Howl [COD Simon Ghost Riley & John Soap Mactavish AU]

Bloodied Feet

Simon woke, groggy, leaning over against Soap's legs where he had curled up on his side. Slowly he sat, the pain from the weight he'd put on his injured shoulder deep and broad across his chest and back. It distracted him from a different ache. One at the base of his spine, between his hips. Against the shorts he wore.

Recovery, sustenance, it didn't help. Dreaming about Roach didn't help. Soap's warm body beside him, the quiet sound of his breathing, didn't help. He scooted away from the other man and laid his head back again, resting his hand over his erection and letting the pressure take some of the edge off.

He hadn't been with anyone in a long time, some of the events of his past making it more of a task than he wished upon a partner. It was vulnerable, even if he tried to make it casual, and it brought out all of his insecurities. His fear of letting his guard down, his inability to connect, his scars.

After he lost Roach he didn't even speak to another person for months. He couldn't bear to look in other people's eyes, the sickening, wet crunch of a bullet through a skull and Roach's small, surprised gasp following him around every corner. His heartbeat had been the score of Simon's life for years, and it ended so suddenly that the sound of anyone else's, even his own, nearly drove him mad. But when your time to recover is infinite, eventually you get bored of your own wallowing.

He went looking for more work. For all the times he had tried and failed to take his own life, Simon made a plan to trick the universe into taking it for him. In battle. He sought the deepest, darkest, most precarious jobs, the ones that Generals and mercenaries raised their eyebrows at when he accepted. That's how Price learned of his reputation nearly six decades later.

And here he sat, having very nearly found the rest he'd sought for so long. He didn't know if Roach waited for him at the end of this life, but he often hoped that he did. He wondered if the anger and blame the man would hold for him for getting him killed that night would have worn off after all this time. He wondered if Roach realized he still hadn't lost him. Regret was a more familiar emotion to him now than anything else, even sorrow. He battled contempt against Soap for bringing all these things back up in him. For reminding him what it felt like to feel the soul of someone else brush up against his in reassurance.

He didn't understand why Soap wasn't afraid of him, even before his confession. Soap saw him. In a way he himself was afraid of, and drunk on. He wished he knew more about him, who he was outside of these life or death situations, how he saw the world, how the world saw him. Part of him knew his curiosity was a bastardized hatred for loneliness, but at least some fraction of it was because he cared about the man. Another fraction, one he wished he could ignore, was an attachment to anyone willing to meet his eyes and treat him like a human being. He figured he could blame himself for that longing.

He let his body relax again, and in a move that he told himself was weakness, he laid a hand on Soap's leg as he slept. He checked his watch. It was late. They had both slept for several hours and he hoped Soap would sleep through the rest of the night. He let the Sergeant's heartbeat lull him back in and out of dreaming again.

Soap was the one that woke at first light, Simon still asleep at his feet. And Simon's hand, large and warm, was resting just below his knee. So he didn't move for a long time. Even though he could tell the fire was low and he was painfully thirsty, he stayed still, that physical connection something he craved so deeply that it nearly brought tears to his eyes.

Soap had been a wild young man, illegally enlisting when he was sixteen and abusing the power his tags gave him over both men and women in civilian life as soon as his boots were back on the ground. Now, grown out of young love and faked seduction, he had found he typically longed to be with someone already on the inside. Someone who understood him, his nightmares and quirks and fear of small spaces. Someone who made him feel like he could turn his back to the door, like he could give them one hundred percent of his focus instead of pulling half of it away to watch for danger. He'd lost his desire to dominate, he found himself turned on by the idea of being safe and comfortable and not having to hide his scars, both physical and mental. But that was rare. And he'd found he often ended up with bits and pieces of his desires, but at least it gave him some release. A little distraction, a false comfort. Even so, it had been a while. It had been since before Mexico.