Chapter Text
Johnny was a c-section. His mother hadn’t been particularly excited to have him naturally or otherwise, mostly just wanting him out, but she’d always liked to tell him how right when the time came for him to leave he got cold feet and tucked himself away, having to be forcibly torn from his mother’s womb. When she asked him why he’d have to go and be born so stubborn, he’d always tell her it came naturally — he was born wanting to protect her, and it wasn’t his fault he hadn’t wanted to leave her the easy way.
“Mo laochain,” she’d say, and her eyes would roll in her head, equally fond and chiding — because the story was usually reserved for when he was being particularly stubborn. “Now go wash up. Dinners ready.”
One time she’d taken his bare hand, fingers fat and short, a small scrape at the base of his palm where he’d fallen and scraped it trying to play with a stick the other day, into her own. She’d lifted his wrist into the air and placed it at the base of her abdomen, which had always been round and full and marked up by little white stretch marks. He’d felt the scar from the procedure that had removed him. Thick and bumpy and a pale pink.
His hands are weathered and tanned. The fingertips are hard with callouses. His fingers themselves are still rather short, though they’ve lost much of the baby fat that his mother had always taken as a sign of a good diet when he was a boy. Not many regard Johnny as a smart man. His mouth is open and free, and his hands seem better suited for weaponry than they are pen and pencil. And yet, his fingers are covered in scars that tell a tale of time spent working diligently on things of his own creation. Experimenting with weapons that had drawn his blood, or slicing his palm open while attempting to sharpen a pencil with a pocket knife, or working so late he’d slipped up and burnt his hands on the machinery he’d been using.
Sometimes when he was a boy he’d shine a flashlight under his finger and wonder why he could see the underside of his nail illuminated. He raises his left hand into the light and points up into the light above him, looking at the bare pink nail bed. It’s haloed in the dim, flickering light. Sunlight pours from the ceiling above him and he feels the warmth, coursing like fire down his finger and into his palm and into his arm. His pinky finger is bent awkwardly, a lump forming where it crooks to the side.
There is a body beside his head and a voice to match it. Soap feels a hand wrap around his wrist and gently pull it back down to rest on the bed. They are speaking, though his ears swim like he’s been underwater too long and everything above has gone fuzzy. He thinks he recognizes what they’re saying, or their voice, or their tone, but it’s all so hard to differentiate from the static in his head.
“John,” they call him, and he nods, responding to the use of his name. They ask him how he feels. He nods again, and when his mouth opens, a soft grunt escapes it, tongue heavy and thick.
The ceiling is blue with sky, the clouds crowding his head. He wishes they’d flutter to the north, cover the sun above him and give him reprieve from its nauseating glow. He lifts his hand again, trying to block the sun, and feels it wrapped in that same hand from before. Thick. Broad. Calloused.
He says the first name that comes to him. Hears a chuckle. Tries again, but louder. “Simon.” Moving his jaw makes his whole body ache. He groans, but his throat is so dry that it cuts off, turning into a cough, or as much of one that he can muster.
The denial of his whisper comes not with words but with an absence of. So he once more tries again, head tilting to the side in an attempt to figure out who it is that sits beside him. The silence is disquieting, filling his mind and accompanying the cotton. He speaks the names he knows and hopes he falls on one that makes the face in front of him right. One-two-three, different people he knows, knowing that whoever is next to him has to be one.
And when there’s an answer, he sees Captain Price sitting beside him, and he smiles, wincing when it tears at his skin. His face splits open, blood splashing messily onto the ground as he vomits it up. Johnny watches from his spot hanging off the bed and realizes he’s puked, the nausea in his gut overwhelming him. Instead of blood hanging from his mouth there is stringy bile and chunks of partially digested food.
The beer slips from his beaten lips and he stands, feeling the world sway as the bartender asks him to leave. He wonders what his mother would think now, remembering how he’d been removed to protect her, and wondering if he’s capable of protecting anyone now. The bartender warps as the bottle drops out of his hand and crashes to the floor.
He’s asked, in no uncertain terms, who he thinks he’s protecting. And it’s such a silly question for Price to be asking, for the very man who had hired him to be wondering who he’s fighting for. It’s an easy question to answer, and he does, and the sun beats him like a belt, and scores his eyes as it scores his back, and Price nods.
