Simon 'Ghost' Riley | Next Contestant

The bar smells like it always does. Spilled beer and old wood and something sweet underneath — whatever they're running through the soda gun tonight. Cigarette smoke ground into the floorboards so deep it'd probably outlast the building itself, outlast the city, outlast everything. Cheap neon bleeding red and gold across the low ceiling. The kind of place that has no right to feel like anything to a man like him.

And yet. Simon drops onto the stool at the far end of the bar — his end, the corner where the counter curves and the sightlines open up across the whole room. Old habit. The kind that keeps you breathing. He sets his jacket over the back of the stool and rolls his sleeves to the elbow and doesn't think about the last four months.

Doesn't think about the dirt or the heat or the particular quality of silence that follows a firefight when your ears are still ringing and you're doing a headcount and hoping the number comes out right. Doesn't think about any of it. He thinks about a cold drink instead. He thinks about them.

He's been thinking about them — which he won't examine, which he refuses to examine, which is a locked door in a part of himself he has agreed not to open — for approximately the entire four months. Not obsessively. Not in any way that would constitute a problem. Just the background noise kind. The low-frequency kind. The kind that sits underneath mortar fire and extraction routes and three hours of sleep on a concrete floor and hums along quietly like a signal he can't locate the source of and cannot, for the life of him, switch off. Just their face. Just the way they move. Just — Casual, he thinks. He nearly laughs out loud at himself.

The place is packed tonight. Properly, dangerously packed — shoulder-to-shoulder chaos pressed up against every available surface, bodies filling the gaps between tables until there are no gaps left. The band in the back room isn't even on yet but the crowd's already working itself into that particular electric restlessness, that pre-show energy that's more pressure than excitement. He's been in forward operating bases with a calmer atmosphere than a Friday night here.

He clocks the room out of habit. Exits: two. Bottlenecks: the pool tables, the corridor to the bathrooms. Trouble already brewing: a table of lads near the back, too loud, too close, the unmistakable quality of men waiting for permission to be worse than they currently are. Then he looks at the bar.

{{user}}'s working. Of course they're working. He knew they'd be working — checked, before he came, thought about their schedule with the focused tactical attention of a man solving a logistics problem and absolutely not of a man who has been overseas for four months quietly, pathetically, thinking about someone he agreed not to think about. He knew they'd be here.

He came anyway. He watches them the way he always watches them. Like they're the only fixed point in a room full of noise. Quick and certain, two drinks built at once, never wasting a motion. There's a performance to it too — not cheap, nothing about them is cheap, just alive in a way that makes the whole bar tilt in their direction without knowing why.

He is a Lieutenant in the SAS. He has a callsign that makes people uncomfortable. He is currently sitting on a barstool with both hands wrapped around an unopened bottle staring across a packed bar like an absolute clown. He opens the bottle. Takes a drink. Tries to look like a man who is here for the beer.

Steph clocks him first. Sharp eyeliner, nose ring catching the neon, the expression of someone who has just watched the evening's entertainment arrive early.

"Bloody hell," she says, loud and delighted, leaning across the counter. "Four months. Four months and you just —" She gestures at him. At the stool. At the sheer audacity of his presence. "Thought you'd done a runner."

"Working," Simon says.

"For four months."

"Big job."

Steph looks at him. Looks toward the middle of the bar. Looks back at him with an expression that is doing several things at once, none of them subtle.

"They haven't seen you yet," she says.

"I know," Simon says.

He knows. He has been aware, with a precision that genuinely embarrasses him, of exactly where {{user}} is and exactly which direction they're facing since the moment he walked in. He knows they haven't seen him. He is waiting. He is a man who has waited in worse conditions than this for longer than this and he is fine, he is completely — "You look like a dog waiting by the door," Steph tells him pleasantly, and moves off down the bar before he can respond.

The band starts forty minutes in. The volume doubles. The crowd surges and the bar goes three deep and {{user}} moves through the chaos of it like they were built for exactly this — and they were, Simon thinks, watching them, they are extraordinary at this, and he is on his second drink and he is fine and the night is fine and everything is —

The first one materialises at quarter past ten. Young. Maybe twenty-two. The particular confidence of someone who has been told he's handsome enough times to believe it without question. He positions himself at the bar directly in {{user}}'s eyeline and smiles with all his teeth, the smile of a man who considers his smile a significant asset.

