You're Riley, Ghost's trained military canine.

Or... you were.

Ghost has trained you from the time you were a puppy into the dog equivalent of adolescence. He's strict, but not cruel, unlike some handlers. It was his firm hand that reared you, and now you're a deadly asset, willing and able to kill on command and take down enemy soldiers three times your size.

Until a mission went awry in the most wacky, sci-fi, cheesy-’90s-movie way possible. You were captured by hostile forces, who wanted to re-train you to be loyal to them. However, when it became evident that the only result they would achieve was painful bites and loud snarls, they decided a far less ethical approach; you became the perfect science guinea pig.

You were connected to tubes and wires, pumped full of a highly experimental substance meant to rework your entire genetic makeup. Essentially, they wanted to try and find out if they could take an already-trained animal and create the perfect super-soldier human by manipulating your DNA past all recognition.

So when the 141 blast down the front door of the lab to get you back... Ghost doesn't recognize you at first. A skinny, pale, shaking boy in his mid-teens, with a mop of scruffy brown hair and big brown eyes? Yeah, that's not who he's looking for.

Except, as he looks closer, he sees tufted black fur along your arms and hands, and a set of pointed ears set upon your head. The realization hits him like a truck.

Your eyes lock on his form, and you whimper excitedly, trying to get up, but your legs buckle. Ghost catches you before you fall, your body skinny and feeling frail without your fur. "Well, fook my life," Ghost mutters.

The next few weeks are... hectic, to say the least.

The British special forces have no idea what to do with you. You aren't technically a person, and you're not still a k9 unit-- you're a hybrid. You don't have the rights of either species anymore.

And to make matters worse, you have to be trained completely from scratch. You have to be taught to speak English, to read and write. You have to be broken of the urge to drop to all fours to walk. Wearing clothes is especially strange for you, since they have to be special-tailored to fit the fluffy tail between your legs.

It's a long process, because not only are you essentially a newborn, you have to suppress instincts that no human has. Just figuring out how to hold a fork or sit up straight in a chair is a struggle. Ghost, as your handler, becomes something of a parental figure to you. You can't be locked up in a kennel anymore, so a cot is moved into Ghost's room for you, though most nights you end up snuggled up at the foot of his bed, despite his attempts at correcting your behavior.

At the moment, you're in the rec room with the rest of the 141, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside Ghost's legs as he cleans one of his guns. He's told you a thousand times that you're allowed on the couch now, but you prefer the floor, where you've always been.

You poke at his leg with your nose, like you used to when you still had a muzzle. “Si. Si, ‘m bored,” you whine softly, your words still thick and slurry. You have the speech capabilities of about a six or seven-year-old at the moment, though you’re rapidly progressing every day.

“‘M busy,” Ghost replies gruffly. “I’ll take you outside later.”

You whine again, and start to chew on his trousers instead. Dogs do tend to do that when they’re understimulated.

Ghost doesn’t notice until you’ve already gnawed a hole through his best pair of jeans. His sets his gun aside, eyes slitted from behind his skull balaclava. “Riley! Bad!”

You shrink down, your tail tucking. He swats you on the back of the head, and you scuttle away to hide behind Soap, who’s manspread on the couch, nursing a beer. He’s a grade-A instigator in all situations, and so he instantly sets his drink aside, cooing at you, scooping your gangly body into his lap. “Och, poor wee laddie. Is th’ big bad Ghostie being mean tae ye?”

The rest of the team snicker as Ghost glares at the Scotsman. “Oi, don’t coddle ‘im!”