Archive of Our Own ^beta

He’s there in the room when the terrible thing happens.

Before the terrible thing happens, the circumstances of your life aren’t much better, but they’re at least recognizable. You work as a language teacher at a local college, a twenty-three minute walk from your apartment. The teaching post pays only a pittance, but you aren’t greedy; it’s enough for you to pay rent on the apartment that you share with your father and even affords you a night out every once in a while.

The world tires you sometimes, but it’s mainly an expected ache in your bones. You have a few close friends. Occasionally you date; it never works out. You spend a lot of your time at home with your father, his caretaker of sorts even though he’s still relatively young. Not in the best health though. Since your mother passed a few years ago, he hasn’t been the same; doesn’t leave the house other than for groceries or lottery tickets at the corner shop, and it’s routine but it weighs on you.

The shadow of a body tipping the door open burns in your mind.

You startle in your recollection. Skip over the bad parts. He might not be in the room when it happens, but he’s the closest thing you have to a witness to your unraveling, to the sudden shift and falling away of this part of your life because you have now severed the two; there is the before and the after.

You think sometimes you’d like to see the ocean or the Andes. In another world, maybe you aren’t born into a life where you feel obligated to take care of your father; maybe you move out of your hometown or stowaway on a ship bound across the Atlantic. Maybe you marry someone in your early twenties and then divorce a few years later. 

The various lives you could’ve lived flit through your mind like you’re flipping through a rolodex. No matter. There’s always time for reflection, always time to sink into memory or a dream.

In retrospect, you’ve been waiting your whole life for the bad thing hanging over your head to finally drop.

It comes on a fairly normal day; blue skies, hardly a cloud in sight, the early spring smell of lilac trees blooming on your walk to work. It’s a Tuesday. In the morning, you teach back-to-back French classes and then Russian in the afternoon. At around three, you have enough time to grab a cup of tea from the street vendor outside the college. You sit in the shade of a magnolia tree for a brief couple of minutes before heading back inside.

The walk home betrays nothing. The warmer weather calls for shorts and there’s a pleasant breeze that cools you as you wind up the cobblestone backstreets to your apartment building. You pause outside the building to wipe a bead of sweat from your hairline. The sun is a delicately perched orb on the horizon, splints of yellow branching off its body. 

Supper is a simple meal of rice and fish, roasted broccoli on the side because you worry about your dad’s heart. It’s not what it once was. You go across the hallway before serving dinner to deliver a magazine you were asked to pick up on the walk home; you forget to lock the door on your way back in, distracted by the sight of your dad trying to take out the broccoli from the oven with his bare hand. 

You shoo him out of the kitchen and take it out yourself, oven mitt on. 

The rest of the evening passes by in a monotonous hum of cicadas outside in the courtyard. The open window invites the sound in. You and your dad sit on the couch and watch some rerun of a show you’ve already seen sixty-some-odd times, but the familiarity of it disabuses you of your sadness for the night. 

The first sign of a change in the atmosphere is the sound of hard boots on the cobblestone, drawing closer and closer. The faint is faint at first, barely enough to get your attention, until you realize that it’s louder than just one or two men and coming quick. Your head turns to the open window. Lips pull down into a slight frown. 

The noise outside grows, more and more footsteps and then the sudden burst of an angered voice. Someone in the group outside yells. You sit up on the couch, the plate in your hands forgotten. Your dad doesn’t pay the same attention to the ruckus outside, still making some offhand comment about the show you’re watching. You sit paralyzed on the couch for a handful of seconds before a particularly loud yell has you scrambling up and over to the window, cracking a bit wider in order to look outside.

You see the tail end of a couple men come in the front door to your building. It doesn’t make sense because there are too many of them and they’re moving too fast. The frown that pulls your lips down evens out into something flat and tight when you see more men coming from further down the road; men all decked out in combat gear and big guns loaded across their chests push up the hill leading to your building, their voices melding together into one loud noise. 

Your head swivels towards the door on the far end of the house when the sound of gunfire hits your ears. It’s coming from the lower floors and even your dad now is alert, plate of floor held in his stiff hands. 

“Dad,” you whisper, worry mounting in your belly. “Dad, go to the other room.”

“What’s going on?” He tries to sound gruff, but there’s an undercurrent of panic in his voice. Your throat constricts to the point where you almost can’t draw in a breath.

“I don’t know—dad, dad, we need to—go in the bathroom, just in case—”

The sound of boots clomping up the stairs has you rising to your feet. Whatever’s going on outside your apartment, it feels like it’s growing deadlier by the second. The men outside the building are firing now too, a deep shout drawing your attention for just a second before you hear the voices of the men coming up the stairs. It sounds like they’re on your floor now. 

There’s a second of horror when you realize the door is still unlocked and then they come barreling in.

There are three of them at first, then four, all dressed in black pants and shirts, balaclavas pulled over their faces. If your heart could stop in your chest, it would. Unfortunately, it does not. 

They’re shouting something in a language you don’t understand, guns already trained on the two of you. You crumple to your knees at their shout, understanding it almost intuitively, or it’s something from a movie that you’ve digested and you’re regurgitating now with all of the piercing terror you’ve witnessed on a character’s face. Except it’s not a character. Your father is brought forcefully to his knees as well, wincing at the impact.

Incomprehensible shouts pass between the four of them. You wish you could understand, but even if you could, your ears ring hollow when your dad cries out when one of the men kicks his boots into the center of his back. It sends him forward onto his hands and knees, the movement riling up the men even more, now busy rigging some machine up in the corner of the room.

“Honey, honey, look away,” your dad begs. He shakes where he kneels on the floor in front of you. His knees must be throbbing from the position. He must be in so much pain. 

You don’t hear him. You hear him but you don’t listen. Looking up at the men surrounding him, your thoughts race and crash across the plains of your mind. You open your mouth and nothing comes out. Shots ring out on the lower floors. The sunset bleeds crimson into the room. 

“Please, please, we won’t move—please—” you hear yourself beg, eyes pleading when you force yourself to stare up at the men circling the two of you. You want nothing more than to cast your eyes down and avoid the situation altogether. 

There’s more shouting back and forth. The man standing behind your father meets your eyes and you see nothing there, a blank slate. He jerks his head back to one of the other men, his voice rapidly intensifying, a tremor running through it. The air in the room crackles with the tension emanating off the four men. His hand jerks on the gun. There’s a shout from beyond the room.

There is a singular blood-curdling wail that fills the room when the man holding the gun to your father’s head pulls the trigger. You don’t recognize it as your own. 

Red flecks the floor in front of you. Red and something dark that seeps. A body hits the ground. You’re staring, but nothing materializes in front of you. There’s something on the floor in front of you and it’s leaking out of a wound in its head. It’s leaking into the floorboards that you’ve scrubbed by hand countless times to the point where you recognize the patterns in the woodgrain from sight alone. You are still screaming.

You thought your destiny fixed, unchangeable—the thing following you into the trenches, into the dead of night, the thing with teeth waiting to sink into you, but known and immutable. You realize now that your destiny is more like a random happenstance upon a diamondback in the quiet of the desert. You don’t realize until it sinks its fangs into you that you could’ve taken another route.

Your eyes are still stunlocked on the slumped over figure of your father, numbness a comfort until the red shock of horror lances up through your belly. His body is crumpled awkwardly on the floor, arms parallel his torso in a way that you know would make his shoulders groan and pop. Cheek pressed to the hardwood floor. 

Your eyes are drawn back up to the way the door swings open silently behind the insurgents, pushed open by the butt of a gun. 

He enters the room like an omen of death, face cast in a macabre mask. 

Your ears are still ringing from the bullet and from the blood rushing through your ears, so the four shots that come in quick succession don’t even make you flinch. At the first bullet, the men turn around, hoisting their guns up on their shoulders, but the man with the skull mask at the door is too quick for them. You see the volley of bullets rip through their bodies and the torrent of blood that comes out the other side. 

When their bodies hit the ground, you finally find it in you to seize up on a gasp and scramble back to the wall behind you, a truly awful sound ripping out of your chest. The man at the door finally enters the room outright, eyes ghosting over you briefly before he and another man flank the walls, guns level to their chest as they inspect the adjoining rooms in your apartment for any other men.

The second man is unmasked, though his face is tense and unfriendly when he looks at you before he puts the pieces together from the scene around you. The corners of his mouth tighten with a bit of sympathy.

“Room clear,” the unmasked man says into a radio clipped to his shoulder, body still tense despite the mitigated threat level. The four bodies steaming where they lie crumpled on the floor; the fifth body still folded over in the center of the room. The one you can’t help but stare at. “We’ve got two civilians—one shot. Four targets dropped.”

There’s a crackle over the radio. “South side of the building clear. Floors one through four clear.” Another crackle and then another voice appears on the line. “Soap, does the hostage need medical attention?”

There’s a tense, suspended moment before the man named Soap responds: “Negative. DOA.”

If you had a voice, you might say something. You might be tempted to scream or demand a doctor anyway, force the man down to the floor with you to check your father’s pulse, to take it back. You don’t have a voice though. You have a pulse skittering into overdrive, nausea creeping in slowly, black spots at the edge of your vision. You have about thirteen seconds before you pass out. 

A black shape materializes in front of you, blocking your view of your father’s body. “Love, are you hurt?”

The question sparks nothing in you. You see the other man, the one in the mask, emerge from your bedroom from the corner of your eye, gun pointed towards the floor. Your head clicks when you turn it to stare up at him; find him already staring down at you. It feels significant, layered, multipronged. 

