cw: this will eventually become sexually explicit, so mdni from the jump. this is not a dark fic, however, so major tags don't apply.
reader gets an anonymous message at work. this is an anonymous identity x cis-fem reader fic. tags + story blurbs will therefore reflect this. for future readers, please refrain from commenting any spoilers (i will delete + block if they come up).
have fun!
navigate to: part 1
part 2
"It's gotta be him. No?" Sasha sips at her coffee eagerly.
"Maybe?"
"But G could also be like, a version of bro or whatever, too," she admits. "He didn't say anything obvious? Make you feel like he's noticed you before?"
"Definitely not." You tap robotically on the lid of your coffee cup. "We didn't even exchange names."
"Yeah, 'cause he already knows yours. Also, how do you get locked inside an elevator with a single person for over two hours and not know each other's names by the end of it?"
You sigh heavily, throwing up a hand in defense. "Listen! I was stressed out and he made me fucking nervous. I don't know, dude. I really didn't get a vibe from him that he was like…messing with me."
Sasha rolls her eyes and her chair back to her desk. "You're on your own then. Call up maintenance and see if they send him. Be a damn detective."
You stomp away dramatically to her light laughter. It's been over a week since the elevator incident.
A telltale blink on the screen when you return.
» Bored?
» Look, I don't want to be rude, but your messages aren't funny to me. I don't like this mystery or thing you're doing. If you want to talk to me, just approach me
» Ah, I'm sorry.
» I really don't mean to scare you.
» You're not scaring me. It's just weird.
» Do you want a hint? Maybe it'll make you feel better.
» Or you could just tell me who you are. Or I could just submit a ticket to IT.
» You could.
» Do we work on the same floor?
» No. But I see you around.
» Do I pass you or do you pass me?
» Both.
That narrows it down to approximately two floors and far too many departments and teams. Time to put the elevator theory to the test.
» Have we talked before?
» I'll say this: you have a very lovely smile.
» Gotta run. Talk soon.
You stand up and go refill your water bottle at the station so you don't shatter your work laptop out of frustration.
—
A grimy July day drips into evening. A few teams, yours included, all banding together to descend en masse to a restaurant with a huge outdoor patio and cold-ass after-work drinks. You tentatively decline until Sasha bullies you into accepting. "Cinq à sept! Cinq à sept!"
Should socialize more rattling around your heat-dumb brain.
Sasha texting you before you guys lock up your computer for the night:
» maybe G will be out there amongst us woooohhhhh
That idea almost makes you decline again until she's parked her ass in front of your cube, firmly entrenched and not budging. "Let's goooo. One drink."
You walk together and your nerves twist in nauseated bundles under your skin as she yaps amiably the whole way. It's your first social outing with anyone other than her, so you quickly order a drink and stand with her, being gradually introduced to a wide variety of folks from accounting, HR, marketing, comms, and so on. When the sept part of cinq à sept passes, you lean over to her. "Do people usually get this drunk at these?" She laughs breezily. "Well. Depends on the group, but I think it's just this fuckin' weather. Oh, I think those guys are from IT. Hey," she elbows you. "Let's ask about your message."
Some people left after a drink or two — like you should've — and more continue to drift in. The IT guys are two tall men that don't look like IT men in the first place. Not that there's a look, but…there can be a look. You let your eyes land on them, taking them in: white with blue eyes and some trendy haircut, and Black with sweet eyes and a dentist's dream of a smile. Sasha needles you. "Let's go say hi, I'll introduce you."
"Sasha," you plead, but she taps her glass to yours and pulls you over.
"Hey! John, right?" She says, easy as anything, to the one with shaggy hair. She introduces you to them both, and they both smile warmly at you. "And sorry, you fixed my workstation last week but I'm totally blanking on your name."
"Kyle," the other guy says with a grin, and you all laugh over the mix of handshakes between the four of you.
"Kyle! Oh my god, right." She throws her head back dramatically. "You saved my fucking ass."
He laughs, taking a slow sip of his drink. "No trouble at all."
Sasha perks up. "I have a fun question for you both then!"
Fuuuuuuck.
"Excuse me, I gotta—" you say just as Sasha tries to grab your arm, but you cut yourself off, slipping away to the washroom before she can make a scene. You are not interested in what the IT team thinks of your fucking messages, and you're annoyed that she's making it a joke. Obviously if you cared enough, you'd have submitted a ticket already and gotten something resolved, but it's a new job and you don't want to make waves. Why couldn't she just let it lie between you both?
If you could get away with it, you'd stay parked in the washroom until IT left. Or just dip and run, but neither of these are viable solutions. Instead, you swipe away the gathered sweat from your neck and hands, pat your face with cold water, and try to make with a facade of confidence back to the group. You spot Sasha still with John and Kyle, so you beeline for another member of your team. Sit down in the safety of numbers, and order another drink.
A little while later, there's a hand that hovers slightly at your elbow. You turn to see Kyle having sit to your far left, where your back had been turned.
"Oh, hi," you say weakly. Sasha's off somewhere else now.
"Hey, just wanted to check if you're alright?"
Your eyebrows pinch together and you sip from your drink nervously. "Yeah? Why?"
"Ah, good. You just seemed bit out of sorts back there with your friend. Summat we said, or?"
You laugh, relieved. "No, no. It's all good." You have no idea if Sasha explained your issue. And you don't feel comfortable revealing it if she did decide to keep her mouth shut. "Just getting used to a big company with lots of people to meet. I guess I'm not used to the big get-togethers. My first one."
He smiles brightly, a lazy laugh coming out of him. "Ah, that's nice then. Bit of a shy one, eh?" His eyes crinkle nicely in the corners when he smiles like that. He looks like a man you would've admired in the men's sleepwear pages of the Sears catalogue; handsome and sweet. Doe-like eyes.
Your cheeks heat under his soft gaze. "Well, I don't know about that. Just getting used to it, is all. How long have you been here?"
He sucks his teeth a little, hems and haws. "Little over two years, I reckon? John headhunted me personally."
"Oh, nice."
"You got any plans this summer? Goin' on holiday?" He props an arm loosely along the back of the booth you're sat on, the relaxed cream linen shirt he's wearing pulled a bit snug over his arm muscles. The sun close to setting now, he seems to glow and gleam in front of you, while you just wilt and sweat. Some are just chosen ones.
You laugh. "I just started. Not taking any time off yet. I might just take off a Monday over a long weekend, maybe."
"Lovely." He smiles. Those're fun," he says, reaching his hand out and tapping his fingertip against your manicure, a reptilian pattern you'd tried last night.
"Oh, thank you." Another self-conscious laugh, the desire to pull your hand back.
"—arrick!" A boisterously loud voice calling over the patio, stopping most people's conversations as heads turn to the source: John, waving at the exit gate. "C'mon, mate, ah dinnae want tae get another ticket!"
Kyle's face breaks down into a seriously, mate? expression, turning back to you to smile ruefully. "Next time? You'll be here."
"Maybe!"
"Nah, you gotta promise that."
You laugh again, his voice carrying as he stands up, grabbing your hand. A couple people looking at you both.
"Sure, maybe I promise."
A smile as bright as the sun and just as intoxicating.
On the walk home to your car, Sasha gripping your arm tightly. "Dude."
"What?"
"Kyle's last name."
You stare at her. "I didn't hear it."
"John yelled it, you didn't hear it?"
"I dunno, kinda? Eric or something."
She laughs at you openly. "Garrick, dummy. G-guh-guh-garrrrrrick."
"No. I think it was Eric or Carrick maybe. I didn't hear a G."
She shrugs, clearly not believing you at all, hands up. "Oookay."
You wait as she waits for her bus, then you head through the secondary parking lot to your car in the next lot. Dozens of moths are swarming each floodlight, forming strange dark clouds that dissipate and reshape themselves.
A truck's headlights turn on in front of you, making you gasp and grab your bag. You squint above into the cab. See a tall shadow. You scurry your feet and hear a door open.
"Just me."
Elevator guy, unfurling his big body from the truck, and stepping down in his uniform and boots. Looks tired in the fluorescent lighting.
"Oh," you twist back, breathless and embarrassed for it. "Hey." The lack of his name gives you pause. "Just getting off now?"
He nods. "Walk you."
You wait as he shuts the engine off and palms the keys as he walks beside you across the swaths of grass and improvised footpaths between the lots.
"Where you comin' from?"
"Oh, the cinq à sept, down the road?" The realization hits you that maintenance and security and warehouse and all those other folks may not get invitations extended their way, and you bite your tongue in shame. "My team invited me last minute." A mollifying shrug offered like you too are on the outskirts.
"Never been," he says simply. You're not sure if you want to get to your car quicker or slower, feeling out of sorts and pulled apart. "They treatin' you nice?"
"Who, my team?"
"Yeah." No inflection, nothing to riddle out.
"Yeah, they're really nice." Wait. "How'd you know I'm new?"
He laughs shortly, not rude but not really kind either. "You got a look to you. Big eyes. Spooked."
You frown down, staring at the hem of your dress and sandals, not realizing people could smell the rookie off you that obviously. "Me? Or new people in general?"
"Don't know anyone else that's new."
You get to your car. Your keys are still in your bag. Sasha's dumb boldness takes root in you for as long as you can harness it.
"Can you tell me your name?"
His brows raise a little. "Simon."
"Full name. Please."
"Riley."
When you look deeply confused and start fidgeting with your keys, he looks around like he's missing something. "Y'alrigh'?"
"Yeah. I just…why'd that guy call you G?"
He looks just as confused as you do. "Who?"
Just gotta admit that I noted every single second of our encounter to replay later and know what a random man called you in a two-plus hour span.
"Your…friend from maintenance? He called you G. Through the speaker."
His expression settles immediately. "Dumb nickname the lads gave me." Even with the dim evening light, washed in deep tangerine twilight, there's colour high on his cheekbones. You stare at it dumbfounded. He is not the type of person — you thought — that would ever blush or seem uncomfortable.
"For what? I mean. What's the G stand for?"
"Ghost." He clears his throat loudly, and kicks your tire with his boot.
"Hey," you say lightly, waving your hands out at him. "That's my…those are my tires you're kicking!"
"Tire's nearly flat." He says, eyes flicking to you briefly.
You spin around to look. Sure enough. Dumb ass fucking piece of shit car. Dumb ass fucking piece of shit you.
"Get in." You do, obedient. Then watch as he gestures to you to wait, and jogs long-legged and slightly stiff, to his truck across the way. You watch in silence as his truck headlights come on. Veer out, across his own lot, then looping around until he's by yours.
"'kay, y'can wait in there if you're not gonna boil. Or y'can help me."
Neither of you speak about anything while he loosens the lug nuts, jacks your car up — not surprised he's got his own jack in his truck — then hauls the spare out of your trunk for you. You do helpful tasks like popping the trunk open. Handing him the occasional item. Staring at him. As you lose the dying bits of sun, holding your phone's flashlight out to see better, which he snorts at.
It's done by the time your roadside assistance would even be dispatching someone.
"Take it for a spin." He gestures, and you climb in, aware of the scent he's left behind — an old but mostly clean sweat — and drive around the parking lot, feeling like an idiot learning how to drive.
"Feels good?"
"Yeah. Thanks." Do you get out of the car? Shake his hand? Hug him? "How—no—can I pay you back, please?"
A solemn shake of his head. "Nah, don't be daft. Glad I was here."
"Me too." Again.
"Can I buy you a drink?" What if he doesn't drink? What if he'll take it as flirting? Do you want him to take it as flirting? What if he's married, or g—
"Alrigh'."
You take his number and don't offer yours in return. You suddenly feel very possessive of that scrap of agency left. "Well, thanks again. Simon."
Head clearing as you hit the highway, realizing you have no better information than you started with.
cw: this will eventually become sexually explicit, so mdni from the jump. this is not a dark fic, however, so major tags don't apply.
reader gets an anonymous message at work. this is an anonymous identity x cis-fem reader fic. tags + story blurbs will therefore reflect this. for future readers, please refrain from commenting any spoilers (i will delete + block if they come up).
have fun!
part 1
The company is large, larger than any you've ever worked for. Huge building all its own, not just some leased office in a commercial space. It has its own parking lot, for Christ's sake. You no longer have to shuttle your little chugger of a car into a daily parking lot that charges out the ass.
You get installed in a small quasi-cubicle with a slight partition. You pin a picture of you and your friends at your friend's cottage after your first few weeks when you noticed that other people decorated their spaces openly. You were never going to be bold enough to do it without tacit permission.
Sea legs take awhile, and this is a huge move for your career. You find sanctuary with a team lead, Sasha, who tours you around leisurely, giving you the dos and don'ts — this washroom is a hidden gem, so don't tell anyone else; she gives you extra scoops of guac if you call her miss; don't bother submitting a maintenance ticket, just grab someone if you see 'em and they'll help — until you're at least more comfortable navigating between the different floors to explore a little on your own when you're bored on break.
Work is more interesting and demanding than any other you've held in the past, so you're constantly nose-to-computer otherwise, navigating the online repository of the company's technical guides and user-created templates. You're deep in one when a little pop-up window for the intra-company chat app appears at the bottom of the screen, then minimizes itself with a flashing icon.
» User G_02 would like to send you a message. Would you like to ACCEPT or DECLINE?
Your team, and even your department, is small. You don't know anyone with those initials. Do you? In your email, you pull up the department group to scroll through all the names; you're still new, you're probably forgetting a few.
Nothing. Well, it's intra-company, so no harm, no foul. It's not as if you're clicking on a suspicious link.
» Accept.
You wait. The longer you wait, the antsier you get. You flick at your thumbnail, your fingertip catching where the nail polish is peeling up. Little flecks of polish in a tiny pile that you sweep off with a scoop of your hand.
Wrong message maybe?
Sighing, you flip back to your manual to scroll through for specific information when the window suddenly blinks.
» Like your hair today
» Hi, sorry who is this?
» You don't know?
Your stomach flips.
» Sorry, I'm new. I really don't know anyone outside my department.
» Shame. Should socialize more.
What?
» Oh, well…I'll start soon, i'm sure lol. Sorry what department are you in?
» Kinda fun to let you figure it out
You minimize the chat window silently. It feels like holding a snake that suddenly turns its head to look at you.
You message Sasha, asking if she knows anyone with the first initial G, without telling her the rest. She laughs and says you might as well be asking if there're any white guys working in big tech.
For the rest of the day, anyone passing by your little cubicle is a suspect. You are in a busy, central spot of your floor; dozens of people float around every hour, many faces still unknown to you. You constantly receive a spectrum polite smiles, blank smiles, warm hellos, but nobody that stares or lingers. Every single person you interact with, hear about, you're training yourself to look for any matching initials.
Judging by their message, G doesn't want you to deduce it right away. Wants to play a bit, and you don't like it one bit. You delete the message history. It won't prevent them from sending you messages, but it's the only thing that works to keep your focus off it.
Pretend it hasn't happened.
—
A week later, you're deep in a document review, eyes bleary, when the window blinks. Doesn't occur to you that it wouldn't be anyone but your team members.
» Forgot to mention I like your cute little picture
Your eyes slam to the pinned picture on your partition wall — you, your best friends, soaking wet on the dock, arms up and eyes closed. A comfort to look at. No different from other people's pictures of their pets or kids or spouses. Suddenly, it feels as if you blew it up and hung it off the side of the building to flap in the wind and let the city gawk at you. Like a nude got published. You're all in your bathing suit cover-ups, nothing untoward to hang up in the workplace, but you suddenly grab it, the little pushpin ripping out with it. You stuff it in your bag, suddenly noticing that your palms and soles of your feet are sweating.
» Make you nervous?
» I don't really know what to say. I don't know who you are.
» You sure?
What the fuck. You close the chat again, pushing your chair out from your desk, and get up to go talk with Sasha. She asks if you want to tell IT; not yet, not really. HR? Definitely not. You both tool around and discover the chat app doesn't let you block other users, considering it's just a company-wide tool.
"Okay, well. I can try to look up directories, if you want, anyone with a G-name. Find an org chart, but those are constantly fuckin' outdated. Do you think they work on this floor?"
"Sasha, how would I know that," you laugh weakly. You scroll up through the chat history to show her. "There's nothing there that tells me what department they work in. How often they see me. They could be mailroom, or someone's assistant, or…anyone!"
She chews her lip, hip bumped against your desk. "Yeah. Fuck. Well, just ignore them for now. Let me know if you want to escalate it." She gives you very serious eye contact until you nod sincerely. "Or if they do something even weirder. Okay?"
You wander back to your desk.
You work later than usual that day. A company this size and given the field you're in, there are still dozens of people on calls, staring at screens, wrapping up meetings. Makes you feel better, safer.
A maintenance worker is waiting for the elevator when you approach. The sheer breadth of him makes you feel small and insignificant, standing there with your lunch bag and water bottle and backpack like a schoolkid. He's got a big yellow maintenance pushcart with him, and when the doors ding open, you motion for him to go first so you can fit yourself in after. He obliges with a blank nod, and you skirt in behind him.
G for you.
B1 for him.
You're staring unseeingly at the smeared stainless steel reflection of the elevator door, picking at your nail polish, when the lights flicker rapidly in a one-two count, and then the elevator car is shuddering, pulling up short and making your stomach roil.
"What the fuck," you mutter automatically. Eyes flick up to the robotic floor read-out, but that doesn't even seem certain where you are. Between 2nd and 3rd floor?
The lights shudder out again, plunging you both in dark for a few moments. You breathe in sharply until some sort of backup system kicks in, running lights on the ceiling of the elevator turning on. A ceiling fan spinning, thank god.
You turn to the maintenance worker — also thank god, someone who might know what to do exactly besides pressing the HELP button — and his mouth is downturned, unimpressed.
"Do you want—?" You gesture to the panel of buttons. He nods silently. Then, with the big-ass cart filling up the space of nearly 4 people, you have to maneuver off to the side like one of those frustrating tile games so he can bring himself up to where you were stood.
Tucked at the back, his broad back blocks you from seeing what he's pressing. Then there's a tinny, crackling voice. "Maintenance."
"Hey mate, it's me. Stuck in car 2 between 2 and 3. Power go out?"
"Oh, hey, man." You can almost detect relief in the other person's voice, like they're grateful not to hear from a panicking employee instead. "Yeah, brown-out. Car should be good though — lights and fan on?"
"Yeah."
"Weird. 'Kay, hold tight. I'll give J a ring." The crackling noise cuts out.
You stare at his back impolitely. Large shapely muscles bulked under a dark grey short-sleeved canvas shirt, tattoos pouring out over thick biceps and forearms. Workman's belt. Matching grey canvas pants and some of the thickest black boots you've seen. Huge, muscular ass. Tree trunk thighs stretching the canvas tight.
Boots turning backward to face you. Your eyes fly up to his face — solemn dark eyes, healed-wrong nose, and full mouth — breathlessly, guilty.
"Y'alrigh'?"
"Yeah?" You almost cough. "Yeah. Good."
"Might be a bit. Stingy fuckers been delaying calling the elevator techs out since spring."
"Oh." You panic because there's nothing to look at except for him and all he's looking at it is the way you're grabbing helplessly at the straps of your backpack. "Well. At least we've got air." You, ever the optimist.
—
The cart forces awkwardness. When you finally slide to sit down, and he follows suit later, you can't even see one another. Two ends of an L shape of space.
The silence is mortifying for no good reason, shining floodlights on your social insecurities.
You've tucked yourself in the back corner of the car, knees pulled up to your chest, unzipping your backpack quietly like you don't want to disturb the man.
It's been an hour and a half. You've stopped caring about the sweat that's peppered along your hairline, under your arms.. You scrape your hair up and find a claw clip to keep it off your skin.
"Whatcha got?" he asks after you crinkle around in your lunch bag too loudly.
"Oh, I was…I was just about to offer. I have some cold noodle salad left. You allergic to sesame or peanut?"
"Nah, no allergies."
You scrape two portions out, using your emptied containers to divvy them up. Big boy; you serve him a bigger portion. Around the corner from you, he won't know any different. Instead of standing, you scoot forward until you're peeking around. His legs are kicked out as much as they can, but he looks cramped and awkward.
