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

47. Why are ghosts bad liars?

Yael Williams, despite her youth, knew her job well. 

In medicine, and even more so in surgery, time was everything. In more cases than her pride liked to admit, it was time that decided between life and death. Not a surgeon's skill. 

On the other hand, she'd discovered she had the absolute faculty and capacity to ignore everything she knew, just to silence the desperate scream of her heart. 

The hours crawled by next to Johnny's bed. Agonisingly slow, infuriating, and unbearably intimate all at once. 

Curled up between the blue armchair and the uncomfortable plastic chair, Yael had come to know all the nurses who rotated through the shifts. She had learnt to pick up on their signals, their eloquent glances, the cautious tone in which they granted her requests. 

As much as the constant company of the lieutenant and the rest of the 141 members eased her solitude, the doctor had ended up feeling like an alien, wounded part of the furniture. 

For almost forty-eight hours, she had watched over the tangle of wires that seemed to have swallowed the stubborn, sunny man she had fallen in love with, her vigil one of obstinate desperation. 

The doctor pressed her fingers hard against her temples as if to hold the pieces together; her head was now throbbing to the cadenced, relentless rhythm of the ventilator. The thought disgusted her, but she would have preferred to be in that operating theatre for another hundred hours, rather than at the mercy of this waiting. 

Every minute that passed without any sign of recovery pushed him further away from her in a way so sadly familiar it made her nauseous. 

She was underwater again, crushed by an ocean floor of unresolved issues and loneliness. A daughter, a friend, a lover once more to someone who, perhaps, would never be again. 

Despite the stifling heat of the intensive care unit, Yael shivered. 

There was no one to watch her drown in the sea of words she still had to say and, as much as she had always been self-sufficient without any qualms, the idea, suddenly, terrified her. 

She suddenly felt her heartbeats soar behind her sternum, fluttering painfully against her throat, her breath leaving her behind. Then, the automatic door slid open with a muffled hiss, and Yael almost swore in relief. 

Against the metal doorframe, the lieutenant's broad figure was outlined – solid, ungainly, and yet, somehow, even behind the dark weave of his balaclava, his stern features seemed an unexpected lifeline. 

His dark irises sized her up, almost motionless, perhaps for the space of a breath, but it felt much longer to her. 

"I can take over, if you want to rest a bit," Simon finally rasped, his enormous shoulders projecting slowly past the threshold. 

"Thank you, but I'd rather stay. I wouldn't sleep anyway," the doctor replied with too much honesty and a slight shake of her head. 

She had wanted to sound somewhat friendly, but the words echoed bitterly in her throat, an inflection she struggled to recognise. 

Simon crossed to the bed in two strides, his brown eyes flitting over Johnny's still form, and stopped beside her. Yael saw his broad chest rise a couple of times, a heavy breath escaping the black fabric. 

"Mhmm," he then mumbled, difficult to say if he was annoyed or undecided.His worn hands fumbled for a moment under his Gore-Tex jacket, near his heart. 

"What...?" before Yael could add anything else, the lieutenant's long fingers briefly offered her a notebook. Her heart leapt into her throat. Even covered as it was in congealed blood, the doctor would have recognised it amongst a thousand.