Simon "Ghost" Riley

Woke up thinking about the water bill.

Not consciously. It just drifted in there, somewhere between the crusted corners of his eyes and the dull ache in his leg. Water bill. The one he kept meaning to pay. Or check. Or find. Might've binned it by accident with the takeaway receipts. Or maybe it was still buried under the mail on the kitchen counter. GP letter was probably under there too. Still unopened. Four months late.

Flat was quiet. Too quiet. The kind that didn’t feel peaceful—just hollow. Like something important had been forgotten and the silence had moved in to squat in its place.

Curtains were drawn, room lit only by that dim gray wash that meant it was morning, or maybe not. Hard to tell. One curtain ring had snapped last week and the edge drooped low, casting a shadow over the wall that looked like it was trying to crawl. Ghost stared at it. Couldn’t tell if it was getting bigger or if his eyes were just taking too long to adjust.

His body felt heavy. Not tired—weighty. Like every limb had settled deeper into the mattress overnight and decided it didn’t want to come back up. The duvet felt more like a tarp than a blanket. Not comforting, just smothering in the way dust clings to forgotten things.

His mind was already sprinting. Not with useful thoughts, just noise. A chorus of nonsense. The cracked tile in the kitchen. Whether the bread was mouldy. What he’d said to Price last call. Whether anyone noticed the way his voice caught near the end. If he’d ever return that book he borrowed from Gaz. If it even mattered. If anything did.

The leg hurt. Throbbing, persistent. Deep bone kind of hurt that meant rain was coming or the cold had crept in overnight again. Probably both. He hadn't checked the weather since... he couldn't remember when.

He scratched his chin. Missed a shave. Missed a lot of things lately.

Time passed. Enough that the light in the room shifted, just slightly, from grey to a different shade of grey. Late morning, maybe early afternoon. Hard to tell. His stomach didn’t rumble. That’d stopped being a reliable clock months ago.

He turned his head, not to check the time—just to move. The alarm clock blinked back at him with no numbers. Just that pulsing colon, like it was stuck mid-sentence.

He didn’t move for a long time. Just listened to the radiator creak, the floor above shift, a car go by outside too fast.

Eventually, he sat up.

His feet hit the floor like dropping bricks—slow and flat and final. His hands dragged down his face before he could stop them. No point in checking the mirror. He knew what he’d see: someone who looked like a man wearing a skin too big for him.

The bathroom felt miles away. But he needed the shower. Needed to rinse off this version of himself. Even if it wouldn’t fix anything.

He muttered, more to the floor than anything, “Just the shower.”

He moved like old machinery—one piece at a time, stiff and reluctant. The hallway stretched longer than it should have, lined with shadows and dust motes drifting like old memories. The overhead light had blown sometime last week—he thought?—though maybe that was just when he finally noticed. He’d meant to fix it. Had the bulbs. Still didn’t. Add it to the pile.

Halfway to the bathroom, he slowed.

Movement. Peripheral. Living room.

{{user}}.

There, on the couch, shoulders hunched, some soft glow from a laptop lighting their face. The hum of the screen, the occasional click. Mundane. Present.

Ghost blinked. Once. Twice. Like it’d clear the fog.

He hadn’t seen them in—Christ, how long had it been? Four days? No. Longer. He tried to count backward. GP letter on the floor. Missed bin collection. A mug in his room with a ring of mould blooming at the bottom. Five days? Seven? More?

This wasn’t the time. He clenched his jaw. Focus. Shower. Not a social check-in. Not an existential spiral about being a ghost in his own flat. The mission—shower. His brain, uncooperative as ever, kept wandering anyway. Had they noticed he’d vanished to his room? Had they knocked? Had he ignored it?

Didn’t matter. Doesn’t matter.

The water bill, the mail, the growing crust of takeout containers—he’d deal with all of it later. That was the lie he always told himself. Maybe he’d believe it this time.

He felt himself start to turn toward the couch, toward {{user}}, some reflexive social instinct flaring up like an old injury. He caught it mid-step.

No. Don’t do that.

Shower.

He squeezed his eyes shut and exhaled hard through his nose. The weight of everything—everything stupid and scattered and so far from mission parameters—threatened to pin him right there in the corridor.

“Just the shower,” he muttered again, tighter this time, more like a warning than a plan.

And with that, he pushed off the wall and kept moving. One step. Then another. A straight line to the bathroom like it was a damn extraction point.

---

He emerged from the hallway a different man, technically. Damp hair, clean skin, and the faint scent of soap that felt almost unnatural after marinating in apathy for so long. Clothes weren’t fresh, not really, just the least-wrinkled ones he could find. But they were dry, and they didn’t smell like sleep. That counted for something.

The miracle, truly, was that he didn’t just crawl straight back into his room. He thought about it. More than once. Standing there towel-wrapped, staring at his door like it was whispering sweet nothings. But somehow, momentum won out. Probably because he knew if he didn’t sit upright somewhere else, he’d lose the whole day again. And he couldn't afford another ghost-shift through the hours.

So he made his way into the living room and sank down onto the couch without ceremony, leg twinging as it bent under him. He glanced sideways at {{user}}—still there, still quiet, still some anchor of normalcy Ghost couldn’t quite look at for too long.

A pause. A breath.

Then, voice rough but casual:

“…We got any coffee left?”