See you later
Hi guys! This is my first time writing anything call of duty related so don’t roast me too hard if it’s bad, this might become a series if the people like it? Anyways, hope you enjoy <3 COD Discord
Masterlist | Part 2
You have always hated goodbyes.
Not disliked them or found them awkward or uncomfortable or bittersweet in the way other people described them.
Hated them.
Because there was something unbearably final about the word itself.
Goodbye.
It sounded too much like surrender. Like acceptance. Like standing at the edge of something and quietly agreeing that this was the last time you would ever see it alive.
Goodbye meant endings.
And you had seen enough endings to last several lifetimes.
So, you stopped saying it years ago. Instead, you always said:
“See you later.”
It was small but hopeful words.
Because see you later implied continuation. It implied there would be a later.
Another briefing room crowded with exhausted soldiers nursing bitter coffee at four in the morning. Another mission where Soap talked too loudly over comms while everyone threatened to mute him. Another moment squeezed into the back of a transport aircraft with knees knocking together while engines roared loud enough to swallow fear whole.
It implied survival.
And in this line of work, survival became something sacred.
You started saying it after your first few deployments together, back when you were all younger, rougher around the edges, still carrying that fragile illusion that skill alone could keep death away.
Back then, you watched people vanish. One second, they were there beside you, laughing through smoke and exhaustion, complaining about ration packs or bad weather or whose turn it was to clean weapons.
The next?
Gone.
Just gone.
A body on the ground, bloodstain spreading too fast beneath tactical gear, and a voice that was cut off mid-sentence over comms that never answered again.
Sometimes there was not even a body.
Just silence.
God, the silence was always the worst part… because silence left room for hope long after hope should have died.
You learned quickly that war did not care who was loved. It did not care who had family waiting at home. And it certainly did not care who still had unfinished conversations or birthdays coming up or texts left unanswered on cracked phones tucked into lockers.
War took people anyway.
Without permission, cruelly and randomly. But the terrifying thing was how normal it became. How casually someone could exist one day and become memory the next.
Just a laugh echoing faintly in the back of your mind. A bunk left empty. A name nobody said out loud anymore because hearing it hurt too much.
So, you made “see you later” into a ritual.
A prayer disguised as something casual.
Every mission, every operation, and every time boots hit the ramp or helicopters thundered overhead or someone checked their rifle before walking into another impossible situation.
“See you later.”
Sometimes they answered.
Soap almost always did.
“Aye, don’t fall apart without me.”
Or
“Try not tae miss me too much, bonnie.”
Always grinning, like he could charm death itself into giving him another day.
Gaz would bump your shoulder as he passed, warm and solid and alive.
“Later.”
Price usually gave you one of those small nods, the kind somehow heavier than entire conversations. Like he understood exactly why you said it and respected you enough not to point it out.
Ghost rarely replied aloud, but eventually you learned the slight tilt of his head counted as acknowledgment. With him, silence was not absence but trust.
And even when nobody responded?
You still said it.
Every. Single. Time.
Because you needed to.
You noticed because somewhere along the way these men stopped being teammates. Stopped being fellow soldiers and became home.
And that was the dangerous thing.
Not bullets. Not knives. Not bombs or collapsing buildings or blood loss.
Love.
Love was the dangerous thing.
Because once you loved someone, fear changed shape. It stopped being about dying and instead about surviving without them. It made every “see you later” carried things you could never say aloud.
Come back to me.
Please come back to me.
Please let this not be the last thing I ever say to you.
You said it lightly every time, casually and habitual.
But inside, it felt desperate, especially before the bad missions.
The ones where tension sat heavy in the air before anyone even spoke. The ones where the helicopters sounded too loud and the night felt wrong somehow. The ones where everyone checked their gear twice and laughed a little harder than usual because deep down you all felt it, that terrible possibility hanging over your heads.
You always said it then.
Always.
Even if your chest ached with dread. Even if some horrible instinct whispered this might be the last time.
Because if you stopped saying it… if you gave in and said goodbye instead…
Then it would become real.
And God, you could not bear that.
Not with them.
You wanted more time.
Selfishly. Desperately.
More late nights after missions where exhaustion made everyone stupid and honest. More arguments over music in transports. More terrible instant coffee shared in safehouses while rain hammered against windows outside.
More moments. Just… more.
Nobody ever tells you how grief begins long before death arrives. It begins in the fear of losing someone, in watching them walk away not knowing if they will return. In memorizing voices and smiles and habits because some part of you is terrified one day memories will be all that remains.
And maybe that was why you hated goodbyes so much.
And soldiers knew better than anyone that final moments rarely looked important when they happened, sometimes the last conversation was about something meaningless.
Maybe it was naive to think words could hold people together. To think rituals mattered against something as merciless as war.
But you clung to it anyway.
Because hope was all soldiers really had in the end.
Hope and each other.
And somewhere along the years, through blood and smoke and sleepless deployments and impossible missions, the Task Force became something dangerous to your heart:
A family.
God, it was real.
The kind of real built from surviving things together that should have killed you, the real that forged in exhaustion and terror and loyalty so fierce it stopped feeling like choice after a while.
You never notice it happening at first.
But it happened slowly.
In little moments.
Price handing you coffee before briefings because remembered exactly how you took it without ever asking. Gaz saving you a seat beside him after rough missions because he knew crowds got too loud when your nerves were shot. Soap dragging everyone into stupid card games at ungodly hours because “morale matters, hen.” Ghost appearing silently beside you in hallways whenever thoughts kept you awake, neither of you speaking as you sat there in the dark pretending not to understand each other perfectly.
Tiny things. Tiny, dangerous things.
Until one day you looked around and realized these men had rooted themselves into every part of your life so deeply you no longer knew who you were without them.
Price became the closest thing you had ever known to a father. Not because he coddled anyone- God no. Price would rather walk barefoot through broken glass than admit tenderness out loud.
But he carried people. He carried all of you.
You saw it in the exhaustion carved permanently into the lines of his face. In the way he stayed awake long after everyone else slept, bent over mission reports beneath dim safehouse lights while cold coffee sat untouched beside him for hours.
The constant thinking, planning out everything and always trying to keep everyone alive. Even when it was killing him slowly.
You remembered waking up one night and finding him sitting alone in the kitchen of some freezing temporary base, reading casualty reports with his glasses low on his nose.