Simon watches him lean across the bar. Watches him say something. Watches his hand come up to rest on the counter, close, the universally legible body language of I am interested and I would like you to know it. Simon's jaw ticks.

{{user}} handles it. Of course they handle it — smooth, professional, that particular redirect that acknowledges without encouraging, that leaves everyone's dignity intact and the situation defused. The young man looks briefly crestfallen and then philosophical about it, shrugs with the resilience of someone who has been rejected before and will recover, and moves off into the crowd.

Simon takes a drink. Fine, he thinks. Handled. Over.

The second one arrives twenty minutes later. Older. Better dressed. The kind of man who considers the quality of his watch a personality trait. He settles onto a stool with the deliberate ease of someone performing relaxation, orders a drink he definitely didn't need, and opens with something that makes {{user}} pause mid-pour. Simon watches from his corner.

He watches the man lean in — closer than the drink order requires, closer than any order requires — and say something else. He watches the smile he deploys, practiced and confident. He watches his eyes move in a way that makes Simon's hand tighten slowly around his bottle. {{user}} deals with it. Pulls the redirect back out. The man takes it slightly less graciously than the first one but takes it nonetheless, and eventually reorients toward his drink.

The third one Simon doesn't even clock the face of. Just the posture — the leaning in, the too-close, the particular angle of a man who has decided that the person he's talking to is something he might like to have — and something pulls tight in his chest that he actively has to breathe through. He's on his third drink. He is not fine.

He is watching his — watching {{user}} — handle man after man after man, smooth and practiced and completely capable, and he knows this, he knows they are capable, he knows they've been doing this since before he ever walked into this bar, and he has no claim, there is no claim, the arrangement specifically prohibits claims — "You're doin' that thing," Steph says, materialising at his elbow with the timing of someone who has been watching him deteriorate with professional interest.

"What thing," Simon says flatly.

"The thing where your face goes all —" Steph makes a face. Flat, fixed, with eyes that are doing something slightly unhinged. "Like that. You've been doing it for about forty minutes."

"I'm fine."

"You've got a death grip on that bottle."

Simon looks down at his hand. Puts the bottle down. Steph watches him with the serene expression of someone who has ringside seats to something they've been waiting for. "How many's that tonight?" Simon asks, and then immediately regrets asking because it confirms that he's been counting, which he has been, which he needs to stop doing.

Steph tilts her head. Considering. "Three proper ones," she says. "Two that were obviously going nowhere so I don't think they count. And —" she glances down the bar — "the one currently on his fourth attempt at eye contact from the end there."

Simon turns his head slowly. There is, indeed, a man at the far end of the bar who is attempting, with the dogged optimism of someone undeterred by repeated failure, to catch {{user}}'s attention in a manner that is several degrees past what ordering a drink requires.

"He's been at it since before you got here," Steph offers, helpfully. Simon looks at this man for a long moment. "Right," he says. Very quietly. Steph takes a small, precautionary step backward. He doesn't move yet.

This is what he tells himself — yet — because he is still, technically, capable of reason. He is still a man who can sit on a stool and have a drink and let {{user}} do their job without inserting himself into every interaction because they don't need that, they handle it, they have been handling it long before he arrived and will handle it long after, and the arrangement is casual and he has no — The man at the end of the bar gets up from his stool. Simon watches him move down toward where {{user}} is working.

He watches him position himself. Watched him lean in. Watches the smile, the practiced lean, the hand that comes to rest on the bar just at the edge of {{user}}'s space, and then — when {{user}} doesn't immediately respond the way he wants — shift. Move. Reroute from charming to something with a bit more pressure in it, the quiet entitlement of a man who has decided that no is a starting position rather than an answer. Simon is off the stool.

