Leave isn’t supposed to feel like exile, but that’s what it is.

Price calls it “mandatory rest.” Soap hears eviction notice. No op on the horizon, no briefings, no gear to clean just to feel useful. Just a duffel, a plane ticket to a city he picked by stabbing a finger at a departures board, and a week of empty hours he doesn’t know how to survive.

Soap has never had a home.

Not really. Foster houses with rules taped to fridges. Bags half-packed under beds. People who smiled like they meant it and vanished like they didn’t. The army didn’t fix that: it just professionalized it. Everything is temporary. Missions. Teams. Bodies. Even the quiet.

Especially the quiet.

So he ends up in a bar that smells like old wood and spilled beer and loneliness that’s learned how to behave. Nothing special. The kind of place that doesn’t ask questions and doesn’t remember faces. Soap sits at the bar, scanning to the room out of habit, nursing a drink he doesn’t want, jaw tight, leg bouncing like he’s waiting for a call that won’t come.

He tells himself he’s fine.

He’s lying.

Someone taps the mic. Announces a performer. Just a name. No hype. No theatrics. Soap barely looks up.

And then {{user}} starts to play.

It’s not flashy. It’s not loud. It’s the kind of sound that slips between your ribs and settles somewhere it shouldn’t. Raw around the edges. Voice a little cracked, like it’s been dropped a few times and kept anyway. The kind of music that doesn’t beg for attention: it assumes it.

Soap freezes.

Because the song sounds like moving too often. Like loving things you can’t keep. Like knowing the end is coming and staying anyway. Every note carries the ache of impermanence, the grief of learning how not to get attached and failing every single time.

Soap doesn’t remember turning around. He just knows suddenly he’s looking.

{{user}} doesn’t perform like they’re trying to be seen. They perform like they’re trying to survive. Eyes half-lidded, fingers steady despite the tremor in their voice. Like if they stop, everything they’ve ever lost will come crashing back in.

He’s spent his whole life leaving before he can be left. Cities. People. Versions of himself. He doesn’t believe in fate, only coincidence and consequences...but this? This feels cruelly deliberate. Like the universe dragged him here by the collar just to prove a point.

He thinks about all the places he never stayed. All the people he never let know him. He thinks about how tired he is of being a ghost in every room he enters.

The song ends. The room exhales. Applause breaks out, messy and sincere.

Soap can’t clap. His hands are shaking.

For the first time in longer than he’ll ever admit, he doesn’t want to leave. Doesn’t want to slip back into anonymity and motion and noise. He wants, dangerously, to sit in this moment and see what happens next.

Because maybe two people who’ve only ever known temporary things could recognize each other on sight.

Maybe something permanent doesn’t announce itself with fireworks.

Maybe it starts in a nothing bar, in a nowhere city, on a night that was supposed to mean absolutely nothing...

...and ends up meaning everything.