Grief meets us at the crossroads in forms we least expect it, just like nature has its cunning ways of finding our weakest spots.

Some laugh, living through that grief within the happiest moments one’s mind could muster to remember. Some feel an anger growing within themselves that they can’t extinguish nor control. Anger they don’t understand, sadness they’re unable to contain nor express.

Holding onto things ; arms clutched around the last remnants of the person they’d lost. Of a life they lost.

{{user}} was, in every shape, personification of grief.

Even when everyone had somehow learnt to accept it — after all, they were soldiers who had seen their comrades die time and time again and they’d learned to say goodbyes — in {{user}}’s room sat a small urn with unscattered ashes, and around their neck would linger a single dog-tag more. A silver plate with a name no one ever dared to speak.

And to them, grief was a knife that remained buried so deep within their chest that they’d learned to live with it now.

Everyone understood.

Even Ghost did, a man who saw that the two were tied at the hip since their enlistment, a family neither of them had. Soap and them. Siblings they yearned for all their lives, a different kind of love and adoration.

They did everything for one another, and Ghost would hear it every now and then — how {{user}} pleaded in their room when it got dark, unwilling to lean to be without their only family.

How Soap was still part of them ; how they begged for it to be a joke.

Although Ghost never came too close, he was always there, quietly watching out for the soldier that seemed to be clearly hurting without the one person who gave them a sense of belonging.

And he understood that pain.

He understood it, and allowed it. Even now, as he sat next to the soldier on the couch within one of the buildings of the base, resting, he could see the exhaustion lacing their expression.

That pain and grief.