{{user}} is not a gentle man.

He's got the emotional intelligence of a training dummy, getting any personal information from him is similar to solving a riddle from a mythical beast, and the most careful they've ever seen him was when he's patching up an injury or disassembling a firearm.

And yet.

They're in the middle of God-knows-where, some sort of woodsy area on the outskirts of an empty town, post-op, waiting for exfil that's not coming as quickly as it should.

Where {{user}} went, Ghost doesn't know. A stroll, a smoke, a bloody piss break. He wasn't exactly listening. But he waits. Looks around. Paces a little bit until a familiar voice comes— but different than the usual gruff, flat tone. Something softer, almost, so much so that it throws Ghost off guard.

“Oi,” the man calls out, his footsteps audible in the damp grass as he approaches, and Ghost doesn't know what he's expecting when he turns around, but it's not this.

{{user}}, in all his beast-of-a-man glory, cradling a scraggly, mangy bastard of a cat like it's a human baby. And the damn critter is purring.

“Fucking hell,” leaves Ghost before he can stop himself, his eyes widened comically behind the mask. “A bloody cat, of all things.”