He meets you halfway, arms flexing to grab your offerings; a can of grapefruit seltzer water, chopsticks and cold noodle salad, and a two-bite brownie from the dollar store. His expression, so blank before, looks surprised when he sees it.
His big fingers drag against yours as you weirdly try to place it all in his opened palms.
"Cheers," he says bluntly.
You nod politely and you both retreat to your corners like sweating, sad boxers.
"Oh wait!" You call out brighter than anything else you've said to him. "Ice packs."
A repeat of moving forward and then a hand-off a cool-but-better-than-nothing ice pack. He makes a very small sound when it hits his hands. Scuffled back into your spots again. A deeper groan when he puts the ice pack…wherever. You don't want to imagine where he's placed it.
"You get this downstairs?" It's the only question he's asked you except
At first, you think he means the ice pack.
"Huh? Oh, the salad? No, I made it. Why, is it okay?" Properly a character deficiency for you to seek validation from a random stranger in a stuck elevator.
He slurps the noodles loudly. "S'fuckin' good. Can't figure these things out though." You suspect he means the chopsticks.
You laugh lightly. "Sorry, I don't have a fork."
"Don't say sorry. S'good." The crisp sound of the pop can being cracked open and then a long thirsty guzzle. He must be sweatier than you in that canvas uniform. You imagine his Adam's apple working up and down as he chugs the water. "Ah, what the fuck is that" spat out in a strangled voice.
"What?"
"Your pop's gone off."
"Huh?"
"Tastes old."
Realization. You laugh. "It's just seltzer water. Flavoured. Not really pop."
You see the edge of his steel toed boots move slightly, and then a hand appear around the corner, setting the opened drink down for you. He moves back against his wall. "'m good. Thanks."
Are you opposed to drinking from the same can as a stranger? Yes.
This stranger? You grab the can quickly as if he's going to snatch you, and set it beside you. Look down and see where some of the water's pooled around the open tab. In the utter, humiliating privacy of your corner, you silently sniff the top of the can. Nothing. You have a tiny sip, and then dig into your own noodles, awash with whatever has come over you. A bitch in heat.
You gasp very loudly when the speaker crackles to life.
"Ey, G? You good, man?"
The man — you still don't know his name. He doesn't know yours — awkwardly pushes himself up to stand. "Yeah."
"Sorry for the wait there, brother. Fuckin' shitshow with these fools. Someone had to pull up their goddamn contract to check about OT calls. Anyway, they should be here soon. You guys good?"
"Yeah, all good, mate. Cheers." From this angle, stood up tall, he glances back and sees you tucked up tight, staring up at him. A funny look crosses his face, but you don't know him, can't read him.
When the technicians finally arrive, it doesn't take long for you guys to finally arrive at the 2nd floor, doors sliding open, and you finally on more stable ground. The man chats a little with the techs and you shyly say, "Thank you so much," to…everyone there, and then aim for the stairwell. The cold recirculated office air is a fucking relief on your skin, under your dampened clothing.
There's a door slam in the stairwell, echoing loudly in the chamber as you descend, and heavy boots clomping down, not hurried but not slow. You glance back and up: he's followed you. Didn't stay to chat.
"Walk you out." He says simply, and you mouth oh and you don't really have any arguments for that, so you walk self-consciously ahead of him. Aware that your pants and top are stuck unflatteringly to your skin with probably a pool-shaped band of sweat at the back of your top. "You drive or take public?"
"Uh, drive." Nerves rankling your voice like you didn't just spend hours cooped up in a tighter space than this.
He nods. Laughs short and rough when he sees you heading to the single car in the deserted parking lot. Overnight crews must park elsewhere.
An absurd question out of your mouth — "Do you want a drive home? Or…need? I don't know if you drive or…" You fumble with your car keys, press repeatedly on the fob to open the doors just for something to do with your hands. Your car lights blinks obediently as you approach.
"'m good. Drove." You turn your head, too afraid to look back up at him now, but watching his arm lift to gesture at a secondary parking lot. Some trucks parked there.
He stands, crossing his arms across his bulky chest, as you smile unnaturally.
"Okay, well, thanks, I guess." You laugh uncomfortably. "For keeping your cool. Made me feel a lot better."
"Yeah?" An eyebrow, ripped apart by scar tissue, tugging up by a hair.
"Yeah. A lot, actually." And then immediately, your cheeks feel even hotter, feeling like you've revealed something far too intimate to a man whose drink you swallowed.
"Cute."
You hustle into your car, flinging your shit on the passenger seat, sweating furiously and keys bouncing off the ignition cylinder multiple times until it takes, and waving until you can pull out and far away.
In bed that night, showered clean and cool, you're tracing the day's events like fingering a long rosary bead until you realize that the other maintenance person called him G.
Lately, you’ve been thinking about having a baby.
Or: the fertility clinic au
Part 1
masterlist
It must be the mother of all quarter-life crises for you to be as torn up about this as you are.
(‘Mother of all’—what an apt phrase for a time like this.)
Two of your friends have babies and suddenly it’s all you can think about. Chubby cheeks and wrinkly fingers; diaper bags stuffed to the brim and shrill baby screams piercing through the house.
You try to help them out as best you can in those first few months, coming over with dinner wrapped in foil and snacks in Tupperware for the exhausted parents, offering to help run errands or tidy up the place while they try to catch up on sleep. The picture perfect friend.
You never thought it’d hit you like this until it does. Baby fever à la max. Even the word ‘fever’ undersells it—the feeling that overtakes you is like a blazing inferno, burning away every other want or desire apart from the one currently tearing you asunder.
It’s all you can think about from that point on. Babies, babies, babies. The milky smell of their heads, the flexible cartilage of their noses, their pudgy, wrinkly yawns and soft sighs. You make excuses to visit, offering to babysit whenever they look like they could use a night out, your agenda so transparent that anyone with eyes could see it.
All you can think when you look at them is that your life has been looking a lot like a house of cards these days: all style and no substance.
They get in your head, alright. That ominous they; not a specific person or group, just a nebulous, widespread opinion permeating far too many corners of your world. All that fearmongering about babymaking windows and that talk of rapidly vanishing fecundity—your eyes nearly bulge out of your head when you come across a TikTok of a thirty-six year old calling her eggs geriatric—and by the end of it, you swear you can hear your biological clock booming between your ears, one swinging gong after another.
You’re able to keep the beast at bay for a bit by tricking yourself into thinking that it’s just in your head. Just one of those things. You’re getting older—of course at some point you’d start to worry about the things you never got a chance to do. FOMO. Regrets blooming into full-blown crises. It’s only natural that it would start to get to you eventually.
Trying to convince yourself of that is not enough to shake the damn urgency from your blood though. You’re like a dog with a bone, too many late nights spent scrolling through parenting forums and conception tips, neither of which are of much use to you as a childless, partnerless person not currently trying for a baby. What does it matter to you if smoking reduces your chances of getting pregnant by forty percent? You don’t even smoke.
You might actually want to have a baby though. Mindblowing after all this time, to think that maybe it wasn’t just a fleeting fancy.
Mindblowing, then abruptly terrifying.
Your present situation is a bit dire. It’s been several years since you last had a partner, none you ever would’ve ever considered having a baby with. Absurd—worse than absurd even. And despite everything, despite the self-imposed countdown ticking away in your head and the stress causing your spine to curl in a half-inch more every single day, you are, thankfully, not desperate enough to reach out to any of them.
So you try. For a short period of time, you make a real, concerted effort to find a partner, going on three dates in a week, each more appalling than the last. It’s the last one that breaks you, your date not only unbearably dismissive to the waitstaff but also entirely uninterested in discussing anything about your life, completely preoccupied with recounting the minutiae of his own life story.
A swing and a miss. You made an effort at least, put yourself out there. Tried to do things the old-fashioned way.
It’s the twenty-first century though, for goodness’ sakes; there are more ways to start a family than just the tried-and-true method.
And that’s how you wind up here, at a fertility clinic on a Tuesday afternoon, PTO plugged into your work calendar with a secretive little “Appointment” reason left for being out of office. It’s no office-busybody’s business though. They don’t need to know about the increasingly debilitating need to have a baby that’s been overtaking you these past few months.
It would clear a lot of things up, but it still isn’t anyone’s business.
The waiting room is a simple, unadorned roost of a room, the walls lined with plastic eggshell-like chairs for all the eggs soon to be hatched. An oddly sterile space for the purpose it serves. It would be a little uncomfortable if it weren’t like every other waiting room in existence, minus any snivelling sick people.
There are other people besides you. Or rather, there were people. People that have already come and gone, not quite so anxious as to turn up an hour early for their two o’clock appointment, their stomachs grumbling from skipping lunch.
And so after the third couple goes in for their appointment with the specialist, you’re left on your own for a bit until a new person walks in.
A man this time, all by his lonesome.
And boy is he a specimen so fine that you can’t help but hope that he’s come to make a deposit. If they let you pick your donor based on build and gait alone, you think you’d have your man right here. You can barely drag your eyes away from him, glued to the rounded muscle of his back, gliding over the curve of his shoulders and up the thick of his neck.
After a brief conversation with the receptionist to check in, he drums his fingers across the counter and takes a seat on one of the little egg chairs along the wall facing yours.
Where he then proceeds to lift his head and lock eyes with you.
In retrospect, you wish you could describe it as a magical moment, but in reality, you just freeze in place, embarrassed at being caught staring. He’s a decently handsome enough man to be good fodder for any later self-care. Square-jawed and bearded.
Good hairline for his age, which you don’t want to take a crack at guessing, but if you had to, it would have to be somewhere around his mid-forties. Maybe late. But it touches him in just the right way, evident in the lines on his forehead and the pull of the skin around his eyes, his beard just ever so slightly flecked with the barest hints of grey.
The writing on the threadbare shirt he has on, almost hidden beneath the plaid shirt layered over it, is barely legible after countless washes. You can almost see straight through it. If you pinched the fabric between your fingers, you think your nails would poke right through. You could rip it right off him, get a better look at the dense pecs that you can just barely make out through his shirt.
You swallow, that thought catching you off guard.
Despite your own embarrassment, his gaze holds steady. Some people aren’t born with shame as a built-in foghorn. Some people look out into the world and genuinely believe it is theirs to conquer, raised on a diet of self-confidence and boldness, free-range audacity.
He’s bold enough, in fact, to rise to his feet and cross to the other side of the waiting room, taking a seat right beside you. He sits down beside you like you're old friends, like there's nothing strange about a man sitting beside a veritable stranger in a completely empty room.
It’s such a bold move that you don’t even know what to say at first, head turned towards him in the chair next to you now with some dumb expression on your face, gobsmacked.
“Can I help you?” you hear yourself ask, years of socialization coming to the rescue. Thank god the gears start turning in your head after that brief second of bewilderment.
“Not at all.” And what a voice too, as if his looks weren’t enough. All unintentional deep-chested purr, leonine English rumbling out of the depths of him, Northern accent to top it off. “Just thought I might introduce myself. Be polite, seeing as how we’re both here for the same reason.”
Unless he ran ahead of a wife still on her way up the elevator, you don’t think that’s the case. You glance around him just to double check the door. “Are we?”
“Maybe a pick-up instead of a drop-off in your case,” he concedes, a droll little note curled up in his voice. “But that’s not so different when the end result’s the same.”
You swallow and force an awkward smile, ignoring the way your heart speeds up. “Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, nice to meet you, um, circumstances aside.” You hold out a hand, which he doesn’t hesitate to take.
“Nothing wrong with the circumstances, but pleasure to meet you too, love.”
His palm feels huge around yours, a warm, firm grip that only yields a few moments later when you have to make an effort to pull your hand away, holding on for the fleetingest of seconds, long enough for a spark of anxiety to shoot through your chest.
You hope that’s the end of it when he finally lets go of your hand. Not because you don’t want to chat up an incredibly attractive stranger, but because you couldn’t imagine the timing being worse.
He, however, seems to have no qualms with carrying on. “Has it taken yet or are you shopping for donors today?”
It’s a horribly invasive question, but you answer it anyway, all buttoned-up and ginger. “Um. No, I’m just here for a consultation. There’ll probably be a lot of paperwork before, um…before we get started.”
“A lot of nonsense for something I reckon we could get done a lot easier together.”
It doesn’t register until it does. Then you just have to look at him and blink, confused.
“Excuse me?” you ask.
He cocks an eyebrow. “I haven’t got this wrong, have I? You said you’re here for a baby?”
“Uh, yes, that’s—that’s what I just said.”
“And I’m here to help someone like you have a baby. Seems like we’d be making both of our lives easier if we just skipped all the red tape and saved you the expense.”
“‘Save me the expense’?” you repeat, stunned.
“Won’t cost anything the natural way.”
You know what he’s insinuating, but you can’t believe it. You actually can’t believe that this man—a stranger, handsome as he might be, good-looking as he might be, husband-envy-inspiring as he might be—would openly proposition you in the waiting room of a fertility clinic. Offer to get you pregnant ‘the natural way’, as if it were a cold drink on a hot day. A side of fries with your order.
“I—I’m sorry, but that’s incredibly inappropriate,” you eventually wheeze out.
That gets a laugh out of him, one of those amused huffs that erupts out of him like a bear flicking a bee off its snout. “Can’t be cagey about this sort of thing, love. You have to be direct when you want to get things done.”
“You do know we’re in public, right?”
“I’d be happy to take this somewhere private.”
The heat under your cheeks might actually result in a physical burn. “I…think I’m going to find somewhere else to sit.”
“Ah, don’t worry about that, love, I’m gonna head out anyway.” A satisfied smile tugs at his mouth. “I think I got what I actually came for.”
Your frown deepens. “You haven’t even been called in yet.”
“Not what I meant.”
Before you can ask what he means, he shifts in his seat, leaning closer to you for just a second, but long enough for your heart to suddenly go wild and your pupils to go big as dinner plates.
“Here,” he grunts, lifting a hip to pull his wallet out of his back pocket, flicking it open and plucking out a business card. He flips your hand over and puts it down on your palm. “That’s my number. When you’re done here, give me a call. I’m sure we can come up with something better than this.”
He taps the card in your hand with a finger. It ricochets through you, the tap rippling up your arm and chest, nearly rocking you back in your seat. Everything he does must be punctuated with the same echoing weight.
He nods to you on his way out, a secretive smile on his lips, just the barest hint of a lift that you might’ve missed had you not been staring at his face. All you can do is stare though, still absolutely floored, practically speechless as you watch him leave.
And then you’re alone again, in an entirely different headspace than when you first sat down.
“John Price?” the receptionist calls out from behind the desk suddenly, but with the man gone, there’s no one else in the waiting room apart from you. “Mr. John Price?”
You blink, stun-locked. You can’t have been the reason he decided to back out of his appointment at the last minute. He must’ve decided to bail at the last minute before throwing a Hail Mary in an attempt to get laid.
That has to be it. He wouldn’t leave because of a brief interaction with you.
The waiting room feels a lot emptier without him now that he’s gone, as if by being made aware of his presence, everything has been indelibly altered. Changed. Slightly less interesting somehow.
You hover somewhere between bewilderment and affront until a flicker of giddiness steals in. Tamp that back down. He's gone, and with him the impossible audacity of what just came out of his mouth. You stare at the door that he just disappeared through, lips parting around a reply you'll never get to deliver, then let out a sharp, disbelieving scoff. The gall.
And yet, despite yourself, you can't quite smother the giddiness bubbling low in the pit of your stomach. Your fingers curl around the business card in your hand.
Eventually it’s your turn. You almost miss the sound of your own name until a lady in purple scrubs repeats it, sending you shooting to your feet. You follow her as she leads you down a hall and towards an open office just as clean and spartan as the waiting room. All there is in her office is a desk, a bookshelf, and a mobile ultrasound machine. Practically empty for all intents and purposes.
Ok lady, you think, sitting down across from her, what’s it gonna take to put a baby in me?
“Four thousand dollars,” she says matter-of-factly, the earlier part of your conversation long forgotten after hearing the price.
That just about knocks all the wind out of you. “Oh,” you bleat, the prospect of ever getting pregnant suddenly a sad and distant dream.
“Per cycle,” she further clarifies, much to your dismay, sliding a couple pamphlets your way. “We’re always hopeful that it’ll take on the first cycle, but we typically see about three to four cycles of IUI before conception occurs.”
IUI—intrauterine insemination. The sperm they have to shove up inside you to just and knock you up. At four thousand dollars a pop.
“There’s no…first time discount?”
“Excuse me?”
“Like the, um…like the home buyer’s loan.”
She seems vaguely apologetic when she shakes her head at least, though that doesn’t really ease the sting. “No, unfortunately. Most of our customers are first time parents, so—”
It wouldn’t make much business sense. “Yeah, no, I get it.”
You do your best to pay attention to the rest of the conversation and ask the right questions, but the sticker shock makes it hard to focus. At some point, the consultation must end because she sends you off with a folder full of pamphlets and QR codes to scan, and a follow-up appointment booked two weeks out for a blood test and a pelvic ultrasound.
No music on the drive home, just silence to let the events of the day marinate.
You know it’s likely just this clinic. It’s not like there aren’t other, probably cheaper clinics. But it’s the principle of the matter, the one factor that you hadn’t considered in this whole endeavour—you’d assumed, obviously, that raising a child in and of itself wouldn’t be cheap, but you hadn't even contemplated that the run-up to actually getting pregnant might be so cost prohibitive.
If you even get pregnant. You exhale in a rush, the thought hitting you like a sledgehammer. God, you might not even get pregnant. You might go through the whole treatment, waste thousands of dollars, and go half-crazy begging the universe to let you get knocked up, and it might not even take.
Dinner is a glass of white wine and burrito straight from the freezer, in no mood to cook or clean even a single dish. You should be cutting down on your alcohol consumption in anticipation of fertility treatments, but that’ll be a task for a later, less devastated you. You’ll rinse the hot sauce off your plate when you’re done eating and leave it in the sink for tomorrow morning.
It’s not how you wanted the day to end. You were hoping to come home invigorated and inspired, already prepping for the next steps in the process. Instead it feels like you’ve taken a massive step back.
Occasionally you like to look up flights to other countries just to imagine what it might be like to get away from your life for a bit, but the ticket price always brings you back down to reality.
This isn’t like that though; this isn’t some temporary flight of fancy or some pie in the sky that you’ll spend decades chasing down in your dreams, hoping for just a single bite or even just a whiff. This is something you actually, genuinely want. A baby. Something you can take with you into the future, something you can build your life around.
There’s got to be another way.
It’s a physical weight in your front pocket. You can feel it now, burning a hole in your hip. When you pull it out, the name John Price is printed on the card in a crisp, typewriter font, his phone number and occupation printed in the same sized font just beneath it.
You stare at the card long enough for your eyes to go dry. Blink. Breathe out, reluctance giving way to acceptance, as tentative as it might be. It certainly wouldn’t be the strangest thing to ever happen. A fun night with a good-looking man, with the added benefit of getting a baby out of it, no strings attached. Not the most irresponsible decision anyone has ever made. Some people join the army, after all.
A shiver runs up your spine when you remember the way he worded it though. Sweat on your upper lip that you have to lick off, the salt sinking into the ridges of your tongue. You don’t think he meant turkey basters and plastic cups by getting it done ‘the natural way’. You saw the way he looked at you.
