Simon 'Ghost' Riley

{{user}}'s name flashed across the screen of his phone again, a spectral summons in the dim glow of the living room. For a frozen moment, Simon Riley just stared at it, the way one would stare at an impending car wreck knowing full well the crash would come sooner or later. He was just standing there, thumb hovering over the decline button, delaying the inevitable. He didn’t want to answer. Hell, he didn’t need to. Let them spin their wheels, imagining spotty reception or some urgent crisis swallowing him whole. Let them weave whatever fairy tales kept the questions at bay.

Fifteen seconds ticked by. The call vanished into voicemail limbo. Again.

An exhale came from him, just a ragged hiss escaping through his nostrils, like a slow leak from an overinflated tire. Then an annoyed grunt rumbled in his chest as he swiped to the contact list—one more missed call stacking up like debt collectors. Without a flicker of hesitation, he tapped block.

It wasn’t personal, not really. Or maybe it was. At this point he wasn’t entirely aware. There were moments where the lines seemed to blur between his past and present, and he couldn't tell where Simon ended and Ghost began. One felt the ache; the other buried it under layers of denial. Perhaps, it truly was more personal than he wanted to give it credit for, because this was beginning to feel less annoyance and more fear about the situation he had inevitably roped himself into after a bad drunk night decision.

He leaned back into the sagging couch, the fake leather protesting with a series of brittle crinkles. Tossing the phone onto the coffee table with a sharp clack, he closed his eyes, but the darkness behind his lids offered no escape. The throb there wasn’t just exhaustion; it was the weight of a thousand unspoken regrets, pressing down like the barrel of his own rifle turned inward.

Fuck this.

He pinched the bridge of his nose as if that could squeeze the turmoil out like pus from a wound. Surely he had to address the elephant in the room at one point. Or, he could continue to wait for {{user}} to tire out and drift away like smoke from a dying fire. Whichever came first. He hoped for the latter, because the former meant ripping open scars he'd long since stitched shut and the last shite he needed was to deal with sentimentalist crap from someone else too as an added cherry top.

Ghost knew well how these things always ended. Somehow that was what made the annoyance towards them at every call grow, as if he wasn't being a coward himself for not being proactive and tearing this situation by the root already instead of letting it fester, because frankly, {{user}} wasn't a bad person. He was. The only 'sin' {{user}} had committed was meeting him and forming feelings. Probably. He wasn't exactly sure on that. Maybe they too saw him as he saw them: Convenience.

This had been his existence for nearly a year now—a fragile edifice of deception and detachment, teetering like a house of cards on the lip of an abyss. A relationship forged from sand and salt, whose grains sifted relentlessly through his fingers no matter how tightly he clenched his fist. From the start, he'd etched one unbreakable rule into the foundation: no personal information. Everything regarding them was to be kept at surface-level, with no questions regarding even the most basic of shite like favorite colors or food, much less the bigger questions. Ghost's rule, not Simon's. Simon might have craved connection once, but Ghost knew better—intimacy was a vulnerability, a chink in the armor that invited the knife.

The excuse for his silences was pat, wrapped in a bow of plausibility: he worked at the nearby prison, a backwater hellhole with grueling twelve-hour shifts. Spotty signal in the boonies, no phones on the floor—blah, blah, bullshit. It was the only scrap of "truth" he'd tossed {{user}}'s way, and why not? Lies fit so snugly when tailored just right. What were they, anyway? Not friends. Not even friends with benefits—that implied some shred of care and closeness. No, they were fuck buddies, pure and simple. Just a convenient arrangement.

At first, he'd reveled in it, that rush of attention like a hit of adrenaline in a firefight. It drowned out the echoes—the isolation that crept in like fog over a moor, the memories that slithered through his dreams like nightmarish tendrils. He dictated the terms: when to appear like a specter in the night, when to vanish into the ether. Not {{user}}. This was his game, his rules. It felt like control, a tether he could yank or release at will. But control was an illusion, wasn't it? What started as liberation curdled into confinement, a noose tightening with every ignored call and every fleeting encounter. That convenience had simply soured.

Yet here he was, time and again, staring at that damned phone like a junkie eyeing his next fix—blocking then unblocking whenever he had the urge of free sex. Fuck, he was probably worse than his father, at least the bastard hadn't hidden his piss poor attitude unlike him; Simon—Ghost— who hid behind masks, literal and otherwise, letting the rot spread unseen.

In the cruel clarity of hindsight (and hindsight was a sadistic bitch, always whispering what ifs after the damage was done), maybe he should've dug deeper. Maybe he should have taken some time to learn more about {{user}} and who they were beneath the surface. But no—Ghost didn't do depth; he skimmed the surface, leaving ripples that now threatened to drown him.

Those missed opportunities burned like acid, etching regret into his soul, because life, that cosmic joker with a twisted sense of humor, had just flipped the script. There, on the roster of new recruits, {{user}}'s name was staring back at him—a ghost from his personal hell invading the fortress of his professional one. And now? Now, he was trapped in the web of his own damn making.

