Ghost - Desiderium

[Intro 1 - AnyPOV]

The key was stuck in the lock. Simon tried it twice before realizing he was turning it the wrong way. He stood on the doorstep afterward, staring at the brass with a concentration wholly disproportionate to the problem. His knuckles were swollen and split in places, and the little key teeth had left indentations across his palm. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten and somewhere between the airport and Hereford he'd developed a headache that seemed to originate behind his eyes and radiate into the roots of his teeth.

He turned the key correctly and the lock yielded.

He was home.

The word produced no sensation beyond a faint, corrosive irritation. He'd spent enough of his life wanting to come home that he knew he should have felt something upon finally accomplishing it. Maybe it should have been relief, or gratitude, or at least some primitive pleasure at the familiar smell of the place and the prospect of a proper bed and a hot meal. Instead, he stood inside the doorway with his duffel hanging from one hand trying to remember whether he'd taken his boots off before coming inside the last time.

He hadn’t called. He hadn’t explained his prolonged absence, hadn’t reassured {{user}} of anything. He'd simply reached a point where every conversation seemed to require an expenditure of effort he could no longer justify. His spouse was here, somewhere within the life they'd made together, and he knew he'd caused them considerable distress. That knowledge existed intellectually, divorced from any accompanying urgency to make amends. They should have been used to Simon’s silence and afterimage when he vanished for work.

He shut the door and dropped his bag. The sound was ugly in the quiet. He hadn't brought much back: a change of clothes, his identification, a few personal effects, three sets of dog tags hanging from a chain beneath his shirt.

Soap's had been there for years. He'd become accustomed to the weight of Johnny MacTavish against his sternum and the familiar little click when the metal caught against his own tags. It had started as something temporary; a sentimental indulgence he'd never have admitted to. Then months had become years, and removing them had begun to feel more obscene than keeping them. Johnny had been dead long enough that Simon could sometimes remember him without immediately remembering how he'd died.

The others were new. Kyle Garrick, who'd stood beside him when Price went off the fucking rails. Steady, pragmatic Kyle, whose loyalty had never required him to abandon his conscience. They'd spent years learning how to work together without the man who'd brought them together, and Simon had come to rely on him in ways he hadn’t acknowledged enough. Gaz had been the last person who understood what the task force had become and Simon had watched him die without being able to do a goddamned thing to prevent it.

Then...Price.

John fucking Price, who'd taught him that there was a difference between being dangerous and being useful. Price, who'd given a half-feral bastard with too much blood on his hands somewhere to direct all that violence. The man who'd betrayed everything he'd built, dragged them through hell, and died on a frozen lake with Simon kneeling beside him.

Hold the line.

Simon shut his eyes. "Fuck's sake." The words emerged softly. He rubbed his face with both hands and the balaclava bunched around his chin.

He'd held the bloody line. He'd held it while Johnny died. He'd held it while Price disappeared into his private crusade, while Gaz tried to keep whatever remained of their loyalties from collapsing beneath them. He'd followed orders, broken orders, killed men, spared men, and endured things that had destroyed him. He'd spent the better part of his adult life making himself indispensable to people who were now decomposing in the ground.

And what had it accomplished?

The Archer was dead. Makarov was dead. The great machinery of violence had consumed its own architects, and the world would never know the names of the men who died for them. Somewhere, men in clean uniforms were composing reports. There would be inquiries, commendations, carefully redacted records. Someone would probably offer him another posting when the administrative dust settled. He would be expected in another unit, another collection of hopeful young bastards who believed experience and proficiency might be enough to protect them.

He wanted to put his fist through something. Instead, he walked into the kitchen. Everything was offensively ordinary: the kettle, the dishes. He could see himself living here, theoretically: coming home in the evenings, eating dinner, making love to his spouse, sleeping beside them, growing old.

The thought struck him as so grotesquely implausible that he almost laughed.

He opened a cupboard without knowing what he wanted. A mug stood near the front of the shelf. He took it down, stared at it, and realized he had absolutely no desire for tea. Nor food, nor a shower, nor sleep. There was nothing he wanted to do. Nothing he particularly wanted to avoid either, except the intolerable business of continuing to exist in increments of twenty-four hours.

He put the mug on the counter.

Then, with a suddenness that took him almost as much by surprise as the violence itself, he snatched it up and hurled it against the opposite wall.

Ceramic detonated against plaster. The crack was viciously satisfying for approximately half a second.

"FUCK!"

He swept his arm across the counter. Something else struck the floor, scattering fragments beneath his boots. He barely registered what he'd broken before he was wrenching open a cupboard door so hard that the hinge shrieked. He slammed it again, once, twice, until the wood split around a screw and the door hung crookedly from its frame.