You could do it for a baby. Let him—and here, you have to squeeze your eyes shut and cover them with your fists—let him do what he has to do to get you pregnant. Cut out the middle man and just let him fit the heavy weight of his body over yours and pry your legs apart to let him sink between your—
just watched 'send help' with rachel mcadams (didn't like it) but it's lowkey sooo ghost x reader sorry but like.
maybe you're a personal assistant for someone important, and the plane you're on for some work trip crashes. you and a personal guard who everyone called 'ghost' are the only one who wash up on the shore of an abandoned island. you wake up before him and do your best approximation of cpr, try to cover his body from the bugs and smack away the crabs because what the fuck else are you supposed to do. he wakes up eventually, thank god, and seems... far more comfortable than you
so you follow him around some. sue you, he knows how to make shelter, he collects rain water easily, and when you find a fruit tree, he lifts you up on his shoulders (without asking first, but still) to reach it. he's quiet, and big enough to be scary without even trying, but he's the only thing helping keep you alive.
a few days in he finds boar tracks. when he says he's going hunting you try to convince him otherwise - you don't have a weapon, how are you even going to kill that thing? it's not a prey animal, it's going to come after you! listen, not to sound selfish, but i'm kinda screwed if you go off and get yourself killed! but he doesn't listen, and you get so frustrated you storm off, stressed and overwhelmed and already convinced he's gone
you're relaxing at the fire later, arms wrapped around your knees while you watch the embers float up into the dark sky. and there's a sound behind you that nearly gives you a heart-attack, a sight that all but does the job. it's ghost, soaked in blood, dragging a corpse nearly his size by the leg behind him.
oh my god, you'd say, because he actually managed to do it. you fawn over him, making sure he's not hurt, then shift to cheering and celebrating. and he's hot, radiating with it, with the energy of a predator who completed a satisfying hunt. do you know how to cook this thing? you'd ask, and he does.
it's only when you reach for a piece of the cooked haunch that he stops you, holding you easily by the wrist. not yet, he says. haven't done much to deserve it, have you?
what? you say
had to work for it, didn't i? he says. had to earn my keep. don't see why you shouldn't have to do the same.
it's only when his hand drops to his belt that you fully realize what he's telling you. he tugs you easily to your knees, the fire at your back as he pulls your face close
PT2 to my neglected beta!reader x toxic 141 (excluding simon), gn!reader
WC: 7.7k part 1 here
Simon thought Johnny was bad enough getting into his head and convincing him to indulge in an actual friendship for once. It didn't help either that getting along with Kyle was as easy as making a remark and laughing together over it. The team created a perfect dynamic, almost unstoppable.
Then came you.
You were always hanging around them, fitting in easily, practically always smiling at his jokes even on missions. Maybe a snide remark back here or there, but it was never more— always balanced. He supposed it was in your nature, as a beta and all, to be perfectly in between like that. Not that Simon was the one to pay much mind to societal matters like that anyway— the battlefield was very different to social gatherings, and the only language he knew was that of violence. It wasn't like he couldn't get by either; it felt like everyone grew up with that small talk ingrained in them from the start. The weather, the latest mission, annoying recruits, the bloody royal family if he really had to.
So, when he started to notice the change around you, he decided to stay out of it. It was plain obvious you felt disappointed when Johnny got an omega, Simon felt a little pang even if he didn't want to. But he didn't know what that feeling meant, and he sure as hell wasn't going to call you out on it. So, he didn't.
Then it was Kyle, and your scent only grew even more sour. Still, you didn't show it on the outside, so he chose not to comment on it again. He probably never would’ve really— after all, who wants to be ‘comforted’ by someone who can't even fix himself?
When the Sergeants hung out, you were no longer in their little circle, always off somewhere else. He asked Johnny once, why you hadn't gone to watch a movie with them, only for him to just blink at Simon. “Oh— them? Guess we kinda just forgot to invite them. We’re not that close, an’ we got an omega ‘n all now.”
Is that what happens? When an alpha gets an omega? They forget everything they ever knew and just.. lock in on that? Still, Johnnys relationship with him never changed, not like he did with you. Something was wrong about all of this but what was he supposed to do, force the Scot to hang out with you again? This wasnt bloody nursery, besides, matters like this meant nothing with the weight of the nation placed on the team. Well, rather on the four alphas, since he soon learnt you were being taken off their shared missions too. For the first time, he faltered during the briefing with Price.
“You’re not bringing them for this one?” He heard about you being taken off of Johnny’s but this was a whole team mission with your file not in it.
“We have to spread resources efficiently. Technically we dont need them anymore, with two mated alphas. They’ll be placed with the extraction team.”
Ghost wasn't stupid, he knew that part of the reason for you being on the team was because of the regulation effects of having a beta on an all alpha team– it’s the same bias that got him into the SAS anyway. Omega’s never got this high in ranks either. But that’s exactly it, it’s meant to be a part of the reason not enough to throw you off an op.
“When we need to go solo, they’ll be on that op. It’s not that bad, Ghost.” Price reassures him, and all he can do is sigh and nod along. He already anticipated how your scent would tighten upon the news, a hint of sadness seeping in. This time he couldn't help himself– this was something he knew. So, he immediately secured your place the second he received orders of his mission, stationed beside him like you belonged. He’d always been able to recognise the change in scent, from the smallest degree, something that was forced into him at a young age. This time, it was clear you were much happier like this, beside one of the 141, on a mission, doing something.
That he could definitely relate to. He’s no stranger to feeling out of control when he can't contribute to an objective.
Having you beside him had a much better effect than he perceived anyway. Not only were you skilled and efficient, but he felt he just worked better beside you. And so he decided to set up a trip to the pub— give you a chance to hang out with Kyle and Johnny too. He was convinced that they had just gotten to in their heads with their new omegas– a honeymoon phase he supposes.
He kicked himself for not saying more at that fiasco, not forcing Johnny to regret those cruel comments in the moment. But you had already retreated back to your barracks at the end of the night, and he was left staring at your closed door with a chest aching with regret he hasnt felt since he was far smaller. The next day he hounded Johnny until he went to apologise to you, listening from the other side of the door in hopes that’d be enough. Still, he had figured you might’ve still been annoyed after yesterday, wouldn't even blame you really, but instead the acceptance was one of a prey who stopped fighting. It didn't satisfy the wound in his heart even for a second.
“Why have you denied my team for the next mission?” He stands before Price’s desk, an anger boiling in his chest that he hasn't felt for years. He swore to himself he wouldnt let his happen again.
“You know I'm mated, Simon–”
“But i’m not.” His palms press on the desk as he stares at his Captain, the man who gave him a reason to keep going ever since this force had started. But he cant defend this, not when he’s taking away your purpose. “Price..”
“If i dont do it now, they’ll force my hand later. It’s a better opportunity for them to work with other teams too–”
“Bullshit.” He knows there’s no more arguing when Price gives him that look. It’s not like you’d be happy in your new omega team– he wouldn't be surprised if you grew envious of them from how their existence had thrown you out of the entire team. He knows something violent would burst if it happened to him.
————-
There’s a heavy haze on your mind when you try to blink your eyes open, like it’s muddling all your thoughts into one. You’re extremely hungry.
A small groan escapes you and when you finally open your eyes, it’s like they’re forced to droop. You can feel dried stains on your cheeks which explains why your eyes feel tired themselves. What happened?
There’s a small rumble behind you, startling you but you hardly have control of your body right now so there’s not much you can do but blink in confusion. The last thing you remember is training for the mission with the team, and by the pain rippling across your body, something must’ve happened during it. Still, your chest doesnt pump with fear, in fact you feel calm, like your body is well aware that you’re safe wherever you are.
Again, you try to move, inhaling a sharp breath as you force yourself onto your back. The pain is instant and you have to breathe out slowly as if you dont feel like there’s tears across your arms. When you finally sober up, you stop scrunching your eyes so tight and finally notice the weight next to you. Or rather.. around you.
“W-what the—?”
———
He had woken up to the feeling of you shuffling beneath his arm, but the muffled pained sound is what made his eyes snap open. It takes him a few moments to realise the predicament he had found— or rather put himself— in last night. One arm draped across your stomach protectively with his nose pressed as close to you as he could manage.
“You’re up early.” He glances at the clock behind you, sat on the dresser, the early time of eight am flashing beside ‘Saturday’. Even though he knows he should be questioning why he’s even doing this, his body feels strangely at ease. It’s even better than the day after a successful op.
“Lieutenant.. why are we in bed?” You croak out, trying to sit up from the embarrassment of it all but his arm tightens to keep you from going too far. It startles you, against his intentions, leaving you even more confused than before. “Wasnt i on a mission..? And— and there was a hostage.. is she alright? Did anyone else get seriously hurt—”
“Mission went sideways ‘cause of a bomb strapped to a hostage, everyone’s out alright. You got the brunt of the damage saving them, the rest of them are already going home safe.”
His alpha isnt as fiery as he remembers it the night prior, the ache in his chest now a warm thrum with you so close. Still, you look uncomfortable, and that hurts his alpha more than being away from you. So he pulls away, letting you sit yourself upright against the headboard.
You take a long breath of relief at his words of reassurance, and he can only assume it’s your own instinctive need to keep others safe. “And how I ended up here..?”
“You had surgery to remove shrapnel and a stray bullet that skimmed you. When you woke, the anaesthesia had you terrified, flailing about like a fish outta water.” He murmurs, gesturing towards the bandages peeking out from the hospital gown you still wore. It had ridden up in the night and now showed the gauze and bandages wrapped around your middle. There were some on your calves as well and the way you wince he supposes you realised about the one on your back.
“They called me in to help stabilise you— figured you’d recognise me. You did, calmed down a bit and then..” He trails off for a moment and you look up at him curiously, watching as he leans back against the headboard. He pauses, unsure whether to tell you about what you had confessed to him in your drugged state. “Jus’ started crying… not sure what about.” He swallows and then glances back down to you. “And well, y’know how we’d get, when another got injured”
They’ve always had their fair share of injuries, usually due to their own brashness as alphas. He remembers when Gaz got shot like it was yesterday, the three of them wouldn't leave his side. It took you all the strength you could muster to force John to let you treat him, even if Ghost had been glued to his side anxiously throughout the entire thing too.
“I took you away from there, brought you here. Stayed till you fell asleep, and then I must’ve passed out myself.”
It’s obvious you’re extremely confused right now, and to be honest, even he is. He’s never felt a pack instinct so strong in his life, not even towards the rest of the 141– it’s still shocking him, and yet, he still cant feel anything but calm.
“Sorry.. for the trouble i caused.” You mumble out but he shakes his head immediately.
“You didn't cause any. Just glad you’re okay.” He gets off the bed, mattress creaking from the relieved weight and springing immediately after he stands. “I’ll go grab breakfast. You shouldn't move too much.”
—————
It took everything in him to force himself to leave you to head towards the mess hall. Doing so also cleared his mind from the tranquility forced upon it, letting him finally go over the events of last night to just five minutes ago.
He had forgone all professionalism, and snatched you from the infirmary like it was what he was meant to do.
When he got back, you practically shovelled the food in your mouth whilst he restrained himself from telling you to eat slower. Still, he offered to help you clean up, since seeing all those wraps didn't make his chest any lighter regardless of instinct. Though,that was enough for you to adamantly shake your head and accidentally shut the door straight in his face.
“Thanks for making sure I was okay.” You say gratefully, dressed in some spare clothes and picking up your phone in your bag to see for any messages about reports or briefings. “ I should head back to my room though.”
He freezes, you weren't supposed to just leave straight away. Well, technically you didn't have a reason to stay, but a burn in his chest makes it physically impossible to watch you step away now.
“Stop.”
You listen to his command, turning to meet his eyes as you wonder what else he could really want. The chair creaks as he stands, making his way over to you until he’s just standing there, scrutinising you.
“You smell.. off.”
“Well.. I'm not using my usual shampoo obviously.” You give him a meek smile, and even though it’s not enough to settle the craving he just nods— accepting it.
“Should probably check by the infirmary just in case.” He mumbles, fighting every urge to scent you before he lets you go.
“I will.”
———
Three days.
That’s all that’s passed since that night, and still his mind is a turmoil he can't unravel. As much as his brain insisted you needed some space, he found himself insistent on making sure you’re okay.
That’s exactly why the second he saw you alone in the mess hall today, he was beside you in seconds.
“Are you feeling any better?” Your shoulders jump in a way that makes him wince, but you relax just as quickly when you realise and smile at him.
“What, better than yesterday when you asked me in the hallway?” He likes seeing you tease him like this, as if the pain wasn't eating you from the inside. You hadn't got the opportunity to talk more than in passing, so you answer more when he looks at you attentively. “The nurses gave me ointment for the burns, and I'll be back on regular training soon. Just taking it easier with lighter gym sets, and running instead to keep my body moving.”
Right, he remembers the significantly less damage on your lower half; running must be a bit easier than any other activity for you.
“Good to know, I’ll keep an eye on you too.”
You look embarrassed by his words, quickly turning your head away as you hurriedly step forward in the queue. “I’m not going to exert myself, you don't need to do that.”
All he can do is shrug, trying to push down the feeling that bubbles with your reaction. Instead he steps in front of you to dish out your portions of food for you. Not too much, or too little, just the way you’ve always liked it. He even skips the sides you don't like.
“I do, actually. As a lieutenant, you’re under my care. And as my beta, I need to make sure you’re well.”
It slips out so easily before he can stop it and he pauses, waiting for you to narrow your eyes in disgust. Who is he to claim you like that? Although.. you don't even seem to catch it, but he does notice the small quirk of your brow when you finally process a few moments later. “Wait–”
“Im on grocery run on tomorrow— havin’ a team movie night on Saturday. You should come too, get some steps in instead of being in this stuffy base for so long” Before you can even answer he places your utensils on your plate and then locks onto the exit. “Meet me by our usual car, alright? Eight amsharp.” And then he’s already weaving through the crowds, leaving you standing on your own.
————————-
For the first time in his life, Simon Riley was excited to see you. He hadn't really had time to question it, between the brand new load of paperwork dumped on him today alone and a million other problems in his mind. And yet, every time he glanced at the time ticking towards tomorrow, his instincts roared.
Would you allow him any closer than before? Although, sleeping beside him was already past many boundaries he had only considered he’d need to ease through now. He’s sure you’d flash him that exact smile when he saw you waiting by the car, positive you’d be embarrassed when he no doubt did something for your sake.
Or you’d back up in fear, your eyes flashing with the same hurt you directed towards Soap that day. You’d realise he’s no different than the rest, infact probably just as cruel as they are.
“Bit late to still be working, Lieutenant, even for you.”
“John.” He murmurs, voice on the quieter end as he watches from his seat on the Captain’s couch. There was a small wad of paperwork clutched in his hands like he needed reason to be here, and not solely for the true purpose.
“Simon.” Price returns, walking over to his desk to light a cigar before returning to sit infront of him. “Got a feeling I know why you’re here.”
It’s silent for a few moments and John is convinced he’ll have to lure the question out himself. But it never really is that simple with Simon Riley. Straightforward as ever, he can't help but jump right to the point “How did you.. know? Your omega.”
Price raises a brow this time, having not entirely expected that, but nods regardless as he breathes out smoke. “Feel it in your chest first. Like your instincts are controlling you really… pulling you towards them. It’s not like you can even try to stop it either.”
“And then what..?”
“The mating bite. The feeling will come soon after, fast even— you’ll get violent. But it’s what’s expected, nearly every alpha goes through it. Just advise your omega to not fight back and there won't be much to clean up.”
He pauses when the air in the room suddenly becomes tense, taking another inhale of the cigar.
“The sooner you do it, the easier it’ll be. You don't know when you’ll see them again with our schedules. I don't want to see you actin’ feral on a mission desperate for their scent.”
Soon enough, it was the next day, and he had driven you to the nearest Tesco Extra. Luckily you had come just in time for a sale.. although that meant there were a lot more people than usual. Despite offering to hold it, the basket dangles in his right hand while you glue yourself to his left side. The explosion had left your senses much more sensitive, so sticking to him was the best option.
“Anything else you want?”
“Maybe another biscuit?” You tease since he’s been filling up the basket with them so far, making you snort a little. When you did hang around the team, him and you were the only ones who’d eat them but you didn't know he liked it this much.
He rolls his eyes at your teasing, and leads you to the next aisle. “Grab what you want and meet me over there.” It’s emptier here, so you nod and watch him go towards the tinned food, now facing the shelves of crisps he left you with.
Well you know Soap and Gaz’s favourites already, and Simon loves kettle chips. You’re not sure if the Captain would also be there, so you grab a mixed bag for him. Would it be weird after not seeing them for so long? Strangely enough, you really can't bring yourself to resent them for what happened.
Was it really their fault? No one ever seemed to have the same problems as you. There was only one time you confessed it to a fellow beta on base, although he had quickly become defensive, shaking his head at you. ‘We’re colleagues at the end of the day. As long as it doesn't affect work, it’s totally fine.’
“Didn't get the crisps you like.” You jump as he appears, grabbing your favourite and tossing it in the basket. “Come on, we’ll get some drinks and go.”
You trail behind him as he carries on, noticing an obvious hunch in his shoulders. He’s tense, which for some reason you find entirely out of place despite you not even knowing him that well. It’s just that, ever since that morning in bed with him, he felt soft, and warm, like everything you’d find comfort in. Surely those same clenched muscles aren't the ones that laid beside you?
You’re about to spiral further into analysing his behaviour when you realise you’re at the checkout with him. “O-oh, do you mind if I run to the beta section quickly? I just need to grab—“
“Already got you one.” He picks up the scent refresher from the basket, scanning it through, as well as other medication he’s also seen you use before. You can only blink at him in surprise—the prices had hiked even higher recently, and you had to debate over buying one or being able to afford morning coffees anymore
It brought a sense of relief to your heart though, that comforting feeling settling in your gut once more. He’s alright, probably just a tough mission coming up.
———————
The past few days it’s like a switch had flipped inside him, too similar to how the others reacted after their new omega. You’re at a loss really, it’s not like he’s being rude, but he’s being distant. Like he’s cautious of you. To be honest, you were half expecting him to tell you not to come to the movie night anymore.
Though maybe you were judging him too quickly— it’s not all alphas, right? It was almost sickening every time the small bit of hope bubbled up though, like it was stupid to think he’d actually be the one to stay longer than the rest. You just hope the reason for this wasn't because of something they told him about you.
You were.. surprised to say the least when you entered the rec room alongside Ghost. The both of you had retrieved the bags from his car after he surprisingly called to make sure you were still coming.
Soap and Gaz weren't lazily sprawled across the couch like they usually would—if anything they seemed antsy. They were both sitting there, shoulders tense, Gaz’s leg even bouncing slightly. You did hear they all came back from a mission recently but they were never this agitated, all pent up like this, back when you were with them.
“Oh, hi.” Gaz looks upon hearing two sets of footsteps and smiles, though it doesn't quite reach his eyes. You just nod, awkwardly fiddling with the plastic bags you grabbed from Ghost’s car. “What’re you here for?”
“Ghost and I went to grab the snacks the other day”
“Y’can call me Simon, y’know.” He takes the plastic bags from your hands and you nod sheepishly, not even realising you had been using his codename.
“Oops, sorry.” He shakes his head at your apology and you quickly help him unpack all the snacks onto the coffee table for tonight.
“Completely blew a mission and now ye come ‘ere for a movie night?” Soap must’ve gotten up at some point, now brushing past you. His arms are like rocks when they hit into yours, and his tone is heavy— almost accusing.
It catches you off guard, and you freeze, watching as he walks around the kitchen, grabbing a glass of water to swallow in one gulp. “Well.. we did always have the best ones, no?” Surely he didn't mean to be that harsh, clearly something had been holding their bodies in a tight limbo. It must be a poor joke, even if it dug deep.
He doesn't take your words in the tone you intended though, brows narrowing down at you in contempt. “Don’t see why we ‘ave to entertain the fuck ups. My omega was in tha’ mission, she could’ve died ‘cause of you.”
“Johnny—“ Simon cuts in, voice low as he steps in front of you, his scent wrapping around you, weak enough to not fill your head too much. He’s being careful for you.
Though before Simon can say anything more, you let out a soft huff, crossing your arms over your chest. “That’s the risk of every mission, Soap. I thought as a demolition expert you would know that. Or are you forgetting the time you almost killed me?”
“That was a calculated risk. And yer still standing, aren’t ya?” He scoffs, rolling his eyes at your supposed argument. “You were being reckless and stupid out there.”
“That’s not what you said when I was on the team.” You snap back, anger starting to simmer inside of you too now. After all, they had constantly sung your praises when you were here. It’s their own fault for throwing you into an omega mission when you weren’t prepared enough.
“You left the team.”
“Because I was forced off!”
That pisses him off, because your words feel like an attack against him, and he walks right up to you, inches away. “We never needed you anyway— just a beta to balance us alpha out. Clearly you’re useless otherwise.” Though suddenly his nose scrunches, stepping back a moment before his eyes narrow into a glare. “Ye fucking bastard. Coming in here, stinkin’ omegas, stinking of her?!”
