the sharpness of its pincers.
Idly, he wonders if this is what shame is supposed to feel like.
“Listen,” Price is saying. “I'm not here to lecture you. But we need your head in the game. Can I trust you to take care of yourself?”
The thing crawls atop his shoulder and he catches a flash of a sand-coloured, bulbous stinger, swaying threateningly.
Ah.
He wonders if the venom will be enough to return him to the ground.
Where he belongs.
With Johnny.
“Simon?”
The ghost- a ghost- meets Price's eyes, and wonders if the captain can see the thing on his shoulder.
He nods, just once, jerkily.
The scorpion’s stinger sinks into the soft, vulnerable flesh of his neck, and he revels in the burn of the poison seeping into his bloodstream.
He turns and walks out of the cramped, smoky office, and hurries back to his room, trying to hide the trail of maggots he leaves in his wake.