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inkformyblood · 4 months ago

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bite-sized domesticity (COD YoOTP25)

Year of the OTP prompt: Like Real People Do - Hozier 09 Ghoap

Riley’s a stain over the counter top, cheap linoleum cracked and peeling beneath his equally torn nails. There’s a mug resting next to his elbow and MacTavish knocks his knuckles against it as he passes by on his aborted way to the sitting room. Fucking freezing.

“Those poor techs keeping an eye on things and having to deal with your arse at three in the fecking morning.”

Riley barely moves as MacTavish swipes the mug up, lifting his arm when he makes a second pass for the plate. Few crumbs left but otherwise it’s been licked clean, knife as well when he stoops to place them all into the dishwasher.

“Doing it wrong.”

MacTavish doesn’t bother straightening, leaning further into the bend to peer back at Riley through the crook of his elbow. They’re both shelled out of their usual fatigues for this mission, Riley still favouring dark fabrics but they’re softer, a loose pair of joggers with the drawstring knotted and a plain long-sleeved black t-shirt, where MacTavish has stopped looking in the mirror for the sake of seeing his father’s face staring back at him. The daft bastard had been right in his choice of jumpers and house slippers, less so on the beard.

“You want to do it?”

“Nah.” Riley leans further onto the counter, one bare foot resting on the crossbar of the stool. There’s a dark stripe across his sole already, his toes pink from the cold. His scars extend even there, pale crosshatching over his heel, a darker line traced just beneath his toes.

MacTavish fumbles his slippers off, hissing beneath his breath at the cold tile, and kicks them over to Riley. One goes wide, skidding to a halt next to the far end of the counter, but the other knocks against the stool. “Then don’t bitch about the way I’m doing it.”

“Pity the poor woman you wind up clubbing over the head and dragging home with you.” Riley does pause his oozing to slide the slipper onto his foot, dropping back onto the stool to hook the other one with his foot before he draws it on also. “Too much of the army in you.”

MacTavish snorts, wishing — and not for the first fucking time since this recon mission was shocked into life — for a smoke. Too much exposure to their targets could send them scurrying back into hiding, ruining a ten month long intel trail, one very intricate daisy chain of pardons and protection details, and countless hours of overtime that would be peeled from MacTavish’s pound of flesh if he spooks the neighbours too badly. As arms dealers go, MacTavish has spent more than enough time next to worse and if his only complaint at the end of this was that they listened to some shitty soap operas too loudly then it would be two weeks well spent. Riley is starting to get opinions about the fate of poor Gabriella and MacTavish will kiss his own service pistol before he admits that he is as well.

Might have to slip the techs something nice and strong to get the name of the programme after the mission.

“Never had to drag anyone into my bed before, don’t think I’ll start now, Riley.” MacTavish straightens, cracks his knuckles before the want for fresh air begins to tear through tendons, and does it again just because. Riley’s eye roll is audible, barely blanketed by the blonde curls that MacTavish scuffs his palm over as he retreats back into the sitting room, a smidge quieter than the snap of Riley’s teeth on thin air.

Riley follows him a moment later, too-large slippers smacking against his heels with every step. It’s too much like MacTavish’s litter of nephews and nieces, down to the overly-serious weight of his gaze, the slight bend to his knees as he walks before Riley tips himself onto the armchair head first. MacTavish takes the sofa, swings his legs up onto it and relaxes back, shoving one of the decorative pillows behind his head. Some bastard had too much fun with the backstory budget for a place that no-one's meant to see and the pillow is pink and frilly, some tripe about love picked out across the front.

Riley had nearly laughed himself sick when they’d first seen the place in the light of day, deliberately being sent the previous night so they wouldn’t turn tail immediately.

MacTavish had sworn at Price over their secure line the instant it had been deemed safe to do so.“S’all well and good making us fucking newlyweds to explain why we’re reclusive, but the fucking pink, Price? Fuckssake.”