For a second he looked old.
Not Captain Price, the terrifyingly competent man who barked orders through gunfire like war itself answered to him.
Just tired and human.
Then he noticed you standing there and immediately straightened.
“You alright, kid?” As if you were the one he was worried about, and it was always that question that he would ask so quietly and sincerely. And maybe that was what hurt most now, that he cared so much. More than he ever let himself say aloud.
You remembered the brief pressure of his hand against your shoulder after brutal missions. The way he positioned himself between you and blame whenever operations went wrong. The way relief softened his expression every single time a headcount came back complete.
Each survival mattered personally to him, like losing even one of you would crack something inside him permanently…
Ghost was harder to explain.
How could you possibly explain Simon Riley to someone who had never known him? How could you explain that beneath the skull mask and the terrifying silence was one of the gentlest forms of devotion you had ever encountered?
Most people looked at Ghost and saw something terrifying, death wrapped in black fabric and bone-white skull markings, violence sharpened into human form, a man so quiet and cold and unreadable that he barely seemed human at all, like hell itself had carved the softness out of him and left behind only something dangerous enough to haunt battlefields and survive them.
You saw the man who quietly learned everyone’s habits without them noticing.
The man who remembered which floorboards creaked in safehouses so he would not wake exhausted teammates at night. The man who automatically positioned himself nearest exits because protecting people had become instinct. The man who checked your gear twice before missions without a word because his way of caring had always been practical.
He was silent, steady, and terrifyingly reliable.
Ghost never spoke about affection like other people did. Never offered soft words or easy reassurance or anything gentle enough to leave him exposed. Love – care - whatever fragile human thing existed beneath all that armour seemed to sit inside him like an old injury he refused to acknowledge out loud.
So instead, he cared practically, quietly, in ways small enough to deny if anyone pointed them out.
You noticed it eventually.
The extra ammunition magazine silently slid across the table toward you because he had noticed your supplies running low before you had. The way he stood just close enough during briefings for your shoulders to brush occasionally, as if proximity itself had become unconscious.
The way his eyes tracked you during firefights, always covering your six without needing to be asked, always making sure you were still moving, still breathing, still alive beneath all the chaos.
You remembered one winter deployment where you got sick and tried hiding it because everyone was already exhausted enough already; the next morning, medicine appeared beside your bunk without explanation, no note or conversation, just the quiet understanding that Ghost had noticed anyway.
When you went looking for him, you found Ghost nearby cleaning his knife like he had not done anything at all, movements slow and deliberate, as if he’d simply returned to routine instead of checking on you.
When you looked at him, he only muttered, “Need you operational.”
Like it was nothing more than practicality. Like it didn’t matter.
But he stayed close after that.
Closer than usual.
And his eyes never quite met yours.
And maybe that was the truth of Simon Riley.
Because he would never call it care, never name it as anything softer than necessity. But it was there, in the way he adjusted his position without thinking so you were never left exposed, in the way he lingered just long enough after speaking to make sure you were steady, in the quiet habit of remaining within reach even when he had no reason to.
He didn’t offer affection.
He didn’t know how to.
So instead, he showed it in what he did.
And for Ghost, that was as close to love as anything ever got.
While Gaz was the kind of presence you only truly understood after imagining what life would feel like without him in it.
Because when Kyle Garrick was around, everything seemed a little easier to carry. Not easier in the sense that the danger disappeared. Missions still went wrong. People still got hurt. The nightmares still came. The weight of the job still sat heavy on everyone's shoulders.
But somehow, whenever you talked to Gaz, the world felt less overwhelming. In a way it was calmer, like stepping inside after standing too long in a storm.
There was something grounding about him. Something refreshingly human in a profession that constantly demanded pieces of your humanity in exchange for survival.
You could walk into a room carrying the worst day of your life on your shoulders, and somehow a ten-minute conversation with Gaz would leave you feeling like you could keep going.
Not because he fixed things but cause he listened. Really listened.
The kind of listening that made you feel seen rather than observed, made you feel important without him ever having to say so.
With him there, the world never felt lighter exactly, but it felt managed. Held together at the edges in ways you did not notice until you looked back and realized how many times everything should have fallen apart.
Not like Soap’s chaos, all loud laughter and reckless optimism that spilled into every corner of a room. Not like Price’s command, solid and immovable, shaping the world around him through sheer authority. Not like Ghost’s silence, heavy and watchful, pressing against everything like a shadow that never fully left.
Gaz was something else entirely.
He was softer but not too soft, quieter but not too quiet. Easier to miss, until you realized he was the reason things did not collapse.
He was the balance point.
The one who noticed tension before it snapped, before voices rose too high, before anger turned into something irreversible. The one who would shift his stance slightly in a room so that he was between people without making it feel like intervention, like he was simply… there, and somehow that was enough to change the temperature of everything.
You noticed it in fragments, always after the fact.
The way arguments softened when he stepped into them, not by overpowering anyone, but by making space where there had not been any. The way he would lean back slightly in briefing rooms so someone else, usually the quietest, the most overlooked, would have room to speak without feeling watched.
The way he made it look unintentional, as if care was just something he accidentally did while existing. Gaz paid attention in a way that never asked for credit, never asked to be seen doing it.
He just… saw people.
And acted accordingly.
And he did so with efficiency, quietly correct and constant.
And somehow, he remembered everything that mattered in ways that made you feel less like a soldier and more like a person who still had a place in the world.
What music helped you sleep after bad deployments.
Who skipped meals when stress got too high.
The exact shift in your voice that meant you were pretending you were fine when you were not.
Gaz never once announce any of it, just adjusted around it, like the world was something he was constantly, carefully holding in place so it would not break apart on anyone.
There were nights after missions where everything felt wrong in your body, adrenaline refusing to leave your bloodstream, hands still half-shaking, ears still full of distant gunfire that was not actually there anymore.
And you would never forget how Gaz would just appear, two cups in hand, always something warm. Sitting down beside you like he had nowhere else to be and no reason to leave.
No questions. No pressure. No expectation that you explain what could not be put into words anyway.
Just company that did not demand anything from you. That alone was enough to make breathing easier again. And sometimes, he would sit in silence for long stretches, elbows resting on his knees, staring forward like he was giving your thoughts somewhere to land without forcing them to take shape.
And when he did speak, it was never heavy.
