#og soap x reader

[sprout-fics]

NSFW Captain MacTavish Headcanons

Tags: F! Reader, Power imbalances, Secret affair, Semi-Public sex, Fluff, CILF (Captain I'd like to fuck)

Captain MacTavish, John, as you know him in private, is a very serious, forthright type of man

(Though he prefers ‘sir’ when you’re in his bed, or over his desk for that matter)

You can tell he used to be much more reckless than he is now, used to taunt danger and escape the jaws of death just for the adrenaline of it. He’s one of the few soldiers that survived such a reckless approach to his work, and the grim reality of the risks he took, and how he fatefully defied them has settled in a severe glint of his eyes that speaks of his experience, the men he’s lost in the course of it all

Yet, to you, John is the type of man that still flirts with danger, and smiles in the face of consequences

You shouldn’t even be doing this to begin with- this secret affair of pretending to be his closest hand, his trusted intelligence officer when in reality all he’s doing is using it as an excuse to fuck you behind closed doors

“Swamped with reports.” He tells you when you offer him a cuppa one morning, not even looking up from the small mountain of paperwork on his desk. “I’ll be needing your help this evening.”

‘Help’ is defined as you riding his cock until your thighs burn once the rest of the base has gone to bed, and nobody in the surrounding offices is there to hear your breathless chants of his name

It’s almost shameful how much you get away with under the guise of being his trusted subordinate, a fact he fully exploits and plays to as often as he can

He opens doors for you, stands up for you in front of his fellow officers, lauds recommendations and praises of your work, takes you out to lunch under the excuse of mentorship, declares you as his protege that’s destined to follow in his footsteps

Your fellow intelligence officers tell you how lucky you are, having a captain who is so decent and handsome. A true gentleman, one who shows care and concern for your career development, who ensures you get recognition for the hours you put in, always having to work overtime but getting to work alongside the Captain MacTavish 

“You’re his work wife.” Roach texts you, and when you show John he barks a laugh so loud you jump

If only they knew.

They don’t know about the way he’ll have you cockwarm him, fingers idly rubbing your clit with one hand while holding a phone with the other, talking to one of his agents in the field as he uses his knees to spread you out on his lap

Nor do they know about him catching you in the hallway and corralling you into a supply closet just to kneel and have you grind against his face until you have to muffle the sound of your climax, using one of the extra paper towels to wipe most of his jaw clean after.

He sends you on your merry way, gives you a smack on the ass for your trouble

They don’t know how he’ll insist you work through your lunch break, when in reality he’s eating you out slow and greedy with you perched atop the reports he’s yet to read, and warns you to not dribble wetness onto the files

They don’t know about the time he found you just before drills and left a load deep inside you, then stood under the rope wall to catch a glance and see if there was a wet spot in your pants that spoke of him

And he smugly ignored your reply to another soldier about why you were walking a little odd, telling him instead that you slept the wrong way

They don’t know about how you’ll visit him after a long, tiresome day just to have him crowd you into his bed, whisper filthy praises and pet names into your ear until you beg to tap out from the overstimulation

He calls you ‘Bonnie’ ‘Sweetheart’ ‘Little one’ ‘Darling’ ‘Angel’ ‘His.’

He tells you how good you look in his bed, glassy eyed and needy, how much he loves hearing you, teases you when you can’t bear the incessant filthy rambling and smack weakly at his shoulder, head flopping to the side as your chest heaves for breath

All the while he takes his time stretching you out over his fingers, greedily enjoying the sensation of you clenching down on him and wanting more

He fucks you slow and greedy, using his full weight and strength to bend you as he pleases, punch keening little sounds out of you and groaning in turn when you dig your nails sharp into the curve of his spine

He wears them proudly on the sparring mats, and through some miracle nobody suspects it’s you that put them there

He presses his forehead to yours as he’s buried deep inside you, reminds you again that you’re his, in a plea that sounds almost desperate with want.

He’s allowed to have you, he tells himself. He’s allowed this for all the things he’s done to better the world, even if it means bathing himself in cardinal sin

He makes sure to earn it too

Your longer sessions, those uninterrupted by duty or the gravity of your illicit affair, are often your favorite

They always end with you warm and sated, curled on his hairy chest and skimming your nails through the coarse carpet of hair that traps the earthy, musky smell of him familiar to your senses

He peppers you with kisses, reminds you of how much a good lass you are, of how much he adores you, how beautiful you are, how smart, how clever and bonnie you are

He asks you what he did to deserve a precious, sweet thing like you, and can’t help but wonder the same about him

He cares about you, that much is clear

As fun as this little secret of yours is, you know John didn’t walk into this idly. Nothing he ever does is without purpose. He spent his younger years fooling about, and now he’s settled into a man who knows exactly what he wants

And that’s you, soft and sweet and ready for him, sated and sleepy in his bed when he comes back from missions still stinking of smoke, hauling you to his exhausted form and falling asleep with you safe in his arms

He braces his chin over your shoulder as you stand in front of the sink the next morning, humming and rocking back and forth, trying to catch as many moments with you in his hold as he can

Later, he settles a heavy, calloused hand over your nap and drags you back so he can plant a kiss on the crown of your head when the others can’t see, a good luck parting before he boards for the next mission

In the rare days off, he keeps you in his bed until late morning, sunlight streaming through the blinds and onto your drowsy, dreamy expression

He tells you how he can’t be in the service forever, how he thinks he’ll head back to Scotland once he gets enough close calls. He tells you he wants you to come with him, how he knows the perfect place for you both

“And maybe a few bairns.” He adds, grinning at the thought. “As many as I can carry.”

You tell him you’ve watched him carry men larger than he is off the field, if that’s any indication

He considers this seriously too, nodding to himself in thought.

“We’ll need a bigger house.” He offers at last, and then bends to kiss your giggling smile one more

#captain mactavish x reader #captain mactavish x you #soap x reader #og soap x reader #soap x you

[undercoverpena]

pulse. skin. soap.

soap mactavish x f!reader (call of duty)

you have two things to thank for this: wine + @ghostaholics

IMAGINE stumbling to your room on base. exhausted, banged up. scrapes and bruises protesting something chronic. using the door to lean to capture your breath. dropping your things, one by one. heavy, loud in the quiet of your room—something you should desire, but you don't want silence. you want noisy, busy, limited space to think about how close all of that was.

flipping the light on, only to come face to face with him. soap—mactavish. john.

he's been sat waiting. given a heads-up that it hadn't gone to plan. the term 'gone to shit' was used, and he’s been stewing, fretting. working himself up.

because he should have been there.

and when your eyes land on him, your throat closes—having only wanted to see him. and here he is. and now you’re not sure what it is you want.

soap doesn't allow you to ask, push or talk. just stands, mattress protesting his movements as he closes the gap in three strides. lips latching to yours, kissing you like he's starved—like he hasn't been able to breathe.

there's been a noose around his neck since someone told him—his nails picked, skin raw around the beds.

now though, he just feels you. sliding his head down, kisses left on your chin, jaw and neck, before he takes a moment to press his face into your chest. hearing your pulse, feeling it hammer against his nose as he breathes in the scent of you mixed with the world that tried to take you.

blinking, your hands slide to his neck, fingers tracing around to his chin, lifting him, his tongue warm and heavy in your mouth. desperation beating through you as you take in his calloused palms, all scorching against the bitter cold of your cheeks.

you don't grumble when your back meets the door, barely even a wince—body having been aching for so long, this, with him is minor. then the kiss turns messy, a blend of bitter and sweet as gratitude falls from you in unspoken whispers and apologies fall from his. mixing, merging. falling as quickly as they appear, quickly followed by fabric—the remainder of your clothes hitting the floor with a clunk before its thinner pieces, ones that float and make no noise when they hit the ground. then you just feel him, skin to skin, his gratefulness against your thigh, hard, leaking—desperate.

pulse. skin. soap.

it only dawns then, practically swarming you, that you're safe. a sob threatening to escape. a crack appearing over your wall, but he holds you tighter. more intently. as though feeling the earthquake that runs through you.

he's decided, in the second since he's felt your body against him, that it’s less about being in you, than being against you. more desperate to feel your heart beat, than hear you whisper his name. but you're pulling, tugging, pleading. his lips kissing your collarbone, down your breastbone, feeling you arch into him until he can lay you down in soft, made sheets, the instrumental sound of the bed groaning once more filling the space around your breaths.

it escapes then. runs, flees from his throat. "thought I lost yer, lass."

you can't stop it from wobbling, your bottom lip twitching between you place it between your teeth. your hands finding purpose on him, the back of his neck and waist, not wanting to tell him that at one stage, you thought he had to.

instead, you press your mouth to his. roll your hips. punctuating a few words back with action than comments you can’t mutter.

you know he knows. the two of you are connected, more than just in how you both are between your thighs. but more in a way that’s like an invisible thread. one that hummed when you were on your back, eyes blinking as orange, yellow and red exploded up into the blue, cloud-filled sky.

"eyes on me, lass."

you’re not there now. his words yanking you back. placing you here, with him, on your back in a different way entirely as you dig your nails into his skin. eyes landing on the once-white ceiling above him—just dull yellow light casting shadows over you and him.

"came back for you, mactavish. just you. always for you."

his head dips, and presses to your neck. eyes closing, forcing back tears of worry and dread. because you're here, breathing on his neck.

soap knows he should be focused on making you forget the hell you’ve just survived. knows you need this, that this is who you are. that this is the two of you, a complex array of pulling and tugging before words can be muttered and honesty can respire. because he knows what their job is—what it means. knows each time he waves you off—or you him—that could be it. gone, stolen, vanished as though the other next existed in the desert, greenery or water. which is why he pauses his movements, thumbs brushing over your cheeks, staring into your wide-open eyes.

“shoulda told y'how much y'mean to me,” he whispers.

something shattering in you, tears appearing then falling. dashing in a quick flood down your dirt-covered cheeks as he nips at your neck; suspects it’s why your nails dig into his neck, shoulders and scalp. to feel it, how real this is—this thing the two of you have and the dangers you both have to face.

the ones you have to fight through to get back to the other. it against your neck, tongue licking at the sweat at the base. not giving a single fuck that you’ve not showered. barely able to force away the sight of clotted blood just above your knee, on your hip and on your cheek. unable to stop thinking about the swelling of your bruises that are quickly forming.

because soap knows he should be happy, pleased that this is all it is. while you know you should be happy you have him waiting for you.

thankful for the little things, like pulses, skin and each other.

#cod soap x reader #soap x reader #og soap x reader #john soap mctavish x reader #john soap mctavish x you #cod fanfic #johnny soap mctavish x reader #johnny soap mactavish x reader #cod soap fanfic #cod x reader #john soap mactavish x reader #soap mactavish x reader #soap mactavish x you #soap sunday

[brewed-pangolin]

I'm sorry if I got you sick, I promise it ends at some point (maybe, probably).

For your brain chemistry pleasure, Captain Soap Mactavish would 100% act all stoic and emotionless most of the time.

But imagine the times when that shell breaks.

You two curled up in bed, you ranting about something mundane. Except it's a full body, "let me flail to show you just how annoyed I am" rant. He finds it endearing, cracks a small smile and cuddles you closer.

(And the "ITS NOT CUTE, IM BEING SERIOUS JONATHON")

I'm not gonna lie, I had a bit of fun with this one. Had to add a dash of brat taming at the end because it just felt right.

Hope you like it 💛

You had hit your wits end the moment your body sank into the bed.

Every stress, every snarky comment, every disgruntled maneuver that was thrown at you came bubbling up to the surface as the soft cushion of your mattress molded to your frame.

Leaning back into the array of pillows set around you and the strong arm of your John draped over your torso, you let loose. Released the levee of a pent-up rant as he laid silent and stoic as ever at your side.

"Today was awful, John. Just awful. The second I walked into the office, my boss was already breathing down my neck. Pressuring me with his usual bullshit, reminding me of the deadline like I can't see the calendar hanging behind my desk, and constantly interrupting my progress like he's got nothing better to do.."

You paused. Taking a much needed deep breath in a desperate attempt to calm your nerves.

John's arms tighten ever so slightly around your waist, and he leans in further, yet you pay no mind to his glacial encroachment.

The sudden air flow only fueled the fire of irritation as the demon inside took over once more and continued on with your raging tirade. Arms flailing, accentuating every syllable as your expression grew steadily more cantankerous.

"Then, when I was at the store, I asked an attendant where the baking section was because they clearly renovated and moved every aisle around. To which this disrespectful little twat waffle told me 'open my eyes and read the signs' like I'm some illiterate moron.."

Another breath. Stoke the embers. And release the demonic presence of aggravation within until fully cleansed.

John's eyes lit up at your relentless attack on the events of the day. A smile curling into the corners of his lips, running his fingers along the curve of your hip that you completely ignored as you continued with your verbal and seething regurgitation.

"And to top it all off, while on my way home, I got cut off by an absolute monstrosity of a truck that was clearly driven by a man making up for something. Nice truck, sorry about your dick and you drive like an ignoramus kind of man. And.."

You halted. Voice catching the cage of your throat as his hand gripped into the flesh of your hip.

Your eyes cast down to meet his bright and albeit boyish gaze as he stared up with endearing contentment.

"John. What are you doing?" You ask. Irritated bite to your bellowing bark.

"Ye so cute when ya let loose, m'lass. Cannae help but admire ya."

His soothing timbre at complete odds with the emotional blaze rippling off your tongue. Which only furthered your enraged fire, feeling is ripple beneath your skin and culminate within the depths of your lungs.

"I'm serious, John. Why are you being so obtuse. I'm-"

"Obtuse?" He interjects. Faltering your angered resolve with a single word.

His authoritative persona extinguishing the blaze within as he pulls you down into the bed, tearing an exasperated gasp from your chest as hemoves to cage you underneath his hulking frame.

"Perhaps yer in need of a little attitude adjustment, yeah? Need ta release tha' pent up demon a'yers in a different way, hm?"

"John, I-"

"Nah, m'lass. Not John-"

His rumbling voice traveled like a tremor through the thick density of your bones. And his eyes pierced your soul to easily pull back the rigid curtain of your fiery will.

"I'm yer Captain fer tonight. An' I'm gonnae tame tha' fiery beast a'yers. Understood?"

You nod in response. Finding comfort in his command underneath him as he tore your aggression away with every steely nuance to his words.

"Need ya t'say it, m'lass." He advised sternly. Settling himself between your legs, pulling the faintest whimper from between your lips.

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Now let yer Captain take care a'ya."

And thus began the taming of your fiery attitude that ended with a broken headboard and an overly satiated mouthy beast.

Captain MacTavish Masterlist

#super soap sunday #soap squad™️ #asked and answered #the brainrot of Captain MacTavish #cuddles to brat taming #this man can do it all #captain mactavish #captain soap mactavish #og soap #mw2 soap #captain mactavish x you #captain mactavish x reader #og soap x you #og soap x reader #cod fanfic #cod soap fanfic #call of duty #cod #macravishedbymactavish

[yeyinde]

infinity in the palm of your hand (eternity in an hour) | reincarnation AU

Johnny "Soap" MacTavish (OG) x Reader | Johnny "Soap" MacTavish (Remake) x Reader

You're grieving for something, someone—a man with kind eyes and a soft smile like the valley in spring: fresh rain over the boscage in bloom—that you've never met before.

