yuly

[yuly]

ive never seen his hair this long omg this look eatsssss

Him holding Hazel 🥺

#thomas gibson

[yuly]

Aeonium arboreum 

photo: David Castenson

#so beautiful #us botanical gardens #plants #aeonium arboreum

[yuly]

the level of angst here is simply ✨ top notch✨

where Simon introduces you to Ghost

PAIRING: Simon “Ghost” Riley x F!Reader 

WARNINGS: established situationship (or is it).  angsty.  18+ only.

LENGTH: 5k

Sooner or later, this way or that, the bubble was going to burst, and now that it was happening—just as you’d predicted—you’d both turned out to be responsible for it.

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_____

Sooner or later, the bubble was going to burst.  You knew that, he probably knew that.  Your collective cognisance (and resigned acceptance) of the fact was in sync—so much so that you’d have found it comforting under different circumstances, how in tune with each you were—and you knew you’d collectively be responsible for it.  

Working together towards your relationship’s last hurrah.

You, with your devotion plain on your face, plain for him to see and develop a hostility to.

Him, with the sky-high walls he’d built around himself, only able—or willing—to show you any hint of what he felt towards you when he was inside you.

Sooner or later, this way or that, the bubble was going to burst, and now that it was happening,  just as you’d predicted, you’d both turned out to be responsible for it.

_____

With the benefit of hindsight, something was clearly bothering Simon that night, and you should have clocked his behaviour as odd immediately.  

At least your involvement starts innocently enough.  

You return home from a shit day at work.  A screw up in the orders the night before had led to an ingredient shortage (you’d had to have a commis run down to the shops to grab flour for fucks’ sake), a fussy table had pissed you off, and—today of all days for this shit to happen to you—you’d left your knives home, and had to use the shitty blunt knives at the kitchen.

You’re upset and your exhaustion seeps into your bones.

Under usual circumstances, this wouldn’t prevent you from seeing Simon per se.  Far from it, sometimes a rough pounding scratched the itch, made it easier for you to step away from your thoughts, gave you something else to focus on.

Today, however, was not usual.  Today, you just wanted to go home and sleep off your shit day, fully intending on consuming an inordinate amount of beer and passing out in front of the telly.

But…Simon had been back on leave for 10 days now, and you hadn’t heard from him at all, bar a text.  Landed.  

You knew the series of events that took place when he returned from deployment—he would take a day or two to reset.  Adjust into civilian life, as far as he could.  Then he’d text you.  You’d see each other three or maybe four times over the period of his leave.  Then he’d return to work again.  Rinse and repeat.

So when you walk home from work in the heavy rain—because why not—you’re taken aback to see him leaning against the front door to your flat block, looking broody and sullen as his eyes dart from person to person walking across the small park in front of your block.   

That, by itself, should have been an indication that something was wrong.  You’ve stepped into the outside world with him before and you know he’s always on guard, always switched on, looking for an unknown threat.  But he never makes it obvious, and every time you look up at him, his attention is focused on you.  

So today’s behaviour is an obvious red flag, a slip-up in the facade as he clearly wears his stress in the furrowed lines of his brow, but your elation at seeing him brings his gorgeous mask-covered face to sharp focus, muting all colours at the edges of your vision.

“Simon?” you ask, rummaging through your pockets for your key.

“Who the fuck else?” comes the gruff reply.

Your eyebrows rise as far as they can go on your forehead.  “Okie doke,” you murmur under your breath, but you know he hears you anyway when he scoffs.  Wow.  So it was going to be like that tonight.

You fumble with the key to your flat, but when you finally manage to let yourselves in, he pauses.  “What happened to your alarm?”

It takes you a second, and you grimace.  “Oh yeah, not sure what’s wrong with it.  Haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet.”  You run a quick hand through your drenched hair.  “I need to shower and dry my hair, do you need anything?”

You don’t even know why you ask.  He’s been over enough times to know his way around your flat.

“Gonna fix your alarm,” he mutters under his breath, and you have to force yourself not to roll your eyes at him.

“Look, Simon, it’s fine.  It’s whatever—I’m going for a shower, just order some food,and we can hang out.  Forget the alarm.  I missed you,” you blurt, and immediately regret the words.  

His massive arms cross over his chest immediately in a defensive posture, and you glance away.  “I saw you a month ago.”   

“I know, look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…it doesn’t matter–”

“You can’t say that shit to me,” he interrupts, his eyes dark with sudden ire.  “ I don’t want to hear it, yeah?”

“I just meant–”

“I don’t fuckin’  care what you meant.  Don’t. Say.  That shit to me.”

“Simon!  What is the matter with you? Did…did something happen?”  You take a step toward him and your hand reaches out to touch his forearm, but he backs up.  You’ve never known him to lose his cool like this, not at something so trivial, and certainly not at you.

“This was fucking stupid,” he mutters under his breath, and then turns to you with dark eyes.  “Don’t wanna do this right now, I’ll see you later.”  He turns to leave before you have a chance to say anything, and your broken safety alarm catches his attention again.  “Get this shit fixed.”  

The implied or else suddenly makes you see red.  Your heart thuds in your chest and you’re surprised at the sudden fury you feel right now.  

“Wh-What the fuck is happening right now?  Don’t fucking talk to me like I’m a dog!”

Your caustic words make him freeze with his hand on the door knob, and his shoulders tighten.  You can see how intimidating his enemies must find him in his rage.  He stands unnaturally still, and his back is turned to you, but you’re under no misunderstanding—his anger is both potent and consuming.  His stillness is dangerous.  

You take a deep breath and try to calm your racing heart.  “Look, just…can we talk?  Something’s clearly happened, let’s just calm down and talk about it, alright?”

He scoffs at your words and turns to face you slowly, arms still crossed over his chest.  “You wanna talk, pet? Let’s talk.  What do you wanna talk about?”

“Simon–”

“I’ll start.  Why the fuck is your flat falling apart, eh?  You need a functioning alarm.”

“Jesus Christ, what is the deal with you and that alarm?  This is ridiculous!” 

“You’re the one s’fucking ridiculous,” he breathes.  “You could get broken into in the middle of the night, and you wouldn’t even know it.”

You drag a hand over tired eyes.  “Oh my god, why do you give a shit?  This has nothing to do with you.”  

Simon exhales.  “It could happen while I'm here.  Then what?” 

“You can take care of yourself, Simon.  Besides,” you can’t hold back a small, bitter laugh “you’re not around enough for there to be a real risk to your safety, alright?”

“Is that what this is about?  How you missed me?”  His voice is mocking, and it’s enough petrol to your fire that your fury rises exponentially. “ I should be around you more?  Quit the army to be your lap dog, s’that it?”

“No.  We are not having this conversation, you’re taking this too far.”

What you don’t tell him is that you can’t have this conversation with him—not now, not ever.  You’re in love with him, you’re so helplessly in love with him, and it will break more than just your heart if he throws it back in your face right now.

“Not fuckin’ far enough,” he mutters.  “Christ, what the fuck am I doin’ here,” he says, running a hand through his hair.  

“And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?  Aren’t you here to fuck me, then leave, then come right back when you like only to pick back up where you left off, like the convenience that I am to you?”

“You think this s’fuckin convenient for me, pet?  Think anything about being with you is convenient?”

“Being with me?” you snort, your anger making you lash out.  “Please let’s not pretend that this is anything more than somewhere warm and wet for you to stick your dick  in every time that you’re in London, Simon.  I’m not with you, and you’re certainly not with me.” 

You turn away from him quickly, walking into your kitchen without giving him the opportunity to respond.  What you need right now is some space.  You don’t hear him immediately follow you, but you’re far from convinced that this is over.

You grab a glass from the cabinet above you, fill it with water.   Your fingers tremble as you bring it up to your lips, though you convince yourself that it’s because you’re still wet and cold from the rain. 

It’s your nerves that make you grip the edge of the kitchen counter hard, until your knuckles turn white. Fuck, where is this coming from?  What could have happened to him?  

You feel more than hear his presence lurking at the entrance to your kitchen.  You turn to him with a sigh, trying to stay calm and reason with him.  And though his words have been hurtful to this point,  something about the way he just stands there makes you look up at him.  His eyes are hard, an edge to them you haven’t seen before, but they’re also shiny.  Honest.  Wounded.

You sigh again.  “Can we just drop this?  Look I’m sorry I said anything, let’s just–”

“Do whatever the fuck you want to do, I’m out.”  He states, but makes no move to leave.  It’s almost like he’s baiting you to respond, waiting for…something from you.  You see his hands clench and unclench at his sides, see the slight tremble in his fingers.  

So this is how it ends.  This is the culmination of almost a year’s worth of devotion to this man, to making him the centre of your universe.  The fight leaves you almost as quickly as it arrived. 

“If you’re going to leave, then just fucking leave. Do  what you think is right.”

“What I think,” he yells suddenly, “is that you’re fuckin’ messing with my mind.”  His voice breaks and his hands go up to his hair, tugging at the short strands in frustration.  “You—you’re fuckin’ everywhere.  Y-you…SHIT.”  He slams his hand against the kitchen door, the frame rattling with the force.    

Your vision blurs with hot tears, from the hurt you feel and from the pity that takes centre-stage in your chest when you look at him.  He’s clearly wrecked with something you can’t put your finger on.  Something’s happened, something’s gone wrong at some point between the last time you saw him and now, and even Simon—with the world’s indifference he pretends to possess—can’t move forward, can’t look past it. 

Most of all, you resent that he’s making you tense, a natural reaction to a physically larger man looming over you and speaking to you in a raised voice.   

The tears flow freely now.  “What–what’s wrong Simon, please, jus–”

“Fuck,” he breathes, his eyes scrunched closed,  one hand holding his chest.  “I can’t—can’t do this.  Thought I could…forgot…can’t forget.”

“Simon…please.  You’re scaring me.”  You whisper, and it’s like you can’t help yourself.  Your feet take him to you as if it's the most natural thing in the world, and your face crumbles when he makes eye contact with you, and you see his shimmering eyes staring back at you. 

He slowly lowers to his knees and you go down with him.  He’s starting to pant like he’s been running hard, his breaths staccato and loud, and his chest starts to heave violently.  “Can’t–can’t breathe, shit, shit,” he whimpers, and you don’t think there’s much more of your heart left to break.

“Hey, hey, look at me.  It’s alright, I’m here, look at me.  There’s enough air in the room, Simon, listen to my voice.  There’s enough.  Just breathe for me.”  You try to soothe him as much as possible, trying to pitch down your voice, make it soft and lilting.  He grabs your hand in  a death grip, and you gently use your intertwined fingers to guide his face to the crook of your neck.  He comes easily, takes a deep breath, and for some time, this is all he does.  Just breathes in your scent where it’s the strongest, and you both sit there on the floor of your kitchen, shivering.  

Your tears slowly return, and he clutches at you tighter but says nothing.

_____

You don’t know how long you sit there with him.   

You hold him until the muscles in your arm ache and burn, and even then, you don’t let go.  You’ve enough awareness to realise that this wasn’t about you at all—you were just there when the dam burst—but you’d both said some horrible things to each other.  Things you couldn’t take back.

He shudders in your arms, once, twice, kisses your neck, then slowly lifts his head to look up at you.  He doesn’t cry—you’re not sure he even can—but his gorgeous green eyes soften and melt as they look deep into yours.  He’s never been vulnerable with you, this is more emotion than you’ve ever seen him show, and so you don’t say anything.  He keeps looking at you, searching for…something, but you’re not sure what.  

He seems to find whatever he was looking for after a moment, and looks away from you.  “M’sorry,” he says, his voice hoarse from disuse. 

You nod and run your fingers gently through his hair.  “Does…does this happen a lot?”    

“Not for a while. Thought–thought they stopped. Sorry,” he says again, and sighs. 

You move your arms so they’re wrapped around him tighter, and lay your head on his shoulder.  “I know we don’t do this, but…do you want to go to bed, Simon?”

“Shit, I–I can’t.  Baby, I can’t.  Not tonight.”

You swallow at the rejection and your eyes dart away from him quickly.  You know this isn’t about you but you can’t help but feel like all he does is reject you, over and over.

But his hold on your chin is gentle but firm, and he brings your eyes back to his.  “I’ve been—there’s dreams.  Nightmares.  S’bad.”

“Then stay awake with me.  Let’s just stay awake together…in bed?”

You don’t know where you stand with him right now.  You don’t know where you’ll go from here.  But when he whispers a quiet okay, and gathers you to him, you think you understand where you stand, right in that moment, and it’s enough for you. 

You can only hope that it’s enough for him too.

_____

You undress quietly, facing away from him.  He turns the lights off in the room, you hear his mask drop on your bed stand, and then…bliss.  He pulls you to him and his arms wrap around you, legs tangling with yours, your face burrowing in his chest.  You almost can’t believe it—you went from just sex to almost nothing to…this.  

It makes all the soft thoughts you hold for him in your heart bubble up to your throat, and you have to hold back from blurting them out.

He stays silent for a long time, his breathing deep and even, and you wonder if he’s fallen asleep after all.  So when his soft voice pierces the night, you almost jump.  “I’m sorry, sweetheart.  Tha’ was—I’m sorry.”

You sigh.  He’s hurt your feelings, been completely inconsiderate, been downright hateful, and all you feel is fear that he’s going to take it all away.  You hate that the worst possible scenario for you is that he could take himself away from you.

 “I’m sorry, too.  I don’t—I know you don’t think of me as a convenience.  I shouldn’t have said that.”

But his body is taut now, tense.  He reads you well. 

“But.  You need to define what you want here, Simon.  I respect you enough to stick to our original agreement.  But if you want to…pause this, then do it.  It’s fine.  But I won’t be strung along—”

“S’not fine to me.”  It’s all he says.  You’re physically close enough to him to  feel his heartbeat between your bodies, strong and starting to take off in his chest.  Your heart, in turn, thuds painfully in your chest, hands and feet clammy, feeling the adrenaline in his body move into yours.  

“What happened, Simon?”  Your words are soft, but firm.

“No,” he whispers, his grip unyielding on you. “Not tonight, please, pet.  Know I fucked up, Jesus.  Fuckin’ knew I went too far today…just not tonight. Please.”

You pause a moment.  Hear his words.  “Okay,” you agree, and lean your face up to kiss him.  He responds eagerly, clutching you tight.  Far too eagerly,  considering the events of the evening, and you feel him hot and heavy against your thigh.  You’re not surprised.

Pleasure and pain all mixed up in his mind. All paths, you’d once hoped,  leading him to you.  Seems like they finally did.

You continue to kiss him, languid and slow, and at one point you feel his brows tightly furrowed and pressed against yours.  An emotion you can’t name settles deep in your chest, and it makes your heart swell and throb.   

Simon is an enigma to you, a puzzle you can’t solve, a man you thought felt only the bare minimum, just enough to get through his life.  But he proves you wrong, shows you just how little you know the man you’re in love with.  Simon feels.  He feels so much, feels so intensely that he separates his entire person from it—becomes Ghost—and tries to keep your Simon safe.

But you know that right now, in this moment, it’s not Ghost who pulls you over him, hands moving over your back gently, like he’s trying to memorise the feel of your skin.  It’s not Ghost in your bed right now, kissing you like the world is ending around you.  And it’s not Ghost who lets you go for a second only to wipe your tears and press gentle kisses along your jaw and the side of your neck.

“Can I?” he whispers.  “Pl-please let me, fuck, let me—”

“Yes, God, please.”

He wastes no time after that.  You think he’s going to push inside you—you brace for that sweet, first stretch—but you’re quickly flipped around so you’re on your back.  He crawls down your body, pulls your panties off and you’re not prepared,not even close to prepared,for the barrage of sensation his body invites in yours. Warm breath for a sliver of a second, then a hot tongue and a thick finger find you molten and willing for him, and you think that this, right here, like this with you, this is where he belongs.  

He may belong to whatever demons reside in his mind, whatever he does out there when he’s away from you for months on end, but he belongs to you while he’s here like this too. 

You’ll take whatever you’re given and you’ll endure.

He pulls you away from your thoughts just as they descend into forbidden territory, but you don’t care.  He can keep himself locked away from you as much he wants, as much as he feels he needs to, but he can’t stop what’s already taken root in your chest.  That belongs only to you.

“S’this okay, pet?  You alright?” He whispers, then dips his head down to nip at where the evidence of how alright you are paints the insides of your thigh.  “You with me?”

“I’m with you, Simon,” you whisper back, the irony and stark contrast of the words against the ones you’d flung at him earlier not lost on you.

Seems he’s thinking the same thing.

“Won’t happen again, dove.”  The words are promised against your clit, and his fingers don’t stop moving inside you when he speaks.  “Promise, I–fuck–I won’t bring it home again.”

The whispered words don’t give you much solace—you know he can’t help but carry it with him wherever he goes, even if he thinks differently—but his use of the word home lights a warmth in your chest like you haven’t felt before.

Home, yes, this is home, with him, worshipping between your legs and you, hovering on that cliff edge, waiting for that feeling only his touch brings.  Waiting for him to give you something you can’t quantify, waiting for him to release the part of you that he holds so you can run free with it, now it’s been imbued with his essence.

He doesn’t keep you waiting long, gives you exactly what you need to be able to drop off that precipice without anything to catch you—and when your pleasure finally runs in your veins, you know it’s because only he can touch you the way you need to be touched at that moment.   

Your hips arch against his mouth, and you haven’t even fully come down from your high yet before he’s moving away from you, freeing himself from his jeans and pushing inside you to the hilt.  The feeling of sudden fullness is almost overwhelming, and your breath sputters and chokes in your chest, as though he’s lodged himself in your throat instead of your cunt.  You gasp and clutch at him, but he’s not done taking your breath away—he lifts both your legs and effortlessly puts them on one of his shoulders.  

You know you’re the singular object of his focus when you close your eyes and turn your face away so the meagre lights from your window don’t accidentally show you his face, but his hand moves to your jaw and brings it back to him.  “Open your eyes, sweetheart.”  

“Simon—”

“Open them,” he insists.  “I want to see your gorgeous eyes, sweet girl.  L-let me see them.”

You open your eyes.  

You can’t see him clearly—of course not, it’s close to pitch black in the room—only the outlines of his features, but you understand what he means.  You want to see his gorgeous eyes when he pounds into you with no abandon, showing you he cares for you in the only way he thinks he’s allowed to.  It’s dark but you can see pieces of him.  A mosaic.  You can draw your own conclusions from the pieces of the puzzle you’ve been handed.

Your eyes trace the crooked length of his nose—how many times has it been broken?  You bring your hand up to trace a single finger over his tight jaw and move up to gently run your hand over his hair—how long can it grow?  Does he cut it himself?  You can’t imagine him allowing someone else to do it, touch him like that, he wouldn’t allow that level of intimacy.   

“I want to get on top,” you breathe.  He starts to shake his head, but you cup his face in your palm.  It makes him pause, then nod.  With a grace you think someone of his size and build shouldn’t possess, he helps you up without slipping out of you, and sits up while you straddle him.

You start to ride him,  but hug him close to your chest—the coalescence of a thousand galaxies in a universe-shattering type of violence could not pull you away from this moment with him—and he groans against your skin.  His mouth moves to your throat, and you swear, you swear, he whispers into the crook of your neck before he kisses it, but you’re so far gone that you don’t hear and you can’t think to ask him.  You’re safe like this, with his arms wrapped around you and with the knowledge that he cares—just doesn’t know how to show it.

Home in the truest sense of the word.

His hands move to your back, supporting you, even as you rise and fall steadily on his cock.  For as desperate as he was railing into you before, he seems perfectly content for you to take your time now, reach the pinnacle of your bodies’ connection, but not sprint towards it and end it too soon.  One of his arms moves to cradle the back of your head and the small shift causes your clit to grind against the coarse hair on the base of his cock.  Your throaty moan doesn’t go unnoticed—nothing ever slips past him unnoticed—and he jerks his hips up, over and over so the sensation never stops, and you feel closer than ever to your peak.

You’re panting now too, the strain on your muscles making you slick with sweat, and you can tell he’s close too.  His jaw is clenched and his eyes stare intensely into yours, but you feel the tightening of the muscles in his thighs and his hips never cease their insistent pistoning motion into yours.  

You’re so close, so close to coming and his hand disappears just briefly between the two of you where you’re joined, rubs at your clit, gathering the slick and bringing it up to your mouth.  You exhale at the filthy action—even after all this time he finds new ways to surprise you—but you grab his fingers before they reach you and push them into his mouth instead.  You catch the widening of his bright eyes and his sharp hiss, but he keeps them on you as he sucks on his fingers.  You grab his face and kiss him then, and the movement of his tongue inside your mouth mimics that of his cock—it’s deep and thorough, leaving no stone unturned in absolutely undoing you. 

You pull back for a moment, and you’re both suspended as though in space—nothing between you but darkness, but you’re wrapped in it too, so are you really apart?  

You suppose you are and you aren’t.

The only two people in the universe.  

He thrusts up into you a few more times, his rhythm broken and stuttering, but his eyes never leave you.  You come just like that, your eyes screwed shut tight and your body burning up with molten heat.  It licks down your spine, and you feel tingles running down the length of your body, from your fingertips all the way down to your toes.  

Your world goes bright then dark, a supernova behind your eyes from the orgasm he gives you, but a black hole where you feel his arms wrapped around you—opposite but sister forces, blinding you when you try to look at him but pulling you into him anyway.

The only two people in a universe that is kind enough to let you pass through it together, that lets you exist at the same time as this man, gives you the privilege to love a man who is so clearly deserving of it, unashamedly craves for it, has been denied it at every turn in his life.

While you come down, you dread the conversation you still need to have with him.  His behaviour is not on but you can’t help but focus on the fixation with your alarm.  That singular thing could not have set him off.  Unless—

Well.  You can’t even start to guess.  The life he leads when he’s away is so far removed from yours, you can’t even begin to imagine what he’s seen, the things he’s done in his line of work.  Fuck, you don’t even know what his line of work is.

“Can hear your mind workin, pet,” he murmurs to you.  “You gonna tell me?”  He moves his face so he can kiss your neck, then decides to stay there.

“Just—just thinking about you.”

“Not thinkin’ about much then?”

“Plenty,” you insist with a small smile.  “Actually, I was thinking about how you must hate how much I reek.  Just came home from an extra-sweaty shift and you fucked me before I even showered.  Disgusting.”

“Quite the opposite, pet.  Ain’t tasted anything sweeter,” he murmurs.  He even makes a point of it by licking his favourite spot on your neck. 

“Dirty flatterer,” you whisper.  His face lifts up to you, and he slowly lifts your hand up and brings it to his face.  You can feel the beginnings of a smile on his lips, and it tells you what you need to know for now.  “Shower, then take out?”

“Yeah, pet.”

“Then maybe we can look online, find a replacement for my alarm?”

You hear him swallow, then nod and lean in to kiss you.  He kisses you for what feels like a lifetime, pouring a profound sadness and longing into it.  You’re scared of it, as much as you hurt for him.  You still don’t understand it, you don’t get why this situation made him so upset to begin with, but you’re willing to work with him on it.  You’re willing to—

“Need you safe, pet.  Can’t—won’t compromise on that.  Need you to be safe while I’m away, yeah?”

“Okay, Simon.”

“Mean it.  Was a proper dick to you today, it won’t happen again.  We’ll…talk about it,” he mumbles.  “But you need to stay safe, I won’t—you can’t get hurt.”

“I won’t, Simon.  I won’t get hurt.  This is a safe neighb—”

“No.  Things can happen, dove.  Trust me.”  He exhales heavily.  “Fuck, trust me, I know.  Just need to know you’re safe when I ain’t here.”

You acquiesce slowly, nodding and laying your head on his shoulder, your heart full with his words.  

How is it that every time you think you figure out one part of the puzzle, it expands, as though no amount of individual pieces of him could ever hold him, could ever hope to draw a full picture.  It’s like he exists outside of the plane you reside in, too big, too complex to be deciphered by using small pieces of him.   

No, he only unravels when he hands you the string and tells you to pull.   He’s only ever yours when he chooses to come to you himself.  

Simon, Ghost, you don’t care. 

You love the version of him that does. 

#absolutely delicious #angsty goodness #angst and hurt/comfort #simon riley x reader #simon ghost riley #simon riley

[yuly]

wow....i feel like i just got my heart ripped out, stomped all over, and catapulted into space

˚ʚ♡ɞ˚ your gentle hands are enough

⤷ simon riley x afab!reader

⤷ cw: nsfw, angst kinda?, unprotected vaginal sex, oral sex, praise kink, creampie!!, reader referred as 'pet' like twice, smut with sadness, hurt/kinda comfort, mention of johnny's death, simon is scared of commitment :(, we still love him.

⤷ reblogs, asks, comments, feedbacks are immensely appreciated!

notes: my first ever fic that i'm posting on this site !! feedback is appreciated ♡ dedicated to @rowarn for being lovely and entertaining my rambles

You and Simon weren't exactly dating.

He visits you almost every night whenever he's in the city and he's always gone before you're out of bed. But you relish on the rare occasions that you're awake before him — the moments you get to brush your hand through the raised scars littered all across his face, the moments you get to tangle your fingers in his hair to hear his little grunts.

