Ghost and Price put Soap on this pedestal after his death. The angry, violent, brash MacTavish retroactively becomes the heart of the group, the light, the one who kept them together. Sure he was a good enough guy. Laughed easily, bonded quick. But he was far from the near saint they're making him out to be now. He had his demons, his nightmares; that light that sometimes shone in his eyes after a mission that no good person would ever have, not with the amount of blood on his hands. But to Ghost and Price, Johnny was the better version of them. He still had his outrage left, that knee jerk reflex of anger at injustice. Not the vague disdain Ghost has, or the cold, distant knowledge of wrongness Price walks through the world with. They're not emotionless or empty, but they forgot how to feel what they're supposed to feel a long time ago; had it trained out of them, or chose to abandon it. Not Soap though. He was still real in a way they weren't. They frame him as this good thing that the evil world took away.
It makes it easy to mourn him. It saves them from: 'He was flawed and painted in violence like the rest of us. How do I mourn someone with so much blood on his hands?' Turns it into: 'He didn't deserve to die, he was too good and I mourn the goodness that went with him.' Makes it easier to justify what they do next too. They're avenging Soap, punishing the world for the suffering it caused him.
His image twists and distorts, and they can't bring themselves to tell real anecdotes about him anymore, just recalling memories vague enough to keep this deity they built alive as they worship at the feet of a man who never existed and drown his altar in blood.
And Kyle is left to deal with their Soap complex, because he was in many ways equal to Soap. Same rank, same age, same wet behind the ears belief that the world should be good and right, that it was possible to make it that way if they just kept going, kept getting dirtier. Soap isn't some faraway echo, he's Kyle in as many ways as he isn't. They're not the same man, of course. But Kyle's memory stays fresh with Soap's annoyed curses when they didn't get clearance for a job that had him especially hungry, with the manic way he threw his body at enemies to slit their throats; with Soap, bloody and violent as the rest of them. Because he still feels all of that. Always has. Feels the same anger Soap did at being forced to fight with the gloves on, feels the same violence course through his veins that he once shared with him, fighting back to back without fear of judgement because their hands were stained the same shade of red; the color of bright, oxygen rich blood.
And he doesn't know what to do with it when the only two people who knew that John MacTavish have turned him into something else entirely. So he keeps the violence and rage alive inside him, remembers the bloody version of Soap as much as he can in hopes it will balance out, correct that false image of Soap Price and Ghost are sending out into the world. He supposes in the end he isn't that different from them after all, kneeling at his own altar.
