Chapter Text
Date/Time: August 17, 2016
Location: Himachal Pradesh, India
Soap
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The first thing I became aware of was the helicopter, its rotors hammering the thin mountain air into violent, uneven pulses above me. The sound dragged itself through the dark before anything else did, before pain, before voices, before I remembered my own name. It filled the hollow places in my skull and rattled down through the stretcher beneath me, each vibration finding some new torn thing inside my chest and worrying at it. For a while there was only that noise, the endless chop of blades, and the cold air moving over my face with the smell of pine, damp stone, aviation fuel, and blood.
I forced my eyes open because some stubborn part of me had been trained to do that, even when the wiser part knew it would hurt. The world came in sideways and blurred, grey sky smeared above dark mountain ridges, prayer flags snapping hard in the rotor wash, the spinning ghost of the Little Bird’s blades cutting across everything like a broken shutter. Price leaned over me with one hand pressed deep into the mess at my chest, his sleeves shoved to the elbow and his forearms slick red. Dirt streaked his face. Blood had dried at the corner of his mouth. His eyes were fixed on me with that hard, furious concentration I knew too well, the look he got when a problem had insulted him by refusing to be solved.
“Stay awake, Johnny,” he said, his voice rough from smoke and shouting and whatever else the last few hours had taken out of him. “You hear me? Stay with me.”
I tried to answer, but my body made a poor attempt of it. Air dragged into me wrong, caught somewhere it shouldn’t have caught, and turned into a cough before I could stop it. Heat flooded my throat. The sky flashed white around the edges. Price swore and pressed harder, and Nikolai’s voice came from near my shoulder, sharp with the kind of panic he was trying to pass off as irritation. “Do not cough. Very bad time for coughing, my friend. Choose another hobby.”
They lifted the stretcher, and every part of me understood the movement as violence. The wound in my chest opened into a hot, wet roar. Something deep inside shifted with a sensation so wrong my mind slid away from it rather than name it. Price’s hand stayed planted over the dressing as if he meant to hold my soul in by force. Nikolai took the other end of the stretcher, boots scraping over gravel, and the helicopter began to fall behind us as they carried me toward the safehouse.
The archway came into view above me, weathered stone and faded paint, its edges blurred by the shaking of the stretcher and the dark creeping in at the corners of my sight. For one second, as we passed beneath it, Himachal Pradesh vanished. Rain struck steel hard enough to sting through gloves. Red emergency light flooded a corridor that smelled of seawater, diesel, and cordite. The freighter groaned beneath our boots as if the ocean had already put its hands around the hull and begun to squeeze. I saw Price as he had been on my first proper mission under him, younger, broader in the shoulders, cigar clamped in the corner of his mouth while alarms screamed and the ship tried to die around us. Back then I had believed in him the way new soldiers believe in men who survive everything before them. Not in words, not even consciously, but in the way I moved when he told me to move, certain that if Captain Price was still on his feet then the world had not yet gone completely to hell.
The memory broke as the arch passed overhead and the mountain returned around me. Gravel became stone beneath the stretcher-bearers’ boots. The air cooled as we crossed into shadow. Somewhere nearby goats complained at the helicopter noise, and farther off men shouted to one another in voices I could not place, fast and urgent, their words running together into sound more than language. My head lolled, and I saw Price again above me, older now, bloodier, more human than the man on the freighter had ever seemed. He had survived too much to look immortal anymore. We all had.
“Nearly there,” he muttered, though I could not tell whether he meant it for me, Nikolai, or himself.
The safehouse swallowed us in pieces: first a doorway, then a corridor, then the smell of wet plaster, kerosene lamps, old wood, and too many men packed into narrow halls. Loyalists moved around us in a blur of boots and rifles, clearing space, calling ahead for a doctor, for lights, for bandages, for anything that might mean I was not going to bleed out on their floor. The ceiling drifted above me in uneven strips. Shadows crawled over cracked plaster. Price kept pressure on the wound until his shoulders bunched with the strain, and when fresh blood seeped warm under the dressing, I felt his hand tighten as though anger alone might clot it.
“Still bleeding?” Nikolai asked.
“Aye,” Price said, and the single word carried enough weight to tell me the truth.
The second memory came with the smell of smoke in the hallway. Bridge concrete under my back. Fire turning the world orange. Gaz on the ground. Griggs gone still. Zakhaev’s men moving toward us with their rifles raised while the Hind circled overhead like a carrion bird. Price lay not far from me, broken and bleeding but still somehow present, still somehow commanding the shape of the moment even when he could barely move. Then the pistol slid across the ground, the old M1911 spinning once through blood and grit before stopping against my hand. I remembered the weight of it as clearly as I remembered my own heartbeat. I remembered Zakhaev turning. I remembered pulling the trigger, again and again, until the slide locked empty and the man who had made the world worse finally fell.