“Think she’s okay, Lt,” Soap says to the other man, head turned towards him now. The sound of his voice has a somewhat soporific effect. You might actually be about to faint. “Lt?”

The masked man stares down at you for a handful of seconds before he presses down on the button of the radio also strapped to his shoulder. “North side clear. Requesting exfil.”

Archiving the sound of his voice for a later date. Deep and rumbling. Harshly accented. The blood roars in your ear. 

His gaze is inscrutable, penetrating. 

“Lt, what’s the plan?” Soap asks again, rising to his feet. 

Two men towering over you and you aren’t scared. You aren’t scared because the worst thing already happened. You aren’t scared because your body recognizes context even if your thoughts are too scattered to collect, and your eyes know what they saw. 

There is still an unimaginable horror waiting for you to rest your eyes on it again. It is bleeding and rapidly cooling in the middle of the room.

“Body recovery is on their way,” the masked man says, eyes coming off you for a second. “The civilian will come with us.”

He lowers himself to a knee, coaxing you off the wall when he slides a hand behind you, resting it on your upper back. “Lt, she’s not hurt, I think she can walk—”

“That’s enough, Soap.”

The other man’s voice cuts off abruptly. You pay no mind to it. There’s a moment where vertigo nearly consumes you as the masked man slides his other arm under your bent knees and rises back to his feet with you in the cradle of his arms, but it passes when he reaches his full height. Higher off the ground than you’ve been in awhile. He picks you up and holds you like it hardly registers. 

It hardly registers to you either. 

“Don’t look, love,” you hear him suddenly murmur into your ear, low enough that’s meant solely for you. You turn your head towards him, cheekbone grazing his chin. Skin warm. 

There’s a sound still like screaming in your ear when he carries you from the room. Your eyes stay fixed on the body lying prone, the one that you remember from your earliest memories, staring up into the wide world and latching on to safety, your father. The sight of his eyes or back or hand clutched in your little hand. You’ve never imagined him gone, never thought that could happen to him. Even now you think that he might shudder and shake it off, rise to his feet and tell you to relax, that he’s fine. 

He never gets up. The masked man carries you out the door and your father’s body disappears behind a wall. 

It’s easier for them to just put you on the payroll. 

When all is said and done, done and dusted, the bodies buried, the paperwork filed and redacted and shredded and then burned, you are the only piece of evidence waiting awkwardly in a military guarded facility. The loose link in the chainmail of a government that is, typically, a careful arrangement of individual parts that disappears at a distance. Except for you. 

You’re a liability because you were in the room. It all boils down to the room and you. If you hadn’t been there, if you had locked the door, if you had hidden your dad in another room when you’d heard the first shot, if they’d opened the door and seen no one there—

You turn over in the cot in your room. It doesn’t matter to think that way anymore. The dead aren’t clawing their way back to life.

In the months that follow, you’re put through an assortment of background checks and psych evals, minor combat training and studying for Defence Language Proficiency Tests. It’s not a sure thing. While you have the right qualifications—you speak a couple other languages in addition to the ones you taught at the local college, maybe not fluently but at least passably—the military doesn’t just hand you the job outright. It’s a tactical move on their part, consuming all loose ends, but there are other ways to make you disappear.

Still, you study and train with a single minded tenacity. You bare-knuckle your way through their tests, studying into the early morning hours, the candle already melted and snuffed out on the desk in your sparse living quarters. 

Then, you see him again.

You learn through a series of hushed whispers that pass between the people around you that he goes by Ghost. It seems apt. You only catch glimpses of him, never more than the quick pass of his burly but silent body from the other side of a field or the prickling awareness of being observed and then turning abruptly around to find him looming on the other side of a room, arms crossed over his chest. Always watching. 

You try not to pay more attention to him than you have to; even meeting his dark eyes, the only part of him visible with that skull mask constantly shrouding his face, seems dangerous. 

He is more bone than flesh.

You don’t learn that much more about him. You know from hearing him speak once in a low conversation with Captain Price that he’s likely from Manchester, given his accent. You know that also from the few conversations you’ve had with him. 

“You alright?” he says in passing to you one morning on your way to Price’s office. He bleeds out of the shadows of another hallway, suddenly at your side like he materialized out of thin air. It’s enough to make you jump.

“Lieutenant,” you greet him, swallowing dryly. He easily keeps pace with you, following you down the corridors. Falling into a cadence. You wonder if he’s part of the reason you’ve been summoned again to Price’s office. “Never better.”

That’s a lie. He won’t pry though, whether out of kindness or disinterest. You doubt he takes you at face value; doesn’t seem like the kind of man he is. 

“…He’s goin’ to ask if you’re ready.” 

You look up at him cautiously. He avoids your eyes, staring straight ahead, arms stiff by his sides. 

“Ready?” you ask.

“We’re shipping out in two days. Extracting an informant who’s been compromised.”

It makes your head spin. You want to tell him that you aren’t ready, that you’ll never be ready. You’re not ready to watch more people bleed out in front of you. 

“Do I have to be ready?”

“You have to be willing.”

The hallway narrows to a singular door. It is buried so deep into the compound that only the sound of your own breathing reaches your ears. When you look up at him, Ghost’s eyes are inscrutable, dark where they stare out from behind the mask. Your lips pull up into something that might resemble a smile and you give a tight nod. 

When you leave him at the door to Price’s office, it feels like splintering at the root. You don’t look back behind you.

You’re not part of Price’s taskforce by any means. Only sometimes.

Most of the time actually, you don’t leave the military base, the same place where you eat and sleep; you sit in a room and listen to foreign intel over and over, eyes burning and head pounding as you translate their words as quickly as you can. There’s always a sense of urgency. When you aren’t burning the midnight oil, you’re a shadow that creeps around the compound, trying to find where you dissolve into the night. 

Occasionally, when there is a need for your skills, you’re whisked away to foreign lands with little to no information about where you’re going. It’s on a need to know basis. All you need to know is that there’s a need for a covert little slip of a woman to sit in the Humvee and listen to radio channels. Someone to translate documents on the fly when they’re recuperated during a mission. 

There’s a sense of accomplishment in being requested by Price. You have the slightest suspicion that the request for you isn’t coming from Price but from the masked lieutenant that hovers in the corner of the room when you’re summoned to Price’s office. You don’t meet his eyes. It’s still too much and not enough.

Ghost is prenaturally quiet. His name is appropriate. It doesn’t matter if you’re on the main base or en route to your job or in the middle of combat itself, you wouldn’t know he was there if he didn’t want you to know. He moves fluidly, even big as he is and a variety of weapons and accoutrement strapped to his vest and buckled around his thighs. His tactical pants don’t even rustle when he walks and you’ve seen the size of his thighs (there’s no way they don’t chafe in the summer in shorts).

That thought makes your brain short circuit. There isn’t a world you can imagine him in where he doesn’t look like he’s about to be deployed. You’re not sure he even sleeps without the mask.

Actually, you know he doesn’t. 

The first time you see him sleep is in a small, windowless room while another soldier on your team, Gaz, plays cards with Soap under the light of a single crank-powered flashlight. You accompany Price’s team to an arms depot deep in the mountains of Verdansk, flying in first and then hiking through acres of snow-covered hills; you’re brought along with them to the depot for a change, suited up in padded clothes and mask to keep your identity hidden, translating between Price and the informant they meet.

There’s a temporary safehouse they’ve commandeered a few klicks away, a sparse, decrepit-looking thing that the team has purposefully left in a state of disrepair in order to mask its true purpose. The exterior is patchwork steel, rust eating away the edges of it; debris litters the ground outside, old cigarette butts from another time. Packs stomped into the dirt that have long since lost any semblance of recognition—you can’t even begin to make out the worn out Cyrillic on the box. 

You’ll stay holed up there while the others venture off in the early hours before dawn breaks, slipping in under the cover of night. In the hours before, the team sleeps in shifts; the safehouse is split into two rooms, one with an old couch with the springs worn down and one with a night table and cot set up in the far right corner. 

In the hours before he’s set to take off, Ghost retreats to the other room for some shut eye. You stay in the main room transcribing some intercepted call for Price while Gaz and Soap play rummy on a foldout table. There’s a crank lamp set up on the floor that flickers every fifteen minutes or so; Soap bats your hand away when you go to crank it back to full charge.

“Need those beauties working on more important things,” he says with a wink, nodding down to your fingers. You flush, but it’s the kind of flush that comes with drawing any attention to yourself at all. Soap’s charm is that he lays it on so thick and so readily that it’s impossible to feel cornered. 

“Knock it off, MacTavish,” Ghost grouses from the other room. Your ears perk up at the sound of his voice. Gaz smirks to himself. Soap makes a face, but doesn’t dare say anything in response. 

There’s no door separating the two rooms from each other. It would make you wonder how they can even sleep at all with the sounds and light coming from just the room over, but in the months since being inducted into the military, you’ve seen soldiers sleep on the back of moving vehicles, snore straight through shooting practice, and only jolt to consciousness at their NCO’s sudden “at ease.” 

Ghost sleeps light though. Half an hour passes and you can tell from the rough sound of his breathing in the other room that he’s fast asleep. They may sleep quick, but they sleep on a hair trigger.

You do not follow him with your eyes (you do). You do not get up and stroll to the other side of the room under the guise of checking out the window (you do; the moon is waning gibbous, heavy in the sky). 

