Archive of Our Own

Ghost isn’t so far gone to put his face on the toilet seat, but at this point, he can admit he’s cuttin’ it fuckin’ close.

He spits out another mouthful of bile-yellow gunk, his ragged breaths filling the crawl space the military calls a bathroom, and collapses bodily against the wall. He slings his arms over his knees, still stinging from the harsh landing on the floor, and lets his mouth hang loose; breath smelling rank even to himself. He sighs and digs his head back into the cold tiles.

It’s getting worse.

He works his jaw, pushing through as it seizes and sticks, the joints grinding like they’re rusted together, until it finally pops enough to let him yawn. His head falls between his shoulders, stretching out the ever-creeping tension in his neck, and threads his hands behind his head, grinding his palms into his skull. They slip just the slightest hint lower, an old, yearning instinct rearing its head- before the rest of his body catches up; a familiar cold disgust lacing his skin.

Ghost rakes his hands over his head and hauls himself to his feet, all but falling onto the flusher as he winces through a wash of vertigo. Harsh blinks do little to cut through the static but he takes the two steps to the shower anyway, the dizziness slowly fading.

This early, it’d be warmer to piss on himself; the cold, hard water setting a bone-deep ache in his skull as he sloughs off the sour tinge of sickness clinging to his skin, his already caustic scent turning like spoiled blood. His empty stomach roils and he spits, tonguing away his scent like he could send it down the drain with it.

Nasty fuckin’ thing, he sniffs and thumbs open his scent-neutralising body wash, brusquely working it into his skin.

The base’s sandpaper towels catch on the goosebumps on his skin, the abrasive fabric rejecting the water more than drying it, leaving him to drip on the tiles. He scrubs it over his head and drops it at his feet, kicking it out to hopefully absorb some of the mess, and digs under the sink for his blockers.

Ghost shakes the box, lip curling at the hollow echo, and pulls out the final strip of patches.

Resting back against the basin, he heats the patch between his hands, eyes half-lidded in lingering exhaustion. Another jaw-cracking yawn catches him off guard as he peels the blockers apart, the double-strength adhesive stringing between the patches before snapping apart. He slaps one on his wrist and props a foot up on the toilet, stretching out his groin with one hand so he doesn’t catch any stray pubes in the sticky mess, and spreads the other patch on his inner thigh.

He mirrors them on the other side and covers the glands on his biceps, the slight readjustment he has to do tearing at the soft inner skin, and he’s once again morbidly glad he doesn’t have to put the bastard things on his throat anymore.

They should do for the next few days, maybe a week if he stretches it out.

Ghost crushes the empty box, tossing it in the sink to deal with later, and hits the light. He dresses in the dark, the line of his back firming with every layer. His mask slides home with a deep sigh; the fabric clinging like a second skin, numbing the ever-present, frantic buzzing under his skin.

His eyes open to deep blue seeping out from behind the curtain, the morning sun struggling to rise over the waterlogged shithole that is Hereford in winter.

Careful; don’t wanna be too charitable, he scoffs and rolls his eyes, grunting at the sharp spike of pain that cuts through his temple. He swipes up the half-empty pack of mints from the bed, crunching three between his back teeth. Spearmint and bile-coated breath traps against his mask as he lets out a sigh.

“Fuckin’ hell.”

Time to go to work.

To the betterment of every man on base, he doesn’t run into a single one of them on the way to the mess, and manages to both brew and drink a cuppa in relative silence, so maybe today won’t be such a wash.

One can only hope, Ghost rolls his eyes and throws in a scoop of milk powder into his shaker like it’ll cover the taste of stale water and staler protein powder; the industrial tub lookin’ like it’s been in the service as long as he fuckin’ has. He’d usually heat it up, try and use the temperature to mask the taste before it cooled into congealed mortar, but the piss-weak excuse for sunlight in this city must’ve actually gotten out of bed today; sweat dampens the back of his neck, his mask already sticking at the edges and making his skin itch.

A tray shoves in beside him, loaded with powdered eggs and toast just this side of burnt; still steaming, as fresh as it gets in this place. The smell batters against the walls of his empty stomach and his brows twitch in at the bowl of sweet porridge precariously balanced on the edge of the tray.

“Smart man’d fuel up on a day like today,” Price drawls, dropping a black tea bag in his mug, and eyes his shaker cup like it hit on his missus.

“Not all of us got an office to hibernate in,” Ghost shoots back, knuckling up his mask to take a pointed slug, and waits for the paste to shut his stomach up. “Must’ve pissed someone off; got pups to chase ‘round, better to be light on my feet.”

“What’s the spread?”

“70/30, Betas to Alphas,” he groans, distantly glad he at least doesn’t have to deal with any Omegas after an already shitty week - shitty month - and Price lets out a low sympathetic whistle.

“Always too much and not enough. Better have some toast at least; give that sludge something to cling to,” he advises.

He pushes out his chin, his eyelid twitching at the grind in his joints. “Pass.”

Price sniffs, a cantankerous grumble slipping out, and throws another tea bag in his mug.

“Someone woke up cranky,” Ghost snips as he drags his tray off the station with an obnoxious scratch of metal on metal, and follows him to a table.

Price hunches over his food like a baited mutt, tray firmly between his elbows, his fork hovering over the far edge after every bite, waiting to defend it. He drags his eyes over his stiff frame, his temple sympathetically pulsing with the headache pulling the skin around his eyes tight.

“Norris still on your ass?”

“Bastard never left it,” he scoffs darkly, an edge of a growl darkening his voice, and he must be on edge if his Alpha’s lingering so close to the surface. Smoking conifer hovers around him, the subtle threat of a forest fire on the precipice of ignition. “Things are heating up in Urzikstan and he still wants to pull support; as if we haven’t recalled half our fuckin’ men already. Hadir’s barely back on his feet after their last op; Farah’s spread too thin tryin’ to cover ‘im.”

“Need me out there?” Ghost asks, already mentally shifting around his go bag; nights in Urzikstan run cold, the desert taking any advantage she can to snare unsuspecting men.

Price spears some egg, drowned in a good third of a bottle of hot sauce, and doesn’t flinch as it hits his tongue. His eyes go distant, a thousand branching paths playing out in his mind, but ultimately shakes his head. “Not yet. There’s rumblings in Verdansk; outposts going dark, shipments gettin’ jumped…”

“Seems to be goin’ ‘round,” he picks up the unsaid thread.

“It’s too close to be ignored, not with the ULF haemorrhaging soldiers and Norris makin’ so much noise,” he growls, shaking his head with barred teeth; ready to lunge and rend flesh from bone. “That we haven’t been put on either… I don’t like it.”

He nods once in solitary agreement. If the Brass don’t want them aiding their own allies… “Drink up, me hearties, yo ho,” he mutters and throws back the rest of his protein paste.

Price’s snort catches on a piece of bacon and Ghost leaves him to choke, kicking the chair in behind him.

“Ghost.”

He coughs out the rest of his strangled chuckles and pushes the porridge from his tray across the table; the last dregs of butter still melting on top, thick with brown sugar and honey. “Take this to go? Eyes got too big this mornin’.”

An uncomfortable tightness seizes his chest, creeping along the underside of his ribs and constricting.

