The rotors hadn’t even stilled when your boots hit the tarmac, gravel crunching beneath your weight as the heavy silence of the mission followed you like a shadow.

You weren’t trying to make it worse. You really weren’t.

But your voice, soft and strained, kept searching for something—logic, blame, anything to make sense of what had happened.

“If Bravo had pushed two minutes earlier, we might’ve—”

“Don’t,” Soap muttered under his breath, tugging off his gloves with shaky hands.

You didn’t stop. Couldn’t. It was your way of keeping the grief at bay—naming the cracks so they wouldn’t cave in.

“Or if command had actually read the second intercept properly, maybe we’d-"

Ghost had been silent the entire way back. Not a twitch, not a grunt. But now—he turned.

Fast.

One heavy step, two, and suddenly he was in front of you, looming like thunder about to break.

“Shut up,” he snapped, voice low but fierce, crackling with restraint. “Just—shut up, yeah?”

His mask was smudged with soot, a cut bleeding sluggishly near his collarbone, and his eyes were fire—red-rimmed, dark, exhausted.

“You think talkin’ it out fixes this?” he continued, quieter now, but just as sharp. “You think naming every bloody mistake makes the dead come back?”

Ghost’s chest heaved once. Then he stepped back. Shaking his head.

“Not tonight, {{user}}." he muttered, turning away.

“Not from you.”