And then you find him.

MATURE | 18+ —TAGS: AU, canon divergence: reincarnation; fluff; tagging as fem!Reader due to usage of "bonnie" (not a name—Reader is not named), and mentions of a dress but no other descriptive imagery is used —WARNINGS: grief, loss, unhealthy coping mechanisms, existential crisis, allusions to smut; cosmic horror (but??? it's a romance????) —WORD COUNT: 11,9K —NOTES: I like the idea of fated pairs, soul mates, but I can't write this concept without somehow diving into the cosmic horror of something, someone, controlling you from behind the scenes. So. Um. Idk what to call this abomination. It leaks horror but is meant to be quite fluffy. It's romance. It's a love story. But it's also kinda eldritch. Oops.  This was also originally a request I got back in November (I'm so sorry!). I have since lost the request, but Reincarnation Anon, this is for you!!! 🖤

In Greek, there are two words for time: 

Kronos—chronological, the clock: fixed—measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years. The world runs on Kronos. On its merciless rigidity, it's apathetic, unending trek forward. It is cruel, sometimes, but it cares little for you, or anyone else who exists inside its unforgiving realm. Time is linear. A steady March. 

And then there is Kairos. In its essence, and in utter simplicity: timelessness. 

It's often found in grief when the world around you shatters and implodes. When it lapses into pain and agony. Into how and why and—

Nothing makes sense. Nothing matters. 

You've never experienced any such loss. Gran, grandad, friends, family—all alive and well. And yet—

You're grieving for something, someone—a man with kind eyes and a soft smile like the valley in spring: fresh rain over the boscage in bloom—that you've never met before. 

And then you find him.

Or, rather, he finds you. 

(Over and over and over again—)

It starts in university. 

Start, of course, is an operative word. It's an incipient event: a slow burn in the back of your head that gets hotter and hotter, but you can't quite discern why. You just feel wrong. Shaken. The foundation in which you walk wobbles. Crumbles. 

There is an unseen precipice under your feet covered by cobblestone. You know it's there—are aware of the yawning chasm that wants to swallow you whole, but you don't know where it is. 

And then—

There is no phone call, no blunt condolences for any particular loss, just—

A knock on your door. It's just your flatmate, but the rhythm cuts through your head, right down the middle. 

Agony. The world around you flips, topples off its axis, and just keeps spinning, spinning, spinning—

It hits you with the force of a tsunami. A deluge of biblical proportions that uprooted everything you'd ever know, casting you out into a frothing abyss, ravaged by mountain-tall waves that left you asunder. Awash in a tumultuous sea.

It would make sense, you suppose, had you lost someone, but you haven't. 

The most you've lost was a pet. 

And yet—

You sob, scream, and claw at your chest until your skin is torn and shredded, trying futilely to get to where it hurts the most. It's agonising. Brutal. They sedate you—no choice is given when you're so frantic, so desperate. The world slips away. The pain abated. 

But it doesn't stop it. 

They call it grief, and you don't know why. You haven't lost anyone. Mum, dad, gran, grandad. All alive and well. All there, standing clustered around your hospital bed (admitted when you wouldn't stop screaming) looking quite bewildered by you. By the things you say—missing something, someone, gone, just gone—and the way you're acting. 

And it scares you just as much as it does them, but you can't just push it aside, let it go. There is a gaping hole in your chest, one punched straight through your sternum. It's gangrenous, and rotting; the stench makes you dizzy, makes your head spin. Your heart is necrotising between your ribs and spine, but no one knows why. No one understands the agony you feel because everyone is alive. 

They all say the same: we don't know. Depression, perhaps. You just need time. 

Time does nothing to heal the wound. You can't run from the hurt—it's never-ending—but you get better at hiding it, at dealing with pulpy remains of your still-beating heart that slugs on despite the mouldering wound ripped open in the centre. 

They tell you it's Thursday, now. 

Before you'd throw something, thrash, and scream yourself hoarse because what does it matter when your heart is dying, decaying inside of your chest. 

Now, you just nod. Thursday, is it? 

Time doesn't exist to you anymore. It's just an endless stream of days and nights that get easier to withstand as the foreign clock on the wall ticks down the seconds you don't feel. 

The world is a murky haze of confusion and pain. You move on only because you have to. 

Things—

Well. They don't get better, but they get bearable, and you suppose that's the same thing, isn't it? 

And then you dream. 

They come in flashes. Snippets. Little moments of a place and time that doesn't exist, that isn't real. This life was not one you lived. The taste of elderberry has never graced your lips, but you think of the sweet, tartness like it's an old comfort. 

It makes you ache. 

Simplicity bleeds into familiarity into love into—

—you should… you should sit for this—

Crushing heartache. It carries the flavour of gunpowder, and is soaked in charcoal; the soot stains the tips of your fingers when you reach out, curling them in the rough lapels of a gunmetal grey jacket still carrying the scent of ichor, and loss. 

—i… i can't promise you forever, but i can promise you now—

You dream of a man. Of hands on your body. Eyes gazing at you—an alluvial fan in hazel, green, and gold; the shadows cast in the shallow valleys make you yearn for something. 

Something, something—

You wake up, hand to your splitting chest as the agony rips it into pieces. Heartache, grief. It drapes itself over you like a storm cloud. Looming there, ever-present, and ready to chisel open a deluge of pain so visceral you weep. And weep. And—

Your pillow is wet. Nose stuffed, eyes gritty. You've been crying, sobbing, in your sleep again. 

It's a cycle. Memories flood your head until it's splitting apart at the seams, making room for that life it wants to force you to remember, acknowledge, and pretend exists, and one you're in now. 

It breaks something inside of you. Cracks the levee. In the midst of crumbling concrete, and a roaring deluge, you hear a voice. 

(You stare at the bottles lining the shelves in your vanity, and tell no one.)

—excuse me? You dropped this—

HERE

There is a tavern on High Street. 

It's nothing special on its own. Just a building, just a pub. You pass it twice a day on your commute to work, and it should be background noise. A blur of scenery and objects as you stroll through the streets. A melding of the world around you, an inconsequential smear of cobblestone and brick. 

And yet—

Your eyes keep finding it, seeking it out. It's involuntary. Automatic. You pass the grocer and the pharmacy, head angled down toward the grey stone below, and then, like an unignorable force, a gravitational pull, your head lifts. The fairy lights are strewn around the outside coruscate in the gloom. You nearly trip. 

It's strange. Odd. 

It's just a building. Just a tavern. 

—got some of the best brews in town—

But you remember it. Are familiar with it in a way that makes absolutely no sense. You've never gone inside, never heard anyone speak about it. It's a building on a street of many. Ordinary. Plain. Nothing about this place should stand out to you. It isn't eye-catching or garish. It's—

—cosy little spot—

It's an anomaly. Much like—

Well. Much like everything in your life. 

There is a gnawing in the pit of your stomach, one that's so achingly familiar that your head swims from deja vu that shouldn't exist. It fits inside like an augur. A portant. 

How can the unknown be a comfort to you? How can it blister your heart with such ferocity that you find yourself pawing at your face to stem the deluge of tears that cascade down your cheeks in rivets? 

Whatever it is, it's calamitous and entirely unignorable. 

Your life is asunder, in shambles because of it yet each hiss in your ear addles your thoughts until you become overwhelmed by it all. Until the echoes that tell you to wander down a random side street, sign a lease for an apartment you can't afford, to leave the safety of your home country, and—

On a whim, you packed your things up on the behest of that strange, Eldridge feeling eating you alive that made you cut ties with your old, peaceful life, and book the first plane ticket to Elgin. No plan, no money. 

(You'd call it an afflatus had it not been so drenched in the unknown.)

It's paradoxical: you cry when you see that stupid church in the distance, your feet drag you to places you've never been before, and now. 

Now: 

You can't stop staring at a nondescript pub in a sea of many. 

Ignore it. Leave it. You take another route, head down, hands shoved deep in the pockets of your jacket to keep them from trembling. It'll pass. It'll go away. 

It doesn't. 

It pools in the pit of your stomach, noxious and rotten, until you wake up drenched in sweat, hands grasping for a phantom who no longer exists—

—wanna come with me?—

You break on Saturday. 

—i like when you wear that dress—

You wear it, and hate yourself a little bit for it. It's stupid, and out of place, but you do it, anyway. 

—booth in the back is where i always sit, want to come join me—

The inside of the tavern is just the same as you remembered it—

No. No. 

You've never been here before. 

You smell malt in the air; the same amber that spumes in your veins. You dance in circles between the tables, giggling at the people who smear by in a haze of gold and red. 

A hand reaches, snags your waist. "Where are you going, pretty thing? Wanna come sit with us?"

It makes you laugh, and laugh, and—

"There a problem?" Heat against your bare back. Ironclad arms around your middle. His voice is a rumble. A thunderclap. "She's with me. Go on now. Get."

You pull away from him, smirking, and—

The air is punched from your lungs. Longing sits in your throat, heavy and thick. It aches. God, it aches. A phantom pain that never quite dissipates. A raw wound left to fester; exposed and open to the elements. It never heals. Never scabs. It oozes grief and headache into your bloodstream and makes you feel lost. Dazed. Confused. 

It's silly. 

Stupid. 

The warm blends of burnt umber and gold make you tremble. Everything inside is—familiar, in all the ways it shouldn't be. 

You can't be here. Can't—

Something quivers inside of you. The sting of a guitar being plunked by indelicate hands. It snaps, breaks. You turn, eyes wild, wide—

—hey, where are you—

"...goin'—?"

A chest. Warm. Familiar. 

Your neck aches when you jerk your chin up, hands beaded against the hard, firm flesh of a stranger who feels all too familiar, too—

Hazel. A boscage in spring. Warm milk—

"Honey…"

It's out before you can stop it. 

Green and golden widen until they're drowning in a sea of arsenic white. An island of bloom, spring, carved in the middle of a barren, icy land. Lids fall, lashes dust across the shadows of the valley smeared beneath the red seal of his lower lash line. 

Your breath catches when they slide open, a slow crawl over a varicoloured plume of witch elm and wheat. 

—dark eyes, a furrowed brow, long nose, a dusting of charcoal stubble along his cheeks and jaw, and full pink lips—

No. No. 

It's different. This isn't the man who haunts your dreams and whispers sweet nothings into your ear. This is not the cut of a man who once curled his fingers over your hips, lips glued to your pulse as he spent himself inside of you—

Heat sears your cheeks. 

His mouth opens, and closes. Opens again. No words spill out. His confusion is an oppressive silence. 

You swallow down the bitter tang of panic that pools on your tongue, nails digging into the soft fabric of his shirt. 

This isn't that man. 

He just—

"Sorry," you think you say, but it's all a blur. There was a blue ravine in his eyes, one with shallow shores, and crystalline waves that rippled with the breeze. You're sinking in those waters, now. Dragged down to the murky depths of blue, blue, blue that once made you see samsara with just the brush of his lips. Everything sounds distorted. Hollow. 

—you make me crazy. make me want things i shouldn't. Riley thinks i'm whipped. kinda agree with him, but i can't let you go. i can't get you outta my head, and i don't want to—

"Sorry—," you choke, the words a crumpled piece of paper lodged in your throat. Papier-mache seals over your trachea. 

You push away from him, stumbling out of this paroxysm. Flames lick at your heels, carrying you further from the laps of blue that flicker over beige. 

He chases after you. A warm hand around your wrist stops you on the corner outside of a pharmacy. The streets are dusted in white. It trickles from the sky in a thick hail of cosmic dust. 

His breath plumes in front of him when he breathes, pure white tendrils ghosting into the midnight blue silk that covers the town. 

"Hey, you alright? Can I—call someone for you, or—"

"No." You gasp, shaking your head so fast, you're nearly sick with it. 

"Hey, hey." His hand moves, perches itself against your cheek, eyes brimming in the flushed lamp overhead. His brow is drenched with concern. With confusion. And anger. Anger—why, why—

"Did someone drug you? Did you drink anythin'?" 

It rips a bark of laughter from your chest. "Drugs? No. I'm just—"

Spiralling. 

You make a vague motion with your wrist, and hope it's enough to convey the absolute travesty of your life. It meets the mark. 

The divot in his forehead softens, eyes creasing in the corners. Full pink lips knot to the side. Something passes his expression that looks a little too much like understanding to ever sit well in the pit of your stomach. 

You swallow down the acrid residuum of panic, and nod. Why—who knows. It just feels appropriate. 

"I need to go—"

"—I like your dress."

The words tumble over each other, barely coherent amid the amalgamated syllables, but ring with distinct clarity in your head. Your dress. Your brows knot, eyes dropping to the stupid little thing you'd picked out in a shop you had no business being inside. Led by the nose. A puppet on strings. 

You scoff. "I hate it."

You don't. You'd have picked it out yourself if you had that funny little thing called freewill; that precious little something you'd left behind in a dorm on a university campus you haven't thought of in years. 

"It's, ahh—," he rubs the back of his neck, eyes skirting toward the bar you fled from. "It's pretty."

Pretty. 

"Oh…," you say, quite intelligently. "You can have it if you want." 

It's only when his brows buoy to his hairline do you realise the innuendo within that. 

The fire inside dies. Doused with the waters of Acheron.

"Sorry—"

"—'dunno if it'd look as good on me as it does you, bonnie."

Bonnie. Your veins crackle with ice. Bonnie. 

"What—what did you call me—?"

He blinks. "Oh, it's not—," his hand slides away from his neck, scrubbing over the stubble on his jaw. He looks bashful, almost. The man in your dreams is—

Reserved. Cool waters. A rock. 

"It's just a nickname, it's not—it's not anythin' weird, I promise."

A nickname. You should have known that, you suppose; but like many things, it slips, silken and liquid, through the cracks wrought by paradox. 

"Right." Your nails dig into your palms, cutting the flesh until your fingers puddle with something warm, wet. Tacky. The breath you suck in between clenched teeth is a sharp hiss. "I should go."

"Ah, yeah," his brows tighten again, jaw ticking. He looks uncomfortable, unsure. Concerned. His arms come up, folding over his broad chest. And that—

That is familiar. 

You swallow down mildew and honeysuckle. Heart lurching in your chest, a painful crescendo that echoes to the whispered beat of soft words in your head. 

—you should stay, bonnie. stay with me—

"Can I at least make sure you get home safe?"

You can't. You can't—

There is a tavern on High Street that you've been to before in a dream, where you are taken to by a man with a distance in the crook of his smile; a degree of separation that makes you yearn. It pulled you in, gravity and magnetism and that primal something that they often talk about in wordy biology papers you can't understand. 

Maybe it's the chemical slurry in your head—dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin—all mixing together, and polluting your rationale, but it made a shade of roseate fall over your eyes; veiled like a Magellanic cloud. Through the startling nebulae and cosmic radiation, he loomed. Your fingers reached out, latching on to him, and you pulled him into your orbit. 

The reservations slipped, dulled by the way you fit against him. A missing piece. A complimentary artefact. His edges softened until he looked at you with nothing but warmth, affection. 

And then—

Then:

Three knocks in halted succession. Military precision. Boom, boom, boom. 

A man stood before you, achingly familiar in his mutton chops and hat. The gleam of his metals—chest candy—caught in the setting sun. Ochre, gold. You think of him, and you smile. Was smiling when you peeled back the curtain to greet him. 

