YEP YEP!

He’s gotta be the most level-headed guy on the field when it goes belly-up — when the limbs start flying and the guts start spilling. This habit, and the way he maintains that composure around the visceral, gory reality of their day-to-day, well. Benji earns a reputation. A very specific one. Something he’d refute, if it didn’t keep everybody so effectively off his arse. 

So yeah, he’s gotta deal with some fucking disgusting jokes about being kept away from funeral homes, held back from hospital morgues. 

It’s not like that, though. He takes the helmets off the bodies because he needs to see, not because he wants to. 

At first, it began as a reality check — punishment. Benji forces himself to look at every single face, if he can. It’s another thing if they’re blown to bits or the face is gone, of course. Like if he lands a lucky dead-center shot to the skull. Benji doesn’t like aiming for the skull, and it gets him reprimanded frequently. But he has to look at the face after. He has to. He needs to see every single one so that he can remember. 

Acting on his own free will, isn’t he? Being perceptive in the pursuit of knowledge. That’s what his mum would want him to do, and he’s doing it. He’s doing a good thing. Being a good man. He’s choosing to undo the straps of those helmets, to gaze blankly into milky eyes washed empty by death. To remember features, scars, birth marks. Human quirks. They’re not faces he’s going to forget, and he’ll make fucking well sure of it. 

Anyway, that’s what he was doing at first — memorizing. It’s not entirely just that, anymore. The point of the habit now is less about memorizing and more about…seeking. Anticipating. 

Because when Benji pulls one of those helmets off? Every time he’s made to yank down a balaclava and peer over a cold, lifeless body?

He holds his breath. 

Benji holds his breath and prepares to put one specific face to memory. And to leave it there. Bitter anger seeps through him when he thinks about the fact that his last glimpse of it might be a mask of death. But anger isn’t what tinges his morbid habit anymore. It becomes something far worse than fear or dread, and he’s got….

No idea why.

That fear curdles through him a little now. Sour in his gut. 

He understand it’s a real fucking bad thing, that he hesitates like this over every body. It’s gonna get him killed or worse, that he pauses. 

The fight is long over, the deafening rhythm of mortar and gunfire tapered off but still bouncing around his skull, ringing. Gun-ring is different than drum-ring. The latter is the kind that comes after sitting too close to speakers for too long; the heartbeat a bass rocking in his chest, an ache sweet and explosive and familiar. It’s a good ring in his ears.

Now it’s his actual heart kicked up a notch instead of a bass, the high-whine in his ears from all the bullets he’s unloaded. A bad ring. Everything is distant. He’s a little mindless as he clears the building, operating on instinct and muscle memory alone.

It’s how he’d gotten the Shadow currently on the other end of his boot there. Had come across the body, clearly prone and in piss-poor shape. He’d strode over and put his foot in the center of that chest without thought, and now that he can manage some space in his brain for it, that makes him sick. 

Judging from the lack of blood around, this Shadow’s not mortally wounded, just clearly injured. Slowed, maybe, by a crunched femur or shaped ankle. Benji’s not sure without inspecting.

But he’s not here to inspect.

He levels his rifle at center-left on the Shadow’s chest, next to the sole of his boot. The poor fuck’s gonna die in pain, but the least he can do is make it quick. Benji always tries to make it quick.

But —the body under his boot keeps writhing, trying to buck him off. Fucking his aim up. Benji leans forward, pressing his full weight down until the Shadow wheezes. It rattles wet at the edges, less like he’s got a wound to the lung and more like he’s been laying there awhile. Resting, maybe?

“M’sorry, mate,” Benji whispers. “My commander’s about. Promise I’m the better choice here. You really don’t want him bein’ the prick to find you.”

“Oh,” breathes the Shadow, and stills entirely. “Hellooo, nurse.” 

Benji, swallowing the lump in his throat, abruptly tears off the helmet. No longer fearing it’ll be that face, but hoping. 

“Fuckin’ hell. Xavier?” 

That pink mouth curls; a familiar flash of it in his memory. In the dark, on his skin. His heart kicks up a frantic beat, because fuck, fuck fuck. Ghost is — 

“People are gonna talk if we keep running into each other like this,” Xavier purrs. It’s a touch too loud, and Benji starts to panic. He aims a glare at him in warning that isn’t visible with his visor, so he takes his helmet off as well. Tries very hard to ignore the audibly appreciative sigh the man on the ground loosens. He doesn’t even seem aware he’s made the noise, anyway.