Like, “You made it back,” said as if that alone was worth acknowledging.
Or, “We’re still here,” said like it was not reassurance, not really, just fact and something grounding.
Somehow, that was what made it hit hardest.
Because Gaz never tried to convince anyone they were okay.
He just made sure they weren’t alone in the parts where they weren’t.
He didn’t erase the weight of what they carried.
He just made it easier to hold.
And in a unit built on orders and silence and survival and the kind of violence that followed you even after the guns stopped firing, Gaz was the reminder that none of them had stopped being human in the middle of it all.
Soap though...
Soap loved loudly, not in the way people usually think of love, not through carefully chosen words or heartfelt speeches, but through every laugh he shared, every shoulder he bumped against yours, every arm slung around someone after a difficult day, and every relentless attempt to make the people he cared about smile even when the world was doing its best to break them apart.
Johnny MacTavish simply moved through the world with so much life inside him that everyone around him felt warmer for standing nearby.
He crashed into people's lives like sunlight breaking through storm clouds after weeks of endless rain.
When Johnny entered a room, something changed.
Things felt brighter, louder and more alive.
He had a way of filling every space he stepped into without ever demanding attention. Every hallway echoed with his laughter. Every briefing room somehow became less suffocating when he was in it. Every transport ride felt shorter. Every safehouse felt less lonely.
Even silence struggled to survive around Johnny MacTavish.
You always knew when he was nearby.
Usually, you heard him before you saw him.
A burst of laughter from somewhere down the corridor. A familiar Scottish accent carrying through walls. The sound of someone, usually Ghost, telling him to shut up, followed immediately by Johnny talking even louder.
Sometimes it was Gaz threatening to throw his speakers out a window after Johnny blasted music at six in the morning.
Sometimes it was Price pinching the bridge of his nose while Johnny cheerfully made a stupid joke while he instructs him to behave professionally.
His stories somehow became more outrageous every time he told them. His jokes were often terrible and occasionally painful enough to earn groans from the entire room, yet somehow everyone still ended up laughing anyway.
Because half the joke was Johnny himself.
The way his eyes lit up when he was telling a story, laughing before reaching the punchline. How he seemed genuinely delighted whenever he managed to make someone smile.
He carried energy with him everywhere he went, and before you realized it, everyone around him was carrying a little of it too.
That was his gift.
Not making people forget their problems but making them remember there was still life beyond them.
You could be exhausted.
Angry.
Hurting.
Running on two hours of sleep, too much caffeine, and sheer stubborn refusal to collapse. You could come back from a mission carrying images you never wanted to see again.
And somehow… Johnny would still get a laugh out of you.
Not because he ignored how difficult things were.
Quite the opposite.
Johnny understood hardship better than most people ever would, clear idea of what war did to people. He too knew how it settled inside your bones, how easy it was to become consumed by grief, anger, guilt, fear.
The temptation to let the darkness have you.
However, he fought against it every day in the only way he knew how.
With laughter, warmth, and an almost stubborn determination to find joy anyway.
You remembered firefights where bullets cracked through the air close enough to kill all of you, and somehow Johnny was still talking over comms, still joking and finding ways to make people laugh.
Because if hearing him joke for thirty seconds stopped a teammate from panicking, then he'd keep talking.
If hearing him laugh made someone remember to breathe, he'd keep laughing.
If being ridiculous dragged people back from the edge for even a moment, then he'd gladly become the punchline.
Johnny had an extraordinary ability to make survival feel like something worth celebrating.
To him, survival was never just about making it through missions alive—it was about everything that came afterward too. A hot meal after weeks of terrible field rations. A decent cup of coffee found in the middle of nowhere. A few uninterrupted hours of sleep. The first sunrise after a long operation. The sound of laughter filling a safehouse. A headcount where every name was answered and every seat at the table was still occupied.
He celebrated those moments because he understood exactly how fragile they were.
He knew how quickly they could disappear.
Maybe that was why people gravitated toward him so easily. Johnny had a way of reminding everyone around him that life was more than the next objective, the next firefight, or the next deployment. He made people stop and appreciate the things they still had instead of constantly mourning what they might lose.
And when you were around him, being alive felt like something more than survival.
It felt meaningful.
Like every extra day was a gift rather than a guarantee.
Like every laugh, every conversation, every shared meal and late-night story was something worth treasuring.
Johnny made you remember that there was still beauty in the world, even after everything you had seen.
And God-
You missed him afterward.
Missed it with a physical ache so severe it sometimes felt impossible to breathe around.
A hollow ache lodged somewhere beneath your ribs that no amount of sleep, work, distraction, or time could touch.
Some mornings you woke up and for one brief, merciful second forgot.
Then reality would catch up.
And you'd have to lose him all over again.
You missed the sound of his boots approaching down hallways before he came into view. Missed hearing his laughter from three rooms away. Missed the way his Scottish accent grew thicker when he was tired, words blurring together during late-night conversations until you had to ask him to repeat himself.
You missed the way he leaned far too close during briefings, invading everyone's personal space until Ghost physically shoved him away.
You missed all the little things you never thought to appreciate because you had assumed there would always be more time.
You missed the life in him.
Because Johnny had been so alive.
That was what made his death unbearable.
People like Soap weren’t supposed to die.
Not really.
Your mind rejected it instinctively because Johnny had survived everything before.
Explosions that should have killed him.
Gunshots that should have killed him.
Blood loss that should have killed him.
Operations so catastrophically doomed that surviving them felt less like skill and more like divine intervention.
And every single time, somehow, he came back.
Bruised.
Bleeding.
Exhausted.
But grinning.
Always grinning.
Always laughing.
Always acting like death itself had taken a swing at him and missed.
So, after enough years, something dangerous happened inside you.
You started believing Johnny would always walk back through the door because he always had before. You started believing some people were simply too alive to die, too stubborn, too bright, too damned impossible to be taken by something as ordinary and cruel as death.
And that was the lie the universe let you live inside, right up until it tore it away.
The tunnel had already begun to feel like a grave before the end came.
The air was thick with smoke and concrete dust, each breath tasting of gunpowder and heat, the metal walls around you shuddering with every distant blast and every heavy footfall overhead. The whole place trembled like it knew something terrible was coming. Everyone was already running on raw nerves, the mission collapsing in real time in the way operations involving Makarov always seemed to: fast, vicious, and with the kind of precision that made panic feel inevitable. Price was ahead, shouting orders over the chaos, trying to force structure into something already falling apart. Ghost had the rear. And Soap - Johnny - was still at your side in the dark, his voice cutting through the static with that familiar, forced brightness, trying to keep the fear from taking root in any of you. Almost making it work.
