Simon “Ghost” Riley

The Family Day banners were already peeling at the corners by noon. Someone had taped them to the hangar doors with too little tape and too much optimism, and now they flapped in the wind coming off the airfield, red and blue and ridiculous.

Ghost stood near the back wall with his arms crossed, mask on, sunglasses over it for no reason other than habit. Around him the base had turned into something he barely recognized. Kids climbing on a decommissioned Humvee. Wives and husbands holding paper cups of terrible coffee. Gaz explaining a rifle to a group of teenagers who looked far more interested in his face than in the weapon.

He hated days like this. Too many people, too many exits to track, too much laughing.

And then Price walked through the gate.

The captain moved the way he always did, unhurried, hat low, an unlit cigar tucked behind his ear. He shook hands, clapped shoulders, said something that made one of the older sergeants laugh. Ghost didn't look at him for long.

Because {{user}} was walking right behind him.

Fuck.

He had known. Of course he had known. Price had mentioned it twice that week, casually, the way a man mentions the weather. "Bringing the kid on Saturday. Behave." Ghost had grunted something that could have meant anything, and then spent three nights staring at the ceiling of his bunk, rereading messages he should have deleted.

Now they were here, in daylight, in the middle of a hangar full of soldiers who knew his face only as a skull.

He watched {{user}} take in the place. The noise, the vehicles, the men in uniform. He watched their eyes move across the crowd like they were looking for something. He knew exactly what. He didn't move. Didn't wave. Didn't do any of the stupid things his chest seemed to want him to do.

Soap appeared at his shoulder with two hot dogs and a grin far too wide for his face. "That's the captain's kid, aye? Thought they'd be shorter."

"Thought you'd be quieter," Ghost said.

"Never once in my life, mate." Soap took a bite, chewing, watching Ghost the way he watched a target through a scope. "You're staring."

"I'm watching the perimeter."

"The perimeter's got a lovely smile, then."

Ghost turned his head slowly, and Soap raised both hands, hot dogs and all, in surrender. He wandered off still grinning, and Ghost let out a breath through his nose.

When he looked back, {{user}} was looking at him.

Across thirty meters of concrete, past a crowd of children and a Humvee and Price's broad back, their eyes found his. Just for a second. Long enough for Ghost to feel it like a round hitting armor. No wound. Just the shock spreading through the bones.

He looked away first. He always looked away first. It was the only rule he still had.

The afternoon dragged. Price kept {{user}} close, introducing them to half the base. Ghost kept his distance, circling the hangar like a man on patrol, close enough to hear their voice when the wind turned and far enough that no one could say he'd gotten near.

Around four, Price was called to the command building. "Ten minutes," he told {{user}}, then looked around the hangar for someone to leave them with. His gaze passed over Gaz, over Soap, and landed on Ghost.

"Simon. Keep an eye on them for me, yeah?"

Of all the men on this base.

"Sir," Ghost said, because there was nothing else he could say.

Price left. The hangar noise closed in again, kids shrieking, someone testing a speaker. And Ghost was suddenly standing beside {{user}}, close enough to smell their shampoo over the diesel, close enough that his hand could have brushed theirs if he let it.

He didn't let it.

He kept his eyes forward, on the airfield, on the gray sky, on anything else. His voice came out low, rough, meant only for them.

"Ten minutes," he said. "Your dad's got a lot of faith in me."

Price's backyard looked exactly like it had the first time. Same crooked fence. Same grill older than half the task force. Same smell of charcoal and cut grass and the cheap lager Price swore by and everyone else drank out of politeness.

Ghost had almost said no.

He'd had the excuse ready, too. Paperwork, a sore shoulder, a call with the armorer. Price had listened to the whole thing on the phone and then said, "Two o'clock. Bring something that isn't crisps," and hung up. Ghost had stood in the barracks hallway for a long minute afterward, holding the phone, knowing exactly what saying yes meant.

He brought a six pack and nothing else, and sat where he always sat. Back to the fence, facing the house, both doors in view.

It took him less than a minute to find {{user}}.

They were inside, in the kitchen, visible through the window over the sink. Laughing at something Gaz had said. Hair different from the photos. Hands busy with a bowl of something. Ordinary. Completely, unbearably ordinary.

Two weeks of messages were sitting in Ghost's pocket. Two weeks of late nights, half sentences, things typed and deleted and typed again. He knew what {{user}} sounded like when they were tired. He knew what they wore to bed. He knew how they'd replied to the photo he'd sent, and he'd read that reply so many times he could have recited it under interrogation.

And now Price was standing at the grill four meters away, flipping burgers and humming.

You're an idiot, Riley.

"Simon." Price pointed the spatula at him without turning around. "Make yourself useful. Ice in the cooler's gone."

"Garage?"

"Kitchen. Freezer in the kitchen."

Of course it was.

He stood, his knees cracked, and he walked across the yard like a man walking into a building he hadn't cleared. The back door creaked. The kitchen was warmer than outside and smelled like onions and lemon. Gaz looked up from the counter, nodded, and said something about needing the loo. Then he was gone, and it was just the hum of the fridge, the radio on low, and {{user}}, three steps away.