Simon Riley has rough hands, scarred and calloused from years in the battlefield. Yet when those hands are caressing your body softly, you know he's being unnecessarily gentle to not let you feel the roughness in his hands — as if he was trying to prevent all the hurt and pain he's inflicted with his fists from bleeding into you.

You pretend to have only just woken up, eyes blinking slowly trying to adjust to the sunlight filtering in through the blinds.

"Morning, Si."

"G'morning, sweetheart. Sleep well?" He places a warm palm on your hip, not fulling resting the weight of it.

"I always do when you're here." You raised your hand to his chest and feel his heart thumping steadily below you. His body always runs hot no matter the weather and it makes you nuzzle into him more during the bleak winter.

Silence engulfs the two of you, lulling you into a vulnerable state of bliss as you recall the events of last night.

You had barely opened the door for him last night before his hands were all over you, lips crashing onto yours as he kissed you with desperation. Strong hands working swiftly to remove your clothes gently as he pushed you towards the bedroom.

Simon was always gentle with you, but you've been with him long enough to know the difference between him missing you and him scared at the thought of missing you.

Instead of gently laying you down on the plush mattress, he pushed you with a little bit of force than usual.

"Simon!" You yelp. You must've been too distracted by him to fully notice that he was now fully naked below you.

He had a glint in his eye that let you know you were not going to be able to rest until he coaxed multiple orgasms from you.

His hand was constantly on your body, not wanting to go for a second without feeling your skin under his. Greedy kisses were peppered all across your collarbone that were now marked with the imprint of his teeth.

You knew Simon was trying to memorize every inch of your body, leave his marks on you because he was going to go back on deployment soon.

This realization is what snaps you out of your peaceful reverie. That your Simon is going to leave you soon.

The mere thought of having to see him leave your apartment in a few hours and not getting to see him for another week? Months?

It leaves a sour taste in your mouth that made you frown and turn your head away.

Simon, ever so vigilant, notices your downturned lips. He cups your chin and swivels it to face him. He nudges his nose with yours, placing a gentle kiss on your lips.

"What's wrong, sweetheart?"

You hate that he was playing dumb. Hates that he thinks you don't know his antics by now. Hates that he thinks you don't know him by now.

"You know why, Si." Pushing your hands on the plush bed, you rest your back on the headboard. You stare at Simon disapprovingly, upset that he's trying to pretend everything is fine.

He sighs heavily and run his hand through his hair, messing it up more than it already was.

"How do you know?" He finally lets out, still laying down on his side staring up at you.

You scoff at him. Maybe because you've seen him through his highs-and-lows. You've seen his little smirk at your antics. Listened to his stories intently as he fondly recalls memories with his squad mates.

But you've also seen him coming to you bloody, battered, bruised, and shaking as you stitched his back. You've seen him scare himself awake at night, dreaming about the last time he saw Johnny.

He chuckles when you stare at him pointedly and finally sits up. He waits for you to stop sulking for a few minutes, before sighing once more.

The bed creaks with his weight as he tries to stand up from it, turning towards the window. You know what's coming next and you are fully aware there's nothing you can do to stop him from going on deployment.

What you can do, is at least try to make him stay a little bit longer.

You crawl forward from your position, throwing both your arms around his wide torso — at least try to, he's way too wide for you to fully engulf him in your arms.

"Don't go."

Your lips are pressed against his back as you softly plead with him to not go. Simon takes both your arms in his hands and angles his upper body towards you. Slowly, you move up from your sprawled-out position and kneel in front of him.

"Please." You slowly pull away your arms from his grip. He reluctantly lets you go before you slowly wrap them behind his neck. You inch closer to him, slowly leaning down and kissing his neck.

Simon moans languidly, still groggy.

"You play dirty, love." He cups your behind, angling his neck upwards to give you more access.

"You love it."

"Being cheeky, are you?" You grin against his neck, biting down softly. Arching your neck subtly as Simon tugged on your hair.

These were truly the moments you truly enjoy the most. Not that you don't enjoy sleeping with him, you definitely do. But being able to love him freely in the daylight made it much more intimate.

You suspect it's why Simon always tried his best to leave before the sun came up.

You know Simon loves you, albeit in his own unique way. He's never been nothing but kind and gentle to you, always making sure you feel safe and taken care of with him. From locking your door with the spare key he has after he leaves, to making sure to take care of you after having sex — always gets up to clean any messes he had left on your body with gentle wipes and ending it with a soft kiss to your forehead.

Despite your numerous attempts to get him to open up about his past, he doesn't bite often. Though, you know some part of him wants nothing more than to tell you every single thing about himself when he speaks little snippets of his past.

He doesn't tell you anything overly upsetting, always keeping it minimal and with as little details of violence as possible.

Perhaps, his idea of a small mercy.

Maybe he thinks he's doing you a favor, giving you little bits of himself hoping you eventually realize how damaged he is. He doesn't understand how those flickers of vulnerability makes you hungrier for more of him. You wanted him, thorns and all.

Simon lets himself get roped back into your arms, all his muscles relaxed, no trace any tautness or rigidness lingering. He feels safe in your arms.

"How long Simon?" You finally ask, preparing for the worst.

Simon was mostly gone for around a month.

But on the rare times you couldn't see him for more than half a year, it was like hell. It hurt so deeply knowing even if he had been killed off somewhere, you might not even know. The only traces left of him would only be the few shirts he's let you take and the Simon-shaped hole he would have left in your heart.

It scared you that you could never be able to smell his earthy musk lingering in your sheets again, that it would fade one day and you wouldn't remember what it smelled like anymore.

"I dunno. More or less three months?"

You hated when he was vague. He was often trying to spare your feelings.

"So... more."

He nods with his face still hiding in your neck. You can feel him press his nose harder and inhale deeply.

Deep down, you feel crushed. You always do when he has to leave. You want to tell him how much you love him again, how much you need him, and you wanted him to say it back so badly.

You thought you had gotten so far with him, slowly breaking down his walls after getting him to start staying over instead of leaving. Something changed after he lost Johnny — he was more touchy, more clingy, but he never let you get any closer anymore. You could physically feel him wince if you told him you loved him during one of your vulnerable moments.

The first time you told him you loved him, he looked at you with a somber look. He didn't say anything, but he pulled you close and gave you a bone-crushing hug.

I'm sorry.

He gave different reactions every time. Some days he'd simply sigh and drag his fingers through your hair lovingly. On worse days, he'd shake his head and do nothing else.

It was like an impenetrable wall had suddenly appeared when it wasn't there before.

You take a deep breath. Simon has been nothing but gentle with fragile you. He's been trying his best to not taint the heart that you've freely ripped out of your chest for him.

Maybe this time, you can do something for him and let him go back without the weight of your love on his shoulder.

"Better make the most of it then, eh?" You pull back from him and hear a grunt of protest. You start pushing him until his back hit the headboard gently. Kissing your way down to his groin, you tug at his boxers impatiently.

"Sweetheart you don't have to-"

"I want to." You cut him off.

"Fuck. You're gonna be the death o' me, love." He lifts his hips and lets you drag his boxers down, revealing his semi-hardness.

God, his cock is so beautiful. It's so thick you could barely wrap both your hands around it even when he's not fully hard.

"I'll make sure to send you off gently with a kiss, Simon." Your mouth slowly engulfs the tip of his cock, licking all around it. Simon lets out a groan as he grabs your head gently.

"Oh, fuck. That's it, sweetheart. So sweet, being so good f' me." He encourages sweetly and it's enough to get you preening and moving your head excitedly down his length.

Just as you know his habits, Simon also knows what makes you tick. Getting praised by him almost always makes you putty in his hands and he makes sure to take advantage of this information to its full potential. He loves to praise you even for the smallest of things, such as cooking for him when he gets back.

Telling you how lovely you are and how he's thankful for you taking the time to cook for grumpy, old, Simon.

You continue taking more of his length in your mouth, gaggling slightly from the sheer size of him. You can taste the salty precum on your tongue and your eyes roll back from pleasure, taking him in more enthusiastically.

"Slow down, love. Don't want- ugh.. you t' hurt yourself." Simon tries to pull your head back to give you space, but you're not happy about it. You glare up at him best as you can before taking him down to the hilt.

Nose pressed deep, you can smell the slight tang of his musk, making you slightly delirious. You moan, sending vibrations up throughout his body.

Simon trembles with pleasure, groaning.

"Yeah, you like that sweetheart? Love choking on my cock? Hmm?"

At his words, you slowly take your mouth off of him, replacing it with your hands. Slick from your spit and his precum, your hand glides along his shaft easily as he bucks into your hand.

"Mhm.." You put your mouth on him once more, only pulling away to rub it all over your face. "Love it so much, Si. Love having your cock in my mouth. Can't live without it."

Simon admires you, cockdrunk on his leaking shaft. Even with his mess all over your face as you slobber on him, he thinks you look absolutely gorgeous.

Looking up at him, it's like you can see hearts in his eyes. You've been wet since the moment you woke up to him next to you, but him looking at you like you're the only person he wants to see on him makes you feel on top of the world.

Unable to take it anymore, you whine pathetically and start humping the bed.

Simon sees you writhing on the bed below him and chuckles as you continue kissing all over his cock.

"Look at you.. so needy, sweetheart. You don't need to hump the bed like a dog in heat. I'm right here, love." With that, he gently pulls you off his cock. You groan dismay, body going slightly limp from desperation.

"Need you so bad, Si." You beg him, tears starting to form in your eyes. You think you're going to crazy if he doesn't fuck you soon. He's about to leave soon for months and you're desperate for him to leave his mark on you.

Simon gently tuts and caresses your cheek. He's in awe of how he's got such a lovely, needy, pet wrapped around his finger. He hasn't had someone this devoted to him in a very long time — someone who's always excited to see him come home, someone who's never asked for him for more than what he can give.

Maybe it makes him a narcissist that he's happy of the fact that you're so desperately in love with him, you'd rather have parts of him than not at all.

But during early mornings where he'd find you sniffling into your pillow, he feels pain in his chest where his heart resides. He knows you cry over him.

He mourns the love that you two could have, but he'd rather mourn over the fantasy he's created in his head — the fantasy where he wasn't fucked up and is able to receive the kind of love you freely give, than have you be heartbroken when Simon inevitably doesn't come home one day.

"I got you, sweetheart. Let me make you feel good." He rumbles against your lips. In a split second, he'd managed to lay you out on the bed and now hovered above you.

He takes a moment to stare at your face. Wide-eyed, sweating, and panting heavily. He peppers kisses all over your face.

His little pet all worked up over sucking his cock.

He's staring at you for a few seconds, making you writhe around, but you never break his stare. It was as if the both of you were trying to commit each other's faces to memory right in this moment, not knowing when you were going to be able to see each other again.

You bring your hand up to his face, slightly wiping the sweat away from his eyes.

His eyes.

The moment he looked at you, you know you were done for. Those eyes never fail to send shivers through your whole body, as if your entire being was standing to attention when his eyes were on you.

"You're so pretty, Simon."

That seemed to break him out of his trance. He grunts slightly as if disagreeing with your statement. You sigh, knowing he's never going to see himself the way you see him.

That's okay. You'll spend as much time as he'll give you to convince him.

Simon kisses and caresses down your body as you moan from the feel of it. Teasing you with his lips and leaving small marks all over. When he gets to your thighs, he slowly raises both of them as he lightly rubs his scruffy chin on it.

"Lift those pretty legs f' me, hm?"

When you don't respond, he gently bites to get your attention and you huff. You grasp your bedsheets so tight your knuckles were going white when you feel his hot breath on you.

"Such a pretty pussy. Just for me, yeah?" He kisses your folds gently, the sensation of his scruff causing a prickly sensation, making you wail in pleasure.

"S-Simon!" You were so needy and sensitive — Simon loved that about you.

"So sensitive." He murmurs against your weeping pussy. He runs his finger across your folds, gathering the wetness. You look down at him as he tastes your wetness on his finger.

"Fuck, Simon."

"Mm, my favorite taste."

After a few moments of simply kissing all around your folds and your clit, Simon decides to stop teasing you. He presses his face in your folds and licks a stripe across it.

He repeats this action multiple times, sucking on your little bud in between. He rolls his finger around your clit as his mouth makes suckling noises. The sensation of his tongue and finger on you make you gasp loudly — your eyes rolling back.

You arch your back and don't stop chanting Simon's name like a prayer. Like he was going to disappear if you stopped calling his name.

"That's it. Let me hear what you want, pretty." He brings two of his fingers back inside your walls, lightly caressing them. He's teasing you, waiting for you to beg him to put his fingers inside of you. You break instantly, begging for him to use his thick fingers to please you.

"Please, Simon. Please, please, please. Need your fingers in me."

How could Simon deny you when you beg so sweetly?

Humming against you, he slowly sinks his fingers inside your aching walls. You sigh in contentment, unconsciously clenching on his fingers.

"Relax love, you're choking my fingers." You relax a bit at his words, trying to get your breathing back to normal. The death grip you

It seems that Simon had other ideas, because as soon as you loosened, his fingers started picking up. You start wailing again at his sudden shift in pace, grabbing his hand that was gripping your thigh.

His hand lets go of your thigh and entwines it with yours.

"Doing so good for me. You can take it, sweetheart. Be good and cum on my fingers, yeah?" At this point the both of you were panting heavily, his heavy cock still leaking precum onto the bedsheets. You didn't realize it before, but you're just now realizing how the bed is creaking from his hips.

Simon pants heavily, the room getting warmer by the second. His heavy groans makes your pussy throb around his fingers as you feel a pressure building in your lower belly.

"Si- please. So close."

Knowing you're close sends him over the edge, his tongue works faster and sloppier in tandem with his fingers. Simon moans and and your back starts to arch higher than before.

You're now making a mess on the bedsheets, wet noises can be heard loudly as it echoes throughout the entire room. You feel hot, sweaty, and suddenly everything's too much.

The lights are too bright, the noises too loud, and you feel so sensitive it burns.

"Simon, I-" You whine, legs starting to thrash as Simon pulled his fingers away to hold your legs. You feel your nerves lighting awake as you feel every single sensation as he sinks his tongue inside.

"Love you Si, love you so much. I'm—" Your body seizes and freezes for a moment and a little flick of his tongue against your bud makes you lose it. Your orgasm washes through you like a crashing wave, causing you to tremble in his hold and let out gasps as you struggle to breath normally and let your legs fall.

Simon lets you catch your breath as he lifts himself up, still hard. You rest your eyes on him and you see him lick his lips — his entire mouth and chin shiny with your slick.

He hovers above you once more, leaning down to give you a kiss. You reach up enthusiastically, pulling him down by his neck. He grunts at the sudden force as you slant your lips against his. It's messy, his lips slick with spit and yours with a small trace of drool. The kiss is desperate, teeth knocking into each other more than once.

It goes on for a while before Simon starts to pull back. Before he's successful, you wrap both your legs around his waist and Simon gasps at the sensation of his cock pressed against your slick.

"Need you inside, Simon. Want you in me." Murmuring against his lips, your hand desperately wanders down his sweaty body and grips his cock.

He lets out a grunt at the sudden warmth enveloping him and is unable to control as his hips involuntarily thrust forward.

"Yeah? You want my cock? Take it, sweetheart. It's all yours." He watches in a daze as you slowly align him with you. The moment he feels his tip rub on your slippery folds, he lets out a whimper.

"Please Si.." You whisper to him. "Wanna feel you inside me so bad." Simon coos at you, seeing you beg him to fuck you never fails to make his brain circuit for a few seconds.

He teases you a few seconds longer, just to hear you beg more for him. He begins to feel bad when you start humping the air in hopes of getting his head inside you.

You're babbling incoherently now, eyes closed, hands wandering all over Simon's body. He gives you mercy and starts to push inside your throbbing hole. It takes a bit of time, but when his head manages to push through, he's already able to feel your walls pulsate around him.

"Oh, sweetheart. So needy f' me." He's also barely coherent, his eyes focused on his cock deeper inside your tight hole. "What are you gonna do when I'm gone, hm? Who's gonna fuck you this good?" Simon barely realizes what he's saying until he's spoken them. The thought of someone else fucking you when he's gone lights a fire inside him.

"Oh, fuck." His cock is fully in you now and you can feel every vein pulsating inside of you. Your hands are gripping Simon harder, possibly leaving red marks all over his body — you relish in the thought of Simon looking in the mirror and seeing the marks you left on him. "No one, Si. No one's gonna fuck me as good as you. Don' want you to go. Want you here with me." Your mouth hangs open uselessly, overwhelmed with the pressure of Simon in you.

Hearing you admit so openly you weren't going to fuck anyone else drives Simon even crazier. You realize now how much of an impact your words have on Simon when he starts pounding your poor pussy that was still sensitive.

"Yeah? That's right, sweetheart. No one can fuck you like I can." It takes him a few seconds to get his words out, huffing above you. You can barely hear what he's saying, ears ringing from the blinding white, hot pleasure coursing through your entire body. Your hands try gripping him as long as you can but his thrusts are causing your body to jostle relentlessly, and now your arms flail helplessly before holding onto the headboard.

Simon is no longer on his forearm, his head resting in the crook of your neck as his hands grip your waist. You're sure his hands are going to leave prints in the morning from how hard he's gripping you.

You don't mind at all.

Your brain feels foggy, only speaking Simon's name over and over again. Simon's no better than you, grunting and groaning at every thrust that leads him deeper into your hole.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck." He moans. "So good for me, so sweet for me." Your legs no longer have the energy to stay corded behind his back, limping helplessly beside you as Simon fucks you.

You feel another orgasm creeping up on you as your walls begin to clench around Simon's cock. Simon hisses at the feeling, leaning up to look at your cream gathering at the base of him. He looks up to the ceiling, gasping in pleasure.

"Si, I'm so close, I-" He brings his head down to give you a chaste kiss before pulling away, nose touching yours and staring into your eyes.

"Let go f' me, sweetheart. Gonna cum on my cock and be good?" He coaxes you, one of his hands going to your face. You don't even realize you're crying until Simon wipes your tears away.

You can't take it anymore, the loving look in his eyes and feeling him inside you breaks you.

"Love you so much, Si. I love you so fucking much." You cry out to him as you're finally sent over the edge. You wail loudly, back arching as Simon continues to thrust at a slower pace, going deeper than before.

"God, fuck. I love you, I love you. Fuck." He continues to mumble against your neck. Your jaw goes slack and another orgasm seizes your body as you clench and gush all over him.

His thighs are drenched from your slick and when he feels your walls pulsing repeatedly over him, he feels shivers all over his body and he cums.

The blinding pleasure takes him off guard, thighs shaking from the sheer force. He continues thrusting shallowly, dragging out his orgasm as his cum fills up your hole to the brim.

He gasps and bites down on your neck, not stopping until he's fully come down from his high.

You're shell shocked, one hand over your eyes as you thinking about what just transpired. This was nothing like before. He'd never said 'I love you', ever. You take a moment to regain your thoughts, heart thumping wildly.

By this point, your hopes had soared like never before, the small part of you that still believes you can have something with Simon begins crawling out of you — coming back alive.

"Si-" You start as you catch your breath and lift your head slightly to look at him.

"Sorry." He mumbles lifting himself from your body, plopping himself on the pillow beside you.

There's nothing but silence for a few minutes. A part of you wants nothing more than to confront him, get him to face his feelings. But you know Simon and that if you did that, he'd panic.

So, you wait. And wait. And wait.

Until he coughs.

"I have to go. Supposed to meet the boys in an hour." He grumbles, fumbling around to get himself off the bed and find his clothes.

Your heart breaks. Was he really going to go away for a few months without talking about what just happened? You had to make a choice. Either speak now or forever hold your peace.

"Simon." You speak with such a finality in your tone that it renders Simon frozen. He pauses putting his pants back on and stares up at you, terrified.

"I love you." You say, loud and clear. You've told him you loved him in the throes of passion and in the sleepy haze of early mornings, but never when both of you were wide awake. Like a secret that's only meant to be whispered so as to not let it get snuffed out.

You see his eyes widen for a fraction of a second. He seems to debate what he wants to say. You badly wish for him to just say something, anything at all.

He doesn't.

Simon continues to put on his pants and slip his shirt over his head. Once he finally gains the courage to look at you once more, he had to clear his throat. The forlorn look on your face would haunt him until the day he dies.

He knows you love him so deeply and honestly, that there was no questioning your devotion to him. He knows that you feel for him so deeply, you'd rather hurt yourself over and over than let him go.

But he's also once harbored care and affection to someone, fighting side-by-side with someone he thought was going to never stop speaking gibberish in his ear.

If Simon almost couldn't survive losing Johnny, there was no way you were going to survive losing him.

With his heart in his throat, Simon stares at you, fighting back tears that threaten to escape. God, he wants to kiss you. He wants to kiss you and tell you he loves you more than anything in this world. That he'd fight through any battlefield with broken limbs just to come home to you. But he knows he can't give you that promise. That promise that he's going to die of old age with you.

He expects you to cry or scream, but nothing in the world would be able to heal the way Simon's heart breaks when you only give him a sad smile.

"That's okay. I know you're not selfish enough to love me back."

He knows he should just leave, but he can't help himself from hurting you once more. Simon steps forward, cradles your head in his hands and lay a kiss atop your head.

And then, he leaves.

#this is DEEP angst #like LAYERS #really it's the last few paragraphs that did it for me #soul crushing gut wrenching deliciously well written ANGST #simon riley smut #simon riley x reader #simon ghost riley smut #simon ghost riley x reader #ghost x reader

[yuly]

baby can you call me back? i miss you, it gets so lonely in my mansion….

#aaron hotchner #the perfect man

[yuly]

from river to the sea

[yuly]

i have nothing christian to say….

#aaron hotchner #criminal minds

[yuly]

he’s so old money

#thomas gibson #the prettiest

[yuly]

…roommate Ghost who within a month of living with you assigns himself as your keeper.

#simon riley #simon ghost riley #simon ghost riley x reader #simon riley x reader

[yuly]

Thomas in the Ibsen's Ghost trailer

#absolutely delicious #thomas gibson #ibsens ghost

[yuly]

GET TO KNOW ME ✰ [2/5] Male Characters ⤷ Aaron Hotchner

"I stand by my actions and by my team. And if you think that you can find a better person for the job, good luck."

#hes so pretty #its unreal #and unfair #aaron hotchner #criminalmindsedit #criminal minds

[yuly]

the progression, the tension, topless simon, straddling simon, the skin to skinnnnnn

hmmm i thought the tid bit about Blue's mom was interesting, I think its very in character for simon, its also very telling how tense Twix is about this subject

bleeding blue | apocalypse au

part eighteen —other parts

pairing: Simon “Ghost” Riley x fem!reader words: 3.3k tags: death. blood. cannibalism mention. zombies of course. AFAB reader. single dad ghost. there will be sex but it isn’t here yet. slow burn!!! enemies to lovers. summary: After losing your companions, you run into a skull-masked man and his daughter. They are your last hope for survival.

Over the next four days, you find yourself panting in exhilaration each morning you spar with Ghost. Every slam of your hand into his ribs feels strangely better than the last. He goes harder on you. He'd been holding back, too, apparently— an unfortunate fact for your ribs. The pain seems to motivate you more, even if he is still beating the shit out of you.

Blue also motivates you. "Hit his nose again!"

Of course, that is the one part of him you purposely avoid.

The sun returns and sweat glides down your face. You knee his stomach. It's less vulnerable than swinging a kick, but still, he attempts to grab you by the waist. You quickly skirt away, the ground firmer beneath your feet, only for his hand to latch onto one of your braids, instead. A sting pulses through your scalp as he tugs hard, wrenching your ear close to his mouth.

"Quicker. Good. But don't get too cocky."

"I thought you wanted me to be more confident," you retort between ragged breaths. 

"Yes, but you can't forget who has the advantage here." There is the slightest bit of arrogance in his voice that makes your teeth grit.

"How could I ever forget?" Your head tilts and he releases the braid. Suddenly, the thought of smacking his nose again doesn’t seem so bad.

His eyebrow quirks. "Get some water, Twix. You need it."

The water caresses your tongue as you gulp it down without abandon. Unsurprisingly, Blue has disappeared somewhere in the treetops. The lack of more broken bones has waned her interest.

When Ghost lifts his mask to drink, you steal a glance at his nose, noticing that the swelling has gone down significantly. The fact he is still wearing that thing with a broken nose upholds your theory that he is at least slightly insane— as if the fact that he once shoved a gun into your fresh wound wasn’t already evidence of that.

Out of nowhere, he materializes beside you and places a hand on your stomach. Your sore muscles spasm under the surprise of his touch, his long fingers stretching from one side of your ribs to the other.

"Your strength starts here,” he explains in a hoarse murmur. “Keep it tight and you will deliver more damage."

You purse your lips to hide a wince and tap your nose. "Don’t I already deliver enough damage?"

"The nose is fragile. You may be landing more hits on me, but I still hardly feel a thing from them."

He allows you to pry his hand off, but the pressure of it seems to linger. Ghost studies you in a way that turns you translucent before demanding, "Lift your shirt, Twix."

Exhaling through your nose, you hesitate before peeling it up, revealing the collection of bruises you have earned from him. A myriad of pink, purple, and yellow skin flares up under his gaze. They have been giving you a hard time lacing your boots and tying your hair in the morning, but once you get moving, the ache becomes easier to ignore.

