First part ; “MacTavish’s Masterpieces”
It starts small like most of Soap’s habits do. Waiting on transport, stuck in briefing rooms, holed up in a safehouse where the electricity flickers too much for movies or video games. He gets restless. Give Soap a pen and a scrap of paper and he’ll fill it in minutes.
At first, it’s just his own forearm. Swirls, smiley faces, little cartoon skulls wearing helmets. Sometimes he’ll ink crude tattoos across his knuckles: “BANG” on one hand, “BANG” on the other. He shows them to Ghost with a grin, waggling his fingers like pistols. Ghost stares for three full seconds, then mutters “Child” and goes back to sharpening his knife.
When paper’s scarce, Soap uses mission notes. Price has pulled more than one briefing sheet out of Soap’s hands only to find half the margins cluttered with stick figures rappelling down the page or exaggerated caricatures of the squad.
“Bloody hell, Johnny, is that meant to be me?”
“Aye, Captain, that’s you. Look, I even gave ye the cigar!”
Gaz gets it the worst. Soap has a particular fondness for sneaking up on him and doodling on his kit. Little smiley faces on the side of a mag pouch, tic-tac-toe grids on his kneepads, sometimes even a cartoon duck hidden under the flap of a pocket. Gaz pretends to be annoyed, but he’s caught more than once laughing when he discovers a new one.
One time, Gaz marches into the safehouse with “KYLE WUZ HERE” scrawled across his helmet in block letters. “Soap!” he snaps. Soap, sprawled across a chair with his boots on the table, just beams. “What? Just makin’ sure no one mistakes ye for somebody else, mate.”
Price has to step in now and then. “MacTavish,” he growls, catching Soap mid-scribble on an ops report. “Do you mind? This goes to Command.” Soap shrugs sheepishly, but when Price flips the page later, he notices Soap has drawn a tiny cartoon version of him in the corner with a cigar in mouth, scowl on face and the caption ‘Papa Bear’. He doesn’t mention it, but he doesn’t throw it away either.
Even Ghost isn’t immune. He’ll strip his gloves off after a mission and find a doodled skull face drawn onto his palm in permanent marker. Or worse: he’ll wake from a rare nap to find Soap has painted a tiny mustache on his mask. The squad holds their breath, expecting Ghost to explode, but he just sighs deeply, pinches the bridge of his nose through the fabric and mutters, “You’re lucky I don’t kill you in your sleep.”
Truth is, no one really minds. The doodles make their way into photos, into memories, into the little moments that keep them human in between the fights. Soap never says it outright, but drawing keeps his hands busy, his mind steady. In a world where everything can go wrong in seconds, the lines he makes are his way of leaving marks that stay. Even after his death.