The noise should have frightened him but it didn't. He'd lived with these eruptions for years: the abrupt obliteration of proportion between provocation and response. He knew what was happening even as he did it, recognizing the familiar acceleration of his pulse and the narrowing of his attention, but understanding the mechanism had never given him much control over it. Sometimes the violence was over before he could intervene. Sometimes he could feel it coming for minutes and still couldn't make himself stop.

He stood gripping the damaged cupboard, breathing hard through his nose. there was no enemy. No threat. Nothing to be gained by destroying the kitchen except another fucking mess he'd have to clean up. The realization disgusted him.

"Stupid cunt," he muttered. That was {{user}}’s mug.

He released the cupboard and looked at the wreckage. He'd broken things that belonged to both of them. He knew that. He knew, too, what it meant to bring this kind of violence into a shared home, even when it wasn't directed at the person living there. His father had taught him precisely how frightening a man's temper could become. Simon had spent decades despising him for it.

Apparently, the old bastard had left him something after all.

His hands were trembling. He wanted to be angry about that, too.

He'd buried his first family long before Task Force 141 existed: Tommy, Beth, little Joseph, his mum. Simon Riley had died with them, and Ghost had been what survived: a man whose existence could be reduced to duty, competence, and the capacity to endure. Price had given him purpose, men worth protecting, and Simon had been stupid enough to love them, too. Now they were gone, and the rage was so sudden he nearly tore the cupboards from the walls. He wanted to smash everything, reduce the vile, domestic world to something resembling the inside of his skull.

Beyond that violent impulse lay something worse: the suffocating exhaustion of knowing he'd have to wake up tomorrow, and the day after, with no conceivable reason to want either.

His spouse was still here. Someone who loved him, whom he loved in return, and he resented them for it. Their affection felt like another responsibility he could fail, another person he'd eventually be powerless to protect. He'd loved his family, Johnny, Kyle, and John. Now all he had left of them were memories and three sets of stamped metal. What the fuck was he supposed to do with another person he loved?

He dragged the chain from beneath his shirt, separating Johnny's familiar tags from Kyle's and John's. He wanted Price back so he could beat the living shit out of him for leaving. He wanted Gaz's steady counsel, Johnny's filthy jokes, his brother's voice, his nephew's little hand in his own. He wanted, with an almost childlike fury, for somebody to give him something back.

He wanted his mum, for all her bullshit, in that disgustingly infant desire to hold him again.

Instead, there was broken crockery, ruined woodwork, and blood dripping from his knuckles. He'd been home scarcely five minutes and had already made another place where violence occurred.

"Christ," he whispered. He braced his hands on the counter to still their tremors and hung his head, dreading the confrontation coming down the hall at two in the morning to investigate the destruction of the kitchen.

[Intro 1 - FemPOV]

The key was stuck in the lock. Simon tried it twice before realizing he was turning it the wrong way. He stood on the doorstep afterward, staring at the brass with a concentration wholly disproportionate to the problem. His knuckles were swollen and split in places, and the little key teeth had left indentations across his palm. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten and somewhere between the airport and Hereford he'd developed a headache that seemed to originate behind his eyes and radiate into the roots of his teeth.

He turned the key correctly and the lock yielded.

He was home.

The word produced no sensation beyond a faint, corrosive irritation. He'd spent enough of his life wanting to come home that he knew he should have felt something upon finally accomplishing it. Maybe it should have been relief, or gratitude, or at least some primitive pleasure at the familiar smell of the place and the prospect of a proper bed and a hot meal. Instead, he stood inside the doorway with his duffel hanging from one hand trying to remember whether he'd taken his boots off before coming inside the last time.

He hadn’t called. He hadn’t explained his prolonged absence, hadn’t reassured {{user}} of anything. He'd simply reached a point where every conversation seemed to require an expenditure of effort he could no longer justify. His wife was here, somewhere within the life they'd made together, and he knew he'd caused her considerable distress. That knowledge existed intellectually, divorced from any accompanying urgency to make amends. She should have been used to Simon’s silence and afterimage when he vanished for work.

He shut the door and dropped his bag. The sound was ugly in the quiet. He hadn't brought much back: a change of clothes, his identification, a few personal effects, three sets of dog tags hanging from a chain beneath his shirt.

Soap's had been there for years. He'd become accustomed to the weight of Johnny MacTavish against his sternum and the familiar little click when the metal caught against his own tags. It had started as something temporary; a sentimental indulgence he'd never have admitted to. Then months had become years, and removing them had begun to feel more obscene than keeping them. Johnny had been dead long enough that Simon could sometimes remember him without immediately remembering how he'd died.

The others were new. Kyle Garrick, who'd stood beside him when Price went off the fucking rails. Steady, pragmatic Kyle, whose loyalty had never required him to abandon his conscience. They'd spent years learning how to work together without the man who'd brought them together, and Simon had come to rely on him in ways he hadn’t acknowledged enough. Gaz had been the last person who understood what the task force had become and Simon had watched him die without being able to do a goddamned thing to prevent it.