“‘M sure one o’ the pups ‘d be willing to take it off your hands,” he says blandly, and he eyes him just a heartbeat too long to be natural; too weighted be anything other than pointed.

The back of his neck itches but he doesn’t follow the instinct to let his eyes cut away, and Price mercifully breaks the tension with a scoff, waving him off to dig his fork through his beans. “For you to make ‘em chuck it back up again? I’ll save the embarrassment for another day.”

With those penetrating, all too keen eyes gone, Ghost’s shoulders manage to roll back down. “You just wanna watch,” he accuses; it comes off his tongue stilted, a half-step off true north, and Price has known some version of him too long to miss it.

“Throwing your ring up in front of a Lieutenant is humiliating; hurling in front of a Captain sticks with you,” he justifies instead of following the fresh blood; a voiceless mercy that sits, bloated, under his skin, and he lets out a breathy snort.

“And word is I’m the sadist,” he mutters, throwing a leg over the bench to stand.

“Opportunism, Lieutenant; it gets you far,” Price calls after him and Ghost waves a blithe hand over his shoulder like the tightness in his chest isn’t threatening to peel muscle from porous ribs fibre by agonising fibre.

Price hates honey.

“Ladies! Let’s try to slap some lipstick on this shit show, shall we?”

Ghost raises an unseen eyebrow at the gathered soldiers, wide-eyed and wrong-footed, all looking at him like they’re waiting for their turn at his breast. A few of them still have razor burn from their buzz cuts. Fuckin’ hell, they couldn’t be more fresh.

Yet here they are, in the hands of the dead.

“You should be running,” he says blandly. “Two kilometres. If it takes you longer than ten minutes, you’re doin’ it again.”

No one moves. A couple waver, taking a few steps, but none take off, uncertainty dripping from their scents.

“Did that sound like a fuckin’ suggestion?” Ghost growls and they sprint.

It’s mindless work putting the pups through their paces; circuits so familiar he could run them in his sleep, let alone dog the rookies’ too-big feet, nipping at their heels until they approach the beginnings of decent times. That itself is a fuckin’ miracle since half of them waddle through the mud course like penguins that never saw basic.

He’s stalking around the barbed wire bed when he catches the traffic jam, the middle of the pit growing congested as one of the rookies struggles to pull himself out of the trench.

“Get a fuckin’ move on, Myers!”

“He’s comin’- get out the fucking way!”

A few bright sparks manage to think long enough to crawl around him but none of them stop to pull him free, instead sprinting to the climbing wall to make up their time. Ghost sniffs. The whispers grow harsher as he gets closer, the rookie directly behind him even punching his boot like he thinks he’s forgotten how to crawl. Reaching under the wire, his hand closes around Myers’ collar, and he wrenches him out, a tidal wave of mud preceding him; eclipsing his face, perfect to choke on.

Quiet mocking laughter undercuts Myers’ retches, mud clinging inside his mouth; the tips of his ears turning red under the caked-on mess, the scent of bitter, over-brewed coffee leaching out around him.

“You waitin’ ‘round for mornin’ tea?” Ghost barks at them and the laughter immediately cuts out. “Jog on!”

They scatter like roaches, the held-up rookies scrambling out of the wire bed, and he waits for them to continue to the course before tugging Myers’ heaving body upright, hitting his back with a harsh clap, dislodging the mud enough for him to spit out. He gasps heavily, unsteady on his feet.

“Head high, Private,” he reminds him lowly and his head lolls in a nod.

“Yes, Sir,” he gulps and sways up, like he means to lick at his jaw, bitter shame diluted with grateful, mocha sweetness, and Ghost goes so thoroughly rigid it sends a bolt of lightning through his jaw. Myers thinks better of it at the last second, baring his throat instead, and hurries to rejoin the course; his hands shaky on the rope, but his mud-slick feet don’t slip.

Ghost rolls the abrupt tension out of his neck, forcing air back between his gritted teeth, and keeps haunting the wet course, keeping an eye out for the stragglers as well as the front runners. He keeps a tally of who slips and who doesn’t, who slows and who manages to rally, and is almost ready to swap them over when he hears a howl from the dry course. And it takes a single whiff to figure out why.

Bloody fuckin’ Beta pups, Ghost sneers. More trouble ‘n their worth. Two knothead Alphas in a room are a pain in the ass but there’s nothing more dangerous than a group of high-strung, stressed Betas all raring to tip each other over the edge of Ferality like hormone-ridden dominoes.

The whole field’s starting to reek of it, bleach and chlorine soaking the earth, stinging his eyes as the whole group’s scents curdle one after another because for whatever reason, they’ve decided common fuckin’ courtesy doesn’t apply to them and tossed their blockers.

A growl kisses the back of his teeth and the stragglers on the outside peel off, tripping over themselves to get out of his way, chins tipped in deference.

“Oi! This look like a fuckin’ playpen to you?” he spits, pulling spectating bodies out of the mess and throwing them away, the impact of them hitting the deck a distant sound.

The two rookies locked together don’t even seem to hear him; both their eyes overtaken by black, pinprick white pupils struggling to break through the void as they claw and snarl at each other. Ghost scowls and kicks their legs apart, breaking them up enough to curl a fist around the top one’s collar, his unblocked scruff free and clear-

When an elbow cracks into his lip and he rears back with a choked noise.

The fang’s gone.

Ghost stumbles away, bowed over the scent-bleached earth, and pants open-mouthed; his mask bowing with the weight of the fang. His upper lip is numb. Damp seeps into the material, wet iron and fresh pus welling on his tongue and filling his senses. He stares, unseeing, at the ground; the dirt’s cracking, shifting, bulging, fighting itself to bloat like a carcass left to swell and crack in the sun.

Pain sneaks back in, a hollow throb curling under his lip and infecting his jaw until the roots of his teeth pulse with it. His tongue weighs down his lower jaw, almost impossible to lift to the roof of his mouth, following it down his gums, and stills when it hits enamel.

His ragged breaths had blown out his mask, harsh inhales sucking the damp of it into his mouth, half-smothering him, before blowing back out, stiff with saliva and something else; something thicker. There’s nothing weighing it down.

He hasn’t lost the fang.

Ghost slowly straightens, the line of his spine stiff, vertebrae refusing to fall into place. All fifteen of them had hit the ground, bellies up and heads thrown back into the grass, some even lying on their arms in their frantic rush to submit; the whole field reeking of terrified, remorseful pups.

“Dismissed,” he pushes out; the sound almost lost before it even makes it through his mask.

The recruits squirm, unsure glances thrown at each other, careful not to lift too far from the ground.

A snarl distorts his jaw. “Go’an, off you fuck!” he sneers and doesn’t wait for the scramble of bodies before turning his back.

Ghost blindly rushes to the nearest bathroom, faceless soldiers lunging out of his way, and he all but breaks the door down forcing it open. He hunches over the furthest sink, a dark stain in a sea of clinical white.

He checks the corners, the stalls all open and empty, and a shiver of disgust digs its fingers into him as he reaches for the hem of his mask. He yanks it off before he can overthink it, dropping it beside the sink; his head bowed, mouth slack. Spit rolls over his lips, far heavier than saliva should ever be; the thick drip of it catching on his lips and chin and he stills at the sight of red and a far worse yellow marring the sink.

