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

46. One lucky bastard

Yael reopened her eyes, groggy, exhausted. As if she hadn't slept at all. Indeed, she wasn't even so sure she had slept. 

Perhaps she had merely lain there motionless, eyes closed, letting everything else take over. Hoping that fatigue would, at some point, switch off her system. 

Instead, bizarre and distressing visions had tormented her. The smell of blood, the piercing sound of bagpipes at sunset, then that voice. 

Try as she might, she couldn't remember when they had spoken of it.Johnny had laughed. One of his laughs – explosive, hoarse, almost a rough snort. 

"In Scotland, the bagpipes just play on two occasions, leannan. On feast days an' at funerals." 

She took a breath to steady the sudden surge of her heart, those furious beats thrashing in her chest, flooding her eyes with tears. 

She tried to push them back, not to let them settle in places she preferred not to look at for the moment. 

Beyond the dusty blinds, the pale light of dawn barely diffused into the bare room, struggling to trace its unfamiliar, anonymous contours. 

She turned angrily between the starched sheets, and an overpowering whiff of industrial soap stung her nostrils. 

Tling. A faint, muffled clinking, metal against metal, barely reverberated off the linoleum walls. Yael's stomach clenched. 

She recognised it immediately, as if her heart had made that simple connection before the stimulus had fully reached her nerves. 

She fought against the wave of terror that had slid, cold and treacherous, into her chest. Her eyes squeezed shut, fingers trembling, while the light metal that pulsed against her sternum seemed to burn. 

Not even twenty-four hours had passed since then, yet it could easily have been another lifetime, the one in which John MacTavish had placed a ring in her hand. 

She swallowed against the burning that pricked her parched throat, her fingers blindly digging under her t-shirt in search of proof, the atrocious consolation of knowing how real it was. 

She turned it over and over between her cold fingertips, so small and yet so heavy it took her breath away. 

Somehow, that opaque, compact stone, with its sharp, almost cutting hues, resembled him incredibly. Unusual, hard, beautiful. 

Yael wondered what it had cost him to wait until then, perhaps to renounce it because of her ancestral fear. She wondered why she hadn't worn it sooner. 

She let it slide onto her skin, slowly, her heart pounding, only to discover that it fitted perfectly. 

It was a bitter sensation, a void, a punch to the gut. She watched the faint glint of gold endlessly revived in the frigid tones of dawn, incredulous, and suppressed a treacherous sob. 

She missed Johnny so fiercely she thought she would break in two, burn with the rebellious desire for his voice, for the comforting rhythm of his breath. 

She sprang out of bed as if it were scalding, fumbled for her boots, and in the faint twilight, pulled on her tactical gear. 

Before she could lucidly realise it, she was already out of the officers' quarters, her pace swift, mechanical, the earthy smell of dew fanning her face. Heading for intensive care. 

She stopped only a step from the antechamber. She peered inside and her heart seized, a dull, raw pain. Yet, she felt she had to experience it, to drown in it to know that all the pieces were still in place.