John protects Simon. He protects Kyle. He protects the man sitting in front of him, Price, the John to match him, the two of them bound by name and bound by something stronger than blood ties and family lines, he thinks. He protects his sisters and his mother and he protects his country and-
None of that is important, he is reminded— because only one of them matters contextually. The man he has failed. And Johnny frightens himself with his lack of memory, as he drags the back of his scarred, too-thick fingers against his lips, wiping away beer as it trickles down his chin. And he tries to ask, he really, truly tries, desperately trying to remember who it is he’s gotten hurt. This time.
This time echoes the man who reminds him, echoes Price, though Johnny is sure he never said it out loud. Because this is John-Soap-Johnny’s birthright, to fail a lineage of men that were his and yet never belonged. His fingers itch for more beer but when he reaches to find his discarded bottle he finds a puddle of vomit on the tiles below his feet and thinks of his father.
And if anyone were to know who he has failed, it is his father. His father who created him to protect his mother, to guard her against his blows, and to save her when he became the villain. And he looks up at his father, now, looks up at Price, and sees the two swim behind a thin film of light, barely concealing them both, leaving them miles and yet inches from his hands when he reaches out.
His hands are clutched by contemptive hands, like a bird hanging from the jaws of a snake. Price squeezes his fingers together until his pinky clicks, and that empty point of light, that halo resurrecting his pointer finger from amongst the rest, begins to sting. There is a bird singing, the tune fraught with the jagged ripping of teeth, though the bird does not stop when its throat has been torn from limb to limb.
Price asks him, almost gently, if he still believes he deserves to touch him, to be held, to be contacted in any way that breaks impact. He doesn’t understand. The bird shrieks, with its esophagus slipping between messy fingers, and his fingers are slipping too, as they instinctively try to pull away from the angry tightness that is Price’s kind hands.
A thousand birds and a thousand beaks. Gunshots ring, and his finger breaks, his whole damn hand does, falling to dizzying shards as it impacts the vomit soupy below him. But then Johnny is on the ground, and he’s looking up, his hand wet where it lies in his vicious sick.
You are the reason, says the man who is Price, standing above him. His foot falls onto Soap’s hand with a nauseating crack as his finger breaks off where it has only just reconnected with his hand. The bird’s shriek rises in pitch, until his ears are bleeding, dripping down to join the sick on the ground, and it’s only when drool and blood slips down his chin does Soap realize that the bird is him. I am the cost.
If he is Cain; he is Abel. His mother begs for protection as his fingers dig out the scar in her stomach. If he is God; he made Hell.
The cell that they designate for his use is more cramped than the last one despite lacking another resident to shrink it. It is four square walls, stained and dark concrete that speaks to the past residents and what they must have done here to bide their time. There is one lonely drain in the middle, and all the flooring around it slopes towards it lazily, black piss and grease stains cloying at its edges. There is a cot with a single blanket, not enough to keep the cold out, a toilet, and a sink. There’s a window, which he supposes is meant to be an upgrade from the last place he’d been housed.
It feels hollow, though. With the uncertainty of Johnny’s fate ringing through and echoing between the meager, claustrophobic corners of his room. They undo his bindings and he does not fight. They shove him into the room with a pile of clothing, and they shut the door, and Simon is left alone.
He turns, nearly slipping along the sloped edge of the floor. It’s slightly damp, and his shoes have been worn before, soles nearly flat. The door is far simpler than the one they’d been imprisoned behind at the warehouse in the snow. It’s a large metal door, one typical for prison use, with a small window in the upper middle and a slot at the bottom that remains permanently open for food and deliveries.
Simon’s hands shake, as he clutches the clothes between them. He passes his thumb over the pocket of the pants they provided. The stitching is torn. He presses down just enough to feel his fingers beneath the layers.
Later, when he is dressed and his clothes have been folded neatly at the edge of his bed, Simon receives a knock on his door in the form of the banging of a baton. The voice that arrives subsequently is jeering in perfect Russian, too quick for Ghost to translate. “Ty prosnulsya, soldat?”
He doesn’t need to think to know what that last word means, though. Ghost is still a soldier here, but he can’t help but wonder whether he is a prisoner of war or property of the state. He stands from his bed as the door unlocks, opening with a noisy creak. The man that steps in is essentially identical to all of the other soldiers he’s had the pleasure of meeting so far. Same buzzed-down hair, same uniform, same scowl.