He forces his heavy head back up, his bruising upper lip pulling back high over the fangs.

The fangs that look like they’re barely hanging on inside his head; his gums inflamed and so swollen it sets an itch under his skin. As he watches, puss bubbles and seeps out from under the ragged, blown-out gums, running thick down his fangs like venom, and the rush of air past it makes him gag; hunching over the sink to spit out the poisoned mouthful as best he can without letting it touch his tongue.

Bile catches in the pockmarks embedded in his throat, maggot holes carved and rotted over, torn open with every putrid breath.

Ghost snatches a fistful of paper towel, soaking it to scrub at the damp of the mask. Red slowly blooms from the black, swallowing the white.

It doesn’t matter that he finds it repulsive, that his hands shake as he tips pills and powders down the bog, that the sight of the prepped needles under the vanity fills him with a cold void of rage. It doesn’t matter that his brother willingly shot up with the same shit that nearly killed Simon before he was even born, doesn’t matter that the weight of an infant’s mortality didn’t mean more to him than scoring. Tommy’s getting clean now.

He has no fuckin’ choice.

He cuts off the sink, the bowl filled with cool water, and carries it into the lounge where Tommy’s sprawled out on the couch; sweat-damp hair clinging to his forehead even as he struggles to tug the thin blanket closer.

‘Fuckin’ hate this thing,’ he’s grumbling, fighting with the twisted fabric.

‘You bought it,’ Simon reminds him flatly, setting the bowl and a tea towel on the coffee table.

‘Fuck knows why; don’t even remember it,’ he spits and he sets his jaw, smacking Tommy’s hands away from it to straighten it out. He tries to hit him back, missing his arm entirely by a handbreadth. ‘Gotta remember growin’ up in that shithole; can’t remember buyin’ a fuckin’ blanket.’

Was it worth becomin’ a smackhead? he bites back, smoothing the blanket down his concave chest. Tommy immediately fucks with it, scrunching the hem between restless, twitching fingers.

‘Take a blanket over that fuckin’ place any day,’ he continues.

‘What, don’t miss only havin’ hot water on Wednesdays?’ Simon says absently.

‘The fuckin’ water- we could’ve boiled that ‘nd sold the minerals ‘n shit it left behind,’ he groans and he buries a snort when they simultaneously smack their lips, the taste of hard water still lingering on their teeth.

‘Would’ve put it on your cereal; maybe then you wouldn’t have still been a foot tall at ten.’

‘Was not, fuck you,’ Tommy scoffs, a tired grin pulling at his lips for the first time in days.

‘Had to explain that I was walkin’ my brother to school ‘nd I wasn’t a teen dad,’ he snarks.

‘Fuck you twice!’ he cries, his laugh breaking into a haggard cough.

‘Remember you nearly fallin’ arse over tits off the roof,’ he snickers like his stomach hadn’t fallen out his arse watching Tommy’s eyes blow wide, the rotten shingle cracking and sliding away under his tiny foot, sending him careening back towards four stories of open air. ‘Got stuck in the gutter ’nd balled your eyes out ‘til I pulled you back up.’

He built his first nest that night; cobbling together clothes and dirty sheets in a pale imitation of the nests he saw on TV. He’d tucked Tommy in a duvet cover, holding him close as he shook through silent tears, his own eyes cruelly dry, until he fell asleep.

He took it apart before sunrise. He knew better.

Tommy lurches upright and Simon barely grabs the old ice cream container before he’s throwing up; thin and harder to get up because of it, the little water he’s managed to ply him with coming right back up. He cups his forehead as he tilts forward, holding him up as he coughs through it.

Simon grimaces as he wretches, his whole chest heaving in punishment for having nothing left in his stomach, and spits out a wad of orange-dark phlegm. Tommy collapses back, breaths shallow and ragged. He wipes at his slack mouth and brushes it off on his pants, unfazed; puke means practically nothing to him now. He glances in the bucket, shoulders pulling tight at the tinge of red clinging to the mess.

‘‘Member you tellin’ me ‘bout the bears,’ Tommy mumbles, breathy and laboured, and Simon freezes. He looks up as he swallows thickly, groaning as it hurts his throat. ‘Mama bear ‘nd little bear ‘nd the ice ‘nd shit. ‘Member that? ‘Bout the Arctic? Bears here-’

‘‘Nd no fuckin’ bears there,’ he finishes, slowly sinking beside the couch with a laugh that comes out only a little strangled. His smile cracks, the edges twitching. He reaches up to scratch at his cheek, trembling lips hidden in his wrist. ‘Didn’t think you remembered that.’

It’s one of the few memories he has that remain untouched; teaching Tommy how to find the North Star, how to find east in the sunrise and west in the sunset. Nearly laughing himself off the roof at his confused, ‘I thought north was up?’ and carrying the sucker punch bruise for three days when he didn’t appreciate his, ‘Yeah, not up in the fuckin’ air, innit?’

Simon chews the inside of his lip. He takes the towel and submerges it in the water, twisting out the excess, and cups the back of Tommy’s damp head, propping him up to set it on the back of his neck. ‘Don’t know why I tried; not like we could ever see shit,’ he scoffs, half scornful of the dump their old man kept them in; half quietly mournful of the childhood he couldn’t give his little brother.

‘Fuck that. Still fuckin’ stars, innit,’ Tommy grumbles, shivering at the cold. He rolls the hem of the blanket over his hand to jerkily tug it over his shoulder and digs deeper into the couch, sighing through the pain of movement, his eyes falling shut. ‘You showed me the whole universe, Simon.’

Simon stares at the shivering mess Tommy’s made of himself. The last few days have been relentless; the hallucinations, the pain, the begging for Simon to make it all stop. But this… it feels like one of the rare moments when they were kids; when Tommy forgot about impressing their dad, forgot the poison and the one-sided feud spewed into their ears by his mum, and just let Simon be his big brother.

He swallows it back and adjusts the cloth to sit better over the back of his neck, heat already leaching into the wet fabric. It’s like Tommy’s body can’t decide whether it should burn out the poison in his veins or let it seep deeper, let the foreign chill overtake his blood until he’s nothing but ice; until there’s nothing of him left. It makes his lips hike up in a snarl, as if his Omegan fangs could threaten the rot out from under his skin.

He blinks as Tommy’s trembling hand lurches up to tangle in his, tugging it into his blanket to clutch it to his chest; their wrists pressing together in an uncoordinated scenting. His lips fall back over his fangs, Tommy’s ragged heart beating a hitching tattoo against the back of his hand, and he breathes out a faint purr; threading their fingers together properly, ignoring the underlying sickness in his torn-grass scent to bathe him in rain-dampened moss and sweet cream.

Twenty minutes later, Tommy threatens to kill him if he doesn’t bring him a bump.

Ghost flinches away from the memory and throws the paper towel in the bin, brusquely scraping his mask over his thigh to dry it, and only when the mask is pulled back over his head does he feel like he can breathe again.

With a sigh, he slumps over the counter, hands threading behind his head. His gums ache, a steady pulse spreading up his face to join the pained tattoo at his temples. The heel of his palms grind into the base of his skull, digging like he could lift the whole plate as easily as his hardshell; a carapace, cracked and ground to dust, needing to be shed.