Almost.
Then Makarov’s men struck.
The ambush hit like a hammer. Gunfire detonated through the tunnel, deafening and merciless in the tight enclosed space, each shot ricocheting off concrete until the whole world became noise, shouts colliding over comms, boots scraping over shattered stone, debris raining down from above in choking clouds. You remembered turning, heart lurching before your mind could catch up, and seeing him there: Makarov, calm and cold in the middle of the firestorm, looking less like a man and more like something rotten wearing a man’s face. He ordered his men to hold back.
To leave the rest to him.
This was personal… he wanted to savor it… killing them was not enough unless he could watch it happen himself.
Price had just reached for the bomb when the shot rang out.
One for Price. One for Soap.
Both hit in the shoulder, both thrown violently backward by the force of it, both swallowed by the chaos in the same horrifying heartbeat. Price hit the ground hard, gritting through the pain, still trying to crawl toward the device. Soap staggered, blood already darkening through his gear, and for one awful second it looked like he had been knocked out, body going slack in the tunnel’s flickering light. Makarov moved in immediately, stepping over the wreckage like he had all the time in the world, pinning Price down with brutal ease while Price snarled and fought beneath him, refusing to die quietly even with a gun in his face. Makarov taunted him then, voice cold and smug, telling him he would carry his hatred to hell with him.
“Never bury your enemies alive.”
The words hung in the air like a curse.
Then Soap moved.
Despite being shattered and bleeding. No… even dragged almost beyond the edge of consciousness, Johnny forced himself upright with the kind of stubborn, impossible fury only he could summon, because that was Soap, because even at death’s door he still found a way to throw himself between the people he loved and the thing trying to kill them.
He lunged at Makarov, knife flashing in the tunnel light, and for one breathless moment hope stabbed through the darkness like a blade of its own. You saw him reach, catching Makarov. Saw the fight reignite in him even as blood ran down his arm.
And then Makarov twisted.
So fast. So cruelly.
He caught Soap’s arm, turned him, and the movement was almost casual, almost bored, as if Johnny’s last act of defiance had only inconvenienced him.
The shot came next, close enough to feel intimate, close enough that your body remembered it before your mind could bear to.
One brutal crack and violent flash… a final sound.
Johnny’s body jerked once in Makarov’s grip and then went slack, collapsing onto the tunnel floor as if the life had been cut clean out of him.
The sound Price made, like a raw and broken animal, split through the tunnel after him, and somehow that hurt almost as much as the sight itself. Because Price did not sound like a captain then. He sounded like a man watching his son die in front of him.
And you-
you stopped breathing.
Because there, in the wreckage and smoke and screaming and blood, was the shape of something that should not have been able to happen.
Soap on the ground.
Johnny gone still.
No more voice over comms. No more stupid grin. No more warmth, no more laughter, no more him leaning too close and filling every silence in the world with life.
Just the awful, impossible fact of him lying broken beneath the flickering tunnel lights while the whole world kept moving around him like nothing sacred had just been torn apart.
Your body moved before your mind could.
You were at his side so fast your knees slammed into the concrete, pain erupting through your legs and vanishing under something far worse. Your hands were already on him, already trying to press down, already trying to hold together what could not be held. The blood was everywhere, too much of it, warm and slippery and impossible, soaking through your gloves, pooling beneath him in dark ribbons across the shattered floor. Your hands shook so violently you could barely keep them in place. You could hear yourself begging before you even realized you were speaking.
“Johnny-please-!”
“Johnny, please- please stay with me- ”
His body twitched once beneath your hands.
Just once.
And then-
nothing.
There was nothing he could answer with.
No teasing.
No joke.
No voice at all.
Just stillness.
The stillness seemingly telling you everything before your mind is ready to understand it.
And when the tunnel finally stopped echoing around you, when the gunfire blurred into the distance and the smoke and dust settled enough for reality to reach you, all that remained was the unbearable certainty that Johnny MacTavish was gone. That Makarov had not just killed a man. He had taken the light out of the room. He had taken the noise. The warmth. The proof that joy could survive in a world like this.
And in the worst, most devastating part of it all, the body in front of you was still so heartbreakingly him that some ruinous part of your heart kept trying to believe he might open his eyes and laugh at you for falling apart.
But he did not.
And the tunnel, cruel and cold and still trembling with the aftermath, kept proving it over and over again.
Soap was dead.
And nothing in the world would ever feel untouched after that.
Following Soap’s death, there was no way to make any of it feel real, not even when his ashes were placed into Ghost’s hands and the four of you stood in the cold breath of Scotland as if the land itself had been waiting to take him back.
Ghost carried the urn.
You couldn't stop staring at it.
Fuck.
Such a small thing.
It shouldn't have been that small.
Years of laughter.
Years of friendship.
Years of loyalty and stubbornness and warmth and life.
Reduced to something a person could hold in their hands.
It felt wrong.
It felt impossible.
The wind was sharp that day, carrying salt and sea spray across the Scottish hills in restless gusts that tugged at coats and made silence feel heavier than speech, yet beneath it all there was a strange, aching peace, golden sunlight breaking through the clouds and spilling across the coastline in soft, trembling rays, as if the world itself was trying, gently, to say goodbye.
Ghost stood at the edge of the wind with the urn held steady in one hand, as if even the smallest tremor might undo him. Price stood beside him, rigid and silent in that way that meant he was holding everything in. Gaz lingered a step closer than usual; eyes fixed on the horizon like looking at anything else might break him apart.
One by one, you stepped forward.
Price went first, hand resting on the urn, his words low and rough, barely more than a promise carried into the wind. Gaz followed, offering a few quiet words that wavered at the edges but never broke.
Then it was your turn.
You didn’t trust yourself with anything long. Just a breath, a pause, your hand pressed against the cold surface as if it could somehow reach him through it.
“I’ll see you later, Johnny,” you said softly.
Nothing more. Nothing elaborate. Just truth, stripped down to its simplest form.
For a moment, nobody moved.
Then Ghost finally spoke, his voice low and fractured in a way none of you were used to hearing from him.