“The Brit,” says the soldier, crossing his arms. Ghost looks him up and down, unimpressed, and earns a nasty sneer when his eyes are greeted by the other’s face once again. “I will give you pass, considering you have not been here long. But when I ask for you, you answer. Da?”
“Da.”
While his and Johnny’s initial schedule had been intentionally disorienting, this prison, Ghost immediately notes, thrives off of monotony. The guard explains as they walk, speaking once in Russian and then once in English, though it’s clear he expects Ghost to start memorizing the former.
Ghost wakes up in the morning to the sound of an alarm at 5 am sharp. He’d slept poorly, but he’d slept, knowing the conservation of his strength is far more important than dwelling on Soap — a factor in his imprisonment that he has no current control over. Each prisoner is made to shuffle outside of their cell and stand waiting for inspection, both of their quarters and of their person. Each prisoner is fastened with metal cuffs around their ankles, giving them about a foot of leeway. Each block is led out of their section one by one and brought down to the canteen. It’s a spacious place, though it still feels cramped, with windowless concrete closing in on every one of them.
He notices quickly what defines this place as different from other labor camps. He’s ignored. Not a single man in this place speaks to him or to each other. There are many of all different ethnicities, ages, sizes, build. And yet each of them remains in their spot, quickly and efficiently eating their way through their small rationed breakfast and then joining their cell block’s guards.
Ghost carries his body on proud steps. They appear outwardly perfect, heel-to-toe, over and over, boots barely clipping the floor. He is led to the end of the line of others in his cell block, all waiting silently and facing directly ahead.
The sky is grey. The sun has yet to finish arriving, and so grey is a blue one, clouds swirling ahead. A storm seems to be on the horizon, and Ghost cannot tell from the temperature whether it’s more likely to rain or to snow. Between several of the compound buildings, there is an overgrown concrete track, a circle with old, incredibly faded lines clearly meant to indicate where runnings would run.
They are led to the track without a word. The track is lined in men with guns, spaced out by a few yards each, the guns at a point of rest, confident that they will not be challenged. The prisoners don’t ask questions and are not instructed. They merely find the starting edge of the track and line themselves up, all in rows, instinctively scurrying towards suitable spots near the back or the front or whatever is their preference.
Ghost ends up in the middle. A neutral place, a new prisoner, with sandy brown-blonde hair and thin scars leaving him permanently grimacing at his surroundings. He squints against the violently bright headlights above them as they flick on with massive clunks, lighting up the sky and the world and his every sense. They buzz, and Ghost finds himself incapable of ignoring them. Like flies, magnetized to something earthy and decaying, they snarl behind the sounds of howling wind.
The soldiers come forward once again. One by one, the cuffs on their legs are undone and then brought away, hung on the metal fence that surrounds them, like strange decorations hanging from hole-filled walls.
They are not instructed to run, but the expectation is clear as the first line of men begins at a jog. Their feet hit the ground in near-perfect succession, a parade, a marching band professing death. One by one, rows begin to run, and they split off as their speeds increase or decrease accordingly. It’s a few seconds before Simon himself is prompted to run, and his muscles tighten in anticipation.
One step, then two, then three. He starts to run in perfect military form, staying linear to the men in front of him. Some of the others step out of line, not having the same sort of training as him. Others seem as if they know, but are too tired to act accordingly.
It’s easy to lose himself in the rhythm of his running now that he’s started. Ghost, Simon, whoever and whatever he is, both together and separate — he’s always felt more solid when he’s drifting, mind empty, running drills or exercising or allowed to simply watch while one of the other 141 shouts at recruits. When he has no duties at all and can merely do what he’s good at- being silent and strong.
The rain finally approaches. He hears it tentatively pushing at their backs, at first. Waiting to really hit, a few drops speckling the far left edges of the empty track. The clouds are dark, rolling over each other in their haste to attack. When the first few drops of rain hit him, he doesn’t notice. So lost in the running, in the monotony, the ability to ignore the trauma of the past few days. And of course — Simon doesn’t think of it as trauma, or at the very least, as his own.
Then the rain picks up. It’s so cold that he’s surprised it isn’t snow. The speed at which it begins to fall is aggressive, and the pavement below him quickly turns black. He continues to run.
On the first day that the world is right again, he wakes up, and at first, he thinks he is home. He can smell slightly burnt coffee and he can see the sun rising outside the window. He can hear the telltale singing of birds, mourning doves and trains crossing tracks, a symphony composed out of the daylight. When Soap raises a hand to block out the light, he feels something standing out.
