Cerberus

John Price

John glances between you and the car and back again.

It’s unbelievable. Fucking bonkers. The car is completely smashed. Sandwiched. Hardly anything left to it. The fact that you’ve seemingly walked out of the car unharmed is a bloody miracle.

“It’s a shame. Was such a good car,” you sigh, wistfully.

John’s hand drops from his face. “You’re worried about the car?”

You shrug. “Of course. We’ve had it for years.”

With a heavy sigh, John drapes his arm over your shoulders, pulling you to him. As your arms wrap around John’s middle, he breathes you in, savoring your warmth and smell. Just hours ago, you could have been gone. Crushed. Broken and unresponsive.

“Hardly care about an old car, love,” he murmurs, kissing the top of your head. “Just glad you’re safe.”

“John,” you laugh. “Don’t get sentimental on me.”

“You’re goddamn infuriating,” he murmurs, going in for a kiss. “Thinking I care more about some fucking car.”

John claims another kiss. Another. You’re alive and that is all that matters.

“Bloody hell!” comes a low, masculine voice. “Get a fucking room!”

You pull away abruptly, tugging on John’s hand, leading him away from the burly tow truck driver.

Kyle "Gaz" Garrick

“You’re back early.” Kyle emerges from under the sink, wiping his hands on a towel as he sits up. He checks his watch. “You’ve been gone all of five minutes.”

That’s right Kyle. Only five.

Five minutes it all it took. That’s how the saying goes, isn’t it? Most accidents happen within five minutes from home. Or is it five miles? Fifteen? Doesn’t matter.

What matters is the god-awful bumper to bumper scrape on the side of Kyle’s new car. A gift from his rich uncle because he’s the favorite. That car is special to him, and you fucked it up. Bad.

“We don’t need it,” you say, lamely.

Kyle’s surprise at your unexpected arrival morphs into confusion. “You decided we don’t need what?”

Shit.

“That,” and you wave your hand in the air, “part you gave me. I mean, is it really that necessary?” You end on an awkward giggle.

Kyle’s confusion dissolves like smoke. “The part I gave you? Told you to take it to John at the hardware store. That part?”

You lick your lips. “Yes?”

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing!” you reply automatically.

It’s too sharp, too high of a crack. Kyle stares at you intently. Nothing gets past him.

“I won’t be mad,” he says, his voice calm and cool. “Talk to me. Something happen?”

Your stomach drops, twisting hard. Not like you can cover this up. It’s his car. You can’t drop it off at the shop and pretend that everything is fine.

“I might have scraped the side of your car,” you admit.

“Might?”

You feel them then, the tears. Hot and salty.

“I’m sorry.”

“Hey. Hey.” Kyle tosses the towel aside and comes to you, encircling you in his arms. “Are you okay? No bumps or bruises?”

“No,” you sob. “Just my pride.”

John "Soap" MacTavish

“Oh shit.”

Symbols ignite on the dash. Some hold their glow while others flash violently in warning. There’s a consistent hiss you can’t locate, and the radio continues to blare “You Spin Me ‘Round” by Dead or Alive.

“Fucking Jesus,” comes Johnny’s voice to your left.

He’s bent forward slightly, one arm out. It’s pressed against your chest like you’ll fly out of your seat and through the cracked windshield.

“The car,” you breathe. “The car. Oh my God.” Johnny’s hand shifts to your face, grasping your head before moving downwards, checking you over for injuries. “And the cow! Did I hit it? Do you think it’s okay?”

Spawning next to Johnny’s window is the hairy cow in question. It moos, and you both jump. A few more appear behind it, and beyond that, a broken wooden fence where more Highland Cows gather, staring at the accident.

“Fence rotted away,” mutters Johnny. “They got out.”

You sigh with relief, and then groan. “Goddamnit. How are we getting to your parent’s house? This is—I fucked this up.”

Johnny turns in your direction. “Ma will understand.” He reaches for you again, cradling your face. “It’s just a car. You’re more important.”

Simon "Ghost" Riley

“Slow down, dove. You’re talking too fast.”

“I hit a tree! I ran into a fucking tree!”

Simon closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “I heard that. Not the last bit.”

Your words fire like a semi-automatic. Simon can hardly keep up.

“There was a kid and I wasn’t going to hit a fucking child with a two-ton car so I swerved—”

“Love,” sighs Simon, grabbing his keys and boots, ready to walk out the door.

“—then there was this llama wearing a pink party hat and a raccoon so I assume there was a birthday party or something because why would there be a fucking llama in the middle of the suburbs—”

Simon pauses with his hand on the front door, opened mouthed. “A what?”

“—and where did the racoon come from and why was it chasing the llama and why—”

“Did you hit your head?”

You go silent for a beat. “Did I—” and then, “are you even listening to me, Simon? The car is totaled.”

Simon rests his head against the wood door, eyes shut as he steadies his breathing. “I don’t care about the car.”

“Well, I care.”

“You hurt? Bleeding? Feel dizzy? What’s today’s date?”

“It’s June. First Thursday of the month.”

“What year?”

“Fuck you and come help me!”

Simon chuckles, a twinge pulling at the corner of his mouth. You’re acting a brat, running your mouth, which means you’re perfectly fine, as least mentally. “Sure you’re not bleeding?” he asks, opening the front door. “No scratches?” And then, because Simon finds it amusing, “Impalements?”

“Very funny,” you snort.

“Love you,” smiles Simon, bolting the door. “Be there in ten.”

Behind the tree line is a motorway, the distant roar of cars barely audible given the natural barrier. The sky is dark. No stars. Simon’s cigarette is the brightest thing on the lot beside the lone bulb affixed to the building in front of them. It’s above the faded wood door, unprotected from the weather. The bulb is slightly blackened, dampening the light.

“Think he’s trying to kill us?” asks Kyle, eyes narrowing as he observes the worn wood.

Simon exhales, smoke curling around his face as it dissipates into the air. “Price?”

Kyle turns to Simon, top lip curled in disgust. “Fucking look at this place, mate.”

Johnny sticks his hands in his pockets, shrugging. “Not up for getting ya’ dick wet?”

“Fuck off,” groans Kyle.

“Think he’s on to something, Johnny,” croons Simon. The behemoth of a man inhales the last of the cigarette, tossing the butt in the gravel, extinguishing the embers with the toe of his boot. “No windows. Weird lock. Metal walls. Fucking murder shed that is.”

“Think there’s a dead body in there?”

“Limbs hanging from chains?”

“Captain Price, the serial killer?” Kyle’s fist lands on Johnny’s shoulder. “Fuck me. That hurt.” Johnny lunges, the two men wrestling for a headlock.

Rolling his eyes, Simon kicks at Johnny’s shin. “Grow up. Fucking children.” Lighter in hand, Simon clicks it open. Shut. Open again. “Rather do this in the club?” He nods toward the secondary building, the larger one to the left. Muffled, pounding music oozes from the building, growing louder when the entrance door opens. “Where everyone can watch? You into that?”

“Piss off.”

Johnny throws up his hands. “No judgement, Kyle.”

“Price wants us to blow off some steam,” says Simon. “We’ve been pent up. Aggressive since the mission. He’s fucking right.” He side-eyes Johnny. “Also felt bad you almost died.”

Johnny sighs dreamily. “Loves me more than my own, Da.” Johnny throws his arm over Kyle’s shoulder, drawing him in. “Probably bought us one of the bonnie lassies in there. Or three.”

Simon growls low in his throat, eyes on the door. “I have the code.”

Kyle’s head tips back, gazing up into the starless sky. “Let’s have it off then.”

Johnny hollers, shaking Kyle like he’s a ragdoll before taking off to the murder sex shed.

“Out the way, Johnny,” scolds Simon, elbowing him.

Simon punches in the code, the red light flipping green. Twisting the knob, he shoves open the door, revealing darkness. It takes a moment for their eyes to adjust, to unwrap the present inside.

“Fucking hell,” murmurs Simon, stepping into the small room. Johnny and Kyle slide in on either side of him. The door shuts with an audible click. “Is that—”

“It is,” says Johnny, clearly surprised.

No bed or lounge decorates this room. No scantily clad women ready to offer themselves. There’s a hole in the wall. A cutout. Large enough for a human to crawl through. Breeding Hole is painted in glowing green neon above it. Two arrows curve inward to point at either side of the hole. The lettering oozes downward like fresh paint.

The hole is not unoccupied.

Johnny’s surprise turns to lecherous glee. “It’s a fucking glory hole.” He slowly strides forward, gaze sweeping over exposed skin and spread legs.

A woman, but only half, sticks out from the wall. You’re on your stomach, a black board with a red cushion supporting your weight, top end covered by a black curtain. Black stilettos, strappy with a razor-thin heel, is all you wear. The rest is exposed and open for them.

Beside the glory hole are two sets of ankle straps. One set is higher than the hole itself, allowing for legs to be locked open and wide. The second set are level with the support cushion. They can bend your knees, force them open, keep you restrained as they fuck you.

Price didn’t buy one or even three of the workers in the club for a quick fuck. A countdown on the wall denotes the remaining time.

Three hours.

Three fucking hours.

Price bought a session.

Graffiti covers the remaining three walls. Several television monitors play porn without sound. Overhead, music blares, a thudding rhythm that shakes the bones. Light comes from a few stray bulbs in the ceiling, each covered by a clear glass box in different colors. The set-up bathes the space in a kaleidoscope, heightening the pulsing intensity of the room.

Simon, Johnny, and Kyle circle you but don’t touch.

Glancing at a nearby rolling cart, Simon grabs a bottle of lube. “Look here,” he says, nodding his head.

It’s packed with silicon dildos of various shapes and sizes, anal plugs, vibrators, a variety of stimulation toys from a feather to a wooden paddle. There are extra bottles of lube, individually wrapped sanitation wipes to clean themselves, or you, off, and beside that are two rows of disposable cameras with extra film. A sticky note next to the cameras says “Use Me.”

“No condoms,” muses Simon, finding them absent after a second perusal.

“Says breeding,” chuckles Johnny. “Don’t need condoms for that.”

“Think she’s clean?” asks Kyle.

Johnny turns on him. “First you think he’s trying to murder us and now you think he’s going to give us STDs?”

“Not intentionally,” mutters Kyle.

Simon snorts, placing the lube back on the cart. “Think Price is the type?”

Kyle inclines his head. “Maybe to his enemies.”

“Be real shite of him,” laughs Johnny. “After feeling bad for me and all.”

Stepping forward, Kyle traces the lines of your body, fingertips hovering millimeters away from skin. “Hand me the lube,” he demands of Simon, not looking at him. “And a plug,” he adds as Simon places the lube in Kyle’s offered palm.

Johnny claps his hands together, grinning madly. “Aye. That’s how it’s done.”

Gripping the plug in one hand and the lube in the other, Kyle squirts a generous amount. As he places his hand on your ass, you jerk as if surprised. Kyle gives you a generous, reassuring squeeze before sliding his hand between, easing you open wider until your pussy and anus are stretched and exposed. Both tense and flex, and Simon groans.

“Fucking gorgeous sight,” murmurs Simon, rubbing his hand over the front of his dark jeans.

Kyle aligns the plug, pressing the tip against the puckered hole. There is resistance but it pops in smoothly. Your thighs shiver followed by another jerk of your body. Kyle fills his hands with you, squeezing, some of the remaining lube transferring.

Squeezing both cheeks, he settles his clothed hips in front of your exposed pussy. “Perfect height,” he says, lightly thrusting. He backs up, gesturing. “Try.”

Johnny takes his place and then Simon. Height won’t be a problem. They’ll be able to fuck you with ease.

“Who’s starting?” asks Kyle.

When no one moves, Johnny aims for his belt buckle. “Aye. I fucking will.”

Johnny releases his semi-hard cock, easing his pants open and down enough to keep the zipper away from his dick. Fisting the base, he jerks himself, pressing the head of his cock to your clit, rubbing against it. A sharp smack echoes with the music as Johnny’s free hand comes down on your ass. A few more send your thighs twitching.

Kyle licks his lips, joining Johnny, occupying his hand with the other cheek. Simon lingers at the cart, picking up different toys and vibrators, clicking them on and messing with the settings.

Beads of precum bloom in Johnny’s slit. He paints your clit with them, smearing it around to act as lube. A few more beads and he playfully teases your pussy, easing the tip in and out, all while jerking himself to hardness.