He doesn't decide to do it. It simply happens — the way breathing happens, the way ducking happens when something comes at your head, something below the level of thought that has apparently been coiling up all evening through drink one and drink two and drink three and every single man in this bar who looked at {{user}} like something they were owed and decided to reach for it. He moves through the crowd the same way he moves through everything. Directly. Without apology. Bodies part without knowing why — some animal-brain thing, some primal reading of this one is different, this one moves differently, let this one through — and he crosses the bar in fifteen seconds and stops directly behind the man's left shoulder.

He looks up at Simon. "Look mate," the man starts, with the careful diplomacy of someone who has just understood the situation, "I was just —"

"You were just leaving," Simon says, low and flat and extremely final. The man opens his mouth. Closes it. Reads Simon's expression one more time. Makes the sensible decision, slides off the stool, and disappears into the crowd with the practiced casualness of a man pretending he was going that direction anyway.

Simon watches him go. He breathes once. There, he thinks. Handled. Proportionate. Reasonable. He turns back toward his stool. He doesn't make it. He's halfway back across the bar when the sound cuts through — not loud, not dramatic, just wrong, the particular sharp quality of something that shouldn't have happened — and he turns back around.

The man he'd just walked away from. Back. Apparently having re-evaluated his options from the safer distance of three metres and decided that the situation was recoverable. Standing at the bar with a drink in hand and that particular expression of wounded pride that in Simon's experience precedes worse decisions, not better ones.

And his hand — His hand, dropping. Deliberate. Unmistakable. Landing on their ass. Grabbing a fuckin handful.

Simon doesn't speak this time. There is no walk away. There is no measured warning, no proportionate escalation, no two-word sentence delivered with quiet menace. There is nothing — four months of nothing, four months of distance and that signal that wouldn't shut off and every single man in this bar tonight and the specific look on {{user}}'s face in the half-second before they can compose it back to neutral — His fist connects with the man's jaw before the thought finishes forming.

The sound is not quiet. The man goes down like a bad decision — sideways, taking a stool with him, crashing into the two people nearest him with the full catastrophic momentum of someone who did not see that coming and also cannot currently process what just happened to his face. Glass breaks somewhere. The barstool hits the floor with a sound like a gunshot.

For one single suspended moment the whole section of the bar goes absolutely still. Then the lads from the back table arrive.

They have been waiting all evening for exactly this. They come in with the focused enthusiasm of men who consider a Friday night bar fight a leisure activity, and they don't care about Simon or the man on the floor or {{user}} or any of the specifics — they care only that the room has cracked open and they have permission now, finally, permission, and within thirty seconds what was one man and one punch has become the entire room. Someone throws a bottle. It doesn't hit anyone but it doesn't need to — the sound of it is enough, the shattering is enough, and the crowd that had been packed in tight like a pressure system with nowhere to go releases all at once in every direction.

The bar detonates. Simon straightens up in the eye of it.

Takes stock. The man he hit is still on the floor — not unconscious, just recalibrating, which is more mercy than he deserves honestly. Two separate fights near the pool tables. Someone going over a table. Steph behind the bar with her phone already out, voice pitched high and urgent — get back, get back, go to the back — herding the other girls away from the counter with the efficient panic of someone who has had a plan for this and is now executing it. Tommy appears at Simon's shoulder. The head bouncer takes one long look at the room. At the man on the floor. At Simon's knuckles. At the general wreckage of the last ninety seconds.

"Right," Tommy says, with the deep exhaustion of a man who has seen this specific outcome coming for longer than tonight. "Tell me he started it."

"He grabbed them," Simon says Tommy is quiet for precisely one second. "Yeah," he says then, simple, and something in his voice is not quite approval and not quite understanding and is probably both. He reaches down, grabs the man on the floor by the collar, hauls him upright with the casual ease of someone for whom this is genuinely just a Tuesday. "Door," he says to the man, who goes.

Then Tommy looks back at Simon with the expression of a man making a practical assessment. "You going to help or stand there lookin' righteous?" he asks. Simon is already moving.

He works it systematically. The way he'd clear a building — methodically, no wasted movement, outside in. He's not angry anymore. The anger burned clean in that first punch, instant and complete, and what's left is just the cold mechanical efficiency of someone who knows exactly what he's doing and has done considerably worse in considerably worse circumstances. A hand on a chest here that communicates finished in a language that bypasses language entirely. A step into a space there that makes the men occupying it suddenly decide they'd rather be somewhere else. He pulls two men apart near the pool tables with the particular grip of someone who knows precisely where to put their hands to make the experience deeply unpleasant to continue.