He lurches away from the sink as the bathroom door creaks open, battered lips pulling back in a venomous snarl- and it dies on his tongue the second he sees Price round the corner.

He stops in the middle of the open room, doing the same perimeter check he did: corners, urinals, stalls. He clears it then turns back to him, a slow turn of his head that makes the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

“I’m giving you one chance to tell me yourself,” he starts lowly, hard in a way he’s never spoken to him; the low warning carrying a threat that sets him on edge. “Take it. What is going on with you?”

Ghost tracks him, teeth fitting oddly in his mouth, and forces a lazy blink. “Bit of a leap, don’t you think? Rookies exhaust you as much as me.”

Price’s jaw flexes and he swears under the flat anger, he looks disappointed. “Wrong answer.”

He crosses his arms over his chest, hands buried in his elbows so he won’t see them balling into uneasy fists. “What do you want me to say, Price?” he drawls, cocking his head; apathy wrapped in a sneer. “You clearly have somethin’ in mind.”

“Not lyin’ to my fuckin’ face ‘d be a start,” he matches him in his bite. “I can take you not sleepin’, can take you at your word that you eat where I can’t see you because I trust that at the end of the day, you’ll keep yourself alive. But I will not fucking ignore an entire training field reeking of rotten fuckin’ meat when I know what it means.”

“You don’t know shit,” he grits out, nails digging into his skin, and feels the fat drop of pus bubble from underneath his gums.

“I don’t know?” he spits incredulously, salt crystallising on the borders of his scent, burning the roots of pine and cedar as it eats them away, and all at once, Ghost realises he fucked up. “I don’t know what it smells like when you’re terrified out of your goddamn mind? What it means that I can fuckin’ follow you to whatever shadow you crawl into?”

“And who fuckin’ asked you to?” he throws out wildly, tongue lining with bile.

“Who else wil- piss somewhere else!” Price snarls, whirling on the opening door, the order thick with Alphan command that makes even Ghost twitch, and the incoming Corporal all but bends in half to bare his throat, fingers catching in the teeth of his half-drawn fly in his mad scramble back out.

Price faces the slowly closing door, shoulders set in a hard line, and Ghost shifts on his back foot as he abruptly about-faces and marches to the nearest stained sink. His breath sticks in his chest, bloated and miasmic, as he bends at the waist and shoves his nose down the drain, taking a thick, hard breath; his face not even twitching at the wet scent of mildew and mold.

He pulls back, snorting his nose clean of the scent, and goes straight to the next, then the next; working his way down the line of sinks, taking great, heaving breaths of each one, and Ghost grows stiffer as he gets closer- and spots the half-dried pus-yellow spittle discolouring the basin.

Price stills and Ghost locks down the wild shiver trying to spider beneath his skin. He straightens with the slow grace of a predator that’s corralled its prey into a trap and feeds his fingers down the drain, sweeping over the rusted metal with no regard to the filth he’ll find.

His knuckles butt against the rim as he twists his fingers, scooping as much as the shallow pipe allows, and raises his hand; a mass of pus and blood sticking to his skin. He rotates his hand, the shine catching in the stark light, and pins him with a glare over his shoulder to make sure he’s watching as the thick filth struggles to drip down his fingers.

“Have you been swallowing this?”

Ghost doesn’t so much as breathe, the channels in his lungs meant for oxygen instead bulging, drowning wall to wall in putrefaction; the rot-wet deflated sacks of his lungs little more than half-melted refuse catching on the rusted grates of his ribs. It wells in the back of his mouth, the flood rising as the silence blanketed him like a physical weight; pus seeping into the worn burrows in the lining of his throat, catching on abandoned nests and shed shells until he could choke on them.

Price’s nose twitches and his clean hand snakes out, a grunt punching out of his chest as he fists his collar and wrenches him close to shove his nose into his mask, just missing the border of his mouth. He sniffs hard, enough to make the fabric lift, and Ghost fights to keep his eyes calm even as the fetid scent of sickness wafts between them.

His eyes are glacial as they drag them up to meet his, razor-thin flecks of frozen glass threatening to make his own flit away. His jaw drops, lips pulling back to roll the odour over his tongue and force as much truth out of the scent as he can. Truth he’s never been able to pull from between his teeth.

Price pulls back a hair, the strength of his exhale making the fangs ache. “On me, Lieutenant,” he grits out, his grip tightening, and his skin prickles beneath his mask. “So fuckin’ help me God, on me.”

Bile stains his tongue. Price’s knuckles creak.

Ghost has to shore up his legs so he doesn’t falter when Price drops his hold, the scant distance between their feet telling him how quickly that’ll change if he doesn’t stay in step. Cement floors blend with sand with every impact through his boots, the steady left-right-left all he has left to cling to; he’s adrift, unmoored, following the harsh of Price’s footsteps embedded in the ground like a nuclear shadow only another shade could see.

The sign in front of the med bay holds like a guillotine over his head and he almost reflexively ducks it. Only Price’s warning look keeps him steady, keeps him in place, as he stalks to the main desk.

Ghost presses back into the wall, his shoulders flat to the chipped paint, and trails him with his eyes as the nurse points him to one of the bays. He fills the barrel of his chest with a sniper’s breath, pressing back harder like the plasterboard will make up for the weakness hollowing out his insides.

It’s wasted seconds. The wall doesn’t answer and when Price comes back, he does little to feel grateful about the walking brick wall at his side.

Big Micky’s the only bastard in here he’ll see; blunt, to the point, doesn’t hover or coddle soldiers who will face worse and worse again. They’re also tired; tired of the waste of life, of the revolving door of boots in their infirmary - some too small and others too scared - to waste their time lecturing the walking dead.

A look is all it takes for Price to snatch him from the wall and he falls in step at his heel. “Cheers for this, Micky.”

“‘M no dentist, Price; can’t promise anything,” they warn shortly, showing them into their exam room and nods him onto the gurney.

Ghost rolls his shoulders, stiffness creeping up his neck. He glances over his shoulder, the click of the closing door a gunshot in the desert, and Price’s glare forces him onto starch, over-washed sheets.

“Just do what you can, s’all I ask,” Price assures, setting himself against the window, arms crossed like a sentinel.

Micky huffs, pulling on scentless nitrile gloves. “It’s just the upper canines, then?”

He catches Price’s pointed eyebrow and he pushes out an affirming grunt.

“Thorough,” they mutter, kicking over a roller stool to sit in front of him, and clicks on a pen light. “Right, Lieutenant, open up and say ah.”

The harsh line of his back is all that keeps him from swaying out from under Micky’s hands; the proximity makes him itch, the light too hot on his skin. He pushes his boots into the linoleum until it feels like he can break through the cement underneath and forces his lip to hike up over the fangs; the rusted hinge of his jaw cracking in protest. Their thumb fits under his lip, pushing it up higher- like they need to, he can feel the way it bulges, forced over the wide bridge of the fangs. He pushes out his jaw, the skin of his swollen gums going uncomfortably tight.

Micky’s good. But Ghost’s better.

The flash of alarm in their eyes, chased by professional calm, is quick but this close, they can’t hide it.

