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

49. A good man

Despite John Price having deliberately dialled the number, the dialling tone clicked through so sharply it sent his stomach lurching into his throat with a nasty somersault. 

He barely had time to compose himself, the tension draining away in a low growl beneath his neat moustache. He counted three rings. 

"Hello?" The casualness of the voice on the other end surprised him, twisting sharp and tight in his brain like a gimlet between his eye sockets. 

He knew it was down to him, yet he would have rather thrown himself into another decommissioned reactor than drop this bombshell on the MacTavish family. 

"Mrs MacTavish?" he articulated slowly, with a calmness he didn't feel, but the urgency burned like a hot coal in his gut, while his fingers drummed mercilessly on the cheap plywood of the desk. 

He hated these shitty offices, all identical in every British military base he had ever set foot on. Bare walls, impersonal furniture, and the stale smell of a storage room. 

He just had to get it over with, quickly and with perfect balance. 

"Naw, Mrs MacTavish's ma mam. Who's this?" the woman on the receiver chuckled, almost as if to make fun of him. Only then did John realise how young the speaker sounded. 

He cleared his throat, forcing himself to swallow the anger that flooded his chest like poison. 

"This is Captain Price, I work with John. I need to speak with Mrs MacTavish urgently," he breathed through gritted teeth, a strange mixture of guilt and terror churning his stomach. 

"Okay... just a sec," the girl grumbled suspiciously, then a sharp sound, as if she had moved the receiver slightly away. "Mam! Phone for ye, some captain..." 

Price's fingers flew automatically to the pocket of his tactical fleece, fumbling inside, hoping to find solace in the cold stump of a cigar. 

"Yes? This is Muriel MacTavish." The voice, too bright, suddenly shattered the dirty silence of the static, and John's heart leapt so fast it forced him to cough. 

"Good morning, ma'am. This is Captain John Price. I need to talk to you about your son, John," he replied, more mechanically than he would have liked. The silence on the other end felt incredibly dense. 

"I can give you a moment to sit down, if you'd like..." he added quickly, perhaps just to fill the void. Instead, the reply came fast, blunt, with no hint of faltering. 

"I'm perfectly comfortable, Captain. Please, continue." 

Her composure, heartfelt and hard at the same time, managed to confuse him, as if there were a nuance in that disarmingly steady tone that was inaccessible, unintelligible to him. 

Price took a sharp breath through his dark moustache, his lungs contracting as if he had just run half a mile, then he spoke softly, with studied slowness. 

"Last November 23rd, following a firefight, John was injured. He was transported to and operated on at the Sir John Moore Barracks in Folkestone..." 

"Is he alive?" Mrs MacTavish's bright voice cut into his robotic speech with the precision of a sniper. The urgency of that simple question wounded him more deeply than he would have cared to admit. 

He should have said it from the start. It would have been more human. 

"Yes, ma'am. He was operated on by Lieutenant Williams, a surgeon I trust implicitly, but as John has been unconscious for more than 48 hours, procedure requires me to notify his next of kin." The words came out in a harsh, almost painful sigh, as his fingers mercilessly massaged his tired eyes.