“Ever think about it?” Riley asks, legs draped over the arm of the chair, his torso wedged into an impossible curve across the seat. His head is half falling off the edge, but his gaze is sharp, locked onto MacTavish like he’s starving, already carving out his liver.

“About what?”

“Wife. Kids.” Riley waves one arm, a load bearing one by the way he slides three inches down. “House with a garden.”

MacTavish lets his gaze go half-lidded, studies the hatch marks of the sunlight filtering through the cracked and dusty blinds over Riley’s form. It is the kind of image that would make a Renaissance painter chisel his hands bloody against a marble block to capture the harsh angles of his limbs, the soft haze of his curls, the intensity of his gaze.

“You offering, Riley? Angling for a nice patch of grass out the back to piss on, warm blanket in front of the fire at night?”

“Going to throw me a bone, sir?”

Laughing, MacTavish throws his forearm over his eyes, sinking back into the soft creaking cushions beneath him. It’ll be easier to confess this if he isn’t looking at Riley directly, the remembered bruise of a cushion beneath his knees in the confessional, musky incense clogging every breath. “I had thought about it before, younger man, big dreams, ‘s what’s expected of me after all with my parents and sisters. Never felt like quite the right fit and I doubt I’d find someone willing to put up with a bastard like me now.”

Riley shrugs, nearly entirely upside down now, one leg hooked over the back of the chair as a final effort to halt his slow descent to the floor. Won’t be helping the newer recruits assumptions that he’s a vampire. “I’m sure there’s someone out there. Bound to be some poor sod with some good qualities, y’know, like head trauma—”

MacTavish launches himself across the room with a curse, swinging the pink plush pillow in a telegraphed arch as Riley hits the floor with a snarling laugh.

They’re meant to be newly-weds, after all, some noise is to be expected.

⁂

The harsh glare of the neighbour’s brake lights dip out of sight around the bend of the cul-de-sac before MacTavish nudges the door open, his keys hooked around one finger. Again, curated for the life they’re living and, accordingly, someone’s had a bit too much fucking fun with it. Not enough for the techs to monitor chatter in the field or whatever bugs they’ve got embedded up some terrorist’s arsehole, but they had to stretch their creative sides.

He didn’t even know there could be pink glittery leather keyrings before now.

“Come on, babe,” he calls back into the maw of the house, swinging the keys into his palm and back out again. Stings a little, metal not yet body-warm, all useless except for the house and the car key. One, MacTavish thinks is someone’s locker key, coughed up for the greater good.

Riley snarls, barely audible except for the comm woven around his ear, against the puckered line of his mouth beneath his mask. “Go fuck yourself,” he hisses, each syllable crisp enough to be imprinted on MacTavish’s tombstone, shining marble and all. He pauses at the door, one hand braced against the frame as his gaze swings from one side to the other, a crease in his brow.

Soldier’s instincts. No, close match but not entirely. MacTavish chews his cheek as he considers it, the raised curve of Riley’s shoulders and the swell of his cheek beneath his mask, teeth bared when the only blood they hold is his own. When MacTavish had been younger, one of his neighbours had a dog, or at least, they had the sound of a dog chained up behind their high fence, announced by the yellow warning signs they plastered over every inch. They’d make a game of it as kids left alone would always do, seeing who could get closest to the fence before the never-seen dog would charge, fragile wood trembling beneath the weight of it, barking loud enough to chill blood in the very marrow it was made in.

Riley’s a screaming yellow beware of the dog sign.

MacTavish holds his hand out, palm up and fingers splayed, and he might get bitten for this strange communion but it’d be worth it. “Riley?”

“Yeah.” A pause, sunlight splintering through the clouds that had descended to illuminate the golden band on MacTavish’s finger and fuck, he’s already damned several thousand times over but this will be the sin he’d nail himself to the cross for. His answer to Riley before hadn’t been a lie, close enough to the truth to slip inside its skin and cosy up for body warmth.