Your jaw clenches as you watch his body language, something you picked upon living around alphas. They get explosive, very strong quickly. First his fists start to clench, the veins in his forearms starting to show. Then his scent starts getting thicker with anger, pumping into the air like a burning building. It’s bad enough that it makes your own anger start to fizzle, hitting your head in waves of pain and you almost stumble backwards. Everything feels like it’s happening in slow motion, his hand rising upwards, the touch of skin against your cheek and the implosion of pain that spreads across your head.
Simon grabs you before you end up dropping altogether and pulls you away from him immediately, shielding you with his body. “I dont know what the fuck has gotten into you Johnny but you need to sort it out— now.” His scent is thicker than you’ve ever smelt it, in fact this is the most you’ve ever been able to make of it. It smells like gasoline, sharp and lingering, and ready to destroy something completely. So toxic, it forces you to gasp for a breath.
“Both of you, stand down, now.”
Price’s voice echoes across the room and you instantly shudder, leaning against the counter weakly as you grasp your face. The bruise will darken tomorrow but you can already feel your cheek starting to swell. What really has you is the mix of scents all around, filling your head so strongly.
“Captain—“
“No.” Price doesn't hesitate to march over, standing in between them as Ghost thrums with anger. You look over to the doorway, hearing the small creak as it closes Gaz standing there with his arms crossed. “You are soldiers, not fucking children.” He argues, pointing an accusing finger towards the Scot before turning to give Ghost an equally sharp glare.
Then his eyes find you. All you can do is stare back, wondering how he’ll react. Would he blame you for all this? Would you be the scapegoat to keep his perfect little pack intact?
Would you let him humiliate you once more?
You’re a soldier, a beta one, but a fighter nevertheless. Missions you’ve fought through, almost died on, saved lives during. For this? To end up like this? You push yourself to stand despite the heavy scents weighing you down, regardless of the stare his alpha is directing to your beta. Everything tells you to submit, the haze in your head and the throb across your cheek.
“You should go, I'll talk to you about this later.” Price commands, nodding his head towards the door. Surprisingly, his words weren't as harsh, in fact more exasperated than anything.
“Enjoy your movie night.” You murmur, grabbing your jacket where it was on the chair and throwing it over your arm.
“Wait—“ Simon starts, backing away from his offensive on Soap instantly to follow you. “Don’t” You hear Price stop him, his hand wrapped around his forearm to stop him chasing after you.
————————-
If that wasn't enough of a reason for you to give up on all of them, you don't know what is anymore. They’ve treated you so horribly, it was hardly arguable anymore that you shouldn’t have even tried with them again. This was all so stupid—you’re so stupid for even thinking this time it could end differently. You could never coexist.
As for Simon, all you feel is a deep regret in your stomach. It was obvious really, of course he must’ve just been smelling omega on you this entire time. It was just a biological confusion, not a genuine interest in you. He didn't care about who you were, his alpha smelt an omega, and that’s all that really matters. It makes you feel sick to your stomach, knowing that you had in some way probably tricked him. His alpha probably had him strung up all week, no wonder he looked so uncomfortable in that shop and every day past.
The chat with Price never happened. They had been briefed almost immediately after you left for an op, and you heard the chatters of their departure the next day. So with them all gone,it was time to get back to work. You had briefings to attend, reports to fill and to forget about everything that happened. Or what didn't happen between you two.
Except you can't.
Everytime you get a second alone with your thoughts, they drift back to him, to that morning and waking up beside him. The last time you’ve woken to someone’s scent around you was when you were very little, your family huddling together in the nest. That stopped as soon as you presented.
Now you’re stuck with this emptiness in your chest. At first you thought his scent had been too strong, and you even tried two pumps of the scent refresher to try and clear your senses. Not even that worked, if anything making it worse now that you longed for his scent even more.
There’s a small balcony you used to see him smoke at, when you first joined the team. He came up here once or twice, and then over the two years you spent with them, never again. In fact, you overheard the sergeants say he quit it altogether. You pause by it today, staring out at the worn railing, the remnants of ash sitting upon it, the mark of his shoe making an outline on the unused floor.
For some reason it makes your eyes water, mourning a connection you could’ve had but seems impossible now.
—-
It’s late at night a few days later. You had taken the opportunity while they were gone to take all of your things out of the rec room. Sure, you should’ve done it before, but a small part of you was still clinging on to possibility. Your blankets that you and the sergeants would swaddle yourselves in on colder nights, the tea strainer you bought to show Price how to use leaves instead of the bought bags, even the few mugs in the cupboard you bought to match them. You left behind the one Soap bought for your birthday— perhaps it belonged there more than it ever did to you. Can't forget the CD player you let Gaz borrow a million times either.
They don't suit your room, the colour clashes with the boring greys in here, and they look like a pile of junk from where you’re beneath the duvets, staring at them. It’s almost midnight, and you know you should be sleeping, but it's a Friday night so to hell with that. You could afford late night wallowing; it’s not like you had anywhere to be tomorrow.
They were supposed to come back today. You heard it from Laswell when discussing something else; she must not know what happened between you. Either they chose not to tell her..or forgot, since you were never that important anyways. The clock blinks one am, maybe you really should sleep.
———
The knock on the door breaks your sleep, and you can only assume it wasn't the first as it continues, each one seeming to become.. slower. You crawl out of bed, mind trying to run a million possibilities through your awakening brain. An emergency mission? Bad news? A sudden attack? An intruder?
“Please..” You hear the groan on the other side of the door, convincing you enough to open it instantly and reveal the other side.
Ghost— or rather Simon, with his mask now fallen at your feet— leans against your door frame, blood dripping onto the floor from a wound near his middle and his eyes glazed over. “Beta..” He breathes through a pained wince, chest sinking quickly.
“Simon?! You should be in the infirmary, not here- ” You scoff, gaze flicking between the blood staining the floor, his hand clenched over the wound and the grime clinging onto his hair and neck.
“No— no- can’t think..” He steps forward, every movement heavy with pain and hurt and yet his eyes stay locked on you. His words are desperate as his hand clenches the handle, sucking in a strained breath.
“A-alright, fine. I’ve got some stuff somewhere—“ Opening the door fully now, you reach for his hand, letting him lean the brunt of his weight as you haul him towards your bathroom. It’s only when you manage to get him to sit on the toilet seat do you free yourself from him, rummaging through your cupboards desperately. “Here- okay, lift your shirt we need to fix that quickly.”
Luckily the wound had just been leaking into the bandages so all you had to do was repack and replace, although you had to deal with his incoherent groans the entire time. Tucking the clean edge into the wrap, he’s finally alright again and you sigh in relief, stepping back.
“Stop—“ He grasps your wrist as you try to put the box back, forcing you to stay in place as you raise a brow at him.
“I need to put it back.“ You sigh, unable to fathom what was up with him right now.
“Stay.”
“Simon, I’m just going to the cabinet..” You sigh as he shakes his head adamantly, pulling you closer even as you try and resist. “Let me go.”
“No.”
“Simon.” You say firmly, a fresh wave of your scent rolling through the air. Never have you used it on any of them before, in fact it only ever worked on inconsolable civilians you’ve saved. Beta scent’s only had the purpose of calming down people anyway, not like an Alpha’s commanding force or an Omega’s lure. “Let me go.”
So when he immediately goes lax, fingers grazing your palm as he gently lets go, you step back in surprise. What?
You keep one eye on him as you place the things away, but he just stays, unmoving. As you close the cabinet, you take a step towards him again, gently pulling down his shirt only to feel the soaked blood on it, as well as the gunpowder and grime. Definitely not a good mission then.
“Why.. don't you wash up, alright? I’ll get you some clothes.”
For a moment you’re convinced you’ll have to drag him yourself, but he takes a small inhale and nods quietly, standing the best he can before he kicks off his shoes and socks. Listening like a loyal dog.
—
You make your way to his room with your own mind full of questions from his strange behaviour. Why did your scent have that effect on him? Why did he come to you? Why did he always call you his beta?
The door unlocks easily with the card you nicked from his gear, and his room is in disarray. It wasn’t uncommon for a pack to have scented items from each other, or very close friends; it usually helped with sleeping or just getting comfortable. You remember Gaz and Soap often had items in each other's rooms for that exact reason, though they never traded with you, even if you never asked yourself.
You immediately noticed Price’s sweater on the floor, kicked to the door. Beside the dresser was Gaz’s spare shirt, crumpled and half shoved beneath the base. Soap’s jacket was behind the bathroom door, hidden away from sight like something that couldn't bear to be seen. In the midst of it was a pair of gloves you lent him during a mission when he was damaged badly. Like a pillar in chaos, it was neatly placed beside a brand new scent refresher and a pack of your favourite snacks. Surely, just a piece of repayment, right?
——————
The shower is quiet when you re-enter your room, and you hesitantly step towards the bathroom door, turning the handle. “Brought some clothes.” You murmur, watching the door handle turn.
“Thank you.” He says, the same gruff tone but quieter, and takes the clothes you pass through the gap.
Surprisingly, he doesn't close it after, letting you hear his quiet shuffling as he changes. It feels weird standing on the otherside, knowing you can just walk in and see him bare like this— an alpha left vulnerable. Though, can an alpha truly be vulnerable before a beta? If anything, you’d always be vulnerable alone with him, and he’d always be the strongest in the room.
“I saw my gloves on your table.” You mumble out, stepping back to take a seat on the edge of your bed. His silence doesn't help your inability to keep in the thoughts running wild in your head.
His breath hitches behind the door, something you’ve learnt to notice since you can't read his facial expressions. “I meant to return it to you. But.. I hadn't washed them yet.”
Just as you thought.
The door opens, and he steps forward, the grime washed off and bandages covered by the thin cotton shirt. He looks exhausted like this, like everything weighing down on him has finally caused him to crumble. Just like the others, his shoulders stay taut.
“You left their things on the floor.”
Your beta is desperate to soothe, to understand the problems within his pack, and help him through them. No sane alpha would push away his pack’s items, it has your beta ringing alarm bells across your mind.
“Didn’t need them.” He murmurs, one hand tugging at the end of his shirt as it clings to his damp body. You’ve never seen him fiddle with things like this, running his tongue over his lips.
“You didn't need your pack’s items?” You huff out crossing your arms over your chest. “At least make the lie believable.” Maybe this was his own strange way of pushing you away like they had, because you just wouldn’t understand, would you?
“It’s not a lie.” He grunts, eyes flickering over you and then towards the door— like he’s about to bolt. Not now, not after everything.
You stand, blocking his path as you look at him. “Why did you come here, Simon? It’s not because you feel guilty about the other day, and you shouldn't anyway— Soap’s right. I’m not needed.”
“You are.”
“I’m not—“ You shake your head adamantly, turning towards the door. There’s no way you were going to sit around and be humiliated again, intentionally or not.
“We need you.” He says firmly, hand grasping your wrist as his strong ash suddenly washes over you and thickens in the air. It’s all you can smell, echoed by the weight of his words. Though, you feel his grip immediately falter afterwards, like instant regret. The scent calms quickly, back to the dull linger it usually is as his fingers fall to gently holding your palm. “I.. need you.”
For a moment you’re stunned, scent sprawling anywhere for something solid to grip onto as you try and weave through the possible meanings of his words. Him, Ghost, the soldier feared across foreign countries’ soil and by his mask alone, needs you? A beta?
“I dont…” understand. The word falls silent on your tongue, glancing down at his hand on yours in the low light. “I thought.. the omega’s I work with– their scent rub off on me. That’s the reason for all of this, isn't it?”
“No, no.” His grasp tightens when you try to pull back, feet following you as you step back, until you take a seat against the edge of the bed. “Your scent, it’s been driving me insane. It’s like I can't function without it.”
“But that’s not possible, Simon. I’m not an omega— I can't lure you like that- even the sweetest scent is nothing more than cheap perfume.” You argue, because it’s the truth and there isn’t anything more to it. It’s facts, written and studied extensively in biological research that forms the foundations of society. There could be no other explanation because it just didn't exist, it never will.
His grip tightens again and this time his lip curls back, almost like he’s snarling.. except he seems to be more frustrated with his own actions than at you. “Lust isn't going to save us soldiers.”
You see it now as you look at him properly since patching him up. His eyes are half lidded but you can see how his pupils have expanded in the short time you’ve had him here. Sorting out the blood spilling out of him might’ve helped, but he was crashing fast now that the pain-induced adrenaline was wearing off.
Now he just looked exhausted out of his mind, frantically holding onto his self control as his eyes locked onto the scent glands on your wrist. You could almost read his thoughts now, how he was slipping off the edge, fingers beginning to tremble. Wounded, exhausted and desperate for a moment of solace.
“Simon..” You whisper again, it’s been more than a few times tonight, but this time it’s different.
He drops to his knees before you, hitting the soft rug beside your bed as his hand holds onto yours. His mask had been off the entire time and yet only in this moment do you truly acknowledge the vulnerability before you. “Please, scent me.” He murmurs, low and soft though not gentle with the rasp of greed that bubbles from his throat. Like he told you, he needs this. He needed you. “Let me be.. your alpha.”
The silence rings loud between you, even from the slow drops from the bath’s faucet and the whir of the bathroom fan fading into nothing. “Okay..I will.” You nod, breaking the dam holding him together and he doesn't even let out a breath until he presses his nose against your wrist. The inhale he takes is greedy, like he wants every last scent coating the air, and then the exhale comes, his body dropping like a bomb.
“Thank you.” He breathes and you watch as he lifts your hand as he rises himself, and you realise now he doesn't have his gloves on from the feeling of his bare skin warm against you.
It’s like he doesn't even hesitate, gently rubbing his wrist against the scent glands on yours. You knew what was coming, read about it a million times between alphas and omegas— hell even heard a million more from them in your youth years.
Scenting, when the alpha’s scent envelopes your body, like a shot straight to your brain.
Except, this isn't like anything they described.
You can feel your scents starting to mix, intertwining together before separating once more. They’re tied in the middle like a promise and yet sprouting at completely different ends and filling the room. His scent changes, shifting from the harsh burnt tinges of ash and smoke like they’ve been washed up by yours. It’s petrichor, the damp aroma whenever rain ingrains itself into the soil and washes over rocks. The smell is fresh, earthy and it feels like the relief of rain when it finally comes crashing down, washing over the ground and letting the dying flora renew.
But yours? Yours blossoms in magnitude, like a bubble that has grown and grown until it suddenly bursts. You’ve never smelt it so strong before, used to the quietness of it all, but it’s finally loud. Sweet honeycomb and chocolate, an appetising combination so rarely put together it makes his entire body melt. It’s comforting like a warm drink on a cold day and refreshing like a breeze on a summer night.
You barely get a chance to shuffle backwards before he’s crashing into you, nose forcing it’s way towards your neck as his limbs one by one fall slack, muscles turned to the mere meat they’re made from. A low purr rumbles through him, up his arms where they wrapped around your middle and his chest which is pressed against yours. His eyes have fallen shut, content to be pressed against your nose gland as he lets everything go.
“My beta..” He murmurs, squeezing you tighter to the point you’re forced to exhale yourself and appreciate the warmth and comfort in the room. This was the first time you’ve truly been able to appreciate a friend’s scent without feeling your head start to spin, and it felt amazing. Like everything in the world was set in place, nothing could even shift the balance in this room.
You squeeze him back, a small huff of laughter bubbling in your throat when he groans in contentment. His scent starts to settle once more, now the faint smell of smoke returning though with the gentleness of a campfire, easing your senses.
“Alpha..” You breathe out, letting your own body relax under his, eyes slipping shut in his grasp. Your beta was satiated, curling up for the first time in weeks, and you were more than happy to lay your heart beneath him.
----------------------------------
part one Buy me a coffee!
one more part and then this will be done!! thank you for reading alonga nd im so shocked at how many people loved the first one sm! please leave ur thoughts in the comments <3333 ALSO THANK YOU FOR 5000 FOLLOWERS!!!!!!
general cod: @heyitsniki18 @insanityall @twoandahalfdimes @ririerm @alexinarcadia @sgt-artemis-owl-riley @fries-pls @tikitsune
taglist (thank you SO much to @lexloon for putting this tgt for me):
You get injected with an unknown toxin and now your loyal teammates are determined to help ease your suffering.
— pairing: Task Force 141 × fem!141!Reader
— cw: 18+ | sex pollen; dubcon/fuck or die; dd:dne; medical & military inaccuracies; pining; hurt/comfort; angst; fluff; cum and orgasms as the antidote; wc: 12k+
author's note: This has been in my drafts for two years 💀 And she would've said yes to all of them.
"We need some answers, Kate. Now." Captain Price's voice booms inside the spacious briefing room.
He's practically pacing in front of the desk like some anxious K-9, arms folded over his plate carrier as he keeps his sharp eyes trained on Laswell and the two scientists sitting behind their laptops, staring at their respective screens.
Meanwhile, the rest of his team is still as geared up as their Captain—all waiting for orders or further instructions, scattered around the room and listening with bated breath while Price grows more agitated with each shaky exhale he can hear coming from you.
You're currently sitting on one of the tables, boot-clad feet dangling off the edge as you stare at the ceiling, right into the fluorescent lights above, ignoring the way your eyes begin to sting from their brightness.
You've been putting on a brave face since getting stabbed with the needle a few hours ago and you've kept the façade up since hopping off the helo back on base, but it's getting harder to mask the panic rising inside you as your body starts to feel funny.
You swipe the back of your gloved hand over your sweaty forehead, catching the cold perspiration on your feverish skin with the rough fabric, and out of your peripherals, you notice the way your teammates' heads snap in your direction—different-coloured pairs of eyes assessing you with worry, concern, and a hint of curiosity.
Soap and Gaz are standing to your left and right respectively, sneaking glances at you whenever you shift on your spot, while the Lieutenant is still as a marble statue a little offside, arms crossed over his bulky tac vest.
Laswell begins to explain calmly, clutching a thick folder to her chest.
"We're still waiting on anything concrete, John, but the research papers your team managed to extract have offered a great insight on that—whatever that bioweapon is."
Bioweapon.
Your eyes widen as you sit up straight, the word making your heart race and your skin crawl with fear. Both Soap and Gaz take a step closer—two strong pairs of arms outstretched and ready to catch you if you faint.
"Easy there, John—" Laswell says firmly, unbothered by his tone as she takes a step towards the captain and gestures at the two scientists watching the scene unfold with wide eyes from behind their laptops.
"They said she won't die. The amount of injection was too low… apparently."
Apparently?!
You inhale sharply and open your mouth to announce your imminent panic, but you're interrupted when one of the scientists speaks up first.
"That is correct, sir. She won't die."
Professor Doctor Boswel, as the name badge on his white lab coat states, chimes in. Price stops pacing at once, though his sharp eyes scream you better start explaining now, or one of you will be made responsible for this.
"Bringing the syringe back to base was the decisive factor. Our team at the lab is still working to decipher and translate the medical reports and research papers your team recovered, but we can confirm that this bioweapon is most likely a toxin."
A low murmur of various curses goes through the briefing room as you try to ignore the odd tingles in your limbs—like they're going numb from sitting in a bad position for too long—and process the doctor's words instead.
"You're saying I've been poisoned, doc?" You butt in crudely, letting out a humourless laugh as you begin fidgeting with your hands, clenching and unclenching them to get rid of those tingles while a cold drop of sweat trickles down your left temple and is swiftly wiped away by Soap's gloved thumb.
"Fuckin’ hell, lass. Ye dinnae look too good," Soap mutters under his breath, exchanging a concerned glance with Gaz, who then looks to the captain for guidance with a serious frown.
When Gaz turns around abruptly, you get a whiff of his scent, and you're ashamed to admit to yourself that you inhale it deeply—musk and sweat and gunpowder smoke, a hint of his fancy body wash lingering underneath all the grime. A perfect concoction of what is entirely Gaz.
It's intoxicating. Mouth-watering.
And absolutely inappropriate, because he's one of your best friends and a comrade.
What the hell is happening?
Of all the injuries and wounds you've already acquired during missions and deployments, this must be the fucking worst. You'd rather get shot or stabbed than sit here, feel strange as hell and be ogled like a failed science experiment.
Price's eyes flicker to Ghost, who hasn't said a word since sitting you down on the table with a gruff order to stay seated, and then to his three sergeants, lingering on you heavily before he turns back.
