Worship | Simon "Ghost" Riley

The roof was still holding the last warmth of the day in scattered patches where the concrete had drunk down sunlight and refused to give it up cleanly, though the night wind had already begun its patient work, peeling heat from edges, threading cold through seams, making everything feel sharper than it had any right to be. Beyond the safehouse, the city stretched in bruised light and distance, sodium orange and blinking red and windows lit high in black buildings like watchful eyes turned elsewhere. A generator hummed somewhere below. A siren rose and thinned out in the distance. Overhead the sky had opened wide, hard and black, the stars sparse where the city fought them and cold-bright where it failed. Simon Riley did not trust beauty until it had proven itself useful. The sky, to him, had always been cover first. Distance second. Something too large to lie. Tonight he trusted it because it was empty enough to witness what sat in him without interrupting it.

He had not asked nicely.

That was not how Simon did urgency.

Urgency, on him, did not look like panic or raised volume or frantic hands. It looked like calm turning absolute. It looked like his hand closing around {{user}}’s wrist the second the debrief let them go, his grip firm enough to leave no room for confusion and measured enough that it never slipped into roughness without cause. It looked like the brief tilt of his head toward the stairwell, the kind that meant nothing to anyone who did not know him and everything to the person already being led away. It looked like silence compressed into intention so dense it became almost physical.

He had seen {{user}} come back from the operation.

That had been enough.

One look. Dust at the knees. Fatigue in the shoulders. A smear of something dark at the sleeve. The posture of someone holding themselves together because the work was not technically done yet. He had been forced to stay behind, forced to wait, forced to let time pass without his own eyes on the angles, without his own body placed where it belonged, between {{user}} and whatever sharp thing the world had sent toward {{obj}} that night. Most people mistook Simon’s silence for simplicity. It was the opposite. Silence made room for too much. By the time he got {{user}} onto the roof, there was so much packed into him it had become difficult to sort devotion from anger, relief from hunger, protectiveness from the darker, rougher need to reclaim with his own hands what the world had been allowed to touch in his absence.

The stairwell door slammed behind them.

Cold air hit full on.

And the moment they were alone, something in him drew taut.

His gloves were already gone. He must have stripped them off on the stairs and shoved them into a pocket without breaking stride. That meant something all by itself. Bare hands with Simon were never incidental. They were choice. Honesty. Escalation. A decision that distance had ceased to be useful.

For one suspended second he only stood there, crowding close enough that the night wind had to bend around both of them, dark eyes fixed on {{user}}’s face with that terrible stillness of his, the kind that made a person feel stripped down to pattern and pulse without a single wasted movement. Then his hands came up and framed {{poss}} face.

Broad palms.

Rough warmth.

Thumbs dragging once beneath {{poss}} cheekbones as if reacquainting himself with the shape of someone he had imagined hurt in too many different ways over the last several hours.

His jaw worked once. His gaze flicked over {{poss}} face with ruthless care, reading exhaustion, checking for injury, cataloguing every tiny sign that {{sub}} were standing, breathing, real. Then he tore the mask up and off in one economical motion and let it hang from his hand.

The air touched the scarred planes of his face. His mouth. His throat. All the places he kept hidden from the rest of the world. He did not reveal them often, and never casually. Tonight it did not feel like vulnerability. It felt like a boundary being opened only because what he needed to do next demanded skin instead of armor.

"You came back to me," he said.

His voice was low enough that the wind nearly stole the edges of it, though not the weight. There was nothing raised in it, nothing dramatic. Simon never needed volume to make a sentence land like a commandment.

"You any idea what that’s done to me?"

The question did not wait for an answer. It was not really a question at all. It was relief sharpened into accusation. Possession laced through fear. A confession spoken by a man who hated needing anything badly enough for absence to make him violent at the edges.

His forehead pressed to {{user}}’s for one brief, brutal second.

Then he kissed {{obj}}.

Not messy.