Under the dim light of the moon, you watch the rise and fall of his chest. You’re unsurprised to find him still wearing the mask—the one with the bone shield sutured into it, like he knows to be ready at a moment’s notice, no time for the soft material of a more casual balaclava—but you can’t help stare at the shape of him, drifting just under the surface of consciousness. Big gloved hands are folded over his belly.

“Problem, love?”

You freeze at the sight of his eyes, suddenly alight. Suddenly on you. His voice emerges from cavernous depths, rumbling through you. You have no idea how long he’s even been awake, watching you watch him. Eyes like blue granite. 

Your mouth is dry when you croak, “No, sir.”

He doesn’t have to say anything. You understand implicitly. His look of reproach is enough.

Your eyes shift back to the world outside, away from him. You pull the curtains shut. 

Most of the time, it’s easy to keep yourself at a distance, both physically and emotionally. You don’t usually have a reason to be in close proximity to Ghost, so it’s easy to place yourself against the furthest wall from him and wait for his instructions. 

You see him as something both real and not. In the back of your mind, you know that he’s a person just like you with thoughts and feelings, but it’s easy to push past that rationale and instead see him as a monolith. A death knell. He’ll forever be the person that pushed open the door and saw you in the moment of your father’s death and brought you restitution.  

It’s not that absurd to reduce people to their essential qualities in war. You’re nothing more than a cipher yourself—a translator here to do your government’s bidding until you either retire (active, not something you foresee) or are retired (passive, likely, like falling down a well that goes on and on forever). Ghost is just another form of that; a tool just like you, but a tool that has been sharpened and polished and tried and true. 

So, no. You don’t see him as a person at first.

Little things start to fall into place overtime though. 

He’s a deeply superstitious person. You learn that en route to a mission one day when Soap spills water all over himself and the strap around Gaz’s thigh snaps and you, listening in to an encrypted radio channel, inform the team that they’ve underestimated the number of enemy combatants stationed at the outpost they’re headed to by a factor of two. Ghost goes stiff in the truck like he’s smelt sulfur in the air and strongly advises Price that they turn back. It is closer to a demand.

It’s a testament to his reputation that Price doesn’t even hesitate to take his word for it. It doesn’t hurt that Ghost’s superstitious nature is legitimized by his downright spooky gut feelings. The man seems to have a sixth sense for these things. He’d been tense even before the revelation that they were vastly outnumbered.

It crops up in less serious ways as well.

Ghost eats the same thing every morning before deployment. Some flavorless, bland ration bar that makes your stomach clench up when he offers you one as well. You take it and chew it to a paste only because refusing a gift from him seems more painful than just eating the stupid thing.

Soap razzes him for it when you’re alone with him: “You’d think his stupid superstitions would be all normal and mundane, but they’re all weird Mancunian shit like if the pouch of his tea rips part way through. Brits.”

You shrug. The two of you are still waiting in the barracks for word from your superiors; there’s talk of a wanted arms dealer sighted in Moldova. You probably won’t be accompanying the 141 this time, but you keep your ears peeled regardless. “You wouldn’t expect it.”

“Think it’d be funny one day to like make him walk under a ladder or something?”

“Go wheels up on Friday the thirteenth?”

He snorts. “Bird wouldn’t even make it off the runway.”

That makes you laugh. When you do, it comes from the chest and it hurts a bit. 

Mechanical motion. Economy of motion. It’s easy to laugh at Ghost’s particular eccentricities, but the reality is that they all have them. You have them too. The door has to be locked at all times when you’re back home in the barracks, checked no less than three times before bed. Lest you forget. 

“Come to think of it—don’t think I’ve ever seen him take off the mask, ‘cept once,” Soap muses. “That’s another one.”

“Not sure that’s the same thing at all.”

“‘Course it is. Used to think he had an ugly mug. S’not as bad as I thought.”

“Is it true he’s blond?” you ask, curious. You’ve heard some rumors about it. As much as you try to keep to yourself, more tight-lipped than you’ve ever been in your life, you live in close quarters to people that don’t share your affinity for silence. That only speak one language and speak it rather loudly. 

Soap grins, all bristly-cheeked and sparkle in his pretty blue eyes. “Can’t divulge everything I know. He’s a man of mystery for a reason.”

“Liar. I bet you’ve never even seen his face,” you say, deadpan, and grin a little when he sputters out a rebuttal. 

The lieutenant’s the one that collapses the distance between the two of you, in the end. You’ve been curious for weeks, nearly months now, if he’s been behind most of the recent moves in your life. Everything post-incident. It’s an assumption you’ve made based on the facts, the facts being: you have no business being here and you have no business being on this team. 

Yet, Ghost is the one that signs you up for mandatory firearm courses and coaches you through the practical components. When you aren’t sitting at a desk, studying firearm safety and operation, he accompanies you to the range when you’re booked in for practice slots, silent behind you. 

His presence makes you nervous. You think that any sane person would be with Ghost posted behind them, arms crossed over his chest, making his corded forearms bulge. His scrutiny makes you twitchy, unsure. You’ve never so much as held a gun in your life and now you’re expected to accelerate through this course, a prerequisite before they’ll allow you to join them on any mission above a certain grade. 

It’s fair. They can’t be expected to babysit you while their attention is supposed to be laser-focused on the job at hand. At the moment, you’re something of a liability, and only a half-useful one (they don’t even need you for any assignment in South America because Ghost, you’ve learned, understands and speaks Spanish to a near native level, notwithstanding his atrocious accent). 

“Get out of your head,” he orders when you slip the earmuffs off after three missed shots. The sheet paper with the printed target dangling at the other end of the range is pristine and untouched, almost mocking. It doesn’t so much as flap under your withering glare.

“I am, sir.” Your tone borders on disrespectful. 

Frustration wells under your fingertips; so much has happened in so little time. In moments, you feel completely eviscerated from your past life, the girl that used to cut through the grass on her way to work. You see the razor-thin line between life and death now, the margin of error permitted in this world. 

“No, you’re not.” His voice sharpens, becoming even more severe when he registers the petulance in your voice. 

You don’t respond, simply slip the earmuffs back on and take the isosceles stance again. The recoil when you shoot makes you wince, forces your leg back. Again, only a single shot lands, well off the mark. You barely suppress a huff when you pull the earmuffs off again to reload.

“Quit starting in isosceles. You’re reverting to weaver anyway—just start there.”

Ghost’s voice is bordering on grating. “The manual says isosceles though.”

You can feel him advance quickly, the entire towering mass of him suddenly just inches behind you. It makes you go rigid, acutely aware of the six-foot-four military personnel that’s been hovering behind you while you’ve been mouthier than you have any right being to a superior officer. 

Big hands shift you ever so slightly into a different form, a booted foot kicking your legs apart and your dominant leg forward. You go with it, malleable under his touch. Let his hands move you this way and that, ignoring how proprietary they feel. How he rearranges you just how he likes and you go with it, not just because he’s stronger than you, but because your body goes traitorously soft when he pushes and pulls. 

It happens so fast that your head spins. 

“You’re going to exhale when I tell you to,” Ghost says in your ear, not even tacking on an ‘okay?’ to soften the command. That isn’t how he speaks. 

You nod, trying to keep your focus on the target in front of you and not the hand curling over your shoulder and rolling it back.

“Stop looking at the target.” You’re not even sure how he knows where your focus is from behind you. “Use the front sight. If you miss again, we’ll do some dry practice instead.”

“Okay,” you whisper, breath coming out shaky. It doesn’t feel good to hear. You’ve only just moved on to live rounds and to go back to shooting without ammo feels like a step back, like he’s confirming that you don’t have it in you. Still, you aren’t going to argue, not when the near unblemished target in front of you speaks for itself.

“That’s not failing,” Ghost says, softer this time. “Progression isn’t linear; it’ll happen over time. Put in the work and you’ll see it.”

The moment feels distinct, outside of reality. You know it’s real because he makes the incision right in between the ribs, cuts you right down the middle. This is what you’ve been waiting nigh on your whole life for—someone to remember that, in the morning, you need to be bled. Your focus shifts in the blood loss. 

His hand is firm on your shoulder for a moment before he releases you and takes a step back.

“Exhale.” 

You do. 

He shows up outside your room sometimes, late at night. Three raps in quick succession until you peel yourself off the cot and stumble over to the door, half-stumbling out of a dream until you open the door and there he is. 

The first time he does, even he looks a bit lost, like he’s not sure how he wound up outside your door. He doesn’t look like the usual Ghost you know—the skull mask is swapped for a softer balaclava, and he’s still rough around the edges, shoulders tense and eyes tight like he just came off the bad end of a mission. You want to open your mouth and ask, but the words fall apart on your tongue like spun sugar. 

“Come in?” you offer instead, taking the smallest step back. Not that it matters. He’s silent when he shoulders his way in.

Your room isn’t anything special to look at—standard military design with a twin bed pressed up against the rightmost corner, a desk and bureau running parallel along the wall, and a small table with two chairs closer to the door. A neat stack of books on your desk. 

When he stands in the middle of your room, it’s like you’ve been snapped back into the dream. For how tense Ghost’s body looks, he seems almost softer than usual; black hoodie and cargo pants. 

“Tea?” There’s an electric kettle on your desk. Just a basic little thing for nights spent researching well into the daylight hours. He nods.

You don’t have any proper tea to offer him, but Ghost takes the mint tea without protest. Your heart ricochets in your chest when you watch as he peels the mask up to just below his nose, blowing over his tea before taking a single, lingering sip. You can’t look away. When he catches your eye, you snap your head away, guilty at being caught. 

“Sorry,” you mumble, staring down at your own mug. 