"What kind of bloody toxin?"
"It seems to be some sort of aphrodisiac, but… uh, well—about fifty times worse than that."
The other scientist, Professor Doctor Adebayo, answers tentatively, as if explaining it out loud makes him uncomfortable.
"The reports say it turns men—"
Dr. Adebayo hesitates, clearing his throat and looking between Laswell and Captain Price, until the latter lets out an exasperated sigh.
"Turns them what, doc?"
It's Laswell who says it eventually, "Turns them aggressive, John. Feral with lust, as ridiculous as that might sound."
The CIA agent finally looks in your direction before approaching you slowly while Dr. Adebayo seems to heave a sigh of relief as soon as she takes over.
"A high dose of it can be used to lower one's inhibition levels to a point where even the most honourable man would resort to sexual assault to ease his urges."
Her factual yet grim explanation makes the tension inside the briefing room spike tenfold. Every man present tenses up, visibly uncomfortable—Ghost especially, who's practically vibrating with strain.
Using a toxin like that—a bioweapon—on soldiers in the field could lead to even more and worse war crimes, and everyone here is aware of that.
"Wait—what? What the fuck?" Gaz utters, bristling next to you while you grip the edge of the table, gritting your teeth as the tingles intensify and wreck through your body in waves that leave you shuddering with each one.
"'Scuse me, what now?" You scoff. "Does that mean I'm gonna turn into a fuckin' nympho any second?"
Multiple pairs of eyes snap towards you at your choice of words. Some look intense and laced with worry. Price scolds you with one glance. Others look mildly amused—the latter being Soap, who lets out a snort but tries to cover it up with a fake cough into his fist.
Laswell surveys you intently, though her voice softens when she addresses you directly.
"How are you feeling, Sergeant? Are you in pain? Nauseous?"
A beat of silence follows. Your eyes flutter briefly as you meet Kate's blue gaze, and you exhale a long breath through your nostrils before you answer curtly.
"I feel weird."
You feel like you're about to get your period, but you keep that information to yourself for now and try not to wrap your arms around yourself self-soothingly.
Your lower abdomen is starting to tighten and cramp. Your gut twists like you just chugged a steaming bowl of soup and your limbs keep tingling—from your toes to your fingertips, and up to the tip of your nose. Tiny vibrations along with hot and cold flushes that make you quake and squirm in your seat on the table.
Kate squints at you, though she doesn't press further.
"What kind of effect will this stuff have on her?" Price enquires gruffly, more level-headed this time, his gaze shifting from the two scientists over to you and then back.
Meanwhile, as you crank your sore neck from left to right to get a good crack in, your eyes catch sight of Soap's muscular forearms and—to your horror—they linger.
The sleeves of his combat fatigues are rolled up to his elbows, exposing dark coarse hair and thick veins and that damn SAS insignia tattoo.
You want to trace the black lines with your tongue and imagine the salt of his skin on your parched taste buds.
And your eyes widen when a sudden rush of mind-numbing, pulsating heat makes you squeeze your thighs together as you clench your jaw to keep the lewd sound bubbling up in your throat from escaping.
Soap shoots you a quizzical look, one eyebrow raising as you avert your eyes from him swiftly, heat crawling up your neck and prickling beneath your skin.
"Fuck," you breathe, doubling over with a groan as the muscles in your thighs and lower abdomen begin to cramp up painfully while you can practically feel your pussy start convulsing around nothing, leaking with arousal and soaking into your underwear.
In a matter of seconds, your team—Ghost included, like a solid wall of quiet reassurance—are by your side, keeping you upright, asking questions, though their deep, accented voices are muffled as your quickening heartbeat begins to thud in your ears.
Their every touch seems to burn through the thick layers of your kit.
"Kate—Kate," Price is by her side in a few long strides, ducking his head to get on eye-level with her as he points at the two scientists accusingly, though Kate is already on her smartphone, contacting the lab again.
Price huffs like an angry bull trying to protect his herd as he turns his attention back to Dr. Boswel and Dr. Adebayo, who seem to be in a frenzied discussion, watching the way you're cramping and writhing.
"What the fuck is happening to her?" He barks at them, demanding an answer yesterday.
"It's—it's the toxin," Dr. Boswel stammers obviously, blinking up at Captain Price from behind his glasses. "She didn't get the full dose, but it's still—" He pauses, eyes flickering nervously under the captain's glare. "—bad."
Another gut-wrenching moan from you echoes through the briefing room as you squirm in Gaz's embrace, and Price must restrain himself from directing his wrath towards the two men in front of him—it's not their fault, after all.
It's his.
"Oxytocin might help… neutralize the toxin in her body," Dr. Adebayo remarks, clicking his pen nervously as he stares at his laptop screen before meeting Dr. Boswel's eyes, who is waiting for an elucidation.
"The hormone," Dr. Adebayo clears his throat again, clearly uncomfortable, "—not the drug." He clarifies, clicking his pen a few more times.
Laswell lowers her phone and shares a look with Price, holding an entire conversation with one long, meaningful glance, the one learned and perfected over more than a decade of working together, when Gaz's voice breaks through the chaos, calling for attention.
"Cap'n! What do we do?!"
You're not brought back to the barracks but Captain Price's private quarters.
Your squad makes sure to keep you out of sight in your condition; away from prying eyes while Ghost sneaks through the shadows with your quivering form cradled against his chest, carrying you bridal style like you're something fragile, something vulnerable he must protect.
Once safely inside the captain's flat, the curtains are drawn before your heavy gear is stripped from you, all while you don't even bother paying attention to who is grabbing or holding you at this point.
All that matters is someone touching you.
Your brain is mush, reduced to your most simple and carnal desires. No shame nor worry about the needy noises you're making whenever one of their big, strong hands strips another layer of clothing.
"Shit, I think she has a fever," Gaz mutters, cupping your face with both hands as he investigates your hazy, unfocused eyes while you let out another pathetic whimper. "She's completely out of it."
"Get her into the guest bedroom. Down the hall, first door on the left," Price orders gruffly, trying to keep his eyes from wandering up and down the length of your trembling, half-naked body.
"I'll call the senior consultant."
Ghost grumbles a low curse under his breath when your hand brushes over the front of his crotch—by accident or voluntarily this time, he doesn't dare imagine—and leaves the guest bedroom while Gaz and Soap manoeuvre you onto the king-sized bed.
Meanwhile, you don't care about the effect your uncharacteristic behaviour has on your teammates and superiors.
Whenever they try to make you drink or take an easy bite of food—whether it's a chewy protein bar or an overripe banana, because Price has no proper groceries at his place—you twist in whoever's embrace you're in, turning your scrunched-up face away like a petulant toddler.
"I don't wanna," you whine and hiccup, protesting each time Gaz tries to lift the rim of the water bottle to your lips, your speech now slightly slurred, glossy eyes averting their gaze as you breathe shallowly, squirming while Soap keeps you propped up with your back resting against his chest on the bed.
Gaz, who has been trying again to make you drink a sip of water for the past twenty minutes, looks back at his Lieutenant and Captain helplessly.
"Doc said we need to keep her hydrated," Price announces, rubbing his bare hand over his tired face. "Keep flushing that bloody poison outta her system and—"
Suddenly, Ghost's deep, gravelly voice interrupts the captain's speech with a harsh bite to it. "Johnny."
Soap, who has been trying his best to ignore the way you keep grinding your arse against his crotch in this position, ducks his head at the sharp and sudden warning.
"What? 'M not doin' anythin'," he grunts before sucking in a sharp breath as his cock keeps stirring and twitching in his combat trousers, "Fuck, lass, please—"
Soap tries to keep you from moving; his ungloved hands get a firm hold of your hips, but you're practically panting and mewling in his lap, making it harder for him not to crumble under the pressure building up in his dick.
Then Gaz is swift to pluck you out of the Scot's embrace with a disdainful frown, like you're some toy that was stolen from him.
"Don't be a fuckin' perv, Soap," Gaz snaps, cradling you into his arms, where you immediately begin pawing at his black compression shirt, determined to get your palms under it and on his bare skin.
"She can't consent!"
It's Price who approaches the bed then, while Ghost stays leaning against the doorframe, keeping a keen eye on the situation.
"Enough! Both of you," Price barks, eyes flashing before his shoulders drop with a rough sigh. He pinches the bridge of his nose. "Doc said it might help if—"
John stops mid-sentence, clenching his strong jaw. He can't believe what he is about to say, and he crosses his arms over his chest again, feigning control while he internally braces himself for his next words.
"Those doctors said it might help if she… climaxes."
His words hang in the air like a thick fog that no one can quite see through nor think in, and everyone seems to be holding their breath while you finally manage to tug Gaz's shirt out of his waistband, making him cuss under his breath when you go on to lick a long, wet stripe over his exposed abs like some feral lioness, utterly hungry for a taste.
"Shit—Babygirl, no, d-don't—" Gaz stammers helplessly while a rush of heat goes straight to his neck and cock simultaneously, overwhelmingly so.
He pushes you away by your shoulders—and hates himself for how reluctant he is at it—and he winces when your blunt nails claw into his bulging biceps, digging into his skin even through his shirt with another whimper.
"Please, Kyle… Let me—" you mewl, batting your eyelashes up at him. "It—It fuckin’ hurts."
Soap pushes his fists into his eye sockets, heaving a deep breath that turns into a frustrated groan. "Steamin' Jesus, lass, ye’re fuckin’ killin' us here."
"Take a bloody walk, MacTavish," Price orders, pointing his thumb at the door over his shoulder, and while Soap climbs off the mattress, grumbling to himself with an obvious erection pressing against the seam of his zipper, Price addresses Gaz.
"And you, Garrick, take—" He hesitates again, balling his hands into fists at his sides, trying to keep his own body in check at the sight and sounds of you, before he nudges his chin towards the door of the bathroom.
"Take her to the shower to get the fever down and… help her."
The captain's last words are nothing more than a strained grumble.
Gaz gapes at his superior. Soap freezes in his steps at the end of the bed, openly gawking and blinking like he didn't just hear right. Ghost visibly stiffens and shifts his stance, still leaning against the doorframe of the guest bedroom. No one can see the way he grits his teeth so hard he might chip a tooth behind his balaclava.
"But sir—"
Price shakes his head; brows set in a stern frown as he holds Gaz's widened gaze.
"She'd want you to take care of her if she could actually consent to it. And that's an order, Sergeant."
Ghost wants to disagree, but keeps his mouth shut and exhales a sharp huff of contempt instead.
The rest of the men try to distract themselves around Captain Price's flat while Gaz takes you to the en-suite bathroom like he was ordered to.
Not asked, ordered to.
He keeps repeating that in his head as he walks you towards the bathroom door with his arm around your waist, your body listing into his side like you've forgotten how to hold yourself upright. His jaw is set so tight his molars ache.
He's been ordered to do a lot of things in his career. Clear rooms. Hold positions under fire. Drag wounded men through mud while rounds cracked overhead. He's followed every order without hesitation, because that's what good soldiers do—they trust the chain of command and they execute.
This doesn't feel like any of those things.
He keeps the bathroom door unlocked—just in case you faint and he needs help—and lets out a huff when you fling yourself into his body suddenly and the air is knocked from his lungs.
"Easy," he pleads with you while his head dips down, and he inhales your familiar scent before he can stop himself. Sweat and the remnants of whatever lotion you put on this morning underneath your gear before the mission, something warm and sweet that he's caught whiffs of a hundred times before in passing and never let himself think about for longer than a second.
"Easy there, love," he tries again, his trembling hands wrapping around your midriff tentatively.
Gaz hates these circumstances. Hates how the mission ended in such a bloody mess. Hates how excited he is to undress you to your underwear, and he despises that this is how he'll get to have you for the first time.
This is not how he'd imagined it.
He never imagined it. Not in any concrete, detailed way. Not like he'd planned it in his head, step by step—the restaurant he'd take you to first, somewhere nice but not so nice you'd take the piss out of him for it. The way he'd tell you after the second drink, maybe the third, that he'd been thinking about you. Casually. Like it hadn't been eating him alive for months.
He hadn't planned any of that.
Fucking liar.
You make a sound against his chest, somewhere between a sob and a moan, and your fingers twist into the wet fabric of his compression shirt, tugging weakly.
"Kyle… Kyle, I need—"
"I know," he murmurs, and his voice comes out rougher than he intends. "I know, love. C'mon."
He manoeuvres you towards the shower, reaching past you to turn the dial to lukewarm. The water sputters, then hisses to life against the tile, and steam begins to curl at the edges of the glass.
You're still in your underwear—plain, standard issue, nothing designed to be sexy—and it doesn't matter, because the sight of you trembling and desperate in front of him with water beginning to mist across your skin is doing things to his head that no amount of mental discipline can counter.
He starts to dismantle his assault rifle in his head.
You stumble into the shower cabin and he follows, still fully clothed. The water hits his chest and soaks through his compression shirt in seconds, plastering the fabric to his skin, and the cold shock of it helps. Briefly.
Bolt. Firing pin. Cam pin.
"C'mon, Babygirl," he coos at you as he turns your quivering body in his embrace until your back is flush against his chest. One arm wraps tightly below your breasts, forearm pushing up against the swell of them through the soaked fabric of your bra, and he tries, and fails miserably, not to take a long look over your shoulder.
Buffer tube. Buffer spring. Buffer.
You melt against his body and his cock throbs in his combat trousers, straining against his briefs uncomfortably. The water is doing nothing for the heat radiating off your skin. If anything, you're burning hotter, pressing back into him with small, involuntary rolls of your hips that make his breath stutter.
Lower receiver. Trigger assembly. Trigger—
"Please," you whimper, and his entire train of thought derails.
Your head lolls back against his shoulder, exposing the column of your throat, and he can see the way your pulse hammers beneath the surface, rapid and frantic. Your hips buck against his hand when he finally—finally—lets it trail down over your lower belly, his calloused fingers dragging across the wet skin, feeling the muscles jump and twitch beneath his touch.
"Yes—yes—yes—" you chant breathlessly, and your hips cant forward, chasing his hand with a desperation that makes something crack open in his chest.
Fuck—fuck—fuck—fuck.
He cups your pussy through your knickers and the heat of you against his palm nearly makes his knees buckle. He can feel you through the thin, soaked fabric and he's not sure if the wetness is from the shower stream or if it's all you.
His chest is heaving when he finally gathers enough courage to dip his long fingers beneath the waistband of your underwear. His jaw clenches and his mind grasps desperately for the drills again—clear left, clear right, move to the next room, check your corners—anything to stay anchored while you let out a moan that echoes off the tile walls and punches straight through him.
You're so wet, so swollen, it's obscene. His fingers slide through your folds with zero resistance and the groan that rips from deep within his chest is involuntary, guttural, ashamed. He can feel your arousal ooze from your entrance, slick and hot, and he can already tell how tight you'd feel clenching around his fingers, how you'd—
No. He's not going there.
"Fuck," he curses under his breath, more to himself than to you. "I'm only doin' this for you, Babygirl. This is only about you."
He says it like a prayer. Like if he repeats it enough, it'll be true.
His fingers press on your clit, pulsing and twitching already, and he starts rubbing small, firm circles over it, adjusting the pressure when your breath hitches or your thighs clamp around his wrist. He reads your body like he reads a room. Methodically, attentive, and cataloguing every reaction.
You writhe and squirm in his tight grip, your nails digging into the arm he has banded around your ribs, and every sound you make, every whimper, and stuttered gasp of his name, chips away at the wall he's trying to keep standing between following an order and wanting this.
"M-more, Kyle, please!"
Gaz curses himself, but he gives you more.
Two fingers pressing into you, slow and careful despite every instinct screaming at him to give you what you're begging for. You clench around him immediately, hot and tight and silky, and his cock kicks in his trousers so hard he must bite the inside of his cheek to keep from groaning.
He curls his fingers, searching for the spot that makes your thighs shake, and when he finds it, you keen so loudly the sound bounces off every hard surface in the small bathroom.
"That's it," he murmurs against your temple, his lips brushing your skin without quite kissing. "That's it, love. Let go for me."
He's not sure when he started talking to you like this. Somewhere between the first touch and the second, the clinical detachment he'd been clinging to crumbled and something else took its place—something tender and fierce and terrifyingly honest.
Your first orgasm hits you hard enough to make your entire body seize in his arms, your back arching away from his chest as a strangled cry tears from your throat. He holds you through it, fingers still working, still pressing and giving, because even as the tremors wrack through you and your legs give out, he can feel your body already winding up again, the toxin refusing to let you rest.
"Shh, shh, I've got you," he breathes, adjusting his grip to take your full weight when your knees buckle entirely. "I've got you."
You cum again two minutes later, and then again after that, and again, and Gaz loses count somewhere around the fifth or sixth time, when his fingers are cramping and his arm is trembling from holding you upright and the water has long since turned cold.
Each time, he thinks it'll be enough, and each time, your body coils tight again within minutes, the toxin driving you right back to the edge with a cruelty that makes him want to put his fist through the tile.
He doesn’t want to imagine what a full dose would have done to you. To anyone.
When you tell him that you're hurting—repeatedly, begging him to make you cum in that desperate, broken tone of yours—the young Sergeant is sure something dies inside him on the spot.
"Kyle—Kyle, I need more, I need you to—please—Fuck, please!"
He knows what you're asking for. You're grinding back against his cock, which has been rock-hard and aching for what feels like hours, and every roll of your hips sends a jolt of white-hot arousal through him that he must physically brace against.
"I can't," he grits out, and it takes everything in him. "Christ. I can't do that to you. Not like this."
"Please—"
"No, Babygirl." His voice cracks on the word, and he presses his forehead against the back of your head, squeezing his eyes shut. "Not like this."
He drops to his knees instead.
The tile is hard and unforgiving under his kneecaps and the now cold water from the shower hits the back of his neck, but he barely registers any of it as he turns you to face him and hooks one of your legs over his shoulder.
He looks up at you once—your hazy, unfocused eyes, the way your chest heaves, the water running in rivulets down your body—and then he leans forward and drags his tongue through your folds in one long, broad stroke.
The sound you make is devastating.
Your hands fly to his head, fingers scrabbling for purchase on his wet hair, and your hips jerk forward so violently he must grip your thigh to keep you steady. He groans against you, he can't help it, and the vibration makes you cry out again, blunt nails raking over his scalp.
Gaz eats you like he's starving for it, because the truth he can't say out loud is that he is.
He's thought about this. Dreamed about it. Wanked to the idea of it in the dark of his bunk with his fist shoved against his mouth to keep quiet. And now he's here, on his knees in his Captain's shower with cold water running down his back and your taste flooding his mouth, and it's everything and nothing like what he imagined because you're not choosing this—you're not choosing him—and that knowledge sits in his chest like a brick.
But he doesn't stop.
Gaz licks and sucks and fucks you with his tongue until his jaw aches and your thighs are shaking so badly you can barely stand, even with his hands gripping your hips. He makes you cum on his mouth twice, then thrice, pressing his face into you each time your body locks up, working you through it with relentless, single-minded focus because if he stops to think about what this means, about what happens after, he'll fall apart.
When he finally pulls back, his lips are swollen, his chin is slick and his cock is so hard it genuinely hurts. You're still whimpering, still reaching for him, still not done, and the toxin is still pumping through your veins with no sign of stopping.
He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and exhales a shaky breath, pressing his forehead against your hip.
"I need—" His voice is wrecked. He swallows hard, then tries again. "I need a minute."
Not because he's tired, or his fingers are cramped and his jaw is sore and his knees are bruised from the tile. No.
But if he stays on his knees in front of you for one more second, he's going to give you what you're begging for, and he will never forgive himself for it.
He stands on unsteady legs, turns the shower off, and reaches for the towel hanging on the rack outside the cabin. His hands are shaking as he wraps it around, and you cling to it loosely, swaying on your feet.
"C'mon," he says, guiding you towards the door with one hand on the small of your back. His voice has steadied, but his eyes haven't. "Let's get you dried off."
You're protesting. He's cursing under his breath. There's shuffling, a stumble, and then he grabs the door handle and swings it open—
And Soap nearly falls backwards into the bathroom.
"Soap!"
