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

51. A handful of ashes

Wind.

It tousled her hair, whistled in her ears, kissed her lips with the damp, earthy taste of the cliff. Yael blinked against its powerful embrace.

The wind lashed at her face as the day plunged behind the rugged profile of the moor. A diffuse, pale gold light. It hurt her eyes, worming its way into her heart.

The scent of damp vegetation was warm, almost familiar; it so closely resembled the stories Johnny had told her that it made her stomach clench.

As if she had been there before, as if she had always known it. It was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen, and yet, something jarred in the background.

What the sun could not touch stretched out into a cold, gloomy shadow. She felt it biting at her boots, clinging to the tough grass, swept by the merciless breeze. She closed her eyes.

No matter how hard she tried not to listen, the faint howl of the wind, echoing in the valley, spoke of a loneliness too deep to be told. A distant, alien universe of abandonment and isolation.

An uncontrollable tremor shook her slender body, from her arms right into her chest.

Then, suddenly, something broke the wild song of the moor. Sharp, familiar, it slipped between her shoulder blades with a shiver. Strange, she had thought she was alone.

"Rest in peace, Johnny..." Simon's harsh, melancholy voice reached her as if through a veil, caressing the nape of her neck in a hoarse tremor. It had been no more than a whisper, yet it violently sucked the air from her lungs. Her heart slowed to a stop.

No... It wasn't possible. It wasn't true.

Yael did not turn, paralysed by fear, with the dread that if she only looked, she would make the lieutenant's features real. Her chest heaved, thundering in rebellion, and her heart began to beat again at the rhythm of a runaway train, clamping her sternum in a vice.

A soft rustle, and something drifted past her in an indistinct cloud, carried by the relentless breeze. This time, she could not shy away. The doctor watched the grey trail move away, scattering across the valley flooded with the last of the light, her brain shutting down, helpless, insignificant.

Like lead, she watched it merge with the cold horizon, where the sky died on the flat surface of the loch. Until it vanished.

So this is what her love had become. A handful of ashes in the wind. Nothing more.

For a mad instant, Yael believed she would break in two. Torn forever in a twisted, suffocating cocoon of pain. Light-years away, lost.

She just wanted to scream. To scream out all the horror that had crept inside her, hoping to uproot it, to expel it like a poison. Instead, not a hiss escaped her parched throat.

Her amber eyes snapped open to a blank wall of faded linoleum, her nails digging blindly into a starched sheet, and the relentless smell of disinfectant hitting her nostrils.

He was still here. He had to be.

Her head throbbed with a sharp, persistent ringing; the edges of the room were faded, blurred. She was trembling.

Something treacherous seemed to have wrapped itself around her trachea, stopping her from speaking, from breathing. It had happened before, after her mother's death.

She tried to regain control, to force her brain to make sense of her surroundings, but the lack of oxygen clouded her vision. She fought for a very long moment against the heart that roared in her chest and, finally, her hands found Johnny's warm form beneath the sheet.