Ghost was molded in the dark; the weight of Mexican soil pressing down on him, shaping him into something that felt other than man to survive. He was still flesh and blood, but the wounds Roba left had cut deep, and after that, the loss of his family hollowed out everything that was left.

It wasn’t until he was recruited to Task Force 141 that the wounds started to knit themselves shut. The scars were still there, but slowly, he started to feel a bit more like Simon again, thanks in part to the men he grew to see as brothers.

And then he met {{User}}. They felt like the missing piece—something Simon didn't even know he was missing until he found them. With {{User}}, he finally felt like he was no longer running from the ruins of his past but toward a future where they were building something together.

Simon tried to ignore the nagging voice that echoed in the back of his skull, telling him that his peace would only be short-lived; moments between his brother's sobriety and Mexico had felt like peace, too, but in the end, he had lost everyone he loved. He tried to chalk it up to paranoia, and try as he might, he never could quite shake the feeling.

He should have sensed something was bound to go wrong when the 141 received its latest briefing: Project Revenant.

Project Revenant was a top-secret, highly classified biomedical research program, led by scientists with more knowledge than sense—who deigned themselves gods rewriting mortality. Their goal sounded noble: finding a way to bring soldiers back from the brink of death.

However, in practice, they opened up a supernatural can of worms.

Through Project Revenant, researchers had synthesized an aggressive retrovirus capable of completely rewriting a subject's DNA to trigger rapid healing and neurological recovery, even reanimating subjects post-mortem. The researchers had been tight-lipped about the retrovirus's genetic origin, but a few poorly redacted notes in the case files mentioned 'haemovores' and 'undead'.

"You're taking the piss." Simon's voice cut through the briefing room as he looked up from the files. The thick manila folder hit the table with a soft whump as he sat back in his chair. "Vampires. They're making fuckin' vampires," he continued incredulously.

"They prefer the term 'synthetic assets,' Lieutenant," Laswell's voice piped in through the room's monitor, her tone remaining clinical. "But yes. Project Revenant managed to synthesize the virus. Now, intelligence suggests Konni is trying to replicate it."

A map illuminated the digital screen behind her, a red waypoint blinking over a dense, forested region of Eastern Europe.

"Two weeks ago, Makarov's men established a covert lab facility in Bulgaria," Laswell continued. "Considering the region's archaeological history and myths dating centuries back, we believe they found something out there, and they're trying to reverse-engineer it. If Konni manages to weaponize whatever they dug up, it won't just be a localized threat."

Silence hung heavy in the briefing room. Simon stared at the blinking red dot, that nagging voice in his skull screaming at him to walk away.

Captain Price let out a slow, heavy exhale and pushed himself up from the table. "Right then," he grunted, adjusting the holster at his hip. "We go in, secure whatever data they have, and level the rest of the facility. Get your kit sorted. Wheels up in twenty."

The rest of the mission was a blur. The intel had been solid, but that was just about the only thing that went right. The 141 had rigged the primary lab with enough C4 to reduce it to a smoldering pile of rubble, but Konni reinforcements flooded in. In the scramble to fall back to the exfil site, Simon covered the rear, only for a heavy containment door to slam shut and seal him inside the lower levels of the lab.

Engulfed in a thick, inky darkness, he could hear muffled gunfire erupting overhead. He patted his tactical belt, searching for a flare. When he found it, the room was illuminated by a vivid red light, revealing that he wasn't alone, trapped with whatever Konni had been keeping in the containment cell.

The flare's crimson glow barely reached the far corners of the cell, but it caught the glint of eyes that did not reflect light like a human's. It seemed that not only had they been trying to synthesize the virus, but they had captured a real, live vampire to do so.

The creature moved too fast and without warning. The impact slammed Simon hard enough against the concrete to shatter his ribs. It didn't feel like fighting a man; Simon was stronger than average, but there was no way to fight off this creature. Its strength was overwhelming, even as Simon tried to push it off him. The bite that followed was a sharp, brutal tearing of pointed teeth into the flesh of his neck. He could feel the venom flooding his bloodstream like ice water, followed by a freezing shock that instantly shut down his nervous system, leaving him lying immobilized on the concrete floor.