The Scotsman catches himself on the doorway, one hand gripping the frame as he glances over his shoulder with a look that's not even remotely sheepish enough for a man who was clearly pressing his ear to the door thirty seconds ago.
Gaz is still wearing his clothes, though they're completely drenched—his compression shirt is a second skin, his combat trousers heavy with water, boots squelching on the tile. He's holding you by the forearm as you stand next to him, loose towel wrapped around your body, still trembling, still making those small, desperate sounds in the back of your throat.
"The fuck, mate? Did you eavesdrop on us?"
Soap shrugs as he straightens up, adjusting his stance in a way that's clearly meant to disguise the state of his trousers. "Was jus' checkin' on ye."
"Checking on—" Gaz's jaw works, nostrils flaring. He wants to snap, wants to shove Soap back into the hallway and slam the door, but he's running on fumes and you're leaning into him again, your face pressed against his soaked chest, mumbling incoherently.
"She needs—" Gaz starts, then stops. Looks down at you, back up at Soap. Something heavy passes between the two men, unspoken but understood.
"She needs more than I can give her right now," he finishes quietly, and the admission costs him more than any of them will ever know.
Soap's expression shifts. The boyish smirk drops, replaced by something sobered, and he gives Gaz a short nod—the kind they exchange in the field when one of them is spent and the other takes point.
"A'right," Soap answers, surprisingly steady, rolling his broad shoulders. "Ah’ve got 'er."
Gaz transfers you into Soap's waiting arms with a gentleness that borders on reverent—one hand on the back of your head, the other guiding your shoulders—and he doesn't let go until he's sure Soap has you secure.
Then he walks past them both, water dripping from every inch of him, and doesn't look back.
He makes it to the kitchen before his hands start shaking badly enough that he has to brace them flat on the counter. He stands there, head bowed, water pooling on the linoleum beneath him, and breathes.
Ghost is leaning against the opposite wall with his arms crossed, and he doesn't say a word.
There is no need to.
Soap carries you back to the bed like you weigh nothing to him; one arm under your knees, the other around your back, the towel slipping loose and neither of you caring, and he lays you down with a surprising gentleness that contradicts every tightly coiled muscle in his body.
He's been hard since the briefing room, balls throbbing uncomfortably. Over two hours of it. The kind of persistent, throbbing ache that sits low in his gut and pulses in time with his heartbeat, and he's been dealing with it the way he deals with most discomfort.
By ignoring it aggressively and hoping it fucks off on its own.
It has not fucked off unfortunately. Truth be told, he’d be worried about himself if it did.
"Right then," he mutters, kneeling on the mattress beside you as he cracks his neck and rolls his shoulders again like he's about to breach a door. "Let's sort ye out, hen."
And that's the thing about Johnny MacTavish—he doesn't agonise. Not the way Gaz does, all quiet guilt and moral calculus. Soap's moral framework is simpler, blunter, built from different materials. You're his teammate, you're hurting, and he can help. Everything else is noise.
That doesn't mean he's unaffected; doesn't mean his hands aren't shaking when he settles between your legs and pushes the towel fully away from your body, or that his breath doesn't hitch hard enough to hear when he gets his first proper look at you fully naked, spread out on the white sheets with your chest heaving and your thighs trembling and your eyes half-lidded, glassy, barely tracking him.
Christ, you're beautiful.
He's thought about this. Fuck. Of course he has. He's not a bloody monk, and you're you.
He's thought about it in the gym when you spot him on the bench press and your face hovers above his, upside down and grinning. He's thought about it on long transports when you fall asleep against his shoulder and he stays perfectly still for hours so you won't wake up. Or when you laugh at his shite jokes that no one else finds funny, when you steal chips off his plate in the mess, when you call him Johnny instead of Soap and don't even notice you've done it.
He's thought about it a lot.
But not like this.
"You with me?" he asks, tapping your cheek lightly with two fingers. Your eyes roll towards him, struggling to focus, and you make a sound that's part whimper, part plea.
Close enough.
"A'right, sweetheart. I've got ye."
He doesn't ease into it the way Gaz did. Where Gaz was methodical, with careful touches, measured pressure, and constant checking, Soap is instinct. He reads you through vibration and sound, adjusts on the fly, follows the frequency of your moans like he's tuning into a signal.
He dips his head between your thighs and licks into you without preamble, broad and hot and greedy, and the noise that tears out of you rattles something loose in his chest.
"Fuck—tha's it," he groans against you, the vibration making your hips jolt, and his big hands grip the backs of your thighs to keep you spread open and steady. "Tha's my bonnie girl."
He's not quiet about it, either. Soap eats pussy the way he does most things. With enthusiasm, commitment, and absolutely zero self-consciousness. Wet, filthy sounds fill the bedroom, punctuated by his own groans and your increasingly incoherent cries, and he doesn't give a single shit that the door is open, and his team can hear every obscene noise he's wringing out of you.
Let them hear.
His tongue works over your clit in fast, tight circles, then broad, flat strokes, alternating rhythm and pressure every time he feels your thighs start to shake. When you try to close your legs, he pins them open with his forearms. When you try to squirm away—overstimulated, oversensitive, too much and not enough at the same time—he follows relentlessly, dragging you back by the hips with a growl that rumbles against your soaked flesh.
"Nuh-uh. Stay still f'me."
He makes you cum with his mouth in under five minutes and then doesn't stop.
Your fingers twist into the sheets, into his mohawk, clawing at his scalp as your back arches off the mattress and a wrecked sob punches out of your lungs. Soap groans in response, the sound reverential, like your pleasure is a hymn and he's on his knees in church.
He keeps going. Lapping at you through the aftershocks, sucking your clit between his lips until you're keening, pressing his tongue inside you just to feel you clench around it, and when you cum again with his name breaking apart on your lips—Johnny, Johnny, fuck yes, Johnny—he nearly blacks out from how hard his cock throbs in response.
His hips have started moving on their own. Small, involuntary rolls against the mattress, his aching cock grinding against the sheets through his combat trousers, and he knows he should fucking stop, should pull his hips back, should focus on you and not the desperate friction building between his body and the bed.
But he doesn't stop.
He is physically incapable.
You taste like honey and salt and something almost medicinal underneath—the toxin, probably, working its way out of your system through your sweat and your slick—and he's drunk on it. Drunk on the way you say his name, how your thighs tremble against the sides of his head, drunk on the wet sounds of his tongue on your cunt and the way you keep pulling his face closer, harder, more.
"God—fuck—lass, ye taste so fuckin' good—"
He's rutting against the mattress in earnest now, his hips snapping in sharp, desperate little thrusts, and the friction is nowhere near enough and exactly too much at the same time.
The sheets are going to be ruined. He doesn't care. Can't. He’s a weak man, and his entire world has narrowed to the taste of you on his tongue and the ache in his junk and the way your body keeps arching into him like he's the only thing keeping you alive.
"Please—please, Johnny, I need—I can't—"
"I know, hen, I know—" he pants against your inner thigh, pressing a biting kiss there that makes you yelp, "—jus' one more, c'mon, give me one more, aye?"
He flickers his tongue, seals his mouth over your clit and sucks, hard, and you shatter. Your thighs clamp around his head, your hands fist in his hair so tightly it stings, and the scream that rips from your throat is ragged and raw and so fucking beautiful that he comes.
Inside his combat pants.
His hips stutter against the mattress and a guttural, muffled groan vibrates against your pussy as his cock pulses and spills, hot and wet, soaking through his briefs and into his trousers. His arms shake, his vision whites out for a second, and he has to press his forehead against your inner thigh and just breathe through it, chest heaving, while you whimper above him, still trembling from your own orgasm.
He pulls back slowly, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and the reality of what just happened settles over him like a cloth soaked in ice water. He stares down at himself, at the damp patch darkening the front of his trousers, and lets out a long, defeated exhale.
"MacTavish."
Ghost's voice comes from the doorway; flat and sharp, dripping with contempt.
Soap closes his eyes, disappointed in himself, exhaling through his nose. "Aye. I know."
"You know?" Price's voice joins Ghost's, closer, much heavier. The captain is standing just inside the bedroom now, arms folded, jaw set. He looks at Soap the way a father looks at a teenage son caught doing something monumentally stupid.
"Get yourself sorted. Now."
Soap doesn't argue. He climbs off the bed on unsteady legs, not meeting anyone's eyes, and adjusts his trousers with a grimace as he shuffles past Ghost in the doorway.
Ghost doesn't move to let him pass. Makes him squeeze by, shoulder to shoulder, just to make it uncomfortable.
"Disgusting," Ghost mutters, low enough that only Soap hears it.
"Fuck off, LT," Soap mutters back, and there's no heat in it. Just shame.
You don't notice the shift at first.
One moment there are hands and mouths on you, voices and pressure and friction. The next, everything is quieter. Stiller. The mattress dips on one side and stays dipped, a solid weight settling beside you but not on you, not against you, not close enough to touch.
You whine at the loss of contact, of heat, of anything, and reach blindly for whoever is there.
A large hand catches your wrist. Gentle and firm, holding it in place.
"Don't."
One word. Low and gravelly, scraped raw like it was dragged over broken glass and wire mesh on its way out of his throat.
Ghost.
He's sitting on the edge of the bed with his back straight and his boots still on, because taking his boots off would mean he's staying, and staying would mean—he doesn't finish the thought.
Price asked him to sit with you while Gaz and Soap pulled themselves together. Asked this time, not ordered, because Price knows that ordering Ghost to do something he doesn't want to do is about as effective as ordering the tide to turn. Ghost agreed with a single nod, and now here he is, and every muscle in his body is locked so tight he might snap a tendon.
You're lying on your side, curled in on yourself, wearing nothing but your sodden underwear again and the ghost of everyone else's touch on your skin. The towel is long gone. Your body is still trembling, still feverish, still caught in the grip of the toxin, and the soft, pained sounds you keep making are doing things to him that he absolutely cannot allow.
He's hard. Has been since you doubled over and moaned and he had to watch your body betray you in front of everyone. His cock is straining against his trousers, thick and heavy and insistent.
Ghost pretends it isn’t. He's very good at pretending things don't exist.
"Simon…"
His jaw clenches beneath the balaclava. You rarely use his first name—none of them do—and hearing it now, in that voice, breathy and desperate and small, is a kind of cruelty he wasn't prepared for.
"You need to drink something," he murmurs, and reaches for the water bottle on the nightstand without looking at you.
"Don't want—"
"Wasn't bloody askin’."
He unscrews the cap and turns to you, and the mistake—the critical, tactical, unforgivable mistake—is that he looks at your face next.
Your eyes are glassy and wet, your lips parted around shallow little breaths, and you're looking up at him like he's the only solid thing in a world that's been spinning for hours.
Not with lust—not the way you looked at Gaz and Soap—but with something quieter. Something that reaches past the toxin and grabs hold of something deeper.
Trust.
You trust him. Even now, reduced to your basest instincts, your intoxicated, unhinged brain still recognises him as safe.
Something fractures behind his ribs, and he shuts it down immediately, brutally, the way he shuts down everything that threatens to breach the walls.
"Sit up," he orders, and his voice is soft yet steady even if the rest of him isn't. He slides one hand behind your head—just his palm, just enough to support your neck—and lifts the bottle to your lips.
You drink. Slowly, reluctantly, with small sips that dribble down your chin, but you drink. He holds the bottle still and watches the column of your throat move with each swallow, and when a drop of water runs from the corner of your mouth and trails down your neck, dark eyes track it all the way to your collarbone before catching himself and looking away.
"More," he says curtly, bringing the bottle back.
You manage a few more sips before turning your head away with a pitiful sound, and he lets you, setting the bottle aside. His hand lingers on the back of your head a moment too long—his thumb brushing once against the nape of your neck—before he pulls it back like he's been burned.
You reach for him again. Fingers closing around the fabric of his sleeve, tugging weakly.
"Stay. Please. Don't—Don't go."
"'M not goin’ anywhere." The words come out before he can vet them, gruff and low, and he immediately resents himself for saying them so quickly, so easily, like a confession slipped out under duress.
He lets you hold onto his sleeve. That much he can allow. That much won't cross a line he cannot uncross.
You shift closer, seeking warmth, and your body curls towards him until your forehead is pressed against his thigh. He goes completely rigid, every muscle locking and nerve firing, and his hands hover in the air on either side of you, not touching, not pulling away, suspended in the unbearable middle ground of a man who wants desperately but won't take.
Another small whimper from you. Not desire this time but pain. The cramps rolling through your body in waves, the toxin still doing its vicious work even after everything Gaz and Soap wrung from you. You're shaking, and not just from arousal. You're exhausted. Dehydrated. Your body is at war with itself.
Ghost is not a gentle man. He knows this about himself the way he knows his blood type and his boot size. It's a fact, unalterable, built into the architecture. He doesn't comfort. He doesn't soothe. He handles.
But.
His hand comes down on the back of your head, and it stays.
Heavy and warm through the leather of his glove. Not stroking just resting, a solid weight against your skull, and you let out a breath that sounds like it's been trapped in your lungs for hours.
You stop shaking. Not entirely. The tremors are still there, running through you in small aftershocks, but the worst of it eases under the steady pressure of his palm, like he's an anchor and you've been drifting.
"Ghost?" Your voice is small, barely a whisper.
"Yeah."
"It hurts."
He closes his eyes behind the mask. His hand presses down just slightly—a fraction more weight, a fraction more warmth—and his throat works around words that don't come.
He knows it hurts. He knows Gaz and Soap's efforts weren't enough. He knows what the doctors said—what Price said—and he knows what would fix it, and he can't.
Not because he doesn't want to. Because he wants it too fucking much.
Simon Riley is not a man who trusts himself with things he wants.
Wanting, in his experience, is the first step towards destroying, and he has destroyed enough for one lifetime. Touching you now the way his body is screaming at him to would not be careful or measured or controlled or gentle.
It would be all consuming, and he would take too much, and he would never be able to look you in the eyes again.
So he sits on the edge of the bed with his boots on and his cock aching and his hand on the back of your head, and he holds himself perfectly, agonisingly still. Just a solid shadow in a bedroom.
You press your face harder against his thigh and he lets you. Your fingers tighten on his sleeve and he lets you. Your breath evens out incrementally but still too fast, still too shallow, though calmer now, and he lets that happen too, guarding it like a perimeter, daring anything to disturb it.
He doesn't know how long you stay like that. Long enough for the light under the curtains to shift and for his leg to go numb beneath the pressure of your head. Long enough for Gaz to appear in the doorway, freshly changed into borrowed civvies, and stop dead at the sight of them.
Ghost meets his eyes over the top of your head. His expression is unreadable behind the mask, but his hand doesn't move from your hair, and that says more than his face ever could.
Gaz nods once and backs out without a word.
In the kitchen, Price is pouring two fingers of whisky into a tumbler and staring at the far wall like it owes him money. Soap is sitting at the table in a pair of Price's joggers, his soiled trousers balled up in a plastic bag at his feet, looking like a scolded dog.
"She's calmer," Gaz says quietly as he enters, and both men look up. "Ghost's with her."
Price takes a long drink. Sets the glass down. Rubs a hand over his beard.
"It's not enough, is it."
It's not a question and Gaz doesn't answer it.
"She's still in pain. She keeps—" He stops and swallows thickly. "She keeps asking. Saying she’s in pain."
The captain stares at the whisky in his glass. The silence stretches, tense and heavy, pressing in on the walls of the small kitchen.
"She needs more than fingers and a mouth," Soap says bluntly, because someone fucking has to, and delicacy has never been his strong suit. Gaz shoots him a look, but Soap holds it, unapologetic.
"He's right," Price agrees suddenly, and the words taste like bile. He pushes away from the counter and stands to his full height, shoulders squared, and for a moment he looks every inch the officer. Burdened, resolute, carrying a decision he'll second-guess for the rest of his life.
"Gentlemen's agreement," he says. His voice is low, steady, absolute. "What happens tonight stays in this flat. No one treats her differently when this is over. No one brings it up unless she does. No one holds it over anyone, including himself."
He looks at each of them in turn—Gaz, then Soap—and holds until he gets a nod from both.
"And we tell Ghost."
Ghost doesn't agree.
He listens to the terms of the gentlemen's agreement from the doorway of the kitchen, arms crossed, stance wide, radiating the kind of stillness that makes lesser men instinctively check their exits. When Price finishes, Ghost holds the silence for a long, loaded beat.
And then: "No."
Price doesn't flinch. "No to which part?"
"All of it. My part." Ghost's voice is flat and final, stripped of everything except the decision itself. "I'll stay with her. I won't fuck her."
Soap opens his mouth—probably to say something spectacularly unhelpful—and Gaz kicks him under the table without looking.
Price studies his Lieutenant for a moment. Then he nods once, heavy with an understanding that doesn't need to be spoken.
"Fair enough." He rolls his sleeves up to his forearms. The mechanical motion of a man preparing for something he cannot delegate. "I'll go first."
No one dares to argue.
Unlike Soap, Price closes the guest bedroom door behind him and stands there for a moment with his hand still on the knob, just breathing. It smells of sex and pheromones, but wrong.
The room is dim. Someone turned off the overhead and left only the bedside lamp, casting everything in low amber light that softens the edges of the furniture and the shape of you on the bed. You're curled on your side, knees drawn up, one hand clutching the pillow beneath your head. The sheets are wrecked; damp and twisted, pulled loose from two corners, and your skin glistens with a thin sheen of sweat.
You look small.
That's the thing that hits him first and hits him hardest.
You're one of his soldiers. He's seen you clear buildings, haul wounded men twice your size to extraction, take a round to the vest and get back up swearing. You are not small. You have never been small or fragile.
But you look it now, trembling and fever-damp and reduced to a version of yourself that he never should have had to witness, and the weight of that sits on his shoulders like a ruck full of stones.
He crosses the room in a few strides and sits on the edge of the mattress. The frame groans under his weight.
"Sergeant."
You stir, your head lifting, and your eyes find his face. They're glassy and unfocused, but there's a flicker of recognition—Captain—before it's swallowed by the next wave rolling through your body. You let out a sound that's half sob, half moan, your thighs pressing together, and your hand reaches out blindly until your fingers catch the fabric of his shirt.
"It hurts," you whisper. "Still hurts. Why does it still—"
"I know." He catches your wrist, holds it. His thumb presses against your pulse point to check, and it’s rapid, thready, way too fast for simply lying on a bed. "I'm going to help you."
He says it the way he says we're moving on that compound at 0300 or I need eyes on that ridgeline. Leaving no room for ambiguity, because if he allows ambiguity into this room, he'll start thinking about what he's doing, and if he starts thinking, he'll stop, and if he stops.
You'll keep hurting. Under his command.
He stands long enough to strip his shirt over his head and remove his belt, and then he's back on the bed, propped against the headboard with you between his legs, your back against his bare chest; coarse salt and pepper hair rasping against your tacky skin. One arm wraps around your midsection, heavy and secure, anchoring you.
"Easy," he murmurs against the top of your head. "I've got you, love."
His free hand trails down your stomach, and your muscles jump and twitch beneath his rough palm. He catalogues every reaction. The hitch in your breathing, the way your hips tilt up to meet him, the small, desperate noise you make when his fingers dip below your navel. The same way he catalogues threat patterns and exit routes.
This is a mission. He is completing the objective. He is taking care of his wounded soldier.
He keeps telling himself that as he peels your underwear down your thighs and off, tossing them aside. As he runs his hand up the inside of your thigh and feels you shake. As he finally cups you and discovers just how wet and swollen you are, dripping on his fingers, he has to close his eyes and clench his jaw against the visceral punch of arousal that knocks through him.
This is the job. You gave the order. See it through.
He works you with his fingers first, because he needs to know what you can take. Two thick fingers pressing into you slowly, carefully, and the sounds you make guts him.
"That's it." His voice is lower now, rougher. "There you go, sweetheart."
He doesn't call his soldiers sweetheart. He has never, in twenty-odd years of service, called anyone under his command sweetheart. The word falls out of him like a loose round, and he can't take it back.
Your sopping hole clenches around his fingers and his cock, already hard and straining against the front of his trousers, jerks so violently he must bite back a groan. He curls his fingers inside you, finds the swollen spot that makes your spine arch and your breath stutter, and works it with a patient, devastating precision.