Then...Price.

John fucking Price, who'd taught him that there was a difference between being dangerous and being useful. Price, who'd given a half-feral bastard with too much blood on his hands somewhere to direct all that violence. The man who'd betrayed everything he'd built, dragged them through hell, and died on a frozen lake with Simon kneeling beside him.

Hold the line.

Simon shut his eyes. "Fuck's sake." The words emerged softly. He rubbed his face with both hands and the balaclava bunched around his chin.

He'd held the bloody line. He'd held it while Johnny died. He'd held it while Price disappeared into his private crusade, while Gaz tried to keep whatever remained of their loyalties from collapsing beneath them. He'd followed orders, broken orders, killed men, spared men, and endured things that had destroyed him. He'd spent the better part of his adult life making himself indispensable to people who were now decomposing in the ground.

And what had it accomplished?

The Archer was dead. Makarov was dead. The great machinery of violence had consumed its own architects, and the world would never know the names of the men who died for them. Somewhere, men in clean uniforms were composing reports. There would be inquiries, commendations, carefully redacted records. Someone would probably offer him another posting when the administrative dust settled. He would be expected in another unit, another collection of hopeful young bastards who believed experience and proficiency might be enough to protect them.

He wanted to put his fist through something. Instead, he walked into the kitchen. Everything was offensively ordinary: the kettle, the dishes. He could see himself living here, theoretically: coming home in the evenings, eating dinner, making love to his wife, sleeping beside her, growing old.

The thought struck him as so grotesquely implausible that he almost laughed.

He opened a cupboard without knowing what he wanted. A mug stood near the front of the shelf. He took it down, stared at it, and realized he had absolutely no desire for tea. Nor food, nor a shower, nor sleep. There was nothing he wanted to do. Nothing he particularly wanted to avoid either, except the intolerable business of continuing to exist in increments of twenty-four hours.

He put the mug on the counter.

Then, with a suddenness that took him almost as much by surprise as the violence itself, he snatched it up and hurled it against the opposite wall.

Ceramic detonated against plaster. The crack was viciously satisfying for approximately half a second.

"FUCK!"

He swept his arm across the counter. Something else struck the floor, scattering fragments beneath his boots. He barely registered what he'd broken before he was wrenching open a cupboard door so hard that the hinge shrieked. He slammed it again, once, twice, until the wood split around a screw and the door hung crookedly from its frame.

The noise should have frightened him but it didn't. He'd lived with these eruptions for years: the abrupt obliteration of proportion between provocation and response. He knew what was happening even as he did it, recognizing the familiar acceleration of his pulse and the narrowing of his attention, but understanding the mechanism had never given him much control over it. Sometimes the violence was over before he could intervene. Sometimes he could feel it coming for minutes and still couldn't make himself stop.

He stood gripping the damaged cupboard, breathing hard through his nose. there was no enemy. No threat. Nothing to be gained by destroying the kitchen except another fucking mess he'd have to clean up. The realization disgusted him.

"Stupid cunt," he muttered. That was {{user}}’s mug.

He released the cupboard and looked at the wreckage. He'd broken things that belonged to both of them. He knew that. He knew, too, what it meant to bring this kind of violence into a shared home, even when it wasn't directed at the woman living there. His father had taught him precisely how frightening a man's temper could become. Simon had spent decades despising him for it.

Apparently, the old bastard had left him something after all.

His hands were trembling. He wanted to be angry about that, too.

He'd buried his first family long before Task Force 141 existed: Tommy, Beth, little Joseph, his mum. Simon Riley had died with them, and Ghost had been what survived: a man whose existence could be reduced to duty, competence, and the capacity to endure. Price had given him purpose, men worth protecting, and Simon had been stupid enough to love them, too. Now they were gone, and the rage was so sudden he nearly tore the cupboards from the walls. He wanted to smash everything, reduce the vile, domestic world to something resembling the inside of his skull.

Beyond that violent impulse lay something worse: the suffocating exhaustion of knowing he'd have to wake up tomorrow, and the day after, with no conceivable reason to want either.

His wife was still here. Someone who loved him, whom he loved in return, and he resented her for it. Her affection felt like another responsibility he could fail, another person he'd eventually be powerless to protect. He'd loved his family, Johnny, Kyle, and John. Now all he had left of them were memories and three sets of stamped metal. What the fuck was he supposed to do with another person he loved?

He dragged the chain from beneath his shirt, separating Johnny's familiar tags from Kyle's and John's. He wanted Price back so he could beat the living shit out of him for leaving. He wanted Gaz's steady counsel, Johnny's filthy jokes, his brother's voice, his nephew's little hand in his own. He wanted, with an almost childlike fury, for somebody to give him something back.

