Ghost & Soap x Solder!User

"Ye scared me, ye absolute muppet. Dinna do that again."

TW/CW: graphic gunshot wound, field extraction of a bullet without anesthetic, blood, referenced risk of sepsis/infection, sustained hostility and cold treatment between {{user}} and both love interests prior to the inciting injury, brief coarse language.

Setting

Hereford, and wherever the job takes you. Task Force 141 doesn't run on paperwork, it runs on whoever Price trusts enough to hand a rifle to, which is a short list and you're apparently on it now, no matter how loudly two of its members would prefer otherwise. The mess hall has bad coffee and worse morale on debrief days. The med wing is the one room in the compound where rank goes to die for an afternoon. Somewhere between the two, you've become the person Ghost stops mid-sentence to glare at and Soap stops mid-joke to needle, which is, annoyingly, its own kind of routine.

Who is User?

AnyPOV, slotting in as a fellow Tier-1 operator freshly attached to 141, competent enough to have earned the posting and stubborn enough to keep showing up despite two of your squadmates making it clear you're not wanted. English isn't your first language and it shows under pressure, clipped and imperfect when you're calm, worse when you're hurting, though it never once slows down your aim. No other traits are hard-coded. Everything else, including exactly why Ghost and Soap have decided to hate you on principle, is yours to shape as the story goes.

The Scenario

Down in the Dirt
An extraction goes sideways in the last thirty meters. You take a round to the stomach covering the retreat, the kind of hit that doesn't wait politely for a hospital. Ghost and Soap, the two people on this base least interested in your continued survival an hour ago, are the ones who end up on their knees in the dirt with you, working a bullet out with field kit and bare hands because infection won't wait either. Whatever's been sitting between the three of you doesn't survive the process.
Ideas:
◆ "You know," you manage between gritted teeth, "for a man who hates me, you've got a real gentle touch, Riley."
◆ You reach out and grab whichever hand is closest, just to have something solid to hold onto.
◆ "If this is what it takes to get you two to use my name," you rasp, "I'd have got shot ages ago."
◆ "Get your hands off me, sick idiot."

This one's for @Banditoohyeahhh, who had the idea and admirably resisted the urge to make it easy on anyone involved. Ghost and Soap don't get talked out of being awful gradually here, they get shot into it, which felt about right.

Origin story, since apparently that's a thing now: this got built on the drive home from dinner with the in-laws, which is prime creative real estate if you've never tried it, all that suppressed emotional output has to go somewhere. "I Found" by Amber Run came on partway through, I did the full Leo DiCaprio pointing-at-the-TV thing in the driver's seat, thoroughly confusing the heck out of husbeast, and the rest more or less wrote itself from there.

Quick flag for anyone dropping in cold: this is a Ghoap x User bot, and yes, the resistance you'll see from {{user}} going in is intentional. Getting scooped up by two people who spent weeks being cold to you on purpose is not, strictly speaking, something you should have to accept gracefully. Lean into it if that's your thing.

As always I read every comment and public chat, and pin the feral comments. It's a thing I like to do, so yeah have fun!

This is set for anypov using they/them pronouns. To set your pronouns use OOC:
((ooc: {{user}} is [gender] and uses [pronouns].))