“I’ll get Pádraig in to prep a lidocaine injection, then I’ll take a closer look,” they announce, pulling back.

“You try puttin’ a line in me, it’s goin’ through your fuckin’ eye,” Ghost threatens, thick with practised Alphan growl, and Micky doesn’t so much as flinch.

“I know your file, Lieutenant; it’s not a painkiller, it’s just a numbing agent.”

The metal gurney creaks under his grip. He knows what it is. He also knows what it’s like to not be able to feel his body but still be aware of dozens of hands digging into it, fingers clawing at his numb skin until he can feel the pressure in the live muscle beneath. To know what it sounds like to have gluttonous fingers grope his organs, to have to lie there knowing something was being done to him but he couldn’t feel what.

“Not fuckin’ happening,” he grits out.

Micky lets out an aggravated sigh, but they know better by now than to try fighting him. They take out a metal examination rod from a sterile pack and it’s through the cold press on the left fang that Ghost becomes conscious of the heat beneath his gums. The faint crosshatch in the metal digs into his inflamed skin and a gag tries to claw up his throat- at the pain and the thick wetness it forces from under his gums to run down the length of the fang.

“To me, they don’t even look rooted; I’m seeing total rejection. For the infection to be presenting like this, it’s already fairly advanced,” he has to focus as Micky rattles off, blindly taking a swap to clean up the new pus. They step back with a low huff, twisting the swap under the light. “Have you experienced any other symptoms, Lieutenant? Fever, lock jaw?”

Price’s glare digs into the side of his skull like it alone can rip the putrid fangs from his gums.

The peak of his cupid’s bow hitches when he makes no move to answer, his nostrils aborting the instinct to flare. “If they’re left alone? What’s the next step?”

“Sepsis; I’ll be surprised if it isn’t in the blood already,” Micky answers, impatience lurking beneath the plain statement like they’re annoyed Price even asked. “An infection like this, so close to the brain? There’s no if; these fangs need to come out.”

A faint echo sounds in Ghost’s ears, a churning, gnawing from below like a distant threat. A long-coming promise. “Or?” he grunts out over it.

They give him a flat look. “Start outfitting your burial plot.”

Micky looks back at the swab and Ghost tenses as something about the pus discolouring it makes their eyes narrow. They turn back to the shelving unit, flicking over a few drawers, before pulling out a plain plastic tube, putting the swab inside and breaking off the end so it closes.

“Sure about skipping that jab, Lieutenant?” they check and he just scoffs. They take out another metal examination tool, this one flat-edged like a palette knife. Micky carefully angles the penlight at the left fang, still aching after their gentle probing; his gums gaping even more around the exposed root of the fang.

“Brace yourself,” they mutter and angle the flat of the tool along the fang, slowly pushing up under the gums; a foreign slackness that sends a nauseating pang of wrongness through him. His entire jaw pangs as they curve the tool deeper, scraping the innermost part of his gums, and he stubbornly swallows a dry heave when the fang’s root shifts inside the bone.

A cold sweat breaks out over his skin, his hands shaking from his grip on the bed, and his whole body jerks as Micky tugs the tool free; a puss-soaked black mass clinging to the thin metal.

“The fuck is that?” Price frowns.

Micky half turns, pulling out another swab from one of the containers lining the shelves. They prod at the mass, clearing away some of the pus and spreading the thick, gravely paste out. “You been doing much outdoor training, Lieutenant?” they ask instead.

Ghost’s hands spasm around the bed. “What is it?”

“It’s dirt.”

Dirt.

The rusted shackle burns the gaping wounds that have been made of his glands, the chain trailing to a car window setting the pace for his death march; his broken and burned feet clumsy over the cracked ground, the edges of the raised, dry dirt glass in his bare soles, bloodied footprints swallowed by the starved sand-

‘You’re mine, English.’

Simon’s scream breaks into a frantic cry, wild, open-mouthed sobs tearing his lips, and he doesn’t know what fractures first; his knuckles or the thin plywood holding the weight of the world above his head. All he knows is when it shatters, when the dirt rushes in, filling his open mouth, his nose, eyes, ears, suffocating as it swallows him with overwhelming hunger-

‘You’re never getting me out from under your skin.’

There’s nothing, no up, no down, he can only hope he isn’t burying himself deeper, blindly flailing as he scrapes and claws and digs, and he only notices he’s made it into open air because his screams stop bouncing off the yawning earth-

“Give us a minute, Micky,” Price’s voice struggles to surface over the vengeful soil, the smug dirt that always knew it was only a matter of time before it buried him again because it left a piece of it with him-

Ghost’s ribs are too close to his lungs. There’s no room for them to swell with the bloat of rot, no give to bulge into before they split, decayed bags of decomposition and pus-soaked air steaming in cruel freedom. No, they’re trapped. Just like he is.

All these years thinking he escaped the grave.

He’s just been carrying it with him.

“Hey! Look at me!” He jolts with Price’s bark, his grip on his shoulder bruising. Ghost’s head wildly swigs up, mouth slack as he heaves for air just for it to reject his rancid lungs. He blocks him in, his other hand shooting up to fist the back of his head. “I need you with me, Ghost.”

He latches onto his wrist hard enough for his skin to blanch, the bones twisting under his desperate grip.

“It’s not over, not ‘til we say it is,” he swears and for a moment, a sliver of air manages to pass over the brood beds in his throat. Pine needles slip under his skin to fit alongside his vertebrae, the quiet strength shoring up the faltering line of his spine. “You’re right here with me and I’m gonna fuckin’ keep it that way, yeah?”

Rapid blinks force the sweat from Ghost’s eyes. He gulps, Price’s hand tightening in the back of his head, and jerkily nods.

“That’s it; we’ve done it before, haven’t we? We’ve gotten you back from the brink,” he pushes, ducking to keep his eyes, and this time, his nod comes easier. “This one’s easier; this one can be fixed.”

This isn’t trying to revive a dead man.

“We can get rid of it, we can get them out-”

His breath turns to ash in his mouth. “No.”

Price goes danger-still, his fresh pine and peppercorns he’s been pumping out over his panicked rot twisting; fouling. A wet forest fire blooms in its wake, smoke fuelled by too-sweet sap and sodden leaves; growing fast and thick, consuming all the air and leaving something suffocating in its place. “No?”

Ghost looks up through his lashes, the shake in his body turning into a deadly stillness. “They’re not takin’ ‘em.”

His eyes tense and he hangs his head, his chest rising in a deliberate breath. “Ghost-”

“They’re not- I’m not-” he heaves and suddenly thrashes, breaking Price’s hold on him, and throws himself away. “Get the fuck off me!”

“Jesus-fuck me-Christ,” he growls under his breath, getting to his feet. He claws a hand through his hair and jabs a finger at the closed door. “You hearin’ them? What those things are doin’ to you?”

“I’m not losin’ them,” he snarls, retreating until the safety of the walls butt up against his back; the whites of his eyes stinging.

“They’re killin’ you!” Price spits; enraged, desperate, pleading.

“Then fuckin’ let ‘em!”

Ghost’s panting breaths are all that break the heavy silence, the echo of his roar caught in the rot-wet burrows in his throat.

