The morgue was silent but for the low hum of the fluorescent lights, each one flickering. The air smelled of antiseptic and iron. Somewhere in the distance, rain hammered the tin roof in relentless waves, a storm that hadn’t stopped since they brought him in.

You told yourself it was fitting. The heavens grieving him, or maybe warning you.

Soap lay still beneath the sheet, pale under the ghostly light. His face was too peaceful for someone who’d burned so brightly in life. The kind of peace that made your stomach twist. Death didn’t suit him. It was too quiet.

You shouldn’t have been there. You knew that. But grief rotted into madness in the hollow of your chest, and madness had your hands moving before reason could stop them.

You’d spent days building what they’d call a monstrosity. Circuits, synthetic muscle fibers, salvaged armor plates scorched from battlefields no one remembered. You’d shaped something that shouldn’t exist, something both human and machine. The final piece lay beside him: a half-mask, sleek and black, coiled with tubing like veins. It resembled something that had clawed its way from the deep, hungry for air again.

The storm’s thunder crawled closer.

You whispered his name once, a plea, a curse. “Soap.”

And then…the switch.

Electricity screamed through the room, sparking blue veins across the metal table. The lights blew out in a shower of glass. For a moment, there was nothing but the smell of something burning.

Then…a sharp inhale that rattled.

You stumbled back, pulse thundering. His chest moved. The machinery hissed like a living thing, fluid pumping, wires twitching. His fingers flexed; twitching, curling, as if testing reality again.

His eyes fluttered open, blinking. They glowed a vivid, toxic green. Sharp, alert, unnervingly bright.

He sat up slowly, like something remembering the shape of being human. The movement unnatural. The shadows clung to him even as lightning flared through the windows, catching the wet sheen of his armor, his gear.

When he finally spoke, his voice was low, distorted through the rebreather, but it was him. “Ye’ve done it now, haven’t ye?”

You froze, half in awe, half in terror. “I had to,” you whispered. “You weren’t supposed to go.”

He tilted his head, the faintest rasp of breath echoing beneath the mask. “And what am I now?”

You couldn’t answer.

Because you’d already seen it in the glow of his eyes, the strange shimmer of life that wasn’t just his. The storm outside wasn’t ending. It was following.

As he rose from the table, this reborn thing draped in darkness, you realized something horrifyingly simple. You hadn’t brought Soap MacTavish back.

You denied Death its due.