Nikprice x Graves is steady romance with heavy flirting, along with redemption .
Ghoap x Graves is begrudgingly acceptance and slow redemption and ever slower romance.
Alerudy x Graves is starting with pure physical attraction and hatred, no redemption and no remorse, with a chuck of toxicity, then 3/4 in maybe a speck of romance if any. ‘I will fuck as much as I want and then i’m hunting you for sport then skin you alive’ mixed ‘missionary so we can continuing arguing’ personified. Literally so much tension that if it had a physical form they would choke each other out with it. With Alejandro and Rodolfo, it’s nice and sweet with each other meetings are done, there’s peace…but when Phillip enters a room?
Arguments. Loud arguments that can last for hours and they end up not even knowing what they were arguing about in the first place. Snide remarks and curses left and right. A right hook on a good day, full on fighting on ground: punches, kicks, everything on a normal day, on the bad… no one likes to talk about it. At the end of the day (sometimes in the middle), they’re dragging him out and they’re probably not gonna be seen for atleast another 30 mins, no one knows if they’re fighting or fucking (most are pretty sure of both).
Would people crucify me if I said I really love Graves/Soap as a ship?
Like, there's so much angst you could do with it. Graves cares so deeply about his shadows, and what if he and Johnny started dating, what if Johnny became an honorary shadow. He becomes one of Graves' boys and Graves genuinely loves him. Sure maybe the relationship started as a way to get intel, a way to ingratiate Graves with the 141, to get deeper in their ranks. But somewhere along the lines he genuinely falls in love.
Johnny was patient and kind and clever, and pushed when he needed to, when helping Graves unpack his internalised homophobia. Johnny was raised catholic but had very much unpacked the bad shit that had left him with. He still considered himself Catholic, but he didn't practice it the way most people did. His catholicism was a kind of folk catholicism. Graves was raised southern baptist and only thought he was past what being raised that way had taught him because he didn't go to church anymore.
He still shakes like an abused dog the first time Soap kisses him.
Soap doesn't mind, though, he gets it, he was the same way the first time he ever kissed another man. He knows how to comfort Graves, he knows how to help him wrap his head around it and he refuses to let Graves push himself too far too fast in an attempt to save face in front of Soap.
Because the differences in their ages gets to Graves a bit too. Johnny's young, he's happy, he's confident in himself and his relationships and sexuality, and Graves is just past 40, but somehow he is the one stumbling through and messing everything up like he's thirteen and just kissed a girl behind the chapel for the first time after skipping Sunday school. Graves hates feeling so out of his depth. It should be the other way round! He's the older one of the two of them, he should be the one who knows what he's doing, the one with experience guiding Johnny through it... But he isnt.
Johnny's already unpacked his religious trauma and guilt while Graves just let it sit and simmer.
Johnny never makes him feel stupid, though. He never judges the stupid questions Graves asks, never makes fun of him for trying something and having it just not work out the way he thought it would.
Johnny makes him feel well and truly loved and appreciated.
Graves almost forgets why they got into a relationship in the first place, until he gets the order that they're going to be moving forwards with the mission, setting the next phase in motion within the month.
It feels like the floor got ripped out from under him. Graves spends the first day after getting the news in shock as he realises what he's going to have to do, then he spends the second day trying desperately to figure out a way to get around this. A way to make sure Soap doesn't get hurt. A way to make sure Soap doesn't realise Graves has been silently betraying him and the 141 from the start.
A way to make sure he doesn't lose Soap in any sense of the word.
He knows it's not possible to keep the 141 from finding out, and it's not possible to make sure Soap doesn't get hurt unless he can get Soap to switch sides.
So he starts planting the seeds, trying to subtly influence Soaps feelings, his loyalties, so that when the time comes he can hold his hand out and ask Soap to come with him, and he will.
He gets to that time, though, he holds his hand out, and Soap refuses.
Graves' whole plan, the future he let himself think they could have together, falls apart right then and there, and he can't do anything but order his Shadow's to do what they'd already been briefed to do. He can't do anything but watch them hunt Soap down, hoping to the god that Soap had helped him believe in, the real god, the good and kind and just god who loved all of his children including the queer ones, that no one would catch Soap, that he'd get away.