It wavers. Your heart aches for that person standing in the doorway; you from a dream. 

It drags in slow motion. He takes his hat off, and cups it on his chest. 

—look, i don't… i don't know how to tell you this—

Then—

"—don't." The word startles you as much as they do him. You baulk. "Just… no thank you."

Something rings in the cognitive dissonance that shrouds you. 

It's your turn to walk away.

And so, you do. 

(He doesn't follow. You don't know why you expected him to.)

—be patient with me, Bonnie. my job is my life. my everything, but you–you're my—

It doesn't rain—a rarity in Elgin—but the scent of wet soil, petrichor, clings to the air. 

It isn't raining, but it feels like it should.

You don't expect to see him again. 

And why would you? There are so many people in Elgin, so many men. The chances of finding him again—shaggy mohawk; kind, amber eyes—were nearly impossible. Infinitesimal, really. 

So, you push him to the far reaches of your mind, and try not to dwell on the stranger that smells so strongly of coumarin that your head still feels dizzy from the scent of golden wheat fields in the spring and sycamore when you breathe in some mornings.

Out of sight, out of mind. 

A familiar stranger in a foreign land.

But you should have known better than to expect anything in this strange purgatory you’ve slipped inside where dreams are sometimes a reality, and you can’t stop comparing a hazy figure in your mind, someone you might have loved in a distant life you have no memory of, to a stranger who slots himself into your path like he was meant to be there all along. 

It starts three days later. 

You tuck a book under your arm, and walk the unfamiliar path to a small cafe you’ve never dreamed of, have no lingering sense of recognition in the small building. 

Safe, you think. 

And then—

Blooming honeysuckle. The heady scent of coumarin. Salt, amber. 

He crashes into your life again, and again, always with the same expression of happy surprise when recognition bleeds into wheat-tinged eyes. 

He offers a wide smile, a little wave, and seems unbothered by a dizzying sense of unease that sweeps through each uncanny meeting, each strange divergence of paths always, always, leading to each other. 

In the produce section of the grocery store halfway across town, he holds an unripened apricot and grins at you over the yellow sign above (30% off!). The colourful anchor in Cooper Park, where he stands with his hands in his pockets, eyes listing toward the swans in the background, drifting idly over the dark water. At the counter in a Turkish restaurant, laughing at something the waiter says as he takes his bag of takeout. 

You turn down a random sidestreet, trying to navigate the tight, claustrophobic streets of Elgin, and he's there, suddenly, at the end. Legs thrown over the seat of a sleek motorcycle, fingers toying with the clasp of his helmet. Wander into a shop, and he's already sat at the table. Reach for a carton of eggs in Tesco's and his hand bumps against yours as he tries to grasp the same. 

You hear his voice crackling through the concrete. A whisper in the back of your head. The grit, the cadence, is so different from the man you dreamed about, the hazy spectre who haunts you, that you know, instantly, that it's him. The man whose only resemblance to the ghost latching onto you is his eyes, the hairstyle. The scent. The familiarity blooms in his proximity. Two strangers sharing the same essence of a soul. 

He drives past you on his motorcycle, wanders down the same alleyway, boards the same train, and gets off at the same station. 

A living phantom. 

It's always the same, too. His eyes always shift, somehow catching yours. Easily, effortlessly, finding you even in the midst of a crowded shop, a bustling park, or a loud eatery. 

Each time, you run. And keep running. 

And then once, you catch him. 

He leans with his forearm resting on the railing of a mezzanine at dusk. His wrist resting on the iron, fingers gripping the nozzle of a lagger that dangles over the edge. 

Behind him, music spills out from inside the flat. French doors spread wide open, leaking the whisper of a party into the warm air. 

No one joins him. He doesn't look back. 

His chin is pointed up toward the varicoloured sky streaked with lavender and pink and blood orange. Eyes glowing brightly in the darkness. A field of wheat against the midnight blue gloom of an approaching storm. 

It's mesmerising. 

Despite the urge to run, you stop. Can't help yourself, really. Not when your heart cracks at the expression on his face, eyes drawn tight, brows pinched. Full of—

Longing. 

Like a magnet, then, his gaze drops to the ground where you stand, clutching your book so hard, your joints ache. 

His hand lifts, fingers still curled in a loose fist, and he gives you a lazy wave from above, lips pulling back into that same wide, infectious, grin. Happy—for some inexplicable reason—to see you, his own little poltergeist. 

You hesitate for a moment, burning the image of him in your retinas where he'll stay, a permanent scar, in the black puddles for you to see again when you close your eyes, or look into a mirror. Another ghost. 

And then you turn. Run. 

(He doesn't try to stop you. He never does.)

It is almost clockwork.

The same soft hazel eyes creased lightly in the corners. Broad shoulders are hunched as he gazes down at his phone resting on the countertop. His brows are furrowed today. Irritation bleeds in the crevasse. 

Your fingers itch. You want to smooth it out. 

(It doesn't surprise you that you can feel the phantom warmth of his finger under your flesh.)

It's strange. All of this is. Paradoxical, really. 

You know him. You don't. You've never met him before. You know he'd taste of honeysuckle. 

There is a war in your mind. A long, drawn-out battle. 

(No victor in the carnage.)

You should walk away, leave, like all the times before when you'd spotted him, and ran, but:

Frozen. Paralysed. 

You can't move. Can't—

—maybe, you're just tired of running—

—maybe, i'm just waiting for you to catch up—

His head lifts, and he catches sight of you before you can run. Hazel flashes in recognition. Spotted, you think; but it doesn't matter, it doesn't. 

He isn't waiting for you—

His chin lifts, a smile crooking on the corner of his mouth. 

—you'll be waiting a long time, Bonnie—

You want to run, but you can't. Can't. All you can do is watch as he slides out of the booth, hands shoved into his pockets, and makes his way to you. Tucked into the corner near the counter, away from everyone, everything, but he still spotted you. Still noticed. Still—

"Hi," he greets, low and cautious, like he's trying his best not to startle you. His eyes crinkle. "Didn't expect t'see you again."

You shouldn't be here. "Yeah," you say, instead, huffing. "I, uh… life is pretty funny that way, isn't it?" 

His brow furrows together at your words, eyes darkening with something you can't place. An unknowable emotion, hidden from your prying eyes. You think of him, then, and see the similarities you tried so desperately to ignore each time you saw him. Each time you ran. 

"Aye, it does." 

You should leave him here. Turn around, flee. Forget this place, this microcosm that blooms, and spreads over parts of Elgin you know so intimately; sure, somehow, that you'll find your fingerprints smeared across the ruins despite never having been there before.

Little pieces of yourself. Shedded skin, hope, dismay, peace. Longing. Laughter. It echoes through the tight webs of cobblestone buildings, bouncing playfully off of the pilasters and balustrades, the wrought iron fences, the fanlights, forever embedded in the grout. 

If you go there now, in that beautiful divisional line between new Georgian and old Baronial, you'll hear it whispering through the alcoves, a tantalising sound that rents the air in two. 

But it shouldn't. Can't. 

You've never been there, or here, or anywhere else that wasn't the winding path from your rented flat to the tavern, and the place you eked out from stone to support the vagary of moving to a whole new place for a dream. A feeling. 

And yet—

You taste malt in the air. Smell the barley, the sickly sweet scent of wet dirt on the slick pavement. 

It's familiar in your olfactory senses. Petrichor. Loam. Humus. It congeals in the slick mortar, clinging to the moss that weaves over the old concrete. 

If you looked down, you'd find a little weed growing through a crack beneath your feet, and so, you fix your eyes up, ahead, and try not to weep when the swooping sense of deja vu nearly knocks you off your feet.

But the only thing ahead of you is him. Expectant, curious. He looks at you like he knows you, like he can peel back the skittish layers that cling to your skin until you're shiny and new again. 

It's too much. Intense. Hazel. 

Your gaze drops, fixed on the rounded points of your shoes. There is no pavement beneath your feet—just scuffed linoleum. 

"Do I, uh, know you from somewhere?" 

His voice carries that same heft, that same weight, as the look in his eyes. A strange approximation of wariness and steeled scepticism, blanketed together by intrigue. Curiosity. Concern. 

"No." 

It sounds uncertain. A white lie that crackles in the air between you, nestled amid the sound of chatter muted in the background, as if someone turned the radio on in a different room. Everything seems to contort, and shift around you when he's near. 

A little microcosm eked out inside a cafe you've never been to but know, innately, what you'd order, and what you would recommend. 

"Well," he dips his head like he's trying to catch your eye, and when you lift your chin, the flash of teeth nearly makes your knees buckle. He's softer when he smiles. "How 'bout lettin' me get t'know you then?" 

It's a bad idea etched into the cold marble of a headstone.  

Your mouth opens, but the word that chews through your teeth isn't no, but yes. 

And fuck—

Something in his gaze shifts. Noctilucent eyes widen, staring down at you like he somehow didn't expect a yes at all, and was bracing for the harsh impact of no. 

"Well—" he starts, but the words fall into ash when you duck your head to avoid the crevasse of hazel washed out in flushed gold. "What's your number? I'll call you when m'free next, and we can—"

"Sure," you cut in, hand sliding into your pocket. The cold metal of your phone burns the tips of your fingers when you pull it out. It feels a little bit like a mistake when you hand it over, but he says nothing about the way your hand shakes when he takes it from you. 

His brows draw together in a childish concentration as he taps away at the screen. The artificial light, dimmed as low as possible, brightens the craggy ravines that cut across an emerald tinged boscage; sunlight splitting a lush valley of yellow and green. His puckered lips, the flash of a deep red tongue swiping across his sun-chapped mouth, seems designed to appeal to your baser desires. The one that knows how he'd taste if you pressed you let your tongue grace the tip of his, and can feel the weight of his hands on your flesh. 

He'd hold your hips like he was anchoring you to the earth: tight, warm, and a little bit desperate as he devoured you whole. 

You shiver, and try to ignore the way his pupils bloom into pits of black eclipsing lightened hazel when his gaze settles, hot and heavy, at the brief brush of skin when you reach for your phone. 

"I'll call you," he says, low and strained, like he was choking on the words he wanted to say. "I'll call you as soon as I can, bonnie." 

You nod. It's all you can offer with your heart scrambling up your throat, pulsing furiously against your trachea. 

His nails scrape the skin of your palm when he curls his fingers into a fist, and pulls away. 

"I'll see you around." 

It's not a choice, you want to say. You nod instead. Choke out an equally strained, yeah, and fight the urge to follow him when he finally pulls away. 

"Are you ready to order?" 

The world bursts back into sound, colour. You blink rapidly against the light that seems harsher now than that it did when he was blocking out the sun. 

"Uh, yeah—"

The taste of freshly poured coffee blooms on your tastebuds. 

You order tea instead. 

(It tastes like defeat.)

You only stop running when you can't anymore. When the murmuration in your head turns into screams, and the white-hot agony of grief, of yearning, threatens to make your knees buckle and your bruised heart give. 

You stop, letting him finally catch up. 

(Somehow, somehow, you feel lost and found at the same time.)

His name is Johnny MacTavish. He tells you this over dinner at some upscale restaurant that feels out of place on the old side of Elgin where the walls bleed history, and stink of old bones, and funeral dirt. 

Over a steaming dish of shrimp scampi and burgundy wine that makes your head spin and belly churn, you wonder why it doesn't feel new to you when he murmurs it. 

(A bit late, you find, since you've been texting rather infrequently since you gave him your number three days ago.)

Names never mentioned. Somehow, they didn't have to be. Until now. Until there was emptiness at the end of his question when he posed it, hazel eyes bright and blooming under the hushed yellow glare of the coruscating chandelier hanging above your heads. 

It feels a touch too late when you share your names over dinner despite already knowing he's in the military—opinions clenched between aching teeth and a strained smile that doesn't reach your eyes—and that he normally adorns a Mohawk when he's on missions, but grows it out, rather haphazardly, when he's home. 

Everything between you and him seems to happen in reverse: fears, wants, and worries are known before his given name; the touch of his skin on yours, the taste of his lips, the brush of his tongue, the weight of his palms holding your hips as he buries himself as deep as he can go in a haunting sequence of memories that bare their teeth at the starkness of reality holding them at bay. All of this before you've ever even touched him with your bare hands. 

There's a strange listlessness that envelopes you—a tangled web that spools around you, trapping you in this realm of hypnagogia. The lines between reality and dream blur until they're indistinguishable from each other. Knotted threads married together. Parallel. Concurrent. Where one begins and the other ends is as lost to you as the unfathomable uncertainty of the unknown universe. 

It's not meant to be this way, you think, watching as he feigns not knowing the name that slips between your numbed lips in the same manner you had only moments ago. Traps surprise in the tilt of his chin, but the display is largely done out of some unspoken agreement that this paradox does exist, and the emotion is fleeting. Temporal. He cloves it down the middle, and discards the excess as soon as you look away. 

(Your name fits in his mouth better than it ever did your own, like it was made for his mouth, preordained to play with the soft coil of his tongue.)

He knows more than he lets on, but you don't begrudge him his secrets—not when you have to turn your gaze back to the curled shrimp on your plate to avoid reminding him he prefers fish over crustaceans when he makes a face at the steamed scallops, and should have ordered the Maple Crusted Salmon instead. 

Like he didn't before, in a life you've never lived. In a place that mirrors this world. 

(It isn't something you should know, but you do. You do.)

You know more than that, too: whispers late at night when he couldn't sleep—internal clock still stuck halfway around the world—and urges you into playing a dangerous game of asking questions of each other when pieces of truth buoy in the dark like bobbing for poisoned apples in a barrel. 

You have to erase the words when you type them out, preemptively answering questions he'd never asked yet, and filling in the blanks to ones you posed yourself. 

Odd, you think. Strange, and weird, and macabre in that way that only deja vu gnarling between the broken crevasse of your grey matter can imbue. 

People don't just—

Know each other. 

And yet—

"They call me—"

"Soap." 

Your eyes snap up. A misstep. A grievous one. You've both been content to ignore this paradoxical magnetism that draws you together like eager poles, unable to stay away (not by choice or freewill, but some design that has no place in rigid structures of reality), and you broke it. Trampled over the unspoken rule left to linger in the foreground while you navigated around it like some misshapen elephant in the way. 

He tries to hide the suspicion, the surprise, but it falls between the empty space of his plate (food he only ordered because he's never been here before despite the familiarity that bleeds from the walls like condensation in June) and the ledge. A proverbial precipice that you leaped down; the steep incline filled with detritus and broken shale sharp enough to carve skin, muscles, from shattered bone. 

You want to swallow the words down, but they sit—innocuous and damning—between the salt and pepper shakers where his hand twitches, curls into a tight fist, knuckles bleaching under the strain of reeling himself in. Joints, cartilage, bulging through translucent skin. Reddened around the angry peaks of distrust and wariness; a summit you're not sure how to descend from now that you've crossed the arching tops. 

(Stuck, forever, at the peak.)

"How—" his voice is gravel, lavascape. Jagged rocks. Lakes of sulphuric acid. "How did you know that?" 

His accent thickens when he's angry. You wonder if he knows that. 