Riley curls his fingers into MacTavish’s, corpse-cool like he always is, a stubborn refusal to follow any orders he doesn’t seem important, and falls into step at his side.

The car ride is unimportant, mundane, except when it isn’t.

MacTavish drives, too familiar with Riley’s assumption that civilian road signs were nothing more than suggestions, and the radio crackles as they slide between stations. Riley taps at the controls with jagged fingers, twists the volume loud to the fading sting of a drumbeat and keeps it loud when the next song starts, some crooning pop ballad about broken hearts. MacTavish knows the scar that curls over the far edge of Riley’s right wrist, the dark line that follows the jut of his tendon before it moves into the meat of his palm like a bastardised fortune teller. But now he also knows what it looks like when Riley taps his hands against his knees along with the beat, his sleeve coming up just enough to expose the scrap of skin, and MacTavish is starving, devouring what he shouldn’t want.

“Tech’s say to pick up a few things and tail from a distance in case they meet a contact here,” Riley reports as they park the car a few rows down from their neighbors. MacTavish nods, drumming his fingers against the steering wheel before he swings himself out of the car and makes his way around to Riley’s side. The other man is already out, door shut behind him, and it’s an easy job to wrap his arm around Riley’s waist as they walk towards the store. There’s a moment of hesitation, Riley’s arm raised and ready to drive his elbow into MacTavish’s torso, then he relaxes into the hold. If he had been a stray cat, MacTavish thinks he might have even been purring, a jagged chainsaw rumble, too large for such a slim frame.

“Sounds like a plan.” MacTavish isn’t an accomplished home cook by any stretch of the phrasing, but he can boil water well enough and follow the instructions on the back of a packet. There’d be a meal deal or two they can pick up to supplement the stock in their fridge and wouldn’t stretch the slim budget on their cards until it snaps. Not a trolley, too bulky to use effectively. A basket shoved into MacTavish’s chest until he grabs at the handles, letting it hang at his side.

It’s a dangerous taste of what he could have, the sheer domesticity of it. MacTavish keeps one hand on Riley as they wander the aisle, the harsh fluorescents overhead humming vaguely and turning Riley’s face skeletal, the purple stain beneath his eyes devouring his features. MacTavish speaks without registering what he’s saying, his gaze slipping over the matched sets of the other couples as they move past, formless, shapeless, inconsequential, some mindless story about his sister’s kids as they’re too close to his thoughts. Heavy fruit dipping low from the boughs.

“It’s sweet,” the lass at the checkout remarks, all of sixteen with all the brashness her age allows. She blinks deliberately at Riley, a dark smudge of mascara in the corner of her eye from when she’d rubbed it, and he matches the expression with a brow raised. “He the protective sort?”

She’s talking about him, one elbow propped against the register like they’re housewives gossiping at the letterboxes, her grin wide as she catches MacTavish’s gaze.

“Yeah. He is.” Riley’s fingers brush against MacTavish’s hold at his waist, the scrape of his shoulders at his back. “‘S sweet though.”

“Yeah, totally. Anyway, here’s your change.”

“Come on, babe.” Riley turns in MacTavish’s hold, steering them both and MacTavish is helpless to obey, more fucked if Riley realises exactly what he could do with a single word. It would be worth it, burning the universe down for a smile. “Let’s go home.”

⁂

Evening falls quickly, the sky plump with the same shade of purple as a fresh bruise.

MacTavish breaks first, a yawn rumbling through him as they lounge in the small sitting room after some scran. He’s reminded again of his da, dozing in front of the telly in an evening, arms folded across his chest and eyes closed but not yet asleep, as attuned to the signal of the remote as the set in front of him.

“Any plans for the evening, Riley?” he asks, tipping his gaze sideways to the same chair Riley had claimed earlier.