“I’ll let you live this time,” he says. Your brain makes a creaking noise in your head when you catch the teasing note in his voice.

Ah, so he has jokes.

“Miss my company? Or is this a professional call?” Your lips twist into something like a smile as you take a seat at the little table at the far end of your room. He joins you, pulling the chair on the other end out and taking a seat.

Ghost shrugs, not offering much in response. That alone makes you nervous. You figure he’s the type of man to come with a purpose, not wander in off the street like an outdoor cat. 

“Nothing like that,” he murmurs. “Just got back.”

You nod, bringing the mug up to your lips for a sip. 

“So…it is a social call?”

“I don’t make a habit of fraternizing.”

“Oh.”

“…You could call this a check in.”

“Oh.” You clear your throat. “About anything in particular, sir?”

He shrugs again. “How you’re getting along. Anything troubling you.”

“That seems like something I should be going to the Captain about.” No accounting for cheek this late at night. Especially when it’s been awhile since you last saw him. You’re not wrong though—Ghost might be a lieutenant, but you’re on Captain Price’s team (and still only occasionally for that matter, he’s not even the main person you report to). 

Even with the mask acting like a barrier between the two of you (it always obstructs that final layer of intimacy, makes you feel slightly removed from him), you catch the knowing glint in his eye that makes you sit up a bit straighter. “Probably about time we stop pretending Price is the reason you’re here.”

There’s little he could have said that would have hit you harder. It shreds the thin veneer of professionalism that separates the two of you. 

“Sir?” A question. A call.

“Yes.” A response. 

The baked in memory of being called into Price’s office at an absurd hour, asked to prepare yourself for something that you never in a million years would have anticipated happening. Not to you. Then, it happens; learning to sleep in a moving chopper, peering out of goggles too big for your face, trudging through swamplands that almost have you sinking up to your knees, sweating through your shirt and then sweating through the replacement even after a cold shower. 

“…Why?”

“I can’t have favorites?”

“You seem more…austere than that.”

“Do I?”

“Rigidly puritanical, sir.”

The mask shifts. You can almost tell that he’s smiling and it briefly makes your chest feel tight. “I’m only human. Need some creature comforts.”

And doesn’t that just crack open your worldview just the slightest bit. It almost leaves you guilty—ashamed at being caught thinking him less than human. He’s just a man. 

Then the loaded part of that answer sinks in and your face goes hot. The physical response is so immediate that there’s no chance at staving it off. You fiddle with the tag at the end of the tea bag. 

“I’m doing just swell, Lt,” you finally whisper, voice catching in your throat. 

Ghost brings the mug back up to his lips, peeling the mask back up again. “You tell me if that changes.”

He sits in silence better than you ever will, content to sip his tea and stare at you until one of you blinks first. Then he restarts whatever game he’s playing in his head. You think maybe he’s winning. 

“Do you play chess?” you ask, eyes drawing over to the board that sits in the corner of the room, underneath a mound of your other belongings. It’s been collecting dust for months now.

Ghost follows your gaze and tilts his head, considering. “Not since primary. Could be tempted if you remind me the basics.”

Isn’t that just enough to get the blood pumping, to warm your heart up? It’s been cold for a while. It’s been sitting on ice since you buried your father in the plot beside your mom back home and used up the rest of your tears, wrung yourself completely dry. 

You get the chess set out.

He’s clumsy when he plays. Hardly even knows what he’s doing at first, apart from knowing the basics of how each piece moves. He catches on quickly though, not quite enough to pose much of a challenge, but enough that your lips press up into a small smile. 

It’s not the rapid-fire clicking across the board that you remember from the days before, but it’s an approximation so close that it, for just a moment, makes you go misty-eyed. Each move is far more spaced out with Ghost, far more deliberate; he considers everything he does, not yet skilled enough to see an opportunity and slip in, but you know that eventually the second sense would develop. If given enough time. 

“I used to play with my d—I used to play with my dad.” It takes you a second to stumble through the sentence. Humiliating. You were hoping to say it easily, just let it fall out into the open. Use that as an opportunity to show how much you’ve hardened yourself.

Poor effort. It comes out of you like it’s been ripped out. 

Ghost doesn’t say anything in response to that. Doesn’t even acknowledge that the words came out of your room. He moves a rook forward and you snatch it off the board when you move your bishop to h5. It burns a bit, like bile at the back of your throat. 

You think you regret it for a half second, offering up such a vulnerable thing. You plucked a rib from your chest and now it’s baking in the space between the two of you. You haven’t even begun to embalm that part of you. 

You have him in check in just five more moves, but the victory comes with nothing apart from the taste of ash in your mouth and the faint scent of regret.

“Show me how you did that.”

His words startle, have you looking back up to where his eyes stare back into yours. Blue-gray like a sky about to burst. 

You smile hesitantly. Nod.

The visits become something of a regular thing. You sometimes go days and weeks without seeing hide nor hair of him, and then suddenly, out of the blue there will come a knock at your door and you’ll open it to Ghost standing on the other side. Always weary. Always weathered.

Always keen to pull up a chair and settle his worn out body into the hard plastic, spreading his legs wide and staring lazily up at you. You already have the kettle boiling, fingers twitching at your sides. Pulling at the material of your sleeves. Hesitant to take the seat across from him until he kicks out the chair for you and gestures with a glove-covered thumb for you to take it. 

It’s like something out of a daydream or a trap. 

The first time he touches you, it’s in a safe house in Belarus right on the Russian border. Soap’s still on the other side of the border waiting to be extracted and you’ve been flipping through various encrypted radio channels, filtering information back to the extraction team about where the Russians are headed so they know which areas to avoid. 

You’re a bit of a fidgeter. Sue you. There’s nowhere else for the nervous energy to go. Soap’s deep in enemy territory and flanked on both sides; he’s been waiting for the extraction team for no less than fourteen hours and he’ll likely have to wait even longer. The team is forced to move at glacial speed lest they alert the Russians to their presence and it’s your job to be on top of their movement. It’s enough to leave anyone feeling jittery.

Ghost is stationed with you at the safehouse because it’s dangerously close to the Belarus-Russian border—a necessity given the need to be close enough to pick up on the various radio channels you’re cycling through. Your knee bounces up and down as you keep your eyes shut tight, trying to hear and transcribe the words simultaneously. 

A hand comes down on your knee. “Mind knocking that off for a bit?”

You freeze at his words. Moreso at his touch. The hand covering your knee practically engulfs it, wider from the gloves he has on, but even through the material, you can almost feel the warmth of his palm. You nod curtly. His hand lingers for a beat longer than necessary before he pulls it away.

“Sorry,” you murmur, eyes finally opening. They feel crusted from sleep deprivation and the dust in the air. 

Even seated, he’s taller than you. His eyes are a piercing light in the near total darkness of the room, no lamps in order to prevent being sighted. There’s only the moonlight ribboning in through the thin window above your desk where the radio equipment is set up and the light of his eyes through the mask.

Just you and the certainty of his presence beside you. 

“S’alright,” he mutters and your breath shudders out of you when his eyes pull away from you.

The second time is in your room back in the barracks, night outside coming down with a sweep of darkened fire. 

He sits down in the same chair as usual, jacket off and hung up on the back of your door, leaving him only in a standard issue shirt that clings tight to his arms. It lets you stare uninterrupted at the tattoos running up his right arm all the way to his sleeve. 

“Come here,” Ghost grunts, chair scraping against the floor when he pushes himself further away from the table.

You’re not sure what he’s talking about at first. Then he pats his thigh with a gloved hand and heat shoots up your belly and cheeks when you finally understand what he means. 

It still takes a second or two for the command to fully bake in you. Especially for you to listen and stumble forward, fists tight at your sides when he pulls you down onto his thigh, both legs across his lap for a second so he can run his hand over the curve of your hip and squeeze. Your hand shifts to his shoulder automatically, breath catching in your throat. 

You watch with something akin to disbelief when he rolls the mask up to just under his nose. You’ve seen him do so before over tea, but you’ve always been careful to avert your gaze. Keep your eyes trained somewhere else. Not invited to look just yet. You’ve been invited into his company but not his trust, not until this very moment when he rolls up the mask and his hand reaches back to twine into the loose strands of your hair, drawing your mouth to his. 

The bunched up fabric feels odd against your skin, but that thought is near obliterated when his lips slot over yours, the first touch of his textured lips—there’s a scar that cuts across his mouth, and it looks old, looks like it would’ve hurt—like a revelation. Softer than you might’ve anticipated. 

His lips slide over yours sweetly, then eagerly. Devouring. Like he’s been hungering for you for far too long and now that you’re in his arms, all he can do is take and take. 

It’s been awhile since you were last kissed with so much passion. Maybe ever. When his tongue slides over the seam of your lips, there’s not a lick of resistance in you, just give. Just wanting whatever he has to give, whatever he wants to take. You grunt from high up in your chest when he holds your chin with his thumb and fore knuckle and tips your head back. Tongue slipping into your mouth, plush and wet. Tasting faintly of cloves or cigarettes. 

Your hair tumbles down your back. Realizing that he’s pulled the elastic right out of your hair to get a better handful, your eyes fly open, finding his only half-lidded. Blue granite, always finding yours. Drugging then, when his tongue rubs over yours, forcing the blood to pump faster through your veins.

“Know you’ve been wanting it, pet,” Ghost says when he pulls not even an inch away from your lips. 

“Wanting it?” you repeat back, flustered all over again. 