When he opens his eyes, it’s too dark concrete above him, a light still and dust-covered where it hangs. There is no sunlight. The buzzing of machinery somewhere else superimposes itself over those mournful calls of doves, the clanking of metal the crossing of trains across the Scottish countryside. His hand is wrapped in dingy beige bandages, a makeshift splint keeping his pinky finger stuck to his ring.
Simon isn’t there. Pain rolls through his stomach, his head, his lips, his hand. Everything pulses dully. When his face twists into a grimace, though, it tugs at the jagged cavern cut through the left side of his face. At least it’s stitched up.
There is an open slot in the base of the cell door across from his bed. The sound of footsteps approaches and then ends in a scuffling as something is slid inside. Metal scrapes against the concrete ground, the food tray clattering a little when it’s almost upended by the force of its movement.
“Tha’ fer me?”
It hurts to talk. He falters on that, and ends with a slight cough. Speaking was a bad idea — but it had felt victorious, had felt like some small triumph over the clear effort to get him to shut the fuck up. But Soap is given no response. He grumbles, tugging his aching body off of the bed and gripping his ribs in his uninjured hand.
Each step sends pain through his upper body. It throbs, seeming to do so into his mouth, the palate where it had been knicked with the knife, the sore spot on his gums where it had cut. His head pounds too, but he makes no indication, settling stiffly on the ground in front of the tray.
A fork. A spoon. A bowl of sludgy oats, some of it having slipped over the side in the forceful delivery of the tray. Three cardboard crackers. A cup of peaches, already cracked open. A small off-orange pill. b 974. Dextroamphetamine.
Contrary to popular belief, Soap isn’t an idiot. This extends to his knowledge of explosives and also sensitive military information. He’s well trained, even if he never did pass his courses on resisting torture and interrogation with flying colors. He knows what dextroamphetamine is, and how it came to be used, and who discovered its uses first.
So when he looks up at the door and grins, the pain is worth it. The sharp tenderness of his cheek is worth it when accompanied by the laugh he lets out, scratchy, throat painfully unused, making him wonder how long he’s been out. “Don’ know what yer playin’ at,” he remarks, gesturing at the pill as if anyone other than him is watching, “But I’m not stupid enough to take that.”
There’s silence. No one responds or acknowledges John, and he can’t see any shadows through the slot below the door, making him wonder if he’s only talking to himself. Doubtful. He lifts the pill, inspecting it further. Its surface is rough, the indentation of the letters an interesting texture beneath his fingers. He lifts it until it’s nearly an inch from his face.
Then he drops it into the cup of watery peaches on the plate with a wet plop. He chuckles to himself, once, then massages his cheek where it aches. He reaches out and takes the container of peaches, scooting forward on the ground and shoving it back out of the slot with so much force that it upends and the wet mush goes all across the floor.
The door swings open and nearly clips Johnny in the face. He leaps backward, landing on his haunches and on one hand. He snarls up at the figure standing above him, stomping in with full black tactical gear and a baton. He dodges a blow, rolling, wincing as he lands on his injured hand. If he can just go fast enough, he might—
Before he can think too much, Soap is running out of the room. He slips on the peaches, but manages to continue, bare feet gripping the ground despite now being slightly wet. He runs, heedless of where he is or who pursues him. It doesn’t matter. All that does is the fact that he is now out of the open door and running, leaving the pill behind.
And then something pinches his lower back, and something sharp runs through his every nerve, and he screams.
Or he tries his best to, back arching, throat gurgling on phlegm. He collapses onto his knees, and then onto his side, limbs twitching violently, beating the ground without his input. Electricity courses through him, burning twin holes through his eyes, his soles, his hands, stigmata where his flesh burns like the tip of cigarettes.
Something grips the bottom of his jaw and pulls it open with so much force he can feel each and every stitch in his cheek snap. John shouts in anguish, no longer hindered by electricity. There’s a large body straddling him, forcing him on his back, arms pinned to his sides, and legs too weak and twitching to fight back. His nose crashes into the ground as his mouth is forced open.
They don’t say anything to him. They do not give him orders and they do not degrade him and they do not tell him what to do. They merely force a small orange pill into his mouth and then cover his lips and nose, forcing him to swallow or choke.