The other man is hunched down into it, a blanket twisted over his shoulders and one of MacTavish’s hoodies sacrificed to the cause. He’s pulled the slippers back on when they’d returned from the brief surveillance in the supermarket, and one dangles from his foot extended over the arm of the chair. A blade flickers over his fingers, the flash of metal just visible as an advert plays, some shite about cleaning products or a new tv show, in a string of pinks and greens. “Same as usual. Bother the techs, keep an eye out, sir.”

Closest thing to civilian life they’re likely to get this side of the dirt. Double bed in the house but only one of them has used it at a time, or, at least, that MacTavish knows about. Limited surveillance in the house at Price’s insistence and MacTavish isn’t going to think anything more about that.

Sometimes, in the early hours of the morning, MacTavish will wake in pale grey denial with the bed indented just beyond his reach.

The space will be cold when he wakes fully.

But he will keep leaving a space for Riley, crack open his ribcage for him to burrow inside if it would provide just a moment of comfort.

“Night, Riley.”

Riley grins up at him, tips his head back to watch him walk past. “Night, sir.”

#09 ghoap #ghostsoap #soapghost #09ghoap #09ghostsoap #john soap mactavish #simon ghost riley #lieutenant simon riley #captain john soap mactavish #captain mactavish #my writing #fanfic

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inkformyblood · 1 month ago

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just for a season (09Ghoap, YoOTP25)

Hanahaki Disease (non-fatal), Historical AU, Mer AU. 09Ghoap, minor John Price x John Soap MacTavish

MacTavish didn’t think he would stay for long at the lighthouse when he’d first arrived on the island. The village itself on the shore just beyond had been more familiar, a low-slung huddle of thatched cottages on the outskirts that congealed into brick and mortar, some storefronts and the bones of a marketplace, a few pubs and he could be content there for a time. The lighthouse had been a scar on the horizon, some artistic rendition of a wizard’s tower thrown on a drunkard’s pottery wheel, and MacTavish had staggered from the small boat sent to ferry him across to it wearing the remnants of his final pint splattered across his boots into the arms of one John Price.

“Only need you to stay for a season, lad,” Price had said, one hand pressed to MacTavish’s forehead to keep him upright, the other resting above the keys at his waist. “Just a season and we’ll send you off to your nice soft bed with some coins in your pocket and a few hairs on your chest.”

MacTavish couldn’t say what colour Price’s eyes had been, but he sketches them in charcoal on the corner of tattered sailcloth strung up along the side of his bunk that first night, the roar of lighthouse horn enough to pluck him from fitful sleep minutes before it sounds. He spends that first breakfast tipping forwards into his plate, a fry-up for the first day after a resupply, strips of bacon fried in their own fat and bread neatly hacked from the loaf and toasted in front of the fire, while Price chuckled, wreathed in smoke and salt like some deity of old. His fingers were crooked, weathered and pale as driftwood, but he’s fast with them, smacking across MacTavish’s knuckles with the flat of his knife to keep him awake, to keep him alert, and just because he could.

He’d hated the man and adored him in equal desperate measure.

One season bled into two, to three, to one bitch of a winter when MacTavish curled up in Price’s bed to steal any memory of warmth from his sheets, and then another.

Then, there was war.

Two men left the lighthouse.

One man returned.

“They’ve asked me,” MacTavish begins, tapping the ash from his cigarette into his mug. It’s mostly paper and char by this stage of the month but he returns it to his mouth all the same, tastes the stale tang of damp tobacco. “If I want to stay on the rock for another season.”

He plucks two cards from his hand, their edges soft with age and warped by the salt in the air, holds them aloft before he adds another, laying them all down on the stool that sits between the two men. It’s a strange configuration; MacTavish slung in the low-backed armchair, the frame moulded to fit a different man’s shoulders, the angle of his hips. He sits forwards, legs spread wide and laces trailing from his boots, half-loosened as the evening stumbled onwards, and sinks back against protesting springs. Riley presses himself upright, the cloying scent of brackish water clouding the air like a lover’s perfume, and the water sloshes against the side of the copper bathtub he’s folded into. If Riley had been any other man, it would be a private affair, MacTavish busying himself with his sketchbook or the snarl of his thoughts.