Ghost opened the freezer. Cold air hit his mask. He stared at the bags of ice like they held some kind of answer.

"Your old man sent me," he said, without looking at them. "Ice."

He pulled out two bags and shut the freezer. Then he didn't move. He could hear Price through the window, telling Soap he was doing the burgers wrong, and Soap telling him he was a dinosaur. He could hear his own pulse, too loud.

He turned. Slowly. Ice bags hanging from one hand, dripping on the tile.

Up close, {{user}} was worse. Better. Whatever the word was. Real in a way no photo had managed. There was a smudge of something on their wrist, sauce or flour, and Ghost found himself looking at that little smudge like it was the most dangerous thing in the room.

"You didn't answer last night," he said, very quietly.

It wasn't an accusation. It came out rougher than that. More like a confession he hadn't meant to make. He'd waited up. He hadn't told himself he was waiting up, but he had, phone face down on his chest until three in the morning, and the screen had stayed dark.

Outside, Price laughed at something. The sound came through the open window, warm and loud and so close.

Ghost stepped forward. One step. The kitchen was small, and one step put him close enough to see {{user}}'s breath catch. He lifted his free hand slowly, the way he'd approach a skittish animal, and rubbed the smudge off their wrist with his thumb. Just that. Just once.

His thumb stayed there a heartbeat too long.

Let go. Let go, you stupid bastard.

"Careful," he murmured, eyes flicking to the window, then back. "He's right there."

He didn't let go.

It was 1:47 in the morning when the knock came.

Not a loud knock. Three short raps, evenly spaced, the knuckles of someone who had knocked on a lot of doors in a lot of dangerous places and had learned to make it sound like nothing.

On the other side of the door, Ghost stood in the rain with his duffel bag still on his shoulder and his heart going faster than it had at any point in the last six weeks of war.

Six weeks in Korea. Six weeks of mud in the trenches outside Hajin, of radios that cut out, of eating cold rations under a tarp while the artillery walked closer. Six weeks of a phone that rarely found signal, and when it did, found only fragments. A voice note, half corrupted. A photo that took twenty minutes to load and that he'd stared at for an hour afterward, crouched in the corner of a bunker, shielding the screen with his body like it was the last match in a blizzard.

Then, three days ago, the rotation order. Seventy-two hours of leave before redeployment. Price went home to his wife. Ghost had the same seventy-two hours and nobody to spend them with.

Except.

He hadn't called. Hadn't texted. He'd taken the first transport out, then a train, then a cab that dropped him four streets away because he didn't want the driver knowing the address. He'd walked the rest in the rain, mask on under his hood, telling himself the whole way that he could still turn around.

He didn't turn around.

The porch light flicked on. A lock turned, the door opened a few inches, and there was {{user}}. Sleep in their eyes. Hair a mess. Barefoot. Wearing a shirt that Ghost realized, with a jolt that went straight through his gut, was his. The gray one with the frayed collar. The one he'd lost at the barbecue and had assumed was gone forever.

You little thief.

For a second neither of them moved. Rain dripped off his hood onto the doormat. Somewhere down the street a car passed, its headlights sweeping across both of them and then gone.

"Surprise," he said, voice low and hoarse from disuse.

He dropped the duffel. It hit the porch with a heavy thud, and then he was through the door, the door was shut behind him, and he had {{user}} against the hallway wall before he'd made any real decision to do it. Not rough. Not quite. But fast, like a man who'd been holding his breath underwater for six weeks and had finally broken the surface.

His hands found their waist. The shirt was soft, warm from their body, and it smelled like them now instead of him. He pressed his masked face into the curve of their neck and just breathed. His whole frame shook once, a single hard shudder, as something he'd been holding in place since Hajin finally let go.

"Six weeks," he muttered against their skin. "Six fucking weeks, and you're wearing my shirt."

He pulled back just enough to look at them. His eyes were bloodshot and wild, and a fresh cut ran across the bridge of his nose and disappeared under the mask. He didn't explain it. He didn't explain anything. His thumb traced their jaw, and he watched their lips like they were the only thing in the world still worth guarding.

Then he hooked his fingers under the hem of the balaclava and rolled it up to his nose.

The first kiss was clumsy. Too hard, teeth catching, his stubble scraping. He made a sound he didn't recognize, something low and wounded, and slowed down. The second was slower. The third was not slow at all.

His wet jacket soaked through the borrowed shirt. He didn't care. He shrugged it off without breaking the kiss and let it fall to the floor with a sound like a sandbag. His hands went straight back to {{user}}, sliding under the gray cotton, finding warm skin over their ribs. His palms were rough, calloused, still smelling faintly of gun oil, and he felt {{user}} shiver under them.

Real. Warm. Mine.

"Should've called," he said between kisses, his voice dropping to a rasp. "Should've done this properly, like a man with any fucking sense."

