#handler ghost

“-ay agi-. -lear- rele- hound. Over.” Came Price’s careful enunciations. 

“Read Back: Clear to release hound. Over.” Ghost confirmed, feeling that he had the jist, but not willing to let another thing go tits up on this mission. He could see Soap perk up, his shoulders squaring and a big anticipatory grin baring his teeth. 

“A-. -irm. Affirm. Aff-. -er.” Price resorted to repeating himself on the first try -against regulations- to make sure his message got across without having to Say Again, sounding just as annoyed as Ghost felt. 

“WilCo. Out.” Ghost ended the exchange, nodding at Soap for him to get himself ready. 

Ghost stepped away from the building and Soap walked into the meager cover offered between his body and the wall. Taking the guns, ordnance, mags, and various other fragile or valuable bits and bobs that made up Soap’s kit, Ghost packed them away into the slots he’d kept open for them on his own kit as his Sergeant passed them over. Soap then handed over his much emptier plate carrier and Ghost started undoing it to yank at the straps until it could be rebuckled into its secondary configuration. Ignoring Soap stripping down to his skin behind him, other than to snap his fingers and silently demand his Sergeant hand over his cargos after he’d stepped out of them. Ghost folded them as flat as he could and shoved the trousers up under his own plate carrier, for lack of a better place to put them. 

“Ready, L.T?” Soap checked in before he pulled the trigger. 

“Ready.” Ghost confirmed, turning fully away. Ostensibly to keep watch while Soap was vulnerable, but it also had the added benefit of shielding himself from having to watch Soap convulse. 

Twisting and arching, his skin bubbling and roiling, giving way to a tawny pelt of wolf-fur that erupted to cloak him, as his bones warped and cracked, snapping together and apart in new and old and completely instinctual ways. The occasional grunt and whine was punched free of Soap’s lungs as his innards and outtards shifted as they liked until he was on four feet, looming over the only man that would dare stand so close. 

Hot breaths wuffed over Ghost’s nape as the werewolf scented at the man until his instincts identified him to be pack, and his tongue promptly darted out to give him a friendly lick. 

“Ack,” Ghost recoiled, dodging away from the beast, “Johnny, quit that.” 

Where once there had stood a man, now towered a mad scientist's wet-dream. The best traits of wolf and man combined into one overgrown mutt. 

Johnny was an odd mix of the Hollywood wolf-man and a massive timber wolf. His limbs were overly long, but were all the same length, carrying a flat-backed barrel-chested torso that had an emaciatedly tight belly, all topped by a short muzzled face with big ears and bigger teeth. 

With a wag of his stunted little tail, Johnny leaned back into Ghost’s space to snuffle at his chest, ducking down and pressing his nose dangerously close to below Ghost’s belt. Pushing Soap’s fat head away before he accidentally nutted him in the bollocks again, Ghost held open Soap's equally as transformed plate carrier and started wrestling it onto him, ignoring his complaining whines. 

The big baby didn’t like the way it rubbed against his fur. 

“Okay, Soap,” Ghost said, latching the last buckle closed and reaching up to pat at his hip, “You’re ready. I’ll be on your six.”

Soap proved that there was something resembling a brain rattling around amongst all the fluff he kept between his ears when he immediately headed for the entry point that had been previously plotted out for him. Ghost paced along in his wake, clearing rooms and amiably double-tapping his sloppy instinctual kills. He couldn’t be too upset with the inefficiency of Soap's methods, when they released the hound precise kills were no longer the name of the game. A cacophony of upset whines and scrabbling thuds drew him forward to where Soap was whinging at a set of reinforced doors secured by the bane of the werewolf's existence, round doorknobs.

Ghost opened the doors and waved Soap through, then turned back to clear the last few rooms he hadn’t finished before Soap distracted him. He was on the second to last room when a horrific yowling scream rent the air and sent him sprinting towards the doors that Soap had vanished behind. Never before had he heard Soap make a sound filled with such terrified pain and he never wanted to hear it again. 

His wish wasn’t granted. 

Soap’s wailing cries kept echoing out to him as he charged recklessly through the building. Hesitating when the screams led him into a stairwell, then nearly breaking his knees as he leapt down the flight of stairs leading to a basement that hadn’t showed up on any of the blueprints they’d had for this compound, cursing himself for pausing for even a moment. 

He encountered his first bit of resistance as he turned down a narrow dank hall with flickering lights that occasionally rained sparks in a way that would be imminently concerning, if Ghost wasn’t so single mindedly focused on getting to Johnny. There was a cluster of people, all conveniently facing up the corridor to where the sounds of Johnny’s agony were coming from. Ghost slid through the huddle without wasting more a moment on each of them to ensure that they wouldn’t be making a problem of themselves later on. He met several other groups and took care of them with the same uncaring ease, their only significance being that they were in his way. 

Bursting through the only door this entire hellscape of a basement contained, Ghost saw Johnny. He was staked to the ground by some torturous cobbled together contraption. It was a hefty flat grate that had tens of long silvery spikes jaggedly attached to it, like an inverted pike trap, with an unnecessary amount of chains strung between it and the ceiling. Ghost could easily guess at what had happened to Johnny. 

He’d come in just as one suicidal bit of deadmeat was shaking at the thing to jostle the innumerous bits of metal stabbed through Johnny, presumably, just to make the werewolf scream. 

