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

29. Can you feel my heart?

When Captain Price's gravelly voice shattered the silence on Bravo-Seven's radio channel, the helicopter carrying Soap and Ghost was flying towards a frigid sunrise silhouetted against the mountains. 

"Bravo Zero-Six to Seven, enemy contact reported at the base." 

The crackling barely overpowered the roar of the spinning blades and the turbulence of the air against the helicopter's metal exterior. 

Yet, Johnny's heart plummeted into his stomach with an unpleasant thud, reverberating inside him at a hundred decibels, and he felt like he'd lost a couple of beats along the way. 

"This is Bravo Zero-Seven. Repeat your last, Captain," the lieutenant barked in reply, his dark eyes, reduced to slits, gleaming through the holes in his black balaclava. 

The sergeant's fingers tightened around the metal handle a few centimetres from his Mohawk, his knuckles turning white. 

"Konni's hit the base," the captain repeated through gritted teeth, a barely contained growl of impatience in his deep, raspy tone. 

Johnny lost all restraint. 

He leapt to his feet, ignoring the instability of the cabin, his blood pumping adrenaline in waves, burning in his veins and clouding his judgment. It blurred his vision and suddenly, staying still seemed unthinkable, almost torture. 

He would have headbutted the metal of the tailgate if it would have been enough to rid him of that premonition of death, to tear it from his heart along with the blood that roared in his deafened ears. Anything to avoid formulating that thought, not giving voice to the worry that slithered coldly between his lungs. 

"Steamin' hell!" he howled, pressed against the windowpane, racked by almost physical pain.

Suddenly, he seemed to see red, as if the world were losing consistency, mixed up in the tangle of thoughts that exploded in his chest to the rhythm of a speeding train. 

It was something he had never experienced in his life. Not with that force. 

"The sick bastard did it again! Fuck!" Soap barked with a new ferocity, the growl of a wounded animal and a heart that left him behind, beating so hard he thought his chest would collapse under his combat vest.

The lieutenant, on the other hand, watched him silently from his seat, his posture rigid, his enormous fingers gripping the rifle butt. If he hadn't known him so well, he would almost have dared to recognize a shadow of fear in him. 

"John!" Price's call echoed in his skull with the persistence of a smoke grenade: "I understand how you feel, but you need to calm down, Sergeant." 

Soap puffed out his chest, chasing a more regular breath, his nostrils flared and his irises glazed over at an unspecified point in that cruel dawn. 

"Stay sharp and save this rage for Makarov. If you want to put a bullet in his head I won't stop you, this time." The Captain continued, and never had a promise sounded sweeter to his ears than at that moment, a trickle of sweat beading his powerful neck and his teeth clenched until they creaked.

"Aye, Cap," Johnny croaked after a moment, in the radio silence with an icy, brutal determination. He didn't care how much blood he would have to shed to find her. 

He returned to his seat, the heavy steps of his tactical boots on the metal floor of the cabin seeming to give a new rhythm to his troubled heart. Inescapable, like his ability to process the adrenaline to make way for a terrible lucidity. 

His heartbeat didn't even accelerate when, in the following minutes, a new communication slipped into the radio static in his earpiece. Only his fingers, in an almost involuntary motion, gripped the assault rifle butt at the soft, terrified tone at the other end.