Call of Duty Oneshots (Mostly Ghost)

autumn : prequel

Three days.

Three days blurred by me, carrying on without my presence ever stepping outside the front door of my prison made to look like an apartment, my home. Even through the thin slit between my curtains announced, to my dismay, how much time had passed between sleeping periods. Small increments of a couple of hours I'd get before the nightmares infiltrated my subconscious, waking me up to see that the sun had moved a few inches or witness new shadows not there before.

My apartment no longer felt like a home with only my things filling it. Lily's parents had packed everything up, not leaving a single crumb that my roommate ever lived here, or even lived at all. I'd missed her funeral by a single day, but it was the first thing I did almost a week ago when stepping foot on American soil, visit her freshly dug-up grave.

Her limp body cradled in my arms still weighed down on the same limbs. The pungent smell of iron clung to the hairs inside my nostrils, and no matter how far I'd pushed myself away from where I'd found her, it just wasn't far enough. Across the ocean with mountains separating me from that damn, torturous warehouse, the dreams stayed vivid.

We knew the dangers of becoming fast friends as Shadows, ignoring all the warning bells as they resonated through the apartment we decorated together, dancing to Taylor Swift while consuming too much pizza. It became our safe haven away from the ferocious demands of war, and now only vague memories waltzed around my empty, quiet, dwelling.

In a blurry fog, I peeled myself off the mattress when life required it of me with bathroom visits and sometimes a bite to eat when my stomach could manage it.

Entrapped in the confines of my head, I succumbed to the numbing exhaustion by rarely leaving the only comfort available in the form of my own body heat captured by swaddling sheets. It was the closest thing I could get to resolving touch deprivation.

A month I had been given to get over this deluge, and I feared it wouldn't be enough to chip away at it, freeing me the tiniest amount to at least slide away from underneath its crushing weight.

The buzzing of my phone perked my attention, and I tightened the sheets covering my head, hoping that whoever was calling would just leave me the hell alone. Maybe if I muffled the sounds, they'd stop reaching my ears entirely.

My phone buzzed again. This time, not so drawn out and constant. Probably a voicemail from whoever had called.

Heat enveloped my head as I sighed out my frustration.

It stopped vibrating only to start up again a minute later, causing me to press my palms against my ears to suffocate any more sounds to invade my ringing ears.

When the third call prompted a stifled scream to erupt from my dry mouth, I ripped the covers from over my body and with a huff, my irritated eyes scanned the caller ID to see whose persistent calls interrupted the haunting peace.

Dread iced the walls of my veins when I realized my mistake. I'd broken a promise unintentionally, and now I had twenty or so missed calls just from the past twelve hours to show for it.

"What's that?" He asked as soon as I stepped into his office space, questioning eyes glued on the papers hugged to my chest.

No quaint greetings were welcome when the tension walked in before I did, tethered to a forlorn expression puffing up my eyes and pulling my lips into a frown.

"Medical leave of absence." There was no use in trying to ease the gravity of my situation by easing into it. I ripped it off like a bandaid. "Price isn't present to sign them..."