“Rest easy, Johnny...”
And with that, he opened and tipped the urn forward.
The ashes caught the wind immediately breaking apart, scattering across the Scottish air like they had been waiting for it. Golden light spilled through the clouds as they drifted away, dissolving into the coastline, into the sky, into something impossibly vast.
Gone.
And still somehow everywhere.
It sits behind your ribs and claws at your throat and turns every breath into something ragged and painful. You turned your face away, blinking hard against the sting in your eyes, trying to force the tears back down where they had no right to be, trying to be stoic for one more second, one more minute, one more unbearable moment.
The unbearable, gutting absence of a man who had once been loud enough to make silence feel impossible, now reduced to drifting dust in his own homeland while the people who loved him stood helpless and broken and trying not to shatter in front of one another.
You wanted to reach for him.
Wanted to tell him to come back.
Wanted, absurdly, to believe that if you just stood there long enough in the Scottish wind, maybe something of him would still return.
But all you had was the ache in your chest, the wet heat threatening behind your eyes, and the knowledge that no matter how tightly you held yourself together, Johnny was not coming back.
So, you stood beside his ghosts of home and grieved him in silence, with your heart cracking open one careful, brutal piece at a time.
Afterward, your mind refused to accept that he was gone.
It simply would not hold.
Not properly.
Not in any way that made sense.
For weeks, you kept expecting Johnny to appear the way he always had. You would glance down corridors and expect to see him leaning casually against a wall, arms crossed, that infuriatingly familiar grin already forming like he had been waiting for you to notice him.
In the mess hall, you would half-turn before remembering there was no one there to call your name over the noise.
In the barracks, you would pause at doorframes where he used to stand, as if your body still believed he would step into the space beside you at any moment and make everything feel normal again.
“Miss me, hen?”
The words never really stopped. They echoed in the back of your mind the way real sounds do when they have been heard too many times to fade.
You told yourself it was not hallucination. It was worse than that, a memory refusing to stay buried.
And everywhere you went afterward, you could feel it.
His traces didn’t disappear just because he did.
Some nights, someone would turn on the shared speakers and one of his playlists would start playing without anyone meaning it to. His hoodie stayed slung over the back of a chair for weeks, then months, because no one could bring themselves to move it. It became easier to pretend he might still come back for it than to accept what it meant to put it away.
Gaz found one of Johnny’s half-finished notes once, wedged carelessly inside a weapons manual, messy handwriting, half jokes, half plans, something unfinished and casual like he would just step out for a moment and would be back to finish it later.
Gaz didn’t say anything.
He just left the room.
And locked himself in a bathroom afterward, you pretended you could not hear the soft sniffles through the door.
Nobody coped well.
Nobody even came close.
Price tried.
At first, he tried to hold it together the way he always did, through discipline, through routine, through forcing the world into shape with sheer willpower. But it didn’t last. Eventually it just became work, endless work, until exhaustion hollowed him out into something quieter, sharper, more distant. He stopped speaking unless necessary. Stopped lingering in rooms. Stopped looking at things too long.
Ghost became quieter in a way that defied logic.
There were no jokes left to shut down. No chaos to correct. Only absence.
He lingered outside Soap’s old room sometimes at night, standing just out of sight of the doorway like proximity itself was something he could still maintain even if he never stepped inside.
Without Soap, that rhythm collapsed.
For you, mornings became a kind of punishment, because waking up meant returning to a world that had learned how to function without him in it.
Sometimes your mind still forgot.
That was the cruelest loop of all.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Until hope stopped feeling like comfort and started feeling like injury.
And still, somehow, in the middle of all that breaking, you tried.
At first, it was small things, like small reminders and check-ins.
Sitting beside people instead of letting them isolate. Talking when silence got too heavy. Bringing food no one wanted to eat but everyone needed anyway. You did not fix anything- not really -but you kept people from falling completely apart.
You became the thread that held what was left together, even if your own hands were shaking while you did it. Because deep down, you felt like this was what Soap would have wanted.
And it worked.
Slowly, painfully, it worked.
They started talking again. Price started leaving his office before midnight. Gaz’s laughter returned in fragments, small at first, like something remembering how to exist. Ghost stopped standing so far away from everyone.
The team started functioning again, not healed, not whole, but moving.
And for a brief stretch of time, you let yourself believe that maybe this was how grief was supposed to be carried, not alone and buried, but shared until it became bearable.
But Johnny was only the beginning.
That was the cruellest part.
It did not happen all at once, not in some sudden, merciful wave that would have shocked you into numbness and ended there. It happened the way grief always seemed to happen in your world, like a wound that kept reopening before it could ever close.
If they had all gone together, maybe it would have been simpler somehow. Maybe one terrible blow would have been easier to survive than a thousand smaller ones, each one stripping away a piece of the life you had built until there was almost nothing left to hold.
But it wasn’t like that.
It never was.
Instead, they disappeared one by one.
It was Ghost next, as if a part of him had gone with Johnny that day in the tunnel and the rest had simply taken longer to catch up.
You remembered the mission he died on with painful clarity, the kind that never fades no matter how many years pass.
Rain came down in sheets, turning the industrial rooftops into slick black mirrors that reflected the red pulse of distant alarms. Gunfire cracked through the dark in sharp, brutal bursts, ricocheting off metal and concrete until the entire world sounded like it was breaking apart.
You and Ghost had been separated from the others during extraction. You were already hurt, limping badly, blood running warm beneath your gear, every breath burning in your lungs, but Ghost had stayed behind anyway, holding the line so you could get out.
Of course.
That was Simon Riley beneath the mask and the silence: a man who never spoke of loyalty, never softened, never made promises, and yet would bleed, break, and die before letting someone else take his place, if given the chance.
You remembered shouting at him to move.
You remembered reaching back for him through the rain and the smoke.
Then the shots came.
Too many.
Ghost staggered once. Then again. The sound he made was not dramatic, not cinematic, not anything a battlefield would have turned into legend. It was worse than that.
It was human.
A sharp inhale that sounded like his body had forgotten how to keep functioning.
Blood bloomed dark beneath his tactical gear, washed thin by the rain as it streamed over him in cold, relentless lines. And still… still… he kept firing. Even with his movements growing slower. Even with his knees beginning to give. Even with death already reaching for him from the dark.