“What are you doing here?” 

Xavier tucks an arm behind his head, lifting the other in the air. “Oh, you know. On vacation.” Benji does not laugh. “I’m stuck here, dude, what’s it look like? You assholes are everywhere…I mean not you, ‘course, but...”

A gunshot from a few stories below them echoes out. Xavier’s head snaps to the side.

Benji puts a finger up to his lips when his focus returns, pretty eyes a little less bright than a moment before. Serious and dulled by something he recognizes. 

He mouths: cover your ears, and then the second Xavier does as instructed, Benji pulls his arm to the side and fires a shot into the ground. Far enough away that there’s no chance of ricochet or breaking the poor fucker’s eardrums open, but he bets it rings, regardless. Bad ring. He apologizes in his head.

“Sticks?” Ghost voice bellows up the dilapidated stairs. It’s dead silent otherwise, but he panics a little more as he imagines him taking them two at a time, even thought he knows he’s probably not.

“Sorry, sir,” Benji calls back. “All good. Clearing out. Shoulda called the shot — found a Shadow still breathin’.” 

And there is, anyway, so it’s not entirely a lie. Under the heel of his boot, Xavier’s chest rises and falls steadily, lifting his knee up a little with every ebbing motion. He tries to keep the words even — his professional, clipped combat voice. It’s alarmingly difficult not to allow any of the genuine relief to worm through.

Shadow still breathin’, Benji thinks as he stares down into the other man’s eyes. Still fucking breathing.

How many times does he think that, wonder it, a day? And when did he start, for that matter? Each time he sees the bastard, it might be the last. The sick, twisting fear: when it is, he’ll never get any fucking warning. 

Started around the same time Benji began to hold his breath every time he went up against a Shadow. His finger, curled around the trigger of a weapon aimed at a black-clad chest, had taken up the traitorous habit of hesitation. It twitches before each squeeze. He feels sick when a bullet tears through dark fiber and further: flesh and sinew and bone. Imagines underneath that vest is an increasingly-familiar chest, once freckled and warm under his palm, now punched with oozing red circles. It’s the chambers of his organ that stutter and stop and pump the remaining liquid spill of life onto the ground as Benji watches.

Benji’s heart stutters too, nowadays. Because he might kill Xavier. He should, shouldn’t he? Could — right now.

Xavier is looking up at him like the thought has crossed his mind as well, and is making no move to stop that from happening. 

“Well, how copy?” Ghost asks after an extended silence. The boom of his voice breaks the spell, and Benji jumps a little, because it’s alarmingly easy to go someplace else when he’s looking at Xavier.

“Gave him a third eye, sir.” He says, grinning. His chest twists when Xavier mirrors it, looking a little dopey. Benji wonders if it’s a head wound.

There’s a morbid chuckle from the stairwell. “Christ, Sticks. You gotta be creepy about it?” 

Benji tears his gaze away, lets it drift towards the door. The words are hard to say, otherwise. Especially with this particular audience. “You like creepy, Lt.” 

Another pause, then: “Clear fast, rookie. Meet me up a floor when you’re done.” 

Benji nods and realizes he’s not gonna hear that. “Aye, sir. On it.”

Jostling beneath him, movement, and Benji snaps his rifle back into position without really realizing. 

Xavier freezes, and it’s only with the bubble of shame and guilt that Benji remembers the boot is still fucking square in the center of his chest. 

“Fuck,” he hisses, relaxing his gun, hand rubbing over his jaw. “Fuck.” 

Benji starts to lift his foot, his weight. Shifting back enough that he almost topples over when a grip catches around his calf. 

“Said it before,” Xavier mumbles suggestively, tracing a finger under the edge of his pants. He pulls annoyingly on Benji's leg hair, smirking. “This whole thing? Really doing it for me.” 

“I’ve just pointed a weapon at you.” Benji whispers, the words hissing through his teeth. It’s hard not to betray his amusement, his incredulity at Xavier’s constant commitment to being as flirtatious as possible. 

“Yeah, you get it,” the redhead purrs back. He squirms in a way that makes Benji believe he needs up. He lifts a little to allow an escape, expecting Xavier to roll onto away.

But he doesn’t. He adjusts, sure, just not in the way Benji is expecting. Xavier wiggles across the ground, further away, and Benji’s boot drags down his chest as a result. Further, tracing a line across that firm stomach, until — 

Xavier falls back on his elbows, chin tilting towards his chest to watch its journey.