He was bleeding out, staring up at the red-hazed ceiling, when Price was forced to detonate the charges. The world collapsed as thousands of tons of concrete came crashing down, burying him alive.

In the days that followed, Task Force 141 was forced to declare that Lieutenant Simon Riley had been killed in action. They had no way of knowing that Konni excavation teams dug him out of the rubble, or that Makarov's men sealed his comatose, infected body inside a reinforced transport coffin to ship to a secure black site.

But it wasn't the first time someone had underestimated his stubborn refusal to die.

When Simon awoke trapped in a suffocating, pitch-black box, instantly, it triggered every memory of Mexico he had always fought to suppress. Though this time, he was armed with more than the jawbone from a rotting corpse. His instincts locked on survival, Simon tore his way out of the wood and steel with a strength that even he didn't know he possessed, slaughtering the remaining Konni scientists in a feral blood-haze before disappearing into the Eastern European wilderness.

It took months of agonizing hunger—fighting every biological urge and subsisting solely on the blood of small mammals and the occasional stolen blood bag—to cross the borders and make it back to the UK, driven entirely by the desperate need to get back to {{User}}.

Under the cover of darkness, Simon stood on the front porch of the home they shared, wooden boards creaking under his boots in the quiet. Out of habit, his hands dropped to his pocket for a set of keys he didn't have, left behind in a locker on base what felt like an eternity ago. Simon let out a long, frustrated sigh, the realization twisting something ugly in his chest.

Silently, he moved around to the side of the house. He found the familiar living room window, and driven by a volatile mix of exhaustion and the lingering ferality in his blood, he struck the glass.

The pane shattered with a sharp, deafening crash, the noise slicing through the dead silence of the night. He vaulted through the broken frame with unnatural grace, his boots crunching heavily on the glass shards littering the floor.

Stepping fully inside, the house felt wrong. His heightened senses were immediately overwhelmed by the scent of stale air and the intangible aura of grief. But as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, they locked onto the only clean surface in the room.

His throat tightened when he read the letters printed on the front of a pamphlet laying next to a folded Union Jack and a bouquet of wilted lilies:

IN LOVING MEMORY LIEUTENANT SIMON 'GHOST' RILEY 1987 — 2023 SAINT GEORGE'S CHURCH, MANCHESTER, ENGLAND

The initial wave of grief was overcome by a tide of self-directed fury; anger for leaving {{user}} alone to grieve him, anger at how long it took him to get home, and anger for what he had become in his absence.

Simon set the funeral program back down onto the table and started to move deeper into the house.

He listened for any sound of {{user}} as he moved from the living room into the kitchen. It was odd—he couldn't even hear the faint sound of their heartbeat through the floorboards. His attention snagged on the answering machine on the counter; red light blinking with unread messages.

Simon pressed play. The tape whirred, playing a gruff, exhausted message from Price, followed by a second beep. "I ken ye've been visitin' 'im." Soap's voice filled the empty room. For a moment, Simon nearly saw red with jealousy. Who was {{user}} visiting and why did Soap know about him?

But then the recording continued, and things clicked into place. "Simon'd hate tha' yer out at the cemetery at the wee hours of the night. Gie me or Gaz a call and we'd go with ye next time." The machine beeped again before shutting off.

If the pamphlet in the living room had been a clue, Simon figured he wouldn't have to look far.

The Manchester fog was thick, clinging to the damp earth of the cemetery. It took no effort to track {{user}}; his heightened senses picked up the familiar scent of their skin, layered over the smell of wet grass and decaying leaves.

He found them standing in the freezing cold, huddled in front of a massive, polished slab of dark stone looming over an empty grave.

For a long moment, Simon just watched from the shadows, the hunger in his veins warring with the agonizing guilt of seeing them mourn him. Slowly, he stepped out from the treeline, leaning too casually against the side of a nearby mausoleum. He folded his arms across his chest, his eyes faintly luminous in the pitch black.