He kept protecting you.
Even while dying.
“Go!”
The word tore through the storm like an order and a plea all at once.
You did not want to leave him.
You never wanted to leave him.
But Ghost looked at you with something fierce and raw behind those dark eyes and shouted again, louder this time, as if volume alone could force you to survive:
“Move!”
So you did.
Because he told you to.
Because some part of you still believed that if you got back up fast enough, if you moved fast enough, if you just did everything right, maybe he would still be there when you came back.
But when you returned… he was already gone.
The skull mask stared blankly toward the sky, rain washing the blood from his face into the gutters below. He looked unreal for a second, like a body left behind by something too stubborn to die. You dropped beside him so hard your knees split open against the concrete. Your hands shook so badly they barely worked, fumbling for a pulse you already knew you were not going to find.
“Ghost…I’m…I’m so sorry…”
Nothing.
No response. No movement. No quiet hum of breath behind the mask. Nothing.
And then that awful sound came out of you, the one that is not quite a sob and not quite breath, just grief clawing its way up through the ruins of your throat because your body cannot contain what your mind refuses to accept.
Ghost died with his rifle still aimed at the enemy.
He died doing what he always did.
Protecting.
After that, Price started to look old.
It happened gradually, like the grief had begun carving itself into him one sleepless night at a time. His hair silvered more at the temples. The lines around his eyes deepened. His shoulders carried themselves lower. Sometimes you caught him staring at old photos when he thought no one was watching, team pictures, rough jokes frozen in time, the kind of evidence that you had all once been whole.
There were so few of you left by then.
Just you. Price. Gaz.
The last scraps of a family war had not completely taken yet.
Price became more protective after Ghost died, if such a thing was even possible. He hovered. He watched. He checked routes twice, then again. He stayed near exits, near windows, near the edges of rooms like he thought vigilance alone could bargain with fate. Like keeping watch hard enough might persuade the world not to take anyone else.
But fate had never cared about vigilance.
Only hunger.
The mission that killed him happened in Prague.
Smoke curled through shattered buildings while enemy fire closed in from every side. The city was a ruin of broken glass, collapsing walls, and alarms that screamed into the night. Gaz was bleeding from the shoulder and trying to return fire through the dust-choked street while you both fought to keep the extraction point in sight.
Then the route went dead.
Collapsed. Blocked.
No way out.
Price realized it first.
Of course he did.
There was a second, just one, where his eyes met yours across the chaos, and in that single look, you knew.
“No.”
The word broke apart in your mouth before it could even become a sound.
Price looked at you, and for a moment all the authority seemed to fall away. His face was smeared with ash, blood trailing down one side of his jaw, his eyes carrying a weariness that went far deeper than fatigue. He looked like a man who had survived too much, buried too many people, and somehow still found the strength to worry about everyone except himself.
“Get out of here. Both of you.”
“Captain, we're not leaving you-”
“Yes, you are. That's an order.”
Gunfire thundered closer. The walls shook. Somewhere overhead another section of the building gave way with a sharp, grinding groan. Price shoved spare ammo into Gaz’s hands, then grabbed your vest so hard your breath caught.
There was blood on his face. Dust in his beard. Years of war in his eyes.
And still he smiled, fucking, how could he still smile at you?
“You did good, kid.”
Your chest caved in around the words.
“No- no, we can still-”
“You listen to me.”
His voice sharpened, then softened immediately after, as if he could not bear to waste one last second being anything other than himself.
“Live.”
God.
That word destroyed you.
Because suddenly you understood that he already knew. Price already knew he was not walking out of that building. He was staying behind so you and Gaz could escape, just like Ghost had. Just like Soap had. Always the same kind of love. Always the same kind of sacrifice. Always choosing everyone else first.
You screamed for him while Gaz dragged you toward the route out. You remember Price firing until the sound of his rifle stopped. You remember the explosion that followed, violent enough to throw you and Gaz to the ground outside while fire swallowed the upper floors whole.
And somewhere inside that blaze, John Price died alone. The man who had carried everyone else until there was no one left to carry him.
Afterward, Gaz broke in slow motion.
But he held himself together for you.
Because that was Gaz.
Even when he was falling apart, even when something in him had clearly already cracked beyond repair, he still made sure you did not see the worst of it first. Still asked if you were okay before he admitted he wasn’t. Still stood a little straighter in rooms where the air felt too heavy, like posture alone could keep everything from collapsing.
But you saw it anyway.
The quiet unraveling.
The way exhaustion stopped looking like fatigue and started looking like something hollowed out from the inside. How he’d sit awake long after the safehouse went dark, elbows on his knees, staring into nothing like sleep had become a place he no longer trusted to return from. Sometimes you’d find him in the same position hours later, unmoving, as if blinking might finally let everything catch up to him.
Other nights, it was worse. The silence between you both.
No Soap to fill it. No Ghost cutting through it. No Price grounding it.
Just Gaz breathing slowly beside you like he was trying not to disappear. You were all each other had left by then.
Not a unit anymore.
Not really.
Just two people trying to survive the shape of what had been taken from them. Two survivors wandering through the ruins of a family that used to feel too loud and alive… too impossible to break.
And you kept the habit.
Because habits are what soldiers cling to when meaning is gone.
Before every mission, you said it.
Even when your throat tightened around the words, when it felt like if you said it too softly, it might not count.
“See you later.”
Gaz always answered. Always.
Even when his voice was flat with exhaustion. Even when his eyes did not quite focus the way they used to. Even when you could see, in the smallest flickers, that he was saying it more like a promise he was trying to convince himself of than a certainty he believed.
“See you later.”
But the mission that took Gaz still happened.
A collapsed structure during an evacuation after a bombing.
You remember the sound first, the building groaning around you, concrete screaming overhead, metal tearing itself apart in a language older than fear. Smoke rolled through the hallways in thick gray waves. Somewhere nearby, civilians were crying, deeper inside, gunfire still echoed.
Then the ceiling gave way.
You saw it happen a second too late.
A support beam cracked with a sound that made your whole body freeze, and before your mind could catch up, Gaz had already moved. He shoved you hard enough to send you stumbling clear of the falling debris, and you hit the ground on the other side of the collapse just as the world came down where he had been standing.
“Gaz!”
Dust swallowed everything.