He has already seen your stomach and more, yet, your skin itches from the exposure. You shove the shirt back down.

His expression shifts. "You should have said something."

"They're just bruises. I'm not bleeding or anything."

"Still."

"Still what?"

He looks irritated. "You need to fucking communicate."

"I don't see why it matters. No coddling, right?"

"That doesn't mean I'm interested in breaking you."

You jerk your chin up to meet his stare. “You won't."

Blue swings down from a tree, plopping between the two of you and unintentionally—thankfully—putting an end to the subject. "I'm glad you two are finally getting along. It's good for the team." She nudges her dad. "But are you done with her yet? You can't just hog Twix all to yourself."

He clears his throat and the air between your bodies breathes wider. "If you're getting bored maybe we need to find something for you to practice."

"Nope!" she says quickly. "Not bored at all." 

He nods to a tree. "Go on. Practice your knives. You haven't done that in a while. Then, you can have her."

With a groan, she trudges away. 

The sparring continues.

Ghost's fists soften by a smidge.

"He annoys the shit out of me sometimes."

Blue rips up a tuft of grass as you inch back to admire the swipe of color on her eyelids. It was her idea to use the bold-colored flowers for makeup— just like the models in her magazines. You did your best to mash the petals and mix them with some creekwater, but the result is kind of patchy and not nearly as smooth as the stuff you used to put on years ago. 

"Hold still. I'm doing your cheeks next."

The sun highlights the splash of freckles on her cheeks and you try to recall if Ghost had them. Her nose is nothing like his. A dainty button. Another trait she must've gotten from her mom. 

"Did you used to wear makeup?" she asks curiously, eyelashes fluttering down. 

"Sometimes. Especially when I went out."

"Went out where?"

Concentration nudges between your brows. "To clubs and stuff. It's where people would... dance."

Her lips spread as she cocks her head to the side in a manner that emulates her dad. You have to remind her again to stop moving. “Oh. Sorry. You danced?"

"I mean, not good dancing. Just dancing for fun,” you murmur, shrugging at the faint memories of being sandwiched between strangers, alcohol flowing through your veins rather than fear and adrenaline. Back then, mornings were spent nursing a hangover before class rather than earning bruises from an ex-lieutenant. 

Humor dances in her eyes when they reopen. "I don't think Ghost ever went to a club. I cannot imagine him dancing."

The images in your mind morph into something utterly laughable— him standing there like an immovable tank as people try to dance around him. "No, probably not."

"He never really tells me about his life before shit happened," she says thoughtfully. 

This piques your curiosity, but you keep your voice light. "No?"

"Well, he tells me the simple stuff. Mostly about his job. But never... never the small things, you know? Like I have no idea what he used to do for fun or what his life was like when he was a kid." She pauses a moment before adding, "He had a brother. That much I know."

You glance up. "Had?"

"He died before the virus. His mom and dad, too. But every time I ask how they died, he just says," she deepens her voice, "'Doesn't matter how, kid. Dead is dead.'"

"Oh, um, yeah, that sounds like something he would say." You tap your fingers under her chin. "I can put some on your lips, too."

Her eyes close again as she puckers her lips out. When you're done, she continues. "He also never talks about my mom." Her face twists. “I think he thinks talking about her will hurt my feelings."

For a few seconds, you struggle to find a response. The rare mention of her mom always makes your heart stutter, but this time, your broken, callused hand reaches out to brush a strand of hair behind her ear.

"It's okay to feel hurt, you know."

Blue shrugs and looks up at the cobalt sky. "I don't think I remember her enough to feel that hurt anymore. She feels so... far away. I remember small things, like the sound of her voice and her old apartment where I lived, but sometimes I wonder if I am making up those memories, you know what I mean?"

"Yeah, I know what you mean." A terrible urge sits on your tongue to ask her more about her mom, about what exactly her relationship was like with Ghost, but Blue changes the subject before you can.

"Does the makeup look good?" A shy blush clouds her cheeks.

You stand up with a faint smile. "I think I did pretty damn good. Come on. I want you to go look in the mirror."

Music.

It pounds so hard you feel it in your chest.

Neon walls enclose you as someone touches your backside, dancing against you. There is a man's voice in your ear that you think you recognize but it's hard to hear him through all the laughing and chatter. Your hair falls in loose curls down your back, free of braids, and you swipe it from your sweaty skin before excusing yourself to the bathroom.

You push through the people. The narrow hall is shrouded with different doors... so many doors. Where is the bathroom? It must be a Friday night on Oxford Street with how fucking crowded and stuffy this place is. Someone knocks into you roughly and your footsteps quicken. A sense of urgency drags you into the next door you come across, a large one made of grey oak.

The smell is horrendous but you feel relieved to see urinals and stalls. Immediately, you press into the granite counter and grip the edge as you catch your breath. The scratched, warped mirror houses a face covered in makeup. Youthful eyes. Flushed cheeks. How much have you had to drink? You need to go home. You will pee and then go home, you tell yourself. Over and over, you repeat this as you relieve yourself in one of the graffiti-doused stalls where condom and tampon wrappers crinkle beneath your heels.

When you're done, you try for the large door you came through, but it doesn't budge. The muffled music outside has faded. Panic sears your chest. You press your back against the door. The bathroom has changed. The stalls are gone. The walls feel like they are closing in, and the smell of piss turns into something even worse. You are alone. Where is the man you came with? You look down. Dead bodies. Strewn limbs. You're standing on a pile of them.

You start screaming. Banging on the door. Digging your fingers into the wood until the flesh rubs down to bone. 

It's not a room anymore, but a box. The fluorescent lights replaced by sheer darkness.

The edges of the door disappear.

A sickening silence replaces your screams.

And then—

"Twix."

You sit up, wild-eyed. You grip onto something—fabric—and a foul taste travels up your throat without warning. You heave several times, your entire body shuddering. 

When awareness settles in, you wipe your mouth and blink up. Ghost. He is... here. Hovering over you. His shirt is tightly bunched between your fingers and you have just vomited into it. The realization smacks you awake and you recoil sharply, staring at his moonlit mask with an expression that must be just short of mortified.

"I... Fuck. I am so sorry. I don't know why— I just..."

When you dare to look at the mess you've left on him, you nearly vomit again. Hands shaking, you rub at your clammy face and begin to ramble unthinkingly as his stare flickers between you and his soiled shirt.

"I've been trying so hard not to hold back like you said, but I think it is fucking me up a little and letting out some things— memories, I guess. I was pretty good about keeping it all in my box because I've been too tired to even think about it, but now I just..." You trail off, realizing your words must make little sense. 

"You've certainly let something out," he rasps.

Your hands drop against the sofa and you cringe. "I'll wash it for you. I'm sorry."

"Stop apologizing."

You inhale. "I just fucking threw up on you."

"I'm aware."

Ghost straightens. He pinches the collar of his shirt and carefully hoists it over his head. Then, you're looking at his bare chest. Slivers of moonlight caress rigid brawn and mountainous scars that capture your gaze for a few heartbeats before you tear it away. 

"I'll, um, hang it outside and... wash it in the morning." 

Your legs are unnervingly steady when you stand up and take the shirt from him, carefully grabbing it by a dry spot. You are relieved to get away from him, draping it over the porch and swallowing gulps of fresh air before you go back inside, praying he's gone back to bed.

Luckily, he has. When the empty living room greets you, you sink to the sofa and palm your eyes. Then, you notice something left on the pillow. A cigarette. You pick it up and recall the few times you smoked whenever your friends offered one. The taste never sat well with you. 

You rummage for your lighter. The first inhale burns terribly, but you cough into the pillow and try again. It starts to calm you down after a few times, and only when you've gotten to the butt of it do you go back to sleep.

"No wonder you're not getting stronger if you throw up like that every night."

Not even five minutes into training the next morning he brings it up. The rest of your sleep ended abruptly when he got you up at an unearthly time, probably to avoid having Blue as an audience. You are too winded to even scowl, your fists held tight in front of your face as you try to predict where he will aim next.

"I told you. That was the first night in a while." 

"Right. Something about a box, huh?"

"Can we just forget about it, please?"

"Hard to forget when my shirt still smells."

"I washed it the best I could."

The next dodge has your head flying down fast enough to undo one of your braids. Hair slips over your face and you huff, holding your hand up. "Hold on. Give me a minute."

As you undo the other one and opt for shoving your hair into a tight bun instead, he watches you strangely. The feel of his stare ignites a spark of irritation and you flash him a sideways glance. "Look, thank you for the cigarette and everything else you have ever done for me, but you can stop looking at me like that. Like you... pity me. I'm not going to break, I'm not going to ask you to kill me again. Everyone left in this world has nightmares and mine probably aren't the worst of them."

"I don't pity you," he says. "I am just trying to understand you."

"Why?" You finish the bun and drop your arms awkwardly at your sides. 

"It's important to understand your ally."

"Oh. Is that what we are?"

His eyes narrow. "Obviously. I wouldn't bother wasting my time with this every day if we weren't."

"Good to know you aren't doing it because you owe me."

"You know what I mean, Twix," he growls. 

"No, I don't." You throw your arms up. "I don't know what you mean and I don't know why you never killed me because you had every reason to, and I definitely don't understand you, so I guess we make terrible allies, Ghost."

"What is with you?" He cocks his head to the side, tone mild with curiosity. "So talkative all of the sudden."

"I have no problem talking when the other person isn't blatantly ignoring me."

His brows lift. "Fair enough."

A deep inhale flares your nostrils before you spread your stance. "I'm ready now."

Despite your claim of readiness, he quickly backs you into a defensive position that has you frustrated once again. You don't understand why, but your progress slips. You keep having to adjust your stance and all of your attempts to hit him fail. It's not long before he locks you against a tree with a tattooed forearm against your neck. 

"You aren't focused today," he accuses.

"Damn, you're observant," you breathe out. 

"Jesus fucking Christ. If I wanted to listen to someone mouthing off, I'd get Blue out here." He presses a bit harder and your throat twitches. "I'm not going to threaten you anymore, but clearly, you think straighter when you channel your anger, so whatever you were dreaming about last night— get it out of your head."

He's right. You breathe deep and try sorting through everything in your head, focusing on just the anger, but it's like fishing in murky water. When he releases you, more of the same happens. This time, you end up on your butt. Ghost glares down at you, circling like a vulture.

"You were doing good the past few days. What the hell is this?"

"I told you," you say through your teeth, brushing off the dirt from your jeans. "Letting out my anger means letting everything else in the box out and it is... confusing me. Making my head fuzzy, I guess."

His chest expands with a deep breath and his pointed stare turns meticulous. "Explain this box to me."

You hesitate for a moment. "It's just... where I put away all of the shit that would otherwise make me insane."

"And what is wrong with being a little insane, Twix? This world is insane. Might as well match it."

Your mouth opens, then closes. You struggle for an answer and rub your temples. "I don't know. Being insane means losing myself completely. I mean, I have already changed so much in the past five years. Like I said, I was never meant to be this person."

"What person? A person who survives? A person who does what she has to?"

"A person who hurts others," you grit out. "A person who kills." 

"You've killed people, right?" he roughly asks and you nod. "Then you're a killer. You were always meant to be a killer. End of story." His words strike you, and you begin to shake your head defensively, but he continues before you can muster a reply. "The past five years haven't changed you, they have revealed who you are. Now—" he raises his fists, "—open the stupid box and turn everything you feel into anger. All of it. It is valuable fuel that will continue to keep you alive."

He swings.

A kaleidoscope of long-ignored memories flashes through your brain when he hits your sore stomach. Your family. Your friends. The life stolen from you. 

And then— you recover your footing and slam a boot into his knee. It loosens his stance just enough for you to throw yourself at him, effectively knocking him over. The ground welcomes your bodies again, but this time, you grip his shoulders and wind up on top, practically laying all of your weight on him. A few harsh breaths expel from your nose before you become fully aware of the position, the heat from his chest pressing into your breasts.

Quickly, you splay your hands flat against him and sit up straight, thighs spread over his narrow hips. Ghost could easily flip you over and pin you if he wanted. But instead, he crosses his arms behind his head. 

"Comfortable?" you ask him breathlessly, raising a brow.

"Quite. Though, if this were real, I suggest an elbow to the neck once you've got them down."

"So you admit it, then. I got you down."

"I allowed it."

"Sure." Your teeth snag on your lip and you lightly brush a finger over his masked nose, detecting a tick in the hinge of his jaw. "Then I will 'allow' you to keep this for now, but next time, I might do more than just break it."

His eyes widen imperceptibly before he quickly recovers. "Ah. So you are a person who hurts others, then. Someone was trying to tell me otherwise."

Your lips twitch at the corner on their own accord. "Shut the fuck up."

He simply stares at you for a pregnant pause before clearing his throat. "I did allow it, but that was good. You focused on the anger, didn't you?"

You nod. "Yeah, I did. Is that what you do all the time?" you ask curiously. "Just get angry and kill people?"

"Pretty much."

By the tone of his voice, a deep brass that reverberates through all the places your bodies touch, you are certain he's joking. Realizing that you are still on top of him, you push off his chest and swing a leg over, careful not to knee his face or let him see the deep flush that crawls over every inch of your skin. 

#shirtless simon lets goooooo #toast FTW #simon riley x reader #simon ghost riley x you #simon ghost riley x reader #zombie apocolypse au

[yuly]

oh well hello therapy!!! YAY!

Moist grass, a hint of rain, freshly bloomed flowers; all hints of something new being born.

ok besides this painting such a fresh and comforting picture in my head, is this symbolism???????? are we going to see growth and new beginnings soon? *fingers crossed*

He had only started a few weeks ago, as most of his energy and time had gone into taking care of you, but once you were well enough to go back to work, well, it was time to take care of himself.

can i get an amen!!! im literally grinning from ear to ear i am estaticcccc, oh and him calling her Spook in therapy I just- excuse me while i melt into a puddle

“If you were better than them, she’d be dead, son.”

the therapist is currently sitting pretty at the top my list of fav characters 😍😍😍

“Remember, she’s a civilian. She didn’t have the resources and training that you did going into that."

this part is what gets me, she was totally unprepared for something like this, a fish out of water, she still fought like a trooper AND my girl is still standing, can i get another amen????

LOL I love the bf vs gf's cat trope its so pure, Boo is a much needed character, and I will happily take the cracked backwards arm as payment for his poor paw!

Still, it was difficult to rot away in that apartment in good conscience knowing he was caring for someone who more than likely should have been a corpse by the ocean. 

it is so painful to read spooks new POV and witness her new outlook on life, but its also very real; to be honest her thoughts are starting to sound a lot like simons' and I think that says a lot :(

It felt… odd. Strange. Nice. In all the years you had been with Simon, neither of you had really talked about your pasts.

I am literally blowing kisses to the therapist right now, and simon! legit so proud of him, this was such a tense moment and he took it as an opportunity to open up!!!! my babies are taking the right steps to healing!

The body had a way of mending wounds that the mind just couldn’t mimic with trauma.

oof, and you have a way with words that my heart just cant handle!

That small bit of information seemed to mean the whole world to Johnny, and his face lit up.

my angel, love me some johnny! see that right there is real love! the love and respect he has for simon automatically applies to anyone that he loves and care for, ugh im feeling so soft and mushy rn

He tried so hard to be something else, anything else; but in the end, Simon was a brutal man whose hands were only capable of violence; might as well put them to good use.

see he's so damn hard headed, he only sees himself in this negative light, those are same hands that have so gently bathed, dressed and held Spook through the most difficult time of her life!!! aghhhhh

Sun Bleached Flies - Part 1

Simon "Ghost" Riley x fem!Reader - part ten of "soft spot"

Healing never comes as fast and easy as you want it to, but you try and adjust to your new life as best as you can. The thing is, there is no going back, there is only going forward, no matter how much you wished it was otherwise.

soft spot masterlist

warnings: PTSD, angst, minor comfort, panic and anxiety attacks, spook and simon are going through it.

wc: 6.6k

A gentle breeze danced through the open window of his therapist’s office, bringing the scent of spring with it. Moist grass, a hint of rain, freshly bloomed flowers; all hints of something new being born. Except this wasn’t new for Simon. Sitting in an overly calm and quiet room in a chair that was too soft as a man who looked too ancient for this earth flipped through notes of their previous sessions. 

This wasn’t Simon’s first time in therapy, and he was certain it wouldn’t be his last. After everything he had endured over the winter, he was required to attend sessions before he would be allowed to return back to active duty. He had only started a few weeks ago, as most of his energy and time had gone into taking care of you, but once you were well enough to go back to work, well, it was time to take care of himself. 

“How was your week, lieutenant?” the man spoke up after finally putting his notes down. His name was Gus, and was ex-military. Or, at least Simon assumed he was, judging by the deep and long wrinkled scars that littered his face and the unceremonious use of his rank. “Anything new?” 

“It was alright,” he answered bluntly. He was never quite good with the awkward small talk that came with therapy. Something about how he was supposed to bare his darkest secrets just to talk about the weather was unnerving. “Spook started physical therapy this week.” 

Usually, Simon never used that nickname Johnny coined for you, but ever since you were taken, he felt as if he couldn’t use your real name. That sharing anything about you was forbidden. Or maybe he was just being selfish, wanting to keep you, even your name, all to himself. 

“At least she’s in some sort of therapy,” Gus said dryly. “She still refusing counseling?” 

He nodded solemnly. “Says she doesn’t think she can talk about it yet.” 

Gus grunted a little as he sat forward in his chair. A pair of frail and shaky hands reached up to remove the oversized glasses on his face before he settled his foggy eyes back on Simon. “Does she talk about it with you?” 

“Tries,” he responded sourly. “She used to talk so much about everything; everything except for whatever was hurtin’ her. Always thought she’d tell me eventually, whenever she was ready. But after this shit? I’m fuckin’ lucky to get anything out of her. Even the good stuff.” 

Instead of prompting him with another question, Gus stayed quiet as he stared at Simon, and he knew what it meant. That man must have been in the business of fixing broken soldiers for quite some time because it never took him long to figure out what was bothering him. Always struck gold on the first shovelful of dirt. Might as well make things easy and give up the rest. 

“Everything that I’ve learned about her past I’ve had to piece together myself,” Simon explained. “Her moms passing she told me herself, but I know her previous partner was a right piece of shit. Judging by the way she hardly ever talks about her father, he probably was no better. She hasn’t told me anything about when she was taken, or what they did to her. There’s some stuff I can figure out. God, there was fuckin’ photographic proof on the damn floor.” He paused for a moment and shook his head as if trying to get his thoughts back in order. “She tries but then just shuts down and I… fuck, I dunno.” 

“And what have you told her?” Gus asked as he leaned back in his chair. 

Eyebrows drawing together and cheeks scrunching under his mask, Simon tilted his head to the side. “What?” 

“I mean, what have you told her? About your past, or your family? Are you making her play the same guessing games?” Gus pressed. 

A lump formed in Simon’s throat so thick he thought he would choke on it. He wanted to say that sharing his past was different. How was he supposed to talk about the torture he endured, the hook tearing through his ribs, the slaughter of his family? How their deaths were pinned on him, and he burnt away the evidence of them; what would you say to that? Or if you knew about his revenge, how he traversed a jungle just to kill a man? 

He grimaced. Hadn’t you already seen his revenge? 

“You’ve been pretty open with me so far, lieutenant, and that’s a lot more than I can say for most of the men I see in here,” Gus continued, “so tell me; what is it that you’re really afraid of?” 

Really, therapy wasn’t all too different from being interrogated. In both circumstances, there was someone trying to poke and prod around inside of his head. And in both circumstances, it was never fun when they poked the right spot. 

“I don’t want her to think I’m like them,” he finally admitted. 

“Her abductors?” Gus clarified. “Why would she think that?”

“I broke a man's arm and shot him as I had him pinned to the ground. Right in front of her,” Simon explained as if he saw Bukin dying all over again. Heard the bone snap and the crunching sound of his flesh grinding underneath his boot. Watched as his head jumped dully against the ground as the bullet tore through his skill. 

“You saved her life,” Gus countered. 

“I was violent,” he spat. 

“So were they.”

“I’m supposed to be better than them.”

“If you were better than them, she’d be dead, son.” 

Silence. The breeze continued to drift through the open window, attempting to kiss Simon’s flesh through his clothes, too kind for him to be deserving of it. He continued to stare through the old man as he waited for him to explain himself. 

“You brought her home alive. You know better than anyone that being soft comes with consequences. Some good, some bad. Be violent, be a monster; be Ghost in the moments when you’re doing your job. When you’re protecting the ones you love.” Throughout his last few weeks of therapy, Simon hadn’t heard the old man speak with such conviction until that moment. Like the man spoke from experience. “Be soft when you’re with her. Share the stuff that hurts. It sounds like you’re the closest person she has. Certainly the strongest. How is she supposed to be vulnerable with you when you’re the one who’s scared?” 

The thing Simon hated the most about therapy was hearing things he already knew but was trying to ignore. Everything would have been so much easier had he let you ramble that night the oxycodone had scrambled your brain. But it was his fault things had gotten that way in the first place. That picture of you that he kept despite his better judgment, leading Bukin right to your door; that was his fault. Selfish of him to hope that you’d be the one vulnerable first as if he didn’t have something to atone for.

Simon let out a heavy sigh as he looked down at his hands. The old man was right, and it was frustrating. “Christ,” he muttered. 

“Start with the small stuff. You don’t have to air everything out all at once. Actually, it would be better if you didn’t. Don’t want to overwhelm the poor girl,” Gus assured him. “Remember, she’s a civilian. She didn’t have the resources and training that you did going into that.” 

He didn’t spend much longer in that office before Gus sent him away to do his homework: figure out a memory to share with you. Sounded easy enough, but when he had spent countless years keeping things to himself so as to keep others safe, it was near painful. But he tried his best to think of something as he made his way back to the apartment. 

You weren’t there when he got home. Not that he had expected you to be, though it still felt wrong. As soon as your wound was no longer needing constant attention, you instantly hopped back into work. He tried to dissuade you from doing so, saying that he’d still have more than enough money to pay for everything, but you wouldn’t hear any of it. Claimed you were tired of being locked up in the apartment all day, even if he was there with you. Though it worried him, he couldn’t blame you, not after everything that had happened there. Every now and then he still found a small, green bead somewhere on the living room floor. 

A sigh left him as he stood in the entryway, staring at Boo who watched him curiously from the couch. The window had been left cracked open, and it looked like the little guy had been enjoying some fresh air. Simon tried to tell you that leaving the blinds open was just asking for someone to snitch that you had a cat in the apartment. You had retorted by saying boarded up windows made for a shitty home. 

“Fuckin’ hell,” he mumbled to himself. 

This was going to be a pain in his ass. 

✦•······················•✦•······················•✦

“This guy is getting on my fucking nerves.” 

That was the fucking understatement of the year. Méabh lazily leaned against your desk as she glared over at the new branch manager they had hired during your absence. His name was Jace, and he liked to spend his time at work micromanaging all of his employees, including Cheryl, who was able to wire money with her eyes closed after so many years in the business. The poor woman looked like she was one more annoying comment from smacking the overbearing manager. 

“He told me I didn’t ask enough security questions on the last transfer I did as if I didn’t ask all the ones that popped up on the screen,” Méabh continued in a droning grumble. “I wish Anna was still here. She did her job and wasn’t a complete cunt about it.” 

“Just be glad that you only work part time,” you teased while trying to focus on your paperwork. 

“Yeah, for now,” Méabh whined. “I’ll be going full time over summer holiday. Means I’ll get to see this prick twice as often.” 

Really, it wasn’t Jace’s hawk-like gaze, or even his annoying nasally voice that got on your nerves. It was his shoes. While most of the girls at the bank wore flats to save themselves from achy feet, Jace wore terribly loud dress shoes. Whenever he walked, it sounded like he wore high heels with the way they clacked on the floor, and with how much he stomped around it was impossible for him to sneak up on anyone. 

“Are you almost done?” Méabh then prompted. “I wanna get out of here.”

“You don’t have to wait for me, you know,” you chuckled. 

“Thought I’d do the noble thing and keep you company. You know, unless you want Jace to read over your paperwork before you submit it,” she retorted with a playful roll of her eyes. 

“How kind of you.” 

Luckily for Méabh, or perhaps the both of you, you had just typed up the finishing touches to your work. Not even a minute later the whirring of your computer died down as you shut it off for the night and stood from your desk. However, you made the mistake of pushing with both your hands, and you winced as a zapping pain shot through your left shoulder. Even after all those months, your wound hadn’t fully healed. 

“You alright?” Méabh asked as you gathered your items. 

“Yeah,” you said, slightly winded. Glancing quickly over at Jace, and poor Cheryl who was still stuck listening to his ramble, you looked back at the young girl before nodding towards the door. “Let’s get out of here.” 

Without saying goodbye, or saving your co-worker, you and Méabh slipped out of the building unnoticed and into the fresh spring air. Or, at least as fresh as it could get in the midst of London. It had been months since you last smelt real fresh air. When had it been, back at the end of August when you and Simon had gone on holiday? With the beautiful seaside and mist that tasted like salt? Or was it…

No. No, that couldn’t be right. 

“Need a ride?” Méabh prompted. 