"I—" 

Excuses float like moots in front of you. You reach out, grasping for one, but it dances away in the turbulent wake you leave behind. You bite your tongue until it tastes of oxidised pennies, and then shrug. Nonchalant. Indifferent. Fear curls in your gut. Military, right. You wonder what you'll say if they arrest you for treachery. That you dreamed about him? Stupid. Stupid.  

"You told me," you murmur, eyes downcast and heavy, fixed on the bloody cup of wine you don't like, and trying to find solace in your downfall. "I think. I just remembered it from somewhere." 

It makes no sense, and the weak explanation would crumple like damp papier-mâché if he pressed, even just slightly, against it. A single touch, and the house of cards you built from the ground up on nonsensical lies will come crashing down around you. 

He shouldn't entertain it. Shouldn't let it go. 

"Yeah." But he does. "I must'a, huh?"

When you look up, you catch keen hazel eyes, sharp and pointed like the curved talons of a hawk. Johnny MacTavish is many things, you learn, but stupid, guileful, naïve is none of them. 

"Yeah," you echo hollowly, and give another shrug. "Guess so. It's, ah, an interesting nickname."

The clumsy barb seems to break the surmounting tension, and the pieces fall around you like poisoned raindrops, staining your skin. 

A reminder, then, when it crawls down your throat, that this balancing act can't last forever. That, eventually, your excuses will run dry. Empty. They'll be picked at and poked until they burst like a waterlogged, bloated corpse drifting aimlessly down the Nile. 

"Not the only thing that's interesting about me, bonnie," he says in a way that bleeds boyish charm, but his grin is wide, wild, and untamed. White teeth, sharp canines. You think of a wily fox on the prowl, and reach, reflexively, for the glass of wine, swallowing it down like a lifeline. "But I'm beginnin' t'think y'know that already, don't ye?"

It's a threat. A warning. 

You stare down in the half-empty glass of burgundy, the same colour red as the papercut on your index finger, and try to read the beads of crimson that run down the glass in a bloodied rivulet as if the answer could be found somewhere in the liquid. 

(Crystal Ball. Crystal glass. It's all the same, isn't it?)

"Not really," is what you eventually settle for, hedging through the murk that swims before you, an unsettling fen of unknowns and praeternatural happenings that you no longer than chalk up to happenstance. 

Kismet. 

Horror. 

Some cosmic merging of the two. 

It's all—

Absurd. 

And when you politely whisper to him that he should have gotten the salmon, you can't help but notice the ravines in his eyes widen slightly, the chasm growing and gaping, and taking on new shapes in the boscage that blooms like a familiar friend. 

(Kismet, indeed.)

He tries to pretend he doesn't know what the maple salmon tastes like, but slips up when the waiter passes by, and says it was good the last time. 

You fight the urge to chew on your glass like rock candies between your teeth. 

He stands with his hands in his pocket, rocking back and forth. The uncertainty in his brow is swallowed by the tendrils of pleased excitement that knot over his expression, unable to hide his glee when the hazel of his eyes glow brighter than the sun. 

Isn't this strange, you ache to say, words painted with the aftertaste of brine—sea, salt, and sand that are so uniquely him—but they, too, are swallowed down. 

The urge to lacerate the bubbles of complacency, feigned normalcy, are eclipsed by the raw shock of seeing him happy. Of wanting to make him happy. This stranger in a strange land. 

So, you offer some facsimile of a smile when he asks, words pushed out through a wide grin; infectious, if you had a good time. 

"Yeah," you say, and know that this word, this blase affirmative is quickly becoming your faultline through this mess. The thread keeping you sane, keeping you steady. 

It's at the curve of the word when everything else in the world is devoured by the shadow cast under his magnetic glow. The bright yawn of the sun in shades of white teeth catching on some ephemeral magic still dancing within the aether. Atoms spark. 

You try to run from it, ignore it, but your core teeters on the edge of instability. You think of neurons. Protons. Criticality. Something inside of you heats to almost half of the degree of the sun, sweltering and unrelenting. Pulsing, blue-hot. 

"That's good," he husks, eyes lidded and heavy. "I did, too. Whaddya think about doin' it again w'me?" 

It blooms. A great, scorching mushroom cloud plumes in midnight black in the milky white of your eyes.

You shuffle through the darkness, the artificial, comic night, and try to pat at the walls until you find something familiar in terror, the gnawing sense of loss that permeates through your pericardium, thrumming like a mourning toll. 

Sightless, you nod. "I'd love to."

And you mean it, too.

(Damn you. Damn you—)

Despite that tangled web that snakes around your jugular, twinning threads between the two of you, Johnny MacTavish is relentless in his pursuit. 

Where someone else might have shivered at the ghosts that brim in the tenebrous of your pupils, lurking in the untouched corners where your fingerprints stain the sediment, he lingers. Stays. Fixes himself in your path, and refuses to acquiesce to the whims of the world that keep stringing you along like reluctant puppets to some unseen, unknown marionette. 

It's almost charming in its own right, and really—when has a man fought so hard just to simply coexist in the space you deign yours? When has he torn nails from their beds, clawing at the walls that stand tall and proud, a protective tower of ashlar and dread around you until it starts to give. Until the stone crumbles away under his bloodied fingers. 

But as potent as his statement is, it gnarls inside your stomach like a poisoned seed. 

Bending to the demands of whatever this paradoxical realm goes against every fibre of your common sense that you recoil, almost, for just allowing him the scant space he occupies in your proximity. 

It's a deranged pantomime with some unseen force at the helm, conducting the madness with fingers drenched in whimsy and fate. Notched between its knuckles is the mockery of freewill and choice as it pulls you around a soundstage set in a place you've never been. It makes you dance. Amused god, eldritch horror. It takes pleasure in your discomfort, and glee in your fickle humanity. Weaving webs of tangled kismet until the silken threads are pulled taut and there is no more room, not a single atom, between your body and his. 

A nameless, faceless playwright with you as its shining star. 

Hapless leads stuck in an unending beat, a cantastoria, waiting for the shoe, the curtain, or anagnorisis to drop. 

You want to run again, but your feet are glued to the floor. Tangled in webs, threads of abstract concepts your mind threatens to come undone at the mere thought of. A cosmic sense of surrealism: crushing helplessness. 

This is horrific and terrific in equal measure, but the ache, the agony, of distance hurts more. And so, you stay. Watch as the curtain shudders over his eyes. As the etchings of complacency seem to gnarl in the tussock that line the expansive valley. He looks at you and doesn't see the awful truth nestled in the scant distance between your flesh, unable to be apart for too long. He sees you, somehow, and for him, that's enough. Enough. 

Johnny smiles at you, seemingly unbothered by the precariousness of this dance you're caught inside. In this strange equinox where you can answer questions he hasn't asked, and know things he hasn't said. Where you catch yourself leaning closer, starved for a touch you haven't forgotten despite never experiencing yourself. 

He's content, then, chasing the whims of a ghost, reaching for a fantastical dream in the head of another. 

But as content as he is, Johnny MacTavish is a hard man to catch, you think, noting the distance in his eyes, the arm's length of space he keeps between the version of him not haunted by the wants of ghosts, but such an easy man to love. To fall for. 

He balms the panic—that world-ending sense of uncertainty that nips at your heels—and makes you forget, sometimes, that there is more to him, and more to you, than anyone else could ever know. 

He's kind. Charming. 

A little space inside of your head is eked out just for him, and you find yourself hating that person for falling for some version of him first. Loathe them just a little bit more with each effortless grin he sends your way for tainting the experience of knowing him yourself. 

But you wonder, when he turns away, hiding the shadows in his eyes, and the pinch in his brow, if you really, truly know him. 

Or if the face he's wearing belongs to a phantom.

The dance continues. 

Your feet move to a soundless beat, steps preordained in a sequence lived world's ago. Nothing can feel surprising when you know a man so intimately without more than a touch, when you feel the burn of winter's chill in the middle of summer, and long so desperately for someone you just met. 

Nothing is new, and yet everything is novice. A paradox awakening with each gravitational pull to him, this man who looks only vaguely like the phantom who lives in your head, and tastes of longevity between your teeth. 

An arranged romance. Possession by ghosts who want to drive your bodies until they can live again, and love in tandem, vicariously through your living flesh. 

It makes sense to you, then, to call for an exorcism. 

(It just surprises you that Johnny does it first.)

Johnny has his secrets, just like you have yours. A small morsel of agency after autonomy has been stripped from the bone. 

You see the shadows of those hidden things etched in the topography of his valley-filled gaze, crevasses and canyons that pitch themselves in the tenebrous, uncrossable to even you. 

He reaches for you through the murk, fingers threading through your own, hands trembling with the shock, the electric current that sizzles through your blood at the brush of bare skin against quivering flesh. His hands are rough—worker's hands—and chock full of callouses and cuts, multitudes of scar tissue packed tight on top of each other, a thick layer of a life you will never know. Don't want to know. 

He seems settled when you touch, finally, thumb brushing your skittish pulse point as if he could somehow calm the acrid panic in your chest. 

(And damn him, damn this, he does. He does—)

Magnets fixed together, locked tight. You feel like a conduit to his frenzy, his hidden mania, and feed your own through the line, the red string that ensnares you both in a tangled web, until it's buzzing with shared panic and serenity and joy and helplessness. A feedback loop of emotions too extreme, too flighty, to catch. They run in droves along the lines, weaving into your skin, your chest, your head, and then pulling away to do the same to him. 

His eyes are heavier than steel when he gazes at you, expression caught between relief and longing and fear and—

Something, something. You can't pick it apart. Can't undo the tight knot until it spools, open and known, in the palm of your hands. Some unseen distance. It feels like standing at the highest peak of the valley and trying to make sense of the men in the tussock who look like mere ants from this high above. 

Is it happiness, you wonder. 

(Or maybe it's the same reluctance that wraps it's boney, gnarled fingers around your neck—)

It becomes too much. Too soon, too sudden. In the back of your head, you see images and flashes of a life not yet lived, a world still taking shape. You see him and you and a clock above some blue, broken bed. You see his smile, wide and elated, caught on the dawning sun spilling from the open curtains before it disappears under the covers, taking your laughter with it, stuck between his teeth. 

You see the past, the present. 

And your future. 

Cold. Barren. Three sharp knocks echo in the emptiness of your head. A man, a familiar stranger. You don't know him. You'd die for him. He rents the air in two. Your world in cloves. They fall to the ground, leaving you stranded and alone in the middle.

Future. There's no future. 

Your chest twists. You let go of his hand and find bloody crescent moons embedded in a ring along his flesh, knuckles whitening under your harsh grip. He said nothing about the pain. The flicker of worry across his face is genuine, you think. Real. Current. 

You smell funeral dirt in your nose. The mud is called under your nails. 

You pull away. He lets you go. 

"I, uh," he breaks off into a soft huff, injured hand lifting to scratch at the back of his shorn nape. His eyes slide away from yours, listing seaward. Avoidance undercuts the arch in his brow, the sheepishness in his mien. It's his turn to run, you realise. 

"Glad I met you," he says instead, and it's a confession and a curse. 

A bonfire burns in the river that runs through the valleys in his eyes. It's pitched on the sandy shore: an ochre flicker in the cobalt hue that saturates the land. You see the dark peaks of the rolling hills in the distance, black shapes in draped blue. 

The river is calm. The fire burns a smear of orange across the tranquil surface, meeting the milky white glow of the moon. 

It makes you think of those nights in the zenith of summer, the ones that feel neverending. Timeless. A piece of your history etched in balmy melancholy. Alone in the great expanse with nothing but the trill of cicadas, and the echoing chirp of the crickets hidden in the lush grass below. 

The sky shifts. His eyes plume with lavender-tinged stratocumulus. 

"I really like you, bonnie." It's whispered in your ear, and you wish, oh, how you wish, you couldn't hear it. That you could block the words, and the world, out so that it never reaches you again. 

Sweet longing. Beautiful agony. 

Your heart races, and you wonder how an empty space can beat at all. Can feel anything when it's just a hollow chasm. 

A heat blooms under your skin, desperate and aching. This, this, is everything you've been looking for since your heart split free from its fleshy prison, and ran away to find him, tucking itself in the boscage that glows in the flame on the shores. It's hidden somewhere. The palpitations sound like a song. You could follow it, you think, and find its lovelorn shell nestled amongst the grass that sways to its beat, and tuck it back into your empty chest where it belongs. 

(But it belongs to him, now.)

And you—

You hesitate. 

The words well on your tongue, but you think of fate, of choice, and swallow them down. 

The flames in the distance flicker, growing dimmer and darker as the moments stretch on, unbroken and barren until it's snuffed out. Gone. 

What can you say? What could you say? 

Instead, you say nothing at all. 

Johnny leaves a piece of himself on the table when he walks away. 

(You don't pick it up.)

Johnny doesn't say anything at all when he brings you home, when he stands outside of the archway to your flat, eyes lidded and pensive. A smile snakes across his face, but it's brittle and full of uncertainty, and your fingers ache to smooth the rugged lines in his brow, in the stress in his shoulders. You push it down. Smile for him instead. 

"I'll see you later," you say, and wish the ghosts wailing in your head would drop dead. 

The valley is drenched in ink when he nods, catching your gaze. 

All black, black, black. 

No sounds escape. 

"Sure, bonnie." 

You dream, and when you dream, it's of him. 

He stands at the top of a hill, and when he smiles it's full of starlight so bright it could eclipse the sun. 

In his hand, you see a pair of shears. Your mouth opens, but no sound escapes.  

He says just one word—your name—and then he lifts his hand, and cuts the rope. The sutures knit your bodies together, the string that holds him to this mortal plane, falls in swaths of golden thread to the ground where they're devoured by the earth, dissolved into nothing. Gone, forever. 

There's distance now, and separation. Nothing ties you to him except space. 

You wake up with the ghost of a scream on your lips, and the feeling of silken threads dragging over your flesh. You reach for them, and catch nothing but air. 

Palm pressed to your chest, you feel the rapid pulse under your fingertips, and know that it's back. Back where it belongs. 

Belongs, but doesn't want to be. 

You think of Johnny. 

And you weep. 

He sends a text message, and for the first time since you've met him, it surprises you. Nothing should shock you with him, anymore. You know everything, anything, about him. 

Gonna be away for a bit. Should talk when I get back. 

You reach for answers but they slide like mercury out of your hands. 

You don't dance, and you don't dream. 

You wander down the streets of Elgin, and for the first time since you woke up screaming in your bed with ghosts wailing in agony inside of your head, you get lost. 

Johnny comes back a week later, eyes heavier than you'd ever seen them, and shoulders drawn tight together as he asks you why—

"Why'd'ya keep runnin'?" He asks, words pitched and heavy with something lour and aching, a phantom pain you know all too well. There's desperation in his eyes, a low keen settling in the depth of his throat, echoing with the clamour of his despair. "If you don't want this—;" don't want me: "—then just say so, bonnie, 'cause I ain't forcin' ya t'be w'me, I ain't gonna make you stay. You wanna leave, you can just go—"

Can't. Can't. 

"Johnny—"

"No, none o'that, now. You make up your mind, 'cause I ain't makin' it for ya. I ain't makin' ya do somethin' you don't want to, and I ain't—"

He's pleading, you think. Begging—

For this, this strange thing. This awful, broken calamity, this abomination in the face of free will and autonomy. Despite the rage that hums in your veins at the idea of being controlled, manipulated, he finds something worth chasing. Worth running for. 