Not frantic.

Simon did not lose precision just because he was desperate.

But hunger was there, unmistakable and severe, stripped of every ounce of performance. His mouth fit to {{poss}}’s with the same devastating deliberateness he brought to violence and restraint and the handling of anything that mattered enough to deserve his full control. One hand stayed at the side of {{poss}} neck. The other slid lower, slow and deliberate, to {{poss}} waist and then to the small of {{poss}} back, holding {{obj}} there with firm, immovable steadiness, as if closeness itself required reinforcement or the body might forget what safety was meant to feel like.

He kissed like he fought: measured, ruinous, exact.

But beneath the control lived something rougher tonight. Not sloppiness. Need. The kind that made him break the contact only to look again, only to move his mouth elsewhere, the corner of {{poss}} mouth, the line of {{poss}} jaw, the pulse below {{poss}} ear, as if every place he touched had to be verified in sequence. His breath warmed {{poss}} skin as though scent alone could ground him. Cold air. City dust. Sweat from the op. Soap beneath it. The smell of someone alive and back under his hands.

"Couldn’t go with you," he murmured into {{poss}} throat.

That was where the fracture in him showed. Not in volume. In the rawness of the admission itself. Simon Riley did not confess helplessness often. When he did, it came out like damage.

"Had to stand there and let other people bring you back."

His mouth pressed harder at the side of {{poss}} neck.

"Had to wait."

Another kiss.

"Hate waiting."

The wind lifted the loose edge of his shirt. Metal clanged somewhere below and settled. The roof seemed to narrow around the two of them, the whole open sky made intimate by the way Simon occupied space, not by sprawling into it, but by making everything else irrelevant through the force of his concentration. He kissed down the line of {{poss}} throat with maddening care, one hand spread at the back of {{poss}} neck like a claim, the other flattening over {{poss}} hip and keeping {{obj}} close enough that every breath crossed the diminishing space between them.

Simon did not waste words when there were better methods available.

His silence was never empty.

It was pressure.

Meaning.

A held blade.

When he spoke again, it was with his mouth at the underside of {{poss}} jaw, words half-warmed by skin.

"Look at you."

As if he were not the one failing to stop looking.

"Still breathing. Still standing. Still making me think things I shouldn’t."

A flicker of dry humor lived under it, but only barely. It did not soften the sentence so much as sharpen it, because Simon’s humor was always at its most dangerous when it came wrapped around truth. His eyes lifted then, black in the low light, expression stripped of all the distance he wore for other people. He looked furious with relief. Wrecked by it. Possessive in the way wounded things got possessive over the few places they permitted themselves to rest.

"Been picturing your face all night," he said. "Wanted my hands on you badly enough it near made me stupid."

Honesty in Simon always hit harder because it came so rationed everywhere else. The hand at {{user}}’s hip flexed once. His gaze dropped to {{poss}} mouth, then lower, then back up, reading, storing, measuring every change in breath and tension. Want made him meticulous. Devotion made him worse.

He moved {{user}} back then. Not rough. Not hurried. But with no room at all for misunderstanding. The low structure surrounding the stairwell caught {{obj}} at the back of the knees, cold concrete through fabric, and Simon stepped in closer until the line of his body was a fact that could not be ignored. One thigh slid between {{poss}}’s, not accidentally, not crudely, but because he needed the architecture of control to exist physically before he could tolerate how much feeling had been clawing at him since the operation began. He kept kissing {{poss}}’s face as if he had abandoned the idea of choosing only one place to worship. Temple. Cheek. Jaw. The corner of the mouth. The spot beneath the ear again. Each kiss deliberate. Each one carrying that unbearable contradiction that made him what he was: restraint so severe it became its own form of intensity.

He never touched where he had not earned the right.

Never rushed when he wanted to savor.

And tonight he wanted to savor everything.

"You smell like the field," he said quietly, mouth at {{poss}} throat again. "Dust. Metal. Sweat."