You pulled your head out of the frigid water, dusted the sand off your knees, and smiled politely as you adjusted the blazer that perfectly complimented your pristine work clothes. You always had a way of bringing yourself back to reality if it meant avoiding an awkward conversation. Always so calm and put together, even with fragments of a bullet still stuck in your body. 

“No, I’ll, uhm, just walk home. Thanks,” you excused as your eyes glanced out at the busy streets ahead. 

Saying goodbye was awkward. Hell, everything was awkward those days. But like you did with all things in your life, you gritted your teeth and bared it before starting your walk home. 

It was strange trying to remember how you used to fit into the world before everything. Sure, you never quite fit in beforehand, squeezing into places too small for you to exist in, but it had become home. But not then. Your edges had become warped, curling in on themselves, retracting into your body. Your piece of the puzzle had shrunk, but everything else stayed the same size, leaving you stuck with a gap that separated you from everyone else. 

You were a watcher; a stranger to the very earth that nourished you. You could hear the seagulls rummaging through a pile of rubbish left beside the bin, and you could see the vibrant valley flowers that took up the window of the florist's shop on your left, but it was… blurry. Fuzzy, like the tingling sensation that plagued your arm every now and then when the blood flow was bad. You tried to focus, do anything to make the imagery around you feel sharper, but the faces of pedestrians were empty, like nobody around you was real, least of all yourself. 

And then you were home. 

It was difficult to tell how long you were standing outside of the door, staring at the empty wood as if it was a mirror. You had just sort of appeared there, like some sort of ghost. Without taking your eyes off of the door, you dug your hand into your bag and blindly felt around for your keys. A part of you couldn’t help but wonder if this was the view Leon had before kidnapping you. Before drugging you and taking you to that fucking basement. 

No. Bukin. Simon told you his last name was Bukin, and you weren’t going to give your dead captor the pleasure of using his first name as if you had been friends. 

Eventually the keys ended up in the lock and you entered the apartment. A heavy aroma of seasoned chicken filled the air around you, and you heard quiet cursing coming from the kitchen. You rounded the corner and were greeted by Simon cooking at the stove and Boo trying his hardest to trip the poor man. The critter stareed up at him with big, begging eyes as he followed your lovers every step. 

“Hey, sweetheart,” he greeted, quickly glancing away from his work to look at you. 

“You two look busy,” you chuckled, tossing your bag onto the counter. 

“I’m busy,” Simon corrected before tossing a playful glare down at the poor cat by his feet. “He’s a menace.” 

Humming, you stood next to Simon and glanced at what he had on the stove. It was pretty common for you to come home from work with dinner already started, if not finished. Simon had become something of a chef since taking care of you, and he had some pasta boiling and some chicken frying. He had started eating a lot more protein and carbs since going back to the gym, attempting to gain back the strength he had lost while captured. 

“He’s just a baby,” you said, reaching a hand towards the hot pan. With careful fingers, you tore off a small bit of the chicken before blowing on it a little to cool it down. Boo had already stretched up to reach up your thigh by the time you had bent down to give it to him. After a few deep sniffs, he eagerly took it in his mouth and ran off. 

“Spoiled rotten, he is,” Simon mumbled. 

“He was being so patient,” you cooed, watching as Boo scarfed down his treat in the corner of the kitchen, as if afraid someone would take it from him. 

“Patient, my arse,” he chuckled. 

A dull beep sounded from the stove, which Simon quickly pressed a button to shut it off. With a twist of the dial, he turned the heat off of one of the burners and you heard the sound of boiling water quiet down before he moved it towards the sink to strain it. As hot steam billowed upwards, you turned your attention towards one of the cabinets where you found yourself reaching up for it. A small stack of china sat on the lowest shelf. You couldn’t even remember the last time you had actually set the table yourself. 

“Don’t worry ‘bout that, sweetheart,” Simon said as he sat the still steaming pot on the counter next to the sink. 

Shooting him a weird look, you continued in your pursuit. “I can handle getting plates, Simon.” 

And you did. Grabbed two plates right off the shelf and held them in your hands as you looked at him as if in a challenge. But you understood why he was still so… skittish. He had spent the last few months doing everything for you. Bathing you, dressing you, making your food; he did it all. It almost felt more vulnerable than bleeding out on cold grass. A burden, that’s what you had become. Just another pet for someone to take care of. And Simon didn’t mind it, you knew that; he never did. Still, it was difficult to rot away in that apartment in good conscience knowing he was caring for someone who more than likely should have been a corpse by the ocean. 

Saying nothing, Simon turned his attention back to his work as you walked towards the dining table. You hadn’t even made it halfway there before something crumbled inside of you. A shooting pain ran up and down your left arm, searing your nerves and burning away your flesh. A tingling numbness settled over your hand and the plates you tried to hold so carefully slipped right through your fingers where they shattered on the ground at your feet with a deafening crash. 

Your gasp was cut off by a short whimper as your hand reached up to press against your old, yet still aggravated wound. You kept the pressure there as if trying to keep yourself from spilling on the floor, and you looked down at the mess you made. 

“Jesus fucking Christ,” you cursed. You pulled your hand away from under your arm and looked at your hand as if expecting blood. 

“You alright?” Simon asked, heavy footsteps trailing across the floor behind you. 

“I’m fine,” you spat, words sharp enough to tear through flesh. 

The footsteps behind you stopped, and it forced you to realize the bite in your tone. It also made you realize how your hand trembled and heart stung as if you were afraid, as if you had been running. In an attempt to calm your nerves, you let out a heavy sigh before looking down at the mess you made. A terrible mosaic of broken glass and a now slightly chipped wooden floor spanned the area around your feet. You had ruined two perfectly good plates, damaged the floor, and you were the one snapping? 

So much like your father. Being angry at the mess when it was your own fault. 

“I’m… fine,” you tried again, softer this time. Empty. “Sorry, I… didn’t mean to…”

When Simon continued to walk towards you, you half expected him to reach for you, and some strange part of you didn’t want him to. Didn’t want his touch. Couldn’t stand it because you knew you didn’t deserve it. Instead, he knelt on the ground next to you, large fingers carefully picking up the bigger pieces of the shattered plates and gathering them into the palm of his hand. 

“You don’t have to clean up my mess,” you said softly, lip trembling as you knelt down next to him to mirror his actions. 

“I know,” he replied simply. He still cleaned anyway. 

Anger was a weird thing for you. It wasn’t often that you felt it without some other emotion accompanying it. Confusion. Frustration. Grief. Shame usually followed shortly after. Truth was, you were angry all the time those days, and it was worse than almost any other emotion you could have experienced. When you had first started your road to recovery, you felt numb, and when you didn’t feel numb you felt terrified. A part of you wished you were still in that stage because you could at least explain why you felt that way. Some sort of self preservation mode your body had forced itself into in an attempt to smother the trauma you had endured over several long weeks. The anger that hid itself away in your chest was something you couldn’t explain. You didn’t know why it was there, but you wished it wasn’t. 

So you stayed silent as you assisted Simon in cleaning up the shattered plates. It had remained mostly in several large chunks, but there were smaller, more fine pieces that you’d have to use a broom for. You hated that your hands shook for each piece you reached out for. 

“I broke one of my mum’s vases when I was a kid,” Simon said unprompted. You found yourself pausing. As you held what pieces you had gathered in your hand, you glanced over at him, and he must have felt your gaze because his eyes flickered to you before focusing back on his work. “Was an accident. Kickin’ around a football in the living room when she told me not to. I tried to hide it from her until I could fix it, but she knew immediately it was missing.”

“Was she mad?” you asked. 

It felt… odd. Strange. Nice. In all the years you had been with Simon, neither of you had really talked about your pasts. All you had gotten or shared were fragments. And there he was, picking up your mess, showing some raw part of himself you had never seen before. 

“Upset, but not mad. She never got mad, even when she should have,” he replied, voice unwavering. 

A thick lump had formed in your throat that was difficult to swallow. Something fuzzy tingled in the back of your mind, like something was trying to rip a chunk of flesh out of you; a memory. Teeth sinking into the inside of your cheek, you swallowed again before speaking. 

“My… father broke a lot of plates when I was younger,” you admitted, staring down at the chunks of china in your hands. “Usually to get a reaction out of my mom. They were her mother’s, my grandmother’s, plates. Eventually she had to end up buying plastic plates when he had smashed them all, but that didn’t stop him from throwing them. He was always…”

So predictable. 

Hadn’t you just said that not too long ago? After the shattering of a bowl? More broken china to stain the ground, the carpet, in that basement. You remembered his glare, Erik’s glare - Adakskin - when you told him he was predictable. And you were right. He had done everything you knew he would. A broken dish was always followed by pain. It didn’t matter. It never did. A broken dish was always followed by pain, even if you were the one breaking it. 

Eyes watering, you coughed a little as a sharp tickle formed in your throat. Simon, whose eyes had been on you, glanced over his shoulder to see a fair bit of thick steam and light smoke rising out of the pan he had been cooking chicken in. Cursing, he stood to his feet and quickly tossed the pieces of china he had gathered into the trash before moving the pan off the heat. 

And just like that, you were back. Still kneeling, still cleaning, still quiet. Your life had become nothing but a blur of time; living in the past and present at the same time. Even at work, at home, with Simon, the past held onto you so violently you weren’t sure you would ever be able to shake it off. You tried telling yourself you could - that you would - but once again you were cleaning up a broken plate. Always cleaning but never clean. 

“Hope you like crispy chicken,” Simon sighed. Spatula in hand, he attempted to scrape the burnt meat off of the pan. 

Once you ensured every single shard had been picked up, you turned your attention towards the kitchen for a split moment. You attempted a smile, but it felt too big on your face, so you got rid of it the moment it formed. 

“I’m gonna change out of my work clothes,” you said instead, crossing through the kitchen to head towards the bedroom. “I’ll, uh… I’ll let you get the plates this time.” 

He didn’t say anything in response as you vanished down the hallway, but he kept his eyes on you. His lips tightened into a thin line for a moment before relaxing once more and turning his attention back to dinner. He knew this stage of healing was going to be the hardest. The body had a way of mending wounds that the mind just couldn’t mimic with trauma. That conversation had been the most he was able to get out of you in months, and you still looked terrified. 

✦•······················•✦•······················•✦

It had been years since Simon had last smoked a cigarette. He used to smoke regularly when he first joined up, especially more so after his family was killed. It was a good way to keep himself awake on missions, or for avoiding nightmares. He quit when the withdrawal symptoms got bad and he had difficulty with cardio during PT. Now he smoked for the alleviation of stress, even if it only lasted for a moment. Or maybe he did it just to keep his hands moving. No matter the reason, it didn’t change the smoke curling in his lungs as he took drag after drag. 

Something had been on his mind since you dropped those plates at dinner the previous night. The empty look in your eyes haunted him almost as bad as the shaking of your hands. It was getting worse. Or, at least, it wasn’t getting better, and that terrified him. He didn’t know what to do to help you short of dragging you off to some therapist, which he knew wouldn’t do any good. Something was building. Something was going to burst, and he didn’t know when, but the pressure was there and there was nothing he could do about it. 

So there he stood, off in some secluded area on base, smoking his cigarette with a jaw so tense there were indentations of his teeth on the filter. It didn’t take him long to finish it, and when it had been stomped into the ground with the heel of his boot, he was half tempted to smoke another. Keeping the pack in his pocket, he released a heavy sigh before marching back towards the building that housed his office. 

Avoiding as many people in the halls as he could, he quickly unlocked the door and shut it as soon as he slipped inside. The air felt stale, like no one had entered to clean his space in his absence, which was probably for the best anyway. He flicked the light on, and it struggled to fill the room, being dimmer than he remembered it being, but it was enough for the moment. With a press of a button, his computer started to whirr to life, and he sat in his chair as he waited for it to boot up. It had great difficulty starting, and he could hear his SSD grind and whine after being shut off for so many months. 

Eventually the monitor lit up, and Simon wasted no time logging in before opening his browser. The last time he had used this computer he had spent all his time and energy searching through houses and apartments and hotel rooms in search of where you were being held. Now, he found himself looking at houses and apartments again, but for a different reason. 

He needed to get you out of there; out of the apartment the two of you had been staying in. Too many bad memories stained the walls for either of you to do any sort of healing. And so he searched and searched and found his frustration growing. A one bedroom apartment for 3,000 a month? Christ, the housing in that fucking city was astronomically expensive, and sure he could afford it, but for a single damn room? 

So he kept searching. It was difficult trying to find someplace that wasn’t halfway across the city from base that was also still close to your work. He’d hate for you to have to take the tube alone, or walk too far alone at night in the city, especially dressed as fancy as bankers usually were. Of course there was always housing on base, but he wouldn’t be able to bring you with because the two of you weren’t married. 

Your wife; they are relocating her.

Even after all that time he could see that woman clearly, whoever she had been, sitting on the floor of the room you were supposed to be in. At the time he tried to shake off the way that statement made him feel. Behind the anger, frustration, and fear, there was something else there. Wife. He had liked the term. He wished it was true. Then he remembered the photos in front of her. Your face; your gorgeous face, trapped in that Polaroid. The tears and blood that stained your cheeks and lips, the way an unforgiving hand gripped your jaw, forcing you to look at the lens. 

Wife. He wanted that, craved it. But that wasn’t the time, not after everything that had happened. 

Simon wasn’t brought out of his thoughts until someone knocked on his door, where he found himself glaring at the big hunk of wood. He hadn’t been there in months, and most people should have known that, so why was someone trying to bother him? Still, he gave them a gruff order to come in and he was quickly greeted by Johnny’s wide eyed expression. 

“You’re back?” Johnny asked breathlessly as he shut the door behind him. 

Well, at least out of everyone that it could have been, it was him. 

“Not yet,” he replied simply. His chair squeaked as he leaned back in it in an attempt to relax some. He tried to make a mental reminder to use some WD-40 on it later. “How’d you know I was here?” 

Johnny used his thumb to point over his shoulder at the door behind him. “Was on my way to storage to put some files away,” he explained simply, simultaneously shaking the manilla folder in his hand. “Walked by and saw the light peeking from under the door. Figured someone was cleaning, but knocked just in case.” He took a few cautious steps forward, as if approaching a skittish cat. “How’s everything?”

Simon wasn’t quite sure how to answer that question. Things certainly weren’t great, but they could be worse. For example, you could be dead, or still hospitalized. But saying things were great was far from the truth, and he wasn’t exactly keen on explaining every little issue that had been plaguing him as of late. 

“It’s an adjustment,” he admitted instead, “but we’re getting there.”

Johnny nodded, getting even closer to his lieutenant. “Spook doin’ alright, then?” 

Even after all that time, Simon still didn’t like talking about you with other people, even if it was Johnny. Hell, even talking about you to his therapist made him feel tense. But he couldn’t hold onto you like that forever, keeping you caged in the safeness of his arms where you were supposed to be safe. And he had to come to the realization that his sergeant deserved to know. Simon had been there the entire time; through the hospital, through your healing. The last time Johnny had seen you, you were bleeding out on your way to the nearest hospital. 

“She’s back to work. Started physical therapy this week, too,” Simon explained, though he wasn’t sure how much more he could say. 

That small bit of information seemed to mean the whole world to Johnny, and his face lit up. “Good, that’s good! Glad she’s doin’ better.” Then, his eyes darted to the monitor. He caught sight of the rental listings lined up on the screen, as well as their crazy high prices. “Searchin’ for a new home?”

Simon’s attention turned back to the computer for a moment where he let a heavy sigh escape him. “Yeah. Figured it was about time I got her out of there. The apartment. Wanted to get her out sooner, but couldn’t when she was still hurt.”

“It woulda been a lot for her to adjust to at once,” Johnny agreed. 

Things fell silent for a moment as both men lost themselves in their thoughts, but only for a short moment before Johnny adjusted the folder in his hand. 

“Well, I’ll let you continue searching,” he excused himself as he took a step back. “Gotta get this to storage eventually.” 

Simon was one second away from wishing the man well before watching him leave his office, but something stopped him. He knew that if he was alone again, his thoughts would go right back to where they were before. That woman in the room. Pictures of you on the floor. The blood. The Polaroids. That fucking hand that gripped your face - the hand that had no fucking right to touch you. Those goddamn pictures. 

“I’ll come with,” Simon said, already shutting his computer down. 

Eyebrows drawing together, Johnny tilted his head to the side as he paused his retreat. “You sure?” 

There was no room for argument. Everything in his office was quickly shut down and put away, and the two men walked through the halls of the building. There were a few familiar faces that threw Simon odd glances, as if surprised to see him there, or perhaps surprised he was still alive. His name was Ghost for a reason. 

Neither man said anything to one another until they reached the storage room. Shelves lined up like dominos and spanned all the way to the back wall where an industrial sized paper shredder sat. Large white cardboard boxes rested on the shelves with simple flip open tops, each labeled with either a case or date of some sort. Painfully white lights washed out the entire room, causing Johnny to squint for a moment before his eyes adjusted. 

“Hate sorting through this shit,” he muttered as he began to wander through the aisles. 

Simon stood in the doorway for a moment, breathing in the scent of old paper and rotting ink. Usually he never had to go into that room; whatever paperwork that he did have that would go there he’d make someone else’s problem. Even then, he found himself searching, eyes scanning the labels on the boxes. Locations, names, dates, everything. Johnny caught onto his search, and watched him for a moment with careful eyes, but still refused to say anything. 

“Aye, here we are,” Johnny sighed as he flipped the lid off of one of the boxes. He unceremoniously tossed the file into it before shutting it once again. “Right. Ready to get outta here?” 

But when he turned to Simon, he saw the man’s attention was caught by one of the boxes. Salthouse | 8, December. The lid was already opened, and Simon stared blankly into it as if he wasn’t sure where to start. 

“Ghost?” Johnny said softly. 

Simon’s hands dove into the box decisively where his fingers grabbed onto a small, orange envelope. There was a slight thickness to it, like something had to be shoved in there to fit properly, or too many things had been stacked and folded on top of one another. He wasted no time undoing the brass clasp at the top and pouring the contents into his hand. 

A plastic bag full of Polaroids tumbled out of the envelope, and Simon and Johnny were met with the image of your face. Beaten, irritated, and bloody, it was a different image than what they had seen last time, like whoever had collected it shuffled through the images in morbid curiosity. You laid on the ground on your back, no hand gripping your face, but still very obviously out of it. Passed out, probably, or at least on the verge of consciousness. 

He wasn’t prepared for the anger that bubbled up inside of him upon setting eyes on those images again. So many regrets, things that he should have done differently. He should have been stronger, faster, deadlier. Should have made Bukin and Adakskin pay for everything they had done to you with more than just a bullet to the head. Should have ripped up that picture of you the moment he got the chance. 

“Simon,” Johnny said again. It was rare that the man ever used his lieutenants real name, but it left him before he was able to stop it. 

Ignoring him, Simon tossed the orange envelope back into the box before ripping open the plastic bag, nearly scattering the photos all over the ground. He gathered them up into his hands before marching off towards the back of the room, boots hitting heavy against the floor. 

“What’re you doing?” Johnny asked, voice a bit more firm. 

“No one needs to see these,” Simon responded within an instant. “Everyone knows what happened to her. No one needs to see her like this.” 

He approached the shredder that sat against the back wall of the room. It was a large thing, made for shredding stacks of paper all at once with teeth that could eat an entire hand within an instant. A few Polaroids wouldn’t be an issue at all. The thing was, Johnny couldn’t even argue with Simon, because he felt the exact same way. So he stood there and watched as Simon powered on the shredder, gears whirring and whining. 

Without remorse, Simon tossed the photos into the shredder and watched as the metal tore them to shreds with ease. Plastic crinkled and cracked until they were all eaten up and spat out into the bag that stored all the other scraps it had thrown up. The thing was, Simon was never very good at fixing things. No matter how hard he tried to be, he always ended up breaking things. His mother’s vase or a man's arm. He could pull a trigger and end someone’s life and yet he felt something convulsing inside of him at the thought of opening himself to you. 

But this? This felt right. Destroying those pictures. There was enough evidence on your body and in your mind as it was. He tried so hard to be something else, anything else; but in the end, Simon was a brutal man whose hands were only capable of violence; might as well put them to good use.

ONE MORE CHAPTER. ONE MORE CHAPTER OF ANGST AND YOU GET THE FLUFF AGAIN. I PROMISE. SWEAR ON MY LIFE. i just felt like it would be a disservice to spook and simon to rush their healing. to make it easy. putting yourself together again is more agonizing than being torn apart.

tags: @ghostlythots @archonsabyss @crowbird @beware-my-thorns @koko-1025 @nessaasstuff @escapefromrealitysm @babygirl-riley @theloneshadow24 @ashableketchup @violet-19999 @paigetaylor628 @curlygirls-world @gaebestie @datlilwrench @ryisghost @suffering-and-happy-about-it @achelois-is-here

find my taglist here

#ugh i love them #this story is toooooo good #must read #therapist FTW #simon riley x reader #ghost x reader #simon ghost x reader #simon riley x you #COMFORT INCOMING PRAISE BE #angst and hurt/comfort #angst and feels #johnny appreciation because he has a heart of gold

[yuly]

im not ready im not ready im not ready

Fertilizer. That’s what he had called you. A task that ended up being bequeathed to him instead. 

mhmm, now thats what I call poetic justice

Your body healed faster than you did.

man this sentence sent me into a spiral, because this is so true on so many levels in real life, skin and tissue can heal relatively fast under normal conditions, however, mental healing from trauma can be a lifelong journey

Doesn’t matter whose fist comes at me, I’ve been doing this my whole life. But I’ve never had someone to pick me up until you.

name a character more deserving of unconditional love and affection ?????????? side note: the way spook's trauma/memory of her dad is woven into the story is so seamless

He stripped his own soaked clothes off, and it was then that you noticed just how… skinny he looked.

you know ive talking a few days (a week maybe?) in between chapters and its just now coming back to me all the torture simon went through right before this!!! now here he is, doing his best to comfort and heal her, but what about his own trauma? i genuinely hope he seeks therapy to help him cope because being a caregiver on its own is a lot, couple that with fresh trauma (and the guilt he's bound to carry around for the next 55 years bc thats who simon is) its a recipe for disaster :(

Everything You Touch - Part 4

Simon "Ghost" Riley x fem!Reader - part nine of "soft spot"

"You deserve better."

soft spot masterlist

warnings: canon typical violence, ptsd, description of panic attack/anxiety, brief accidental/unintentional self harm, a lot of hurt, a crumb of comfort.

wc: 5.3k

Hospitals always had a way of smelling like bleach and death. No matter how much cleaning and scrubbing was done, it always lingered in the halls and in the pores of every single brick of the building. Simon hated the scent, and he wanted nothing more than to leave that place far behind him, but he couldn’t. Not with you stuck in that stale bed with a brace around your neck. 

After stabilizing your condition at a local hospital, they flew you off to St Mary’s Hospital in London as its trauma center was one of the few hospitals in the city that could handle a case like yours. Severe strangulation, a gunshot wound that had torn through your axillary artery as easy as shredding tissue paper. You should have died, and Simon was well aware of that fact, but by some miracle you were alive. 

No thanks to him. 

Over the last two days, Simon had heard so much medical jargon he was certain he could quit his job in the military and become a doctor. He had every single ailment of yours memorized, and he couldn’t stop repeating them in his mind. A high energy wound from a deformed round had torn through the soft tissue in your chest just under your arm, severing your axillary artery. If it wasn’t for Kyle’s quick thinking, and John’s call for an air ambulance, you would have bled out. On top of that you also had a grade two concussion, two fractured ribs on the right side of your body, and three on your left, a hairline fracture in your hyoid bone, and grade one laryngeal edema. You weren’t malnourished or dehydrated at least, and that fact alone changed everything about your survival. Had you been treated any worse, he would have been sitting next to a grave instead of a bed. 

Two days. Two days of sitting there watching you slip in and out of consciousness. Whatever medicine they had hooked you up to was strong, and probably for good reason. It was selfish of him to wish you’d wake up, to wish you’d open your eyes and greet him with a smile as if everything was okay. As if he hadn’t held you through what he thought were your final moments. As if he hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep because of the pure anxiety and rage that flooded his system. 

He should have made their deaths slower. He wanted to, anyway. For the time you had spent sleeping in the hospital, he kept replaying the way Bukin had called you darling. He hated the way the bile rose to his throat whenever he thought of it, and he knew he should have caused more pain, should have drawn his death out. When he was younger, before he joined the force, he was an apprentice to a butcher. People weren’t all too different from pigs, and he was still just as good with a knife. But he couldn’t take that luxury when you stood there to watch it all. 

A soft sigh brought him out of his thoughts, and Simon’s eyes landed on you again. It was impossible to tell if you were just visiting for a short while, or waking up for real, but just as he did the other times, he reached forward and took your hand in his. Your hospital wristband rustled against the fabric of your blankets, and he found his fingers absentmindedly playing with it. Because you had arrived at the hospital with a gunshot wound, and there was slight concern about someone coming after you, they had given you the fictitious name of Jane Doe in an attempt to protect you from further harm that could come your way. Your date of birth was also wrong, as they made you three years older than you really were. 

“Si-...?” you attempted, but your voice failed halfway through. It was like that time you were a kid sick with laryngitis. Your voice was much deeper than it was supposed to be, and the words refused to vibrate properly in your throat. 