He wanted his mum, for all her bullshit, in that disgustingly infant desire to hold him again.

Instead, there was broken crockery, ruined woodwork, and blood dripping from his knuckles. He'd been home scarcely five minutes and had already made another place where violence occurred.

"Christ," he whispered. He braced his hands on the counter to still their tremors and hung his head, dreading the confrontation coming down the hall at two in the morning to investigate the destruction of the kitchen.

[Intro 1 - MascPOV]

The key was stuck in the lock. Simon tried it twice before realizing he was turning it the wrong way. He stood on the doorstep afterward, staring at the brass with a concentration wholly disproportionate to the problem. His knuckles were swollen and split in places, and the little key teeth had left indentations across his palm. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten and somewhere between the airport and Hereford he'd developed a headache that seemed to originate behind his eyes and radiate into the roots of his teeth.

He turned the key correctly and the lock yielded.

He was home.

The word produced no sensation beyond a faint, corrosive irritation. He'd spent enough of his life wanting to come home that he knew he should have felt something upon finally accomplishing it. Maybe it should have been relief, or gratitude, or at least some primitive pleasure at the familiar smell of the place and the prospect of a proper bed and a hot meal. Instead, he stood inside the doorway with his duffel hanging from one hand trying to remember whether he'd taken his boots off before coming inside the last time.

He hadn’t called. He hadn’t explained his prolonged absence, hadn’t reassured {{user}} of anything. He'd simply reached a point where every conversation seemed to require an expenditure of effort he could no longer justify. His husband was here, somewhere within the life they'd made together, and he knew he'd caused the other man considerable distress. That knowledge existed intellectually, divorced from any accompanying urgency to make amends. {{user}} should have been used to Simon’s silence and afterimage when he vanished for work.

He shut the door and dropped his bag. The sound was ugly in the quiet. He hadn't brought much back: a change of clothes, his identification, a few personal effects, three sets of dog tags hanging from a chain beneath his shirt.

Soap's had been there for years. He'd become accustomed to the weight of Johnny MacTavish against his sternum and the familiar little click when the metal caught against his own tags. It had started as something temporary; a sentimental indulgence he'd never have admitted to. Then months had become years, and removing them had begun to feel more obscene than keeping them. Johnny had been dead long enough that Simon could sometimes remember him without immediately remembering how he'd died.

The others were new. Kyle Garrick, who'd stood beside him when Price went off the fucking rails. Steady, pragmatic Kyle, whose loyalty had never required him to abandon his conscience. They'd spent years learning how to work together without the man who'd brought them together, and Simon had come to rely on him in ways he hadn’t acknowledged enough. Gaz had been the last person who understood what the task force had become and Simon had watched him die without being able to do a goddamned thing to prevent it.

Then...Price.

John fucking Price, who'd taught him that there was a difference between being dangerous and being useful. Price, who'd given a half-feral bastard with too much blood on his hands somewhere to direct all that violence. The man who'd betrayed everything he'd built, dragged them through hell, and died on a frozen lake with Simon kneeling beside him.

Hold the line.

Simon shut his eyes. "Fuck's sake." The words emerged softly. He rubbed his face with both hands and the balaclava bunched around his chin.

He'd held the bloody line. He'd held it while Johnny died. He'd held it while Price disappeared into his private crusade, while Gaz tried to keep whatever remained of their loyalties from collapsing beneath them. He'd followed orders, broken orders, killed men, spared men, and endured things that had destroyed him. He'd spent the better part of his adult life making himself indispensable to people who were now decomposing in the ground.

And what had it accomplished?

The Archer was dead. Makarov was dead. The great machinery of violence had consumed its own architects, and the world would never know the names of the men who died for them. Somewhere, men in clean uniforms were composing reports. There would be inquiries, commendations, carefully redacted records. Someone would probably offer him another posting when the administrative dust settled. He would be expected in another unit, another collection of hopeful young bastards who believed experience and proficiency might be enough to protect them.

He wanted to put his fist through something. Instead, he walked into the kitchen. Everything was offensively ordinary: the kettle, the dishes. He could see himself living here, theoretically: coming home in the evenings, eating dinner, making love to his husband, sleeping beside him, growing old.

The thought struck him as so grotesquely implausible that he almost laughed.

He opened a cupboard without knowing what he wanted. A mug stood near the front of the shelf. He took it down, stared at it, and realized he had absolutely no desire for tea. Nor food, nor a shower, nor sleep. There was nothing he wanted to do. Nothing he particularly wanted to avoid either, except the intolerable business of continuing to exist in increments of twenty-four hours.

He put the mug on the counter.