A red haze of rage, stoked to levels that rivaled divinic, fell over him and Ghost moved. The plagues called upon Ramses paled in comparison to the punishments Ghost wrought upon the people in that room. Karmic justice, customized and hand delivered. There was no judge nor jury, just the bliss of an executioner with a newly woven noose. 

When he calmed enough to have a hand on his own reins again, Ghost was stood panting over the same man that had been tormenting his wolf. Blood was running from Ghost in rivers, splattering onto the cement floor and dripping over the man's shaking boots as he scrambled to squeeze himself further into the corner he’d been chased against. 

“I- Il Mostro!" He stuttered, gazing up at Ghost with wide eyes filled with feral prey-animal terror. 

Pulling out his least favourite knife, Ghost carved a smile into the man's belly, careful to knick all his organs on the way through, then turned away. Leaving him desperately trying to pick his guts up off his lap, while trying to hold himself closed at the same time. 

“Johnny?” Ghost murmured, dropping to his knees at Johnny’s head, gently petting shaky fingers over the blood-matted fur between his eyes. 

Johnny’s eyes rolled, his breaths wheezing and wet, the growing lake of blood -Johnny’s Blood- pooling outward, soaking warm through Ghost’s trousers. 

“Johnny?” Voice pitching up into a desperate questioning denial, Ghost cupped his hands under Johnny’s head, lifting it to pet his thumbs over Johnny's cheeks, giving him as hard of a shake as he dared when Johnny’s eyes started fluttering. 

“No, no, no. Johnny!” Ghost tapped frantically at his face, “Open your eyes, don’t you dare. Johnny!” Hazy blue eyes slitted open, gazing unseeingly in the direction of Ghost’s voice. 

Scanning over the contraption, Ghost spotted the winch that must lift it back up to the ceiling and was halfway to his feet when he belatedly remembered his medical training. With that many through-and-through stab wounds, pulling out the things daming the blood would be the fastest way to kill Johnny. Wait. Medical.

Medical!

“This is Ghost, requesting immediate medical assistance! Soap is down! Multiple perforating stab wounds. Compound Alpha, Lowest floor, South room! Over!” Static blatted damningly from his radio, “This is Ghost, requesting immediate medical assistance! Compound Alpha, Lowest floor, South room! Does anyone copy? Over!” 

Receiving no response again, Ghost’s eyes darted uncertainly between Johnny and the door. If he could get above ground maybe his radio would be able to transmit, but he would have to leave Johnny. 

With a tormented groan Ghost leaned down to press an anguished kiss to Johnny’s muzzle. He gently laid Johnny’s head back down on the hard ground, then raced through the door and up the stairs as fast as he could force his legs to move, panting his distress call through the radio as soon as he cleared the stairwell. 

He barely waited long enough for the medics to be confirmed as on route before booking it back towards Johnny. The stairs warped before his eyes, the corridor twisting longer and longer, his panting breaths echoing back to him off the walls. After an age, he threw himself back into the room, skidding the last steps to Johnny on his knees. 

Johnny was quiet. 

He couldn’t even hear the wheeze of his strained breathing. Why couldn’t he hear him breathing?

“Johnny?” The hand he reached out shook, trembling at every joint. He placed it hesitantly on Johnny’s muzzle and realized it wasn’t just his hand. His entire body was shivering, shakes wracking through him in uncontrollable waves. 

The medics clattered in through the door and shooed Ghost out of the way, nudging him further and further away until he was outside the room, looking in on the chaos.  The hustle and frantic terse voices seemed distanced from Ghost by a much farther length than just the doorway that separated them. He felt far removed from what he was seeing, yet at the same time, he felt like he was inside Johnny’s chest.

Watching that beautiful heart slow, and stutter, and stop.

A great hew and cry went up among the medics, one starting up chest compressions as best they could, while the others fluttered about the spikes like butterflies drawn in by the blood. 

“Come on, Riley,” Price coaxed, planting a hand on Ghost’s shoulder to turn him away, “Let them do their job.” 

Ghost doesn’t know how long Price had been stood beside him, watching the tragedy unfold, but he numbly let the Captain guide him away. He dimly registered that Price was trying to distract him, talking about a disrupter that Gaz had taken down, but there was barely enough life left in him to keep moving forward. 

He’d left his heart on the cold cement to bleed out at Johnny's side.

Thank You For Reading!

Fun fact: 'Over and Out' is incorrect radio lingo, as is saying 'roger wilco'. In both of this situations you're supposed to say one or the other. Roger and WilCo are interchangeable, but Over and Out are not. Over is for when you expect a response, and Out is you ending the conversation. Technically its very frowned upon for the person of lesser rank to say Out and end the exchange, but I figured that Ghost and Price wouldn't care about that.

The plan originally was that after Ghost kills everyone and gets called a monster is that he turns into a dashing white knight and saves Johnny. For the contrast, you understand. But then I thought about how impossible coming back from those kinds of wounds would be, and I'd already set up the comms being unreliable, and it all panned out from there. Afterall, what monster, but a man, dares shed tears.

Oh! If you were wondering about the trousers, when Johnny shifts back he's naked, so Ghost was carrying his pants for him to put back on.