“Hey,” he said softly, rubbing his thumb over your knuckles, “try not to talk too much. Your throat is still pretty swollen.” 

Everything felt light, like you were floating, but not in a way that was comforting. It reminded you of how everything felt when you first woke up in that basement. How sick you felt and how Leon wrapped his arm around you to keep you upright. Or that rot in your chest as you sat crumbled in the sand on the beach. The overwhelming scent of his cologne on the jacket he made you wear, his hand on your wrist, hands around your throat, choking, crushing, breaking-

“Sweetheart, hey, hey,” Simon said softly. As he reached out and wiped the tears that you hadn’t even been aware was streaming down your face, you tried to remember the last time you had heard him speak so softly to you. Like he thought his voice would shatter you. “You’re alright, you’re safe. I’m here now, yeah?” 

The heart monitor showed proof of your anxiety, but as Simon kept talking he filled the noise in your head with him instead. It was just him and his thumb wiping gently at your cheeks. He was so warm, and you found yourself taking breath after deep breath in an attempt to calm yourself down. His mask was on, that same odd skull patterned one he wore when he saved you, but his eyes were just as expressive. 

You reached your other hand up and gently pawed at the plastic brace around your neck. After wiping away another stray tear, Simon grabbed that hand and gently pulled it away from your throat. Holding both of your hands in his, he continued to rub his thumbs across your knuckles. 

“You’re still pretty swollen, so you’ll have to keep that on. Try not to move your neck,” he instructed as if he was a doting parent. 

Was this real? Were you out of that basement, out of Leon’s reach? It had to be real. Simon’s touch was as soft as it always was, and the scent of the hospital was just as stale and vile as you remembered it being as a child. You attempted another deep breath, but you became suddenly aware of the pain that coursed through your body and winced. Everything hurt, but it felt far away at the same time, like you felt the aches through a veil. 

Sniffling a little, you snaked one of your hands out of Simon’s and reached for his left arm. Everything was fuzzy, but you remembered that he had been shot in his arm. Johnny had cracked some sort of joke about it, so you knew it wasn’t bad, yet you still worried. Even as you laid in a hospital bed hooked up to machines and tubes, you still worried about him. 

“Just a flesh wound sweetheart, nothin’ to worry about,” he assured you. His eyes studied you for a short moment before dropping down. You thought he looked at your throat, until you remembered the new pain that blossomed in an odd area along the side of your chest. “Should be more concerned with the wound you got.” 

You made a pitiful attempt to look down at yourself, but the brace on your neck made it impossible to do so. Which was certainly for the best, because you didn’t want to know how badly it would have hurt if you bent your throat in such a way. Instead, you pulled your hand away from Simon’s arm and gestured to your chest with a quizzical look on your face. Or, at least what you hoped was a quizzical look. 

“Yeah,” he confirmed as he grabbed your hand again. It was like he couldn’t stop touching you. “Got a few fragments left in you, but nothin’ the doctors couldn’t handle. Guess we got you in the best goddamn trauma center in the country.” 

Even with everything that happened, he tried to make light of the situation; probably in an attempt to not worry you. Maybe you shouldn’t have been worried. It didn’t hurt to breathe anymore than it had previously, so the bullet hadn’t gone through your chest or punctured a lung. You were lucky that it wasn’t worse. 

God, what a sour thought that was. Thinking you were lucky; thinking you should be grateful to have survived such atrocities. 

Your vision grew a little fuzzy, and you found yourself staring off into space as your mind wandered again. Everything felt too real and so fake at the same time; like the pain was faux. You should have been able to hop out of that bed and head to work, and your co-workers wouldn’t even spare you a second glance because there was no way you were gone for as long as you thought you had been. Yet at that same time, you should have been dead. Should have been laying splayed out on your back with dry eyes that stared up at the seagulls finding solace and food in the flesh of your body. Perhaps a part of you did die; some part of you was left to rot in that orchard. 

“Wh-t h…ppened?” you asked. Voice still failing you, you made sure to choose simple words. Tingling pain mingled in your throat, and your mouth felt itchy. 

“The boys and I brought you home,” Simon answered softly. But that answer was too short - too blunt - and even he knew that, so he swallowed and tried again: “You were in pretty rough shape. You’ve got a few fractured bones and your throat is messed up bad. But you’re safe now, they can’t hurt you. I promise.” 

Such a funny way to say that he killed them. Not that you blamed him at all; how could you when you had attempted to slaughter Leon with a steak knife? You remembered exactly what it was like standing there as you watched Simon dig the heel of his boot into Leon’s shattered arm. Remembered what color dead grass turned when blood pooled under it. 

Fertilizer. That’s what he had called you. A task that ended up being bequeathed to him instead. 

“I need you to get some rest, yeah?” he continued. “Doc says he won’t send you home until you’ve healed up some. 

It wasn’t much, but you squeezed his hand in response. You weren’t sure if it was because the state your body was in or because of the various medicines they pumped through you intravenously, but you were tired. The type of tired where you didn’t care if you woke up or not. Simon carefully raised your hands up and pressed delicate kisses to your knuckles through the fabric of his mask. When you were in that basement, all you wanted was for Simon to hold you, to feel his touch again, to be bathed in his warmth. Now that you were finally out, everything felt muted. Everything was spoiled. 

No, you were just tired. That was all. So you closed your eyes again and listened to the steady hum of the machines around you. They sounded similar to the machines your mother had been hooked up to when receiving treatment when you were a kid. You used to take naps listening to those beeps. Things always had an odd way of coming back to you. Comforted by the auditory proof of your own existence, you faded away into sleep once more under Simon’s careful gaze. 

But what Simon didn’t know was that the very moment you finally woke up, the nightmares began. They chased after you in sleep, in consciousness; it didn’t matter. Even in death Leon’s hands still wrapped around your throat; even after you were well enough that they removed your brace; even after the swelling went down; even while holding Simon’s hand. Always small. Always weak. 

Things only got worse when you were well enough to be sent home. There was something dehumanizing walking into your home and not being able to recognize the smell. It was cold, bitterly so, as the drafty window was something your landlord still refused to fix. Boo, who had grown much too big much too fast and was without his cast trotted towards the entrance as a cooing mess. In what was surely an attempt to trip you, he rubbed against your legs in greeting, and Simon assisted you in settling in. 

And though everything was the same as how you had left it, something was wrong. A crawling feeling overtook your skin every time you looked at the floor in the living room. The air smelled stale like you were in a coffin rather than a home. Dinner tasted more like blood than it did soup. Did it all change in such a short amount of time? Did you just not recognize it? Or was it just you that had changed? A stranger in your own home? 

“I want to shower,” you said suddenly. 

It was the first thing you had said throughout the entirety of dinner. You stared down at the half eaten bowl of soup in your hands. Your voice sounded better, and your throat didn’t spasm every time you swallowed, but you were still restricted to a liquid food diet more or less. 

“A bath would be easier,” Simon countered. His spoon had been clinking against the side of his bowl for some time, but you knew him better than that. He had probably finished eating quite some time ago. “Can’t get your wound wet. I could run one for you.” 

You swallowed another spoonful of soup. It wasn’t until your stomach began to churn that you realized it had gone cold. “Okay.” 

Neither of you moved for what felt like forever. Weights kept you held down by your ankles, and all you did was move your spoon around the thick liquid in the bowl. You almost hadn’t realized that Simon stood from his seat until his hand brushed against the side of your face. You didn’t jump, but your heart lurched so hard it almost hurt, and still you gazed up at him with dull eyes. His hand smoothed over your hair, eyes studying your face carefully, before he slowly leaned down and pressed a firm kiss against the crown of your head. 

“C’mon,” he said, pulling away. “Let’s get you cleaned up.” 

You followed behind Simon as he led you to the bathroom. Boo trotted along still hellbent on tripping you and purring the whole time while doing so. He didn’t seem scared even when Simon turned the water on, and he perched himself on top of the counter behind you as you began to undress. Healing was agonizing, and taking longer than you wanted it to, and tasks such as dressing and undressing were no longer as simple as they used to be. 

That deep ache in your chest had dulled over time, but hadn’t quite gone away, and was still aggravated whenever you bent over, but you were still able to get your pants and socks off with relative ease. The real trouble came when you tried to take your shirt off. Raising your left arm was impossible with your wound, but you tried your best to wiggle out of the clothing anyway. A particularly painful pinch shot through your chest when you attempted to raise your arm, drawing a wince out of your sore throat. 

“Here,” Simon spoke up softly. 

He was very well versed in taking your clothes off, but he had never been so gentle about it before. You let your arms go limp as he slid the fabric of your shirt across your body, freeing your right arm and exposing your torso. He moved the collar over your head, and gently straightened your left arm so he could slide the rest off of you. Due to your injury, you weren’t able to wear a bra, so you were fully exposed to the chilly air. 

A fuzzy paw tapped your back and you turned around to give Boo some much needed and deserved attention, but the moment you caught sight of yourself in the mirror, you froze. Maybe you just hadn’t paid attention, but you couldn’t remember the last time you looked at yourself. Really looked at yourself. Stale bruises littered the delicate skin of your throat. Pale red burst capillaries stained the whites of your eyes, though there were very few left over after your time healing. 

Then, of course, there was the obvious. Thick gauze covered the wound itself in order to keep it clean and avoid infection, and it was then that you realized you hadn’t actually seen the damage that had been caused. You had seen the blood that poured from it, and felt how terribly the bullet burned as it tore through you, but hadn’t seen how bad it mangled your flesh. You were sure it was for the best, in some way, but you didn’t need to see it in order to tell the extent of the damage. 

The gauze stuck to the side of your breast and extended up over your chest and under your armpit in order to stay secure. Without an exit wound there was no need to patch up anywhere else on your body, but you could see the bruising peek out from underneath the pristine white dressings. 

Simon’s fingers ghosted along your right shoulder as he stood behind you. His eyes found you in the mirror, and it took you a moment before you were able to do the same. You wanted to tell him how silly you thought it all was. How you felt so terrible despite the evidence of your pain being so minimal. You thought that after everything you went through, you would be nothing left but a pile of flesh and blood. There should have been more scars, some sort of disfiguration, and yet you were the same woman just painted a different color. 

Your body healed faster than you did. 

When you were ready, Simon helped lower you into the tub where the steamy water enveloped your body. As much as you wanted to lay back, close your eyes, and let go, you needed to stay sitting up in order to keep your dressings dry. Boo hopped off the counter with a chirp before jumping up to sit on the edge of the tub. Curious, he pawed at the water before leaning down to drink from it. 

“Why’d you have to snatch up the weird one?” Simon asked teasingly, though his voice fell flatter than he would have liked. 

You tried to laugh, or smile even, but nothing came. There was something strange about talking about such domestic things. After everything that had happened, you had expected all the good to be sapped from your life. It felt like the only thing you should have been allowed to talk about was pain and death and yet there you were, sitting in a tub with your cat drinking up the water like an idiot. 

As Simon settled on the floor next to the tub, you noticed Boo’s right paw was deformed. For the most part it was intact, but it seemed flatter than his other paw. You remembered his pained squeak when Leon had attacked you, how he had gotten in the way and fell victim to another one of that monster's merciless acts. 

“His paw,” you pointed out softly, hand sloshing in the water to point. Boo took your pointing as an invitation to sniff your finger, and then lick the water that dripped from it. 

“Yeah, got messed up pretty good,” Simon concurred as he leaned across the tub to grab your body wash. “Had him in a cast for a bit. Strong little bugger. Shoulda seen him hobbling around with it on.”

He presented you with your body wash and a fresh rag and you contemplated the items for a moment before carefully reaching out for them. It had been a long time since you washed yourself with items that belonged to you. You breathed in the familiar scent of the soap as you rubbed it into the rag and then along your skin. It didn’t smell how you remembered it, but it was better than plain water. 

You thought back to the time you and Simon had gone on holiday when that terrible nightmare of your father plagued you. You remembered how Simon’s arms wrapped around you and held you close to his chest as you let the water wash over you. He had asked you if you wanted to talk about it; he always had a habit of knowing your feelings better than you did. Though talking about it would have done some good, you said no. Why had you even done so? What was the reason? Were you afraid? Whatever it was, you regretted it, because you feared then that you’d never be able to talk to him about anything ever again. 

Would never be able to tell him what happened; what Leon said, what he did. How he tried saying he and Simon were the same - that your lover was a violent man. That he liked to watch you squirm. How could you tell him all of that? About how you fell to the sand hoping and praying to feel his touch again? How you had to wear Leon’s coat? And the scent that clung to it - clung to you - no matter how much you scrubbed, and scrubbed, and scrubbed, and-

“Hey, easy,” Simon warned softly. 

His hands carefully wrapped around your wrists and pulled them away from your body. Fresh abrasions prickled across the now raw skin on your wrist from the intensity of your cleansing, and the rag was promptly removed from your hand. Simon attempted to get you to look at him, but your vision was too blurry to see anything correctly. 

“I can’t,” you spoke, and it was only then that you realized you were crying, “can’t get clean, can’t do it, Simon I- it’s-” 

Water sloshed around you, and Boo ran off as it spilled over the side of the tub. Strong arms wrapped securely around your center as you felt your back collide with something firm. Simon had climbed into the tub behind you, fully clothed, with legs on either side of your body. His chin rested on top of your head and you found your arms wrapping around yourself as he embraced you. 

“Breathe, sweetheart,” he coaxed as he swayed as much as the confines of the tub would allow him to. “I’m right here. Need ya to slow down and breathe, yeah? Just focus on me, nothing else. It’s just me and you.” 

If it wasn’t for Simon holding you together, you were certain you would have crumbled. It wasn’t a pretty sight or feeling; being broken. That knowing even in death Leon still had a hold of you. But you focused on Simon, how his legs had to be bent in order to fit in the tub with you, how you could feel intermittent kisses to the top of your head. The tattoo on his arm glistened as the water clung to his skin, and you found your head falling back to lean against his chest. You listened to his breathing and tried to match his pace; felt his heart thud against your back and willed your body to steady itself.  Boo licked himself furiously in some corner, paws having gotten wet from the displaced bath water.

Nothing had changed. 

“Your arm,” you said between stuttering breaths. 

“It’s fine,” he assured you. 

You knew that it probably wasn’t. Warm water had a particular way of making fresh wounds sting, but worrying about it wouldn’t change anything. Even though you wanted to, you needed to focus on staying with Simon and not slipping away somewhere else again. 

“I thought of you. When I was in Urzikstan,” he said when your breathing finally slowed. He placed another quick kiss to the top of your head and loosened his grip as he ran his hands gently up and down your arm. “Couldn’t get you off my mind. Kept thinking ‘bout every moment I ever spent with you. That god awful movie we saw together at the cinema. The first time we kissed. You’re the only thing on this earth I care about and I fucked up. This shoulda never happened and that’s on me.” 

You shook your head, skull rolling along his clavicle. A pulsing pain bounced along the soft tissue of your brain as it protested the movement, but you did your best to ignore it. “Stop,” you said, but you weren’t mad. You were too tired to be mad. “I already know what you’re going to say. I don’t care.” You paused to swallow, your voice still not used to speaking so much at once. “Doesn’t matter whose fist comes at me, I’ve been doing this my whole life. But I’ve never had someone to pick me up until you. So don’t-” Your voice failed you, and you weren’t sure if it was because of your throat, or because of the cry you tried to suppress. “Don’t you fucking dare say it.” 

So he didn’t. All of those words on his tongue dissipated and dissolved into his blood where it festered and boiled. He didn’t agree with you a single bit. Had he torn that picture of you to shreds the moment he found it in his pocket, Bukin would have had nothing to use against him. Would have never found you. It wasn’t supposed to be like that at all. You were the one who was supposed to take care of him because you were supposed to be unharmed. Instead, he suffered from a broken nose and malnourishment, and you had taken the bullet meant for him. 

Instead he relished in the fact that he had you in his arms, that he could breathe in your scent, feel your warmth. It shouldn’t have happened at all, but he was going to take what he could get. 

“This can’t be comfortable,” you pointed out after a while as you tugged on his sopping wet jeans. You said it as if Simon hadn’t tried to confess something, as if you hadn’t just experienced a panic attack; like things were okay. 

“Been through worse,” Simon said dryly. 

“Really?” you asked as if sincere. “I think wet jeans are what nightmares are made of.” 

It wasn’t funny, but Simon laughed anyway and tilted his head to the side to press his lips against your temple. He was always touching you, always kissing you, as if he could wash everything away with his hands alone better than any body wash could. Maybe he could. His hands were certainly kinder than your own. 

Once the water grew cold, Simon helped you out of the tub. He stripped his own soaked clothes off, and it was then that you noticed just how… skinny he looked. Between the hoodies he always wore and bundling up in the cold winter weather, you didn't realize just how much weight he had lost. The scar on his ribs stretched tight with his skin, and his veins protruded more than you remembered. Even with his state he came back for you. 

A fresh and thick towel was used to dry you off, and Simon made sure to do all of the work. From what little of your torso that had gotten wet, all the way down to your feet. He didn’t take nearly as much time drying himself off before quickly ushering you into the bedroom and assisting you in getting dressed. After taking the myriad of antibiotics, probiotics, and painkillers you had been prescribed, you found yourself laying in bed, staring up at the ceiling while Simon shuffled about. 

Eventually several layers of blankets had been tossed on top of you, and Boo purred at your feet, content to finally have his family back in one place. Simon settled under the covers next to you, and you instinctively curled into the warmth of him. Everything was soft and fuzzy due to the oxycodone flooding your system but you were still very much aware of the way Simon’s fingers traced up and down your left arm. 

“Ischemia,” he said slowly. 

“What?” you hummed, half awake. 

“Ischemia. Bad blood flow,” he repeated. “Doc told me to keep an eye on the blood flow in your arm.” 

“Because of the wound?” you asked, to which he hummed in response. 

Things grew quiet as he ran his hand up and down your arm. Boo continued to purr up a mad storm while your fingertips were poked and prodded at. Simon watched carefully at how the color would push in and out of your nail bed, providing proof that your circulation was fine. Once he was satisfied, he studied your face, taking in how your eyes darted underneath the lids, the soft rise and fall of your shoulders. Everything in him was telling him to pull you tight and don’t let go, but he was terrified he’d crush you. 

“I wasn’t afraid of dying,” you admitted suddenly, causing Simon to pause. You said it like you had answered a question nobody asked. Your eyes slowly fluttered open, and he took notice of how unfocused they looked. “I was just afraid of… not… being able to see you again.” 

What was he supposed to say to that? How was he expected to form words when the love of his life looked at him like she’d die without his presence? A tight line formed along his lips as he lifted his hand to rub against your cheek. 

“You should get some rest,” he diverted. 

You knew exactly what he meant by that, but your eyes closed anyway as you reached your hand up to rest on his. Even moving it that far sent a pang of pain shooting down your arm and through your chest, but it was worth it to be able to hold him. 

“Can we talk about it later?” you asked quietly. 

“‘Course,” he promised. 

After laying there for a moment, Simon reached over and turned the side table lamp off, plunging the room into darkness. It was strange laying in bed. He couldn’t quite recall the last time he had fallen asleep in such a comfortable position, as he spent his entire time captive falling asleep in a chair, which proved to be a difficult habit to break. 

He wondered what it must have been like for you, down in that basement; a civilian mixed in military matters. Blood soaking into the bed sheets stained his vision almost worse than the Polaroids that had been taken of you. Sometimes he’d wipe his hands off on his pants because he still felt your blood staining his hands through his gloves. Every waking moment he heard Bukin calling you darling like it was played on repeat on his own personal broken record. 

But there was no time for regret, grief, or anything else that tempted to poke at his heart and mind. There was limited space in his life, and in that moment, and forever more, it was reserved for you. Only you, and your laughter and your soft touches and the way you looked at him. He loved you. He loved you so fucking much it hurt. But there wasn’t space for that either; that terrible realization of just what he would do for you. No, for the moment it was only you, him, and that stupid cat purring at his feet, and that was enough for him.

!!!! wow!!! this was a super long arc! it's been 10s of thousands of words since spook and ghost were together again. there will be more parts!! the series isn't over yet, as i have a few more arcs planned before wrapping everything up. thank you guys so much for all the support so far, and thanks for sticking through this rough patch 🩷

tags: @ghostlythots @archonsabyss @crowbird @beware-my-thorns @koko-1025 @nessaasstuff @escapefromrealitysm @ilovehyperfixating @babygirl-riley @theloneshadow24 @ashableketchup @violet-19999 @ocyeanic-dani @paigetaylor628 @curlygirls-world @gaebestie @datlilwrench @ryisghost @suffering-and-happy-about-it @achelois-is-here

find my taglist here

#save my babies #justice for ghost and spook #simon riley x reader #ghost x reader #simon riley x you #simon ghost riley x you #simon ghost x reader #pure angst #is that half a crumb of comfort i smell

[yuly]

oh man the title alone is enough to make me cry, but here we go..

FINALLY! OMG finally some PROGRESS

spook finally gets an ally!!!! someone trying to help her omg omg i could cry

With as much strength as you could muster, you plunged the knife into Leon’s back.

YES YES THERE SHE IS!!!!!! GET HIM!!!!!!!!! i mean after everything she's been through mentally and physically she still puts up a fight, thats my baby dammit!

“Don’t fucking call her that,” he warned, his eyes giving away all the ways he wished he had killed him slower.

Finally, Simon turned to face you, and you swore that in that moment you would crumble.

these moments above make up for everything you put the through, all is forgiven, this is exactly what that scum deserved xx

He was… so pretty. You hadn’t realized he had torn his mask off, but you couldn’t help but glance over his features.

So many hands were on you and you wanted to do nothing but tear them off. You were tired of people putting their hands on you. But you couldn’t.

this made me realize that spook's life has essentially been turned upside down, im so gutted, i hope we don't lose the bubbly chatterbox we've come to know and love :(

Everything You Touch - Part 3

Simon "Ghost" Riley x fem!Reader - part nine of "soft spot"

"Everything you touch ends up like this, kid."

soft spot masterlist

warnings: canon typical violence, descriptions of death, stabbing, gunshot wounds, broken bones, mentions of domestic violence, a lot of hurt, a crumb of comfort. that's all i can think of but let me know if i missed any!

wc: 8.2k

If there was anything you learned about healing, it was that it always gets worse before it gets better. As you laid in that bed, a crumbled mess upon bloody sheets, you knew things were beginning to crumble. Over the hours that you were there, alone and in the dark, all you wanted to do was sleep, but the pain that coursed through your body wouldn’t allow you. Each breath you inhaled was agonizing, and your chest felt stiff like your ribs were fuzing together. Things weren’t just crumbling around you, but inside of you. 

Despite how late it was, the sound of boots clomping on the floor above you was near deafening, which only made the pounding in your head worse. Voices faintly bled through the wood, but there was no laughter, no dull drone of some video game like there usually was. Whatever you could hear sounded hushed, upset, or even a little scared. You started to wonder if the lack of their usual childish fun was because of what Adakskin had done to you. Erik. 

Was he in trouble for it? For beating you? That thought almost made you laugh. There was a particular irony to the idea that a terrorist would get in more trouble for hitting you than your own ex-boyfriend ever had. 

An involuntary cough forced its way out of your chest and you tried your best not to tense more than you needed. Your nose had started bleeding sometime after Leon had left, and every now and then a coagulated clump of it would slither into your throat from your sinuses. With no energy to drag yourself into the bathroom to cough it up into the sink, that quilted blanket gained several new stains. 

You wondered if that older woman you had seen in the kitchen had made it. 

Someone's footsteps shuffled outside of the door to the room, but you didn’t bother to move. What use was it when the room was near pitch black and you were too stiff to fight back? So when you heard the familiar jingle of keys unlocking the door, you told yourself you didn’t care what happened next. 

The door creaked open and then shut with a quiet click. Whoever entered stayed standing towards the door without saying a word for longer than what felt comfortable, and even then you didn’t move. Maybe if you stayed still long enough, your existence would soak into the bed. 

Then the light flickered on, and a stabbing pain shot through your eyes as if they were turning into goo in your sockets. A shaky hand reached up to cover your eyes, and you let out a shaky breath. The edge of the mattress sank down some, and you could feel the dip in the fabric, but it didn’t move as much as you had expected it to. It only moved a fraction of the amount it usually did when Leon sat there. 

Doing your best to hold back a wince, you dropped your hand from over your eyes and waited for your vision to adjust to the brightness around you. You could feel your pupils struggle to dilate, but eventually everything more or less came into focus. To your surprise, it wasn’t Leon, or even Adakskin at the edge of your bed. It was the blonde woman. 

Even more surprising than her presence was the state of her. In the rare instances she would look at you, her expression was akin to something like a glare, something of disdain. But not then. Her eyes held nothing but an exhaustion that ran as deep as her bones which only seemed to run deeper due to the smudged makeup under her eyes. Her pale hair was falling out of its ponytail, and a faint bruise painted her left cheekbone. 

Sudden shouting sounded upstairs, and then a loud bang, like a chair had been knocked over, and then there was silence. Both you and the woman flinched. You could see her throat bob as she swallowed. 

“They are anxious,” she said, accent heavy. 

It was the first thing she ever said to you, and it was significantly kinder than you had expected it to be. Or, not exactly kind, but certainly wasn’t rude or malicious. If anything, her voice was as tired as her eyes, and a soft ball of pity formed in your stomach at the sound. 