Pus-white saliva drips from his chin and he blinks hollowly when eggs don’t splatter in its wake; when they don’t pop, fetid and squirming, through the film of the swollen seedbeds in his cheeks to roll down his teeth to the floor. They sit heavy on his tongue, the infection that’s leeched out from his maggot-filled core; his festered, stinking soul cracked open, baring the depths of his filth, of his corruption, and Price-

Price grips the small stool, knuckles going tight as he bows over it, and for a heartbeat, Ghost thinks he’s about to pick it up and throw it. Plastic squeals, hollow legs forced too tight in on themselves. The wheels drag against the linoleum, trembling under the pressure pushing down on them, too heavy to roll, and a scoff catches on the root of his decaying tongue when they stay firmly on the floor. As if he would be enough to break the inexorable Captain Price; as if his filthy blood dripping from stolen teeth could do what a thousand others couldn’t.

Price rakes his hand over his beard, his mouth contorting from the force, fingers digging in and blanching the skin beneath.

It starts with a single huff. A bull-like snort, building into a low-throated chuckle, bitter and enraged, rolling off his tongue with the pointed vengeance of an avalanche; running through anything it hits and tearing it up at the roots, a cruel smile twisting his lips. He shakes his head, teeth dragging over his bottom lip, and when he looks up, the borders of his irises shiver infinitesimally; iceberg blue threatening to crack and flood his sclera and every instinct Ghost’s ever cultivated screams, ‘Run’.

“Everything you did to survive him… and you’re just gonna stand there and let ‘im kill you?”

Ghost stops breathing.

He pushes off the stool, smile still wide and wrong as he shakes his head and spins, turning his back on him, and walks to the little window; its frosted glass doing nothing to hide his already warped reflection. “You are a fuckin’ wonder, Simon.”

The flinch that wracks him comes from the ground up, the linoleum under his feet creaking and roiling as the fetid, abandoned corpse of Simon Riley shifts.

Ghost’s weight falls heavy on his heels, holding down the bucking grave before he can claw out of it; a threatening growl welling in his throat that even to his ears sounds more like a desperate plea for Price to stop.

“Gonna put yourself back in the dirt just to give ‘im the satisfaction?” he sneers anyway. “Eyes will have melted outta his skull by now, he won’t even recognise you. You gonna tell ‘im he succeeded in killing Simon Riley?”

Distant, weak light shimmers through glass- the table, the stool, the fire extinguisher, break it- the window’s too small to squeeze through- the walls, gip-rock, water stained, but hiding what- framework or brick- too much time wasted on finding out- ceiling tiles, thin, held down by nothing, easily broken through- he won’t make it up before he can be pulled back down-

Price stands, immutable and rooted as a redwood, between him and his only exit and the borders of his iris don’t melt so much as they explode.

Ghost lunges, claws first, infection dripping from bared fangs- but Price pivots, catching his weight and throwing him over the bed. He crashes into the equipment, smashing between his back and the wall. Plastic splinters, shrapnel embedding in his skin, and he crunches more under his fist as he shoves himself up.

Get out, get out, get out, get OUT-

He kicks the bed, the locked wheels screeching along the ground and ramming into Price’s knees, and dives over it for the door just for an arm to hook through his own. He jerks back as his other hand snatches his belt, wrenching him off his feet to slam him into the table; instruments flying off to scatter to the four corners of the room. The plywood breaks beneath them and they go sprawling, Price an immovable weight on his back, and Ghost chokes on a cry as his cheek strikes the floor-

A jaw bone sits abandoned, the two fangs he ripped from its companion waiting in his palm; a grave, open and yawning, behind him. Simon’s hand shakes around the pliers he found in a dead man’s kit, clenched tight around his fang for the second time, blood spilling into the sand where his tears had long since dried, the desert forever apathetic to both-

The pressure against the fangs- like his gums are splitting apart all over again-

“Enough! Enough, Ghost!” Price barks, his voice breaking. His arms tighten around him and his struggles shrink, dying into shivers and aborted sobbed breaths.

Blood pools on the linoleum under his tongue.

A cut sigh ghosts over his ruined nape and Price drops to notch his forehead under the base of his skull. “Enough.”

Ghost’s irises writhe, twisting blindly in on themselves like worms stolen from the dirt, struggling to rebuild their walls, and he squeezes his eyes shut.

His stumpy Omega fangs plink off shattered wood and nail-scrapped dirt as they’re swallowed by the black hole of Simon Riley’s grave, the faint sound a death knell ringing out in the desert silence.

“You pulled yourself out of the grave once,” Price whispers. “You don’t have to do it again. Let me dig you out this time, Simon.”

‘I’m sorry, Tommy.’

Arms curl around his ribs and Ghost hangs in them, limp. They haul him up onto unsteady feet, fighting his weight to lie flat. He doesn’t flinch as thumbs brush the sensitive skin under his eyes, staring ahead at nothing as they blend the sticky wet mess of his eyeblack and reaffix his mask; unnervingly gentle over the slack of his jaw.

Price cups the back of his head, the span of his arm blocking what little peripheral vision that hasn’t tunnelled, like putting blinders on a sight hound.

“Come on, son,” he urges lowly.

He doesn’t see anyone, doesn’t see the corners they take or the walls they pass; he’s empty, void, puppeteered by voiceless order. He only notices they’ve stopped when Price’s hand falls from his head; the sharp scrape of a key in a lock too loud after getting so deeply lost.

And Ghost numbly follows, instinct to mirror his Pack Alpha driving him forward into the room, and lines his boots up beside his, stopping at his side before the bed.

Price bends to unlock a storage trunk, the heavy lid clanging against the metal bed frame, and a deep rush of temperate forest wafts out; the scent quietly urging his shoulders down from around his ears. He can barely see inside it for the amount of fabric bunched inside but each piece is so thoroughly drenched in Price’s scent it’s like he’s stepped into the woods themselves; scented from all sides.

It looks like a tangled mess to him but Price reaches in and cleanly pulls out a fitted bedsheet, flicking it out and throwing it over the bed, flattening the edges as much as the bunched hem allows. Pillows follow, tucked inside the sheet’s deflated hem, and all Ghost can do is watch, lost.

“My dam was never much for nestin’,” Price announces from nowhere, weaving the ends of the pillow cases tightly together like it’s second nature. “Never much for bein’ a dam to begin with. I was as accidental as they come; dumped me on his sister the second ‘e could, but she wasn’t ready for a pup anymore than he was, so I bounced around to whatever relative ‘d take me. Ended up at my Great Nan’s a few times; right evil bastard of a woman. Never knew why she agreed to take me.”

The pillows get turned in on themselves, the sheet pulling taut in the centre of the bed, until they stand on their own in a sturdy wall, cases acting as mortar holding it all together, when it finally clicks.

An unsteady roar deafens his ears, the rise and fall of it matching the peak of trough of pain lacing through his jaw.

Price’s hand hovers over the trunk, blankets indistinguishable to Ghost’s eyes mentally weighed and discarded, before he selects a well-worn charcoal fleece.