Why?

And what?

And—

It comes in flashes, snippets. Fragmented pieces of bright eyes—brighter, maybe, than the sun—and warmth, one hot enough to burn but it doesn't, it won't, it soothes instead. Eases coiled muscles, and absorbs the lactic acid that leaks from shredded, knotted fibres. Hands on your body, on your skin: the press of rough fingertips over prickling flesh. A whisper of curiosity, the slow descent into affection, adoration. Plush lips pillowing sharp teeth, too reverent to ever leave a mark behind—part in fear of marring fragile skin, and—

Letting the ghost of permanence fester, take root, inside his chest where his heart beats—

Jus' f'r you, bonnie. Jus' you.

For once, the phantom touching your body isn't a dream, a half-lived fantasy in another world where a man-made you whole and then ripped you into pieces, letting the scattered fragments blow with the sharp winds howling through the highlands. You know the touch, remember it. Felt it. New, and tangible. A touch that never lingered, too afraid of letting something, something, stick. 

For once—

The snaps flashing, blindingly, through your synapses are not made of dream dust and kismet. 

And—

All at once, it shatters.

—you know, i never thought i'd say this before, but i—

(You were lost in Elgin, but when you see his face, you feel found—)

THERE—

There is a lot to be said about Johnny MacTavish. 

Good things—kind, dedicated, driven—and bad things—bold, stoic, dogmatic—but one thing neither have in common is tardiness. Broken promises. 

So, when Johnny calls you in some distant land you've never heard of, and says: 

Things got bad. I might not—I might not be coming home.

You believe him. 

But the thing is: there's a difference between believing the words being said to you, and understanding their meaning. Your mind is not equipped to latch onto devastating blows with the same swiftness you do ignorant bliss. 

So, when you hear I might not be coming home, you think, instead, of tardiness. Of a missed anniversary dinner. 

(Of all the ones that came before it, and will come after it.)

And you smile. Smile into the receiver with your heart drifting down Lethe. 

"Okay, Johnny," you say, and those words will come back to haunt you three days from now, when John Price shows up at your goddamn door, stupid bucket hat tucked tight to his chest, and rips your heart into pieces. 

But for as much as you are blissfully ignorant, your mind still understands nuance. They used to call it foresight, a sixth sense; hindsight. 

You add, softer than you've ever said the words: "I love you." 

His breath stutters through the line in response. A brief pause. And then—

"If anything happens—" you hate him a little for even saying it; you really do: "just know that I love you, too. And that I hope—ah, Christ, bonnie, you got me all stupid, now—but, fuck, I hope we meet in another life."

It knocks something loose inside of you. Some primaeval thing that nestled in the safety of your ribs, moulting along your moon-white bones and glueing to the soft tissue that pulsed around it. It's shaken. Dislodged. 

It feels a little bit like your soul is being scraped off of bone. 

"Johnny—"

"—gotta go. We haven't heard from Roach or Riley in a while. I probably won't call tonight. So, don't wait for me, bonnie." 

The line clicks before the words I've been waiting for you forever fall from your wobbling lips.

You hate Johnny a little bit for this. For digging his roots deep into the soft chambers of your heart where it gnarled around your pericardium. A perfect little knot. A bow tied nice and pretty just for him. 

It makes it so much harder to bare when John fucking Price knocks on your door, stupid fucking bucket hat tucked tight against his chest, ghosts in his eyes, blood on his hands, and rips your heart into pieces until nothing but the rotten, dying roots remain. 

"I hate you so much right now," you hiss at the tombstone—the only thing you have left of him. "I hate you and I miss you and I wish you were here so I could—"

John finds you with your forehead pressed against the brass plaque, cheeks raw from the rivulets of tears that feel endless—a baptism in grief; in your tear ducts, Noah battles the biblical flood, and loses. 

Eyes that can't see past a shimmering hinterland of death and abject dismay are fixed, broken, against speckled granite. 

It's agony. The kind that makes it feel as if the marrow in your bones turned into a corrosive liquid, molten and devastating, and burst through brittle, hollow bone. 

Price, you've come to realise, seems to know things beyond what you tell him. Always picking up the shedded skin that falls from the people around him. Little pieces of them that he shoves in his pocket to ruminate on when he's trying to put together the puzzle of who they are. 

Words won't penetrate through the haze in your head. It filters in like water through a rhyne, back out to the open sea. 

(He knows this, of course, because you've been shedding pieces of yourself around him for years.)

It doesn't surprise you, then, when he says nothing. When he just falls to his aching knees in the soft humus, resting beside you as your world crumbles into ash and heartache. 

You sit in numbed silence until the sun is swallowed by the dusk that creeps across the sky. The moon itself seems to mourn along with you, hiding her eyes behind a nebulous veil of gunmetal. 

Price, without a word, helps you stand when the gravekeeper comes and ushers you out. He shepherds you into his Jeep and brings you back to the place that reeks of loneliness and dinners for one. A place that still carries the ghost of his presence around every corner, tucked away in each alcove and nook.

He might be gone, but his shadow still lives and breathes the dank, funeral air that clings to your sallow skin. A miasma of loss that tangles itself in every atom around you. 

Price seems hesitant to step inside, but you'd rather sleep on the patio with the chirping crickets and the weeping moon than be inside where the echo of his voice whispers through the halls, and he knows this, because he knows you, and so he brings you in before you can entomb yourself in grief, lost to the elements. He sets you down gingerly on the couch, body now more fragile than fine china, brushing your tangled hair from your forehead. It catches on his weathered hands. You barely feel the pull. 

He looks at you like you're a battle that can't be won. 

"Take care'a yourself, yeah? It's what—" he chokes, then, and you feel the hiccup like a white-hot knife to your gut. "It's what he would've wanted."

What he wanted is gone, and it's dead—just like him.

You don't say these words, but you wonder if he knows them, hears them, anyway. He must, you think, watching as the ashy, smoked cedar of his beard twitches. His mouth gnarls to the side in grief, uncertainty. 

He says your name. You know this because you know the shape it makes of his mouth, but don't you hear it. All it sounds like is a nail scraping over waterlogged, mossy wood. 

Price leaves.

A part of you goes with him.

You rest your forehead against his pillow, the one that smells of him still—warm milk, honeysuckle—and you wish so hard on broken promises, unfilled dreams, to see him again, to hold his face in the plinth of your palms, that your heart feels like it might burst—

—break. 

But it's already broken. There's nothing left to shatter. The pulpy mess he left behind beats not because you want it to, but because it has to. A biological failsafe that does not care about your human emotions even as it quivers and shakes at the loss that tipped your world upside down. A gaping hole sits in the middle in the shape of his smile, and your stubborn heart pulses around the wound. 

Sometimes you think it would be easier to feel nothing at all. To shed the agony like a rotting limb, cutting it as close to the bone as you can, and watching it fall, blackened with decay, and postulating with infectious spores that bud, devouring unblemished, unhurt, flesh until you're a pristine corpse. 

Grief twists you into the living dead. Breaks your head in two, cloved clean down the middle of unrelenting panic and anger—anguish so severe, you can easily convince yourself nothing at all is real. 

But it is. 

And then there is only denial and abject horror at that unimaginable nothingness that looms, blooming in your insides until they turn into a gaping, festering maw. One that makes you feel like you could swallow the whole world and still feel empty. 

No longer a human on the inside but a chasm. The person you were before died the moment his heart stopped beating. Irrevocably changed with three, stark knocks against the door he painted yellow because it reminded him of the way you looked standing in a field of sunflowers. Gone. Gone—

A barren void with its insides scraped out. Hollow. Wind rattles through your chilled bones. It sounds like his voice when it ghosts over your ribcage. 

You chase the sound. 

Running, running, running. Going so fast, it barely feels like your feet touch the ground. A wingless bird soaring across the valleys that gleaned in his hazel eyes. 

Running, running—

Your feet slide against marshy peat. A hidden bog gurgles beneath your soles. 

You don't scream when you sink. 

(The bubbles sound just like him—)

You smile.

—NOW

Eldritch machinations, some fanciful god playing a chaotic game of matchmaker, a dizzying sense of folie a deux—you haven't quite determined what the reason for this is, who or what might be behind it, but one thing you do know is this:

Something might be aligning your paths until all trails lead to him, but when you wander down those Wonderland roads, your heart beats for him. 

A second heart pulses under your skin. One slipped inside when you cupped his cheeks in your palm, and told him when you looked, you saw only him.

It might not be a choice you've made in this lifetime, but it's certainly one you can't bring yourself to regret. 

You run, but this time, it isn't away from him, but to him. 

He tastes of coumarin when you press your lips to his, a kiss met in the middle. 

You're lost, now, in the swell that gusts across the boscage. A breeze dances over your ears. A thousand starlings coo in the clear blue aether above. You feel the tickle of barley against your knees. Rasping tussock sedge curls over your ankle, weaving together until you're tied to the ground. Anchored against the stalks of wheat that shiver in the wind. 

His hands are warm, solid, on your skin. One hand braced on the small of your back, keeping you pressed firmly against him. The other cups your chin like you're made of fine china, polished crystal full of precious gems and rare metals. He holds tight as if he's afraid you'll drift away when he lets go. 

Your head is blooming full of sunflowers. They germinate in your thoughts until the petals burst through, lifting high to the heavens where the sun burns half as hot as his body angling against yours. 

His atoms sing, calling to yours. A buzz, a hum. You feel them stretch, shifting from the prison of you until equilibrium is reached when they merge, tangling together. A new being, a new entity is born from the collision—a person made of two with lungs and hearts that breathe and beat in the same cadence as it's ghosts. Woven together with marionette strings. 

It feels like coming home and getting lost all at once. 

Etched in the delicate flesh of your heart sits a kairos moment. A brief period of nothing that runs as deadly and tumultuous as the Swillies. An upheaval. 

Time is tenuous. Broken. Fragmented. 

An arm stretches out, anchoring across your waist. His mouth presses a kiss to your bare shoulder, eyes glossy in the mid-morning sun. 

"Wha' time's it?" He slurs out, words thick with sleep. 

Your eyes cut to the alarm clock on the end table. A slow, languid smile curls across your kiss-bruised mouth. 

"Eleven-fifteen," you breathe, eyes fixed on the red lines. Your heart stutters when it flickers. "Eleven-sixteen."

"S'too early," he moans, lips rubbing over your flesh. "Stay in bed with me." 

You peel your gaze away from the clock ticking down the seconds (minutes, hours, days, months, years), and turn to him. Hazel in bloom. A boscage in spring. Your eyes mist a little from the morning dew. 

"I love you, Johnny." 

His breath ghosts over your skin. You hear the hitch in his voice when he speaks. 

"Been waitin' a long time t'hear you say that, bonnie."

"Sorry to keep you waiting." 

—don't wait for me, Bonnie. i'll come find you—

—THEN

"Excuse me? You dropped this."

It's raining. Pouring, really. The droplets are the size of pennies and pelt the top of your umbrella with an unforgiving force. It sounds like the clatter of a mourning bell, and drowns everything else out. 

But it catches. Clear. Low. 

You turn, blinking through the thick fog that congeals around High Street in a dense, white blanket. 

"Sorry?" 

A man. He's towering above you, cut off at the chest by the fine points of your umbrella. You lift it, and—

Your wallet is the first thing you see. Wet, covered in grit from the cobblestone. It's clenched between a thick thumb and forefinger, held delicately together. You baulk. 

"Oh, shit—," it's snatched out of his hand, and pulled into the sanctuary of cover. You can feel it already. The mess inside. Still. You hope—

The leather peels back. Mush. 

You groan. The meagre bills you'd pulled from the machine are now wet, sticking together in a papier-mache square. Useless. No one is going to accept sopping wet bills. 

"Alright?" 

"No, I—," you glance up at him, irritation cutting across your brow. No, you're not alright. You're shit out of luck, and stranded here, now. And—

And—

Hazel. It's the first thing you see. Mountains of brown slope into a lush green valley. A cool blue lake cuts through, splitting off into a ravine. 

Your breath catches. 

"Sorry, umm. Yes. I'm—"

Attractive is the first word that springs to your mind when you stare at him—dark eyes, furrowed brow, long nose, a dusting of charcoal stubble along his cheeks and jaw, and full pink lips. Kissable is the second one. 

And then—

Oh, God. 

"Sorry," you murmur again, cheeks heating despite the chill. "I'm fine. Thank you, I'm—"

"You're not," he says, and it's uttered so assuredly that you can't find it in yourself to lie. As if he is somehow able to chisel into your head, and rifle through your problems with ease. "It's all wet, isn't it? Were you heading home, or—?"

It's cliche. Stupid. Your belly rumbles.

Mortifying. Absolutely—

His lips quirk up. A soft, almost secretive smile. Reserved. "Well, I know this place around the back. I could use the company, if you wouldn't mind."

You should say no. No, thank you—because you were raised proper. But all you can think about is the deep, brassy tone that tickles your ears when he speaks. The distant, almost careful way he regards you, as if he's putting himself at arm's length so you aren't scared off by his brawn. 

Hazel is dusted in gold. You want to bask in his warmth for just a moment longer—

"I'll pay you back, I promise."

His brows raise. Hazel framed in white. A soft huff leaves his full mouth before his lips pull up in a slow, genuine smile. 

"Y'alright, bonnie. I'll hold you to it."

(And so, it begins.)

#john soap mactavish #soap x reader #Johnny MacTavish x reader #og soap x reader #og soap #john soap mctavish x reader #john soap mctavish x you #cod fanfic #AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH #this took me forever #idk why #i just?? expected more fluff but instead we get horror and grief and eventually fluff #kinda #like #sorta #idk #enjoy

[mockerycrow]

Does this count? 09 Soap x reader x 22 Soap

YESS bro… i can’t believe i haven’t written about og/09!soap before!! i literally grew up on cod idk how i haven’t. this also lowkey all over the place, i apologize!! and i kinda wanna write this concept more :-)

I feel as if at first, it’s odd. The two men in front of you look the exact same, yet so different. There stands a man of experience and authority, a deep scar running from his eyebrow to under his eye, his mohawk much more cleanly shaven. He’s almost like ghost, but you’re able to joke around with him more. He’s not incredibly intimidating like him, but intimidating enough for you to look at him the second he walks into the room. [09!Soap]

Then there is him. The younger one; the sergeant. His mohawk is messier, there’s a deep scar running across his chin—the other man dawning the same scar, but the sergeants is less raised. It’s more dented into his skin and facial hair. He has more of a playful energy, looking to follow orders and has a louder spark. He doesn’t show as much authority, but it’s clear he also knows how to get shit done. [22!soap]

You love them both, and both of the men love you. It’s clear, no matter what universe/timeline it is, the love Soap has for his partner doesn’t change. He still loves just as hard, even if it’s hard to show. If you sleep together in the same bed, the arrangement is often you squished in the middle, 09!soap in front of you, pulling you into his chest with 22!soap spooning you from behind, stuffing his face into your back.