“They think your friends are coming,” she continued as her fingers pulled at the fabric of her jeans. “Some of them went into the village not far from here. Said things did not seem right. They are going to move you.” 

You weren’t sure if her words were confusing, or if you only had a hard time understanding because of the throbbing in your head, but you weren’t sure why she was there. For the last few weeks it had only ever been Leon who entered your room. Save of course her and Adakskin a few hours prior, but you were certain that wasn’t entirely authorized. Was the whole reason she was there just to tell you that? Why hadn’t Leon himself said it? 

“I… don’t understand,” you said, and your voice sounded odd. No, your voice was fine, but it was your lip, too swollen to move properly, causing you to speak with a lisp. 

She looked away from you for a moment before and her pale eyes glanced around the floor. The pictures Adakskin had taken of you still littered the area. Some had bent plastic from being stepped on, but the contents were still clear as day. You tried your best not to pay attention to it as the woman stood from the bed and walked to where you had placed your shoes. Usually you had slept with them on, but since Adakskin had caught you as you came out of the shower…

“Bukin sent one of the boys down here to get you ready,” she said as she picked up your shoes. She placed them on the floor next to the bed before looking down at you. “I offered instead.” 

Another weak cough rattled your chest as if there was a lost bone floating around in your ribcage. Your face contorted for a short moment before you forced your body to relax. Eye still swollen, you stared up at the woman as you tried to gather the strength to sit up straight. Sensing your struggle, she reached a hand towards you while keeping her other arm awkwardly pressed against her stomach. She carefully took your hand in hers and you stared up at her for what seemed like an eternity before allowing yourself to accept her help. With a strained wince, she pulled you into an upright position, and you sat with your legs swung over the side of the bed. 

Such a simple movement had caused your entire world to spin. Between the bright light causing your head to throb and the ache in your face and chest, you felt like you were about to disintegrate. But you pushed through it and looked up at the woman with stony eyes. 

“Why?” you asked, winded. 

She stood in front of you, and you felt like a child. Her eyes were near impossible to read, but even with your swollen eye you had caught on to the slight tremble of her lip. 

“I am not a good person,” she said, and it sounded like she was confessing to some god. “But I am not a bad person, either. I could not let you leave without apologizing.” 

More shuffling sounded upstairs, and your eyes quickly shot up towards the ceiling before landing back on the woman in front of you. It was like she couldn’t look at you. She’d rather stare at the floor by your feet than anywhere else. You could almost see her shame wrapping around her throat, choking her. 

“Apologize for what?” you asked. Each word you spoke took so much thought and effort your head started to spin because of it. Every bit of energy you had left was used for just keeping yourself upright. 

“Everything,” she answered bluntly. 

Something didn’t make sense. Was this the same woman that you had known from earlier? The one who would grab your clothes and throw you the nastiest look you had ever seen anyone wear? The one who laughed and smiled while Adakskin took pictures of your beaten body? Previously, you were under the impression she was just as strong and brutal as the others in the home, but sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at her as she held her arms close to her stomach, you weren’t too sure. Not with that bruise on her face. 

With a stiff arm, she gestured to the shoes she had set on the floor for you, and taking the hint, you leaned down and picked up the shoes tenderly. Every movement had your body screaming in protest, but something in your gut informed you that you didn’t have the time to mess around. If they were moving you, if they were scared your friends were coming, then that meant Simon was close.

You were going home. No matter what it took. 

It wasn’t until you got one shoe on that the woman started to explain herself. “I should not be here. I am not a fighter or a killer. I am only here because my husband brought me here.” She paused and pulled her forearm closer to her stomach. She said the word husband like it was sewage on her tongue. “Blood scares me. Erik knows this. So he did… that to you. Wanted me to see what happens to someone who… who does not know their place.” 

Erik? Adakskin was her husband? That crazed man who had beat you nearly within an inch of your life had done so just to make an example of you? To his poor wife, nonetheless? An example she didn’t seem to learn from, judging by the shining bruise that bloomed under her pale skin. She had done a decent job of covering it with foundation, but no amount of makeup in the world could take away the pain and swelling. 

“I tried to hate you. It was always easier to see you as the enemy, like he said you were. But I could not. I am not meant for this type of life,” she continued. “I am sorry for who I was when I was pretending. But maybe if I had pretended a little harder, this would not have happened to you.” 

There was something almost laughable about her words. No, it wasn’t her words, it was the fact that she spoke them in the first place. As a beaten and bloodied mess, you were supposed to receive penance from those who harmed you. There was something peculiar - something wrong - about it all. Why was it always the victim’s mouth that the word sorry tumbled out of first? 

“You’re not responsible for their actions,” you said, swollen lip making it difficult to speak. 

“I know.” Like a woman who was used to cleaning up someone else’s mess her entire life, her reply was quick to leave her lips. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, her eyes finally landed on you. Their cool color looked almost grey in the pale lilac light of the room. “But had I known that he would have beaten you anyway, I would not have bothered to pretend.” 

There wasn’t anything you could say in response to her. Nothing that came to mind, anyway. You had never been good at responding to apologies, perhaps because you had only received very few genuine ones in your life, but it seemed as if she wasn’t looking for forgiveness. Instead, she turned her attention to the far corner of the room where a crumpled mess of black wool laid on the floor. 

While she meandered across the room, you worked on getting your other shoe on, which was just as difficult and painful as the first shoe. Even though you had full use of your fingers, tying them was the most agonizing part, as any time you spent hunched over was time your chest spent screaming at you. 

When you straightened back up, you turned your attention back to the blonde woman, and you froze. She held Leon’s jacket out towards you with one hand, as if she was afraid it would bite her. You weren’t sure if it was because of the neverending taste of blood in your mouth, but a wave of nausea rocked your stomach just at the very thought of wearing that jacket again. You remembered how much time you had spent in the shower, trying to get the scent of it off of you, and your skin tingled. 

“No,” you said dully as you shook your head. “I’m not wearing that again.” 

After taking a few steps towards you, the woman stopped pressing her arm against her stomach. With a bit of difficulty, she rolled up the sleeve of her shirt to reveal a serrated steak knife. Small bits of food clung to the shining stainless steel, and you could see the small marks and indentation in her pale skin from holding it against her so firmly. Without a word, she pulled the knife fully out from underneath her sleeve and slipped it into one of the pockets of Leon’s jacket. That terrible coat that had nearly suffocated you hours before swallowed the knife up with ease in its deep pockets. 

With both hands this time, she held the jacket out for you again and said: “The eyes are afraid, but the hands are still doing it.” 

As your father had once said, blood tastes sweeter when it’s drawn from your own knife. For a long time you had just thought it was some odd saying of his, something the violence in him craved. When you got older, the real meaning hit you in an epiphany; revenge is sweeter than karma. Why wait around for the forces of nature to bite your enemy when you could bite them yourself? 

So you allowed her to help you into that jacket, wincing only a slight bit as your sore and bruised muscles flexed. That earthy cologne-like scent filled your nose and you nearly choked. The only respite you had was knowing that jacket - Leon’s jacket - now housed the thing you hoped to bring his end with. 

Stomping footsteps creaked overhead and you could very clearly hear its distinct pattern towards the stairs, and the quiet thumping of hollow wood as someone descended to the basement. The zipper of the jacket was quickly closed, and the blonde woman backed away from you with her arms crossed. Whatever softness that had settled on her features during your conversation had vanished, and she became suddenly familiar in the way she glared at you. 

The door opened without warning and Leon crossed the threshold into the room. Refusing to look at him, you focused all your energy on just standing upright. You prayed that you weren’t swaying as bad as your vision made it seem, but you nearly fell over when Leon took a careful and calculated step towards you. 

He approached you like you were some skittish animal. Some petrified deer caught in the all consuming headlights that promised you a brutal and violent end. His hand wrapped around your arm, and even through the thickness of his coat you could still feel his fingerprints branding your skin. By the time this was all over, you hoped that the scars faded. You couldn’t bear the thought of Simon seeing you with the proof of cruelty staining the essence of your being. 

When he spoke, Leon’s voice sounded far away, as if you were underwater. You knew he wasn’t speaking to you only because the blonde woman in front of you responded to him, her voice dull and monotonous in her reply. All you could do was stare at the ground as they conversed. The Polaroids Erik took of you covered the blood and soup stained carpet, and it was the first time you were able to get a good look at them.

You wished you hadn’t. 

All you could think about as you saw the photos of your bruised and bloodied face was his fist cracking against your skull. In an odd way, it sounded eerily similar to crumbling drywall. Or a shattering vase. But it was more wet. There was more blood that squelched from your body when the fist hit you directly, and not grazed against you in some poor attempt at self control. Worst of all, you could hear his voice clear as day. Erik. Adakskin. Eric. Fuck, they were blending into the same people. It didn’t matter. Derogatory Russian spat in your face was just as biting as the alcohol stained breath calling you a minx. 

Your father. A lover. A terrorist. It didn’t matter. It was nothing new. 

A hand brushed against your chin and you couldn’t hide the wince that pushed past your lips. Leon tilted your head up to look at him, and you found yourself having very little left inside of you to fight against him. There was a slight frustration in his eyes, like he was looking at his favorite toy that a bully had broken. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and it almost sounded sincere. No, of course he was sorry. You were his most valuable bargaining chip. Damaged goods were bad for business. “We’ll get you some ice.” 

You didn’t bother answering him, and he turned to speak a few more short words to the woman before gently guiding you towards the door. She stood with her arms crossed and her eyes blank as she watched you leave like a dog being dragged out by their leash. But you weren’t blind to the way her eyes flickered to the pocket of your coat just before you and Leon rounded the doorway. 

✦•······················•✦•······················•✦

Whenever Simon thought of the ocean, he thought of you. It was like those ideas were forever intertwined, unable to be torn away from each other. Waves crashing on the rocky shore reminded him of the time you insisted that you dipped your toes in the water, despite the very obvious impending storm that loomed over the water. 

He thought back to that time the two of you went on holiday with nothing but fondness until he realized that it hadn’t even happened all that long ago. A few months at most, but it had felt like years had passed. Several painful years since he heard you knock on the bathroom door of the hotel, since your voice quietly bled through the thin wood as you called his name. He fondly remembered holding your body close to him as you both stood underneath the shower. He remembered how tense you were; how you declined his offer to talk about the nightmare you so obviously suffered from just moments prior. 

Something had haunted you for quite some time, and as time passed by Simon was able to make out the shape of it. There was the vague idea of what was supposed to be a protector soaked with vile amounts of blood. There was the frail figure of a woman with rotting skin. Something else that haunted you in the shape of scars rather than physical being. A part of him wanted to burn those memories of yours until they were nothing but ash. If he filled your mind with nothing but as much love as a man like him could muster, maybe it would be enough. 

But the thought of being your savior made Simon feel sick, especially as he stood on the crest of the hill that overlooked the cottage they knew you were housed in. A dim light began to glow far off in the distance, promising dawn. They only had a handful of minutes left to utilize the cover of night, but it didn’t matter to Simon; seen or unseen, his blade moved just as quick. 

“You ready?” 

Johnny’s voice pulled Simon out of his thoughts, and he turned his attention to the three men standing with him. They were all bundled up tightly against the frigid December air, and the wind from the ocean didn’t help. He would have preferred completing that mission by himself. There was something that didn’t sit right inside of him; dragging his teammates along for a mission like that. Bukin had already proved to be an unpredictable man. Their inability to foresee that was what got you taken in the first place, and he didn’t want anyone else to face unnecessary wrath due to his mistake. 

But Simon hadn’t been officially cleared for active duty again. If it got out that he was even there in the first place he would probably receive several harsh slaps on the wrist. Really, it wasn’t the punishment that worried him, but knowing that he wasn’t at peak condition anymore, not after all those weeks he was held prisoner. He needed help in order to save you, to bring you home, and that fact frustrated him more than anything else. He wasn’t strong enough to do the one thing he was supposed to. 

He didn’t have time for that. Regret. Whatever it was. Instead, he looked at the men with him as he adjusted his grip on his rifle. If he couldn’t do it alone, he was glad he was at least doing it with them. So he nodded his head, and like the carefully trained killers that they were, they descended the hillside towards the sleepy little cottage. 

Everything they did was quick and practiced. Killing had become Simon’s job, his second nature, and they were able to drop the two men waiting for them at the entrance with ease. Whatever resources Bukin seemed to have obtained must have been close to depleted, because the resistance at the cottage was only a fraction of the amount they ran into in Urzikstan. As they cleared the ground floor they ran into a few individuals with shitty aim and even worse trigger discipline. A few didn’t even have weapons and still rushed at the four well armed men anyway. Cannon fodder was all; men throwing their lives away in some desperate attempt at what? Keeping you prisoner? 

The heaviest resistance they ran into while inside the cottage came from Arina Morton herself. Even with no weapon in her hand, the string of angry Russian that left her mouth was vile enough to make the Devil Himself cringe. The boys of the 141, however, were left unphased, and instead kindly requested that the old woman shut herself up, lest she be detained. 

Once the ground floor was littered with bodies, and one very upset grandmother, the team's attention was turned to the descending stairs. They all knew that you were down there, somewhere, waiting, and judging by the lack of visuals on both Bukin and Adakskin, they were there, too. 

Simon’s chest hadn’t felt that tight since returning home; since he walked into the living room and found the blood, not knowing if it was yours or not. He breathed in deep through his mask and took point as he traversed down the stairs. The old wood squeaked and complained underneath his feet but he continued on anyway until he reached cement. A large TV screen greeted them in what appeared to be a makeshift game room. Several beer bottles littered the ground, and the monitor was dimmed slightly from being idle so long. Whoever had been playing on the console last had racked up a kill count of 52 for that round. 

Kyle chuckled as he glanced at the screen before turning his attention to the hallway that led further down the basement. “Better shots in the game than in real life.” 

The lack of a greeting party was slight cause for concern, but the group pushed forward anyway. Simon tried to keep an ear out for any auditory hints of you; crying, conversation, anything. But with Arina Morton still shouting upstairs, it was impossible to tell for sure. 

“Someone needs to lay grandma down for her nap,” Johnny muttered. 

Something was wrong. Things were too quiet; so much so that it was nearly suffocating. Simon pressed onward, clearing room after room nearly on his own, leaving the others to trail behind him like amateurs. He was locked in, seeking something, seeking you. But after he cleared each empty room, your scent only grew more and more stale. 

They came to the last door tucked away at the very end of the hallway. It was much too crowded for the four of them to stand in a single file, unless they all wanted to get shot with the same bullet, so John and Kyle took cover in one of the empty rooms they had cleared before. Johnny threw his lieutenant a cautious look but the man wasn’t even looking at him. His dark eyes were focused straight ahead as he reached for the doorknob with a skeleton gloved hand. 

A squeak accompanied the door as it swung open, and the two men burst into the room with guns raised only to be met with nothing. No shouting or gunshots, just a woman with bright blonde hair who sat in the middle of the floor with a stack of photos in front of her. As if anticipating them, her hands were already held up, showing nothing but good faith as she stared up at them through a partially swollen eye. 

But this was the room, Simon was sure of it. Disgustingly pale lilac walls closed in around him, and he certainly wasn’t oblivious to the blood in the room. A few small splatters soaked into the dull color of the carpet, which had also been covered in stale scented soup. A much larger puddle stained the pillow and blanket on the bed that was shoved in the far corner of the room and he refused to let his mind wander to what could have caused that because he wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep his anger bottled up. 

John and Kyle followed up close behind only to lower their rifles at the sight in front of them. Making sure nothing went unchecked, Johnny took a quick peek into the bathroom, only to confirm what he suspected; empty, and no you, just like everywhere else. 

“She is not here,” the woman finally spoke without prompting. Her eyes focused directly on Simon with some sort of vengeful intensity. Mixed into the pale blue color of her eyes was a desperate call for revenge. Silly of him to think you were the only victim in all of this. “Your wife; they are relocating her.” 

A fluttering feeling gnawed at Simon’s stomach at her words, and he wasn’t sure if it was because of her choice of vocabulary or because, as usual, they were one step behind. As much as he would have liked to dwell on the odd thoughts that flooded his mind, he did not have the luxury to do so. 

“Where is she?” he demanded, voice tense. 

For a moment, the woman didn’t answer. Instead, her gaze looked away from the masked man in front of her and down at the stack of pictures on the floor. Simon followed her lead, and he felt his trigger finger twitch when he finally realized what they were; pictures of you. Irritated and swelling skin around your lips, the way you could hardly keep your eyes open as someone held you by your chin, forcing you to look at the camera. The bright flash revealed the dull shine of blood and tears that stained your cheeks. Several other photos were stacked underneath that one, but he wasn’t sure he could stand looking at the sight of you like that much longer. With grinding teeth, he looked back up at the woman, a new darkness lurking in his eyes. 

“There is an old orchard to the east, I think,” she finally spoke. “They have a truck there that they plan on using to escape. I think they said something about a boat and going to France.”

That was all Simon needed to hear. He took a few steps back from the woman and glanced around at the others. Johnny’s eyes were fixed on the photos on the ground, teeth visibly grinding, and the others looked just as ready to pounce as he was. One last time, the woman glanced up at him just as he barked the order to get moving, and she watched as the men filed out of the room one by one, leaving her to her own devices. 

The woman lowered her hands and set them in her lap as she listened to the dull sound of boots stomping out of the house. Her grandmother-in-law was still screeching about something upstairs, crying about the unfairness of it all; how was she supposed to clean up so many bodies? But she didn’t care. For the first time in years, perhaps her entire life, a sincere smile crossed her pale lips at the knowledge that she would soon be a widow. 

✦•······················•✦•······················•✦

Snow had begun to fall in fat fluffy flakes. It wasn’t enough to stick to the ground, but it was consistent enough to pelt the exposed skin of your face as Leon dragged you behind him. Moving your legs wasn’t an issue, but getting your body to keep up with the movement was. Your chest could only expand so much to accommodate the air you needed to breathe in while you helplessly jogged behind that brute of a man. Each beat of your heart reverberated painfully in your skull as it felt like your brain pulsed with each step. 

“Come on,” Leon urged, his grip on your arm tightening, “we’re almost there.”

It felt like you had been running for ages, but maybe it only felt that way because of the steep hill you were attempting to traverse. The morning sun peeked over the horizon, lighting the cloudy sky up in a dull purple similar to that lilac color that plagued the room you had been trapped in. You started to wonder if you would ever escape that place, or if you’d be trapped there forever. 

No. No, you were making it out of there. Simon had found you, and you knew for sure because of the gunshots that you had heard earlier. Earlier. They had since died down, and now the only sound that plagued the land was the biting roar of the wind and the sleepy waves crashing on the shore somewhere on your left. 

The two of you finally scaled the hill, something that took you twice as long to do than normal because of your condition. The land curved downwards a slight bit before flattening out where an orchard of sorts stood among the dead grass. They had long since lost their leaves and fruit leaving behind nothing but bony branches that shivered in the wind. Several bushes scattered the empty spaces between the trees giving the area the appearance of a forest rather than something grown and nurtured by hand. 

An uneasy feeling settled deep in your gut as Leon prompted you forward. Simon was there, somewhere, and yet you were moving away from him bit by bit. Certainly they had gone through the house and realized you weren’t there, and now they had a large vast land that spanned for miles in all directions to attempt to search. If you kept going, you would be gone by the time he caught your scent again. 

You wanted to scream. You wanted to thrash and fight and run until you crashed into Simon, but you were in no condition to waste more energy than had already been sapped from you. While Leon’s attention was focused straight ahead as he began to pull you into that forest of an orchard, a shaky hand reached into the pocket of your coat. The handle of the steak knife had grown cold during your time outside in the elements, but your hand wrapped around it nonetheless. 

If you were going to fight, you needed to make it count. 

You revealed the knife underneath the pale light of the dawning sun and gripped it tight as the trees continued to swallow you whole. In the distance a rusted blue truck sat nestled in a small clearing in what you assumed was the center of the orchard. The thing looked ancient and worn from years of transporting fresh fruit and goods, but you knew that if you reached that truck, your fate would be far less sweet. 

Adjusting your grip, you held the knife up with the blade pointed downwards. There had only been one other time you had wielded a knife in such a manner, and it was when Leon had originally attacked you back at your apartment in London. Through some miracle you had managed to wrestle his knife out of his grip and used it against him to slice through the flesh on his forearm. You wondered if it had scarred. You prayed that this time you would do a lot more than wound him. 

With as much strength as you could muster, you plunged the knife into Leon’s back. It didn’t go as deep as you had hoped that it would, as it felt like you had caught the blade on the thick bone of his scapula, but he let out a roaring yell and loosened his grip on your wrist just enough for you to slip free. While Leon reached his hand around to try and paw at the gash on his shoulder, you turned and ran as fast as your legs would carry you. A slick mush formed underneath your feet with the heavy falling snow soaking the ground, but you weaved through the trees with the knife still in your hand. Leon’s angry and panting breaths could be heard close behind you, and you could nearly feel his breath on the back of your neck. 

Silly, really. Silly of you to think that a weapon like that in the hands of prey like you could kill a beast as vicious as Leon Bukin. The only thing that you had ever been good at was running, and even that started to fail you. 

A hand snaked its way around the collar of your coat and yanked you backwards. Your back broke your fall as the ground made a squelching sound underneath you, and the impact knocked the air from your already aching lungs. Leon stood above you, heavy panting visible in the cold air, and he snarled at you with a fury you had never experienced from him before. 

You attempted to scamper backwards to get some distance between the two of you, but he quickly rendered you unable to move as his knees crashed down on either side of you, trapping you underneath him. In a wild effort to fight, you brandished the knife at him, catching the fabric of his coat but only just barely before he grabbed your wrist. You yelped as he squeezed you with crushing force, and you found your fingers going limp enough for him to yank the knife out of your grip. 

“I’ve lost my patience with you,” he barked as he tossed the knife out of your reach. 

“Get the fuck off of me!” you demanded with as much strength you could muster with your burning diaphragm. 

“Shut the fuck up!”

His hand collided with your sore cheekbone and it sent your neck snapping to the side. Cold and mushy grass stung your cheek, and it almost felt refreshing. Your head spun while your ears started to ring, and as you tried to blink away the confusion fogging your mind you felt rigid fingers grip your jaw and force your gaze upwards.

“Stupid fucking girl, you don’t understand anything!” he continued. The hand on your jaw dropped lower until the meaty part of his palm pressed against your throat. His other hand joined in, and you found your nails clawing at his wrists trying to break his fingers off of you. “Ever since your friends took over our base in Tobrak, we’ve been stuck in this shithole country. You were our only chance of going back home.”

This wasn’t the first time you found yourself underneath Leon with his hands around your throat. He had done something similar when he first kidnapped you. It didn’t take long for you to pass out as he put all of his strength into cutting off the blood supply to your head, but this time was different. There was more force on your windpipe, and you felt a terrible tickling feeling in the back of your throat that caused you to cough something dry and pathetic. Tears escaped from your eyes as it felt like they began to bulge out of your skull. Unbothered snow continued to fall around you as your nails dug into the skin of his face. 

“They’re dead. My men. Sizov’s men. It doesn’t matter. The bastard can rot with the Urzik filth. But now?” He punctuated the word with a tighter squeeze around your throat. “Now comes the real fun. What use are you if I no longer need my commander? Huh? I was trying to do you a favor by taking you with me. At least you’d be alive. Did you really think you’d be able to go home after all of this? Perhaps you’ll make good fertilizer for the trees in the spring. But you’re of no use to me anymore.” 

Desperate gasps for air left you as your legs thrashed underneath him. Something in your throat cracked and a sharp wave of pain blossomed there. You tried to roll, scratch, cry, scream, anything. Anything to get away from him. But all you could do was squirm. All you could do was perform the very show he wanted from you in the first place. 

Just when you felt your vision beginning to darken, Leon’s weight suddenly lifted off of you. Your hands flew to your throat as you coughed and sputtered, drawing in long gasps of air like it was your first time breathing. A sickening snap echoed between the barren trees, and a sincere scream was ripped from Leon’s mouth. A new pair of hands landed on your shoulders, and you tried to push them away until you saw a familiar face. 

“Can you stand?” Kyle asked as he gently pulled you into a sitting position. 

Still rubbing your throat, you nodded your head as you weren’t quite sure you’d be able to speak. He looked so different from the time you had seen him at the ball. He sported a cap with the Union Jack on the front of it, and he was decked out in military gear you hardly recognized. He offered you a hand, which you took and allowed him to pull you to your feet. 

Once you steadied yourself, you heard another eardrum bursting yell from Leon. Still holding your throat, you glanced around the area. The morning sun lit up the area better than it had earlier, and you were able to clearly make out several familiar faces. Besides Kyle, there was also his captain, John, who seemed to be muttering something into a radio attached to his vest. Then there was Johnny, who approached you with a soft sort of sadness in his blue eyes. His skin was reddened from the bitter wind, yet he didn’t seem all too cold. 

And then there was Simon. He stood towering over Leon unwavering like a statue. You had never seen him in his uniform before, or with a rifle in his hand for that matter, but the sight of him should have terrified you. Especially his mask; that skull printed balaclava that obscured the features of his face showing nothing but his eyes which revealed the unbridled anger lurking in his features. His foot stood firmly on Leon’s arm, where you noticed he had what appeared to be an extra elbow. The man panted and winced as he looked up at Simon. He attempted to grin, but it looked more like a snarl. 