“What about this one?” Simon holds up a small vibrator no larger than the palm of his hand. It’s on, shaking wildly, nearly jumping around from the speed setting.

Johnny smacks his dick against your pussy a few times and steps away as Simon approaches with the vibrator.

“Too much?” asks Simon, switching the speed down a level.

“Not enough,” replies Johnny, slowing his hand movements to strokes.

Simon ups the speed again, firmly shoving the vibrator against your clit. Your ass bucks into the air. Kyle lunges forward, placing pressure onto your lower back, forcing you back to the cushion. You writhe under Kyle’s hold, attempting to escape the sensation. Simon, with the continued pressure, swirls the vibrator.

Another jerk, and they all jump back.

“Fucking hell,” laughs Johnny. “Got ourselves a squirter.” Simon is already reaching for a wipe, patting down your skin to clear the excess. Johnny inserts two fingers into your pussy, pumping slowly. “She’s dripping.”

“Need us to hold her?” asks Simon

“Aye,” and Johnny nods at the cameras on the cart. “Want a picture of this slick cunt taking my cock.”

Simon chuckles, handing off a camera to Kyle as he readies his own. He holds it up, snapping a photo as Johnny’s cock disappears.

“Fuck,” groans Johnny. “Tightest cunt I’ve ever fucked.”

Simon snaps a few more photos and sets the camera aside. “We got her, Johnny.”

Together, Simon and Kyle grasp your legs, pulling you toward them and further onto Johnny’s cock. They move as one, adjusting the ankle straps, locking you in as Johnny rests his hands on your back, putting his weight behind it.

Hips sharply jerking, Johnny drives into you, only chasing his end. Lips parted, panting, beads of sweat forming on his brow. Simon and Kyle watch intently, their eyes lust-laced and eager, each of them stroking themselves to hardness as they wait their turn.

Johnny groans out his pleasure, grinding his hips against you as his balls tighten. Kyle already has the camera ready as Johnny slips out. Simon moves when Kyle does, spreading your pussy wide with his fingers. Kyle waits a beat, snapping a photo when Johnny’s cum appears.

“Not enough,” observers Simon. “Needs more.”

Kyle takes position. He doesn’t fuck as wild and hard as Johnny, but his strokes are deep and deliberate.

Johnny smiles behind the disposable camera. “Hold that pose.” Kyle eases your leg up a bit, giving Johnny a clear view of how Kyle’s thick cock stretches your pussy.

The camera goes off and Kyle starts to fuck you again. When the creampie happens, they snap another cumshot photo.

“Not enough,” repeats Simon. “Not nearly enough.”

With three hours on the tab, they rotate, take pictures, make you squirt a few more times. Kyle removes the anal plug, going up a size, insert it while they turn you onto your back. Ankles are secured in new restraints, toes pointing toward the ceiling, legs stretched.

Simon hooks his arms around your legs, hands firmly gripping your thighs. He cares little for ceremony or niceness. Their mixed cum is smeared all over you pussy and ass, overflowing whenever one of them fucks your cunt.

Johnny aligns the camera perfectly, angling just so to capture the position without Simon’s head in the photo and the television monitor off to their left. It’s showing a gloryhole similar to this one.

“Turn her on her side,” instructs Kyle, indicating how with a flick of his finger. “Think that tight ass is ready.”

Unhooking your ankles from the restraints, the three of them turn you onto your left side. Simon eases you toward them a touch. Lifting your top leg, he plants it on his shoulder. He straddles your other leg, aligning his cock up with your pussy. Johnny spreads your ass cheeks for Kyle; the plug removed with a wet pop.

On the other side of the partition, you cry out around Price’s dick as not one but two cocks enter you. They fuck rough. Hard. Whoever they are. Not that you can ask. Not that you can say anything. All you can do is stare daggers at the man keeping your mouth occupied.

Price tuts as you choke on him. “What will your daddy think of you?”

Daddy won’t know about this at all.

You’re taking this but you’ll never speak about it. Whatever your adoptive father did to earn Price’s ire is unknown to you, and you don’t wish to know anyway. General Shepherd never brings work home, but you’re aware of his power, and that he likely has enemies everywhere.

When Price took you from your apartment in Washington D.C., you thought he’d kill you. Make you an example to your father.

“Apologies, love,” murmurs Price, using his thumb to wipe away smeared cum on the corner of your mouth. “But your father’s a bastard.”

There is cum in your hair, on your face, all over the cushion, spread over your breasts. You’re not allowed to swallow. Your mouth is a hole for Price to come in. Nothing more.

Price palms your breast, squeezing, teasing your nipple between thumb and forefinger. “Glad my men are having fun.” Price eases the rest of his cock into your mouth until you gag. He retreats slightly, but only enough for your breathing to return to normal. “They deserve it. After what happened to them. What your father put them through.” He sighs. Shrugs. “Not that they know who they’re breeding.”

Unable to move, unable to speak, you only stare, narrowing your gaze to stinging venom. Price brushes it off like it’s nothing.

Insignificant.

Killing General Shepherd was Price’s gut reaction.

Soap shot in the head, bleeding out, barely clinging to life. They thought him dead. His recovery, as slow as it was, surprised them even more. If Johnny had been killed, if he hadn’t survived, General Shepherd would feel lead, too. Know death was coming for him.

The sole reason Price didn’t fill General Shepherd full of holes is because Johnny lives, and lives well. Price’s revenge requires a different taste, and before him, the spread is bountiful.

A few favors are all it took to put Price in Shepherd’s office at the Pentagon. Place is a fucking fortress but it’s just a building when people owe you. Shepherd will know it’s him. There’s no doubting that. But Price wants him to know.

Price leans against the front of the desk, lightly tapping the final nail against his palm. Around him are pictures. Took a while to develop them. Can’t walk into a store, hand over rolls of film full of cumshots, and ask for them to be developed. He had to do this quietly. Discreetly. Took a few months of planning, but it’s here, in front of him.

Each and every picture is from that night. The only face that appears in any of the photos are of yours. Boys were smart about how much of themselves they revealed. A few didn’t make it, but there were plenty in the end.

Price admires his work, at how the photos cover nearly every surface. Shepherd will walk in, and everywhere he looks, they’ll be a picture of his daughter taking cock.

But there’s one final piece.

Something he didn’t expect.

Something that happened just this morning.

You should have killed me. You should have fucking killed me!

You were angry, standing at Price’s doorstep. Don’t know how you fucking found him, but your Shepherd’s, and he likely taught you well.

Beating on his chest, screaming in Price’s face, you raged, and then you spit out the real truth, the reason you even went looking for him in the first place.

The pregnancy test stares up at Price.

There are three possible fathers. All of them still ignorant about you and what Price did.

He’ll disown me. Did you know that? He’ll force me out of the family over this.

Price won’t put it past Shepherd to act so harshly, but you’re with him now. Left you asleep on his bed, curled up under the covers. He’ll have to tell the lads eventually, but not right now.

It's flatpack. IKEA. Forty quid and a bag of wooden dowels. A normal, boring, adult activity that millions of people do every weekend without incident.

But Simon is building it shirtless, because he got warm, and he's sitting cross-legged on the living room floor with the instruction manual spread across one beefy thigh, and he's wearing reading glasses—the ones he thinks you don't know about, the ones he keeps in the junk drawer next to his side of the bed—and he's holding a tiny Allen key between two fingers that could crush a man's windpipe, and he's frowning.

Not his scary frown. Not the operational, someone-is-about-to-die frown.

The little one.

The one where his split brow furrows and his lips press together and he looks like a very large, very dangerous man who is mildly inconvenienced by step seven of twelve.

And you're standing in the doorway.

You've been standing in the doorway for four minutes; hands clenched at your sides, and a feeling building in your chest that can only be described as rage.

"Whot," Simon says, without looking up, because of course he clocked you the moment you approached the room.

"Nothing."

"You're starin'."

"I'm not."

"Y'are. Can feel it." He picks up a wooden dowel, examines it, checks the diagram. Pushes his glasses up his nose with one knuckle. "Either help or stop hoverin'."

The glasses adjustment. The calloused knuckle. You want to bite him. You want to sink your teeth into his stupid massive shoulder and shake him like an overstimulated dog with a squeaky toy.

"I hate you," you say eventually.

He looks up slowly; one eyebrow raised above the glasses. "Whot?"

You start gesturing wildly. "I hate you. I hate your face. Put a damn shirt on."

"... No?"

"Put a shirt on or I'm going to do something insane, Simon Riley!"

He sets the Allen key down and looks at you properly. There's a smudge of saw dust on his cheekbone and his dirty blonde hair is pushed back from his forehead and the reading glasses make his dark eyes look bigger and you are going to lose your entire mind.

"You olright?" he asks, with the same cautious tone he'd use on an unstable IED.

"NO! No, I'm not alright. You're sitting on my floor building me a bookshelf in your reading glasses with your stupid arms and your stupid frown and I can't—I literally cannot—" You gesture at him incoherently. "How DARE you!"

His eyes flick down to the bookshelf, then up again. "How dare I... build furniture?"

"How dare you look like THAT while building furniture! You look like a—like a domestic—like someone's HUSBAND—"

His frown drops. "I am yer husband," he deadpans.

"THAT'S NOT THE POINT!"

He stares at you, and the ghost of a smile is pulling at the corner of his mouth now, which makes everything worse, because Simon Riley almost-smiling in reading glasses is a federal crime.

Simon clicks his tongue. "C'mere," he says.

"No," you retort petulantly, arms crossing again.

"You're goin' to come here, sit in my lap, and tell me exactly whot's wrong with you."

"What's WRONG with me is that you're—" You cross the room in three furious strides, drop into his lap, grab his face with both hands, and kiss him so hard you nearly knock the glasses off. He catches them. Catches you. One strong arm around your waist, holding you steady while you kiss him like you're trying to absorb him through osmosis.

When you pull back, you're breathing hard. He's not, just watching with that smug expression of his.

"Better?" he asks calmly.

"No. I'm still angry."

"About the bookshelf?"

"About your ENTIRE existence, Simon."

"Noted." He puts the glasses back on. Picks up the Allen key. "Step eight requires a Phillips head. Make yerself bloody useful and pass it."

"I hate you."

"Y'mention that." He kisses your temple without looking up from the manual. "Phillips head. Top of the box."

You pass it and stay in his lap. He builds the rest of the shelf with you sitting between his legs, silently furious about the way his pale forearms flex, tendons twitching, when he tightens the screws.

Meanwhile, the rest of his team is still as geared up as their Captain—all waiting for orders or further instructions, scattered around the room and listening with bated breath while Price grows more agitated with each shaky exhale he can hear coming from you.

You're currently sitting on one of the tables, boot-clad feet dangling off the edge as you stare at the ceiling, right into the fluorescent lights above, ignoring the way your eyes begin to sting from their brightness.

You've been putting on a brave face since getting stabbed with the needle a few hours ago and you've kept the façade up since hopping off the helo back on base, but it's getting harder to mask the panic rising inside you as your body starts to feel funny.

You swipe the back of your gloved hand over your sweaty forehead, catching the cold perspiration on your feverish skin with the rough fabric, and out of your peripherals, you notice the way your teammates' heads snap in your direction—different-coloured pairs of eyes assessing you with worry, concern, and a hint of curiosity.

Soap and Gaz are standing to your left and right respectively, sneaking glances at you whenever you shift on your spot, while the Lieutenant is still as a marble statue a little offside, arms crossed over his bulky tac vest.

Laswell begins to explain calmly, clutching a thick folder to her chest.

"We're still waiting on anything concrete, John, but the research papers your team managed to extract have offered a great insight on that—whatever that bioweapon is."

Bioweapon.

Your eyes widen as you sit up straight, the word making your heart race and your skin crawl with fear. Both Soap and Gaz take a step closer—two strong pairs of arms outstretched and ready to catch you if you faint.

"Nothing concrete yet?" Price snaps incredulously. "Goddammit, Kate!"

"Easy there, John—" Laswell says firmly, unbothered by his tone as she takes a step towards the captain and gestures at the two scientists watching the scene unfold with wide eyes from behind their laptops.

"They said she won't die. The amount of injection was too low… apparently."

Apparently?!

You inhale sharply and open your mouth to announce your imminent panic, but you're interrupted when one of the scientists speaks up first.

"That is correct, sir. She won't die."