You clawed your way back, choking, screaming, dragging broken pieces of concrete aside until your hands split open and bled. The rubble was too heavy. The smoke was too thick. People were shouting for you to back off, shouting that the structure was unstable, shouting that you were going to get yourself killed.
You did not care.
Gaz was in there.
Gaz had been warm thirty seconds ago. Still breathing. Still talking. Still there.
You could not lose him too.
Not him too.
Not the last voice that still answered when you called into the dark.
But when they finally pulled him free, his body was already cold.
And something in you gave way for good.
Because Gaz had been the last one.
The final soft answer. The last living proof that “see you later” still meant anything at all.
After that, the silence was total.
No more laughter in hallways. No more arguments at the table. No more terrible music in the barracks. No more late-night coffee in too-cold kitchens. No more family dinners at impossible hours after surviving another operation no one should have survived.
Just empty rooms haunted by the shape of people who had once loved you enough to die.
And the worst part?
You survived them all.
Every single one.
Which meant every morning afterward became another act of remembering.
Soap’s laugh. Ghost’s steady silence. Price’s tired pride. Gaz’s gentle smile.
Gone.
Gone.
Gone.
And no matter how many times you whispered it into the dark…
“See you later.”
…none of them ever came back.
In the end, you died the way soldiers like you often did, alone in the wreckage, far from home, far from anyone who could have held your hand through the last few breaths, and with the kind of silence that made your sacrifice feel almost unbearably small compared to everything you had given up to reach that moment.
It happened in the middle of a hostage extraction, in a city so cold the air itself felt like glass in your lungs. The streets were split open by smoke and dust, alarms shrieking overhead while the building around you groaned like it was already halfway into the grave.
Civilians were crying somewhere behind you. Children, terrified and hoarse. The last few survivors were still being pushed toward the exit route when the structure shuddered again, a deep, dreadful sound that made every nerve in your body go sharp with warning.
A second too late to stop it, but not too late to understand exactly what was about to happen.
The enemies had boxed the route in from both sides. There was no clean way out. No safe line through the debris. Only a narrowing gap, only panic, only the knowledge that if you hesitated even once, the people behind you would die with you.
So, you did what you had always done
You made the choice no one else had time to make. You threw yourself into the collapse zone without thinking, driving two civilians out of the blast path with everything you had left, shoving them hard enough that they landed clear just as the ceiling came down in a storm of shattered stone and steel.
Pain arrived like fire.
In waves so violent they stole the air from your lungs. Something heavy struck your back and drove you into the floor. The impact knocked the world sideways. Dust filled your mouth. Your vision flashed white, then black, then white again, and for one terrible second all you could hear was the ringing inside your skull and the muffled scream of someone calling your name.
You tried to move.
Nothing happened.
Your body felt distant, wrong, too heavy to belong to you anymore. Concrete pinned your legs. Warm blood spread beneath you, slick and impossible, and the awful clarity of it settled in before your mind was willing to admit what your body already knew.
This was it.
Not another rescue.
Not another miracle.
Not another last-second extraction where someone dragged you back by the collar and told you to stay awake.
This was your time.
The realization should have terrified you. Instead, it only made you feel unbearably tired. Tired in a way sleep had never touched. Tired down to the soul, like you had spent years carrying grief and duty and love through fire until there was nothing left in you that could keep standing.
Your breathing turned shallow, then wet, each inhale scraping harder than the one before it. Smoke drifted above you through the broken ceiling, pale light falling through the ruin in thin, weak shafts that made the whole world look already half-gone.
Around you, the sounds of panic kept moving, boots pounding, radios crackling, someone shouting for a medic, someone else yelling to clear the route, but they all sounded far away now, as though you were already sinking beneath the surface of your own life.
And then, because grief was cruel even at the end, your mind turned to them.
Johnny, laughing too loudly in some transport somewhere long ago, as if the world had never managed to scare him for more than a second at a time.
Ghost, silent beside you, his presence saying more than words ever could.
Price, rough hands tightening your vest straps like he could keep you safe through sheer force of will.
Gaz, tired smile, gentle eyes, that quiet steadiness that made the world feel less sharp whenever he was near.
God.
You missed them before you even died.
Missed them in a way so deep it felt like it had been built into your bones. Missed them in the spaces between breaths. Missed the sound of their voices, the weight of them, the impossible comfort of being known by them so completely that you no longer had to pretend to be anything other than broken and still loved.
Your family.
Your boys.
Gone before you, every one of them.
And in that wrecked, bleeding, vanishing moment, what hurt most was not the fear of death.
It was the longing.
The unbearable, childlike yearning for one more night in a safehouse with too much coffee and too little sleep. One more argument in the mess. One more mission briefing where Soap complained and Ghost ignored him and Price threatened violence and Gaz tried not to laugh. One more chance to hear their voices from across a room and know, with absolute certainty, that you were still together…
You hoped, with all the stubborn tenderness left in you, that wherever they were now, they had found some peace the world never gave them here.
You hoped Johnny was laughing again, somewhere warm and bright enough to feel like forgiveness.
You hoped Ghost had finally laid down the burden he had carried for so long.
You hoped Price was no longer trying to hold the whole world together with exhausted hands.
You hoped Gaz was smiling.
You hoped none of them were hurting anymore.
And then, because your heart had always been too loyal for its own good, one last selfish thought rose through the pain.
Maybe this was not the end.
Maybe there was another life waiting beyond this one. Another world where war had never found you. Another place where the four of them were still alive, still arguing over stupid things, still filling some safe little room with noise and warmth and the kind of love that only soldiers know how to give each other after surviving hell.
Maybe somewhere out there, they were waiting, if you just kept going long enough, you would find them again.
See them again.
Love them again.
Stay with them again.
Your lips trembled as the world dimmed around you, and the last thing you gave the dark was not fear, but devotion.
Please let me find them again.
Then nothing…
Just a vast, quiet dark that seemed to go on forever, until a voice cut through it like a match struck in a sealed room.
“Oi.”
Your eyes flew open before your mind had even figured out where you were, the first thing you felt was a tap on your shoulder.
The second thing was instinct.
Your body moved on its own, all that hard-earned training and survival and fear snapping awake in a single violent motion. Your arms shot out, fingers locking around the wrist that had touched you, clamping down hard enough that whoever stood beside you gave a sharp, startled sound.
“Bloody hell-”
The voice stopped.
Not because it was angry.
