Wait For Me || John "Soap" MacTavish x OC (Call Of Duty)

1. You must be the sergeant

Manchester, October 2022

The fog had settled in thick that morning as Yael crossed the Trinity Bridge alone. She almost felt like she was in an unknown, alien ocean, with the red brick cutting through the grayness like a tongue of sand on a distant seabed.

She glanced down at the black waters of the Irwell below, tumultuous, undisturbed, indistinct in that sea of gray. The roar not far away the only sign of its whirling and relentless force. She shivered.

She wrapped herself tightly in her faded green parka, the thick wool of her blue scarf soaked with the condensation of her breath. The cold pinched her straight, thin nose, bit at her barely exposed ears, and cut its way to her lungs.

She quickened her pace with the unconscious hope of meeting someone. 

She had no reason to fear anything, she had been walking that road for three years now, morning, afternoon and night. But it wasn't fear that had crept into a corner of her chest, it was loneliness.

That October had been harsh, with no trace of the sweetness of an autumn that, for as long as she could remember, had reddened the tips of the centuries-old oaks in the city, timidly warming the old buildings with the last sun before winter.

From an empty apartment, she took the early morning, sparsely crowded metro, walked through deserted streets, and even now, as every day, the austere, hybrid silhouette of the Royal Infirmary loomed solitary on the horizon.

A schizophrenic structure, both ultra-modern and ancient at the same time. 

Behind the geometric and reflective lines of the entrance, one could still guess, even in that fog, the old spires blackened by the soot of the university building.

She still remembered perfectly the warm, gloomy charm of the large, dimly lit rooms, the halls cooled by the graying marble, the smell of old plaster and printed paper. 

She only missed them sometimes, on long night shifts, a time when the comfort of a tutor had alleviated many of her responsibilities.

Those had been difficult years. Surgery had always been a male environment, but it hadn't just been that. 

The daughter of a military man, she had attended university as a military. As if that wasn't enough, in the last twenty years being called Yael certainly hadn't helped her make friends.

Leaving the university environment had been a breath of fresh air. 

Working in the emergency room had never been her first choice, but it was the only path that had opened up to her at the right time. She had to get away, and fast. 

So she ended up in that ostentatiously new and modern emergency room, free, with only one constraint: her status.

As a fully qualified medical officer, she would have to personally handle all requests from the British Army and Royal Navy.

That's why on that rigid October morning, on a day off, she crossed the double frosted glass doors for the umpteenth time, sleepy and cold.

She changed quickly in the desolate locker room, distractedly, forgetting to gather her long dark hair. 

It got tangled awkwardly between her immaculate lab coat and the blue uniform of the emergency room, tearing a sigh of exasperation from her full lips.

Ann was waiting for her on the threshold of the tiny, grey-walled examination room, far from the chaos of the ambulance entrance. 

The doctor caught her beautiful green eyes reduced to slits, made even brighter by those tousled red curls framing her pale, round face.