❝ you don’t have to pretend to be fine, if you need me to stay i will. ❞ (fix saying this to ghost?)
I fucking love Fix and Ghost and how they deal with hurt/comfort with the other. Fuck it's so good.
“He’s smoking.” Soap says as you walk past him after your shower. The Scot is still inventorying his kit under the faulty light of the safe house, steady hands appraising the contents beside his vest. He pauses to throw you the barest glance over his shoulder, brow scrunched with something akin to worry before he goes back to his task.
“On the fire escape.” He adds, and there’s meaning in the scarce words he offers you, meaning that has you quietly slip away in the direction he’s offered you.
Soap doesn’t question the thing between you and his lieutenant, if it can be called that. You’re not sure if he knows the full scope of your relationship with Simon and is strangely quiet on it, or if you both have managed to keep him as carefully in the dark as you intended. Either way, Soap knows Ghost well enough to recognize his mannerisms just as you do, and you both know that Simon slinking off for a cig means something is weighing heavy on his mind.
You knock on the pane of the window that leads to the fire escape, making out Ghost’s looming figure just beside it, concealed carefully in the shadows. The only indication he’s there at all is the slant from the light inside catching across his boot, the glow of the cigarette in his hand as he lifts it to his lips.
When you knock you see him make room for you to climb out, and even though he doesn’t welcome you, it’s a clear indication that he at least tolerates your presence. You lean on the wall beside him, catching the light where he sidles further into darkness, boots scraping the metal mesh of the platform under you. The wisp of nicotine curls around you both, an acrid smell to fill the silence.
You don’t press him. You know better than that. You learned long ago that saccharine sweet words to Simon will only throw his guard up just as it does yours, make him bristle and bare his fangs in a paradoxical effort to protect himself.
❝ You don’t have to pretend to be fine, if you need me to stay I will.❞ You told him once, remembering how Simon’s head had snapped in your direction hard enough to make his neck crack.
“I don’t need anything.” He told you flatly, scarcely hiding his hostility. It had startled you then, this whiplash of emotion from him. Yet when you looked at him, saw the look in his eyes, you understood.
You’re both feral, untamed creatures. There’s beauty in the wildness of you, an understanding of the untouchable spirit that resides in the other. You wander the wilderness in search of someone just the same as you, something more fit for savagery than gentleness. Like a beast howling at the sacrosanct moon, you hear the other's lonely call and dare to challenge it with your own.
Yet wounded, injured, the proximity of others summons flashing fangs and snarling gazes even as you desperately want to be anything but alone.
So you only stand beside him, cross your arms and brace on the wall until you gesture at him for a cigarette, smiling to yourself when he simply offers his. His lighter flicks as he lights a new one for him, and the orange of the flame reveals the grim set of his jaw in the shadows.
You try and think back on the day, try and discern the things that could have gone wrong to warrant this sudden heaviness and withdrawal of him. Ghost had been set up in a sniper nest all day, navigating you and Soap through the city in your plain clothes, tailing a contact. You’d been waiting for him to make an exchange, information hidden in his briefcase. Yet the person he had handed it off to was not another gangster.
Instead, it was a boy.
Blonde. Brown eyes, looking up at his father and smiling as the man had cupped the child’s face when he spoke.
Ghost didn’t take the shot.
You take a long drag of your cigarette, wincing at the taste. You never had a penchant for smoking, picked it up only to find excuses to linger beside the man next to you. Simon is silent, ruminating, and you tumble the image of the boy in your mind, trying to find the tether that connected him to Simon’s heart.
It hits you all at once. A kid, roughly the same age, blonde, brown eyed, rosy cheeked, looking up at his father with stars in his eyes.
Joseph.
You close your eyes, pained realization rippling through your chest. Joseph, the smallest one lost to that deadly night that took Simon’s family. The one he had spoken of only once and then never again. A secret locked in the deepest parts of his heart, something he trusted scarcely few people with.
Including you.
The gift and responsibility of Simon’s trust of you isn’t wasted in its meaning. You know how difficult it is for him to allow even the smallest sliver of someone that deep inside, and you tread carefully, knowing that there’s things that you haven’t told Simon either about your own family.
You fight him tooth and nail for every meager scrap he gives you, and it’s enough. It’s always enough- because every single truth you unspool from him ties its threads into your own stitches atop your fractured heart.
You both stand in the long silence of the night air, letting the curl of smoke wind between your two forms before you deign to speak.
“He looked nothing like him.” You lie.
Simon goes still beside you, coiling a telltale inch as you finally speak the truth of it into existence. You think maybe he’ll go back inside without another word, and will leave you out here in the aftermath of your feigned declaration.
“No.” He replies flatly, not moving from where he stands, voice firm in a way that tells of what he is trying to hide underneath- something you know you’ll see eventually when he comes to you with desperate touches and hushed words, trying to escape the weight of the world in the feral familiarity of you.
“He didn’t.”
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