He bucks violently against the grip. He tries to open his mouth, to bite the hand, the gloved fingers, to tear at fabric and skin. John fights even through the immense pain running down his cheek, the blood sliding down his face and matting into his hair. It’s too long, now. Too even. They haven’t cut it down again. It’s a few inches longer.
Involuntarily he swallows as blood floods his mouth and throat. The pill goes down. He gags and the soldier with a hand on his mouth places his other hand on his throat, forcing it to clamp down on the pill. Soap tries to breath, desperately panting through mouthfuls of blood and foamy spit, nose nudging at the palm over his face. He can’t, though, and everything is fading, growing increasingly emptier until he can hardly even see the haloed soldier sitting on top of him, an Angel of Death, come to pin him down by needles in his fingers, a bird broken against a shadowbox and displayed for his crimes—
They haul him up by his armpits. His legs won’t cooperate, dragging behind him, smearing the trail of blood that his cheek empties onto the ground. He can breathe now, and does so violently, near-heaving onto the ground as his vision swims in and out, in and out, like the hypnotic swaying of a boat.
One of the most noticeable things about the prison complex is how little anyone speaks to one another. Ghost learns quickly that his voice is not valued, and so he doesn’t use it. If there is no use for his tongue — whether to fight or to comply — then he’ll lapse into the familiar and remain silent.
He’s never been the most talkative. Even as a child. His mother told him he was born without air in his lungs — he didn’t howl or scream, didn’t babble much, either. He cried, though, silently and without fanfare. He’d been born with a full head of silver-blond hair and bright blue eyes that have both since faded.
There is no expectation to speak in this place, and that might’ve comforted him, had it not been for every other circumstance of his stay there. And besides— the quiet isn’t comforting when there’s no one familiar there to fill it.
Each cellblock is designated a name. Each prisoner, a number. Ghost becomes фазан триста сорок девять. Fasant, trista sorok devyat'. Pheasant, number 349. The European. The soldier. Each cellblock is then designated an area of tasking in the massive prison. There are men who are cooks and janitors and there are men who are trained to assemble machinery and there are even some men who are in charge of running their own cell block around, not unlike the guards themselves. Every man in each building appears to be a prisoner of some sort, and some appear to relish in the minute amounts of power they are gifted.
Pheasant is delegated to the mining tasking group.
A few clicks Northwest of the compound is a large open-pit mining site. It stretches nearly four kilometers, a gaping wound in the heart of the land, teeth of coal and iron and gold. The Soviets started the race to the earth’s crust, as far as Ghost can remember. He can imagine himself scrolling through articles about it, mildly disinterested, while waiting around for something else to do with his time between missions. The Kola Superdeep Borehole, a wailing portal to Hell with barely enough room to throw a toddler down. It had never scared him much.
Mirny, though. Mirny stuck with him. It had been the second largest manmade hole in the earth — only followed by the Russian Borehole itself. While the borehole seems more ominous at first glance, it’s Mirny that one could truly get stuck in. It’s Mirny that you can fall into the cavernous depths of, rows upon rows of abandoned steps into the depths of the earth. It isn’t boreholes or the depths of the Earth that scared or will ever scare Simon. The idea of such an unfathomably large mining pit that planes can’t fly over it, though, is a little bit eerie, and he isn’t afraid to admit that.
Their mining hole isn’t nearly as large as Mirny. The land around it is flat and empty, barren ground stripped of all nutrients like the earth stripped of ore. There’s a separate, smaller compound here, presumably for the overseers of the project. Each day Pheasant and several other cellblocks are driven en masse to the site of the pit, inappropriately named урна, or The Urn.
In reality it is brutally, horribly cold. As they descend, Simon begins to realize that Hell is not hot. Hell does not burn or flame or destroy. Hell is a cold, unending place, frozen in time and in temperature. It freezes sweat drops before they can clog his pores and it rips through his skin until his hands bleed against axes and hammers.
But upon his first day, he does not know this yet. Each prisoner is provided a large, worn coat, a pair of thick gloves and socks, a fur-lined hat, and thermally insulated pants. Pheasant is led to the showers and forced to strip, cleaning themselves quickly and methodically, none of the typical friendly (or otherwise) banter Ghost is used to overhearing in military locker rooms. Their jumpsuits are searched while they clean themselves, and returned once satisfyingly empty of contraband.