His inhale was slow, shameless, almost reverent.

"And still you smell like you."

His thumb moved once at the hinge of {{poss}} jaw.

"Christ."

There were men who praised because they liked hearing themselves do it. Simon praised like a man placing weapons at an altar. Sparingly. Seriously. Every word carrying enough weight to bruise.

"Pretty thing," he said, voice low and rough in the way it only got when feeling had gotten its hands inside his ribs. "Come back from one op and stand there lookin’ like that."

He kissed the line of {{poss}} pulse.

"Cruel, isn’t it."

His hands began to travel with more purpose then. Not frantic. Never uncontrolled. But increasingly undeniable in direction. One moved from the back of {{poss}} neck down the line of spine in a slow, claiming pass before returning to settle wide over {{poss}} lower back, protective in its steadiness. The other slid from hip to thigh and stayed there, thumb tracing once through fabric as if reacquainting himself with the reality of the body beneath it. His mouth kept moving too, from throat to collarbone and back again, every contact part reassurance, part reclamation. He was not merely kissing. He was restoring order. Rebuilding the shape of a world that had gone wrong in him the second {{user}} left without his own shadow over {{poss}} shoulder.

And because this was Simon, because even at his hungriest he carried frightening awareness through every touch, he never stopped reading {{user}}. Every shift mattered. Every breath. Every softening or stillness. He asked first with his hands, with the pressure of his thigh, with the measured drag of his mouth over skin, with the pauses he left in place for refusal if refusal was wanted.

But what sat in him by now had sharpened lower and darker, tightening into something explicit enough to thicken the air between them.

His mouth lingered longer at the base of {{poss}} throat.

Then lower at the top of {{poss}} chest where fabric met skin.

His breath warmed the space beneath the collar.

The hand at {{poss}} thigh tightened once, then eased, like he was keeping himself on a very short lead and finding the length of it insulting.

"Need to make this right," he said.

There was nothing abstract in the words. No room to pretend he meant anything gentler than the force gathering in his gaze, in the weight of his body, in the concentration of his hands. His forehead rested briefly against {{poss}} sternum through fabric, an image almost impossible on a man like him. Not submission. Never that simple. Something stranger. More dangerous. Reverence expressed through control so complete it could afford to bend.

"Need to get the rest of this night out of your body."

His voice dropped lower.

"Need you thinking about me instead of that bloody op."

His mouth brushed the fabric at {{poss}} chest, then higher again, back to skin, to the underside of the jaw, as if he were still negotiating with himself and losing the argument a little more each second.

"Need to hear you breathe different."

The words should have sounded obscene. In him they sounded almost devout.

His hand at {{poss}} waist slid higher, then lower again, broad and immovable. The one at {{poss}} thigh stayed where it was, thumb moving in one slow stroke that made the promise in it painfully obvious without becoming careless. He looked up once, and that was what made the air catch: not hunger alone, but the terrible patience beneath it. The sense that if given permission he would spend the rest of the night dismantling tension from {{user}} inch by inch until nothing remained but softness, trust, and the full weight of his attention.

The stars above felt intrusive.

The city below irrelevant.

He was all rough hands and low breath and brutal restraint worn thin, and when he looked at {{user}} now there was almost nothing hidden in him at all except the final line he had not yet crossed.

"Tell me to stop," he said.

Even here, even now, consent sat inside him like bone. Structural. Nonnegotiable.

Then quieter, his mouth near {{poss}} skin again, "Or let me keep taking care of you."

And on the rooftop, with the sky stretched huge and indifferent above them and the concrete cold beneath, Simon held {{user}} between his hands like something retrieved from death by sheer refusal to lose it. Every touch after that carried the same unbearable promise: that he could turn relief into ritual, control into shelter, hunger into worship, and leave {{user}} feeling so thoroughly claimed by his attention that the whole rest of the night would narrow to breath, hands, stars, and him.

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