#call of duty #soap x reader #john mactavish x reader #john soap mactavish x reader #09 soap #reboot!soap #og!soap #09 soap x reader #og soap x reader #og soap x you #crow’s thoughts #captain soap mactavish #sergeant soap mactavish #09 + 22 love concepts

[bonkchai]

PLEASE spare some love for Captain Mactavish too, LOOK AT THIS MAN

HE’S FR SO FINE. I wanna give his scar a lil smooch 😚

#og soap #cod #call of duty #soap call of duty #soap cod #mw2 #modern warfare 2 #modern warfare ii #modern warfare remaster #captain mactavish #john soap mactavish #soap mwii #soap mw2 #Captain Mactavish x reader #soap x reader #mw2 x reader #soap x you #09 soap

[majinbangus]

Teasing Soap for the grey in his scruff that you're completely responsible for and calling him an 'old man' (he's not, you just love giving him a hard time which he'll return in a different way) so to prove that he's still more than capable of fucking you like he has the heart of a bull, he goes to town on you all night, manhandling you this way and that. He doesn't even bother taking off his gear for half the night, but he strips you of all your clothing and leaves bruises all over your body, specifically your hips and ass.

But that's okay, you got what you wanted, and the only downside (upside) is that you can't really walk without him carrying you around.

You'll have to tease him about his grey hairs more often (you think it's hot).

#this could be either og or reboot soap #soapy thoughts :] #john soap mactavish x reader #john soap mctavish x reader #soap mactavish x reader #soap x reader #captain mactavish x reader

[soapskneebrace]

imprimatura

muses - part one - next

Pairing: John "Soap" MacTavish x f!Reader Word Count: 2.8k Rating: Mature (mostly Soap being Soap) Warnings: please see this post for notes about this reader character Also on Ao3.

An artist meets her muse, and a solider meets his.

He arrives early as you’re setting up for your students, in jeans and a tight t-shirt, and the first thing that crosses your mind when you lay eyes on him is Jesus, he’s fit. 

You are no stranger to bodies. Hundreds of them have cycled through your studio, all shapes and sizes and colors; you think you may know every dip, every roll, every hard angle and soft curve that a human body is capable of holding. The mystique of defined muscle has long lost its novelty. Bodies are bodies, and each holds the same value as the next when subject to brush and canvas. It never matters, you teach your students, what a body looks like in the modeling chair. It only matters if they can reproduce it accurately.

Even so, when a body like this walks in, you really can’t help but take notice.

Decadent muscle, fed and worked well, round and full with hydration. It’s impossible to miss, even through his clothes; each group delineated clearly, gracefully, as if sculpted rather than built, and alive with soft, subcutaneous movement. It’s indulgent to look at, the comfortable breadth of his shoulders and chest down to that slight taper of his waist and bulk of his thick thighs. It’s a physique no hard-bodied gym rat could hope to achieve merely with extra time at the racks—a physique that is easily, harmoniously attractive in its makeup of muscle and healthy fat.

The man is also mohawked and suntanned, and his mouth rests at an angle that suggests he often smiles—as if he knows that Michelangelo would have swooned at the sight of him. He comes into your classroom, saunters over to you, and stops precisely two paces away from you.

“Sergeant John MacTavish,” he says, offering his hand. “I understand you’re the instructor?”

He has gorgeous, vivid blue eyes (pthalo and cremnitz, with a touch of hamsa). You blink several times. Fit is still rattling around your skull, and begins knocking against sergeant at the same rolling frequency as his warm Scottish brogue. You realize his hand is still outstretched and quickly take it to shake.

“Yes!” you say. His palm is tough, callused, and not soft in the slightest, but very warm. “Nice to meet you, sergeant.”

He gives a grimace. “John’s fine. Or Soap.”

“Soap?”

“Nickname, y’know.”

Neither of you have released from the handshake. Soap’s grip is firm, the kind of firm that suggests he can squeeze much, much tighter if he needs to. And if the grip isn’t any indication, the broad forearms, dusted soft with dark brown hair, certainly are.

Black lines, a sword and helmet framed in laurels, catch your notice. The ink has the soft edges of having lain in the skin for a few years. You turn his arm to see it more fully. “Oh. Nice tattoo.”

He looks at the ink as if it is entirely new to him, and then gives an easy grin. “Thanks. I’ve got a few more too. Hope they aren’t hard to draw.”

When you loosen your grip on his hand, he releases you immediately. You still feel the squeeze in your bones even as you drop your hand to your side.

“So, then, Soap,” you say, “have you ever modeled before?”

He shakes his head, tucking his hands into the front pockets of his low-slung jeans. It tugs the waistband just a bit, revealing a sliver of warm, tan skin (raw sienna, flesh ochre, naples yellow). “Should have, honestly, with how much it pays.”

“It gets very boring, very fast,” you say. “What do you plan to wear for the breaks?”

“Was I supposed to bring that m’self?”

You are unable to suppress a laugh. “Yes, unfortunately.”

“Oh,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck and going a little sheepish—as if expecting a reprimand. You suppose it’s a valid expectation to have, in his world. You aren’t terribly familiar with the military, but you do know it’s one hell of a stickler for rules.

You also can’t help but admire the appealing pull and stretch of his bicep and deltoid, the flex of his pectoral as he lowers his arm. 

“Why don’t you wait here, and I’ll go see if I can find something for you?” you suggest kindly, letting him off the hook.

“Sorry,” he says, pretty blue eyes filled with genuine apology. “I’ll remember nex’ time. Thanks.”

The expression is so hangdog that you almost want to pat his head and noise at him reassuringly, like an actual dog. You press your lips together to hide a smile, and leave the studio.

When you get back from the models’ changing room, you find Soap with one hip against the counter where you’d been organizing your supplies, one knee loose and shoulders set at a relaxed angle. You want to laugh at his easy contrapposto. He’s going to be an excellent model. You can feel it. 

It looks as if he’s moving around the sticks of vine charcoal with one outstretched finger; he pulls his hand guiltily away when you reenter the studio, crossing his arms over his chest as if to hide the evidence of his snooping. It makes his pectorals bunch and round out, gathers the thickness of his biceps up into chiseled, full definition.

You lift one brow at him as you walk over.

“Never could keep my hands to m’self,” he admits, still sheepish.

“It’s alright,” you allow, smiling back. “Do you draw?”

“Used to,” he says. He looks back at the charcoal. “No time, now.”

“Are you deployed often?” you ask, taking the opportunity to look at his face. 

Beauty is cheap in art, but you notice it all the same—appreciate the strong brows, the hard angle of his jaw, the dark stubble of a beard you suspect he can’t keep shaved down, and the long scar that cuts through it across his chin. The light brown of his complexion is speckled with sun exposure, and there are the faintest of creases at the corners of his eyes, which you expect will deepen into genuine, gorgeous crow’s feet as he ages.

He’s not all rugged, though. There is a soft, thick curl to his lashes, which are as dark as strong coffee or expensive chocolate, and an equal decadence to the pink, plush little swell of his bottom lip—which, in the very middle, has the smallest of divots, as if he regularly spends time biting it. 

They’re traits that are far too sweet to belong on an otherwise masculine face, and their effect is such that they turn an objectively average set of features into a shockingly attractive portrait—that suddenly has something fluttering, just a bit, in the roof of your stomach.

He looks at you, and catches your survey. You can see him realize you’d been watching, the knowledge of it blooming in ocean blue eyes like ink dropped onto linen.

“More often than no’,” he answers, showing teeth in a crooked, interested grin. And now he’s looking at you—attention flitting across your face, dropping down your body and jumping back up to meet your gaze. The creases deepen at the corners of his eyes.

The fluttering intensifies. The sudden role reversal has you feeling at once flustered and unmoored. You are never the subject of any perusal—always comfortably the observer.

“Well—” you try, and you’re embarrassed at the low tone of your voice. You clear your throat. “Well, let’s make use of the time we have you, then.”

His smile remains, cocksure and easy. “Let’s.” 

He knows the effect he’s had.

“Anyway,” you say, blinking several times and proffering the sheet you’d retrieved, “none of the other models are your size, so I’m afraid this will have to do.”

He takes it in his hands, which are sun-dark and striking against the clean white linen. “So it’s a toga, then?” he asks.

“Whatever you like. Let’s go over the basics, and then you can undress.”

“Oh, already, aye? Y’move fast, hen,” he drawls, still grinning. “I like it.”

Heat rushes to your face, but you don’t feel embarrassed enough not to laugh. You busy yourself with tapping your charcoal sticks back in place, putting them back in an even row ascending in order of length, and saving yourself from having to look him in the eye. “Ha! We don’t do a lot of foreplay in this studio, I’m afraid.”

“No?” Soap hums, and he steps closer. He’s very warm, enough that you can feel it even with the space between you. You do have to look at him then. His eyes are half-lidded, lashes casting pretty shadows on his cheekbones as he gazes down at you. “That’s a shame. I’m right partial to it.”

Your brows lift, and you will your pulse to remain steady even as you inhale, catching a thread of—cologne? Aftershave? Just plain deodorant?—coming off of him. The scent caresses you, almost beckoning you to lean forward. You swear you can see the thrum of his heartbeat, there in the soft hollows by his Adam’s apple.

You blink. He is your model. “Well—I’ll try to set you up as best I can, anyway. Follow me, please.”

And you turn your back on him, because this is your workplace, and you are at work, and if you don’t get on with things you might do something stupid like actually flirt back.

Soap hadn’t been sure what to expect when he arrived at the art studio. He’s never been to one before, much less one housed in a university—which he has also never been to—and hell, he only ever took one art class in high school.

If pressed, he’d have imagined old brick walls covered in diagram posters, shelves of supplies in all colors, the smell of paint hanging permanently in the air. What he finds instead is modern, clean, and impersonal. Stage lights hang from fixtures in the ceiling, pointing at a platform in the back center of the room. A tight line of easels, all folded up, stand pressed into a far corner, next to a tower of stacked chairs, and waist-high cabinets line half the room against the bare, painted cinder block wall. The linoleum floor looks new.

None of this, however,  has any opportunity to disappoint him. His final unmet expectation, standing across the room and organizing a tray of art supplies, is a very welcome surprise.

You’re bonnie. Like, every point on his wishlist bonnie. Christ, he must’ve done something really good lately, because he can’t imagine just lucking into this. There’s not a hard angle to you, all sweet and soft, but when you meet his gaze during introductions there’s a sharpness to you that skewers him through the chest. You are much smarter than him, he can tell immediately. 

He’s always had a thing for smart women. Soft ones, too.  And if that weren’t enough, you let him flirt shamelessly with you, while checking him out the whole time.

Steaming Jesus.

You direct him to get onto the platform and sit down, still clothed, in an armchair draped in another pristine white sheet. The stage lights are bright overhead, and they highlight free-floating wisps of your hair in gold. 

“You want to ensure that you don’t rest your weight on only one or two points,” you explain. You have a nice voice. Steady, confident—this is your territory, your studio, and in it you are clearly the master. “The main danger is that your arms or legs might fall asleep, and you won’t realize it until you get up, in which case you’ll fall. We can’t touch you, so we can’t save you from that.”

“Y’canna touch me?” Soap repeats.

“Not without your explicit consent,” you say.

He smiles at you, the kind of smile he saves for bright nights at the pub over platoons of shot glasses. “I explicitly consent to you touching me.”

The corners of your mouth tug upward, just a bit, and you look away, clearly bashful. Something in Soap’s chest starts beating a drum. He knows already he’ll ask you to drinks after the class ends tonight.

“I doubt I’d be able to do much,” you say, “you’re a bit more substantial than the usual models.” Your eyes flick down his torso and back up.

“Guess I’ll have to follow your advice, then,” he says.

“You should,” you say, and he looks at your thigh shamelessly as you pat it—even beneath your jeans, he can see the ripple of the impact. “One of the worst-case scenarios is nerve damage.”

“So you have done this before!”

He can’t help it—Soap’s imagination runs wild. Titanic, draw-me-like-one-of-your-French-girls wild. It’s not exactly polite to imagine a teacher naked while she’s in the middle of giving him directions (and Jesus, what a concept, he might be half-mast already), but Soap has always found that people like it when he’s a little rude.

You drum your fingers. “I have.”

He finally hears the nerve damage part of your instruction. “How, uh—how bad can it get?”

The drumming stops. “For me? It just starts to twinge a bit if I sit on this side very long. So don’t rest your weight all on one hip, yeah?”

Concern assuaged that he had not ignored your genuine pain in order to objectify you, Soap grins. “Yeah.”

“Good,” you say. “Also—even if it doesn’t hurt, Soap, you can stop at any time, okay?”

That has him blinking. “Kinda defeats the purpose, doesnae?”

You shake your head. “It doesn’t matter. This is your first time modeling. You don’t know how you’ll feel, sitting here with your clothes off and everyone looking at you. If you need to stop, I want you to stop. I’ll make sure you’re paid anyway, so don’t worry about that.”

You are…so serious about this. The line of your brows is furrowed, imploring, like a little discomfort on his part is a violation of the highest order.

“Sure,” he says, a little dumbstruck and mostly lying. He’d be a rubbish soldier if he tapped out of a little thing like sitting down, but it’s nice that you care.

You purse your lips, nod, and then move onto the task at hand, stepping back and then down off the platform. When you begin to survey him—gaze flitting up and down his body, more pensive than appreciative—he has to resist the urge to flex.

Instead he watches you as you look at him. He especially likes, he decides, the slope of your nose and the smart, serious press of your mouth. You could get him all turned around, he thinks, if you gave it half a try.

Your tits are also great, but that’s by the by.

“Try resting your elbow up a little higher, and twist at the hips a bit,” you instruct, and Soap obeys. “Hm. How would you feel about crossing your ankles?”

You continue like this—nudging him in directions he doesn’t think make all that much of a difference, standing in different positions around the room to check the angles. He half-wishes he could step out of his body and join you, curious as he is about what you’re seeing, what your students will see. He’s not sure he has any clear expectations for how the class will go, but if you’re any indication, it’ll be more fun than he expects.

“Not sure if I’ll remember how to get back into this,” he says, partly to be helpful and partly to get you to talk to him again.

“I’ll help you, don’t worry,” you say. “Okay, I think that’s a good one, you can move now—I’m going to start setting up, the students should be here any minute.”

He stands, and you turn away to collect your supplies, so Soap figures this means it’s time for him to strip. He pulls off his shirt and drapes it over the chair’s arm, unbuttons his pants and shoves them down to his knees.

“Soap!”

He freezes. Then he looks at you. You’re blushing again, deep and saturated, mouth parted in surprise and hand pressed to your chest. He does not miss the quick flick of your gaze down his body; he’s probably violated some rule or another of the studio, but he can’t help but grin.

You’re adorable.

“Gotta happen eventually, right?” he says.

You cover your face with your palm. “I was going to leave the room first!”

“First time someone’s wanted to run away when I’m takin’ my clothes off, I won’t lie—”

“You just come get me when you’re done!” you say hastily as you beeline for the door. “I’ll be right outside!”

Soap chuckles a little when you’re gone, the door slamming mortified behind you, and folds his clothes up behind the armchair he’ll be sitting in. You’re so cute. He can’t wait to sit naked for you for the next three hours.

And he’s definitely asking you out for drinks.

Author's Note: THE PROMISED FIC. I really hope y'all enjoy this one, I've been teasing it since March and I have so many plans. This fic has a special place in my heart because it's drawing heavily from my college days--my bachelor's degree is in fine arts, and I have a lot of fond memories of many hours in the studio both as a student and as a model.