You cum and gush on his fingers with a broken cry, your body locking up in his arms, and the aftershocks roll through you in long, shuddering waves that he holds you through without a word.
It's still not enough. He knows it won't be for a while longer.
Price reaches for the condom on the nightstand—Gaz found them in Price's bathroom cabinet, a half-empty box, almost expired, shoved behind the toiletries like an afterthought—and tears the foil with his teeth while you keen and squirm against him, already spiralling back up.
He undoes his trousers and pushes them down just enough to free himself, because keeping them on feels like maintaining some essential boundary, some last scrap of separation between Captain Price doing what needs to be done and John wanting what he shouldn't want.
Rolling the condom on is a particular exercise in self-control. His cock is thick, flushed dark when his foreskin slides back, weeping pre at the tip, and every brush of his own fingers against the oversensitive skin makes his abs clench.
He lifts you with ease, one hand on your hip, the other gripping himself, and positions you above his lap.
"Sergeant," he grunts through gritted teeth, "look at me."
Your head lolls back against his shoulder, eyes half-open, and you meet his gaze as best you can. He searches for something in your expression—recognition, maybe awareness, you—and finds enough of it to quiet the loudest of the voices screaming in his head.
"If it's too much, y’tell me. That's a bloody order."
You nod hazily. He doesn't know if you actually processed the words, but he needed to say them. Needed that on the record, if only between himself and God.
He lowers you onto him slowly.
The sound that comes out of him is not one he's ever made before.
You're scorching hot and soaked. Your body takes him inch by inch, clenching and fluttering around him as gravity and his guiding hand ease you down, and by the time you're fully seated in his lap, he's seeing stars and his fingers have left dents in the flesh of your hip.
"Fuck," he breathes, and the word is ragged at the edges, torn from somewhere deeper than his chest.
You moan shamelessly, and the relief in the sound nearly undoes him. Like something that's been wound unbearably tight has finally been given slack. Your body relaxes against his, tension draining from your muscles for the first time in hours, and the change is so visible, so immediate, that it almost justifies this.
Almost.
He starts to move. Rolling his hips up into you, slow and deep, both hands gripping your waist to control the pace. He keeps it measured; long and deliberate strokes that drag against your inner walls and make you whimper with each one, because if he lets himself go, if he fucks you the way his body is begging him to, he'll lose himself entirely.
And he hates—Christ, he hates—how fucking good you feel.
He hates the way you fit around him like you were made for it, and the way your head falls back against his shoulder, how your lips part and you breathe his name—not his rank, not Captain, but John—and the sound of it rushes through him hot and electric and wrong. Hates the wet, obscene sound of your body taking him repeatedly; that his hips are moving faster now, snapping up into you with a force that makes the headboard knock against the wall.
Hates that he doesn't want to stop.
Your eyes squeeze shut, your head tips back as you cry out. "John—John—oh god—"
His arm tightens around your ribs, crushing you back against his chest, and his mouth finds the curve of your shoulder—not kissing, just pressing there, teeth grazing skin, breathing you in. His other hand slides down between your thighs and rubs tight circles on your clit in counterpoint to each thrust, and you come apart so violently in his arms that he has to hold you through it with every ounce of strength he has.
You clench around him like a vice and he follows you over the edge with a bitten-off groan, his hips stuttering, his cock pulsing deep inside you as the orgasm tears through him with a ferocity that whites out his vision.
For a few suspended seconds, there's nothing left. No rank, no mission, no guilt. Just the pounding of his heart and the aftershocks rippling through both your bodies and the impossible, terrible warmth of you around him.
Then reality seeps back in, cold and unforgiving, and Captain John Price opens his eyes and begins the long process of hating himself for every second of the last twenty minutes.
He pulls out carefully, disposes of the condom, and fixes his trousers. When he leans you back against the pillows, your eyes are already glazing over again, your body winding up for more, and the sight of it makes something weary and furious crack behind his chest cavity
He cups your jaw, tilting your face up. "Stay with me, Sergeant. Stay with me."
You whimper, and your hips shift restlessly against the sheets.
Price stands and walks to the door on legs that feel like they belong to someone else.
"Garrick. You're up."
Gaz and Soap take you in turns after that, and it's different this time.
Where the first round was clinical in its own way—Gaz with his careful guilt, Soap with his missionary zeal, Price bearing the weight of command—this his round is rawer.
The boundaries have been breached, and the gentlemen's agreement hangs over the room like a ceasefire that everyone knows is temporary.
Gaz is gentler than Price was. He lays you on your back and settles between your thighs with a tenderness that borders on devotion, pressing his forehead against yours as he pushes inside you.
He goes slow and gentle, and whispers things against your temple that no one else can hear, private things meant only for the space between your mouth and his.
"I've got you," he murmurs repeatedly. "I've got you, Babygirl, I'm right here. I will be here."
He comes inside the condom with a shudder and your name bitten into the skin of your shoulder, and when he pulls out and rolls onto his back beside you, he stares at the ceiling for a long time without blinking, tears prickling at the corners of his eyes.
Soap goes after. He's not gentle—can't be, doesn't know how to be, not with the way you claw at his back and wrap your legs around his waist and beg him harder, please, harder—but he's present.
He hooks your knee over his broad shoulders and fucks you deep, watching your face with a focused intensity that's almost clinical in its own right, cataloguing every reaction, every gasp, adjusting angle and depth and rhythm like he's zeroing a scope.
"Tha's it, sweetheart, take it—fuck, yer so—fuck—"
The condoms run out after Soap's first round.
Gaz discovers this when he reaches for the box on the nightstand and finds it empty, and the look on his face—the quiet oh, shit—would be funny in any other context.
"Cap'n," he calls, voice strained. "We've got a problem."
Price, who has been standing in the hallway staring at nothing, appears in the doorway. Gaz holds up the empty box. Price closes his eyes.
"Then pull out," the captain says flatly. "That's an order."
It should be simple, and it’s anything but.
Gaz tries. He genuinely, sincerely tries, but you're clenching around him so tightly and making those sounds, those desperate and wrecked, grateful sounds, and when your orgasm hits and your walls contract around his cock in rhythmic, milking pulses, his hips stutter and he buries himself to the hilt and spills inside you with a choked groan before his brain even registers what his body has done.
"Shit—shit, I'm sorry, I—fuck—"
He pulls out too late, watches his cum leak from you onto the sheets, and drops his head against your sternum with a devastated exhale.
Soap doesn't even pretend he's going to manage it.
"'M not gonna be able to pull out," he announces with a frankness that makes Gaz want to strangle him. "Jus' bein' honest, Cap."
"You'll pull out or I'll pull you out myself, MacTavish."
And yet Soap does not, in fact, pull out in time.
Price has to physically haul him back by the shoulder, and even then, Soap's cock jerks and pulses as it slips free, painting your inner thighs and lower belly with hot, thick ropes of cum while the Scotsman lets out a string of Gaelic curses that would make his mother disown him.
The room smells like multiple people fucking and sweating and something medicinal—the toxin, working its way out of your pores at last—and you're finally, finally, starting to slow down.
The desperate edge has dulled. Your whimpers are quieter now, tired rather than urgent, and your body has stopped arching off the bed every few minutes.
You're still reaching, though. Still searching for contact, for warmth, for a body against yours.
Ghost enters the room without being asked.
He's stripped down to his black t-shirt and trousers. The balaclava is still on, but his gloves are off, and the sight of his bare, scarred hands is somehow more intimate than anything else that's happened in this room tonight.
He doesn't look at the other men or acknowledge the state of the sheets or the smell or the heavy, post-coital guilt saturating the air.
He simply moves to the bed, sits down, and gathers you against his chest with a practised efficiency that suggests he's been rehearsing this moment in his head for the last two hours.
You go willingly. Boneless, exhausted, trembling with the last dregs of the toxin and the cumulative aftermath of more orgasms than your body was designed to handle in one night. Your face presses into the crook of his neck, your fingers curl loosely in the front of his shirt, and you let out a breath that sounds like surrender.
Ghost pulls the duvet up over both of you. One arm settles around your back securely. His other hand comes up to cradle the back of your head, fingers curling into your hair, and he holds you against him like he's shielding you from blast radius.
"Go to sleep," he says quietly. An order and a request and a plea all compressed into three words.
You make a small, incoherent sound against his throat.
"I know." His hand moves over your hair, slowly and gentle. "Sleep."
Price watches from the doorway for a moment. Then he pulls the door halfway closed and leaves the Lieutenant to his vigil.
In the kitchen, the captain pours himself another whisky—three fingers this time—and drinks it standing up, staring at the drawn curtains. Gaz is in the shower. Soap is sprawled on the sofa in the living room, one arm over his eyes, dead to the world.
Price's phone buzzes. Laswell.
How is she?
He stares at the screen for a long time. Types and deletes three different responses before finally settling on one.
Handled. Debrief in the morning.
He sets the phone face-down on the counter and finishes his drink.
Hours later, you wake up slowly, like surfacing from deep water.
The first thing you register is warmth. A wall of it, solid and breathing, pressed against your back. An arm draped over your waist, heavy with sleep. Fingers loosely tangled in yours against your sternum.
The second thing you register is that you are naked, sore in places you don't want to think about, and your mouth tastes like the inside of a boot.
The third thing is the balaclava.
You can feel it, the knitted fabric against the back of your neck, and the slow, even exhale of breath warming your skin through the cloth. The chest behind you rises and falls in the deep, steady rhythm of genuine sleep, which means the Lieutenant trusts this room enough to have let himself go under.
Which means something, though you're too foggy to figure out what.
You shift slightly, testing your body. Everything aches. Your thighs, your hips, your abs, your jaw for some reason, and there's a deep, bone-level exhaustion settled into your muscles that reminds you of the tail end of a bad flu.
The cramps are gone, though. The tingling, the feverish heat, the desperate, clawing need—all of it has receded, leaving behind a hollow, wrung-out emptiness.
And memory. Fragments of it. Arriving in pieces like delayed radio transmissions.
Kyle's hands shaking as he touched you. I'm only doin' this for you, babygirl. Johnny's mouth on you, hot and relentless. The sound he made against your thighs.
The shower. The water. Voices.
John.
Your eyes open wide and your body goes rigid, and the arm around your waist tightens reflexively. Ghost pulling you closer in his sleep, an unconscious response to a perceived threat, even though the threat is just you waking up and remembering.
You lie very still.
The flat is quiet. Early morning light edges around the curtains, pale and grey, and somewhere in the distance, you can hear the muffled sounds of the base waking up—vehicles, a distant shout, the rhythmic thud of boots on tarmac.
You don't move, don't speak. You stare at the wall and breathe and try to organise the wreckage in your head into something you can process.
Behind you, Ghost's breathing changes. Shifts from deep and even to something shallower, more aware. His arm tenses around you, a brief contraction of muscle, there and gone, and you know the exact moment he wakes up, because his entire body goes perfectly, absolutely still.
Neither of you says a word.
His hand is still tangled with yours against your bare chest. His thumb rests against your knuckle. But he doesn't pull away.
The silence stretches. Not uncomfortable, exactly. Heavy. Full of things that need to be said and won't be. Not now, certainly not yet, and maybe not ever. And there is a fragile, terrified understanding that what happened in this room changed the molecular structure of something that can never be unchanged.
Finally, after what feels like an hour but is probably two minutes, Ghost speaks.
"How do you feel?"
You consider the question. Really consider it, not the reflexive I'm fine that sits on your tongue out of habit.
"Like shit," you answer honestly. Your voice is wrecked, raspy, and it hurts to talk.
Then, so quietly you almost miss it, he answers, "Yeah."
His thumb moves once. A single, slow stroke across your knuckle.
Then he lets go of your hand, carefully disentangles himself from around you, and gets up without another word. You hear his boots being pulled back on. The soft click of the door.
You lie in the bed that smells like all four of them and none of yourself, and you stare at the wall, and you breathe.
the first time your daughter walks, the whole house goes stock-still.
you're at the sink, wrist-deep in warm water, washing dishes. john, sat at the breakfast nook with the paper and tea. you had set the baby down on her play mat to keep her busy, but she's apparently grown bored of her small world.
the moment john sees her, he abandons his reading and swings off the bench, opening his arms to her.
she puts one wobbling foot after another, babbling as she slowly crosses the floor. neither of you breathe. her tiny arms windmill as she closes the distance to her father, at last pitching forward into his waiting arms with a squeal. john laughs, delightedly hauling her up against his chest while she giggles and takes big handfuls of his beard. she swivels toward you with a big smile, and john catches your eye over the crown of her head.
here it is. the future john dreamed of and whispered to you night after night for years.
you both spend the day coaxing her to wander around the cabin. he takes her outside to walk the garden and along the fence at the property line.
later, after supper and a bath, you lay her down in her crib and soon enough, she's fast asleep. she sprawls, mouth stuck open, one tiny fist curled under her chin. you watch her for a long while, still in a daze of how your life has changed yet again in the span of a single day. tomorrow, john'll have to check every room with fresh eyes, reassessing all his baby-proofing so far. he'll think about what she can reach now, what she'll pull herself up on, and any escape route she might discover.
he's leaning in the door frame when you turn to leave, backlit with the hallway light. you go to his side and tuck into it like he likes, and together you stand in silence for a few minutes more. eventually, he presses a kiss to your head and takes you to bed.
it's better because he's happy. slower and gentler.
"remember when you used to cry an' cry about this? used to beg me to not come in you," he grunts as he bottoms out. "hard to believe, isn't it."
he slows to slip his hand beneath your chin, tilting your face up just enough for his thumb to rub along the collar locked around your neck. it's long since softened from years of wear, so soft that you often forget you're wearing it.
simon riley laying low in a small coastal town after an OP x naive tourist having a port day who doesn’t realize that the boat will absolutely leave without you if you spend all afternoon canoodling with the big, brusque behemoth who won’t let you check the time on your phone when he has you spread out on his lap in some local tavern and grinding down on his thigh until the sweat on your upper lip drips down your neck and he licks it up. but he’s more than happy to let you spend the night in his hotel room until you’re able to catch a flight to the ship’s next destination
he’s sitting on the couch watching television when you walk into the room after getting back from work.
when you finally reach the couch, you immediately snuggle into him and all he says is, “is that all i get?”
you turn your head to look at him.
“what do you mean?” you ask softly.
“i haven’t seen you all day, don’t you wanna give your daddy a kiss?”
you quirk your eyebrows at him before laughing.
“you’re so gross,” you say as you shove him gently but his gaze stays locked on yours.
you know that look, that stupid smirk that doesn’t leave his face, he’s going to get what he wants because at the end of the day you're still weak for him.
you roll your eyes and kiss him softly, and that’s when he knows he’s in.
he starts sneaking it into casual conversations after that, always referring to himself as your “daddy” and you laugh, brushing him off as just teasing you.
but it gets worse when he starts using it in the bedroom.
you start acting out?
“come on, love. don’t you wanna be good for daddy, hm?” he says in that soft voice and it has you melting.
he knows just how to break you. he knows you love when you talks to you in that gentle voice of his. he also doesn't forget the way you subconsciously lean your cheek into his hand when he strokes it softly.
always so sweet for him.
he also is incredibly patient.
it doesn’t matter how much his pants tighten when he watches you squirm in front of him because you’re too embarrassed to ask him to fuck you. he’s going to wait, however long it takes.
john makes you use your words. if you don’t say anything, you won’t get anything.
"you gonna tell daddy what you want?"
he looks at you expectantly with a smug look on his face as he feeds off your embarrassment.
when you finally give into him, a pitiful "please touch me, daddy" leaving your lips, he smiles cockily before he leans down to kiss you roughly and his hand wraps around your throat holding you in place.
umm not sure if i like this but omegaverse kinda-neglected reader! x tf141 (ghost focus), angst, good ending, gn!reader, SFW
You’re a beta. That should come as a relief, many tell you every day they wish they were your designation instead. No heats, no ruts, not even stinking up a room when you got a bit too overwhelmed by an emotion.
Just in the middle: a nice calming scent, a decent paying job— never too high, a beta CEO wouldn't be able to control anything— and the lack of any crazy season that would get you all flustered. Your sense of smell was incredibly different to theirs, but you werent given much chances to complain considering all they went through in heats.
So naturally you were taught your life revolved around alphas and omegas, all the way from secondary school when you were sat next to the reactive Alpha’s to “try and make them behave better”. In biology class your designation was skimmed over very quickly in favour of understanding how to react to their emotional changes and the like, and anything else you had to figure out for yourself.
It’s not like getting out of school into the workforce was much better. Omega’s rights had changed greatly in the past century, and no one would bat an eye at them being in most jobs— so applying was even more impossible. Even when you did get into the workplace, it was like alpha’s would immediately stop listening when there was an omega in the room, or vice versa. Truthfully you were jealous of their natural pull to each other, like the relationships you’d read in books or see in swoon worthy movies.
“There’s all sorts of jobs— chefs, mechanics, cyber analysts, engineers, dont just have to be a soldier.” The army recruiter outside your local supermarket rambles, clearly trying to get at least one recruit today at the minimum. Otherwise he’d definitely get in big trouble. “And you’re a beta, so you can do both work with Omega and Alpha jobs! You’ll be fine!”
“What?” You look at him, that mention perking you up and he looks at you with glee. You were only listening in hopes he’d get you off his back, but that was certainly news to you.
“I bet you’re sick of fighting with even more people for jobs now, huh? In the military omega’s and alphas are kept very seperate, even so, they’re required to be on suppressants so everything’s very easy.”
—————
So, that’s how you ended up here, bullied and forced into the shape of a soldier, something you still feel fake about even after countless deployments. It’s quickly forgotten though when you have the thrill of finally finding your place in society.
Your first team was mostly alphas, a beta here and there, but it felt great to have them treat you equally, slapping a hand on your back and grinning at a job well done. The omega team wouldnt even bat an eye when you were assigned to them, just as welcoming. Truly the best of both worlds, you could be anything you wanted in this system— it was like it was built for you to thrive.
Then the taskforce got established, and by a stroke of luck, you got transferred on. “You always run this early?” A hand lands on your shoulder, and you jump just to meet Sergeant Mactavish’ grin. After completing your demolitions course with flying colours, you soon got assigned under him. His hair is wet, mohawk flat for once, and you can only assume he just washed off. Still, his scent washes over you, easing your momentary shock and you nod, smiling. “Yeah, isn't the water too cold this early?”
“It’s alright. C’mon, let’s go meet the others for breakfast.”
You follow him, the faintest happy scent trailing off of you as you do so, and spiking just the miniscule amount when you sit down at the table.
“Please please give me your bread roll, i love the jam they use for it.” Gaz pleads, clasping his hands together and you can't help but roll your eyes, letting him trade it for his fried egg. “I love you so much-“ He mumbles, already taking a bite out of it that Price rolls his eyes as he takes a seat.
“Almost thirty years old...” He mutters and you giggle, eyes moving to where Ghost comes with his tray, sitting next to Price.
“I saw you on the track, you looked tired.” He says, giving you a pointed look, and making your cheeks flush. Oh, right. The night prior you’d been suddenly awaken to help deal with a feral omega, forced to give up hours of sleep to soothe them to submission..
“Just didn’t get the best sleep. I’ll feel alright after a coffee.” You give him a small shrug, eating more of your food. His eyes linger on you for a moment longer before nodding and carrying on.
The sergeants were more than happy to include you in all their plans, barely batting an eye when your scent wasn't as strong as theirs or in combat training you couldn't hold as much of an intimidating presence. Nor did the Captain and the Lieutenant care either, always praising the fact you could slip by unnoticed, with no chance of wavering from the other two designations and such.
It felt almost like a pack.. and it was perfect. So perfect.
“Johnny, just spill it!” Gaz groans as the Scot dances around the subject for the tenth time that morning, making you all roll your eyes at the breakfast table.
“I got an omega!” The whole table falls silent, and then Gaz lets out a low whistle patting him on the back whilst the Captain nods approvingly.
“And you wont show us a photo?” Ghost chimes in, making Soap stumble to get his phone out, excited as he passes the phone around. A sweet, soft omega. Round cheeks, a bright smile, hanging off his arm like it was the key to her heart. A perfect match to him.