“Her mind ‘d gone years ago; her Alpha left her with six pups headin’ into World War One, two still hangin’ from ‘er breast,” he says. He flares the blanket over the structure and an even deeper scent of acorns and freshly cracked chestnuts, such a rare and softened layer to Price’s scent, washes over him. He leans carefully over it to mould the inner well, his hand smoothing it out so it curves just so, and tucks the edges in under the outsides. “I’d wake up to ‘er cussin’ ‘im out, screechin’ and cursin’ him for steppin’ out on her like he could still hear ‘er. No Alphas in the family could leave their shoes inside ‘cause she’d rip ‘em up thinking he was tryin’ to come home.

“Only time she stopped her fuckin’ howlin’ was when she was in a nest.”

Ghost watches him fuss with the bowl of the most sound nest he’s ever seen, the inner wall of pillows not so much as shifting as he shores it up. A second layer of pillows is laid at the head of the nest, another blanket following to seal them in tight, just as dutifully smoothed out.

“Took off my shoes when I went to her funeral,” he adds lowly. “Didn’t feel right, otherwise.”

He takes a step back, casting a critical eye over the pristine nest, and gives a definitive nod.

“In you get.”

Ghost blinks once, feet rooted to the floor.

Price huffs, shaking his head, muttering something unheard under his breath, and kneels on the bed, throwing his other over the wall of the nest. It throws him to see his Captain like this, backed by such plush indulgence, as comfortable here as in a sniper’s perch. Second nature, shameless and instinctual; Ghost so easily brought into the fold like it’s nothing to offer him the same. Like it’s everything.

His hand curls behind his shoulder, his wrist just shy of the bare, scarred skin at his collar; the remnants of the mince meat made out of his glands. Blind obedience pulls him forward, following his guidance into the soft belly of the nest.

Ghost holds himself stiff, even as something old and wounded loses its cry as he’s enveloped in the welcome and safety of Alpha and Pack. His next breath comes shaky, his lungs filling with the scent of nature, and the liquid heat that has only just resettled within his iris rushes his sclera once more.

Price just watches him, a lighter warmth overtaking that protective rage only a Pack Alpha can express.

He curls his hand under his shirt, billowing it out, and when he doesn’t stop him, he pulls it off, tossing it into the corner of the room instead of weaving it into the nest and disrupting its careful scent balance. Freckles and darker moles scatter over his chest and shoulders like the lingering constellations of shotgun spread, nothing he hasn’t seen before but here; now...

“I can’t give you the real thing; no matter how much you deserve it,” he says, remorse and an almost grief colouring his tone, and Ghost’s numbness breaks long enough for confusion to take its place. It builds as he takes out the army standard knife from his bedside table, his fingers fitting around the handle like he’s coming home, worn smooth over years of service just like his own.

And Ghost’s breath stills as he takes the blade just above his nipple, not even hissing at the cut it leaves behind, blood quickly welling over the clean edges.

“Price…” he whispers like he’s been struck.

It slows in the thick of his hair, catching up with itself until it wells over and seeps through, picking up speed as it curves over the wide drum of his ribs.

‘Mantente alejado,’ raw, cracking; the first words spoken in days, and they break the air like a gunshot. The youngest, twenty if she’s a day, clutched to her breast, desperately sucking for any meagre drops she can produce, eyes clouded with ivory; weak, pained.

The others barely have the strength to cling to each other, slumped in the furthest corner of the cell, using bony elbows and shaking hands to prop up their breasts and cheeks. The croaks of their grateful purrs cut out, their dry throats no doubt in as much pain as Simon’s after days of broken moaning; days of screaming.

His lips burn, dried and cracked and dried again after he sucked what little blood he had left to spill down his parched throat. He can barely lift his head from the wall, hair matted down to his skin with days-old sweat and blood from writhing on the cement from a Heat unfulfilled, and everything in him aches to join them; his Omega screaming out to feel arms wrap around him, for skin on skin that won’t hurt.

For the liquid promise of Pack, no matter how temporary, to dull the pain.

Simon’s throat bobs. The eldest’s collapsed against the wall, her too-frail arms curled around the girl’s head like she can shield her from it all. No tears wet her glare.

They’re useless in this place.

‘Mantente alejado.’

A plea. An order. A punishment.

Her eyes narrow. ‘Tú nos hiciste esto.’

He grits his teeth, his hips and scuffed shoulders screaming. He forces his body to turn, his breath trapping in the corner of the two walls, and his Omega wails; begs to turn back, to offer throat and belly and breast, anything to be allowed in the circle of their arms. Simon wishes it would stop; save them both the pain. They won’t find any comfort here.

‘You did this to us.’

“This is all I can give you, Ghost,” Price rumbles, the sharp tang of blood blending with nature-sweet sap as he cups his pec and squeezes; a sluggish, vermillion line spilling over his fingers.

Ghost’s shaking. He can’t fight it; the tremble overtaking his skin as he watches Price’s offered blood flow freely down his chest. He can’t make it stop anymore than he can stop himself from collapsing, falling bodily into him and blindly nuzzling into his chest, hot blood smearing over his cheeks; a choked, guttural purr struggling to rise in his chest like a long suppressed scream. He wants it to stain, wants his skin and his scent branded with iron and conifer, never to be lost under the weight of decay.

Price holds strong under him, not so much as swaying under his frantic scenting. He reaches up to tug his mask above his nose and only at this express welcome does Ghost allow his mouth to close around his nipple, the cut cradled on his tongue as he holds him close, uncaring of the sting of old puss seeping into the wound.

Price lets out a heavy exhale, thick with a chest-rooted chuff; the sound curling around him like a physical weight. Something in his spine shifts with it, an old tension cementing his vertebrae loosening its grip, and he follows it down; melding into the soft, bracing line of Price’s body, until him and the nest at his back are all that keep him up.

His gums ache with each gentle suckle, the press of the fangs against Price’s chest as harsh as an impact. But he doesn’t pull away.

Price’s arm frames the back of his head; his bicep protecting his mangled scent glands and scruff, his hand splayed over the side of his face, hiding his bared skin from the air itself and urging him even closer.

Ghost swallows the sluggish mouthful of blood, pheromone-rich with conifer, an entire forest on his tongue; ancient trees strong in their protection, rooted so deep nothing but themselves could hope to fell them. And, as he rolls the last remnants on his tongue, pulling back just enough for his lips to brush his skin, room for him to run endlessly.

Hidden, but never lost.

“I can’t lose ‘em, Price,” Simon whispers against his chest, his shame almost lost in his blood-wet skin. “They’re all I got. The only proof…”

That I made it out.

That I’m alive and he’s not.

That I’m not still trapped in the dirt.

Price’s nose ghosts over his temple, the touch soft against his clammy skin as it drifts down, following the curve of his eye socket to the full of his cheek. It stops at the corner of his lips and that same putrid shame stops his breath from passing his rotten teeth.

He gently nudges the edge of his lips, his breath teasing where his own has stilled, and he feels the low croon call from the depths of his chest. He feels his lungs swell with it, his chest shaking under his cheek, and a broken, unpracticed whine answers. It latches onto the pockmarked lining of his throat, claws sinking in, desperate to go unheard…

But Price breathes it in with a hearty chuff; like the admittance is all he wanted.

His hand tangles in his, skin-warm blood shared on their fingers, and all he can do is trust as he curves it under his jaw, pressing his fingertips into his pulse point.