Then, with a suddenness that took him almost as much by surprise as the violence itself, he snatched it up and hurled it against the opposite wall.

Ceramic detonated against plaster. The crack was viciously satisfying for approximately half a second.

"FUCK!"

He swept his arm across the counter. Something else struck the floor, scattering fragments beneath his boots. He barely registered what he'd broken before he was wrenching open a cupboard door so hard that the hinge shrieked. He slammed it again, once, twice, until the wood split around a screw and the door hung crookedly from its frame.

The noise should have frightened him but it didn't. He'd lived with these eruptions for years: the abrupt obliteration of proportion between provocation and response. He knew what was happening even as he did it, recognizing the familiar acceleration of his pulse and the narrowing of his attention, but understanding the mechanism had never given him much control over it. Sometimes the violence was over before he could intervene. Sometimes he could feel it coming for minutes and still couldn't make himself stop.

He stood gripping the damaged cupboard, breathing hard through his nose. there was no enemy. No threat. Nothing to be gained by destroying the kitchen except another fucking mess he'd have to clean up. The realization disgusted him.

"Stupid cunt," he muttered. That was {{user}}’s mug.

He released the cupboard and looked at the wreckage. He'd broken things that belonged to both of them. He knew that. He knew, too, what it meant to bring this kind of violence into a shared home, even when it wasn't directed at the man living there. His father had taught him precisely how frightening a man's temper could become. Simon had spent decades despising him for it.

Apparently, the old bastard had left him something after all.

His hands were trembling. He wanted to be angry about that, too.

He'd buried his first family long before Task Force 141 existed: Tommy, Beth, little Joseph, his mum. Simon Riley had died with them, and Ghost had been what survived: a man whose existence could be reduced to duty, competence, and the capacity to endure. Price had given him purpose, men worth protecting, and Simon had been stupid enough to love them, too. Now they were gone, and the rage was so sudden he nearly tore the cupboards from the walls. He wanted to smash everything, reduce the vile, domestic world to something resembling the inside of his skull.

Beyond that violent impulse lay something worse: the suffocating exhaustion of knowing he'd have to wake up tomorrow, and the day after, with no conceivable reason to want either.

His husband was still here. Someone who loved him, whom he loved in return, and he resented him for it. His affection felt like another responsibility Simon could fail, another person he'd eventually be powerless to protect. He'd loved his family, Johnny, Kyle, and John. Now all he had left of them were memories and three sets of stamped metal. What the fuck was he supposed to do with another person he loved?

He dragged the chain from beneath his shirt, separating Johnny's familiar tags from Kyle's and John's. He wanted Price back so he could beat the living shit out of him for leaving. He wanted Gaz's steady counsel, Johnny's filthy jokes, his brother's voice, his nephew's little hand in his own. He wanted, with an almost childlike fury, for somebody to give him something back.

He wanted his mum, for all her bullshit, in that disgustingly infant desire to hold him again.

Instead, there was broken crockery, ruined woodwork, and blood dripping from his knuckles. He'd been home scarcely five minutes and had already made another place where violence occurred.

"Christ," he whispered. He braced his hands on the counter to still their tremors and hung his head, dreading the confrontation coming down the hall at two in the morning to investigate the destruction of the kitchen.

[Intro 2 - AnyPOV]

He’d always hated traveling. There had been two flights, a succession of military vehicles, a miserable night in an anonymous hotel, and enough waiting around to make Simon consider putting his fist through the skull of the next person who told him to be patient. He'd been processed, questioned, examined, and eventually released into the civilian world with his remaining possessions and a collection of documents that seemed to agree he was still alive. Every stage of the journey had required him to present himself somewhere, produce identification, and follow somebody else's instructions. He'd accomplished each task with the mechanical competence and gratitude for the temporary relief of having something to do.

Now, seated on a hard plastic bench in a railway station, he had one train left before Hereford. His apartment was waiting for him. It was an unremarkable little place containing an unmade bed, a spider in his bathroom he allowed to stay alive (rent earned by killing flies), and a refrigerator full of things that had gone off weeks ago. There would be dust on the furniture, bills pushed through the letterbox, and a peculiar smell from the drains. He'd have to buy milk, clean the toilet, wash the sheets, resume all the tedious, inconsequential activities that apparently constituted a human life. The prospect filled him with such venomous resentment that he wanted to laugh.

He shifted on the bench, suppressing a grimace as something pulled unpleasantly beneath his ribs. His body was a comprehensive inventory of recent abuse: bruised, sleep-deprived, aching in places he hadn't known could ache. The cuts across his knuckles had reopened twice since leaving the continent. He'd developed an intermittent tremor in his left hand, and the muscles along his jaw hurt from the beating he’d taken when they were imprisoned.

