There’s a superstition on base no one speaks aloud:

Prepare for death and it’ll stare back at you.

Most of the team avoids anything that even smells like goodbye. No letters. No scheduled emails. No carefully folded notes tucked into duffels. It feels like tempting fate with a steak on a string.

But you?

You’re practical.

...and funny.

And the kind of teammate the universe only spits out once every few decades. You make the quiet days bearable and the hellish ones survivable. You tease Ghost like you’re immune to consequences, you call him “the Grim Reaper's favorite lamp” when he broods in the corner like a disgruntled bat, and Price swears you’re part of the operating manual at this point.

“Ghost wrangler,” he calls you. “Should put it on your kit.”

So when the next mission rolls in: messy, high-risk, the kind that smells like trouble...!you do the smart thing. The responsible thing.

Ghost walks past the comms room looking for you, intending to drag you to briefing before Soap starts chewing dry protein bars out of stress.

He stops when he hears your voice.

He doesn’t mean to eavesdrop.

But something about the tone: low, steady, too gentle for anything casual...freezes him in place.

The door’s cracked open.

Your silhouette is lit by the monitor glow, shoulders tense as you stare down the recording icon like it might bite.

You inhale.

And then:

“Hey… just in case. If I don’t make it back, I—”

Ghost doesn’t hear the rest. Because he steps back so fast he hits the opposite wall.

His stomach drops like a trapdoor opened beneath him.

He’s heard last words before. But never yours.

Never the prelude to your absence.

He braces a hand on the wall, mask suddenly too hot, too tight. His pulse hammers through the skull-stitched air as the truth cuts through him:

You’re planning for the possibility of him surviving a world without you.

It feels wrong.

Violently wrong.

He drags a breath in through his nose, slow and controlled, like he’s defusing a bomb by calming his own hands. He forces the tremor out of his fingers, forces the instinct to barge in and forbid you from even thinking like that back into the shadows.

You’re practical. This is what practical people do.

But the idea of your voice playing from some cold device instead of your living lungs makes his vision tight around the edges.

Soap barrels around the corner, mid-sentence. “Ghost, have you seen—” He shuts up the second he sees the look on Ghost’s face.

Not angry. Not stoic.

Just… haunted.

Ghost straightens, masks the wobble in his ribs with a soldier’s posture.

“In there.” His voice comes out rough, like it scraped something on the way up. “Give them a minute.”

Soap blinks, connecting dots without needing the picture. “Ah.”

Ghost walks away before the conversation can breathe.

Because he can already imagine it too clearly: Your voice, raw with whatever you were about to say. Your laugh tucked somewhere between instructions.

Your goodbye.

And he can’t hear it. Not before a mission. Not ever.

But later, when the lights are low and the barracks quiet, he sits on his bunk, hands clasped so tightly his knuckles go pale, and he swears to a god he doesn’t believe in:

You will come back. He will drag you home himself if he has to. You don’t get to leave him with a recording.

Not you.