Professor Doctor Boswel, as the name badge on his white lab coat states, chimes in. Price stops pacing at once, though his sharp eyes scream you better start explaining now, or one of you will be made responsible for this.

"Bringing the syringe back to base was the decisive factor. Our team at the lab is still working to decipher and translate the medical reports and research papers your team recovered, but we can confirm that this bioweapon is most likely a toxin."

A low murmur of various curses goes through the briefing room as you try to ignore the odd tingles in your limbs—like they're going numb from sitting in a bad position for too long—and process the doctor's words instead.

"You're saying I've been poisoned, doc?" You butt in crudely, letting out a humourless laugh as you begin fidgeting with your hands, clenching and unclenching them to get rid of those tingles while a cold drop of sweat trickles down your left temple and is swiftly wiped away by Soap's gloved thumb.

"Fuckin’ hell, lass. Ye dinnae look too good," Soap mutters under his breath, exchanging a concerned glance with Gaz, who then looks to the captain for guidance with a serious frown.

When Gaz turns around abruptly, you get a whiff of his scent, and you're ashamed to admit to yourself that you inhale it deeply—musk and sweat and gunpowder smoke, a hint of his fancy body wash lingering underneath all the grime. A perfect concoction of what is entirely Gaz.

It's intoxicating. Mouth-watering.

And absolutely inappropriate, because he's one of your best friends and a comrade.

What the hell is happening?

Of all the injuries and wounds you've already acquired during missions and deployments, this must be the fucking worst. You'd rather get shot or stabbed than sit here, feel strange as hell and be ogled like a failed science experiment.

Price's eyes flicker to Ghost, who hasn't said a word since sitting you down on the table with a gruff order to stay seated, and then to his three sergeants, lingering on you heavily before he turns back.

"What kind of bloody toxin?"

"It seems to be some sort of aphrodisiac, but… uh, well—about fifty times worse than that."

The other scientist, Professor Doctor Adebayo, answers tentatively, as if explaining it out loud makes him uncomfortable.

"The reports say it turns men—"

Dr. Adebayo hesitates, clearing his throat and looking between Laswell and Captain Price, until the latter lets out an exasperated sigh.

"Turns them what, doc?"

It's Laswell who says it eventually, "Turns them aggressive, John. Feral with lust, as ridiculous as that might sound."

The CIA agent finally looks in your direction before approaching you slowly while Dr. Adebayo seems to heave a sigh of relief as soon as she takes over.

"A high dose of it can be used to lower one's inhibition levels to a point where even the most honourable man would resort to sexual assault to ease his urges."

Her factual yet grim explanation makes the tension inside the briefing room spike tenfold. Every man present tenses up, visibly uncomfortable—Ghost especially, who's practically vibrating with strain.

Using a toxin like that—a bioweapon—on soldiers in the field could lead to even more and worse war crimes, and everyone here is aware of that.

"Wait—what? What the fuck?" Gaz utters, bristling next to you while you grip the edge of the table, gritting your teeth as the tingles intensify and wreck through your body in waves that leave you shuddering with each one.

"'Scuse me, what now?" You scoff. "Does that mean I'm gonna turn into a fuckin' nympho any second?"

Multiple pairs of eyes snap towards you at your choice of words. Some look intense and laced with worry. Price scolds you with one glance. Others look mildly amused—the latter being Soap, who lets out a snort but tries to cover it up with a fake cough into his fist.

Laswell surveys you intently, though her voice softens when she addresses you directly.

"How are you feeling, Sergeant? Are you in pain? Nauseous?"

A beat of silence follows. Your eyes flutter briefly as you meet Kate's blue gaze, and you exhale a long breath through your nostrils before you answer curtly.

"I feel weird."

You feel like you're about to get your period, but you keep that information to yourself for now and try not to wrap your arms around yourself self-soothingly.

Your lower abdomen is starting to tighten and cramp. Your gut twists like you just chugged a steaming bowl of soup and your limbs keep tingling—from your toes to your fingertips, and up to the tip of your nose. Tiny vibrations along with hot and cold flushes that make you quake and squirm in your seat on the table.

Kate squints at you, though she doesn't press further.

"What kind of effect will this stuff have on her?" Price enquires gruffly, more level-headed this time, his gaze shifting from the two scientists over to you and then back.

Meanwhile, as you crank your sore neck from left to right to get a good crack in, your eyes catch sight of Soap's muscular forearms and—to your horror—they linger.

The sleeves of his combat fatigues are rolled up to his elbows, exposing dark coarse hair and thick veins and that damn SAS insignia tattoo.

You want to trace the black lines with your tongue and imagine the salt of his skin on your parched taste buds.

And your eyes widen when a sudden rush of mind-numbing, pulsating heat makes you squeeze your thighs together as you clench your jaw to keep the lewd sound bubbling up in your throat from escaping.

Soap shoots you a quizzical look, one eyebrow raising as you avert your eyes from him swiftly, heat crawling up your neck and prickling beneath your skin.

"Fuck," you breathe, doubling over with a groan as the muscles in your thighs and lower abdomen begin to cramp up painfully while you can practically feel your pussy start convulsing around nothing, leaking with arousal and soaking into your underwear.

In a matter of seconds, your team—Ghost included, like a solid wall of quiet reassurance—are by your side, keeping you upright, asking questions, though their deep, accented voices are muffled as your quickening heartbeat begins to thud in your ears.

Their every touch seems to burn through the thick layers of your kit.

"Kate—Kate," Price is by her side in a few long strides, ducking his head to get on eye-level with her as he points at the two scientists accusingly, though Kate is already on her smartphone, contacting the lab again.

Price huffs like an angry bull trying to protect his herd as he turns his attention back to Dr. Boswel and Dr. Adebayo, who seem to be in a frenzied discussion, watching the way you're cramping and writhing.

"What the fuck is happening to her?" He barks at them, demanding an answer yesterday.

"It's—it's the toxin," Dr. Boswel stammers obviously, blinking up at Captain Price from behind his glasses. "She didn't get the full dose, but it's still—" He pauses, eyes flickering nervously under the captain's glare. "—bad."

Another gut-wrenching moan from you echoes through the briefing room as you squirm in Gaz's embrace, and Price must restrain himself from directing his wrath towards the two men in front of him—it's not their fault, after all.

It's his.

"Oxytocin might help… neutralize the toxin in her body," Dr. Adebayo remarks, clicking his pen nervously as he stares at his laptop screen before meeting Dr. Boswel's eyes, who is waiting for an elucidation.

"The hormone," Dr. Adebayo clears his throat again, clearly uncomfortable, "—not the drug." He clarifies, clicking his pen a few more times.

Laswell lowers her phone and shares a look with Price, holding an entire conversation with one long, meaningful glance, the one learned and perfected over more than a decade of working together, when Gaz's voice breaks through the chaos, calling for attention.

"Cap'n! What do we do?!"

You're not brought back to the barracks but Captain Price's private quarters.

Your squad makes sure to keep you out of sight in your condition; away from prying eyes while Ghost sneaks through the shadows with your quivering form cradled against his chest, carrying you bridal style like you're something fragile, something vulnerable he must protect.

Once safely inside the captain's flat, the curtains are drawn before your heavy gear is stripped from you, all while you don't even bother paying attention to who is grabbing or holding you at this point.

All that matters is someone touching you.

Your brain is mush, reduced to your most simple and carnal desires. No shame nor worry about the needy noises you're making whenever one of their big, strong hands strips another layer of clothing.

"Shit, I think she has a fever," Gaz mutters, cupping your face with both hands as he investigates your hazy, unfocused eyes while you let out another pathetic whimper. "She's completely out of it."

"Get her into the guest bedroom. Down the hall, first door on the left," Price orders gruffly, trying to keep his eyes from wandering up and down the length of your trembling, half-naked body.

"I'll call the senior consultant."

Ghost grumbles a low curse under his breath when your hand brushes over the front of his crotch—by accident or voluntarily this time, he doesn't dare imagine—and leaves the guest bedroom while Gaz and Soap manoeuvre you onto the king-sized bed.

Meanwhile, you don't care about the effect your uncharacteristic behaviour has on your teammates and superiors.

Whenever they try to make you drink or take an easy bite of food—whether it's a chewy protein bar or an overripe banana, because Price has no proper groceries at his place—you twist in whoever's embrace you're in, turning your scrunched-up face away like a petulant toddler.

"I don't wanna," you whine and hiccup, protesting each time Gaz tries to lift the rim of the water bottle to your lips, your speech now slightly slurred, glossy eyes averting their gaze as you breathe shallowly, squirming while Soap keeps you propped up with your back resting against his chest on the bed.

Gaz, who has been trying again to make you drink a sip of water for the past twenty minutes, looks back at his Lieutenant and Captain helplessly.

"Doc said we need to keep her hydrated," Price announces, rubbing his bare hand over his tired face. "Keep flushing that bloody poison outta her system and—"

Suddenly, Ghost's deep, gravelly voice interrupts the captain's speech with a harsh bite to it. "Johnny."

Soap, who has been trying his best to ignore the way you keep grinding your arse against his crotch in this position, ducks his head at the sharp and sudden warning.

"What? 'M not doin' anythin'," he grunts before sucking in a sharp breath as his cock keeps stirring and twitching in his combat trousers, "Fuck, lass, please—"

Soap tries to keep you from moving; his ungloved hands get a firm hold of your hips, but you're practically panting and mewling in his lap, making it harder for him not to crumble under the pressure building up in his dick.

Then Gaz is swift to pluck you out of the Scot's embrace with a disdainful frown, like you're some toy that was stolen from him.

"Don't be a fuckin' perv, Soap," Gaz snaps, cradling you into his arms, where you immediately begin pawing at his black compression shirt, determined to get your palms under it and on his bare skin.

"She can't consent!"

It's Price who approaches the bed then, while Ghost stays leaning against the doorframe, keeping a keen eye on the situation.

"Enough! Both of you," Price barks, eyes flashing before his shoulders drop with a rough sigh. He pinches the bridge of his nose. "Doc said it might help if—"

John stops mid-sentence, clenching his strong jaw. He can't believe what he is about to say, and he crosses his arms over his chest again, feigning control while he internally braces himself for his next words.

"Those doctors said it might help if she… climaxes."

His words hang in the air like a thick fog that no one can quite see through nor think in, and everyone seems to be holding their breath while you finally manage to tug Gaz's shirt out of his waistband, making him cuss under his breath when you go on to lick a long, wet stripe over his exposed abs like some feral lioness, utterly hungry for a taste.

"Shit—Babygirl, no, d-don't—" Gaz stammers helplessly while a rush of heat goes straight to his neck and cock simultaneously, overwhelmingly so.

He pushes you away by your shoulders—and hates himself for how reluctant he is at it—and he winces when your blunt nails claw into his bulging biceps, digging into his skin even through his shirt with another whimper.

"Please, Kyle… Let me—" you mewl, batting your eyelashes up at him. "It—It fuckin’ hurts."

Soap pushes his fists into his eye sockets, heaving a deep breath that turns into a frustrated groan. "Steamin' Jesus, lass, ye’re fuckin’ killin' us here."

"Take a bloody walk, MacTavish," Price orders, pointing his thumb at the door over his shoulder, and while Soap climbs off the mattress, grumbling to himself with an obvious erection pressing against the seam of his zipper, Price addresses Gaz.

"And you, Garrick, take—" He hesitates again, balling his hands into fists at his sides, trying to keep his own body in check at the sight and sounds of you, before he nudges his chin towards the door of the bathroom.

"Take her to the shower to get the fever down and… help her."

The captain's last words are nothing more than a strained grumble.

Gaz gapes at his superior. Soap freezes in his steps at the end of the bed, openly gawking and blinking like he didn't just hear right. Ghost visibly stiffens and shifts his stance, still leaning against the doorframe of the guest bedroom. No one can see the way he grits his teeth so hard he might chip a tooth behind his balaclava.

"But sir—"

Price shakes his head; brows set in a stern frown as he holds Gaz's widened gaze.

"She'd want you to take care of her if she could actually consent to it. And that's an order, Sergeant."

Ghost wants to disagree, but keeps his mouth shut and exhales a sharp huff of contempt instead.

The rest of the men try to distract themselves around Captain Price's flat while Gaz takes you to the en-suite bathroom like he was ordered to.

Not asked, ordered to.