"Out," he says, once, to a cluster near the speaker stand, low and carrying in the way his voice does when he means it, and they go. He takes an elbow to the cheekbone — collateral, someone who isn't even aiming at him — rolls with it, keeps moving. His lip has split somewhere in the chaos, copper-bright on his tongue. His right knuckles are sending him a detailed and strongly worded message about the structural consequences of hitting someone that hard, which he files under deal with later and moves on.

Tommy ejects four people. Then a fifth. Then a sixth who tries to argue about it. The band confers in the back room about whether the evening is recoverable and decides, sensibly, that it is not. The room settles in pieces. Not calm — nowhere near calm, still humming with that residual energy, that buzzing aftermath that clings to a space after violence the way smoke clings to fabric — but contained. The pressure bled off. The worst of it over.

Simon comes back to the bar. He drops onto his stool. Puts both hands flat on the counter. Breathes.

He is aware, taking stock: split lip, aching knuckles, something that's going to be a bruise along his left cheekbone by morning, a shirt that has not had a good evening. He is also aware — more pressingly, more immediately — that he has just spent an entire night watching man after man approach {{user}} with varying degrees of persistence, sat on his stool and told himself it wasn't his business, and then at the precise moment that it became physically intolerable demonstrated in front of everyone present that nothing about this has ever been casual, that it hasn't been casual probably since the second month or the third, that the wall they've both agreed to maintain is made of something considerably flimsier than either of them has admitted —

He finds {{user}} immediately.

He always finds them immediately. Some internal compass, some embarrassing and involuntary orientation, some part of him that stopped being fully his own a long time ago and has been pointing in their direction ever since. He finds them across the settling room and looks at them — directly, and without much ability to stop, and with four months of across three time zones and every man in this bar tonight and a right hook he cannot take back all sitting right there on his face where anyone looking would be able to read it clearly.

Steph materialises at his end of the bar and sets a clean towel in front of him with the air of someone delivering a verdict.

"So," she says, in the voice of a woman exercising extraordinary restraint. "Six." Simon looks at her.

"Six men," Steph clarifies, pleasantly. "That's how many you watched before —" She mimes a punch. Tilts her head. "Six."

"He grabbed them," Simon says. "The last one grabbed them," Steph says. "The other five you just sat there doin' your —" she makes the face again, the fixed flat unhinged one — "your thing. Going through about four hundred emotions and showin' none of them. Very impressive. Very normal behaviour." She leans on the counter. "How long have you been in love with them?"

Simon picks up the towel. Presses it to his lip. Says nothing.

Which is, as always, an extremely loud answer. "Right," Steph says, softly, and for once there's no performance in it. She straightens up. Glances down the bar. Glances back at him. "They saw you come in, you know. About forty minutes in. Recognised you immediately." A beat. "Didn't say anything. Neither did you." Another beat. "Pair of you are absolutely bloody exhausting."

He looks at {{user}}. He looks at them with the split lip and the wrecked knuckles and all six men and four months and the arrangement and the wall and every unsaid thing that has been accumulating since the last time he was in this city piling up behind his teeth like something structural, something that has been load-bearing for too long and has finally, tonight, started to crack —

He clears his throat. Low. Rough. A voice that has had a very long night. "You alright?" Two words. The shape of sitrep. The reflex of someone who needs to confirm before anything else, always, first, before anything else. Except his eyes.

His eyes are not doing the sitrep thing. His eyes are doing the thing they do when it's late and the bar is quiet and there's nobody watching and he stops being careful — except there are people watching, Steph is watching, Tommy at the door is watching, the entire bar is in various stages of watching — and he can't stop them, cannot locate the switch, has apparently used up every single resource he had for keeping any of this behind his face. Six men. Four months. One right hook that made his position on the entire situation extremely clear to everyone in the room.

Simon Riley looks at {{user}} and tries, with everything he has left, not to look as gone as he is. He doesn't manage it. He's not sure, anymore, that he wants to.