“Are you serious.” Benji demands, because when he stops moving it’s conveniently with his crotch pressed to the sole of Benji’s boot. 

“You’ve gotten stuck in the middle of SAS territory, you don’t have a fuckin’ piece on you. Is this the time for it, mate?”

“Silly Benji. With you? I’ll make time,” Xavier laughs throatily, and the noise breaks off into a quiet whimper as he shifts again. Admittedly, Benji is a little hypnotized. His fluffy hair is wild in his face, hanging loose with his neck tilted back. Benji could pull away. Should. But Xavier starts to rock his hips, tac belt jingling against the concrete floor, and it is really fucking hard to look away from him like that. 

His head is tilted back, but he hasn’t yet broken eye contact with Benji. It gives him the luxury of watching those mischievous eyes darken. 

“Xavier…”

“Fuck, that’s good. I told you. The uniform? Really working wonders, dude.”

“You gotta get out of here,” Benji says, voice rough, but he doesn’t move.  Xavier’s face is beginning to flush, his bottom lip stuck between his teeth, and every distancing pull of his hips gives Benji a flash of the outline in his pants. It makes his tongue feel heavy in his mouth.

He tries again, clearing his throat and trying to sound more serious: “Xavier. Listen, you bastard, I —”

“Ooh,” Xavier sighs, “I do miss it when you’re not snippin’ at me.” His eyes have fluttered shut with the friction, but now one cracks open. A lazy, sultry wink. “You little shit.”

Benji’s mouth snaps shut. His face gets hot, too, because those words do something real awful, real fuckin’ deep. Miss it, Xavier says. Like he means miss you. Except Benji knows that’s his traitorous fucking brain going at it. Just hearing what it’d like to hear, even if the words are from some merc he barely knows humping against his leg.

Miss it, he says. Benji wants to tell him that every time he pulls a helmet from a dead Shadow’s skull, he worries it’ll be his face beneath.

Miss you, Benji thinks, the words bubbling ups his throat dangerously.  He opens his mouth and —

“Takin’ an awful long time,” comes Ghost’s voice. It is right in the doorway, round the corner, and that is too fucking close. 

“Fuck!” Benji yelps. Xavier is shielded from view, prone as he is on the ground and behind a mess of concrete and rebar, but Benji still leans forward a little. The motion is instinctual, protective. As if his frame, as much bigger as he looks in all the gear, would be enough to hide a man of Xavier’s size. 

“Lt, piss off. Please, fuckin’ announce yourself. Like a  — I don’t even know what, mate, you are silent.” He quickly lifts his foot off and away, ashamed like he’s been caught, even if there’s no hint of awareness Ghost’s mask-darkened countenance.

“Sorry.” The lieutenant quips, lacing it with enough acerbic sarcasm for Benji to get the message that he’s very much not. “All done here, then?”

Benji glances down, pinned momentarily in place like it’s him on the ground.  Xavier, in turn, gazes up at him with that bright countenance, a smirk tugging the corner of his mouth. His eyes are shiny with their typical mirth, but edged with the steely glint Benji has only seen once. When Xavier had his boot wet in the sopping, red-shard remnants of a man’s skull.

Xavier is preparing for a fight. He won’t fucking win against Ghost, that much Benji knows for sure. Couldn’t name a man that might come out victorious, not even in 141 — Ghost takes ‘em all, easily. 

“Aye, sir,” Benji says. He hopes the dart of his eyes about the room isn’t as obviously nervous as he feels. Piece of loose rebar in the corner. Piles of dusty office papers scattered in the last few mortar drops. A shovel, propped against the far windowsill. “Almost.” 

“Almost?”

Benji nudges Xavier’s side so the belts on his vest, the fabric, slip and make noise. Jingle. Really sell the fact that there’s a body under his boot. And not one that hasn’t just been rubbing its hard cock against him. 

“Almost.” He says, aiming for bashful. It’s hard when he’s starting to sweat, feel tight and jittery at his edges. His eyes dart to the window again. Three stories, if he counted the stairs correctly. Glass doesn’t look breakable. “Sorry I’m trying to keep us all up, y’dickhead. This one was a medic, figured I’d refill what I could.” 

It slips out of him easily, the lie, but it’s not one he’s going to be able to substantiate if prompted. Benji’s kit is mostly full, and Ghost is thorough enough about his soldiers (heh, he thinks) that he knows what all of them carry. 