He keeps repeating that in his head as he walks you towards the bathroom door with his arm around your waist, your body listing into his side like you've forgotten how to hold yourself upright. His jaw is set so tight his molars ache.

He's been ordered to do a lot of things in his career. Clear rooms. Hold positions under fire. Drag wounded men through mud while rounds cracked overhead. He's followed every order without hesitation, because that's what good soldiers do—they trust the chain of command and they execute.

This doesn't feel like any of those things.

He keeps the bathroom door unlocked—just in case you faint and he needs help—and lets out a huff when you fling yourself into his body suddenly and the air is knocked from his lungs.

"Easy," he pleads with you while his head dips down, and he inhales your familiar scent before he can stop himself. Sweat and the remnants of whatever lotion you put on this morning underneath your gear before the mission, something warm and sweet that he's caught whiffs of a hundred times before in passing and never let himself think about for longer than a second.

"Easy there, love," he tries again, his trembling hands wrapping around your midriff tentatively.

Gaz hates these circumstances. Hates how the mission ended in such a bloody mess. Hates how excited he is to undress you to your underwear, and he despises that this is how he'll get to have you for the first time.

This is not how he'd imagined it.

He never imagined it. Not in any concrete, detailed way. Not like he'd planned it in his head, step by step—the restaurant he'd take you to first, somewhere nice but not so nice you'd take the piss out of him for it. The way he'd tell you after the second drink, maybe the third, that he'd been thinking about you. Casually. Like it hadn't been eating him alive for months.

He hadn't planned any of that.

Fucking liar.

You make a sound against his chest, somewhere between a sob and a moan, and your fingers twist into the wet fabric of his compression shirt, tugging weakly.

"Kyle… Kyle, I need—"

"I know," he murmurs, and his voice comes out rougher than he intends. "I know, love. C'mon."

He manoeuvres you towards the shower, reaching past you to turn the dial to lukewarm. The water sputters, then hisses to life against the tile, and steam begins to curl at the edges of the glass.

You're still in your underwear—plain, standard issue, nothing designed to be sexy—and it doesn't matter, because the sight of you trembling and desperate in front of him with water beginning to mist across your skin is doing things to his head that no amount of mental discipline can counter.

He starts to dismantle his assault rifle in his head.

Upper receiver. Charging handle. Bolt carrier group.

You stumble into the shower cabin and he follows, still fully clothed. The water hits his chest and soaks through his compression shirt in seconds, plastering the fabric to his skin, and the cold shock of it helps. Briefly.

Bolt. Firing pin. Cam pin.

"C'mon, Babygirl," he coos at you as he turns your quivering body in his embrace until your back is flush against his chest. One arm wraps tightly below your breasts, forearm pushing up against the swell of them through the soaked fabric of your bra, and he tries, and fails miserably, not to take a long look over your shoulder.

Buffer tube. Buffer spring. Buffer.

You melt against his body and his cock throbs in his combat trousers, straining against his briefs uncomfortably. The water is doing nothing for the heat radiating off your skin. If anything, you're burning hotter, pressing back into him with small, involuntary rolls of your hips that make his breath stutter.

Lower receiver. Trigger assembly. Trigger—

"Please," you whimper, and his entire train of thought derails.

Your head lolls back against his shoulder, exposing the column of your throat, and he can see the way your pulse hammers beneath the surface, rapid and frantic. Your hips buck against his hand when he finally—finally—lets it trail down over your lower belly, his calloused fingers dragging across the wet skin, feeling the muscles jump and twitch beneath his touch.

"Yes—yes—yes—" you chant breathlessly, and your hips cant forward, chasing his hand with a desperation that makes something crack open in his chest.

Fuck—fuck—fuck—fuck.

He cups your pussy through your knickers and the heat of you against his palm nearly makes his knees buckle. He can feel you through the thin, soaked fabric and he's not sure if the wetness is from the shower stream or if it's all you.

His chest is heaving when he finally gathers enough courage to dip his long fingers beneath the waistband of your underwear. His jaw clenches and his mind grasps desperately for the drills again—clear left, clear right, move to the next room, check your corners—anything to stay anchored while you let out a moan that echoes off the tile walls and punches straight through him.

You're so wet, so swollen, it's obscene. His fingers slide through your folds with zero resistance and the groan that rips from deep within his chest is involuntary, guttural, ashamed. He can feel your arousal ooze from your entrance, slick and hot, and he can already tell how tight you'd feel clenching around his fingers, how you'd—

No. He's not going there.

"Fuck," he curses under his breath, more to himself than to you. "I'm only doin' this for you, Babygirl. This is only about you."

He says it like a prayer. Like if he repeats it enough, it'll be true.

His fingers press on your clit, pulsing and twitching already, and he starts rubbing small, firm circles over it, adjusting the pressure when your breath hitches or your thighs clamp around his wrist. He reads your body like he reads a room. Methodically, attentive, and cataloguing every reaction.

You writhe and squirm in his tight grip, your nails digging into the arm he has banded around your ribs, and every sound you make, every whimper, and stuttered gasp of his name, chips away at the wall he's trying to keep standing between following an order and wanting this.

"M-more, Kyle, please!"

Gaz curses himself, but he gives you more.

Two fingers pressing into you, slow and careful despite every instinct screaming at him to give you what you're begging for. You clench around him immediately, hot and tight and silky, and his cock kicks in his trousers so hard he must bite the inside of his cheek to keep from groaning.

He curls his fingers, searching for the spot that makes your thighs shake, and when he finds it, you keen so loudly the sound bounces off every hard surface in the small bathroom.

"That's it," he murmurs against your temple, his lips brushing your skin without quite kissing. "That's it, love. Let go for me."

He's not sure when he started talking to you like this. Somewhere between the first touch and the second, the clinical detachment he'd been clinging to crumbled and something else took its place—something tender and fierce and terrifyingly honest.

Your first orgasm hits you hard enough to make your entire body seize in his arms, your back arching away from his chest as a strangled cry tears from your throat. He holds you through it, fingers still working, still pressing and giving, because even as the tremors wrack through you and your legs give out, he can feel your body already winding up again, the toxin refusing to let you rest.

"Shh, shh, I've got you," he breathes, adjusting his grip to take your full weight when your knees buckle entirely. "I've got you."

You cum again two minutes later, and then again after that, and again, and Gaz loses count somewhere around the fifth or sixth time, when his fingers are cramping and his arm is trembling from holding you upright and the water has long since turned cold.

Each time, he thinks it'll be enough, and each time, your body coils tight again within minutes, the toxin driving you right back to the edge with a cruelty that makes him want to put his fist through the tile.

He doesn’t want to imagine what a full dose would have done to you. To anyone.

When you tell him that you're hurting—repeatedly, begging him to make you cum in that desperate, broken tone of yours—the young Sergeant is sure something dies inside him on the spot.

"Kyle—Kyle, I need more, I need you to—please—Fuck, please!"

He knows what you're asking for. You're grinding back against his cock, which has been rock-hard and aching for what feels like hours, and every roll of your hips sends a jolt of white-hot arousal through him that he must physically brace against.

"I can't," he grits out, and it takes everything in him. "Christ. I can't do that to you. Not like this."

"Please—"

"No, Babygirl." His voice cracks on the word, and he presses his forehead against the back of your head, squeezing his eyes shut. "Not like this."

He drops to his knees instead.

The tile is hard and unforgiving under his kneecaps and the now cold water from the shower hits the back of his neck, but he barely registers any of it as he turns you to face him and hooks one of your legs over his shoulder.

He looks up at you once—your hazy, unfocused eyes, the way your chest heaves, the water running in rivulets down your body—and then he leans forward and drags his tongue through your folds in one long, broad stroke.

The sound you make is devastating.

Your hands fly to his head, fingers scrabbling for purchase on his wet hair, and your hips jerk forward so violently he must grip your thigh to keep you steady. He groans against you, he can't help it, and the vibration makes you cry out again, blunt nails raking over his scalp.

Gaz eats you like he's starving for it, because the truth he can't say out loud is that he is.

He's thought about this. Dreamed about it. Wanked to the idea of it in the dark of his bunk with his fist shoved against his mouth to keep quiet. And now he's here, on his knees in his Captain's shower with cold water running down his back and your taste flooding his mouth, and it's everything and nothing like what he imagined because you're not choosing this—you're not choosing him—and that knowledge sits in his chest like a brick.

But he doesn't stop.

Gaz licks and sucks and fucks you with his tongue until his jaw aches and your thighs are shaking so badly you can barely stand, even with his hands gripping your hips. He makes you cum on his mouth twice, then thrice, pressing his face into you each time your body locks up, working you through it with relentless, single-minded focus because if he stops to think about what this means, about what happens after, he'll fall apart.

When he finally pulls back, his lips are swollen, his chin is slick and his cock is so hard it genuinely hurts. You're still whimpering, still reaching for him, still not done, and the toxin is still pumping through your veins with no sign of stopping.

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and exhales a shaky breath, pressing his forehead against your hip.

"I need—" His voice is wrecked. He swallows hard, then tries again. "I need a minute."

Not because he's tired, or his fingers are cramped and his jaw is sore and his knees are bruised from the tile. No.

But if he stays on his knees in front of you for one more second, he's going to give you what you're begging for, and he will never forgive himself for it.

He stands on unsteady legs, turns the shower off, and reaches for the towel hanging on the rack outside the cabin. His hands are shaking as he wraps it around, and you cling to it loosely, swaying on your feet.

"C'mon," he says, guiding you towards the door with one hand on the small of your back. His voice has steadied, but his eyes haven't. "Let's get you dried off."

You're protesting. He's cursing under his breath. There's shuffling, a stumble, and then he grabs the door handle and swings it open—

And Soap nearly falls backwards into the bathroom.

"Soap!"

The Scotsman catches himself on the doorway, one hand gripping the frame as he glances over his shoulder with a look that's not even remotely sheepish enough for a man who was clearly pressing his ear to the door thirty seconds ago.

Gaz is still wearing his clothes, though they're completely drenched—his compression shirt is a second skin, his combat trousers heavy with water, boots squelching on the tile. He's holding you by the forearm as you stand next to him, loose towel wrapped around your body, still trembling, still making those small, desperate sounds in the back of your throat.

"The fuck, mate? Did you eavesdrop on us?"

Soap shrugs as he straightens up, adjusting his stance in a way that's clearly meant to disguise the state of his trousers. "Was jus' checkin' on ye."

"Checking on—" Gaz's jaw works, nostrils flaring. He wants to snap, wants to shove Soap back into the hallway and slam the door, but he's running on fumes and you're leaning into him again, your face pressed against his soaked chest, mumbling incoherently.

"She needs—" Gaz starts, then stops. Looks down at you, back up at Soap. Something heavy passes between the two men, unspoken but understood.

"She needs more than I can give her right now," he finishes quietly, and the admission costs him more than any of them will ever know.

Soap's expression shifts. The boyish smirk drops, replaced by something sobered, and he gives Gaz a short nod—the kind they exchange in the field when one of them is spent and the other takes point.

"A'right," Soap answers, surprisingly steady, rolling his broad shoulders. "Ah’ve got 'er."

Gaz transfers you into Soap's waiting arms with a gentleness that borders on reverent—one hand on the back of your head, the other guiding your shoulders—and he doesn't let go until he's sure Soap has you secure.

Then he walks past them both, water dripping from every inch of him, and doesn't look back.

He makes it to the kitchen before his hands start shaking badly enough that he has to brace them flat on the counter. He stands there, head bowed, water pooling on the linoleum beneath him, and breathes.

Ghost is leaning against the opposite wall with his arms crossed, and he doesn't say a word.

There is no need to.

Soap carries you back to the bed like you weigh nothing to him; one arm under your knees, the other around your back, the towel slipping loose and neither of you caring, and he lays you down with a surprising gentleness that contradicts every tightly coiled muscle in his body.

He's been hard since the briefing room, balls throbbing uncomfortably. Over two hours of it. The kind of persistent, throbbing ache that sits low in his gut and pulses in time with his heartbeat, and he's been dealing with it the way he deals with most discomfort.

By ignoring it aggressively and hoping it fucks off on its own.

It has not fucked off unfortunately. Truth be told, he’d be worried about himself if it did.

"Right then," he mutters, kneeling on the mattress beside you as he cracks his neck and rolls his shoulders again like he's about to breach a door. "Let's sort ye out, hen."

