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[cptains]

― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

[text id : “To be loved means to be consumed. To love means to radiate with inexhaustible light. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge]

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“I hope you fall in love with someone who never lets you fall asleep thinking you’re unwanted.”

— Unknown

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I tripped and drew this on the way down

Outfits: y00sef___ on Instagram

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sorry for only posting angst. compensation will partially be in the form of big brother ghost headcanons

his own birthday means very little to him, but he has a great memory for them. won't do anything flashy or over-the-top, but will offer a little bump on the shoulder on the day of (or a head pat if he's in a particularly good mood).

will go hungry if it means the others get to eat. he can and has often dealt with hunger for longer than most, and he won't take no for an answer if you refuse his rations.

grabs teammates by the strap of their vests if they head in to an uncleared area too recklessly. kind of like grabbing puppies by the scruff. scolds them like they’re puppies, too.

is quick to pick up on discomfort. he isn’t the best at soothing it, necessarily, but he does try his best with a few bad jokes and a practical albeit brief (sometimes even brusque) pep talk.

lets soap ramble over the comms. he might not seem very engaged when all he does is hum or offer minimal input, but he knows it helps soap settle his nerves, and he doesn't mind lending an ear.

won’t admit it, but is always pleased to hear soap cheer him on and basically fanboy over him on the comms. he thinks it’s kind of annoying, but also kind of cute.

carries a very small flask from which he himself almost never drinks (tends not to drink on the job, but he keeps it handy). instead, he'll wordlessly offer it to price or laswell to share a swig after a particularly hard day.

knows how to make a decent range of birdcalls and teaches anyone who asks. it's a surprisingly useful skill especially for off-comms communication, but more importantly it's a good way to get him to talk about birds and how he solo hikes national parks between assignments.

gets a kick out of spooking gaz with made-up ghost stories about wherever they've camped out for the night. it's funnier because gaz genuinely gets freaked out by any of the generic bloody ghost stories he pieces together.

gaz, soap, and roach remind him of his late brother in their own ways. it makes him care for them that much more.

knows his way around a knife and can whittle some decently detailed carvings. will sometimes carve a figure of a stray dog or a wooden knife and just. offer it to you. but getting offered and then accepting one of his carvings means you’re now a part of his inner circle.

if any of the taskforce gets hurt, it's personal. he can hold a grudge for a long time, and you can bet that he'll remember exactly who did what. lives by the eye for an eye doctrine to a brutal degree.

has a habit of running headcount after he's done with his watch shift. will fix blankets if the other person is asleep, but if they happen to be awake, he doesn't fluster easily. just says something along the lines of 'don't catch a cold,' fixes the blanket, and walks off to check up on the others.

sleeps sitting by the main entryway of any basecamp with his gun on his lap. price tells him he doesn't have to, but ghost does it anyways. the taskforce isn't the same as a family, but he'll still die protecting them.

if you catch him feeding the strays, he'll tell you to join him and give you a scrap of whatever food he's offering them so you can feed them too. he can spend hours just letting the stray cats and dogs mill around him, and if he can, he stops by to say goodbye to them before he leaves.

he's always first off the helo and last off the ground. if anyone dies, it'll be him.

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All I can imagine with this Ghost is him finally saying something that crosses the line and goes way too far where even the reader can’t make any excuses for him anymore and starts to avoid/ leave him. What would he do in a situation like this?? Personally I think that at the beginning he’d be “okay” with it but as time goes on he’d lose his mind and want the reader back at any costs. I’m kinda unsure if he would fight to get back together or if he would just let go.

ahah fantastic question anon, and i think you're right on the money

he's certainly no less an efficient soldier after he breaks things off because it's going to be he who breaks it off. i think being in love genuinely keeps him up at night, and not in the good way. it terrifies him, especially after a good while wherein you've firmly established that you do love him and are willing to deal with the worst parts of him when his doubt swallows him whole. he's spent his life thinking that something was wrong with the way he loved, that something was wrong with him. so i genuinely think he'll break things off when the relationship is as good as it's ever been. just as he starts to open himself up to you, he slams the walls back down, because it's frightening, isn't it? to be known after you've only known how to hide yourself away for the sake of others?

