Soap comes to and he's already walking. This on its own isn't entirely surprising because it's not the first time this has happened. There's just never enough time in the day. He finishes one thing, and then it's right onto the next; steadily marching from one task to another. When most of his life is spent walking, he learns to tune it out. Mental space better wasted on something else.
Present again in his own mind, he takes time for a perfunctory sit-rep. The skies are mostly clear, sparse clouds, and the forest around him is lush with foreign vegetation. He's traveling light, just basic gear and his firearm, a—
... hold on, he doesn't have a firearm. Scratch that, he doesn't have arms.
Soap stumbles, suddenly dizzy, and promptly trips over himself in a heap of new limbs, leaving his field of vision blocked by a wall of blue-grey that he has the horrifying realization is attached to him.
"What the fuck?" He starts, trying and failing to move his fingers or toes. "What the fuck?!"
He's echoed by Gaz somewhere behind and above him, a slightly higher-pitched "What the fuck?" And then, "Captain?!"
"Gaz?" Soap (lacking fingers or toes) wiggles a set of limbs, expecting arms and instead finds that he's stiltedly unfolding a set of wings he'd tangled himself in. He has wings. "Steaming fucking christ."
"Is that a fucking pegasus?" Asks Price, sounding far too calm for the situation at hand. It's quickly remedied when he adds, "Is that a unico—Fuck! What the fuck!" And, honestly, if the Captain is panicking then it's a very bad day indeed.
What seems like hours of shouting, swearing, and flailing pass in a slightly less than hysterical blur for all three of them before they're able to calm enough to take stock of the situation (beyond the well established fact that they all appear to be horses of some variation.)
"Why's Gaz the unicorn?" Soap asks, trying his damndest to distract himself from the very real stress of having two more legs and a total of four new limbs he's not used to. "That's Scotland's national animal, the fuck is a pegasus good for? It should have been me."
"Soap, Jesus Christ, Fuck off." Gaz doesn't look over at him, focused solely on his hooves, trying to stay upright without swaying. His fur (is it fur or hair on a horse? Soap never cared much for horses) is a deep violet, darkest along his spine, but his chest, belly, and legs below the knees are solid white. (Are those the knees? Or are those the ankles? Fuck, if he'd known this was in his future he'd've had a horse phase.) He is also, to Soap's irritation, a unicorn; the horn is the same color as his fur, and he has a little beard that matches his mane and tail, both tight and coily like his human hair.
"Don't think so hard about it," he advises, swallowing his own nausea from making the same mistake. Hypocrite, he is. Actually, he remembers hearing somewhere that horses can't vomit, and wonders dizzily if that applies to pegasi as well. "The movin', I mean. Y'ken what to do if you let your body do it."
"Muscle memory?" Gaz asks, incredulous and still a little hysterical. "How can I have fucking muscle memory when the body is brand new?"
Soap shrugs, then becomes hyper-aware of the fact that horses cannot shrug, despite the fact he just did, and is thrust head-long into another fit of nausea.
"No, you're not," says Price, with all the authority of his station. (If your Captain says you're not going to throw up, then by God you better keep a lid on it.) "He's right, though. It's best not to think too hard about how to move, just move and keep your head screwed on while you do it." Despite the surety of his tone, Soap can hear him huffing out every breath through his nose, almost snorting.
"Sir," he and Gaz acknowledge at the same time, and Soap even goes so far as to straighten his posture—solidly not thinking about what muscle groups he has to engage to do it. Just straighten up (and fly right—oh god.)
Soap doesn't know where to rest his gaze. Down, and he sees his hooves (upsetting), up and he sees Gaz and his Captain (also upsetting), too far up and he's just looking through the trees at a picturesque sky (not upsetting, but less than helpful).
"I'm gonna," he starts, then quickly falters, still lokking at the sky and unsure of what, exactly, he's gonna do. (Not vomit, that's for sure.) "Gonna... walk. Around. I'm gonna walk a perimeter." He sounds a little more steady as he realizes that's exactly the thing he needs right now—he needs to be alone for a moment, needs a minute to actually get his shit straight without being distracted by his teammates doing the same.
"Sergeant..." Price's warning tone is slightly strained, and though Soap is watching wind blow through the leaves, he doesn't hear any movement from the Captain's direction.
"I'm not an idiot, Captain, I won't be goin' far. Just need some air Gaz hasn't breathed first."
"Hey." The protest is weak, made more for a sense of routine than any real offense.
Soap obediently waits until he has the reluctant go-ahead from his Captain before he ducks off the beaten path and into the surrounding woodland.
It's easier to look around here, without the risk of catching a glance of some major discrepancy that'll make his stomach turn. He goes far enough that he can only catch glimpses of Gaz's purple coat through the trees before he turns and starts his perimeter.
It's slow-going. He’s trying to get used to looking down and seeing hooves instead of feet, and most his success comes from cataloging them like they belong to someone else, and not him. He notices they're cloven, like a cow's, and a blue so dark it's almost black. Further up, toward what he's decided to call his knees, his fur lightens to a mottled cerulean. Beyond that he's unsure—those observations had to be made in furtive glances because if he looked too long, he'd notice himself walking, and if he noticed himself walking he'd be sent stumbling and cursing into the underbrush.
He's able to notice other things about himself with detached curiosity; he doesn't have a horse's tail, and instead has large, wide tailfeathers, like a bird. When at rest, his wings settle snuggly against his sides, but if he properly relaxes them they droop toward the ground (this was another event that sent him stumbling into the underbrush. Moving naturally was one thing, but trying to single out a single set of limbs he hadn't been born with made him forget about his legs for a moment. The front set. Forelegs?)
Completing half his circuit finds him back on the dirt path, this time behind the Captain and Gaz, speaking in low tones as they put their heads together. Price's coat is a sort of green he doesn't quite know the name of, like the grass turf of a golf course after a bit of rain so there's some mud around the edges of everything. Like Gaz, his legs up to the knees are white, although he also has a diamond-shaped splotch over his shoulderblades. Lucky bastard seemed to be a normal horse, save for the fact his stupid mutton chops made it over somehow.
"If he can't have the hat, suppose it only makes sense he gets to keep his dick-tickler," Soap mutters as he crosses again from dirt path to dense foliage. It's only after a few seconds of no response that he realizes he was waiting for one at all.
Soap spins around, but the lieutenant isn't behind him (no other horses aside from himself, the Captain, and Gaz for that matter). He walks back out onto the path, but sees no sign of anyone or anything that could be Ghost, although Price turns around to give him a concerned look. (He's half convinced that he may be exaggerating the level of expressiveness his Captain has right now, but he's already committed to not thinking too hard about how his hindbrain interprets their situation.)
"Where's Ghost?" He already knows the answer, but Price's sudden look of alarm just confirms it.
