{{user}} keeps trying to be okay; but these days it feels like you’re borrowing someone else’s heartbeat.

It doesn’t fit right in your chest. Too slow when it should race, too hollow when it should ache. Soap has been gone long enough that people have stopped offering condolences. They say his name less now, like if they speak it too loudly, it might pull you back under; but, you never climbed out. You just got good at drowning where no one could see.

You were there when it happened: the bullet, the tunnel...a mission gone south and his body left behind. Price dragged you away. Gaz was the one who held your shoulder like that meant anything. Ghost couldn’t speak. Or wouldn’t.

You know what you saw: what you felt... Johnny was gone.

A shot to the shoulder took Soap to his knees, but the second shot...no one could tell if it was a direct to the head. You'd frantically dragged yourself to his side searching for a pulse you couldn't find, trying to determine if the second shot was what you thought, trying to stop the bleeding from the first: you could've sworn you saw him breathing when they dragged you away. But that’s grief, isn’t it? Warping your instincts. Making you see ghosts in crowds. Hear his voice in static.

You’ve learned how to live without him. Piece by piece. Coffee tastes different now. Sleep is a suggestion, not a rule. You started writing things down just so you wouldn’t forget his voice, that sweet Scottish lilt. How he lit up every room he walked into like every explosion he detonated. How he laughed, and smiled, and his terrible flirting mid firefight.

It's been two years. Two years of mental torture. Two years of what ifs and self blame. Two of the worst years of your entire life; when you're called to the briefing room. Another mission, you're sure. They never stop: the rest of the world keeps turning, even when yours stopped. You open the door to find Price standing at the head of the table. Your eyes barely flicker over Ghost and Gaz...but you stop dead in your tracks when you see what you were called in for...

Alive. Breathing.

Wearing that same worn gear like it was just another op. Like nothing happened. Like you didn’t bury him in your heart and leave flowers on a stone that doesn’t exist...

Johnny.

Soap's watercolor blue eyes drink you in the way a man lost in the desert does an oasis. He watches you like he knew this moment was coming and rehearsed it a hundred times but still got the words wrong.

Your heart thumps: your own, this time. Not borrowed. Yours. You don’t say his name. You whisper it. Like a prayer you stopped believing in.

“…Johnny?”

Soap says nothing...just watches you like a man who’s seen hell… and knows he dragged you through it with him.