nothing good has ever stayed long in his life, so he enters the relationship already expecting to wake up one day to an empty bed.

despite this, after the break, something is noticeably very wrong. he wakes up on an oddly spacious cot; he no longer has to track you down to wrestle his missing jackets back from you; he feels cold all the time, and when soap runs his vitals, there's nothing wrong with him. 'probably a cold,' he tells soap, and they both know he's lying because he isn't exactly good at hiding the way his eyes follow you when you aren't looking. what a shitty cliché to have the very rejection he dealt thrown back in his face.

he avoids you like the plague because what would he do if he were to stand face to face with you again? he's never been good with words that mean something, and he isn't about to start now. but the yearning is stronger than ever because he's had a taste of what little good he can grasp, and he can't help but want. did you feel this way, too? he doesn't mean to reduce himself to a simpering dog, but he can’t quit you, so he starts leaving small things he knows you'll like atop your pack or cot as his own meager apology. he hopes you keep them (thereby proving that he's worth something to you, even if only as a function of utility), but he finds that as quickly as he offers them, you give them to the others or throw them away outright.

and he keeps this up until one day you find him in his corner of basecamp and all but shove one of his pitiful little 'gifts' into his chest. he recognizes the anger in your expression, a thin veil over the kind of pain that slowly rots you from the inside out. you 'don't have time for this,' you tell him. it's surreal having his own words spat back at him. it hurts, but it's as he's expected all along. he and love simply don't go together. so he listens. that's all. no possessive entitlement, no pleading, nothing. just nods and watches you turn on your heel.

he grew up watching his father contort love into misery. can you blame him for being afraid that in chasing you, he might do the same?

if anything, he becomes even more efficient on the field. there's a certain level of brutality that comes with heartache, as if inflicting pain on others might bleed the hurt out of him like pus from an open wound. he starts to get reckless. maybe he wants to slip up. what's another bullet wound if he gets to see you fret over him and, lord, even just touch him to cinch a tourniquet over his leg? (except it's gaz who's closest to drag him behind cover when he's felled by enemy fire. and when he does get hauled into a medevac, you don't visit him once.)

he told you that you'd get over it. why can't he tell himself the same?

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i love tragic characters who get their whole world ripped out from underneath them and then completely fuck themselves and everyone around them over in the most violent unnecessary ways imaginable

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‘it’s not worth the trouble,’ ghost says, eyes averted.

you lift your palm to his jaw anyways, cradling his head through his mask. and treacherous, his body betrays him in the slope of his shoulders and the shifted weight melting down over your palm, molding into you the way his voice says he will not.

because beneath it all, he’s just a man, flesh and blood and the oh-so human desire to love still pulsing defiant from behind calloused walls. for every rejection, every betrayal, every part of him he sacrificed in the hopes for something better that never came, there was never another hand to salve the wounds left behind. and despite everything, he’s still ten years old, hiding under his bed and wondering why love just isn’t enough.

‘it’s not worth the trouble,’ he says again as if to convince himself that he is undeserving of the warmth on the other side of his mask. his voice thins and trembles, and he turns his head to curl closer into your touch.

a sickening pool wells in his gut. as early as he can remember, the greed of others has only caused him the kind of excruciating pain that carves its anguish in wounds that forever refuse to close. he should have learned his lesson. who is he to hunger? who is he to swallow the monster whole, and, in doing so, become one with the cruel urge to insatiably take, take, take? such vicious cycles cannot be broken when he, too, desires from the deepest parts of his heart.

want is a fever that burns its own pyre, but he has been cold for so, so long.

yet the hand that feeds him does not strike him, this time. you bring your second hand to cup his head in your palms like a precious stone, and that wretched, wretched want grabs him by his throat and rips him under the tide. and he itches to claw open his chest and tear his beating heart from the cage of his ribs because the violent intimacy of hurt might just let him ignore the simple fact that for the first time in ages, love is an unconditional generosity that solely gives. because the tide has swept him somewhere where the waves are still, and the water is warm, and your hands are so, so soft through the worn fabric of his mask.