I came back with a jolt as they took a corner too sharply. Pain ripped through me, and I must have made some sound because Price looked down at once. His mouth moved, but another noise crashed over him before I caught the words. Water. Rain. The roar of the waterfall in Afghanistan. The Zodiac pitching under us while Price fired at Shepherd’s Pave Low, the river opening ahead, the whole world dropping out from beneath the boat. I remembered the knife in my chest after that, remembered Shepherd standing over me with that calm, righteous bastard’s face, like betrayal was something holy if you wrapped it in enough flags. I remembered Price screaming behind him. I remembered my own hand closing around the handle. Pulling it free had been less like pain than like tearing myself out of my own body. Throwing it had been simpler. Cleaner. One last act with everything narrowed down to distance, aim, and hatred.
Then the present slammed back in because someone hit the stretcher hard enough to make my vision spark. For a moment I thought we had clipped a doorway, but the weight stayed. It settled over my chest, not as a careful medic’s hand but as a body braced across mine, blunt and practical and heavy enough to force the air out of me. My eyes dragged open, and Badger came into focus above the blood-soaked dressing. She was crouched over me while we moved, staring at me like I was the bird she’d been sent to retrieve. Mud caked the lower half of her trousers. Blood marked one sleeve. A shallow cut ran along her jaw where something had caught her earlier and failed to matter. She did not look afraid. She did not look concerned. She looked at the blood leaking between Price’s fingers the way she looked at a door, a weapon, a man shifting his weight before a fight: as information.
For several seconds, she did nothing. That was what cut through the fog most clearly. Soap MacTavish was dying under her hands, or near enough to it, and Badger only watched because she did not care whether he lived or died. I had known that about her for years, in one form or another, but knowing a thing and being the body on the stretcher are different lessons.
“Badger,” Price barked, and her eyes snapped to him at once.
He looked at her over the bloody ruin of my chest, jaw tight, voice low and hard enough to cut through the corridor. “He does not die here.”
“Aye,” she said.
That was all it took. No plea, no explanation, no claim that I mattered, no desperate attempt to make her understand the shape of his fear. Price gave the rule, and she obeyed the rule. She shoved both hands down over the dressing the moment he shifted, taking the pressure from him with all the crude certainty of someone who had learned medicine at kitchen tables and in barns where the choices were stitch, bind, burn clean, or bury. The pain turned enormous. It drove what little breath I had left out of me and replaced it with a bright, airless dark that swallowed half the corridor before spitting me back into it.
Badger did not apologize. She did not soften her grip or check whether she had hurt me. Her hands stayed locked over the wound, fingers spread wide, weight angled through her shoulders as the stretcher lurched beneath her. Price used his freed hand to shove a man aside and force open the next door. Nikolai cursed in Russian when the stretcher clipped the frame. Somewhere ahead, someone shouted that the doctor was coming. Badger looked neither at the door nor at the men around us. Her attention had narrowed to the blood under her palms and the rise and fall of my chest. Not concern. Measurement. If the dressing shifted, she shifted with it. If my body tried to curl around the pain, her knee pinned the canvas harder and her hands held the wound shut like she had been told to keep a gate closed against wolves.
I thought, distantly and with a strange, floating clarity, that this was probably as close to mercy as anything in Beck’s house had ever been. Not soft. Not comforting. Not kind in any way that would make sense outside blood and dirt. Just the brutal refusal to let a body come apart before its work was done. She had not been made into a medic. She had been made around the old logic of cheap whisky, sewing thread, fire-cleaned needles, and hand-sharpened steel. Hold them down. Stop the bleeding. Put the pieces back where they looked like they belonged. If they lived, they lived. If they didn’t, you learned what failed and did it better next time.
The room they carried me into was brighter than the hall, and the light hurt more than it should have. Lanterns burned on hooks along the walls. A long wooden table had been cleared in a hurry, leaving scratches and old stains exposed under the glare. Medical supplies sat in uneven piles that looked both too few and too far away. A rusted oxygen tank leaned against one wall beside a crate of bottled fluids, and the whole place smelled sharply of antiseptic trying and failing to defeat damp stone.
The doctor met us halfway across the room. He was thin, grey-bearded, sleeves already rolled, spectacles pushed high on his nose, and he had the permanently irritated expression of a man who had been dragged away from sleep by other people’s catastrophes often enough to stop being surprised by them. “What happened?”
“Knife wound,” Price said.
“And blood loss,” Nikolai added, already helping lower the stretcher beside the table. “A great deal of blood loss.”
The doctor looked at the soaked dressing under Badger’s hands and then at Price. “Move him onto the table. Carefully.”