“Spook,” Johnny spoke up softly. His hand came to brush against your shoulder but he froze when he saw the way you flinched. Retracting his hand, he instead opted to step forward, attempting to get into your field of view. “Hey, you don’t have to watch this.” 

How could you not? How could you not watch the scene unfold in front of you when Leon’s eyes found you? Even though he laid on the ground on his back like an overturned turtle with his shattered arm being crushed further underneath Simon’s boot, his eyes found you. Not the man whose mercy he was at. As if after all that time you’d be the one to offer him forgiveness. 

You were tired of forgiving. 

“I guess you were right after all, darling,” Leon spoke through gritted teeth. “Your friend really-” 

A sudden ear-ringing crack filled the air around you, and it was so loud you could hear it's high pitched echo bounce around in the distance. It cut off Leon’s talking as it reduced his very being to blood and brain matter on the grass that was just as dead as he was. His eyes continued to stare at you - stare though you - as Simon stepped off of his arm with a good push as if the man could still feel the pain. 

“Don’t fucking call her that,” he warned, his eyes giving away all the ways he wished he had killed him slower. 

Finally, Simon turned to face you, and you swore that in that moment you would crumble. His eyes softened but the anger in them was still evident as he looked over your body, assessing the damage. You still held your hands around your throat, and each time you swallowed your face tensed from the pain. Blood spewed from your nose again from your tumble with Leon, and there were several cuts and bruises evident on your face. It was worse than the photographs they had seen in the room, as the swelling was able to start, but you were alive. You were upright, and breathing, and you were alive. 

Your first step towards him was shaky and stumbly, but Simon quickly helped you close the distance. His vest didn’t make the most comforting thing to lean against with the countless magazines and assortment of grenades strapped to him, but when he wrapped his arms around you, you knew you could have stayed like that for all eternity. 

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” he whispered into your hairline, the thickness of his mask muffled his voice, but only barely. You wanted to speak, to tell him it wasn’t his fault, but when you tried to talk all that came up was a cough, and that hurt even worse than swallowing, so you shook your head instead. “We’re gonna bring you home.” 

When he pulled away from you, his hands came up to fix the messy strands of your hair. Blood from your dripping nose had soaked into the front of his vest, and even though the fabric was black and you knew he had gotten worse on it, you couldn’t help but feel a little bad. How long had it been since you had seen each other? Since he had held you? Maybe it hadn’t been all that long, but it was as if an entire lifetime had passed.

But something was wrong.  

You felt it before you saw it. A deeply unsettling feeling gripped your already aching ribs, and you found your eyes scanning between the trees and bushes around you. With the sun higher up over the horizon, the area was lit up significantly better than it had been earlier, and it should have been comforting, but it wasn’t. 

The boys caught onto your apprehension immediately, and even then it was too late. Erik Adakskin, the man who had beat you within an inch of your life, the man who abused his wife, that evil terrorist who enjoyed blood for the sake of blood, stood with a handgun raised. He stood a few yards away from you in the direction of the truck, and you had guessed he had been waiting for your arrival. It was the first time you had ever seen fear in those disgusting eyes of his, as the sight of his leader dead on the ground certainly tanked his morale. 

Simon turned to face away from you, rifle raised. Several shots fired at once, and it was impossible to tell who it all came from, but you knew the sound sent your ears ringing something fierce. John, Simon, Kyle, Johnny; all of them had their weapons raised, and once the sound and chaos settled, you saw Simon clutching his arm and you heard a harsh curse under his breath. 

“LT!” Johnny exclaimed as he rushed to his side. 

Not wanting anyone to worry about him, Simon raised his hand and waved the man off. The sleeve of his uniform was slightly ripped, and a small gash could be seen tearing through the flesh on the outside of his arm. Behind him, you could just make out Adakskin lying dead on the ground, and riddled with many more bullets than Leon had received. His gun had discharged despite it all. 

“Nothing bad,” Simon assured. “Just tore off a bit of meat.” 

Johnny chuckled in relief. “Think they’ll give you a Victoria Cross for that one?” 

“Simon?”

It had taken everything in you to get that singular word out, and any joking the two men indulged in ceased as they turned their attention towards you. You stared at your hands. All you had been given to keep yourself warm was a coat, Leon’s fucking coat, but you hadn’t been given any gloves. And your hands hurt as a tingling numbness settled over them, extending up your arms. Something happened, and your brain refused to process it. All you knew was that something searing hot had torn through you, and you had become so cold even the blood on your hands started to freeze. 

“Fuck! She was hit!” Kyle shouted, panicked. 

Everything happened in a blur. Simon and Johnny were at your side within an instant, and you felt like you were floating as they lowered you onto the ground. Heavy rustling sounded from where Kyle stood as he yanked out several medical supplies buried with his gear, and John’s voice was loud and demanding as he spoke over the radio, but you couldn’t quite comprehend what he said. 

“Sweetheart? Sweetheart, look at me,” Simon spoke, the softness of his voice cutting through the chaos of everything else. 

His own wound long forgotten, his gloved hands gently held your face as he kept your eyes on him. Someone was working on cutting away your jacket, and the wind seeped through the thin clothing you wore underneath. So many hands were on you and you wanted to do nothing but tear them off. You were tired of people putting their hands on you. But you couldn’t. All you could do was stare up at Simon. 

He was… so pretty. You hadn’t realized he had torn his mask off, but you couldn’t help but glance over his features. A few new angry pink scars raised puffy and irritated on his skin, and something about his nose seemed different than how you remembered it, but it was him. 

Someone pressed something on your chest, and your mouth opened in a gasp as your legs kicked underneath you. Tears streamed from your face as the pain overwhelmed your body. Everything hurt so bad you couldn’t even pinpoint where it was coming from anymore. 

“Please,” you begged through a sob, your voice hoarse. “Stop!” 

“I know, I know sweetheart,” Simon said. He used his thumbs to wipe at the tears staining your cheeks, and you closed your eyes as you leaned into his touch. After several weeks spent in that fucking house, his were the first hands that touched you that didn’t try to take something from you or bring your pain. “Hey, eyes on me, alright? I need you to stay awake for me, yeah?” 

But you couldn’t. All you could do was lay there on the ground and listen to the muttering of Simon’s teammates being drowned out by the ocean’s waves crashing on the shore somewhere behind you. The seagulls had woken up as the gunshots tore them from their slumber, and they complained something fierce as they screeched. The thick scent of salt in the air oddly contrasted the sickening iron taste of blood in your mouth that you couldn’t seem to get rid of.

Everything around you was almost perfect, and it would have been a beautiful morning if you weren’t on the ground, freezing. You could feel Simon’s breath tickle your face as he incoherently begged in frustration. Everything felt tingly by that point, and you tried one more time to open your eyes for him, but you couldn’t. 

It would have been a perfect morning if it wasn’t for the blood. But Simon was finally there to hold you, and that was all you had ever wanted. 

you might hate me for this, but just know that i will always hate myself more (:

tags: @ghostlythots @archonsabyss @crowbird @beware-my-thorns @koko-1025 @nessaasstuff @escapefromrealitysm @ilovehyperfixating @babygirl-riley @theloneshadow24 @ashableketchup @violet-19999 @ocyeanic-dani @paigetaylor628 @curlygirls-world @gaebestie @datlilwrench @analyseeeesworld @ryisghost

find my taglist here

#cant tell you how amazing this story is #must read #the perfect amount of angst comfort human emotion plot just perfection all around #simon riley x reader #ghost x reader #simon riley x you #simon ghost riley x reader

[yuly]

oh man this was a tough chapter

the mind games that this bastard is playing are so sick, poor spook :(

spook going to see joseph????? this bastard beating on her is so out of left feild....snapping pics???? his neck better get snapped in the upcoming chapters

im so exhausted, i just wanna fast forward to the comfort and fluff :(

Everything You Touch - Part 2

Simon "Ghost" Riley x fem!Reader - part nine of "soft spot"

"You knew what would happen."

soft spot masterlist

warnings: cannon typical violence, angst, hurt no comfort, mind games, manipulation, non-consensual photography, Bukin is a creep again! big time! once again, it's a tough read so feel free to skip if you get uncomfortable at any point (: (but also know that as creepy as Bukin gets, and the uncomfortable things he says, nothing graphic like that happens)

wc: 9.7k (kill me)

After your body was finished detoxing, and you were more aware of your surroundings, you had expected the torture to start. It’s what you always saw in the movies, anyway. Capture something someone loves, and break it apart piece by piece in front of them, and then you get what you want. You thought they would bring out the camera again like when they recorded that first video, thought they would tear flesh from your skin, make you scream, and send it to Simon in a neat package. You told yourself you wouldn’t mind if something like that happened, because you knew what was at stake. If Simon and the others were holding a friend of Leon’s, you knew he was a dangerous man, and if you had to die to save the lives of countless people well… it was out of your control anyway. 

But none of that happened. For the first two weeks that you were held there, you hardly even saw Leon, or any of the other people that worked for him. Their laughter bled through the walls and floorboards throughout the days, and their stomping feet clacked loudly, making you jump and glance up at the ceiling every time they walked throughout the house. But the only times you would see them is when they would feed you, and you hated to admit that the food wasn’t even bad. 

At first you didn’t trust the food. Leon brought it to you on a silver platter with a smile before leaving you to eat. You were certain he had done something to it, drugged it, poisoned it, something. But eventually your hunger grew so much that it nearly swallowed your body whole, and half delirious, you gave in. They fed you simple breads, warm soups, or sometimes something that seemed to be picked up from a restaurant. 

You wondered if Simon got such lavish treatment.

Other than that, you were left to your own devices, which should have been a form of torture in itself. No books, no newspaper, not even a deck of cards. For the first few days you spent them cuddled up in the corner of the bed, terrified that they’d come down and do something. But when you realized they saw you more as a hidden asset than a prisoner, you grew a little more brave. You paced around the room in an attempt to get some exercise, and you would even try and peek out the window. It was boarded up with a thick slab of wood, and no matter how you tried to wiggle your fingers under it, you couldn’t break it free. But you were able to hear seagulls calling in the distance, and smell a faint saltiness to the air. 

Every day or so you would shower. There was a bathroom connected to your room with a working lock on the inside, which was the only reason you even felt safe doing so. You had free use of it, and a myriad of soaps waited on the edge of the tub for you. A woman with bright blonde hair and heavily shadowed eyelids would gather your laundry every now and then and would give you plain, fresh clothes to change into. She never spoke to you, and you weren’t sure if she knew any language other than Russian. But she didn’t need to know English in order to communicate the disdain she felt towards you. The heavy glare she shot your way every time she entered your room was perfectly clear. 

Despite your relative safety, you didn’t sleep well. The bed was plenty comfortable, and you weren’t too cold, but you found yourself jumping at every single sound. Someone getting a glass of water in the middle of the night. A TV droning in a room not too far from yours. You found yourself sleeping with your shoes on, just in case someone came for you in the night. But things were quiet. Despite the fact you were in the hands of terrorists, it seemed that there was little danger. 

Things started changing after your first two weeks there. When Leon would bring you meals, unlike before, he wouldn’t leave. He would sit on the edge of the bed with you, and attempt what seemed like normal conversation. Family, work, friends, he would ask about it all and each time you would skirt the question with either a painfully obvious answer, or by giving him nothing more than the dirtiest look you could muster. No matter what you said, he would continually smile at you, and you began to wonder if he knew how to do anything else than grin and be a creep. Occasionally he would attempt to scoot closer to you, which only caused you to move further away. 

Needless to say, you started eating faster. 

It only got worse from there. The talking. The visits. In an odd way, he tried to shower you with gifts, and it made you feel disgusting. How could this man who took Simon from you, who fucking kidnapped you, keep you in that basement and ask if you wanted to play cards with him as if it was nothing? A part of you wished he would just hurt you. Hit you, scream at you, throw you around, kill you; because you felt like the lowest form of life on earth for having him treat you with such kindness, feigned or not. 

Leon continued with it for three weeks. No matter how many times you snapped at him, told him to go to hell, he would be in your room the next day, smiling and offering you something new. Three weeks of terrifying advances. And then one day it got worse. 

Just like he had for some time, Leon had entered your room with a grin. A large, bulky jacket sat in his hands, which he held out for you to take. Sitting on the edge of the bed, you looked at the jacket before glancing back up at him. This was different than anything else he had done, and your stomach felt strange. His smile was so smug, and you wanted nothing more than to slap it off his face. 

“I’m not cold,” you said bluntly. 

“You will be,” he responded simply. “It’s cold outside.”

Outside? You hadn’t stepped foot outside of the small confines of your room in over a month, let alone gone outdoors. The wood plank blocked even your view. Something inside of you began to buzz, a little bit in anxiety, yet also excitement. If you were going outside, did that mean you were going home? Had they finally given up and decided to hand over whatever man Leon had rambled about all those weeks ago? 

You hated that you thought of your captor by his first name. 

Despite the fact you didn’t want to, you still stood from the bed before timidly walking towards him. He held the coat out by the shoulders, keeping it wide open. It was large, much larger than you. Carefully, you reached a hand up and grabbed the coat by the collar in an attempt to take it from him, but he only pulled it away from you. You yanked your hand away and looked at Leon with narrowed eyes. 

“I’m not a barbarian,” he chuckled. Always chuckling, always grinning, always laughing. 

He straightened the coat out and held it towards you as if saying try again. Those days you grit your teeth so often your jaw ached. You wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them cracked by that point. But the thing about Leon was, even if he seemed kind, even if he smiled, you knew by the look in his eyes that there was no disobeying him. Say no all you want, but that darkness lurking in the depths of his eyes warned you that he had a breaking point. 

So you played into his little game. You slipped your arms into the sleeves of the coat, and you tried not to pay attention to the way he pulled the coat over your shoulders. How his hands rested against your arms as he smoothed it over. Your stomach twisted as he turned you to face him so that he could zip it for you. You felt small. Like a child. Like a toy. It was even worse as you realized that this wasn’t just some spare jacket. The scent was fresh, like some earthy cologne. This was not the scent of a jacket that had been shoved in a closet for months. No, this jacket was one of his.

You felt sick. 

“There we go,” he smiled. “Now stay close, yes?” 

With no other choice but to listen, you followed Leon as he led you out of the room you hadn’t left for weeks. The basement was furnished with what appeared to be one or two other rooms, as well as a large common area. Several men who you had never seen before sat on couches and the floor in front of a TV as they played some sort of first person shooter you didn’t recognize. If they saw you and Leon heading up the stairs, they didn’t say anything, and instead shouted at the screen in loud, angry Russian. 

The ground floor felt too… perfect. Beautiful sheer curtains let in the grey light of winter, and a roaring fire sat in the furnace in the corner of the living room. A warm aroma radiated from the kitchen, and as you walked by you noticed a lady old enough to be your grandmother working over the stove as she hummed to herself. Leon said something to her in Russian, and she looked up at the both of you with a smile before responding in kind. 

It was then that you fully realized you were in a home. Not some secret hideout, not some boarded up abandoned building, but a quaint home where men sat around playing video games like boys while lunch was made upstairs. 

Leon ushered you out of the house and into the bitter wind of the outdoors. A heavy overcast settled in the sky above you, and the roaring crash of the ocean filled your ears. A vast expanse of dead grass and rocks filled the hills around you. A long dirt road started at the house and twisted and turned into the land before you where it seemed to vanish in the distance. The ocean was a stone's throw away from the house, and its proximity made the air humid. Besides a few storage sheds, there was nothing else around. 

You were in the middle of nowhere. Even if you could run, you wouldn’t get far before freezing to death.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Leon said with a sigh. 

You turned to look at him. With his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his sweater, he almost seemed like a normal human being. Which you were sure was the entire point of everything he had been doing the last few weeks. Attempting to get close to you, trying to earn your trust. Perhaps he was trying to use it against Simon in some way. No, he certainly was. 

“What are we doing here?” you asked instead, refusing to play into his game. 

Leon held his hand out, gesturing towards the ocean. Between the thick patches of grass was a stone walkway that created a path towards the sandy beach below. “Going for a walk.” 

Of course it was something stupid like that. Why would you think you would finally be going home? But it was your first time being out of that house in over a month. Even if you had to spend time with that monster of a man, you were going to attempt to enjoy the fresh air, at least. 

The sand was difficult to walk on, and you kept getting it in your shoes somehow. It was frigid, and you felt your toes begin to go numb as your shoes weren’t really cut for the cold weather, but you acted as if nothing was wrong. You stayed silent as you glanced around at the area. A few seagulls hopped along in the sand in front of you, pecking at random things on the ground. Their shrill calls filled your ears as a few others flew in the icy air above you. They looked at you hopefully, as if you’d provide them solace of some sort from either the cold or their hunger. 

You were trying to find your own kind of solace. 

“I grew up in Taganrog,” Leon spoke up, his voice cutting through the crashing waves. His pace slowed to a halt as he turned to look out at the ocean, and you knew you had no other choice but to follow his lead. However, you made sure to keep plenty of room between the two of you. “It rests right on the Sea of Azov. I used to go down to the harbor just to look at the water. When I was in school, my friends and I would sometimes go for a swim when things started warming up. There’s something so freeing about being able to float on the water. You almost feel invincible.” 

The hypnotizing waves in front of you was the only thing you allowed yourself to focus on, and still you could see Leon turn to look at you in your peripheral vision. For as long as you could manage, you tried not to look at him. As far as you were concerned, he didn’t exist at all. And yet, you caved in. His smile was too friendly. Too kind. One that you were sure you would see in your nightmares when it all blew over. 

Instead of humoring his story, you instead asked, “why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?” he asked innocently. 

“Pretending that we’re friends.” 

Leon’s smile only grew wider, and he took a few steps closer to you. Every cell in your body was screaming at you to back up, to run away, even. And yet you stayed standing still. It was like the air around you had frozen you solid.  

“Are we not friends?” he asked. 

His selective hearing was almost laughable, and you crossed your arms in an attempt to look broader. For the whole time you had been stuck there, you had felt small. Small like a pest. Small like a trophy. You were tired of it. 

“You’re playing dumb,” you muttered, eyes flickering to the sand at your feet. 

“Have I not acted friendly?” he questioned as he took another step closer to you. “Have I not fed you? Given you clothes? Kept you clean? Have I hurt you since you arrived here? Has anyone? Why do you think that is?” 

It was almost laughable. If he wasn’t so fucking terrifying you would have laughed at him for how childish that whole conversation was. Instead, you shook your head as you looked up at him. 

“Do you want me to say thank you?” you said, trying to hold back the malice in your words. “You don’t get to bring me here against my will and demand my gratitude. Showing what you think is kindness doesn’t erase the shit you’ve done.” 

For the first time since you had arrived there, Leon almost looked hurt by your words. There was a sort of softness in his expression that was betrayed by the glint in his eyes. It was like he secretly enjoyed your defiance. 

“You think I’m a bad man, yes? Because of what they’ve told you?” he asked. “You can believe that. No one would blame you. I’ve killed people. Many people. But only for what I believe is a good cause. Didn’t your masked friend do the same? Are him and I not the same?”

Leon stood so close to you that your frosty breaths mixed together to create a single short lived misty cloud between the two of you. You wanted to stand tall, to show him that you weren’t afraid, but there was something in the tone of his voice that set off a screaming alarm in the back of your mind. Its screeching was powerful; overwhelming; terrifying. 

“You two are nothing alike,” you said decisively. 

“Are you sure?” His question came quick, as did his step towards you, and you found yourself stumbling backwards to keep the space between you. But his presence was ever looming, slowly closing in on you, cornering you like an animal. “I think him and I are more alike than you realize. We are both big men. Both killers. We do dirty things. He is a violent man.” 

“He’s not violent,” you defended. But your defense was crumbling. It caught on the back of your throat and tumbled out of your mouth. Your defense was pathetic. 

Whatever sadness or hurt Leon tried to convey before was washed away by another hideous smile. He took another step towards you, stalking you, hunting you. 

“Oh, but he is. You want to know how I know?” he grinned. 

Before you could process it, his hand swiped at you, and his fingers caught your left wrist in an iron-like grip. You yelped as he pulled you closer to him, and you used your free hand to push against his chest in an attempt to keep some distance between the two of you. 

“Because I am a violent man, too,” he answered. “I think he likes the blood and the gore of violence. There is something comforting about spilling blood knowing that it lessens the chance of your own being poured. He finds safety in death. And while I can appreciate the sentiment, I never really had the stomach for blood. No, I prefer to watch things squirm.” 

And it was exactly what you were doing. Squirming. Arms flailing like a rabid animal as you fought against him. You pushed and grunted and strained but there was no breaking free. You started to wonder whose punishment this was supposed to be: Simons? Or yours?

“It’s so much easier, but you almost start to feel bad for the poor creature. Maybe it would be kinder to just kill people and get it over with, but this is much more satisfying. I think your husband enjoys it, too. Watching you squirm and writhe and struggle. I certainly know I am.” 

Ice invaded every vein in your body and expanded until you were certain you were going to burst. There wasn’t a day that had gone by where you didn’t feel terrified. Not since you were brought there. But the fear that coursed through your body was something else entirely; something rancid and primal. It was the kind of fear that made you wish you had been killed. 

That feeling only worsened when you saw the features of Leon’s face soften. The darkness that he hid behind his eyes seemed to fade some, and he tilted his head as he stared down at you. With a hand still firmly gripping your wrist, he brought his other hand up to gently caress the back of your hand up towards your ring finger. A soft hum left him. If you hadn’t known he was a monster, you would have thought he felt sorry for you. 

“Oh. Not husband,” he said softly. His hand and fingers on your skin were almost colder than the air around you. It was like a corpse had a hold of you. “He carries a picture of you in his pocket, lives with you, shares a bed with you, and yet…”

“Let go of me,” you interject. Your voice trembled and shivered like the skin that lined your spine, and you tried to pry his grip off of your wrist. 

“He hasn’t made you his wife? Does he love you? Properly, I mean,” Leon continued despite your protests. “He’s given you away, hasn’t he? Why else hasn’t he come for you? We’ve given him the location to meet to return you home, and he refuses to talk to us.”

“Shut up,” you warned through gritted teeth. 

You gave up on trying to pry his fingers off of you and instead leaned away from him with your whole body weight. Sand gave way underneath your feet, causing you to slip slightly but you continued to catch yourself as Leon talked. Dark eyes stared down at you and he licked his lips as a small grin pulled at his features. He looked hungry.

“Poor thing. He hardly touches you, does he? Kiss you? Fuck you? You’re too pretty to be neglected like that. Though, of course, it is always the ugly bastards who get the little treasures, yes?” he chuckled. “So what makes him so special? Or do you think you are not worthy of quality? Maybe it was good that I did what I did. Taking you, I mean. I saved you, didn’t I?” 

“Shut the fuck up!” you screeched. 

Either you finally slipped out of Leon’s grasp, or he let go of you, but you landed on the ground. Bitterly cold sand stung the palm of your hands as you looked away from that infuriating man. The ocean’s waves still crashed on the shore next to you, and you listened as the seagulls conversed on the rocks. The salt in the air was so refreshing you could almost ignore the stomach acid eating at your esophagus. Everything around you was perfect except that you were on the ground, knees in the sand, rot building in your chest, and Simon was not there to pick you up. 

“Take me back,” you ordered. You refused to sit there and listen to any more of his poisonous words. If you found a rock sharp enough you would have ruptured your eardrums yourself. 

“Are you not enjoying our walk?” Leon asked as if he was oblivious to everything that had happened. 

Ignoring him, you pushed yourself to your feet. You didn’t bother to brush the sand off of you, and you still refused to look at him. Bile bubbled up in your stomach, and you felt your diaphragm painfully tense. But you would not give him the satisfaction of seeing you cry. 

“Take me back,” you repeated again.

Walking back to that home was excruciating. Seeing that lady in the kitchen, dishing plates like she was feeding a family. The boys downstairs still playing their game as if they were children. Everything continued on around you as if there was nothing wrong. But you? You were the scared girl hiding in her room, just like you did as a child. Always a child. Always scared. Forever running. 

You stood in the center of that room with its nauseating lilac colored walls. Back turned to Leon, you refused to look at him despite the fact he stood in the doorway like he was hoping you would invite him in. Footsteps clomped loudly above you, and you flinched at the sound. It was too much. You wanted to fade away; you should have turned into seafoam and washed yourself away in the water; should have thrown yourself at the seagulls and begged them to devour you. 

“Keep the jacket,” Leon spoke up finally. You could hear the grin in his voice. “It looks good on you.” 

Hinges squeaked as he shut the door and a soft click followed as he locked it behind him. A violent wave of grief started to suffocate you, and you felt your face contort with the emotion before you had the chance to stop it. It enveloped your body in a chokehold as its chains weaved through your ribcage, squeezing all other emotion out of you until you were left with nothing but agony. 

Clumsy fingers attached to trembling hands came up to your throat as you unzipped the jacket - Leon’s jacket - and slid it off of your body. A sob tore through your throat as you bunched the coat up and threw it at the cement wall in front of you. You wanted it to tear through the wall, to wake up the dead with a crashing sound, but all you were given was a dull thud that sounded in harmony with a fit of laughter from your captors upstairs. 

