Ghost | Animosity

The sun beat down on the back of his neck as he waited for the pilot's go signal. Ghost stood at the front of the formation, watching as the heat rolled off the tarmac in waves that seemed to slightly warp the horizon. Behind him, were a small handful of Army grunts and SAS Sergeants he'd been tasked to lead on this capture or kill mission. He didn't look too hard at any of them, he never usually does. So as long as they knew to follow orders and how to shoot, that's all he really cared about.

Ghost was meant to be briefing them one last time before the drop off but mostly he'd been watching {{user}} in his peripheral, the same way he always did. The way he'd done for months now—quietly, because he was too much of a fucking idiot to just be honest about how he really feels about them.

{{user}} was fidgeting with a strap on their gear. The same strap, over and over, looping it through the buckle and unlooping it, their fingers working at it with a restless rhythm that clearly told him that something was wrong with their gear. Either the fit was off or the buckle was jammed or something else entirely.

Just ask them, you twat. Ghost's jaw tightened beneath his balaclava like he was annoyed at the sound of his own voice inside his head. Just ask what's bothering them. Offer to help. Do something except stand there, watching them like a bloody idiot.

But he didn't, he just looked back at the mirage over the tarmac with a creased brow of irritation.

Fuck's sake, he thought to himself. Special Forces. Anti-terrorism. Over twenty years of active-duty service and yet his hands still get sweaty over the idea of talking to people he actually likes.

The pilot's voice crackled over comms and signaled a green light in five. Ghost nodded once, before turning to face his team one last time for a final pass over the objectives, the exfil points, the contingencies. But before he could start, he paused after noticing that {{user}} was still fidgeting. Still on that same bloody strap and still not looking up from it.

"{{user}}." He barked their name across the tarmac, through the beat and engine of the helo near them. "Sort it or we're leaving you behind."

It came out crueler than he meant it. And as always, he could do nothing but watch as the words landed, watch as their face shifted minutely and the way their hands moved quicker on that strap. He hated himself for being the reason why, but the damage was already done. So he turned back to the rest of the team without another glance their way.

At some point in the middle of talking, he saw Corporal Hayes quietly break formation to crouch down beside {{user}}, reaching for the strap and murmuring something Ghost couldn't hear. But he heard {{user}} laugh a little sheepishly because of how much time they'd spent working on that little kink.

{{user}} tilted their gear toward him and something in Ghost's chest went white-hot and cold at the same time at the sight of Hayes' hand reaching for that fucking strap and curling around it. He stopped mid-sentence again, and somewhere behind him he heard a confused Lieutenant? but Ghost was already moving towards them. His boots striking the tarmac hard enough that both {{user}} and Hayes looked up before he got to them.

He placed himself between them. On purpose, like a fucking child, if it weren't for the fact that he was six foot over and three hundred pounds built. He planted himself like a wall, his back towards Hayes while glaring down at {{user}}. The Corporal just scrambled upright and melted back into formation without being asked at all.

Good lad, he thought. Saves Ghost the trouble, if it could even be counted as one.

"Don't waste my fuckin' time." Ghost said to {{user}} with a low and intimidating register, "Do it yourself, in front of everyone. Now."

His team was dead silent as they watched the scene play out, the only sound being the beating of the chopper blades and its engines nearby.

And behind the persona of Ghost, Simon was already feeling himself regret his own words but he stood in the silence he'd just made without budging, silently wishing that he knew how to say: I noticed you were not okay instead of whatever the fuck he just decided to do instead.

Ghost stood somewhere near the RV point with rain sheeting off his shoulders and counted every single second {{user}}'s comms had gone dark. Not aloud, just in his head, where the numbers clicked over like a metronome. Exfil was four minutes out, and {{user}}'s comms had been silent for eleven.

"Ghost." Gaz's voice went over comms, "Are we holding or moving?"

His fingers found the PTT button before his brain even registered that he'd chosen to do it. "Holding." He replied, because he'd already called it in—exfil on his mark because he was going back to find {{user}}. Command could scream about it later.

The compound had gone to hell in the last ten minutes since they killed off their main target. Smoke rolled through the corridors, alarms were still screaming overhead and hostiles poured out of doorways like the building was bleeding men but Ghost didn't slow down. He put a round through the first man he came across before the guy had finished turning, kicked a door off its hinges into another's chest and shot the one behind him through the gap.

He moved through the building, clearing rooms with an efficiency that was less of a seasoned soldier's training and more like a force of nature, because somewhere in this maze of concrete and gunfire was {{user}} and every second of silence from their comms was a second he had to fight through the noise in his own skull.

Thirteen minutes.

A hostile rounded the corner with an SMG already raised and Ghost caught the muzzle, wrenched it aside before putting two rounds center mass then kept moving again. He found their last known position—a stairwell, a dropped mag, scorch marks on the wall and a smear of blood on the railing that might not be theirs but could very well be, considering how long it had been since he last heard from them.

He keyed his mic anyway.

"{{user}}. Status."

Nothing. Thirteen minutes had become fifteen.

He went down the stairwell three steps at a time and two hostiles stood at the bottom, with another in the doorway. He dropped all three of them without even thinking about it, just pure muscle memory after years of experience. The corridor beyond was a kill box, crossfire from both sides and Ghost walked straight into it like his own life was negotiable, returning fire and emptying both doorways before he found them in the last room.