Riley blinks at him, first one set of lids — milky white like death’s first kiss — then the other, dark lashes spilling shadows across his cheeks. “What did you say to them?”

There’s dark indentations splashed across his forearms from the edge of the tub, harsh lines woven over the paler sheen of scale and skin. Riley leans closer with a slosh of water, three cards held between thumb and forefinger before he drops them on the stool. He has a way of looking up at MacTavish — a necessity given their seating arrangements but it runs deeper than that — like he’s studying him in the same way a religious man bleeds over his bible.

“They’re not wrong for asking, there’s meant to be some new blood on the rock for years now.” MacTavish drags blunted fingers over his jaw, scratches at the line of his neck. “Could be a younger man for you to bite at over cards, with a pretty wife and a baby. More interesting company for you than an old man.”

Riley hums, his jaw tight. It doesn’t sit even, the scars at the corner of his mouth drawing his grin jagged, the curve of his teeth constantly on display. “No, you’re fine.”

“It’s like you’re trying t’make me blush.” MacTavish shifts his cards between his fingers, places them all flat on the stool, only to pick them back up again. The evening air is cool, a distant prickle against the nape of his neck, the edge of his wrists, and he considers rising from his seat and crossing the expanse of four steps to the huddle of the stove and throwing another piece of driftwood in. It would burn beautifully, a riot of purple flames devouring the pale sculpture, but that would be a step away from Riley, from the deliberate weight of his gaze.

MacTavish stays where he is.

“What would you do in town?” Riley asks, his teeth exposed in something more than common flesh healed jagged. There’s seaweed tangled in his hair, dark against the sodden curls, never able to fully dry but golden all the same. “Your own pretty wife, a baby?”

MacTavish laughs then, really laughs with his head thrown back and chest aching from the effort. His ribs had never healed right from his first tumble into a foxhole, fresh blood on his palms (his, Price’s, the laughing lad next to them) and every breath sends a pang echoing through the memory, crashing into the swell of the present. Price had pulled him from the stinking mud, slapped him on the back before his hand rested on MacTavish’s shoulder, keeping him upright, keeping him steady.

“No, lad.” MacTavish chucks down his cards, clearing his throat before he swallows down the mud of a foreign field he hopes to never see again. He draws another pull of his smoke, the dull glow burning steadily to his fingers, and breathes out through his nose. “No wife, though it wasn’t for a lack of them trying when I was younger. Must’ve told you this before—” He looks to Riley, tipping his head to one side in question. They’d spent countless nights together living in the same cramped quarters, the aging lighthouse keeper and the mermaid in his bathtub, and the details blur together in MacTavish’s memory, faded like an old photograph that’s been exposed too many times and the image beneath bleeds through. Riley shrugs, layering his arms over the edge of the bathtub and resting his chin upon them. Could be an oil painting of a cherub torn straight from the church walls and MacTavish abandons his cards on the stool without a second thought, reaching for the bloated curve of his sketchbook, pencil jammed between the pages.

“Anyway,” he says, scratching out the blunt beginnings across an empty corner of a page. “When I was younger, back when I kept saying I was only staying on the rock for a season, I had a handful of girls trying to court me.” It had been a heady, if uncomfortable, sensation as a young man, giddy excitement of being craved warring with the bitter panic that something isn’t right, something with no shape or name but it existed all the same. His older sister had brought home an unbroken colt once and he’d felt the same as that beast; trying to flee a world that did nothing but exist. “Few of them were Heartsick over me, wore their flowers in their hair so I’d notice.”