But Ghost doesn’t prompt, just takes him at his word.

“Shoppin’, then.” He chuckles, a warm rumble that would usually have Benji’s stomach flipping with heat. It only makes him more edgy, now. The way Ghost laughs sometimes is…frightening. Like he’s in on his own secret, always. “Pick somethin’ out in my size and color, hey?”

Xavier’s hand slides from the floor, over the toe of his boot and up higher. Those long, pale fingers snake under the hem of his pant leg once Moree, and curl about his ankle. Squeeze. Stroke. Benji bites the inside of his cheek.

“Sure, Lt,” Benji says, his mouth suddenly dry. Ghost’s trigger finger is proper, nice and safe on the side of his rifle. The issue is that the rifle is out. Wouldn’t take more than a second for him to lift, given a reason. And he has a sidearm like Benji. Probably more that he can’t see, knives and other deadly shite tucked beneath all thet black fabric. There’s no way — 

“Rendezvouz on level three. Make it fast, trooper — we got pickup in ten.”

“Aye, sir.” 

Ghost’s broad shoulders nearly fill the doorway completely; he turns to make them fit, leaving Benji stood there. It’s several seconds before he lets the breath he’d been holding out, torso slumping forward in relief. 

He glances down only to find himself at the end of a strangely assessing green stare. Benji feels it settle over him, then. The drive, the awareness: clinical and anticipatory, but none of the jitters. Like he’s about to get into it, finger on the trigger, fists in front of his face.

Pickup in ten. It’s a three minute walk back to their meeting point. That leaves him maybe six to get Xavier safely away.

“Don’t go down the stairs,” Benji says, pointing at the ground like Xavier’s a dog needing orders. “Let five minutes go, and then get yourself the fuck out of here.”

“Huh?” There’s a frown on his face like he’s about to argue. Benji fucking hates seeing it twisted like that.

“Look, mate, if Ghost — if he spots you?” Benji shakes his head, cutting the air with a flat palm. “That’s it. Xavier, listen. Do you get what I’m telling you, right now? That’s it. You gotta swerve ‘em, and I can make sure — I’m buyin’ you time, dickhead.”

“Buying time,” Xavier says distantly, as if he’s taken a bite of the word and doesn’t like the taste, can’t quite place why. “With that big skull fucker?”

Benji nods. “Skull fucker. Not in a shag way.” A filthy grin tugs at the corner of his mouth. He swallows the but kinda that threatens to slip out. 

“Christ.” Xavier huffs. “I hope you have a great conversation. Make it a long one. I am moving slow.”

“Something like that,” he says, and then sobers at the pull of Xavier’s brow again. He wants to ask where he’s hurt, what’s causing that wrinkle — he has the sudden flash of smoothing it with a thumb, but again. Time.

“Hey. Don’t worry, sweetheart. Not your first rodeo, yeah?” He laughs nervously. “S’what you fuckin’ Yanks say. You’re a sharp one, a’right? You’ll get out.” Benji is rambling, nerves a live wire that sparks and jumps just under the surface of his skin.

The hopeful sales pitch, the chipper words…they’re meant as much for himself as they are Xavier, because there’s a flash of an alternate in his mind. Not an escape, but —  he shudders, elbows pressed inwards like he’s protecting himself from the thought as it scrapes at his skull. Xavier lying broken somewhere, bleeding in ways no amount of gauze or stitches can fix. Mangled, maybe by Benji’s own fucking lieutenant.

Benji imagines that he’s pulled the helmet off to find a mess of bone and flesh like Robson’s, topped sickeningly with dark red hair. Almost upturns the contents of his stomach.

He goes quiet, stares at Xavier for a long moment. And then, because he can’t help it, because he feels like he might fucking lose his mind if he doesn’t, he fists a hand in the edge of that black tactical vest. Pulls the entire top portion of Xavier’s body from the ground. It doesn’t take much effort to yank the other man into a mouth-crushing kiss — might be the last, that monstrous anxiety quips. And Benji squeezes his eyes shut. He can’t handle looking at Xavier for this.

 No finesse to it whatsoever, even though he would really like to add some. Be slow and thorough, like they’ve time to spare. They don’t, and he hasn’t got the seconds to savor anything. Wants to, though. 