‘i’m not worth the trouble,’ he rasps, because third time’s the charm, and maybe this one last heave will finally stifle the ache of life banging against the walls of his chest. it doesn’t. he buries his face in your hands, and even through the bony armor stitched over his mask, he swears he can feel you running your thumbs over where the highest points of his cheeks lie. his heart doesn’t quiet. of course it doesn’t.

his mind stills in defeat. resignation for a victory undeserving. maybe something in between. but where his words fail, you speak instead, your voice strong and clear as you press your brow against the brittle bone shielding his skin.

‘it’s worth it to me,’ you say softly. ‘you are to me.’

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könig and ghost, masks off

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— Mahmoud Darwish, Another Road in the Road

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Wow

indeed

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I dont understand does ghost love her or not ? :(

i think he does! but he has complicated feelings about it. u can read some of my thoughts on the matter here

tldr: i think love still dwells in him, but he’s spent his entire life making a stranger of his own body and himself that it’s hard to trust his bleeding heart. and it’s equally difficult to wrap his head around an earnest and genuine love being given freely to someone like him. he just doesn’t want to be hurt again yknow

also for future ref, i’m going to keep most of my writing gender neutral bc imo these r more character explorations than fics

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You are an incredible fucking person finally someone actually understands ghosts personality keep going with that writing please 🥹 your doing an amazing job 🤝🥂

ahh thank u anon :> ghost was p tricky to flesh out while avoiding the extremes of babying him or hypermasculinizing him, but i’m glad my interpretation resonates w u

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I think tht ghost is tht guy who is like I don’t love you but ur mine bitch

oh absolutely, but i think the denial is a front.

obviously he has to have quite a high level of trust in you that he'd physically (and somewhat emotionally) bare himself to you in his most vulnerable state. but it's like when an animal is starved for months on months, given just enough to keep its heart beating, then is suddenly presented with a veritable banquet of food. and it just sits there, so overwhelmed that it doesn't think that its hunger is real anymore. when you come to him with trust and softness and the kind of earnestness that endures, you also fundamentally turn his entire worldview atop its head, and the only way he knows to cope with it is to deny, deny, deny.

1—he doesn't believe that you love him. remember that whole line about how the people closest to you can hurt you the most? yeah. at best, it's a bad joke. 2—at worst, say you really do love him. what is he supposed to do? every time he's loved someone, something terrible happens, and i mean love in the very broad sense: his family, roach, soap, fuck man even his father. he's a death sentence, and laying claim to you is the equivalent of sealing your fate. and 3—i genuinely don't think he remembers what it feels like to give and receive love in a way unbound from transaction or duty. the compartmentalizing worked a little too well.

but he's still human, isn't he? we are not human without love. and to him, love is a cancer that's spread into his blood—it's in every pore of his body—and no matter what he does, he can't rid himself of it. he rebuffs you and snaps at you and silently picks at his nails until they bleed when you're not in his direct line of sight because if something were to happen, he wouldn't be there to save you (not that he has any confidence that he could, but there's comfort in knowing that he tried, that he wasn't helpless to watch another one bleed out this time). and you keep coming back like a goddamn duckling, never giving up on him when he's practically begged you to just leave him be. he hates being wanted, but it feels so good.

the world is so cold, but you are there to kiss his scars, you are there to share your pleasure, you are there to give a damn. in spite of everything, there is you.

why would he ever want to let that go?

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FUCK THT TOXIC SHT YOU WROTE ABOUT GHOST DZO IT AGAIN PLzPLzPlZ AAHhHhHhH

lol will post another v soon

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John Steinbeck, East of Eden

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hey, quick question.