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

39. London calling

The air inside the cargo hold was taut, motionless. 

Turbulence, stubbornly swirling against the fuselage, made the supply crates rumble and the bare seats creak, saturating the silence.

She prayed it wouldn't be noticed, but Yael was trembling. 

Partly from the biting cold of the altitude and the wind that howled relentlessly over the Ural Mountains, and partly because she had no idea where to look.

The blind, half-empty belly of the giant military aircraft offered no plausible escape route for her restless eyes. 

She felt that silence pressing down on her, deafening, laden with a million words buzzing in her head. It seemed to her that the others, like her, were meticulously avoiding crossing each other's lines of sight.

As if they could clearly sense the weight of that intrusion.

Even in her earphones, pushed deep into her ears to muffle the rest of the world, she could have sworn she could hear Soap's slow, steady breathing, a gentle rasping in puffs of white condensation.

With the corner of her eye, the doctor caught a movement, a rubbing of the blue tactical uniform, as if the massive body had suddenly had to change position.

She couldn't help herself, and her amber irises rested on the muddy tactical boot. It was tapping, almost imperceptibly, but at a rhythm that she knew had to be that of his heart.

Yael swallowed hard, her throat dry, and her hands instinctively flew to rub her cold arms in a nervous gesture. Under her nails, the profile of the word "Medic", embroidered on the Velcro strap at her shoulder, was unmistakable.

However much they were heading home, she was now neck-deep in it.

She tried to recall the cold-bloodedness that Captain Price must have counted on, but in vain.

Again, she found the situation absurd, this inexorable and cosmic collision of their worlds. All it had taken was a waiver for her to intrude on the Task Force, to be absorbed into something that, only a few months earlier, had seemed so distant as to twist her stomach.

It hadn't been an accident, a mere sequence of events, she had wanted it. As much as she still struggled to believe it, she had found that strength within herself. Whatever the implications.

However, she wondered what it must be like for Johnny, really.

She thought she had caught a glimpse of it a couple of times, in the look of unconfessed pride that tainted the shadow of fear in his cerulean irises. He would waver for a moment, before bravado took over again, muddying the waters.

John MacTavish was not afraid of death, Yael had come to terms with that a long time ago. Not his own death, at least. Not anymore.

What was Yael Williams afraid of, instead? It was one of the hardest questions she had ever asked herself.

Perhaps because the answer was not at all clear to her, it wavered confusely somewhere between the emptiness she carried within her and the warmth with which Johnny's presence had insinuated itself there.

Yael knew death too. She played an endless game with it, so daily that it seemed almost trival. 

And yet, since the sergeant had been in her life, it had taken on a new form, both terrible and familiar. It hovered between them with the scent of a promise, something inevitable and addictive.

What scared Yael Williams most was a choice.

To let him die far away, in a foreign and strange country, or to watch him die, closer than anyone in their right mind would have considered bearable.