He couldn’t remember their names, but he remembered their flowers, the same ones that would likely litter their pillows in the morning or be chewed and swallowed along with their food, a bouquet of red roses, some pink, daisies, primroses. Their scent hung heavy on the morning air, mixing with the smoke of the incense in church as MacTavish took one hand between his own, lowering his face to whisper a blessing that would be devoured in one starving blink. The affliction wasn’t fatal, a byproduct of God’s love for his creations or some quirk of human biology if the doctors were to be believed, but it could be inconvenient for the sufferers. The radio plays and serials would use it to raise the stakes in their romantic subplots, sending out the fresh-faced female leads with a wreath of roses woven into her hair or the plotting step-sisters with fresh blooms cut from the garden.

“Although,” MacTavish tears himself free of the memory, the remnants of it clinging to his arms, his hands like dust. “If you’re asking because you’re a siren, Riley, then you’ll have a poor last meal from me.”

Riley chuckles, the sound closer to the scratch of a match than anything a human could produce. His tail shifts, the dark fins stretching above the water to counter his movement, a ripple of muscle down its surface as Riley lifts himself upright, seawater sloughing off his skin. He’s human from the waist up, the sharp concave line of his belly warring against the onslaught of pale scales, his navel blank except for the scars that stretched across it; one set over his hip, another straight up the centre of him, a handful more curving over shoulder and forearms, before the deliberate devastation of his throat and jaw. There’s a few tattoos visible on his upper arms, the edges of one on his collarbone, and another on his ribs, and MacTavish marks them quickly on his sketch, smudges his thumb over the hurried outlines. Riley doesn’t move when MacTavish isn’t watching him, dark eyes catching the embers, the faint glow of MacTavish’s smoke. He holds out one webbed hand expectantly, and MacTavish hands the cigarette over with a rueful sigh. He doesn’t mind, not truly. The end glows a pittance in Riley’s hold, the smoke barely more than a wisp as he breathes it in, the memory of it rolling from the gills in his neck like morning mist inland, pale and barely there.

“I don’t think I’d see much of you if I left the rock,” MacTavish says, returning his gaze to the cards spread out in front of them, his sketchbook balanced on his lap, his pencil tucked behind his ear. There’d be grey lines over his temple later, dark against the silver shot through his hair.

Riley drops his set of cards down, nudging them into place before he returns the cigarette to his mouth. It’s down to the paper now, grey ash falling free over Riley’s fingers, floating on the surface of the water like soap scum. “I could go with you.”

MacTavish first met Riley the night after a storm. It had been his second or third season at the lighthouse, his legs growing steady with every step over the slick rocks, the salt crystallising down to his bones. Price had dropped a basket onto his chest, mercifully empty, and sent him out with a smack to the back of his head, Price’s jumper sitting wide on his shoulders and long on his hips. Seagulls wheeled high overhead, shrieking to each other and dropping out of the slate-grey sky to pick at something on the ground, barely visible at first as MacTavish made his way over. He’d expected some fish, their eyes already glassy or missing, just empty husks staring up at a sky they were never meant to see; but what he found was a man, his skin scraped raw and bright over his hip, his elbows, blood and feathers clinging to his palms, his mouth.

“Fuck off,” Riley had snarled, his voice barely louder than a rasp behind the display of his teeth, and MacTavish only laughed, a mixture of disbelief and wonder rattling through the empty spaces between his bones, the universe reshaping itself because of one chance encounter.

“You’d go with me?” MacTavish asks, leaning back in his chair and letting his legs slide wider. He’s got a small cottage back on the mainland, it had been Price’s like so many things that MacTavish owns now, just another thing folded into his hands alongside a black-edged telegram that was too small to contain the full breadth of the man it trapped in dark typeface, the man who would be forgotten as just another name amongst the war dead.

It’s big enough for two.

MacTavish hums quietly, reaching for a smoke he no longer holds. He pushes himself up from the chair, the creaking of the springs only masked by the cracking of his knees, a line of pressure caught tight in his back. He staggers his first step towards the low slung cabinet, but catches himself on the second, the third. Another wail of the horn high overhead, the carrion call of some enormous bird, and MacTavish pulls fresh rolling papers, a folded paper package of tobacco. “Another?” he asks over his shoulder, drinking down the shadowed lines of Riley’s features as he slouches against the line of the bathtub, his fingers twisted in the seaweed caught in his hair.