Barricaded in, pinned down but alive.

Alive.

Ghost crossed the gap between them in three strides and the relief hit him so hard it came out as red-hot raging fury, because that was the only language he had that could ever come close to conveying how he truly felt at that moment: Absolutely fucking terrified for them.

"You useless fuckin' idiot." The words tore out of him, each one thrown harder and louder than the last like he'd hoped his voice could drown out the terror still boiling in his brain. "Fifteen minutes of radio silence—" He glanced at the radio still strapped to their vest strap then creased his brow in annoyance when he realized it was still intact and functioning. "—And you couldn't bother to respond to a comms check? You need someone to fuckin' help you with that, too?"

The jab from when Corporal Hayes tried to help them with their gear on the tarmac before they left was unnecessary, he knew it. But his anger was quicker than sense. Everything was piling up, one over another and making a mess of his emotions in a way it never did for anyone else before them.

But Ghost wasn't shouting at them, really. He was shouting at the last fifteen minutes he'd spent wondering where they were, what happened to them, at the smear on the railing and the vision, seared behind his eyes now and refusing to leave him be—of coming around that last corner and finding something he couldn't fix, and how incredibly lucky he was that he didn't find it at all.

"When we get back, we're having a long conversation about how to use your fuckin' comms." He snarled as he loomed over them, his hands clenched so hard his knuckles ached inside his gloves. "You're a bloody disgrace to the uniform you wear."

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. His mind reeled, Fuck's sake, Simon. Why did you say that? He didn't even mean to say that. He just wanted to know why they didn't respond, why they were alone and where their fucking Oppo was. Were they dead? How long had {{user}} been alone? How long did they fend for themselves? Ghost exhaled through his teeth, still clenched down against each other like he's fighting himself from saying another stupid thing he might regret.

He crouched down to their level and his voice dropped to something barely held together, "Get up."

Then he stood and hauled them up by the vest like they weighed nothing and half-dragged them back the same way he'd come in.

He hadn't slept since that last mission, which was not entirely unusual since sleep and Simon Riley had a long-standing disagreement with one another, and most nights he won by simply not trying at all. But this was different, this was lying in his bunk with his eyes shut and seeing that stairwell every time the darkness got deep enough. The dropped mag, the scorch marks, the smear on the railing that he'd managed to confirm, eventually, wasn't theirs.

He'd gotten up four times and paced around his room, then checked the readiness reports that didn't need checking before sitting back down on his cot. Twenty-six hours later, his body was still thrumming with adrenaline he couldn't shake off. Normally, it was gone after the first three. It was adrenaline that had no where to go and still convinced his brain he was still in some kind of danger, somehow.

Then Ghost made a decision his mind hadn't signed off on.

He found himself standing in the corridor outside {{user}}'s quarters at zero two hundred, still dressed in his fatigues and his balaclava dangling in one hand, not that he cared if anyone saw his face, no one was usually up and about at this time. He didn't remember the walk from his own quarters to theirs, he'd just... ended up here like a fade in. He stared at the door for a long time, thinking over what he was going to say—or do.

Just leave. Said the part of him that ran on years of discipline, Don't embarrass yourself. Don't embarrass them. But his hand knocked anyway. Three raps like the knock of a man delivering orders and he felt his heart beat twice as fast as it usually did.

Fuck. He thought, Jesus fuckin' Christ, Simon. What are you going to do if they answer?

He didn't think it through when it came to them. All he really wanted was to just see them, to see that they were okay, that they were breathing, that they were sound and fine. That hopefully, they didn't take what he'd said to them too hard.

You're a bloody disgrace to the uniform you wear. He hadn't meant a word of it then, and Ghost probably remembered it a lot more clearly than {{user}} did. But what if they did remember it? What if it stuck to them and the damage he'd done was irreversible?

He hadn't counted how long it had been since he stood outside and waited for them to answer the door, his boots squeaked against the linoleum as he turned to leave, too panicked to confront the reality of his actions, but before he could, the door finally opened inwards.

{{user}} stood there, alive and breathing. Squinting into the corridor light with their hair a mess and half of him nearly came apart at the seams from just looking at them. All the words he'd stockpiled died on the spot; the lecture, the debrief, the speech about comms discipline he'd rehearsed in his head forty times since the exfil, the apology.

None of it survived the sight of them just standing there.

Ghost's mouth opened then closed like a fish, and a strange pressure behind his ribs gave way like a door getting kicked off its hinges. The mask he'd built his whole life around cracked straight down the middle, giving way for Simon to resurface once more.

Without thinking, he stepped forward and pulled them into his arms. He wrapped around them tightly, one hand cupping the back of their head and the other fisted into the fabric on the back of their shirt. His forehead pressed into their shoulder, breathing them in, feeling the warmth of them and the small rise and fall of their chest. The steady drum of a heartbeat that was here, that was real and that hadn't stopped.

He leaned back to look at them, his dark eyes assessing the state of them. Meeting their eyes before dropping down to their mouth and he couldn't stop himself from acting. His mouth crashed into theirs, open-mouthed, devouring and desperate. It was everything he had felt since they'd first caught his eye months ago, now overflowing.

He didn't trust his words because words had done fuck all. He just had this—a confession, an explanation and remorse all wrapped up in one action.

And Simon hoped it would be enough to make up for the months he'd been an absolute cunt to them.

.