You’ve known for weeks that there’s been something brewing between the two of you. It’s evident in the way his body moves with yours, encircles it, welcomes it in—lets you sleep against his arm on the long drives back to base, lets you pick the burrs from his mask when he’s come back from treks through the woodlands, seeks you out when he comes home after weeks away. Always gravitating to you. 

“Where this ends up.” He thumbs your lower lip, tugging it down. You watch his pupils dilate. 

“I didn’t think you were ever going to—is it even—you won’t get in trouble?”

If possible, that seems to turn him on even more. “You’re worried if I’ll get in trouble?”

Ludicrous, you realize in a split second. No one’s going to reprimand the man who doesn’t exist. You glance away, embarrassed. “You’re right. Sorry, I just—I mean, I know I will.”

“You let me worry about that, love,” Ghost says, leaning forward again to wrest another kiss from your lips. He’s more demanding now when he licks into your mouth. “I promise no one’s going to say fuck all about this.”

His hands come to your waist, twisting you suddenly until you straddle one of his thighs. He has your back pressed to his chest, and he feels massive behind you, chin resting easily on the top of your head. A hand travels up your sternum, so wide across your chest that it nearly makes you go cross-eyed. 

You move over him with startling alacrity, lit up from within when your clit rubs over the hard muscle of his thigh. 

“Atta, girl,” Ghost grunts into your ear, big hand settled on your hip, guiding you over him. “Just empty out that head of yours. Rub that pretty lil’ pussy on my thigh.” 

He keeps a hand over your mouth in case you get too loud. It actually feels like permission to be loud, the sound muffled into the palm of his hand as it is; you can’t help being oversensitive and needy, grinding down over his thigh in tight circles, belly drawn in tight. All that brawn packed up tight behind you makes you whimper like you’re in heat. 

“Been making me ache and fuss over it, huh, pet?” he snarls, other hand dipping under your shirt until he fits a big hand over your breast, pinching a nipple tight enough to make you squeak. It hurts good, but still hurts. “Haven’t gone a single day without thinking about it. Sitting in the desert for hours staring down the scope of a rifle and all I can think about is coming home and getting my tongue in your cunt.” 

You pant something incoherent into the palm of his hand, like how you’ve been thinking about what his cock tastes like, whether he’d tip your head over on his bed and push in until he touched the back of your throat or make you lap up the sides of him while he held your head tenderly. Your words are muffled in his palm, but pressed against your ass, you can feel the hard length of him stiffening in his cargos. 

“S’the only thing I can think about sometimes,” Ghost rasps. “Sweating to death in the desert, livid to fuck that things aren’t going the way they’re supposed to, and the only thing keeping me sane is that thousands of miles away, there’s a pretty girl tucking her fingers into her cunt because she needs it so bad from me.”

You keen, grinding down on his thigh harder, head thrown back now onto his shoulder. Panting desperately into his hand, belly already clenching. The hand on your breast drops to clutch at the inside of your thigh, spreading your legs wider and making you yelp. You feel half-desperate and mad for it, like if he stills your hips now, you’ll do something rash, like tie him down and use him until you come.

Ghost chuckles against the side of your head. It rumbles down your back. You clutch at the arm hooked across your chest, anchoring you in place. With his hand holding you open, there’s little more you can do than squirm and cant your hips. 

It sneaks up on you. Hits you so fast that you go dizzy when the hand pressed against your inner thigh suddenly slides up, the tips of his fingers brushing so close to your sex. Your whole body seizes up, legs tightening even in his hold, tongue rubbing over his palm when your mouth goes wide and your moans go chest-high. 

“I know, love,” he murmurs into the soft bubble surrounding the two of you now, pressing a wet kiss into the mess of your hair. “Not just me. Been needing it just as bad, haven’t you?”

Wet pants into the palm of his hand because you can’t say yes just yet. Even though it’s true. 

He has you face down over his bed the third time he touches you. The first time he ever hooks a hand over your shoulder blade and drives forward until his cock is sheathed in your wetness. 

The stretch has you near empty headed; it doesn’t even happen all at once. He has to work you up to it with three fingers, each thicker than two of yours, and his mouth wet on your clit, sneaking a suck when he has you flat on your back at first. You stare sightlessly at the backs of your eyelids behind the blindfold that he made you put on, but it’s worth it when you hear him shuck the mask and toss it off somewhere into the corner of the room. 

The intimacy is scalding. Even with the blindfold on, you can feel every strand of hair between your fingers when you tug on it and that almost forms a picture in your mind. 

When he tips you over onto your back, you can’t see his face, but you can imagine him hovering over you. Heavy body marked with old scars and keloids, the white, rippled, almost baby-soft new skin of past wounds. You wish you could see and trace them. 

Ghost slots himself between your spread legs, his arms braced on either side of your head. This close, he smells so rich that it almost makes you breathe in deep; musky and salt-licked. You can feel the whiskery rasp of his beard over your skin when he dips his head to suck at your beaded nipples. 

“I’ve been—” you start and stop. Swallow, abruptly shy. “I’ve been—for months now, I’ve been hoping you’d knock on my door and you’d—”

It’s impossible to get the words out. You’ve always been more reserved than most, used to keeping your thoughts close to your chest. Worse after your father’s death, when you’d laid bare everything to this man, the one hovering over you, in a single second. You showed him the heart of you, cracked it open so completely that there was no way you’d ever be able to close it up ever again. Not for him. 

You feel his rapt attention on you. Tongue coming out to drag lazily over your nipple, indulgent. 

“Careful now,” he cautions, but his voice is deliciously amused. “Might be tempted to keep you if I think I’ve been leaving you unsatisfied for months.”

“No, Ghost—”

“Name’s Simon, pet,” he says while notching his cock against your slick opening, sinking in a couple inches with a grunt. It punches the breath out of you. “Call the man fucking you by his name.”

Whatever he says after that is lost in the wind, lost in the guttural moan that comes wrenched from the center of your chest. Your legs tighten around his waist, straining against the bulk of him. Ankles not even able to hook around the small of his back. His body rolls over yours, your wet nipples dragging across his chest when he thrusts into you. 

It feels like a plundering, like weathering some great storm. Simon’s hands press you down by the backs of your thighs and you rake your nails across his back, already criss-crossed with old scars. You’re part of the picture now, leaving scars that’ll be embedded into the fabric of his skin come morning. It makes your head spin. 

His dog tags dragging across your chest as he fucks you. A big hand pats your cheek. 

“You with me, love?”

You blink up at him. You feel like an angel with a hundred different eyes. 

When you blink again, you’re pressed over onto the bed with your ass canted up into the air. Toes just barely brushing the floor where Simon’s dragged you half-off the mattress, one leg grounding himself with the other propped up on the bed. He gets in deeper that way; you think you can feel his cock all the way up to your throat. 

Simon’s less talkative when he fucks you, reduced to a medley of curses and grunts. Guttural. Primordial fucking. When your feet can’t find purchase on the floor, it makes you tighten up, brilliantly turned on from the feeling of helplessness. Like you have nowhere to go but where Simon moves you.

“Can’t even get the whole thing in,” he grunts, and that alone is almost too much. You have no choice but to sneak a hand down to pet your clit. 

It makes you talkative instead, makes you babble. “It’s so deep—I can—Simon, please—gonna make me come—”

You grasp frantically around for the hand on your hip, lacing your fingers through his and dragging it under you until it rests over the slight curve of your lower belly. Feeling himself riles Simon up, makes him pound into your tender sex harder; you know already, in the back of your mind, that you’re going to be sore tomorrow. 

He goes a little wild right before he comes. Now you have to live with that knowledge for the rest of your life—you could be seated across from him in the canteen or on a ship in the middle of the Pacific and you’ll know that Simon Riley goes completely quiet in the seconds before he comes, draws the whole weight of his body across the length of your back and bottoms out inside of you. 

You’ll find his eyes and know in the back of your mind that he goes a bit unhinged with the need to make you come first, replaces your fingers with his over your clit. Pants like a bull in your ear when you finally do, lips curving up into a smile that you can only feel. 

The fourth time he touches you is in a hallway between meetings, the two of you walking in silence to Price’s office. There are a thousand things on your mind, not the least of which being the underlying uncertainty that still hovers in the air whenever you’re alone in a room with Ghost (only Simon when you’re alone with him, you know this, you have to train yourself out of saying his name reflexively). 

His hand brushes against yours and you almost jerk your hand back, thinking it an accident. 

You glance up at him. Find blue eyes staring back down at you. 

You see it there. Raw longing. You feel it mirrored in you; it, for a moment, arches right out of your soul.

A moment suspended in animation:

Choppers touching down in the desert, thick muffs strapped over your ears. Already tasting sand—it’s the only certainty that will follow you over the next month. The promise of sand in your mouth and in every crevice of your body. You’ll be scrubbing it out for weeks to come. Price leads the way to the convoy that awaits your team, shoulders undulating as you stare at his back. Ghost’s presence heavy at your side. Another certainty. 

The Kopp-Etchells effect lighting up the night sky as you watch Ghost ship out; the sparks string across the sky like fairy lights. It’s routine; it happens so frequently that you forget how much it hurts until the blinking light of the chopper vanishes behind a cloud off in the distance. Never knowing when you’ll see him again. 

The wide Sargasso Sea staring back at you from where you stand on a balcony in Nassau. When you blink, the blue deepens.

Ghost teaching you how to toss a butterfly knife, how to flip it between your clumsy fingers; bandages wrapped around almost your whole hand for weeks afterwards. 