Carefully turned out to mean the sort of agony that made careful a meaningless word. Price took my shoulders, Nikolai and one of the Loyalists took my legs, and Badger kept both hands clamped over the wound while they shifted me from canvas to wood. My body tried to arch the moment my back hit the table. She leaned in harder without being told, pinning the blood where it wanted out. The doctor reached for the dressing, but Badger did not move.
“Let him work,” Price said.
Only then did she lift her hands.
The doctor peeled back the dressing. I could not see his face clearly anymore, but I heard the breath he took through his teeth. It was not a dramatic sound. That made it worse. It was the sound of a professional recognizing a bad thing without needing to announce that it was bad.
“This is bad,” he said anyway.
“No shit,” Price growled.
After that, the room became hands and instructions. The doctor cut away what remained of my shirt and told someone to bring more light. Nikolai translated half an order for a Loyalist who had already guessed the meaning from the doctor’s gesture. Price stayed close enough that every time my vision cleared, some part of him was there: a sleeve, a shoulder, the hard line of his jaw, his bloody hand braced against the table. The doctor spoke of the wound’s depth, of breathing, of getting pressure back where it belonged, and none of it arranged itself into sense inside my head. I knew only that when he touched the wound, the pain came back all at once. White-hot and blinding. My back lifted off the table before I realized I was moving.
Badger hit me a second later.
Not hard. Just fast.
One knee landed beside my ribs on the narrow edge of the table while the other came down across my hips. Her weight settled over me immediately, turning movement into work. By the time my body finished trying to twist away from the doctor, she’d already adjusted, one forearm pinning my shoulder while the other hand caught my wrist before it could reach the wound.
I tried again.
She shifted with the movement instead of fighting it, riding it until it collapsed under its own weight. Every attempt to sit up gave her something to work against. Every attempt to pull free just pinned me more thoroughly.
“He needs to stop moving,” the doctor snapped.
“Trying,” Nikolai said.
Badger leaned more of her weight onto my shoulder. Not enough to hurt. Enough to make the effort pointless.
“Fuirich sìos.”
It wasn’t comfort. It wasn’t encouragement. It was the same tone she’d use telling somebody to move a crate or open a door. A correction. Nothing more.
I stared past her toward the ceiling and tried to obey.
The pain began to change after a while. That frightened me more than anything. It stopped being a thing with edges and became distance instead. The lanterns seemed farther away. Price’s voice stretched strangely when he said my name. The doctor was still working, hands moving quickly, sleeves darkened at the cuffs. Nikolai hovered somewhere near my feet, muttering curses and prayers with the same cadence. Badger had one hand on my wrist and one forearm pressed across my shoulder now, holding me where the doctor had told her to hold me, her expression empty of everything except the task Price had given her.
“Soap,” Price said.
I turned my head because he had used that voice, the one that still reached me through blood loss, gunfire, and years of habit. His face swam above me, familiar and wrong, too pale under the grime. I wanted to tell him I was awake. I wanted to tell him I remembered the freighter, the bridge, the pistol, the river. I wanted to tell him that if this was the end, it had been a bloody stupid way to get here after surviving everything else.
What came out was nothing.
“Stay with me, son,” he said, quieter now.
I tried. Christ, I tried. I held onto his voice the way I had once held onto the ramp of a helicopter over the Bering Strait, fingers slipping, body too heavy, the sea opening below. But the room kept tilting away. The ceiling beams blurred into the rotor blades from outside. The lantern light became muzzle flash. The doctor’s hands became Shepherd’s knife, became Price’s pistol, became my own blood spreading warm beneath me on foreign ground.
Then Nikolai’s voice cut through the room, stripped of humor at last. “We are losing him.”
The words moved everyone at once. The doctor shouted for the machine. Someone dragged equipment across the floor hard enough that metal screamed against stone. Price did not move away until the doctor forced space between us, and even then his hand stayed on my shoulder, gripping tight as if I might be pulled back by pressure alone. Badger released me only when she had to, stepping back into the edge of the lantern light with blood on both hands and no expression on her face. Her eyes stayed fixed on me, not because she cared whether I lived, but because Price had told her the rule and the rule had not yet been satisfied.
The machine began to whine, high and sharp and ugly. The doctor rubbed the paddles together. Nikolai said something about charging. Price’s hand tightened once, hard enough to hurt through everything else, and I was grateful for the pain because it meant some part of me was still close enough to feel him.
“Three,” Nikolai said.
The room blurred.
“Two.”
The helicopter faded.
“One.”
For a moment there was only Price’s hand on my shoulder, Badger’s bloodied silhouette at the edge of the light, and the old, stubborn instinct that had dragged me through every impossible thing before this.
“Clear.”
The world went white.