He thinks about Xavier’s taste a lot. His mouth, sure, saliva and teeth and tongue. But also the flavor of the spot right at the hollow of his throat, the dipped connection of those pretty, pronounced collarbones. Sweat and skin and…Xavier-taste. He’s got no other word for it. 

This kiss as one for the books, but Xavier doesn’t seem to mind. He whimpers into it like Benji’s licking at his mouth, and when they pull apart his green eyes are shot-through; dark, dilated. Benji doesn’t know why. It was just a peck, really. 

Except…he’s breathing awful hard too, isn’t he? 

He tosses his pack to the ground. A raunchy smirk spreads Xavier’s cheeks, and Benji rolls his eyes.

“You’re not gettin’ tail, you prick. Relax.” He fishes his kit back out of his bag and rifles through it. Finds what he’s looking for, pops the top off the plastic containing it, and holds it up between their faces. 

“Whatever is about to happen,” Xavier says, “I’m scared. But also into it.”

“You are so fuckin’ insufferable sometimes, do you know that?” Benji hisses, patience fraying. He reaches down and takes Xavier’s wrist, wraps their fingers together around the handle of the scalpel. Xavier’s hand is warm and dry, gritty with dirty and a few scrapes along his knuckles. It’s too big for Benji to get a proper full cover of it under his own palm. He pulls their hands, and the glistening metal sharp-edge first, towards his own throat. 

“See anybody and get close enough — look, here y’are. Go for ‘em right there, okay? This spot — ” He angles it better, tip of the blade right above his artery, and does not think about the fact that he is showing Xavier how to kill another soldier. Kill him. “They’ll go down fast enough for you to grab a gun.”

The expression that settles across the other man’s face is made up of quite a few emotions — none of which Benji can begin to categorize. Scared to, in fact. So he doesn’t try.

He moves their hands down, shifts closer to accommodate the demonstration. Guides the scalpel behind his back until he feels the sharp kiss of it near the small of his back, tucked just so under the bottom half of his vest. He adjusts the grip, angles it up, and shakes Xavier’s fist in his hand. He hasn’t blinked, hasn’t broken eye contact — brown on green — and Benji watches his pretty eyelashes flutter. Ruddy and delicate, like desaturated saffron. His chest hurts.

“Or here,” he breathes, their faces just inches apart enough that the air lifts a sweaty lock of hair off Xavier’s forehead. “Goes right to the kidney, this way.”

“Man,” Xavier whines. “You are so goddamn hot.”

Somehow, he gets Xavier sat upright. Slings a gangly arm over his shoulders to get him steady. Less time now, the seconds counting away. Benji’s savoring every single one, because each is another that he has a guarantee of Xavier being alive and warm next to him. 

They don’t say much as Benji rights himself, slings his pack on, strides out the little room he’d found the Shadow and down the ruined hall. There’s light filtering in from the stairwell, and it makes him narrow his eyes.

As he descends the stairs, Benji spares a last glance at the doorway of the room. Pauses. Xavier stands there — leaning, rather, against the frame. He’s got an arm wrapped around his midsection, and Benji wishes he could put more effort into finding out how bad those injuries are, because he surely has a few. Enough to knock him down for the count, awhile. And yet he’d gotten up. Stood and limped, probably, to the door to watch him go. 

For some reason, it makes his face get hot. 

Benji shoots him a thumbs up, swallowing the feeling down, and Xavier’s brow pinches before he raises the scalpel-wielding fist and mirrors it. 

Good boy, he mouths, because he wants to say it and can’t. Too loud, Ghost too near. 

Instead: “Lt. All clear, sir. Found somethin’ pretty for you, too.” He turns his back to Xavier with one final wink, and takes the stairs two at a time.

There’s a warm trickle creeping into the edge of his shirt, pinpointed at the spot on his neck. Benji swipes with his thumb, collects the crimson glob. Studies it for a second, shiny and wet on the pad of his thumb, then licks it clean. He’s had a specific taste on his mind for awhile, and the coppery tang doesn’t compare in the slightest — it just tastes of blood. 

That strange buzz of anticipation and fear while talking to Ghost will only come as a realization later. Much later, on his next leave, when he’s laying in bed alone and staring up at the ceiling. He’d been assessing the room, Ghost and his kit and his fight pattern, as a reflex. He does it before every brawl, every spar — assesses. Learns patterns like he’s reading music, figuring out which rhythm is gonna work best with his beat. Preparing himself to lay into that beat — hit, stomp, roll — adapt it into something that fits, that works.

Preparing for a fight, too.