Because it was shocked.
No… wait it was… it was… his.
Something inside your chest cracked so suddenly it almost hurt more than any wound ever had. A breath caught in your throat, sharp and uneven, like your body had forgotten how to do anything except recognize danger.
Enemy? Threat? Attack?
No, no, no-
When you forced yourself to look up, the world did not give you war.
It gave you Johnny MacTavish.
Only not the Johnny you had buried in your heart a thousand times over.
This one was younger.
His still unscarred in the ways you remembered later. His mohawk was shorter. His expression was open in that maddening, familiar way, all confusion and impatience and life, as if he had never once met death and never suspected it might one day take anything from him.
Bright blue eyes blinked down at you, startled.
Alive.
God.
Alive.
No blood. No tunnel. No white-hot gunshot wound. No body collapsing in your arms while your hands shook uselessly and your world came apart around you.
Just Johnny.
Breathing.
Warm beneath your grip.
Real.
For one terrible second, you could not move.
You could not speak.
You could not even be sure you were not already dead and dreaming this as some kind of punishment or mercy or cruel joke your brain had invented on the edge of the grave.
Your chest caved in so violently it felt like something in you had been split clean open. Relief surged through you so hard it hurt, but it came tangled with grief, and fear, and the kind of longing that only exists when you have already loved someone enough to lose them once.
Your fingers tightened without meaning to.
Soap glanced down at your hand still locked around his wrist, then back up at your face with a furrowed brow.
“Right,” he said slowly, voice edged with confusion and a bit of dry amusement. “Am I supposed tae be worried now?”
The sound of his voice... his voice, young and unbroken and full of that ridiculous accent that used to haunt your memories after he was gone, hit you like a blade straight through the ribs.
Real…! He was real.
Not a hallucination.
Not a final mercy.
Not another memory your mind had dressed up in flesh just to torture you with what you had lost.
You loosened your grip too slowly, like your hand had forgotten how to let go. Soap pulled his arm back carefully, still studying you with open bafflement. “Ye look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
The irony nearly broke you and your mouth parted, but nothing came out.
Your throat felt raw, as if you had already spent years screaming his name in another life, because you had. Because you had watched him die and die and die again in all the ways grief can kill a person who survives too long.
And now here he was, standing in front of you and looking at you like you were the strange one.
“Soap,” you breathed at last, the word almost falling apart on your tongue.
He blinked.
Then his brows lifted in mild offense and disbelief mixed together. “Aye, that’s me.”
You stared at him.
At the youthful ease of his face. The unbroken energy in his posture. The way he stood like the world had not yet taught him how cruel it could be.
Something in you hurt so badly you thought you might make a sound.
He had no idea.
No idea what he had been to you. No idea how many times you had heard that laugh in empty rooms after he was already gone. No idea how many mornings you had woken up missing the weight of his presence like a missing limb. No idea how badly you had wanted just one more chance.
One more day.
One more conversation.
One more stupid joke over comms.
One more “see you later.”
Your eyes burned, not enough for tears yet, but close.
Too close.
Johnny shifted under your stare, rubbing the back of his neck with the faintest edge of discomfort. “Should I be offended or flattered? Because I’m gettin’ both.”
A laugh nearly escaped you; it was wild how close it came to sounding like a sob.
You did not know whether to cry or laugh or grab him by the front of his shirt and hold on until the world stopped shifting beneath your feet. Whether this was a second chance or some new kind of torture. You did not know whether you were meant to love him again from the beginning and suffer through all of it one more time, or whether the universe had finally decided to be kind.
You only knew that your hands still remembered the shape of losing him. And your heart, treacherous thing that it was, had already started hoping.
A voice called his name from somewhere behind him.
Soap turned slightly, attention splitting away from you for the first time since he had touched your shoulder.
“Aye?” he called back.
Then he looked at you again, and the confusion on his face softened into something almost amused, almost patient, as if you were some odd recruit he had been assigned to babysit.
“I’ve got tae go,” he said, already half-turning. “But you’re gonna explain whatever that was, because if you’re in the habit o’ grabbing superiors by the wrist like a startled cat, I need tae know now.”
The mention of superior almost made you flinch.
Because this was before.
Before the tunnel. Before the blood. Before the years that would hollow you out. Before the version of him you carried like a wound in your chest.
He was still here.
Still teasing.
Still Johnny.
And you were suddenly so overwhelmed by the sheer miracle of that it almost felt unbearable.
Your mouth trembled.
“Sorry,” you managed finally, voice rough and broken with more feeling than the word could contain. “I… sorry, Sergeant.”
Soap blinked at you, then let out a short, incredulous huff like you had just told him the most absurd thing in the world.
“Now I’m Sergeant, is it?” One eyebrow lifted, that familiar spark of mischief already creeping back into his expression. “Aye, that sounds like someone’s been hearin’ I’m important.”
God, he was infuriating.
God, you had missed him.
The way he stood there so casually alive, like the world had not already taken him from you once before, like time had not already taught you what it felt like to lose him and keep living anyway.
He tilted his head slightly, studying you now with something quieter beneath the humour.
“Seriously,” he said, softer this time. “You alright?”
And you… you almost laughed.
Because how were you supposed to answer that?
How were you supposed to tell him that no, you were not alright, because you had already buried him once and your hands still remembered it?
That your chest still carried the shape of his absence?
That your entire life had already been carved into a before and after and he was standing in the impossible space between them?
Your throat tightened painfully as you try to say something, anything, but nothing came. And then, mercifully, the world moved for you.
The voice called out across the base again, all too familiar too.
“MacTavish!”
Soap turned immediately. “Aye, coming sir!” he shouted back.
He started to turn away again, and panic struck so fast it made your whole body go cold.
No.
Not again.
Not even for a second.
You couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t bear watching him disappear into a hallway, into a day, into a future you already knew would end badly if fate was cruel enough to repeat itself.
Maybe it was memory. Maybe it was reflex. Maybe it was the desperate, aching part of you that had loved him once and could not stop itself now.
Whatever it was, the words came out before you could stop them.
“See you later.”
Soap paused.
The world seemed to hold its breath with you.
He glanced back over his shoulder, that familiar half-smirk tugging at his mouth, confusion still lingering there but not enough to dim the warmth in his eyes.
Then he smiled.
As if the universe had never hurt anyone.
“See you later.”