Running the track in the training facility until your lungs scream, body pushed to its limit. It’s never enough. You’ll never catch up to the lot of them, bodies honed over years and years while you’re just beginning to carve yours out, but that’s not the point. What’s the point? You catch your eyes in a mirror after showering and promptly avert them. The point is to bring yourself to the point of annihilation every time, until you can graze it with the palm of your hand. 

Pipe dreams like the sound of rushing drain water.

The sound of someone with your father’s name in their mouth. Your whole body going stock-still, a faint tremor running through you until a body pushes past you and you realize that the name was meant for someone else. Dry heaving into the sink in your room immediately after that.

Seeing him after countless weeks apart, that first sighting always like a Fata Morgana. Thinking it can’t be real until it’s proven true; until the thick mitt of his glove presses into the back of your head, his hand pulling you forward and shoving your face into his chest. Breathing in a shuddering, almost watery breath.

You drink so much water in the desert but you’re never quenched. 

In the weeks since you first came together, you’ve slept with Simon three more times. Each time, cataclysmic in its own way. He never shows his face, but he shows you every other vulnerable part of him. The third time, he pulls you astride him and lays your hands flat on his scarred chest, fingers curling in the blond tufts of hair there.

It leaves you covetous, desperate for whatever you can get from him, but wanting too much has hurt you before and that’s the worry now. That this—whatever the two of you have going on—is only going to end in hurt. In someone’s death or forced retirement or distance or the strain of working under the constant stress that is just part and parcel of the military.

“Stop thinking so much,” Simon says when he catches you in a vulnerable moment, curled up next to him in his bed. 

“…I can’t get out of my head.”

You think of the surface of love as a smooth and still, deep, dark lake. Big blue sky overhead, torn across by streaks of wild white clouds, lake deeper and darker because of the bright sky looming over. You imagine yourself silent by the edge of the pool, watching your legs go green under the water, watching the tips of your toes blur beneath the surface.

His hand tips your head up, grazing his lips over yours. 

“I can help with that,” said before you’re turned over onto your back.

Days later, finding Ghost’s eyes from across the tarmac, knowing it’ll be days before you see him again. Everything unbearable and unspoken flutters beneath your breastbone as you search for the right word to describe this moment, but it rises from your lips into a gust of godwind.

You think you’re special because you cheated death? You haven’t done anything worth noting. You’ve died innumerable times in innumerable universes; in this one, someone walked in the room and broke the pattern.

You are in the room with him when the terrible thing happens.

It’s a recon mission that goes sideways almost immediately. Not even an hour after the 141 entered the city, with you accompanying them to help with reconnaissance. There’s an argument to be made that you shouldn’t have even been on the mission with them, one you’d tentatively voiced during the morning SITREP briefing the day before heading out and one’s that summarily ignored. It’s not even Price’s call that you tag along, but rather some general that thinks you’ll be handy.

You’d split up from the others with Ghost, tagging along by his side like a wayward Victorian child, covered head-to-toe in tactical gear. It’s heavier than you expected, weighs you down. Ghost barks into your comm to keep up with him as he trudges through the city, a brisk pace that you struggle to match. 

The sweltering heat and his irritated voice in your ear—waspish because he’d sensed something off the second your team pulled into the city—has you on edge. You’re even more on edge when you rendezvous with a local that’s supposed to act as an informant for your team who keeps giving you different answers when you press him for information. When you relay his answers to Ghost, you can almost hear his teeth grind together. 

Ironically, it’s the first time you’ve seen Ghost in nearly a month. You’d been hoping the operation would go smoothly; just a handful of days in a dry, arid place and then back home to spend the next week on leave. You’d been looking forward to hot showers, cold glasses of lemonade, and eight full hours of sleep. Maybe even finishing a book over a quiet afternoon.

Those things seem further away than ever now.

Gaz and Soap are gone, somewhere on the other side of the city where they’d been sent on some wild goosechase, following soldiers that aren’t even there. Bad intel. Intel that’s going to get someone killed and that someone is likely you at this point—you with your little combat experience and zero tactical skills. 

The gunfire nearly catches the two of you off guard when you leave the house where you’d met with your contact, but Ghost pulls you back inside in an instant. Like he has an instinct for when shit’s about to hit the fan. 

There’s hardly enough time to communicate. He shouts at you to follow him out the back, combatants already swarming in through the front of the house and you run faster than you ever have before, Ghost hot on your heels. 

Bullets whizz by your head, stone walls blasting to pieces just feet from you, following you even as you sprint down alleys and side streets. You’re sure you hear Ghost returning fire, but you can’t turn around to check, even as you breathe in dust and sweat dripping from your upper lip. You nearly trip over a pile of boxes, catching yourself against a building and cutting your hand open, wincing as the pain registers but there’s nothing else you can do apart from keep running. 

“Two down—take the left door,” Ghost growls behind you, loud enough for you to hear over the screams. He speaks in clipped sentences, but your eyes flit to the building he’s talking about, hand wrenching open the steel door and hauling yourself in. 

You must have put some distance between you and the shooters because the two of you manage to make it out of the line of fire. Ghost herds you into the building from the back, more forceful than he’s ever been with you. 

“Stairs —take the stairs and head to the far north side.”

“Why?” you shout back, head still spinning. 

He’s already hustling you up the stairs, not giving you a second to catch your breath or explain himself. Glass from a shattered window crunches under his boot as he nearly herds you up the flight of stairs.

“Soap can come—s’where we left them off.” His voice sounds pained, but you can’t glance around to look, jogging down the hallway to the staircase at the other end leading out of the building. 

There’s a shout from somewhere just outside.

“Fuck,” Ghost hisses behind you when the sound of the steel door banging against the wall echoes from the floor below. He grabs you by the back of your shirt and hauls you into an empty room, shutting the door quietly behind him. 

There’s hardly enough time to barricade the two of you in, especially since you can hardly make a sound. Ghost pulls you to the wall with him behind the door, making sure you’re not in the sightline if someone comes in.

“Take this,” he says, unholstering a pistol from his side and forcing you to take it, “and keep it tight on that door. The second it opens, you shoot—doesn’t matter who.” 

You nod, voice gone. There’s no way you could force a sound out even if you tried. 

He positions himself in front of you, keeping you covered, and you move just enough so that you’re not pointing the gun at him. 

You feel like you sit there, crouched against the wall with your gun aimed at the door, for hours. Poised on the edge of a cliff. Your arms shake with the effort to hold the gun up, but they don’t buckle, held up by sheer anxiety. It twists and coils in your belly and smells of rust. Only when the voices grow faint, still on the floor below but somewhere farther away in the building, does some of the tension leave your shoulders. Only enough for them to unlock and lower your weapon a bit. 

Something clatters to the floor. Your head snaps to the man guarding you only to see him slumped against the wall, breathing heavily. 

“Simon?” you ask sharply, putting the pistol aside and twisting his body around. A cold shock spreads through your body when you notice the blood pooling on the floor beneath him.

His eyes are already rolling back up into his head, body slumping back against the wall. You peel up the mask just over his nose, heart stopping when you see how pale he’s grown, the color leached from his face. 

The first slap glances off him, not enough force behind it. You’re strung too tight, nerves shot. The second one actually ripples across his face, even smarts against your palm. You whisper-shout his name again, eye darting frantically over to the door that he’d piled chairs in front of to barricade the two of you into the room. 

It doesn’t take more than a couple seconds of observation to isolate the issue. There’s a bullet wound in his thigh bleeding profusely, more blood than you’ve ever seen a person lose. It makes you go dizzy, head suddenly balancing on a single point like there’s nothing holding it up. Only your hand flat on the wall that Ghost is slumped against keeps you upright. 

There’s no time to lose it though. There will be a time later to feel the blood rush from your head. Pressure to the wound runs on a loop in your brain. Even though the leg of his pants is nearly saturated with blood, you can see where he’s been shot from where the material is ruptured. There are gauze pads in your vest that you take out with clumsy fingers, tearing the pack open and shifting his leg so you press it against the inside of his thigh. It does nothing to stop the near constant flow of blood now coating your fingers. 

You haven’t had any medical training beyond basic first aid and military prereqs, but you wrench the belt from around your waist with shaking hands. Loop it around his upper thigh into a tourniquet, almost near his groin, pulling the strap tight. 

Your heart rate goes erratic when the bleeding doesn’t abate, still a steady flow. It’s so dark on the concrete. He’s lost so much blood that it’s a wonder that he stayed conscious for as long as he did. Probably clung to it for as long as he could. 

Only when you twist the windlass, holding it so tight that you worry that you’re doing something wrong, that you’re somehow making it worse, does it staunch the flow. 

“Simon, Simon, please—wake the fuck up,” you beg, but it falls on deaf ears. 

You cup his cheeks, then peel back an eyelid to check what’s underneath, but it does nothing. He’s out cold. 

There are smelling salts in your tac vest that you crack and shake under his nose. Even from a distance, you get a whiff of ammonia and draw back, eyes stinging, but despite the way Ghost’s face wrinkles involuntarily, it doesn’t wake him. 

At first, you try to pick him up. You squat by him and ruck one of his limp arms over your shoulders, trying to lift him up like that, supported against your side. He doesn’t even budge. Your quads strain under his weight, getting all of an inch up before you collapse back against the wall. Breath punched out of you. It’s no wonder—you’ve never squatted anything more than fifty kilos and Ghost is easily twice that. 

You try another time before admitting that he’s just too heavy for you. He’d be heavy on a good day, but he’s also wearing about twenty kilos of equipment. 

