#idk you can read this as platonic or an introduction that leads to the reader getting railed within an inch of their life later

[ivymarquis]

Elevator Music

Pairing| None; Gen!fic Rating| T Content/Warnings| The author is not experienced with trauma responses but assumes someone buried alive would have adverse feelings about being stuck in an elevator. Also the author realized halfway through that an elevator is lift but too lazy to change anything, so you're American coded against your will. Sorry about it.

You think nothing of it when stepping onto the elevator, Ghost close on your heels. The pair of you are heading towards the same meeting on another floor.

A wicked storm rages outside, wind whipping trees and debris as rain pelts against the glass windows. 

The base usually holds up well in storms. You don’t worry about it. 

There’s no one else in the elevator as it shuts. Your phone is kept in hand despite knowing you never get service here. In just a moment you’ll be at your destination, and the effort of putting it up just to immediately pull it back out is more than you want to do.

You give a polite nod to the SAS sniper as he walks past you and settles himself with his back tucked against the wall. He returns the gesture and that’s about it for your small talk.

You’re not friends, and even acquaintances would be pushing it. But you cross paths enough to have that adjacent familiarity. He knows your face and you know his…well, his mask. You’re not entirely sure you’d recognize him on the streets- you have no idea what he actually looks like underneath all that black, but he is built like a brick shithouse so maybe you’d recognize him based on his build alone. 

If it was someone else you might ask the performative question of double checking the two of you are heading to the same floor. Idle chit chat to pass the time on the way to the meeting.

 Ghost isn’t the chit chat type and you know it. The number 5 glows when you press the button, the gears whirling overhead. 

You’re on the second floor. The screen indicates 2-3-4-

And just shy of the screen switching over to 5 the gears screech to a halt, the lights cutting out in the elevator. You’re plunged into darkness, a startled “what the fuck?” escaping you before the emergency light kicks on. 

It’s dimly lit and spooky. Ghost’s skull faced balaclava doesn’t do anything to lighten the mood.

You’re not in love with the idea of being stuck in the elevator, a distant ringing outside the compartment indicating that there’s people (you) trapped inside. 

You know it won’t do anything but you press the now dim 5 button a few times. The mechanical click of the button depressing is the only thing that greets you. 

“Well shit. You don’t have service, do you?” you figure the answer is no, but maybe today will be your lucky day. 

Ghost is silent just a hair too long and the silence is enough to set you slightly on edge. He’s not registering that you’ve spoken to him. 

“Ghost?”

It’s fucking creepy the way his head snaps to your direction. But at least now he’s acknowledging your existence. 

“Do you have service?”

The amount of time it takes him to blink scares the shit out of you. 

He doesn’t normally kick up your flight or fight response like this. But then again he’s not usually fucking dissociating right in front of you. He’s stiff as a board, not moving, barely blinking and staring you down in silence. 

Maybe you shouldn’t have tried so hard to get his attention. Maybe it would have been better to shut the hell up and follow his leadg. 

“Ghost,” it takes everything in you to keep your voice even keel. 

You’ve heard the stories. Not of him specifically but soldiers in general. They call them episodes. 

The term is almost cute. Much less cute that an episode involves you being trapped in a verifiable shoebox with a soldier who could snap you like a twig if he wants to. 

That’s usually a problem for nurses and other medical staff. Working in tech you aren’t usually given a front row seat to a soldier looking ready to crawl up the walls.

He blinks again and you let out a sigh as the tension in his shoulders drops slowly.

He still hasn’t answered you. 

“I, uh, don’t really do elevators,” you babble. It’s a lie. Your concern about elevators is the normal amount- you prefer to remain untrapped, but being trapped doesn’t instill panic in you because osteonsibly you realize that at a certain point they will 

But like- people overcome anxieties when faced with someone else’s anxiety. That’s a thing, right? That’s totally a thing. 

Otherwise you’re about to sign your own death warrant by tipping him over the edge.