“You feel that?” he rumbles, gripping his hand tighter, willing him to believe in the slow, rhythmic thud under his skin. And Simon slowly meets his eyes, the borders of his irises hazy with Feral blue; soft with Alphan pride. “They’re not the only thing you kept. You’re alive, Simon.

“You’re alive.”

“Still think they some’ow managed to skip basic,” Ghost scoffs, tugging the zip of his jacket down before he’s even through the door. “Who the fuck makes it through without knowin’ which end of a rifle to point away from you?”

“Your pup did just fine without you,” Price coos behind him, shrugging off his own coat, and he bristles, shoving him back through the doorway.

“‘My pup’, fuck you; Myers ain’t my nothin’,” he grumbles over his snickers.

“And yet you knew who I meant,” he counters, that annoying knowing glint in his eye.

“Fuck you twice,” he shoots back maturely, and strips off his boots; the itch between his shoulder blades he gets after being off base easing just at the sight of Price’s nest.

The pull is magnetic and Ghost doesn’t fight it; bodily collapsing into the perfectly woven mess of pillows and sheets. Leaf litter and overturned earth meet him, his own scent given its place within the nest, but he snorts it away to smell past it, searching for cracked bark and pine needles, for the undercurrent of slow-moving sap that never fails to take the edge off. And below that, a deep scent lingers, rooted and grounded, just on the cusp of ripeness; fresh-pulled vegetables still clinging to soil, snapped open to take in their subtle sweetness. It’s soothing in its familiarity, the way he recognises it from the edges of Price’s own scent, rare but always encompassing, like a warm jumper only worn on the coldest nights.

With a deep sigh, he gives in to it; letting himself go boneless as his Omega surges to the forefront, loose chirrups falling from his lips as he grinds his cheek into the scent-drenched wall of the nest.

Price gets in beside him, the graceless climb rolling him closer. “How’d it go?”

“Waste o’ bloody time; barely had to look at ‘em,” Ghost sighs, twisting himself better on his back. “They’re not rejecting, no sign of infection, bone’s holdin’ strong. Got one more check scheduled in a month but she reckons it’s smooth sailin’ from ‘ere.”

And thank Christ for that; the less time he has to spend in a fuckin’ examination chair the better. Even with the burning overhead lights gone, replaced with pen lights and whatever down lights the exam room had to offer, he still had to fight not to bite every hand that came near him. He still doesn’t know how he made it through the removal. He wouldn’t have, plain and fuckin’ simple, if it hadn’t been for Price.

He was the one at his side, the breadth of his body blocking out the room and its equipment, his arm fit tight around his throat, forcing his head back so he was all he could see, and giving him something to cling to so he wasn’t alone with the needle slipping under his skin. It was his voice that followed him under and his voice alone that guided him back to the waking world, his mouth lighter and far too empty without the poisoned fangs crowding his teeth.

They were rotten down to the root, so fragile they barely held up long enough for an impression to cure before crumbling apart. Price kept him hidden while the implants were being sculpted, bullshitted some mission or another in the arse end of nowhere so he didn’t have to face anyone with the all too obvious lack of fangs protruding from his hidden lips.

It was his nest he curled up in like a dying mutt, sweating through the claws of infection; left with fever-fogged memories of pained whines and Price’s answering remorseful croons as he cleaned the holes they left behind, water carefully urged down his throat as he kept him alive despite his best efforts.

‘Look at that; swellin’s gone right down, just what we wanted,’ Price announces, dropping the cleaning swabs aside. His thumbs brush over his cheekbones, his head heavy and limp in his hands where he’d dropped into them like a pup, and he guides it down on the wall of the nest. Ghost lets out a cracking whine, shrinking back into the blankets the second he allows, the lingering threads of ache already fading under his thorough hands. ‘Done well, Ghost; shouldn’t be much longer now.’

His voice is warm and thick with pride, as if Ghost himself is in charge of his body’s healing. As if there isn’t dried blood flaking off the meat of Price’s hand from the last time he lost himself and bit back, familiar hands warping into cruel, grasping memories.

But it didn’t last long, never does. He doesn’t understand why there’s a difference, not with his mind still heavy with fevered infection, but it’s undeniable in how Price touches him, how there’s always a breath before the contact; not out of hesitation but pure askance, and for the first time in his life, Ghost genuinely believes if he said no, those same asking hands wouldn’t turn into fists.

And it was Price who did it all over again when he had to go under for the implants; holding him still as he fought the anaesthetic, his promises that he’d be there when he woke up the only thing that let him go down. And his chuff was the first thing he heard when he woke back up; the foreign-familiar fangs back where they belong.

Price shifts again, pushing up on his side, and Ghost halfheartedly hisses as it rocks him out of place. “You gonna show ‘em off? Let me see their hard work?”

He rolls his eyes, like he hasn’t expected this from the moment he set foot back on base. He folds up the hem of his mask, instinctively grinding back into the nest to drag the scent over his inert glands. A chuff falls from his tongue and he lets his mouth fall open. Price all but lunges for him, cupping his jaw and fitting his thumbs to the corners of his mouth to urge his lip higher over his fangs.

They felt too big for his mouth the first few weeks; the gaping, shameful void in his upper jaw so eclipsing that feeling enamel butt up against enamel again felt wrong. But now? They feel strong, solid down to their titanium core; rooted so deep, nothing could hope to tear them free.

“There they are,” Price purrs, creasing his eyes with the strength of his grin. “Look at you. Lookin’ strong, Ghost.”

Ghost matches him, feral grin pulling wide, feeling a bit like a mutt with his tongue hanging out. He even got to pick the colour, slightly yellowed to match the rest of his nicotine-stained teeth so they’d feel right at home. He snorts, running his tongue over his bottom lip.

“Keep ‘em open, soldier,” Price rumbles, a quiet order, but an order nonetheless. He pauses for a beat, but he lets his jaw fall slack again anyway, his upper lip rolling back over the thick curve of his fangs.

Price’s calloused thumb brushes over the corner of his lip, a rhythmic back and forth that makes it both easier and harder to hold the faux-snarl. Spit gathers at the back of his tongue, his open-mouthed swallow too loud in the sudden heavy silence. When Price leans down over his chest, eyes falling half-lidded, to lick the broad of his tongue over his fangs.

Ghost stills completely, his lip tingling where the tip of his tongue catches it. The nest seems to heat up beneath them, a flush chasing over his skin with a vengeance as Price hovers over him.

“Such a strong Alpha, Simon,” he murmurs into his fangs, and his breath stutters, a litany going up in the tentative re-inflation of his lungs.

Price pets over his cheek - once, twice - then pulls back. “C’mon, let’s get some sleep; those little bastards had me goin’ in circles.”

He stretches an arm over his head, grumbling as he feels around for the blanket, their normal settling back over them like it was never interrupted by an act of pure submission by his Pack Alpha. It should send ice down his spine, should rouse the maggots from their long sleep to burrow their way from under his skin.

Instead, Ghost pulls over the blanket Price can’t find, dumping it on his face for good measure just to make him snort, and kicks it out over them both. He rolls into Price’s bulk, sinking into his content rumble, the rise and fall of it matching the slow beat of life in his chest; a promised balm, like the distant hum of cleansing rain.