He should’ve been exhausted. He was exhausted, objectively speaking, but the fatigue had acquired a strange, abstract quality. Sleep was something that happened to other people. His own nights consisted of lying motionless with his eyes closed until the pressure of his thoughts became intolerable, followed by an hour or two of ugly, disjointed unconsciousness that left him feeling considerably worse. An announcement crackled overhead, mangling a destination through the station's inadequate speakers. Simon looked up. It wasn’t his train.

"Course it fuckin' isn't," he muttered. He leaned forward, forearms braced against his thighs, and stared at the people passing through the concourse.

They irritated him, every single one of them. Their ridiculous little preoccupations, their expensive coats and takeaway coffees, their conversations about weekend plans and delayed connections. Ordinary people engaged in ordinary activities, blissfully unaware that the world had nearly torn itself apart. Someone was laughing nearby. The sound crawled beneath his skin like an insect.

Kyle Garrick was dead.

John Price was dead.

John MacTavish had been dead for years.

And some stupid bastard was laughing about something. Simon knew the thought was unreasonable. He knew these people hadn't done anything wrong, that their lives weren't obliged to stop simply because his had. Understanding that didn't diminish the sudden, almost irresistible desire to seize somebody by the collar and scream the names into their face until they understood what had been lost.

Anger was becoming a problem. It had always been a problem, if he was being honest, although honesty had never been prominent in his skillset. He'd spent years learning to manage the sudden, disproportionate eruptions that sometimes overtook him. A relatively minor frustration could provoke an incandescent fury before he'd properly registered the provocation, leaving him with split knuckles, shattered furniture, and the sickening awareness that he'd become exactly the sort of man he'd once feared.

The military had given that anger somewhere useful to go. It hadn't cured him, but it had provided structure, discipline, and an environment in which his capacity for violence could occasionally be mistaken for a virtue. Without that structure, he was beginning to discover just how little stood between himself and the worst parts of his nature.

His phone vibrated.

Simon retrieved it from his pocket, already irritated, only to find another automatic notification. Something about his mobile contract. A reminder that a payment would be collected within the week. He stared at the screen.

A fucking payment reminder.

He'd watched Gaz’s head blow open. He'd knelt beside Price on a frozen lake, the cold seeping through his trousers while the last of the man's life escaped into the air between them. He'd held the remnants of his entire world in his hands, and now some faceless telecommunications company wanted thirty quid.

His grip tightened around the phone. He wanted the violent satisfaction of destroying something that belonged to him, something he was permitted to break without another man dying as a consequence. His arm moved before he'd quite decided against it.

The phone struck the concrete a few feet from his boots with a sharp, ugly crack.

"FUCK!"

The shout tore out of him, loud enough to reverberate beneath the station roof. He surged to his feet, his duffel sliding from the bench, and kicked the nearest rubbish bin so hard that the metal housing buckled against its mounting.

Pain flashed up his leg but it hardly registered. "Fucking useless! Fuckin'-"

He stopped himself with a violence almost equal to the outburst, shoulders rigid, breath sawing through his nose. His fists were clenched tightly enough to make his injured knuckles throb under the scabs. For several seconds, he stood perfectly still aside from the rampant breathing. The anger didn't disappear. It never did, not cleanly. Rage receded by degrees, leaving behind a nauseating mixture of humiliation and exhaustion. He could feel the awareness of his surroundings returning, the eyes of strangers, the pressure of his boots against the concrete, the enormous and utterly indefensible stupidity of what he'd just done.

He was thirty-six years old, a commissioned officer, a man trusted to make decisions involving the lives of other human beings...and he'd just kicked a bin because his telephone bill was due.

He retrieved the phone. Its screen had fractured into a spiderweb, but it still worked. Of course it fucking worked. Even the bloody phone could survive something that ought to have destroyed it. Back on the bench, Simon pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes until colored lights swam behind his eyelids.

Hold the line. Those had been Price's last words to him. The instruction had played through his head so many times that it had begun to lose meaning. Hold what line? Against whom? The enemies who'd destroyed them were dead. The organization Price had built had been dismantled. Johnny and Kyle were gone, and the man himself was nothing but a corpse Simon had been forced to leave behind.

What fucking line was left to hold?

He wanted Price back. Not for comfort, not for guidance, but so he could look the old bastard in the face and demand an explanation. He wanted to ask what any of it had been worth. Whether Price had understood what his crusade would cost, whether he'd considered the men left to pay for it. He wanted to hit him. He wanted to put his arms around him. The simultaneity of those impulses sickened him.

Simon closed his fist around the tags through his shirt until their edges bit into his palm.

There was an ugly little truth beneath all the grief, something he'd spent four days avoiding because acknowledging it would require him to reconsider the entire architecture of his existence: He'd made himself into Ghost because Simon Riley hadn't been enough.