Freezing water pounds against his back. Ghost watches, out of the corner of his eye, as a scrawny older man is tugged away by the back of his neck and thrown naked against one of the tiled walls. The guard above him is holding a jumpsuit in one hand and a makeshift shiv, presumably the older man’s, in the other. He shouts, ranting and raving as the older man sobs, tears cascading down his face. The soldier looks up and barks an order to the other soldiers lining the walls.
The tiles are slimy and cold. They are off-white, grey and stained with piss and blood and shit. They are not given any soap. Suddenly, all of the showers switch off, and Ghost twitches in confusion before he realizes the goal. All the other prisoners stand there, entirely nude or in a state of half-dress, while the shower on the wall above the older man turns on.
With the rest of the showers off, all of the heated water is concentrated at that one spot. Steam rises and rolls and Simon can almost imagine he can feel it, as the older man, that singular, fool of a prisoner, begins to scream and shriek. Skin blisters and pops and blisters again. White fat melts and dribbles down the man’s sides. He vomits in fear and pain, and it, just like the man, is burnt alive.
They do not finish their showers that day. By the time Simon is dressed and ready to leave the room, the man still isn’t quite dead.
He can’t sleep.
Of course, Soap isn’t stupid enough to not understand why. The last time he’d closed his eyes he’d awoken with his cheek re-stitched. There’s something filling his mouth and expanding outward to surround the rest of his lower jaw. A muzzle with a bit, forcing him to keep his mouth uncomfortably clamped shut. It seems that they no longer want to go through the trouble of sewing him up again — or of listening to him speak.
But in the meantime, it’s clear they’ve kept up on the doses of medication. It doesn’t take long for it to hit his waking body. A sense of restlessness. His fingers twitch where they’re bound behind him. Soap sits there on the side of his bed as long as he can, but it’s hard, when both of his knees refuse to stop shifting around and bouncing, his head screaming at him to move.
So eventually he gives up on fighting that urge, sneering as best as he can behind his muzzle as he stands, stretching his aching knees out in front of him. Drool slicks up the plastic of the mask he’s confined to, his mouth forced to remain open. He chews at the bit, but there’s barely any leeway allowing him to move his aching jaw up or down, preventing him from fucking his wounds up further.
He paces, for as long as he can. Paces and thinks, though each thought is fleeting and torturously not enough. They dance through his mind, the buzzing of flies, each one overlapping until they combine together to be nigh incomprehensible. He tries scratching at the muzzle and finds that his hands still sting and burn where they’re missing nails and his fingers have been broken. Not only that — but the muzzle is fastened by thick, strong leather behind his head, and locked, a padlock hanging from the back.
Like an animal pacing a cage, teeth torn out and declawed. Soap snarls to himself as he tries to speak and finds himself thwarted, growing increasingly more erratic.
Time passes.
There are no food or daily visits to give him any measure of how much time, though. Merely the seconds he tries to count, the steps he takes back and forth. One, two, three, four, five. A few more and he’s cleared the room, forcing him to turn back around, heel-to-toe. The minutes and hours pass achingly slow, with a lack of stimulation to give his racing mind something to focus on. It isn’t long before he gets hungry.
Soap has no idea for how long he remains in that room alone, pacing, back and forth and back and forth, burning holes through the dingy concrete beneath him. He cannot sleep. Still, he lies down in bed, and he closes his eyes, and finally, begins to slip away—
Only for the door to open. A soldier enters dressed in customary army garb. He takes one glance at Johnny and seems to pause.
“Sotrudnichat?”
John blinks, trying to communicate his confusion and disinterest from behind his muzzle. He grunts and turns around on the bed, facing the wall and ignoring the sounds of quiet breathing behind him.
A beat later the soldier speaks again, this time in English, phrased as a question, a request. “Cooperate?”
Soap remains turned around and ignorant. The soldier takes three steps backward without turning and closes the door.
Sleep is difficult, but eventually, he manages. It’s a fitful sleep, filled with nightmares he can hardly remember, and when he wakes up, his bed is soaked in sweat, hands fisted in the mattress. John curses, then again when it comes out as little more than a grunt. He chews at the bit between his teeth and lifts a hand to slip two fingers beneath the muzzle, the most he can fit.
The discomfort has already set in alongside the boredom. His lips are painfully chapped, his skin uncomfortably dry. He scratches impulsively at the scabbing wound on his cheek, but hardly manages to do more than put himself in more pain.
