So, everyone knows about heats. I think the pre-heat is just as entertaining. Your body is about to go through this hormone driven, intense metabolic change for multiple days. So clearly, the body has to prepare to ensure it’s not gonna keel over. Soap and Reader have vastly different needs during their pre-heats, and it drives everyone crazy. Especially when your heats start to align.
I imagine Johnny is needier than usual. He wants to be around his mates, wants them in his nest, wants to steal the clothes off their back, wants to spend his time with them. He’s also constantly hungry. He’s a big guy, and he needs the energy. He’s constantly moving, wants to wrestle and play fight. Needs an excuse to be moving. The others can handle this fairly well. You can throw Johnny on a fighting mat and then feed him anything as long as it’s protein heavy, and he’s perfectly content. He’s verbal and often simply goes after what he wants.
Reader’s pre-heat needs are a little more subtle. Lots of rest and naps. Has specific preferences about what they will and won’t eat. Needs more space from the pack and any interaction needs to be on their terms. And your nesting behaviors look different. Less collecting and more organizing. Ensuring everything is where it needs to be. And you make your displeasure known, snipping and baring teeth if the others push too hard. It takes the pack a lot longer to adjust to this Omega’s needs, after having Johnny as their only responsibility.
John can be a bit heavy-handed at first. His brain keeps telling him to keep his omega comfy, so it feels like he’s hovering. But he prides himself on how well he keeps his pack, and he wants to take care of you just as well. And Gaz is similar where he’s trying to figure out what you need, but it leads to him overthinking. Johnny has a habit of bulldozing them, so there isn’t as much guessing involved. Hilariously, Ghost is probably the best at handling you. He’a simply accepted that if you need something, you’ll come around, and he understands needing boundaries on touch. So if you only came over for a brief hug or only want to sit beside him for a few minutes, that’s more than fine with him. He’s not one for midday naps, but he does like that when you want to take one you’ll curl up near him.
The biggest problem is truly between Reader and Johnny. Their opposing wants create a funny situation where Johnny is fucking annoying and Reader is doing their best to kill him. Nests are off limits but everything else is fair game. Soap’s favorite are surprise attacks where he’ll lay his full weight in them or haul Reader off their feet and refuse to let go. It’s a lot of goading on Johnny’s part and hissing and cursing from Reader. Soap likes being an asshole about it sometimes, likes it even more when he gets to pin Reader down.
Gaz is the most frequent one to break up these little fights. Ghost tends to watch and simply finds it amusing, might drag Johnny off if he notices him getting too excited. John has a habit of reteaching Johnny how to be nice to his fellow omegas.
I love the idea of Clan Mactavish as much as the next Soap enjoyer, but I also love the idea that Johnny has many issues with his family.
I like Soap who loves his family, but it always comes with a little asterisk at the end. He loves his family, but there are things that he can never forget. He loves his family, but he can only tolerate a weekend in his family home. He loves his family, but there’s only so many times he can hear a joke about his teenage “rebellion” before wanting to gnash his teeth. He loves his family, but he purposely is always “deployed” around Easter. He loves his family, but he tries to limit phone calls with his mom. He loves his family, but he and his dad have about three topics they can safely talk about. He loves his family, but he doesn’t like who he feels like he has to be around them.
Normal, safe, and happy 16 year olds don’t try to enroll in the army multiple times.
Soap absolutely got kicked out of his house as a teenager. If you asked him about the specifics of how it happened, it’s a mixture of things. Despite the fact that he showed so much promise, in Secondary he started to falter. Missing and failing classes. He falls into a “bad” group, at least that is what his parents think. He struggles with his parent’s high expectations and desire to control and mold him. He’s an angry kid with nowhere for it to go. And it all kind of collides into the world’s most dangerous train wreck when his mother catches him kissing the drummer boy from down the way.
It’s a vicious night. Full of yelling and shouting. His siblings are afraid, teary eyed and hidden around corners. It escalates and escalates until Johnny is stomping down the street with a half filled backpack and sporting bruises. The threat of the police being called and the shrieking demand that he can’t be like that under their roof rings in his ears.
He’s lucky to have friends with parents who allow him to couch surf, but that isn’t a longterm solution. Kindness and generosity run out, he knows that. It doesn’t lead him with many options. The military simply happens to be the best one.
I do think after he comes back from maybe his first or second deployment, his parents find him again. They’re sorry, regret treating him so poorly. Want to make amends, be better this time around.
And Johnny always imagined he would spit in their face, show how much he didn’t need them. But seeing his mom sobbing and begging honestly tears him apart more than he originally thought. And maybe he just wants the family that he used to have. So he offers to try and forgive them. That yeah, maybe he can make Sunday dinner work soon.
But I don’t think the bitterness ever goes away. He can’t ignore that their apology only came after he didn’t need them anymore. That they saw a struggling kid and turned him away. Left him to fend for himself. And that’s just something he can never really forget.
I feel like Johnny does haircuts around base. It’s kinda just something to do, a way to earn an extra spare few dollars with his clippers. But he’ll also accept alternative forms of payments. Cigarettes, drinks, favors, the rare blowie here and there. And Johnny gossips worse than his nan, loves that he gets all the fun little stories going around base. Swears that there’s some form of barber-patron confidentiality involved.
When Johnny is fucking you too good and you try to squirm away, he doesn’t drag you back under him. Rather he chases you. Follows your squirming and wriggling until he has you cornered and there’s no where for you to go.
I feel like Johnny enjoys the barracks. He grew up in a large family me thinks. Lots of siblings, lots nearby cousins, his house was hectic. Was used to random noise highlight his days and others doing their own thing in the space he existed in. So shifting to a barracks wasn’t that much of a challenge. Of course there are things he was annoyed by, people who he didn’t particularly care for. But nothing is as bad as the first night in his first apartment when it’s just him staring at the ceiling and the idle noise of his empty house rattled through his bones.
I think Johnny likes dumbing down his job. He tells people he makes things explode for a living, and that’s true, yeah. But he’s also an incredible chemist and engineer, he does math in his head that most people can’t do with a calculator. He’s mathing out rate reactions, half-life, chemical formulas and reactions, projection velocity, and so much more on a daily basis.
He says he does it so it doesn’t seem like he’s bragging. But he actually really likes the look people get when the realized they underestimated him but it’s too late.