“It’s one thing when they open but this is like, not that and I’m trying really hard to not freak out,” you continue on. 

“So I like, need, you to tell me that they’re gonna fix the elevator and we’re gonna be out of here soon. Otherwise I’m going to climb the wall.” You’re rambling, nerves getting the better of you which serves to better sell that you’re panicked about being trapped in the elevator. 

It’s not the elevator. It’s that Ghost has started acting fucking weird in the elevator. 

He blinks (you think at least), the silence continuing to be deafening before your ears are graced with the sound of that low purr of his voice. 

“They’re going to fix the lift, and we’ll be out of here soon.”

He looks- and maybe this is just your imagination running away with you- somewhat more settled and not as spooky looking. 

“Again, please.” Maybe stop pushing your god damn luck?

He takes a breath and you feel better. Some tension in his shoulders drops. “They’re going to fix the lift, and we’ll be out of here soon.”

“They’re going to fix the elevator and we’ll be out of here soon.” Just in case maybe he needs to hear it again from someone else rather than just hearing himself say it. 

But you really well and truly learn your lesson and shut the fuck up. You’ve done your job-that’s-not-really-your-job (accomplished your self appointed mission would be better perhaps?), and now to just not upset the very precarious balance that you have struck by calming down the spooked Lieutenant. 

The only sound in the elevator is your breathing and Ghost’s- frankly as long as he stays on rhythm you’ve got no desire to follow up on that or do anything in the slightest that might cause that rhythm to change.

Ghost is important enough that people are going to notice his absence from the meeting which has assuredly started already, and the few people there who know you are going to know something drastic has to have happened for you to not be present either.

After a few minutes of can-hear-a-pin-drop silence, you can hear him muttering “They’re going to fix the lift,” to himself.

You don’t really know what to do. You assume it might be better to distract him but he’s calm now and not staring through you rather than at you. You don’t work in psych. You don’t know how people’s brains work. You don’t know what the best way to handle this situation is, and you sure as shit don’t want to accidentally upend the balance you’ve struck with him.

It is after another few minutes of silence as you weigh the merits of acknowledging his existence to treat him like a fellow human being vs trying to not set him off when very obviously being stuck in here did something to him mentally when the machine rumbles.

There’s one part of you who has watched enough horror movies that you’ve got a vague concern for the elevator plunging you both to your gruesome death some four-ish floors down, but that’s just the byproduct of an overactive imagination being stressed beyond belief.

The elevator shudders and makes a god awful noise, and then the lights turn back on and you can hear it continuing up the floors.

5 lights up on the screen and as the doors open there is none other than Captain Price waiting with crossed arms, flanked on either side by the Sergeants Garrick and MacTavish (who for all the world are looking like they’ve been continually shoo’d away but persistently want to be in on the excitement). As soon as the doors open all three men take a glance at you, as if assessing you, before focusing on the lieutenant. 

“Alright then, you two?” Price inquires, gaze flicking back to you at the same time Ghost’s does.

Ghost nods. You give a “Just peachy, Captain,”, because no one has ever told you what to say once released from the cold grips of an elevator into the direction supervision of a Task Force Captain.

The rest of the 141 are clearly anxious to get Ghost out of there without making any moves to do so themselves.

It takes him a second but not in the I-am-under-duress kind of way but more the “I am being polite and letting you have the space to get off the elevator first kind of way. You hesitate for a split second and he is still as a statue and you decide that this is the last straw and you’re not getting into a pissing contest of after you, no really, I insist, with a simple nod to the lieutenant.

The other three men move out of your way so you have the space to slip by. You merely decide to keep things pushing- out of the frying pan and into the fire so to speak, going from being stuck in the elevator to being moments away from being stuck in this meeting for the foreseeable future once the task force joins in the room.

And maybe, after everything is said and done, you can call Lieutenant ‘Ghost’ an acquaintance.