But he persists. He does not cooperate.
Then the hunger kicks in.
John chews on the bit between his teeth as saliva fills his mouth. Sleep works to avoid the aching in his gut, but only for a while. His head hurts. His chin and neck are wet as he salivates like a dog to a bell, growling grouchily to himself. The constant stream of irritating saliva fades quickly, though, as they give him no water, either.
He doesn’t know how long it goes on. When he feels an urge to pee, it’s a dark color, his stomach cramping whenever he manages anything. His legs are weak. His head swims. He spends his time pacing the cell.
Insanity is defined as doing something over and over again in the exact same way despite there being no change in results. John knows pacing across his cell seems insane, because it’s driving him a little nuts, and it’s certainly not conserving his energy. But what else does he have to do?
He doesn’t know how long any of it keeps going for. Every once in a while a soldier will enter the room. Asks the same question. Russian, then English. Cooperate?
Each time Soap ignores them, listening instead to the ceaseless, painful rambling of his own mind. His head hurts, a low grade migraine turning to a fever pitch. The lights in his room are never off, and pretty soon, he can’t sleep with them on anymore, each time he tries only making his head pulse and scream harder and harder.
Pacing back and forth and occasionally trying to pee become quite literally the only things he’s capable of. Until the shaking becomes so bad that every time he walks his knees buckle, sending him crashing to the floor. He tries. He tries so hard to persist.
But his vision swims through pools of darkness. His stomach rolls and cramps fitfully. Every nerve in his body shakes, trembling agonizingly, a ceaseless movement that makes it impossible for him to sleep, to breathe, to move.
He cries, one night. So exhausted and thirsty and hungry he could sit there and sob for hours, if given the chance. His body aches, muscles dehydrated and shriveled. When he tries to clutch his hands to his knees, they shake, fingers twitching, bouncing up and down against his brittle bones. John thinks of his mother. He thinks of his friends. He thinks of Ghost. Of Simon.
And he realizes he’s crying too late, only noticing when it begins to overwhelm him, and he cannot breathe around the bit agonizingly tight in his mouth. His throat is too dry to swallow around. Tears flood his mouth and eyes, and yet he can’t produce any, so profoundly dehydrated he couldn’t really cry even if he wanted to. Johnny chokes, gagging on plastic, trying to cough, hands too weak to scratch at his neck. The world —
— Returns, in a flash of awful light and colors as a soldier enters his room. Soap awakens, moaning through his nausea, his agony. He’d been asleep, finally knocked out. But now here he is, and a soldier is in the room, staring at him where he’s curled up at the foot of the bed, one hand spasming errantly against the concrete floor, freezing to the touch.
“Sotrudnichat?” Asks the soldier, pausing for a breath, as is customary. “Cooperate?”
Soap nods.
His hands dry and then burst and then bleed, callouses he’s accrued over decades of work nothing to the repetitive slamming of hammers and axes. Even through the gloves Simon wears, it’s bad, sharp pain in every cut line dug into his palms and fingers, deep as the trenches they dig through.
He thinks some of the worst part is that they can still see the sky. A promise of sunlight, of escape. But he’s so fucking cold, every inch of him trembling nonstop. The heavy coat they’d given him had at first seemed a kind gesture — now not nearly enough. Hell is not hot, he reaffirms. Simon knows inside of him that Hell is a slow burn, an agonizing freeze creeping into your skin until you are painfully aware that you will never be warm again.
The schedule repeats, day after day. He awakens early in the morning. Pheasant is fed their breakfast. Then, they are either forced to run around outside and exercise, or they are taken to The Urn. Simon relaxes in the repetition, for as much as it hurts him. He learns how to throw his weight against stone and rock and earth. He finds out how much his body can take before collapse, how much cold he can withstand. He bleeds through the callouses. He learns.
Simon wonders, most of all, past his poetic musings about Hell and snow and trenches and callouses, what has happened to Johnny.
Soap paces. It’s all he does. One-two-three-four-five steps across the room, if he’s going fast and with big strides. Sometimes he shuffles instead, counting each one in turn. One-two-three-four-five-fix-and he gets lost somewhere around ten, usually, because his brain instead chooses to focus elsewhere.
The sound of the droning lights above him. The feeling of the cold concrete beneath his feet. These are things he can focus on, can recall, if for only short bursts before his mind aches and begins to flip between an ever-growing photobook of nothingness. One-two-three— he trips, and curses, shaking his head, moving back to the edge of the room to restart.
