Mutt
Summary: After an ambush, Soap learns to trust the newest member of the 141
Pairing: Johnny Soap Mactavish x Fem!Werewolf!MC (call sign is Mutt)
warnings: vague description of violence and injuries.
word count: 800
thank you to: @captainsamwlsn @thesadvampire @humanransome-note @joel-mlller and @luxuryberzatto @madhyanas @littleferal and @djarin-junk for helping me with this story and rattle off in your ears about Mutt! I love you all so very very much <3
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“What are you?”
It was a valid question given the circumstances.
Soap could hardly count himself as conscious at that moment. It was a wave, pulling him back and forth until he was able to force his head to the surface, gasping for air and able to just barely look at his surroundings before he was pulled under again.
“Does it matter?”
It was dark out. He remembered it being dusk when they set out on their mission, the sun slowly setting in the horizon as Price told them to radio in at any issue and meet at their rendezvous point as soon at possible.
Fuck.
He broke the surface once more to notice that he wasn’t moving, but swaying side to side. Each step that crunches the ground is not his, but the blood drip, drip, dripping down, leaving a foreboding trail of their journey, is.
Your shoulder digs into the crevice of his chest with each movement.
“Yer carryin’ me, Mutt.”
“I am.”
You never spoke much. Johnny had equated you to Simon in that way, quiet and foreboding. Your actions spoke where your voice rasped in the shadows. Tucked in the corner booth of a pub when the others went to celebrate a job well done. The loyal guard dog, waiting on its haunches for an order.
He was the one who would move to you first. Setting a beer in front of you before sliding into the seat across from you with a tap of his knuckles on the polished table. His knee would bump yours every time. You’d never complain.
“Big scary bastards, the both of you.”
But then you’d give him a grin, a flash of your crooked canines so fast it was gone when he blinked.
“Well it’s a damn good thing you talk enough for all of us then.”
Jonathan Mactavish was only a stone’s throw from 215 pounds but you carried him without complaint. The swaying with each step made his head spin and looking up was too much work for him to trust himself not to vomit. He let his eyes drop and stare at the ground, watching you take one step after another in a steady rhythm like an infant listening to their mother’s heartbeat. Through the darkness, he’s able to make out the shadowed shape of your feet in the night.
“You’ve got no shoes on, Mutt.”
“Feels better this way.”
He can’t see much. Even if it weren’t for the blood loss and what he’s going to safely assume is a grade two concussion, it’s far too dark out for his surroundings to be seen as anything more than vague shapes and textures he can almost make heads or tails of.
Your eyes are focused on the trail ahead, already accustomed to the darkness in a way he’d never seen anybody else without night vision goggles or a Mag-light.
“Tried to reach Price but the comms are busted. You got your bell rung pretty bad back there but-” You shifted your grip on his body and he felt something sharp press against his ankle, a gentle warning that mouthed at the skin of his Achilles's tendon. “We're only a few miles away from the rendezvous point. Think you can keep it together until we get there?”
Claws. You had claws.
Through the nausea rolling through his body and the lights dancing behind his eyes, Soap could feel the fog begin to clear from his head. A flash of orders rising from his memory like the vision returning after a flash grenade.
He remembered seeing you charge through the muzzle flash and smoke like a vision. Uniform stained with the viscera of your enemies so dark he didn’t recognize you at first. The moment you came toward him he was raising his gun until he heard you speak.
“You know me, Johnny.”
But he didn’t. Not really.
When he looked at you there was no familiarity or trust. He knew the color of your eyes and the curl of your lips in a snarl but nothing else. Not your name or family nor the reason you joined.
In the darkness, moonlight glinted against your eyes and he found himself thinking of the coyotes in Las Almas that watched him and his team from the shadows, pacing with a choir of chattering yips and howls in the darkness, waiting for the proper time to pounce.
He’d never admit it but there was a pause, when his hand held the barrel of his gun steady at your head. Just as long as the width of the shallow breath trapped in his lungs, a split second where his pointer finger twitches, where the voice in his head urges him on.
“You never answered my question.”
He knows nothing of you except that the blood in your mouth was spilled for him.
“I’m your teammate. That ought to be enough for you.”
It would have to be.
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so ... demons coming right after elegy, in the middle of the cancer arc is a crazy choice and i know it means something. please share all your big brain thoughts on mulder & demons?
well...it's kind of like...in elegy, they're being haunted by the future (omens of scully's impending death), in demons, they're haunted by the past (visions from before samantha disappeared). both are highly metaphorical, and both are intrusive, even though he sought out the second. the first is too much. the second isn't enough. and after elegy it's becoming clear that...nothing will be enough. she is so close to death that she can see it. she can't...hide it from him, anymore. she's been dying for a long time. and she doesn't make him face it. she never has that moment where she tells him to just get over it. she never has that moment where she tells him to just accept it, stop avoiding it. she goes to all of her appointments alone. she bleeds alone. even in elegy when they almost argue over it, she tells him that she is fine, and then she goes outside and cries in her car.
but she's not fine, she's so close to death that she can see it, and he knows that. he's so eternally aware. mulder's fatal flaw is that he can see the world, he understands every underlying system, he knows people and how they think. and when he says "i refuse to believe that," he knows that doesn't make it go away. in elegy, he tells her that he's afraid, and she tells him that she's fine. it is a system established long before this particular death sentence.
in the script notes for the last scene of never again, it is remarked that: “if it were ever going to happen, it would be now. as they maintain the silence.”
the way i see it, never again is when they knew. they are not escaping each other. they are dying together. you are coming down with me. (hand in unlovable hand). and then, in the very next episode, comes a diagnosis. they are dying together. and they are dying now. silence is maintained.
so what does she do, after her diagnosis? she buys a journal, and she writes. she writes him letter after letter after letter. begging forgiveness. begging grace. begging courage.
the page that he found, that he read, this is what it said:
“mulder, i feel you close, though i know that you are now pursuing your own path. for that i am grateful- more than i could ever express. i need to know you’re out there if i am ever to see through this.”
i need to know you’re out there. a few months later, in demons, a gun to his chin on the floor of his childhood home, does she feel that he’ll be “out there”? she finds out she doesn’t have much longer to live, maybe weeks, in the next episode, and she doesn’t tell him. she maintains silence.
there’s so much discourse over the choices that mulder makes in demons…it was selfish, it was stupid, it was confusing…i see people ask all the time why he would willingly do something that causes everyone to kill themselves. the answer, of course, is that mulder wants to kill himself. that’s not new, we all watched pusher. (scully watched too). in redux it’s revealed that the “gethsemane” of the episode directly following demons is not scully’s inevitable and closely impending death, it’s mulder alone in his apartment with a gun.
i’m really uninterested in attempting to moralize these decisions…what’s “selfish” at the end of the world? i think demons makes people uncomfortable. to watch a dying woman care for her reckless partner. i also think that’s…the point.
demons is desperate. there’s an obvious desperation in mulder, of course, but also in scully.
throughout season four, we’re watching scully die. she’s getting smaller. she’s getting weaker. she’s getting sicker. but as it progresses, scully is realizing that mulder is dying too. and it all culminates in demons. and what can she do but be afraid? what can she do but get down on the ground and hold him? what can she do but write about what she fears will happen to him? she won’t be there.
nothing will ever be enough after elegy. and there’s nothing that he can do that’s enough. he can’t save her (so he thinks). and…he can’t solve the quest before she dies. he can’t give her the answers that she’s dying for. demons to me is such a last ditch effort. such a hail mary. she deserved to know the capital t Truth, before she’s gone. and i think they both know that maybe, when she is gone, it will never be found.
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