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You can’t cry when you’re dead.
Soap remembers that in a rush, watching Ghost kneeling beside his body.
His eyes don't burn, his throat doesn't clench.
His body looks wrong, now, like it doesn't belong to him. Some of that is the distant horror of the hole in his head, spilling all that important gray matter out of his skull. Not all of it, though: It’s not the first time in the five lives he's rapidly re-remembering that he’s died completely human, but it still burns, to go out as only half of himself.
He can't cry in his cat-skin, either, but that's different from not feeling it.
His people, these people who are so close to him, they do not even know he is anything more than human.
Was.
Either way.
He regrets it, distantly, in the way all things have of being distant in this place, this half step to the side of life.
“He needs me,” Soap says, watching Ghost. He still knows that, however distant anything else has become. His ears are flat to his skull with his displeasure, his tail lashing. Those at least are still in his conscious control.
Gaz is attempting to disarm the bomb, but Ghost is making no moves to either help or get away. He’s simply kneeing beside the body that until recently had been Soap, shoulders bent, heavy.
Soap wants nothing more than to go to him, to press up against him, to purr as he never allowed himself to do in his presence, to butt his chin against his, and mark him with his scent.
To have strong hands in his hair and on his ears, and know he was accepted for everything he was, no matter how impossible.
All the reasons he had for continuing to hide, to refuse to reveal himself even just to Ghost, they all seem so distant and meaningless now.
What were they, against never having gotten to feel Ghost's hands in his fur, to lay on his chest and purr until some of that wire-taut tension finally faded away?
“MAYBE,” Death concedes, standing beside Soap and watching as well, as Soap’s tail twitches, agitated, brushing against his long black cloak. “BUT YOU ARE DEAD.”
Soap doesn’t actually care about that right now.
“Are you here for them as well?” He demands it, though he has no right to demand anything of Death. It is his privilege, as a cat, to see Death. Death's affection for him and his kindred are a gift, but one that does not prevent him from doing his job.
Death is silent for a long minute.
They watch.
Gaz disarms the bomb.
Price calls in the report. Calls in Soap’s death.
Ghost releases the wrist of body that was recently Soap, his own hand falling open limp on his knee, held with careful deliberateness, separate from his body, like its bearing and open wound from contact with Johnny’s dead body, like it’s contracted some incurable disease and may have to be removed.
“NO,” Death says, finally. Like he hadn't been sure until that minute.
Soap doesn’t have a body, right now. All the messy parts of living are distant at the moment. He remembers this feeling, knows it’s a side effect of this, of stepping into Death’s domain. The grief that should squeeze his heart is stubbornly absent, but he knows it still by the hollow places it leaves in his very soul.
“Let me go back to him,” Johnny pleads, ears twitching, tail lashing faster. "Let me fix this."
The shadows of his four previous lives fade in and then out again as he turns to half face Death, though he keeps Simon in his periphery, unable to look away. A big fat orange tomcat twines around his ankles and fades again. A gray, grizzled old man flickers in to glare at Death, then vanishes again. A long, lanky teenage cat, tabby stripped and crook-eared, leaps into the arms of a woman in a fancy old dress, and they both fade back into ghostly mist.
Death turns his great cowled head towards him. He looks past Soap, at things the Scot cannot even imagine.
Boney hands rise, and phlanges clack as Death's fingers run through Soap’s mohawk, scratch behind his flattened ear, which twitches and perks up at the attention.
Soap leans into it, fearless and warm, rumbling gently as boney fingertips give the best skritches. He has no fear of Death, and Death has always been fond of cats, even the kind who sometimes walk on two legs.
“YOU GO TO YOUR SIXTH LIFE, SLIPPERY ONE.” Death intones, hand falling away again. “ONLY FATE CAN SAY IF YOU WILL MEET THIS ONE AGAIN IN IT."
That’s not acceptable. None of his remaining four lives will be what they should be, without Ghost.
Soap has an idea, however.
He explains it to Death.
Death is quiet for even longer this time, tapping the hilt of his great scythe restlessly on the ground, as more people arrive and what had once been Soap is removed. As Ghost continues to kneel in place, Price speaking quietly to him.
They will take his body home. His family will not grieve the way they expect, the way that Ghost will. They will know that he has met Death, that the sorrow they have is for themselves, for losses and partings, not for Soap, not for endings without end and the chance of future meetings, all unknowing.
Poor Simon. He won't understand.
Soap never gave him the chance to.
But maybe…
“YOU MAKE AN INTERESTING ARGUMENT,” Death allows, a long moment of thought after Soap is done. “THOUGH FATE MAY BE UPSET.”
“Fate likes a good story as much as the next cosmic being,” Soap argues. “It’s practically his whole job.”
Death contemplates some more.
“THAT MAY BE SO,” Death allows, shrugging. “WELL. IT WILL CERTAINLY BE INTERESTING TO WATCH.”
And then he swings his scythe.
~
Sgt. John "Soap" MacTavish lopes over to his mission lead, fearless, and punches *the* Ghost’s shoulder, promises to save him a seat. The two of them have worked well enough together, if distantly, the few times they've met before. This is different though, this will be a longer assignment, closer contact, and Soap is looking forward to the chance to get the know the elusive bastard better.
He turns to the chopper, and only what is rapidly becoming *two* lifetimes of special forces training prevents him from tripping right over his own feet there on the tarmac in front of Ghost, God, and his men.
Fuck — *fuck*?
He died. He fucking *died.*
Makarov fucking killed him.
He died and —
And now he's alive.
He doesn't remember the details of his meeting with Death, but he knows he would have met the being on his passing.
It's a cat's privilege.
He doesn't know how, or why, or what he said to gain this chance, but one thing is becoming rapidly clear, as his past memories expand, double disconcertingly, and then settle into the nearly the whole of two lives overlapped:
Fate is a fucking asshole.
Why now? Why not sooner, when he could have blown Makarov’s brains out on that helo and saved them all a host of trouble?
The sense memory twinges, of pain, of fighting through it, struggling — and then blackness.
His tail wants to lash, his ears to flatten, but they’re tucked down tight in his soul the way they have been for the last pair of doubled decades, except for rare leaves and visits back to his family.
Well, that’s the first thing he’s going to change.
He knows Ghost is trustworthy enough for this, though he’ll probably need to wait until Los Almas, to build something stronger, before he drops a revelation like that on him.
Well, no, the first thing he's going to change is this shitshow of a mission, then he'll focus on winning back Ghost's affection, and hopefully more.
He'll figure it out, one step at a time.
Soap isn't going to waste this second chance.