“She looks perfect with you, good on you, son.” The Captain says, giving him a gruff smile and Gaz snickers at his father-like praise. Then they turn to you, as you sit in shock, fork gently clattering on the plate.
Your jaw hurts from how you physically have to force a wide enough smile, standing up and coming around to congratulate him properly. It’s even worse when Kyle insists he should show more pictures and so you stand there between them, making fake ooo’s and aaah’s in hopes it would hide the slightest change in your scent.
It changes everything.
“Soap, me and Gaz are going to the pub later—“
“Ah… cant, omega wants me to watch a movie with her. What about friday?”
“Oh— do you mind if we do some sparring today?”
“Uh.. okay, sure. Just gotta finish up this text to my omega. Ye know she’s getting stronger by the day! I’ve been helping her keep fit, yknow, to stay safe and all.”
“Do you want to go grab lunch?”
“Oh— sure. Feels like i havent seen you in forever.”
You smile wide when he finally agrees to hang out with you again— after all, it’s not like he was acting like this with Kyle. So you both enter the mess, going to grab your plate.
“Ahh.. the ‘mega loves chicken like this, makes hers a bit more seasoned though. Bloody good.” You smile weakly, trying to start your own conversation about work, and the mission you’ll be going with him on.
“Oh ye havent heard yet.” He falls quiet and you tilt your head in confusion, about to place the dish on your tray.
“Havent heard what? Was there a new brief?”
“You should talk to the Captain.”
Confused, you do stop by his office later that evening, gently tapping on the door with your knuckles and announcing yourself. With a weaker scent, he couldn’t tell you apart from the alpha’s across base with their scent blockers on, unlike the rest of the taskforce.
“Come in.”
“Soap said i havent heard something about the mission im going with him on soon? Did something change?”
“Ah, right. You dont need to go anymore.”
You blink in surprise, suddenly really confused by all of this and you step forward a bit more, scent souring. Not that he’d pick up on it.
“He’s a claimed alpha now, there’s no need for a beta to mediate.”
You stand there, the contents of your stomach in your throat as you process his words. Mediate. You werent there because of skills.. the CO who encouraged you to take a demolition course didn't even think you were good at it either. They just needed a beta to mediate in a field lacking them.
“Oh. Right.”
A month passes by of you watching Soap slip away from you, barely talking to you if not about his omega, never joining you on a morning run until you’re sure he’s forgotten about you altogether. At first you had chalked it up to him just being busier with mated life. After all, you’ve witnessed the pull of an omega first hand many times, how it makes them change. Though, his relationship with the alphas didn't change in the slightest.
With his protective instincts he was drawn to the alphas more now, always hanging around Gaz and and Ghost when they weren't busy, beelining straight past you unintentionally. You cant really blame him either, no one remembers the beta’s faint scent.
It was Gaz next. One evening you were leaning against him on the couch, unable to hide your despair and luckily he’d been nice enough to let you sit there without explanation. It was nice, you thought that if you had no Soap, at least you had your other best friend. He always made you smile, and he was the reason you even got a slice of attention from Soap these days.
And then it came.
It started small, just hanging around Soap more often than not. Really you hadnt thought much of it, but it did feel rough when you sat also on the rec room couch just to watch them fully invested in something you could never join in on. You figured it was about Soap’s omega again, not something you particularly wanted to hear about.
Then it turned into turning down bar nights altogether. They would both cancel, Gaz excusing it with ‘plans’ whilst Soap was always honest. Sure you had the whole team, but being in the vicinity of four alphas in an alpha only bar was enough of a scent overload to give any beta a headache.
Then you saw his lockscreen on accident, just wanted to check the time really. It was unmistakably obvious though, the smiles, calmer than Johnny’s one, but just as gorgeous and adorable. A real treat for the eyes.
“Congratulations.” You mumbled when he came back to the couch with his can, raising a brow at you.
“What..?” He knew, of course he did. You knew his lying look.
“Got yourself an omega, when are you gonna tell the others?”
He seems embarrassed, quickly grabbing the phone off of you, cheeks burning. “How did you see that?!”
The next morning he announces it to the team and you join in with congratulating again, only too aware of the cycle that was soon to repeat. Only, it wasn't too bad with Gaz. You were grateful, so grateful when he still would spend a lunch or two with you, or even just talk to you.
“Hey, we going on our usual grocery run this week?” You two were put together on the rota for stocking the rec room and so you both head out, riding shotgun in Gaz’s car.
You both had a copy of the list, walking around the store together, until you eventually got them all. “Oh! Just a second, need to grab some scent stuff.” In the small beta section they allowed, there were really good products to clear out scents from others that’d stick to betas and linger around. After all, you had a keener sense of smell, so being around the taskforce meant it racked up pretty fast on your clothes and on your room.
Kyle was the first you confided in after you suddenly fainted once, at a bar, the scents too much for you to handle. Though you managed to quell it pretty quickly with these. Some you could just spray in your nose and go— perfect for getting rid of the oncoming dizziness.
“You know you dont have to get the fanciest things, just get the base ones. It’s at the back of the store and they’re expensive.”
You pause, he never questioned this before, not even the first time you had nervously told him— afraid to be undermined.
“There’s no base ones..” You say with a raised brow, but you cant bring yourself to be too rude to him. Even if his tone was almost sharp, scolding, as if you were being selfish. Right now it feels like you’re reduced to your designations, and that’s it. Not humans, not friends, not even teammates. Alpha and beta. “There’s only one brand that ever does it.”
“Really? And what about the cheap scent clearers? The ones you used to use before.” He gives you a firm look, challenging, and you swallow, unsure where this hostility came from.
“..They got pulled off the shelf, Kyle. Thousands of beta’s got chemical burns— i couldnt smell properly for a week.”
He pauses for a split second, like he’ll acknowledging the truth in your words and his wrongs, then just huffs, turning to scan where the empty checkout is. “Fine. Get what you want then, but I'm going to pay. I’ll meet you at the car.”
When you return with the small plastic bag, he puts his hand out for the receipt so it can be handed to you at a price for expenses on the card. “I paid for it myself.” You mutter back, your scent tinging sour and in the close proximity it might be noticeable this time. He pauses, and then puts his hands on the wheel, choosing not to comment further.
———————————
The sergeants are on a mission, one you were supposed to be on, but now you’ve been shoved into another with unclaimed alpha’s who need a bit of extra settling. Or rather someone lesser than them they can secretly believe they’re higher than. It doesn't feel much different to secondary school now, and you find yourself with less will to argue about it.
Thankfully, Lieutenant Ghost is here with you. He’s always been alright— not exactly friendly but not rude either. You were quite intimidated by his rank at first, convinced he’d be strict and unforgiving but he’s content if you get the work done.
“Handled that bomb in record time.” He comments beside you on the way back to base. There was another demolitions expert on the team but when news came up that there was another bomb they had not suspected, he immediately put his trust in you to disarm it.
“Thanks for the chance, Lt.” You smile up at him and he nods, acknowledging your hard work. After all, you really did always put in more than your best. Even so, he cant help but notice you sink as soon as he shifts his attention to someone elsewhere, the conversation falling quiet. He’d be blind to notice the gap between you and the sergeants, even if you were a beta and them having omega’s shouldnt even bother you. Him and Price had to regularly reminds them to not walk around in clothes stinking of their partner.
“The sergeants are back from their mission, could hit the pub tonight. Whole team can come”
You feel too bad to decline now, so you just nod. “Okay. Yeah.”
—————
The Alpha only pub is bustling and you offer to grab the third round just so you can escape the thick scents building around you. It doesnt help that you’re basically rationing your scent-refresher as of right now.
“Omega’s doing good.” Soap responds to Price’s questions.. At least you’ll miss this mandatory conversation while you go. The bartender already knows you, greeting you with a welcoming smile as you start your order. It’s all going on Price’s card, so you take the opportunity to get a sundae instead of alcohol. He did owe you one after an explosive you caught right by his position. Besides, it was less than a tenner, and you’d savour it for life.
“Heat’s coming up though. It’s only three days long usually, but should go smoothly. The store almost ran out of supplies too.” Soap sighs loudly, shaking his head and Kyle nods along, also probably having similar issues.
You’re not exactly listening, carefully holding the plate of drinks so you don't accidentally spill it with the countless bodies in this crowd.
“If they got rid of the beta section, they’d have more to spend stocking on the omega stuff.” A soldier hanging around elbows Soap, but he doesnt disagree. If anything the buzz of alcohol just makes him want to finally speak his truth now.
“Right? I mean really? Beta period products? Beta scent enhancers? Like those would actually even work to attract an alpha let alone an omega. Those scent refreshers cannot be real either, i mean, you’d think they’d want to smell us, ya know? Not like they get anything else— ”
The table goes silent, Gaz obviously kicking Soap in the leg until he looks up and meets eyes with you. The other soldier doesnt bat an eye, raising a brow at you. “Oh, your drinks are here. Can you order me two aswell?”
“I’m not a waiter” You snap back, and the Captain stands quickly, taking the tray from your hands and placing it down on the table.
“Think your team wants you back over there.” He motions for the soldier to go with his eyes, and he quickly leaves. “Thanks for grabbing them, i’ll get yours. Come, sit.” He turns to you but you freeze, shaking your head, and turning back into the crowd. “I’ll get it myself.”
“You idiot!” Gaz puts his head in his hands at the very obvious tension from Soap’s words.
“I didn't know they was there!” He retorts, though also slumps into his seat a little more. “It’s true. What do you want me to say?”
“Enough.” Price sighs, pinching his brow, he should’ve stopped the sergeants earlier but he hadnt known he’d be stupid enough to say that. Even if it was something that they were all thinking.
They take their drinks from the tray you brought, Gaz and Soap downing theirs immediately as if that’ll get rid of the dread hanging on their head. Price begins to sip his light chatter starting up again until Ghost suddenly speaks up.
“They still haven't come back.”
It’s been five whole minutes, and there’s no sight of you to be seen anywhere.
—
You’re sitting at the back entrance of the pub, empty at this time with the game roaring inside the pub. The alleyway it leads into is dirty, a few football decorations here and there, but mostly just black bin bags spilling out the large bins. There were two guys who had been staring you down for a while, like you were something that needed saving. The second one of them approached and caught your lack of omega scent, they immediately groaned and just turned away.
You just stick your spoon back in your sundae, not even lifting your head the entire time, just letting the cold sweetness try and keep you together.
There’s a small noise as someone sits down beside you, a rustle of clothing, and then the soft click of a lighter. You turn your head, slightly surprised to find Ghost there instead of a random drunk bloke hoping to score a sweet thing. He meets your eyes but neither of you say anything as you go back to eating your sundae.
“Should’ve got the other one.”
“What?”
“The bigger one.” He shrugs, the cigarette hanging loosely between his fingers. “Price told us to order whatever.”
“This is the only one that can come in a takeaway cup.” You mumble and he doesn't say anything further, not even when you lick the spoon clean.
“Why are you here?” You ask, unable to keep silent anymore. It’s not like he actually came to see how you were, and you’re suddenly glad he didn't come ten minutes earlier when you were on the verge of bawling your eyes out.
“S’posed to be a team night.”
“Maybe for the Alphas.” You grumble and he cant help but hum alongside you, not arguing with you on that fact.
“Cant stand the smell, can ya? Got the takeaway cup cause you knew you’d need to go regardless.” Of course he figured it out immediately, though you’d think it’s impossible to read you given how some people treat you.
“You mad i’m not fawning over your scent?” You scoff and wipe your mouth with the back of your hand, making sure no chocolate sauce lingers— especially with how he’s watching you right now.
“Johnny is a stupid drunk, ‘lright?.” He mutters, a bit of bitterness in his tone that always lingers, but it’s not directly at you. “Price’ll convince you it’s just his instincts and all, looking after the omega.”
You look over at him and give him a deadpan look, the most honest you’ve ever been with the man. Usually you’re pretty agreeable, in fact the only time you’ve had a conflicts was when they got injured. Turns out you’re the only voice of reason whenever that happened, as the smell of the blood sent the rest of them into a spiral of worry.
And well, after that, he can't really blame you for being like this.
“I’m going.” You mutter, standing up and throwing the plastic cup in the bin before wiping your hands on your jeans.
To your surprise, he doesnt hesitate to follow you as you round to the front, heading to the little bus stop. It’s not the first time you’ve left early, but it is the first time someone’s made sure you’re alright by the end of the night.
————————
Soap only makes a quick apology which you’re forced to just accept,, because what else can you really do? Mess up a whole team because of one thing he said which wasnt that far from the truth?
As predicted, Price did try and tell you it was due to protective instincts, wanting the best for his omega. Right, the same instincts that made him leave you like you were dirt on his shoe.
Besides, life was getting busier for you as you now got passed between two teams. Either working with Ghost and Price or a different group of alphas. Passed around like a damn stress toy in your opinion.
“So we’re going to the one in the highstreet?” Gaz and Soap are chatting on the couch, not that you’re listening, just getting your things out the cupboard to make yourself a hot drink.
“My ‘mega loves it, craves the food there all the time. She’s gonna love meeting yours.”
Whatever, it wasnt the first time they’ve discussed plans in front of others. Wouldn't be the last.
“I’ll text the Captain and Ghost.” Soap adds, humming as he starts tapping away at his phone, opening their group chat you assume. One that you’re clearly not on, given that they dont invite you.
“You think he’ll even come?”
“He’s not that antisocial.”
“Yeah but he’s only one without an omega dumbass.”
The container you're holding clatters against the table and they both back to stare at you with the exact same wide eyed look you’re giving them. If he’s the only one then Price..
You walk out like nothing happened, even if you can feel the tears start to burn your eyes. It was all going so well, you were all happy together— werent you? So why?
The cycle repeats for the third time. You’re taken off another team, not deemed useful enough anymore. You congratulate Price when you next see him, and he doesn't say more than a thank you. Somehow it hurts more that he didn't purposefully tell you— he just forgot, like everyone else did.
You stopped coming by the rec room the last time the sergeants had a movie night without you. The texts between them and you ran dry, and after skipping one breakfast, you just never came back again. That’s just how it was now, and they didn't even reach out once. In fact, all of the last messages were from you. An unanswered question, a conversation cut short, or a text that just never even got opened.
Except for Ghost. He still spoke to you— well, as much as he’s known to anyway. A hello in passing, a chat between sets in the gym, maybe when you’re queuing for food. As much as you wanted to take the opening, you just couldnt, too terrified to. After all, it was only a matter of time until Ghost left you aswell. You should know that you should savour every last moment, cling onto it tight, but you just can't. It’s not like you two were ever the closest anyway.
——————-
You’ve been moved to an omega team this time. It’s not the first time you’ve worked with one, but usually they can balance each other out easier since they aren't as explosive as Alphas. It also means this is a mission you can't slip up on from the months of work they’ve put into this.
They welcome you immediately, and you grasp the ropes of it all fairly quickly, until it’s finally the day. The prisoners are right where you expected them, and just as told, the one in the middle has explosives strapped all over.
They evacuate the rest out whilst you kneel down before the explosives, watching the wires and where they turn and twist intently whilst the person tries their best not to squirm too hard. Even with your best efforts, nothing seems to match what you know but you frown as you notice the wire reaching towards the chair they’re bound to. Down to the floor.. a weak floorboard. The weight of the chair.. essentially a mine.
One hostage on that chair— you move her off and everyone dies. What do you even do?
“Do not stand up at any point, okay? I’m going to get you out, but you have to trust me.” Shrugging all the gear off, you cut the straps that locks the person to the chair.
You hand her your gear carefully and step back, just enough to reach the doorway. There’s no telling how large this bomb is, but you can assume it cant be enough to seriously damage the ship you’re on.
“Okay, you need to shuffle forward just slightly and place the gear behind you, okay? Then, when you’re ready, cover your head with your hands and run towards me.” The woman trembles, doing as you told and the weight of the gear seems to be a good enough trade off for the mine to not set off.
After that, she bolts, and you pull her through the doorway and as far away as possible, shielding her as the shockwaves rattles through the ship.
———————
Ghost hadnt expected to see his phone buzz at this time, by the infirmary no less. But when they relayed what happened, he had made his way there immediately. You had just come out of surgery, a high enough dose of anaesthesia in you that you just werent acting right. He intended to wait outside until you stabilised, that is until the nurse rushes out suddenly.
“Would you mind coming in, sir? We need someone to restrain them.”
He steps inside to see you squirming against another nurse, slurring and trying to escape your bed, clearly panicked.
“Stop that, you’re going to hurt yourself more.” He reaches for your flailing wrists, forcing the nurses out the way as they stand at the back and watch you get manhandled by the alpha.
Something in his gut feels uncomfortable with the stains of red across the bandages across your body, burns peeking out of some. So he carefully restrains your wrists against each other, holding them firmly.
“L-lieutenant?” You stammer out, dazed eyes searching for him intently until you manage to focus on his mask. Finally you stop freaking out for a moment. He turns but the nurses are already gone, probably called to another patient— the operation you were on had quite a few injuries for different reasons.
“Yeah, it’s me. Y’just came out of surgery, you’re okay now, alright?” He carefully lets go of your hands, helping you reposition yourself after you had tried to squirm off the bed. “I’ll grab the nurse, then we can see when we can get y’outta here.”
The nurse?
You blink at him, looking around at your surroundings, the sterile smell of the place attacking your nose. Simon was an alpha.. and the nurses, well specifically in this wing.. your eyes glance to the sign outside the door, the familiar writing.
“No- no you cant!” You barely manage to grasp his arm as he pulls away and he looks at you in confusion. The beeping in the room starts getting even louder than before, almost incessant and you feel like your chest is going to explode.
“Your heart rate is rising, sarge. You need help—“
“Lieutenant— no, please-“ You whine pathetically as he pulls away from you, leaving him stunned until he reluctantly steps closer again before you throw yourself entirely out of the bed to reach him.
“I wont let ‘em hurt you, promise.” He can only assume you must be scared of needles or something, a fear of medical care surely. He never knew that about you, and it spikes something in his chest, a cog in his head. The fear radiating off of you is palpable, and he can smell the faintest change of your scent in the air.
“No- no! The nurse— she’s an o-omega, you cant—“ You choke out, head getting dizzy from all the sudden movement as you desperately clutch his sleeve. It forces him to stay right there, not the grip on his sleeve but the desperation in your eyes.
“Sarge— i’m not gonna act like a wimp in rut from talking to an omega.” He huffs but he knows you’re out of it. It must be the anaesthetic getting to your head, making you say all these silly things.
“You’re going to leave me- you’re going to—“ A sob escapes you as grip loosens on him and he freezes, watching you curl into yourself. Your forehead gently hits his arm, tears wetting his sleeve.
“I’m right here.” He says, voice quieter and it makes him breathe relief when the beeping settles down to a steadier rate, even if it is still high and you look even worse like this— so lost and terrified.
“You are..” You sniffle, pressing your nose further against his arm. “t-the omega nurse- she- she’ll come and you’ll leave with her. You’ll leave me- a-and never speak to me again, please- lieutenant please.” Your hands tighten and he swallows sharply, letting your words sink in.
It was never about envy, not even the way you stared at them whenever they spoke about omegas. It was pure fear. And this feeling in his chest, it was tightening with each soft sniffle from you, instincts flaring. He’s never felt like this in his life, infact he was convinced he never would. But he just cant stand the sight of you like this— the bloodstained clothes, the fear in every small movement, your vulnerability.
He steps forward without thinking about it, his free arm gently prying you off of him until you fall back against the pillows. “Not leaving you for some random omega, you silly beta.” He scolds, picking you up off the bed until your head rests on his shoulder, sniffling into his shirt.
“Gonna take you where you belong. Gotta tell me if i hurt you, though.” Warmth spreads through him now that he has you against him like this. It clicks something in his brain he didn't know was waiting for a stimulant.
All that leaves your lips are the sobs that keep coming, staining his shirt, but finally settling now the dizziness has settled. “Dont go.. don’t, please, you cant..”
You’re right, he cant keep you around these omegas and all of this. No, he needs you to be healing properly around things you like— you want. He needs to look after his beta.
He grabs your duffel off the chair where it’s left, checking the corridor twice before marching through the quiet corridors towards the barracks.