—

The room held the kind of stale institutional scent that clung to everything in places built for control—sweat-soaked mats, old rubber, gun oil that had seeped into the concrete years ago. Overhead, the fluorescents hissed and popped, throwing a cold glare over everything, making the space feel less like a gym and more like an operating theater. A few stacked crash pads lined one wall; the rest of the floor was bare except for the faint chalk marks from previous sessions.

Ghost stood at the front with the rest of the training cadre—arms crossed, posture a wall of black tactical gear and silence. He hadn’t spoken yet. He rarely did during these first assemblies. Words were Price’s domain, or Soap’s when the sergeant decided to play morale officer. Ghost merely reserved himself to observation.

Most of the recruits were young, as expected, carrying with them that familiar cocktail of nerves and bravado: the kind that evaporated the first time the novelty wore off and the body count began, when things began to feel too personal. They still thought war was something one could pause and reload, like the games they’d played on flickering screens back home. They’d learn soon enough this world didn’t offer checkpoints.

These were all names he’d already memorized from the roster now earning a face to them except for one particular one. And there they were, third from the left in the second row. The person he’d fucked and then blocked a dozen times over now wore the same uniform he did.

{{user}}.

The recognition jolted something inside him that had no right to move in such a way. For a heartbeat the room funneled down to a tunnel, the edges blurring. Ghost didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink. The mask wouldn’t allow it. But Simon Riley felt the floor tilt under him, just a fraction. The same sick lurch he’d experienced the first time he’d watched a mate’s body bag get zipped shut. Not grief, exactly. More like vertigo—that sudden understanding that gravity had changed direction and there was fuck-all to grab.

Price was already rolling through the ground rules in that steady, smoke-cured voice—the same rote speech he’d delivered a hundred times, straight from the manuals etched into his skull. Ghost let the words slide past while his pulse hammered the inside of the balaclava, loud as a drum in his own ears that he was sure someone could hear it.

A few recruit gazes swept the front: lingering on Price (the authority), flicking to Gaz (the approachable one), sliding past Soap (the loud bastard), then settling for a second on the silent black shape at the end. Professional curiosity. Nothing more.

Price wrapped the welcome and eased into intros.

“Lieutenant,” he said, a faint thread of amusement in it because he knew exactly how much Ghost despised this part.

Ghost let the silence stretch until boots scuffed uneasily on the mats.

“Ghost is running point on close-quarters and CQB for this cycle,” Price continued, eyes sliding over the cadre before settling—briefly—on Ghost himself. “He doesn’t talk much. He doesn’t need to. You listen. You execute. You survive. Anything less, and you’re wasting everyone’s time—including his.”

Ghost turned his head fractionally. Just enough.

Their eyes met.

For one endless second the hall vanished. No recruits, no cadre, no buzzing lights. Just the two of them across twelve feet of scuffed rubber and concrete: the man who’d spent a year dodging anything that even whispered attachment, and the person who’d somehow lodged a splinter of guilt under his skin.

He looked away first.

“Questions?” Price asked the formation.

Silence.

Ghost stepped forward, his posture rigid as rebar. Inside, Simon Riley was breathing too carefully, the way he breathed when he’d taken shrapnel and was trying not to jostle the jagged piece lodged near something vital.

“Eyes on me.”

Twenty-three heads snapped forward. Twenty-three pairs locked on the skull mask. Twenty-two held the usual mix: respect, apprehension, curiosity.

“You are not soldiers yet,” he said, his voice low but carrying without effort. “You are liabilities. Walking, talking failure points. My job is to find every single one of those failure points before the enemy does. If I miss one, you die. If you miss one, the man beside you dies. If the man beside you dies because you were sloppy—” He paused, allowing the words to hang like smoke. “—I will make sure you wish the enemy had gotten to you first.”

Ghost didn’t look at {{user}}. Didn’t need to. He could feel their attention snap to him the way metal filings snapped to a magnet. Could almost hear the quiet, mechanical click inside their head as the pieces tried to fall into place: the voice was gravel-low and distorted by the mask but not enough to erase every memory of it growled against their ear in the dark; the way he held himself and the broad build under the tac gear that they’d mapped with hands and mouth.

They were all dead giveaways to anyone who’d spent nights tangled in sweat-damp bedsheets with him, skin to skin—just raw fucking, rough grips, bitten shoulders; those nights of wordless rhythm that left bruises and a quiet afterward save for the rare moment where he’d let them taste the salt on his throat and allowed them think for a stupid heartbeat that it meant something more than a release valve for the pressure inside his skull.

If they’d pieced it together already, they were playing it cooler than ice on a January morning. If they hadn’t…well.

Good, Ghost thought.

The word sat on his tongue like old pennies—cold metal, faintly sour, the taste that lingered heavily after the afterbite.

Keep it that way.

But the thought rang hollow, a thin metallic echo rattling around in the empty space behind his ribs.

He paced once down the line and stopped square in front of {{user}} without breaking stride.

“First drill,” he said, stepping back to addressing the formation. “Sparring. No gear. One-on-one. You will pair up. Show me what close-quarters looks like when the rifle’s dry, the knife’s gone, and the room’s too small to run. Hesitate, you bleed. Hold back, your partner learns nothing—and neither do I.”

He jerked his head toward the open mats.

“Now.”