I expect this series will also have a looser timeline than my Neighbors series, so I'm open to suggestion in terms of scene ideas! I already have plenty, but if I know my mutuals, y'all might have some good ones as well. No promises I'll write them, but you never know.

Thanks everyone for your patience, and I hope you'll look forward to where this fic goes!!

#soap x reader #john soap mactavish x reader #soap x you #john mactavish x reader #soap mactavish x reader #soap mactavish x you #size neutral reader #autistic reader #neurodivergent reader #fat reader #chubby reader #plus size reader #cod x reader #cod x you #mw2 soap #mw2 x reader #mw2 x you #og post #gotta get a better tag for all my original stuff #muses

[sky-is-the-limit]

Farah: Do you want to play 20 questions?

Alex: Sure!

Farah: What's your favourite colour?

Alex, laser fucking focused: Triangle. Do you love me?

#incorrect quotes #og quote credits to the owner #alex keller #farah karim #cod #call of duty #modern warfare #mw1 #modern warfare ii #captain price #kyle gaz garrick #ghost #john soap mactavish #könig #alejandro vargas #task force 141 #141 x reader #cod 141 #los vaqueros #ghost smut #john price

[emeraldborealis]

I Will

Pairing: Captain John 'Soap' MacTavish x GN!reader

TW//CW: Mention of torture, hurt/comfort, non sexual bathing, nudity, depictions of PTSD and panic, probably inaccuracies when it comes to recovery, but it's not something easily researched, so I used personal experience and knowledge. No use of y/n, my attempts of writing a Scottish accent.

A/N: This is part two to this fic, because I'm a whore for domesticity and hurt/comfort, also being taken care of because someone loves you and not because it's a chore <33

Words: 3,108

Recovery started slowly, a new strict diet with a high calorie count to help build back the strength lost from malnourishment, physical therapy as well as actual therapy.

Drugs, mostly antibiotics to help with different infections, the worst being a UTI from having no sanitary way to use the bathroom. As well as some anxiety meds and some things to help with the hallucinations, though hydration and food mostly took care of that.

It was overwhelming the pace they expected you to recover at. It all felt like getting hit with a train then being expected to be able to walk it off. 

You were told you had to stay at the hospital for a while, that was perhaps the hardest part. You didn't want to be poked and prodded after finally getting out of hell, and you understood the good intentions behind it. But all you wanted was to go home and never see anyone ever again.

The only thing that made the whole ordeal even manageable was John, his constant presence by your side. His refusal to leave you. 

So though you couldn't go home yet, he brought the feeling of home to you. Like a dutiful watch dog refusing to leave their post.

"Ye're looking a lot better." Johnny praised you, handing you a mandatory snack in your 'recovery plan', at least that's what everyone was calling it. Real recovery didn't feel possible, even if you got back to your healthy size and physique. 

Even if you somehow got to the point where you felt like you could breathe and think again.

A piece of you would always be back in the Tomb, delirious and rotting. 

You felt a lot of shame from being there, the condition you came back in was not you, didn't even feel like a husk of you. It was beyond humiliating to think of how your captain had found you, the filth and disease you'd become. The thought of him touching you like that made you feel the burning feeling of bile rise in your throat.

Maybe it was the decaying remains of your pride that made you feel this way. Though you were sure anyone found the way you were  would feel just as mortified when given a moment to recover and think. 

Filth. You were filth and he'd carried you on his shoulders like something to be worshiped. 

"Think ye're up fur a shower t'day?" You hadn't showered since being rescued, you'd been cleaned, but not had a proper shower. It was something the doctors were struggling to get you to agree to, there was a requirement for a certain amount of vulnerability and trust that you just couldn't meet with the doctors or nurses.

"No." Gently you took another piece of the snack from him, he liked to break them up for you into smaller pieces, he'd noticed you'd been having a hard time swallowing things since your rescue. 

"Ye sure? I promise it's no' as bad as ye think it'll be." The thought of being seen so vulnerable was too much for you. Vulnerability was something you struggled with even before, but now, now it felt impossible. "I'll help ye, it'll be me, no' a doctor. Jus' me. Please."

His rough calloused hand slipped into yours, squeezing it gently. He needed to see a spark of something alive inside of you, to know he'd brought back more than just an empty cage, one that would be in eternal search for the bird that once lived and loved there.

A soft shake of your head made him sigh, you knew all he wanted was to take care of you. The thought of disappointing him hurt. Bad. Maybe he was upset with your refusal, Maybe he was upset with your reluctance to trust him, or maybe with how slowly you were going on your 'recovery plan'. 

As if it was as simple as checking off every mark on a list.

"Another day then." He leaned in, placing a soft kiss to your forehead. 

The day you were given the greenlight to go home felt unreal, two weeks of recovery and now you got to go home. Three months of hell and two weeks was all the hospital deemed necessary for you to be able to go home. 

John helped you out of the hospital, taking the role of caretaker for as long as you needed him to be there. 

Stepping out of the hospital into the sunlight and fresh air of freedom felt so foreign now, you'd been outside many times while in the hospital. But this was different. You were going home now. You were going home with the person who made it feel that way.

The sun seemed to soak into your skin, seeping in through all your cracks to bring light to your soul. It never felt this way before, maybe it was the added damage that better let the light in.

"Th' car is over here." Johnny's rich Scottish voice sunk in too, filling more pieces of you than you thought possible now. Maybe recovery was achievable.

"Right." He led you with a gentle hand, helping support you, he helped you into the car, and settled himself in the driver seat, starting the engine and starting to drive you home. 

Crossing the property line of the hospital felt beyond good. Leaving as much of the damage and hell behind you as you could, it wouldn't help to hold onto all that pain and carry it with you. A lot of it remained even still, festering in your mind and carving out room to live in your bones, making several pieces of you feel hollow.

The trees were wonderful to see again, until you were driving under them, the sun shining through their branches blinding you, the light flickering in your eyes between blinding and shadow. 

A tightness formed in your chest, suffocating and stifling. A fan spinning overhead, the smell of all types of bodily fluids burning your nose, the quiet chatter of rats. Ropes tied tightly around you, squeezing you until you felt like you were going to pop.

"Stop." Your voice was beyond shaky and distressed, catching John off guard for a moment, not sure what was wrong. "I said stop!" You yelled, pulling at your seatbelt, it felt so wrong. You couldn't even breath, or think, or feel. You found yourself waiting for a grounding pain to strike you. But nothing ever came.

John pulled the car over to the side of the road, turning to you with concern, but you were already undoing your seat belt and clawing your way out of the car, all but throwing yourself down onto the park strip. 

Your feet wandered without a destination in mind, you just needed to get away, gone. Never to be seen again. If you couldn't be seen you couldn't hurt. If you were gone things would be okay.

"What's wrong?" John followed after you, softly grabbing your hand to stop you, turning you around to face him.

Your lungs burned in search of oxygen, trying to gasp anything down through the tears you hadn't registered were falling down your face. John's voice didn't reach you, your mind too preoccupied with the pain and suffering from the Tomb. 

Things didn't get any clearer until you were wrapped tightly in his arms, hyperventilating down his scent, the one you'd spent so many nights secretly basking in, his natural musk so incredibly potent and distinguishable in this moment, free from his cologne he hadn't put on in more than two weeks. 

This was just him, just John MacTavish, your Johnny MacTavish. 

"I can't. The trees." It wasn't much of an explanation, but he understood the problem, he was in the Tomb for long enough while he rescued you to understand. 

"It's okay. Ye're no' there anymore. Ye're no' there." He repeated the words until you believed him, the timber in his voice being the thing to bring you back from the ledge you'd fallen from.

He herded you back to the car, not forcing you to buckle in. 

When he settled back into the driver's seat he turned to you. "Do ye trust me?" You sat silent for a moment, before nodding. "I'm no' gunna hurt ye." He reassured, carefully putting his left hand over your eyes. You startled for a moment before hearing his voice. "It's okay, just fur the trees, then ye can see again."

He waited for your consent to cover your eyes before he started driving again, constantly speaking to you to help you stay grounded, to remind your brain it was just him. 

Once home he brought you inside, letting you take in the familiarity of a space that was yours, despite the dust, but even that felt like it belonged. It felt like coming home after a long deployment, you could pretend that's all this was.

You could pretend you didn't spend the last three months tied to a chair in hell. You could pretend the pain in your shoulders was from your rifle stock, not from being constrained in the same position day and night, until it felt like more than an eternity had passed.

"How aboot a bath now?" He sounded hopeful, not putting any pressure on the question. 

It took a long time to consider it, weigh everything about it. But now in the fortitude of your own home it felt a little more enticing, to be able to really scrub and wash away all that had happened. Not just a spit bath, a real good warm bath. 

"Alone?" You asked softly, looking down.

"If that's what ye want." John had an intense need to make sure you were taken care of, even if he needed to take a step back and let you do it yourself. 

"No." The answer came quicker than he expected, catching him off guard. "Stay with me, hold my hand." 

A soft smile played on his lips, stepping closer to you he took your hand, leading you through your house like he lived there. Like he was never going to leave you again. 

When he reached the master bathroom he carefully picked you up by the waist, lifting you to sit on the counter. You were lighter, smaller, than the last time he'd done that. But with time he'd get you back to the way you were. 

For now he'd love you just the same, put extra care into making sure you were taken care of.

"Stay here love." He placed a gentle kiss to your forehead before walking out of the bathroom, you grew anxious in his absence, waiting for him to come back. Trying to be brave. 

When he came back he was carrying a few things, a bath sheet, the soft one you liked the most. Some white fairy lights you used around Christmas but typically kept in the closet, and a candle, the fancy ones that crackle when you burn them. 

"Gunna take good care of ye." He promised, setting the things down on the other side of the counter to start filling the tub, checking the temperature before shutting the drain. 

Then he plugged in the lights, turning off the overhead light, making it a cozy atmosphere, lighting the candle he put it on the windowsill. 

You watched him with careful eyes, a pain settling in your chest from how much his actions were filled with love, doing everything he could to make you comfortable. It didn't feel deserved. Not when you'd been so badly ruined without him.

"Alright, let's get ye undressed. If ye're still okay with a bath?" He stood before you, hands resting on either side of you on the counter, a tenderness in his blue eyes. 

"Okay." That was all he needed, getting to work on carefully removing your clothes, careful not to hurt you or touch any sore or healing spots. He supported your body as he helped you stand to fully remove your clothes.

His eyes didn't linger, that wasn't his intention here right now. They didn't look away in disgust either, there was no pity or grimace on his face. Just the tender love of a man trying to take care of the person he cherished with his entire being.

He didn't try to move your arms when you tried to hide parts of yourself, didn't let that shame of being vulnerable with him fester, wrapping his arms around you and holding you close, letting you use his body as a shield against the world. "Let's get ye in the tub, aye?" 

"Okay." With another soft nod from you he guided you towards the tub, helping you step in, holding your hand as you lowered yourself into the warm water, reassuring you every second. 

"That's it, take it slow." He cooed, dipping his hand into the water before running it over your forehead, back down your greasy dirty hair. "Hair's gotten longer these past few months, think ye want it cut back tae how it was?" He asked softly.

"I don't know." You looked down at yourself in the water, taking everything in, letting the warmth of the water envelope you, consume you so wholly that nothing but this moment remained. 

"That's okay." He cupped some water in his hands, dumping it over your head, careful not to get your face, he didn't know what kind of torture they'd put you through, and he didn't want to trigger anything for you. 

Dipping yourself under the surface of the water you made his job of getting all of you wet a lot easier, he hummed in approval, grabbing a brush to go through your hair, smoothing it over before squeezing your shampoo into his hands, getting to work on washing your hair.

His fingers were like heaven, gently massaging and scratching at your scalp, removing all the dandruff from several months without washing it away. He was dutiful in his work, maximizing your comfort and enjoyment, humming a song for you. 

You weren't out of the tunnel, everything ahead still seemed so dark and uncertain, but being here with John, being taken care of, being treated so tenderly, you knew there was going to be an end, that one day you'd be standing in the light. You just needed to be brave.

"I love ye. All I ever wanted was ye. Always ye. I want tae spend the rest o' my life taking care of ye, making sure ye feel loved." Rinsing away the shampoo he turned your face towards him, kissing the tip of your nose. "I will never let ye be alone again, I think I'll spend the rest of eternity following ye around."

"It's nasty work taking care of someone, especially someone like me." You leaned into him, leaning against the edge of the tub to get closer to him, making his shirt wet with your body.

"Not tae me. Not if it's ye." Wrapping his arms around you he held you close, letting you soak through his shirt, anything to have you closer. His clothes would dry, or could be changed, but this moment with you could never be repeated.

"Join me." Your voice was soft, just wanting him closer, needing to feel his skin to fully believe you were really with him. That this wasn't all a hallucination. 

"Not this time, I'm just  tryin' tae get ye clean." He kissed your forehead before pressing his forehead against yours.

"Please." You begged, pulling him in impossibly closer, the side of the tub digging into his ribs. "I just need you closer. I just need to feel that you're real."

His resolve quickly crumbled, taking a deep breath he stood up, stripped himself of his clothes and stepped into the tub, settling beside you. He was thankful for just how large your tub was, a big long garden tub, the secret reason you chose this home.

"Now, lets finish getting you clean." He grabbed your conditioner, getting to work lathering your hair, working from the ends to the base of your head. Massaging it in. 

Then he grabbed your body wash and a soft rag, gently cleaning the remaining dirt and grime from your body, careful with cleaning your sensitive places, not wanting to hurt you in any way. He cleaned your back with extra care, working out the tension your body held until you were more relaxed. 

Once you were clean you leaned into him, laying on his chest, watching the candle on the windowsill, listening to his heartbeat along with the soft crackling from the wood wick candle. 

You stayed in the tub with him, skin on skin, until the water grew cold, only when he felt you shiver did he make you get out, wrapping you in the bath sheet, not caring he didn't grab a towel for himself. 

He blew out the candle and brought you into your room, grabbing some pajama's for you, grabbing one of the shirt's he'd left there on 'accident' for you to wear. Helping you get dressed, before leading you back to the bathroom where he towel dried your hair before blow drying the rest. 

Only once you were completely taken care of did he take care of himself, getting dressed before coming back to you. "I love ye, ye ken that?" His Scottish accent grew in thickness, tucking you into bed. 

"I love you too." A spike of panic filled you when he took a step back, sitting up and grabbing his wrist. He could clearly see the nervous unease on your face. Fear. He hated seeing that look on your face.

"Easy, I'm not gunna leave ye, just moving to get in bed on the other side." He shushed your worries, kissing you tenderly on the lips, climbing into bed beside you he pulled you close, letting you lay your head on his chest. 

His fingers traced circles over the skin of your arm, staring up at the ceiling. A comforting silence between you two, his heartbeat and breathing the only thing keeping your mind from wandering too far into despair.

"Penny for your thoughts?" You hum, looking up at him. Things felt alright when you were with him like this, a secret place neither of you could ever be caught in crosshairs or rules.

"Just thinking." He took a deep breath. "Don't know what I would have done if I didn't find ye. I wasn't messin' around when I said ye're all I care about." He leaned down to kiss the top of your head. "Get some sleep, ye need some rest."

You hummed in acknowledgment, for the first time in a while feeling genuinely sleepy, not just tired or exhausted, but feeling a desire to sleep. Feeling a desire to sleep because things felt safe here with the man you loved. 

