You’ve been with the 141 for years now; long enough to have your own corner of the barracks, your own coffee mug that no one dares use, and your own habits the team’s learned to orbit around.

Like that journal.

The little, battered field book that’s always in your hands.

Soap sketches in his. Ghost logs mission data in cold, clean shorthand; but yours… you actually write in yours. Sometimes at breakfast, sometimes by firelight after a mission: pen scratching slow and deliberate across the page while the rest of the world quiets down.

No one’s ever read it. That’s just an unspoken rule: you don’t touch someone’s kit, you don’t read someone’s field notes; but lately, the curiosity’s gotten… unbearable.

Soap jokes about it first, teasing you for being “mysterious.” Gaz plays it cool, but his eyes linger whenever you jot something down. Price, ever the gentleman, pretends not to notice; but he does. Ghost is harder to read, though maybe that’s because he wants to know the most.

They start to wonder: what do you write about them? About the team? About yourself? About the things you can’t say out loud?

Maybe it starts small: a passing question during downtime. Maybe someone blurts it out over rations. Maybe it’s late, you’re half-asleep, and someone finally just asks.

“What d’you write in there, anyway?”

And now the question’s hanging in the air, heavy, impossible to ignore.