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

26. I don't have time for singing

Yael couldn't even remember the last time she'd walked down the cold, bare corridors of the Ministry of Defence. Yet, she could perfectly recall the vague sense of nausea and repulsion that had accompanied her on each visit. 

Especially after her father's death. 

She hesitated in front of the frosted glass of the old cherry door for what seemed like an eternity, took a breath, then another, until her heart finally slowed its racing. 

Dorothea Johnson was waiting solemnly behind the long, lacquered walnut desk in the anteroom. 

Her dark hair, tightly pulled back in a bun at the nape of her neck, lifted her gaze of a pale, washed-out blue, almost grey, as soon as the squeak of her boots sounded on the polished parquet. 

Thea offered a nervous smile as her slender legs sprang forward to greet her, revealing the perfectly ironed formal uniform. Her elongated, olive-skinned face was slightly fuller than when she had met her at the academy years before.

"Yael..." she called in a warm whisper that broke her heart, as if she had seen a ghost, dear but light-years away. 

"You look well, Thea." the doctor sighed, and her stiff legs brought her closer, enough to catch the familiar smell of old, dusty furniture, mixed with the sweet scent of expensive Cuban cigars. 

The girl in uniform held out a small, warm hand on which a nearly new wedding ring sparkled. She reached across the lacquered desk and the modern PC monitor, in a heartfelt clasp. 

"I've missed you, we haven't seen each other since..." Dorothea smiled, accompanying the grip of her soft fingers, but a breath died in her throat.

A subtle and awkward unspoken tension filled the still air. Their lives couldn't be more different, more distant. 

Yael chasing the night between shifts in the operating room and a partner in the special forces; Thea, a caring and gentle soul, who had put everything else on hold for a businessman husband and a baby of just a few months. 

It had become difficult for them to intrude on each other's lives, partly out of shyness, partly due to incompatible schedules. And yet, Yael still remembered with affection the night she had left the operating room to assist Thea, who had just come through a long and complicated childbirth. 

She had never imagined a future like that for herself, not until that moment. 

"I know, I'm sorry. I should have come to see you." the doctor admitted with a sigh, a pang of regret tying traitorously at her throat. 

The other's slender fingers gripped hers even tighter. It seemed like something absurdly intimate, more so than the dozens of messages they had exchanged over the past year. 

"It's okay. Oliver has grown so much, you wouldn't recognize him." Thea smiled with a maternal pride that took her breath away: "Our door is always open to you." 

For a moment, Yael didn't know what to say. There was still too much to sort out in her own life to reach the serenity with which Dorothea was speaking to her. So much of it depended on the simple fact of whether John MacTavish was alive or not. 

She simply nodded, a breath caught in her throat, and, with her heart in turmoil, released her friend's reassuring grip to knock on the austere, carved wooden door separating the anteroom from the office. 

The almost barked reply from the other side shook her feet, nailed to the polished parquet.

Colonel Hughes' office was exactly as she remembered it. A relic, preserved and distant, almost frozen in time.