“No,” Riley murmurs, far gentler than he has any right to be. Drawing him wouldn’t be enough, MacTavish could fill every inch of the lighthouse with his visage, carve the smooth curve of his form into the rock itself so someone, somewhere can dig it out of the ruins and marvel, and it still wouldn’t be enough. MacTavish is stubborn and sullen, a ruined husk of a ship from a bygone age left to rot in the sun, with salt on his hands and an anchor looped around his neck, never more than a handspan away from the terrified lad who breathed in the thick scent of blooming roses and wondered why he didn’t feel anything.

MacTavish dampens one edge of the paper, tapping out a thin line of tobacco, rolls, and lights it. Riley wins the game, his grin sharp behind his facade of indifference, blood scented in the water and leapt upon, and MacTavish blackens his lungs with every inhale, the taste sharp across his tongue.

“Going to be a storm tonight,” Riley murmurs. The fire has long since burnt to embers, the room cast in pale shadows, and his eyes gleam strangely in the low light, dual eyelids shimmering with every blink. “You should sleep.”

“Aye.” MacTavish stands, presses his hands into the small of his back as he leans against it. Riley lifts himself partially from the tub to sit on the edge of it, the sharp bite of the sea ever present.

He’s solid in MacTavish’s arms as he lifts him, Riley’s arms locked around his neck and the curving tattoo on one bicep the point of MacTavish’s focus as they breathe in tandem, for a moment, a single entity. The lighthouse howls above them, around them, and Riley twitches, his tail fin flaring wide in a ripple of muscle down the length of it, his jaw clenched tight as he turns his face into MacTavish’s neck, his breath damp against his skin, the fall of his crucifix.

“You alright, Riley?” MacTavish murmurs as he makes his halting way down the stairs, his shoulders turned to keep Riley’s tail clear of the narrow stone walls.

“Yes,” Riley answers, his voice thick. His hands twine in the loose strands at the nape of MacTavish’s neck, the sharp edge of his claws scratching delicately at his scalp.

Their parting is inevitable, the roar of the sea against the edge of the broken sluice gate louder than the lighthouse overhead, the marrying of their two worlds. MacTavish kneels, the stone damp and soaking into the light fabric of his trousers, matching the ocean already emblazoned across his chest and belly, the rivulets slipping over the edges of his spine, and he hasn’t been inside a church in years but here is sacred enough for him to worship. Riley slides from his hold, catching himself on the edge. “Sleep well,” he murmurs, his words almost lost beneath the roar of the water, and then he is gone.

MacTavish returns to the huddle of his rooms, a thin trail of smoke fluttering behind his every step like a bridal veil. His thoughts are muffled, echoing through shattered bone and tangling around the snarl of his ribs, the stagnant cling of his heart, and he thinks of Riley, Riley in the old-wheeled chair gathering dust in the corner of Price’s, of his front room; the double bed that always felt too big for him so he spent his nights stretched out in front of the fireplace, seeking salvation from cool stone and the distant hiss of the ocean. He sleeps but he doesn’t dream, and wakes with a rose petal between his teeth.

It tastes like his ma’s perfume, a deliberate steeping of the fresh spring cuttings, and he spits it out into the trembling cup of his palm. Dark enough that he can barely make out of the shape of it in the gloom, the air trembling with the aftermath of the lighthouse’s call, but he knows it by the musky tang coating his tongue, the scent heavy in the air and the space behind his teeth. MacTavish brushes his fingertips over the gentle crush of it and tucks the petal behind his ear, blinking out into the darkness.

In the distance, inside the emptiness of his thoughts, he hears the roar of the ocean.

#09 ghoap #ghoap #ghostsoap #soapghost #price x soap #captain john soap mactavish #lieutenant simon riley #john soap mactavish #simon ghost riley #john price #my writing #cod mw2 #fanfic

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