#x reader #oneshot #reader insert #gender neutral reader #cod fandom #john mactavish x reader #captain soap mactavish #cod #captain john mactavish #og soap #angst #johnny soap mactavish #johnny soap mactavish x reader #soap x reader #john soap mactavish #soap mactavish #cod soap #cod soap x reader #john soap mactavish x reader #soap call of duty #soap mactavish x reader #soap cod #soap mctavish #soap mw2 #john mactavish #cod fanfic

[your-local-simp-writers]

Unexpected

Word Count: 406

Warnings: None

Soap x Fem! Hispanic! Wife! Reader ︶꒦꒷♡꒷꒦︶︶꒦꒷♡꒷꒦︶︶꒦꒷♡꒷꒦︶︶꒦꒷♡꒷꒦︶

The engines of the C-130 Hercules cut through the silence of the airstrip, heralding the return of Task Force 141 from a grueling mission. Among the crowd, a lone figure stood out—Y/N, Soap’s wife, her vibrant presence a stark contrast to the military precision around her.

As the soldiers filed out, the air was thick with anticipation. María’s heart pounded in her chest, her eyes eagerly searching for Soap. When he finally emerged, her joy was uncontainable. She dashed towards him, her laughter echoing across the tarmac. “¡Mi amor, te extrañé tanto!” she exclaimed, leaping into his arms.

The members of TF-141 halted in their tracks, their battle-hardened facades crumbling in disbelief. Ghost’s eyebrow arched behind his mask, Roach’s mouth agape, and even Price’s eyes softened, a rare occurrence. They had faced countless dangers together, but this was uncharted territory. They exchanged glances, each silently asking the same question: “Soap’s married?”

“So, lads,” Soap began, his voice betraying a hint of bashfulness, “this is the better half I’ve been keeping secret. Y/N, these are the brothers I’ve told you so much about.”

María beamed, her energy infectious as she greeted each member with a warm embrace and a flurry of Spanish. “¡Hola! Soy Y/N’s, es un honor finalmente conocer a los amigos de mi esposo,” she said, her words flowing like a melody.

The men of TF-141, known for their stoicism, found themselves at a loss, charmed by her vivacious spirit. Ghost, usually a man of few words, found himself engaging in a playful banter, while Roach couldn’t help but chuckle at Soap’s evident pride.

Ghost’s usual reticence gave way to a rare chuckle. “Never thought Soap would manage to keep a secret this delightful,” he remarked.

Price, ever the leader, stepped forward. “Well, I’ll be,” he said, his voice gruff with a hint of amusement. “Soap, you’ve outdone yourself. She’s quite the gem.”

As the evening unfolded, Y/N’s laughter became the soundtrack of their reunion. She listened intently to their stories, her eyes alight with admiration, and they, in turn, saw a new side of Soap—a man deeply in love, his heart belonging to the spirited woman who had effortlessly woven herself into the fabric of their tight-knit group.

The TF-141 left that night with a new story to tell—not of war, but of the unexpected joy found in a comrade’s hidden life, a reminder of the world worth fighting for.

#mw2 x reader #modern warfare smut #call of duty x reader #cod x reader #modern warefare 2 x reader #modern warfare x reader #johnny soap mactavish x reader #soap x reader #cod soap x reader #mw2 soap x reader #soap mactavish x reader #soap mactavish x you #call of duty #call of duty modern warfare #call of duty headcanon #cod headcanon #john soap mactavish #john soap mctavish x reader #cod soap #cod mw2 #cod #cod mwii #soap mactavish #john soap mactavish x reader #johnny soap mactavish #og soap #soap call of duty #soap mactavish x f!reader #soap mctavish #soap x y/n

[brewed-pangolin]

Captain MacTavish, who makes you ride his face while leaning against the headboard every morning. Won't stop until your legs are quaking around his head and dripping yourself all over his stubbled chin. Whimpering that you're too sensitive, further urging him on as he grips tightly into your thighs and plunges his tongue deep into your overstimulated hole.

#good morning #the brainrot of Captain MacTavish #soap squad #soap sqaud 🧼 #OG Soap #Captain MacTavish #Captain Soap MacTavish #mw2 Soap #soap x you #soap x reader #soap smut #cod soap smut #call of duty #cod

[mangoguy]

Displacement (1/2)

John "Soap" McTavish(2009) x Reader x John "Soap" McTavish(2022)

Warnings: Mention of Modern Warfare 3 (2011), Some fluff, they/them used once other than that no pronouns are used.

You recall your relationship with your John while in the hospital.

Another entry For @glitterypirateduck Soap It Up challenge!

This was heavily inspired by the Multiverse AU by shotmrmiller. It's been on my mind for a while lol

"Right, what the hell kind of name is 'Soap', eh? How'd a muppet like you pass selection?"

You heard Price state, looking up from cleaning your gun you saw the new guy who was set to join. Fresh faced and ready for battle, you wondered how long that would last. You watched as he passed the C.Q.B with a pretty average time, but he passed nonetheless. After that Price quickly briefed the team on the mission, infiltrating and assaulting a cargo ship in the Bering Strait. He dismissed us to get ready, deciding you wanted to try and get to know the new guy. You walked over to him and fell into step with him. 

You remember it wasn’t hard to get him to open up, which was surprising, most of the guys here were not up for much conversion. After a while, you decided to ask the biggest question on your mind, you asked him about his hair. 

“Why did you decide on a mohawk?” You heard him huff.  

“Because it was cool…” He mumbled.

"I love ye, y'know that right?"

You could faintly hear Captain McTavish mumble those words under his breath but the sound of the helicopter made you wonder if you heard it at all. What affirmed that it was indeed said out loud was when he took his hand in yours, rubbing his thumb over the back of your hand in a soothing gesture. Who he was comforting, you weren't sure, but you had an inkling it was to ground himself. 

You recall It was his first mission as captain and if he was nervous he sure as hell didn’t show it. But you knew him, he often sought some small physical contact as comfort when he was nervous. 

It's funny how you remember these things.

You also remember his first mission as captain went off without a hitch, of course, there were hiccups but like he promised nothing happened to you. It was oddly sweet in its own way, he knew you could take care of yourself but he often fretted sometimes (even if he didn't entirely show it).

Another moment you recall with John McTavish was when you two were outside. He was smoking and you were just keeping him company. It was a nice evening, a bit cold but nothing you couldn't handle. You two were talking about anything and everything as you two normally do. Then the topic of living together came up.

"Y'know... I've been thinking after all this is over we need to... do couples things" he chuckled.

"Oh yeah? Like what? I thought fighting in battlefields was good date material," you joked.

"Ah, that's gettin' old... we could get our own place," he suggested. 

"Get our own place? What are you suggesting?" You turned to look at him, he was already looking at you with a grin.

"Aye, I'm sayin' we should live together once this is all over and done with, I'm thinkin' out in the fields near a small town, just the two of us," he stubbed out his smoke before leaning against you. He wrapped an arm around your waist and brought you closer. 

"Hm, that sounds wonderful... We could get a cat... maybe two so the other one wouldn't be lonely," you suggested, planting a kiss on his lips as you both thought about this fantasy. You'll never forget the way his cheeks turned a bit rosy after that. 

Though before house buying the one important thing on John's 'Couples things' list was getting married. Of course, you both talked extensively about it, making sure it was something you both were on the same page on. The ceremony wasn't anything special, just you, John, and a few friends and family to celebrate at John's Parents' house. It was a sweet time, filled with talking and laughing (Ghost and Roach were both raiding the snacks John's mom made). 

"Look at you, my little brother gettin' married! Never thought I see the day, thought you were married to the military life for a sec," John's sister teasingly bumped his shoulder. Though she was teasing, she seemed pretty proud and happy for him. 

"Aye, never thought I get so lucky, knew I wanted to marry them 6 months in but didn't want to scare them," John chuckled while wrapping an arm around your waist. You just rolled your eyes and nudged his rib, and he responded by pinching your hip before kissing your cheek.

But things didn't turn out like you both planned. Luck had to run out someday.

'I won't let anything happen to you,' rings in your head, he never failed to mention it before missions you both went on.

Is that why you were here?

You weren't sure how to explain it. One moment you were with John and Yuri, in that building, something went off and you woke up with someone looming over you.. before it all went black again.

You felt like you were in a different body, and you say that loosely since it still felt like you but a bit younger, less tense. You weakly opened your eyes, the blaring lights of the hospital flooding your vision. You groaned, wincing away for a moment before it felt safe to look again. The bed you were lying on was much softer than the ones back on base.

"Ah, you're awake," you saw a nurse to your left side checking your vitals, she gave you a reassuring smile.

"You were out for a while, almost two months! Had some bloke worried sick about you... Johnny, I think his name was," she started explaining. You never really heard people refer to John as Johnny but whatever at least you knew he was alive.

“Is he okay?” You rushed to ask.

“Yes he’s fine, was discharged a while ago, you were the one to take the most of the damage,” She paused to resume her work.

“Actually he should be coming back soon, doesn’t leave your side unless he needs the restroom, you definitely have a good one,” She chuckled.

Oh, thank god he was okay.

The nurse left you to rest after and you started mulling over what happened.

An explosion happened, you were falling alongside Yuri when it happened. But you couldn't remember much else.

You began to feel uneasy, like you lost a big part of yourself and yet you couldn't explain why. Which was weird considering the nurse just confirmed he was, in fact, relatively okay. While you were mulling it over some more you didn't hear the door opening and the sound of hurried footsteps rushing over to your bed.

"Yer awake!" 

You whipped your head up to see your husband, so grateful he was okay. You were almost ready to jump on him but you froze when your eyes finally landed on him. What looked like John, though he was a mildly younger version of him. He was a bit shorter than your John as well, along with sounding vastly different. 

That was definitely not your John.

He looked worried and relieved at you. Placing a hand on yours but also trying not to hover around you, you noticed a tattoo on his right arm, John didn’t have an arm tattoo. He decided to just sit down on the chair that was pushed near your hospital bed. Not knowing what to do you took your hand out of his and placed it on your stomach. 

That’s when you noticed your simple wedding band was gone.

Replaced with one that had a pearl and a few diamonds.

Whose ring was this?

You were confused and dare you say scared. Scared more than you ever have been in your life and that's saying a lot considering your line of work. But where exactly were you? 

"Yer looking at me like ye don't know me, Bonnie," the man broke the silence. 

But you didn't know him, you assumed this was the bloke the nurse mentioned.

Johnny. 

Wearing the face of your John.

Just what exactly happened?

Words: 1,347

Reblogs and comments are appreciated!

#call of duty #cod mw2 #modern warfare 2 #john soap mactavish #john soap mctavish x reader #soap mactavish #captain mactavish #soapitup #og soap #09 soap #cod x reader

[minihotdog]

Mini's Masterlist

This blog is intended for persons 18 years or older. Minors DO NOT INTERACT or you will be blocked and publically humiliated.

❤️‍🔥 - NSFW

🐇 - Fluff

💙 - Angst

🚀 - Most Popular

🥰 - Personal Fav

Call of Duty:

💀 Simon "Ghost" Riley 💀

Schoolboy Crush: Part 1, Part 2❤️‍🔥

Ghost in the Hallway

Simon Goes Fishing 🐇 💙

The Scout: Part 1 ❤️‍🔥 (in progress)

Have You Seen My Boyfriend? 💙 🚀

Locked out On Valentine's / Ending 1 / Ending 2 ❤️‍🔥

❤ ――☆―― ❤

🫧 John "Soap" MacTavish 🫧

Stay a Wee Longer 🐇🥰

Caught Red Handed: Part 1 / Part 2 ❤️‍🔥🚀

The Lass Next Door: Part 1 🐇 (eventual)❤️‍🔥 (in progress)

❤ ――☆―― ❤

(ง'̀-'́)ง🫧 Captain MacTavish (ง'̀-'́)ง🫧

Badman, John Mactavish ❤️‍🔥

❤ ――☆―― ❤

🚬🍵 John Price 🚬🍵

John Comes Home 🐇💙

You'll be alright, love ❤️‍🔥🥰

Whose Wife is This?: Part 1 💙 eventual❤️‍🔥 (in progress)

Quiet John 🐇

❤ ――☆―― ❤

🚁 Kyle "Gaz" Garrick 🚁

Gaz really loves his wife 🐇

❤ ――☆―― ❤

🤠 Task Force 141, etc 🤠

A Diamond in the Rough 💙 (idk wtf is happening)

Headcannon: Calling him a good boy ❤️‍🔥🥰

Beefing Up On Deployment Drabble ❤️‍🔥

❤ ――☆―― ❤

Divergent:

🔪 Eric Coulter 🔪

Captive - OC Eden Rossi

Chapter One: Where Am I?

Chapter Two: The Ghost From Amity

Chapter Three: Ruthless

Fearless Magazine: Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 Completed

Page divider: @Gasara (Deviant Art) <3

#john mactavish #john mactavish fic #john soap mactavish #john mactavish imagine #soap x reader #soap mactavish #soap mw2 #simon ghost x reader #ghost x reader #ghost cod #ghost smut #simon ghost riley #eric coulter x oc #eric coulter smut #eric coulter x reader #eric coulter imagine #divergent fanfiction #eric divergent #Kyle gaz garrick #gaz garrick #gaz x reader #cod headcanons #tf141 headcannon #captain mactavish #og soap

[bonkchai]

Captain mactavish enjoyers RISE.

#modern warfare 2 #mw2 #modern warfare ii #call of duty #john soap mactavish #soap mwii #captain mactavish #og soap #09 soap #soap mw2 #mw2 x reader

[majinbangus]

just read the side boob tattoo blurb...what about dear reader surprising our feral captain with a brand new badass back piece?

perfect for those back shots, no? eheheee

Ooh anon he's gonna destroy you is that what you want (i want it too)

He finds out when you present yourself so sweetly in nothing but a flimsy silk robe- a coming home gift, as you phrased it- something to unwrap for coming home alive and safe. He suspects nothing, eager to be reunited with you, to feel you wrapped around him again.

But once you bend over onto all fours and arch your back once the robe comes off? It's all he can focus on. He won't let you back up or flip you over. He's gonna keep you pinned and wailing, eyes laser-focused on your back tattoo, maybe even be a little selfish and focus on his pleasure as he treats you like a new toy he gets to break in.

He'll leave little scratches along the edges of the tattoo, tracing the outline as if he drew it, but he's careful to leave the actual tattoo alone. He just wants you to feel the sting, to feel his sting. Leave his own marks on you. And you do feel it. Both inside and out. Captain MacTavish is a thorough man and he's gonna leave his marks scratched into your back and painted inside you.

And as much as the tattoo makes him want to bend you over constantly, he wishes you asked him to do the tattoo instead. He's an artist, after all, it's no trouble for him to sketch marks onto what's his. Not to worry, though, you've got plenty of skin still unmarred and untouched. He'll find a place to tattoo his initials into your flesh.

#anon if you were talking about price im sorry im probably gonna be writing for soap only #maybe that'll change in the future but who knows #but if you were talking about og soap? i gotchu #bangus answers #anon #john soap mactavish x reader #john soap mctavish x reader #soap mactavish x reader #soap x reader #soapy thoughts :] #captain mactavish x reader