Disclaimer: I own nothing to do with Soap, Ghost or any other part of Modern Warfare as they all belong to Infinity Ward. I'm just an amateur writer who likes to borrow them a little. I do own Lara 'Bones' McCoy of course.

Note from Sassy: Hey guys! If you've stumbled onto this collection, then let me do a bit of explaining. For those who don't follow their fanblog, fuckyeahcodocs over on tumblr have been running an awesome community CoDathon writing event since December which closes today. The idea is to work on a writing idea and then post your contribution and yep, you guessed it, this is mine.

So I had planned a big multichapter fic, but unfortunately life got in the way. But even with crazy life stuff like moving city/moving house, the CoDathon has had me so inspired these past few months and so this story is made up of mostly drabbles and individual pieces I've written since December. The first three chapters kind of follow on from each other, but the remainder are one shots and are designed to be written on their own.

Remember Griffin from MW3? Well here he is in the spotlight, being a BFF to Lara in a world where she is stuck at home in the UK injured and genuinely believes that her friends in the 141 are dead. This is set in an CITS AU where Lara and Ghost are still a thing and have developed feelings for each other, because I am trash and like to break my own canon whenever possible. What follows that? Well, read on and see.

As always, I love you guys. Whenever I get a follow notification it quite literally makes me beam ear to ear. Thank you for giving me this platform to share my writing with you and thank you even more for supporting me over the years.

(P.S. CITS is not dead and I will be updating soon!)

-x-Sass-x-

She's just surviving at this point.

This isn't her and she knows it. Looking for solace at the bottom of a glass, drinking her life away when she's so bloody lucky to still have it in the first place. Knows that nothing is going to help her recovery less than this. She should be back out there, building up her strength and getting busy healing, not languishing away in this grotty, sticky floored shithole of a pub.

And yet, she gets the landlord with only three teeth to his name to pull her another pint.

She's a doctor. She knows all about the grieving process. Knows all about mental health, about how the stigma is just a load of bollocks and that talking and a proper course of agreed treatment is the way forward. She's aware of the million and one ways in which she could be dealing with what she's feeling better, appreciates that she's doing herself less and less good the longer she sits perched on this bar stool, the dehydration headache from yesterday's bout of drinking intensifying in her skull.

It's easy, knowing all of that. Applying it to a hypothetical Lara McCoy who doesn't feel like her heart has been ripped right out from underneath her ribs.

The real Lara, she's the one struggling to take her own advice.

It's hard to grieve when you don't know if your friends are dead. Even harder to comprehend when you weren't there to see them fall, when every piece of information you are fed is from some abstract, second hand source. She finds herself thinking about them late at night, trying to recall their faces, their voices, their laughter. She can still see them in her mind's eye, although it feels as though the picture gets blurrier as the days wind on. But she can barely hear them anymore. There's no laughter there now, just a bitter silence and a desperation to remember.

It doesn't feel real. She's trapped, stuck in place. A self-imposed form of purgatory that's slowly pushing away everyone she has left one by one. By now, she's numb to the loss.

Riley is a constant presence in her head. At night, memories of him come to her in waves, forcing their way through the darkness and past her closed eyes. She remembers his smile, the deliberate and cocky way that he moved. She remembers the way he'd reach down and kiss her, harsh intensity mixed with a tender grip of her jaw. She can almost still hear their arguments, the brutal words that they had spat at each other back when that had felt like it was all they were. Some nights, she tries to comfort herself with the memories of the first time he'd told her that he loved her and the feverish way that they'd kissed afterwards. The memory often spirals out of control, moves to where they'd been naked and pressed together, his body trapping hers against the mattress. Riley had always had a habit of making every inch of her skin feel worshipped when they were together and the memory of it alone is heady, enough to send her reaching between her legs so she at least has a chance of feeling him again. The fantasy doesn't last long after that, her touch empty compared to his and she often finds herself sobbing and beset by a fresh sense of loneliness.

Alcohol doesn't cure anything. But it at least forces her into a dreamless sleep where there's no time to lie awake and think.