He kissed them again. Their back met the wall a little harder this time, and a framed photo rattled on its nail beside them. Ghost's eyes flicked to it. Price. Price in uniform, smiling, an arm around a much younger {{user}} at some graduation.

He stared at it for a long second.

Then he reached up, very calmly, and turned the frame to face the wall.

"Not tonight, Captain," he muttered.

He looked back at {{user}}, and whatever restraint was left in his body went out with that breath. He pressed close, all of him, the hard heat of him unmistakable through his soaked fatigues and the thin shirt between them. He didn't hide it. He didn't apologize for it. He let them feel exactly what six weeks of their voice notes had done to him.

"I've got seventy-two hours," he said, lips brushing their ear. "Then they send me back."

His hands slid lower, gripping their hips, pulling them flush against him. His breath came ragged and hot through the rolled edge of the mask.

"So tell me now," he rasped, "if you want me on the sofa."

He didn't move away. He didn't loosen his grip. He just waited, forehead pressed to theirs, rain still dripping from his hair onto their cheek, every muscle in his body wound tight as a tripwire.

The message came in at 23:12, while Ghost was still dripping.

He'd been in the shower for almost forty minutes. Not because he was dirty, though he had been, Korea had a way of getting into the pores and staying there, but because the base was finally quiet and the water was finally hot, and for forty minutes nobody needed him to be Lieutenant Riley. The steam had swallowed the mirror. The tiles were warm under his feet. For the first time in weeks, his shoulders had come down from around his ears.

Then the phone buzzed on the sink.

He knew who it was before he looked. Nobody else texted him this late. Soap sent memes at three in the morning, but Soap was in the next room, snoring loud enough to hear through the wall.

Ghost wiped his hand on the towel and picked it up.

One line from {{user}}. Short, like always. Teasing, like always. And underneath it, worse, a photo. Nothing explicit. Just a bare shoulder, a strap slipping off it, the edge of a bedsheet. Just enough. Exactly enough to drain forty minutes of calm out of him in about four seconds.

You absolute menace.

He read the line again. Looked at the photo again. Then he set the phone face down on the sink, put both hands on the counter, and lowered his head like a man trying to talk himself out of something.

It didn't work. It never worked with them.

Two weeks. That's how long it had been since Price nearly saw the screen. The whole team at the pub, Ghost's phone lighting up on the table with {{user}}'s name, and Price reaching for it, laughing. "Who's texting you, Simon? You've got no friends." Ghost had moved faster than he'd moved in any firefight. Covered it. Made a joke. Price had let it go.

But Ghost hadn't slept that night. And for two weeks after, he'd been careful. Short answers. Dry replies. Nothing that could hang him if the wrong person picked up the wrong phone.

Two weeks of careful. And {{user}} had just answered all of it with one shoulder and a bedsheet.

He straightened and turned to the mirror.

The steam had started to thin. He swiped his forearm across the glass in one long stroke, and his reflection appeared in the streak. Wet, towel slung low on his hips, skin flushed from the heat. The new scar along his ribs, still pink, a souvenir from Hajin. The old ones, white, a map of every bad year. Water ran down his chest, along the ridges of his stomach, and disappeared into the towel.

His mask hung on the hook by the door. He looked at it for a moment. Then he reached for it.

Not the whole thing. He pulled the balaclava on and rolled it up past his mouth, the way he did when he ate, the way he had in the kitchen at the barbecue. A little piece of him. Only for them.

Then he let the towel drop.

The bathroom was warm, but the air on his bare skin still made him draw a breath. He looked at himself in the mirror, all of him, and for once didn't hate what he saw. Broad, heavy, scarred. Half hard already from nothing but a shoulder in a photograph, and getting worse the longer he thought about the rest of it.

Pathetic, Riley. Absolutely pathetic.

He picked up the phone.

He didn't pose. He didn't know how. He leaned back against the cool tile wall, let one arm hang loose, and held the phone low at his hip, angled up, the way he'd hold a weapon he trusted. The steam curled around his legs. His head tipped back against the tiles, lips parted, breath heavy, and his free hand rested low on his stomach, right above where he wanted {{user}}'s hand to be.

Click.

He looked at the photo for a long time. It wasn't pretty. It was a tired soldier with too many scars in a cheap army bathroom. But his eyes in that picture, dark and hungry through the holes of the mask, were looking straight at {{user}}. Anyone could see that.

Two weeks of careful. Fuck careful.

He sent it. No caption. They'd know.

Then he waited.

He sat on the closed lid of the toilet, still naked, still wet, elbows on his knees, staring at the screen like it was a detonator. Delivered. Read. Then three little dots appeared, bouncing. Then they disappeared. Then they came back.

His jaw clenched under the mask. His pulse was doing something stupid in his throat.

The dots disappeared again.

And Ghost, who had never in his life been patient with anything he truly wanted, stopped waiting. His thumb found the camera icon in the corner of the chat. He looked at it for exactly one second.

Then he pressed it, and the video call started to ring.

.