And that's the thing about Johnny MacTavish—he doesn't agonise. Not the way Gaz does, all quiet guilt and moral calculus. Soap's moral framework is simpler, blunter, built from different materials. You're his teammate, you're hurting, and he can help. Everything else is noise.

That doesn't mean he's unaffected; doesn't mean his hands aren't shaking when he settles between your legs and pushes the towel fully away from your body, or that his breath doesn't hitch hard enough to hear when he gets his first proper look at you fully naked, spread out on the white sheets with your chest heaving and your thighs trembling and your eyes half-lidded, glassy, barely tracking him.

Christ, you're beautiful.

He's thought about this. Fuck. Of course he has. He's not a bloody monk, and you're you.

He's thought about it in the gym when you spot him on the bench press and your face hovers above his, upside down and grinning. He's thought about it on long transports when you fall asleep against his shoulder and he stays perfectly still for hours so you won't wake up. Or when you laugh at his shite jokes that no one else finds funny, when you steal chips off his plate in the mess, when you call him Johnny instead of Soap and don't even notice you've done it.

He's thought about it a lot.

But not like this.

"You with me?" he asks, tapping your cheek lightly with two fingers. Your eyes roll towards him, struggling to focus, and you make a sound that's part whimper, part plea.

Close enough.

"A'right, sweetheart. I've got ye."

He doesn't ease into it the way Gaz did. Where Gaz was methodical, with careful touches, measured pressure, and constant checking, Soap is instinct. He reads you through vibration and sound, adjusts on the fly, follows the frequency of your moans like he's tuning into a signal.

He dips his head between your thighs and licks into you without preamble, broad and hot and greedy, and the noise that tears out of you rattles something loose in his chest.

"Fuck—tha's it," he groans against you, the vibration making your hips jolt, and his big hands grip the backs of your thighs to keep you spread open and steady. "Tha's my bonnie girl."

He's not quiet about it, either. Soap eats pussy the way he does most things. With enthusiasm, commitment, and absolutely zero self-consciousness. Wet, filthy sounds fill the bedroom, punctuated by his own groans and your increasingly incoherent cries, and he doesn't give a single shit that the door is open, and his team can hear every obscene noise he's wringing out of you.

Let them hear.

His tongue works over your clit in fast, tight circles, then broad, flat strokes, alternating rhythm and pressure every time he feels your thighs start to shake. When you try to close your legs, he pins them open with his forearms. When you try to squirm away—overstimulated, oversensitive, too much and not enough at the same time—he follows relentlessly, dragging you back by the hips with a growl that rumbles against your soaked flesh.

"Nuh-uh. Stay still f'me."

He makes you cum with his mouth in under five minutes and then doesn't stop.

Your fingers twist into the sheets, into his mohawk, clawing at his scalp as your back arches off the mattress and a wrecked sob punches out of your lungs. Soap groans in response, the sound reverential, like your pleasure is a hymn and he's on his knees in church.

He keeps going. Lapping at you through the aftershocks, sucking your clit between his lips until you're keening, pressing his tongue inside you just to feel you clench around it, and when you cum again with his name breaking apart on your lips—Johnny, Johnny, fuck yes, Johnny—he nearly blacks out from how hard his cock throbs in response.

His hips have started moving on their own. Small, involuntary rolls against the mattress, his aching cock grinding against the sheets through his combat trousers, and he knows he should fucking stop, should pull his hips back, should focus on you and not the desperate friction building between his body and the bed.

But he doesn't stop.

He is physically incapable.

You taste like honey and salt and something almost medicinal underneath—the toxin, probably, working its way out of your system through your sweat and your slick—and he's drunk on it. Drunk on the way you say his name, how your thighs tremble against the sides of his head, drunk on the wet sounds of his tongue on your cunt and the way you keep pulling his face closer, harder, more.

"God—fuck—lass, ye taste so fuckin' good—"

He's rutting against the mattress in earnest now, his hips snapping in sharp, desperate little thrusts, and the friction is nowhere near enough and exactly too much at the same time.

The sheets are going to be ruined. He doesn't care. Can't. He’s a weak man, and his entire world has narrowed to the taste of you on his tongue and the ache in his junk and the way your body keeps arching into him like he's the only thing keeping you alive.

"Please—please, Johnny, I need—I can't—"

"I know, hen, I know—" he pants against your inner thigh, pressing a biting kiss there that makes you yelp, "—jus' one more, c'mon, give me one more, aye?"

He flickers his tongue, seals his mouth over your clit and sucks, hard, and you shatter. Your thighs clamp around his head, your hands fist in his hair so tightly it stings, and the scream that rips from your throat is ragged and raw and so fucking beautiful that he comes.

Inside his combat pants.

His hips stutter against the mattress and a guttural, muffled groan vibrates against your pussy as his cock pulses and spills, hot and wet, soaking through his briefs and into his trousers. His arms shake, his vision whites out for a second, and he has to press his forehead against your inner thigh and just breathe through it, chest heaving, while you whimper above him, still trembling from your own orgasm.

He pulls back slowly, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and the reality of what just happened settles over him like a cloth soaked in ice water. He stares down at himself, at the damp patch darkening the front of his trousers, and lets out a long, defeated exhale.

"MacTavish."

Ghost's voice comes from the doorway; flat and sharp, dripping with contempt.

Soap closes his eyes, disappointed in himself, exhaling through his nose. "Aye. I know."

"You know?" Price's voice joins Ghost's, closer, much heavier. The captain is standing just inside the bedroom now, arms folded, jaw set. He looks at Soap the way a father looks at a teenage son caught doing something monumentally stupid.

"Get yourself sorted. Now."

Soap doesn't argue. He climbs off the bed on unsteady legs, not meeting anyone's eyes, and adjusts his trousers with a grimace as he shuffles past Ghost in the doorway.

Ghost doesn't move to let him pass. Makes him squeeze by, shoulder to shoulder, just to make it uncomfortable.

"Disgusting," Ghost mutters, low enough that only Soap hears it.

"Fuck off, LT," Soap mutters back, and there's no heat in it. Just shame.

You don't notice the shift at first.

One moment there are hands and mouths on you, voices and pressure and friction. The next, everything is quieter. Stiller. The mattress dips on one side and stays dipped, a solid weight settling beside you but not on you, not against you, not close enough to touch.

You whine at the loss of contact, of heat, of anything, and reach blindly for whoever is there.

A large hand catches your wrist. Gentle and firm, holding it in place.

"Don't."

One word. Low and gravelly, scraped raw like it was dragged over broken glass and wire mesh on its way out of his throat.

Ghost.

He's sitting on the edge of the bed with his back straight and his boots still on, because taking his boots off would mean he's staying, and staying would mean—he doesn't finish the thought.

Price asked him to sit with you while Gaz and Soap pulled themselves together. Asked this time, not ordered, because Price knows that ordering Ghost to do something he doesn't want to do is about as effective as ordering the tide to turn. Ghost agreed with a single nod, and now here he is, and every muscle in his body is locked so tight he might snap a tendon.

You're lying on your side, curled in on yourself, wearing nothing but your sodden underwear again and the ghost of everyone else's touch on your skin. The towel is long gone. Your body is still trembling, still feverish, still caught in the grip of the toxin, and the soft, pained sounds you keep making are doing things to him that he absolutely cannot allow.

He's hard. Has been since you doubled over and moaned and he had to watch your body betray you in front of everyone. His cock is straining against his trousers, thick and heavy and insistent.

Ghost pretends it isn’t. He's very good at pretending things don't exist.

"Simon…"

His jaw clenches beneath the balaclava. You rarely use his first name—none of them do—and hearing it now, in that voice, breathy and desperate and small, is a kind of cruelty he wasn't prepared for.

"You need to drink something," he murmurs, and reaches for the water bottle on the nightstand without looking at you.

"Don't want—"

"Wasn't bloody askin’."

He unscrews the cap and turns to you, and the mistake—the critical, tactical, unforgivable mistake—is that he looks at your face next.

Your eyes are glassy and wet, your lips parted around shallow little breaths, and you're looking up at him like he's the only solid thing in a world that's been spinning for hours.

Not with lust—not the way you looked at Gaz and Soap—but with something quieter. Something that reaches past the toxin and grabs hold of something deeper.

Trust.

You trust him. Even now, reduced to your basest instincts, your intoxicated, unhinged brain still recognises him as safe.

Something fractures behind his ribs, and he shuts it down immediately, brutally, the way he shuts down everything that threatens to breach the walls.

"Sit up," he orders, and his voice is soft yet steady even if the rest of him isn't. He slides one hand behind your head—just his palm, just enough to support your neck—and lifts the bottle to your lips.

You drink. Slowly, reluctantly, with small sips that dribble down your chin, but you drink. He holds the bottle still and watches the column of your throat move with each swallow, and when a drop of water runs from the corner of your mouth and trails down your neck, dark eyes track it all the way to your collarbone before catching himself and looking away.

"More," he says curtly, bringing the bottle back.

You manage a few more sips before turning your head away with a pitiful sound, and he lets you, setting the bottle aside. His hand lingers on the back of your head a moment too long—his thumb brushing once against the nape of your neck—before he pulls it back like he's been burned.

You reach for him again. Fingers closing around the fabric of his sleeve, tugging weakly.

"Stay. Please. Don't—Don't go."

"'M not goin’ anywhere." The words come out before he can vet them, gruff and low, and he immediately resents himself for saying them so quickly, so easily, like a confession slipped out under duress.

He lets you hold onto his sleeve. That much he can allow. That much won't cross a line he cannot uncross.

You shift closer, seeking warmth, and your body curls towards him until your forehead is pressed against his thigh. He goes completely rigid, every muscle locking and nerve firing, and his hands hover in the air on either side of you, not touching, not pulling away, suspended in the unbearable middle ground of a man who wants desperately but won't take.

Another small whimper from you. Not desire this time but pain. The cramps rolling through your body in waves, the toxin still doing its vicious work even after everything Gaz and Soap wrung from you. You're shaking, and not just from arousal. You're exhausted. Dehydrated. Your body is at war with itself.

Ghost is not a gentle man. He knows this about himself the way he knows his blood type and his boot size. It's a fact, unalterable, built into the architecture. He doesn't comfort. He doesn't soothe. He handles.

But.

His hand comes down on the back of your head, and it stays.

Heavy and warm through the leather of his glove. Not stroking just resting, a solid weight against your skull, and you let out a breath that sounds like it's been trapped in your lungs for hours.

You stop shaking. Not entirely. The tremors are still there, running through you in small aftershocks, but the worst of it eases under the steady pressure of his palm, like he's an anchor and you've been drifting.

"Ghost?" Your voice is small, barely a whisper.

"Yeah."

"It hurts."

He closes his eyes behind the mask. His hand presses down just slightly—a fraction more weight, a fraction more warmth—and his throat works around words that don't come.

He knows it hurts. He knows Gaz and Soap's efforts weren't enough. He knows what the doctors said—what Price said—and he knows what would fix it, and he can't.

Not because he doesn't want to. Because he wants it too fucking much.

Simon Riley is not a man who trusts himself with things he wants.

Wanting, in his experience, is the first step towards destroying, and he has destroyed enough for one lifetime. Touching you now the way his body is screaming at him to would not be careful or measured or controlled or gentle.

It would be all consuming, and he would take too much, and he would never be able to look you in the eyes again.

So he sits on the edge of the bed with his boots on and his cock aching and his hand on the back of your head, and he holds himself perfectly, agonisingly still. Just a solid shadow in a bedroom.

You press your face harder against his thigh and he lets you. Your fingers tighten on his sleeve and he lets you. Your breath evens out incrementally but still too fast, still too shallow, though calmer now, and he lets that happen too, guarding it like a perimeter, daring anything to disturb it.

He doesn't know how long you stay like that. Long enough for the light under the curtains to shift and for his leg to go numb beneath the pressure of your head. Long enough for Gaz to appear in the doorway, freshly changed into borrowed civvies, and stop dead at the sight of them.

Ghost meets his eyes over the top of your head. His expression is unreadable behind the mask, but his hand doesn't move from your hair, and that says more than his face ever could.

Gaz nods once and backs out without a word.

In the kitchen, Price is pouring two fingers of whisky into a tumbler and staring at the far wall like it owes him money. Soap is sitting at the table in a pair of Price's joggers, his soiled trousers balled up in a plastic bag at his feet, looking like a scolded dog.