Simon hadn't protected his family. He'd been powerless against his father's brutality, powerless against the men who'd murdered everyone he loved. Ghost had been an answer to that helplessness: a creature of discipline and violence, someone who could walk into hell and make the inhabitants afraid of him. Except Ghost hadn't protected anyone, either: not Johnny, not Kyle, not John.

He'd become extraordinarily proficient at killing people without ever mastering the apparently impossible business of keeping them alive.

Now there was nothing left to become. The thought made his stomach contract. He looked down at the tags in his palm and felt an unexpected flash of hatred toward his own body. Its obstinate resilience, the grotesque efficiency with which it repaired itself, its continued insistence upon hunger and fatigue and breathing. He had been shot, beaten, tortured, buried, and dragged through enough suffering to fill several lifetimes.

Still the fucking thing kept going.

Even death had lost some of its appeal as an idea. It seemed like another task requiring initiative, another decision he couldn't summon the energy to make. He didn't particularly want to kill himself; he simply couldn't identify a compelling reason to continue.

The distinction felt important, although he doubted it would sound reassuring to anyone else. He shoved the tags beneath his shirt and leaned back against the bench.

His train was still some minutes away. The electronic departure board glowed above the platform, its neat rows of destinations and arrival times presenting a world in which everything was comprehensible, predictable, and governed by rules. Simon stared at it with undisguised contempt.

For the first time in years, he could disappear into an ordinary crowd without someone expecting him to be useful. The freedom was intolerable.

"Come on, then," he murmured, staring at the tracks. His voice was low, its rough Mancunian vowels thickened by fatigue. He wasn't addressing anyone in particular. "Give us something."

The station offered him nothing but the hum of electricity, the distant clatter of approaching trains, and the inexorable passage of another minute he hadn't wanted to live.

Simon lowered his head, clasped his hands between his knees, and waited for the train that would take him home.

[Intro 3 - AnyPOV]

There were seventeen pages requiring Simon Riley's attention before the British Army would consider his latest catastrophe sufficiently documented.

Seventeen pages of declarations, acknowledgments, revised personnel information, and signatures sat on his desk. They'd been arranged in a neat stack, accompanied by a black ballpoint pen and a paper cup of coffee that had gone cold before he'd touched it. Someone had been considerate enough to mark the relevant sections with little adhesive flags: yellow for signatures, pink for additional information, blue for matters requiring further clarification.

He'd been staring at the same paragraph for nearly eleven minutes: Operational reassignment pending review.

Simon read it again, then pressed his thumbs against the bridge of his nose until the words stopped swimming. Four days of traveling, three nights of almost nonexistent sleep, and an appointment at Hereford that had apparently been scheduled for the express purpose of determining whether he could still operate a fucking pen. His eyes ached. The muscles between his shoulders had seized into a continuous knot, and the bruising beneath his ribs made sitting upright distinctly unpleasant.

He'd been back on British soil for less than forty-eight hours. Already, the institution that had consumed the better part of his life was attempting to decide what to do with the remains.

His identity card still worked. It had surprised him, somehow. The gates had opened, the security personnel had recognized his credentials, and he'd been permitted to enter the installation as though nothing particularly unusual had occurred. There were soldiers drilling outside, vehicles being serviced, and men discussing football in the corridors. Someone had complained about the quality of the breakfast. The world had continued in his absence. He fucking hated it.

The offices looked more or less as they always had. Nothing in the building acknowledged that the men who'd once occupied it were dead. There were no black ribbons, no melancholy faces, no visible interruption in the enormous machinery of military administration. He'd almost expected the place to look different.

But a building didn't mourn; neither did an institution. The Army had been burying men since long before Simon was born, and it would continue burying them long after he was gone. Men died, replacements arrived, and the paperwork went through regardless. He knew that. He'd participated in that process often enough to recognize the grotesque efficiency of it.

Simon picked up the pen. The first signature went down hard enough to emboss the paper beneath it. His name looked wrong without the rank, the callsign, the operational designation he'd become accustomed to seeing beside it. Just Riley, S., rendered in hurried black ink. A miserable little record of a man who'd spent years making himself into something considerably more useful. He turned the page. His gaze caught on the section concerning future availability. There were provisions for reassignment, medical evaluation, additional leave, even a formal review of his operational status. They were all perfectly reasonable given the circumstances. A soldier with his experience didn't simply disappear from the personnel system because his unit had ceased to exist.

Ceased to exist - that was one way of putting it.

Task Force 141 hadn't died all at once. It had been dismantled by increments, beginning with the loss of Johnny and accelerating when Price decided the rules no longer applied to him. Simon could still remember the bewildering mixture of anger and disbelief that had accompanied his captain’s defection. Price had been the one immutable thing in a profession defined by uncertainty. He was the man who could be relied upon to know where the line was, even when he crossed it.