She's worked so hard at pushing people away now that even her brother is keeping his distance, her childhood confidante so unbearably kind and yet so oblivious to the bonds formed between soldiers. It had infuriated her, forced her to say things to him that were wholly unfair and now even he hung back, limiting their contact to texts and phone calls so that he could at least keep a timid eye on her. Lara knows that he will be worried sick, her mother even more so and yet she can't bring herself to open up to them. Not yet.

Despite her best efforts however, she isn't alone. Somehow the SAS have adopted her into their dysfunctional family, gifting her with a constant shadow in the form of Griffin. She doesn't know for sure who gave the order for him to try and become her new, unwilling best friend, but she has a pretty shrewd idea. It's almost sweet in a way, the way one of the most accomplished special forces operatives in the world has been reduced to one broken woman's babysitter.

The poor bloke has suffered at her hand, not that his arrogant, no nonsense persona would show it of course. She's been less than receptive to his attempts to watch out for her, but even so she can't deny the fact that his routine appearance is almost a comfort. Without him, she wouldn't have made it home safe some nights, even if all she does is treat him like a punch bag.

It's not his fault, really. He's too familiar and at first his presence had been all too painful with just how much it reminded her of Riley. It was subtle, but unmistakably there in the way he carried himself, the way he spoke in cocky insults the way that Riley had when they had first met. One night when she had been at her lowest, Lara had reached up and kissed him, desperate to feel closer to the man she loved. It hadn't worked obviously, the mouth that hers had met alien and strange when she'd been reaching out for the familiar.

At least since then she's been able to see him more as Mark, rather than a cheap imitation. He's not the man she loves, but he is the one who held her when no one else would.

That counts for something.

Now he's sitting beside her, silent, idle fingertips tapping away at the cheap wood of the bar. She still feels wounded from his words, from his reminder that she wasn't there when her team needed her most. The knife he'd twisted in that moment had been wedged deep in her heart and she wants to despise him for it, but somehow she can't quite bring herself to. The old Lara is still in her mind somewhere, telling her that he did it to try and force her to see sense and although she can't quite let that rational thought take over, it's still unmistakably there.

Her eyes shift from Griffin to the pint glass in her hand, the exterior smeared with her fingerprints. Inside, the amber liquid sloshes as she examines it, white foamy scum swirling on the surface. She brings the glass up to her lips and tilts the liquid towards her opening mouth.

The beer reaches her skin just as she decides to close her mouth, lowering the glass. Somehow, the voice in the back of her head telling her to stop is a little louder today. A little clearer. She puts the glass back down onto the bar.

'Do you really fucking think they would have wanted this for you?'

She's heard those words so many times from so many different people and yet somehow today, they ring true. Instead of seeing Riley's smile, she sees his grimace, an angry furrow in his brow. She's known all along that it would kill him to see her like this and yet tonight she actually feels it.

Perhaps the old Lara isn't quite as deeply buried as she had feared.

"… C'mon." She's standing before her thoughts betray her, throwing a fiver down onto the bar to pay for her last beer and turning to Griffin. "We're leaving."

"What?"

"Unless you want to stay?" She throws him a dark smile. "Doubt it though, you've complained about being here enough."

"And where exactly are we headed?"

"Home. I need a shower and about a gallon of coffee." She raises an eyebrow. "I only need you for the ride home part, obviously."

She's terrified as she leaves the pub knowing full well that tonight, without alcohol to dull her senses, she's going to have to feel, to confront the emotions that she's been running from. Sobriety will bring with it a whole of host of thoughts that she has been avoiding, but she knows that she has to face them and it has to be alone. The old Lara wouldn't let the unknown destroy her life and the new Lara wants to try and follow her example.

She needs to heal, both mentally and physically. She needs to rediscover her strength. To harden herself to a point where she can be the ruthless soldier that she needs to be. Because, there's no way she can exist any longer in this purgatory, trapped between not knowing and being too scared to find out.

She needs answers. She needs her brothers. She needs to do something, even if she is all that's left. But before she can do any of that, she at least needs to be whole.

Maybe tonight is her first step.