"She's calmer," Gaz says quietly as he enters, and both men look up. "Ghost's with her."

Price takes a long drink. Sets the glass down. Rubs a hand over his beard.

"It's not enough, is it."

It's not a question and Gaz doesn't answer it.

"She's still in pain. She keeps—" He stops and swallows thickly. "She keeps asking. Saying she’s in pain."

The captain stares at the whisky in his glass. The silence stretches, tense and heavy, pressing in on the walls of the small kitchen.

"She needs more than fingers and a mouth," Soap says bluntly, because someone fucking has to, and delicacy has never been his strong suit. Gaz shoots him a look, but Soap holds it, unapologetic.

"He's right," Price agrees suddenly, and the words taste like bile. He pushes away from the counter and stands to his full height, shoulders squared, and for a moment he looks every inch the officer. Burdened, resolute, carrying a decision he'll second-guess for the rest of his life.

"Gentlemen's agreement," he says. His voice is low, steady, absolute. "What happens tonight stays in this flat. No one treats her differently when this is over. No one brings it up unless she does. No one holds it over anyone, including himself."

He looks at each of them in turn—Gaz, then Soap—and holds until he gets a nod from both.

"And we tell Ghost."

Ghost doesn't agree.

He listens to the terms of the gentlemen's agreement from the doorway of the kitchen, arms crossed, stance wide, radiating the kind of stillness that makes lesser men instinctively check their exits. When Price finishes, Ghost holds the silence for a long, loaded beat.

And then: "No."

Price doesn't flinch. "No to which part?"

"All of it. My part." Ghost's voice is flat and final, stripped of everything except the decision itself. "I'll stay with her. I won't fuck her."

Soap opens his mouth—probably to say something spectacularly unhelpful—and Gaz kicks him under the table without looking.

Price studies his Lieutenant for a moment. Then he nods once, heavy with an understanding that doesn't need to be spoken.

"Fair enough." He rolls his sleeves up to his forearms. The mechanical motion of a man preparing for something he cannot delegate. "I'll go first."

No one dares to argue.

Unlike Soap, Price closes the guest bedroom door behind him and stands there for a moment with his hand still on the knob, just breathing. It smells of sex and pheromones, but wrong.

The room is dim. Someone turned off the overhead and left only the bedside lamp, casting everything in low amber light that softens the edges of the furniture and the shape of you on the bed. You're curled on your side, knees drawn up, one hand clutching the pillow beneath your head. The sheets are wrecked; damp and twisted, pulled loose from two corners, and your skin glistens with a thin sheen of sweat.

You look small.

That's the thing that hits him first and hits him hardest.

You're one of his soldiers. He's seen you clear buildings, haul wounded men twice your size to extraction, take a round to the vest and get back up swearing. You are not small. You have never been small or fragile.

But you look it now, trembling and fever-damp and reduced to a version of yourself that he never should have had to witness, and the weight of that sits on his shoulders like a ruck full of stones.

He crosses the room in a few strides and sits on the edge of the mattress. The frame groans under his weight.

"Sergeant."

You stir, your head lifting, and your eyes find his face. They're glassy and unfocused, but there's a flicker of recognition—Captain—before it's swallowed by the next wave rolling through your body. You let out a sound that's half sob, half moan, your thighs pressing together, and your hand reaches out blindly until your fingers catch the fabric of his shirt.

"It hurts," you whisper. "Still hurts. Why does it still—"

"I know." He catches your wrist, holds it. His thumb presses against your pulse point to check, and it’s rapid, thready, way too fast for simply lying on a bed. "I'm going to help you."

He says it the way he says we're moving on that compound at 0300 or I need eyes on that ridgeline. Leaving no room for ambiguity, because if he allows ambiguity into this room, he'll start thinking about what he's doing, and if he starts thinking, he'll stop, and if he stops.

You'll keep hurting. Under his command.

He stands long enough to strip his shirt over his head and remove his belt, and then he's back on the bed, propped against the headboard with you between his legs, your back against his bare chest; coarse salt and pepper hair rasping against your tacky skin. One arm wraps around your midsection, heavy and secure, anchoring you.

"Easy," he murmurs against the top of your head. "I've got you, love."

His free hand trails down your stomach, and your muscles jump and twitch beneath his rough palm. He catalogues every reaction. The hitch in your breathing, the way your hips tilt up to meet him, the small, desperate noise you make when his fingers dip below your navel. The same way he catalogues threat patterns and exit routes.

This is a mission. He is completing the objective. He is taking care of his wounded soldier.

He keeps telling himself that as he peels your underwear down your thighs and off, tossing them aside. As he runs his hand up the inside of your thigh and feels you shake. As he finally cups you and discovers just how wet and swollen you are, dripping on his fingers, he has to close his eyes and clench his jaw against the visceral punch of arousal that knocks through him.

This is the job. You gave the order. See it through.

He works you with his fingers first, because he needs to know what you can take. Two thick fingers pressing into you slowly, carefully, and the sounds you make guts him.

"That's it." His voice is lower now, rougher. "There you go, sweetheart."

He doesn't call his soldiers sweetheart. He has never, in twenty-odd years of service, called anyone under his command sweetheart. The word falls out of him like a loose round, and he can't take it back.

Your sopping hole clenches around his fingers and his cock, already hard and straining against the front of his trousers, jerks so violently he must bite back a groan. He curls his fingers inside you, finds the swollen spot that makes your spine arch and your breath stutter, and works it with a patient, devastating precision.

You cum and gush on his fingers with a broken cry, your body locking up in his arms, and the aftershocks roll through you in long, shuddering waves that he holds you through without a word.

It's still not enough. He knows it won't be for a while longer.

Price reaches for the condom on the nightstand—Gaz found them in Price's bathroom cabinet, a half-empty box, almost expired, shoved behind the toiletries like an afterthought—and tears the foil with his teeth while you keen and squirm against him, already spiralling back up.

He undoes his trousers and pushes them down just enough to free himself, because keeping them on feels like maintaining some essential boundary, some last scrap of separation between Captain Price doing what needs to be done and John wanting what he shouldn't want.

Rolling the condom on is a particular exercise in self-control. His cock is thick, flushed dark when his foreskin slides back, weeping pre at the tip, and every brush of his own fingers against the oversensitive skin makes his abs clench.

He lifts you with ease, one hand on your hip, the other gripping himself, and positions you above his lap.

"Sergeant," he grunts through gritted teeth, "look at me."

Your head lolls back against his shoulder, eyes half-open, and you meet his gaze as best you can. He searches for something in your expression—recognition, maybe awareness, you—and finds enough of it to quiet the loudest of the voices screaming in his head.

"If it's too much, y’tell me. That's a bloody order."

You nod hazily. He doesn't know if you actually processed the words, but he needed to say them. Needed that on the record, if only between himself and God.

He lowers you onto him slowly.

The sound that comes out of him is not one he's ever made before.

You're scorching hot and soaked. Your body takes him inch by inch, clenching and fluttering around him as gravity and his guiding hand ease you down, and by the time you're fully seated in his lap, he's seeing stars and his fingers have left dents in the flesh of your hip.

"Fuck," he breathes, and the word is ragged at the edges, torn from somewhere deeper than his chest.

You moan shamelessly, and the relief in the sound nearly undoes him. Like something that's been wound unbearably tight has finally been given slack. Your body relaxes against his, tension draining from your muscles for the first time in hours, and the change is so visible, so immediate, that it almost justifies this.

Almost.

He starts to move. Rolling his hips up into you, slow and deep, both hands gripping your waist to control the pace. He keeps it measured; long and deliberate strokes that drag against your inner walls and make you whimper with each one, because if he lets himself go, if he fucks you the way his body is begging him to, he'll lose himself entirely.

And he hates—Christ, he hates—how fucking good you feel.

He hates the way you fit around him like you were made for it, and the way your head falls back against his shoulder, how your lips part and you breathe his name—not his rank, not Captain, but John—and the sound of it rushes through him hot and electric and wrong. Hates the wet, obscene sound of your body taking him repeatedly; that his hips are moving faster now, snapping up into you with a force that makes the headboard knock against the wall.

Hates that he doesn't want to stop.

Your eyes squeeze shut, your head tips back as you cry out. "John—John—oh god—"

His arm tightens around your ribs, crushing you back against his chest, and his mouth finds the curve of your shoulder—not kissing, just pressing there, teeth grazing skin, breathing you in. His other hand slides down between your thighs and rubs tight circles on your clit in counterpoint to each thrust, and you come apart so violently in his arms that he has to hold you through it with every ounce of strength he has.

You clench around him like a vice and he follows you over the edge with a bitten-off groan, his hips stuttering, his cock pulsing deep inside you as the orgasm tears through him with a ferocity that whites out his vision.

For a few suspended seconds, there's nothing left. No rank, no mission, no guilt. Just the pounding of his heart and the aftershocks rippling through both your bodies and the impossible, terrible warmth of you around him.

Then reality seeps back in, cold and unforgiving, and Captain John Price opens his eyes and begins the long process of hating himself for every second of the last twenty minutes.

He pulls out carefully, disposes of the condom, and fixes his trousers. When he leans you back against the pillows, your eyes are already glazing over again, your body winding up for more, and the sight of it makes something weary and furious crack behind his chest cavity

He cups your jaw, tilting your face up. "Stay with me, Sergeant. Stay with me."

You whimper, and your hips shift restlessly against the sheets.

Price stands and walks to the door on legs that feel like they belong to someone else.

"Garrick. You're up."

Gaz and Soap take you in turns after that, and it's different this time.

Where the first round was clinical in its own way—Gaz with his careful guilt, Soap with his missionary zeal, Price bearing the weight of command—this his round is rawer.

The boundaries have been breached, and the gentlemen's agreement hangs over the room like a ceasefire that everyone knows is temporary.

Gaz is gentler than Price was. He lays you on your back and settles between your thighs with a tenderness that borders on devotion, pressing his forehead against yours as he pushes inside you.

He goes slow and gentle, and whispers things against your temple that no one else can hear, private things meant only for the space between your mouth and his.

"I've got you," he murmurs repeatedly. "I've got you, Babygirl, I'm right here. I will be here."

He comes inside the condom with a shudder and your name bitten into the skin of your shoulder, and when he pulls out and rolls onto his back beside you, he stares at the ceiling for a long time without blinking, tears prickling at the corners of his eyes.

Soap goes after. He's not gentle—can't be, doesn't know how to be, not with the way you claw at his back and wrap your legs around his waist and beg him harder, please, harder—but he's present.

He hooks your knee over his broad shoulders and fucks you deep, watching your face with a focused intensity that's almost clinical in its own right, cataloguing every reaction, every gasp, adjusting angle and depth and rhythm like he's zeroing a scope.

"Tha's it, sweetheart, take it—fuck, yer so—fuck—"

The condoms run out after Soap's first round.

Gaz discovers this when he reaches for the box on the nightstand and finds it empty, and the look on his face—the quiet oh, shit—would be funny in any other context.

"Cap'n," he calls, voice strained. "We've got a problem."

Price, who has been standing in the hallway staring at nothing, appears in the doorway. Gaz holds up the empty box. Price closes his eyes.

"Then pull out," the captain says flatly. "That's an order."

It should be simple, and it’s anything but.

Gaz tries. He genuinely, sincerely tries, but you're clenching around him so tightly and making those sounds, those desperate and wrecked, grateful sounds, and when your orgasm hits and your walls contract around his cock in rhythmic, milking pulses, his hips stutter and he buries himself to the hilt and spills inside you with a choked groan before his brain even registers what his body has done.

"Shit—shit, I'm sorry, I—fuck—"

He pulls out too late, watches his cum leak from you onto the sheets, and drops his head against your sternum with a devastated exhale.

Soap doesn't even pretend he's going to manage it.

"'M not gonna be able to pull out," he announces with a frankness that makes Gaz want to strangle him. "Jus' bein' honest, Cap."

"You'll pull out or I'll pull you out myself, MacTavish."

And yet Soap does not, in fact, pull out in time.

Price has to physically haul him back by the shoulder, and even then, Soap's cock jerks and pulses as it slips free, painting your inner thighs and lower belly with hot, thick ropes of cum while the Scotsman lets out a string of Gaelic curses that would make his mother disown him.

The room smells like multiple people fucking and sweating and something medicinal—the toxin, working its way out of your pores at last—and you're finally, finally, starting to slow down.