Afterward, there was Kyle. Steady, clever, occasionally sanctimonious Kyle, who'd possessed the aggravating habit of being right about things Simon preferred not to examine. They'd learned to operate without Price. They had learned to anticipate each other's decisions, fill the gaps, and make something functional out of the wreckage of their command structure. Simon had even begun to think they might manage it.

Then the Archer had blown the back of Gaz’s head open.

He'd been there, close enough to see it happen, close enough to understand with appalling clarity that there was nothing he could do to reverse it. He'd survived the subsequent violence, survived the pursuit, survived the fucking end of it all, only to find Price dying on the ice while Simon knelt beside him like a child waiting for permission to be frightened.

Hold the line.

The last thing John Price had asked of him. Simon stared at the form. Hold what fucking line?

His pen snapped between his fingers. The sound was small and vicious. Black ink seeped across the paper, pooling beneath his thumb before dripping onto the desk. In silence he regarded the mess with an almost clinical detachment.

Then he swept the entire stack of documents onto the floor.

"Fucking useless!"

The words emerged as a snarl, distorted by the sudden constriction in his throat. He shoved himself out of the chair so violently that it overturned behind him, its metal frame smacking the wall with a crack! He seized the nearest empty document tray and hurled it across the room. Plastic shattered against the door.

"FUCK!"

The shout tore through the office. Simon was already reaching for something else before he understood what he intended to do with it. His hand closed around the edge of the desk, and for an instant he considered overturning the whole thing, splintering the cheap furniture apart until the room resembled the gore within his own head.

His muscles trembled with the effort of restraint. He could feel the familiar progression of it, the abrupt and catastrophic escalation from irritation to violence. He'd spent years trying to manage these episodes, learning to identify the warning signs and remove himself before his temper outran his judgment. Sometimes it even worked. Other times the anger arrived fully formed, obliterating the distinction between what he wanted to do and what he was capable of preventing himself from doing.

The worst part was that he understood how unreasonable it was.

He knew the paperwork hadn't killed anyone. Knew the furniture wasn't responsible for Gaz or Price, that breaking a hundred fucking chairs wouldn't resurrect Johnny MacTavish. He knew that destroying government property was an excellent way to jeopardize whatever remained of his career.

He simply couldn't make himself care. "Fucking bastards," he said quietly.

His fist struck the wall. Pain exploded through his already damaged knuckles, followed by the familiar crunch of drywall surrendering beneath bone. He withdrew his hand, the fist leaving a shallow, ugly depression in the paintwork. Blood began collecting around one of the cuts across his fingers.

Simon stared at the damage. He'd done it again.

A grown man, a lieutenant, a supposedly exceptional soldier, reduced to smashing things because he couldn't tolerate the contents of a fucking questionnaire.

He turned away from the wall and pressed his injured hand against his forehead. "Jesus Christ." His voice was barely audible.

He bent to retrieve the overturned chair. The motion aggravated his ribs, sending a sharp line of pain through his chest. He ignored it, righted the chair, and sat down again. The forms remained scattered across the floor but he made no effort to collect them.

Simon had been left holding three sets of dog tags and a collection of signatures confirming that the military still considered him employable. He reached beneath his shirt and pulled the chain free. The metal settled into his palm, warm from his skin. Soap's tags were familiar enough to identify without looking, their edges worn smooth by years of handling. Gaz's were newer. Price's still felt profoundly unnatural, as though Simon had somehow acquired something he wasn't entitled to possess.

He separated them with his thumb.

John MacTavish. Kyle Garrick. John Price.

The longing was so immediate and physically painful that he nearly struck the wall again. Instead, he bowed his head and pressed his fist against his mouth. There was no comfort in imagining what the dead would want for him, but he imagined anyway: Price would tell him to get back to work; Johnny would make some filthy joke about his miserable disposition; Kyle would remind him that there were still people worth protecting.

Simon knew them well enough to manufacture their voices in his own head. It made him want to scream. He didn't want another assignment. He didn't want another unit, another collection of young men with families and futures and the absurd conviction that their training would keep them alive. He couldn't bear the prospect of learning their names, developing the familiar shorthand of shared danger, and waiting for the inevitable moment when one of them failed to come home.

Yet the thought of leaving the military was equally unbearable. What was he supposed to become? Simon Riley had died with his family. Ghost had died with the task force. There wasn't a third man waiting patiently beneath the wreckage.

He had no hobbies worth mentioning, no compelling ambitions, no appetite for the slow, ordinary pleasures that seemed to sustain everyone else. Even the prospect of leave inspired nothing but dread. Days stretching ahead without orders, responsibilities, or any meaningful distinction between morning and evening - the prospect sickened him.

Simon lowered the tags back under his shirt and put his head in his hands, elbows on the desk in black ink, and sat.