You feel helpless, verging on some kind of breakdown, sure that any second someone’s going to come up to the floor where the two of you are hiding and bust in the door.  

There’s a tarp folded up tight in your pack that you pull out with shaking hands, fumbling over the straps and ties. For a split second, you aren’t sure you’ll be able to get it out in time—you hear the sharp ricochet of bullets echoing a floor away, someone loading a round—but then it bursts open, the whole dark green expanse of it shaking out. You make quick work of spreading it out across the floor right next to Ghost’s prone form. 

You sweat so hard that your hair mats to your face, forces you to drag a hand repeatedly over your forehead so the strands don’t dangle in front of your eyes. Obviously didn’t put enough hair wax in it to slick it back before you set off with Ghost earlier that day. You’ll shave your whole head if there’s even a chance this could ever happen again (you cling to that word as you roll Ghost over onto the tarp; again, again, ever happen again).

The radio strapped to Ghost’s shoulder crackles to life. “Lt—something’s wrong—no bodies on the north side. Headed back your way. How copy?”

Your pulse jumps at the sound of Soap’s voice on the radio. 

You lean over your lieutenant’s body, thought in your head to apologize later (later, later, when he’s awake, when he’s awake and the wound is plugged and he’s bandaged up and later), and press down on the comms button. “Soap—Ghost’s out. It’s just me.”

His voice goes serious immediately. “Bonnie, what d'ya mean? Ghost got hit?”

“Yes. I—I got a—got a tourniquet on, but he’s not waking up.”

“Fuck, fuck,” Soap hisses into the radio, and you can almost imagine the twisted expression on his face, the hand raking over his stubbled cheeks. “He’s alive?”

You nod to no one. “Yes. Just unconscious. We got pinned down—he passed out right after we shook them off.”

“S’he still bleeding?”

“No—I—” You swallow, check under his leg. Feel woozy all over again at the sight of fresh droplets of blood on the concrete. “Yes. A–a little.”

“How long s’he been out? You tried to rouse him?” 

You don’t know how he’s keeping it together enough to ask you questions, but it’s what they’re built for, what they’re meant for. There are noises in the background on his end that you can’t discern, won’t even try to. 

“Not long, maybe um, fi-five or ten minutes? Yes, I tried—even the smelling salts, they’re not working—”

You think you can hear the crackling shape of his thoughts even over the airwaves. 

“Bonnie, don’t think that we can make it back in time to—” Soap bites the words off at the root, wild desperation clinging to his voice. “Hide him. Hide him good and I’ll—we can come back when it’s not—when it’s not crawling with soldiers. First light. Can you hide him?”

“There’s nowhere to—” Your eyes scour the room, looking for anything that could constitute a hiding place. There’s nothing. It’s sparsely furnished, walls plain. If someone were to walk in, there’s no way they’d miss the hulking soldier collapsed in the middle of the room. “No. Maybe I could—I could c-carry him. Meet you out front.”

“Bonnie, he’s heavy as shit, there’s no way—you gotta leave him.” His voice breaks over the command.

“I can take him, I can take him.” Your voice doesn’t even sound like your own. The sound of men somewhere in the building causes you to drop your voice. “Let me do it, please, please, Soap, please, I can—”

“A’right, a’right.” Soap’s breathing heavy, finger probably clamped down over the comm button, not letting it go even for a second. You can hear the sound of tires squealing in the back. “Doubling back now. Keep the heid, bonnie—get the two of you by the far entrance where we let you off.” 

“Yes, sir.” The radio goes dead, Soap’s finger finally letting go of its death grip on the button on the other end. 

It takes near an age to drag Ghost’s body across the building, sweat soaking down the lengths of your arms. The hardest thing you’ve ever done. Your whole body aches like it might give up, stressed to the brink of exhaustion from the weight of the man you pull behind you. Despite the tourniquet, the blood still trickles down his leg, soaking his pants up to his ankles, and it makes your blood pressure spike when you stare too long. 

You don’t even have the luxury of reaching down to check his pulse again. The building might be more or less free of hostiles—you haven’t heard the echo of boots against the concrete in awhile now, and likely they’ve gone on to search some of the surrounding buildings for the two of you—but there’s always a chance someone could surprise you. 

You keep the pistol that Ghost gave you earlier holstered at your side. Ears peeled. 

And what’ll it mean to lose him? It’ll mean staring down the barrel of your own life, swept away, washed down the current. 

This time, it won’t happen. Not just because Ghost is a palimpsest over your own narrative, not because he’s occupying the space your father once filled, but rather because you cannot watch this man die. Not this man. Anyone else but him.

You think sometimes that the only way out for Simon is through—from this life into the next. The little you know of him suggests that. This is a man who’s lost so much and trusts no one now—works himself to the bone as if in penance or maybe because it’s the only thing tethering him to the real world. You know he sees other people as somehow different from him, like they’re fundamentally incompatible. 

Not this time. When he witnessed the annihilation of your world, something clicked in your head. You can’t articulate it, but in the second that it happened, a morbid sense of kinship emerged from the ashes of your burning world and his world, already burnt. If God wants him back, he’ll have to pry him out of your dead hands.

The strength that floods you comes from nowhere. Everywhere. Adrenaline like nothing you’ve ever felt before—how mothers lift vans off toddlers, how people walk away from car wrecks on broken legs—and it’s how you’re able to drag the heaviest man you’ve ever met down a flight of stairs without cracking his head on the concrete and nearly a hundred feet. 

You shoulder a door open to blinding sun, keep it propped with your foot while you leave Ghost for a second, searching for a stone heavy enough to keep it open. Your hands are shaking when you grab the end of the tarp again and you see the blood now from where the skin on your palms has been torn away, a nail split. 

The pain doesn’t even register. Just sunlight and hot air. 

The sound of tires rumbling and small rocks shaking in the dirt signals their approach. Your head whips up to catch a truck rounding the corner at breakneck speed, coming to a sudden halt just feet from you. Your heart goes wild for a second, but the side door opens before the truck even comes to a full stop, Gaz barrelling out of it and Roach coming out the back. 

There isn’t time for it yet, but you near collapse, body burnt out. It takes two men to heave Ghost’s unconscious body into the back of the truck, and you hobble after them, Roach catching you under the arm and helping you in when he lets go of Ghost’s legs. 

White dominates your vision, the sunlight making you squint after being stuck in the dark for so long. Again, Soap doesn’t even leave enough time for Gaz to slam the door shut before he peels off, engine roaring with how hard he presses down on the gas. 

“Roach, check ‘im,” Soap shouts back, taking a turn so sharp that you almost slam your head into the side of the truck. There’s a grab handle just overhead that you white-knuckle, swallowing down the bile that’s threatening to come up. 

There’s gunfire behind you, a bullet ricocheting off the side of the truck, but the soldiers still firing at your team are too far away to actually hit at this point. Soap’s boot is nearly parallel with the floor of the truck; you’ve been in planes that weren’t as fast. 

The only thing keeping you sane is the sheer relief in Roach’s eyes, visible even from behind his goggles. He tends to the wound you dressed on Ghost’s upper thigh, checking his vitals every thirty seconds or so, like he needs the reassurance that his lieutenant is still with them, still alive. 

“Not bleeding anymore, Soap,” Roach says. 

The sense of relief is almost palpable, the way the three of them let out a collective breath. It still doesn’t feel real. 

A hand pulls your hood back, combs through your hair. Gaz, likely, grounding himself. His hand is a comfort that you didn’t know you needed. 

“You did good, bonnie.” Soap’s praise is almost lost, your head too light for the words to fully sink in. 

“He’s okay,” Gaz says into your ear, likely a shout but your hearing is so shot that it sounds like a murmur. “He’s gonna be okay, doll.”

When you look out the back window, you watch as the town recedes beyond the horizon, buildings sinking down into the ground. The nightmare isn’t behind you yet—Ghost is likely still looking at time on the operating table and you’ll probably need to be stitched up as well (the pain is just starting to sink in as the adrenaline ebbs)—but it’s fast approaching its end. You finally breathe.

The first thing Ghost says when he opens his eyes to you: “You shouldn’t have done it.”

You expected nothing less than resistance. You aren’t a novice here anymore, you know how these men operate—dogs of war, carved into living statues, wrung dry of tears and sentimentality—but you are shocked to find that it still stings. Hurts worse than your body, which feels like one large bruise. 

“I don’t care,” you reply, lips stiff. Maybe fighting back a wayward tear.

So you’re more sensitive than the lot of them. So you haven’t been scraped down to the bone. 

Seeing Ghost laid back in a hospital bed actually doesn’t remove the intimidation factor. The nurses have him stripped down to a medical gown and blue face mask, the black paint already washed from his eyes, leaving behind only faint dark smudges, but all it does is expose the bulk of him that’s often hidden beneath three layers of clothing. Arms packed with muscle, riddled with lacerations and burn marks. Some large enough to make you wince.

There’s a rational part of you that understands what this is. A man who thinks that he should’ve saved you, not the other way around. You just don’t know how to get the words out that he already has. 

You’re also short circuiting a little because a nurse came in earlier to check on his bandaging and pulled part of his gown back enough for you to see that Simon has a nipple ring. In all the times you’ve slept with him, you’ve never noticed any piercings on him. In fairness, most of the time he insists on blindfolding you so he can go without the mask. 

“Is that new?” you had asked, dry mouthed. Eye twitching.

It’s the first thing that got him to actually smirk a little beneath the mask. “Usually take it out. Forgot to before we shipped out this time.”