The desperate edge has dulled. Your whimpers are quieter now, tired rather than urgent, and your body has stopped arching off the bed every few minutes.

You're still reaching, though. Still searching for contact, for warmth, for a body against yours.

Ghost enters the room without being asked.

He's stripped down to his black t-shirt and trousers. The balaclava is still on, but his gloves are off, and the sight of his bare, scarred hands is somehow more intimate than anything else that's happened in this room tonight.

He doesn't look at the other men or acknowledge the state of the sheets or the smell or the heavy, post-coital guilt saturating the air.

He simply moves to the bed, sits down, and gathers you against his chest with a practised efficiency that suggests he's been rehearsing this moment in his head for the last two hours.

You go willingly. Boneless, exhausted, trembling with the last dregs of the toxin and the cumulative aftermath of more orgasms than your body was designed to handle in one night. Your face presses into the crook of his neck, your fingers curl loosely in the front of his shirt, and you let out a breath that sounds like surrender.

Ghost pulls the duvet up over both of you. One arm settles around your back securely. His other hand comes up to cradle the back of your head, fingers curling into your hair, and he holds you against him like he's shielding you from blast radius.

"Go to sleep," he says quietly. An order and a request and a plea all compressed into three words.

You make a small, incoherent sound against his throat.

"I know." His hand moves over your hair, slowly and gentle. "Sleep."

Price watches from the doorway for a moment. Then he pulls the door halfway closed and leaves the Lieutenant to his vigil.

In the kitchen, the captain pours himself another whisky—three fingers this time—and drinks it standing up, staring at the drawn curtains. Gaz is in the shower. Soap is sprawled on the sofa in the living room, one arm over his eyes, dead to the world.

Price's phone buzzes. Laswell.

How is she?

He stares at the screen for a long time. Types and deletes three different responses before finally settling on one.

Handled. Debrief in the morning.

He sets the phone face-down on the counter and finishes his drink.

Hours later, you wake up slowly, like surfacing from deep water.

The first thing you register is warmth. A wall of it, solid and breathing, pressed against your back. An arm draped over your waist, heavy with sleep. Fingers loosely tangled in yours against your sternum.

The second thing you register is that you are naked, sore in places you don't want to think about, and your mouth tastes like the inside of a boot.

The third thing is the balaclava.

You can feel it, the knitted fabric against the back of your neck, and the slow, even exhale of breath warming your skin through the cloth. The chest behind you rises and falls in the deep, steady rhythm of genuine sleep, which means the Lieutenant trusts this room enough to have let himself go under.

Which means something, though you're too foggy to figure out what.

You shift slightly, testing your body. Everything aches. Your thighs, your hips, your abs, your jaw for some reason, and there's a deep, bone-level exhaustion settled into your muscles that reminds you of the tail end of a bad flu.

The cramps are gone, though. The tingling, the feverish heat, the desperate, clawing need—all of it has receded, leaving behind a hollow, wrung-out emptiness.

And memory. Fragments of it. Arriving in pieces like delayed radio transmissions.

Kyle's hands shaking as he touched you. I'm only doin' this for you, babygirl. Johnny's mouth on you, hot and relentless. The sound he made against your thighs.

The shower. The water. Voices.

John.

Your eyes open wide and your body goes rigid, and the arm around your waist tightens reflexively. Ghost pulling you closer in his sleep, an unconscious response to a perceived threat, even though the threat is just you waking up and remembering.

You lie very still.

The flat is quiet. Early morning light edges around the curtains, pale and grey, and somewhere in the distance, you can hear the muffled sounds of the base waking up—vehicles, a distant shout, the rhythmic thud of boots on tarmac.

You don't move, don't speak. You stare at the wall and breathe and try to organise the wreckage in your head into something you can process.

Behind you, Ghost's breathing changes. Shifts from deep and even to something shallower, more aware. His arm tenses around you, a brief contraction of muscle, there and gone, and you know the exact moment he wakes up, because his entire body goes perfectly, absolutely still.

Neither of you says a word.

His hand is still tangled with yours against your bare chest. His thumb rests against your knuckle. But he doesn't pull away.

The silence stretches. Not uncomfortable, exactly. Heavy. Full of things that need to be said and won't be. Not now, certainly not yet, and maybe not ever. And there is a fragile, terrified understanding that what happened in this room changed the molecular structure of something that can never be unchanged.

Finally, after what feels like an hour but is probably two minutes, Ghost speaks.

"How do you feel?"

You consider the question. Really consider it, not the reflexive I'm fine that sits on your tongue out of habit.

"Like shit," you answer honestly. Your voice is wrecked, raspy, and it hurts to talk.

Then, so quietly you almost miss it, he answers, "Yeah."

His thumb moves once. A single, slow stroke across your knuckle.

Then he lets go of your hand, carefully disentangles himself from around you, and gets up without another word. You hear his boots being pulled back on. The soft click of the door.

You lie in the bed that smells like all four of them and none of yourself, and you stare at the wall, and you breathe.

A convenient lie. The kind Jade can write in her sleep, and one vague enough that nobody in their right mind would question it, because nobody wants the details of someone else's stomach problems.

It works. You hate that it works, because it means you're stuck behind a desk.

Two weeks of paperwork, inventory logs, and mission reports that need filing instead of writing. Two weeks of watching your team kit up and walk out the door while you sit in a swivel chair under fluorescent lights that still make your head pound if you forget to eat. Two weeks of the same four walls, the low hum of your ancient desktop computer, and a bin tucked discreetly under your desk—just in case.

You follow Jade's instructions to the letter.

Prenatal vitamins, tucked inside an old ibuprofen bottle so no one sees the label. Smaller meals, more frequently, even when the thought of food makes your throat tighten. No caffeine—which is its own kind of torture and has turned you into a deeply unpleasant person before noon. Water. So much water that you've memorised the squeak of every bathroom door in the building by now.

You do all of it without once stopping to think about why.

Because if you think about why, you'll think about what's growing inside you, and if you think about that, you'll spiral, and if you spiral, you'll be sick, and if you're sick—

So you don't think about it. You file reports. You drink your water. You take your vitamins. You keep your head down and your hand on your stomach only when you're sure no one's watching, and even then you tell yourself it's just because it's sore.

It's fine. You're fine.

The gym is quieter than usual at 0600. Most of the lads from the task force are either still asleep or already out on the range, which is exactly why you picked this time slot—fewer eyes, fewer questions.

You're fifteen minutes into a light session on the rowing machine—light, per Jade's very specific and very threatening instructions—when the familiar sound of combat boots on rubber flooring makes your shoulders tense before you even look up.

Kyle rounds the corner of the weight rack with a towel slung over his shoulder, a protein shaker in one hand and that easy, loping stride of his that usually puts people at ease. Today it puts your teeth on edge, because you already know what's coming.

"Mornin'," he says, casual, dropping his towel on a bench nearby. Too nearby.

"Morning." You keep your eyes on the digital display, maintaining your pace. Steady. Controlled. Nothing to see here.

He stretches, or pretends to, glancing at the resistance setting on your machine with all the subtlety of a man who's never been subtle a day in his life. "You, uh… you sure you should be doing that, yeah?"

"Rowing?"

"At that resistance."

"Kyle."

"I'm just saying—"

"And I'm just rowing." You pull harder on the handle out of spite, which sends a wave of nausea rolling through you that you swallow down with practised ease. Worth it for the way he winces.

He raises both hands in surrender and backs off—for now. Takes up position at the free weights across from you, where he has a clear line of sight and makes absolutely no effort to hide the fact that he's monitoring you like you're a live feed on a security camera.

You last another ten minutes before the hovering becomes unbearable.

It gets worse.

At the range two days later—you're only there to supervise a qualification drill for the new intake, clipboard in hand, not even holding a weapon—Kyle materialises at your elbow like a six-foot-two guardian angel no one asked for.

"You're not shooting today, yeah?"

"I'm supervising, Gaz. I have a clipboard." You give a small wave with it to emphasize your statement.

"Right, right. Just—The noise, though. Isn't that, like… bad for—" He gestures vaguely at your midsection with his eyes, and you step on his boot hard enough to make him grunt.

"Say it louder, why don't you," you hiss through a smile that's all teeth. "I'm sure the recruits in the back didn't quite catch that."

"Ow—alright, alright."

But he doesn't leave. He stands next to you for the entire drill, arms crossed, occasionally handing you water bottles you didn't ask for and once—once—trying to take the clipboard from you because it was "too heavy".

It's a fucking clipboard.

The breaking point comes on a Thursday.

You're in the armoury, logging a new shipment of sidearms into the inventory system. It's mindless work—scan, catalogue, shelve—and you're almost grateful for it, because mindless is all you can handle lately. The nausea comes and goes in waves now, predictable enough that you've learned to work around it by eating a dry biscuit, sipping water, breathing through your nose, keep moving.

You're reaching up to slide a crate onto the third shelf when a hand appears next to yours, taking the weight of it before you can finish the lift.

"I got it." Kyle. Of course it's Kyle. He slots the crate into place with one arm and a smile that he clearly thinks is charming.

Something inside you snaps cleanly in half.

"Gaz, stop fucking bothering me, will ya?"

The words come out louder than intended, sharp enough to echo off the metal shelving, and Kyle blinks, smile faltering. He looks around quickly—the armoury is empty, it's just you—and then he steps closer, voice dropping.

"You need to tell Price, man. You can't keep lifting heavy and shite, you're—" He leans in, conspiratorial, as if the walls themselves might be listening. "You're bloody preggo with Ghost's—"

"Stop!" You snap, and the sound of your own voice cracks something open inside you that you've been keeping sealed shut with sheer, stubborn will. Your hand comes up between you, palm out, fingers trembling. "Bloody Christ, just—low it, Kyle."

Kyle leans back. He lets out a long, deep sigh—the kind that sounds like it's carrying the weight of a problem that isn't even his, which makes you want to scream, because he's acting like he's the one dealing with the brunt of this.

Then his expression shifts. Softens into something more careful.

"It's because of Soap, innit?"

The armoury goes very, very quiet.

"What?" Your eyes widen. "What makes you say that?"

Kyle kisses his teeth, shrugging with a sheepish little smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes. "Err, well… Jade told me that you're in love with him."

The nausea that rolls through you this time has nothing to do with the pregnancy.

"Oh, I'm gonna fucking kill her."

"Hey, it's not her fault," he says quickly, straightening his shoulders and puffing his chest out like a proud peacock. "I'm her future husband and therefore entitled to know all the juicy gossip."

Your lips tighten into a thin line as you shake your head slowly. "That's—That's not how it fucking works, Garrick."

"Yes, it does."

"It absolutely does not—"

"It does, though."

You stare at him—this infuriating, well-meaning, impossibly loyal man who's been shadowing you for two weeks because he genuinely believes it's his job to keep you and your accidental cargo safe—and the anger drains out of you so fast it leaves you dizzy. Or maybe that's the hormones. Hard to tell these days.

Your back hits the metal shelving behind you and you slide down until you're sitting on the cold concrete floor, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around your shins. Kyle watches you for a beat, then lowers himself down next to you with a quiet groan of his knees, stretching his long legs out and crossing them at the ankle.

For a while, neither of you says anything. The overhead lights buzz. Somewhere outside, a truck reverses with a series of sharp beeps.

"I don't know what I'm doing, Kyle." It comes out small. Too small for someone like you.

He doesn't look at you. Just tips his head back against the shelf and stares at the ceiling. "Yeah. I know."

"I can't tell Price because then it's real. And I can't tell Simon because—" You stop. Swallow. Try again. "Because I don't even know what to say to him. What do you say to someone you—" Slept with because you were heartbroken over someone else and too drunk to think straight. The sentence curdles in your mouth, too ugly to finish.

"And Johnny—" Your voice cracks on his name, and you press your lips together hard. Kyle's head turns, just enough to watch your profile.

"You still love him."

It's not a question. You nod anyway, and it costs you something.

"And Simon?" Kyle asks quietly.

You think about brown eyes going soft with concern across a briefing room. A hand on your back in a nightclub. Shot-for-shot solidarity. A glass of water he brought you before anything else. Tell me if it hurts.

"I don't know," you whisper, and that's the most honest thing you've said in weeks.

Kyle exhales slowly and bumps his shoulder against yours. "You're gonna have to figure that out, y'know. Before—" He glances down at your stomach and then away, tactful for once. "Before it figures itself out for you."