Every day he is fed three times, though they’re at random points throughout the day. His cheek has yet to fully heal, but he doesn’t disturb it anymore, knowing the punishment for doing so is one he desperately needs to avoid. Soap thinks of Simon, as he paces, and—
He trips again, slamming a fist into his knee in frustration. He walks back to the other side of the wall. “One. Two. Three—” he says it out loud, but the noises get lost, blurring before he can understand what they mean.
And fuck, is he tired. Every part of his body aches with the effects of that pill they continue to feed him, of which Soap can no longer remember the name of. He is fed three times a day. They give him a pill each time, and he eats it dutifully. A drink of water, then the pill, then another drink, and Soap goes back to pacing.
He imagines a trench dug into the concrete by his feet. He scuffs the bottoms of his appendages into the concrete, manically digging his skin open until it bleeds. Soap drags his palms and heels across the ground until a trail of dry red can be seen, marking his path. A bloody line, a marker, a tribute to the sacrifice of his aching limbs.
One-three then one-two-three then one-six— then Soap pauses, a desperate, pained noise bubbling up in his throat. He takes a handful of his hair into his hand and tugs at it. With the other, he covers his mouth, suffocating a frightened sob as he continues to pace.
Simon is a handsome man. His eyes are brown. They aren’t chocolate or caramel or dirt or mud or any pretty shade of honey— they’re so brown they’re almost black, his iris typically blending in. But when the sunlight hits them they are nearly red, the color of a sunset, an orange so dark it’s bloody. His jaw is thick and built and lined only a little bit with stubble, disrupted on his chin by a scar. His lips are full, but rather thin, frown lines accumulated at the sides. Two small scars extend from either side of his mouth.
He’s tall. Annoyingly so, Soap would say. His hair is a sandy blonde, more brown than anything, but it gets golden as wheat when the sky is light. One of his ears is cut in half, missing the top half. The other is pierced, a singular black stud in the lobe.
His eyes, though, continue to be what Soap watches the most. There is no sunlight to make them glow in this awful place, where blood lines his path and Simon stands there at the end, beautiful. One-two-three-four — and then Simon sidesteps as soon as Soap reaches him, a sad smile on his lips. Soap hadn’t seen Simon smile at all before they were captured together. Now he’s seen it many times, despite their less than happy circumstances.
And sometimes if he really thinks hard enough he can feel him, too. Can feel Simon’s hand sliding down his back as he pats it in congratulations. Can feel his gaze, piercing through his back like a spear from God’s winged Thrones, sliding through one side of his cheek and rendering the fat of his tongue useless.
Simon isn’t his only visitor, though.
Price talks to him. He’s the only one that does. He’s visited Soap several times now, and leans against one wall with a cool expression, smoke slipping out of his lips despite the absence of a cigar. His hat hangs low over his eyes. There’s a smile on his lips. One-two-three, Soap walks towards him, feeling his exhaustion melt away.
And then Price is looking up. There’s nothing there in his eyes, dull and unfocused and separated. His mouth bleeds smoke and Soap stumbles, forcing himself to step back to the beginning of his path and restart. Price still stares at him, though. His arms limp at his sides, his mouth hung open, his neck distended and long from a noose that someone already unwrapped from around his throat.
Soap’s fingers are rubbed raw from tying the rope. They bleed, and Price snarls, scenting the blood in the air. He whispers past the smoke and past his crushed, empty lungs—
Wake up.
The bartender speaks over the phone in a gruff, usually irritated voice. When Soap asks where his father is, his answer is that the bartender doesn’t know, and that he shouldn’t call again. When Soap asks where he himself is, the bartender tells him something in the language of buzzing flies, of static between his ears. When Soap asks why he’s not allowed to sleep, his answer is silence. When Soap asks where Price is, the bartender hangs up.
And the entire time, Price watches. He’s here more often than Simon now, leaving Soap aching to see his friend once more. Empty sockets roll when he begs, and Price demands that he start on his path again, that he walk through every step, every mistake he’s made that has gotten him here.
Even if Soap is afraid, he obeys. One. Two. Three. Each step drags him further into the sloping concrete, until he’s at his knees in front of Price, crying out in a desperate screaming wail for forgiveness that he does not deserve and that will never come.