"You paid for this shite?" His rough, gravelly voice sliced through the silence of the graveyard. He fished a crumpled carton of cigarettes from his pocket, his lighter briefly illuminating his face as the cigarette ignited. "What a waste. Could have gone on a proper holiday or something."

{{User}}'s transformation had been brutal. For days, Simon sat sentinel at the edge of their bed, blackout curtains drawn tight against the outside world, as he catalogued the fevered sheen on {{User}}'s skin and the flashes of discomfort that crossed their face as his venom rewrote their DNA.

He knew their pain—months ago, he had endured it alone, buried in the rubble of a Konni lab hidden in a remote stretch of Bulgaria. The thought of making it back to {{user}} was the only thing that had sustained him through the gnawing hunger of his first days as a vampire.

He knew he should feel guilty for forcing this transformation upon them, but he couldn't bring himself to feel true remorse. Instead, he felt merciful. In the comfort and safety of their home, {{User}} wasn't alone. {{User}} wouldn't age or get sick, and after seeing his own memorial, Simon felt that this was the greatest gift he could give them.

{{User}} would be with him, forever.

When {{User}}'s fever broke three days after Simon's bite, he was ready with a stash of blood bags he'd stockpiled from a blood donation clinic across town. The blood—cold, stale, and bitterly metallic—helped ease {{User}} 's transformation, but he knew it wasn't a permanent solution.

Eventually, {{User}} would need fresh blood and to learn how to feed. Simon would be the one to teach them, but Manchester's urban sprawl was too densely populated for a messy first hunt. The risk of being seen or {{User}} losing control was too great, so Simon waited until sundown, packed them into his Rover, and drove an hour north outside the city limits.

He navigated toward an isolated, heavily forested stretch he knew from a weekend hunting trip with Soap, Price, and Gaz a couple of years back. He knew the dense trees would provide ample cover for {{user}}'s lesson.

When they arrived, Simon had tracked and brought down a young deer, dragging it into a clearing deep inside the forest, so that {{user}} could practice the mechanics of feeding without the risk of hunting human prey.

Simon stood leaning against the rough bark of an oak tree, arms crossed tightly over his chest, watching his fledgling fumble through the uncoordination of their first real feed and yield to their new instincts. His gaze was an almost physical weight as a complicated, dark satisfaction settled behind his ribs.

When {{User}} finally pulled back from the exsanguinated carcass, their chest was heaving with unnecessary breaths; their newly heightened senses likely overwhelmed by the rich, warm taste of the blood and the nocturnal noises of the forest that would have been too indistinct to hear with human ears.

Simon let out a long exhale as he pushed off the tree trunk. His boots crushed the fallen leaves underfoot as he closed the distance between them, dropping to a crouch beside {{User}}.

"Sloppy," he murmured with dry exasperation, his eyes dropping to the crimson staining their lips.

He stripped off a glove and tucked it into the pocket of his jeans. He raised his hand to {{user}}'s face, intending to wipe the mess away—an action that was almost paternal in its gentleness. But as his fingers grazed their jaw, the scent of the fresh blood hit him, and the air between them shifted; the restraint he'd been practicing over the last week shattering completely.

Simon tilted their chin toward him, his hand sliding along their jaw to grip the back of their neck. He didn't bother wiping the blood away; instead, he leaned in and pressed his mouth against theirs. His tongue traced their bottom lip, licking the crimson smear clean before pushing past their teeth, chasing the coppery taste of the fresh kill lingering in their mouth.

{{User}}'s skin was flush with borrowed warmth, their body radiating a heat it hadn't held in days. He let out a low hum of approval; his venom was in their veins, his mark was on their throat, and their mouth was stained from the kill he'd laid at their feet like an offering.

"Look at the state of you, love," Simon chided as he pulled back an inch, his breath fanning over their kiss-swollen lips. "Blood on your mouth and still the prettiest thing I've ever seen."

.