You let out a watery laugh. "When did you get wise, Garrick?"

"Always been wise, mate. You lot just never bloody listen."

You see Johnny at dinner that evening.

Not unusual—the mess hall is the one place on base where paths inevitably cross—but you've gotten good at timing your meals to avoid the overlap. Today, a meeting ran late and your carefully constructed schedule crumbles the moment you walk through the doors and hear his laugh before you see him.

He's at the far table with a handful of guys from Bravo team, animated as always—hands moving while he talks, that wild grin splitting his face, mohawk freshly buzzed on the sides in a way that makes his jaw look sharper. Someone says something that cracks him up, and his head tips back with a full-bodied laugh that you feel in your ribs like a tuning fork.

Fuck.

You grab your tray. Keep your head down. Choose a seat at the opposite end of the hall with your back to him, which is its own kind of cowardice that you're well-practised in by now.

You're halfway through a portion of shepherd's pie that you're forcing down because Jade will ask if you ate, when the bench across from you creaks under sudden weight.

"Alright, stranger?" Johnny's bright blue eyes are right there when you look up, his tray already set down, that lopsided grin aimed at you like a weapon he doesn't know he's wielding. "Haven't seen ye aboot in ages. Where've ye been hidin'?"

Your heart does the stupid, painful thing it always does around him—contracts sharply and then thuds too fast—while your stomach flips for an entirely different reason.

"Desk duty," you manage, stabbing a piece of potato with your fork. "Got a stomach thing."

"Aye, I heard." His grin softens into something more genuine; concern edging in around the corners. "You a'right, though? 'S not like ye to be off the field this long."

No, it's not. And if you knew why, you wouldn't be sitting here looking at me like that.

"I'm fine," you say, the same lie you've been telling everyone, smooth as breathing by now. "Just boring desk shite. I'll be back before you know it."

Johnny hums, unconvinced, and drums his fingers on the table. "Well, it's been dead out there without ye, I'll tell ye that much." He leans forward on his elbows, conspiratorial and warm in a way that's so fundamentally him it makes your chest ache. "Bravo's new sniper cannae hold a candle. Nearly took my ear off on Tuesday."

You can't help it, and a small, genuine laugh escapes you. "Your ear would've grown back. There's enough of you to spare."

"Oi!" He clutches his chest in mock offence, but he's beaming, and for one terrible, selfish moment, sitting across from him feels like the only normal thing left in your life.

Then his eyes flick down—just for a second—to where your hand has drifted unconsciously to rest on your lower belly, and you snatch it away like you've touched a hot stove.

If he notices, he doesn't say anything. Just picks up his fork and starts eating, filling the silence between you with easy chatter about the lads, about some prank Bravo pulled on the new recruits, about a pub in town that apparently does a class quiz night on Wednesdays.

"You should come," he says, pointing his fork at you. "Get you out of that bloody office for a night, aye?"

You open your mouth. Close it. Open it again.

"Maybe," you hear yourself answer, and the word sits between you like a lit match near a dry patch of grass.

Johnny grins, wide and bright and devastating, and goes back to his pie.

He'd looked up from his beer and said "There she is," in that low, unhurried rumble, and something behind your ribs had just—shifted. Cracked open and clicked into place like a round chambering.

You'd been eighteen then. Old enough to know better. Young enough not to care.

Now you're lying in your childhood bedroom with the door locked and the window cracked, and the sound of their laughter carries up from the patio below—your dad's easy and bright, and then his, that deep, warm thing that you feel more than hear.

And you press your thighs together under the duvet and stare at the ceiling and think about absolutely nothing.

It doesn't work. Never does.

Because John Price is downstairs in your father's house, and he's probably in that soft grey henley he wears when he's off duty, the one that pulls across his buff chest and does nothing to hide the breadth of him. He's probably leaning back in the garden chair with his knees spread wide and a cigar between his fingers, and you can picture it so clearly it makes your stomach swoop and drop.

That slow way he brings it to his mouth, the way his lips close around it, the way his steely blue eyes would look if he glanced up and caught you watching from the window.

Would he hold your gaze?

Your hand moves before you give it permission. Just resting. Palm flat against your lower belly, fingers splayed over the waistband of your shorts. You're not doing anything. You're just—so warm.

Their voices drift up again. You hear your dad say something about the last rugby match he watched on the telly, and then Price laughs, and the sound rolls through you like a slow wave of heat, settling low and heavy between your hips.

You slip your hand beneath the elastic.

You're already wet. Embarrassingly, pathetically wet, and you haven't even done anything yet—just laid here listening to his voice and thinking about his hands.

God, his hands. Broad and rough and so fucking capable, the kind of hands that probably know exactly how much pressure to apply and where.

You think about the way he gripped and curled around the neck of his beer bottle earlier, casual and sure, and your fingers press on your clit and your breath catches sharp in your throat.

You've tried this before. Plenty of times. In the shower, in bed, with your ex-boyfriend's clumsy fumbling that never quite got there. It always builds to a point and then just—stalls. Plateaus. Leaves you frustrated and aching and too much in your own head.

But right now you're not in your head. You're in his.

You're imagining what he'd do if he came upstairs. If he opened the door without knocking—because he would, wouldn't he, he's that type, all quiet authority—and found you like this. Flushed and panting with your hand down your shorts in the room you grew up in, and his name caught between your teeth.

Would he stop? Would he turn away, do the decent thing, mutter an apology and shut the door?

Probably. You shake your head. No. Not in this daydream he wouldn't.

He'd lean against the doorframe. He'd cross his arms over that broad chest and watch you with those steady blue eyes, and his voice would be so calm, so impossibly composed, like he's giving a briefing and not watching you fall apart.

Don't stop on my account, love.

Your hips jerk. You press harder, circling in tight little motions that send electricity sparking up your spine, and you have to bite the inside of your cheek to keep from making a sound because the window is open and they're right there—and somehow that makes it worse.

Better. The risk of it, the obscenity of it, touching yourself to the sound of his voice while he sits ten feet below you, oblivious.

Or maybe not oblivious. Maybe he knows exactly what he does to you. Maybe Uncle John has known for years—seen the way your gaze lingers a beat too long, the way you flush when he calls you sweetheart in that offhand way, like the word belongs to you. Maybe he's thought about it, too. Late at night, alone, his hand wrapped around his cock in the dark while he thinks about his best mate's daughter and hates himself for it.

That's it. Good girl. Let me see you.

The wave crests without warning.

It's nothing like the plateau. It's nothing like the stalling, the frustration, the almost-but-not-quite.

It's a full-body thing—a clench and release that starts where your fingers are and radiates outward in a hot, pulsing rush, and you arch off the mattress with your teeth sunk into your bottom lip and his name trapped silently in your throat.

Your thighs shake. Your toes curl. The sound that escapes you is small and strangled and desperate, and for a few suspended seconds the entire world narrows to the rhythmic throb of it, rolling through you in waves that leave you breathless and loose-limbed and blinking at the ceiling like you've just discovered a new law of physics.

There you go.

You lie there after, chest heaving and sweaty, hand still pressed warm between your legs. Your pulse is loud in your ears. The breeze from the window cools the thin sheen of sweat on your collarbones, and from below, their voices haven't changed—still easy, still laughing, still utterly unaware.

Your phone buzzes on the nightstand. You reach for it with trembling fingers.

J. Price (17:36): Your dad's firing up the grill. Coming down, sweetheart?

You stare at the message. Read it twice. Three times, blinking slowly with your cheeks on fire.

Then you type back: Be right there ☺️

You're going to go downstairs. You're going to sit across from him at the table and eat whatever your dad's burning on the barbecue, and you're going to smile and make small talk and pretend your legs aren't still shaking and your knickers aren't soaked through because of him.

And when he looks at you—really looks, the way he sometimes does, lingering and half-lidded and maybe not as innocent as he lets on—you're going to hold his gaze.

And you're not going to look away.

British born Kyle Garrick enlists in the military at the ripe age of 16, so young and full of ideas of finally being able to be a "hero", as soon as he got accepted doing his best to be top of his unit and learn all the ropes, but as time in the military drags on, he feels his moral compass slowly be threatened, first deployments of intercepting terrorist fundings in foreigns countries seem legit, but soon he notices the people that carry the consequences of foreign interventions that are only here for their ego interests and not actually helping the population, in his final years the politics surrounding everything start to sober him up, and as soon as he completes the requirement age of servitude, he asks to be changed to a more "domestic" exploit in order for him to serve better (he needs to be able to have his hands free and help, not be a simple merchant of doom forced to witness), and so he finds a job as a S.T.A.R.S. member in the RPD force of Raccoon City.

A big yet cozy city, soon he finds himself adjusting more to it by the day, yeah sure its no UK with how americans seems to be so "uncivilized" as his coworkers would pretend he thinks, but after a while he likes the openness of being in such a work force that actually sees through with helping it's people, no military bs where they only serve the government and can't say sh!t or risk being downed for insubordination despite logical reasoning, that is of course, until something strange plagued the air of Raccoon City...

He could only think of it as a "right place, right time" fate, as he had quickly gone over to his home to pick up some forgotten documents, chaos has started to bubble: screams, fires, destruction started to be a constant, soon he had his two personal firearms equip as well as a bulletproof vest just in case of a domestic or terrorist attack, knowing all too well how these surprises felt from his time in the military, but when he encountered his first undead, almost downing an entire magazine on one until it finally hit it's head, he knew that this was no child's play at all, this was hell opening its gates in Raccoon City itself.

As smoke slowly overwhelmed the city sky, aiding the night on plunging it into ominous darkness, he slowly made his way to his vehicle, hoping to get to the RPD in time to reunite with his team in order to combat the situation as a unit, hell perhaps he might finally meet the Jill Valentine lady they had always mused about in the office everytime they remembered he was a part of S.T.A.R.S., but all that awaited him was desperate pleas andb cries as the station was overwhelmed, Kyle tried and sweep a way for them to escape, but they kept coming and coming and coming. Soon, with the advice of a dying comrade to escape and seek out a way to make an SOS call for the goverment to send aid, he miraculously escaped and had made it to a neighboring city far away enough.

(In this setting Kyle would've been the first one out, so people like Leon, Claire, Sherry, Jill and Carlos are still battling it out inside the city, not knowing of Kyle's escape ofc, while Kyle doesn't know that they are there)

As soon as he's able to have a breather and call someone, he calls Alex, a US agent that he had worked with in his time in the military and had kept contact, especially when he had relocated to being in Raccoon City.

His distress call reaches Washington, with his notice there, he finds a place to rent for the morning to wash off and clean himself in case he is needed, when he gets ringed up by Alex again, he expected to hear something good, perhaps the Army was going to be deployed with special ops to deal with getting people out, a perimeter to enclose the undead, families could be treated for the infection or at least help them understand what happened, he never expected to hear that the talks were about nuking Raccoon City as a whole.

He had fought with Alex to reach out and tell them the situation from his experience, the spread was fast and deadly yes, but there were still people alive and healthy there, people that weren't trained like him to be able to maneuver out of the city, they couldn't possibly be fathoming wiping it all out and calling it a day, Alex had assured him that at least a surviving unit of a so-called "Umbrella" whatever task force assured that they had a vaccine and if they delayed the nuke they could deliver it to pharmaceutical companies for study and recreation, which had relieved him for a moment, at that moment he felt his body weigh him down and ask for some proper rest, so he settled, knowing that the city would be cured...

Only for strong rumbling shaking the ground beneath his feet waking him up a few hours later, only to finally have the idea to turn on the TV to the news, only to be hit the headlines and detailed images of a nuke landing square center on the heart of the city.

He had felt disillusion before, his superiors in the military always reprimanded his "moral compass" of being always oriented to help and not simply combat like he was told to do, he had started to slowly become numb to it at some point in that time, but the end of his mandatory service sparked a stubborn refusal to fall into the desensitization of what they were doing, and Raccoon City and S.T.A.R.S. had given him that sliver of hope of finally doing the good he had always had as a priority in his mind, but this? this had him livid to his core.

He couldn't even process the grief of imagining all the poor souls that had vanished in that explosion, but he could process the rage, the frustration with a government that had went with the cheap and dirty option instead of actually going for the people, lives lost for no reason, lives he felt that were now resting on his shoulders, pleading for him to seek justice for them, and justice he would try to serve them.