cw: nightmares. soap with a poor appetite and/or bad mission recovery habits. dry heaving. Hurt/comfort. soapgaz (platonic or romantic)
Thinking about Soap who comes back from six weeks in the field without an appetite.
Six weeks on whatever they could find plus a rotation of MREs, bodies running on fumes and adrenaline and not much else. They all deal with it when they get back. Price eats everything in front of him for three days straight. Gaz sleeps a lot between three step meals. Ghost disappears somewhere and doesn't come out until he's ready.
Johnny doesn't eat. Johnny works, reviews, trains, and distracts himself throughout the day.
A week passes and he's still pushing food around his plate and drinking coffee like that's a meal. His face gets a new sharpness to it that Kyle doesn't like.
The first few times, Kyle stays quiet. They're still new together. Still figuring this out. It's not Kyle's place to tell a man how to handle his trauma.
The nightmares start, or Kyle starts hearing them, maybe not the same thing. The first one comes through the wall as a sound that gets choked on, swallowed down. Kyle lies in the dark and doesn't sleep for an hour. Then the third sound is of Soap's door closing and Kyle's sitting up and following him down the hall.
He finds Johnny on the bathroom floor, arm hooked over the rim of the tub, shaking like a cold dog. He's dry heaving into the air, body wrung out and insisting, that awful sound going on too long in the small tiled room. Kyle opens a cabinet in the low runner lights along the floor, runs a cloth under the cold tap and crouches behind Johnny and presses it to the back of his neck.
Johnny flinches. Then goes still. Then starts shaking again. Kyle keeps the cloth there.
It takes a while to stop.
"Sorry," Johnny says eventually, voice scraped raw.
He gets him up off the floor, a hand under his arm, and Johnny lets himself be moved. He walks him down the hall and sits him on the edge of his bed. Then reaches past him to the shelf and sets a small stuffed bear in his hands.
Kyle leaves him for 12 minutes to to make rice.
He keeps it plain, keeps it soft, almost overcooked. Just a bit placed in a small bowl. He brings it back and Johnny is sitting exactly where he left him, bear held loose in both hands, staring at nothing. Kyle sits beside him and holds the bowl out.
Johnny takes it from him, letting the warmth seep through the ceramic and into his palms. Then he eats. Just slow, small bites, like his body has just enough left in it to do this one thing. At some point he just sets the spoon down and Kyle takes the bowl from him without comment and puts it on the nightstand.
Kyle eases him back against the pillows, one hand between his shoulder blades, and Johnny goes, a bit boneless now, the bear tucked against his chest between his arms. Kyle pulls the blanket up and then pulls him in. Johnny's back against his chest, arm over him. Johnny doesn't say anything. Doesn't make a joke of it or laugh at Kyle's sudden gentle manner.
Kyle lies there in the dark and listens to his breathing slow down and even out, feels the last of the tremors work their way out of him. The room is quiet. Neither of them are asleep yet but neither of them speak.
Kyle feels Johnny tuck in closer to his chest, curling in around the bear, burrowing under the blankets.
Kyle places his chin on Johnny's head and closes his eyes.
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