Your knees felt weak, and you found yourself stumbling to the bed were you collapsed on top of the mattress. You pressed your face into the pillow as you attempted to smother any sob that threatened to tear through your body. But all you could think about was how much your wrist ached and how you wished Simon was there to kiss the top of your head. 

✦•······················•✦•······················•✦

Simon was back in Tobrak again. Back in that cell with his wrists and ankles bound to a chair. The stale scent of mildew and blood assaulted his nose. It was nauseating, but he had no food in his stomach to throw up. Somewhere in the distance he could hear a child laughing, and for some reason that irritated him. He could feel the heat rumble in his chest, but he continued to sit and stare at the bars in front of him. 

“Ghost?” 

Simon didn’t even realize you were there until he heard your quiet voice. Looking down, he saw you sitting next to him on the ground. You faced the same direction as him, so he could only see the back of your head as you rested the side of your face against his bare thigh. He tried to raise his hand up to touch you, but the rope binding him to the chair was unforgiving. 

“Yes?” he responded. 

“Why did you bring me here?” you asked. 

Simon hesitated. The rumbling heat inside of him began to gurgle, and he could feel his organs boiling within his own body. Fists clenching, he struggled against the rope once more only to fail again. 

“I didn’t mean to,” he said. His voice was wrong. Too muffled. As if his ears were full of water. 

“Sorry, that was a stupid question,” you giggled. Your entire body shook with your laughter, and it caused his leg to move, and that warmth in his chest became unbearable. “I already knew the answer. I already told you that you couldn’t stop it.”

Eyebrows knitting together, Simon tried to lean forward in an attempt to look at your face, but it was like his back was glued to the chair. “Stop what?” 

“You don’t remember?” you questioned, but your voice was flat. Like you already knew the answer to that one, too. 

“No,” he admitted. 

“You will soon.” 

Really, he couldn’t remember, but his brain was too fuzzy to focus on what you meant. His head leaned to the side to rest on his shoulder, and you tilted your own head in kind. It was like no matter what angle he tried to view your face, you would turn so that he couldn’t see. 

“Sweetheart?” he asked. 

“Yes, Ghost?”

“Will you look at me?” 

You didn’t answer right away, and the squealing laughter of that child only grew louder. You gently lifted your head from off his thigh and sighed heavily. 

“I can’t,” you said. 

“Why not?”

“You’ve forgotten what I look like.” 

That sentence stole away all the breath from his lungs, and he opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. He wanted to prove you wrong, but he couldn’t picture your face. The color of your eyes was lost somewhere in the back of his mind, and he couldn’t remember if your hair color was correct. 

“I’m sorry,” he choked out. 

“Me too.” 

You rose from the floor, and the scent of blood grew stronger. Simon’s eyes tracked every move you made as you walked towards the bars of his cell. Your back was turned to him as you still were unable to show him your face. The laughter from the hallway grew louder, so much so that Simon could hardly hear the thoughts in his head. 

“Are you leaving?” he asked. 

“I have to,” you said. A solid and loud squeak interrupted your words as the door to the cell slid to the side, granting you access to the hallway. 

“Where are you going?” 

“To see Joseph,” you replied. 

Simon shook his head as he watched you take a step into the hallway. “Joseph’s gone.” 

But you continued to walk. You turned and vanished down the hallway, and the laughter grew further away. He tried to say your name, but he couldn’t get his vocal chords to work. Instead of a pleading shout of your name, his voice was nothing but a whisper. No matter how hard he tried to force it out, to cry out for you, there was nothing. 

A groan left him and his head fell forward as he looked down at his lap. Frayed remains of rope littered the ground by his feet. His wrists and ankles were free from their restraints, and yet he still couldn’t move. A part of him thought moving would do him no good. Instead, he continued to sit there and stare at the patch of blood that stained the area on his thigh where your head had rested just moments before. 

It was a dull thumping sound that woke Simon from his sleep. Intermittent little taps on the floor that would pause for a short moment before continuing once more. A long and heavy sigh left him as he opened his eyes to be greeted by the yellowed ceiling above him. He had fallen asleep on the sofa in the living room sitting upright, just like he had for the last few nights. His head had fallen back, and his neck ached from the odd angle. 

The tapping continued, and he looked around the living room with a grunt as his neck popped. Boo ran around the floor where he batted around a fake mouse made out of yarn. A bright blue cast enveloped his front left paw and even from a distance Simon could make out where Johnny had signed his name on it. Despite his injury he played as if he had no ailment at all. 

Five weeks since you had been taken. Almost long enough for a broken bone to heal. 

Simon fished his phone out of his pocket and glanced at the display. Just before four in the morning. Hardly even two hours of sleep. But he hadn’t slept well in months. How was he supposed to when your side of the bed was cold? 

Standing from the couch, Simon slowly shuffled to the bathroom where he began to peel off the clothes he had worn for roughly the last twenty-four hours straight. Boo hobbled behind him and pawed at him from underneath the door, demanding entry. Ignoring him, Simon looked at his bare body in the mirror. His hair was a bit longer than he normally kept it, and he still hadn’t gained back all the muscle mass he had lost during his time in captivity. But his wounds had healed, and he earned new scars on his face, and he no longer got dizzy when he stood. 

Five weeks. Long enough for him to heal. 

His shower was cold and quick. Just long enough for him to wash the nightmare sweat off of him and freshen up before changing into clean clothes. He fed Boo around four thirty, forced breakfast down his throat, and left the apartment just before five. He couldn’t stand to stay there any longer than he had to. If it wasn’t for Boo, he would have slept in his office on base. Even though he hadn’t been officially cleared for duty, and he wouldn’t be for quite some time, the only thing that consumed his mind was work. 

Tracking you down, bringing you home, was the only thing that mattered to him. 

When he arrived on base, he immediately slipped into his office where he promptly shut the door behind him. His computer was still running from the previous night, so all Simon had to do when he sat in the chair was log in and he jumped right back into his work. He couldn’t quite search every corner of the United Kingdom by himself, and certainly not in his condition, but he could do the next best thing. 

Simon had been provided with a database of potential human trafficking locations. Some were locations where actual busts had taken place, but a majority were locations where the probability was high, such as hotels or traveling locations. The database had not only locations, but pictures to go along with it. There was a website where people who were traveling could take pictures of their hotel rooms and send it in to be collected so that images could be cross referenced with any evidence authorities gathered. 

For at least three weeks, Simon had been scrounging this database for any location that looked even the least bit similar to the room he saw in the recording Bukin sent. Pale lilac was easily becoming his least favorite color, and apparently it was every designers hated color as well, as there was not a single location that looked even remotely similar. But he continued day in and out, painstakingly searching through every picture of hotel rooms and abandoned buildings alike. 

Will you look at me?

I can’t.

About an hour in, Simon sighed and broke his gaze from the monitor in front of him. The harsh and unforgiving light threatened to burn a hole through his retinas. The sun hadn’t even peeked over the horizon and he could already feel a headache settling in. So he focused his eyes elsewhere as he glanced around his barren office. If you were there, he was certain you’d be critiquing his lack of decorations. You always had a way of brightening things up even when he swore he preferred the dark. 

Why not? 

You’ve forgotten what I look like.

Before he realized it, Simon’s fingers wrapped around the knob to one of the drawers on his desk, and he gave it a quick tug. Several pens and a few other office supplies rolled around on the old wood, but he didn’t care about that. He cared about you and that polaroid you had snuck into his pocket. He should have torn it to shreds when he first found it, and a part of him still wanted to in a strange way. But when Bukin had captured you, he didn’t have the heart to dispose of it. Not when it was the only picture that he had of you. 

His thumb traced the features of your face as if yearning for the touch of your skin. He missed the nights of laying in bed next to you; of watching the rise and fall of your body and the twitch of your eyelids. He wanted your laugh and he wanted the scent of your perfume. He wanted to kiss you, to hold you, to look at you. He’d give anything to have that again. To have you. Even if just for a moment. 

But he didn’t have the time to yearn. So he tucked the polaroid back into his drawer and shut it up tight; hidden away in the dark once more. 

He wished he never let you in the light in the first place.

✦•······················•✦•······················•✦

No amount of water could wash away the decay eating at your chest or the filth that stained your body. You had been in the shower for half an hour as you used your nails to scratch and scrub at every inch of your skin until it was raw. All you could think about was Leon. His words, his hand crushing your wrist, his jacket trapping your body. Your scrubbing became more furious, and you prayed the sound of the running water muffled your broken cries. 

You hadn’t felt that way in years. Not since you had been dating Eric. It was a type of frustration that paired too well with shame. You were furious that any of that had happened in the first place. That you hadn’t screamed and protested more. That you had been nothing but a fawn, following Leon’s lead as to not get yourself hurt. It was frustrating because it wasn’t your fault for just trying to survive. But it was humiliating because it really was your fault. It was always your fault. 

It wasn’t until the water grew cold that you turned the shower off. Every inch of your skin ached from your scrubbing, and even then you still felt dirty. Like there was a grime that permeated through your skin and to your very being. But you couldn’t clean forever, so you hopped out of the shower and patted yourself dry as you ignored the churning of your stomach. 

You dressed yourself in some of the clothes that you had been supplied with. A plain black shirt and matching sweatpants. You weren’t sure what had happened to the clothes you had worn when you first arrived all those weeks ago, but you hadn’t seen them since the first time you showered there. Maybe you didn’t want to know the answer. 

With your dirty clothes tossed into the hamper in the bathroom, you stood and looked at yourself in the foggy mirror. Your eyes were slightly puffy from the crying, and the green tiled walls casted a sickly color on your skin. You hardly recognized yourself. You were just some skittish creature lost somewhere she shouldn’t be. 

Resisting the urge to stand there and pick apart every detail about yourself, you instead turned to the door. You unlocked it and swung it wide open, but hardly got a single step into the room before you realized something was wrong. 

Adakskin, the other man who had been in the room with Leon when you first woke up, sat on the edge of your bed with a tray of food on his lap. It was the same tray you were given for each one of your meals, and judging by the tense expression on his face, he had been sitting there for quite some time. 

“Did you enjoy your walk?” he asked bluntly. 

You stood in the doorway, unsure of what to do. A terrible thudding shook your chest as your heart began to work overtime. The adrenaline that had plagued your body since you arrived there dulled over time, but there was something in your gut making it worse. Something was screaming at you in a warning. 

“What?” he spat. “Did Bukin not teach his new pet how to speak?”

“I’m not his pet,” you retorted. 

Adakskin hummed, and it seemed like there should have been a smile on his face, but there wasn’t. “He feeds you. Takes you on walks. Gives you his clothes. Sounds like a pet to me.” 

Your teeth bit into the inside of your cheek as your eyes glanced at the discarded jacket on the floor. If they had allowed anything even remotely sharp in your room, you would have torn it to shreds by that point. But the wool was too thick for you to tear through by hand. 

“Sounds like you’re jealous,” you mumbled. 

A small, nearly nonexistent smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. He would have been somewhat handsome if it wasn’t for his usual scowl and the fact he was an atrocious human being. But that smile faded in an instant as he slowly rose from the bed, tray of food in hand. 

In a single swift motion, Adakskin hurled the tray at the wall next to you. The metal silverware rang as lukewarm soup bled into the carpet. Shards of fine china chipped the paint off of the wall and scattered on the floor by your feet. Every muscle in your body froze, but you refused to duck or cry out. You had seen this all before. It was always the same every time. Whether it was your father, Eric, or this crazed terrorist, violence always followed the same path. 

It was the only thing in your life you could rely on. 

“You think you’re funny?” he spat as he took a step closer to you. 

You refused to back away. Standing your ground, you kept your eyes on him with as neutral of an expression as you could manage. Even though you could feel your heart thudding in your throat, you wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing you scared. 

“Doesn’t matter,” you replied dully. “No matter what I said you were going to get angry. That’s how this works. It’s how men like you work. Always so predictable.” 

He stood only inches away from you, close enough that you could see a storm brewing in his eyes. Close enough that you could see the way his hands flexed, fingers straightening and curling back up on themselves again. Adakskin drew in a sharp breath, and your eyes instinctively closed. 

The meaty part of his palm collided with your cheekbone and it sent you stumbling to the side. Your back crashed into the wall where you held yourself there for a moment before allowing yourself to slide down it and sit on the floor. A terrible ringing sound overtook your ears for a short moment, but it dulled to a quiet whine when you opened your eyes once again. Your skin stung like pins and needles were sticking out of it, but you had no more tears left to spill over simple pain like that. 

“We should have killed you weeks ago,” he said as he took a step closer to you. He towered over you and obscured the bedroom light in the process. The light that bled around him almost made him look like your savior. “Cut up your body and send the pieces back to your friends. We have no use for a mouthy whore.”

You knew better than to stand back up. He would only knock you down again, and you needed to save your energy. So you sat there on the ground, back against the wall as you stared up at him. Bending down, he crouched in front of you so that you were more eyelevel. One simple shove and he would topple over, but you knew not to poke the bear. 

“Is that all?” you asked as you leaned your head back to rest on the wall. 

“You think you’re tough?” Adakskin asked. 

You shrugged. There’s no correct answer to his question. Stay silent and you’ll get hit. Say no and you’ll get hit. This wasn’t about you. It never was. This was about him. You just happened to get caught in the middle of it. But if you were going to be reduced to nothing but red mush, you might as well earn it. 

“I’ve been hit harder than that before.” 

✦•······················•✦•······················•✦

It had been awhile since Simon had last hit something, and his knuckles weren’t used to it. The achiness radiated from his fingers up his wrist and through his forearm, and still he whaled on the punching back in front of him. Dull thuds echoed throughout the empty gym, and his panting was sharp and labored. 

Each punch that landed brought up image after image in his mind. His own mangled face. Your smile. Boo’s crushed paw. Your beaded necklace scattered on the ground. The bloodstain on the wooden floor in the living room back at the apartment. He wished it wasn’t a punching bag in front of him, but Bukin. Or maybe even Adakskin. But most of all, he wished he didn’t have to be violent in the first place. But he never had a choice. 

“Figured I’d find you here.” 

John’s voice boomed across the gym, demanding attention in the way a leader’s words usually do. Simon stopped his harassment against the punching bag and turned to face his captain as he carefully moseyed through the room. 

“How so?” Simon asked. 

“It’s where I would be,” John replied bluntly. 

Adjusting his stance, Simon pulled at the wraps on his knuckles. It wasn’t often that he boxed, so the wraps weren’t exactly professional, and were more irritating than if he had just done it bare handed. But he knew better than to unnecessarily scuff himself up.

“Any news?” Simon asked. 

“Big,” John answered. 

“How big?”

“A location.” 

For the first time in weeks, Simon felt his chest pulse like he was feeling his heartbeat for the first time. He no longer lazily pulled at his wraps but instead tore them off and tossed them to the side. 

“Where?” he demanded. 

John nodded towards the exit and Simon followed suit. Johnny and Kyle were already waiting in the captain’s office by the time they arrived. Both men seemed restless and refused to sit in the seats John had set out for them. They had been waiting the same five long weeks as Simon had for answers. 

“Salthouse,” John said the moment the door shut behind him. 

He walked to his desk where he opened his laptop. The screen hummed to life where he put in his password. A map of England popped up as the last image he looked at where a small village in Norfolk was highlighted. It was well away from London, about a three hour drive by the looks of it. 

“How’d you figure that?” Kyle asked with his arms crossed as he stared down at the screen. 

“MI6 has been doing the heavy lifting with intel,” John explained. “They couldn’t find anything on Bukin, but they got a hit on Erik Adakskin. He’s got a grandmother here; Arina Morton. Immigrated from Russia in the sixties and got married and has been here ever since. She lives in a cottage well outside of the village. It’s remote, plenty close to the ocean…”

“The perfect safehouse,” Johnny finished. 

John nodded solemnly as he glanced around at the men beside him. The gears in Simon’s head began to turn as John opened up a new window. Pictures popped up on the screen that looked like old listings for the home last time it was put on the market. It was a quaint cottage, and you could see the ocean just beyond it. Not big enough to hide an entire platoon, but enough to hide you. 

“Any interior pictures?” Simon requested. 

With a few clicks of the trackpad, John began to cycle through the photos that they had on file of the house. A cute kitchen, a living room with a wood burning furnace, an extravagant master bedroom, a small bathroom with ugly outdated green tile. 

A room with sickening lilac walls. 

“That’s it,” Simon confirmed as his hands clenched. 

“How soon can we head out?” Johnny asked. 

“As soon as we’re able,” their captain responded. “MI6 is already in contact with local authorities. We’ll have to make sure medical is on standby. It’s impossible to tell what condition we’ll find Spook in after all this time.” 

Pausing, John turned his gaze to Simon. His full attention was still on the screen, and even through his balaclava his face was visibly rigid. 

“Ghost,” he spoke up, “have you been cleared yet for missions?”

“I’m going,” Simon responded, his tone leaving no room for argument. 

A smile tugged on John’s features. “I expected nothing less.” 

✦•······················•✦•······················•✦

You were on the floor of your childhood bedroom. Birds chirpped outside and a soft breeze blew through the window, but you couldn’t feel it on your skin. Everything was bright and fuzzy, including your senses. Something was wrong. Each breath you took was agonizing, and your limbs ached too much to lift yourself up, so you continued to lay there on your back, staring up at the ceiling. 

“Do you still love him?” 

You tried to narrow your eyes, but something stopped you; some deep pain. Your entire face felt stiff, as if it was swollen beyond recognition. So you kept your expression the same as you continued to lay there on the floor. 

“What?” 

“I asked if you still love him.” 

Vision blurry, you carefully tilted your head to the side as you glanced around the room. A pair of old shoes stood a few feet from your body, and as you traced up the figure in front of you, you were met with the terribly familiar face of your father. He stared down at you with his hands in his pockets like he was watching something he didn’t care to stop. 

“Who?” you asked, voice raspy. 

“That boy of yours,” he responded as if it was obvious. 

“Oh.”

Cigarette smoke filled your lungs, and you tried to cough but it sounded more like a wheeze. Blood coated your tongue and you licked at your lips only for the taste to intensify. It felt like the gravity of the earth had doubled, like the ground was trying to swallow you alive. 

“I love him,” you replied finally. 

Your father hummed and nodded his head in thought. Outside, the birds chirped louder than ever, but you still couldn’t feel that breeze. All you could feel was the scent of smoke and nicotine settling into every pore on your body. 

“I guess I was wrong,” he chuckled. “Not even violence will make you listen.” 

A flash of light blinded you for a short moment and when your eyes adjusted, you realized you weren’t in your childhood room. You were still in that basement in the cottage by the ocean, still in Leon’s grasp, still bleeding on the floor. That realization almost felt worse than the thick blood caught in the back of your throat. 

You realized that the flashing light came from a camera. A polaroid. Adakskin stood in front of you, in the very place you had thought your father was, snapping pictures of you where he’d then toss them on the floor to develop. Behind him was the blonde girl who would grab your laundry. Leaning against the wall, she puffed lazily away at a cigarette where she’d flick the ash onto the floor next to the spilled soup and shattered china. 

Adakskin said something in Russian, and the woman giggled as he took another photo of you. A groan bubbled out of your lips and you squeezed your eyes shut before tilting your head away from him. The flash burned your eyes, and you felt tears stream from the corner of your eyes, slipping away from you without permission. 

“Nyet, come now,” Adakskin chuckled. 

He took a few steps towards you where he knelt next to you and reached to grab your jaw. You couldn’t hold back the yelp that erupted from your lips. It was at that moment that you realized just how much everything hurt. Every nerve in your body was blazing with a fiery pain. Each breath you took was almost enough to get you to sob as you swore you could feel your ribs crack with every inhale. Your left eye was so swollen you could hardly see out of it, and your head pounded in time with your heart. 

“Don’t you want to be smiling in your pictures?” he taunted. “I’ll send them to your friends! I’m sure they’d love a postcard from you.” 

Another flash, and he let go of your face with a forceful shove. More cigarette smoke filled the air around you, threatening to suffocate you. Your eyes flickered to the blonde woman, and you realized that was the first time you saw her with a smile on her face. When you laid helpless on the ground while her partner took pictures of you. 

Their laughter and conversation ceased when the door to the room opened. Both of them turned to face the figure looming in the doorway. You could tell just from the overbearing presence alone that it was Leon. The blonde lady hummed and dropped her cigarette on the ground where she squished it into the carpet. 

You didn’t need to understand Russian to tell that Leon was furious. He didn’t even bother to shut the door behind him before taking Adakskin’s collar in his fist. But he didn’t back down, despite his superior’s snarling, he just tossed the camera onto the bed before gesturing to you on the floor with a smile. 

You felt like a child again. Laying on the ground, watching violence with glossy eyes. You wished that the earth would open up and swallow you whole. Bury you deep in the ground where you could hibernate until Simon found you. No amount of pain could replace the ache you felt in your chest when you thought about him. How long had it been since you had seen him? 

Would you even get to see him again? 

Leon pushed Adakskin towards the door with a forceful shove, but the man only chuckled. He held his hands out to the side as if saying he was innocent, as if he did nothing wrong, and he spoke something in such a kind tone that you knew it had to be malicious. Whatever he said infuriated Leon, and a sharp crack filled the smokey air as Leon’s fist sunk into brittle skin, and you watched Adakskin fall to the ground. 

The blonde woman’s smile vanished from her face as her hands covered her mouth in surprise. Leon looked at her, pointed towards the door, and muttered something to which she instantly complied with. A chuckle left Adakskin as he pushed himself to his feet as the door shut behind his friend. He hardly got the chance to stand up straight before he was shoved against the wall with Leon’s full strength, and you heard as the air left his lungs in a painful puff. 

“Erik!” Leon roared. 

Every thought left your mind when Leon said that word. That name. Suddenly the pain seemed to fade, and you found your eyes going as wide as the swelling in your face would allow. With as much strength as you could muster, you attempted to prop yourself off of the floor, which you just barely managed. 

“Did… did you call him Erik?” you asked, choking on the blood that continued to pool in your mouth. 

Leon froze as his attention turned to you. You had rolled partially onto your stomach where you dug your hands into the carpet to try and keep yourself steady. He looked back at Adakskin to glare at him for a short moment before letting go of him. He muttered another order, and the man left the room, taking care to slam the door shut behind him. 

Erik. Eric. You thought back to the night you invited Simon to the bar where you had unfortunately ran into your obnoxious ex-boyfriend. Remembered how his hand felt digging into your waist, as if he wanted to tear the flesh off of your bones. It was the first time you saw Eric get a taste of his own medicine. You had never seen someone’s neck snap so violently before, see the light leave their eyes like they were a single step away from death. Simon hit him once and knocked him down for good. He could have killed him. 

And still he walked you home afterwards. Let you take care of his split knuckles with stupid Hello Kitty band-aids. The same hands that sent a man flying on his back were the same hands that covered your mouth when you tried to force yourself to have sex. They were the same hands that held you as you danced in the bedroom. The same hands that took off your shoes for you when you were too drunk to do it yourself. 

You laughed. It wasn’t cute. It wasn’t a sweet school girl giggle. It was a pitiful, gurgling laugh that erupted painfully out of your throat, and yet you couldn’t stop. Not even as blood dribbled out of your mouth. Not even as Leon stalked towards you, not even as he knelt in front of you. 

“You… you were right,” you panted out between unhinged fits of laughter. “You’re right…”

Leon hissed at you to be quiet as he attempted to grab you by your shoulders to steady you, but you pushed his hands away. Reaching out, you grabbed him by the collar of his shirt before pulling yourself up. You looked up at him with a bloody grin as you attempted to quell your laughter long enough to speak. 

“No, but you were right. My… my friend? He’s a very violent man,” you chuckled. “And you know what? I think I’m violent too.”

“Stupid fucking girl,” Leon muttered. 

He grabbed your wrist and yanked you to your feet alongside him in one swift motion. The world around you began to spin, and the pounding in your head only grew more intense, but you continued to laugh even as he shoved you onto the bed. As you fell against the mattress, you tried to hold back the cries that threatened to leave you, but they mixed with your laughter instead, causing you to sound like a rabid animal. 

“He’s gonna find me,” you assured him as he ran a hand through his hair. The red locks knotted in his fingers, and he cursed under his breath as he looked at the floor of the room. “He’s gonna find me, and he’s going to make you squirm.” 

Maybe it was the trauma that had been done to your body, or maybe you had finally broke, but there was an odd pit of excitement that formed in your stomach. That pit only grew when you saw the look on Leon’s face. He didn’t look at you like you were a toy anymore, or some pet. He looked at you like he lost. 

“What’s wrong?” you patronized. Leon had lost the only edge he had on you. There wasn’t anything he could hold over your head anymore. Not when you choked on your own blood with a smile and laughter. “Do you still think you saved me?”

tags: @ghostlythots @archonsabyss @crowbird @beware-my-thorns @koko-1025 @nessaasstuff @escapefromrealitysm @ilovehyperfixating @babygirl-riley @theloneshadow24 @ashableketchup @violet-19999 @ocyeanic-dani @paigetaylor628 @curlygirls-world @gaebestie @datlilwrench @analyseeeesworld @ryisghost

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#and ofc his name is erik #pure angst #simon ghost riley x reader #simon riley x reader #simon riley x you #ghost x reader

[yuly]



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