He grows serious when the nurse leaves the two of you alone. You’ve had a bit of time to come to terms with everything. The doctors have had him holed up in a private room to recuperate ever since he was operated on post-exfil. 

“What did Johnny tell you to do?” Ghost asks. You raise an eyebrow.

“Johnny?” 

“What did Soap tell you to do when I was out?”

You don’t want to open your mouth. Soap’s likely already told him everything. You haven’t been in his hospital room twenty-four-seven; after your own medical evaluation—antiseptic, a couple stitches for your hand, and a new box of Tylenol for pain relief—you’d been hauled away to work on other assignments, luckily all of which have kept you stationed on base. Probably Price’s work, but you haven’t been able to track him down to ask, nor have you wanted to. No reason to look a gift horse in the mouth. 

You frown, pulling at a loose thread on your sleeve. “I thought you read the report.”

“I want to hear it from you. Stop avoiding the question.”

“Why are we doing this now?” 

It’s so strange how even just sitting on a chair next to him, a soldier laid up in a cot in a hospital room, has you feeling cornered and shifty. The monitor still attached to him beeps faintly. It should diminish his threat level, but instead it only reminds you that he’s alive.

“Because I said so.” End of story, his eyes say. 

“He told me to hide you,” you finally bite out. 

“Hide and what?”

“And leave.”

His eyes stay trained on yours. Ghost says nothing for a few seconds, letting you sit in what goes unsaid. “Next time Soap tells you to get out, you get out.”

You say nothing, lips sealed and held in a tight line. Get up out of your chair when he dismisses you and go about your day. 

In a better frame of mind, you’ll understand that he has to say those things. That there’s such a thing as a chain of command and that little reprimand he gave you in the hospital room was in lieu of a much longer write up for not following your sergeant’s original orders. It doesn’t stop you from stewing in frustration for the rest of the day, stabbing blankly at your food when you eat in your room and taking painstaking notes later when you work on transcribing an audio file until your fingers cramp up.

Stunned silence follows you like dust in your wake. 

It doesn’t take long for news to travel across the base that Ghost is recovering in the hospital after the events of your mission. People stare a beat too long at you nowadays. Men approach you in the gym to talk or offer you tips because maybe they want to be able to say that they helped the girl who dragged Ghost home. Makes them feel powerful to think that they’re stronger than you. 

The level of scrutiny that comes is almost too much to handle. You can’t explain yourself to anyone. You can’t say “I would’ve done it no matter who was in that room” because there’s a kernel buried at the root of you that speaks the truth and the truth is that no, you wouldn’t have. You would’ve listened to Soap. You would’ve piled the chairs in a corner of the room, draped the tarp that you dragged Ghost out over them, and done the best that you could before heading out alone.

So instead, you scamper back to your quarters and stay put in your room. Only leave when summoned by someone with enough authority that you can’t politely refuse.

Over the days when Ghost is forced to stay in the infirmary (you’ve heard that Price threatened him with medical discharge if he so much as twitched out of bed), Gaz keeps you company more often than not. He’s got nothing better to do. After the shit show of your last mission, neither of you are going anywhere for a while. 

It’s nice having someone around who gets it. You haven’t spent as much one-on-one time with Gaz as you have with Soap (and Soap is otherwise occupied, recovering himself since he gave a decent amount of his blood to Ghost), but he has a more calming presence. 

You worry for a brief period of time that there’s no coming back from this. You know Ghost isn’t the type to invite softness into his life. He rejects it at the door, sends it back; you’ve shown your hand in doing what you did, in knowing that he knows that you wouldn’t have done that for anyone else. 

So you’re ready for the inevitable—for his presence to completely disappear from your life apart from the few times when you’re shipped off somewhere together, sitting on opposites of the plane. Not making eye contact in the halls. Hearing his voice come gruff and stilted, rather than the softer tone that you’ve become accustomed to in the privacy of his or your room. You’re prepared to be replaced altogether one day, to see someone else—another translator, someone who actually knows what they’re doing—take your place, run up the tarmac to him instead of you.

What you are not prepared for is the way he becomes an absolute fixed presence at your back the second he’s released from medical care.

“This…this can’t be comfortable for you,” you say, still reeling from Ghost having pulled you across his lap after summoning you to his office. 

He hums, not bothering to offer a response. He’s been filling out a report for the last ten minutes while you’ve been sitting quietly in his lap, his thumb stroking over the underside of your rib where he holds you. At one point, he shifts and you offer to leave, worried that you’re hurting him. He silences you with a single look.

The days after that are the same. Hand on the nape of your neck in the hallway when he walks you to his office, where you spend more and more of your time now, pulling one of the chairs up to sit closer to him while you do paperwork in silence with him. Sometimes listening to a podcast in the background until Ghost gripes that he can’t hear his own thoughts and you smile as you shut it off. His presence is heavy at your back wherever he follows you—the rec center, air field, taking the treadmill next to you when you come to the gym for an early morning workout.

In your room, it’s even worse. He spends more time between your legs than not, pussy-drunk when he laps up your clit, holding you down with a thick arm across your stomach. His tongue flutters over the little bud between your legs, kissing it like it’s a mouth. Almost ravenous. Pushing two fingers in and grunting like he’s missed it so much, licking around where his fingers disappear. 

You almost kick him in the head with how hard your leg spasms. 

He also—and your mind screeches at this—doesn’t blindfold you before pulling the mask off his face. You almost think it’s a mistake at first, screwing your eyes shut before you even get the briefest glimpse of his face. Throwing an arm across your face in case you’re tempted to sneak a peek. 

“Sweetheart,” Simon coaxes, a hand traveling up your body to pull your hands away from your face. “Sweetie, none of that. Keep ‘em open for me, yeah?”

You blink your eyes open. 

Lips thin like most of his countrymen. Thick scarring from an old burn near his temple—you’ve seen them also along his shoulder on the same side. Cheekbones set high on his face. You’ve seen his nose before when he’s pulled the mask up to eat and drink, but never in full view like this, showing the little bump in the middle of it. Pretty. Pretty pretty pretty. You can’t stop thinking it as you stare down at his face, trying not to flush when you see how wet his lips and chin are from eating you out. 

He runs his tongue deliberately up the center of your cunt without losing eye contact with you. You go a bit dumb after that.

When Simon fucks you now, it feels different than before. Before felt good, toe-curlingly satisfying. Never dull, always exciting and thrilling and leaving you gagging for more. This though, is borderline lewd, crazed. Like he’s trying to bury himself inside of you so he never has to leave. There’s nothing you can do but lay there and take it. Let him leave wet, sucking kisses up your neck and over your chest; know they’ll be dark and splotchy tomorrow. 

“Mine, huh?” he grunts, pounding into you and leaving you mindless. “Wan’ to keep me all for yourself? That why you dragged me home?”

“No, that’s—that’s not why—”

“Gotta take responsibility for your actions, pet. M’yours now, yeah? You don’t bring something home and let it loose—gotta keep it close so no one takes it.”

It’s so much scarier than you could’ve imagined. You feel flayed open, like he’s seen inside of you. You’ve never felt this way with someone before, never had someone claim you like this. 

Simon’s always been quiet when he fucks, much like he is in the day, but not with the kind of single-minded intensity he adopts after you’ve come. Brows drawn together tight and teeth grit. Emptying himself inside you when he comes, breathing out harshly through his nose like a storming bull.

In the morning, he’ll grab your coffee for you. Pass it to you like it’s nothing, like it’s a new routine. 

If you keep feeding that dog, it’ll keep coming back. You’ve heard that saying before and it’s never made sense until now. 

You almost don’t see it coming because it’s so quick. It’s blink-and-you-miss-it.

Ghost sits at the table in your room under the glow of a single lamp, only a simple balaclava on. It betrays intimacy, betrays something further than skin deep, but you aren’t ready to say it just yet. He stares down at the chessboard in front of him, scrutinizing your opening move; these days, you take turns opening, often taking the minute to put on the kettle when he considers his opening move or his rebuttal. Today, it’s the latter.

“This is the Caro-Kann defense,” he says, moving the pawn at c6 forward. You blink; the next plays already rustle across the plains of your mind, but the suddenness of seeing a familiar figure on the horizon makes you pause.

You know that. He shouldn’t know that.

“Reading up on chess openings before you come over?” you tease, still light hearted even though your heart skips a beat in your chest. 

“Yes,” Ghost says gruffly. Ah.

As a child, you learned to write your name in cursive and block letters: this is a kind of godliness. The cacophony of the external world would dim to a mute droning in your ear as the letters manifested onto the page again and again, rising off the paper, melding into a fluidity you would later recognize as blood.

You think you understand it now. Blood is a language you both speak.

“I won’t ever say it out loud,” he warns, nuzzling into the crook of your neck when he pulls you close to him in bed later that night. 

You know what he means. He’s giving you tacit permission to look but not speak. He is saying that it is unbearable to be known, but if someone must know him, it should at least be someone who understands some fundamental part of him. Maybe that's you.

Your hands are still stained with his blood; you can smell it sometimes at night, when you’re right on the precipice of sleep.

“I know,” you say instead. “I don’t need it.”

Your heart has taken a good beating in this lifetime. Someone tells you once a day about their thoughts on the weather, like it is so much, like you stand beneath the same sky together. Maybe your heart flickers into the embers of your soul when you talk about the rain together like life itself is this collection of fine tuned moments.

You are choosing to end the story on a note that simmers away at the infinite possibilities because you know what the alternative is: you have seen it with your eyes on an unremarkable day. 

Today, you curl around him and dream.